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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T18:15:53.110" Score="6" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our world is a wonderful, complex place that takes people lifetimes of study to understand. Even so, these people who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; devote their lives to understanding our world often come up with more questions than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, all stack exchange sites are a limited format. We cannot give a lifetime of expertise in such a short space. We will have to use terms and ideas to summarize worlds. Just like our world, there will be different aspects or areas of interest, and just like in the real world, one area of interest can affect another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I submit that we need a common vocabulary to talk about worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of a world-building vocabulary is to increase people's ability to effectively communicate what is going on. How do we know if a world shares the same physical principles and properties as our own? Do we just make assumptions? Should we talk about worlds according to a genres of games or books they appear in? How can we describe worlds in a short and effective way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, assume the world from the Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; was unknown to all but one person. That individual comes to our site for help. Can we have a common vocabulary so this person can say &quot;classic fantasy world&quot; instead of &quot;a world based on Middle Age Europe with subtle or low magical elements whose physical properties closely approximates our own&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="7" LastEditDate="2014-09-16T20:21:14.450" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T20:21:14.450" Title="How To Talk About Worlds" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T18:18:02.793" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need tags so people can responsibly ask questions, and so that we can better answer questions as well. What tags should we have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T18:23:06.707" Title="We need tags for our site!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2014-09-16T18:23:06.707" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mainly tags happen as needed. We really don't need to worry about them, they'll happen organically as questions are asked. One good thing is that during private beta everyone can make tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also since tags are dumped if they have no questions we can't really pre-make them anyways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T18:23:06.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8" CreationDate="2014-09-16T18:58:55.490" Score="34" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question that I remember was brought up on another site (I think it was the late Digital Preservation site, but I could be wrong about that part), and which I think is worth considering early on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, early voting patterns can have a large influence on whether the site ends up with lots of voting, or little voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we want Worldbuilding SE to be a high-voting site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that there are few things more frustrating than spending time to research and type out an answer in particular (but the same goes &lt;em&gt;also for questions&lt;/em&gt;) and receive just a few measly upvotes in return for that effort, so &lt;strong&gt;personally I would want to establish early on that posts are voted on fairly heavily.&lt;/strong&gt; (In the name of symmetry including downvotes, should those be appropriate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that lots of voting going on also means that it will be in some ways easier to reach any given reputation threshold, which may need to be considered in the light of reputation requirements for various privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T15:54:52.107" Title="Should this be a high-voting site?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:00:21.820" Score="13" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I mean by alternate earths is taking current day earth geology, and then applying different realities to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a geographically identical earth but with a machine based civilization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post apocalyptic earth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zombie apocalypse earth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39" LastEditorDisplayName="user39" LastEditDate="2014-09-16T19:47:37.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T19:43:19.340" Title="Are alternate earths on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:14:38.177" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say &lt;strong&gt;yes,&lt;/strong&gt; as long as it pertains to the world building (and thus is a fit for the site's scope in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is defined in Area51 as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[a] Q&amp;amp;A site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see nothing there that would suggest that only non-Earth worlds and settings should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several questions on the Area51 proposal which are fairly highly voted and more or less explicitly deal with humans or our Earth. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13860/should-research-questions-be-allowed&quot;&gt;Should research questions be allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding/64930#64930&quot;&gt;How much similarity to a real (historic or modern) culture is too much in a created world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding/63764#63764&quot;&gt;What are the hottest and coldest temperatures that can still support human life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding/65408#65408&quot;&gt;What is a realistic population of a medieval village? And what is required to support that number?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding/66601#66601&quot;&gt;Is there an acceptable range of &quot;width-to-depth&quot; ratio for moving bodies or water (such as rivers, streams, etc.), in soil types found on Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, lots of fiction works take place in worlds that greatly resemble our world and society, with anywhere from trivial to fairly large differences. We wouldn't want to bar those questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:04.720" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T19:43:19.340" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:24:08.093" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes vote lots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is important on all SE Sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically Vote often, vote early, vote up and down. Especially in the beta it helps to sink the crud and raise the cream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T19:24:08.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:25:21.683" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system doesn't work if people don't vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is literally The Thing that allows Stack Exchange to work. Good answers are brought to the top, singled out in some cases. Seeing that the next answer has nearly-as-many votes means you shouldn't stop with the first answer, and in other cases where you see a steep drop-off in voting (at least for older answers) may indicate that you can stop where you are. Remember, Stack Exchange is built around &lt;em&gt;answering questions for all future purposes&lt;/em&gt;, as well as for the initial person asking it. Part of that means, at some point, saying &quot;you've gotten the meat out of this topic; there may be some more useful ideas, but you have read the things that this community thinks are best.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Regulars, of course, should endeavor to read all of the answers, so that voting actually happens, and also for the sake of late answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are also important! Sometimes answers have problems, sometimes &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; have problems. One of the most important things for a new Stack Exchange site is attracting experts. The number one thing that turns off experts is noise. If someone has a lot of experience, and takes a look at our front-page, we want them to immediately think &quot;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is an interesting question,&quot; or &quot;Oooh, I was &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; struggling with that, let me share my knowledge,&quot; &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Wow, ok. What a bunch of amateurs. Seriously, 10 upvotes? Did &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; thought go into that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system is intentionally skewed, in answerers' favor. Answers are worth more, downvoting an answer costs you rep but not for questions, and so on. People come here looking for answers, not questions. People ask solid questions here &lt;em&gt;because we can provide answers.&lt;/em&gt; So don't be afraid to tell someone to rework a question, or to put in some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, of course, reward effort where it's given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T18:41:15.783" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T18:41:15.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:32:36.560" Score="24" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of questions I have about worldbuilding, it seems to me, &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be asked at History.SE or Physics.SE. Already we have some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13/17&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately did news travel in rural medieval Europe?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;ndash; should this be History.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40/17&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed planets realistic?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;ndash; should this be Physics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have nothing against these particular example questions; in fact, I've upvoted both. And I can think of many more examples myself; I have yet to actually ask a question &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; I'm not sure where to draw this line. I think Worldbuilding.SE &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the place for at least some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also think some of these sorts of questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be asked on Physics.SE or History.SE. But I'm not sure which ones. I'm not sure about the two I've linked. I was hoping we could get some ideas on how to draw lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, active members at History.SE or Physics.SE, it would be &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; for you to weigh in on the kinds of questions that &lt;em&gt;are not welcome on those sites&lt;/em&gt; that we might want to provide a home for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T16:30:55.987" Title="Worldbuilding.SE, as opposed to History.SE, Physics.SE" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:33:09.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help guide&lt;/a&gt; outlines what constitutes an on-topic question. It should be kept in mind while discussing questions with this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:17:46.567" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:17:46.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:33:09.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about whether or not a given question or sort of question is on topic at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T07:16:39.183" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T07:16:39.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:38:44.477" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, we don't need vocabulary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is intended to be for everybody – not even just all members, but also people coming in from other Stack Exchanges through the hot network questions, and from people totally unfamiliar with SE coming in from Google. When we answer, we don't just answer one person's question – we try to answer that question for all people in the future who have the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we do not want jargon. We don't want to add any additional barriers to entry. If your answer cannot be understood by someone from the outside, it can and should be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T19:38:44.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15" CreationDate="2014-09-16T19:55:23.023" Score="18" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Constructed languages, such as Quenya or Klingon, are a fascinating topic and can be an amazing way to bring a culture to life. We already have a question on the topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19/17&quot;&gt;How does one go about developing a language for a particular culture in your world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is also already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Linguistics.SE&lt;/a&gt; which might be better equipped to answer such questions. While clearly related to worldbuilding, it's a specialized-enough discipline that I'm not sure that &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding experts&lt;/em&gt; are going to necessarily be experts on it &amp;ndash; while &lt;em&gt;linguistic experts&lt;/em&gt; seem pretty likely to be, or at least give legitimately educated conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's still pretty obviously related. Does Worldbuilding.SE think it can handle constructed languages? When do questions about constructing languages go beyond our purview, into the realm of Linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.530" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T17:55:54.803" Title="Are Constructed Languages on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T20:05:39.143" Score="27" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seriously, from the word go, we need to be pre-emptive about requiring people to ask &lt;em&gt;specific enough questions that we can offer concise and definitive answers&lt;/em&gt;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19/17&quot;&gt;&quot;How does one go about developing a language for a particular culture in your world?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is basically asking &quot;how do I con-lang?&quot; &amp;ndash; which is the subject of myriad websites, blogs, and &lt;em&gt;entire books&lt;/em&gt;. A big chunk of the field of linguistics comes into play in answering that question, and Stack Exchange already has a whole site dedicated to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fascinating question. I love reading any solid thoughts on the subject. But it's not something that you can answer concisely and definitively, and that is what the Stack Exchange format is good at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;code&gt;constructed-languages&lt;/code&gt; could be an entire tag, with potentially hundreds of questions. Every individual culture on every individual world could &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; be a separate question &amp;ndash; and a difficult one, at that! I don't know if such questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on topic here &amp;ndash; maybe they should go to Linguistics.SE instead &amp;ndash; but I do know that no Stack Exchange is ever going to be able to give that question the response it deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please: let's work together, as a community, to focus questions. Focused questions are real, detailed, describe distinct parameters for answering and judging the worth of answers. A question that amounts to the entirety of a culture's history and a detailed breakdown of their environment is too much &amp;ndash; that'd be Too Localized, as well as kind of a ridiculous thing to expect us to answer &amp;ndash; but brief, general descriptions of the &lt;em&gt;actual problem you are trying to solve&lt;/em&gt; are the way to get good answers out of a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other really good solution, for those who honestly are looking for answers to the big questions, is ask for resources. &quot;How do I con-lang?&quot; is too broad. &quot;Where can I learn about making a constructed languages for a (fantasy/futuristic/alien/whatever) world?&quot; is answerable and hopefully something this community would know something about (but make sure it's not a Shopping Question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T21:35:08.480" Title="Yes, questions can be Too Localized. But usually they are at far greater risk of being Too Broad" Tags="|discussion|policy|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2014-09-16T20:05:49.983" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;After looking at the Linguistics meta (especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/433/should-we-include-conlangs-in-our-scope&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) it is likely that a significant portion of constructed language questions would be deemed off-topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not uncommon for two sites to have overlaps (science fiction with movies and TV). The asker is generally encouraged to ask their question on the site that is either most appropriate, or that they believe would give them the most helpful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.310" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T20:05:49.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2014-09-16T20:29:31.850" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an active member of Physics.SE, if it isn't about physics as we know it, it's not the place to ask it. Lots of world-building type questions need to be &quot;snuck in,&quot; thus why people are interested in this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40/are-geographically-typed-planets-realistic&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed planets realistic?&lt;/a&gt; would likely be considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T20:29:31.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:18:13.070" Score="10" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone takes content from a question or answer with intent for use in a published work, are they required to attribute the original contributor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:24:01.990" Title="Using content from answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:33:16.507" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look back to when you joined there were details then (which of course many of us don't read). Or just look at the bottom of each page; where it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there's the answer of the licence and requirements for (re)use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T21:24:01.990" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:24:01.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:35:08.480" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very good point. Most of the questions I've seen so far are just that. Questions instead of problems. Including those problems could help narrow many of those &quot;too broad&quot; questions down to &quot;just right&quot; size. It might be worth making that point on any question that isn't - for lack of a better term - bite size. After all, we want to make sure the quality of questions in the beta represent what we want to see on the site later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T21:35:08.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:41:01.783" Score="20" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have any examples of such questions yet, so I suppose it might be a little silly for me to be asking this on meta already, but I want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we consider questions asking if something is realistic to be on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say I considered a problem my world is having and came up with a solution. There might be some flaws in my solution, so I ask here if my solution is realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made this writing system based off &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tying knots in rope&lt;/a&gt;. [Examples] Could this writing system (or something very similar) have developed naturally? Would it be too difficult for everyday use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, I could ask about the problem I'm having and see if people have different solutions, and then add the system I developed as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: If people had only three fingers, what kinds of writing systems could they develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Well, there's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this fantastic Incan system&lt;/a&gt; that should be doable even with less fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be particularly attached to &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; solution, however, so maybe in that case I should ask what kind of an effect this solution will have on the world at large, or perhaps what flaws it might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it cause any significant changes to the way people gather and share information if writing was not stored on paper, but on rope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few ways around it, but the core of my question remains the same. If I describe a particular effect in my world to the best of my ability, along with the reasoning for this effect, could I simply ask if it is realistic? Would we need extra criteria for such questions? (Answers must explain why instead of simply saying Yes/No, questions must indicate a few possibly problems, etc.) What do we think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T23:31:58.800" Title="&quot;Is this realistic?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:43:07.403" Score="17" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in ways to use computer programs to procedurally generate worlds.  The worlds would be random, but their generation would follow well defined rules.  While I know that programming questions regarding this would be off-topic here (there are plenty of other stack exchange sites for that), would questions regarding the design of the &quot;world generation rules&quot; be on topic?  For example, questions of this type would look like &quot;What are methods for simulating when one species splits into two?&quot; or &quot;What properties of a region affect the rate and demographic of immigration?&quot; when they are looking almost mathematical ways to define those processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T19:55:15.830" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T21:37:00.327" Title="Procedural generation questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:43:22.197" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for a question to fit reasonably on more than one site.  A site forms when a &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt; of questions fits together and they don't all belong on another site.  We have overlap with History, Physics, Linguistics, Space, maybe even the religion and arts sites -- heck, even Gardening, depending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question fits &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; scope, we should accept it here even if it could reasonably have been asked elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T21:43:22.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:45:42.153" Score="20" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of various software packages out there that assist in the creation of a world, from keeping track of details, characters and plots to map creation tools. Are questions asking for recommendations on which software to use for a specific task on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example question might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What software is available / recommended to help me build the maps for my world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T03:35:10.653" Title="Are software recommendation questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2014-09-16T21:46:19.937" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;We accept questions about physics, history, and linguistics. I see no reason to prevent questions about mathematically modelling things like this. It's of use to people who are worldbuilding, so therefore it belongs here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T21:46:19.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2014-09-16T23:31:58.800" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions in this area should be &lt;em&gt;about the problem you're trying to solve&lt;/em&gt; -- e.g. &quot;my people have only three fingers; what counting system would they most naturally develop?&quot;.  As part of &lt;em&gt;showing what you've already tried&lt;/em&gt;, you might go on to explain: &quot;I'm considering a base-6 system on the theory that we developed base-10 because of 10 fingers, but am worried about (whatever caused you to not just do that but instead ask us)&quot;.  People answering your question can then validate your approach (&quot;yes, that works and that's not a problem because...&quot; or &quot;yes that can work, and you can address that problem by...&quot;), or they can instead offer a completely different approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tangentially related: over on Writers we're having a discussion about critique questions; &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/a/879/1993&quot;&gt;here's what I wrote about that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.667" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T23:31:58.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23" CreationDate="2014-09-17T03:35:10.653" Score="21" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I would say &amp;quot;Yes, if specific enough&amp;quot;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most SE sites don't allow recommendation questions, but there's a whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendation SE&lt;/a&gt; that's specifically for it.  While they're good at finding software over there, it's a fairly low-traffic place and the kind of question which would be asked here is likely to be very specific, with answers talking about little-known software.  We can do a better job of answering &lt;strong&gt;world building software&lt;/strong&gt; questions internally than by pointing people over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we need guidelines, and I think theirs are worth adopting, at least as a starting point. (See image, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336/what-is-required-for-a-question-to-contain-enough-information&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/356/what-is-required-for-an-answer-to-be-high-quality&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NwEbR.png&quot; alt=&quot;SoftwareRecs.SE question guidelines&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question would state what the intended use is (world generation, naming, knowledge maps, etc), what kinds of features it should have (random generation from a seed, word lists, smart linking, etc).  A good answer would address that use and those features and ideally include something of a personal review of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T03:35:10.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2014-09-17T05:38:34.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can certainly suggest appropriate help material (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23/are-software-recommendation-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, it has a slightly different context, but the idea is similar). And as Donald said, we can answer some questions that would be off topic on [Linguistics.SE].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will probably also have some people that have knowledge in linguistics and are also interested in world building. These people could would be able to answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T05:38:34.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T05:56:18.870" Score="18" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common thing to do when building a world is to build a &lt;em&gt;map&lt;/em&gt; of that world. This typically outlines the various countries, important landmarks, factions, terrain, climate, etc. of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I present a list of various cartography related questions. Respond with thoughts on whether they are on topic or not. Some of them may be considered to be only tangentially related to worldbuilding. The hope here is to create a line in the sand, as a community, as to what cartography questions are allowed and what are not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What factors could result in inaccurate mapping of a world?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I develop a naming scheme for cities and towns in my world?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some ways mass terraforming in a short period of time could occur?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can the shape of borders develop within a continent?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How quickly could erosion cause an island to break off from a continent?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some tools to create maps of my world?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I draw biome variations on a medium scale regional map?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I mark a desert in a map?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Advice on making a decent looking city / large town&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="89" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T22:36:25.797" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T22:36:25.797" Title="Are cartography questions on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28" CreationDate="2014-09-17T06:22:34.143" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say yes. A map is the world, so it's basically world building at it's core. And even if Cartography.SE did exist, it might not accept questions that don't have a realistic core (some of the questions you've added I imagine would be off topic). So people could come here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions above I wouldn't consider cartography (particularly &quot;Advice on making a decent looking city / large town&quot;), but would still be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T06:22:34.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T06:39:19.233" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Current tags about space or similiar topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceship&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetoids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetoids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetoids&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteorology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteorology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteorology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these belong in their own tags, while it may be argued that others are too localised, or synonymous with other tags, and should be merged into other tags. Respond with a proposal of which tags should be kept (it could be &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them and I might just be overzealous here), and which ones should be merged into other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T09:48:48.713" Title="How should we tag questions about space?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T07:14:30.600" Score="15" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, following &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt;&quot; what should we have as our elevator pitch? We want the pitch to be creative, catchy, and descriptive. It needs to catch the eye of new comers, and let them know what the site is about. SE has some guidelines at &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/stack-exchange-naming-for-dummies/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Naming for Dummies&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Elevator Pitch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is an elevator pitch? I only have a moment, so here’s an&#xA;  “elevator pitch” for the elevator pitch: “Who is the site for? What is&#xA;  it about?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Imagine a user who will never read&#xA;  your FAQ and you have fifteen seconds to grab their attention. It&#xA;  should be catchy but descriptive. It should be thoroughly clear but&#xA;  painfully concise. Make every… word… count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this elevator pitch we will likely pick our name and motto (but not guarenteed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you post one pitch per answer, then we'll up vote the ones we like best. &lt;strong&gt;If you downvote a pitch, please explain why in a comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T10:44:28.573" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T09:20:31.057" Title="What should we have as our elevator pitch (name)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-17T08:22:09.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How in the worlds did you do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T08:22:09.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28" CreationDate="2014-09-17T08:23:25.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;General cartography questions are probably better suited to GIS.SE.  Cartography questions that involve fantasy elements and similar hypothetical elements or are otherwise not things that real world cartographers deal with would make sense to cover here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T08:23:25.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2014-09-17T09:46:13.603" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, remember that tags should be useful for &lt;strong&gt;grouping questions based on subject matter.&lt;/strong&gt; Someone who is an expert in a particular area should be able to follow a particular tag and be notified of questions to which they are likely to be able to provide good answers, or be notified of questions that they are likely to  be interested in. &lt;em&gt;Too much segregation between tags goes against that goal.&lt;/em&gt; A tag should also provide meaningful information &lt;strong&gt;when used on its own&lt;/strong&gt; on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that venue, I feel &lt;strong&gt;planets&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;planetoids&lt;/strong&gt; are similar enough that separating them doesn't make much sense. Someone who is familiar with one is likely to be familiar with the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;space&lt;/strong&gt; when referring to the part of the universe outside of a planet's atmosphere appears overly broad. It can probably be replaced with some other tag where it is used. Maybe &lt;strong&gt;astronomy&lt;/strong&gt; would be useful on questions that perhaps otherwise would be tagged just &lt;strong&gt;space&lt;/strong&gt;. I do think that we should have a tag &lt;strong&gt;space-travel&lt;/strong&gt; that deals with questions pertaining to travel through the universe. A related tag could be &lt;strong&gt;travel&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;terrestrial-travel&lt;/strong&gt; for travelling on or near a planet's surface (for example: on foot, by horseback, dog sled or airplane).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;astronomy&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;meteorology&lt;/strong&gt; seem like good tags to me, assuming that the subjects themselves are to be considered on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T09:46:13.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T09:46:21.953" Score="23" ViewCount="875" Body="&lt;p&gt;As some of you may know, StackExchange sites get &quot;Pro Tempore&quot; moderators just before the private beta goes public. These moderators are chosen by the StackExchange Community Team rather than being voted on due to the generally small size when the site moves from private to public beta but still really needing some users who can use all the moderator tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do you become a provisional moderator for this site?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon after the site launches into &quot;public beta,&quot; the Community Team will appoint provisional moderators from this community until the community is ready to hold its own elections (once it graduates from beta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deep engagement in the community's development&lt;/strong&gt; is required for all temporary moderator candidates. All potential candidates must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Show an interest in their meta’s community-building activities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Lead by example, showing patience and respect for their fellow community members in everything they write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Exhibit those intangible traits discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bonus points for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Members with participation in both meta and the parent site (i.e. interest in both community building and expertise in the field).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Area 51 participation, social network referrals, or blogging about the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Members who have already shown an interest or ability to promote their community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Candidates will be contacted and three of them will be selected to act&#xA;  as provisional Moderators until the community holds formal elections&#xA;  after the Beta period. Besides the normal abilities of a Moderator,&#xA;  they will:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have access to a special chat room where we will collectively work through the challenges of moderation and community self-policing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Organize the process of selecting the site’s attributes (domain names, design issues, the [help center], etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Rally community support and drive the mission of getting publicity for the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Essentially, &lt;strong&gt;they will have the ear of the Stack Exchange team for&#xA;  anything we can do to help their sites succeed!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nominating users to serve as moderators for the beta&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each user that you would like to nominate,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post an answer containing the URLs to both of the user's &lt;strong&gt;main and meta profiles on this site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;optionally, link to the user's &lt;strong&gt;Area 51 profile&lt;/strong&gt; or a profile from another site, or add a reason why you'd like him/her to moderate during beta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;self-nominations&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. posting your own profiles) are allowed and even encouraged&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post each user as a separate answer, and add multiple answers if you wish to nominate multiple users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if someone nominates &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, please &lt;strong&gt;edit the answer&lt;/strong&gt; to indicate your approval (or declination). Optionally, add a paragraph or two about yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you downvote a particular nomination, you are encouraged to &lt;strong&gt;share why&lt;/strong&gt; you did so in the comments, though you are not required to do so. Optionally, you may do the same for upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything above is fairly standard. However I have a few extra notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;being on this list does not guarantee being picked; it is just a good spot to gather community views on who we want as mods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not being on this list doesn't mean you won't be picked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In regards to being picked:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is based on complicated metrics including history on other SE sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not being picked should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be construed as the SE Team not liking you/not trusting you. It is most likely due to too many good potential moderators to fill the limited number of slots.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T02:20:27.507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T21:52:14.833" Title="Nominate &quot;Pro Tempore&quot; moderators to help guide the site through beta" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="36" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30" CreationDate="2014-09-17T09:48:48.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say keep all of them for the next week and then we can review tags/burninate some. But definitely wait and see how they develop between now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T09:48:48.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:01:53.697" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%C3%B6rling&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;Accepted&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%C3%B6rling&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Michael Kjörling at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Michael Kjörling at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%C3%B6rling&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Michael Kj&amp;#246;rling at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/225818&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Michael Kj&amp;#246;rling on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/225818.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael has been active on the meta with multiple really nice answers - a favourite of mine is his answer on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/34/16&quot;&gt;tagging related to space topics&lt;/a&gt;. Michael also has prior moderator experience and is in general a a user we want active here and I think he could be a great moderator for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T21:22:19.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:04:07.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Building Better Worlds&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T10:04:07.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:29:06.020" Score="15" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we have a specific means (perhaps certain tags) to say that certain questions are asking for science-only answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128/what-would-be-the-next-technological-step-for-a-civilization-after-it-has-deplet&quot;&gt;What would be the next technological step for a civilization after it has depleted all resources that allow for conventional technologies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asks a purely sci-fi (so far as I can see) question but two out of three answers are suggesting magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add a &quot;science&quot;, &quot;fantasy&quot;, &quot;hybrid&quot; or similar tags to distinguish which questions are looking for what sort of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T22:16:51.767" Title="Distinguishing science and fantasy based questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:32:33.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Building better imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T10:32:33.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:49:17.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think we should. It would provide an easy an quick way to see the background behind a question. This would allow us to answer the question faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T10:49:17.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2014-09-17T10:59:45.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, being able to separate where askers want answers that are based in science as we know it (up to and including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hard sci fi&lt;/a&gt;) or magic-based answers could potentially be quite useful in navigating the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we look for ways to establish the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; to start with, as well as come up with good tag wikis for the two. &lt;em&gt;If it turns out later&lt;/em&gt; that these by themselves are not adequate, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; we can add gradations between them, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/34/29&quot;&gt;as I have mentioned elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; we should be careful about making tags that are &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; narrow in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T10:59:45.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:09:19.500" Score="22" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site launched into private beta yesterday, and we at the time of this writing have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;44 questions&lt;/a&gt;. Of those, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+hasaccepted%3Ayes&quot;&gt;9 questions have accepted answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would suggest that we ought to be careful about accepting answers this early.&lt;/strong&gt; While it is definitely nice to see that green checkmark next to one's answer, this is still very early in the process and we should expect new users who signed up to participate in the private beta to come in at least over the next several days. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4/29&quot;&gt;Do vote, however!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly on lower-traffic sites it is generally suggested to wait at least a day or so before accepting an answer, based on that people live in different time zones and that questions which have accepted answers tend to receive less attention from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't something I or anyone else can mandate, obviously, but I feel it is something that would be worthwhile to keep in mind as we ask and answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T07:27:53.323" Title="Let's be careful about accepting answers early" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="45" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:10:34.950" Score="13" ViewCount="686" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm copying in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17625/would-we-support-expanding-existing-fictional-worlds&quot;&gt;Q and A&lt;/a&gt; from the proposal. Feel free to disagree and post new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commonwealth Saga&lt;/a&gt; has a lot of details about the worlds in it, especially in the two novels set earlier in the timeline. Would questions relating to how certain effects might be explained or questions about how you might reproduce the Silfen world that Ozzie visits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see people being inspired by worlds like that and wanting to understand them, either for the purposes of running games in them, or adapting them for their own stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:04.720" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T15:35:40.797" Title="Would we support expanding existing (fictional) worlds?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:10:48.590" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deconstruction of an existing world helps reveal elements that you might not otherwise have thought of.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expanding or reconstructing them does likewise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modifying one or two aspects could drastically change how they work and is oft used as a plot hook.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its cool.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T11:10:48.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:13:31.083" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14537/would-support-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;Another from the proposal&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/users/106199/styphon&quot;&gt;Styphon&lt;/a&gt; for discussion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question I thought of posting was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what techniques can I use to stay sane whilst building my world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I started thinking, is this about world building? Would such a question be considered on topic? Will this site cater for questions that are not directly about building a world, but more about the people building the world's and any queries they may have during the process of building a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:04.720" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T21:18:12.970" Title="Would support question be on topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="46" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:15:16.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that that with a rewording, the original intent of the question could remain while the answers would be more appropriate. Just off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What techniques can be used to keep track of complex interactions between cultures in a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you organize your design so that you can keep track of what has been worked on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples, instead of going &amp;quot;my head hurts&amp;quot;, instead focus on methods and practices used in designing and building worlds, while giving the same kind of answer. Its about asking the question with the worldbuilding being the focus, rather than the worldbuilder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment by &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/users/74216/bobson&quot;&gt;Bobson&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Going off of this, I'd say the OP's question would be closed as &amp;quot;Too vauge&amp;quot;, and then the clarity of why his project is giving a headache (such as your examples) would lead to it reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T11:15:16.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:33:54.537" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the real world, building real worlds away from the real world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify each part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the real world&lt;/em&gt; -- this is a real world web site, and the work being done by the people posting questions and answers take place in the real world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;building real worlds&lt;/em&gt; -- emphasizing the use of various sciences in constructing a world, as stated in the Area51 proposal: &lt;em&gt;[a] Q&amp;amp;A site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;away from the real world&lt;/em&gt; -- the worlds we're discussing are, to a very large extent, more or less imaginary; they are not our real world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T19:22:23.170" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T19:22:23.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="46" CreationDate="2014-09-17T11:41:52.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question like &quot;what techniques can I use to stay sane whilst building my world?&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;incredibly broad.&lt;/strong&gt; Stay sane in what regard? Without more context, that's the sort of question that, at the very least, needs not a world-building expert but &lt;strong&gt;a doctor or a psychiatrist to be answered,&lt;/strong&gt; and the answer is likely to be heavily tailored toward the asker and as such unlikely to be useful to any future visitors. That makes the question a poor fit for the Stack Exchange model of Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question should in my opinion be closed most likely as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;,&lt;/strong&gt; depending on specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the question can be posed in terms of something answerable, which relates to the process of world-building, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it would be on topic. Questions about how to arrange materials, keep track of the history of your world, and so on, have the specificity that the original question does not, and as such may very well be on topic (subject to other requirements). But your example has no information on which to base such a rewrite, which would essentially involve rewriting the entire question, so any edits to that effect would be pure guesswork. Such edits should likely be rejected, perhaps as &quot;radical change&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T11:41:52.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T13:16:33.247" Score="13" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3041/4398&quot;&gt;RPG.SE's RSS voting meta Q&lt;/a&gt;, I'd like to suggest that we consider what RSS feeds we should put in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;main chat room&lt;/a&gt;. I've found that site meta questions in the chat proper and mainsite questions in the ticker feed are a good idea for most SE site chats, but if there are blogs or news feeds we'd find appropriate to our topic, those should get suggested too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:26.427" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T14:08:07.063" Title="Worldbuilding chat feeds?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2014-09-17T14:02:29.733" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reviewing tag suggestions for some time and I wanted to check in and talk about this. I'm not going to push for or against a tagging practice, I just want to steer the discussion towards a specific consideration when creating the tagging practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of divide between &quot;Am I asking a question that wants to be founded on hard science or out of speculative fantasy potential?&quot;, it's definitely a major consideration. So it's definitely something we want to think on. But we want to ask ourselves, &quot;Are tags the right way to do it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;em&gt;tags are not the only tool to distinguish questions or indicate what a question is about&lt;/em&gt;. The title, and most importantly, the body of the question, are handy tools to tell you what exactly a user is trying to get. The latter has the biggest advantage in that it gives the user the most room to convey what they want or need. If they want answers that only confer to a specific standard, or that have to abide a certain restriction, that comes in explanation in the question body. A parallel from elsewhere on the network, if you were on Stack Overflow and had restrictions on what options in technology you could use, that would be explained in the question body while the tags would highlight the general content of your question as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that there shouldn't be tags. For example technologies &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; comprise a good amount of tags on Stack Overflow, for example I myself tagged a bunch of things with the particular form of SharePoint I was working with (and not with MOSS since I didn't have that available in our installation). The important thing is to understand why and when to use tags to identify these things. So some tips, which I probably buried in all this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't approach tags from the idea of cataloging the kinds of questions you get. Just because the concept of a category exists, doesn't make it meaningful as a tag. Boss fights are a pretty solid concept in gaming but we phased out the &quot;boss-fight&quot; tag on Arqade since it did little beyond just being a tiny label.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tags are primarily designed for the benefit of filtering for answerers. It's both a quick sign when browsing the front page, and also allows one to browse within this sub-category. As such, tags should be looked at from the perspective of &quot;Would I really picture answerers browsing around in this tag regularly?&quot; Bonus points for tags that stand alone and don't depend on other tags to give them context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the tagging reflect normal expectations within the subject matter? We generally blacklist particular tags that reflect the obvious topic of the site, but going past that is the understanding of what one expects in general in the topic space. It's the concept of tagging &lt;em&gt;exceptions&lt;/em&gt; to the norm, which leaves the norm as something which doesn't need to be tagged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similar but not identical to the previous, is it an unspoken understanding that doesn't need explicit identification? For example, we don't need &quot;gameplay&quot; as a tag on Arqade because it's readily apparent on any question that is about gameplay, that it is indeed about gameplay. These questions don't make up every kind of question but on questions where it applies, it doesn't even need to be stated in the question body.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal immediate thought patterns is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps something better named, would be handy when you want to settle that the question must be rooted in the physics and society of our own world. The spectrum of non-scientific, be it full pseudo-scientific or handwave-y, when you're dealing with a concept like building worlds, it's all about creation and so that strikes more as a norm. We shouldn't need additional tags or gradations betwixt them to identify the stuff in between since that I feel is best addressed in question bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T14:02:29.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="66" CreationDate="2014-09-17T14:32:20.803" Score="16" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am seeing alot of questions that are very broad like in case of X what would happen, or if the world were made of X then how would life evolve?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to be extra careful to ask more focused questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/159/72&quot;&gt;Population range for a booming/dying frontier town&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is focused wants to know what would be an approriate population for a former boomtown that is now just hanging on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the focus of that question to these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127/what-effect-would-elemental-magic-have-on-the-work-force&quot;&gt;What effect would elemental magic have on the work force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142/what-kind-of-technologies-could-be-developed-based-on-magic&quot;&gt;What and how main technological breakthrough we have today could be replaced with magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120/72&quot;&gt;If technology allowed for instant brain to brain transmission of knowledge, how would society change?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hate to have an outright ban on hypothetical situations when our problem is too broad of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we be trying to salvage these too broad questions?  If so How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T18:55:10.583" Title="Hypothetical situations and broad questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:02:42.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with meta as posted chat messages and main site as ticker feeds. Works well for RPG.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T15:02:42.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:04:09.303" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would propose a minimum of two days at this time. Simply so people have a chance to look over the questions, though it is also worth noting that this SE does tend to require more research into answers and looking at the ones we have, there are a lot of full and detailed posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T15:04:09.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:19:29.300" Score="9" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/98/72&quot;&gt;How could a generation ship maintain a source of potable water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions about space travel just do not seem to be about world building.  I am thinking they should be off topic.  However some of them do seem to be about world building:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16/in-space-do-shipping-lanes-make-sense&quot;&gt;In space, do &amp;quot;shipping lanes&amp;quot; make sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how should we handle these.  Do we want to allow for space travel questions if they could be tangental to world building?  I do not think we want to completely rule out space travel but rather limit it only to that which is directly linked to world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T15:37:36.213" Title="Are Space travel questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="65" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:22:29.760" Score="18" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions involving the terms &quot;Magic&quot; and &quot;Technology&quot; at the moment. If your questions talks about applications of one or the other, or about their interaction or replacement your question is highly likely to be &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as we would hate to get an answer that basically said &quot;By magic&quot; without explaining that kind of magic, questions that simply say &quot;What kind of effect would magic have on X?&quot; is terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that has had issues with this despite describing their magic (and has been improving) is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127/what-effect-would-elemental-magic-have-on-the-work-force&quot;&gt;What effect would elemental magic have on the work force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of magic being correctly used in a generic sense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8/must-magic-be-tied-to-medieval-tech&quot;&gt;Must magic be tied to medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of getting it wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142/what-main-technological-breakthrough-we-have-today-could-be-replaced-with-magic&quot;&gt;What main technological breakthrough we have today could be replaced with magic? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to say is &lt;strong&gt;be specific in on how your magic works&lt;/strong&gt; (and technology too, if nonstandard)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T15:59:26.323" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T17:22:24.387" Title="Magic and Technology are meaningless words without context" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:23:03.360" Score="7" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/5/72&quot;&gt;Creating order in a settlement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is squarely in the wheelhouse of Sociology.  While I can see that understanding this would be important to worldbuilding it does not to be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be?  Do we have any way to create guidelines for what types of sociology questions are acceptable and which should be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T19:06:18.170" Title="Do we want sociology questions to be on topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:37:36.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that &quot;world&quot; building can extend to the environment in which those worlds are located, i.e. the world's universe. Many worlds are located within universes which are primarily space.  By extension, space shipping lanes would also be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a &quot;world&quot; need not be a ball of rock - it may be any place that is a setting for drama of some sort (say, a novel or a game), which could conceivably include a spaceship.  A generation ship would effectively be a tiny artificially constructed world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of non-standard worlds, several worlds I created were inverted tetrahedrons floating in the air inside a crystal sphere that was the whole universe.  There was no &quot;space&quot;, and no balls of rock that anything much bigger than a bug could live on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T15:37:36.213" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="57" CreationDate="2014-09-17T15:44:46.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;World building is a very broad topic in many ways.  There could be any number of questions that are relevant, and as long as the OP can show &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; a question is relevant, it should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to sociology questions, any world inhabited by sentient beings would have to have some sort of description of its society (or lack thereof), and questions that help the OP define a society should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T15:44:46.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2014-09-17T16:05:43.110" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My problem with this is that I have in mind questions that would be both science-based and magic based for the simple reason that the genre I am currently working in could be described as science-fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that my worlds have magic, but that magic must be well-defined with a pre-determined set of rules that could be said to be scientific in nature, even if &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the magic works is not known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike some bad fantasy novels I won't name, I don't want to just handwave a magical topper to an opponent's magical gambit just because I want the story to work out that way, the characters in my worlds have to work within the rules, even if they don't understand them completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my opinion is that we need a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt; tag, and the presence of both on a question would imply that the magic/fantasy element of the question has specific rules that need to be followed.  Alternatively, we could also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; tag too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T16:05:43.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-17T16:08:54.113" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making fictional worlds more credible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T16:08:54.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="56" CreationDate="2014-09-17T16:29:22.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on &quot;Technology&quot; and &quot;Magic&quot; is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology (or science) is knowable.  Each item of technology can be derived from known principles and/or materials.  The only art involved in technology is in its design, not its function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic is unknowable.  Magic cannot be derived back to a known principle; if such is attempted one will inevitably reach an unknown.  It may involve known principles and materials, but there will be an additional unknowable component.  It may follow rules defined by the world's creator, but beneath the rules is only the unknowable.  The working of magic is never purely science, it always involves a degree of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also implies that science can destroy magic - by making the unknown known, but that is just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would agree that if a question involves magic, some of the relevant rules must be mentioned or at least be obvious from the context of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T16:29:22.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="57" CreationDate="2014-09-17T16:47:03.730" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sociology &lt;em&gt;related to world-building&lt;/em&gt; should be on-topic here.  In fact, while we haven't seen a lot of it, it's one of the things that attracted me to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions that ask how having technology X would affect how communities behave is certainly on-topic.  For example, a world in which teleporters are as common as phone booths once were would vastly change how people and goods move, how breaking news is reported, how calamities are fought, even how wars are fought -- that stuff's all part of the world's context.  Questions digging into the sociological aspects of that should be as welcome as ones digging into the technical or economic aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, those questions still need to meet all our other expectations of questions -- not too broad, etc.  &quot;What would be the sociological effects of teleporters?&quot; is too broad; I meant that as a category, not an actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T19:06:18.170" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T19:06:18.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="78" CreationDate="2014-09-17T17:15:04.820" Score="14" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective/Bad Subjective guidelines&lt;/a&gt; talk a lot about what make for great questions and answers for subjective issues, and it primarily falls around Back It Up!: answers need to cite some kind of relevant material (scholarly works, authoritative discussions, relevant personal experience, something), and questions need to be written such that they encourage such answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, Back It Up! applies to objective questions and answers, too, the resources you use for backing those up just may be somewhat different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we need to be pro-active, from the beginning, about demanding that answers Back It Up! This SE, in particular, I think, is closely tied to a lot of speculative fields &amp;ndash; as several meta questions have already discussed, there are a number of SE sites that have significant overlap with this one, &lt;em&gt;but would not accept our kind of question&lt;/em&gt; because of their speculative nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we need a policy, guideline, or at least discussion of what is too speculative, what questions cannot be answered in a way that Backs It Up! The &amp;ldquo;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;rdquo; close reason exists for this, but we as a community have to decide where to draw the line for using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also, as a community, need to enforce backing things up in answers. Everything about this endeavor is, by definition, highly speculative: the only way to be serious about this, to produce good answers, is to minimize, as much as possible, the &amp;ldquo;pure&amp;rdquo; speculation. Cite sources, compare to real-world history, sociology, physics, and so on. And flag or downvote answers that don&amp;rsquo;t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T15:40:06.737" Title="Back It Up! policies" Tags="|discussion|policy|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="56" CreationDate="2014-09-17T17:22:24.387" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/39/distinguishing-science-and-fantasy-based-questions/51#51&quot;&gt;I wrote a post recently&lt;/a&gt; talking about the nature of what needs to and what doesn't need to be tagged, and that kinda ties all this droning I've written below. Magic... technology... what constitutes these terms is defined by the world in question, which makes them poor at their base level for tags. If you are looking for high science material, you don't want to run into a question asking about magic catapults. And that's where I see that people would &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; want to be looking at divides. My main point here? &lt;strong&gt;From a categorical perspective, &quot;Magic versus technology&quot; is a poor divide so instead look at more useful divides to answerers like whether the nature of the technology is &quot;powered by etheric means&quot; or if it's powered by the same mechanical logic we observe in our own world. Tag and label things on this site not based on logical categories but based on what you, as a community, will actually use.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The raws of terminology, that can be handled by the question body. And in fact it should - a question that wants to talk about magic or technology within a world should really provide the nature of such systems in order to be properly understood. Even if it is referential to existing works, an asker still needs to supply the information necessary for answerers to genuinely assist them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of this answer is kinda ranty in general about the concepts of &quot;magic&quot; and &quot;technology&quot; but it's how the above point all comes up from, so it may be a nice read for some folks so I'll include it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about how this site is running. We have people asking about things like biological diversity and geological structure and all these things, trying to figure how things would work in a theoretical world based on how things work in our own world. That's great and it's a fundamental means to establish something that is comprehensible to the player or reader of your world you create. It just kinda fails when you look at a divide like &quot;magic versus technology&quot; because &lt;strong&gt;magic versus technology is not a perceived divide that exists in our reality&lt;/strong&gt;. By consequence, &lt;strong&gt;the nature of what is defines magic or technology depends on the perspective of the world being built&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology takes its roots in how we had progression in this world - we had this distinct medieval age of stone castles and swords and candlelight, then we had this distinct period of innovation with inventions such as the electric light and the combustion engine, and then computers happened and so we have all these distinct classes of technology we can group. They're logical and there's nothing wrong with it, but the root comes that all of this only happens because that's how it happens in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; world. Ours is a reality perspective which does not contain &lt;em&gt;comprehended&lt;/em&gt; magic to the layperson. Our technology is derived entirely without the influence of whatever mystical existences may be hidden from our perception. This leads to my main point that as a consequence of how we know of our own world, &lt;strong&gt;there is no solid or universal concept of magic in the realm of worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take some examples of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A world locked in medieval stasis where sword and sorcery are wielded alongside each other. I'm not going to elaborate more because this is a very common and easily understood example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A world similar to the 1800s, but where there are &quot;wizards&quot;, who can cast &quot;spells&quot; by using a gigantic rifle-cannon and loading it with special bullets created from materials such as powdered dragon bones. The nature of the material determines the power, and settings on the gun determine the end result of firing the bullet by applying new kinds of physics to it - suddenly the bullet cuts through space itself, or suddenly it produces flames, or suddenly it provides a mental map of the surroundings. It's a very methodical process that is rather well understood, though only some folks are capable of utilizing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A world set thousands of years past ours, where there are machines which are powered not by electrical current, but by the induction of &quot;dynamo blood&quot; found only in the hearts of half the world's population, due to a particular hereditary origin line. Make coffee in a coffee machine by sacrificing your own life force, which replenishes overnight as you sleep, and thus by extension save yourself thousands of dollars on the electrical bill. Each year, new kinds of machines that take advantage of dynamo blood are created in order to reduce the strain done to the planet's resources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A world not unlike our own, but every once in a while a &quot;mutant&quot; is born. This mutant has special powers like the ability to teleport, to regenerate from any wound, to control ice or fire. It apparently finds its roots in strange genetic mutations, and the concept as a whole isn't wholly understood - it is acknowledged that it exists and that it happens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could make more examples but I hope these illustrate my point clear enough. How many of these would you say are magical in nature? And what makes you call them magical in nature? You might find yourself sitting and thinking, and if you had to sit and think any bit that's my point here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the lack of universally acknowledged &quot;magic&quot; in our own world, the identity of what is classified as &quot;magic&quot; in a created world must come from the perspective of that world. We lack any analogues in our own world to make for it, unlike what we can do with technology. But that comes to another fault point - technology and its advancement are defined by the resources available to a culture, and that culture's ability to understand, explore, and manipulate the given resource. That fine divide of the knightly past, the electric modernity, the robotic future - that all is derived from the perspective of our own reality. &lt;strong&gt;This causes the root existence of technology - technology as the collection and development of tools and machinery of any sort of make, to be confused with instead the idea of &quot;technology derivative of highly-advanced-science&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. It's taken me far too long to reach this point but it is the other half of my important point that I started off with. Since we lack magic as a counterpoint to technology, we default to the idea that &quot;technology&quot; refers to what we have. In a proper world setting, though, if they had different resources due to the presence of some supernatural or mystical force, technology would be affected based on the nature of the resource. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that make it scientific or magical, though? That is how we get back to the dependence on the perspective of the world, and by extension why it is a problem to try and make that kind of sweeping categorization on this site. As a site, we cater to this world, we cater to the perspective of the worldbuilders themselves. Especially with a system like tags, there has to be a shared meaning that applies or else there come misconceptions and misuse and the categorization falls apart. Context is important for these things - &quot;What happens if we introduce magic into X technology&quot; is at raw point pretty easily recognized as terrible and it all comes from the root fact that magic lacks a universal definition to us, and technology's definition comes scoped from the world in question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T17:22:24.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2014-09-17T18:34:06.127" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I know it is too early to speculate, but&amp;hellip;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest &quot;problem&quot; I see on this site is when an author throws out a very broad premise and asks folks to brainstorm the many possible story lines and outcomes that could result from their initial thesis (e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;What would a world/town/people be like if {x}?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While plenty entertaining, that's not really what this site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any area of expertise we cover, a writers' site shouldn't start from the premise of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;write a storyline for me.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Instead, an author should focus in on a very &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; problem they encountered in their day to day work. This site can become be a fantastic resource where writers and designers tap into the expertise of technology/physics/geography/history/sociology/ecology &lt;strong&gt;to make sure their fictional world is at least plausible.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that much of the content here revolves around interesting thought exercises. But if you find yourself asking &quot;what would a world/people/place be like if {x}?&quot;, you may simply be too early in the process for a site like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can stick to issues of very &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; problem-solving writers and world designers encounter, this site will do fine. But if questions continually veer too far into  soliciting boundless story lines and roundtable discussions, I'm afraid this subject may be be better served by a discussion forum than a Q&amp;amp;A site. I'm not conceding that, of course, but it's something to consider when asking your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastEditorUserId="52" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T18:55:10.583" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T18:55:10.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2014-09-17T19:28:52.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I agree with Back It Up!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're here to answer questions because they don't fall into the asker's realms of expertise when it comes to world-building. (If they already have the knowledge, why would they come to us?) The Back It Up! policy will provide legitimacy to answers in addition to the legitimacy the voting system can provide. Sources will provide more resources for the askers, making our answers better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there will undoubtedly be questions which can be solved with good old logic, sans references. These answers, while not &lt;em&gt;strictly&lt;/em&gt; conforming to the Back It Up! policy, should be accepted if the logic is sound. Logical answers should also only be accepted when the logic is laid bare, so anyone can follow it. (Otherwise &amp;quot;logic&amp;quot; should be counted as opinion- not sufficiently backed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, &lt;strong&gt;I propose the following supplementary guides for closing questions and judging answers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if an expert or principles in a relevant field cannot provide an answer, vote to close / down-vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if logic cannot provide an answer, or provided logic has insufficient explanation, vote to close / down-vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if personal &lt;em&gt;world-building&lt;/em&gt; experience cannot conceivably provide an insight, vote to close / down-vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you can't &amp;quot;logic it&amp;quot; or cite something (experts, experience, or principles) for the answer, it's a bad question or answer for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T19:49:09.120" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2014-09-17T20:51:20.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This site is a site for asking speculative questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If there was hard fact to back up a physics question, it would be on Physics.SE. If there was hard evidence on what benefits a Timelord's two hearts gave him, then it would be on Biology.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you have work that you draw upon or facts that you used to help make an estimate, please share your sources. I am always happy to see a question filled with links to aid in speculation and cause and effect, however I do not believe that this should not be a barrier to someone who has an insight or understanding that they can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I believe that insisting upon sources for speculation and imagination will not only be detrimental to this site, but would &lt;em&gt;probably kill it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gut feeling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T15:40:06.737" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T15:40:06.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2014-09-17T21:37:00.327" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/87/thurizas&quot;&gt;thurizas&lt;/a&gt; raises an interesting sub-question in the question comments. Should we welcome algorithm questions like diamond-square versus uplift? I think that algorithms for generating worlds should be on topic (whether step by step guides to the order in which to build up a world, or abstract algorithms for generating terrain). However, the type of question asked is still important. If the question is just &quot;&lt;em&gt;How does the diamond-square algorithm work&lt;/em&gt;&quot; then I would consider it off topic. An on topic question would be something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;How similar to natural rock formations are the terrain models produced by the diamond-square algorithm?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T21:37:00.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="75" CreationDate="2014-09-17T22:02:56.493" Score="18" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone needs information about virtual worlds, like for example, the one seen in Matrix, would that be on topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes -- how this should be treated / tagged etc.? Do we treat such worlds and questions as pure SF or do we have special treatment for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking about &lt;em&gt;purely virtual&lt;/em&gt; worlds. The one, in which character exists only, when connected to some kind of device, machine, network etc. Plus eventually about dream-worlds. I'm not talking about worlds that someone may call &quot;virtual&quot; only because they're modern / future / new-tech / different than our world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T16:57:33.203" Title="Are purely virtual worlds on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2014-09-17T22:05:10.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that some questions might belong here, but others should go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rule that questions about how a world works are ours but those about why things happen would be theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T22:05:10.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2014-09-17T22:16:51.767" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that science-based answers are not the same than scifi-based answers. In science-based worlds you simply can not have interstellar travel, so you would be limited to one star (with maybe several planets, and trips of several years between them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess that we should separate &quot;real science&quot;, &quot;hard scifi&quot;, &quot;soft scifi&quot; and &quot;almost fantasy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T22:16:51.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2014-09-17T23:00:39.153" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Purely virtual worlds must have rules, maps, weather, societies, currencies, etc. as well, so yes, they are on topic. They may be similar to ours (like Level 13 or Matrix) or very different (like Tron) but each one must be crafted with detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T23:00:39.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2014-09-17T23:26:33.387" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a world is considered &lt;em&gt;virtual&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; is irrelevant. All worlds require the same things, as mentioned by @Envite. In terms of planning, there's no difference between a &lt;em&gt;virtual&lt;/em&gt; world or a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; world, in that they're all &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; worlds created by us, and so are on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T23:26:33.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2014-09-17T23:40:42.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we encourage &lt;strong&gt;Back It Up!&lt;/strong&gt; Absolutely. Should we enforce it? &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Absolutely not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. And let me explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there will be plenty of questions where authors, creators, designers of worlds will want to base their world as close to our own as possible and to make sure that the world they are designing is as realistic as possible. In these cases &lt;strong&gt;Back It Up!&lt;/strong&gt; would be beneficial to the answers, ensuring that the best research has gone into sourcing the most accurate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this site is also about fantasy, fiction and imagination. It's for those who create the impossible within their minds, and then turn that into a world for others to explore. If Terry Pratchett were to come on here and start asking questions about Disc World then it's highly likely any answers would be hypothetical and based in reason and informed decisions rather than verifiable facts. An enforced &lt;strong&gt;Back It Up!&lt;/strong&gt; policy simply wouldn't be practical. It would stifle those questions and the health of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the solution is to encourage users to back up their facts wherever possible, but to enforce a &lt;strong&gt;Back It Up!&lt;/strong&gt; policy on a site like this would be detrimental to its growth and potentially exclude a large portion of its membership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T23:40:42.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2014-09-18T00:29:56.113" Score="16" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Back It Up! &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; mean real-world history or physics or linguistics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are valuable fields that can give a fictional world a sense of realism, or at least credibility and verisimilitude. Answers that reference these things are often going to be better than those without them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Back It Up! can mean &lt;em&gt;extrapolate&lt;/em&gt; from reality&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, many of us want to build worlds that are &lt;em&gt;unrealistic in specific ways&lt;/em&gt; – but we are capable of reasoning how the things we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have experience with would react to this change. We can talk about building techniques, weapon technology, different social, ethical, and legal structures, linguistic developments, so on and so forth, to show how a given reaction to something new &lt;em&gt;fits in with all the things that are still the same.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Back It Up! can &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; mean personal experience&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to encourage experience worldbuilders – people who have done it, who have put their work out there, have received feedback, who have seen what works and what doesn’t work. How great would it be to have a bestselling author or Hollywood movie director or prime-time television screenwriter answering questions? This is the kind of thing we want to encourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So someone could easily decide to Back It Up! not by citing journals or histories, but by talking about their own personal experience: what they have tried and put to the test and seen work or fail. What their fans have received well and what their fans have taken issue with. That would be a phenomenally backed up answer, and gets straight to the heart of the Good Subjective/Bad Subjective guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But failing to Back It Up! means you’re just guessing&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer needs to justify the conclusions it comes to. “This sounds like a neat idea to me” simply &lt;em&gt;does not fit in well with how the Stack Exchange system works&lt;/em&gt;. It probably is a neat idea. The next guy’s got another neat idea. How do I decide which one to vote for? They’re both neat ideas, so I guess I’ll vote for both? Or maybe just the one I happen to like more, because equal votes to everything make voting pointless. But then my vote is just going to my personal preference, that’s not right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how the system breaks down when answers fail to Back It Up!. This is why we close questions that are Primarily Opinion-Based. It’s not (necessarily) that these are bad or invalid questions, or that these ideas aren’t neat. It’s that &lt;em&gt;the software that this website is based on is tailored for one specific thing,&lt;/em&gt; and idea-generation &lt;em&gt;isn’t it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T00:29:56.113" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T02:53:22.483" Score="11" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes I'm aware &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14/yes-questions-can-be-too-localized-but-usually-they-are-at-far-greater-risk-of&quot;&gt;Yes, questions can be Too Localized. But usually they are at far greater risk of being Too Broad&lt;/a&gt; exists, but I want to talk about something a little different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything in this site is probably going to be &quot;too broad&quot; for a standard SE site. Most questions are &quot;what if&quot; questions that could be answered in myriad of ways. Even &quot;localized&quot; questions will likely have multiple valid answers, because Worldbuilding is not a direct science where there are yes or no answers. Anything is possible. So we may need to define &quot;too broad&quot; a little differently than most SE sites. My suggestion is something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A question needs to be answerable in a few paragraphs. A  'question'&#xA;  should only have one actually question inside it, and needs to have&#xA;  the context to be able to be answered in a specific way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I think we need to give people a little bit of a break when it comes too to broad. This site will easily produce multiple answers to a question, I think, because most questions will have multiple possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, I think we should also consider discouraging downvoting of &quot;too broad&quot; questions, especially those of new users. Obviously people will vote how they want to vote, but I think we should have a sentiment of not downvoting these questions &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it can be vary hard to grasp what is &quot;too broad&quot; on this site, because Worldbuilding is a very broad subject. I think it would be easy to get discouraged if your questions were constantly being closed &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; downvoted because you couldn't quite get how broad something could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T20:15:08.787" Title="Redefining too Broad" Tags="|discussion|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2014-09-18T03:06:19.187" Score="18" Body="&lt;h1&gt;There needs to be enough definition to guide voting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s really it. SE depends on votes and voting to work. A question needs to be specific enough to say &lt;em&gt;“This&lt;/em&gt; is a good answer, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is not, because &lt;em&gt;reasons,”&lt;/em&gt; so that a consensus can emerge and the best answers can come to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question could be answered in too many ways, or the only way to answer it is to just list ideas which will never be exhaustive, &lt;em&gt;that cannot happen.&lt;/em&gt; Answers all become equally good-but-not-complete: the best answer would just be one that includes all (or a lot) of the answers in one answer. If that’s the only way you can imagine answering a question, then it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You avoid this by having &lt;em&gt;specific criteria for judging answers.&lt;/em&gt; List details that an answer has to cover, include restrictions and constraints for answers to fit inside, whatever. “I need ideas,” even “I need ideas for this situation,” tend to be bad questions &lt;strong&gt;for SE&lt;/strong&gt;. The system is poor at generating and refining those ideas (limited ability for back-and-forth refinement and discussion), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the community (should) expects a little more from question-askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, yes, this SE is different. We will have to get a feel for where line needs to be drawn. We will no doubt have to refine that line. We should probably allow things that are just a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; against our better judgment, to see if they turn out well. But ultimately we have to remember that the most important thing is that answers can be voted on in a meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T03:06:19.187" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2014-09-18T05:19:58.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specific questions about altering worlds to create a new derivative or which use existing fictional worlds as examples seem reasonable.  Questions directly about fictional worlds seem withing the purview of scifi.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be a good name for the Bolian character in my Star Trek Fanfic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off topic as it's not about altering the Trek setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be the smallest change to the Bolians to have then end up as enemies of the Federation rather than members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly on topic as it's a question about making a new world based on Star Trek and it might seem out of place on scifi.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T05:19:58.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="83" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T05:47:29.533" Score="10" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/133/98&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which to me looks like a classic list question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, list questions are discouraged on stackexchange, however on some sites there seems to be an (informal?) convention to allow some, but have a community wiki answer for collecting list items in that case (I didn't find a reference just now, but I'm abolutely sure I've seen that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should be the policy for such questions on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clarification about the community wiki answer: The idea is not that the question or all answers are community wiki, but that there's a single community wiki answer which collects all the good points from other answers, and is the accepted answer. That way you still can vote on individual answers, but someone just looking for an answer has not to go through all the individual answers (which might also have some overlap).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T20:53:52.340" Title="How to deal with list questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2014-09-18T06:13:56.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think list questions should be allowed, and the answer that gives the most &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; /most &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; reasons is the &quot;correct&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's why: Often when someone looks for how to create a world, they don't know about certain things and want realistic reasons why something could happen. So they ask here. Often times there are multiple ways this could happen, but the question is still helpful. I guess it would be &quot;good&quot; subjective. So you need a list question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should require list questions to be community wiki. (When you see one flag a mod). Or if you are typing a list answer, you need to mark it as community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-09-18T07:46:46.330" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T07:46:46.330" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2014-09-18T07:27:53.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree entirely, also the site is very active because it's very new - I have no doubt it will slow a little, that will need some patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the criteria for having a site progress is a reasonable number of answers per question. If we accept answers too early then people will be discouraged from answering questions which already have some responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think there's more responsibilities than that. As a community we must make a real effort to &lt;strong&gt;revisit older questions&lt;/strong&gt; to reward and balance later answers. Otherwise the newer answers will inevitably sink to the bottom and attract less attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T07:27:53.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2014-09-18T07:50:22.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with DonyorM that these questions should be on topic. Many of the problems people face when they create a world is they have a great idea but don't know how to build the logic behind it. I think that by making these sort of questions off topic and banning them we would be seriously limiting the value of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However where we disagree is on the use of community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the appropriate way to answer these question is to encourage thoughts and opinions and voting should indicate the best ones. The selected answer is the one which is of most use to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main reason for this is to encourage participation, community wikis require people to be far more selfless. One of the reasons I love the SE sites because of the challenge of rep and badges. I would like to earn reputation for posting an original and well thought out suggestion to someone's &quot;How can I...&quot; question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T07:50:22.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2014-09-18T08:13:15.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only difference between a virtual and a &quot;real&quot; fictional world is that the virtual world has interactions with at least one other (the &quot;real&quot;) world. For example, in Matrix there exist two fictional worlds: The simulated one, and the &quot;real&quot; one in which the simulation runs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But otherwise there's not much difference. You may claim that in virtual worlds there is more freedom for the rules, but I don't see any difference in principle between hacking the matrix and magic, as far as possibilities are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T08:13:15.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T09:06:06.447" Score="27" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're going to be talking about physical quantities, mathematical models for aspects of reality, and algorithms for generating aspects of our worlds.  So enabling the LaTeX Math feature used by Math.SE would be beneficial for expressing such things clearly and concisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2014-10-13T18:37:48.480" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T18:37:48.480" Title="LaTeX notation for Math" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2014-09-18T12:48:21.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; handle list questions well&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s just no good way to vote on them and answers are never complete or finished. There’s always more that you could list. The system simply fails when presented with them. There is no way to distinguish in any objective way which answer is “best” or even distinctly “good,” aside from which listed items happen to seem more important to you, personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List questions are basically &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; both Too Broad and Primarily Opinion-Based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T12:48:21.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:33:51.343" Score="7" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/275/how-would-a-meteoroid-shower-impact-effect-a-dyson-sphere&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has got me thinking. I think it balances a very fine line, on the one hand Dyson Spheres are most definitely on topic, how to destroy one... yeah, I could see it. The last lonely outpost with a pressurised atmosphere. It's no different to asking about any other apocalyptic scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bothers me about this the drive of this question it isn't about how can I design this world, it's about how can I drive this campaign/story. For that reason I can't help thinking it's better suited to RPG.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T14:50:28.723" Title="Are story building ideas on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:35:02.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a nice feature here on SE now: the list of hot questions in the right column. The more answers and  more upvotes on answers, the higher the chance the question will get there. And the more questions will get there, the more attention we will get from the rest of the SE community. So I'm glad that worldbuilding seems to be a site with lots of answers and lots of upvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw. this is the main reason why RPG.SE is my most visited site recently (not counting programming sites which I need for work) - its community has habit of answering and voting a lot, so you can almost always see some of their questions in the hot question list, and I often follow some of these links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T13:35:02.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:39:48.310" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, while writing my answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/112/18&quot;&gt;tides question&lt;/a&gt; I thought would have been very useful  to have formula available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/243/what-factors-impact-a-planets-gravity&quot;&gt;gravity strength&lt;/a&gt;. If maths formula were enabled we'd be able to refer to the proper gravitational maths much more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T13:39:48.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="92" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:45:27.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your assessment that the Dyson sphere question is likely off topic.  The problem is that there isn't a well defined line between stories and event-driven worlds.  Personally I think we should draw the line depending on which types of answer and which driving forces are involved.  For instance, &quot;What events can cause this change in the world at large?&quot; could likely work.  &quot;What world structure would lead to these sorts of events?&quot; could also likely work.  &quot;What events can cause this future event to happen?&quot; is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dyson sphere question wants the players to leave the dyson sphere.  It is asking for events that would lead to this (although it does limit to a specific world change to drive this).  While the means passes through a global event, it is still one event driving another and therefore more story-telling than world building.  The answers do not depend on the world involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T13:45:27.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:49:35.403" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is a little premature but it's one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;7 questions we should be asking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be an appropriate logo to use for a WorldBuilding site? What is recognisable, will work alongside the other SE sites and be eye catching to visitors of the What's Hot list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:49:04.500" Title="What should our logo and site design look like?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-09-18T23:10:20.273" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:50:54.163" Score="10" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a few questions this morning and a few from yesterday that were basically materials science questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/264/would-roof-over-a-ships-board-hinder-operation-of-the-ship-significantly&quot;&gt;Would a roof over a ship&amp;#39;s board hinder operation of the ship significantly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/263/how-would-sails-from-a-fireproof-material-affect-ships-performance&quot;&gt;How would sails from a fireproof material affect ship&amp;#39;s performance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/229/how-can-i-make-airships-less-flimsy&quot;&gt;How can I make steampunk airships less flimsy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/206/how-would-rudder-protection-against-water-elementals-affect-ships-performance&quot;&gt;How would rudder protection against water elementals affect ship&amp;#39;s performance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/186/how-would-the-existence-of-large-rideable-flying-creatures-have-changed-the-desi&quot;&gt;How would the existence of large rideable flying creatures have changed the design of castles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions do not appear to be directly about world building but definately have an application in world building.  But then again so does physics, math, geology etc.  I am thinking we need to draw the line somewhere that is relatively easy to tell which side of the line most questions fall.  &lt;strong&gt;But what should that line be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T04:19:58.340" Title="Is materials science on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="97" CreationDate="2014-09-18T13:52:49.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to look to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Magrathea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magratheans&lt;/a&gt; and think about a partially constructed planet. Perhaps something like wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r56Js.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of the globe being peiced together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T13:52:49.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:05:27.517" Score="-3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some statistics on Worldbuilding.SE on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;. Some other sites have a community wiki topic where the statistics are recorded every week or every other week. Do we want to make something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statistics for the first few days are misleading, so starting this before day 7 doesn't seem to be a good idea, but at least we have time to discuss it how to do it (if we want to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full disclosure: I can't volunteer to become WB.SE's record keeper if the community wants to establish this function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T20:14:09.257" Title="Will we regularly record statistics for our site?" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:12:42.417" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a &lt;em&gt;very specific type&lt;/em&gt; of list question can be on topic here.  Specifically, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;brainstorming&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; ones like the one the OP linked to.  There should be a specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/brainstorming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;brainstorming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; tag to indicate the type of question, and it should have to have a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; end goal&lt;/strong&gt; that the OP wants to reach.  (Such as &quot;Large geographic changes in a short period of time&quot;.)  All other list questions would be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers would, in fact, be lists of whatever ways to accomplish the end goal people can think of.  Votes would be based on how well people think those answers work, and acceptance is based on whichever idea the OP decides to go with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;open-ended questions about accomplishing a specific result&lt;/strong&gt; should be on-topic.  This includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/92/50&quot;&gt;story building ideas&lt;/a&gt; as well as questions like the one in the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example that would get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/brainstorming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;brainstorming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/275/how-could-a-dyson-sphere-be-destroyed-through-natural-causes&quot;&gt;How could a Dyson Sphere be destroyed through natural causes?&lt;/a&gt; - &quot;I have this idea, how can I make it work?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:59:46.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="97" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:24:53.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would vote for a half drawn map&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:24:53.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="92" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:31:02.057" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In My Opinion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Storytelling is the thing the worlds built here are made for. Therefore questions with storytelling in the back of our heads are essential to keep the whole community fresh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you label every question where &quot;in my story there is ...&quot; and &quot;they do ... &quot; with off topic and send them to other SE pages you scare the new members away. WorldBuilding has many crossovers with physics, space, rpg, languages, economy and who know what else! So you could set the side up as a &quot;post question here to get redirected to some other SE side&quot; or you could be more like &quot;nice that you questioned this here and not on this SE side, let me try to answer your question&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the core of the questions is about building a world (what in my understanding is also building living things that need to take actions fitting into the world) and have some side notes that the question is asked with that bit RPG in mind, it is here to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-09-18T14:32:59.513" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:32:59.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="97" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:49:04.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's far too early to be thinking about this. That 7 questions post is out of date. The site will change and be defined between now and when it gets out of beta. And when it does the logo and site design will be done by the staff at stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:49:04.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="92" CreationDate="2014-09-18T15:02:55.300" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/101/50&quot;&gt;my answer about list questions&lt;/a&gt;, I think questions like this &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be on topic here, but only within my proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/brainstorming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;brainstorming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tag would be specifically for &lt;strong&gt;open-ended questions about accomplishing a specific result&lt;/strong&gt;, such as &quot;How do I make {this thing} happen, given {these} constraints?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T15:02:55.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-18T18:03:54.943" Score="26" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are seeing some questions which receive answers that deal with magic. There isn't anything wrong in building worlds where magic exists, but there are two main issues that I can see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic systems differ from world to world. No two writers are likely to come up with exactly the same magic system, so anything proposed would need (possibly fairly extensive) tailoring to the world where it will be used. This isn't necessarily a big problem, but it is something worth keeping in mind. Nothing kills suspension of disbelief like a good repeated whacking over the head with inconsistency.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More importantly, &lt;strong&gt;not everyone is building a world where magic exists.&lt;/strong&gt; In fact, lots of worldbuilding involves worlds where magic doesn't exist, or where it exists but is not understood by the protagonist's race.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to be world-building for a detective story set in some town on Earth, and get stuck on some particular point, I want to come here and be able to ask about it (within the limits of what we ultimately decide is on topic for the site in the first place) without having to explicitly state that I don't want answers involving magic wands, shapeshifters and highly specialized magic systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, if I'm building a magic-based world, I want to be able to come here and ask questions and receive answers that are likely to be useful to me in that endeavour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question thus becomes: &lt;strong&gt;should we assume that answers invoking some form of &lt;em&gt;magic are acceptable, by default?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that we &lt;strong&gt;should not;&lt;/strong&gt; if an asker does not explicitly ask for answers that invoke some sort of magic, then I feel our default stance should be that any answers given should be &lt;strong&gt;accurate to within known sciences.&lt;/strong&gt; Also consider the Area51 proposal blurb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A site for writers/artists &lt;strong&gt;using science, geography and culture&lt;/strong&gt; to construct imaginary worlds and settings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes in hand with the suggestion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/64/29&quot; title=&quot;Meta.WB.SE: Back It Up! policies&quot;&gt;answers should be supportable by facts and references&lt;/a&gt;. Answers based (in whole or part) around magic cannot be supported by references to known sciences, for which there appears to be a fairly wide consensus even though the specifics differ between various proposals for how and how strictly to implement it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I think that by default, answers should be based in known sciences only, and invoke magic only if that is &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; asked for.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T07:26:49.047" Title="Should our default position be that answers should be science-/logic-based, rather than magic-based?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2014-09-18T18:09:18.637" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree.  Unless the question says there is magic and gives a decent description of what is possible, I assume we are sticking to real world physics.  Science fiction and steampunk stories have enough variety already, adding magical answers with no knowledge of if magic exists or how is just unproductive and isn't likely to be useful to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T18:09:18.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2014-09-18T19:17:11.297" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;If a question is unclear, &lt;em&gt;don’t answer it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote to put it On Hold, and ask for clarification in the comments instead; that’s what they’re there for. Questions should stipulate &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; this much detail in order to avoid being Unclear or Too Broad, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guessing or assuming will result, inevitably, in guessing incorrectly and that tends to lead to messes where answers that were good (and even well-received!) but founded on some assumption that turned out to be invalid start to clutter the answer space, and that’s awkward and problematic. This is why the On Hold status exists, and has the name it does (as a special case of Closed): answers are only closed temporarily to allow us to refine and clarify them, so that answers can &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what it is they’re supposed to be answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T19:17:11.297" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2014-09-18T20:14:09.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once we have established at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35/29&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pro tempore&lt;/em&gt; moderators&lt;/a&gt;, this becomes much less necessary. While analytics data is intended only for moderators, and as such cannot be shared in detail with the community at large, &lt;strong&gt;moderators do have access specifically to such statistics&lt;/strong&gt; as number of page views, visitors, posts, referrer statistics, new user counts, etc. which provide insight into one aspect of the health of a site. Such statistics go back to the birth of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any moderators, Stack Exchange staff has access to this data and &lt;strong&gt;are likely monitoring it already.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T20:14:09.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2014-09-18T20:53:52.340" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take a moment here and realize something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;List question&quot; is basically a loaded buzzword. There is no proper construct, nor are these questions inherently a bad fit for our engine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a very wide misconception spread by this term which causes any and every question which has multiple answers, especially that they may form a list of more than 2 items, to be condemned as this horrible thing called a &quot;list question&quot;. It's partially rooted in the idea of there needing to be a single definitive answer to any question. Neither of these are actual things. Being a list isn't a problem in itself. And the realization of this fact is that while there are a specific kind of problematic list (itemized lists, which were the subject of a number of our blog posts), you can often transform these into a non-problematic sort of list with a little effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the question that brought this up, &quot;What are some ways mass changing of terrain in a short period of time could occur?&quot; The asker clarifies that the time frame is a matter of weeks-to-months, that the terrain change is something along the lines of a brand new mountain or islands splitting off, and that natural phenomena rather than wizard-did-it solutions are being sought. This is like many things that just happen to ask for a list - the ultimate goal is to find a single solution to be used, and it solicits multiple solutions in order to find the best one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to take a moment right here, to point out that &lt;strong&gt;asking about a problem to solicit multiple solutions in order to find the best one for my purposes is literally one of the major points of existence for Q&amp;amp;A sites like ours&lt;/strong&gt;.  That there are multiple valid answers is not a problem, and we naturally have the ability to support this kind of system. The way it plays out is simple, we'll first start off by accruing the most commonly known means of mass terrain reformation. Some users will post multiples of these within one answer - &lt;em&gt;that makes for a stronger answer than someone who only proposed one&lt;/em&gt;, so that kind of answer probably gets more votes. But someone could suggest a rather esoteric means that not many people are familiar with, and fleshes it out with paragraphs of reasoning. That too would be pretty strong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes this acceptable is the scope. And let's not confuse this for some kind of &quot;Oh if there are fewer than 10 possible answers it is good&quot;, there's no such thing of numbers here. It's about &lt;strong&gt;what kind of scope makes logical sense for a question to contain enough information without being too broad or too narrow to be useful?&lt;/strong&gt;, and I find that something like &quot;Natural phenomena that would cause mass land reformation over a relatively short period of time&quot; is actually pretty useful. This isn't a rare kind of construct to use in world-building, sometimes you just gotta have a new mountain, yanno? You can see this as a simple contained system that is being sought out. This isn't acceptable because &quot;Oh there's only so many possible natural phenomena&quot;, even if that is a reality. It's acceptable because the problem space that is being asked about is very reasonable to us as world builders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all about changing how you look at it. What is at surface phrasing &quot;Give me a list of mass land reformations&quot;, is at heart &quot;How could I go about causing a mass land reformation in a period of weeks to months?&quot;, that's a single problem. That's the key here, it's &lt;strong&gt;isolating what problem is being asked, and then you judge the validity of the question based on that problem.&lt;/strong&gt; If the &lt;em&gt;problem's&lt;/em&gt; scope is improperly sized or is otherwise unfit for the site, that makes it a poor question, not the fact that the question requests a list of items. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem's scope would be improperly sized if, for example, if I asked (probably on Chemistry more than here) for a list of how every chemical element reacted with water in its purest state - there may be a finite number of elements but the list is unwieldy. I'm either trying to find a specific kind of reaction (to which I should've asked what kinds of elements produce said reaction), trying to find what kind of reactions there are (to which I should've asked what common reactions there are) or I'm trying to scout for outliers in the mix (to which I should've asked about unusual reactions). And the latter case may be too speculative to be useful. In fact there's a lot of places in scope decision that are fraught with perils like that - too broad, too narrow, too speculative, too obscure, too contrived, too complex, too simple... there are degrees in many directions that can render the scope of a question not useful to actually helping people. And they're all a problem associated with the scope, not with the fact that there's a list being asked for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see something that you'll instinctively call a List Question, &lt;strong&gt;think about what it's actually asking.&lt;/strong&gt; Think to yourself what problem it's trying to solve, and whether you think it's a useful problem to solve, and that the scope of the problem is useful. It may sometimes need you to tinker with the question to make it more visibly appropriate, but remember that our best tool is our ability to work with each other as a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T20:53:52.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="92" CreationDate="2014-09-18T21:02:11.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question could be saved with an edit to ask what would cause a sphere to be completely destroyed and what would the effect be. The current version is too much about how does the story work and not enough about how the dyson sphere would start the destruction, be destroyed etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T21:02:11.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="113" CreationDate="2014-09-19T02:46:46.290" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do we send referrals out for the Worldbuilding site?  I know a few people who might be interested but I'm not seeing anyplace that gives me a referral link.  I ask because I've noticed others have 'credit' for referring on Area 51. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T02:53:41.753" Title="How do we refer people to the site?" Tags="|support|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="112" CreationDate="2014-09-19T02:53:41.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You only get &quot;credit&quot; for referring people pre-private beta. But you can refer anyone to the site now, especially once it has entered public beta. Once it has entered public beta, just send them the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now you can invite specific people by email to the private beta. Go to the main site, and look on the right hand sidebar. There is a box that says &quot;Invite Fellow Experts.&quot; Fill in the data to invite someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T02:53:41.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="98" CreationDate="2014-09-19T04:19:58.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is, like many other such &quot;on-topic&quot; questions, is that it's not easy to draw a line. Of course questions that are more scientific than world-building are not on-topic. That's for another SE site. But this site is going to have a lot of overlaps with other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think most of these questions are fine. Take, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/206/how-would-rudder-protection-against-water-elementals-affect-ships-performance&quot;&gt;How would rudder protection against water elementals affect ship's performance?&lt;/a&gt; This would probably be marked as off topic very quickly on some other sites. But here it is fine. Why? Because it has to do with a specific situation in building a world. It does effect real life, water elementals don't exist, but in his world it is a very pertinent question. So it needs to be on topic here, the asker can't ask it anywhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's a basic guideline on where to draw the line? My guess is where it no longer is specific. Too broad is likely our biggest guideline here. If it isn't specfic, say something like, &quot;How would I create a fireproof ship?&quot; We can't answer it. It's too broad. He could ask, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/263/how-would-sails-from-a-fireproof-material-affect-ships-performance&quot;&gt;How would I create a fireproof sail&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and that would be fine, because we can give him a specific set of steps. Of course, if something is actually just history (say &quot;How would medieval people fireproof their siege engines) or just science, (something like &quot;What process of metabolism creates energy for plants&quot;) we don't answer it here. It belongs on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T04:19:58.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T06:24:04.400" Score="9" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently made an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/168/revisions&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; to the &quot;fantasy-based&quot; tab. The edit shows up in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/168/revisions&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; of the tag wiki. But if I visit the tag wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/fantasy-based/info&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; it doesn't show anything there. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; approved the tag wiki edit, I see that in my suggested edit history. I also receive credit for the &quot;Research Assistant&quot; badge. But I don't see the actual edit being made, why is that? Is there something different with tag-wikis during beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The history does not show anyone going in and deleting all the stuff I added. The only edit was me adding data to the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T06:24:04.400" Title="Tag Wiki Edits not Showing" Tags="|bug|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T07:23:24.420" Score="12" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because worldbuilding tends to appeal to creativity and hypotheses, it happens that different people provide different answers, each one being entirely valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here's a question I asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123/what-could-cause-rock-formations-small-stones-boulders-islands-to-levitat&quot;&gt;What could cause rock formations (small stones, boulders, islands...) to levitate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one to validate, if any? How to reward every person who worked on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T08:45:16.460" Title="How to deal with many good acceptable answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-19T07:34:03.613" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;Accepted (see below)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile forMonica Cellio at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Monica Cellio at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Monica Cellio at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Monica Cellio at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/505925&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Monica Cellio on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/505925.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an elected moderator on Mi Yodeya and The Workplace, and a pro-tempore&#xA;  mod on Writers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen her good work on both Writers and the Workplace and would like her experience and guiding hand here. I've been very impressed with the quality of questions she's been asking both on the site. They're well thought out and have been well received. I feel it's important to have someone who takes the effort to ask good questions to encourage others (myself included) to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Monica:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been on Stack Exchange for about 3.5 years, been an elected moderator for 2 and a bit, and participated in sites at all stages of development from private beta to mature graduate, though not &quot;SO levels of huge&quot;.  I'm active on MSE, the SE-wide meta, and a variety of other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If chosen, I see my primary role as bringing broader SE experience, particularly with subjective-leaning sites.  &lt;strong&gt;I am not a domain expert.&lt;/strong&gt;  When questions come up about whether something is on-topic per some nuance of our scope, I'm going to &lt;em&gt;kick that back to y'all&lt;/em&gt; -- which I think is a reasonable thing for a mod to do especially in early beta, but if you're looking for somebody who will take a decisive leading role in deciding What This Site Is For, that's not going to be my strong suit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I will strive to keep asking good questions, to poke at the boundaries to help firm up our scope from time to time, and to help keep us in sync with SE norms through meta discussion and guidance.  Some of this might be bordering on the usual role for a site's assigned Community Manager, so maybe that's already covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T23:14:41.657" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="116" CreationDate="2014-09-19T08:05:03.577" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that OPs should upvote all answers they believe are of good quality and select the one they find the most useful for the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the help documentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accepting doesn't mean it's the best answer, it just means that it worked for the person who asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning that you should choose the answer which helped you towards your final solution/understanding. This may not or may not be the highest voted answer. A high rating indicates the quality of the answer not it's usefulness to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-09-19T08:45:16.460" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T08:45:16.460" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T08:25:39.247" Score="10" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have my doubts over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rpg&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rpg&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rpg&lt;/a&gt; tag, it's only used on a couple of questions but for me it steers the site towards application over creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain, I believe World Building should focus on the creation of realistic (or at least feasible environments) which can be used in literature, film or games. I think it's a real cross discipline site with real potential to bring in people with a lot of different interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when we start to design worlds for a specific purpose see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/are-story-building-ideas-on-topic&quot;&gt;story building question&lt;/a&gt;) I think we start to drift away from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't need or want to know about the world's application, whether it's an RPG a first person shooter or a hollywood blockbuster. I feel like tags like this drive us towards categorising for use rather than design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T22:51:05.053" Title="Do we want the RPG Tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T10:16:07.130" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's my first Beta phase on a SE and i am not very long on the whole network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that many Questions on the Meta Page are phrased like &amp;quot;are we doing this&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;should we accept this&amp;quot; even &amp;quot;do we want - that kind of question - to be on Topic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of questions are mainly opinion based. So should there even be an Selected Answer? After this short Time (not even 50 views on the Questions) the usual 10 Members on the Meta Page responded to the answer and than their Opinion is set there. Mostly looking like this is now set in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the Answers should at least be locked for a week so everyone has the time to UP and DOWN vote and than the questioner can select one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-02-21T14:22:28.107" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T14:22:28.107" Title="Answers to &quot;are we&quot; or &quot;should we&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2014-09-19T11:07:32.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Meta especially, the accepted answer is fairly meaningless.  All it really represents is a super-powered vote by the question asker to show their preference.  I don't think holding off on an accepted answer for longer than a day or two would greatly benefit the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T11:07:32.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2014-09-19T12:03:39.660" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with removing the tag, on two counts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly I think it's too early to start deleting tags, we need to see how things pan out for a while first. In particular tags may only have 2 uses now but the most popular tag only has 11!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly the application can be relevant to both questions and answers. When writing a novel (for example) you have control over where the characters go and if they suddenly go an unexpected direction you are able to pause and create that area. In an RPG though (especially one where you need to prepare maps and stat encounters in advance so improvisational play is harder) then you need to have those areas fleshed out before the players hit it. In a computer game this is even harsher - if a player is going to do something you need to have considered it and programmed it in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use to which a world is being put does influence how you build the world, what features you need in the world, and what levels of detail you need in what locations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T13:39:11.817" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T13:39:11.817" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2014-09-19T12:56:12.463" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what Godric Seer said, at this stage of site development -- and well into public beta for that matter -- it's not unusual to have &quot;should we do X?&quot; questions on meta.  Beta is all about shaping a site so that it will be useful and have a user base for the long haul.  And early in beta a lot of these philosophy questions get set in motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, meta is often opinion-based; while that's a sign of a weak question on &lt;em&gt;main&lt;/em&gt;, meta is different.  This is where we figure out things about how to run the site; it's going to be full of opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T12:56:12.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="92" CreationDate="2014-09-19T14:50:28.723" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;History building is an important factor of world building. History building is also pretty much the same as active story building, just that the writer is the one moving all parts and roles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't to say it's automatically on-topic though - I think it's valuable to consider whether we as a community want to assist in &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; worlds in the same way we do &lt;em&gt;creating&lt;/em&gt; worlds. Personally I feel it can easily detract from the goal we have as a site, if we start mixing in people actively running their worlds. This is as a result a really tricky problem to think about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ease of parallel between &quot;history&quot; and &quot;story&quot; means we can transform these but I would suggest we not just do that in all cases. Rather, &lt;strong&gt;look at what the question is asking, look at the underlying problem, and ask, &quot;Do I think this is a valuable thing for world building?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; If the answer is yes, then we can use edits to help shape the question to be less about the story and more about the history. That is, assuming that the scope of the question remains useful on the site - something far too contrived or narrow may just not be useful for people at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sometimes, or perhaps even often-times, that answer will be no&lt;/strong&gt;. If someone comes in here asking about this huge political tangle caused by the players in the story, that's probably not something we want to deal with. Whether these players are operated by the writer alone or by friends in roleplay, there's a distinct difference between something being background data and something being active developments. &quot;Player interference&quot; can be an easy measure for whether or not something is in our comfort zone. &quot;Event driven&quot;, as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/are-story-building-ideas-on-topic/96#96&quot;&gt;Godric Seer's answer&lt;/a&gt;, is another key sign of acceptability. There's a difference twixt writing to produce a particular backdrop or setting, which is what we do here, and writing to allow for a particular event or dramatic structure, which is not what we do here. The line isn't a clear black-and-white, unfortunately, but it's one we would have to judge based on. I prefer salvage over outright shutdown but this I feel can easily lean more often to unsalvageable. As long as we don't stay blind to what can be fixed to something that we find useful in worldbuilding, though, I think it can work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T14:50:28.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-20T04:07:17.770" Score="8" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing I did when I got the notification that the private beta was up was to look for question on conlangs (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;constructed languages&lt;/a&gt;), since that's the facet of the worldbuilding process I'm most interested in at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it took me a while to find anything, because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; tag doesn't yet exist, only one question actually contained the word &quot;conlang&quot;, and the questions that are about language construction so far are tagged under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I envision language construction eventually becoming a significant part of this website. What do you think should we do about the scope of this tag? Is there enough that's relevant about linguistics other than conlangs to merit &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlangs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlangs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlangs&lt;/a&gt; getting their own tag? Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastEditorUserId="150" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T17:37:06.947" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T17:37:06.947" Title="Should questions about conlangs be tagged with &quot;conlangs&quot;, or is &quot;linguistics&quot; good enough?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="125" CreationDate="2014-09-20T09:40:52.207" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; being a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; is broader than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt;, but on this site they are practically the same. But there are enough people who would want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt;, that's worth keeping it around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T09:13:18.913" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T09:13:18.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="128" CreationDate="2014-09-20T12:54:00.297" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some contexts like sites where people with a common interest (hey, exactly like wb.se.com! ) it could happen that the people there wants to gather together around shared projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While wb.se.com is not a place for people to meet, but for questions to be resolved, should we make our community feeling stronger by providing means for people to directly help other people in their projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. somebody building a world needs some help with vulcanism, and makes several questions here, all answered by the same geology expert. It would make sense for them to collaborate directly. Should we encourage that? Maybe via our chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T17:36:43.763" Title="Making community" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2014-09-20T17:36:43.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, we shouldn't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange isn't a social network; it's a questions and answers network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if I was an expert in geology with specialization toward volcanoes, and saw multiple questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volcanism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volcanism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volcanism&lt;/a&gt; in a short period of time, I might get curious and look more closely at that tag thinking that maybe there is more there which I can answer relatively easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with any other subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we shouldn't expect people to do that. Every user picks which questions they want to answer, and to what level they want to take their answer, based on their own feelings, available time, and knowledge. I know I have been rather annoyed when people have taken my answering one of their questions as some sort of carte blanche to ask me specifically to answer their other questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for your specific suggestion of chat: generally speaking, &lt;strong&gt;chat is a terrible way of doing Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/strong&gt; It comes down to largely the same issues that make the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format better than forums (or Facebook) for getting specific answers to specific questions. If someone is willing to discuss a question through chat then by all means, but those discussions should focus on &lt;strong&gt;asking the best question possible.&lt;/strong&gt; The answer should be posted on the question itself. That allows the community to chime in and vote, potentially much later, and preserves knowledge in an easy-to-find form for later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have started out in chat a few times trying to figure out basically &lt;em&gt;where to start asking a question,&lt;/em&gt; and what information should go into the question, when I wasn't sure how to approach a problem. But I have always made it clear up front that the intention is to &lt;em&gt;post a question&lt;/em&gt; rather than seeking actual answers in chat. That also means that people not intimitely familiar with the subject matter might be able to help out in chat, as asking a good question is a skill that transfers between subject matter domains.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T17:36:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="125" CreationDate="2014-09-20T17:53:38.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel I discussed this over in my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/34/29&quot;&gt;How should we tag questions about space?&lt;/a&gt;, but here it goes again. &lt;strong&gt;Tags should be used to provide meaningful question grouping.&lt;/strong&gt; (Also consider Grace Note's answer &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/51/29&quot;&gt;over here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does separating constructed-language questions specifically from non-constructed-language questions provide a benefit to those looking for questions, whether to learn or to answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126/29&quot;&gt;as DonyorM wrote&lt;/a&gt;, on this site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; would largely be the same, then again what's the benefit in separating them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I see any benefit in such a separation, at least not at the moment. We currently have three questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt; and nothing tagged &quot;constructed language&quot; or anything like that which I can find with a quick look through the used tags. (If there is such a tag and I'm missing it, please do point it out and I'll revise this...) Questions relating strictly to existing human languages are probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;a better fit&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the Linguistics SE&lt;/a&gt; than on Worldbuilders anyway. (If this site is to have any chance of making it, we need to focus its scope. Just because a topic &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; relate to worldbuilding doesn't mean this is necessarily the best place to ask about it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/107/envite&quot;&gt;Envite&lt;/a&gt; pointed out in a comment, I'd &lt;em&gt;suggest we avoid jargon if possible.&lt;/em&gt; We had a discussion about this on the Amateur Radio SE as well (besides outright technical terms, amateur radio is fairly jargon-heavy, and much of the jargon is international in nature) and while that site's Meta is not quite as active as ours here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ham.meta.stackexchange.com/q/70/29&quot;&gt;more people felt jargon should be avoided if possible&lt;/a&gt; than otherwise. Tags can be named with up to 25 characters; if we need a tag specifically for constructed languages, I would strongly suggest simply calling it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/constructed-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;constructed-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;constructed-languages&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;because that will be easy to find and understand the meaning of.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.530" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T21:25:58.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-21T02:27:10.690" Score="8" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-creation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-creation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-creation&lt;/a&gt; be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cartography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cartography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cartography&lt;/a&gt;? There are three questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cartography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cartography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cartography&lt;/a&gt; and two tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-creation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-creation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-creation&lt;/a&gt;. They mean the same thing, one is just a specialized term and the other is laymen's speech. So I think they should be synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-03-08T21:57:44.923" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T21:57:44.923" Title="map-creation synonym of cartography" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-21T07:41:04.123" Score="6" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;stats on Area 51&lt;/a&gt; still look good, but they are lower than they were. After an intense initial push we have slowed down. To a certain extent this is natural, but our current pace will bring the figures below the targets in a few days from now, which would threaten our private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the underlying causes for this? Is the slow down just due to the weekend - are people more active during the week? Or is this a sign of running out of questions? As has been pointed out by others, a high question count only helps if they are high quality questions, so it's no good just churning out questions that don't fit. I want to see discussion of how people think things are going, rather than just judge it from simplified stats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T09:37:17.120" Title="Why are we slowing down?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-09-21T07:46:55.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;More examples of posts that would be much improved by the availability of MathJax (LaTeX maths formatting):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/341/109&quot;&gt;geostationary orbit near the surface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/what-minimal-radius-is-needed-for-rotation-to-simulate-gravitation-without-avers&quot;&gt;minimal radius for simulated gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-12T01:26:22.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="130" CreationDate="2014-09-21T07:52:19.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are differences but not enough to make much difference without causing a lot of confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;longer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are some subtle differences, I think map creation is about drawing maps from a designed world. Whereas cartography is about the design of how the maps and coordinate systems work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if I was to ask about implementing a coordinate system based on bearing and distance to a particular point that's cartography. If I wanted to know how to represent a church on my map that's map building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've actually changed my mind since beginning this post. While I think there is a a difference I think these distinctions are probably too subtle and would simply cause confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would merge them because although there are minor differences I think it would be more valuable to have all the map type questions together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T09:18:19.177" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T09:18:19.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-09-21T07:57:04.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is less convenient due to having to link off-site, a good compromise until we get MathJax is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathurl.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathurl.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows you to edit an equation and then create a link which can be included in your answer as an image. An image link is just like a normal link in an answer except that it is preceded by an exclamation mark. To make it display as an inline image you can append &quot;.png&quot; to the link. This then gives results that match what would be produced if we had MathJax LaTeX support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of how to get this working, look at the following answer and press edit to see what text was used to achieve the end result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/303/109&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/303/109&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that as celtschk points out in the comments, it is very useful to use the LaTeX text as the alternative text that will be displayed if there is a problem with the link. This makes your answer more robust, and provides a quick and painless way of converting to native MathJax if we are given this capability in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T10:22:09.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="131" CreationDate="2014-09-21T08:04:12.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two thoughts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's the weekend, people are out doing things. Let's have another look on Monday or Tuesday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A lot of people have asked their initial questions and current problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately a lot of sites suffer from the beta effect where people want to get answers to their questions and problems early on because they don't know how long the beta is going to stay active. There's always going to be an initial surge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now will come the real test of whether the site is sustainable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T08:04:12.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-21T09:35:33.233" Score="11" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/363/is-there-a-physically-sound-faster-than-light-travel-system-for-a-spaceship&quot;&gt;Is there a scientifically sound faster-than-light travel system for a spaceship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has a close vote for off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not convinced it's off topic as the method of FTL would have massive effects when universe building (which is a part of world building). Equally though I can see how it isn't directly world building...so any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T16:47:42.617" Title="FTL Travel, On or Off Topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="131" CreationDate="2014-09-21T09:37:17.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment it's private beta. There are only so many questions and answers that 208 people can ask and answer so some slow-down is to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real test will come when it transitions to open beta and beyond...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T09:37:17.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="136" CreationDate="2014-09-21T11:11:10.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Real science details could be off-topic sometimes since they can be better suited for physics.se.com but everything else is on-topic since universe-building is part of world-building. There would be no Asimov's Foundation, no Herbert's Dune, no Star Trek, no Star Wars, no Babylon 5, no Stargate, no Transformers without some kind of FTL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T11:11:10.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="140" CreationDate="2014-09-21T15:55:10.607" Score="12" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we encourage users to +1 each question, they find at least that interesting, that they're deciding to answer? AFAIK, this case isn't certain among other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find this fair and professional. We have opposite mechanism (if answer is good, its author is awarded with +1 or even acceptance). But what about OP? If I find question good enough to answer it, I think, OP should be awarded with vote-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd like to know other opinions -- whether this should be encouraged (in FAQ, in comments) or should remain as purely private opinion / decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:19:39.837" Title="Should we encourage voteup upon answering?" Tags="|discussion|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2014-09-21T16:15:50.533" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, in a small private beta with relatively low voting rates, your question makes sense. Even popular questions get few votes, so whether or not the answerer votes up makes a big difference. However, I see this as a short term phenomenon that won't be worth thinking about beyond private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is good enough that it is getting votes from viewers, then the answerer's vote will not make a significant difference. If a question is getting very few votes from viewers, then that suggests it is not a great question, and the answerer shouldn't feel obliged to upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answerer should choose whether to vote and whether to answer as two separate decisions. In most cases where I post an answer, it is because I found the question interesting, and so I upvote. I wouldn't want to be pressured to upvote though, or conversely pressured not to answer if I don't feel like upvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be cases where a question is not off topic and there is no reason to close it, but it is not a particularly good question. Adding an answer that demonstrates the problems with the question and explains why there can be no definitive conclusions can be helpful for future reference, and if I saw such a situation I would upvote the answer but not the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T16:15:50.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="136" CreationDate="2014-09-21T16:47:42.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not every world needs to be perfectly physically accurate, or even follow the same physics as our universe. However, it is a natural part of world building to want to understand the science underlying concepts you want to play with - even if you don't want to stick to the restrictions. For example if I want to write a story that must involve faster than light travel, then I'm going to do it regardless of whether it is physically realistic. However, it would still be very useful to me to gain an understanding of what is already possible, so that I can limit the amount of rule bending and make sure those rules that I do bend do not detract from the story too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I definitely see faster than light and physics questions in general as on topic. Sometimes they can't be asked on physics stack exchange because that concerns our universe and current rather than future science. Even when they would be a good fit for physics stack exchange, that needn't make them off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T16:47:42.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="143" CreationDate="2014-09-21T19:43:39.293" Score="13" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently eight questions tagged &quot;design&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/377/29&quot;&gt;Asteroid as a generation ship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/332/29&quot;&gt;Foundation Component of New World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/325/29&quot;&gt;Ensuring consistency in a world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/316/29&quot;&gt;Can you simply scale up animals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68/29&quot;&gt;Ship design that could navigate on the edge of an incredibly strong vortex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58/29&quot;&gt;For designing a vocal language for an intelligent species, how to decide on phonemes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40/29&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed planets realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2/29&quot;&gt;How can I break down the task of creating a world into manageable chunks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a glance, these don't really have a lot in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one (&quot;Foundation Component of New World&quot;) is tagged &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; whereas the others have additional tags as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly do we intend the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; in this case? Can we even deduce a meaning for the tag from the mass of questions tagged with it, or should we simply drop that tag entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since worldbuilding almost by definition relates to some sort of design, I think we can drop the tag entirely.&lt;/strong&gt; How does the community feel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T20:10:23.087" Title="What does the &quot;design&quot; tag even mean? Do we want it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2014-09-21T20:10:23.087" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually despite the fact I've said a few times now that I think it's too early for a tag cull...in this case I agree, the tag is pretty meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T20:10:23.087" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2014-09-21T20:15:08.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is happening here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/388/90&quot;&gt;What would be the main societal changes if we invented a free and unlimited energy source tomorrow on earth?&lt;/a&gt;) is very interesting for this issue I believe: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question started out as too broad, but because it was left open for long enough, people's comments helped narrow it down to a maybe localized enough question. It remains to be seen whether we're able to do that every time (or if it's even the case with this question), but I believe that we should encourage this kind of behavior on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will tend to come up with über broad questions because, just like you said, we like the &quot;what if&quot; sorts of things here. But we can narrow it down together and get something to work even when it started as &quot;Too Broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenters are asking &quot;what field are we targeting? Economics? Physics?&quot;, and &quot;what time frame are we looking at? 1 day? 1 year?&quot;... And this is good I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T20:15:08.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-21T21:32:46.590" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18/liath&quot;&gt;Liath&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;declined with apologies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18/&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/18.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Liath at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Liath at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18/&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Liath at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/18.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/143675&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Liath on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/143675.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liath has strong participation on both main and meta.  From the questions and answers on main it's clear that he has domain knowledge; from the participation on meta and the helpful comments he leaves, it's clear he cares about building the site and has good things to contribute there.  He's been a Stack Exchange user for several years, mainly on SO and Movies &amp;amp; TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;liath&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I'm flattered by the nomination and will continue to participate in site the but for personal reasons I'm unlikely to be able to dedicate the time I'd want to at the moment. I'm still hoping to be around, active and involved but I'd hate to take on a responsibility I didn't know I could honour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T09:03:02.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-21T22:09:52.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/107/envite&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/107.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Envite at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Envite at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/107/envite&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/flair/107.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Envite at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Envite at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/1870957&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Envite on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1870957.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since (CITE) &quot;&lt;em&gt;self-nominations (i.e. posting your own profiles) are allowed and even encouraged&lt;/em&gt;&quot; I'm daring to nominate myself. It is not that I would be a wonderful moderator (this should be judged by the community), but what I can bring here is expertise in the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the badge I'm user on &lt;strong&gt;Astronomy.SE.com&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Scifi.SE.com&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;RPG.SE.com&lt;/strong&gt; and I'm there because I love those subjects. I'm Astrophysicist (you can check that most of my answers here are about planetary issues), Roleplaying Master in lots of different game systems (from Middle Earth to Star Wars) and an very avid reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T22:09:52.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-22T04:23:53.633" Score="8" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/394/does-living-without-access-to-sunlight-for-extended-periods-have-known-physical&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question had a close vote on it. I reviewed it and decided to leave it open, because I doubt it would be accepted on other sites. But should this kind of question (scientific questions about human psychology/physiology that aren't valid in a real-life context) be allowed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T16:04:17.817" Title="Would questions about psychology be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-22T05:07:20.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/81/donyorm&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/81.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for DonyorM at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for DonyorM at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/81/donyorm&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/flair/81.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for DonyorM at Worldbuilding Meta Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A about the site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for DonyorM at Worldbuilding Meta Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A about the site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/3223020&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for DonyorM on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/3223020.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a fairly new member to the whole SE network, but have spent time learning how it's worked. I currently GM a PBP RPG, and have created an earth-like world from scratch. I really enjoy building worlds and I've learned a lot answering and asking on this site. I'm fairly active here (in the top 10 according to Area 51), and would like to  be able to help moderate the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been as much on the foreground in meta as some others, but this is because I have been waiting and learning. I have asked several questions, and answered a few too. But I've been around voting on a lot of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T05:15:48.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-09-22T05:55:06.167" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B.&lt;/a&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;Accepted&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Tim B at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot; title=&quot;profile for Tim B at Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Tim B at Worldbuilding Meta Stack Exchange, Q&amp;amp;A about the site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/3659411&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for Tim B on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/3659411.png&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim B. has been very active on both meta and the main site, and has managed to rack up quite a lot of rep. He has answered several meta questions well, and seems to keep an eye on everything. He also is very good at answering questions on the main site and has successfully answered many a question. He is knowledable of the SE model and I think he would make a good moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T18:19:05.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="147" CreationDate="2014-09-22T09:40:46.447" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;How would people react in this situation&quot; type questions are on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychology/Biology/Physics are very broad topics and I think the questions we get here are more about using established knowledge in a new way, in a new world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80/redefining-too-broad&quot;&gt;ideas proposed here&lt;/a&gt;. Questions like this are not off topic, but they need to be assessed on a case by case basis to make sure they are sufficiently scoped to avoid a myriad of ideas being suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion Monica's question is a very good example of doing just this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T09:40:46.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="177" CreationDate="2014-09-22T10:42:26.767" Score="11" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're a week since Stack Exchange Area 51 announced invitation for Worldbuilding private beta for all of us and we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;currently have &lt;s&gt;93&lt;/s&gt; 94 questions&lt;/a&gt;. How we're doing? Is it good, poor or critically low?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my first SE site, where I participate in private beta. My journey with most others started at public beta. Though my commitment to these sites started many days, weeks or even months after starting public beta, I must admit, that I find it quite nervous for me personally to see, that those public beta sites had  thousands of questions (4-6k), while our site has less than a hundred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, I have completely no idea / information / experience, how this should look in private beta, so I might mess some things out. But, I must admit, that each time I'm looking at these &lt;em&gt;poor&lt;/em&gt; &lt;s&gt;93&lt;/s&gt; 94 questions, I fear really much, that we're doing really, really bad, and that there will be no public beta at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would apperciate, if someone with experience could spoke and say, that I see these things in a very bad way, and that we're doing really good. I think, my following nights would be much peaceful, after this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T14:54:56.820" Title="How are we doing in this Private Beta?" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-22T14:02:38.893" Score="10" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on Area 51 you can still browse the list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=definition&quot;&gt;example questions&lt;/a&gt; that were used in the definition phase before we got to private beta. Some of these have been asked in similar format here, but many have not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to ask more of the high voted example questions as private beta questions? Should this be done by the original poster or if they have not done so yet can we start to post them ourselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T14:02:38.893" Title="Questions from the definition phase on Area 51" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="152" CreationDate="2014-09-22T14:02:38.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that any we think are valid questions should be posted, so that the community can judge them by voting and contribute more to defining the scope of the site. Posting an expanded or slightly changed version also contributes to this process - it needn't be word for word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any problem with posting a question based on someone else's Area 51 example question. This is a collaborative effort and it helps the site. By all means ask the person concerned if they are around in case they plan to post it themselves, but if they are not I see no reason not to go ahead with posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T14:02:38.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="151" CreationDate="2014-09-22T14:26:49.617" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been with 3 sites from private to public (and very active in 2 of them (one being the most active non-mod review queue processor, the other being a protem moderator)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our quality, number of questions and number of answers are all &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; good for a private beta. No question the public beta will be very soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T14:26:49.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="147" CreationDate="2014-09-22T16:04:17.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you linked is about more than just psychology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This SE is about world building not story telling.  Its not about how a person or small group of people would react but rather how a civilzation would react or cope or what they would need to do to cope, as seen in the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking about how a civilization would react or what would cause it to respond in a certian way is about crafting the history and lore of the world, and is certianly on topic.  However questions that are more about telling a story or on an individual or small group scale should be off topic here.  History is full of exceptional individuals who overcame the norm and led others on to greatness.  An individuals expected response is not likely to be helpful in worldbuilding, though how the masses would react certianly could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T16:04:17.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-22T16:36:46.557" Score="6" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can start with a chemical composition for a planet and ask &quot;what kind of geography and mountain types are likely to result from this composition?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively I can start with the requirement for a specific type of mountain and ask &quot;how would I build a planet that results in this type of mountain?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both these approaches on topic, or just one, or neither?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="109" LastEditDate="2014-09-22T16:47:28.440" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T16:58:26.607" Title="Top down versus bottom up" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2014-09-22T16:36:46.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I welcome both kinds of question (provided they are not off topic for some other reason). I would like to see questions that look for the consequences of specified decisions. I would also like to see questions that look for the required decisions to produce specified consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided a question is not too broad and there is evidence that some thought has been put in prior to asking the question, I consider both types on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T16:36:46.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2014-09-22T16:58:26.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course the wording of the question ultimately makes the final decision of if a question is off-topic, but I would expect both types of questions to be thrown out there.  Sometimes someone is wondering &quot;what would this do?&quot;  and sometimes they are wondering &quot;How would you get to that situation?&quot;  Both are good questions &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T16:58:26.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-22T17:01:08.543" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I encounter a problem during world building, I would like to ask it as a question. However, not all problems I encounter will be related to world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Off topic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an extreme example, if my pen runs out or there is a fire alarm, my world building will be interrupted but it would make no sense to post a question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On topic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I specify the locations of a collection of villages and a distant city, I could ask what road layout is likely to emerge naturally if not planned in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't expect disagreement with the examples (if there is, let me know and I will simply change the examples).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, where between these two extremes should we draw the line on what counts as a &amp;quot;world building problem&amp;quot; and what is simply a problem that happened to be encountered during world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am raising this question is due to a close vote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/426/a-permanent-war&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where you can see the discussion in the comments. I would like some guidance on where the line should be drawn, which will hopefully also indicate whether that question is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T16:18:16.680" Title="Problems encountered during world building" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="151" CreationDate="2014-09-22T17:03:44.237" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;if you go back to the Area51 and look at the world building, it give you a sort of score card.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;  We're not doing to bad according to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T17:03:44.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="159" CreationDate="2014-09-22T17:32:20.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line should be is the question more about the World building or the story telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building questions ask about effects and civilizations and properly scoped to in bounds of time, scale, and technology as appropriate.  Story telling questions ask about specific actors more than the overall effects.  Plot building questions tend to be more abstract but are still story telling questions rather than world building. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your linked question you ask about a permanent war and can it go on.  Since you have no scope of time or distance this becomes a story telling/plot building question.  However if you bound it properly and expand to ask about how the war would scar the land or affect the population, or something similiar then it would be a properly scoped world building question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T17:32:20.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="159" CreationDate="2014-09-22T18:04:17.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Chad on this one. The permanent war is going to be a large part of both the terrain and society. It would change the landscape (potentially), the people (definitely) and the way the entire world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is on topic as such a large event is going to have a massive impact on the world that is being built. It's going to have just as much if not more effect than (for example) the tides created by multiple moons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T18:04:17.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-22T18:34:20.260" Score="10" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; will show that very few have a tag wiki (the brief wording below a tag that explains what it is for). Even if you don't have access to edit these, you have access to suggest edits to these, which is still very helpful (just click on the tag and you will see a link to create a tag wiki, which need only be a sentence or two).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sooner we get these completed, the less chance there will be of conflicting use of tags which will be a pain to clear up later. Better to have something written so it is explicit, then if there is disagreement it will be known and can be discussed. If you're really not sure which way to describe a particular tag, raise a meta question. Otherwise, just go ahead and write the tag wiki excerpt - it will be edited again in future if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend just focusing on the excerpts for now (a few sentences to summarise). The longer full wording can be filled in later (feel free to do these too - I just want to prioritise the excerpts first as they are quick to complete).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T01:40:01.923" Title="We need tag wiki wordings" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="166" CreationDate="2014-09-22T22:00:45.097" Score="8" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/449/29&quot;&gt;Is there a credible way a shapeshifter could gain/lose body mass when changing forms?&lt;/a&gt; has received eight upvotes, one downvote, and two close votes (both as &quot;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding&quot;). I'd call this a reasonably positive but rather mixed reception by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the people who have downvoted or voted to close have left any clear comments explaining why, so there is nothing that I can act on in order to fix the question, if it indeed is to be considered off topic in its current state. At this stage, since we are still trying to figure out exactly what the scope of the site should be, close votes in particular really don't mean much if they aren't accompanied by a description of just what makes the question off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What about that question would make it not about worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T19:04:58.857" Title="What about my question makes it &quot;not about worldbuilding&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2014-09-22T22:27:37.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A positive reception doesn't make a question on topic, but in this case I believe your question is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/159/problems-encountered-during-world-building&quot;&gt;problems encountered during worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; seems relevant. Personally I consider your question to be one which affects the building of your world, not just stories set within it, and as such on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example question in the linked meta post can be answered by geographical, technological or social considerations, so is not just a question about people but about the world they live in. However, I had to edit that clarification into the question before the close vote would disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider your shapeshifting question to be on topic for the same reason. Building a world in which a shapeshifter can apparently change mass requires a world in which the physics, technology or biology allows for this. You're not just asking for a shapeshifter, but for a reality in which it can be realistic. I think the answers reflect this. You can have a world with altered biology or a world with nanotech and this would allow you to make an otherwise unbelievable story much more feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such decisions will affect the rest of your world. A world with a nanotech threat may have cities designed very differently to defend against them. A world with altered biology might well have a whole ecosystem of different metamorphic creatures. Legal and political systems may also be different depending on which solution you choose. These things may not form part of the answers, but the answer to your question still has a huge effect on the structure of your world once you start to incorporate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question will very much influence the nature of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T22:27:37.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2014-09-22T22:32:55.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not one of the close voters but I've mixed feelings on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that no part of it is about the world, it's about a single type of organism within the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However that is no different than other discussions such as scientific reasons for dragons and largest sea creatures. Those creatures can be a large part of designing the world and may even play some part in shaping it so they are a worthy discussion point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've mixed feelings, as its about designing a single creature type, but in balance I think it's on topic as that creature type is part of the world and its ecology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T22:32:55.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="164" CreationDate="2014-09-23T01:40:01.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing this some, and others have to. But I agree that we need to focus on it more. I suggest that when people pick a tag to favorite, they also go an update the tag wiki for that tag. If you create a new tag in a question, you should also go update the excerpt, if not the full tag. This will help others make sure your question actually fits the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T01:40:01.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="170" CreationDate="2014-09-23T06:40:08.250" Score="5" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there something wrong with my browser settings? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find it in the search bar. I had to go over to the proposal in Area 51 to find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As you can see; when I put &quot;world&quot; in the search bar, WorldBuilding doesn't show up anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P3D8p.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackExchange dropdown with the word &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; in the search bar without any results&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T08:57:31.320" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T08:57:31.320" Title="Worldbuilding doesn't show up in the &quot;StackExchange&quot; dropdown on my browser anymore" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2014-09-23T07:45:06.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doesn't show up for me either, but you can add it to your &quot;favorites&quot; bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kh7bb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click the edit link (circled above), then type in &quot;Worldbuilding&quot; in the box that shows up. Then hit the save button to save the changes. You can then add it to your favorites if you would like. I'm guessing that because this is a private beta, it doesn't show up in the standard list of SE sites. For that you will have to wait for it to enter public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T07:51:36.120" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T07:51:36.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-23T08:22:03.323" Score="8" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just saying: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77143/storytelling-and-blot-buidling/77146#77146&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77143/storytelling-and-blot-buidling/77146#77146&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole &quot;this is story telling and not world building&quot; discussion will eventually lead to this in the future, so why not start now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this will impact on the user base of Worldbuilding but clear the line most of the community members here want to establish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T07:29:11.070" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T07:29:11.070" Title="Storytelling and plot building" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-23T13:31:30.167" Score="-5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am still new to the Beta and SE, and I'm puzzled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whats should I do when I have a question which I think of someone would Google for, but which I know the answer to? What dose SE say about that? Are these Questions OK if another person answers them first? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need a &quot;Google&quot; tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T13:36:48.397" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T13:41:38.447" Title="Can we post Questions for google users and should there be a Tag for them?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2014-09-23T13:36:38.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We definitely &lt;strong&gt;shouldn't&lt;/strong&gt; post questions &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; because people are likely to google for them. We should post questions (and answers) because &lt;em&gt;they add to the corpus of knowledge on the Internet;&lt;/em&gt; in other words, they &lt;em&gt;help someone learn&lt;/em&gt;. Ideally, they should be useful to people &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/979/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long after the person posting the question and answer are both gone&lt;/a&gt; from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; shouldn't use a specific tag for questions &quot;meant to be found through a search engine&quot;. What would the value of that tag be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; if you have a question that you feel is on topic for the site, then there is no reason why you can't ask it. If you happen to know the answer as well, there is a checkbox below the question body field which allows you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;post a self-answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; at the same time that you post the question. Doing so is allowed and even encouraged on the Stack Exchange network, subject to the question being on topic and a good question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that self-answers &lt;em&gt;tend&lt;/em&gt; to be judged more harshly than answers posted to other peoples' questions, so if you do this, really put time into both the question and answer and make sure they are both as good as you can possibly make them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T13:36:38.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2014-09-23T14:03:23.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sites in private beta are not visibly linked to the rest of the network.  If you check your network profile page you won't see it there either, even though you do have an account here and it is tied to your others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the site goes into public beta all of this should work as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T14:03:23.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2014-09-23T17:55:54.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not only feel they are on-topic, as part of world-building (remember that Middle Earth started with some poems in constructed languages), but have even discussed about the proper tag &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125/should-questions-about-conlangs-be-tagged-with-conlangs-or-is-linguistics-g&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T17:55:54.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="151" CreationDate="2014-09-23T18:04:56.743" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Grace Note, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange. And one of these days I'll get to make an announcement for you guys as a question rather than an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistically, this site's doing great. We're very happy with what we're seeing. The volume's doing decently, the breadth of coverage is also nice, and most of all the community here is doing astoundingly well. The one major thing the site has going for it is that the people who've committed here are committed to taking it seriously. Y'all are questioning everything about your process and trying to make sure things work, not by trying to force things in, but by working with the system and with each other. The amount of Meta discussion here is very nice to see. All in all, the performance of this site is healthy and full of all the things we love to look for in the private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're planning to hold the site back for one more week of private beta&lt;/strong&gt;. Right now, there's still some pretty active discussion about certain matters such as the importance of evidence and &quot;backing-it-up&quot;, and how best to manage this in a way that avoids sacrificing either creativity or rigid usefulness. It's a tough nut to crack and we think it'll suit the site better to have some more time to focus on that material before opening to the public at large.  Once the community's at least got more solid ground on content policies, next week we should be able to hit public launch for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T18:04:56.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="171" CreationDate="2014-09-23T18:56:47.413" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we can get the blessing from Robert Cartaino, Grace Note, and/or their group at SE I think we should open up the topic to include storytelling and plot building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this is either going to be something this site will either fight against its entire existance or something it can embrace and grow with.  It will still be very important that questions meet the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective tests&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real Question Tests&lt;/a&gt; but with in our realm I think opening up this site to include these topics will help provide a stronger community that will feel inclusive rather than trying to force it out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest reason is there is no clear line between story telling and world building.  A perfect example is this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/449/72&quot;&gt;Is there a credible way a shapeshifter could gain/lose body mass when changing forms?&lt;/a&gt;  This question is not about world building because were there mass goes of one magical creature in your world is only needed to explain in the story telling and will have no real effect on the overall world unless the story requires it too.  But the creature is part of the world and explaining the creatures features is part of building the world.  So as you see the line is not as distinct as it really needs to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no benefit that the site gets by declaring these questions off topic.  I understand that the increased scope could make it more difficult to moderate but at the same time I think it will ease the burden as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a duty to see that our site minimizes the overlap with other existing sites so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose the following guidelines:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Following belong on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about technical details of an RPG world (like how the rules of the game apply) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about interacting with players &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the facts of an existing world belong on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SciFi.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technical questions about Writing and documentation Belong on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On-Topic Here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions directly about worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about story telling&#xA;as they relate to a fictional world or its elements &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about&#xA;Plot building as they relate to elements of a world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T19:13:30.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2014-09-23T19:01:15.737" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some brainstorming on chat I think that there are three kinds of questions, that should have different Back It Up policies for answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hard Science questions:&lt;/strong&gt; answers should be properly backed up with documentation or scientific articles, and could potentially be posted on specific scientific-subject sites such as perhaps Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fantastic science&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;pseudoscience:&lt;/strong&gt; answers should be backed up by solid reasoning in the way of (citing @MichaelKjörling) &quot;if we were to assume that Thing X exists and works as hypothesized, then it would be possible to use it to perform Miracle Y by doing A, B and C.&quot; This form could be used to explain, for example, how a hypothesized type of particle could be used to perform something which cannot presently be done&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pure fantasy:&lt;/strong&gt; answers should be reasonable, and can be based on personal experience, readings or whatever other means.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All&lt;/strong&gt; answers must be internally consistent, as well as in line with the asker's specified requirements, whether those are &quot;hard science only&quot; or &quot;magic fairy dust exists that works like this: ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T19:10:11.220" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T19:10:11.220" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-23T19:01:15.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2014-09-23T19:04:58.857" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where the mass does goes from one form to another is not about the world and unless your story requires the answer matter.  It only matters to your story.  That makes it about story telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that there are dozens of different mythologies that include lycantropy legends.  Most that I have seen say that a werewolf is much larger than a common wolf.  But because there are many mythologies and it is your world it is your decision what happens to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question can be changed from being about storytelling to about world building with the addition of a few details.  First &lt;strong&gt;include the details that you have already determined&lt;/strong&gt; about how these creatures came to exist in your world and what rules you have already set for them.  Second instead of asking where the mass goes &lt;strong&gt;ask how you can explain&lt;/strong&gt; in context to those rules the change in mass from one form to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands your question is probably better suited for SciFi.SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T19:04:58.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="183" CreationDate="2014-09-23T19:22:25.413" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, this mine question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/488/36&quot;&gt;How and why to build FTL weapon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, that weapons are essential parts of every world (or story), being build, but I'd like to have some confirmations (or disagree) from other community members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions about weapons are on topic, then do we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T05:25:34.313" Title="Are weapons questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="181" CreationDate="2014-09-23T19:57:38.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that an expert on medieval weapons could use that expertise to answer a question about this FTL weapon, and since tags are for ease experts work to answer questions, I do not think the tag could work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, they are on-topic if they are not real weapons with known effects, which should go to (possibly) Physics.SE.com (hard to draw the line, as always).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T19:57:38.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="181" CreationDate="2014-09-23T21:00:57.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think weapons are no more or less on-topic than plants, animals, or gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if your question relates to &lt;strong&gt;how weapons fit into your world&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;what weapons your world may have&lt;/strong&gt; or something like that, then it's on topic.  If your question relates to how a given weapon may work, it's not likely to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need a specific tag for it, any more than we need one for any of those others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T21:00:57.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="181" CreationDate="2014-09-24T05:25:34.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the linked question since it was written as a fishing expedition, not a problem that needs a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question was written asking about a particular in-world problem, then I would agree that it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T05:25:34.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="193" CreationDate="2014-09-24T05:40:29.467" Score="5" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fictional world is more than just the physical setting and the biological and psychological nature of whatever inhabitants it may have, it may also be filled with people, each with their own personality and history, some of whom may have a profound impact on that fictional world.  There are times when a world's future may hang on one person's decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question:  Are questions about an individual (who may be fictional, or who may be a real person placed in a fictional situation) in a particular world on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be &quot;What would X do here?&quot; or &quot;What sort of person would I need to do Y here?&quot; questions, or other questions involving a specific inhabitant of a world, whether defined yet or asking for a definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="52" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T16:42:10.427" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:06:53.793" Title="Are questions about characters and personalities on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="197" CreationDate="2014-09-24T05:58:55.353" Score="10" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;A person building a world may have put in a lot of work, written a lot of background, and then become stuck with a particular problem that depends heavily on that background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a problem is such that it is necessary for someone to read and understand a lot of that world's background - which may be too voluminous to post on SE without a link to a document stored elsewhere - is it still a good question for Worldbuilding SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have - perhaps as a Community Wiki - a question that asks Worldbuilding SE users to post some details about worlds that they have created (which could be used as the background for follow-on questions)?  RPG SE has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/just-for-fun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;just-for-fun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;just-for-fun&lt;/a&gt; tag and a showcase of user-designed character sheets as a community wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T15:38:56.783" Title="Worlds in development with deep background" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2014-09-24T07:52:02.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that somewhat depends on what we say about Chad's idea &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/178/81&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Basically do we want to have storybuilding questions on this site? I personally think that would be good, because there isn't a site for that on SE yet, and worldbuilding and story building almost always go together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quickly heading off a discussion, RPG questions about &lt;em&gt;stories&lt;/em&gt; would be allowed, but not RPG questions about mechanics or RPG specfic things (i.e. would be applicable in a book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T07:52:02.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T08:28:34.137" Score="9" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some groups of questions share common elements.  Any answer to a question about scaling things up or down is going to involve linear, quadratic, and cubic scaling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to create a general question that can be used to provide the general answer and free up the specific questions for specific answers that can assume familiarity of the basics without having to repeat them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;General: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/493/what-basic-principles-should-i-keep-in-mind-when-scaling-things-up-and-down&quot;&gt;What basic principles should I keep in mind when scaling things up and down?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/316/can-you-simply-scale-up-animals&quot;&gt;Can you simply scale up animals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very Specific: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20/insectoid-lifeforms-speed&quot;&gt;Physical speed of insectoid lifeforms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is to include the general answer in each specific answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific questions only allows for more self contained and cohesive answers, but require more effort overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General questions allow greater focus in each answer and reduce duplication of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T14:04:38.850" Title="Are generalisations of other questions a good idea?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="189" CreationDate="2014-09-24T09:35:08.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason why there shouldn't be both general &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use the example, some of the general principles of scaling can be applied to animals, but not in all aspects.  In fact, there is one element that cannot: Eyes. A small animal has proportionally larger eyes than a large animal, since eyes have an optimum size, and no benefit is achieved by further up-scaling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we need the general &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T09:35:08.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="189" CreationDate="2014-09-24T14:04:38.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. This is what &lt;strong&gt;canonical questions&lt;/strong&gt; are about, and they are used to good effect on several sites. We could absolutely adopt the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example that I am familiar with, &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aquestion%20canonical&quot;&gt;ServerFault has a number of them&lt;/a&gt; dealing with various subjects that come up repeatedly. If a question &lt;strong&gt;does not need an answer that goes into particular details not addressed by the canonical question,&lt;/strong&gt; these are good as duplicate targets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we should be careful to not close as duplicate of such questions indiscriminately; sometimes someone really &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; want to go into more detail about a particular aspect, which makes it not a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:14:55.397" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T14:04:38.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2014-09-24T14:21:42.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions about &lt;em&gt;people collectively&lt;/em&gt; (sociology, politics, etc) are on-topic for Worldbuilding, but I hesitate to extend the line to &lt;em&gt;people individually&lt;/em&gt;.  The distinction between world and story is important.  We are not a plot-generation site nor a critique site nor anything else that fits better in a forum.  Further, it seems likely that these questions would be very subjective, and not of the &quot;good subjective&quot; variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T14:21:42.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T14:24:06.580" Score="16" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other Stack Exchange sites often have a clever name for their main chat room. For example Code Review has &quot;The 2nd Monitor&quot; and Programming Puzzles and Code Golf has &quot;The Nineteenth Byte&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we call our Worldbuilding chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T16:28:06.507" Title="A name for our chat" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-06-29T01:31:19.300" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T14:24:06.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the best name our chat could have is the one it already has - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;&quot;Worldbuilding&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This makes it immediately obvious that it is the right chat room and helps ensure new users can find the chat and participate as early as possible. I think our community will benefit from maximising communication with new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T14:24:06.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="186" CreationDate="2014-09-24T15:38:56.783" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions on Stack Exchange need to be answerable and reasonably scoped.  If somebody needs to read extensive background materials before being able to answer, then that's too much to ask of the community here.  Further, it's &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; not going to be useful to anybody else, and while Stack Exchange's goal is to answer people's real questions, it's not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; about the asker -- we're writing for all the future people who will have the same problem and find their way here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In asking your question it's important to share relevant background information -- my magic system works this way, or my planet has the following unusual properties, or whatever.  But you should be able to summarize the important parts of that in several paragraphs, not whole books or chapters.  And a several-paragraph explanation fits in an SE question, so there's no need to take it off-site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T15:38:56.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="171" CreationDate="2014-09-24T15:57:45.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Help me figure out my plot/story/character motivations&amp;quot; is a bad fit for Stack Exchange, as Robert Cartaino explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/18009/28610&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; about the &amp;quot;Storytelling and blot buidling&amp;quot; SE proposal (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, writer's block and plot development are certainly common problems for writers, but the site you are proposing is not aimed at the techniques for overcoming these issues (see our Writers' site). &lt;strong&gt;This proposal is designed to be a content-generation engine&lt;/strong&gt; — a contest of sorts, with the voting going towards the &amp;quot;people's choice&amp;quot; for their favorite or most creative entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's not really what we do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, note that that proposal has gained all of 5 followers, the same number it had when I first saw the link here on meta yesterday.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/875/1993&quot;&gt;scope for Writers&lt;/a&gt; includes the following relevant explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking to brainstorm ideas tailor-made for your particular story is off-topic; that’s too specific to your own work. But identifying a general scenario which naturally presents plotting difficulties is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Those same reasons apply here.&lt;/em&gt;  Brainstorming of the sort being proposed here (and in that Area 51 proposal) should be off-topic everywhere on Stack Exchange.  It's well-suited for writing groups, forum sites, and discussion with your friends over beer, but it's terrible Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Robert notes, the more &amp;quot;procedural&amp;quot; parts of plot-generation are a different matter.  These are already on-topic on Writers; that doesn't mean they can't be on-topic anywhere else (site overlap is fine), but know that there's a home for them now.  If we make plot/story/character-building on-topic here, we are going to struggle to keep it contained (process good, brainstorming bad).  I suspect it will also overwhelm the &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; part of the site fairly quickly (people create more stories than worlds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a viable site now.  Once we get some experience with it, if we find that the line between world and story is more porous than it now appears, we can &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; broaden the scope later.  Given a baseline that already works (we're not too narrow now), it's better to gradually expand (if warranted) than to expand now and take scope away later.  People get upset when they find out they've invested in a site that now deems their contributions off-topic or otherwise unwelcome, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T21:43:59.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T16:51:24.167" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;White Mice Lounge&quot; in reference to Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the white mice are credited with creating earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T16:51:24.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T16:56:59.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To carry on with the Douglas Adams quotes begun by MadMAxJr, the white mice may have &lt;em&gt;commissioned&lt;/em&gt; Earth, but Magrathea actually &lt;em&gt;built&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;The Magrathean Watercooler&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T16:56:59.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T17:03:54.603" Score="5" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have decided that questions about software are on-topic. However, I think there is more work to do about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually askers do not mention which Operating System they are using, and thus answers can give them programs that they can not use. I have suffered that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should make a policy of requesting each asker which Operating System is at hand, and requesting each answer to mention on which Operating Systems each program works (or if it is a web application).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for non-free software or software that is not free (which are different things), Licence and Price are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastEditorUserId="107" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T19:26:15.883" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T19:26:15.883" Title="Should we require OS information from people asking for software recommendations and OS and licensing information for suggested prgrams in answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2014-10-03T01:31:40.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T17:14:33.597" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think something like World Architects or Blueprinting for Worlds could work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe even Fictional Realities or something along those lines.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T17:14:33.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T17:41:41.437" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that it has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/177/109&quot;&gt;decided to give us a second week&lt;/a&gt; to clarify our content policies, what do you most want to see clarified? Obviously we will continue to ask and answer things as they come up, on main and meta, but for anyone with some spare time but uncertain where to focus their effort, what would be most useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything already being discussed that could benefit from more example questions on the border between good fit and bad fit to try and test what works and what doesn't? Although we have excellent meta participation, there is still slightly more feedback available in the main site that on the meta site, so asking main site questions is a good way to find out what the community approves of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you want to see discussed and explored and better defined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T19:57:51.117" Title="The focus for our next week" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="203" CreationDate="2014-09-24T17:56:00.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it we should use the time to make the Questions and answers a bit more polished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for my part will go back to my posts and look over them. So when public Beta starts their will be lots of wrong grammar and German influenced sentences but it will look goooood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also we should upvote some more i think - most of the questions dont even have half of the active user votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T17:56:00.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T17:59:50.197" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;the first day&quot; As i just said on the Chat in reference to the bible &quot;at the first day, god made the earth&quot;. would be controversy but also a bit funny.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T17:59:50.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="203" CreationDate="2014-09-24T18:03:13.537" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to see how much detail we expect from questioners.  If the question is about how magic would effect x or how ftl travel would work/effect shipping lanes and culture, how much detail do we want on the particular magical system/ftl travel physics before we answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are multiple possible ways a question could play out, should we give a listy type answer or ask for clarification/vote to close as unclear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, nailing down too broad vs too specific would be good.  Questions can easily swing one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T19:57:51.117" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T19:57:51.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="171" CreationDate="2014-09-24T18:41:00.620" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm mostly bouncing off of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/178/52&quot;&gt;Chad's Answer here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we're more on the same page than you think. It's just a matter of how far you want to push it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, discussing and working out storyline plots is an intrinsic part of &amp;quot;world building&amp;quot; — but when questions veer from &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;, answerable questions about building alternative worlds into the realm of soliciting crowd-sourced plot lines, that's where you'll run into trouble. Let me run through a series of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q: Can you simply scale up &lt;em&gt;ants&lt;/em&gt; into a race of &amp;quot;giant insects?&amp;quot; — &lt;strong&gt;ON TOPIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very little argument here. The mainstay of this site will be questions that tap into your knowledge of technology/physics/geography/history/sociology/ecology, etc, etc in a way that makes sure your fictional world is at least &lt;em&gt;plausible.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q: What conditions have to exist in a world to explain giant insects? — &lt;strong&gt;EXCELLENT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this question relates to plot building, but it's also &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; Q&amp;amp;A. It's somewhat akin to your question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/449/is-there-a-credible-way-a-shapeshifter-could-gain-lose-body-mass-when-changing-f&quot;&gt;credible ways a shapeshifter could gain/lose body mass&lt;/a&gt;. That's a fantastic question; love it. It taps into the expertise of physics and physiology and other areas in a way that is eminently &amp;quot;answerable&amp;quot; (even if the answer is somewhat theoretical and speculative). No problem there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's where we run into trouble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q: What would the world be like if it were ruled by giant insects? — &lt;strong&gt;TOO BROAD&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is soliting ideas for a plot line. That's not good Q&amp;amp;A. We're getting into a place where anyone can propose a vague topic of discussion, and participants can advance the storyline by posting stuff others may or may not find interesting. Then voting goes to &lt;em&gt;what?&lt;/em&gt; Most creative? Best effort? People's Favorite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While plenty entertaining, that's not really what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest building up a really strong base of canonical, useful content of &lt;strong&gt;answerable questions&lt;/strong&gt; (I hate that phrase) before starting to solicit broad plot-line discussions and crowd-sourcing story ideas. If people are simply (in a sense) &lt;em&gt;guessing&lt;/em&gt; what might might help the author specifically, more than likely it is simply too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But I'm glad you brought this up&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be careful NOT to make the mear &lt;em&gt;mention&lt;/em&gt; of &amp;quot;plot&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;storyline&amp;quot; the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;verboten buzzwords&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of this site. There is nothing &lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; wrong with asking questions that involve &amp;quot;story telling&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;plot line&amp;quot; in their content. All too often I see these types of on- and off-topic discussions elicit a kneejerk reaction anytime someone dares phrase their question wrong. Here, that trigger point would be &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How could my storyline account for {x}&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; — and that's not at all what I meant by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/66/52&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothetical situations and broad questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief note to answer the original question — The generic subject of &amp;quot;story telling and plot building&amp;quot; is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; only on topic here when the question is  &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;predominantly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; about the subject of world building. But very &lt;em&gt;generic&lt;/em&gt; questions about any author might ask about the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; of plot building are more the purview of our &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writer's site&lt;/a&gt;. I talk more about why that is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/18009/5&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be on topic here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T15:00:56.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T20:20:10.447" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have a lot of variables when we are talking about fantasy worlds.  To avoid the OP having to define too much when asking a question and where it is appropriate I'd like to suggest we create/utilize an &quot;earth-like world&quot; tag.  This ensures we are answering the question in the framework of the physical, cultural, etc. rules of Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T08:05:50.697" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T08:05:50.697" Title="Do we need a tag for Earth-like worlds?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-24T22:03:35.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I just got the Room Owner mantle automagically appointed me, I'm going with &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilders' General Chat&lt;/strong&gt; for now. Reasoning: It's obvious what SE it attaches to without being confusingly similar to the SE main site's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; the idea of a more &quot;clever&quot; name, and will occasionally return to this space to see what the gestalt thinks up as our site's identity congeals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T22:03:35.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2014-09-25T00:40:40.927" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious if questions on expanding/altering existing worlds could run against existing copyright laws.  Someone who is a lawyer or works for Stack Exchange may know for sure.  Its a big step from asking questions about an existing creation, LOTRO, Harry Potter, Star Wars on scifi stack exchange to adding onto or altering these worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it wasn't illegal, it would be tricky.  Why questions or reverse engineering could be on topic because they would expand the questioners knowledge of worldbuilding. Questions like, what could cause a civilization to develop like civ x from story y shouldn't be a problem.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question was solely factual, what did cause civ x from story y to develop as it did, I wouldn't see that as a valid worldbuilding question.  Its a tricky subject that starts with figuring out the legal requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T00:40:40.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-09-25T02:13:02.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Who is the site for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: It's for builders of fictional worlds. Like fiction writers and game designers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What is it about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: What do you think about having a tail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Sorry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: How would having a tail change the way our world works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: umm... I guess it would be kind of cool, but it might get caught in doorways, and we would have to cut holes in all our clothing. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: We talk about stuff like that. We discuss what happens if the world were just a little different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be tails. It can be gills, or twin planets, or FTL travel, or almost anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so maybe that's three or four floors, but this little exchange is, IMO, one of the best quick pitches we can give for the site, for three reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World building is inspired by curiosity. I don't get the impression from the beta so far that anyone is asking questions because there is some significant external pressure for them to figure out if invisible aliens are possible, or if space lanes make sense. Sure, there could be users who are hard at work writing novels, designing games, story-boarding for movies, or even creating dungeons and dragons campaigns, and we want to attract as many of these users as possible. But I'd hazard a guess that one of the reasons the private beta has seen early success is because &lt;strong&gt;the discussion of worldbuilding is just plain fun&lt;/strong&gt;, and if you can give a sense of that fun in the elevator, I'll bet that will be much more memorable and meaningful than some tag line, however catchy it may be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most people will definitely remember that kid on the elevator who asked them about human tails, or that red-haired girl who polled your opinion on invisible aliens, or that old dude who asked you what you think would have happened if the JFK assassination was unsuccessful. Even if that person only has a mild interest, these types of discussions are contagious (in my experience anyway), and the stranger may get off the elevator with some amount of curiosity as they head back to their cubicle. By the time they get there the stranger might ask their colleague about hive minds, which would be debated, and could &lt;strong&gt;result in a web search to settle the dispute.&lt;/strong&gt; And before you even asked the question in the elevator, you knew what the first hit on google was going to be when they searched for it :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There will undoubtedly be some people who just loose interest, or who just think it's too weird to imagine a world where humans have tails. They will squint their eyes at you and just say &amp;quot;I don't... know.&amp;quot; and as they walk off the elevator they will spend exactly 5 seconds thinking how random that was and then proceed to their ordinary, uninteresting, and entirely normal lives, where nothing unexpected never happens. Ok, it might not be that bad, but this site is not going to appeal to everyone, and &lt;strong&gt;if they are not the least bit interested in your off the wall scenario you're suggesting then they aren't going to like the site, and we don't really want them anyway&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is awesome and everyone here knows it. I guess this doesn't exactly replace the need for a shorter description, but if you've got 5 floors this is way better than a 10 second pitch and 20 seconds of silence. I haven't tried this on anyone yet, but I know from experience that some people love to discuss alternate realities. &lt;strong&gt;Why would you simply talk about your product, when you can give them a free sample?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let me quell a few doubts about my intentions: I'm not saying we should just open the floodgates and let every question that seems semi-interesting survive because its fun to talk about, I'm saying that there's raw interest in worldbuilding that, &lt;em&gt;if carefully bridled by mods and experienced users&lt;/em&gt;, can fuel an inspiring and informative SE site for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T02:13:02.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-09-25T07:07:26.660" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from @MontyWild 's Douglas Adams suggestion what about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Factory Floor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Slartibartfast line to Arthur &quot;Welcome to our factory floor&quot; (where they build the planets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WoldBuilding: The Factory Floor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T07:07:26.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="208" CreationDate="2014-09-25T07:46:34.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the idea is interesting, &lt;strong&gt;I strongly doubt we need a tag specifically for that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more precision is unnecessary for the purposes of the specific question, the OP can just write &quot;assume an Earth-like setting&quot; or something similar to that within the question body itself; I've done pretty much that myself, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/320/29&quot; title=&quot;Could venoms evolve naturally in mammals?&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/43/29&quot; title=&quot;How would societal development be impacted if humans were not an apex predator?&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more precision is needed (which I see as likely being most cases where a statement like that would be used), the &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt; details will have to be spelled out anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, &lt;strong&gt;I don't see a tag adding much value either way.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/51/29&quot; title=&quot;Grace Note on Distinguishing science and fantasy based questions&quot;&gt;Not everything needs to or even should be expressed with tags&lt;/a&gt;. Tags can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1854/14478&quot; title=&quot;Can we rename [nutrition] to [nutritional-content]? on Seasoned Advice Meta&quot;&gt;easily be misunderstood&lt;/a&gt; if people are not familiar with the scope of the site, and we should expect people to come to this site and not be intimitely familiar with its scope (or even how the Stack Exchange network works at all). We regularly have people coming to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ham.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the Amateur Radio SE&lt;/a&gt; thinking that just because the site has &quot;radio&quot; in the name means that everything even peripherally related to or simply called &quot;radio&quot; (even when it isn't; consider &quot;Internet radio broadcasting&quot; for example) is on topic, when in fact the scope is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ham.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;fairly well defined&lt;/a&gt; following extensive meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Earth is comprised of a huge variety of settings, everything from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mariana Trench&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Everest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Everest&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vegetation.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;large number&lt;/a&gt; of different &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biomes&lt;/a&gt; from arctic and antarctic to tropical jungle, greatly varying terrain including both huge flatlands and such mountain ranges as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alps&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_Mountains&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Appalachians&lt;/a&gt;, and a huge variety of living species spanning the gamut from incredibly generalistic to highly specialized, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tardigrades&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cheetahs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elephants&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blue whales&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trying to condense all of that into a single tag&lt;/strong&gt; seems difficult, unnecessary and possibly even counterproductive to me, and risks causing problems like those somewhat peripherally discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40/29&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed planets realistic?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:21.210" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T08:04:43.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T10:35:54.930" Score="9" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need to prepare for our site to enter public beta, and one of the things we need to do is define what goes in the help center and the tour. This is one of The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the 7 Essential Questions page says about creating documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Much of the site’s documentation will be the same as on every other&#xA;  Stack Exchange site: “be nice,” “how to create an account,” “how to&#xA;  ask questions” — it’s all pretty static. Even the sections about “what&#xA;  kind of questions should I (not) ask here?” comes primarily from the&#xA;  Definition phase of Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the questions you want to discuss in meta are those issues&#xA;  specific to your site that need to be mentioned in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Take Super User’s “About” page as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Super User is for computer enthusiasts and power users. …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Ask about…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Specific issues with computer software, hardware or networking Real&#xA;    problems or questions that you’ve encountered Don’t ask about…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Anything not directly related to computer software or computer&#xA;    hardware Questions that are primarily opinion-based Questions with too&#xA;    many possible answers or require an extremely long answer Videogames,&#xA;    consoles, or other electronic devices, unless they connect to your&#xA;    computer Websites or web services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and&#xA;    WordPress Shopping, buying or product recommendations Issues specific&#xA;    to corporate IT support and networks.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are then elaborated on in SU’s What topics can I ask about here? page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It took us almost a year to figure out the list of “we want these sort&#xA;  of questions” and “we don’t want these sort of questions” on Super&#xA;  User. Area 51 gave you a head start but you should also be working out&#xA;  other scope- and documentation-related issues specific to your topic&#xA;  and your community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference &quot;on-topic&quot; questions here on meta as well as Area 51 when creating these articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that we add an answer for each article in the Help Center (and one for the tour), and that me make them community wiki. This means that most people will be able to help edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a common legend for answers to use to help with discussing various additions to articles. Feel free to add more if you want to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Items in &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; are debatable. Please discuss them in the comments. Mark items in italics using &lt;code&gt;_underscores_&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T21:59:11.680" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T21:59:11.680" Title="Create Custom Help Center Articles" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-25T13:09:27.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="214" CreationDate="2014-09-25T10:35:54.930" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This answer is for the &quot;What Questions Can I Ask Here?&quot; section of the help center. All text from this line on is intended for the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists to get help creating imaginary worlds. This includes geography, culture and creatures for the world. Questions on this site should be about building settings and the reasons around why they are the way they are. A setting might not be a planet; it can be larger than a multiverse or smaller than a village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, questions are &lt;strong&gt;welcome&lt;/strong&gt; that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;not about:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Role-playing Games&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to Worldbuilding (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question involves magical elements, you must provide enough details about the magic system in question so that answers may be given that conform to the particular magic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not cross-post questions to multiple Stack Exchange sites. If you want your question migrated to a different site within the Stack Exchange network, use the &quot;flag&quot; action link below the question text to flag it for moderator attention, select custom reason, and request migration to your desired site. A moderator will then look into the request and take appropriate action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T21:58:34.130" CommentCount="17" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-25T10:35:54.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T12:57:44.903" Score="16" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need to ask about creating tags all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been said several times: tags are one way to add categorization to questions, which should be used when they have value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the purpose of the private beta period is to define the scope of the site. This to some degree includes what tags we want to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of asking &quot;do we want a tag for X?&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;let's just create tags as we feel the need, assuming that they add some reasonable classification to the questions which they are attached to.&lt;/strong&gt; Let's also do our best to avoid creating &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; tags with the same meaning but different names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in a month or two we can revisit the tags list and reconsider those tags which have only a small handful of questions. We can always fix wrong tagging later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T13:05:56.753" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T19:49:11.110" Title="Do we really need to ask about creating tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="216" CreationDate="2014-09-25T13:12:29.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We appear to have a new &quot;Should we (not) have this tag?&quot; almost every day. We are a new site and we currently don't really know what we want to do with tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;numerous&lt;/em&gt; answers about tag questions here on meta it has been said that we should not try to create artificial categories via meta discussion and I agree that there will be plenty of time for a tag cull in the future when we have more users, more questions and more tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to avoid talking about the artificial creation or delete of tags on meta until the end of November at the earliest, just make them or don't make them as you see fit. Use the edit system we have if you think a question needs a tag, its part of its use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fill in the tag wiki entries so that there is better advice on how to use them. Encourage their creators to do so if you can :-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let them be created naturally until at least the end of November, rather than trying to 'look forward' to see what we might need (aka guessing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the end of the period raise another meta post with an analysis as a community answer, so that we can see which tags are being paired with each other so much that they need merging. Which ones are underused. Which ones are being misused. Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that we might need to occasionally talk about deleting a tag because it is too broad (such as design).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T13:12:29.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T14:16:55.480" Score="-4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/lets-be-careful-about-accepting-answers-early&quot;&gt;a nice post a while ago&lt;/a&gt; about not accepting answers too early. This is good! Well done. Remember to poke* people who accept too quickly to remind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let's look at the flip side of this. &lt;strong&gt;Can we please poke* people who have questions over a week old, with answers that have at least 10 votes on to accept an answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not all questions will be appropriate for this, so use your judgement. But let's keep the number of accepted answers high (as I know we can do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also doesn't have to be a Thursday to do it, but I'm an immediate kind of person and today is Thursday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*And by poke I mean comment. On their question. With their @Name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T17:15:07.067" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T17:15:07.067" Title="Accept Answer Thursday" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-09-25T14:18:05.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T14:18:05.430" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T14:18:05.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-25T14:18:05.430" Score="0" Body="Draw a persons attention in comments by using the @Name. Ideally in the commends of their answer or question." OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-09-29T08:26:06.327" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T08:26:06.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="219" CreationDate="2014-09-25T15:23:35.427" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, please do not do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system already has processes in place to prompt the user to accept an answer when warranted, so please don't prod user further to accept answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While well intentioned, all these &quot;gentle reminders&quot; sprinkled throughout the comments everywhere starts to look somewhat harassing to new users &amp;mdash; so I would ask you not to do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learned this lesson when we used to display a user's &quot;answer rate.&quot; The constant prodding to &quot;please accept an answer&quot; only makes the entire environment of the site somewhat unwelcoming. Accepting an answer is a completely voluntary activity, and it is up to the user to decide when (and if) an answer should be accepted at all. I understand this post is in followup to a specific initiative to forestall this activity, but commenting on posts to ask for accepted answers is not necessary or even all that helpful to the site. &lt;strong&gt;So please don't poke users to accept answers.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T16:00:09.273" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T16:00:09.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="201" CreationDate="2014-09-25T16:08:37.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user has specific requirements they should mention them in their question.  If not specified I think all options should be on the table.  Provides better long term value for the question anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T16:08:37.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T17:17:47.597" Score="8" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;If humans build a world from scratch, say a colony on another planet, or a generation ship such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/532/ethical-solution-to-generation-ship-where-new-generation-want-to-go-home&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, can we ask how their ethics would affect their choices in how to design such a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T19:04:11.670" Title="Can we ask about how ethics affect a human-built world?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="225" CreationDate="2014-09-25T17:47:22.383" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definitely think ethics are a major part of worldbuilding and should be on topic when asking how a particular set of ethics could affect the world.  Now that I look further at your question, I think you should have to define the particular ethics of your world.  There are so many ethical systems and minor points that I don't think asking, is this ethical, is clear enough.  You need to specify the ethical system of the society in question before we can answer your question.  Is lying ethical to your colonists?  Is murdering disendants?  We need further clarification in your case to answer, but the world consequences of ethics should be just as much on topic as the effects of magic or science.  Just like in those questions, you need to give some guidenance on what you mean by your key term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T17:47:22.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="214" CreationDate="2014-09-27T08:50:36.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This answer is for the custom elements of the tour. Beyond these two lines it is all intended for the three or four lines of the tour that describes what we can or cannot ask. Discuss content in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating elements of a world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Specific effects of events on a world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Technology and magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific actions of individual characters, rather than the world they inhabit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;General Writing or Storytelling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Software that doesn't directly relate to Worldbuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-09-29T18:09:54.923" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T18:09:54.923" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-27T08:50:36.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-27T10:33:13.150" Score="15" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had a few incidents recently of close votes being started but no comment given to explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in cases where people think it's obvious I think it will really help with defining the scope of the site if people leave a comment to explain why they are voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &quot;Too broad&quot; covers a lot of potential problems with a question, and deciding what is too broad is an important part of the beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T09:05:54.200" Title="Close votes - please state reasons" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="228" CreationDate="2014-09-27T13:51:00.233" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing questions is important in order to get them clear and on topic before any answers arrive addressing the wrong question. Giving a clear statement of why will not only help the question poster to improve their question, but also help show others why the question needs to be closed, so they can close vote quickly and decisively. This allows a question to be closed quickly before answerers waste their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear explanation is good for the question poster, good for the potential answerers, and good for the process of site scope definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be in the form of a quick comment, or a comment linking to a new meta post, or linking to an old meta post if the reason has already been discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who avoids leaving a comment because they don't want to be identified as the close voter, there is no reason to hide. Bear in mind two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once a question is closed the 5 close voters are listed for all to see.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closing questions is a good thing. It's not only helpful to defining the site scope, but helps open a discussion to make sure the question has the chance to become the best it can be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need close voters, they are vital to the running of the site. The other side of this is that it is helpful to welcome close votes even on your own questions. See them as positive, and ask for clarification of what you need to improve. Open a meta discussion for any difference of opinion so the outcome can benefit future questions too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="109" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T09:05:54.200" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T09:05:54.200" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="231" CreationDate="2014-09-27T15:18:37.147" Score="8" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I recently rejected a tag-wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/254&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt;, but others approved it. I personally thought (from reading the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/redesigned-tags-page/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page, and gentle comments from Robert Cartino on my own edits), that a tag wiki excerpt should contain what kind of questions should be asked in that tag, and that the full tag wiki should define what it the item means (especially to this particular site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this was the proposed text for the full tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions regarding organism, morphology, physiology, anatomy,&#xA;  behavior, origin, and distribution. This includes what if scenarios&#xA;  for possible life forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it was approved by people whom I would trust on this site. Have I missed something about tag wikis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T20:49:25.257" Title="What is accepted as a good tag wiki?" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="230" CreationDate="2014-09-27T20:49:25.257" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your understanding appears to mesh quite well with mine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki should explain, ideally within 2-3 sentences at most, which questions should use the tag. It should not need any external references in order to do so. It may also suggest alternative, related tags which may be of interest but which are not synonyms (consider for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceship&lt;/a&gt; tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;full&lt;/strong&gt; tag wiki should go into more depth, perhaps define terms used, provide links and other references for those wishing to learn more, and so on. This can be several paragraphs or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, in this particular case, I might have rejected the edit myself; the proposed text makes a decent tag wiki (as opposed to full tag wiki), but frankly it feels too broad to me. Tags need to be &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; specific; that tag wiki sounds like it's throwing in pretty much everything and the kitchen sink. Behavior, for one, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ethology&lt;/a&gt;, not biology. Origin and possibly also distribution feels like it would be better tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt;. And possibly others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T20:49:25.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="216" CreationDate="2014-09-28T02:15:53.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that early in the beta we should &lt;strong&gt;be bold&lt;/strong&gt;.  Think we need a tag?  Create it!  Use it on new questions!  See if it sticks.  (Going back and retagging a bunch of old questions is pretty disruptive, though, so please don't do that all at once.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think we should ignore the other side of this.  Sometimes it's obvious early on that a tag is not quite right somehow -- maybe it should be merged with another very-similar one, or maybe it's really a meta tag, or maybe it's a tag that would apply to almost all questions so it has no real utility.  In those cases, fixing them early both (a) is less work and (b) avoids setting a trap for people who see that tag and think it's good (or that they should create more like it).  So we should create tags as needed, and we should &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; cull early when it's fairly obvious that we have a bad fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More-nuanced refinement, on the other hand, should come later, as should overhauls that bump lots of questions to the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-01-27T19:49:11.110" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T19:49:11.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-29T14:45:21.650" Score="6" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;When posting a question that uses a previous question or answer as a premise, is just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/583/how-would-the-design-of-an-underground-castle-differ&quot;&gt;linking the question/answer&lt;/a&gt; good enough, or should we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/339/what-would-a-planet-spinning-fast-enough-to-allow-geostationary-orbit-near-the-s?rq=1&quot;&gt;quote the question/answer&lt;/a&gt; as well? If the latter, how much quoting is too much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T16:07:37.413" Title="Follow up questions referencing their origin" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="237" CreationDate="2014-09-29T15:38:29.667" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, Tomorrow or Wednesday?  I saw the post earlier, just wondering when our Beta will finally go public, we seem to be slowing down without the influx of new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T06:23:36.013" Title="So does our 'week' of Private beta end" Tags="|discussion|beta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="233" CreationDate="2014-09-29T16:07:37.413" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the context contained in the body of the question/answer is relavant to what you are asking then it makes sense to quote the important part.  If the reference is just to inform why you are asking the question but contains no important context then there is no real reason to quote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to provide great context but also only the details that are actually needed for the question.  If you provide details that do not matter people tend to focus on the wrong things in the quote rather than what you are asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T16:07:37.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="234" CreationDate="2014-09-29T16:12:56.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Although we have been given an additional week to help define the site, I don't think this was meant to indicate a definite start date for public beta. The decision will have to be based on the whole private beta, including the additional week, so it doesn't make sense to try and put a definite timing on it. People who have been there for the start of other public betas may be able to give you more insight, but I would still expect it to be mainly conjecture at this stage.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We are now in public beta!!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T06:23:36.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="234" CreationDate="2014-09-29T21:12:42.440" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It apparently just ended. At least I just got the beta badge, and the site shows up in my Stack Exchange profile, which it didn't before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T21:12:42.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-30T07:12:03.193" Score="-1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing is an important part of getting questions and answers in the best condition they can be. If I see a post with some typos, or that could be worded more clearly, I edit it. However, there are two things slowing down this process of improving posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who are happy to edit won't notice every opportunity (we have lots of posts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who notice editing opportunities won't always have the time/confidence to make the edit themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you feel about having a community wiki meta post to which anyone can add a link to a question they'd like to see edited? Then someone can link to their own question or answer if they think it isn't quite worded right, or they could highlight a post from someone else that has excellent content but confusing sentence structure or spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People could also come here when they feel like contributing to the site by improving posts, but don't want to trawl through everything trying to find posts that need editing. Just come here, pick up the top link, and then delete it from the list when you've edited it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I want to find out how the community feels about this and if it would cause any problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T07:33:52.673" Title="Bring your posts for editing" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="238" CreationDate="2014-09-30T07:26:29.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this wouldn't be that useful, it would quickly get clogged with threads that people had edited but not cleared out, or posts that don't need actual editing. It is better that you just edit when it is needed during your normal rounds around the site. We should be able to do this, especially right now because we don't have a whole lot of traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not sure how useful it would be. I know I regularly just read a post, and I would end it if it needed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T07:33:52.673" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T07:33:52.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-30T08:34:20.190" Score="10" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're in public beta, now we need to let people know that we are here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get things started I've done a post for the GitP Worldbuilding forum:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?374474-Worldbuilding-Stack-Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?374474-Worldbuilding-Stack-Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a quick read of the forum rules there and it seems that post should be allowed. (We don't want to spam people or post in inappropriate places as that will just annoy people, not get them interested)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T08:49:58.737" Title="Time to spread the word" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="240" CreationDate="2014-09-30T08:49:58.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the fact that you've included direct links to interesting questions, in addition to the link to the site. I would expect there to be many people who aren't motivated to browse an unfamiliar site but will click on a link to an intriguing question. I recommend anyone who is ready to share a link have a glance at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;top voted questions&lt;/a&gt; for examples of eye catching posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T08:49:58.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-30T09:06:50.533" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that we are in public beta we are open for anyone to find us through search engines or links or browsing. With this in mind, and thinking about new users, I wanted to raise a discussion about the chat tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with tags in chat so I don't know their purpose. They don't seem to be visible on the list of chat rooms but they can be used to filter the list (although only if you know them already as I can't see a list). At the moment we have 3 tags applied to our main chatroom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/balloon-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balloon-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balloon-whales&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bewildered-gods&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bewildered-gods&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bewildered-gods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reasoned-discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reasoned-discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reasoned-discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing these tags do not exist and lead to a 404 page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see discussion of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we want chat tags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we want chat tags to be real tags with a tag summary page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will imaginary chat tags confuse new (or existing) users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will tags bring new chatters to the room?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T09:32:02.620" Title="Imaginary chat tags" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="242" CreationDate="2014-09-30T09:22:42.940" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally they should be allowed to remain as tags of the chat room. It doesn't matter what the chat room tags are right now, because there aren't really any other rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I love &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242/imaginary-chat-tags#comment523_242&quot;&gt;githubphagocyte's&lt;/a&gt; idea of creating fake tag wiki pages for them, just to keep up the comic relief. My only problem with that is that they then have to be tagged on at least two questions (on the main site). Then again, that could be done, some of the tags would produce interesting posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that we should only do this for the three tags currently on the main chat room, it would get annoying if anyone could make a chat room with fake tags and start making fake tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T09:22:42.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="242" CreationDate="2014-09-30T09:26:43.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly any tag that would be appropriate for a site-wide chat room would be far, &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; too broad and useless as an actual tag for questions on the site. We should not compromise the integrity of the main-site sorting system for the sake of the chat; the chat system is a tertiary function in the Stack ethos and should bow before mainsite and meta in all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that we either have no tags on the chat, or primarily made-up ones. Many sites go for the former, and that's fine--but kinda boring. Some sites find a particular use for chat tags: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11/rpg-general-chat&quot;&gt;RPG.SE chat&lt;/a&gt; has tags specifically designed to clue in newcomers that it's not a chat room about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;explosives&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;video games&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;legacy programming&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we don't seem to yet have a particular purpose the tags need to fulfil, we're having some fun with them. They can get changed at any time (another reason not to try backing them up with main-site wikis purely for the sake of an impermanent chat conceit), and no doubt will as the chat culture grows and changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat tags aren't necessary, but they can be useful and/or fun! I like 'em.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's unlikely existing main-site tags will be useful as chat tags, and we shouldn't invent main-site tags just to accommodate chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If people are confused, they can ask. A lot of people don't even notice chat tags at all, in my experience. Tags shouldn't be misleading or offensive, obviously, but otherwise I'm seeing this as trying to fix a problem we don't yet have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tags will not attract chatters to generic site rooms. In my experience people either go straight for the room they already know they want, or just click on the most active rooms in a kind of &quot;go lucky number 52&quot; gamble and see what they get.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T09:32:02.620" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T09:32:02.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T09:36:29.007" Score="9" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commerce&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commerce&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commerce&lt;/a&gt; is applied to 2 questions, both of which also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't seem to add anything extra to these 2 questions, and I don't anticipate it being needed for future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear both sides of the discussion on whether commerce should be removed or merged with economy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T09:05:02.250" Title="Commerce tag - synonym of economy?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2014-10-01T10:41:45.157" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commerce&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commerce&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commerce&lt;/a&gt; tag is not useful and should be removed.&lt;/strong&gt; It is slightly more specific than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; without adding enough to justify its use. The economy tag is a useful distinction applied to several questions. The commerce tag seems more like a tag applied for the sake of it, just to make up the numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was recently used to replace the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; tag, which I agree was redundant. However, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commerce&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commerce&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commerce&lt;/a&gt; is redundant too, and it would be better to discard both money and commerce in favour of just having &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T10:41:45.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-10-01T10:59:49.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reference to the Matrix: &quot;The Architect's Room&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="234" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T10:59:49.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-10-01T11:07:09.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Drawing Board&quot; in the metaphorical sense as used in &quot;back to the drawing board&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="234" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T11:07:09.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T14:32:15.533" Score="11" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd just like to draw your attention to the fantastic job that everyone is doing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We seem to be at the 100% of questions answered all day long, we have lots of answers per question. What this seems to say to me is that what we lack at the moment is users, as we are ready and eager to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go you guys!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the most interesting questions on the Hot Network sidebar are for this site. (In my bias opinion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T14:32:15.533" Title="100% of answered questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-10-09T14:09:54.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="252" CreationDate="2014-10-01T14:33:25.253" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/753/what-should-be-considered-when-creating-dialogues&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; would be much better suited to Writers.StackExchange. However when I clicked to close it as better suited for another site the only option available was meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we add to this list? I would suggest our most common crossovers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writers (how do I write?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language (What's the word?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RPG (What game mechanic?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case I'd suggest that this question should be closed because it's very broad. There would be little point to send it Writers for them to close it! However that doesn't answer the question of what happens next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: The question has gone, for prosperity's sake it was about designing realistic dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T21:43:06.993" Title="How can we define which sites appear in the Off-Topic list?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="250" CreationDate="2014-10-01T14:49:25.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally agree, there are some questions that obviously make sense elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time I think it important to say we should avoid moving all the questions that &quot;could&quot; go elsewhere, we knew coming in that there was going to be a lot of overlap.  In most cases, unless its clearly evident that the question belongs elsewhere we put the question on hold and have them rewrite, I feel like migration should be used sparingly on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T14:49:25.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="250" CreationDate="2014-10-01T15:31:04.783" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beta sites don't get to customize this list, but moderators (once we have them) can migrate anywhere.  If you think a migration is called for, use a flag to say where and it'll be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to is now gone so I can't comment on the specific case.  In general, we should jealously guard our on-topic questions; if something &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on-topic here and somebody asked it here, don't send it elsewhere because it might fit &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; there.  If it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; fit here, of course, and is also a suitable question (not too broad, opinion-based, etc -- the SE-wide norms), then we should try to help the asker move it to a site where it does fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T15:31:04.783" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="225" CreationDate="2014-10-01T15:31:21.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that ethical questions are perfectly reasonable, but the writer seems to want an &quot;objective&quot; answer. That's not possible: ethics is intrinsically subjective. This is not to say that ethics is always simply a matter of opinion, but rather that there is no agreement as to any absolute or stable point from which to extrapolate an objective ethics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I suggest that clarification or editing insist on either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a specific proposal as regards a base ethics system within which to address the question, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question which makes such a proposal the desired result.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T15:31:21.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2014-10-01T16:57:33.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One could quite reasonably argue that every world is a &quot;virtual&quot; world. This is the old Cartesian problem: what if my entire perception of the world is actually a deception created by a monstrous demonic entity? Some people think of it as the &quot;brain in a jar&quot; problem, or these days the Matrix problem. At base, it's not something one can solve -- this is one of the implications of Kurt Gödel's famous theorems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, hypothesizing about &quot;virtual worlds&quot; in the sense defined here is necessarily a matter of worldbuilding, and thus perfectly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T16:57:33.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:09:30.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the rpg tag is only going to be of significant value if the question specifies a rules system. For example, someone says she's designing a world to be a setting for an Ars Magica game; this tells answerers a great deal about the constraints involved. If it's completely generic -- &quot;I'm designing a world for my fantasy rpg&quot; -- then it makes no real difference that it's an rpg: it's just a world, and all we know from this statement is encapsulated in &quot;fantasy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a long-time gamer, I would certainly look up rpg questions to address, but they'd have to give me some actual information about the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: I'd say keep the tag, but ask people who use it to specify the game system or else remove the tag if the game system isn't relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T21:09:30.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:16:19.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Keep&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the test of a tag’s worthiness is whether or not you can imagine using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why would someone use the &lt;code&gt;[RPG]&lt;/code&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if I’m building a world for an RPG system (whether it be an existing one or for creating a system to go with the world), would searching for all questions tagged &lt;code&gt;[RPG]&lt;/code&gt; be useful to me? &lt;strong&gt;I absolutely think it would!&lt;/strong&gt; That way I can learn about the process, about the particular wrenches that RPGs throw into the system, about issues I didn’t even think to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might I favorite the tag? &lt;strong&gt;Definitely!&lt;/strong&gt; For one, the same way I wanted to peruse existing questions on the topic, I might want to keep abreast of new thoughts or problems people have run into, and hey, if I’m serious about doing this, I may have some insight to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching and favoriting are basically the two things that tags enable you to do. This tag is useful for both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But! Be careful about usage&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPG tag is only useful, as described above, if it is used for questions that are &lt;strong&gt;distinctly and uniquely about RPGs&lt;/strong&gt;. As in, the things that RPGs, in particular, affect and change and make issues when they might not be otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone tags their question &lt;code&gt;[RPG]&lt;/code&gt; just because the world they’re building happens to be &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; an RPG, but that fact doesn’t affect the question in any special way, that tag should be removed. It might be useful information, I encourage question-askers to include it in their questions, but the &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt; should only be for questions that come up &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of the world’s use in an RPG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The existing usage is good&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one question, as of this writing, that uses &lt;code&gt;[RPG]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/218/17&quot;&gt;Is the world of a Roguelike RPG plausible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly the kind of thing that &lt;code&gt;[RPG]&lt;/code&gt; makes a good choice for: the gameplay of a roguelike requires certain truths about the world, truths which are, on their face, very odd and quite different from how things generally work in the real world. But if you want to make a roguelike, you have to keep these tropes for the sake of the gameplay. This is a very valid question, and it is &lt;strong&gt;directly influenced by considerations of the setting’s use in a game.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T22:51:05.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="258" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:36:32.500" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;This meta post is about whether or not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/667/17&quot;&gt;What fantasy race has an affinity for water?&lt;/a&gt; should be put On Hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T23:14:52.503" Title="Should we put the fantasy water races question On Hold?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="257" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:36:32.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Too Broad&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that this question is &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; too broad: the asker must specify a lot more detail about their world and about what he or she is looking for in an answer. Because right now, all of the answers are nothing more than bare lists of ideas, and really they &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be more than that. As of this writing, &lt;strong&gt;three of the four answers have exactly the same score&lt;/strong&gt;, which indicates that we &lt;em&gt;just do not have enough criteria by which to judge one as better than the rest.&lt;/em&gt; They’re all just equally-valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several people have already commented on this issue, but I think more action needs to be taken. As-is, no one can even &lt;em&gt;attempt&lt;/em&gt; a definitive answer, and the system is not working for promoting a “best” answer, because there isn’t and cannot be one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these comments, on the question and on @ivy_lynx’s answer, respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As worded I have to agree there seem to be countless (well ok you could probably count them all) options here from all the various fictional universes out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—James&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;um downvote because it's mostly links? Should I elaborate on all these? The question is quite broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—ivy_lynx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why is this a problem?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it’s impossible to vote. How do you say one list of possible races is better than another list? You could pick the biggest one, or vote for all of them, or vote for the one that interests you most personally, but &lt;strong&gt;none of those reasons are related to which answers the question best.&lt;/strong&gt; We just don’t have enough context to pick out a particular race and say “ah yes, this would be perfect!” The question doesn’t &lt;em&gt;get answered&lt;/em&gt; — the question-asker just waits long enough to see something they happen to like, or until they come up with something of their own, and they check the answer that happened to include it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange system doesn’t work under these conditions. The system is broken by the very concept, and &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; benefits from simply putting the question On Hold, encouraging the asker to &lt;em&gt;really pin down&lt;/em&gt; what they want, and then we can see about giving really definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What the question needs&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need enough information to be able to decide why any given vaguely-watery-but-not-aquatic race is better or worse than any other entry in that category, because the category is large and nebulous. The nix on aquatic creatures is a good step; the emphasis on trade and sailing is also, albeit a bit obvious (can you imagine a race that could be called “watery” &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; that?), but we need more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some particulars that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; would like to see, personally, are some more context about the world they’ll be placed in, particularly the other races and how &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; are tied to elements. Knowing that would allow us to make arguments for or against any particular race as a good fit, based on the niche the race is supposed to occupy and through parallelism with existing races and their connections to elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T22:42:13.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="250" CreationDate="2014-10-01T21:43:06.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Be very careful about suggesting sites where a question won’t be welcome&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that don’t fit well here will, very often, &lt;em&gt;not fit very well on other sites either&lt;/em&gt;, because regardless of where a topic fits best, there are also other issues with the question. We have to be careful about sending them questions they don’t want: that gives their moderators more work to do, distracts their users, and possibly worst of all, gives the question-asker the most obnoxious and frustrating run-around you could imagine. Unless you’re familiar with the norms of the community you’re suggesting they go to, at the very least &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; give feedback and critique for preparing a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; question on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, it’s just about being a good neighbor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I base this on my time on RPG SE; we used to send everything that had anything to do with video games over to Arqade, which annoyed them because frequently we were sending over &lt;em&gt;bad questions&lt;/em&gt; that they then had to deal with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T21:43:06.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="257" CreationDate="2014-10-01T22:07:42.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It strikes me that what's required here is a formulation, composed by those who put the question On Hold, that the question requests a list or enumeration rather than a definite answer. The same thing might go like this: &quot;Can someone give me some examples of a fantasy 'race' that lives entirely in water?&quot; A definitive answer to this would be &quot;yes.&quot; Which isn't helpful. In other words, &quot;On Hold: this question requests a list rather than being answerable definitively.&quot; Something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requested edit should ask that the question be reformulated either to be exceedingly narrow -- say, one or two examples might exist but they're hard to think of -- or, far better, to specify exactly the characteristics sought, with a subsidiary request for extant examples. That way, an answer can describe how such a species might operate, and go on to say, &quot;for example, in so-and-so's book Such-And-Such, there are the Blahblahs.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enumeration or list questions are going to pop up with some regularity, so I think that ought to be addressed specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="114" LastEditDate="2014-10-01T23:14:52.503" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T23:14:52.503" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T23:54:19.183" Score="13" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/371/can-civilization-development-occur-completely-without-faith%20*this%20thread%20about%20religion&quot;&gt;this thread about religion&lt;/a&gt;, there is an extensive series of answers that are based on patent falsehoods and misinformation. As a professional scholar of religion (who happens not to be in any sense religious), I don't see that I can stand by idly. This is the kind of nonsense I've spent 16 years teaching students to stop spouting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, I don't see a good way to address such issues without either being exceedingly rude or simply playing &quot;gotcha.&quot; What's needed -- and this is going to come up constantly when religion (among other things) gets discussed -- is a formal explication. But I can't see how that would work on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Is there perhaps a good way to use the &quot;ask and answer your own question&quot; thing? I don't entirely grasp that (and yes, I've read the SE blog entry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T20:04:08.803" Title="How should one deal with grossly uninformed answers and discussions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="261" CreationDate="2014-10-02T00:17:14.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no formal explication option on a Stack Exchange site, really. You should &lt;strong&gt;write your own good answer&lt;/strong&gt; to that question so we may upvote it! Of course we should also downvote bad answers (if an answer can be &lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt;, comment with that suggestion; otherwise the downvote is sufficient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend against creating a separate question-and-answer purely for the purpose to telling people how they're wrong, as it's not really how the Stack works and it'll get purged pretty fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2014-10-02T00:23:13.420" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T00:23:13.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="261" CreationDate="2014-10-02T00:42:45.007" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If any of the posts or comments are objectively &lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt; -- that is, the &quot;reasonable man&quot; would find them so, not just that you do -- then flag them for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of the comments are &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;too chatty&lt;/em&gt; -- if side conversations are happening that are not about improving the post to which they're attached -- then flag those too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any answers &lt;em&gt;fail to address the question&lt;/em&gt; -- if they answer some other question that wasn't asked, or offer some tangential opinion or anecdote -- then flag those as &quot;not an answer&quot;, which will send them to a review queue for other users to look at and possibly delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, an answer is merely &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, then downvote it.  Being wrong isn't, by itself, cause to delete an answer.  People are allowed to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xkcd.com/386&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wrong on the internet&lt;/a&gt;, just as we are free to -- and expected to -- express our displeasure through votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you can offer a &lt;em&gt;better answer&lt;/em&gt; to a question, do so and reap the rewards -- the minor reward of some reputation when people upvote your answer, and the major reward of making the Internet a better place by sharing your knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T00:42:45.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="261" CreationDate="2014-10-02T01:21:44.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The question is a very bad fit in the first place&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have said, you have studied these issues for 16 years. This isn’t a topic for a quick Q&amp;amp;A, this is the topic of books – plural, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; have been published &lt;em&gt;trying&lt;/em&gt; to answer that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To try to answer it in the SE format is, I think, absurd. An expert of your caliber might be able to do a summary justice here, and I’d be thrilled to see that answer, and upvote it – but I wouldn’t necessarily expect an expert of 16 years in religious studies to be answering questions on worldbuilding, and I don’t think the question belongs here in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my ideal answer to this situation is to see your answer, upvote it, and then see the question closed anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T01:21:44.540" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-02T02:17:51.173" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/808/why-and-how-would-a-completely-urbanized-city-planet-exist&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is made up of 5 separate well worded questions on the topic of a planet-wide city. Addressing them all will make for &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; long answers, and addressing just one per answer will make for answers that cannot be compared by voting. It has been suggested in the comments that the asker repost as separate questions. Should this be enforced by closing this question or are there reasons to keep them together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;This question has now been deleted and split into separate parts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T10:52:01.293" Title="Should this be 5 separate questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="265" CreationDate="2014-10-02T02:17:51.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see an advantage to keeping the 5 questions in one, and the disadvantages of excessively long answers and answers that cannot be compared by voting makes me certain that this should be split up. Answers to the individual questions can still cross-reference each other if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime the question should be closed to prevent time being wasted on answers that will later have to be split up and rewritten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The day after the post was split up, I've noticed another advantage: The individual questions now show up separately in the unanswered questions list, so the last to be answered is highlighted as still needing an answer. In a combined question once there are a few answers there would be much less reason for people to go in and decide which sub-question still needed an answer. Separating ensures no aspect is overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="109" LastEditDate="2014-10-02T10:52:01.293" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T10:52:01.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-02T13:31:54.910" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/39/distinguishing-science-and-fantasy-based-questions&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56/magic-and-technology-are-meaningless-words-without-context&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; meta posts, it seems that one of the most important distinctions to be made on this SE is the distinction between questions which should be answered with as hard, logical, science as possible, and those which either, by their nature, demand extra-scientific/magical answers or at least a lot of fudging of the physics involved.  Because of this, I suggest that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; is renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic-based&lt;/a&gt;, to better distinguish and contrast with the popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly there should be a second tag for soft scifi worldbuilders who don't want magic used, but do not require or would actually prefer that the science is not limited to what we know for sure: any type of well-defined phlebotinum or highly speculative 'science' (dark matter, gratuitous nanomachines, crystals with special properties).  I would call this tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speculative-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speculative-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speculative-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speculative-science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speculative-science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speculative-science-based&lt;/a&gt;, maybe even [tag;pseudoscience-based], but I don't know if it's necessary or desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T09:12:35.457" Title="Renaming the &quot;magic&quot; tag to &quot;magic-based&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2014-10-02T13:53:36.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I understand where you are coming from &lt;strong&gt;I disagree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is saying &quot;answers should be &lt;strong&gt;based&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; hence its name. The person doing the question is specifically calling out they they want answers to use facts and current knowledge to help explain something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag, it allows for more speculative answers and furthermore the question itself will be setting out what it wants. Soft-science isn't a category, it is by definition a vagueness, a vagueness that is narrowed down by the question. However, if you feel the need to create the tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-science&lt;/a&gt; do so, so that over time we can see if anyone is using it. I suspect the reason it hasn't been created is because nobody has felt the need to declare &quot;I don't need answers based in science&quot; with a tag because they have already done so in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic on the other hand has nothing to do with science-based or facts, its not even the opposite. The tag description calls it out as &quot;non-mechanical solutions&quot; to a problem, to differentiate it from technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; aren't opposites though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic-based&lt;/a&gt; feels like an attempt to define/create a tag because its presumed opposite exists, that is not what tags are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T09:12:35.457" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T09:12:35.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2014-10-02T14:02:06.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the whole, I don't see that adding this tag is likely to achieve anything much. I do not think that &quot;magic&quot; is a consistent enough framework or system in the minds of most readers that it means much to say one's design or question is &quot;based&quot; in it. The &quot;science-based&quot; tag really means &quot;please confine your speculations or formulations to the limits imposed by currently-known hard science.&quot; If you replace the last two (or four) words with &quot;magic,&quot; the sentence suddenly becomes quite peculiar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine a &quot;historical&quot; or &quot;history-based&quot; tag being of value, but I doubt that magical constructions are going to fall into that terribly often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T14:02:06.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2014-10-02T14:11:37.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not all that happy about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, actually, and I disagree with adding more members to the &lt;code&gt;-based&lt;/code&gt; family.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should &lt;em&gt;characterize the question&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;add meta-constraints for answers&lt;/em&gt;.  The question itself should specify the parameters for answers, whether that's &quot;science-based&quot; or &quot;consistent with current technology&quot; or &quot;compatible with telepathy&quot; or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't imagine somebody wanting to search on a tag, like people do to find all the questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/underground&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;underground&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;underground&lt;/a&gt; settlements, then that tag might not be serving one of its primary functions: to index the site.  Do you think people will search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;?  Science isn't one big thing, so if, say, a physicist does so, he's still going to be skipping over a bunch of questions about chemistry and biology and others.  Wouldn't he instead either use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; tag, if there were one, or do a text search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if my argument here isn't accepted, I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/268/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic-based&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have the same need driving it that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T14:11:37.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="159" CreationDate="2014-10-02T14:39:52.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the general principle is whether the question can be addressed effectively or not within the stated bounds of &quot;world building.&quot; Assuming that &quot;world&quot; includes historical phenomena, there can never be an absolute division here. What's required is sufficient specificity and detail that an effective answer can actually address a reasonably large proportion of the issues at stake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case at hand, it seems to me that several of the answers are thoughtful and on-target, and should be of value not only to the original questioner but to future readers. Thus I'd argue that the community finds it relevant and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T14:39:52.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2014-10-02T15:50:07.080" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Renaming the tag would change the meaning.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic-based&lt;/a&gt; is that &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;magic&amp;quot; is descriptive and &amp;quot;magic-based&amp;quot; is proscriptive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot; tag says &amp;quot;This question involves magic&amp;quot;.  A &amp;quot;magic-based&amp;quot; tag says &amp;quot;I want answers based on magic&amp;quot;.  While the former is a useful piece of information, the latter doesn't really help - we can't just arbitrarily make up your magic system for you to accomplish your goal if you don't provide one, and if you do provide one then it's obvious you want us to work with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T15:50:07.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="159" CreationDate="2014-10-02T16:18:16.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A rule of thumb can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is about how the world is or how the world works, it is on-topic. Examples can be used for the question, but they are not the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is about a single individual of that world (instead of the individual being the example stated above), it is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T16:18:16.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-10-02T17:52:24.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/890/optimum-laser-color-for-maximum-destruction&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; another question which would benefit from math: I want to be able to put formulas about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_divergence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;beam divergence&lt;/a&gt; into an answer I'm contemplating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T17:52:24.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="261" CreationDate="2014-10-02T20:04:08.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this instance you could downvote the question and provide an answer detailing why the other answers are not good answers, you do not need to be rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel this is a bad fit, flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T20:04:08.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="456" CreationDate="2014-10-03T01:29:50.240" Score="14" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moon&lt;/a&gt; tag appear today on a question about single moon.  I wanted to change it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt; because some worlds have multiple moons (and we have questions about that), but I don't have enough reputation to just do it and I can't propose an edit because &quot;moon&quot; and &quot;moons&quot; can't exist simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and added the tag to a question I asked about multiple moons even though it looks kind of goofy, but could we please fix this while the question count is low?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nominal tags on SE are usually plural in my experience, by the way -- moons, planets, plants, cities... compilers, laws, parts of speech, users, tags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T00:52:09.370" Title="Please rename &quot;moon&quot; tag to &quot;moons&quot;" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-03T11:24:26.330" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently two questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;. Would it make sense to retag them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-10-29T00:55:36.763" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T00:55:36.763" Title="Change [tag:life] to [tag:biology]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-03T11:24:44.540" Score="10" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/948/what-are-the-key-questions-you-have-to-answer-when-designing-a-fictitious-societ&quot;&gt;What are the key questions you have to answer when designing a fictitious society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently in the vote-to-close queue as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, it's very broad... and it asks for a list which is a warning sign... however the question is specifically looking for key points which could then be further investigated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the fact that it's asking for key points make it not-too-broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question was rephrased as &quot;what are the most important questions to ask&quot; would that change anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T16:37:48.510" Title="Key Questions question - too broad?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="277" CreationDate="2014-10-03T11:34:11.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of questions where one tag would apply and not the other so I vote no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; in a magical setting might have very little connection to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;. This all depends on how the tags are defined though. Does the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; really mean anything? Maybe it should just be removed entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that's been discussed a few times though (and most people seem to agree) is that for the first month or two we should let tags go and see how they shape out. (Other than obvious cleanup like moon-&gt;moons or deleting design of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T11:34:11.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="278" CreationDate="2014-10-03T12:26:17.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've voted to close this as too broad, not because it's a bad question&#xA;  but because I think there are endless really good questions which&#xA;  could make up your framework (and thus a LOT of equally valid&#xA;  answers). If anything the correct answer will almost be a flowchart of&#xA;  questions. Questions for defining an aquatic culture would be very&#xA;  different to ones defining a land or air based ones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few examples of questions with LOTS of answers recently where everyone seems to have an opinion and votes are more of an indication of age (IMHO) than quality of answer. It's made me appreciate a lot more some of the chat discussions of &quot;Too Broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this are good for the the OP (because they get lots of answers) but not good for the community/mechanism because they attract so many answers which are equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted directly I was beginning to think that we were opening a lots and lots of meta Qs for questions we were unsure about. I think there's been an element of trying to avoid upsetting anyone and trying to decide as a community but I think we're reaching consensus more and more. Now more people have review privileges I simply voted and left it to the review queue to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T12:26:17.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="278" CreationDate="2014-10-03T12:58:23.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the fact that it's asking for key points make it not-too-broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the problem is that without setting any context at all in the question, there are no general key points. Absolutely any feature of a society can be an important top-level variable, and need to be in the key points list of a world where it could vary. That's because as Worldbuilders, we get to decide what the important drivers for society are, and we need to follow through with those consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on a world where there were four sentient races based around the classical elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, a key point for each culture within it would be which elements were represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/647/the-first-few-things-to-note-down-about-an-imaginary-culture&quot;&gt;a very similar question&lt;/a&gt;, and got good responses. I think that is because I scoped my question to be about describing a fantasy RPG world. If the question we are discussing here could set a less general top-level scope (e.g. science-fiction describing the culture on each planet), then I thinkit would be easier to make a start on an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T12:58:23.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="278" CreationDate="2014-10-03T16:37:48.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At base, it's too broad for the same reason my &quot;what are the crucial elements for designing a religion?&quot; question is too broad. A very good answer or two may lay groundwork for future, well-scoped questions. But the question itself is broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to see come out of a question like this, after initial discussion and closure, is people tagging the original in order to specify a narrow, highly-specific question about a factor or element that arose in the early discussion. Conversely, the entirely open-ended question -- &quot;is it important to have XXX when I'm designing my world?&quot; -- can be referenced back to the original and marked as a duplication (or commented, with a reference, suggesting either closure or an edit toward specification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T16:37:48.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="286" CreationDate="2014-10-03T20:40:53.563" Score="10" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The title is awful but I couldn't come up with a better one, feel free to edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering about is this: when presented with question such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/542/how-would-society-be-different-in-a-sentient-species-that-does-not-care-for-its&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/966/could-a-civilization-achieve-spaceflight-without-inventing-advanced-weaponry-alo&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/780/in-a-society-of-flying-beings-would-the-wheel-ever-be-invented&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, where the answer is most likely a resounding &lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt; and there are strong reasons as to why what is questioned is impossible or extremely unlikely, should we, by default, also try to present possible workarounds to make it &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons this is different here, compared to more strictly technical sites, such as SO, is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are imaginary worlds and they're not obligated (nor can they) conform to reality 100% (so workarounds &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; always possible, if not always good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a Q&amp;amp;A about building worlds and ideally it should provide help in building worlds, not just stating that imaginary situations are impossible or possible (which feels more appropriate for a science or technology-focused Q&amp;amp;A)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While many questions are asked by people with &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; sense of the related subject matter of their question, it's unlikely we'll be getting questions on whether imaginary situations are possible or not, from people who are already experts on the matter. Lacking expertise, it's also unlikely they'll be able to come up with plausible solutions to their worldbuilding on their own. The obvious question a lot of them would ask in real life is &quot;Under what conditions would it be &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;. It would make sense to expect the same from those who search for said questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions state this in the question body already, but should we consider this follow-up query on how to squeeze the impossible in there to be an &lt;em&gt;implicit part of these questions always?&lt;/em&gt; Should we expect &lt;em&gt;the asker&lt;/em&gt; to add this side to the question themselves? or is the answer of &quot;No, here's why&quot; enough considering the scope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit: The tag idea was a joke, only placed here for completeness, yet answers seem to be focusing on that part entirely - so I'm editing it out for clarity. Making a note here for future readers: huge success.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T15:17:42.447" Title="Should workarounds be suggested when the question implies an impossibilty?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="283" CreationDate="2014-10-04T01:16:09.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it varies per asker. Some may be trying to add legitimacy to a plot point/other establish feature of their world, while others are testing the grounds to see if an idea is plausible.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, personally, find it difficult to find a way to state &quot;well, if this question presupposes something that wouldn't work, please suggest something similar in vein or a workaround or an easy, only-slightly-handwaving justification or something like that, please&quot; in my questions.  I know we don't like metatagging, but perhaps in this case it's justified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, previously &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plausibility-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plausibility-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plausibility-check&lt;/a&gt;.  We could continue with that, but perhaps another tag, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/workarounds-welcome&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;workarounds-welcome&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;workarounds-welcome&lt;/a&gt; (eww) or something of that sort could be introduced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, we don't want unnecessary tag proliferation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T01:16:09.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="283" CreationDate="2014-10-04T02:30:46.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am opposed to the idea of having a tag to invite alternative solutions.&lt;/strong&gt; The asker will often not realise that what they originally ask for is not possible or not ideal, so will not know to add the tag. Unless an asker explicitly states that they are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; interested in anything but a very specific answer, any answer that attempts to solve the askers problem is welcome. The votes will judge the alternative solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/877/is-it-possible-to-advertise-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;Is it possible to advertise on the moon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: Not by the suggested method of projection, but it is possible using physical panels on the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this kind of answer (both a no and an alternative solution) serves this site well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Disclosure: the answer I refer to is mine)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T02:30:46.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="283" CreationDate="2014-10-04T15:08:47.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;On reading the edited question, I think it's an important issue. I'll rephrase, in case I don't understand the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is really about the &quot;impossible&quot; situation or proposal, but rather about fishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your view, we are seeing a good many questions posed thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given X conditions that differ from our own known situation, would Y known phenomenon occur?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(or some variation on this basic structure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner lacks a good deal of foundational information with respect to the relevant fields of knowledge, and thus is effectively fishing for whatever information might be relevant. This is problematic, because it makes a strong, clear answer impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in all likelihood, the questioner means something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my world, X conditions differ from our known situation, and I do/don't want Y known phenomenon to occur. How can I make that plausible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps what's called for here is simply an awareness on the community's part that this kind of formulation tends to lead into shallower speculation than is desirable. Thus the best thing to do is to write a comment suggesting the reformulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the spaceflight without weapons question, or the flying civilization without the wheel. In the former case, I suspect that the question is whether the author can plausibly develop a spaceflight culture without advanced weaponry. In the latter, I don't know whether the author wants wheels or not -- and that confuses the issue a good deal. Both questions could be narrowed to specify the desired outcome, leading to more productive and authoritative responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is the &quot;ban on computers&quot; question. Granted a ban on computing, what then? That's far too open-ended. What does the questioner want to happen? The issue here is to connect the dots: &quot;I want a ban on computers, but I also want some kind of artificial intelligence thing like HAL-9000, and I want to be able to have starships. Is there a way to make those things not mutually exclusive?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And no, I don't think tags are relevant, but neither does the OP.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="114" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T15:17:42.447" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T15:17:42.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-05T09:48:54.457" Score="13" ViewCount="877" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1047/109&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; makes a reasonable explanation but I have downvoted it for the use of the word &quot;slut&quot; and its sexual analogy to explain carbon chemistry. My objection is not to the use of promiscuity as an analogy, but to the use of this word to indicate it. Promiscuity is not inherently good or bad, but this word has traditionally been used to insult only one gender and not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that the worldbuilding community want to welcome, tolerate, or reject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Following BESW's advice, I have replaced the word with [snip] in the linked answer until the answer poster is available for a rewrite.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T20:07:37.863" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T22:23:16.557" Title="Is potentially offensive language welcome in our community?" Tags="|discussion|writing-style|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2014-10-05T09:48:54.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I object to the use of the word and feel uncomfortable using it even in quotation marks for the purpose of asking about it. I would not want to be part of a community that welcomes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place I could see a justifiable use for the word would be in a question or answer that specifically deals with insults and conflict, and discusses its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate a light hearted analogy to aid understanding, but such an explanation ceases to be light hearted when it uses a word that divides the population into offensive stereotyped groups (regardless of whether that was the writer's intention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see the answer edited so that I can remove my downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="109" LastEditDate="2014-10-05T10:00:21.630" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T10:00:21.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2014-10-05T10:15:16.437" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like any other offensive word or phrase, it's appropriate when it's genuinely necessary and at no other time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a site for thirteen-year-olds and up, and we should write our posts accordingly. Even beyond that we should --as a matter of courtesy-- avoid unnecessarily offensive language. This will sometimes mean avoiding phrases which we are personally not offended by, because we know that they're commonly inappropriate for polite company. That's the price of participating in the Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contexts where a &quot;bad word&quot; is necessary to communicate an otherwise-valid question (as english.se allows profanity in questions &lt;em&gt;about profanity&lt;/em&gt;), then it SHOULD be used--albeit as sparingly as possible. However, &lt;strong&gt;it's hard to imagine many worldbuilding questions which require offensive language.&lt;/strong&gt; Outside of that context, crudity for the sake of emphasis or 'entertainment' should be considered inappropriate and proactively removed from any post which contains it: Edit the phrases out, or flag as offensive. I've seen an RPG.SE mod just replace profanity with [snip], and if that compromises the post's usefulness (it rarely does) then-- oh, well. The poster can fix it himself: we probably shouldn't put extra effort into fixing a post which didn't have the original effort of trying to fit basic Stack politeness standards, because it just shows the person they don't need to make that effort since we'll do it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2014-10-05T11:58:27.563" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T11:58:27.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="277" CreationDate="2014-10-05T10:20:36.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;life&quot; has many meanings, so as a tag it may end up applied to a variety of different questions that do not benefit from sharing a tag. For example, questions on biology, longevity, lifestyle, magical lifeforce, rights of living things...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; will require a very clear tag wiki to make clear what it is intended for, but that in itself suggests that a different, less ambiguous word would be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the long term future of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; is that it will be deleted. A vague tag eventually causes more problems than it solves. I'd like to see it deleted sooner rather than later, so that there is a space for new tags to grow into naturally, rather than leaving a much larger void later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T10:20:36.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-10-05T11:04:22.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few more questions I've come across which would likely benefit from math support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/819/29&quot;&gt;What is the maximum size of a flying creature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/601/29&quot;&gt;Feasibility of anti-matter as a fuel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and possibly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1052/29&quot;&gt;What would happen if magic was constrained by the second law of thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1051/29&quot;&gt;one of the answers&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1031/29&quot;&gt;Is it possible for life to evolve on planets without oxygen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all these questions coming up goes to show that &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding SE has a legitimate use for having MathJax enabled.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T11:04:22.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-05T12:30:01.217" Score="7" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every site needs to be able to promote itself to people who will be interested in the content of the site. In fact, promoting sites is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt;. So here we go!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone thinking about this should read: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/a-recipe-to-promote-your-site/&quot;&gt;A Recipe to Promote your Site&lt;/a&gt;. That blog post has a lot of good, basic information about promoting a site. But that link also encourages innovation. That's what this post is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please post an idea for promoting the site in a community-wiki answer below.&lt;/strong&gt; Each idea can be discussed using comments below the question (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; is also a good place to discuss these things.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This post is for general ideas for promoting the website, likely we will have other questions on meta about promoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, how do you go above and beyond simply sharing links to great&#xA;  questions? Get specific! Rather than asking giant, hard to answer big&#xA;  picture questions like “How do we promote our site?”, start by asking&#xA;  bite-size, specific questions that are easier to answer — more along&#xA;  the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What are the three biggest webmaster conferences we can sponsor?”&#xA;  “Can the GIS community support a ‘Dev Days’ like Stack Overflow?”&#xA;  “What are the top 10 photography podcasts that might pick up on our&#xA;  site?” And don’t stop there. When you get your first round of answers,&#xA;  use those answers to get even more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Does anybody know photographer Scott Bourne (&lt;a href=&quot;http://photofocus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://photofocus.com/&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;  to ask about talking to us on his podcast or to his Twitter&#xA;  followers?” This takes a bit more coordination and discipline than&#xA;  asking a one-shot question and expecting a final solution to simply&#xA;  emerge. It takes individual members to rise up and ask methodical,&#xA;  step-wise questions with an end-goal in mind — and follow through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions about an idea that wouldn't fit in comments, or want to get something more attention than just through comments, you can ask a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question about promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T09:51:37.380" Title="How can we promote this site?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-06T17:38:32.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2014-10-05T12:30:01.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most basic way to share a website is to share links to great questions and answers. This is really easy to do within the Stack Exchange system, with built-in share links to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Share links to questions you find interesting and you think others would find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting A Recipe to Promote your Site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The absolute best and easiest way to promote your site is to simply&#xA;  share links to great questions or answers. The hallmark, the&#xA;  cornerstone, the fundamental bedrock of Stack Exchange is producing&#xA;  Q&amp;amp;A that we’re proud of, Q&amp;amp;A that’s worthy of sharing with others. At&#xA;  the risk of explaining the obvious, here’s how to obtain a link to a&#xA;  question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;copy the URL in your browser’s address bar right click the question&#xA;  title itself, which is a link to the question, and select Copy. right&#xA;  click the “share” text just under the question, and select Copy. If&#xA;  you need a short URL, remember that we don’t require anything beyond&#xA;  the number ID of the question. So if you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/970/solar-panels-worth-it&quot;&gt;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/970/solar-panels-worth-it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This can be shortened to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/970&quot;&gt;https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/970&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/q/970&quot;&gt;https://diy.stackexchange.com/q/970&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also get a short permalink by clicking the &quot;share&quot; link beneath a post (question or answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:16.920" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T12:30:01.217" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-05T12:30:01.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2014-10-05T13:01:05.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have a shortage of views from potential users. We have 5 questions in the Hot Network Questions at the moment, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240/time-to-spread-the-word&quot;&gt;links are being posted to our site&lt;/a&gt;. There are plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=NewUsers&amp;amp;sort=creationdate&quot;&gt;new users arriving&lt;/a&gt; every day. I think what we need to address is ways of encouraging people to stay. At the moment we have far more answers being posted than questions. Our answer rate is very high, and our unanswered question count is very low. While this is good, it does mean that new people arriving do not have fresh questions to encourage them to answer and start to become part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason for the large number of answers per question is that some of our questions are too broad. The community is doing a good job of closing these. However, even for questions that are just right, answers come in very quickly because there are not many questions arriving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we already have an excellent base of people who write very good answers very quickly, what we need to focus on is attracting more people to ask questions. People following the site out of interest will grow naturally - we have intriguing questions and answers. New people who have questions of their own are more rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason it would help to focus not just on telling as many people as possible, but thinking carefully about where the people with worldbuilding questions might be. Most people are interested in the material we have on our site, whether they are worldbuilders or not, but they won't ask new questions. Natural, useful questions come from people who are actively involved in worldbuilding. Novel writers, script writers, artists, game designers (computer games, table top games, role playing games).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Targeting these various types of worldbuilder will bring more questions, which will automatically grow the rest of the community by providing even more interesting content that we will link to naturally without even thinking about promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T13:01:05.030" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-06T17:38:32.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2014-10-06T15:06:53.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the definition phase this came up and at the time we decided that questions about individuals would generally not be on topic.  The one potential exception we discussed is major, world altering recurring characters.  People like Elminster from DnD or The Prophet from Warcraft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts are that a world's history is relevant and major players in the universe, individuals who had truly global impact should be on topic, but only insofar as it relates to building the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:  Knowing that, &lt;em&gt;FirstName the adjective&lt;/em&gt;, conquered the known world from west to east over the course of a decade, &lt;em&gt;insert a question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:06:53.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-06T15:09:20.367" Score="11" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many cases, a good answer to the worldbuilding question would result from a good Q&amp;amp;A on a real scientific site (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1091/what-efficiencies-make-a-realistic-food-chain&quot;&gt;What efficiencies make a realistic food chain?&lt;/a&gt; on Biology.SE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a policy on doing just that (e.g. taking Worldbuilding question, and rewording it to be a real SE question - such as on Biology SE: &quot;what's a realistic amount of food material that apex and non-apex predators require&quot;, perhaps using specific ecosystem example; and then posting a WB.SE answer based on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T21:49:04.037" Title="Copying the questions (or claims) from this site to science SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|exact-duplicates|cross-site|science|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2014-10-06T15:32:29.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caveat: Provided that we formulate the specialist SE site questions well, to be GOOD on topic questions AND judiciously synthecize good World-building answers instead of mere copy/pasting the SE answers here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It lets us build &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; much better answers, by leveraging scientific field expertise of relevant SE sites which our site might have in significantly lower amounts (we may have biology experts or strong amateurs, but a lot less of them). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the example question I gave had some postulated biology based answers that were NOT backed up by any supplied research. Doesn't necessarily make them bad answers, but clearly &lt;strong&gt;not excellent&lt;/strong&gt; ones either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we are judicious in how we formulate questions, we enrich the sister SE sites by seeding them with interesting and good quality questions which allow for great answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this isn't done well, we end up with literal cross-site duplicates. Not a great state of affairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is mitigated by the fact that a great world-building answer would build on the $Science.SE answer, adding actual worldbuilding content to dry scientific fact it uses as a basis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It lets people farm rep on this site by basically leveraging expertise of others &quot;for free&quot;. See the old &quot;Well, my contract will cost $10,000. $4k for you, $4k for me, and for $2k we subcontract the guy from Texas who said he'd do it for $2,000&quot; joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mitigated by the fact that the main goal of the site is to generate awesome answers with good information, and not to prevent anyone except deep SM experts from earning rep.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastEditorUserId="634" LastEditDate="2014-10-06T15:36:15.227" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:36:15.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-10-06T15:57:32.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reticulating Splines&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:57:32.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2014-10-06T16:28:06.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demiurges’ Lounge&lt;/strong&gt; (or something else involving demiurges)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will leave it to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; to explain the concept of the &lt;em&gt;demiurge,&lt;/em&gt; which fits worldbuilding very well in my opinion. While a concept of gnosticism, which can be considered a religion, I would be surprised if anybody were offended by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T16:28:06.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2014-10-06T19:26:49.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I object to the use of the word and feel uncomfortable using it even&#xA;  in quotation marks for the purpose of asking about it. I would not&#xA;  want to be part of a community that welcomes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that we are or will be a very diverse community.  Some of our community will understand the anthropomorphism technique being used here to make the subject more interesting to some.  I think your downvote is appropriate and if you are offended by the text then you should flag it as offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, while I find the answer in poor taste and believe it could and would have been better had the OP toned it down,  I am against censoring it.  There are already mechanisms to handle this.  Pop into chat and ask for others to flag this, or take it upon yourself to rewrite the answer to improve it.  I also think it is appropriate to bring the answer here and ask for it to be fixed or removed.  But if inaction on that request is enough to drive you away then you might be better off just leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T19:26:49.680" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2014-10-06T21:33:50.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is actually &lt;em&gt;reworked&lt;/em&gt; such that an answer to one variant is not an answer to another variant (for whatever reason), then by definition it is not a duplicate, on-site or cross-site. (They can, however, very much be &lt;strong&gt;related,&lt;/strong&gt; and I would encourage adding appropriate links.) Just make sure to attribute content appropriately. I can't see much reason why a question on Worldbuilding SE couldn't make people curious about how it would work &lt;em&gt;in our real world&lt;/em&gt; and there is no reason to stop them from asking on the science-based sites such as Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Earth Science, Space Exploration, or what have you. I'm betting this happens already, but Worldbuilding SE is more likely to be a source of such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; cross-posting the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; question to multiple sites is very much frowned upon on the network. At least one Stack Exchange site, the Unix &amp;amp; Linux SE, even has it as a specific close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has been &lt;strong&gt;posted on multiple sites&lt;/strong&gt;. Cross-posting is strongly discouraged; see the help center and community FAQ for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper way to move a question from one site to another, absent established migration paths (which involve closing as off-topic, and which are added only if there is a significant number of questions which are good fits for specific other SE sites), is to flag the question for moderator attention and request migration to a desired target site. The moderator handling the flag is likely to seek guidance from the moderators on the desired target site as to whether the question would be welcome there, unless they are active on the target site as well and know whether it is likely to be, and then act on that judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the latter (not cross-posting, and how to migrate) is currently specifically mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/29&quot;&gt;the proposed help center &quot;what questions can I ask here?&quot; text&lt;/a&gt;. (In case it gets changed later, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/215/16&quot;&gt;this is the most recent revision at the time&lt;/a&gt; which includes that text, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/215/11&quot;&gt;this is the revision that introduced it&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T21:49:04.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-07T14:06:06.627" Score="8" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1194/is-there-any-kind-of-technical-term-for-a-civilization-that-eats-others-to-gai&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks for a term describing a civilization that eats others to gain their assets. It's an interesting question and clearly related to worldbuilding. I would argue that worldbuilding is not the best fit for this question though and I think it would do better on either &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, this is not a question about worldbuilding, but rather a question related to worldbuilding. I suppose it's up to the community to decide if questions like these should be within the scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T14:29:03.267" Title="Are questions asking for worldbuilding related terminology on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2014-10-07T14:08:29.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is on topic because it related directly to world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Sci-fi or English Language would give you better answers however (especially Sci-fi for this question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Just don't post it to everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-10-07T14:28:21.723" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T14:28:21.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2014-10-07T14:18:08.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is off topic beacuse the answers won't relate directly to world building and more than the answers to the question: &quot;What do you call a game where 22 people kick around a ball?&quot; would. Even if you intend to have a fictional species play football in your book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, this question would generate better answers on other sites in the stack exchange network, it is therefore unnecessary to include it in the scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T14:18:08.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2014-10-07T14:39:57.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there is a massive grey area here and some &quot;name this&quot; questions may well be on topic but others not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example a parasitic society that preys on others is clearly on topic, so naming of it should also be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Football is clearly off topic, so naming of it is also off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Football in space? Football with quadruped aliens? That's now on topic - so naming of the new sport is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my suggestion is that if the subject that the naming question is about is on topic then naming questions are on topic, and not otherwise. Especially since some naming questions might not be on topic on another site. For example English Language is unlikely to care about made-up names but actually you can construct a word such as &quot;sociovore&quot; for something that eats society so it's not just a matter of picking a bunch of random syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T14:39:57.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-07T15:41:14.510" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1144/can-a-river-be-put-under-enough-pressure-to-jet-straight-up-for-a-mile&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, the lack of good support for math equations makes things difficult to explain or follow. It would be nice to remedy this, especially for hard science answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="620" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T15:41:14.510" Title="Can we get some math markup in here?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-10-07T16:33:43.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-10-07T23:15:48.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1144/can-a-river-be-put-under-enough-pressure-to-jet-straight-up-for-a-mile&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, the lack of good support for math equations makes things difficult to explain or follow. It would be nice to remedy this, especially for hard science answers. The answer calculating real-world numbers &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; a way to show the equations and the process of solving the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="620" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T23:15:48.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2014-10-08T00:13:24.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Let's look at this from the other perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Magic systems differ from world to world. No two writers are likely to come up with exactly the same magic system, so&quot; the number of worlds where magic is an explanation may very well outnumber the worlds where it is not. Why make lack of magic the default?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, not everyone is building a world that relies on Earth-based physics. If I were to be world-building for a detective story set in some village on Middle-Earth, and get stuck on some particular point, I want to come here and be able to ask about it (within the limits of what we ultimately decide is on topic for the site in the first place) without having to explicitly state that I don't want answers involving atomic bombs, paratroopers, and highly advanced technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions should make the type of world they're working in explicit, even if it's something as simple as adding the science-based tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="620" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T00:13:24.263" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="310" CreationDate="2014-10-08T06:15:37.907" Score="8" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1194/is-there-any-kind-of-technical-term-for-a-civilization-that-eats-others-to-gai&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has so far attracted a higher than usual number of answers, most of which could be construed as opinion-based, and together looking like a list question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. Although most SEs avoid such questions, some (notably ELU's word/phrase-request questions) actively embrace them. Do we want specific policies around such questions - welcome or avoid - or is the default voting mechanism enough? Does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64/back-it-up-policies&quot;&gt;back-it-up policy&lt;/a&gt; sufficiently cover questions such as this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related discussion about the question itself being a terminology-request question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/302/are-questions-asking-for-worldbuilding-related-terminology-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are questions asking for worldbuilding related terminology on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T07:05:34.347" Title="Opinion based, list questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2014-10-08T07:05:34.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say yes, because they won't be welcome on other sites and they are about world-building. I certainly think the community can handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions could also be very hard to answer on your own/with google searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T07:05:34.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2014-10-08T09:51:37.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could try and put some community promotion ads on other sites, such as Physics SE or RPG SE. At the end of every year, SE sites put up a meta post that allows people to put advertisements for open-source projects or things the community would find interesting. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8040/community-promotion-ads-2014&quot;&gt;Arqade's&lt;/a&gt; from last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we used this idea, someone would have to make a graphic to represent this site. I have limited graphical abilities, likely someone could do it better than I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:43:43.380" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T09:51:37.380" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-08T09:51:37.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-09T02:55:39.530" Score="11" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the ideas for promoting the site was creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/311/81&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ad&lt;/a&gt; for another site. But if we want to do that we need a banner to post. This banner needs to advertise our site in visual manner. So, to decide on the best banner to represent a site, post the banner here. If you have multiple banners, please post each of them in separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the required format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Image requirements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels&#xA;  Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Must be GIF or PNG No animated GIFs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[1]: http://image-url    [2]: http://clickthrough-url&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a normal site where we post the actual answer, that's all that's allowed, but here it's ok to post some discussion if you're doing it on this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The click through link should be to this site. We could have it go to the unanswered section, but that is almost always empty so I don't think that is a good idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T15:37:31.977" Title="Creating an ad for community promotion" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-09T04:39:26.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MERyR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T07:21:50.770" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T07:21:50.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-09T04:44:01.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TUPef.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T14:29:49.963" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:29:49.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-09T07:10:29.810" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rIu9R.png&quot; alt=&quot;What will you build?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T07:10:29.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2014-10-09T07:26:49.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Magic is not a thing that some worlds have and some worlds don't&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fiction, magic is just a name, that is used to describe widely different concepts in different worlds. If the question has not defined what magic is in this particular world, then it is meaningless to refer to magic in an answer unless the answer also describes exactly what magic means in this particular case. Even then, unless a question is &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; for a magic system to be designed, such an answer would in most cases be ignoring the purpose of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Magic is a cause without an explanation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases in fiction, magic is not given an underlying explanation. So magic is particularly inappropriate as an answer to questions asking for a cause for some event or behaviour. If someone asks what could be the reason for something happening, and the answer is &amp;quot;maybe magic causes it&amp;quot;, that isn't giving a reason - it is simply suggesting that no reason be given. While it is perfectly acceptable for a worldbuilder to have aspects of their world that are not explained, if they are asking for an explanation then suggesting they don't give an explanation is not addressing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T07:26:49.047" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-09T08:39:01.890" Score="7" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are already working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312/creating-an-ad-for-community-promotion&quot;&gt;internal adverts to use with the Stack Exchange network of sites&lt;/a&gt;. This is limited to 220 by 250 pixels. Would there be interest in also creating a larger advert that people can post externally (outside the Stack Exchange network)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we need to discuss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the size of the advert&lt;/strong&gt; (it's easier to design for a specific size and shape, even if it may sometimes be scaled elsewhere)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;external places&lt;/strong&gt; where the ad may be acceptable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any important &lt;strong&gt;points to consider&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any reasons &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to advertise externally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's a positive response we can post another meta question where the answers are large adverts and anyone who wants to post one externally can (being guided by the votes if they wish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T05:28:49.510" Title="Creating a large external ad" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:20:24.433" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NVUJJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;World In Progress&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:09:30.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:21:46.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HLAuZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;World In Progress&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:08:30.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="330" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:22:33.173" Score="12" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a few questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recomendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recomendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recomendation&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to me there are some big gaps in the tools out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DokuWiki seems to be ideal for documenting a new world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Graphics programs and Map creators seem to be the best option for designing the geography.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a lot out there for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Autogeneration of&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solar Systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Races&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Landmasses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Designing a world which can then be tweaked and exported as maps for fiction/RPG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keeping track of&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Characters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flora and Fauna&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is simple (and very broad). Is there enough desire/skill/inclination to create an open source project to close some of these gaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please post answers in the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Features you'd like to see&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Interest in joining such a project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skills you could bring to the table&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T23:09:12.813" Title="Could we design some open source software?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:37:44.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Features&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ultimately like to build a project which can be run as either a windows application or a plugin library (to support games and any other software which people wish to use it for) which you can throw a blank galaxy at and it will populate from the stars to the houses. The user/developer can then go in and tweak everything to their heart's content... big ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top Features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To create a &lt;code&gt;new Galaxy();&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;new City();&lt;/code&gt; for use in a game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To model a world and link to it from WB.SE so questions can be answered about it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To print off maps of your designed world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To create webpages/documents about your world including/excluding &quot;not yet released&quot; sections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, time permitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skills&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly technical .NET, C#, javascript/jQuery and SQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T13:58:45.953" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T13:58:45.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:39:57.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;3 &amp;lt;3 &amp;lt;3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am a bit saturated for projects at the moment, I have some design ideas that could work brilliantly with this and I have been researching a lot of libraries and related software and the main project I'm working on has UX and feature ideas that can possibly translate to this as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skills&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can at least help with prototyping it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Javascript and related tech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C would be what I could work with best (my C is really rusty though).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Design proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit - As far as worldbuilding is concerned, I think Dwarf Fortress has a parameter model for world generation that can be used as a starting point for what to include and how to present the options. It uses a layer based approach to building the world, much like TimB's series of questions, which would let us leverage them algorithmically. DF also has a good degree of scope in its world generation, even going as far as simulating civilizations falling and rising, wars and legendary figures.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, as overactor suggests, it should be modular - a set of specialized software that outputs maps as images (where that is relevant) and data held in something like an sqlite db. These programs can easily be built in C and since they'd be command-line, they'd also be easy to port between platforms. Mingw-w64 can be used to cross compile to windows, so we can keep it all under one compiler (gcc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can make it scriptable in Lua for configurability, if it's in C or Javascript (there's a lua vm compiled from the C sources for Javascript). I think this would be idea - just export an api object to that and control the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the interface, we can use a xulrunner app (since xulrunner is crossplatform) which should allow quick prototyping for the ui, leveraging web technologies, even for the rendering. Common formats should be used and they won't be a problem with this. The huge advantage of xulrunner is that, using chrome priveleges and XPCOM, you can build an app that has all relevant native capabilities - save files arbitrarily, call programs as backends, run scripts, whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's already lots of libraries in javascript to help out and an sqlite compile from the C sources to js, so that can carry over, cross-platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the UI design is concerned, it would require some basic drawing tools, which can already be plugged in using existing libraries and may require some clever UX to make sure it isn't overwhelming, if we're going to place everything in the GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of CV and OCR libs out there, we can probably make something configurable by hand so that, for example, you can import an rpg map, tell it how to interpret it (elevation etc.) and then figure out where rivers would go. Simple, but it can be handy - or at least cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature set would have to be defined better for clearer design, but overall, I think if we keep everything nicely separated, it should allow us to work at our own pace, knocking out one piece at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The features I think can be cleared the easiest would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terraforming (landmasses etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geological resources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bioming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Population/resource estimation (maximum, minimum sizes, growth rates)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I think we can leverage this for questions (along the lines of &quot;How can I practically model &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; in my world?&quot;) and leverage questions for computational approaches (especially the more practical and handwaivey ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can always use &lt;a href=&quot;http://pencil.evolus.vn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;evolus pencil&lt;/a&gt; for UI designs, when we reach that point (i'd prefer it best to build bottom-up). It's cross-platform, exports to both images and its own format to maintain the widgets in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also always build a web app - all of this &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be done in javascript, but it would be quite bulky and I hate bulky web apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;if the mess above suggests I'm too much of a noob, I'm ok with getting excluded because of that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T22:32:25.643" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T22:32:25.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:41:37.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Features&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is realistic but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be extremely cool is if we could make a bunch of modular programmes, where modules essentially take input variables and have several output variables. This way, you can generate a solar system with one module, select a planet from that solar system and plug those variables into a geology module etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would have to decide what sort of modules we can create and what sort of inputs they take and what sort of outputs they generate, but if we do, creating the individual modules can be done independently of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every module can also generate some optional data and graphical output along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, though I don't have all that much time, I'd love to help out where I can in any project that comes out of this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skills&lt;/strong&gt; (Sounds better on paper than it really is)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some knowledge of programming using:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delphi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C#&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swift&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C++&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Javascript&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have some background in game dev and 3d modeling and working with several graphical programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T12:41:37.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="317" CreationDate="2014-10-09T15:08:08.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I think we should create many different images of many different shapes and sizes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Advertising_Bureau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAB&lt;/a&gt; has done some work to standardize &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web banner&lt;/a&gt; sizes with the following results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20221222235424/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Standard_web_banner_ad_sizes.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20221222235424/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Standard_web_banner_ad_sizes.svg&quot; alt=&quot;Banners&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like we should adhere to these sizes and possibly make one image (or several images) for each of those sizes, this guarantees that we'll have an ad for most every conceivable use case on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some things we'll have to keep in mind&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312/creating-an-ad-for-community-promotion&quot;&gt;community promotion ads&lt;/a&gt;, the target audience of these ads won't necessarily know the philosophy of the stackexchange network. So where these images are used and what context is given to these images should be considered and specified when designing one of those images. I'll leave further comments on this topic to others (or maybe I'll tackle it at some point in the future.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T05:28:49.510" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T05:28:49.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-09T21:48:15.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Features&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross platform&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to worldbuilding.stackexchange.com?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Informative error messages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simulation (so a planet/solar system/valley can be allowed to develop and the most interesting point in time can be chosen as a setting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hierarchical simulation (so a machine with limited resources can just simulate a small region in sufficient detail - ideally choosing level of detail and size of region to include)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interest&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can contribute on a part time sporadic temporary basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Skills&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be acquired. Currently I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basic familiarity with Python 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Superficial awareness of C++.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T21:48:15.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-09T22:16:13.217" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is on topic and has been narrowed a bit so is manageably broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1354/elves-in-a-modern-society&quot;&gt;Elves in a Modern Society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think it may be too opinion based and the fact that the answers start with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe if &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tend to agree that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All reinforce that thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we worry about opinion-based question on this stack exchange and if so how much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T05:20:57.683" Title="Is this question &quot;too opinion based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="326" CreationDate="2014-10-09T22:33:08.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not against a question that results in a variety of different imaginative solutions that can be backed up. I am against a question where the answers cannot be backed up (by either references or logic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this particular question I do not believe that Tolkien's writing gives a sufficiently consistent description of elves' attitude to advances to allow an objective answer. I don't mean that as a criticism of his writing, but simply to say that elves were varied, as humans are. So answers may say &quot;elves were very traditionalist based on this reference&quot; or &quot;elves had a thirst for knowledge of materials based on this reference&quot; leading to highly contradictory answers that all give references to Tolkien's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Tolkien's elves lived in a variety of different communities with different attitudes to the world and to technology, so asking how they would react to modern society is like asking how humans would react to modern society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the best answer that can be posted is &quot;they would react in a myriad different ways, no more predictable or stereotypical than humans&quot; then I don't see it as a useful question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I can't see a way of answering the question objectively beyond pasting in a book on human behaviour, so I recommend closing as primarily opinion based.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T22:33:08.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-10T02:26:39.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Features&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the important features to me are already posted. But I would really like the program to be cross-platform and modular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Interest&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat sporadic, I'm pretty busy and I have another project that I have to do for school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Skills&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty new to programming, so I would be learning quite a bit if I helped. But I do know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A little bit of C++&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T02:26:39.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="326" CreationDate="2014-10-10T05:20:57.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, darn... I just spent the last hour+ typing up a lengthy response to this question (considering historical analogues to see how societies react to culturally-distinct minorities in general), and then signed up for an account on this SE, only to refresh the page before posting, and see that this question had been put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="897" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T05:20:57.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-10T07:46:21.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requested Features&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Support for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;.NET Framework&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross-platform&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exports:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various map styles in common formats (JPG, PNG, GIF)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XML file (for import into any other application/language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some kind of webpage/wiki (available from WB.SE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World documentation, an encyclopedia (for DMs/Authors)   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Filters to control publicly revealed details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World generation profiles in YAML&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Autogeneration of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solar Systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Races&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Landmasses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scalability: users should be able to design an island in a lot of detail or a galaxy in a low level of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Realism control: users should be able to pick between &quot;fast mode&quot;, for quick and dirty mockups, &quot;fantasy mode&quot; where unrealistic extremes are allowed for the engine and &quot;realistic mode&quot; where the engine attempts to create features within known real bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This should be controllable per generation type, not just overall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scriptability: the UI shouldn't stand between users and their goals; an API should be exported to allow advanced users to use the full power of the engines, even from the command line. Also, this would make it easy to exchange world generation approaches in an easy to use form and &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; make the UI pluginnable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keeping track of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Characters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flora and Fauna&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Project details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A project management structure which will allow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Team members to dip in and out and commit to features when they have time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Focus on requirements they want to see and use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Developers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Liath&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;overactor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graphics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Support, Testing and Documentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;overactor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DonyorM&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Progress&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're chatting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17257/creating-and-using-worldbuilding-software&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've stubbed out some example C# code to demonstrate my suggested architecture it's available &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ardliath/WorldBuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Next Steps&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit this answer with features/offers of help&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussion Board&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ardliath/WorldBuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2014-10-11T01:32:53.783" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T01:32:53.783" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-10T07:46:21.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-10-10T08:29:01.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar than some others. Original credit to overreactor's banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worlds in Progress&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T08:29:01.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2014-10-10T09:20:31.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deeper Backgrounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using knowledge of the world as it is to explore worlds that could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T09:20:31.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-10T09:30:11.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Features&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that gives both a core API that can be plugged into other systems and a direct interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this type of project to be easy for people on different platforms and types of system to use, I strongly recommend that we use JavaScript for the majority of the project simply because everyone can access it and lots of people can write it without needing anything beyond a text editor and a browser. Also there are runtimes that can be plugged in to just about anything else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it's a reprehensible language, but it is ubiquitous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potentially a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a lot of time to contribute at the moment because all my spare dev time is going into a (javascript) game development project but I am very happy to share ideas initially and if I ever get the confounded game finished I have a bunch of half-finished world-building tech ( mostly around international/social/economic activity ) that I want to use to generate the setting for Version 2 and would be more than happy to incorporate into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skills&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of experience with various programming languages, strongest currently being C#, Ruby and JavaScript all of which I have been using professionally for at least ten years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="246" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T09:44:53.980" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T09:44:53.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-10T11:28:58.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wPA88.png&quot; alt=&quot;World In Progress&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:04:23.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-10T11:30:03.993" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TBSE3.png&quot; alt=&quot;World In Progress&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:05:33.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-10T13:27:38.063" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;After seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1396/253&quot;&gt;this question on shared worlds&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1348/what-software-can-prototype-a-solar-system&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, I'm wondering whether such questions are better handled as community wikis, or even if they would be on-topic if broad enough to work as community wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, is there any class of question that is not too broad on this Q&amp;amp;A that could become a community wiki? Is that ever an alternative to broad questions that can work as lists of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T13:27:38.063" Title="Community wikis - are they ever a possibility?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|policy|too-broad|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-10T13:45:51.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qxYLM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T13:45:51.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-10T14:14:24.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Liath.  This is brilliant, and if WB SE accomplishes nothing but this I would consider it an amazing success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to list out a bunch of features, I think that is pretty well covered and if this does take off there will be no shortage of requests.  So I am just going to make a couple of suggestions/throw out a couple of ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Version control, yes we need it, config is my day job and I have some free alternatives to git that support collaboration and social aspects as well as code management, plus my company is an enterprise (sooo not free) customer so I have access to the support teams if we need it.  I know folks out there love git but if you're interested in looking at others let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Project management:  I can volunteer to do this.  Its nice to have someone keep track of where we are and what everyone is working on, this is the second hat in my day job.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Testing and doc:  I am happy to help with both of these as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:14:24.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-10T15:32:27.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h3cx6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T15:32:27.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2014-10-10T15:37:31.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/unPxu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T15:37:31.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="395" CreationDate="2014-10-10T19:42:36.567" Score="14" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1396/are-there-any-free-science-fiction-world-settings&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; seeks a ready made world that is &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; (not copyrighted) so that anyone can set stories in it. A setting in which all the necessary questions have already been settled so an author (or artist or game maker) can focus on story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far none of the answers have given quite what is being sought. Is this something we could create as a community, asking questions for each problem that needs to be addressed until the world is fully formed and can be used by anyone who wishes to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in seeing discussion on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is this an acceptable use of the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;would the community be interested in it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;would we store an overall description in an off-site repository, or just let the questions and upvoted answers describe the world?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;would some questions be better on meta, such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;what should we name our new world?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not proposing any exceptions - obviously all questions would have to be valid, in scope questions that fit the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've tagged this&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/site-promotion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;site-promotion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;site-promotion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;since any stories based in this world should credit worldbuilding.SE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T19:38:53.507" Title="Is there an appropriate way to build a free world on our site?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|csw-project|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2014-10-10T19:59:40.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good questions, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is this an acceptable use of the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would the community be interested in it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would we store an overall description in an off-site repository, or just let the questions and upvoted answers describe the world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would some questions be better on meta, such as &quot;what should we name our new world?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This concept was discussed during the definition phase of this proposal.  World building collaboration sounds like a lot of fun but when previously discussed, and I still agree, we decided it is not appropriate for this site.  (That could change obviously)  That isn't to say that it wouldn't have a presence here in the form of questions, heck we could make a tag unique to the collaborative world to help ID questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you could certainly find plenty of people interested in helping create a rich vibrant setting here yes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(and 4)  There is simply too much content that is not SE appropriate to host it here.  If someone is interested in creating an off-site forum/repository though this could be a place to discuss it (on chat for example) and find people to help.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very cool idea, but one that just doesn't quite fit the format for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T19:59:40.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4685" CreationDate="2014-10-11T03:08:02.057" Score="16" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a banner (the most highly voted one), from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/312/creating-an-ad-for-community-promotion&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, I have posted the banner as a community promotion ad on several sites. If the ads get six upvotes, then they will be displayed on the main site. I will post the links here if you wish to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thanks to overactor for creating the banner! Which is this one below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpuqj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-01-02T01:34:45.360" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:08:03.510" Title="Community Promotion Ad" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-11T09:48:12.607" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was re-tagging questions and it occurred to me to make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speculative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speculative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speculative&lt;/a&gt; tag for all those questions that are &quot;what if&quot;s and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alarms went off in my head about what that encourages, considering the issues of breadth that a lot of questions have and a lot of questions are at risk of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions are speculative (many are about requesting expertise), would such a tag have any purpose or is it just an invitation for broad questions that are off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T15:37:05.907" Title="A tag for speculative questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|tags|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="344" CreationDate="2014-10-11T11:03:01.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a purpose for the tag. Would anyone want to follow &quot;speculative&quot;? Is anyone an expert on &quot;speculative&quot;? Does it tell people anything that the question itself does not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with it existing but don't see what it gives us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T11:03:01.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="347" CreationDate="2014-10-11T14:58:36.973" Score="5" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; tag used by 5 questions so far - 4 of them deal with world resources, but there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1396/are-there-any-free-science-fiction-world-settings&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; asking for worldbuilding resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the tag itself should be used for worlds, rather than &quot;tool&quot; or &quot;asset&quot; resources - however, due to the nature of most tags we have, there isn't really a way to tag this unless what you're asking for clearly falls into the scope of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-making&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-making&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-making&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;, the former being too specific and the latter too broad, if you're just asking for possible websites with map images or a world archive (just an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to think of another tag, but the problem is, it has to be intuitive enough that someone, upon trying to tag their question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; and seeing that it's not for what they intend, wouldn't have a problem guessing the correct tag - and I can't think of anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a good idea for such a tag-name? Is this a non-issue, since it may not really come up again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T15:22:19.647" Title="&quot;Resources&quot; tag ambuguity" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="346" CreationDate="2014-10-11T15:22:19.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should add the tag: natural resources &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T15:22:19.647" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="344" CreationDate="2014-10-11T15:37:05.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is difficult to label a question as speculative before seeing the answers. The fact that someone is asking the question makes it likely they are not sure whether it is realistic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a speculative tag could become confusing and lead to disagreements about when it is appropriate. I'd expect it to be divisive, without adding much, so I'd rather we didn't have such a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T15:37:05.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2014-10-11T23:09:12.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Features&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross-platform please&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Web interface, maybe?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interest&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not very skilled at all this fancy worldbuilding stuff, but I can help with the code in general. I don't have a huge amount of time I could contribute, but I'd still like to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Skills&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages, listed roughly in order of comfortableness / how much I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Front-end web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruby&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bash&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A tiny bit of C++&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Git&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regex&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linux / Unix systems (I run Ubuntu)&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: Yep, I'm listing jQuery separately here. Because... jQuery!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2: By &quot;tiny bit&quot; I mean &lt;em&gt;tiny&lt;/em&gt; bit. Very little.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3: Does this count as a language? I don't even know why I'm listing this but meh&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4: Not sysadmin-type stuff at all, just a general working knowledge (and to provide information that I'm using Linux in case that matters)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1947" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T23:09:12.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-13T12:18:16.607" Score="-4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I ask and answer questions on this SE, I feel that we need some sort of easily reference standard for backgrounds for questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I might ask a question about time travel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a society had limited (expensive and time consuming) access to time travel, how would it shape their culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in order for people to make reasoned answers, they need to know about the technology and society that surrounds that question. Is this Ultra Tech? Star Trek? Is there magic available? Are people superstitious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel it detracts from a question sometimes to have to define the skeleton of a world in your question or answer for it to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My suggestion:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Define several Archetypical Worlds. Worlds with a given and pre-defined set of parameters that are easily linked to or otherwise referenced. This would let people ask a question and quickly give a familiar context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a society had limited (expensive and time consuming) access to time travel, how would it shape their culture? Assume this is in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;High Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note that, for lack of a better illustration, I linked to Wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, people who would answer the question can go to the community's definition of a High Fantasy world and all be working off the same premise instead of each person's distinct concept of &quot;high fantasy&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might even be easier to give them each a name, (Elerroth?) rather than taint people's thought processes with something as contentious as &quot;high fantasy&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of creative people in this community, think we could realistically nail down some of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, where can we keep them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T22:51:13.963" Title="World Archetypes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="351" CreationDate="2014-10-13T12:26:18.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I don't think this is helpful unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High Fantasy is only part of the definition of the world, there are so many more variables in play and that is only one of them. I certainly think giving each world cryptic names would be a mistake. That will make Q&amp;amp;A both only readable by &quot;insiders&quot; rather than having an open and inclusive community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T12:26:18.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2014-10-13T15:51:17.467" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've enabled MathJax on both the main and meta sites. As indicated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#latex&quot;&gt;editing help&lt;/a&gt;, simply use $ as a delimiter. Enjoy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T15:51:17.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="356" CreationDate="2014-10-13T22:35:16.890" Score="12" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it a better answer is always welcome, but then I noticed when I answered a question that it got pushed up the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this only because it was a relatively fresh question?&#xA;Do adding comments have similar effects?&#xA;Is there a policy on necro-ing questions if they do in fact &quot;rise from the depths&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T23:01:05.493" Title="What About The Necros?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="351" CreationDate="2014-10-13T22:51:13.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see where you're going with this, but I agree with Tim B on the &quot;insider&quot; limitation. This kind of scope is what tags are for, fortunately. I don't see much issue with creating tags to handle assumptions. Then they can be universally valid, accessible to the layman, and documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex: Dystopian Cold-planet Twilight-planet Gaslamp-fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T22:51:13.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2014-10-13T23:01:05.493" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding an answer, or editing a question or an answer, bumps the post no matter its age.  Comments do not.  This is by design and makes sense to me -- if there's a new answer or some other improvement, we want people to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because edits bump, it's important to make them meaningful.  Don't just fix one typo; look over the whole post and see if there's something else that ought to be fixed while you're in there anyway.  Edits that are too minor usually won't be approved (if they go to a review queue), and if you make a habit of such edits you might be asked to change your behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we're trying to make this the best place on the Internet to get answers to questions about world-building, so please &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; improve old posts -- responsibly and bearing in mind the bump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T23:01:05.493" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="359" CreationDate="2014-10-13T23:03:31.200" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/351/world-archetypes&quot;&gt;This meta&lt;/a&gt; brought up the utility of having a way to describe our worlds. Setting up a framework in a way that doesn't clutter the question makes it easier to read among other things. We already have tags like science-based to solve part of this problem. I suggested tags like gaslamp-fantasy to define technical and magical limits of a society. However just having all the tags exist doesn't make it easy for the person writing such a question to tag it to describe their world. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What tags can we come up with to frame a world in a way that's accessible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the &quot;insider&quot; (that knows to look at the tags) communicate that their question revolves around them most effectively to the &quot;outsider&quot;? Do we just take it for granted? Do we develop a catch-phrase?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we have a nice post somewhere (possibly another meta question) that can be used as a resource that groups these tags together? &lt;sub&gt;(since looking at tags pushes more frequent ones to the top not just the world-defining ones)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T11:37:34.037" Title="List of tags to setup a framework for a question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="360" CreationDate="2014-10-14T05:25:20.577" Score="8" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The badge notification seems to have an encoded apostrophe in it. Interestingly the notification of reputation change for the same question doesn't seem to have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c07BM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this on safari for iPad and Chrome for the PC if that makes any difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="1" LastEditDate="2014-10-14T12:54:05.180" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T12:54:11.620" Title="Escaped apostrophe in notifications" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2014-10-14T09:36:54.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could have sworn that this question (or those similar to it) had come up already in the meta but it appears I was wrong. However the question of tagging has been raised &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216/do-we-really-need-to-ask-about-creating-tags/218#218&quot;&gt;many many times on this meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general advice on creating tags still stands. &lt;strong&gt;If you think a tag is helpful to a question, create the tag and use it. Don't try to create frameworks of tags.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt;. If you think that there are likely to be enough questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gaslight-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gaslight-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gaslight-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; to warrant it, then add it to a question that asks about a gaslight-fantasy world. If the tag isn't used, it will end up getting culled. The key here is trying to decide if the tag will be used, don't just ask a question to get the tag created if you were not already going to ask the question. &lt;em&gt;If you do create it, please assume responsibility for creating the tag wiki to make the tag use clearer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T09:39:10.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="358" CreationDate="2014-10-14T12:54:11.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/242036/155160&quot;&gt;Should be fixed now&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T12:54:11.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2014-10-15T11:37:34.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why tags over more question-based exposition?&lt;/strong&gt; Defining a planet succinctly via tags or an archetype makes a question shorter and more readable, which is generally a good thing. It also helps the poster to frame their question when unsure of the specifics. If someone wanted to talk about a planet with a Renaissance setting they may not know more than the fact there were painters in that time period. Having an archetype or setting tags allows the poster to get the information crucial to their question without having to know anything more of the specifics. They could ask &quot;If my Renaissance planet gradually loses all metal how would it change?&quot; while maybe expecting something about the color titanium white disappearing in paints they may get more enlightening examples such as loss of the rapier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be reasonably expected to present an answer with the tags providing information not outlined in the question body. One such example is for questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Seasoned users can be expected to know and newbies can be expected to have taken the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; which outlines the importance of tags.&#xA;Users are also frequently helpful to each-other and can suggest reading whatever is appropriate for a particular scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags don't carry the entire story by themselves though. You wouldn't ask a question &quot;How would an ecosystem revolve around my creature?&quot;, tag it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unicorn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unicorn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unicorn&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; expect people to answer with unicorn-based answers. That's more reason in favor of explicity defining the world in the question body or using a phrase to draw attention to the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A catch-phrase&lt;/strong&gt; along the lines of &quot;On a Custom-World limited in scope by what's listed in the tags...&quot; would be much more accessible to a person hitting a StackExchange site from google for the first time, than a tag such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/custom-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;custom-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;custom-world&lt;/a&gt; with a definition along the lines of &quot;Questions with this tag are assumed to take place on a world as described in the question body, as well as any tags present.&quot; (although the tag itself may or may not be a bad one, it's up to us). In addition, if similar, well-worded &quot;hints&quot; appear often enough then the new and regular users will immediately be able to identify with what's expected (a custom world implicit in the tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As far as the mention of a framework&lt;/strong&gt; I just mean a group of tags that the community would find useful in custom planet scenarios. Per previous meta questions we're going to just ride this one out for now and see how the tags develop, but I can see certain generic ones being indispensable. Specific one's such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gaslamp-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gaslamp-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gaslamp-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; would of course only show up if we get questions along those lines, it was just an example (it was meant to be short and extreme). I could see two ways of doing this and mentioned the first one grouping: create something along the lines of a good meta something that could be pointed out like a sticky would on a forum, color-code tags, etc. some seem more likely than others. The second idea (and the one I'm now leaning more toward) is referencing other tags within a tag's description like my example definition for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/futuristic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;futuristic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;futuristic&lt;/a&gt; below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216/do-we-really-need-to-ask-about-creating-tags&quot;&gt;this meta&lt;/a&gt; we're just going to let the tags grow organically for now and focus/cull later. But for the purpose of archetypes its pretty important to have a common base so that those tags get more focus and end up surviving the cull and making a lot of sense together. I was looking for some answers that listed tags &lt;em&gt;we already have&lt;/em&gt; that fit this description, and &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; tags that almost seem necessary but haven't yet received attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sci-fi&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sci-fi&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; seems like a good example of the type of tag that almost seems necessary but hasn't received much attention. Currently we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; answers that push this territory, which is fine. But I can see it getting attention as a tag when we stop asking questions specifically about FTL travel and more along the lines of &quot;How is a space economy different than a regular economy?&quot; where the poster wants semi-realistic answers but doesn't need/want a hard numbers answer that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is implying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what tags do I think personally would be useful? How about fleshing out the current archetype set? How about listing the one's we already have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We currently have tags that easily fit the archetype scenario:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Planet in the following could also be read as &quot;question&quot; since the planet-type invoked would necessarily be referenced there. Some tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; even requiring additional information.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Time-period tags give the target feel for a Planet's technology level and culture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renaissance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;renaissance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;renaissance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wild-west&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wild-west&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wild-west&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have tags to specify the Planet's assumption on magic vs. technology (I'm seeing these as science vs. science w/ some magic vs. magic):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modifiers for technology levels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/steampunk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;steampunk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific archetype tags for a Planet may already be defined based on their common usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rogue-planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rogue-planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rogue-planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dyson-sphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dyson-sphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dyson-sphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags that can be used to indicate a planetary biome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/caves&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;caves&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;caves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/underwater&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;underwater&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;underwater&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceship&lt;/a&gt; (not really a biome &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; but if on a constructed world may make more sense than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/construct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;construct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;construct&lt;/a&gt; (or maybe not, that tag has no definition))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Adjectives&quot; may modify the resulting planet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/colony&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;colony&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;colony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/isolation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;isolation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;isolation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/extreme-terrain&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;extreme-terrain&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;extreme-terrain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We could &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; add:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additional technology level tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/primitive&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;primitive&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;primitive&lt;/a&gt; For questions assuming Stone Age technology and a lack of metallurgy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antiquity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antiquity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antiquity&lt;/a&gt; For questions where technology and culture is centered around that of Ancient Europe. Ancient Greece and Rome are typical examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern&lt;/a&gt; For questions where technology and culture is centered around Present Day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/futuristic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;futuristic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;futuristic&lt;/a&gt; For questions dealing with what the world could look like in 50 to 100 years based on our current understanding of science and assuming focused, unhindered progress. Basically assuming &quot;bleeding-edge&quot; science will become mainstream. Compare with sci-fi.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sci-fi&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sci-fi&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; For questions dealing with technology that's &quot;ahead of the curve&quot;. Usually with no currently active or viable experiments in the necessary areas, and sometimes stretching the limits of being scientifically plausible. If you can't draw a road-map of expirements to get to a science or technology that is loosely science-based it is sci-fi.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additional basic biome tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scrubland&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scrubland&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scrubland&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rain-forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rain-forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rain-forest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/desert&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;desert&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;desert&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polar-desert&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polar-desert&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polar-desert&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More basic biomes but maybe considered a slightly more abstracted tag by some:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/taiga&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;taiga&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;taiga&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tundra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tundra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tundra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/savanna&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;savanna&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;savanna&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/grassland&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grassland&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grassland&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reaching the limit of what would be considered a good fit for tag proposals and reaching into the territory where the current organic growth fits better (they fill the gaps of what's currently listed but aren't likely to have many questions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tide-pool&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tide-pool&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tide-pool&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intertidal-zone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intertidal-zone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intertidal-zone&lt;/a&gt; For questions concerning a biome similar to Earth's intertidal-zone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bronze-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bronze-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bronze-age&lt;/a&gt; For questions assuming Bronze Age level technology where metallurgy was possible but only soft metals can be worked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/iron-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;iron-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;iron-age&lt;/a&gt; For questions assuming Iron Age level technology where working harder metals was possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gaslamp-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gaslamp-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gaslamp-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; For questions that follow a blend of steampunk and magic &lt;strong&gt;(After defining this... in hindsight this is a horrible tag, even for filling gaps. You can just add the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/steampunk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;steampunk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; and be done with it. Ironically this illustrates the utility of having a good set of go-to tags over purely organic growth, since I honestly would have used this tag for a relevant question and might have been too lazy to define it and notice my mistake.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not worth a set of tags unless this area sees &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of activity (but worth mentioning in a framework), and probably being said in the question body regardless would be the world government, if any, and normal economic level of the planet (subsistence, etc.) since it's possible to have high-technology but subsistence level living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm was hoping to see an answer along these lines if not some simple suggestions. I feel like this is going to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; relevant at some point given the nature of this site. And I don't seem to be the only one since this question was actually based off another user's post. Once again, I realize we've decided &quot;organic tag growth&quot; for now but I see this as a crucial subset that may warrant breaking that rule while we can. If this means someone needs to go out and post questions designed around using these tags then so be it. I just thought it was worth bringing up and discussing since it should be a small but useful set that (&lt;em&gt;crucially&lt;/em&gt;) meshes nicely. Drawing people's gaze towards &quot;framework&quot; tags that could be genuinely useful but aren't &quot;in the wild&quot; is helpful as I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T11:37:34.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="343" CreationDate="2014-10-15T11:58:08.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;2014&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to announce that we made it past the threshold on 5 sites now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5067/16488&quot;&gt;RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5116/33055&quot;&gt;Scifi.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1408/community-promotion-ads-2014/1764#1764&quot;&gt;GameDev.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6211/60884&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8040/community-promotion-ads-2014/10016#10016&quot;&gt;Gaming.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ad has also been posted at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;currently no sites where it is not past the threshold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a community wiki, feel free to edit as you vote on our ad or if you post an ad elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:41.363" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T01:29:35.617" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-15T13:26:34.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T16:25:05.823" Score="13" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1213/601&quot;&gt;Assistance to fight off a silicon-based lifeform&lt;/a&gt; was asked from an in-universe point of view, and another user added a comment to the question that suggested making the in-universe approach &quot;the required way to ask questions on this website&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about it for a while and realized that the approach works well for questions like that one where a character can discover something's existence and wonder how it might have come to be, what a creature's biology might be like, what vulnerabilities it might have, etc. The advantage of an in-universe approach is that it encourages users to think through what information their characters might be able to perceive about something and what the characters actually might need to know to make the story work. It avoids &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14/601&quot;&gt;overly broad questions&lt;/a&gt; by forcing the asker to be specific enough in exposition that answerers have something to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think it would work so well for questions of the form &quot;Starting from a given initial condition, what would happen to a particular environment, species, or institution?&quot; that happen often when creating the protagonist's own corner of the world. These are things that any character is expected to know just from having grown up in the setting, like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/780/601&quot;&gt;Would flying beings invent the wheel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1241/601&quot;&gt;How would legless humans thrive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1268/601&quot;&gt;How would a city of humans accommodate merfolk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's my question: For what questions do we want to encourage an in-universe point of view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T10:32:47.467" Title="When to use in-universe point of view?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2014-10-15T16:43:38.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think being the official &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Source_of_Truth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;single source of truth&lt;/a&gt; for a particular fictional world is within SE's model. But I wouldn't object to a community wiki post that indexes worlds to which members can contribute. Here are examples of questions that a community wiki might answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which fictional worlds created by Worldbuilding SE members have a universe compendium under a &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license for free cultural works&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which fictional worlds are maintained on external wikis that members of the public can easily join?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="601" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T16:43:38.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-10-15T16:47:39.200" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that involve a specific character or kind of character's means of dealing with a given circumstance or solving a given problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrative point of view can be used to show, rather than tell, the information known about the problem from the point of view of the people who need to solve it. This helps the question asker keep the assumptions about the problem limited to what the character would know in that given situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrative point of view can also help keep answers on topic, as the answerer feels compelled to answer in the same perspective. This discourages purely speculative answers, as well as off-topic ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that all questions should be asked in this manner. Especially considering that most of our questions would be along the lines of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hello, I am god. What would happen when two planets collide?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that we do not encourage one way or the other. We can make it known that asking a question in this manner is accepted, perhaps a tag that says this is &quot;In-Universe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T16:47:39.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T19:00:02.207" Score="-3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/after-mars-and-luna-which-is-the-most-viable-place-for-colonization-within-our&quot;&gt;Where in the solar system is the most viable place to put my colonists, after Mars and Luna?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that this is a fun question that allows people to contribute and that is why it gets so many votes.  But that question feels like it is totally against the whole spirit of this site.  It is not about world building but rather just a fun question for people to speculate on.  But it really does not belong here.  And if we continue to allow these types of questions this site will become cluttered with the type of nonsense that most internet forums are.  I would hope that is a fate that we want to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:12:08.723" Title="How is this question on topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="366" CreationDate="2014-10-15T19:28:24.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's on topic - for the simple reason that it's about creation of a setting. If someone is creating a setting involving colonizing the solar system then part of building that world is deciding where would next be colonized...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T19:28:24.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="366" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:06:05.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of the question (at present) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mars and Earth's moon already feature in a lot of fiction about space colonization. After these two planets, and assuming that other solar systems are too far away, what is the best place within this solar system to colonize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence establishes the context of fiction about space colonization, so I think it's pretty clear that this question is asking about building out a fictional scenario.  That's on-topic.  But it could be stronger; it would be better to cast the question not as &quot;which is the most viable place...&quot; but, rather, &quot;where in the solar system can I put my colonists to minimize risks to them?&quot;.  That places the emphasis more clearly on the problem to be solved -- I have colonists I want to put somewhere in this solar system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the current question is off-topic.  I'm going to propose the edit (of the title) that I've just described here.  (Update: edit accepted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T19:12:08.723" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:12:08.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-10-16T08:38:01.757" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While I love the way the question has been written, it is in danger of &lt;em&gt;reading as&lt;/em&gt; though it were character specific and thus in danger of looking off-topic. They should be the occasional fun exception rather than the rule.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I really enjoyed reading that question and look forward to more in the same vein, if this was the main kind of question new users saw, it may muddy the water as to what exactly is acceptable for new users, since that question is &lt;em&gt;dangerously close&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/9&quot;&gt;&quot;Specific actions of individual characters, rather than the world they inhabit&quot;&lt;/a&gt; just by the way that it is phrased. As such, I think that they should be the exception rather than the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not encourage an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/in-universe-view&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;in-universe-view&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;in-universe-view&lt;/a&gt; because for every question written this way we then have to carefully check that it isn't actually a character plot question (which are off-topic), and potentially reword them if they seem to be. IF we get too many written like this, we might even have to considering banning them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe @MadMAxJr said it well when he said &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm going to start reading every question on this site as if were a bunch of cosmic deities asking for how-to help with creation.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T08:45:05.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-10-16T09:33:09.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This type of writing is only acceptable as a supplement to a normal question.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This type of question could spawn a bunch bad questions trying to replicate its success.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I too love this particular question, I believe it sets a bad example as it is. The biggest problem is that new users might make the assumption that this sort of question is encouraged when they see the great response it got and try to emulate it. Since new users never read the meta, how to ask page or even the short tour, they will mainly use the questions they see as a reference when asking (or answering) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The format has a few issues as it is.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this type of question does indeed encourage answerers to reflect more (or at least differently) about their answers, it also discourages thinking about the question ina  larger context. This question asks what a specific character should do in a specific situation. Where the focus of the question should actually be: I (as a writer) want to have X, how would this be handled by Y and does this pose any problems? In this case, there is a very good overlap but this might not always be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what information is intentionally left out and what is accidentally forgotten. This format hardly allows for explaining which factors you know could play a role but don't because of handwaving or prior decisions that were made without complicating the narrative. Additionally, it's also difficult to provide a lot of necessary information about the world this question is set in and teh type of answers you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including a (well written) narrative like this into a question is great way to pull people in and get them interested, but some out-of-universe framing will always be helpful and indicate to new users that defining what you are asking for in your question (regardless of how it is written) is important. For these reasons, the question shoudl either be edited or closed as &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T09:33:09.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-10-16T09:43:56.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I don't think it's something to either encourage or discourage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are either clear or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are either on topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stylistic choices don't alter that fundamental criteria by which questions are either closed or left open. It's not like we've had a flood of questions in a similar style and even if we did, so long as those questions are clear then what's the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T09:43:56.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2014-10-16T10:32:47.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;None.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, encourage no questions to ask and be answered from an in-universe point of view. Equally, you don't need to &lt;em&gt;discourage&lt;/em&gt; any, necessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's at least three things that are going to be vital to questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That questions and answers are clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That they're of good quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That people have fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating some kind of official encouragement or, rather, &lt;em&gt;pressure&lt;/em&gt; to use an in-universe point of view compromises all three, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; not going to be the clearest way of asking a question. When it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in-universe and clear, great!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People feeling forced to use an in-universe point of view when they don't want to is going to lead to unclear, low quality work. Better leave it to the people who &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fun stuff like this is fun only when it's by choice, not when it's being enforced by the fun police. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nedroid.com/2009/05/party-cat-full-series/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manatory fun is like Party Cat.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So leave it for when people want to do it and do a good job of it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/49018/1204&quot;&gt;It can work really well!&lt;/a&gt; But don't ave an official position of encouragement or discouragement. Just ensure questions and answers are clear and of good quality, make suggestions when improvement is available or needed, and when the improvement involves &lt;em&gt;not being in-universe,&lt;/em&gt; suggest that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T10:32:47.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T14:00:12.997" Score="12" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on main about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2710/how-long-does-terraforming-take-without-a-planet&quot;&gt;creating a planet from the asteroid belt&lt;/a&gt;. On being informed that the main asteroid belt contains nowhere near enough material, I expanded this to include the trojan asteroids and the Kuiper belt. I had miscalculated the mass of the Kuiper belt and was informed that the total mass was still only 10% of Earth's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can continue including more mass but the question is becoming not only different from its original form, but also more broad as it's now taking mass from a wide variety of solar system resources which all require different approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it useful to leave my question as it is, with the existing answer that explains clearly why there is not enough mass? If I leave it as is, should I change the title to include reference to the asteroid belt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T19:32:03.377" Title="Question drifting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2014-10-16T14:17:26.110" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that in cases like this the question take preference. If the question has to change in order to be a good question, then the answers need to change to adapt to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally nice when doing this to leave a note at the end of your question explaining what you did so that the answers don't get down-voted to oblivion without having a chance to be modified. If you want to leave a comment on each answer to let the answer know the question has altered, you could also do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T14:17:26.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2014-10-16T14:19:37.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case the question has been answered. It's not possible to do what the OP wanted to do using the asteroid belt. Leaving that answer helps anyone else who had the same idea who finds this post in the future - you now have a new question and should ask it as a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise answers are always chasing a constantly moving goalpost and the good initial answer gets lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The focus of Stack Exchange is good answers - good questions are there only to facilitate the answers and there are several things in place to reinforce that. (For example downvoting questions is free, downvoting answers costs rep. Answers get more rep per upvote than questions, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T15:31:45.330" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T15:31:45.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-17T10:03:35.323" Score="6" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question on main which asks &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2773/how-long-scent-remains-in-air&quot;&gt;how long a scent can remain tracable&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LpNPQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel like this question is off-topic since there seems to be no reason why this question couldn't refer to a mundane, real life scenario. There is nothing for us to add that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chemistry.SE&lt;/a&gt; couldn't do better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not 100% sure though and feel like it's valuable to discuss these edge cases more explicitly, so we can make a more confident decision the next time around. I'm also not entirely sure if this specific question could be rewritten to be more on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the community feel about this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:06.697" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T13:56:24.043" Title="Are questions about (minor) plot points in mundane settings on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="376" CreationDate="2014-10-17T10:08:30.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is off topic for a number of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not speculative - as you say a &quot;grounded in reality&quot; site can answer it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's too small scale - world building can theoretically cover things as small as a village or building but this just feels too small&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not about building a world, it's about research for a plot point within a world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it's definitely in the gray area though. It's not completely off topic, but I think it is enough off topic that it crosses the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this question can be re-written to fit as there is no way to make it about shaping the world. The question isn't asking about the world-shaping effects of lingering smells, or how to change how long they linger for, or even about the effects of scent on creatures. It's asking for a simple real-world forensics figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T10:14:14.927" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T10:14:14.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="376" CreationDate="2014-10-17T10:12:44.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/9&quot;&gt;The help center article we are working on&lt;/a&gt; has this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are &lt;strong&gt;welcome&lt;/strong&gt; that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Specific effects of events or world elements on that world's society, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Technology and magic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;not about:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Specific actions of individual characters, rather than the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Specific character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Role-playing&#xA;  Games&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Software&#xA;  Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange&#xA;  sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about the specific actions of characters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about storytelling and plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about something tiny in scale. ^&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about something based in science in real life that is a perfectly reasonable &lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;^ I know we consider all scales, but this is small in impact as well as in physical size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To make on topic?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;I agree that this particular question can't be made on topic. It hits too many trigger for not being WB, albeit just.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T10:12:44.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-17T11:16:22.960" Score="8" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a reoccurring problem. As someone with dyslexia myself I understand how easy it is to make mistakes. However, Stack Exchange is a site that is supposed to be professional and we seem to have a problem with some users consistently not bothering to use a basic spellchecker or proof read. It comes across as lazy and can damage the image of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down-voting doesn't seem to be the answer because once someone has edited the post it is no longer a reason for down-voting. It also comes across as fairly petty to down-vote and not fix the spelling yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we go about solving this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I don't want to pick on anyone in particular, so I'm not providing examples; however we have users who should know better.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note 2: I know that we have users who's primary language is not English, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be using a spellchecker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr &lt;strong&gt;PLEASE use a spellchecker before you post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this wasn't known: If using chrome you can choose another language from the right click menu in a text editing area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T11:34:44.963" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:25:36.883" Title="Misspelt questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|low-quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="376" CreationDate="2014-10-17T13:56:24.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's off-topic because it's not about the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;.  I don't think its being a small detail is the issue; worlds are made up of small details and it should be ok to ask about them.  But this doesn't seem to ask about &lt;em&gt;building a world&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that asked &quot;I want smells to be able to linger for several months; what properties of my world would cause that?&quot; or &quot;if it's implemented by X, what other properties would that have?&quot; would be about the world and thus on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T13:56:24.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="382" CreationDate="2014-10-17T14:03:13.333" Score="6" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question brewing in my head, and already written up, and I wanted to check and see if it would seem appropriate here. I know that a question like this would not be appropriate over on Stack Overflow or any of the other programming-based question sites because there isn't a single 'right' answer, (though there may be a 'best' or 'most helpful' answer).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I am outlining a situation in which magical catastrophes occur, laying down what is causing them, and specific triggers, and asking for more ideas for the sorts of disasters that could cause. I have several ideas already, but the situation is worldwide in scope, and I'd like to have some more variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is a question like that appropriate for WB? One wherein I lay out how the disasters are being caused, and ask for ideas for specific instances...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:06:57.200" Title="'More Ideas' questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2014-10-17T14:12:20.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like you're making the question you have in mind seem worse than it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is seems no different than a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2623/what-would-world-war-i-outcomes-be-if-the-tunguska-event-had-occurred-over-londo&quot;&gt;What would World War I outcomes be if the Tunguska event had occurred over London in 1908?&lt;/a&gt; which deservedly was a well received question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to be careful for is that you don't focus too much on &quot;what would be interesting&quot; and more on &quot;What would be likely/possible given the restraints&quot;. Afterall, this is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2623/what-would-world-war-i-outcomes-be-if-the-tunguska-event-had-occurred-over-londo&quot;&gt;Writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;. Be sure to define exactly what the restraints are, to make sure the answer goes into the direction you want it to go and to prevent the question from being too broad. Don't be afraid to change the question around a bit if some issues come up in the comments either. That's what the comments are for, improving teh question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T14:12:20.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2014-10-17T14:40:55.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now I can see the actual question this refers to (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2781/magic-came-back-catastrophes&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2781/magic-came-back-catastrophes&lt;/a&gt;) I can see two problems with what you are asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is the scope, you're asking for a huge number of ideas over a huge range of scenarios. For a good question people should be able to give one definitive answer and be able to judge which answer is better than which other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that really you are asking for what feels more like plot ideas than world building ideas. These are all possible plot events, not things that shape your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question needs to be drastically refocused so that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is much more reasonable in scope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's clearly talking about world building not plot building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a way to evaluate answers and can objectively up-vote them or not based on their respective quality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T14:40:55.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="387" CreationDate="2014-10-17T16:05:35.260" Score="9" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story short: &lt;strong&gt;What is difference between this site and &lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if I make list like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build a fictional world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such world does not to be scientifically accurate (magic, aliens...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Hopefully) lets use such world as a plot device or ... well the world where the story takes place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels to me, that everything above &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be also asked and answered on Writers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several related questions I kinda do not know where should be ideally asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My hero is about to go through Alien encounter. Any idea on plausible (scientifically accurate) aliens and where they could be from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could we go from &quot;now&quot; to utopian future to make it plausible story?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What technology could my hero develop if they lived 500 years ago?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2014-10-18T07:50:46.893" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T07:50:46.893" Title="Worldbuilding versus Writers?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2014-10-17T16:21:59.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key, I think, is that questions that belong on Worldbuilders.SE are about the backdrop of a story. Things asked here relate to how the world itself works in regards to physics, civilization, culture, and (fictional)history, rather than plot points or dialogue or acts or story arcs or that sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some examples:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2648/539&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a developed society to practice human sacrifice as a ritual?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/14136&quot;&gt;Writing “X, Y, and Z” vs “X and Y and Z.”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2711/539&quot;&gt;Can two civilizations on nearby stars develop independently but be at a similar technological level?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/14098&quot;&gt;Need A Way To Avoid Excessive Use Of Subject When Refering To&#xA;  Character&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To Summarize:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers.SE deals with the technical and stylistic aspects of writing a good story (Or even a good research paper), while Worldbuilding.SE deals with the nuts and bolts of how a world or setting fits together in a plausible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T16:21:59.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2014-10-17T16:41:05.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about this some more and want to say why I think that splitting this particular question was a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that none of the new questions are actually different. They're just &quot;pick element X ask the same question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My map-making questions that I split had logical separation. Different people would answer each section and apply different expertise. Each question was actually different and the answers were very different too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't take a &quot;too broad&quot; question and make it not &quot;too broad&quot; by just splitting it into 5 flavours. You need to actually break it down in a more meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T16:41:05.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2014-10-17T16:45:01.730" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about specific plotting are off-topic on Writers as &amp;quot;what should I write?&amp;quot; questions.  Here's the distinction from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/875/1993&quot;&gt;meta overview&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generating Plot Ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking to brainstorm ideas tailor-made for your particular story is off-topic; that’s too specific to your own work. But identifying a general scenario which naturally presents plotting difficulties is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136/is-a-help-me-generate-plot-ideas-or-similar-question-on-topic&quot;&gt;Is a &amp;quot;Help me generate plot ideas?&amp;quot; or similar question on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted, questions about general scenarios are on-topic there, but mustn't be too broad.  &amp;quot;What kind of world would enable such-and-such future technology?&amp;quot; won't fly.  &amp;quot;What are some realistic ways to handle a ransom drop?&amp;quot; might&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; -- or, a little closer to WB home, &amp;quot;what are some realistic ways to put my commercial spaceships in the line of pirate attacks?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even where the scope seems to overlap, the focus on Writers is &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;, while the focus on WorldBuilding is &lt;em&gt;building the setting&lt;/em&gt;.  Anecdotally, questions on Writers that stray too far into plot- or character-development, even if technically on-topic, will have more trouble there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The question that &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/136/1993&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; was about was ultimately closed and deleted (in 2012).  Here is its text, for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can my kidnapper get away with the money? [closed]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my story I have a guy who kidnaps kids and hold them ransom. After the police pay the ransom, he makes off with the money and kills the kid. What's a plausible way my guy can get the money and not get caught?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T16:45:01.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2014-10-17T19:06:57.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will readily admit that I haven't read the specific question(s) in detail, and may end up changing this answer (or like Tim B, post another answer) after I do, but am going to answer this in a somewhat more general fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions on the form &quot;does anyone have more ideas about this?&quot;, even with well-defined constraints, fare &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; poorly with the Stack Exchange format.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that questions on that format have a strong tendency to become very open ended. Yes, we have some questions that can be considered rather open ended. Most of the content posted on Worldbuilding SE is going to be highly speculative in nature in one way or another. One way to actually mitigate that, and help prevent questions from becoming &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;opinion-based&quot;, is to &lt;strong&gt;be very specific about what you want to know.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I need more ideas&quot; in any way shape or form does not do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, questions on that format have an infinite number of possible-answers. For that reason, they tend to be better suited for either a discussion forum (which Stack Exchange is not and very specifically aims to not be) or chat (which Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; provide). If you go the &quot;chat&quot; route, I recommend taking what you have learned and turning it into a question and answer if possible within the Stack Exchange framework and general rules. There tends to be several knowledgable people in chat who are likely to be able and quite possibly willing to help you frame what you want to learn in a question which is appropriate for the Stack Exchange format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions need to be specific enough&lt;/strong&gt; that answers can be specific &lt;em&gt;and judged on their respective merits.&lt;/em&gt; That's how voting works, and how good answers end up rising above less good answers in the end. (The bad answers are generally culled if not improved on.) If we can't judge how well an answer actually answers a question as asked, then voting breaks down; it becomes basically &quot;I personally like this answer&quot; or &quot;this answer has a longer list of possibilities&quot;, which is not what voting should be about &lt;em&gt;at all.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, I would argue that the type of question that you indicate, &lt;em&gt;in general,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;should be avoided&lt;/strong&gt; on Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;in general.&lt;/em&gt; They are likely to end up closed as either too broad or primarily opinion-based, depending on specifics as well as the mood of those voting to close (there is significant overlap between those two close reasons, and I personally know from experience that it's not always easy to pick one or the other). If you have a question which you feel is becoming on that format, I would strongly suggest taking it either to chat, or your own head :) and simply reworking it so that it is at least in some manner objectively answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the Worldbuilding SE is still in relatively early beta. Questions ending up being put on hold and eventually closed remains a good thing, as it helps establishing the site's scope. So don't feel bad if your questions end up being closed; take the input, re-do the question, and either edit your question such that it fits within the site's scope (if that can be done without turning the question completely on its head) or simply post an entirely new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:06:57.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2014-10-17T19:13:46.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we go about solving this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple. &lt;strong&gt;Edit the post to fix the errors.&lt;/strong&gt; This goes whether the errors are in spelling or grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have the time to fix all of it (we tend to get answers especially that go rather well in depth, which makes them rather lengthy), you certainly can &lt;strong&gt;fix a part of it.&lt;/strong&gt; Someone else, or perhaps yourself later on, is likely to come along and fix the remainder. Just make sure you feel comfortable enough with English that you don't risk making things worse with your edits, and if you are uncertain about a particular change, don't make it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borrowing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;the help center article on editing&lt;/a&gt;, my emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit,&lt;/strong&gt; you are welcome to do so. The original author of a question or answer may always edit their own post, regardless of reputation level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to &lt;strong&gt;leave the post better than you found it.&lt;/strong&gt; Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit a post, the edit shows up under either &quot;suggestions&quot; or &quot;revisions&quot; under the &quot;activity&quot; tab of your profile (accessible by clicking on your reputation/badges counts in the top bar), so you can easily find your way back to a post you have previously edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with not fixing &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; that is wrong with a post within an edit, but please try to make each edit substantial enough to count. Remember that editing a post bumps that question to the top of the front page, so try to avoid minor edits on older posts in particular, even if you have the reputation to make them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:25:36.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="391" CreationDate="2014-10-17T21:13:28.563" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site seems ideally suited for a &quot;big-list&quot; tag.  I am therefore surprised not to fine one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of big-list type questions would be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the issues with faster than light travel and how might they be overcome?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the issues with time-travel and how might they be overcome?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc... there are many more examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2178" LastEditorUserId="2178" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T21:46:46.467" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T21:46:46.467" Title="Why no &quot;big-list&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="390" CreationDate="2014-10-17T21:34:49.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because “big lists” suck on Stack Exchange. If a question calls for one item per answer, then you get a large collection of mediocre answers. Older answers get to have more votes and newer answer remain largely ignored: voting reflects pretty much only age, also popularity if you're lucky, but forget about quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good answers are comprehensive. They discuss the relative merits of different approaches, the different environments that could lead to different scenarios. They seek to cover the problem as a whole, not to exhibit one tidbit. If a question calls for that kind of answer, it isn't a “big list” question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something calls for a big list, it's better suited on a wiki, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tvtropes.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/are-list-questions-allowed/79#79&quot;&gt;once thought that list questions were fine&lt;/a&gt;. And then I saw them at play on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;. (You can see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1/what-science-fiction-novels-have-well-developed-alien-languages&quot;&gt;best one&lt;/a&gt; preserved for posterity.) And then I &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/411/culling-list-and-recommendation-questions&quot;&gt;happily burned the lot of them&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like “What are the issues with faster than light travel and how might they be overcome?” are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;too broad&lt;/a&gt;. You could write a whole book about that. More focused questions, about e.g. what the irruption of FTL technology would do to a particular society, or what FTL technology could enable a particular plot, are perfectly fine and welcome here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and the tag itself would be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;: it doesn't help to categorize questions in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T21:34:49.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-18T17:20:56.977" Score="11" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of writing this, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;330 questions&lt;/a&gt;. 113 of these are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Only 23 are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally, almost every question that isn't explicitly tagged either, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;could be seen as grounded in science&lt;/a&gt;, Of these 23 magic questions, 4 ask to explain or justify magic in terms of science, another 4 are closed and another 4 are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2784/magic-came-back-catastrophes-wood-based-disasters&quot;&gt;essentially&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2783/magic-came-back-catastrophes-water-based-disasters&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2782/magic-came-back-catastrophes-fire-based-disasters&quot;&gt;same&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2785/magic-came-back-catastrophes-air-and-earth&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'll reiterate the question: Where are all the (good) magic questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it that there are just less magic questions to be asked or are we somehow not attracting those questions? In case of the latter: How can we attract more/better magic questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T10:47:33.883" Title="Where are the questions on magic?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2014-10-18T19:09:46.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I have argued strongly against &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/316/109&quot;&gt;magic answers to questions that are not about magic&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to see &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about magic. Provided they are framed in a way that allows for clear, definite answers, I welcome questions on fantasy, alternative physics, and self consistency of asserted magical properties of creatures/cities/geographical features/...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As TimB points out in a comment on the question, it wouldn't make sense to ask the biggest possible creature question in a magical setting, but if you already have a large creature that you assert can survive at that size due to magic, you could ask what consequences this might have for the surrounding environment, landscape or climate - that would be a scientific treatment of an impossible creature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you could ask purely about the self consistency of magical rules. If a magical river turns everything that touches it into gold, how should the effect end where the river meets the sea? Should there be a reef of dead golden fish marking the line along which river becomes sea? What additional magical effects will be needed to prevent the river clogging up with golden leaves at the end of each summer, since they cannot be carried by the current like natural leaves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I include alternative physics here because I see it as &quot;science based magic&quot; - fitting somewhere in between. For example, you could ask about a universe where the gravitational force is 10 times stronger. In a solar system where the Earth is much smaller, so the people on that Earth experience the same gravity as us, how would that universe's higher gravitational force affect the appearance of the sun and moon in the sky? How would it affect the tides, seasons, days...? Would the life cycle of the sun be different with the increased gravity? I overlap this with magic because the purely scientific answer might not be what the asker is seeking - a world that looks so similar to ours might be unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T19:09:46.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2014-10-19T01:56:29.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, too, would welcome magic questions.  I think in addition to what Tim said in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/392/where-are-the-magic-questions#comment1876_392&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/393/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it's probably harder to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; good magic questions.  For science questions we have a baseline of knowledge, facts that can be taken as given without a lot of explanation.  With magic, you have to explain much more of how &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; magic works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So people should ask these questions, and I am not too surprised that there aren't a lot yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T01:56:29.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2014-10-19T02:53:47.853" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A summary of what has been done so far&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 26th April 2015: The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; has been unfrozen following a new request being received for access to the Google docs. Since momentum seemed to subside in December after an initial flurry of work, I'm announcing this here for anyone who wants to get involved again. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of course anyone new is very welcome too - the whole idea is to be collaborative so anyone can edit/add/discuss whatever comes up.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is now a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Worldbuilding-Workshop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub organization&lt;/a&gt; where you can see things taking shape. If you would like access to edit you are welcome to - just drop into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;our chat&lt;/a&gt; and ask for access. Once you have access you can also add anyone else who asks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; for discussing anything to do with collaborative projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a Google doc for &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWX0SkgcxfXl7SdpLlwcgXBbN7VRtIMA2JzAvJN_guM/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specifying preferences&lt;/a&gt; on various aspects of the projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a Google doc for &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GKjRU_9MoYoquQyxegrJ6aWbUHAT2XqyHUDosvPa8wQ/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;content&lt;/a&gt; for a trial project set on Earth in 2060.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google docs is not intended to be the final solution for hosting the content - just a temporary place to get things moving. Discussion on potential places to host a wiki-style world description are welcome in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; or suggestions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWX0SkgcxfXl7SdpLlwcgXBbN7VRtIMA2JzAvJN_guM/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preferences&lt;/a&gt; that people can put their name to so we can see what has most support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to contribute to any of these. For edit access to the Google docs just drop in to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; and ask - that way you won't have to wait for the doc owner to be available as any of the editors have authority to make you an editor too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like to move from google docs to wiki software. We've had DokuWiki recommended - if anyone has experience and can help us set it up do drop into the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has also been discussion of using GitHub. It would be great to see people add their names to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWX0SkgcxfXl7SdpLlwcgXBbN7VRtIMA2JzAvJN_guM/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preferences&lt;/a&gt; doc to say whether they are for/against using GitHub (with or without reasons - all feedback is useful) and any alternative suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T19:38:53.507" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-19T02:53:47.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="397" CreationDate="2014-10-19T04:45:39.830" Score="8" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2855/2072&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; of mine which asked about the mechanics of life, I was about to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; until I saw the tag wiki exerpt, which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions tagged with life should be about life in general, not about&#xA;  its mechanics. For example, a question about lifestyle on a particular&#xA;  planet would be a good use of this tag. A question about how a&#xA;  particular planet would affect the cells of a living organism would&#xA;  not fit this tag, the biology tag should be used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that, in order to alleviate confusion, this tag should be renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;. Doing this would make the tagging system a whole lot more intuitive for people who ask &lt;code&gt;mechanics of life&lt;/code&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T14:53:38.617" Title="Rename [life] to [lifestyle]" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="396" CreationDate="2014-10-19T09:43:12.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Remove life tag&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; tag should be removed as it is highly ambiguous, and not everyone will read the tag wiki, leading to half a dozen different uses, making the tag meaningless. Your suggestion of renaming it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt; is a good one, so that the misleading tag name will no longer exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Apply biology tag&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the 7 existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; questions, all of them are about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, and should be retagged as such. The biology tag wiki specifically includes non-Earth-like biology. None of these questions fit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Only add lifestyle tag when there are relevant questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the 7 existing questions are about lifestyle, so there is no need for the tag at this point. If you see another question outside these 7 that is about lifestyle, or if you ask a new question about lifestyle, anyone is free to add the tag. If the tag is not applied to questions within a certain period of time, it will be automatically deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T09:43:12.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="396" CreationDate="2014-10-19T14:53:38.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; have now been retagged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T14:53:38.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:13:08.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do think there is a strong implication here that questions not based very solidly in real-world physics will be closed as over-broad. Assuming that the question is not about the &lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt; of magic or occultism, and assuming that magic refers to something not entirely explicable in physics terms, I don't see how any &quot;magic&quot; question will be answerable in definitive terms. So long as this site rigorously excludes open-ended speculation, we're not going to have a lot of magic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T15:13:08.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="418" CreationDate="2014-10-19T22:53:13.907" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Jason FB's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2711/can-two-civilizations-on-nearby-stars-develop-independently-but-be-at-a-similar#comment5317_2787&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I posted a comment saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was recently edited to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who did this, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T03:11:49.533" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T20:12:11.583" Title="Who edited my comment? Why?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="441" CreationDate="2014-10-20T19:20:36.167" Score="8" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/396/2072&quot;&gt;prior discussion&lt;/a&gt;, we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/398/2072&quot;&gt;removed&lt;/a&gt; all of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that discussion, I changed the tag wiki to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/396/2072&quot;&gt;community has decided&lt;/a&gt; that this tag is too ambiguous. Use the&#xA;  tags from the wiki excerpt ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt; )&#xA;  instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the wiki exerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please do not use this tag -- it is very ambiguous. For questions&#xA;  about lifestyle, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;. For questions about the&#xA;  mechanics of life, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19018/266359&quot;&gt;blacklisting&lt;/a&gt; the use of this tag, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2114/5323&quot;&gt;other tags have been blacklisted&lt;/a&gt; on other sites, because the tag is way too ambiguous and is unproductive, and whatever material may accumulate under it, is covered either by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:29:32.460" Title="Blacklist the [life] tag" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|specific-tag|tag-blacklist|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="403" CreationDate="2014-10-20T20:40:00.327" Score="7" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a couple of mediocre answers in the review queue. They are more appropriate as comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I just skip them in the queue and I ask the users to clarify their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When is it appropriate to delete answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-09-12T21:01:52.547" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T21:01:52.547" Title="When should we recommend to delete an answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="402" CreationDate="2014-10-20T21:07:53.810" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;from the help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers that &lt;strong&gt;do not fundamentally answer the question&lt;/strong&gt; may be&#xA;  removed. This includes answers that are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;commentary on the question or other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;asking another, different question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“thanks!” or “me too!” responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;exact duplicates of other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;barely more than a link to an external site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T21:07:53.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T08:41:44.680" Score="-10" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found this site and was thrilled since I have a big and broad general interest in applied science and politics. However, when seeing some questions and answers involving magic and other not only imaginary but unreasonable scenarios, I understood that there is something else to this SE-site than what I initially thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extending on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/384/worldbuilding-versus-writers&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding versus Writers?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;Should our default position be that answers should be science-/logic-based, rather than magic-based?&lt;/a&gt; there does seem to exist a positive view on separating these things, and that there is some overlap between Writers and Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about is we sharpened the division of labour among these two sites, and only allow science-based and rational questions and answers here? This does seem to be the main function wanted by the participants here even if them being fictional writers, while the mix-in of magic and pure fantasy might discourage people like me with a purely scientific/rational interest that might actually provide some significant value in this symbiosis. Would it be possible to let Writers handle the magic stuff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2301" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T09:08:47.830" Title="More strict scientific culture in Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2014-10-21T09:05:02.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/commerce&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commerce&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commerce&lt;/a&gt; should become a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;. It means almost the same thing, close enough to mean the same thing. People have used it, even though they use it in conjunction with economy. If it is a synonym, you can't use it twice, but it will allow people who are unfamiliar with the terms to use it instead of economy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T09:05:02.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2014-10-21T09:07:47.013" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag already does pretty much what you want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The science-based tag should be used for questions that require answers based in hard science, not magic or pseudo-science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strictly&lt;/em&gt; science-based questions and answers are likely to be about subjects which are at least equally appropriate on the science sites (Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Astronomy, Space Exploration, ...), and can generally be asked there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Worldbuilding SE overlaps with quite a few other sites on the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Writers SE&lt;/a&gt; deals primarily with &lt;em&gt;how to write&lt;/em&gt;. Worldbuilding SE deals with &lt;em&gt;the world in which your story is set&lt;/em&gt;. There are ways to worldbuild that have nothing to do with writing per se; consider role-playing games for example. That's not writing, but it's very much something that requires worldbuilding to be successful. I think there was a proposal for a storytelling SE, which would be about &lt;em&gt;what to write&lt;/em&gt;, but as I recall it was pretty much shot down because it was felt that such a site would be completely opinion-based almost by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had discussions (though I can't seem to find the meta post) before about a corresponding &quot;magic-based&quot; tag, but the suggestion has been argued against on good grounds (and some people have also extended that reasoning to also cover the science-based tag). For the time being, you can either hide tags which you feel are not what you want out of the site, or follow the science-based tag (as suggested by Tim B) as that will give you questions and answers that appear to be what you are after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:23.937" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T09:15:39.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2014-10-21T09:09:12.180" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writers is about the theory and practice of writing, that's a completely different subject from worldbuilding and magic questions would be off topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is here for people who are building worlds. While many worlds are rooted in &quot;hard science&quot; many others are not. You also have a huge gray area, for example Star Wars I would classify as &quot;fantasy in space&quot; but many people would argue it is science fiction. Far future &quot;hard&quot; sci-fi can also delve into a wide range of possible subjects some being more plausible than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reducing the scope to purely hard science questions reduces how many people the site is useful for and also prevents the use of science-based reasoning applied to non-science worlds. Ragnarok may not actually ever happen, but we can still use science to work out what would happen to the solar system if the Sun did disappear for 3 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I suggest is that people with no interest at all in magic or soft questions should follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag. Within that tag you will find very few questions that do not interest you while the site as a whole can still embrace everyone who is interested in building worlds. Whether those worlds include fantastical elements or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T09:09:12.180" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2014-10-21T09:10:27.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Writers doesn't want to handle magic and &quot;pure fantasy.&quot; It handles how to write. I actually think magic is on-t. I for one like magic questions and find them interesting. I'll admit that pure magic questions aren't very good for this format because you can just say &quot;a wizard did it.&quot; But we have very few of those, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the contrary, recently we have had several questions that combine history or physiology with magic. Questions like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2918/would-we-see-cannons-in-a-magic-using-society&quot;&gt;Would we see cannons in a magic-using society?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; are perfectly legitimate, and should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T09:10:27.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T09:16:39.450" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cartography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cartography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cartography&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-making&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-making&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-making&lt;/a&gt;, can the community look at this and see what they think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cartography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cartography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cartography&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-making&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-making&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-making&lt;/a&gt; should be made synonyms because they are essentially the same thing. They have subtle differences, but not enough to be worth having seperate tags. For a full discussion on this, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130/map-creation-synonym-of-cartography&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. For further argument, map making is redirected to cartography on wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/map-making/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/map-making/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T21:56:58.760" Title="Cartography synonym of map-making" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-21T16:11:17.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For blacklisting tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19018/266359&quot;&gt;Implement a Tag Black List&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="2072" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T03:51:54.023" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T03:51:54.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-21T16:11:17.457" Score="0" Body="For suggesting tags that should be banned from usage on the site." OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="2072" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T03:52:00.440" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T03:52:00.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-21T16:12:35.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:18:09.993" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:18:09.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-21T16:12:35.443" Score="0" Body="For questions that ask about specific tags -- questions like &quot;Is this tag useful?&quot; &quot;Should this tag be banned?&quot; &quot;Should one tag be merged with another?&quot;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="2072" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T03:51:47.390" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T03:51:47.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2014-10-21T19:32:03.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have favorited &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1229/5323&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Mi Yodeya Meta, because I like linking to it when it's relevant. I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2/isaac-moses&quot;&gt;Isaac Moses&lt;/a&gt; completely in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once a question has an answer that is considered valuable by either&#xA;  the community (through upvotes) or the asker (through acceptance), no&#xA;  one, including the asker, ought to edit the question in a way that&#xA;  changes its meaning sufficiently to invalidate the existing answer. If&#xA;  people want to get answers to a different question, they should ask&#xA;  that question separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the edit invalidates valuable content and/or requires more&#xA;  work from answerers or the community to update the answers to keep up&#xA;  with the updated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In cases where a question is ambiguous, such that there are multiple&#xA;  possible interpretations of what it is asking for, it should be closed&#xA;  until it's edited to be sufficiently precise. The earlier this happens&#xA;  in the question's life-cycle, the better. If the asker notices that&#xA;  there are answers that either don't address the asker's intent or&#xA;  assume multiple interpretations of that intent, the asker should edit&#xA;  the question as soon as possible to be more precise and should comment&#xA;  to the answerers accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1231/5323&quot;&gt;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1231/5323&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:17.337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T19:32:03.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T23:25:01.707" Score="12" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that we have MathJax, people are editing old posts to replace compromises with clear mathematical notation. I just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/1906&quot;&gt;approved an edit&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1402/what-kind-of-event-if-any-would-knock-the-moon-off-its-orbit-without-destroyi/1440#1440&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;In the Review Suggested Edits queue, selecting &quot;rendered output&quot; did not display correctly rendered MathJax.&lt;/strong&gt; After I approved the edit, I looked up the answer and found that the MathJax was rendered correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means answers will display correctly if approved, but &lt;strong&gt;the decision to approve has to be made based on MathJax markup, instead of based on rendered MathJax.&lt;/strong&gt; This makes it much more likely that a mistake will be overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the MathJax was rendered in the Suggested Edits queue. My first guess is that MathJax surrounded on both sides by whitespace renders correctly, while any MathJax preceded or followed by punctuation fails to render. Putting MathJax inside a quote block also appears to prevent rendering. Both these problems are limited to the Suggested Edits queue, and display correctly once the edit is approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please post an answer if you have experience of this either happening or not happening.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(You can click on the linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/1906&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1402/what-kind-of-event-if-any-would-knock-the-moon-off-its-orbit-without-destroyi/1440#1440&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to see if you get the same problem)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the problem is apparent using Firefox 32.0.3 and Firefox 33.0 on Windows 7. I also checked Internet Explorer 10, and this gives a similar problem except that with Internet Explorer even MathJax surrounded on both sides by whitespace does not render in the Suggested Edits queue. Rendering is still correct after the edit is approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T08:06:16.563" Title="MathJax render failure in Suggested Edit queue" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2014-10-22T09:08:47.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I am very much in favour of magic and alternative physics questions being part of the site, they still need to be well defined and answerable. The questions that would put off someone with a scientific mind are those that are vague and attract opinion based answers. If questions are not clear then we close them, so the only magic questions that remain are those that can be answered with a logical, rational approach similar to how science approaches the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fictional worlds, whether used for artwork, writing, role playing games or computer games, require suspension of disbelief. The users of such worlds know that the worlds are not real, but effort is made to make the worlds believable for them. For hard science fiction worlds, this requires scientific accuracy. For softer science fiction and fantasy worlds, there may be aspects that are not consistent with science as we know it, but such worlds can still be very well received if they are internally self-consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers here need to take a rational approach and be backed up. However, this backing up is with evidence or logic that matches the question - not always science. Magic questions that have answers that are well thought through and persuasive appeal to many of our experts in scientific fields, who have a general interest in consistency and skepticism which goes beyond applying it to real world science. They thus add to our pool of experts rather than causing us to lose them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T09:08:47.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-22T22:49:44.253" Score="33" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators Pro Tempore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that this community’s issues are properly addressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; alt=&quot;Monica Cellio&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; alt=&quot;Michael Kjörling&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tim B&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/147.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vincent&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Did I overlook anyone?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why &lt;strong&gt;you'll have your elections several weeks after graduation.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T16:19:13.970" Title="Moderators Pro Tempore IN SPAAAAACE!" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2014-10-23T01:42:47.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything relevant in the history there.  There is no deleted comment containing only your first line, for what that's worth.  Moderators can't see revision history on comments, but I understand that developers might have other ways of investigating should they choose to.  (Because this is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; it will eventually be seen by someone from SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole post has since been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T01:42:47.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="425" CreationDate="2014-10-23T16:27:37.857" Score="7" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have discussed before &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/29&quot;&gt;what we should have in our &quot;on-topic&quot; help center page&lt;/a&gt;. I want to draw the community's attention to one of those bullet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, that post says that we welcome questions that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Technology and magic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just what do we really mean by that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, it seems to me to risk allowing pretty much anything. Can we narrow this down at least a little?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T22:03:22.463" Title="What exactly do we mean by &quot;technology and magic&quot; in the on-topic subjects list?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-23T16:27:37.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2014-10-23T16:27:37.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, let's make that bullet point instead read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology and magic, as they affect the world itself including elements and events of that world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm marking this Community Wiki. Feel free to edit to improve the wording, but let's keep the gist intact. Specifically, if you have alternate proposals, post those as separate answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="81" LastEditDate="2014-10-26T01:57:32.450" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T01:57:32.450" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-23T16:27:37.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-23T16:36:40.963" Score="9" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Community user, which neither slumbers nor sleeps, alerts moderators to questions that are attracting lots of answers.  Sometimes this is &lt;em&gt;just fine&lt;/em&gt;, even &lt;em&gt;healthy&lt;/em&gt;, of course.  Other times it can mean that the question could use some tightening-up because it's attracting answers that are all over the board (making different assumptions, etc).  And sometimes it means that purveyors of low-quality posts (like spammers) have chosen to congregate there and we need to protect the question and clean up some answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators receive this notice, but in most cases the quality judgements that are required should be made by the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;, not by us.  We have an accumulation of such flags right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;s&gt;17&lt;/s&gt; 294 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=answers%3A10&quot;&gt;questions with 10+ answers&lt;/a&gt;.  Please consider picking something off that list to review.  Read the question, read the answers, and take appropriate action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should something be edited?  Please do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a question unclear, too broad, off-topic, etc?  Vote (or flag) to close.  (Don't use custom flags; close flags will send the question to the review queue but custom flags go only to mods.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is an answer not up to snuff -- a one-liner or naked link, an incomplete thought, not clearly an answer to the question that was asked, etc?  Comment asking for improvements, and if appropriate, also flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not sure, or something you can't handle on your own?  Bring it up in chat (for informal discussion) or on meta (to reach more people).  We have &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/specific-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/specific-answer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-answer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-answer&lt;/a&gt; tags for this reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A previous version of this question asked for feedback in answers here.  That made more sense when there were only 17 such questions.  I'm making this edit and closing this question, preserving the commentary already collected here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T20:51:19.927" Title="Please help review our oft-answered questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-27T20:52:05.403" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-26T02:11:40.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-10-23T16:58:15.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2516/539&quot;&gt;How can I save a high-tech/no-spaceflight civilization against the wrath of non-technological gods?&lt;/a&gt; Hit the HNQ and has a number of 0-vote two-paragraph answers at the bottom. Some of them do not contribute materially to the question. I have flagged the worst one for mod attention, but I am unsure what to do about the legit, small, but apparently unread and unvoted answers at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T16:58:15.650" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-26T02:11:40.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-10-24T01:23:35.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/where-in-the-solar-system-is-the-most-viable-place-to-put-my-colonists-after-ma&quot;&gt;Where in the solar system is the most viable place to put colonists, after Mars and Luna?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;24 votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;11 answers (highest has 31 votes, yet no answers have been accepted; lowest-voted answer has 1 vote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5661 views (as of this posting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question and answers have slight component of opinion to them, but there's no way around that. Overall, the answers are nice and varied, with most containing detailed reasons and good, relevant facts and information. I wouldn't call any of the answers low-quality, and I think that they all successfully address the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T01:23:35.747" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-26T02:11:40.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2014-10-24T03:15:23.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest a slightly different variant (different enough I posted it separately for now):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology and Magic where it is relevant to how the world works, but not where it relates to specific characters or plot elements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T03:15:23.420" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-24T03:15:23.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-10-24T15:18:00.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/586/why-would-you-build-underground-defensive-structures-in-an-an-alternate-world-me&quot;&gt;Why would you build underground defensive structures in an alternate world medieval Europe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 answers (highest has 11 votes and was accepted; another 2 have 9 and then there is a drop-off, with some 1- and 0- vote answers at the bottom)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1029 views (as of this posting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have a couple of high-quality answers and then a bunch of answers that aren't quite as good (not to knock on some of the mid-ranked answers). The lower-voted ones are generally short, while the higher-voted ones are longer (and may include graphics). They could probably be expanded upon, which is why they haven't garnered as many up-votes. No down-votes on any, though. Overall, I'd say that the answers answer the question pretty well, although it would be nice if they could maybe address just what the structures would be like - although James delved into that a little in his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T15:18:00.660" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-26T02:11:40.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-24T16:32:06.870" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed we have fallen off the first page of 'Hottest Proposals' at Area 51.  We've been slowly sinking down the list for a week or more, yesterday we were at the bottom.  Is there anything we can do to 'get hot' again?  I think being on the first page especially near the top helps us out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T17:42:59.517" Title="Today we fell off the first page of 'Hottest proposals' at Area 51 is there anything we can do to get back on there?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="427" CreationDate="2014-10-24T16:56:37.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm not sure how this hotness is calculated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is the overall activity of this site. There is no need to be alarmist but it stagnated in the last week and and now our numbers are slowly decreasing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visitor per day peaked at 3000 a week ago maybe and now we are at 2700. It is still good, but there seems to be a trend here. Unless I'm wrong, it's a average for 37 days, not the number of visits for a particular day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2014-10-24T22:33:05.220" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T22:33:05.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="427" CreationDate="2014-10-24T22:07:45.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I don't think area 51 is getting us any significant numbers of visitors. It's a low traffic site mostly only visited by people who have been pointed their at a specific proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things like google searches and HNQ get us far more traffic and we may have dropped off the peak but we still heave pretty healthy figures on both of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T22:07:45.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2014-10-25T13:14:03.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's another alternative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The level and workings of technology and magic shaping the general structure and appearance of a world as well as general abilities and restrictions of its inhabitants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T13:14:03.403" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-25T13:14:03.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T12:38:34.803" Score="4" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3116/scientific-accuracy-alien-communication-ideas&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as a duplicate, and I therefore cannot edit the tags. Since this is tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt;, this tag appears in the list of tags when people are considering what tags to apply to their questions. As it would never be appropriate to use this tag, I recommend that the question be edited to show a valid tag, so that untagged can be removed and will no longer appear as a misleading example for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this tag be removed now that the question is closed as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T19:48:42.630" Title="Tagged with tag untagged" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="427" CreationDate="2014-10-26T17:42:59.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking a more or less educated guess: The hotness of a proposal is mostly determined by Area 51 activity regarding this proposal, i.e., people visiting the proposal page, asking example questions, committing to the proposal, etc.. As we are in public beta now, the activity shifted from Area 51 to the actual site, which is where it belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is nothing to worry about. In fact, you may have noticed that only three of the many many betas (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237472/where-have-the-site-self-evaluations-gone#comment778914_237588&quot;&gt;about ten, who only need their design finished to graduate&lt;/a&gt;) are on the first page of Area 51 hotness – and all of those are rather young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T17:42:59.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="431" CreationDate="2014-10-26T19:39:48.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica beat me to it by a minute. :) This was an unintended side effect of a migration plus merge, but the question in question now has the same tags on both sides of the merge so this should no longer be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate question came from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ham.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Amateur Radio SE&lt;/a&gt; (it has been posted on several sites, and deemed off topic everywhere except on Worldbuilding), where it was tagged, but the sites had no tags in common. Thus, the question had its tags removed and replaced with [untagged] as part of the migration process. When I merged the questions, I didn't consider the tags on the migrated question, and it was left with the [untagged] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:21.210" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T19:48:16.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="431" CreationDate="2014-10-26T19:41:18.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem wasn't the closure; it was probably the merge.  Your link actually took me to the new (destination) question, which has tags, so I was initially confused.  When I searched for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; tag I found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the tags of that question to match those of the one it was merged into.  This should remove the &quot;untagged&quot; tag in about a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two &quot;oh by the ways&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't remove the last tag from a question.  If you were trying to delete &quot;untagged&quot; without replacing it with something, that would have failed no matter the state of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are migrated here from other sites can come in as untagged, so we may see this pop up again.  If you ever see that tag and can help, please do jump in (as you tried to do here).  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-10-26T19:48:42.630" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T19:48:42.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="516" CreationDate="2014-10-26T19:57:14.203" Score="12" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing through the tour, and I noticed that the sample question given is currently about unicorns eating daisies. Oof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking my personal opinion of the subject matter out of it, I'll say that this is clearly not a good representation of the questions on the site. Is there any way we can change it? Should we change it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-06-19T03:41:27.673" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T03:41:27.673" Title="Can we change the sample question on the tour?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T21:19:50.723" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3163/2072&quot;&gt;question about society&lt;/a&gt;, and found myself confused about the necessity of having tags for both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a need for both, or should they be merged/synonimized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T05:01:24.243" Title="Do we need both [society] and [culture]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="216" CreationDate="2014-10-27T03:37:30.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're still seeing this now that Worldbuilding has entered public beta, it might be a workaround for low reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a new tag requires reputation, and if Worldbuilding were to leave beta and get a design tomorrow, I wouldn't have enough.* Public beta sites and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260754/feedback-requested-design-independent-graduation&quot;&gt;graduated sites without a design&lt;/a&gt; require 150, most sites with their own design require 300, Meta Stack Exchange requires 500, and Stack Overflow requires a whopping 1,500. This leads to two workarounds mentioned in answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/260632/2738262&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow's child meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/146950/229356&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggest new tags on a site's child meta. This requires only 5 reputation but allows suggesting the tag wiki content at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post using other relevant tags and add a comment to your question requesting creation of the new tag. This requires other relevant tags to exist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments pointed out a third way that requires 20 rep: chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* I had less than 300 reputation on Worldbuilding when I first posted this answer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T16:32:51.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T08:48:10.017" Score="9" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3129/29&quot;&gt;Hacking the universe&lt;/a&gt; has shown up on several different &quot;be aware&quot; lists (particularly, answer flagging and number of answers in a short period of time). The question basically boils down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine the whole universe is a simulation. ... What would be a reasonable attack vector for a simulated human to hack the very simulation that human lives in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has attracted 12 answers in just over a day, over half (seven) of which are zero net voted as I am typing this. Several of the answers, while not necessarily bad, are also what I feel is below par for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that the question as it stands appears to me as very broad. It has been fairly highly voted, but a part of that appears to me to be that it offers the possibility of an in-universe explanation for magic. However, it also seems to be asking for &lt;strong&gt;a largely unbounded set of answers&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;what would be a reasonable attack vector?&quot; without establishing much in terms of constraints).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the number of different answers attracted by that question, several of which by users new to the site as well, while not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; a problem in itself, shows how broad the question is and how differently it is being interpreted by different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have put it on hold for the moment so that we can have a bit of discussion about it here and decide what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question too broad?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is too broad, then what can be done to it to make it less broad, such that it is a good fit for the Stack Exchange format and the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it isn't too broad, then what does that mean for our standards on what constitutes &quot;too broad&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answering the above questions, you may also want to consider the meta questions listed below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/52/29&quot;&gt;Hypothetical situations and broad questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14/29&quot;&gt;Yes, questions can be Too Localized. But usually they are at far greater risk of being Too Broad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/80/29&quot;&gt;Redefining too Broad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T14:26:24.473" Title="Is the question &quot;Hacking the universe&quot; too broad?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|too-broad|specific-question|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2014-10-27T09:29:17.013" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to play devil's advocate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly I agree that the large number of posts from new users is an indicator that it could be too broad however it could equally be an indicator that this is a really good and interesting question, it's made the Hot Topics list - these questions always attract new users. In addition I know I'm as guilty as anyone of not reading every other answer before adding my own, I don't think the fact their are lots of answers means that each one is a new idea (I'm afraid I've not read each one in detail yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is actually fairly well limited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It presents the world succinctly (in an artificial reality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It describes the people/tech... us and now&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a concept we're familiar with (The Matrix)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It gives a clear goal to hack (or cause mischief with the system)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be scoped further by giving a more defined goal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gain root access&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bend physics to fly/spontaneously combust/teleport&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However by doing so you're effectively asking how could you do these things given what we know about the world. That's not what the OP wanted, they're after breaking an imaginary (we hope) system which we live in. You need to give scope here otherwise you're just asking &quot;How could I hack the universe to fly?&quot; it's unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the fact this question has received so many upvotes is an indication that it's an interesting question. I think the large number of answers only shows that people WANT to add their own opinions. I believe it's our responsibility as SE users to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go through these answers and vote up/down appropriately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mark the question as protected if there are a lot of low quality responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the closing the question as &quot;Too Broad&quot; reaction hurts us because it's shutting down a question which people clearly like and want to have answers to. I think we need to go through and critique the answers instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T09:29:17.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2014-10-27T09:38:27.427" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been alternately trying to define to myself why this question is too broad and trying to answer the question (it is one of those questions that makes you go &quot;I have an idea! Wait, ANOTHER idea!&quot; ) and I think I've finally resolved both points to a single answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is effectively: Anything you want it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means there is no clear way to pick an answers, which in turn means that the question is too broadly scoped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top voted answer doesn't even answer the question specifically, it describes the process.&#xA;Asking for what methodology you would use to make an attack seems reasonable, asking for a list that includes almost every set and subset of actions a person could take does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T09:38:27.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="401" CreationDate="2014-10-27T12:29:18.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; tag has been removed, so it won't be offered as an option when people start to type a tag name now.  I asked a community manager about blacklisting it, but it's an expensive operation so they reserve that for really &lt;em&gt;persistent&lt;/em&gt; tags, ones that keep coming back over and over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try to not need to blacklist the tag.  Please don't use it, and if you see it pop up, please retag with something better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:29:18.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2014-10-27T12:32:19.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the question as &quot;What properties should my world have so that this plot idea I have works?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading back, this isn't quite what the person asked.  It seems to be more of the format &quot;Given an unspecified world, how can I develop this plot idea?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers are again different, with the following interpretations showing up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can one discover bugs in a software system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What aspects of reality appear to be bugs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of bugs can a simulated world have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What might stop the characters from escaping a simulation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, it seems like the question is too open for interpretations, and should probably be respecified to be more focused.  Many of the above interpretations could work, depending on what the OP actually wants to know. Different interpretations can be posted as different sub-questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original question is to be kept, I think the world should be specified.  Many of the answers are of the form &quot;Suppose your world is like this, then this can be done.&quot;   If, instead, the properties of the world were fixed, these answers would have to be more specific (and probably more useful for the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2428" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:32:19.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="445" CreationDate="2014-10-27T13:11:07.693" Score="10" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3186/how-can-you-tell-if-you-are-dreaming&quot;&gt;This question on Dreaming&lt;/a&gt; was asked recently. Lets ignore the fact that its also off topic for now. When I googled the question I found that the top result was a comprehensive and well referenced question from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wikihow.com/Tell-if-You%27re-Dreaming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikiHow&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I can see, its a perfect answer, but we don't post links and copy/pasting the entire thing seems wrong.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3294/could-life-survive-on-a-diet-of-dust&quot;&gt;Another example, as requested&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;em&gt;Do we think that questions that can be answered by a basic Google search&lt;/em&gt; show a lack of basic research and therefore should be closed?*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*By basic google search I mean that one place high placed result answers the question in a full and comprehensive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition: Worldbuilding typically has long answers to complex questions. Were it a case that copying a single sentence or paragraph and providing attribution were the answer, I would probably ignore it. However in this case there is a full length article written on it from a popular (and high ranked) site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T12:28:01.263" Title="Questions that show a lack of basic research" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="443" CreationDate="2014-10-27T13:15:48.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why shouldn't we be the top link when someone googles this next?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that as long as it's not the official documentation of the topic in question we're competing with. There is no reason why that super-helpful, easily findable, well referenced link shouldn't be knocked of its throne by a superior link to a question on the SE network. What wikiHow can do, we can do better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be said however, that a bad question is still a bad question. And we should only answer these questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86043/introduce-a-general-reference-close-reason&quot;&gt;if they are interesting and non-trivial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T12:28:01.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="443" CreationDate="2014-10-27T14:14:18.407" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote tooltip for questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote tooltip for questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like the solution is downvotes, rather than close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:29:33.943" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:29:33.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T14:28:58.160" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really do not understand why you would not take the time to upvote a question that you spent time answering. The question has obviously given you pause for thought (especially true for questions on this site, where answers are rarely simple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain why this happens to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not talking specifically about HNQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T14:30:31.197" Title="Questions with more answers than upvotes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2014-10-27T14:36:27.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I would personally always up vote a question that I take the effort to answer (in part because the question doing well will ultimately attract more attention for my answer as well) I can imagine that some people would consider certain questions not notable enough to be worth an up vote. But still possess the knowledge to provide an answer that will help the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a valid way to use your votes. Just because a question is answerable, doesn't mean it's a particularly good question that should be seen by as many people as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T14:36:27.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2014-10-27T15:39:16.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree. If I have to spend more than 1 minute writing an answer (as is the case with every answer I write) - that is, if I have to stop, think, and use logic to answer it - I'll generally upvote. If, on the other hand, I could answer the question without a second thought, it's probably easily answered with a Google search (or duckduckgo, my engine of choice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2015-06-05T14:30:31.197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T14:30:31.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2014-10-27T19:18:46.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I do upvote most of the questions I answer (and many others as well), some questions I feel I can answer for the one asking, but I don't think the question is that great so I won't upvote it.  Sometimes the question is so specific that I think it would not be real likely someone else will have the same or similar question.  So it doesn't deserve more than 1 or 2 votes in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T19:18:46.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T20:29:41.233" Score="11" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the bullet question.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3184/what-can-be-used-to-make-the-worlds-deadliest-bullet&quot;&gt;What can be used to make the world&amp;#39;s deadliest bullet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about this question makes me think it should be off-topic.  At the same time (especially with the edit) it doesn't seem that different from some of our other questions.  I know we have voted already and it is on hold, I am just having troubles defining why which isn't fair to the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it the specific nature, or is it that it seems more relevant to plot than world building?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thats what I am leaning toward but wondered what you all thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information:  Ok so this question popped up.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3248/how-can-i-lightly-irradiate-30-000-km%C2%B2-for-just-3-generations&quot;&gt;How can I lightly irradiate 30,000 km&amp;#178; for just 3 generations?&lt;/a&gt;  I like this question and feel like it is far more on topic than the bullet question.  Why?  Whats the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T23:41:06.013" Title="Is this off topic, if so WHY?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="450" CreationDate="2014-10-28T01:08:36.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/2428&quot;&gt;the suggested help article&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/420/2428&quot;&gt;the clarification on &quot;Magic and Technology&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, this is off-topic.  It is covered exactly by the &quot;but not where it relates to specific characters or plot elements&quot; clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't really address the general issue, though.  There seem to be two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are questions about properties of reality (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/176/2428&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/313/2428&quot;&gt;B&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13/2428&quot;&gt;C&lt;/a&gt;) on-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How big does something (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/843/2428&quot;&gt;D&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2625/2428&quot;&gt;E&lt;/a&gt;) have to be to be part of world-building, rather than  a plot detail?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue seems to be already discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/378/2428&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first issue, I suggest that the opposite formulation be encouraged.  Rather than asking &quot;Given a world $W$, (how) can I do $X$?&quot;, ask &quot;I have a world $W$ in mind and also want $X$; what do I have to change?&quot;  This would make answers to such questions contain distinctly different (and hopefully more useful) information than people would get on a reality-oriented site.  (Hopefully, it would also be a bit more clear what is and isn't based on reality, see for example the answers to B.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(While writing this I was concerned about accidentally involving questions of the form &quot;I have a world $W$, what follows?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2895/2428&quot;&gt;F&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/186/2428&quot;&gt;G&lt;/a&gt;).  These seem to be some of the best and most on-topic questions, but they do have some overlap with the previous group.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2428" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T01:08:36.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-10-28T04:42:27.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2648/is-it-possible-for-a-developed-society-to-practice-human-sacrifice-as-a-ritual&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a developed society to practice human sacrifice as a ritual?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answer are very long others are short. Some are good, and other are not really answering the question. I haven't accepted one answer because I don't know which one to choose. They all have good elements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2667/147&quot;&gt;This one is more a comment.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2750/147&quot;&gt;This one is more about death penalty, it's not really related in my point of view.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I just flagged the other answers that are not good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T04:42:27.003" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-28T04:42:27.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="450" CreationDate="2014-10-28T17:13:18.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem with the question is that it feels too small in scope. It's in keeping with the overall theme of the site but designing one ammunition for one weapon for one plot point feels like it has little connection to &quot;world&quot; building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was talking about entire classes of weaponry or outfitting of armies or the future development of weaponry then (assuming they weren't too broad) that would all be fine. This is asking about just 1 bullet though. i.e. it's about an individual which is explicitly out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T17:13:18.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-10-28T22:13:46.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8/2072&quot;&gt;Must magic be tied to medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to have a lot of answers (out of total 13) that are just examples of stories with magic in high-tech times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12/2072&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/140/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/140/2072&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11/2072&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/870/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/870/2072&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45/2072&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21/2072&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21/2072&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those are upvoted, most have a zero score, and two have a score of -2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that these answer either are (1) better as comments (2) asking to be deleted as &quot;not an answer&quot; (3) better as examples in one big CW post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Memor-X's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/90/2072&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, Styphon's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11/2072&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; and bowlturner's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12/2072&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, I think, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; good answers, because even though they also answer the question by counter-example, they put effort into explaining what they meant to say, rather than just citing examples without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have flagged some of the above answers as &quot;not an answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T03:06:32.583" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-28T22:13:46.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="450" CreationDate="2014-10-28T23:41:06.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My objections to the question were/are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It isn't really about worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt; It's more of a physics or chemistry-oriented question. As far as I can tell, this site can't really offer much. Before the edit, it had absolutely nothing to do with the site's premise. The recent edit helped, but I still feel that worldbuilding is only tangentially related.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weapons.&lt;/strong&gt; This a personal opinion, but I'm not a huge fan of questions regarding explicit weaponry - that is, detailed instructions on how to kill someone. This doesn't seem to be suitable for a site like this. But this is just my opinion; others may disagree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T23:41:06.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="276" CreationDate="2014-10-29T00:52:09.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;With my newfound diamondly powers (bwahaha), I am now able to do this.  Because 11 of you agreed with me and nobody objected, I have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T00:52:09.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T04:07:09.260" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago, I asked a question that was closed for being too opinion based. I deleted it, then was persuaded to re-ask it. It gets 10 upvotes and is not closed. This shouldn't happen. What can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2358" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T14:23:23.197" Title="Question that was closed (opinion-based) was re-asked and stayed open" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="457" CreationDate="2014-10-29T08:25:13.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought it was good. In my opinion it isnt opinion based. I think it is broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately broadness is another of those things that the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format generally handles poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the stock close reasons, out of the set that we have available to choose from currently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unclear what you are asking:&lt;/strong&gt; I can't tell what exactly it is that you want to know; &lt;em&gt;add a specific question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad:&lt;/strong&gt; I can tell what exactly you are asking about, but you want to know too much or there are simply too many possible answers; &lt;em&gt;narrow it down&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primarily opinion-based:&lt;/strong&gt; I can tell what you want to know, but answers are likely to be primarily about what people feel or think, not about facts or specific expertise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; are clearly actionable: there is a specific problem with the question that can usually be corrected with a relatively minor edit, but that edit is far from always easy to do by someone not the original asker because how to edit depends very much on the asker's intent. &lt;em&gt;Primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; is harder to fix in-place, since it might require rethinking the basis for the question, but is by no means impossible to fix. In the best of cases, a &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; question can be fixed simply by adding constraints to the set of answers you want, or specifying that you want answerers to focus on some particular aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In your particular case:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3179/29&quot;&gt;your first question&lt;/a&gt; of the pair only lived on the site for about 20 minutes before you deleted it. That isn't much time at all to gather comments or votes (and even less so answers). &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3226/29&quot;&gt;The second question&lt;/a&gt; isn't all that different in terms of what you are seeking to know. What you should probably have done, rather than deleting, was to edit in place such that answers would have been based in fact, rather than opinion: tighten it up, add constraints to what answers you are looking for, describe the situation that you have in mind, be specific about what you want us to tell you. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9/mourdos&quot;&gt;Mourdos&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18338937#18338937&quot;&gt;phrased it well in chat&lt;/a&gt; the other day (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As terrible as it is, a lot of the time broad questions are just badly phrased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Try not to think of the question as a chat with people. Treat it more as if you are submitting it as a formal thing.&lt;/strong&gt; By which I mean work out what you want from the question and ask exactly what you want. I know how easy it is to just say something, and then clarify that, and then clarify that bit in a paragraph, but you are often better off going back and making it clearer in the first place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Generally speaking:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you feel your question should not have been closed,&lt;/strong&gt; then either flag it for moderator attention (and one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/417/29&quot;&gt;us&lt;/a&gt; will look at it), or bring it up on Meta and make your case for why it should not have been closed. If you do that latter, make sure to link to the specific question in the Meta question to make it easy to find, and keep in mind that it must not be deleted as a lot of users don't have permission to view deleted posts. You may also want to drop by in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to draw attention to your Meta post, but keep the discussion on Meta as much as possible. Chat is great for quick back-and-forth, but it isn't a good way to retain knowledge and reasoning. If anything in particular is pointed out as poor with your question (people will usually leave comments explaining what they feel should be fixed, though it is not a requirement to do so), then edit the question to fix that &lt;em&gt;first.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you feel your question was closed with the wrong close reason,&lt;/strong&gt; but the closure itself in hindsight was appropriate, then don't do anything. &lt;em&gt;Nobody is keeping score&lt;/em&gt; of whether your question got closed as &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, and it isn't always easy to pick a specific close reason because multiple close reasons might apply to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful about &lt;strong&gt;deleting questions&lt;/strong&gt; which have been put on hold or closed. Deleted questions is one of the factors considered by the software that runs the Stack Exchange network for how well your contributions have been received in the past, and if your contributions appear to not be well received, you may eventually hit the point where &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/157730&quot; title=&quot;What can I do when getting “We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account”? on Meta Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;contributions are no longer accepted from your account&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you delete the question, then later realize that it would probably have been better to edit it in place,&lt;/strong&gt; all is not lost. Click on your reputation score in the top bar, which takes you to your profile, and then click through to the &quot;questions&quot; tab. Below the list of questions, there is a link to show &quot;deleted recent questions&quot;. Click on that, and you will be taken to a list of your recently deleted questions. Click through there to the particular question, then edit it and undelete (in that order). If for some reason you are unable to undelete the question yourself, you can flag it for moderator attention, again &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; fixing whatever caused it to be deleted in the first place, and someone will take a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particularly interesting case is questions which are closed as duplicates. Duplicate questions can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230/157730&quot;&gt;serve as useful signposts&lt;/a&gt; and there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/32311/157730&quot;&gt;well established precedent&lt;/a&gt; for not deleting good duplicates. Hence, &lt;strong&gt;avoid deleting&lt;/strong&gt; questions which end up being closed as duplicates; leaving them around makes it easier to find the duplicate-target question, helping others gain knowledge later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T14:15:30.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="457" CreationDate="2014-10-29T14:23:23.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michael's answer covers the general case, I want to cover the specific case of these two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Version 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If humans were to be eradicated, what would be the next dominant race. Would there be several or just one big one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Version 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If humans didn't exist, what species would populate the earth? Would an animal gain human-like intelligence if humans weren't here? What animal would gain dominance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of reasons why the second question was accepted and the first was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second one talks about intelligence, the first one just talks about dominance. Intelligence is a specific index along which species can advance and through that become dominant. That massively reduces how broad the question is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restricting it to intelligence also reduces the opinion-based part of the question, there are fairly objective ways to measure and project the development of intelligence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the first question though you ask if there would be one race or several, which is purely opinion based as there is no way to analyze it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But in the second question you ask whether an animal would gain human-level intelligence (which is a binary yes/no question and hence much easier to answer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Length - A question so short as the first one shows very little thought and will bias people towards closing unless the question itself is excellent. The second question is still short but not as short.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only part of your second question which is opinion based is the final &quot;which animal&quot; bit, but even there we have information available which people can use to draw reasoned conclusions and present viable candidates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why question two is acceptable whereas question one was not. The changes may have seemed tiny but they actually refocus the question into one which while it is still both broad and opinion based is no longer too broad or too opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T14:23:23.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T20:20:04.243" Score="9" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to suggest something in relation to this (and other) question(s):  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3267/best-platform-for-collaborative-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Best platform for collaborative worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Software Recommendations SE this is the &quot;what makes a good question&quot; entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good software recommendation requests have two components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A purpose — a task to accomplish, a user story &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Some objective requirements — a minimum set of features Please read our question&#xA;  quality guidelines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s&#xA;  also OK to ask and answer your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're asking for alternatives, be sure to describe the features&#xA;  you're using and why what you have isn't up for the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the topic of answers, we request that answers demonstrate how the&#xA;  recommended product meets the requirement and is suitable for the&#xA;  intended purpose. Please read our answer quality guidelines for more&#xA;  information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put I suggest we adopt the same rules on software recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:54:36.080" Title="Software Recommendations" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T01:19:19.163" Score="8" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3320/28&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks what possible events could bring about a global government collapse.  We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/207/28&quot;&gt;consensus&lt;/a&gt; that we don't do idea-generation for storytelling.  Specific examples from that meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What conditions have to exist in a world to explain giant insects? — EXCELLENT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What would the world be like if it were ruled by giant insects? — TOO BROAD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, you could argue that the present question follows the &amp;quot;what conditions have to exist...&amp;quot; form and is thus on-topic.  On the other hand, it feels very open-ended; the number of (credible) answers that explain giant-insect overlords should be much smaller than the number of answers brainstorming about government collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the government-collapse question ok?  Too broad?  And, more generally, where is the line between the focused, answerable, &amp;quot;what conditions cause...&amp;quot; questions that we want and the &amp;quot;help me brainstorm my plot&amp;quot; questions that are better-suited for a writing group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T07:51:56.100" Title="Is this question too broad?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="462" CreationDate="2014-10-30T07:45:05.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree and have voted to close, it's too close to the &quot;I need an idea&quot; or &quot;How could this happen&quot; type questions we're tying to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T07:45:05.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="462" CreationDate="2014-10-30T07:51:56.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question is quite clearly too broad but think that this type of question can work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;what would happen if&quot; type of question can work well if the possible consequences of the premise are limited. For this, the question needs to be clearly stated and the constraints have to be defined unambiguously. The scope the answers should touch on also needs to be well defined. This includes the time frame, as well as aspects that should be discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The amount of possible distinct answers to this type of question are limited (which shows that it's not too broad) and can be voted upon by evaluating the plausibility (and how well it is explained) of the idea and how well it works as a narrative device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T07:51:56.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T08:07:28.670" Score="17" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3320/what-events-can-cause-global-government-collapse-within-a-month-or-less&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/462/is-this-question-too-broad/464#464&quot;&gt;too broad&lt;/a&gt;. As Michael Kjörling noted in the comments though (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] For the specific case, I'm tempted to agree that it is very broad, but also (at a glance) &lt;strong&gt;think that the answers saved the question&lt;/strong&gt; which makes me unwilling to close it by mod hammer. (And, of course, it already has an accepted answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's the question, &lt;strong&gt;what should be done when a question on its own merit should be closed but has received good answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to say the question should be edited as much as possible to be a better fit for our site while trying to avoid making the answers (completely) invalid. This is in line with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/179003/stack-exchange-is-too-harsh-to-new-users-please-help-them-improve-low-quality-po/179009#179009&quot;&gt;stack exchange's goal&lt;/a&gt; to  create a mass of excellent answers to well asked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T17:56:49.157" Title="What to do when a question should be closed but an answer is good?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="465" CreationDate="2014-10-30T09:19:39.137" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We close the question, the answers remain for anyone who views or finds the question but no more can be added. The question has up votes and high quality answers so will not be automatically deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:19:39.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="470" CreationDate="2014-10-31T12:54:01.773" Score="8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at our stats the one big thing where we could fail is not getting enough questions to bother keeping the site open.  Our questions per day keep falling, and more and more of the questions we do get are being axed for various reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think we need to try and help those questions that can be modified to meet Worldbuilding parameters more.  We need to encourage questions, and encourage the formation of better questions.  We don't want to discourage people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T16:06:44.220" Title="What can we do to encourage questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="467" CreationDate="2014-10-31T13:14:11.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator I have access to analytics data that shows things like how many questions are being asked. There is a note asking me not to publish specifics (I don't know why but I'm not going to break that request without permission), however...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of questions being posted is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; reducing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weekends are always quieter than during the week but during the week we're consistently getting around 9 questions a day and have been since launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the first few days we had a massive surge of questions (over 30 on one day!) (several other days with quite high numbers too) which are now falling out of the averages causing it to look like numbers are falling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to see more questions, an upwards trend would of course be preferable, but there is no downwards trend. In fact this week we've had more questions on the corresponding days than we had last week, although the week before that was higher than either this week or last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please ideas for getting more activity are always welcome, but don't go into that thinking we are on some sort of downwards spiral :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T13:14:11.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="467" CreationDate="2014-10-31T15:00:56.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at Analytics data (the specifics of which as Tim B mentioned cannot be shared in public), I do see a few trends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; inflow of new questions right at the beginning of the private beta. That is expected, but depending on how the average is calculated, it also means that any more normal activity level is going to lower the average. The trend for answers is nowhere near as pronounced. On the whole, numbers of both questions and answers are holding relatively steady and have done so for a fair amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 10% of our traffic comes from search engines, which I would argue is &lt;em&gt;not bad at all&lt;/em&gt; for a site only a month into public beta. Only a few percent is &quot;direct traffic&quot;, essentially meaning that someone typed &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt; into their web browser's address field. The lion's share of the remainder is intra-StackExchange traffic, which likely translates into people being curious about hot network questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are holding steady as far as number of questions being closed, and see a slight uptrend in deleted answers. The former, together with the above, means that question closure is about as common as it has been. The latter is to be expected as the site attracts more traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have posted at least one question similar to this one before,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/427/29&quot;&gt;a week ago now&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Personally,&lt;/em&gt; I think you worry too much about relatively superficial statistics. Artificially inflating the number of questions won't be of any benefit to the site. Even a relatively low-traffic site can flourish &lt;em&gt;if and only if the content is of high enough &lt;strong&gt;quality.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; If we end up posting questions just to post questions just to boost some average number of questions calculated over some unknown period of time, that is likely to lead to poor quality content which is likely to be a more important factor if the site were to be shut down. The latter which I currently can see no signs of being in the works in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T15:00:56.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="467" CreationDate="2014-10-31T15:44:02.033" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encourage you to look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Area 51 statistics&lt;/a&gt;, which show this site getting 7.5 questions as of this morning. Even though the description says that's merely &quot;Okay&quot;, the truth is World Building is off to a magnificent start. To give you an idea how betas normally progress, here's the questions per day timeline for &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writers&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/writers/query/241364/questions-per-day-over-time#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yO3IG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writers questions per day&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After private beta, enthusiasm naturally dropped off a bit. Here's the same graph for World Building so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0XeOR.png&quot; alt=&quot;World Building questions per day&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I draw your attention to the y-axis in particular which shows that in its 7 short weeks, this site has never dipped below 7 questions a day on a weekly average. That's a phenomenally fast start by any measure (other than &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/241364/questions-per-day-over-time#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow itself&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I'd normally be suggesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/242839/1438&quot;&gt;ways to move the needle on questions per day&lt;/a&gt; at this point in a site's life, I don't think participation and traffic are currently among World Building's problems. Rather I would suggest spending some time thinking about whether the site is headed in the right direction in terms of topic space and quality. (I haven't looked into those issues myself, so I'm not saying there's a problem here. Rather, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you have to worry about anything, those are the more productive things to think about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T18:42:07.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-01T19:42:56.457" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted the following on &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62/notifying-experts-on-specific-subjects&quot;&gt;HSM Meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is fairly diverse, no matter what it may seem. This question on Physics inspired me to post a modified version here, because I think it could be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the principle is that users can post information here about their specialties - that is, the areas where they feel they can best post high-quality answers. If there is a question related to a user's specialty, they can be notified, and hopefully post a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let everyone know what you think, and post your information below!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As Shokhet pointed out, most people can't see HSM Meta; the questions on Physics that inspired this can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1159/opt-in-to-be-always-pingable-to-answer-questions/5497&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/list-of-users-with-specialities-who-are-willing-to-be-pinged-should-we-do-this&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As user291957 pointed out, this is relevant on many SE sites. I think it may be especially relevant here, considering the variety of topics we have. So, feel free to post an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T14:03:16.897" Title="Notifying &quot;experts&quot; on specific subjects" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2014-11-01T19:45:08.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/users/2153/hde-226868&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love astronomy, and have for a long while. I'll answer anything related to stars, black holes, planets - you name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/56299/hde-226868&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; and related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also love physics, especially the theoretical side. I'll answer conceptual questions, as well as ones about physicists. I'm considering physics as a career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/users/5963/hde-226868&quot;&gt;Space exploration&lt;/a&gt; and related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Space exploration fascinates me. We're constantly journeying to further places, and pushing the frontier. I know a fair amount about the history of space exploration, especially the Space Race&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.887" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T19:45:08.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2014-11-01T21:16:06.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a question related to a user's specialty, they can be notified, and hopefully post a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, that idea is contrary to the idea of Stack Exchange, which is to focus more on &lt;strong&gt;content&lt;/strong&gt; than on &lt;strong&gt;specific individuals.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody should feel obliged to answer any specific question. People interested in specific subjects can follow tags, add tags to a RSS reader, favorite questions, and so on. There is a reason why you can only @-ping people in comments who have participated in the post that you are commenting on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know there are no limits to how many tags can be followed or favorited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can outright hide questions on the front page that are about subjects you aren't interested in. (Follow the &quot;set tag preferences&quot; link.) (Hiding content is a luxury that moderators don't have...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T21:16:06.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2014-11-01T23:20:17.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;While I don't know if I agree with it being any better to &quot;notify the experts&quot;.....&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have pretty broad coverage in most areas which I find useful in drawing connections between topics that are obvious but maybe overlooked due to other experts being too &quot;domain specialized&quot; which makes &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; usually something I can weigh in on (though not to the level of an expert, so I would say the more fringe questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an idea my personal worst subject is probably Biology. Which is ironic given &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2469/why-arent-animals-photosynthetic/2470#2470&quot;&gt;my personal best&lt;/a&gt; for up-votes.&lt;sub&gt;(don't tell anyone it's a secret)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My forte is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; though. From chip fabrication and algorithms, to Zero Instruction Set Architecture and Information Theory, to Gorilla glass chemistry and iPad bulk prices, to cost-benefit analysis of PS4's shared RAM model and having written all this, it seems like this is the kind of thing that belongs in our bios. &lt;sub&gt;(Although me and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; are best buds with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3115/what-would-be-required-for-a-completely-self-sufficient-1-man-habitat/3120#comment6443_3120&quot;&gt;Caleb Hines&lt;/a&gt; so I wouldn't want to take out the important stuff.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since nobody knows quite as much as they think they do, I'm gonna wiki this so you all can add and remove expert tags with wild abandon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T23:20:17.313" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-01T23:20:17.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T09:31:27.993" Score="12" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can have up to three custom close reasons offered when voting to close a question. (More can be added by request if there is a demonstrated, pressing need.) Do we have any situations arising often enough to justify a custom close reason yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we don't need to use these, they are there for if we find a use for them and aren't going to get taken away just because we don't put anything in them straight away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've removed my examples as no-one can vote on examples and they might confuse people into thinking they were already being added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-11-03T15:39:33.407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T15:39:33.407" Title="What custom close reasons, if any, do we need at present?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="475" CreationDate="2014-11-03T09:57:08.687" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideas Generation : This come up on a semi regular basis, and is indicated by a question that has &quot;something happen&quot;. Often a list answer and opinion based.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Split into three answers as suggested (Feel free to add examples)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-11-03T10:34:16.393" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T10:34:16.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="475" CreationDate="2014-11-03T10:34:30.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plot Writing : This is fairly close to Too Localized, but at least gives a specific reason as to why we close it. Note that Writers.SE does not accept plot questions either, so this is not a redirect (which already exists)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Split into three answers as suggested (Feel free to add examples)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-11-03T10:40:10.460" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T10:40:10.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="475" CreationDate="2014-11-03T10:34:39.630" Score="-6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lack of Basic Research: The official answer to this is to downvote, but I've seen a number of these and people don't seem to understand that this is SE policy that the questioner should have done some basic research before asking a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Split into three answers as suggested (Feel free to add examples)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-11-03T10:40:25.453" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T10:40:25.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T10:36:55.940" Score="8" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are starting to have a problem with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; questions. While the impact of events on a culture is part of Worldbuilding, you could easily write a thesis on even the smallest change and how it permeates through society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I have two requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feature&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;Can we get a warning tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; like stack overflow does if you tag java and javascript? Something that says how broad a field it is an that you need to focus on a narrow aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;Questions that ask about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; are required to have narrow scope. When you ask about psychology, ask about a very specific aspect. Questions that say &quot;Could this change to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; cause this?&quot; are good. Questions that say &quot;If {something happens} how would the world react?&quot; are clearly bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, we need to start enforcing our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/78/9&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;back it up policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with these questions a lot more strictly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As usual with these kinds of posts. Upvote for agreement, downvote for disagreement, answers for responses and considerations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T11:06:12.613" Title="Questions about [tag:psychology]" Tags="|feature-request|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="475" CreationDate="2014-11-03T11:08:52.673" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it Possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a lot of low quality questions where people have an idea which they want to know if it's possible. While I don't have a problem with this in particular - I've certainly as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29/what-factors-could-cause-a-world-to-see-northern-lights-much-further-down-the&quot;&gt;asked them&lt;/a&gt; but I think it's a trend of some poor quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to settle on the moon?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to fly to another solar system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible intelligent life could evolve on the seabed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps these are already covered by &quot;Too Broad&quot; but it's the type of question where &quot;I want to get the moon and I want you to work out how to do it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest edits for a better name for this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T11:08:52.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T14:18:28.000" Score="7" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a type of question on this site, that asks something like &quot;given these parameters, what would be the effect on society?&quot; A recent example of this type of question was one &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3230/what-changes-to-human-society-would-be-necessitated-by-a-race-with-small-size-an/3501#3501&quot;&gt;Monty Wild asked&lt;/a&gt;. In that question Monty asked about what effects the presence of fairies would have one medieval, human society. &lt;strong&gt;Do we want this kind of &quot;effect&quot; question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I actually kinda like the question. I upvoted it, and answered it. But as I was answering it, I realized how broad it was. Monty asked the question well, there are very clear parameters about how the fairies look and how the interact with humans. But even then he can't include everything. Should these kind of questions be allowed? Should the answerer just assume things not mention in the question using logic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-to-deal-with-list-questions&quot;&gt;How to deal with list questions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/479/questions-about-tagpsychology&quot;&gt;Questions about [tag:psychology]&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:58:49.823" Title="Do we want &quot;effects&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="481" CreationDate="2014-11-03T14:44:15.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree the the question are rather interesting but that they are also overly broad. I think that they should be permissible, but as outlined in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/479/questions-about-tagpsychology&quot;&gt;Questions about [tag:psychology]&lt;/a&gt; post, we need to restrict them to very narrow scope and make sure that answered are backed up. I'm not sure how far to go with Back It Up! on these, part of me is happy with the style of answers we have now, part of me wants to require linked studies in your answers (were appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we do need to do is just downvote vigorously answers that guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T14:44:15.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T05:33:44.007" Score="-1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt; tag seems really too broad to me. According to wikipedia and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/tags/early-modern/info&quot;&gt;History SE&lt;/a&gt;  the modern era stretches back from the end of the middle ages to the Second World War. Or more or less from 1500 to 1950 and possibly beyond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should put some order in the historical tags. &#xA;This said, I think we should do more or less the same as History SE and split it in several tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early modern age: that is the equivalent of the Renaissance: 1450-1500 to 1750-1800&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern age : 1750-1800 to 1940-1950&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and another tag for the actual era since the end of the Second World War. I don't know how we should name the era, maybe just actual era or present era... Most modern era questions fall into this category. Some implied futuristic setting but since our actual era has no clear ending yet, &lt;strong&gt;should we also include the near future in the actual era?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding the future&lt;/strong&gt;: we already have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/futurology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;futurology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;futurology&lt;/a&gt; tag and I think it's good for now. I haven't seen any tags for other future eras. I think it's best to stay vague as it's mostly speculative anyway. People tend to use other tags not related to history when they ask questions about future technologies and I think it's fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also thought about talking of the ancient era and prehistoric tags but there is only one question and it's closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:53.193" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T09:16:01.197" Title="Question on [tag:modern-age]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="488" CreationDate="2014-11-04T05:45:44.327" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess it is pretty clear to see that these two are synonyms but I can suggest it officially. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linguistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linguistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless someone think there is a difference.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T16:18:10.197" Title="Linguistic synonym of language" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="483" CreationDate="2014-11-04T09:16:01.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need fine-grained history tags (and if we do, they will surface anyway). And I guess the vast majority of people coming here would understand &quot;modern-age&quot; as equivalent to &quot;the world we currently live in&quot;. And indeed, that's how it seems to be currently used. Thus using it to means something different would only be confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T09:16:01.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2014-11-04T11:53:47.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment with regards to the above that you can agree or disagree with separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that talks about psychology changes should include what you think would happen. This narrows the scope as answers focus on what you think would happen, and if others believe it would or would not happen that way. It also shows that you have put some thought into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T11:53:47.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T14:48:33.963" Score="17" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; Blogs are &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/115/2014/6/11&quot;&gt;on hold&lt;/a&gt; for the moment and this thread will likely not lead directly to us having our own blog. Instead, this post is supposed to test the water. I think Worldbuilding is a good candidate for owning a blog and discussing the possibility now can only be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be beneficial to add a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/2011/06/blog-overflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt; to Worldbuilding. I think the main challenges with maintaining a blog is having enough and sufficiently motivated contributors and defining a reasonable scope. This is reflected in the 4 steps mentioned in the post I linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Raise the idea on the meta site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define the purpose and scope.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recruit contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plan a schedule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figure we can roll the first two points into one meta question (this one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do before answering this question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/2011/06/blog-overflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;starting guide about starting a blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a look at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1712/code-review-blog-phase-1-raise-the-idea-on-the-meta-site&quot;&gt;attempts to start a blog&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1446/&quot;&gt;haven't made it through&lt;/a&gt; (yet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a look at some &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;successful blogs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think before you answer. (no seriously, take some time)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to put in your answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A proposal for the blog that contains&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A purpose of the blog. (What does the blog do for us?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A scope for the blog. (What do we write about in the blog?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An argumentation why this blog benefits us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or&lt;/strong&gt; an argumentation against a blog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What comes after this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everything goes smoothly, we'll have either a 'no' or a clear winner as to the scope and purpose after this thread runs its course. If not, an additional thread might be needed. The next step would then be recruiting contributors and setting up a schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have started &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/524/328&quot;&gt;another question where we can discuss ideas for specific blog entries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T18:06:50.413" Title="Worldbuilding Blog - Phase 1 and 2: Raising the idea and definition" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="484" CreationDate="2014-11-04T16:18:10.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they are closer than Economy and Commerce. So I have no problem with them being tag-synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T16:18:10.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T01:46:30.983" Score="-7" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondering how serious do all of out tags have to be?  Many/most certainly could use a very good and serious answer.  However, I was having a little fun with 'computer' and for the Excerpt put in &quot;I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.&quot;  (HAL 9000) because I didn't think that particular tag needed a serious explanation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it might be kind of fun to have a few like this here and there if the tag seemed obvious enough, and the expanded text could still have a 'good' answer.  Thoughts? Opinions?  I bring this up of course because that and one other I was having fun with were rejected so thought I'd ask.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T08:22:30.837" Title="I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="491" CreationDate="2014-11-05T02:12:38.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Tags are Serious Business.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are one of the essential sorting mechanisms that we use to connect questions with experts and solutions with users. Relatively few SE users read all the documentation, so the &lt;em&gt;practice&lt;/em&gt; of tagging (including how we write tag wikis) is the primary way they learn how the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If every user was well-educated about tags, tag jokes might be more feasible. However, because tags are so crucial to the Stack Exchange 'pile of well-sorted questions and answers' goal, we really should make sure that tags model behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So do the Serious Stuff first, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; add levity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you slip a reference like this into a tag wiki that &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; has all the useful and necessary tag wiki content, that shouldn't be a problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T02:12:38.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="491" CreationDate="2014-11-05T08:22:30.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/492/29&quot;&gt;BESW's answer&lt;/a&gt; in that &lt;strong&gt;tags are not something that we should joke about.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I also want to add two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, personally &lt;strong&gt;I would also have rejected that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/2225&quot;&gt;tag wiki excerpt edit&lt;/a&gt; outright&lt;/strong&gt; since it doesn't do anything to aid anyone in knowing when to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computers&lt;/a&gt; tag. A better tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt would have discussed how we use and expect users to use that tag; &lt;em&gt;for example,&lt;/em&gt; does it pertain only to electronic computers, or are questions about mechanical computers acceptable (cue someone perhaps asking about situations which might lead a civilization to develop &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;difference engines&lt;/a&gt; but never advance beyond that)? What about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the concept of computing&lt;/a&gt; without involving the use of any particular invention? And so on. There are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; nuances to such a tag that can &lt;em&gt;and should&lt;/em&gt; be captured in the tag wiki, in order to guide people on how and when to use the particular tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the edit was rejected by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;the director of Community Development for Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. That alone should tell plenty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T08:22:30.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T14:51:37.737" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technological-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technological-development&lt;/a&gt;. The later being used to ask question about how technology develops &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; your fictive world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to exclude scientific research that doesn't directly pertain to technology. If I for instance am interested in the scientific worldview a pre flight society on the moon of a gas giant might have, tagging as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technological-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technological-development&lt;/a&gt; would not be appropriate, but neither would &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we introduce a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scientific-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scientific-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scientific-development&lt;/a&gt; for questions like these, we might rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technological-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technological-development&lt;/a&gt;, add it as a synonym or make it a separate tag altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a question that could use this tag, I present you with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1464/328&quot;&gt;What if time travel had to take into account spatial distance?&lt;/a&gt; Which in part asks, what kind of experiments scientists might perform to study time travel with certain restraints. This doesn't quite fit under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technological-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technological-development&lt;/a&gt; umbrella, but would certainly benefit from a tag that indicates a focus on in-universe scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T15:46:05.127" Title="Do we need [tag:scientific-development]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="495" CreationDate="2014-11-05T15:46:05.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is usual with questions about tags. If you have a &lt;strong&gt;genuine use&lt;/strong&gt; (as in, you were writing / saw a question and went &lt;em&gt;&quot;That needs &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scientific-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scientific-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scientific-development&lt;/a&gt;!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) just go ahead and make the tag. As long as you &lt;strong&gt;make sure you write the tag wiki for it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review it in a month or so and see if the tag has anyone else using it. If not, considered deleting it from the question, which will automatically kill the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would much prefer seeing questions about merging tags than I would see questions about making them on meta. If you think the tag is needed for a current question, use it. Chances are someone else will probably want to use it as well. If its too similar to another, someone will see and propose a synonym/merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T15:46:05.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="481" CreationDate="2014-11-06T09:45:50.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These types of questions are okay, but I feel one should build slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you've linked to is an example why someone should start with a small change and then make follow up questions. Right now, it's a total mess and the answers are not interesting at all - humans end up extinct or in a wildlife preserve, and fairies are the new humans. Whatever interesting social dynamics you were looking for, they're not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T09:45:50.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2014-11-06T19:18:43.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How broad is too broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's rephrase the question &lt;strong&gt;&quot;How might I hack into a Linux web server&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Well now we have a real world question we can answer. We could write an entire book on very specific vectors (heartbleed, shellshock, etc), or we could answer the question in broad strokes (find or inject a vulnerable component, hit that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broad stroke approach would arguably provide a sufficient answer for this question, but if someone wants to invest some time writing a canonical answer, well hey, why not. That would actually probably be rather useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is a slightly handwavy answer sufficient? Is it OK to talk about general principles of hackery and how they might relate to the situation at hand, educating and enlightening the person, or do we want a single right solution (e.g. hit bash with a specially crafted request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use the hackneyed metaphor, do we want to give the questioner a fish, or do we want to teach them to fish? This is a question we will have to tackle as a community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well clearly questions have to be limited in some way, otherwise we have anarchy, but there are lots of ways to limit a question. We can limit to two domains and how they overlap (venn diagram style), or to a specific type of circumstance. The question needs to be clear, but it can still be a little open, because, by definition, the user doesn't know the answer before they ask it and may not be able to narrow it down without assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say there's a place for all these approaches on this site. For exact answers, for broad principle answers limited to a very specific domain, and even for long form answers if the user has the time, provided of course they are limited to a very specific domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How broad is too broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that a question asking for a limited set of principles from a well specified domain and how they might in principle apply to a situation is acceptable. Perhaps that's just me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think denying questions like this one sucks some of the joy out of the site. Perhaps that's just me too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="917" LastEditorUserId="917" LastEditDate="2014-11-07T10:26:15.357" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T10:26:15.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="501" CreationDate="2014-11-07T15:28:28.490" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that we have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-world&lt;/a&gt; tag. I perused the (7) questions  using it and noticed that most of them really didn't have much to do with alternate worlds. They all would be perfectly identifiable with only  the other tags they used. Does anyone else think that these questions poorly use the tag, or that we don't need the tag at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2014-11-07T15:43:01.677" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T08:05:12.567" Title="What's been wrong with the alternate-world tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="467" CreationDate="2014-11-07T16:06:44.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we could attract more answers if we could, as a community, find a good way to bend the Q&amp;amp;A pattern into more of a dialogue.  I see a fair number of questions that look like &quot;I know exactly what I want to ask, but I'm trying to be generic so my question is two sentences long.&quot;  And a few &quot;people are going to need to answer my question using only what I provide, so &lt;strong&gt;text wall!&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I, personally, am lured in by the possibility of my answer being accepted or upvoted a ton, so I find myself pressuring myself to answer quickly instead of drawing the author in and finding an answer together as opposed to throwing one at them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I posit that the real reward of answering Worldbuilding questions is a chance to visit their world, and make it better&lt;/strong&gt;.  Any cultural shifts within the group which make that easier strike me as really good places to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T16:06:44.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="499" CreationDate="2014-11-07T16:35:16.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt; tag that functions to define worlds as earth like in all ways except those specified in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-world&lt;/a&gt; is redundant, and less descriptive in it's meaning.  Alternate can mean totally unlike Earth or like Earth (just the English definitions I mean, the meaning is well spelled out in the tag definition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T08:05:12.567" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T08:05:12.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-08T11:02:20.163" Score="16" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3821/golf-colored-magic-makes-my-faeries-too-powerful&quot;&gt;Colored magic makes my faeries too powerful&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it on topic? Off topic? Something we want to encourage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself is on topic, but is the way it's presented (as a competition), or the fact that it's not actually trying to solve a &quot;real&quot; world building question a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had several hypothetical questions asked and answered because someone was curious and exploring a concept so we've already established that &quot;real&quot; world building is not a requirement, although we do prefer it as it makes it easier to keep things concrete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T05:21:22.777" Title="Are Worldbuilding Golf questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2014-11-08T12:43:46.843" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I haven't misunderstood, this is a &quot;let's all play a fun game&quot; question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Puzzles and Golf are all about this type of thing, and that's all fine and jolly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it's on topic here? I would say it's a reasonable and enjoyable question. The preamble adds specific rules which turns it into more of a forum style chat game. I would say for me this is the problematic part, as we already have rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assessment. Without the preamble: on topic; with the preamble: probably not. Just my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="917" LastEditorUserId="917" LastEditDate="2014-11-09T19:46:47.793" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T19:46:47.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2014-11-08T13:30:29.610" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually kinda like the idea, but I don't think its a good fit for this site. The asker points out the issue in the opening of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Golf, unlike Code Golf is a subjective effort. Very few&#xA;  worlds can be summed up as fast as &quot;shortest program&quot; or &quot;use only&#xA;  punctuation,&quot; which are easy fodder for Code Golf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the asker says, Worldbuilding Golf by nature is subjective. That means it doesn't work very well. Do we reward answers that are creative? Or answers that most fully answer the question? Ideally that would be one and the same, but I doubt that will happen a lot. It's hard to do a &quot;subjective&quot; contest like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T13:30:29.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2014-11-08T21:02:45.990" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers on Worldbuilding.SE are intended to help in the worldbuilding process. They are not intended to help with writing style or layout. Useful answers are written with this single purpose, not in an artificially condensed writing style for the purposes of a game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love the idea of having games (this one and others) which can bring us together as a community in healthy competition. I'd like to see this discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and maybe regular challenges set up similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/850/chatroom-writing-exercises-log&quot;&gt;those held at writers.SE&lt;/a&gt;. However, &lt;strong&gt;it is important that games be kept separate from the Q&amp;amp;A part of the site&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By all means set up a chat room specifically for planning and organising games. You can also use a meta post to discuss what this should involve and to provide an up to date summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer draws on the useful advice I received in response to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/341/is-there-an-appropriate-way-to-build-a-free-world-on-our-site&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; about building a world collaboratively.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.667" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T21:02:45.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2014-11-09T01:35:06.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fine to propose question drives, challenges, and contests -- &lt;em&gt;on meta&lt;/em&gt;.  Embedding all that into a question &lt;em&gt;on main&lt;/em&gt; is problematic, and that will have to be edited out before the question can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular game (&quot;golf&quot;?) proposal strikes me as needing some work.  It seems to encourage brainstorming on a discussion forum.  Stack Exchange sites are not for free-form brainstorming, and they are not discussion fora.  &lt;em&gt;Chat&lt;/em&gt; is a great venue for that and our site's chat room is frequently quite active, so please avail yourself of the opportunities there.  If you (meaning the author of the question on main) want to pursue the &quot;golf&quot; proposal, please make a new post &lt;em&gt;on meta&lt;/em&gt; explaining the idea, how it would work, and how it fits the Stack Exchange model.  The fewer established principles you violate, the better the odds are of it working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are meant to be useful for the long-term.  Any limitation in a question like announcing a time period during which answers are welcome runs afoul of this.  The asker of a question is of course free to share any constraints he himself is operating under (like &quot;I need to submit a draft in two weeks&quot;, but if somebody comes across the question six months later and has a good answer, nothing in the question should discourage him from offering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this specific question, I can't tell what the question actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;.  I see it was closed for being off-topic; I would have closed as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;.  My advice to the OP would be to cut all the contest meta stuff and then clarify what remains into a clear question that the community could then reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T01:35:06.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="508" CreationDate="2014-11-09T12:22:35.283" Score="12" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a community we've helped each other construct worlds, build ideas and solve difficult problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's time for a little self promotion to show off what our community has achieved. What have you created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T14:31:07.147" Title="What have we built?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="507" CreationDate="2014-11-09T12:24:43.640" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please edit answer and post your success stories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Liath&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00PEKMXP6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Delta Fay and the Lady from Arendal&lt;/a&gt; - When Delta is summoned home from her mutually agreed exile and dispatched halfway around the world she wants to know why. But this time she isn't travelling alone, as the young woman is thrown into a foreign conspiracy she must protect not only herself but the person she holds most dear... &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/deltafay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;@DeltaFay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T14:31:07.147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T14:31:07.147" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-09T12:24:43.640" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-09T21:36:52.347" Score="7" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious how we can improve the quality of our open-ended based questions such that they are on-par in terms of long-term value to our more fact-based questions.  &lt;strong&gt;Could the answers to open-form questions that try to provide direction rather than typical answers make the open-form Q&amp;amp;A as valuable as the more traditional closed-form Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find myself dividing questions into two major categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed-form or fact-based questions:  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is X plausable?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open-form or opinion-based questions: &lt;em&gt;&quot;What happens if Y?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Closed-form questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I categorize questions this way in my mind, closed-form questions have a common pattern.  It comes with an attitude of &lt;em&gt;&quot;I have this great idea, but I do not know if my readers/visitors will accept it or not.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  Whether X is really plausible doesn't really matter much for these cases... what matters is whether the visitors to the world will accept it or not.  If they accept it, hang plausibility!  Viva imagination!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we don't know what our visitors will actually say until they visit our world, so we have to be more strict.  The value of the closed-form questions seems to be very similar to the alternate hypothesis/null hypothesis structure used in science.  &lt;em&gt;&quot;If I did have a visitor who didn't accept my idea, what fact based evidence can be presented to defend my position.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1452/could-underwater-living-organism-create-technology&quot;&gt;This is very evident in questions like the Could underwater living organism create technology&lt;/a&gt; series, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/541/natural-projectile-weapons&quot;&gt;Natural Projectile Weapons&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect is to say &lt;em&gt;&quot;visitors should generally not disbelieve things that exist in reality, so if we can find real defenses for our idea, then it will be easier to give our visitors a believable world.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these closed form questions, the results appear clear to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Affirmative answers (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Yes, X is plausible&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) have immediate and obvious long term value, especially to google searchers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negative answers (&lt;em&gt;&quot;No, X is not plausible because of Y&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) bug me for other reasons, but they also have obvious long term value to save future worldbuilders time on ideas that lack believability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Open-form questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With open form questions, the situation is murkier.  This is Worldbuilding.  We are trying to be creative, and inspire creativity.  If someone asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;What happens if Y,&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the question is officially open for creative answers, if not perhaps risking becoming a &quot;list&quot; question outright.  What is the judging criteria for a large group of creative people exercising their creativity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble with the long term value of such questions for worldbuilders and google searchers.  So much creativity goes into the answers to open-form questions, that it would be tempting for the next worldbuilder to just start from them.  However, I do not believe that's world building; rather, that is world &lt;em&gt;borrowing&lt;/em&gt;.  We didn't help them build the next world.  In fact, we may have impeded creativity in the long run by distracting future searchers from finding their own simple worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Using &quot;direction&quot; answers to reign in open-form questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see one approach which appears to have great promise when I mull it over.  While all of our creative juices will take us to different and incomparable places, we share one common point: we all start from the question's point of reference, and then take off running from there.  Right at the start of our run, we all share a common direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This direction is interesting to me because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two very creative people can come up with different worlds, but start running in the same direction, meaning those two people are likely to agree upon what is a good direction(answer) vs. a bad direction(answer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone asking an open-form question is going to be re-imagining our answers in the end, so all they really need is the direction.  Then they'll let their own creativity flow!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future Google searchers will see not just point destinations, but entire paths where they can get off at any time and stretch their own imagination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of end-point vs direction answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(end-point) Aquatic beings would have trouble getting to the moon because water ties us together closers, so family structures would be tight and it would be hard to find astronauts.  They'd probably rely on sending fish to the moon first, likely a carp because they're intelligent.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Natural next question: &quot;Is there a better fish than a carp to land on the moon?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(direction) Aquatic culture would be dominated by tidal forces because water can exert more force than air (scuba divers are warned about undertow).  This would cause cultures to be closer knit because that makes it easier to not be separated by undertow.  Close family ties could have a huge effect on how a culture grows towards colonizing the moon.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Natural next question: How would close knit family structures affect the growth of technology towards landing on the moon?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the aquatic series of questions is barking up this tree.  It is shaping up into a series of closed-form questions that add up to an open-form journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this &quot;direction not endpoint&quot; or &quot;the journey, not the destination&quot; attitude has promise for maximizing value from our open-form questions.  So I'd love to ask others what creative solutions they might have to help turn the answers to open-form questions into directions.  However, in the spirit of consistency, I am going to stop short of asking that open-form question.  Instead...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could the answers to open-form questions that try to provide direction rather than typical answers make the open-form Q&amp;amp;A as valuable as the more traditional closed-form Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/strong&gt;   The best answers would include suggestions of things that could be done to provide more direction, or suggestions as to why direction isn't the way WB needs to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T16:18:29.010" Title="Is there a way to improve &quot;open ended&quot; questions by focusing on the journey rather than the destination" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2014-11-10T05:21:22.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the motivating principle behind golf was stated by William of Ockham: more parsimonious explanations are more believable. In the case of this particular question, I myself think the setup itself needs to be golfed down first, but I'm not sure the asker would necessarily agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magical phenomena result from three different orthogonal fields. A single spell can be positive or negative in each of these fields, but a positive spell and a negative spell in the same place, at the same time, and in the same field cancel out. Mages explain this using an analogy to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opponent process&lt;/a&gt; of color vision: &amp;quot;you can't have something both red and green.&amp;quot; Faeries, being smaller and more numerous than humans, can band together to manipulate magical fields at a finer detail than a single human can, allowing them to make use of sharper gradients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the motive for asking a &amp;quot;golf&amp;quot; question is to find the most parsimonious explanation for a phenomenon, in order to make the phenomenon not feel contrived. It's sort of like the difference between what members of a literary analysis wiki call &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Justified_Trope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;justification&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and what they call a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hand_Wave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;handwave&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. To fit the goal of golf into a question that has an answer, one could finish by stating Occam's razor explicitly in the question, as I did in an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the most parsimonious justification for how Humans can continue to thrive despite Faeries' finer control of magical color gradients?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T05:21:22.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-10T07:41:30.760" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had some discussion before about whether &lt;strong&gt;software recommendation&lt;/strong&gt; questions are on topic. This meta question is not about software recommendation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I want to pose the question of whether questions about &lt;strong&gt;development of software&lt;/strong&gt; which may be useful in worldbuilding would be on topic. As an example, &lt;strong&gt;I present you&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/410/29&quot;&gt;What is the most efficient data-structure to store planet elevation?&lt;/a&gt; which was closed by community vote during the site's private beta period. Two of those who closed the question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;myself&lt;/a&gt;) subsequently were appointed pro tem moderators on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling was at the time and remains that this type of question is a poor fit for &lt;em&gt;this site&lt;/em&gt; because it is not a type of question that a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding expert&lt;/em&gt; would be expected to be able to answer. Depending on exactly how you frame it this is a software development, computer science or geographical information sciences question; it is not a question about how to make a world work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, this type of questions are likely a better fit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (because it is essentially about the design process of a geographic information system) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the Programmers Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (because it is about algorithms and data structure concepts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the community feel about this type of questions?&lt;/strong&gt; Do we want them to be on topic? &lt;em&gt;Can&lt;/em&gt; they be on topic? (Please provide a good rationale beyond what essentially amounts to &quot;I think we should cater to everyone's needs in everything that can be peripherally related to worldbuilding because I think it makes for cool questions&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific question mentioned as an example, replace the concept of &quot;worldbuilding&quot; with &quot;map-making in the real world&quot;; &lt;strong&gt;would you still feel the same way about the question?&lt;/strong&gt; Because the question in that case remains essentially the same: what data structures would be a good choice for storing a particular type of data? If you feel differently about the question in that case, please explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let's hash this out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T21:33:51.787" Title="Are questions about how to develop worldbuilding software on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2014-11-10T08:14:59.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the benefit of making voting clear, I'll post an answer with an explicit alternative. Feel free to add other answers if you agree with the sentiment but disagree with the reasoning, or for that matter if you disagree with my stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about development of worldbuilding software should be off topic on the Worldbuilding SE for the reasons laid out in the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T10:51:40.133" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T10:51:40.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2014-11-10T13:02:49.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A general purpose Blog&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think world building has plenty of topics to write about in a blog and probably more than enough people who can write the entries (writers are a large part of the audience after all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here is what I would suggest as appropriate topics for our blog:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remarkable questions and answers, possibly in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.blogoverflow.com/2014/10/highlights-from-2014-3rd-quarter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a quarterly recap&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Showcasing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/507/328&quot;&gt;something one of our users has achieved&lt;/a&gt; with our help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/509/328&quot;&gt;Ideas&lt;/a&gt; about the scope of our site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/23/328&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding related software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the purpose of this blog?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two topics I suggested deal with promotion and hopefully need no further explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of our site is a difficult beast, since we all come from a different background and world building can at times be difficult to keep objective. There have been many discussions on meta and in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; about the scope of our site and whether a certain question is or isn't on-topic. A blog would be a great place to elaborate on the argumentation behind your views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is another thing that is difficult for us to talk about in the current format. A blog would be an ideal place to write a review (which would be too opinionated and too extensive for the main site) or compare a bunch of software with a similar purpose (this avoids list-type questions). There are possibly other topics like this that might be more appropriate on the blog than on the main site. (Perhaps books about world building?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the benefit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that by now, you've already spotted the various ways this will benefit our community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It offers a way for us to promote our high quality questions and good users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It helps us shape our site into a better one. (Any additional discourse of ideas can only benefit us)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows us to talk about topics that relate to world building but fit poorly within the Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These advantages should be obvious and sufficient to justify the existence of a world building blog. There's another reason for this blog to exist though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of our users are aspiring writers who would no doubt embrace an opportunity to contribute to a blog about a topic they (hopefully) love. These blog posts shouldn't just list facts or be a bunch of links. They should be engagingly written and should thus be a good platform for people wanting to practice their writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T13:02:49.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2014-11-10T14:11:44.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/276/1993&quot;&gt;similar issue&lt;/a&gt; came up in the early days of Writers.  We ultimately decided that questions about &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; software, if they were tied in with writing and not general tool use, are ok, but questions about &lt;em&gt;specifying or writing that software&lt;/em&gt; are not.  (We also noted that some software-&lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; questions really belong on Super User.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should take a similar approach here.  Questions about how to write software &lt;em&gt;for use by&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilders are not really questions &lt;em&gt;about worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;.  But we have relevant experts here, so I see why someone would come here for that.  If somebody wants to gather use cases or requirements from the experts here, I think chat is the ideal tool there (and could go along with a meta question).  So yes we can help software developers, but not on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/512/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, and am posting this to offer additional reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:03.667" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T14:11:44.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2014-11-10T15:14:38.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Closed-form questions&quot; sound like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. So it seems we're defining the scope of all of WB outside that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discouraging world borrowing is the same broken window fallacy used to rationalize over-expansion of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, your &quot;direction&quot; point reminds me of the &quot;answers that explain why and how&quot; from the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;&quot; essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &quot;what happens if Y?&quot; questions can be reworded as &quot;In the background of a particular species or culture in this world, what challenges would they have had to overcome due to Y, and how might they have done so?&quot;. This is still open ended but less overly broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="601" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T15:14:38.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2014-11-10T16:16:58.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can change the question, see here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/92078/possible-about-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/92078/possible-about-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However we need a Q&amp;amp;A on the site that matches those criteria, and so far we have none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you need a Question and an Answer where both are less than 400 characters long, both have no fancy formatting, and both have a positive score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 400 character limit is probably what is killing us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T16:16:58.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2014-11-10T16:18:29.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like your take on what you term &quot;open-form questions&quot; this is generally how I approach these questions.  for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3739/what-is-the-distance-between-large-settlements/3901#3901&quot;&gt;What is the distance between large settlements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2838/how-can-i-ensure-my-cities-dont-all-all-look-the-same/2900#2900&quot;&gt;How can I ensure my cities don&amp;#39;t all look the same?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which came up today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is a teach a man to fish kind of scenario.  I don't want to create a world for other people, I want to assist them in creating their own with methods I have found useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T16:18:29.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2014-11-10T21:43:47.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;overactor makes good points, and I'd like to see everything he suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd also like to see blog posts written on the process of world-building itself. From the organization of ideas down to how much history you need to think up down to whether you need to define the gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of questions on subjects like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19/539&quot;&gt;How does one go about developing a language for a particular culture in your world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/824/539&quot;&gt;Is there an effective way to design a realistic religion for a world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/524/539&quot;&gt;Is there an established framework to create a language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/948/539&quot;&gt;What are the key questions you have to answer when designing a fictitious society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We turn away most of them for being opinion based or too broad, (As we should) but these are legitimate questions for a group of experts on world-building, and I think we can answer them by writing and posting well researched blog posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only would I like to read these blog posts, but I'd be more than willing to write a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T21:43:47.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2014-11-10T22:08:27.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a supplement to other answers, another type of blog post I'd like to see is &lt;strong&gt;case studies&lt;/strong&gt;.  I mean a blog post where somebody &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; this site to help build a world and writes about that, including linking to the questions he either asked or found that helped him.  Particularly if there's a case where somebody used several questions for one project, it'd be cool to see how that worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T22:08:27.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2014-11-10T23:33:27.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of voting, I'll argue that questions like these are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons for this include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since it's a problem someone may encounter while worldbuilding, why not help with that? After all, the scope includes &quot;Specific issues with worldbuilding&quot; and &quot;Real problems or questions that you’ve encountered&quot; (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the community is comprised of people who have, are, and want to build their own worlds, it stands to reason that people here will know the answers to these questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an answer to the argument that it should be off-topic because it's not &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; related to worldbuilding, that same argument would make &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software questions off-topic, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/23/2072&quot;&gt;the community has already decided that software questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can think of more reasons that these questions would be on-topic, I would certainly welcome those as comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T23:33:27.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2014-11-10T23:57:28.550" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fairly significant aspect of world building is procedural world creation.  Implementation details would generally make more sense on StackOverflow, GIS.SE or the like, but the higher level algorithms are fairly specialized and more likely to attract the attention of experts in the area here than they are in a general programming or GIS site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that raised this issue is a borderline case at best but a good question would be something like &quot;How can I generate a realistic set of river courses without needing to build a DEM?&quot;  This is the sort of thing only a world builder would need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T23:57:28.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="552" CreationDate="2014-11-11T05:54:25.203" Score="29" ViewCount="1983" Body="&lt;p&gt;We now have a dedicated &quot;Idea Generation&quot; close vote/flag reason!! What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the problem with &quot;idea generation&quot; questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T10:29:06.287" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T10:29:06.287" Title="What's wrong with &quot;idea generation&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|faq|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="522" CreationDate="2014-11-11T05:54:25.203" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, idea generation questions are not a good fit for the Stack Exchange model for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are no criteria for picking the best answer&lt;/strong&gt; -- everyone's ideas are equally valid; the question is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;too subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's just a kick-starter for a discussion or a debate&lt;/strong&gt; -- SE is not a forum (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/92107/266359&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92115/266359&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;), and does &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; care to have &quot;good discussions.&quot; These sites exist to answer questions, so if you want to start a discussion about a topic with no specific answer in mind, &lt;em&gt;this is not the site for you&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Ask answerable questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is not specific enough&lt;/strong&gt; -- for someone to be able to answer your question properly, ask about a &lt;em&gt;specific problem&lt;/em&gt; that you have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are too many answers&lt;/strong&gt; -- like I said before, all answers are equally valid; if you don't provide enough basis for the answering, the question is probably too broad. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real questions have answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, this &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243200/266359&quot;&gt;How to ask a good subjective question?&lt;/a&gt; for more information on asking good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above applies pretty much to all sites on the Stack Exchange network. A few points that are more or less specific to Worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/207/2072&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Storytelling and plot building are off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; because this site is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a content generation machine. To steal the examples from Robert's post, &quot;&lt;em&gt;What conditions have to exist in a world to explain giant insects?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is definitely on-topic, while &quot;&lt;em&gt;What would the world be like if it were ruled by giant insects?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is far too broad. The long and short of it is that you can ask a question here to see if something is plausible, but we won't write your book/game/movie for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this answer is not clear to you, feel free to bring it up in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;! I'll try to be available there (ping me by writing &lt;code&gt;@Shokhet&lt;/code&gt;), but there will probably be somebody there willing to explain it to you. Enjoy your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T05:49:32.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-12T12:06:08.193" Score="13" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;As our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/487/328&quot;&gt;recent question raising the idea of starting a blog&lt;/a&gt; showed, the community is interested in starting a blog with a variety of topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In this question, we will see what specific articles could fit within this blog.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should propose either a topic for a specific blog post (such as a review of &lt;a href=&quot;http://universesandbox.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;) or a topic for a regularly recurring blog entry (such as a monthly/quarterly recap of best answers and questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer should also contain an outline of how this blog post could be structured and why it is a good fit. People can then vote on the suggestions they like and dislike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posting a suggestion does not mean you commit to writing this blog entry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though you can of course express interest in writing it. Other people can also mention they would like to write a certain post, posted by another user by commenting on that post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that the blog actually starting is not a guarantee, and even if it does start, it might very well be quite a long time from now. Even so, I believe this question will prove useful if we need want to start a blog at some later time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T15:18:13.910" Title="Worldbuilding Blog - Specific article ideas" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2014-11-12T12:17:15.843" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility would be interviews. Maybe once a month a community member gets interviewed about what brings them to worldbuilding, what they are interested in, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interviewees could be high rep users (both long term and newcomers with a high impact on arrival), moderators, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2864/want-to-be-interviewed&quot;&gt;Want to be interviewed?&lt;/a&gt; If so, leave a note there.  Also leave a note there if you're interested in &lt;em&gt;conducting&lt;/em&gt; interviews; they don't all have to be by Tim, who's happy to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T04:28:27.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2014-11-12T13:41:52.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion is to have a short blog post/story/description of a world the author has created. Describe your world in 3 paragraphs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be happy to write one about &quot;Oss&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd describe briefly that Oss was a world I envisaged when writing about my character Delta Fay, I'd give a brief overview of how it's an archipelago of islands ruled by the Lords of the Isles, an Emperor and the rulers of the nine races.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd probably go on to give some nuget of information which isn't in the book, perhaps something I've planned but hasn't made it into the characters' storyline yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2014-11-12T13:56:57.297" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T13:56:57.297" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2014-11-12T13:44:18.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Masterclasses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;TimB&lt;/a&gt; posted some great questions a little while ago around creating a realistic world maps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/581/creating-a-realistic-world-map-landmass-formation&quot;&gt;Landmass formation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1353/creating-a-realistic-world-map-currents-precipitation-and-climate&quot;&gt;Currents, Precipitation and Climate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1020/creating-a-realistic-world-map-erosion&quot;&gt;Erosion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These could be turned into great How To articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T13:44:18.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="529" CreationDate="2014-11-13T05:20:15.673" Score="10" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged an answer yesterday as &quot;not an answer,&quot; leaving a comment saying as much (which got two upvotes). Someone else who reviewed the answer left the stock &quot;This does not provide an answer to the question&quot; comment, which also got two upvotes (one mine).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the answer was edited after the flag, and now I think that it does provide an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in my flagging history, the flag shows up like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;not an answer – Shokhet yesterday   declined - flags should only be&#xA;  used to make moderators aware of content that requires their&#xA;  intervention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.....say what? When else should &quot;not an answer&quot; flags be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2072" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T11:43:49.643" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T08:18:25.360" Title="Why was my flag declined with &quot;flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="528" CreationDate="2014-11-13T10:02:03.230" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your profile currently shows a single declined flag, so I assume that's the one you are talking about; that particular flag was handled by Tim B. I've taken another look at the answer, and the below is how I would reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags should ideally be used for content that is basically &quot;unsalvageable&quot; within the scope of the site. As you say that after the comments and the (later, small) edit, you feel the answer &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; answer the question, it follows that the edit turned the non-answer into an answer. That, to me, indicates that the answer was still an answer earlier, it was just in need of clarification of exactly what the answerer meant. It is also important to note that by the time Tim handled the flag, &lt;em&gt;that edit had already been made.&lt;/em&gt; Especially taking those two together, &lt;strong&gt;declining the flag seems to me to have been an appropriate course of action&lt;/strong&gt; at the time it was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the timeline was: post answer -&gt; flag answer -&gt; edit answer -&gt; review flag -&gt; decline flag as invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the answer downvote canonical reason: &lt;em&gt;This answer is not useful.&lt;/em&gt; That sounds applicable to an answer that needs to be more explicit about exactly what the answerer feels is the answer to the question. (Once the answer is clear, it may still be &lt;em&gt;wrong,&lt;/em&gt; which should warrant downvoting.) You don't say whether or not you downvoted, but there are no current downvotes on that answer, and I can see no evidence that the answer has been downvoted in that past and those downvotes reversed after the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, at the very least and by your own admission, at the time Tim handled the flag it was no longer valid, and at the time the flag was raised, really what the answer needed was a small amount of clarification about what the answerer felt the answer to the question was. That can be handled by commenting and downvoting, and does not require moderator intervention. (If you leave a comment asking the answerer to clarify an answer and after some reasonable time they have not, that may be reason to flag the answer. But do make sure to give it at least a few days or so; not everyone visits the site every day.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To try to sum up: an answer being &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;technically inaccurate&lt;/em&gt;) is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a reason to flag that answer; as I said above, it is a reason to downvote. Even more so on a site with as wide-ranging topics as the Worldbuilding SE, moderators are not and cannot be expected to be subject matter experts in every subject that ends up being asked about on the site. In this regard, think of us moderators, when we act in the role of moderators, more as janitors than experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you feel an answer is wrong or in need of clarification or expansion, then downvote, ideally following up with a comment and/or take it to chat as appropriate so the answerer becomes aware of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is wrong with the answer. Be willing to acknowledge that perhaps the problem was simply a misunderstanding that can be fixed by rephrasing the answer without actually changing its content. Do not flag &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; because an answer is technically inaccurate; &quot;only technical inaccuracy&quot; is even specifically a reason to decline a flag. Always respect the original poster; if they do not want to edit the answer (for whatever reason) after you make your case why the answer is wrong, respect that decision, but &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; consider downvoting answers which you feel are incorrect. Better yet, post an answer of your own with your view of things (take care to not make it dependent on any other answer; the question and any &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; answer should make sense when read together with no other context).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are able to fix the post without changing the original poster's intent, then edit to fix the problem. Everyone can propose edits, and users with (currently) 1,000 rep or higher are able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit immediately without community review&lt;/a&gt;. Keep in mind that editing a post bumps the question to the top of the front page, so please try to make edits substantial enough to count even when you have the rep to make minor edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a post is outright gibberish, spam, etc., is unlikely to be salvagable or even is outright unsalvagable (into some form appropriate to the site), then by all means flag it with an appropriate flag reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given appropriate reputation, &lt;em&gt;when appropriate, prefer&lt;/em&gt; voting to close, voting to delete, voting up/down, etc., over flagging. Flags show up separately to moderators, and we prefer keeping that to only content that actually requires moderator attention. &lt;strong&gt;This is not meant to say that you cannot flag; it's better to flag once too much than once too little&lt;/strong&gt; if you are uncertain. However, flags do end up in the moderator queues, and there are only three of us, so if some other action which you have access to will do equally well through community reviews, prefer that other action over flagging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Always flag spam or offensive content with the appropriate system-provided flag reason.&lt;/em&gt; Do not use custom flags for these. If enough people flag with those specific reasons, the flag is handled automatically by the system without requiring further human intervention. This automated handling does not work when people use custom flag reasons, even if the custom flag reason is for example &quot;spam!&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T08:18:25.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="528" CreationDate="2014-11-13T15:56:39.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the person who handled the flag I can't really add much to what Michael said but I can confirm that I was looking at the post-edit version. For the record though I would most likely have declined the flag even on the pre-edit version. The question is a reality-check - they are asking if something is possible. Replying saying it is not possible may or may not be wrong but is still an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall reason for declining flags like this is simple, it may have been a poor quality answer but it was still an answer. Poor quality answers should be down voted or deleted. There is no need for moderators to do anything with those answers as voting will automatically take them to the bottom of the list or even grey them out if they go negative enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; should be used for cases where the &quot;answer&quot; really is not an answer. A common case is where someone is asking for more information or clarification. Another case is where they are going off on a &lt;strong&gt;completely&lt;/strong&gt; unrelated tangent, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you have a &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; flag accepted for an answer that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question from an interesting point of view, but is this just a game or is there a concept involved with a real outcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly a comment asking for clarification, not an answer and is a perfect example of where a &lt;em&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/em&gt; flag is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have also been a number of flags on what were essentially link-only answers that have similarly been accepted. Note though that we as moderators and the community as a whole are all learning all the time and need to work out just what level of answers deserve what type of treatment so those standards may well change as we refine our understanding of how this site works best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T19:05:29.537" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T19:05:29.537" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T14:32:53.553" Score="14" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the edits for a post and I noticed that someone changed &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/neighboring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neighboring&lt;/a&gt;&quot; to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/neighbouring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neighbouring&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/270/4&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt;.  I've been avoiding edits like that on the assumption that people should be able to post in the variant that they want.  I know that I would be annoyed if one of my posts was given British spellings.  British (or Australian, etc.) spellers would presumably be annoyed to see spellings changed in their posts to the American version.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all this is complicated by the use of spell checkers, which tend to mark one or the other spelling as incorrect (neighbouring is marked incorrect as I look at it now).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a site policy on this?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T19:22:49.950" Title="Should we prefer British or American spelling?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="531" CreationDate="2014-11-16T14:45:26.307" Score="20" Body="&lt;h2&gt;So long as it's consistent within a single post, it doesn't matter what style is used.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming, of course, that it meets all other guidelines for politeness, legibility, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no useful way to define a standard version of English for the site--even within, say, American English, we'd have to choose which &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;style guide&lt;/a&gt; to adhere to. We cater to people all around the world, and so long as we're internally consistent and otherwise follow guidelines, it doesn't matter how many 'u's we put in our words, or whether quotation marks come before or after closing punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything more stringent than &quot;understandable and internally consistent&quot; will make the site unnecessarily unwelcoming to the experts who we already ask to jump through several hoops in order to participate in the Great Stack Experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Other Stack sites have had this discussion, and this is the general consensus that gets reached.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; get people who just plain don't know their style of English isn't a universal style. They make unnecessary edits in good faith, and while individual education can help with that, it's not an issue that will ever go away. We should be glad they're taking such an interest in the site's quality (as they think they're improving posts by removing actual &lt;em&gt;mistakes&lt;/em&gt; in style/grammar/spelling) and deal with them graciously as we help them direct their efforts toward more productive site tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T15:03:06.237" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T15:03:06.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="531" CreationDate="2014-11-16T19:22:49.950" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the Stack Exchange system actually provides a bit of guidance in the matter. Consider the description of the &lt;strong&gt;no improvement whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt; reason for rejecting an edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that only changing from one style of spelling to another, without any other improvements, falls into that category. While the edit might not make the post &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; to read, in the general case such edits fairly clearly don't make them easier to read either. They might for some subset of people visiting the site, but far from necessarily all people visiting the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, things get a bit more difficult if such edits are made at the same time as fixing other, more immediate problems with the post. At that point, it pretty much comes down to a sort of judgment call; is the post, on the whole, &lt;em&gt;better with the edits than without them?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the &lt;em&gt;most correct&lt;/em&gt; way to handle such a situation is to pick the &lt;em&gt;improve edit&lt;/em&gt; option, and change the spelling back to the original poster's style while keeping the improvements, but if the post is substantial it might be that the person reviewing the edit might not have the time to do so. This would be the correct course of action if the edits, besides the particular flavor of English used, are substantial enough to stand on their own. If I am not completely mistaken, this will award the +2 reputation to the editor for the edit, it will show as accepted and be stored as a revision, and a separate revision will be created with the reviewer's edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if the edit is mostly such style changes and only one or a few things that actually improve the post, pick &lt;em&gt;reject and edit&lt;/em&gt; and carry the good changes forward. That way the edit will be rejected, and the editor can become aware of the fact that edits that consist primarily of such style changes are undesired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, always keep in mind that we all start out as newcomers to the network, and try to explain why you take the action you do in the review, so that the person on the other end of the keyboard can learn from the experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T19:22:49.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2014-11-20T19:24:54.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that I've wanted for a long time but couldn't do by myself, but I think the community here would be perfect for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the purpose?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To fill a niche. There are actually a lot of worldbuilding blogs out there, but almost every one of them is focused on worldbuilding in service to a particular end, mostly fiction writing. So their content leans towards questions of how to make things immersive or how to get certain bits of information to the reader over the course of a story, and so on. A blog that focuses on the worldbuilding for its own sake would fill a void, in my opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To cultivate community. Since stackexchange is primarily for the asking and answering of questions only, a blog is a good place for communication and recognition beyond that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It brings more attention to the main exchange. A decently run blog with quality content will attract people and lead to more engagement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the scope?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO a dream blog would be one &amp;quot;Dedicated the the process of worldbuilding,&amp;quot; which is actually extremely broad and could allow for some very interesting articles. The one place where I think we should keep things restricted is in terms of &amp;quot;Worldbuilding for&amp;quot; another purpose. There are already lots of blogs and articles about how to worldbuild in fiction, for games, for movies, and so on. I don't know if it would be wise to bar all such material, but I think it should be limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Material that could be included would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elaborations on more open ended questions, as Danny Reagan mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews of material with an eye specifically for the worldbuilding underpinning that material. i.e. Avatar and the way its world is built out of a few basic cornerstones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles about looking at the way our world works and how that can be incorporated into a project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spotlights on member projects and specific ways they went about solving problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews of tools and resources, which I think was mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles on process, how to distribute population, how to place waterways, how to manage timelines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles on alternate approaches to worldbuilding: worldbuilding through music, more extreme or surreal worlds, small scale projects, etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles on the history of conworlds. This shit has been going on for forever, well before Tolkien, and it would be interesting to talk more about things like universal myth, old texts where the authors dreamt up everything in them, and so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Themes, tropes, and cliches, and how certain settings dealt with them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contests a la the worldbuildling subreddit, where a topic is offered and people provide a few paragraphs of worldbuildling in response, with the winner receiving the most votes from the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the blogs that have made it, their material goes far beyond what may be pertinent to the stackexchange site, and digs into the topic itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Material I'd resist would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The aforementioned &amp;quot;worldbuilding for...&amp;quot; type articles. They've been written before, many times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General world overviews. Very few people enjoy reading world descriptions of the &amp;quot;Races, Continents, Religions,&amp;quot; variety. Spotlights should focus on a specific element, either a cultural detail, a political moment, a geologic anomaly, or so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors using the blog to brainstorm. I think the focus should be on what other people are doing and how they are doing it. Otherwise the blog risks becoming insular and irrelevant to anyone but those personally invested in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that with worldbuilding it is particularly useful to have a blog that comes from a community, because as a hobby it encompasses pretty much everything, and people come from it with different focuses. A lot of the stackechange com seems to be interested in the science of it all, but I personally spend most of my time reading anthropologies, histories, and folklore, and am more interested in high fantasy and mythopoea. There's a lot we can learn from each other, and having a single blog that brings it all together would be an excellent forum for that engagement. Like I said, I've wanted one for forever, but there's only so much a single contributor can provide. If the blog is established I can commit to writing something once a month at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T19:24:54.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T11:54:26.963" Score="11" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before anyone worries, we're doing really well as a beta. Our stats are really good. This post is looking for ways to improve something we are already doing well, it is not prompted by any concerns on performance so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However having said that we do seem to have stagnated over the last month or two, overall activity has been flat or even slightly decreased and while we have a solid level of new content being generated it would be nice to see activity increasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search traffic will naturally increase as we get more quality questions and answers, for example in a search for &quot;should merfolk have vertical tails&quot; we already have the first three links in the results page pointing to worldbuilding. On the other hand though as the site has grown it seems to have got harder for us to get into Hot Network Questions which previously was luring a lot of traffic our way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to improve visibility or activity? Is there anywhere we should be spreading the word? Are there any banners or other similar material that we need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should we just be patient and accept that it will take time to build up the site? The value of the site naturally grows over time as the pool of questions and answers increases and as more people become aware of us. Maybe we just need to give that process time to bear fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T12:47:52.543" Title="How do we increase Worldbuilding visibility and activity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2014-11-21T13:55:37.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I expect this is obvious, everyone who belongs to a book site, author group, RPG site etc. have posted (or will post) links back to WorldBuilding.  My suggestion is to grab (links to) questions/answers that you really like or seem to be relevant to the board you are posting on.  There are a couple places I post links now and then just to help point things this direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T12:47:52.543" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T12:47:52.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2014-11-21T18:01:34.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could use some techniques they use in the commercials. While some might say it's a bad idea because we might end up with interesting but shallow questions, it might get more people on the site form the other SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We saw that poorly written questions received little attention and often bad comments. The question is often good but can't get the attention she deserve. Some even got closed as being off topic. Most of the actives users here will check the question even if it's clunky but people from the outside are less likely to do the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, we need to make questions interesting for a wide audience. Try to use words that will hit their imagination, that will inspire people. We should be doing this without changing the meaning of the question and avoid being provocative intrinsically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe using complete sentences in the title could be a good start?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are too long need to be edited in a way that the&#xA;reader can quickly see what the question is about and separate the&#xA;important information from the complementary information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the text is hard to read, I won't bother. Or I will say : I will&#xA;read it later. The test need some editing but too much is not always better. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another idea would be to analyze the text of the questions and see what words attract more people. However, this might be complicated and I'm not sure how useful it would be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2014-11-21T20:14:15.100" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T20:14:15.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T19:57:55.847" Score="5" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent question (Fire in Zero-G) it was accurately pointed out that micro-G and zero-G are not the same thing (and rightly so).  Is it worth having these tags separately?, or can they be synonyms?  I find zero-g is most often used incorrectly to represent Mirco-gravity anyway, maybe this is best as a synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I do realize there is a thread saying not to ask about tag creation, this is one of those border line tag-differentiation / tag- synonym / tag - creation questions that I thought was worth defining)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T23:43:17.827" Title="Do we need a micro-gravity tag separate from Zero-G?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:10:38.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-g&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-g&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-g&lt;/a&gt; tag already has a description &lt;strong&gt;&quot;For questions about zero or low gravity environments&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; Since zero g is nearly always short hand for some degree of low gravity, there is no need for a separate tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In time &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-g&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-g&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-g&lt;/a&gt; may be absorbed into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt;, but there is no need for action at this point. There is nothing to be gained by adding a new tag for micro gravity, since the zero g tag works perfectly well. The distinction is not important since true zero g is unattainable in any practical setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T23:10:38.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:14:28.437" Score="13" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I tag something &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt; then while typing it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-g&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-g&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-g&lt;/a&gt; will not be suggested. However, if we instead had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-gravity&lt;/a&gt; tag then while typing the word &quot;gravity&quot;, both tags would be suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this would only involve adding a few letters to the tag (for which there are only 4 questions to consider), is there any reason not to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-05T14:49:40.240" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T14:49:40.240" Title="Should zero-g be renamed zero-gravity to aid the auto suggest?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="540" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:20:50.223" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; avoid abbreviations of important words in tags.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've just run into one major reason why: it makes it harder to find the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, we really should change this tag to spell out &quot;gravity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T23:20:50.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="540" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:28:46.973" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with the other thread on the topic here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/538/do-we-need-a-micro-gravity-tag-separate-from-zero-g&quot;&gt;Do we need a micro-gravity tag separate from Zero-G?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I think Zero-G should either be a synonym of Gravity or completely removed in favor of just using the gravity tag as it's covered by the more generic gravity tag.  Makes this a bit moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T23:28:46.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2014-11-21T23:43:17.827" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per vincent's comment, I believe using the less specific term 'Gravity' is preferential over breaking out specific gravity types such as Zero-Gravity, Micro-Gravity, High-Gravity, Earth-like-gravity and all the other possibilities that ultimately refer to specific strengths of Gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T23:43:17.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2014-11-22T00:23:20.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that developing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341/is-there-an-appropriate-way-to-build-a-free-world-on-our-site&quot;&gt;collaborative worlds&lt;/a&gt; to the point that stories and games are set in them will bring more awareness of the site. Recently interest in this seems to have dried up. I imagine it will need to hit a critical point of ease of use and breadth of content before contributions will grow sustainably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be good to see some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/505/109&quot;&gt;worldbuilding based games&lt;/a&gt; as a way of sparking interest. We are still getting dozens of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=NewUsers&amp;amp;sort=creationdate&quot;&gt;new users&lt;/a&gt; each day, so I think (as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/294/109&quot;&gt;said before&lt;/a&gt;) a big part of growing our community is hanging on to the new users we are already getting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't underestimate what a difference it can make to say something encouraging or welcoming to a new user. Explaining something that seems natural now but isn't obvious to a new user can make SE a much more comfortable place to be. Even closing a question can be a positive thing if a helpful comment is added (new users don't necessarily know that putting a question on hold is often a positive thing, to give the question time to improve).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T00:23:20.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:21:55.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T17:21:55.827" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T17:21:55.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:21:55.827" Score="0" Body="For questions that reference in some way a post from another Stack Exchange site. " OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T00:16:41.663" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T00:16:41.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:22:37.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for questions about Stack Exchange moderators, whether Community Managers, elected moderators or pro tempore moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Worldbuilding, the current list of elected moderators can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:59:00.650" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:59:00.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:22:37.967" Score="0" Body="For questions that are for or about the moderators of Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T00:16:36.037" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T00:16:36.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:25:53.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about changing a tag on Stack Exchange. This tag is also for questions that are about the creation or rethinking the usage of a tag on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T20:56:10.530" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T20:56:10.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:25:53.247" Score="0" Body="For questions about changing a tag on Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T20:56:31.960" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T20:56:31.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-24T00:07:23.217" Score="12" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a tremendous uptick in tag wiki edits lately, thanks to the work of a few dedicated users. I've reached the review limit of 20 over both of the past two 24-hour cycles, and I've begun making edits myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I've noticed, though, is that the tag summaries and excerpts vary quite a lot in their phrasing. Take a look at some of the other SE sites and you'll notice that there are patterns in the phrasing. It gives the tags a sense of order. While our tags contain a lot of good information, it gives the impression of descriptions thrown together helter-skelter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any ideas on standardizing the tag wikis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T21:34:41.643" Title="Can we please standardize the phrasing for the tag wikis?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="522" CreationDate="2014-11-25T15:49:35.323" Score="24" Body="&lt;h2&gt;When should I close a Question as &quot;Idea Generation&quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have an &quot;Idea Generation&quot; close reason, but it's important to apply it reasonably. In particular virtually every question on this site is asking for ideas to be generated in some way or another. The key thing that would cause a question to be closed with this reason is that the question is too open ended. In particular the main reason to close as &quot;Idea Generation&quot; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are too many possible answers to the question (Idea Generation is a subset of Too Broad)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no objective way to evaluate one idea as better than others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common symptom is that answers will tend to list a number of different possibilities rather than expanding on one. This is a consequence of the first problem, as the person posting the response has no way to know which of their ideas are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I get my &quot;Idea Generation&quot; Question re-opened?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These problems can almost always be solved by making a question less broad. If the question is scoped to the point that a single good answer (or at worst a few good candidates) can be written and identified as the best solution to the question then the question should be open. If it cannot then it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general if a question starts getting a large number of different answers, or if people start posting answers with multiple options, then the question is most likely Too Broad or Idea Generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best tools to solve this problem are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Break down the question into multiple smaller questions (we recommend asking the new questions one at a time so that later questions can build on the earlier ones)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define the starting or ending conditions more closely or narrow down the means to be used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specify an objective way to measure the validity of an idea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I wipe out humanity&quot; is Too Broad/Idea Generation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I wipe out humanity with these resources and in this timescale&quot; is Idea Generation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I wipe out as much of humanity as possible using a genetically engineered artificial plague and contemporary technology levels&quot; is On Topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference in the final question being that you have an objective measure to rate answers by (&quot;% survivors&quot;), specified resources and technology levels, and a sufficiently narrow scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T15:49:35.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T21:09:10.503" Score="6" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious if people aren't voting because they can't on the suggested combinations, (I voted for the only one I could) or they don't care either way on the current list  or they don't even know about the list to look at/for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we have 6 open for voting and I've been expecting some kind of movement (up or down).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it too early to seriously think about combining any tags yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly I'm looking for what my reasonable expectations should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDT: Just thought I'd bump this, we have two sets of tags that should have enough people to make a decision one way or the other, just wanted people to remember to take a look now and then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T21:24:45.447" Title="Tag Synonym voting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2014-11-25T21:18:18.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been active reviewing tag edits (and making a few myself), but I didn't know about the tag synonym voting. Thanks for bringing it to the attention of everyone who didn't know about it (unless that's just me!). I've tried to suggest synonyms before, but I learned that you need a score of at least 5 (I think) in the tag to suggest a synonym. That may contribute to a lack of participation, especially among the rarer tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I followed the link, by the way, but I was unable to vote on the synonyms (despite the fact that I'd like to). How do we go about doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T21:18:18.860" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T23:35:40.493" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Struggling to find a way to phrase this question in a manner that doesn't fit into an 'idea generation' format and keep it on-topic in WB's guidelines.  The question (with a bunch of caveats) boils down to why (or what motivation) humans would colonize a distant world fully knowing that contact between them and the Earth where they originate is near impossible (or take 10 years to send a message)?  This would include knowing that the original colonists making the decision to leave would not live long enough to see the world they are to colonize, nor would their children, but their great great grandchildren would be the ones to colonize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea's on how to write this question in a manner that isn't idea generation and keep it on topic?  Or is it good the way it sits here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easier to write this question as a what would society be like in such a format for the children / grand children that are forced into the transition lives between the two worlds...but I'm looking for a way to ask the motivational piece of what would encourage this send off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="288" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T15:33:58.493" Title="Is 'what would motivate us to...' on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="555" CreationDate="2014-11-28T01:07:19.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this site decided (indirectly and without formal vote) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/are-story-building-ideas-on-topic&quot;&gt;story building questions are ontopic&lt;/a&gt; as long as they tackle the history of your world, and your question is about the history of your colonies (/ world where the colonies start from), I see no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding your question should contain all informations about the mission itself (time of travel and time of communication), the political and social climate in which the astronauts starts and any additional informations that might be of interest (Aliens, Dangers ect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is in itself a discussion based question, I've seen worse on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strike&gt;As performance index you could choose simply the proposal which will most likely attract the most (soon-to-be) colonists.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You will however need a good performance index on which you choose an answer over another. Be it the costs for a promotion campaign, the smallest ecological impact necessary ect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be short, keep your question as simple as: &lt;strong&gt;What could be the most important motivation for my colonists?&lt;/strong&gt; (with above details in the question body + your desired performance index).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T11:45:40.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="555" CreationDate="2014-11-28T09:48:44.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three kinds of questions (Okay, I lie, there are lots more, but most of them fall into this model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is a starting point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X is what changed between A and B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B is the end point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question is only really a valid question if at least two of those points are well defined. We tend to have problems (ideas generation) with questions that go I have A and did X, tell me B (written AX?); they are often very open ended and so need to be really focused.&#xA;i.e. What happens if I throw a moon at a planet? A is the normal state of those two bodies, X is causing them to collide, B is the result you want to know. (very basic I know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have A and B, what was X is probably the most common question we get, and they are normally always very focused. (Written A?B)&#xA;How do I throw a moon at a planet? You start with the same A as before, B is your collision, and X is how you go about it. Great fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have B and X happened, what would A have been? (Written ?XB) These are the rarest of the question that fit into this category. However they can generally be rewritten into A?B (and should be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, it presents as a ?XB that is really an A?B question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why would a group of colonists to want to leave, knowing that they would never be able to interact with Earth again?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A is standard Earth (define it. How is it different from current day?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B is leaving with no chance of turning back, or communicating, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X is the reason for leaving, which would be something that happened that you want defined. Was there an opportunity? Did something on Earth change? Was there something in their lives that caused them to re-evaluate themselves? Be specific about what you want from the answers. Do you want to focus on macro changes to Earth in some way, or do you want it to be personal, decisions the people made because of things happening in their lives? Try to define the general scope of X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( I should really do a write up on the AXB system)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T15:33:58.493" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T15:33:58.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="559" CreationDate="2014-11-29T18:42:30.450" Score="9" ViewCount="1678" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;N.B.: This may not be exactly the right place to ask this, but I'm looking for suggestions from a community who would use this sort of thing and here is the best one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/site-for-online-custom-map-with-tags-or-labels&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I am now creating a site for worldbuilders to upload and edit their maps. Problem is, I don't know exactly what would be useful in such a site. The basic requirements set out were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow me to upload a map of a world (either URL or file, I don't mind).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow me to tag/label that map, to mark the locations of thing (either plain text, or URL links).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Host the image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let me change/update the image without wiping the tags (as the map becomes more detailed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow multiple people to edit the tags/labels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough, I can implement all of those. But that makes for a pretty basic site without much functionality apart from that. So I'm looking for suggestions from &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;. The people who would use this. What other functionality could it have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Wouldn't reject offers of help if they want to come along, either...&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;UPDATE as of 06.12.2014:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The server is running and good, the front page is well on the way. This is the design phase which may take longest but once it's done I have a template and other pages will start going up much faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next things to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finishing CSS and design.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build other pages and upload&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finish server-side control code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current version can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilders.hol.es/#metaworldbuilders:update061214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;UPDATE: 07.12.14&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple one: Added the Contact Us page and server control. &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilders.hol.es/#metaworldbuilders:update061214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Same place as last time.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;UPDATE: 17.12.14&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full user registration/login/logout functionality is now in, along with all the server relationships and the beginnings of an upload screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone interested can now register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;UPDATE: 28.12.14&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upload section and associated code is up. Actually editing the map you upload is currently impossible, but that's also the most complicated bit. It's next on the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing users: the upload section &lt;strong&gt;currently may not work&lt;/strong&gt; for you: the database was offline while I was developing so I couldn't grab usernames to create folders. However, when it's back online I'll put them in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;UPDATE: 04.01.14&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New section: metadata editing. You can now title and describe your maps. The only thing left to do is the main editing section, but that's coming on well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A job for the community: as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/675/2685&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, go and break the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:53:10.943" Title="Ideas for a Worldbuilders mapping site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="31" ClosedDate="2018-04-18T01:35:52.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="558" CreationDate="2014-11-29T23:24:54.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just kibbitzing, so treat this as an &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;user request&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are thinking of this as a mapping service in particular, rather than an image-annotation service that people can use for maps if they want, then it seems like it would be handy if a user could indicate a route (by successive clicks, presumably, since to you it's just an image) and be told a distance.  Bonus points for &quot;Distance N, N1 along roads, N2 through woods, N3 through mountains&quot;, etc, if the creator annotated terrains so you can figure that out.  That would help game-masters and authors make travel times more realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously for this to work the creator of the map would have to indicate the scale, and you'll want to think about projections for whole-world maps.  (Is everything Mercator or do you support others?  If the latter, the creator of the map has to specify how he drew it.)  If you do anything with projections I recommend defaulting to &quot;hey, this is just a flat regional map; treating it as a rectangle is fine&quot; and letting the creator get fancier if he wants to.  If I upload a map of my one region or continent I probably don't mean to have it morphed around a very small planet. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-11-29T23:35:56.413" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T23:35:56.413" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="561" CreationDate="2014-12-01T13:29:56.393" Score="5" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just don't look at my score, because it will make you think that I am experienced SO user. Truth is, I am just passionate ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4825/cost-of-colony-on-mars-moon-per-metric-ton&quot;&gt;question about costs of Mars colony&lt;/a&gt; and I do not have time or passion to actually find answers for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I already up voted it and Favorited it, I would like to draw even more attention to it by providing some of my internet points to someone answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is obvious: How to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T13:40:53.350" Title="How to add reward bounty to question of different user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="560" CreationDate="2014-12-01T13:40:53.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;Set Bounties&lt;/a&gt; privilege help page. It also outlines which questions are eligible for bounties. (The question you linked to does not, at present, meet the criteria.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you should see a &lt;strong&gt;start a bounty&lt;/strong&gt; action link below the comments (immediately below &quot;add a comment&quot; to the question). Click on that and follow the instructions. The screenshot in the help article appears to be slightly outdated, but should be close enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that bounties are non-refundable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I already up voted it and Favorited it, I would like to draw even more attention to it by providing some of my internet points to someone answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Favoriting&lt;/em&gt; a question does not have any impact for other users. Basically, it's a way for you yourself to find your way back to a specific question a little more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T13:40:53.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="558" CreationDate="2014-12-01T14:20:27.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being able to hide and reveal parts of the maps/annotation layers/etc would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an added plus having a DM layer only visible to certain users would also be really good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T14:20:27.597" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-01T20:41:04.420" Score="6" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4752/28&quot;&gt;This question about alternatives to wikis&lt;/a&gt; (to use to build an encyclopedia of one's world) is currently on hold.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4726/28&quot;&gt;This question about map-making software&lt;/a&gt; is currently open.  Both are software-recommendation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/26/28&quot;&gt;highly-voted meta post&lt;/a&gt; that suggests permitting &lt;em&gt;well-scoped&lt;/em&gt; questions of this type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can do a better job of answering world building software questions internally than by pointing people over there [Software Recommendations]. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question would state what the intended use is (world generation, naming, knowledge maps, etc), what kinds of features it should have (random generation from a seed, word lists, smart linking, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these questions describe what the author is looking for (although maybe not in enough detail in some cases).  Both state a world-building purpose (encyclopedia, maps).  What is the difference between the two?  Or is there none and they should either both be open or both be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T23:56:24.797" Title="When are software-recommendation questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="563" CreationDate="2014-12-01T20:41:04.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software-recommendation questions are on-topic (we even have a tag) if specific enough, so in principle both of these could fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the wiki question feels a little more like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/14486/162102&quot;&gt;boat programming&lt;/a&gt;, as if the world-building aspect isn't central to the question.  I hope we all agree that we'd close a question asking what the best keyboard is for doing lots of typing even if one is typing up a description of one's world; this feels kind of like that.  At its core, this feels like a general web-development question that could just as easily be motivated by world-building, technical documentation, a fan site about your favorite TV show, or helping Aunt Martha organize her recipe collection.  A key quote from the above link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fundamental rule is you can't just stick &quot;for programmers&quot; on a question to make it programming related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, couldn't we say the same thing about the maps one?  Maps can be for world-building, but they could also be for navigation systems, tools for lunar/Mars rovers, or meteorology.  To &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; the map question feels more tightly bound to world-building than the wiki one does, but I'm just one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question we have to ask about a software-recommendation question on this site is: how strong is the tie between the software and the purpose of world-building?  I don't think we can codify that; part of our work in beta will be to develop a record of precedents, of examples that fall on both sides of that line.  It is especially important for the community to weigh in on issues like this; please use meta, close/reopen votes, and chat to help us all reach consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T20:41:04.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="563" CreationDate="2014-12-01T21:15:55.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fan of recommendation questions, be they for software, web sites, books etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a tendency to fail in one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They become a list of everyone's favourite thing and people tend to just link to that thing rather than explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it solves the problem the OP as posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They become out of date - how quickly will depend on how fast the thing you're talking about is moving. So, on Stack Overflow or Programmers (for example) where the subject is programming which moves quite rapidly, recommendation questions become obsolete very quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a recommendation question to work it has to be an excellent question, which is something most of us (myself included) can't write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3400" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T21:15:55.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="563" CreationDate="2014-12-01T21:59:07.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4752/are-wikis-the-only-solution-for-creating-online-encyclopedias&quot;&gt;wiki question&lt;/a&gt; looks off topic to me. I expect there to be on topic wiki questions in future, I just don't think this particular one is on topic. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm really glad to see a meta question on this because otherwise future users could easily think that the closure of the wiki question sets a precedent of all wiki questions being off topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular wiki question does not relate to worldbuilding. It is driven by needs for the presentation of the content, not the development of the world itself. If it was about tracking the changes, highlighting areas to double check for consistency, or modelling some aspect of a world, then it could be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How can I keep track of changes in my world in progress&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be on topic, despite being also on topic on several other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How can I present this finished content&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/site-for-online-custom-map-with-tags-or-labels&quot;&gt;map question&lt;/a&gt; may also appear to be about presentation, due to being visual, this is functional, seeking a useful way of modifying a world and observing the changes. The map question should attract answers that have worldbuilding in mind. The question is about finding a useful tool for creating, rather than fine tuning the presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T21:59:07.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-02T02:49:16.773" Score="14" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the recent questions on Worldbuilding have been interesting, and not just content-wise. Lately, we've had quite a few questions that seem (at best) tangentially related to building a world, and more related to semi-speculative science questions that might not go over well on their related science sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4863/could-planets-switch-orbits-like-janus&quot;&gt;Could planets switch orbits like Janus?&lt;/a&gt; (which I answered, admittedly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/is-it-possible-that-any-life-on-earth-could-evolve-to-live-off-a-liquid-which-is&quot;&gt;Is it possible that any life on earth could evolve to live off a liquid which is not water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4757/is-it-possible-that-a-gas-giant-of-similar-size-to-jupiter-could-harbor-life&quot;&gt;Is it possible that a gas giant of similar size to Jupiter could harbor life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4621/how-would-a-user-interact-with-a-direct-neural-interface&quot;&gt;How would a user interact with a direct neural interface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just questions that (in my very-possibly-flawed opinion) aren't directly related to worldbuilding. The first might be better off on &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;; the second would be good for &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;; the third might also be good for &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;; the last would be good for - well, I'm not sure. Perhaps one of the computer-oriented sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to be harsh. There have been plenty of questions which I think (again, this is my opinion) &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; perfectly suited for Worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4764/would-charging-unicorns-survive-the-impact-with-a-line-of-infantry&quot;&gt;Would charging unicorns survive the impact with a line of infantry?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4809/economic-and-geopolitical-effects-of-building-a-space-elevator&quot;&gt;Economic and geopolitical effects of building a space elevator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4779/is-it-plausible-that-humanity-get-extinct-out-of-not-making-enough-children-if&quot;&gt;Is it plausible that humanity get extinct out of not making enough children? If not what would make it more plausible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your opinions? Do you think these sort of questions are fine here, or perhaps not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.887" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T23:55:37.360" Title="How many questions here are really about worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="563" CreationDate="2014-12-02T03:33:08.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the OP of the wiki post, I thought I'd weigh in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding, by its very nature, will cover every topic that exists in the world.&lt;/strong&gt; As a worldbuilder your research will likely include Physics, Astronomy, Biology, Evolution, Engineering, Architecture, History, Mythology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Cartography, Linguistics, Phonology, Fashion, Metallurgy, and Gastronomy to name a few, many of which I'm assuming have their own dedicated SE's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the Worldbuilding SE works because we understand implicitly that the questions are being asked &lt;strong&gt;by worldbuilders for worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;. As such, we're getting answers from people involved in the worldbuilding process, and &lt;strong&gt;we can expect their answers to be more relevant to our needs.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this weren't true, there would be no reason for this SE to exist - we could all just ask biologists, astronomers, historians, chefs, and software engineers instead. &lt;strong&gt;The relevance of questions on this SE should not determined by topic, but by purpose&lt;/strong&gt;. (Actual purpose, not hypothetical purpose.) If it's for worldbuilding, it belongs here. Simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3122" LastEditorDisplayName="user3122" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T04:06:06.520" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T04:06:06.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2014-12-02T13:38:31.420" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Speaking for myself, not in any official capacity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the questions you list there are all fine. They may not fit into everyone's own area of interest but they are all relevant to building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example a planet that switches orbits would be a very interesting setting (cold and warm years depending on when you switched, various effects when the switch happens, etc). It directly feeds into world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that something is on topic on another site doesn't automatically make it off topic here. One thing that people should consider though is where they would get the best answer, the planet switching for example might well get more solid answers in Astronomy.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T09:53:50.483" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T09:53:50.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2014-12-02T13:56:50.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I asked the Janus question, I'll put my reasoning and thinking here.  As Tim pointed out having a strange orbit where planets switch places every few years could be a very interesting place to have a story, warm years and cold years etc.  I think I could have a lot of fun with stories working with these.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was interested in if the Janus situation could scale up to planet sized bodies and how that might affect things.  Would it cause extra earthquakes when they came close together etc. Would the needed minimum change in orbit severely affect the seasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since I am a member of the Worldbuilding community, and I thought the question was a reasonable one to ask here, this is where I asked it.  To help build this site and try to have good questions and answers available here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my questions really don't fit, like the one about Scott Summers, then I it will be moved or deleted.  We have some very knowledgeable people here and we get some great answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T13:56:50.410" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2014-12-03T09:18:20.423" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, one thing, that should be considered is the context. Some of the question people ask here fall also into fields of Physics, Biology, Geology, etc. But the questions world-builders need to ask are quite often very speculative and rather than completely exact scientific answer, they want plausibility check and some &quot;rule of thumb&quot; that allows the world-builder to resolve the question in his/her world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me take the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1091/what-efficiencies-make-a-realistic-food-chain&quot;&gt;What efficiencies make a realistic food chain?&lt;/a&gt; as an example. You could ask the same question in Biology Stackexchange, but the question would be probably closed as too broad or as impossible to answer in general. The reason is that to scientists it is clear that there is no universal efficiency of metabolism. Yet, at Worldbuilding Stackexchange, we will give answer that &quot;efficiency of 10% is a good rule of thumb&quot;, which is far from exact, but quite close to the truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/is-it-possible-that-any-life-on-earth-could-evolve-to-live-off-a-liquid-which-is&quot;&gt;Is it possible that any life on earth could evolve to live off a liquid which is not water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4621/how-would-a-user-interact-with-a-direct-neural-interface&quot;&gt;How would a user interact with a direct neural interface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fall into this category, I think. Some questions, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4863/could-planets-switch-orbits-like-janus&quot;&gt;Could planets switch orbits like Janus?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4757/is-it-possible-that-a-gas-giant-of-similar-size-to-jupiter-could-harbor-life&quot;&gt;Is it possible that a gas giant of similar size to Jupiter could harbor life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be probably asked elsewhere, but I wouldn't push people too hard to do so. I think there is no harm in being generally accepting towards these questions. Also because the field of worldbuilding is very broad itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="478" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T09:18:20.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2014-12-03T20:56:08.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a few suggestions based on other SE sites, how they handle this, and what I've found. I've gone to some of the larger ones to see how they do it, and some smaller ones to get a more rounded view. I'm mostly looking at the excerpts, because that's what most people see, though the summary shouldn't be discounted of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gaming.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arqade has a lot of tags, and seem to have tried tag standardization in the past. Looking at the most popular tags shows that there is some consistency, though it is not complete. Some of the general structures seem to be something like the following...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Company]'s [genre] game [short blurb]. This tag is for [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/tags/minecraft/info&quot;&gt;Minecraft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;A [genre] [year of release] by [company]. [Short blurb].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/tags/skyrim/info&quot;&gt;Skyrim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is a [what it is].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/tags/steam/info&quot;&gt;Steam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This tag should only be used for questions about [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/tags/xbox-360/info&quot;&gt;Xbox 360&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is for questions regarding [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/tags/technical-issues/info&quot;&gt;Technical Issues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chemistry is also in beta, so it may be a good place to look for ideas. Their top tags are structured generally as follows...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is a [branch/field] of chemistry that [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/organic-chemistry/info&quot;&gt;Organic Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;In [a field of chemistry], [tag name] is [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/crystal-structure/info&quot;&gt;Crystal Structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This tag should be applied to [...]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/acid-base/info&quot;&gt;Acid-Base&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions relating to [what the tag is].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/thermodynamics/info&quot;&gt;Thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Simple textbook definition].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tags/ph/info&quot;&gt;pH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags page&lt;/a&gt;, it seems a lot of the most common tags on Electrical Engineering have the following structures...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;a/an [definition].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tags/capacitor/info&quot;&gt;Capacitor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is [definition].&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tags/voltage/info&quot;&gt;Voltage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[definition]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tags/current/info&quot;&gt;Current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of SO's most popular tags are very similar...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is [definition]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;Most of them.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even some of their newer tags have similar structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://writers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers is also in beta, not many more tags than Chemistry (both have slightly more than Worldbuilding). Writers has the following that I can see...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tag name] is [definition]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/fiction/info&quot;&gt;Fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tags are a bit shorter. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/style/info&quot;&gt;Style&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/legal/info&quot;&gt;Legal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/characters/info&quot;&gt;Characters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[definition]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/technique/info&quot;&gt;Technique&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot; title=&quot;Ironically, I wanted this to be consistent... Can I format a message using my typical URL method?&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like two of the above myself as they both strike me as interesting and informative, as far as tags can be at least. Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/characters/info&quot;&gt;Writers[characters]&lt;/a&gt; and something on SO (I'll use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/java/info&quot;&gt;Java&lt;/a&gt; since I can't figure out how to link C# properly), I like what I see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tags/characters/info&quot;&gt;Characters&lt;/a&gt; tag is witty in a way, yet still feels professional. It's short, concise, and gets its point across while also being a bit funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/java/info&quot;&gt;Java&lt;/a&gt; tag looks well written to me, with a very specific definition of what it is that (I don't know much about Java) prompts me to want to look into it to read more. Behind that, there is so much information that I immediately know where I'm going if I want to learn. That last part may not be what this site will do, but it's a nice feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like the format of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/java/info&quot;&gt;Java&lt;/a&gt; tag, but writing it purely that way may not be a good fit for a site where we may want to guide the writer with the tag. Look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and you will see what I mean. It references some special requests about biology questions in that it asks for special parameters to be defined, if necessary, in the question. That can also be a good target for the main body of the tag: put good example questions in there. If people get stuck in how they should cover everything, they can check that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might write it as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Biology is the science of life and living organisms.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Use this tag for [...]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions about biology should [...]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:38:54.597" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T01:51:29.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="575" CreationDate="2014-12-03T23:10:34.813" Score="6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished doing 50 tag wiki edits and I expected to get the &quot;Research Assistant&quot; Badge, but its not there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought maybe it takes a while, but it already been a while. So what's up or am I not patient enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s4imJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this does say 100%, so am I missing something besides my badge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T13:42:55.897" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T13:42:55.897" Title="Where's my Badge?" Tags="|support|status-completed|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="563" CreationDate="2014-12-03T23:56:24.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since most of the points have already been covered I won't go over them again, but there is a key point that bears repeating (skip to the last paragraph for it). I do see that it was closed by a mod vote rather than by members of the community but not knowing how many flags and such it got, so I can't really comment on that. &lt;em&gt;Declaration of Bias: I wrote the question that is still open.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the questions is asking for very specific thing, clearly listed in bullet points. It also asks for existing sites or services (the fact that there was an offer to develop something notwithstanding)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other start reading like a rant about the current options and then five paragraphs in asks the actual question without defining in a clear and concise manner what the actually wanted. The word &quot;better&quot; was used which is a key indicator of opinion based. It also asks two subtly different questions, both for recommendations: One for self development and one for pre-existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking a very quick stab at rewriting the question that isn't mine, I would have gone along the lines of asking how people organise their own notes and writings online, providing details of what I was looking for: Non collaborative, few hyperlinks, easy to format. (Not being the original author, I can't say exactly what they are looking for.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is usually the case in questions that get closed, it comes down a lot to how you ask your question, rather than what your question wants answered. Had the closed question been written as a request, rather than a complaint, it would probably have been okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is already three times as long as I intended it to be. As a result, those of you who skipped here for the short answer, read the paragraph above, or better yet, read the whole post you lazy so and sos :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T23:56:24.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="573" CreationDate="2014-12-04T01:11:51.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the badges getting awarded run at different times to keep from bogging down the system.  Usually within 24 hours most badges that you should receive show up.  Some badges like the Unsung Hero has an extra '10 days' appended to the end, though the badge wiki doesn't say it.  So 10 days after meeting the criteria if you still meet it you get that badge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others are almost immediately, so that might throw your expectations off a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T01:11:51.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="573" CreationDate="2014-12-04T07:22:51.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;em&gt;Research Assistant&lt;/em&gt; badge was &lt;strong&gt;awarded,&lt;/strong&gt; ironically enough, ten minutes after you posted your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You posted your question at 23:10 UTC, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/79/research-assistant?userid=56&quot;&gt;the badge was awarded at 23:20 UTC&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Monica pointed out in a comment, &lt;strong&gt;badges may not be awarded instantly.&lt;/strong&gt; In general, I would recommend waiting 48 hours before surmising that something is amiss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T07:22:51.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2014-12-04T08:50:19.010" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely not worth me adding an answer, but this was a little long for a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to add that there is an over-concern in the SE communities regarding what is EXACTLY appropriate and what is not. I recommend we assume the person has an intelligent reason for asking such a question first. If, after some analysis, or after watching for awhile, we can find enough data points that suggest a question IS a bad question then maybe it's worth doing something about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a trend of shooting questions down because the question is, or seems to be, poorly worded or uses too many catch phrases that an existing question used. &#xA;Let me point out that if it's difficult to tell if it's a duplicate or poorly thought out then there are (effectively) three likelihoods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we either don't know enough about the topic to judge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person has a poor grasp of the language they are writing the question in (or similar difficulty... including they don't know enough about the topic to even ask a good question... which is absolutely NOT a good reason to shoot it down... this means it will resonate with people in a similar state)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or, last, it probably isn't&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suggest we consider questions valuable until there is fairly overwhelming evidence that it is not, (and someone else downvoting it is some of the worst sort of evidence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is particularly applicable to World Building... as this topic can literally encompass nearly any other topic, many of which we will NOT be experts in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we should be more focused on watching for low effort/low quality questions than than worrying about whether or not we deem them appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if there is a poorly worded, likely not thought out, question we should likely take action against it, AS LONG as there are not a large number of good answers being generated from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that good answers are the primary reason SE is one of the first, and typically, most applicable, search results I see (well programming related generally). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are just a catalyst for answers &amp;amp; the quality of answers, therefore, are more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2162" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T08:50:19.010" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-07T18:51:53.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussion questions are the heart of your community.&#xA;For example: Should a certain question be allowed on the site? For what reason did a moderator lock a certain question? Are said actions setting a precedent?&#xA;Be sure to present your entire case, background, information and data, so the subject can be discussed fully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3518" LastEditorUserId="3518" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T13:55:14.550" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T13:55:14.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-07T18:51:53.697" Score="0" Body="The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus." OwnerUserId="3518" LastEditorUserId="3518" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T13:54:56.073" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T13:54:56.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="583" CreationDate="2014-12-08T14:23:18.130" Score="7" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried editing an answer, only to be a bit taken aback when the system told me that &quot;Account is not allowed to suggest edits.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've never seen this message before anywhere on SE, on any platform. Even when I was a newbie with low rep on other sites, I could suggest edits. So the only conclusion I can reach here is that I've been edit-banned for some reason, but I can't think why. Can any of the mods shed some light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using the iPad app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:13:26.943" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T18:59:34.117" Title="Not allowed to suggest edits" Tags="|support|status-completed|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="582" CreationDate="2014-12-08T14:35:45.490" Score="8" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to leave the 2 questions I found answers to in here in case others have the same questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four of us have received the bronze badge for 'science-based'.  Great.  However, 3 of us have more than 1 tag that would qualify.  If it was just me, I'd wait a couple more days, but Tim B has a couple that should have been awarded a while ago and so does HDE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that the Generalist Badge isn't being awarded.  I could see if there is some 'beta' restriction but then why show it at all?  I also looked at Code Review which is in beta and they have awarded 21 of them. I qualify and Tim has qualified for quite a while, he's closing in on getting all 40 top ten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the taxonomist badge has not been awarded for either 'reality-check' or 'space' (this could be someone who created them 'left' and that would make sense).  I check because I like to see who started each tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:03:40.570" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T14:28:43.690" Title="Another badge question. Tag badges" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="581" CreationDate="2014-12-09T16:03:05.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bronze badge is only awarded for a tag once that tag has been used on more than 100 separate questions. So far only science-based has enough although several more are getting close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generalist badge only counts tags that have been used on 200 questions, it will not be awarded until there are enough questions on enough tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Taxonomist badge is once-only. Once someone has earned the badge for one tag then even if another tag matches the requirements a second badge will not be awarded to that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:03:05.383" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-09T16:03:05.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="580" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:59:34.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a bug in the iPad app, now &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225138/162102&quot;&gt;fixed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is some extra text to prevent SE from converting my answer into a comment again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T18:59:34.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-10T08:35:38.280" Score="14" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in nit-picking mode today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While my question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4953/how-would-a-martian-colony-be-able-to-celebrate-christmas&quot;&gt;Christmas on Mars&lt;/a&gt; got great reception and loads of positive votes, and personally I totally enjoyed answering both questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5158/maggots-at-a-party-how-would-alien-races-dine-together&quot;&gt;dining habits of aliens&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5200/culture-shock-alien-social-activities&quot;&gt;alien social activities&lt;/a&gt;, my inner editor tells me that there is &quot;something wrong&quot; in these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to me, these questions share the fact, that they are &quot;fun questions&quot; and their main aim is not to &quot;build a world&quot; but &quot;have fun as community&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here my reasoning with myself ends in dead circle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we disallow &quot;fun question&quot; this site can begin to be &quot;boring&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we keep fun questions in scope, it will attract people wanting &quot;internet points&quot; to post more and more fun questions to gain the so much wanted points. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I would like to hear your own view on this. How to tackle the &quot;fun questions&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T00:11:57.623" Title="How to deal with &quot;funny questions&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2014-12-10T10:25:59.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think they need &quot;dealing with&quot;. You are right that for the alien dining I don't have a specific use-case at the moment but it was an interesting question that I was thinking about and wanted to see some other points of view. They are also questions that will be useful to any future visitors who are trying to build worlds with multiple different species interacting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we prefer questions that are trying to solve a specific problem and often get better answers for those cases that doesn't mean that more speculative questions should be unwelcome either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of scenes in my head that the alien-dining question helped clarify. Whether I'll ever use those scenes I don't know but if I do ever use them they will be improved by the answers given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to be really careful trying to enforce any anti-fun rules as well. Who are we to judge the worth of someone's thoughts. Maybe they have an idea for a story they want to write but abandon it after asking a question here and discovering the world is impossible. Maybe they are someone that starts 10 projects and finishes none. Maybe they are someone who is just interested in science fiction in general and wants to discuss ideas. Maybe they are an established published author with a best selling series that wants to branch into science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no way for us to know which of those someone is or to help one over another...and even if we could I don't think we should!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is the quality of the questions, the ideas, and the answers. Nothing else should be used to rate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T10:31:23.303" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T10:31:23.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2014-12-10T12:45:41.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the OP is confusing world-building with society-building.  The questions that are described as off-topic mostly concern designing a believable physical world (or planetary system), and the examples of on-topic questions involve variations (sometimes fantastical) in social or technological systems (also part of a world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are actually really good fits here, I think.  I'm currently getting told off in Biology that a question about building structures using programmed bacteria is overly broad and speculative, and I'm thinking about moving the question here.  It's a speculative question, but I think one that is relevant to architecture and construction, and may be a valid technological path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="115" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T23:55:37.360" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T23:55:37.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2014-12-10T15:59:54.420" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only spent any time on the &quot;alien social activities&quot;, but based on that it seems to me that &quot;funny questions&quot; are very much relevant to world-building. While the questions on this SE tend to focus on checking verisimilitude, the actual goal of world-building is not generally to build a realistic setting. It is to build a setting that other people can accept and be interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the activities question, while &quot;funny&quot; could actually be a very important detail to any story that concerns alien contact, a very important facet of any setting where first contact is common, a significant piece of the background for any setting with large number of sentient species, or even the entire story for a short story about first contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if we ignore the &quot;utilitarian&quot; aspect, such &quot;fun&quot; issues are pretty important to people in the real world. Most people spend more time thinking about Christmas, dining, or social activities than they do about physics or economics. Unless your world is devoid of people, your world-building should reflect that to some extent. If your setting has multiple sentient species, you should have some idea how your people try to share social activities across species, for example. It would be pretty important concern for the people, if your world was real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T15:59:54.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-10T16:20:20.993" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I had fun with space-questions, and learned we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-construct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-construct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-construct&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-station&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-station&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-station&lt;/a&gt;. It occurs to me that every spacestation is a space-construct. I can't immediatly immagine a spacestation that is not artificial, and as such I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-station&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-station&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-station&lt;/a&gt; repetitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108" LastEditorUserId="108" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T18:37:43.700" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:37:43.700" Title="Do we need [space-construct] and [space-station]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2014-12-10T18:53:13.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they should be welcome. Surely Douglas Adams would approve, and the humorous worlds in his books would be in scope, no? I would think that any fictional world situation would be in scope for a question, regardless of seriousness. The site description doesn't say the fictional worlds need to not be comedic worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:53:13.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="481" CreationDate="2014-12-10T18:58:49.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that they can be good questions, though it helps if they are limited to specific points they are asking about. Questions that describe a situation and then ask what would happen or what else would the world be like are infinitely broad, and I would think should be broken into questions about specific aspects, or else the answers will be about different things and the question may as well be &quot;do more creative work on my world idea for me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:58:49.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="422" CreationDate="2014-12-10T19:31:30.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2711/can-two-civilizations-on-nearby-stars-develop-independently-but-be-at-a-similar&quot;&gt;Can two civilizations on nearby stars develop independently but be at a similar technological level?&lt;/a&gt; currently has 12 votes and 11 answers ranging from 10 to 1 votes. I think it's a good common but broad question with good answers. Personally I think it's good, but I'm not really invested in the idea of forcing questions to be narrow-scope with few answers particularly for WorldBuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T19:31:30.257" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-10T19:31:30.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-10T19:55:46.617" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world/825#825&quot;&gt;Is there an effective way to design a realistic religion for a world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he asked about the problem with uninformed religious questions on the site in Meta, and we told him he could ask and answer his own question, and he did, and lo, it was awesome, and both his question and his answer were much-upvoted and thanked, and people rightly commented that it was a great resource to which they would refer often in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, it got CLOSED as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be re-opened? Should this be elevated to a FAQ, somehow? How is that done? Should he just publish it to a blog or journal somewhere, and we should link to it? It makes it look like it is a problematic item by having it closed, while in fact it is a great resource which could head off many daft questions and headache-inducing answers. Or is closed-as-too-broad the place Stack Exchange thinks such things belong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T19:31:06.547" Title="Why was CAgrippa's awesome FAQ-worthy religion question closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="592" CreationDate="2014-12-10T20:08:22.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed -- by the community, not by moderation action -- as too broad (&quot;if you can imagine a whole book being written to answer this...&quot;).  It &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; get an excellent and well-received answer, which is valuable content for the site.  But it seems that the community, after considering it, found it too big, at least for one question.  That happens sometimes, especially early in beta when a site is still working out its scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no shame in having a question closed.  Closed questions are still available on the site, can be voted on and linked to, and provide knowledge.  This question is not at risk of being deleted.  Being closed prevents additional answers to this one and also signals that &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; questions should be scoped more narrowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have religion-related questions, please do go ahead and ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for FAQ status, that's not really what the site's FAQ is for, but it's totally kosher to link specific questions from the site in tag wikis where that makes sense.  I haven't looked to see if that makes sense here, but if there are religion-related tags whose wikis would benefit from a link to that question/answer, go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T20:08:22.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2014-12-11T17:31:56.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, some people write funny stories. I think it's quite hard to make question about such story sound serious. And there would be no point of it as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, a lot of fiction is mostly about entertaining the reader. I can't come up with a good reason why can't we have a little meta-entertainment with coming up together with some bizarre answer for montypythonistic questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, there are two reasons why the question might sound &quot;funny&quot;: subject or wording. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Mystra007 pointed out, some people can talk about anything and still sound funny. Some do it deliberately, others just can't help themselves. Is that a reason to ban them from discussion? Not in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the subject is funny, then... Then what, exactly? What's wrong about it? I've heard theories, that having fun is a sin, but I hope we ditched that mindset as a society some time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, there is a difference between &quot;funny question&quot; and &quot;trolling&quot;, but all provided examples are falling into first category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3254" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T07:11:58.793" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T07:11:58.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="597" CreationDate="2014-12-11T21:33:17.097" Score="14" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from Area51: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sites remain in beta for at least 90 days to build up a critical mass&#xA;  of users, questions, and participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are at day 86 and our stats are good. We have hit a slowdown but the numbers are getting better. So the numbers are ok. What is going to happen in 4 days from now? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When could we hope to see this site released?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of you have more experience with Stack exchange than me but I know that the 90 days period is just a symbolic mark. I've seen other SE that are still in beta after 2 or 3 years.  Their stats used to be acceptable maybe but now the are usually not high enough for a full release and they are unlikely to improve after so long. For some topics, it's possible to come with new questions but less for other. I think we could be in the second category but it's still unclear for the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I look at the History SE, they have been in beta for 1157 days and their stats today are just under the requirements. If the activity does not increase, could it get closed or can it stay in beta forever as long as there is some activity? And is it really a problem to stay in beta indefinitely?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T12:55:35.457" Title="End of beta soon?" Tags="|discussion|policy|beta|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="595" CreationDate="2014-12-11T22:10:51.527" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly, the text on Area 51 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/239464/162102&quot;&gt;woefully out of date&lt;/a&gt; on this point.  The shortest time to graduation for any SE 2.0 site (that is, all but the few oldest) was six months and that was a while ago.  On average it takes about two years, with some sites having been in beta now for close to four years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that SE will let sites linger in beta for years so long as they think there are still users there and there's at least a little activity.  On the other hand, if a private beta gets off to a slow start they're much more willing to shut that down.  I don't know what counts as still active (is there a minimum number of active users? how active?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are doing well.  Yes we need to increase the number of questions, without compromising quality of course.  I &lt;em&gt;suspect&lt;/em&gt; we'll be one of the faster sites to graduate -- but that it could still be a year or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, SE's designers are very overloaded, so even once a decision is made to graduate a site, it can take 6-12 months to actually implement it.  (Yes, I believe they recognize that this is a problem.  Whether it changes how they manage graduations down the road, I don't know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, bottom line, please take Area 51 with a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; grain of salt, and meanwhile please focus on making this an awesome site with lots of great questions, stand-out answers, and engaged users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:10:51.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="595" CreationDate="2014-12-12T12:55:35.457" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Monica has already pointed out, the information on Area 51 is woefully out of date. (Great phrasing, so I'm borrowing it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When could we hope to see this site released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is already released. It's here, there's activity (&lt;em&gt;plenty&lt;/em&gt; of it!), and more than one of the higher-ups seem to feel that we are taking on a difficult type of subject matter and handling it well. I would consider the risk, at present, of the site being shut down to be very small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could perhaps cause the site to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt; graduate from beta would be if there is a marked deterioration in the quality of content posted, or if the site's scope turns out to broaden considerably. I do not believe we are seeing the latter (questions are being closed for various and from what I see appropriate reasons, and what's more, they are being closed by &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; voting rather than by the infamous mod-hammer), and my personal feeling is that while some posts, particularly questions, turn out needing work beyond the first revision, the community appears to be guiding newcomers which is almost certainly a huge plus in the eyes of the people with the keys. In general a few (1-3) questions are closed per day out of the 5-15 or so questions posted per day; consider that some of these are reopened later, and that is not a bad fraction at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things that we do have (almost certainly an incomplete list):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High quality content&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of activity compared to many other sites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; decision-making, including voting on posts and closing/reopening questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A very active Meta site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An active chat room&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A generally welcoming atmosphere where more experienced community members guide people who are new to the site and/or the Stack Exchange format in general&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An increase in new content added; currently questions are trending marginally upwards, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; are practically taking to the skies&lt;/strong&gt; and are currently close to the site's all-time high since the public beta began. Upvotes are trending upwards while downvotes are holding relatively steady and starting to trend upwards at a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; lower level.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are great signs going forward, but the fact that the site is able to generally keep producing high-quality content (as also indicated by the voting pattern shown by the community at large) is a &lt;em&gt;stellar&lt;/em&gt; sign in my book at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which pretty much brings me to the bottom line. &lt;strong&gt;Keep up the good work.&lt;/strong&gt; Try to bring new people into the fold. Post links to great questions and/or answers elsewhere on the Internet. Keep mentoring new users (remember that we are all new to this at some point). Keep contributing. Keep voting, &lt;em&gt;both up and down&lt;/em&gt; as appropriate. It's a great sign in a way that question votes are not very far below answer votes; &lt;em&gt;around a quarter of all up and down votes&lt;/em&gt; are on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &lt;strong&gt;Let's prove with every action that this site is &lt;em&gt;worthy&lt;/em&gt; of graduating, and eventually it will graduate.&lt;/strong&gt; Until then, let's obsess more about ensuring that it will eventually graduate than about exactly &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; it will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T12:55:35.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="592" CreationDate="2014-12-12T19:31:06.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the question, you'll find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then there are the sub-questions, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed by a bullet list of questions, each of which could have been a question of its own. I think this is a good indicator that the question is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T19:31:06.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-13T22:32:05.447" Score="9" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have LaTeX on Worldbuilding and Worldbuilding Meta (which doesn't seem to be the case for Physics, strangely enough). It's extremely useful in many cases, and I've been using it a lot lately. It also lends more credence to your answer - if you can calculate that the gravitational acceleration on Planet Q is about 8 m/s$^2$, you can definitively show that humans would be okay there.&#xA;$$\huge \text{It's okay to use }\LaTeX{}\text{!}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't just say that, though - and I won't, because I do want to talk a little about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why we aren't seeing a lot more math in answers? I've seen perhaps 5 posts in the past week or so using a significant amount (some of which I've edited, because, once again, people aren't using LaTeX!). I'll concede that in many cases, you don't need any math, and a nicely written answer consisting of a couple of paragraphs is worthy of every single vote it gets.$^1$ And it is quite the pain to edit LaTeX - or write it in the first case, especially if you're new to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are cases where math would be better, and it seems like there's not a lot of math being used. Is there any reason why we're not using more math here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^1$ Actually, I'd say this is always the case, and I'll congratulate those who can eloquently deal with a question in two or three paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T22:45:48.023" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T18:53:13.237" Title="It's okay to use LaTeX!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2014-12-14T01:33:47.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, I didn't realise it was there, and had a cringing moment when I saw how terrible the math was to read. After realising it was there, though, I immediately said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;How do I use this?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therein may be the issue: people don't know it's there, or they don't know how to use it. It is, fortunately, not difficult to learn. A powerful tool in the right hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason for there not being more math may be that it just isn't coming up, or people are not considering it necessary in answers. I, personally, would appreciate a bit of mathematical proof in an answer where appropriate (if the math wasn't over my head), no different than I would in the classroom. Anything with sufficient basis on actual physics or math (plain math in worldbuilding? hmmm...) could benefit from it, though others may disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T01:33:47.357" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2014-12-14T07:43:18.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure to what extent this actually happens, but the questions on this site can sometimes &quot;scare off&quot; the kinds of people who would give quantitative answers. I don't mean that they're literally &lt;em&gt;scared&lt;/em&gt;, of course (scientists are often &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/242/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;surprisingly comfortable&lt;/a&gt; with blowing up the world and so on), but they're just not able to give meaningful mathematically-justified answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the questions here are roughly of the form &quot;In a situation where theory Y is false, what does theory Y predict?&quot; It's like the scientific equivalent of &quot;Suppose $1 = 2$, then what's the solution to $x^2 - 31x + 5 = 0$?&quot; Once you make a nonsensical assumption, then you can reach pretty much any conclusion you want, but there's no one right answer. People with expertise in the relevant science will often pick up on that, and they won't be able to give an answer that is consistent with their knowledge of the science. No matter what answer they try to come up with, they'll see some reason it wouldn't work. That becomes especially true if they try to include a calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, on Physics SE we decided very early on to make these &quot;fictional physics&quot; questions off topic for precisely this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying there's anything &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; with these sorts of questions. They are a lot of fun, for sure, and sometimes you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer a question while breaking scientific laws in a consistent way. This site has a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of passive fans in the hard sciences. But in many cases, it's just too hard to do a logical or mathematical analysis of a worldbuilding question that gives any conclusion other than &quot;this can't happen.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a related issue that just occurred to me: unless I have reason to believe otherwise, I would assume that many of the readers of this site don't really want to see math, or at least will not understand enough to benefit from it. This was my thought process while posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3658/277&quot;&gt;my first answer&lt;/a&gt;. There was a lot of math I could have included, but I didn't think it would add anything useful to the answer, and it would probably scare some people away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T07:43:18.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2014-12-14T10:51:16.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we can't really assume readers here understand either jargon (oops, &quot;proper scientific nomenclature&quot;, or whatever) or mathematical notation beyond the basics. So a good useful answer is written in plain English with clear facts and reasoning. Understanding the answer should not depend on understanding the math. Or having memorized lots of names of dead mathematicians or physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, once you have explained the answer in English, there is no harm in adding the actual formula or even an actual example of how it is used. I kind of dislike math and my understanding of the notation is weak, but there have still been many times that I have turned to reading the mathematical formula included to actually understand the written explanation. Explanations written by people who understand the topic tend to be filled with jargon and copied from a source that assumes a higher level of reader knowledge on the topic. Explanations written by, to say it politely, &quot;non-experts&quot; tend to have basic flaws in understanding the logic or miss important details. Having the math included is a big help in either case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, many world-building questions are so speculative applying real-world science to their details is meaningless and almost certainly gives the wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the matter of correct precision. In world-building the inputs are often so vaguely defined that doing calculations naively results in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GIGO&lt;/a&gt; effect. You can't give a better than vague answer with vague inputs, and while math can be used with vague input values, a verbal explanation is much more likely to be understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastEditorUserId="3434" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T18:53:13.237" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T18:53:13.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="606" CreationDate="2014-12-14T14:28:34.060" Score="8" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/558/ideas-for-a-worldbuilders-mapping-site&quot;&gt;mapping site&lt;/a&gt; is coming along well now. Registrations are up (meaning feel free to go and register), the next job is logins and the rest of the pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have now come across the problem of moderation. I don't know what kind of uptake this site is going to have, but I would like some help with running it. So, some ideas I've had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could ask this community for volunteers to help moderate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This seems fair but it does open the door for someone to come in and start destroying things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could give the three moderators here automatic mod accounts there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means I can trust them, but they do have plenty of work to do here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know which of these would be best, so some thoughts would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T15:25:07.113" Title="Mapping site (again) - Moderators" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2018-04-18T01:36:36.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2014-12-14T16:20:02.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the issue is one of scope.  Some people want this forum to be a place to get quick quality answers for the worlds they are building for professional use, or similarly serious use.  Others see this place to build smaller, less important worlds.  Consider, there is no objective metric differentiating &quot;Christmas in Space&quot; from &quot;Aquatic Intelligence,&quot; other than that it is very clear that the author of &quot;Aquatic Intelligence&quot; intends to incorporate it into a larger work, and it is less clear if &quot;Christmas in Space&quot; will be incorporated (but we don't know for sure!).  &lt;em&gt;Both are positively addressing a world that does not exist, and is being built&lt;/em&gt; (at minimum, being built on SE, as we speak!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is of the mindset that the purpose of this forum is to support professional work, and nothing more, then these smaller questions could be seen as crowding out.  The other mindset would suggest that these other questions attract more attention to the forum, giving the professional question askers an even larger audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The line between acceptable or not has to be fuzzy.&lt;/strong&gt;  As an example, I posted a puzzle question a while back, and the community decided this forum was not the place for puzzles.  However, the question itself was valid (so much so, that I received several suggested edits to try to bring it around and get the hold released).  The presentation mattered so much, that the actual content was never called into question, even though I openly borrowed content from popular questions of the time.  &lt;em&gt;Other than my choice to present the quesiton as a puzzler, there was no way to discriminate between it and the serious Faerie and Magic questions around it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would err on the side of caution, and allow more &quot;funny questions&quot; over closing them.  Give people the benefit of the doubt, or we run the risk of starving the forum as people fear the moderators closing all of their questions.  If we need it, a tag might surface to denote &quot;serious work&quot; for those who would like a smaller, more dedicated audience to answer it.  Jokingly, may I suggest &quot;Serious Inquiries Only&quot; as the tag name? ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T16:20:02.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2014-12-14T16:30:55.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generally speaking, pure-nonfiction questions should go on the other forums.&lt;/strong&gt; They have dedicated communities that are far better at fielding such questions.  However, there are a few places where I see a strong need for questions to come here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that require non-real physics.  The other forums &lt;strong&gt;require&lt;/strong&gt; reality, to the best of our knowledge, and anything that diverges ever so slightly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are hard to answer with real-life data.  I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40/are-geographically-typed-planets-realistic&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed plants realistic?&lt;/a&gt; question is actually a perfect example of this.  The author readily admits that the Earth is not the world he is looking for, and he is questioning whether it is reasonable to invent a world with particular traits.  Also included in this are forward-propagation questions that ask the community to help them figure out where a world would go after an event that has never occurred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related family questions, where there are several questions all related to the same topic.  In this case, having them all in once place may be wise, even if one or two of them could be better answered elsewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13/how-quickly-and-accurately-did-news-travel-in-rural-medieval-europe&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately did news travel in rural medieval Europe?&lt;/a&gt; question could be a good example of one to move to History.  While it is clear they intend to use this information in the world of fiction, the question is stated as a very clear &quot;true History&quot; question.  If the History buffs feel they do not have enough information to offer interesting enough information, that might be a very good time to migrate it to WB for a little creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think what sets us apart from the other SE's is that WB can deal with a much higher degree of uncertainty.  If you asked a question about the Alcubierre drive on a Physics board, I would expect the answer has to be terribly full of math, because what that device does is very precise and very technical.  If you need to ask a question about it with less than a PhD in physics, we may be able to help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T16:30:55.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="603" CreationDate="2014-12-14T20:49:02.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm glad to see that you're making progress on this great project!  I expect this to be very helpful to many of our users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking only for myself, I'd like to avoid blurring the line between SE moderation and moderation on your mapping site.  Even if some of the same people end up moderating both, I'd be more comfortable if you didn't just automatically make WB.SE mods also mapping-site mods.  You should be free to go in whatever direction you like without depending on SE's decisions about who our mods are.  And this would be a great opportunity for some people who &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; already mods here to get some moderation experience, if they're interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my recommendation is that you either ask individuals directly or ask interested people to apply directly to you.  Either way, it'd be a good idea for you to have a description of what the moderation duties on your site are, so that people can decide if that matches their experience and interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T20:49:02.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-14T21:20:42.027" Score="14" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathematical notation written using MathJax (mathematical Latex) can make questions and answers much clearer and more succinct, but how do we learn to produce this output?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to improve the community wiki answer to give those of us new to MathJax and Latex the best chance of getting to grips with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-02T08:06:26.950" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T03:30:04.460" Title="How do I add mathematical notation using Latex MathJax?" Tags="|discussion|faq|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2014-12-14T21:20:42.027" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LateX code required to give a particular output can be learned from a variety of sources, from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt; stack exchange site to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathurl.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathurl.com&lt;/a&gt; where you can piece together an expression and then see what code produces it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Mathematics on wikibooks&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Advanced_Mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Advanced Mathematics on wikibooks&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; are also good dictionaries for LaTeX. You can also click &quot;edit&quot; below any question or answer you'd like to emulate, and see what code was typed to get that result (just don't save the edit...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get seriously mathematical, see the similar guide on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;meta.math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you need to know is that when embedded in a sentence, the code is surrounded by dollar signs, and when centered as a separate paragraph the code is surrounded by double dollar signs. (Apparently, TeX uses dollar signs because formatting math used to be expensive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Here is $x=y$ in the middle of a sentence&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is $x=y$ in the middle of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Here is $$x=y$$ as a separate centered paragraph&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is $$x=y$$ as a separate centered paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you know this, you can experiment to see what works, checking the preview as you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we're all keen to see you contributing, drop into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; if anything is unclear - this will also help us know what to improve in this answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Letters and numbers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letters in LaTeX inside the dollar signs are easy - just type in the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; A $\to A$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for numbers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; 1 $\to 1$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek letters&lt;/strong&gt; require you to spell out the letter after a slash mark. Use a lowercase first letter for a lowercase Greek letter, and uppercase for an uppercase Greek letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; \gamma $\to \gamma$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; \Gamma $\to \Gamma$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Text&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In LaTeX, writing out words within dollar signs simply renders them as a series of letters. For example, writing out 'apple' becomes $apple$. However, you can use the syntax \text{apple} to make it different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;apple $\to apple$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\text{apple} $\to \text{apple}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When combining words and numbers (e.g. in units after a quantity), the two parts can blend together: $560kilograms$. Use a space in the syntax: \text{ kilograms}. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; 560 \text{ kilograms} $\to 560 \text{ kilograms}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can use &quot;\space&quot; as a command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$x\space y$ &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to $x\space y$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Changing the size of the font&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also make the text different sizes: huge, large, small and tiny. Use a slash and then the size name before typing in your text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\huge \text{Huge}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\huge \text{Huge}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\large \text{Large}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\large \text{Large}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\small \text{Small}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\small \text{Small}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\tiny \text{Tiny}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\tiny \text{Tiny}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These do not have to be used with the \text{} function, if you do not want the LaTeX to be words. These can be used on normal characters, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\huge x=y$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\huge x=y$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other formatting commands&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boxed text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\boxed{text}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\boxed{boxed}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highlighting text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\bbox[color]{text}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\bbox[yellow]{highlight}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Colors&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can color text like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\color{color}{text}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also work with any symbol like \varnothing or \div: $$\color{red}{\varnothing}\color{blue}{\div}$$ &#xA;Written by: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\color{red}{\varnothing}\color{blue}{\div}$ &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Written with double dollar-signs so as to display).This only works if you use the regular command (like \div). Sizes apply as well: $\color{red}{\huge{\div}}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\color{red}{\huge{\div}}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use fonts, positioning, etc. The &quot;colors&quot; are applicable to anything as long as they follow the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\color{color here}{text here}$ &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;format and any sizes/fonts/symbols and additional opening/closing of brackets continues normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of colors here and the colors they produce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\color{black}{black}\color{blue}{blue}\color{brown}{brown}\color{cyan}{cyan}\color{darkgray}{darkgrey}\color{gray}{gray}\color{green}{green}\color{lightgray}{lightgray}\color{lime}{lime}\color{magenta}{magenta}\color{olive}{olive}\color{orange}{orange}\color{pink}{pink}\color{purple}{purple}\color{red}{red}\color{teal}{teal}\color{violet}{violet}\color{yellow}{yellow}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it is possible to use any colors if you know the hexadecimal color code based on their RGB values, which you can find &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\color{#hex color here}{text here}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example with 3 different gold, there is a subtle difference: $\color{#daa400}{gold}$ $\color{#f7d100}{gold}$ $\color{ #f1bb00}{gold}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Operators&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Operators such as multiplication and division aren't done the same way as they are in other applications (i.e. programming or computer calculators). Some signs are, but some have their own codes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Addition | Subtraction | Multiplication | Division&#xA;  $+$    |     $-$     |    $\times$    |  $\div$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$+ | - | \times | \div$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use indices and roots, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raising a number uses &lt;code&gt;base^{index}&lt;/code&gt; syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$3^{4}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$3^{4}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Square roots go &lt;code&gt;\sqrt{number}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\sqrt{625}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\sqrt{625}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Parentheses and Brackets&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parentheses and brackets are typically easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$(  )$&#xA;$[  ]$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not do this, though, because it is used in other syntaxes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;${  }$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are reserved for other cases, such as doing an operation on multiple characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$6^{7x}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$6^{7x}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\int_{x+2}^xf(x)dx$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\int_{x+2}^xf(x)dx$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, however, escape them by preceding them with a &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\{1,2,3\}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\{1,2,3\}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can adapt brackets and parentheses by using the \left and \right features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$x \times (\frac{\frac{x}{6}}{y+3}+1)$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$x\times (\frac{\frac{x}{6}}{y+3}+1)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be written as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$x \times \left(\frac{\frac{x}{6}}{y+3}+1 \right)$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$x \times \left(\frac{\frac{x}{6}}{y+3}+1 \right)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes LaTeX more aesthetically pleasing. Brackets (&lt;code&gt;[]&lt;/code&gt;), escaped braces (&lt;code&gt;\{\}&lt;/code&gt;), and pipes (&lt;code&gt;||&lt;/code&gt;, useful for absolute value) can be used, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Special symbols&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a special symbol, the most convenient way to find it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Detexify&lt;/a&gt; which allows you to draw a symbol and searches for $\rm\LaTeX$ symbols that are similar. There's also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comprehensive $\rm\LaTeX$ Symbol List&lt;/a&gt; which lists all symbols of $\rm\LaTeX$. However note that not all of the $\rm\LaTeX$ symbols are implemented in MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Titles&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While using MathJax in titles is technically possible, &lt;em&gt;please try to avoid it&lt;/em&gt; as it can make questions more difficult to find. Instead of having a question title that contains a mathematical formula, keep the question title a &lt;em&gt;description of what you want to know&lt;/em&gt;. If a good question title relies on mathematical formulas, consider whether the question is really on topic on this site; maybe it's really a better fit for one of the hard science sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Spoilers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normal spoilers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't work with LaTeX. On Mathematics, Achille Hui wrote up &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13736/hierarchical-spoilers/13738#13738&quot;&gt;a basic one&lt;/a&gt;, which can be very helpful. Here's that example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\require{action}&#xA;\toggle{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/click me for hint/}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;1. &amp;amp; \text{Define }x \text{ = (complex formula)}\\&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/more hint.../}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;1. &amp;amp; \text{Define }x\text{ = (complex formula)}\\&#xA;2. &amp;amp; \text{Observe } f(x) = 0\\&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/That's it, thanks for wasting your time!/}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}&#xA;\endtoggle$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code to make this happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\require{action}&#xA;\toggle{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/click me for hint/}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;1. &amp;amp; \text{Define }x \text{ = (complex formula)}\\&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/more hint.../}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}{&#xA;\begin{array}{cl}&#xA;1. &amp;amp; \text{Define }x\text{ = (complex formula)}\\&#xA;2. &amp;amp; \text{Observe } f(x) = 0\\&#xA;&amp;amp; \bbox[2pt,color:red;border-radius:3px;box-shadow:4px 4px 8px firebrick]{&#xA;\verb/That's it, thanks for wasting your time!/}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;}&#xA;\endtoggle$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T03:30:04.460" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T03:30:04.460" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-14T21:20:42.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T12:15:15.183" Score="12" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're participating in Winter Bash, earn &lt;strong&gt;hats&lt;/strong&gt; by doing &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt;. Add &lt;strong&gt;hats&lt;/strong&gt; to your avatar. Turn off &lt;strong&gt;hats&lt;/strong&gt; if you don't like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;strong&gt;hat&lt;/strong&gt; leaderboard here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/leaderboard/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/leaderboard/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an inter-site leaderboard here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/leaderboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/leaderboard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets see how high we can climb ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T20:31:34.820" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T20:31:34.820" Title="It's mad hattering time" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-16T15:03:10.000" Score="6" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have been rolling a question...or a series of questions around in my head for a couple weeks.  I am working on developing cultures in my world and religion will be a part of it.  So I want to ask what will need to be a series of questions on the topic and here are some that I currently have in mind that need answering.  Just wanted to see how you all felt about them before I get too crazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What components make up a religion, this is mainly asking, &quot;When designing a religion what things do all religions have?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  Done&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What has made some religions historically competitive?  (Feels too broad not sure how to narrow it)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do religions preach tolerance and good then engage in war against heathens?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does a religion need a 'prophet' mainly meaning the role that say Jesus or Mohammed played in the evolution of Islam and Christianity. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it realistic that a world has a single religion (perhaps some fringe elements are other)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some more but they build on these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2014-12-24T15:09:17.513" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T15:09:17.513" Title="I want to post some questions on religion -- help me shape them so they are good and on topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T15:34:50.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What has made some religions historically competitive? (Feels too broad not sure how to narrow it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to me to be a fairly easy way to narrow this down quite a bit: &lt;strong&gt;define exactly what you mean by &quot;a historically competitive religion&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the answers to (a) what makes people evangelize about a religion are potentially quite different from the answers to (b) what makes &quot;heathens&quot; &lt;em&gt;want to&lt;/em&gt; voluntarily join a religion, which again may be quite different from (c) what makes people willing to kill or die for the sake of their religion. By spelling out exactly which effect you are seeking, it becomes much easier to identify specific causes which might lead to that effect, and to draw parallels in the scientific studies of various religions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you simply ask what makes a religion &quot;historically competitive&quot;, that sounds likely to be in the realm of &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt;, which is likely to (should) get your question closed as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to describe the (particularly social) environment in which the religion develops, as that may have an impact on answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T15:39:54.013" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T15:39:54.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T15:39:56.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Religion questions are welcome&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/592/why-was-cagrippas-awesome-faq-worthy-religion-question-closed&quot;&gt;previous religion question was closed for being too broad&lt;/a&gt;, not for being about religion. All of your questions are much narrower. If any turn out to be still too broad the community will let you know so they can be refined or split further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Expect conflicting answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion questions will lead to widely varying answers as people have conflicting ideas about what makes a religion work and what is inevitable rather than inspired (and widely differing views on what constitutes human nature). We are all biased and that bias shows through particularly strongly with questions about religion. This doesn't mean you shouldn't ask questions about religion, but expect there to be a very mixed reception for the question and very mixed answers. You may find the mixture of answers more useful than any individual answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;It's easy to offend without intending to&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not offensive to ask questions about religion, in the sense that a person taking offense would be considered unreasonable by most people. However, it can be offensive to make assumptions in the course of asking a question - most people would consider it reasonable to take offense at an assumption. So although I would generally advise simply asking the best question you can write, and then adjusting it following feedback, for sensitive subjects such as religion it might be worth asking a meta question (as you have here). You could do the same for individual questions once you've finished the full wording: &amp;quot;Are there any assumptions in this question wording that I should remove to avoid offense?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't think that you need to ask on meta first, but if you want to maximise the variety of answers by not excluding anyone, it may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing assumptions is a good way to improve a question in general - identifying assumptions helps to attract unexpected answers that approach the question from a more useful angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T15:39:56.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-16T15:44:04.537" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;So would it be bad form to ask someone to downvote one of my posts on worldbuilding (just temporarily) So I could get another hat?  Business in the front party in the back is for an up and down vote on the same day.  I don't really want to write a question or answer poorly just to get a down vote. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T15:47:45.557" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T14:01:15.840" Title="Would it be bad form to specifically ask someone to downvote a post of mine?" Tags="|discussion|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T16:01:05.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do religions preach tolerance and good then engage in war against heathens?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could narrow down whether you are asking about human nature or the types of religion that see this effect more often. These seem to be two different questions so you may get clearer answers by separating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What aspects of human psychology allow a population to hold peaceful religious beliefs but support war against people who do not share that belief?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What aspects of a religion make its believers more accepting of apparently contradictory teachings (promoting peace and spreading war)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recognises the possibility that many religious wars are due to human nature rather than the beliefs held, and that not all religions have historical examples of war or even violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:01:05.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T16:08:36.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does a religion need a 'prophet' mainly meaning the role that say Jesus or Mohammed played in the evolution of Islam and Christianity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be answered briefly and boringly with a counterexample (of which there are many).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be more useful for your setting to ask whether having a historical character as a focus for a religion makes that religion more long lasting and more inclined to spread to others. It seems you are interested in what makes a religion spread and dominate other religions, so it would help to know whether the most widely held religions on Earth are widespread in part due to having a historical character to focus on, or whether that is coincidence and the Abrahamic religions have some other characteristic which makes them more robust and likely to spread (for example, they are all monotheistic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:08:36.760" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T16:28:08.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What components make up a religion, this is mainly asking, &quot;When designing a religion what things do all religions have?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems specific, clear, on topic and with definite answers. I wouldn't change it (other than taking out the &quot;mainly asking&quot; bit, which I assume is just for the meta post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it makes me think to consider as a separate question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In which major aspects do religions differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I would find useful in designing an ecosystem of different religions for a world, in order to ensure a good variety rather than just 6 different versions of the same religion with different names for things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would see this question as on topic, but some might consider it too broad. I'd be interested to find out. I don't see it as too broad, provided it can be made clear that it's not asking about the trivial differences like language or naming conventions, but about the fundamental differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atheistic/monotheistic/polytheistic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enforcing/evangelising/insular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rule based/personal inspiration based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hierarchical/communal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those differences are fundamental, but asking the question may throw up things that are more fundamental or a longer list with reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:28:08.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2014-12-16T16:39:24.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it realistic that a world has a single religion (perhaps some fringe elements are other)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might need some background. A few hundred years ago, many countries had one enforced religion with only fringe elements that did not comply. However, it's doubtful whether the enforced religion was reflected by the internal beliefs of the individuals as widely as it was expressed externally. Other beliefs were likely to have been present but kept secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's important to distinguish between asking whether an official religion could dominate the world, and asking whether a single religion could become genuinely accepted by the vast majority of the world. If you are interested in either you could specify that you want a way of portraying either outcome in a realistic setting, or otherwise you could ask the two as separate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also expect the population size and population density and ease of communication in the world to be relevant, so if possible I would recommend specifying whether your &quot;world&quot; is a country with medieval technology, a densely populated planet with a politically uncensored internet, or a solar system spanning population, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:39:24.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-16T21:42:31.810" Score="10" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on PPCG.SE they have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/sandbox-for-proposed-challenges&quot;&gt;sandbox on meta&lt;/a&gt; where questions can get feedback before being posted to the main site. That's vital when designing a programming challenge question that must be precisely specified, but less important on other stack exchange sites where problems with a question can just be pointed out in comments and resolved quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/610/i-want-to-post-some-questions-on-religion-help-me-shape-them-so-they-are-good&quot;&gt;meta question on getting religion questions right&lt;/a&gt; is almost a mini sandbox in itself, and makes me wonder if it would be useful for us to have a sandbox too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could either have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; meta tag and post questions on meta first before posting them to the main site once feedback has tailored them to be a good fit, or we could use the same approach as PPCG and have a single meta question to which all the answers are potential main site questions waiting for feedback in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this as something everyone would use, but it would be there for anyone who has the beginnings of a question but already knows it isn't ready to be posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T13:27:28.420" Title="A sandbox for sculpting questions" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2014-12-16T22:28:06.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites have sandboxes, though they may be used for different purposes. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/4666/sandbox-for-drafts-of-long-complex-posts&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; has one for long posts in general. At the moment, it's pretty empty, but some of the posts have hundreds of revisions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/55/formatting-sandbox&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; has one, too, which is used semi-often. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389/this-is-a-sandbox&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; has one, but a lot of the posts were defaced, and most - if not all - were never really used. I also started one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/278/sandbox-suggestion&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, though I appear to be the only person who uses it. Sadly. I'm not sure about any others (besides PPCG.SE) in SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones I listed are generally used for mathematical posts (I suppose this really isn't valid because the only ones that are used a lot are pure math, so it's actually a crappy data set), if they're used. Note that only the two math sites use the sandboxes any non-negligible amount. You could say that that's because only math-heavy posts need a lot of writing (using LaTeX takes a while, and searching for one-character mistakes is a pain). PPCG.SE's sandbox is more encouraging, though, because it's all about community input. It would be really awesome to have that on Worldbuilding, because we're a tight-knit community and most of us are interested in a wide range of questions. Having one sandbox would be really handy - as opposed to experimenting on multiple meta questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if I end up being the only user on the sandbox, I shall be mightily annoyed. And a bit sad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:05.117" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T02:08:47.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2014-12-17T10:07:35.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, definitely. I think a sandbox is a brilliant idea to make sure that questions don't have to be down voted, closed and reworked on the main site, which has the effect of lowering the &lt;em&gt;apparent&lt;/em&gt; quality of our site by having more closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a member on PPCG, I have to say the sandbox there is very cluttered. It's hard to keep track of what's done and what's not, especially since many people forget to clean up their posts after completing them. I therefore recommend a tag rather than a single question. This has the added benefit of enabling people to write more comprehensive summaries of what needs improvement in an answer rather than a comment, and enables the OP to show which points helped them the most with a checkmark. Questions that are finished with fall out of view off the front page pretty quickly; posts in a single sandbox not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could have a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; meta post for a week or two to introduce people to the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; tag and methods of using it effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do, however, appreciate that a single sandbox post makes it easier for a greater community input, as it can stay permanently &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt;. However, a tag wouldn't be too much more work in my opinion, as you can filter by tag or simply search for &lt;code&gt;tag:sandbox&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, sorting the sandbox post by activity (as @githubphagocyte says) does make a difference. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but in my opinion a tag is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T10:17:48.723" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T10:17:48.723" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-17T14:36:08.077" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6597/what-common-structures-and-systems-exist-in-global-organized-religions&quot;&gt;What common structures and systems exist in global organized religions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So.  This question was pretty extensively discussed yesterday and was significantly tailored from its original form.  At one point it had 3 close votes, then after some work went down to two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see how this is too broad at this point.  It has a defined answer, currently the highest voted answer is what I am looking for, but that does not mean a better answer is not out there.  The nature of world-building is that there is usually not going to be a single correct answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that either a) people are voting to close things without effectively reviewing them because they already have a couple votes (the first two votes were in before any of the edits were made yesterday), or b) people see religion in the title and automatically think its not answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the last three to vote commented, which means the poster (me in this case) does not know their concerns with the post.  That's bad form, I understand it is not required but when time has been taken to review and edit a post it is very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you truly think this requires some additional attention please advise on why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I am biased or anything but I think this should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of comparison:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6515/what-could-humans-do-to-render-the-earth-uninhabitable&quot;&gt;What could humans do to render the earth uninhabitable?&lt;/a&gt;  How is this not more opinion based and broad than my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hopefully illustrates why I am concerned that we may be looking at a situation where close votes snowball once one is cast and we are inconsistent with what we do and do not close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T17:04:27.497" Title="Discuss...What common structures and systems exist in global organized religions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="609" CreationDate="2014-12-17T14:57:17.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a hat...Warm Welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its not on the list...which drives me crazy cause I have no idea what I did to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is cozy though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T14:57:17.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2014-12-17T15:34:05.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a &quot;list&quot; question, which most SE boards avoid because it is too hard to decide on a single winning answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shame too, because I was interested in the discussion, but I can't think of a way to re-phrase that question to avoid everyone simply chiming in with their answer, leaving a hard-to-vote mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T15:34:05.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2014-12-17T16:09:37.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to add these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you gain by reopening?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You claim, that (my) answer is &quot;what you seek for.&quot; Although I should say you that &quot;there could be better answer,&quot; it is just theoretical possibility. Reopening can bring you &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having &quot;closed&quot; question is not bad thing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not lose &quot;internet points&quot; or &quot;online reputation&quot;. Anybody seeking for such question can still find it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Religion itself is broad topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is loads of books about religion. There is countless amount of books written about major religion. Heck, there is even loads of books about &quot;small&quot; religions, like Neo-paganism, which I am member of. &lt;em&gt;You cannot make it into one question and answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question itself does not have clear &quot;winning criteria&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this (to me) holds true to several more questions here on Worldbuilding, namely the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6624/2071&quot;&gt;one about Energy weapons&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6565/planetary-scale-artworks&quot;&gt;the one about planetary artworks&lt;/a&gt; where &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; any answer can be the winning one, in your case it is &quot;one more drop to the already full glass&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I am for keeping it closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T16:09:37.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2014-12-17T16:41:11.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth Cort Ammon and Pavel Janicek have covered my main reservations about the question - even after all the edits it's still a list question and it has no clear way of rating the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bright side you've restricted it to large organized religions but even that is open to interpretation. For example do you separate Catholics, Church of England, Protestants, Mormons, etc? How about the various sects of the other large religions? New age stuff may not be as monolithic as some but is still international and organized, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think it now squeaks over the line into acceptable, and would vote to open it if it came up in the queue. I'm not confident enough in it to use my moderator binding vote though. It's very close to the line and I can fully understand mixed voting on whether to close it, keep it closed, or open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice my planetary artworks question has been mentioned and I had some concerns about that when I asked it. As a result I was careful to give three objective measurement scales (visibility, longevity, clearly-artificialness) by which answers can be rated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T16:47:43.030" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T16:47:43.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2014-12-17T16:48:05.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-to-deal-with-list-questions/110#110&quot;&gt;lists are not automatically bad&lt;/a&gt;. Also although religion is a broad subject, I believe this question now addresses specific practical aspects of organisation, rather than the much broader metaphysical side of religion. I do not personally see the question as too broad, although there may still be ways of clarifying it following feedback here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not see a reason for complaint here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close votes do not require comments. It is not bad form to close vote without commenting. If the community disagrees the question will be reopened. This is the process working as it should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A close vote has a reason, and that reason is displayed once 5 votes have been placed and the question is on hold. I'm strongly in favour of giving more detail in the comments, and having wider discussion on meta, but this is not mandatory. Someone voting to close a question without making any comment or meta discussion is still contributing simply by voting, and this is a positive thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can feel very personal when a question you wrote is put on hold, especially when you put a lot of effort into writing it and getting feedback beforehand. It can take an effort to avoid taking it personally, but that effort is worthwhile to promote a positive discussion and improve things further. We are still in the process of refining the scope of the site (to some extent we always will be) and people close voting is what stops the site descending into chaos. Every so often the community will disagree on whether a question is on topic, and the discussion will come to meta. I would much rather these occasional differences of opinion than just letting the chaos flood in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like your question, and I hope to see it reopened, but I also want to recognise the close voters as performing an essential service to our community. We're all on the same side here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T16:48:05.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2014-12-17T17:03:42.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to admit here to being a non-commenting close-voter in this case; for that I apologise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question because as it stood at the time I cast my vote (19 hours ago now, approximately 21:00 UTC 16.12.2014, it appeared &quot;too broad&quot;. I thought that answers, as the close reason says, would have to be long to properly cover the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it could easily become a list of answer covering either the same point or multiple different points; this makes it hard to find a comprehensive detailed answer covering everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm writing, my close vote still stands (it is currently on hold) and I have not voted to reopen. I would like to see some narrowing of the topic (for example, I would deem the original &quot;global organised &lt;strong&gt;churches&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; more answerable, or perhaps some leads you've already thought of to give answers a place to start and focus on. If some edits are made I will happily vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that topic, that's why I haven't close-voted the other question you linked. Although it is a broad question, it has given a number of good leads for answers to go from, which leads to reasonably concise answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T17:03:42.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-19T11:56:01.720" Score="5" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not of interest to non-moderators but if there was a way to turn off the &quot;more than 10 answers&quot; automatic flagging on worldbuilding that would be great. We get that triggering most days (sometimes multiple times) and just dismiss the flag as our community does an excellent job of flagging any answers that actually need moderating and 10 answers is a common occurrence. (Our average number of answers is 4.7)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T16:35:47.113" Title="Moderator Feature Request - Turn off &quot;more than 10 answers&quot; auto flag" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="629" CreationDate="2014-12-20T16:35:47.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to take the &quot;more than ten answers posted&quot; flag as a &quot;this question is &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; too broad, and might warrant a bit of scrutiny&quot; flag. That's what it is intended for. In our case, most often the auto-flagged questions are okay, but I like how the system is pointing out questions which may be at risk. So &lt;strong&gt;personally I'd want to keep that auto-flag right where it is.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my flag handling statistics are horrible because aside from basically egregious examples, I prefer to leave flags which the community can handle to the community. We have an active community with many high-reputation members who are doing a good job at handling the review queues; it's rare that I come to the site and see something that really requires &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; attention. And that's a good thing. The more we (moderators) can focus on the truly exceptional cases, the more attention we can devote to the few cases that really require moderator intervention. Remember that there are only a few things that a diamond moderator can do which a high-reputation community member cannot. (Migrations, comment flags and custom flags come to mind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T16:35:47.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-21T01:36:19.543" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been editing some of the tags on the main site, and I noticed that a few (two out of the top twenty most-used tags) have links to Wikipedia, and one quoted directly from a Wikipedia article! In one case, the quote made up the majority of the tag wiki (and I left it there); in the other case, it was added as a supplement at the very end which I deleted because that tag wiki was clearly strong enough to stand on its own. The first tag had a poor tag wiki if the Wikipedia article is excluded; the second had a very good tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we quote or add links from Wikipedia in our tag wikis? Should we use external sources at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T00:53:29.953" Title="Should we use Wikipedia (and other external sources) in tag wikis?" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2014-12-21T01:44:37.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same guidelines for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;using other people's work&lt;/a&gt; that apply to posts (questions and answers) also apply to tag wikis: quote only what's relevant, don't quote excessively, and cite and link the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think linking to, and selectively quoting from, external resources in tag wikis is fine.  I've seen this on other sites.  I've also seen tag wikis that link to questions (or, more usually, answers) &lt;em&gt;on the main site&lt;/em&gt; -- if there's a great answer that really explains the topic of the tag cleanly, go ahead and use that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please always make sure that the tag wiki fulfills its primary purpose, which is to explain what the tag means &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T01:44:37.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2014-12-22T00:53:29.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linking to an external site can help confirm that we are talking about the same thing.  For example, if we had a Gutenberg tag, we might mean the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;man&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;printing press&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bible&lt;/a&gt;, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;site with free digital copies&lt;/a&gt;.  Those links help disambiguate our use of Gutenberg.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links can also serve a secondary purpose of giving people places to find out more about the subject.  This isn't the main purpose of a tag wiki, but it is a nice side bonus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the real purpose is what Monica said:  &quot;to explain what the tag means &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;&quot; on this site.  I wouldn't remove an appropriate link, but there's no need for a Gutenberg Bible link on a Project Gutenberg tag wiki unless it's to illustrate a bad use of the tag.  An excerpt is more questionable.  We should prefer our own words to those of others.  However, in some cases, the excerpt is the tag.  Unless you're willing to fix it by writing a replacement, the excerpt is still better than blank space in my opinion.  If the excerpt contains information that better specifies what the tag means here, the excerpt should remain until it is made redundant by added content.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T00:53:29.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="613" CreationDate="2014-12-22T14:01:15.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that asking this is borderline.  In general it is bad form, but since the creator of the hat probably expected this this to happen, and it really won't have any long term negative effects on the site it can be over looked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T14:01:15.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1751" CreationDate="2014-12-23T10:05:50.763" Score="54" ViewCount="7747" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This sandbox got a little full, so we've created some more&lt;/strong&gt;. You should still link to this one as we will update it whenever a new one is created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current Sandbox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox for proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous Sandboxes(Incomplete list):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions 2017-2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions-2014-2017&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions 2014-2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3813/6507&quot;&gt;In order to make the Sandbox easier to use&lt;/a&gt;, a new Sandbox question will be posted when the old one becomes too full. &lt;strong&gt;This Sandbox is currently INACTIVE&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sandbox&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a place where Worldbuilding.SE users can get feedback on prospective questions they wish to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified question on the first try can be difficult. There is a much better chance of your question being well received if you post it in the Sandbox first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To post to the Sandbox scroll to the bottom of this page and click &amp;quot;Answer This Question&amp;quot;. Please &lt;strong&gt;only post questions here&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want feedback on an answer, please use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. Give the details of your question just as you would when actually posting it. Other users will help you improve your question by rating and discussing it. When you think your question is ready for the public, go ahead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;post it&lt;/a&gt;, and mark it as posted here by removing the body and tags, leaving the title and a link to the question. &lt;strong&gt;After a few days you should delete the post to keep the sandbox reasonably clear.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions do not have to be in any particular format, but they should conform to the general guidelines indicated in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/640/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, you can use sandbox notes to indicate your thoughts on the question, written like this: &lt;code&gt;[**Sandbox note:** your thought about this question here]&lt;/code&gt;. Alternatively, you can leave your questions about the question in a Sandbox Questions section at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please review questions here by commenting and voting. If you think a question is ready for the main site, indicate this with a comment and upvote. When a question gathers enough support it will be posted. &lt;strong&gt;Please avoid answering questions here.&lt;/strong&gt; I know it's tempting, but answering the question in a comment will clog the comments and make it harder to see good guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on how to use the Sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please make sure you wait at least a day after posting into the Sandbox to give a range of people time to see the question and respond.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Sandbox works best if you sort posts by &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; (click &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions?answertab=active&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-11T04:00:46.657" LastActivityDate="2022-12-11T18:40:14.527" Title="Inactive Sandbox 2014-2017" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|" AnswerCount="44" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-23T10:11:32.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; is a meta question which users can answer to get feedback from the community about questions they want to post but might have some issues. The Sandbox is the place for sorting those issues out so that when posted it is answerable as easily as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a separate &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/656/2685&quot;&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where users can get similar feedback for answers they are thinking of posting but which are as yet incomplete or may have other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Sandbox is slightly different; for full &quot;operating guidelines&quot;, please see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox was created from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/618/a-sandbox-for-sculpting-questions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T21:17:57.310" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T21:17:57.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-23T10:11:32.693" Score="0" Body="The Sandbox is the place where users can get feedback on potential questions and answers. Apart from the Sandbox itself, this tag should be used for meta-questions about the Sandbox." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T21:15:22.453" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T21:15:22.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="640" CreationDate="2014-12-23T10:49:35.757" Score="13" ViewCount="784" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Sandbox can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is the sandbox?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why should I use the sandbox?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the sandbox work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I review proposals?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should the format of sandbox posts be (title, tags, body)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2022-12-11T03:59:41.043" Title="How does the Sandbox work? How do I use it?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2014-12-23T10:49:35.757" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Where is the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The current Sandbox is located on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;. A list of all Sandboxes can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions-2014-2017&quot;&gt;original Sandbox post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Proposed questions should be posted as answers to the &lt;strong&gt;current&lt;/strong&gt; Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why should I use the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be thinking, perhaps, why would you stage questions on the sandbox instead of posting them directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this, let's see what could happen if you post it directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your question is incomplete, it will probably be quickly closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If people think that some point of the question is unclear, they will complain about it in comments and down vote your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might edit your question and fix the problems pointed out by commenters, but some down votes will not get retracted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your question has some point that is unclear or vague, some people may misunderstand it and post some bad answers, leading to unnecessary arguments, down votes and frustration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is intended to mitigate all those problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How does the Sandbox work?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get an idea for a nice question for this site, but aren't sure of its format or structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You post an answer to the sandbox. Your answer to the sandbox should contain the question that you are proposing. It is ok if your question is still incomplete.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After you post it there, people will give suggestions to improve your question and point out potential problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You fix the problems, improving your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When people agree that it is good, they will up vote it here in the sandbox; you should wait until a sufficient number of people seem to support your proposed question via voting and commenting before posting it on the main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now that you know that most of the problems are worked out, you post it in the main site.&#xA;Furthermore, the sandbox allows you to suggest improvements for questions from other people too. Upvote other people's questions when you think that they are ready.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you post your question on the main site, edit the post here. You should remove the body and tags of your question, leaving the title and a link to the question on the main site. Then delete the post, and add a link to your question on main to the list of graduated that is the accepted community wiki answer on the current Sandbox. Currently the list for graduated posts is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4858/28789&quot;&gt;this community wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How should I review proposals?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can contribute to the community by reviewing proposals to help them get ready for posting. Here is some advice to make your reviewing more productive and more helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort the sandbox by active&lt;/strong&gt;. While the Sandbox is young this may not make a huge difference, but as it grows, you'll see more active posts instead of just well-received posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Read the sandbox notes&lt;/strong&gt;. For incomplete questions, the author should leave sandbox notes (see What should the format of Sandbox posts be?, below). Read these notes; if the author knows there's something to be done you don't need to tell them. Similarly, if you think the author has missed something, point it out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Go through the close-vote reasons&lt;/strong&gt;. You want to make sure that the question, if posted in its current form, won't fall victim to a harsh close-voter. Check that it doesn't come under any of the close reasons (or close flag reasons, if you can't yet close-vote).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upvote complete proposals&lt;/strong&gt;. You can also comment to indicate your approval. When a question gathers enough support it will be posted to the main site, so make sure you show when it's ready.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What should the format of sandbox posts be (title, tags, body)?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions do not have to come in an absolute format, but some general guidance makes it easier to use the Sandbox. In general, questions should include the title, tags and body. You can also use sandbox notes to show points about the question. Here's a general template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# My Question Title&#xA;[tag:some-tag] [tag:other-descriptive-tag]&#xA;&#xA;Here goes the body of your question, literally as you intend to post it on main.&#xA;Incomplete sections and notes intended only for the sandbox phase can be denoted&#xA;as follows: [**Sandbox note:** I still need to add test cases.]&#xA;&#xA;-----&#xA;&#xA;## Sandbox Questions&#xA;&#xA;In this section at the end you can put a few general sentences/questions aimed at&#xA;reviewers in the sandbox, e.g. asking for specific feedback on parts of your question.&#xA;Any thoughts you have about the question should also go here for the community to give&#xA;you feedback on.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-11T03:59:41.043" LastActivityDate="2022-12-11T03:59:41.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="643" CreationDate="2014-12-23T13:11:28.547" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've added detail to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6849/in-portal-pushing-interconnected-portals-on-thin-portal-sized-rectangles-of-m&quot;&gt;In &amp;#39;portal&amp;#39;, pushing interconnected portals on thin portal sized rectangles of material through each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And requested moderator attention for re-opening, but the question is still on-hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5015" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T16:36:40.277" Title="Reopening portal question" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="642" CreationDate="2014-12-23T15:12:05.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I held off on opening it by moderator fiat as it was still borderline in my opinion and I was waiting to see the consensus. I haven't discussed it with the other moderators but I imagine their thought process was the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the flag earlier today and it had 4 open votes so I re-opened it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general the community here is good at processing both open and close votes so for things like that which do not need moderator intervention we prefer to let the process work without interference. As moderators we're here to step in and help with exceptional situations, whereas in this case the standard closing and opening process was entirely capable of handling things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially important during the beta phase of the site as we determine together just what is and is not on topic for the site. Moderators could easily overwhelm otherwise valuable input and discussion by the overriding power of our open/close votes. By waiting for it to have 4 open votes already my fifth vote had the same impact as anyone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2014-12-23T15:33:31.493" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T15:33:31.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="642" CreationDate="2014-12-23T15:20:37.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had a short discussion in the chat and most, like me, felt like the question was borderline as Tim B just mentioned. I'm not a mod but I got some moderation privileges. I was not sure what to do with the question so I let the others decide. That's why it took some time. But it's open now and I pretty sure it will stay open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T15:20:37.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2014-12-24T10:48:01.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested I'm posting this here in order to try and get it on topic. I don't want an answer from the physics Stack Exchange site because the intent of the question is much more to do with how to explain the concept than how to solve the math. Question follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to develop a story where a vast and sinister Alien Intelligence is bent on testing humanity's primitive knowledge of physics via the Q &amp;amp; A answer sites on their world wide communication system to make sure that they are not a threat to him (not entirely dissimilar to what Emperor Ming does in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon_%28film%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Flash Gordon movie&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/quotes?item=qt0384452&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Emperor Ming:&lt;/a&gt; Every thousand years, I test each life system in the&#xA;  Universe. I visit it with mysteries, earthquakes, unpredicted&#xA;  eclipses, strange craters in the wilderness... If these are taken as&#xA;  natural, I judge that system ignorant and harmless - I spare it. But&#xA;  if the Hand of Ming is recognized in these events, I judge that system&#xA;  dangerous to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What question should the AI ask the humans in order to test them and what matching answer would fully demonstrate that FTL travel violates causality? Something like this perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I have a spaceship that can instantaneously and infallibly travel&#xA;  to any point within a few hundred light years show me how I can travel&#xA;  back in time and prevent myself from being conceived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously in order to adapt something like this to a story the answer needs to be without complicated maths (especially as I can't follow it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background that prompted this idea is that I've occasionally seen the phrase/assumption 'FTL travel violates causality' (or variations thereon) used by sci fi fans and authors such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-will-not-write-4-escha.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Charless Stross&lt;/a&gt; but I have never seen a good explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For seconds: faster than light travel would appear to be a necessary&#xA;  precondition to writing wide-screen space opera. But if you permit&#xA;  violations of special relativity, you're also implicitly permitting&#xA;  global causality violation — time travel. (Go read a physics textbook&#xA;  if you're not sure why.) Permitting violations in the first place&#xA;  suggests that there'll be more than one way of doing FTL travel (just&#xA;  as there's more than one way of doing heavier than air flight —&#xA;  compare a helicopter to a jet airliner and a bee). And then you've got&#xA;  to ask, what are the implications of time travel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best explanations I have seen usually involve two frames of reference moving in opposite directions at the speed of light where one observer sees an event (e.g. shooting a giant space weapon at a harmless planet) before the other observer has started the event and is thus assumed to be able to (near) instantaneously travel to the other frame of reference (thus effectively back in time) and prevent the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble with those explanations is that surely, once an observer in one frame of reference tries to become an actor in the other frame of reference, the frames of reference must somehow merge or expand and therefore the initial conditions are no longer valid thus invalidating the violation of causality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3042" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T10:48:01.223" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="650" CreationDate="2014-12-24T16:10:57.410" Score="8" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; is now up, and there's a decent amount of activity. I like what I'm seeing: good dialogue between users on the posted questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm suggesting that we use the sandbox for answers, too. I'd like input on one I'm working on, and I daresay others would like it, too. Should we use the sandbox for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd advise not voting on this question; please vote on the answers posted below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion of mine here would be to not downvote any answers. That way, we can gauge the support of each option better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post-Christmas Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After being away for some time, I see that things have gotten quite interesting. Four people have done what I said not to do and have voted on the question, while three have done what I said not to do and downvoted an answer. Ah, well, I shouldn't tell people what to do, as this is an issue for the community, not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding in ArtofCode's vote, the winner appears to be the option of having a separate sandbox. I'll leave it up to ArtofCode to create it, as s/he created the original one. In the meantime, feel free to voice any and all objections on the matter. This case isn't closed quite yet, though it may have reached its resolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;The Answer Sandbox has been created.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.120" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T19:52:40.640" Title="Should we use the sandbox for answers, too?" Tags="|discussion|answers|sandbox|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2014-12-24T16:14:18.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to post three answers, each detailing one of the options as I see it. Community members, please vote on these to indicate your agreement or disagreement with each option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Option 1: No. Period.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox should never be used for answers as they are more easily changed on the main site without negative consequences such as closing. Answers posted in the Sandbox for feedback should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T16:14:18.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2014-12-24T16:16:04.190" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to post three answers, each detailing one of the options as I see it. Community members, please vote on these to indicate your agreement or disagreement with each option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Option 2: Yes. Period.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox is valid place for answers as they are just as subject to bad feedback as questions and could be made better with community feedback in the Sandbox. Answers posted in the Sandbox should stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T16:16:04.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2014-12-24T16:17:31.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to post three answers, each detailing one of the options as I see it. Community members, please vote on these to indicate your agreement or disagreement with each option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This option has my vote, so add 1 to the total votes on this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Option 3: Separate Sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current Sandbox should be left for questions alone, but a separate Sandbox should be set up for answers as they are equally deserving of feedback, but the two should be kept separate. Answers in the Question Sandbox should be deleted, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T16:30:48.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="679" CreationDate="2014-12-25T18:04:20.720" Score="8" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6941/using-international-waters-to-avoid-legal-punishment&quot;&gt;Using international waters to avoid legal punishment&lt;/a&gt; seems to be asking a real-world legal question.  I think law is in principle on-topic on Worldbuilding (same as sociology or religion or other &quot;how people act&quot; questions are), but I'm having trouble seeing the &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; in this one.  Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T16:04:01.933" Title="Is the &quot;international waters&quot; question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2014-12-25T18:49:02.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say I agreed with you at first. However, at second glance I'm reconsidering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, yes there's no worldbuilding in it - until the OP comes to the idea of making/claiming an island. Specifically, one of the answers says that instead of trying to find an unclaimed island, he could &lt;strong&gt;create&lt;/strong&gt; one. Now we're definitely into worldbuilding. Defining that island, whether just the island or the world surrounding it, is on-topic here, including defining its laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T18:49:02.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2014-12-25T20:21:18.247" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like an information gathering for me. We don't really know what the guy is planning - for all we know he might be planning to murder someone in real life (although it's highly unlikely). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal impression is that OP's starting point is that someone did something wrong on international waters and got away with it, and now the author is trying to figure out how to justify it. Considering that in the real world it's incredibly hard to pull off such trick, I'd say that the fictional world in question definitely need some building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other, less likely reason to ask such question is that he is building some world from scratch, but wants to borrow some legal stuff from ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know if OP had any of this in mind, but in my opinion there are valid reasons why other people may be looking for similar data for their work, so the question is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3254" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T20:21:18.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2014-12-26T15:28:44.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The question is off topic as it is asking about our existing world.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reality check question describes an artificial setting and asks whether it is realistic (consistent with what we know about the real world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about the real world with no changes is not building a new world, but assessing the existing one. This is interesting but not what our site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in favour of questions on building worlds that are arbitrarily similar to our own. However, I draw the line at simply asking about our world. This question is off topic and should be closed to avoid setting a precedent of real world questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to write a detective story set on Earth, with no changes, then you have no worldbuilding to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T21:56:05.877" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2014-12-27T15:40:05.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit that I'm not very familiar with this site (also, I have a bit of an a priori in favor of this question since I spent some time answering it). But it seems to me that it's a pretty run-of-the mill reality check question. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I want to build a spaceship that allows my characters to …, is it compatible with the laws of physics in our world?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“I want to build a micronation that allows my characters to …, is it compatible with the laws of nations in our world?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1 seems perfectly on-topic. What's so different about question 2 that would make it off-topic? Glancing through meta discussions, I don't see any sentiment to restrict the site to &lt;em&gt;SFnal&lt;/em&gt; world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastActivityDate="2014-12-27T15:40:05.930" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T15:41:24.470" Score="13" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What is the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sandbox&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a place where Worldbuilding.SE users can get feedback on prospective answers they are writing. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified answer on the first try can be difficult. There is a much better chance of your answer being well received if you post it in the Sandbox first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To post to the Sandbox scroll to the bottom of this page and click &amp;quot;Answer This Question&amp;quot;. This Sandbox is intended for &lt;strong&gt;answers only&lt;/strong&gt;; for posting questions please use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Question Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers do not have to be in any particular format, but they should conform to the general guidelines indicated in the post about answers in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/640/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, you can use sandbox notes to indicate your thoughts on your own answer, written like this: &lt;code&gt;[**Sandbox note:** I still need to do X]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please review answers here by commenting and voting. If you think an answer is ready for the main site, indicate this with a comment and upvote. When an answer gathers enough support, it will be posted to the relevant question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on how to use the Sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt; This information was originally written for the Question Sandbox, but much of it is also applicable to answers. Additionally, there is an answer there detailing specifics for answer posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Sandbox works best if you sort posts by &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; (click &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers?answertab=active&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T14:29:53.937" Title="Sandbox for Proposed Answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2014-12-29T15:49:28.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, the guidance in the other post can also be applied to the answer sandbox. However, the format of posts in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; should be slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# [Title of the question](link to question)&#xA;&#xA;Here goes the body of your answer, literally as you intend to post it on main.&#xA;Incomplete sections and notes intended only for the sandbox phase can be denoted&#xA;as follows: [**Sandbox note:** I still need to add test cases.]&#xA;&#xA;-----&#xA;&#xA;## Sandbox Questions&#xA;&#xA;In this section at the end you can put a few general sentences/questions aimed at&#xA;reviewers in the sandbox, e.g. asking for specific feedback on parts of your answer.&#xA;Any thoughts you have about the answer should also go here for the community to give&#xA;you feedback on.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;formatting guide&lt;/a&gt; in the help center for further help with Markdown formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T15:49:28.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:16:56.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paraphrased from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, answers are replies to questions or solutions, retaliations, responses that are relevant to the said questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are what Stack Exchange sites are all about (apart from questions). Without good answers, the sites don't function as no one will come and post their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/answers/info&quot;&gt;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/answers/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T21:16:56.677" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T21:16:56.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:16:56.450" Score="0" Body="This tag is for questions about answers: how to answer, whether specific answers are appropriate, and so forth." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T21:18:03.350" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T21:18:03.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:38:36.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested may be provided in the form of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are half the basis of Stack Exchange (the other half being answers). They are the result of someone wanting some help with a problem, or input from other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What guidelines should questions follow?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Man has made some machines that can answer questions provided the facts are profusely stored in them, but we will never be able to make a machine that will ask questions. The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, questions should follow the guidelines set out in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Help page&lt;/a&gt; on How to Ask. To summarise these points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Search and research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stay on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can find the list of what is on-topic for this site at the relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be specific&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it relevant to others&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep an open mind&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The answer to your question may not be what you are expecting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you should check the site before posting to check that your question does not already have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; for more detailed guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2020-01-21T16:36:57.493" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T16:36:57.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:38:36.640" Score="0" Body="This tag is for general questions about questions. Answers should be applicable to the vast majority of questions. Do not use this tag for questions on a single question, use the [specific-question] tag instead." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2020-01-24T00:00:57.837" LastActivityDate="2020-01-24T00:00:57.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:46:20.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As opposed to the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; tag, this tag is for discussion or support about a &lt;strong&gt;single, specific&lt;/strong&gt; question from the main site. It should be used, for example, when you ask about &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/592/2685&quot;&gt;why your question was closed&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/651/2685&quot;&gt;whether this question really is on topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, questions on meta with this tag should not also have the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; tag and vice versa. However, this rule has some exceptions, so use common sense when tagging. If you believe your question might have an &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; applicable to many new questions on the main site, tag it &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; also, but keep the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/specific-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'specific-question'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-question&lt;/a&gt; tag, as it should still pertain to one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question linked above (&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/592/2685&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) might be tagged both, as although it related to one question to start with, the answers have given rise to some discussion about what is on-topic here, a subject applying to all new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T22:44:01.130" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T22:44:01.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-29T20:46:20.520" Score="0" Body="This tag is for use in questions pertaining to one question on the main site in particular." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T22:44:07.800" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T22:44:07.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="665" CreationDate="2014-12-30T18:56:13.533" Score="11" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in the sandbox, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;, I have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/646/2113&quot;&gt;question about violence and religion posted&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments a concern was raised about answering the question for fear of offending someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a valid concern, i.e. should the question be scrapped?  Obviously the intent of the question is not to offend.  I simply want to look at how these two seemingly exclusive concepts manage to overlap, I don't believe it is opinion that this concept is a reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly it sort of bothers me that hypersensitivity doesn't allow us to even have the conversation so I am inclined to ask it, but I was wondering what everyone else's feelings on the subject were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T20:20:16.663" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:32:11.163" Title="How do we feel about questions that have the possibility of offending people?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2014-12-30T19:16:34.037" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think a topic should be off-limits just because it's a topic that people can get offended by.  Consider that SE's &lt;em&gt;religion&lt;/em&gt; sites sometimes get questions on topics that might be offensive to people who aren't members of that religion, yet those questions are important to those sites.  For example, Mi Yodeya has a question asking if Christianity meets the formal definition of idolatry, Christianity.SE and BH both have questions that make truth claims offensive to non-Christians, and I suspect that if I took a look at Islam.SE I'd find some questions that offend Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others there.  And I imagine that if we looked at some of the non-religious sites like Politics and Skeptics, we might find some hot-button questions there too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think the answer is &quot;don't ask&quot;, but I also think it's important to ask such questions with sensitivity.  Don't make religious assertions (truth claims) if you don't need to (and you &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; don't need to); use descriptive rather than prescriptive language, and focus on the question as it relates to the world you're building, which is probably different in some important ways from the world we all actually live in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the specific question you're talking about, I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions#comment2577_646&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; -- I think as a question about &lt;em&gt;how religion works&lt;/em&gt; it's over-broad, but that's also not directly in our scope.  If you recast it as a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; question -- I want to produce these effects, I want it to seem realistic to my readers/viewwers/players, how do I do that? -- then I think it would be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T19:16:34.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2014-12-30T19:16:43.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really an &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; answer to this, so it will depend on what the preferences of the community are. That being said, I don't think the idea of restricting questions just because they might offend a few people is well supported on Stack Exchange sites. These sites cater to an audience that values the free exchange of information; that's kind of the whole point of having a Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the SE system does have a built-in method of dealing with offensive content, which tells us something about what Stack Exchange intends to be considered offensive. The description of the offensive flag says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question contains content that a reasonable person would deem inappropriate for respectful discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question you're considering asking comes even close to falling under that description. So I don't think you should hold back from posting it on the grounds that it would be inappropriately offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And referring to the question in question: the objection raised in the comments was not even that the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; would be offensive, it was that the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; person had in mind &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be offensive to a small minority of participants in the site. I certainly wouldn't consider that any reason not to post the question. If that one person is uncomfortable posting their answer, then they're free not to post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T19:16:43.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2014-12-30T19:26:21.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the discussion in the comments, and I have to say, I thought it was rather interesting, because I ran into a similar situation this past fall, where my team was prohibited from participating in an athletic competition on a religious holiday because the school administration thought that members of that religion might be offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both scenarios, there is no evidence that people will be offended. True, perhaps not a lot of people have seen your question in the sandbox, but it would be pre-mature to not post something like this on the off-chance that it will offend hypersensitive folk. Nobody has complained so far; given how the question is written, there's nothing to suggest that anyone will complain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the question itself . . . I see nothing wrong with it. You wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at religions in world history they are often a source of conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no history buff, but I can name quite a few wars off the top of my head that have been motivated by religion. What you state is a fact (although perhaps &amp;quot;often&amp;quot; is a tad too strong): religions can cause conflict. If you had written something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at religions in world history they are the prime source of conflict&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see people getting offended. A little bit. But what you say next is far from offensive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a few exceptions religious dogma generally preaches peace. I do not believe that religion itself is the cause of violence as religion is directed in the end by people, and in the end people are the source of violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But far too often religious belief is used to promote violence.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's something that worries me at all, it's that last line. &amp;quot;Far too often&amp;quot; could be interpreted different ways, and hypersensitive folk may take that to mean &amp;quot;A majority of the time.&amp;quot; Is that what you mean? Of course not. But will someone take that the wrong way? Odds are that one or two will, but that's really nothing to stop you from posting the question. If you can tweak the wording a little for that, you should be just fine. As it is, I can see you're bending over backwards to make sure nobody takes you the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that I'm an atheist, so my opinions might be swayed here. Heads up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T22:49:28.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2014-12-31T01:13:27.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7092/necessary-psychological-steps-to-achieve-true-anarcho-capitalism&quot;&gt;Necessary psychological steps to achieve true Anarcho-Capitalism&lt;/a&gt; (question deleted on main site)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My description of anarcho-capitalism is a market driven means of resource exchange, without any interference from a state, actually there is no government or state, world bodies of trade. Goods and services innovation is driven through the quality and pure market forces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Banking is peer to peer, using a decentralized currency like bitcoin. No fractional banking or credit creation as now, so a leaner/bank could not lend you credit unless they had them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No taxes at all, so product and service policy is defined by you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All current services supposedly funded by taxes are paid for on the quality and on a voluntary system, like old Chinese medicine practices; poor were free, the rich paid on how well the service worked. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laws are based purely on common law, victim based laws and are judged by a group of peers - no lawyers and judges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not a historical but based on an open internet and no restrictions on ideas exchange, except good technology to remove bots and PR. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Education teaches civics, self-authority and self-responsibility. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing the need for a state, government, shadow government or any slave masters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;End of all &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_%28United_States%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psyop warfare&lt;/a&gt; upon the population.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What mass psychological steps are needed and how did this happen? What caused a mass awakening in realisation that we no longer need a State or Government? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes: For example we have had several whistleblowers expose mass surveillance, we have had the rise of the police and military state, the CIA torture reports. Yet I believe the masses are kept under a psychological trance for a better word. Taking current world events as a start point, what removed this trance?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T16:51:45.680" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2014-12-31T02:35:45.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Monica said, go take a look at Politic SE and count the questions that are not offending anyone... It is very hard to ask a question without getting in the left/right debate for example. Even trivial statement can get the people to downvote a message because they share a different view. There is no way to clearly know in advance that something will offend someone. Unless you are being provocative deliberately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can give some advice: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the best of your abilities, you should make sure your not talking about any religion in particular. You should avoid saying that some religions cause people to be more violent that others.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T02:35:45.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="343" CreationDate="2015-01-02T01:31:52.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;2015&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new year means new community-ad posts that have to be voted on again.  This ad is fairly new so I don't think we need to change anything about it (if you disagree please speak up), but it &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; need to be resubmitted to other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ad has made it past the threshold on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5355/32756&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5293/19667&quot;&gt;RPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/community-promotion-ads-2015/6400#6400&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:41.363" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T23:07:52.860" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T01:31:52.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2015-01-02T02:17:36.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see how this can be on-topic. It only needs like one or two gratuitous sentences saying something like, &quot;suppose someone wanted to create a new environment by starting a new pocket dictatorship on an uninhabited island, or even a ship, barge, or set of vessels, on 21st Century Earth. What set of laws would they need to work around?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like a world-building question to me, and it seems sufficiently implied that it's not strictly necessary, and that the question should not be put on hold, but that it could benefit from some such addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has net 20 upvotes, and an great answer to it has over 40 upvotes, as opposed to downvotes and people saying &quot;boo hiss&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we just add an edit with something like the above addition to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T02:17:36.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-02T18:09:26.163" Score="10" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water-vessel-design&quot;&gt;'water-vessel-design'&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water-vessel-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water-vessel-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water-vessel-design&lt;/a&gt;) is really wordy; something like 'ship-design' would be a little better. However, we do have the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shipbuilding&quot;&gt;shipbuilding&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shipbuilding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shipbuilding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shipbuilding&lt;/a&gt;), which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An actual term&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two also seem to be similar in usage; there are four questions using both of these tags and one uses both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we combine the two? I'd suggest one as a synonym of the other but I lack the necessary in rep in either tag. I'd also like to hear a discussion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shipbuilding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shipbuilding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shipbuilding&lt;/a&gt; can apparently also be used for spaceships, so my preference would be to get rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water-vessel-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water-vessel-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water-vessel-design&lt;/a&gt; tag by making it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shipbuilding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shipbuilding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shipbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, and use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shipbuilding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shipbuilding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shipbuilding&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T22:07:07.357" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T22:07:07.357" Title="Should we merge 'water vessel design' and 'shipbuilding'?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2015-01-03T00:36:10.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the one having raised the concerns leading to this question, I think I should explain myself a little bit more than I could in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem with the original question (the current one is fine, see below) was that it was about some of the mechanisms of religions in general. As such, truthfully answering it would require me to make some general, negative observations about real religions, which at least apply to a relevant subgroup of religions and thus might upset people. Moreover, to back-up these observations, I would need real-life examples, which are in a clear danger of upsetting adherents of the respective religions. I will leave it at that, because going into more details might already be offending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I could actively censor myself and not use any examples (except for dead religions) and refrain from making general observations. Censoring myself is pretty bad on its own and it would also mean that I could not answer the question to my best abilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wouldn’t censor myself, I would expect my answer to gather offensive flags or cause heavy discussions that we probably do not want here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some of you argue that potentially offensive content is everyday business on the religion sites or Politics. That’s correct, but all this is in places you have to expect it: If I visit Christianity, e.g., I have to expect to be exposed to Christian opinions. On Worldbuilding and many other sites, this is not the case. On the other hand, on religion sites, answers are expected to come from the point of view of the respective religion (if I am not mistaken). If I would answer certain questions on such a site freely (and thus from another point of view), they would probably be deleted. Moreover, I do not think that on any other site some question on religious mechanisms would be asked, so this could really go further than existing content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an unwritten rule for conversations in groups for which religious heterogeneity is to be expected (and which are not expected to be open for such questions), not to raise the topic of religion, because otherwise quarrel could ensue. In my opinion, there are further reasons to follow this rule, which I cannot explain here, however, without braking this rule. And that’s despite &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/891/updated-april-14-design-for-academia-se/896#comment2597_896&quot;&gt;me usually being the one who is annoyed of hypersensitivity&lt;/a&gt;. On the other hand, if somebody does address the topic of religion, they have to expect that I freely speak my mind and if they are offended, it was them who raised the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, the updated question is fine in my opinion as it is now about a specific fictional religion and not about religions in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a sidenote, I find it acceptable to close or avoid a question based on the answers it might receive, as long as they are actually answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:17.787" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T00:44:22.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2015-01-03T03:02:22.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the site's operating definition of the word &quot;World&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that the OP might have, without leaving the specificity of the &quot;real world&quot;, asked about the psychological world view of fictional characters trying to legally provide (non-child) prostitution services to American citizens on a yatch which travelled outside national waters before the carnality began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if they had asked what plot turns could be expected due to the complexity of maritime law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if they specifically asked how the fictional characters might escape prosecution, thus providing the story with a happy ending?  (no pun intended)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these questions satisfy the intended focus of this forum?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Notice that none of these questions concern the conventional idea of world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, aren't we trying to provide authors with a place to work out the details of their stories?  Aren't we trying to help them build a believable, fictional world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and before anyone brings up the detective novel again, let me clarify something which I think is important within the context of this discussion.  All writing involves world building.  Even when the author is trying to write non-fiction, they are limited to rendering the subset of reality which can fit on the paper and within the reader's attention span.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are all world builders.  Whether we do it by adding the fanciful or by subtracting the mundane, shouldn't be a criteria for participating on this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3112" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T03:02:22.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-04T20:59:02.117" Score="10" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, this &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilders.hol.es/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mapping site&lt;/a&gt; is now mostly working. There's some editing functionality to put in yet, but the vast majority of the work is done. However, as with all new systems, it's likely to be full of bugs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go and break my site. Find the bugs - any kind, cosmetic, security, random weird stuff because I forgot to handle an edge case, go for it. Please post your bugs in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case anyone wants to really try breaking it and going for the database, there's a table set up there called &lt;code&gt;tests&lt;/code&gt;. Cookies for you if you can retrieve the contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rewards, you ask? Well, since you mention it, I'm planning to put up some credits. Of course, bug-finders qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mods (and the community in general really): thanks all for putting up with these posts - they're not quite on topic but it is useful to have them.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T21:40:34.027" Title="Mapping site - Go Break It" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-04-18T01:37:19.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="678" CreationDate="2015-01-05T00:34:25.320" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see we have a new tag, called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/no-ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;no-ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;no-ftl&lt;/a&gt;. This stands for &quot;no faster-than-light [travel]&quot;, and indicates that nothing in the universe in question can travel faster than light. The tag is based off of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ftl&lt;/a&gt; tag, which stands for &quot;faster-than-light&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not spell out the phrase &quot;faster-than-light&quot; ($\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/no-faster-than-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;no-faster-than-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;no-faster-than-light&lt;/a&gt;)? Many people may not know what &quot;ftl&quot; stands for, and this would mean that the question wouldn't necessarily have to explain what &quot;ftl&quot; means. And for those who think &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; a mouthful, just look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water-vessel-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water-vessel-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water-vessel-design&lt;/a&gt; - although &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/672/should-we-merge-water-vessel-design-and-shipbuilding&quot;&gt;I've suggested&lt;/a&gt; that it's unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/no-ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;no-ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;no-ftl&lt;/a&gt; because I'd assume that faster-than-light travel doesn't automatically exist in a given world, and we can assume that, unless stated otherwise, it does not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this is all complicated further by the fact that there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ftl&lt;/a&gt;, just a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faster-than-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faster-than-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faster-than-light&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We should either get rid of the tag entirely, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spell out &quot;no-faster-than-light&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T11:21:34.780" Title="Why use the phrase 'ftl'?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="676" CreationDate="2015-01-05T05:20:13.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the no-ftl tag is my accidental creation.  I was looking for a way to tag my question with a constraint as you've described.  I didn't realize that using a non-existant tag would create a new one.  I thought that it would push back at me like when I tried to use an &quot;aliens&quot; tag and it suggested that I use &quot;alien&quot; instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no objection (nor right to object) concerning the renaming of this tag from &quot;no-ftl&quot; to &quot;no-faster-than-light&quot;.  I would however support its continued existence as it is a valuable suppliment to the &quot;space-travel&quot; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Space travel with ftl is like modern air-travel with no major inconvenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Space travel without ftl is like crossing the Atlantic in colonial days, life threatening and involving years of commitment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may be similar ideas, but they have vastly different effects on a story.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I doubt that the absence of an &quot;faster-than-light&quot; tag on a question would keep people from suggesting faster-than-light solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3112" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T05:20:13.710" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="676" CreationDate="2015-01-05T11:21:34.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/no-ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;no-ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;no-ftl&lt;/a&gt; tag should be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two things a tag does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, a tag is an indicator of what a question is about. A question about the lack of faster-than-light travel can accurately be tagged with the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ftl&lt;/a&gt; since it has to do with the implication of (the lack of) ftl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly a tag can imply a set of rules about how the question should be answered. These tags by their very nature need to be used sparingly and need to have a wide appeal. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is an example of this, where it states that answers must be based in scientific theory. (Note that this is not a replacement for asking for such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FTL/No FTL is clearly not a candidate for the second category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ftl&lt;/a&gt; already indicates that a question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; ftl (or the lack thereof). Henry Taylor 's question is not about ftl, therefore the tag ftl is not appropriate (and nor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/no-ftl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;no-ftl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;no-ftl&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restrictions in questions are restrictions in questions, they do not need tagging as such. Regarding the specific question (which is currently closed as idea generation), I think it appears to be misusing tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T11:21:34.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2015-01-05T16:04:01.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was edited per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/671/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and subsequently reopened by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm marking this as accepted to indicate that the situation seems to have been resolved, but I'm not trying to shut down discussion if there's more to say about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T16:04:01.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="675" CreationDate="2015-01-05T21:14:53.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no check for MIME type before allowing an upload. I uploaded a renamed Clipper PRG file as a JPG. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't yet view/edit any map. All links for editing go to a 403 error page, access denied.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will edit as I find more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5260" LastEditorUserId="5260" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T21:40:34.027" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T21:40:34.027" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-06T16:15:14.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every question asked on Stack Exchange can have up to five tags that categorize the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta sites have tags that need to be present in the question, which are &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'bug'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'support'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'discussion'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'feature-request'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;; there are also tags that can be added only from moderators, such as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'featured'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'status-declined'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; (along with other status tags), which are shown with a red background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see the section on tagging in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T08:29:06.037" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T08:29:06.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="683" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-06T16:15:14.787" Score="0" Body="Tags are keywords or labels that categorize and group your question with other, similar questions." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T08:29:11.313" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T08:29:11.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-06T23:08:31.240" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions about the development between world building and creative writing off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to post the following question below, but I was not sure if it is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encountered an interesting distaste from the creative writing community. At least some creative writers do not support beginner writers world build their first story. The shocking truth that I am told time and time again, the first written story will fail, because it is the first piece ever created by the author. This goes beyond the practice of creative writing. Even if the author practices writing short stories for several months to even years, the first story will still fail. Once the failure is complete, the author learns from the mistakes to make a better published piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do world-builders move past this scary colossal truth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T09:47:01.140" Title="Are questions about the development between world building and creative writing off topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2015-01-07T00:11:54.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It is off topic.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, you've written a question about both worldbuilding and writing processes. Questions here about worldbuilding process have been closed before, so I would't expect much different for this one, especially given the addition of writing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend going over to Writers, but it seems they've expressed distaste for such a question and since I'm not a member there I can't shed much more light than that. Perhaps some nice commenter will come up with somewhere you can ask this :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-01-07T09:47:01.140" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T09:47:01.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2015-01-07T01:49:21.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, thank you for bringing this to meta and giving us the opportunity to provide feedback before asking on main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your question sounds like &quot;how do I get over having my first manuscript rejected&quot;, which doesn't sound very much like a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; question to me.  It doesn't seem to be about the world or the process of building it; it sounds like it's about the writing/editing/submission process.  If, instead of fiction set in a new world, your manuscript were a physics textbook (that you'd heard would be rejected because you don't have the right academic ties), would you think it on-topic at either Physics or Academia?  I wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, &quot;how do X move past this&quot; sounds primarily opinion-based to me; how would you objectively evaluate answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you have a question about how to design a world for reworking -- e.g. how to design parts of your world so that, if the containing story/game/etc is rejected you don't have to go back to square one -- that would be a world-building question and on-topic here.  Be sure it's answerable and not an opinion survey or discussion, but I would expect there to be things akin to &quot;defensive coding&quot; and encapsulation that you could do when designing a world, and I can imagine good questions in that space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T01:49:21.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="603" CreationDate="2015-01-10T15:25:07.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding a history that can be restored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy fix is to create a field in your database that stores a value of Y or N, to show or hide comments, posts, uploads etc. This way when your moderators nix a particular item, a simple N would be inserted into your db, effectively hiding the item from public view. This would always allow you the ability to change that back to Y, to restore history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6389" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T15:25:07.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1685" CreationDate="2015-01-12T12:34:55.607" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've been seeing, we've had a number of off-topic questions around in the past few days/weeks, such as the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8585/what-is-one-word-that-means-to-matter-less&quot;&gt;What is one word that means to matter less?&lt;/a&gt;. Now, obviously we have very good processes to close or delete these, but I'm thinking: on other beta sites on which I'm a member, I haven't seen nearly as many off-topic questions per on-topic. So there's the question: are we getting a higher proportion of off-topic questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T14:49:16.973" Title="Are we getting a higher proportion of off-topic questions than other sites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1684" CreationDate="2015-01-12T13:00:15.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have we had that many really? Completely off topic questions (as opposed to just overly broad) are fairly rare really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have to ask if it matters? If they happen we deal with them. What difference does it make if our ratio is lower or higher than other sites? How is that information useful to us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent ones may be connected to the fact that we get a lot of questions in HNQ so it's not surprising that we get people coming in who are not familiar with what is on or off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T13:00:15.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1684" CreationDate="2015-01-12T14:49:16.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not done much for beta work other than this and software recommendations.  This site does have more than SR but that is a pretty strait forward topic.  I think this site will always have a little trouble differentiating between on and off topic just as a byproduct of the subject matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T14:49:16.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-12T21:33:37.390" Score="6" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;while I know about tag synonyms I'm not exactly sure in this case if I'm using it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed ai to be a synonym of artificial-intelligence, since at least one person keeps using it.  is this correct or should I continue to replace the tag when I see questions with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T22:44:40.630" Title="Tag synonym vs. renaming" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1688" CreationDate="2015-01-12T22:00:19.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That sounds like an appropriate use of a synonym to me.  A synonym should be defined when there are multiple ways to describe a concept &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; when typing one of them wouldn't offer an auto-complete to the other.  So, for example, don't create synonyms between singular and plural forms; if you start typing either the tag will be suggested.  But if the words are very different -- meteorology -&gt; weather, cartography -&gt; map-making, or (IMO) ai -&gt; artificial-intelligence, a synonym is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T22:00:19.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1688" CreationDate="2015-01-12T22:28:22.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica is (as usual!) right, in my opinion. It seems like you're fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confession time: I edited out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ai&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ai&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ai&lt;/a&gt; tag from the question it was used on - before seeing this meta post. My reason was that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artifical-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artifical-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artifical-intelligence&lt;/a&gt; tag already exists and doesn't seem to have any problems; I didn't think it was necessary to have an abbreviated tag - though if anyone wants to rollback the edit, that's fine with me. But I don't think we need to have tags that are this similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ai&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ai&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ai&lt;/a&gt; tag is kept, I think it should by all means be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artifical-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artifical-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artifical-intelligence&lt;/a&gt;. Wish I had the required rep to vote for that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T22:28:22.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1688" CreationDate="2015-01-12T22:44:40.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with editing the tags of all faulty questions is that people might still continue to use it in the future. Thus, every time a new question appear, we would need to change the tag. It is much easier to use 2 tags and put them as synonym in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless someone make a world building question related to Adobe illustrator. (.ai is the extension of the files) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T22:44:40.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-13T00:08:29.457" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8633/types-of-magic-superpowers-in-a-simulated-universe&quot;&gt;Classifying possible sources of supernatural abilities in a simulated universe&lt;/a&gt;&quot; doesn't currently give any details about that simulation but asks for weaknesses/exceptions in its laws. Is this too broad, or simply unclear? Should it be closed until improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems very similar to another question previously discussed &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/438/is-the-question-hacking-the-universe-too-broad&quot;&gt;Is the question &amp;quot;Hacking the universe&amp;quot; too broad?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; so discussion there may be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T17:47:33.173" Title="Is unspecified simulated universe too broad a setting for questions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-01-13T01:26:40.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;2 problems&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author ask for the limitations but he should be the one to&#xA;specify them. Otherwise, it comes to the answerers to set them but that is just too broad and we end up saying that everything is possible. Unless I misunderstood what crude video game means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no limit (see 1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, this is too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T01:26:40.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-13T01:32:43.533" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be literally dozens of comments on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8613/matrioshka-testing-a-way-to-keep-your-ai-honest-or-at-least-guessing&quot;&gt;Matrioshka Testing Question&lt;/a&gt;, so I was wondering if a community wiki format might not be more appropriate. If people here agree, how would I go about doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T15:54:02.537" Title="Can I turn my &quot;Matrioshka AI&quot; question into a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1694" CreationDate="2015-01-13T04:03:15.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the specific question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I see there is a lot of &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; in comments, which isn't really what comments are for.  Community Wiki would make it easier for people to collaboratively edit the question, but these comments aren't proposing edits or asking clarifying questions, so I don't see how that would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't generally convert &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to community wiki because doing so would also convert all the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to community wiki, which would deprive those users of the reputation points for their contribution. That is one of the reasons the feature has been largely deprecated. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Future of Community Wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to convert an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (that you posted) to community wiki, edit it and check the &quot;community wiki&quot; box below the edit textbox (on the right).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6MqRU.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="52" LastEditDate="2015-01-13T15:54:02.537" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T15:54:02.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:32:11.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think in any subject area, anything said comes down to 'intent'.  If your question, comment, or answers come across with the intent to offend, then it should be down-voted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it has the possibility to offend due to your ignorance of the subject, because you are typing (where tone doesn't always come across well), you should spell out very clearly that you are genuinely curious, but also genuinely ignorant of the issue, and don't have any harmful intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:32:11.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="558" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:53:10.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Map Items&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as an urban planner who 'makes maps' almost everyday, I am not sure what everyone's needs would be in a world-builder, but here are the layers (as suggested by Tim B) that can be turned on and off, and also &lt;em&gt;interchangeable&lt;/em&gt; so that one can be 'above' another, or moved 'below' another.  From the bottom layer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Land (and sea, mountains, etc: geological features), Infrastructure &amp;amp; Roadways (including paths), Vegetation and Landscaping, Plots/Building Footprints/Buildings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, another additional item to your annotations might be 'designated' areas as polygons or shapes, such as environmental reserves, settlement growth boundaries, maybe even zoning.  Well now that I think about it, there are a lot of features to map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Layers can have metadata embedded, and points, lines, polygons can have colors attributed to them, which can be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User Tools&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at ArcGIS right now (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcGIS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;description&lt;/a&gt;), and it includes as standard tools (there are thousands): Zooming/WorldView, Info (you click on a feature and it tells you all the metadata about it), and an Editor to change the points, lines, and polygons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a publishing function (&quot;Layout View&quot;) to switch to where you're preparing a map, with a legend (your layers), scale, north arrow, title, etc.  Each can be modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:53:10.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-13T17:46:11.340" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently put an answer on the Matrioshka AI question. It's generated a fair amount of controversy and differing viewpoints. Essentially, I found that I needed more information than was reasonable to formulate my answer to be based on a futuristic simulator, so I answered based on the question's principles but using current simulation methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have since been a number of comments which have the overall tone that my view is wrong. This has put me into defending my answer; I think it's reasonable that answers here have some difference of opinion (as TimB said on one of my other recent answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write, the last comment in the stream is mine. One user asked if I could claim to be an expert in simulations, but I felt the tone of his comment was, while not out there rude, a bit... off. I replied with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8613/matrioshka-testing-a-way-to-keep-your-ai-honest-or-at-least-guessing/8629#comment18497_8629&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, which essentially says many answers have some opinion base and if he can't claim to be an expert either then there is no need to argue so violently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, am I right in defending myself and my view, or should I have handled this differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T19:48:28.983" Title="Am I right to be defensive?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1698" CreationDate="2015-01-13T18:27:15.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the issue was handled very well by any of those involved, including, to some extent, me. The back-and-forth comments went well past the point where they should have gone to chat, for one. It seems that there was misunderstanding between the parties about the basis of the answer and the criticism, and since it was not easily clarified, it should have been moved to chat for better two-way communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I agree with the content of the comments that you mention, but disagree with the tone. I think that you have some unfounded assumptions in your answer that need to be explained or justified, but the comments do seem to be a bit hostile, in particular, the implied accusation that you have no argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to remember that StackExchange is supposed to be &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt;. So, when leaving comments, one should avoid attacking the answer or question, or the one who posted it. As for you and your response, when you encounter comments that strike you as rude or hostile, you should assume that you are misinterpreting and that the commenter meant simply to point out room for improvement. Getting defensive is just responding to hostility with more hostility, which never really helps things. If it is inappropriate for someone to ask &quot;are you an expert in modeling physics?&quot; then it is also inappropriate to respond, &quot;are &lt;strong&gt;you?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3468" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T18:27:15.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1698" CreationDate="2015-01-13T19:48:28.983" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some observations, coming in after the fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the conversation should have gone to chat way, &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; earlier.  There are now enough comments that I can push a button and move the whole thing, which I will do in a bit (so you might want to quote from the comment you currently link to, as the link will break).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, online communication is hard, especially when any form of negative feedback or critique is involved.  I think we all, authors and readers, need to take some extra care:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;strong&gt;writing&lt;/strong&gt; a comment, be aware that phrases like &quot;do you claim to be an expert&quot; may sound neutral to you (hey, you think you're asking about credentials), but words like &quot;claim&quot; carry an accusatory tone.  Asking what someone's sources are is &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt;, but try to use the most neutral language that does the job.  Sometimes a simple &quot;could you say more about X?&quot; does the job.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an author, I've found that expressing my &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; lack of knowledge can help with that: &quot;I'm having trouble following your argument; could you spell out steps X and Y for me?&quot;  &quot;I'm not familiar with that research; where can I learn more?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;strong&gt;reading&lt;/strong&gt; a comment, try to assume the best intentions unless there's clear evidence otherwise.  The Internet is a worldwide, multi-cultural environment and people have vastly different levels of knowledge, experience, and ability to express themselves.  Try to assume that that negative-sounding comment wasn't really a slam on you and address the content without reacting to the tone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; clear evidence otherwise, that the comment is an attack or trying to start a fight, try not to engage.  Remember that you can flag things, and particularly if somebody is being rude we want to know that.  But please try to minimize the splash zone once you realize it's gotten to this point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;strong&gt;receiving&lt;/strong&gt; a comment, please try to remember that someone may still have a valid point even if he's not an expert.  Even a student can spot an error in a PhD thesis, and people can spot logical flaws in arguments even if they're not experts in the particular field.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;everybody&lt;/strong&gt;, remember that people will be &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/386&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrong on the Internet&lt;/a&gt;, and if you've reached the point where you don't think you can (calmly) persuade the other of your view, all you can do is walk away.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/138173/162102&quot;&gt;Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some Stack-Exchange-specific reminders:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for discussions.  If you put &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; in your markdown that'll turn into a link to the main chat room; you can use that to try to move a discussion early, before the auto-prompt pops up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can express your disagreement by &lt;em&gt;offering a different answer&lt;/em&gt;, please do that instead of using comments, which are temporary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The primary tool for expressing agreement or disagreement is the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T19:48:28.983" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-01-14T15:47:45.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm torn on the best way to answer.  As a programmer, I &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; agree it is too broad, but I'm not sure if it is easy for me to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is too broad to a non-programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Programming languages have a class of behaviors called &quot;undefined behavior,&quot; or UB for short.  If you do something with UB (such as using memory you don't have official rights to use), anything goes.  The compiler can refuse to work, you can crash, you can launch nuclear missiles, &lt;em&gt;or it could work seamlessly like nothing ever happened.&lt;/em&gt;  If you get anywhere near this class of glitch, the capabilities are limitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I've seen this kind of question several times.  I paraphrase it as, &quot;Hey, check out this new insanely overpowered ability/creature in my world, which you can mathematically prove is more powerful than the rest of the world combined.  I don't want to get into implementation details, but how do I stop it?&quot;  I've been wondering if we should start closing such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common place they show up is the singularity.  So many questions are in the form &quot;assuming computers are better than humans in every way shape and form, and can build themselves.  How do humans keep up?&quot;  The answer is &quot;they don't,&quot; until you get into implementation limitations for computers (such as FLOPS/watt) which have been swept under the rug by the initial wording.  In such scenarios, they intentionally leave the capabilities of computers boundless, but force their humans to wrestle with their implementation details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-01-14T15:47:45.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-01-15T09:13:25.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of the mentioned question, and I'm not sure that it is &quot;salvageable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I am not good with words and I cannot precisely describe what I really want to ask about. First the question was too broad, now I get answers on a different level of abstraction that I was interested in. Yes, they are nice answers (deserving upvotes etc), but they are answers to a completely different problem - and if I edit the question more, the thread will become even more incoherent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to break the quality of the site (especially in the beta phase it is important!) so I think it's better to close this question than to leave it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6434" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T09:13:25.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-01-15T17:41:45.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's too unclear to have a meaningful answer. Even the author is saying he isn't getting answers he wanted, and I don't think other readers will find this Q or the A's useful unless they are already confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This and what Cort and Vincent say are all true. The question does not explain well what it means, starting right off with &quot;crude video game&quot; when it seems to mean something incredibly sophisticated and nearly indistinguishable from the real world, like The Matrix. And you really don't explain what the actual issues and questions you are trying to get at are. The best answer to the question as written is in this thread: you need to define it more. Even the most detailed actual video games have major limitations, and the values in even a serious simulation are just entered in based on the real universe's natural laws as the programmer understands them, so they could be changed to anything without being inconsistent with the simulation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that The Matrix simulates an earth-like world because it is trying to fool brains from the real earth so that their instincts will not notice that the world they are in isn't the one they evolved in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general there's no practical limit on what powers or causes there can be in a simulation, or in a story, unless the creator, programmer, or hacker decides there are limits or causes and builds them in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="286" LastEditDate="2015-01-15T17:47:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T17:47:33.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1709" CreationDate="2015-01-16T15:58:47.077" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patience is not my second name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1701/2071&quot;&gt;my idea&lt;/a&gt; for question to sandbox and nothing happened for quite some time, I was like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, there is no issue with the question! Lets ask it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, when I actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/how-could-a-human-learn-to-talk-to-apes-like-from-planet-of-the-apes&quot;&gt;asked it&lt;/a&gt;, the real &quot;sandbox&quot; started to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am happy that the question got edited to good shape, I feel ashamed that this editations did not happen by me and by actually sandboxing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in nutshell, how long should I wait for comments? And after how long is sandbox question without any comments considereded &quot;good enough&quot; to be posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T21:34:53.530" Title="How long should I wait until the question is &quot;sandboxed&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1707" CreationDate="2015-01-16T16:13:54.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say at least a day, since people are in different timezones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the sandbox concept is that there is no alerting or other functionality built into Stack Exchange to tell people that there is a new Sandbox answer waiting for feedback. It is reliant on people checking it off their own initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I check it once or twice a week, but that's all I have time for (and how often I remember).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best bet after posting to the sandbox will be to also post in the chat, that will notify people more rapidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox concept is one we're still experimenting with and working out though - so the answer is that we just don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T16:13:54.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1707" CreationDate="2015-01-16T16:43:59.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is completely voluntary, both posting to it and reading it.  So some people will see your post for the first time when you post it on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using the sandbox, then I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1708/28&quot;&gt;Tim B's answer&lt;/a&gt; -- it may take a day or two for people to notice.  Feel free to bring up a particular post in chat too; that might get more eyes on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your post gets feedback or edits on main, &lt;em&gt;that's ok&lt;/em&gt;.  We all want the same thing: to jointly build an outstanding collection of questions and answers.  If a question ends up needing to be put on hold while that happens that's not a badge of shame.  And sometimes issues can be addressed quickly through comments and an edit while the question remains open.  Either way, no harm done.  Please don't feel ashamed.  This is how Stack Exchange works, and as a new site we're still finding our own collective boundaries and expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T18:18:17.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1707" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:02:15.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally try to wait until I have seen 4+ up votes, I also tend to wait for comments from some of the regulars (they have moderation powers...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course for this to become the expectation we have to review it pretty regularly so that we don't just have a bunch of questions sitting around gathering digidust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T20:02:15.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1707" CreationDate="2015-01-16T21:34:53.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As most of the answers here. Give it at &lt;strong&gt;least&lt;/strong&gt; a day so everyone has a chance to see it. I'd be tempted to wait longer - there seems to be a core group of Sandbox reviewers and I'm the only one who gets pinged when a new answer comes up (unless everyone else has favorited). Personally I'd give it a couple of days. Again as others have said, posting in chat helps - the Sandbox regulars seem to be pretty regular in chat too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes are also (supposed to be) used to show when a question is ready for main. While 4+ upvotes seems rare so far, I'd wait for at least a couple of upvotes. That way, you have people who think the question is good to back you up if the site doesn't like it. And given that our mod Tim B seems pretty regular in the Sandbox...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T21:34:53.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1713" CreationDate="2015-01-17T01:07:25.363" Score="11" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also, by the way, extends to questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just posted an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8860/is-a-spherical-core-and-magnetic-field-possible-in-cube-world&quot;&gt;Is a spherical core and magnetic field possible in Cube world&lt;/a&gt;, the (as of now) most recent of the questions on cube-shaped planets. I had been busy during the other cube-shaped-planet questions, and so hadn't picked up on the fact that it was assumed that a little magic had to be invoked - otherwise, as I (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8772/can-a-nonspherical-planet-exist-and-can-it-be-habitable/8793#8793&quot;&gt;jamesqf&lt;/a&gt;, independently and long before me) - pointed out, such a planet could not rotate and stay in the shape of a cube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason I had been clueless to this was that all three of the questions used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. Normally, I would answer a question like this using only science, logic, and things that we know to be true - in other words, without magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise of the questions, though, appear to rest on what may be an extremely  trivial or may be an extremely important use of magic. I'm asking this question, though, for &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; questions - so don't take these questions as the optimal examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How realistic should a question using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;) tag be? Are minor breaches of reality allowed? Alternatively, should it all be up to the asker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd support the latter proposition, and deal with it on a case-by-case basis, if there even &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a case like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:29:54.320" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:29:54.320" Title="How realistic should a question tagged &quot;reality-check&quot; be?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2015-01-17T09:49:10.247" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reality-check tag says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike the science-based tag, a reality-check question does not always require a scientific explanation. Most of the time, it is used to figure out if a concept make sense or not. Answers to the question should determine whether or not certain elements of the question are appropriate or realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in other words if a question is science-based and reality-check then a hard science answer is needed, but fantasy-based reality-check would be asking if something is plausible within the context of that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8639/the-practicality-of-mail-armor-cloaks&quot;&gt;The practicality of mail armor cloaks&lt;/a&gt; is asking about giants wearing chainmail cloaks. While the setting is fantastical the actual concept of a cloak made of chainmail can still be reality-checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar tags could be applied to things like unicorn cavalry, the travel time for a centaur army, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that - in usage the tag does mostly seem to be used on questions grounded in reality as we know it. So should the tag be updated to reflect that usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T09:49:10.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2015-01-17T16:43:23.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference for me is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; ask specifically for a hard science answer. This tends to include natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and possibly the earth sciences like biology and climatology. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is less restrictive and you can use social sciences (history, politics, economy...) and also natural sciences in the answer or just common logic (philosophy, mathematics). Furthermore, this tag ask if something is possible or logical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For fantasy stuff, we also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T16:43:23.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2015-01-18T05:01:24.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking from an academic perspective, these two words have totally different meanings. Society refers more to social structures and organization, while culture is shared history and identity. Culture would impact the form of a society, but the two terms are in no way synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you wanted to ask about class structure, society would fit, while culture would likely be inappropriate unless the form of the class structure was highly impacted by some specific tradition (such as caste systems). Similarly, asking about the development of an art tradition would fall under culture and likely not society. The main difference is that culture has an element of identity, while society is collective and systematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the confusion might be from the generality of the current definition of the society tag. It's accurate, but rather broad and lacking any examples. The tricky bit is that the terms overlap fairly heavily in meaning, but not in usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5083" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T05:01:24.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-19T21:02:15.530" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic page&lt;/a&gt; trying to figure out what is and isn't on topic here when I noticed this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as they are not about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to Worldbuilding (consider the&#xA;  Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's very useful to point users to &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;. Those sites are wholly unrelated. Furthermore, WorldBuilding has nothing to do with software... This should be removed, or perhaps someone has some suggestions for what this should be replaced with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to be clear about this, as a user who knows nothing about your site, I find it really confusing that you're referring people to these sites. It feels like something that was over looked when modifying a standard SE help page template. Agree with me or not about the need to refer people to these sites, but it's confusing for new users and confusing new users is certainly an issue for the community to address. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T12:24:25.577" Title="On topic page refers users to software related sites" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2015-01-19T21:08:18.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, WorldBuilding has nothing to do with software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is actually on-topic. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23/are-software-recommendation-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. Quoting Bobson,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I would say &amp;quot;Yes, if specific enough&amp;quot;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most SE sites don't allow recommendation questions, but there's a whole Software Recommendation SE that's specifically for it. While they're good at finding software over there, it's a fairly low-traffic place and the kind of question which would be asked here is likely to be very specific, with answers talking about little-known software. We can do a better job of answering world building software questions internally than by pointing people over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've also had some good software question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1348/what-software-can-prototype-a-solar-system&quot;&gt;What software can prototype a planetary system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125/what-software-is-available-for-map-creation&quot;&gt;What software is available for map creation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's very useful to point users to Super User or Software Recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be right about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T21:08:18.380" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2015-01-20T08:34:56.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think it's very useful to [under the &quot;as long as they are not about&quot; point on the on-topic help center page] point users to Super User or Software Recommendations. Those sites are wholly unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I feel confident in saying that the above was sort of the point with the phrasing. The help center page in question underwent fairly extensive community back-and-forth &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/215/29&quot;&gt;right here on Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt; and the phrasing that we ended up with emerged as basically community consensus. (Note that despite several diamonds in the revision history, up through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/215/17&quot;&gt;revision 17&lt;/a&gt; pro tem moderators had not yet &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/417/29&quot;&gt;been appointed&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point in this case is that &lt;em&gt;general software questions are off-topic here&lt;/em&gt;. We don't want the &quot;I'm writing a draft description of my world and Word keeps changing my asterisks to bullet lists, how do I turn that off?&quot; &lt;em&gt;because that has nothing to do with the worldbuilding process&lt;/em&gt;. Such questions should go onto the general sites, and we helpfully point you in the appropriate direction rather than leave you wondering where such questions might be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some software &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; related to worldbuilding. We've had a few of those questions, which are more likely to get better answers here than on a general site because of the type of expertise needed to answer them well. Hence, it makes sense to allow questions about software that &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; relate to worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites aren't mutually exclusive, and aren't really in a competition for traffic. Each site has its scope, which may or may not overlap with other sites. (For example, technically the scope of &lt;a href=&quot;https://askubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;Ask Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; is wholly covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt; which partly overlaps with both &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt;. Each of those sites still serve their niche, all are established and are doing well.) Questions on the network are regularly migrated between sites in efforts to get the best possible answers to the asker's question. If a question is off topic on one site but would be on topic on another, with established sites community members can vote to migrate, and on all sites, moderators are outright &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; to migrate questions we believe to be on topic on the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all this, I firmly believe that &lt;strong&gt;helping users find the most appropriate place to post their question is perfectly appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt; If a question is posted in the correct place from the beginning, it greatly increases the OP's chances of getting good answers, it reduces confusion on the part of the community (particularly people new to the community and site) as to what the scope of each site really is, and it saves time (in our case for us moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some other sites that directly on the help center page list suggested sites for questions which are off topic on that site, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and probably others that I can't think of right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:38:54.597" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T08:34:56.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1722" CreationDate="2015-01-20T22:20:54.080" Score="5" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just... what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a recent answer of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJXdm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's my profile at the moment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZGet.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok... but the problem here is no other mod capabilities appear to be available to me. No tools, for example. And the same doesn't show up on the iPad app when I try that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2015-01-20T22:49:25.233" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T08:41:23.177" Title="So I'm a moderator now?" Tags="|support|bug|status-norepro|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2015-01-20T22:52:16.653" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to call shenanigans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare the flair from a moderator on another beta site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6MoN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with your's from the screenshot you posted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KpRWD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the diamond looks to be further away from the name than usual. Plus there is other information and links that are available to a moderator on their profile which aren't visible on your screenshot either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to even guess how you did it, but I don't think you are really seeing this on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3400" LastEditorUserId="3400" LastEditDate="2015-01-20T23:03:12.493" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T23:03:12.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2015-01-21T08:41:23.177" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no way for you to get the diamond without someone with developer access doing the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giving it to you through developer tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manually executing a query that essentially does what the tool would&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever someone is promoted to moderator by appointment or election, an entry is made in a user history table indicating that your access changed, and the name of the developer that did it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9E20C.png&quot; alt=&quot;We log all kinds of stuff&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; such user history event for you on the main or meta site. I checked, just to make sure someone didn't accidentally click on the wrong profile while granting access. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for you to have a diamond, there &lt;em&gt;must also&lt;/em&gt; be a corresponding history event. While I'm going to look, I can't think of any possible bug or scenario that would end up with a diamond / moderator status next to your name, &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; access to the tools, as seen from your profile screen shot. So that basically rules out either possible scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You weren't given access by someone that has access to the developer tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't have a rogue developer manually running queries to avoid logging of diamond grants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless there's some information that you didn't include in your report, I'm sticking this right behind Big Bird in my filing cabinet ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T08:41:23.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-23T04:03:05.587" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some of my answers, especially when doing mathy latex stuff, tend to get rather unwieldy and long. Is there any way to make certain sections hide and only be revealed if the user clicks on that section? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking something like the hide tag for spoiler on some forums hides some text (and does NOT take up space) until you click on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T21:29:30.933" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T21:29:30.933" Title="Any way to hide part of an answer?" Tags="|feature-request|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2015-01-23T08:24:16.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think such a feature exists.&lt;/strong&gt; You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; in theory use spoiler block quotes, which are hidden by default until the user mouse overs them (I'm not sure how they interact on clients that don't have hover states), but they still take up vertical in the post and if you ask me should not be used except for material the person reading the answer is going to want to make a conscious decision to display. That does not include math, so I would &lt;strong&gt;very strongly discourage&lt;/strong&gt; using those just to hide &quot;mathy stuff&quot;. That's not what spoiler quote blocks are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To render a spoiler block quote, prefix one or more lines with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt; rather than with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; It shows up like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or with math (yes, I know this math is pretty much nonsensical, I'm just using it to give you an idea of what it'd look like):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; $$ \frac{\Delta{}v}{\Delta{}t} = \frac{v_{final} - v_0}{t_{end} - t_{start}} \\ x = (\Delta{}v)^{2} \cdot \epsilon{} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the spoiler block, that exact same math block is rendered as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ \frac{\Delta{}v}{\Delta{}t} = \frac{v_{final} - v_0}{t_{end} - t_{start}} \\ x = (\Delta{}v)^{2} \cdot \epsilon{} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T09:19:27.690" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T09:19:27.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2015-01-23T09:00:55.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Michael's answer, the only other way I could think of doing it would be put all your equations at the bottom and reference them in your answer if they are purely supplemental to your actual answer; though I would hesitate before doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T09:00:55.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2015-01-23T15:28:47.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange currently doesn't have a way to do this, but we should ask for it (which you did by tagging this as a feature request; thanks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not think of this as a math-specific problem; other sites that don't use math also have long explanations sometimes, and it would be great to have a way to collapse/expand designated sections inline -- not with another page load, not with a mouse hover &lt;em&gt;a la&lt;/em&gt; spoilers, and not by disrupting the flow of the answer, but by having a toggle bound to a section of an answer designated in the markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A blogging platform that does this well is Dreamwidth, just as an example.  The source for an entry can include &quot;cut&quot; tags, which mark the beginning and end of the section and also specify the text to include in the main page (defaults to &quot;read more&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T15:28:47.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1729" CreationDate="2015-01-24T21:08:37.173" Score="11" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;The Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; may be one of the greatest things on Worldbuilding Meta. I recently had a question &quot;graduate&quot; (i.e. people stopped posting helpful objections and I addressed the ones that had been already made). I then edited out the question, edited in the link to the new question, and noticed that there are currently &lt;em&gt;14&lt;/em&gt; proposed questions (including one deleted one, I think), 8 of which have been posted as questions on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all very well and good, but the page has gotten to the point that it's unfeasibly long, even with the completed answers reduced to a link. This is partly due to the fact that there tend to be loads of comments and partly due to the fact that there are 14 proposed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of yesterday, the Sandbox is one month old, so we're averaging 14 questions per month. In the next year, I expect activity to grow, no matter what level the site is at. Even if activity &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; grow, we'll be at&#xA;$$12 \text{ months} \times \frac{14 \text{ questions}}{\text{month}}=168 \text{ questions}$$&#xA;Plus probably 1000+ comments, if not 2000. This will make the page unfeasibly large. You could argue that one can simply sort the page by &quot;active&quot; - which I tend to do - but people might still end up editing old proposed questions, especially if they haven't been asked yet. It will be very difficult to find a given question (although one could circumvent that by using the search box). &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/6424/requests-for-reopen-undeletion-votes-etc-volume-10-2012-12-2014&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a good example of a very, very, very long question/answer thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do we do about this Sandbox Overflow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we're going with the deletion idea, I've created &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/1751#1751&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; in the Sandbox for links to all the deleted questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-02-07T22:14:02.777" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T22:14:02.777" Title="Sandbox Overflow!" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2015-01-25T01:15:08.190" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete it.&lt;/strong&gt;  If you see a post where this wasn't done and it's been a few days, please flag for a moderator to delete. (Please first edit to replace the post with a link to the question, as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1735/28&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1745/28&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  You'd need that for the flag anyway, as otherwise how would we know it's obsolete?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question from the sandbox has been asked, the sandbox post is no longer needed -- the comments should have done their job and resulted in a better post, so you don't need those any more, and there's no particular need to keep a record of questions that came from the sandbox rather than being posted directly or being worked out in chat.  Or, if people want to keep that record, create &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; (community wiki) post to collect the links for questions that have been asked, and then delete the posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep the sandbox comments from your question for your own interest, you can take a screenshot or save a copy of the page.  Also, I believe (though I'll need a non-moderator to confirm) that you can always see your own deleted answers on a question, even if you don't otherwise have enough reputation to see deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T19:01:02.493" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-25T03:31:08.070" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tonight I saw this on the front page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ClzlN.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't Community bumps that are somehow being misreported; both questions have upvoted answers and shouldn't have been eligible for a bump.  Nor have there been recent deleted answers there (that somehow aren't being reported).  I see nothing special in the timeline for either question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't &lt;em&gt;mind&lt;/em&gt;, and I don't have anything against these two questions.  I'm just puzzled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T00:41:58.047" Title="Why are questions with no recent activity, and not bumped by Community, on the front page?" Tags="|support|recent-activity|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1734" CreationDate="2015-01-27T00:28:18.750" Score="12" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my time on Worldbuilding, I've seen loads of answers along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember reading a book with a similar scenario: [Insert book name here] by [Insert author name here]. In it, [long plot summary here]. It seems similar to your premise. Perhaps [Insert one sentence that wraps it all up].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to quote or mention specific answers, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's really embarrassing for the person in question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There don't seem to be any people who consistently do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, these kind of answers annoy me, because they could - and perhaps should - be written into an eloquent comment with a reference or two. Nothing more. As it is, they are often vague and/or contain no original ideas. They typically receive low votes &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; the user then coherently expounds upon the idea, gives it a unique twist, relates it all back to the original question, and, in short, writes a great answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be our stance on such answers? Am I just being a bit annoyed, or is this something we should seriously consider?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T09:54:30.267" Title="Are answers solely referencing novels/movies/etc. okay?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1730" CreationDate="2015-01-27T00:41:58.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to make a community wiki post of all the things that &lt;em&gt;haven't&lt;/em&gt; caused this, because, quite frankly, I'd still like to solve this . . . somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things that didn't cause this weird bug:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being on a different tab (e.g. active, hot, week, month, frequent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having specific tags blocked/favorited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having an edit on the posts being removed during a grace period&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having an edit on the posts rolled back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica being a moderator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The questions being unanswered and being bumped by the Community user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica being adept at Photoshop&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;. . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything else would help solve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T00:41:58.047" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-27T00:41:58.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2015-01-27T03:58:27.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't see a problem &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; the answer explain clearly what is important about the reference but I agree that it should not just be a summary of the book, movie, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not because someone is taking the content of a book in order to answer the question that the answer is necessarily bad but too often people just drop the information without getting in the details. The content does not need to be original, especially if the reference has a good answer in it. We should be able to fully understand the answer without having to read the book, web-page, see the movie...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T03:58:27.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2015-01-27T08:28:24.723" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to me to be an outgrowth of link-only answers, except worse in a way (because while links are often possible to visit without paying, many books/movies/etc. require you to pay for them). Even interlibrary loans of the works in question may not be available everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an answer that basically states &quot;you can do this in manner X by A, B, C, &lt;em&gt;as for example&lt;/em&gt; Delta Echoson did in &lt;em&gt;Flurry of Grimmicks&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is very different from &quot;Delta Echoson did this in &lt;em&gt;Flurry of Grimmicks&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The former actually answers the question (and can be judged on how well it does) and provides a reference for those who wish to find out more, but the reference is not required to understand the answer. The latter makes the reference absolutely essential to even understanding the answer, and without access to that reference, the answer is meaningless. Ideally, of course, an answer that provides references of this kind would provide &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; references by &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370/157730&quot;&gt;Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?&lt;/a&gt;. Based on the same line of reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers that simply state &quot;read this book&quot; should be either improved (by incorporating relevant details into the answer) right away, or flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot; and either improved through the review process or deleted, &lt;em&gt;the same as you might a link-only answer&lt;/em&gt; on most other sites in the network&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers that state &quot;read this book where it's done &lt;em&gt;like this&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for some low value of &quot;like this&quot; should be encouraged to improve upon, but they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; answers because when you strip away &quot;read this book&quot; it still provides useful information to the person asking or later reading the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers that state &quot;you can do it this well-explained way, &lt;em&gt;like for example&lt;/em&gt; this author does in this book&quot; are good because it answers the question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; provides references for those who want to learn more about how others have used the particular element they are interested in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All of this assuming, of course,&lt;/em&gt; that the answers really do address the OP's question in the first place. If it doesn't, then it should likely be edited, or downvoted and/or commented on to have the answer improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above-linked MSE question says &quot;strip the markup&quot; (including links). Here, we might say &lt;strong&gt;&quot;strip the references&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; Does the answer still make sense, and does it still answer the question? If it does, then it's probably an answer; it might be a good answer or a bad answer, and it might be a correct answer or a wrong answer, but &lt;em&gt;it's still an answer.&lt;/em&gt; If the answer does not make sense without the reference and/or markup, then it should probably be flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot; and treated as such in the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T09:54:30.267" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T09:54:30.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2015-01-27T14:11:23.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to take this from PCG, from where most of our sandbox came...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently 330-ish questions in the sandbox over there. There are also several past revisions of the sandbox which have been closed when they hit 400 questions and a new sandbox post was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like that. It does make for far too many questions in the sandbox, and it means it will never load on an app. As Monica says, I vote delete. This will need to be self-regulated. I also suggest that we leave the current system in place partially: once the question is posted, the post is edited to a link to the question, then a few days later it can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T14:11:23.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1739" CreationDate="2015-01-28T16:24:11.937" Score="11" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; was created late December 2014 (see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/647/2685&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; about creating it for detail). Since then, it has generated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 votes (+3/-0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 favorite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;0 posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it's not getting used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we still want to keep this sandbox or can it be integrated? Is there any need for it at all? While those questions are largely a reiteration of the questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/647/2685&quot;&gt;original post&lt;/a&gt;, I think it's worth a review given the low activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T00:47:24.800" Title="Do we still want the Answer Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|answers|sandbox|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2015-01-28T16:50:21.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect an answer sandbox is a little too far off the beaten path to get attention when it's needed.  If you're drafting an answer, it's probably because people's attention is on the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; (and its other answers).  What prompts somebody to then go look at the sandbox for answers in progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, somebody coming to the answer sandbox needs to do some work before he can really look at a post there -- you've got to at least go read the question and maybe the other answers, and then come back and read the proposed answer, and then provide feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like people are comfortable just posting their answers -- which is great; that's what we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; people to do!  If somebody wants help on an answer before posting, then I'd suggest coming to chat, where there tend to be people around (or will be within hours) and where you can have more active engagement.  That seems better than posting a meta answer that might go unnoticed for much longer and then have slower conversation in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T16:50:21.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2015-01-29T14:45:01.730" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ill still stick with my initial response to &quot;Do we want an answer sandbox?&quot; and say that I find it more important to have a question sandbox as &lt;strong&gt;the implications of a bad or at least under-developed question have far more impact than a poor answer.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that need work can waste a lot of peoples' time.  Some of my early questions when beta opened were modified so many times that the original answers to the question didn't even makes sense anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the primary reason I support the question sandbox, and you simply don't have the same issues with answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd vote we get rid of it for now and re-evaluate in a few months or a year to see if it is something we have a need for down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T14:45:01.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T17:02:26.003" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen a question, but thinking about the answer, I realize it is still too broad and so wanted to change my vote.  Is there a way to do so?  Or do I just have to count on others to keep it closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T17:06:19.867" Title="How do you reverse a Reopen vote?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2015-01-30T17:06:19.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently reopen votes &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193061/162102&quot;&gt;can't be retracted&lt;/a&gt;, even after it became possible to retract a close vote.  (The link is to an unanswered feature request on Meta.SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T17:06:19.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-03T15:09:24.060" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recently-created &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fortress&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fortress&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fortress&lt;/a&gt; tag is applied to only one &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9503/how-do-i-set-up-a-political-conflict-in-this-large-city&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; so far. However, it seems it me to be fairly meta: all I can tell from this tag is that there is somehow a fortress involved in the questions: not who lives there, what is happening to it, or how it's built; not how it relates to the world in question or the question in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we think? Is it necessary? Its easy enough to clean it up if we decide we don't now, just removing it from the question will see it automatically deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T17:19:11.467" Title="Do we need the [fortress] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1743" CreationDate="2015-02-03T16:22:21.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need it.  We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military-defense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military-defense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military-defense&lt;/a&gt;, which used &lt;em&gt;together&lt;/em&gt; say &quot;fortress/fortifications&quot; to me -- though in the case of this question its &quot;fort-ness&quot; isn't obviously central anyway.  If a body of questions develops then the tag's unique properties should become apparent, at which point they can be captured in a tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-02-03T17:19:11.467" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T17:19:11.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2015-02-03T17:59:35.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Edit down to just a title, then delete&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extra practice learned from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/sandbox-for-proposed-challenges&quot;&gt;PPCG sandbox&lt;/a&gt;: For the benefit of high rep users who see all the deleted answers, edit your answer down to just the title before you delete it. If you forget, you can still edit your own answers after they are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes a huge difference for people who can see deleted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:59.653" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T17:59:35.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T10:10:57.037" Score="10" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, we reached 1000 questions! We've been around for 4 months and have generated a lot of really great content. We're well on the way to Making the Internet a Better Place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's have a bit of a celebration. Let's have a look back at some of the best stuff we've generated. Comment suggestions for categories of question; answer with specific questions, the category you put them in, and we'll show off the best of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Categories&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In-universe  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T14:01:33.687" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T12:35:31.633" Title="The Great Kilo-Question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1746" CreationDate="2015-02-06T12:44:21.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few personal favorites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3429/how-might-modern-humans-leave-a-message-for-50-000-years/3482#3482&quot;&gt;How might modern humans leave a message for 50,000 years?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/313/how-could-dragons-be-explained-without-magic/345#345&quot;&gt;How could dragons be explained without magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6747/a-small-group-recreating-modern-technology/6774#6774&quot;&gt;A small group recreating modern technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T12:44:21.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-07T20:29:11.513" Score="10" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2856/life-on-a-planet-with-multiple-gas-layers&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3419/could-a-cold-planet-tundra-develop-and-maintain-a-breathable-atmosphere-for-hu&quot;&gt;lot&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6465/what-would-the-problems-with-consequences-of-a-torus-shaped-planet-be&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2478/terraforming-a-gas-giant-into-an-habitable-planet&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5049/in-a-created-planetary-system-how-many-planets-can-fit-in-the-goldilocks-zone-w&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7088/what-would-life-on-earth-be-like-if-the-sun-was-replaced-by-two-blue-giants&quot;&gt;planetary&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9758/habitable-zone-around-a-class-o-hypergiant&quot;&gt;habitability&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4729/is-jupiter-sized-planet-plausible-in-habitable-zone&quot;&gt;just&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/342/what-would-a-habitable-moon-most-probably-look-like&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6909/can-a-gas-giant-have-its-own-habitable-zone&quot;&gt;name&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2478/terraforming-a-gas-giant-into-an-habitable-planet&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8772/can-a-nonspherical-planet-exist-and-can-it-be-habitable&quot;&gt;few&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=habitability&quot;&gt;This search&lt;/a&gt; will give you these and many, many more. I enjoy answering these, as Astronomy is one of my passions and I've learned quite a lot about it. As such, I answer quite a lot of these questions. If I don't answer one, it's generally because there was at least one superb answer before me - often more than one, actually - which I then read, upvote, comment on, and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the answers I write to &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of them, I find myself repeating a few key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calculating the habitable zone's inner and outer radii&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lifetime of the central star and whether or not it could support life&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calculating planetary temperature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Investigating whether such a planet could form (if applicable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most cases have &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; unique about them - whether it be that the planet is shaped like something other than a sphere or whether it is entirely covered by snow - but most ask about whether or not the planet would be habitable, which can be analyzed by the points I listed above, as well as a number of other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7270/habitable-moon-of-a-gas-giant-working-out-the-sizes-and-distances&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question led me to write a loooong answer that addressed a bunch of these, but there's still a lot that's left out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of all this is that I'd prefer to write much shorter answers in the future and not have to rehash all of this stuff. All of it is necessary framework to consider, but I think that sometimes people see some of it in my answer, say &quot;Bleah, math and too many words&quot; and skip it to move on to greener pastures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to create a canonical &quot;general habitability&quot; question and answer that can be referenced in the future, so I don't have to keep bringing up these points time and time again. It would mean I (and others) could be much more concise and focus on the essential aspects of future questions, allowing me (and them) to go into more detail on the minute aspects of each scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to cover all of the points I described above and more in an answer, with  mathematics in the relevant sections and links aplenty. If it was needed, I could add in some points about moons and other objects, which would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this question and answer acceptable, or should I not post it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, I'll post it either today or tomorrow (most likely tomorrow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, we appear to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/habitation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;habitation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;habitation&lt;/a&gt; tag, which has been unfortunately only used on three questions (as of this posting). It should probably be used more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/592/why-was-cagrippas-awesome-faq-worthy-religion-question-closed?rq=1&quot;&gt;There was an issue previously&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I only came across it now. I realized that there's a chance that this question will suffer the same fate, in which case I totally understand if mine is closed. Still, I think that it should be kept open because, unlike CAgrppa's question, the material covered in mine has been reiterated time and time again, and will certainly prove useful in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, though, I understand if the community wants to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been split up into two questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9857/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-star&quot;&gt;one about the star&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9944/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-planet&quot;&gt;the other about the planet&lt;/a&gt;. Others may be added if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are now multiple answers on the planet question dealing with different aspects of the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T20:21:44.470" Title="Should there be a canonical &quot;habitability&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-02-07T22:12:56.860" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&lt;/a&gt;, many answers containing now-graduated questions have been deleted. This is designed to be a repository for all those questions that have graduated. It is a community wiki answer, so add in your question here, at the end of the list once it is posted on the main site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11182&quot;&gt;Believable magical transmutation of elements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8755&quot;&gt;How could a human learn to talk to &amp;quot;apes&amp;quot; (like from Planet of the Apes)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9490&quot;&gt;Could a Species Use Tools (and Build a Civilization) Without Thumbs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9263&quot;&gt;Underground life on Mars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9214&quot;&gt;What methods of transportation would develop in a Stone Age society in a forest world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8906&quot;&gt;The social implications of Life as currency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9009&quot;&gt;Developing Factions - Secret Societies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8831&quot;&gt;How can a world with constantly-moving nomads form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/7337&quot;&gt;How do you layer history?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8662&quot;&gt;Does an expansionist, monotheistic religion require a central prophetic figure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/7301&quot;&gt;How to explain the co-existence of peace and violence in religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/7117&quot;&gt;Plausible explanation for lack of reflection in a mirror&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9856&quot;&gt;Cohabitation with large creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10781&quot;&gt;Keeping people illiterate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11742&quot;&gt;How to effectively deliver a flu virus that destroys the brains ability to absorb serotonin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12626&quot;&gt;In a post-apocalyptic world, would plastic be more useful than metal as currency?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13010&quot;&gt;Planetary defense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13514&quot;&gt;How fuel-efficient are airships?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14034&quot;&gt;How can I create a poison that kills a person after a specific amount of time, and is treatable by an antidote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12626&quot;&gt;In a post-apocalyptic world, would plastic be more useful than metal as currency?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14460&quot;&gt;Hiding own space program&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14481&quot;&gt;Opening the Windows, In Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14894&quot;&gt;How to make plasma manipulation powers, on equal power with phases of matter, without material generation powers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15105&quot;&gt;Buying Jupiter for the price of a space station&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15140&quot;&gt;Suspended animation vs. regular animation aboard a spaceship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15466&quot;&gt;The end of torture? (Due to Omnipotence or International Legislation...)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15642&quot;&gt;How would an earth-like planet with a habitable moon work and how to get there?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15692&quot;&gt;How to get a Female Archbishop of Canterbury of the 1950s Anglican Church?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18819&quot;&gt;A planet with changing gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/17925&quot;&gt;Witnessing the death of a star that would go supernova&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/17471&quot;&gt;Moving people from a dying planet onto the moons of a gas giant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/17206&quot;&gt;Preparation for Lycanthropic Transformation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/17077&quot;&gt;Single Resource Cities - Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19376&quot;&gt;Mathematical Magic - Solving the Traveling Wizard Problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/7092&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/7092&lt;/a&gt; (Deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13870&quot;&gt;How do I create a popular and fictional team-sport?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13670&quot;&gt;The Magical British Government: At War&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15642&quot;&gt;How would an earth-like planet with a habitable moon work and how to get there?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11849&quot;&gt;Death to humans by deadly monsters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14456&quot;&gt;Size of a medieval/fantasy trading port&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15008&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15008&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19834/&quot;&gt;Time no longer passes except near intelligent creatures, how does the world continue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/21838&quot;&gt;What would the climate be like on an earth-like planet with only one convection cell per hemisphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22248&quot;&gt;Aircraft and Rockets on a Magical Super-Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22431&quot;&gt;The Simplest Energy Beings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22934&quot;&gt;Cheapest way to fake the Mars landing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22957&quot;&gt;Religion After the Discovery of a Multiverse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23185&quot;&gt;OK, I cannot fake the Mars landing. 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unique addressing system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38921/can-a-super-governmental-military-body-like-this-work&quot;&gt;Can a super-governmental military body like this work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39909/29&quot;&gt;What would be the major weather patterns on this map?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37567/calculating-time-dilation-effects-on-relativistic-accelerations&quot;&gt;Calculating Time Dilation Effects on Relativistic Accelerations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40325/would-ablation-be-an-effective-way-to-redirect-objects-in-space&quot;&gt;Would ablation be an effective way to redirect objects in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51548/7974&quot;&gt;What is the best way to classify Intelligence in a world full of various Intellects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51563/10851&quot;&gt;Help me evolve a &quot;Boar Troll&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56900/what-would-be-the-most-important-consequence-of-decreasing-sexual-dimorphism-in&quot;&gt;What would be the most important consequence of decreasing sexual dimorphism in humans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60939/6986&quot;&gt;Dealing With Dragonslayers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57986/6986&quot;&gt;Building an Ethics Framework for use of Uploaded Personalities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/67061/627&quot;&gt;Can time travel make us rich through trading, and is this a problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70961/reasons-to-pack-weapons-on-interstellar-mission&quot;&gt;Reasons to pack weapons on interstellar mission?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72698/symbolics-of-cargo-cult-after-1000-years&quot;&gt;Symbolics of Cargo Cult after 1000 years&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73432/how-to-realistically-create-a-bow-thats-also-two-one-handed-swords&quot;&gt;How to realistically create a bow that's also two one-handed swords?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73447/how-would-a-command-structure-and-strategy-for-a-galactic-war-be-organized&quot;&gt;How would a command structure and strategy for a galactic war be organized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74130/using-only-molecules-found-in-humans-how-close-can-i-come-to-creating-a-wolf&quot;&gt;Using only molecules found in humans: How close can I come to creating a wolf?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74308/how-can-asymmetrically-powerful-states-be-balanced-aka-why-dont-legendary-her&quot;&gt;How can asymmetrically powerful states be balanced? (AKA why don't legendary heroes rule the world)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/74932/627&quot;&gt;What would be the most plausible way to arrive at a functional and sustainable theocracy that preserves certain democratic institutions with limits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/74827/627&quot;&gt;Would these changes to humanity due to genetic memory help technology develop more quickly or slowly than our world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75829/how-could-cats-evolve-toxic-claws&quot;&gt;How could cats evolve toxic claws?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75884/how-would-an-army-defend-itself-against-mass-robo-snake-attacks&quot;&gt;How could an army defend itself against mass robo-snake attacks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/76270/whats-the-best-way-for-a-democratic-government-to-make-people-disappear-witho&quot;&gt;What's the best way for a Democratic Government to make people “disappear” without being noticed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78040/how-could-chocolate-bunnies-evolve&quot;&gt;How could chocolate bunnies evolve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78022/what-giant-insects-would-fill-the-role-of-our-domesticated-cattle&quot;&gt;What giant insects would fill the role of our domesticated cattle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78053/has-the-government-done-enough-to-re-integrate-formerly-demonically-possessed-pe&quot;&gt;Has the government done enough to re-integrate formerly demonically possessed people back into society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80265&quot;&gt;Humanity’s first effort at moving a planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T12:53:19.630" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T12:53:19.630" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-07T22:12:56.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1750" CreationDate="2015-02-07T23:10:03.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes I think it could be useful to have that. Tim B asked questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/581/creating-a-realistic-world-map-landmass-formation&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; already. As you said, the topic as already been covered in most angles possible and only the details are changing. Therefore it becomes repetitive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After seeing the question on the main SE, I realize that it's a good idea as long as the scope is relatively focused. Right now, the answer lack consistency probably because the topic is too broad and some parts are just a series of ideas with no descriptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About habitation,: it does not feel appropriate. Habitability would suit better. Habitation is more a synonym of a house, the physical place where we live.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T16:08:44.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1750" CreationDate="2015-02-07T23:22:50.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the existence of this question would not preclude the existence of other habitability questions, it would be useful to have it as a general guide to point people to. I would suggest it should be CW-ed so that it's easy for other people with knowledge to edit it and add bits to it - it just needs a bit of a check every now and then to make sure it hasn't become nonsensical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T23:22:50.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1761" CreationDate="2015-02-08T15:44:20.473" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;We often get questions about whether (my civilization) can do this or that. While they are fun to answer, there is the tedious and seemingly inevitable bit about asking the OP about the desired technological level of the society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of a community wiki post whereby we create a finely graded &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kardashev scale&lt;/a&gt;, with examples at each interval of the presumable (science-based) capabilities of such civilizations. So going from Type 0 to Type 3 (or even 4) in .1 increments using the Sagan logarithmic scale interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\huge{K=\frac{log_{10}P-6}{10}}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where K is a civilization's Kardashev rating and P is the power used by that civilization in watts. Thus humanity cca 2011 would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;${\frac{log_{10}(17.4\times10^{12})-6}{10}}=\frac{13.24-6}{10}\approx0.7$ on the continuous Kardashev scale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;at least one place on the internet where this was done&lt;/a&gt;, but not rigorously and only with literary examples in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of adding in some extra help-factors, like easy conversion tables between $BTU/day$, $J/yr$, $W$ and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;other measures of energy magnitude and output&lt;/a&gt;, the energy required to power a spaceship to fractions of the speed of light and projections at various linearized growth rates of humanity's energy usage growth, and the time to reach various thresholds under those conditions, and perhaps estimates of the power output of humanity or specific civilizations at some point in the past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While admirable, the scale of this question is likely beyond my current time commitment capacity. Would there be interest in participating in a wiki page for such an endeavor?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before unleashing this on the Main, I would love feedback on the general feasibility of such a wiki, things that I'm missing out on, and other general thoughts and advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:  Under severe time constraints at the moment, will try to build this up in here in preparation of posting on main in a few days' time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T02:25:36.650" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T02:25:36.650" Title="Civilization Technological Rank Wiki Question" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-08T16:11:20.820" Score="4" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to be a difficult one, particularly given the wildy varying flavors and rules of magic out there. Nonetheless, I think it would be interesting to build a community wiki attempting to put some consistency into magical settings. &lt;strong&gt;The main goal is to go beyond the standard No/Low/Medium/High magical settings and allow some fine tuning in terms of specifying how magical a world is and how powerful the magic in that world can be, while remaining as inclusive and universe-independent as possible.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If anyone knows of a similar already existing scale, by all means let me know!!!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preferred option would be civ-wide, In terms of the feats that a civilization with that class of magic should be able to accomplish. Thus, we would be effectively ranking different types of magic settings by the capabilities of magic in that setting. &lt;strong&gt;This would make it a lot easier to have self-consistent answers to magic-based questions&lt;/strong&gt;, in my opinion, because you can state specifically just how magic-heavy your world is, &lt;strong&gt;on multiple dimensions of magic-infusedness&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Measurement  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For things whose power output can be measured (like fireballs and floating cities), what would the total power output of such magical civilization be, given the expected number of mages, and the frequency with which such powers would be used? So far, this is almost straight-up Kardashev (albeit scraping the bottom of the 0 category)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many mages are there? Can anyone become a mage with study? &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does one become a mage? All/Anyone, Divine Grant, Heritable, Random, or Transfer from another mage [A,D,H,R,T]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the magic prevalence in society (% of pop)? i.e [R, 0.001%] would mean random magical talent, with 1 in 100,000 prevalence of magic skill. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there hard limits to magic (mana drainage from environment, mage fatigue, lyrium requirements) or is it simply skill-limited and upwardly unbounded? [Environment/Stamina/Consumables/Unlimited]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, for other kinds of magic, such as illusion, gating, teleportation, mind-domination, there is no easy way to figure out power output. Perhaps use some magic difficulty/attainability level setting to tell apart hard-rare magic settings from easy-magic-infused settings? (See next section on magic types). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Availability and strength of magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Type of magic&lt;/strong&gt; Which of the following types/schools of magic exist in universe? (I will borrow freely from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DnD&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abjuration: Abjurations are protective spells. They create physical or magical barriers, negate magical or physical abilities, harm trespassers, or even banish the subject of the spell to another plane of existence.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjuration: Each conjuration spell belongs to one of five subschools. Conjurations bring manifestations of objects, creatures, or some form of energy to you (the summoning subschool), actually transport creatures from another plane of existence to your plane (calling), heal (healing), transport creatures or objects over great distances (teleportation), or create objects or effects on the spot (creation). Creatures you conjure usually, but not always, obey your commands.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Divination: Divination spells enable you to learn secrets long forgotten, to predict the future, to find hidden things, and to foil deceptive spells.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enchantment: Enchantment spells affect the minds of others, influencing or controlling their behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evocation: Evocation spells manipulate energy or tap an unseen source of power to produce a desired end. In effect, they create something out of nothing. Many of these spells produce spectacular effects, and evocation spells can deal large amounts of damage.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Illusion: Illusion spells deceive the senses or minds of others. They cause people to see things that are not there, not see things that are there, hear phantom noises, or remember things that never happened.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Necromancy: Necromancy spells manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force. Spells involving undead creatures make up a large part of this school.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transmutation. Transmutation spells change the properties of some creature, thing, or condition.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus a full magic world would be characterized as having [A,C,D,En,Ev,I,N,T].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scale of power&lt;/strong&gt; Can a single mage destroy a magically unprotected army of 10,000 warriors? How easily? If how, how many mages working together would it take?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Setting consequences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would a setting where most people in such a civilization are medieval peasants actually be realistic, or, with artifact-level objects lying about in every inn and stable, would the amazing power of magic make even squibs powerful, with the fields plowing and harvesting themselves and the buildings raising themselves from the ground? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before unleashing this on the Main, I would love feedback on the general feasibility of such a wiki, the dimensions of ranking, some way of quantifying (if at all possible) some of this wild variation, and other general thoughts and advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: Abandoned for now due to lack of community interest.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T02:26:59.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T21:00:45.023" Title="Kardashev Scale of Magic Wiki" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1746" CreationDate="2015-02-08T16:29:50.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this question because the answers covered just about everything:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/where-in-the-solar-system-is-the-most-viable-place-to-put-my-colonists-after-ma&quot;&gt;Where in the solar system is the most viable place to put my colonists, after Mars and Luna?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question provided a lot of creative answers, and was what drew me to the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/843/how-do-i-drug-a-population-in-the-most-efficient-way&quot;&gt;How do I drug a population in the most efficient way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T16:29:50.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1755" CreationDate="2015-02-08T18:07:12.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this sort of idea is that it is not inclusive. It's all well and good defining a scale like this but if it becomes something we only use to talk to each other then that means both that questions and answers become much less useful for anyone who isn't familiar with the scale. It becomes a barrier to entry for anyone new to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand though the scale could become the de-facto scale and have everyone start using it, including people not on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be hard to define it as well, there are some many different flavours and varieties of magic systems and some would not fit into this proposed schema at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T18:07:12.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-09T00:31:16.263" Score="19" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago (four months) on a site far, far away (roughly two clicks), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240634/how-do-weekly-topic-challenges-work&quot;&gt;a great suggestion was made&lt;/a&gt;. Jon Ericson came up with the idea of weekly topic challenges. For those not willing to make the one click that is now needed to get to that post, here's the gist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users suggest various topics or themes. For example, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347/earth-science-biweekly-topic-challenge&quot;&gt;Earth Science&lt;/a&gt;, suggestions have included &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/antarctic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;antarctic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;antarctic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volcanology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volcanology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volcanology&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone else upvotes topics or themes they like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each week, the highest-voted suggestion becomes the weekly topic challenge. A meta post is written up giving a brief summary of the idea (with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; tag, hopefully), and at the end of the week, users who asked or answered one or more questions about that topic are recognized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Repeat until everyone gets tired of the idea or everyone runs out of suggestions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we have quite a lot of diverse questions on Worldbuilding, and we sometimes have unofficial themes affecting pockets of questions within a short period of time, so it appears that from time to time Jon Ericson uses Force mind tricks to manipulate people$^1$. But generally we don't have this kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have weekly (or biweekly, if we want) topic challenges? By the way, let's agree to go or not go with the idea as a whole before suggesting specific ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no, nobody is required to participate in the challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^1$ Disclaimer: To my knowledge, Jon is not a Jedi or a Sith. I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: It looks like there's quite a lot of support for this, so I think the answer is yes! I'll run these unless someone objects, and I'll start up new meta posts as soon as we have enough suggestions - hopefully this coming Monday. The post to suggest topics on is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-be-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges?lq=1&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T16:46:09.837" Title="Should we have weekly topic challenges?" Tags="|discussion|questions|challenge|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1750" CreationDate="2015-02-09T08:52:47.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of having various canonical questions to point people to, but also want to raise a point of concern here. The question touches on and brings together several disciplines, which isn't at all bad by itself, but it is also &lt;strong&gt;very broad.&lt;/strong&gt; The sheer length of the answer itself (even ignoring the images) is a good indication that maybe the question is trying to bite off too much. &lt;em&gt;The answer is easily four screenfuls or so tall&lt;/em&gt; even on a high-resolution monitor, and even so, &lt;em&gt;there are still parts of it that aren't filled out or fleshed out&lt;/em&gt;. On most sites in the Stack Exchange network, a question prompting an answer of that length would immediately fail &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the so-called &quot;book test&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's often a problem with canonical questions in general, especially for as broad (subject matter wise) a site as ours: &lt;em&gt;answers risk getting overwhelming.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I think we should have several different questions (or at the very least, several different answers, each clearly labelled) each of which focuses on a different aspect. One of those could be &quot;I have a planet at distance X from a star, how do I know its temperature?&quot;. Another could be &quot;how does the luminosity of a star vary over its lifetime?&quot;. A third could be &quot;what range of atmospheric compositions would allow life as we know it to form?&quot;. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That approach does have the downside that it doesn't offer as clear-cut a &quot;close as duplicate&quot; target for any given question. However, it's a lot more digestable for the person who wants an answer to their specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T08:52:47.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1758" CreationDate="2015-02-09T09:02:06.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this idea is a good one. Can we focus on some of the less used tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T09:02:06.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1754" CreationDate="2015-02-09T09:12:01.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fairly similar to your other question on the magic scale and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1757/9&quot;&gt;answer given there by TimB&lt;/a&gt; is just as relevant for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again and again people have talked about having language for worldbuilding. If you look on the area51 proposal and at the earlier meta questions you will see that it was suggested (admittedly mostly in less well defined ways). However again and again the answer is a resounding no from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. You should be specifying the power of your civilisation in a way that a layman can understand. The result from your formula the result would be meaningless to me. At that point I would never be able to answer a question that used your formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, while it sounds good, we don't actually have a problem that this needs to solve and it makes our site much less friendly to people who don't know how much power a civilisation uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned in the comments about tables with helpful examples of what each level is like. Why do we then need the formula if we can just use those descriptive terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T09:12:01.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1746" CreationDate="2015-02-09T12:35:31.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me one of the best questions has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71/how-would-having-multiple-moons-affect-tides&quot;&gt;how would having multiple moons affect tides?&lt;/a&gt;. I really enjoyed thinking through and working out the answer to that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's simple, very useful and could be used by WBers time and time again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T12:35:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1758" CreationDate="2015-02-09T14:28:25.630" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good idea.  I would propose we go with a &lt;strong&gt;two week&lt;/strong&gt; span for each topic of interest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes things need to stew around here and overlapping topics would be too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy to help manage it if we decide to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T14:28:25.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1758" CreationDate="2015-02-09T15:13:05.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this idea, and my proposal would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each week we pick tags that are fairly popular but haven't hit 100 questions yet. This shows that there is a reasonable amount of interest in that tag, but there are still a lot of interesting things to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would mean the eligible candidates this week (with between 50 and 100 questions) are: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each week on Monday we post a question on Meta with one answer for each eligible tag. People can vote for their preferred tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then start the challenge on the Tuesday using the highest voted tag and run it for either one or two weeks (I think one week is enough to be honest, then take a break before starting the next challenge) on the selected tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T15:13:05.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1809" CreationDate="2015-02-09T16:19:28.223" Score="19" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I wrote up &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1758/should-we-have-weekly-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; asking if people would like weekly - now fortnightly topic challenges. The answer from the community was a resounding yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So today will be the first one. As per some of the suggestions, I'm going to start with tags that have seen a decent amount of activity but still aren't commonly used. For the next two weeks, the tag will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;. Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, I'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. Let's build some new worlds!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T15:02:53.933" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2015-02-11T03:10:37.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize for digging something up that should by all rights be buried, but I now know the answer. I checked through the Low Quality Posts queue and discovered that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/1830&quot;&gt;I recommended deletion of the answer, along with a bunch of other users&lt;/a&gt;, and I recommended deletion at the exact same time as the comment was posted. So it appears that I had posted the comment in that form originally and completely by accident. No edits were made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as of this past weekend (10/30/2016), mods can now see the edit history of comments that have been edited. Just for fun, I made an edit to the comment on the deleted post to bring it up, and sure enough, the history showed no other edits besides my test one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like I simply forgot about the automatic comment message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T20:12:11.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1755" CreationDate="2015-02-11T05:04:33.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think defining such a scale will be at all helpful.  Mostly, because it fails to account for &lt;a href=&quot;http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanderson's First Law of Magics&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked post goes into more detail, but it boils down to this:  *If the reader understands the magic, it must be used as a &lt;em&gt;tool&lt;/em&gt;.  If the reader doesn't understand the magic, it must be used as a &lt;em&gt;plot device&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;  If you've been explaining how the magic works (a hard magic system), your characters should use it according to those rules to accomplish their goals.  Breaking the rules just confuses your reader.  Conversely, if you haven't been explaining it (a soft magic system), then use it to solve problems it comes across as &lt;em&gt;deus ex machina&lt;/em&gt; handwaving. (Obviously, there's graduations and subtleties in between those two extremes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this is relevant is that your proposed system for defining magic &lt;strong&gt;implicitly assumes magic is hard&lt;/strong&gt;.  Where would LotR fall on your proposed system?  Who knows.  I don't think there's any way to tell whether Gandalf could have singlehandedly destroyed an army of 10,000 orcs.  He &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt;, but that doesn't mean he &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt;.  What schools of magic exist there?  What are the limits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by trying to fit all magic systems into a single discrete set of values, you'd force it to be narrowed down, quantified, and have all the flexibility squeezed out.  And often, for questions here, it's not even worth going into that much detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T21:00:45.023" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T21:00:45.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-12T01:59:22.653" Score="40" ViewCount="2150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is beginning its &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1758/should-we-have-weekly-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;fortnightly topic challenges&lt;/a&gt;. In that &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1758/should-we-have-weekly-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;trichoplax wrote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this question is already being used for answers on how to approach this, would it be clearer to have a separate &amp;quot;Theme suggestions&amp;quot; meta post rather than posting topics as answers here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is going to be that post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please, post suggestions! Only one per answer, though. The most upvoted answer each fortnight (not counting ones that have already been used) will be used in the next challenge. Heavily downvoted suggestions will not be used. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347/earth-science-biweekly-topic-challenge&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Earth Science post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the answer suggesting a topic will be deleted when that topic is selected, to keep the answer space clean. A list for all to see will be kept under the &amp;quot;previous topics&amp;quot; heading below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current topic:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3401/fortnightly-topic-challenge-29-government&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3401/fortnightly-topic-challenge-29-government&lt;/a&gt; (21 March - 11 April), suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9498/asciithenansi&quot;&gt;ASCIIThenANSI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous topics:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1765&quot;&gt;1 - Space&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1810&quot;&gt;2 - Flora&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1862&quot;&gt;3 - Creature Design&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1916&quot;&gt;4 - Magic&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1966&quot;&gt;5 - City Design&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2047/29&quot;&gt;6 - Evolution&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2104/29&quot;&gt;7 - Economy&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2154&quot;&gt;8 - Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2199&quot;&gt;9 - Map Making&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2242&quot;&gt;10 - Time&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2262&quot;&gt;11 - Religion&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2323&quot;&gt;12 - Humans&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2386&quot;&gt;13 - Weapon Design&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2454&quot;&gt;14 - Hard Science&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2548&quot;&gt;15 - Worldbuilding Process&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2612&quot;&gt;16 - Warfare&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2644&quot;&gt;17 - Moons&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2688&quot;&gt;18 - Architecture&lt;/a&gt;|&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2718&quot;&gt;19 - Politics&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2756/fortnightly-challenge-20-language&quot;&gt;20 - Language&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2793/fortnightly-challenge-21-underwater&quot;&gt;21 - Underwater&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2820/fortnightly-topic-challenge-22-geography&quot;&gt;22 - Geography&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2860/fortnightly-topic-challenge-23-santa&quot;&gt;23 - Santa&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2883/fortnightly-topic-challenge-24-near-future&quot;&gt;24 - Near Future&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2911/fortnightly-topic-challenge-25-culture-and-society&quot;&gt;25 - Culture and Society&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2985/fortnightly-topic-challenge-26-mythical-creatures&quot;&gt;26 - Mythical Creatures&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3172/fortnightly-topic-challenge-27-history&quot;&gt;27 - History&lt;/a&gt; |&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3286/fortnightly-topic-challenge-28-calendar&quot;&gt;28 - Calendar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jenkinsstuff.bl.ee/challenge/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question/Answer Generator&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685/artofcode&quot;&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/a&gt; for quick and easy generation of challenge questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update on April 12th:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3483/should-we-end-the-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3483/should-we-end-the-topic-challenges&lt;/a&gt; answer: regular fortnightly challenge is not needed anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T08:23:12.223" Title="What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="35" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1778" CreationDate="2015-02-12T15:32:54.220" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whats the deal with this?  The site is greying out certain posts for me...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lseUh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T15:40:58.593" Title="Greyed out questions on main...?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1777" CreationDate="2015-02-12T15:40:58.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your preferences you have ignored the tag &quot;earth-like&quot;, as a result any questions with that tag in them get greyed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you ignored it by accident you can go back into your preferences and de-ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T15:40:58.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T02:40:52.337" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10166/where-should-i-place-my-city-in-space&quot;&gt;Where should I place my city in space?&lt;/a&gt;, most immediately because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; challenge reminded me but I would have gotten to it eventually anyway.  I intended to ask a science question -- given this information about size, population, and usage, what kind of placement makes the most sense?  I know very little about planetary gravity, orbits, the effects of those on spaceflight, and so on, so that's where I was coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was way too vague (that was much clearer in my head than in the question that came out), and I got lots of great input about &lt;em&gt;societal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;logistics&lt;/em&gt; factors, about worker commutes, tourists, the improved real-estate value of nice views, navigation, and lots more.  This is all great stuff, and some of it I hadn't thought through before so I definitely appreciate getting the input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't help thinking that as a &lt;em&gt;question on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;, quite aside from the great answers it got anyway, it could have been asked better.  And while I don't have other specific examples to point to, I have the impression that this happens a fair bit on our site -- a question &lt;em&gt;turns out&lt;/em&gt; to be broader than the author intended, which we only find out once the answers roll in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a problem?  Or if not an actual &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt;, something askers can improve?  If so, what should we be doing differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:25:02.760" Title="Case study: can and should we try to focus our questions more?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|case-study|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1779" CreationDate="2015-02-13T04:02:52.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe that is a problem but I don't see how it can be solved. When someone ask a question, it's because he don't know the answer and often doesn't know everything on the question's topic.  With this lack of knowledge, it's hard to set the correct boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my head, my questions always seems very simple. That's usually a bad assumption. People always bug on things that I haven't anticipated. This is because it's not possible to think at every possible details and inconsistencies. And because different people understand the same question differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt; depending on your personal background, we might have a different interpretation about the same thing. God is an obvious one but gender and social engineering are more subtle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; Using the Sandbox can make the question more foolproof but it's not guaranteed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T04:02:52.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1779" CreationDate="2015-02-13T08:38:35.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that this is a problem and once you have answers addressing factors you didn't consider you can't really change the question as it invalidates them. On this SE site, we don't like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if you still need additional answers about an area was wasn't covered, asking another question focusing on those aspects would be the best way to do it. I wouldn't consider asking for a detailed explanation of a very specific aspect of a previous question a duplicate, especially if the previous question's answers didn't bring it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T08:38:35.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1779" CreationDate="2015-02-13T14:10:00.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should stay mostly as we are. It is true that questions here are hard to scope, but I think that's a good thing: it enables you, exactly as described, to get answers addressing factors that you haven't thought of that might actually be important further down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If answers do not fully address your questions, then as the help center says , you can ask a new question. You can also (this is another emerging pattern on this site) comment on answers asking them to expand on a specific element that you were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T14:10:00.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T16:37:14.363" Score="6" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just looked at the help center's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;don't ask&lt;/a&gt; page, and it doesn't seem quite right for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: &quot;What if ______ happened?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost all&lt;/strong&gt; our questions here are this in some form or another: &lt;em&gt;what if&lt;/em&gt; everyone had horses, &lt;em&gt;what if&lt;/em&gt; I could scale down the Solar System... you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be an idea to reconsider the text on this page. I assume it's an SE-wide standard text (though I haven't checked), but it seems it doesn't quite apply to every site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we change this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T23:44:34.993" Title="Can we edit the dont-ask section of Help?" Tags="|feature-request|help-center|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2015-02-13T22:37:02.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't seem to have access to edit this page, so our options are limited unless Stack Exchange want to add this as a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that particular line is unfortunate but most of the page is reasonably well suited to our needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T22:37:02.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-14T01:13:54.370" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a tendency to go back after my questions are answered for a couple weeks if I see room for improvements. My question is a simple one, it is: &lt;strong&gt;What is the best practice amount of time to go back and edit your questions and improve formatting and to clear up your thoughts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking two weeks before you move on, but I might not be considering them viable for too long or I might not be considering them for a long enough period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-02-14T12:37:01.227" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T12:37:01.227" Title="How Long until a question should quit being updated?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1785" CreationDate="2015-02-14T12:36:46.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This, like much else on Meta sites, is going to be a matter of opinion, but that doesn't mean I can't offer mine. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as long as edits don't invalidate existing answers,&lt;/em&gt; you should not feel compelled to not update a question just because a certain amount of time has passed&lt;/strong&gt; or even because a certain number of answers have been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? Well, the first part is obvious; nobody wants to see the answer they put a lot of thought and effort into go to waste and perhaps even receive downvotes because someone edited the question to ask what is, in effect, a different question. (Whether that is because constraints were added that the existing answers don't, and cannot easily, meet, or it was because someone replaced the question entirely. Yes, we've seen that latter happen!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part might not be as obvious. Sometimes, you realize long after the fact that the question wasn't as clear as it could have been. Maybe someone comes across the question after a year or two (or more!) and posts a comment, let alone an answer, that alerts you to the fact that the question, while existing answerers have all taken a similar approach to reading the question, could reasonably be misinterpreted. In that case, &lt;strong&gt;it makes sense to edit the question to clarify.&lt;/strong&gt; But also see above; do your best to not invalidate existing answers. You may also want to leave a comment on each of the existing answers to alert the poster of the answer to the edit, so that they can choose whether to revise the answer in response or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Formatting-alone edits&lt;/strong&gt; are a slightly different kettle of fish. Remember that any major activity on the question (a new answer, or an edit to either the question or an answer, including title or tag edits) bumps the question to the top of the front page. Again, there is no hard-and-fast rule about when this becomes a problem, but I try to think of it sort of like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the question already/still on the front page?&lt;/em&gt; Then it is probably okay to bump it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Has the question made it to the network hot questions list?&lt;/em&gt; Then bumping it isn't going to have any major adverse effect, and the extra attention it is receiving might warrant fixing up even minor parts to make it as clear as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In other cases,&lt;/em&gt; try to make edits more substantial than merely changes to formatting, because the edit is going to push more recent content off the front page. If the question is old, hasn't received much attention recently, and is good enough that the only thing you can improve is formatting, it is perhaps the case that the question really is good enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel the need to edit the question in such a way that the edit is going to invalidate existing answers, consider whether you really are &lt;strong&gt;asking a different question&lt;/strong&gt; and should &lt;em&gt;post it&lt;/em&gt; as a different question instead. Remember that (generally speaking) &lt;strong&gt;it isn't a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; if a valid answer to one is not a valid answer to the other question. Adding constraints on answers would normally meet that criteria and make the second question not a duplicate, though possibly related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T12:36:46.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2015-02-14T12:57:30.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, yes, it does appear that &lt;strong&gt;the page in question is not editable by moderators.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;strong&gt;I'm not so sure that phrasing is necessarily a problem&lt;/strong&gt; in practice, even if people were to take it more literally. Notice that the bullet point specifically talks about &lt;em&gt;open-ended&lt;/em&gt; questions. That's basically what we call &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/29&quot;&gt;idea generation&lt;/a&gt; questions: every answer is equally valid, and there is little or no way to judge how well each answer actually answers the question. &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is what the bullet point aims to discourage (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;not even disallow&lt;/a&gt;, a blog post which I strongly encourage everyone here to read; also, hence the heading &quot;&lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; asking ...&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind what we say on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T12:57:30.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1789" CreationDate="2015-02-14T13:11:01.090" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page in the site's help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in 2010, Robert Cartaino posted a Stack Exchange blog post titled &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;. That post talks about how hard it is to have subjective questions, and outlines half a dozen guidelines that helps define a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; subjective question. Since Worldbuilding is, by definition, a rather subjective site (few of our questions have hard answers that are either &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot;; it's more of a continuum than a binary either/or situation), I propose that we add a link to that post to our help center article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the help center article says, in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the community feel about such a change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T14:09:10.077" Title="Change the &quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot; help center page" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-14T13:11:01.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1788" CreationDate="2015-02-14T13:11:01.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we change the relevant paragraph to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Chat&lt;/a&gt;. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Feel free to make minor adjustments to the phrasing here, but if you wish to state a difference of opinion, make that a separate answer so that community voting works!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T13:11:01.090" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-14T13:11:01.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1798" CreationDate="2015-02-16T15:10:19.320" Score="30" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want anyone to start expecting any immediate graduation from beta (that can take years) but on Sunday &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;our Area51 stats&lt;/a&gt; hit Excellent in the final category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9uf6G.png&quot; alt=&quot;All System Green&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been on excellent everywhere else for a long time but our questions per day activity level (at least partially due to the Space Challenge but it was rising without that) has finally caught up with the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good job everyone, and keep building those worlds :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-02-27T20:44:44.927" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T20:44:44.927" Title="Congratulations Worldbuilders - all systems green" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-17T01:37:06.717" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading a book that has some poor (IMO) science and it is a 'science thriller'.  I had a question alone the lines of &quot;can you believe this?&quot;  And was wondering how it would be taken.  I wasn't planning on naming names but spending time here makes me more aware of some things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if questions like this have a chance, or have a tag &quot;World building fails&quot; or something.  Maybe asking for better ways to do it, or just better answers than the ones provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several examples from this book but the one I wanted to float out there has to do with a marine biologist grad student who made two statements that show the author misunderstands evolution AND Darwin.  Partly I wanted to verify my own understanding and partly I wanted to point out a &quot;what was he thinking&quot; moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started really paying attention when one character mentions that -25C = -87F and everyone is OK with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to bring it up here to see if something like this is OK depending on how the question is worded (as a &quot;avoid these mistakes&quot; section) And if it's OK how we want to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T14:10:14.323" Title="Questions about built worlds" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2015-02-17T02:41:14.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eh, I'm not sure if it would be on topic for this site, but I would probably love the Scheiße out of that tag, if only to read it, laugh at it and feel mildly pleased with myself every once in a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then ask myself: &quot;If they can get their book published, why can't you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which the answer would be: &quot;Because you never finish any book you start writing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6421" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T02:41:14.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2015-02-17T03:19:56.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While that kind of critique can be fun, it's not really what the Q&amp;amp;A site is for.  On the other hand, go wild in &lt;em&gt;chat&lt;/em&gt; -- things are much less formal there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that describes a premise and then asks a question based on that premise is on-topic whether that premise is your own or somebody else's.  If you want to ask a question about evolution in a world with certain properties, go ahead.  On the other hand, if your goal is more to point out flaws in an existing work or ask science questions that aren't really worldbuilding per se (like equivalences between temperature scales), this isn't the best place for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, while it's fine to ask questions based in existing worlds, please make sure you provide enough information in the question for people who haven't read that book/seen that movie/played that game to understand what the question is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T03:19:56.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2015-02-17T08:41:52.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual with late night US time questions, Monica beat me to an answer, and I agree with her. I do want to add something though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was wondering if questions like this have a chance, or have a tag &quot;World building fails&quot; or something. Maybe asking for better ways to do it, or just better answers than the ones provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not what tags are for at all. A tag is generally good if it reasonably fits in a statement like &quot;I am an expert in tag-name&quot;. It might sound a little contrived with the exact tag name, but it shouldn't make you want to look at the person in question and ask &quot;are you for real?&quot;. A good tag also should be usable as the &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; tag on a question. We are already stretching that by having the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and so on tags. There is a certain precedent there, however; RPG has its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rules-as-written&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rules-as-written&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rules-as-written&lt;/a&gt;, SO has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language-lawyer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language-lawyer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language-lawyer&lt;/a&gt; tag, and so on (both of those specific examples serve a purpose quite similar to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; in the context of their respective sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reasonable way for a person to say with a straight face &quot;I am an expert in world building failures&quot; (okay, maybe there is, but it doesn't really mean what you are implying for the tag to mean). And it makes little sense as the only tag on a given question in terms of question categorization. Hence, it pretty much fails &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; criteria. That makes it a bad tag proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the two specific examples that you mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a marine biologist grad student who made two statements that show the author misunderstands evolution AND Darwin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one character mentions that -25C = -87F and everyone is OK with that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aren't &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; questions. They are either background-facts checking failures on part of the author, or deliberate characterization. For example, maybe the grad student was &lt;em&gt;made up&lt;/em&gt; with a flawed understanding of evolution, and the statement made is a reflection of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; rather than the author's lack of understanding of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding SE isn't an &quot;anything goes&quot; site. Our site scope is quite broad, but this site still isn't where you drop just about everything and the kitchen sink. Questions asked here should relate to &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; and some things are explicitly off topic. Like...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Character building as a topic is explicitly and specifically off topic.&lt;/a&gt; Character building questions tend to only be really useful to the person originally asking them, whereas we strive to create a resource useful not only in the moment but also for years to come. What is considered good and bad questions &lt;em&gt;across the entire network&lt;/em&gt; pretty well reflects this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For actual sciences questions about the real world around us, the other sciences sites quite possibly may be better fits than Worldbuilding. What Worldbuilding adds on top of sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Space Exploration&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Earth Science&lt;/a&gt; and the whole slew of others is essentially a place to ask the &lt;em&gt;hypothetical questions&lt;/em&gt; that have no real counterpart in the sciences (most of the sciences sites tend to scoff at hypothetical questions or questions with preconditions that don't match our real world; consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10126/29&quot;&gt;What if the speed of light were 100 times higher?&lt;/a&gt; for just one example that almost certainly would be shot down at Physics), as well as perhaps the cross-disciplines questions. I still feel that just because a question can be shoehorned into worldbuilding doesn't mean it necessarily should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.887" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T08:41:52.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2015-02-17T09:47:15.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not technically what the site is for. &lt;em&gt;But...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can phrase the question so that it reads as &quot;would this factor be possible in &lt;em&gt;this world I'm building&lt;/em&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;does this factor make sense in &lt;em&gt;said given world&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then it's perfectly on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't be bothered, use chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T09:47:15.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2015-02-17T14:10:14.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if the question is asked in relation to what you are building it would be fine (to offer a counter point).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I saw _______ in x world, that seems wrong, can someone explain why?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That feels like a legitimate question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T14:10:14.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1791" CreationDate="2015-02-17T17:49:13.090" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this deserves an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/salute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes Sir...I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hooray us.  Have a baloon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XeP1p.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T17:49:13.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-18T10:16:12.017" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;SF.SE has a (hotly debated) &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; tag, used for questions about speculative fiction works which the querent vaguely recalls but can't find on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could help people track down Isaac Asimov's essays on magic and science, Willy Ley's &lt;em&gt;Exotic Zoology&lt;/em&gt;, various speculative documentary series on &quot;edutainment&quot; channels, and other helpful sources of worldbuilding information they've lost track of: &quot;I saw a documentary about flying shark-raptors a few years ago, but I can't remember what channel or what it's called. I do remember it was narrated by a guy with an Australian accent and there was a bit with an exploding whale.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would we be amenable to fielding similar questions about locating half-remembered world-building resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T03:19:48.143" Title="&quot;Resource ID&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1799" CreationDate="2015-02-18T10:27:21.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource ID questions fit easily into the Stack scope. There'd be a pretty definitive &quot;right&quot; answer to resource ID questions, its draws on expertise and experience with the field at hand, and the topic is certainly within the &quot;practical answers to real problems&quot; scope of the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions of this type would be held to all the standards of our site, and so would get closed if they're too vague for voters to be able to tell if an answer is likely useful. Good answers will be more than a link or a title: they'll justify why the suggested material is the work the querent is looking for, based on the information provided, just like any answer for any question would explain why it's a good solution to the querent's problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't open the door for shopping questions or lists of recommended reading: it'd be using our experience with world-building resources to help people track down a specific resource they know of but can't locate on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2015-02-18T10:33:11.580" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T10:33:11.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1804" CreationDate="2015-02-18T11:16:04.817" Score="9" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flesh-humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flesh-humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flesh-humans&lt;/a&gt;. This is (in my opinion) a redundant meta-tag and is being used to indicate that humans are in fact human. As far as I am aware, if humans deviate from being entirely human by being virtual or cyborgs, then it is indicated in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there is a case for creating a virtual-humans or other non-normative human tag, humans being humans is normative and should not have a tag. Anyone agree/disagree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-02-19T12:00:13.853" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T12:00:13.853" Title="flesh-humans meta tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1801" CreationDate="2015-02-18T11:33:27.457" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see how the tag might be useful in cases where you want to be clear the answers should not use cybernetics etc. However Flesh Humans is ambiguous too though as things like mutants, bio engineering, etc could be very different from humans as we know it but still flesh-humans. For that matter if you start implanting chips in people's skulls where does the line between flesh-humans and cyborgs get drawn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in other words, I agree - the tag can be burninated :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T11:33:27.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1801" CreationDate="2015-02-18T14:32:24.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag has been replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; on both questions where it appeared. This change should propagate fully throughout the site within the next 24 hours or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T14:32:24.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1799" CreationDate="2015-02-18T21:44:08.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/search?q=user:13941+[story-identification]&quot;&gt;BESW knows what s/he's talking about when it comes to story identification questions&lt;/a&gt;, so it's good that you're the one to bring this up. But I have to &lt;em&gt;partially&lt;/em&gt; disagree for this idea on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story identification is good on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy. I've seen a lot of good questions there. The thing is, they &lt;em&gt;have to relate to the science fiction/fantasy aspect of the story/book/movie/comic&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6560/why-was-this-questions-closed-as-off-topic&quot;&gt;This meta post&lt;/a&gt; discusses a case where the question wasn't really about the proper aspect of the movie/comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we decide these are on-topic (and I think that's how it will go, if all goes well), then we need to make sure that the questions we get are about worldbuilding. It seems that a lot of the ones you've brought up are just about (really awesome) science topics. A &lt;em&gt;documentary&lt;/em&gt; about flying shark-raptors doesn't seem to it's directly about world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Awesome idea, though. I hope we get these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T21:44:08.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="581" CreationDate="2015-02-22T12:46:33.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just an update on our badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the generalist badge progress the top 40 tags have at least 20 questions asked each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 15 tags with at least 50 questions (resulting in 9 Taxonomist badges)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 6 tags &gt; 100 (technology is at 99!) (allowing for 22 Bronze tag badges to have been awarded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 1 tag over 200 with 1 more (reality-check) at 193&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go us! (2/22/2015)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update 5/6/2015:***********************************************&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 31 tags with at least 50 questions (resulting in 15 Taxonomist badges)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 11 tags &gt; 100 (allowing for 43 Bronze tag badges and 1 silver to have been awarded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 5 tags over 200 uses.  When 40 tags hit 200 the Generalist badge will start being awarded. (next update when 40 tags have 50 each)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update 7/26/2015 *******************************************&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 40 tags with at least 50 questions (resulting in 19 Taxonomist badges)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 16 tags &gt; 100 (+ 1 @99!) (allowing for 63 Bronze tag badges and 1 silver to have been awarded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 7 tags over 200 uses.  When 40 tags hit 200 the Generalist badge will start being awarded. (next update when 40 tags have 75 each)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update 11/17/2015 *************************************************&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 58 tags with at least 50 questions (resulting in 30 Taxonomist badges) (41 with 75)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 26 tags &gt; 100 (+ 1 @99 &amp;amp; 1 @97!) (allowing for 112 Bronze tag badges and 6 silver have been awarded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 11 tags over 200 uses.  When 40 tags hit 200 the Generalist badge will start being awarded. (next update when 40 tags have 100 each)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Update 03/08/2016 *************************************************&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 68 tags with at least 50 questions (resulting in 33 Taxonomist badges) (55 with 75)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 40 tags &gt;= 100 (allowing for 175 Bronze tag badges and 9 silver have been awarded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 14 tags over 200 uses.  When 40 tags hit 200 the Generalist badge will start being awarded. (next update when 40 tags have 150 each)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T14:28:43.690" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T14:28:43.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T13:13:54.397" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;We recently got the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10641/29&quot;&gt;Proof of our existence&lt;/a&gt; on the main site. It's now closed, hopefully pending edits to fix it up and perhaps migrate it to a more suitable site, but there's something I saw which made me really curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question was voted to be migrated &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, to Worldbuilding Meta.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta site is supposed to be &lt;em&gt;about our&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone involved would be willing to step up (I see no reason to name any name(s)), I would be really interested in learning more about why it was flagged as a potential candidate to migrate to Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T13:13:54.397" Title="Why was this question voted to be migrated to Worldbuilding Meta?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1765" CreationDate="2015-02-22T23:37:28.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;During this challenge, there were 26 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9900/how-small-could-an-earth-like-planet-be-while-still-realistically-being-able-to&quot;&gt;How small could an Earth-like planet be while still realistically being able to sustain human life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9922/must-all-planets-have-a-solid-liquid-core&quot;&gt;Must all planets have a solid/liquid core?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9923/in-space-how-can-they-hear-me-scream&quot;&gt;In Space, how can they hear me scream?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9948/is-there-a-theoretical-maximum-size-for-rocky-planets&quot;&gt;Is there a theoretical maximum size for rocky planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9967/how-long-before-were-stuck-on-earth-due-to-space-debris&quot;&gt;How long before we&amp;#39;re **stuck** on Earth due to Space Debris? (Kessler syndrome)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9980/how-could-we-do-steampunk-space-travel-with-minimal-magic&quot;&gt;How could we do steampunk space travel, with minimal magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10004/how-big-can-a-space-empire-get&quot;&gt;How big can a space empire get?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10082/what-modifications-would-be-needed-to-allow-humans-to-survive-in-space-with-limi&quot;&gt;What modifications would be needed to allow humans to survive in space with limited protective gear?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10126/what-if-the-speed-of-light-were-100-times-higher&quot;&gt;What if the speed of light were 100 times higher?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10150/how-can-i-destroy-a-gas-giant-planet&quot;&gt;How can I destroy a gas giant planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10153/how-far-could-life-develop-inside-a-black-hole-before-it-explodes&quot;&gt;How far could life develop inside a black hole before it explodes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10166/where-should-i-place-my-city-in-space&quot;&gt;Where should I place my city in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10186/conditions-needed-for-a-fractured-moon&quot;&gt;Conditions needed for a Fractured Moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10214/the-new-space-race-racing&quot;&gt;The new Space Race - Racing!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10276/what-sports-could-safely-and-easily-be-played-in-space&quot;&gt;What sports could safely and easily be played in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10305/are-islands-flying-in-space-possible&quot;&gt;Are islands flying in space possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/space-the-final-frontier-to-defend&quot;&gt;Space, the final frontier … to defend&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10332/prison-in-space&quot;&gt;Prison in space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10377/expanding-your-empires-space-from-the-inside-can-it-be-useful&quot;&gt;Expanding your empire&amp;#39;s space from the inside — can it be useful?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10428/information-exchange-in-space&quot;&gt;Information Exchange In Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10434/can-a-planet-with-2-3-orbital-eccentricity-sustain-life&quot;&gt;Can a planet with 2/3 Orbital eccentricity sustain life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10492/a-planet-made-of-trash&quot;&gt;A planet made of trash?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10502/how-would-i-transport-an-atmosphere&quot;&gt;How would I transport an atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10560/interstellar-commerce-how-easy-would-it-be-to-find-sources-of-potable-water-in&quot;&gt;Interstellar commerce: how easy would it be to find sources of potable water in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10563/interstellar-commerce-how-accessible-are-oxygen-sources-in-space&quot;&gt;Interstellar commerce: how accessible are oxygen sources in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10601/interstellar-internet-use-cases-or-what-if-the-internet-was-mail-order&quot;&gt;Interstellar internet use cases, or &amp;quot;What if the internet was mail-order?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many, many people participated. Here they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Askers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7050/akaddoura&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7050.png&quot; alt=&quot;akaddoura&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6454/mjr&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6454.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2072/shokhet&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2072.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/328/overactor&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/328.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/320/jimmery&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/320.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/155/newlifer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/155.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2071.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/757/magic-mouse&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/757.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7312/seth&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7312.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/288/twelfth&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/288.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5304/user89&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5304.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3316/adamhovorka&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3316.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answerers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3202/samuel&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3202.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3434/ville-niemi&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3434.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2947/ckersch&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2947.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3104/user3082&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3104.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2974/nick2253&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2974.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7/pipperchip&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/687/peter-masiar&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/687.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/22/vulcronos&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/22.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7066/user3453518&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7066.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5002.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5147/ghosts-in-the-code&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5147.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3112/henry-taylor&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3112.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7069/nitram&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7069.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3468/ksmarts&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3468.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7079/grin&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7079.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2926/bill-blondeau&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2926.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/757/magic-mouse&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/757.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3042/clara-onager&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3042.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2087/abulafia&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2087.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/147.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2054/blake-walsh&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2054.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2252/cort-ammon&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2252.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2148/pluckedkiwi&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2148.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/dustin-jackson&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6511/user6511&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6511.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6595/dewi-morgan&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6595.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7168/6711/spacetime&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7168.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6711/joshua&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6711.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/939/kutschkem&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/939.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jdlugosz&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/885.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2919/beta&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2919.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/264/loren-pechtel&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/264.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/288/twelfth&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/288.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/659/hugorune&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/659.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/858/ratchet-freak&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/858.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4936/alanse&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/4936.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7246/harry-kim&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/246.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/1991/anixx&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/1991.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2968/layna&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2968.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7182/small-moon&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7182.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2113/brythan&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2113.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7210/nils-sens&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7210.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2316/foo-bar&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2316.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/75.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2746.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3407/2012rcampion&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3407.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2884/oldcat&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2884.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7072/unknown&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7072.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3307/ajmansfield&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3307.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6511/user6511&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6511.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6745/andyt&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6745.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2803/daniel&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2803.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6972/m-t&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6972.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3276.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7281/markus&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7281.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7287/werelic&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7287.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3535/kittycat3141&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3535.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/447/armanx&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/447.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3254/darth-hunterix&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3254.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7174/deleteman&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7174.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3131/sobrique&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3131.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7241/oskar&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7241.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7325/gary-walker&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7325.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7355/hkob&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7355.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/278/mark&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/278.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=space#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T15:02:53.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1861" CreationDate="2015-02-23T00:52:15.457" Score="14" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously I wrote up &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1758/should-we-have-weekly-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; asking if people would like weekly - now fortnightly topic challenges. The answer from the community was a resounding yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So today will be the second one. As per some of the suggestions, I'm going to start with tags that have seen a decent amount of activity but still aren't commonly used. For the next two weeks, the tag will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flora&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flora&lt;/a&gt;, as suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9/mourdos&quot;&gt;Mourdos&lt;/a&gt;, who wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because it hasn't seen much use and plant life is an important aspect of any world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, I'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. Let's build some new worlds!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T05:34:50.657" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1817" CreationDate="2015-02-24T18:56:09.807" Score="9" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;magic-based&lt;/code&gt; to give guidance as to what types of answers are acceptable to the author. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10792/plant-based-armor&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; made me wonder if we should also have a &lt;code&gt;history-based&lt;/code&gt; for questions that want to see what actually happened related to a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, questions with this tag would be more citation-heavy and less speculative (as the excellent answers on this question point out). I think it would be useful to determine what kinds of answers are desired, in much the same way that I check whether it's &lt;code&gt;science&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;magic&lt;/code&gt; based before answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T01:44:54.170" Title="History-Based tag for questions about what actually happened" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2015-02-24T19:15:14.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question that deals directly with &lt;strong&gt;what has happened in our real world&lt;/strong&gt; and has no speculative elements does not seem to me to be directly related to &lt;em&gt;the subject of world building&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;strong&gt;it seems to be more like background research.&lt;/strong&gt; Which is a great thing to do, but isn't something a worldbuilding expert would be the most likely to be able to help out with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, a question that prompts the use of your proposed tag should in my opinion be asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the History Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Or, depending on the specific subject matter, any of the myriad other science-based sites in the network. (What we can add here is largely the &quot;what would happen &lt;em&gt;if this happened&lt;/em&gt;&quot; part; if your question is &quot;please describe this part about &lt;em&gt;this real-life thing&lt;/em&gt;&quot; then ours is likely not the best place to ask the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On our site, I would argue that it should probably be voted to be closed as not worldbuilding, and if it's a good question I could see benefit in it being flagged for possible migration to History SE or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conversely,&lt;/strong&gt; a question that asks whether a concept is feasible as well as for similar things done in the real world, without necessarily being about &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what has happened in our real world, seems well served by the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags, in combination with a specific subject tag (such as for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;). Such a question, &lt;em&gt;generally speaking&lt;/em&gt;, would appear to be more on topic here than on say the History SE, because of its speculative elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Let's not abuse tags and turn them into what they were never really meant to be in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:53.193" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T19:20:45.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2015-02-24T19:45:15.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the world-building I do is based on real world geography, organizations, events, people etc etc etc.  The real world and it's history is the single greatest source of inspiration available to us.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How events unfold in a fantasy world should always seem believable (SHOULD...they don't always) and the best way to verify that is to bounce it against reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem what-so-ever with a tag that is history based.  The question obviously should not simply be a history query.  It needs to be tied to the process of building a world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see a question along the lines of oh...I don't know this one:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/527/what-are-the-primary-triggers-for-the-degrading-and-fall-of-great-empires&quot;&gt;What are the primary triggers for the decline and fall of great empires?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the answer should be primarily based in real world history.  (that is what I was asking for).  These questions should certainly be allowed if framed correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T19:45:15.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2015-02-24T20:14:10.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks if a specific concept existed in our past. He is looking for a specific information, and that does not make it a question about history. Not as it is worded at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;History is the series of past events that determine the present-day&#xA;  characteristics of a world. Much of worldbuilding is based on the&#xA;  world's history and defining how it got to its current state. Creating&#xA;  a good history can help explain and set up the world and make it&#xA;  easier to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example for a history question could be (but too broad) : If people had invented plant-based armour, how would history change? What would be different over a long period of time? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T20:14:10.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2015-02-25T01:44:54.170" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is going to overlap with Michael's, but I'm posting it separately so I can go on at greater length than comments afford. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fine line between &lt;em&gt;pure history&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;historically-informed exploration&lt;/em&gt;.  A question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/527/what-are-the-primary-triggers-for-the-degrading-and-fall-of-great-empires&quot;&gt;What are the primary triggers for the decline and fall of great empires?&lt;/a&gt; pretty much requires an answer based in history, but it's not a &lt;em&gt;history question&lt;/em&gt; -- it's a question about how empires work, with reference to empires we know about.  And there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96/what-are-the-necessary-conditions-for-a-worldwide-government&quot;&gt;What are the necessary conditions for a worldwide government?&lt;/a&gt;; our world has attempted something of a world government in the UN, kinda sorta, and some answers have drawn on history, but it's not a history question per se.  All of this seems ok to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13/how-quickly-and-accurately-did-news-travel-in-rural-medieval-europe&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately should news travel in a rural medieval setting?&lt;/a&gt;, which I asked very early in our private beta.  Were it asked today I think we'd close it and that doesn't seem wrong to me.  My &lt;em&gt;motivation&lt;/em&gt; in asking the question was world-building (I want the types and speeds of my communication channels to be historically accurate), but instead of asking &lt;em&gt;how to make those realistic&lt;/em&gt;, which would be an on-topic question for sure, I asked &lt;em&gt;what did they do&lt;/em&gt;.  Once this discussion dies down I may try to rework that question, if I can do it without invalidating answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are questions where answers will rely on history, and I understand that to be your motivation in asking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-based&lt;/a&gt; tag to go along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm not wild about this.  I'm not actually wild about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; either, but I understand why we probably need it -- there is a large supply of non-science-based answers (read: magic) that would otherwise be offered, and spelling out &quot;I'm looking only for things consistent with science as we understand it today&quot; on every such question gets tedious, and maybe we don't want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; for everything in that category.  (Though maybe we do!  Separate question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't perceive the same problem with history-related questions so far.  Do we have a lot of questions where what's needed is an answer based in earth history, but they're attracting more fanciful answers and it's too invasive to spell it out in questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T01:44:54.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1820" CreationDate="2015-02-25T15:35:09.553" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of my recent questions have gotten more than a few good and highly upvoted answers. How do I decide which one to accept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5304" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T20:20:05.243" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T20:57:56.890" Title="How should I select which answer to accept?" Tags="|discussion|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1818" CreationDate="2015-02-25T15:55:34.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You simply need to select the one that &lt;strong&gt;Best&lt;/strong&gt; answers your question.  Look for completeness and accuracy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find that the answers are quite different and yet equally valuable its probably a good sign that you could have narrowed down your question a bit more before asking.  Which is something to keep in mind for the next question you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T15:55:34.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1818" CreationDate="2015-02-25T20:23:06.840" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;James said &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1819/29&quot;&gt;simply pick the best answer&lt;/a&gt;. Which is true in a way, but doesn't really help in deciding which answer is &quot;best&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;the help center article on what accepting an answer means&lt;/a&gt; states (in part, my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that &lt;strong&gt;the author received an answer that worked for him or her personally,&lt;/strong&gt; but not every user comes back to accept an answer, and of those who do, they may not change the accepted answer if a newer, better answer comes along later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows from this that you should accept the answer that &lt;em&gt;most helped you solve your specific problem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may or may not be the same as the answer that has been voted the highest by the community. I find that the most highly voted few answers often are good candidates for acceptance, &lt;em&gt;but not always&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a newcomer to a field, a highly technical answer might be voted highly for completeness and accuracy, but it might not be the one that is the most helpful to you. In that case, you should accept another. You can get answers better suited to your level in the field in question by stating what your approximate knowledge level in the field is (something like &quot;I am an amateur astronomer and have some idea of the different star types, but couldn't tell the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification#Class_G&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a G5Ib and a G5IV&lt;/a&gt; if it bit me in the rear&quot; will help answerers aim at your particular level of expertise, increasing the chances that you receive answers that are useful &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end,&lt;/strong&gt; it is &lt;em&gt;your choice as the person asking a question which answer, if indeed any at all, you should accept&lt;/em&gt;. If an even better answer comes along, it is also your right as the asker of a question to unaccept a previous accepted answer and accept the better one. Answer acceptance is not cast in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also strongly urge &lt;strong&gt;waiting for a while before accepting an answer&lt;/strong&gt;. Accepting indicates that you feel the question has been answered to your satisfaction, and thus reduces the likelihood of other members of the community chiming in and adding further answers which may be even better for you. I suggest waiting at least 1-2 days before accepting an answer, and longer if the question doesn't see a lot of traffic. Never feel forced to accept an answer, but by all means be ready to upvote good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with acceptance, you should upvote answers that you receive which you feel are helpful. (I'm always a bit confused personally when someone with reputation to vote up accepts an answer but doesn't upvote it. Was it useful or not? &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/686/157730&quot;&gt;The two actions are separate&lt;/a&gt;, but still very much related.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Oh, and every now and then someone suggests the ability for moderators (or others) to force-accept an answer if the asker doesn't. It gets shot down every time, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/8692/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/157304/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3669/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. So don't even bother to ask about something like that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T20:57:56.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T21:13:49.203" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is something that is best hashed out ahead of time. In our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1768/29&quot;&gt;fortnightly topic challenge topics suggestion question&lt;/a&gt;, we currently have three suggestions all ranking as #2 when sorted by net votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make sure the choice isn't completely arbitrary, &lt;strong&gt;how should we decide which one to pick&lt;/strong&gt; when multiple alternatives all have the same (highest) net vote score by community voting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T22:15:57.310" Title="In the fortnightly topic challenges, how to choose between identically voted suggestions?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1821" CreationDate="2015-02-25T21:13:49.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pick the one among the equally-net-voted alternatives that was &lt;strong&gt;posted the earliest&lt;/strong&gt; according to the answer's &quot;answered&quot; timestamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to compare the timestamps, everyone has access to the information (and thus can verify the choice if they feel so inclined), the risk of collisions is minimal (equally net voted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; top net voted &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; posted the same second seems incredibly unlikely to me) and they will all get their turn eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T21:13:49.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1821" CreationDate="2015-02-25T22:15:57.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm actually ok with a little arbitrariness.  On some sites I've seen a moderately-voted suggestion get picked over higher-voted ones because it's in some way topical &lt;em&gt;that week&lt;/em&gt;.  That's fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as it's broadly matching the will of the community, I'm happy to let the person who's doing the work make choices in the case of ties or to &lt;em&gt;occasionally&lt;/em&gt; choose something farther down the list for a good, stated reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T22:15:57.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1827" CreationDate="2015-02-26T10:06:11.960" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of numbers here. A high proportion of questions take mathematical answers or are in a position to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just read through the answers on one of these, and the eternal internationalisation problem has struck again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that comes out to 13.400K&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found myself thinking, you're trying to heat that thing up and you want to go to thirteen point four Kelvin? What's going on? I did eventually realise that the number was European style, but it took a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the question - do we need to define a constant style for numbers? It wouldn't have to be done by the OP, but an editor could then be sure that their edit wouldn't cause controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T17:25:31.623" Title="Do we need to standardise number styling?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1824" CreationDate="2015-02-26T14:53:36.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Mi Yodeya we sometimes have a related issue: there are different transliteration schemes from Hebrew, and it can be a little confusing (especially with tags involved).  What we've learned over time is that there is no One True Way, and the best approach for us is to let each poster use his own system while doing our best to remove ambiguity (which may mean an English translation in parentheses sometimes, or going to the extra effort of typing the actual Hebrew characters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we have a similar situation here.  &quot;K&quot; isn't &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;; it's a different convention.  Rather than trying to mandate a single style, which, demonstrably, will be unnatural to some subset of readers, let's try to focus on &lt;em&gt;clarity over rules&lt;/em&gt;.  What does &quot;K&quot; stand for here?  Should that be stated somewhere?  (Like an expansion of an acronym, it can simply be expanded on first use and then &quot;K&quot; thereafter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see an ambiguous notation and you know what was meant, please edit to clarify.  Together we can make this site accessible to all readers, regardless of geography or scientific specialization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T14:53:36.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1824" CreationDate="2015-02-26T16:47:05.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how it can be solved. Different people use different systems naturally. Furthermore, based on a discussion on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/531/should-we-prefer-british-or-american-spelling&quot;&gt;similar issue&lt;/a&gt;, it was agreed that modifying the text one way or the other was not considered an improvement. It was more likely to confuse or anger people. I was the one responsible for the controversy apparently. Since I'm not a native English speaker, I don't know all the subtleties between the different Englishes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also reminds me of this issue I encountered here not long ago: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T16:47:05.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1824" CreationDate="2015-02-26T17:25:31.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I say that the American UK system wins. I'm not saying that just because I live in the US, I grew up on the &lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; as decimal separator system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ran an SQL query on data.stackexchange the REGEX \d*,\d*.\d* vs \d*.\d*,\d*, you'll find that over 90% of the users favor the &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; as decimal separator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I don't see this as an issue, as long as we have a post on Meta somewhere specifying that unless otherwise noted, we're using the Non-continental-European rest-of-the-world notation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: It's been a while since I've regexed in SQL, so lemme know if it did something horrible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T17:25:31.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1829" CreationDate="2015-02-28T18:41:13.510" Score="6" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently edited a question which had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; (I left the tag alone). I recalled having seen that tag before, so I went back and looked at the questions with the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag excerpt and tag wiki were the same. They read (past tense):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Science-Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that combines tropes and elements common to both Science-Fiction and Fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and found this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Science fantasy is a mixed genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy, and sometimes also incorporates elements of horror. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points out that as a genre, science fantasy &quot;has never been clearly defined,&quot; and was most commonly used in the period 1950-1966.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, the tag wiki is clearly uncited plagiarism and should be cited (which I have just done, and made some other changes). Second, looking at the rest of the Wikipedia page was not any more enlightening. The genre doesn't seem to be very unique, and appears to be more a subset of fantasy than of science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to discuss the merits of the tag. Part of me thinks it's useful, part of me thinks it's not useful, and part of me thinks it should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T10:09:45.990" Title="Modifying the &quot;science-fantasy&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2015-02-28T23:31:32.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: I've gone through and removed the tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; can do nothing but confuse people who look at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; tags. It is also an attempt at a meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at a couple of questions that use it, and it seems that this tag effectively applies to every fantasy setting ever. Either remove it, or replace it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; if it looks like the question is asked for scientific answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the questions that use it, none of them need it, so remove and it will self burn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Going off topic now. Upvote or downvote based on the above, not the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I think this brings us to a bigger problem. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; seems to have evolved into &lt;strike&gt;something other than what I had intended it to be&lt;/strike&gt; a sprawling mess that means nothing. It &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; mean (in my opinion) that you don't need to question the how. Evolution? Bah, A wizard did it (See Owlbear), FTL communications? Technology does it (aka, magic), but don't ask me to explain it. That kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the questions that use it, it adds nothing to almost all of them. Therefore I think it might be time to talk about burning it as an unnecessary meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2015-03-17T10:09:45.990" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T10:09:45.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T00:57:59.523" Score="13" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;But first... &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/39/distinguishing-science-and-fantasy-based-questions&quot;&gt;required reading&lt;/a&gt;, a question asked two days into private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have come a long way since then and I think that we need to have a serious talk about what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; really means. Because when we first created this tag, we had it was intended to say &quot;Magic be here, begone with your science and your logic, for we are wizards  and we tell the universe what to do.&quot;. This was eventually followed up with a large number of discussion about magic and technology, soft science fiction (space-fantasy) vs hard sci fi and various other nebulous things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is important to take away from this is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; became that tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; has become a mess. It is too broad and doesn't actually add anything to any of the questions I've looked at. The tag description itself defines fantasy as fantasy..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fantasy is a genre of stories that involves things that aren't normal in this world. These can be anything from strange creatures to magic to other worlds. In fact, all of these things are common in fantasy stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been through the fantasy-based questions by votes. Below are the ones with 10 votes or above and my first attempt at explaining why I don't think we need this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think its time to burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; because it is too broad and being applied with no real rhyme or reason and we have outgrown it, what do you guys think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like they wanted to use science based, question not about fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7288/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-calories-to-live&quot;&gt;How do centaurs get enough calories to live?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9117/hammer-proof-armor&quot;&gt;Hammer-proof armor&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/316/can-you-simply-scale-up-animals&quot;&gt;Can you simply scale up animals?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9300/a-more-powerful-bow&quot;&gt;A more powerful bow&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4179/consistency-of-giant-spider-webs&quot;&gt;Consistency of Giant Spider Webs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calls for reality check - one of these is about an alternative building material, the other is about how a &quot;small group&quot; defeated a large groups, and actually used historical examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9774/how-could-a-group-of-6-people-destroy-an-army&quot;&gt;How could a group of 6 people destroy an army?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10254/would-it-be-possible-to-smelt-and-craft-things-from-salt&quot;&gt;Would it be possible to smelt and craft things from salt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adds nothing about equipment, not fantasy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9642/what-would-be-favoured-weapons-and-weapon-styles-of-a-four-armed-human&quot;&gt;What would be favoured weapons and weapon styles of a four-armed human?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10340/how-do-i-encourage-fully-armored-knights-to-carry-a-shield&quot;&gt;How do I encourage fully armored knights to carry a shield&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discuss supernatural creatures or abilities or events. Mythical-creatures tag is more specific for these, as its tag description is about non-existant creatures&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10688/how-effective-would-dragon-dragoons-be&quot;&gt;How effective would Dragon-Dragoons be?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;How to Defeat a Precognitive Warrior?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2629/what-happens-if-the-sun-disappears-and-then-reappears-some-days-later&quot;&gt;What happens if the sun disappears and then reappears some days later?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9529/what-would-a-sentient-intelligent-but-very-small-bird-use-as-a-ranged-weapon-a&quot;&gt;What would a sentient, intelligent, but very small bird use as a ranged weapon against human or larger armored targets?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10804/burning-down-a-mountain&quot;&gt;Burning down a mountain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impact of magic on one aspect of the world, magic tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1209/what-are-the-societal-effects-of-an-easily-available-resurrection-service&quot;&gt;What are the societal effects of an easily available resurrection service?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2918/would-we-see-cannons-in-a-magic-using-society&quot;&gt;Would we see cannons in a magic-using society?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10645/what-would-poverty-be-like-if-there-was-an-infinite-supply-of-food&quot;&gt;What would poverty be like if there was an infinite supply of food?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/586/why-would-you-build-underground-defensive-structures-in-an-an-alternate-world-me&quot;&gt;Why would you build underground defensive structures in an an alternate world medieval europe?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/625/solving-the-difficulties-of-a-world-based-on-harmonics&quot;&gt;Solving the difficulties of a world based on harmonics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternative world (we have a tag for that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9901/unsettled-continent&quot;&gt;Unsettled continent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;society - more about alternative populations or rule of government (and now we have a feudalism tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9968/how-to-promote-nationalism-for-a-multi-racial-kingdom-against-other-such-multi&quot;&gt;How to promote nationalism for a multi-racial kingdom, against other such multi-racial kingdoms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10964/how-would-i-limit-feudalism&quot;&gt;How would I limit Feudalism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually about fantasy.. and fantasy-based is can be removed with no loss&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3953/why-would-a-magic-world-be-stuck-in-medieval-times&quot;&gt;Why would a magic world be stuck in medieval times?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;creature-design, we have this tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9517/pack-animals-for-forests&quot;&gt;Pack animals for forests&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8569/how-to-make-a-realistic-giant&quot;&gt;How to make a realistic &amp;#39;giant&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10055/negating-the-negative-effects-of-childbearing&quot;&gt;Negating the negative effects of childbearing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T02:18:20.693" Title="So let's talk about burning the fantasy-based tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T16:38:13.163" Score="7" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just reviewed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/6219&quot;&gt;suggested edit&lt;/a&gt;. It was fine, but I have to say it would have been quite useful to see the &lt;strong&gt;actual&lt;/strong&gt; rendered output instead of text and the raw MathJax I saw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oCjgD.png&quot; alt=&quot;mathjax raw text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HOm8x.png&quot; alt=&quot;what i want&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/72lja.png&quot; alt=&quot;what i want&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of options for how the review is rendered, currently &quot;rendered output&quot; and &quot;markdown&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rtag0.png&quot; alt=&quot;options&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that in the &quot;rendered output&quot; display, the MathJax should be rendered as above; in the &quot;markdown&quot; display it should show as the raw text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T08:05:39.667" Title="Render MathJax in review queues" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-03-02T08:07:33.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T20:10:23.423" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11120/how-has-leonard-nimoys-method-character-development-contributed-to-imagined-w&quot;&gt;Can characterization contributed by actors (not the writer) have a significant effect in building a rich and enduring imagined world?&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My on-topic question is whether non-author (non written word or documented) collaborators can have a profound effect on realizing the richness and success (lasting impression) of an imagined world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't think so, that should be an Answer, not a &quot;it's not so go, away and nobody else can say otherwise&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I didn't state the thesis clearly enough, please someone help me to improve upon it.  I further specialized it to be a tribute to Nimoy, so, it is rather timely and I want it available for other answers ASAP. It's been 15 hours since I commented on the on-hold, and as I said I'm at a loss as to how to more acceptablably explain it or make the concept more understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T23:36:05.643" Title="Please revisit this timely on-hold question soon" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1832" CreationDate="2015-03-01T20:26:34.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I need to ponder this and revisit the question, but it seems that your actual &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what ways has his Method results (not conventional writing nor anything regarding the overt setting) contributed to the World Building of the projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sounds to me like you aren't really looking for insight into &lt;em&gt;the process of worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; or seeking help with &lt;em&gt;a problem you encountered during worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; (which is what this site is about) but rather want to discuss &lt;em&gt;the impact of a specific person on a specific worldbuilding process&lt;/em&gt;. The latter being something that few people outside of the circle of people involved are likely to be able to answer, and seems peripheral at best to the site's purpose of adding to the corpus of knowledge on the Internet on the site's topic. Hence likely why the question ended up being put on hold as not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that Stack Exchange deals quite poorly with timing-specific questions. (Even though it doesn't see a whole lot of use, there's even an annotation specifically for questions dealing with rapidly-changing events.) Sure, on a busy site a question is likely to get its fifteen minutes of fame and then see little further activity, but I have seen questions receive well-thought-out answers literally &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; after the question was originally posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-01T20:46:25.557" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T20:46:25.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1832" CreationDate="2015-03-01T23:36:05.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a quick rule of thumb, characters aren't part of worldbuilding, much less actors playing the characters.  As such, we're probably not the best place for paying tribute to Leonard Nimoy.  This is not because we dislike him.  As a group, I expect most of us are rather fond of his work, particularly as Spock.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking purely for a Nimoy related question, perhaps something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;How would the world need to be different for the predominant (humanoid) race to have green blood?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to create a a world where the inhabitants look essentially human but have green blood (like the Vulcans on Star Trek).  What would have to change to make this happen?  Would it be as simple as replacing iron in the blood with something like copper or gold?  Or would we need to make more changes for this to make sense?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could always post in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/2113&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; if you wanted to try to tweak a question into proper shape.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be really difficult to come up with a question that more directly links the actual character of Leonard Nimoy or even his acting skills to actual worldbuilding.  It's a touching tribute but not really appropriate for this site.  We don't deal with casting decisions.  Our focus is on helping people design backgrounds for their stories that are logically (and sometimes scientifically) consistent.  By the time that people are on to casting (assuming they are writing a screenplay or play), our job is done.  It's up to them to provide ambiance, etc. that can be provided by good acting, lighting, and proper settings.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you are correct in describing the thing that you want to discuss as world building, but it's not the kind of worldbuilding that we do here.  Your question simply doesn't fit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T23:36:05.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-02T14:28:22.223" Score="3" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11182/believable-magical-transmutation-of-elements?&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as a potential duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/519/wondering-what-would-happen-if-magic-was-constrained-by-conservation-of-energy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm asking for a self consistent framework and side effects, of which energy is just one part, I don't see this as a duplicate. I'd like to see both sides of this argument so we can decide how to treat this question, and as guidance for future askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T16:57:54.400" Title="Magical transmutation - duplicate or not?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1835" CreationDate="2015-03-02T14:37:40.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I issued the close vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt that anyone looking for hard-magic ways of transmuting elements will necessarily need to deal with the general conservation of energy as the most crucial part of that framework given the massive amounts of energy involved. If you hand-wave that away then you are quickly out of the realm of hard-magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to dissuade the whole &quot;how would X work if Y?&quot;, &quot;how would X work if Z?&quot; sort of duplication where the answers are similar, but fragmented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I am also concerned that the question is too broad. Once you allow hand-waving something as vital as the conservation of energy, you allow &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; possible hand-wavy/magical answers to solve your problem. But I voted as duplicate since it's more helpful than too broad, even if the broadness helped encourage my duplicate vote when I might've otherwise considered it different enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T14:37:40.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-02T21:58:22.007" Score="13" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/283/should-workarounds-be-suggested-when-the-question-implies-an-impossibilty&quot;&gt;Should workarounds be suggested when the question implies an impossibilty?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is about questions that are (roughly) of the form, &quot;In a world with feature X, how could phenomenon Y occur?&quot; and how to respond when you think that phenomenon Y could &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; occur under those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of questions of that general form, where the questioner presents a set of conditions for their world, and asks about the consequences. On these questions, it is not uncommon for someone to post an answer that rejects the &lt;em&gt;premise&lt;/em&gt; of the question. That is, in response to the question, &quot;Under X circumstances, how would Y happen?&quot; someone says, &quot;X can't happen.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11230/implications-of-respawning&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, which has the constraints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the original is most assuredly dead, and the copy is most assuredly not the original&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has an answer that says, &quot;you are still you,&quot; thus rejecting the constraints. The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5019&quot;&gt;Weapon developed in modern melee only world&lt;/a&gt; has a number of answers that say &quot;people would use ranged weapons anyway&quot;. And consider how much debate came up around &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10017&quot;&gt;How would society react if the existence of a god was scientifically proven?&lt;/a&gt; regarding whether or not God actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; exist or &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be proven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we respond these answers, that reject the conditions of the question or say that those conditions can't occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct is that in creating fictional worlds, we will necessarily have fictional elements. Therefore, answers that reject those elements are not helpful and should be rejected as &quot;not an answer,&quot; especially if that is the entire content and no alternatives are suggested. After all, I can't imagine that someone responding to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; question with &quot;magic is not real&quot; would be very welcome. Is this correct, or are these answers acceptable? (Or is there some other response to consider?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T21:26:00.997" Title="Answers that contradict Questions: how to respond?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2015-03-02T22:07:05.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these answers, while not totally in the spirit of the question, are quite often useful and should be left alone. I've seen a few instances where someone has answered in this fashion and the OP has commented something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks! I hadn't thought of this but it's an interesting direction to go in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding requires creativity. Sometimes, I think if a premise in a question doesn't entirely make sense to an answerer but &lt;strong&gt;they can think of a similar alternative&lt;/strong&gt;, the answer could actually help - whether by introducing a new direction or identifying an unviable one, it's still useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if the answers completely contradicts the question it should be deleted/flagged for deletion. In this case I don't think that's necessary as the answer is not that far off the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T22:07:05.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2015-03-03T02:04:24.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might be guilty of this, in which case I apologize for those answers. At the very least I'm to blame for my ubiquitous &quot;No, it can't&quot; answers, although people seem to like those when I back it all up with facts, sources and calculations. Also, thanks for linking to the earlier meta question; that gave me some inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First off: The linked questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be frank and say that while I'm a solid atheist, I know that any answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10017/how-would-society-react-if-the-existence-of-a-god-was-scientifically-proven&quot;&gt;How would society react if the existence of a god was scientifically proven?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; take on the existence of a god as the premise. Period. There is no way around it. I really don't see how you can argue against it, especially because - as I'll get to later - the question does not have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags! So even though some of us disagree with the idea in real life, we have to cast that aside to discuss the issue. Were I to write an answer to that, I'd happily assume that a god exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the scenario in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5019/weapon-developed-in-modern-melee-only-world&quot;&gt;Weapon developed in modern melee only world&lt;/a&gt; is plausible (and I won't get into any arguments about it), so I reject the answers (but did not downvote) that forego the question based on the rationale of impossibility. But that's just my belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11230/implications-of-respawning&quot;&gt;Implications of &amp;#39;Respawning&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;, too, didn't seem to have an outlandish presence. I was pleased to see that all but one answer (sorry, TimB!) took the premise as reasonable into consideration. Again, I see no reason why the scenario is implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer in which I acknowledged that I reject many premises is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4795/could-a-civilization-as-advanced-as-humans-exist-on-a-planet-dwarf-planet-like-p/4799#4799&quot;&gt;Could a civilization as advanced as humans exist on a planet/dwarf planet like Pluto?&lt;/a&gt;. I'm fine with this type of answer because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asked if the scenario is possible, to which I duly responded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My answer used facts and logic to back it up, and I think I did a decent job of proving my point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question uses either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags, then I think it should accept answers that say that a given scenario is not possible (note that if &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; refers to the universe in question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1712/how-realistic-should-a-question-tagged-reality-check-be&quot;&gt;then some scenarios that are impossible in our universe may be possible in the given universe, and answers should reflect that&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Physics, Astronomy and other science sites, I've seen instances where the user wants a scientific answer to a question but refuses to abandon an unscientific premise. Often the premise involves Creationism, to which I downvote, flag (occasionally, if the post is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; bad and I think a mod won't see it) and wait for it to be closed or heavily modified. Fortunately, I've never seen a post along those lines on Worldbuilding, but the same logic applies: If you want a scientific answer, adopt a scientific premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll end on sources. I've always been big on adding in citations and links to give an answer some credibility and to make it clearer. Adding facts lends some heft to whatever point you're trying to make. If you say, &quot;I don't think this is possible,&quot; you won't get as many people to believe you as if you say, &quot;I don't think this is possible because this study says blah blah blah and this article says yada yada yada . . .&quot; I'm not advocating mandatory citations and links in answers, but in cases like this, they can be very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T02:04:24.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2015-03-03T03:49:41.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It depends.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and someone says that magic is not real, then it's reasonable to flag the response Not an Answer.  However, if a question is marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, then saying that something is not realistic is perfectly appropriate.  There's a line somewhere in the middle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large part of worldbuilding is plausibility.  In particular, the melee weapons only rule was trying to justify a claim.  Knowing that there's a lot of pushback on certain parts of the explanation is useful in that case.  It's not a plausible way to justify development of a specially compliant weapon unless there is some impetus to carry a weapon as well.  If readers lose suspension of disbelief on a point like that, then the story stops carrying them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How society would respond to proof of God's existence is more interesting.  Arguing that God does not exist is useless there.  I count three deleted answers, and I think rightfully so.  It's possible that others should be deleted, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/10071/2113&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but even that answer illustrates an actual reaction to finding proof.  Another reaction is of course to deny that the proof proves anything.  So an answer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/10050/2113&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; fits the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11231/2113&quot;&gt;TimB's answer to Implications of Respawning&lt;/a&gt; is helpful.  It points out that some people would regard the clone as a continuation.  I don't know that a story will get very far by assuming things that most people will regard as false.  Authors can't force suspension of belief on readers.  It must be earned.  Now if you want to make the dominant position that the clone is not a continuation, that's possible.  But it seems quite likely that most clones will consider themselves continuations.  After all, what else could they be?  They have all the memories of their first lives.  When you awake, do you regard yourself as a different person from the one that went to sleep?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, the best solution to a bad answer is a downvote.  A deletion is a rather strong reaction and leaves the question vulnerable to others making the same point.  A downvoted answer still shows to everyone and allows people to see the existing answer so that they don't have to repeat it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T03:49:41.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1846" CreationDate="2015-03-03T16:24:19.063" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it really strange that we used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; 7 times but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; only once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think someone should suggest  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt;. Or maybe we should just use diplomacy, it's all the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough rep to suggest the synonym. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T18:14:56.447" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T22:22:45.093" Title="Should &quot;diplomacy&quot; and &quot;interspecies-diplomacy&quot; tags be synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2015-03-03T19:12:51.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers that directly contradict the premise of the question are not really helpful. However, answers that explain why the premise is impossible or unlikely (and especially answers that then offer new possibilities that stick as close to the intent of the original question as possible while fixing the flawed premise) seem to me to be more helpful than answers that accept an impossible premise without pointing it out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically, saying 'magic isn't real' deserves a downvote, but saying 'your concept of how magic works in your universe is problematic because x, however if you do y, you can solve your problem by doing z' is constructive and thus should be treated as a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, edits based on comments are usually encouraged. If the questioner feels that the answer is not constructive, they can say so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T19:12:51.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2015-03-03T20:15:18.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think they're synonyms, but I also don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; needs its own tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inter-species&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inter-species&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inter-species&lt;/a&gt; maybe, then you could pair it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; when you're specifically talking about governments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google definition of diplomacy: &lt;code&gt;the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country's representatives abroad.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think (for example) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5200/culture-shock-alien-social-activities&quot;&gt;Culture shock… Alien Social Activities&lt;/a&gt; should count as a question about diplomacy, but it certainly has a lot to do with interspecies interactions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what I'm saying is that we keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt;, but change &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; to just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inter-species&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inter-species&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inter-species&lt;/a&gt;. Not sure how this is done, but I think it would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T20:15:18.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2015-03-03T21:26:00.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to add one point and that is simply that, building an entire world from the universe/solar system, down to the social acceptance of a certain scenario is a massive undertaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of us are experts on all of the topics that exist in that spectrum.  To not help another user identify bad assumptions/logic/science is actually a disservice to the user asking the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in this question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10584/what-if-the-notion-of-nationalism-was-eradicated&quot;&gt;What if the notion of &amp;#39;Nationalism&amp;#39; was eradicated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I responded that the premise the question was based on was flawed.  I know this because I have studied it, my masters is in international relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were I to not answer because to do so I have to tell the user their question is flawed I am certainly not helping them out.  So as others have mentioned these kinds of answers certainly have their place...with the mentioned caveat that you can't (as mentioned above) say, &quot;Your question about the implications of a deity is wrong because I am an atheist and god doesn't exist.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the difference between the two mentioned scenarios is pretty clear cut and I do not see that we currently have a problem in relation to this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T21:26:00.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2015-03-03T21:29:26.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we can just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt;.  I don't think we need a synonym; if somebody types &quot;interspecies-diplomacy&quot; he'll get a match on &quot;diplomacy&quot;, and if he means some &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; interspecies concern (e.g. biology) he won't want that.  So I'm not sure a synonym actually helps here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T21:29:26.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2015-03-03T22:22:45.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I modified the tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I replaced &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/communication&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;communication&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;communication&lt;/a&gt; for&#xA;2 of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I replaced &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/communication&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;communication&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;communication&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;added &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; for 1 them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I replaced &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sociology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sociology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sociology&lt;/a&gt; for 1 of&#xA;them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I deleted the tag for 3 of them because it was not required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-diplomacy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-diplomacy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-diplomacy&lt;/a&gt; Has fallen into oblivion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T22:22:45.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-04T11:27:48.270" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11328/what-languages-would-animals-speak&quot;&gt;What language(s) would animals speak?&lt;/a&gt; as 'too broad'. When I again clicked on &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; there are suddenly &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; 'already used' notifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gVIcr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sorry for not drawing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19775/189029&quot;&gt;free hand ellipses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3106" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T12:05:00.293" Title="Incorrect 'You have already raised this type of flag' notice" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1847" CreationDate="2015-03-04T12:03:26.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you don't have the reputation needed to cast actual close votes, what you're actually doing is flagging to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; closure. Once you've flagged &lt;em&gt;for closure&lt;/em&gt;, the other options that suggest reasons why the question should be closed aren't available, as you've already flagged that the question should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the others are still there, e.g. quality related, spam, other. This is very similar to how you can't cast 2 close votes on a single question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a mistake in the reason for closure that you picked, just use 'other' and leave a note to the moderator that you actually meant to use another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T12:03:26.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-03-05T07:41:40.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Society of a Multi-lifespan empire&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, within my setting, there are many different types of roughly humanoid people which are of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9507/what-should-architecture-of-an-imperial-capital-be-like-in-order-to-accommodate&quot;&gt;various sizes&lt;/a&gt;, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9968/how-to-promote-nationalism-for-a-multi-racial-kingdom-against-other-such-multi&quot;&gt;various types&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9350/how-would-eating-killing-rearing-an-animal-be-like-when-an-animal-person-of-tha&quot;&gt;all created by a pantheon of gods&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9966/how-would-an-empire-survive-weak-crown-authority&quot;&gt;all united under one emperor&lt;/a&gt;, as equals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing however, is that they all have varying lifespans, a dog person may be able to live to about 12 years old on average, while a turtle person can live upwards of a hundred years, with humans also being able to live a remarkable 80 years, then there could be those who are only able to live up to about 5 years, like the frog people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that above is sort of the question that I want to go for, but I am very certain that such a question is too broad, so how do you think I should go around trimming such a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am imagining that I can split it up into multiple questions, like what I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9862/tame-and-sovereign-dragons-the-opinions-of-the-sovereign-dragons&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10766/the-desert-of-ore-what-would-the-flora-and-fauna-of-it-be-like&quot;&gt;done&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10218/horses-for-absolutely-everybody-how-it-came-to-be&quot;&gt;previously&lt;/a&gt;, however, I am not sure how I should go and split this question this time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I want to ask is, how would working experience be valued or quantified? Suppose that you have a frog person boasting of 2 years of work experience, that would not be very impressive to humans and other longer living races, but this is a frog person that has worked for easily 40% of his life on a profession&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing might be about education and the adulthood, a human child today would study for 6 to 12 years from the age of 6, but that would be longer than many other race's lifespan. How would they then determine a syllabus or laws concerning underaged people, would it be so specific as to concern only any one race at a time? If that is the case, would all laws be different for each race because of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose also that a kingdom wanted to mandate mandatory military training, how long should each person train for? They all live different lives, and it would be seen as tyrannical to be training for war for the entirety of your relatively short lifespan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That then leads to a question about combat effectiveness. A human militia may drill for about 6 months, and then become reasonably proficient at marching around and holding a spear or poleaxe or pike in front of them, but that would be very long for shorter living races.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the kinds of questions I am trying to ask, and would wish to refine them here first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6429" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T14:55:27.373" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-05T10:46:57.930" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11384/an-exotic-yet-portable-powersource&quot;&gt;An exotic yet portable powersource&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love it. I totally LOVE it, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it idea generation question? And if not, what makes it &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; idea generation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T13:07:10.220" Title="What makes this NOT idea generation question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1850" CreationDate="2015-03-05T13:07:10.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are too many possible answers to the question (Idea Generation is a subset of Too Broad)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no objective way to evaluate one idea as better than others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common symptom is that answers will tend to list a number of different possibilities rather than expanding on one. This is a consequence of the first problem, as the person posting the response has no way to know which of their ideas are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is science-based, asking for something specific (portable powerful energy sources), answers can be rated based on reasonableness, plausibility, and appropriateness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it's on the edge but in my opinion it has got a sufficiently constrained answer set to make it workable, and as a result no-one has seen fit to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T13:07:10.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="540" CreationDate="2015-03-05T14:49:13.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have renamed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-g&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-g&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-g&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-gravity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this change &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; take some time to fully propagate throughout the site. It however looks to me like the process is complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T14:49:13.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1858" CreationDate="2015-03-09T14:13:37.740" Score="8" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get numerous questions on the form &quot;how do I make X happen?&quot;, and these seem to be generally appreciated by the community. However, by a strict reading of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;, there is nothing to indicate that such questions are on topic on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we amend the help center article to indicate that such questions are on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T19:34:42.280" Title="Should we amend the help center text to allow &quot;how to accomplish X&quot; types of questions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1857" CreationDate="2015-03-09T14:13:37.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, by adding the following bullet point under &quot;questions are welcome that are about&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of technology or magic, while maintaning in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T14:13:37.740" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-09T14:13:37.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1860" CreationDate="2015-03-09T16:21:25.210" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently added a few tags to better accommodate some of my questions about a medieval empire, and have added the 'empire-building' tag. I have added a few others also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should the creation of a new tag be discussed on Meta before hand, or is it okay to create an appropriate tag if you know it is not a synonym of others?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T19:46:27.063" Title="Should the practicality of a tag be discussed before its creation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1859" CreationDate="2015-03-09T16:36:31.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's OK to create new tags with out discussion, generally.  However, you should think about it, make sure something else doesn't already cover it and if you think it helps go for it.  If it dies or doesn't take off, we can always remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thought though, if you think it is a questionable tag, feel free to bring it up here.  Many have, including me and you will definitely get an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T16:36:31.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2015-03-09T17:35:39.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contest as ended and during these two weeks we had 29 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flora&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;flora-container&quot;&gt;flora&lt;/a&gt; questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11562/do-different-star-types-produce-plants-with-different-properties&quot;&gt;Do different star types produce plants with different properties?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11547/alternative-absorption-spectra-for-plants&quot;&gt;Alternative absorption spectra for plants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11484/humans-as-pollinators&quot;&gt;Humans as pollinators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11476/alternative-atmosphere-plantlife&quot;&gt;Alternative atmosphere plantlife&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11435/fluorescent-flora&quot;&gt;Fluorescent Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11336/how-could-a-large-spherical-plant-heat-air-inside-to-fly&quot;&gt;How could a large spherical plant heat air inside to fly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11323/dangerous-salty-creature-killing-the-triffids&quot;&gt;Dangerous salty creature killing the triffids&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11208/are-flying-plants-possible&quot;&gt;Are flying plants possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11179/fire-resistant-flora&quot;&gt;Fire Resistant Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11170/what-could-kill-all-vegetation-in-an-area-and-then-stop-it-from-growing-back&quot;&gt;What could kill all vegetation in an area and then stop it from growing back?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/how-long-a-footbridge-could-you-make-from-natural-materials&quot;&gt;How long a footbridge could you make from natural materials?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/big-green-men-from-earth&quot;&gt;Big Green Men... from Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11056/how-might-plants-produce-flames&quot;&gt;How might Plants produce flames?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11050/what-properties-would-make-a-plant-ideal-for-use-on-a-space-ship&quot;&gt;What properties would make a plant ideal for use on a space ship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10923/thats-no-moon-planet-sized-plants-possible&quot;&gt;That&amp;#39;s no Moon: Planet-sized Plants Possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10914/could-plants-spread-their-seed-to-other-planets&quot;&gt;Could plants spread their seed to other planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10884/how-concentrated-would-a-metal-ore-need-to-be-to-be-extractable-by-a-suitable-pl&quot;&gt;How concentrated would a metal ore need to be to be extractable by a suitable plant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10865/chemoautotrophic-flora&quot;&gt;Chemoautotrophic Flora!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10853/power-plants-literally&quot;&gt;Power plants — literally&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10844/in-a-nanotech-future-how-do-you-preserve-the-plants&quot;&gt;In a nanotech future, how do you preserve the plants?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10815/what-kind-of-reaction-time-could-a-mobile-plant-have&quot;&gt;What kind of reaction time could a mobile plant have?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10793/how-tall-can-a-tree-grow&quot;&gt;How tall can a tree grow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10792/plant-based-armor&quot;&gt;Plant-based Armor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10766/the-desert-of-ore-what-would-the-flora-and-fauna-of-it-be-like&quot;&gt;The desert of ore, what would the flora and fauna of it be like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10735/how-could-a-sentient-plant-evolve-and-what-conditions-would-be-required-for-this&quot;&gt;How could a sentient plant evolve and what conditions would be required for this evolution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10697/could-a-plant-be-engineered-to-live-in-a-vaccuum&quot;&gt;Could a plant be engineered to live in a vacuum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10692/are-there-any-good-uses-for-infinite-grass-and-potatoes&quot;&gt;Are there any good uses for infinite grass and potatoes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10682/plants-to-ravage-tanks-with&quot;&gt;Plants to ravage tanks with&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10669/how-would-an-intelligent-forest-control-and-direct-its-animal-minions&quot;&gt;How would an intelligent forest control and direct its animal minions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Askers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dwcO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dwcO.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3104.png&quot;&gt;stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7648/jetscooters&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7648.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2071.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/147.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7135/niffler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7135.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7584/tigertoo&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7584.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9/mourdos&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/224/philipp&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/224.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7190/brad&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7190.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7/pipperchip&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/19.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/879/mike-nichols&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/879.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6429/grimmsdottir&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6429.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/jax&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6421/feaurie-vladskovitz&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6421.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt;: We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%20%5Bflora%5D&quot;&gt;148 answers&lt;/a&gt; considering that the contest ended before the 149th answer was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=flora#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T05:34:50.657" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T05:34:50.657" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-09T17:58:51.480" Score="9" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Today begins our Third topic challenge!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates:  9 March - 22 March&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6724/blaizor&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6724.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've only had a handful of creature-design questions, but they've&#xA;  been a joy to ask, answer, comment on, discuss; the works! I can't&#xA;  help but love the idea of a frenzy of questions asking for creature&#xA;  designs - they truly are challenging, interesting and occasionally&#xA;  just a fun question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let the games begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T15:01:13.247" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1859" CreationDate="2015-03-09T19:46:27.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like bowlturner said, there is, &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; speaking, no need to get any sort of pre-approval on tags. If you think it will be useful, add it and see if it takes off. That's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;create tags&lt;/em&gt; privilege&lt;/a&gt; is all about; at a certain amount of reputation, you are considered to know the ways of the site well enough to recognize when a new tag might be more appropriate than any existing tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, do be careful about &lt;strong&gt;meta tags.&lt;/strong&gt; Those are tags that don't directly help categorize what the question is asking about. Meta tags should &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; be discussed on meta beforehand, allowing time for a clear community opinion if perhaps not consensus to form, and should be added very sparingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T19:46:27.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-03-10T15:01:17.813" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they are often interesting to answer and are typically a greater challenge than others due to the speculative answers it can attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T14:42:59.823" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T14:42:59.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-03-10T16:20:39.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oxygen&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;oxygen&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;oxygen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because getting 20+ questions about oxygen requires a good deal of creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T16:20:39.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1868" CreationDate="2015-03-11T13:45:27.660" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently marked a question for migration (a week ago) and when it asked me which site to migrate it to the only option was the World-building Meta. Is this problem currently being addressed? How long until it should be totally resolved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T13:58:03.760" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T14:41:53.780" Title="Why can I only vote to migrate from Worldbuilding to Worldbuilding Meta?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T13:57:21.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1867" CreationDate="2015-03-11T13:56:18.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are describing is not a bug, as was suggested by your initial tagging of the question. That is why I re-tagged your question from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, specific migration paths are established after there is a proven sufficient need for questions to be migrated to particular sites. We have not yet reached that point on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;you can always &quot;flag&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; a question for moderator attention and suggest migration to a particular site, and one of us will look into it and take appropriate action; a diamond moderator on a site can migrate any question to any site in the network, regardless of established migration paths. Do keep in mind though that generally speaking, if there is site scope overlap such that the question is appropriate on more than one site, then the asker of the question gets to decide where the question should go. Hence if the question fits here there's usually little reason to request migration elsewhere just because the question &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; fits elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T14:41:53.780" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T14:41:53.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T11:36:48.923" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11779/how-to-get-a-concussed-person-back-up-to-speed-quick&quot;&gt;How to get a concussed person back up to speed quick?&lt;/a&gt; got supplied with requested details, so that the scope seems narrowed enough not to be &quot;idea generation&quot; anymore. Currently it has 4 reopen votes but it fell low enough it doesn't get any traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone either provide the last reopen vote, or tell what else should I do to make it fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7646" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T11:36:48.923" Title="Concussion question - Reopen request" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2015-03-13T13:52:34.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say: &lt;strong&gt;Remove it entirely&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; to ask for answers based on science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; to ask for answers based on fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science-fantasy&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;genre name&lt;/strong&gt;!&#xA;We don't have the much more popular &lt;strong&gt;science-fiction&lt;/strong&gt; genre as a tag. So why would we have science-fantasy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Genre names do not qualify how the question should be answered!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no benefit to telling your genre. Pick one of the aforementioned tags to define what kind of answers are helpful to you. If both apply use both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7780" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T13:52:34.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1877" CreationDate="2015-03-13T22:29:47.840" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that many of my questions on Worldbuilding meta are along these lines, but hey, everyone else seems to have already asked the good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay. To the point at hand. I've seen the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sci-fi&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sci-fi&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; tag used recently, and I'm wondering what it adds to questions. It doesn't have a tag summary (which is part of what makes me reach for the ax), and the questions it uses (mostly) don't seem to be solidly based in sci-fi - at least, not to the extent that science fiction is the primary concern of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible arguments against this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1832/please-revisit-this-timely-on-hold-question-soon&quot;&gt;Please revisit this timely on-hold question soon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1799/resource-id-questions&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Resource ID&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if these ideas go through the gauntlet of meta - which they very well may; I can't say yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T16:48:06.237" Title="Should we keep the &quot;sci-fi&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1799" CreationDate="2015-03-14T01:56:28.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything you &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; would be on-topic at Movies &amp;amp; TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vie for this for the fact that it would be the only place you could even think to ask &lt;em&gt;Identify this (Non-SciFi) &lt;strong&gt;BOOK&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you prepared to field these kind of questions that would essentially be off-topic, save for this new tag? E.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's that [John Grisham] novel where all the world's computers stop working because of some virus? I'm looking to do something similar in my world. [actually I'm just trying to find the name of the book, 'casue I'm too lazy to Google and I finally found somewhere on SE to get away with asking this.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I'd love a place to ask about books, I just don't think it should be here. There seems to be enough questionably-on-topic material here already. Worldbuiling would be my first stop to try asking questions that would be off-topic everywhere else. You guys seem nice ;p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL:DR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building has enough on its plate. Other than books, &lt;em&gt;Identify this&lt;/em&gt; can be answered elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T03:19:48.143" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T03:19:48.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1875" CreationDate="2015-03-14T12:49:53.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sci-fi&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sci-fi&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; tag is currently used on three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11853/29&quot;&gt;What would hinder the exploration of an alien outpost?&lt;/a&gt;, tagged technology alien exploration sci-fi (I'm sure this can be retagged better, but sci-fi seems to not add anything substantial in terms of classification of the question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11764/29&quot;&gt;Could air gas giants exist?&lt;/a&gt;, tagged science-based planets sci-fi (seems covered by the science-based planets tag pair, so sci-fi does not really add anything substantial)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10461/29&quot;&gt;hypothetical criteria for non-paradox FTL&lt;/a&gt;, tagged science-based physics faster-than-light sci-fi (the first three seem to fit quite well, but again sci-fi doesn't add anything substantial)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;none of these do I see the sci-fi tag adding&lt;/strong&gt; any substantial classification of the respective question. The whole field of science-fiction is also very broad (heck, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;a &lt;em&gt;whole site&lt;/em&gt; for it&lt;/a&gt;!), and the concept also covers a great deal of what we do here (similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/142/29&quot;&gt;the design tag that we had for a short while&lt;/a&gt;) so it is doubtful whether the tag adds any meaningful classification at all; it appears more like a meta tag, which is something we generally should be careful with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the tag can safely be removed from all three questions without any significant loss, and it is my feeling that &lt;strong&gt;we do not need the sci-fi tag at all.&lt;/strong&gt; It can thus be removed from the questions and be allowed to die an honorable death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T12:49:53.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1875" CreationDate="2015-03-16T16:48:06.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the risk of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1828/modifying-the-science-fantasy-tag/1874#1874&quot;&gt;repeating myself&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Genre names do not qualify how the question should be answered!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questioners can limit answers to be either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; or accept both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to give your question some context to get answers that feel natural to the world your building. However, telling your genre is not going to help. Have a look at the following question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a novel about semi-intelligent &lt;strong&gt;zombies&lt;/strong&gt; working as mascots in a &lt;strong&gt;horror theme park&lt;/strong&gt; encountering weird situations with visitors. How could a zombie try to prove he is just a human in a costume in case he is forced to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/horror&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;horror&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;horror&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comedy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comedy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comedy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you really think this hypothetical question will get better answers because of its – also fictitious – genre tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7780" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T16:48:06.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T20:14:23.607" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a tendency to edit extra content into my questions and sometimes it changes the questions and it seems like it is sometimes unavoidable despite the fact that I have been on this site for a while. I felt like I should ask on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the best practices in editing that can stop you from changing the nature of your question and in consequence the validity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T09:44:21.860" Title="How to avoid changing the nature of a question in an edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1880" CreationDate="2015-03-17T09:44:21.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your edit invalidates existing answers then it is usually better to ask it as a new question, otherwise editing is generally fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that a question might need refinement then post it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T09:44:21.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T10:17:57.270" Score="6" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1830/so-lets-talk-about-burning-the-fantasy-based-tag&quot;&gt;We have consensus on burning&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we need to actually go through and remove it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that there are 80 questions using it as I write, and that is a whole lot of work. The reason this is such a big task is that we don't just need to remove the tag, we also need to see if there is an appropriate tag to replace it with, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythic-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythic-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythic-creatures&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;etc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;etc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to start going through the questions later today and editing their tags, but I would appreciate some help doing so :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T01:41:33.853" Title="Can I get some help burning fantasy-based?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T16:39:07.003" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;@SerbanTanasa has been asking a series of questions recently about an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12091/keeping-secrets-in-a-thought-reverberating-hall&quot;&gt;adventurer&lt;/a&gt; named &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;Alice&lt;/a&gt; overcoming various &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11252/how-to-catch-a-dream-thief&quot;&gt;magical foes&lt;/a&gt;. The answers to these questions often involve creative solutions to magical or fantastical situations that would never occur in real life, but by using real-world skills. However, there is no single tag for questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there should be a tag for questions involving a real-world solution to a magical problem/foe/obstacle. I'm not really sure what to call it, but I want it to exist. Thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T15:38:04.967" Title="Tag For Overcoming Magical Obstacles" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T20:15:58.217" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12119/what-is-the-naming-element-convention-that-is-unique-to-other-essential-elements&quot;&gt;What is the naming element convention that is unique to other essential elements that are different between lifeforms from different worlds? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made some edits to the following question. Are these edits sufficient for reopening the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T20:15:58.217" Title="Are these new edits acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1882" CreationDate="2015-03-18T01:26:27.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has now been completed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to thank Dustin Jackson and Bowlturner for their help. I'd also like to stare in amazement at HDE 226868 and Serban Tanasa for the amazing speed at which they burned through the tags. Trying to remove a tag and finding that HDE had just snipped it from under me was happening far to frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to anyone else who I might have missed in dealing with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy sorting by activity for the next day or so :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T01:26:27.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1884" CreationDate="2015-03-18T09:10:52.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to borrow Monica Cellio's comment from the question, here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good exercise for &quot;I think we might need a tag for this&quot; cases is to try to write the tag wiki. Without just saying &quot;like Serban's questions&quot;, how would you characterize the questions that should get this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's really it. &lt;strong&gt;Start out&lt;/strong&gt; by actually &lt;em&gt;defining&lt;/em&gt; what the tag should be all about. Write that down. Try to condense it into maybe 2-3 sentences for the tag wiki excerpt as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can meaningfully describe the tag within that space, such that someone coming across the tag will know when it should be used, then it might be worth adding it to the relevant questions, putting the tag wiki on it (attract the attention of high-rep users in chat if you don't have the rep to make tag wiki edits of your own) and see if it takes off. We can always cull it later if it turns out that it didn't actually fill a need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T09:10:52.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1890" CreationDate="2015-03-18T15:48:34.380" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll make this short and sweet. I recently added a bounty to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10964/how-would-i-limit-feudalism&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question because some of the answers there were great, though I could only accept one. When it asked me why I was adding the bounty I clicked the &quot;One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty&quot; reason. The problem is extremely minor, but it made me wait 23 hours to award the bounty to said exemplary answers. While I waited and I didn't die (not like I thought I was going to anyway) it was an annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I suggest we add the option to immediately award the bounty or wait for a day when someone picks the &quot;One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty&quot; option. Thoughts or ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T14:15:25.840" Title="Should exemplary answers bounties be immediate?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-03-18T16:08:36.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been asked and answered before (on other stack exchange sites so I can't close as duplicate, this is the first time it's been asked here as far as I know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116072/should-the-24-hour-timeout-apply-to-bounties-awarded-for-exemplary-answer&quot;&gt;Should the 24-hour timeout apply to bounties awarded for &amp;quot;exemplary answer&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T16:08:36.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1892" CreationDate="2015-03-18T16:24:06.710" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag has seen a lot of misuse recently, since apparently 28% of our questions are science-based. Since we have killed off its erstwhile companion tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt;, I believe it now makes sense to start enforcing a separation between questions that ask about whether a particular concept breaks suspension of disbelief &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and questions that really are about show-me-the-numbers hard science &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; for those more &lt;strike&gt;obsessive-compulsive&lt;/strike&gt; meticulous among us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that this is in line with the initial purpose of the tags. My suggestion is to clarify the tags and start enforcing this distinction better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT: &#xA;The consensus seems to be building around having a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag (see the rationale in the answer + comments below).&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T23:25:33.033" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T23:25:33.033" Title="Should Science-Based henceforth actually be science based?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1891" CreationDate="2015-03-18T18:11:36.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, dear, let's &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; have another editing run for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. I'm ~32 edits closer to the 'copy-editor' badge after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1882/can-i-get-some-help-burning-fantasy-based&quot;&gt;the events of last night/whatever-time-it-was-for-y'all&lt;/a&gt;, but we &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; screwed up the &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; tab, which led me to bump a few recent questions up via minor edits to restore some sanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I suspect that this question is the result of a discussion we had in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; while relaxing after the genocidal editing, right? I'll rehash my position: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; should contain hard science. I'll quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath/107#107&quot;&gt;Vulcronos' entire answer to an older question here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally agree [that our default position should be based on science and logic]. Unless the question says there is magic and gives a decent description of what is possible, I assume we are sticking to real world physics. Science fiction and steampunk stories have enough variety already, adding magical answers with no knowledge of if magic exists or how is just unproductive and isn't likely to be useful to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I ask a question about, say stone-eating insects (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11992/could-insects-evolve-that-could-create-a-hole-in-a-stone-wall-within-a-day&quot;&gt;been there, done that&lt;/a&gt;), I'll assume that everyone knows that I want a sensible answer (or answers). I did add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, though (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1712/how-realistic-should-a-question-tagged-reality-check-be&quot;&gt;which could have different connotations&lt;/a&gt;). No magic, please!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt; agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; should call for hard numbers and strong evidence, backed up by sources, preferably papers (for good, free pre-prints, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;). If I were to add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag to my insects question, that would let people know that anything remotely speculative is a no-no. I want evidence, observations, and scientific theories that are backed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually like the idea more from my traditional standpoint: that of an answerer. It's evident that I use math quite a lot, possibly more than any other user on Worldbuilding. I have a tendency to go a bit overboard from the perspective of others, bringing in calculus and the like. The reason I do that is because &lt;em&gt;so much of science uses mathematics.&lt;/em&gt; And not just algebra. Differential equations (e.g. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{d^2x}{dt^2}-\frac{dx}{dt}=2e^x$&lt;/span&gt;) can be very important. Unfortunately, many people that want scientific answers use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; - which is fine, but it does give me the impression that they want hard science, which typically involves a lot of math, papers, citations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we agree to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag for only answers with hard science, I'll know when to add in equations and hard science and when to stop myself from delving in too deep. And it'll make it better for those who dislike it when I write answers like that. This proposal would be &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would have been a comment on Monica's answer, but it was going to run way too long, so I figured I'd add it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; sort of smells like a meta tag, but if we end up using it as meaning &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot;, then it could be a very useful meta tag. Going back to my question on insects, if I wanted an answer based only in science, I would use the tag. As it is, I recognize that the idea isn't too plausible (logistically, too), and so I didn't expect that any of the answers would have much to back them up. That's a case where science is expected, as it is in most answers. But if I asked for &lt;em&gt;hard science&lt;/em&gt;, most answers would be partly or entirely invalidated for the sole reason that there's pretty much nothing we know on the subject of stone-destroying insects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you were to use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71/how-would-having-multiple-moons-affect-tides&quot;&gt;a question you mentioned&lt;/a&gt;, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't be needed. As it is, you used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt;, which added all the specificity needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'm on the fence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be a meta tag, or it could be useful as a tag explaining just how much science needs to back an answer up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, I'm now 100% behind &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; (see the rationale in the comments below, as well as the reasons in the other answers for sort of getting rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;). We've reached a point where almost all answers are backed up with science, so I think it's no longer needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and written a test question for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-predict-and-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debr&quot;&gt;How can a Type II civilization influence accretion rates from a debris disk to a passing star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T21:55:18.480" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1899" CreationDate="2015-03-18T19:11:20.983" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have several tags about history: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-based&lt;/a&gt; (?? - that should be a synonym...), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehistory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehistory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehistory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of those are fairly obvious - but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehistory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehistory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehistory&lt;/a&gt; is not. Is it about prehistoric events? When is &quot;prehistoric&quot;? No: the tag wiki says this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for questions about societies that don't have invented a writing system yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is that &lt;em&gt;grammer bad&lt;/em&gt;, but it appears to me to have nothing to do with history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's used on 1 (closed) question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarify the meaning of this tag; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Burn it. This just requires removal of the tag from the 1 question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T09:26:22.980" Title="Forgetting our [prehistory]" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-03-18T19:51:25.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would make &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehistory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehistory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehistory&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thought is that both are pre-recorded history.  Which means story and myth, none of which you can gauge the truth of because nothing was documented.  Would probably be best to re-write the tag descriptions too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another note I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-based&lt;/a&gt; could be synonyms or consolidated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T19:51:25.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1891" CreationDate="2015-03-18T20:07:16.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we're going to have the tag, yes.  But I really don't like either this tag or reality-check.  Here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; answers on this site should be consistent with the baseline in the question.  Answers on a question about unicorns don't get a free pass just because they're magical beasts; answers need to jive with what we know (or what the asker has stated) about unicorns.  And &lt;em&gt;all questions&lt;/em&gt; should specify -- right there in the question -- what they're looking for to the extent that they can.  A question about science-y things should get science-y answers &lt;em&gt;because that's the question that was asked&lt;/em&gt;, not because of the presence or absence of tags.  A question asking &quot;is X realistic given factors Y and Z&quot; should get an analysis of X with respect to Y and Z regardless of the tags.  I'm having trouble seeing the added value and, demonstrably, the tags get used a lot and in ways that people don't seem to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these are meta tags, but more than that I think they're &lt;em&gt;unhelpful&lt;/em&gt; meta tags.  I would prefer that we be willing to spend a few more words in the question to say what we actually want (&quot;science&quot; is pretty broad too, after all), and I'd like to see answerers and askers work together to nail down the level of desired detail when that's not clear.  Incremental answers are great for this -- here's an answer with first-order citations and key quotes/equations/etc, and the asker (or anybody else) can ask more detail about such-and-such point and then you show more math, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T20:07:16.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-03-18T20:14:49.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-based&lt;/a&gt; should just go away.  It doesn't need to be a synonym; when you start typing &quot;history&quot; you'll see options.  Synonyms should be used in cases where the vocabulary really is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the concepts of &quot;prehistory&quot; and &quot;ancient history&quot; to be different; &quot;ancient&quot; is things like ancient Mesopotamia, while &quot;prehistory&quot; is things like dinosaurs.  But these are distinctions that only make sense on Earth, while world-building is broader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we need a tag for the general concept of &quot;early in a planet's development before humans did/could have developed&quot;, I might go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pre-human&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pre-human&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pre-human&lt;/a&gt;.  Do we have questions like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T20:14:49.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1891" CreationDate="2015-03-18T21:13:47.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been battling this in my mind. Basically, I believe I feel much the same as I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;back then&lt;/a&gt;: if a question doesn't specifically state anything at all, &lt;strong&gt;we should assume that answers need to be consistent with the known sciences as we know them.&lt;/strong&gt; That leads to at least two conclusions relevant to this particular question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag isn't really needed. In the absence of some specific indication to the contrary, we should assume the semantics of that tag as defined in the tag wiki: that such questions &lt;em&gt;require answers based in hard science, not magic or pseudo-science.&lt;/em&gt; The tag could in principle be deleted and the site should not suffer from that. The voting on the old meta question indicates fairly strong community agreement with basically this position, and it agrees well with the original mission statement of the site from the Area51 proposal. &lt;strong&gt;Assume our real world, unless the asker specifically states otherwise.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; we are going to keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag, then it really should mean what the tag wiki states, and not something else or half-hearted. The kinda-sorta half-hearted variant is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; (a whole similar question in itself, but unrelated to this) is meant to cover.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not we keep the tag itself, &lt;strong&gt;a good litmus test&lt;/strong&gt; for whether an answer fits a question that matches the above might be: &lt;em&gt;if I take this one random claim that is made in an answer, and post it on one of the science-based sites with a request basically amounting to &quot;please explain this statement to me&quot;, then would it get shot down as not based in actual science?&lt;/em&gt; That means sites like for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Space Exploration&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Earth Science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;, ... well, you get the idea. If it would get shot down there for that reason, then it doesn't belong in the answer and it follows that anything based on it also doesn't belong. An answer doesn't necessarily need to provide scientific references for every claim made within the answer itself, but every claim made in an answer to a question seeking answers based in science &lt;em&gt;should match known science&lt;/em&gt; and be possible to &lt;em&gt;explain in the context of the relevant sciences as we know them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.887" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T21:13:47.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-03-19T06:06:01.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of &quot;pre-history&quot; as before writing systems is the common use of the term.  For example, that is the definition used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prehistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dictionary sites&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.  While we can obviously choose to use a different definition from that commonly used, we should only do so if we have a good reason to avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also argue that the definition makes sense.  The reason why writing is relevant to history is because that is how we know what happened.  While old documents rarely attempt to be a (relatively) unbiased statement of facts like more modern history, they do at least provide evidence as to what happened.  That is how we know the names of kings, when they went to war and with who and their stated reasons for going to war.  For civilizations without writings, we have to rely on archaeological evidence.  That can tell us more or less what happened, but it leaves huge questions as to why.  While documents can be misleading (either accidentally or intentionally), they still give us huge amounts of information.  The Illiad is a terrible history book, but it provides huge amounts of information about the people who wrote it; what they believed and what they thought was important.  That sort of insight is entirely missing from our knowledge of pre-historic societies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7498" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T06:06:01.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-03-19T09:26:22.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt; for medieval time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-based&lt;/a&gt; is already burned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt; for Romans and before. We might in the&#xA;future consider making a Roman tag later on if that time is popular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; for different events happening in the&#xA;past (which can be combined with the above) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete history &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; - Its is a broad tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehistory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehistory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehistory&lt;/a&gt; is already burned, but should have probably been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/oral-tradition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;oral-tradition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;oral-tradition&lt;/a&gt;, since that is it actually is, and it makes the tag more useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T09:26:22.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1891" CreationDate="2015-03-19T11:11:10.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I introduced science-based to solve the problem of people asking scientific questions with magical answers. The culture of the site is now well enough established that I do not think it is needed any more, I've certainly not seen many magic answers to science questions recently. In other words the tag has succeeded. The question is whether the presence of the tag is still needed or whether those answers would start sneaking back in if we removed the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other reasons that might encourage keeping it as well. For example some people really dislike magic-based questions. Being able to filter on only science-based questions is a useful feature for those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm on the fence here, I think it was useful. I'm not sure if it's still useful. It's certainly popular which suggests that people like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T11:11:10.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-03-19T14:15:25.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't you want to draw attention to those outstanding answers so people who missed them the first time around will vote?  Bounties aren't just about you giving a reward to another user; they're also about generating some extra attention.  That's why they show up on the main page with the blue marker and why they have their own tab (though, granted, the latter is more of a factor on bigger sites -- but we'll be big before too long!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it means there's a risk that you won't award your bounty and the auto-awarder will do the wrong thing.  It would be nice if, &lt;em&gt;for this bounty reason&lt;/em&gt;, you could either designate when you set the bounty (but it won't be awarded until later) or the auto-awarder didn't run at all (because, by definition, it won't award the correct answer).  But I'd kind of like to see those bounty-worthy questions be labeled as such for more than the few minutes it would take you to award it manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I tried to post this yesterday &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; after the question was deleted.  Now that the question is back I'm adding this extra bit of reasoning even though there's already a pointer to MSE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T14:15:25.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1907" CreationDate="2015-03-20T00:11:38.917" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Difficulty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1891/should-science-based-henceforth-actually-be-science-based/1892#comment4185_1892&quot;&gt;a suggestion by Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1891/should-science-based-henceforth-actually-be-science-based&quot;&gt;a sort of consensus on the issue&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is ready for use. In fact, I decided to use test it out: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-predict-and-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debr&quot;&gt;How can a Type II civilization predict and influence accretion rates from a debris disk to a passing star?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-predict-and-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debr#comment28917_12311&quot;&gt;frightened Serban Tanasa off into the woods&lt;/a&gt;. This is not a good thing, because it seems to be that most people want answers to their questions.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I myself would probably not want to take a shot at an answer, because the resulting analysis could take up a lot of space and time. Given that I'm not too concise,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I would be a bit afraid of the work I'd have to put in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the question, though, because I wanted (and still want) an answer from a true expert.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; I've come up with some ideas to figure some of it out already, but they would involve a large simulation to test. Given my (nearly lack of) programming skills, that's not feasible. However, I'm willing to bet that there are people who &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I don't want all questions (or in fact, the majority of questions) using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; to be hard (i.e. difficult). Were that to happen, all the creativity that so freely leaps around on Worldbuilding would be . . . gone. So I propose that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; all be really-hard-and-expert-level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hardness-of-science level&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need a range of questions where the tag could be used. Obviously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;all questions on Worldbuilding (that don't purely involve magic) should be grounded in logic and science&lt;/a&gt;. But where should questions switch from science to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;? It's really up to the user, but there's a chance that the same thing that happened to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; will happen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;: overuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How difficult should questions using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; be? When should the tag be used? What about other boundaries of usage of the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of my musings since the tag's inception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, there &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debris-disk-to-a&quot;&gt;are&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12323/could-a-tank-survive-a-nuclear-blast&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12380/asteroid-flux-or-how-to-make-a-planet-perfect-for-mining&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serban's is easily the best and most successful. It has a catchy title and focuses on something that is near and dear to us all: blowing stuff up.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mine have been less popular, harder, and, I think, somewhat close to pure science. This is, contrary to what one might think, bad. I love science and using it to solve problems; I think that it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that I could solve one or both by boiling it down to the pure science part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, though, that this is just me. I'll be honest: I'm &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; more interested in the science part of a question than its applications to world building, and that may have influenced my two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I also don't want Serban to die at the hands of some wild animal.&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I hit the 30,000 character limit in &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/26862/are-diet-soft-drinks-linked-to-depression-in-women/26970#26970&quot;&gt;an answer on Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;, which set off warning flags.&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Well, besides the part about the Type II civilization. I don't know how many people are experts in &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Come on, at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; point in your life you've been interested in explosions. Even fireworks.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T17:31:24.110" Title="Defining the boundaries of the &quot;hard-science&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1902" CreationDate="2015-03-20T17:35:40.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion (the main point of which I have stated several times in various places):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The science behind these answers should be &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; science, not &lt;em&gt;soft, subjective&lt;/em&gt; science. As I said in the original tag wiki, and on the meta post I believe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This means no subjective sciences like philosophy. Ideally, answers should be backed up by equations, relevant theories, and citations where possible - arXiv can be quite good for citations, though Wikipedia is usually OK too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;arXiv idea stolen from you, HDE...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I count &lt;em&gt;soft&lt;/em&gt; sciences as sciences for which there is a great deal of leeway on the &quot;right&quot; answer. People's mentalities and actions, in my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;cannot be defined in hard science&lt;/strong&gt;. They need sciences like sociology and philosophy (and to a lesser extent psychology), whose scientists frequently debate heatedly the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other point I'd like to make is those citations: I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; can be answered with top-of-the-head knowledge, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; should require more research and demonstration of why your answer works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T17:35:40.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1902" CreationDate="2015-03-21T17:13:03.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should be afraid of low votes and low views. If the purpose is not to hoard rep, but to seek an answer to the question up to your exacting standards, it's perfectly ok if it gets tumbleweed badges or whatever, as long as it actually gets addressed eventually. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The larger issue is that even on stack-exchange, most people are either not mathematical/physics literate, or too time-constrained to address the question effectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it even make sense to ask in Worldbuilding, as opposed to the science forums? Why? Can you break it into a worldbuilding and a science component, and ask (and link) the questions on the two forums? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you have a worldbuilding shading to it, and/or is so cool you think it would fly here regardless, this means that the question needs particularly &lt;strong&gt;careful crafting&lt;/strong&gt;. It needs to be &lt;strong&gt;catchy&lt;/strong&gt; to attract attention from the side-bar, and it needs to be &lt;strong&gt;specific and narrow&lt;/strong&gt; enough that it can be addressed (or a response sketched out) without using a Large Hadron Collider, supercomputers or 12 hours of R/Python/Mathematica programming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all interested worldbuilders would &lt;strong&gt;dutifully upvote hard-science they like&lt;/strong&gt;, and perhaps &lt;strong&gt;spread the word&lt;/strong&gt; in the more established hard-science forums, it will eventually attract some skilled answers. Finally, you may need to &lt;strong&gt;stake some bounty&lt;/strong&gt; on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree that unworthy half-baked 3-liner answers for this worthy tag should be &lt;strong&gt;mercilessly down-voted&lt;/strong&gt; and even deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to have a micro version of the Physics/Astronomy/etc stacks, but with more attention afforded towards the World-building goal. So it is doubly difficult, in that it must be &#xA;$\Large{\text{both science-grounded and story-telling-worthy.}}$&#xA; But that's the best kind, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T17:31:24.110" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T17:31:24.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1912" CreationDate="2015-03-22T00:45:30.933" Score="7" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12467/what-would-be-the-fastest-way-to-end-hostilities-with-the-usa-without-surrender&quot;&gt;What would be the fastest way to end hostilities with the USA (without surrendering) for a superpowered being?&lt;/a&gt;.  I disagree with the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the question says that surrender is not an option.  One of the answers suggests a white flag, while explaining that the white flag does not necessarily mean surrender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the explanation and the answer.  The answer is not a bad answer by the context of the site and the question; however, it is a bad answer in my own personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I downvote the answer and make my counterargument to the answer in the comment?  Or is downvoting reserved for answers which are blatantly bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T10:34:24.580" Title="Should I downvote an answer I disagree with even if the answer is appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1910" CreationDate="2015-03-22T01:57:29.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no oversight on voting, beyond serial voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You vote with your conscience, and the community's combined voting habits --not any one vote-- indicate the site's approval or disapproval. Nobody can tell you that you vote &quot;wrong.&quot; Liking and disliking answers is a very common justification for a vote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are more and less responsible ways to vote. This has been addressed many times on many metas. Here are two especially good ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/130046/244929&quot;&gt;When should I vote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/2451/244929&quot;&gt;Why do you cast downvotes on answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For myself, a significant rubric is &quot;Is this answer useful and actionable?&quot; And often, I simply choose not to vote at all if I don't feel firmly one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; you wind up voting, &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; leave a comment explaining the downvote unless the focus of the comment is how the answer can be improved. Anything else is invitation to discussion and argument, and has no place on the Stack. If the only way you'd reverse your downvote is if the answer's central premise changed, your comment is unlikely to add anything useful to the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, upvote the better answer if it's there or write your own if it's not and you can provide one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T06:58:25.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1910" CreationDate="2015-03-22T10:34:24.580" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your votes are yours to do as you wish with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the voting tooltips provide some guidelines: on the main site, the tooltips say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Upvote]: This answer is useful&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [Downvote]: This answer is not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm... the definitions of &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; are mostly subjective. So, as I see it, you should vote where you think those are true: if that means it's not useful because you don't think it's right or you don't agree with it, then downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T10:34:24.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1914" CreationDate="2015-03-23T02:19:31.057" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way we can tell how many users have been active on Worldbuilding over a period of time, like, say the past 5 minutes/hour/day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T09:17:30.863" Title="Number of Active Users" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1913" CreationDate="2015-03-23T09:17:30.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question as asked is: Not directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The site is currently doing &lt;em&gt;very well&lt;/em&gt; in terms of activity.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diamond moderators have access to &quot;analytics&quot; data, which includes data like number of visits on the site per day. (The data is available down to a resolution of one day, so doesn't really meet your request of being for minutes or hours.) The specifics of analytics data cannot be shared in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, having gone in and looked at some of it just now, I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; state as much as that by almost any reasonable measure of site activity (number of visits, number of questions and answers, number of votes cast, number of edits, ...) we are currently &lt;strong&gt;at or close to all time highs.&lt;/strong&gt; This includes the initial surge of activity at the beginning of the public beta period, which we have actually in some ways &lt;em&gt;surpassed&lt;/em&gt;. Good job, community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T09:17:30.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1862" CreationDate="2015-03-23T14:00:37.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In total we had 19 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; questions over the last two weeks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11667/asymmetrical-animals&quot;&gt;Asymmetrical animals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11721/multigeneration-ship-pet&quot;&gt;Multigeneration ship pet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11676/earth-wind-and-water-naturally-navigating-all-three&quot;&gt;Earth, Wind, and Water: Naturally Navigating All Three&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11637/intelligent-cats-with-a-serious-attitude-problem&quot;&gt;Intelligent Cats With A Serious Attitude Problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12294/can-telepathy-and-telekinesis-exist-in-biological-creatures&quot;&gt;Can telepathy and telekinesis exist in biological creatures?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11648/how-to-strengthen-bones&quot;&gt;How to Strengthen Bones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12270/most-effective-way-to-camouflage-a-visible-physical-connection-on-a-creature-tha&quot;&gt;Most effective way to camouflage a visible physical connection on a creature that uses part of its body as a lure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11610/a-creature-with-sonic-powers&quot;&gt;A Human Hunter with Sonic Powers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11622/sharks-with-frickin-lasers&quot;&gt;Sharks with frickin&amp;#39; lasers!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11679/we-saw-that-in-orbit-wait-how-did-it-get-down-here&quot;&gt;We saw that in orbit....wait, how did it get down here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11650/evolutionary-explanations-for-dragon-firebreathing-interesting-uses-of-indigest&quot;&gt;Evolutionary Explanations for Dragon Firebreathing: Interesting uses of indigestion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11992/could-insects-evolve-that-could-create-a-hole-in-a-stone-wall-within-a-day&quot;&gt;Could insects evolve that could create a hole in a stone wall within a day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12254/creature-with-a-non-centralized-brain&quot;&gt;Creature with a non-centralized brain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11817/evolution-of-a-predatory-antlered-cat&quot;&gt;Evolution of a predatory antlered cat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11767/breathing-lightning&quot;&gt;Breathing lightning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11970/animals-for-weightlessness&quot;&gt;Animals for weightlessness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11849/death-to-humans-by-deadly-monsters&quot;&gt;Death to humans by deadly monsters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12521/creatures-that-can-displace-themselves&quot;&gt;Creatures that can &amp;quot;Displace&amp;quot; themselves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12065/how-to-insure-my-hulks-survival&quot;&gt;How to insure my Hulk&amp;#39;s survival&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions were asked by:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7190.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/James&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6429.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7351.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7072.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2071.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7713.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/19.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We also had a total of 99 answers...for 5.2 answers per question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not going to post all the answers/answerers...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=creature-design#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T15:01:13.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-23T14:23:07.323" Score="8" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Today begins our fourth topic challenge!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates:  23 March - 5 April&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I joined Worldbuilding, I told myself that I would only answer&#xA;  science-based questions. I'd stay away from magic-based or&#xA;  fantasy-based questions. I've done a decent job of it, but I've seen&#xA;  lots of brilliant questions asked about magic. It seems to bring out a&#xA;  lot of creativity in people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let the games begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design?cb=1&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T14:58:49.673" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1862" CreationDate="2015-03-24T02:13:14.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the impatient and/or hopelessly competitive minded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/292082/posts-by-votes-and-views-for-tag-in-timerange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posts By Votes And Views for Tag in Timerange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note that data.stackexchange is usually a little bit behind the live-servers so some Questions/Votes might not show up until a few days later.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T02:13:14.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-03-24T03:00:52.860" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wont vote for Rome, because i spend my whole set of questions about Rome today. But i believe Zombies can get a go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7066" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-03-24T03:08:40.267" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T03:08:40.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1884" CreationDate="2015-03-25T15:38:04.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conflict Resolution&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;For questions about possible results of specific conflict situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Challenge Solution&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;For questions about solutions to specific challenging situations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this would cover more questions, and could be combined with [magic] or whatever to cover solutions to magical problems&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also be good for Dustin Jackson's questions about defeating specific wizards, or questions such as HDE 226868's about imprisoning wizards who can walk through walls. The first one would also cover questions like Dustin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10265/sapient-ant-colony-rivaling-homo-sapiens-and-homo-neanderthal&quot;&gt;Sapient Ant Colony Rivaling Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note we do have a &lt;strong&gt;Conflict&lt;/strong&gt; tag, but it has no description, and is only applied to one question (the ant/neanderthal one linked directly above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T15:38:04.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-25T15:56:11.293" Score="3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am setting up this community wiki to develop explanations of standard magic systems.  The idea is that in a question, you can link to a post here that explains the core ideas of the system in question, instead of repeating that information in every question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So.  First I think we should define a template of what needs to be documented for each system.  Please post answers of your recommended template and we can merge/swap etc to get a standard single template.&lt;/strong&gt;  Once that is completed we can populate the standard template for each system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use cases might help us write the template, so here are some examples of systems we might want to write up.  &lt;strong&gt;This question is not about these systems.&lt;/strong&gt; This question is about a template that we could use to describe systems like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System 1:  &lt;em&gt;I can do cool stuff but it costs me&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System Name:  &lt;strong&gt;The Feedback System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This system allows a caster to trigger incredible skills but the energy required to accomplish the task comes from the caster's body.  Conservation of energy is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System 1.5: &lt;em&gt;I can do cool stuff but it costs someone or something&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System Name:  &lt;strong&gt;The Siphon System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The energy comes from the world around me, any living thing can provide the fuel I need to perform magic.  Conservation of energy is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System 2:  &lt;em&gt;The elements are mine to command&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System Name:  &lt;strong&gt;The Elemental System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can manipulate the elements but only within the rules of physics.  I can create fire with my will power but oxygen must be consumed (for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System 3:  &lt;em&gt;BOW TO ME YOU PITIFUL MORTALS&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System Name:  &lt;strong&gt;The Deus Ex System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My power apparently knows no limits or the limits are ambiguous and vague and only apply as a story-telling constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  I include this system mainly to point out that questions based on it will (in my mind) always be idea generation.  This system should not be used to ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T21:37:54.620" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T10:02:56.690" Title="Define standard magic systems: let's create a template" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2015-03-25T18:53:01.933" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Necromantic magic :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the will of the spirit of the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herbal magic :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the reaction of herbs and other compounds to create potions and cast spells using such potions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mana magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on a immaterial force called Mana that has limited quantity. Sorcerer uses his own mana or mana from the ambient, or mana from a special talisman/focusing tool that can recharge its mana from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relic magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on relics to channel spiritual force into a spell. Relics might be the bones of an ancient saint or sage, a talisman or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pseudo magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on unknown laws of physics, like creating an artefact that collects sun energy to form a laser. Being unknown to the era, people cannot tell magic from science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elemental magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the will of the spirits of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religious magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the action of gods and can archieve its porpuse by summoning them. Gods have their own business and might not want to do what you ask from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlimited magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has no limits known besides the will of the magician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7066" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T18:53:01.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2015-03-26T10:02:56.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drawing on what the community has previously talked about with regards to terminology, &lt;strong&gt;I stand against this idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have time and time again concluded that there should be no barrier or obstacle to posting a question on this site. You shouldn't need to know a piece of terminology in order to be able to ask a question. But you might say, &quot;You don't need to use this, it is there for those who know it!&quot;, except that I can very easily see one of two things happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, people might see it in questions and attempt to copy it, but not actually read the meta post on what the format is, which muddies the water, this leads to people going in an editing questions in order to make them conform, not something I particularly like.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, we will (and you know we will, there always is) have at least one person who goes around and tells people that they are asking their questions wrong, because they need to use the template.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition, while there are comment elements that magic can share, people will &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; need to explain their particular system because even within a general type of system, it will be different. Are we going to have to specify the way you cast spells? What about the knowledge required to be able to cast a spell? Are there items that change these rules? and a hundred others that I can't think of, because &lt;em&gt;Magic&lt;/em&gt; is ever changing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that relevant information about magic should always be included in the question about magic itself. A template feels just as bad as a vocabulary in this case. Finally, &lt;em&gt;this feels like an attempt to solve something that isn't an issue&lt;/em&gt;, and if we have a common system of magic system being used, make a tag for it. Otherwise leave it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T10:02:56.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1929" CreationDate="2015-03-26T18:31:10.683" Score="-2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question can be popular with multiple answers, and an accepted answer, and a moderator alone can cast a close vote and put the question on hold; and then do the same thing for multiple questions by the same person, none of which have the required number of votes from the community (as this is a community driven site) to put on hold otherwise; and the reason for being put on hold are not for reasons of explicit moderation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to give too much weight to the subjective view of the mods, such that if the mod happens to be personally adverse to the subject of the question they can place it on hold for reasons other than stated. While they should still be allowed to express their desire to place on hold the question unless the question actually requires moderator action then I don't see the rationale for having the mod vote be the sole arbiter for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why creating a way for mods to vote to close but not as a moderator action could be done? What is the rationale for the system as currently set up? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7666" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T10:01:03.070" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T10:01:03.070" Title="Can mods be changed to cast close votes like everyone else not as a moderator?" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|moderators|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-03-26T18:39:03.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of the most popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41062/add-a-way-for-moderators-to-cast-a-normal-non-binding-close-open-vote&quot;&gt;feature requests on Meta SE&lt;/a&gt;, and it has been declined for (I presume) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41062/add-a-way-for-moderators-to-cast-a-normal-non-binding-close-open-vote#comment92117_41333&quot;&gt;following reason&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a moderator is certain that a question should be closed, then he should just close it. A moderator who would cast one vote when he could cast 5 shouldn't vote at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from a comment by Shog9. It's probably also worth reading more of the discussion in the comments on those posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:39:03.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-03-26T19:46:57.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators have moderator powers for a reason - to moderate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of that process we do not vote on subjective cases, we vote on cases where we are sure that it is the right thing to do. You can find several places on this site where we were not sure and so we waited and only voted once 3 or 4 votes had already been made or in fact didn't vote at all and let the community handle it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/642/reopening-portal-question&quot;&gt;Reopening portal question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we're only human. We can and no doubt will make mistakes. When we do then there are meta discussions and the standard re-open process available to correct them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally we prefer to sit back and let the community handle it and as a result you will see most questions closed and re-opened by community votes. In cases where questions need work (usually Too Broad or Idea Generation) then we will step in even if the community vote has not yet caught up with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly important if the question is getting a lot of views or activity as otherwise there tend to be a lot of list based or subjective answers posted before the voting system catches up and a lot of the time the people viewing or answering do not have the reputation needed to close the question themselves or may not even be aware of the guidelines by which we do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question is not final. It's not a &quot;black mark&quot; or a punishment, or anything else. It's just putting the question on hold (and in fact you see it is called [On Hold] in the list) while problems with the question get corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once they have been corrected the question can then be opened again and the result will be much higher quality answers that are far more useful to both the original asker and anyone else interested than had the question been left alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T19:46:57.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-03-26T21:12:57.113" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1928/29&quot;&gt;Tim B explained&lt;/a&gt;, there are many good reasons for moderators to have the power to take immediate action, sometimes even in the face of community disagreement. This is not just limited to putting questions on hold; it also includes deleting posts, marking as spam, and at the extreme end even destroying entire user accounts and feeding them into the spam-fighting systems, or request destruction of user accounts along with all contributions made from that user account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This power is sometimes necessary&lt;/strong&gt; in order to efficiently moderate the site, and it is a power that I dare say that &lt;strong&gt;all moderators use with care.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of the time&lt;/em&gt; when moderators step in, the situation can broadly be classified into one of three major categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when the community cannot handle the situation on its own for some reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where there is community disagreement as to the proper course of action and a decision needs to be made as to the correct action to take&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when a post needs to be handled and is an &lt;em&gt;utterly obvious&lt;/em&gt; case (&lt;em&gt;for example&lt;/em&gt;, blatant spam or totally off-topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have the possibility of &lt;strong&gt;the community largely having stepped in already,&lt;/strong&gt; and the moderator only adding a final or near-final (say, in the case of putting questions on hold which requires five votes, vote number four or five) vote, thereby &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; participating as one of the larger community. Another possibility is to simply leave a comment or bring the issue up in chat, but leave the voting to the community; a moderator's opinion tends to have some weight even without a binding vote. For uncertain cases where the moderator wants to take &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; action, one of these is often preferred over a binding vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appointed or elected moderators are held to an even higher standard than the rest of the community. In the words of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;, which guides moderation on the Stack Exchange network, emphasis original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your goal is to &lt;strong&gt;guide the community with gentle — but firm — intervention&lt;/strong&gt;. Respect your fellow community members at all times; demonstrate fairness and impartiality in your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the moderators on a site operate in a vacuum; &lt;strong&gt;moderators normally regularly cross-check each others' actions,&lt;/strong&gt; and discuss actions that are under consideration, not just with each other but also with other moderators in the Stack Exchange network, as well as the Stack Exchange (the company) community managers if it becomes necessary to escalate an issue that far. Every moderator has access to the full log of moderation actions taken by all other moderators on their site; this includes everything from the mundane to the extreme. All moderators (both elected and appointed) on the network have access to a special chat room where issues can be discussed with other moderators on other sites in order to benefit from the experience of moderators who have faced similar situations before. Most, if not actually all, sites on the network also have a site-specific moderators-only chat room for discussing issues local to the site; Worldbuilding does have such a chat room which is frequented by the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, particularly in cases such as putting questions on hold, the community can actually in a manner of speaking override a moderator's decision. A moderator can put a question on hold with a single vote, but it takes only any five community members with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast reopen votes privilege&lt;/a&gt; to reopen the question; and on our site, this happens quite regularly when a question is put on hold, fixed and reopened. A moderator can lock a question, which prevents the community from reopening it (or doing just about anything to it), but there is a special list of locked questions in the moderator dashboard so doing so inappropriately is highly likely to draw the attention of the other moderators. A question that repeatedly gets closed and reopened is going to draw some degree of attention. A locked question can still be flagged for moderator attention, drawing the attention of the other moderators on the site. Or a moderator can be pinged in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;our general chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a dispute cannot be settled simply by discussing the matter among the moderators (which it most often can be, if there even is a dispute in the first place; see above about utterly obvious cases), then any moderator can escalate the issue to a community manager. The CMs are spread around the world and a situation can often be resolved within hours or less at any time of the day or week in urgent cases (and, not uncommonly, also in non-urgent cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users always have the option of bringing things up either in chat, or on the site's respective Meta site,&lt;/strong&gt; if they disagree with the actions of any moderator. It is also a well-established practice that moderators do not handle flags that relate to themselves, either leaving them unhandled or specifically requesting that another moderator look at them. If multiple moderators are involved, this may also involve escalating an issue to a community manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In extreme cases, and hopefully only ever as a very last resort, &lt;strong&gt;any user can use the &quot;contact&quot; link at the bottom of every page to contact Stack Exchange directly, completely bypassing the moderators.&lt;/strong&gt; This choice exists, for example, for users who feel like they have been approached inappropriately by one or more moderators and the normal courses of action available to users do not result in corrective action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, &lt;strong&gt;moderator powers are always subject to the continued approval of Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/strong&gt; This applies to both appointed and elected moderators. There have been cases where moderators have been stripped of their diamond powers for taking what was considered inappropriate action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T18:48:06.353" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T18:48:06.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-03-27T13:33:40.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole point of being a moderator is that you have these abilities to close, delete and generally clean up the site without having to bother anyone else. We are more like janitors than anything else. On very large and very small sites it's generally not a problem. In either case there's too much for the regular users &lt;em&gt;who have the necessary permissions&lt;/em&gt; to control. In the large site case there's too many poor quality posts etc, in the small site case there are simply too few users with the necessary permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case where this might be an issue is in the mid-range site. The volume of posts is low enough for the number of users to cope with so, for the most part, moderators aren't needed to cast their unilateral votes. In these cases, you don't have to vote, just leave it to the regular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a moderator isn't confident enough that their vote is the correct thing to do then &lt;strong&gt;they shouldn't vote&lt;/strong&gt;. There are other avenues open to them (as indeed there are for regular users):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment explaining their concerns. Other users will read this and vote with this new information at their disposal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk to other users (including other moderators) in chat. Sometimes this will be on the site's own chat room, but in other cases they may need to chat in moderator only rooms - but that's OK the chat is visible to SE staff and can be reviewed if necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can still raise some flags without their vote being binding. If the other moderators are on a different time schedule this can be a useful way of leaving a note for someone else to take a look. These flags will even push the post into the review queues where other, regular, users can take a look too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3400" LastEditorUserId="3400" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T15:21:32.973" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T15:21:32.973" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-28T14:30:42.680" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I really like some poster's questions, or another poster's answers. Unfortunately, they post rarely. Is there any way to be alerted (I mean inbox) when they post a new question/answer? A bit like the follow feature of twitter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T14:30:42.680" Title="Follow a Specific User" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1933" CreationDate="2015-03-28T16:14:11.957" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know. &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilders are nice&lt;/strong&gt;. Nice, calm, gentle people. All business (of writing) all the time. At least in public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless (I guess there's a reason why I'm asking this while saint-like Monica Cellio's away for the day), some questions/answers are just so off-the-wall silly (no specific examples, please) that a tiny teeensy smidgen of snark &lt;em&gt;totally, absolutely, necessarily must be employed&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I have been made to see the light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-03-28T18:46:10.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T18:46:10.323" Title="Acceptable Level of Snarkiness" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1932" CreationDate="2015-03-28T17:11:14.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;Snark&quot; actually achieve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might give you a smug feeling of having put someone down but what good has it actually done for anyone really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are misguided then telling them so is fine. For example I've seen quite a few scientific fallacies corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because someone may be lacking in knowledge of a certain area doesn't mean we should be nasty to them though. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T17:11:14.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-29T01:11:42.640" Score="6" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of this post is to put some order in the tags of the main site. Suggestions can be done here instead of spreading on multiples questions. You can suggest to create synonym, merging tags, or anything else related to tag management. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is not to have the least number of tags possible but to have an good system were users can find information easily with the appropriate tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T17:27:36.140" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T06:20:16.937" Title="Putting Tags in order on the main site" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1964" CreationDate="2015-03-29T03:00:46.493" Score="6" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all love &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/site-eval&quot;&gt;Site Self-Evaluation review queue&lt;/a&gt; is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. &#xA;Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? &lt;strong&gt;Post an answer below to share your thoughts&lt;/strong&gt; and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T03:01:03.767" Title="Let's get critical: Mar 2015 Site Self-Evaluation" Tags="|discussion|site-evaluation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1940" CreationDate="2015-03-29T06:53:19.083" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case there is one-and-only answer available, considering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sufficiently good answer, addressed most of the question, wouldn't it be unfair to select it as the best answer right away? Wouldn't it be wise to wait for a day or two, then, if there's no other viable answer available (or still be the sole answer), I picked it as the best answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typically bad answer, out of topic, name it. Should I pick it as the best answer just because it's the sole answer (for days, or even weeks), although the answer is (sigh) both the best answer and the worst answer at the same time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7974" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T08:31:49.953" Title="Picking the sole answer as the best answer" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1939" CreationDate="2015-03-29T07:04:39.810" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to ask something that I already know (albeit partially, assume I want to know better answer), is it wise to ask it and answered it, on which the answer is supposed to be the baseline and also to explain the original idea of what would be the solution?&#xA;Or should I included that detail on the question, although it might limits the opportunity to obtain better answer not constrained by the original concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7974" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T08:14:05.040" Title="Answering your own question as a baseline" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1938" CreationDate="2015-03-29T08:14:05.040" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The guiding principle for whether to self-answer or to include previous efforts in the question itself should generally be &lt;strong&gt;whether you would upvote and/or accept the answer that you give, if it came from someone else.&lt;/strong&gt; Self-answers should not receive a free pass, and in fact are often judged more harshly by the community than those posted by people other than the OP. There is nothing &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; with posting a self-answer (in fact, it's even encouraged) &lt;em&gt;as long as it actually &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; the question as asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That largely answers your question above; if you already have &lt;em&gt;an answer&lt;/em&gt; and are seeking more, then your answer can be a candidate for a self-answer to the question. If you have thought about the question, came up with &lt;em&gt;portions&lt;/em&gt; of an answer and want others to help flesh out the details in some particular aspect, then it's generally better to describe in the question what you have thought of so far. You can still leave the question open to alternative approaches, perhaps as simply as by writing (in the question, alongside with your thoughts on the matter) something like &quot;this is what I have thought of, but I am open to other suggestions as well&quot;. Be careful to not make the question too broad or an idea generation one; for one thing, make sure to state your constraints clearly to avoid this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T08:14:05.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1937" CreationDate="2015-03-29T08:31:49.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;Accepting an answer&lt;/a&gt; is not mandatory. Also, accepting an answer indicates to the community that you feel the question has been answered to your satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, to answer your subquestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;accepting an answer just because it came first means you reduce the likelihood of getting further answers from other users. That might be okay, and is really up to you. It is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; the asker's prerogative &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; to accept an answer, &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; to do so, and &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; answer if any to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;accepting a sub-par answer that doesn't really answer your question is the wrong thing to do at best, and outright counterproductive at worst. If an answer outright &lt;em&gt;doesn't answer the question&lt;/em&gt;, then flag it as &quot;not an answer&quot; to push it into the review queues for the community to look more closely at. If the answer is missing aspects that are stated in the question and you feel are important, but the parts that are in there are good and relevant, then comment on the answer to request clarification or improvement. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Commenting on any post&lt;/a&gt; requires 50 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has been sitting for a while and not received what you feel is a good answer (in my experience this happens rarely on our site, but you seem to have encountered it with a large fraction of your questions), you have two main courses of action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;Bring it up in chat.&lt;/a&gt; There's usually people hanging out in our main site chat room &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;Worldbuilders' General Chat&lt;/a&gt;, and this can draw attention to your question. Make sure to not spam the room, and stay around to act on possible feedback. Depending on the time of day (the chat room is least active in UTC morning) it may take some time to get feedback, but chat is a good way to handle those quick back-and-forth discussions that are sometimes needed to turn a question from just-not-quite-closeworthy to great. Talk in chat requires that you have at least 20 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;Offer a bounty on the question.&lt;/a&gt; This provides increased visibility, as well as an additional incentive for people to answer the question (they might gain some extra reputation essentially for free). Given that you currently have only 85 rep, you may not want to do this just yet (the lower limit is 75 rep for the privilege, and you can bounty off between 50 and 500 rep per question, leaving you with a maximum of 35 rep after offering the bounty; check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;list of privileges&lt;/a&gt; to see what this would mean in practice), but it is definitely an option once you have earned a bit more reputation on the site. Do note that &lt;strong&gt;bounties are 100% non-refundable once started.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T08:31:49.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1952" CreationDate="2015-03-29T19:15:01.527" Score="6" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280091581/Google-tailors-search-results-based-on-user-behaviour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this thing&lt;/a&gt; where it tailors the results of searches to the search history of that person or machine. If SE members who regularly search this site attempt Google searches, they are more likely to come up with stack exchange answers. As google searches are explicitly asked for while reviewing, should our searches take advantage of a any browser's ability to ignore history while performing our searches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means using &quot;incognito&quot; mode in chrome, or similar features of other web browsers. Should this be done the results of the site review are less unsullied by our own use of Stack Exchange? The scientist in me (which is a significant portion of me) &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; wants to use that incognito mode!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to see stack exchange beat out a lot of other places, since I really do think the SE method works well and is generally helpful, but I also want to the self-evaluation to be as honest as possible. Do we want the google-reflected self-bias, or is it inconsequential enough that we can ignore it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T20:36:36.453" Title="Site Self-Eval Question: Google's Search Results" Tags="|discussion|site-evaluation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1951" CreationDate="2015-03-29T20:36:36.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for helping with the site self-evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best assessment of Google results will come from searches that aren't influenced by your own personal search history, so incognito mode is a big help here.  There are no &lt;em&gt;requirements&lt;/em&gt;, and in practice the evaluation will reflect a mix of incognito searches, user-tailored searches, and no searches (not everybody is going to do exhaustive searches for every question, and I expect SE takes that into account). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't let an ideal of How Search Should Happen prevent you from doing the evaluation, but if it's easy for you to do incognito searches, that will tell us more about how likely our content will be found by people who don't already know about this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T20:36:36.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1935" CreationDate="2015-03-31T21:42:32.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strategy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strategy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strategy&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T21:13:11.997" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T21:13:11.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-01T18:05:09.387" Score="6" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13495/how-can-santa-exist-when-adults-buy-the-toys&quot;&gt;How can Santa exist when adults buy the toys?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this seen as off-topic?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is world-building reserved for subject matter suitable to an adult audience?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP (who is not me) is a children's author, looking for a plausible explanation for the weird behavior of parents in their Santa-is-real Children's story...   How is that not world-building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I do not know the OP, nor do I know that the OP is a children's author.  I'm involved here only in self-interest: I wrote a really cool answer and the question got closed moments before I could post it.  At first, I posted my answer as three-successive comments, then I thought better and deleted those comments so that I could bring the discussion here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T17:31:10.540" Title="The Closing of How can Santa exist when adults buy the toys?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2015-04-01T18:40:03.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the second to vote to close, so I'll voice my rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, as phrased, seemed - and still seems, so some extent - to me to be more a reflection on &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; world, not a built world. The title itself, &quot;How &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; . . .&quot; (emphasis mine) is also along the lines of, &quot;This is a commentary on our world.&quot; At least, that's how it seemed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I voted to close not as off-topic but as unclear - which sucks, because the close message indicates that I thought it was off-topic. I thought it was on-topic, I just didn't understand it, because it seemed like the heart of it wasn't as prominently placed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my rationale for voting to reopen. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is world-building reserved for subject matter suitable to an adult audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Cough cough) Awkward moment.&lt;/em&gt; Funny, how I'm a kid voicing my opinion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There wasn't really much wrong with the question, looking back. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13495/how-can-santa-exist-when-adults-buy-the-toys#comment32358_13495&quot;&gt;Bret called it &quot;rambling&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and tried to fix that a bit. It just seemed a bit confusing. But I think it's all right because it discusses a societal aspect. We've had . . . erm . . . controversial questions regarding in-world beliefs, and they're on-topic. The beliefs discussed here are simply different. And they aren't beliefs, come to think of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one look forward to seeing your answer, should the question be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T18:45:12.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2015-04-01T20:33:57.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm leaning towards a reopen now that it has been changed, even though the change is small.  It feels on-topic enough for me.  He gave clear definitions of what he wanted out of santa-clause world, and expressed what he thought made it difficult to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T20:33:57.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2015-04-02T17:31:10.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1955/the-closing-of-how-can-santa-exist-when-adults-buy-the-toys#comment4349_1955&quot;&gt;Michael's comment&lt;/a&gt; . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has now been re-opened. And Henry has added &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13495/how-can-santa-exist-when-adults-buy-the-toys/13521#13521&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt;, which has turned out to be very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T17:31:10.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-04T20:58:36.707" Score="2" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost exactly as the title says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ran a search with the search query &lt;code&gt;is:answer 0,&lt;/code&gt;. Fine, search works. I got to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?page=2&amp;amp;tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%200%2c&quot;&gt;page 2 of the results&lt;/a&gt; and discovered that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5270/could-a-manned-maneuvering-unit-provide-artificial-gravity/6545?s=24|0.2219#6545&quot;&gt;HDE 226868's answer&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;Could a manned maneuvering unit provide artificial gravity?&quot; is rendered incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A section that is text when you look at the actual answer is rendered in the results as MathJax, and several sections of actual MathJax are rendered as plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing happens on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?page=3&amp;amp;tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%200%2c&quot;&gt;page 3&lt;/a&gt; of the same results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T13:55:05.687" Title="Search renders MathJax sections incorrectly" Tags="|bug|mathjax|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-04T21:49:13.923" Score="11" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the lack of negativity to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/20904424#20904424&quot;&gt;a suggestion&lt;/a&gt; I made in chat, I'm posting this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been running for quite a while now and we've got great activity. However, I feel like we could know each other better &lt;em&gt;as a community&lt;/em&gt;. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post an answer. Tell us about yourself. What kind of thing do you do? Most importantly, what interests you about Worldbuilding - why are you here? Have you got any worldbuilding projects going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get to know each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T11:08:47.380" Title="Who are you and what planet are you from?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2015-04-04T22:59:43.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The planet part is easy. I'm from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, as you can tell from my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more serious note, my primary interests lie in the sciences. I love physics and astronomy, and I hope to major in astrophysics in college. I'm always reading something new. I find that looking so much at other worlds makes me appreciate this one just a little bit more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do on Worldbuilding? I provide an endless source or annoyance for those who hate high-school algebra, focusing on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stars&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; tags. In real life, I go to a STEM school, and in my free time I do some self-studying. Oh, and I maintain a social life and athletics, too, believe it or not. But my love is science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was younger, I used to read all the fantasy books I could. My favorites were Brian Jacques' &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; saga. I spent nearly as much time poring over the maps he drew as I did reading! Well, not really. But I learned to delve deep into the world he came up with. I went beyond the story and imagined what it would be like to live in that unnamed land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books I read now are a bit more complicated, but every now and then I look back and re-read some of those old books. I guess that's why I love world building and story-telling. Maybe I think that someday I can get to that world where I lived when I was younger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagination can transcend the boundaries of what we think is possible and send us leaping across worlds. That's what drives me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T22:59:43.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1936" CreationDate="2015-04-05T03:01:03.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Final Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10923/thats-no-moon-planet-sized-plants-possible&quot;&gt;That&amp;#39;s no Moon: Planet-sized Plants Possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 25&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 25, Satisfactory: 11, Needs Improvement: 0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9944/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-planet&quot;&gt;Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 23&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 24, Satisfactory: 9, Needs Improvement: 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9707/how-can-my-accidental-time-travelers-determine-the-year-using-star-stars&quot;&gt;How can my accidental time travelers determine the year using star/stars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 22&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 24, Satisfactory: 10, Needs Improvement: 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10232/what-sort-of-problems-might-occur-if-every-human-gained-extra-muscle-mass&quot;&gt;What sort of problems might occur if every human gained extra muscle mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 22&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 23, Satisfactory: 11, Needs Improvement: 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9837/weaponising-local-air-pressure&quot;&gt;Weaponising Local Air Pressure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 21&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 21, Satisfactory: 14, Needs Improvement: 0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/cohabitation-with-large-creatures&quot;&gt;Cohabitation with large creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 19&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 21, Satisfactory: 10, Needs Improvement: 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10186/conditions-needed-for-a-fractured-moon&quot;&gt;Conditions needed for a Fractured Moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 15&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 16, Satisfactory: 16, Needs Improvement: 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10044/what-if-jupiters-rotational-period-was-equal-to-that-of-the-earth&quot;&gt;What if Jupiter&amp;#39;s rotational period was equal to that of the Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: 12&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 15, Satisfactory: 19, Needs Improvement: 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10405/of-augmentation-and-androidisation&quot;&gt;Of Augmentation and Androidisation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: -1&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 8, Satisfactory: 15, Needs Improvement: 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10327/post-singularity-economy&quot;&gt;Post-singularity economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Net Score: -3&lt;/strong&gt; (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 21, Needs Improvement: 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T03:01:03.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1916" CreationDate="2015-04-05T23:51:04.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just had our most popular challenge until now with 36 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions including 2 closed questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12600/how-to-cure-a-phobia-with-magic&quot;&gt;How to cure a phobia with magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12634/how-can-i-imprison-a-wizard-who-can-walk-through-walls&quot;&gt;How can I imprison a wizard who can walk through walls?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12772/uses-for-limited-human-flight-in-medieval-setting&quot;&gt;Uses for Limited Human Flight in Medieval Setting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12774/magical-april-fools-prank&quot;&gt;Magical April Fools prank&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(close)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12801/how-to-defeat-a-nature-mage&quot;&gt;How to defeat a nature Mage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12853/non-logical-magic&quot;&gt;Non-logical Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12859/magic-that-alters-living-cells-how-to-efficiently-battle-with-it&quot;&gt;Magic that alters living cells - How to efficiently battle with it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12901/how-can-fae-rescue-one-of-their-number-from-an-iron-cage&quot;&gt;How can fae rescue one of their number from an iron cage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12912/how-to-escape-a-horde-of-worms-using-magic-with-minimal-injury&quot;&gt;How to escape a horde of worms using magic with minimal injury?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12923/how-do-i-draw-the-elves-into-the-war&quot;&gt;How Do I Draw the Elves into the War?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12925/magically-knock-someone-down-and-pin-them-using-science&quot;&gt;Magically knock someone down and pin them using Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12940/how-to-minimize-the-threat-of-guns-in-present-day-magic-fantasy&quot;&gt;How to minimize the threat of guns in present day magic fantasy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12985/how-could-flying-soldiers-influence-medieval-battle-tactics&quot;&gt;How could flying soldiers influence medieval battle tactics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12990/a-most-subtle-magic&quot;&gt;A Most Subtle Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13042/how-to-escape-an-impossible-situation-using-minimal-magic&quot;&gt;How to Escape an Impossible Situation Using Minimal Magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13065/limited-fate-sensing-powers-to-give-protagonist-of-miyazaki-style-story&quot;&gt;Limited Fate sensing powers to give protagonist of miyazaki style story&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13114/use-of-liquid-potential-energy&quot;&gt;Use of Liquid Potential Energy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13129/magivore-designing-a-magic-eater&quot;&gt;Magivore - designing a magic &amp;#39;eater&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13141/sympathy-give-me-the-chills&quot;&gt;Sympathy: Give me the chills!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13145/designing-a-battery-to-store-light&quot;&gt;Designing a battery to store light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13149/magic-what-might-be-dangers-of-connecting-your-own-soul-to-a-stronger-soul&quot;&gt;What might be dangers of connecting your own soul to a stronger soul?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13212/how-would-an-intelligent-planet-develop-the-ability-to-bend-space-time&quot;&gt;How would an intelligent planet develop the ability to bend space-time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13234/can-you-have-magic-that-doesnt-have-rules&quot;&gt;Can you have magic that doesn&amp;#39;t have rules?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13285/magic-as-luck-control&quot;&gt;Magic as Luck Control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13326/magic-on-an-atomic-level&quot;&gt;Magic on an atomic level?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13339/will-my-magic-system-decrease-its-credibility&quot;&gt;Will my magic system decrease its credibility?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; (closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13364/if-magic-is-real-can-it-be-true-that-rational-scientific-thought-should-exclude&quot;&gt;If magic is real, can it be true that rational scientific thought should exclude it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13384/would-science-emerge-in-a-world-with-magic&quot;&gt;Would science emerge in a world with magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13393/magic-that-alters-living-cells-growing-cities-out-of-trees&quot;&gt;Magic that alters living cells - Growing cities out of trees?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13638/development-of-society-with-random-encounters&quot;&gt;Development of society with random encounters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13670/the-magical-british-government-at-war&quot;&gt;The Magical British Government: At War&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions asked by:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/75.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2071.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7666.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6620.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/443.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/4857.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6429.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/19.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2138.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7974.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8512.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6751.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7302.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7940.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2318.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3112.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6781.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2685.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We add 207 answers during the challenge. This is an average of 6,68 answers per question, including the closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=magic#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good job everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T14:58:49.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2046" CreationDate="2015-04-06T00:02:45.627" Score="9" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our fifth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 6 April - 19 April&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/James&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've enjoyed these questions. I can see these sort of questions being asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-Given x environment (available resources etc) what would a city look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-Given x technologies...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am sure there are more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let's build some cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design?cb=1&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T06:31:08.433" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2015-04-06T15:21:56.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have more interests and hobbies than I have time or money for.  Most of my spare cash seems to go to my woodworking shop and now I'm learning how to do black smithing and I love it.  (more money gone...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love to learn and I love to read, so I tend to have a bit of knowledge about a very wide range of things.  Part of my interest with worldbuilding is the fact that I do read a lot.  I also read 2-5 (plus others of course) books a month that I get in exchange for reviewing them.  So I tend to put a little more analysis into my reading to form a critique.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I tend to notice a lot of things that make me shake my head and think I should hire myself out as a consultant.  &quot;Who in there right mind would do that?&quot;  &quot;What is the motivation for that antagonist? Real people are not 'Dr. Evil'!&quot;  etc.  So my hope was to help raise the bar on ideas and concepts and try to get rid of the worst offenders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read some very BAD fiction and I would like to spare others the experience.  Also I keep playing with the idea of one day sitting down and actually putting some of my ideas to paper and write my own story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T20:16:40.283" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T20:16:40.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2015-04-06T19:27:46.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several of the tags you can put on me are: physicist, practitioner of historical european martial arts, gamer of both the video and table-top persuasion, programmer/app developer, collector of myths, german-speaker, and meddler in linguistics as well as other fields. In short, I feel like I'm a pretty inquisitive person. Curiosity gets me into trouble sometimes, but it generally &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love me some good books and mythology, especially from old sources. Among my more impressive reads are the Nebulungenlied (in Middle High German) and The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English). Attempting to not lose base with modern fantasy, I read things like the the Kingkiller Chronicles (seriously, Patrick, finish the darn'd thing!) as well as Brandon Sanderson's books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I here? Honestly, it's partly because of the silly science questions, and partly because I love building worlds. Many an hour was spent by me trying to figure out world-editors from Blizzard in high school, well before learning about stack exchange. Home-brewed settings and narratives are normal for me whenever I run an RPG which lets me do so. My favorite RPG world is learning many things from this site. (No, I'm not stealing ideas from here, just learning lessons via &quot;case studies.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T19:27:46.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-07T14:25:51.717" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just added the modern-in-medieval tag to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13748/how-would-a-person-with-modern-knowledge-of-chemistry-and-medicine-fare-in-ancie/13775#13775&quot;&gt;How would a person with modern knowledge of chemistry and medicine fare in Ancient times?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question clearly states that he is interested in modern science set in a time before medieval.  It's not exactly modern individual, just their tech, and it's not limited to medieval times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the spirit of the tag still applies to the question, but not the literal definition.  It may be worth making the tag a more general concept to include these sort of questions.  At the very least I think the tag should not be limited to medieval times, modern-in-past or something along that lines generalizes the tag so it can be applied in other situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example I would like to be able to tag my question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12129/what-would-be-the-impact-of-modern-programer-and-laptop-being-dropped-into-world&quot;&gt;What would be the impact of a modern programmer and laptop being dropped into World War II, possibly breaking Enigma?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't asking about medieval times, but the idea of modern traveler going to the past still applies, it feels like something closely linked conceptually to the other questions that have the tag, it's a shame that no one can find this question if their interested in other time traveler in the past style stories and click the modern-to-medieval tag (after all this is such a perfect question, having been written so perfectly by a man who is clearly smart, ingenious, and above all the humblest man ever to live).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T18:01:21.067" Title="Should modern-in-medieval tag be made more generic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-08T09:00:53.560" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming onto the site this morning, I was surprised to find that apparently every single one of our questions has -999 score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a second look, it turns out they actually have ~999 score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be some kind of bug: when I vote on the post, the score returns to normal with my vote added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xvWad.png&quot; alt=&quot;A post showing ~999 score&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same post when voted on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CvoOP.png&quot; alt=&quot;A post which I have voted on, showing the correct score&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems strange; it's such an obvious bug that no doubt someone would have brought it up before me, so I have some suspicion that it's client-side. Still, can someone take a look?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T09:00:53.560" Title="~999 problems and votes are every one" Tags="|bug|voting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1973" CreationDate="2015-04-08T18:00:41.677" Score="9" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4807/how-would-tattoos-fare-on-reptilian-scales&quot; title=&quot;How would tattoos fare on reptilian scales?&quot;&gt;a simple question&lt;/a&gt; that attracted a lot of good answers, and although none of them fully answered my question, it gave me a really strong base; I made more research, based on those answers, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4994/3382&quot; title=&quot;Very extensive answer&quot;&gt;posted one myself&lt;/a&gt;. For most parts, I took the other answers and developed them further, then added my own findings when adequate. It was pretty detailed, and in my opinion, answered the question extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know self-answers are more critically judged, and they're fine if it actually answers the question. However, this self-answer received a lot less upvotes than the other answers, making me wonder if I should accept it. I know the most-voted answer isn't always the acceptable one, but there's a 13-to-2 difference here. The lack of comment on the answer leads me to think it wasn't read by many, but I prefer not to make more assumptions than needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I accept my own answer if it only got a couple upvotes, even after a few months?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T19:47:11.303" Title="Ethics of answering one's own question when it has very low votes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2015-04-08T18:54:46.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That you gave people a few months to review and vote on questions is good practice in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said you are completely within your rights to accept your own answer.  I feel like we do have an issue where late answers are not reviewed by nearly enough people...I think this spawns from plenty of fresh content showing up daily (which is a good thing for the site) and people don't look at older content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T18:54:46.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2015-04-08T19:47:11.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a similar situation with &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/15285/472&quot;&gt;a question on another site&lt;/a&gt; -- I asked a question, got lots of helpful answers (which I upvoted), and ultimately synthesized them.  That left me with the question of how to record the outcome on the question, so I wrote a summary answer, acknowledging/linking the other answers, and accepted it.  It felt weird to me to do so, but I wanted to signal that I didn't still need help.  New answers are always welcome, but that acceptance mark says &quot;I got something that works for me so feel free to move on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read your whole answer, but it looks like you have a similar case.  The other answers prompted you to do more work, you wrote it up, you acknowledged what you built on, and you got something sufficient for your needs.  There's nothing wrong with going ahead and accepting that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you accept your own answer that answer &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; float to the top, unlike other acceptances, so you won't be pushing higher-voted answers down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:06.950" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T19:47:11.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-08T20:43:22.300" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13792/whats-the-most-entertaining-way-to-prove-to-someone-that-they-arent-real/13875&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; we have a well-received, high voted, question with many answers. But it's off topic, and expressly so for most of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly it is &lt;em&gt;liked&lt;/em&gt;. So, how about making a way for it to be welcome? Perhaps a creative-writing SE that is for brainstorming rather than explicit answers, or a &lt;strong&gt;tag&lt;/strong&gt; that can be put on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a lot of what we have here is bordering onnthis kind of brainstorming, without being explicit in its wording (&lt;em&gt;the best way&lt;/em&gt;).  It is quite the opposite of Physics or Math where questions have definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T13:31:21.157" Title="brainstorming vs definitive answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2015-04-08T20:54:38.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I haven't been around long, but I love to share, and I like the spirit of the question, so here goes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm first and foremost a programmer (web, database, Java, pretty much anything anyone decides to teach me), but for as long as I can remember in my spare time I've been building and exploring fictional worlds. Whether it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://skyrimforums.org/sf/threads/to-kill-a-dovahkiin.8333/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the three &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; survivors of the attack on Helgen&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://fcwars.net/forums/list.php?category/53-Comics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the soldiers fighting the weekly battles of the online war-simulator Forerunner Conflict&lt;/a&gt;, I've spent most of my time writing and illustrating fan-fiction, but I think that gives me an interesting edge on Worldbuilding; after all, every question is a new world, and every answer is a fan-fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I've been trying recently to build some of my own worlds. In my current game (like a top-down shooter, but with medieval weaponry), I've envisioned an eleventh-century world where the British and Roman empires have risen together, and clash for control of the continent. For my Subcreation assignment in my Tolkien class (yes, it is a class where you talk about Lord of the Rings all the time), I've created a world where men are enslaved to Elves, dragons roam the forests seeking vengeance for their lost power, and gods wage war through the sky, consuming stars. But my main world, the one I really look forward to exploring, is set centuries in the future, where the galactic community struggles to maintain order and tradition in the face of ever-expanding plot holes. All of these worlds have been enhanced and strengthened by the things I've learned here, and though I've answered more questions than I've asked, I honestly think I've gained more from this site than I could ever give back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T20:54:38.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1974" CreationDate="2015-04-08T21:26:42.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this kind of question is it's &lt;em&gt;opinion based&lt;/em&gt; and therefore, &lt;em&gt;subjective&lt;/em&gt;. No doubt this has been linked many times before but I'll do it again: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange, in general, shuns subjective questions, and rightly so. Without objective answer-judging criteria, the award of the surprisingly highly-prized check mark is completely down to the OP and there are no grounds on which other people can object to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while the check mark has always been somewhat subjective (it is, after all, for the answer &lt;em&gt;which helped the poster the most&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;voting&lt;/em&gt; should not be subjective. There should be criteria by which people can judge which answer is the best and therefore it will gain votes to float to the top. Without these criteria, all answers are of equal merit and equally deserving of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the idea that subjective posts don't fit on StackExchange was established fairly early, when most of the sites were about programming, science, &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; subjects like that, where a question almost always has a definitive answer. Here we're on a site where creativity and personal opinion are encouraged in answers because it leads to great, creative answers - why not in questions too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; close reason says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the nature of worldbuilding, why should we have to provide &lt;em&gt;specific expertise&lt;/em&gt; for an answer to be valid? Sure, if it's a scientific question or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, we expect the answer to be verifiable. But some of our best questions are pure fantasy, which, given that fantasies are all fairly unique, is nigh on impossible to provide facts, references and specific expertise for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd love to see a way for this kind of question to become acceptable here. Come on, we're not exactly a &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; topic site: dragons and oversized spiders, anyone? A lot of what we do here is imaginative, creative, &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; - and personally, I think that's one of the big reasons this site got going so well. I'd like to see this attitude extend to the content we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;. There are always conditions. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; we start allowing questions like this, there's going to be friction. How do we differentiate the good subjective questions, like the one in question here, and the bad subjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is, as the blog post I linked says, that expertise lies in between objectivity and subjectivity. On many posts, we see differences of opinion, and that's a good thing. It means our community is healthy - we're discussing our points of view on a post, and in general, I find posts are in the state they should be. Bad posts are closed and left that way. Posts that need improving are put on hold, edited, and reopened. Good posts gather lots of upvotes, answers and discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point here is this: we have a good community. Let's &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it. All the subjective posts we get are still subject to community voting and closing: if we get a good subjective, it's likely to stay open; a bad subjective is likely to be closed, just as it is if the post is completely objective. All I would advise here is that we &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; vote to close &lt;em&gt;purely&lt;/em&gt; because a post is opinion-based or subjective, only if the post has issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My opinion in short: we should accept posts like this without voting to close purely due to their subjectivity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T21:26:42.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1974" CreationDate="2015-04-09T00:01:55.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll admit that the moment I read that question, I contemplated voting to close for idea generation. But I think that in this case, as well as with many others, it's the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; more than the questions that cause these kinds of problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I answered, one could say I gave a shining example of the &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; way to answer a question: instead of exploring the factors and explaining myself, I chose to write a short narrative. These kinds of answers are always dangerous, as they usually provide a single, specific example when a general rule is preferred. It is conceivable that someone else could give the same basic answer as mine (that is, swapping human I/O buffers), but dressed up in a way so as to look completely different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, accepting the previous statement accepts the underlying assumption that my answer &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; a basic form. I'd say that form includes the first paragraph, wherein I build constraints, and an imaginary second paragraph when I explain how swapping perception would fulfill all the requirements of the question in the most effective way possible. If I'd written that second paragraph, and if other answers followed a similar format, then I don't think the question would have been flagged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your main question, whether idea-generation or brainstorming questions should be accepted, I want to say yes, but I think it goes against the founding ideals of SE. Like they say on Stack Overflow, we're not here to do your homework for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T00:01:55.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2088" CreationDate="2015-04-09T00:32:00.690" Score="19" ViewCount="1429" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13907/what-is-the-least-expensive-way-to-annihilate-humanity&quot;&gt;What is the least expensive way to annihilate humanity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While perfectly within the realm of worldbuilding, do we really want to answer these sorts of questions? Imagine if someone were to give a really, really good answer, and that some extremist group were to find inspiration in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would not be fun. What do the people here think? Should we have a range of questions that are &lt;strong&gt;too close for comfort&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T13:40:55.197" Title="Should we be mindful of potentially dangerous questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2015-04-09T00:48:39.240" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm actually posting under my own name. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11173/could-an-unsually-long-lived-being-continue-to-learn-with-the-times/11203#11203&quot;&gt;I'm exactly who I say I am.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This decade of this century I happen to work in business intelligence, although I have worn a few hats in my time, and seen a tiny bit of the world. I have an interest in short stories (reading and writing them), and I am positively obsessed with ontology, astrophysics, neuroscience, transhumanism, and the myriad ways of exercising one's mind and body.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm here to warn people of the dangers of bad science and of the threat posed by dihydrogen monoxide as a lethal substance and lead global warming contributor. Oh, and also to ruthlessly downvote anyone who mentions oxygen-hydrogen atmospheres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T11:08:47.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1978" CreationDate="2015-04-09T01:31:51.867" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Censorship isn't really a good way to prevent bad things from happening, if anything having a good body of work on potential doomsday scenarios could lead to better preparation and prevention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A while back Stack Overflow had a similar discussion on the ethics of answering &quot;malicious&quot; or &quot;hacker&quot; questions, it was determined that making these methods public knowledge could/would lead to better security. Basically a computer virus is only effective if your anti-virus software hasn't heard of it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar arguments could easily be made here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T01:31:51.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1978" CreationDate="2015-04-09T06:50:52.717" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspiration comes from many, many sources. If you go looking for these things, you'll find hundreds. Most of the people who give answers here, probably read about them in a book in the first place. Many of the others are simply made up on the spot. In both cases; an extremist looking for them will find the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there's the miracle case of someone having a flash of inspiration that no person has heard before, if it's that good it'll spread to both sides quickly and by posting it at least it's out in the open. Imagine if an extremist had the flash of inspiration and nobody had posted it openly before, then there'd be no preperation for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides; as they say: ideas are a dime a dozen. All of these answers are just pointers. With or without them, it takes a huge amount of effort and planning to actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything. Knowing that you can spread a biological agent through the water supply (seriously, how many B-movies have this plot, again?) is one thing, actually getting your hands on the biological agent and access to the water supply is a completely different affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if people were starting to give real-world addresses on where you can buy said biological agents and names of people working at water treatment facilities... but that'd be illegal, so we don't need any extra rules against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T06:50:52.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1985" CreationDate="2015-04-09T10:51:54.550" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just reviewed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/7119&quot;&gt;this suggested edit&lt;/a&gt;. The original answer was short and not of the best quality; the edit drastically improved it, so both I and Mourdos approved the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was proposed by &lt;em&gt;Anonymous&lt;/em&gt; and not the post author. That had me considering how to review for some time: drastic edits to posts not by the author are generally frowned upon and rejected for fear of changing the author's meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what should be done with edits like this? Did I do the right thing or should I have rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T14:26:22.837" Title="What should I do with drastic edits to low-quality answers?" Tags="|discussion|reviews|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1974" CreationDate="2015-04-09T13:31:21.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the close-voters, and as someone who initially brought up how broad and opinion-based this question is, I'd like to explain the reasoning I had for closing the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I had no problem with this question - even after posting the comment that I did, I gave my own answer that I felt was within the parameters set out by the question-asker.  But it occurred to me while comparing my answer to others that the metric for upvoting answers, that they be 'entertaining', was entirely too subjective, and VTC'd appropriately.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good subjective questions are easy to find on SEs like this one, and this is definitely a good subjective question, but the metric for analyzing answers to this question was extremely opinion-based at best when the question was first asked.  I felt that it needed to be a little more specific in order to get a proper answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the question parameters have been edited to be more specific, and to have a more specific goal in mind for which answer constitutes a 'good' answer (The complication of the setup, versus how easily it could be explained away) it's much easier to understand what type of answer is good for this question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this will come up again on this SE, and they will be VTC because they're too open-ended again.  But just like what happened here, the asker will have a chance to improve the question, make it more clear what type of answers they're looking for, and ask for users to re-open the question in Meta.  This is ideal, and this is how the VTC/On-Hold system should work.  Now instead of a great question with a small problem, we have an even better question without any problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="764" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T13:31:21.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2015-04-09T13:54:58.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just personal opinion, but . . . I would have rejected that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit absolutely changed the author's meaning. Heck, the anonymous user who suggested the edit began the third paragraph with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I guess my theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis on the &quot;my&quot;. The user who suggested the edit was modifying it with their own ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Mourdos added &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13794/how-would-cities-be-designed-that-were-threatened-by-dragons/13798#comment33626_13798&quot;&gt;a note&lt;/a&gt; about the decision, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I approved this edit (/pending edit) on the assumption that the annon user was SRG. SRG, if you log in to edit your answer, we don't have to manually approve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't assume one way or the other in this case (although leaving a comment was the best thing to do). I've seen loads of edits where a user tried to add on &quot;helpful&quot; information, but was someone completely different. I would think this could be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the edit help? Yes. But I would either have rejected the edit or skipped the review (though I probably would have rejected it). If the author wants to add that information in, s/he can do it him/herself at a future time. A modified version of Mourdos' comment could have worked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I rejected this edit (/pending edit) in case the anonymous user was not SRG. SRG, if you log in to edit your answer, we don't have to manually approve it. You can then edit your post as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better to be safe than sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T13:54:58.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2015-04-09T14:26:22.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, keep in mind this phrasing from the proposed edit rejection dialog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. &lt;em&gt;Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, as a reviewer, you are unable to confirm that the edit does preserve the goals of the post's owner, you generally should &lt;strong&gt;reject the edit.&lt;/strong&gt; Alternatively, &lt;strong&gt;skip that review&lt;/strong&gt; and let the post's owner handle it, particularly if the post's owner is a registered user (this is visible on the user's profile page) and thus can be expected to be coming back to their own account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T14:26:22.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1988" CreationDate="2015-04-10T15:40:57.983" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I use the Plants tag, it automatically changes it to Flora.  Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14062/personal-plant-survival&quot;&gt;Personal Plant Survival&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T10:39:07.383" Title="Plants tag changes to Flora" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1987" CreationDate="2015-04-10T16:16:24.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plants&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plants&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plants&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flora&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flora&lt;/a&gt; they are basically the same thing.  The change just keeps things more organized around here.  This way when someone wants to search questions about plants if they select plants OR flora they will get all the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/flora/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/flora/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T10:39:07.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1969" CreationDate="2015-04-10T18:01:21.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't the correct answer here be a combination of tags?  for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this makes more sense than a single tag for a particularly narrow concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T18:01:21.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-12T17:34:19.633" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14123/in-an-all-out-nuclear-war-how-long-should-people-remain-sheltered&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has an odd &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/14123/revisions&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175396/in-an-all-out-nuclear-war-how-long-should-remain-sheltered?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copied&lt;/em&gt; by another user into a new, separate question on Worldbuilding (which was subsequently answered)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14123/in-an-all-out-nuclear-war-how-long-should-people-remain-sheltered&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14107/how-long-after-nuclear-apocalypse-is-it-safe-to-go-out&quot;&gt;a duplicate&lt;/a&gt; of the copied version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content dispute notice added&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unlocked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content dispute notice removed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-opened&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merged with the question it had originally been marked as a duplicate of, which was marked as a duplicate with &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; one prior to the merge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tip my hat to Michael Kjörling for all the work he did on this, but there's still one problem: Despite a good, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; well-received &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14123/in-an-all-out-nuclear-war-how-long-should-people-remain-sheltered/14126#14126&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/278/mark&quot;&gt;Mark&lt;/a&gt;, the question still shows up on the &quot;Unanswered&quot; tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot from earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZiQFq.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can no longer see the bug, so it seems to have resolved itself, but I'd be interested in seeing if anyone else has had the same issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T11:48:22.353" Title="This unanswered question isn't so unanswered" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-12T17:48:16.317" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;On April 9, in response to flags, I deleted an answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13907/what-is-the-least-expensive-way-to-annihilate-humanity/13980#comment33709_13980&quot;&gt;What is the least expensive way to annihilate humanity?&lt;/a&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/13911/28&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; reads, in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fund global warming denialists, then if you have investments in the fossil fuel industry, you can actually make a profit. See e.g. the Koch brothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had received this comment from the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This isn't about making the money though: it's about utilizing the available resources ($1 bil) to, y'know, kill everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is more of a proto-answer/outline -- not developed (presumably why it got flags).  Also, according to the OP it's not an answer to his question.  As noted in the &quot;insufficient explanation&quot; post notice, we're looking for answers that provide explanations (and answer the question), not just one-liners.  In contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/13980/28&quot;&gt;this answer along the same lines&lt;/a&gt; was added later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, when moderating these kinds of one-liner answers, I'll add the post notice, leave a comment guiding the user, and leave a flag active to come back in a day or two to see if it got fixed, deleting if it didn't.  There were three reasons I didn't do that in this case: (a) the answer came from an experienced user, one we would generally presume to be familiar with site expectations already; (b) the comment from the OP; and (c) the question was drawing a lot of attention (and answers) on what for some are hot-button topics.  So I added the post notice (as explanation) and deleted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This decision has been challenged, so I'm bringing it to the community: What should have happened with this answer?  And what should happen now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T19:48:39.480" Title="What should be done with this answer?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2015-04-12T18:17:04.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the real question here is how far an answer can and should go in echoing what should be common knowledge to any educated person.  Seems to me there are two possible ways of doing this answer.  One would be for me to write a tome on the process by which burning fossil fuels causes global warming and its long-term consequences (that is, probable extinction of higher life forms, including humans), adding a long digression into the psychological and economic motivations of the denialists.  To do this adequately would not only take months (likely more space than StackExchange provides), it has already been done by others, who've made a much better job of it than I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other approach is simply to point out that the answer exists, and details can be found elsewhere.  That merely requires two sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3545" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T18:17:04.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2015-04-12T18:47:57.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started writing this thinking it would be a couple of paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was sadly, sadly wrong. So I've divided it up a bit. Hope you don't mind. I do have a summary at the bottom and a &quot;TL;DR&quot; at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Too Long; Didn't Read:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep the answer deleted. Get rid of some other poor answers, and improve similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Does it answer the question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer answers the question, technically. Funding the fossil fuel industry would, in the long run, hurt the human race. 'Course, we're already doing that. But this would accelerate it. So I feel like it's an answer, from a certain point of view.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What about these ones?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give some other answers to the same question (some deleted, some not):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Fund analysis and development of the next Candy Crush.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One: Create an internet virus. Use stuxnet as a template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Four: Hide until the holy war is over.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Start a website where you can ask or answer strange questions. Call it &quot;QueueExchange&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are some examples of joke answers the question received. While I hate to call out specific posts, it should be clear that these were &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; meant seriously. There was at least one other answer that I feel is extremely poor, but I won't quote it because I don't wish to embarrass that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet all of these answers answer the question. They &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;, in principle, happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear that we don't want the site to descend into a bunch of jokes. Yet it seems that at times, we don't quite take things seriously. Is this the fault of the asker or the answerers? Could the asker have done a better job of posing the question, or should the answerers just kept quiet? Is it that the question is too broad, in the sense that there are too many possible answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I . . . ?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question is too broad because it is, like many other (popular) questions on Worldbuiling, a &quot;How can I . . .&quot; question. This one doesn't literally use those words, but it's in the spirit of them. It sets a task and asks for ways to accomplish that task. These questions seem to be too broad. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=how+can+I&quot;&gt;Just look at the list!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions do inadvertently encourage jokes. Are there some gems? Absolutely. Are there some awesome answers? Yes! But there are a lot of joke answers, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So what?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to say is that there are poor answers to these sort of questions. We need to re-examine them and perhaps do a bit of cleanup. I don't just mean mods and high-rep users coming in a deleting stuff (though that may happen); I mean a concerted effort by &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; - askers, answerers, editors - to fix up these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I didn't answer your question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I actually answered your question yet. Perhaps near the beginning. But I digressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, looking back, I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; answer it. I think that it's not fair to this answer to delete it when there are other, shorter, joke answers that are still up, and getting votes.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I vote that we either A) undelete this one or B) significantly improve/delete other non-serious answers. Not just on the question at hand, but on other past questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually much more in favor of B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This answer addresses the question but was deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other answers are jokes, but (also) address the question and stay up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How can I . . . ?&quot; questions seem to get a lot of poor answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's address these poor answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either undelete this answer or (as I would favor) get rid of the joke answers, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have to improve the &quot;How can I . . .?&quot; questions to avoid getting joke answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Possibly from the same point of view that Darth Vader killed Anakin, admittedly.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; A couple of mine are in there, unfortunately.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Fortunately, the really good answers are being rewarded a lot more.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T19:48:39.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-12T21:41:57.927" Score="17" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems &lt;strong&gt;we have a problem.&lt;/strong&gt; Specifically, a downvoting problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the private beta, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4/29&quot;&gt;Should this be a high-voting site?&lt;/a&gt; which received (relatively speaking) massive community support. A passage from the accepted answer on that question seems to have gone by largely unnoticed, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Downvotes are also important! Sometimes answers have problems, sometimes &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; have problems. One of the most important things for a new Stack Exchange site is attracting experts. The number one thing that turns off experts is noise. If someone has a lot of experience, and takes a look at our front-page, we want them to immediately think &quot;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is an interesting question,&quot; or &quot;Oooh, I was &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; struggling with that, let me share my knowledge,&quot; &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Wow, ok. What a bunch of amateurs. Seriously, 10 upvotes? Did &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; thought go into that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that most people are only, or almost exclusively, voting &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;. Voting up quality content is great, but we also need &lt;strong&gt;downvotes&lt;/strong&gt; for bad or &quot;not useful&quot; content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look at the moderator Analytics data, the specifics of which cannot be shared in public, there are peaks and valleys on the graph of upvotes, whereas the downvotes &lt;em&gt;barely register&lt;/em&gt; on the graph when viewed using the same scale. This Analytics data tells me that in the past 28 days, of all votes cast, &lt;strong&gt;about 97% were upvotes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer allows looking into database dumps. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/280622/sites-by-upvote-to-downvote-ratio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some aggregate statistics&lt;/a&gt; for all sites say that we, on average, &lt;strong&gt;vote up posts 48.5 times for every downvote cast&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/195762/average-number-of-votes-on-all-sites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; tells us that on average, with 10079 posts (not including deleted posts) &lt;strong&gt;each post on average receives about 5.40 upvotes and 0.16 downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;, for a 34x ratio. This agrees well with the Analytics data. Note that this actually means that on average, &lt;em&gt;less than one post in six is ever downvoted&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is perhaps even more alarming is that we actually have a substantial number of &lt;strong&gt;deleted, upvoted answers&lt;/strong&gt;. I used the search feature to get a list of all deleted answers with a net vote score of +1 or higher. At the time of writing this, it returned 35 hits. Expanding the search to answers voted net zero and higher and deleted, it returned &lt;em&gt;263&lt;/em&gt; hits. That is, out of our some 10,000 answers, a full &lt;em&gt;2.5% or so was deemed bad enough to be delete-worthy, but were not deemed &quot;not useful&quot;.&lt;/em&gt; I occasionally come across answers when simply browsing the site that have been deleted by someone other than the owner, but which are not negatively voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Content curation requires both upvotes and downvotes.&lt;/strong&gt; It's how the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A model is able to consistently produce high-quality questions and answers that actually match each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; aren't people downvoting more?&lt;/strong&gt; If the content is bad enough to warrant outright &lt;em&gt;deletion&lt;/em&gt;, surely it is bad enough to warrant a downvote as well; but there can also be plenty of content which warrants a downvote but not a delete vote. &lt;em&gt;Delete votes are not super-downvotes, just like close votes aren't super-downvotes;&lt;/em&gt; the actions are separate for a reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a highly active community on this site, which is great. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What can we do&lt;/em&gt; to encourage that community to actually exercise the downvote button more?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that a downvote isn't permanent; it gets locked in a few minutes after being cast, but even once it has been locked in, &lt;em&gt;if the post is edited&lt;/em&gt; (by anyone) then the vote can be retracted and even reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T18:25:13.913" Title="Where are the downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|voting|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2015-04-12T22:26:04.083" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why aren't people downvoting more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some possible explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Many questions are subjective, and have no &quot;wrong&quot; answer.&lt;/strong&gt; This is not the case on most other Stack Exchange sites. For example, on Mathematics, an answer saying that $x+x=\frac{x}{2}, x \in \mathbb{R}$ will get downvoted to hell because it's wrong.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; On Worldbuilding, you don't see many cases where answers can be blatantly wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we also need downvotes for bad or &quot;not useful&quot; content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of answers that aren't so good are still &quot;useful&quot;. Unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The community is too soft.&lt;/strong&gt; I notice a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; mood change when I swing from, say, Physics over to Worldbuilding. We're rather lighthearted - perhaps too much so - and more accepting of ideas that aren't so good. As a group, Worldbuilding's users welcome pretty much anything. We seem to have subconsciously developed lower standards than other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are going to jump on me for that last bit. Yes, I'm talking about science questions. I've harped on it before, and I'll use it as an example: &lt;em&gt;we don't downvote crap science as much as we should&lt;/em&gt;. By &quot;crap science&quot;, I ineloquently mean ideas that are only somewhat based on science and are instead speculative. I see a lot of posts regarding the insides of black holes, parallel universes and the stuff of popular science - not scientific journals. Some of the stuff here would get downvoted on science sites because it isn't science. We let it go by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science is just one example.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People don't want to lose that 1 rep.&lt;/strong&gt; Downvoting answers loses you one rep point. While that's the same network-wide, I'd speculate that we have a much, much, &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; higher answer-to-question ratio than most Stack Exchange sites. A higher percentage of our posts are answers, so people are less likely to downvote. If we had more questions, I think downvotes might be &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; higher. Slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can we do to encourage that community to actually exercise the downvote button more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Set higher standards.&lt;/strong&gt; No more of that &quot;crap science&quot;. Much as I'd like to see as many questions as possible use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, there's no way I can do that, because it will fail just as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag failed. It was overused. I don't want to see that happen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can agree to downvote speculative stuff to bits, like a wiener dog run over by a cement mixer. I hope everyone remembers how we agreed to keep &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; based in at least basic logic. I say we go out an apply that idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Think.&lt;/strong&gt; It's so easy to keep upvoting, especially on posts where there are a lot of upvotes. My sports team had the motto &quot;Don't be a sheep!&quot; (Ironic) Let's do the same, because I feel like this is an issue at times on Worldbuilding. I know we have some long posts - I'm trying to make mine shorter - but we should really take the time to read them in their entirety. This may lower the upvotes, even if it doesn't raise the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll admit one thing: I don't downvote a lot. I probably should, but I don't I apologize if I seem to be criticizing everyone else; I am guilty of the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also add that just because an answer is wrong is no basis for deleting it. We can delete answers that don't actually answer the question, are spam, etc., but we can't delete wrong answers. This has always annoyed me a bit, but it's Stack Exchange policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It claims that the case holds even for $x \neq 0$&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-04-12T23:07:01.143" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T23:07:01.143" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1999" CreationDate="2015-04-13T17:25:32.770" Score="22" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the most common reasons for downvoting a post on this site? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can I do to avoid being downvoted, and what can I do to improve my already-downvoted post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-04-13T19:02:06.207" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T14:35:20.547" Title="Why was my post downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|faq|voting|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1998" CreationDate="2015-04-13T17:25:32.770" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;When science isn't science&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science and speculation aren't a good mix. When the two meet in one post, it's incredibly easy to speculate that something might be a good scientific theory. However, this may also attract downvotes: where science is required (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag), we like to see &lt;em&gt;hard, verifiable&lt;/em&gt; science, preferably with citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can improve this by&lt;/strong&gt; removing the speculation from your post. Make sure what you're claiming is science  &lt;em&gt;actually is&lt;/em&gt; science, not a mix of speculation and the stuff of popular science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1996&quot;&gt;HDE226868's answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1995/where-are-the-downvotes&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1995/where-are-the-downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro-forma comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;The scientific claims in this post appear to be wrong. Where science is required, we like to see *verifiable* science. You can improve this by making sure what you're claiming is science  *actually is* science. See [Why was my post downvoted?](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1999) for more explanation.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Joking posts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having humour is good, and we welcome it here - &lt;em&gt;as long as it doesn't cloud your contributions&lt;/em&gt;. If you're thinking of posting a quick, jokey answer (or question), it may be better suited to a comment. For example, if the question asked is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I destroy the Earth with minimal effort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then merely answering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Develop a new addicting game and let humanity wipe itself out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a good answer. While the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; is something that others might appreciate, the answer space should be left for full answers. If you're prepared to justify and explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; your addicting game would wipe out humanity and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you might go about doing this, then we'd love to have that answer. If not, consider leaving a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can improve this by&lt;/strong&gt; reining your humour in or explaining why it works. If you haven't posted yet, consider commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro-forma comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;This answer appears to be a claim without justification. You can improve it by explaining *why* this idea would work. See [Why was my post downvoted?](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1999) for more explanation.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Lack of explanation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is partly related to the last point. If you've written up an answer with a great idea of yours that answers the question perfectly, but you've still been downvoted, this might be why. When writing answers, it's good to consider how &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; will read it: someone without your knowledge of your idea. If the post might be unclear to them, or if you're in some doubt, consider adding more explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are great, but if we can't understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they're answers, they're likely to get downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can improve this by&lt;/strong&gt; adding explanation to your post. If you're not sure what needs explaining, you can try leaving a comment on your own post for another user to respond to, or you can stop by in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and ask for suggestions on how to improve the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro-forma comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;This post demonstrates a good idea, but needs expanding on. You can improve it by adding some explanation. See [Why was my post downvoted?](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1999) for more explanation.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Incorrect answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody likes admitting they're wrong. However, if another user thinks you've got something wrong in your post, they may have downvoted it. (They may also have left a comment explaining what was wrong, but it's not mandatory.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific answers are often the easiest to fix: you may have used the wrong theory or a wrong number somewhere. A quick edit should fix that. However, the nature of many of our questions means that answers can often seem wrong to some people and right to others. If it's only one downvote, let it go: if it's more then there may be a bigger problem in your post to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can improve this by&lt;/strong&gt; correcting the errors in your post. Comment or ping someone in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; if you're not sure where they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no pro-forma comment for this.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments on incorrect answers should be tailored to the inaccuracies of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not answering the question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is slightly more serious, as answers that don't actually answer the question can attract Not An Answer flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10820/what-sort-of-punishment-would-replace-fines-in-a-post-scarcity-society#comment-25417&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; explains, many questions on this site are speculative and based in fiction. When you answer a question, &lt;em&gt;you must take for granted the premises in the question&lt;/em&gt;. If the question says dragons exist, answering that the question is invalid because dragons don't exist is not a good answer. Instead, assume dragons &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; exist and reconsider your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can improve this by&lt;/strong&gt; reconsidering your answer in the context of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pro-forma comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;This does not appear to answer the question. You should reconsider your answer, taking the ideas in the question to be valid and true. See [Why was my post downvoted?](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1999) for more explanation.&lt;/code&gt; (consider also casting a NAA flag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this post has not cleared up why your post was downvoted, it may just be One of Those Things. Voting on Stack Exchange is anonymous and personal; your votes are yours to do as you wish with, as are other people's. You can try leaving a comment on your post to ask for an explanation of the downvote, or you can try coming into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to talk it over with some other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T14:35:20.547" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-13T17:25:32.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2015-04-14T00:09:55.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am one of the worst offenders (serial upvoter, stingy downvoter), so I speak from experience. I certainly don't mean this post as guidance for other (down)voters, merely as an exploratory analysis at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I got past the point threshold for voting on closing question, I noticed that I almost entirely stopped downvoting. If I can flag a question for closing at no reputation cost, cleaning the exchange and simultaneously asking for other people's input (unless a mod is involved it's a cooperative close), there's little point to also downvoting the question. I have voted to close probably about 100 questions, while my downvotes are a trickle by comparison. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as &lt;strong&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/strong&gt;  pointed out, this exchange is fairly subjective. Just because a question looks silly to me, it doesn't mean it won't get 10,000 views and 100 upvotes. Actually, it seems that the relation between what seems silly to me and what gets upvoted the most is slightly negative if nonzero. So another reason to withhold judgment right there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I will downvote any posts about non-trace oxygen-hydrogen atmospheres and other such abominations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T00:09:55.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-14T01:38:49.340" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always assumed the number next to the review link was the number of items in the queues, ans its non-matching caused by the queue being emptied (by others) without updating the indicator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now it's clear that this is not the case. Even reloading the page shows it still at (4), but the queues are empty and there is not enough activity to imply that new items are appearing and disappearing too fast to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find 4 of anything, or non-zero of anything.  So what's it for? It can't be counting what I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; do because it appears out of nowhere (that's what prompts me to work the queues) and generally goes down in value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T03:32:44.777" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T03:32:44.777" Title="what is the number next to the 'review' link?" Tags="|support|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2002" CreationDate="2015-04-14T02:21:59.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are far from the first person to ask this.  There are lots of questions about this on Meta.SE, some of which lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230742/162102&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  The bottom line is that the counter in the header is the &lt;em&gt;total number of things awaiting review&lt;/em&gt;; it's not personalized for you.  It includes things you can't review -- because you already did, because you skipped them, or because there are queues you don't have privileges to review yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four items in the queue is not at all bad for a site at our stage of development.  If you see the number start to climb (and not go down) and you're already doing the reviews you can do, then it's time to bring it up on meta or in chat to try to get the review queues some love.  Otherwise, just keep doing what you're doing and treat this number as an overall site indicator, not an indicator of your own to-do list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T02:21:59.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-14T07:22:37.857" Score="7" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check+science-based&quot;&gt;83 questions tagged both reality-check and science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and another &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check+hard-science&quot;&gt;one question tagged both reality-check and hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wikis excerpts for the tags say, respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reality-check:&lt;/strong&gt;  For questions asking whether or not a particular concept is realistic in a given context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;science-based:&lt;/strong&gt;  For questions that require answers based in hard science, not magic or pseudo-science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hard-science:&lt;/strong&gt;  All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to me to be a progression here, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; being the most relaxed but still requiring some degree of maintenance of suspension of disbelief (you can plausibly have a question involving dragons and unicorns tagged reality-check), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; on the other end of the scale requiring any claim in an answer to be backed up by citations (which means the unicorns are probably out the barn door).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, any &amp;quot;higher requirement&amp;quot; tag would seem to imply the lower requirements as well. You could hardly have answers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question that wouldn't pass the requirements of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, for example, but answers to a reality-check tag don't have to meet the standards of a hard-science question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these tags don't really serve to categorize the question, and each question is limited to a maximum of five tags, these &amp;quot;meta tags&amp;quot; should be used sparingly, and there has been plenty of discussion right here on our meta if we should have them at all, with vocal proponents of both sides. &lt;strong&gt;Using more than one of the above tags on a single question&lt;/strong&gt; however doesn't seem to me to make sense in any situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Thus:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; imply &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, without that having to be made explicit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; imply &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, without that having to be made explicit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said alternatively, &lt;strong&gt;does it ever make sense to use more than one of these three tags on a single question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim of this question is not to decide the fate of our current 84 questions. If we decide that the tags do imply one another, then we can later decide what to do with the questions we currently have that are in that case redundantly tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:32:52.547" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:32:52.547" Title="Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2015-04-14T09:11:30.200" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I partially disagree and partially agree that they imply each other, fortunately it's easy to demonstrate in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; asks &quot;is this possible/feasible/plausible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; asks &quot;answer this using hard science&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if we ask a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a rocket weighing 10 tonnes, with 5 tonnes of that being propellent and efficiency similar to our current best performing rockets. What is the maximum acceleration and top speed of that rocket?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, entirely answerable, but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand if I asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a rocket weighing 10 tonnes, with 5 tonnes of that being propellent and efficiency similar to our current best performing rockets. Would that rocket be able to get into an orbit around mars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could usefully use both tags here. This question is both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &quot;is this possible/does this make sense&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &quot;answers should be based in science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I do agree with you though is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; implies &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Those two are much more closely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T10:07:58.993" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T10:07:58.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2015-04-14T11:25:32.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with TimB's answer, and just to add a few points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, as the wiki says, needs to be backed up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; need to be backed up but should be free of flights of fancy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is, as you say, the most relaxed, and answers only have to be &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt;, not necessarily scientific. Flights of fancy are fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have to specify more than two of these on any one question, and in most cases one should be sufficient. The most important part here is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does not fit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, and the two together on one question &lt;em&gt;may be&lt;/em&gt; grounds for immediate tag editing (unless it's unclear which is meant, in which case the author should be consulted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; cases, one of these tags should be sufficient: if it's really necessary, more details can be specified in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T11:25:32.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-14T15:38:16.500" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/21087116#21087116&quot;&gt;As I said yesterday in chat&lt;/a&gt;, I've got plenty of free time over the coming weeks, so I'm going to try to work on something useful for us. Specifically, SEDE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What statistics could we make use of here? What do we want to know about the habits of the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can look at the database schema on the right hand side of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page on SEDE&lt;/a&gt; to get an idea of what data we might have access to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What queries would be useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please note: if you're looking for the queries themselves, they are now in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2013/worldbuilding-data-queries/2014#2014&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T17:54:26.400" Title="What data queries would be useful here?" Tags="|discussion|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2015-04-14T15:47:47.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I'd be interested in seeing is how the average up and down votes per question has varied over time. I've a feeling votes were generally easier to come by earlier on in the life of the site but I've not seen any solid evidence to support that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T15:47:47.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2015-04-14T15:53:40.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another thing I'm curious about is looking at the distribution of questions with how many answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. how many questions have 1 answer, how many 2, how many 3, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T15:53:40.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2015-04-14T16:12:12.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that have gotten &quot;a lot&quot; (TBD) of answers in &quot;a short period of time&quot; (TBD).  I speculate that when this happens (e.g. with hot network questions), we end up with two kinds of answers we might want to address: duplicates and one-liners.  If that hypothesis holds, then a query to find these questions so the community can figure out what needs to be cleaned up on them would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T16:12:12.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2015-04-14T16:37:07.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Promising new users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With our sometimes-high volumes, it can be easy to miss that newcomer who gave a decent answer to a question or two and hasn't participated more yet.  We want to find and encourage users like this.  So a query that finds users with, say, 3 or fewer posts, some upvotes, and maybe none (net) downvoted would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T17:52:52.303" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T17:52:52.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2014" CreationDate="2015-04-14T17:42:30.920" Score="14" ViewCount="719" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is here to house SEDE (StackExchange Data Explorer) queries relating to this site. Originally spawned from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2007/what-data-queries-would-be-useful-here&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Queries are categorised below depending on the data they look at. If you have written a query and would like it added to the list, just edit it in in the correct category (if you feel there is no category, create one). &lt;strong&gt;Please do not add new answers for other queries.&lt;/strong&gt; I've made the answer CW so most people can edit, however if you have insufficient reputation and would like your query added, leave it in a comment below or talk to someone in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel like you can improve on a query, just fork the query using the link in SEDE and make your changes. You can change the link in the answer when you're done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T13:43:06.160" Title="Worldbuilding Data Queries" Tags="|discussion|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2015-04-14T17:42:30.920" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Voting and Moderation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/opensource/query/335866/votes-over-time?VoteType=2#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upvotes Over Time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows how many votes each post received on average over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300940/percentage-of-questions-closed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percentage of questions closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows a simple rundown of total questions, closed questions, and the percentage of questions closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Post Statistics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300919/distribution-of-votes-on-answers#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution of Votes on Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows how many answers have how many votes. I find the graph most interesting here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300923/distribution-of-votes-on-questions#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution of Votes on Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows how many &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; have how many votes. Again, the graph is very interesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300932/asked-closed-reopened-per-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asked/Closed/Reopened per week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the number of questions asked, closed and reopened together in a graph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/313404/status-percentages-of-questions-asked-each-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status Percentages of Questions Asked Each Week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the percentage of questions asked each week that have accepted an answer, have been closed, or are still open.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300931/number-of-questions-with-respective-number-of-answers#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Number of questions with respective number of answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the number of questions that has each specific number of answers. (For example, how many questions have 0 answers, 1 answer, 2 answers, ..., 10 answers, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/353426/closed-question-info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed Question Information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - Compilation of closed questions with some useful data. For full use, you may need to write your own filtering criteria, right now it's at least useful for finding all of the closed questions asked during a certain time or by a certain user. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/403565/what-questions-have-the-highest-ratio-of-votes-to-views?MinViewCount=2500&amp;amp;MinScore=10&amp;amp;LastNDays=6000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What questions have the highest ratio of votes to views?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Highlight &quot;high-quality&quot; questions, with high votes relative to the viewcounts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Posts to Watch&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300384/possible-downvote-worthy-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible low-quality answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - gives a list of answers which satisfy some common criteria of low-quality answers. Note that being in this list does not automatically make an answer low quality, they should still be evaluated on their own merits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302938/possible-downvote-worthy-answers-interactive?MaxBodyLength=500&amp;amp;ScoreUpperThreshold=0&amp;amp;MinComments=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible low-quality answers - Interactive version&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - a version of the possible low-quality answers query that lets you set your own thresholds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302141/new-answers-to-old-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New Answers to Old Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows answers from the last week posted on questions more than 30 days older.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302101/highest-voted-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Highest Voted Posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - gives the top 15 highest voted posts from the last week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302107/lowest-voted-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lowest Voted Posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - gives the top 15 lowest voted posts from the last week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302123/most-commented&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most Commented&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - lists the 15 most commented posts of the last week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302126/most-viewed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most Viewed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - lists the 15 most viewed questions of the last week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/302129/most-edited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most Edited&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - lists the 15 most edited posts that were last edited in the last week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Users&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1244442/suggested-edits-reputation-league?n=100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested Edits Reputation League&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - tells the top users in terms of the reputation earned from suggesting edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/171748/distinct-contributors-per-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distinct Contributors per week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the number of &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; users engaged in different activities per week. Taken directly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2667/27355&quot;&gt;TWP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/161189/users-by-date-joined#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New Users per week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the number of new users who joined each week. Again, from TWP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300967/newuserprogress?daysSinceJoined=14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New User Progress&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows newly-contributing users, showing numbers of questions/answers and rep.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/372267/list-of-questions-of-a-given-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User Total and Average Scores on Questions Asked&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows average and total votes by user across all questions asked, for users with more than 10 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/489021/counts-and-scores-and-averages-for-questions-and-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User Question/Answer Count/Score/Average&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - Shows the count of questions and answers, the total score for questions and answers, and the average score for questions and answers for users with more than 500 rep. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/405626/curious-inquisitive-socratic-badge-progresse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How Socratic Are We?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Shows counts of positively scoring questions asked in distinct days, for all users, ranked by total counts. Helpful for those hunting for &quot;Socratic&quot; badges, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Tags&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=science-based#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Usage over time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows how much a tag has been used over time as a graph of number of posts against time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300939/tag-experts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Experts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows the user who has the highest answer score for each tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/499298/tag-expertise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Expertise&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - shows in how many tags the user is top expert (based on the Tag Experts script above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;General Activity/Utility&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/161411/site-activity-and-votegraph#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Site Activity and Voting graph&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - a graph of significant stats like votes, questions and answers, all per week. Copied from TWP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/322527/answersbydayofweek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions and Answers Posted Each Day of the Week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - proof that we're all doing this instead of getting work done :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/334859/posting-users-and-posts-by-hour-of-week-gmt#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posts and user activity by hour of week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - 00:00 Sun to 23:59 Sat UTC, averaged over history of the site (change DaysOfHistory if you want something more recent).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="76267" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T13:43:06.160" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T13:43:06.160" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-14T17:42:30.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2015-04-14T17:54:26.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much a tag has been used over a period of time, and cross-tag comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could let us see which tags are becoming popular and should be monitored, which tags are no longer being used and should potentially be phased out, and which tags are used in conjunction with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could also be used to analyze tags before, during and after Weekly Topic Challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T17:54:26.400" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2017" CreationDate="2015-04-14T18:07:30.037" Score="6" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just removed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exoplanets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exoplanets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exoplanets&lt;/a&gt; tag from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14312/what-would-the-conditions-on-a-methane-world-be-like&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which clearly just needed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; tag. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exoplanets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exoplanets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exoplanets&lt;/a&gt; tag is still used on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14066/youve-made-it-to-another-star-now-how-do-you-find-its-planets&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which involves arriving in another planetary system, viewing the planets as exoplanets, as opposed to planets in viewer's original system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exoplanets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exoplanets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exoplanets&lt;/a&gt; tag, or should it be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of this, because I can't see many questions needing to differentiate between planets and exoplanets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, exoplanets are just planets that aren't near where you are. It's similar to the idea that ever person is a foreigner - to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T09:25:41.147" Title="Should we make &quot;exoplanets&quot; and &quot;planets&quot; synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2015-04-14T18:15:46.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it could be argued that exo-planets is not needed at all.  The difference is all in perspective, and if that perspective is not evident in the question I would hazard a guess that the question isn't great in the first place.  I would be fine with removing or making them synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T18:15:46.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2015-04-14T18:33:32.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An exoplanet is just like a planet except that it's in another solar system. Using the tag would make sense only (maybe) if it was using the in-world perspective. We would be talking about a far away planet vs the planets we can see with naked eyes/affordable telescopes.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, as James already mentioned, it's just a matter of perspective. From the omniscient point of view, the differentiation doesn't add anything.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T18:33:32.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2015-04-15T09:25:41.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, and since others seem to as well I've made this change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T09:25:41.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T20:45:43.183" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Methane-world tech questions left me wondering what tag it ought to have. &lt;em&gt;planets&lt;/em&gt; is about the planet itself, but what about a tag for alien (unearthly) conditions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is an existing tag suitable, or should I create a new one? If the latter, what's a name that would be meaningful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T23:02:07.863" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T08:40:22.803" Title="What tag should I use for questions about alien conditions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2022" CreationDate="2015-04-15T21:00:48.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about planets, how planets interact with the surrounding system and how the large-scale properties of a planet affect its smaller-scale features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Large-scale properties&lt;/em&gt; can include atmosphere and how it would affect the &lt;em&gt;smaller-scale features&lt;/em&gt; of the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we try to make tags to further categorise planets, we'll end up with Tag Soup™, where users who don't have experience here will find it hard to correctly tag their questions. Not a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should, in general, be kept &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; generic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/universes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;universes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;universes&lt;/a&gt; might not be a viable tag because there are so many possible things a question tagged it might be about, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; is just about the right level of generic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:00:48.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-04-16T06:55:48.233" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see a load of medieval questions, not only because of their context, but because of the wide variety of other categories that frequently entail questions of such a foundation. These include magic and war, which just add to the depth of which our answers must reach to satisfy the hungry, medieval beast that is the OP. I think, if we encourage the use of it through a contest, we could get some highly refined, difficult to answer questions out of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be based on things that happened hundreds of years ago, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; continues to hold a lot of potential for great questions and even better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6724" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T06:55:48.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2022" CreationDate="2015-04-16T08:34:15.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very broadly speaking, tags should be used to &lt;strong&gt;categorize the type of domain knowledge that answers need to draw on.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When adding tags, &lt;strong&gt;ask yourself&lt;/strong&gt; the question &quot;is an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/abc-xyz&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;abc-xyz&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;abc-xyz&lt;/a&gt; the most suitable individual to answer my question?&quot;. If the answer to this is a resounding &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, then the tag probably makes sense; if the answer is anything less than that, then consider some other tag, or leave it out entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you are asking about &lt;em&gt;the planet itself&lt;/em&gt;, then tagging the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about &lt;em&gt;effects on the environment&lt;/em&gt; of some specific condition of the planet, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/environment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;environment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;environment&lt;/a&gt; is probably more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about &lt;em&gt;effects on the society&lt;/em&gt; of that condition of the planet then you could usefully tag the question simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about &lt;em&gt;the effects of&lt;/em&gt; commonplace space travel &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; the society &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; a planet, then a tag combination like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; probably makes sense to categorize the question. Note that such a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; and should not be tagged as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about the effects of a specific level of surface gravity on the development of airships, then a combination like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/airship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;airship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;airship&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt; probably makes sense, possibly alongside &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technological-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technological-development&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; depending on the specific focus of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And so on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just because&lt;/strong&gt; the text of a question starts out with, say, &quot;I have a civilization living on a planet where...&quot; this does not necessarily make it a question &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;. The major exception to this is &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; knowledge about planets (that is, naturally formed celestial objects orbiting a central star) is &lt;em&gt;specifically useful in answering the actual question being asked&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T08:40:22.803" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T08:40:22.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2029" CreationDate="2015-04-16T21:01:49.147" Score="7" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked some questions on here relating directly to &quot;big reveals&quot; I'm lining up for an interactive story I'm planning to run over the internet with some friends. The discovery is a big part of the fun, and I'm worried about some of the participants googling plot points and spoiling it for everyone else. However, I asked these questions on here not only for the help you all have given me (which has been wonderful, by the way), but also in case they could help someone else later on, so I don't want to have to delete them. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; To clarify, I was never seriously considering deleting the posts, and I'm happy to find out that that's not even really an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3316" LastEditorUserId="3316" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T21:28:18.560" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T21:28:18.560" Title="What should I do about audiences googling plot points?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2015-04-16T21:10:32.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This essentially comes down to a discipline issue with the people you're running the story to. You need to convey to them that Googling plot points about it wastes your time and their time and is pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this end, we really &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to see you deleting your questions: they're valid and good content that we don't want to lose. Moreover, StackExchange will not &lt;em&gt;let&lt;/em&gt; you delete them: in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;help center page on deleted questions&lt;/a&gt;, it says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users can delete their own questions if the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has zero answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;only one answer, but that answer has no upvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I've seen no question here go without an answer for more than a day, I'm going to assume that all your questions have at least one upvoted answer, meaning you can't delete them. To get them deleted, you'd need to flag for mod attention and while I can't say for sure what that would bring, I'm fairly certain that they'd deny the request because it's good content. (Mods, could one of you chime in here?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially given that you're going to be running this with friends, you should be able to make it clear beforehand that you don't want them to go off and Google stuff about your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T21:10:32.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2015-04-16T21:18:44.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant issue here basically boils down to whether others have found your content valuable. From a quick look at your profile, that appears to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that significantly changing the content of a post after the fact can be seen as defacing the content, which in severe cases can actually get your account suspended for vandalism, even if it is your own posts. This is especially true if people have spent time answering a question, or if there have been upvotes on the post, but other factors can also be at play there. So you certainly can flag a post and request deletion, but it is highly likely that such a flag would be denied. As Monica Cellio stated, moderators generally won't delete posts that the post owner can't delete normally (and even if deleted, they will still be visible to high-reputation users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, specifically section 3 &quot;Subscriber Content&quot;, which starts out by stating (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is &lt;strong&gt;perpetually and irrevocably&lt;/strong&gt; licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You grant Stack Exchange the &lt;strong&gt;perpetual and irrevocable&lt;/strong&gt; right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store such Subscriber Content and to allow others to do so in any medium now known or hereinafter developed (“Content License”) in order to provide the Services, &lt;strong&gt;even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by You.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the entire purpose of this site is to be findable. The entire purpose of the whole Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;network&lt;/em&gt; is to increase the corpus of knowledge on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, unfortunately, &lt;strong&gt;there isn't a lot you can do.&lt;/strong&gt; If you aren't willing to perpetually license what you post to Stack Exchange, then you shouldn't be posting it on any site in the network. If you don't want the people you are involved with to find your posts here by searching, and possibly derive plot points and spoilers from them, then you will simply have to fudge what you do with them enough that it isn't readily recognizable as being based on the questions you have posted and answers you have received in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T21:18:44.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-17T23:07:02.030" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand the logic behind accepting purely fictional answers, such as several composed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14561/brutal-unsubtle-brainwashing-how-does-it-work&quot; title=&quot;this discussion of brainwashing&quot;&gt;this discussion of brainwashing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I can tell, a very vague question was posed, and now there is praise (and no criticism) for a piece of fiction that proposes no answers. Why is this valid? What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's nothing more here than I'm seeing, it's actually a double problem: not only does it need a sharp challenge, but furthermore any strong challenge will appear a criticism of writing ability and creativity rather than of the fiction as SE answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T13:01:41.067" Title="How to evaluate fiction in place of answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2033" CreationDate="2015-04-18T08:45:23.013" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;whenever I post a comment it gets deleted within a minute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is happening, why do all my comments get deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9075" OwnerDisplayName="cflat" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T10:07:37.567" Title="why does the software here keep deleting my comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2032" CreationDate="2015-04-18T10:07:37.567" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted your comments because they were being unpleasant towards another community member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answers are getting deleted because they aren't answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it float on water? That might help tranporting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question, not an answer and also repeats what several other answers already say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lol no why would that be possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also not an answer, not really even a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit like I mentioned in my answer on your other question, many power sources just add lots of weight to your city and produce little energy in comparison to the amount require to suspend a big city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For every extra power source you add, you add weight, so you need more energy to support the weight, so you need more power sources..... it is vicious circle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is balance to be struck and it lies in the realms where you produce lots and lots of power. Perhaps best method would be by matter convertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This on the other hand is a good answer. It addresses the question, it provides valid reasoning as to why the answer is true and raises a good point. As a result this answer has been upvoted and you've recieved rep for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can say is that if you keep writing answers like this one you will gain rep. If you write them like the first two then they will be deleted or you may well be downvoted and lose rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you reach 50 rep (which only needs a couple more upvotes so you are close) then you can comment everywhere, which is what you seem to be trying to do in a number of these cases. Comments are much more relaxed about what can be posted, although we still try and keep the site clean so long discussions should happen in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to remember that we like to try and keep the site clean. Questions should be clear, answers should answer the question. Anything else makes the site a lot less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's good that you want to get involved, we're happy that you seem to like the site, but to keep the site useful we need to make sure that the quality on answers is high and that every answer really is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T10:07:37.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-18T12:20:27.087" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people on the worldbuilding website ask series of related questions when building a setting, either because they divide the work into manageable chunks or because they want to follow up on a previous question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the appropriate way to aggregate links to a series of related questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T12:47:56.177" Title="Series of questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2034" CreationDate="2015-04-18T12:47:56.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that other posts provide context for the current post, the appropriate way is to &lt;strong&gt;link from the post where the context is needed to the posts that provide the context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This does not mean&lt;/em&gt; that every question should be linked to every other question that relates to the same world one is building, or even every previous question posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link to provide context, not to show off unrelated previous work.&lt;/strong&gt; All your existing questions are 2-3 clicks away (click on the username, then click on the &quot;questions&quot; tab) for those who might be interested; that is plenty enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T12:47:56.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2031" CreationDate="2015-04-18T13:01:41.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which answer to accept is entirely up to the person asking the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, one should &lt;em&gt;as the asker&lt;/em&gt; accept the answer that was &lt;em&gt;most helpful to oneself in solving the problem at hand&lt;/em&gt;. Note that this does not mean accepting the most upvoted answer. Compare what I wrote in response to a previous MWB question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1940/29&quot;&gt;Picking the sole answer as the best answer&lt;/a&gt;. A highly upvoted answer is usually a good candidate for acceptance, but that is not a prerequisite. (As a case in point, I recently saw an answer on &lt;a href=&quot;http://workplace.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;The Workplace&lt;/a&gt; that had been downvoted to oblivion, yet was accepted by the OP.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are by design a speculative site; very few questions being asked here have hard-and-fast answers. Some questions seek answers drawing on various fields of science, whereas other questions do not need or want answers to be bound by the known sciences. That is something each person writing an answer to any question should respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should obviously strive to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they answer the question as asked, and should ideally be &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; about what they are proposing, but I feel that &lt;strong&gt;the bottom line is&lt;/strong&gt; that we cannot, as a community, realistically &lt;em&gt;impose&lt;/em&gt; a particular style on answerers. What each member of the community &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is to take how well the answer actually answers the question, as well as the answer's level of clarity, into account when deciding &lt;strong&gt;if and how to vote&lt;/strong&gt; on the particular answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T13:01:41.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-18T15:28:48.833" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/worldbuilding-blog-phase-1-and-2-raising-the-idea-and-definition&quot;&gt;the community discussed&lt;/a&gt; starting a blog. Good ideas were raised and an initial scope was formed. However, the discussion stagnated after the realisation that in-house SE blogs are &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/115/2014/6/11&quot;&gt;on hold&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange hasn't been quick about re-opening blog creation. However, as many people noted in the last thread, Worldbuilding may be a good candidate for having one, and now that we have a mature community, I think now may be a good time to revisit the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/21169121#21169121&quot;&gt;As I said in chat&lt;/a&gt;, I am happy to both set up a blog on an external platform (probably Wordpress or similar) and contribute to it. We have a basic scope already defined in the last post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell me what you think. Do we still want a blog? Who might our contributors be? Opinions please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T02:30:34.743" Title="Revisiting the Blog" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2015-04-18T16:03:17.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be an awesome idea. One thing I've noticed about Worldbuilding (when compared to other beta sites) is that we have a really strong community. We know each other pretty well, and I think we're pretty welcoming to new users. This isn't a place where it's easy to ask stupid questions - people won't criticize your question just because it seems far-fetched. A blog would strengthen this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One idea I like is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/524/worldbuilding-blog-specific-article-ideas/527#527&quot;&gt;Liath's suggestion of &quot;masterclasses&quot; about certain topics&lt;/a&gt;. Some people here have a lot of knowledge about certain subjects, and it would be great to have their help writing mini tutorials on different world building tidbits. I'd be perfectly happy to volunteer to contribute to posts about astronomy, space and physics, should those ever be featured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll spend some time answering some of the questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/worldbuilding-blog-phase-1-and-2-raising-the-idea-and-definition&quot;&gt;overactor put forth&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the purpose of this blog?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To discuss the community and talk a bit about who we are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To give some canonical information we would otherwise give in questions and answers on worldbuilding.stackexchange.com.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To get some publicity for the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the scope?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tips, tricks and ideas to help world builders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;News from the community (whatever that might be).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the benefit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publicity for the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A greater sense of community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A place to expand a bit. I have no specific ideas for what this means, but I think a blog would help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My support for this hinges on this idea being approved by Stack Exchange, which might not be the case. If that's the case, then we can treat it like an official blog. If we don't get the explicit support, though, things could get . . . tricky. In that case, I don't think we could legally claim affiliation with Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. Which would defeat the whole purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T22:26:10.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2039" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-18T16:37:21.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag when announcing or discussing on of Worldbuilding.SE's topic challenges, which are typically &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T12:38:50.207" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T12:38:50.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2040" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-18T16:37:21.770" Score="0" Body="For questions about one of Worldbuilding.SE's topic challenges." OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T12:38:38.863" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T12:38:38.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-18T16:39:05.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is for questions about Worldbuilding.SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unofficial blog, Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;. It is independent from Stack Exchange and is not affiliated with the network, but those behind it are users of Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange currently does not start new blogs, so there is no official site blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T21:41:00.327" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T21:41:00.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2042" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-18T16:39:05.290" Score="0" Body="For questions about Worldbuilding.SE's unofficial blog." OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-05-02T20:02:39.470" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T20:02:39.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2015-04-18T17:16:09.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing I'd like to see in a Worldbuilding blog is highlights of recent questions. Not even necessarily high-view or high-score questions, but the author of the article would pick a question and go into some detail about it: look at the answers, etc. The people over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://security.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Information Security's blog&lt;/a&gt; do this already with their QoTW (Question of The Week) series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T17:16:09.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2015-04-18T22:37:31.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this can really work out well at all, as proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, don't get me wrong. There is nothing preventing a community member starting a blog on the subject of worldbuilding. It could even use content from the site; that's what the CC-BY-SA license is all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where things get trickier (also &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt;) is in trying to make the blog somehow officially or semi-officially associated with the site, or Stack Exchange. It opens yet another can of worms if it's going to be hosted off the Stack Exchange network. &lt;em&gt;I am not speaking for Stack Exchange in any capacity here&lt;/em&gt; (diamond moderators are not Stack Exchange Inc representatives) but I have doubts that something like that would be approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T22:37:31.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2015-04-19T02:30:34.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate that SE is not currently allowing sites to create new blogs.  &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; we can show that we have content queued up (not just good ideas, but people actually writing stuff), then I think we could petition them again.  But until we can show that this is more than just an aspiration, we're not going to get help from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody is of course free to set up an off-site blog.  A blog that has to be gated through one person (i.e. only the owner can post) will be seen as less open than one that allows direct contributions from a larger set.  It also creates a vulnerability; if that person becomes unavailable, the blog fails.  So, if looking at off-site options, I strongly urge people to look for ones that allow multiple owners/posters/administrators.  (I have no idea if WordPress is such a platform.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a good next step is to identify content, going a little deeper than the broad categories we've already identified.  What &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of tips and tricks?  What would we &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; about a featured question of the week?  &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; canonical information (that doesn't fit on the site itself)?  Who will write it?  How frequently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of a blog.  But I don't think the next step is &quot;create a blog&quot;; I think the next step is &quot;scope it out some more&quot;.  Back when SE was allowing blogs they expected communities to do that legwork first, and I think there are sound reasons for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T02:30:34.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2015-04-19T10:48:15.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic challenge generated 21 questions and 134 answers (no I didn't count them wrong... we really did get that many), for an average of 6.38 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions by date asked&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13768/cities-in-the-trees?s=21|0.0000&quot;&gt;Cities in the trees&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13774/would-it-be-possible-for-a-city-floating-on-water-to-exist?s=20|0.0000&quot;&gt;Would it be possible for a city floating on water to exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13794/how-would-cities-be-designed-that-were-threatened-by-dragons?s=19|0.0000&quot;&gt;How would cities be designed that were threatened by dragons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13810/urban-cohabitation-of-dragons-and-non-dragons?s=18|0.0000&quot;&gt;Urban cohabitation of dragons and non-dragons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13819/how-to-build-a-city-surrounded-by-giant-spiders?s=17|0.0000&quot;&gt;How to build a city surrounded by giant spiders?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13892/a-modern-manhattan-city-planner-in-new-amsterdam?s=16|0.0000&quot;&gt;A modern Manhattan city planner in New Amsterdam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13898/city-design-freefall?s=15|0.0000&quot;&gt;City Design: Freefall&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13967/rapid-planetary-colonization-how-to-build-a-city-fast?s=14|0.0000&quot;&gt;Rapid Planetary Colonization: How to Build a City, Fast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13968/how-would-antigravity-change-the-design-of-cities-and-buildings?s=13|0.0000&quot;&gt;How would antigravity change the design of cities and buildings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14089/growing-a-city-literally?s=12|0.0000&quot;&gt;Growing a city (literally)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14110/designing-cities-inside-a-hollowed-out-asteroids?s=11|0.0000&quot;&gt;Designing cities inside a hollowed-out asteroids&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14167/how-to-build-a-tsunami-proof-island-city?s=10|0.0000&quot;&gt;How to build a tsunami proof island city?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14244/designing-a-city-around-a-giant-tree?s=9|0.0000&quot;&gt;Designing a city around a giant tree?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14421/can-i-make-a-movable-medieval-city?s=8|0.0000&quot;&gt;Can I make a movable medieval city?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14435/a-city-of-sand-stone?s=7|0.0000&quot;&gt;A city of Sand…stone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14456/size-of-a-medieval-fantasy-trading-port?s=6|0.0000&quot;&gt;Size of a medieval/fantasy trading port&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14535/how-would-cities-be-built-on-large-ruins?s=5|0.0000&quot;&gt;How would cities be built on large ruins?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14558/what-power-generation-method-is-the-best-to-sustain-a-hovering-city?s=4|0.0000&quot;&gt;What power generation method is the best to sustain a hovering city?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14581/just-how-unrealistic-is-a-hovering-city?s=3|0.0000&quot;&gt;Just how unrealistic is a hovering city?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14684/city-in-the-wake-of-the-yggdrasil-engineering-considerations?s=2|0.0000&quot;&gt;City in the wake of the Yggdrasil: Engineering Considerations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14686/what-are-the-design-considerations-for-my-underwater-settlement?s=1|0.0000&quot;&gt;What are the design considerations for my underwater settlement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions asked by&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8312&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8312.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/19.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7312&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7312.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5002.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6751.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/885.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7389&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7389.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/295&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/295.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2055&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2055.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9050&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9050.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2685.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2685.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9029&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9029.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3276.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=city-design#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good job!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T10:48:15.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2103" CreationDate="2015-04-19T13:41:17.357" Score="8" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our sixth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 19 April - 3 May&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because it impacts almost all aspects of a world, from the mundane to the central, yet is often given lip service by authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just how did my creatures evolve to have blue skin? How could several intelligent species co-evolve in the same environment without outcompeting each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These types of questions often permeate a story to varying levels, and definitely shape the environment that the story takes place in.&#xA;  I've enjoyed these questions. I can see these sort of questions being asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let's build some cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T07:24:22.403" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2015-04-20T06:31:08.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are promoted as &quot;challenges&quot;, implying some kind of judging and competition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a call or summons to engage in any contest, as of skill, strength, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;em&gt;exhibit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;expose&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;showcase&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;feature&lt;/em&gt; would be better terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T06:31:08.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2051" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:12:17.830" Score="6" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6889/restoring-the-world-after-a-global-apocalypse&quot;&gt;Restoring the world after a global apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; a few minutes ago, and noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; tag. It suits the question, but the question itself isn't so much about the apocalypse as events &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the apocalypse - as you can imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a whole bunch of other &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; questions - and many are in the same vein as this one - that are really post-apocalyptic. Therefore, I propose a tag for them, phrased as either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/post-apocalyptic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;post-apocalyptic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;post-apocalyptic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, in keeping with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/post-apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;post-apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;post-apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T22:01:05.990" Title="Do we need a &quot;post-apocalyptic&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2050" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:18:04.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a worthwhile idea to try out to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest going with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/post-apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;post-apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;post-apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; and using the tag wiki excerpt to make it clear when each should be used. That way, someone typing &lt;code&gt;apocalypse&lt;/code&gt; into the tags field will be offered both and immediately see a short description of when each should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T21:18:04.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-04-20T23:10:10.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the religious or moral values of a subterranean species?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a humanoid species psychologically similar to humans that lives in underground caverns and tunnels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List item They have contact with surface dwelling groups, but the majority of the species still lives in their underground communities. This species was not originally subterranean dwelling but have been for the at least the past ten thousand years. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the species is descended from the original 900 or so who went underground to survive a planet wide disaster. They were the last of their species - there are no similar people surface side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My time frame for technology is rough but is the year 1600 at most.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Community size varies from smaller communities to large cities inside mountains. However such large cities are few in number. Most of the species lives in middle sized village or town environments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various underground settlements have regular contact with each other, although travel time obviously plays a large role in communications. Smaller communities are more isolated than the few big cities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The species eye sight and color perception is notably worse than humans, but their sense of smell is notably better (if this changes anything).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What effects would their underground lifestyle likely have on their religious or moral values? This question was originally asking about the effect on their culture in general, but I decided to narrow it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Does this work all right?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="295" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T22:48:24.033" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T22:48:24.033" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T13:08:26.397" Score="7" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is kind of related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1837/answers-that-contradict-questions-how-to-respond?lq=1&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, in terms of people sometimes answering with &lt;em&gt;this couldn't happen&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In writing some questions for the WorldBuilding.SE, sometimes I am looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; answers in which a reasonable answer is &lt;em&gt;this couldn't happen&lt;/em&gt; (with a clear explanation of why included).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've noticed a few questions, mine included, that do rely on the suspension of disbelief in situations that clearly would never happen, but asking about possible consequences anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; or [tag questions, which usually clearly state it is a world in which magic exists, but rather a non-magic world where the laws of physics have been suspended somewhat, for a specific reason, and what other possible consequences would be a reaction of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a lot of the cases, it is clear that the OP &lt;em&gt;knows&lt;/em&gt; it is not a realistic scenario, but simply wants to know what a world like that would be like anyway, maybe just out of personal curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still attracts a lot of comments and sometimes answers of &lt;em&gt;this would never happen&lt;/em&gt;, which are unproductive based on the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way a new tag could be added to address this? So that each of these posts isn't edited hours later with &lt;em&gt;I know this isn't possible in the real-world, but...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the irony that it is potentially a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; question looking for science-based answers, where the question asks you to ignore science for it's very existence, but it could potentially get rid of &lt;em&gt;this-wouldn't-happen&lt;/em&gt;ers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's kind of outside the realms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344/a-tag-for-speculative-questions&quot;&gt;speculative tag&lt;/a&gt;, as it is not necessarily asking for an &lt;em&gt;anything can happen&lt;/em&gt; answer &#xA;in an &lt;em&gt;anything can happen&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize from the questions that keep coming up in &lt;em&gt;similar questions&lt;/em&gt; that this issue has been addressed multiple times (Yo dawg, I heard you like meta, so I put some meta in your meta...), such as trying to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1828/modifying-the-science-fantasy-tag&quot;&gt;science-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; but as far as I've looked there hasn't been a solid solution yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we possibly decide on something so that anyone else asking could be linked to it? There seems to be a lot of uncertainty around this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I really should have initially added an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really speak for others on their behalf about whether they want to have this tag, so I'll use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14784/is-someone-travelling-on-a-space-elevator-escalator-possible&quot;&gt;my own question&lt;/a&gt; about a space elevator as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made it clear in the question (I hope) that it's not the possibility of the space escalator/elevator I'm after, but rather if one did exist, could a human potentially use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one good answer who seemed to understand what I was asking for, which was that you needed to take the reality of the wind into consideration when using the fictional elevator/escalator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the comments address the possibility of such an escalator/elevator, which is not what I was looking for. If I could have added a tag letting people know that the conditions are set in stone but the considerations of those conditions are what I'm seeking, it would have possibly saved a lot of those people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8312" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T06:15:05.760" Title="Possible new 'non-reality-check' tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2015-04-21T13:18:03.270" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see a &quot;non-&quot; tag I cringe a little, because tags are meant to indicate areas of expertise.  Somebody might be an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; or even in conducting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;s (though I admit that's a little farther out), but what does it mean to be an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-reality-check&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of tags more as &lt;em&gt;categorization&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;scoping&lt;/em&gt;.  The best way to limit the kinds of responses you're looking for is to say so &lt;em&gt;in the question itself&lt;/em&gt;.  If you say that you are looking for answers consistent with these premises, then &quot;that couldn't happen&quot; isn't an answer (and should be flagged as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T13:18:03.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T19:06:47.347" Score="7" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2037/revisiting-the-blog&quot;&gt;My last meta post&lt;/a&gt; on this subject showed that our community is interested in having a blog. The purpose of this post is to add some more scope before I create it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/524/worldbuilding-blog-specific-article-ideas&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Blog - Specific article ideas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - this post contains &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; article and content ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this post, I aim to come up with some of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific article/content ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Content you would be willing to write&lt;/strong&gt; - I am now looking for contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Timelines - how often should we post to the blog? My initial thought is a post a week. Is that too much or not enough?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T18:45:48.330" Title="Scoping the Blog - Specific Content and People" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-21T19:11:29.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be interested in one of the ideas from the last post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/525/2685&quot;&gt;community interviews&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One possibility would be interviews. Maybe once a month a community member gets interviewed about what brings them to worldbuilding, what they are interested in, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Interviewees could be high rep users (both long term and newcomers with a high impact on arrival), moderators, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be happy to conduct interviews and write them up into articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts of this nature might come about perhaps, as the linked post says, once a month. I think they should be rarer posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could alternatively run a content cycle: have a number of types of post, and put up a new one each week (so if we have types A to D, then posting one a week we'd go a month between two posts of the same type).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in the question, I think a post a week is a good timescale. Perhaps two, if we want to do a quick &quot;Question of the Week&quot;-type feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of regular contribution, I would also be willing to write a QotW style post each week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T23:18:28.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-04-21T19:18:33.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Selection of best questions and answers: What caused buzz in last month and some comment to that by author of such article&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T19:18:33.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-21T19:19:43.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First a general comment.  I like this idea and would be happy to help.  We have an &lt;em&gt;insane&lt;/em&gt; range of people here and it is a very entertaining community.  That should make for good blogging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So.  Here are the areas I feel I can contribute.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My specialty (academically) lies in international relations and philosophy (how in the world did I end up working in IT?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Culture and civilization:&lt;/strong&gt; Its one thing to have this great idea for a secret society or individual character, its another to weave that organization or person, into a greater cultural fabric.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have also studied world religions to a decent extent and would be willing to write on religion topics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two person entries.  Show how two specialties can blend together to form a more engaging world.  For example magic and physics (the whole conservation of energy thing)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Point/Counter-Point entries.  We disagree around here...generally in a tactful manner.  Find points of contention on a topic and have an entry that represents both views.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T19:19:43.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-21T22:37:11.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My thought process:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first thought was, &quot;Hey, I should do something science-y!&quot; The problem there, though, is that &quot;science&quot; is way too broad. I was implying to myself that I would restrict it to natural sciences, but again, that's way too broad. There's a reason there isn't just one giant Stack Exchange site for science. Also, I'm not knowledgeable in all areas of science, so it would be kind of inefficient to write up science posts and then not cover a good chunk of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my thoughts shifted to physics and astronomy, the things I know best. Actually, perhaps I should stick to astronomy. I could answer a good portion of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; questions raised on Worldbuilding - and in world building scenarios - but those questions are (no offense) pretty basic; blog posts about physics should be in-depth and come from someone with an in-depth knowledge of physics. Also, I'll be frank: Many of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; questions here are speculative, in part because people like speculative stuff. I think that it would be tough to write realistic posts that would still engage people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, but what specific bits about astronomy could I focus on? I can't just do post after post on various planetary systems. I already answer a lot of questions about various scenarios, and I have to say, it's getting to be a bit mundane. Again, I don't want to offend anyone, but a lot of the stuff is kind of basic and repetitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm thinking of is something in-depth - perhaps a masterclass-type-thing in astronomy for people trying to learn how to figure out what will realistically happen in a certain scenario. I wouldn't go over any specific topic that could be used in building a specific world, but I'd go over the principles of something - the tools and building blocks of astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme Bombardment: How to calculate and control the amount of collisions a planet will undergo, and just how much is too much for life on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hydrogen, Helium and Heat: Strange things that can happen when a planetary system wanders through a gas cloud.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternative Energy: How to provide astronomical sources of heat and/or light to planets and other bodies - no stars allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to Make a Stellar System (Without Really Trying): Galaxy collisions and the incredible things that can happen afterwards.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not shy away from math, and I would use calculus, if necessary, but I promise to keep it to a minimum. I would &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; to focus on planetary and stellar systems (and then on cool things that can influence habitability), but I'd love to branch out more - I gave some more expansive ideas already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could find the time to do this perhaps once every week or two. It would take some time to write up, although that depends on how long the post would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T22:37:11.457" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-22T01:43:46.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would be interested as well. There are a lot of subjects I'm interested in. A couple of years ago, I started to do maps and I came to learn all sort of things. I took a particular interest in the climates because I think they are really important and it's almost mandatory for me to get them right. They are hard to change and and will have a major impact on the people living in this area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So there the climates: how can we explain them, make easy to&#xA;understand with minimal inconsistency? Without a powerful dedicated&#xA;computer, it's not possible to do accurately but we could still have&#xA;something good. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geography: we have several topics on the Cartographer Guild with&#xA;what/what not to do on maps. Examples include how to place mountains,&#xA;deserts and rivers. It look simple but most novice get so many things&#xA;wrong. Other might simply emulate Earth without knowing what the are&#xA;doing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Economy: I find this topic interesting and I think we could develop on some topics such as: international trade, currencies, domestic production/trade: how much food does a farmer produce? how much money does the average commoner ears in a year? how many jewellers does my 25 000 citizen city have ... things like that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Politics: That's my specialty (similar to James). Designing intricated worlds is important in worldbuilding and story telling. It's what makes countries interesting to me (with the culture). This would include not only the central power but all the ramifications (if it's a feudal system) and other organizations (military orders, religious groups, mage organizations, merchant guilds. It would also include how the states interact with each other. There are plenty of theories about that. We could explain the different political regime, the different ''theories'' in international relations maybe (example: mercantilism, liberalism, imperialism, real politik, social darwinism...) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T01:43:46.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-04-22T02:01:23.137" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deploying your world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A blog is a good vehicle for covering topics &lt;em&gt;related to&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding that wouldn't actually be on-topic &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; Worldbuilding.SE.  We could have articles about &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;game-mastering&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;theatre/scripting&lt;/em&gt; that focus on how to reveal your world in interesting, informative ways that aren't just visits from the exposition fairy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's kind of vague, but maybe it'll inspire some concrete suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: my &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@cellio/revelation-for-rpgs-index-df7647e9a690#.czeg1kalc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs&lt;/a&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T05:09:48.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T05:09:48.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2015-04-22T19:00:49.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know, this is happening because a bit of misunderstanding about how tags work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that any given question have a determined amount of &quot;hardness&quot;. A question is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; when it obeys the constraints of the real world, and is &lt;em&gt;soft&lt;/em&gt; when it doesn't. That said, Hard/Soft is not a binary thing, it is more like a sliding scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have three tags at the moment that modify the &quot;hardness&quot; of a question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; implies the basic constraint-checking, sanity-based tests that goes with every more-or-less world concept. It's about checking the basic concept to see if it works, on works that &lt;em&gt;cohesion is important&lt;/em&gt;. A reality-check question is &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; than a non-reality-check question. While it checks the concept, it doesn't check for the science involved on the question - you could tackle magic in there, and everything would be fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is different. This tag explicitly indicates the use of real-world science. If this tag is applied to a question asking about &quot;is X possible?&quot; or &quot;Given that X exists, is Y possible?&quot; answers of the type &lt;em&gt;this can't happen in a hard-science-based setting&lt;/em&gt; are perfectly reasonable. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; doesn't open space to pseudoscience answers, magic or handwavium - it is &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. Something that fails reality-check would automatically fail science-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is the Skeptics.SE mode for Worldbuilding. This tag makes explicit the need for equations that match real-world phenomena, without room for any non-physic answer. It's like science-based, but must be backed up by references and math. This is, than, &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Something that fails science-based also fails hard-science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, putting science-based or hard-science in a &quot;this is possible&quot;-like question is more-or-less like strapping reality-check to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to keep in mind that the &lt;em&gt;science-based&lt;/em&gt; tag is not for &lt;em&gt;something that looks like science&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nor science-fiction.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Science-based is for questions that &lt;em&gt;want scientific answers&lt;/em&gt;. If you don't need the level of constraint that those tags deliver to the question, don't use them. You can create a question with other tags, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/colonization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;colonization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;colonization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want answers that don't adhere to real constraints and instead focus on your &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt;, you should do your tagging differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T19:00:49.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-22T22:34:11.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can do religion and classical anthropology. Happy to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T22:34:11.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-23T14:00:19.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love to contribute, but without any real area of specialty I'm not sure if I could come up with anything good. However, as I said in the last meta post about this, I'd like to see people talk about their reasons behind worldbuilding. You know, not so much how the world was built, but &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it was built. I find that the question of why is very important, and would like to show people how the best stories usually come about not because someone wanted a good story, but because there was something else they wanted to explore, and a story came out of it. For example, Tolkien used to say he created Middle-Earth as a way to play around with languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just realized this perhaps should have gone into the other blog question. But I would still like to volunteer to write stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T14:00:19.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T14:32:47.220" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2037/revisiting-the-blog&quot;&gt;last&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/scoping-the-blog-specific-content-and-people&quot;&gt;couple&lt;/a&gt; of posts have given the blog some scope, content ideas, and contributors. There are just a few more things we need before we can start writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one of those is a good name, which should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be somehow related to worldbuilding;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have the relevant .wordpress.com (or other equivalent on another platform) domain available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You may also want to propose a tagline.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one of these is a schedule. Here I'd like some more input from those who volunteered to contribute in the last post: &lt;em&gt;how often can you commit to writing something?&lt;/em&gt; This is not an &lt;em&gt;absolute&lt;/em&gt; commitment - a few missed days won't matter too much - but we should be putting content out regularly, so we need to work out how to do that. Tell us how much content you can commit to writing, and we can work out a schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; There is also a discussion about platform to be had, as Monica Cellio said in the comments. If you wish to chip in on this, please use &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/23112/blog-platform-discussion&quot;&gt;this chatroom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T08:15:22.427" Title="The Blog - Naming and Scheduling" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-04-23T14:51:40.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love to see an article on &lt;strong&gt;Suspension of Disbelief:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term&#xA;  coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor&#xA;  Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a &quot;human&#xA;  interest and a semblance of truth&quot; into a fantastic tale, the reader&#xA;  would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.&#xA;  Suspension of disbelief often applies to fictional works of the&#xA;  action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it would be a little too broad and opinion based to tackle in our usual Q and A format, but it is a key factor in world building of any sort. The ability to encourage and sustain suspension of disbelieve can make or break a good narrative.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T14:51:40.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2015-04-23T15:31:47.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Names:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Daedalus' Sandbox&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ok I can only think of one right now...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Schedule:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think each person should be willing to write once a month or so.  With a half dozen people that gives us pretty regular updates, though the more the better, I think ideally it would be updated at least twice a week to keep traffic stopping by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T15:31:47.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2015-04-23T16:34:59.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestion for the name: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Demiurge&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T16:34:59.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T21:21:32.947" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/close/7430&quot;&gt;this close review&lt;/a&gt;, I had some trouble with the close reason that my fellow close-voters gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about an event which could happen in a world. Yes, it's earth, but we have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt; tag that doesn't specify how different earth and earth-like have to be; this question could validly have been tagged with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one specific example. However, I am seeing a number of disagreements about what questions are off topic. We need to &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; define what fits here and what doesn't: we have the definitions in the help centre but they aren't helping. They get linked and then get their meanings debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was that question really off topic? Granted it's not a great question, but I don't think it was off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just what is on and off topic here?&lt;/strong&gt; Should we review the help centre text?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T11:40:09.167" Title="Clarify what off-topic really means" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2015-04-23T22:15:42.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was that question really off topic? Granted it's not a great question, but I don't think it was off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it was off topic, in my opinion, as what is on topic is defined as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and off topic has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of that question we aren't given enough information to know what the impact on society or culture of the event will be as we don't actually know what the event is, or what it will be portrayed as having been as I think the asker may be going for conspiracy. So they aren't asking about what the social changes or cultural changes will be due to what has happened, but what the reactions of people will be, which is a plot element, being part of the events in the sequence of cause and effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7666" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T22:15:42.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2015-04-24T01:26:11.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess that I don't see why the question is off-topic either. If you'll pardon my saying so, it is ill-worded and unclear, and perhaps this was the problem. Let me see if reformulation helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is clear enough in outline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Busy Times Square crush&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suddenly, all the giant TV screens fritz and show an empty Nevada road&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A message appears, reading, &quot;Submit&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the TV screens fall to the ground, with all the damage entailed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How might major earth organizations respond to this in the short term?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apart from sending emergency personnel, how would the City of New York respond? Would they plead for calm, demand revenge, point fingers at hypothetical enemies (Al-Qaeda, for instance), or what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would major news services respond?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would the state and federal governments reply?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How might foreign news services present the same information?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Video of what happened will go viral, leading to all kinds of instant armchair &quot;experts&quot; with more or less elaborate theories about the event... like what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this has anything to do with what &lt;strong&gt;actually&lt;/strong&gt; happened. It's a matter of thinking through how our current world functions to make a series of reasonable projections. This is stuff the FBI, CIA, and lots of others do routinely. Surely that is worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would clearly be &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; topic would be asking such questions as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I have my characters respond?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think would be a good cause for this effect?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I see this question as about projecting realistic short-term responses from large and relatively predictable organizations and their spokespeople. So I would say it needs rewriting but then should be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T01:26:11.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2015-04-24T01:58:12.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the use of Daedalus in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to schedules, I suggest that some people may be best able to commit to a block of writing over this or that period. American academics, for instance, are commonly swamped beyond belief at the end of semesters (Nov/Dec, late Apr/May), and couldn't possibly commit to something that has them writing at such times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I (for instance) were to write three or four blog entries in rapid succession, then leave them with whoever is nominally &quot;running&quot; the blog page to be used whenever a gap comes up. This means I can work irregularly, but the editor doesn't have to panic if someone suddenly can't meet a deadline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree also that roughly 2x/week posts is the way to go: not so much as to overwhelm normal traffic, but enough to encourage hits and return views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I defer to anyone who actually knows anything about online publishing, blogging, web traffic, and so on. I'm only guessing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T01:58:12.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T08:42:31.560" Score="6" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to WB (not SE), and I've posted a couple of answers, but I wasn't sure if I should credit my inspirations for ideas, or provide links to stories with the kind of idea I'm thinking of. For example, if I give an answer where I suggest a desert planet where water is very scarce and is effectively used as currency, should I add &quot;a bit like Dune&quot;? Does that add to the questioner's understanding of the answer, or (given this is a site about building original worlds) does it inhibit the imagination, and make the answer worse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Related to, but not the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1731/are-answers-solely-referencing-novels-movies-etc-okay&quot;&gt;Are answers solely referencing novels/movies/etc. okay?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9198" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T11:31:25.493" Title="Should answers credit inspiration?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2076" CreationDate="2015-04-24T10:22:23.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am always adding the inspiration both to the questions and answers. I think it gives people better understanding of what is on my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14460/hiding-own-space-program&quot;&gt;Hiding own space program&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of answer (where I also quoted Dune): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13129/magivore-designing-a-magic-eater/13133#13133&quot;&gt;Magivore - designing a magic &amp;#39;eater&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T10:22:23.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2076" CreationDate="2015-04-24T11:31:25.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That really depends on what you mean by inspiration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's just a related idea that didn't directly lead to your answer then there is no need.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If something is a close match then it might make sense to credit it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your answer is very similar to or builds on something else then you should definitely credit it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really the things to keep in mind are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the other person contribute a significant amount to this answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so it's only polite to credit them (and the license may require it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does including the reference/inspiration improve my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so then it makes sense to include it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if all you are doing is talking about a Desert World then Dune is probably not relevant. However if talking about something similar to Spice or Sandworms then it becomes much more so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T11:31:25.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2015-04-24T11:40:09.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree this question falls into a gray area. I think it is off topic though for one simple reason. It's about an individual event and the localized reaction to that event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the reaction of the crowd be? Scream and run away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the reaction of the news anchors be? That depends on the news anchor - it's a question about a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could easily be world building questions built around a scenario like this - but the question as it stands is asking us to write the outcome of a plot event. That's not the same as asking us to build a world and is explicitly off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T11:40:09.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-04-24T18:45:48.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Count me in. As to the content, I dunno, have been swamped all this month, so I can't catch up with the entire discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we stick w/ non-fictional issues, I could do future economics posts, elaborating on the Kardashev scales, investigating the economics of space colonization, etc. As to my out-of-WB knowledge set: I'm a PhD in political science methodology (as in Bayesian stats and stuff) and work in business intelligence/big data analytics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do creative stuff instead, maybe a chunk of Alice and Rynn's adventures, one every month or so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T18:45:48.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-04-24T18:55:25.730" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, I got lots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abusing the Kardashev Scales for Fun and Profit&lt;/strong&gt;,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Economics of Space Colonization, or Why I'd Sooner Colonize the Gobi Desert&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why AIs Love Paperclips&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tropes, Subvert or Play Straight?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lampshade Hanging for Dummies&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 101: Worldbuilding Or Why You Can't Have Oxygen-Hydrogen Atmospheres&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 102: How to Technobabble Your Handwavium Most Persuasively&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 103: How to write a lovable character&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 104: How to write a memorable character&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 105: How to write an intelligent character&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding 106: How to write a super-intelligent character &#xA;(when you're not a genius yourself)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Like A Pro: How to Make Your World Setting Reusable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T19:14:36.543" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T19:14:36.543" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2015-04-24T19:01:53.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the drive-by (been a busy month), but here are a few thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leonardo's Workshop&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Writers' Pensieve&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Rogue and Spaceship Factory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T19:01:53.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2015-04-27T08:15:22.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slightly relevant musing here; Wordpress does indeed support multiple users; as one of my favourite anime blogs; Random Curiosity has multiple bloggers to keep up with how many shows come out in a given season these days. Although they have their own domain, this can be seen on their &lt;a href=&quot;http://randomc.net/about-this-site/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't know if I can commit to being an active contributor to such a project (used to be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://detarame.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;anime blogger myself&lt;/a&gt;, but I retired due to work commitments and that place is now only for links to my RPG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said; as for naming ideas, did anyone consider:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The Magrathean Forges&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Magrathea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hitchhikers Guide reference&lt;/a&gt;; Magrathea is the premium heart of the intergalactic worldbuilding industry (they make planets to order, and this canonically included the Earth); which is VERY appropriate for this stack exchange, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T08:15:22.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-27T15:24:23.900" Score="9" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have now gone through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2037/revisiting-the-blog&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/scoping-the-blog-specific-content-and-people&quot;&gt;different&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2066/the-blog-naming-and-scheduling&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; about the blog. Finally, it is almost ready to start working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created the site. You can find it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://magratheanforges.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://magratheanforges.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;. I went with &quot;The Magrathean Forges&quot; as the name since it seemed most easily linked to worldbuilding; any objectors please come forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributors: the site is ready for you to start your writing. I will need either your Wordpress usernames &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; an email address to add you as a contributor - either leave them in an answer or ping me in chat. You can also give me anything you want to be added to the About or Contact pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T19:27:42.043" Title="The Blog - up and waiting for writing" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2016-07-08T23:39:45.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2015-04-27T16:09:10.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the first topic I would like to put up on the blog is about &lt;strong&gt;the world building process.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had several very good answers and discussions here on the topic.  If anyone would like to contribute let me know.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be macro-level.  Then perhaps down the road we can go into some more specific topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T16:09:10.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2015-04-28T08:41:07.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of those specific topics I'd love to eventually write to let out my mad inner storyteller: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Handwavium or Hardcore? What does my story need?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Building an Economy 101: Supply and Demand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chekov's Shotgun vs. Scenery Porn&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, no idea when I'll get around to actually writing any of that; especially since May and June tend to be busier months at work. Late April has been mercifully quiet, which is why I've had time to join in on this stack exchange at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a couple of quick notes from a past blogger: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People tend to stay longer and look around if you have some eye-catching elements (without them being too loud and garish, of course). Using purely a default wordpress style is generally not going to help with that. I did things like tweak the CSS and added a new custom banner to my chosen template to mix things up a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it wasn't an issue for me in the past, these days you've also got to consider whether you have a site with big buttons to attract mobile device users, and whether you want a narrow-width site so you can attract people with antique PCs with rubbish resolutions; and again, small screen mobile devices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your main source of income (of visitors) is links from other popular places; though Google does throw some people your way on occassion, especially when you have some unique topics. For instance, things like my old Touhoumon posts and visual novel diaries got alot more google hits because no one had written much about them. Funny posts also tend to get more referrals and pingbanks, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you want to carry on with Hitchhikers guide references, it does lend itself to several workshop type topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Improbability Drive:&lt;/strong&gt; [Insert Reality Check Topic Here] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Petunias at Terminal Velocity:&lt;/strong&gt; ['The things not to do' type Topic Here]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Restaurant at the End of the Universe:&lt;/strong&gt; [Insert posthumous world&#xA;analysis Topic Here]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T08:41:07.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1978" CreationDate="2015-04-28T17:10:35.683" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although at one hand I have grown up in environment advocating freedom of information like the other two answers do, I do believe their arguments are intrinsically flawed, because they do not account for the responsibility one holds when being trusted with information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike in the past knowledge can nowadays equate power far easier than it used to. To just give a very down to the earth example to prove the point: passwords. Passwords are secret pieces of knowledge that through their obscurity provide a lot of security. If you have the knowledge about a certain password it gives you a lot of power. And thus, when given knowledge, one does have the responsibility to share it responsibly. Now, to give a more practical example of knowledge that unlocks power: Lets say the following question would be fully on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the cheapest and easiest way one can create the most lethal bomb using publicly available materials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you're a chemist who is able to build an extremely lethal bomb using stuff anybody has at home. Should you share that publicly? Personally I would argue that that's incredibly irresponsible. Humans tend to act irrational from time to time against their nature (e.g. due to depressions) and the more power those humans have at their fingertips, the worse the consequences can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean we should suddenly ban lots of questions? I don't think so. Questions that will &lt;em&gt;too easily&lt;/em&gt; give people unproportionally much power are definitely questions one should be mindful of (for example &quot;What kind of human inflicted wounds are the most lethal?&quot; can be easily wrapped in a nice 'I want to design a race of assassins' package, but is not an answer that I think a doctor should answer). A question how to annihilate humanity for cheap however doesn't really seem like something that we need to be wary of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T17:10:35.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2015-04-28T17:38:52.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in a comment to James, this is a bit of a busy time for me and anyone else in an academic institution (whether a student or a educator). I personally probably won't have time to write anything for a few months while I transition from college to professional life, but I'll keep an open mind in case there's anything I can put together easily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, could I draw something for the banner image? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T19:27:42.043" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T19:27:42.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T18:18:55.997" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look around the tags section, you will see we have many useless or repetitive tags. Many of these only have 1 question. I suggest we begin to burn some of these as it is foolish to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/futurology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;futurology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;futurology&lt;/a&gt; tag and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt;. That is only 1 example of many that I can bring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the community have to say about this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally suggest we burninate all tags that have only 1 question for a week or more after their creation. I wanted to run this by some meta users before I took any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T20:26:48.000" Title="Burning underused tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2095" CreationDate="2015-05-01T18:44:27.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Burnination&lt;/em&gt; is the remedy for widely-used tags that we don't want.  It's an alternative to editing it out of all the questions.  So that's not what we're looking for here; if there are one or two uses of a tag and that tag needs to go away, just edit the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infrequently-used&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;unneeded&lt;/em&gt;; it's possible to have a specialized tag that sees little traffic.  I'm not saying that's the case here, just that it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags with only one use &lt;em&gt;and no tag wiki&lt;/em&gt; are auto-destroyed after a while (I think six months but I might be wrong about that).  The way to preserve a valuable tag that is, or risks becoming, single-use is to write a good tag wiki for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not surprised that we have redundant tags; every beta goes through an initial burst of tags followed by a rationalization/cleanup of them.  Those should be cleaned up.  If you know what needs to be done, please just do it -- your edit will bump the question and if others disagree, they can respond.  (Please don't do so many at once that your earlier edits -- and other people's new posts -- get buried.)  If you're not sure what to do, please bring it to meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your efforts to improve our tags.  Fixing this not only helps organize existing content but makes it clearer where new stuff -- both questions and new tags -- should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T18:44:27.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2095" CreationDate="2015-05-01T20:26:48.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no - as Monica says, it's possible to have tags that &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; useless - only 1 or 2 questions, no tag wiki - but could actually add a lot of value to categorisation of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're over 2k rep, so you have access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;moderator tools&lt;/a&gt; - at the bottom of the page (on the stats tab) is a section for recently-created tags. I tend to watch this and act on new tags as seems to be necessary - if they add no meaning or anything helpful, I remove the tag and let it die. If they seem useful, I might add a tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T20:26:48.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-03T22:31:02.323" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions like the following seem to be valueless to anybody except the question poster which is strictly against SE mentality where a question should hold value for all future readers and not only the question poster: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15508/how-to-bootstrap-technological-development-from-one-man-in-the-forest-to-buildi&quot;&gt;How to bootstrap technological development from one man in the forest, to building a spaceship?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am seeing more and more questions that very precisely outline the story or world a user is building and next ask a very specific question within that world. For now I have flagged the question as too broad (which I believe it is as well), however what I wanted to ask is whether we're open to extremely specific questions that do not hold value for future readers (aside of being fun to read, but that's not what worldbuilding.SE and SE itself is about (aside of maybe &lt;em&gt;puzzling.SE&lt;/em&gt;)) or whether I should flag them anytime I see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More questions like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15631/what-would-the-weather-on-this-continent-be-like&quot;&gt;What would the weather on this continent be like?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could instead have been: How to determine the weather on a continent based on the locations of mountains and ocean flows? (And dropping the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; content of the OP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15528/how-to-move-on-as-a-society-without-a-common-language&quot;&gt;How to move on as a society without a common language&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could instead have been: How long would it take a group of strangers to create a common language? (And dropping all the specific detail)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T04:16:33.067" Title="Aren't some questions becoming too localized?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2015-05-04T07:55:21.480" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm borrowing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/279/david-mulder&quot;&gt;David Mulder&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2099/arent-some-questions-becoming-too-localized#comment4699_2099&quot;&gt;comment to the question&lt;/a&gt; here, because it adds useful context to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I fear is that it will just create a positive feedback circle where more and more questions like those will be asked, as they are/can be fun to read and thus get upvoted and even make it to the hot questions list. A question like the linked one should never ever have been allowed to get 14 upvotes. It's both too broad &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; too localized, yet a large number of users (1470 views) now will think it's a good question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, note that Stack Exchange actually &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;too localized&quot; close reason two years ago now. There is a fairly explicit message here: a question being &quot;too localized&quot;, as defined by that close reason, is not &lt;em&gt;in and of itself&lt;/em&gt; reason enough for closing it. There needs to be something else wrong with it &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/184154/157730&quot;&gt;Closing changes: on hold, unclear, too broad, opinion-based, off-topic reasons, bye-bye to Too Localized&lt;/a&gt;, point 5(A) in the question, on Meta Stack Exchange for the relevant announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; say that you feel the question is &quot;too broad&quot;. I have not read through it, but the fact that it currently has four &quot;too broad&quot; close votes out of the five needed for closing, definitely indicates that the community agrees with this assessment. &lt;em&gt;That is a different issue, however.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Too broad&quot; is &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; a reason to vote to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up/down voting is on an axis different from close/reopen (and to some extent also delete/undelete) votes. Note that the canonical upvote/downvote reasons focus on &lt;em&gt;research effort, usefulness and clarity&lt;/em&gt;. This is, to a large extent, orthogonal to close-voting which is mainly based on &lt;em&gt;topicality and answerability&lt;/em&gt;. Someone who votes up is unlikely to also vote to close, say, but a downvote is decidedly not the same thing as a close vote. People who vote up or down also don't need to explain to anyone why they vote the way they vote, and are not held accountable (note that even diamond moderators cannot see who voted how for a given question). It is therefore possible to have a question that receives high votes, yet is off-topic. In this regard, the Hot Network Questions list is a blessing in disguise; it brings in lots of traffic, but lots of people who follow those links tend to not be very familiar with the specific site's scope and standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question as &quot;too localized&quot; never really told the poster &lt;em&gt;what needed to be done to fix the question&lt;/em&gt;. Hence it was not &lt;em&gt;actionable&lt;/em&gt; which (yes, I agree with this) made it a poor reason to close a question. A good reason would tell the poster what to do to fix what is wrong (and comments could be used to add further details if needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, a question that would when that close reason existed have fallen into the &quot;too localized&quot; bucket would these days receive poor votes for its lack of general usefulness, but assuming it is otherwise on-topic and answerable would remain open, and may or may not be answered depending on the specific situation. If the question is too broad, unclear, not on-topic for the site, etc., then it would get closed &lt;em&gt;as such&lt;/em&gt;. The latter is something that can either be fixed, or the question can be a candidate for migrating to a more suitable site in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T07:55:21.480" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2102" CreationDate="2015-05-04T19:52:42.733" Score="11" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love this stack. I've just recently gotten into it and have been absolutely enthralled with the deep discussions and thought provoking responses that I've witnessed in my short time here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I am not a writer. I do not have any use for what I see on this stack. I just love the theoretical discussions that are held on interesting topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often times I see questions that start with &quot;I'm writing a story that requires a world where...&quot; Or &quot;I'm building a world without&quot; and I sit there like &quot;hmmm maybe I'm doing this wrong&quot; So, do I have to have a specific endgame in mind in order to post? I've seen people say that this stack is for &quot;question authors to ask about things relevant to them as well as to future askers&quot; and I'd like to know if I should continue posting the things that interest me even if I won't actually implement them into anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T18:28:10.667" Title="Do questions HAVE to be for some greater cause?" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2015-05-04T20:19:15.927" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there is no hard and fast requirement that you be in the midst of building your own world to participate.  If you have an area in which you are knowledgeable and can help answer questions all the better.  If you played some game or read some book and had a hypothetical question come to mind that can be good info as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the content you post is useful and on topic you are certainly welcome to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T20:19:15.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2047" CreationDate="2015-05-04T20:53:20.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic challenge generated 26 questions and 112 answers, for an average of 4.3 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions by date asked&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15530/what-needs-to-be-different-in-order-for-a-parthenogenetically-reproducing-specie&quot;&gt;What needs to be different in order for a parthenogenetically reproducing species to evolve sentience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15435/red-giant-habitable-zone&quot;&gt;Red giant Habitable zone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15432/macroscopic-life-in-the-dead-sea&quot;&gt;Macroscopic life in the Dead Sea?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15343/can-a-creature-evolve-to-preserve-its-own-environment&quot;&gt;Can a creature evolve to preserve its own environment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15278/sea-creature-moving-via-rotational-motions&quot;&gt;Sea creature moving via rotational motions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15263/how-would-a-plant-evolve-to-germinate-inside-a-person-or-other-animal&quot;&gt;How would a plant evolve to germinate inside a person (or other animal)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15231/what-form-of-life-was-brought-to-earth-by-aliens&quot;&gt;What form of life was brought to earth by aliens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15216/interlocking-ultra-high-forest-is-it-possible&quot;&gt;Interlocking, ultra-high forest, is it possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15215/how-could-something-like-a-gargoyle-evolve&quot;&gt;How could something like a Gargoyle evolve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15192/is-bio-luminescence-possible-in-aquatic-mammals&quot;&gt;Is bio-luminescence possible in aquatic mammals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15156/evolving-another-pair-of-limbs&quot;&gt;Evolving another pair of limbs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15101/survival-without-emotion&quot;&gt;Survival without emotion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15061/how-would-a-reflecting-oven-jay-evolve&quot;&gt;How would a Reflecting-Oven-Jay Evolve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15056/people-of-the-sea-living-on-a-migratory-fleet&quot;&gt;People of the Sea- Living on a Migratory Fleet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14962/how-far-in-the-future-would-a-modern-human-need-to-go-before-they-were-functiona&quot;&gt;How far in the future would a modern human need to go before they were functionally a different species than people of the time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14919/food-economy-of-pre-civilization-carnivorous-humanoids&quot;&gt;Food economy of pre-civilization carnivorous humanoids&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14877/evolution-of-a-creature-that-uses-light-as-a-weapon&quot;&gt;Evolution of a creature that uses light as a weapon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14861/could-an-animal-species-evolve-to-use-electricity&quot;&gt;Could an animal species evolve to use electricity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14822/is-my-humanoid-creature-too-far-out-there&quot;&gt;Is my humanoid creature too far out there?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14807/what-are-the-conditions-in-which-a-creature-would-evolve-more-than-one-brain&quot;&gt;What are the conditions in which a creature would evolve more than one brain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14790/evolution-of-a-naturally-invisible-prey&quot;&gt;Evolution of a naturally invisible prey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14789/evolution-of-a-naturally-invisible-predator&quot;&gt;Evolution of a naturally invisible predator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14788/animal-life-on-a-planet-orbiting-a-red-dwarf&quot;&gt;Animal life on a planet orbiting a red dwarf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14743/how-can-people-naturally-become-smaller&quot;&gt;How can people naturally become smaller?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14741/what-would-be-the-evolutionary-adaptations-of-a-subterranean-fantasy-race&quot;&gt;What would be the evolutionary adaptations of a subterranean fantasy race?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14738/how-could-animals-evolve-like-they-do-in-pok%C3%A9mon&quot;&gt;How could animals evolve like they do in Pok&amp;#233;mon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions asked by&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9207&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9207.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9199&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9199.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6799.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2092&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2092.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6453.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/90&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/90.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6751.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9127&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9127.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6421&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6421.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9029&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9029.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2947&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2947.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6429&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6429.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8312&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8312.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7190&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7190.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8792&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8792.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3276.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/295&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/295.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7389&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7389.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9029&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9029.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300992/tag-usage-over-time?TagName=evolution#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tag Usage Graph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T20:53:20.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2155" CreationDate="2015-05-04T21:26:49.687" Score="6" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our seventh topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 4 May - 17 May&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/295/&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/295.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because too often fictional worlds have no visible economic activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let's build some cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T01:21:20.467" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2015-05-05T07:47:03.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not at all! Many of our most famous questions are completely theoretical - to name one, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12219/in-what-war-would-one-modern-military-vehicle-make-a-difference&quot;&gt;In what war would one modern military vehicle make a difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't feel comfortable with asking theoretical stuff that you won't apply to anything, you can always get involved in the discussions and debates with answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T07:47:03.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T13:18:07.257" Score="6" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;Collaborative project's chat room&lt;/a&gt;, we've been making some progress with the project to create free worlds for anyone to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've found a point that's hard to agree on - licence - as in what licence fits the project best. Some suggestions have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA (the licence used by SE)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This allows us to freely ask questions and use content from here, but restricts the licensing options &lt;em&gt;(previously spelled 'potions'...)&lt;/em&gt; for users of our work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This licence seems to fit our desired outcomes (that anyone can use, in any way, and licence their work how they see fit) the best, but means we can't use content from here without asking post authors for explicit permission to use CC-BY.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're now looking for opinions from all our contributors and potential contributors about this subject. What licence should we use, and why should we use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T13:32:06.977" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:32:06.977" Title="Collaborative project: How do we feel about licensing?" Tags="|discussion|csw-project|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about the Collaborative project. The project is coordinated in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds&quot;&gt;this chatroom&lt;/a&gt; and the content is maintained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Collaborative-Shared-Worlds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this GitHub organization&lt;/a&gt;. If you are interested in contributing, come into the chat and ask for access to the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2108" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to the Collaborative Shared Worlds project. Coordinated in http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/collaborative-shared-worlds." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:21:12.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-05-05T18:33:01.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/futurology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;futurology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;futurology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's just too darn fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T18:33:01.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-05-06T22:10:31.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love a blog about consistent worlds and trying to reason through the implication and culture of a world that you create.  I sort of went on a small tirade to that effect in this question already: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14009/what-would-the-world-be-like-if-humanity-always-valued-gender-equality/14092#14092&quot;&gt;What would the world be like if humanity always valued gender equality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T22:10:31.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-07T18:28:14.813" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole point of stack exchange is that it is a Q&amp;amp;A style site, and an overwhelming majority of questions have a question as a title. This is surely a nit-picky thing but it really bugs me when titles aren't questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16781/world-of-automation&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this something that bothers anyone else? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this something that WB moderators should fix?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, then should previous questions be adjusted or only future ones?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T13:44:05.583" Title="Do the titles of questions need to be in question format?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2015-05-07T18:40:06.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, titles do not need to be questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right that this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, but there is no requirement that titles are questions. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;help center articles&lt;/a&gt; about asking questions specify what you should do when asking questions, but I can't find any title requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can sometimes &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; when a title is a question: question titles often have very clear meaning - but if someone wants to name their post something else, that's OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, in fact, sometimes a good thing: there are some questions that just can't be simplified to a single-sentence question to go in a title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a title &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; going to be a question, it should be a &lt;em&gt;grammatically correct&lt;/em&gt; question. &quot;How to blow up a planet?&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a correct question. &quot;How to blow up a planet&quot; - no question mark - is, as is &quot;How can I blow up a planet?&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A title &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; give some indication as to what the question is about. Even if you're trying to give your question a fun name, include in that name some mention of the content of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the above points as criteria for editing titles. They are not reasons to downvote (unless the entire post is really bad quality), but are things that should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It only bothers &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; if there's another problem with the title - in which case it should be edited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's fine as it is and doesn't need fixing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See second answer (but if you want to improve posts, please do - just edit them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I'm glad to see you're interested in getting the quality here to be better. If you think you can improve on a title, please do submit an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T18:40:06.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2015-05-07T20:27:32.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do the titles of questions need to be in question format?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asked that way, I think the answer is pretty obvious: no, there is no requirement for question titles to themselves be written as questions. Sometimes, it might even be so that doing so would be impractical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;question titles should be clear and to the point.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know we get questions occasionally that have &quot;witty&quot; titles. I've edited a few of those myself. Consider the title box placeholder text: &lt;em&gt;What's your worldbuilding question? Be specific.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question titles should allow readers to, &lt;strong&gt;at a glance, tell what the question is about.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Exactly what this means will be context-dependent&lt;/em&gt; (tags, for example, can add context to a question title) but I find that in practice, a good test for whether something makes a good question title is: would you type it, or a close variation of it, into a search engine if you were looking for the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question title and the first few sentences from the post is what someone sees on the front page, on the questions page, in search results, etc. etc. etc. In the Hot Network Questions list, the site logo and the question title is &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that someone sees. My opinion is that &lt;strong&gt;we should be using that space to give readers as good an idea as possible of what the question is actually about.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this something that bothers anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, it bothers me, so it does bother at least someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this something that WB moderators should fix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No.&lt;/em&gt; Not because we are diamond moderators on the site, at least. This is perfectly within the capabilities of the community to handle on its own. (That doesn't mean we won't fix what we perceive as a poor question title if we come across it, but it wouldn't be in the course of &lt;em&gt;moderating&lt;/em&gt; the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of us diamond moderators as janitors and/or human exception handlers. A poor title, regardless of what one means by &quot;a poor title&quot;, is not an exception; just like other aspects of clarifying the content of a post, it's something that any user on the site can propose improvements to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If yes, then should previous questions be adjusted or only future ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the only problem with a previous question is that it has a less than perfect title, I would say that you can edit the title if you believe you can make it substantially better &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the question is still on the front page. Avoid small editing if the question is no longer on the front page, and avoid mass edits, especially but not only of old posts; keep in mind that editing a post bumps its question to the top of the front page, crowding out more recently added content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the title is the question's &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; problem, and it's no longer on the front page, I'd say don't worry too much about it. The bad title probably didn't hurt too much in the grand scheme of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are substantially editing other aspects of the question, and that question happens to have a poor title which you feel you're able to improve at the same time, then by all means go ahead just like you would with similar edits elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T20:44:58.680" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T20:44:58.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2015-05-09T13:44:05.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Titles written as questions bother me. The title is not the title of the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, it's the title of the whole page, including the answers. There's something weird about using a question as a title for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, it's ok sometimes to have titles phrased as questions, in the same way that articles are sometimes titled for the question they seek to answer. But don't overdo it. Never mangle a title just for the sake of making it a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some good advice in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title&quot;&gt;the title FAQ on the main meta&lt;/a&gt;. Summarizing it, keep in mind that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title is the first, and often only, thing that people see. It needs to make it obvious what the question is about. Note that people won't always see the tags, so don't leave out information on the basis that it's implied by the tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep it short. Often people will scan through a list of titles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lead with the most important word, because some readers will drop off. This is where questions phrased as titles often fail — they start with boilerplate like “how can I” (best avoided) or “what is the best way to” (completely useless). Non-question titles can fail too — leading with “best way to” would be bad too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T13:44:05.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-10T16:20:19.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE voting system works relatively well on StackOverflow, where there are technical programming questions, and tons of expert users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even there it's sometimes highly silly/unfair. example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1789945/how-can-i-check-if-one-string-contains-another-substring?rq=1&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1789945/how-can-i-check-if-one-string-contains-another-substring?rq=1&lt;/a&gt; - a basic but fundamental question, with a useful simple answer. The question has 3022 votes, and the answer has 4687 votes. Writing good answers to other questions might take years or decades to get so much reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On WorldBuilding, and other sister sites with creative subjects, subjective answers, and fewer rabid viewers, it's much less accurate at giving credit where due, or attention to interesting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you observe, the Hot Questions seem to drive 90+% of the attention, often the fastest answers get a mob of votes, and later answers are largely ignored, much more than quality is indicated by votes. And there is not much time after a question is asked before there is already an upvoted answer or two at the top, and readers don't read down low enough to see or vote on the later ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One fix might be to not show votes, or not sort by votes/accepted, for a couple of days after a question is asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another that probably won't be done, would be to have people vote on what they think a question's rating should be, and have the votes averaged. So rating wouldn't best be attained by getting heaps of people to think one answer was best. But I don't have a full proposal for that, I'm not interested in the mega-debate that would ensue, and if someone at SE is interested in reprogramming such a thing, they'll do it. So, just mentioning it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What some people do do though, to human engineer a little of this, is to go look at older questions, check the low-voted answers and upvote the good ones, and NOT vote for good answers that already have plenty of up-votes. There aren't many people doing this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:38:54.597" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T15:54:52.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2119" CreationDate="2015-05-10T19:49:30.390" Score="5" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recomendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recomendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recomendation&lt;/a&gt;. No, I did not spell that wrong: the tag's creator did. 11 questions and apparently nobody's noticed yet: it should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we rename that tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's just make sure our other tags haven't got a similar problem...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-05-10T21:05:50.160" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T21:06:25.693" Title="Can we spellcheck our tags?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2118" CreationDate="2015-05-10T21:06:25.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recomendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recomendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recomendation&lt;/a&gt; has been renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on HDE 226868's comment I also renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-nova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-nova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-nova&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supernova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supernova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supernova&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may take a few moments for the changes to fully propagate throughout the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T21:06:25.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-10T21:20:30.540" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2118/can-we-spellcheck-our-tags&quot;&gt;Can we spellcheck our tags?&lt;/a&gt;, ArtOfCode brought up the fact that we had (note the past tense; Michael Kjörling took care of it) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recomendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recomendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recomendations&lt;/a&gt; tag when we really needed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag. I also noticed that we had (again, past tense) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-nova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-nova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-nova&lt;/a&gt; tag when we needed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supernova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supernova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supernova&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are dealt with; chances are, others are not. Use an answer on this question to bring up a tag (one tag per answer, please!) you feel needs to be renamed, whether because of spelling or another reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.120" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T17:34:14.987" Title="What tags need renaming?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2015-05-11T18:28:10.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement of that sort.  However, it is common for writers to give that sort of background because it helps provide scope for the answers.  Without such a background, one has to be careful to provide enough guidance to lead us towards useful answers.  Otherwise the question ends up getting closed because it's too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the many posts about Alynn, Rynn, or Alice. I'm not sure what ArtOfCode or Serban Tanasa do with those characters, but they're just crowd-sourced characters to play with neat theoretical ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of requirements to post, here's my two rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has to be useful to you.  &quot;Pure enjoyment&quot; qualifies, if you ask me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be in a form that could be useful to others.  If you need four pages of prose to describe an exact situation a character is in, it's probably too specific to your book.  But if your character &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; carry a staff with a live Tucan on it, you should include that detail so we don't make things too generic!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And as a non writer, I have a feeling the second rule is less constricting =)  )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T18:28:10.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-12T16:22:11.450" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; tag with my last question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17139/low-tech-inertial-dampener-options&quot;&gt;Low-tech inertial dampener options&lt;/a&gt;  I feel like this is a very common time-period to write stories on and definitely deserves a tag. However, I had a hard time coming up with a good description for the tag. I was hoping someone who is better at descriptions could help suggest a good wiki description for the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular I feel like it should say that the world is close enough to the present day to not feel alien to present day readers. New technology will likely exist, but most of the technology should feel as simple logical progressions of the existing technology, not so advanced to be functionally magic. Spaceships may exist, but energy shields and teleporters for that ship may not. New energy generation sources could be produced, but no Singularity reached etc. However, I didn't know how to describe that coherently in so few words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help on word-smithing the tag?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T16:05:06.083" Title="near-future tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2125" CreationDate="2015-05-12T18:11:55.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions relating to the near future of humanity, featuring cultural or technological advancements that could plausibly occur within the next few decades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think it's missing something, but that's all I could think of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T20:17:19.990" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T20:17:19.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2125" CreationDate="2015-05-12T18:59:00.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions concerning the immediate future, where technology is assumed to have advanced slightly while still recognizable to modern humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Any extra input greatly appreciated!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T18:59:00.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2134" CreationDate="2015-05-13T15:03:51.950" Score="12" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I submitted a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17163/how-to-make-a-fictional-anarchist-society-believable-to-non-anarchists&quot;&gt;how to make a fictional anarchist society believable to non-anarchists&lt;/a&gt;. It's getting out of hand, and &lt;strong&gt;I think it's my fault.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why my question might be on-topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding in fiction (be it novel, video game, movie, RPG, or otherwise) generally requires suspension of disbelief. Not everything is going to be internally consistent and not everything about the world is going to be explained. Even if you write a treatise on how such a society might function, people are still going to find things about it that they believe to be impossible. Anarchism is a living example of that; countless treatises &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been written, and it's clearly a very controversial subject -- case in point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I still think this is a valuable question to people who want to build believable worlds: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Say your reader/viewer/consumer hates your political views and thinks that your utopia is really a dystopia or simply impossible. What do you need to do in order to still draw them in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered making that my question, but it's way too broad, so I talked specifically about anarchy, which is the world I'm working on anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why my question probably isn't on-topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@ivy_lynx pointed out early on that my question is half-writing and half-worldbuilding. @Benubird also seems to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/17186/9557&quot;&gt;what my question really is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other people have posted answers that basically boil down to arguments why an anarchic society is not possible. While I don't disagree with them, I also don't see them as relevant to your question. Setting aside whether such a society is believable, the best way to make it plausible is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is the only relevant answer that I see. Because the answer has more to do with writing than with worldbuilding, I'm guessing that the question itself is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why I'm disappointed with the answers either way&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a complaint that I want to voice: The answers I got were mostly about how anarchy won't work in the real world. I don't think those answers are helpful in terms of answering the question, and I also don't think that they're in the spirit of worldbuilding. &lt;strong&gt;The whole point of worldbuilding is to imagine how a world might look if _____.&lt;/strong&gt; Occasionally, an idea for a world actually won't work even in one's imagination; clearly anarchy is not an example of that, given the large following that it has maintained for at least a few hundred years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new to this community, so I'll stick around and hope that this &quot;your idea won't work&quot; attitude isn't typical. It seems it happened because I brought up a contentious subject, but often those are the most interesting ones, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47236" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:12:30.480" Title="Should my writing question be closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T14:53:30.947" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question today has essentially &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/467/what-can-we-do-to-encourage-questions&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt;. The reason I've decided to ask it again in a different question is because the question mentioned was asked 6 months ago, and also that what I'm asking today is not exactly the same but very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stack's beta has been extremely successful so far. Participation is very good, question quality (in my opinion) is fairly high (albeit certain questions aren't perfect), and overall content has remained fresh and useful. All of our stats on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; are 'excellent' except for questions per day(QPD), which are 'okay'. My question is, &lt;strong&gt;why would we not try to boost QPD slightly in order to make all of our stats read 'excellent'?&lt;/strong&gt; I understand that we don't want quality to fall but I feel like we have the user-count to support 1.2 &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; QPD so why wouldn't we try to get there? &lt;strong&gt;Can we (as a community) support that growth without sacrificing quality?&lt;/strong&gt; Also, &lt;strong&gt;If not, what is stopping us?&lt;/strong&gt; And finally, &lt;strong&gt;What 'cons' are there in achieving 10 QPD?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also, if this is too redundant because of the similar question let me know and I'll just take it down (I really won't mind), just trying to bring this up because it bugs me!&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:16:24.310" Title="Should we settle for an 'okay' number of questions per day?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T15:31:27.650" Score="9" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok so &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17248/recommended-book-framework-for-fantasy-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;this questions&lt;/a&gt; prompted me to think of something I feel we should have thought of a long time ago.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be a great idea to create a community wiki (or wiki's depending on how many responses we get) for world-building resources.  I'm talking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Websites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you get the idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, each answer could be topic specific and broken into sections&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sample&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Creating Magic Systems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Resource books and guides:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Book 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Book 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Book 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Helpful websites/communities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Site 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Site 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Site 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Useful Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Program 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Program 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Program 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reference material and examples&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This section might be stories you would recommend to people as examples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Material 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Material 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T17:03:08.410" Title="Shall we create a community wiki of world-building resources" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-13T17:01:53.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2131" CreationDate="2015-05-14T16:19:38.680" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think about which of these could be done in relevant &lt;em&gt;tag wikis&lt;/em&gt;.  That intrinsically links the resources with the questions most likely to benefit from them.  I've seen occasional tag wikis that are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; thorough -- encyclopedic, even.  Let's use a structure we already have for the cases where it works; people already know about it, can edit it, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T16:19:38.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2130" CreationDate="2015-05-14T19:25:32.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we should never do is sacrifice question quality in search of quantity. We've spent considerably time with the question stat in the green, sometimes it drops below. Sometimes it rises above. In fact whenever a particularly successful question challenge happens that tends to push us over the edge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reason to worry about the future of this site, sites with far worse performance have been kept running. Yes all stats green will no doubt help us rise up the rankings towards graduation - but all graduation does is give us a fancy user experience overhaul. Everything that you can do on a graduated site you can already do on this beta one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a long queue for graduation, so people should be focusing on making the site as good as they can and not on worrying about a graduation that may well still be years away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T19:25:32.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2128" CreationDate="2015-05-14T22:12:30.480" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Should it stay open?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, yes. There is definitely a strong worldbuilding aspect there; it's not a duplicate; it's clearly written; the scope is reasonably narrow, and there's nothing opinion-based about it. That covers the entire close dialog - so essentially, it's a great question of the type we want to keep around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another (fairly) strong indicator is the question's success (though this is not a rule) - your question has seen 22 votes (with 0 down), 15 answers, and 2582 views as I write this. There's not a single close vote on it. That's a fair signal that it's a decent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Answers that aren't and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be clear on one important point here: &lt;strong&gt;if an answer rejects the ideas you put forth in the question as impossible, it is not an answer&lt;/strong&gt;. As TimB points out in the comments, answers are supposed to help you develop your world, &lt;strong&gt;taking into account the premises in the question.&lt;/strong&gt; Whether they're realistic or not doesn't matter, except in (as far as I can see) two situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. This is a request for a sense-check of your ideas, so answers &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; tell you they're unrealistic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The premises are self-contradictory. Ideas can be as wacky as you like, but if they contradict themselves it becomes very hard if not impossible to answer. These questions should be closed, fixed, and reopened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question fits neither of those criteria. Therefore, if you feel an answer is completely rejecting what you set out in the question, leave a Not An Answer flag on it. This kicks it into a review queue, where the author will be informed that their answer is not, and the answer may be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, welcome to the site! Your question, while on a contentious topic, is a great question, and is exactly the kind of stuff we like to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:12:30.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2130" CreationDate="2015-05-14T22:16:24.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I more or less agree with Tim, but I'd like to add an extra dimension to why we should be content with lower number of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions in world building are fundamentally different from questions in most other SE sites. In most sites you simply want to know something you don't already know and make a clear question of it. All that is required is ignorance of something and literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building on the other hand starts with creating a hypothetical situation and being able to communicate it well enough for others to understand. And then you ask a question about some aspect of that hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sites allow asking some kinds of hypothetical questions, some require some degree of creativity, and some require more of the question than others. But surely world building has one of the highest levels of effort required per question asked around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I submit that the number of questions asked is not directly comparable with that of other sites as a measure of user commitment. Simply because in reality more commitment per question is required here than on most other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:16:24.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2131" CreationDate="2015-05-15T06:21:15.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am definitely down for this idea. The main benefit I could see here is that most of the major sources people would need to cite would me all in one place. I can't think of any specific examples right now, but I have seen before where several answers referenced the same source (web page or other answer on world building), so having a wiki would allow people's really good answers to be promoted there so that they don't get lost or unknowingly plagiarized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found the kind of question that would benefit most from a wiki. This is the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/17010/7072&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add more stuff like this as I find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T22:04:52.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-05-15T23:34:37.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A workflow for creating the world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T23:34:37.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2140" CreationDate="2015-05-17T22:31:47.413" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a question about how a fictional amateur journalist might obtain specific information from a (UK) private school. The universe is as close to ours as to require little other world building and I do not want to ask an off topic question and waste other people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8847" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T03:33:39.867" Title="Is this a suitable location for questions regarding how a character might realistic do something?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2015-05-19T03:33:39.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me this feels a little too far in the plot/character direction rather than worldbuilding.  However, it might be possible to turn it around so it's a worldbuilding question.  Instead of asking about how the journalist would research something, could you ask how schools of a certain type (which you'd describe in the question) would protect sensitive information from prying eyes?  That feels more like a question about the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; to me.  Once you have that, you can then work out the plot of how your journalist would defeat their protections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that help at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T03:33:39.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-19T03:38:03.210" Score="8" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17323/antimatter-storage&quot;&gt;Antimatter Storage&lt;/a&gt; is currently on hold as off-topic.  It has comments suggesting it be moved to Physics.  It also has three reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me why it's off-topic.  Merely &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; being on-topic somewhere else isn't a reason to migrate, but if it's truly off-topic here then we should help the author by migrating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is off-topic, why?  If it's not, should it be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T13:10:35.357" Title="Why is the antimatter question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2141" CreationDate="2015-05-19T13:10:35.357" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did the recent (extensive) edit and voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, it is a hard science question, not so different from, say &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/how-to-create-a-nuclear-explosion-localized-to-only-a-few-square-feet&quot;&gt;How to create a nuclear explosion localized to only a few square feet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that makes this one tricky, I think, is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. If it didn't have that, the question would definitely be on topic and a good fit here and not on physics: &quot;I have an idea, what physics do we need to make it work?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, I think it's a better fit for physics. But I can see how this question could, with a bit of story padding, be about building a world: &quot;In my world, they use antimatter as power source, and the containment field is going to break. Their system acts like such and such. Is this plausible?&quot; While that might not be a great question, it certainly looks more on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since antimatter storage is a part of so many sci-fi worlds, I think this is a good look at a possible method to explain how it can work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T13:10:35.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T06:29:58.100" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see the conversation still in the comments, after accepting the suggestion to move it to Chat.  It copied the messages, not moved them.  Did something go wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-05-20T23:16:01.713" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T23:16:01.713" Title="&quot;move&quot; threads to chat?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2015-05-20T12:37:42.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing went wrong. &quot;Moving&quot; threads to chat doesn't actually move them; it copies them to a new chat room and leaves a comment as the person who accepted the suggestion, linking the new chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, it is easy to be misled by the wording of the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T12:37:42.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T15:24:04.267" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In going through our tags page and doing some pruning, I found two tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bone&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/skeleton&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;skeleton&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;skeleton&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need both? Looking at the questions list, I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; see arguments for keeping both, as there is at least one question there where &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bone&lt;/a&gt; is valid but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/skeleton&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;skeleton&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;skeleton&lt;/a&gt; isn't. However, the two are very closely related and I'm wondering if we couldn't use one tag for both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T20:39:42.233" Title="Do we need both [bone] and [skeleton]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T18:35:09.500" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago I created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empire-building&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;empire-building&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;empire-building&lt;/a&gt; tag for my chain of medieval questions. So far, the only questions in this tag are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empire-building&quot;&gt;my 3&lt;/a&gt;. Is this tag constructive to the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created it and I think it is, but I want an opinion from someone (maybe a mod?). Does this fall into the category of &quot;Not often used&quot; or the &quot;Not constructive, let's toss it&quot; category?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T19:49:42.063" Title="Is the empire building tag constructive?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2150" CreationDate="2015-05-20T19:49:42.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A general principle I go by is this: if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; create a tag, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have to demonstrate that it has worth to the site, usually by adding a tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you did add a tag wiki, which was approved. It is from this and a quick read-through of the questions that I base my opinion, which is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't appear to have any other tags whose scope cross.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a valid aspect of worldbuilding - empires are important to the politics and dynamics of a world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, I think this tag, although little-used, definitely has a place on this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note: it may be little-used, but if people need a similar tag, the tag search box should bring it up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T19:49:42.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2148" CreationDate="2015-05-21T21:52:52.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I would say we need both. Because bone can be bone in general &lt;strike&gt;(including things such as nails)&lt;/strike&gt;, skeleton relates more towards specific things such as Exoskeletons, Skeletal Structure, and undead skeletal creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, we can have things that require Bone, but not Skeleton. (Eg: Question asking about bone claws)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as Michael has noted, you can have skeletons that aren't bone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-05-24T20:39:42.233" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T20:39:42.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2200" CreationDate="2015-05-24T11:12:40.867" Score="5" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our eighth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 24 May - 7 June&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because for a site about building worlds we seem to spend a lot of time destroying them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(And because we might get more questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ragnarok&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ragnarok&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ragnarok&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let's destroy some things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2104/fortnightly-topic-challenge-7-economy&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T17:38:37.693" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #8: Apocalypse" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2015-05-26T01:21:20.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were a total of 17 questions asked with this tag this time around, with a total of &lt;em&gt;106&lt;/em&gt; answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15675/measuring-the-economic-power-of-a-country-over-time&quot;&gt;Measuring the economic power of a country over time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;2- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16736/a-room-for-heroes-on-the-run&quot;&gt;A Room for Heroes on the Run&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;3- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16737/favor-based-economy&quot;&gt;Favor based economy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;4- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16761/galactic-wishes-economy&quot;&gt;Galactic Wishes - Economy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;5- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16794/the-deep-space-mining-dilemma&quot;&gt;The deep space mining dilemma&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;6- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16802/what-are-the-necessary-professions-of-an-advanced-society&quot;&gt;What are the necessary professions of an advanced society&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;7- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16807/can-humans-interact-meaningfully-with-the-economy-when-robots-are-better-at-ever&quot;&gt;Can humans interact meaningfully with the economy when robots are better at everything?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;8- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16888/how-would-a-lawless-city-function-economically&quot;&gt;How would a lawless city function economically?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;9- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16938/would-glass-bullets-be-feasible-in-a-hypothetical-world&quot;&gt;Would glass bullets be feasible in a hypothetical world?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;10- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16982/economies-of-scale&quot;&gt;Economies of Scale&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;11- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17048/in-a-truly-human-free-market-society-how-would-slavery-be-prevented&quot;&gt;In a truly (human) free market society, how would slavery be prevented?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;12- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17077/single-resource-cities-economy&quot;&gt;Single Resource Cities - Economy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;13- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17244/ftl-travel-is-impossible-how-is-interstellar-trade-possible&quot;&gt;FTL travel is impossible. How is interstellar trade possible?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;14- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17252/economic-effects-of-the-rift&quot;&gt;Economic Effects of &amp;#39;The Rift&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;15- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17327/is-mining-the-riverbed-in-a-venice-like-canal-city-for-metal-ore-feasible&quot;&gt;Is mining the riverbed in a Venice-like canal city for metal ore feasible?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;16- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17343/consequences-of-a-dragons-hoard&quot;&gt;Consequences of a Dragon&amp;#39;s Hoard&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;17- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17368/humans-moved-to-different-planets&quot;&gt;Humans moved to different planets&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Asked By&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/147.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2092&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2092.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5002.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/757&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/757.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9426&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9426.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2947&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2947.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8312&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8312.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7453&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7453.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/19.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9207&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9207.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/443&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/443.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9250&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9250.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8918&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8918.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7974&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7974.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T01:21:20.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2158" CreationDate="2015-05-28T23:55:42.487" Score="6" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;We appear to have gained celebrity status over the past few hours, and are now receiving &lt;strong&gt;over 20 million&lt;/strong&gt; visits per day. According to the Site Stats readout on the side of the page, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IRBsD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 does not corroborate this. Perhaps the two fell out over something, and Site Stats is making a statement of some form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4EhPv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: why is this happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-06-01T19:18:52.907" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T19:18:52.907" Title="We're suddenly very popular" Tags="|bug|status-completed|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2015-05-29T01:24:03.290" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The falling-out isn't between the main site and Area 51, but rather between Google and Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna Lear, an SE developer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/aalear/status/603317977191161857&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tweeted about a Google API change&lt;/a&gt; two days ago.  That's when the moderator tools for viewing traffic reports &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/257285/162102&quot;&gt;stopped working&lt;/a&gt;.  (These are still broken as of this writing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is some part of this chain reporting 20M visits?  Possibly this is part of reseting something -- we may be seeing every page load since the beginning of time, though that still feels off by a couple orders of magnitude.  However, another, much-smaller site is &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/21894788#21894788&quot;&gt;seeing the exact same number of visits now&lt;/a&gt;, so we might be getting all hits for the entire network over some period of time.  Throw SO into the mix and things get out of whack, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 sometimes goes days without updating this stat.  Area 51 is old and creaky and doesn't get a lot of love; my guess is that it isn't as resilient in the face of failure or flakiness.  Area 51 may have just given up, while the main SE sites try valiantly to get updated data from Google and, well, don't necessarily get the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; data.  This may be one of those rare times when Area 51 is better off for being old and creaky and devoid of love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, maybe we should &lt;a href=&quot;http://shouldiblamecaching.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blame caching&lt;/a&gt;.  It's traditional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T01:24:03.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T08:28:46.867" Score="6" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;races&lt;/a&gt; tag, which I hadn't noticed before. Based on the tag wiki it would have been almost perfect for my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18062/29&quot;&gt;How can I make humans NOT WANT to investigate how a supernatural ability works in an intelligent, non-human creature?&lt;/a&gt; (in fact, I'm going to edit it in after posting this, despite that question having had its fifteen minutes of &lt;strike&gt;shame&lt;/strike&gt; fame) but &lt;strong&gt;the name does not, in my opinion, make the tag particularly discoverable.&lt;/strong&gt; The tag wiki states that the tag is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about differing intelligent species that are co-existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Races&quot; could also at the very least mean different forms of competitive racing, which seems like it could be a reasonable subject in matters of worldbuilding (we also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sports&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;sports&lt;/em&gt; tag&lt;/a&gt;, which has seen some use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should generally be named such as typing keywords relevant to the question into the tag box yields reasonable tag suggestions based on substring matching in both the primary tag name as well as any synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, &lt;strong&gt;is the &lt;em&gt;races&lt;/em&gt; tag appropriately named, or should it be renamed? If it should be renamed, then what should it be renamed to?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T01:06:06.963" Title="Is the &quot;races&quot; tag appropriately named, or should it be renamed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T22:03:19.247" Score="7" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17796/worldbuilding-workshop&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Workshop&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Working on free (not copyrighted) worlds for anyone to use at &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/Worldbuilding-Workshop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;github.com/Worldbuilding-Workshop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if a user types in a story about beans, what is the copyright status of that bean story? Also, whatever the answer is, shouldn't it be more clear. The chat room doesn't even have the cc-by-sa 3.0 thing at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-05-29T22:32:07.237" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T22:39:25.887" Title="Should the worldbuilding workshop be more clear about its copyright status?" Tags="|discussion|csw-project|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2015-05-29T22:39:25.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this to our attention; I can't say I've really taken much notice of the room description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The GH organisation controls&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In disputes or contradictions, the details in the GH organisation's help centre holds sway over those here - simply because we look at it more and don't review stuff here such as descriptions as much.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The chat room is merely communicatory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We use the SE chat platform simply because the project was born here and GH doesn't have huge amounts in terms of communication features. It should not be considered under the terms of the licence we're using: anything in the chat room is governed by SE policy and legal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question about the hypothetical beans story, if someone wants to contribute something they are most welcome to do so; it will be licensed as all our work is, under CC-BY 3.0. Thus, it &lt;em&gt;does have&lt;/em&gt; a derivative of copyright on it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll update the room description to remove any ambiguity soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T22:39:25.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2015-06-01T19:18:43.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was the result of Google deprecating the login method we were using to get analytics. We've updating all the analytics code and it's pulling again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T19:18:43.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2159" CreationDate="2015-06-02T14:12:57.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed in the comments, it would appear that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-relations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-relations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-relations&lt;/a&gt; tag that is very similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;races&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about the interactions and relationships between two different species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about differing intelligent species that are co-existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we combine them. As Michael Kjorling suggested, the only problem is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;races&lt;/a&gt; tag is about different &lt;em&gt;intelligent&lt;/em&gt; species, whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-relations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-relations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-relations&lt;/a&gt; is more general. However, I think a tag for interactions between species of variable intelligence is fine; after all, intelligence is more of a subjective quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T15:16:05.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2169" CreationDate="2015-06-02T17:20:23.107" Score="8" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;After providing an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18051/tomorrow-is-groundhog-day-for-everyone-how-does-society-respond&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; recent site-favorite question, I got to wondering about what makes some questions so much more popular than others. As of this writing, we have 14 questions with at least 50 upvotes, two of which have more than 125. This is excellent for the site and great for the askers. We all want to have questions deserving of this kind of attention, especially when they attract a greater number of (hopefully) high-quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what qualities of a question make it great?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T22:19:23.347" Title="What are the qualities of a great question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2167" CreationDate="2015-06-02T17:43:57.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is along the lines of the points discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6303/the-secret-to-getting-a-massive-reputation-is&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6303/the-secret-to-getting-a-massive-reputation-is&lt;/a&gt; on Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Simplicity and straightforwardness&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's sometimes a difference between asking a great question and asking a question everybody can identify with. I could come up with an awesome idea involving ocean currents, but if answering it involves detailed knowledge of fluid dynamics&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; because it's so technical, many people will pass it by. If people can't understand it or relate to it - or if the key is buried in a  mountain of text - people will pass it by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People should be able to read the title, think, &amp;quot;Yes, that's an interesting idea!&amp;quot; and understand everything else from the body, because it rests on common knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Which I don't, by the way, have.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T17:43:57.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2167" CreationDate="2015-06-02T18:51:38.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The secret to writing a good question is very similar to the secret of writing a good book, or article, or similar. &lt;strong&gt;Catch&lt;/strong&gt; attention, &lt;strong&gt;hold&lt;/strong&gt; it, and &lt;strong&gt;direct&lt;/strong&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Catch&lt;/strong&gt; people's attention with a good title. This should describe what the question is. If it can be humorous, so much the better, but it is very important that the title is clear and easily understandable. It's the first thing people see of your question and the major deciding factor in whether or not people click on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Holding&lt;/strong&gt; attention is the prerogative of your question body. You should be interesting and relatable: as HDE says, if your question is about some highly specialised area of special additional nuclear relativity (is that even a thing?) then most people will give up thinking that they couldn't possibly answer it. Similarly, badly-written questions often get on people's nerves: a few grammar or spelling mistakes here and there are perfectly forgivable, but if it's so bad that it takes effort to read the post, I'll leave about two seconds after downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question body also needs to &lt;strong&gt;direct&lt;/strong&gt; attention. Many good questions have several aspects to them, and without direction the answers would be varied in the topics they talk about. If you're looking for answers on one specific bit, you need to be able to tell people what that bit is. Directing attention is also about making sure that people know your question is on-topic, not too broad, and all the rest of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also, to some extent, luck involved: unless you're a very good sociologist who can predict what people will react to next (in which case, why are you not employed in advertising?), you will never know if your question will be the next big one or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T18:51:38.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-02T19:15:39.740" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gender&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gender&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this opens up a lot of possibilities and debate, it is not contentious in this particular site, like it would be on Youtube comments or whatever.  I think this would be exciting, because we're talking about past/future, alternate reality, or alien civilization; among other things.  This is one of our tags, and this is one of the few sites where it can be discussed maturely.  If not, why is it a tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="3276" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T05:18:15.887" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T05:18:15.887" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2172" CreationDate="2015-06-03T09:02:42.800" Score="-1" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been noticing more and more questions along the lines &quot;aliens did [this silly complex magic thing], what would happen?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we please create a tag for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should encompass all posts of this kinds, even if it wasn't aliens' fault specifically, such as &quot;suddenly [this silly unexplainable thing] happened for apparently no reason, what now?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T14:00:34.943" Title="&quot;Alien did it&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2171" CreationDate="2015-06-03T14:00:34.943" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I disagree with creating a tag for this purpose.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should be used to categorize content. Ideally, saying &quot;I am an expert in tag-name&quot; should pass the laugh test. We have a few meta tags (science-based, hard-science, reality-check, and perhaps a few others) which pass this test only because &lt;em&gt;they aren't supposed to be used in isolation;&lt;/em&gt; a question can't be &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; science-based, though it can be for example science-based evolution. In this sense, our such tags are similar to for example Stack Overflow's language-lawyer tag, which also can't really be used in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, nobody is going to say seriously and with a straight face &quot;I am an expert in alien-did-it&quot;, or any variation thereof. Nor are they going to say &quot;I am an expert in alien-did-it dragons&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you also said in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd expect better thought-out questions, which steam from serious attempt to build credible worlds. Instead we've recently been flooded with very silly &quot;stuff happens for no reason, what then&quot; which have blatantly no purpose other than having an idle chat. This is a very serious problem: if not addressed, it could easily kill this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a tag for questions that you feel do not belong on the site in the first place is &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;the wrong path to take.&lt;/strong&gt; If anything, creating a tag indicates to people that the type of question covered by the tag &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; welcomed by the community, at least to some level. If you feel these types of questions are off topic, you should be flagging them as off topic, bring it up on Meta (we have a quite active community on our Meta, especially for a beta site), or bring it up in chat to try to gain a community consensus. All of these options are available to almost everyone with an account on the site, with the possible exception of chat which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;requires 20 reputation&lt;/a&gt; (which frankly isn't very hard to get on Worldbuilding; a single half-way-decent answer will likely get you there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had significant discussions both in chat and here on Meta early during the beta period about what types of questions we accept, which has been summarized in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help center's page on what topics are on-topic for us&lt;/a&gt;; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic tag&lt;/a&gt; here on Meta captures some of this. Our subject here at Worldbuilding, almost by definition, is going to be a lot less about right or wrong answers than, say, Stack Overflow, but that doesn't mean we don't have quality standards for content, only that our standards are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from those of the trilogy sites in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One of the main ways in which Worldbuilding differs from many other sites&lt;/strong&gt; is that we accept questions stating preconditions that cannot happen in the real world, which answers are expected to take into account. We have questions involving &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dragon&quot;&gt;dragons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ragnarok&quot;&gt;Ragnarök&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifter&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot;&gt;miscellaneous mythical creatures&lt;/a&gt; like centaurs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and so on and so forth. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4764/29&quot; title=&quot;Would charging unicorns survive the impact with a line of infantry?&quot;&gt;We even have an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; question about unicorns.&lt;/a&gt; This &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; for questions that handwave away how a situation came to be (so you don't even really need to say in your question &quot;an alien did it&quot; about how unicorns evolved in your world; if you state that unicorns exist, answerers are to assume that unicorns do exist), while asking for answers to &lt;em&gt;what will happen&lt;/em&gt; in that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T14:00:34.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2192" CreationDate="2015-06-03T14:15:11.493" Score="11" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the answers seem to be - while amusing - either 100% wrong (the proposed method wouldn't destroy ALL life), or outside the question's clearly delineated parameters (e.g. near future means, no magi-tech, no hand-wavium)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18419/634&quot;&gt;Hydrogen atom&lt;/a&gt;. 20 upvotes. Requires magi-tech to accelerate the atom to needed energy, clearly NOT feasuble with near future means.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18426/634&quot;&gt;Neutron star&lt;/a&gt;. 10 upvotes. Leaving aside requiring magi-tech to acquire one, the question explicitly mentioned &lt;strong&gt;periodic table of elements&lt;/strong&gt;, so no amount of &quot;looks like an atom&quot; hand-waving can make it be an on-topic answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 answers have serious flaws but at least are fixable. My question really is about 2 answers above, not the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18435/634&quot;&gt;Astatine&lt;/a&gt;. 3 votes. While nowhere near as bad as other answers, it doesn't even remotely show that it can be used to wipe out &lt;strong&gt;all life&lt;/strong&gt; - as opposed to a couple of beings. Mind you, this answer can probably be improved to show &quot;how&quot;, so it's the 2-d least objectionable one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18458/634&quot;&gt;Hydrogen explosion&lt;/a&gt; - this one has only one problem. It wouldn't affect life on deep sea floor. (though, with enough hydrogen, maybe? That requires some calculations to be sure; as well as knowing how much Oxygen you have available).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T20:22:48.390" Title="Why are 100% incorrect answers on this question highly upvoted and not deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|low-quality|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-03T17:39:43.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think part of this issue comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mob mentality&lt;/a&gt;, which causes people to behave in accordance with the people around them. Seeing a question or answer that already has upvotes implies it has good content, which encourages people to upvote it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I, while reading through the existing answers to a question, sometimes forget parts of the question, which leads me to wrong conclusions about the validity of an answer. I doubt I'm the only one. If someone remembers the question wanted an element to destroy life on Earth, but didn't remember it needed to be done with near-future technology, the hydrogen answer (voted +26/-2 at the time of this writing) appears to satisfy the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, remember that there is no specific reason a person is required to vote. You are not required to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you voted (or didn't vote), nor should you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I didn't vote on those answers, mostly because I don't often vote, but also because the answers at the time didn't satisfy the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T17:39:43.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-03T17:56:20.333" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kind of think that good answers should be upvoted regardless of whether or not they answer the question. If it's a good read and teaches me things that I find useful (like how a neutron star might be considered a single atom), then I'm going to upvote that so that other people will see it. Of course, if it's &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, then no one who needs to see it will probably ever see it, so that should be downvoted and/or deleted. However, someone looking for an answer to a similar question may find these answers useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, at least on Worldbuilding, it seems that a lot of questions don't exactly know what they want. I think one of the problems we have here is that many of our questions are too broad, but when they get narrowed down there is no room for the best answers. If you have to bend the rules to answer, I think it may be worth it to try; not that we should encourage this sort of behavior, but I think it all works out in the end (people wouldn't upvote if they were unhappy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T17:56:20.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-03T18:55:39.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak about the other answers, but my answer was probably upvoted because, at the time I answered, there was nothing in the question about using near-future technology. The goal of the question was to 'destroy the Earth, or at least obliterate all life, using only one element.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this happen in a few other questions as well, where the asker wants different answers than what are provided, and changes the question to try to get them. Unfortunately, this means that what were previously good, relevant answers no longer make sense in the context of the edits to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2947" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T18:55:39.683" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2180" CreationDate="2015-06-03T19:56:24.720" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new here, and I am not entirely sure what makes a question on-topic or off-topic. Particularly when they are at the edge. But Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18459/signs-of-a-realistic-ragnar%C3%B6k&quot;&gt;Ragnarok&lt;/a&gt; question (which I tried to answer). To me it seems that this is asking for an idea generation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually there are a few questions somehow similar, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18451/travel-back-in-time-and-rise-to-power&quot;&gt;that one&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;that one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying they are not interesting, but it is hard to objectively evaluate which answer is best. It is stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone clarifies WHY these questions are perfectly on-topic on WB.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T21:08:34.493" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T21:08:34.493" Title="Is it an idea generation and thus off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2181" CreationDate="2015-06-03T20:38:28.010" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will someone please explain what makes &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18487/aliens-want-our-water&quot;&gt;Aliens want our water&lt;/a&gt; a downvote worthy question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only been up for about 1 hour, and already received 2 downvotes - While I'm perfectly aware that downvotes are subjective to the downvoter and that they don't have to provide any reason for it, I'd like to know if the question is a bad question in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the question is on topic and specific enough to be answered. It's also a clear (or if it's not, please tell me how I can make it &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; clear) question, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T12:21:16.400" Title="Is this question good enough for WB?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2015-06-03T20:49:28.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO, the question is &lt;em&gt;trivial&lt;/em&gt;: No there aren't. (I don't want to detail more reasons here in meta, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not downvote it, so those who did could probably detail their reasons better, but to me, that is not a question interesting for WB.SE in its current form because of its triviality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T20:49:28.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2015-06-03T21:26:20.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilders are a bit weird. By that, I mean that this site has some characteristics a bit different from other SE sites, and this is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure we had a meta-discussion about this a while ago, but I can't find it right now so I'll just say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; an idea-generation question can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be packaged up nicely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be reasonably narrow-scoped (so there aren't millions of possible answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and is popular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then we seem to be accepting of them. Whether this is &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; or not I don't know and this would require more discussion, but that's the pattern I've observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; tend to be the more controversial questions - ask at your peril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T21:26:20.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2015-06-03T21:39:45.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The downvote button's tooltip says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This questions does not show any research effort, is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Draw from that what you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our case, &quot;useful&quot; seems to be defined as being a worthwhile/fun question to spend some time answering. To me, this question is not: although I haven't tried, I suspect it could be solved in a few quick Google searches. Sure, it might get me a few tens of reputation points, but it wouldn't have been fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2167/2685&quot;&gt;What makes a great question?&lt;/a&gt; for some question pointers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T21:39:45.770" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" Score="0" Body="For discussion about whether a particular question or type of question is off-topic on Worldbuilding." OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T21:41:09.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2015-06-03T22:58:12.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDITED, as requested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; loses the &quot;recommendations&quot; part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epidemiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;epidemiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;epidemiology&lt;/a&gt;, but some people might not know this term; please consider changing it to &quot;disease&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no purpose for the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chemoautotrophism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chemoautotrophism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chemoautotrophism&lt;/a&gt; tag, and recommend removing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have frequently-used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weather&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weather&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weather&lt;/a&gt;, so please consider removing the never-used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteorology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteorology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteorology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="3276" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T23:08:48.933" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T23:08:48.933" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2015-06-04T08:28:09.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, the Ragnarok question I asked is near to the &quot;Idea Generation&quot; border, but I don't believe it is over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/49&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/49&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the answers can be evaluated both by how closely they fit the legend while at the same time being scientifically plausible. That's also a constrained enough answer set that I do not expect to see huge numbers of different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I could be wrong, in which case the question should be closed. Personally I think it's the &quot;right&quot; side of the line but I agree it's near to it so people would be fully justified in starting a close vote if they think one is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T08:28:09.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2015-06-05T12:21:16.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if this seems harsh, but I can understand why the question got down voted and closed. The question is so badly flawed as to be un-answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is lots of water in the universe. Why take it from an inhabited planet?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About the only thing that could replace water in all categories it would be heavy water (which is still H2O but using different isotopes).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your aliens can make anything but they can't make water. So why not make hydrogen and oxygen and combine them? If they can't make hydrogen or oxygen then they can't make anything as they are very common elements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the aliens can make anything, and one of the things they can make is an exact substitute for water, then why not just use that substitute?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These four factors combine make it impossible to answer the question because the constraints just don't make sense and even contradict each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T12:21:16.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-05T20:34:36.730" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This came up in the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/controlling-magic-through-words-possible&quot;&gt;Controlling magic through words - possible?&lt;/a&gt;, in which the author of the question did not want to detail background elements for fear that others might copy the idea. Based on that, a discussion insured as to whether or not utilizing the ideas presented in a question (or, in a broader context, answers) would make the work using the material derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not a lawyer, I do have a very strong (unflattering) opinion of copyright law, which has led me to take an interest in it. My understanding is that to constitute a derivative work, direct references would need to be made: either content would need carried over (characters, setting, etc.) or actual portions of the text would need copied (including translations). Indeed, only the second is entirely clear-cut, with situations like LOTR’s elves and dwarves being prominent staples of fantasy. Merely taking an idea and using it without direct use or reference to the source would not constitute derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only case in which (again, by my understanding) the Worldbuilding license would apply is direct reproduction of material: say, a Q&amp;amp;A book on common writing problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is perhaps a broad question for meta, I think it is important: if members here believe they can (and possibly intend to) take legal action if their answers are utilized, that needs to be made very clear to all involved, regardless of what the answer to this question is. I very much doubt the majority of people asking questions here intend to place their works under by-sa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think someone with direct legal background or perhaps a member of the StackExchange staff would give the most valuable response to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is not the same question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/using-content-from-answers&quot;&gt;Using content from answers?&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to refer to direct copying of material (as with my Q&amp;amp;A book example above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T21:24:36.067" Title="Legal status of works utilizing question or answer concepts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-05T21:32:18.470" Score="26" ViewCount="2504" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta&quot;&gt;The Many Memes of Meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/the-many-memes-of-scifi-stackexchange&quot;&gt;The many memes of scifi.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something I thought of a couple months ago, but decided to wait to actually propose. I'll quote the post on Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catchphrases and concepts that spread from person to person are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memes&lt;/a&gt;, which, courtesy the Internet, can now explode across the Earth like a highly contagious virus (hence &amp;quot;going viral&amp;quot;). As with their real-life counterparts, some infectious diseases are global (pandemic), while others are endemic to specific regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow, and now even more predominantly Meta Stack Overflow, have seen more than their fair share of these pathological social constructs spread through the user base. They are now ingrained units of our collective culture as SOpedians (a term which I hate, by the way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as travelers' immune systems can be assaulted by new diseases in new places, new users are increasingly likely to be miffed by an ingrained meme and left sitting scratching their heads. I therefore propose that this space be used to document the memes endemic to Stack Exchange's culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each meme should be listed separately and I hope that we as a community will be able to provide greater context to each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please actually explain each meme in a way understandable to those not already in the know.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have quite a colorful community on Worldbuilding, and a colorful set of questions and answers. There are, I think, memes out there. I propose that we use this to document some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T21:09:20.613" Title="The many memes of Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2015-06-06T08:52:20.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure any official answer will just say &quot;read the license, that tells you what you can do.&quot; Any attempt to &quot;explain&quot; the license, particularly from anyone official, just dilutes the license as people can try to point to the explanation as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source style licenses are generally written to be clear and non-confusing. It should be possible for anyone to read them and understand what they can and cannot do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that everything posted to Stack Exchange is licensed under CC-BY-SA as part of the agreement you signed up to when joining the site. That means that this summary page applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as to whether an idea from a question is copyright is not addressed there however...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not a lawyer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is generally true that you cannot copyright an idea. That is what Patents are for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt talk to a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion is also relevant: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139698/re-using-ideas-or-small-pieces-of-code-from-stackoverflow-com&quot;&gt;Re-using ideas or small pieces of code from stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T08:52:20.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-06T10:10:16.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is very simple in fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The content in worldbuilding, as long as it fascinates people with the possibilities that such a thing might exist, is prone to be supported faster;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer has some coherent logic (although totally impractical or close to reality), changes the reader's perception in accepting the concept;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mob upvoting as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2174/10184&quot;&gt;Frostfyre mentioned&lt;/a&gt; encourages more people to read and subsequently upvote;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a fictional concept is largely supported, new concepts may arise from it, thus expanding and turning the original one into a largely accepted and popular concept;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, it's much harder to delete an already popular/accepted concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T10:10:16.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2015-06-06T14:22:51.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ideas&lt;/em&gt; cannot be copyrighted. &lt;em&gt;Content&lt;/em&gt; can. Stack Exchange licenses under CC-BY-SA the content that users post to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means, in theory, that anyone using content &lt;em&gt;or derived content&lt;/em&gt; has to attribute and link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derived content is, I think, the contested point here. My pseudo-legal&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; view is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;work using the concepts expressed in content in an answer &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; constitute a derivative work;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would be hard to use the &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; expressed without retaining some semblance of similarity to the original post, which &lt;em&gt;can be used in a legal claim&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the license has been put in by Stack Exchange to protect users' content - and they have a legal team who I don't doubt considered it pretty carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; - your content is protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I live with two lawyers. That still doesn't mean this is full legal advice. Also, I live in the UK and I do not know US court process (but license interpretation &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-06T21:24:36.067" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T21:24:36.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-06T14:49:16.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;People upvote answers because they are clever, witty and entertaining, even if they are clearly outside the scope of Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is generally about coming up with fictional worlds which if not realistic are at least plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linked question, accelerating a single proton to sufficient energies to disintegrate a planet is completely implausible and integrating it into a fictional work would require some &lt;strong&gt;serious&lt;/strong&gt; handwavium, considering the most energetic particle ever detected, 10 million times more energetic than anything we can create with our most advanced accelerators, &lt;em&gt;hit with the energy of a baseball travelling at 55mph&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The energies involved in that answer at least would only take about 1 week output of a dyson sphere, magnitudes less energy, than say &lt;em&gt;steering a neutron star into the Earth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What these answers have in common, is they are clever and entertaining, they answer the title of the question, and basically disregard the text of the question. For example in the linked question, even in the original version of the question it specified &quot;chemical element, get out your periodic table&quot; (last time I checked, Neutron Star is not on the periodic table), and that this was to be done by a &quot;mad scientist&quot;, not a wizard or a civilization with extreme hypertechnology. Neither of the top voted answers are answers even to the original question - let alone the revised versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one of the things people like about Worldbuilding is that making stuff up is generally permissible. If someone asks a question on Space which is too speculative (i.e. cannot be given a scientifically sound answer), they might be told to ask it on Worldbuilding instead, because on Worldbuilding speculation is welcome and answers don't have to be scientifically sound. It is a site where people can have fun, and maybe it becomes &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; having fun, but this could easily degrade the usefulness of the site if poor answers are consistently upvoted (yes, I'm sure some people ask questions in the hope of getting entertaining answers, but I'd hope some people ask questions because they are making a fictional world, for a novel, game or so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should actually attempt to answer the question as a whole - not merely answering the title taken completely out of context. Furthermore, plausibility in general should be valued, unless the question indicates that it is a fantasy world with high magic or hypertech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2054" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T14:49:16.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2194" CreationDate="2015-06-06T19:12:15.767" Score="0" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding sometimes gets questions about somewhat adult topics. So far, we've had questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2578/could-fictional-species-benefit-from-limited-inbreeding&quot;&gt;inbreeding&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2698/could-a-species-benefit-from-intercourse-with-another-species-with-no-dna-compat&quot;&gt;zoophilia&lt;/a&gt;, and possibly others that are harder to search for. Even now, I'm currently writing a question about sex toys in a Type 2 Kardashev scale (will probably be finished soon after I post this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the Stack Exchange network does not have any rules against adult content (for example, Travel has questions about prostitution and Writers has questions about writing erotic scenes). However, there might still be people that visit this in an environment where NSFW content is inappropriate, like a school, a workplace,... Usually, the question title explains enough to tell you not to visit it, but sometimes, it might not be that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add a NSFW tag that can be added for questions where either the question is NSFW or one of the answers are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T20:49:36.583" Title="should we add a NSFW tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2193" CreationDate="2015-06-06T20:49:36.583" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, &lt;em&gt;no,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;no,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2172/29&quot; title=&quot;&amp;#39;Alien did it&amp;#39; tag?&quot;&gt;Not until you can, &lt;em&gt;at the very least,&lt;/em&gt; say &lt;strong&gt;I am an expert in not-safe-for-work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why should we judge what is considered &quot;safe for work&quot; for someone? What would be the specific criteria for adding this tag to a question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why can't the same content be &quot;safe for work&quot; in some settings and &quot;not safe for work&quot; in others? (Think private office versus open floor plan, for example.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is someone browsing the site at all in such a setting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what situation would someone want to find questions that are &quot;not safe for work&quot;? (A major use for tags is searching for questions.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who would be following such a tag? (Similar to, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; which has 9 followers, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terraforming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terraforming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terraforming&lt;/a&gt; which is followed by 2 users, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; which is followed by 7 users, or the 8 users who follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that this site has a lot of active users and a lot of visits. But when you are at work, you are supposed to be doing what you are being paid to do, not leisurely browse Stack Exchange. I can easily imagine settings where browsing Physics, Biology, Programmers, Stack Overflow, Server Fault, The Workplace, Electrical Engineering and what have you is relevant to the task you are supposed to be doing, but I am having a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; hard time imagining a setting where browsing Worldbuilding is relevant to what you are being paid to do, and even more so such a situation where having a not-safe-for-work tag would add anything useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get this type of suggestions repeatedly: &lt;strong&gt;using tags for things tags are not meant to do.&lt;/strong&gt; Generally speaking, &lt;em&gt;meta tags is something that we should avoid.&lt;/em&gt; I was a proponent of the science-based tag originally, which didn't pan out very well, and now we have another one (hard-science) which seems to me to quite possibly be going down a similar slope: answers taking liberties the tag is supposed to say they cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each question is limited to &lt;strong&gt;a maximum of five tags.&lt;/strong&gt; In between the meta tags we already have (reality-check, science-based, hard-science; which are not uncommonly combined) that already puts serious limitations in place on the &lt;em&gt;meaningful&lt;/em&gt; tags that can be added to a question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2004/29&quot; title=&quot;Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?&quot;&gt;I tried a suggestion to rectify this somewhat&lt;/a&gt;, which didn't really fly with the community. It isn't at all uncommon today to see questions that are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; plus something else. If you add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/not-safe-for-work&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;not-safe-for-work&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;not-safe-for-work&lt;/a&gt; tag, you're already up to three out of five tags &lt;em&gt;before you have even stated anything useful about the question's topic.&lt;/em&gt; That does not make the site any more approachable or make it any easier to find the content you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T20:49:36.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-06T23:55:35.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-beings&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-beings&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-beings&lt;/a&gt; While specific, there's quite a few of them in literature and not much is know about how they work or what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T23:55:35.580" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2241" CreationDate="2015-06-08T17:07:24.347" Score="6" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our ninth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-making&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-making&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-making&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 8 June - 21 June&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maps add extra realism to a story and can set the stage well. They make a world come alive. Just look at Tolkien's maps - Middle-Earth seems close enough to touch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat. Let's make some maps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2154/fortnightly-topic-challenge-8-apocalypse&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #8: Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2104/fortnightly-topic-challenge-7-economy&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T20:40:01.690" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #9: Map-Making" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2154" CreationDate="2015-06-08T17:38:37.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 24 questions and 118 answers, for an average of 4.92 answers per post. Good going!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Yes, this results post has a different format I&quot;m trialling. If you don&quot;t like it, shout at me.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18032/thunder-clap-armageddon?s=24|0.0000&quot;&gt;Thunder Clap Armageddon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10044&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10044.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17862/escaping-a-dying-planet?s=23|0.0000&quot;&gt;Escaping a dying planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6421&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6421.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17898/surviving-the-apocalyspe?s=22|0.0000&quot;&gt;Surviving the apocalyspe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8574&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8574.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17919/what-would-happen-to-an-urban-fantasy-earth-hit-with-a-supernatural-planet-size?s=21|0.00007&quot;&gt;What would happen to an urban fantasy Earth hit with a supernatural, planet-sized EMP?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9069&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9069.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17984/is-there-a-scientifically-plausible-way-to-wipe-out-power-communications-in-an?s=20|0.0000&quot;&gt;Is there a scientifically plausible way to wipe out power &amp;amp; communications in an urban-fantasy Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9069&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9069.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18037/size-of-the-volcano-that-ends-the-world?s=19|0.0000&quot;&gt;Size of the volcano that ends the world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6507.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18228/what-could-cause-a-predictable-apocalypse?s=18|0.0000&quot;&gt;What could cause a predictable apocalypse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2947&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2947.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18251/short-term-effects-of-orbital-decay?s=17|0.0000&quot;&gt;Short Term Effects of Orbital Decay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/489&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/489.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18269/if-the-sun-were-to-go-supernova-how-long-would-earth-have-before-it-was-consume?s=16|0.0000&quot;&gt;If the sun were to go supernova, how long would Earth have before it was consumed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10030&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10030.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18275/how-many-people-are-required-for-a-healthy-re-population-of-the-earth-post-apoc?s=15|0.0000&quot;&gt;How many people are required for a healthy re-population of the Earth (Post-Apocalypse)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3276.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18303/building-noahs-ark?s=14|0.0000&quot;&gt;Building Noah&amp;#39;s Ark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;12&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18344/what-if-the-atmospheric-pressure-suddenly-would-start-decreasing-slowly?s=13|0.0000&quot;&gt;What if the atmospheric pressure suddenly would start decreasing slowly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7264&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7264.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world?s=12|0.0000&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18432/what-if-the-earth-was-physically-split-in-half?s=11|0.0000&quot;&gt;What if the earth was physically split in half?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8914.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18434/what-if-the-earth-was-turned-physically-inside-out?s=10|0.0000&quot;&gt;What if the earth was turned physically inside out?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8914.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;16&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18440/aliens-put-us-on-the-moon?s=9|0.0000&quot;&gt;Aliens put us on the moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8914.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;17&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18445/aliens-steal-our-trees?s=8|0.0000&quot;&gt;Aliens steal our trees&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8914.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;18&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18459/signs-of-a-realistic-ragnar%c3%b6k?s=7|0.0000&quot;&gt;Signs of a realistic Ragnar&amp;#246;k&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;19&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18473/what-if-all-explosives-existing-on-earth-suddenly-get-transported-to-one-place-a?s=6|0.0000&quot;&gt;What if all explosives existing on earth suddenly get transported to one place and then blow up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7264&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7264.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;20&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18530/changing-earths-rotation-rate?s=5|0.0000&quot;&gt;Changing Earth&amp;#39;s rotation rate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7886.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;21&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18549/could-the-earth-be-flooded?s=4|0.0000&quot;&gt;Could the Earth be flooded?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10149&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10149.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;22&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18556/the-benign-apocalypse?s=3|0.0000&quot;&gt;The Benign Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Congratulations:&lt;/strong&gt; this post was the most popular during the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5002.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;23&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18557/what-would-the-effects-be-on-a-earth-like-planet-if-the-magnetic-field-was-much?s=2|0.0000&quot;&gt;What would the effects be on a earth-like planet if the magnetic field was much stronger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10139&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10139.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;24&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18601/laugh-til-you-drop?s=1|0.0000&quot;&gt;Laugh til you drop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8400.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T17:38:37.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-08T20:43:41.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psionics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psionics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psionics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is an unused tag, which could bring interesting ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A science-fiction setting with a little drop of magic in it. I think that psionic capabilities can add a lot to different worlds for a relatively cheap price in term of balance of the whole world. And for that we should explore it more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T20:43:41.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-08T20:46:43.913" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/communication&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;communication&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;communication&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because without communication, it would be a lonely world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T20:46:43.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2159" CreationDate="2015-06-09T01:06:06.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;races&lt;/a&gt; tag description sounds like an attempt to describe typical fantasy/SF races in a generic way. I doubt that it was meant to imply race relationships specifically, so I would not combine it with other tags about relations. Instead, it might just need to be more obvious that it’s about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sf-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sf-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sf-races&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alien-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alien-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alien-races&lt;/a&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;race&lt;/em&gt; in the everyday sense of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T01:06:06.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2206" CreationDate="2015-06-09T10:39:50.943" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18704/would-fantasy-giants-be-possible-due-to-the-square-cube-law&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, which was marked as a duplicate by a some users (including myself), and the discussion in the comments, the OP expressed his feeling that his/her question differ enough not to be considered a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prompt me to ask whether there are/have been some discussion here about which policy should be taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just came upon a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6944/why-is-the-close-as-duplicate-policy-so-aggressive-and-should-we-change-it&quot;&gt;similar discussion&lt;/a&gt; in the meta of scifi.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to have clearer rules? Or just leave it to every user to decided for themselves? Do we want to have a strict duplicate policy (which could frustrate some users, or at least seem to)? Or we'd rather have a more relax policy (which might spread a lot the relevant answers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:20.743" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T13:11:27.007" Title="Discussion on duplicate policy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2204" CreationDate="2015-06-09T11:35:34.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing questions requires 5 users to agree precisely to solve this problem of subjectivity. The principle is that if 5 people can agree that a question is a duplicate, it's a pretty good indication that it is, and the question should therefore be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reopen process is also designed to combat this problem: if, by some chance, those 5 users were wrong and the question should remain open, another 5 users can get the question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have is swarm-voting: when there are already close votes on a question and other close voters visiting the question vote to close solely based on that (as opposed to judging the question on its merits by themselves first). We do encourage people to judge the question first, but unfortunately there's not a lot that can be done about this from a site perspective. If you think a question has been wrongfully closed, vote to reopen it and if others agree it will be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think &lt;strong&gt;no policy shift is required&lt;/strong&gt;. The processes in place are sufficient to ensure questions that should be closed are, and those tat should be one remain so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T13:11:27.007" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T13:11:27.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2204" CreationDate="2015-06-09T11:58:00.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need to have a rule for when to close and not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with worldbuilding compared to other parts of SE is that is very unclear when something is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at Superusers or Stackoverflow, it is pretty clear when a question is belonging to somewhere or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on worldbuilding the gray zone is pretty large, i have seen posts been pretty onspot voted for close because idea generation, and other questions where the question was clearly about idea generation left open for the sake of the question being interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means the quality of the votes relies totally on someones gut feeling. And as ArtOfCode mentioned Swarm mentality. And as long as the guidelines for voting is in such a large gray area. One might expect arguments about if it should be closed or not, since there is no solid ground to use as reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="757" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T11:58:00.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-11T17:08:17.607" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on narrowing down &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18730/2138&quot;&gt;How to go about creating an &amp;quot;inaccurate&amp;quot; map?&lt;/a&gt; to be a better question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my most recent edits help, but is it enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, any further ideas of what I would need to clarify in order to narrow it down further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T17:55:09.580" Title="Is the Inaccurate Map question still off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2209" CreationDate="2015-06-11T17:55:09.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed on the basis that it was an Idea Generation question (given a 3/2 split for IG/straight off-topic - I hit the wrong one when voting). This means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many valid answers;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is hard or impossible to &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; judge which is best.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reason reflects this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about Idea Generation are off-topic because they tend to result in list answers with no objective means to compare the quality of one answer with the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, to improve it you should add some way of objectively judging answers. A question here &lt;em&gt;can be&lt;/em&gt; idea generation, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it is possible to judge it. By far the easiest way to demonstrate this is to say &quot;I will pick the best answer based on X, Y, and Z criteria&quot;. Perhaps in your case, you could judge the best answer to be the method that is &lt;em&gt;most wrong&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;least obvious&lt;/em&gt; to inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your recent edits &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; help with this, they just didn't go quite far enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other close reason given was off-topic, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't see how this is off-topic here - but if it is, there's very little that can be done to remedy the question while keeping the same basic question - it would have to be moved to another site where it is on topic. I don't think you need to worry about this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T17:55:09.580" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-11T21:28:54.743" Score="18" ViewCount="738" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1891/should-science-based-henceforth-actually-be-science-based?lq=1&quot;&gt;an issue&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag came up, Monica Cellio made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1891/should-science-based-henceforth-actually-be-science-based/1892#comment4185_1892&quot;&gt;suggestion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Re the addendum, would [hard-science] better convey what you're after?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale behind the question that started that discussion was that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;almost all answers are expected to be based in science and logic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the tag was started, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debris-disk-to-a&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; to test it out. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debris-disk-to-a/12568#12568&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa's answer&lt;/a&gt; earned a bounty I placed, but I didn't accept it, because it wasn't as in-depth as I wanted. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-can-a-type-ii-civilization-influence-accretion-rates-from-a-debris-disk-to-a/12581#12581&quot;&gt;I also posted an answer&lt;/a&gt; to demonstrate just how I thought answer using the tag should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, but I don't think that the answers have turned out to be quite as good as I had hoped. Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;the tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this day, I have yet to see more than a few answers - and this takes into account that some of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; answers aren't up to snuff here - that actually fit these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag going the way of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;em&gt;not good&lt;/em&gt;. I tried to bring this up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1902/defining-the-boundaries-of-the-hard-science-tag&quot;&gt;Defining the boundaries of the &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; tag&lt;/a&gt;, but the issue has not gone away. I see questions migrated away to other sites, like Physics and Engineering. That's good, but I think we should strive to have questions demanding tough answers on-topic and welcome &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm just getting a bit touchy about the issue because of the types of topics I'm used to writing about on Stack Exchange. But I think that this is a necessary issue. After this, I'm not going to push the point. I promise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we please, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; bring back &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; to the way we envisioned it, and make sure that the original ideas - like what an asker should want in order to use the tag - are enforced? If things keep sliding, the concept, I think, will be dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T01:00:43.640" Title="A hard-science ultimatum" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2015-06-11T21:50:03.493" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, to prevent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; going the way of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, we're going to have to be strict about things. Really, quite harshly strict about it - like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question but tagged as one, a tag edit is needed. Any and all attempts to re-add the tag should be rolled back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If an answer to a hard-science question doesn't cite sources, have evidence and proofs, then (this is the harsh bit) &lt;strong&gt;it is not an answer&lt;/strong&gt; and thus &lt;strong&gt;it should be deleted&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(perhaps this might go a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; too far) If an answer is scientifically wrong, it is also &lt;strong&gt;not an answer&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;should be deleted&lt;/strong&gt;. Hard science expects hard, verifiable, &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note, as per HDE's comment, that bullet point 3 is outlawed on many of the hard-science SE sites - so I'm open to that bullet being rejected here. Just a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in my personal opinion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; does serve a useful purpose here, for those questions that really want completely scientific answers to problems that might be off-topic on a hard science SE site. If it goes the way of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;it will no longer serve a purpose&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, I think we &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; apply the measures detailed above, and apply them consistently and strictly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect some people to disagree. That's fine, but this is an issue we need to solve, so if you wouldn't be OK with helping apply these policies, &lt;strong&gt;let's debate them&lt;/strong&gt;. Post a counter-answer here or a comment, and let's actually sort this one out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-11T21:56:39.357" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T21:56:39.357" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-12T21:16:04.023" Score="7" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm nitpicking too much, but if the site is going to write a comment for me I'd like the grammar to be correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if I select a possible duplicate for a question, the site, on my behalf, posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;possible duplicate of Another question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two problems there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first letter of the sentence should be capitalized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My comment takes on the ending punctuation of the question title. I'm not asking a question; I'm making a statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see it, at minimum, say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Possible duplicate of &quot;Another question?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the language is a bit awkward, as the sentence skips the subject and goes straight to the predicate. I see the value of the brevity, but I don't think adding a short subject would be that terrible. This would leave us with something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is a possible duplicate of &quot;Another question?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this too much to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T21:16:04.023" Title="Can we improve the grammar of the canned comments?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2167" CreationDate="2015-06-12T22:19:23.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what qualities of a question make it great?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has a different answer than the answer to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...what makes some questions so much more popular than others&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to focus on what makes questions &lt;code&gt;popular&lt;/code&gt;. Popular questions not only &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2169/2138&quot;&gt;catch attention and keep it&lt;/a&gt; as @ArtOfCode stated, they &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2168/2138&quot;&gt;are also interesting to a broad audience&lt;/a&gt; as @HDE226868 seems to be suggesting. They create a curiosity that makes one not only wonder what the actual question is, but what the answers are. Sometimes this is created by references to pop-culture or by humorous titles, and sometimes its because its a question everyone can relate too - but most people have never thought about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the question is read, a popular question usually has border-line &quot;too broad&quot; criteria that means everybody could put in a little bit different perspective or focus on a little bit different area. It is also usually about a topic that nearly everyone is equally proficient at and comfortable with - they can't be told &lt;em&gt;&quot;You are wrong&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by the &quot;experts&quot;, even if there were any. People are excited with the idea, or with the idea of the answers, and they up-vote, or comment, or even add their own answer more readily than they would have otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what makes questions fun to read and answer, but they are not always &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;, which is what I think is the main difference between a &quot;great&quot; question, and a &quot;popular&quot; question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great questions produce useful questions/answers, but aren't always popular&lt;/strong&gt;, while &lt;strong&gt;Popular questions produce fun questions/answers, but aren't always great&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T22:19:23.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2015-06-13T21:59:43.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe &quot;thought experiment&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would get rid of the &quot;non&quot; and put a positive context to it. What if questions that are impossible in practice have a long and honourable history in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree something like this would be useful.It is fairly common for the most difficult part of answering to be determining, if I should pretend the scenario makes sense as written, point out a modified scenario that actually does, or simply tell straight out that it is impossible. It would be nice if you could just use tags to make that determination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course all this assumes that the person asking the question knows how to use the relevant tags properly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastActivityDate="2015-06-13T21:59:43.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2015-06-14T20:22:48.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a strong preference on WorldBuilding for positive answers.  I think this is a side effect of the creative nature of the SE.  We don't always know what is going on in the OP's head.  It is far more helpful to provide a person some clever-yet-absurd solution which may knock free something in their head that creates brilliance than it is to simply state &quot;you cannot do that.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could easily have closed a series of 4 or 5 questions as &quot;impossible&quot; or &quot;too broad&quot; because, honestly, life has had a vested interest in &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being annihilated.  This not only covers being annihilated by a single element, as per the question, which is a cakewalk compared to the more complicated things life has to protect itself again.  It would take quite a lot of discussion to arrive at this hard reality for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, we switch to creative/loophole approaches to try to jar loose some thinking on the OP's part.  The absurdity of the answers points at the directions the OP should look at next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to set up a policy as @Michael Kjörling calls for of putting the question on hold and bringing it into chat.  However, the format of SE does not seem to make that easy.  We almost need a two phase approach where an open question is first communally edited for answerability, and only the answered. It would also end up being a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; subjective approach.  I'd say easily 70-90% of the questions I see here are questions I think would benefit from some back and forth discussion before the official question/answer pattern is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T20:22:48.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2223" CreationDate="2015-06-15T09:12:07.870" Score="7" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I post frequently on other SE sites, and have been lurking here for some time. Finally, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19140/how-would-a-dragon-be-used-in-a-modern-military&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which I felt like I could answer, so I logged in and saw that the question had been protected. In the box, it states that &lt;code&gt;&quot;Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site&quot;&lt;/code&gt;. However, I have the standard, free 100 rep as I have many accounts on other SEs. Is this a typo in the protected message box? Or is my reputation wonky? What's going on here? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T12:21:48.690" Title="Reputation required for posting answer?" Tags="|support|specific-question|protected-questions|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2222" CreationDate="2015-06-15T09:42:32.543" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The operative phrase is &quot;10 reputation &lt;strong&gt;on this site&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. For the purposes of posting answers to a protected question, the association bonus (unfortunately, perhaps) doesn't count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm the one who protected that question, perhaps a little bit of explanation is in order. For whatever reason, that question was attracting low-quality answers, drawing flags; it currently has one deleted answer, and another two that are accumulating delete votes. Aside from cleaning up after the fact, the only real option we have (which still allows answers to be posted at all) is protecting the question, which causes users who have not yet earned the 10 reputation on the specific site to not be able to post answers to that specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at your network profile, you seem to be a good contributor elsewhere on the network, and I'm sorry that people such as yourself get caught in the crossfire when something like this happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: things are working as expected, and even though the message could be clearer, it does state why you are unable to post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upside is that even a single upvote on a single answer elsewhere, or two upvotes on a question, will get you above the threshold. We have a pretty upvote-happy community. Surely there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; other question where you can contribute a useful answer in order to earn the necessary reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This has since been clarified in the text, which currently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 &lt;a href=&quot;/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; on this site (the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;association bonus does not count&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T12:21:48.690" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T12:21:48.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2227" CreationDate="2015-06-15T14:56:03.307" Score="5" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to a recent question, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/19099/6986&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer. What I thought to be a fairly innocuous sentence (edited out now) intended to be a lead-in to the next sentence seems to have been misconstrued by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/803/lightness-races-in-orbit&quot;&gt;Lightness Races in Orbit&lt;/a&gt; and led to a series of hostile comments I attempted (maybe ineptly) to diffuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to clear the air between Lightness and myself, but I don't feel continuing the discussion in the comments to that answer would be appropriate and the chat room doesn't recognize me as a member of the Stack Exchange community, no matter what I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on how I should proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T19:41:53.010" Title="Clearing the air of hostility" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-06-15T16:15:42.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just reviewed an edit on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is the right place for air clearing...sorry you can't get to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good answer overall. While appealing to current events does add interest to the answer, it doesn't seem to me that the sentence about the Middle East had any specific bearing on the answer. So follow the Be Nice rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I approved the edit because it's nice. Really. It didn't change the meaning of the post (&quot;Parts of the Middle East&quot;), and made it nicer for people who might be offended. The fact that you didn't mean to generalize/offend made this an easy one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the best case would have been to say &quot;Oh, that's not what I meant,&quot; fix the post to be more clear that you didn't mean to offend, and move on. If Lightness had a problem, 1 comment and a downvote would have sufficed. &lt;strike&gt;There wasn't a downvote in this case, so that didn't happen.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;i&gt; In fairness to Lightness, he doesn't have the rep on this stack to downvote. One comment is still usually sufficient though.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't walk on eggshells, but be quick to edit if there's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="489" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T16:28:25.243" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T16:28:25.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2228" CreationDate="2015-06-15T16:48:20.573" Score="7" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;While browsing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;list of badges&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that some badges have never been awarded. For some, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/81/constituent&quot;&gt;Constituent&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/43/legendary&quot;&gt;Legendary&lt;/a&gt;, this seems like a reasonable assumption for this point in Worldbuilding's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one badge caught my attention, specifically because it's a bronze badge that has never been awarded: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;Tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt;. We have such an active and communicative community here that I don't see Tumbleweed ever being awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tumbleweed isn't the only badge that seems infeasible to acquire (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/50/tenacious&quot;&gt;Tenacious&lt;/a&gt; comes to mind), so is there some process by which badges are evaluated for their viability and what should be done with badges considered nigh impossible to acquire (if anything)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T08:37:29.623" Title="Badge viability" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-06-15T16:54:30.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to clear the air, chat &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the place to do it. Perhaps you - or someone - needs to look into your problems with chat: what exactly &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; happen when you try to get in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disagreements with an answer, on the other hand, should be resolved in comments. That's what they're for - improvements, information, clarification. (See also Monica's comment below - try to minimise back-and-forth discussion and simply keep it to correcting a mistake.) In the comment thread on your answer, I see some comments which could perhaps have been better said. The following comments are not necessarily directly aimed at the two of you or any specific comments, but are observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of assuming people are saying something because they're biased, or deliberately to offend, or with any malicious intent, it is wise to instead assume that they are merely mistaken. Doing so gives a sudden change to your mindset when commenting: instead of &quot;not another &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wrong person on the Internet&lt;/a&gt; who I must correct&quot; (resulting in angry, accusatory comments), you get &quot;ah, a minor slip-up. I'll inform OP so he can correct it.&quot; (which results in much more friendly comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, it is also wise to assume that commenters didn't &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; to accuse you of doing wrong, and treat them as such. Even if it seems someone is out to get your answer, acknowledge that they might have a point, research whether they're right, and correct your post if they are. If they're not, simply point them to a URL which demonstrates that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;assume everyone has good intentions&lt;/strong&gt;, and comments will be friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If comments &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; descend into madness, walk away for a while, come back calmer. You'll then be able to say to your previous adversary, &quot;I said some things there that perhaps were unfortunately phrased. My apologies if they came across badly.&quot; All your problems are henceforth so solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Outright rude or offensive comments should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be flagged.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T19:41:53.010" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T19:41:53.010" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2226" CreationDate="2015-06-15T17:16:45.057" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, there is no review of badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably simply because badges are an SE-wide unchanging feature, and I think it unlikely that there is any functionality to control badges on a single-site level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think there needs to be either - the fact that people can browse through badges and see that these badges have never been awarded on WB is great because it demonstrates what a good community we have. Their continued simultaneous existence and non-usage simply serves as a magnet to our community: if, in the course of looking through a user's badges and thus the badge list, someone discovers the fact that Tumbleweed is never given, it becomes clear that this community gets things done and answered. The lack of Tenacious badges shows that they'll get rewarded for participation. And that is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what we want - it draws people in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T17:34:58.690" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T17:34:58.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-06-15T17:56:59.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of this conversation was tongue in cheek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if that wasn't clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T17:56:59.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-06-15T18:58:45.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have deleted a bunch of comments there.  In the future, if you see comments you consider inappropriate -- whether they're outright rude, or not constructive, or too chatty -- please flag them.  We mods don't see everything on this large, active community.  I saw these because of this meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to resolve an issue with another user (assuming both are willing) is, as others have said, to get into a chat room together.  That way you can discuss as much as you like without producing a big pile of comments on the main site.  Comments that aren't aimed at improving the post -- such as long discussions or arguments -- tend to get deleted.  So if you want to have a conversation, chat is the place to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like you've found a way to get into chat now.  If you're still having trouble, please let us know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T18:58:45.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2226" CreationDate="2015-06-16T08:37:29.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally as a completionist I agree with you and it annoys me. Even on Stack Overflow there are badges that are impossible for anyone to ever get (precognative for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish there was a way to turn off certain badges on a per-site basis. Currently there is no way to do so and based on a conversation I had a while ago I don't think there is any interest in adding a way. The developers have more important things to work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T08:37:29.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-16T11:58:24.030" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finally, a bug that seems reproducible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When opening the flag dialog in Chrome for iOS (iPad, not iPhone - iOS version 8.3 - Chrome 43.0.2357.56, 32-bit), the &quot;moderator intervention&quot; reason text box overflows the dialog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v6xYL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T21:56:22.720" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T21:56:22.720" Title="Design bug in flag dialog" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2015-06-16T20:08:46.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fairly new to Stack Exchange generally and also to Worldbuilding SE. I have upvoted often and downvoted hardly at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did not occur to me until quite recently that downvoting mattered as much as it does. Suggestion: better publicize the explanation of why careful downvoting is constructive. Possibly put something along those lines in the tour, or &lt;em&gt;under its own heading&lt;/em&gt; in the help center. Or make an article on responsible downvoting pop up when a user has just gained the ability to downvote. It may be that there already is an explanation which I have missed. If so, take my not finding it as one point of evidence suggesting that it is currently too hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I grant that this very question by Michael Kj&amp;ouml;rling is itself an explanation of why you should consider downvoting. But I found it only with some difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another area for which I think better, more prominent explanations would increase responsible downvoting is the question of whether downvotes (and votes in general) are anonymous. I now &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I have worked out that, yes, they are anonymous even to users of high reputation (although I have learned that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/128074&quot;&gt;canny users can often guess who downvoted&lt;/a&gt;). But it took me a long time to work out that votes are probably anonymous, and I am still not sure. Again, if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an explanation somewhere, it needs to be better publicized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above assumes that confidence of anonymity will increase the willingness of users to downvote. Based on my own personal wishing to be liked and/or cowardice I think that is likely to be the most usual pattern. However I tentatively put forward an opposite suggestion: that making it visible who downvoted will help make downvoting respectable. The fact that it is public who put a question on hold, and it can thus be seen that this is regularly done by respected users, serves to demonstrate that putting on hold is an accepted practice. The same could be true of downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T20:08:46.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2015-06-18T11:05:07.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been here very long, but I still observed that the voting systems has some bias, at least as far as our community is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I gather from what I observed, is that people usually limits themselves to the two or three most voter answers. And do not read further down. Which increases the votes of those answers, and leave the other ones either to 0 or very low votes. And hence no one actually bothers to down-vote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, we are quite active, meaning that the first answers will gather some momentum very fast. And answers that come two to three days later will often be overlooked, regardless of their qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, more than once have I seen a VERY good answer in the middle range: it came too late to be up, and a few bothered to read it, which extracted that answer from the 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that digression to explain why I see some general &quot;concerns&quot; about voting on WB.SE. Now downvotes? Examples. As any new users, I can notice that there are few downvotes around. Furthermore there are a few comments about &quot;Why is it downvoted, care to comment?&quot;, which would then render the anonymity void. But on the other hand, it can help to identify the problem and improve the question/answer, which would avoid the need to downvote from the beginning. This can be illustrated by the number of comments which seems large here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some new users may care about their -1 rep. A few of those could make a difference with some given priviledges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it might be a &quot;Don't do to others what you would not wish to be done to you&quot; type of problem. People don't like to be downvoted, so don't downvote the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T11:05:07.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-18T12:45:19.617" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that Worldbuilding is long overdue from becoming fully matured member of the Stackexchange network, especially now that all of the criteria is &quot;excellent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone heard if it is going to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6464" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T13:36:51.757" Title="How much longer will Worldbuilding be beta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-18T13:26:06.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2236" CreationDate="2015-06-18T13:36:51.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere recently that StackExchange has changed its policies about smaller but stable communities being in perma-beta. They assumed that a community had to be big to be stable (which clearly isn't true for Worldbuilding).  For the life of me, I can't find the article I read or what their plans were for the smaller, stable communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T13:36:51.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2015-06-18T21:34:41.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a good idea. However, I think there's little actual &lt;em&gt;standardizing&lt;/em&gt; to be done, and far more &lt;em&gt;formalizing&lt;/em&gt; of the standard that we already have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the top few &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;excerpts&lt;/strong&gt; seem to follow this format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about [short topic description]. [Additional important information].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; tag has this excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but additional information is usually necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which follows the format perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this format: it's clear, to the point, and fits in the limited space available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;tag wikis&lt;/strong&gt; themselves are a bit more varied, and will need some standardizing. The format I try to use, based off of tag wikis here and on other sites, and the guidelines in the sidebar, goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[topic] is [description].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be used on questions that [relate to/cover/ask about etc] [topic], for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[some popular questions from the tag]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is not for [forbidden uses].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, [description] is a longer cover of the topic, usually incorporating something from the topic's Wikipedia page and other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may not need to make a completely formal standard, but as long as tag wikis have a generally accepted format, they can be edited as we go to fit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T21:34:41.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-19T18:15:56.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/blacksmithing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;blacksmithing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;blacksmithing&lt;/a&gt; ok minor edit, the proper form for this tag would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forging&lt;/a&gt; which actually exists on the site  (as of now)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently signed up for an intro course to learn to blacksmith, as many worlds are medieval it seems an interesting and appropriate topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention one of my all time favorite chapters in any fiction book was the scene in Eragon where he and the elf forge him a new sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T16:47:08.920" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T16:47:08.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2199" CreationDate="2015-06-21T20:02:48.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 9 questions and 85 answers, for an average of 9.44 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18718/how-can-i-indicate-a-third-dimension-on-a-map-of-outer-space&quot;&gt;How can I indicate a third dimension on a map of outer space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18730/how-to-go-about-creating-an-inaccurate-map&quot;&gt;How to go about creating an &amp;quot;inaccurate&amp;quot; map?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2138.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18736/encrypting-maps&quot;&gt;Encrypting maps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18926/how-could-bird-people-map-the-air&quot;&gt;How could bird people map the air?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2947&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2947.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18938/making-the-marauders-map-can-i-make-a-map-that-changes&quot;&gt;Making the Marauder&amp;#39;s Map: Can I make a map that changes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18957/how-would-you-create-a-map-based-upon-scent-or-other-senses&quot;&gt;How would you create a map based upon scent (or other senses)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7886.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19107/graphically-represent-map-multiple-spatial-dimentions&quot;&gt;Graphically represent (map) multiple spatial dimentions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9708&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9708.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19301/mapping-a-fantasy-horror-building-where-rooms-overlap&quot;&gt;Mapping a fantasy/horror building where rooms overlap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9928&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9928.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19332/how-to-navigate-without-magnetism&quot;&gt;How to navigate without magnetism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8400.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T20:02:48.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2261" CreationDate="2015-06-21T20:08:30.840" Score="4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our tenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 22 June - 4 July&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/328&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/328.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There haven't been very many questions with these tags, but I feel like making them a challenge could result in people thinking in perhaps surprising way about any questions they might have on their mind. time especially is a bit more vague than the challenge topics suggested so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2199/fortnightly-topic-challenge-9-map-making?rq=1&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #9: Map-Making&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2154/fortnightly-topic-challenge-8-apocalypse&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #8: Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2104/fortnightly-topic-challenge-7-economy&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T21:06:41.493" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #10: Time" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-21T20:24:15.067" Score="6" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/fortnightly-topic-challenge-10-time-and-time-travel&quot;&gt;tenth topic challenge&lt;/a&gt;, just posted, we have some disagreement about the correct places to vote. The important part here is that there is some disagreement, not that it is about votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, I suspect, not the first time a topic challenge has generated controversy, nor will it be the last. However, our process (such as it exists) for posting topic challenges at the moment lends itself to people getting upset: simply, a user posts the next challenge at the proscribed time, and someone collates the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has an issue with a topic challenge, that leaves said user's post being downvoted. If lots of people have the same issue, that user's post gets heavily downvoted. Yes, there is no rep involved here on meta, but nobody likes having heavily downvoted posts under their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, if a post is very well-received, it gets lots of upvotes. OK, we all like those at least, but it's probably not fair to let already-prolific posters here gather more high-scored posts that, in reality, were written by &lt;a href=&quot;http://jenkinsstuff.bl.ee/challenge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a machine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, a suggestion: we make all TC posts community wiki. Nobody then has their name or profile attached to the posts, and they can be voted on to our hearts' content without fear of offending anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I ask this only because us regular users can't make &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; community wiki - only mods. Mods - if we flag posts for conversion to CW, will you object? Any changes/suggestions?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T20:24:15.067" Title="Can we make topic challenges Community Wiki?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-22T15:41:01.867" Score="11" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was sifting through the question sandbox...would it be totally inappropriate to remove items that haven't seen any activity for maybe...30 days?  Talking about questions that have not been deleted/promoted to main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are starting to accumulate a lot of content that has stagnated and appears to be going nowhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side question, is there a way to view a thread excluding the deleted posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T13:20:05.850" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T13:20:05.850" Title="Sandbox cleanup" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2015-06-22T16:57:31.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the name 'sandbox', I'd say that if someone hasn't touched a question in 30 days, they probably aren't going to and the question should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T16:57:31.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2015-06-22T18:14:57.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll admit to having similar thoughts recently, given the number of apparently inactive posts we have there. Good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;30 days sounds like a good threshold to me: it gives enough refining time without sticking around for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the moderators are happy for us to flag these answers for deletion, great. If not, if you spot one just jump into chat and find 3 4k+ users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T18:14:57.407" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2015-06-22T18:25:13.913" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering about why people don't downvote enough might be useful, but I think it would be even more useful &lt;strong&gt;being reactive and change the site rules in order to increment the amount of downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;remove the reputation cost&lt;/strong&gt;. Seriously: it's stupid, it makes no sense, it directly harms the quality of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;introduce &lt;strong&gt;badges for downvoters&lt;/strong&gt;. This would be a nice incentive to downvote questions you don't like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvote should be effective towards every user, &lt;strong&gt;remove the 1 rep low cap&lt;/strong&gt;. If I downvote someone who has 1 rep, he'll just stay at 1 rep. If, after that, he gets an upvote, he gets the full points, so it's like I never downvoted in the first place. This is stupid.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more depth about these points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not really, it's just plain old stupid, nothing to add.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you are concerned people would just randomly downvote to get some badges, well, this is a more general site problem, this could happen anyway for the general voting badges, and this might be solved by the secret magic bots who detect &quot;improper&quot; (sigh) voting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you are concerned about people having negative points, don't be: everyone should start at 0 rep, and you would at worst show 0 rep instead of a negative one. But, &lt;strong&gt;internally&lt;/strong&gt;, you would count down to negative. If you are concerned people would create a new account if their current one has a negative rep, well, let them do it, who cares, how many times would this happen anyway?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect this to really happen, since, frankly, in my quite arrogant opinion the SE &quot;higher&quot; community is crystallized in their traditions, even when they are very detrimental, and once you point out something out of their safe canon, they go berserk and insult you (politely, sure! Ha!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that's my 2€$. 2 cents were not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T18:25:13.913" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T14:21:45.217" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about an hour ago and it was recently voted to close for the reason it was unclear what i was asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is not a complaint about this rather than no comment was given with what part that was unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at SE meta for world building we are on 9.9 questions a day and we want to reach 10 - a good way to reach the last one is maybe using comments to fix questions instead of just &quot;pretend not to care&quot; and close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I requested an explanation in comments but it seems like the &quot;pack mentality&quot; on this site bought it another vote without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do i go about this ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do i improve my question without feedback ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="757" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T07:25:37.067" Title="Fixing questions rather than deleting it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2249" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:16:45.397" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try and geuss why your qeustion was closed - is it too broad, off-topic, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see the problem, try re-wording it. Perhaps you've phrased something in a way that could be interpreted differently than how you intended it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8887" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:16:45.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2249" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:24:19.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please link the question in your post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unsure why it was closed posting here on meta, or asking in chat can help get you answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally try to provide comments as to the thought of those closing but sometimes it doesn't happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking people are more than happy to help you review a closed question and keep in mind that closing a question doesn't mean it is gone.  Closure is there to avoid answers stacking up against a question that may need to drastically change (thus negating the validity of the answers).  so at its most basic we are trying to keep question quality high and not waste people's time answering a question that is likely going to change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:24:19.670" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-06-24T18:38:33.240" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The atmosphere is a fairly essential part of any world, and this should be reflected by use of this tag. Since the atmosphere is important, but often ignored, I think that questions that focus on it could have potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9708" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:38:33.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2254" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:00:24.923" Score="10" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask an open ended question whose answer will be entirely subjective.  But I think the question and answer would be beneficial to the site.  This is technically something that should be flagged to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What are mapping or diagramming techniques that would be valuable to&#xA;  someone mapping a solar system?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically, it's a question about creating maps or diagrams.  I've seen&#xA;  number of different approaches taken and each of these has provided&#xA;  unique insight into various aspects of interplanetary travel.  I&#xA;  wanted to see if there are other perspectives that I haven't seen that&#xA;  might prove to be equally valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I ask such a question without getting it closed or am I stuck doing my own research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be impossible to select a &quot;best&quot; answer but that doesn't mean there couldn't be many very good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T20:53:42.040" Title="How do I create open ended questions with subjective answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:53:42.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you're that far off, actually.  You have a problem (mapping a solar system) and you want to know how to do it (just what SE is for).  What's missing are criteria for success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of asking &quot;what tools/techniques are there&quot;, which is pretty general and (as you said) subjective, try to be more specific.  What tools do you already know about and in what ways did they fail you?  What specific features are important to you?  What level of precision are you after?  (A map to include in the front of your book is different from a high-end model used in an RPG.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, instead of &lt;em&gt;starting a discussion&lt;/em&gt;, try to &lt;em&gt;describe a problem&lt;/em&gt;.  I'm confident that our industrious community can help you with this if you can just be a bit more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing your question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T20:53:42.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2249" CreationDate="2015-06-25T07:25:37.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, I agree with you that the first to vote to close, or at least one of the first, should consider writing a comment about it directly. As James had it, closing a &quot;non-perfect&quot; question saves time for the answerers, but commenting on a question may save further time for the reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually try to do that, but I'm not sure I'm always clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point, however, one VTC does not mean it's getting closed. Maybe the others disagree with that vote and the question never gets closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T07:25:37.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2259" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:35:09.407" Score="14" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately, I have the feeling that there are some questions about climate discussions with changing the geography or a few things to our world. To name a few that might fall in those categories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19871/an-even-more-northern-north-america&quot;&gt;An Even More Northern North America&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19276/sunda-and-sahul&quot;&gt;Sunda and Sahul&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19180/a-completely-different-africa&quot;&gt;A Completely Different Africa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, those questions can't have a really good answer, as climate simulation is a very complex task, which requires the knowledge of many parameters that are fully missing in the questions. Some of those questions have been closed on the basis that they are too broad. It is indeed a real problem: impossible to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/19875/9685&quot;&gt;a satisfying answer&lt;/a&gt;, unless spending days running some simulations. And we can't be expected to do that, are we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we agree on a treatment of the questions of that type: &quot;If I do this to a continent, how is the climate changed?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Please note that it seems most of those come from the same user.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:58:35.640" Title="How to deal with the &quot;If I do this [radical change] thing how does the climate change&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:31:24.507" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed those kinds of questions too and find myself unwilling to make the effort to answer them for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Climate is really complex.  One need look no further than the hundred of publications on climate change on Earth to show how many different factors there are to account for and how much variation there is in the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who ask these kinds of questions don't appear to have done enough research into climate to ask focused questions and if they do learn enough to ask those focused questions, they know to ask them to climatologists, not us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(This may seem petty) but I don't want to spend my time answering the question of someone who hasn't done basic research into the water cycle and rain shadows.  I don't want this site to turn into &quot;Let me Google that for you&quot; for basic climate information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, the quality of answers I see for these kinds of questions is low probably because it's so hard to answer with any kind of specificity and relatively few of us here are climatologists (I'm sure not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks a focused, reasonable-time-to-answer question then I vote to keep it open.  If not, then close it with the &quot;too broad&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:31:24.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2015-07-07T16:08:59.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 10 questions and 43 answers, for an average of 4.3 answers per question, counting the 2 closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19986/rules-magic-for-time-travel-one-way-to-the-past&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19986/rules-magic-for-time-travel-one-way-to-the-past&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8909&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8909.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19953/what-difficulties-would-there-be-for-society-if-people-could-manipulate-time&quot;&gt;What difficulties would there be for society if people could manipulate time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2138.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19834/time-no-longer-passes-except-near-intelligent-creatures-how-does-the-world-cont&quot;&gt;Time no longer passes except near intelligent creatures, how does the world continue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10139&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10139.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19829/what-traits-should-we-expect-from-religion-in-the-presence-of-time-loops&quot;&gt;What traits should we expect from religion in the presence of time loops&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2252&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2252.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19789/what-should-i-fear-consider-if-someone-asked-me-today-to-put-me-on-hibernation-a&quot;&gt;What should I fear/consider if someone asked me today to put me on hibernation and set the time to wake me up 2000 years from now?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/480&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/480.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19728/can-i-significantly-shorten-the-days-on-a-planet-that-can-support-human-life&quot;&gt;Can I significantly shorten the days on a planet that can support human life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19719/a-perception-of-time&quot;&gt;A Perception Of Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5002.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19607/can-you-build-a-relativistic-clock&quot;&gt;Can you build a relativistic clock?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/879&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/879.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19539/the-great-time-war&quot;&gt;The Great Time War&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9685.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19525/an-immortals-measurement-of-time&quot;&gt;An immortal&amp;#39;s measurement of time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6986.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T16:08:59.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2322" CreationDate="2015-07-07T16:17:30.960" Score="5" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our eleventh topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 7 July - 21 July&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2071.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simply because it gets omitted so many times when we create new worlds and new societies. I would like to see more of religion questions in set up of fictionary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/fortnightly-topic-challenge-10-time&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #10: Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2199/fortnightly-topic-challenge-9-map-making?rq=1&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #9: Map-Making&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2154/fortnightly-topic-challenge-8-apocalypse&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #8: Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2104/fortnightly-topic-challenge-7-economy&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/fortnightly-topic-challenge-1-space&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #1: Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T22:05:24.470" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #11: Religion" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2015-07-07T19:30:48.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the correct answer, I actually find these questions inviting &lt;em&gt;when I have the time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know there can never be a 'correct answer' to these, the results of the speculative science seem to always be rewarding for consideration of other worldbuilding.  I agree, however, that this defeats the purpose of a Q &amp;amp; A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe they can be edited to more concise, such as &quot;Would the oceans get warmer, if...&quot; or &quot;Would it disrupt the gulf streams if...&quot;?  Tough topic to tackle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T19:30:48.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T02:00:08.510" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future&quot;&gt;How do you prove you&amp;#39;re from the future?&lt;/a&gt; gives an example of somebody coming back from 2100.  What will happen if this site still exists 100 years from now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to limit using example years in some way, or is this problem not important, in this example, for another 85 years anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the example had used 2020?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10785" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T02:08:25.857" Title="How to deal with timestamps given to example time-travel related questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2265" CreationDate="2015-07-09T02:08:25.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think people will figure it out from context. The timestamp of the post is visible, after all.  If you come across a discussion about planning for the Y2K problem, does that confuse you?  I doubt it, because you know the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, if it causes problems, people will just edit those posts at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need rules about this.  Even for a question that uses 2020.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T02:08:25.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T11:38:33.140" Score="35" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that many users link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mobile Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; rather than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desktop Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. This is very irritating when reading on a desktop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users of supported mobile devices are automatically redirected to the official mobile version of Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supported: iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, WebOS, Opera Mini, NetFront (Sony Ericsson phones, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3), Wii, and numerous others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking to the desktop version of Wikipedia makes browsing more pleasant for desktop users and mobile users will be automatically redirected to the mobile version. If you copy paste a mobile address, then please remove &lt;code&gt;m.&lt;/code&gt; from the URL.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It's not much to ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I just crazy or are other desktop users irritated by this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T20:46:04.587" Title="Please don't link to m.wikipedia.org" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2267" CreationDate="2015-07-09T13:09:27.630" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that the people doing this are posting from mobile, so they researched something, collected the link, and used it.  Probably they don't even notice that the link is sub-optimal, so thanks for raising awareness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If authors can edit those links that's great, but if they don't, anybody else should feel free to edit in this change.  That way only the first person to be potentially irritated by it has to be irritated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T13:09:27.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-07-09T18:24:17.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20213/how-would-a-future-british-islam-respond-to-rule-by-alien-mages&quot;&gt;How would a future British Islam respond to rule by alien mages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Setting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;London 50-70 years in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technological regression to mid twentieth century &lt;em&gt;(might be good to add an actual year or at least a decade, tech advanced pretty rapidly in the 20th century)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regression was forced by aliens disguised as humans &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The aliens can use magic &lt;em&gt;(tiny description of what can be done and what they do with it wouldn't hurt)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has been about 40 years since the technological regression occurred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many humans do not believe that they are aliens nor that they have magic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The alien rulers are probably no worse than most human rulers throughout history. &lt;em&gt;(there is a large range of good to bad human rulers, best to clarify or give a human ruler as a comparison)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most people accept the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am more familiar with western religions but wanted to include a Muslim character. The character is female, mid-20's, lower middle-class, unmarried member of the Resistance with a mostly South Asian ancestry. She wears a headscarf but not a veil and works outside the home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(to answer the question we need to know how devout she is...guessing from your description I would guess not super devout...or at least she does not adhere to strict sharia rules)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her beliefs are not shared by all British Muslims of her time, &lt;em&gt;(what beliefs?)&lt;/em&gt;  but she is meant to arise from a significant current of opinion. &lt;em&gt;(re-word this, not sure what it means)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would she be willing to believe in magic and aliens or would she think it is a bunch of humans cooking up a technological fraud to keep themselves in power? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would she take from the Koran about the possibility of magic and/or aliens?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They clearly are not either demons or angels, but morally mixed creatures like us. If she does accept their genuineness, does she see their rule as something that needs to be opposed on the grounds that magic is evil, or rule by non-humans is evil, or would her resistance be purely political? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is relevant to state that the regime permits religions to be practised so long as they stay in line. Decades ago risings against the aliens in Muslim countries were savagely put down, but Islam is not seriously persecuted in Britain at the time of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What words would she use to describe her own beliefs as a member of the resistance? Jihad seems an obvious one, but are there other concepts from Muslim thought that she would apply to this situation? What suras, ayahs and hadiths would she quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aliens generally exhibit mild disdain for all Earthly religions and political theories, although a few express a rather condescending interest. Would she think it obligatory to make the probably futile effort to convert any she meets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove the below, it makes this way too broad, though you could ask a separate question about the more general Muslim response&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;~Remove~&lt;/strong&gt; Moving away from this one character, what other types of Muslim response would there be? What religious justifications might those Muslims who choose to collaborate with the aliens put forward? Or those who resist, but not in cooperation with the officially pluralistic general resistance movement in Britain? &lt;strong&gt;~/Remove~&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; This question has been placed on hold as too broad on the main site. James has suggested I place it here to seek suggestions on how it can be edited to be more suitable. Maybe it could be split into several questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note 2 (15th July 2015):&lt;/strong&gt; Unfortunately I have not had the chance to look at the suggested edits for this question over the last few days, and it looks as if I won't have more than momentary access to the internet for the next few days either. I have thus exceeded the five days for which a question remains on hold and the question will be closed. Nonetheless I would like to resubmit a new version of this question at some point in the future, taking into account the suggestions made, for which many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T22:06:40.607" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2267" CreationDate="2015-07-09T20:27:00.733" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like something that Stack Exchange’s automatical link conversion could automatically do, given that Wikipedia is probably the most linked external source. It’s not much different from converting this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2267&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2267&quot;&gt;Please don&amp;#39;t link to m.wikipedia.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/260843/255554&quot;&gt;feature request for this&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T20:46:04.587" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-10T06:20:14.410" Score="-3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does Worldbuilding Stack Exchange  allow irrational ontological questions i.e. contrary to scientific reasoning as espoused by Saint Thomas Aquinas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" OwnerDisplayName="frank milton lipsky" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T19:23:20.583" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T18:07:24.057" Title="Why does Worldbuilding allow irrational quintiessential questions i.e. contrary to scientific reasoning" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2015-07-10T07:00:42.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;World-building is about exploration, not about rational limits along the line of the world as we know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This branching out can be messy and frustrating at times. It is that phase in brainstorming where brand new avenues are investigated. This can be baffling, frustrating and in the end when looking backwards pointless after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the price of breaking through boundaries of current thinking into the unlimited unknown. If you have suggestions making the process more efficient, please put it forward at &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case the process needs to stay effective and free as well because you never know what you will find further along the (admittedly initially unlikely) road.&#xA;(Many of us enjoy this uncertainty during the chase)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9487" OwnerDisplayName="Bookeater" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T07:00:42.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-07-10T22:05:43.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to have had 3 Hispanic Presidents of America by 2006...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What changes to the cultural history of America would be required so that the country would have had at least 3 different Hispanic Presidents, that are unrelated and not arranged in a sequence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be correct to say that the only POD (Point of Divergence) that I would need for my Alternate History is drastically lower Anti-Mexican Sentiment in America? So, then Mexicans could get better educations on average, and have almost, if not the exact same, chance of being President as a 'white' person, after being weighted for population of each demographic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I've got a question for research required for this question on History.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23451/was-the-texas-revolution-and-texas-annexation-the-root-causes-of-modern-hispanop&quot;&gt;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23451/was-the-texas-revolution-and-texas-annexation-the-root-causes-of-modern-hispanop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I post a sub-question on Politics.SE? If so, what should I ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:53.193" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T17:19:18.283" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2015-07-11T09:29:24.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is about &lt;strong&gt;building&lt;/strong&gt; fictional worlds, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the questions should be amenable to rational debate, and the initial posters should do some basic research first. Yet sometimes questions get closed and sometimes the answers fill the gaps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some closed questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20260/further-down-into-the-depths&quot;&gt;Further Down Into the Depths&lt;/a&gt; -- four-figure accuracy is pointless and the question cannot be answered with the given data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20018/the-lake-mongolia&quot;&gt;The Lake Mongolia&lt;/a&gt; -- the effects are impossible to calculate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19988/what-reason-would-keep-an-aircraft-from-flying-higher-than-250-feet&quot;&gt;What reason would keep an aircraft from flying higher than 250 feet?&lt;/a&gt; -- again I find it hard to reconcile two-figure accuracy with the open question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others remained open and attracted answers and views, despite being similarly hard to answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19695/can-i-map-the-location-of-my-convenient-store-inside-a-wormhole&quot;&gt;Can I map the location of my convenient store inside a wormhole?&lt;/a&gt; -- assuming the wormhole networks are just &quot;FTL shortcuts&quot;, what is there to map other than the entry points?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20290/forced-re-entry-of-all-man-made-satellites-in-short-moment-notice&quot;&gt;Forced re-entry of all man-made satellites in short moment notice&lt;/a&gt; -- the poster doesn't seem to realize just how much junk there is in space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20208/could-medieval-age-people-have-built-a-missile&quot;&gt;Could medieval age people have built a missile?&lt;/a&gt; -- the distinction between guided missile, unguided artillery rocket, and guided space launch system seems unclear to the poster. No research on Chinese fireworks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if our challenges produce many of the bad questions, as people try to ask questions without having a world to build ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T18:07:24.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:28:08.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you'll find this answer convincing - if the others aren't good enough, which I think they are - given that it comes from someone who has probably been the biggest advocate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, the inclusion of scientific reasoning into any situation possible, and rigorous answers designed to be up to the standard - if not to a higher standard, if possible - of the science sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you ever read &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; trilogy, and/or other works by Tolkien? I have. I love it. I actually think that it's the single most impressive work of fiction I have ever read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, Tolkien didn't merely stick a plot somewhere. He stuck a plot in an actual &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;. This means developing all the aspects of the setting to the extent of details in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give you some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Languages.&lt;/strong&gt; It might interest you to know that Tolkien created many languages for his books. The Elves have their own language - in fact, they have &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Elvish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; languages&lt;/a&gt;, which reflects the fact that not everyone in a given race is the same. Many writers overlook that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History.&lt;/strong&gt; Tolkien came up with the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Age&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ages&lt;/a&gt; long periods of time in the history of the world. He wrote detailed timelines of all of these ages, showing the evolution of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Arda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arda&lt;/a&gt;. It's quite incredible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cartography.&lt;/strong&gt; Tolkien's maps are absolutely incredible. They show places and kingdoms in Middle Earth (and beyond, into other continents). The maps let you realize the relationships between people and events. They add one more touch of realism to the stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deities.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Deities&quot; is the best term I can come up with to describe some of the higher beings in Arda and beyond. The key example is, of course, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Il%C3%BAvatar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eru Ilúvatar&lt;/a&gt;, the creator. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Maiar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maiar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Valar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valar&lt;/a&gt; are more beings that do not obey the laws of science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many things in the whole Tolkien compendium do not agree with science. There are deities, magic, and creatures that could never evolve on Earth (&lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Troll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I hope!&lt;/a&gt;). Yet I think that many people would agree that Tolkien's universe is an incredible example of a beautifully built world. No science needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for this idea - that great worlds do not need to obey the laws of science - that we allow - and cherish - questions that are &quot;contrary to scientific reasoning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T12:28:08.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-07-13T18:44:00.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What unique challenges would interstellar missionaries face?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my story, a planet has been discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri B. By a strange coincidence - actually, despite incredible odds against - the planet is Earth-like and habitable. Furthermore, radio transmissions have been detected from the planet, and they seem to be the production of an intelligent species. They don't appear to have been intentionally broadcast, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For years, governments bicker about what to do. Private space enterprises are blocked from attempting a voyage, and after five years, Earth has not even sent anything like an attempt to start a conversation. That's bureaucracy for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minor religion that is based off of a space opera-like story1 decided just after the discovery to send a ship with missionaries there. For five years they worked, and managed to build a ship that can get people to the planet in about ten years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ship leaves Earth, unbeknownst to anyone else. Earth never gets around to making contact after some alien scares pop up in the populace, and any related projects stall. The ship, however, continues on to its target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon landing, what unique challenges will the missionaries face? By &amp;quot;unique&amp;quot;, I rule out any challenges that any explorers would face or any missionaries would face. I'm talking about challenges that spring up when you stick missionaries on a planet around another star with absolutely no government backing or prior knowledge of the inhabitants of the planet, or much of the planet itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually posted this as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20514/what-unique-challenges-would-interstellar-missionaries-face&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20514/what-unique-challenges-would-interstellar-missionaries-face&lt;/a&gt;, but I deleted it because I felt it was a little boring, and it just seemed to simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T18:50:55.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2280" CreationDate="2015-07-14T16:24:55.193" Score="6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a question where I do not have a complete answer, but I noticed something that, unless I'm mistaken, everyone else have not considered so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I write a partial answer featuring this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can't be easily edited into another answer without changing it drastically, and it doesn't fit a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T14:09:30.720" Title="I don't have a complete answer, but I have something to add" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2283" CreationDate="2015-07-15T00:55:14.837" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;JDługosz just asked an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20565/what-would-be-the-mythology-of-an-aquatic-species&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about the interaction between aquatic alien mythology and aquatic alien psychology.  The question is a good one but it makes me wonder if an alien-psych tag might be useful to help identify these kinds of questions.  And if an alien-psych tag is useful, perhaps a human-psych tag would be useful too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:47:58.770" Title="Utility of an alien-psych and human-psych tags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2278" CreationDate="2015-07-15T14:09:30.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be an answer but judging whether it is a good answer or not is subjective and will be different for every user. My best advice is : try. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answers tend to be deleted because they often show a lack of effort and could be just as useful as comments. These short answers are fine as long as they do answer the question, but 1 or 2 lines of texts is not always enough to fully develop an idea: that's usually the problem when they get flagged.  Long answers are less likely to be considered useless. I have different theories about why these are more acceptable but I think I don't need to get into this now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other point is about the content of the answer. The content could be similar to another post but it would have to bring something new in order to be considered useful.  A new element, a new perspective... otherwise it's could be considered a form of plagiarism :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T14:09:30.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T15:48:49.320" Score="4" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this moment, there is a suggested edit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/9957/6986&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in the review queue. When seen from the review pane, the edits display the Latex code used to render the final output. As someone who doesn't know Latex all that well, I find this annoying, especially when the edits are solely in regard to the Latex code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to make a change to the review process so the review pane can display the final result?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T15:48:49.320" Title="Showing rendered Latex during review" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-15T19:08:55.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T18:11:04.710" Score="28" ViewCount="827" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions reach the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt; list recently, which is probably related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2262/fortnightly-topic-challenge-11-religion&quot;&gt;the current topic challenge&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;. This means that there are a lot of outside viewers coming in to Worldbuilding (and sometimes joining and voting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, Worldbuilding is an odd site. We're not like the others. We cover a wide range of topics, including science, linguistics, and history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious: What do users from outside sites think of us? What is our reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how can we change any negative perceptions that may exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T20:31:17.980" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:02:47.547" Title="What do users from other Stack Exchange sites think of Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="14" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2015-07-15T19:09:32.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alien&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alien&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alien&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stats on these are currently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;38 questions tagged psychology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;76 questions tagged alien&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;102 questions tagged humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &lt;strong&gt;only two&lt;/strong&gt; questions are tagged &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology+alien&quot;&gt;psychology and alien&lt;/a&gt;. All of &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology+humans&quot;&gt;psychology and humans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you cite as an example isn't even tagged psychology; it's tagged alien, religion, underwater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this shows that there is not a great need at present for a tag &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;em&gt;alien psychology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;Any user with sufficient reputation can create new tags&lt;/a&gt;, and nobody (not even us diamond moderators) has a veto on them (short of blacklisting, but that's not what we'd be doing here; blacklisting tags is primarily for tags that used to be considered acceptable but now aren't, but keeps coming back), but I think this site is mature enough by now that new tags should fill a real need in terms of categorizing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we had tons of questions tagged &quot;alien psychology&quot; then this might very well have been different, but as it stands, I don't see any real need that would be fulfilled by such a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, my stance at this time is to recommend &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; creating such a (highly specific) tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:47:58.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-07-15T22:42:19.440" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terraforming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terraforming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terraforming&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We usually build our own worlds from scratch. Having to use certain features in a pre-built world and changing them to what is needed requires a whole different approach for both characters and their creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, we can build a world and let it be up to the characters to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T18:03:22.273" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T18:03:22.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-15T23:40:55.257" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure I speak for (at least most of) RPG.SE when I say I love Worldbuilding.  Our sites work together very well and no more are our roleplayers asked to be experts in history, science (and science fiction), every form of magic ever imagined in all of fiction, and biology (and xenobiology, robobiology, and necrobiology) in order to answer questions about making campaign settings - we direct them to the experts over here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bringing together collaborators from all the various sites where their expertise might reside - RPG, Sci-fi/Fantasy, History, Biology, Writing, and I'm sure more - and making all those experts available in one place to help with building realistic worlds is a dream come true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4941" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T23:40:55.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2289" CreationDate="2015-07-15T23:46:51.747" Score="8" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a fiction set in 1835, and no website I can find will give me an easy-to-reference list of what's common, what's still being adopted, and what major things haven't been invented yet.  I don't need a detailed breakdown of every single thing, just enough to make it not break verisimilitude if I describe a town corner or a rail hub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm having no luck finding a website that suits my purposes, I'm considering posting a question on StackExchange.  Worldbuilding was my first thought, but on further reflection, I wondered if it might be History, since I'm not asking anyone to help me with any &quot;building&quot; so much as just tell me what pieces I should have available to build with.  Can you help me narrow it down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4941" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T18:58:15.200" Title="Is this the right site for this question? (Historical technology level)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2286" CreationDate="2015-07-15T23:55:12.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that Worldbuilding isn't quite right, because you're asking a question about the real world. I recently saw a comment about that in a question that was being put on hold. It was along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about the real world. We deal with hypothetical worlds here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I want to attribute this to TimB, but I'm not precisely sure.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask questions about alternate Earths here, sure, and you can ask questions about generic settings, like a generic medieval setting. But asking for the kind of things you're asking about seems to be off-topic. Just by a hair. Perhaps it could be changed to be good, in which case I'd love to see it. (You could try &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions?cb=1&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T23:55:12.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T01:21:39.260" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a work that's set in a universe of an existing, fictional work (basically, a fanfic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to explore the worldbuilding of that work's Universe in a direction where the original creator pretty much left things mostly to imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is asking questions in this context on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If so, is it preferable to honestly state what the Universe is (which - if no other benefit - instantly offers people familiar with the works many many  details of the world); or simply describe the relevant details of the World without mentioning it's based on a published work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a random example, I would like to ask a question asking about how would a specific detail of Heinlein's &lt;em&gt;Starship Troopers&lt;/em&gt; world work. This is clearly offtopic for SFF.SE (as I'm interested in a hypothetical, not in-universe or RAH facts); but seems fully ontopic here, if not for the fact that the world I'm &quot;developing&quot; is not originally mine but Heinlein's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: (more fanfic friendly :) - what jobs could a pure-blood wizard do, if they wish to (a) live in a Muggle world; (b) use magic to help them in their work; yet (3) Not get Ministry of Magic repercussions by violating secrecy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T06:51:38.973" Title="Is asking to &quot;extend&quot; an existing fictional world on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-07-17T15:02:13.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2286" CreationDate="2015-07-16T01:39:23.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am misreading what you're trying to achieve, but questions about &quot;what happened/didn't happen in real history at time X&quot; squarely and completely belong on &lt;strong&gt;History.SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T01:39:23.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-16T02:20:17.583" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll tell you this: I'm not &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;really&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; a user here. So I think whatever I have to say is... decently valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered this site looking through the gazillions of collections of beta sites that seemingly go on forever. When I first see a site, I look at some of the users, the highest voted questions and read their answers. I fell in love with this site at first glance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an account here, yes. I don't build the world... Even though the old ones tell me &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, it's you young folks that will build the world of the future&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (I'm 15 by the way). But I don't participate. I don't know if it's because I think my own ideas are stupid or something else, but I don't. &lt;s&gt;Quite frankly, I don't even know if I vote.&lt;/s&gt; Yep, I haven't even cast a single vote... :( Actually, this meta question is the first up vote I've ever cast, on meta and main. I just love reading answers to various questions, smiling and laughing throughout the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love many answers with this site, that sometimes I get a few of my friends together that love writing and we read through the answers. The comments are the best. We love talking about it. They love the site as much as I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious: What do outside sites think of us? What is our reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how can we change any negative perceptions that may exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation (That means something, oh... That's user reputation :P)... I think it's pretty good. I don't talk to much with a lot of &amp;quot;people&amp;quot; from the entire community, and I don't think I've ever seen it brought up. So I can't tell you what the SE community thinks of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, students and teachers in my school love this site (Worldbuilding). It helps us with ideas, they provide us with inspiration for projects in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; outside of school. Being referenced in schools is... A pretty darn amazing feat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negative reputation... Well there's nothing negative of this site. Yes, there's the odd question or answer here and out, but that's common with everything, just like any other site. Nobody minds this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an &amp;quot;outsider&amp;quot; (Don't think I'm one anymore...), this site is amazing, and I just have one thing to note (And yes, I'm smiling and &amp;quot;yelling&amp;quot; when I say this)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Keep It Up! :D&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T13:07:20.253" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-07-16T02:42:41.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;How dangerous is someone who can control the friction coefficient of air, in a limited volume?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given someone who can alter the friction coefficient of any volumes of air in her sight and then maintain those changes indefinitely, so long as the total volume is no larger than 10m^3...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both groups are prepared for the other, how large a military force could such a person defeat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastEditorUserId="6812" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T23:32:06.887" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T23:32:06.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2288" CreationDate="2015-07-16T06:51:38.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It is fine to do so. I certainly &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19539/the-great-time-war&quot;&gt;did&lt;/a&gt;, and if the question wasn't very popular, it wasn't considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I would say that it does not harm, but you'll have to see if it brings something to the question. You have also to consider that, maybe contrary to most well known cases in SFF.SE, here not everyone may be familiar with the original world, so you certainly need to summarise the key factors of the world. With that in mind, you could either be building a world similar to the original, or a fanfic, no one needs to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is just maybe one reason why specifying the world, is that if you are doing fanfic, you are constrained by the possible incoherences of the original sources. Indicating where it comes from explains why you must respect some constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For your second example, look at Kingsley Shakelbolt as a secretary of the muggle Prime Minister. So you might want to clarify whether there are canon answers, if you want to do a fanfic.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T06:51:38.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2294" CreationDate="2015-07-16T08:45:35.253" Score="8" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/20507/29&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; real life history question recently, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2286/29&quot;&gt;dodged&lt;/a&gt; another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strict reading of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; doesn't provide any guidance for this type of questions, but it's fairly clear that they are outside of the site's intended scope also by community judgement. The general advice is that real-world history questions belongs on the History SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we update the help center text, to specifically list real-world history questions as off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T21:09:06.017" Title="Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2293" CreationDate="2015-07-16T08:45:35.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we add as a bullet point under &quot;as long as they are not about&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;http://history.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt; or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T21:09:06.017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T21:09:06.017" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-07-16T08:45:35.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2015-07-16T08:48:01.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with ArtOfCode, but wanted to add that many of us don't feel qualified to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. I suspect the same would be mostly true with regards towards knowing is something has enough hard science in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting answers and adding comments is still the initial first step for answers that are not good enough. The deletion reason for answer would be &quot;low quality&quot;. Scientifically wrong answers that still (inaccurately) use &quot;facts&quot; and equations (however misapplied) are in fact answering the question, and as per norm should just be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that those of you who constantly use the tag are going to have to spend a lot of time adding comments, VTC, VTD, editing and quoting the tag wiki to get this into the heads of most of our members, since while meta is where decisions are made, it is not always read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T09:45:51.397" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T09:45:51.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T17:10:54.007" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once a question is closed, shouldn't any comments also be closed? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world&quot;&gt;&quot;is there a way to design a realistic religion&quot;&lt;/a&gt; question is turning into a debate forum completely inappropriate to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T08:58:57.383" Title="Closed questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2296" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:14:48.763" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, comments should not be closed. This is because questions being closed is a temporary measure. If and when the question has had the problems with it fixed (if that is possible) then it can be opened and the comments are a vital part of that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is specific abuse of comments happening in one question then that should be dealt with there. Looking at the question though I only see 4 or 5 new comments in the last day, not enough to worry about yet although it would be better taken to chat and if the number of comments does explode a moderator will most likely step in and enforce that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T18:20:31.430" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T18:20:31.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:41:50.937" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a not-Worldbuilding user, I &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; seeing WB questions in the sidebar. They're almost always fairly interesting (there are the ones I don't like, but they're rare) with &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; answers. I'm amazed at how much research people here put into answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean seriously, of these two which are you more likely to click?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qsKvY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user197" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T18:41:50.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2301" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:46:29.573" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7951/snoringfrog&quot;&gt;SnoringFrog&lt;/a&gt; has been editing a lot of posts today. He currently has +92 rep, just from these edits being approved. He has 10 rep from other activities and 100 from an association bonus. I'm sort of concerned about this (the active questions page is full of questions he's modified) and the intentions of this user (perhaps they are trying to fast-track their rep), but is there anything to be worried about here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T23:58:08.213" Title="Alarming Number of Edits" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2015-07-16T19:03:32.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a quick look and it seems that he's going through changing links to the mobile version of Wikipedia to point to the desktop one and also making other minor spelling/grammar changes at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words they are valid edits and as such a good thing since he is improving the site. The rep being gained is being &quot;earned&quot; so he is not in some way gaming the system by doing this - and rep from edits is capped anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note that this was discussed here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/please-dont-link-to-m-wikipedia-org&quot;&gt;Please don&amp;#39;t link to m.wikipedia.org&lt;/a&gt; and a highly voted answer encouraged people to go through and do exactly this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that this sort of mass editing spree does tend to mess up the recently active list so we don't want to encourage it too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T19:03:32.720" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2015-07-16T20:21:24.897" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nah, nothing to be worried about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt; said, this issue came up on on popular WB Meta post recently (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/please-dont-link-to-m-wikipedia-org?cb=1&quot;&gt;Please don&amp;#39;t link to m.wikipedia.org&lt;/a&gt;). That, combined with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/336825/find-links-to-m-wikipedia-org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; someone linked on that question and my boredom here at work today led to me going a little edit happy (figured if I was just going to do a few, why not just take care of them all?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few edits in I started looking for anything else to fix in answers too. Assumed that if I was going to be editing things at all I should at least take the time to spruce up the grammar/spelling, fix some formatting, or add some useful links where appropriate. That way the edits were a bit more substantial and useful that just the convenience of the changed link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Having said that this sort of mass editing spree does tend to mess up the recently active list so we don't want to encourage it too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, I was unaware of. I don't search out many questions here, so I don't typically use that page to find things. If I'd realized edits bumped things up there I probably would have just done a few a day for a couple weeks or something. My bad, and I'll keep that in mind so I don't make a mess over there again in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T20:21:24.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-16T20:30:20.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a user who mostly spends time on Stack Overflow and related sites, and I love seeing questions from here. Not just because I like to broaden my horizons, but also because it gives me things to keep in the back of my mind for when I someday plan to make video games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for me that is not an idle boast, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have experience working on every part of video games, just it has always been as part of an existing project. I am currently spending most of my time on toolchain development rather than gaming though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does strike me as the sort of site that needs a FAQ (or general &quot;what you should consider during world creation&quot; guide) though - is there one? And possibly a curated &quot;best of&quot; like &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-of&quot;&gt;we have on Code Review&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11034" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:34.187" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T21:27:00.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T23:19:48.603" Score="-2" ViewCount="1080" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pardon the title, but I couldn't think of anything to accurately describe the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20681/can-there-be-a-religious-group-that-will-not-commit-religious-violence/20704#20704&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; was posted. I was immediately concerned by the use of the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The 20th century is largely the story of the war against murderous materialistic atheist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we would all agree that this statement&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; is a tad inflammatory.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I was a wee bit ticked off, and I was even more concerned when I noted that there were already two upvotes. I duly downvoted and left two comments. I considered flagging, but thought of &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/438/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this xkcd&lt;/a&gt; and decided to push off thinking about the whole thing later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today - this morning, as it is evening for me now - I came back to Stack Exchange, went through all the new responses, and checked on this answer - and saw that it had more upvotes (the current net score is five, from nine upvotes and four downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left another comment, waited a while, almost flagged, stopped, wrote up a meta post, stopped writing before posting said post, mentioned it in chat, and finally decided to write up a new post, centered around one question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this answer upvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer has some interesting points - which I have some arguments against, specifically against the claim that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the idea that &quot;religions cause wars&quot; is fallacious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so I will state that it's not entirely a rant.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; I also don't think that it's entirely off the point of the question, as that one statement is a valid response. I disagree with the evidence given to support it, but that part is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to sum up this question body that hopefully wasn't prohibitively long, I'd like to ask this: Why did an offensive, rant-like, partly-off-topic answer get upvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage both sides to share views. I ended up not flagging the answer because I was curious enough that I wanted to see a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - and I write this with a wry grin - I suppose I asked for this simply by writing the title of the question the answer at hand was posted on.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I'll admit that I think it's wrong, too.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 I should note that I'm an atheist, so I'm actually personally offended here.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 At least one other user used this term.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4 Not that I was taking one side over the other; that was precisely why I asked the question in the first place.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T13:00:07.793" Title="Why did this answer get upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-16T23:53:13.850" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only seen World Building questions that appear in Hot Network Questions, and questions that get posted in chat rooms I frequent. I signed up on WB solely to answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like your site has a very broad range of questions that can be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7182/what-goes-on-programmers-se-a-guide-for-stack-overflow#comment21542_7182&quot;&gt;On Programmers it has been said&lt;/a&gt;, to the question of &quot;What goes on Programmers.SE?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Part of me thinks there should be an answer here (to the question in the title, rather than to any of the four questions in the body) saying, &quot;To a zeroth-order approximation, nothing goes on Programmers.SE&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For World Building, I feel that the answer might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To a zeroth-order approximation, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; goes on World Building&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's just no limit to the number of &quot;WTF&quot;'s that can come up when seeing a World Building question. You just never know what kind of strange scenario that a question will ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I had a bit of a problem with my keyboard, so I was suggested to teach my keyboard yoga, to which I asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you teach a keyboard yoga?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And got the reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that might be on-topic on WorldBuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which ended up getting 4 stars (Chat transcript &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/19838731#19838731&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other occasions, you might see a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/218848/does-a-mistress-get-anything-from-torturing&quot;&gt;weird title on Arqade&lt;/a&gt; and you say &quot;WTF, Arqade&quot;? And then you realize: &quot;It's not as WTF as WorldBuilding...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you might &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150310-how-to-break-the-internet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read an article on BBC&lt;/a&gt; and you think: &quot;That might be something for WorldBuilding...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can recommend a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=worldbuilding&amp;amp;page=1&amp;amp;pagesize=50&amp;amp;sort=stars&quot;&gt;chat search&lt;/a&gt; to see what people say about you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:10:04.393" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T23:53:13.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2015-07-16T23:58:08.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the bulk edits is that it upturns the &quot;active&quot; measurement. I am flooded with semantically empty changes and don't see &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; new or updated posts anywhere near the top of the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;don't bulk edit&lt;/strong&gt; without using a special silent editorial change feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not easily available, how about limiting all such edits to be &amp;lt;10% of total traffic? Then I'll see some false active entries, but still mostly useful entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T23:58:08.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-17T09:08:35.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come over from stack overflow, and I think it's awesome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go on vote me down :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10985" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T09:08:35.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T14:31:36.960" Score="8" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the wake of my own recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2299/alarming-number-of-edits?lq=1&quot;&gt;editing spree&lt;/a&gt;, user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%C5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt; brought up a good point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about a checkmark for edits that are editorial only, not affecting the semantics of the post? That will not mark it as fresh active. Wikipedia has &quot;minor edit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main concern was that when a large number of minor edits are performed, the active questions list gets flooded with questions that have no real semantic changes at all. Indicating an element is minor or editorial only should simply stop that edit from from bumping up the question in the activity list to prevent it from being flooded unnecessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal, I think &quot;editorial only&quot; is more clear than &quot;minor edit&quot;, since there could be relatively minor edits that do actually improve the question in a way that warrants bumping. Additional, these types of no-bump edits may need to be constrained to small amounts of changes (because if you're doing 300 characters (not a suggestion, just a random number) worth of editorial edits, the quality of the overall post is probably being improved enough to warrant bringing attention back to the question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T17:16:33.133" Title="Should minor/editorial edits be possible to make without bumping the post to the front page?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2015-07-17T17:15:56.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of bumping a question that gets edited is so that other community members can have a look at it and make sure the edit is reasonable. This is an important community cross-check; even high-rep users sometimes make mistakes and end up making edits that outright need to be rolled back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a better way to implement this -- perhaps a separate view of the most recently edited posts, instead of bumping them all to the front page? -- but in the implementation that we have at present, I don't see such a &quot;minor edit&quot; option adding much value. In fact, I can easily see it being abused to &lt;em&gt;mask&lt;/em&gt; edits that really should see some form of community review. While many -- most, actually -- edits are useful, some (often, these are caught in review and rejected) are outright detrimental or destructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways to approach this that both, IMO, are better than a &quot;minor edit&quot; option, at least in the short term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Space edits apart. Don't edit dozens of posts at a time; instead, edit a few, then wait until the next day and edit another few. This prevents flooding of the front page and, assuming the number of posts to be edited is reasonable, still ensures that the edits get done in a reasonable amount of time. Pick the number of posts and the time to wait between edit sprees based on the activity level of the site; Stack Overflow can obviously sustain a higher rate of edits than Worldbuilding without flooding the front page with only edited posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have an editing day or weekend, to fix issues agreed on by the community needs fixing. This needs a bit of coordination (which can happen through Meta &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; chat) but can easily make it all go quicker in the end. At least Super User has done this with tag edits where old tags needed to be replaced with new ones; proposals are made on Meta, community agreement is sought, then a time period is picked when the changes are implemented and real-time coordination is done in chat. This largely floods the front page with the edits, but it's for a limited period of time &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; everyone can clearly tell what's going on. The relevant Meta post can easily be featured for the time period, making it readily visible to those visiting the main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T17:15:56.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2303" CreationDate="2015-07-18T05:38:58.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a functional materialist and and a philosophical agnostic in the Huxley tradition. My models of human behavior are grounded in evolutionary psychology. I think that evolutionary psychology makes a strong argument that religion is needed to moderate human behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my phrasing is no more inflammatory than the very title of the post &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can there be a religious group that will not commit religious violence?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the question relies on the premise that there is a direct connection between religion and violence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor more inflammatory than many of the answers and comments in that post or this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer pointed out that all organized groups of humans, especially polities, will commit violence. There is nothing, absolutely nothing about believing in the supernatural that makes individuals or groups more prone to violence. There is however, significant evidence religion moderated violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if I offended anyone as that was not my intent. I regarded my statement as merely factual and not a matter of contention by any educated person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by the same token, I will point out that atheist are utterly tone deaf to the sneering disrespect they vomit out on others constantly not to mention their arrogant attitude of asserting that religious people are always irrational and destructive while atheist have never made a mistake in the last two centuries and are responsible for everything good in the modern world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an attitude wears and can make one snappish. Especially for those of us who are not religious but suffer in our own reputations and regard from the reactions that atheists misbehavior evokes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very fact that my statement was considered provocative while the post title was not, demonstrates at best an blind spot and at worst outright bigotry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to substance, I will simply state it as a matter of historical record that every political regime that was explicitly atheist or in which atheism played a predominate role turned murderous which shocking rapidity. I can point to the The French Directorate, the Mexican PRE, The Soviets, Mao and all the rest of the sad litany. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are zero counter examples. People can try to offer rationalizations about why this doesn't matter but they can't offer the real world evidence of atheists regime that didn't turn on its own and others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stating that the  20th century has largely been a struggle against murderous atheist ideologies and states is simply history. The liberal democracies, still dominated by religious populations have had to wage war and containment against atheistic Communism and Fascism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also clear that atheism removed all moderators on their behaviors making them more murderous both internally and externally. No religious leader ever endorsed the concept of unrestricted warfare but atheist adopted it quickly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Communist were explicitly atheist and there is simply no debate. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Hawaiian Democide project&lt;/a&gt; puts the deaths attributable to Communist, outside of war, i.e. killing their own populations at 120 million. To this we could add their role in the creation of Fascism of a counter reaction and Stalins attacks on the German Social Democrats in an an attempt to polarized Germany and bring about a &quot;crisis of capitalism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to mention their creation of the entire Cold War and their pushing humanity to brink of extinct on several occasion based on their delusional, but entirely materialistic and supposedly &quot;reasoned&quot; belief in Marxist historical inevitability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;As far Fascism:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I find it interesting that atheist rather calmly accept that Communist were atheist but violently reject that Fascist were even though Communist killed more people and presented a much more significant threat than Fascism ever did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1893554783&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mussolini was an explicit atheist.&lt;/a&gt; He was raised in a Marxist household his father reading from Marx at night like the partisans of old read from the bible. He came to power after the strikes and sabotage by Red socialist, driven by Communist, brought Italian cities to actual starvation. However, Mussolini never managed to create his totalitarian state being forced to work within the framework of the Constitutional monarchy and constantly opposed by the Italian king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relative high degree of internal diversity in the Third Riech confuses many  who only lightly study it because they assume Hitler ruled with as tight a fist as Stalin. They assume that any political assertions by any Nazi at any time must, just as would have been true under Stalin, have had Hitler's blessing and reflected his beliefs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But unlike Stalin, Hitler came to power by election having to cobble together a coalition to get and keep power. He did not inherent a system of central authority as the Communist inherited from the Tzars. He did not inherent population of illiterate peasants but the best educated population in Europe. He had a short time table to mobilize for his war. He had to keep things as loose as possible to build as broad of support as possible. He couldn't squeeze to hard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Twentieth_Century&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rotenburg's Myth of the 20th Century&lt;/a&gt; one on the Nazi's foundational text (though Hitler hated it), was so hostile to Christianity that Hitler blocked Rosenberg from having any prominence in the regime out fear he would alienate to many Christians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as party members acknowledged Hitler's leadership and embraced his racial ideas, he allowed a wide degree of latitude in beliefs within the party. Others were coerced to join the party for propaganda reasons. Therefore their were a some Nazis that professed Christianity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that does not mean Hitler was Christian. He remained technically a member of the Catholic Church and ordered Goerign and Gobbles to remain also but he never attended or took sacrament as far as I tell. More definitively, unlike most Catholic leaders, he had no religious advisors in his retinue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of Hitlers latitude,  Himmler tried to create a whole ritualistic system for the SS to create an emotional bonding system based on Hitler's success with rituals in Nazi public ceremonies. He based it on everything from king Arthur to  Nordic gods to bits of old Sanskrit. People have looked at that and thought that Hitler must have approved so Hitler must have been into the occult. In fact, Hitler let Himmler do as he wished but sneered behind Himmler's telling Speer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus Hitler had little sympathy with Himmler in his mythologizing of&#xA;  the SS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has&#xA;  left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over&#xA;  again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it&#xA;  had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS&#xA;  saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave. . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert_Speer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Inside the Third Riech, pg 94&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All members of the SS were required to be avowed atheists by the way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the fact that there were some Christian Nazis means little to core drives of the party no more than as much as a 20% of the Nazis were former Communist does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people point to this or that statement on Hitler's point that he was a Christian. Well... I suppose that's definitive proof. What's the world coming to when you can't take the word of a mass murdering psychopathic leader who see propaganda as their main tool? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know what else he said in hundreds of speeches all throughout the 30s? He absolutely promised, to never ever, pinky-promise, cross his heart and hope to die to never ever start another war in Europe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to break this to people who think Hitler was a Christian but well...hold your hats...Hitler lied, kinda a lot, sort of thing you might say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had a knack for telling people just what they wanted to hear, to appear to really believe whatever the person in front of him believed while giving a wink and nod that all that other stuff was just for the rubes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't judge Hitler, or any other leader by why they said but only what they did. Hitler never attended a church, had no clergy in retinue, and he held a giant festival every year for the most noted Atheist philosopher of the previous century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond embracing Nietzschean philosophy complete with its atheism and its idea that religion was just a means of the weak to control the strong. Hitler's racial theories were dependent on the concepts of non-Darwinian evolution, then scientifically current and rejected by most Christians who remain creationist. Likewise he jumped onto the Eugenics bandwagon,he didn't invent it. An most Christians opposed Eugenics.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert_Speer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;At best Hitler saw religion as practical materialistic tool for motivating and controlling populations p95&lt;/a&gt;. He told Speer that it was to bad that Christianity took over from the pagan religions in Germany  that they'd be better off with a religions he thought more militaristic like Islam or Shinto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking:&#xA;  &quot;You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why&#xA;  didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for&#xA;  the Father- land as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too&#xA;  would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did&#xA;  it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?&quot;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert_Speer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Inside the 3rd Reich p96&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bormann#Anti-church_campaign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;He butted heads with the Catholic church repeatedly&lt;/a&gt;, most famously when they shut down his euthanasia program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hitler believed that people could programmed and he sought out various means of doing in an utterly cynical manner. He would say anything, adopt any façade and hijack an set of ideas, values and beliefs and tack into his programming system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;As for religions and wars:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, atheist have employed a rhetorical trick of ignoring that prior to the mid-1800s, the idea of any strong separation between the materialistic and the supernatural did not exist. Going backwards in time just a couple of centuries leads us to a time when no separation existed. Religion intertwined with everything from brushing ones teeth to all politics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It almost the way that people treat science today, using it to justify any action whether it well proven, still conceptual or even pure pseudoscience, well proven or not or complete pseudoscience centuries from now, histories will believe that science caused all wars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all actions were justified at least partially by religion, it’s easy for the dishonest or ignorant to assert that religion caused the conflict. At best the assertion is untestable since all cultures where religious and all major action had a religious justification, how can you actually assert that without religion, people would have made better decisions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you can't. Moreover, since strong materialistic causes always exist behind every war, we can never isolate religion as a sole or even critical trigger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since the 20th century has shown that atheist are every bit as capable as horrific murders and wars than and religions, clearly the absence of religion does not prevent wars, indicates it is not a necessary element.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can religion be used to excuse wars fought for other reasons? Yes. Is there any historical examples of a war having no driver except religion? No. (I would welcome any examples because I have looked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion is often used as a fig leaf to disguise more grubby self interested motives of the cynically powerful. People wrapped themselves in a halo long before they wrapped themselves in flags or hugged trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. The Tai ping Rebellion mentioned in a comment above was not driven by religion. Religion simply coalesced many smaller and local uprising that had been going on for years in the disintegrating Quig dynasty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having some nut running around claiming to be Jesus' younger brother merely increased the internal cohesion of the rebels, it did not create the motives of the rebellion. Although, some religious rationale would have played a prominent role in the rebellion because religion played a prominent role in all human choices back then in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Having proved my point, I will offer the following observations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It disturbs me greatly that many people with still hold so many tropes of atheism even though they claim to believe in evolution. It appears for most atheist, evolution is used merely to replace divine creation in a cosmology without a god but even a basic application of rule of evolutionary theory to human cultures and histories makes it plain that religion must have been very vital to rise of large scale human societies and that it might remain so indefinitely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we step back from the struggle for social and political dominance and look at religion objectively as phenomena, then from a scientific perspective, the behavior of religion clearly serves an evolutionary purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) All known historical people's have/had a religion or a belief in non-material i.e. spiritual effects on the world, usually in response to human moral decision. If religion served no purpose, somewhere,just by chance we should expect to find a purely materialistic society and such a society should have major advantages over a religious one. We have not. That strongly suggest a materialistic society could not survive in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Civilizations have devoted staggering amounts of resources to religion when those same resources could have raised the standard of living or been used for military action. Theoretically, an atheist society at any point of history would have had a significant advantage against religious ones because it would not &quot;waste&quot; resources on religious rituals, buildings nor cloud their thinking with beliefs in supernatural effects. Yet, again, no atheistic or materialistic civilizations are known. The only conclusion is that the high material cost of religion is off set by a strong positive materialistic return. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) All attempts to base a society or polity explicitly on atheism, have failed catastrophically and with shocking rapidity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can deduce that religious ideas provide some great benefit that purely materialistic ones cannot. It appears that key element is the concept of  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inescapable Supernatural Consequence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for human actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the consequence mechanism are utterly fictional is irrelevant. It only matters that people believe in the inescapable consequence and moderate their behavior to avoid the consequence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, in a strictly materialistic world view, if you escape materialistic consequence, then you face no consequence. But in a religious culture, every sociopaths believes that all their moral choices will have a supernatural consequence. The Tzar believed he would answer for his decisions before God, Stalin did not. Which one was quicker to kill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is supernatural consequence true? Philosophically, I can't say, my gut says no and as practical matter I would never make a decision based on the premise that it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn’t mean it isn't a powerful moderator of human behavior perhaps one that we cannot do without.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best evidence for this moderation by inescapable consequence is found in the deep similarities between the ###behaviors### that all major religions require in their adherents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as different genotypes produce the same phenotype, different theologies generate the same general behaviors. If one compares the behaviors between Buddhist and Christian that arise from their moral choices, what differences do they exhibit? None really. Shorn of decoration and ritual, Buddhist and Christian make the same moral choices in the same circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because natural selection operates on the phenotype and not the genotype, a theoretical infinite number of theologies could exist and persist as long as they all produce the same similar highly cooperative &quot;phenotype&quot; behviors in their adherents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, some will say, maybe in the past we needed religion but do we need it now? After all, we know so much more now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The base problem that we face in trying to make decisions about society and politics and morality using only reason is that we lack any hard science on human social organization, political behavior, sexual behavior, etc. So when we say we're using &quot;reason&quot; to make decisions we're deluding ourselves. Instead, we simply create rationalization for our own Darwinian self-intersest and then things get ugly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All atheistic ideas about society, politics, morality etc as seriously flawed because the proven data they need to be usefully accurate does not exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is rarely admitted. Instead, atheist do what everyone does in a logical argument when they run past the data, they paper over the hole and keep going. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of the last 200 years has shown that such &quot;reason&quot; is every bit a dogmatic, provides every bit as much certitude as religion every did. Religious people proved correct about many major ideas in the the 20th century, Eugenics, Freudian psychology, Behavioralism, the effects of social welfare programs on individuals and communities, sexual eduction (failed to alter behaviors) etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion makes better decisions about such matters, because, with great irony, religions have &lt;em&gt;evolved&lt;/em&gt; over the courses of centuries under the presure of natural selection and encode within their edicts more sound models of human behavior than materialistic models based on incomplete or flawed data can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's twisted,, but religious people ultimately have faith in the results of an evolutionary process and atheist do not. Instead,atheist prefer the ad hoc revelations of their own inherently flawed intellects.  Religious models of human behavior are based on experimentation, atheism on intellectual revelation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason can produce absolutist and dogmatism and the certitude that justifies murder even quicker than religion if for no other reason that religion carries with it the weight of centuries of expectations while flawed reason does not. There are certain limits to the actions a Christian can take, there are no limits to the actions an atheist can take if reason justifies the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atheist are dangerous precisely because they have no behavioral moderators, no brakes. (This is particularly true of sociopaths whom now have reason to believe are very common, at least evolutionary theory predicts they will be.)  Applied to politics, that lack of brakes produces internal purges and external wars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will offer this final observations: The universe does not reflect our personal desires. Simply because we choose the materialistic assumption, indeed, even if we assume that the materialistic assumption is actually absolutely true, that does not mean that humanity has evolved in such a way as to be able to build large scale functional societies with the governor of inescapable supernatural consequence.  It maybe that we have delude ourselves to some degree,and constantly invent a supernatural consequence just to suppress our selfish, Darwinian cores. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="573" LastEditorUserId="573" LastEditDate="2015-07-18T18:33:29.247" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T18:33:29.247" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2286" CreationDate="2015-07-18T18:58:15.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this should have already been asked, answered and tagged &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt;. With an extensive community answer, listing the most important technological advances in a bulleted time line (with every century being a header), for all those 'Earth like' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting is 1700 AD? No penicillin yet (1897). Steel? not on an industrial level (1856). Definitely no digital electronics (1947).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T18:58:15.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-19T18:07:45.273" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26/enable-mhchem-mathjax-extension&quot;&gt;an mhchem extension&lt;/a&gt; for Mathjax that could prove useful in some cases. Would it help on Worldbuilding? I've seen questions involving chemical reactions that might find it pretty helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked about the possible downsides on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261021/are-there-any-downsides-to-using-mhchem&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T22:01:37.617" Title="Do we want the mhchem extension?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2313" CreationDate="2015-07-19T20:55:18.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say we do. As long as someone can provide a link to some basic documentation on how to use it, I see it being very useful. I know for a fact there have been several answers of mine alone that could have done with better chemical equation formatting, and plenty more questions that could have had chemically-minded answers for which it would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there may be technical limitations we don't know of; that's for SE to tell us about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T20:55:18.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-20T01:32:42.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I count as a “user from other Stack Exchange sites”, since there are 32 sites where I've written more answers than here, and I've never written a short story in anger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, there are many threads here that are both fun and interesting. It does help that this site matches my interests pretty well — I'm an avid SF reader, and the world building aspect (including but not limited to counterfactual “what if” aspects) is what drives me to SF more than “mundane” fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when I see topics I know something about, I'm sometimes disappointed (and occasionally even appalled) by the lack of breadth exhibited by some contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With questions about speculative fiction, I sometimes want to scream “go read the classics!”. And TVTropes should be mandatory reading before asking — with all the SF that's been written, good luck finding an original premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to questions about realistic worlds, I especially notice problems in topics related to computer science (my field of professional expertise) and some domains of history and sociology (where it seems that some people believe that the whole world is exactly like their neighborhood). That makes me wonder just how much of what I read on other topics (physics, biology, history of parts of the world I'm unfamiliar with, …) is outright wrong, but just plausible enough for me not to be able to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a surprising problem on a site with such breadth. I'm not sure if it can be alleviated by any policies. An &lt;em&gt;attitude&lt;/em&gt; of rewarding well-referenced answers and penalizing answers that lack both sources and reasoning would help somewhat, but I wouldn't want to impose a &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;-like level of reference requirements either. I've sometimes noticed poor answers, decided to post my own better-informed one, and never gotten around to it because I'd have to spend too much time finding the right references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:45.670" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T01:32:42.507" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2318" CreationDate="2015-07-20T20:21:53.710" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have some good questions that are off-topic on the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, that have been closed because of this and are awaiting migration. I just don't understand why people are downvoting these questions were flagging/voting to close is the appropriate way to deal with these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behavior annoys me but at least, the reputation penalty doesn't carry over to other sites. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T04:01:33.750" Title="Why are people downvoting questions that needs to be migrated?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T20:34:28.293" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20829/how-to-wipe-out-humanity-within-a-week&quot;&gt;How to wipe out humanity within a week?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is marked with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. But, IMO neither the question, nor any of the answer really live up to the exigence. Or am I being too strict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this follows the previously discussed point&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2211/a-hard-science-ultimatum&quot;&gt;A hard-science ultimatum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T20:34:28.293" Title="Hard Science not-so-hard: wiping out humanity" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2316" CreationDate="2015-07-21T04:01:33.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is asked well -- shows research or analysis, is well-asked, etc -- and is arguably in our space, I generally won't downvote it even if I vote to close it.  Especially on a beta site where we're still working out some scope boundaries, we can't expect everybody to guess right on the first try.  If a question comes in here that should be moved to Chemistry or Physics or Space Exploration or Health or RPG or Parenting, let's help the asker and migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has &lt;em&gt;nothing to do&lt;/em&gt; with worldbuilding, like if somebody asks a question about Python (and he's not talking about alternate worlds or the future or snakes), I may well downvote it no matter how well or badly it's written.  The asker may have showed effort in formulating his question but he doesn't seem to have shown effort in deciding &lt;em&gt;where to ask it&lt;/em&gt;.  Again, if we can help him out with a migration, let's do it and no harm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20895/chemistry-help-needed-molar-solubility&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20895/chemistry-help-needed-molar-solubility&lt;/a&gt; doesn't show much research effort and its connection to worldbuilding is, err, non-obvious.  I didn't vote, but I understand why some people downvoted it.  In its present form it doesn't appear to meet the requirements over on Chemistry, so it's not a good migration candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20872/how-to-align-all-the-definitions-in-a-symbol-list-word-2010&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20872/how-to-align-all-the-definitions-in-a-symbol-list-word-2010&lt;/a&gt; doesn't seem to have anything to do with worldbuilding.  I left a comment (though I could have been more verbose) and closed it.  The asker hasn't been back since then.  This question might be on-topic on SuperUser; I think I'll just migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes don't follow a question to its new home, so the fact that voters here found it a poor fit and voted accordingly does not harm the question (or its author) at the migration site.  And eventually the migration &quot;stub&quot; left here gets deleted, I'm pretty sure, so even the local rep loss is temporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T04:01:33.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-21T11:16:28.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found StackExchange when I was checking if my SF settings were wrong, I frequently browsed Physics.SE at first.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I always hesitate to ask a question on Physics SE, because I did not study physics in university, I am afraid that what I ask may be silly in physics degree holder's eye, then I will be downvoted. One day I discovered this site and I asked a question about special relativity. I think this is a great site for asking about fictional physics idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10658" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T07:26:16.353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T07:26:16.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-07-21T19:37:42.923" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are often saddened by the fact you can't move faster than light, and therefore sort of write relativity out of their stories. What they don't understand is the &lt;em&gt;rich&lt;/em&gt; structure of relativity and what it allows you to do. For example, completely legit relativity &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; allow you to have a galactic empire (although it would take a lot of energy) (the trick is time dilation). It is surely stranger than fiction. Making this a fortnightly challenge would allow people to learn all the &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; stuff relativity allows you to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T22:15:58.403" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T22:15:58.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-07-22T01:02:48.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All web search engines stop working, forever 'cause magic... How would people react?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;web search engines&lt;/a&gt;, like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc. stop working, but everything else is normal?, Google Drive works, Google Maps work, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And making new web search engines is prevented by more magic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this affect the internet habits of people on a personal level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, you can only go to other websites via bookmarks or links people tell you about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this massively increase the effects of, or create a lot of, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;echo chambers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastEditorUserId="6812" LastEditDate="2015-10-20T11:45:21.507" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T11:45:21.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2262" CreationDate="2015-07-22T04:19:08.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 25 questions and 181 answers, for an average of 7.24 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20264/need-to-start-a-religion-with-a-predefined-self-destruct&quot;&gt;Need to start a religion with a predefined self-destruct&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/634/dvk&quot;&gt;DVK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;304 total votes, 47 question votes, 26 answers, 6921 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20238/how-could-a-resurrected-jesus-prove-he-is-jesus&quot;&gt;How could a resurrected Jesus prove he is Jesus without performing miracles?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;145 total votes, 32 question votes, 19 answers, 7256 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20168/should-ai-have-faith-too&quot;&gt;Should AI have faith too?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;113 total votes, 30 question votes, 19 answers, 5593 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20130/how-can-a-god-convince-a-civilization-that-he-doesnt-exist&quot;&gt;How can a god convince a civilization that he doesn&amp;#39;t exist?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;102 total votes, 31 question votes, 18 answers, 5608 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20681/can-there-be-a-religious-group-that-will-not-commit-religious-violence&quot;&gt;Can there be a religious group that will not commit religious violence?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;75 total votes, 15 question votes, 15 answers, 3669 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20597/how-can-i-convince-members-of-peaceful-religions-to-start-a-holy-war&quot;&gt;How can I convince members of peaceful religions to start a holy war?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;53 total votes, 9 question votes, 8 answers, 2360 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20249/how-can-i-establish-a-stable-and-growing-church-where-everyone-is-chaste-no-sex&quot;&gt;How can I establish a stable and growing church where everyone is chaste (no sex)?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/634/dvk&quot;&gt;DVK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;51 total votes, 10 question votes, 15 answers, 575 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20883/would-wars-still-happen-after-a-rapture-like-event&quot;&gt;Would wars still happen after a Rapture-like event?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;47 total votes, 7 question votes, 12 answers, 2525 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20876/how-would-people-most-naturally-react-to-a-new-god-in-their-own-polytheistic-p&quot;&gt;How would people most naturally react to a new god in their *own* polytheistic pantheon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;35 total votes, 10 question votes, 4 answers, 474 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20576/a-power-structured-polythesist-religion&quot;&gt;A Power-Structured Polythesist Religion&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 4 question votes, 7 answers, 143 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20286/how-do-you-protect-against-granted-prayers&quot;&gt;How do you protect against granted prayers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/634/dvk&quot;&gt;DVK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 6 question votes, 6 answers, 166 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20476/mixing-different-views-on-religion&quot;&gt;Mixing different views on religion&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10896/smajl&quot;&gt;Smajl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 102 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20908/how-might-a-religion-be-used-to-help-maintain-a-generation-ship&quot;&gt;How might a religion be used to help maintain a generation ship?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 5 question votes, 6 answers, 152 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20153/what-are-the-core-elements-required-for-creating-a-successful-religion&quot;&gt;What are the core elements required for creating a &amp;quot;successful&amp;quot; religion?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 0 question votes, 5 answers, 173 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20565/what-would-be-the-mythology-of-an-aquatic-species&quot;&gt;What would be the mythology of an aquatic species?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 91 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20435/if-religion-worked-like-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;If religion worked like Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 11 question votes, 0 answers, 202 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20916/revealing-your-religion-to-be-false-at-the-end-of-a-generation-ship-trip-or-not&quot;&gt;Revealing your religion to be false at the end of a Generation ship trip, or not&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 143 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20432/the-god-of-the-atheists&quot;&gt;The god of the atheists&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 157 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20509/religion-for-a-random-god&quot;&gt;Religion for a random god&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6781/rob-watts&quot;&gt;Rob Watts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 105 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20331/what-if-ai-decided-to-rule-the-world-through-religion&quot;&gt;What if AI decided to rule the world through religion?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 179 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20361/what-shape-would-religion-take-in-a-world-of-hallucinations&quot;&gt;What shape would religion take in a world of hallucinations?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/634/dvk&quot;&gt;DVK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 67 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20749/what-would-have-been-if-the-islamic-religion-was-never-founded&quot;&gt;What would have been if the Islamic religion was never founded?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11031/user4729&quot;&gt;user4729&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 92 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20372/is-it-possible-to-develop-early-society-without-developing-religion-as-a-side-ef&quot;&gt;Is it possible to develop early society without developing religion as a side effect?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 134 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20213/how-would-a-future-british-islam-respond-to-rule-by-alien-mages&quot;&gt;How would a future British Islam respond to rule by alien mages?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9207/lostinfrance&quot;&gt;Lostinfrance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 3 question votes, 0 answers, 226 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20573/islam-and-alien-mages&quot;&gt;Islam and alien mages?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10913/medi-saif&quot;&gt;Medi Saif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -2 question votes, 1 answers, 69 views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T22:05:24.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2385" CreationDate="2015-07-22T04:33:15.967" Score="8" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twelfth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 22 July - 5 August&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While worlds can be populated with all sorts of intriguing and fantastical creatures (or robots, or other life forms), I find questions about how a fixed life form we're all most familiar with would fare in other settings to be both interesting and well-grounded (not figuring out a world &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; its inhabitants at the same time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2262/fortnightly-topic-challenge-11-religion&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #11: Religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/fortnightly-topic-challenge-10-time&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #10: Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2199/fortnightly-topic-challenge-9-map-making?rq=1&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #9: Map-Making&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2154/fortnightly-topic-challenge-8-apocalypse&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #8: Apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2104/fortnightly-topic-challenge-7-economy&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #7: Economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/fortnightly-topic-challenge-6-evolution&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #6: Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/fortnightly-topic-challenge-5-city-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #5 : City Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1916/fortnightly-topic-challenge-4-magic&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #4: Magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1862/fortnightly-topic-challenge-3-creature-design&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1810/fortnightly-topic-challenge-2-flora&quot;&gt;Fortnightly topic challenge #2: Flora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:53:09.053" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #12: Humans" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2303" CreationDate="2015-07-23T03:32:06.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a lot of people &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-distrust/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dislike atheists&lt;/a&gt;.  We get compared to rapists, for example, in levels of trust - and not favorably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there's a demographically significant media push that paints atheism as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2013/12/22/militant-atheists-war-on-christians-and-christmas-in-2013/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extremely anti-Christian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, note that our site is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1995/where-are-the-downvotes&quot;&gt;heavily weighted in favor of upvotes&lt;/a&gt; (97%).  So in fact 9 up/4 down is a highly unusual ratio, and is an indicator that the answer was particularly disliked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact probably a large majority of people disliked it, but only a small percentage of them were willing to downvote.  The anti-atheist minority had a much higher upvote percentage, so they won the war.  It just comes down to math and vote ratios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T03:32:06.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-23T05:47:53.610" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2299/alarming-number-of-edits&quot;&gt;alarm about a large number of edits&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a second question in the last five minutes.  Would that be considered rude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, what if I asked 35 questions tonight, which floods out / pushes down other peoples'?  &lt;strong&gt;Would this be considered rude or abusive&lt;/strong&gt; with the WB crowd?  And why?  Or, could it be seen as a treat for question-hungry people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T19:23:41.980" Title="Alarming number of questions (related)" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2326" CreationDate="2015-07-23T07:59:30.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be only my opinion, but, especially if those questions are related, I would give it a bit of time in between. Like (at least) one a day or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least a few reasons for that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you perfectly mentioned, a question spree would push all other questions away, which is kind of unfair,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should try to have high-quality questions, and that is hardly achievable in 5 minutes,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give a bit of time for the community to assimilate your question. There may be some need to clarify some points (e.g. rules of magic), and it would be a waste to do it on all your questions at once,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first answers to the first questions, may change your point of view on the following questions, change the order, add another one, etc. The answers are some kind of feed back, which you can profit from it. If you intend to write a series of books, you usually like to have some feed back on the first one before writing the many 1500-paged books,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No-one can probably find the time to answer 35 questions in the same day. Most people are busy otherwise and have to share their time between different questions,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People would get bored by the 5th, and no-one would have a look past the 15th.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T07:59:30.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-23T10:38:29.350" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;We usually agree that idea generation questions should be avoided, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. However I had the feeling that we used to have a more explicit statement about it in the help section.... but I can't seem to find it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it removed? Is so, why? Is my impression wrong and there never was such notice? If so, why shouldn't we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idea generation is a common reason for closing down questions, and a typical mistake made here. Shouldn't we dedicate a few lines in the help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T14:50:27.060" Title="Idea Generation in Help" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-23T13:57:56.370" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I started a series yesterday, that seemed like a good idea at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21079/the-limits-of-human-biology-atmospheric-tolerances-1&quot;&gt;The limits of human biology: atmospheric tolerances (#1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My plan was/is to create a series (I have a few in mind and I am sure more will come up from other people)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atmospheric Tolerances&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Temperature tolerances&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Energy consumption&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Size Limitations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea was to have a set of standard questions with well documented, hard-science answers covering the major aspects of H. Sapiens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was pointed out in the question...these are pretty strictly biology questions, I am not looking for the what ifs of meddling with humanity rather the no kidding capabilities of our physical bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously has value for world builders looking to figure out what a human can do but as was mentioned in the comments these are pretty obviously pure biology questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we wan't these on our site or should we refer them to biology...I can see answers supporting both so I wanted to see what everyone thought before we got to far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T14:00:01.943" Title="Limits of the human body series" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2330" CreationDate="2015-07-23T13:58:43.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it should be on topic because: (add a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T13:58:43.470" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-07-23T15:39:21.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2330" CreationDate="2015-07-23T14:00:01.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No it doesn't belong here, don't be lazy you can click on the BiologySE site and ask it over there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide comments below if you have other reasons in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T14:00:01.943" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-07-23T15:39:33.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2329" CreationDate="2015-07-23T14:50:27.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like the &quot;Idea Generation&quot; close option, because I think that's what this entire site is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer to just have &quot;Too Broad&quot; and a second option of &quot;Too Subjective&quot;.  I think that second one covers most &quot;bad&quot; Idea Generation categories while being more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T14:50:27.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-23T17:14:03.920" Score="4" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/cliche-world-who-would-you-be-and-why&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/cliche-world-who-would-you-be-and-why&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wondered if it were okay. Can we authorize questions which lead to discussions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T18:06:52.427" Title="Are discussion oriented questions authorized?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2326" CreationDate="2015-07-23T19:23:41.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post as many questions as you like. If they are unrelated then there is no reason to wait (unless you really are posting a huge number in which case it might be polite to slow down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are related we recommend waiting between each one but that is for your benefit not ours as described in Bilbo's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T19:23:41.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-23T20:20:13.517" Score="10" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2329/idea-generation-in-help&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really like &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot; as a reason to close.  It seems like too much of a subtle reason to me, since really this entire site is about ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the accepted answer about &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;What is Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; seems to indicate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have an &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot; close reason, but it's important to apply it reasonably. In particular virtually every question on this site is asking for ideas to be generated in some way or another. The key thing that would cause a question to be closed with this reason is that the question is too open ended. In particular the main reason to close as &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are too many possible answers to the question (Idea Generation is a subset of Too Broad)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no objective way to evaluate one idea as better than others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The too many possible answers is already covered by Too Broad.  So really the only reason to close as Idea Generation is because a question doesn't have an objective measuring stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the case, shouldn't we rename it something like &amp;quot;Too Subjective&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Not Objective&amp;quot; (or something else along those lines)?  That would be clearer and is less of a judgement call.  It also makes it very clear to the original questioner what changes they would need to make for their question to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T00:37:41.243" Title="Should we rename Idea Generation?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2336" CreationDate="2015-07-24T00:37:41.243" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of the idea-generation close reason is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about Idea Generation are off-topic because they tend to result in list answers with no objective means to compare the quality of one answer with the others. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/28&quot;&gt;What's wrong with idea-generation questions?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top-voted answer on the linked question talks about breadth and subjectiveness, and also includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/207/28&quot;&gt;Storytelling and plot building are off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because this site is not a content generation machine. To steal the examples from Robert's post, &quot;What conditions have to exist in a world to explain giant insects?&quot; is definitely on-topic, while &quot;What would the world be like if it were ruled by giant insects?&quot; is far too broad. The long and short of it is that you can ask a question here to see if something is plausible, but we won't write your book/game/movie for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, the idea-generation close reason doesn't cover anything not already covered by existing close reasons, specifically &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; (too subjective).  I think we should get rid of this close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;storytelling/plot-building&lt;/em&gt; questions are a problem, then we might want to create a close reason for &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;.  If somebody wants to propose that, please look over our questions to see if this has in fact been a problem, and then propose it if so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T00:37:41.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-24T03:50:38.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come to SE for programming questions. I never deliberately come here, but fun and interesting questions often come from here to the &quot;Hot Network&quot; questions, so it's somehow become the exchange I've the second-highest rep in, and probably the one I most look forward to seeing a question from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love the sense of creativity and fun here, the plethora of exotic mental landscapes it gives the reader, and the imagination-stretching questions. Nobody's yelled at me yet, I know of no negative perceptions, and I like it just the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6595" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T03:50:38.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-24T05:21:19.100" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18392/when-do-we-get-co-ed-showers&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I thought I was giving a reasonable explanation of why modesty standards evolve. This was misunderstood and the following comments are getting off the track. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to delete my own answer in such a case? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who would still see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:07:34.160" Title="Should I delete an answer with inappropriate comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2340" CreationDate="2015-07-24T13:05:00.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other than clarifying your answer on that particular question, I don't think you need to delete it.  The comment thread on your answer look like an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=threadnaught&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;threadnaught&lt;/a&gt; to me so I wouldn't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:05:00.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2340" CreationDate="2015-07-24T13:07:34.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I've only had time for a quick glance so far.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer is good -- it answers the question, it's not just a one-liner, it doesn't have major problems, it's been well-received, etc -- then please don't delete an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; just because of the &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; it's attracted.  That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see problematic comments -- rude, too chatty, whole conversations unfolding therein, tangents, etc -- please flag.  Moderators can and do delete comments (quite a few; we're a chatty bunch here on Worldbuilding).  But don't rely on us to notice; this is a large, active site and new comments don't alert most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If comments point out issues in your answer -- things that aren't clear, errors, logical problems, etc -- then you should &lt;em&gt;edit the answer&lt;/em&gt; to account for this input.  Once you've done so those comments are probably obsolete, so you can flag them as such.  A meaningful edit comment will help us evaluate the obsolescence of those comments when we see the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:07:34.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-25T21:41:25.887" Score="11" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hear me out on this. It's not what you'd expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Worldbuilding, we have an extremely low amount of Unanswered Questions, typically hovering around zero.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The longest I've ever seen a question stay unanswered is about a week. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/251859/is-there-an-option-to-view-what-percentage-of-questions-have-an-accepted-answer/251860#251860&quot;&gt;this basic math&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/291743/accepted-posts-and-post-count-across-database&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;, though I used the former for this calculation to be more accurate), 1,581 questions out of 2,653 total have accepted answers, for a rate of ~ 59.59%.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The inherent value of questions increases with the number of answers, because there are many different solutions to a given problem, all of which are valid. This is very important on Worldbuilding. We receive &lt;strong&gt;lots&lt;/strong&gt; of answers to questions that hit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use this to make a point: We need new users to answer old questions. Why? They add new ideas, new viewpoints, new perspectives, and new thoughts. I often ask questions and have no idea what kind of answers I'll get. I often don't anticipate some of the more amazing ones. So even after I accept an answer, what answers would have come in the future, if only users were around earlier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding questions often have no right answer, which is what sets us apart from other sites. So I think that these new ideas would be great to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can we add some motivation? More than once, I've thought of offering bounties on old questions to see if they would get new ideas. But I'm not sure how effective that would be. Still, it might be our best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I realize this question sounds like one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Community Building&lt;/a&gt;. But I want to apply it specifically to Worldbuilding, and so I ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we let these new voices be heard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you disagree, why should we not do something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Okay, right now it's at six, but it's a weekend.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:23.830" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:29:18.033" Title="How can we get new users to answer old questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2343" CreationDate="2015-07-26T04:49:27.490" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newish user, I hesitate to answer older questions because I'm not sure that my answer will ever be signaled as useful with up or down votes. I get the feeling that viewers only look at the top two or three answers, find the info/perspective they want then move on.  Sometimes I'll find a question that I do have an answer for but the info I would provide has already been covered in a higher upvoted and/or accepted answer.  I think I could improve on that answer in terms of clarity or layout but then the time cost outweighs my risk calculation that I'll not get any acknowledgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answers stay at zero votes because they really aren't useful or just low quality.  Others lack the visibility to move up the answer list to get to where they really can be more fully appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's a technological answer for this since answers with more upvotes &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; show up first.  They are the most valuable, someone looking for an answer shouldn't have to dig around.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there's a cultural fix though.  When I became aware of this pattern of no [up|down] votes for answers with lots of competition for eyeballs, I've made a point to evaluate every answer that comes into the questions I ask and upvote if I think it's worth it.  Since users natural inclination is to stop at the top of the answer list, perhaps we can train/encourage people to keep scrolling down the list and up voting useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T04:49:27.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2343" CreationDate="2015-07-26T17:55:58.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from all what Green describe, and with which I perfectly agree, there is also the question of why wasn't any question accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually try to accept one answer to all my questions (not so many so far, pretty easy to hold), but sometimes you don't find any very satisfying, so you leave it on. In that case, a new answer could get the attention of the OP and get the accepted hit, which will later also improve later upvotes, even if not reaching some other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as an answerer, I have sometimes the feeling that the Question's author simply forget/don't know (for newer)/left and never accept an answer. To give an example, sorry about basing on my own, but they are the ones I know more, but that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17626/why-would-canals-exist-long-before-railways/17632#17632&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17626/why-would-canals-exist-long-before-railways&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, was the first one, is reasonably high voted (10, and the question is at 2 for 1630 views as of now), and I think it fully answers the question of the OP. Why isn't it accepted? I have the feeling the author simply forgot... or left&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Generally, if we are in this configuration, a new answer, might not even attract the original poster's attention. And in that case, hard to be motivated, and we come to what Green describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Of course, I could be completely wrong and the answer in that example does not deserve to be accepted. But I think you anyway get the idea.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T17:55:58.737" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:06:37.473" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fish are delicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:06:37.473" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:12:58.223" Score="10" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is a good tag when used properly, providing very high quality answers. I notice, though, that it is typically used with respect to &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; and other &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hard sciences&lt;/a&gt;. Physics definitely is my favorite branch of science, but world building could benefit from social sciences as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I could ask &quot;how would people react to super powered people&quot;, and expect answers with citations to psychology articles referencing how people respond to societal changes and apparently supernatural phenomena. This follows the usage of &quot;asking about a plausible scenario, and extrapolate from current science&quot; that the hard science tag has a history of here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other useful social sciences would be sociology and economics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stretching it a bit, but does it also extend to other academic fields, such as law, history, philosophy, mathematics, etc...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, should the OP specify with respect to which science they want to be hard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The answer seemed to be yes, so I did a test run, which is failing. I'm scared that a nonanswer will get a lot of upvotes. HELP! Aren't there any social scientists on world building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21317/how-would-humans-and-society-react-to-a-superhero-existing-and-saving-the-earth&quot;&gt;How would humans and society react to a superhero existing and saving the earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T02:16:18.157" Title="Can hard-science apply to social sciences and other academic fields?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2348" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:37:59.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes of course. As long as they follow the same rules as natural sciences questions/answers as mentioned in the tag description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How far can we stretch it? It depend on the specific question. Philosophy is based on logic, much like mathematics. A specific reasoning can be &lt;strong&gt;demonstrated&lt;/strong&gt; and explained just like an &lt;strong&gt;equation&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, it could be classified as hard-science, but it really needs to be solid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:37:59.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:58:15.283" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Jon Skeet] is famous on Stack Overflow. Who is our Jon Skeet and associated facts. Propose one user per answer, and their awesome feats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, humor should generally be related to world building, and this site's culture, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:58:15.283" Title="Who is our Jon Skeet?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-27T09:59:03.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2348" CreationDate="2015-07-27T07:03:15.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As was pointed out in the comments, it really depends howw you define &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. Typically &lt;strong&gt;hard&lt;/strong&gt; sciences is often limited to physics and mathematics. But it is often extended to natural sciences, by adding, chemistry and biology. Which such definitions, we should then restrict ourselves to those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag. As explained in a few other posts here on meta, as well as in its own wiki, the tag isn't used to really categorised the question, and rather to indicate some expectations on the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that &quot;definition&quot;, I think we can include all the fields which have a peer-reviewed publication system. It might be tricky for philosophy, as, to my (limited) knowledge, philosophy usually takes the form of essays, rather than publications, sociology is based on statistical studies with polls, following a significant number of people, etc. Economics can include very advance mathematical models, and heck, I have seen economics studies more sound than some medecine ones (if one is not from the fields, it is often better to stay away from medecine studies). So yes, one could include them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this would be my limitation: &lt;strong&gt;if there are specialised peer-reviewed publications on that field, then it can be covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which point to a question, if such a definition is adopted, then maybe a renaming of the tag might be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T07:03:15.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2343" CreationDate="2015-07-27T09:22:40.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One simple way would be to make the &lt;strong&gt;Unanswered&lt;/strong&gt; tab the default view when entering Worldbuilding. Personally, I tend to gravitate there anyway - maybe it's because I like answering rather than reading the answers of others (!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T09:22:40.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T12:54:18.210" Score="6" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21225/can-you-shoot-someone-with-a-bullet-from-orbit?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit?&lt;/a&gt; asks about shooting a bullet from space to earth.  This seems more like a physics question (how do trajectories work? how does gravity affect that?) than a worldbuilding question; I don't see where a world is being built here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question received some flags suggesting a migration to Physics, after which I left this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; question? It sounds more like a physics question to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comment has ten upvotes, but the question had not a single close vote.  It only takes 500 reputation to cast close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A migration to Physics seems iffy to me; several of the answers would not be appropriate there.  The OP would be better off asking a new question there, I suspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've put the question on hold as off-topic while we discuss it.  What should be done with this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T18:48:32.727" Title="Is the bullet-from-space question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2353" CreationDate="2015-07-27T15:16:54.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see it going both ways.  Certainly, the answer is purely about the physics of dropping a relatively light object through several hundred kilometers of atmosphere with the precision to hit and kill a human sized object but the circumstances and motivation are purely fantastical.  If there were no fantastical element, I'd say send it to Physics SE but since there is such an element, I vote to keep it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T15:16:54.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2353" CreationDate="2015-07-27T17:42:03.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is (are?) my two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does not rely on any world building whatsoever. I've been guilty of asking questions like this in the past, but that doesn't mean that it's right to do so (it's not). You could answer this simply with some equations and scientific logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to direct everyone's attention to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122785/could-legolas-actually-see-that-far&quot;&gt;Could Legolas actually see that far?&lt;/a&gt;. It's about an equally speculative topic that is not based in science, yet as of this writing, it has a voting score of +118/-0. It also has 12,308 views and is the #14 question in votes, of all time, on Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because something is speculative does not make it off topic for a science site. I would advise checking with the mods there before migrating, but I know that if I saw this question in the close vote review on Physics, I would certainly click &quot;Leave Open&quot;. I can't speak for others, but that's what I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest closing - well, that's already done, actually - and migrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:15.693" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T17:42:03.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T18:42:31.943" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/20942/29&quot;&gt;You are a minor character in a fictional story. How do you get to be the hero?&lt;/a&gt; has been drawing some auto-flags (not a bad thing in itself) and the more I looked at it, the more I wonder how it can be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question specifically asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you suggest long-term strategies to -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) get yourself promoted to be the main character of the book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) for extra kudos, get your name mentioned in the title. Note: At first your character may not even have a name. What would be a suitable one to give yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially in combination with the title, I simply don't see how this falls into our scope of &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;. Rather, this seems to fall squarely into &lt;em&gt;actions of individual characters&lt;/em&gt; which we list as an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;types of questions that are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and as such &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; welcome on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yet that question is currently voted +33/-1,&lt;/strong&gt; with no close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is that question even on topic?&lt;/strong&gt; And if it is, then &lt;strong&gt;why is it on topic,&lt;/strong&gt; when we specifically disallow questions about actions of individual characters as being not about worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T01:18:57.047" Title="Is the &quot;minor character wanting to be the hero&quot; question on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2353" CreationDate="2015-07-27T18:48:32.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I should provide an answer, since it was my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a few reasons for posting it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) - I thought it was too crazy to be taken seriously on Physics. HDE 226868 has shown that that's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) - The question hit on a variety of topics, from projectile motion to atmospheric conditions to materials to propulsion to weapon design to... other stuff, probably. I know that asking a question here will give me a broader understanding of the problem, because Worldbuilding is sort of a broad topic itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) - I am building a fictional world in which the information gained from asking such a question would be useful. That seemed like enough reason to ask the question here, though now I'm doubting myself on that. I still don't think I know what kinds of questions to ask here, but I'm willing to be a bit flexible if the intentions are pure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T18:48:32.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T20:30:20.020" Score="8" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have plenty of different tags, but while having a look at some of them, I realised that we have some &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in plural: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gods&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gods&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gods&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cities&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in singular: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dragon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dragon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dragon&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alien&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alien&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alien&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceship&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason why we should have such a mix. There have been some discussion about it on meta, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41501/tagging-as-singular-or-plural&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6752/merge-singular-and-plural-tags?lq=1&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; (thanks HDE226868 for the links). There isn't a clear preference. Some even suggest to have synonyms between plural and singular forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to avoid that. But what do you think, should we prefer singular or plural? In which cases? And if so, should we go on editing the ones that are &quot;wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T12:56:39.540" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T15:29:50.650" Title="Tags cleaning: singular vs. plural" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2360" CreationDate="2015-07-27T20:37:25.633" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it really matters, but I vote for plural. I forget where I first heard this, but tags are supposed to attract people who can say &quot;I am an expert in/on [tag]&quot;. You would not say &quot;I am an expert on dragon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, the plural form is more encompassing. For instance, a question about how dragons interact with one another may not feel right under a 'dragon' tag, but a question about a single dragon definitely fits under a 'dragons' tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But like I said, I don't think it matters. This is one of those things people just auto-fix in their heads, and I don't want to go around editing posts just to add a single letter to the end of a tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T20:37:25.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2358" CreationDate="2015-07-27T20:47:54.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it focuses a bit (too much?) on the plot part. But in a way the life of a character within a book, who knows he is a character of a book is a world as such. We have many questions that are related to the plot, but we kept, due to, IMHO, the world in which those take place. But I can understand the motivation to VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T20:47:54.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2360" CreationDate="2015-07-28T16:42:31.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The agreement seems to be that tags should be used in their plural form. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197731/285933&quot;&gt;answer on meta&lt;/a&gt; indicates that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;moderators can rename a tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and assuming that that is the case, we could list below the tags that are in singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be renamed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/civilization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;civilization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;civilization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/crime&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;crime&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;crime&lt;/a&gt; to criminality?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/economy?q=economy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;countable&lt;/a&gt; for countries economy = &quot;economics&quot; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/population&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;population&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;population&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; ? plural of folk is folk/folks...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; ? It might have a slightly different meaning...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sea&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sea&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; The tag is confusing because there is only one Solar system, it's the system Earth is orbiting. But there are many star/stellar systems. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supernova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supernova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supernova&lt;/a&gt; - &quot;supernovae&quot; and &quot;supernovas&quot; are both used as plurals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be kept&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt; as it refers to The Evolution theory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt; : There are several laws but there is the law in the broader sense. Law as an academic field for example can't be plural. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; Is the action of flying in space. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; because in its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/society?q=society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; about people living in communities in general, it is uncountable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T15:29:50.650" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-07-28T16:42:31.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2348" CreationDate="2015-07-29T01:54:51.043" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hard sciences are those sciences in which precise accurate and repeatable measurements are possible. Such high quality measurements in turn allow the creation of testable hypothesis which in turn create highly predictive models of the measured phenomena. Physics is the &quot;hardest&quot; science because it has the easiest to measure phenomena. As you move away from physics, the measurements get harder, less precise, less accurate, they hypothesis less and less testable and the resulting models less and less predictive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably better to think of mature predictive science verses immature non-predictive science. Each scientific field starts out unable to measure, test or predict anything. It spends a lot of time simply observing and labeling things kind of making a basic inventory of phenomena. Then it starts developing measuring methods, then methods of testing hypothesis and eventually producing useful predictive models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Astronomy was the first science because the heavens where the easist phenomena to accurately measure. Long before people understood what celestial objects were they could measure their motions and predict their paths. Physics followed soon after, and chemistry shifted from the taxonomy stage or naming stage to the measuring stage in circa 1800 and then generated testable hypothesis by they 1820s and predictive models by the 1850s. That's when chemist started really being able to synthesize things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biology started out in the early 1800s naming things, started measuring populations in the 1830s and by 1860 Darwin had created testable predictions. A lot of subfields like biochemistry and cellular biology, zoology etc split off. Some being more mature than others. By 1947, synthetic Darwinism could make testable predictions about populations and genetic relationships subsequently proven by DNA assay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychology and Social Science are even today only at the basic observation and labeling stage. The phenomena they seek study really can't be measured at all. How does none reliably measure love, hate, anger, pride etc? Even with FMRIs, such measurements are dubious. Psychologist make few testable hypothesis and have no predictive models of human behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social Scientist are not even really though the labeling stage yet.  How do you measure &quot;Social Justice&quot; even assuming anyone has bother to actually define the phrase. Sociologist have in the past century or more produced no testable hypothesis and have produced no predictive models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, as a student of science history, the pretense of the Social scientist to be considered a hard science is simply revolting, considering all the damage they've done in the arrogance, Anyone remember eugenics? Say, how did those inter city housing project turn out? Or my favorite, explain to us again how you spent 50 years calling anyone who said homosexuality was innate and based in biology a Nazi fascist and then suddenly, in the early 90s just did a 180 turn about based on no new evidence whatsoever? Social scientist have never produced a single testable prediction nor a single predictive model, yet they still con us into basing social policy on the fatuous pronouncements usually using the most poor and vulnerable members of our society as their guinea pigs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a group of claimants cannot offer up testable hypothesis it is not a hard science. Their statements have no predictive value, and their assertion are merely personal opinion with no more weight than anyone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would thing that when someone ask a world building question under the label of &quot;hard science&quot; they expect an answer based on solid measurement, testable hypothesis and proven predictive models, not idil fad driven guesses of the secular version of a self-appointed priest class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try this out, can you think of several classic science fiction stories based on physics that still stand the test of time? I can, stories from 1920s, 30s, 40's, 50s etc years still retain the validity of their physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how about classic science fiction stories based on the social sciences of the 1920s and 30s, you know when scientific racism and eugenics where the big rage in the social sciences? Brave New World is still a good read, but it was supposed to be a satire of many of the idea of the time, particularly the idea of social scientist that they could engineer society. Or how about stories influenced by the utterly fictional, completely made up Freudian psychology? back in the 50s, 60s and 70s various forms of Marxism, behavioralism and social engineering were all the rage. How do those stories stand the the test time? Any classics you can think off? Any stories you can read and say, wow this based social sciences fads back in the sixties still rings true even nearly 50 years later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No you can't because their ideas are gibberish and get turned over and tossed down the memory hole every generation. Social science can't offer a writer any help at all. A writer has just as good an idea about society as as any &quot;social scientist&quot; because the writer has just done just as much science on the matter i.e. none. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stories based on the social science fads du jour will likely ring hollow in their own day and certainly won't be classics remembered decades from now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want  the hard science tag to mean anything other than &quot;some guy who managed to get tenure said so,&quot; then restrict it to the predictive sciences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="573" LastEditorUserId="573" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T02:16:18.157" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T02:16:18.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-29T16:13:28.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being used to the other SE sites (SO, RPG, gaming, etc) the thing I have noticed to be common here is how often there is no single, definitive 'right' answer to the questions.  There may be a 'best answer' but it is hard to definitively say what is 'correct.' This is even more obvious when you get into things like Magic. Because Magic doesn't play by any rules but the ones you ascribe to it. Magic can do anything and nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, on this site, I have had a hard time transforming questions into something that has a definitive answer and is not opinion based or idea-generation. In most other SE sites, it is much easier to ask a question with a definitive answer...but here where we are the ones inventing the rules, it's much harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T16:13:28.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T08:18:18.943" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9262&quot;&gt;My edit&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21388/overpopulation-in-space&quot;&gt;Overpopulation . . . IN SPACE!&lt;/a&gt; was rejected with the standard &lt;em&gt;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have of course to guess at the intent of the post. I assume it is to get answers, and then the amount of non-essential text does not really help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aren't SE sites supposed to be about (concise) &lt;strong&gt;Questions and answers&lt;/strong&gt;? All this excess verbiage does not help the OP getting answers IMO.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Does Worldbuilding allow more prose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the question has been edited later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar cases:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/176557/why-was-this-edit-rejected-for-changing-the-original-post-too-much&quot;&gt;Why was this edit rejected for changing the original post too much?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/203123/how-does-this-edit-suggestion-changes-the-original-meaning-or-intent-of-the-post&quot;&gt;How does this edit suggestion changes the original meaning or intent of the post?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3106" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T11:48:27.010" Title="Is this rejected edit in line with SE goals?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2015-07-30T09:24:46.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being one of those who rejected your edit, I should probably try to explain my point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say, that this is again one of those cases where Worldbuilding differ from other SE sites. Your edit suppressed 70-80% of the content of the OP. With it, you removed any background information on the world the OP intend to build. This background can give indications to the answerers about what they should or shouldn't include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any correlation between length and quality. Too verbose aren't good, but so are too short questions. The latter usually ending with a series of comments asking for precisions, more details, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like the question as it is asked, you can comment and/or downvote. But editing large bunches out isn't a good solution. Generally edits should be limited to grammar/typo/etc. More, you should comment to suggest to the OP to edit him/herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T18:25:04.167" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T18:25:04.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="461" CreationDate="2015-07-30T15:01:34.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that software recommendations are fine for Worldbuilding, because humans can't do everything by themselves. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1345/tool-to-simulate-climate-weather-effects&quot;&gt;Simulating weather&lt;/a&gt;, for example, is a task that needs software. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag has done well so far, though only 11 questions use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to the guidelines. I think that they're pretty good for us. We probably should change one thing, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requests for world building software recommendations should choose a specific task. Some questions can be too broad, such as asking for the best software for doing a certain task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may also want to discuss the generality of &quot;doing a certain task&quot; in a meta post - in other words, how general &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also include a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:54:36.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-07-30T15:10:23.943" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It may have the effect of returning people to SE.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only learned about Stack Exchange, and subsequently Worldbuilding, because I was googling a question I had that dropped me into Space.se  -- and as a writer, I noticed an odd question that was from worldbuilding, from which I've since gained so many writing resources - and I like to think I've contributed, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I hadn't seen WB, I wouldn't have even remembered the URL &quot;stackexchange.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T15:10:23.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T19:22:17.587" Score="7" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was something that I was thinking about recently, but what is the community's opinion of having &quot;flavorful&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have asked a couple of questions on futurology which reference the fictional, and fairly whimsical/comedic, nation of Futurestan. I wrote them like that because I figured an easy, fun read would get more people to read the entire question than a dry list of assumptions. I have seen other such questions, but I would like to know if there is a widespread opinion on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2092" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T23:22:59.930" Title="Flavor in questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2373" CreationDate="2015-07-30T19:59:32.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I prefer to read questions that are engaging and fun to read.  I don't do a very good job at doing this in my questions but appreciate it when others do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the trick is to do both.  Engage the reader enough to get them to keep reading but still provide concrete enough constraints that the question is not too broad and objectively answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T19:59:32.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2373" CreationDate="2015-07-30T23:22:59.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien used to say that he wrote about Middle-Earth so he could explore languages, and devise plausible histories for them. As a byproduct of that exploration, he developed a massive world that people all over the world and of all generations love to explore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I take from this is that good stories are often secondary: they come about not because someone wanted to tell a good story, but because someone found something so beautiful and interesting that the story told itself. I've found this to be true in my own writings, as my best work always seems to come from exploring someone else's world, while telling stories just for the sake of the stories themselves always falls flat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; encourage people to wax poetic on their questions. Instead, I would encourage them to make their questions as useful and informative as possible. If something great develops on its own, then so be it. And honestly, I think that happens here: it's often from the blandest questions or the most matter-of-fact answers that &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; imagination gets inspired. I may enjoy reading the more verbose questions, but they don't stick with me, and they probably won't end up helping other users as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T23:22:59.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-31T11:03:38.457" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here an example of question I revised:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9127&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9127&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I thought it was confusing because of all the necessary information in it. My edit was accepted hence my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question contains humoristic content unrelated to the meaning of the question should we remove this content? Is it acceptable to do so even if it deeply changes the author and question's writing style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T11:26:53.027" Title="What should we do with humour in questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2015-07-31T11:48:27.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background information helps establish the context in which the question is asked. In many cases this can be a good thing. In no case that I can think of can we say that &lt;em&gt;removing&lt;/em&gt; that information preserves the intent of the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; things one can do to make the question easier to read. I originally posted these as a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2369/29&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin's answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I think they deserve to be in an answer instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question and &lt;code&gt;**boldface**&lt;/code&gt; the important part to make it stand out better. This works well if the important part is a few sentences or less.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question and put a &lt;code&gt;# heading&lt;/code&gt; above the important part. This works well if the important part is longer, but well isolated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question, copy the specific question to the top, and prefix the remainder with something like &quot;background material:&quot; to make it clear what is extra material that can be useful to understand the question but might not be required reading. This works well if the specific question is fairly well-contained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question and give it a &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; title. This helps readers quickly get an idea of what the question is about, which aids in skimming for relevant details. While witty titles can be fun, they are not always conducive to promoting a quick understanding of what the question is about. Just a really good question title can be what makes the difference between a moderately bad question, and a fairly decent question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these &lt;em&gt;preserve the intent of the original poster, while improving readability or answerability.&lt;/em&gt; Which is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better than to edit out large portions of what the original poster wrote &lt;em&gt;which, after all, are relevant to the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very different matter if the excess material is unrelated to the question that is being asked. As a slightly contrived example, which obviously would need to be much more detailed to be an actual acceptable question, if someone were to post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I love chocolate and strawberry ice cream, which I eat while building my worlds. My unicorns descended from horses but evolved naturally a horn projecting from its forehead. How did this horn evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then even if the non-question part is fairly long, it would be perfectly reasonable to edit out the first part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;I love chocolate and strawberry ice cream, which I eat while building my worlds.&lt;/strike&gt; My unicorns descended from horses but evolved naturally a horn projecting from its forehead. How did this horn evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leaving only the part of the question that is actually relevant to answering the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My unicorns descended from horses but evolved naturally a horn projecting from its forehead. How did this horn evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T11:48:27.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2384" CreationDate="2015-08-03T02:52:38.883" Score="7" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21719/dragon-vs-antiaircraft-artillery&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; recent question about a dragon's pursuit of human prey brought to mind a question I thought of a while back, but never asked. This question is more about strategy and tactics than a specific character's actions (I think), but when does a question cross the boundary between being about something on-topic and being about the actions of a character, which is defined as off-topic in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help section&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The perspective in the linked question gives a nice refresher from the typical answers on Worldbuilding, but seems to edge into plot development (also off-topic). However, I quite enjoy writing snippets of fiction (and I have already provided my own answer to the question), so this question is merely about when it is proper to close a question for the reason it is about a single character's actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T09:58:17.060" Title="Definition of when a question is about character action" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2383" CreationDate="2015-08-03T02:59:06.540" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;My world has a variety of types of phlebotinum with well-defined properties and a number of pre-defined applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am considering writing a question on the main site giving these properties and asking for additional plausible applications given the defined properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be considered idea generation, or would this be an acceptable question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T09:35:22.310" Title="Is &quot;Uses of phlebotinum&quot; on-topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2382" CreationDate="2015-08-03T09:35:22.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As proposed here, I think that your question would be off topic as either &lt;em&gt;idea generation&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;), or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly because with such a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there would be no way to judge how well answers actually answer the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the potential set of answers would be unbounded; there would always be &quot;one more&quot; possible answer that nobody has posted yet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can fix those problems, then your question should work. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt; said in a comment, reducing the scope of the expected applications and providing criteria based on which answers can be judged would probably be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might not be a bad idea to post your question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/29&quot;&gt;the question sandbox&lt;/a&gt; initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T09:35:22.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2381" CreationDate="2015-08-03T09:52:35.200" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there can be a hard-and-fast rule about when a question is about &lt;em&gt;an individual character&lt;/em&gt;, when it is about &lt;em&gt;plot events&lt;/em&gt; and when it is about &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;. At some point, it comes down to judgement calls about specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A good rule of thumb would probably be:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the answer will &lt;em&gt;affect all characters in your world equally&lt;/em&gt; (possibly restricted to all characters of a given species only, based on the capabilities of that species), then the question is likely about worldbuilding and thus on topic for us&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the answer will affect &lt;em&gt;different characters in different ways&lt;/em&gt;, or the answer will be &lt;em&gt;different for different characters&lt;/em&gt;, then the question is likely either about plot or (more likely) individual characters and thus off topic for us&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;as described in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, the &quot;world&quot; does not have to be the whole planet or the whole universe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A setting might not be a planet; it can be larger than a multiverse or smaller than a village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning for the bullet points above is that when you are dealing with individual characters, or plot, what happens to one character will be different from what happens to another character or how another character perceives those same events. However, when you are dealing with worldbuilding, everyone who perceives the element or event will perceive it in essentially the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4764/29&quot;&gt;A group of charging unicorns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would appear basically the same to everyone, and would be (largely) the same thing regardless of whether you are in front of or behind them, given that the unicorns remain the same. The capabilities of the unicorns do not change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How a particular individual reacts to those unicorns charging toward them&lt;/em&gt; would be different for every character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the former is about worldbuilding, and the latter is about individual characters' actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T09:58:17.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2323" CreationDate="2015-08-03T15:45:51.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 36 questions and 136 answers, for an average of 3.78 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21142/how-do-you-find-a-mate-when-everyone-looks-amazing&quot;&gt;How do you find a mate when everyone looks amazing?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;89 total votes, 11 question votes, 15 answers, 5435 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21204/how-do-you-establish-identity-when-people-can-change-their-appearance-at-will&quot;&gt;How do you establish identity when people can change their appearance at will?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;62 total votes, 12 question votes, 11 answers, 1696 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21759/everyone-now-has-two-bodies-what-do-you-do&quot;&gt;Everyone now has two bodies: what do you do?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;59 total votes, 22 question votes, 8 answers, 3695 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21396/how-inhuman-can-a-human-be&quot;&gt;How inhuman can a human be?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;54 total votes, 22 question votes, 6 answers, 3019 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21785/repopulating-the-world-from-a-single-couple-what-would-it-really-be-like&quot;&gt;Repopulating the world from a single couple - what would it really be like?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;41 total votes, 15 question votes, 5 answers, 2193 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21414/dumbbell-planet-how-would-humans-cross-the-bridge&quot;&gt;Dumbbell planet - how would humans cross the bridge?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;34 total votes, 10 question votes, 6 answers, 1990 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21474/what-justifications-would-people-use-to-justify-discrimination-of-people-with-sp&quot;&gt;What justifications would people use to justify discrimination of people with special powers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;31 total votes, 8 question votes, 5 answers, 1249 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21465/could-humans-split-into-two-species-living-on-two-separate-planets&quot;&gt;Could humans split into two species living on two separate planets?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;24 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 1600 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21292/society-of-kind-handsome-geniuses-dystopia&quot;&gt;Society of Kind, Handsome Geniuses = Dystopia?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;24 total votes, 4 question votes, 10 answers, 496 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21801/what-is-the-maxiumum-depth-for-an-earth-like-atmosphere&quot;&gt;What is the maxiumum depth for an Earth like atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11251/josh-belmont&quot;&gt;Josh Belmont&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 9 question votes, 1 answers, 192 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21468/what-changes-would-be-needed-for-humans-to-live-in-an-ocean&quot;&gt;What changes would be needed for humans to live in an ocean?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 5 question votes, 3 answers, 546 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21065/human-rights-in-space&quot;&gt;Human rights in space&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 240 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21394/how-much-life-could-our-galaxy-support&quot;&gt;How much life could our galaxy support?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 5 question votes, 4 answers, 429 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21521/how-would-humans-be-affected-by-a-12-hour-day&quot;&gt;How would humans be affected by a 12-hour day?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 387 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21247/how-to-cook-for-forty-humans&quot;&gt;How To Cook For Forty Humans?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;Dan Smolinske&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 161 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21079/the-limits-of-human-biology-atmospheric-tolerances-1&quot;&gt;The limits of human biology: atmospheric tolerances (#1)&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 6 question votes, 1 answers, 153 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21260/whats-to-stop-shapeshifting-humans-from-changing-their-appearance-all-the-time&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s to stop shapeshifting humans from changing their appearance all the time?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 173 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21770/aliens-are-evicting-us-from-the-earth-how-much-time-should-they-give-us&quot;&gt;Aliens are evicting us from the earth; how much time should they give us?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 218 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21693/humans-with-360-degree-vision-across-ir-visible-uv-and-xray&quot;&gt;Humans with 360 Degree Vision across IR, Visible, UV and XRay?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 153 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21484/if-everyone-had-to-wear-a-box-over-their-head-how-would-society-differ&quot;&gt;If everyone had to wear a box over their head - how would society differ?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 250 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21117/how-would-people-adapt-to-a-wet-world&quot;&gt;How would people adapt to a wet world?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 250 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21698/an-alien-craft-lands-on-earth-in-the-stone-age-and-leaves-a-useful-artefact-d&quot;&gt;An alien craft lands on Earth in the stone age and leaves a &amp;#39;useful&amp;#39; artefact. Did they waste their time?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 183 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21485/reversal-of-human-sexual-dimorphism&quot;&gt;Reversal of Human Sexual Dimorphism&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;Dan Smolinske&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 127 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21483/are-there-any-side-effects-if-genomic-imprinting-no-longer-exists&quot;&gt;Are there any side effects if genomic imprinting no longer exists?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10658/fairytale&quot;&gt;fairytale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 62 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21188/narcissuss-nemesis&quot;&gt;Narcissus&amp;#39;s nemesis&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 77 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21262/how-would-humans-adapt-their-language-in-response-to-moving-through-time-at-diff&quot;&gt;How would humans adapt their language in response to moving through time at different rates relative each other?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 93 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21317/how-would-humans-and-society-react-to-a-superhero-existing-and-saving-the-earth&quot;&gt;How would humans and society react to a superhero existing and saving the earth?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 7 question votes, 3 answers, 212 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21265/is-it-possible-for-a-half-alien-and-half-human-hybrid-eyes-to-change-color-acc&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a half alien and half human (Hybrid) eyes to change color accordingly to moods?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11200/meesa26&quot;&gt;Meesa26&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 148 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21251/how-should-we-break-the-ice&quot;&gt;How should we break the ice?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, -1 question votes, 2 answers, 132 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21364/race-relations-in-the-land-of-human-shapeshifters&quot;&gt;Race relations in the land of human shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 2 answers, 75 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21748/how-would-a-human-society-be-different-from-ours-if-our-feet-were-hands&quot;&gt;How would a human society be different from ours if our feet were also hands?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9056/joze&quot;&gt;Joze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 82 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21611/narcissuss-mirage-loki-master-piece&quot;&gt;Narcissus&amp;#39;s mirage, Loki master piece&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 1 question votes, 1 answers, 101 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21198/extreme-sport-fishing&quot;&gt;Extreme Sport: Fishing&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 1 question votes, 1 answers, 94 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21615/how-to-find-freshwater&quot;&gt;How to find freshwater?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 2 answers, 101 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21689/the-ancestry-of-fantasy&quot;&gt;The Ancestry of Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 144 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21121/fell-the-phylogenetic-tree&quot;&gt;Fell the phylogenetic tree&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, -1 question votes, 3 answers, 141 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:53:09.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2453" CreationDate="2015-08-03T15:49:02.777" Score="7" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our thirteenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapon-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapon-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapon-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 3 Aug - 17 Aug&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6453.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I, for one, just loooove ka-boom-boom. After all, who doesn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Propose new topics here:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:50:14.567" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #13: Weapon-Design" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2015-08-03T19:58:35.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started as a reply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21689/the-ancestry-of-fantasy&quot;&gt;The Ancestry of Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; but it only answers the first line of that posting, not the main question, so I moved it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more a comment than an answer, but I need more characters and the ability to do some formatting. I believe you're using the label alternative world in the wrong way, which makes it difficult &lt;em&gt;for me&lt;/em&gt; to answer some of your questions, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21667/great-lakes-earth-north-america&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19928/a-much-stronger-current-in-the-ocean&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19215/the-arctic-rainforest&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. You might note that it takes five votes to close, so I'm not the only one who has problems with the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpeculativeFiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speculative fiction&lt;/a&gt; can be divided into subgenres. The borders are fuzzy, but alternate history has a generally accepted meaning. Alternate world is less clear. All are appropriate topics for Worldbuilding, BTW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A story involving magic and the classic fantasy races. Tolkien, swords and sorcery, fairy tales, and all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrbanFantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urban Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; takes the magic into the modern world. Still fantasy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Horror&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horror&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is often, but not always, using fantasy tropes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Science Fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A story that explores the impact of scientific discoveries on the protagonists. Often with a focus on engineering, and bordering on the non-scientific where it comes to FTL drives and the like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Space Opera.&lt;/em&gt; Starships and heroes. Star Trek and Star Wars, even if the latter borders on Fantasy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Technothriller.&lt;/em&gt; A science fiction story set in the near future, often involving espionage or weaponry. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/TomClancy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Clancy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/DaleBrown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dale Brown&lt;/a&gt;, much by &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/MichaelCrichton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Crichton&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time travel.&lt;/em&gt; A science fiction (or fantasy) story where characters travel into the past. There they may or may not change history. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TimePatrol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poul Anderson&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/IslandInTheSeaOfTime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SM Stirling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateHistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alternate History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A story which explores the outcome when a historical event &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HowFewRemain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;turned out differently&lt;/a&gt;. It should be an outcome that could have happened, but didn't. That means no time travelers. No &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Worldwar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt;. No elves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary:&lt;/strong&gt; The label &quot;alternate Earth&quot; generally refers to alternate history. The questions you're asking seem to go in a different way. The definitions are not set in stone, but the links show that my usage isn't completely without precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:58:35.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2390" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:29:29.147" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've ran into several posts where the author used 2 systems in the same post. Personally, I use the metric/international system all the time. Other people might use other systems, namely the US system. I'm not really comfortable using it myself but I'm fine if others prefer to use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem arise when the two are mixed in alternation, it's annoying. &#xA;I think the users can use any system as long as they use it consistently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T13:49:52.277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T13:49:52.277" Title="Systems of measurement" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|systems-of-units|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:44:06.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, that one unit of measure should generally be used in a post.  I fear I might be one of your culprits though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T15:44:06.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:46:58.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this kind of thing is really annoying (though I've probably been guilty of it myself in the past). &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SI units&lt;/a&gt; are the most common ones in science, and given that most of the familiar constants are best known as their SI unit values (e.g. the value of $c$ is ~ 300,000,000 meters/second), I think that they are our best choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, consistency in a given post is important. We don't need to have consistency across the board, though - for example, if I reference a table of statistics about population density, I might be working in acres. That could be okay to use across the post, but if there aren't too many numbers, then conversions should be used. Let's not be lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T23:38:19.440" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T23:38:19.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2397" CreationDate="2015-08-04T22:54:35.987" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why I first found out about this site was because I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19669/how-to-deal-with-a-friendly-boghog-without-hurting-it-and-maintaining-a-postive&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; site, but as the answer would not be supported by hard factual evidence, it was closed, and then migrated here, and as it was not closed here, I assumed that this was the new place for my crazy questions, and that I had found my place to fit in with finally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I then asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20860/how-to-best-upgrade-your-towel-for-military-combat&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question which became the most popular across all of the SE networks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BugY4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BugY4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And got loads of upvotes, however after 9 days of it being open, the site decided that it was off-topic, even though it was so popular, and closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this mean then that this is not the place for my crazy Towel questions and the like and that I should find a new place for them or create my own crazy SE site if they are not on-topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10622" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T20:34:16.047" Title="No more Towels?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T17:33:26.600" Score="11" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question recently was edited and approved: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20311/how-to-protect-a-space-elevator-against-terrorism&quot;&gt;How to protect a space elevator against terrorism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit provided an embedded picture and link to a relevant xkcd comic. The comic was already linked in a comment. While it is related topically, and might add a little humor to the original question, I fail to see how this edit improves the question in a meaningful way. In addition, the comic contains a certain four-letter word that would otherwise probably be edited away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some rules or guidelines to consider when editing/reviewing edits for other members' posts? While these could be subjective, my first thought is that an edit should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not violate the original intent of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide meaningful improvements to the overall quality of the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts about this question in particular? About general editing guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7312" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T18:06:41.593" Title="Rules for editing questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2015-08-05T17:56:51.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edit in question, had I reviewed it, would have got a reject vote. It violates the intent of the original author. More to the point, it doesn't add any pertinent, &lt;em&gt;permanent&lt;/em&gt; detail. The XKCD comic link is nice to have - but in a comment, an ephemeral bit of text that can be quickly deleted if needed. It's not appropriate in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've rolled the edit back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T17:56:51.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2015-08-05T18:06:41.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As can be seen in the comments, it turns out I accepted the edit by mistake, not realizing that the new syntax would display an image. I definitely agree with the rollback, and apologize for my mistake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the lesson to be learned is that it's a good idea to thoroughly review edits, especially those containing code you do not understand. I will certainly be more diligent in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T18:06:41.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2015-08-05T18:53:02.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapon-mass-destruction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapon-mass-destruction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapon-mass-destruction&lt;/a&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons-of-mass-destruction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons-of-mass-destruction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons-of-mass-destruction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;of&quot; is typically used in the phrase, and it makes the phrase grammatically correct. Also, pluralization would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T19:34:45.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T19:34:45.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2392" CreationDate="2015-08-05T20:34:16.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the humorous tone of the question, (that probably didn't help) it was closed because it was about the optimization of a particular object and not about how it would affect the world around it. It took some time to close the question because the line is not always clearly defined between what is on-topic and off-topic. This is a problem on this site that other site in the Stack-exchange might not have: subjectivity. Some people will think that a question is acceptable while others will disapprove base on the same criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have mixed feelings about the question. Because I know that although it's more about the towel than the world around it, the towel could have an impact on the world (in warfare for example). Then yes it could be about worldbuilding but it's not explicitly mentioned.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T20:34:16.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2402" CreationDate="2015-08-05T22:25:13.023" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice this week I've seen comment chains turned into chat rooms. Are they really useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upside of leaving it as comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leaving the discussion as a chain of comments allows for the voting of comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can just check the top bar on any SE page to see if I have a notification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Much easier one click access instead of having to load a separate page, or tab out to check the post details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the downsides to leaving it as a comment chain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downside to converting to chat room: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really don't want to have to open and close a tab just for a chat room discussion, or keep it open on the side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no notifications, making it tough to see if I need to reply to anything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the upsides of converting it to a chat room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T09:43:33.900" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T17:38:14.180" Title="Are chats really useful?" Tags="|discussion|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T00:25:11.750" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that several of the questions about weapon design are solely about the weapon.  They appear to make no effort to integrate the weapon into a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T09:54:33.600" Title="Has the weapon-design challenge taken us away from world-building?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2015-08-06T01:59:06.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some appear to be borderline according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are welcome that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weapons are elements of the world but the questions should also include how the elements helps defining/altering the world. If the sole focus of the question is only about the weapon, then I believe it's not a worldbuilding question. If your not sure but you think it's off-topic, you can flag it. If enough high reputation users agrees with you, it's probably off-topic.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T01:59:06.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2015-08-06T06:48:24.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main idea is that neither the questions, nor the comments are places to discuss and/or debate. The chat is. So if you have some disagreement with someone (in a good way), and the point needs to be discussed, you should go to chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you come to some form of understanding, you can adjust the comments on the post or the post itself with the summary of the chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, visitors do not need to go through the complete argumentation and discussion to get the relevant information. Not everyone is interested in reading a long series of comments, but would rather have one or two higly relevant comments and/or an improved post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T06:48:24.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2015-08-06T06:55:25.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say what @MonicaCelio usually writes (occasionally to me): if you think something is off-topic, vote to close it. People may or may not follow your lead, but you should help maintain a consistency throughout the site. Recent cases have shown that sometimes off-topic sometimes evade the usual voters/mods. If you are unsure about a certain question, do ask on meta about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T06:55:25.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:21:35.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible that some of these weapons are &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; integrated into the world, and the askers are just asking how to plausibly account for them. For instance, my question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21822/how-to-make-a-sound-gun&quot;&gt;a sound gun&lt;/a&gt; is based around a weapon I wanted to have in my world, and I just wanted to know how it would work, or if it was plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, I assume that's what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is for: questions not specifically about worldbuilding, but about building individual aspects of that world that you'd like to have, but aren't sure are possible. In many cases, I don't think it's necessary to flesh out why you're using the weapon or what other aspects of the world exist, so long as you provide the materials available for the construction of said weapon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to point out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2101/do-questions-have-to-be-for-some-greater-cause&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where the accepted answer pretty much states that you don't actually have to have a world in mind when asking a question. As long as that question is on-topic. There might be a chicken-and-egg scenario here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit it's sort of a grey area in many cases, though. I get the feeling we're having way too many 'is this worldbuilding?' questions here on meta, and the answer usually comes down to what you as an individual (with close votes) decide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T13:21:35.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:05:07.650" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/steampunk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;steampunk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaslit Victoriana. Copper, brass and smoke everywhere. C'mon, steampunk worlds are so different from our own!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T16:05:07.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2343" CreationDate="2015-08-06T20:29:18.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that the best way to get new users to post on old questions is to lead the charge. I often find myself commenting on questions that are months old simply because someone edited the tags. Edits and new answers bring old questions back into the sunlight, where new users can more easily discover them (like on the 'active' tab, which I use almost exclusively). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's important to upvote answers to your own questions. If someone provides a good answer to one of your questions, even if you already have all the information you need, make sure you upvote them for their commitment to the greater community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it might help if you link future questions to past ones. If you find a good question with few good answers, you may be able to ask a question to help fill in the gaps, or ask a related question and provide a link to the old one just in case an expert is around who might provide answers for both. This option may not be the best the way I'm describing it, but I think we can find a way to make it work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to point out, by the way, that this question made me more eager to answer old questions, so in a way it is its own answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:29:18.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2411" CreationDate="2015-08-07T00:44:18.993" Score="13" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently read several cases where comments or answers seem to be deliberately taking apart the question. This isn't new, it's been going on for a while now, in both old questions and new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a worldbuilding site. It's natural for some of our questions to contain things that don't make sense. If and when the OP wants the idea torn apart (in context), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/24441/discussion-on-question-by-aify-lets-weaponize-jellyfish&quot;&gt;My old jellyfish question (where the comments are now a chatroom)&lt;/a&gt; shows one such case, where people question the premise of the post instead of answering the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22035/what-forms-of-transmission-would-work&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; zombie question where I try fairly hard to rip it apart (but that might just be my bias because I've a) seen too many zombie questions that don't make sense and b) seen too many horrible questions in the same pattern by the same person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My old question for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15278/sea-creature-moving-via-rotational-motions&quot;&gt;Sea creature moving via rotational motions&lt;/a&gt; - many answers simply state a &quot;can't happen&quot; instead of trying to find a way to make it happen. (Note: That question contains the reality-check tag, albeit used incorrectly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21840/we-finally-have-a-weapon-to-win-the-war-against-the-aliens-we-dont-know-how-to&quot;&gt;We finally have a weapon to win the war against the aliens. We don&amp;#39;t know how to deploy it&lt;/a&gt; (which also happens to be my question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21985/world-where-gender-roles-are-swapped&quot;&gt;World where gender roles are swapped&lt;/a&gt; also seems to have the OP defending his premise &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also brings up the question of when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; should be used, but I think that's covered pretty well &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1712/how-realistic-should-a-question-tagged-reality-check-be&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we encourage this &quot;rip apart the question&quot; behavior &lt;strong&gt;even if there's no reality check tag?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T18:21:16.817" Title="Tearing apart questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2358" CreationDate="2015-08-07T01:18:57.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the originator of the post in question I'm a little surprised by the closure. Now that I understand the purpose of the community better, I always make the effort to include a substantial 'world' component. In this case it is a fictional world with its own peculiarities. For example there are blank areas reflecting the authors lack of knowledge. The answerers have picked up on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because I mentioned an individual character doesn't mean that all the other inhabitants of the world weren't involved - in fact they specifically were included by me and by others. The main character just provided focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't intend to point the finger directly but if I wanted to I could find many questions that have far less world-building than mine do. Yet they seem immune. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own preference would be to relax the rules somewhat. I think that sooner or later the possible worlds will run out. There are only so many zombie apocalypses we can have. Details of interactions within a zombie infested world and discussions of which weapons to use present a much wider scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T01:18:57.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2015-08-07T02:01:49.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own preference and the reason I don't tend to vote-to-close except in blatant cases is that I would prefer a relaxation of the rules. I suppose, on reflection, what I'm really doing with this specific question is crying &quot;Unfair!&quot; when I am treated strictly and others aren't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean I want to bring others down with me. Despite the title, I don't object to such questions. I actually think they are very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="10759" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T09:54:33.600" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T09:54:33.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2407" CreationDate="2015-08-07T03:37:53.447" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, very much so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Challenging a question's premise can make the questioner defensive, I admit (I've had it happen to me before), but challenging a question can improve it or, in some cases, reveal the underlying problem the questioner is really trying to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember there was a discussion on the main meta site or on Stack Overflow (I don't remember which, or when) about the latter case being a recurring problem, where the questioner would ask a question to solve a problem tangential to the real issue that needed addressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt this exact problem occurs often here on Worldbuilding, but the idea is the same. Challenging a question can help both the questioner and the answerers get a better grasp of the premise and, in return, improve the question. And that's what it's all really about: improving the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may be pretty lenient and easygoing as a community, but we don't want our forum overrun with subpar questions/answers. We can close questions as unclear, but that's the extreme end. If we feel that we can add clarity to a question by challenging its premise -- and the question is already feasibly answerable -- then, by all means, point out the flaws in the premise and wait for feedback before voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question can be perceived as a final solution, the community basically saying, &quot;We don't want that here.&quot; I've noticed that a lot of questions don't get reopened once closed. If we can get questioners to improve their answers without hitting them on the head with the hammer of rebuttal, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T12:07:41.090" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T12:07:41.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2414" CreationDate="2015-08-07T08:59:34.560" Score="13" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I had a porn dream, which I wanted to put into a story. And then suddenly, instead enjoying porn/erotica aspects of the idea, I got myself into worldbuilding mode and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21985/world-where-gender-roles-are-swapped&quot;&gt;asked a question about the porn world itself&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First question got generally well received, but two downvotes (knowing this site) tells me, that I am pushing some buttons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I realised it after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22034/international-politics-of-gender-swapped-world&quot;&gt;asking second question&lt;/a&gt; about the world, which has zero votes thanks to one downvote and one upvote. So, I am definitely pushing some buttons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: &lt;strong&gt;How to ask questions about sexuality and worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several more ideas, all mainly suitable for porn/erotica worlds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alien race which enjoys sex. How would their society look like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sex as money. Can this work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, that in second case of my question, I could be pushing buttons maybe also because I had religious claim which was not so true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, my editor self tells me, that both questions are in-scope of Worldbuilding, if we talk strictly about the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is: I dont like &quot;pushing the buttons&quot; but still I would like to ask more sex(uality) related questions. How should I proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T16:37:25.110" Title="How to approach worldbuilding ideas about gender and sexuality?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2015-08-07T12:34:09.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I see the problem. A brief glance at those links shows that they have received reasoned answers.  I also don't see why people with pushed buttons shouldn't raise their objections. A debate could ensue in chat perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you preface your ideas with the premise of erotica then it comes down to &lt;em&gt;caveat lector&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally am not interested in erotic fiction &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; so I would simply not answer your questions or comment on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem is with subjects that are taboo and I think you have to be sensitive to that. It is the old business about culture clash.  I wouldn't normally draw a cartoon of someone's prophet just to annoy them but I might (and sometimes do) make an oblique reference to the illogicality of religions in general.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in the final analysis you must make up your own mind. I get the impression that you are not entirely sure in yourself and that you want us to bolster your point of view.  I'm not prepared to do that but I go along with the famous quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the&#xA;  death your right to say it” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attributed to Voltaire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note - Sometimes I have to catch myself. I'm not always oblique enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T12:34:09.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2015-08-07T13:17:11.193" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things like sexuality and religion have been fought over for a long time. You're pretty well off if all you're worried about is 'pushing buttons'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, maybe the people who get offended aren't the kinds of people we want on this site. This is supposed to be a place for professionals, people who can take an objective look at a problem and then solve it using logic, science, and hard factual evidence. If they downvote your questions for no reason other than &quot;eww, sex is gross&quot;, then I don't see how keeping them happy on this site benefits the overall purpose of Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I would suggest that you simply take the time to make sure your questions are well-thought-out and on-topic. Take the same care as you expect from your answerers. And if you don't want to push buttons, keep as close to the point as possible, and don't stray into unneccessarily graphic depictions of your world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I browse this site mainly at work, I haven't gotten around to reading your questions, but I'm confident you're holding up your end of the deal. If you're willing to bear the ignomity of a few downvotes here and there, then I think we'd all be better off for it. Maybe you could even suggest a sexual tag for the fortnightly tag challenge, that might be interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:17:11.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2015-08-07T16:37:25.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topics you've chosen aren't a problem at all - you're free to ask questions related to said topics. However, note that questions regarding these topics tend to err on the side of &quot;too broad&quot;, &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;, and &quot;idea generation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, your first question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;What needs to happen through a history to produce an alternate Earth where gender roles are in total opposite to ours, while keeping all biology the same? (Women giving birth is the main example)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, that reads as both too broad, opinion based, and idea generation. There's no way to say which answer that answers this question is the &quot;best&quot;, and there are an infinite list of possibilities of events that could have happened through history to cause this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;How would international politics look in gender swapped world?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - Again, both too broad, opinion based, and off topic. There are infinite possibilities for how the politics would look like (too broad + idea generation), and it's opinion based because you can't prove which one is the best, other than your own judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's currently phrased, I suspect that your two unasked questions will also suffer from the same symptoms as your two asked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T16:37:25.110" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-08T01:06:13.083" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel pretty stupid asking this but what is the challenge? Is it just to submit a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that, when the deadline has passed, the questions are shown in numerical order but I can't for the life of me see what criterion is used for ordering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone enlighten me please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T22:55:29.133" Title="Fortnightly challenge - what is the actual challenge?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2419" CreationDate="2015-08-08T01:18:22.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really a challenge since the goal is too increase the activity on the website by promoting certain topics. Wolrdbuilding SE is over 300 days old and half of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; question were asked during the 14 days of the &quot;challenge&quot;. Since, it doubled the number of questions for that tag, I would call it a success. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are usually show in order with the oldest first or the newest first (it depend on the person writing the message). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also used to write every single answer as well because the goal is to give good quality content not just to produce unanswered questions. We stopped doing it because we have an average of 5 answers by question and it takes a lot of time to enter them all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T01:18:22.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-08T22:07:38.500" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a competitive soul. I'm interested in there being a winner for the Fortnightly challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ha! you exclaim, chasly would say that wouldn't he? He has a very successful question running at the moment!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem that I want it for that reason. That's true but it isn't my primary motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I entered into the challenge because I assumed it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a competition. I like competitions even if I don't win them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we be shown a score for the top three questions. It could be in terms of views, or answers, or total up-votes on question and answers (my personal favourite), or it could be some other measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise it is a lot of work to extract the statistics and I don't want to be unreasonable. I'm not asking for the whole thing to be exhaustively analysed and typed out, just the top three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T22:25:50.020" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T20:52:07.153" Title="Fortnightly challenge - Feature request - make it a competition" Tags="|feature-request|challenge|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2419" CreationDate="2015-08-08T22:55:29.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The challenge is simply to post a post in that tag. That can be a question or an answer to a question in the tag. Its aim is to increase activity in that tag, which has been fairly successful so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the challenge posts are now automatically generated using &lt;a href=&quot;http://jenkinsstuff.bl.ee/challenge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this generator&lt;/a&gt;. Being the author of said generator, I can tell you that the numbering is simply a product of how the posts are returned from the API. I don't think there's an order to that, though it may be by date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T22:55:29.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2421" CreationDate="2015-08-09T06:28:19.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've wondered about the stats of the fortnightly challenges myself.  I'd be very curious to see them, whatever they may be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There wouldn't be any rewards obviously, other than reputation gained from questions/answers.  No badges either because that requires code changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T06:28:19.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2421" CreationDate="2015-08-09T09:45:41.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the need, but if we did do this I'd suggest just ranking by total upvotes-downvotes on all questions (maybe on answers too). This encourages quality over quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T09:45:41.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2426" CreationDate="2015-08-09T10:05:09.810" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I convince/persuade/implore/etc those volunteer policemen and policewomen of this site for clemency on this question titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22204/can-centuar-walk-down-stairs?&quot;&gt;Can centuar walk down stairs?&lt;/a&gt; I shall invoke the right to bribe... just kidding but seriously upwards of 150 reputations what says you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T10:40:17.640" Title="Appeal to reopen a recently closed question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2425" CreationDate="2015-08-09T10:40:17.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked question is currently on hold as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Begging, bribing, etc. isn't going to make the question any more clear. (In fact, neither is posting on it on Meta.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you should follow the advice in the &quot;put on hold&quot; box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;put on hold as unclear what you're asking by Aify, JDługosz, Green, SJuan76, o.m. 1 hour ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need.&lt;/strong&gt; As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, &lt;strong&gt;please edit the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally when voting to close, it would be courteous to also add one or more comments pointing out what the problem/s with the question is/are (questions that get put on hold without any comments actually show up in the moderator flag queue). However, two things about your question stand out to me like a sore thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question title needs to match (and summarize) the question body. As it stands, the question title seems to be about one thing (whether centaurs can walk down stairs), and the question body seems to be about another (the reason for inventing stairs). With so little to go on, that can certainly justify closing as unclear. A few sentences is &lt;em&gt;very rarely&lt;/em&gt; enough to ask a question that is specific enough that specific answers can be given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I fail to see the worldbuilding component in your question; it looks more like the beginnings of a rant or a flamebait, intended more to provoke discussion than to seek specific answers. That would be reason to close as primarily opinion-based, or possibly as simply &quot;not about worldbuilding&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, these two points need fixing before the question can be eligible for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T10:40:17.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T19:38:57.083" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recent meta posts have brought up the idea that results for the topic challenges should show some stats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since many of our challenge posts are now &lt;a href=&quot;http://jenkinsstuff.bl.ee/challenge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;automatically generated&lt;/a&gt;, and since I'm the author of that generator, I need to know what to include in the posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, two questions for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What stats would you like to see included in the results posts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should the results be sorted by any of these stats?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://api.stackexchange.com/docs&quot;&gt;API docs&lt;/a&gt;, if you're so minded, to see what kind of data I can actually get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T14:29:57.137" Title="What kind of stats would you like to see from challenges?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:16:33.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to see something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(question title) (total score of Q + As) (number of answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe sort by the total score.  This gives us a very rough measure of community response -- it's a rough measure of how &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; responded to it.  This is distinct from other possibly-interesting data like view counts, which are broader.  Everybody who follows a link from a tweet or HNQ or the like contributes to the views, but only people with accounts (and at least 15 rep) can actually vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:16:33.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T23:30:22.770" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;This community is great for getting thoughtful and accurate answers about world building. If you need anything explained from intergalactic teleportation to magic-based agriculture, you can find it here. However, I find myself craving the ability hear the thoughts and ideas of other worldbuilders. In this community it is not considered productive to simply share our worlds with one another. I was wondering if anybody would like to share some tips on where worldbuilders can discuss their creative experience, not through facts and research. Any help would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7454" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T02:53:32.977" Title="How do we share our worlds with one another?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2429" CreationDate="2015-08-09T23:55:01.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem as I see it is that Stack Exchange just isn't set up for discussion. The format doesn't support it. Even here (and despite the 'discussion' tag)  I don't know whether to discuss by posting an answer or by making a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you discovered &lt;strong&gt;chat&lt;/strong&gt; yet?  Actually I'm not entirely sure how to use it myself but I presume you can contact a person by name and invite them to talk about a mutual interest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I've only reached chat when sent there automatically from a discussion that was going on too long in comments. Annoyingly I've just tried to search for it and can't find how to access it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T23:55:01.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2015-08-10T00:11:57.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am one of those people who uses this community as an end in itself. Not necessarily to win points but that features as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My world building is very much contained within my questions. I enjoy exploring a scenario and getting feedback on it. Once that is done I have no intention of writing a story, building a game world or anything so ambitious. In my mind, I have created, lived in and explored a world for a few hours in convivial company and that suffices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm attracted to the humorous subjects. I mean, if you like Terry Pratchett for example, why wouldn't you be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To personalise it, I recently submitted the following question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22173/is-there-any-reason-centaurs-cant-fit-their-own-horseshoes&quot;&gt;Is there any reason centaurs can't fit their own horseshoes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did so because it amused me - I'll never take it any further. Yet anyone who does want to populate a world with centaurs would do well to consider such things. I believe I've done those people a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question betrays more than nit-picking. I think there is an element of thought-police about it.  Who cares? It's not like the SE is going to run out of memory just yet.  Questions have their moment then disappear into obscurity. They do no harm to anyone unless they are truly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T00:11:57.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2429" CreationDate="2015-08-10T02:53:32.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best place within Stack Exchange to chat about this is...chat.  While the main site has stricter rules about what's on-topic and productive to ask about -- because the main site is not a discussion forum -- chat is all &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; discussion.  Anybody with at least 20 reputation can use chat.  I recommend starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;main Worldbuilding room&lt;/a&gt;, but if people want to set up a separate room to focus on specific types of discussion that can be done too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have also been efforts to start a collaborative world-development project (using Git) and a blog; I'll leave it to the organizers of those projects to say more about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T02:53:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-10T09:26:27.197" Score="-2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange just isn't set up for discussions. The format doesn't support them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raised this point in an answer here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2429/how-do-we-share-our-worlds-with-one-another&quot;&gt;How do we share our worlds with one another&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of Michael Kjörling's very useful reply, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note the tag wiki for the [discussion] tag on Meta: &quot;The question&#xA;  you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a&#xA;  particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.&quot;&#xA;  That's a very different type of &quot;discussion&quot; compared to the&#xA;  discussions that happen in &quot;conventional&quot; online discussion forums. –&#xA;  Michael Kjörling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that, if the purpose of the tag is to solicit opinion rather than initiate discussion, we should make that explicit and change the name of the tag accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change the 'discussion' tag to 'opinion' and maybe have tags for 'consensus' and 'best practice' if these are considered sufficiently distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T11:23:47.967" Title="Proposal to change name of 'discussion' tag to 'opinion'" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2015-08-10T10:06:33.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be a feature request for the entire Stack Exchange site so it's unlikely to happen. There's no reason you can't create an &quot;opinion&quot; tag, but that's not really what the Q&amp;amp;A parts of the site are for. Discussion should go into the chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to add:&#xA;I'm not saying that &quot;opinions&quot; would be a bad name for the tag to have. I'm just saying it's no better than &quot;discussion&quot; and no better is not sufficient reason to change something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T11:17:32.080" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T11:17:32.080" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2015-08-10T10:40:43.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a meaningless discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Stack Exchange is not set up for discussions, but it can (and has been) be bent to that use on meta sites. The idea is that each interested person puts forward their point of view as an answer, there's a (limited) amount of discussion in comments or in chat, but ultimately it's the votes from the community that decide which point of view holds sway. If the voting and comments on the answers influence the poster and they can then update their answer (and hence their position) by adding more information, emphasising certain aspects etc. If they ultimately decide that they've changed their mind they can delete their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While discussions are there to solicit opinions, that doesn't mean that the tag needs to be changed. We are discussing things, we are not &quot;opinioning&quot; things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3400" LastEditorUserId="3400" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T11:23:47.967" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T11:23:47.967" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2015-08-10T14:29:57.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how useful this would be to anyone else, but I would like to know the impact the challenge had on that tag. For instance, if you could grab something as simple as how many questions used the tag before the challenge, and compare it to the number of questions asked during the challenge. And, if you can do that, it's probably not too hard to compare vote counts or average number of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But like I said, I don't know if anyone other than me would care about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T14:29:57.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2421" CreationDate="2015-08-10T20:52:07.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to declaring a winner based on &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; questions, I propose that we also have a winner for &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; questions. Because a lot of the time, the answer is much more useful than the question. This could be judged based on votes, as with the questions. Pretty much just whoever gets the most upvotes for answers to questions with the challenge tag wins. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, this would give people more options for participating in the challenge. If you can't think of a good question, maybe you can think of a good answer, and that's just as useful, and something for which you deserve credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T20:52:07.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T02:03:31.337" Score="5" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;. My question is, how does one determine which tag to use, since they both weakly imply each other as far as the world itself is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have a good idea about what the difference is supposed to be, but I thought it would be good to have a question asking for the difference for those that don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T07:40:43.823" Title="What is the difference between a science-based question and a science-fiction question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|science|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2439" CreationDate="2015-08-11T07:29:38.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the tag and read the text above the questions (and click read more) the tag wiki will answer your question. I've copied them here for reference. Putting only &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; on a question may mean that some answers are more suitable for soft-scifi, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; says that answers must be based on real science (or extraptolations from that). It is important to note that science fiction isn't always based on science. For instance star-trek, an iconic sci-fi show, can actually be classified as fantasy in space. None of it is rooted in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/how-can-i-weaponize-ftl-travel&quot;&gt;your question on weaponising FTL&lt;/a&gt; is not an appropriate candidate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; as time travel contradicts the laws of physics as we know them and you seem to want to allow that based on your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; goes one step further than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; (and you don't need both) and specifies that only existing science can be used to answer the question (and you must cite references, show equations etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used on questions relating to settings in science-fiction. This tag merely denotes the world's setting, and answerers should take this into account when coming up with answers: answers to science-fiction questions are also required to have the elements of science fiction in them that the question has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with this tag should be answered as far as possible based on known scientific fact or reasonable extrapolations from that. For example, we do not currently have the material science required to build a space elevator, but we can discuss the potential risks, consequences and benefits of building one based on known scientific facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When discussing future technology it is harder to know where to draw the line, but answers should still be rooted in what we know of the universe and be compatible with the current state of scientific knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most answers on Worldbuilding are expected to be based in logic and, to some degree, science by default, so even questions without this tag may receive scientific answers. However, use of this tag indicates that the asker wants specifically science based answers; answers based in magic or pseudo-science on this question are not answers and may be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T07:40:43.823" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T14:26:48.933" Score="8" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a question today that had been closed today because of poor writing (too broad, not clear, etc) but the underlying idea was an interesting one. I'm pretty sure I could write a question to the same idea but in such a way that it won't be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, writing a new question and posting it essentially &quot;over top&quot; the closed question is just rude. I don't want the idea to go to waste but rubbing someone's poor writing skills in their face isn't appropriate either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T14:58:03.620" Title="Borrowing ideas from poorly asked questions" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2441" CreationDate="2015-08-12T16:15:13.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A closed question doesn't have to be closed forever. You can try your best to edit it into shape instead, or you can wait a week or two before posting it. If you think you can edit the question without changing OP's intent, then do so. If you can't, then the reason for waiting is so that they have a chance to fix their own question first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="6453" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T14:58:03.620" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T14:58:03.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2445" CreationDate="2015-08-13T01:19:48.190" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been scanning through the question feed here from time to time, because some of the titles (and in some cases, even the descriptions) of questions are very amusing when taken out of context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21484/if-everyone-had-to-wear-a-box-over-their-head-how-would-society-differ&quot;&gt;If everyone had to wear a box on their head, how would society differ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21826/can-i-grow-a-banana-that-will-produce-mushroom-cloud&quot;&gt;Can I grow a banana that will produce a mushroom cloud?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm curious can I grow a banana which is rich in heavier unstable elements so that I can harvest &lt;strong&gt;and threaten my neighbor&lt;/strong&gt;? (A single banana must be able produce fission reaction.)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20961/how-would-having-a-spherical-carapace-benefit-an-animal&quot;&gt;How would having a spherical carapace benefit an animal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This question is inspired by a bowling ball&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21271/personal-fart-power-is-it-viable&quot;&gt;Personal fart power - is it viable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20860/how-to-best-upgrade-your-towel-for-military-combat&quot;&gt;How to best upgrade your towel for military combat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22151/is-it-possible-to-rain-dinosaurs&quot;&gt;Is it possible to rain dinosaurs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22181/which-will-survive-better-a-duck-sized-horse-or-a-horse-sized-duck-what-about&quot;&gt;Which will survive better - a horse-sized duck or a duck-sized horse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21078/what-are-the-limitations-of-apple-based-weapons-and-construction&quot;&gt;What are the limitations of apple-based weapons and construction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22069/how-would-medieval-battles-look-like-if-human-have-fully-prehensile-tail&quot;&gt;What would medieval battles look like if humans had prehensile tails?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21920/how-would-wars-be-fought-if-everyone-had-a-nuclear-hand-grenade&quot;&gt;How would wars be fought if everyone had a nuclear hand grenade?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21966/how-can-i-vaporize-my-enemies&quot;&gt;How can I vaporize my enemies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21966/how-can-i-vaporize-my-enemies&quot;&gt;How can I liquefy my enemies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get the idea.  If someone saw these question titles without knowing what the site is about, they would probably assume that everyone here is a mad scientist bent on destroying the world and/or universe.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is this:  Every so often, review the new questions, and create a meta post in which people can vote for the funniest title.  The award would presumably be limited to bragging rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, it would be necessary to avoid people asking questions exclusively for the purpose of winning the contest, but that shouldn't be much of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T22:01:06.187" Title="Idea for an unofficial contest" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T08:05:06.590" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vote buttons are dead pictures and don't react, though the middle &quot;show votes&quot; still works.  The flag and up buttons on comments are similarly affected, though they show up after touching the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just me? Is this a known issue? How do I make it work again?&#xA;I'm running Firefox on Android, with &quot;desktop&quot; site (not the &quot;mobile&quot; view, which I don't like because the text is way too small)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: regular (non-beta) Firefox developed the same issue a few days ago. I suspect a bug in FF or irregularly in the site that bothers mobile FF, and the issue I saw in beta just moved to production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I uninstalled Firefox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T14:38:41.163" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T17:32:35.230" Title="Can't vote any more" Tags="|support|bug|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2443" CreationDate="2015-08-13T08:30:44.477" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, while it's a fun idea I don't think it's needed and I don't think we should encourage people to make jokey titles rather than ones describing the question. We've already had that problem a few times where people trying to be funny put titles that are utterly meaningless when it comes to knowing what the actual question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T08:30:44.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2015-08-13T08:37:51.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you've tried just reloading the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you tried logging out, clearing your cache and cookies, restarting your browser, and then logging in again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may reset whatever has got into a funny state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T08:37:51.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T17:58:33.213" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I have been lead to believe, cross posting is a no-no on stack exchange.  However, I have seen at least one question now where there was a rather substantial consensus that the OP could benefit greatly from moving the question to Writers SE for additional opinions, but felt there was a very valid reason to keep the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have any direction on cross posting when the community seems to feel it is a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22445/3202&quot;&gt;This question on Myth&lt;/a&gt; is the best example I was thinking of.  There are aspects of this that are &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; WorldBuilding.  However, Writers SE could provide a valuable alternative angle to the same topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T18:11:20.943" Title="Cross Posting Recommendations" Tags="|discussion|cross-site|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2447" CreationDate="2015-08-13T18:50:06.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that the &lt;em&gt;exact same&lt;/em&gt; question can't be valid for both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this somehow is the case, the question is probably in a grey area and not explicitly in the domain of both sites at the same time. But in any case, such a question would be a rather rare occurrence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More likely there may be facets of the question which should be separated and then posted individually to each site with links between them. Perhaps the preamble information is the same or very similar, but the ultimate question would be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing the most likely candidate questions would be those about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;. Those questions have the highest probability for a crossover with Writing, Role-Playing Games, or Super User. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;our help section&lt;/a&gt; spells out some topics that could be belong under the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;, but actually belong on those other sites and not ours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the Writers or Role-playing    Games Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to Worldbuilding (consider the    Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit, given your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22445/3202&quot;&gt;specific example&lt;/a&gt; you may be referring to. While the question &quot;How do I create myths?&quot; would be valid here it wouldn't be on the Writing SE. Where &quot;How do I portray the myths I've created?&quot; would be appropriate there and not here. So, reposting the same question without changing the focus isn't appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T19:21:59.630" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2447" CreationDate="2015-08-14T09:55:21.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem for cross posting a question. But I agree you have to &lt;strong&gt;shift the focus of the question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of my own cross-posted question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12205/how-do-pilots-stay-disciplined-and-use-checklists-even-after-they-have-become-r&quot;&gt;https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12205/how-do-pilots-stay-disciplined-and-use-checklists-even-after-they-have-become-r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7967/how-do-astronauts-overcome-the-boredom-from-the-daily-routine&quot;&gt;https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7967/how-do-astronauts-overcome-the-boredom-from-the-daily-routine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:01.373" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T18:11:20.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2015-08-17T13:54:04.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 43 questions and 210 answers, for an average of 4.88 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21814/wooden-sticks-are-the-only-allowed-weapons-in-a-technological-society-how-far&quot;&gt;Wooden sticks are the only allowed weapons in a technological society - how far would these weapons have progressed by now?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;209 total votes, 33 question votes, 20 answers, 8116 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21908/how-can-i-liquefy-my-enemies&quot;&gt;How can I liquefy my enemies?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;177 total votes, 29 question votes, 17 answers, 7614 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21921/mosquito-assassin-what-is-the-most-deadly-substance-that-can-be-injected-into-s&quot;&gt;Mosquito Assassin: What is the most deadly substance that can be injected into someone?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;160 total votes, 30 question votes, 12 answers, 6631 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21951/how-to-make-a-2d-image-which-kills-people-who-see-it&quot;&gt;How to make a 2D image which kills people who see it?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;107 total votes, 22 question votes, 20 answers, 6531 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22563/perfect-weapon-for-two-elbow-creature&quot;&gt;Perfect weapon for two-elbow creature&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3254/darth-hunterix&quot;&gt;Darth Hunterix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;95 total votes, 23 question votes, 12 answers, 3400 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22124/what-would-be-the-ideal-melee-weapon-for-someone-with-superhuman-strength&quot;&gt;What would be the ideal melee weapon for someone with superhuman strength?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/262/vsz&quot;&gt;vsz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;54 total votes, 22 question votes, 10 answers, 1616 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21826/can-i-grow-a-banana-that-will-produce-mushroom-cloud&quot;&gt;Can I grow a banana that will produce mushroom cloud?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;53 total votes, 12 question votes, 5 answers, 3810 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22347/lightning-rifle&quot;&gt;Lightning Rifle&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/366/culyx&quot;&gt;Culyx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;51 total votes, 14 question votes, 3 answers, 2017 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22426/lets-weaponize-frogs&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s Weaponize Frogs&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10778/whyenbe&quot;&gt;WhyEnBe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;37 total votes, 11 question votes, 6 answers, 2050 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21750/can-i-create-an-unstoppable-disease&quot;&gt;Can I create an unstoppable disease?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;36 total votes, 11 question votes, 5 answers, 2218 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22312/handheld-weapons-plasma-vs-laser&quot;&gt;Handheld weapons, plasma vs. laser&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11564/llama-guy&quot;&gt;Llama_guy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;34 total votes, 9 question votes, 3 answers, 1819 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22573/how-will-my-nerdy-mars-astronauts-do-battle-between-their-colonies&quot;&gt;How will my nerdy Mars astronauts do battle between their colonies?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;32 total votes, 10 question votes, 5 answers, 607 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21763/chemical-propellant-free-automatic-weapons&quot;&gt;Chemical propellant free automatic weapons&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;30 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 934 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21822/how-to-make-a-sound-gun&quot;&gt;How to make a Sound Gun&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;28 total votes, 8 question votes, 4 answers, 1074 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21892/hypnosis-as-a-weapon-in-the-war-against-terror-how-could-it-be-delivered&quot;&gt;Hypnosis as a weapon in the war against terror. How could it be delivered?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;19 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 608 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22660/scorpions-as-living-handgrenades&quot;&gt;Scorpions as living handgrenades&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/95/pavel-v&quot;&gt;Pavel V.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 182 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22006/how-can-a-dragon-utilize-antimatter-in-combat&quot;&gt;How can a dragon utilize antimatter in combat?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 217 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21840/we-finally-have-a-weapon-to-win-the-war-against-the-aliens-we-dont-know-how-to&quot;&gt;We finally have a weapon to win the war against the aliens. We don&amp;#39;t know how to deploy it&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453/aify&quot;&gt;Aify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 2 question votes, 5 answers, 663 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21786/a-weapon-to-control-the-population&quot;&gt;A Weapon To Control The Population&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 125 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22069/what-would-medieval-battles-look-like-if-humans-had-fully-prehensile-tails&quot;&gt;What would medieval battles look like if humans had fully prehensile tails?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 5 answers, 329 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22641/what-about-electronic-warfare&quot;&gt;What about electronic warfare?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 77 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22176/process-for-creating-cultural-weapons&quot;&gt;Process for creating cultural weapons&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 111 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21966/how-can-i-vaporize-my-enemies&quot;&gt;How can I vaporize my enemies?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 124 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22214/question-about-non-lethal-weapon-for-large-number-of-people&quot;&gt;Question about non-lethal weapon for large number of people&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11414/satori-wita&quot;&gt;Satori Wita&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 8 answers, 166 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22082/personal-issue-handheld-3d-printer-during-wartime&quot;&gt;Personal issue handheld 3D printer during wartime&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 108 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22392/using-depleted-uranium-weapons-in-medieval-battle&quot;&gt;Using depleted uranium weapons in medieval battle&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 114 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22310/how-can-i-create-sonic-boom-using-personalized-katana&quot;&gt;How can I create sonic boom using personalized katana?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 102 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22320/an-assault-rifle-that-can-fire-homing-rounds&quot;&gt;An assault rifle that can fire homing rounds?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 1 question votes, 5 answers, 123 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21926/is-it-possible-to-create-a-bio-weapon-that-targets-a-certain-group-of-people-wit&quot;&gt;Is it possible to create a bio-weapon that targets a certain group of people without risk of spreading beyond them?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 84 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22222/how-ineffective-would-a-tesla-coil-be-as-a-static-defence-weapon&quot;&gt;How (in)effective would a Tesla coil be as a static defence weapon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7076/philip-rowlands&quot;&gt;Philip Rowlands&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 157 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22071/is-it-possible-to-engineer-a-sperm-whale-into-sub-killer&quot;&gt;Is it possible to engineer a sperm whale into a submarine killer?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 100 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22388/is-freeze-ray-possible&quot;&gt;Is freeze ray possible?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 100 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21811/air-robots-for-law-enforcement-trial-period&quot;&gt;Air robots for law enforcement trial period&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 67 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22434/energy-based-super-weapons-in-space-realistically-possible&quot;&gt;energy based super weapons in space, realistically possible?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11608/nonafel&quot;&gt;Nonafel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 204 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22150/what-kind-of-technology-is-required-to-part-water&quot;&gt;What kind of technology is required to part water?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 0 question votes, 4 answers, 219 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21927/can-we-arm-rfid&quot;&gt;Can we arm RFID?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, -1 question votes, 3 answers, 108 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22577/weaponizing-the-reverse-assembly-or-partial-disintegration-of-matter&quot;&gt;Weaponizing the reverse assembly or partial disintegration of matter&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11608/nonafel&quot;&gt;Nonafel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 77 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21773/would-the-gravitational-waves-a-binary-black-hole-system-make-a-feasible-weapon&quot;&gt;Would the gravitational waves a binary black hole system make a feasible weapon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 94 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22151/is-it-possible-to-rain-dinosaurs&quot;&gt;Is it possible to rain dinosaurs?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 59 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22323/how-does-the-medieval-militants-use-mirror-as-weapon&quot;&gt;How does the medieval militants use mirror as weapon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 77 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21883/project-hide-of-leviathan&quot;&gt;Project Hide of Leviathan&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 43 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22168/how-can-medieval-knights-hunt-down-a-spinosaurus-using-nothing-but-lance&quot;&gt;How can medieval knights hunt down a spinosaurus using nothing but lance?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 1 question votes, 1 answers, 68 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22164/general-purpose-machine-gun-ring-planet&quot;&gt;General Purpose Machine Gun Ring Planet&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 38 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:50:14.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-17T14:05:25.993" Score="9" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now begins our fourteenth topic challenge!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please keep in mind that asking hard science questions requires enough information to allow people to answer with, math, science or peer reviewed studies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 17 Aug - 31 Aug&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a new tag and we need it to get some visibility. We also need to find out how good we are at using it properly. Now is the time to do that :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:50:50.030" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #14: Hard Science" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2456" CreationDate="2015-08-17T14:57:18.120" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22204/preventing-centaurs-from-invading-china&quot;&gt;&quot;Preventing centaurs from invading China&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; to imply that the OP seeks for a solution which does not require having guards at a gate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also makes sense, otherwise it would completely pointless to ask the question in the first place, since the answer would be… have a gate with guards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer besides one takes this assumption. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/22759/222&quot;&gt;The other one&lt;/a&gt; is basically a &quot;well, obviously use guards&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/22700/222&quot;&gt;The only answer with more than 1 upvote&lt;/a&gt; opens up as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The easiest solution would be manually guarded gates. Open them in&#xA;  normal use, close them when centaurs are approaching. They don't&#xA;  interfere with normal usage so the people of the north can use&#xA;  carriages or ride horses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But your question seems to strive for a technical solution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just edit the question then, to make this explicit, since apparently it is to most, but it is not to someone? The alternative is to downvote and close it as &quot;unclear&quot;, but I'd rather edit and upvote, since I believe this would improve the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T16:27:52.633" Title="Should I edit this question, from another user?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2455" CreationDate="2015-08-17T16:27:52.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, you shouldn't edit your assumption into the question.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are curious about what the OP intended then comment on the question and &lt;em&gt;ask them what they intended&lt;/em&gt;. If they confirm your suspicion, then ask them to update the question, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1881/3202&quot;&gt;not in a way that invalidates existing answers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find the question unclear at all. It may be that the asker simply didn't think of that possibility, not that they wanted it excluded from possible answers. Many questions really do have an obvious answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're outside the OP's box, it's why they are asking us to look inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T16:27:52.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-08-17T18:55:03.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lithosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lithosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lithosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new look at spheres. Atmo-, bio- and exo- have gotten enough attention.&#xA;From the ground up^Wdown: How would a planet with an interesting layering have to be designed? Bring plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unobtainium&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11689" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T18:55:03.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-08-17T19:05:09.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unobtainium&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unobtainium&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unobtainium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Kirk saw push coming to shove, Scotty would &lt;strong&gt;modulate the phaser frequency&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;If Luke had to act hogwartsy, he'd &lt;strong&gt;use the force&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot device for world builders: &lt;strong&gt;unobtainium&lt;/strong&gt;, the right stuff with that property you need but chemists haven't found to this day and which makes physicists throw fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11689" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T19:05:09.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2460" CreationDate="2015-08-18T12:32:11.427" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new to stack exchange, and asked this question yeaterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22805/funding-government-by-only-printing-more-money/22856#22856&quot;&gt;Can government be funded by only printing more money and not taxing anyone?&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;With the great number of answers I received, am I supposed to pick and accept one of them?  Different answers bring different points into the question, so I feel it is too hard to just pick one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11090" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T13:08:36.880" Title="Deciding on answer for question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-08-18T13:14:56.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2459" CreationDate="2015-08-18T13:08:36.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's any number of strategies you can use to pick an answer.  Two are listed below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Highest Votes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just reward whoever got the most upvotes on their answer.  Usually the upvotes indicate that the answer is most useful to whoever looked at your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most Useful&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what you plan to use the answer for, you might pick a question that offers a particularly interesting insight or perspective that you find useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T13:08:36.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2441" CreationDate="2015-08-18T13:37:36.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would strongly advise to try to either convince the OP to improve his/her question or edit it yourself. If it's only a matter of grammar, do it right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A duplicate is a duplicate. I, for one, would not want to set a precedent. If, however, the OP isn't responsive after a reasonable effort, and no &quot;simple&quot; edit can fix the OP, then do ask your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T13:42:53.563" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T13:42:53.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T20:46:45.237" Score="-1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/67266/please-help-review-and-suggest-my-element-diagram&quot;&gt;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/67266/please-help-review-and-suggest-my-element-diagram&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was obviously off-topic for RPG SE, but it was migrated there anyway… they rejected and locked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T02:38:38.463" Title="What's the problem with that question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2015-08-18T21:11:23.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged the question for migration because I felt it was better suited for RPG SE. Specifically it was a question of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;RPG rules or mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asking for suggestions or improvements for the &quot;15 elements system which may be used in my game and/or card game&quot;. That's not a Worldbuilding question in my opinion. It's also why it was closed, it's idea generation or brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a mod, so I didn't actually migrate it, for that you'll need to ask the mod that moved it. I would assume they didn't blindly follow my suggestion, so must have agreed with the move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T21:11:23.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2443" CreationDate="2015-08-18T22:01:06.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Tim said, and I'd like to add this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; possible to do this with the topic challenges. I make no claims that it's the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; mechanism, but still. If, for a topic challenge, you post a question with a funny yet catchy and descriptive title, people are going to want to look at it. The more people look at it, the more votes and answers you get, and you may get it to HNQ - granting &lt;em&gt;even more&lt;/em&gt; views and votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic challenge results posts (in an answer on each challenge post) are now given stats and ordered by the total votes on the question and answers. If you've got a good title, you've got a good start in getting to the top of that list. It's not an &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; competition, but it's nice to see your name at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T22:01:06.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-08-19T02:13:02.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of all the animals on earth, humans appear to spend the most time thinking about it and doing it.  Aside from bonobos, who go to even greater extremes than us, there are practically no other animals which seem as obsessed with sex as humans.  Just look at the internet; when you have to have special filters to keep sexually-related results off the results list, you know that it's a big topic.  Despite that degree of importance, as of the moment I write this, this tag has only two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that humans are so obsessed with sex, there are plenty of ways that sexuality can affect a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T02:13:02.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2463" CreationDate="2015-08-19T02:38:38.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For starter, the question is off-topic for Worldbuilding SE since it was asking for ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the suggestion to move the question to RPG SE, the idea would not have crossed my mind &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; I took the decision. I'm not a user there, so I don't know what is on topic. A quick glance at some questions gave me the idea that it was more appropriate there that here and the comments about the question (on the question page and in chat) also indicated this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not sure if the question would be left open or closed once migrated but I was sure that RPG SE was a better fit for the question. I misjudged and we are back to square one. The question can still be edited and reopened in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T02:38:38.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-20T19:52:12.233" Score="4" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technological-development?sort=unanswered&amp;amp;pageSize=15&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, I see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yRQlU.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blue words should really be &quot;recently active technological-development feed&quot;, and the text should wrap. A similar effect shows up &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science?sort=unanswered&amp;amp;pageSize=15&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ia2jr.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wrapping is done properly elsewhere on Stack Exchange, e.g. on Physics (using &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics?sort=unanswered&amp;amp;pageSize=15&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; as an example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KNmL8.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternate fix, I suggest moving the start of the feed link to the far left, as indicated by the big red arrow in the first image. No wrapping needed, thanks to the tag character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Internet Explorer on Windows 7, if that helps. But I'm not sure why the wrapping would be fine on one site and not fine on another, if it's a browser issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T20:00:46.663" Title="There is a wrapping bug for tag feed links" Tags="|bug|formatting|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-20T20:34:39.197" Score="10" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a lot of worlds described as our world, but with one change, like &quot;our world, only gold is replaced with lead,&quot; or &quot;like our world, only there's mutants that can see the future.&quot;  The questions usually start from that and end up at a few broad sweeping questions like &quot;how would religion change?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble with these questions because there are &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; many answers.  It's not like changing one thing locks the entire reset of the world in stone.  It also usually sidesteps the issue that, when you change something, everything changes a little bit to adapt to it.  I fear we are doing a disservice by answering because it seems like the individual is electing to World Build themselves in a corner by trying to draw straight causal lines where they don't actually need to be.  In many cases, the answer should be &quot;whatever you want, as an author,&quot; because, even if you pick a particular a priori answer to their question, its easy enough to build a world to match that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first instinct is to identify them as what they are: idea generation.  There is too little information to really constrain the question. However, this is the WorldBuilding forum.  Trying to provide good helpful answers to questions that are right on the edge of idea generation seems to be a worthy endeavor.  Given how often questions are framed in that form, it makes sense to try to help those questioners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to try to form a consensus on how to deal with these questions, to shape them as a community?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T16:25:30.787" Title="How to approach &quot;the same as our world but with change X&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2471" CreationDate="2015-08-20T20:53:28.007" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I see it as a kind of filler they're using to set the scene.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree there are a lot of them that don't make sense if the part about &quot;just like our world&quot; is taken literally. Otherwise the answer is obvious, &quot;it's just like our world except that thing you said was different&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when I read them and it's something like &quot;just like our world, except sentient beings can see six seconds into the future&quot; then I take that to mean, anything that massive change &lt;em&gt;doesn't touch&lt;/em&gt; is the same. It's a shorthand way of saying there isn't anything else fundamentally different in that universe. There are a whole lot of things that are &lt;em&gt;not the same as our world&lt;/em&gt;, but they all stem from the difference described. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should certainly mention if the difference is a branch or a trunk. For instance it may be alternate history where things went differently, a branch from this universe. A trunk would have had that change since the start of time, like slow gravity or some other fundamental change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the ultimate question is still idea generation then we should treat it as such, whatever the setup for the question was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T20:53:28.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2471" CreationDate="2015-08-20T23:53:52.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing that you do is vote to close them as too broad or possibly opinion based, since we don't want people to answer them while they are in this state. (If anyone has answered them, consider downvoting any answers if the answer is also highly opinion based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was about to say that we make sure they are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-world&lt;/a&gt; as appropriate. Why do we have two alternate tag anyway? But back to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for improving the post, this could be one of a few things, either the poster thinks that the question is cool and is asking it just to see the answers, which is not technically supported by the site, they want to create a realistic world and this is different (which seems weird, just to change something without having an idea of the outcome), or they are suffering from the XY problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our second action, after issuing a close vote should be to comment and ask &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What are you trying to achieve?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ramble:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did an analysis a while ago that I never managed to finish (because I found exceptions to the framework I was using). These questions fall under the category of &quot;What happens next?&quot; which is &lt;em&gt;almost always&lt;/em&gt; a candidate for closure. The theory postulated that most questions have A, B and C. A was the starting point, B was the influence or change and C was the outcome. A?C questions are the best fit, or as I called them &quot;How do I get from here to there?&quot;. If the question is ?BC, or &quot;Where did I come from?&quot; this is also generally fine, since A tends to have some defining characteristics already. AB? is where we have the problem, and any question asking for C needs to have a very clearly defined A and B, as well as a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; narrow focus for C, in order for any answer to be meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T15:06:31.347" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T15:06:31.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-21T13:39:08.937" Score="-2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;People here would post a lot of questions, actually i would say ideas. They include, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A lot of science based Fiction kind of situations and solutions(implying answer for the question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideas of unbelievable weapons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About aliens and other planets&#xA;etc....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so I was wondering that, If any of the hollywood director, any director for that matter, out there is watching this site for his upcoming science based fiction movie ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of the scientist is watching this questions and started researching towards it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be happening? I thought that because people here are intelligent enough to post such wonderful ideas so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8322" OwnerDisplayName="Achyuth Laggani" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T19:39:53.880" Title="Any director or scientist watching our community questions for their upcoming project ideas?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2015-08-21T14:50:58.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any such person would be in an &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; legal position when it comes to multi-million-dollar hollywood projects. Have you checked the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copyright terms&lt;/a&gt; of this site? Hollywood investors want exclusive rights to their material, and CC prevents that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T14:50:58.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2015-08-21T14:59:03.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just like to point out that during the two weeks of this challenge, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/300932/asked-closed-reopened-per-week#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;, we had the highest(105) and third highest(97) number of questions asked in a week in the entire history of the site. We also had the top two weeks of closed questions(38 and 23). I have a feeling the challenge had a hand in these numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T14:59:03.457" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2015-08-21T19:39:53.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most writers will tell you that &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; are the easy part; it's all the time, sweat, late nights, discarded drafts, and caffeine that go into the final work that &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; take all the time and effort.  Further, while we are a clever and creative bunch, we're not the only people with interesting ideas; if you pursue writing/film-making you probably already have way more than you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;stealing&quot; ideas isn't too attractive, and even if somebody did, your idea would become a tiny fraction of the overall work.  Sure it'd be nice for them to acknowledge you if that happens, but you wouldn't really be in a position to force the issue.  You can't copyright ideas, only concrete implementations of those ideas -- books, scripts, songs, videos, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, one of the things I love about this site is the open sharing.  We're here to help each other &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the people who find our posts later.  If somebody takes an idea I threw out and builds something awesome from it, that's a &lt;em&gt;win&lt;/em&gt; to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T19:39:53.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2480" CreationDate="2015-08-21T21:47:19.827" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I like up-votes, but it seems strange to me that probably less than three seconds after I asked my most recent question I got a +1 vote on it:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23118/2138&quot;&gt;With current technology, what would be the best way to store energy for future generations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't nearly enough time to actually look at the question, and in addition it only had 1 view. (&lt;em&gt;so far I've always considered myself to be that first view&lt;/em&gt;), and I refreshed the page shortly after I got that vote, and it was still 1 view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just seems weird to me, I was wondering if maybe there was an up-vote bot, or how one would figure out how I got this vote so quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:41:39.587" Title="An immediate upvote on my question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2478" CreationDate="2015-08-21T22:05:02.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a bunch of question campers around here who just watch the RSS field of new questions and pounce to read each one.  If they like it, they upvoted.  I, ahem, might maybe possibly be one of those campers occasionally.  I don't think I was your instant up-vote though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:05:02.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2478" CreationDate="2015-08-21T22:07:31.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;That vote was me.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By a strange coincidence, I saw the title of the question and immediately upvoted. I know, it's a stupid thing to do in general, because one should always read the whole post before voting, but I saw the title and though, &amp;quot;This is the post I've been waiting to answer today.&amp;quot; I don't normally do this - in fact, this is probably the first time I've done so. I'll be more patient in voting next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three-seconds-after-posting timing was simply a coincidence. I have no idea how I pulled it off. I'm not a bot (I think).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:41:39.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2478" CreationDate="2015-08-21T22:08:09.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering the four well thought out answers you received in under 30 minutes on that question it seems reasonable to infer that activity on the site is quite high right now, and someone upvoted based on a skim of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:08:09.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-08-21T22:48:36.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would power generation be affected by gravity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ie: all other things being equal, because the definition of Watt depends on gravity does all the formulas related to power generation depends on gravity? (pressure in boilers does, so turbines generates much less power in low gravity, and so on...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: How is it related to worldbuilding? Simple. If power generation is unaffected by gravity, but the amount of work required decrease, let's mine all the low-gravity asteroids first to get more bang out of our buck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2287" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:48:36.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-22T10:30:37.957" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly I must make it clear that I think the fortnightly challenge is a great idea and I wholeheartedly support it. It is the idea of voting for the next topic that I am questioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we are exhaustively working our way through the tags as seems to be the case, we could choose the next in any order. For example alphabetically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we choose them by popularity then as we proceed, the remaining topics will become less and less popular until we are left with the 'dregs'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we really want to choose tags in popularity order, there is a very simple way. The &lt;strong&gt;popular tags&lt;/strong&gt; page already arranges them in order of popularity - as chosen by the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Repeated voting means that people whose vote fails once simply have to keep voting until it succeeds. It would be simpler to have a one-off vote and proceed in order of votes. Then do the same again when the first list has been exhausted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that all tags get a turn, we could simply choose them in alphabetical order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If popularity is the method, then do away with the vote and choose them from the sorted list that is already available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to encourage use of little-used tags then start at the end of the current sorted list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the actual intended purpose of repeated voting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the most efficient means of achieving that purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="10759" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T11:03:12.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:21:57.377" Title="What is the intended purpose of voting for the next fortnightly-challenge topic? Isn't there a more efficient method?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2015-08-22T14:46:30.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the concern. We will run out of topics eventually but it will take a lot of time. We have maybe a year of challenges just by using the proposed list, and some tags have not been proposed yet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choosing by alphabetical order might be worst than by popularity because we will need to go over each tags even the strange/too specific and unpopular ones. Unless we have a way to filter the tags (example: the tags must have at least 10 questions). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe, but the challenges are still popular as of now. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not just about popularity. Some of the most popular tags are meta tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; and would not make for a great challenge. We vote for tags that we like and that we want to see promoted. Remember, we doubled the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; question during the contest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand. We can only vote once for each answer, we cannot vote repeatedly.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T14:54:29.020" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T14:54:29.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-22T16:49:46.490" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eventually, we might run out of topics for the normal challenge. We still have at least 1 year with the current proposals, other proposals can be added and we could also recycle the old ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are called challenge but are not really challenging. I had an idea the other day while browsing the challenge suggestions. I saw several topic with an equal number of votes. I thought that maybe we should could do a challenge with 2 or multiple tags applied together.  Questions featured in this challenge will need to cover both topics. Just as an example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; would be a good combination: Can a supernatural ability be explained with science? It could lead to some very interesting or bizarre combinations and make things more challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This challenge could be set to take part separately form the usual challenge or in alternation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; but it does not have to about specifically about science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T16:59:43.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:27:52.800" Title="Proposal for harder/more specific challenges" Tags="|discussion|questions|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2486" CreationDate="2015-08-22T20:13:23.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of the tag challenge is not that it's challenging for one person to write one question. It's a challenge to the community as a whole to work together to raise the profile and activity in that tag. As a mark of success most tags that have been in a challenge have now either passed or are close to reaching the 100 question point which makes them eligible for giving out tag badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the benefit in making the challenge harder for individuals to contribute to, that just takes it away from the community and makes it more of an elitist pursuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T22:01:58.127" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T22:01:58.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2015-08-23T05:21:57.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few points to supplement Vincent's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic challenges so far have revolved around tags, but they needn't.  (And there was one that was based on a &lt;em&gt;pair&lt;/em&gt; of tags, which could happen again.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting on a proposal means &quot;I think this has merit&quot;.  It's reasonable to assume that the tags/topics that people have voted on correspond to the ones our community finds most interesting, regardless of how many questions have been asked already on those themes.  Topic challenges are driven by users being interested in those topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're still a young site with some less-than-useful tags.  Our tag set isn't static and could probably do with some cleanup.  Walking the list when the list is in flux seems challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:21:57.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2486" CreationDate="2015-08-23T05:27:52.800" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Tim's answer about the challenges being for the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you want to add a separate challenge that's harder for the individual users, one way to do that might be to run a concurrent challenge using one of the tags in the current topic challenge (and another that you choose).  If the current challenge is, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt;, go ahead and propose a concurrent challenge for, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;.  You can get a pretty good idea of what the next few challenges will be from the current votes, so you can work up a few additional challenges and be ready to go when the time comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:27:52.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2530" CreationDate="2015-08-24T01:13:08.477" Score="18" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding will be one year old on September 16, 2015.  We've got a great community here and &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of great content, so if any bunch of people could come up with fun ideas for how to celebrate our first birthday, it'd be this community. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T07:54:43.330" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T07:54:43.330" Title="How shall we celebrate our birthday?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-24T03:07:13.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking we could post something on the blog or maybe a post on meta: Best questions for a specific topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, &lt;strong&gt;best questions: Dictator edition&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not meant to be taken too seriously but do you think that the formulation could be offensive for some people? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T02:26:18.210" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T02:26:18.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2494" CreationDate="2015-08-24T08:32:31.540" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question to discuss: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22836/what-would-happen-if-affirmative-action-activists-had-free-reign&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22836/what-would-happen-if-affirmative-action-activists-had-free-reign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now got deleted, thanks to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think its bad question. I think it is troll question. Thats why I did click &quot;Delete&quot; on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got told, that next 9 votes are remaining to delete such question. OK, agree, lets have broader decision about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once I confirmed the action, this question appears deleted to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I forget that with high points, I get awarded by high privileges. So, now what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T09:23:23.653" Title="Accidentally deleted low ranked question. Now what?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2493" CreationDate="2015-08-24T09:23:23.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On our site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;voting to delete questions requires 2,000 rep&lt;/a&gt;. It takes a minimum of three delete votes to delete a question, and more if the question is well received. We currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/327/week/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;85 users that have 2,000 rep or higher&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22836/what-would-happen-if-affirmative-action-activists-had-free-reign&quot;&gt;the question being discussed&lt;/a&gt; was voted +0/-9, I think it's safe to say that the question was not well received according to the criteria used for increasing the number of delete votes required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't directly related to your having high reputation on the site. The only relevant privilege level would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;trusted user&lt;/a&gt; at 4,000 rep, but that only allows you to vote to delete poor questions sooner; it doesn't affect the &lt;em&gt;weight&lt;/em&gt; of your vote. One vote is still one vote, regardless of reputation, and the same number of delete votes would still be required to delete a question. The only exception to this in the Stack Exchange system is that diamond moderators have binding votes, which take effect immediately, for reasons &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1926/29&quot;&gt;we have discussed elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, but no Worldbuilding moderator was involved in the closure or deletion of this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't know&lt;/strong&gt; why the system would have indicated that an additional nine delete votes were needed, and I can see no reason why it should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reasonable possibility I can see is that you somehow mistook the net post vote count for delete votes required, but I can't really see how that would have happened. The two should be quite distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that out of the people who voted to close (five community members) and those who voted to delete (three community members), you were the only one to vote &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; to close and delete. So the question ended up being deleted by the votes of seven different community members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you see something like this happening again&lt;/strong&gt; or suspect that it might, I would encourage you to make screenshots and/or write down exactly what you do, and post that as a bug report. For the time being, I'm inclined to chalk this down to &quot;one of those things that just happen&quot; at the intersection between imperfect human beings and imperfect technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And before you think otherwise: I'm not perfect either. Despite wielding a diamond.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T09:23:23.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-24T16:10:25.940" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a &quot;share a glimpse into your world&quot; week?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've asked questions here it's probably because you have a project -- maybe a full-on novel/game/script/etc you're in the midst of, or maybe a more early-stage idea.  Either way, would people be willing to share a (non-contract-voiding, non-copyright-constrained) bit of what you're doing?  A drabble (very short writing), a scene, a short story, a setting description, a sketch or painting... something that shows a little bit of what you're doing with your worlds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people like this we'll figure out how to do it in a way that's consistent with site structure.  I'm envisioning a meta post with links to material elsewhere, so you can host (and control) it yourself.  If you don't post it directly on SE then it's not subject to the CC-BY-SA license, which has been relevant over on Writers with some &quot;share your work&quot; projects.  But I'm open to other ideas for structuring it, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been a lot of discussion in comments (thanks!) about implementation.  If we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2504/28&quot;&gt;could get a BlogOverflow blog&lt;/a&gt; that'd be great, but SE might not allow it (see the linked post).  If not, and given that the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; might vary widely -- short text pieces, hundred-page reference documents, drawings, videos, things I haven't thought of -- I think people should post their material wherever it makes sense and we'll make a nice meta post with links to all of it.  That way it can be on your blog, in a Google doc, a GitHub repository, a Vimeo link... whatever works best for you.  The downside is that it's harder for users here to provide feedback (since it won't be posted here), so I'd encourage you to do it somewhere that allows people to comment, but that's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Followup:&lt;/strong&gt; Post links to your work on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2559/28&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.  This is a staging area, not the final collection; someone will later take all this and make a blog post and/or meta post to tie it all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T13:09:06.220" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-24T16:11:40.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could hand out a Birthday Contributor Badge. (Can we even make custom badges? Maybe a prerogative of diamond moderators.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gold badge --&gt; Contributed for 9 or more months during the inaugural year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silver Badge --&gt; Contributed for 6 or more months during the inaugural year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bronze Badge --&gt; Contributed for 3 or more months during the inaugural year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T16:11:40.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-24T17:14:22.197" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if we made our own world (or part of a world) together?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could do a top-down design of whatever it is by having people propose and vote on different ideas, starting at the '5000 ft. view'.  Then, we would dig deeper and more specific with more polls or questions.  People could even propose and vote on what we will design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could even have different people in charge of different sections of the design, so it doesn't burden one person too much.  (Maybe if your idea gets voted for, you get put in charge of makings polls and managing everything for the next level of the design?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10187" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T17:14:22.197" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2500" CreationDate="2015-08-24T19:01:55.583" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2494/3202&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; Michael Kjörling told us that a question that is not well received requires three votes to be deleted. That answer was to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2493/3202&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about why the question the OP voted to delete was immediately deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the vote count remaining for deleting questions is not being reported correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tested by voting to delete the two lowest ranked questions on the site. They are both closed and one has a delete vote already while the other does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18065/3202&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt; with one delete vote already:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c7S2d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c7S2d.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/511/3202&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt; with zero delete votes already:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TLmXC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TLmXC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions show that 25 votes are remaining. I would presume that the &quot;25 remaining&quot; is how many more close votes are required before the question is deleted. In these cases, I don't see how that can be the correct value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else get the correct count on either of these questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm running Chrome (Version 44.0.2403.157 m) on Windows 7 64-bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T13:40:37.573" Title="Votes remaining for deleting a question is (probably) wrong" Tags="|bug|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2498" CreationDate="2015-08-24T19:14:08.633" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the 25 vote remaining are the number of deletion votes you can cast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;How many times can I vote to delete per day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At 2,000 reputation, you can cast 5 delete votes per day. An&#xA;  additional vote is granted per 1000 reputation, to a maximum of 30&#xA;  delete votes per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited: I quoted the wrong site. We are still in beta and the reputation required is lower : 2000 instead of 10 000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T13:40:37.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-24T22:34:23.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Let's celebrate memorable questions and answers!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303045/10-million-questions-lets-share-some-stories-that-the-number-doesnt-convey&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow did something similar to this&lt;/a&gt;: highlighting some of the more memorable (though not necessarily most viewed or most upvoted) posts we've seen throughout the past year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who want to participate could post short blurbs as answers to a meta post that describe a post that they felt was clever/funny/brilliant/extremely helpful/awesome, especially if that post didn't get many views or votes (though the point is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to garner the post more of those, just more accolades).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think folks would get swag for participating, but I shouldn't speak for Stack Exchange. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T22:34:23.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-08-24T22:56:03.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Superheroes and the law: a series of questions around the impact of humans with superhuman powers on the different kinds of laws, and vice versa&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a series of questions, similar to other series that would otherwise grow too big, like the one on magical destruction (split in 4 parts). Each question would focus on a different major part of law (which ones I still need to figure out, but the first one would be penal code, the second one would be immigration and travel, so stuff involving passports and visas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a regular human gains superhuman powers through whatever method. These powers would basically make him similar to Superman: no real limits, noone can stop him, but he's benevolent for the most part, meaning he won't choose to do traditionally evil acts (like negatively impacting innocent people) unless he's misguided in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions I'm thinking to ask: Would a superhero affect what laws are created on local, national and international level? And to what extent would a superhero feel obliged to follow the law, considering he tries to be benevolent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T22:56:03.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T23:13:33.180" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2490/how-shall-we-celebrate-our-birthday&quot;&gt;How shall we celebrate our birthday?&lt;/a&gt;, I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2490/how-shall-we-celebrate-our-birthday&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; idea for us post our stories. I was wondering how this would when it hit me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has already been discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/worldbuilding-blog-phase-1-and-2-raising-the-idea-and-definition&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but it did say &quot;his thread will likely not lead directly to us having our own blog&quot; due to blogs being on hold. I think the birthday would be an excellent time for making the blog!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposal. We make a blog for our birthday. Blog posts would be &lt;em&gt;worlds&lt;/em&gt;, specific settings that could be used in stories. Other elements of the story (characters, plot, conflict, etc...) would be minimal or nonexistient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could get a ton of blog posts this way. We would make sure only top quality stuff goes on it, but we would be unlikely to run out of ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the blog posts could function as &lt;em&gt;templates&lt;/em&gt; for worlds used on the main site. For example, if you have a world about a galactic empire, a person on main could link to the blog post to start their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Is a World-Building World blog a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T23:13:33.180" Title="We should have a World Building World blog!" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-08-25T17:41:53.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2507" CreationDate="2015-08-25T02:54:00.927" Score="15" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange put per-site blogs on hold a while back because, among other things, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252690/what-privilege-should-30k-users-get/252711#comment825295_252711&quot;&gt;WordPress was causing too many problems for them&lt;/a&gt;.  (They also had &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244467/162102&quot;&gt;concerns about usage&lt;/a&gt;.)  Now that SE has &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/07/the-new-stack-exchange-blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;migrated its own blog off of WordPress&lt;/a&gt;, can we reopen the question of per-site blogs?  Specifically, may we have a blog for &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have an active community.  Holy cow do we have an active community; this is the most-active beta I've ever participated on.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/487/28&quot;&gt;Some members of this community want to share worlds (or parts of worlds).  Some want to share the &lt;em&gt;products&lt;/em&gt; of those worlds -- stories, setting descriptions, and so on.  And some want to write about the &lt;em&gt;process of building all that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;  This is all great stuff to have on a blog, stuff that doesn't work on a Q&amp;amp;A site.  I understand that the activity level on the per-site blogs was disappointing and every site thinks it's special, but I'm still going to say it: &lt;em&gt;I think the Worldbuilding community has the interest to make it happen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2085/28&quot;&gt;an attempt to set up an external blog&lt;/a&gt;.  I can't speak for anybody else, but the reasons &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; haven't participated there are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;WordPress.  I need a whole new set of &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt; -- tools, account, workflow, RSS feed (to read) -- to participate there.  I'm already here; demonstrably, going &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is a hurdle for me.  I think this is true of others too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't feel like it's part of the site.  This is through &lt;em&gt;absolutely no fault&lt;/em&gt; of the fine folks who set it up.  It's just that it's, of necessity, separate (and separately-owned), and to me that doesn't feel inclusive even though it's intended to be.  It's &lt;em&gt;the best tool available for the job right now, but...&lt;/em&gt;  it doesn't have the SE name, URL, visual identity, or -- most importantly IMO -- integration with this site.  You can't click on a &quot;blog&quot; link here and go there, and new posts don't get announced in the Community Bulletin and the weekly newsletter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For SE: Would Stack Exchange be willing to try per-site blogs again, using the new platform, with Worldbuilding as a beta tester?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For us: Are y'all interested in building an SE-integrated blog?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T22:46:56.283" Title="Can we have an SE blog for this site?" Tags="|feature-request|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="487" CreationDate="2015-08-25T18:06:50.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think specific worlds and settings would make for good blog posts. Plot and characters would be optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T18:06:50.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2504" CreationDate="2015-08-25T18:14:47.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say that an SE hosted blog is the way to go! Like you said, it really makes it part of the site. More importantly perhaps, it is under the control of the community when it is on there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote for yes to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T18:14:47.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2504" CreationDate="2015-08-25T22:46:56.283" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If per-site blogs are ever coming back, it won't be for a long time. We love the enthusiasm, and we still think new ongoing blogs would be super cool, but site blogs are just not anywhere near the front of the line for resources right now. It'll be 6-8 &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;... but it definitely isn't &quot;weeks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/help-center/publications-d23372baede0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Medium publications&lt;/a&gt; as a solution to this problem before on other sites because I personally think they are a good fit and I'd &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; to see a community take them for a test drive. A Medium publication wouldn't be in the SE ecosystem, but then again, Blog Overflow &lt;em&gt;barely&lt;/em&gt; is anyway. But publications work pretty well as a conceptual replacement: anyone can write a post, and a publication editor can invite them to contribute it to the &quot;collection&quot;. You can keep collecting them on an ongoing basis, or just put together a compendium of 12 posts (or however many) to be a resource to point to going forward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're flexible, and you can even brand them if you want them to, but getting them set up requires no intervention whatsoever on SE's part. It's something you could easily use as a pilot project and come back in a year and say &quot;See? You wouldn't give us a blog, so we made something awesome without you instead!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T22:46:56.283" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2531" CreationDate="2015-08-26T15:04:35.680" Score="6" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of moving our old blog over to a new platform (Medium) as part of our birthday celebrations. In doing so, I'm reconsidering the name, which is currently The Magrathean Forges. That's an OK name, but it could certainly be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone got any other suggestions for names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T06:51:05.820" Title="Medium Blog - Naming" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2510" CreationDate="2015-08-26T15:16:22.290" Score="11" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of moving our current blog over to a new platform (&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/help-center/publications-d23372baede0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Medium&lt;/a&gt;), as part of our birthday celebrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's face it. Our old blog didn't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; get off the ground. Part of the reason for that was because of the entry barrier to the platform (Wordpress), requiring Yet Another Login Credential. Part of the reason was that we didn't have enough people committed to writing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with a fresh platform let's have a fresh start. I'm now looking for two sets of people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We need people who are willing to write for us. It doesn't have to be much - maybe an article a month if we have enough people - but this is the essential bit of a successful blog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;OK, more like &lt;em&gt;curators&lt;/em&gt;. These people - called &quot;editors&quot; by Medium - are people who are willing to help &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; out with administration. I can't keep a whole blog running by myself! I don't entirely know what this role entails, but it won't be a massive commitment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a community wiki answer below. If you're interested, please add yourself to the relevant section, along with any other detail you want to be known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-09-08T20:53:41.960" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T20:02:40.033" Title="Medium Blog - Contribut(ors|ions)" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2509" CreationDate="2015-08-26T15:16:22.290" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I'm interested in...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Writing/contributing, either on a one-time basis or more frequently:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Monica Cellio  (heavier on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2061/28&quot;&gt;writing/presentation/etc&lt;/a&gt; and probably some fiction; probably some &quot;what I learned from the WB community&quot; stuff; light on science)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ HDE 226868 (mostly harder science articles, but also focused on applying these principles to a world, not simply working on calculations; an astronomy/physics focus, if needed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ James ...I wanted to support last time and didn't get around to it, hopefully Ill get more motivated this time around.  I like the process discussions and tips and tricks for making a logically consistent world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Samuel (How to make science and engineering plausible (anti-scoff tips), the mysteries (and non-mysteries) of electricity, how to do research like a grad student, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Vulcronos - Fantasy and building consistant worlds with magic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ knave - Conlangs for those like myself with no linguistic background. This would probably be a multi-part series, covering grammar, coming up with vocabulary, and how to make it less like English, and using my own conlang as an example. Also willing to share my world if that's something we'll be using it for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Serban Tanasa. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/524/worldbuilding-blog-specific-article-ideas/2081#2081&quot;&gt;Here are a few ideas&lt;/a&gt;, feel free to grab some of them if they haven't been covered yet... Might post ongoing short stories if I get around to polishing a bit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ JDługosz (John Długosz). I have an interest in having Hard SF and not-stupid-SyFy-move SF &quot;track&quot; increased knowledge of science &lt;em&gt;and of the readers&lt;/em&gt;.  In fact, expanding on that with explaination and examples would be a perfect first post.  I'm an experienced (non-fiction) writer and technical editor/contributing editor from the bygone days of dead-tree curated article collections.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Mikey (Mikey Lynch) - I am interested in City Building, as I was quite literally building entire cities in Abu Dhabi, and have studied the history (even pre-medieval), economics, law, etc. of settlement and urban planning in my masters.  Would I be restricted to that 'tag,' though?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ PyRulez - Hard SciFi mostly, maybe some magic, probably only occasionally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Tim B - Will write something occasionally, probably not regularly though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Thales Pereira - People-oriented city building, fantasy realms and large-scale world building. Focus on smart use of magic interwined with technology. I'm also inclined to write articles in the sense of &quot;How Stuff Work&quot;, trying to explain the physiology and habits of fantastic creatures in a &quot;encyclopedic&quot; way. I'll post once in a while.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Editing/curating:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ Monica Cellio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;✓ bilbo_pingouin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Samuel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JDługosz (John Długosz)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We've got enough editors for now. Feel free to add yourself here, but we may not need any new blood for a while.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ticks indicate a user has been added to the blog's contributor list.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-10-09T20:02:40.033" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T20:02:40.033" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-08-26T15:23:08.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-26T15:25:56.947" Score="6" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a dicussion in WB chat, we decided to perform a tag cleanup/restructuring on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-in-medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-in-medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-in-medieval&lt;/a&gt; tag. (@MonicaCellio said it was okay) It was originally added in early April 2015 but has not been used since then.  This tag was removed in an effort to clean up the tag space and remove precedent for the proliferation of tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-in-rome&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-in-rome&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-in-rome&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-in-babylon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-in-babylon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-in-babylon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the changes were just rollbacks but a few took editing to remove the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T11:30:40.517" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T11:30:40.517" Title="Deprecation of the modern-in-medieval tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2471" CreationDate="2015-08-26T16:25:30.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on how the long form question is written, I think they should either be told to focus on the one aspect that they really want answered, or if the question is already focused then let them stand as is.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Someone may get inspired and come up with an answer, even if others don't see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user can't, or won't, focus the question, then a close vote is appropriate, but shouldn't be the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the possible exception of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags, most answers on here are going to be somewhat opinion based, since my answer should be different than Samuel's answer based on background knowledge, interpretation of the question and personal opinion on strengths and weaknesses of different options.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If Samuel's answer is the same as my own, then I should just up vote his, and possibly add a comment if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-world&lt;/a&gt; tags if they can't be used for questions where the majority of stuff is the same, but not everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T16:25:30.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-26T18:28:56.713" Score="-1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have one &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2085/the-blog-up-and-waiting-for-writing&quot;&gt;unofficial blog on WordPress&lt;/a&gt;. Another unofficial blog on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2509/medium-blog-contributorsions&quot;&gt;something called medium&lt;/a&gt; is in the works. When we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/worldbuilding-blog-phase-1-and-2-raising-the-idea-and-definition&quot;&gt;first started thinking about a blog, Blog Overflow was down&lt;/a&gt; (the official Stack Exchange blog thingy.) Its &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&quot;&gt;back up&lt;/a&gt; and seems to be doing good now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, where does the community &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; their blog hosted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:32:53.397" Title="What platform do we want our blog on?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2513" CreationDate="2015-08-26T18:28:56.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say the best place for a blog is the official platform: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&lt;/a&gt;. This is so it would show up with the other community blogs, and it would be more visible. Users also wouldn't have to sign up or use any other websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/115/stack-exchange-community-blogs&quot;&gt;It also comes with a chat room.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why we would've wanted to roll our own blog when blog overflow was down, but blog overflow is back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:28:56.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2513" CreationDate="2015-08-26T18:32:53.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blog Overflow is not available to us.  The site is up but they aren't letting communities create blogs there.  That was the whole point of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2504/28&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; -- see the answer there from Abby, who works for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She suggested Medium as a good alternative to the SE-hosted blogs we can't have, and that's why we're pursuing that now.  I'm happy to take advantage of the research SE has already done on this, so while I'd never heard of Medium before this, I say let's go for it.  In addition to getting a blog that SE thinks is technically viable, we can provide feedback to SE for &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; sites who want to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:32:53.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2015-08-26T18:38:30.180" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;World Building Stack Exchange Community Blog&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunate that blog overflow is being taken down. To help make sure that this blog stays connected with this site, I think we should name it after this site. That also helps with search engines, since then the sites would be more likely to be connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:38:30.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2015-08-26T19:22:55.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clever names are fun, and one of my favorites since the first time we discussed this topic is &lt;em&gt;Daedalus' Workshop&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said there is a lot are a lot of positives to using something simple (as we chose to do with the chatroom) and go with &lt;em&gt;The world builders' blog&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Makes it abundantly obvious what the purpose/intent of the site is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T14:07:48.410" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T14:07:48.410" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2015-08-26T19:45:16.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to have it here for voting, ArtOfCode's original name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Magrathean Forges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T19:45:16.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T08:25:52.667" Score="10" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm going to be writing this type of post for the blog each month - &quot;The Best of Worldbuilding&quot;. It'll have a look at some questions and answers from the last month, and make a few awards of &quot;badges&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should those badges be? We can't actually award them on-site, because custom badges aren't a thing yet, but I'd like to sound out some categories. For each category, I'll award a gold, silver and bronze badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for 3-4 categories with creative names (like the badges on the site) and a description of what criteria the post has to match to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T22:55:13.070" Title="Medium Blog - Best of Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|blog|badges|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-27T08:58:13.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one idea of a badge: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;World Destroyer&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; - a question or an answer which aims on killing the most of people and/or destroying as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because, lets face it, we love building worlds. But sometimes, we love destroying them even more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T08:58:13.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-27T09:02:40.283" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badge Idea: &lt;strong&gt;Keyboard Coffee&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question/answer that surprised you or made you laugh so much you nearly sprayed your keyboard with your beverage of choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T09:02:40.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-27T09:05:50.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badge Idea: &lt;strong&gt;Clickbait&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a question title that when it made it onto the HNQ list people just had to click on it to find out what was going on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T09:05:50.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2526" CreationDate="2015-08-27T12:11:55.043" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question I asked has 3 close votes, what should I change about it before it's closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23485/cargo-of-a-supernatural-smuggler&quot;&gt;Cargo of a supernatural smuggler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is removing the &quot;Bonus question&quot; enough to prevent it from being closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not should I add other information about the settings or the question itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I'm not sure this is an appropriate use of the meta section, sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastEditorUserId="9601" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T12:26:43.520" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T12:33:36.200" Title="How to improve my question before it's closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-08-27T12:46:19.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-27T12:28:47.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;General idea: &lt;strong&gt;Apply only one badge at a time:&lt;/strong&gt; From first look, I kinda liked the Gold, Silver and Bronze badge idea. But, say, who was third best in clickbaiting in last 14 days? Who let you spill third biggest amount of coffee on your keyboard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assign just the &quot;badge&quot; itself and made it valid for certain period of time (week or 14 days)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T12:28:47.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2524" CreationDate="2015-08-27T12:30:36.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; for preparing and improving questions. This is to avoid a spread of posts accross meta for people who want feedback on their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just a note, if your question gets another VTC (voted to close), it will be placed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;on-hold&lt;/a&gt;. In that state it can still be edited, so it's not a race against time. If it is on-hold, any edit will appear as a request to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a specifics to your question, you have too many supernatural creatures to make your question answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T12:33:36.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-27T13:30:03.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things that make you go hmmm.&lt;/strong&gt; Answers that are surprisingly good but not in the expected way.  Giving an unique view to answering the question (and still being a good answer!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T13:45:22.860" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T13:45:22.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2529" CreationDate="2015-08-27T14:02:43.587" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put up this answer yesterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23463/is-it-a-foregone-conclusion-that-religion-will-always-be-a-product-of-developing/23468#23468&quot;&gt;Is it a foregone conclusion that religion will always be a product of developing a civilisation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question was then marked duplicate.  Would it be kosher to re-post that answer in the original, still open question? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/371/can-civilization-development-occur-completely-without-faith&quot;&gt;Can civilization development occur completely without faith?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just sad to see it go since I put a fair amount of time into the research/lookup.  Maybe delete the answer in the duplicate to avoid rep fishing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:21:19.187" Title="Re-posting an answer in a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2015-08-27T15:21:19.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer answers the other question, it's completely kosher to move it there.  (Move, not copy, as you said.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes duplicate questions are not &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates, so do review your answer against the other question and make sure it answers that question.  If the question was closed as a dupe then you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; need only minor changes (if any) to bring that about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T15:21:19.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-08-27T16:05:18.403" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relaunch the blog&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is a compendium of other answers.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To celebrate our first year, we will &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2509/28&quot;&gt;re-launch the blog&lt;/a&gt; and make several posts during the month of September to kick it off.  We'd like to see posts from &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of people.  The new blog site should make that a lot easier.  Please think about how you'd like to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topics/themes that have been suggested include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2501/28&quot;&gt;Memorable questions and answers (or groups of them)&lt;/a&gt; -- what really stood out for you this year?  Different people will have different favorites, and there's room for everybody.  Write up something about what you enjoyed and why, and maybe award some light-hearted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2520/28&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2495/28&quot;&gt;Glimpses into your worlds&lt;/a&gt; -- post something that uses your world, like a story or a game module or a single scene or a setting description.  Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/519/28&quot;&gt;case studies&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2497/28&quot;&gt;Share a world&lt;/a&gt; (or some portion thereof) -- great project for collaboration here.  This is related to the previous item, but the focus here is on the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;how it's being used&lt;/em&gt;.  Think of this as something you would give to an author or game developer to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/518/28&quot;&gt;The world-building process&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2061/28&quot;&gt;tips for deploying your world&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/527/28&quot;&gt;master classes&lt;/a&gt; (start a series in September) -- not the &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; but the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/23/28&quot;&gt;Software reviews&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/525/28&quot;&gt;Spotlight on our users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/524/28&quot;&gt;Any of these suggestions for specific articles -- or insert your idea here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Topics that are too open-ended, broad, or opinion-based to work on a Q&amp;amp;A site.  The blog is a great place to explore some of those ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see posts in September from lots of users, both one-offs (no ongoing commitment) and first posts in series.  Want to write a series of articles over the next year on map-making?  Designing ecosystems?  Zombies?  Time-travel?  Alien biology?  Now's a great time to start.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested, have ideas, contributions or feedback, or want to be added to the blog, drop into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;the blog chatroom&lt;/a&gt; and let us know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T01:55:56.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2015-08-27T16:36:36.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The temporary name I put in while we figure out another, for voting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T16:36:36.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T17:57:21.430" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposal for solicitation for entries for the WB blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding has been home to your questions and answers for a year now.  However, what we don't ever see are the results of these questions, the stories, art, and games that you create. Universe Factory, our blog, is a place to display your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are looking for artwork, videos, story snippets, world descriptions, in short whatever you've created as a result of your interaction with Worldbuilding SE, we would like to see. If you're interested in offering a series of posts, we especially would like to hear from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Info about copyright here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drop an answer below if you want to get involved; tell us what you'd like to do with a few details. This thread is not for topic &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt;; it's for telling us if you'd like to write something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T18:23:15.293" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T18:23:15.293" Title="Solicitation for blog posts" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-08-28T01:47:15.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-28T01:48:23.427" Score="6" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so a lot people would like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2495/8914&quot;&gt;&quot;share a glimpse into your world&quot; week&lt;/a&gt;. My question is, how should we implement this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thought that comes to mind is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2509/medium-blog-contributorsions&quot;&gt;blog we're planning&lt;/a&gt;. The only problem is that everyone would who contributed would have to become an official medium contributor, even if it's just a one-off thing. This wouldn't be too much of a problem. The best ones would probably be posted to the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, where should we have people post and write their stories. Should we write them directly on Medium, or prepare them somewhere else for to be more inclusive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T12:07:07.297" Title="How should we implement &quot;share a glimpse into your world&quot; week?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2533" CreationDate="2015-08-28T01:53:16.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion:  Those who want to post them on our blog should post them on our blog.  Those who want to post them elsewhere (like on their own blogs) and avoid signing up on Medium should do so.  And to bring it all together we should use meta to collect all the parts so we can write a &quot;round-up&quot; blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Psst&lt;/em&gt;: Creating an account on Medium is as easy as signing in with your Google, Facebook, or Twitter ID, same as here on Stack Exchange.  You don't need to create a separate login ID and password.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T01:53:16.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2533" CreationDate="2015-08-28T14:55:21.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could do it on the site (in meta).  Work it like the sandbox - a single question explaining the concept, with &quot;answers&quot; containing the shared content.  Update the question to have a list of links with short descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That keeps it on-site, it has familiar controls/editting and allows voting (for what that's worth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be insufficient exposure vs the blog option, I just thought I'd throw it out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T14:55:21.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-28T18:10:16.353" Score="-2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just created a new tag of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sapience&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sapience&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sapience&lt;/a&gt;. I noted a number of questions that asked about the evolution of sapient level creatures and felt that it would be nice to be able to tag these sort of questions with both evolution &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; sapience.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the tag to be more general then just evolution of sapience, to instead include both questions about sapience itself and to include questions about creatures that are sapient including things such as how does one set policies for deciding if an alien species is sapient, evolution of sapience, what would happen if a creature were uplifted to sapience artificially, what would happen if you had a species that included sapient and non-sapient members etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the tag is useful, but I don't really like the tag description I gave.  I was hoping someone could help me word-smith it slightly to make it better describe the general idea.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, due to the confusion between sentient and sapient I would want the tag to describe a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; brief description of what sapient is, something like &quot;human level intellect&quot;, to avoid confusion of those who don't know the word or often confuse it with sentience.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is appreciated :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T22:56:37.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T23:07:39.263" Title="Help defining the sapience tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2015-08-28T22:55:13.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to keep these searchable, all assume in the past 2 weeks/month/whatever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Up And Comer&lt;/strong&gt; - Most popular answer and/or question that's the first post by a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt; - most upvoted question that was eventually closed as Idea Generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Platinum Standard&lt;/strong&gt; - highest upvote/view ratio for a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dark Horse&lt;/strong&gt; - most upvoted question with &amp;lt;1k views (trying to exclude HNQ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Repapalooza&lt;/strong&gt; - question with the most combined upvotes, including upvotes to answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Back By Popular Demand&lt;/strong&gt; - question with the most recent views originally asked at least two months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some rough concepts, feel free to tweak.  Also let me know if this is too many and I can cull some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T22:55:13.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2536" CreationDate="2015-08-28T23:07:39.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about sapience or sapient creatures.  Includes human or above intelligence, or beings which possess (or will evolve) that level of intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T23:07:39.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-29T06:54:18.610" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parody is big part of writing and the parodies itself take place in a worlds. While we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, I am missing some tag which would tell everyone, that I am not searching for really realistic solutions, but for plausible, or even funny ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am proposing tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parody&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parody&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parody&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parody-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parody-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parody-based&lt;/a&gt; to clearly say what is the setup of the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; Proposed tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions which do not require exact scientific reasoning, but rather a fun explanation why such question could work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit2&lt;/strong&gt; Basically, what I am looking for is to give idea in how serious the answer should be. And best by having a tag for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="2071" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T20:16:25.890" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T11:05:34.147" Title="Tag for not-so realistic worlds" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2015-08-29T19:38:46.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might just be my opinion, but fun is, to some extend, subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then either you suggest some possible answer and wants to see if it is somewhat plausible. And then, the tone indicates where you stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you're asking for a typical idea generation and that would probably be closed out as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I'm not much of a fan of the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T19:38:46.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-30T19:46:28.903" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is based in part on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23718231#23718231&quot;&gt;a chat message&lt;/a&gt; I wrote on Thursday, which I'm now acting on (ignore the linked question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some&lt;/strong&gt; sites on Stack Exchange allow, in some form or another, resource recommendations, using one or more of the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online-resources&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online-resources&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;. . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag (and Stack Exchange also has &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/65287/hardware-recommendations&quot;&gt;Hardware Recommendations Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; may enter private beta soon), and we have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag, so recommending worldbuilding resources works on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. However, I'd like to take it a step further, and suggest that more resource recommendations be on topic, specifically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/book-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;book-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/website-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;website-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;website-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/site-for-online-custom-map-with-tags-or-labels&quot;&gt;Site for online custom map with tags or labels&lt;/a&gt; is really one of these, not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; question; the same goes for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3267/best-platform-for-collaborative-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Best platform for collaborative worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; as a catch-all for the rest, if there is anything that doesn't fit in the above two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; or [tag:worldbuilding resources]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I'm working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23708/what-is-a-good-book-for-developing-a-constructed-language&quot;&gt;a trial question&lt;/a&gt; to test the waters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have resource recommendation questions? If so, what should the limits be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant precedent question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23/are-software-recommendation-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are software recommendation questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/563/when-are-software-recommendation-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;When are software-recommendation questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt; is also relevant and based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4752/are-wikis-the-only-solution-for-creating-online-encyclopedias&quot;&gt;Are Wikis the only solution for creating online encyclopedias? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T14:23:16.760" Title="Do we want resource recommendation questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T06:35:22.793" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any need for having two different tags, which, IMHO, relate to the same thing? I don't have the required rep in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military-defense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military-defense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military-defense&lt;/a&gt; to suggest a synonym to the more general &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T07:50:16.287" Title="Do we need military-defense tag when we have warfare?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2543" CreationDate="2015-08-31T07:30:03.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone who is an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; should probably be able to provide good answers to questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military-defense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military-defense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military-defense&lt;/a&gt;. If party A exercises &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; against party B, then it stands to reason that party B will need to exercise &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military-defense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military-defense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military-defense&lt;/a&gt; unless party B is prepared to immediately and unconditionally surrender to party A (which, come to think of it, is also a defense strategy, though unlikely to work well in the long term). Hence, the two are merely opposite sides of the same coin, but one can reasonably expect people to look for one or the other depending on the focus of the particular question they are writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sounds to me like a good candidate for a tag synonym.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; see any need for an additional, different tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military-defense&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military-defense&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military-defense&lt;/a&gt; which is &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;, as we currently have. &lt;strong&gt;The two can probably be merged&lt;/strong&gt; (and, in fact, will need to be, if we want to establish the synonym).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T07:50:16.287" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T07:50:16.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:10:26.423" Score="7" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2542/29&quot;&gt;Do we want resource recommendation questions?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23/29&quot;&gt;Are software recommendation questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt; and to a lesser extent &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/563/29&quot;&gt;When are software-recommendation questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out elsewhere, we already &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2542/29&quot;&gt;have tags that are meant to be about various &quot;recommend me something&quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several other sites have specific standards for what they consider to be acceptable recommendation questions. See for example those of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/14091&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/q/336/1813&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that there is a fair consensus for us accepting questions on the form &quot;please recommend me an X to do Y&quot; (where X so far has primarily been software), we should have a set of standards for what makes such a question acceptable, and ideally what makes for a good answer to such a question. As far as I can tell, we have so far been rather non-specific in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should those standards be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please post separate answers discussing the questions and the answers respectively,&lt;/em&gt; as the standards for each are likely to be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:02.687" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T09:11:57.173" Title="What should our requirements on various &quot;recommend me something&quot; questions be?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2545" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:23:01.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Questions should be focused on a particular aspect of the WB process&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you recommend a book for worldbuilding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which software should I get to build my world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prefer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which book do you recommend to help me getting the right relation between the main religion and the political power in an European Renaissance setting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a software which can use fractal methods to help me draw the map of the continent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T08:31:15.793" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T08:31:15.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2545" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:30:17.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answers should be clear and specific, possibly adding link(s) to the resource in question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of a fixed resource (film, book, etc.) a small summary should be added, to give a chance to the OP to evaluate the relevance of the resource to her/him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In a book by Shakespeare, you'll find an example.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem: is the OP expected to read the complete work of Shakespeare to find an example which might not stretch more than a few pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prefer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Romeo &amp;amp; Juliet by Shakespeare (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1505259568&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amazon&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;), you'll find some material about the organisation of families in early Italian renaissance. For example, we learn that [...].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T09:11:57.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2613" CreationDate="2015-08-31T13:19:45.997" Score="8" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our fifteenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 31 August - 14 September&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/147.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our stack exchange is about building worlds. We have a lot of great questions with great ideas but it would be interesting to have tips or techniques to help us build better worlds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T18:31:10.643" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #15: Worldbuilding-Process" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-08-31T13:51:34.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; in combination with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; for those not comfortable with hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a more specific challenge and the goal is to see whether or not it's possible to explain the proprieties of a fictional creature with science. Sometimes a &quot;no, it's not possible&quot; is a perfectly valid answer and the question is not bad because of this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T13:51:34.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-08-31T15:27:19.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This world is a modern urban world where Fae are hidden, but living among humans.  Most Fae live in caverns underneath the city.  Their light (magic) serves as energy for plant growth and illumination of the cavern rooms.  The more Fae in a room the lighter it is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are waiting to return to their otherworld where they age so slowly they are almost immortal.  The more time they spend with humans, the faster they age.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main character is a woman abandoned by the Fae into the human world as a child. I want her to be found and re-enter the Fae world, but how has she managed to retain her light?  This is a magical world so there could be a spell or something, but I would like a natural element to be the thing that helps her retain her light.  Copper?  What are old fashioned light bulb filaments made from? Some sort of flint?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12186" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T15:27:19.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2454" CreationDate="2015-08-31T15:58:09.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 33 questions and 100 answers, for an average of 3.03 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22769/can-stars-exist-that-are-not-powered-by-nuclear-fusion&quot;&gt;Can stars that are not powered by nuclear fusion exist?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;93 total votes, 42 question votes, 11 answers, 4800 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23237/blind-spot-in-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;Blind spot in the Solar System&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;93 total votes, 17 question votes, 11 answers, 4272 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23313/stealth-in-space-how-realistic-is-it&quot;&gt;Stealth in Space: How realistic is it?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;86 total votes, 23 question votes, 11 answers, 3680 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23118/with-current-technology-what-would-be-the-best-way-to-store-energy-for-future-g&quot;&gt;With current technology, what would be the best way to store energy for future generations?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;59 total votes, 12 question votes, 10 answers, 1129 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22862/the-last-ride-of-the-magic-schoolbus-termination-of-the-ignorant&quot;&gt;The last ride of The Magic Schoolbus: Termination of the ignorant&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 10 question votes, 1 answers, 173 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23011/design-me-a-mars-drone&quot;&gt;Design me a Mars drone&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 10 question votes, 4 answers, 180 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23284/how-would-you-designate-targets-for-orbital-bombardment&quot;&gt;How would you designate targets for orbital bombardment?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 323 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23127/would-it-be-possible-to-use-the-earths-rotation-to-launch-spaceships-to-other-p&quot;&gt;Would it be possible to use the earth&amp;#39;s rotation to launch spaceships to other planets?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 224 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23235/the-babbage-probe&quot;&gt;The Babbage Probe&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/1989/scott-downey&quot;&gt;Scott Downey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 3 answers, 571 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23452/can-you-add-a-mini-moon-to-earth&quot;&gt;Can you add a mini moon to Earth?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 177 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23168/can-medieval-people-make-a-potato-gun&quot;&gt;Can medieval people make a potato gun?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 6 question votes, 1 answers, 109 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23397/if-mars-contains-coal-will-it-becomes-dominant-source-of-energy&quot;&gt;If Mars contains coal, will it becomes dominant source of energy?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 128 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22806/large-spider-walking-upside-down&quot;&gt;Large spider walking upside down&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 106 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22863/how-to-render-a-large-percentage-of-humans-infertile&quot;&gt;How to render a large percentage of humans infertile?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 8 question votes, 4 answers, 118 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22765/cloth-eating-creature-wants-to-eat-synthetic-textiles-how&quot;&gt;Cloth-eating creature wants to eat synthetic textiles. How?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 64 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22795/what-is-the-best-planetary-orbit-around-a-black-hole-in-order-to-support-life&quot;&gt;What is the best planetary orbit around a black hole in order to support life?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 155 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22781/targeting-cities-with-meteors&quot;&gt;Targeting cities with meteors&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 124 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23145/how-to-make-a-flying-human&quot;&gt;How to make a flying human&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 80 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23040/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-stars&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world(s) map - Stars&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 6 question votes, 0 answers, 98 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23183/close-the-door-on-your-way-out-life-lit-by-a-blue-dwarf-star&quot;&gt;Close the door on your way out - Life lit by a blue dwarf star&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11859/rumguff&quot;&gt;rumguff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 103 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23402/how-can-future-mars-colonists-combat-intelligence-loss&quot;&gt;How can future Mars colonists combat intelligence loss?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 127 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22834/silent-low-altitude-long-range-supersonic-drone&quot;&gt;Silent low altitude long range supersonic drone&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 94 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22861/targeting-cities-with-meteors-part-2&quot;&gt;Targeting cities with meteors (part 2)&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/50/bobson&quot;&gt;Bobson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 89 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23646/a-spacecraft-the-size-of-apollo-11s-lunar-module-composed-of-antimatter-aroun&quot;&gt;A spacecraft the size of Apollo 11&amp;#39;s lunar module, composed of antimatter, around a normal star&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7974/hendrik-lie&quot;&gt;Hendrik Lie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 66 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22824/turning-moon-into-a-solar-panels&quot;&gt;Turning moon into a solar panels&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 1 question votes, 3 answers, 82 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23316/how-to-effectively-survey-alien-planet-for-complex-lifeforms&quot;&gt;How to effectively survey alien planet for complex lifeforms?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 1 question votes, 1 answers, 60 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22796/what-minerals-can-be-used-to-make-teeth&quot;&gt;What minerals can be used to make teeth?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 36 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22924/fending-against-asteriod-assembled-using-only-lego%c2%ae-bricks&quot;&gt;Fending against asteriod assembled using only Lego&amp;#174; bricks&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, -1 question votes, 1 answers, 85 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23243/what-would-our-world-be-like-if-we-only-had-knowledge-of-mathematics-up-to-and&quot;&gt;What would our world be like if we only had knowledge of mathematics up to (and including) precalculus?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11941/user3529361&quot;&gt;user3529361&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 5 answers, 173 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22920/how-can-an-advanced-civilization-harvest-energy-from-an-x-ray-binary&quot;&gt;How can an advanced civilization harvest energy from an x-ray binary?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 2 question votes, 0 answers, 45 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23141/can-we-use-cme-or-solar-flare-to-power-spacecraft&quot;&gt;Can we use CME or solar flare to power spacecraft?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 1 question votes, 1 answers, 26 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22849/would-the-moon-doom-a-particle-accelerator-attached-to-the-iss&quot;&gt;Would the moon doom a particle accelerator attached to the ISS?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 94 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23150/shoot-for-the-moon&quot;&gt;Shoot for the moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -3 question votes, 2 answers, 79 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T21:50:50.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T22:06:39.093" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2385/2685&quot;&gt;may&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2453/2685&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2551/2685&quot;&gt;seen&lt;/a&gt;, the topic challenge results are now handing out badges for various things! (OK, not &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; badges - they don't get applied to your profile, but close enough.) We currently have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(descriptions in the tooltips if you hover on them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(plus one secret badge that hasn't been awarded yet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a fair few, but I'd like to see more. In the answers here, propose a badge (or badges), along with its tier (bronze/silver/gold) and requirements that you'd like to see added to the challenge badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some as-yet-undefined threshold of community approval through votes, I'll add the badges to the generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T06:01:53.913" Title="Topic Challenges - Badges" Tags="|discussion|challenge|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2015-09-01T06:51:05.820" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to provide some alternative which is 1) short and 2) a clear reference to WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Built Worlds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T06:51:05.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2542" CreationDate="2015-09-01T14:23:16.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is already covered tag wise with the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wholly support asking for resources from people, though lets be honest in most cases answers are going to be opinion based...so I am not sure how this would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions in this category will need to be very specific.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Potential good questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I need a book that illustrates Mayan dress during the height of the empire&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I need a book that details Roman military organization and tactics prior to the Marian reforms&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T14:23:16.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-01T19:35:49.300" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of this posting (9/1/2015), there are six unanswered questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23415/karyotypes-of-partially-interbreeding-human-races&quot;&gt;Karyotypes of partially interbreeding human races&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23040/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-stars&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world(s) map - Stars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22872/could-life-exist-in-a-circumstellar-disk&quot;&gt;Could life exist in a circumstellar disk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23691/liquid-filled-habitats-on-high-g-planets-and-on-ships-that-accelerate-quickly&quot;&gt;Liquid-filled habitats on high-G planets and on ships that accelerate quickly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22920/how-can-an-advanced-civilization-harvest-energy-from-an-x-ray-binary&quot;&gt;How can an advanced civilization harvest energy from an x-ray binary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23696/what-would-the-mercator-projection-look-like-if-the-north-pole-were-in-a-differe&quot;&gt;What would the Mercator projection look like if the north pole were in a different spot like in Hapgood's Planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All six have been unanswered for at least two days, three have been unanswered for at least one week, and the oldest has been unanswered for two weeks. None have any answers (even deleted ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like us to try to answer these, because I think that all six are answerable and on topic (I do think that the sixth is borderline, though). However, I'd like to put forth another point: &lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; are they unanswered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One week is a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time for a question to stay unanswered on Worldbuilding. The balance of probability is against it. Yet here we have &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; questions that have been unanswered for at least that long, and three others that have been quiet for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this happening, is this indicative of these particular questions (or is it just luck?), and should be do something about it (besides answering them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T20:02:26.143" Title="Answering the unanswered questions . . . and reconsidering them" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2556" CreationDate="2015-09-01T20:02:26.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several of those questions are marked as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; which greatly increases the bar for anyone who cares to answer, particularly the &quot;Map of the Stars&quot; question.  The Karyotypes question feels like hard-science, even if it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe those questions have gone unanswered generally because they are difficult to answer.  The sixth question just struck me wrong and I wasn't inclined to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T20:02:26.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-09-01T22:57:18.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of sharing parts of our stories, but I'd like to suggest something a little bit different: short stories on demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can go like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person with the highest reputation on the site (or a moderator, or the first signed person... just pick someone to start) gives the topic as a question on meta, and people write their stories about that subject as answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time, for example 24 hours, the person with highest score is declared as winner and gets to suggest next topic (we can close the question for a few hours before declaring a winner to give a chance to those who contributed last minute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is to write quickly, choose the winner, move on to next topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can have as many iterations as we want to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topics can be introduced in several ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Describing what the story is about&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Describing a character&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Providing title, the first line or the last line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a crazy idea (probably not doable thanks to copyright laws, but cool nonetheless): we could compile the winning stories in a popular e-book format and donate it to some foundation to help it rise money for their noble cause. My type would be Electronic Frontier Foundation, because they would know how to handle it best and they do a lot for us regarding out rights online, so we kinda owe them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3254" LastEditorUserId="3254" LastEditDate="2015-09-02T05:34:48.760" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T05:34:48.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2533" CreationDate="2015-09-02T00:37:13.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm starting this answer, and marking it Community Wiki, to collect links to whatever people want to share from their worlds -- stories, descriptions, game modules, fact sheets, etc.  Wherever you've posted it, please add a link and your name here once you do.  This should make it easier to compile a blog post about it later.  (&lt;em&gt;Hint: We can only compile a meaningful round-up post if there are multiple submissions.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glimpses into people's worlds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt; (by author's names):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/artificial-stupidity-5988077490ec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Artificial Stupidity, chapter I&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/artificial-stupidity-behind-the-story-fc5013a627ea#.j8ur27bud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt;: ArtOfCode's short story for the blog on artificial intelligence,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cognitive-load-6181f84e78c2#.kfzxwlsg8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cognitive Load&lt;/a&gt;: a short story by ArtOfCode,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/father-simon-e369c4eb2d55#.cga7eodgp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Father Simon&lt;/a&gt;: a short story into the world of bilbo_pingouin,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cateye-94fb2dad390f#.3psd3rmam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cateye&lt;/a&gt;: a short story by Frostfyre,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coming of Age&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/coming-of-age-chapter-1-63377ccbac4c#.p6gn6q7sw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/coming-of-age-chapter-2-59141b5a3edc#.9n2gn8f78&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;: a story by HDE 226868 based on a question on WB,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-lost-builder-355cf7de7ec6#.prl8hyhvg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Lost Builder&lt;/a&gt;: a story by Joe Bloggs, inspired by the design of the site,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sisters&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-a718622d808f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-43c4dccd1bd1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-3-3bfaa22068b4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-4-e1357240d1c3#.oe9fnu9rj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-5-with-commentary-518cd2f51dbe#.5jfzpblpu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-6-with-author-notes-a2e8662228bf#.5ziit5bfe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-the-story-behind-the-story-12944abf0d2a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;process notes&lt;/a&gt;: Monica Cellio's polytheists with competing moon gods,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/ash-part-first-418e872c4e04&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ash (part 1)&lt;/a&gt;: Green's story based on an answer here,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/decoherence-969205285e4c#.il3r5ky5v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Decoherence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/red-stranger-8ab78489795f#.cpoyrj1kp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Red Stranger&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/electronic-angel-679039cb7381#.6xcpeyily&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Electronic Angel&lt;/a&gt;: a series of 3 short stories by Tim B,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/where-is-will-hicks-1605c08779a9#.x5lkoguh1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Where will Will Hicks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/deconstructing-will-hicks-554b966960e5#.a823xzru7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt;: a short story of Tim B,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/nature-s-oven-eea4c8d197ad#.1j2rvjl9u&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nature's Oven&lt;/a&gt;: a short story by Tim B based on a some WB posts,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other support&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T12:07:07.297" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T12:07:07.297" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-02T00:37:13.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2552" CreationDate="2015-09-02T06:42:48.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about badges for &lt;strong&gt;ratio of votes per views&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistically, a question that attracts many views will have more upvotes, but I am not sure it is always related...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get some idea to place the threshold, I used the results you had for the last &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; challenge to produce the following&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OkcaJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OkcaJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;ratio votes-views&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dashed curves on the right sides are 1st-order linear fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether we should take the total vote (red on the graphs) or the question vote (blue). The question vote is probably less biased as a viewer can vote for a question and for the answers. But the total vote also give prices to very good answers. YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the sake of it, I made the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ebHDP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ebHDP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Relation between the number of votes on questions and the total number of votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the dashed line is a log fit (elimitating the highest point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2015-09-02T13:52:06.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T13:52:06.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2015-09-02T11:05:34.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this needs a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason for this is you are actually making it harder for people reading the question to know what sort of answer is expected. Unless they see the tag &lt;strong&gt;and know what it means&lt;/strong&gt; then they could well go in completely the wrong direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sort of situation I think you just start the question with something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a hitch-hiker's guide style comedy and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a romantic comedy set in a world where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a spoof sci-fi show that sends up star wars and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This both informs people that it's a parody world and gives them real information as to what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T11:05:34.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2563" CreationDate="2015-09-02T11:49:09.920" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What is the most efficient way to use resource X/object Y ?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; questions accepted on Worldbuilding SE ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what information should be added to make them neither opinion based or too broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect the criteria to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exact description of the item&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Available quantities/number&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Description of the people who have access to it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Goals of these people (what they wish to achieve using the item / what is important to them)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note :&lt;/strong&gt; I'm asking this because a question I previously asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23485/cargo-of-a-supernatural-smuggler&quot;&gt;mafias using magical bags&lt;/a&gt; was closed, and i'd like to ask a similar question about another object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T12:17:50.513" Title="Can we ask &quot;Most efficient way to use&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2015-09-02T12:11:07.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you write in your question, the tendency for those questions is to be either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and sometimes both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to make sure that the &amp;quot;efficient&amp;quot; is quantifiable in some way. And you need to set a goal. For me a question like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the most efficient way to travel from Paris to Brussels.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a single Human adult and I am looking for a fast solution with the least impact in term of CO&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; on the environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be acceptable. Though it would be closed for not-being about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T12:11:07.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2577" CreationDate="2015-09-03T04:19:37.137" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of questions on Meta. The problem is that many are not useful anymore. For some, the usefulness is only ephemeral and many useful questions  get drowned in a sea of questions that nobody is using as reference. Finding the good questions when we need them become harder because of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am referring to questions like mine here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/linguistic-synonym-of-language&quot;&gt;Linguistic synonym of language&lt;/a&gt;.  The issue have been dealt with a long time ago and I feel we should get rid of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question: &lt;strong&gt;What is the best way to deal with obsolete questions on Meta&lt;/strong&gt; like the one mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two solutions for this but feel free to share your thoughts about it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a temporary list of questions that are obsolete and delete them upon agreement of the other moderators/high rep users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use tags to classify the questions appropriately. A lot of questions seems to be badly tagged on Meta. Create new tags if necessary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a combination of 1 and 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T13:35:05.640" Title="Ordering the questions of Wordbuilding Meta" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-09-03T05:16:14.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd go for a tag. Like &quot;solved&quot; or something like that. Don't we have some mod red-tags similar to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question might appear useless at some point, but might be useful down the road. And I'd be wasted to have to ask it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T05:16:14.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-09-03T07:03:37.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Search is here for a reason. Having a backlog of solved posts isn't a problem, and can actually be useful for dupe targets when people ask for the same thing again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're concerned, being a mod you can add the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; tags (or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T07:03:37.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-09-03T12:51:27.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should delete meta posts just because they no longer apply.  Meta is still useful as part of our history and so we can look up &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we did something (if there was a post about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can add the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is signal to anybody who comes across a question.  Once questions fall off the main page, they'll only be seen if people search, look at specific tags, or follow links -- and in those cases, I think the presumption is that they wanted to see it.  (Ok, technically Community might bump them, but Community only bumps old posts that have answers of score 0 or lower.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T12:51:27.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2015-09-03T13:35:05.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2576/29&quot;&gt;Monica wrote&lt;/a&gt;, Meta serves as a useful record of our site's history, the decisions we have made and the reasoning that went into those decisions. We should not delete those just because we feel that they are no longer relevant. In many cases, for future reference the reasoning is a lot more interesting than the specific outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;strong&gt;there are other ways to indicate that the issue discussed has been resolved.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious is for the poster to accept an answer. In questions that primarily seek community consensus, just accepting the highest-voted answer (after some reasonable period of time to allow for the community to actually &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt; to some consensus) is usually sufficient, and doesn't take any real mental effort on part of the asker. In the case of support questions and friends, acceptance should work much the same way as on the main site: accept the answer that was most useful to you. This closes the loop on the question and lets us move on with good conscience. Most Meta questions are of the kind that can have an answer accepted just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diamond moderators and Stack Exchange community managers can use the various &quot;status&quot; tags: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-norepro&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-norepro&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-norepro&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-reproduced&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-reproduced&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-reproduced&lt;/a&gt; as appropriate. If you come across a question that you feel is a candidate for any of these (hover to see the tag descriptions), then either do it yourself (if you have a diamond) or flag the question for moderator attention and suggest adding the tag you feel appropriate (also please link to an answer or possibly comment that supports your claim that the tag is appropriate). Note that these are primarily intended for something that requires specific action on the part of someone else; there is no need to tag a support request that has an accepted answer as &quot;status-completed&quot;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also,&lt;/strong&gt; please let's not mass-edit questions; it bumps them to the top of the front page, &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; drowning out new content. Sometimes it's best to simply leave the sleeping dog alone, even if it could sleep in a better spot. It's obviously comfortable enough where it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T13:35:05.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1935" CreationDate="2015-09-03T18:44:16.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/delude&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;delude&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;delude&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; - or deleted.&lt;/strike&gt; $\to$ Delete the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/delude&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;delude&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;delude&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I removed it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23073/would-it-be-possible-to-excavate-a-planet-and-mine-it-without-indigenous-citizen&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; yesterday, which was about confusing in-universe people. I don't really see how it could be useful. &lt;strike&gt;It was suggested in chat that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/psychology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;psychology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;psychology&lt;/a&gt; would be better, and I can't see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/delude&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;delude&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;delude&lt;/a&gt; coming in useful anywhere.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T22:58:00.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-09-04T02:28:42.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Analytics &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the past year in numbers, using graphics. General activity of the site over the year and how it's comparing with other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also have different analysis like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what is the best time to post a question in term of views and&#xA;participation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can we correlate up-votes with certain days of the week?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What make popular question well, popular (I'm mostly thinking about&#xA;the subjects of questions or the vocabulary used).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do short questions get more attention that longer ones?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that it's not always about Worldbuilding per see but that would be interesting nevertheless.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T04:08:57.213" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T04:08:57.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-09-04T05:47:20.963" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own experience regarding what non-WB users think of WB is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We think the question titles are, quite often, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2443/idea-for-an-unofficial-contest&quot;&gt;absolutely hilarious&lt;/a&gt; when taken out of context.  Some of my personal favorites include:  &quot;If everyone had to wear a box on their heads, how would society differ?&quot;, &quot;Can I grow a banana that will produce a mushroom cloud [so I can threaten my neighbors]?&quot;, and &quot;If corners were illegal, where would ghosts live?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't understand how you handle closing questions.  It is hard to imagine how you apply most of the VTC reasons.  For example, isn't every question here primarily opinion based?  Why isn't everything on-topic?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a similar note, we are confused as to what metrics you use to determine which answer to accept.  What criteria do you use to decide which method of liquefying your enemies is better than the other suggestions, or which usage of scorpions as living hand grenades is superior to the alternative options?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the most common reaction to Worldbuilding is one of confusion and mild amusement, but also the obligatory respect bestowed upon our fellow SE communities.  We don't understand you guys, and sometimes we laugh at the titles of your questions, but we love you because you're our brothers and sisters in SE-hood.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T05:47:20.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:23:39.980" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was recently a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23938755#23938755&quot;&gt;suggestion in chat&lt;/a&gt; that the length of the topic challenges should be shortened because activity peters out after a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, too, have noticed this lack of activity in the second week of a challenge, especially in less popular challenges. Let's exclude &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapon-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapon-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapon-design&lt;/a&gt;, it was a little bit of an outlier in its popularity. I'm in favour of making the challenges shorter, perhaps down to 1 week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Shorter or not? What time should they run for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T10:11:46.287" Title="Should we shorten the length of our topic challenges?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2015-09-08T09:28:31.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The challenges are there, IMHO, for two reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;varying the subjects, by suggesting themes, less asked questions might arise, and the most active users (who usually take part in the challenge) are &quot;forced&quot; to think outside their own issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now having a shorter time for the challenge would have a consequence of a much faster turn around the themes. I can foresee a few consequences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faster drying out of themes, or need to often repeat,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The required thoughts would either keep people very busy, thinking some new questions on a new themes every weeks, or they might get bored and users would participate less.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either it looses some interest, or it takes precedence over the real purpose of the WB SE, which is to ask questions that you are facing when building your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say that &lt;strong&gt;every two weeks is fine&lt;/strong&gt;. If on the second week there is less participation on the theme, it will leave more time for non-themed questions, and might allow people to ask a follow-up question and still be on the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T09:28:31.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2015-09-08T10:11:46.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if we put down &quot;usable&quot; tags from about 500 on main site (guestimate), it would mean that feared &quot;tag rotation&quot; would happen about once a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut feeling tells me, that &lt;strong&gt;rotating tag challenge can be good thing&lt;/strong&gt; - In meaning: &quot;We did not talk that much about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapon-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapon-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapon-design&lt;/a&gt; for over a year. Lets try if users can come up with good questions and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weekly challenge is to me long enough to come up with good questions and answers and also short enough to keep fun going on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T10:11:46.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T18:11:38.283" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I have come across more than a few answers that would better belong in the comment section, but have been posted by new users who lack sufficient rep to post. These range from jokes to valid clarification requests. They are deleted swiftly, and I feel the community at large has no idea what to tell them except to &quot;improve it.&quot; Should there be a pro forma for this specific situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have considered brining the topic up on the SE Meta. I think the best solution &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be a comment review system similar to the Q &amp;amp; A community moderation system we have in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T19:57:14.933" Title="How to deal with users who cannot comment due to lack of rep?" Tags="|discussion|comments|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2588" CreationDate="2015-09-08T19:23:42.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This turned into a pretty lengthy answer. &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Flag as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot;, vote to delete, comment on the answer to let the poster know that it's likely to be deleted, and &lt;em&gt;encourage them to participate elsewhere on the site&lt;/em&gt; until they have earned the necessary reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There already exist several pro forma comments for this. Different people have slightly different variations on the theme; here are some of the ones that I use (these three by no means cover every possible situation, and some situations call for specific, custom-written comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers should be used only for actual answers to the question as asked, whereas it appears to me that this answer does not attempt to answer [OPusername]'s question. To ask for more information or suggest improvements, add a comment to the post in question. You can always comment on your own posts, and with a bit more rep, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;you will be able to comment anywhere&lt;/a&gt;. For the moment I've added the comment for you, and I'm flagging this post for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers should be reserved for actual answers to the question as asked. If you have another question, please ask it by clicking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask Question&lt;/a&gt; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please don't add &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;me too&amp;quot; and similar as answers. We're a Q&amp;amp;A community, not a conventional forum, so answer posts must answer (or attempt to answer) the question; answer posts which fail to do so are subject to deletion. Invest some time in the site and you will soon gain sufficient reputation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;vote up&lt;/a&gt; posts that you like, which is the Stack Exchange way of saying thank you. Once you have sufficient reputation, you may &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;offer a bounty&lt;/a&gt; to draw attention to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, jokes would have no place on a Stack Exchange site. Consider the question comment box placeholder text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and for commenting on answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid comments like &amp;quot;+1&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim here is obviously to indicate that comments should either ask for more information, or suggest improvements, relevant to the post the comment is attached to. Of course, &lt;em&gt;all work and no play makes Jimmy a dull boy&lt;/em&gt;, but jokes come very far down the list of priorities here. The focus should be and remain to &lt;em&gt;within each specific site's scope, asking quality questions and providing quality answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that occasionally, the relatively high reputation requirement for commenting prevents the very workflow comments are supposed to encourage, so I certainly see what you mean. Lowering the reputation limit for commenting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=comment+reputation&quot;&gt;suggested every now and then&lt;/a&gt;, such as for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/176448/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/264128/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66140/157730&quot;&gt;somewhat here&lt;/a&gt;, has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/12119/157730&quot;&gt;shot down here&lt;/a&gt; and commenting is in the MSE FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/214173/157730&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Just to point out a few questions on Meta Stack Exchange that deal with this very issue. The severity of this as a problem varies with how upvote-happy and active the community is; on our site, it's less of a problem than perhaps, say, on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The takeaway of all of those is basically that someone should show their ability to constructively contribute elsewhere, and then earning enough reputation to comment everywhere isn't very hard. And of course, once you have 200 reputation on any site in the network, you get to skip past all those pesky low-rep limitations on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; sites thanks to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/141648/157730&quot;&gt;association bonus&lt;/a&gt; of 100 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Within the framework that we do have,&lt;/strong&gt; and assuming that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;the reputation limit&lt;/a&gt; is not significantly changed (note that even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flagging&lt;/a&gt; is something you don't get to do at 1 rep), &lt;strong&gt;the best course of action for most people&lt;/strong&gt; is to simply flag such answer posts as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot;, vote to delete if you have the necessary reputation, and &lt;em&gt;clearly tell the user what they can expect&lt;/em&gt;. Leave a comment on their answer explaining that it is highly likely to be deleted, and encourage them to find other questions to which they are able to post solid answers that others can vote up. If the answer can be fixed with editing, encourage them to edit it. Teach them the ropes! I would also suggest to avoid downvoting unless the post is &lt;em&gt;truly horrible&lt;/em&gt;; particularly to someone who doesn't know how our system works, a first experience being a downvote on something they wrote when genuinely trying to be helpful can be devastating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all started off at 1 rep at some point, with a brand new account on only one site, and clawed our way up from there. As frustrating as it can be for someone coming new to the site and seeing &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the question they want to help figure out what the OP wants out of, unless the Powers That Be have a major change of heart we are pretty much stuck with these reputation limits for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is a pretty upvote-happy community. It definitely shouldn't be hard to earn the 200 rep here needed for the association bonus to kick in, and the 50 rep to get to comment everywhere on the site should be easy. With our incredible diversity of subjects and question styles, &lt;strong&gt;I am willing to bet that we have a question for just about anyone where a newcomer can post a good answer, get some upvotes, and get started on the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if all else fails, just point them toward &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4764/29&quot;&gt;our very own unicorn question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T19:57:14.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2878" CreationDate="2015-09-08T20:31:43.770" Score="29" ViewCount="3009" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2509/medium-blog-contributorsions?s=2|1.4644&quot;&gt;may&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2508/medium-blog-naming&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2520/medium-blog-best-of-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;seen&lt;/a&gt;, over the past couple of weeks, Worldbuilding has been building not a world, but a blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setup of that blog is now complete! &lt;strong&gt;You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;come and visit us&lt;/a&gt; now.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've got a reasonable bit of content up there, and our organisation is good and looking set for more. Go and read it - you can sign up on Medium using a Twitter/Facebook/Google account like you can here on Stack Exchange, and then you can click the Follow button to get our writings straight to your Medium inbox. (And email, if you so choose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we're by no means done! If you missed out on getting involved, or have changed your mind and want to, &lt;em&gt;that's fine&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;you're welcome to get involved with writing now.&lt;/strong&gt; We'd love to see posts from lots of people here - series of posts on a topic, or just single, one-off posts. It's up to you what and when you write - don't be shy! If you want to get involved, just drop into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;this chatroom&lt;/a&gt; and ask someone to add you - if they can't themselves, it's likely they'll know of someone who can. You'll need to create an account on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Medium&lt;/a&gt;, and leave the username of that account in your message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We've got a blog - follow along!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T23:41:31.180" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T18:30:05.490" Title="We have a blog!" Tags="|discussion|faq|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2836" CreationDate="2015-09-10T01:03:22.993" Score="7" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/28&quot;&gt;We have a blog&lt;/a&gt;, and it's off to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;great start&lt;/a&gt;.  In its first week and a half or so it's produced eight posts by four different authors, and tomorrow will see a fifth author's first contribution.  There's an active chat room where planning happens, so I know more is coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not bad for something that we've, thus far, promoted only on meta and in chat!  Imagine the readers and contributors we could attract with a little more visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were a graduated site we could have a community ad for our blog, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxH6z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxH6z.png&quot; alt=&quot;EL&amp;amp;U ad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another site is using an ad to promote a community publication project (a book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w7x5X.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w7x5X.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mi Yodeya ad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beta sites don't get ads normally.  One beta site has a notice that's important for their community to see all the time (even more than a blog ad), and they did this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XJV0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XJV0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Health notice&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May we please have some means to promote our blog on the front page?&lt;/strong&gt; Right now we're doing that with a featured post in the community bulletin, but &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; isn't forever, nor is it meant to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a community ad would be more appropriate than a pinned notice; there's already a space where ads go, and the blog, while important, isn't as &lt;em&gt;essential&lt;/em&gt; as that notice on Health.  But I don't know if there's a technical barrier to a beta site having community ads, while we've seen that there is no such barrier for a notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideally&lt;/strong&gt;, we'd like a community ad that could go into the rotation with the other site-promotion ads that show up on the front page.  If we can't have that, could we have some other way to promote the blog long-term on main?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T21:22:14.073" Title="Could we get some prominent blog promotion on our site?" Tags="|support|feature-request|blog|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2598" CreationDate="2015-09-10T09:25:59.763" Score="6" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've posted a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25209/would-intelligent-life-evolve-any-other-body-plan-than-humanoid&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that has spurred much debate and made me wish it could be worded differently for clarity. It's already quite long so if I keep adding to it, reader fatigue will set in. Unfortunately so many answers take direct quotes from the question itself that even a small re-write would make whole answers completely invalid, despite their already huge amount of votes. It doesn't seem right to just abandon the question and ask a new one on the same topic, but it also doesn't seem right to &quot;ninja&quot; the validity away from those already posted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't feel that the question has been answered to the standards I set for it, and the re-write would allow me to define things in a way that may be more accessible and understandable. However, much of the debate that has happened on it has progressed the topic and it would be a shame to lose the history of that conversation by simply dropping it for a new question, or heavily editing it so those conversations become out-of-context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best course of action here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6807" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T12:57:09.777" Title="Is it okay to majorly re-write a question that already has answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2595" CreationDate="2015-09-10T10:02:16.873" Score="50" ViewCount="12102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a series of questions that go through the process of creating a realistic world step-by-step. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a series of questions that tries to break down the process of creating a world from initial creation of the landmass through to erosion, weather patterns, biomes and every other related topics. Please restrict answers to this specific topic rather than branching on into other areas as the other stages will be covered by further questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of all the questions in the series can be found below, so that a link to this meta post should be enough for future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T10:54:50.237" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T10:54:50.237" Title="Creating a realistic world Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2594" CreationDate="2015-09-10T10:05:17.547" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main series of questions is the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/581/creating-a-realistic-world-map-landmass-formation&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Landmass formation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1020/creating-a-realistic-world-map-erosion?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Erosion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1353/creating-a-realistic-world-map-currents-precipitation-and-climate?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Currents, Precipitation and Climate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21349/creating-a-realistic-world-map-coastlines?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Coastlines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21402/creating-a-realistic-world-map-waterways?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Waterways&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23097/creating-a-realistic-world-map-underwater-geography&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Underwater geography&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23941/creating-a-realistic-world-map-vegetation-biomes&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Vegetation/Biomes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25084/creating-a-realistic-world-map-mineralogy&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Mineralogy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25366/creating-a-realistic-world-map-fuel&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Fuel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25721/creating-a-realistic-world-thermohaline-circulation&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Thermohaline circulation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25396/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-languages&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25478/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-religions&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading religions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23820/creating-a-realistic-world-map-countries-borders?rq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Countries Borders&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25524/creating-a-realistic-world-governements&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Governments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56232/creating-a-realistic-world-economics&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Currency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some spin-off questions were made and are listed here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21408/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-solar-systems?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world(s) map - planetary systems&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23040/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-stars?lq=1&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world(s) map - Stars&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T16:44:04.913" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-10T10:05:17.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:17:44.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue you mention has happened before, at least once that I can think of. Specifically with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12634/6986&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. The OP kept changing the question so much a diamond moderator closed it. When the question was finalized, the OP notified everyone who had already provided an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason you can't do the same: make your changes and notify everyone who has already provided an answer that the question has changed. Each individual can then decide whether to update or delete their answer, or simply write a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T12:17:44.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:41:07.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make as few changes as possible and be respectful of other's time.&lt;/strong&gt;  If you're just editing for clarity and not changing any of the essential parameters of the question then I think you can get by with lots of changes.  However, if essential parameters are changing then make as few as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental issue is respect for the people who have answered.  If you essentially state &quot;Screw you, I don't care about your time investment into this question&quot; by changing essential parameters without telling them about it, that's just inconsiderate.  But if you communicate with that that a few essential things have changed about the question and they might need to adapt their answer, then that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be angry if someone made a huge change to a question I had spent a lot of time on and didn't tell me about the change. Especially so if someone who came later got upvoted more than I did just because they answered later.  I don't want to look like an out of touch fool because the OP changed and I didn't know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T12:41:07.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:57:09.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Invalidating existing, good answers is a pretty big no-no on Stack Exchange.  As noted by others, it is disrespectful of others' efforts and could turn them off from the site.  What is a &quot;good answer&quot; in this context?  I'm not sure if there's official guidance, but another site treats any upvoted answer as being worthy of this kind of consideration, taking its inspiration from the fact that you can't delete a question if it has an upvoted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an idea I want to float, not moderator policy:  If you can't fix your question &quot;in place&quot; without either damaging existing answers or forcing their authors to do more work, how about &lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt; the existing question, asking the new one, and notifying all the answerers with a link so they can adapt their answers to the new question if they like?  If they don't then ok, you don't get an updated answer -- but at least you haven't taken anything away from the people who wrote them.  If people do adapt their answers and end up getting votes on both, so what?  In a sense they answered two different questions, so that seems kosher to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T12:57:09.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T15:05:34.390" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got &lt;em&gt;access to site analytics&lt;/em&gt; achievement,  which the linked help says is at 5000 points. Is this a new feature that's being applied en masse to everyone who qualifies, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T16:25:27.100" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:25:27.100" Title="&quot;access to site analytics&quot;, is that a new thing?" Tags="|support|site-analytics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2599" CreationDate="2015-09-10T15:52:59.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a new privilege that's rolling out now.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt; for the details on how to use it, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/260849/162102&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; for the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's granted at 25k on graduated sites and 5k on beta sites.  Even if you haven't gotten a notification yet, if you have the rep you probably have access -- &lt;em&gt;privilege notifications&lt;/em&gt; seem to be generated only on reputation changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T15:52:59.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T21:35:36.733" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to this site but I've noticed that on the worldbuilding forum it seems common for people to edit their questions in response to answers. In some cases, these edits substantially change the question and, in turn, change the validity of the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result for those answering is that their effort is wasted on producing an answer that's no longer an answer and they also risk losing reputation via downvotes (until they delete) because their answers are no longer valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be policy on acceptable changes to questions? Or should we just expect to have the carpet pulled from under us every now and then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12199" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T21:35:36.733" Title="Should there be a limit to editing on an question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-09-10T21:38:03.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-12T00:30:52.820" Score="7" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an idea for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2590/we-have-a-blog?cb=1&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; post. The problem is, I probably won't make a bunch. Indeed, for all I know I might only be able come up with one good blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I submit only one blog post without joining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2509/medium-blog-contributorsions&quot;&gt;blog team&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T09:47:12.367" Title="What if I want to contribute only occasionally or once to the blog without joining the blog team?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2603" CreationDate="2015-09-12T09:47:12.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I'm interested in...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Writing/contributing, either on a one-time basis or more frequently:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are also looking for people who want to write one article. If you're one of these people, the process for contributing is broadly the same: you can either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add yourself to the post you linked; I'll follow up on these&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;drop into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;Universe Factory chatroom&lt;/a&gt; and talk to someone there&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, you'll need to create an account on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medium&lt;/a&gt;, and tell one of our editors the username so that they can add you to the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T09:47:12.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2552" CreationDate="2015-09-13T13:50:11.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Controversy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of up-votes and down-votes on your answer/question is nearly equal (less than a difference of 2 votes on either side)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bronze (5-7 up-votes and 5-7 down-votes for the same question/answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silver (10-12 up-votes and 10-12 down-votes for the same question/answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gold (15 or more up-votes and 15 or more down-votes with a net difference less than 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we (members) can't really count up and down votes on our posts (we can only see the net result) but mods can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T13:50:11.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2015-09-13T14:01:10.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about an article about &lt;em&gt;when to stop?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine that after having decided on the geography and atmospheric composition of your world, you rent a supercomputer to do a climate simulation, so you'll get a realistic climate on your world. I think everyone here would agree that this would be overkill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you certainly don't want to just claim a climate without any consideration, or else people will object to your rainforest on a world without any water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are, of course, intentionally exaggerated examples. But the basic point is: How do you know when you have spent enough thought on building your world? How do you identify points worth of further consideration, and points which you can simply claim as fact in your world without further research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the problem is of course not restricted to climate, but occurs for all aspects of your world. At what point do you stop research to make your medieval world believable? When do you stop worrying whether your creatures are really possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an article about this subject could be worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:01:10.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-09-13T16:43:21.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i don't see many questions with this tag although it is important in many aspects of our lives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T16:43:21.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-13T17:12:42.023" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of my question, I decided to post an answer as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/25569/147&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;The reason as stated in the answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I decided to make a community wiki because all the answers have good&#xA;  points but none covered all the aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It serve as a summary of the different answers posted. I might also add more content to complement it. I was expecting to do the same this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25478/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-religions&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading religions&lt;/a&gt;. I'll try to use the wikis only when it's necessary: when I can't pick an answer as the accepted one because all the answers are good in their own way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it the best course of action?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T19:46:10.170" Title="Question on the community wikis" Tags="|discussion|answers|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2608" CreationDate="2015-09-13T17:16:47.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems reasonable to me.  Since it's community wiki you're not gaining reputation, and since it's an answer on your own question you won't gain reputation from accepting it, so it strikes me as purely a community service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T17:16:47.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2611" CreationDate="2015-09-13T22:42:18.863" Score="7" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that questions that are based on &quot;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&quot; are off topic, but if I had created a specific creature, would it not count as asking about a species?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to ask a series of questions based on the aforementioned creature, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;[Given the following creature], how would this creature have avoided being hunted down by its predators&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How would the creature defend itself&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What circumstances may have caused this section of the creature to evolve to look like this&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What in the world could this feature of the creature possibly be useful for&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Extremely detailed diagrams, models, and pictures of the creature will be posted along with the question(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can see that this kind of question isn't listed in the &quot;On-topic&quot; list,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of technology or magic, while maintaining in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's also not listed under &quot;Off-topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; help page, it states that if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK&quot;, which seems to fit into the format of the questions I'm thinking of asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask these questions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T03:50:02.333" Title="Can I ask questions based on a specific creature of my world?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2610" CreationDate="2015-09-14T07:23:02.617" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my firm belief at least that at least most of those questions that you propose can be on topic. &lt;em&gt;However,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't make it about the individual. Make it clearly about the species.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't say &quot;here are details about this &lt;em&gt;one individual&lt;/em&gt; creature I have designed. how would it accomplish X?&quot;, but rather &quot;here are details about this &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; I have designed. how would it accomplish X?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former risks being too much about the individual, and as such off topic as &quot;actions of individual characters&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter form, assuming sufficient detail is provided in order to come up with an answer, should fall squarely into the &quot;Creation of elements of a world&quot; (specifically species) bucket, because you are seeking help in figuring out some particular aspect of the &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; you are creating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T20:20:17.317" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T20:20:17.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2643" CreationDate="2015-09-14T16:52:28.467" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our sixteenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 14 September - 28 September&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5083&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/5083.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who doesn't like a nice war? Let's challenge the myth that it never changes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love the smell of gunpowder in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T09:04:39.987" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #16: Warfare" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2548" CreationDate="2015-09-14T17:00:31.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 19 questions and 96 answers, for an average of 5.05 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23765/how-can-i-make-my-languages-structurally-less-like-english&quot;&gt;How can I make my languages structurally less like English?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;175 total votes, 42 question votes, 21 answers, 6057 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23861/how-can-i-make-a-shared-world-less-restrictive&quot;&gt;How can I make a shared world less restrictive?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;69 total votes, 18 question votes, 9 answers, 2156 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23820/creating-a-realistic-world-map-countries-borders&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Countries Borders&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;33 total votes, 12 question votes, 4 answers, 1384 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/24006/how-to-approach-the-creation-of-fairy-tale-world&quot;&gt;How to approach the creation of fairy-tale world&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;33 total votes, 7 question votes, 7 answers, 616 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23811/how-do-i-make-the-political-evolution-of-my-world-believable&quot;&gt;How do I make the political evolution of my world believable?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;31 total votes, 14 question votes, 6 answers, 1254 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25478/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-religions&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading religions&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;26 total votes, 11 question votes, 6 answers, 161 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25396/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-languages&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading languages&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;22 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 135 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23941/creating-a-realistic-world-map-vegetation-biomes&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Vegetation/Biomes&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 10 question votes, 1 answers, 103 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23934/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-political-entities&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - Political Entities&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 385 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/24042/how-can-i-make-the-cultural-evolution-of-my-world-believable&quot;&gt;How can I make the cultural evolution of my world believable?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 13 question votes, 2 answers, 102 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25228/how-can-i-replicate-language-evolution&quot;&gt;How can I replicate language evolution?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 9 question votes, 2 answers, 125 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25358/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-non-state-actors&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - non-state actors&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 4 question votes, 7 answers, 329 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25084/creating-a-realistic-world-map-mineralogy&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Mineralogy&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 9 question votes, 2 answers, 155 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25524/creating-a-realistic-world-governments&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Governments&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 119 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25450/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-brigands-bandits-rebels-and-thieves&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - Brigands, Bandits, Rebels and Thieves&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 6 answers, 246 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25366/creating-a-realistic-world-map-fuel&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Fuel&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 81 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23819/how-do-you-not-lose-your-mind-when-thinking-about-structural-politics&quot;&gt;How do you not lose your mind when thinking about Structural Politics?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 158 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25419/how-to-create-social-structures&quot;&gt;How to create social structures?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9601/spacelizard&quot;&gt;SpaceLizard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 96 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25185/what-is-world-building&quot;&gt;What is world building?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13356/baby-aaron&quot;&gt;Baby Aaron&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -3 question votes, 1 answers, 34 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T17:00:31.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2552" CreationDate="2015-09-15T06:01:53.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Number of questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a badge that does not go to questions as such, but to users. Some users are particularly prolific on some topics and maybe the first one might receive a badge. Maybe not more than one because we prefer quality over quantity. But nevertheless it might be interesting to mark it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, out of 20 questions for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;, Vincent asked 6 himself. And for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, out of 33 questions, user6760 asked 12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T06:01:53.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T02:48:07.980" Score="7" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm certainly one of Worldbuilding's foremost proponents of $\LaTeX$, and I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/599/its-okay-to-use-latex&quot;&gt;encouraged its use&lt;/a&gt; in the past. However, I've noticed a certain trend that I think is important to note: the use of inline LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You'll need a spaceship to provide about 125,000 newtons of thrust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LaTeX-ified, this is sometimes written as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You'll need a spaceship to provide about $125,000 newtons$ of thrust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this annoying for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There should really be a &lt;code&gt;\text&lt;/code&gt; modifier in use, specifically, &lt;code&gt;\text{ newtons}&lt;/code&gt;, which would make this line render as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You'll need a spaceship to provide about $125,000 \text{ newtons}$ of thrust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because the normal LaTeX formatting treats the letters &lt;code&gt;newtons&lt;/code&gt; as variables (i.e. $n\times e\times w\times t\times o\times n\times s$), and so tilts them. There should also be a space between the units and the number (hence &lt;code&gt;\text{ newtons}&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;\text{newtons}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, LaTeX should not be used here at all, in my opinion. It grabs my eye when such emphasis is not necessarily necessary - for example, the important part of this sentence could be that a spaceship is needed. But instead, my eye is drawn to the number, which is formatted in a way that clashes with the normal font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions are when symbols are needed that can't be easily added by normal characters. One example is $\int_0^1 f(x)dx$. Now, I typically give integrals their own lines, but that's simply a personal preference. As an example workaround, exponents can be represented as x&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt; via the text &lt;code&gt;x&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;n&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, instead of as $x^n$; the same is true for subscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else find the unnecessary usage of LaTeX to be a little annoying, and if so, can we try to reduce these occurrences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T02:31:29.987" Title="Judicious use of inline LaTeX" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T05:32:30.063" Score="-10" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I was given a lowly bronze badge when I acquired 200 rep in one day which has been stated as daily maximum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now now! I put such superb hardwork, concentration and support to fellow members and gathered as much rep in a day as was possible for any mortal. And at the end of the day I am awarded with a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bronze&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; medal. I mean ... really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I demand my Mortarboard (yeah, that's the name of the badge awarded) to be converted from bronze to gold. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I would be highly motivated to stay super-active if you send me cookies, a chocolate cake and some candies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T07:53:54.273" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T07:55:48.737" Title="I'm Given Bronze. I Demand Gold Gold Gold!" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-09-17T14:43:32.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T06:21:31.900" Score="32" ViewCount="1582" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE&lt;/a&gt; celebrates its first anniversary. It &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2490/how-shall-we-celebrate-our-birthday&quot;&gt;was announced&lt;/a&gt;, and the day has come finally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of the celebrations for the anniversary, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2590/we-have-a-blog&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; has been launched and several members of the community wrote some very good content for it already with, as of now, 13 posts about World-Building, Worldbuilding SE, and built worlds. I encourage all of you to have a look at the various posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to celebrate in some other way, I suggest that, in reply to this post, you mention a single question, from the first year, which you have found inspiring, interesting, funny, worthy of attention. It can be one of yours, but does not have to be. It would be good to write a few words to explain your choice. Maybe it had the best answer you ever read, maybe it makes you laugh each time you think about it, it's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we should keep it to the simple rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one question/reply per user,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each question only once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your favourite question is already mentioned, you'll have to write about your second best. If your prefered post is an answer, still indicate the question to which it answered, but you can specify that it was the answer that you liked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T08:03:44.030" Title="One Year of Building Worlds" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2616" CreationDate="2015-09-16T07:38:00.053" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mortarboard is a bronze badge that is supposed to be reasonably easy to get if you put in the effort. Earning 200 reputation in a day once is not terribly difficult, and even easier with our upvote-happy community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a single good answer on a question that happens to hit the Network Hot Questions list is often sufficient (and a good way) to hit the daily reputation cap. I have hit the cap several days in a row on other, far more mature sites that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/43/legendary&quot;&gt;Legendary&lt;/a&gt; is the corresponding gold badge, which requires hitting the daily reputation cap on 150 separate (UTC) days. That one, like most gold badges, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; hard to get. Having earned it on our site would be even more of an achievement given that the site has only been around for about twice that length of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;On Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, right now among our about 8800 users&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;122 &quot;Mortarboard&quot; badges have been awarded,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with no awarded Epic (silver, 50 times hitting the cap)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or Legendary (gold, 150 times&#xA;hitting the cap) badges,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for an overall ratio of about 72 users to 1 &lt;em&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;On Stack&#xA;Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, which is arguably&#xA;the most active site in the network, right now among its 4.3 &lt;em&gt;million&lt;/em&gt; users&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mortarboard has been awarded 22k times,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Epic 529 times&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and Legendary 193 times,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for an overall ratio of about 114 Mortarboard to 1 Legendary&#xA;and 22500 users to 1 Legendary; or about 195 users to 1 &lt;em&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our Mortarboard-to-Legendary ratio&#xA;   was the same as that on Stack Overflow, we would have a single Legendary badge awarded by now,&#xA;   but given that our site is so young, anyone having achieved that this&#xA;   early is not really reasonable to expect. If our user-to-Legendary&#xA;   ratio was the same, we'd have 0.4 Legendaries. (The user that had&#xA;   Legendary would be at about 30k rep minimum, while the users we do&#xA;   have which have the most reputation have about 23k rep currently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/were-changing-our-name-back-to-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;the fact that we are officially awesome&lt;/a&gt; does not help much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: &lt;em&gt;Keep working on it!&lt;/em&gt; I don't see Mortarboard being converted into a gold badge, and even if it &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; to get converted into a gold badge, that is not something a site moderator can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a gold badge, good badges to aim for would be either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/76/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/83/steward&quot;&gt;Steward&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/copy-editor&quot;&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/a&gt; (with &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; edits), as all of these help to directly improve the site experience for everyone. The corresponding bronze and silver badges are also fairly easy to get, and the gold badges aren't terribly hard to get, indicating their perceived value for the community, relative to other gold badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T07:55:48.737" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T07:55:48.737" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2015-09-16T09:30:36.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had to hunt around to find how to use units. If it were explained on a cheetnsheet summary...? What I found was a different word, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &quot;minor&quot; use that could be handled without TeX is superscrips.  It's not on the toolbar or markdown, but html tags work.  I've seen posts use mathjax to get the superscript but then mess up the unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peppering a post with small fragments of mathJax is a real problem on a tablet, as it makes the editor slow down to the point where you can't type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T07:40:28.147" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T07:40:28.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-16T14:24:28.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go with the accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2489/6507&quot;&gt;Natural Projectile Weapons&lt;/a&gt;. It's a long one (which is usually a good sign as far as I'm concerned), but it represents the best explanation of how evolution works that I've ever seen. Most of the answers I've provided that deal with evolution have this answer to thank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the greatest parts about this site is that we get answers based in hard science, but revolving around fictional concepts. It's a marriage such as this that allows us to better understand why the world is the way it is, and how beautiful it is for being that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T14:24:28.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-16T22:56:55.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go with the question that brought me to Worldbuilding: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/843/how-do-i-drug-a-population-in-the-most-efficient-way&quot;&gt;How do I drug a population in the most efficient way?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I missed the private beta of Worldbuilding because the site really wasn't in my radar until late September/early October, around the time it went into public beta. I stumbled across this question somehow - I think it was via the Hot Network Questions list - and I was simply amazed at the ingenuity of some of the answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was what convinced me to take a look at other posts on Worldbuilding. 278 questions and answers later, I still marvel at that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T22:56:55.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-17T01:47:13.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4444/whats-the-most-logical-shape-for-my-city-in-space-space-station&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most logical shape for my city in space (space station)?&lt;/a&gt; not because I needed it for a world but because I wanted to understand the reality behind two conflicting tropes: should space stations be basically rings or basically tubes?  I learned a lot from the many good answers, some of which argued with each other -- enough that only now have I gone back and accepted one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my &quot;aha!&quot; moments was the explanation &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4447/28&quot;&gt;in this answer&lt;/a&gt; of how rings &quot;evolve&quot; &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; cylinders over time.  I'd never thought of it that way before, and in fact that changed by 90 degrees how I thought about interior layout and &quot;levels&quot; of a station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T01:47:13.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-17T17:26:49.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I particularly like the accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/25318/98&quot;&gt;How do seasons work in a binary system (planet orbits one star, not both)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It provides not only an exhaustive answer with good description of the geometry and assumptions, but additionally even provides code to make your own experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T17:26:49.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-18T07:25:11.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I shall go with the following question below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13000/can-an-asteroid-have-a-molten-core&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can an asteroid have a molten core?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is similar to HDE 226868: I still won't forgive a certain clown, who dumped this question of mine at Worldbuilding. However, thankfully I still enjoy good quality answer/time here, so I am letting bygone be bygone. Anyway, I guess I should be on my way to building a new world. Hasta la vista, Baby!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T08:03:44.030" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T08:03:44.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-18T18:03:43.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my favorites, not for reference, but just because I always wondered, was about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18278/could-you-maintain-breathable-oxygen-for-long-term-space-travel-through-shipboar&quot;&gt;building shipboard gardens to provide oxygen&lt;/a&gt; (with an excellent accepted answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal memory of the year was posting &quot;What would be the possibility of a Dwarf orbiting opposite Earth,&quot; having forgotten the word [planet].  I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8651/what-are-the-possibilities-of-a-dwarf-planet-orbiting-opposite-earths-orbit&quot;&gt;hastily re-phrased it&lt;/a&gt;, but it made me laugh out loud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T18:03:43.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-19T22:15:36.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are so many good questions I can't nominate them all, however numbers don't lie and there is just one question on worldbuilding that has had &gt;20 thousand views. At the time of writing it has had 23,976 views. The next closest has had a little over 17 thousand, and those are the only two with over 15 thousand so it's not a close race.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future&quot;&gt;How do you prove you&amp;#39;re from the future?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T22:15:36.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-21T17:31:28.250" Score="-3" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Action&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators delete comments, or move them to chat. They do that for many reasons which &lt;strong&gt;are not the point of this question&lt;/strong&gt;. We'll assume they are very good reasons, fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Result&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People keep writing comments, because if you read a post and you have something to write about it, you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to write it, and you do just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;add comment&quot; button is just there, you click, you write. As simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's not. Sometimes people answer, sometimes a mod passes by and purges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Fairy tale&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admins state that &quot;comments are not for discussion, they are meant just to improve the question: incorporate them, then delete them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uh, ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a fairy tale. This is &lt;strong&gt;not going to happen&lt;/strong&gt;. Why? Read again the former paragraph: people want to write a comment, people do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Impulse&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting something is a natural impulse. &lt;strong&gt;You may delude yourself&lt;/strong&gt; into believing this will change, but this will not. You will not change natural impulses of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have the impulse to write, there's a &quot;here, you can write&quot; button, people will hit the button and write. Yes, I'm repeating the same concept a few times, but that's because I feel you keep missing the point: you are trying to fight nature, and you will always lose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Pragmatism&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fighting the current never works and it's stupid. Fighting a war you can't win. You should be &lt;strong&gt;pragmatic&lt;/strong&gt;, you should &lt;strong&gt;open your eyes, look and accept the reality, and adapt to it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying &quot;don't do anything&quot;, I'm just stating that what you are trying to do is unnatural and it's pointless to go on: you'd rather have to find an alternative method of dealing with this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So, which is the problem?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes an OP leaves a comment when he should have integrated it into his post. Ok, it would be better if he did that. Will deleting comments help towards this end? Uh, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are tons of off-topic comments and the good ones don't get noticed? By whom? Most of the times, the OP will read every comment anyway: he'll notice. If he wants to reply or integrate them, he can. Of course he almost never does anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Two tabs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible improvement would be to have two comment &quot;tabs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default tab would be the &quot;chat&quot; one: you can write below this post anything you like, IT or OT, who cares. The goal is to cater the &quot;I must write&quot; instinct here, keeping the other tab clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can select the other tab, which would be called &quot;improvements/suggestions/clarifications&quot; or something along this line. And add your observations or requests there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if a user writes a useful observation in the chat tab? No problem, moderators can move it. Maybe even users can request to move it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if a user writes something spammy in the improvement tab? Moderators and users can request to delete it. Still, I think this will rarely happen: there's the other tab just for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who considers this to be &quot;too complicated&quot; wouldn't even bother to use any of this site's features properly anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Idea&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is just &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asserting is that you &lt;strong&gt;are most definitely&lt;/strong&gt; doing it wrong. Just look. It's right there under your nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that this &quot;two tabs&quot; is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; solution, I'm just saying that's it's &lt;em&gt;a possible&lt;/em&gt; solution: you might find better ones if you think about it. And &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; is what I'm asking you: &lt;strong&gt;think about it&lt;/strong&gt;. Stop and think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Honestly&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to be frank, I think you'll just ignore this as every single other suggestion I've given to this network. I think the SE admins are absolutely completely beyond any reasonable hope of reason. They got almost everything wrong, and have built a strong community religiously dedicated to treat every single rule as a dogma, never stopping to think if this makes sense or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my hopes of you actually listening – not doing something, but even &lt;em&gt;listening&lt;/em&gt; – are next to none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I had to do it anyway because, as I said: I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T18:08:53.557" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T19:29:15.213" Title="Pragmatism: reconsider the stance on comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2015-09-21T19:09:55.993" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I have never seen a complaint about how comments work here on world building before.  The concept is pretty strait forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the moderators see comments that are useful and to the point, they remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said when two or more people start discussing the topic in question in the comments section that is not the right place to discuss.  That is what we have chat and meta for, in the end its just housekeeping to keep relevant information on the site and remove distractions from the real content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are lambasting a group of &lt;strong&gt;volunteer&lt;/strong&gt; moderators chosen from world building's general population...for processes they did not create nor have the authority to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you &lt;strong&gt;choose&lt;/strong&gt; to join a community you are agreeing to adhere to the community's rules, just as you would moving to a new country that has laws...jumping up and down in the middle east and yelling &quot;YOU ARE ALL STUPID!  ALCOHOL SHOULD BE LEGAL!&quot; would get you nowhere...actually you'd probably end up in a prison but that is besides the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am trying to get across is that while you are welcome to your own ideas and opinions, showing up, berating everyone and telling them how stupid their community is will get you nowhere.  That attitude will not help your ideas gain traction.  The SE format is not perfect, but then nothing is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New ideas are implemented all the time on SE&lt;/strong&gt; and if you take the time to understand the community instead of fighting it and show that you are a valuable member of the community then you will have far more support when you do suggest new ideas.  As its stands no one is going to bother reading, let alone give a second thought to an online temper tantrum.  We appreciate new ideas on world building...its what the site is about, but if you are going to fight with everyone...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TbqkN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TbqkN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T19:09:55.993" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2015-09-22T04:07:27.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25869/how-to-enforce-a-ban-on-vegetarianism&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; specific case, I moved the comments to chat because the asker was not replying to any of the comments. There was a lot of comments and I have no way to know if he will read them or not. Some might be more inappropriate than others but that's always subject to subjectivity. I moved them all to the chat, they are all accessible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not &quot;hunt&quot; comments herds. We usually deal with the comments only when there is a flag. The system emits a flag automatically after a certain number of comments have been made in a short amount of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T15:01:45.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2015-09-23T03:13:45.863" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;One new user's observations, here. For context, here's my history of participation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;amusedly reading questions coming through on the network for a good year or so,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recently answering two questions and trying to make some meaningful comments on those questions and their answers, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reading through some of your top (voted) questions and their answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My Impressions:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The questions asked are often some of the most interesting I see coming through the feed. Now, I'm an RPGer who derives significant amounts of pleasure from world-building, so perhaps I'm not representative....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; chatty. To the extent that it feels like a Q&amp;amp;C site, not a Q&amp;amp;A site. A popular question may have dozens of comments, a third of which address the question, a third try to provide tiny answers, and a third being a dialogue on a tangent spun off of a joke-comment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of frame challenging. &lt;em&gt;I.e. &quot;How does one accomplish X?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; answered with &lt;em&gt;&quot;you shouldn't try to do X.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Now, sometimes &lt;em&gt;&quot;X is impossible and here's why...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a great answer. Not all frame challenges fall into that good form, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not much in the way of &quot;comments aren't for answers,&quot; &quot;unclear what you're asking,&quot; or &quot;this question seems likely to generate many opinion-based answers; answers should be based on and describe &lt;em&gt;actual experience&lt;/em&gt; with the methods or suggestions, rather than bald speculation&quot; from the mods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many questions generate answers that read as lists of &lt;em&gt;whatever idea popped into my head&lt;/em&gt;, without enough detail in the question to suggest what differentiates good ideas from bad ideas. I think lots of questions could benefit from a bit of &quot;Put on hold as unclear what you're asking&quot; time and work. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Second Thoughts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that some of the above stems naturally from the speculative nature of many of our questions. &lt;em&gt;&quot;What sort of ecosystem would cause &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Formics&lt;/a&gt; to evolve as dominant species?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is inherently speculative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But reading through some of the best work here convinces me that if I ask &lt;em&gt;&quot;What weather changes would result from the Earth spinning 10% faster?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; I'll get plenty of comments along the lines &lt;em&gt;&quot;do you have any idea how much energy it'd take to add that much angular momentum?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Followed by an argument about how one could or could not deliver that energy to the earth.) One excellent answer would talk about the sizes of the wind bands we currently have, how they'd re-size and shift, &amp;amp;c. &amp;amp;c. &amp;amp;c. Others would reference scientific papers that are absolutely on-point and I'd never have found without this. And in the comments to these answers there'd be extensive arguing over whether the Coriolis force exists or not. (You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; this is true!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of great and fun stuff here. I enjoy it as an observer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participating, it feels pretty chaotic. I'd describe it as a &lt;em&gt;lightly-threaded brainstorming site&lt;/em&gt; more than the Q&amp;amp;A I find so useful on SO or MathematicsSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T03:13:45.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-23T08:39:07.557" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favourite question and answer are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/569/is-there-a-scientific-explanation-as-to-why-aliens-should-look-similar-to-us&quot;&gt;Is there a scientific explanation as to why aliens should look similar to us?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself deals with the limit between being enjoyable for our audience and being realistic. As soon as you enter sci-fi it's a question you will ask yourself. In movies we are limited by humans actors and current technology : puppets, costumes, prosthesis, CGI... In literature we are not, so why not make our main sapient species arthropods ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the accepted answer, oh my. It's very detailed, explains feature by feature what is likely to be found in aliens and what is not. When we deal with evolution, we rarely go back to the very first lifeforms to see what first emerges, so this answer is also very useful to understand how all animal life on a planet can look like our planet or not. A gem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T08:39:07.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-23T17:53:18.420" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/581/creating-a-realistic-world-map-landmass-formation&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world map - Landmass formation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Striking features of this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the specificity of the assumptions/constraints and the explicit limits to its scope led to excellent answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it jump-started the intentional series of &quot;Creating a realistic world map&quot; questions: after landmass formation there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1020/creating-a-realistic-world-map-erosion&quot;&gt;erosion&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1353/creating-a-realistic-world-map-currents-precipitation-and-climate&quot;&gt;currents, precipitation, and climate&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;then by other authors we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21349/creating-a-realistic-world-map-coastlines&quot;&gt;coastlines&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21402/creating-a-realistic-world-map-waterways&quot;&gt;waterways&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21408/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-solar-systems&quot;&gt;solar systems&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23040/creating-a-realistic-worlds-map-stars&quot;&gt;stars&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23097/creating-a-realistic-world-map-underwater-geography&quot;&gt;bathymetry&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23820/creating-a-realistic-world-map-countries-borders&quot;&gt;political geography&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23941/creating-a-realistic-world-map-vegetation-biomes&quot;&gt;biomes&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25084/creating-a-realistic-world-map-mineralogy&quot;&gt;minerology&lt;/a&gt;; &#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25366/creating-a-realistic-world-map-fuel&quot;&gt;fuel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T17:53:18.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-24T01:30:59.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of questions and answers that I've liked or been impressed with this last year, for a lot of different reasons.  So I'm just going to pick a question from mine that I liked, and learned quite a bit from.  It also happens to be the most popular question I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21921/mosquito-assassin-what-is-the-most-deadly-substance-that-can-be-injected-into-s&quot;&gt;Mosquito Assassin: What is the most deadly substance that can be injected into someone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T01:30:59.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-09-24T11:20:25.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-Eukarotic Macroscopic Life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All multi-cellular life as we know it is composed or eukarotic cells -- cells with a nucleus. Some single-celled organisms are eukarotic, some are prokaryotic (cells without a nucleus, such as bacteria.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would non-microscopic life that was NOT made of eukarotic cells be possible? Is there another way that macroscopic life forms could theoretically come to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to post this as a [hard-science] tagged question, but I worry that it may fall too far into &quot;idea generation&quot; territory. Is this question acceptable? How could it be improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="647" LastEditorUserId="647" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T17:49:26.590" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T17:49:26.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2610" CreationDate="2015-09-25T03:50:02.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than drawing difficult lines like that, I'd ask a meta question: &quot;is there a way I can formulate this question such that it is more likely to be helpful to others.&quot;  In particular, I'd look at the constraints placed on the problem, and see if they are helpful.  If the question is tailored such a way that &quot;the creature is 3'6&quot; tall&quot; is an essential part of finding an answer, the question is rather useless to others.  However, if &quot;the creature is the size of a child&quot; is the essential part, then your needs may be applicable to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T03:50:02.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2015-09-27T17:24:12.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mines&lt;/a&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mining&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mining&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mining&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is just semantics, but &quot;mining&quot; encompasses the entire industry, not just the structures used in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:24:12.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2612" CreationDate="2015-09-28T08:19:29.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 27 questions and 171 answers, for an average of 6.33 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25658/how-would-a-war-between-immortals-be-fought&quot;&gt;How would a war between immortals be fought?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;317 total votes, 47 question votes, 25 answers, 12241 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25724/what-good-are-herbivores-in-an-animal-army&quot;&gt;What good are herbivores in an animal army?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;313 total votes, 32 question votes, 16 answers, 7711 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26138/do-surface-warships-have-a-future&quot;&gt;Do Surface Warships Have a Future?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;58 total votes, 12 question votes, 12 answers, 2352 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25872/how-powerful-do-i-make-my-mages-to-inspire-trench-warfare&quot;&gt;How powerful do I make my mages to inspire trench warfare?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;51 total votes, 9 question votes, 8 answers, 2090 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25715/forest-rebels-and-the-animal-brigade&quot;&gt;Forest rebels and the animal brigade&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;43 total votes, 14 question votes, 2 answers, 771 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26046/how-to-defend-ourselves-against-unknown-aliens&quot;&gt;How to defend ourselves against unknown aliens?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11079/tyrabel&quot;&gt;Tyrabel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;34 total votes, 7 question votes, 10 answers, 361 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25816/creating-super-soldiers-by-removing-emotion-singular&quot;&gt;Creating super soldiers by removing emotion (singular)&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2092/jake&quot;&gt;Jake&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;27 total votes, 15 question votes, 10 answers, 1523 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26108/do-powerful-lasers-mean-no-aircraft-is-safe&quot;&gt;Do powerful lasers mean no aircraft is safe?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;22 total votes, 9 question votes, 8 answers, 646 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25611/military-tank-for-an-interstellar-war&quot;&gt;Military Tank for an Interstellar War&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10738/moran&quot;&gt;moran&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 3 question votes, 9 answers, 310 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26155/what-non-metallic-materials-would-allow-making-guns-and-bullets&quot;&gt;What non-metallic materials would allow making guns and bullets?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9498/asciithenansi&quot;&gt;ASCIIThenANSI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 5 question votes, 6 answers, 747 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25756/military-logistics-f-em-and-feed-them-beans&quot;&gt;Military Logistics: F&amp;#39; &amp;#39;em and Feed them Beans!&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 4 question votes, 7 answers, 291 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25817/what-should-be-considered-for-creating-a-professional-army-in-a-medieval-based-s&quot;&gt;What should be considered for creating a Professional Army in a medieval based society?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11327/dynas&quot;&gt;Dynas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 6 question votes, 4 answers, 201 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25764/what-kind-of-attire-would-covert-ops-actually-wear&quot;&gt;What kind of attire would covert ops actually wear?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11564/llama-guy&quot;&gt;Llama_guy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 5 answers, 241 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25654/how-to-make-varus-win-the-battle-of-the-teutoburg-forest&quot;&gt;How to make Varus win the battle of the Teutoburg Forest?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 138 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26313/how-would-military-tactics-differ-if-we-primarily-used-android-soldiers&quot;&gt;How would military tactics differ if we primarily used android soldiers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/djmethaneman&quot;&gt;DJMethaneMan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 4 question votes, 5 answers, 158 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25685/the-american-british-colonies-support-great-britain-in-the-war-effort&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The American British Colonies Support Great Britain in the War Effort!&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13556/dopapp&quot;&gt;Dopapp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 250 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25648/what-would-out-of-water-warfare-look-like-for-underwater-people&quot;&gt;What would out-of-water warfare look like for underwater people?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 8 question votes, 2 answers, 127 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25896/battles-in-space&quot;&gt;Battles in space&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/320/jimmery&quot;&gt;Jimmery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 96 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26279/wars-just-a-metagame-son&quot;&gt;War&amp;#39;s just a [meta]game, son!&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2252/cort-ammon&quot;&gt;Cort Ammon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 162 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26300/how-would-the-widespread-creation-and-use-of-androids-affect-weaponry&quot;&gt;How would the widespread creation and use of androids affect weaponry?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/djmethaneman&quot;&gt;DJMethaneMan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 89 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25760/eco-terrorism-in-cyberpunk&quot;&gt;Eco-Terrorism in Cyberpunk&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 1 question votes, 3 answers, 123 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26380/other-than-surprise-what-is-our-chief-weapon&quot;&gt;Other than surprise, what is our chief weapon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;Dan Smolinske&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 115 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26408/can-a-medieval-age-sub-turn-the-tides-of-war&quot;&gt;Can a medieval age sub turn the tides of war?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 99 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26339/command-and-control-structures-in-a-war-where-time-travel-is-possible&quot;&gt;Command and control structures in a war where time-travel is possible&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 133 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25783/who-would-win-dinosaurs-vs-mammals&quot;&gt;Who would win? Dinosaurs vs Mammals&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 5 answers, 226 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26479/how-to-deal-with-our-giant&quot;&gt;How to deal with our giant?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18/liath&quot;&gt;Liath&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 94 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26149/zombies-attrition-warfare&quot;&gt;Zombies, attrition warfare&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 139 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T08:19:29.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2687" CreationDate="2015-09-28T08:22:47.483" Score="8" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our seventeenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 28 September - 12 October&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2685.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've seen a lot of questions here about planets and the people on them, but the existence or nonexistence of moons is also a very important factor to the planet, influencing factors such as tides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T15:23:22.377" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #17: Moons" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-09-28T12:01:45.203" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the subject of nourishment and food in general (sources, processing, storage, quantities, etc) is a vital part of world-building and species-building. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag could generate questions in relation to biology, culture, religion, society, technology and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T12:01:45.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-28T19:10:00.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I especially like the many answers to my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13819/how-to-build-a-city-surrounded-by-giant-spiders&quot;&gt;How to build a city surrounded by giant spiders?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember that I drew inspiration from a question by (I think) HDE226868. I cannot really remember what it was about, but it obviously struck me as a good one. I especially liked the [accepted] answer by Twelfth. His answer also inspired me to start writing more answers. Speaking of answers, my favorite answer that I have written is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14385/to-assault-a-dwarven-city/14389#14389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (come on, who doesn't like suffocating dwarves?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T19:10:00.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-09-29T05:59:14.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't answered so far, as I have troubles to find a single question that I can juge better than the others. And I am not sure I remember which was the question that got me here (from writers, unexpectedly). So back in history, my first upvote was on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/345/9685&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/90/sheraff&quot;&gt;sheraff&lt;/a&gt;'s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/313/how-could-dragons-be-explained-without-magic&quot;&gt;How could dragons be explained without magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very informative and illustrate well the depth of worldbuilding by having quite clear answers on unexpected premises. And not just a &lt;em&gt;'cause magic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T05:59:14.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2015-09-30T02:31:29.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a topic I feel quite strongly about.  I personally use MathJax a lot, in particular for quantities.  I find that it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Visually distinguishes them from the surrounding text, so that a reader can skim quickly through my answer without missing anything.  My reasoning for this is that I usually emphasize the calculation: for me, the important information is that there's $125~\text{kN}$ of thrust.  If it's important, I'll describe the source of the thrust somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keeps a consistent appearance outside and inside formulas.  This is the biggest reason to use MathJax in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of my type of usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We can use a simple formula to find the speed of a spacecraft in a&#xA;  $400\times 400~\text{km}$ circular orbit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$ v =&#xA; \sqrt{\frac{\mu}{a}}=\sqrt{\frac{\mu}{R_E+400~\text{km}}}=7.67~\text{km}/\text{s}&#xA; $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$\mu$ is Earth's gravitational parameter, equal to $3.98600441\cdot 10^{5}~\text{km}^3\text{s}^{-2}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It so happens that escape velocity at any altitude is equal to&#xA;  $\sqrt{2}$ times the speed of a circular orbit at that&#xA;  altitude,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; so $v_\text{esc}=\sqrt{2}\times&#xA; 7.67~\text{km}/\text{s}=10.8~\text{km}/\text{s}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; A proof of this is beyond the scope of this example, but&#xA;  essentially the idea is that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I typeset units with upright letters, and put a space between them and the numeric part of the quantity, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$1.6~\text{km}$&lt;/code&gt; ($1.6~\text{km}$)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$39.3~\text{m}/\text{s}$&lt;/code&gt; ($39.3~\text{m}/\text{s}$)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$9.8~\text{m}\cdot\text{s}^{-2}$&lt;/code&gt; ($9.8~\text{m}\cdot\text{s}^{-2}$)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the tilde &lt;code&gt;~&lt;/code&gt; for a space out of habit (in LaTeX's text mode it's a non-breaking space, which is useful to prevent a quantity from being split over two lines); also I just don't like the unbalanced spacing in &lt;code&gt;1.6\text{ m}&lt;/code&gt; (but this is just a personal preference).  An escaped space (&lt;code&gt;1.6\ \text{m}&lt;/code&gt;) works too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; surround all of the units in a quantity with a single &lt;code&gt;\text{ }&lt;/code&gt;: I encapsulate each unit individually.  This allows me to use mathmode constructs like &lt;code&gt;^{-2}&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;\cdot&lt;/code&gt; in compound or derived units.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;code&gt;\cdot&lt;/code&gt; ($\cdot$) to separate parts of a single quantity, i.e. between the significand and the exponent, and between units (when necessary).  I reserve the multiplication sign (&lt;code&gt;\times&lt;/code&gt;, $\times$) for multiplication of quantities or numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I use a thin space (&lt;code&gt;\,&lt;/code&gt;) to separate groups of digits.  This allows you to use either a dot or comma as the decimal separator without causing confusion, e.g. &lt;code&gt;$12\,345.678$&lt;/code&gt; ($12\,345.678$) or &lt;code&gt;$12\,345{,}678$&lt;/code&gt; ($12\,345{,}678$).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I try to avoid numbers with lots of places whenever possible, using either SI prefixes or scientific notation.  An exception is when comparing values: &quot;$12~\text{MW}$ vs. $760~\text{kW}$&quot; might be better stated as $12\,000~\text{kW}$ vs. $760~\text{kW}$.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the above points are mandated by the BIPM: see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SI brochure, section 5&lt;/a&gt;.  Here are some of the important bits (but I recommend you read it yourself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unit symbols are printed in roman (upright) type regardless of the type used in the surrounding text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A multiple or sub-multiple prefix, if used, is part of the unit and precedes the unit symbol without a separator. A prefix is never used in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Multiplication must be indicated by a space or a&#xA;  half-high (centred) dot (⋅). Division is indicated by a horizontal line, by a solidus (oblique stroke, /)&#xA;  or by negative exponents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not permissible to use abbreviations for unit symbols or unit names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number.  [An exception is made for degrees (and minutes and seconds) of arc, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for degrees Celsius.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For numbers with many digits the digits may be divided into groups&#xA;  of three by a thin space. Neither dots nor commas are&#xA;  inserted in the spaces between groups of three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When multiplying the value of quantities either a multiplication sign, ×, or brackets should be used, not a half-high (centred) dot. When multiplying numbers only the multiplication sign, ×, should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not conforming to this standard is not a matter of preference, or even poor style: it is just &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;.  (I told you I feel strongly about this!)  Do note that the BIPM uses $\times$, not $\cdot$, to separate the significand and exponent, although they do not mandate such usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I avoid using MathJax where it would introduce inconsistency in the style: for example, the footnote label &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;1&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) remains consistent with the surrounding text.  I feel it improper to use $^{1}$ (&lt;code&gt;$^{1}$&lt;/code&gt;) in this context because the footnote label should not be stylistically associated with quantities or formulas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't use a lot of math, or don't want the overhead of MathJax, I recommend the use of the following HTML entities and tags to improve your formatting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt; - non-breaking space, use to separate numbers and units, e.g. &lt;code&gt;1.6&amp;amp;nbsp;km&lt;/code&gt; (1.6&amp;nbsp;km).  This prevents a quantity's unit from being separated by a line break. (As in: 1.6 km.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;sdot;&lt;/code&gt; - multiplication dot, use to separate compound units, e.g. &lt;code&gt;5.8&amp;amp;nbsp;N&amp;amp;sdot;m&lt;/code&gt; (5.8&amp;nbsp;N&amp;sdot;m).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; - superscript, use for exponents, e.g. &lt;code&gt;6.62607&amp;amp;sdot;10&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&amp;amp;minus;34&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;J&amp;amp;sdot;s&lt;/code&gt; (6.62607&amp;sdot;10&lt;sup&gt;&amp;minus;34&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;nbsp;J&amp;sdot;s).  &lt;strong&gt;Don't&lt;/strong&gt; use the Unicode superscript/subscript characters, since a) most browsers will end up rendering them with a different font from the rest of the numbers, and b) using &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is better for accessibility and copy-pasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note the use of the minus sign (&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;minus;&lt;/code&gt;, &amp;minus;) instead of the hypen-minus (&lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt;, -).  Not only does it look better, it properly lines up with the plus sign (&lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt;, +) in a variable-width font:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - 1 (&lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 + 1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 &amp;minus; 1 (&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;minus;&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit these are not easy to type on mobile devices (one reason you may be avoiding MathJax in the first place!) but they do help your posts look more professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking into account the above information, let me tackle HDE's &quot;annoying&quot; examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;$125,000 newtons$.  This is wrong.  Let me say again, this &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in pretty much every way.  HDE's suggestion of $125{,}000\text{ newtons}$ is better, but we should really get rid of the comma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ 125\, 000\text{ newtons} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel like if you're spelling out a unit then it's better formatted as plain text (i.e. 125&amp;#8239;000&amp;nbsp;newtons), to make the &quot;word form&quot; of the unit consistent with the surrounding words.  (Note the use of the narrow no-break space &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#8239;&lt;/code&gt; as the thousands separator.)  If you want to treat the quantity as a symbol, I'd use the abbreviation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ 125\,000~\text{N} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, let's compactify the representation even more by removing all those zeros:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ 125~\text{kN} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much better!  (Of course if you don't want MathJax you can write 125&amp;nbsp;kN.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;$x^n$.  This one is much more a matter of preference.  x&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt; is perfectly valid, but in my opinion it fails to distinguish the mathematical expression from the surrounding text.  The change in font when reading $x^n$ is a clear sign that the reader's brain needs to switch gears, which eases comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've read this far, thanks for listening and happy typesetting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3407" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T02:31:29.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2653" CreationDate="2015-10-04T09:33:39.880" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the right side of the main site there's a box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jw4d4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jw4d4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However when clicking the &quot;stack exchange&quot; link, I don't get to a statistics page about Worldbuilding, but to the list of sites, which makes no sense to me (it certainly doesn't contain any statistics about this site). I remember that in the past this linked to one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/327/week/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;User Reputation Leagues&lt;/a&gt; for the site, which makes more sense; in any case, it should link to &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; site-specific statistics page, as that is what is promised by the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T08:36:44.123" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T08:36:44.123" Title="More stats on stackexchange?" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2015-10-04T10:25:55.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE list of sites &lt;em&gt;does actually&lt;/em&gt; contain some stats. When you click on a site's card, you'll be provided with some basic stats (some similar to the A51 stats, some different), and a link to visit the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it certainly isn't clear. Not a bug, but neither is it good design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T10:25:55.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-05T06:09:10.700" Score="9" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help&lt;/a&gt; secton states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;questions are welcome that are about [...] as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;not about&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that we have a rather huge number of questions which might be considered off-topic due to that reason. It might be interesting to clarify where to draw the line, to avoid random closing of some questions and not closing of others, which would (justly) appear unfair to some users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some discussion on the chat yesterday, to be read starting from @MonicaCellio's &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24508293#24508293&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between worldbuilding and plotbuilding? Examples that seem more like plot-generation to me (but have no close votes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. The examples that have been thrown in the discussion are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26927/murder-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;Murder on the Moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26918/humanely-reducing-the-human-population&quot;&gt;Humanely reducing the human population?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26794/uniting-the-wild-peoples-of-eow&quot;&gt;Uniting The Wild Peoples Of Eow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26791/rfp-put-me-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;RFP: Put me on the moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23350/could-an-average-person-take-over-the-world&quot;&gt;Could an average person take over the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as @HDE226868 &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24512063#24512063&quot;&gt;pointed&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quite a few of our top questions could be closed for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which calls for the present discussion to clarify what we want, as a community. Where to draw the line?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some points to keep in mind. Stricter closing mean less users and less questions. Weaker closing means that actuall world building questions might be drawn into the mass of plot-related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T02:19:18.530" Title="Questions about single individual actions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2015-10-05T06:23:17.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should have a strict closing policy, and might have to revise past questions, but we need to agree on what is and what isn't on-topic. To me, questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the actions of single individual within a given frame/world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;. However, the following points would be exceptions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The &quot;individual&quot; is a person (physics or moral) of authority. Like the government, the defense forces, a widely recognised spiritual leader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reactions of persons of authority participates in the creation of a world. Not so much on a geography level, but more to do with the society of that world. &lt;em&gt;Is the police allowed to send SWAT units for a 7 year-old child stealing a sweet in a sweet shop?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The question implies the modification of the world around the character. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something along the line of &lt;em&gt;What should be changed in the American electing process to allow the previously unkown Joe Average be elected POTUS within a 4 years?&lt;/em&gt; Yes it is about the actions of a single individual, but we are focusing on the world around that individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T06:23:17.753" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2015-10-05T13:29:48.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding is about creating systems or systems of systems.  Character-building or plot-building is about the actions of an individual in a system they cannot alter.&lt;/strong&gt;  So a question about how the leader of a political uprising might orchestrate a coup would be fine while a question about an underling in that same uprising would not be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some gray area here, of course.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brightline definition:&lt;/strong&gt; If the actions of a person role have the capacity to substantially alter the world-system then it's an okay question.  If the person is operating in a defined world-system (even if the world system itself may change over time) where that person has no power to change the system then it is an &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; question and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the distinction between a person and the role they fill.  Mahatma Ghandi is a man but his role was that of political transformer in Indian society.  So questions incorporating his role are okay.  Questions about who he is independent of that role are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T14:40:39.277" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T14:40:39.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2015-10-05T13:46:10.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Plato has taught me to be wary of simple answers, I want to provide this single criterion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions must not be about a single individual's reaction. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lot like the answer to that linked question, but I'd like to elaborate in my own way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's examine some edge cases. As bilbo_pingouin mentioned, we should accept questions about figures of authority. I would say this is somewhat false: we should not answer questions about the reaction of any individual. However, we may answer questions about the &lt;em&gt;authority&lt;/em&gt; of these figures, and how they are &lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to react. Thus, answers will not be about the single individual, but anyone in that position of power, and are more about the power itself than the people holding it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, in pingoin's second example, the question is not about the individual, but about the society/world that aids him/her. Since this particular individual could be just about anyone, the question isn't really about just one person, and anyway they're not reacting to anything. Since the individual is the object rather than the subject, more of the action than the reaction, it's fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem we may run into with this criterion (the only problem I can think of at the moment) is that questions that seek to fulfill it may end up being too broad; after all, how can you tell what the President would do if you can't specify who the president is? To this, I would say that these questions are off-topic for being too broad, or opinion based, or idea generation. Thus, we keep the 'questions about an individual' problem simple by pushing most of the edge cases into other categories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T13:46:10.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-05T19:25:17.270" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something that I'm sure others have noticed, but that always seems to plague my questions, is the fact that answerers tend to focus on parts of a question that don't actually matter. For example, while I admit my recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26663/how-big-can-a-moon-be-where-you-can-jump-to-its-planet&quot;&gt;How big can a moon be where you can jump to its planet?&lt;/a&gt; suffered from some inconsistencies (escaping the moon vs reaching the planet, I didn't realize at the time that the two were separate), I really don't think it's my fault that the first two answers were about how you can't run in low-gravity. The first paragraph of the question summarized part of the story I was writing, and I wanted to provide some sort of context just to give a possible application of the scenario, but I was in no way married to the concept, and I thought my question did a pretty good job of showing that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it got me thinking: is it actually a bad idea to provide this kind of context? Is it perhaps detrimental to the quality of a question to provide some sort of explanation of why you're asking, or how you will use the answers? Should questions seek to only give the necessary parameters of the question, and leave absolutely everything else out? For instance, maybe I shouldn't have provided the above example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, alternately, is there a good way to separate out world-information from question-information? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T14:54:46.807" Title="Does adding context hurt questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2015-10-05T21:30:36.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A world is composed of systems and interactions between those systems.  If a detail isn't pertinent to the operation of that world then don't include it.  However, this can get tricky because sometimes you don't know what details are pertinent to the world's operation; especially if the world employs physical, social, psychological, or chemical systems that author isn't familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crafting succinct questions that elicit exactly the kind of answers you hope for is hard.  I struggle with it myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T01:10:47.080" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T01:10:47.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-05T23:10:50.103" Score="11" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt to settle a discussion started by &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18395474#18395474&quot;&gt;Mourdos&lt;/a&gt; almost a year ago. I would like to know what others think of this. There is the full version &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hDtagn8cTsk3Lju33Db8eJsmiossDs45cScnPxsULHk/edit?pli=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but I made some modifications to the proposition, see below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this could help people write their questions and help users determine if the questions should be left open or closed. Even if the questions fall into these categories, it's always required to have some kind of scope, otherwise it could still be too broad. Overall, this is just a general guideline and it's not because a question doesn't meet these criteria that it should automatically be closed. Hopefully, we might be able to improve it, in order to make it even more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can classify most questions into categories. Using 3 things to classify them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is the START&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B is the RESULT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X is the CHANGE or process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving these types of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have A and X, give me B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have B and X, give me A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have A and B, give me X&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or in plain English:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT : &quot;What happens if I do&#xA;this?&quot; (Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have RESULT and CHANGE, give me START : &quot;How was it before?&quot; (Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have START and RESULT, give me CHANGE : &quot;How would I cause this?&quot;&#xA;(Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other combinations are not mentioned: having only one of these and asking for the other two is always too broad. It's typical of unclear or incomplete questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other possibilities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have either START or RESULT : &quot;Is this plausible?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking information about something specific can be on-topic as reality-check but can sometimes lack basic research. A lot of questions asking about a good concept but with no tomorrow falls into this category &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T12:27:27.213" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T22:07:38.740" Title="Finding a more objective way to identify questions that are too broad" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|too-broad|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2015-10-06T02:19:18.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about individual actions are a part of the issue (and I agree with other answers that they should be closed if character-specific but possibly not if role-based).  But I also think this is one type of broader &lt;em&gt;plot&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Given this situation, what would people do?&quot; is often problematic whether we're talking about an individual or a group -- it veers into idea-generation and it feels more like we're collaboratively writing a story than answering questions about building a world.  &lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;given this situation and this societal structure, how should we expect this segment of society to react?&quot; feels more about the world -- or it least it can be.  How would a militaristic society respond to a visit from seemingly-peaceful aliens?  How would a deeply religious society respond if their god showed up and said &quot;no, you got it wrong&quot;?  How would an ancient Roman army train to engage a zombie attack?  These all feel like they're on the on-topic side of the line to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line is very fuzzy, which is why I brought the question up in chat (thanks for bringing it here!).  Most of the examples listed in the question feel like they're on the off-topic side of the line to me, but saying exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; -- beyond &quot;plot-building&quot; -- turns out to be hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T02:19:18.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2015-10-06T12:24:12.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding context to your question could reveal an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377&quot;&gt;XY Problem&lt;/a&gt;. With the right information, someone reading your question could mention an alternative solution to the problem and inform you in comments. Whether you choose to employ the new solution and/or change your question at that point is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to separate world and question information, you could always use a horizontal rule. This also helps draw attention to certain pieces of information, as it serves as a mental break for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, there would be something important here, but this is just for demonstration. I use this last section to clarify what I expect from answers and the information here isn't directly tied to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just remember not to add too many horizontal rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post might start to look weird if you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T12:24:12.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2661" CreationDate="2015-10-06T13:06:35.560" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT : &quot;What happens if I do this?&quot; (Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is where we have most of our problems.  &quot;Suppose on Earth the following event had never happened -- what would change?&quot; is usually still too broad.  If you're asking this kind of question you probably need to &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; that change -- to biology, to societal development (which might need to be further scoped), to technological development... something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T13:06:35.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2661" CreationDate="2015-10-06T14:06:28.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest problem is that some of these are our most well voted questions and yet they really should fall into the too broad category.  But because they are interesting and well voted we are loathe to close them...not to mention they can be fun to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scope is what these questions most often need.  I enjoy the alternate world scenarios but people both asking and answering need to keep this in mind and the community needs to learn to close these questions even if we like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It often seems like we will close a question once, a small edit will be made and the question gets re-opened...but the question is still way way to broad.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; I guess I am personally torn on what we should do with these questions.  When the are well asked and interesting I feel like they should be in scope...when they aren't as interesting I feel like they should be closed.  I think the site carries that bias from us users and we are inconsistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That inconsistency should be resolved but I am not completely sure if there is an objective way to do that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T14:06:28.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T20:21:38.203" Score="11" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;One issue I've seen come up a few times deals with a sense of scale in space.  People's instincts on what can and cannot be done are often off by not just an order of magnitude, but an order of magnitude number of orders of magnitude!  The same set of numbers tend to come up for describing just how big a project is, and that tends to get accepted as the answer, and we all move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard at least one call to be able to just close these questions, but I'm not quite a fan of this.  Just because the answer is &quot;you weren't even close&quot; doesn't make the question devoid of value (consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lethal Neutrinos&lt;/a&gt;, one of the more epic order of magnitude problems I've ever seen).  Besides, sometimes its just plain fun to see someone crunch the math and show just how small our measly humanity actually is!  (&quot;Give me a long enough lever and I will move the world&quot; is really amusing if you ever try to crunch the numbers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does, however, make sense to do &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; with this class of problem.  They're easy to spot.  Just look for the answers using scientific notation with ridiculous exponents.  If people keep coming in with these issues, is there something we can do to make the existing answers more useful, or easier to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm pondering the idea of retroactively tagging questions with a tag devoted to sense-of-scale-in-space, and in the answer pointing future question askers to look for that tag.  I just don't know if that's a feasible approach or not... and I don't think my 5-word-long tag suggestion will fly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T09:16:54.733" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T09:16:54.733" Title="Dealing with sense of scale in space" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2015-10-07T14:55:12.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is a problem, and perhaps one that I have run into a few times with my own questions, but I don't think there is a cut-and-dry way to solve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I don't think this is just a problem with space. I can think of a few evolution questions where the right answer is 'evolution doesn't work that way because X'. There are just a lot of cases where people are asking questions about things for which they are not experts, and end up getting something wrong along the way. I think this is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;XY problem&lt;/a&gt;, though I may be overgeneralizing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the big problem, the one that's causing these space magnitude errors and so many others, is that people who ask questions don't know about what they're asking. And I think if they come in not knowing they're wrong, we're already doing all we can for them by explaining how they're wrong. If someone doesn't know how big space is, but they think they do, they're not going to go looking for any questions here that might put them in the right direction. They're going to ask about what they &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; they don't know, while what they &lt;em&gt;don't know&lt;/em&gt; they don't know remains hidden until someone points it out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T14:55:12.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2015-10-07T17:34:14.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exobiology&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T17:34:14.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-10-07T19:45:02.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really enjoyed (and am using) the answers provided in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11610/a-creature-with-sonic-powers&quot;&gt;A Human Hunter with Sonic Powers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T19:45:02.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-08T11:22:42.397" Score="9" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not actually 100% sure how the whole process is made. But an answer appear in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/a&gt; queue, and the reviewer can choose between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looks OK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how the queue is populated. The help says it is populated from the system. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/233912/285933&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; states that it comes from the post being flagged, and typically having a 0 or lower score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most often, the posts appearing in the queue are from new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I noticed that the answer wasn't posted more than 20 minutes previously. More often than not, there is no comment on the post indicating what is wrong. Or if there's one, it was too shortly before, that we cannot expect the OP to react on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us exclude false positive, and obvious cases of spams, rudeness, etc. But limit ourselves to what could be honest mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, I often have the dilemma that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot say the answer looks OK, as it does not,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want to edit, as I am not sure what the OP meant to add/say/remove,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommend deletion feels a bit too hammer-like on a new(ish) user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would be nice to have an option like: &lt;em&gt;recommend deletion as it is, but leave a chance to the user to actually makes some improvement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is the whole process can be done in less than 30 minutes. And new users aren't usually camping on SE to see what comes out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T18:10:46.083" Title="Are incorrect answers deleted too fast?" Tags="|feature-request|answers|low-quality|reviews|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2015-10-08T14:28:08.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Monica mentioned is my method as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will generally add a note explaining what is wrong with the answer and then say it looks ok...even if it doesn't necessarily.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want a user's first post to be deleted 20 minutes later because it popped up in queue...I feel like it chases new people away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of these is pretty limited, maybe 2 or 3 a day I would guess (someone want to run a query on that?) so its not as if we are littering the site with a ton of garbage if they do not end up editing their answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Small price to pay to keep new users coming back and learning the ins and outs of the site in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T14:28:08.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2015-10-08T15:05:11.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Incorrect answers should not be deleted.  They should be &lt;strong&gt;downvoted&lt;/strong&gt; and/or commented on.  Note that downvotes are reversible if the post is edited.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users should already have gotten feedback from the First Posts queue.  They shouldn't be getting feedback from the Low Quality queue.  Perhaps the problem here is that people aren't handling their First Posts duties properly.  Adding a comment at this point can help compensate for that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the answers that I see in the Low Quality queue are there for being too short, not incorrect.  I suspect that it's relatively rare for such people to start writing good posts after a weak start.  Does anyone have actual data showing otherwise?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of posts on which I commented:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27204/2113&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27204/2113&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/26998/2113&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/26998/2113&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26925/2113&quot;&gt;What is the highest acceleration that a normal human could safely endure for (say) 8 hours?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26713/2113&quot;&gt;How different would the world be if animals in the same kingdom could bear offspring?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the four, only one responded to my comment by updating the post.  That one time was on a question, not an answer.  It's my impression that that's typical.  Askers are more likely to come back and check their posts than answerers.  Particularly first time posters of either type.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T15:15:31.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2015-10-08T18:10:46.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The users might tend to vote without thinking about the consequences too much, because they are not the only one sharing the decision of deletion (I know, I did in the past). Because there are other people required for the deletion, they might think that the others will write something. The problem comes when the others are thinking the same resulting in a total lack of action. This was actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;studied&lt;/a&gt; by sociologist, although maybe not on the Internet. Even if it's not mentioned in the rules, if they want their community to prosper, it's in their interest to help new members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding how long one should wait before casting a vote depend on&#xA;   one question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will the user edit the question or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Probably not&lt;/strong&gt;: Oddly maybe, sometimes the answers is no. I'm referring to&#xA;unregistered users. While we have at least one UU (unregistered user)&#xA;with an account over 4 mounts old with several questions/answers,&#xA;this is quite the exception. Normally these users only come once and&#xA;the never come back. There are no possibilities of improvements. If&#xA;the post is unclear/does not answer the question, I see no reason to&#xA;keep it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about posts like these that was posted while I am writing   this message by Franco Manco, a UU, on this question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14949/in-a-global-apocalypse-killing-most-of-humanity-what-would-be-the-impact-of-nuc&quot;&gt;In a global apocalypse killing most of humanity, what would be the impact of Nuclear Fallout?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally thought of Mad Max when you mentioned Australia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with this universe but maybe it does have    similarities. Since the user is not explaining anything, I have no idea what he is talking about. I would recommend deletion or having the post moved to the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More likely:&lt;/strong&gt; Some answers are just short and that can be a problem. Short answers&#xA;can answer the question but if it's not well explained (not clear)&#xA;they will get down-voted and sometimes deleted. Short answers should&#xA;not be deleted if they are well written and are answering the&#xA;question. Our most ever up-voted answer is actually pretty short. It&#xA;has more than 200 up-votes exactly for the reasons I just mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How long to wait before taking action&lt;/strong&gt; (when encountering low quality posts)? Ideally: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check if it's from an UU and if yes: recommend deletion since it's not going to get any edit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not: Comment to help improve the post. After, you could click on &quot;look ok&quot; to make it exit the review queue faster in order to avoid a hasty deletion by other users or, click on &quot;skip&quot; hoping that the others will be as patient as you. It's not bad enough to outright delete it/ or it was posted by a new user. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wait. Hopefully, it will be edited by the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not: Eventually it might get further downvoted or deleted but at least the user had the time to edit the post. If it's not deleted, that's not a problem either. If it was inappropriate for the site (Spam, offensive content) it would have bee en deleted on sight. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, flags can be used for different reasons that are not explicitly mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make people aware of problems. A bad post needing guidance for example. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Promoting the donwvoting of a bad post without deleting it, hoping the user will improve it. (does this sounds like bullying?) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T18:10:46.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2015-10-09T03:59:17.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think worldbuilding has a unique challenge because we have to walk the fine line of not engaging in idea generation, but simultaniously very few WB questions are purely factual, by the nature of world building.  If you make the problem too context sensitive, it becomes too hard for others to apply the answers.  If you make it too generic, it may be ineffective for solving your problem at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been toying with whether there's a format that permits asking a nested question, accepting answers for both generic and specifics, because I think that might generate answers that are useful for others.  I just haven't nailed down a format well enough for my tastes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T03:59:17.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2685" CreationDate="2015-10-09T17:41:38.990" Score="7" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In respect to the question here on Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2659/2138&quot;&gt;Does adding context hurt questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was checking out that discussion because I think my most recent question (&lt;em&gt;and, I feel like a lot of my questions&lt;/em&gt;) is suffering from this somewhat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/27243/2138&quot;&gt;Blind Humanoid Species - how would they discover the concept that some species have sight?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am trying to focus on a scientific path which would be plausible for an intelligent, blind, non-hunter society to discover that other species have sight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am struggling with the view that &quot;this setup is not possible&quot;, or &quot;never&quot;. This is not a reality-check question, and I'm encountering a lot of resistance when it comes to the existing conditions. It's actually got me a bit frustrated, and regretfully a bit defensive, which is why I'm posting here to try and figure out what I'm doing wrong, or if its just a bad question for this site, or if I should just get used to having those answers generally being top-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I asking my question incorrectly? Should I just go and explain the entire world, even though my particular question shouldn't need to incorporate all those details? Maybe all these details are things which a reader would have to discover as they are reading my story!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm not asking incorrectly, do we need to police for &quot;this is not possible&quot; more closely? None of the answers which directly disagree with the base setup conditions are useful, so I have downvoted them - but is that enough? Other people seem to upvote them, because they are more &lt;em&gt;realistic&lt;/em&gt;, but they are not &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's related to the problem in: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/possible-new-non-reality-check-tag&quot;&gt;Possible new &amp;#39;non-reality-check&amp;#39; tag?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;though I don't believe a tag should be necessary if this is even a problem&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T03:07:42.980" Title="Reality Checking on questions not tagged &quot;reality-check&quot; | or ask questions differently?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-09T17:43:44.210" Score="10" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I caught myself almost entering a downvoting spree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not because I was enraged, hungry or somehow ill tempered, but because some of the questions that I read were a bit... hard on my mind. I'm not posting examples for now, I'm not sure if they are needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not my intention to point any fingers, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time, I walk around WorldBuilding reading what people are doing and casting an eventual comment about the content. I'm more of a lurker, so to speak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, on my usual stroll around World Building, I found some... less than cohesive questions, asking information about worlds that... just don't work in the context the author wants it to work without some heavy hand waving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that this sometimes happens because someone wants to build not a &lt;em&gt;World&lt;/em&gt;, but a &lt;em&gt;Story&lt;/em&gt;, and is asking about story elements without considering the worldbuilding elements per se. Those questions normally use &quot;Consider that assumption X is true&quot; or something similar. That's mostly ok, but... sometimes the &quot;X&quot; is something that makes the world, as proposed, be impossible or nonviable. I see that, if the author goes that way, his end result would be something that doesn't really helps the suspension of disbelief regarding his works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about fantasy-based, crazy worlds that are, by design, &lt;em&gt;weird&lt;/em&gt;, like Discworld ou Synnibar. I'm talking about worlds that are &quot;Like Earth but with this critical thing different&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first impulse when I see a world with such a impossible setting (let's say, a question that assumes that human evolution would be the same in a world with radically different parameters) is to comment the perceived problem pointing what I noticed that was a bit off. If the author keeps pushing his view as correct, and keeps asking for handwaving, I tend to just downvote and disengage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if that is the correct way to go, tho. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;impossible settings&quot; are only a problem when the proposed world has realistic overtones - science-based, evolution-based, hard-science questions... things like that. Questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt; obviously are not in scope here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much... world cohesion should we expect from questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="2138" LastEditDate="2015-10-09T18:01:35.637" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T18:55:20.467" Title="Does a world in a given question need cohesion?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2015-10-09T18:37:11.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem is that you cumulate three points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a very stretched starting point,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a certain incoherence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a wrong tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our world, the view was always developed when there was light. There are some sonar-like systems, but it usually complement the view instead of replacing it. This is because the view helps protect the individual and make more precise actions at close distance. So it's hard to accept. Plus suddenly there a new part in the world, full of light and creatures with functioning eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have evolved not seeing, it is very likely that they developed other form of recognising the space. Basically because any species which would do that would dominate the whole animal kingdom. So think sonar, advanced touch, smell, etc. In that case how can they not notice the new animals? They should have good senses which should allow to gather some information, at some distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scientific-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scientific-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scientific-development&lt;/a&gt; and the question about scientific definition of light. Which seems to be orienting on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, even if you did not use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the problem of that question is the combination of those three different points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot judge your other questions, as I haven't checked them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T18:37:11.447" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2680" CreationDate="2015-10-09T18:45:05.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question, like many on world building is yes...and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The yes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes a world should &lt;em&gt;make sense&lt;/em&gt; in the end.  When someone builds a world, as a user/consumer/viewer/reader/whatever I expect a logically consistent world (within the premises outlined.  I am not saying all worlds need to be scientifically accurate, but they should be plausible and (again) internally consistent.  Worlds that do not do these things drive me absolutely crazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The no:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building is a site for asking questions about creating your world...none of us are experts in everything, some of us (me included) are not experts in &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;...we dabble.  Anyway, odds are the main question that drove this discussion is this one:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27243/blind-humanoid-species-how-would-they-discover-the-concept-that-some-species-h&quot;&gt;Blind Humanoid Species - how would they discover the concept that some species have sight?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will premise this with, I up-voted this question.  Why you ask?  Well because it is an interesting question and an interesting scenario.  It made me think.  That the premise is flawed does not in my opinion mean it is a bad question.  We all have flaws in our logic and gaps in our knowledge...&lt;strong&gt;That is why we are here asking each other questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess my point, if I have one, is that an interesting question with a flawed premise shouldn't require down votes.  I reserve down votes for poorly asked questions.  I figure a question that generates (at this point) 6 answers is worth of an up-vote because people are interested, even if only to tell the OP that the question is flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Point:&lt;/strong&gt;  So in the end, yes, your world should be cohesive, but while you are working on it you are just trying to get to that point and maybe you learn that in the end your idea just isn't great...better to find that out now than when you put a finished product together and people go...&lt;em&gt;&quot;what the hell is going on this makes no sense&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T18:45:05.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2680" CreationDate="2015-10-09T18:58:07.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like James, I don't think we can give a definitive answer. The possible actions to an implausible question are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accept the premises and give the best answer possible,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comment to explain why the premises are not plausible/coherent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suggest an answer, modifying slightly the premises. This might be ignored or even downvoted, but at least you tried to help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvote the question. In particular if there are incoherences and the OP denies/refuses to react to comments pointing it out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pass on to the next question and forget you ever read that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that if comments and constructive answer does not help, leave it at that, you don't know the reasons behind the question. If the OP does not at the end get a satisfying answer, he might reconsider the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T18:58:07.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2015-10-09T21:41:32.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. This irks me. A lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hm. I think that this issue arises from a more general class of problems in questions dealing with astronomy: imagination exceeds common sense. All three of the questions &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2667/dealing-with-sense-of-scale-in-space#comment7225_2667&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling mentioned&lt;/a&gt; are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Yet the only possible science that you could put in an answer to one of those questions would be along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Science doesn't allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, these questions are based on the premise that things are a lot simpler than they are, which isn't true. I see this a lot on Worldbuilding - no offense, all - and I feel like it's been happening a lot more lately (which has made me less inclined to answer questions). My current method of dealing with this annoying phenomenon is to not look at the question any further. Why? Because even worse than the fact that the question is unrealistic is the fact that many (though not all) of the answers that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; go along the lines of &quot;This isn't possible&quot; are so far-fetched that they would be better off used in a low-budget soft sci-fi flick - and yet they still get upvotes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to offend people, but it's not just the questions that are the problem here. The answers contribute just as much, because they are often written from a naïve point of view. Sure, there are the answers that work with the numbers, but those are the answers that are forced to conclude with &quot;No can do.&quot; My point is that these answers aren't helping. They're hurting, and making the site a worse resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End of micro-rant. So what do we do? I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2670/627&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh's answer&lt;/a&gt; in that an overarching policy would be A Bad Idea™. However, I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; advocate doing something, and that something would be twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letting the author of the question know that their idea is fairly far-fetched.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waiting for any forthcoming changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no changes come, closing the question as off-topic via a custom reason (if people like this), along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is based on false premises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or something.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T15:01:10.780" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T15:01:10.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2015-10-10T07:02:29.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These kinds of questions are very difficult on SE.  To work with you to get proper context, we are obliged to engage in a conversation rather than the query/response format preferred by SE.  This does get done in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is impossible for a question poster to provide all relevant context.  The answers always make some assumptions about what you are looking for.  In many cases (especially with the scientific tag), realism is the default metric for measuring how good an answer is.  In this case, that wasn't the right metric for us to use, because you weren't really looking for a &quot;realistic&quot; situation.  You had another metric in mind, and that's fine.  Not everybody should be bound to making worlds that are agreed upon by a consensus that they are &quot;realistic.&quot;  Writing would be boring if that was the only acceptable definition of realism.  Consensus leads to staleness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, without the agreed upon default metric for &quot;realism,&quot; answers have a real challenge: how do we figure out what is the right solution to the problem.  We have to question how deeply you expect a reader to probe into the world.  If you plan on never having the reader break the surface of your society, and the society plays little to no part in the story, one set of answers becomes most valid.  If you plan on having your readers not only read the story, but also build their own stories in the world, a different set of answers becomes valid.  Looking at the issues with evolution of blind humanoids, I'd actually be tempted to work up an answer involving the Xel Naga watching the species from orbit, tweaking its evolutionary path because the Xel Naga need a blind species to combat the Zerg (For those who don't know, the Xel Naga are a race from the Starcraft world which shaped the genetics of species for milinina, before their own creations turned on them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been struggling with this challenge for a while.  How do we fit a proper discussion of metrics into the SE format.  It's usually bad form to change the question, but if someone points out something contradictory, can you drop it from the question?  The best I've found so far is to use comments, just like they were in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T07:02:29.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2015-10-12T13:52:31.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 32 questions and 100 answers, for an average of 3.13 answers per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26773/moons-of-moons-of-moons&quot;&gt;Moons of Moons of Moons&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11087/varrick&quot;&gt;Varrick&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;89 total votes, 25 question votes, 4 answers, 4273 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26663/how-big-can-a-moon-be-where-you-can-jump-to-its-planet&quot;&gt;How big can a moon be where you can jump to its planet?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;81 total votes, 16 question votes, 7 answers, 4899 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27185/thats-no-moon-its-a-space-station-how-big-can-a-space-ship-be-before-it-coll&quot;&gt;That&amp;#39;s no moon! It&amp;#39;s a space station! How big can a space ship be before it collapses on itself?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;31 total votes, 12 question votes, 3 answers, 1323 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26927/murder-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;Murder on the Moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;27 total votes, 2 question votes, 6 answers, 802 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26730/how-will-the-world-react-if-our-moon-turns-into-black-hole&quot;&gt;How will the world react if our moon turns into black hole?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;26 total votes, 6 question votes, 9 answers, 529 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27062/effects-on-the-earth-if-the-moon-was-at-1-10th-current-distance&quot;&gt;Effects on the Earth if the moon was at 1/10th current distance?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;23 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 1233 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27189/how-to-get-rid-of-moon-stations&quot;&gt;How to get rid of moon stations?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14037/angelo-fuchs&quot;&gt;Angelo Fuchs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;22 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 116 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27082/how-do-we-keep-the-moon-from-eating-the-world&quot;&gt;How Do We Keep The Moon From Eating The World?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;Dan Smolinske&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 7 question votes, 3 answers, 574 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26672/why-build-space-habitats-on-within-moons&quot;&gt;Why build space habitats on/within moons?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;19 total votes, 7 question votes, 5 answers, 623 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26561/what-does-my-moon-colony-need&quot;&gt;What does my moon colony need?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/5002/dan-smolinske&quot;&gt;Dan Smolinske&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 7 question votes, 5 answers, 217 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26527/get-keep-air-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;Get/Keep Air on the Moon!&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 7 question votes, 5 answers, 264 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27134/can-a-robot-experience-an-identity-crisis-which-is-not-by-design&quot;&gt;Can a robot experience an identity crisis (which is not by design)?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 127 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27171/what-is-the-minimum-level-of-technology-to-enable-interlunar-civilization&quot;&gt;What is the minimum level of technology to enable interlunar civilization?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 6 question votes, 1 answers, 301 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26791/rfp-put-me-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;RFP: Put me on the moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10970/hannover-fist&quot;&gt;Hannover Fist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 143 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26595/moon-composed-of-optical-material&quot;&gt;Moon composed of optical material&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/366/culyx&quot;&gt;Culyx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 75 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27254/with-what-precision-timing-can-we-send-a-missile-to-strike-the-moon&quot;&gt;With what precision &amp;amp; timing can we send a missile to strike the moon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 120 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26717/how-could-i-make-the-moon-appear-larger&quot;&gt;How could I make the moon appear larger?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/lord-of-eden&quot;&gt;Lord of Eden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 123 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26613/what-kinds-of-stories-would-people-from-a-forest-moon-tell-about-their-moon&quot;&gt;What kinds of stories would people from a forest moon tell about their &amp;quot;moon&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 77 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26578/can-we-build-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon-with-present-technology&quot;&gt;Can we build a space elevator on the Moon with present technology?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 165 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26896/largest-stable-object-in-daily-orbit&quot;&gt;Largest stable object in &amp;quot;daily&amp;quot; orbit&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13484/michael-richardson&quot;&gt;Michael Richardson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 47 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26712/how-to-convince-king-arthur-you-have-just-returned-from-the-moon&quot;&gt;How to convince King Arthur you have just returned from the Moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 141 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26639/how-to-blanket-moon-with-a-permanent-atmosphere&quot;&gt;How to blanket moon with a permanent atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 99 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26609/making-doomsayers-right-an-eclipse-that-matters&quot;&gt;Making doomsayers right - a moon(s), planet alignment that matters&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 93 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27449/is-a-moon-inside-a-hollow-earth-possible&quot;&gt;Is a moon inside a hollow Earth possible?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 38 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27019/what-would-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon-be-made-out-of&quot;&gt;What would a space elevator on the moon be made out of?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 122 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26826/what-is-the-most-effective-way-to-build-road-on-mars-and-moon&quot;&gt;What is the most effective way to build road on Mars and Moon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 86 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26634/how-can-you-make-a-stable-configuration-including-a-moon-that-has-a-moon&quot;&gt;How can you make a stable configuration including a moon that has a moon?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 475 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26816/seasons-months-on-a-habitable-gas-giant-moon&quot;&gt;Seasons/Months on a Habitable Gas Giant Moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14177/midwinter-sun&quot;&gt;Midwinter Sun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 81 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27376/how-primitive-should-the-alien-technology-be-to-exchange-knowledge-and-culture&quot;&gt;How primitive should the alien technology be to exchange knowledge and culture?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -2 question votes, 2 answers, 35 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26704/spacecraft-pulled-by-the-moon&quot;&gt;Spacecraft pulled by the moon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13492/king-of-panes&quot;&gt;king of panes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -2 question votes, 2 answers, 41 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26909/shall-the-moon-be-bigger-or-closer&quot;&gt;Shall the Moon be Bigger or Closer?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-2 total votes, -4 question votes, 1 answers, 40 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26630/the-moon-vs-the-earth-no-longer-moving&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26630/the-moon-vs-the-earth-no-longer-moving&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13506/feidhelm&quot;&gt;Feidhelm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-3 total votes, -3 question votes, 1 answers, 93 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T13:52:31.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2717" CreationDate="2015-10-12T15:04:25.033" Score="6" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our eighteenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/architecture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;architecture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;architecture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 12 October - 26 October&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We spend so much time building entire worlds that we often forget about building smaller things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T17:27:44.523" Title="Fortnightly topic challenge #18: Architecture" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2690" CreationDate="2015-10-13T17:04:00.237" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire idea of a &amp;quot;Top 3&amp;quot; question seems to scream &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Too Broad&amp;quot; when first looked at, and if it isn't worded carefully it will almost certainly end up being &amp;quot;too opinionated&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an extreme example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the top 3 traits of an &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; alien species?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no constraints in that question to narrow down what we are looking for, and with the way the question is asked it seems like a popularity contest. It wouldn't take long for that question to be closed, though it would be fun for the 3 seconds it lasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, what if we asked a more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the 3 most important engineering rules to take into account when considering the effects of gravity on architecture, (&lt;em&gt;such as when you wish to construct a new house&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then constrained the answers, as well as provided a way to grade them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep each of your 3 points to a eighty-word maximum (&lt;em&gt;maximum of 240 total&lt;/em&gt;) - longer is not always better. Links are encouraged but should add more detailed information rather than containing your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; 3 are those which are capable of covering the most, while also being the most concise and explanatory within the word limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this still too opinionated? Encompass &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot;? Too Broad? Do you see improvements that would make it better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more general sense, would it be possible to have well-asked &amp;quot;list&amp;quot; questions if they constrain themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see these questions being used for &amp;quot;where to start&amp;quot; on extremely broad worldbuilding topics such as Architecture or Language and I think they would very useful - yet I could also see how, since the topics are so broad, we might prefer that we just don't ask those questions here - and that people go and do their broad research elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T18:56:46.333" Title="Is it possible to ask a good &quot;Top 3&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2689" CreationDate="2015-10-13T18:56:46.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Top 3 something tends to be opinion-based. So you need to &lt;strong&gt;provide an objective metric to rank&lt;/strong&gt; the objects you are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Top 3 guitarists of all time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is opnion-based, whereas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Top 3 richest guitarists of all time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;isn't. But then it's too broad. So you need to consider a &lt;strong&gt;limited number of pool of objects to be compared&lt;/strong&gt;. There are and have been thousands and thousands of guitarists in the world. So with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Top 3 richest Jazz guitarists, which played on at least 3 CDs released in the 1970s, selling a minimum of 100,000 copies with an Australian nationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you get to something. But then it's off-topic because it's not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a top3 question might be possible, but it isn't easy. And by the time you get it to fit the format, you probably found the answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to your specific question, reducing the size of the answer does not narrow down the scope of a question. So, it is still too broad and opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T18:56:46.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-10-15T14:32:07.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15061/how-would-a-reflecting-oven-jay-evolve/15069#15069&quot;&gt;The Reflecting Oven-Jay's evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why but it was a very satisfying question/answer. (Not only the top two answers complete each other and were accepted but the question itself originated from another topic by another user). The question also had me ponder evolution as a whole from a survival/need perspective. Something I had never really done on that level before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this is when Worldbuilding SE is at its best. : )  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8440" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T14:32:07.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-16T03:37:12.273" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;i made an account here to ask questions on the viability of mine and my friends work-in-progress webcomic, specifically the biology and astronomical bodies.&#xA;between me and my friend i am making this part of the comic while she makes the characters and setting and such, with overall plot and things being shared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what im wondering, is if she can join this site or use my account to ask about character design and/or character creation and most other things like that. if i cant, can you point me to any sites or other sections of StackExchange where i can?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14515" LastEditorUserId="14515" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T08:20:47.483" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T19:14:32.413" Title="whats the extent of character building allowed here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2694" CreationDate="2015-10-16T05:24:55.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two points to consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;, you are not supposed to ask a question about character development and/or plots. Apart from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt;, there are some discussions about it around here. Last in date &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2654/questions-about-single-individual-actions&quot;&gt;Questions about single individual actions&lt;/a&gt;. As you can read in there, it is possible under some circumstances to ask questions related to some character. But I suppose that's not what you had in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On other SE sites. You might consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers SE&lt;/a&gt;. But there again, you should consider if it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; or not. But Writers is intended more for writing techniques, general suggestions about how to build a plot or even a character, but strictly speaking a character development will be off-topic.  As far as I'm aware, there aren't any specific sites dedicated to characters and/or plot development. &lt;em&gt;Why?&lt;/em&gt; Because it is too specific. The main idea of SE questions is to offer a solution that might be interesting not only to the original poster, but also to someone else later. Character development questions tend to be either too narrow (not useable by someone else), too opinion-based (&lt;em&gt;What's the best hair color&lt;/em&gt;) or even what we call here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you might also peruse around WB and Writers, as there are a number of characters-related questions. That would give you a feeling of what is allowed and what isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T19:14:32.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2700" CreationDate="2015-10-16T15:49:38.600" Score="13" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I created a question about what adult entertainment would look like in the future. I deleted it quite quickly afterwards because people were concerned anti-porn filters would view it as offensive and we risked blocking the entire network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about this on this meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2193/should-we-add-a-nsfw-tag&quot;&gt;should we add a NSFW tag?&lt;/a&gt;, where the question I created is also mentioned) and on the network-wide meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/258126/what-is-the-network-policy-on-questions-involving-adult-themes&quot;&gt;What is the network policy on questions involving adult themes?&lt;/a&gt;, which also mentions the question I deleted). On this meta, I asked the wrong question (we shouldn't use a tag for such a thing), but on the network meta, there appeared to be somewhat of a consensus that self-imposed censorship is not the way to go to avoid external censorship, and that invidiual sites should determine their own policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Network Meta says that we should determine our own policy on adult topics. Could we come to a consensus in this meta questions? To what extent do we allow them, if at all? What ground rules should we have for such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that we already have some topics that could be considered adult aspects of worldbuilding, like inbreeding, interspecies sexuality, genital transplants, centaur breastfeeding and possibly other ones as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T00:07:37.977" Title="What is the worldbuilding policy on questions and answers involving adult aspects of worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2697" CreationDate="2015-10-16T16:12:59.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say as long as it's on-topic and isn't just trying to be deliberately offensive, it should be allowed (see my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2412/how-to-approach-worldbuilding-ideas-about-gender-and-sexuality&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a longer answer, what I'm saying is that there are good questions out there that some people may find offensive or may trip some filters, but to outright reject these questions can lead to a slippery slope. We don't want to turn away good, intelligent, honest folk just because they have questions we don't feel comfortable answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't want this site to become a den of scum and villainy. We already get way too many 'Hey, what if I replace the Moon with whipped cream?' kinds of questions, and things like that are just as likely to turn away good users and attract bad ones as any NSFW question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think that we should be somewhat more critical of questions, especially those we feel are only asking to be entertaining, shocking, or outright offensive. We should endeavor to keep both our questions and our answers professional, no matter the subject. At the end of the day, if an 'adult' question has run the gauntlet and remained open and answered, then we'll know that anyone who sees it will either respect it for being intelligent, professional, objective, and well-thought-out, or not respect it because they're immature and/or ignorant. That second option really shouldn't describe our target audience, so it's a win-win. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T16:12:59.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2697" CreationDate="2015-10-16T16:19:06.603" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very good question. Honestly, when I asked asked a question about a future society with slavery, I structured it in such a way that I didn't have to be too specific about exactly what a slave might be required to do (it really wasn't germane to the discussion; the question was how to justify slavery in general, not how to justify using a slave for more than manual labor, which has plenty of historical precedent saying, in effect, &quot;just do it&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the network-level consensus that self-censorship is not the way to go, I still think that if a questioner can edit out the sexuality from his subject matter on this site, not only is the question closer to PG-rated, it could end up more helpful to other people with a similar question who might be dissuaded from reading your thread if the subject matter is too explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions, however, simply can't be expressed in such a way. While there might have been a slightly more tactful way to ask the question about centaur breastfeeding, there really isn't any way to dodge it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can scope the question in such a way as to avoid sexual connotations, that would likely be best, not only to avoid tripping filters, but to garner answers, that, while applicable to an adult theme, are equally applicable to other scenarios. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can't avoid the topic, keep the language of the question and all answers clinical and anatomical; no slang or other vulgarities as those are extremely likely to trip content filters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use as much tact as possible while being clear about the question being asked, especially in titles; users don't have to browse into your question if they know it's NSFW from the title, but the title itself must be PG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No explicit illustrations or animations of any kind, no matter how clinical. People have been fired for browsing blogs on breastfeeding during lunch break; we don't need anyone being forced to world-build because they've lost their day job and have &quot;fired for watching porn at work&quot; on their employment record.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I debated suggesting the use of spoiler tags for explicitly NSFW content, but ultimately decided against it; spoiler tags can't be used in titles, which should be the first thing keeping someone from browsing NSFW questions from a work or public computer, and ultimately using spoiler tags for non-spoiler content just pollutes the intent of the feature and makes the question harder to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11434" LastEditorUserId="11434" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T16:26:01.537" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T16:26:01.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2697" CreationDate="2015-10-16T20:54:21.080" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree with DaaahWhoosh. We're a little squeamish here in the US about sex; however, just because people want to keep their heads in the sand and more importantly keep their children's heads in the sand doesn't mean that I think sex should be avoided just to 'protect' some unspecified children from 'harm'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you have an honest question for building your world, you should ask it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do also feel that if the question feels deliberately offensive or for shock value only, it should be closed. Entertainment questions would be taken on a case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as offensive goes, Stack Exchange had a site that made it to private beta that was specifically for questions about sex, techniques, vocabulary, etc. It failed but I don't believe it was because of the actual content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about a sexual practice you want in one of your books and are looking for how it might have come about or some other social issues it would create more power too you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at no time am I advocating visual aids to accompany these questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-10-17T00:07:37.977" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T00:07:37.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-16T20:59:10.750" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question which revolves around a group of characters plotting the mass extinction of a species. However, I haven't yet not posted it as I'm not sure it fits within the scope of Worldbuilding. (I have a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; good description of the creatures they wish to eliminate, but no idea on the most effective manner to accomplish it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a question about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to do a mass extinction of a very specific species on-topic? Or am I barking up the wrong tree (or however the saying goes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14576" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-10-17T00:00:52.097" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T00:00:52.097" Title="Is a question about planning a mass extinction on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2701" CreationDate="2015-10-16T22:58:14.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting idea. I'll say that it is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal question here would be along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If [A] happens, will it create a mass extinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a definite answer (either yes or no). There's no subjectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I create a mass extinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you're venturing into uncertain waters. In general, this kind of thing can be Too Broad, but here it might be okay, because very few things can (realistically) cause a mass extinction. You'll probably get some wacky answers about gamma-ray bursts and the like, but those are impossible for the immediate future. Only a small amount of events could cause a mass extinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you phrase it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the best way of starting a mass extinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you're in trouble, because &quot;best&quot; is usually subjective. You'd need to give a set of hard, definite criteria for this to work. See the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective/Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2253/how-do-i-create-open-ended-questions-with-subjective-answers&quot;&gt;How do I create open ended questions with subjective answers?&lt;/a&gt; right here on Worldbuilding meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if you attack it the right way, the question will be fine. Although I don't think anyone has ever asked about them before on Worldbuilding (cue someone proving me wrong), mass extinctions are on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T22:58:14.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2709" CreationDate="2015-10-19T14:00:31.603" Score="8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;About a day ago, I asked the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27925/skydiving-from-a-space-station&quot;&gt;Skydiving... From a space station&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got a fair number of votes, and it was on the Hot Network questions list for a couple of hours. Then, it was closed as a duplicate of this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25851/returning-from-iss-felix-style&quot;&gt;Returning from ISS, Felix style&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are some similarities, like the height of the jump that question has some tight constraints, and doesn't answer the question I proposed, which takes place a couple hundred years in the future, with less tight constraints. A user also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27925/skydiving-from-a-space-station?lq=1#comment73109_27925&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not a duplicate -- the other question asks, &quot;Given these resources, could someone parachute from the ISS?&quot; This asks, &quot;Is it reasonable to operate something that would allow you to parachute from the ISS?&quot; The resources necessary is open. The answer to the previous question was no. The answer to this question is yes. – Brythan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just wondering why it was closed, and requesting that it be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T12:48:57.620" Title="Why was my question closed as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2015-10-19T14:51:12.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a look at both questions and while the premise is the same the requirements on the questions are very different.  The Felix question gives a set scenario which = dead HALO jumper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ethan's question on the other hand allows more wiggle room in the form of future tech and asks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And if so, is there anything that could be changed to make if&#xA;  somewhat plausible?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am voting to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T14:51:12.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2708" CreationDate="2015-10-19T18:31:43.273" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would existence of a stun gun affect Worldbuilding Meta? Look, I am not against that idea specifically, I just feel it is too much of asking for one specific topic, which is not amusing for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asked so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27990/would-hunting-be-affected-by-existence-of-a-stun-gun&quot;&gt;Would hunting be affected by existence of a stun gun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27980/what-would-the-rules-for-carry-and-use-of-weapons-be-affected-by-reliable-stun-g?lq=1&quot;&gt;What would the rules for carry and use of weapons be affected by reliable stun guns?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27982/how-will-police-be-armed-and-trained-in-a-world-where-effective-stun-guns-exist&quot;&gt;How will police be armed and trained in a world where effective stun guns exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are also Fortnightly challenges (and I did not find the Moons one amusing either), but what I am basically trying to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much should you go into your big idea and ask about specific aspect of such idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T18:16:21.313" Title="How much of one idea is too much?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-10-19T18:43:19.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What and how would we go about salvaging an alien craft in the immediate days after a crash?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In present-day Portland, Oregon, USA, a large 'saucer' of 350m radius and a thickness of 30m has crashed into the west hills leaving debris, but remaining largely intact.  It's understood that no aliens have survived, and the human count is very low.  Forest fires have been contained.  Now what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Here's my problem: it's way too broad.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I add specifications to the Alien's civilization, the types of things known and unknown to be available on the craft, etc.?  My more important focus is the procedure scenarios immediately undertaken locally, nationally, and internationally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I list that there's a warp drive, an infinite-energy source, etc. on-board, which gives rise to jurisdictional fighting between countries, agencies, etc. would adding these specifications help make this an acceptable question?  Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T18:43:19.657" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2705" CreationDate="2015-10-19T18:46:08.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What bugged me (a little) about those questions was their temporal proximity to each other in posting.  Three questions all on the same day about the same idea seems a bit excessive, though if spread out over a few days I wouldn't have minded.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed other OPs post questions over the course of days or weeks where I can watch the development of their world. @rumguf had a fantastic (though very hard to answer) set of questions about alternate biochemistry systems.  I couldn't answer any of them but they were really fun to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T18:46:08.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2705" CreationDate="2015-10-19T18:47:35.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing inherently wrong with what is being done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said I see a few issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odds are people aren't going to respond to three question on the same topic...nor even necessarily read them all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal method is to space them out.  I asked a series of ...I think it was three questions on religion, I waited until each was answered and accepted before starting up another one and even then I think I gave it two or three days before I did my follow up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couple reasons I go this route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want the focus on one of my questions, not 2, not 3...etc.  The focus hypothetically gets me more and better answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its less for me to keep up with (comments, clarification, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you screw up the premise on one question (which can be clear after comments from people) you now have to clean up three or however many questions as opposed to 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't annoy &lt;em&gt;pavel&lt;/em&gt;.  I say this seriously though I am just using you as an example.  Frankly when I see any more than two questions from a single person on the top of the new list I feel like it is spam...it may be three well thought out questions but posting them all at once somehow diminishes the perceived value of each.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T18:47:35.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2015-10-20T12:48:57.620" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed by community vote, and &lt;strong&gt;it has been reopened by community vote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions end up being closed as duplicates even when they aren't actually duplicates at all. That's just what happens every now and then; the system isn't perfect, but it's good enough that such a situation can be handled quite readily by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, you handled this exactly the way I feel it should be handled: by &lt;strong&gt;editing the question to highlight and clarify the differences&lt;/strong&gt; between the questions involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only &lt;em&gt;really tiny&lt;/em&gt; thing I would encourage you to do differently next time would be to make that clarification in the question &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, and only if that doesn't get the question reopened &lt;em&gt;within a reasonable amount of time&lt;/em&gt; bring it up elsewhere, either in chat or on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that editing the question during the &quot;on hold&quot; grace period automatically nominates the question for reopen review. Only if the question transitions from &quot;on hold&quot; to &quot;closed&quot; before you make the edit is there a &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to bring it up elsewhere and ask for it to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T12:48:57.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2705" CreationDate="2015-10-20T14:19:26.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion, asking a lot of questions revolving around a single topic is definitely better than slapping your topic down on the table and taping a question mark to the end of it. Rather than asking one question that's too broad, series questions seek to split up their general lack of knowledge into manageable chunks that can more easily be digested by answerers. I think this is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem that I've often noticed, though, is that the answer to most of these questions depends on the answers to the other ones. In your example, you can't really say how the police would be trained to fight stun-gun-using bad guys until you know what laws are in place for the use of stun guns. Likewise, it might be difficult to say what laws would be put in place for stun guns without knowing how the police could respond to them. In situations such as this, I find myself in an answerer deadlock, and can't focus on one question without focusing on the others. For this reason, not only have we gone back to the initial too broad problem, but now no one can even provide a good answer without splitting it into separate pieces or copying it into the other questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even think the temporal distance between questions is of any use here, because asking one question while leaving the other for the next day might mean that that second question ends up getting answered in order to answer the first. Thus, either you see both questions and can't answer either, or you only see the first and end up answering all of them by accident. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I'd say there are still cases where asking a series of questions is just fine, but that you can't always split up a broad question and expect it to be improved. That hunting question looks like it could stand on its own to me, but the law and police questions are just too closely coupled to be split up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T14:19:26.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T14:57:36.347" Score="10" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently asked a question a got a fantastic response, with lots of answers that I found interesting and useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was struggling to choose one answer to accept, so I went and read these articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1818/how-should-i-select-which-answer-to-accept&quot;&gt;How should I select which answer to accept?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116/how-to-deal-with-many-good-acceptable-answers?rq=1&quot;&gt;How to deal with many good acceptable answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brought me to wondering whether I should accept any of the answers I have been given. I will certainly be using bits from several answers (and the comments), so picking one over the others seems unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are whole mechanics built into the site for accepting an answer (highlighting, reputation increases, etc), and I would like to engage these mechanics if possible without accepting anything. But I am not sure if this is possible with the current Stack Exchange format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my real question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that the &quot;question and accepted answer&quot; format is the basis of Stack Exchange, but does it really fit into something as subjective as World Building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I love the community here, I frequently use Stack Overflow, and I am a big believer in the adage &quot;if it ain't broke, don't fix it!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am just wondering if this Q&amp;amp;A format works as well here as it does elsewhere (like on Stack Overflow), and if it doesn't, is there anything we can do to improve this system for us? I must emphasize that I am not thinking of major over hauls to the site or anything like that, only small changes and minor tweaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if others agree with me then I wonder what tweaks we could implement to the format to accommodate us better. Don't worry, if nobody thinks there is a problem here I'll hide away and keep quiet, but if we can improve our site to serve us better, shouldn't we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T15:21:21.797" Title="The Stack Exchange Q&amp;A Format and the subjective nature of Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2015-10-20T15:21:21.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While worldbuilding may be subjective, Worldbuilding SE should not be. A good question is not one that asks for subjective answers; such a question should be closed as opinion-based. Likewise, answers should not just entertain fantasies, but instead apply the laws of this universe or in the OP's supplied universe and extrapolate them in order to solve the problem that was presented in the best, most logical and consistent manner possible. With this in mind, there &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; in most cases be a 'best' answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are some cases where this doesn't exactly work. Sometimes there are a lot of possible answers, and each answerer only covers a subset of them. Sometimes everyone just covers one possible scenario, and runs with it until the answer section looks like a bunch of short stories. In cases like these, I don't really think that the 'accepted answer' format really works, but I would also suggest that these questions may be inherently flawed. Unfortunately, these questions seem to be the most popular, but I think we'd be better off in the long run if we attempted to avoid them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T15:21:21.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2015-10-22T03:07:42.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know your answer won't pass the [Science] or [Reality Check] tags but you still explicitly want the answer to your question, then I'd include that information in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in&#xA;&quot;I do not want a reality check, I'm using a different set of constraints.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;How this situation arose in my world isn't relevant to the question at hand.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you simply want the answers to assume some portion of reality does not apply, then explicitly state that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a question about architecting a refuge for the Zombie Apocalypse.  I completely ignore the fact that no zombie like plague is known AND I state in my question that the answer need not consider attacks by other humans (although it may be that other humans are the most dangerous enemies to survivors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T03:07:42.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2015-10-22T16:27:56.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/13800/2138&quot;&gt;One of the answers I've enjoyed the most&lt;/a&gt;: from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13792/2138&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most entertaining way to prove to someone that they aren&amp;#39;t real?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time I read it, it touched my funny bone and literally made me laugh out loud. At work. Especially because of the second comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a great example of a question which gets the creativity going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T16:27:56.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2716" CreationDate="2015-10-23T23:09:52.207" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, I came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;algorithms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;algorithms&lt;/a&gt; tag, and thought it was kind of cool. Only one question uses it so far (as of the writing of this question), but there's the potential for development, which I saw after a brief conversation in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tempted to ask a couple questions using the tag, but I'd like to know about possible ground rules first. Here are a few questions I have about the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should questions be about hypothetical algorithms - i.e. about how to make an algorithm to do something - or about an actual implemented algorithm that someone else has made?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should questions be more technical or casual - that is, might actual code be used in an answer, or pseudocode?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should questions be about the code behind a computation, or the mathematics behind a computation (i.e. coming up with an equation/algorithm to determine population size)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can break these questions up into separate meta questions, but I figured that it might be good to consolidate discussion about the scope of the tag into one place, since it hasn't been discussed much yet, if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T23:35:08.257" Title="What kinds of questions can I use the &quot;algorithms&quot; tag on?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2715" CreationDate="2015-10-24T21:32:20.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As much as possible, I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;algorithm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;algorithm&lt;/a&gt; question should avoid implementation(s) for the same reason that we avoid questions about what individual characters will do since answers of this kind are useful only to the OP, not anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pseudocode should be used in answers so that the resulting process can be easily translated to which ever language the OP uses.  Also, an algorithm's description in pseudocode will allow non-programmers to access the process.  Not all algorithms are intended to be turned into computer code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual implementation questions are probably off topic because those are programming questions and WB isn't about programming.  That's StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technical or casual should be just fine as long as the required algorithm isn't too narrow or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the math behind an algorithm would be okay.  Questions about implementation of the algorithm would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T21:32:20.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2015-10-27T13:55:22.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 18 questions and 67 answers, for an average of 3.72 answers per question. A total of 4635 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28053/architecture-of-the-perfect-zombie-apocalypse-refuge&quot;&gt;Architecture of the perfect zombie apocalypse refuge&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;297 total votes, 51 question votes, 16 answers, 6333 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27627/i-would-like-a-levitating-temple-on-a-mountain-hand-wave-free-ish&quot;&gt;I would like a levitating temple on a mountain. Hand-wave free...ish&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;40 total votes, 10 question votes, 8 answers, 211 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27960/architectural-encoding-of-maps&quot;&gt;Architectural encoding of maps&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3434/ville-niemi&quot;&gt;Ville Niemi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;29 total votes, 11 question votes, 5 answers, 210 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/medieval-low-energy-houses&quot;&gt;Medieval low-energy houses&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;24 total votes, 8 question votes, 5 answers, 228 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27539/gravity-and-architecture&quot;&gt;Gravity and Architecture&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 11 question votes, 2 answers, 279 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27458/how-would-a-city-of-ai-be-built&quot;&gt;How would a city of AI be built?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 8 question votes, 5 answers, 170 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27761/what-are-some-major-architectural-designs-in-spaceships-for-aquatic-beings&quot;&gt;What are some major architectural designs in spaceships for aquatic beings&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 10 question votes, 4 answers, 125 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27567/what-should-centaur-dwellings-look-like&quot;&gt;What should centaur dwellings look like?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 9 question votes, 1 answers, 129 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27958/hair-based-architecture&quot;&gt;Hair based architecture&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3434/ville-niemi&quot;&gt;Ville Niemi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 11 question votes, 1 answers, 189 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27618/what-are-some-major-architectural-designs-that-would-be-in-spaceships-for-flight&quot;&gt;What are some major architectural designs that would be in spaceships for flighted beings?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 413 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27850/the-cultural-flow-of-architecture&quot;&gt;The cultural flow of Architecture&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 7 question votes, 3 answers, 235 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27557/whats-the-largest-building-you-could-build-on-the-world&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the largest building you could build on the world?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 163 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27933/how-deep-should-our-colony-be-on-the-moon-mars&quot;&gt;How deep should our colony be on the Moon/Mars?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 121 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27821/if-one-of-the-spatial-dimensions-wrapped-around-how-would-architecture-be-diffe&quot;&gt;If one of the spatial dimensions wrapped around, how would architecture be different?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 84 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28117/what-would-the-architecture-be-like-in-an-alternate-history-where-mexico-was-col&quot;&gt;What would the architecture be like in an alternate history where Mexico was colonized by China?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12213/user24353&quot;&gt;user24353&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 82 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27853/how-will-cities-be-transformed-after-hover-cars-become-common&quot;&gt;How will cities be transformed after hover cars become common?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2081/relix&quot;&gt;Relix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 63 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27654/could-a-historic-society-live-on-another-world&quot;&gt;Could a historic society live on another world?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685/artofcode&quot;&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 66 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27875/if-one-of-the-spatial-dimensions-not-perpendicular-to-gravity-wrapped-around&quot;&gt;If one of the spatial dimensions *not* perpendicular to gravity wrapped around, how would architecture be different?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 total votes, 0 question votes, 0 answers, 38 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T17:27:44.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2755" CreationDate="2015-10-27T14:45:50.310" Score="7" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our nineteenth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 26 Oct - 9 Nov&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/109&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/109.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There has already been discussion of how to ask questions about the delicate subject of religion. Politics is another subject often avoided in everyday conversation to avoid potential offense. Perhaps a couple of weeks of questions would help test what is acceptable and on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T19:39:45.253" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #19: Politics" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:29:13.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question, but I have no idea if it's off-topic or not. Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What foods would/do people eat during a journey through a desert?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I'm writing a story that features a group of people traveling through a desert (walking, with a small caravan of camels), and I want to know what food my characters will eat during this journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if that's too &quot;realistic&quot; and thus off-topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user171" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T00:29:13.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2721" CreationDate="2015-10-28T18:26:54.883" Score="-1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those of us who are completionists (individuals who are driven to complete whatever they start, whatever that may entail), the badges can be a bit of a nuisance. I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2226/6986&quot;&gt;asked previously&lt;/a&gt; if it would be possible to remove the badges that are next to impossible to acquire here on Worldbuilding, considering our active community. We don't have the capability to do that (and may not want to, given the accepted answer), but that leaves completionists like me (and Tim B) in a bit of a jam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to remember there was a discussion in the comments here on Meta a while ago (I can't find it now) suggesting users were specifically taking actions to award badges to each other, but that was on viable questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Would it be acceptable to create questions/answers specifically to acquire badges?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, posting a question indicating that users should not look at it, vote on it, or answer it for a week, in order to get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;Tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that doing this may reduce the quality of site, if too many users opt to acquire all the badges. This could be considered a form of social experiment using the site itself as a Worldbuilding question. (&quot;Given these constraints, how would society respond?&quot; is a frequently-asked question, after all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T21:23:42.693" Title="The Completionist's Dilemma" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2720" CreationDate="2015-10-28T18:36:48.970" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not something I would support.  Learn to live with disappointment, and I do not mean to come off snarky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desire to be a completionist is admirable in my opinion (if you're not a little OCD you're not doing it right!) but is conceptually flawed in this case.  Setting a goal that cannot be completed without cheating the system is not the systems fault, rather it is the fault of flawed goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end we are also talking about imaginary internet points right?  I do understand how that can make a person's brain itch, I have that problem in certain situations as well, but I assure you that learning to ignore that itch when it doesn't really matter is a good life skill to pick up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T19:29:47.200" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T19:29:47.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2720" CreationDate="2015-10-28T19:13:58.420" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that doing this may reduce the quality of site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That should be your answer, right there.&lt;/strong&gt; Why would we want to take active steps to reduce the quality of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see no valid reason whatsoever for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some badges &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; easy to get (Autobiographer comes to mind). Others &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; hard to get. Consider badges like Reversal, Unsung Hero, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T19:13:58.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2720" CreationDate="2015-10-28T21:23:42.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand you. But badges should be about achievements. Cheating and cheap tactics are not for the best interests of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, if done right, chasing down badges can be good for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Announcer&lt;/strong&gt;: Share link to your questions or questions that you like to&#xA;help the growth of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote (up or down): we have on a good day, 20+ question and an average&#xA;of 5 answers per question. That is roughly 120 posts. It's not that&#xA;hard to get the : &lt;strong&gt;Vox Populi&lt;/strong&gt; (40 votes on a day), &lt;strong&gt;Suffrage&lt;/strong&gt; (30 votes). Voting is important, it lets everyone know what content is good/bad. That said, don't vote on every single post unless you read them. Otherwise it will hurt the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also work your way to get the &lt;strong&gt;electorate&lt;/strong&gt; badge. It's a long run but by now we have plenty of good content to vote on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reviewer&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Complete at least 250 review tasks. This badge is awarded once per review type.&lt;/em&gt; And   &lt;strong&gt;Proofreader&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;em&gt;Approve or reject 100 suggested edits.&lt;/em&gt; That is quite easy to get and doesn't take too much time. There is always something waiting in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strunk &amp;amp; White&lt;/strong&gt;: In the same vein, as you read posts, edit mistakes if you see them. I normally have 3-4 edits everyday. You can get it pretty easily if you do it regularly with close to 400 posts per week or so. In no time, you will get the Copy Editor badge (3-4 months maybe) :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider the &lt;strong&gt;Explainer&lt;/strong&gt; badge (edit and answer a question afterward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Revival&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;necromancer&lt;/strong&gt;: old questions need answers too. Some might be old but it doesn't mean there is noting more to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deputy&lt;/strong&gt;: Flag bad content when you see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Self-Learner&lt;/strong&gt;: Answering your own questions sounds odd but sharing your knowledge with the community is a good thing in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Research Assistant&lt;/strong&gt;: Many tags don't have descriptions yet. Although the creation of new tags is much slower than a year ago, new tags are still created every now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T21:23:42.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2725" CreationDate="2015-10-28T21:53:13.890" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens if/when somebody decides to get a friend who votes for all their posts and vice/versa? Would that be bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T06:50:01.857" Title="Farming or harvesting votes?" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2724" CreationDate="2015-10-28T22:00:31.823" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's bad if it's dishonest.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we, society, have agreed that being dishonest is bad. However, if the two people legitimately like the other person's posts for whatever reason then it's not bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious extension would be creating a second account to vote for all your posts. That's bad. It's inherently dishonest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case it is ultimately pointless. These are &lt;em&gt;internet points&lt;/em&gt;. You can't spend them and falsely inflating them will not give anyone a sense of accomplishment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T22:00:31.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2724" CreationDate="2015-10-28T22:43:18.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can see the voting behavior of users. Although they can't see the specific details of each vote, they have the metadata. Furthermore, if you up-vote too many posts of the same user in a short time, the system can undo it automatically under certain conditions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's done in good faith, you should not have problems if you give a handful of votes now and then. Still, I would encourage you to upvote: not just your friend's posts but all the posts you consider useful as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T22:43:18.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-30T06:46:31.550" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the shortcut syntax to link to another Stack Exchange site? I can't remember and it's not in the help center! But I know it's worked before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T21:24:16.340" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T21:24:16.340" Title="Shortcut link to another Stack Exchange site" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2727" CreationDate="2015-10-30T09:27:09.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general form is &lt;code&gt;[sitename.se]&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;sitename&lt;/code&gt; is the part of the fully qualified domain name preceding &lt;code&gt;stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;. For example, &lt;code&gt;[worldbuilding.se]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[biology.se]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[meta.space.se]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sites have special &quot;magic links&quot;, like &lt;code&gt;[so]&lt;/code&gt; (Stack Overflow), &lt;code&gt;[sf]&lt;/code&gt; (Server Fault) and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use links like &lt;code&gt;[meta]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[main]&lt;/code&gt; to link back and forth between a single site's meta site and main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/157730&quot;&gt;Add data.SE style “magic links” to comments&lt;/a&gt; for a (hopefully current) list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these magic links only work in comments. In questions and answers, use the full form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T09:27:09.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T02:45:12.090" Score="4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been noticing a pattern of people closing questions as not Worldbuilding which to my mind clearly are Worldbuilding.  I don't want to get too hung up on this specific example, but I don't have a good way of viewing closed questions by close reason and this is the one that I just saw:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28822/2113&quot;&gt;From how much of a planet's surface will the Space Elevator be visible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone's building a fictional world with a space elevator and they want to talk about seeing the space elevator in the sky -- where in the world might they be?  Now clearly this question has problems.  For example, we don't know how the counterweight is designed.  Is it just an extended cable?  Or a satellite?  Perhaps the author did too little research.  But that's a reason to downvote, not close.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original version did not make clear that it was a fictional question and not a real question.  Is claiming fiction a requirement?  Should every question include &quot;This is for a fictional world&quot; just to check off that box?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that this question might be askable elsewhere.  But that's a bad reason to close.  One, overlap is inevitable.  Two, more reality-based sites don't have the speculative background that this site has.  If someone wants to ask about the current NASA budget, this is the wrong site.  If someone wants to speculate about the results of doubling the NASA budget, then this is the right place.  If someone wants to speculate on what would have happened if we'd gone on from landing on the moon to building a moon base, this is absolutely the right site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one's ever built an actual space elevator.  To me, that makes questions about what a space elevator would be like on-topic for this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my concern is that &quot;off-topic&quot; is a terminal concern.  It's essentially saying that the question doesn't belong on this site.  Unlike &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;, it doesn't lead to natural fixes (narrowing or clarifying the question).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T02:53:56.810" Title="Are we being too picky about what we call Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2730" CreationDate="2015-11-01T02:53:56.810" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to answer a general question with only one example, so I'll just address that example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question was put on hold, it read (in its entirety):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;From how much of a planet's surface will the Space Elevator be visible?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Earth, from how much of a planet's surface will the Space Elevator be visible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worldbuilding aspect is not at all clear there.  It sounds like a geometry question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting it on hold did what it's supposed to do: it prompted the author to clarify and expand in an edit.  It's now more clearly on-topic and should be in the reopen review queue.  It's only been an hour, so the community hasn't had time to act yet.  (You have enough rep to vote to reopen, so if you haven't yet, you could do that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process appears to be working.  Even question put on hold as off-topic can be fixed sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T02:53:56.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T16:53:33.630" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across something which struck home for me in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28850/looking-for-superpowers-preferably-physics-based&quot;&gt;Looking for Superpowers Preferably Physics Based&lt;/a&gt;.  In the comments, the author commented that it seemed a bit arbitrary that we don't allow idea generation on WB.SE, and that he'd like if the rules were posted up front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I understand why we don't have idea generation, but his plight echoed mine when I joined WB.  Its not clear that rules even exist until someone comes by and slaughters your question with some &quot;no idea generation&quot; rule which you couldn't find anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does SE offer any way to make those rules more visible to a new user?  It bothered me that I couldn't find a good way to find the &quot;rules&quot; of the SE when I got here, and it clearly got to the author of that post as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T18:54:02.097" Title="Being more up front about idea generation" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2015-11-01T17:09:51.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the &quot;Idea Generation&quot; reason to close isn't very good, as most questions are about idea generation. But that discussion was already made some time ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2336/should-we-rename-idea-generation&quot;&gt;Should we rename Idea Generation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then I tend to avoid closing anything for idea generation. But the question you took as an illustration is simply too broad. I voted to close as such. And those rules are there over all the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if people were actually reading the help pages, they would get that info up front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T17:09:51.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2015-11-01T18:30:58.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two tools available &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; a question gets asked are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.  New users are prompted to take the tour when they first visit.  For the help center (or the tour after that initial prompt) you have to know to go look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOjbL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOjbL.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have limited ability to edit these pages; most of it comes from SE and is the same across all sites, but we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have the ability to edit the &quot;ask about/don't ask about&quot; lists in the tour and the on-topic/off-topic lists in the help center.  I just took a look and you're right; those aren't as clear as they could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to suggest improvements to these pages.  What -- that is bullet-point-sized, not a long paragraph -- could we put in the do/don't-ask lists in the tour to make our scope clearer?  If you (anybody, not just the OP) propose alternatives in an answer, the community can easily weigh in and we can refine through edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T18:54:02.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2737" CreationDate="2015-11-03T08:55:18.593" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below one of my questions, I started comment chat with one of the Worldbuilding users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat itself is totally interesting for me and for the user, but I am afraid that it might be off-topic for the rest of the people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some means of continuing such discussion somewhere else than in comments or chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid of using chat because I know that I am from Europe, while the user may be from USA, which means about 7-8 hours time difference by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T10:28:40.003" Title="Is there a way to contact specific user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2015-11-03T10:09:13.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know that you can anytime create a chat room apart from the main worldbuilding chat (or any other main chat rooms, for that matter), where you and any interested user may contribute. For example, we made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;room specificially dedicated to the WB blog&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way you do not disturb other people, and can share without problem. If it is unused for 14 days it will get frozen. And eventually might be deleted. But for the purpose of that discussion, the chat will be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want it fully private, then I believe you have to take it out of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T10:09:13.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2015-11-03T10:28:40.003" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to contact specific user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, no. Stack Exchange is not a social network, and does not aim to be. Hence, unless a user discloses contact information, there is no easy way to contact a specific user either inside or outside of the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there some means of continuing such discussion somewhere else than in comments or chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am afraid of using chat because I know that I am from Europe, while the user may be from USA, which means about 7-8 hours time difference by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is asynchronous. You can leave a message in chat, and the other user comes by later, reads it and responds. In that regard, chat works in exactly the same way as comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you feel the conversation is useful, but not necessarily &lt;em&gt;where it is currently located&lt;/em&gt;, I would recommend just &lt;strong&gt;creating a chat room and moving the conversation there.&lt;/strong&gt; Just because it's chat doesn't mean it has to involve everyone being present at the same time. Create a chat room, copy all previous comments into it, and leave a link at the end to it like &quot;let's continue this over here: [link to chat room]&quot;. Flag the post for moderator attention and request a comments cleanup. All done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T10:28:40.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T18:36:16.000" Score="8" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my most recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29014/realistic-economic-impact-of-a-hero&quot;&gt;Realistic economic impact of a Hero&lt;/a&gt;, I've gotten a lot of pretty good answers but none of them have really hit it out of the ballpark. I could just accept one of the highest voted answers and be done with it, but I feel like that would be abandoning my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read through the answers, I noticed that there are a lot of good ideas spread among the answers. If all of them were bundled up in one answer, it could make for an amazing answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I had the thought, why don't I do that myself? I could make a community wiki answer that compiles the other answers. I would then accept that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this seem like a reasonably good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T19:37:15.397" Title="Should I make and accept a &quot;community wiki&quot; answer to my own question?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2740" CreationDate="2015-11-05T19:08:53.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end, how to handle the situation is up to you. There are multiple ways to do it, but I can see two main options here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posting a community wiki answer yourself&lt;/strong&gt; and accepting that is a possible way of documenting the parts of the posted answers that you went with, but since community wiki answers float only based on community votes, lots of people might not even notice it even if you do accept it. Also, since it wouldn't add anything new, but rather just repeat content from other answers, it might be seen as a not very constructive contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other alternative is to simply &lt;strong&gt;not accept any answer at all.&lt;/strong&gt; While answer acceptance is nice, nothing forces you to accept an answer to a question. I have a few questions where I am in the same boat; multiple answers all making good points that contributed to the path I took. In such a situation, picking the single answer that helped the most can (as you have found) be very difficult, and perhaps the best choice then is to not pick any one single answer at all. Take the parts from each that helped you the most, vote up those answers, proceed with building your world, and let the votes from the community do the rest of sorting answers for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are &lt;strong&gt;posting an answer and adding a solution of your own&lt;/strong&gt; then you can of course accept that. But in that case, you might not (probably don't) want to make your answer community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T19:37:15.397" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T19:37:15.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2740" CreationDate="2015-11-05T19:31:42.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could always post a bounty asking for a canonical answer, maybe someone would take the time to compile the best parts from each of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just mention in your bounty posting that is what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T19:31:42.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T16:58:01.693" Score="11" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; (requires 2k to see) breaks down recent closed questions by close reason, and also shows what happened to those questions after closure.  In the last 90 days we have closed 87 questions as &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; (the largest single bucket, about a third of the closures in that time).  Of those, 24 were edited.  Of those, 7 were reopened.  That's less than 10% edited and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding, by its nature, attracts broad questions, so naturally a lot of those rightly get put on hold.  But ideally it doesn't end there; in an ideal world the question gets improved and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do to help askers produce answerable, not-too-broad questions?  Do we need better guidance up front?  (If so, what?)  Do we need to provide better feedback in comments?  Do we need to be more active in editing?  Do we need to be more clear that &quot;on hold&quot; is meant to be temporary and the asker shouldn't give up?  Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably some of the questions really aren't salvagable, but 90%+?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T22:55:29.033" Title="How can we (systematically) improve too-broad questions?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2015-11-09T18:36:51.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After doing a limited investigation of the questions closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; (thanks for the query, DaaaaWhoosh), I noticed a few trends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author didn't contribute meaningfully to the discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No discussion for close reasons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a lot more we can do about this specific issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users are presented with the tour when they start and I saw plenty of direction to the tour and help in the comments of potentially-closed questions from new users. We can't force them to go through the tour and the entire history of questions on the site is available for anyone to look at in their spare time. The resources are there for new users and the community already tries to point them out. We're also great about providing constructive criticism of questions from new users, though we do tend to get carried away when an idea presented is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. (Feel free to detail the many reasons the word &quot;wrong&quot; should not be used as bold and italics here. :) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author doesn't contribute to the discussion about the question, there's nothing we can do. Sure, we can make edits, but those will probably be in conflict with the author's intent, let alone in conflict with each other. We'd end up turning questions into tennis balls at the National Tennis Championship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did notice one concerning trend: the lack of discussion from the close-voters. I've been guilty of this one myself a few times, but mostly when the community is already hip-deep in discussion. Perhaps the community could be more explicit about why a question is too broad and conveying suggestions for improving the question, but there's not much we can do if the author doesn't respond to commenters (a sub-trend I noticed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a few other trends I noticed (e.g., author adamant it's not too broad), but those three were the most widespread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T18:36:51.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T19:12:49.643" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that if you opt in to be a moderator of a site, you allow to do &lt;em&gt;tedious work&lt;/em&gt; (as of moving chatty comments to a chat where they belong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, is there a way to move chatty comments to a chat room &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than flagging the comments as &quot;too chatty&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: Specific question in mind: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28836/can-average-joe-reboot-the-nuclear-power-plant&quot;&gt;Can Average Joe reboot the nuclear power plant?&lt;/a&gt; where I did even create a chat room for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T10:57:17.033" Title="Is there a way to move comments to chat?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2015-11-09T19:24:34.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, keep in mind that just flagging a single comment as &quot;too chatty&quot; is more likely to, if we think the flag has merit, see that &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; comment deleted; when we view comment flags in the moderator dashboard, we see them out of context. Specifically, we only see flagged comments, not the discussions surrounding them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software will automatically suggest moving comments to chat if it detects what appears to be significant back-and-forth. I don't know the exact heuristics used, though; they are probably described over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it does that, you can just opt to migrate the discussion to chat. Note that the comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2144/29&quot;&gt;aren't actually moved, just copied&lt;/a&gt;. You can then flag the post and request a comments purge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is to flag, ideally (in my mind, at least) &lt;em&gt;the post&lt;/em&gt; the comments are attached to with a custom reason, and request that comments are migrated to chat and purged. If you do so, one flag is perfectly sufficient and it's easy for us to see what's needed. A moderator can transfer the comments to chat at any time, including migrating further comments into an existing chat room if needed. (The latter is not always ideal, but the option is there. Better to try to actually make people continue the discussion in the chat room if possible.) &lt;strong&gt;This ability is however no excuse for keeping up a conversation in comments and expecting us moderators to clean up after you.&lt;/strong&gt; If we have to do this repeatedly, particularly on the same post (yes, we have Ways(tm) to tell), be aware that it is actually &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; for us to just lock the post permanently for off-topic comments and nuke the comments from orbit. That is probably &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; what you want us to do...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T10:57:17.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2750" CreationDate="2015-11-09T21:54:11.463" Score="7" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29284/6986&quot;&gt;This recent question&lt;/a&gt; about making a car unavailable to some users seems have sparked some interest from high- and low-rep users alike, but there appears to be a growing consensus that it isn't on-topic for Worldbuilding. I attempted to articulate in the comments to chasly why I believe the question doesn't deserve to be closed, but the growing consensus has me concerned that I may not be understanding our scope quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone definitively identify whether that question is on- or off-topic and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T07:44:55.140" Title="Is the customized car question on- or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2748" CreationDate="2015-11-09T22:19:44.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'm fine with calling more story ideas related to technology to be on-topic.  That said, the official rules are that questions should be related to world design.  So if everyone or even a large minority had cars like this, it would be on-topic.  But this is about a specific individual who wants to have a special car.  If this isn't covered under the prohibition against questions about individual actions to enable a specific plot point, what is?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is on-topic, we should change the rules to cover it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are welcome&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  as long as they are not about:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they &#xA;  inhabit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - Elements of plot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two rules seem to pretty clearly exclude this question to me.  The plot is that Alice and Bob have this relationship.  How can the individual Alice alter her car so that only she can drive it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want a similar question that would be more borderline?  What physical property of the universe should I change such that Bob can't drive Alice's car?  Example answers might be to make Bob and Alice radically different sizes.  Or to give Alice a magic power that allows her to start cars.  Those are changes to the world or universe, not to one specific vehicle that is different from everyone else's vehicle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I don't hate this question.  I'm fine with rewriting the rules to cover this situation.  But this question seems pretty clearly on the wrong side of the rules as currently written.  Should it be?  I don't know.  But it is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T22:19:44.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2748" CreationDate="2015-11-10T00:36:56.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions here need to be about &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, not just about &lt;em&gt;things in your world&lt;/em&gt;.  If the question asked how a security-conscious society would design cars that could only be operated by their owners (within these economic/technical/etc constraints), that would be on-topic as an aspect of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more (made-up) examples might help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can my law-enforcement officers defend themselves from laser weapons?  &lt;strong&gt;On-topic&lt;/strong&gt;; question about a technology that fundamentally affects the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do infantry tactics in a medieval-style army change in the presence of fire-breathing dragons?  &lt;strong&gt;On-topic&lt;/strong&gt;; question about the behavior of an institution or group of people in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can my evil overlord prevent his slave labor from escaping given these terrain factors and fortifications?  &lt;strong&gt;Borderline&lt;/strong&gt;; it would depend on how much of this is about the terrain and fortifications and perhaps the general characteristics of evil overlords, and how much is about the specific evil overlord.  If we start getting clarifications like &quot;he's an excellent shot with a crossbow, and he can move small objects with telekenesis, and by the way he's immune to fire&quot;, then we're solidly into the realm of plot and should close it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can an assassin kill the king given the following defenses?  &lt;strong&gt;Off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;; unlike the previous one where we &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to abstract out some general answers about fortifications and terrain, this is really dependent on the specific situation.  It's plot, not world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does a security-conscious society with today's level of tech ensure that only the owner of a car can drive it?  &lt;strong&gt;On-topic&lt;/strong&gt;; see the first paragraph of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can Bob prevent Alice from driving his car?  &lt;strong&gt;Off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;; ditto.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T00:36:56.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-11-10T00:38:22.110" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-relations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-relations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-relations&lt;/a&gt;! Do a challenge on those!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastEditorUserId="16736" LastEditDate="2016-01-24T21:42:47.880" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T21:42:47.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2748" CreationDate="2015-11-10T07:44:55.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am author of such question. Here I will try to step back a little and provide my thoughts on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can you help?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide constructive feedback&lt;/strong&gt;: As author I heard only &quot;This is not about Worldbuilding!&quot; I get you. What I &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; hear is what would make such question to be about Worldbuilding. I know that original idea was, that such question would be better off on &lt;a href=&quot;https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Lifehacks&lt;/a&gt;, but still, even if a question is in scope for site A, it does not make it out of scope for site B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encourage people to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (And visit it by yourselves). When I had idea for this specific question, I had a gut feeling that such question might not be on scope. So that question being off-topic is idea I also support. However, as an author, &lt;em&gt;I made all possible steps in making such question on-topic&lt;/em&gt;, which is posting it in Sandbox first. If such question did receive similar comment on Sandbox, I would improve on it as long as there is common agreement. Or delete it completely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encourage casting close votes&lt;/strong&gt;: The discussion below this specific question looks like flame war to me. And where there is flame war, people tend to take sides. When you cast a close vote, people with enough reputation get &quot;notified&quot; and my past experience tells me, that community of this site takes quick actions, so if another 4 people get to same conclusion as you did, the question will be put on hold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encourage the idea, that putting any question on hold is good idea&lt;/strong&gt;: If you are active user, chances are, that some of your question will be put on hold. &lt;em&gt;And that's good.&lt;/em&gt; As an author and beginning writer, I am familiar with idea of editors and second drafts. Make sure, that any user knows that putting question on hold is not a bad thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use Meta&lt;/strong&gt;: The Meta is good place to discuss about questions. And sometimes to vent out your feelings about recent happenings on the site. For instance, I personally got bit annoyed by frequency of one user posting questions about one idea. So I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2705/how-much-of-one-idea-is-too-much&quot;&gt;asked about it on meta&lt;/a&gt;. We discussed it and that's it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My personal comments:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes me bit sad, that mine question caused such huge discussion. I admit it is not the best as of quality and/or scope. However, at this point, I feel &quot;betraying&quot; the 10 users who did answer the question by changing the scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are thinking of putting that question on hold, it is fine with me and as stated above, I think it is part of normal writer's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:43.103" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T07:44:55.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2015-11-10T16:22:15.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One additional thing I have noticed is certain users tend to be less than cordial when commenting on closing questions.  This is particularly irritating when we are talking about someone brand new to the site (I generally focus on &amp;lt;200 rep).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are new you are likely going to ask bad or malformed questions...we all know getting used to the SE format is a challenge...rather than berate people we need to make sure we are offering suggestions and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true for all users but in particular for new people as new blood means new questions and a healthy site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise I pretty much agree with what @frostfyre said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T16:22:15.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2718" CreationDate="2015-11-10T19:04:22.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 22 questions and 117 answers, for an average of 5.32 answers per question. A total of 6235 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28980/whats-the-most-likely-post-democracy-form-of-political-government&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most likely &amp;quot;post democracy&amp;quot; form of political government?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;263 total votes, 60 question votes, 23 answers, 8434 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29199/how-would-government-change-if-everyone-died-by-the-age-of-25&quot;&gt;How would government change if everyone died by the age of 25?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;178 total votes, 41 question votes, 21 answers, 6175 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28569/would-earth-try-to-keep-extra-planetary-colonies-dependent-on-them-for-financial&quot;&gt;Would Earth try to keep extra-planetary colonies dependent on them for financial gain and political power?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;71 total votes, 19 question votes, 10 answers, 2991 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28573/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races&quot;&gt;Medieval politics with fantasy races&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;30 total votes, 15 question votes, 4 answers, 223 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28476/how-would-political-power-shift-without-upheaveal&quot;&gt;How would political power shift without upheaveal?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/81/donyorm&quot;&gt;DonyorM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;22 total votes, 5 question votes, 6 answers, 420 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28805/how-to-make-elections-magic-proof&quot;&gt;How to make elections magic-proof?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 304 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28624/how-will-uploaded-personalities-be-represented-in-a-government&quot;&gt;How will uploaded personalities be represented in a government?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 175 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28636/would-a-i-make-a-good-politician&quot;&gt;Would an A.I. make a good politician?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 8 question votes, 6 answers, 141 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28642/what-would-be-the-most-viable-form-of-government-for-the-first-space-colonies&quot;&gt;What would be the most viable form of government for the first space colonies?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 5 question votes, 4 answers, 200 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28725/political-ramifications-of-long-lived-humans&quot;&gt;Political ramifications of long-lived humans&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 114 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28993/how-can-a-dynasty-of-immortals-be-overthrown&quot;&gt;How can a dynasty of immortals be overthrown?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 331 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29016/result-of-a-goverment-where-extra-votes-can-be-bought-earned-or-lost&quot;&gt;Result of a goverment where extra votes can be bought, earned, or lost?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 4 question votes, 5 answers, 155 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28594/how-does-the-law-treat-uploaded-personalities&quot;&gt;How does the law treat uploaded personalities?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 7 question votes, 2 answers, 54 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28611/how-might-digital-intellectual-disability-be-dealt-with-by-society&quot;&gt;How might digital intellectual disability be dealt with by society?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3202/samuel&quot;&gt;Samuel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 90 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29070/would-lunar-and-martian-colonists-retain-a-global-government&quot;&gt;Would Lunar and Martian Colonists Retain a Global Government?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 100 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28537/what-can-be-the-main-political-reason-behind-mass-cloning-of-soldiers&quot;&gt;What can be the main political reason behind mass cloning of soldiers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 98 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29010/tyrant-ruled-kingdom-surrounded-by-wilderness&quot;&gt;Tyrant ruled kingdom surrounded by wilderness?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15006/bhustus&quot;&gt;BHustus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 161 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28521/what-is-a-good-political-reason-for-every-spacecraft-design-to-come-with-self-de&quot;&gt;What is a good political reason for every spacecraft design to come with self destruct sequence?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 98 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28553/intelligent-animal-politics&quot;&gt;Intelligent Animal Politics&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13707/c-vanhorn&quot;&gt;C. VanHorn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 113 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28783/how-to-convince-your-population-to-get-to-war&quot;&gt;How to convince your population to get to war?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 96 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28529/politics-in-an-a-i-society-without-humans&quot;&gt;Politics in an A.I. Society Without Humans&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, -2 question votes, 2 answers, 58 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29154/what-sort-of-government-might-very-long-lived-humans-form-with-normal-humans&quot;&gt;What sort of government might very long-lived humans form with normal humans?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 1 question votes, 0 answers, 43 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T19:04:22.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T19:10:27.030" Score="9" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twentieth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 9 Nov - 23 Nov&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8918&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/8918.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because language influences and is influenced by culture, religion, history, geography, and much more. I would love to see more questions exploring these nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a list of past topics, or to propose new topics go here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:31:20.550" Title="Fortnightly challenge # 20: Language" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2765" CreationDate="2015-11-12T00:07:04.860" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29391/what-good-do-tornadoes-do/29427#29427&quot;&gt;the tornadoes question&lt;/a&gt; for writing clarity and to be more clearly on-topic, without, I think, changing what the OP meant to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other reasons not to re-open it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T15:52:14.533" Title="Is there disagreement about reopening the tornadoes question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2759" CreationDate="2015-11-12T04:34:29.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original asker disagrees with your edit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original asker is satisfied with the existing answers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that, I'd say that if you want the revised question answered, you should ask your own.  If you were just trying to be helpful, the original asker has pretty clearly indicated that your changes were unhelpful to him.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think that @Vincent was wrong to revert to your changes.  If your version is better, then someone else should ask it.  The original asker shouldn't have to work with a question with which he disagrees.  If the question as asked was bad, it could be closed and then possibly deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and since the original asker isn't likely to say it, thanks for trying to make the site better.  Even if it's not working out as you hoped, others may appreciate your efforts more in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T04:34:29.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T14:27:13.483" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions based on FTL travel or infinite forces can't sensibly be given answers that match the requirements for a hard science answer. Instead they've got to be answered with refutations of the central point, and possibly a soft science alternative or a limit treatment of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions however can start with an impossible premise (or at least a premise so unlikely as to be impossible) and have precise physical consequences that are [Hard-Science] through-and-through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK if a question is tagged with [Hard-Science] if the question includes a starting premise that is not hard, but which requires a hard look at the consequences of that event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T09:57:44.930" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T09:57:44.930" Title="Is the use of the [Hard-Science] tag acceptable in questions with a non-hard premise?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2761" CreationDate="2015-11-12T14:36:43.907" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one is pretty straight forward, if it can be answered with hard science, maybe something like the &lt;em&gt;thermo-dynamic implications of tossing a fireball&lt;/em&gt;, then yes answer with hard science.  This example would require you explain conservation of energy etc but it can be done.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand if you are talking about a situation where physics just can't apply...and I am having trouble coming up with one, then sure we can recommend the poster remove the HS tag and maybe add science-based or reality-check instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T14:36:43.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2761" CreationDate="2015-11-12T14:57:48.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to quote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Review the tag info before using this tag. Consider alternatively the science-based and reality-check tags. Avoid using this tag as the only tag on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I would say if you can reasonably expect there to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, or other such things that can be used to answer your question, then go right ahead and use the tag. Otherwise, if you want people to take a more scientific approach to something that &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; real, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags, which I would say have a pretty good record of keeping things rigorously scientific.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T14:57:48.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T15:08:36.190" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was asked yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29471/developing-counting-systems&quot;&gt;Developing Counting Systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was voted off-topic: not about worldbuilding. And some comment even suggest to move it to Math.SE. One other user took it to him to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/12820&quot;&gt;edit the question&lt;/a&gt; to try to fit the scope. That edit got accepted (2 to 1... that 1 being me), and a reopen vote went through (5 to 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from introducing a much too broad question, the edit changes the focus of the question, IMO. So the OP may get answers which are not relevant to what s/he was asking/interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My philosophy would be to suggest the OP to make a similar edit, but not do it ourselves. Unless, maybe, a reasonable amount of time has passed since the suggestion. Of course, the OP may roll back, but that might invalidate some of the answers given in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I too strict? Or what should we do in similar case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T15:19:38.777" Title="Fitting a question to the scope: Counting Systems" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2759" CreationDate="2015-11-12T15:52:14.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dronz, I consider that your edit was a good improvement. I took your edit because the title was straight to the point but I could have either rolled back to KeithS's edit or made my own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was unclear and misleading. Several people made complains in the comments and downvoted the question because of this. &#xA;Although I understand it's the user's post, everyone is free to edit it and improvements to the post should be kept as long as they do not change the meaning of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We prefer to have questions that are clear and thus answerable by the community. Misleading question might have answers that are off the track.&#xA;Bad question tend to get donwovoted and with enough time, there is the risk of deletion by the system. We don't want that if the question has already several answers and a potential to gather a few others. If the question is salvageable, we should try to keep it so the answers have not been for nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T15:52:14.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-16T21:08:21.413" Score="83" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a big day. You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Worldbuilding met our threshold for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/257614/graduation-site-closure-and-a-clearer-outlook-on-the-health-of-se-sites&quot;&gt;graduation-worthy sites&lt;/a&gt; and after a review, the Community Team determined that you're good to go. Reaching 'mature community' status is a big milestone, and you should be very proud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your site actually passed this threshold a few weeks ago, but we experienced a number of issues with the first wave of design independent graduations. We've since resolved these, so I'm happy to announce that we're ready to flip the switch for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean exactly? Graduation works in two phases. Starting today, you'll receive the following benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will soon have an election for community-voted moderators - there is some backlog here as the elections for some of the first-wave sites have also had to be delayed. Elections for you and the other sites in this wave will start being scheduled in December.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will no longer see the &quot;beta&quot; label attached to your site's name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will become eligible for question migration paths with the rest of the network&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will soon be able to select your own community ads. We're very close to the new year and the new ad cycle, and we have some exciting changes planned for these as well. These, too, will begin in December or early January so that you may enjoy the new changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site will still receive a full design from one of our designers, which will be packaged with an increase in the amount of reputation needed to access each privilege. It's no secret that our backlog for site designs is long, so instead of making you wait to receive all the parts of graduation at once, we wanted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260754/feedback-requested-design-independent-graduation&quot;&gt;give you the things we could give&lt;/a&gt; you now. We think we've hammered out most of the bugs in the process, but there are still likely to be some left -  so if you come across anything out of place, please report it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; using the [graduating-sites] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has reached this point because of your generous contributions. Together, you've created a valuable resource that helps people. Congratulations on all you've accomplished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T02:49:15.217" Title="Congratulations, Worldbuilding is graduating!" Tags="|discussion|graduation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2015-11-17T17:10:06.273" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could also close fewer questions. When questions are closed, it keeps new users from being able to answer them which might be just the thing that the OP needs to get the inspiration or information they need. &#xA;Sometimes, questions need to be broad because the OP is feeling their way through something and this forum could help with that. Instead of closing the question, I recommend creating a review list (similar to the lists for reviewers to check the quality posts from new users) for broad questions to help the OP get a better sense of the details they need to find the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question is too abrupt and doesn't serve the community. Creating a mechanism that helps the OP refine their concept would be much more useful and would serve beginners immensely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could have a &quot;broad&quot; tag for questions, and then give points to people who help the OP refine their questions to something specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, some people don't know enough to know specifics, and I think we can create a way to help them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15188" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T17:10:06.273" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:41:19.933" Score="17" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm told that question migration paths don't just appear automatically, but we ought to discuss which ones we need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Why not?  I always expected the list to be populated the same as the upper-left corner button, and never knew why it never worked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what other SEs do we find useful for this list?  I'll start a community answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T15:38:17.710" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T15:38:17.710" Title="Which question migration paths do we want?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:41:19.933" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Physics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of questions are pure physics questions and don't involve worldbuilding even if the situation is hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Astronomy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just today, that started this discussion.  People designing settings on other planets might want to know what is &quot;out there&quot; and other characteristics about other kinds of stars etc.  These are &quot;real knowledge&quot; questions with their own communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Biology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, hypothetical questions on non-exotic life forms can best be answered by a biologist, and sometimes questions are mundane real-existing-knowlege questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What previous stories have used the idea?  Or is it involving an existing &quot;shared universe&quot; rather than designing a new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Writing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closely related!  Often times general SF plot and character ideas surface here and need to be turned away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason to keep the list short?  Or at least to keep it ordered manually rather than automatically sort by actual use?  If someone asks a Chemistry or Economics questions &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt; we can't migrate it because we didn't think it would be a common thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T22:41:19.933" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-11-17T22:41:19.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-11-18T00:22:25.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are to establish the migration path based on our current numbers, we can use this to have an idea. Although, it seems like many more questions could/should get migrated away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistics for questions migrated away to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB Meta: 6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RPG: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astronomy: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cognitive sciences: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Engineering: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science fiction and fantasy: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Super user: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one occurrence: Ask different, Earth sciences, English Language, English learner, Freelancer, History, Home improvement, Law, Pets, Movie/TV, Philosophy, Space exploration   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T00:55:54.303" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T00:55:54.303" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-11-18T12:37:31.080" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Physics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get lots of questions that are about real-world physics. While the answers may be used in building a world, the person most able to answer such a question isn't a worldbuilding expert, but a physics expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;em&gt;real world&lt;/em&gt; physics should be migrated to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T12:37:31.080" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-11-18T12:40:58.167" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Astronomy&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about real world astronomy are better off asked to astronomy experts. This site is intended to cater to the hypothetical, so if a question seeks purely science-backed answers about astronomical phenomena in our real world, whether or not the intention is to integrate the knowledge presented in answers in a work of fiction, that question should be asked on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T12:40:58.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2767" CreationDate="2015-11-19T14:43:56.023" Score="21" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Congratulations Everyone&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been on and off this site since private beta, and it's a really cool site. Great job on achieving graduation and creating such good content. Worldbuilding is still my favourite StackExchange site and has some of the most interesting questions on the network! (In my humble opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes from here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T14:43:56.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-19T23:38:27.533" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and the feature on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worldchanging-ideas-2015/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;10 big advances that will improve life, transform computing and maybe even save the planet&quot;&lt;/a&gt; caught my eye. I open it up to an illustrated page on Microwave Rocketry, using ground-based power plants to power vehicles that reach from ground to orbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wow.  That's the bleeding-edge of science fiction turning reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be read as a short-list of ideas to explore for near-future SF. How will this affect society, what spinoffs will it have in day-to-day life, what will our children experience as routine that we find so marvelous, and how will that change them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to suggest that we consider these ideas specifically over the next month for our worldbuilding inner adventures, whether it can be worked into a Fortnightly Challenge or just inspired from this post (you can add a comment to this post noting it, in leiu of a suitable tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eye-Controlled Machines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Microwave Rocketry &amp;mdash; Beamed power could create a low-cost paradigm for access to space&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trawling for Viruses &amp;mdash; A new method identifies every virus in a given sample with near-perfect accuracy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Soft, Injectable Electronic Probes for thr Brain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Little Fusion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kill Switches for GMOs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Heat Vacuum &amp;mdash; A multipurpose mirror sucks up heat and beams it into outer space&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Machines That Teach Themselves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slow-Motion Cameras for Chemical Reactions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seeing around Corners&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T12:52:49.987" Title="Challange Idea: SciAm 2015 World-changing Ideas" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2776" CreationDate="2015-11-20T12:52:49.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a near-future tag on the list of potential challenge topics. That tag could be chosen for the next challenge and this suggestion rolled into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T12:52:49.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T19:25:51.057" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;My next door neighbor pointed a couple anomalies out from the &quot;reputation&quot; section (or whatever it's called).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't bother me, but it does look weird.  Just curious, &lt;strong&gt;how can a total reputation be less than a year's reputation?&lt;/strong&gt;  Examples (can't be a**'ed to see if there are more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzwR1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzwR1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T19:25:51.057" Title="How can a total reputation be less than this year's reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2015-11-20T22:55:29.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a new user (long-time lurker, first time poster) I can speak to this, as my very first question was first posted in the wrong exchange (&lt;em&gt;writers&lt;/em&gt;) and when redone here in &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; was slapped with a hold so fast it made my head spin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specificity is great as an aid in answering a question but isn't always necessarily a requirement to do so.  Case in point: while responders in &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; were busy shooting down my question and giving broad examples to demonstrate how my question wasn't specific enough (irony!) before it was finally thrown into &lt;em&gt;hold&lt;/em&gt; status, responders in &lt;em&gt;writers&lt;/em&gt; were actually answering the exact same question with perfectly valid and helpful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is specificity necessary for all questions? Only if the answer(s) need to be specific. Also consider that no matter how specific a question is phrased chances are it can always be made &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; specific. At what point do you stop worrying about specificity and get down to actually attempting an answer? Be careful in your pursuit of specificity that you don't miss opportunities to genuinely help the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15480" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T22:55:29.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-11-23T19:36:13.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;H1&gt;Space Exploration&lt;/H1&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several times where I was about to ask SE and then realized it would be better on WB, and vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about space elevators, interplanetary exploration / space colonies, exposure to space, satellites, etc. could frequently be posted on SE's page, but just fit better here since there's an open to speculative science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T19:36:13.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-23T21:21:51.547" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think of Q &amp;amp; A in terms of storytelling by default.  How will working out an idea in that way be good for plot advancement, suspension of disbelief,  charactization, and tropes that readers are familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if a question is meant for RPG, different needs are relevant and different shared background and culture is in play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should questions be tagged as to the domain?  What are the choices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T22:03:22.980" Title="Should questions be marked with tags about intended use?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2783" CreationDate="2015-11-23T22:03:22.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that &lt;strong&gt;questions should not be tagged based on the purpose of asking the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Such meta-tags do not add any significant useful categorization of questions.&lt;/em&gt; For example, the expertise needed to answer a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bookwriting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bookwriting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bookwriting&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; question should not be significantly different from that needed for answering the same question if it were tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rpg-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rpg-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rpg-design&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;; both would need someone reasonably able to answer a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; question, while the differences between answering the question for the purpose of bookwriting and RPG design should ideally be limited to nonexistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;strong&gt;if you have specific needs that you want answers to cater to, state those needs in the question.&lt;/strong&gt; Doing so also almost automatically makes it not a duplicate of any existing questions that do not have those specific needs stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember we have the triad &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; already; pick the &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of those that is most appropriate to your needs, and state any further needs (those not covered by the tag wiki) in the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that it adds value, you can always (regardless of which tags you use to categorize the question) state in the question body &quot;I'm designing an RPG world for Game ABC revision V, and...&quot;. This adds the relevant information, and is much more both specific &lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt; versatile compared to having a tag for every RPG game and revision in existence, let alone every book and movie genre as well. I would recommend stating something like that fairly early, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; right at the top of the question (because the latter would diminish the usefulness of the question excerpt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T22:03:22.980" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2786" CreationDate="2015-11-24T03:17:28.747" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a few frustrating experiences with this. I have read a few posts, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2253/how-do-i-create-open-ended-questions-with-subjective-answers/&quot; title=&quot;this one&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. And I totally agree, we should be asking questions that &quot;&lt;em&gt;describe a problem&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, more than &quot;&lt;em&gt;start a discussion&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Triggering question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30330/world-building-for-my-pen-and-paper-rpg-suggestions-on-my-random-generator&quot; title=&quot;here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with the very helpful people talking to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for many of my questions, if only because that's how I think, it's difficult to even narrow down to successful criteria for an answer. Because, and I'll try to explain this so it makes sense... the question I'm asking is based on &lt;em&gt;gestaldt&lt;/em&gt;, or overall 'wholeness' or 'what-everything-means-together' of what ends up being a pretty long list of things. Like, my question isn't about any &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of those things, it's about &lt;em&gt;the list itself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I tried to break it down any further than I have, I'd lose the actual question I had in the first place. Not to mention, if I knew whether any of my specific 'list items' was wrong, then I would've asked about it specifically.&#xA;And what if I'm just looking for general feedback, or suggestions, or just plain validation? &quot;Is this general thing good? What would you change?&quot; kind of thing. I do know what I want out of it, but I don't know what the specific problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like all of those things are still valuable here, if understandably hard to answer. I want to improve on this, while &lt;em&gt;also getting activity and helpful feedback on the questions I actually have&lt;/em&gt;. But I apparently lack some technique there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14656" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T07:10:25.470" Title="How do I ask questions about open-ended topics? Specifically, 'big-picture' questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2785" CreationDate="2015-11-24T05:22:42.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, your asking about building a system, which is a complex topic in my opinion. I'm sure it would be easier to provide an answer if you limited yourself to one or some specific aspects only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the main problem has already been summarized by Frostfyre: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe the issue here is that a &quot;What do you think?&quot; question is&#xA;  inherently hard/impossible to determine a &quot;best&quot; answer. Open-ended&#xA;  questions are accepted if they have criteria for determining the best&#xA;  answer, but I don't see how you could define criteria here without&#xA;  having solved your issue in the first place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was pretty clear in the vocabulary of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggestions on my random generator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gives me validation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I improve this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I’d like to get a bit of feedback&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment, your post is asking for a discussion or a brainstorming. This doesn't suit the Q/A format of Stack Exchange well. It would be much easier and efficient to have a discussion on chat or on a forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are/should opinion-based questions closed on Stack Exchange?&lt;/strong&gt;: My personal explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just a matter of opinions and ideas.  Opinions can't be wrong since they are not based on facts, knowledge or anything meaningful. Everyone can have a different opinion and since opinions can't be wrong, all the answers are good. But if answers can't be wrong: how useful is the question? (For you and the other users). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, determining what is good and if there is something missing is rather subjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of recently closed (last 4 months) opinion-based questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29154/what-sort-of-government-might-very-long-lived-humans-form-with-normal-humans&quot;&gt;What sort of government might very long-lived humans form with normal humans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23027/the-initial-reaction-of-the-society-about-a-new-human-race&quot;&gt;The initial reaction of the society about a new human race&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23383/what-can-you-disguise-a-space-ship-as&quot;&gt;What can you disguise a space ship as?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22702/we-burst-their-bubble-now-what&quot;&gt;We burst their bubble. Now what?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28965/what-emotions-should-my-wizard-keeps&quot;&gt;What emotions should my wizard keep?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25061/how-differently-would-the-societies-have-evolved-if-every-person-is-allowed-to-c&quot;&gt;How differently would the societies have evolved if every person is allowed to commit one murder?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T05:22:42.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2785" CreationDate="2015-11-24T07:10:25.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the top of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2786/9685&quot;&gt;Vincent's answer&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to point out two ways to get some feed back on your question, which does not involve any vote to close and too specific rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are often some people on chat willing to discuss a possible question. Note that you can also ask question there about people's opinion. I know I had some braimstorming problem for a story, and I could discussed it on the chat, when it would have been closed on main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T07:10:25.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2790" CreationDate="2015-11-24T21:13:55.230" Score="7" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this is a good fit for meta or if it should be a chat discussion, but the votes will answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain crazy events in world building, one has two choices. Either science or magic. In the questions, this is reflected by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tags and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/398148#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; (I've always been pretty poor in SQL, so if the query's wrong, I apologies), we can see that the &quot;science tags&quot; are &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason behind this, who doesn't want to know &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/313/how-could-dragons-be-explained-without-magic&quot;&gt;how could dragons exist without magic&lt;/a&gt; or other crazy questions like this. I find it very interesting myself, and these are in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; opinion the coolest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall, the science-based questions seems to draw much more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, what could be adapted when writing magic-based questions to make them potentially as interesting as science-based questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, most of the questions I've seen go along these lines : &quot;Here's my magic scenario, I'd like to know how to do X or Y &lt;strong&gt;without involving too much magic&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.  I feel like it is difficult to reflect this intent within the question. And well, it's hard to come up with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/not-too-much-magic-please&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;not-too-much-magic-please&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;not-too-much-magic-please&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This isn't an actual problem, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tag is already pretty popular. I'd just want to see if there's be something &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; could do to make my magic questions more interesting to answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2133" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:16:29.690" Title="How can we make magic-based questions as interesting to answer as the various levels of science-based questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2792" CreationDate="2015-11-24T21:19:06.527" Score="9" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's happened twice already (On MartialArts.SE the first time though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used all my votes allowance for the day, but the badge tracker indicates me I voted 38 times (Which &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be true, I don't keep a count :p). The Vox Populi badge asks for 40 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to receive the badge if I used my full allowance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2133" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T22:08:00.783" Title="Can't have the &quot;Vox Populi&quot; badge" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2788" CreationDate="2015-11-24T21:29:17.387" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, what could be adapted when writing magic-based questions to make them potentially as interesting as science-based questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A well described system of magic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason science based questions are more fun to answer (or at least easier) is because we all know how science works. We can all recognize if something does or does not fit within the system. We can delight in the way an answer is made to fit in this well known system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, magic systems are far far more arbitrary. To get good answers for a magic question, a very well described system also needs to be provided. For such a system to be internally consistent, it usually has to look a lot like science, but more colorful. If such a description is absent, the answer usually comes down to &quot;then some magic happens&quot;, which is (for me) rather unsatisfying. However, if a very clear system is also described, then we can see how the answer does or does not fit within that system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious problem with this is people will probably end up designing a system that makes an easy solution to the problem, rather than designing a complex solution to fit the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T21:29:17.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2788" CreationDate="2015-11-24T21:47:13.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Samuel's answer, I'd like to point out that questions that &lt;strong&gt;allow&lt;/strong&gt; answers based around magic are usually too broad, or opinion-based, which are both cause for closure. Any answers are acceptable when they can use magic, because magic makes &lt;em&gt;literally anything&lt;/em&gt; possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Exchange, good questions are ones that have a single answer; good answers rely on logic, knowledge, and research. If you're making up your own magic, research is out of the question. Any knowledge used in answers will be based either on existing science or facts you give about your world or your magic. And logic requires a set of axioms, or laws that define how things work; provide these for your magic system and people might actually have something to build on. Otherwise, all they can do is discuss, and that's not something we encourage here (except in chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T21:47:13.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2789" CreationDate="2015-11-24T22:08:00.783" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The daily vote limit is a little arcane.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5213/162102&quot;&gt;this post on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The exact number of votes available &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90202/&quot;&gt;depends on your voting behavior for the day&lt;/a&gt;. Concretely, there are three upper limits to respect &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt; to be able to vote.&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;40 post votes per day per user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;30 answer votes per day per user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;5 post votes after you got your first &quot;5 votes remaining&quot; warning of the day. If you reach 25 answer votes at time &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; of the day, given &lt;code&gt;q(t)&lt;/code&gt; as the number of question votes cast by time &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, the total post votes limit will be no more than &lt;code&gt;30 + q(t)&lt;/code&gt;. If you cast less than 25 answer votes, ignore this point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically, you get 10 votes &lt;em&gt;specifically for questions&lt;/em&gt;, but you need to use them early.  Once you get close to the limit of 30 &lt;em&gt;unrestricted&lt;/em&gt; votes, you can't claim all 10 of the others any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don't know why.  I suspect it's a limitation in how voting was implemented (the 10 extra votes for questions were a later addition), rather than an intentional design decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T22:08:00.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2819" CreationDate="2015-11-25T15:14:00.000" Score="8" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our 21st topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/underwater&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;underwater&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;underwater&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 25 Nov - 7 Dec&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's a whole 'nother world underneath the oceans. Mermaids and mermen are the typical citizens, in Earth lore, but they're not the only ones there. I can see some creative civilizations and creatures coming out of a topic challenge focused on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T16:01:24.787" Title="Fortnightly challenge # 21: Underwater" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2788" CreationDate="2015-11-25T15:16:29.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another reason as well - most science based questions include the tag to stop people answering with magic. Magic questions on the other hand do not all have the magic tag or need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example this question:&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7289/how-do-centaurs-get-enough-oxygen-to-run&quot;&gt;How do centaurs get enough oxygen to run&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tagged it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;, not with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:16:29.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2756" CreationDate="2015-11-25T15:24:00.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 19 questions and 114 answers, for an average of 6.00 answers per question. A total of 6080 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29497/in-an-atheist-alien-society-where-bodily-functions-reproduction-and-waste-elimi&quot;&gt;In an atheist alien society where bodily functions (reproduction and waste elimination) are not taboo what would be used to curse?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;255 total votes, 42 question votes, 18 answers, 9511 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29720/what-language-would-the-anglo-french-empire-use&quot;&gt;What language would the Anglo-French Empire use?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7076/philip-rowlands&quot;&gt;Philip Rowlands&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;70 total votes, 10 question votes, 11 answers, 1428 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29885/why-would-a-language-based-solely-on-volume-develop&quot;&gt;Why would a language based solely on volume develop?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13869/jimsug&quot;&gt;jimsug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;58 total votes, 12 question votes, 7 answers, 2299 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29447/can-a-single-language-have-two-separate-dialects-spoken-in-a-single-location&quot;&gt;Can a single language have two separate dialects spoken in a single location?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;58 total votes, 8 question votes, 14 answers, 1449 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29908/how-do-i-keep-a-language-shared-by-two-separate-peoples-static-for-as-long-as-p&quot;&gt;How do I keep a language shared by two separate peoples, static for as long as possible? The lower tech-complexity the better?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6812/malandy&quot;&gt;Malandy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;56 total votes, 10 question votes, 10 answers, 1798 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29491/would-a-common-language-develop-in-a-fantasy-world&quot;&gt;Would a common language develop in a fantasy world?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;39 total votes, 12 question votes, 11 answers, 1767 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29881/grammar-for-a-species-that-communicates-via-hallucinations&quot;&gt;Grammar for a species that communicates via hallucinations&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 12 question votes, 6 answers, 351 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29632/will-spoken-language-become-obsolete-with-advances-in-technology&quot;&gt;Will spoken language become obsolete with advances in technology?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 8 question votes, 7 answers, 667 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29661/what-language-would-droids-use-to-communicate-with-each-other&quot;&gt;What language would droids use to communicate with each other?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 5 question votes, 4 answers, 526 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29518/is-it-possible-for-a-language-method-of-passing-information-based-purely-on-touc&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a language/method of passing information based purely on touch to develop?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 330 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29653/what-would-a-gesture-based-language-look-like-in-the-absence-of-a-spoken-languag&quot;&gt;What would a gesture-based language look like in the absence of a spoken language?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 216 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29727/how-to-explain-something-like-a-universal-translator&quot;&gt;How to explain something like a universal translator&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751/andyd273&quot;&gt;AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 5 question votes, 4 answers, 141 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29737/what-are-ways-plants-might-be-communicating-with-one-another-without-people-real&quot;&gt;What are ways plants might be communicating with one another without people realizing it?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 91 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29471/developing-counting-systems&quot;&gt;Developing Counting Systems&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7/pipperchip&quot;&gt;PipperChip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 197 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/would-communication-lag-stop-language-developing-in-a-space-borne-race&quot;&gt;Would communication lag stop language developing in a space-borne race?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 99 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30220/possible-language-changes-of-a-suddenly-isolated-group&quot;&gt;Possible language changes of a suddenly isolated group&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15016/wick&quot;&gt;Wick&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 47 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29684/do-intelligent-organisms-evolved-to-communicate-only-through-scent-have-a-langua&quot;&gt;Do intelligent organisms evolved to communicate only through scent have a language?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 34 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29511/language-problems-for-time-travelers&quot;&gt;Language problems for time travelers&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11787/crissov&quot;&gt;Crissov&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 109 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30207/abstract-conversation-on-an-interspecies-level&quot;&gt;Abstract conversation on an interspecies level&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15501/ban-lonely-days&quot;&gt;ban_lonely_days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 82 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:24:00.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2798" CreationDate="2015-11-27T17:49:01.793" Score="62" ViewCount="30319" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This Query is part of the Worldbuilding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;Resources Article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As you all know there is a series of questions that have been asked to create fictional creatures in a realistic evolutionary way.&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And below is a summarized list of all of the questions in order of post, so that a link to this meta post should be enough for future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to a large amount of low quality question using this series' formula, user JBH has suggested adding specifications to the core idea of the series. Below are the most recent rendition of the rules as of April 27 2018. If a question has used the title Anatomically Correct and you feel it's poorly executed, please link to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/em&gt; (AC) series of questions are a popular tradition on Worldbuilding.SE.  Their purpose is to invite site participants to consider how to describe fictional or mythological creatures from an evolutionary context with as much biological and behavioral realism as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In keeping with the Stack's general rule of not fielding questions about 3rd party or commercial worlds, the ACS is now limited to questions about documented myths and legends of Humanity and creatures thoroughly designed (other than lacking anatomical fulfillment) for a fictional world of the OP's own creation. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7843/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the responsibility of the questioner to provide sufficient detail to specifically identify the creature in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generalizations such as &amp;quot;Elves as commonly found in fantasy stories&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;vampires&amp;quot; (without further clarification) are unacceptable and grounds for closing the question as &amp;quot;Unclear what you're asking.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links to specific examples of the creature in question are encouraged, but may not be used alone.  A specific description of the creature is &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; or the question will again be closed as &amp;quot;Unclear what you're asking.&amp;quot;  An ambiguous or insufficient description may result in closure due to the question becoming &amp;quot;Primarily opinion-based.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Images of the creature are always appreciated.  If possible, reduce large images to a width of 450 pixels and link the image to a larger version.  As with links, images may not be used alone.  A specific description is required to avoid closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Creature descriptions must include important behavioral attributes and a clear physical description.  It is the questioner's responsibility to invent the creature and the privilege of participants to explain how that invention could be manifest with evolutionary believability.  To coin a phrase, We're willing to help, but we will not invent the creature and summon it into this world for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question writing guide was developed long after the first AC question was asked.  While we encourage questioners to review earlier AC questions to better understand how to meet these requirements, the fact that some previously asked questions do not meet these expectations may not be used to justify a poor question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answer is expected to be the one that provides the greatest detail, the greatest creativity, and the greatest capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you have come to comment on a recent Anatomically Correct post that needs to be added, please post that on the community answer, or I will not see it. Also, the question cannot have been closed within a week of posting because of being off-topic or a duplicate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-02-27T15:49:13.320" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T15:49:13.320" Title="Anatomically Correct Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2797" CreationDate="2015-11-27T17:49:01.793" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;+The questions of the series are listed below in order of oldest to newest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25281/anatomically-correct-griffins&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Griffin&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25466/anatomically-correct-angels&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Angels&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25579/anatomically-correct-nuckelavee&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Nuckelavee&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25899/anatomically-correct-gods&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct God&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26001/anatomically-correct-werewolves&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Werewolves&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28458/anatomically-correct-phoenix&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Pheonix&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30163/anatomically-accurate-cyclops&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Cyclops&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27842/realistic-4-legged-sapient-creatures-centaurs-etc&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct 4-Legged Sapient Creatures&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11787/crissov&quot;&gt;Crissov&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30771/anatomically-correct-golem&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Golem&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31029/anatomically-correct-hecatoncheires&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Hecatoncheires&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32182/anatomically-correct-elemental&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Elemental&lt;/a&gt; Asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751/andyd273&quot;&gt;Andyd273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33083/anatomically-correct-land-shark&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Nanaue&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34221/anatomically-correct-medusa&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Medusa&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34235/anatomically-correct-hippocampus&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Hippocampus&lt;/a&gt; Asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15131/hanko-tanks&quot;&gt;Hanko Tanks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35835/anatomically-correct-bio-fabricator&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Bio-fabricators&lt;/a&gt; Asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17931/donald-hobson&quot;&gt;Donald hobson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36722/anatomically-correct-harpy&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Harpy&lt;/a&gt; Asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14789/caleb-woodman&quot;&gt;Caleb Woodman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38435/anatomically-correct-jackalope&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Jackalope&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40985/anatomically-correct-xenomorph&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Xenomorph&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42017/anatomically-correct-hydra&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Hydra&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44703/anatomically-correct-naga&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Naga&lt;/a&gt; Asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19006/jackwise&quot;&gt;Jackwise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46099/anatomically-correct-unicorn&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Unicorn&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46664/anatomically-correct-king-kong&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct King Kong&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48778/anatomically-correct-khajiit&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Khajiit&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48819/anatomically-correct-gnolls&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Gnolls&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3097/shalvenay&quot;&gt;Shalvenay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48874/anatomically-correct-pixie&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Pixie&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21222/renan&quot;&gt;Renan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48894/anatomically-correct-argonian&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Argonian&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17179/fi12&quot;&gt;fi12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48913/anatomically-correct-sleipnir-eight-legged-horse&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Sleipnir&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/401/ghanima&quot;&gt;Ghanima&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48988/anatomically-correct-giant-carnivore-earth-worm-graboid&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Graboid&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21222/renan&quot;&gt;Renan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51326/anatomically-correct-tomte&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Tomte&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/20953/grollo&quot;&gt;Grollo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51563/help-me-evolve-a-boar-troll/51576#51576&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Boar Troll&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10851/cobaltduck&quot;&gt;cobaltduck&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51758/anatomically-correct-cerberus&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Cerberus&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51771/anatomically-correct-giants/&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Giant&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19372/lciii&quot;&gt;LCIII&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51903/anatomically-correct-arachne&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Arachne&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/24960/%E6%B8%A1%E3%81%97%E5%AE%88%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AD%E3%83%B3&quot;&gt;渡し守シャロン&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52440/anatomically-correct-murlocs&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Murloc&lt;/a&gt; asked by  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/22678/sky&quot;&gt;Sky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52483/anatomically-correct-ent&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Ent&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/24960/%E6%B8%A1%E3%81%97%E5%AE%88%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AD%E3%83%B3&quot;&gt;渡し守シャロン&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52890/anatomically-correct-den-den-mushi&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Den Den Mushi&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9526/masclins&quot;&gt;Masclins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53664/anatomically-correct-spriggan&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Spriggan&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55104/anatomically-correct-minotaur&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Minotaur&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55996/anatomically-correct-pegasus&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Pegasus&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26717/yacomini&quot;&gt;Yacomini&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60104/anatomically-correct-slenderman&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Slenderman&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60132/anatomically-correct-creeper&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Creeper&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13987/t3-h40&quot;&gt;T3 H40&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62036/anatomically-correct-mok%C3%A8l%C3%A9-mb%C3%A8mb%C3%A9/62037&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Mokèlé-mbèmbé&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67182/anatomically-correct-slimes&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Slimes&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74254/anatomically-correct-multiarmed-humanoids&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Multi-armed Humanoids&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/34687/marqfja87&quot;&gt;MarqFJA87&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85641/anatomically-correct-huddle&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Huddle&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88204/anatomically-correct-nachtkrapp&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Nachtkrapp&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&quot;&gt;Secespitus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96301/anatomically-correct-scylla&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Scylla&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43370/lot-of-malarkey&quot;&gt;Lot-Of-Malarkey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97127/anatomically-correct-chimera&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Chimera&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43370/lot-of-malarkey&quot;&gt;Lot-Of-Malarkey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98175/anatomically-correct-ponies&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Ponies&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6846/gaazkam&quot;&gt;gaazkam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100126/anatomically-correct-ahuizotl&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Ahuizotl&lt;/a&gt; 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asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/70058/se-is-too-politically-correct&quot;&gt;SE is too politically correct&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169037/anatomically-correct-grootslang&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Grootslang&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/72193/icewar1908?tab=profile&quot;&gt;icewar1908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169146/anatomically-correct-kitsune&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Kitsune&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/72193/icewar1908?tab=profile&quot;&gt;icewar1908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169327/anatomically-correct-loch-ness-monster&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Loch Ness Monster&lt;/a&gt; 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asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/72193/icewar1908?tab=profile&quot;&gt;icewar1908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168362/anatomically-correct-cockatrice&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Cockatrice&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/70683/rotndecay&quot;&gt;RotNDecay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/170141/anatomically-correct-vanara&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Vanara&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/47352/tgcf&quot;&gt;TGCF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117923/anatomically-correct-kemonomimis&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Kemonomimis&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/353/mindwin&quot;&gt;Mindwin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143436/anatomically-correct-isitoq&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Isitoq&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49209/sealboi&quot;&gt;SealBoi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112387/anatomically-correct-asari&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Asari&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/46520/preg-fan&quot;&gt;Preg-Fan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173307/anatomically-correct-shrek&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Shrek&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/72193/icewar1908?tab=profile&quot;&gt;icewar1908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173735/anatomically-correct-super-intelligent-shade-of-blue&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Super-Intelligent Shade of Blue&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/51138/keizerharm&quot;&gt;KeizerHarm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110859/anatomically-correct-bulborb?rq=1&quot;&gt;Anatomically correct bulborb&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/48815/dabantam&quot;&gt;Dabantam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/122477/anatomically-correct-snallygaster?rq=1&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Snallygaster&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/48815/dabantam&quot;&gt;Dabantam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/174311/anatomically-correct-giant-seahorses&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Giant Seahorses&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/66420/richard-lindahl&quot;&gt;Richard Lindahl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/181441/anatomically-correct-glebsig&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Glebsig&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/181441/anatomically-correct-glebsig&quot;&gt;Galactic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/188632/anatomically-correct-sentient-skeletons&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Sentient Skeletons&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/72193/icewar1908?tab=profile&quot;&gt;icewar1908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227926/anatomically-correct-night-land-monsters&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Night Land Monsters&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2800/logan-r-kearsley?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Logan R. Kearsley&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/230011/anatomically-correct-moonstrider&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Moonstrider&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/230035/anatomically-correct-rull&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Rull&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2800/logan-r-kearsley?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Logan R. Kearsley&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/232391/anatomically-correct-mummy&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Mummy&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/80733/squidkid999&quot;&gt;SquidKid999&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/232104/anatomically-correct-elves&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Elves&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/96931/itm-coder&quot;&gt;ITM_Coder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/231950/anatomically-correct-asian-dragons&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Asian Dragons&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/96931/itm-coder&quot;&gt;ITM_Coder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/232226/anatomically-correct-sea-serpents&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Seas Serpents&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/96931/itm-coder&quot;&gt;ITM Coder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="97812" LastEditDate="2023-01-27T22:37:15.043" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T22:37:15.043" CommentCount="30" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-04T06:07:52.283" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-30T03:15:31.573" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be on topic for this site to ask a question like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are possible faster than light travel mechanics and their narrative consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And have the answers explore systems like warp, hyperspace, BSG jump drives and so on, explaining how they could possibly be executed in stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No answer would be selected, like community wiki questions on other SE sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15450" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T17:27:06.490" Title="FTL community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2799" CreationDate="2015-11-30T08:53:32.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that asking such a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; appropriate for our site. Collecting answers to overly broad questions is not what Stack Exchange is meant to do, nor what it does well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question is marked Community Wiki doesn't mean it doesn't need to adhere to our quality standards. As bilbo_pingouin already pointed out in the comments, a question such as the one you propose would be extremely broad. (You are asking for &lt;em&gt;all possible&lt;/em&gt; mechanics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; without bound their narrative consequences, for &lt;em&gt;all possible&lt;/em&gt; imagined faster-than-light propulsion systems. This one wouldn't even be limited by, say, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. If that's not closeworthy as &quot;too broad&quot;, then frankly I don't know what would be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could design a FTL drive for my universe which is powered by the digestive byproducts of little white mice eating bits of cheese after running through labyrints, and describe that system including its narrative consequences in excrutiating detail. (The probability of such a system? Most likely, it would be almost infinitely improbable. But who are you to judge?) It isn't likely to be useful to anyone else, but it would be a valid answer to your question as proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the above (which is largely generic), as far as the specific example is concerned, almost any FTL-type drive would have similar consequences and narrative implications. This includes allowing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;violation of causality&lt;/a&gt;. The specific technological gizmo or handwavium used to overcome this might well be different from one story to another, but the problem to be overcome (or simply handwaved away; or not overcome, if that's what you want!) remains exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can, however,&lt;/strong&gt; ask a series of questions that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;sufficiently specific&lt;/a&gt; for our site, and then post a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt; meta question about the series. I'm not entirely thrilled about that latter either myself, but that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; much more a valid use of the site. If you go this route, then please spread the questions out over time so that each can get the attention it deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T21:34:59.973" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T21:34:59.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2805" CreationDate="2015-11-30T20:17:30.423" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare our answered/unanswered ratio to other SE sites.  We have essentially no unanswered questions.  That may seem like a symptom of a perfectly healthy exchange site to some, but I think it shows that we're super, super aggressive about shutting down (and thus excluding from consideration) any question that is either difficult to answer or causes disagreement amongst members.  Most times when I notice a question is locked or on hold here, I roll my eyes, because there's no simply no good reason for it, it's just people with high rep playing &quot;gotcha&quot; with fresh questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is entirely a cultural problem with the site or if it could be resolved by requiring greater numbers of people/with higher rep for holding/locking questions.  Any other ideas?  Am I just bonkers, missing out on the fun of stomping on my neighbors' flowers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T04:19:32.473" Title="Does anyone else find WB insanely aggressive re: holding/locking questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2015-11-30T20:54:33.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that WB has such low unanswered rate and swiftly held/closed questions as a symptom of an active and vigilant community coupled with a relatively light question volume.  If the question volume were higher, such as on Stack Overflow, it would be easier for low quality questions to go unanswered or unflagged for quality.  Likewise, if the WB's most frequent users didn't check the question feed frequently, then questions might slip through because those with the power to act on poor questions wouldn't see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That a question is on hold means that at least five people considered the question and found significant problems with the question.  Sometimes we do get really well written question that survive for significant periods but are ultimately closed because they violate the quality requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rapid holding/closing doesn't bother me because if the questions are fixed then they often unheld/opened with just as rapid pace as they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the process is working as intended.  Low quality questions end up where they belong thus clearing the way for higher quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T20:54:33.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2015-11-30T20:55:24.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope, you're bonkers.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about this exchange you're not taking into account is that we attract the random questions that don't fit anywhere else. People come here to ask their random musings that either have too many equally valid answers to fit the format of the site (too broad), are more appropriate for another stack (off-topic), or are incomprehensible because the asker hasn't even thought about it yet (unclear what they're asking). We're actively &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2744/3202&quot;&gt;working to resolve the issue of the high number of questions that are too broad&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want to work with any specific examples so, we don't need to go there, but I recommend you actually read the questions closed as too broad, off-topic, or unclear what they're asking. You should have done that before deciding that the high rep users are voting to close questions they don't have answers to. That hypothesis doesn't even make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a short while you will have enough reputation to vote to reopen questions. Please use that ability to propose an edit to any closed questions and begin the reopen voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T22:48:35.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2015-11-30T21:17:28.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say we have a team of super-fast users who close/hold questions within seconds of them being asked. I think this would be great; the asker would have instant feedback, and be able to improve their question before it gets lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I don't think it's the speed you have a problem with, but perhaps the criteria for closure. For this, I suggest you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;read about what questions should be asked here&lt;/a&gt;. Specifically, note that you should avoid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your question is just a rant in disguise: “______ sucks, am I right?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, if we really stuck to these criteria, I think a lot more questions would get closed. We're constantly struggling to decide what types of questions we can answer, and which ones should be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the improving process is one that many new users really don't understand. When we close/hold a question, the asker is supposed to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; something about it; it by no means means we just don't want to answer. In fact, a lot of the time, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to answer a closed question, but usually that's because I'm assuming I know what the asker wants when in reality they weren't entirely clear, or because there are too many possible answers and I'm only really answering a small part of the question. Once the user improves their question, the same people that closed it will most likely also vote to re-open it, and the system will work out as intended. The only problem is that people don't always see that a question was once closed and has been improved, they only see the questions that were abandoned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T21:17:28.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2015-11-30T21:31:54.250" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Samuel wrote, our site has a tendency to attract questions that are little more than random musings. More to the point, our site has a tendency to attract questions that are everything from nutcases to sheer madness, and not uncommonly, without any prior research having been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the word &quot;attract&quot;. Just because we attract those questions doesn't mean they are appropriate here. In fact, fairly early during the beta period about a year ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/215/revisions&quot;&gt;we had a lengthy process of figuring out what the help center's &quot;on topic&quot; page should say&lt;/a&gt;, with corresponding discussions in chat as well, all of it documented as part of our site's history for those interested in learning more about the rationale behind each point. Here, I would like to also point out that the bulk of this work was done prior to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/417/1&quot;&gt;the pro tem moderator announcement&lt;/a&gt;. (Now that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2767/29&quot;&gt;graduated&lt;/a&gt;, the community will soon get to have their say about who the site's moderators should be. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35/29&quot;&gt;Again&lt;/a&gt;, I might add.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE has, on the whole, a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; active community. We have a core community of people who stop by often (we currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/55/fanatic&quot;&gt;35 users with the Fanatic badge&lt;/a&gt;, which is awarded for visiting the site each day for 100 consecutive days; note that the site has only been in &lt;em&gt;existence&lt;/em&gt; for maybe 400 days!), most of which are regular and appreciated contributors, with corresponding reputation to show for their efforts. Our meta is highly active; just look at the response you've got to this question in, as I am typing this, less than an hour. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;, but don't have data readily available to back it up, that Worldbuilding is one site that has done among the better in terms of building and maintaining a community of users devoted to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that you are still fairly new to the Stack Exchange network (other than on Worldbuilding, your currently highest reputation is 151 rep on RPG SE). Please don't take this as an insult of any kind; we all start out with a single account and 1 rep (and so did I). Nobody gets a free pass. There is, however, a lot about how the network works that you might not yet have experienced. That'll come with time and reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already stated, we do try to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2744/29&quot;&gt;work actively&lt;/a&gt; on our &lt;em&gt;reopen&lt;/em&gt; rate. Even a high rate of questions being put &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; isn't necessarily a bad thing at all; it simply indicates that the community felt that the question was either not a good fit for the site, or not answerable in its current form. Instead of wasting time &lt;em&gt;guessing&lt;/em&gt; what the OP is asking about, we put the question on hold while we figure out what the specific question is. This is perfectly normal behavior on the network. Some questions simply aren't salvagable, and sometimes the OP pretty obviously doesn't care about the question any longer, so it never gets improved to the point of being reopenable. I did, some time ago, compare our numbers to those of other sites with high quality standards and a decent amount of traffic, and found them to (at least at the time) be largely similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that any question that is edited during the &quot;on hold&quot; grace period is automatically entered into the reopen review queue. Users with sufficient reputation (this is the same limit as for casting close votes) can &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast reopen votes&lt;/a&gt; if they feel the question should not be closed, either at all or any longer after edits, which, too, enters the question into the review queue. If you feel a question that is marked as &quot;on hold&quot; shouldn't be closed, then propose an edit that you feel addresses the problems stated in the reason for why the question was put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't understand why a specific question was put on hold or closed, then &lt;em&gt;ask about it&lt;/em&gt;, either here on Meta or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;our general chat room&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't even need to be your own question. If, armed with this newfound knowledge, you are able to fix the question &lt;em&gt;while maintaining the original asker's intent&lt;/em&gt;, then great! If you still feel that the specific question was closed &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; because the users voting to close didn't know the answer, then by all means flag it for moderator attention and describe the situation, &lt;em&gt;citing specific evidence supporting your view&lt;/em&gt;. However, at least I have yet to come across many closed questions here that I felt strongly were good enough to warrant being reopened, and most of the ones I have, at the time already had reopen votes and thus were being looked at by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T21:45:07.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2015-12-02T04:19:32.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community closes more questions than it used to do, but it has always had a great answer rate.  If there's a problem, I think we may be too quick to upvote mediocre answers to difficult questions (which makes them look answered).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I personally think that we are over-aggressive about voting to close.  But I don't think that affects our answer rate.  We've been known to close questions with upvoted answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that Closed/On-hold is not an end state.  Many of the closed questions are salvageable, even under the more stringent criteria that others use.  Questions closed as Too Broad should be edited into a narrower form.  Unclear What You're Asking should be clarified.  Even off-topic questions can sometimes be salvaged.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T04:19:32.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T21:31:47.347" Score="8" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following some &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25860034#25860034&quot;&gt;discussion in chat&lt;/a&gt;, it might be interesting for the two weeks starting from Dec. 21st to replace our normal challenge by a Santa-related challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that Santa is delivering gifts to all the well behaved kids in the World. Surely there are some interesting questions about it, which could be included in a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of questions have been thrown around in the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you say, do you want to have this special challenge as challenge number #23?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:07:59.630" Title="A special challenge for the holidays season?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2808" CreationDate="2015-12-03T14:07:59.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-be-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;put it to a vote&lt;/a&gt;. It'd only take around fourteen upvotes to put a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa&lt;/a&gt; tag on the top of the list. If we don't get that many, then either not enough people care about the challenges, or people don't want to talk about Santa for two weeks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:07:59.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-12-03T17:03:48.647" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Daring proposal: &lt;strong&gt;no migration paths&lt;/strong&gt; (other than meta).  Here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of questions that are &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; here, but collect migration votes to sites where they are &lt;em&gt;also on-topic&lt;/em&gt;.  That's not how SE is supposed to work.  As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/respect-the-community-your-own-and-others/&quot;&gt;Respect the Community -- Your Own, and Others'&lt;/a&gt;, we should jealously guard our on-topic questions rather than sending them away.  Sometimes a question can be asked on more than one site; the asker chose to ask it &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, so if it's within our scope we should answer it here.  Of course, if it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; within our scope (but is otherwise a good question) it should be migrated to a site that can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am concerned that we &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25882522#25882522&quot;&gt;don't&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25882525#25882525&quot;&gt;all agree&lt;/a&gt; on the science-related aspects of our scope.  &lt;strong&gt;For now&lt;/strong&gt;, I would like those migrations -- which have been few in number thus far -- to get some extra scrutiny.  First the community should close them as off-topic, and then -- if they are good questions (wouldn't just be closed as too broad or unclear etc on the target site) -- they can be flagged for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they're not off-topic, they shouldn't be migrated.  If they are off-topic, let's make sure our scope as expressed through the Help Center is as clear as it can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10250/162102&quot;&gt;Meta.SE FAQ post on migration&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T23:20:12.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-12-04T06:13:18.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;with $2million what kind of survival kit would you bring to a prehistoric earth like medieval world with dragons, dinosaurs and uneducated populace?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what items would you bring with you to another world with the budget of 2million dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were given the information that they are not technologically advance and they have magic. On top of it you deducted upon questioning that it is a medieval-like age as well!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asked to save the other world. Save their world/race/kingdom/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;assuming you accept the offer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you ask to be given money so that you can prepare for the trip after 3 months of preparation. You were also given a bag that has time space magic that can store things the size of 50x50sq meters. It preserves everything inside in their perfect state just as you put them there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you won't be able to return back to earth for another 50 years assuming you will live for that long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems that possibly you might face are.&#xA;-Demon king problems (Cause humanity manage to annoy its neighbors and their neighbors united against them, the leader of the coalition was thus named the Demon king.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Race survival. Humans are on the verge of extinction, you need to save them as a fellow human being!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-LOTResque kind of struggle between good and evil(Some immortal thought that it is time for his revenge or simply wants to burn the world to the ground)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Poverty(Economic Crisis, some sick super powerful merchant guild want to rule the world through power of money)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Health(Bacterial/Viral Problems. Do i need to say hygiene?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Rebellion(Some bastard thought he should be the emperor/king. The princess/prince says otherwise by summoning you)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Bloodline issues(You need to marry the last of the royalty to thicken the royal blood more)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Possibly alot more as you point out what kind of issue one might face here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what would you bring? What possible issues that you would be facing apart from the stated above? What kind of preparation could you do in 3 months before your inevitable travel to another world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issue: Too Broad..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me to tighten it up? You can also answer the question if you want&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11313" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T06:13:18.470" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T01:17:36.170" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roughly put a Fibonacci number in mathematics is a series of number whereby each subsequent/following number is the sum of its predecessors... or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of using a single tag for the fortnightly challenge would it be much better to reuse tag from previous challenge and add to the new challenge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Challenge#78971 ( tag&quot;H&quot; + tag&quot;P&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Challenge#78972 (tag&quot;P&quot; + tag&quot;J&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Challenge# 78973 (tag&quot;J&quot; + tag&quot;A&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My arguments are that our brain excel at recognizing pattern and attempts to associate more than one object or event together, such feat have yet to be surpassed by machine also we could kill two chicken eggs with an asteriod impactor... 1. increase difficulty yet push up our creativity ceiling cap 2. allow a grace period for us to familiarize with each tag and so that but it won't feel like we're rushing, as a saying goes translated crudely from Chinese: knowing the enemy is half a battle won or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw where is the suggestion box?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="8400" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T05:25:15.107" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T05:25:15.107" Title="I like to suggest this site could adopt Fibonacci challenge to spice things up maybe?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T15:31:34.887" Score="13" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or, as they say, &lt;strong&gt;bring on the hats.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We participated in the annual Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/609/29&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2014&lt;/a&gt;. Because everybody loves hats, we have decided to so again this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2015&lt;/a&gt; will run from 14 December 2015 through 3 January 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to wear or see hats, there will be an &quot;I hate hats&quot; button in the site footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T03:42:50.557" Title="Worldbuilding SE is participating in Winter Bash 2015" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-07T11:27:02.777" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &quot;top questions&quot;, I notice mine just hit 1000 views, and there is another with 11000 views, but the other &quot;top&quot; questions have view counts like 14, 32, 60, and rarely something over a hundred.  Worldbuilding is still not a very large site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would some have orders of magnitude difference?  And why would a fresh post with no views still be &quot;top&quot;?  That is, what does &quot;top&quot; mean?  I always figured it was most recently asked/edited/answered, but I see the label is actually &quot;&lt;strong&gt;top&lt;/strong&gt; questions&quot;, not &quot;fresh/updated threads&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T20:45:49.363" Title="What accounts for the strange distribution in &quot;number of views&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2817" CreationDate="2015-12-07T12:54:23.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what you are referring to. But if you mean the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;fontpage of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, which indicates &quot;Top questions&quot;, you'll notice, on the right of the said &quot;Top questions&quot; indication that you can sort by &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=active&quot;&gt;active&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=hot&quot;&gt;hot&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=week&quot;&gt;week&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=month&quot;&gt;month&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. By default, &quot;active&quot; is selected. Meaning, that the highest question is the one that was most recently active. Active includes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking a question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answering a question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;editing a post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and possibly some comments as well. So in that view, you have fresh questions as well as older questions which had a new answer (or were edited).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the other sorting criteria use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60756/how-do-the-arbitrary-hotness-points-work-on-the-new-stack-exchange-home-page&quot;&gt;Hot Number calculation&lt;/a&gt;. And the featured are the ones where a bounty is placed upon. But there are none as of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T20:45:49.363" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T20:45:49.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2793" CreationDate="2015-12-07T15:07:01.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 25 questions and 80 answers, for an average of 3.20 answers per question. A total of 4490 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30662/an-underwater-creature-that-could-take-down-a-boat&quot;&gt;An underwater creature that could take down a boat&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8312/mike-c-ford&quot;&gt;Mike.C.Ford&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;157 total votes, 22 question votes, 13 answers, 6365 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30513/how-deep-can-the-ocean-plausibly-be&quot;&gt;How deep can the ocean plausibly be?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;92 total votes, 26 question votes, 6 answers, 3914 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30738/how-do-mermaids-perform-major-surgical-procedure-underwater&quot;&gt;How do mermaids perform major surgical procedure underwater?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;66 total votes, 14 question votes, 3 answers, 3673 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30749/mermaid-architecture&quot;&gt;Mermaid architecture&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;24 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 105 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30480/how-big-can-the-leviathan-and-kraken-really-be&quot;&gt;How big can the leviathan and kraken really be?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;19 total votes, 9 question votes, 2 answers, 417 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30843/what-would-make-good-clothing-for-an-underwater-species&quot;&gt;What would make good clothing for an underwater species?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 146 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30645/do-mermaids-lay-eggs-underwater-or-give-birth-to-live-young&quot;&gt;Do mermaids lay eggs underwater or give birth to live young?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 358 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30927/how-could-an-underwater-civilization-develop-electricity&quot;&gt;How could an underwater civilization develop electricity?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 371 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30561/low-tech-underwater-weaponry&quot;&gt;Low-tech Underwater Weaponry&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 178 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30820/what-adaptations-would-a-water-dwelling-species-need-to-survive-by-primarily-hun&quot;&gt;What adaptations would a water-dwelling species need to survive by primarily hunting pre-industrial humans?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/djmethaneman&quot;&gt;DJMethaneMan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 400 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30762/save-london-from-a-sudden-glacial-melting&quot;&gt;Save London From a Sudden Glacial Melting?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 72 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30699/does-mermaid-evolution-come-with-buoyancy-control&quot;&gt;Does mermaid evolution come with buoyancy control?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 1 answers, 67 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30690/cephalopods-inherit-the-world&quot;&gt;Cephalopods Inherit the World&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7/pipperchip&quot;&gt;PipperChip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 171 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30613/what-modifications-are-needed-for-my-sea-creature-to-able-to-hold-its-breath-for&quot;&gt;What modifications are needed for my sea creature to able to hold its breath for weeks?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 224 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30706/how-do-mermaids-ears-work&quot;&gt;How do mermaids&amp;#39; ears work?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 128 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30707/how-to-explain-mermaids-tail-morphing-into-legs-and-vice-versa&quot;&gt;How to explain a mermaid&amp;#39;s tail morphing into legs and vice versa?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 231 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30744/how-do-mermaids-map-ocean-currents&quot;&gt;How do mermaids map ocean currents?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 64 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30837/what-happened-when-my-scientist-drilled-a-hole-through-europas-crust&quot;&gt;What happened when my scientist drilled a hole through Europa&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;crust&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 90 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30702/would-an-average-seawater-mermaid-be-any-larger-than-its-freshwater-counterparts&quot;&gt;Would an average seawater mermaid be any larger than its freshwater counterparts?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 92 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30680/what-might-mini-submersible-dogfights-be-like&quot;&gt;What might mini submersible dogfights be like?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10851/cobaltduck&quot;&gt;cobaltduck&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 89 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30733/how-mermaids-watch-news-live-on-tv-underwater-if-conductivity-of-sea-water-affec&quot;&gt;How mermaids watch news live on TV underwater if conductivity of sea water affect electromagnetic signal?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 158 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30566/psychology-and-sociology-in-my-earth-changing-underwater-community&quot;&gt;Psychology and sociology in my Earth Changing underwater community&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 56 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30704/cartilaginous-mermaid-or-bony-mermaid-best-for-adapting-underwater&quot;&gt;Cartilaginous mermaid or bony mermaid best for adapting underwater?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 2 question votes, 0 answers, 65 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30647/would-future-combat-submarines-come-with-jet-propulsion-thruster&quot;&gt;Would future combat submarines come with jet propulsion thruster?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 total votes, -2 question votes, 5 answers, 135 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30669/could-the-water-found-underground-near-the-earths-crust-somehow-find-its-way-on&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30669/could-the-water-found-underground-near-the-earths-crust-somehow-find-its-way-on&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15661/johnny-urbani&quot;&gt;Johnny Urbani&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-2 total votes, -2 question votes, 1 answers, 39 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T15:07:01.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2859" CreationDate="2015-12-07T15:07:38.680" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twenty-second topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 7 December - 21 December&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It occurs to me that geography has an almost limitless number of questions that can be asked and is crucial to building a world...unless you are doing a story in space...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T22:07:43.563" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #22: Geography" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-07T16:24:47.430" Score="4" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aztec&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aztec&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aztec&lt;/a&gt; tag should be removed as it's way too specific, unlikely for Worldbuilding use, ans only used on one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't see a button for that, or any way to submit it for attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T19:40:31.780" Title="Remove dud tags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2821" CreationDate="2015-12-07T19:40:31.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are removed automatically after a period of time where they don't have at least two questions using them.  I forget how long.  Six months maybe?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would still be there for people to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only very new posters can't create tags for themselves.  The only real difference is that it will show up if someone types &quot;tec&quot; and notices it before the fourth letter (or az.. or zt... but no one seems to be typing those).  So someone who is typing technology might see it.  But how many people type technology on a question about Aztecs?  If there are a lot of people doing this, maybe we do want the tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag system is designed to be mostly self-maintaining.  People add tags as needed; the system prunes unneeded tags.  Sometimes people create a tag that a moderator removes.  These tend to be not over-specific tags but over-general ones.  For example, a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't be much use here.  Outside of that though, manually mucking with the tag hierarchy is extra work that doesn't really give us anything.  The automatic pruning will handle truly over-specific tags.  Eventually.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T19:40:31.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T11:05:35.970" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31061/885&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31061/885&lt;/a&gt; I see **anti-**gravity where the asterisks are not accepted as bold formatting because the closing one is not followed by whitespace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the preview shown while editing the answer, I saw that a U+FEFF character (zero-width no-break space) did the trick.  But when completing the edit, it went back to showing asterisks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally I've run into the opposite problem, where unrelated asterisks get read as one spanning formatting directive.  But what do we do in this case, where it is not recognizing things as a formatting code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T11:34:15.497" Title="Markup not being taken" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2825" CreationDate="2015-12-08T11:34:15.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be a case of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;**anti-**gravity &lt;code&gt;**anti-**gravity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anti&lt;/strong&gt;-gravity? &lt;code&gt;**anti**-gravity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem is not that it should be followed by white space (th&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;s w&lt;strong&gt;ork&lt;/strong&gt;s) but it cannot be preceeded by non-alphanum character (you see the **stars **).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T11:34:15.497" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T19:28:55.913" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22795/what-is-the-best-planetary-orbit-around-a-black-hole-in-order-to-support-life&quot;&gt;What is the best planetary orbit around a black hole in order to support life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My comment has a wikipedia link, but the close-square-bracket is not being taken and the link runs on to the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T20:05:59.947" Title="Why is my link messed up?" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|markdown|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2827" CreationDate="2015-12-08T19:44:39.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See Greg Egan's novel&#xA;  [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)](Incandescence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have written &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See Greg Egan's novel [Incandescence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="3202" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T19:53:18.527" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T19:53:18.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2827" CreationDate="2015-12-08T19:48:50.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel is correct. The syntax for Markdown links is: &lt;code&gt;[link text](full link URL)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wrote &lt;code&gt;[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)](Incandescence)&lt;/code&gt; or in other words, &lt;code&gt;[full link URL](link text)&lt;/code&gt;. This is not a valid Markdown link, so the default behavior of making a link out of what appears to be a URL probably kicked in. With unusual characters in the URL, that can easily backfire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T19:48:50.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2832" CreationDate="2015-12-10T05:17:45.030" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I tell people about aspects of Athius they commonly ask why I keep things secret. Telling me that &quot;No one will steal my ideas.&quot; or &quot;Nothing is new under the sun.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet my concepts, ideas, lore, stories, and characters not only have unmatched value to me personally, but also could have financial value in the future, as I plan on capitalizing on said aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would disclosing information about my world make them less valuable or am I hindering success by keeping elements a secret?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; This question is a train wreck. To reiterate in (&lt;em&gt;Hopefully&lt;/em&gt;) more understandable terminology; I am asking if sharing (&lt;em&gt;To anyone, not just this SE.&lt;/em&gt;) the characters, lore, stories, and other parts of my world &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; any part of it is published takes away from its potential value, or adds to it. (&lt;em&gt;This question is most likely on the wrong SE, sorry for wasting your time.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15913" OwnerDisplayName="Izach" LastEditorUserId="15913" LastEditDate="2015-12-11T14:44:18.527" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T14:44:18.527" Title="Disclosure of worldbuilding information used in potential publications" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2830" CreationDate="2015-12-10T14:53:00.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell if you are referring to talking about posting on this site (in which case meta, where this has been migrated to, is the right place) or talking about sharing your ideas in general, in which case worldbuilding is not really the right place at all (since we deal with the building of worlds, not the protection of content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about posting on this site, in order to help you get better answers we will need to know things about your setting in order to help inform and refine answers to your questions. Anything you write is subject to the licence on StackExchange, but the words only, not the idea behind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about sharing your setting with other people (and this isn't on topic here, but I'll answer anyway), then that is down to you. Eventually if you decide to monetise you setting, then you are going to have to reveal it eventually. What you seem to be missing is that the real value of your ideas is in how you use them, rather than in the ideas themselves. If you use them to write a story for instance, the skill that makes them worth something is your skill with writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T14:53:00.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2830" CreationDate="2015-12-10T20:33:01.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, if you think your ideas are so unique that they would get stolen and you would be disadvantaged by it in a future work, then by all means keep them to yourself until you are ready to get them published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let me remind you of one or two points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a lot of books have been written so far. It is very likely that something close to your idea and your characters exist somewhere already.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you intend to publish your story, how do you plan to convince an editor to accept your book without sharing anything?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll note that many famous authors share chapters of their books on-line before getting the whole books published (e.g. GRR Martin). And I don't think it hindered their knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Stack Exchange is a Q&amp;amp;A based on the concept of social sharing of knowledge. So if you don't want to share your ideas, then asking questions here is probably not the best place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that ultimately, it is your writing style, the way you present your story, etc. that will make your story a success (and some good marketing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people around here (me included) think that it is possible to share some of their story without compromising their chance to get the whole novel published later. You might also invent some similar case with different characters if you want to protect your main ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T20:33:01.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-12-10T23:56:14.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/units&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;units&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;units&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/measurement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;measurement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;measurement&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these tags, only &lt;code&gt;currency&lt;/code&gt; already exists, but doesn’t world building often include the design of a custom system of measurement and units, which are often linked to coinage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11787" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T23:56:14.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-12-11T18:55:45.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to follow this suggestion and ask my question here first, to see if you find it on topic, or not too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would my magic system affect the economy, commerce and security of my fictional country?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I will describe my &lt;strong&gt;magic system&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a Sense based magic, with two components: the energy source - an unobtainium material called Spark - and a sensory trigger. The trigger depends on the effect you want to cause, and has to stimulate a sense in a special way to &quot;activate&quot; the magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every sense is divided in 3 Ranks. The ability to use these is not &quot;hereditary&quot; or &quot;fixed&quot;, though gene pool helps. Is more like a trained art, like having a good ear for music, or learning to wine taste. So almost anyone can improve their rank, given enough effort. The difference between ranks is not arbitrary, there is a hard limit, something that &quot;clicks&quot; when you surpass it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most basic Rank is very extended among the population, almost&#xA;everyone has Rank 1 in several senses. Those can use the &quot;Spark&quot; as&#xA;is, without a trigger, to just enhance the sense, and have a very&#xA;poor energy efficiency, needing plenty of sensory activation and&#xA;Spark just to get very minimal effects, almost all internal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second Rank senses are not as extended, I don't have a specific %&#xA;of people having it, but it would be like the ratio of people we&#xA;have in our world that know how to play an instrument or sing,&#xA;versus those that have no talent (as I am). A second rank Sense has&#xA;a pretty good energy efficiency. While a Rank 1 could keep an effect&#xA;a few minutes, given the same amount of energy and sense stimuli a&#xA;Rank 2 could keep at it for an hour or two. With this rank, one can&#xA;start to do pretty amazing things, like healing wounds, listening to&#xA;other's thoughts or hurling flames to others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rank 3 is rarely seen. It's the elite. That being said, those that&#xA;attain Rank 3, rarely do so in a single sense. Using this Rank&#xA;literally consumes the source of the stimuli. You don't lick&#xA;something, you eat it. You smell something and it disappears into&#xA;you. Your tact disintegrates what you touch, absorbing it into you.&#xA;You have (kinda) laser eyes, absorbing whatever you see. This costs&#xA;a lot of Spark, but it gives a lot of punch for so little buck. The&#xA;things that these people can do is very extreme. Not only they have&#xA;the advantage of being able to absorb things, some even at a&#xA;distance, but the effects they can manage are exponentially higher.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Someone with Rank 1 licking, touching or sniffing a tiny pebble of charcoal might increase her body temperature, keeping herself warm. Someone with Rank 2 might generate and control enough heat to keep herself warm for the whole night, or throw 3 or 4 tongues of heat. A Rank 3, consuming the charcoal, will have heat to use for hours, and (for example) melt the reinforced door of a bank, no issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the magic system is explained, here comes my problem with it. As the vast majority have Rank 1 in most senses, it would not be uncommon to have specialized stores that dealt with their needs. I'm thinking of some little strips of different materials, scented, colored, textured... Regular people could go and buy themselves some charcoal stripes (to keep with the heat example) and keep themselves warm while on the exterior, kinda like magic hot pockets, or you could sell flowery scented ones for disease treatments, or emotional comfort (like magic aromatherapy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, something so innocent as this can be very harmful if someone of Rank 3 just goes and buys some charcoal sticks and burns the Town Hall. In the other hand, is not hard to make some charcoal yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not in our modern world, but in my fictional one. The society I'm working with is kinda Victorian / Steampunk-esque. Also, the country is at the verge of war, due to the lack of Spark. They use it not only for their magic but to power almost every machine, and they have dwindling resources. So it's pretty militarized already, people is losing their temper, desperate. Some parts of the cities are being shut down of the energy source (the poorest ones), and the country is already building up tension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubts are:&#xA;a) Would this kind of &quot;sense shops&quot; be viable? Are they too much of a security risk?&#xA;b) Would you keep them open in this pre-war scenario? Put a special tax on the most dangerous materials maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it's too long... But it was kinda needed to give context to the question. Thank you for reading it, and I await confirmation (or not) that the question is good to go. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7991" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2015-12-11T19:11:48.157" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T19:11:48.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2592" CreationDate="2015-12-12T23:42:03.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2767/28&quot;&gt;graduation&lt;/a&gt; comes the ability to run ads that we design on our site.  These are called community-promotion ads.  Early next year SE will open a post where we can submit designs for ads, and any ad that gets enough votes will join the rotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that people can start thinking about ads (not just this one, but any others we'd like to see), here is the required format for ad submissions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Image requirements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;300&lt;/strong&gt; x 250 pixels&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Must be GIF or PNG No animated GIFs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The size requirement is changing for 2016 and beyond; ads will now be 300x250, not 220x250.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T21:22:14.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-14T17:11:02.643" Score="7" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just created an 'urban fantasy' &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt;.  I figure this is a very common genre, and as such is deserving of a unique tag.  I think the genre is pretty well known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm really bad at short &amp;amp; concise descriptions.  I was hoping someone could help word-smith a good and precise description for the urban-fantasy genre, or what a tag related to worlds with such a genre is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short version is &quot;magic in modern world&quot;, I have something like that already, but I know others can do better :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I tagged was one asking about modern warfare in presence of magical healing being available.  Other examples I can think of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will &lt;em&gt;some group&lt;/em&gt; respond when magic suddenly reappears in the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic exists in a world identical to ours, but most people aren't aware of it.  How do I justify no one proving it's existence?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our world is suddenly invaded by a magical world that created a magic portal to ours, how do we defend against them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I keep my rare wizards in the modern world a viable threat that other supernatural folks would fear when a sniper rifle could kill them immediately no matter how strong they are?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would a modern legal system create fair laws to maintain order in a world were some individuals are affected by magical curse causing them to become Were-people; who's instincts drive them to be more territorial and settle internal disputes with physical fights for dominance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMagocracy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mageocracy&lt;/a&gt; handle the advent of modern technology making most of the effects the public depended on them accessible to non-mages?  can they keep their power etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those are a little open ended, but I think the express the idea, presumably the actual questions would be a bit narrower focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Justification of the tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was pointed out that we got rid of the Fantasy tag as redundant because we had more exact tags for most cases fantasy covered, and thus it was asked rather this was likewise superfluous due to it being handled by other tags.  I think this is a valid point, I'm willing to debate rather a tag should exist at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see that we have the Modern Age tag, so in theory most of the above answers could be covered by using the Magic and Modern Age tag's together; thus arguably covering the need without a new tag.  However, if you consider my last two example, these cover worlds that would likely qualify as urban fantasy (depending on how one defines urban fantasy) but the modern age tag definitely doesn't apply since, while our modern technology exists, it is clearly not &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; modern world, and doesn't have our social norms (a mageocracy would be opposed by most societies in normal world, and the were-people are explicitly defined as having foreign social norms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose a looser interpretation of modern-age, or a separate tag that refers only to modern technology but not modern social norms, could still cover the above examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I still kind of prefer this tag.  In the case of removing the Fantasy tag the argument was not that other tags could cover it, but that other tags &lt;em&gt;more exactly&lt;/em&gt; covered the situation; with fantasy too much of a catch-all.  with this tag, even if you assumed some combination of magic and modern-tech tags could cover the question they are still less exact then urban fantasy is for describing the exact feel and type of world (based off of the general understanding of urban fantasy I have from fiction).  I feel this tag allows an increased degree of accuracy when describing the format of the question, as opposed to the fantasy tag which was so generic that it failed to increase understanding about the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So generally speaking it seems to me like it's better to have then not have.  However, perhaps others disagree, if the consensus is that the tag is superfluous then obviously it should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T03:04:40.950" Title="Urban fantasy tag?" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2837" CreationDate="2015-12-14T18:10:10.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;For questions relating to magic or other fantasy elements in a relatively modern setting.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still seems short, but I think explaining any more than that would limit the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, is there a hat for editing tag wikis? Because if so, and people like this one, I want to be the one to put it in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T19:04:06.793" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T19:04:06.793" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-15T02:09:32.150" Score="10" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found World Building an interesting stack exchange, and I've answered a couple of questions. I'm considering asking one now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know what restrictions there are on questions. Do I need to be a fiction book writer, or a dungeon master, having an actual need for information, in order for it to be an &quot;Actual problem&quot; (a phrase mentioned in the tour for the site)? Or can anyone with an interesting scenario who needs specific information ask a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T19:06:35.593" Title="What's an &quot;Actual problem&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2839" CreationDate="2015-12-15T07:39:29.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The focus here is on the question, not on the purpose for which the question is being asked. We do not ask people to justify the merits of why they are asking the question, if you had enough reason to ask then that is fine by us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that the question itself be specific, answerable, on topic, etc. The reason having an actual problem is good is that it helps you achieve those goals. The more realized your problem and the more you have already tried to solve it then the more specific and helpful the problems can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I assume you mean this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour is the same for all Stack Exchange sites and beyond changing the example question we are unable to edit it. That means that a few bits are not as directly applicable as we might like. This was originally written for people in Stack Overflow asking programming related questions where this applied more directly than it does here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T07:39:29.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2839" CreationDate="2015-12-15T10:27:47.957" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;WB.SE is unique in the sense that we have a great workforce ready to answer almost anything that drops around the site. This can easily be seem if you look at how fast unanswered questions get a answer - this place is one of the most efficients on the whole Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, each one of us can only answer so many questions in a given time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like to help. I would love to be able to give some hints or some direction for someone writing a book or any other kind of media, and see that material taking off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't like, however, is to spend a considerable time writing an answer to discover a bit later that the asker just asked it because he/she was &lt;em&gt;bored&lt;/em&gt;, and the time I spent on his question was basically moot. Really, I could have spent all the time that I spend thinking about that question on something else - my own works.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also have used that time to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;help someone that actually needs help&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that this is not a entertainment site, as much as it looks like. We are here to help people understand stuff, as much as every other other stack around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asked &quot;just because&quot; take off manpower that could be used on questions that have a legitimate need for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just wondering something on the lines &quot;What would happen if...&quot; just to sate your curiosity, you can always use the chat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if you would use the question for something applicable, that would be the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-12-15T19:06:35.593" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T19:06:35.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T16:29:41.273" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if each SE has any control over any part of the &quot;site tour&quot; under the &lt;code&gt;help&lt;/code&gt; menu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily because I think it would be neat if there was a last little section talking about our specific community, we could mention things like stopping by &lt;code&gt;chat&lt;/code&gt; and visiting our &lt;code&gt;question sandbox&lt;/code&gt; or checking out the latest &lt;code&gt;challenge&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;blog&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if it is shared for all sites, we can't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Side-question that made me think of this: &quot;What is the easiest way to get to chat?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;answer seems to be scrolling to the bottom of the page and it's hidden in the orange links&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="2138" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T17:32:12.697" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T17:42:41.050" Title="Does Worldbuilding control what is on our &quot;site tour&quot;? (+ possible improvements)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2799" CreationDate="2015-12-16T17:27:06.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree that one massive post is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the way to go about it, that doesn't mean there isn't another way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able to go about it in a way similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/a&gt; series of questions. Where each separate question is more like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are narrative consequences of faster-than-light travel in the form of... [warp-drive, etc]?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Feel free to suggest/use better versions of the question. There would have to be more than that one sentence but you get the idea.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then start compiling those questions in a big list on meta. However, I wouldn't ask those questions all at once. People will tire of them quickly and they wouldn't each get the attention they deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T17:27:06.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2842" CreationDate="2015-12-16T17:42:41.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The parts of the tour that moderators can edit are: the first paragraph, the &quot;ask about&quot; list, and the &quot;don't ask about&quot; list.  We can also change the example question, within some pretty tight constraints.  Everything else is standard across Stack Exchange and can't be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T17:42:41.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2846" CreationDate="2015-12-17T01:13:22.380" Score="9" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;While working the first posts review queue, I was presented with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31600/6986&quot;&gt;this first answer&lt;/a&gt; by a new user. While everything seemed fine at first glance, I noticed the user under review, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/133/pops&quot;&gt;Pops&lt;/a&gt;, is a brand new user and a diamond moderator. Pops also appears to be a diamond mod on several other sites within the Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I missed something, but I didn't think we held elections recently for new moderators here on Worldbuilding. Do diamond mods keep their status across sites, or is there something fishy going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T01:24:04.633" Title="New user is a diamond mod?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2845" CreationDate="2015-12-17T01:24:04.633" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a Community Manager (i.e. a Stack Exchange employee), so I have diamonds everywhere. I just look new because I've never really interacted with this particular site before. Nothing happened with your elections (or anything else), I just decided to poke my head out and see why everyone was saying this site is so awesome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explicitly answer your last question, diamond mods typically hold office on just one site. There are a few non-employees with diamonds on multiple sites, but they were elected or appointed to each site individually and independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T01:24:04.633" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T17:16:59.037" Score="35" ViewCount="1005" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Kurtis, and I'll be working on the new design for the graduated Worldbuilding site. As most of you are aware, each site within the Stack Exchange network gets its own unique theme while maintaining some consistency and common elements with the rest of the Stack Exchange family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're in the very early stage of brainstorming, but before we get too excited about the endless possibilities, we'd like your input on the overall direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to come up with an icon that is recognizable at all sorts of sizes including tiny.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any ways that the site should visually connect with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;medium blog&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we encompass all of the genres covered on the site without leaning too specifically toward one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T15:12:57.030" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T15:12:57.030" Title="Brainstorming Worldbuilding Site Design" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-17T18:03:15.747" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it would be great fun to have something like one of these two images for the background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wsign.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wsign.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilder at work&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YQpSU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YQpSU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Fantastical world at play&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one identifies our purpose as Worldbuilders in that we build worlds, often with painstaking detail. The second aligns with the often-fantastical nature of our products and identifies that what we do is meant more for fiction than reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Both images above acquired via a Google image search.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our icon could be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PkJGi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PkJGi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Hand holding a world&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simple and identifies our hands-on approach to world development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak to the blog, as I've not been involved in it. I wish I were, but I haven't had the time when I'm not at work and don't want to be there while at work when I have the time...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T18:03:15.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-17T18:27:06.393" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Artistic theme&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we encompass all of the genres covered on the site without leaning too specifically toward one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure we can encompass &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them, but I also think that's ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By our nature we get questions on a wide range of topics and covering a wide range of &quot;realisms&quot;, from planets in binary star systems with actual science all the way through magical worlds that follow no known laws of nature.  These worlds are inhabited by everything from people to AIs to elves flying on griffin-back.  But whatever those worlds are like, they almost certainly involve a land (let's call it a planet) that probably has a sky with suns and/or moons and/or other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, the concept of worldbuilding is captured well by an alien landscape (with suns/moons/nebulas/? visible in the sky, which probably isn't blue).  It's also captured well by an &quot;arial&quot; view of a planet clearly not Earth in a system clearly not ours.  I think that even if you're designing a medieval-oid fantasy world with wizards and dragons, this could still resonate.  I don't think my RPG questions would be out of place on a site whose design revolves around an alien landscape with two moons in the sky, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asked for some images to illustrate the kinds of things I'm thinking of.  These are meant to be evocative, not literal -- when I think of &quot;worldbuilding&quot; these are the kinds of pictures that come to my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alien landscapes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KyT8q.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KyT8q.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alien landscape&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SiJ3v.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SiJ3v.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;another alien landscape&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S3o25.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S3o25.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;red planet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Arial&quot; views (i.e. showing whole planets/stars/etc):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WQbrM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WQbrM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;planet in nebula&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3TuB3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3TuB3.png&quot; alt=&quot;planet with moons&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T21:31:36.270" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T21:31:36.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-17T18:32:05.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blog tie-in&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any ways that the site should visually connect with the medium blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a great question!  I would like to see some connection between the site and the blog.  But we don't need to feel bound by the current design of the blog; we can adjust that to fit the site design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We -- by which I mean @ArtofCode -- created the blog design from scratch because there were no design elements &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; that it made sense to use.  The generic white &quot;WB&quot; on a light blue background just didn't do it for us, y'know?  I think that if we'd already &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; a site design, though, we would have tied into that.  And while I don't want to speak for the people who'll be doing the work, I think it's reasonable that we could incorporate WB.SE design elements into the blog.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;incorporate&quot; rather than &quot;copy&quot; is the right approach; the Q&amp;amp;A site and the blog &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; different sites, though closely related, so they should look related but not the same.  If there's something on the blog that you'd like to pull in, go for it -- but we can go the other direction too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T18:32:05.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-17T18:37:28.130" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The role of whimsy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While worldbuilding is serious stuff, we're also a whimsical community.  (I mean, look at our popular questions!  Facebook summoning Cthulhu?  Physical properties of Santa's sleigh?  We're doing real work but we're also having fun.)  So if there's some way to convey a sense of whimsy in a small way in the design, that'd be cool.  I don't know what that looks like.  It should not overwhelm; we don't want to suggest to visitors that we're a joke site, because we're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T18:37:28.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-18T00:26:46.447" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I think Monica and Frostfyre are on to something, but here's some ideas straight from my head to the paper to here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cXIXS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cXIXS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;idea for icon&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a rough concept of an icon I came up with. In the center it's half a brain and a protractor, to represent how the topics here are a cross between science and imagination. Then the orbiting bodies are, well, orbiting bodies, moons of some sort, to give a somewhat more concrete implication that the circular object in the center is meant to be interpreted as a planet, and also to suggest that we deal with building worlds of all sizes. In the top right I've drawn a tiny version, to show that it works pretty well when that small (though I still don't know how to draw a brain). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6SBV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6SBV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;main top thing idea&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this would go on the top, you know, with the site name and all the buttons. There's a lot going on, so let's start from the left. On the bottom, there's kind of like a holodeck-esque tear in reality to suggest that this world is not yet finished. On top of that is a mountain range with a volcano, to suggest the beginning of things (initial planet formation, geographical changes due to active plate tectonics and a hot core). That plume of smoke is coming from a little primitive village. In the middle, on the ground, is a river, both because rivers are important to geography and civilization, but also to again represent how we as a community flow through a lot of different topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above that is another planet, with a moon orbiting it, and a star to its upper right, this part symbolizes our focus on space and physics and all that. There's also a dragon and a spacceship, representatives of fantasy and science fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the right there are some hills, kind of an antithesis to the mountains to represent erosion and the changes to things over time. Behind the hills is a futuristic city, to match the primitive one on the left. In front of the hills, or really on top of one, we have a man with a spear looking to the sunset with a robot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and behind everything there is just a bit of fog, or dust, or something. I just like having that extra layer, but it could represent the unknown, and again the fact that there are parts of this world that are yet to be explored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this mainly focuses on the duality of beginning and end, but I think it also does a decent job of incorporating most of the things we talk about here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for colors, I think there would be some, but as I'm vaguely colorblind I don't tend to worry much about them. I'm thinking pastels and simplicity would be nice; you know, something basic, yet inviting. A calming vista rather than a sharp one, to remind new users that we have some semblance of order we like to keep, and they should really go to the help center first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yeah, this just my idea. I don't really know how much symbolism actually works, but I like thinking about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternate option would be to use my avatar for everything. I would also be on board for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T00:26:46.447" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-18T13:50:21.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like the design to not be too obtrusive or &quot;in your face&quot;. A lot of people browse the site from work and we don't want to discourage them from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For images itself our discussion on the Worldbuilding site advert has some relevant ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312/creating-an-ad-for-community-promotion&quot;&gt;Creating an ad for community promotion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely like Frostfyre's suggestions, in particular a hand painting a world should work as a variable size icon. Maybe even have a bit of the world missing and the paint is filling it in. That detail might disappear at the smallest size but be visible in the larger ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T19:44:24.957" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-18T14:50:57.963" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like the coloring and feeling of @Frostfyre's first image.  However, I suggest replacing the painter's hand with a scaffolding and construction workers.  Basically, something that uses the world and the starry-nebuly background of his image, but the accents of the image below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7or9M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7or9M.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The workers can be more or less realistic looking, and possibly holding tools.  The puzzle theme is optional (I'd go without it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="10851" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T14:24:20.083" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T14:24:20.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T18:05:27.883" Score="15" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a fan of what I refer to as Hard Magic, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Magic A is Magic A&lt;/a&gt; in concept.  Basically, magic systems where magic has very hard and set rules that must be followed.  All the rules may not be known by all characters within the story, but the magic itself has rules and works based off those rules.  The characters in the story may not know all the rules, or may be learning and discovering them as time goes on, but the rules always apply and set boundaries for the magic.  This is obvious analogous to hard science, where science has exact rules and worlds must function within those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if a tag for worlds that use Hard Magic is worth having, and if not rather we have some other way of expressing the concept with existing tags.  I think it not only would address the ability to better describe your magic system and intent of question, but may also help address a previously mentioned problem by encouraging the very answer chosen for it to occur: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2788/how-can-we-make-magic-based-questions-as-interesting-to-answer-as-the-various-le&quot;&gt;How can we make magic-based questions as interesting to answer as the various levels of science-based questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example of the sort of questions that may be tagged with a [hard magic] style tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want a world where magic is used in a specific way with specific limits, what set of rules would meet these needs while also fitting some theme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a magic system which works with &lt;em&gt;these rules&lt;/em&gt; would it be possible for my protagonist to achieve effect X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My magic works with this set of rules, how would my world's mages safely explore and discover the rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My magic system abides by thermodynamics and can be powered by converting energy in this way, what method of fueling large spells would make most sense for my community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a world with magic limited in this way what things would people find easier to do with magic and what would be best done with mundane method&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a magic system which I wanted to abide by these rules, but I want some effect that can't be achieved in such a system, how can I tweak my rules to allow such an affect while keeping with some desired principle for the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;many of the examples above could be tagged with just 'magic', but they all focus on the idea either that rules already exist and they want to see the result of the world given the exact rules, or that they need help defining the rules better.  In both cases a very exact set of rules is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where I'm inclined to create a hard magic tag.  My biggest problem being that I'm not sure others will know it exists.  If the tag is known it could be useful, but if no one is aware of the tag it doesn't do much good (that's why I suggest hard magic, because someone thinking of the hard science tag may naturally go with the hard magic as the obvious analog tag's name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see a hard magic tag only defining that a magic system abides by &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;enter link description here&lt;/a&gt; sort of system, with questions focusing on creation or use of these rules.  Or it could be a tag that focuses on a more general concept of realism in a world with known magical rules.  Ie. the tag could include concepts such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would Hard Science interact with my magic rules in realistic way.  For example example 4 above is clearly looking for a scientist view on thermodynamics and energy generation to help define how his magic could be used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realism of a magical system within a world.  For instance examples 3 and 5 sort of touch on this.  Given a magic system how do I create a realistic world that logically results from the rules implied by my magic. (though probably this would be covered by [reality-check]?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, do we need a tag to cover these concepts, and if so what should the tag look like.  I guess that could be broken into a few sub questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should the tag exist at all in some format; and if not what tags serve to address the sort of questions asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should this be one tag or multiple tags, for instance maybe instead what we need is a [rule creation] tag for creating rules for a system, be it magic or sci-fi rules for some new technology/device or rules of a society legal system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is one tag that should exist what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; should it cover, ie what should the description look like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should it's name be.  I'm not committed to Hard Magic, though I lean towards it since it's similarity to Hard Science and use elsewhere makes it seem the easiest for others to figure out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4857" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T07:10:37.357" Title="should a hard-magic tag be created?" Tags="|discussion|tags|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2015-12-18T20:10:13.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even silly and wild magical worlds such as Piers Anthony's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xanth&lt;/a&gt; have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; rules. The first description of a magical world is usually based around what rules it has defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with &quot;Hard magic&quot; is that most magic eventually becomes &quot;hard&quot; at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; point, even though that point may never appear in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You give an example of &quot;Lord of the Rings&quot; where magic remains pretty undefined. But it remains consistent as well - which suggests that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; rules, we just don't know what they are. You know what would have been a way bigger issue than the Eagles saving Frodo? &lt;em&gt;If Gandalf teleported to him and Sam and then teleported them home.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic being undefined is okay - magic being &lt;em&gt;inconsistent with the rest of the story or world&lt;/em&gt; is a problem. Or, if it's not a problem in the OP's mind, any question/answer regarding the magic is literally &quot;anything goes&quot;, such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the world were the same as &quot;Alice in Wonderland&quot;, how would Alice [&lt;em&gt;accomplish any new particular goal requiring magic&lt;/em&gt;]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why posts about magic, by default, need an explanation of the rules to work within, to stay consistent. Otherwise, they are &quot;too broad&quot;. So the real problem with having a &lt;em&gt;Hard-Magic&lt;/em&gt; tag is that every answerable magic question would apply to it on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see what we're aiming for, for instance - I can imagine asking a question for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31691/2138&quot;&gt;the magic used in my newest question&lt;/a&gt; - asking what some of the most useful spells might be, along with the &quot;equations or sources&quot; that would be required for a &quot;Hard Science&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think if that were my question, I would probably tag it as Hard Science as well, but try to make it clear where the question is coming from. (&lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In response to the actual question: I don't think a &quot;Hard-Magic&quot; tag is necessary, so long as it remains that &quot;magic&quot; background questions can have the &quot;Hard Science&quot; or &quot;Reality-Check&quot; tags applied to them.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T20:16:32.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2015-12-19T16:06:46.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A contrary perspective. Please note in advance that I don't intend to try to insist about this, but I think the question raises interesting and important points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hard-magic,&quot; as described in the question, is a magic that is &lt;em&gt;intrinsically&lt;/em&gt; systematic, which is to say, subjectivity does not enter strongly into its internal logic, which can be analyzed in strictly local terms. This is by no means the only sort of magic about which answerable questions can be posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several, rather inconclusive questions about magic &quot;systems&quot; (using that term loosely) that are in some way or other intrinsically evaded  or impossible to correlate effectively with scientific experimentation. As several posters have noted (myself included), this is perfectly plausible. It is significant, however, that most of the respondents chose to ignore the question: they replied, &quot;no, your question is impossible, if it exists then science can figure it out.&quot; Which is not a valid answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does this make the question itself invalid for the site? Nobody has seriously suggested so, nor would I. So it seems, just from this single example (two or three, really), that it is possible to answer and address questions about magical conceptions that are impossible to systematize in the &quot;hard&quot; sense proposed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, certainly many posters do indeed want help fleshing out the implications or structures of &quot;hard&quot; magic systems. I think of the question about how much energy would be required to produce a D&amp;amp;D-style fireball, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, &quot;hard-magic&quot; would tag a subset of the latter questions. Here the point is not simply to ask for science-based translations and what amount to reality checks, but assistance developing and fleshing out a rigorously and rigidly structured magical system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a poster suggests building a magic system based on a precise balancing of the classical five phases of Chinese philosophical cosmology. S/he is having trouble how to ensure that their interrelations, in both creation and destruction cycles, mesh smoothly with the yin/yang balance. Now obviously, such a question in this particular case would be better answered by a historian of sorts, but the example will serve. This is certainly &quot;hard-magic,&quot; in that it is rigorous, systematic, and magical. But it is not &quot;hard&quot; simply because it can be discussed rationally or logically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main objection, insofar as I have one, is that I think the tag would rarely be used accurately, since I rather doubt we could explain its meaning effectively enough without an enormous post. Still, I think the idea has great merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T16:06:46.920" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-12-21T20:37:12.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biotech&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biotech&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biotech&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bio-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bio-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bio-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genetic-engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genetic-engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genetic-engineering&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cybernetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cybernetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cybernetics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/trans-humanism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trans-humanism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;trans-humanism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evolution was already a topic; I'd be really interested to see questions more focused on body modification, long-term goals for genetic engineering &lt;em&gt;(why bother terraforming a planet if you could live on its surface without a suit -- but what kind of physiology would that require?)&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16021" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T20:37:12.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2820" CreationDate="2015-12-21T21:48:11.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 8 questions and 20 answers, for an average of 2.50 answers per question. A total of 1230 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31824/how-could-1bc-earth-speed-up-communication-across-vast-distances&quot;&gt;How could 1BC Earth speed up communication across vast distances?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;72 total votes, 14 question votes, 6 answers, 820 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31250/the-really-really-big-mountain&quot;&gt;The really really big mountain&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 149 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31686/what-would-cause-a-supermassive-plateau-that-sticks-out-of-the-ocean&quot;&gt;What would cause a supermassive plateau that sticks out of the ocean&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 112 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31387/could-a-habitable-planet-form-with-no-major-bodies-of-water&quot;&gt;Could a habitable planet form with no major bodies of water?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15131/hanko-tanks&quot;&gt;Hanko Tanks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 116 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31369/what-mathematical-function-would-describe-the-relationship-between-two-moons&quot;&gt;What mathematical function would describe the relationship between two moons?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14210/kay-ellis&quot;&gt;Kay Ellis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 123 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30985/world-with-only-one-habitable-off-center-quadrasphere-quadrant&quot;&gt;World with only one habitable, off-center quadrasphere/quadrant&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/114/cagrippa&quot;&gt;CAgrippa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 121 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31124/geography-in-a-universe-with-4-spatial-dimensions&quot;&gt;Geography in a universe with 4 spatial dimensions&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 122 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31851/how-to-create-a-holy-happy-earth-without-human-death&quot;&gt;How to create a holy, happy earth without human death?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16359/manirajss&quot;&gt;ManirajSS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, -1 question votes, 1 answers, 70 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T21:48:11.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T21:51:55.040" Score="11" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twenty third topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 21 Dec - 4 Jan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9685.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Santa Claus is the embodiment of the holidays season. Why not trying to get Santa in our worlds? Or maybe some other elements around Santa (reindeers, elves, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:43:42.923" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #23: Santa" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2015-12-23T20:05:11.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they are a staple in certain types of fiction works, yet tend to only get cursory attention. We already have some questions about them; giving them their two weeks of fame could prove interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the similarity to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2245/29&quot;&gt;already proposed mythical-creatures challenge&lt;/a&gt; -- &quot;shapeshifters&quot; can probably be considered a subtag of &quot;mythical-creatures&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T20:05:11.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2868" CreationDate="2015-12-23T23:34:17.700" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question I encountered at first seemed like it would be fun and playful to answer. It went something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What would happen to a member of [this described species] in [this circumstance]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the asker was wanting us to &lt;em&gt;describe&lt;/em&gt; what would happen. The better detailed and gruesome, the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but think this isn't so much about world building - it sounds to me like its asking us to write a particular event for the OP. But I could be looking at it a bit harshly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this question be closed as off-topic? Or is this acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2138" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T17:12:27.050" Title="Is asking for &quot;descriptive&quot; explanations an accepted request?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2862" CreationDate="2015-12-24T21:42:41.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;that was my question! Yaay! Ahem. So, to justify myself, I wasn't asking for a particular event/scene, nothing like that. I was merely asking what would happen in this particular circumstance so that I could get a more scientifically accurate picture of this species' place in the universe. What happens to them in this particular circumstance is relevant to the way in which they behave, their technology, their culture, etc. I.e: world building! That said, perhaps my wording could have been better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15567" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T21:42:41.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-25T23:41:38.317" Score="9" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been doing a series of interviews for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/latest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Community Blog&lt;/a&gt;. And we are looking for volunteers to be interviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples can be found below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter if you're new to Worldbuilding or have been here for ever. If you're up for doing a quick interview just leave a comment here or write a note in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you'd rather interview others, you're also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T10:11:33.330" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T08:53:37.893" Title="Want to be interviewed?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-26T08:39:08.020" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just throwing out some idea for an icon that could work on tiny sizes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFxCR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFxCR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Logo sketch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give you an idea, here is the icon at 16×16 (which is the size of hot-network-question icons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnK80.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnK80.png&quot; alt=&quot;16×16&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, it has flaws in its current state, but I hope that it’s apparent that with tuning, it may work on this size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T08:39:08.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-27T05:55:21.737" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a generic profile of a head and a lightning bolt inside(brainstorm)  then design orbiting around head planets or worlds moons or Suns looking like a galaxy? Sorry no picture just an idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16519" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T05:55:21.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2862" CreationDate="2015-12-27T11:30:40.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case the question is asking for &quot;detailed and gruesome answers&quot;, that's not the same as asking you to write the scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if I posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The eyeballs would burst out of the skull, blood would start getting sucked through the lining of the lungs causing them to drown, their bars would thoroughly foo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a ready-to-use scene, however it is both detailed and gruesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T17:12:27.050" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T17:12:27.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-30T19:28:49.130" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog&lt;/a&gt; and are now a few months in, so this seems like a good time to collect an initial round of opinions on what's working well and what could be better.  This question is primarily for people who are &lt;strong&gt;writing for the blog or are interested in doing so&lt;/strong&gt;; reader feedback is welcome at any time on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/28&quot;&gt;blog announcement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell us what your experience writing for the blog has been like.  Feel free to address any or all of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;content: are you getting to write things you want to write about?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;process: coordination, scheduling, the chat room, etc&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pacing: are you feeling pressured, impatient because you have tons of stuff you want to share, something in between?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;platform: how's Medium as a blogging platform -- what's easy, what's hard?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(other stuff I've failed to think of)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2507/28&quot;&gt;Abby's meta answer suggesting Medium to us&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T01:30:18.253" Title="Bloggers: how's the blogging experience for you?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2869" CreationDate="2015-12-31T07:38:06.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think overall Medium is fit for purpose. It's not perfect, but then nothing is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the limitations of Medium can be annoying to work around but on the other hand they do provide a cohesive feel tying all the articles together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from my perspective it works pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T07:38:06.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2015-12-31T18:43:07.160" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little late to the party but here is my contribution/idea.  Never mind the terrible drawing skills :) (oh the thing on the far right is a universe in a hand...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the full spread (details to follow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2GR0i.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2GR0i.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here are the close ups&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J74V2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J74V2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KqX15.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KqX15.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IloO0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IloO0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T18:43:07.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2869" CreationDate="2016-01-01T13:57:38.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still new to the blog (well, at least as writer), and I must admit it's not really clear to me how the process works; maybe it should be documented at a standardized place (or if it is, that place should be better advertised, for example by linking it from the featured &quot;We have a blog&quot; meta post, or from the chat room's description text). The one post I did was essentially an invitation; I have no idea e.g. where/how I would propose topics I might write something about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T06:32:02.317" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T06:32:02.317" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-02T06:53:27.947" Score="6" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very first thing I'm usually interested in when a new topic challenge arrives (and thus the previous one has ended) is the results of the previous challenge. However while the new one is easy to get to (it's a featured question, after all), getting to the previous is more effort (the best way seems to be to go through the &quot;What should be the subjects …&quot; post, locate the link to the previous challenge, and follow it; not really hard, but still some effort that might be saved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be worthwhile to have a link to the previous challenge in the new challenge, so the results are just one further clicks away. Note that I'm not speaking about a list of links to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; earlier challenges (as had been in the earliest challenges); one rarely wants to visit earlier challenge than the just-completed one and the list would grow on each challenge, therefore that clearly would be a bad idea (which is probably why that practice was abandoned). However a link to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the previous challenge would not take much space, and would IMHO be quite useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T06:53:27.947" Title="Should topic challenges link to the previous challenge?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-02T19:36:59.410" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/32515/6986&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on the main site. While I was looking over the tags, I noticed that none of them really fit my question. I've selected three tags that are related, but don't really capture the essence of what I'm asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several questions about RPG-esque adventurers in a world, and I'm sure there will be more, not to mention any questions about specific features of a dungeon(s) a character(s) has to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to create a &quot;dungeon&quot; tag to cover above- or below-ground locations, including any traps, pitfalls, and other detritus likely to appear therein?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T19:36:59.410" Title="Viability of a &quot;dungeon&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2016-01-03T07:10:37.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually write on our Blog about how to meld hard and soft magic together.  They're not as separated as people sometimes treat them.  I actually rely quite a bit on the flexibility of the magic tag to recommend people soften their magic systems.  In this day and age, it seems really popular to try to make an entirely rule based magic system.  Maybe it's the video games.  However, people often want a softer system and are unaware they want it.  If they tag it as hard-magic, it will be harder to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I worry about is how treacherous hard magic systems can be.  Because there's nothing standing in the way of rules, many such systems have glaring weaknesses that can be exploited.  I think, if there were a hard-magic tag, I would want to see the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must post your entire magic system, unless you know how to prove that you only need to provide a part.  Inconsistencies easily creep in if you play with one part at a time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must be ready for the question to be closed with a new reason for closure: &quot;Your hard-magic system is already broken.  We can't answer your question until you fix the system.&quot;  It is terribly frustrating to watch somebody patch their system over and over because you keep finding holes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these are reasonably similar to hard-science.  The first bullet is easy in hard-science, because it is understood that real world science is in effect.  However, hard-science with things that break physics have already been closed for simply being wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T07:10:37.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T19:12:56.967" Score="6" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31762/885&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31762/885&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's the right way to put units inside of TeX blocks?  I remember a font directive but not what the word was. And it's a kludge anyway &amp;mdash; was a proper unit macro notation ever added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T14:48:57.053" Title="Units in MathJax markup" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2590" CreationDate="2016-01-03T20:14:06.393" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;We want to make it easy for people to contribute to the blog, whether there's one article that you want to write or you have an idea for a whole series or you're just not sure and want to check us out.  This post is for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How to get your work on the blog&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you have an idea already&lt;/strong&gt;, please either comment here or tell us about it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;the blog chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you want to write but don't know what to write about&lt;/strong&gt;, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/524/28&quot;&gt;look through past suggestions from people here on meta&lt;/a&gt;.  See anything that's been requested that you can do?  Let us know!  You can also browse &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/latest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all the past posts on the blog&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration or come talk to folks in the chat room -- people there are happy to kibbitz on ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2510/28&quot;&gt;this older post where people who are interested can sign up&lt;/a&gt;.  If you edit that post to add yourself, somebody will follow up with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You do not need to wait to be asked.&lt;/strong&gt;  Once or twice we've invited people to contribute something -- for example, turning an answer here on Worldbuilding into a post on the blog.  But this is meant to be an open project.  We'd love to see more people and a broad range of worldbuilding-related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bottom line:&lt;/strong&gt; tell us somehow that you want to write, and we'll guide you from there. Drop a note into the blog chatroom that you want to write something, together with a link to your profile page on Medium, and one of the editors will add you to the blog as a writer.  (This step is required by Medium; only writers on a publication can submit posts to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you're ready to write&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2886/28&quot;&gt;here's how to use the tools on Medium&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the blog process?  How does stuff get there?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great, you want to write, you maybe have a specific idea, you've made yourself known, maybe you've started to write your first post for Medium -- now what?  How does the team operate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blog coordination happens mainly in the blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.  When you're ready to start a post, let us know what you're doing and it'll go into the buffer.  If we don't hear from you with an update after a while we'll check in with you, but there's no pressure.  The better idea you can give us of what you're doing and when it might be ready, the better job we can do of scheduling it -- but we're a pretty flexible bunch, so don't worry if you're more of an &amp;quot;I'll tell you about it when it's done&amp;quot; person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We try to maintain a good balance across several dimensions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A mix of topics.  Worldbuilding is big, from hard science to magic systems, from technical articles to how-to posts about writing or game-mastering to fiction, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A mix of article types.  Some articles are discourses on specific topics, such as what you need to know about black holes.  Some are more how-to in flavor, such as a process to help make believable magic systems.  And some are anecdotal, e.g. I wanted to design a species with three genders, here's what I did, and here's how it worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A mix of articles and &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; posts.  In addition to being a blog &lt;em&gt;about worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, this is the blog of the &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding community&lt;/em&gt;.  We include interviews with community members, discussions of questions/tags/challenge topics, and potentially other stuff about the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A mix of authors.  We'll almost always give priority to a new or infrequent poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have questions?  Comment here or ask in the chat room.  We look forward to working with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T18:30:05.490" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2877" CreationDate="2016-01-03T22:30:00.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Use &lt;code&gt;\text{}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This MathJaX code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1 \times 10^{23} kg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;produces this output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ 1 \times 10^{23} kg $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By wrapping the &lt;code&gt;kg&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;\text{ }&lt;/code&gt;, we get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1 \times 10^{23} \text{ kg}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ 1 \times 10^{23} \text{ kg} $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T22:30:00.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-01-04T06:51:05.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A white on blue sketch of a planet would evoke a blueprint and work at rather low res.. A thought balloon around that could be interesting. Details, of course, can be added as resolution increases... at least for the site favicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to special other art, it's hard to pick between sci fi and fantasy themes... Could look a bit like role playing or TeX or more modern, with sans serif fonts and really clean and clear controls and icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be really neat if we could have a site setting to pick which stylesheet appealed, but that might be too much work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15270" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T06:51:05.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-01-04T15:41:32.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is based in large part on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2880/29&quot;&gt;The Nate's suggestion&lt;/a&gt; of a blueprint site icon, but adds a bit to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A blueprint of a planet for the site favicon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blueprint theme for the voting arrows and similar controls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDITED TO ADD:&lt;/strong&gt; Blueprint background surrounding the site main content area (compare the grids over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Role-Playing Games&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's safe to say that lots of people, even those far removed from the engineering professions, at least &lt;em&gt;recognize&lt;/em&gt; a blueprint. It also should be easy to make work in a wide variety of sizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this would be low-key, definitely doesn't scream &quot;this is all fun and games&quot; (like Monica pointed out, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2851/29&quot;&gt;we do serious work too!&lt;/a&gt;), yet is a distinctive design that I don't think I've seen anywhere else on the network (and I can't think of any site elsewhere that it would be obviously confusable with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T20:08:03.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:01:22.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Below stats also include questions asked in the week before the challenge)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 17 questions and 103 answers, for an average of 6.06 answers per question. A total of 13895 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32086/santa-is-satan-but-why&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;519 total votes, 91 question votes, 16 answers, 16075 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31987/how-does-santa-protect-himself-from-ip-lawsuits&quot;&gt;How does Santa protect himself from IP lawsuits?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;415 total votes, 86 question votes, 16 answers, 10286 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31520/how-can-the-nsa-capture-santa-claus&quot;&gt;How can the NSA capture Santa Claus?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;217 total votes, 58 question votes, 12 answers, 7886 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31482/santa-exists-how-do-we-react&quot;&gt;Santa exists. How do we react?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;128 total votes, 35 question votes, 10 answers, 5812 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31593/how-does-santa-keep-the-elves-from-revolting&quot;&gt;How does Santa keep the elves from revolting?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;119 total votes, 34 question votes, 8 answers, 3939 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32007/how-do-santa-and-the-reindeer-survive-delivery-night&quot;&gt;How do Santa and the reindeer survive delivery night?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;54 total votes, 14 question votes, 7 answers, 1663 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31457/what-if-santa-does-not-want-norad-to-track-him&quot;&gt;What if Santa does not want Norad to track him?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;38 total votes, 8 question votes, 9 answers, 1374 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32230/how-does-santa-avoid-heart-attacks-from-bad-cholesterol&quot;&gt;How does Santa avoid Heart Attacks from bad cholesterol?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16035/quill&quot;&gt;Quill&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;25 total votes, 8 question votes, 7 answers, 523 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31460/how-much-does-santas-sleigh-weigh&quot;&gt;How much does Santa&amp;#39;s sleigh weigh?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 7 question votes, 2 answers, 291 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32132/santa-is-a-time-traveller-how-does-he-not-violate-casuality&quot;&gt;Santa is a time traveller. How does he not violate casuality?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 9 question votes, 3 answers, 151 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32471/from-where-will-santa-deliver-after-north-pole-melts&quot;&gt;From where will Santa deliver after North Pole melts?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 0 question votes, 2 answers, 48 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32155/robotic-micro-assembler-santa&quot;&gt;Robotic Micro Assembler Santa&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 4 question votes, 2 answers, 40 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32381/how-to-heat-your-house-by-being-naughty&quot;&gt;How to heat your house by being naughty&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16648/erik-philips&quot;&gt;Erik Philips&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, -3 question votes, 3 answers, 119 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32157/if-santa-can-time-travel-why-does-he-need-elves-to-make-toys&quot;&gt;If Santa can time travel, why does he need elves to make toys?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 68 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32258/how-does-santa-afford-the-materials-to-make-the-toys&quot;&gt;How does Santa afford the materials to make the toys?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16035/quill&quot;&gt;Quill&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 43 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32279/how-can-santa-exist-when-kids-are-cryogenically-grown-until-adulthood&quot;&gt;How can Santa exist when kids are cryogenically grown until adulthood&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16035/quill&quot;&gt;Quill&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 60 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32001/can-i-use-my-earth-changing-invention-to-help-out-santa&quot;&gt;Can I use my Earth changing invention to help out Santa?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 2 answers, 99 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:01:22.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:25:03.623" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twenty-fourth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 4 Jan - 18 Jan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9326&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9326.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because we don't want to get ahead of ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T19:40:42.110" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #24: Near Future" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:31:48.103" Score="8" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2125/near-future-tag&quot;&gt;near-future tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tag description and the previously linked question it appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; only covers technological advancement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to include social, political and cultural change as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T15:06:49.293" Title="What all does &quot;Near Future&quot; cover?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:39:19.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions concerning the immediate future, where technology is&#xA;  assumed to have advanced slightly while still recognizable to modern&#xA;  humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, to me, covers anything that happens in a future with better technology than we have now. I think it would cover the changes you've listed, though it may appear misleading, especially when &quot;social, political and cultural change&quot; has occurred independent of technological advancement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we could replace 'technology' with 'society', which to me sounds like a superset. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:39:19.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2590" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:43:41.960" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How to Use Medium&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each time a new contributor has been brought on board, we've had to get them up to speed on the tools we're using - &#xA;specifically, we've had to explain how to use Medium. This is through no fault of the fine folks who write for the blog,&#xA;so we'd like to smoothen the onboarding process by providing this guide on how to get started writing for us on Medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sign Up&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signing up for Medium is pretty easy. Go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medium homepage&lt;/a&gt; and click &quot;Sign In / Sign Up&quot; in the top-right corner. You can sign up using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter identity (like on SE), or you can create an account using your email address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use your email address, Medium will send you email to complete the sign-up process.  Later, to log in, click &quot;log in&quot; and they will email you a link.  (If you signed up with Google/Facebook/Twitter, it'll work like on SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that at no point you are asked for a password, even if you use your email to sign in. Don't worry about this; this is by design: Medium does not use passwords, but relies on the security of the linked account(s). If you want to log in through email, you are sent by email a new login link that's valid only for a limited time. If you don't want to go through this process every time and don't have/want to use an account on Google, Facebook or Twitter, you should allow Medium to set persistent cookies (that's the browser's default, so if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll probably not have to do anything anyway). That way you'll remain logged in even after closing the browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Start Writing on Medium&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you can submit anything to Universe Factory, you've got to write it. Hopefully you've been to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;chatroom&lt;/a&gt; by&#xA;now - drop a note in there that you're starting writing, and someone'll add your article to the &quot;Pending&quot; list so that &#xA;we can look at potential spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you can start writing. Go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medium homepage&lt;/a&gt; - it should hopefully look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4awlI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Medium&amp;#39;s homepage&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See that little circular icon in the top-right corner (your avatar, if you've set one - that default image shown above,&#xA;if not)?  See that button to the left of it that says &quot;Write a story&quot;?  Click that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eOxtC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;New story&amp;quot; page on Medium&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those keyboard shortcuts at the bottom should help you with editing; Medium does also have some on-site help with their &#xA;editing tools. They're not the best, but they work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alternative: Write Elsewhere and Import&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've already written a post (on your personal blog, for example), or if you prefer to write in HTML instead of using Medium's user interface, you can import your story.  Go to the drop-down menu from your icon and click on &quot;Stories&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VO2GO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VO2GO.png&quot; alt=&quot;gravatar drop-down, &amp;quot;stories&amp;quot; circled&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This takes you to a page that has these options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/285On.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/285On.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stories page - import or write&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose &quot;Import story&quot;, enter the URL where you've posted your work, and you'll get a draft in the Medium editor.  You can make further edits here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Cover images&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most (if not all) of the posts you see on Universe Factory's homepage have a background image, or &quot;cover&quot; image. This is a feature of Medium: if you have an image in your post, it uses that image as the background image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are benefits to doing this: a plain-white background story looks a little out of place on an image-full homepage, and posts without a cover image don't occupy the &quot;latest post&quot; slot. We recommend including an image to use as a cover, but it's not essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want some help picking a cover image, drop into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;chatroom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When You're Done&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you've finished writing your article, you can submit it to Universe Factory for review. At least, that's what &#xA;Medium calls it - in reality, we use that &quot;review&quot; period more like a queue. If you'd like us to check it through for &#xA;mistakes and coherency, we can - just drop a note in the chat room asking us to do it. We usually don't correct &#xA;anything but the most glaring errors, unless you ask for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To submit, click the &quot;...&quot; button in the top-right menu. &lt;strong&gt;Beware:&lt;/strong&gt; if you click Publish, you publish to &lt;em&gt;your own&lt;/em&gt; blog - you can still add this to Universe Factory, but if you only want the article on UF then use the additional menu instead. You should get this menu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BByDI.png&quot; alt=&quot;The extra options menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &quot;Add to publication&quot;. You should now get a menu detailing the publications you can submit to; select Universe &#xA;Factory and click &quot;Submit draft for review&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Publishing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your part is done now; all that's left is to publish. The editors have a queue of submitted drafts; every 3 days (at &#xA;least, that's what we're aiming for) we'll publish something for it. You can drop into chat to check out the progress &#xA;of that and to shout if there's something you want to input to the process. We're a friendly bunch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T23:48:44.560" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T23:48:44.560" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-01-04T18:43:41.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2016-01-05T15:06:49.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarize what i wrote in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;near future&lt;/code&gt; tag makes most sense for technological advances. It is supposed to describe situations where available tech is pretty much like we have it now, with only small changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since technological advance has to happen in steps, each building on the former, this is a sensible setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Society, politics and culture not only can change in any direction any time, they are not uniform, either. This is especially visible in not so strongly developed countries, where culture differs strongly even between the cities and the countryside of the same country. Of course this effect is even stronger if you look for example at the Koreas: very close together spatially, but they could hardly be more defferent politically and socially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some changes in societies happen very gradually, like for example the women's rights movements in western countries, or enlightenment (in some western countries ;-) ), others happen quite radically. Think of the rise of fascist dictatorship in germany, and the even faster decay of the socialist / communist society around the reunion of east and west germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you look at for example turkey or malaysia, both are countries that nowadays are more religious and more socially strict than they were 40 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for society, politics and culture, the amount of time that has passed from today to the future will most likely have a divverent effect than time has on technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For technology, the aspect of near-future is important, while for the other three, it is far less so. So i vote to stick to technology for this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T15:06:49.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2890" CreationDate="2016-01-06T15:52:09.967" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a nonsense in this  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32650/9134&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, simply copied from the linked document. On sites like SO, it'd have been fixed rather immediately, here a fruitless discussion in comments started, so I thought, it's my turn. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/13814&quot;&gt;my edit&lt;/a&gt; was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not whining about it, I just want it to get fixed. It ain't no rocket science, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9134" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T13:30:53.880" Title="Do you really believe in -450 degree Celsius?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2016-01-06T16:12:24.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fixed it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised your edit was rejected, but if in doubt you can always post in meta (like you have) or even just mention it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T16:12:24.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-01-09T05:31:09.960" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm told in the comments that we can have an Error 404 unique page.  Can I propose something similar (I am not a graphics person, just threw this together) to the below?  It seems that the text can't be changed, but the location of &quot;Page Not Found&quot; can be centered - I'm not sure about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XH4z9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XH4z9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T05:31:09.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-01-11T02:14:48.147" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2IMcv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2IMcv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the ad below but put the &lt;strong&gt;caution tape&lt;/strong&gt; around the middle. I think that would scale well with a little adjustment. Less stars, less purple; use the background from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/335/799&quot;&gt;grey one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oAUu1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oAUu1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T02:14:48.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2896" CreationDate="2016-01-11T12:43:19.010" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked the following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32880/what-if-the-royal-game-written-by-stefan-zweig-was-about-go-instead-of-chess&quot;&gt;What if The Royal Game written by Stefan Zweig was about Go instead of Chess?&lt;/a&gt; and still don't know if it belongs on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are multiple things to consider. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself asks about a world that was already built. In this sense it may not fit Worldbuilding but something like &quot;World-re-building&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about how to create a world very similar to an already created world with a main difference. From this difference, new possibilities emerge. This argument leads, in my opinion, to leaving the question on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to consider, the original author has is own style and ideas. Forking a story of his needs to be consistent with the previous work of the author. This may be more appropriate for Writers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what to do with this kind of questions ?&#xA;What about the specific example ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13450" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T13:11:52.587" Title="On which site do &quot;What if author X wrote about B instead of A&quot; questions belong?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2894" CreationDate="2016-01-11T13:09:37.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question does not appear to be about world building at all. It's about a plot. Or the story of a man. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the original book you cite, but from your summary, you talk about a man who, by reading a single book about chess, is able to play reasonnably well, because he integrated all the details about the games presented in the book. How does that affects his neighbour? The government? The biotopes? The climate? The History? Or the society as a whole? To me, it appears not to affect any of it. And therefore it is not about &lt;strong&gt;world&lt;/strong&gt;building, but rather &lt;strong&gt;plot&lt;/strong&gt;-building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plots are very interesting points, but unfortunately, there aren't any specific sites dedicated to it. This is due to the inherent subjectivity of plots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific to your question, why do you think the same story about go would be so much different? Go is a game with more degree of freedoms, but with many similarities with Chess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T13:09:37.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2894" CreationDate="2016-01-11T13:11:52.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general 'world-re'building' is what the vast majority of people here do. We don't completely throw out the rulebook on physical laws or history and start again, rather we take a world that's already been built (even if it's right at the fundamental level) and ask how our changes might affect it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But onto the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that questions of this type 'what if x person had done y instead of what they actually did?' are rarely suitable for worldbuilding, but that's because they tend to generate opinion based answers, not because they're based on works or a world that already exists. In the example given, the 'correct answer' depends a lot on what the OP's opinion is of Stephan Zweig, and what various people's opinions of the effects are. It also (and this is crucial) has &lt;em&gt;no bearing&lt;/em&gt; on a world that the OP is building. He's just asking a hypothetical question about a book someone else has written. If the question was reworded as 'Could an imprisoned man learn Go in a way similar to that used in The Royal Game?', then it would be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that someone on Writers would have a better idea of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the book would have been written on a different subject (or for the OP to write a book in the style of Zweig), or someone on chess might have a better idea of what the effects would have been &lt;em&gt;on the game of chess&lt;/em&gt; had The Royal Game been written about Go, but overall this isn't a suitable question for any of the stacks, due to the lack of any way to define the acceptability of an answer. Two separate questions (one chess, one writers) could potentially do the trick, but you'd have to craft them very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future instances of this kind of question: It depends upon the question. If the question falls within the scope of worldbuilding and isn't going to produce opinion based answers then it's fine. Otherwise? Well. We've already got rules for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T13:11:52.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-01-11T13:49:03.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come much later (I was away for some time), but if I like some of the previous examples for banners, they seem overloaded. How about something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jDgOq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jDgOq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Please excuse the low quality, I only had a mouse around me.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the idea is that a wizzard and a &quot;metallurgist&quot; using arc welding are building a planet (identified by continents and water), based on the blue prints that a robot and a buisness man are discussing over. Meanwhile a Faerie riding a dragons goes on lightning stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T13:49:03.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T21:32:59.247" Score="18" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the past two years we have run community-promotion ads on other SE sites (graduated only), promoting this community.  The current ad we're using is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpuqj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpuqj.png&quot; alt=&quot;our ad for other communities&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, now that &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; have graduated we can run ads on our &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; site. Candidate ad topics include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the blog (direct link to the blog, to encourage readership)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; for the blog, maybe something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxH6z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this EL&amp;amp;U ad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the sandbox, aimed at new askers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any external resources that we have found useful for worldbuilding (map-making sites, for example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, we need &lt;strong&gt;images&lt;/strong&gt; for these ads.  And we can't just reuse last year's, because &lt;strong&gt;the size requirements have changed&lt;/strong&gt;.  Community ads will now be 300px wide by 250px high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what ads do we want to make, both for ourselves and to run elsewhere?  Do you have ideas for art to fit the new size requirements?  Please share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon there will be a separate post calling for submissions for community-promotion ads.  This is not that post.  I'm posting this now so that people can get started with drafting ads and adjusting -- or replacing, if we think it's time for a change -- our current external ad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T22:04:00.120" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T22:17:35.490" Title="Let's design some new ads!" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-01-13T17:06:02.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When are detailed calculations required in worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I'm unsure of the best tags. Suggestions?][Worldbuilding-Process]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me a little while ago that although we delight in performing to-the-last-decimal-point calculations on worldbuilding, the vast majority of the time all we really require (from a story point of view) is a single digit and an order of magnitude. I very rarely have to pull out the exact orbital velocity of a spoon orbiting a pulsar for the purposes of building a narrative, but instead can go for the very generic 'fast'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore when I'm building my worlds I often skip many of the detailed parts of calculations, rounding throughout the process and throwing out a reasonable looking estimate for the speed of my spoon. I only then move down to an accurate result if something (or someone) in my particular story needs to say the exact speed of the spoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For various genres (fantasy/hard sci-fi/alternate histories) and media (written, acted, video games, art) the requirements for hard numbers instead of rough ones change, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point should Worldbuilders from various genres/media move to accuracy over spitballing the numbers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;------&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to ask this question to gauge where various different media need higher quality worldbuilding, but I feel that as it's an incredibly opinion based factor in the worldbuilding process that it will be nigh on impossible to get any reasonable answers out. Help!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2016-01-13T20:04:45.690" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T20:04:45.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-14T21:06:35.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My artistic skills are non-existent, so I cobbled this together in Paint just as an illustration of concept, or to inspire someone with better art skills, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; intended to be a final design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/inBNS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/inBNS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is for advertising the Worldbuilding Sandbox.  The intention is to show a pair of hands sculpting a globe within a child's sandbox.  At the top, the globe should look finished, then fade in level of detail toward the bottom, where it is just sand.  The globe could be earth-like, but would probably be better as an abstract fantasy globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T21:06:35.220" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T03:14:23.387" Score="15" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's 2016 now, and we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites&quot;&gt;made some changes to the sidebar size&lt;/a&gt;, and so with it, we now have finally reached the time to start Community Promotion Ads on your graduated site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for understanding worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blogs or articles of existing interesting worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;300 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of &lt;strong&gt;150 KB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2902&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T08:29:20.990" Title="Community Promotion Ads 2016" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-01-15T04:08:40.637" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cPvvZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Writers Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:23.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:47:03.510" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2905" CreationDate="2016-01-16T17:36:15.040" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last 24 hours I've had two posts edited by moderators/high reputation users which were automatically applied. One was on WB and the other on another stack exchange. In both cases, the edit reason given was &quot;Removed/Added X Characters in Body&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, don't get me wrong, I understand that editing posts for clarity and acceptability is an important aspect of the site, but this seems pretty uninformative. In the case of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/33419/revisions&quot;&gt;WB Edit&lt;/a&gt;, the revision seems to provide little to no improvement - a 12 character change replacing &quot;-&quot; with a longer version. Was this a readability change? Why was it necessary? Is it a standard that I should be following? How am I meant to improve the quality of my posts so that future edits aren't required if the reason for the edit isn't explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the edit reasons given in both posts were almost identical in format, I'm guessing that this is either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The automated message that comes up if you don't put anything in the reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What people are taught to do somewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's 1., should it not be mandatory to explain why you are editing someone else's post, and if it's 2., where does it say this so that I can suggest it's changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I realise that this may be better suited to Meta Stack Exchange rather than the Meta WB. If this is the case, please let me know/Move it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T18:15:26.150" Title="Uninformative Edit Reasons" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2016-01-17T07:02:27.913" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the users who edited your posts, but I can speak to your points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Added x chars in body&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in fact the automated edit reason if one isn't given. The edit itself was not automatic; the user did manually go in and edit your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a little speculation, my guess is that they might have felt their edits were minor but also self-evident, so they didn't require a reason. When you see someone replace your hyphens with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;em-dashes&lt;/a&gt;, the only possible conclusion I can think of is, &quot;that person is telling me that I should probably use em-dashes instead&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a minor thing, of course, but I can answer your many sub questions succinctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was this a readability change? Why was it necessary? Is it a standard that I should be following? How am I meant to improve the quality of my posts so that future edits aren't required if the reason for the edit isn't explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;em-dash&lt;/a&gt;, which has always been typographically superior to double hyphens. Thus the intent and implicit recommendation behind the edit seems evident to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15478" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T07:02:27.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2016-01-17T12:19:08.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I note that when I was using Firefox, the edit-reason bkank would remember a history list including common edits, making it easy to pick a descriptive well-written line.  With Chrome mobile, that mechanism doesn't work so well and it can be more difficult to explain than to make an editorial/typography edit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The #1 edit I make that's repeated is &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;it's&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly should be using the right dashes, when typesetting in a modern proportional font, just as you use commas and periods where needed. Wikipedia editing has a little button bar below for common characters including en and em dashes.  If you use a dash as a punctuation mark&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;a fairly modern fad&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;your post would indeed be superior if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; did so and didn't substitute a similar-looking character or fake it with a sequence of tiny hyphens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice a lot of posts don't use a mechanism for superscripts. I won't automatically fix that when I'm on a tablet because multiple MathJax sections in one post will slow down Chrome to the point of  making it difficult to continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH, on my desktop I can type em and en dashes (and other characters) trivially on my extra-row keyboard add-on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T12:19:08.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2016-01-17T12:40:08.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suspensions of disbelief can be considered a skill or specialty. In writing, it can be hard to get right, making something consistent and plausible while being completely impossible, or in the case of an alegorical tale, not distracting the reader with the un-reality of it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for a positive thing to be an antenym of reality-check, how about suspension-of-disbelief and synonym &lt;em&gt;unreality-check&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to non-reality-check)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T12:40:08.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2016-01-17T18:15:26.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;removed/added X characters in body&quot; is the default if an edit reason isn't given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for learning from an edit, it depends.  If it's correcting a common spelling/grammar error (like &quot;it's&quot; where you meant &quot;its&quot;), that's worth noticing.  (When I leave an edit message in such cases I tend to say something like &quot;corrected typos&quot; -- I try to avoid calling somebody out on &quot;errors&quot;.)  If it's just a style thing (like emdashes) then &lt;em&gt;shrug&lt;/em&gt;; yes emdashes are better than double hyphens, no not everybody is going to do them (case in point), and if somebody who cares edits to change them, that's ok.  We're an eclectic bunch, and whether you change your future posting habits is entirely up to you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are cases where two styles are &lt;em&gt;equally valid&lt;/em&gt;, or where style is &lt;em&gt;hotly debated&lt;/em&gt;, and an editor shouldn't impose his preferred style on a post that uses the other one.  For example, British and American English are both welcome here; Americans shouldn't go changing &quot;ou&quot; to &quot;o&quot; and &quot;ise&quot; to &quot;ize&quot;.  For another example, gender-neutral pronouns are controversial; if somebody used neutral &quot;he&quot;, people shouldn't edit to change to singular &quot;they&quot; or vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, edits that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; change style can feel a little gratuitous; people shouldn't bump a post to the front page just for minor style changes.  Minor style changes as part of a larger edit to improve readability, fix grammar, incorporate information from comments, and so on are fine; please keep doing that.  If you're editing anyway, please try to make all the improvements you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T18:15:26.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-17T21:33:20.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something like this might work for the Universe Factory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47Txk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47Txk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tv6DZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tv6DZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RhbHH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RhbHH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've now managed to add metadata (mainly the information about used images; IIUC needed to comply with the license, since the community ad doesn't have additional descriptive text to it) to the image; the following is the resulting file (visually identical, but with metadata):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Ggsp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Ggsp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images used in the creation of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andromeda_Galaxy_%28with_h-alpha%29.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andromeda_Galaxy_%28with_h-alpha%29.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P_writing.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P_writing.svg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The logo of Universe Factory (copied directly from the page)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T07:35:48.510" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T07:35:48.510" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-18T02:33:36.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u2E9l.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u2E9l.png&quot; alt=&quot;external ad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidate external ad, based on an example in a highly-voted design suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; So far I've been unable to confirm usage rights on the image.  It's on a bunch of &quot;download free wallpaper&quot; sites, but that's not the same as republishing and it's not attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T15:12:49.430" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T15:12:49.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T14:58:10.090" Score="11" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our twenty-fifth topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic(s): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 18 Jan - 1 Feb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are separate concepts (I believe we had a meta discussion) but it is also tough to divorce them so I am thinking we combine them into a single challenge.&#xA;  These questions can (and have been) tough to ask but I find very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use these tags if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T16:57:14.987" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #25: Culture and Society" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-18T15:15:09.870" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yLlmH.png&quot; alt=&quot;World In Progress&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the original ad slightly modified to fit the new size requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6033/19667&quot;&gt;Submitted on RPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T17:20:17.607" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2016-01-18T15:48:15.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My main excuse is that I'm new here and I'm not yet used to the conventions on such things. It was a bit of a fire and forget answer, I didn't actually check the rest of the values on there were correct, just that they were within the ranges I expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T15:48:15.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2883" CreationDate="2016-01-18T17:13:54.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 10 questions and 54 answers, for an average of 5.40 answers per question. A total of 3470 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32829/life-post-singularity-or-how-to-survive-without-instagram&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Life post-Singularity&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;How to survive without Instagram&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9601/spacelizard&quot;&gt;SpaceLizard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;127 total votes, 31 question votes, 14 answers, 4289 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32577/how-many-nanobots-can-i-have-in-my-blood&quot;&gt;How many nanobots can I have in my blood?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;118 total votes, 36 question votes, 4 answers, 4821 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32647/if-venus-mission-finds-life-will-we-shift-our-attention-from-mars-to-venus&quot;&gt;If Venus mission finds life, will we shift our attention from Mars to Venus?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;66 total votes, 17 question votes, 4 answers, 3144 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33520/apps-for-our-bodies&quot;&gt;Apps for our bodies&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;31 total votes, 4 question votes, 7 answers, 720 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33440/how-do-i-make-floating-ambient-light&quot;&gt;How do I make floating ambient light?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15131/hanko-tanks&quot;&gt;Hanko Tanks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 5 question votes, 7 answers, 515 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33272/ai-tasked-with-bringing-down-medical-costs-what-could-possibly-go-wrong&quot;&gt;AI tasked with bringing down medical costs? What could possibly go wrong?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 6 question votes, 9 answers, 414 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32581/what-human-induced-disaster-could-cause-permanent-fog-in-an-area-the-size-of-new&quot;&gt;What human-induced disaster could cause permanent fog in an area the size of New York City or larger?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138/doubledouble&quot;&gt;DoubleDouble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 5 question votes, 3 answers, 176 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33343/societal-implications-of-a-200-year-lifespan&quot;&gt;Societal implications of a 200 year lifespan?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 171 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32564/geomagnetic-interaction&quot;&gt;Geomagnetic interaction&lt;/a&gt; - Kristoffer Jay Martin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 78 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32899/would-self-flying-cars-fly&quot;&gt;Would self-flying cars fly?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/98/celtschk&quot;&gt;celtschk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 0 question votes, 2 answers, 69 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T17:13:54.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-01-19T13:11:30.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/100985/urban-planning?referrer=op6sMC2p1JNyhN5AgOqmTw2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/100985.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discuss the real world. Start Urban Planning SE!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9228" LastEditorUserId="9228" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T21:56:16.773" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:56:16.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-19T15:16:48.283" Score="104" ViewCount="2306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Kurtis, a product designer at Stack Exchange. First off, congratulations on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2767/congratulations-worldbuilding-is-graduating&quot;&gt;your recent site graduation&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Graduation and Your Site Design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graduation comes with a few perks. We have already begun work on your site's design based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/brainstorming-worldbuilding-site-design&quot;&gt;community's ideas&lt;/a&gt; so that the design gives you a unique theme that reflects your topic and culture. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Design Concept&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were inspired by all of the different ideas posted in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/brainstorming-worldbuilding-site-design?cb=1&quot;&gt;meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community's Medium blog&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks to everyone who participated. As we began to design here are just a few highlighted ideas we kept in mind...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2854/13448&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;draw continents that are clearly not directly inspired by any of&#xA;those on Earth&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2851/13448&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;While worldbuilding is serious stuff, we're also a whimsical&#xA;community.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2849/13448&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;By our nature we get questions on a wide range of topics and&#xA;covering a wide range of &amp;quot;realisms&amp;quot;, from planets in binary star&#xA;systems with actual science all the way through magical worlds that&#xA;follow no known laws of nature.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2852/13448&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;On the bottom, there's kind of like a holodeck-esque tear in reality&#xA;to suggest that this world is not yet finished.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x50IR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x50IR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding mood board&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding mood board&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Color Scheme&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6st1G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6st1G.png&quot; alt=&quot;Color swatches&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the color scheme we chose a palette with an otherworldly feel. We wanted colors that might exist in nature but not on earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Logo Concept&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fRHwM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fRHwM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worlbuilding Logo brainstorming ideas&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A visual for the logo that recurred during brainstorming was an unfinished world being crafted by a tool or hand. We started the logo design with this idea but the addition of a tool or hand added complexity at a smaller size. We then began to think about the role of the human brain and our unique ability to shape fictitious worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfRFT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfRFT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding Logo concept&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawing inspiration from a brain scan that showed neural activity during the act of imagining, we combined that with a primitive sphere. The shape represents the beginning of an idea not fully formed in its complexity, while the bodies of water abstractly represent the imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vsCtx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vsCtx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding Logo&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Visual theme&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQXtZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gQXtZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;DaaaahWhoosh's sketch&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early on we took inspiration from the imagery in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2852/13448&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh's sketch&lt;/a&gt;. We starting the design with a poster that we would later reassemble into a site design because it gave us a little more creative freedom to explore a theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dtSrG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dtSrG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding Poster&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all elements of the original sketch made it into the poster, but we had the idea that if the design for the main site gets approved by the community, we could treat the meta theme as an alternate dimension to the one displayed below — a black and white version that includes some of the more primitive elements that were discussed in the brainstorming post. For instance, the robot could be a dragon-esque creature and the city could be medieval. (Yes, it would include a balloon whale.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Swag&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RHLeG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RHLeG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding poster, t-shirt, and coffee mug&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above are a few potential examples of Worldbuilding swag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Overall Site Design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the site design, we downplayed many of the visual elements in the poster and kept much of the artwork in the header and footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click images to view larger versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8hiCR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tu9Ub.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding home page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/LUwYRlE.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tDAjq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding question page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We believe the design captures the mood we were going for and would love to hear your feedback. If there are no major design changes, we're hoping to launch the site soon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for for making this such a great community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T11:47:36.043" Title="Worldbuilding Site Design" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="52" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-19T15:39:36.937" Score="72" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Suggestion: add a planetary ring to the logo&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the logo but feel like it doesn't have much of a silhouette, which makes it seem very generic at smaller sizes. The fact that the colours start to blend together at small sizes doesn't help either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest you add a planetary ring to it, this would make it immediately recognisable as a planet and make it stand out more at any size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logo could also possibly do with a bit more strongly saturated red/orange, especially for the smaller sizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made a quick (and very bad) mock-up of what the logos could look like with a ring (with no additional adjustments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wn5RK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wn5RK.png&quot; alt=&quot;logos with ring, large&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J32s0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J32s0.png&quot; alt=&quot;logos with ring, small&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like it's an improvement, though obviously some more thought and care needs to go into the exact placement, color and look of the rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the name could look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/804LL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/804LL.png&quot; alt=&quot;worldbuilding name with new logo&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or possibly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JimCO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JimCO.png&quot; alt=&quot;worldbuilding name with new logo, ring goes through the letters&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T09:10:34.780" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-19T17:03:38.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another idea for the blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d0kN5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d0kN5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wording mostly stolen from the EL&amp;amp;U blog ad; images are two header images from our blog, and the blog logo (which I have high-res versions of, if anybody wants one to make an ad with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Font is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.losttype.com/font/?name=fairview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fairview&lt;/a&gt;, which is the font our logo is based off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T18:51:57.890" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T18:51:57.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2016-01-19T17:42:35.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;And here's a general ad for Worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2MALg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2MALg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background image is from a blog that says all its posts are public domain. Main font is once again &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.losttype.com/font/?name=fairview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fairview&lt;/a&gt;, secondary font is Quartz MS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7993/52927&quot;&gt;Posted on SciFi, on the suggestion of a few people in chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:41.363" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T19:15:49.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-01-19T19:32:00.293" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2878/2685&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iggrs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Share your work on the blog -- we&amp;#39;ll help!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:47:08.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-19T21:32:52.557" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I mostly like it. I don't think the different levels of details in the different elements is a disadvantage, here; a bit &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design#comment7954_2918&quot;&gt;like Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;, I think it sort of makes a point of showing that not everything has to be &quot;pixel perfect&quot;. There comes a point at which the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and as worldbuilders, we should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28883/29&quot;&gt;aware of that point&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things, though, stand out to me as could use a bit of improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The orange is really strong&lt;/strong&gt; off to the sides, and personally I find it a bit distracting, possibly even to the point of being annoying. Could that color be toned down (possibly just desaturated) slightly? (Please? Pretty please? With chocolate chip cookies? It's a well-known fact that all artists love chocolate chip cookies.) I don't mind orange per se, but right now it feels a bit too much &quot;in your face&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;contrast between the tag names and tag name background&lt;/strong&gt; is IMO too low &lt;em&gt;in the question list&lt;/em&gt;. Can we use the same colors for that in the question list as in the question view (which I think are much better)? Alternatively, maybe just darken the tag name text somewhat in the question list, to make it easier to read, if you don't want to change the background. I can understand why we wouldn't want the tags to overshadow the question title, but at present I really think we need a bit more contrast for those who have less-than-stellar monitors and maybe not the best eyesight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T21:44:22.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-20T00:40:14.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A nitpick that I have with both the poster and the site design:  The planets, robot and humanoid have light and shadows that appear to be coming from different light sources.  The light source appears to be just below the horizon in the centre of the poster, between the city and the volcanoes, yet if you draw a line from the centre of the planets to the brightest-looking edge, they point at the city, and the figures' shadows point all over the place if you trace them back from the direction they point to the light source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting this right would necessitate rotating the planets a little so that their brightest edges were pointing to the (unseen) light source, and orienting the figures' shadows correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you can't just reduce and relocate the two figures with their shadows for the site design - the shadows would have to be re-oriented, but the site design has a less obvious light source anyway, so it doesn't matter so much there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with overactor that the logo needs something more, like a ring - perhaps a ring that is incomplete, like a letter &quot;C&quot; rather than an implied letter &quot;O&quot;, where the ends of the gap in the &quot;C&quot; is pixelated as if it is unfinished.  If close to the sphere and angled at 45 degrees, the ring could still fit into the icon's square without reducing the size of the sphere significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The T-Shirt logo should be in full colour like the mug logo, not just the wireframe as is currently the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T00:40:14.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2016-01-20T01:52:42.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My though is that this is something that can be solved via a downvote and a comment explaining that the op did not ask if it was possible. I suspect others will disagree, but we need a discussion on when it is appropriate to challenge the frame of the question like this and when it is not. These kind of meta questions (speifically re this is not possible) make up a not insignificant number of of our 'problem' meta questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T19:25:40.620" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T19:25:40.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-01-20T07:03:12.430" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Ggsp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Universe Factory&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T20:47:12.510" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:47:12.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-20T19:02:19.733" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make the world in the logo a little bigger&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a visual perspective, the world in the logo could be a little bigger to make it have equal weight to the other letters in my opinion, especially in the non-colored version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a rough, low quality example of what it'd look like (top - original on bottom):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AtWeB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AtWeB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H55Ib.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H55Ib.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new version is currently at 107% of the old size, but could be fine tuned more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example below shows how making the circle a little bigger evens out the visual weight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GlwEe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GlwEe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without guides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HaNUb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HaNUb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/57712/23061&quot;&gt;this post on GD.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17257" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.310" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T19:06:43.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-01-20T21:40:03.350" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to recommend a repeat tag.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; was a fantastic topic for the fortnightly challenge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are generally interesting and always generate significant interest and passion.  Last time we were slightly worried about it being too contentious but things remained civil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would enjoy this topic coming up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T21:40:03.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2933" CreationDate="2016-01-21T10:16:52.403" Score="-2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I got into multi generational ships topic and I feel that I am not only interested in ideas how we could travel to another solar system at speeds slower than lightspeed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purpose of this meta post is to gather all multi generational ship posts on one place. I will start with my additions and mark the answer as Community Wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free adding other posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T13:04:58.753" Title="Multi generational ship FAQ" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2931" CreationDate="2016-01-21T10:23:30.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, stop. I realized there is tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/generation-ships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;generation-ships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;generation-ships&lt;/a&gt; which does exactly the thing I need to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means I tagged my own questions appropriately and recommend others to apply the same approach when talking about multi generation ships&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T10:23:30.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2931" CreationDate="2016-01-21T13:04:58.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current &quot;series&quot; meta questions for the most part are actually a series (i.e. how the realistic worlds one started out) where the questions all reference each other. Having a single meta post that they can all link to rather than linking to each other allows those questions to be organised better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grouping questions by categories as you already noted is better off done using tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;anatomically correct&quot; series is more borderline as to whether the meta post is relevant. The difference there though is both that there was no clear tag that applied to relevant questions and only those questions and there were a considerable number of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T13:04:58.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-22T06:32:59.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The logo looks to me like a die with a large number of faces used by web designers to pick between colors. (Which I wish I had thought of before, I really suck at picking colors.) I like the idea behind your derivation, I really do, but there is nothing in the finished logo to suggest a connection to either worlds or brain scans without reading your explanation of the derivation. Further this is &quot;world building&quot; not &quot;coloring primitive spheres&quot;. So despite the derivation being good, the finished result doesn't really have any connection to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you could make blend a planet and the primitive sphere with transition and maybe that hand working to show the site is about starting with primitive spheres and turning them into worlds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The palette... Did I already mention I suck at picking colors? Sp I am not going to offere suggestions for a better palette or anything since I really suck at picking colors or palettes... Did I already mention it? But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write about picking a palette that is alien to Earth and suggests alien world and pick a palette with two earth colors, two muted vegetation colors and a stone color... I think I kind of get what your intent was. Start with the colors of the Earth and then adjust so they look unnatural which makes them look alien, right? But I don't think it is really working. Alien worlds have the same physics as ours does, so they have the same colors, bar the differences in the solar spectrum, but our brain actually compensates for that since it happens at dawn and dusk on Earth. So it just looks like an illustrator picked a &quot;stylish&quot; color palette, not colors of another world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, there is nothing wrong with the palette. IMHO it looks just fine. I am just not sure if it was what &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; wanted, since it doesn't to me make the impression you wrote about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I am not sure if I already mentioned it, but I suck at picking colors, so you can safely ignore anything I say about colors and palettes, if you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not sure if the theme really suggest world building, it seems to suggest more exploration than construction, but... it does look nice so who cares...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastEditorUserId="3434" LastEditDate="2016-01-22T06:38:54.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T06:38:54.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-01-22T22:32:06.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fauna&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fauna&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fauna&lt;/a&gt; I am surprised we don't have a fauna request.  We had Flora months ago!  Need to fill the story with little beasties to pet, fight and eat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T22:32:06.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-01-24T03:41:17.783" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BUfmt.png&quot; alt=&quot;RPG.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:46:35.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2948" CreationDate="2016-01-25T08:12:48.800" Score="16" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not one to frequently ask or answer on worldbuilding, but I do lurk very often. I'm well familiar with the layout of Stack Exchange sites, and am mainly active on Super User.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34124/why-terraform-at-all&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in which the original asker &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/34124/revisions&quot;&gt;reverted any and all edits&lt;/a&gt; (which were approved in the case of the user with less than 2k rep), I figured it would be best to discuss the matter here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He edited this in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;edit: If you feel the urge to fix my post's tone please resist your edits dumb it down and add nothing. Please stop making edits. I will revert them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I know for a fact is something that &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be in a question. I've myself removed more &quot;Edit: Thanks for the answers!!&quot; and &quot;Edit: Nevermind guys!!&quot; out of questions than I can remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Stack Exchange sites are not forums&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the interest of not creating more conflict, I didn't edit his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the edits @Jim2B made, I didn't see anything wrong with them. When an edit changes the intent of a question, they are malicious. &lt;strong&gt;I don't believe his edits changed the intent of the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be argued edits that improve grammar / spelling / change sentences around a bit &quot;change the original author's tone&quot; but I see questions with very poor English all the time that have been edited, and go on to be stellar questions (point being the tone &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; changed due to the way the question was worded, but the question intent was exactly the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What to do:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the original edit fine?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should the question be reverted to that edit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either way, should we removed the &quot;do not edit my question&quot; part of the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13978" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T13:43:30.100" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T10:20:24.740" Title="User rolls back and refuses any and all edits to his question" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2016-01-25T08:29:55.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with the point 3. I edited it (let's see what the user do) to remove that line. It should never be part of a question, regardless anyone's feeling of tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the other part, I have more mixed feelings. I understand that the user want to make awkward sentences &lt;em&gt;on purpose&lt;/em&gt;. And if that was the aim (it might be intended to indicate a given &quot;tone&quot; for the answers), the original edit probably goes against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the intention wasn't really clear, and instead of just rolling back, s/he should have indicated more explicitely in the comments that s/he wanted it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for me, apart from the extra line, the OP is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T08:29:55.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-25T09:14:37.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a comment but I'll promote to an answer so I can add an illustration&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5nYVC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5nYVC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your mesh seems to have off-center positions with lines being uneven lengths.  The picture I&#xA;Posted here is a dome not a full sphere, but you can see that the placement of the nodes is uniform. &lt;em&gt;geodessy&lt;/em&gt; in mechanics means that the forces are all in compression or tension, without torque or twisting going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T09:14:37.427" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2016-01-25T09:29:56.843" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't had a chance to look at the various edits in detail, so cannot comment on the validity of those, but I still want to answer one part of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Either way, should we removed the &quot;do not edit my question&quot; part of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one seems fairly obvious. While the OP shouldn't have to put up with nonconstructive edits, making statements like the one quoted in a question (or indeed anywhere) appears in &lt;em&gt;almost direct contradiction to the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; policy,&lt;/em&gt; perhaps particularly &quot;be welcoming, be patient, and &lt;strong&gt;assume good intentions&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP finds the way a post is edited to be unacceptable to them, it's most often better to edit further to try to incorporate the point of the edit in a way that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; acceptable to them. Very few edits are outright destructive; better to assume good intentions and try to understand what the editor was trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across such things in the future, the proper thing to do is to &lt;strong&gt;flag the post for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt; and describe the problem. This is even more important to do if attempts to edit it out once or &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; twice through community effort is reverted by the OP. Nothing good ever comes of getting into an argument; at that point, just flag it and move on. Avoid using custom flags for frivolous reasons (there are only a few of us diamond moderators, and each custom flag has to be dealt with manually; for this reason, custom flags may also remain &quot;pending&quot; for longer than other types of flags, but rest assured that we stay on top of them), but if you feel that something does need the attention of specifically a diamond moderator, by all means use the custom flag feature; that's what it's there for! Also note that custom flags are confidential, visible only to diamond moderators and Stack Exchange employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As moderators, we have the ability to deal with this type of behavior in ways that the community doesn't (particularly, if necessary, we have the ability to contact a user privately to resolve issues, or in severe cases suspend users for a period of time). If the post is flagged with an appropriate flag description, that gives a clear record should it turn out that the behavior is consistent rather than a one-off thing, and it points us directly to the problematic post(s) should we want to look into a user's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are volunteers, and we invest our time in trying to make the site and community a good one. (About all we really get for our efforts is an Imaginary Internet Badge, either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/85/constable&quot; title=&quot;Served as a pro-tem moderator for at least 1 year or through site graduation&quot;&gt;Constable&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/86/sheriff&quot; title=&quot;Served as an elected moderator for at least 1 year&quot;&gt;Sheriff&lt;/a&gt;.) However, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; we are volunteers, it's unlikely that we'd go out of our way to search for similar issues in a user's previous posts' revision histories. Flags show up in a convenient summary that we can use to quickly judge whether it's a consistent problem that needs dealing with on a larger level than just a single post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-01-26T15:26:06.210" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T15:26:06.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-01-25T17:23:13.550" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just some personal thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding cover a wide range of topics and while I know it might not be easy to make several themes fit in the site design, I feel that the actual one as proposed focuses too much on science-fiction. Other popular themes that could be incorporated would be medieval, steampunk and fantasy (as in magical stuff). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I feel the desert is a bit empty. How about adding some vegetation maybe through terraforming? It could be alien Cyan-ish plants, to fit with the color palette. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T17:23:13.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2016-01-25T19:14:54.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's obvious that Earthins should be Earthlings or Earth-people or Terrans. Earthins is not a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T19:14:54.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T19:46:33.873" Score="10" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is time to have a discussion about the amount of challenging the frame of the question that we have on this site; a follow up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/possible-new-non-reality-check-tag&quot;&gt;Possible new &amp;#39;non-reality-check&amp;#39; tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is challenging the frame of the question? Well, the best explanation of this I know comes from the RPG.SE meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3318/how-do-we-handle-a-desire-to-challenge-the-frame-of-a-question&quot;&gt;How do we handle a desire to challenge the frame of a question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had a number of meta posts on this matter, and so I think its time we discussed site policy. Answers on a post(card :P) please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T04:37:48.237" Title="'It won't work' - challenging the frame of a question" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-25T19:50:29.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make it site policy that we should not be challenging the frame of the question in answers. The fact that the situation you are in is impossible is not relevant to the question in these cases, only what happens from now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for clarification are fine, that is what comments are for. 'Do you know this wouldn't happen?' is a perfectly valid clarification request if you are unsure. It isn't however appropriate for an answer to say 'your question is bad'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate response to this being done is to downvote the answer and leaving a comment (if you so wish) saying something along the lines of 'OP is not looking for a reality check', or for answers that only say 'this wouldn't happen' flag for deletion as non answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, none of this applies to question who ask 'Is this possible?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T21:00:58.823" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T21:00:58.823" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T23:36:13.840" Score="6" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34157/what-sort-of-problem-would-drive-a-near-omnipotent-civilization-to-seek-an-outs&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; last night and got a lot of great responses, and I'm interested in pivoting off of it to further develop the ideas for my &quot;world.&quot; Should I therefore evolve and update my existing question? Or, if they can stand on their own, should I stick to asking new questions, even if they are related? Is there a way to link questions (on top of the obvious way of simply linking within)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are many answers that I consider to be valuable input. Is it therefore suitable not to pick a &quot;best&quot; answer in that case since they are all quite valuable? Or, as I would do on any other SE site, should I always pick a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, I view this as a valuable resource for my work, and I value the contributors' attention and time. I want to be a good steward of both. I would greatly appreciate your advice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17131" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T03:35:00.683" Title="What is the best way to &quot;evolve&quot; my existing question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2953" CreationDate="2016-01-26T00:28:13.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: There's no reason to fear having &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; good questions and answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe sounds like the perfect reason to ask another question. You've got a good question, it's garnered good answers, and you can &quot;close the book&quot; on those, so to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post a new question and link to last night's in the body of the question the link will also show up in the &quot;Related&quot; sidebar for that question. And the reverse link will show up in the tergeted question. (&lt;em&gt;I.e.&lt;/em&gt; you need only link once, and both questions will show the other as &quot;related.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I can't speak to this SE's culture around acceptance rates. I know on my main site there's no inference of disrespect when never accepting an answer, even if many serve you well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T00:28:13.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2953" CreationDate="2016-01-26T03:35:00.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking a series of questions is just fine.  I've done it too -- I asked a question, the answers to which prompted another question, the answers to which prompted &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; question.  Make sure each question contains enough information to stand on its own (people shouldn't have to review all the others as prerequisite for reading the new one), and feel free to link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask a question and realize you need to refine it in some way, &lt;em&gt;and doing so won't invalidate existing answers&lt;/em&gt;, it's fine to edit.  Most often this happens when somebody asks a question in a comment and you add that information to the question.  &lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, it's bad form to change your question in a way that breaks existing answers; that's asking that people who already tried to help you go back and do extra work or risk having their answers downvoted as not addressing the (current) question in some way.  An edit that harms existing answers will likely be rolled back when noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, as you're writing a question, you realize it might need a little extra work but you're not sure how to refine it, consider trying it out in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/28&quot;&gt;question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T03:35:00.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-26T07:18:31.093" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a practice we want to avoid, because it can be frustrating to ask a question and only receive answers of the type: &quot;your premises are faulty&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it might actually be useful. The OP may not realise where the fault is. So the challenging answer might be more valuable to the OP than a standard answer. It happens. Alternatively, the OP might be aware of the flaw(s) (and thus get more frustrated), but it might help to clarify or refine the question, not to get further challenging answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it might just be useless, especially if it's of the third type. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, challenging answers might be left, provided that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are sufficiently detailed to be useful to the OP. Avoid answers like&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dude, you're so wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the answerer accepts the risk that the OP might edit his question, thus invalidating his answer. We generally don't want that to happen. But as we wrote challenging answers isn't what we want to see all the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion, I do not think that enforcing a no-challenging answer policy is recommended.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is up to the OP at the end to select the best answer, and not by the voting of other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="6453" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T18:14:27.750" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T18:14:27.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-26T15:21:30.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem with challenging the frame of a question. It can be beneficial if it's done right by explaining the flaws of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, by done right I mean that the answerer should also answer the question as it was asked. One should avoid answering the question that he think should have been asked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-01-26T16:16:47.957" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T16:16:47.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-26T17:47:32.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been making a lot of comments here, so I thought I'd try and get my thoughts on this into an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm gonna go a bit Platonic on this, so be aware that this proof has its flaws. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, imagine a question that is bad. The asker shows insufficient research effort, and/or is not being clear. Should you post an answer to this question, detailing its flaws? Of course not; you should try to improve the question through minor edits or by asking the asker what they mean and/or what they've tried. After the question is improved, you can answer it, confident in the knowledge that both the question and answer need not be modified in the future, and will be useful to people who find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, a question with a bad 'frame' is just another bad question. Thus, based on the above paragraph, you should not respond to it until the flaws have been fixed. Note the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34275/how-can-light-travel-without-mass-nearby&quot;&gt;how does light work without mass&lt;/a&gt; question; the asker had a flawed knowledge of how light worked, and instead of everyone coming in and answering that light didn't work that way, they tried to explain in the comments and put the question on hold; I believe that is how it should always be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to challenge the 'frame' of a question, you can ask and answer your own question about it. Then comment on the user's question, linking to your question and its answer, and suggest they edit their question in light of this new information. If they're not actually asking about their frame, you have no right to write an answer about it on their question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T17:47:32.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-26T20:14:38.890" Score="7" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been on Worldbuilding much, but I know that on Stack Overflow we're generally against people putting useless text like &quot;Hi, I'm new but I hope you can answer my question.  I love this community and I've been here for a long time but today is my first post, thanks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34157/what-sort-of-problem-would-drive-a-near-omnipotent-civilization-to-seek-an-outs&quot; title=&quot;This question&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; on Worldbuilding pretty much has this filler and I feel like it shouldn't have the intro paragraph for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It adds nothing to the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody reading the question came to read about the user's personal lurking habits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would set a bad precedent for every question to have this kind of text prepended&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T14:04:30.577" Title="&quot;Pleasantries&quot; at the start of a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2016-01-26T20:21:51.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right.  When I edit questions that have those I delete them (the extraneous sentences) I just don't go and edit them for that alone.  Feel free to clean them up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T20:21:51.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2016-01-26T20:55:02.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are usually more lenient than SO on surrounding text, but nevertheless if you do see them, don't hesitate to edit them out. Anyway, your edits will be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T20:55:02.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-01-26T21:13:22.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetary-rings&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetary-rings&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetary-rings&lt;/a&gt; ? they don't get much attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-01-27T00:00:36.900" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T00:00:36.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2972" CreationDate="2016-01-27T02:48:08.107" Score="12" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomically-correct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomically-correct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomically-correct&lt;/a&gt; tag was recently created, which I noticed when all the questions in that series were edited to add it.  Do we need this tag?  The questions also have the appropriate other tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomically-correct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomically-correct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomically-correct&lt;/a&gt; feels like a meta tag to me.  If exactly the same question were asked by somebody who didn't know about or intend to participate in the series, would the question get the tag?  What value does this tag add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T16:52:45.707" Title="Do we really need an anatomically-correct tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2016-01-27T03:18:32.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am the new user who posted that question and the accompanying &quot;pleasantries.&quot; I was aware that such frivolity is not generally encouraged on SE sites. However, being that I was a new user at the time and also that I have a great love for both the site and the concept it implements, I felt that it would be proper to include the fluff. That kind of thing is just sort of in my nature... I've always been a tad goofy in that way. It was genuine, though, and meant to convey the real sense of camaraderie I feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figured that it would eventually be edited out by a user with the rep and the inclination to do so... and in fact I had planned to edit it out regardless after a small time. It seems as though I was correct in my assumption: it has indeed been edited out. Don't worry; I won't be reversing it. It was, after all, part of my plan. Muahahahah!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17131" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T03:18:32.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-27T06:56:30.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that overall, challenging the frame of a question is a great thing. Challenging the frame of questions can cause unanswerable questions to change into answerable questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even challenging the question needs to be done correctly. You can't just go and say &lt;strong&gt;&quot;this question is bad because ___&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; - I think it's better to about it saying something more along the lines of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why/how do you explain _____&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. This method provides a chance for the question to be edited into one that fits the sites scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this isn't to say that you should question the question in an answer - I think a comment should suffice to make your point. I disagree with Bilbo in that regard; challenging &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; should never be left since they're rarely actually answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the actual answer is just &quot;no&quot;. In that case, go ahead and put that in as your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T06:56:30.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-27T08:36:33.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, it can be useful if done correctly, and by correctly I mean, constructively. To put it as simply as I can, an individual simply stating, &quot;NO!&quot; adds no substantive value to the question and, doesn't provide any means for the author to restate or reshape their question. The author learns nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If however, an individual states something along the lines of, &quot;No, but...&quot; in order to provide an alternative or states, &quot;No, and here is why...&quot; to explain the faults in the question, they are then contributing to the author and the question by allowing the opportunity to learn or adapt.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5253" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T08:36:33.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-27T13:34:19.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A variation of bilo's answer is to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain the problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present my own interpretation/variation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB is different from many (most) areas in that the questions don't relate to real things so much and are themselves ideas and works in progress.  If a rough idea can inspire something interesting in terms of plot or design, then it's still worthy as a straw-man, and interesting and entertaining to the members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T13:34:19.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2016-01-27T14:39:37.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a comment on the post saying &quot;Our custom is keeping to the question rather than introducing ourselves. That said welcome to the site&quot;. Would be friendly and non-aggressive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17311" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T14:39:37.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-27T17:43:38.187" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be cool if the score indicator at the top made a cute indication when it was a prime number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T08:40:08.897" Title="Idea for fun &quot;flair&quot; on the top bar" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2016-01-28T08:40:08.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you propose might be a neat gimmick, but compared to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=[feature-request]%20-[status-completed]%20-[status-declined]%20duplicate%3a0%20is%3aq&quot;&gt;the 12,772 other feature requests just on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; that have yet to be either implemented or declined, I think it should have an exceedingly low priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote &lt;strong&gt;no.&lt;/strong&gt; Even without having gone through that list of feature-requests on MSE, I can say with certainty that there are far more important things for the designers, developers and testers to spend time working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T08:40:08.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T16:12:46.397" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/2685&quot;&gt;we have a blog&lt;/a&gt;. As part of writing for that blog, I'm going to be writing an Editor's Picks series - essentially a round-up of some of the great stuff we get on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do that, I need to find some great stuff to write about. Now, while I could do that on my own, it'd be far more effective to ask everyone to nominate something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's why I'm here. For each Editor's Picks post I do (about every month, give or take a week or so), I'll post here on meta, asking for submissions for inclusion. Occasionally, there might be some special criterion (such as questions or answers in one particular tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For January 2016, I'm looking for some of the best stuff you've found on Worldbuilding to write about. To nominate a post, please drop an answer on this question linking to the post and giving a (brief, it doesn't have to be long - I'll flesh it out) summary of what you liked about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T14:27:19.440" Title="Editor's Picks: January 2016" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2963" CreationDate="2016-01-28T16:52:45.707" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As they would say on Stack Overflow: &lt;strong&gt;BURNINATE IT!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag is definitely, as 2012rcampion states, an intersection of creature-design and reality-check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, every question tagged with it already starts with &quot;Anatomically correct&quot;; to me, it almost feels like the tag is used solely to categorize questions starting with that title, which is totally wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T16:52:45.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-01-28T18:39:23.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Altering history is dangerous. You can accidentally destroy the Earth or cause yourself to never be born. Which is why we need a safe way to talk about what would happen if things were different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9498" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T18:39:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-01-29T04:37:48.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;History matters&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I postulate a democracy where a group of people were enslaved but gave their owners 3/5 of a census credit for population weight.  Since representatives are apportioned based on population weight, this means that the votes of freemen in areas with high slave ownership are effectively worth more than the votes of freemen in areas with low slave ownership.  That's a ridiculous proposal.  Why would voters in low slave owning areas agree to it?  Yet that is the actual, real behavior in the early USA.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many times when people point out problems with the frame of the question, what we are doing is pointing out weak areas in the background.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple solution to this problem of disproportionate representation would be for the North to secede from the South.  Then the North wouldn't be subject to the South's whims.  But that's not what really happened.  The House of Representatives was overwhelmingly controlled not by the South with its disproportionate representation but by the North.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was there a 3/5 rule?  In the original thirteen colonies, seven were northern and six were southern.  The seven also had more free population.  So if the natural rule of only counting free population would have held, then the North would have held control of both houses in Congress.  The compromise gave the South control of the House and the North control of the Senate.  Later that would switch, the South would use control of the executive and an even split in the Senate to block undesirable legislation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing the historical background and actual facts of the case would allow people to give realistic analysis of what was going to happen.  Without that, people would be likely to give the wrong path forward.  Instead of having the South secede, they'd have the North secede.  Expecting good answers for badly framed questions is unrealistic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, these things should be handled via comments, but in practice, comments simply don't allow enough explanation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T04:37:48.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2016-01-29T10:20:24.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real issue is I think somewhat obscured here. The original post is in dramatically non-standard English, and should not stand in this form. If the OP refuses corrections made by others, then he or she should correct them. As it stands, however, the question is problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the real issue is what to do if a question in semiliterate English cannot be edited because of the OP's preference? I say the question should be closed, or it should be edited without the OP being able to roll back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T10:20:24.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2971" CreationDate="2016-01-29T12:44:38.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/34279/328&quot;&gt;Building a bridge to the stars&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9796/whelkaholism&quot;&gt;Whelkaholism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like it because the idea seems ridiculous at first and your (or at least my) first thought is: &quot;That will never work!&quot;. But after some brief calculating, the concept actually holds up surprisingly well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points were also earned for a new form of Handwavium namely: lalalaicanthearyouium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T12:44:38.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2959" CreationDate="2016-01-29T14:04:30.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;pleseantries&quot; are very short, I don't think they're a problem. They are only a way being polite and gratefull, if they don't distract from the point of the question and stops after only a few words, in my opinion we don't have to delete them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T14:04:30.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2971" CreationDate="2016-01-29T19:11:35.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34157/what-sort-of-problem-would-drive-a-near-omnipotent-civilization-to-seek-an-outs&quot;&gt;What sort of problem would drive a near omnipotent civilization to seek an “outside the box” solution?&lt;/a&gt;. The question itself didn't stand out a lot to me, but the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; are fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T19:11:35.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-31T11:10:02.717" Score="12" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of Stack Exchange sites have their own Twitter accounts, which are controlled by a bot that tweets hot questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sites on the network have decided they don't like this, and have created their own independent Twitter account for the site, which is controlled by a group of humans who tweet questions that have caught the community eye, retweets of other comments about the site, and other on-topic links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should Worldbuilding become part of this latter category? With a Twitter account of our own, we could promote the site, promote the blog, engage with our community on another platform, etc etc. It could be controlled by a group of users (or the moderators, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they have the time and inclination to do it), which is arguably better than a bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-02-06T18:22:24.183" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T18:22:24.183" Title="Should Worldbuilding set up a Twitter account?" Tags="|discussion|community|twitter|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2979" CreationDate="2016-01-31T12:34:47.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that's a good idea. It requires a group of 3 to 5 active users. I think it would be preferable to have at least one mod in the team. We could repost the blog posts, post hots or challenging questions. And maybe engage further in the worldbuilding community of twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twitter is always a rather nice way to have headlines and short stories promoted around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T12:34:47.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-31T14:12:57.890" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a series of questions all closed as too broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34646/the-ice-of-eurasia-in-full-detail&quot;&gt;The Ice of Eurasia, in Full Detail&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34770/the-poles-great-lakes-earth&quot;&gt;The Poles, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34794/if-the-laurentide-ice-sheet-swallowed-more-of-north-america&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34794/if-the-laurentide-ice-sheet-swallowed-more-of-north-america&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34505/the-neo-tethys-sea-in-full&quot;&gt;The Neo-Tethys Sea, in Full&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While they are all quite broad (and cover a big chunk of land) I don't agree that they are too broad (and one of them is receiving re-open votes). We've had far broader questions in the past be well received. In particular an &quot;overview&quot; answer could quite easily be given and has been given to at least two of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is it specifically about these questions that makes them too broad and would need to change to see them opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T14:51:18.560" Title="World Under Ice Questions Too Broad?" Tags="|discussion|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2981" CreationDate="2016-01-31T14:33:56.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I voted to close one of those question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the climate is a very complex phenomenon (otherwise there wouldn't be any prolonged debate on global warming... or it wouldn't have lasted that long). There are plenty of parameters that come into the definition of a climate, and to my knowledge, not all are even know to the research. The OP provides some changes to our known world, and typically asks how that affect climate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, changing one parameter affects many others. Making the result kind of hard to actually predict. Like if the sea was up by 77m around Africa, some piece of lands disappear... how does the climate is affected? Well, it's hard to explain, because that would mean more water on the globe's surface and therefore the global temperature would be affected, probably more water evaporation, more storms, the sea currents would probably be affected as well. Making it hard to provide a definite answer. The same is true for the ice thing. @o.m. actually provides some points about it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, we already had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2257/how-to-deal-with-the-if-i-do-this-radical-change-thing-how-does-the-climate-c&quot;&gt;discussion about it&lt;/a&gt;, where my (amongst others) view on it is already summarised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T14:33:56.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2979" CreationDate="2016-01-31T18:45:20.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a good idea.  Giving a moderator access sounds like a reasonable idea, but in general, this is something that can be handled by the community without diamond intervention.  So if a moderator wants to actively participate then great, but, like the blog, this wouldn't be an official thing and can thus be done by anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mi Yodeya has a curated Twitter account (also an SE-supplied bot).  There are, I think, three people with access to the account, though 90% of the work is done by one (non-moderator) user.  There needs to be at least one person who's enthusiastic enough to keep it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally retweeting other worldbuilding-related content not from our site and users is an important tool in the &quot;building visibility&quot; toolbox.  So someone with access to the account should be following other Twitterers who post such material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T18:45:20.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2971" CreationDate="2016-02-01T14:27:19.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to nominate the lava questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First mine, asked on first January: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/32467/2071&quot;&gt;Castle surrounded by lava&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And second this one asked on 15th: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33450/2071&quot;&gt;How would a city styled like Venice be built with lava instead of water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because: Buildings on lava look cool and both questions and answers show, that living there is not so cool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T14:27:19.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T15:28:57.490" Score="11" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our 26th topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 1 February - 15 February&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2138&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2138.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Myths are always fun to adapt to one's world and entertaining to read about. Lets bring on the mythical-creature questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T16:46:41.747" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #26: Mythical Creatures" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2911" CreationDate="2016-02-01T15:36:23.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 48 questions and 261 answers, for an average of 5.44 answers per question. A total of &gt;12755 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge (exact stats pending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33662/society-rules-for-marriages-and-love-on-multigeneration-ship&quot;&gt;Society rules for marriages and love on multigeneration ship&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;190 total votes, 42 question votes, 17 answers, 5670 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34602/i-duplicate-the-u-s-president-what-happens&quot;&gt;I duplicate the U.S. President. What happens?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8914/pyrulez&quot;&gt;PyRulez&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;172 total votes, 52 question votes, 9 answers, 7563 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33696/society-expectations-to-work-for-your-living&quot;&gt;Society expectations to Work for your living&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;159 total votes, 38 question votes, 14 answers, 4670 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33806/is-it-possible-for-a-religion-with-1-billion-followers-to-die-out&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a religion with &amp;gt;1 billion followers to die out?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;108 total votes, 23 question votes, 13 answers, 7103 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34599/benevolent-aliens-will-help-us-all-on-one-condition-can-we-end-all-wars&quot;&gt;Benevolent aliens will help us all- on one condition. Can we end all wars?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16977/daniel-m&quot;&gt;Daniel M.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;105 total votes, 14 question votes, 10 answers, 2880 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34119/effects-of-tax-your-vote-political-system&quot;&gt;Effects of &amp;quot;tax your vote&amp;quot; political system&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;92 total votes, 18 question votes, 11 answers, 2899 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34491/whats-the-impact-of-a-cloning-teleporter&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the impact of a &amp;quot;cloning&amp;quot; teleporter?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;85 total votes, 25 question votes, 11 answers, 3425 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33598/can-we-have-a-meaningful-cultural-exchange-with-aliens-if-we-never-meet&quot;&gt;Can we have a meaningful cultural exchange with aliens if we never meet?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;64 total votes, 23 question votes, 9 answers, 2323 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34170/is-a-medieval-country-of-artists-viable&quot;&gt;Is a medieval country of artists viable?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9685/bilbo-pingouin&quot;&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;62 total votes, 15 question votes, 6 answers, 2150 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34240/taxes-weighed-by-years-of-military-service&quot;&gt;Taxes weighed by years of military service&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;54 total votes, 14 question votes, 9 answers, 2077 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34802/could-a-world-where-two-neigbouring-countries-only-one-of-which-uses-magic-e&quot;&gt;Could a world where two neigbouring countries, only one of which uses &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;, exist?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6410/l-r&quot;&gt;L.R.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;36 total votes, 7 question votes, 12 answers, 1295 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34289/cultural-norms-regarding-law-and-order-on-generation-ship&quot;&gt;Cultural norms regarding Law and Order on Generation ship&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;33 total votes, 10 question votes, 8 answers, 1022 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33894/would-generation-ships-encourage-a-caste-system&quot;&gt;Would generation ships encourage a caste system?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;25 total votes, 11 question votes, 5 answers, 195 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33746/how-would-magic-affect-the-subjects-taught-in-school&quot;&gt;How would magic affect the subjects taught in school?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;23 total votes, 9 question votes, 3 answers, 243 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33896/how-might-a-colony-treat-the-arrival-of-a-new-generation-ship&quot;&gt;How might a colony treat the arrival of a new generation ship?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;23 total votes, 6 question votes, 5 answers, 183 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34154/how-would-a-drug-cartel-claim-legitimacy-as-a-government-entity&quot;&gt;How would a drug cartel claim legitimacy as a government entity?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17384/carlos-danger&quot;&gt;Carlos Danger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;23 total votes, 7 question votes, 3 answers, 168 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33716/significant-day-to-day-impact-of-having-eyes-on-palms-of-hands&quot;&gt;Significant day-to-day impact of having eyes on palms of hands?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13878/user1717828&quot;&gt;user1717828&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 5 question votes, 7 answers, 610 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33980/is-it-possible-for-birds-to-use-rudimentary-technology-to-build-simple-infrastru&quot;&gt;Is it possible for birds to use rudimentary technology to build simple infrastructure and weaponry?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17333/johnny&quot;&gt;johnny&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 7 question votes, 3 answers, 523 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33997/how-would-society-react-to-docile-zombies&quot;&gt;How would society react to docile zombies?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;18 total votes, 6 question votes, 7 answers, 297 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34564/abolishing-slavery&quot;&gt;Abolishing slavery&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 375 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34311/how-would-a-population-react-to-an-ai-made-for-the-purpose-of-statewide-surveill&quot;&gt;How would a population react to an AI made for the purpose of statewide surveillance using current tech?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17384/carlos-danger&quot;&gt;Carlos Danger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 8 question votes, 3 answers, 134 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34386/if-a-culture-split-up-and-its-parts-were-isolated-for-750-years-would-they-then&quot;&gt;If a culture split up and its parts were isolated for 750 years, would they then be able to understand each other?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17362/cheese&quot;&gt;CHEESE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 6 question votes, 7 answers, 1034 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33976/is-it-possible-to-have-a-transhumanist-theocracy&quot;&gt;Is it possible to have a Transhumanist Theocracy?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 5 answers, 136 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33711/cultural-beliefs-practices-and-prejudices-of-tribes-practicing-ritual-cannibal&quot;&gt;Cultural beliefs, practices, and prejudices of tribes practicing ritual cannibalism&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 81 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34462/could-a-viable-interstellar-civilization-form-with-this-technology&quot;&gt;Could a viable interstellar civilization form with this technology?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 5 question votes, 3 answers, 348 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33713/how-much-could-a-species-benefit-from-a-single-child-possessing-dna-from-multipl&quot;&gt;How much could a species benefit from a single child possessing DNA from multiple fathers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 75 views &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34208/how-would-society-react-if-the-existence-of-a-devil-was-scientifically-proven&quot;&gt;How would society react if the existence of a devil was scientifically proven?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6781/rob-watts&quot;&gt;Rob Watts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 6 question votes, 2 answers, 148 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33730/no-one-leaves-africa-without-his-bow&quot;&gt;No One Leaves Africa Without His Bow&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 132 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34276/how-can-government-function-in-a-world-where-everybody-is-a-slave&quot;&gt;How can government function in a world where everybody is a slave?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 217 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34635/how-to-implement-radical-cultural-mindset-shift&quot;&gt;How to implement radical cultural mindset shift?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 115 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33912/what-would-a-post-apocalyptic-government-be-like&quot;&gt;What would a post-apocalyptic government be like?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 6 question votes, 6 answers, 317 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34740/the-teleporters-stopped-deleting-the-old-copies-what-happens&quot;&gt;The teleporters stopped deleting the old copies. 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- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 3 question votes, 2 answers, 98 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34492/turning-the-baltic-sea-into-the-baltic-plain&quot;&gt;Turning the Baltic Sea into the Baltic Plain&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 59 views &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34374/what-if-androids-out-perform-humans-at-interpersonal-relationships&quot;&gt;What if androids out-perform humans at interpersonal relationships?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 165 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34328/effects-of-rings-social-effects&quot;&gt;Effects of Rings; 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- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11787/crissov&quot;&gt;Crissov&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 65 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34202/effects-of-latitudinal-time-zones-with-multi-step-dst&quot;&gt;Effects of latitudinal time zones with multi-step DST&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11787/crissov&quot;&gt;Crissov&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 41 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33663/life-imitating-art-slow-motion&quot;&gt;Life imitating art - slow-motion&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 110 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34691/what-mental-trait-or-combination-of-traits-could-make-a-race-well-suited-to-warf&quot;&gt;What mental trait or combination of traits could make a race well suited to warfare?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6894/trismegistus&quot;&gt;Trismegistus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 114 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34797/how-would-society-react-to-the-impending-destruction-of-its-planet&quot;&gt;How would society react to the impending destruction of its planet?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 93 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34368/herpes-kills-and-we-have-to-stop-it&quot;&gt;Herpes kills, and we have to stop it&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17463/downrep-nation&quot;&gt;downrep_nation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 93 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34096/better-synonym-for-retirement&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34096/better-synonym-for-retirement&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17376/neville-h&quot;&gt;Neville H&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 total votes, 0 question votes, 0 answers, 23 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34496/how-important-would-magic-be-if-people-died-very-soon-after-starting-to-use-it&quot;&gt;How important would magic be if people died very soon after starting to use it?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17362/cheese&quot;&gt;CHEESE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -1 question votes, 2 answers, 119 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34062/how-would-world-looks-like-if-indians-doesnt-exist-at-all&quot;&gt;How would world looks like if indians doesn&amp;#39;t exist at all?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17358/user17358&quot;&gt;user17358&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-2 total votes, -3 question votes, 1 answers, 63 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T15:44:14.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T20:00:27.220" Score="20" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3065/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, February 8th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T20:01:58.280" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="26" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T20:00:27.220" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T20:00:27.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T20:06:06.187" Score="12" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2016 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T20:06:06.187" Title="2016 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-01T20:06:06.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T21:05:13.953" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do the candidates view those questions. Can they specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T21:05:13.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T21:09:49.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it's come up on a couple of other elections, and because I think it sets a good precedent of openness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have you ever been suspended on Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; (a main site or in chat)&lt;strong&gt;, and are you willing to release existing moderators from the moderator agreement for the purposes of confirming or correcting this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T21:09:49.773" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-02-01T21:10:47.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cuisine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cuisine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cuisine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes one needs to sit back, relax and enjoy a good meal. Why wouldn't the inhabitants of our worlds do it as well? How to build an exotic cuisine for an exotic world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T21:10:47.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T21:43:31.937" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short and simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T21:43:31.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T21:45:39.717" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;One looking to the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T21:45:39.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T22:28:01.260" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll post one of Grace Note's secondary questions as a separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T22:39:07.443" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T22:39:07.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T22:36:25.143" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical question, worth considering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you have previous experience with moderation on the network?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are you currently a moderator? Where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T08:51:35.977" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T08:51:35.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T22:37:54.500" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not the most important question, but it might be interesting to spread the different mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In which timezone are you generally?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T22:37:54.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-01T22:40:50.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one you might hear at a job interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your weaknesses? In other words, are there any reasons people should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; vote for you?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T22:40:50.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T00:03:33.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network?  If so, where and in what ways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities?  If so, tell us more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T00:03:33.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T03:14:19.483" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What fraction of questions and answers do you (currently) read?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T03:14:19.483" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T03:16:13.460" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When reading questions and answers, what are some patterns you notice in yourself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;E.g.&lt;/em&gt; things you like/dislike, things you find effective/ineffective, things you wish were done differently, things you hope to emulate, ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T09:30:50.127" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T09:30:50.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T06:14:22.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T06:14:22.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T06:16:42.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you want to change about the current moderation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T06:16:42.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T07:16:55.070" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T08:33:11.507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T08:33:11.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T08:07:26.600" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More of an information request but it involves a bit of opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For moderators:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Please point out three of your most interesting/debatable moderation examples (comments, discussions, actions taken).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also (for both non-moderators and moderators):&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Please point out three of the most interesting/debatable moderation examples (comments, discussions, actions taken) of a moderator (other than yourself).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of us aren't going to sift through the many (interesting and important!) comments left over the year by each of the moderators, which means that we'll miss out on the less known mods and their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12009" LastEditorUserId="12009" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T09:26:59.607" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T09:26:59.607" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T08:42:09.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means all votes (except upvotes and downvotes, which work the same as without a diamond) are &lt;em&gt;binding&lt;/em&gt; and take effect immediately. (Suggestions to allow moderators to make non-binding votes have been repeatedly shot down on Meta Stack Exchange.) You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T10:56:17.553" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T10:56:17.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T08:45:25.257" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of asking which time zone a candidate is in, this aims to establish the times of day and weekdays on which a person is likely to be on the site. &lt;em&gt;This is not an obligation.&lt;/em&gt; However, having two or three moderators with similar schedules and one with a radically different schedule can easily place undue burden on the last one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give times &lt;em&gt;and weekdays&lt;/em&gt; in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T08:45:25.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T12:14:00.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things I've found from moderation in the past is that it's relatively easier to moderate a very active community - it takes more time but the community as a whole but will recover easily from moderation mistakes - too harsh or too lenient. WB.SE is currently a flourishing community, but it may not always have such an abundance of good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would your moderation methods change during highly active and &quot;Question drought&quot; periods? How would you help the community recover from an inactive phase?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T12:14:00.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T12:30:45.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect moderation to take up in your day? Does this fit with your available free time?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the slightly more personal addendum: &lt;strong&gt;Is there any life event in the next year that could adversely affect your ability to actively moderate? How do you plan on dealing with that?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this is important to ask as I know how suddenly the amount of free time you have can change. 5 years ago I was a student who was online almost constantly. Then I started working and I was only online occasionally during the day and consistently in the evening. Then I had a child 18 months ago and I'd never have the time to moderate now! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking for a detailed description of your personal life, just an &quot;activity risk assessment&quot; and a contingency plan should your ability to get online to the same level change. Obviously this is linked to the first question - if you only plan on doing 30 mins to 1hr or modding a day and can justify why this would be sufficient, then only having 30 mins a day won't be an issue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T12:30:45.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3011" CreationDate="2016-02-02T12:38:37.633" Score="8" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt;, and noticed that multiple candidates that were nominating themselves for moderation already are mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They stated,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[they]'d like to continue as a moderator [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder. I also visited and voted on the 2016 elections over at StackOverflow, but could not recall any of the nominees already being moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look, but could neither find any information on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2989/2016-community-moderator-election&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;, nor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;official page&lt;/a&gt; and even searching on meta. So my question remains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For how long are Worldbuilding moderators elected?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I just missing something? Is this different to how moderation on StackOverflow works? I could imagine so, as the workload there is much bigger than on your beloved Worldbuilding site, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone point me to some information, or tell me what I missed? I am just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T12:58:54.070" Title="For how long are moderators elected?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3010" CreationDate="2016-02-02T12:54:58.657" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the very most part, &lt;em&gt;community elected&lt;/em&gt; moderators retain their position until they choose to resign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can also be removed by Stack Exchange company officials in the event of serious infractions, violations of the terms of service, etc. This happens, but very rarely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro tempore (&quot;pro tem&quot;) moderators are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35/29&quot;&gt;appointed by Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; company officials and keep their positions until they resign, are removed, or until the first community moderator election (which in our case is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;now underway&lt;/a&gt;). Pro tem mods are appointed to guide the site through the beta period only, up through graduation and until the community is mature enough to support community moderator elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, &lt;strong&gt;any current pro tem mod&lt;/strong&gt; (because even with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35/29&quot;&gt;the input from the community&lt;/a&gt;, there was never any election) who wishes to continue must run in the community moderator election and be elected moderator by the members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T12:58:54.070" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-02-02T13:44:20.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this sounds, but how about a small spark of electricity when the vote buttons are clicked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is OK, then we could have some more special effects like maybe a time travelling image while a post is loading, or an alien comic at a dead link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T13:44:20.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T15:05:08.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt; are you on Worldbuilding Stackexchange?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T17:57:47.607" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T17:57:47.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T15:51:30.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have you ever been caught in a quarrel with another user? Or have you been asked to intervene in one as a Moderator? Assuming that this might happen, how do you manage this kind of situation?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T15:51:30.143" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T15:59:29.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you use the unique usage data that moderators can access to monitor and boost the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T15:59:29.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-02T17:58:01.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you have other major real-life commitments that would detract from your ability to moderate on Worldbuilding? (children, a 16 hr/day job, etc)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you have other major moderating commitments that would detract from your ability to moderate on Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T17:58:01.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-02T22:32:40.943" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are the Hot Network Questions (HNQ) that gets displayed across the entire set of Stacks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QZagS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QZagS.png&quot; alt=&quot;HNQ&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different group of questions seem to get placed on it on refresh. While clearly these are the ones with lots of traffic and votes, and there's a formula for it somewhere, I have no way of knowing which WB questions if any are currently on HNQ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anyone know any way to find out?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T22:45:50.093" Title="Is there a quick way to see which WB questions are on the HNQ roster?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3017" CreationDate="2016-02-02T22:45:50.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only know a manual way. You click on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt; link (also included in the image), and manually count on the two pages. If there's any way more fancy, I'm not aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T22:45:50.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-03T03:00:18.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this question is actually a series of closely related questions that would likely be answered together in a single block. Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your profile shows that you had cast $A$ upvotes and $B$ downvotes. You had $C$ votes on questions and $D$ votes on answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is that the voting proportion that you think is ideal for you? If not, what it would be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What you consider when voting on a question or an answer either up or down?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also if you downvote someone, in which circumstances you would or wouldn't explain your downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the way that you vote for questions and answers will change if you get elected? If yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Comment: In many of the questions here, all the candidates are likely to present very similar answers. So I forged this question to know more about the differences, unique behaviors and specific personality traits from our candidates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3002" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T03:00:18.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-03T07:46:33.017" Score="7" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the deal with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32232/885&quot;&gt;this Answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a banner saying it needs more citations.  But this SE is all about making things up and discussing ideas, except for specific cases such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.  It's had a ridiculous number of references added, so now it's basically a list of sources.  The apparently new user was told to post more of them.  Then the Answer was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the story here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T17:08:58.687" Title="Why was this post deleted? Since when do we need citations to make Answers acceptable on WB?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3023" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:18:31.217" Score="7" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a beginner to this stack exchange and I am holding account in 21 sites of stack exchange. I ask a question, I get positive comments and a valid answer . With that am offered with down-votes too which reduces my reputation. When a person gets a valid answer, shouldn't the down-votes go meaningless? Why those people who down-vote do not leave comments explaining why they down-voted for questions which has an appropriate answer ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17526" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T04:39:22.423" Title="Why do people downvote but refrain from commenting the reason?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-10T15:12:10.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3022" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:42:00.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the people who &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; downvote without any comments, I will try to list for you &lt;strong&gt;my personal reasons for downvoting&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1: You are too political, borderline trolling.&lt;/strong&gt; If the question is, say, on gender issues or women's rights, I downvote answers based on personal opinions. Example: &quot;Women should know their place&quot; answer on this example gets downvote for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2: Your answer is too simplified or too hand-wavy&lt;/strong&gt; Again, if I ask about, say, generational ships and how to survive 600 years, I tend to downvote answers saying &quot;Just put them into a freezer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3: You answer something I did not ask about&lt;/strong&gt; Example, if I ask about using poison, I do not like getting answers that say I should use a bomb in that scenario. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4: I am not really sure what you are saying:&lt;/strong&gt; Although I am a non-English speaker myself, I can understand &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; typos. But if I cannot understand, I downvote. However, I usually comment when this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;They are just internet points&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it is easy to say when I myself have 12,196 of them and you have just six. But remember, it's just virtual points, nothing more. Whenever you get downvoted, take deep breath and try remind yourself of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Post specific examples here&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point that you have just six internet points can have an effect on people downvoting you. I have been in several online communities, so I can safely assume that someone looking down on new users can happen here, as it was common in several communities I have been part of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is what the Meta is here for&lt;/strong&gt;: Post links to specific question or answers which got downvoted. It will get more attention from moderators and/or experienced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal experiences with the Worldbuilding community is that it is a welcoming community full of people willing to help you provide better questions or answers and get more internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="16736" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T04:39:22.423" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T04:39:22.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3025" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:48:39.673" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being active user on this site, I am constantly curious who is running up for the moderators of this site. However, I did not find any easy way how to get to the election site than just remembering the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;link to worldbuilding election site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some mouse-only option I could access the election site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: Good luck to all running for the Moderators. Just Primary itself will be really hard to decide, because there are already at least 6 people I would like to see as moderators&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T10:16:45.113" Title="Is there easy way to get to the Worldbuilding election site?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3024" CreationDate="2016-02-03T10:13:05.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a direct link in the sidebar, under the &lt;em&gt;UPCOMING EVENTS&lt;/em&gt; section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yTQwP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yTQwP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link is also availiable on meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L94uU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L94uU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These will take you directly to the site you requested and stay there until the election is over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="13987" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T10:16:45.113" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T10:16:45.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3022" CreationDate="2016-02-03T10:30:20.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only see one question on your account. In the case of that question they most likely also started a close vote, with the close vote reason being the same as for the downvote: Your question is not actually about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read the tour and in particular the sections about what to ask and what not to ask that should help you consider how to re-ask the question in a way that will be better received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T10:30:20.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-03T15:00:14.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would you do to help the new users to know and explore better the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that sometimes is not really easy for a new user to know everything he/she should know about the site, especially if he/she doesn't speak really good English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T15:00:14.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3021" CreationDate="2016-02-03T16:35:28.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the original people who voted to delete it, so I'll give my reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What could cause an avian species to become intelligent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that there are already intelligent birds (parrots, ravens, magpies) with intellectual abilities akin to a human child, this suggests that their brains are far better optimized than human brains, weight for weight. So an avian brain of equivalent intellect to a human adult would not necessarily have to weigh anywhere near 1.3 kg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not answer the question at all. At all. Unless you think that it's disputing the premise of the question by saying that birds are already as intelligent as children, which is something of an odd claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer was originally posted on December 27, and was deleted on December 28. The sources were not added - in fact, the answer was not edited - until ~9 hours ago. The reason the user was told to post sources would have been because originally, &lt;em&gt;there were none&lt;/em&gt;. Then the answer was deleted, long before any edits were made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stand by the decision to delete the answer in its old form. I don't think that the sources make the answer fantastic - while good research, it still doesn't address the &quot;what could cause&quot; part of the question - but it's not as bad now. My reaction to the undeletion is that the answer is borderline Not An Answer, but the answer is certainly better now, and it was certainly worse before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T16:44:50.677" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T16:44:50.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3021" CreationDate="2016-02-03T17:08:58.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the notice is more than a month old, I will try to answer as best as I can but I've completely forgotten about this answer by now. Ideally, next time there is a problem, it would be better not to wait that much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the answer as been edited, I agree with you that it's just a list of references. Just one or two would have been enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quoting the first version of the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that there are already intelligent birds (parrots, ravens,&#xA;  magpies) with intellectual abilities akin to a human child, this&#xA;  suggests that their brains are far better optimized than human brains,&#xA;  weight for weight. So an avian brain of equivalent intellect to a&#xA;  human adult would not necessarily have to weigh anywhere near 1.3 kg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems I see with this answer (in the original state): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Birds are as intelligent as a human child. I'm not an expert in ornithology but I have serious doupt this claim. I don't doupt that birds have a certain level of intelligence, but saying they are just as intelligent as a child would require something more solid to back it up.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their brains are more optimized: That's based on the assumption that 1 is true which still remain to be proved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as HDE already mentioned, the answer might prove that birds are intelligent, but I does not explain how they became intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was it exaggerated to add a notice on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think so&#xA;since it's just a warning. By the time I added the notice, there was already an active flag for &lt;strong&gt;not an answer&lt;/strong&gt; and deletion was already under way. I added the notice hoping that it would help the user improve the post. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T17:08:58.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3031" CreationDate="2016-02-03T19:52:04.513" Score="9" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35161/if-sun-comes-up-in-west-and-earth-starts-spinning-in-opossite-way-could-gravity&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; popped up a few minutes ago and its premise has no foundational basis in anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No really.  &quot;If the Earth were to spin the other way, could gravity exist?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is such a complete non-sequitur, so I am unsure how to handle it.  None of the flagging or closing options seem to apply here (beyond &quot;other&quot;), yet it seems to me that this question is...not appropriate for Worldbuilding.  It's not a bad question though (aside from the poor English due to non-native speaker, on the surface the question is fine), it's just that it is blatantly &lt;em&gt;wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from down-voting and commenting, how should such a question be handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T10:05:59.067" Title="Non-Sequitur Questions: how to handle them" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3030" CreationDate="2016-02-03T21:28:47.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it can be answered, answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it cannot, then close it (with a custom close reason if appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optionally, down vote if you feel it's a poor question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Move on :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in this case the question actually has quite a good answer. Even poor questions can lead to good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T22:18:33.533" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T22:18:33.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3030" CreationDate="2016-02-04T07:38:21.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came accros the question in the review queue. I don't think there were grounds to actually close it: it is on-topic, it is answerable, etc. It is just wrong, so downvote it. You might want to give the OP a chance by commenting first and downvoting later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T07:38:21.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3039" CreationDate="2016-02-04T23:38:23.260" Score="43" ViewCount="1212" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months back, my participation on this site dropped heavily for various reasons, most of them real life commitments. Now I've come back, and there's something I've noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I left, the site was filled with great stuff about worldbuilding. Information on specific topics, such as the making a map series, great discussion about how to make a world tick logically, or not logically in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my return a month or so ago, and ever since then, it seems to me that the focus of the site has changed to being a more whimsical, what-if type of thing. More and more questions seem to me to be idea generation, which we have a close reason for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't personally think that's a good thing. We've lost the great worldbuilding we had going on in favour of hypotheticals to satisfy a curiosity. But it's not up to me. So, several questions for the community at large:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you think my observations are correct?&lt;/strong&gt; Have you seen the same? Something slightly differently? Is Worldbuilding more what-if now than it was?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should&lt;/em&gt; this be happening?&lt;/strong&gt; This is the killer - is this a good or a bad thing? Do we want to be what-ifs and idea generations? Your opinions, please.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the kind of thing we want to be happening, that's fine - but there are potentially some policies and functions around the site that could do with having another look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="328" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T12:24:19.433" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:31:24.720" Title="Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T01:17:44.833" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wanting to start a meta discussion about this too.  Thanks for bringing it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, too, feel that we're getting more of this type of question lately and that it's not good for the site.  The reason I haven't mod-hammered more of these closed is that I'm confused about what the community wants -- we say that we're about &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;plots&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;characters&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;idea-generation&lt;/em&gt; -- but people engage with these questions, often enthusiastically.  These questions and their many answers get lots of upvotes and positive comments, and not as many close votes as I'd expect.  This tells me that the community is divided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The call on any given question is made more complicated by the fact that there's a spectrum here.  At one end, a question about how to work out the orbital mechanics of a multi-mooned planet in a binary-star system given constraints A, B, and C is clearly on-topic.  At the other end, a question that describes a multi-mooned planet in a binary-star system and asks for plot ideas set in that world is clearly off-topic.  In between we get lots of fuzziness.  Is a question about how to kill everybody overnight on-topic?  What about a question about how AIs can do so?  What about a question about the logistics of alien invasion given factors X, Y, and Z?  What about a question about how society would have developed differently if earth had two moons?  Binary stars?  Double the land mass?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that we've run out of the kinds of questions that used to be our near-exclusive fare; people are asking those too, in comparable numbers I think (anecdote, not data) but in smaller proportion as our overall volume increases.  We were averaging 10 questions/day in November; today it's 20/day.  That's significant growth, and perhaps we aren't as able to guide users as we once were.  Let's fix that.  First step: more-clearly describing the boundaries, making some good, clear meta posts about it, and updating our custom close reasons accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T01:17:44.833" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:01:31.447" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to answer @overactor's comment on Monica's post, but as the length grew, I thought it could make an answer on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regularly read: that question is fine because it is popular (in substance, but also sometimes literally). I remember back in July when we closed (one of) the most popular question on the site, because it was too broad. Why couldn't it be done now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the OP, I too sometimes have the feeling that many of the questions aren't from people actually trying to build a world, but are just curious. If that's in absolute not bad, the appeared predominance of those certainly made the previous approach for our scope somehow shaky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could simply say that whatever is popular with good answers, etc. fit the scope. That's a good way to get good stats, a lot of views and good participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am more of the approach that we should discuss the scope on meta. See the closing reasons, are they still fine. What does that mean too broad, what does IG means, where does the plot building starts, where does the worldbuilding ends, etc. We've had those discussions before, but maybe it's time the newer users share their views on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then once those discussion have taken place, they should be enforced, regardless of the popularity of a question, even if it might pain to close an otherwise interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a concluding note, I think this is a debate that is sane, and needed, but it should be kept to after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;. Even if the candidates could give their views on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:01:31.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:02:56.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I will try to put down a defense on &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what-if&lt;/a&gt; questions, because, well, personally I think it is good way of asking questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Some ideas are too big to begin with&lt;/strong&gt; You get an idea for alien life form and at first point (my approach) you care about one thing about that aliens. You as an author are willing to hand vawe &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of the attributes, but want one or more to be plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. To me (and seems that not just to me) it is natural way of processing new idea:&lt;/strong&gt; I want to invent new bomb/poison/pill/device which goes &lt;em&gt;poof&lt;/em&gt; and magically changes one attribute. What will be the consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want my aliens to live on planet which would be twice as big as Earth. What are the outcomes? And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Seems to be better understandable all around the world:&lt;/strong&gt; As non-English speaker myself, I feel the struggle of actually &lt;em&gt;understanding what is being asked&lt;/em&gt; in the question. Again, in my case I get better understanding of questions in &lt;em&gt;What-if&lt;/em&gt; format than in &lt;em&gt;Solve for X&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However, I agree it is time to draw the line&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35213/an-alien-spacecraft-crash-lands-very-publicly-how-does-the-world-react&quot;&gt;this specific example&lt;/a&gt; of a question, I caught myself thinking if the question is on topic. Personally I like it, I even upvoted on the question, but truth is, that such question is asking for a plot. And here is where I feel it is beginning to be a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Good step forward is stop &quot;plot&quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with ArtOfCode's observation: Community likes these questions (including myself), these questions get lot of attention, upvotes and answers. But I agree it is time to think if it is good in long run&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:02:56.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T09:12:49.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll offer a rather extreme view (which I mostly agree with) for people to vote on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It is happening, it is a problem and it needs fixing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also been less active over the past few months and have been visiting more frequently again lately and have the exact same impression. I'm often quite convinced a question should be closed, but am hesitant to do so because of the massive amount of upvotes and complete lack of flags or close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, in my view, comes almost entirely from the HNQ. Almost by design, questions that reach the HNQ are less in depth than the ones that don't. And HNQ is how we get most of our new users, so naturally, they'll ask questions like the ones that brought them here and vote according to the standards set by those. It's easy to see how this would result in a slippery slope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What we should do&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our scope is rather mushy and it would be difficult to change that. Instead I think we should be very harsh with enforcing our mushy scope and do so immediately and retroactively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New questions should be judged by high standards, regardless of their popularity. Older popular questions should be retroactively closed or locked to indicate to users that these are not the questions we want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the latter I would suggest making a Meta post to keep track of those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What we should also do (but I'm conveniently not addressing because it is hard)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to define our scope more clearly. Unfortunately this is way more difficult than enforcing a scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T09:12:49.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T12:25:03.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asked as a separate question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;Case Studies - on or off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T16:34:01.743" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T16:34:01.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T13:41:19.047" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I'd say we've moved from Worldbuilding SE to Whatif SE. I see three problems that need to be dealt with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)- &lt;strong&gt;External image&lt;/strong&gt;. Our most popular questions don't actually seem to be about worldbuilding a lot of the time, so when people see them on the HNQ they get the wrong ideas. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that popular questions should be left open because they are popular, and I disagree with it. You could ask the absolute best question ever, and it might still be off-topic for this site, so we should close it and see if it can be migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) - &lt;strong&gt;Lack of consistent understanding&lt;/strong&gt; of the scope of this site. We have discussions like this often, and I feel like we never actually get anywhere. Every so often, I get really scared that every question I see is off-topic, but over time I've just given up because it's all &quot;subjective&quot; or &quot;borderline&quot;. The way I see it, we should all be a little looser with our close votes; if people agree with you, they'll see the votes and add their own. If you're alone in your opinions, there'll be one downvote and the question will stay open. After doing this for a while, maybe we can get a better understanding of what people think should be closed. Plus, we should keep talking about this. Obviously there's a problem, we just need to figure out exactly what to do about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) - &lt;strong&gt;We ARE the problem&lt;/strong&gt;- I can say with complete confidence that I've asked some off-topic questions here before; we all have. But I think that's the biggest problem, and it bleeds into the other two: if new users come in and see 10k rep and up users asking bad questions, they'll think it's all right to ask bad questions of their own. We're about to graduate, we don't need to contribute questions to fill the void any more. I say those of us who are active in Meta and/or have a lot of reputation should be more careful with the questions we ask, because new users are usually going to end up asking worse questions than us, and if we want those questions to still be on-topic we have to make sure &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; questions are &lt;em&gt;super&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T14:14:52.850" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T14:14:52.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3041" CreationDate="2016-02-05T13:47:27.150" Score="8" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just did my &lt;s&gt;fourth&lt;/s&gt; fifth(? stopped counting...) review on an answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35243/you-are-an-advanced-ai-that-controls-a-smart-house-how-do-you-kill-your-master&quot;&gt;You are an advanced AI that controls a smart house. How do you kill your master?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands now, the question has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a total of &lt;s&gt;29&lt;/s&gt; 30 answers, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;17&lt;/s&gt; 18 answers with score &amp;lt;= 3,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;five&lt;/s&gt; six of those with zero score and (partly) below, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About a third of the answers (&lt;s&gt;9&lt;/s&gt; 10) are posted by users with &amp;lt;200 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site/3034#3034&quot;&gt;recent discussion&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;what-if type&lt;/em&gt; of questions; this question especially caught my eye, as it keeps attracting more and more answers by new users with questionable quality. I do not intend to start the same discussion within this question, but what I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; look for is a way to protect this post from more mid-to-low-quality postings, as I feel like the total quality of the question seems to suffer under the increasing amount of answers, and I wonder if we could (should?) do something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has already been discussed that those questions are somehow off-topic for being idea generation. So, &lt;strong&gt;for this specific question&lt;/strong&gt;, should we close it? Protect it? Not to punish the author of a well-recieved question, but to prevent it from getting heavily overloaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T19:40:47.927" Title="Is he dead yet?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3040" CreationDate="2016-02-05T14:06:47.730" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and protected it (thanks for the alert).  This can be easily reversed if we decide later that it's unneeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protection is usually warranted when a question attracts several poor-quality answers from new users.  In fact, a question is automatically protected if three answers from new users are deleted.  In this case none of the answers you're talking about are deleted (and many are at 0 rather than downvoted), so while protecting the question helps reduce &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; answers, the community still needs to address the current answers.  Please (everybody, not just OP) look them over, leave helpful comments, flag low-quality or non-answers for review, vote, and so on.  Please remember that these answers might have been those users' first encounter with our site, so guide them where you can.  Helpful tip: in a comment, &quot;[tour]&quot; is a shorthand for the tour page and &quot;[edit]&quot; is an edit link for that post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T14:06:47.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T16:30:18.950" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've griped about this in the past, so I'm glad you've brought this up. I agree with a lot of what has already been said, especially in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site/3034#3034&quot;&gt;Monica's answer&lt;/a&gt;. However, I have a different direction I'd like to go in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;There are three types of questions. . .&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some thought, I realized (well, it seems to me, at least) that there are actually three different types of questions on Worldbuilding, and I've asked questions in each category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if . . . ?&lt;/strong&gt; These are the kinds of questions that are at the center of this discussion. I would further subdivide them into two new categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Random hypothetical thoughts.&lt;/strong&gt; These are things that people may have thought up on the spur of the moment. They are generally not too closely tied in to a specific world. We get these from a variety of sources, mainly just people thinking about weir scenarios. However, some also stem from &lt;strong&gt;topic challenges&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;migrations&lt;/strong&gt;. The former (topic challenge-based) are cool, and encourage asking questions in niche areas. The latter (migrated questions) are not, in my opinion, good. There is often no motivation to build a world at all. The reason we get these may be because of our external image, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3039/627&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh wrote&lt;/a&gt;. I sometimes try to discourage these migrations on the science sites, but this is often unsuccessful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Broad questions about a world.&lt;/strong&gt; These are ideas that come from worlds that are not fully fleshed out, but may be in the planning phase. The questions are often about some overarching property that sets the world apart from ours (if people were twelve feet tall, for example). There is generally not a lot of detail in these questions. However, they do have the potential to lead to good worlds. The motivation for worldbuilding is there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specific worldbuilding ideas.&lt;/strong&gt; These are the questions I like best. These questions have several characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The world is well-though out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific details are mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other important ideas/information are/is included in the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The world is already being built.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like these questions, and we had many more of them (certainly by percentage, if not numbers) a long time ago, when the site was young. You can still find them around. In my opinion, these are the questions we should strive to ask and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta-topic questions.&lt;/strong&gt; These questions hide in a few related tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shared-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shared-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shared-worlds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a couple others. These questions also may not have any of the tags. I find these questions very helpful, and I've used some that others have asked when building my worlds. I think we should also have these.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What do we want?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta discussion is, as I have said, about questions in the first part of the first category. I'll be explicit, and say that &lt;strong&gt;we should no longer allow these questions&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions of the second &quot;What if . . . ?&quot; type may be fine, so long as they aren't too broad, opinion-based, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, some downsides to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower site participation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fewer questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fewer questions on the HNQ (and these What if? questions often get on the HNQ, because it's easy to answer them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upside is simple: &lt;strong&gt;A site that's actually about worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt; Is it worth the downsides? I would argue yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Enforcing it&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do end up changing the scope as I've said, then we need to ensure that it's followed. I have a proposal that I think may help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show some effort!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of sites on Stack Exchange expect askers to show some effort researching and trying to answer their own question. They should then provide some details of what they know and what they've found, and what they don't know and haven't found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use a modification of this: Namely, to require askers to show that they have a clear, specific world in mind and have spent time developing it. This will hopefully dissuade many of the &quot;random hypothetical thoughts&quot; I talked about earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some sample details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name of the world's lands and the people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The technological and social era at the time in question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any developed language (possibly relevant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A map, if possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A short history of important events in the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A description of the world's culture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, it will not be possible for everyone to provide all of this information. However, I suspect that it &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; lead to better thought-out questions and better worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Random unrelated thoughts:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DaaaahWhoosh is right; a lot of us high-rep/high-activity users are culpable here.&lt;/strong&gt; Some of my recent questions have been directed towards a specific world I've been developing, but many are questions in the first category - some of which are random thoughts and some of which are about infant worlds that are not well though-out. It is up to us to set a better example here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need more meta-worldbuilding questions.&lt;/strong&gt; These are &lt;em&gt;incredibly&lt;/em&gt; useful to people, and they will help in the long run.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kudos to anyone who read through all of this.&lt;/strong&gt; It's a bit extreme insofar as I'm proposing banning many questions that make Worldbuilding Stack Exchange popular, and it's not concise. But I appreciate anyone who reads it all in full and gives feedback.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T16:44:35.533" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T16:32:58.797" Score="14" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evolution in the scope of the site is not a bad thing, we've learned a lot about what does and does not work in the over-a-year since the site first entered private beta. I'll use a number of my own questions as examples here to avoid picking on anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain questions are clearly both popular and answerable both from the number of views and the number of up-votes they are getting. I've chosen my top 5 highest voted questions to discuss. Of the 48 questions I've asked at the time of writing these are the five that proved the most popular with voters. It's notable that each of these was also on the Hot Network Question list and in at least one case was on it for over a week. &lt;strong&gt;As a result many of the people voting may well not have been regular Worldbuilding users, however regular Worldbuilders did get it into HNQ in the first place.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;How would Facebook Sysadmins prevent the summoning of Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; This is not about defining something concrete and part of the world, for example a mountain or a city. However it is about mechanics inside a world. Specifically what methods are feasible for people to use to face this threat. When designing a mountain part of building that world is specifying how people can climb that mountain. Here I've defined part of the mountain (Cthulu friending people) but am looking for plausible ways to climb it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Borderline on whether it is plot or world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32086/santa-is-satan-but-why&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; This one treads close to the &quot;actions of an individual person&quot; line. The &quot;out&quot; here is that Satan/Santa isn't really treated as an individual character, it's an essential part of the framing of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Borderline on &quot;individual person&quot; or Worldbuilding. Note that I wrote this as part of the &quot;Santa&quot; challenge which almost guaranteed a lot of questions about an individual, was that challenge a bad idea? It was certainly popular both with regular users of the site and visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28980/whats-the-most-likely-post-democracy-form-of-political-government&quot;&gt;What's the most likely “post democracy” form of political government?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Selecting methods of government for countries is an important part of worldbuilding when working at that scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; It Risks straying into &quot;list based&quot; answers or idea generation which is why I was careful to narrow the field and specify the criteria by which answers would be rated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29497/in-an-atheist-alien-society-where-bodily-functions-reproduction-and-waste-elimi&quot;&gt;In an atheist alien society where bodily functions (reproduction and waste elimination) are not taboo what would be used to curse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; This is about building the society of inhabitants of a world. While individual people would be using these terms that actual nature of them is a part of that society and hence the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; This had the same problem as the &quot;post democracy&quot; question that it could easily be too broad or Idea Generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6565/planetary-scale-artworks&quot;&gt;Planetary Scale Artworks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; This is clearly about building worlds (or multiple worlds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Again this risks going too broad or idea generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this list starts to illustrate the problem here, every single one of those questions could be argued as either off topic or on topic. Looking at my next few questions we see the same thing as well: Alien Viewpoints risks idea generation, Centaur Feeding is probably fine, Natural Projectile Weapons again could be idea generation, Landmass Formation is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So of my top 9 questions only 2 do not in some way risk being classified as off topic. So where do we draw the line? Is the popularity of these questions enough to justify their existence? My personal opinion is that by itself popularity is not enough to save a single question, however if a lot of similar questions are popular then we should consider the fact that clearly the people using this site have an appetite for questions along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I invite people, take a look at these questions and answer in the comments to this answer. Should they be closed, if so why? If not then do we need to adjust the guidelines to say why they should not be closed? I promise not to get offended, I just offered them up as sacrifices for the greater good after all :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth I believe that all those questions are on topic for the site (or I wouldn't have asked them) but several are definitely pushing a long way into the &quot;grey area&quot; between what is actually building the world and what is not. Anything that can reduce the grey and make the boundaries more explicit would be a positive step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T09:24:25.177" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:24:25.177" Title="Case Studies - on or off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T16:44:27.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like &quot;what-if&quot; is only a small set of the potential problems, and additionally many excellent worldbuilding questions are &quot;what-if&quot;. The problem with what-if questions is actually a symptom of a larger problem rather than a root-cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we need to do is define the &quot;axis&quot; (Risk factors?) upon which off-topicness can be measured and then set the threshhold for those risk factors. For example too individual, too broad, too plot, too writing-techniques, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example we could have a meta post asking for &quot;things that can make something off topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each answer to that is a single risk factor that can make it off topic (examples listed above) and we can up or downvote that thing as being relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we've worked out which risk factors we care about we can then define the threshold for each risk factor and (if it doesn't fall into an existing close reason) do a custom close reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. &quot;too individual&quot; would have a meta post describing what makes something too individual (describing actions of an individual character), what the threshold is, and suggestions for changes to make to correct that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T16:44:27.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3043" CreationDate="2016-02-05T17:01:24.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summoning Cthulu&lt;/strong&gt; - It's just a fancy way of saying 'there's a virus, how do they stop it?' It's more about dealing with a specific, limited instance, rather than building out a world. You weren't asking how this could be prevented, and you're not asking about the long-term effects. Thus, I'd say it's off-topic because it's about individual actions. Possibly refactor and ask on another site on the network where they deal with hardware problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Santan&lt;/strong&gt; This one's tough, because while it deals with an individual character, that character has a lot of power over the world, and the question deals with his actions over a long period of time; thus, the reasons behind his actions could actually have profound effects upon the world. The bigger problem I see is that it's too-broad/opinion-based/idea-generation; there's no good way to deal with this character's motivations except to make an incredibly long list of possibilities. 'Judged based on plausibility' seems like a pretty flimsy and subjective criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post-Democracy&lt;/strong&gt; I find the use of the word 'might' dangerous here, almost as though you knew going in that this was going to be idea generation. And again, judged on plausibility. The right answer should be right because it's &lt;em&gt;the right answer&lt;/em&gt;, not because it's the best-looking guess anyone could come up with. Also, this is about &lt;em&gt;our world&lt;/em&gt;, our future without anything changed. I once had a question closed because it was about our world; I agreed with that closure, but if other people disagree then I'll nominate it for re-opening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Curses&lt;/strong&gt; I think this one is fine; I don't know why. Though I would say it could look bad based on answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Big Art&lt;/strong&gt; Close as too broad. What are the limits of these beings' power? Without an upper bound, the number of possible answers is literally limitless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T19:14:38.197" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T19:14:38.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3043" CreationDate="2016-02-05T17:06:49.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoilers:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm going to say most of these are Idea Generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;How would Facebook Sysadmins prevent the summoning of Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Meh. This one seemed what-iffy to me - there was no &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; link between the fact that Cthulhu was running rampant and needed to be stopped by the sysadmins, and the world it was happening in. This wasn't so much about &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;specific-event-building&lt;/em&gt;, which I don't think is what we're here for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;On/Off Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Off topic. Idea Generation, or if we had a plot-building close reason I'd be using that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32086/santa-is-satan-but-why&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; No. This is character-building. Again, there's no link to the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; here - why are the answers any different based on the world it's all in?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;On/Off Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Off topic. It's almost the definition of idea generation - there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; an attempt to add an objective criterion, which would have salvaged it (though it would still not be worldbuilding), but define &lt;em&gt;plausibility&lt;/em&gt; - that's still subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28980/whats-the-most-likely-post-democracy-form-of-political-government&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most likely &amp;quot;post democracy&amp;quot; form of political government?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes. There is clear evidence that this could easily be used as part of building a world based on Earth in the future. There could be more details about the world added, but I'm happy with the worldbuilding aspect here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;On/Off Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Tentative on-topic. There is potential that this could be IG, or even primarily opinion-based, but frankly the nature of WB is such that quite a lot of question are. We should apply the IG and POB close reasons sparingly, therefore, and I wouldn't use one on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;4. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29497/in-an-atheist-alien-society-where-bodily-functions-reproduction-and-waste-elimi&quot;&gt;In an atheist alien society where bodily functions (reproduction and waste elimination) are not taboo what would be used to curse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt; - this was an excellent question. There's detail about the society, the tech level, the state of the world. This is the kind of thing we want more of.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;On/Off Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Do I even have to answer this? Absolutely on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;5. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6565/planetary-scale-artworks&quot;&gt;Planetary Scale Artworks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Eeeeehh. Race-building, perhaps. &lt;em&gt;Thing&lt;/em&gt;-building, more like. I'd be tempted to say it's not. There's not much information about the universe they live in.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;On/Off Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Off-topic, as Idea Generation. It's quite literally asking for ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T17:06:49.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T18:54:35.733" Score="19" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt; and based on Tim B's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;recent post&lt;/a&gt; , I'd like us to have a series of case studies, where various users of the site post their five top-rated questions (or any five questions of their own they think would be most interesting), self-evaluate, then allow the rest of the community to debate whether or not these questions are or should be on-topic. The point of this is to help come to a consensus of what should be on or off-topic for this site, so that going forward we can present a unified front of moderation and guidance to new users, and preserve the integrity of the site as it makes the transition of graduation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post will serve as an FYI, and as a reference to each post as it is posted. I've volunteered myself to go next, on Monday the 8th; I was thinking after this, future posts would be spaced out to every other day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone wants to volunteer, let me know and we can get it scheduled. I know a few of you have already shown interest, just let me know (here or in chat) what day you want to go and I'll fill it in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do let me know if you want to contribute, and please wait your turn; the last thing we want is to be flooded with case studies no one evaluates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;February 5 - Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3063/case-study-2-daaaah-whoosh&quot;&gt;February 8 - Daaaah Whoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3093/case-study-3-james&quot;&gt;February 10 - James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3145/case-study-4-overactor&quot;&gt;February 15 - overactor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3168/case-studies-greens-highest-viewed-questions&quot;&gt;February 16 - Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3200/case-study-6-hde-226868?lq=1&quot;&gt;February 18 - HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3225/case-study-7-aify&quot;&gt;February 20 - Aify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3256/case-study-pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3261/case-study-monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remaining volunteers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dates:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 10 - James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 12 - ArtOfCode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 14 - overactor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 16 - Green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 18 - HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 20 - Aify&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 22 - Monica Cellio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;February 24 - Pavel Janicek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above volunteers, we have quite some questions to review. If you want to volunteer yourself, you can add a comment, below. But for the moment, the above should be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:22:27.230" Title="Case Study Series" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-05T20:12:30.453" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally posted this on the case study question but the content makes more sense here in the general discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever we have conversations around what fits world building &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2304/189&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; from meta comes to mind, primarily this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For World Building, I feel that the answer might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To a zeroth-order approximation, everything goes on World Building&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the rub, and we keep discussing over and over again, what is in scope and what is not...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that &lt;strong&gt;all topics are on topic&lt;/strong&gt;, I mean c'mon we are talking about the entire freaking universe, that pretty obviously covers everything.  Which is not to say that all questions belong here, just all potential topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not suggesting that questions should not be closed, because obviously that would just make the site a dumping ground for a lot of garbage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...I don't think we can just say x is on topic and y is not, I don't think world building fits that paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on world building &lt;strong&gt;Forms of questions&lt;/strong&gt; can be on or off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off Topic Stuff&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plot/Idea Generation is off topic, we are not here to write stories for people.  However we can help people confirm an idea would work scientifically or logically in their given scenario.  This is where things get hazy in my opinion and in cases like this I tend to give a well asked question the benefit of the doubt and leave it open.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Assessing questions (If you only read one part of my post read this...please)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general method, which I would suggest is a good one is to do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask:  Am I helping someone gain knowledge to build a world? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask:  Am I helping someone write a story&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;Yes, No&lt;/strong&gt; situation no issues we are good to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;No, Yes&lt;/strong&gt; situation I vote to close&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;Yes, Yes&lt;/strong&gt; situation I vote to close and suggest a way to rework the question to avoid the idea generation portion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;No, No&lt;/strong&gt; situation I suggest deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T20:26:44.553" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T20:26:44.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3051" CreationDate="2016-02-06T05:52:44.443" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, two of my questions were closed. It can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35156/if-everyone-was-cloned-and-the-clones-were-a-foot-tall-how-would-they-be-dealt&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The reason given for it being closed was,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a very broad questions. It would have a lot of implications on social, economic, and generally every aspects of the society. It is likely to produce a civil unrest or war. And your last questions focuses on situations where the whole step was done. So in the worst case, you ask us to describe hypothetically a few decades. That's what I call too broad. – bilbo_pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this was &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; I edited it to make my focus how would the government deal with them. Which is precisely the advice given on the little ribbon that says it's closed (please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue). So why was it closed? Bilbo was the only one to even provide an answer as to why he voted to close, and I think he was going off of what he had read earlier. The other four people didn't even upvote his comment, much less provide a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question still too broad? Or is there some other reason my question is invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T02:30:13.390" Title="Can someone give me a good reason why my question was closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3050" CreationDate="2016-02-06T07:59:42.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not involved in the closing of this question, but I will speculate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed because it is a &quot;What if&quot; idea generation question. The very text of the question poses it as a hypothetical, and the details are minor and suggest you just want to know: &quot;What if this happened? How would the government respond?&quot; That is fundamentally not about world building -- it invites speculation, opinion, and does not have a reasonable metric by which a correct answer could be judged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11306" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T07:59:42.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-06T18:22:10.290" Score="7" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;So what seems like an age ago now, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2979/should-worldbuilding-set-up-a-twitter-account&quot;&gt;if we should have a community-run Twitter account&lt;/a&gt;. It seemed like the response to that was generally positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few of us have taken on the project of developing a bot to run some aspects of that account. One thing it's planned to do is manage the tweeting of question links. This can be done using suggestions from users in chat, and if that doesn't provide enough material then the site can be scraped to find potential questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd assume that we don't want 'bad' questions tweeted. Therefore, we need to define what 'good' is, in terms that a bot can use. This means in things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;close and delete votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existence of post notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and any mathematical operations thereon. Some of those are reasonably obvious, some less so. So what should the requirements be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T18:22:10.290" Title="What should the requirements for tweetable questions be?" Tags="|discussion|twitter|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3055" CreationDate="2016-02-06T19:56:43.073" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find myself leaving a constructive comment on a bad answer with ways to make it suited for the topics of this site rather than downvoting it because that costs me rep. Therefore, I leave it to higher-rep users to downvote bad questions and answers. For example, take this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35408/death-clock-certain-death-has-never-been-more-certain&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and read the answer by Joseph Bannister Kulhavy. Rather than actually addressing the questions in the question, he simply raises more unanswered questions. I would downvote but I really don't want to lose the reputation that I worked so hard for. What should I do? I've already commented and flagged as not an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T21:27:13.483" Title="Unwilling to downvote" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3053" CreationDate="2016-02-06T20:09:53.440" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you correctly flagged as Not An Answer, the reviewers will likely agree with your flag and the post will be deleted. When a post is deleted, the cost of downvoting it is refunded to you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suppose the post doesn't get deleted and your reputation point is lost. Then you can do your penance by suggesting a good edit to another post (this takes work, as a penance should). The balance is in your favor: one edit offsets two downvotes. If you are good at recognizing low-quality content, you should also be able to make some of the content better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user788" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T20:09:53.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3053" CreationDate="2016-02-06T20:10:12.733" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case leaving a comment and flagging is a good solution, it will bring the question to other people's attention and it will either get deleted or down-voted or otherwise treated appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can down-vote &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; with no cost of reputation, so if you find a bad question then down-vote freely!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you down-vote an answer and it later gets deleted you get your reputation back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T20:10:12.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3050" CreationDate="2016-02-07T02:30:13.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made an edit to the mini-me question that I think captures your intent (based on what you said here on meta) and makes the question not too broad.  If you think I've missed your point then feel free to edit further, but if you're happy with the edit I made, let's see how the community feels.  (It already had reopen votes before my edit, BTW.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T02:30:13.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:00:41.477" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are flagging to close a question as off-topic you are presented with two reasons for closure that seem very similar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blatantly off-topic (this question has nothing to do with worldbuilding)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused as to what the difference here is. Does the first reason mean that this is simply a misguided question that should be reworded to fit within the scope of Worldbuilding while the second reason means that this question simply has nothing to do with Worldbuilding? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2WNsz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2WNsz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot showing the off-topic choices&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: As of June 6, this issue has not been resolved. Even after site graduation, the issue persists.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2016-06-06T21:01:41.787" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T21:11:09.213" Title="Flagging to close as off-topic" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:24:50.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as your question is concerned, I would say you assume right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This flagging reason is for questions, that are sort of worldbuilding related. The help center says not to ask questions on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a question that asks about character building should get flagged with this reason. Whereas the other reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blatantly off-topic (this question has nothing to do with worldbuilding) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is basically for questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I bake a chocolate cake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be only related to flagging posts (Users with &amp;lt;500 reputation), as this close reason does not appear for close voting (Thanks @Vincent for the screenshot):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sUJ05.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sUJ05.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T18:24:50.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:33:23.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So... it turns out that we have defined two custom close reasons, the idea-generation one and the first one you're seeing.  I am not sure why that first one exists.  Maybe at the time it was created there wasn't a &quot;just plain off-topic&quot; option and there is now?  Maybe it's always been there but the mods didn't notice?  Maybe we were distracted by unicorns? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll consult with the other mods; I suspect the answer is to just remove that first, generic custom reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T18:33:23.933" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:44:45.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my suggestion for the first reason as requested by Monica Cellio in the comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is related to the topic of worldbuilding, but it needs&#xA;  to be revised in order to fall within the scope defined in the help&#xA;  center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the second:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is completely unrelated to the topic of worldbuilding,&#xA;  and cannot be revised to fall within the scope defined in the help&#xA;  center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="17179" LastEditDate="2016-03-13T00:53:45.360" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T00:53:45.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-02-07T19:14:11.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When voting to close on an off-topic question, the reasons available are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;note: They are placed in no particular order since different users&#xA;are offered different options according to the privileges they have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is able to see this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about Idea Generation are off-topic because they tend to&#xA;  result in list answers with no objective means to compare the quality&#xA;  of one answer with the others. For more information, see What's wrong&#xA;  with idea-generation questions?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This too, but idea generation is a different close reason than off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This option is only available to users with less than 500 reputation. It's the default off-topic option of Stack Exchange. It can't be edited here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This option is available to users with more than 500 reputation. These users can vote to close and migrate questions to other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is another default close reason offered for anything that doesn't fit in the other options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users with less than 500 reputation are the only one to see&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  scope defined in the help center.and the Blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's where the confusion comes from. Personally, I think the first option is clearer and it links to the appropriate help section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solution would be to include a mention on the other close reason that if users see both of them, they can chose whichever they want because, in the end, they mean the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, these are just flags. The community will review them and when they do, both will appear as off-topic flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T19:14:11.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-02-08T00:50:47.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As requested by Monica Cellio &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3057/flagging-to-close-as-off-topic#comment8414_3059&quot;&gt;in the comments,&lt;/a&gt; here is my suggestion for the new wording of the close flag reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question seems to be related to fiction and worldbuilding, but violates one or more of the criteria under the &lt;em&gt;what not to ask&lt;/em&gt; section in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T15:11:12.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T14:55:28.200" Score="14" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;Case Study Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As before, this is a series of my own top-rated questions; I'll give my own opinions about whether or not they are on-topic, and anyone else can give their own opinions. I encourage everyone to provide their own answer, even if they agree with the ones already posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32577/how-many-nanobots-can-i-have-in-my-blood&quot;&gt;How many nanobots can I have in my blood?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; I would say that this is about worldbuilding. I wanted to know about a near-futuristic technology so I could use it in a sci-fi world where its applications could have large and far-reaching effects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I don't know about this one, I think it's on-topic but maybe I could have asked it on Biology SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11277/how-could-i-scientifically-explain-ice-breath&quot;&gt;How could I scientifically explain ice breath?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, I think this one is on-topic. It's about how dragons would work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I can see this as being idea-generation, but for some reason it doesn't seem &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; idea-generation. I think my intention was for answers to draw upon real-world evolution and choose the solution that was... the most plausible (I think I get it now, Tim B). This goes along with what some people have been saying, that idea-generation may not actually be a bad thing as long as its scope is thin enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11348/what-time-is-it-in-space&quot;&gt;What Time is it IN SPACE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; How to tell time in an interstellar society definitely seems about worldbuilding to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, this could be idea generation, and I think it's an even bigger culprit than the last one. I don't think I have a defense for this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21225/can-you-shoot-someone-with-a-bullet-from-orbit&quot;&gt;Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; It has applications in military strategy, and the military is pretty important for changing worlds, so yeah, I'd say it's about worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, this one &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; closed as &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about worldbuilding, so maybe I have a skewed perspective. But I think orbital ballistics is way more on-topic than some of the other stuff we've had recently, so please, if I'm wrong, explain how. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10923/thats-no-moon-planet-sized-plants-possible&quot;&gt;That&amp;#39;s no Moon: Planet-sized Plants Possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm building a world out of plants. I think it's definitely about worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Nah, I think this is cut-and-dry on-topic. 'Can it be done' is way narrower than 'how can it be done' or 'why would it be done'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T16:46:15.673" Title="Case Study #2 - Daaaah Whoosh" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T18:28:52.603" Score="11" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regards to the current discussions about &quot;idea generation&quot; and &quot;what if&quot; questions, I've written an ontology, or categorization of answer types.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Those with programming experience will recognize many of these types as basic (or not so basic) programming data types. This is intentional as computational theory has a long history of working with deciding on answers to questions. ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implicit with all answer types is a requirement to justify the answer.  Just saying &quot;Yes&quot; or &quot;No&quot; isn't useful to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answer &quot;data types&quot; that I can come up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Boolean: Yes or No.  The valid answer must also provide some justification for an answer but fundamentally, the answer is yes or no. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; almost always resolve to a [boolean][1] Yes or No.  No one ever worries about these kinds of questions because they are inherently answerable and (generally) quickly answerable. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Integer or Floating Points: Give me a number.  These too are easily answerable though perhaps with a bit more work on the part of answerer.  Providing a number and justification is easily done. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; questions often ask for this kind of answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Multiple Choice: This is a kind of extended boolean.  The OP provides a list of options and the answerer provides the best choice.  These are also easily answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Event Sequence: An OP may ask a &quot;what happens, then what happens, then what happens, then what happens; given these initial conditions and these world-systems&quot;.  The answer is a chronological sequence of events.  While it's easy for the OP to request a sequence of events over &quot;too-broad&quot; a range, requesting a sequence of events, in and of itself, isn't bad.  Note, to remain a valid question, the OP must ask about an event sequence in a system, not that of an individual.  Further, the OP must only specify the initial conditions.  Specifying events to occur or changes to world-systems some time after the initial conditions constitutes &quot;too broad&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A List: (Ah, the current point of controversy :) )  A list in and of itself, is a valid answer type. An OP asking for a set of systems required to support human life on a space ship, is a valid world-building question (albeit a very simple answer).  Contrast this with a question asking for ways that an AI house might kill its owners without any constraints to determine if one answer is better than another.  The problem isn't the inherent data structure of the answer, it's that there isn't a good way to choose a best answer. Granted, list answers tend to make people uncomfortable because they are so easily abused but I submit that the relationship is correlative, not causative. List questions don't cause opinion or plot generation answers, they just happen to appear in the same place at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;World-System: Here, the OP states a world system (and associated constraints) and asks about interaction between their system and &quot;real-life&quot; world-systems. (Though it could  Phrases like &quot;How would this work?&quot; frequently show up in questions asking for world-systems. A common example of this kind of question is astronomy questions about orbital mechanics.  World-system answers often fall prey to [combinatorial explosions][2] of feedback loops and complexity.  Climate or socio-economic-political questions are frequent victims of unmanageable complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The World-Systems answer type is really really complex and I'm sure can be chopped into lots of different sub answers.  I think this is enough for right now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T19:38:28.813" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T19:38:28.813" Title="Ontology of Question Types" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:01:31.450" Score="14" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2987/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Not every question was compiled - but there was a split on the last slot and after review, we decided to keep them and push it to 11 questions total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/e4255645-7aee-4544-ad1b-1234ea09c6b9/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Index (in alphabetical order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3079/28&quot;&gt;Aify&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3075/28&quot;&gt;AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3066/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3072/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3071/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bowlturner&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3068/28&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3081/28&quot;&gt;fi12&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3087/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3073/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;James&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3115/29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3076/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3077/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3074/28&quot;&gt;Riley Santos&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3070/28&quot;&gt;Samuel&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3069/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3067/28&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tim B&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T20:31:48.313" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:19:04.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm ArtOfCode, and these are my answers. They're also some random thoughts I had while writing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Views on Scope&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not long ago, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt;. For&#xA;anyone who hasn't seen it, it's the result of my observation that Worldbuilding has changed its focus to more what-if &#xA;type questions over the past few months. In it lies my opinion of idea generation questions: I think Stack Exchange's &#xA;model got it right when they banned (well, not &lt;em&gt;banned&lt;/em&gt;, but discouraged without specific criteria) opinion-based and&#xA;idea generation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; do these questions better than many other sites on the network ever could, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; the root problem&#xA;still lies firmly where it started. There's no objective way to judge answers. And with that issue comes another, &#xA;which is that it's suddenly rather difficult to define what an answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn makes flagging as NAA and &#xA;subsequent deletions problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Idea Generation questions should generally be out of scope, unless they're directly about worldbuilding and &#xA;can be objectively answered. Yes, that's a flaky definition - though &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3064/ontology-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Green has sort of got it here&lt;/a&gt; - and we need&#xA;to do some definition of it. I intend to get that done after this election, whether I'm elected or not. Expect plenty&#xA;of Meta posts!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You may not be surprised to learn that I think much the same of these. Worldbuilding is not plot-building, &#xA;character-building, or scene-building. We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; site, which can deal with some of this. Worldbuilding &#xA;should be more about, well, building the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;. Unless your character is so pivotal to the world itself that a &#xA;single action of theirs effects change on a global scale, Worldbuilding is not the site for these.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are always exceptions, of course - and part of the meta-discussion I intend to do after this election is to start&#xA;defining more exactly what those are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly? Because it's rewarding. So I guess my reasoning is a little bit selfish, though it does also get the job done.&#xA;It's nice to be able to come onto the site, and be someone who is seen to be capable, trustworthy, and reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience moderating on Stack Exchange (&lt;a href=&quot;https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Hardware Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Source&lt;/a&gt;), it's also fun. Some&#xA;may disagree with me on that one, but I'd certainly enjoy the post, and I think that's important - a moderator who &#xA;doesn't enjoy their job won't be as dedicated to the site and its community as one who does. Having a great community&#xA;is also a massive boon, which Worldbuilding has in bundles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. How do you deal with a valuable but controversial contributor?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Is it really a good idea to keep these old questions in circulation, when they've been answered many times over? &#xA;Hmmm... there's a discussion for MSE.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributions are great. Arguments, flags, and the disputes in the community that stem from them, are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;. The &#xA;latter outweighs the former by far. Of course, it's not just down to that - for a successful community, you can't allow&#xA;&lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; to get away with breaking the rules, no matter how valuable the content they produce is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone like this needs to be contacted. On noticing the pattern, I'd be sending them a mod message about it. &#xA;Communication is always the first resort: it's entirely possible that the user is just unaware of the issues they've &#xA;caused, and informing them of that is the first step to solving the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the option of taking the user into a private chatroom, if I think their actions aren't so egregious that &#xA;it's worthy of a mod message and the permanent stain that leaves, but I want to engage with them and have a conversation&#xA;about what can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. How do you handle a moderator action you disagree with?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communication is the basic answer to most of these types of question. If a moderator has taken a moderator's binding&#xA;action on a post, they clearly thought there was something wrong enough with it to warrant that. Perhaps I've missed &#xA;what it is they saw. Unless I talk to them, I'm not going to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sites have a moderator-only chatroom, for moderators to talk about their duties and issues surrounding the site. &#xA;This is a prime example of what such a chatroom should be used for - I would head over there, and ping the mod in &#xA;question to ask them why they took that action. That starts a discussion, which leads to a resolution either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5. What are Worldbuilding's greatest challenges?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;em&gt;biggest&lt;/em&gt; challenge right now is nailing our scope down. I've talked about that in my answer to bilbo_pingouin's &#xA;question, which is honestly demonstrative of the challenge it is. That's my opinion there; other people &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have &#xA;different points of view that are equally valid. Scope changes are always heavy on the discussion front, which as a mod&#xA;I could facilitate. I feel like once this election is over, we should be trying to make a decision on Idea Generation &#xA;questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; biggest challenge is, I think, cross-site communication. And that's &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. Code Review had to build a bot&#xA;so that they could monitor Stack Overflow recommending questions being moved to CR when they were off-topic on CR, and&#xA;even now I believe they still run it and have the occasional issue with Stack Overflow sending them stuff. This is &#xA;partly linked to the last point: I think one of the reasons we get so many what-if type questions is that other sites&#xA;don't understand our scope and see us as more of an &quot;anything goes&quot; site. We need to challenge that and change it, or &#xA;we'll never solve our scope issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;6. Why are you more effective as a moderator than as a high-rep user?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to be pedantic, I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; one of the high-rep bunch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation is a figure, a measure of your participation on a site. It's never been a good judge of who you are - there &#xA;are some high-rep users on some of the larger sites whose behaviour is truly appalling. A moderator's diamond shows&#xA;everything you do in a different light, and makes you not only an 'authority' figure, but respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, you get access to a bunch of extra data and tools. Those allow you to perform your primary duty as a moderator,&#xA;which is to handle flags. This &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be done by the community in any tangible way (yes, there are a few ways in which&#xA;the community handles flags, some even before they get to the mod dashboard, but they're... convoluted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you become an ambassador. This means that you're looked at by other sites on the network to be knowledgeable &#xA;about your site matters, and by your own community to be able to, well, moderate - to mediate and arbitrate discussions &#xA;and generally facilitate the running of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some of that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be done as a regular user, I've found it's generally easier as a mod, and would allow me to &#xA;represent the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;7. Are you OK with enforcing definitions you don't agree with?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a word: yes. I already do that on &lt;a href=&quot;https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;HR&lt;/a&gt;, where part of our scope is &quot;pre-purchase inquiries&quot;. I don't think that &#xA;they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be part of the scope for a number of reasons (which aren't relevant here, so I won't detail them), but &#xA;since the community has decided that we want them on the site, it's my job to enforce that scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important for a moderator to be open-minded, and this is part of that. If a moderator attempts to force their idea &#xA;of a scope onto their site, it's going to go badly and &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; done in the past. Moderators' points of view are of course&#xA;still valid, but they're not worth any more than an opinion from any other community member, and can be shot down just&#xA;the same. If that happens, it's time to shrug and move on - trying to argue will only cause more issues and arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;8. When are you active?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ooooh, this is an easy one! I'm in the UK, so GMT or BST depending on the time of year. That's UTC+0 or UTC+1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm generally around the sites a good proportion of the day - not necessarily actively participating, but certainly able&#xA;to respond to anything urgent that comes up. I become more active from 16:00, all the way through the evening. That &#xA;pattern is pretty consistent through the week, and the weekends see a little more activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I do need to get a life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;9. What's your review activity like, and how will it change?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My review queue activity is consistent with my general activity profile. It dropped off as my participation here did a&#xA;couple of months ago, but it's coming back now as I do. I generally try to be as active at reviewing as possible, &#xA;because it's really useful community moderation. If you like numbers, then I am &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9th in reviewing Close Votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9th for First Posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;13th for Late Answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7th for Low Quality Posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;8th for Reopen Votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;11th for Suggested Edits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how my activity will change, I'd be reviewing here with much the same attitude I take to the review queues on&#xA;other sites where I'm a moderator. If a case is clear-cut and I'm certain enough to act on it unilaterally, I'll act on&#xA;it. That's the purpose of a mod's binding vote - to expedite the normal community moderation processes. If I'm not sure,&#xA;then it's just a case of pressing the Skip button. I come around the review queues and have a look at the outcome of &#xA;some review tasks I've skipped every now and then, so that I can get a feel for how the rest of the community is &#xA;reviewing. That's a good practice, actually - I'd recommend it whether you're a moderator or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;10. What do you want to preserve about the current moderation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I can see deleted posts. Looking through some of those, it's obvious that the approach to moderation on&#xA;Worldbuilding is pretty hands-off. The cases where I see a mod-closed question, or a mod-deleted post, are rare - &#xA;especially in cases where it's debtable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mods here are doing an excellent job of letting the community get on with the moderation, and that's a great &#xA;advantage to the community. When a community is left to moderate itself in all but the most egregious and clear-cut &#xA;cases, it ends up being more of a &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; site than it ever could be if we just relied on the moderators to enforce&#xA;the standards for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what I want to preserve most. There are other things too, obviously, notably how friendly our mod team is, that&#xA;I'd love to keep, but if I were to pick one thing that's it. I think that's important to the well-being and community&#xA;spirit of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;11. Where else are you active?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've mentioned, I moderate &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Source&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Hardware Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, so I participate on both of those.&#xA;Open Source generally sees more participation and less moderation (because there's less moderation to do and more &#xA;stuff I'm interested in to answer), while the nature of Hardware Recommendations means that a significant amount of time&#xA;there is spent moderating and checking through for quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important, while moderating, to remember that you're not a thin blue diamond line against a tidal wave of incoming&#xA;spam, low-quality and off-topic posts, but in fact you're a welcoming face who should be giving helpful advice and &#xA;guidance on how to improve a new poster's posting. That's the moderation philosophy I try to practice, and I believe it &#xA;works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other worldbuilding communities? Um. Not really. I guess you could say I helped build a world for an RPG campaign once,&#xA;though that wasn't so much of a community as a tiny group. I do also try to watch social media for interesting &#xA;worldbuilding stuff - but I don't have masses of involvement in other worldbuilding communities, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:46.220" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T20:25:51.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:27:46.083" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;Tim B&lt;/strong&gt; I've been pro tem moderator since Beta and wish to continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are Too Broad or Idea Generation are ones where it is impossible to give one “best” answer or cover the subject in a single reasonably sized answer. Generally the question needs to be more constrained or have more objective ways to rate answers. The name &quot;Idea Generation&quot; is misleading and needs to change but until we can pin down what a better name and definition would be we need to work with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individual Action or Plot questions are harder to pin down as some individuals are part of building a world. Classic examples would be a pantheon of gods for a fantasy world. Creation of that pantheon is Worldbuilding even though you are building individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve been very active in the scope discussions both in the original beta and the ones that have just started again recently so I’m hoping we can bring a lot more clarity to this situation soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really feel like a part of this site, having helped it grow from nothing into a thriving community. I’d like to help it continue to grow into the future without losing any of the imagination and the structure that has made us such a success so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially I would check the records of that user to see if there were already moderator messages or annotations, and depending on the urgency of taking action I would discuss the user with other moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of taking action I would start by deleting any provocative comments and any replying to them and then try a moderator message to the user suggesting more appropriate ways to behave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that still was not sufficient then I would begin to suspend them for gradually longer times until they learn their lesson or leave. One toxic user drags the site down for everyone and can let others think that such behavior is acceptable. No amount of good answers are valuable enough to warrant that as we have plenty of people who can provide good answers without causing trouble for other members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For every good answer the troublesome user posts how many good answers are lost from people they have driven away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has happened a few times over the past year and in each case I discussed it with that moderator and we were able to reach an agreement. If we still did not agree then I’d ask another moderator to act as a deciding vote or suggest that we write a neutral-tone meta post asking for community feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest challenge is scope creep, particularly with the rapid growth in both users and questions over the past few months. We need to revisit the discussions we had during beta and really nail down what I’ve been calling the “Risk Factors” for making a post on or off topic. The idea is that we define a set of things such as List Generation, Individual Action, etc and clearly specify for each of those factors where the line is drawn along with having a custom close reason and meta posts to explain how to fix the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that I can handle things such as comments, flags, and similar behaviour that even a 20k user does not have access to. I could continue to provide some moderation by things like being active in the review queues if not a moderator, but my interventions would be slower and more limited in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is unlikely to happen as our guidelines are sensible and I'm actively involved in the process of bringing them up to date with what we have learned over the past year. If it should happen then I would enforce the definitions fairly and wait to see how they work out, if after at least 6 months to a year I still thought that they could be improved then I would think about raising a discussion to see if the policy should change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most active in the evening (19:00 to 23:00) and at weekends (11:00 to 23:00) but I am nearly always online via my phone and on breaks at work (08:00 to 23:30) so I monitor situations and can deal with them as they arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not active in the review queues at all since as pro tem moderators we have been making a conscious efforts to let the community handle things where they can and only step in as &quot;exception handlers&quot;. In this respect things will not change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more serious note, we have a really strong team at the moment but equally a lot of the candidates are also very strong. I'm confident that we will see an excellent team after the election, no matter who gets the position. I hope the emphasis will remain on light touch moderation and exception handling. Trying to guide rather than force the community has produced excellent results so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm active on Stack Overflow (27k reputation) and have similar reputation to that on Worldbuilding (29.5k), I am also occasionally active on other sites such as Role-Playing Games, Workplace and Arqade. Beyond that I'm not active in worldbuilding communities as such, however I do frequently use worldbuilding in my hobbies (where I run RPG games over the internet, LRP games in real life, and also write Pathfinder Adventures, and even short stories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was also recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-tim-b-6c05407b4884#.uk9n2x1e0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interviewed&lt;/a&gt; for our community blog Universe Factory (normally I do the interviews but bilbo_pingouin decided to turn the tables) and so you can find out a little more about me there if I haven't already said enough here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T22:15:39.140" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:15:39.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:36:20.320" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This turned out to be really short. Let me know if you have questions, but I think I expressed my opinions well enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe that the site has become too accepting of questions and answers that are too broad, not in scope, or generally not conforming to the Stack Exchange model. That said, I realize that Worldbuilding is a special case, and there really is no 'right' way to govern the site. That's why I've been contributing to the debates on Meta and in chat on these important issues, to come to a consensus on what should be done. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to be a moderator because while I don't trust myself with power, I &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; trust someone who trusts themselves with power with power. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a user produces good answers, I will not moderate their answers. If a user produces bad comments, I will moderate their comments. If the user is active in chat or wishes to know why I am moderating them, I will explain my reasoning, and hopefully show them the error of their ways. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I can see and clearly understand their reasoning, and can tell that they missed an important detail, I will reverse their action. Otherwise, I will try to get in contact with them to understand why they made that action, so we can both decide who's right. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The biggest problem we have now is differing ideas about scope. It seems like the newer the user, the wider the scope, and if we don't do something the levee's gonna break and we're going to drown. We need to figure out what's good and on-topic, and I think the current discussions are a step in that direction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll have mod privileges. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want this site to be 'fun', but I'll gladly vote to close 'fun' questions that are off-topic. As a mod, I'd be willing to follow the guidelines set down by the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looks like 2-10PM UTC, or 9-5 Eastern time, Monday through Friday, is when I'm most active. If elected moderator, I'd try to expand this to a few hours later on weekdays and similar times on weekends. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I keep an eye on the review queue, but will admit I'm a bit conservative with my votes. I'll stick to this policy as a moderator, only taking action when absolutely necessary; at all other times, I'll let the system work and the community decide. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our moderators are fair, thorough, and communicative. Plus, they all seem like really nice people. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not very active elsewhere. I lurk around other SE sites, usually though the HNQ list. But Worldbuilding is where my heart rests, and that'll remain the case whether I get to moderate it or not. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T20:50:30.530" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T20:50:30.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:37:43.963" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5VvgZ.png?s=128&amp;amp;g=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5VvgZ.png?s=128&amp;amp;g=1&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that many of the most dedicated users feel the site is losing focus on worldbuilding. I would start a consensus building discussion on meta, and if the general opinion is in favor and once the specifics have been worked out, I would consider adding What-If questions into the “off topic” category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm the sort of person who is drawn to cleaning up messes; for instance, I’m always the one sent in at work when the projects are stalled and need someone to veer them back on course. With my current reputation, I already have many moderating duties. On WB in particular I find clean-up and review work room rewarding and spend at least 20 minutes of my time moderating each day, and more time in the chat-rooms and the meta. As a diamond mod I could expand the reach and impact of my moderation by addressing the range of issues raised through the flag queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That largely depends on what the comments and flags are all about. If the valuable-answer-generating user is being actively rude and disrespectful of other users, this requires immediate moderator attention, and such behavior should not be tolerated. If the discussion is about substantive issues, I would prefer to keep a low profile, and leave it to the community to resolve the issue through votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would never get into a close-war with another mod. Sausages are not made in public, neither should mods air their disagreements in public. If I feel &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; strongly about it, I’ll contact the mod in private asking for reasons and whether perhaps they might be amenable to being persuaded to change their opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-site-communication (we kinda end up as a dumping ground for all sorts of questions that are out of scope elsewhere but not necessarily in scope here). This perception has fed into a creeping scope shift here on WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data!!! and Tools!! Better access to the statistics and metrics would allow me to moderate far more effectively and holistically than I do now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfectly fine. I am not the dictator who makes all decisions, it is a community who decides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am active on the EST time. 2pm UTC to 12am UTC. I am active &lt;strong&gt;every day&lt;/strong&gt;, minus some weekends if I'm travelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &amp;quot;mere&amp;quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My review activity has been ok, I have about 100 reviews in all the major categories. With so many active reviewers, there is little chance to hit the review thresholds quickly without constantly refreshing the site minute by minute. My hat's off to users like HDE who have managed impressive review counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Light footprint. I like the light footprint. High-rep users and the community do lots of the work. That's good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm active on the main SO, but not extensively as a poster, although I do occasionally answer on R, Python, SQL. I'm active in DC in a bunch of Data Science Meetups, as well as a few social organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T20:47:53.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:53:04.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Samuel&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid wearing out your mousewheel, I've quoted the questions in my answer. Upvote for mousewheel conservation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users)&#xA;  is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been&#xA;  quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know&#xA;  the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes,&#xA;  namely idea generation/broadness and individual actions/plot questions&#xA;  How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own&#xA;  definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary issue with both types of questions is that they're often poorly constrained. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/27375487#27375487&quot;&gt;I said in meta&lt;/a&gt; these questions are often of the &quot;extrapolate from here&quot; type rather than the &quot;what happens between here and here&quot; type. Asking Worldbuilders to &lt;em&gt;extrapolate&lt;/em&gt; on a presented idea is generally a bad question. On the contrary, asking Worldbuilders to fill in the blanks (&lt;em&gt;interpolate&lt;/em&gt;) is generally a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An in-scope question is one that has asker provided bounds on either side of it, this lets us exclude &quot;spitballing questions&quot; and also provides a clear way to determine the best answer by determining its fit between those points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To maintain and improve the Worldbuilding SE. I thoroughly enjoy this site and I want to help others see the best of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of&#xA;  valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;  arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd ask them about it in chat. There are several users who can be abrasive without seeming to know it. I think having a quick discussion is the easiest way to determine the tone of the comments and then asking them to clarify or remove intentionally offensive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc&#xA;  a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer to leave that open to the voting process in place. If a mod is using their privilege inappropriately, then we could discuss it, but I don't believe that's likely in this community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding&#xA;  site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's out-of-scope but sensational questions. It's a similar problem to news on the internet, many stories aren't really news, but if they're sensational enough they will get published. Luckily we have moderators to keep the worst offenders out. We'll continue to improve our definition of scope so new users can easily see what is on topic and what is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If&#xA;  elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k&#xA;  user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the highest rep-users and I don't think it's effective measure of moderation ability. A more important determinant is time on the site and participation in the community. There is a correlation between high rep and site experience, but it's not one that should be used for decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a&#xA;  moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous&#xA;  definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you&#xA;  do not [necessarily] agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem understanding that rules are useful even if I don't agree with them. I don't believe I have any disagreements with our existing definitions (except perhaps the term &quot;Idea Generation&quot;, like most people). If it's clearly a consensus definition, I'll gladly enforce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely&#xA;  to be active on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on Pacific Standard Time. I usually log in at work (typical 9-5) and check the site regularly during weekdays. On weekends my activity is less regular but usually quite frequent. I also use the Android app and regularly check notifications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you&#xA;  expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate&#xA;  action on the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go through the review queue multiple times a day. It's generally quite quick. I will gladly cast a regular vote, but would prefer to be light on decisive action when there is some grey area, the community is usually quite quick to figure it out without a mod hammer intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to&#xA;  preserve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's light. I like that, we're supposed to be a community driven site and for the most part that works. The current moderators are quick to act and have always seemed very even handed in their actions. I'd like that to continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where&#xA;  and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE&#xA;  worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began my SE participation on the Electrical Engineering Stack while I was in grad school. I'm still active there, though my Worldbuilding participation has far outpaced the EE work. It's a lot more fun here, and I already do electrical engineering every day, so it brings diversity. My only other Worldbuilding is with RPG games like D&amp;amp;D (SCL). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers! &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election?cb=1&quot;&gt;Cast your votes here&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:54:26.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:53:42.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bowlturner&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely idea generation/broadness and individual actions/plot questions How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some questions that are obviously to broad or complete Idea generation, when someone basically is asking us to do their thinking for them or would need a doctoral thesis to give a good answer.  Many are very much on the money.  However there is a decent grey area.  I tend to be a little more lenient, because I tend to be trying to think of an answer on intriguing questions before thinking if the question is a good fit for the site.  I tend to answer 'broad' questions with 'broad' answers when it seems to fit.  I mostly call idea generation when someone has no clue what they want, just for us to do the brainstorming for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm willing to do the job and I think I'd do a good job of it.  I am currently a mod on Woodworking and I appreciate the difference between being a mod and a user, even a high rep user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tough question.  I would start by trying to reason with them, and ask them to try and reduce their flag collecting.  As it continues I would be more and more willing to delete their inappropriate comments.  I would also discuss it with the other moderators to see what the team thinks is most appropriate.  Then follow through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would first contact that mod to see why they closed it.  Maybe I missed something.  Did the user edit it after it was closed?  We all read things a little differently and it helps to understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently it is deciding which questions are in scope and where the lines are for closing, especially for too broad and idea generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, since I am a 30K user, I would then have the added powers of the mod.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a consensus, I will follow it.  If I disagree, I will make my opinions known, why I hold them and try to change the consensus.  But these sites don't work if mods just do what ever they feel like regardless of decisions being made.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My most active is 2-10:30 UTC M-F, but I do show up evenings 14-16 utc and weekends &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post? Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest area it would change is in the close/reopen queues.  At woodworking I only vote on those when it is very obviously not an appropriate question or if I agree and there are at least 3 and preferably 4 VTC already cast.  In general I feel voting to close and reopen are community issues (most of the time) and the mod hammer should be used sparingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The even and fairhandedness the current mods show.  Also the team work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a mod for the SE Woodworking site and have 10K there as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T21:32:33.493" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:32:33.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T21:01:22.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;bilbo_pingouin&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3064/ontology-of-question-types&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; to try to provide a more precise and general definition for those cases. If I were elected as a moderator, I would of course make mine the view of the community. But as a personal view, prior to other conclusions, I could give the following points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions?lq=1&quot;&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a horrible &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2336/should-we-rename-idea-generation&quot;&gt;name&lt;/a&gt;. It has to be renamed to something more precise. We are often ask to generate new ideas. The main issue is when the OP is asking for a brainstorm. Where they want to get as many answers as possible. While it is interesting as an author or even a world builder, it is not the idea of the Stack Exchange network. Nevertheless most of those questions appear to fall in the &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and/or opinion-based categories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt;. On SE, the questions should be answerable. For that the OP should provide a reasonable scope, and provide some information about the kind of answer they are looking for. Failing that, the question likely falls into the too broad spot. And will be voted to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-topic: plot&lt;/strong&gt;. I think we should add a category for closing posts: plot question (the name could be discussed). We are either building worlds, or helping others doing it. Setting up a scene is also fine. But the actions of the characters is part of a plot, and is the responsibility of the author. So &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2654/questions-about-single-individual-actions&quot;&gt;individual characters&lt;/a&gt;, who by their position (and not themselves) affect the whole world, might fall on the right side of the fence. But others should be avoided and closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to provide some illustrations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cheating on their partner is legally allowed, how does John reacts when his girlfriend tells him she did?&lt;/em&gt; Is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic: individual characters&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How does my society works if cheating is legalised?&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Take a country like the USA now, and the newly elected government decides to set a new law which removes cheating as an argument in a divorce trial. How does the society reacts in the first weeks?&lt;/em&gt; is probably ok.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I joined Worldbuilding.SE, I have active (almost) every days. I appreciate the site a lot. And I am spending a big part of my time on the site supporting the community as much as I can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I would be able to be good moderator, and being moderator would allow me to go further in that support of that great community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question. As I have never been in front of such a case, I would guess that I would try to see if I can identify some patterns on the flagged comments. And then take it on trying to discuss it with the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confident that in most cases, a clarification/discussion with the user would be enough to solve the issue. However, I don't want Worldbuilding to descend into a flame war ground. And no-one is above the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how it appears, I would take it up to them, and discuss the subject. Maybe I would learn a new perspective. Maybe they would learn one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in discussing a set of rules with my peers, and try to keep to that in order to provide an unbiased moderation. But those rules may evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greatest challenge at the moment is the &lt;strong&gt;scope of the site&lt;/strong&gt;. From the beginning there have been some continuous discussions about what makes a question fit for the site and what doesn't. Now that we graduate, and a lot of newer very active users have joined, we need to clarify the scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a second point, it is likely that the new moderator team faces what I would call a generation change. At some point, as months or years passes, the users who were there at the beginning will lower their activity. We have seen that to some extend. The moderators will be responsible to transmit the flame from the older to the newer users, and continuous promotion of the site, so that it does not start accumulating dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have that reputation. But in any case, I want to be there to help anyone in the community. And by being a moderator, I can really do. Very high-reputation users are active in producing material for the site, with great questions and answers. Moderators are there for cleaning up, solving potential conflicts, helping new users, etc. There are sometimes and overlap, but it does not mean that that is the best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problems with that. I have presented my views, and will any time there is some discussion. But &lt;em&gt;in fine&lt;/em&gt; it is the community who decides, and I will apply the decision it comes with. That is what it means to be supporting the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am usually there during the week days 7:00-15:00 and most evenings 19:30-22:00. During the week ends, my participation during the day is less predictable. All the hours are provided in UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With my reputation, I have access to vote/reopen/first posts/review/low quality/late answers. I have been very active on all of them, and I am amongst the most active on each of them. In particular, I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/78/reviewer&quot;&gt;Reviewer badge&lt;/a&gt; for closing questions. And close to one for First Posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as moderator, I would let the binding reviews to the community, except as a last vote. And of course, with exception of flagrant violation of the rules. But for questions closer to the line, the community, should prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really appreciate the activity of the current moderators. They are reasonably often reachable and are very helpful. I would like to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am much less active on any other sites of the network. I contributed to a few others, but I mostly read a lot from many different sites. I have been active on internet communities on-and-off since more than 15 years. But at the moment, I am not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for reading my answers, and if you have any question, don't hesitate to comment, or join me in the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T09:28:27.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T21:13:13.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;James&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these topics are grey areas and hence have been difficult to lock down.  While most sites have a limited scope, the complication with world building is that in the end, &lt;strong&gt;all topics are on topic&lt;/strong&gt; though it is also true that &lt;strong&gt;not all questions are on topic.&lt;/strong&gt;  That may seem counterintuitive but stick with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we discuss off topic here what we really mean is &lt;strong&gt;the form of the question is not appropriate for the site.&lt;/strong&gt;'  For example, is baking on topic on world building?  If someone came to the site and asked, &lt;em&gt;&quot;How do I bake a cake?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; we would certainly close it and very politely recommend another site.  If on the other hand the question was, &lt;em&gt;&quot;I want to tell a story about a bakery on an alien planet, what would the impact be on the baking process if I change x aspect of the environment.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  That would be a perfectly appropriate and I am guessing strangely complicated question to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addressing Plot and Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individual Actions and Plot Questions.  These questions can be &lt;strong&gt;both on and off topic&lt;/strong&gt;.  Again let me explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask a question about what a person &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do, the question is off topic.  We as world builders are neither here to write your story nor help develop the personality of a single character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand if you were to ask about a system.  &lt;em&gt;Given x can my character do y?&lt;/em&gt; You are on-topic.  Yes the question is in relation to the action of the character, but the question is actually about the system and would be the same question if the character were not even mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation and Broadness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are tough, and I predict they will continue to be difficult to manage.  I know many prefer clear black and white, yes or no answers (we do after all have a lot of people that work in technology) but simply put this issue is neither white nor black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I review these questions I utilize the following system and it works pretty well, at least in my opinion/experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask:  Am I helping someone gain knowledge to build a world? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask:  Am I helping someone write a story&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;Yes, No&lt;/strong&gt; situation no issues we are good to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;No, Yes&lt;/strong&gt; situation I vote to close&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;Yes, Yes&lt;/strong&gt; situation I vote to close and suggest a way to rework the question to avoid the idea generation portion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;No, No&lt;/strong&gt; situation I suggest deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions on this topic feel free to ask in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simply put, I love this site&lt;/strong&gt;.  I have been around World Building since it was first opened on area 51 and helped get the proposal reopened when it was shut down.  I volunteered to be a pro-tem moderator when the beta site was opened up but my experience on the network was somewhat lacking. Now that I am familiar with the tools available to high rep user I am far more able to fill the role, and would appreciate the opportunity to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would start with a one on one conversation mentioning the following:&#xA; - The issue has been raised, and explaining the problem.&#xA; - Ensure the expectations of the community regarding behavior were explained.&#xA; - Inform the person that if it continues to be an issue the impacts for them will gradually escalate...or less gradually depending on the nature of the offenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, it is situation specific, but I tend to give people clear explanations, open communication and ample opportunity to improve and adhere to community norms.  Failing that enforcement of the rules is carried out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is pretty straightforward.  I would have a private conversation with the moderator in question and come to a mutual agreement on the proper course of action.  If it is a matter of opinion I would be ok agreeing to disagree.  &lt;strong&gt;Disagreements between moderators should generally not be public knowledge, it just serves to divide the community.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the other moderator is abusing their authority or unwilling to discuss in a reasonable manner (not being a respectful community member) escalate to the proper authorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel our challenges are all linked together.  Namely, fairly rapid growth, site changes (graduation!) and the aforementioned (item #1) site scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rapid growth means change and new people with new opinions.  The best way to manage growth is to welcome new members and educate them on the expectations of the community.  New blood means change and that is not a bad thing, but we do have to be careful to adhere to the expectations of the site, and network at large.  These issues of course tie directly into the scope question answered above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it would make a significant change beyond what responsibilities/privileges are afforded to mods above and beyond what a 10k rep user can already do.  If there will be a significant change in your behavior at this point I feel you are not performing the responsibilities you already have as a site user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The site is the community&lt;/strong&gt; what the community agrees upon is fine with me so long as it doesn't violate the expectations of the greater network of SO sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am generally on the site from 1400 - 2300 UTC Monday through Friday.  Were I to become a moderator I would make an effort to be more available Saturday and Sunday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am quite active in the site queues and generally in the top 5 for reviews all time.&lt;/strong&gt;  I expect this rate would significantly decrease as I would wait for at least 3 other close/reopen/etc votes before voting with moderator powers.  Again, the community is the site and sets the standards, I don't want to take away from the value that adds.  I would only use moderator powers to circumvent the community voting power in the cases of clearly off topic or clearly offensive posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hands off approach.  The moderators have been very good and frankly the site would do great if our current moderators all stayed in their positions.  As mentioned in the previous few answers, the moderator is there to deal with conflict and disagreements not to control how the site functions and its scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World Building is far and away my most active profile.  I am active on several other sites, including SO, Writers, Woodworking, Home Improvement and a few others.  I generally use those sites in far more specific as needed scenarios.  Though I do tend to ghost around writers pretty regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T21:26:27.700" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:26:27.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T21:26:26.163" Score="-5" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;RILEY SANTOS' QA BID&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Broad Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I Believe that the definition of broadness is constantly fluctuating and often hard to grasp. However, I also think that if you are asking what can be clearly recognized as multiple questions, you are very likely pushing your boundaries. The same if you have a question with 4 or more conditions, or just generally longer than a typical answer. Questions are made to be concise, and you can always make another to explore new possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Reason&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be a moderator because there are a lot of questions out there that are treated unfairly, users who feel almost bullied,  unexplained random-flung downvotes, dupevotes, and closevotes, and because I believe that a lot of things can be improved with a patient, fair, and most importantly, &lt;em&gt;not overbearing&lt;/em&gt; leader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sneak&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I see that guy all the time, the person who makes good q's and awesome a's and then messes up his real-life reputation through the untouchable world of comments. But the answer is pretty simple. Flag, place a friendly comment, and even see if I can contact them personally. I already do that whenever I need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Close&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone else (a moderator,) decides to close a post, I respect that. But if I disagree, I will do so in a polite and communicative way. Contact them personally, and see why they closed it. And then open-vote if I believe that their reason isn't valid. It's the most you can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Random downvoters, the dropping of spam (Fish are delicious? What?) and lack of source citing are some of our biggest problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Logos Trump&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, other candidates have many much votes and all the fame and fortune and they're great. But. Some people just happen to duck the radar. I am sad to say that I am one such person. But happy to say that I don't mind not being rich and famous. If I know anything about the internet, its that -1s multiply, and +1s just as much. &quot;Oh, They like it? Okay. Click. Move on.&quot; While rep may make you more rep, I feel like quality speaks for itself more than fame. This is not a popularity-contest tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Scope Enforcement Quandary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, boy. Enforcing definitions is such a highly opinion-based idea. I'll leave that one to Monica and DaaahWooosh. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When am I on? Whenever I'm not doing things. When's that? Almost perpetually. I'll be around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Diamond&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't say as I have the little diamond next to my name yet, but recovering from losing my account that had it will take a rather significant amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Moderation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I like and want to preserve about moderation? How fair it is. The parts where it's fact based. The parts where people are helpful and correspond with you in non-public ways. The parts where people come in looking to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Competition&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes show in game-making and arqade, but I typically stay in WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:26:26.163" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T21:28:43.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AndyD273&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While broadness can be a real issue, &quot;Idea Generation&quot; is what this site is about. I think it is just the wrong term for asking to much from a single question. Many questions that are to broad should simply be put on hold until the asker has a chance to narrow the scope of the question and possibly split it in to several questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Character and plot questions on the other hand don't fit the scope of this site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We can't write your story for you, and you need to decide what your characters are going to do for yourself, as each person would handle a situation differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like the opportunity to be more involved, and to be in a position to help with growing the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take each flag on a case by case basis. Just because an answer is controversial doesn't mean it's bad or inappropriate for the site. Each answer should be judged by the Worldbuilding site guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contact the mod in question in private  and get their reasoning as to why they felt that it needed that attention.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d try to come to an understanding, but if that wasn’t possible and I felt strongly enough about it I’d take it to another mod to see what they thought. If it came down to it I’d let it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest challenge at the moment, with Worldbuilding coming out of beta, is to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we’re here for, while balancing out any changes that the community agrees are important as the site grows and evolves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&#xA;  Most of the current candidates would make great mods.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just make sure to do the best job possible and work really hard to keep the site running smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a definition that I didn’t agree with I would fulfill my duties as moderator.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it was something that my conscience wouldn’t allow me to do (for whatever reason) I would step down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m usually checking in periodically from 1 pm to 5 am UTC most days of the week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to this point whenever I’ve seen something on the review area I’ve tried to address it quickly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Un)fortunately there are fairly few things brought up to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, I would probably step back and let the community deal with most of the queue, only stepping in when the situation really required it, such as blatant policy violations and abuse, or to respond to flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate how the current mods keep the site running smoothly without throwing their weight around or imposing their will on everyone else just because they can.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I’m elected I will let the site run, stepping in when flagged or for the protection of the sites users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve been a member of Stack Overflow for many years, which was my introduction to the SE network, and have participated in off line creative writing groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:28:43.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T21:33:03.703" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've written&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3034/28&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2664/28&quot;&gt;than&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2337/28&quot;&gt;once&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;speculative, open-ended questions of the form &quot;I have this situation -- now what?&quot; are problematic.  They don't fit the Stack Exchange model, a model that has been built up over several years based on 150+ sites (mostly) using it to get good results.  We're not a discussion site, and we also shouldn't be trying to emulate XKCD's successful &quot;What If&quot; blog series -- which is great for a &lt;em&gt;blog&lt;/em&gt;, but not for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;idea generation&quot; itself isn't really the problem.  &lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt; good, on-topic questions are going to be looking for &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt;; people have a problem and are seeking solutions, after all.  &quot;Idea generation&quot; is a symptom; if that's the main thing you're noticing about a question, rather than the astronomy or the magic system or the geography or the sociology or the biology, then the question probably has deeper issues.  &lt;em&gt;Usually, in my experience, these are either too broad or primarily opinion-based.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are too broad can be narrowed or split into multiple questions.  We should work with askers to help them focus each question such that it can be answered here.  If the question is little more than a one-liner -- &quot;earth, but with three moons -- what happens?&quot; -- then there's not much we can do, but if the person has put some work into the world already and explained what he's trying to do, we can probably help.  Either way, we should put the question on hold pending improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second part of the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/207/28&quot;&gt;we're a site about &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, not about plotlines or the behavior of individual characters&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Writers.SE has a similar problem: questions about &lt;em&gt;what to write&lt;/em&gt; are off-topic there.  In both cases, there's a clear &lt;em&gt;connection&lt;/em&gt; (plots are set in worlds; plots are explained through writing), and that may seem too nuanced to newcomers.  I sometimes try to direct people to our chat room, which is usually populated and often lively, for plot/character discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect, our Santa challenge (which I supported) might not have been a good idea.  It tried to walk the line between a type of mythological creature (ok) and a specific creature (not ok).  Some questions focused on the broader mechanics, including teleportation and time-travel.  That's fine.  Other questions were more about the specific character, and we could have managed that better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our scope has been getting a little fuzzier recently, and I'm very glad to see the community-initiated &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3048/28&quot;&gt;case studies&lt;/a&gt;.  Let's use this to evaluate where we are and what we need to be more clear about, and then explain it clearly on meta, in the help center, and in applicable close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoyment and efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really enjoy this community, and I'm thrilled that I've been able to help keep things running smoothly and offer a guiding hand throughout the beta.  I've found moderation -- both here and on other sites -- to be personally gratifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diamond or not, I'm going to continue to be an active and influential member of this community.  This community operates by consensus, and having a diamond doesn't make my argument on meta about scope or custom close reasons or topic challenges any more right.  But for some other things, most especially comment curation, being a moderator sure does make things easier -- instead of flagging a bunch of comments individually, or flagging the post and asking a moderator to dig through it, I can just handle it.  That's more attractive to me than the Marshal badge I'd inevitably get as a regular user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can, alas, be a common problem with people who come from a &quot;forum&quot; background -- they think comments are for discussion or even arguments, just like they are on lots of other sites.  After cleaning up any messes that need attention, the first step is (ironically) a comment pointing out the problem, linking to &quot;what comments are for&quot; in the help center.  If the behavior continues, the next step is a private chat (keeping the other mods in the loop).  I'd emphasize that we value his positive contributions and then talk about what's expected in comments.  I would presume that he has good intentions and doesn't yet understand our norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the behavior continues, the next step would be a mod message.  If that doesn't help, or if he crosses from arguments to outright trolling or other abusive behavior, then it's time for a short suspension (in consultation with the other mods).  I hate having to suspend people, but sometimes you have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens I ask the other mod about it.  Sometimes that's in the private mod room, but I don't see a problem with a public discussion (like in the main chat room) of public actions like closures.  If there's fuzziness in our scope or policies then the whole community, not just moderators, should be weighing in, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When raising an objection (not just here but in general), I strive to &lt;em&gt;ask questions&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;talk about my own understanding&lt;/em&gt;, rather than making assertions about the other.  &quot;I'm having trouble understanding X&quot; or &quot;this seems on-topic to me; can we reopen?&quot; invites conversation; &quot;you're wrong&quot; or &quot;this is unclear&quot; invites conflict.  I assume that we're all adults who want to get along, and that we all have different communication styles and assumptions about what's obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our greatest challenges is scope fuzziness; see question #1 for my thoughts on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another challenge -- a good problem to have, but a challenge nonetheless -- is volume.  We get a lot of questions, and those questions get a lot of answers.  It's easy for a newcomer to fly under the radar, to make several posts that aren't really what we're looking for without getting attention and guidance.  There isn't a single &quot;right thing&quot; to do here; we just all need to be attentive, to take the time to leave that helpful comment if no one else has yet, to remember that we were all new once and a kind word and a &quot;welcome&quot; before telling them what they did wrong goes a long way.  Maybe we can harness chat for help here; when someone in chat links to a post that needs some help it usually gets it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users aren't the only ones who can go unnoticed for a while; more than once I've seen a user with thousands of rep and said to myself &quot;who?&quot;.  I feel like we could be making stronger connections within our community than we are.  Stack Exchange isn't a social network, but we're still a community made out of people.  I find that chat (where people have talked about their blacksmithing and woodworking projects, for instance) and the blog interviews help me get to know the worldbuilders.  Let's keep that up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final challenge: when we get our new design soon, the reputation requirements for privileges will go up and some of the people who've been reviewing, voting to close or reopen, protecting, and maybe even editing will lose those privileges (until they earn them back).  The rest of us will need to do more there to cover the gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, for starters, I'm a 5k user, not a 10k or 20k one.  After the privileges change, I'll be able to vote to close or reopen.  (And review, edit, and flag.)  I'd certainly use the privileges I still have, but as a moderator I'd retain access to more of them, thus making me more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, it's my job to enforce community policy.  If the community has decided that such-and-such is off-topic, then the fact that I think it should be on-topic doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;when I moderate&lt;/em&gt;.  I'll close, edit to bring into compliance, explain on meta, clarify in the help center, and whatever else is needed.  I've done this at some point on every site where I'm a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt; I still have a voice in those discussions.  If I feel strongly that a community policy is mistaken, I'll make my case on meta the same as if I were not a moderator.  I'm allowed to do that.  Should I do so, I'll be extra-careful to not let my diamond interfere: I'll say clearly that I speak as a user, I'll leave moderation of that post (and anything related) to other moderators, and I won't use mod fiat to force perpetual discussion of something that everybody else has agreed I'm wrong about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;em&gt;liaison to Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt;, if I see the community headed in a direction that's really out of sync with the network in general, I'll bring it up and try to nudge us back on-track before SE has to become involved.  I can't think of a case where this has been an issue, but I include it for the sake of completeness: it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that the community has consensus on something that &lt;em&gt;nonetheless we are not going to do&lt;/em&gt;, and if that happens I'll be careful to explain why and tell people how they can appeal it to Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm generally online and paying attention to the site from about 14:00 UTC to 05:00 UTC, six days a week.  I'm offline one day a week, approximately Saturday UTC, give or take a couple hours.  The graph in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25779/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;my chat profile&lt;/a&gt; is a pretty accurate representation of overall activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do most of my reading of questions and answers on main at times when I'm not at work, but I can jump in and look at specific questions that come up in flags, on meta, or in chat as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to review suggested edits and first posts, when bowlturner isn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/35016/revisions&quot;&gt;hogging them all&lt;/a&gt;. :-)  As a moderator I tend to stay out of the queues where my vote is binding, preferring that the community handle those.  I've been a pro-tem mod since a few weeks after public beta started, so I therefore don't have a lot of reviews to my credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like how much the community is &lt;em&gt;community-run&lt;/em&gt;.  On some sites moderators are fairly active in closing and deleting posts, but here the moderators are pretty hands-off about that.  Sure we close and delete things sometimes, but I (and I think the rest of the pro-tem mods) first consider whether this action is needed right now.  I want to keep the sense of community empowerment that currently works about 99% of the time.  (For the other 1%, I hope moderators will continue to take action -- and to be able to recognize when they need to do so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an elected moderator on &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/users/472/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/325/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;The Workplace&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I'm also a pro-tem moderator on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/1993/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;. I talked a little about those experiences when &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-monica-cellio-f9a038f999ab#.l49ykac1w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TimB interviewed me for Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm active on &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/162102/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which helps me stay in touch with, and sometimes influence, network-wide concerns.  I also participate on assorted other SE sites; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/505925/monica-cellio?tab=accounts&quot;&gt;my network profile&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My participation in non-SE worldbuilding activities has been less formal.  Through our blog I've come to know about other worldbuilding &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/form-void&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;communities&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@KateElliottSFF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;authors&lt;/a&gt; on Medium, which I now follow and interact with.  For years I've been a kibbitzer and informal editor for friends' SF&amp;amp;F fiction (most recently &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B019BJAS3Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Deadly Tales&lt;/a&gt;), where poking at world consistency is one of my strengths.  Offline RPGs have also &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-5-handling-transformations-in-your-world-and-in-your-characters-439cf2b84f0e#.w8asjuupo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;honed my worldbuilding skills and interests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T00:13:22.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-08T22:55:04.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, Idea Generation is pretty obvious.  The OP asks &quot;How can &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; come about&quot; or &quot;How can I justify ...&quot;.  The thing with worldbuilding is that as a world builder, this is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; responsibility.  You can't get someone else to do it for you.  You can ask all the questions you like about the things you don't understand, but it is up to you what you're going to do with the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadness is another issue.  I see quite a few questions that would effectively require a rewrite of thousands of years of history, or where pretty much any answer might be correct, and again, with such scope, it is up to the world builder to answer those sorts of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I also occasionally see another type of &quot;too broad&quot; question - the one that the community has voted as being too broad, but that I - as an expert in the matter, usually in the field of biology - &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;em&gt;only one&lt;/em&gt; real correct answer.  It's very frustrating to see these and to have to try to get other community members to vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lurk and post on Worldbuilding SE for the better part of each weekday.  It is my favourite website, and as a world builder, I'd like to see the site flourish.  Becoming a moderator would be a way for me to keep this community alive and relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd have to treat each flagged instance as a separate case until such time as it became apparent to me that this was a particular user's pattern of behaviour.  I'd start by suggesting to the user in a private message that they should change their behaviour, and only if they could not restrain their flag-provoking behaviour would I consider more punitive action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communication is the key.  I'd ask the other mod for their reasoning, and discuss their feelings on reopening it given my own reasons, and go from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main issue is staying on-scope.  OPs, particularly the newbies, tend to ask questions that are too broad or unclear, and I can also see questions being migrated from other SE sites that don't fit our scope either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that I'm one of the older candidates running in this election.  That means that I have a breadth of experience that younger mods might not have.  Anyway, reputation is important, but it isn't everything.  A new user today may end up as a moderator in our &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; election, despite their lower rep, due to their other experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I have a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; good reason for intervening when the community takes action to close or reopen a question or take some other action, I'll let such community decisions stand.  WB SE isn't &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; community, I'm part of &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I typically hang out on WB SE from 21:30 to 05:00 UTC, Monday/Tuesday to Friday/Saturday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't anticipate that much will change, except that I'll probably review a little more often.  I'm always careful about my reviews as a user, and I can't really take any more care if I'm elected as a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, the pro-tempore mods are fair and don't intervene much that we can see.  I'd like to continue in the same style.  The mods are here to keep WB SE nice, not for their own personal glory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most active in Stack Overflow, RPG SE and also Science-Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy SE, as well as several other SE sites, though I'm not a moderator anywhere - on or off Stack Exchange - yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:55:04.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-08T23:53:41.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think saying something like &quot;the site is now more of an [X] type of site&quot; is a subjective generalization, and boils down to how many questions of the type you have in mind are being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Should this be happening?&quot; Well, while I agree that more focused and practical questions may be cooler, it seems to me what we get is about what people ask. I do not think that what-if questions should be banned or closed or made off-topic just for being what-ifs. If a question is too wide open, yeah that's a problem for this format. But I think the thing to do about that is close/edit/moderate those bad what-ifs, and then encourage or lead by example with other types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In looking at the most recent questions, though, I see a series of questions that all seem, at least from their titles, to be problematic to me, all for the same reason: They all seem to be asking for a creative idea for an answer, and/or include the silly assumption that there would be one answer to the question. This would only mildly annoy me on a forum, but on StackExchange with its weird Q&amp;amp;A rules and moderation, it's extra-annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What mental trait or combination of traits could make a race well suited to warfare?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How many can I think of or invent for you? Probably an infinite number.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would people on multi-generational ships wear?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clearly, pink polka-dot pajamas. Again, how many ideas can we list?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of technology would be developed in the process of creating shapeshifters?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hopefully this question has already done major work narrowing its idea of what shapeshifters are and what &quot;technology to create&quot; them would be in the proposed world. The wording (&quot;would&quot;) bothers me. It's fantasy, so you make something up. Again, could be any number of things.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would modern IT look like if Silicon Valley had been completely destroyed in 1985?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Argh. Again, it hurts my brain because it sounds like the OP thinks this might have one answer. But really, it's asking for alternate histories to be invented for one event.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What effect would a known but lost precursor civilization have on religion and philosophy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I hope they have a specific one in mind, and they just need some detail figured out. Otherwise, this is not only calling for speculative imagination again, but probably with many points of unknown. I'm afraid to even open the question to see.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if these are all narrowly scoped in the details, the titles seem to me all problematic, because they all sound like the OP is asking for a general answer, as if there would be one. If I had a question about what people would be practical to wear on my specific type of multi-generational ships, I would word it more like, &quot;What type of clothing would be practical for my particular type of multi-generational ships?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, just that list of titles seems like it's going to inspire people to write more questions that are written like that, which does look to me like an awful problem. I don't know how you all feel about handling it, but if I had the time and energy and were editor, I'd want to write or point to a guideline about broad questions and how to make them specific and how to word them so as not to seem like they were crazy broad, and then edit the crap out of the existing titles so that they were about the OP's specific setting. Because otherwise, I think this will probably just spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="286" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T00:44:47.833" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T00:44:47.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-09T00:14:17.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Aify&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely &lt;strong&gt;idea generation/broadness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;individual actions/plot questions&lt;/strong&gt; How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'll start with idea generation/broadness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think idea generation is actually okay, as long as there is a valid way to evaluate the answers in order to obtain a best answer. Some of our best questions are idea generation questions. For me, idea generation questions have to pass 2 hurdles. The first hurdle is whether an accepted answer can be validated properly. A question with a valid way to evaluate an answer would be able to treat the answers as something objective, something measurable, and comparable. Perhaps efficiency, or pros/cons listed out and counted. An invalid way would be an answer that is picked solely because the OP liked the answer more (completely subjective). The next hurdle I see with Idea generation questions is that they're almost always too broad, which leads me to point #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of broadness, I very much like the definition someone once stated; I can't remember who, but it goes something like this: &quot;if you have to write a book to get a good answer, it's too broad.&quot; So when I look at a question, the first limit for me is how long the answer is likely to be. I ask myself questions, like &quot;How many components are there to the post?&quot; &quot;Is the person asking 90000 questions in the same post?&quot; &quot;Are the questions affected by other details that, due to not existing in the post, change the answers drastically?&quot;, etc. If the questions I ask myself can be answered by the OP to clarify and narrow the question down, I'll often ask them, but if there are too many missing details, I'll often vote too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I'll discuss individual actions/plot questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't deal with this kind of question often, a lack of experience is working against me. If I were elected a moderator and I came across a question like this, I'd probably ask another mod to have a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't like individual actions/plot questions, because they are way too specific to be of use to anyone other than the OP. Of course, the flipside is that often these questions can be generalized out to fit the scope of the site. Let me give an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original question: &lt;strong&gt;Bob in situation X wants to achieve goal Y. What action Z does Bob take to do it? [insert details about Bob here]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above question is very very specific to the individual character Bob, or the plot of the story. However, here's an edited version that would fit the site scope better: &lt;strong&gt;What is the fastest way a character can cause z to happen, given situation x?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is, in my opinion, more fitting of the scope of the site. It's not opinion based, as it can be evaluated properly using a factor of speed, and assuming enough details are given in X, it wouldn't be too broad. It asks about the action that any character can take in any similar situation to achieve a goal quickly, which could be applied to more than one story, which means it isn't too plot specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, pretty much any way you look at how I ask the OP the answer those questions is going to be met with resistance, since people don't like to be challenged, but hey, someone's gotta make a move and fix those questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spend a lot of time here and I really like the community. The feedback I get from my questions that I use for my stories always end up helping me, and our questions only get more interesting with each passing day. To be able to help moderate and upkeep the site, or even bring the site to a higher level, would be an honor; something I could do to give back to the community here, other than asking more questions and providing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would very much depend on the type of flags that are arising from the comments. Granted, most of the flags possible for comments are bad. First I would look at whether the flags are consistent - are they all for the same thing? For example, are they all rudeness flags? If so, I may ask the user to watch his language. Are they all &quot;too chatty&quot; flags? Perhaps recommend the user to use the chat room system more often. Valuable answers are what makes this site awesome, and I think it's important to make sure we don't push our users away, but it's also important to make sure that users don't offend other users. I'm not sure if there are moderation tools that can do &quot;comment bans&quot; for temporary periods of time, or something like that, but if the situation really gets big, I'd first confer with the other moderators before resorting to a tool like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd first go and talk to the mod who closed the question to ask why the question was closed/deleted/etc. If I can understand the reasoning behind the action, depending on the reasoning (if it's valid/weird/invalid reasoning) I would perhaps also ask another moderator, maybe make a meta post, or try to convince the moderator that acted on said question to re-open/undelete/etc the question. This is a community run site, so a meta post would probably be the next best course of action if talking to the mod didn't convince me that his decision was right, or if I couldn't convince him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the greatest challenge right now is the large influx of poor questions. When I first started on this site, almost every single question was well researched and well thought out. More recently, question quality (in my opinion) has dropped - more and more questions are being put on hold, are out of scope, and don't show nearly the same amount of research as before. I think that we, as a community, should upkeep our high standard of quality, by introducing more good questions, and continuing to fix bad ones - in other words, do exactly what we're already doing, but at a higher rate. I've also noticed that most people don't downvote nearly as often as they upvote - this is also something that should be addressed, since the voting system is so crucial to the SO network. I think bad questions shouldn't be upvoted, but alas, it isn't up to me to tell people how to vote, and as such, I can't really think of a way to approach this problem. Perhaps we can decide as a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as I am not a 10k/20k user yet, being a moderator would allow me to operate at least on equal standing as the other 10k/20k users. Of course, at the current time of posting, I'm pretty sure 5k rep is all that's required to access all the tools - since I can already access all the tools, the moderator position really only amplifies my effectiveness by a bit, unless the rep requirement changes. Being a moderator, however, does give me more motivation to work harder and spend more time here, since to me, the moderators represent a beacon of light for which the users can follow, and I'd work harder in order to represent that light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necessarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that as a community run site, the general consensus must be upheld even if I am in the minority. Logic wins out here, and it's just numbers. Even diplomatic governments run on numbers, I don't see a reason why we can't take a tip from them in terms of scope direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mondays - Sundays - 5:00 PM UTC to 7:00 AM UTC, +/- 1 or 2 hours depending on how tired I am. Note that I'm usually able to check the site at least once per 2 hours between those times every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post?&lt;/strong&gt; Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't actually spent much time in the review queues, because there is usually nothing there... however, I do spend most of my time browsing the questions directly, so this doesn't actually change my review queue activities that much. Since my actions are binding, I'd be more careful before VTC, or deleting stuff - while previously, I would vote directly on the question, I may instead choose to flag the question instead of voting, so that the community gets a chance, or I may wait until more votes come in before voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like how they current moderation isn't overly obtrusive or noticeable. It's subtle, but even while it's subtle they're able to make a difference and fix issues. For example, I don't see huge outroars on meta about moderator decisions, etc, at all. You don't think, &quot;Oh, it's &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; mod again&quot; when you see a comment with a diamond tag on it. The moderators blend in well, and I'd like to preserve this subtlety, since it's non-disruptive and promotes better meshing between the community and the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm active on Stack Overflow, and I used to be more active on Puzzling.SE - I've actually been working on a big puzzle to post on Puzzling.SE, so it may seem like I'm inactive there but I'm actually working on something for it in secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of the SE network, you can find me frequenting flash game sites, Moderating on Minecraft servers. I play a lot of other games too, to get inspiration for my stories and puzzles, but to list them all here would be a huge list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="6453" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T00:29:47.257" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T00:29:47.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3043" CreationDate="2016-02-09T00:19:08.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;1. How would Facebook sysadmin prevent the summoning of Cthulhu ?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite hard to answer. If you had asked about what &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; the sysadmin do, it would definitively be about plot. Since you ask what they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do, it can be interpreted as a question not about the characters, but about the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not conclude only based on that, but I do not know what to add which will actually make sense (and I spent like 2 hours searching, and it is already to much introspection for one day). My instinct tells me it is not worldbuilding, but it is not consistent with my instinct about question 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;No... ish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question actually is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What reason would the font of all evil and the generally unpleasant one have to pretend to be a jolly fat man and give away presents to make people happy for one day each year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You ask about the devil, as a force of nature, a fundamental principle. The answer you implements in your world, will shape the way of thinking of the absolute evil there. That is a defining property of the world you are building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you consider Satan and Santa has just two guys, it is about plot, but it is not how I understand the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is rating the answers. You propose :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would a very powerful evil being of corruption and darkness actually think that's a good plan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is a cyclic argument, if your evil being do it, it obviously thinks it is a good plan. So it does not help, since you basically tell us to use what we are asked to define to judge an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. What's the most likely &quot;post democracy&quot; form of political government?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. It can actually be useful to build a near-future world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The definition for the judgement of the answer is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers will be rated based on plausibility (both that the society will function and that we could transition to it) and on originality (they should be different both from our current systems of governance and ones that have been widely used in the past).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important point is that the criterion of &lt;em&gt;plausibility&lt;/em&gt; is fundamentally different from the one of the previous question. We have historical examples and other kind of data to let one judges if a scenario is actually plausible or not. Of course, since these data are based on social sciences, there is still some subjectivity and interpretation, but that is a problem of social sciences in general and not of the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. In an atheist alien society where bodily functions (reproduction and waste elimination) are not taboo what would be used to curse?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a question about social science (here linguistic) in a given setup. As such the question have the same flaws and quality as the precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to be a bit formalist, it lacks a criterion to rate the answers. I do not see why the accepted answer is better than the second most rated one (more on that at the end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5. Planetary Scale Artworks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is basically the same trick as in the first question. You do not ask about what your beings &lt;em&gt;will do&lt;/em&gt;, but what they &lt;em&gt;can do&lt;/em&gt;, knowing their objectives. However here, my instinct tell me it is about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;Yes... ish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Concluding remarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions 1. and 5. are about exploring the possibilities offered by a world to then choosing one. The possibilities it offers are part of a world, so I think we should either accept both as valid questions, or both as not valid ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing is that in my opinion all questions, except (arguably) 3, are equally &quot;idea generation&quot;, in the sense that they do not provide an actual way of rating the answers. It is yet easy to spot an answer which make sense from one which does not, but it is not possible to select &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; answer, not even the best one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think that all question are acceptable with respect to that last point. However my main point here is more that they should not be treated differently. For example 2. and 4. both as much lacks of objective criterion to rate the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9779" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T00:19:08.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-09T02:32:27.533" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fi12&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely idea generation/broadness and individual actions/plot questions How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Personally, I view idea generation/broad questions as kind of to be expected. Often the best questions about Worldbuilding are about generating new, innovating ideas. Rather than &lt;strong&gt;idea generation as what we don't want on this website&lt;/strong&gt;, I would use the term &quot;brainstorming or conceptualizing&quot;. This refers to questions that simply give a scenario, and ask for a vague solution, or &quot;what are the effects/implication of this?&quot; type of question. These questions also often go hand in hand with broadness, in the respect that these brainstorming questions often have no correct answer, and so it can be difficult to mark an answer as accepted when several highly up-voted answer provide relevant yet contrasting information. These are the questions that should be closed as &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;idea generation&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of plot being off-topic, I entirely agree. The point of Worldbuilding is to create a fantasy world or a part of a fantasy world or hypothetical situation. On the other hand, individual characters, their actions, and questions about plot seem far more suited for the Writers SE. Asking about a hypothetical situation is fine, but anything behind should be closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I've only been active on this site for about 3 weeks, but I have already recognized the unique feel of this questions and answers on this SE compared to others on the network. I would love to play a greater role in this community by being a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I would first check what comments of theirs were flagged, and try to determine a pattern. Were they being rude? Being off-topic? Spamming? I would then try to communicate with them 1 on 1, talking in a private mod chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I would try to communicate with the moderator about why they closed the question. After talking, I would hopefully understand their POV and they would understand mine, and we could reach a friendly agreement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Definitely how vague the scope is. Everyday, I find myself flagging too many off-topic and broad questions that don't fall within the scope of Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I don't have that reputation. Hopefully, being elected as a moderator gives me the privileges needed to make the community a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If the community's view disagrees with mine, and I have presented mine, I have no problems with that. Through discussion, we can find a nice compromise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;11PM to 3AM Mon - Fri. 2PM to 2AM on Saturday and Sunday. All times in UTC. I am in EST. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post? Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Unless there is something that really jumps out at me as broad or off-topic I would let the community handle it. Only clear violation of the rules would urge me into intervening and casting a definitive and final vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Definitely the helpfulness of the current moderators. I (and probably many others) like the fact that there's someone to reach out to when you need help or a second opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways?&lt;/strong&gt; On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&#xA;I am not extremely active on other SE sites, but I do maintain a presence on ELU and Stack Overflow. I'm not currently part of any other worldbuilding communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T02:32:27.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-09T04:43:27.223" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I've long been a fan of this question, which was closed but is still there:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world?rq=1&quot;&gt;Is there an effective way to design a realistic religion for a world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it on-topic, useful and interesting, but it was closed for (annoying IMO) Stack Exchange &quot;fit&quot; reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today we have this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35541/what-effect-would-a-known-but-lost-precursor-civilization-have-on-religion-and-p&quot;&gt;What effect would a known but lost precursor civilization have on religion and philosophy?&lt;/a&gt; which is not closed (yet?). I like the topic, but if it were my site, I'd edit it to be more like the first question, and I commented as much on the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This question seems to me to be trawling for idea suggestions. Seems to me I could spend all day thinking of different possible answers to that. I like the topic, but I wonder if it might be more useful and appropriately answerable to ask how one might go about choosing &amp;amp; designing cultures in a situation like this, rather than an open-ended request for specific ideas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I remembered that first old question, which is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong about thinking this new question is interesting but even more open-ended that the closed old question, and so probably should be edited to be more answerable specifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it should be edited, how could it be edited so as not to be closed the way the first question was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainly just curious... I still don't quite get how the first question can be thought something to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T13:18:35.960" Title="Should not this new idea request question be closed if this other was closed, and how should it be edited?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3082" CreationDate="2016-02-09T13:18:35.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between the two questions is that the older one was asking, &quot;What is a religion?&quot; and the newer asks, &quot;Given these conditions, how might religion form?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments to the older question, &quot;What is a religion?&quot; is far too complex a topic to be handled appropriately by the stack Exchange format of questions and answers. (Odd side thought: Is there a limit on question/answer length?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How might religion form?&quot; is a perfectly valid topic for Worldbuilding, and the question has qualifiers to narrow the scope to specifically what the OP needs. It could be construed as idea generation, but I consider the development of religion to have only so many possible outcomes for a given set of starting conditions. Votes will (should?) identify the most likely course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be closed? IMHO, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T13:18:35.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-09T16:06:40.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely idea generation/broadness and individual actions/plot questions How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not a fan of either of these types of questions, and I would like to see their prevalence on the site greatly reduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My definitions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation:&lt;/strong&gt; A question qualifies as Idea Generation if it asks for ideas about what features a world should have. For example, I would argue that a question asking what type of government a city should have is Idea Generation (unless it specifies enough factors that it clearly narrows down the question to only a few options).&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Individual Actions/Plot-building:&lt;/strong&gt; A question qualifies as being about plot-building if it is about a sequence of events that are mostly opinion-based. So a question asking what the protagonists of a story should do to fight a dragon would be off-topic as being about individual actions. Currently, we allow questions about individual actions if the individuals will clearly influence the entire world (or a large portion of it). I would personally like to see that change, designating these questions, too, as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are exception handlers, but they are also ambassadors. I would love to represent Worldbuilding in cross-site affairs, letting people know what we’re about and who we are. Being a moderator also means being - in many cases - a leader, and I think I can help propel us through the changes in scope we’re currently experiencing - although I’ll be there just as much if I’m not elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on how persistent the problems are. If the user’s had two or three instances where this is the case, I would leave a comment or two explaining a few of our policies (the Be Nice policy included) and how the user is violating or coming close to violating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the problem persists - which is likely - then I’d talk to the user in a private chat room, maybe with another mod there. I don’t think this is a common strategy, but on a middling activity site like Worldbuilding, community is extremely important, and each user matters. Going straight to a suspension in a case like this seems a bit impersonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the behavior continues, though, I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; go for a suspension, after talking with the other mods. I’d most likely start with a day or two, then increase that with future infractions. Once the length gets to a week, I’d mod message the user. If s/he continues after that, I might jump to a year-long suspension, given all the previous warnings and chances the user has been given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the sites I’m a moderator on, we the mod team act together. We don’t have a lot of issues where we have to take unilateral action on a question or on a user. We generally conference when something like this happens, in private if things haven’t already been public. Unity is important to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to continue this on Worldbuilding. If I disagree with another mod, I’d talk with him or her - again, in private, if the disagreement between the mod and other users isn’t already public. Hopefully, we can come to a consensus. Optimally, the entire mod team would be onboard with the resulting decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things: Scope and external image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’ve been having some major meta scope talks lately, especially about What-if? questions (kudos to ArtofCode for bringing that to fruition). This is something that we need to fix. We’ve seen way too many questions that are not about worldbuilding and are too broad. I feel like we’ve strayed from the early days - certainly from when I first joined, a week or two into public beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to a problem of how other sites view us, our external image. I brought this up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2282/what-do-users-from-other-stack-exchange-sites-think-of-worldbuilding-stack-excha&quot;&gt;What do users from other Stack Exchange sites think of Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2582&quot;&gt;Wad Cheber’s answer&lt;/a&gt; seems to describe the opinions of other sites well: amused but confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to fix this problem. If outside users don’t understand our scope, then we’ll have a hard time with making any changes to it after our ongoing discussions on What-if? questions! This will lead to issues for new users and migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note: I’m active on a lot of the sites we migrate questions to and get questions from: Physics, Astronomy, etc. I’ve had to dissuade users there from migrating some questions here that would be off-topic. I hope that in the future, I can reduce how many times I have to say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said before, moderators are ambassadors. I’m confident that I can be more effective by helping to maintain our network-wide, cross-site imagine and let other sites know who we are and what we’re about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not a mod’s job to enforce things according to how s/he thinks. I’ll enforce policies if I agree with them or if I disagree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if I disagree on a decision the community has made, I may voice my dissent, either in chat or on meta, and give my reasons for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monday-Friday, I’m active from ~UTC 21:00 - ~UTC 0:400, although I check occasionally from ~UTC 12:00 onwards. On weekends, I can be on the site sometime between ~UTC 12:00 - ~UTC 0:400.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post? Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &amp;quot;mere&amp;quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m pretty active in the review queues, although bowlturner has stolen the spotlight from the rest of us! I’m working on my third Reviewer badge - one Low Quality Post review to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On HSM and Mythology, I’m way less active in the Close/Reopen queues; I like the community to decide things for itself. I’ll try to avoid unilateral closings, meaning that I won’t be in those queues. However, I’ll still be active in the others, especially First Posts and Late Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The team’s been pretty hands-off when it comes to unilateral actions, which I think is fantastic. I also see a lot of stuff going on that’s not highly visible but is still important, like editing and flag-handling. They get things done quickly, and don’t let problems accumulate. This is all great, and I would love to see it continue. It will certainly be part of my moderation policy if I’m elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m highly active in asking/answering/moderating on a bunch of other sites. I’m a pro-tem mod on HSM (~ 15 months old) and Mythology (~ 9 months old). I’m also one of the highest-rep uses on Astronomy, and quickly becoming one on Health, it seems. On non-beta sites, I’m most active on Physics. I also have experience on Mathematics, Skeptics, Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy, and Law, as well as some on quite a few other sites. Oh, and I’m quite active on Meta Stack Exchange. The places you won’t find me on Stack Exchange? Many places, but, notably, all the coding sites, and others about related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not yet active in any non-SE worldbuilding communities, although I’m considering joining the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cartographersguild.com/content.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cartographers’ Guild&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T16:06:40.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2016-02-09T18:31:20.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, I agree with your assessments, but I do have some additional thoughts on the orbital bullet question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it seems like “Idea Generation” has become somewhat of an evil phrase around here. Idea generation seems fundamental to the site, but we need a better way to describe and identify the difference between proper narrowly scoped idea generation and the looser variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How many nanobots can I have in my blood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, I think it is. Nanobots are a traditional sci-fi topic and this question is foundational to anyone trying to keep some realism in a world with nanobots in people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think so. The question suggests that an answer will require some knowledge of biology, but the sci-fi component makes WB a more reasonable home for it than Biology SE. It probably could have used a science-based tag though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I scientifically explain ice breath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; It definitely seems to be. Questions dealing with creature design are solidly in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; This is idea generation. But I believe this is the exact type of idea generation that belongs on this site. The scope is quite narrow and, while there could be multiple correct answers, there is a metric on which all answers can be evaluated (how closely does the scientific solution match the proposed ice breath?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What time is it IN SPACE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; As someone who has personally used this question to inform his own world design, it definitely seems in scope to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; This is once again idea generation, but like the previous question, the scope is narrow enough that good answers can be separated from the bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; I don’t think so. The text of the question makes this read like a hypothetical and it’s just not clear how it relates to world building at all. The ability to fire a bullet from orbit, while possibly having &lt;em&gt;implications&lt;/em&gt; on the world, seems to be more related to a plot point or the actions of one character (or multiple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Other than reading like a what-if hypothetical, I think there is an instruction in the question that may have also made it a little too broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if there's something that makes it impossible for a regular sniper&#xA;  rifle, please consider a bigger or more specialized gun that can get&#xA;  the job done, if one can exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That instruction seems to expand what was originally a narrowly scoped reality check question (focused on a 50-caliber weapon) into also being a loosely-bounded idea generation question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's no moon: planet sized plants possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; In addition to quite literally being about world building, I think it fits into the scope adequately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking Off-Topic?&lt;/strong&gt; There are some sub questions added, but they lead answers along the path to showing whether it’s possible or not. I think the scope remains pretty narrow and invites positive idea generation. It seems on topic to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11306" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T18:31:20.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T01:20:57.410" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've made a chrome app (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/93WIn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see a screenshot here&lt;/a&gt;) that simply opens the web browser to the Worldbuilding SE. Since I have homepage set to chrome://apps/ and I visit WB frequently, I thought this would be pretty cool to have so I made it originally for myself. I figured someone might want this so here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.filedropper.com/worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download link&lt;/a&gt; for it. Here are the steps to install it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download and unzip the folder. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Chrome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to chrome://extensions. Check the box that says Developer Mode. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click Load Unpacked Extension... &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select your file (make sure it is unzipped!).    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reload the page and go to chrome://apps, and it should be there!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this isn't a question, didn't really know where to post it. &#xA;Also, the icon is the worldbuilding icon for the iOS app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-04-13T08:56:26.300" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T08:56:26.300" Title="Chrome app for Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2661" CreationDate="2016-02-10T14:51:41.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Starting with:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Vincent's very helpful framework, let's consider what happens when we add constraints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is the START&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B is the RESULT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X is the CHANGE or process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving these types of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have A and X, give me B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have B and X, give me A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have A and B, give me X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in plain English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT : &quot;What happens if I do this?&quot; (Good)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have RESULT and CHANGE, give me START : &quot;How was it before?&quot; (Good)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and RESULT, give me CHANGE : &quot;How would I cause this?&quot; (Good)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where Clause&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all we need to add here is a WHERE (condition) clause that specifies constraints on the scope of the answer.  &quot;Within&quot; is another word that could be used in place of &quot;where&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT within CONSTRAINTS on START and CHANGE: &quot;What happens if I do this within this specific context?&quot; (Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have RESULT and CHANGE, give me START within CONSTRAINTS on RESULT and CHANGE: &quot;How was it before?&quot; (Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and RESULT, give me CHANGE within CONSTRAINTS on START and RESULT: &quot;How would I cause this?&quot; (Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28455/a-zero-gravity-life-form-that-harvests-asteroids&quot;&gt;Vacuum Creatures&lt;/a&gt; - Suggested constraints: The OP doesn't state any criteria on which a &quot;best&quot; solution will be chosen such as &quot;lowest energy requirements&quot; or &quot;simplest propulsion system&quot;.  More details about the creature in general beyond a vague &quot;fungus-like&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28394/war-technology-making-use-of-reversed-velocities-of-light-and-sound&quot;&gt;Sounds is faster than light&lt;/a&gt; - Suggested constraints: a proposed set of the laws of physics in this world, most importantly.  Second, since light is fundamental to pretty much everything in how the universe operates, the OP will need to further narrow down the scope of covered warfare to something more restricted than &quot;all known wars have been fought, but the technologies and war tactics used during them were drastically different.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28198/what-kind-of-technology-would-be-better-than-nuclear-power-in-terms-of-energy-pr&quot;&gt;New Power Sources&lt;/a&gt; - Suggested constraints: The OP mentions nothing about how the new power source is supposed to behave beyond &quot;more powerful than nuclear&quot; (antimatter is the only thing more powerful than nuclear).  There aren't any statements of how hard the physics in this world are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Discussion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly like doing a query on a large database.  Without any constraints, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rows/answers come back; which in WB speak is &quot;too broad&quot;.  But with the addition of sufficient constraints, an entire universe of answers resolves down to one or two answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T22:07:38.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-10T14:57:09.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll jump in here, even though I've got not much cred. (Somebody's got to bump up the curve, eh?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, this is &lt;em&gt;beoming&lt;/em&gt; WhatIf.SE.&lt;/strong&gt; And part of me thinks that's cool. But not the part that understands how the various SE &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt;. It's great for the internet to have more than just Randall Munroe answering What Ifs, but its not great for WB.SE for this to be the place where it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is it happening?&lt;/strong&gt; I think it's an artifact of the WorldBuilders' &lt;em&gt;incredible&lt;/em&gt; breadth of expertise. Here (it seems to me) questions get answered &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; quickly and (generally) with really high quality. The presence of objectively-high-quality answers and lots of upvotes and lots of traffic tends to discourage regulars and mods from closing, so scope has crept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this a problem?&lt;/strong&gt; There are two reasons I see: (a) WhatIf isn't a great fit for the SE model; (b) diminishing value &lt;em&gt;for worldbuilders!&lt;/em&gt; This has become a great site to come read some interesting questions and get really interesting answers. And the fit isn't so bad that it's obviously broken. But it's losing its focus as a place where authors, artists, even RPGers can aggregate wisdom on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I've got a question brewing in the back of my mind for one of my (RPG) campaigns about how history and culture work in a world where sentient species have vastly different lifespans. (Think Tolkienesque humans, dwarves, elves.) But looking at the frontpage that question feels oddly out of place here....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, two thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use close votes. I found my motivation yesterday with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35604/12207&quot;&gt;How deep underwater do I have to dive to be safe from a 1MT Hydrogen bomb detonation above?&lt;/a&gt; Interesting question (if you're into that sort of thing). Answers seem to bring expertise to bear. Popular, and generating traffic. But how is it remotely about worldbuilding? (And the only answer to that was &quot;well, it's not, but it's interesting.&quot;) So I'm going to use my close votes much more. If four agree we'll start reining in the WhatIfs. (And we'll be prepared for a stream of &quot;why was this closed as off-topic&quot; meta questions, which will be a good thing for bringing more voices into the discussion.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the obvious thirst for a WhatIf.SE site begs for the attention/input of SE higher-ups: &quot;WB.SE is in danger of being overwhelmed by WhatIf traffic. The community has an urge to pull back its scope to traditional worldbuilding. But SE users clearly like asking &lt;em&gt;and answering&lt;/em&gt; these questions, and they bring a lot of expertise to bear. It's just not &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; expertise. Does SE want to host WhatIf.SE?&quot; Can current mods bring this to the attention of our community representative?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T14:57:09.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2016-02-10T15:43:44.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What-if questions and answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/28&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks about what-if questions, which tend to be too broad and open-ended to work on our Q&amp;amp;A site.  (See the answers there for much discussion.)  But these questions are popular with readers, and people here enjoy answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those posts don't fit our main Q&amp;amp;A well, but they sure would make interesting material for the blog (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Randall Munroe has already demonstrated&lt;/a&gt;).  So my suggestion: if you see (or think of!) a what-if question that you'd like to answer in some detail, write it up as a blog post instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T15:43:44.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T16:07:15.613" Score="7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part three of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;case study series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;Part 1 - Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3063/case-study-2-daaaah-whoosh&quot;&gt;Part 2 - Daaaah Whoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I submit the following for review.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Insofar as destroying worlds is about world building yes, I believe this is on topic.  My major gripe with this question was actually some of the answers it attracted.  Many of the answers failed to take the premise of a mad scientist into account.  This led to some modifications of the restrictions that I placed around the situation.  I didn't feel that some of them should have been necessary but if you're not specific around here people tend to go for outlandish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this question seems pretty strait forward on topic to me.  If anything you could probably claim it is idea generation but I think the restrictions put in place make it clear I am looking for someone with chemistry/physics knowledge to fill in the gaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9717/how-would-space-battles-alter-combat-tactics&quot;&gt;How would space battles alter combat tactics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This question helps define combat in space, so in my mind is a discussion of how things differ from the combat we are used to today.  Feels pretty on-topic, discussion of a system and how it impacts the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  Nope, I am happy this one is well within scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/527/what-are-the-primary-triggers-for-the-degrading-and-fall-of-great-empires&quot;&gt;What are the primary triggers for the decline and fall of great empires?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes this is about world building, specifically developing a history for the world in question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  I think it is probably too broad.  We went back and forth on this question several times.  It was an early question on the site so I can't recall exactly, but I think it was closed once or twice.  This question would probably have benefited from the sandbox but I don't think it had been created yet.  It could probably be reworked to be more on topic, I'm just not sure how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10102/how-would-multi-race-humanoid-evolution-happen&quot;&gt;How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;  Absolutely.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  Not at all.  This one is nice and clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7301/how-to-explain-the-co-existence-of-peace-and-violence-in-religion&quot;&gt;How to explain the co-existence of peace and violence in religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, the goal of this question was to help illuminate how this process works so it can be included in the world as a source of conflict throughout history etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  It feels on topic to me but there could be an argument that this is a plot idea.  I think the question is effectively framed as looking at the system though so it should be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:23:19.187" Title="Case Study #3 - James" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T16:47:23.943" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some this is a problem brewing, for some this is a problem that has brewed, for others, its sat on the desk going moldy from being ignored. What do I talk about? Well &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad we are looking at this matter, but this isn't something that is suddenly new. This has been an ongoing discussion from the moment worldbuilding went into private beta and it continues today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem we have is that whatever we talk about on meta, however much we agree, there is very little use in being in a bubble. The majority (and I could be wrong here) of our users never read meta, they don't take part in these discussions and most importantly, &lt;em&gt;they don't read them.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question to everyone here reading this who is simple, but like all things, difficult: &lt;strong&gt;How do we enforce the policy we decide upon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion, and I suspect that it isn't going to be popular is that the mods needs to be more hands on. We love our mods, we love the light touch they have, how they let the community decide and deal with its problems. In this however, they might need to be more proactive in enforcement. The main reason for this is that for most people, the weight of a mod carries a lot of authority behind it, their words (and those of high rep users) telling people in the comments of a closed question 'This is a what if and is too broad' with a link to meta will help spread the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is my opinion. I've made this thread because there are many about what the problem is and where the line is to be drawn. I want to start a discussion about how we actually go about enforcing whatever is decided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T10:06:24.190" Title="Is Worldbuilding a What if Site - a followup" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|policy|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:02:01.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;what if&quot; questions (and I mean all of them, even the ones that may not be too broad) are not allowed, we could simply have a close reason for &quot;This is a what if question and is off-topic for the site.&quot; (assuming we add it to the help center as well), so that the users could instantly pop close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've yet to see a good &quot;what if&quot; question, but if someone finds one, please link it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, the community closes more questions than the mod hammer does regularly - as such, I think having a custom close reason for that may be suitable for increasing the enforcement of the policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:02:01.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:02:53.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, we are not to a consensus yet (at least not so far as I have seen).  We are looking through the case study threads to figure out where the lines are.  I will agree that there seems to be a consensus that there is an issue...just not what it is and how to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I disagree that this is a problem for the moderators to manage themselves.  We have plenty of users with a high enough reputation to flag questions as off topic and get them in queue, and that's how it should be anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:02:53.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:03:23.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the first step is to have clear guidelines, once we have those the community and moderators together can enforce them but when right now we can't even agree on whether certain questions are on or off topic then that makes it harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a proposal brewing for how we handle this by defining Risk Factors, drawing a line for where those Risk Factors become too much, and possibly specific close reasons and meta posts for each Risk Factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the current dramas of the election and new site design are over I was planning to start the discussion (whether still a moderator or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a taster though this is the sort of thing I have in mind (each Risk Factor will need refining in its own meta question). Keep in mind this is a very rough and not-attempting-to-be-complete example. Please don't discuss this specific example but the idea in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor:&lt;/strong&gt; Individual Action&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; This question is asking about decisions or actions of an individual rather than a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exceptions:&lt;/strong&gt; Creation of historical figures, world leaders, pantheons, and similar is on topic but it must relate only to their history and nature not future actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close if:&lt;/strong&gt; Asking for future actions of an individual. Asking for reactions, plans or consequences for an individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would have a custom close reasons with links to the meta discussion on why they are off topic and on a &quot;how to fix my question&quot; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T17:23:40.853" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:23:40.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:06:28.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; I don't really see how this would be considered worldbuilding. It's about destroying a world, but it's &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; world, not a fictional one you're building. Also, it's not so much about the best way to do it, but the best way given some random criteria that no one would actually use when trying to destroy the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Aside from being out of scope for the site, I think it's well-structured. It's definitely idea generation, but with solid enough criteria that all answers are essentially numerical; basically, the lowest number wins (see Green's ontology). This is a good example of how to ask a Stack Exchange question, I just don't know if it belongs on Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9717/how-would-space-battles-alter-combat-tactics&quot;&gt;How would space battles alter combat tactics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Yup, cut and dry about building worlds. War tactics inform ship design, logistics, locations, and important events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I don't see how. Answers should draw on real-world examples and experience, and the answer with the most of this should be the best one. If two armies have two different opinions on tactics, usually one of them loses, and that should apply here, so no opinion-based problems, and enough criteria is given as to technology to keep it from being too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/527/what-are-the-primary-triggers-for-the-degrading-and-fall-of-great-empires&quot;&gt;What are the primary triggers for the decline and fall of great empires?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;  I can see its applications in world building, but for the most part it's more of a history question. But since I don't think it would quite fit on History SE, I think it fits here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, this asks for real evidence, not opinion or speculation, so I think it's suitably constrained by reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10102/how-would-multi-race-humanoid-evolution-happen&quot;&gt;How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Yep, I think it's about worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; The problem I see here is that it may be difficult to draw upon actual evidence. You never specified where your races were from, so answers based on D&amp;amp;D races or Tolkien races could be just as valid as answers that drew upon the user's own understanding of what these races are. So I think this one is opinion based because you haven't rigorously defined your fantasy races, but if these races are more consistent across different sources then I may be wrong. That said, I think the answers are good, so a similar question with more constraints would be on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7301/how-to-explain-the-co-existence-of-peace-and-violence-in-religion&quot;&gt;How to explain the co-existence of peace and violence in religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Yep. Kinda like the space combat one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  This one seems like it's almost going into idea generation/opinion based territory, but I can see that you're trying to stick to historical precedents again, which I think it a suitably limiting factor. I would be worried about the kinds of answers this could generate, but the question itself seems fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final words: The last 4 questions are all definitely about worldbuilding, and a trend that I noticed is that they seemed to be constrained in proportion to the amount of real-world knowledge and experience they expected. These questions don't ask for ideas or opinions so much as they ask about what has come before, and what can be said about what already exists. You seem to be asking more for an idea generator rather than idea generation; these answers should allow you to create your world on your own, rather than having the answerers create it for you. Which I think is a great example of what this site is supposed to be about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:06:28.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:28:02.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many nanobots can I have in my blood?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree this seem plenty on topic for world building.  Its a matter of what a human can take given a loss of blood volume to nano bots.  You could potentially ask the question on Biology sure but that doesn't make it off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How could I scientifically explain ice breath?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creature design questions are pretty universally accepted as on topic and I see no issues with this question that would make me want to VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What Time is it IN SPACE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No issues here.  I apparently missed this question when it was asked.  +5 rep for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting question, and an utterly amazing answer but when I read it I don't feel like I am helping you build a world so much as a plot point.  VTC, Not related to world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are admittedly tough...ironically I think it falls in line with my mad scientist question...so I would have to say that question is OT as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's no moon: planet sized plants possible?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one seems really borderline to me.  It is asked well but it starts feeling too broad toward the end.  I think asking about fewer aspects (provide them yourself as part of the scenario) would make this cleanly on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T17:48:33.907" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:48:33.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2016-02-10T18:35:04.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think 1, 2, 3, and 5 are on-topic for reasons already given in other answers.  I want to address #4, which I mod-closed after a few days (and several flags).  FYI, it later received a reopen vote, went to the review queue, and got four &quot;leave closed&quot; votes there.  I say all that just to report the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about a weapon to be used under a specialized circumstance by a single character.  That makes it feel less about the world and more about the plot, though I can see opposing argument too.  It further says &quot;assume this is possible&quot; and then asks how to design the bullet, so it's built on a fuzzy foundation.  Taken together, I think that places the question out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you explained more about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; sniping from space would work in general, that could firm up the foundation and make it more about the behavior of things in your world.  Things like gravity, atmospheric properties, metallurgy, and probably lots of other factors could be brought to bear on the question at that point.  But right now it's almost like a magic question where the magic system isn't specified -- on what basis can people answer a question about a detail in a system that seems impossible to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did get an amazingly thorough answer, and several highly-voted answers.  Sometimes that happens, and I'm glad you got the information you were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I was wrong to close this, but if the consensus here is that it should be reopened, I won't oppose that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T18:35:04.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T19:39:36.860" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my mad rush to f̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶i̶c̶k̶  burnish my credentials for the moderator election, I have noticed that I am missing one vital badge: Outspoken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFkt2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFkt2.png&quot; alt=&quot;[outspoken]&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now aware that you can check your own starred posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLEDK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLEDK.png&quot; alt=&quot;starred posts&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The condition, however, is that the posts are starred by different users&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jOFft.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jOFft.png&quot; alt=&quot;starred posts by different users&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are we to know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T00:30:11.597" Title="Progress towards Outspoken badge" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3104" CreationDate="2016-02-10T20:57:55.787" Score="32" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have this poster, and I am curious to know what you all think we should name our robot.  &lt;strong&gt;Please, one post, with one name suggestion per person.&lt;/strong&gt;  We don't want this to get too far out of hand.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j98rD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j98rD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T16:14:14.153" Title="Naming our robot" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:09:10.323" Score="25" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Slartibotfast&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is, of course, a play on Slartibartfast, a famous World Builder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T12:03:03.810" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T12:03:03.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:14:49.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jebediah&lt;/strong&gt; old biblical name for a futuristic robot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T21:14:49.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:20:49.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Alphonse&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Full Metal Alchemist&lt;/a&gt; character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T21:20:49.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:26:04.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like a &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Daneel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to me. I hope you &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;get the Asimov reference&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T21:26:04.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:48:40.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nanobots&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About worldbuilding? Yes.  Exploration of the limits of a speculative technology seems to be about world-building.  While not explicitly about the mechanics of a world, the question does ask about limitation on a possible mechanic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risking off-topic?  No.  I think this one is pretty clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ice breath&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About worldbuilding?   Same as the first question.  I think it's on-topic because it talks about the mechanics in a world.  The accepted answer outlines clear limitations on frost-breath that the author will need to work with/around.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risking off-topic?  No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keeping time in space&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About worldbuilding? Yes.  This question discusses how to organize time keeping in an intergalactic empire.  Time keeping is a fundamental mechanic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risking off-topic?  No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bullets from Orbit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About worldbuilding? Edgy.  If this question is off topic, then the nanobots and ice breath questions are also off topic since they both address limitations of an environment involving a highly speculative premise.  Besides, the question was good enough to get a supremely good answer with graphs (and everything!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risking off-topic?  No.  I don't think this question is off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plant Planets&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About worldbuilding? Yes.  Literally, this question addresses the construction of a planet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risking off-topic?  No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T21:48:40.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-10T23:31:00.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Machine&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World builders used to have to solve their own problems... Then we developed a machine to answer all of our problems. Just like in those books written by the guy with sideburns!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T23:31:00.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-11T07:22:13.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Jeremy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I derived this name from the name &lt;strong&gt;Jenkins&lt;/strong&gt;, as many Worldbuilding users also are programmers that know this tool (though the connection isn't really important). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to keep the &quot;butler-y&quot; feel that this name carries, as robots usually are used as servants and helpers for humans. The poster, however, also creates the impression of friendship and guidance between the robot and the human (What's her name, anyway?) so I wanted to choose a name, that seems somehow close and trustworthy. Something you could call a friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="13987" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T11:53:25.317" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T11:53:25.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T10:43:23.310" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, during my early morning stroll around the site, I found this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25130/super-a-i-trapped-in-an-r-c-car-can-it-escape&quot;&gt;Super A.I. trapped in an R/C car. Can it escape?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is blatantly off-topic, since it's about the actions of a single character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it got a bounty. As such, we can't vote to close, so it not just stays open as a bad example of question for the site, but it also seems like we are &lt;em&gt;rewarding&lt;/em&gt; questions like those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do in this case? Can we do something at all while the bounty is open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T08:22:17.440" Title="VTC on a question with a bounty" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3111" CreationDate="2016-02-11T11:02:22.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Flag it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could flag it as &amp;quot;in need of moderator attention&amp;quot;, type out your reasoning and let the mods handle it from there. This is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/14593/267636&quot;&gt;what was decided on meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the question stayed open for this long probably means taht a moderator might not want to close it without asking about it on meta though. SO perhaps you should start a discussion about whether this question should be closed seperately from this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T08:22:17.440" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3111" CreationDate="2016-02-11T11:47:17.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I've not mod-hammered it closed is because (and here's the subtle difference) it's not asking &quot;what should/will an individual do&quot; it's asking &quot;what can the individual do&quot;. In other words what are the options for the individual in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's in a grey area but it's definitely grey at the moment and one of the areas I want to resolve in the upcoming scope discussions. For now we're gathering case studies and discussing options. Once the election is over I plan to work with whoever the new mod team is to start a rather more structured discussion on scope and once that's resolved cases like this will be much clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T11:47:17.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-02-11T18:48:00.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the main difficulty for moderators (as well as high-rep users) is to consistently respect the scope of the site. There have been quite some discussions about it here on meta. But I would like to know the views of the candidates on two critical elements of our scopes, namely idea generation/broadness and individual actions/plot questions How do you view those questions? Can you specify their limits and own definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as stated, this is a difficult area, and the distinction is far from always crystal clear. This leads to different people applying these topic scope points in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My definition of &quot;idea generation&quot; is simply where the set of answers is large or even &lt;em&gt;potentially unbounded&lt;/em&gt;, and there are &lt;em&gt;no objective criteria&lt;/em&gt; given for evaluating answers. Both of these criteria need to be met for a question to be &quot;idea generation&quot;; if they are not, then the question might be &quot;too broad&quot; or maybe &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, but it is not &quot;idea generation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Individual actions&quot; or &quot;plot&quot; questions can be very difficult to spot, even more so than &quot;idea generation&quot; questions. This centers on whether the question is about the world itself or a character, and is not a fixed distinction. Sometimes a question that &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like a question about individual actions is really about the world; sometimes one that &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; to be about the world is really about an individual's actions, or of plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, virtually all questions on this site are some kind of &quot;idea generation&quot; questions; people who have a problem and are looking for ideas or suggestions on how to solve it. So simply &quot;idea generation&quot; isn't reason enough to close a question, just like a question mentioning &quot;the president of the United States&quot; or &quot;the CEO of Big-Name Tech Company&quot; doesn't make it about the actions of an individual character. These have to be viewed in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of our site is clearly to help people solve their problems when building the worlds their works are set in, but also to help build a repository of knowledge for future visitors. Questions that deal with individual characters' actions, or plot elements, are very unlikely to be of any help to anyone other than the person originally asking them. When in doubt, the measuring stick should be &quot;is this question of value to people other than the asker, who want a similar element in their world?&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;If the answer to that question is no, then the question is highly likely to be off topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to help guide the site further, ultimately toward its goal of world supremacy (just kidding about that last -- I think). I hope to offer my experience from being a pro tem moderator here since early in the beta period, while also helping to moderate the moderation activities taken. I enjoy the site and want to help it grow further while retaining its unique character as well as the occasional hard-science parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not I am elected a community moderator, you will keep seeing me on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time we are seeing &quot;a large number of arguments/flags&quot;, I expect the user has already been instructed in comments by other users on the kind of behavior we want to see, and what comments are for. If there is a consistent pattern of flags, I would look at some comment threads the user has been involved in, and aim to start there, as well as by cleaning up any inappropriate comments and moving longer discussions to chat instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that does not stop the problematic behavior, the next step would be to contact the user through private messages and attempt to both determine the root cause for the behavior in comments, and to guide the user in what type of behavior we expect of users. Since this is a user who &quot;&lt;em&gt;tends&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to get into this kind of situation, I would also deal with the situation in cooperation with the other moderators on the site, to ensure that all moderators respond to the situation in a similar way. (A similar situation has already happened, which was discussed among us pro tem moderators and eventually more or less resolved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the disruptive behavior continue despite attempts to talk it out with the user, timed suspension may become necessary. I would be hoping that the situation can be resolved long before it comes to that, however; timed suspension is the last, not the first or even among the first, option that a moderator should reach for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be brought up either with the specific moderator, with all the moderators on the site (both of those almost certainly in the private moderator chat room), or on Worldbuilding Meta, which is meant for discussion &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the site. Exactly which of these avenues is most appropriate depends on the specific circumstances. Taking the matter to Meta may be particularly appropriate should the action that the moderator was involved in not be something only a moderator took part in; for example, if a moderator cast a delete vote after the post had already been delete-voted by community members, but I disagree with deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are humans, too, and even with just four moderators there are bound to be disagreements on various issues. Those disagreements need to be ironed out in appropriate forums; we might not all always fully agree on what we each think is the best course of action, but we should be able to determine whether a given action is the one that most closely matches the community consensus on similar issues. Sometimes that does mean bringing the discussion right out in the open, and letting the community chime in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think are the greatest challenges facing the Worldbuilding site at the moment and how should we approach those challenges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, topic scope is the site's Achille's heel at this time; we get quite a number of questions that, while not &lt;em&gt;obviously off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, are not &lt;em&gt;obviously on-topic&lt;/em&gt; either. Several users have already mentioned that this is going to be discussed after the election ends, which is a good thing. There is the case study series going on. We need to spend time on Meta and perhaps in chat, figure out where to draw the lines on various question types even when that means that we end up closing old, popular, previously well-received questions, and then update our help center with guidance that both new and old users can use to judge whether a given question is, or is likely to be, on topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Right now, a lot of the candidates are really high-rep users. If elected moderator, how will you be more effective than as a 10k or 20k user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the moderation privileges, after the reputation requirement changes associated with the graduation and design, will be above my current reputation level. That will leave me without access to most of the features needed to effectively moderate the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would obviously still be doing things like voting on posts, close/reopen voting, and so on, and might even do so somewhat more boldly knowing that my vote is not the only one that counts. However, something as simple as viewing deleted posts would be out of my reach until I earn sufficient reputation, which with my relatively low number of posts here will take some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition. How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone has a different exact idea of what the site's scope is. This is even more evident given that our site's scope is, by its nature, somewhat flexible. As a moderator, you are a representative of not just yourself but also the larger site community. If the community has agreed on a scope, then it is almost a moderator's duty to uphold that. It is my hope that such community efforts to determine the site's scope should include also, but not rely entirely upon, the opinions of the community elected moderators. Should I find that the scope drifts so far that I more often than not find myself unable to enforce that which the community has determined, then at that point it may be appropriate to consider resigning as a moderator; I do however hope that it will not come to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During what (UTC) times of day, and on what days, are you most likely to be active on the site? Our site is an active one, and having moderators able to check in on the site around the clock allows keeping closer tabs on activity and handle problematic behavior quickly. Let's look at when you might be available during the week rather than timezone. Please give times and weekdays in UTC to allow for easy comparison between different candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been mostly active in the mid-day to evening periods UTC, all days of the week, and I do not expect this to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What has your review queues activity been like so far? How do you expect this to change when a single vote from you results in immediate action on the post? Having a diamond associated to your name isn't just a fancy gimmick; it effectively means that you are no longer participating as a &quot;mere&quot; high-reputation community member. Particularly in this case, it means actionable votes are binding and take effect immediately. You can close, reopen, delete, undelete, spam-flag, migrate, etc. posts with just a few clicks regardless of how the rest of the community feels about the post. You can lock posts such that they cannot be touched by community members. Explain the ways in which your review queue behavior might change (or remain the same) in light of these privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been particularly active in the review queues, mainly because whenever I browse the site, there tends to not be anything &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the review queues. (And I do consider that to be a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing. It means that the community is handling most of the moderation, which is exactly the way Stack Exchange is intended to work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; about the action to take on a post, &lt;em&gt;I prefer to take no diamond-powered action at all.&lt;/em&gt; Expanding on what I wrote in my initial nomination, I aim to make every diamond-powered action I take on the site something that I am willing to explain in public on our Meta. This is occasionally limiting; whereas as a regular community member perhaps I would have cast a close vote where I felt a post is borderline off-topic, as a diamond moderator I won't cast that vote unless I am &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; that the post qualifies as off-topic. Actions taken with a diamond attached to the name not only take effect immediately, but also tend to carry a lot more weight in the eyes of other community members. &lt;strong&gt;I strive to use that power wisely and only in times of need.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you like most about the current moderation and want to preserve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to try to preserve the community moderation aspect. While occasionally some super-powers are needed to sort out a situation, more often than not, Stack Exchange works as well as it does in part because it offloads moderation decisions onto not a few individuals bestowed with diamonds to their names, but onto the community. Diamond-powered moderation should be light-handed and done only when there is an immediate need, and should be accountable to the highest standards. Again, it is sometimes better to take no action, than to take the wrong action, when a single person's judgement can overrule that of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you active elsewhere on the Stack Exchange network? If so, where and in what ways? On the flip side, are you active in non-SE worldbuilding communities? If so, tell us more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am active on a number of sites in the Stack Exchange network, which should be obvious from my network profile. My highest-reputation accounts are on Super User, Unix &amp;amp; Linux, Stack Overflow, Worldbuilding, Amateur Radio, Meta Stack Exchange and Programmers, in that order. Other sites I frequent to varying degree are Server Fault, Space Exploration, Photography, Electrical Engineering, Physics, and many others. At this writing, to my count I have reputation beyond the association bonus on 49 different sites in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T18:48:00.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-11T23:26:10.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's see how people like the name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Quasimodo&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since I think that this 'bot looks rather like a hunchback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T23:26:10.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3119" CreationDate="2016-02-12T00:55:07.010" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering, can opinion based questions be posted on the meta? Or is it discouraged here like it is in regular world building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T01:28:17.470" Title="Can opinion based questions be posted on the meta?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3117" CreationDate="2016-02-12T01:02:22.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the Worldbuilding main site that are primarily opinion based are not on-topic here on Meta. We still have an option to close questions here as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;. Though I think we're far more lenient here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean Worldbuilding questions (but would be off-topic on the main site) that are not about the Worldbuilding main site, the answer is still &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. Those would both be off-topic and primarily opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T01:02:22.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3117" CreationDate="2016-02-12T01:28:17.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some meta questions are inherently opinion-based.  Yes the close reason is available, but the same base set is present on every site, main and meta, on the network, so I wouldn't read too much into that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about our scope, about what our policy should be on some point, or for that matter about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3102/28&quot;&gt;what to name our robot&lt;/a&gt; will evoke opinions.  That doesn't make them wrong.  Answers should still &lt;em&gt;support&lt;/em&gt; those opinions in some way; just saying &quot;unicorns should be off-topic&quot; doesn't help anybody.  And questions still need to be &lt;em&gt;about the site&lt;/em&gt; (or the SE platform in general); don't use meta to ask people what their favorite movie-worlds are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;what is meta?&lt;/a&gt; in the Help Center for more about the purpose and use of meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T01:28:17.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3121" CreationDate="2016-02-12T01:29:39.880" Score="13" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moments ago, I saw this:&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yR8aQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yR8aQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question this was posted on is 100% opinion based + idea generation, thus making it clearly off topic. Should we answer off-topic questions (before they're put on hold/closed) if we know that they're off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bring this up because while a new user may rush to answer a question straight away because it's interesting or they have an idea, I feel that this sets a bad example for future users - that even off-topic questions can receive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, as more experience users, we should refrain from answering obviously off-topic questions and start setting an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="12207" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T04:15:37.703" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T07:14:10.273" Title="Should we answer off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3120" CreationDate="2016-02-12T01:37:44.097" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree.  We should model the behavior we want from others, and getting a bunch of answers for questions that should be put on hold doesn't set a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know that a question should be put on hold -- whether it's too broad, off-topic, or something else -- please vote/flag and try to help the OP fix the problem (if possible).  Or, if he has at least 20 reputation, invite him to chat where topics that aren't good main-site questions flow freely!  That way the user gets &lt;em&gt;the help he came here looking for&lt;/em&gt;, but we don't &lt;em&gt;send mixed signals to our users&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage you to also leave a friendly, helpful comment.  Some &quot;magic links&quot; you might find useful (these work in comments but not posts or chat): &lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T01:37:44.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3128" CreationDate="2016-02-12T01:45:54.350" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35628/75&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35628/75&lt;/a&gt; has been through the wringer, it seems.  First it was off-topic, then after a major edit, it was on-topic, and now it is off-topic again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get this over and done with once and for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; is this question off topic - and can anything be done to salvage it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T07:28:31.030" Title="Why is &quot;Creating an undetectable 'Manchurian Candidate'&quot; off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3122" CreationDate="2016-02-12T04:24:59.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my 2 cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading your edit, I feel that the question is off-topic, but not for the reasons stated in the close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the only reasonable answer to give right now is &quot;It depends on how the two &quot;programmers&quot; think&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a more specific answer would require details that answer the above question, which would then make it a individual character question, thus still off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To not give the answer to that question leaves it either too broad or opinion based (since multiple valid answers could be given that are more specific than the above quoted statement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I have no idea how to fix that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T04:24:59.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3150" CreationDate="2016-02-12T05:13:38.387" Score="15" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it'd be nice to have a place to steer some of the most-obviously off-topic &quot;What If,&quot; as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3091/12207&quot;&gt;mentioned earlier&lt;/a&gt;. Turns out, there was a proposal in Area 51 for some type of speculative-yet-science-based Stack. Curious as to its fate, I sent this e-mail to the community managers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello all-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that a scientifically-based speculation Stack—a WhatIf.SE, if you will—has been proposed in Area 51 and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/75912/scientific-imagination?referrer=IPIEcsN2huMFuP7v0aO_3g2&quot;&gt;subsequently deleted&lt;/a&gt;. Is there a record of why that proposal failed? Specifically, was it lack of support, or a perceived incompatibility with Stack function? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ask because Worldbuilding.SE is going through some scope-pains recently. To put it briefly: the site seems to attract a lot of really curious querents with interesting questions, answers full of an amazing breadth of expertise, sometimes having little to do with worldbuilding. (That’s just my personal characterization.) See, for reference, meta discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/12207&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3094/12207&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3048/12207&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2661/12207&quot;&gt;four&lt;/a&gt; on the general topic, along with any number of “why is ___ on/off topic?” meta questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that these questions stem from two base human urges: (a) curiosity &amp;amp; (b) sharing. People are curious about how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35789/12207&quot;&gt;outrun a nuclear explosion&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35732/12207&quot;&gt;what a market for words might look like&lt;/a&gt;. And others have expertise they bring to bear on these topics, or would like to bring to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I mentioned in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3091/12207&quot;&gt;recent WB.meta post&lt;/a&gt; that it’d be nice to have a place to point these querents. Frankly, I think the world would be well-served with more than just Randall Munroe answering “What if…?” (No offense meant, Randall. We love you.) And while WB.SE isn’t that site, we’re attracting some of that material. If we had a place to point (or migrate) these questions it would make it easier to maintain WB.SE’s core scope while still serving those querents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, if the previous proposal withered due to lack of support, perhaps we need to consider marshaling support around here for resurrecting that proposal. However, if the proposal was judged a fundamentally-flawed concept for SE then you’ve already hashed out many of the ones we’re facing, and we’d love to hear your experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many thanks for your attention,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-[real name redacted] (nitsua60)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll let you know if I hear a response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T15:06:10.540" Title="What if there were a What If?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-12T05:22:56.300" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please contrast &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35604/12207&quot;&gt;How deep underwater do I have to dive to be safe from a 1MT Hydrogen bomb detonation above?&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35789/12207&quot;&gt;Is outrunning a nuclear mushroom cloud feasible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is one really on-topic while the other's off-? It may be that there's an important difference, but I'm not seeing it. If you see it, please explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six months later, with many discussions on scope and topicality having passed by... any new thoughts on whether there really is a difference between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've lost my close-vote priveleges to the ratcheting of rep-thresholds, or I'd have just nudged one into a review queue as a way to bump this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T03:41:49.470" Title="Is one really on- and the other off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3125" CreationDate="2016-02-12T05:46:31.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think the diving escape from the hydrogen bomb has similar enough attributes to be treated the same way. By the close votes, some others seemed to think so too. The world building potential is about as low as most other what-if questions, and with slight rewording it seems like it might even be well received on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a question that topically fits on &lt;a href=&quot;https://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;XKCD's What-If&lt;/a&gt;. There are a lot of these floating around right now, and I think there is substantial hesitation by many in the community to jump into judgement on these questions while we discuss scope (I personally avoided casting a close vote). That may or may not be the right course of action, but there seems to be too much subjectivity over highly-popular questions at the moment. Once the elections are over, I think clarity on these issues will be pursued quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, a lot of questions are not treated fairly. Depending on who is online at any one moment some potentially out-of-scope questions get close votes while others get upvotes. It's a symptom of scope creep and subjective guidelines, which are actively being discussed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11306" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T05:46:31.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3120" CreationDate="2016-02-12T07:14:10.273" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Additionally to the otherwise good answer from Monica, one should avoid answering because, the more answer that questions gets, the more 'hotness' points it gets, thus has a chance to appear on the HNQ. And before it gets closed it has 1000 views, and 20 upvotes. And then closing it becomes more intimidating (it shouldn't but experience shows it does).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of course exagerating a bit, but nevertheless, as experienced users, we should do what we can to prevent that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T07:14:10.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3122" CreationDate="2016-02-12T07:28:31.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimers: I wasn't part of the first closing round, and neither of the reopening ground. I haven't seen the edit history (before now), but I was one of those who voted to close it in the current stage.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already commented on the question, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The power is quite general, I understand. As it stands, I don't think it would be unanswerable, so no IG (or it keeps on the right side) for me. However, you are asking about a specific use of that power... for a plot. So for me it is a plot building, and not world. The power is already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I'll try to explain it further here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is an interesting question. I think it is answerable, so no idea generation, not too broad, etc. However, you present us with with a situation, and a power, as well as a typical use for it. Now the questions can be summarised as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can my character use it in the best way to fool the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to me, as interesting as it is, this is not about &lt;em&gt;building a world&lt;/em&gt;. It is about developing the plot. And plot questions are off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't think your question can be saved (to me), as the part of the world for that is already made. I really suggest you to join on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where such discussions can be adressed. And very welcome. Writers might be an option, but they also avoid discussing plots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T07:28:31.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-12T07:48:53.760" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I immediatelly connected the robot with name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Laika&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was name of first dog in cosmos, and it could make people to &quot;Like&quot; the robot. Also, I like the idea of robot being female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T07:48:53.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-12T09:16:08.077" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quasirobo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With credit to Monty Wild for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3116/49&quot;&gt;original suggestion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T09:16:08.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-12T17:20:27.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Arya&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because when we get onto suggesting names for the woman in the photo, I'm going to suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15036/alynn-the-scientific-mage-science-principles&quot;&gt;Alynn&lt;/a&gt; - this goes nicely with that. Also, who says that bot's male?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's a cool name. Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T17:20:27.070" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-12T20:35:47.423" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35721/most-secure-way-to-build-a-government-only-back-door-into-my-cell-phones&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as a clear, right-now example of a point that annoys me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is not the problem, but the first comment in the answer, which accuses the question to be OT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please: I would like the stuff in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; regarding &quot;Elements of Plot&quot; be fixed since it seems to be not so clear for many people in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, almost &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; time -with almost no exception- when we ask about a topic, we ask it to make our plot more consistent, directly or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the core question, given the background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any practical way to implement this (that doesn't involve launching critical evidence into orbit)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is clearly asking about a specific aspect of the technology or protocol, given the background of his already-made plot. They talk about government, terrorists, and bla bla bla. That's not the focus in the discussion, but a specific technical matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please, fix the point in the help center since this is not the first time I see people not being capable of understanding what that point means, when &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; we write here is somehow related to the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; the point since it's not useful, as it is already &lt;em&gt;implied&lt;/em&gt; by the &lt;em&gt;character building&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;individual actions&lt;/em&gt; points. Plots are made of beginning, middle (we say &lt;em&gt;knot&lt;/em&gt; in spanish countries) and ending, and are &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; based on characters' decisions, whatever the nature of the characters is. But as it is right now, it makes people think there's something more in wha makes a &lt;em&gt;plot&lt;/em&gt;. Surrounding elements, not being the character background (bulding) or decisions (actions) are just part of the world they belong to. So, as I see it, the Elements of Plot item should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my original idea is to discuss reformulating that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10127" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T21:59:18.477" Title="Please clarify &quot;Elements of Plot&quot; to be more concise" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3133" CreationDate="2016-02-12T21:59:18.477" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about this since the whole &quot;off topic&quot; and &quot;idea generation&quot; discussions came up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not be popular, but I think that we shouldn't be so fast to close questions for those reasons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As this question points out, the question might be mostly fine and just need to be rewritten slightly, or maybe just reread to help understanding. Not everyone uses english as a first language after all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if it is off topic, or about a plot, who cares? Bad questions don't hurt anyone, and won't get that much attention anyway, and someone might still come up with a good answer to help the questioner out.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And sometimes plot elements give the biggest opportunities for creativity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hear you saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but those questions are to subjective and don't give us any way to tell a good answer from a bad answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't matter.&lt;/strong&gt; A good answer is one you like, a bad answer is one that makes no sense in the context of the question, and the questioner is the one that has the final say in what answer helped them the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even now I could ask a great &quot;on topic&quot; science-based question, overlook all the good answers with math and choose the one that says &quot;rockets go zoom&quot; as the correct answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the site is called worldbuilding, that doesn't mean that every question has to literally be about a world, or we'd only see geology questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions on this site aren't about worlds, but instead are about very small parts of worlds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which are generally indistinguishable from plot elements when viewed a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, almost every question I've read was asking a question, hoping someone could come up with, or maybe generate, an idea to answer the question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But despite almost every question being a idea generating question, not that many get closed for it. Seems weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One proposal I can see would be a tag that could be applied to these questions as a sort of warning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/off-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;off-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt;. May lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idea-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idea-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idea-generation&lt;/a&gt;. Reader beware!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about everyone, and some people might be more sensitive than others, but personally I won't get upset if I accidentally take a few minutes reading an off-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a serious note, the one (and only) positive reason to close questions that are bad, IMHO, is to give the questioner a clear indicator that they need to fix it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of times, unless it's a drive-by questioning, this can be accomplished by providing constructive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T21:59:18.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3124" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:12:02.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, now there's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95463/what-ifhypotheticals&quot;&gt;WhatIf proposal&lt;/a&gt; again. If you think it's worth having a stack like that around, I suggest you go follow the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question in discussion of the proposal is how is this different from worldbuilding? If you feel that WhatIf and Worldbuilding really are different topics, please weigh in on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3136/12207&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never been involved in a site proposal before, so don't know how else to advise one to be supportive. If any of you, dear readers, do know what would be good, supportive actions to take please consider crafting an &quot;action-list&quot; and posting it as an answer here. Pretty please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:20:25.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:17:12.130" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95463/what-ifhypotheticals&quot;&gt;site proposal&lt;/a&gt; up for a WhatIf.SE. The first question up is &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/22863&quot;&gt;How is this different from Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request help crafting an answer to that. I'm not very active here, only read a smattering of questions, and would love the input of more-experienced and more-knowledgeable community members on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:04.720" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:17:12.130" Title="How is &quot;WhatIf&quot; different from Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-24T09:57:50.870" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:30:16.347" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95463/what-ifhypotheticals&quot;&gt;WhatIf.SE proposal&lt;/a&gt; over on Area 51. One element that would help it along would be a collection of sample questions. I believe we have that source material already at hand. (They're the very questions we're wrestling with when considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/12207&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request your help in assembling a list here of questions asked on WB.SE that you think would be good sample questions for WhatIf.SE. Please submit one question per post, and we can bring the highest-voted sample questions over to the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've just grabbed a couple and posted them below, as a way of &quot;seeding&quot; the list. Vote as you think they would be interesting/on-topic on a WhatIf.SE. My working motto for the site is &quot;curiosity: meet expertise.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:46:08.200" Title="Sample questions for WhatIf" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:42:54.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12304/12207&quot;&gt;What if the social contract was literal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if, as a rite of passage at the age of reason, we all had to sign a contract agreeing to live in the systems created and maintained by the government? We'd get the benefits of order, infrastructure, justice, etc. and in exchange we follow the laws and don't interfere with the enforcing of the laws. Anyone who refused to sign the contract would not be able to live in that area of governance. We'd have basic statutes to allow people to travel through the area, but even that would require a less binding agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could have happened to make this system preferable?&#xA;What sort of social pressures would result if the contract was seen as preferable to exile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:42:54.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:44:30.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19703/12207&quot;&gt;What if humans were shorter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking outside of the window and got an idea &quot;All tools human use seems to be strangely fit for our size. Buildings, cars, various power tools. All of them are have good size for humans that are 1.5-2m in height.&quot; But is that really true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would human society, tools, buildings or machines look like if humans were much smaller or shorter. Lets say 1m or 0.5m . Would the buildings or machines be just scaled down or are there any mechanical or technical issues that would need to be handled when fitting them to smaller humans? Or how would such smaller species of humans develop? Would it same as current humans or would there be any differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:44:30.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3137" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:46:08.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31406/12207&quot;&gt;Could life form in a universe without galaxies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Galaxies, they come in many shapes, and many sizes. In fact, the universe is filled with galaxies, holding the stars and planets together. What if, in a universe where black holes and dark matter don't exist, would habitable planets form? Would there be intelligent life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:46:08.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3142" CreationDate="2016-02-13T05:47:37.350" Score="6" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions based on movies OK? More specifically, is something like this acceptable, or should it be kept in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Anatomically correct (insert creature here)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In movie A, creature B inhabits planet C. How can a real life creature evolve traits D and E, which allow them to do F and G.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between this and the other anatomically correct questions is that the other questions are based on popular mythological creatures, while this type of question would be based on a movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16977" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T08:33:13.197" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T11:34:03.487" Title="Are questions based on movies okay?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2016-02-13T08:32:30.687" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason why a question based on a movie &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt; be on topic. In fact, I'm fairly certain that we have plenty of those, if for no other reason then because someone saw something they liked in a movie (or novel, or other work), want something similar in their own world, and want to better understand either how it could have come to be or the consequences of the element involved. (Not to mention that answers quite often draw on existing fictional works.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;the question must still stand on its own.&lt;/strong&gt; We discussed this in the context of answers in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1731/29&quot;&gt;Are answers solely referencing novels/movies/etc. okay?&lt;/a&gt;; I feel the points made in the accepted answer to that one apply potentially equally to questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question that simply states &quot;how could a creature like X in movie Y evolve naturally?&quot; &lt;em&gt;should probably be closed as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;&lt;/em&gt; because without watching the movie and analyzing it, it really is. Without the additional reference material or knowledge, it is impossible to know what the OP wants. The question doesn't stand on its own, hence it is unclear. Compare also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/266909/486504&quot;&gt;Should a question that is meaningless without viewing an external link be closed?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/254428/486504&quot;&gt;Something in my web site or project doesn't work. Can I just paste a link to it?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question that states &quot;in the movie Y, there is a creature X with traits A, B and C. what would be the prerequisites for these traits to evolve naturally in our world?&quot;, where the traits are adequately described in the question itself, &lt;em&gt;is likely just fine&lt;/em&gt;. There is also a reference for those who are curious and want to learn more, or see more exactly what you have in mind, but &lt;em&gt;the necessary information is in the question itself&lt;/em&gt; so the reference is nice but not mandatory in order to produce an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all other points to consider about whether a question is a good fit (such as broadness, general on-topic considerations, and so on) remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;please&lt;/strong&gt; for the love of all things holy, &lt;em&gt;give the question a good title&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Anatomically correct X&quot; is, I think, a &lt;em&gt;horrible&lt;/em&gt; question title. &quot;How could a creature with traits A and B evolve in an Earth-like setting?&quot; would be a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better starting point for a question title, because it actually sets the context of reading the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T11:34:03.487" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T11:34:03.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2016-02-13T12:07:35.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why we worldbuild&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this would need a pretty poetic answer, though (especially if it's used as a standalone blog post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, this idea can be combined with interviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16977" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T12:07:35.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T07:32:30.337" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Part four of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;case study series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;Part 1 - Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3063/case-study-2-daaaah-whoosh&quot;&gt;Part 2 - Daaaah Whoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3093/case-study-3-james&quot;&gt;Part 3 - James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I submit the following for review.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my 5 most popular questions order approximately from less to more popular. (though the last on would more likely lend on place 2 or 3, but has been put as last since it was a follow up of what ended up being number 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3646/can-i-keep-our-universe-but-without-the-speed-limit-of-light&quot;&gt;Can I keep our universe, but without the speed limit (of light)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like a pretty fundamental worldbuilding question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything it errs a bit towards a &lt;em&gt;too scientific&lt;/em&gt; side, but I think physics.SE wouldn't appreciate this question and worldbuilding.SE would answer it more in the way that I was hoping. Though as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3647/328&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek's answer&lt;/a&gt; pointed out, this question may not be the right one to pose when building a world (to some).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1359/how-do-i-prevent-my-turtle-from-collapsing-under-its-own-gravity&quot;&gt;How do I prevent my turtle from collapsing under its own gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creature design is an accepted topic on worldbuilding.SE and this particular creature aspires to be roughly the size of a world, I think this is a pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this question is very much answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3049/what-could-cause-an-avian-species-to-become-intelligent&quot;&gt;What could cause an avian species to become intelligent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, no doubt about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It leans a bit towards idea generation (or simply too broad). There are many possible answers and there is no very clear way of picking one answer over another. On the plus side, it does have a rather well defined scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2625/could-a-disaster-kill-all-human-life-on-earth-but-leave-astronauts-in-low-orbi&quot;&gt;Could a disaster kill all (human) life on Earth but leave astronauts in low orbit alive long enough to return?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debatable, but I think it falls on the right side. Disasters may be rather plot-y, but designing or choosing a specific disaster, especially a worldwide one, seems more worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think it's an interesting question and has the starting and end point well defined as well as a tight scope, but even though it's not posed as one, it is a very list-inviting question. And it did in fact attract lists as answers. I guess the deciding factor here would be: are these lists potentially endless and do the minor differences between list items really matter, or can things be generalised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3188/what-should-three-men-and-three-women-do-if-everyone-else-is-dead&quot;&gt;What should three men and three women do if everyone else is dead?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. It is about the actions of individuals, but they are the only remaining individuals and I did ask for whatthey should/can do and not what they would do. I feel like this one might fall on the wrong side of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's definitely a tad broad and invites speculative answers, I'm not entirely sure if this alone would make it closeworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:23:49.987" Title="Case Study #4 - overactor" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2016-02-15T12:01:17.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Badges Progress&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the users like to see how they fare with their virtual rewards, namely badges. And sometimes it isn't easy to know how much more we have to wait before we get such and such badge. Here are some queries which can give some views on those. Or explanation on how to get to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/87/curious&quot;&gt;Curious&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/88/inquisitive&quot;&gt;Inquisitive&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/89/socratic&quot;&gt;Socratic&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/33/favorite-question&quot;&gt;Favorite Question&lt;/a&gt; /  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/36/stellar-question&quot;&gt;Stellar Question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/20/nice-question&quot;&gt;Nice Question&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/21/good-question&quot;&gt;Good Question&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/22/great-question&quot;&gt;Great Question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/26/popular-question&quot;&gt;Popular Question&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/27/notable-question&quot;&gt;Notable Question&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/28/famous-question&quot;&gt;Famous Question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;Tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/19/enlightened&quot;&gt;Enlightened&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/91/refiner&quot;&gt;Refiner&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/92/illuminator&quot;&gt;Illuminator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/15/generalist&quot;&gt;Generalist&lt;/a&gt; =&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/435407/generalist-progression-updated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Generalist Progression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/18/guru&quot;&gt;Guru&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/23/nice-answer&quot;&gt;Nice Answer&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/24/good-answer&quot;&gt;Good Answer&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/25/great-answer&quot;&gt;Great Answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/populist&quot;&gt;Populist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/57/reversal&quot;&gt;Reversal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/64/revival&quot;&gt;Revival&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/17/necromancer&quot;&gt;Necromancer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/14/self-learner&quot;&gt;Self-Learner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/50/tenacious&quot;&gt;Tenacious&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/51/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;Unsung Hero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Participation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/31/commentator&quot;&gt;Commentator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/56/pundit&quot;&gt;Pundit&lt;/a&gt; =&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/293394/how-long-until-i-get-the-pundit-badge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt; for a given user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/54/enthusiast&quot;&gt;Enthusiast&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/55/fanatic&quot;&gt;Fanatic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/epic&quot;&gt;Epic&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/43/legendary&quot;&gt;Legendary&lt;/a&gt; =&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/235570/epic-legendary-progress-which-days-were-it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;When did you reach the cap?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/30/beta&quot;&gt;Beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/68/convention&quot;&gt;Convention&lt;/a&gt; =&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/166532/how-close-am-i-to-convention-badge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How close am I to a convention badge?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/65/talkative&quot;&gt;Talkative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/69/outspoken&quot;&gt;Outspoken&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/13/yearling&quot;&gt;Yearling&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Moderation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/70/deputy&quot;&gt;Deputy&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/76/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/32/civic-duty&quot;&gt;Civic Duty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/78/reviewer&quot;&gt;Reviewer&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/83/steward&quot;&gt;Steward&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/12/strunk-white&quot;&gt;Strunk &amp;amp; White&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/copy-editor&quot;&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/44/electorate&quot;&gt;Electorate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/74/archaeologist&quot;&gt;Archaeologist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/73/proofreader&quot;&gt;Proofreader&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/63/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;Sportsmanship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/62/suffrage&quot;&gt;Suffrage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/79/research-assistant&quot;&gt;Research Assistant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/11/taxonomist&quot;&gt;Taxonomist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/71/vox-populi&quot;&gt;Vox Populi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Others&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/60/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/61/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T14:21:03.763" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T14:21:03.763" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-15T12:01:17.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T12:53:26.637" Score="9" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In light of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2833/328&quot;&gt;upcoming topic challenge&lt;/a&gt; using the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; I wondered if this tag would benefit from being renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt;. Calendar might be a more common word, but it rather arbitrarily excludes some topics that would be covered by a timekeeping tag&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest renaming &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt;, since there seems to be no point in having two tags coexist when one is included by the other but the extra ground isn't massive. Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; should be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1: such as a hypothetical &quot;How long would this society's seconds be?&quot; question&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T01:44:56.297" Title="Should the calendar tag be renamed timekeeping?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3147" CreationDate="2016-02-15T13:54:54.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. Time-keeping is more general, and IMO it would also be more useful than calendar, since this one is quite specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T13:54:54.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2016-02-15T14:07:19.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd love to read an article about &lt;strong&gt;how to mantain the internal consistency betweeen history, culture and technological development&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm creating a world and have many problems trying to be consistent. I think many people may have this problem and benefit from an article kike this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T14:07:19.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3124" CreationDate="2016-02-15T20:37:45.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer from the community team, 2/15/16:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&#xA;  Area 51 proposals which have been sitting in either the definition or commitment phase for more than 1 year are subject to immediate closure, and they will be deleted shortly after that. You can read more about that here: Closing a Proposal After 1+ Year in Definition or Commitment – This is what caused the proposal you linked to be both closed and deleted.&#xA;  Regards,&#xA;  Stack Overflow Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the proposal is re-active and has 9 followers (!) we'll see what happens....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal hs moved from Definition into &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95463/what-if?referrer=1pJBoPD-F9bZmn5-ipqbWg2&quot;&gt;Commitement phase&lt;/a&gt; as of 16 June 2016. Even if you've no interest it might be worth taking a look to chime in on a couple of discussions that reference WB.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/22863/149027&quot;&gt;How is this different from Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/22900/149027&quot;&gt;Scope and existing SE overlap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in September of 2016 the proposal was shut down by SE staff. If interested you can find the closure-message &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/25324/149027&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Be aware, though, that this post sits attached to a deleted proposal--there's likely no point in commenting or voting. Some of the enthusiasm for &quot;WhatIf&quot; moved over to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/109272/speculative-science&quot;&gt;Speculative Science&lt;/a&gt; proposal, which as of this writing sits in definition phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="12207" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T15:06:10.540" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T15:06:10.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T22:59:53.713" Score="12" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can see how many people have voted in the Worldbuilding election by looking at the number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/81/constituent&quot;&gt;Constituent&lt;/a&gt; badges awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a little friendly contest for no prize at all. Lets see who can post the number closest to the final number of constituents we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules are simple, post an answer or comment here before 12:00 UTC tomorrow with a guess of the number of Constituents we will have at the end of the election. You can't pick a number anyone else has chosen. The closest to the final number wins. &lt;sub&gt;One entry per person. The decision of the organizers is final. By taking part in this competition you sign over all rights to the color yellow and that story you wrote in English class when you were 7.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Congratulations to Overactor and XandarTheZenon for the closest guesses. Have a virtual cookie :)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The election site is saying 309, the badge count is 308. 309 means Overactor wins, 308 means Xander wins so I'm calling it a join win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T19:27:38.417" Title="Number of Voters Betting Pool" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-15T23:01:07.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sticking with my big round number of &lt;strong&gt;400&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T23:01:07.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-15T23:03:54.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say &lt;strong&gt;347&lt;/strong&gt;. There's no reason for the choice whatsoever. It's probably a terrible guess. Nothing interesting even happened in all of 347 AD. But it's my choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T23:03:54.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-15T23:04:06.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll go with 375.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T23:04:06.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-15T23:06:52.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll go with &lt;strong&gt;351&lt;/strong&gt;, possibly making for interesting interactions with HDE 226868's guess.  C'mon, 349!  Make the judge decide how to break ties!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T23:06:52.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-15T23:17:46.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;346 Because that is what my RNG told me (randomnumber(339,350)).&#xA;It is also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FranelNumber.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Franel number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-02-15T23:23:36.113" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T23:23:36.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T00:20:16.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The glass is half empty, and the final number will be 300. I'll make the reservations in hell, we can all dine there tomorrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T00:20:16.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3159" CreationDate="2016-02-16T00:29:16.993" Score="10" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question focused on a certain term led to some confusion for those trying to answer it, as the way the term was used in the question made it unclear what the user was asking. The user replied to the comments on their post in a bit of a hostile manner since the term wasn't immediately understood by other users. The user then deleted their question(?) and rewrote it in the same manner they commented in with linked examples of the term to explain what they meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I researched the term in order to find information that would help me in providing an answer, but I saw the user's original question also posted on Reddit. The same user's reply to answers there involved the phrase &quot;those [*****] at stack exchange&quot;, etc., which struck me as incredibly rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather not name any names, which is why I was so vague, but my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a situation where a SE user publicly refers to other SE users (without their usernames directly involved) in a derogatory and harmful manner on a different website, is/should the user be subject to some kind of action here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17072" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T21:57:49.087" Title="Handling Off Site Hostility" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3158" CreationDate="2016-02-16T00:45:32.293" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was any specific user targeted directly?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, calm down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDbak.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDbak.png&quot; alt=&quot;comic from xkcd&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can not fix the internet, and as long as they are not harming the content on the site, like vandalizing answers or posting rude comments in the fields or in chat here, we can not really punish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;those [*****] at stack exchange&quot; includes a lot of people, including you and me, so it can hardly be very person-oriented. (And I would not have taken it very seriously if I had seen it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the same person mocks the same person again multiple times, we are starting to have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until then, get a cup of tea or whatever you drink in your country, and find a some nice posts to read here. There are plenty of better stuff to spend your time on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T21:57:49.087" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T21:57:49.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T05:18:06.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is &lt;strong&gt;301&lt;/strong&gt; It's a good number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="16736" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T14:33:26.137" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:33:26.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3145" CreationDate="2016-02-16T05:33:20.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;They all seem on topic and perfectly answerable to me, as long as the people answering know what they're talking about. The many people who upvoted them definitely thought so. And the people who didn't close vote them obviously thought they were on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for the last question, I feel that it is in topic, because you are talking about the human species as a whole (a very small whole) who would have a specific goal in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T05:33:20.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3158" CreationDate="2016-02-16T06:51:08.250" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few points to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Someone is rude on StackExchange&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag the offending post, indicate precisely the part that is offending. The moderators (remember to vote for them today) will see which actions need to be taken. They can directly delete the offending parts, up to ban a user with the help of the StackExchange staff. If the user starts calling name, it is more likely that they will get a free ticket to... any place which isn't here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Someone is rude about SE users on other sites.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are yourself on that other site, you may consider appealing to the moderators there. Most forums prefer to avoid conflicts on public display.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are specifically concerned by the offense, you may consider legal actions. But those will probably result to be costly, and long. Is the offense really worth it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recommended approach is usually to follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3159/9685&quot;&gt;Hohmannfan's answer&lt;/a&gt;: sit up, take a deep breath, and forget all about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Never to be done&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it is here or somewhere else, you should never reply and engage in the path proposed by the offending user. You have more to lose than to win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T06:51:08.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T07:12:55.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;327&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No particular reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T07:12:55.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T08:18:14.457" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is &lt;strong&gt;316.4&lt;/strong&gt;, since that's the id of this answer divided by 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T08:18:14.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T09:25:30.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going for &lt;strong&gt;320&lt;/strong&gt;, as I'm arriving late to the party and mercilessly exploiting the gaps left by everyone who has voted so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T09:25:30.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T12:33:19.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will go even higher: &lt;strong&gt;404&lt;/strong&gt; voters, because internet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Because I guessed too late, &lt;strong&gt;I am not eligible to win&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="2071" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T12:55:42.750" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T12:55:42.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-02-16T13:34:54.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;250 constituents voted in the last election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T13:34:54.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T14:08:49.147" Score="9" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25272/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-ship-capable-of-crossing-the-pacific&quot;&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;  This question asks if building a trans-Pacific ship is feasible using only merchants as the shipbuilders. (They die horribly in one way or another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Nope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt;  Not IG since the question asks for a binary Yes/No with some justification.  IG tends to generate open ended lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25724/what-good-are-herbivores-in-an-animal-army&quot;&gt;What good are herbivores in an animal army?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic?&lt;/strong&gt; No.  A fantasy world of human style conflict but carried out by carnivores and herbivores is definitely worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt; No, since the question outlines a set of constraints for the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26991/how-to-defend-against-the-convince-me-ray-gun&quot;&gt;How to defend against the “convince-me” ray gun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes.  The question focuses on a world mechanic involving a semi-involuntary mind control/idea implantation at a distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't think so.  Mind control ray guns seems very world-builder-y to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt; No, because there were sufficient constraints to limit the answers and decide a &quot;best&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21142/how-do-you-find-a-mate-when-everyone-looks-amazing&quot;&gt;How do you find a mate when everyone looks amazing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes.  The question asks for a description of specific adaptations or sociological systems that would influence how a person goes about finding a mate when personal appearance is no longer fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  No.  Genetic manipulation of appearance is definitely on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt; Likely not.  Though this question can generate a list of possible fitness criteria, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23192/what-is-the-best-apex-predator-to-thin-the-zombie-herds&quot;&gt;What is the best apex predator to thin the zombie herds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes.  The question addresses natural ecosystems after most humans turn to zombies with respect to apex predators.  Asking about the &lt;em&gt;entire ecosystem&lt;/em&gt; would have been too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;  No.  A world of zombies is definitely WB material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/strong&gt; Edgy. The question asks for &quot;the best&quot; apex predator to thin the zombie herds but doesn't really specify any criteria for what constitutes &quot;best&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T09:58:32.707" Title="Case Studies - Green's Highest Viewed Questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3145" CreationDate="2016-02-16T14:36:56.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3646/can-i-keep-our-universe-but-without-the-speed-limit-of-light&quot;&gt;Can I keep our universe, but without the speed limit (of light)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Looks good to me, one might call it universe-building but I think that definitely fits here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; The problem I have with these kinds of questions is that they're not always the easiest to answer. Changing the fundamental laws of the universe generally throws out most forms of knowledge we might have. But in this case I think it's a narrow enough question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1359/how-do-i-prevent-my-turtle-from-collapsing-under-its-own-gravity&quot;&gt;How do I prevent my turtle from collapsing under its own gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Yep, creature design is on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, you are asking for &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; solution to the problem, with no real criteria to judge answers, which could border on 'idea generation'. It's also a bit too broad, since you state that even the laws of physics can be changed to get this to work, which sounds to me more like the magic that you didn't want to use. The question seems to be of the form &quot;I don't know how to get this to work, please provide me with some ideas&quot;, which is the kind of question I'd like us to avoid. So I might consider voting to close, though it is almost a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3049/what-could-cause-an-avian-species-to-become-intelligent&quot;&gt;What could cause an avian species to become intelligent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; Yep. Evolution seems on-topic to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Yeah, this is idea generation. When analyzing James's questions, I realized that answers should be the primary idea generators, not the questions. That said, the accepted answer to this question attempts to answer a more general, 'what does it take to become intelligent?' question, which I think would be on-topic if it was ever asked (and maybe it has been). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2625/could-a-disaster-kill-all-human-life-on-earth-but-leave-astronauts-in-low-orbi&quot;&gt;Could a disaster kill all (human) life on Earth but leave astronauts in low orbit alive long enough to return?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; This one is tenuous. I like to go to my shoot-someone-from-space question and say that since it was closed for more of a plot event than a worldbuilding aspect, that this should also be closed for the same reason. But since I thought my shoot-someone-from-space question was on-topic, I would be fine letting this one in, as long as people agree I was right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, the way you ask it, it should have yes or no answers, but the only way to really back up these answers are to provide lists of possible disasters. Plus, you're asking for way too much specifics; this looks to me like a 'everyone describe a really interesting way this can happen' question, which I'll admit are fun to answer and to read other answers, but I don't think they should be allowed. Or maybe they should, I don't know, that's worth considering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3188/what-should-three-men-and-three-women-do-if-everyone-else-is-dead&quot;&gt;What should three men and three women do if everyone else is dead?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About world building?&lt;/strong&gt; There are only a few characters involved, but it's not really their actions as individuals you're worried about. You want to know about them as a species, as the last of humanity, so I think it works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; This seems like more idea generation to me, but I would say it is much easier to judge objectively. So not too bad, but could be better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary:&lt;/strong&gt; A lot of these seem like idea generation to me. I know we've been saying that 'everything is idea generation', but my and James' questions have shown that that's not true. These questions don't seem as bad as some, but I definitely don't think they're the best examples of how we should encourage users to ask their questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:36:56.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3158" CreationDate="2016-02-16T16:09:29.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't fix the Internet, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3159/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; points out.  People on other sites will say things, sometimes things we don't like, and there's not much we can or should do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when a user is specifically &lt;em&gt;targeting&lt;/em&gt; a user off-site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/226499/162102&quot;&gt;there's not much SE can do about it&lt;/a&gt;.  This doesn't even rise to the level of harassment; it's just somebody saying unkind things.  A question was asked on Community Building about how a community can defend itself from this sort of thing; I &lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/676/83&quot;&gt;said some things there&lt;/a&gt; that you might find helpful.  Bottom line: don't feed the trolls, definitely don't engage a troll on his home turf (like his own blog), and if somebody is seriously misrepresenting the site (not just ranting) somewhere where it really matters, at most just offer a calm fact-check.  For something like what you describe here, I'd just ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:23.830" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T16:09:29.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2985" CreationDate="2016-02-16T16:30:39.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 17 questions and 94 answers, for an average of 5.53 answers per question. A total of 5570 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35499/what-does-the-minotaur-eat&quot;&gt;What does the Minotaur eat?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;177 total votes, 42 question votes, 11 answers, 7146 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35027/help-my-mother-in-law-got-mind-uploaded-and-now-pesters-me-through-the-surround&quot;&gt;Help! My Mother-in-law got Mind-Uploaded and now pesters me through the surround system&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;172 total votes, 41 question votes, 19 answers, 7758 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35537/politically-correct-valkyries-why-do-they-choose-who-they-choose&quot;&gt;Politically Correct Valkyries: Why do they choose who they choose?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;75 total votes, 21 question votes, 7 answers, 3039 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35050/creating-a-siren-song&quot;&gt;Creating a Siren song&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;71 total votes, 20 question votes, 7 answers, 2129 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34892/evolution-of-giant-floating-mammals&quot;&gt;Evolution of giant floating mammals&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751/andyd273&quot;&gt;AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;27 total votes, 10 question votes, 6 answers, 807 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35157/mountain-sized-machines-how-do-they-move&quot;&gt;Mountain-sized Machines - How do they Move?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;19 total votes, 3 question votes, 9 answers, 215 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34922/lemmings-making-the-myth-the-reality&quot;&gt;Lemmings, making the myth the reality&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;17 total votes, 6 question votes, 6 answers, 264 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35282/how-would-a-person-who-is-a-snake-from-the-waist-down-move-around&quot;&gt;How would a person who is a snake from the waist down move around?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6908/thomas-jacobs&quot;&gt;Thomas Jacobs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 8 question votes, 2 answers, 168 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35223/on-the-origins-of-leprechauns&quot;&gt;On the origins of leprechauns&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7076/philip-rowlands&quot;&gt;Philip Rowlands&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 112 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35370/how-would-dragons-griffins-and-thunderbirds-affect-travel-and-trade&quot;&gt;How would dragons, griffins, and thunderbirds affect travel and trade?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;12 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 109 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34980/if-thunderbirds-were-real-how-would-it-affect-shepherds-and-ranchers&quot;&gt;If thunderbirds were real, how would it affect shepherds and ranchers?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 149 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34934/how-do-you-get-an-elemental-wind-animal&quot;&gt;How do you get an elemental wind animal?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15401/the-anathema&quot;&gt;The Anathema&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 3 question votes, 5 answers, 104 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35378/building-a-dragon&quot;&gt;Building a dragon&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17720/sam&quot;&gt;Sam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 144 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34885/could-bigfoot-have-actually-existed-how-could-they-be-there-leaving-no-trace&quot;&gt;Could Bigfoot have actually existed? How could they be there leaving no trace?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 122 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35095/if-mountain-lions-were-griffins-how-would-it-affect-other-animals&quot;&gt;If mountain lions were Griffins, how would it affect other animals?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 89 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35523/what-kind-of-technology-would-be-developed-in-the-process-of-creating-shapeshift&quot;&gt;What kind of technology would be developed in the process of creating shapeshifters?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43/jerenda&quot;&gt;Jerenda&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 1 answers, 114 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35752/the-evolution-of-african-wild-dogs-who-can-float&quot;&gt;The Evolution of African Wild Dogs who can float&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8538/ambarish-sathianathan&quot;&gt;Ambarish Sathianathan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 119 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T16:30:39.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T16:35:38.260" Score="7" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now begins our Twenty Seventh topic challenge!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 15 Feb - 29 Feb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the history of a world isn't always directly relevant to the story, it can add flavor and extra realism to the setting. You can use the history of a world to figure out how it will evolve and actually better understand how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T10:58:59.573" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #27: History" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T17:25:04.157" Score="7" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was sifting through tags today and what I will refer to as the &lt;em&gt;history section&lt;/em&gt; seems like a mess to me...ok maybe that is too harsh, but I still think we can make it better. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then a whole host of era specific tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renaissance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;renaissance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;renaissance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pre-industrial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pre-industrial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pre-industrial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/industrial-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;industrial-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;industrial-age&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; is good to go and the tag wiki is nice and specific.  We are talking about earth history with some sort of change be it major or minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also happy with the age/era specific tags, I think those make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would propose:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We eliminate the history tag, as it is too broad to be useful in categorization.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We add a tag, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-creation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-creation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-creation&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-development&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-development&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-development&lt;/a&gt; or something similar for tagging questions related to creating an completely non-earth related history for a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes I recognize the irony that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; is our current topic challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T17:32:07.853" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T17:59:39.690" Title="What shall we do with the history tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T20:18:09.197" Score="29" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;first moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 4 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/627.png&quot; alt=&quot;HDE 226868&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/28.png&quot; alt=&quot;Monica Cellio&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/49.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tim B&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/3510.png&quot; alt=&quot;Serban Tanasa&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will become your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderator team&lt;/a&gt; shortly. Please thank them for volunteering!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please join me in thanking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt; who served as moderators &lt;em&gt;pro tempore&lt;/em&gt; and did so much to help this community thrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/4895722432364544/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can learn more about the new team by reading their &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-the-moderators-6fe9d7119fd1#.dibvcg8t5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;group interview&lt;/a&gt; on the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T03:25:30.600" Title="2016 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-16T20:22:10.693" Score="14" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Congrats to the new moderators team. I am sure you will make a great job!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I am glad I took part in the election, and it was really a good mood going around the chat. Many great candidates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And by the way, thanks to those who voted for me both in the primary and in the final part&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T20:22:10.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-16T20:31:12.377" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you @MichaelKjörling and @Vincent for your excellent moderation during the beta and early graduation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T20:31:12.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-16T22:50:32.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to the new moderators.  I may not have been elected, but at least I can rest assured that moderation of the site is in better hands than mine - not that I would have been &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, mind you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T22:50:32.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3033" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:31:24.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll keep this &lt;strike&gt;short&lt;/strike&gt; errr &lt;strike&gt;short-ish&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;cough cough&lt;/em&gt; medium-long,&lt;br&gt;(Apparently bad @ short answers :D ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too much plot asking (or leaning in that direction) does not fit &lt;br&gt;(credit goes to various answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having various criteria show a clear balance in a non-world building direction is the best way to determine if a question is of topic &lt;br&gt;(credit goes to @TimB)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waaay too broad &lt;br&gt;(credit goes to @Dronz)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said the above, I emphatically believe it is very important for us &lt;em&gt;to focus on changing the culture through as many non-modhammer-esque means as possible&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br&gt; With aggressive closing a very last resort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Justification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What we should care about is the average tenor of questions in &lt;strong&gt;aggregate&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br&gt;  &lt;em&gt;It's the general feel of the site that matters!!&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt; While we all agree the feel isn't quite right anymore, I believe the best fix is to mold the culture to something more fitting NOT add an aggressive close-hammer approach to the culture.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Over aggressive duplicate concerns, (despite the fact that Jeff Atwood said &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;stop worrying about it&lt;/a&gt;), with a nearly belligerent smack down of 'evil' duplicates, seems to have irrevocably changed the feel &amp;amp; decreased the value of StackOverflow (from my view @ least).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;It would be very disappointing to have the same experience here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Solutions (yep, failed @ teh short...)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the fortnightly challenge (great name too) but clearly ask for world building related questions (and maybe even kindly ask users to avoid asking questions unless they are developing a world this applies to)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possibly add another similar event, or string of events, in which users mention their most helpful world building questions here on meta (or wherever makes the most sense). e.g.: 'List the top two questions asked here on World Building that helped you develop a world.' OR 'List the single most valuable question you asked about a world you were developing' OR 'List the name of the user who you think gave the most useful World Building related answer in the last day'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migrate to a more fitting site if @ all possible (too heavy on plot goes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;... I actually don't know if there is anywhere for non-plot-but-not-really-world-building questions... but it would be best if we tried)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only actually close a question, (add the last close vote), if the OP/question asker has been unresponsive to multiple pleas to change their question to be more world building related.&lt;br&gt; If the user who asked the question is likely to go away from the experience of getting their question closed feeling positive, we win.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, not that my opinion matters much, but I don't feel that what if questions are inherently bad, they just need to actually be about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:23.937" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:31:24.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3180" CreationDate="2016-02-17T11:39:48.610" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just could not believe my eyes, seeing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3040/is-he-dead-yet&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; of mine as a hot meta post just now. I know that it was one before, but I could not figure out &lt;em&gt;why now?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11602/what-formula-should-be-used-to-determine-hot-questions&quot;&gt;this popular meta post&lt;/a&gt;, the aspects considered during calculation are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Votes [aka Score]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Views &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Answer Votes [aka Score]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(Whether the question has an accepted answer or not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Time question was originally asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Time of last activity on question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(Reputation of asker)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(Reputation(s) of answerers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not really see how the posts statisfies those criteria?&#xA;Have a look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Votes [aka Score]&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently it stands at +5, which is rather decent for WB-Meta but not extraordinary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Views&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I first looked at it, it stood at 70 views. Not that many...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answers&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exactly &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answer Votes [aka Score]&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;+8&lt;/em&gt; - again, quite decent but nothing special&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the question has an accepted answer or not&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time question was originally asked&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This and the next seems the most important to me, the question was asked &lt;em&gt;Feb 5&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time of last activity on question&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and last active &lt;em&gt;Feb 5&lt;/em&gt; as well; meaning 11 days in the past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, the reputation related aspects, though they do not appear in the formula mentioned in the meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reputation of asker&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;394&lt;/em&gt;. Meh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reputation(s) of answerers&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;~5.1k&lt;/em&gt; impressive, but not that thrilling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand how it got hot the time it was posted - but now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just do be clear, I am not sad about what's happening, after all it's some attention to my own post (yay) - but this just does not seem right. Aside from that, I do not think that this specific question has much relevance now, as it was related to a specific situation that is now resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is: &lt;strong&gt;How come this post landet in the hot meta post section?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed by a &lt;em&gt;Should it?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As an example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;wouldn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3158/handling-off-site-hostility&quot;&gt;Handling Off Site Hostility&lt;/a&gt; statisfy the requirements much better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly calculating the hotness scores to prove my point, I resulted with a score of &lt;strong&gt;~0,064&lt;/strong&gt; for my question and &lt;strong&gt;~2,17&lt;/strong&gt; for the example - a significant difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T14:20:47.207" Title="Am I time travelling?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3179" CreationDate="2016-02-17T12:12:44.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The logical answer is that there are only so many meta posts, so anything reasonably recent and &quot;popular&quot; is likely to be selected at some point. I'm not sure what the refresh cycle is (how often it changes the meta post that's hot right now), or whether everyone sees the same &quot;hot meta posts&quot; at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147/should-the-calendar-tag-be-renamed-timekeeping?cb=1&quot;&gt;the one I have right now&lt;/a&gt; is even less &quot;hot&quot; by the criteria you posted than yours. The implication here is that it switches regularly to get people looking at the different discussions. Certainly, using those same criteria, your post would easily be in the top 20 most &quot;Hot&quot; questions in Meta within the last two weeks. If the other more recent posts were all recently featured it could have run out of more topical stuff to display and gone back to old stuff...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, or there's a routine that ensures that any remotely popular questions by users automatically show up in their &quot;hot questions&quot; box in order to make them feel self-important and more likely to post, as part of some strange user-manipulation scheme to increase the amount of questions asked. Depends on how much you like your conspiracy theories!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.107" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T12:12:44.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-17T13:32:39.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi guys, thank you for the fantastic job you will do and you have done!!!&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Misters and misses moderators, welcome and thanks. We have elected you because we thought you will do the work well  with responsability.Know you'll do a fantastic job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Michael Kjorling, @Vincent, thank you very much for what you've done. A full year has passed and you worked much and well. Let's take a rest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T13:32:39.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="417" CreationDate="2016-02-17T16:19:13.970" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to thank all four of our pro-tem mods for their service to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We just finished &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;our first election&lt;/a&gt;, and, sadly, Vincent and Michael Kjörling will be leaving us as mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Kjörling, thanks for helping to guide us through the early stages of the site, especially on meta. You've helped us get through a lot of tricky discussions on scope, tagging, design, and a host of other topics, as well as providing a lot of great questions and answers on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vincent, you stepped up when the site needed you most, and spent so much time tagging, retagging, editing, and organizing tag wikis - both with meta posts and behind-the-scenes edits. I don't know if people appreciated those contributions enough; they've proved important in improving hundreds and hundreds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the both of you will stay around and keep on doing what you do best: Guiding the site through tough times in a variety of ways. Thank you so much for all you've done for Worldbuilding Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica Cellio and Tim B, you guys have also done fantastic stuff during the beta phase, and I'm glad that you'll be staying on as mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica, you've done so much to bring Worldbuilding to an important place in the network. You helped promote us through the blog and made use of your many connections on other sites to get our name out there, and improve inter-site relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim B, you've also done many of the same things Monica did. Your blog posts have been awesome. You've also gotten us onto the HNQ list through many good, popular questions. I look forward to seeing more in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All four of you guys were the most important force in helping Worldbuilding graduate in a relatively short time (only a year or so!). I look forward to your continued guidance in a number of ways in the time to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T16:19:13.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3173" CreationDate="2016-02-17T16:52:51.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok I have been thinking about this and I think I have my final recommendation (pending you all slaughtering it with red ink/sheep's blood).  It mainly centers around standardizing the tags and hopefully making use more clear to world builders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eliminate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; it's simply too generic to be useful in categorizing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-alternate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-alternate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-alternate&lt;/a&gt; to support a new convention (Ill elaborate on the next step)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rename the era specific tags to:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-ancient&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-ancient&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-ancient&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-medieval&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-renaissance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-renaissance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-renaissance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-preindustrial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-preindustrial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-preindustrial&lt;/a&gt;  (we can probably burninate this one?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-industrial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-industrial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-industrial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-modern&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-modern&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-modern&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the form ensures that anyone typing &lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt; will come across the more specific versions of the time periods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-fictional&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-fictional&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-fictional&lt;/a&gt; to cover history questions related to fictional/created worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change set would require us going through all the history questions and applying the new proper tags, 51 questions at this point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T16:58:14.763" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T16:58:14.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3173" CreationDate="2016-02-17T17:59:39.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In no particular order, my thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; is indeed very broad. Adding &quot;history&quot; to the &lt;em&gt;end&lt;/em&gt; of the tags missing it would ensure that anyone typing the word &quot;history&quot; comes across the more specific tags and would then pick the era-specific tag most appropriate to their question. &lt;strong&gt;Delete&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we're changing them, I greatly prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-ancient&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-ancient&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-ancient&lt;/a&gt;, as it makes more sense grammatically and doesn't inhibit any searches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; has a far broader scope than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-history&lt;/a&gt;. Changing the tags that don't currently specify history to include that word runs the risk of excluding certain questions currently in the tag list. It's not a huge problem, but one we'd want to consider. I present these three questions from the Medieval section as examples of questions that would no longer fit quite as well if the tag changed to specify history:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12634/how-can-i-imprison-a-wizard-who-can-walk-through-walls&quot;&gt;How can I imprison a wizard who can walk through walls?&lt;/a&gt; The era it's set in is only peripherally related to the main question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6411/possible-distance-travelled-by-horse-over-6-weeks&quot;&gt;Possible distance traveled by horse over 6 weeks?&lt;/a&gt; Horses move at the same speed whether in modern or pre-modern times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29491/would-a-common-language-develop-in-a-fantasy-world&quot;&gt;Would a common language develop in a fantasy world?&lt;/a&gt; Mostly interested in linguistics, not technology. They just need to be pre-modern (and therefore pre-Internet) to get their desired outcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of these tags are almost never used.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renaissance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;renaissance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;renaissance&lt;/a&gt; has 9 questions. Almost all of them are also tagged as Medieval or would otherwise easily fit into a different tag. Very few are actually Renaissance-specific. Although the Renaissance was really cool, apparently we don't want to build worlds in that time. &lt;strong&gt;Delete&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pre-industrial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pre-industrial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pre-industrial&lt;/a&gt; has 3 questions, all of which could either be Medieval or Ancient History. The age described is horribly broad, hence the broadness of the questions within it. &lt;strong&gt;Delete.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/industrial-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;industrial-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;industrial-age&lt;/a&gt; has 8, but all of them are actually about this specific era, which makes sense because the Industrial Age was a very exciting and rapidly-changing time. There's lot of potential for questions in this era. &lt;strong&gt;Keep.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like the idea of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inventing-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inventing-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inventing-history&lt;/a&gt; tag of some kind. Alternate history is still clearly about Earth. An inventing history tag would allow people to ask questions about non-Earth-based worlds. &lt;strong&gt;Create&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T17:59:39.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-02-17T18:03:34.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/industrial-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;industrial-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;industrial-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While exploring James's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3173/what-shall-we-do-with-the-history-tags/3184#3184&quot;&gt;history tags question&lt;/a&gt;, I discovered this tag and think it's fascinating. The Industrial Era was a hotspot of innovation and development, and I feel that there's loads of potential for industrial innovations in new and unique worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T18:03:34.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3187" CreationDate="2016-02-17T18:14:47.643" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This badge is earned by earning an excess of 200 (What are they?) points in one day. According to the timeline on my account, one day I got 212 points, 100 of that because I was trusted on other sites in the community. Is that why it didn't give me the achievement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note - It's not that important to me, I'm just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T18:37:24.713" Title="Why don't I have the Mortarboard Badge?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3186" CreationDate="2016-02-17T18:26:07.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need 200 points from votes and accepts (+2 and +15 from accepts and +x from bounties count) to gain the &lt;code&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/code&gt; badge. The +100 from associating a trusted account does not count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45870/why-no-mortarboard-for-me&quot;&gt;this post on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/101184/mortarboard-badge-not-awarded-for-200-reputation-in-a-day&quot;&gt;also this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the badges are only calculated every few hours, so even if you did get 200 points from voting, you may not see it for a few hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mortarboard bronze; awarded once&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Earn more than 200 reputation in a single day&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Reputation points earned for associating accounts do not count for the badge&#xA;  Each &quot;day&quot; lasts from midnight UTC to immediately before midnight, UTC; days are not counted in local time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Exceeding the cap is defined as earning ≥200 reputation in one day from a combination of upvotes and accepts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T18:37:24.713" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3186" CreationDate="2016-02-17T18:29:24.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 100 points for the trusted site bonus doesn't count toward the daily 200 limit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T18:29:24.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2016-02-17T23:18:57.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I mostly agree with everyone else on these ones with one big exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nanobots: On topic. The fact that it could be asked on biology does not make it off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ice breath: On topic since we've established that creature design is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orbital Bullets: &lt;strong&gt;On topic&lt;/strong&gt;. In my opinion this question should be allowed it does not ask &quot;will&quot; someone do this, it does not ask &quot;should&quot; someone do this. It asks &quot;can&quot; someone do this. Would and Should are not Worldbuilding, Can is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Planet plants: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T23:18:57.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2016-02-17T23:30:00.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;World Destruction: I have mixed feelings on this one. I'm not sure it is really world building. I've got a combination of concerns around the broad scope and the fact that it's not really about building anything. Perhaps if you asked about the plausibility of destroying the world with a specific element that might be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Space warfare: On topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fall of empires: On topic. While it may be broad it's actually reasonably constrained and just asking &quot;most important&quot; helps on that. Maybe some more constraint would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multi-race evolution: Mixed feelings on this one, it feels a bit too opinion based, you could make a valid argument for virtually any combination. Maybe the nature of the tree needed constraining or a way to judge which tree is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion peace: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T23:30:00.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3145" CreationDate="2016-02-17T23:37:31.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speed  of Light: Maybe too broad but overall I think it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turtle: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avian Intelligence: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISS surviving apocalypse: Off topic - clearly too broad just from the number of answers and the fact that several answers are a list of possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6 survivors: Too broad. &quot;what could these people do in order to maximize humanity's chances of survival?&quot; was maybe ok but then you added &quot;(and what are some less obvious problems they will face?)&quot; which was immediately definitely too broad. If you trimmed it down to the first question then maybe it's ok. It's a &quot;can&quot; question not a &quot;should&quot; or &quot;would&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T23:37:31.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3101" CreationDate="2016-02-18T00:30:11.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This information &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; be available (albeit through a bug, and hidden in the websocket's frames) through the websocket chat uses to communicate with the server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That bug has now been fixed, and the information is no longer available. Same for flags, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T00:30:11.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T14:48:49.723" Score="12" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding, it seems, is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a What If site.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's start making that happen. If we don't want these questions around, then I think the first step is with close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have an Idea Generation close reason, which there are mixed opinions about. Personally, I think it's actually pretty useful, and covers most what-if questions. However, it would no doubt be better if we had a close reason designed for, and dedicated to, closing what-if questions. So here are two closely related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we remove the Idea Generation close reason?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we add a What If close reason, and what should its wording be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that if you're proposing a wording, there's a 500-character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T14:59:52.963" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:30:04.703" Title="What if Worldbuilding banned What If questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2016-02-18T14:59:27.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;1. Should we remove the Idea Generation close reason?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Much as I personally make use of it, and despite my generally good opinion of it, I also think it has its problems. For one, I don't think it was well defined when we added it, and was done in a little more of a hurry than perhaps it should have been at the time. Oh well, what's past is past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; not very well understood what we should use it for, and in what ways it's different from the primarily opinion-based close reason. There are differences, but they're subtle and not very obvious. At this stage, it would in my opinion be easier and in the long run better for the site to remove it and work out what we can do instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. Should we add a What If close reason, and what should its wording be?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; what we can do instead. We should add a close reason that specifically addresses what-if style questions. This will likely be &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; to the primarily opinion-based close reason and to the Idea Generation reason, but will hopefully make it more obvious what's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps something like this would do the job:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What-If style question&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;mdash; questions that pose a hypothetical scenario and ask what the outcomes might be, without specifying details relevant to the worldbuilding problem, are both too broad and difficult to objectively answer, and are hence off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T14:59:27.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:19:32.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I fully agree with the thought of removing &quot;idea-generation&quot; (after all, idea-generation is what we do, really)...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the 'what-if' closing reason that would replace it still seems too broad... How many details are needed to have successfully completed the requirement for having &quot;specified relevant details&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my suggestion. Open to edits and suggestions, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please Show Your Work&lt;/strong&gt; closing reason &amp;mdash; questions that pose a hypothetical scenario and ask what the outcomes might be, &lt;strong&gt;without showing that the question author has put any thought into the implications of the scenario themselves&lt;/strong&gt;. Worldbuilding exists to help along and augment the work of the worldbuilder, not do the work in their place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T15:30:04.703" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:30:04.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:21:05.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;1: Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least...not yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a larger discussion to be had here about close reasons and how to handle what is and is not off topic. While IG/WI are an important part of that discussion they are only part of it and I'd prefer a more integrated approach rather than trying to patch one part of the problem without looking at the bigger picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:21:05.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:21:52.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem isn't &lt;strong&gt;what-if&lt;/strong&gt; questions &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, and I'm reluctant to use that phrase as the name of a close reason lest we mislead people.  &lt;em&gt;Many&lt;/em&gt; of our questions ask &quot;what if?&quot;; we're building new worlds and need to work out the details, after all.  The problem isn't &quot;what if?&quot;; the problem is questions that are open-ended and ask us to speculate or hold a conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with &lt;strong&gt;idea generation&lt;/strong&gt;, the name doesn't capture the problem.  Let's fix that for both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should remove the &lt;strong&gt;idea generation&lt;/strong&gt; reason now (it's not only not helping but doing some harm), and while we do need to develop one or more new close reasons to cover our scope boundaries, we need to be clear and not over-broad in describing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:21:52.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T16:06:32.323" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that has been coming up while reading/answering questions, and as I'm fairly new to the site I'm unsure what's acceptable/encouraged. In particular, it tends to come up when addressing questions on topics such as FTL travel, e.g. this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35207/interplanetary-vs-interstellar-travel&quot;&gt;Interplanetary vs Interstellar travel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone wants to know about FTL specifically, the hard science answer is usually &amp;quot;FTL is impossible&amp;quot;, and rightfully so. But SF involving FTL travel is both an enormously popular subgenre and a lot of fun, and it's an area where most people willing to suspend disbelief - so answers often take the angle of providing solutions that are satisfying to readers, or maximally compatible with suspension of disbelief, or most convenient in terms of constructing plotlines, as you'll see the answers to the question I linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've chosen to use FTL as a case study because it comes up a lot, but this applies to more or less any question where &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; degree of handwaving is necesary to make the story work, and thus answering the question is a matter of deciding what kind of handwave will work best. I want to clarify - is there a risk of blurring the lines into writing/plotting advice? What makes the difference between a discussion of making an idea work in a way that's plausible, versus making it work in a way that's entertaining to read? Or is the latter not so much of a problem, within reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Test cases&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Good?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Slow [your FTL model] down to days [across interplanetary distances] and it's still a trip that people could make routinely, but it would be painfully slow for interstellar travel. Like if it takes, say, 2 days to get to Mars, that's an average speed of 3.1 million miles per hour. Incredible speed! But at that rate it would take you over 200 years to reach Alpha Centauri.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - this excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/35233/8579&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; feels good to me. It's providing a scientific explanation for something the author wants to contrive (how to have a story constrained to a single star system, but where interplanetary travel is still fast enough to be convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bad?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Invented so as not to call anyone out specifically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think you should make interplanetary travel take between a few weeks and a few months, as this will give your story an Age of Sail feel, allowing you to tap into those tropes. Long journeys raise the possibility of illnesses on board the ship, adds tension via the threat of malfunction/being stranded, and maybe adds drama if the long time spent out in interplanetary space, coupled with other factors, leads to a mutiny on board.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that satisfying readers and their expectations/preferences is a part of worldbuilding, but maybe not the part this site wants to address? Given that it's the area which begins to overlap with discussion of general writing concerns like pacing, tension, providing meaningful but surmountable challenges for characters, avoiding a feeling of &lt;em&gt;deus ex machina&lt;/em&gt;, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8579" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T16:17:52.307" Title="Asking for/providing ways to make something believable and/or entertaining, rather than scientifically accurate" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3198" CreationDate="2016-02-18T16:17:52.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These sort of questions are perfectly fine, and note that we also support fantastical and magic based questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The criteria for all questions, whether science based or not are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they about building a world (or more generally a universe/multiverse/whatever)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they answerable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of details that follow onto that such as the question needs to specify enough detail, be sufficiently constrained, etc. Fundamentally though unless the question has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; then we're talking about believability and self-consistency not real-world physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'Bad?' answer you give isn't even bad really. It would very much depend on the question that you are answering but I can see an answer like that being appropriate for some questions. As you rightly say though we do want to steer clear of plot/pacing/etc advice and we're actually currently discussing just where those lines should be drawn. There's a number of meta posts on the subject at the moment and expect to see more joining them soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T16:17:52.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T16:20:35.907" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series?rq=1&quot;&gt;the case study series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22769/can-stars-exist-that-are-not-powered-by-nuclear-fusion&quot;&gt;Can stars exist that are not powered by nuclear fusion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; I would say yes, because whether or not this is possible is the key to the premise of my world (an artificial star). It is certainly strongly based in science, but I think that's okay. After all, I want my world to be believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I would say not. It's broad-ish, but a lot of the answers said that it wasn't possible, for various reasons, so maybe it's straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25658/how-would-a-war-between-immortals-be-fought&quot;&gt;How would a war between immortals be fought?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, as it defines tactics in a conflict that will impact the entire world (in this case, one nation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Possibly too broad, and it does focus on the actions of individuals - and there are a lot of possibilities, as evidenced by all the answers it got. So maybe this one's closeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23350/could-an-average-person-take-over-the-world&quot;&gt;Could an average person take over the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes; the actions of this person will shape the fate of the entire world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, it's currently closed, and one of the close voters was me. I think it's really too broad as it stands; there are loads of possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23765/how-can-i-make-my-languages-structurally-less-like-english&quot;&gt;How can I make my languages structurally less like English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Heck yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, this one could be too broad, but it's broader than most &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; questions, in my opinion. I think it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29199/how-would-government-change-if-everyone-died-by-the-age-of-25&quot;&gt;How would government change if everyone died by the age of 25?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; It's similar to a What-if? question, but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; set guidelines and explain what I've considered, as well as the background. It also focuses only on small part of my world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T10:58:32.753" Title="Case Study #6 - HDE 226868" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3217" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:43:15.853" Score="17" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3102/naming-our-robot&quot;&gt;Naming our robot&lt;/a&gt;, we should also try thinking up names for the other character on the poster, the Lady of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same rule applies - &lt;strong&gt;one post, one name suggestion per person&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9g49.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9g49.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T17:39:34.740" Title="Naming our lady" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:45:42.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Alynn&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a hat-tip to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15036/alynn-the-scientific-mage-science-principles&quot;&gt;brief series of questions&lt;/a&gt; I wrote a while back. I can see the scientific mage and her pet robot being a great force for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T17:45:42.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-18T18:25:40.213" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=alice&quot;&gt;drum roll&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Alice!!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T14:00:31.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3200" CreationDate="2016-02-18T19:16:55.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non fusion stars: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immortal wars: Subject is fine but too broad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Average Joe: Too broad. Subject is ok since it's &quot;can&quot; not &quot;should&quot; or &quot;would&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language structures: On topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;25: On topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T19:16:55.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-18T19:20:05.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pixie&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She just looks like a pixie to me, no reason beyond that :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T19:20:05.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T20:09:35.523" Score="27" ViewCount="1075" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: This question is the foundation stone of an attempt to more thoroughly define the scope of Worldbuilding by defining &quot;Risk Factors&quot; that make something Out Of Scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion of individual risk factors has started can can be found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3229/risk-factor-definition-too-individual&quot;&gt;Risk Factor definition: Too Individual/Character Based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3281/risk-factor-definition-too-story-based&quot;&gt;Risk Factor Definition: Too Story Based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is in Scope?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part does not seem too contentious. If it's to do with building a world that is in some way fictional then it is potentially in scope. The help center currently says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are &lt;strong&gt;welcome&lt;/strong&gt; that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaning in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;not about:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;http://history.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt; or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Role-playing Games&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may want to adjust these help center articles once this process is complete so please consider this a starting point, not a hard and fast set of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is not in Scope?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the real discussion starts, some questions are clearly in scope and answerable. Others however are not and are clearly out of scope. The problem comes though that we also get a large number of &quot;gray area&quot; questions that might be in scope but might not be and we have been inconsistent in whether we close those questions or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The plan moving forwards&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is simple, we define a number of Risk Factors. These are things that if present in a question to a sufficiently bad level cause it to be off topic. This question will be used to compile a list of potential Risk Factors and case studies for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post each Risk Factor in its own answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feel free to edit any answer to add or improve to the wording, do not change the meaning substantially though. For a substantially different meaning create a new Risk Factor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not worry too much about trying to set the line where each risk factor should be enough to close the question, however adding examples is valuable. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please don't discuss specific examples in these questions and answers, just add any you think might be relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once we know what the risk factors are we will ask separate questions to discuss each one and decide where the line should be drawn.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone should vote the proposed Risk Factors up or down for whether you consider them a valid or important reason to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We do not need the examples to all be out of scope. They just need to have that Risk Factor. Examples on both sides of the line will help us draw it in the correct place.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The risk factor template is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Risk Factor: **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T11:38:13.533" Title="Worldbuilding Scope - Risk Factors" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-18T20:14:34.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T20:10:33.793" Score="15" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;... taking any question that isn't accepted elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be a reminder, or refresher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These days, there are many questions about trying to set objective and clear limits for the scope of the site. But then, yesterday, I read that comment from a user from another site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such questions based on hypotheticals aren't really a good fit for Stack Exchange sites, as they're not likely to be useful to anyone else, and there isn't a ground-truth that can be examined when clarification is required. There is one exception: Worldbuilding is designed for such questions. If you want, flag this question for moderator attention, and we'll migrate it there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was on a question that got migrated to us. I have nothing against that particular user, I don't know them. But I'd rather like not to see such comments again. I know &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/were-changing-our-name-back-to-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;we are awesome&lt;/a&gt;, and we have some local specificities. Like, for example, we are more lenient than many sites with verbosity. We usually enjoy it even. Nevertheless, Worldbuilding is part of the StackExchange/StackOverflow Network (SEN). As such we follow the general definition that questions should not be open-ended, too broad or opinion-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hint, &lt;strong&gt;if your question is too broad or insufficiently specified in your site, it probably also is in ours&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem goes further. The last days, I have seen a few comments like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is sort of off topic for this community , it may be better if you ask at the physics stack exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, nothing against the user. Again, I don't know them. But, there are 152 sites within the SEN. Many have overlapping topics. An Anime of Science-Fiction or Fantasy would be on-topic both on Anime.SE and SFF.SE. Heck, if we talk about the Chronicles of Lodoss, it might fit in RPG.SE as well. For programming questions you have to choose between 4 or 5 sites. That does not make any of them less interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the same here. We don't want to close a question &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it would be on-topic somewhere else. That might, or might not be. But this isn't our problem. The user chose to ask the question here, we should discuss whether it is on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't deny our users to answer a question just because someone else might take it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two actions tend to the same thing, reduce the overall quality of questions here on worldbuilding. We don't want to collect questions that no-one else wants while sending good questions away. We should all actively support our new moderator team in ensuring that we keep a good quality of questions. And that even if the questions were on-topic somewhere else, people like to ask it here, because of our unique approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T20:26:31.063" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T20:59:15.170" Title="What the scope of Worldbuilding is NOT about" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3208" CreationDate="2016-02-18T20:28:06.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say a question was using tags that didn't match its question. Someone would probably go in and change the tags, so that user's question could attract the right kinds of answerers who will know the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I say, if we're not afraid to retag a question, why is it so wrong to migrate it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We aren't at war with the other sites in the SE network; I like to think that we're all just different sections of a growing database of knowledge, available to anyone with access to the Internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, though, is that the Internet is big. I mean really big. If someone asks a question that has a difficult answer, the person who's qualified to answer it might not regularly check this site. So, just like tagging questions, we try to put questions in places where we think the right people will see them. As a corollary to this, I would say that people on this site who can answer questions about things other than Worldbuilding shouldn't just lurk here. Go out, look on other sites, share your knowledge in the places it is needed most. Many of our top users already do this; if we're willing to share users, why can't we also share questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the unvoiced fear that many people have here is that Worldbuilding doesn't have a scope. We're worried that if we give up questions to sites that can answer them better, then we won't have any left to answer here. I don't think that's true, but even if it is I don't want to hoard good questions, keeping them from finding the right answers just so we can limp along pretending to be something we're not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, maybe the reason people think we're the catch-all site is because we never prove them wrong. They throw questions into us and never get anything back. If we start giving them questions that we don't think belong here, maybe they'll start realizing that we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have a scope, and they'll think twice about sending bad questions our way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, these are just my thoughts, I think I only tangentially refuted your argument. I agree with the first part, I just completely disagree with the second. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T20:59:15.170" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T20:59:15.170" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-02-18T20:35:33.413" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/slavery&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slavery&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slavery&lt;/a&gt;? After all we only have 7 slavery questions on the site, it would be interesting to see what else the community can come up with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T19:20:13.547" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T19:20:13.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-18T20:57:53.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;===Congrats on moderator, all!===&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy to have been with you through the election process, and participating in the chat. Go out and make us proud!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T20:57:53.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-02-18T22:47:39.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Show your Work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are asking about a hypothetical situation without a worldbuilding focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This covers the What-If questions. &lt;em&gt;Some&lt;/em&gt; what-ifs are okay, as long as they're not too broad (which we have Too Broad for) and have a focus on worldbuilding, rather than just a random thought. It's also okay to ask about a random thought, as long as you can phrase it as a worldbuilding scenario - we won't be able to tell the difference, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phrase the question as a worldbuilding scenario. Think something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;This is my world (describe your world). These are its people/culture/geography/whatever is relevant (describe them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Event X has happened (describe the event). What would the effects on the (specific aspect Y) be, with specific regards to (Z thing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rephrasing the question like this makes it obvious how the post relates to worldbuilding, and therefore enables people to answer it with a look at the wider world, rather than just that situation. The more specific you can be about the effects you want to look at, the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28573/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races&quot;&gt;Medieval politics with fantasy races&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T14:48:04.780" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-18T22:47:39.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-02-19T09:35:39.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Too Vague&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking about a world where not enough detail is available to give a specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This covers questions where the question itself is clear and on topic but not enough detail has been given. For example a lot of magic questions are asked that fail to define the magic system well enough. As a result the answers can either be &amp;quot;a wizard did it&amp;quot; or have far too many possibilities to evaluate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two common scenarios here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In science based questions -insert howto here-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In magic or fantastical based questions -insert howto here-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T09:35:39.147" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-19T09:35:39.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-19T14:07:09.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Calliope&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As our lady offers a refreshing design of the muse of epic poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4855" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T14:07:09.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-19T15:14:26.057" Score="21" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Pandora&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was given a jar, and warned to not open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She opened it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfectly in the curious spirit of a worldbuilder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T15:14:26.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-19T15:14:58.563" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the idea of using a character that has already been created by the users (I'd also love if the robot and lady become the protagonists of every hypothetical setting in questions!), but just to widen the pool a bit I thought I'd suggest the World Builder created by one of the greatest world builders ever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Kin_Arad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kin Arad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone not bothered to click the link, Kin Arad is the name of a character of Terry Pratchett's (in Strata) who is responsible for the construction of worlds. Seems apt :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I know there was brief discussion on avoiding any potential copyright issues, but I figure if anyone is going to be fine with it, it'd be the Pratchetts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T15:14:58.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-19T16:29:27.550" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Atahensic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because nothing encompasses world building like an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atahensic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iriquois creation myth&lt;/a&gt;. Giant turtles, birds carrying people, magic trees, and the beginning of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T16:29:27.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-02-19T16:55:50.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be fun to trade out the standard up/down arrows for either a sword or a fletched arrow. That would bring a medieval element to the theme, and reflect that blend of future and past that is common in many works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14915" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T16:55:50.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-02-19T20:04:12.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I think this is a sort of evolution to &lt;strong&gt;opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Open-Ended&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question asks for a list of ideas without adequate constraints or intent; answers to this question would each be equally valid and could cover a virtually limitless number of options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asked on Stack Exchange sites should have a single definitive answer, based on knowledge and logic, which can be provided by a single user. Open-ended questions often lead to lists of equally valid answers or answers that list as many options as the answerer can think of; as such, they can never actually be definitively answered by a single answer, and instead promote a popularity contest where answers are upvoted based on voter preference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Try to provide clearer criteria upon which answers can be based, or on how answers can be judged objectively. If you have an answer in mind, you can provide this as an example and ask if it is viable. If you are only asking for a brainstorming session, you can bring your questions up in chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T20:04:12.897" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-19T20:04:12.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2016-02-19T20:47:46.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Manitou&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitou&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;great spirit&lt;/a&gt; and giver of the land in Algonquin traditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T20:47:46.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-02-19T23:21:30.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Causal Chain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are asking for an unconstrained causal chain of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you ask for a sequence of events where each one depends on the one before it then the number of possibilities quickly becomes unmanageable. For example even if there are only 2 possibilities at each choice then after 5 steps there are already 32 different possible paths. In practice there are almost always more than 2 options at each step in the sequence so the combinations grow even faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking for what the effects of a specific event after multiple time intervals (for example 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week) after the event is fine. The problem comes when each step depends on the one before it as a cause rather than all the steps being a result of one individual cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a nail the shoe was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a shoe the horse was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a horse the rider was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a rider the message was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a message the battle was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each of these events depends on the one before it. If the rider had a spare horse then everything after that changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Either modify the question to remove the dependency of each step on the one before or ask for only a limited number of sequential elements (1 or 2 preferred, you may be able to get away with 3) and once you have decided the path for those ask a follow on question for the next group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20749/what-would-have-been-if-the-islamic-religion-was-never-founded?rq=1&quot;&gt;What would have been if the Islamic religion was never founded?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T11:38:13.533" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-19T23:21:30.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-20T11:57:38.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to suggest &lt;strong&gt;Athena&lt;/strong&gt;, the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, mathematics, strength, war, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because she rappresents lots of the things a world builder has to think about when he builds worlds and because of the symbols she rappresents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wisdom: the information needed, the things the people/aliens in your world know. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Courage: to do a thing lots of people think it's strange and crazy &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inspiration (does it need an explanation?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Civilization: of the ones you make&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Law: the rules a worldbuilder decides to follow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Matemathics: to build the world as precise as possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arts: Worldbuilding is an art! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastEditorUserId="14276" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T18:05:48.760" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T18:05:48.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3226" CreationDate="2016-02-20T17:48:15.143" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series?rq=1&quot;&gt;the case study series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18402/lets-weaponize-jellyfish&quot;&gt;Lets weaponize jellyfish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, because I had already provided the hypothetical world - the purpose of the question was to use the basis of that world to weaponize something for the entire hypothetical world to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Possibly risking Idea Generation, but I think enough restrictions were provided in the question to allow for a objective view on best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14807/what-are-the-conditions-in-which-a-creature-would-evolve-more-than-one-brain&quot;&gt;What are the conditions in which a creature would evolve more than one brain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes - this question could be referenced for future creature design of anyone who wants to have a world of creatures with 2 brains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, possibly Idea Generation, but I think that enough restriction was given on the definition of &quot;2 brains&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28191/why-would-the-mouth-of-a-creature-evolve-to-be-away-from-the-head&quot;&gt;Why would the mouth of a creature evolve to be away from the head?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Same theory as the two brains question, so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Nope. This one definitely has more than enough detail keeping it away from &quot;Too Broad&quot;, and the details and pictures depict exactly what I'm saying/mean, so even Idea Generation is limited severely by the requirement to fit the provided pictures + description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17498/projectile-weaponization-of-water&quot;&gt;Projectile Weaponization of Water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, as it applies to any world that could use a projectile water weapon, which happens to be almost any hypothetical world with water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Restrictions provided stop it from being too broad/idea generation, so no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15278/sea-creature-moving-via-rotational-motions&quot;&gt;Sea creature moving via rotational motions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, for essentially the same reason as the above 2 creature design questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Maybe too broad/opinion based. I probably didn't provide enough restrictions for this one. Luckily, since the majority of the answers were &quot;not possible&quot; answers, it was easy for me to pick the one answer that &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; actually answer the question properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:22:50.013" Title="Case Study #7 - Aify" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3225" CreationDate="2016-02-21T11:22:30.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weaponized Jellyfish&lt;/strong&gt; I agree this is pushing into idea generation territory but overall it's in pretty good shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multiple brains&lt;/strong&gt; Again risking idea generation, and that's supported by the number of questions in the comments. Overall I agree it's the right side of the line though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-head mouth&lt;/strong&gt; Same as the others, you seem to ask a lot of interesting worldbuilding questions that are all pushing into idea generation but staying the right side of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weaponized Water&lt;/strong&gt; Same as the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rotational Sea Motion&lt;/strong&gt; Same as the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T11:22:30.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-21T18:03:30.803" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear moderator candidates talking about being around since it was on Area 51, etc.  &lt;strong&gt;What's the story of WB's start, its naming, and its earliest definition(s)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T21:02:17.933" Title="What is the story of Worldbuilding's beginnings" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3227" CreationDate="2016-02-21T18:23:52.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of that history can be seen on the Area51 site here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual origin of the name and the site I don't think anyone can answer since the person who originally proposed it hasn't been around since before it even went into beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We started with definition:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=definition&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I joined during commitment:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=commitment&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=commitment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there was the beta:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=beta&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276?phase=beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the private beta we worked to define the site's scope, and then during the public beta we worked to prove that the site had longevity and purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-02-21T20:24:20.007" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T20:24:20.007" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-21T21:02:34.453" Score="7" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the Risk Factor identified as most important by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3206/worldbuilding-scope-risk-factors&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; I'm starting a discussion on &lt;strong&gt;Too Individual/Character Based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please start answers to this question discussing each of the examples, adding more examples, and discussing just where to draw the line. Once we've reached a consensus and updated the descriptions given here we'll then create a meta post to point people to and a custom close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the preferred name is &lt;strong&gt;Too Character Based&lt;/strong&gt; suggestions for alternatives are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about an individual and how they will or should act, not about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about the actions of individuals is not Worldbuilding so is off topic for this site. Creation of historical figures, authority figures, pantheons, etc for a world is on topic but anything that asks whether someone would or should do something is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rephrase the question to remove all references to an individual and any &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; parts of the questions. &amp;quot;Would Joe Marine 17 climb this hill wearing his backpack&amp;quot; is off topic. &amp;quot;Could a well trained marine wearing a 30kg weight backpack complete a 1 mile route with 500' of ascent in 10 minutes&amp;quot; is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the person who is writing a character can decide how that character will act in a given situation. Worldbuilding can determine what is possible for that character to do, but the choices that the character makes given those possibilities is down to that individual character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T02:24:39.407" Title="Risk Factor definition: Too Individual/Character Based" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-21T21:02:34.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-21T21:02:34.453" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you think of a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32086/santa-is-satan-but-why&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building an authority figure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating historical backstory for the figure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While it is asking about a decision the decision is already made, it is asking for reasons why that decision might have been made&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question is not about helping refine the backstory of a historical figure, it says 'make one for me'. That is clearly story/plot, not about the impact they have had on the world. We made an exception for historical figures of importance to allow questions about how they shaped a world, not so that we could do all the work for a plot/story suggestions. (James +1)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The connection between the backstory requested in the question and the world being built is too tenuous (thus its 'worlbuilding-ness&quot; isn't clear enough).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T19:49:41.640" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T19:49:41.640" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-21T21:02:34.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-21T21:04:21.790" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you think of a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;How would Facebook Sysadmins prevent the summoning of Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While it's asking about actions of a character in a story that character is generic &quot;Facebook Sysadmin&quot; and the question is asking what options that character has not which options that character would choose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Idea generation  [...] =&gt; Not the question within the current thread, please ignore for now)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;Facebook Sysadmins&quot; are generic characters, they are not generic characters in position of authority over the world. While they have some influence, they cannot take or execute decisions that could have a significant impact on the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T20:13:42.103" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:13:42.103" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-21T21:04:21.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-21T21:07:47.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you think of a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21225/can-you-shoot-someone-with-a-bullet-from-orbit&quot;&gt;Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about capability not about whether the sniper should/would do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general we've decided that things like weapon capability is on topic, this seems to fall inside this area even though it says &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about a gap in your scientific knowledge should be on topic.  Example:  &quot;I have a character and I want him to do X, can and how should it be done?&quot;  This is fine so long as you are avoiding the &lt;strong&gt;why he should do something.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is a question about physics that does not have any implication on the world wherein it is used. The OP asks for a plot element, which does not affect the world as such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking about an individual character. We only provide exceptions for notable historic character and even then the focus must be on the consequences of their actions, not the actions themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T02:24:39.407" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-21T21:07:47.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-21T21:15:47.173" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you see a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23350/could-an-average-person-take-over-the-world&quot;&gt;Could an average person take over the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe may be named but is defined as a generic class of person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asks about capability, not what choice should be made.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that this question should be and is closed as &quot;too broad&quot; but that doesn't have bearing on this question of whether it would be on topic if the scope was corrected. (James +1)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question asks &quot;how can Joe take over the world&quot; not, &quot;in which world could Joe take over&quot;. The question asks for the actions of the characters, who isn't, by his function, a significant figure of the World.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T12:54:02.720" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-21T21:15:47.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3124" CreationDate="2016-02-22T16:57:58.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A need for dissociation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fair to propose that a lot of people (Some call them noobs, but not me personally,) believe that WB is the proper place for &amp;quot;what if&amp;quot; questions, regardless of whether or nor that is the real intent of the site. You will often find that new users will post questions such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22828/what-if-your-legs-would-not-stop-moving-in-the-walking-motion&quot;&gt;What if your legs would not stop moving in the walking motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19703/what-if-humans-were-shorter&quot;&gt;What if humans were shorter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet we see that some questions under that 'base idea' that are actually quite fun to read and answer, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32264/what-if-there-was-no-coffee-anymore&quot;&gt;What if there was no coffee anymore?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that there is certainly a certain amount of good clean fun to be had in a 'what if' context, but first you would need to find a good way to indicate to people in general that WB is not necessarily a place for such things, and that the dissociation is necessary, and also that these questions can be useful and interesting, using questions perhaps misplaced but high-voted on various SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T16:57:58.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2016-02-22T17:32:35.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you voted a lot today, you can't anymore, for the next 24 hours. The fact that your browser doesn't &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; you this when you run out of votes is a firefox bug. I have checked on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T17:32:35.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T17:36:26.060" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a fetish. One that I am extremely careful about any place serious. I like helping people. I like helping &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; people. And I like voting for people so they don't have to scrape and agonize to get to the relatively tiny rep I have after months. But this is SE. And this is WB. And while new people are less likely to pump out awesome answers like you might expect from a high-rep user, it is off-putting to get unhelpful comments, unexplained down-votes, and the like. So I like the idea of voting for new posts by new users, answers by people under 1k, and the like. But is that &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; ethical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T17:49:58.250" Title="Ethics of voting for low-rep users?" Tags="|discussion|voting|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3236" CreationDate="2016-02-22T17:38:59.773" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it doesn't help them. Praising crap will only get you more crap. If you want to help them, post a helpful comment. An anonymous upvote is as &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; helpful to your cause as an anonymous downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T17:38:59.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3236" CreationDate="2016-02-22T17:49:58.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvotes are a form of positive reinforcement. If you do something that's good, we will give you upvotes and you will learn that's the right thing to do. If we give you upvotes for bad things, then you may think that bad things are the right thing to do, and continue to do them. Eventually, you may be around long enough to start encouraging new users to do the bad things you've done, since you think they're good things, but since you've already learned to give upvotes for bad actions you'll allow the next generation to get away with even worse actions. If this continues for too long, we'll have a site where the majority of users think that the bad things they're doing are actually good things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that this has already happened. However, I do realize that my interpretation of what is 'good' may be flawed. Hopefully I have made my point clear, though, that by reinforcing positively regardless of quality, you lose all control over the future of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T17:49:58.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-22T19:15:40.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maggie&lt;/em&gt;, as in Magrathea, the planet of planet-builders from HHGG&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15450" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T19:15:40.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-22T19:27:58.220" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you think of a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Effectively narrowed/constrained&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking for a technical solution to a problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Idea generation [...] =&gt; Not the question within the current thread, please ignore for now)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No context: the OP does not provide a context on which the question is based. There is no indication of how this relates to building a world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:16:20.397" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-22T19:27:58.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-02-22T20:28:33.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding chat&lt;/a&gt; users could tell you, the election was very intense. In a good way. A large part of the candidates were spending more than 10 hours every day connected. The very first election of the site was very interesting, and curious to the worldbuilders that we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, long story short, we collected some statistics from the election, which I put together in a post for our &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/democracy-building-in-the-worldbuilding-world-1a4ad92852a9#.utug1gr57&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Democracy Building in the Worldbuilding World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole process of the election is presented as well as some details on the votes attendance and results. Probably a great way to understand how elections works on Stack Exchange and how our great new team got to be elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any question, do ask them here, or on chat, or directly on medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T20:28:33.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T20:36:38.017" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I have questions.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good questions. Hot questions. Quite a few of them. They get many views. They get many answer-upvotes. But. I don't get credited for asking a question worthy of an answer of quality. If you like an answer to a question, unless it's poetic or comedic, then it only makes sense that you like the question, or at least to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But everybody's favorite beef here is why their apparently worthy question doesn't get voted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I'll ask:&lt;/strong&gt; How do we get people to upvote good questions, and possibly, how could we make a bit of software on WB tailored to make people want to in that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T06:45:47.403" Title="How to boost upvotes on questions" Tags="|discussion|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3242" CreationDate="2016-02-22T20:49:08.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While we should get people to upvote the good questions, your logic is somewhat flawed. A question could be badly written, yet be answered in a very admirable way. So it is possible to have a low-voted question with very high-voted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And generally, I think on Worldbuilding, we don't have much problem of not enough upvotes, we do however, of not enough downvotes. We are a friendly bunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;voted questions&lt;/a&gt; have more than 100 upvotes, which considering the size of the community is quite reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But the best way to promote it, is to upvote other people's question yourself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that once the scope of the site has been clarified, people may be more clear about what constitutes a good question on worldbuilding. And hence get more upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T20:50:52.907" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T20:50:52.907" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3242" CreationDate="2016-02-22T22:00:59.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, first of all, don't ask questions just for the rep. That's a bad idea, and it'll hurt the site. I see way too many posts that are blatant attempts to make it to the HNQ list, and more often than not it works. That's just going to attract lower-quality questions, lower-quality answers, and lower-quality users. If you're asking a question, it should be because you want to know the answer, so if you have a bunch of highly voted answers to your question, that should be a good thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, most of the time the answerer will do more work than the asker. If someone told Da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa, and then he did, who do you think got all the credit? Answers already get 2x the rep per upvote, so you know SE values answers at least twice as much as questions. Keep in mind that users can provide answers to their own questions; if you can't provide a good answer to a question that exists, then maybe you have a good answer to a question that doesn't exist, and you can ask that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, it shouldn't be about the rep. I know it is about the rep, it's always about the rep (unless it's about the badges), but it really shouldn't be. Stack Exchange is about helping people, not about earning Internet points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T22:00:59.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3242" CreationDate="2016-02-23T02:55:20.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Ask better questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered simply asking &lt;strong&gt;better&lt;/strong&gt; questions? I went and looked through your questions, and even your two highest voted ones are low quality to me - to me, your questions show little to no research effort, are too broad, and are idea generation + opinion based, all of which are valid reasons for me to VTC. Also, I'd like to clarify to you that 2k views does not really qualify as &quot;many views&quot;. The only legitimate method to boost upvotes on questions is to &lt;strong&gt;ask better questions&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If you like an answer to a question, unless it's poetic or comedic,&#xA;  then it only makes sense that you like the question, or at least to&#xA;  some degree.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a misconception. Each person's view on a question is different - what one may consider an off topic question could seem to be an astoundingly good question to another. Personally, I don't upvote questions unless they're amazing, peak my interest, and show research and effort. I apply the same criteria to answers, and since most answers require doing research and effort to answer the question, often times I'll upvote a good answer and choose to leave the question alone. &lt;strong&gt;This is not uncommon&lt;/strong&gt; - evidently, the community pretty much already does what I described (proof being high vote answers on low vote questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Bilbo noted in his answer, our community is already an upvote-trigger happy one. We don't have enough downvotes. At the time of this answer, the site overall has essentially a 1500% upvote:downvote ratio (According to a rough estimate by looking at the site analytics - there were about 200 downvotes in the week of Feb 14, and over 3200 upvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I ran a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/439951&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; to see why this seems to be the case. I only listed 10 users in the query, but if you increase the number of users shown, after going about 5 entries down the list, there are a bunch of people with 200+ upvotes and &lt;strong&gt;very few&lt;/strong&gt; downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the query is written to sort by users closest to a 1:1 upvote:downvote ratio. That means that as we list more users, you see a higher gap between the # of upvotes and the # of downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T06:45:47.403" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T06:45:47.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3250" CreationDate="2016-02-23T13:56:04.633" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to glance at my progress towards the various badges yesterday and noticed something peculiar. My current progress for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/epic&quot;&gt;Epic&lt;/a&gt; is marked as 2/50. Epic states that it is for reaching the 200 daily limit 50 times. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/41/mortarboard&quot;&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/a&gt; is awarded for reaching the 200 daily limit, and I only have one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Mortarboard awarded only once, am I missing a Mortarboard badge, or are Epic and Mortarboard calculated differently? (I don't remember hitting the 200 mark except once...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Side Note: Congrats to Samuel for being the only user with Epic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T14:23:05.477" Title="Am I missing a badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3249" CreationDate="2016-02-23T14:04:52.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, Mortarboard is only awarded once.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case with most non-question/answer badges, with the exception of a few like Socratic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epic and Legendary are also awarded only once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/188731/274942&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T14:10:09.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T17:25:06.677" Score="10" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we Burninate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/balloon-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balloon-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balloon-whales&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of the current posting, there is 1 question using that tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/balloon-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balloon-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balloon-whales&lt;/a&gt; is too specific a tag for WB. A combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flight&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; would cover any flying animal (and thus any use of this tag), while the description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/balloon-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balloon-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balloon-whales&lt;/a&gt; implies that it should be used literally for balloon whales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, according to Vincent (in the comments), this tag was chosen as the chat tag specifically so that no one would ever use it, because it's so specific - now that someone is using it, the removal of the bad tag is necessary in order to guide users in the right direction towards tag usage. As of the time of this post edit, a user has already named the tag as &quot;permissible&quot; just because it exists, which is &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T02:14:49.687" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T02:14:49.687" Title="Popping balloons (Burnination request)" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-23T18:59:56.690" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a somewhat safe bet for this risk factor I found. Let's confirm that, and use it as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you see a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31023/npcs-discover-they-are-in-a-video-game-do-they-let-the-pcs-know&quot;&gt;NPCs discover they are in a video game. Do they let the PCs know?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asks about the reaction of a group of characters. Does not influence the world as it is built.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:44:56.987" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-23T18:59:56.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-23T19:10:23.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a possible character-based question that is highly-voted and well-answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you believe this question is ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you believe this question is OFF TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit the answer and add reasons why if you think of a reason that is not covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;How to Defeat a Precognitive Warrior?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the question focuses on a single character, the question behind is about the techniques that were developed to fight against such creatures. Which is about worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons why off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:38:28.093" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-23T19:10:23.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-02-24T01:48:20.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't an example question; it's a proposed change to the proposed close reason that we're discussing.  (I'm hanging this here for now, but ultimately I assume we'll have a post asking what our close reasons should be where we collect them all for voting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close reason: Story-based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding.  Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;likely to develop&lt;/em&gt;, not what someone &lt;em&gt;would or should do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rephrase the question to remove all references to individual actions and any &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; parts of the question. &amp;quot;Would Joe Marine 17 climb this hill wearing his backpack&amp;quot; is off-topic. &amp;quot;Could a well-trained marine wearing a 30kg weight backpack complete a 1-mile route with 500' of ascent in 10 minutes&amp;quot; is on-topic.  &amp;quot;Would government pass such-and-such law&amp;quot; is off-topic. &amp;quot;What could cause government to pass such-and-such law given these societal conditions&amp;quot; is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the person who is writing a story can decide how characters will act or plots will develop. Worldbuilding can determine what is possible, but the choices about what happens given those possibilities belong to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T01:48:20.250" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-24T01:48:20.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3147" CreationDate="2016-02-24T02:38:20.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt; is better because it applies to far more situations than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt;. For example, take a look at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26095/im-stranded-on-an-alien-planet-how-do-i-measure-an-earth-year-without-a-clock&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt;? I, for one, think this question and many others like it are related to time-keeping, rather than calendars, and time-keeping envelops the calendar concept anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T02:38:20.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-24T07:38:19.840" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;Case study series&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23146/2071&quot;&gt;How many humans can I abduct without getting noticed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; I doubt it. It does not really build a world; it just uses real world as a background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I think not. When writing the question, I tried to provide clear criteria for an acceptable answer to avoid opinion-based or idea-generation answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28836/2071&quot;&gt;Can Average Joe reboot the nuclear power plant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, I think the answer is no. It uses a quickly drafted world as a background and asks about actions of a specific person in that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I think there is a close reason for actions of one person. I decided to ask the above question because I know that asking about &quot;one average person and their actions&quot; is generally considered on-topic here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28659/2071&quot;&gt;Killing off Indiana Jones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Here I rather incline towards yes; although, I am actually building a temple and not a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I would say no. I tried to avoid opinion-based answers by adding how much resources I have and how many years the temple needs to hold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33662/2071&quot;&gt;Society rules for marriages and love on multigeneration ship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, under the premise that a generational ship is a &quot;world&quot; in itself, although really tiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; This could be an opinion-based question, although I tried to make the question as well defined as I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional info&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This question was my &quot;contest entry&quot; to a biweekly tag challenge and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2911/2071&quot;&gt;it won the tag challenge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4953/2071&quot;&gt;How would a Martian colony be able to celebrate Christmas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; No, but it builds a society rather than a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; To me this is borderline opinion-based. Also, it is rather an old question, to showcase what was generally accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I typed all of above with kid on my lap, so there will be typos and errors. If I find time, I will revisit this question and edit it on myself, but if you see an error, please feel free to correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:23:32.157" Title="Case study - Pavel Janicek" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3147" CreationDate="2016-02-24T11:38:59.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disagree, because language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I would use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/timekeeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;timekeeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;timekeeping&lt;/a&gt; for questions how to track time during a given day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; would be used for questions on how to tell what season is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T11:38:59.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-02-24T12:24:45.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diseases&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diseases&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diseases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diseases can be downright terrifying if portrayed accurately. How they spread, how they work, how people react to them...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7076" LastEditorUserId="7076" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T21:11:27.270" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T21:11:27.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3256" CreationDate="2016-02-24T14:34:05.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23146/2071&quot;&gt;How many humans can I abduct without getting noticed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think this is worldbuilding, it seems much closer to plot-building to me. It may also be borderline too broad. But I think for the most part, it's answerable and answers are judgeable, so this may be a good example of a good question that doesn't fit on Worldbuilding. Or maybe it does fit, I can see both arguments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28836/2071&quot;&gt;Can Average Joe reboot the nuclear power plant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this looks like plot building. It may be about any average person, but you're essentially asking what one person could do in a scenario. This is a lot of like that series of questions Serban asked about Alice and overcoming magical enemies; it could potentially be on-topic, but I think it's an edge case that's well worth considering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28659/2071&quot;&gt;Killing off Indiana Jones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question has applications in worldbuilding, but may again be too broad. That said, the answers can be somewhat objectively judged, so I think again it could be considered a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33662/2071&quot;&gt;Society rules for marriages and love on multigeneration ship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be too broad or opinion based, but is definitely about worldbuilding. I think most society questions are going to be difficult to narrow down enough, so since I like society questions I guess I'm advocating allowing them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4953/2071&quot;&gt;How would a Martian colony be able to celebrate Christmas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this one is that it has too many questions in one. Is it asking how they'd celebrate Christmas, when they'd celebrate it, or if they'd celebrate it at all? And are you asking for a scientific explanation for how Santa would make the journey? I think some of these questions are on-topic, others would be opinion-based without some work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final Summary:&lt;/strong&gt; A lot of these seem borderline to me. Not necessarily bad, not necessarily good. I'd like to see some discussion on these, because I don't even know if most of these should be closed or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T14:34:05.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3227" CreationDate="2016-02-24T21:02:17.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can provide some details on the real early area 51 activity.  After Kexx proposed it the proposal was actually shut down.  The description and scope were virtually non-existent. Myself, &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/users/52171/rbwhitaker&quot;&gt;rbwhitaker&lt;/a&gt; (who I believe made an appearance here at one point) and a couple others lobbied Robert Cartaino for a few days and got him to open the proposal back up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that we reworked the description and got working on making the sample questions better and kept it open, it gathered steam rather quickly as far as proposals go...and the rest they say is history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T21:02:17.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T03:33:18.087" Score="9" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;Case study series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Whoops -- just noticed I missed my assigned date.  Sorry.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16/in-space-do-shipping-lanes-make-sense&quot;&gt;In space, do &amp;quot;shipping lanes&amp;quot; make sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, it's about travel patterns and thus, indirectly, &quot;layout&quot; of points of interest in space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I think it's on-topic, though one could argue that I needed to specify a tech level rather than hand-waving that.  I think that's ok because sometimes worldbuilding runs backwards -- I have this outcome, and I'll make the background lead to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71/how-would-having-multiple-moons-affect-tides&quot;&gt;How would having multiple moons affect tides?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.  The effects of planetary/lunar/solar configurations are well within our scope and we have many such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; No, I think this question is on pretty firm ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13/how-quickly-and-accurately-should-news-travel-in-a-rural-medieval-setting&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately should news travel in a rural medieval setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; It's about communities' behavior in a world -- travel, fragmentation, interactions with outsiders.  It could have been asked more cleanly, and the original version was in retrospect off-topic as a history question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; It's still a history question at heart and is kind of broad and speculative, though I tried to fix that in a later edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8/must-magic-be-tied-to-medieval-tech&quot;&gt;Must magic be tied to medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; It's about the relation between magic and technology, both of which are core worldbuilding factors, so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; But it's pretty opinion-based and speculative.  It's more a philosophy question than a concrete worldbuilding question.  Were it asked now I think it would be closed.  (That was, I think, Day 2 of private beta.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96/what-are-the-necessary-conditions-for-a-worldwide-government&quot;&gt;What are the necessary conditions for a worldwide government?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Government is part of worlds and this is about developing government, so I say yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I think it's on-topic.  It describes a desired outcome, suggests one way to possibly get there, and asks about alternatives to that.  It draws some precedents from our world to provide some foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:23:05.767" Title="Case Study: Monica Cellio" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3256" CreationDate="2016-02-25T03:46:16.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I largely concur with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3259/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  I think the Christmas question could be adapted into a solidly-on-topic question by instead asking: would a human colony on Mars preserve its Christmas tradition and if so in what ways, given the differences in year length and environment? (The parts about Santa getting there seem more iffy to me.)  You'd want to scope this in time; as we've seen with immigration on Earth, the first few generations can behave differently from later ones (and from each other).  So, adding some bounds here keeps it answerable and encourages richer answers.  I think there's a good societal question at the core of this one, but its current form is borderline (and very broad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T03:46:16.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T07:37:04.263" Score="9" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different subjects are being discussed for a clarification or a re-definition of the scope of the site. We want to have clear lines to separate the questions that are accepted on worldbuilding from those that aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, due to different people starting different approaches, it can be confusing to find all of them and follow the complete discussion. The intention of this part is to accumulate links for the different parts of the discussion for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T14:08:49.943" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T13:14:25.533" Title="Scope clarification discussions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3263" CreationDate="2016-02-25T07:37:04.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below are summarised the different discussions on meta about the clarification of the scope of the site. Please only include generic discussions and not threads about a single question. Furthermore, since we want to consider the current discussion, try to keep only recent threads in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Case Studies&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where some highly voted questions are presented by some users and discussed to see whether they do or do not fit the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;Case Study Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tim B's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/case-studies-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;Case Studies - on or off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3063/case-study-2-daaaah-whoosh&quot;&gt;Case Study #2 - Daaaah Whoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3093/case-study-3-james&quot;&gt;Case Study #3 - James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3145/case-study-4-overactor&quot;&gt;Case Study #4 - overactor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3168/case-studies-greens-highest-viewed-questions&quot;&gt;Case Studies - Green&amp;#39;s Highest Viewed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3200/case-study-6-hde-226868?lq=1&quot;&gt;Case Study #6 - HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3225/case-study-7-aify&quot;&gt;Case Study #7 - Aify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3256/case-study-pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Case study - Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3261/case-study-monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Case Study: Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Risk Factors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where we intend to define some factors which makes some risks for the question to be out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3206/worldbuilding-scope-risk-factors&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Scope - Risk Factors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3229/risk-factor-definition-too-individual-character-based&quot;&gt;Risk Factor definition: Too Individual/Character Based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3281/risk-factor-definition-too-story-based&quot;&gt;Risk Factor Definition: Too Story Based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3312/risk-factor-definition-multiple-questions&quot;&gt;Risk Factor Definition: Multiple Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3365/risk-factor-definition-too-vague&quot;&gt;Risk Factor Definition: Too Vague&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What Ifs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions seems to follow a &quot;what if&quot; pattern and a few discussions started from that observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3094/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site-a-followup?lq=1&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What if Site - a followup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3124/what-if-there-were-a-what-if&quot;&gt;What if there were a What If?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3137/sample-questions-for-whatif?lq=1&quot;&gt;Sample questions for WhatIf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3193/what-if-worldbuilding-banned-what-if-questions?lq=1&quot;&gt;What if Worldbuilding banned What If questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Story-based&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3298/when-should-i-close-a-question-as-too-story-based&quot;&gt;When should I close a question as &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3318/story-vs-world-building-study-case&quot;&gt;Story vs World building: study case&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3277/are-too-character-based-and-too-plot-based-the-same&quot;&gt;Are Too Character Based and Too Plot Based the same?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Miscellaneous&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3030/non-sequitur-questions-how-to-handle-them&quot;&gt;Non-Sequitur Questions: how to handle them&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3120/should-we-answer-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;Should we answer off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3133/please-clarify-elements-of-plot-to-be-more-concise&quot;&gt;Please clarify &amp;quot;Elements of Plot&amp;quot; to be more concise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3141/are-questions-based-on-movies-okay&quot;&gt;Are questions based on movies okay?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3304/what-happened-to-the-idea-generation-close-reason&quot;&gt;What happened to the idea generation close reason?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3208/what-the-scope-of-worldbuilding-is-not-about&quot;&gt;What the scope of Worldbuilding is NOT about&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Taking action&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3363/why-was-my-question-closed&quot;&gt;Why was my question closed? [Collected Answers]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3120/should-we-answer-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;Should we answer off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3366/rules-of-peer-moderation&quot;&gt;Rules of Peer Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T13:14:25.533" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-25T07:37:04.263" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3261" CreationDate="2016-02-25T16:21:17.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/16/in-space-do-shipping-lanes-make-sense&quot;&gt;In space, do &amp;quot;shipping lanes&amp;quot; make sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, this is about building a world.  How will x work in the future given y scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; No, this one seems pretty clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71/how-would-having-multiple-moons-affect-tides&quot;&gt;How would having multiple moons affect tides?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, clearly on topic...though if we don't want to continue answering how does this planetary set up work questions maybe we create some sort of guide for people to use...though that's a lot of math and I would have trouble following personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Clearly On Topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13/how-quickly-and-accurately-should-news-travel-in-a-rural-medieval-setting&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately should news travel in a rural medieval setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Clearly about building a world.  Trying to understand and define how things work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; History questions, like physics, biology etc are a discussion we need to have...do we want them here?  If we want them fine...but we should discuss there seems to be plenty of confusion around that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8/must-magic-be-tied-to-medieval-tech&quot;&gt;Must magic be tied to medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Again yes about world building but maybe not a great fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I concur this one is very opinion based, I don't know that we can objectively say why medieval settings are more predominant when it comes to magic...though I think I could answer that.  I actually think the larger problem is the comparison of modern versus medieval...yeah this one would be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96/what-are-the-necessary-conditions-for-a-worldwide-government&quot;&gt;What are the necessary conditions for a worldwide government?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt; Developing nations and their governments is clearly on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risking off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I would say clearly on-topic.  There is a ton of historical information to base an answer on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T19:44:47.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T21:23:04.647" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physiology&lt;/a&gt; different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; should they be synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physiology:&lt;/strong&gt; For questions regarding the functioning and activities of living organisms and their parts, including all physical and chemical processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Biology:&lt;/strong&gt; For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but additional information is usually necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these different enough to justify separate tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T10:01:28.107" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T10:01:28.107" Title="Tag Question: Physiology" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3266" CreationDate="2016-02-25T21:35:16.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the description it's no different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, physiology is a subset of biology which focuses on the mechanism of action for biological structures (anatomy) and specifically not the structures themselves. But the provided description blurs the definition to be nearly identical to biology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we keep biology and nix physiology. Being a subset, there is no area which is mutually exclusive and I can't think of a case where someone would want to follow the physiology tag, but not the biology one. Or where that kind of specification is required via the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T21:35:16.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T21:56:40.330" Score="8" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question is sitting with four votes to reopen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36743/how-long-would-it-take-to-reach-a-nearby-star&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36743/how-long-would-it-take-to-reach-a-nearby-star&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its core, it can be reduced to the question, &quot;Given a certain speed, how long would it take to get from Point A to Point B?&quot; I am not seeing anyone else, including moderators, point that out. The initial close reason was that it was simply too broad. &lt;em&gt;So if it wasn't, it'd be fine?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that a lot of questions on WorldBuilding rely on mathematics and physics to work, but more often than not it's a gauntlet or series of equations to work out in order to give answers and even then there's a touch of flair. The hard-science tag, for example, still &lt;em&gt;builds worlds.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simplistic questions like this seem to me to be better suited to Physics SE or maybe Math SE. You could switch &quot;spaceship&quot; with &quot;car&quot; and &quot;star&quot; to &quot;town&quot; and functionally it remains the same. It has the possibility of going into alternative worlds/civilisations but that depth is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With everyone talking about fixing/adding focus to the scope of this network, I think it's necessary to ask: Is this really the sort of questions we want to receive? Cookie cutter math questions? Or am I missing something? I'd like to know how to react to them in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspects of why it doesn't quite sit right with me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even with specifications in order to remove broadness, one could change one aspect of the situation and then frame that as a separate question. I.e. - &quot;How long would it take for a ship to go from the edge of the Milky Way to the other with an Alcubierre Drive?&quot; / &quot;How long would it take for a ship to go from the edge of Andromeda to the other with ion propulsion?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To expand on the former point, one question might have an obstacle (a lake, an asteroid belt) and another might not. You can add more caveats but you're not changing the spirit of the question. Simply add more time to avoid whatever obstacle the author wrote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not interesting. It differs from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18414/what-single-element-could-destroy-the-world&quot;&gt;What single element could destroy the world?&lt;/a&gt; in that it's answerable with a one liner comment. It's almost as bad as a Yes/No question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It fits more on another network. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-would-it-take-me-to-travel-to-a-distant-star&quot;&gt;How long would it take me to travel to a distant star?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15401" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T23:21:24.410" Title="What to do with simplistic mathematical questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3268" CreationDate="2016-02-25T22:37:54.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a simple math question, but it's also under-specified and so unanswerable in its current form in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not just a math question because in space you don't go in straight lines at constant speeds.  The trip would be affected by at least the following factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;properties of the ship: speed, acceleration, maybe maneuverability, maybe drive type&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;distance and duration of the orbits on each end&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;intervening hazards (asteroid fields, black holes, that space station with the really &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; bar...)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these properties were specified I think this would be an answerable and non-trivial question.  Without them, we're just guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T22:37:54.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-26T00:01:43.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Terra&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its Latin for Earth afterall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T00:01:43.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-02-26T10:13:21.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Justification for making clouds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Back story&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had an idea for a (short) story I want to write some time ago that centres around the concept of &amp;quot;Cloudscaping&amp;quot;. Basically, in this world there are no natural clouds, but they are created by people for... some purpose (This is the bit I'm struggling with, and I''ll get to that). Like with plants, there are two types of cloud creation: creation for practical use (the reason they started doing it in the first place), like farming/terraforming, and creation for art, like landscaping/horticulture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The art justification is easy; people love finding shapes in clouds, and wouldn't it be great to create our own. It would be like an air display taken to the next level, and in a world with no clouds, having Cloudscaping at your rich soirée would be a sign of wealth. In order for the premise to work, though, there has to be a practical reason why people would want to create clouds in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Main question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It boils down to this: &lt;strong&gt;Is it possible for an environment to exist whereby there is a practical reason for creating clouds?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm open to any justification except for military: this is a society at peace with everything except for its environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm open to different backgrounds: it can either always have been this way or it could be that a recent environment change caused it to be necessary. I'm thinking the latter is more feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm open to different substances being used to make the clouds, i.e., one of the main things I'm struggling with is that it's hard to justify spraying massive amounts of water vapour into the air for a practical reason (it's not an efficient irrigation method and if you have enough water that that doesn't matter it's difficult to see why you'd do it in the first place). If the clouds were made of something else, that would otherwise be pretty useless, then that solves a lot of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to keep the environment as Earth-like as possible, or at least that I don't have to rely on specific chemical/physical properties that would clearly make the environment alien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a hard-science question. &amp;quot;Sounds pretty reasonable&amp;quot; is good enough for me. I only need it to hold up to basic science and common sense, rather than it having to be justifiable under rigorous scientific investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to start a discussion about the feasibility of creating clouds in the first place. I'm confident (at the moment) that there is no major scientific issues with this, and as long as it sounds pretty reasonable that's good enough for me. If you think there are pretty serious scientific issues with the concept of people able to create clouds in the first place then let me know in a comment and I'll start a question about that as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Things I've considered so far:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Irrigation: instead of creating an extensive pipe system, create massive clouds of water vapour in the sky above the fields to water the crops. I don't think this is valid as I can't think of a reason why it would be easier to do this than make pipes (feel free to prove me wrong!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud cover: &lt;strong&gt;Sandbox Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This is my most feasible thought so far. When I post the question I'll write this one up as an answer as it's quite detailed. If noone comes up with a better plan (and noone proves it incorrect) I'll accept it as the answer. In the actual question I'll list this bullet point and reference my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Criteria for the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answer, for me, is the one that provides the simplest and most logical reason for making clouds, and has the least &amp;quot;scaffolding&amp;quot; of specific environmental criteria to make it work: I'm trying to make a short story about an Average Joe cloud maker who dreams of being a Cloudscaper; I don't want to spend pages explaining why he has a job in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T10:13:21.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-26T13:04:02.957" Score="7" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Life tag was discussed and destroyed before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/396/rename-life-to-lifestyle&quot;&gt;Rename [life] to [lifestyle]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401/blacklist-the-life-tag&quot;&gt;Blacklist the [life] tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it's come back. Do we still want it gone? Shall we blacklist it or synonym it or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be too vague to synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T19:18:09.903" Title="It's back, the [Life] tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2016-02-26T17:39:34.740" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First thing I noticed when I looked at her is that green, wavy hair. That remembered of the iconic creatures that fight for survival on a extremelly harsh world - The Lemmings. No, not the critter, but the game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm that old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, that's what looks she is trying to do: surviving in a harsh world. She lost her friends and family, but came to know  a nice, kind hearted robot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's a new name!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T17:39:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3272" CreationDate="2016-02-26T19:18:09.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blacklist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I propose blacklisting it is that it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a far too broad a tag, it could be applied to half the questions we have, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; already exists when appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given that it has multiple meanings, even making it a synonym might not solve the problem, but probably cause incorrect tagging instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 37 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; questions, 26 of which do not have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T19:18:09.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3276" CreationDate="2016-02-26T20:42:58.753" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mod Hammer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been noticing a trend in the last five days of some heavy handed moderator attention. There isn't really any point in being vague about it, TimB seems to have broken from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3065/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/3067#3067&quot;&gt;campaign promise of light moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hope the emphasis will remain on light touch moderation and exception handling. Trying to guide rather than force the community has produced excellent results so far. - TimB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to single out TimB, but all three questions closed via mod-hammer in the last five days (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36601/3202&quot;&gt;#1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36721/3202&quot;&gt;#2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36843/3202&quot;&gt;#3&lt;/a&gt;) were due to TimB. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36849/3202&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; for Serban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not arguing for or against the validity of the questions, I'm just questioning the exclusion of the community in voting to close questions. Am I wrong in seeing this as in an increase in moderator intervention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen a trend yet, nor can I see who is responsible, but I recently had my comments deleted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36809/3202&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; asking for a clearer definition of &quot;mind control&quot;. I asked for some specific aspects that I believe would have cleared up the question quite a lot. The edit which apparently addressed my comment was rather insufficient in my view. However, my comment request was deleted because apparently a mod felt my questions &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; sufficiently addressed. The particularly annoying aspect of this is non-moderators can't see deleted comments, not even our own, so I can't even see why my comment may have received such an insufficient reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T23:07:40.260" Title="Is this the new moderation style for Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3275" CreationDate="2016-02-26T22:06:20.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually my campaign promise was to keep moderating how I have been, which hasn't changed. Sometimes there are a cluster of events where I intervene, sometimes a week or two goes by without using a mod hammer like that once (although there are still plenty of other flags to handle on those weeks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closing Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of those questions they were clearly in need of further refinement before they were ready to answer. (In fact I'm struggling to understand why #3 can have reopen votes when so far as I can see it is still completely unclear). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these were very clear cut I put in comments saying what needed to be improved and mod hammered them closed rather than waiting for them to have more close votes before doing it (I think two already had close votes). This is something I've done many times before and no doubt will do many times in the future. In general the less contentious a close vote is and the more likely I think it is for people to try and answer before it is closed then the more likely I am to mod hammer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment Deletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are generally 3 reasons why I delete a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've migrated the discussion to chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comment is offensive/rude/inappropriate or off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comment is obsolete.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time a comment comes to my attention when it's been flagged either automatically or manually. Sometimes I see them as I'm browsing the site, I don't remember which was the case here but it most likely was me deleted the comment as I have deleted quite a few this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case you had asked for clarification in the question, the question had been clarified. The comment was now obsolete. Note also that there are two other currently unanswered questions in the comments (although there may have only been one when the deletion happened). By removing other comments that the answer had been improved upon it stops obsolete discussions from drawing attention away from questions that have not yet been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not intended to be permanent additions or decorations to the site, and once their purpose is served they are eligible to be deleted. Permanent records is what questions and answers are both for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same logic as was used when I deleted my own comments from your answer about magic genes at the same time as I upvoted the answer. The comments were now obsolete so leaving them does not add anything to the site and does distract from other things that may still be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not going to go on some vast crusade to sweep out comments from every nook and cranny of worldbuilding, but equally if we see something that could use a bit of tidying we might get out the dustpan and brush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some Stats&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past month I've deleted 179 comments.&#xA;In the past week I've deleted 31 comments.&#xA;That's actually a reduction in average deletions per day, although my all time monthly average is lower than 179 so it seems there was an increase earlier this month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This month so far I've closed 8 posts.&#xA;This week I've closed 5 posts.&#xA;That is an increase but the numbers are so small it's easy for clusters to form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a little hasty in deleting that specific comment and apologize for that. However it was done in the context of deleting many other equally obsolete comments that just didn't happen to be quite so recent and I am willing to stand by the action. Obsolete is obsolete. It doesn't matter how long it's been obsolete for. You asked a question, it was answered in an edit that directly addressed it and covered the main points (two directly, the third by inference). At that point your comment was obsolete and eligible for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T23:07:40.260" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T23:07:40.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T22:51:34.993" Score="5" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3229/risk-factor-definition-too-individual-character-based#comment8772_3229&quot;&gt;proposed&lt;/a&gt; that the risk factors &quot;Too Character Based&quot; and &quot;Too Plot Based&quot; could be merged together into one close reason and that there is enough overlap between them to warrant that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can certainly think of question that are both plot and character, but equally I can think of questions that are just plot and questions that are just character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T00:22:02.593" Title="Are Too Character Based and Too Plot Based the same?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3261" CreationDate="2016-02-27T22:59:03.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shipping Lanes: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple Moons: On topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medieval News: On topic unless we decide history questions are off topic. Personally I think they're fine but I know some people disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medieval Magic: I sort of agree, this could be closed as too opinion based if asked now. On the other hand a definitive &quot;no&quot; answer with reasons can be given so maybe it's ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldwide Government: It could be quite broad, but I think it's ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T22:59:03.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3277" CreationDate="2016-02-27T23:05:15.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, plot-based would be about plot events, some of which would be informed by character design. Character-based questions, on the other hand, would be specifically about character-building, some of which would be informed by plot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, plot building: &quot;How would these characters kill a bunch of bearded aliens?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And character building: &quot;How would this bearded guy feel about killing bearded aliens?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are off-topic, so we should have a reason for that, but I don't think we need both character-based &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; plot-based. If I had to choose, I'd say character-based &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; cover both cases, but I'd much rather come up with a better name to blanket both more definitively. No suggestions though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T23:05:15.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3277" CreationDate="2016-02-28T00:22:02.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multi-faceted close reasons are fine, especially when we only get a few, so long as there's a unifying theme.  A question doesn't have to be asking about plot &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; characters to be closed as &lt;strong&gt;story-based&lt;/strong&gt;.  In both cases the remedy is the same: instead of asking about stuff happening &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; your world, ask about &lt;em&gt;your world&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only could these factors be collapsed into a single reason, but I feel that the reason would be stronger for it.  Story versus world -- we can explain that.  Character-based when &lt;em&gt;groups&lt;/em&gt; of characters can be ok and &lt;em&gt;significant world-affecting characters&lt;/em&gt; can be ok gets confusing.  Let's move it up a level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3254/28&quot;&gt;More background and some language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T00:22:02.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-28T14:01:26.070" Score="16" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're going to look at merging the &amp;quot;Too Individual&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Too plot based&amp;quot; close reasons into &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;. Keeping in mind the discussions from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3229/risk-factor-definition-too-individual-character-based&quot;&gt;Risk Factor definition: Too Individual/Character Based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3277/are-too-character-based-and-too-plot-based-the-same&quot;&gt;Are Too Character Based and Too Plot Based the same?&lt;/a&gt; here is the proposed close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close reason: Story-based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding.  Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;likely to develop&lt;/em&gt;, not what someone &lt;em&gt;would or should do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the back story of a character are also prone to fall into being Too Story Based. Checking whether a specific element of a back story that you have already written is possible or likely then that is likely to be on topic however &amp;quot;write this for me&amp;quot; is not. You should also be careful to explain why the back story is relevant to the world and building that world, rather than being just development of that character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rephrase the question to remove all references to individual actions and any &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; parts of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Would Joe Marine 17 climb this hill wearing his backpack&amp;quot; is off-topic. &amp;quot;Could a well-trained marine wearing a 30kg weight backpack complete a 1-mile route with 500' of ascent in 10 minutes&amp;quot; is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Would government pass such-and-such law&amp;quot; is off-topic. &amp;quot;What could cause government to pass such-and-such law given these societal conditions&amp;quot; is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful when doing this not to make the question too broad, it should still be specific and answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the person who is writing a story can decide how characters will act or plots will develop. Worldbuilding can determine what is possible, but the choices about what happens given those possibilities belong to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Points for discussion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should filling in gaps in knowledge be acceptable questions (for example bullet from orbit). The consensus seems to be that it should so long as the question is answerable but this might be worth further debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question asks &amp;quot;how can Joe take over the world&amp;quot; not, &amp;quot;in which world could Joe take over&amp;quot;. The question asks for the actions of the characters, who isn't, by his function, a significant figure of the World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking about capability are on topic, questions about whether a specific person would or should use that capability are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people seem to think that Facebook vs Cthulhu is off topic but not really giving any reasons for why. Does it fall under this close reason. If so why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Satan Santa: Question is not about helping refine the backstory of a historical figure, it says 'make one for me'. That is clearly story/plot, not about the impact they have had on the world. We made an exception for historical figures of importance to allow questions about how they shaped a world, not so that we could do all the work for a plot/story suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Satan Santa: The connection between the backstory requested in the question and the world being built is too tenuous (thus its 'worlbuilding-ness&amp;quot; isn't clear enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;NPCs in Video Game: This one seems quite clearly agreed. The question asks about the reaction of a group of characters. Does not influence the world as it is built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if we can clarify these discussion points then we will be able to create a general community wiki Q&amp;amp;A for &amp;quot;Why has my question been closed as Too Story Based and how do I fix it&amp;quot; and then create a custom close reason with a link to that Q&amp;amp;A. We should try and make the guidelines as clear as possible within that question as to what is and is not off topic as too story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T21:54:01.743" Title="Risk Factor Definition: Too Story Based" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-29T11:25:04.060" Score="7" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was already discussed that questions related to series, films, etc. are accepted. However, tags that are related to series are far more too specific for us. They are often related to one single question. Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/441980/list-tags-per-question-number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a query&lt;/a&gt;, I could find the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dexter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dexter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dexter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stargate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stargate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stargate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conan-the-barbarian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conan-the-barbarian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conan-the-barbarian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sims&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sims&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sims&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cthulhu&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cthulhu&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cthulhu&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/star-wars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;star-wars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;star-wars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I might have missed some others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would support a direct removal of those, but I'd rather have your point of view on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T13:45:42.100" Title="Series/Films-related tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3282" CreationDate="2016-02-29T13:14:14.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with one exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should describe the question and also allow people with relevant expertise to find that question or filter it. It's unlikely that dexter or conan-the-barbarian expertise will be specific enough to warrant a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception is cthulhu which I think is worth keeping just because the cthulhu mythos is extensive and a lot of things have been written based on or using the mythos or ideas from the mythos. I'd say cthulhu is now closer to a genre a la steampunk rather than being a specific series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T13:14:14.330" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3168" CreationDate="2016-02-29T15:33:20.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, No, This definitely fits the risk profile for what if but I believe this one is properly developed and constrained to be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What good are herbivores in an animal army?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, No, Seems defined enough to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to defend against the “convince-me” ray gun?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, No, It is idea generation but the question has many constraints so finding a best answer seems doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you find a mate when everyone looks amazing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sort of, I think so, Yep...so the problem is that the gene augmentation/editing isn't really the question, the question seems to be more a general discussion of how appearance impacts mate selection when removed from the equation.  Which while an interesting question I don't think really fits here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-02-29T19:43:24.503" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T19:43:24.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T06:20:23.710" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37100/a-world-where-every-individual-naturally-desires-to-achieve-something-profoundl&quot;&gt;A world where every individual naturally desires to achieve something &amp;quot;profoundly incredible&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've fixed the question to be focused enough now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T17:59:23.017" Title="I think that my question, in its final form, is not too broad - Updated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T10:16:52.977" Score="9" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our 28 topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-keeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-keeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-keeping&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 29 Feb - 22 Mar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11787&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/11787.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The leap day is close again and won’t be for another 4 years. The Chinese New Year is even closer (8 Feb 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another world needs another calendar, but how different can and should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In two weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T21:43:31.337" Title="Fortnightly Topic Challenge #28: Calendar" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3172" CreationDate="2016-03-01T10:21:37.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 6 questions and 26 answers, for an average of 4.33 answers per question. A total of 855 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36200/is-psychohistory-a-practical-leadership-tool&quot;&gt;Is psychohistory a practical leadership tool?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;48 total votes, 14 question votes, 9 answers, 1432 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36617/online-character-generation-resources-types-of-occupation-throughout-history&quot;&gt;Online character generation resources: types of occupation throughout history&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;26 total votes, 15 question votes, 5 answers, 224 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36194/methods-for-creating-great-people-for-your-worlds-history&quot;&gt;Methods for creating great people for your world&amp;#39;s history&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 12 question votes, 5 answers, 401 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36438/alternative-history-if-the-hindenburg-incident-never-happened&quot;&gt;Alternative History: If the Hindenburg Incident Never Happened&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17268/mr-star&quot;&gt;Mr. Star&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 1 question votes, 4 answers, 86 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36300/what-if-the-slave-trade-occurred-at-a-later-date&quot;&gt;What if the slave trade occurred at a later date?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 total votes, 1 question votes, 2 answers, 74 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36417/what-if-antibiotics-existed-in-the-middle-ages&quot;&gt;What if antibiotics existed in the Middle Ages?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18386/cassyxoxo&quot;&gt;cassyxoxo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 total votes, 0 question votes, 1 answers, 53 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T10:21:37.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-03-02T15:40:32.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Non-speculative question of fact&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be a simple question of historical or scientific fact with no speculative element and no clear link to Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has dozens of sites for answering questions on a variety of subjects. Worldbuilding is about building fictional worlds, and while the process of building worlds may contain things like physics, biology, or history, questions that focus too much on one subject without requiring consideration of the others would almost certainly find better answers on a SE site that specializes in that subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question contains enough worldbuilding elements to belong here then edit the question to more prominently display these elements. You should try to better inform people trying to answer the question as to what type of answer is expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question does not contain enough worldbuilding elements to belong here, consider flagging it for moderator attention and requesting migration to a subject-specific site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37131/glass-hitting-water-at-terminal-velocity&quot;&gt;Glass hitting water at terminal velocity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37310/is-this-moon-system-stable&quot;&gt;Is this moon system stable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T16:05:21.977" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-02T15:40:32.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T19:44:35.983" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to figure out how to put subscripts into an equation for an answer to a question on Worldbuilding Stackexchange but I don't know how to make subscripts in the equation.  How do I put subscripts into the equation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13661" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T14:04:59.707" Title="How do I put subscripts in an equation?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2016-03-03T21:13:48.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're using $\LaTeX$, just use&#xA;&lt;code&gt;_{}&lt;/code&gt;, putting the thing you want to put in subscript in brackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using regular text, use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to surround the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T14:04:59.707" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T14:04:59.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-03-03T21:33:55.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Visibility after speed of light&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faster-than-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faster-than-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faster-than-light&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that I can move much faster than the speed of light, would I still be able to see at that speed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following inferences led me to think that I can't see at that speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I accelerate towards &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt;, time starts to slow down. Movements slow down. Light spectrum shifts. Colors change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I'm at &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt;, time stops. There is no movement. The only things that are moving are light and I. We have the same speed. My vision perception starts to change at this speed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now, I'm moving faster than the speed of light. So much faster that the light itself slows down and eventually stops. And since there's no light (photon) movement, I shouldn't be able to see. The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing that is moving is me, and if I want to see, I need to be keep moving so that my eyes can collect/detect/pick up the light (photons) that are frozen in time/space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; I've asked this question initially in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241109/beyond-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Beyond the speed of light&lt;/a&gt;) and later in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;scifi.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/121101/visibility-after-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Visibility after speed of light&lt;/a&gt;) and got turned down both times. Apparently, this question was not fit for either one. So you can imagine my frustration. I was suggested that I should try my luck in here, and this is me trying. If this also fails, well, whatever.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T21:33:55.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3294" CreationDate="2016-03-03T23:24:58.037" Score="10" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new Worldbuilding site design (which looks awesome) was being discussed and demonstrated &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design?lq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Does anyone have any official (or accurate) information as to how long we have to wait before the new design is implemented?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T20:16:26.403" Title="When is the new site design being launched?" Tags="|discussion|design|graduation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3293" CreationDate="2016-03-04T15:40:20.353" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the delay. We're really excited to update the design and launch the site. A few things came up at work and outside of work that put us behind schedule. I will make sure that we carve out some time to move this forward next week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T20:16:26.403" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T20:16:26.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-04T19:39:18.530" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know its possible to move a person's question from worldbuilding stackexchange to meta worldbuilding stackexchange but I was trying to figure out how to migrate a question to another site on stackexchange such as philosophy stackexchange.  When I was about to vote to migrate a question I noticed it seemed the only site I could vote to have it migrated to was meta worldbuilding stackexchange.  Is it possible to have a question on worldbuilding stackexchange migrated to another site on stackexchange entirely such as as I said philosophy stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13661" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T21:11:43.527" Title="Is it possible to migrate a question from worldbuilding stackexchange to another site on stackexchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3295" CreationDate="2016-03-04T20:11:00.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the option is not proposed to you in the closing reasons, you will need a moderator to do it. You just need to flag it (in need of a moderator intervention) with a short explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that graduated sites can migrate their questions without mod intervention but we are not quite there yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T20:11:00.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3295" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:11:43.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, this applies only to questions that are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; on Worldbuilding.  If a question is on-topic here, even if it would be better somewhere else, don't migrate (or request migration) -- the person asked it here and we'll keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that are off-topic here but on-topic somewhere else, you can use a custom flag to suggest the migration (as Vincent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3296/28&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;).  You should also vote to close as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Stack Exchange generally discourages migrating &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; questions, especially if there's an &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When suggesting migration it's helpful to also leave a comment on the question about it.  That way others have a chance to either support the suggestion or point out why it might not be a good idea.  Moderators can then make use of that feedback instead of having to look up the candidate site's on-topic list and make a judgement about whether this fits.  The more help you give us, the easier it is for us to make the decision to migrate (or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T21:11:43.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:45:03.410" Score="9" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What criteria should I use when closing a question as Too Story Based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T05:05:14.410" Title="When should I close a question as &quot;Too Story Based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-04T21:45:03.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3298" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:45:03.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question should be closed if it contains any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about what a character or small group of characters would decide in a given situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about a specific individual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not asking about building the world but instead creating a scenario&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lack of context, if it is unclear how the question relates to building a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should not be closed for any of these things (unless it also has the things above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about what options are available in a given situation (if insufficiently constrained close as too broad).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly asking for techniques or strategies can be on topic (if insufficiently constrained close as too broad). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating significant figures such as leaders, gods in a pantheon, historical figures, etc where the question relates to building of the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about the reaction of an organisation or country significant enough to be considered party of the world in a situation where that reaction can reasonably be predicted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T05:05:14.410" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T05:05:14.410" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-04T21:45:03.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:47:04.580" Score="32" ViewCount="2923" Body="&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3298/49&quot;&gt;When should I close a question as &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding.  Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;likely to develop&lt;/em&gt;, not what someone &lt;em&gt;would or should do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the back story of a character are also prone to being Too Story Based. Checking whether a specific element of a back story that you have already written is possible or likely is probably on topic; however &quot;write this for me&quot; is not. You should also be careful to explain why the back story is relevant to the world and building that world, rather than being just development of that character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because only the person who is developing a plotline can decide how characters will act or the plots will develop. Worldbuilding can determine what is possible, but the choices about what happens given those possibilities belong to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T22:23:34.553" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T15:59:25.127" Title="Why is my question &quot;Too Story Based&quot; and how do I get it opened?" Tags="|discussion|faq|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3300" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:47:04.580" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rephrase the question to remove all references to individual actions and any &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; parts of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic:&lt;/strong&gt; Would Joe Marine 17 climb this hill wearing his backpack&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic:&lt;/strong&gt; Could a well-trained marine wearing a 30kg weight backpack complete a 1-mile route with 500' of ascent in 10 minutes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off topic:&lt;/strong&gt; Would government X pass law Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic:&lt;/strong&gt; What could cause a government to pass such-and-such law given these societal conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful when you are doing this not to make the question too broad, it should still be specific and answerable. In many cases the best way to get a good result is to give the outcome you are looking for and ask how to achieve it. Asking for motives and reasons that characters may use though is likely to be off topic, whereas asking whether something is physically possible is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T21:47:04.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T16:49:23.903" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to figure out how to put an integral into an equation in an answer on Worldbuilding StackExchange but I'm not sure how to?  How do I put an indefinite or a definite integral into an equation on Worldbuilding StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13661" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T17:50:57.057" Title="How do I put integrals into an equation on Worldbuilding StackExchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3302" CreationDate="2016-03-05T17:50:57.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The \int tag is used to put integrals in Latex. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\int_a^b ! f(x) \, \mathrm{d}x&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\int_a^b \! f(x) \, \mathrm{d}x$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when Latex formatting is applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further (and more detailed) explanation, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://latex.wikia.com/wiki/Int_(LaTeX_symbol)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Latex int site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T17:50:57.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3305" CreationDate="2016-03-07T04:25:33.467" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the close reason &quot;idea generation&quot; gone? I have not heard really anything about the change, probably because I don't go on meta too often. Could someone point me to a post about it, or just tell me? I'm reasonably sure it has become the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason, and the very subjective close reason of plot based was added in its place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T14:22:09.237" Title="What happened to the idea generation close reason?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3304" CreationDate="2016-03-07T06:28:30.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was too vague, so it got removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also misleading since basically everything we do here is idea generation of some sort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use &quot;Too Broad&quot; or &quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot; as the alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T14:22:09.237" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T14:22:09.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2864" CreationDate="2016-03-07T10:02:26.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it might be interesting to gather all the interviews in one post, here is a list that were published so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is often a delay between an interview and its publication as we work with a publication queue to alternate the type of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2685/artofcode&quot;&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-artofcode-5221953e8748&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-bowlturner-dbde33e9183d#.xehrpevt1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6507/daaaahwhoosh&quot;&gt;DaaaahWoosh&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-daaaahwoosh-1875a52778d0#.dmsnhuaex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-dot-sp0t-4bf4a1654861#.n2zh6i6sn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-frostfyre-ce8ee5071cb7#.z0bx3shot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-green-7db999b4777a#.uxhoq7ivg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-hde-226868-3763bc7705aa#.xu5zb4uge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-james-c693f062d63b#.wek745ho1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-joe-bloggs-91f6a0cf2eec#.2uqp64ua9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-monica-cellio-f9a038f999ab#.2czzcn1b3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3202/samuel&quot;&gt;Samuel&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-samuel-7f0887ad85c#.gf2bxh5e0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-tim-b-6c05407b4884#.q5n7st4ha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-tres-2b-651a86dadd52#.x1fythqd7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Special&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First elected mod team: &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-the-moderators-6fe9d7119fd1#.l8vpt6f8a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;group interview&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Coming up&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453/aify&quot;&gt;Aify&lt;/a&gt; (completed &amp;amp; queued),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75/monty-wild&quot;&gt;Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt; (completed &amp;amp; queued),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt; (completed &amp;amp; queued)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Status as of 2016-05-02&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T08:53:37.893" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-07T10:02:26.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:13:26.113" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that I can edit other people's questions on Worldbuilding StackExchange.  Does this mean I am one of the Moderators of Worldbuilding StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13661" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T17:24:01.527" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T20:20:01.160" Title="If I can edit other people's questions on Worldbuilding StackExchange does that make me a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3307" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:23:51.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No. You are not a moderator.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can suggest edits to questions and those with even more rep can directly edit questions without going through the edit queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T20:20:01.160" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T20:20:01.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3307" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:24:35.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is a privilege granted based on your reputation.  One level lets you edit to make the posts better, but all of your changes are reviewed by other users.  A second level of edit authority is granted at a higher reputation.  When we get our new site design all of the privileges are moving up to 'full' site values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T17:24:35.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3307" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:38:41.067" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YES!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...in the sense that &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; who contributes to Worldbuilding is a moderator&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you contribute here, you earn more and more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;extensive moderation privileges&lt;/a&gt;, giving you considerable influence over the direction of the site. You're trusted to collaborate with others in establishing rules and norms, and to make sure that they're communicated to the folks just starting out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;elected moderators&lt;/a&gt; who have even more extensive privileges and are expected to perform roughly the same duties (though perhaps more often and more extensively). When folks talk about &quot;Moderators&quot;, they're often referring to this latter group, although they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be referring to either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T17:38:41.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-07T20:06:44.810" Score="6" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/2685&quot;&gt;we have a blog&lt;/a&gt;. As part of writing for that blog, I'm writing an Editor's Picks series - essentially a round-up of some of the great stuff we get on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do that, I need to find some great stuff to write about. Now, while I could do that on my own, it'd be far more effective to ask everyone to nominate something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's why I'm here. For each Editor's Picks post I do (about every month, give or take a week or so), I'll post here on meta, asking for submissions for inclusion. Occasionally, there might be some special criterion (such as questions or answers in one particular tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For February 2016, I'm looking for some of the best stuff you've found on Worldbuilding to write about. To nominate a post, please drop an answer on this question linking to the post and giving a (brief, it doesn't have to be long - I'll flesh it out) summary of what you liked about it. It should have been posted in the month of February 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:29:11.573" Title="Editor's Picks: February 2016" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-07T20:07:38.620" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the next most popular Risk Factor suggestions is Multiple Questions so this is a general discussion of that close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point to clarify is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should questions be off topic for this reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so should it be a close reason or a &amp;quot;canned comment&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Multiple Questions in One&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking multiple questions in one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking multiple questions in one is not recommended as it makes it hard to answer with a concise and focused reply. Additionally it becomes much harder to rate answers as to whether one is better than another as the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer to each part of your question may be held in different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separate your question into multiple questions. In general we recommend asking one question first and then writing follow on questions based on the answers to that (feel free to link from one question to another) but if the answers really do not depend on each other then you are welcome to ask multiple questions at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common format we see if an introduction to the world followed by a list of multiple questions about that world. Make sure you look at each of those questions and consider whether it is substantial enough to have a good answer written about that alone. If so break it out into a separate question, ideally linked back to the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36269/impact-of-ftl-on-humanity-discovering-new-intelligent-life/36272#36272&quot;&gt;Impact of FTL on Humanity &amp;amp; discovering new intelligent life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37882/cell-division-into-three-parts&quot;&gt;Cell division into three parts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion points so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that too many question in one post is a problem, but it doesn't need a custom close reason -- that's what &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; is for. However, something to link to that explains how to fix it (like this does) would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By creating a specific close reason we can have it link to a question on how to fix it and also make it explicitly clear to the person who's being closed why it's been closed and what the need to do to fix it. I think this is specific enough to warrant being a special case - however I do agree that if we have too many other custom close reasons this is one that could be cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This could also be done via a comment linking to the meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The subject matter of this site calls for some leeway on the multiple question front. For instance, I might concisely ask &amp;quot;how would people live in 10% gravity?&amp;quot;. Or I might expand on that and ask for examples with respect to biology, performing common tasks like cooking and showering, required exercise routines and supporting technology, and so on. All of those are implicitly invited in the concise version (and having a new question for each one isn't useful), so explicitly requesting them should be valid. Not valid would be &amp;quot;how would people live in 10% gravity and with 16 hour days&amp;quot;. – aroth yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That's a great example of what should be closed for this reason. Imagine if you got 3 answers. One was perfect for cooking but bad for showering. One had a great description of the exercise but nothing else, another one had good answers on both cooking and showering but was completely wrong on the biology. How would you vote for or rate those answers against each other and which one would you accept? The correct way is to ask multiple questions where each answer can address one specific area and focus on and be a great answer to that area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T11:48:29.710" Title="Risk Factor Definition: Multiple Questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3312" CreationDate="2016-03-07T20:48:32.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion. People are of course welcome to post alternative opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions clearly should be closed. Not much to discuss there. I would be ok with the &quot;canned comment&quot; approach but I prefer a custom close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By creating a specific close reason we can have it link to a question on how to fix it and also make it explicitly clear to the person who's being closed why it's been closed and what the need to do to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that a specific close reason is warranted for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is by far the most common single reason I have for needing to close questions and to explain why I've closed them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While a subset of &quot;Too Broad&quot; it is a different and specific subset, one that can clearly be identified and which specific and actionable advice can be given to fix.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Providing it as a close reason means everyone can see it, not just the few people (and let's be realistic, it will be a few) who have the canned comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our use case differs from many other sites. This is nothing like as common or as big a problem there since our subject matter tends to attract broad questions. For example Stack Overflow questions are unlikely to ask about multiple things at once since they are by their nature focusing on one specific problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; I think this is specific enough to warrant being a special case - although it's a shame we couldn't have it under &quot;too broad&quot; rather than lumped into &quot;off topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T20:48:32.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3312" CreationDate="2016-03-07T21:18:17.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this really a good idea?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it not already covered by &quot;too broad&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are not very closely related questions best asked together?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is fragmenting a problem? Would this scare away new users?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do we really need a canned reply, when we can point out what is wrong in just a few words?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are &quot;..and if so, are...&quot; chains of questions OK?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is this close reason dependent on how related the questions are?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, are there scenarios where multiple questions are allowed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it a good idea to edit out side-questions from another persons question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should that be discussed with the OP first?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How often is multiple-questions-in-one actually a problem?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What about assumptions made for the setup are also demanded to be checked?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is this the kind of post you want to avoid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T21:18:17.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3312" CreationDate="2016-03-08T00:04:17.433" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions aren't &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;; they're &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.  Using a custom off-topic reason for this is misleading, implying that the individual questions would be off-topic.  It also consumes a scarce resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I said elsewhere before, I support having a nice clear explanation of the problem (like the one in this question) to link to, and a canned comment that people can use to do so, but I oppose defining a custom close reason for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This the current text of the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason.  Maybe the answer here is to ask that this be adjusted to also include &quot;too many questions&quot;.  (This close reason gets applied often for that reason on some other sites I'm active on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rgtI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rgtI.png&quot; alt=&quot;text: too broad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T14:07:36.557" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T14:07:36.557" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3311" CreationDate="2016-03-08T00:54:19.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36103/is-there-a-way-to-create-a-bomb-to-destroy-a-star&quot;&gt;Is there a way to create a bomb to destroy a star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come on, you're blowing up stars! Who doesn't like that? On a more serious note however, this question sparked some really interesting discussion and I enjoyed seeing it unfold. This question could hold some historical significance in the future because it is easily relatable to almost any space-based science fiction novel or short story. The answers also introduced some out of the box ideas ranging from infusing the star with energy to dropping degenerate white dwarf in it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T00:54:19.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3312" CreationDate="2016-03-08T13:51:52.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My opinion: no custom reason&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like Monica said, it's amply covered by &quot;too broad&quot;, and it's not &quot;offtopic&quot; - marking it as such (even with a custom reason) would risk leading to confusion over why something was being closed - you would have to know that there was a sub-reason of offtopic that you could select that was actually a sub-reason for too broad that we weren't allowed to implement in that manner... it's just messy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The wording of the reason would have issues regardless of how careful you are. The problem with asking multiple questions isn't actually the fact that you've asked multiple questions; it's that the &lt;em&gt;effect&lt;/em&gt; of asking multiple questions causes your question to be too broad to effectively answer. I think we can all agree that it's possible to ask a question that contains a whole bunch of questions but is perfectly valid (And indeed in many cases a very good question), when the extra sub-questions help focus exactly what the OP is looking for (If we don't all agree on that I can try and find examples). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem isn't multiple questions, it's &lt;strong&gt;BAD&lt;/strong&gt; multiple questions. In which case &quot;Multiple questions&quot; can't be a close reason, because it isn't always incorrect. The thing that makes the question bad is being too broad as a result of the multiple questions, hence: Too Broad is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15882" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T13:51:52.290" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:19:44.050" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is yet another post to try to rationalise the limit between story-building (off-topic) and worlbuilding (on-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37602/how-to-determine-where-the-nearest-mainland-shore-is-when-standing-on-an-island&quot;&gt;How to determine where the nearest mainland shore is when standing on an island?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was first closed for story building, then edited and reopened. It started some discussion on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/28101639#28101639&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. To make it short, DaaaahWoosh* summarised as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;think the main point here is that we all agree the question can be on-topic, we just disagree on if it was in its original wording &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question &lt;em&gt;can be&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. But depending on how it is worded it would or wouldn't cross the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I suggest as an exercise here, is to write simplified versions of the same question. And that all should go over all different versions and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;upvote&lt;/strong&gt; when the version is on-topic, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; when it is off-topic. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please don't leave it without voting as we really want to establish a scale.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that all the proposed versions are on-topic, add your own version that would, for you be off-topic. The other way as well: if they are all off-topic, write your version that is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:21:44.587" Title="Story vs World building: study case" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|case-study|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:19:44.050" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meet Bob. Bob is great. Imagine McGyver, A-Team, Ethan Hunt, Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris together in one person. But then better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He let himself be captured by the Bad Guy(TM). But while he escapes, his enemy left to kill the president. He finds himself on an island in the middle of the fog. Swimming up to the shore is not problem. But how can he find the right way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:19:44.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:20:50.070" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joe is an average person who due to unexpected circumstances got left on an island. He is a bit hungry, and scared and wants to get ashore as soon as possible. However the island is surrounded by a thick fog. How can he know in which direction is the shore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:20:50.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:22:45.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my world, there is a rare magical storm. It appears as a fog and transport randomly one or more person to another place. There is a population of fisher who live on the shore. Since it happened a few times, they developed some methods to help them find the shore in the middle of the fog, without any other information on their current location. What could they do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:22:45.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:23:59.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a world with large turtles who resemble some islands. Except that they move, even if quite slowly. And I have a population who lives on those islands. The problem is that some days the fog is so thick that they can't see where the next turtle or the shore is. And since the turtle moved they don't know where they are. What techniques could they have developed to always locate the shore in the fastest way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T21:37:14.560" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T21:37:14.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3311" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:29:11.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Shameless self-promotion ahead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36446/why-fill-a-dungeon-with-puzzles&quot;&gt;Why fill a dungeon with puzzles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it was the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuildingme/query/447261/questions-asked-in-previous-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;highest-upvoted question in February&lt;/a&gt; that is still open, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36446/why-fill-a-dungeon-with-puzzles#comment101192_36446&quot;&gt;terrified&lt;/a&gt; several people, sparked numerous humorous comments, and helps form the foundation for why the ruins of a world are the way they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:29:11.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T20:36:23.233" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my world, I have an exploration party that has to get to the shore of an island. The story part is not important, however, how the island is constructed would greatly affect what techniques are used to find the nearest shore. Also, I should mention that it is really foggy on the island, so you are likely to no see very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the shore-finding techniques available for various kind of geography?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T20:51:08.573" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T20:51:08.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2016-03-08T21:21:32.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On a world similar to ours, with thick fog near the coastlines, which for geographical reasons has numerous small islands near it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to storms, reefs, and rocks, it's not uncommon for boats to wreck, and if the sailors don't drown it's not uncommon for them to wash up on one of the islands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the fog, spotting the sun isn't always dependable, and even though the islands are generally only a couple hundred meters off the mainland wave sounds are usually dampened by the fog.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, the sailors may not have a compass with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are some dependable ways that would be taught in sailing school to find the mainland in this all to frequent occurrence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T21:21:32.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3327" CreationDate="2016-03-09T19:45:58.707" Score="30" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is probably off-topic, but whatever. I had no better place to put this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time I'm on the SE network, I just go back and forth between a few sites, reading things that catch my eye. This network is like therapy, helping me to cool down during stressful hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have to say something special about this one site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently had a tough moment in my live, with lots of things going wrong at the same time and a bit of my little world crumbling over itself. Life went dark, and for the last few months I lost a few of the most important things (and one person) I had on my life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, during this time, I kept coming here. Checking out WB, seeing stuff around. Laughing with some of the most awesome ideas for worlds I had ever seen. Smiling from some witty comments. This site kept my head cool, distracted, and made my life a bit better during those times. For that, I'm extremely grateful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the bottom of my heart, a huge Thank You for this community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep on being awesome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T16:29:58.273" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T16:29:58.273" Title="A quick word of thanks for the WB Community" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3326" CreationDate="2016-03-09T19:54:31.810" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thales, I'm sorry to hear you've been going through a rough time, and glad that we were able to bring you some cheer while you're doing so.  I hope that things improve for you and that you're able to participate in the ways you enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T19:54:31.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3174" CreationDate="2016-03-10T03:25:30.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May the the odds forever be in your favor...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T03:25:30.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-10T09:28:42.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T09:28:42.387" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:28:42.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-10T09:28:42.387" Score="0" Body="Discussion about a class of questions, by topic or user" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T17:29:22.620" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T17:29:22.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3333" CreationDate="2016-03-10T13:41:32.253" Score="8" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;This message showed up in my inbox. I had to do a little research even to know what it meant. As far as I understand it, this means that someone went through and systematically up-voted a big stack of my answers to various questions, and it happened in rapid enough succession that the script caught it as suspicious, then reversed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was looking all this up, I found that the usual worry with this sort of thing is not so much that someone is up-voting on the basis of personalities rather than content (a bad thing, to be sure), but rather that people sometimes create fake accounts to give themselves extra reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding of what &quot;serial voting reversed&quot; means correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was this reversal entirely automatic or was there moderator oversight involved?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to know who was doing this? (It sure as heck wasn't me.) I don't need (or want) to know, but does some actual human being in what passes for authority 'round these parts know?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has this user been addressed by the moderators in some appropriate fashion?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can or should do to reassure this SE group that I had nothing to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can or should do to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this kind of thing happen often here at WB/SE?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this is not the first instance, should we make some kind of definite statement here in Meta about what &quot;serial voting&quot; is and why it's bad? (Here I mean the form that is well-intentioned but misses the point by focusing on personality/name instead of content.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T17:20:02.717" Title="&quot;Serial voting reversed&quot; - meaning and response?" Tags="|discussion|support|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3331" CreationDate="2016-03-10T14:03:55.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whoa, those are a lot of questions... But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is my understanding of what &quot;serial voting reversed&quot; means correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially yes. It is one user who up/down voted suspiciously. Typically going to a single user up or downvoting all their answers and questions. Normally it should go with a large change in your reputation (recovering from the up or downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Was this reversal entirely automatic or was there moderator oversight involved?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No way for me to know. It's often automatic. Especially if you did not raise the alarm yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is there any way to know who was doing this? (It sure as heck wasn't me.) I don't need (or want) to know, but does some actual human being in what passes for authority 'round these parts know?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, not for normal users. And normally, AFAIK, the mods aren't allowed to tell it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has this user been addressed by the moderators in some appropriate fashion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user will have been notified that their voting was reversed. If it's a first offence, I'd expect that nothing more will be done. Especially if it was automatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is there anything I can or should do to reassure this SE group that I had nothing to do with it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, I gather it was a serial upvoting ;-) As I wrote before, if it was a first offence, I don't think anything else will happen at that point. Moderators and staffs can check IPs and so on. And if the situation arise again, you'd be contacted, I expect. So, no, nothing to be done and either way nothing you can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is there anything I can or should do to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be worth making sure that it wasn't a good willing friend of yours (IRL) who did it. But if it was someone random, not much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does this kind of thing happen often here at WB/SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never heard of that here on WB. But I read about it on other SE site. How often it happens? I don't know. I expect most of the time it is reversed, and no one needs to hear about it. So it's not unheard of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If this is not the first instance, should we make some kind of definite statement here in Meta about what &quot;serial voting&quot; is and why it's bad? (Here I mean the form that is well-intentioned but misses the point by focusing on personality/name instead of content.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many information about it on meta. But there is an automatic system to remove it directly. So I don't think we should do much more. If the situation arises again, there might be some investigation, but as this is not a usual behaviour... we should all be aware that serial voting is bad and that people should vote on posts, not users. More than that would probably be too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a mod, neither here nor anywhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T14:03:55.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3331" CreationDate="2016-03-10T14:07:53.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Serial voting is explained briefly in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.  It can happen with upvotes &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; downvotes cast in rapid succession on posts from the same user.  Sometimes this happens for benign reasons -- somebody sees a great post from you, looks to see what else you've posted by walking through your profile, and votes on several.  Sometimes it happens for, err, nefarious reasons. These are either people knowingly voting on friends (or enemies), or people actually creating additional accounts (sock puppets) to vote for themselves.  An automatic script invalidates these votes, whether innocent or not, without human intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens occasionally on Worldbuilding, and while moderators can't see individual votes, we can see patterns of voting that might suggest that something is going amiss.  We don't, unfortunately, get &lt;em&gt;alerted&lt;/em&gt; when serial voting is automatically reversed, so we might not always notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we discover a pattern of voting that the scripts didn't catch but is nonetheless clear.  We can, in those cases, request manual invalidation of the votes, but in those cases the users involved will typically hear about it by other means.  Voting fraud is a serious matter that can lead to account suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all serial voting is caused by fraud, of course; that benign case I mentioned isn't that uncommon among users new to Stack Exchange.  If this happens to you it obviously wasn't under your control.  Generally speaking, if you see an occasional &quot;voting reversed&quot; event and you don't hear from the moderators by other means, you have nothing to worry about.  It wasn't you; it was some other guy.  If we think you're doing something you oughtn't be doing, you'll hear from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, your message here led me to discover a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; case of probable voting fraud, one having nothing to do with you.  So thanks for that; we'll look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T17:20:02.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3331" CreationDate="2016-03-10T15:03:14.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this was nefarious, I had a handful of old answers get up-votes overnight as well (4 or 5).  Nothing was triggered but it seems someone was sifting through old answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T15:03:14.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3346" CreationDate="2016-03-12T15:57:28.663" Score="8" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The Context&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many questions being voted for closure as being &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. Now, if you think about it for a moment, aren't &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions opinion based (except the &lt;em&gt;hard science&lt;/em&gt; questions of course)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was one and only one correct (and legitimate) answer to a question, why don't we delete all the other answers once an answer is selected by OP? Take for example this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37833/how-large-would-a-world-have-to-be-for-a-sailing-ship-to-never-make-it-past-the&quot;&gt;How large would a world have to be for a sailing ship to never make it past the horizon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 12 answers to this question, with one marked as accepted. The accepted answer is at +36 score while the runner up questions have also scored +17, +15, +7 scores (the top 3 respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now considering that one answer has been accepted, shouldn't we delete all the remaining answers? Logically speaking, we should, because there is a question and there is an accepted answer to it. Keeping other answers intact would mean that we are consciously or unconsciously confusing anyone else browsing the site with a similar (or the same) question in mind. On the other hand, if only the accepted answer is available, it would provide the person with a direct, straightforward answer for his/her question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I agree that this would be a very bad (and resembling a dictatorial society) practice because &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;everyone has their own mind and someone with a similar (or the same) question in mind might find other answers more useful than the accepted answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; But the &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt; decision of a non-opinion-based society would be to delete all non-accepted answers for a question, since they represent nothing more than the &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; of the answerer-posters about the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Suggestion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should not shun opinion based questions. As it happens, everyone is unique and even questions marked &lt;em&gt;hard science&lt;/em&gt; get different answers (logically speaking, only one answer should be voted up for such questions), many of which get voted up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suggest that there should be an &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; tag available for question askers. Of course no-one is obliged to answer a particular question and knowing beforehand that the question is primarily opinion based would save the time and mental effort of all contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let there be idea generation and asking people's opinion about things. However I do admit that having a &lt;em&gt;proliferation&lt;/em&gt; of such question may be detrimental to the core concept of the site. Opinion based question which are too broad or require too long answers can and should of course be discouraged and closed. However asking people's opinion about precise matters in short/medium length replies should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T09:35:05.310" Title="What exactly is &quot;Opinion Based&quot; and why do we shun it?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3337" CreationDate="2016-03-12T16:55:03.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two reasons to keep non-accepted answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was vague, and people had to make assumptions about what was being asked. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was too big, and there are things that previous answers missed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, problem 1 is caused by 'too broad' or 'open ended' questions, which have their own problems, but here those problems manifest with answerers who don't really know what you want. People who answer these kinds of questions have to assume what you're asking for, so a lot of them are going to get it wrong. However, their answers are probably still good answers to questions that don't exist yet, so anyone looking for answers to that question may be able to eventually find them. As it stands, this is a bad system, so instead of answering too-broad questions I think we should just close them until the OP can be more specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for problem 2, this can be solved by community wiki answers, which can be edited with new information. However, due to the point-based SE system, this would rob contributors of their Internet points, so sometimes we have to let it slide. Either way, multiple answers of this form are just different pieces of the same one answer, thus you can think of them as essentially the one answer that is not deleted. Other answers that are simply wrong or don't contribute anything new to that 'one' answer should be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yeah. Opinion-based is bad, I think, because it's another piece of the problem 1. Answerers can't really know what you're asking, so they make up a fantasy question and answer that. If someone wants to know the answer to that fantasy question, it'll be hard for them to find this answer, and overall the fantasy question that may have helped the most people may not be the same as the fantasy question the OP thought it was asking, so its answer won't be put to the top of the list. If people asked properly limited questions with one best answer, I think you could probably delete all other answers.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T16:55:03.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T00:43:07.153" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25185/what-is-world-building&quot;&gt;What is world building?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37955/what-is-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37955/what-is-worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are two questions that were both asked on Worldbuilding proper asking the same question: what is considered worldbuilding; what is the definition of it? However, I've noticed a few things. Why was the first question closed with 4 downvotes, while the second question, asked more recently, is still open, with 3 upvotes (until I downvoted on it) and 1 favorite? Aren't these both essentially the same question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T02:31:02.520" Title="What's the difference between the two &quot;What is worldbuilding?&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T00:51:18.130" Score="2" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, questions are welcome that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and&#xA;magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and&#xA;environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world,&#xA;including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaning&#xA;in-universe consistency&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several problems I've noticed with this. Nothing about the actual content, but with the grammar and spelling of this paragraph. For one, isn't it awkward to say &amp;quot;questions are welcome that are about&amp;quot;? Wouldn't it sound much better if you changed it to: &amp;quot;questions that are about: &lt;strong&gt;list list list&lt;/strong&gt; are welcome on this site.&amp;quot; Also, the word &amp;quot;maintaning&amp;quot; should be changed to &amp;quot;maintaining&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure this is a per-site change, so I think this is something the moderators could change. I think this is something worth looking into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:24:56.613" Title="Grammar of the &quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot; help center page" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-12T23:47:55.380" Score="8" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I entered a writing contest a my school, which promised that the winner would have his or her writing published. I proceeded to go home, began writing, and immediately came down with a terrible case of writer's block. At that point, a friend referred me to this site. I came here today, and saw the term &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, which I though was simply the name of the site  standing alone. Being unsure what it is, and since I'm already here, I've decide to ask you guys. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18909" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T17:15:44.130" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T17:15:44.130" Title="What is Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2016-03-13T00:19:45.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you're going to get a lot of answers from this, so I'll give you some &quot;big picture&quot; definitions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (noun, verb, adjective) - The act or subject of construction of (fictional) worlds, especially as an aid to the creation of art or to facilitate play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key part of this definition is that the construction of the world is an aid to something else. This is not always true, but may be the reason why many people come to this site or got into worldbuilding in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you want a more specific definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (verb) - The creation of lore, history, religions, geography, or any other aspect of a fictional world &lt;em&gt;which is not directly related to the characters in a fictional story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great example of this are Brandon Sanderson novels, as he does a lot of world-building to create these fantastic worlds/universe for his novels to take place in. I suppose this leads to my final definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (verb) - the creation of the setting of a fictional story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good worldbuilding helps answer some questions like &quot;How does magic work?&quot; &quot;What is different about my fictional world (especially in contrast to the real world)?&quot; and &quot;If this universe/world/story has this property or situation, how can I make it believable, or what are the logical consequences?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding can be useful for writers, game designers, RPG players, and even as a tool to explore our own world. That's also an argument for science fiction and fantasy in general, but the worldbuilding inside those works facilitates that exploration. A well-made world allows the audience to accept even outlandish or illogical aspects of a fictional world, to enter &quot;the magic circle&quot; and suspend their disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" OwnerDisplayName="PipperChip" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T00:19:45.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2016-03-13T00:20:00.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; is the term used to describe the art of building an imaginary world -- i.e. a setting in which a story or game takes place. This might involve creating fictional geography (maps), biology (races or creatures), politics (kingdoms), history (famous people or events), language, religion, mythology, technology, philosophy, or pretty much any other aspect of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take a concrete example, consider Tolkein's Middle Earth (Arda) created for the Lord of the Rings. None of it exists for real, but there is a huge amount of detail available. Tolkein creates new races (Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs, Ents...); creates a detailed map of Middle Earth, with mountains, plains, forests, and rivers; imagines political entities such as the kingdoms of Arnor, Gondor, and Rohan as well as towns and cities like Hobbiton, Bree, Rivendell, Helm's Deep, and Minas Tirith; a family trees of Elvish languages (Quenya vs. Sindarin); the creation story of Eru and the Valar; and Three full Ages of history, including family trees for some of the rulers of prominent kingdoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="897" OwnerDisplayName="Caleb Hines" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T00:20:00.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2016-03-13T00:38:30.290" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the act of creating and &amp;quot;building&amp;quot; a fictional or imaginary world. Oftentimes these worlds are created for use in novels, movies, or video games (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Elder Scrolls, etc.) Sometimes, worldbuilding as a process is used to create an entire fictional universe, similar to that in the Star Wars movie franchise. Some people (like me) enjoy creating these worlds as a thought experiment, so sometimes these worlds are created only for your own amusement and enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;The resulting world may be called a constructed world&amp;quot;. Worldbuilding encompasses creating geography of the world, history of the world and its people, fictional languages, religion, culture, environment, and it often includes creating maps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of best examples of this is the Lord of the Rings (including The Hobbit) novel series by Tolkien, in which he created the well-known fictional land of Middle-Earth, along with its inhabitants, Men, Elves, Dwarves, Wargs, Orcs, Goblins, and more. He created a fictional language based on Viking runes, and created a backstory to explain the history of these races, and also explain the significance of the One Ring, and how it was acquired by the hobbits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this definition of worldbuilding, as defined by this SE site, is probably the most relevant to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists to get help creating imaginary worlds. This includes geography, culture and creatures for the world. Questions on this site should be about building settings and the reasons around why they are the way they are. A setting might not be a planet; it can be larger than a multiverse or smaller than a village. You can ask about languages, species, buildings, biology, technology, magic, and your fictional world's societies, cultures, and environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is probably more suited to meta though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" OwnerDisplayName="fi12" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T00:38:30.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3339" CreationDate="2016-03-13T02:31:02.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first one is pretty unclear and is just a few broad bullet points.  The second one shows some thought; the asker has a problem and a clear question, albeit also broad.  I also suspect that once the migration to meta was suggested, people who might have downvoted refrained -- this is obviously somebody new to the Stack Exchange network who didn't even know about meta, so people might have just voted to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T02:31:02.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3337" CreationDate="2016-03-13T02:41:15.930" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be multiple correct answers.  Acceptance doesn't mean &quot;this is the best (or most-correct) answer&quot;; it means &quot;this is the one the person asking the question liked best&quot;.  Sometimes it isn't even right.  So acceptance is orthogonal to other considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why is opinion-based bad?  Because even though there are often multiple correct answers to a question, we do want to be able to &lt;em&gt;evaluate the correctness&lt;/em&gt; of answers.  If the question is a broad &quot;so, what do you think I should do?&quot; or &quot;what's the best X&quot; or the like, there's no way to do that.  The Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format works well precisely &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it's Q&amp;amp;A -- not discussion threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering many questions will involve some amount of opinion, especially on a site like ours.  Note that the close reason is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; opinion-based&quot;; it's not saying &quot;no opinions at all&quot;, but, rather, that this question will mostly (or entirely) produce opinions and discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; for a discussion of what makes good not-purely-factual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T02:41:15.930" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2016-03-13T04:10:54.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;World building is constructing a consistent &lt;em&gt;setting&lt;/em&gt; for a story (e.g. a novel, gaming, or just a mind exercise).  The &quot;world&quot; you build doesn't necessarily mean you are building a planet.  You could be building:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Universe from the ground up and changing all the the physics as you&#xA;go&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new dimension&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hyperspace&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A city&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A computer program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, people building worlds use conventional physics to describe their world and only make the minimal changes required to tell their specific story (e.g. an FTL space drive or magical abilities).  When this is the case, the questions here include one of the tags (hard science, science based, or reality check) depending upon the level of fidelity they wish to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely no reason you need to use any of these tags.  Things in your &quot;world&quot; may fly away from its planets (there may not even be planets).  The settings illumination may be powered by Unicorn farts.  Basically you get to make the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not intend to base your world upon &quot;Real World&quot; science though, be sure to say so in your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T04:10:54.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2016-03-13T08:43:22.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to rather than substitute for what has already been written in these answers: it is worth pointing out why Worldbuilding can be particularly helpful for fiction-writing (whatever the medium).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about how our own world works--&quot;world&quot; here meaning anything from physical universe to local town neighborhood--you might notice the omission of information from conversation. There are lots of things that are so obvious and known that nobody bothers to mention them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elementary mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calendar and timekeeping systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many foods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language structures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mainstream religious norms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basics of transportation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elementary sexual politics and dynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elementary racial politics and dynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say, of course, that these things are never discussed or commented upon. Lots of people love to get into lots of detail about food, for example. But there are basic assumptions that don't get discussed: onions and tomatoes are edible foods, for example. Why wouldn't they be? So nobody comments on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're writing a story set in an alternate world, be it another culture, another time, another universe, one very common and unfortunate tendency is to explain things that don't need explanation, and whose explanation in the story's narrative can be frame-breaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if characters in your story start having long conversations explaining how timekeeping works (the number of hours in the day, etc.), that's going to seem strange to the reader, because it jars against the sense of ordinary normality. Many times, the writer has done some Worldbuilding, and figured out some nifty alien system for timekeeping or whatever, and as a writer she badly wants to share it with her readers. But it's going to be tricky to pull off, because it's hard to imagine why such things would get discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that the Worldbuilding process can help with is to move from this kind of &quot;idea-dump&quot; to a fuller integration. If you as a writer know the world very well, and you understand how all these funny alien elements of it work together smoothly, you don't have to explain everything. You can instead try to make your story seem as though it were written by someone living in your alternate universe. Because the story now includes various passing references, terms, allusions, and so forth, all perfectly ordinary and trivial to the implied or explicit narrator but alien to the reader, we get a sense of a real world. And if those passing bits actually link up to one another, not because they're important to the plot but because they're part of a complete world, the whole thing comes to seem rich and vibrant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's Middle Earth is the most famous and obvious example. His ability to have characters remark blandly that it's blacker than the cats of Queen Beruthiel works beautifully: it's just the sort of thing people do say, and it doesn't really mean anything, but we get a strong sense of a world in which there are a great many stories and such that we aren't being told because they don't happen to be relevant. The story of the War of the Ring just gives us a sort of slice through a very complex world, and we end up learning far less about that world than we might appear to at first glance. This is part of why Middle Earth seems so real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Tolkien did this the long way: he actually invented all the stuff to which people refer. That's great if you want to spend your life at it, but it isn't necessary. You can do it by simply tracing out a thin surface and making sure the various pieces weave smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, to do that coherently does require that you know everything about everything. Supposing you don't, you can ask here. You know all about the languages, let's say, but although you know that this group uses bows made from giant insect chitin, it occurs to you that you don't know anything about insects. So you explain here that you've got these people who use these bows, and you want them to have 60-pound draws, and you wonder whether that means you have to use 6-foot wings or legs or what, and so on. And people here who do know about insects and archery and engineering will try to help you get the information you need so that your characters can use their bows and refer glibly to giant cricket wings, and your readers will come to feel that it all makes sense because you, the writer, know enough to ensure that it does in fact make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T08:43:22.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3340" CreationDate="2016-03-13T08:49:11.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're quite right, in one sense, and a little wrong in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are welcome that are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is bad grammar. Properly speaking, what precedes a colon -- most especially if what is called for after it is a list -- must be a complete clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, questions are welcome on any of the following topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not the most elegant way of putting it, but it's at least grammatically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gets rid of the passive voice and is grammatically correct. It is also marginally more specific. &quot;Worldbuilding SE&quot; might be replaced, but with what? &quot;We&quot; sounds a bit patronizing to my ear. &quot;This site&quot; has the same number of words but less specificity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T08:49:11.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3337" CreationDate="2016-03-13T09:17:12.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I suggest that there should be an &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; tag available for question askers. Of course no-one is obliged to answer a particular question and knowing beforehand that the question is primarily opinion based would save the time and mental effort of all contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: No &quot;opinion-based&quot; tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems neither answer here so far has addressed this part, so if you'll indulge me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags are used to categorize questions based on either their content, or the subject matter expertise needed to answer them. This is why we get tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; and so on. Tags allow filtering to questions about subject matters of interest. Generally speaking, it should be possible to say &quot;I am an expert in that-tag's-name&quot; without making it sound too weird. (&quot;I am an expert in biology&quot; is a perfectly reasonable thing to state. &quot;I am an expert in shapeshifters&quot; has some odd implications, but doesn't sound totally outrageous. What does it mean to say &quot;I am an expert in opinion-based&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags are discoverable. While a newcomer to the site might very well not get all the tags right, if their question is on topic they should be able to find at least &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; already existing tag that accurately categorizes their question. Tag synonyms can help here, because they allow people who might know one term but not another to find tags that accurately describe the question they are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags, and in particular tags used on a large number of questions, imply that questions about a specific subject matter are generally accepted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &quot;opinion-based&quot; tag fails #1, is doubtful in #2, and goes against the Stack Exchange format so implicitly fails #3. (&quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; is a network-wide close reason, not up to each individual site to decide about. We even get that one on Meta sites, where almost by definition &lt;em&gt;every question tagged discussion is primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider what we say at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Chat&lt;/a&gt;. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, opinion-based questions aren't necessarily &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;. There are valid situations that call for &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;question and answers&lt;/em&gt;. That, however, &lt;em&gt;isn't what the main site is about&lt;/em&gt;. As pointed out in the help center article, that kind of questions are often a better fit for chat, which allows a lot easier back-and-forth than the main site's Q&amp;amp;A format does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of the questions we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get on Worldbuilding are, to some degree, opinion-based; there is no &lt;em&gt;single correct&lt;/em&gt; answer. Even on Stack Overflow (which is probably where, on the network, the Q&amp;amp;A format strictly speaking works best), with well-asked questions, you rarely get questions that have a &lt;em&gt;single correct&lt;/em&gt; answer and every other answer is incorrect; answers tend to focus on different aspects, or suggest alternative solutions to the problem. The distinction is whether a question is &lt;strong&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; opinion-based or, as explained in the close voting/flag dialog (my emphasis),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but &lt;strong&gt;answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions,&lt;/strong&gt; rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is the type of questions we &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; want; to borrow Monica's wording, we want to be able to &lt;strong&gt;evaluate the correctness&lt;/strong&gt; of the answers posted in response to the question. Questions that are &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; do not allow us to evaluate answer correctness, causing the Stack Exchange implementation of the Q&amp;amp;A format to break down because voting no longer works; hence, that kind of questions are not welcome, and we should not encourage them by having a tag that implies they are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's similar to Wikipedia's advice of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verifiability, not truth&lt;/a&gt; which follows from their policies of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no original research&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verifiability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, that is also why we tend to prefer longer answers to single-sentence answers; a longer answer is more likely to explain its reasoning, thus being easier to evaluate the correctness of &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; more likely to be useful to people other than the person asking the question being answered. An answer merely being longer is no guarantee it will be better received, but all else being equal, an answer that explains its reasoning will be longer than one that doesn't, and the answer that explains its reasoning will be easier to evaluate the correctness of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T09:27:19.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2016-03-13T14:36:03.540" Score="19" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; Alice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;Serban&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural height:&lt;/strong&gt; ~ Feb 2015 to present day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; The name of Serban's iconic hapless female wanderer fighting her way through a myriad of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;precognitive warriors&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11252/how-to-catch-a-dream-thief&quot;&gt;dream thieves&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, this is Serban's default name for any protagonist in any of his questions, so it's kind of grown to be an inside joke in the Worldbuilding community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other notes:&lt;/strong&gt; Alice was suggested as a possible name for the woman in the Worldbuilding poster. Also, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36315/handling-a-dream-invader-prisoner?lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36062/how-does-an-ai-keep-its-human-pets-happy&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12091/keeping-secrets-in-a-thought-reverberating-hall&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17639/she-can-move-mountains-literally&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29881/grammar-for-a-species-that-communicates-via-hallucinations&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for more examples of Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T21:53:03.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T15:09:59.907" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;On main page, in the Hot Network Questions, text is automatically converted to MathJax, even if it shouldn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wzzAS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wzzAS.png&quot; alt=&quot;overzealous MathJax&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/220619/globalswp-the-query-vs-global-wp-query&quot;&gt;WordPress.SE doesn't have MathJax enabled&lt;/a&gt;, and that question is rendered properly there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:37:59.463" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T15:09:59.907" Title="MathJax rendered on Hot Network Questions (where it shouldn't)" Tags="|bug|mathjax|cross-site|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T17:01:08.277" Score="51" ViewCount="790" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design&quot;&gt;all of your feedback&lt;/a&gt; and patience while we made design updates. Below are a list of updates and planned updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Logo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the community's discussion, we've made some adjustments to the logo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2917/13448&quot;&gt;added a halo&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;saturated the colors a bit more, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and made the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2928/13448&quot;&gt;world a bit larger&lt;/a&gt; than the surrounding text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/svdsT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/svdsT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding logo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multiverse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We decided to mix up the two themes a little bit by creating a variation of the main characters for the meta theme and having a more gothic, steam-punk-inspired city in the main theme and using the futuristic city on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WXO1Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WXO1Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding posters&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PPQbO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click to view larger version.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Swag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on some of the comments, we decided to go with the artwork for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design#comment7960_2916&quot;&gt;Tshirt&lt;/a&gt; and make one of the items a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design#comment7970_2916&quot;&gt;sketchbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmCbV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmCbV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding branded sketchbook and t-shirt&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Site Design&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following updates are being made to the site design, and we'll share those when the site is live:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;added contrast to the tags,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2923/13448&quot;&gt;toned down the background color&lt;/a&gt; a little bit,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;added a hint of greenish color to the right-hand side to balance out the figures on the left,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and adjusted shadows on the figures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T17:01:08.277" Title="Worldbuilding Site Design Updates: March 15" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3357" CreationDate="2016-03-15T17:36:26.510" Score="8" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38006/can-a-theoretical-case-be-made-for-transporting-our-consciousness-over-via-l&quot;&gt;this question about sending consciousness&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38106/how-to-prepare-for-an-alien-pyramid-exploration&quot;&gt;this question about archaeology  on Mars&lt;/a&gt; we see fairly rapid moves to close on the basis that the questions are &quot;off topic.&quot; In the latter case, a couple of comments by one user specified that it seemed story-based. In the former, no one wrote any comments whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that there is currently a move to be more restrictive and arguably rigorous about this SE's scope, but this behavior strikes me as unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think anyone should be voting questions off-topic unless they are willing to specify why. Furthermore, in the majority of cases, I don't think anyone should do this unless the concern has been explained to the OP, with some suggestions for editing. (By &quot;in the majority of cases,&quot; I mean that every once in a while you see a question that clearly belongs at another SE entirely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that both these questions be re-opened, for a start. Certainly the one about sending consciousness: there are no comments but mine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding of this SE's etiquette correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T20:04:25.440" Title="&quot;Off topic&quot; voting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3356" CreationDate="2016-03-15T19:47:31.157" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/this-unanswered-question-isnt-so-unanswered&quot;&gt;This question some time ago&lt;/a&gt; flagged something that now seems to happen a lot. When I go to the &quot;unanswered&quot; tab, I spot 6 questions that have answers. That doesn't seem right. And some of those answers have been up for quite some time: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36994/a-reef-without-the-coral&quot;&gt;A Reef Without Coral&lt;/a&gt; was answered on Feb. 28!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug? A feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T20:02:03.983" Title="Unanswered questions that are already answered" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3355" CreationDate="2016-03-15T19:49:17.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unanswered means that it does not have any answer with &gt; 0 score. So questions can be answered, but those are not upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T19:49:17.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3354" CreationDate="2016-03-15T20:04:25.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that has been written over and again around here. And you are right that close voters should ensure that &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; did explain the problem to the OP. Typically, people should follow the rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule N. 5: If you are going to vote to close and there's not comment about it on the question, take your time to write one, or refrain from voting to close.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a form of corollary, do read the comments BEFORE voting to close. The OP might have addressed the issues in a way or another in there and do not blindly follow a trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T20:04:25.440" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-03-15T21:23:00.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;travel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would we go if we couldn't travel? Nowhere of course!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T22:18:32.267" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T22:18:32.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T22:08:29.123" Score="10" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are every now and then discussions about where the Worldbuilders are active outside WB.SE. The definition of active is of course hard to define, but a user reaching a certain reputation usually indicates a certain activity (even if that activity could be quite old). In any case, I wrote a SEDE query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/451242/cross-site-overlap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cross-site Overlap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It requires to set a minimum threshold. Find the list of all SE sites and compare on each site how many users have more than the given reputation threshold on both WB and the other sites from the list. Anyone can try it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just to give some example, if we follow the standard of SE that requires 200 reputation to be considered active, we get the following overlap for WB:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Stack         |   User overlap&#xA;------------------------------------&#xA;  StackOverflow |  53.3 %&#xA;  SFF           |  26.4 %&#xA;  ELU           |  23.0 %&#xA;  Programmers   |  16.4 %&#xA;  SuperUser     |  15.7 %&#xA;  The Workplace |  15.4 %&#xA;  RPG           |  15.0 %&#xA;  Meta          |  14.8 %&#xA;  Security      |  12.8 %&#xA;  Gaming        |  12.4 %&#xA;  Physics       |  11.7 %&#xA;  Academia      |  11.2 %&#xA;  Puzzling      |  11.0 % &#xA;  Code Golf     |  11.0 %&#xA;  Maths         |  11.0 %&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the top 15 overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are curious about who are the users present on two concrete sites, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/451242/cross-site-overlap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;that other query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Please note that I am a total beginner in SQL, so don't be too harsh about non-optimum syntax.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T12:09:12.007" Title="Overlap between Worldbuilding and other SE sites" Tags="|discussion|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3360" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; allows anyone to run various T-SQL queries. A lot have been written already, but it is possible to write it your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those queries might be relevant to the Worldbuilding community at large. And the tag indicates the meta discussions involving one or more of those queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3361" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" Score="0" Body="This tag is intended to indicate discussions involving SEDE Queries." OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T22:14:50.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3337" CreationDate="2016-03-17T09:35:05.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the other answers, you should also keep in mind that even if three answers are explaining the same thing in the same correct way they may all take different approaches to that explanation. For some people one explanation would be more helpful than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at this question for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21692193/why-not-inherit-from-listt&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21692193/why-not-inherit-from-listt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not checked them all but most of the top answers are all actually saying exactly the same thing from the technical point of view. However they are explaining it differently. Some of those explanations will work better for some people than for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T09:35:05.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T18:57:18.260" Score="7" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's use this meta question to collect the &lt;em&gt;already-vetted&lt;/em&gt; explanations of common reasons for questions to be put on hold.  The intention is that you'll use a comment (suggested here) to link to a specific answer here when voting to close in an applicable situation, if nobody's already done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we're going to be linking here and many readers won't already be meta regulars, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; don't add lots of comments to the individual answers here.  And please don't answer here to propose something; there are separate meta discussions of several close reasons or risk factors, and this post is intended to collect the final results of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some comments you can use, with links to these answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Too broad -- too many questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Asking multiple questions in one is not recommended as it makes it hard to answer with a concise and focused reply. Additionally it becomes much harder to rate answers as to whether one is better than another as the &quot;best&quot; answer to each part of your question may be held in different answers. See [tips on how to fix the problem](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3364).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="12207" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T03:16:04.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T03:16:04.013" Title="Why was my question closed? [Collected Answers]" Tags="|discussion|faq|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-17T18:57:18.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3363" CreationDate="2016-03-17T18:57:18.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Too broad -- too many questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was put on hold because it asks too many questions, which makes it hard to answer with a concise and focused answer and makes it hard for the community to rate answers that address only some of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tips on how to fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Separate your question into multiple questions. In general we recommend asking one question first and then writing follow-on questions based on the answers to that. Feel free to link from one question to another.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A common format we see if an introduction to the world followed by a list of multiple questions about that world. Make sure you look at each of those questions and consider whether it is substantial enough to have a good answer written about that alone. If so break it out into a separate question, ideally linked back to the first one.  (Do make sure that each question can stand alone; people might encounter them in any order.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not always wrong to ask more than one question together.  If the questions are strongly related and reasonably well constrained, so people wouldn't have to write a book to answer, then it's probably ok.  If the community put your question on hold as too broad, however, you probably need to either break it up or constrain the questions more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T18:57:18.260" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-17T18:57:18.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T19:48:21.857" Score="7" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the next most popular Risk Factor suggestions is Too Vague so this is a general discussion of that close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point to clarify is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should questions be off topic for this reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so should it be a close reason or a &amp;quot;canned comment&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could do with some examples, we also need to work on the &amp;quot;how to fix&amp;quot; etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: Too Vague&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking about a world where not enough detail is available to give a specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This covers questions where the question itself is clear and on topic but not enough detail has been given. For example a lot of magic questions are asked that fail to define the magic system well enough. As a result the answers can either be &amp;quot;a wizard did it&amp;quot; or have far too many possibilities to evaluate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two common scenarios here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In science based questions -insert howto here-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In magic or fantastical based questions -insert howto here-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None so far - add some&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion points so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd lean towards re-wording this as something like 'Your question needs to provide more details in order to get a specific answer,' since, for many questions, not a whole lot of detail is necessarily required. For something like the unicorn charge question, or the question about how dwarves would build cities, details about the world the dwarves/unicorns live on aren't strictly necessary, since we don't need them to have a good idea of what unicorns or dwarves are like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this an &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; reason or is it a variant on &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot;. If the latter then it should most likely be a canned comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T19:48:21.857" Title="Risk Factor Definition: Too Vague" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T10:09:41.020" Score="17" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the moderators, user with enough reputation&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; can cast votes to close and/or reopen questions. This is not a right, this is a privilege that you are being given as an active user of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already some information about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt;, but it might be interesting to read the network-wide's &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;. However, I feel that there are some rules that people should keep in mind when using the review queues. Some tend to be forgotten, so it's probably worth repeating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll call those the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rules of peer reviewing on WB.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 0:&lt;/strong&gt; Be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;general rule for the Network&lt;/a&gt;, but remember that the provilege you have does not make you better (or worse) than the other users and that you should try to always keep civil. And in no case, a closing vote should be used as a petty revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Please read the post you are reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people judge a question &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; by its title. The OP might have written an unfortunate title, but the question might be on-topic, not too broad, answerable, etc. Go beyond a glimpse, and really read the whole post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Decide for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not follow trend. If a question appear in the close-review queue, it is because either someone flagged it, or someone voted to close it. But that does not mean that the question &lt;em&gt;has to&lt;/em&gt; be closed. You are given a vote, use it fully. Do not follow the others, even if those are high-reputation users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Make sure you are familiar with the scope of the site and general agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you've probably read too much about it these days, but before voting, you should make sure that you are familiar with what is on- or off-topic on WB. As there may be some inconsistancies, seeing a similar question open isn't enough to say that the current question you are reviewing should stay open. It might be that the other should be closed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One place to get started on that could be the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3263/scope-clarification-discussions&quot;&gt;Scope clarification discussions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 4:&lt;/strong&gt; Don't wait until someone else starts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially with lower reputation, it might be intimidating to flag a question or vote to close it if no one else did it before you. But it might simplly be that others missed that particular question. By flagging and voting on it, you'll bring it to the attention of the community. And it's ok, if people do not agree with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 5:&lt;/strong&gt;  If you are going to vote to close and there's no comment about it on the question, take your time to write one, or refrain from voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When 5 voters agree that a question has serious problem, that question is put on-hold. Apart from closing blatantly wrong questions, one of the aim is to improve the overall quality of the questions. But that can only be done if the voters express their views. So if you are reviewing a question, make sure that there is a comment on the question that reflect your idea. If there aren't, do write one yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't be bothered to write a comment, don't bother voting to close, click on the &quot;skip&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 6:&lt;/strong&gt; Make sure you are up to date with the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is related to the rules 2 and 5. When the first votes to close appear and correctly commented on, it is likely that the OP will ask some details, or edit their question. So maybe that too broad vote isn't valid for the current version of the post. In any case, make sure that appart from the post, you have gone through all the comments to see what is the current standings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow up on that rule, &lt;strong&gt;if the OP, e.g., provide a set of constraints for a broad question, make sure those are edited in the question.&lt;/strong&gt; Either by the OP, or yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 7:&lt;/strong&gt; Vote on the post, not the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have had a disagreement with the OP, or the OP is a well respected member of the community. But none of those should affect your vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 8:&lt;/strong&gt; Don't answer a question that you voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing answers on a question, pretty much validate the question in the eyes of most. So if you vote to close a question, don't answer it, otherwise you send mixed signals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rule 9:&lt;/strong&gt; If you don't like a question, but it is answerable and on-topic, downvote it, don't vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vote to close isn't your only tool to indicate that you are unhappy with a question. Use all your possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Thanks for reading those rules.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that other queues are also subjected to those rules, in particular the low-quality posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: For the time being, with the beta scale still there, that would be any users with at least 500 reputation. Once the graduation process finishes, that will limit it to 3000 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T07:42:41.160" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T16:32:12.857" Title="Rules of Peer Moderation" Tags="|discussion|reviews|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:08:57.643" Score="17" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be considerable disagreement about the questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38103/29&quot;&gt;How will our world change if all men suddenly die?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38265/29&quot;&gt;How will our world change if all women suddenly die?&lt;/a&gt;, which are bouncing back and forth between being open and closed. That's a very bad sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's hash this out. Are those two questions acceptable on Worldbuilding or not, &lt;strong&gt;and why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T14:05:58.300" Title="Are the questions &quot;How will our world change if all {men,women} suddenly die?&quot; on topic or not?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3427" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:17:48.677" Score="11" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this question posted today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38347/what-is-the-tidal-locking-limit-for-this-star&quot;&gt;What is the tidal locking limit for this star?&lt;/a&gt; [on hold]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looked like a reasonable World Builder type question, but it was closed using the &quot;Off Topic&quot; flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By necessity questions on World Builder could cover any number of a range of topics (such as this astronomical/physics question) we have traditionally answered questions like this one unless it required detailed knowledge not available to people using World Builder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've closed &gt;20% of the most recent questions.  Are we getting carried away with closing questions?  If in doubt, isn't it better to leave a question open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T03:42:52.283" Title="Are we closing too many questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|too-broad|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3367" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:28:45.447" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michael,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general rule of thumb is, &quot;if in doubt, leave it open.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific opinion on these two questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It proposes a fictional alternative situation.  So it &lt;strong&gt;is on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; (it was marked as off-topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does not ask a specific question though.  So it might be considered &lt;strong&gt;too broad.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no way to objectively choose one answer or another.  So it&#xA;might be considered &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would leave it open but ask for some clarity from the OP on #2 &amp;amp; some means of evaluation for #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time I checked, World Builder was the only Stack Exchange site that had answered 100% of its open questions (with the exception of some new incoming questions).  A big part of that is because we close questions pretty aggressively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is necessarily a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:28:45.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3370" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussion about posts closed using the &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; closure flag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="7886" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3371" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" Score="0" Body="Discussion about posts closed using the &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; closure flag" OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="7886" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:31:12.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:36:59.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do think that there have been some over-zealous closures recently, but generally we strike the right balance. We do need to be careful both not to close questions that should be open and to open ones that should be closed. All we can do to correct this is exactly what you've done here, when a &quot;questionable&quot; close occurs we discuss it together. Once discussed we decide on the correct action, and then take it and educate anyone not taking the correct action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a great example of how to do this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3367/are-the-questions-how-will-our-world-change-if-all-men-women-suddenly-die-o&quot;&gt;Are the questions &amp;quot;How will our world change if all {men,women} suddenly die?&amp;quot; on topic or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular case of that question then there is/was insufficient information to answer it. So the problem isn't that it was closed but that it was closed without anyone explaining what needed to be done to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T18:42:09.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3367" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:49:40.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions are building a world where this has happened, so from that perspective they are on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not asking about individuals or about plot points, so still on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However they are very broad and very unconstrained. On that basis they are too broad/too opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are borderline enough on both that I can see why people are not sure whether they should be open or closed. My personal opinion is that anything saying &quot;How will the world change? Will the civilization survive? What are the consequences?&quot; Is too broad. That's a massive subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will civilization survive? Would be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two are actually rephrasing of the same &quot;What are the consequences?&quot; question and that is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is that the question gives no way to rate answers. They do not say what outcome you want or how to rate one outcome against any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So both should be closed until the question can be made more constrained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:49:40.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3367" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:57:36.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think these questions are on the verge of being off-topic, because at their core it's really a plot-based question: 'this things happens, how do people react?' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a &lt;strong&gt;What-if&lt;/strong&gt; scenario that &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; more like curiosity than serious worldbuilding, though I would never want to close a question just because it seemed like the OP wasn't going to use it for anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also feel like 'do the work for me' questions. This goes back to the too-broad problem, because there is just so much work that any answerer has to do that it vastly overshadows any work that the OP might have done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, and in many others, I think the solution is to ask a smaller question. For instance, there are already questions on this site about making babies without women, so that aspect of 'kill all the women' shouldn't be coming up again. There's probably questions about how societies react to a large number of deaths, so you don't need to ask that again (and really, the fact that there are three of basically the same question, none of which can be closed as a duplicate, proves that this is a problem). Basically, I think these questions can be split up into many smaller questions, where each one may actually be useful to worldbuilders. But as they stand, these questions are asking for too much and are too specific to be useful to anyone, except as an interesting What-if scenario (and if you want that, go support What-if SE on Area51).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:57:36.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3367" CreationDate="2016-03-18T14:05:58.300" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;These posts (I hesitate to call them questions) are far too broad for Worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only do they &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not as specific questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, they more importantly offer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no criteria on which to judge the answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Breakdown&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in almost all of the answers the immediate loss of life due to the virus and resulting accidents is easy enough to predict. So is the resulting panic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from there on each answer focuses on their respective poster's own interpretation and biases. Most see the women survivors as panic stricken, and unable to cope, thus leading to the collapse of civilization. I found it funny that the male survivors would somehow be expected to fare better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sexist undertones aside however, how would we know how the survivors may, or may not, pull together to survive, or cling to civilization? How could we possibly understand the implications of such a power vacuum suddenly appearing? Of so many accidents taking place, and so many dead bodies suddenly being left to rot in the streets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An answer focusing &lt;em&gt;purely on body disposal&lt;/em&gt; and the health implications could easily grow to the length of an essay, or even a short novel. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another answer focusing on putting out the fires resulting from the various planes falling from the skies, or cars crashing into buildings could be similarly complex.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yet a third focusing on keeping power generation up and going could be a question in an of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a lot of answers on WB involve &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; guesswork, this is simply taking it to the next, &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Concern&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see incredibly broad but &lt;em&gt;fun to answer&lt;/em&gt; questions on WB I cringe a little bit. A part of me wants to join in the fun of imagining the many implications of that catastrophe taking place, and post an answer, or critique existing ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after 4 months on the site I can clearly tell that allowing this sort of behavior to develop unchecked would turn Worldbuilding SE into the garbage dump of Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things I &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thoroughly enjoy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  about our site is the the quality control which the community performs. How we are quick to help people out with a well thought out answer, however also quick to enforce our standards, rather than open our metaphorical doors to the metaphorical barbarians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't Reddit, dammit! I expect intelligent questions, and well thought out answers when I log in, and that's the community I want to help keep alive, not one which bows to public opinion and answers silly questions simply because they're &quot;fun&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; Not that there's anything wrong with fun questions :-P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T14:05:58.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2016-03-18T14:15:27.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've noticed a lot of new users on the site within the last couple of weeks. While this is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; thing, these low rep users have been responsible for asking a lot of questions which are not on-topic, or match some other close criteria, and also have answered some questions in ways which clearly fall short of the standards to which we hold our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love that we're attracting users, however we need to steer them in the right direction, and not simply allow them to redefine the scope of the site based on their own ideas or interpretations on what we represent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a Stack Exchange site we try to keep our answers somewhat factual, and grounded in &quot;reality&quot; (sometimes as defined by the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, I too have noticed that we've been closing a lot of questions recently, but I also think that the ones we've targeted have been sub-par, and that this trend can more reasonably be associated with an increase in fresh users than with our community somehow growing too snobbish, or picky. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than close fewer questions I believe we need to focus on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;educating&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; our new users. We should point them to meta posts regarding site standards, and explain to them how they might better word their questions, or add the constraints which would bring them within scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T16:10:22.037" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T16:10:22.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3379" CreationDate="2016-03-18T15:18:21.410" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just browsing through Worldbuilding when I visited a user's profile and saw this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This account is temporarily suspended for voting irregularities. The&#xA;  suspension period ends in 5 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I understand what temporary suspension is, but voting irregularities? Does that mean the user has been creating fake &lt;strong&gt;puppet&lt;/strong&gt; accounts to upvote their own answers? Could someone give me an example of such a voting irregularity? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T15:52:17.637" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T16:08:57.607" Title="Voting irregularities?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3377" CreationDate="2016-03-18T15:51:34.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't give an example, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't discuss why individual users have or have not been suspended or had any other actions taken against them. The user in question is free to discuss it if they choose to do so. In general the best results come when everyone just moves on with a fresh chance once the suspension has ended so we'd prefer if it isn't mentioned unless they raise it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question or concern about whether certain behavior is legitimate that is not related to a specific user then feel free to ask in a meta post about it. If you believe a certain user is somehow breaking the rules then flag them for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T15:51:34.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3377" CreationDate="2016-03-18T16:01:01.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Likely only a moderator would be able to offer an exact answer to this, but given that the relevant information would be covered by the confidentiality clauses in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;the moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt; a moderator would be prohibited from actually giving out any details. The descriptions available for the functioning of the software that detects this type of behavior are deliberately vague, to avoid people gaming the system, and additionally the software evolves over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;strong&gt;it is possible to answer this in the general.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has numerous systems in place to detect unusual voting patterns, and some of these feed into the moderator reports. The most likely case here would seem to be that the user account has been giving out a large number of similar votes to a small number of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a voting pattern is normally a sign that someone has created a &quot;sock puppet&quot; account to boost their own reputation, or sometimes the reputation of someone they know. It can also be a sign of someone revenge downvoting or target downvoting someone in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because voting is supposed to be about the content and not the person, when the system detects this, it raises a flag for the moderators to look at. I don't know if it ever suspends user accounts based purely on software heuristics, but if the moderators (after investigating) agree that something fishy is going on, they can basically choose between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doing nothing. Not really an option at that point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sending a moderator private message. Usually a first step, to try to sort out the issue without resorting to suspensions. Moderator private messages are visible only to the users directly involved and to other moderators and Stack Exchange employees, and show up in the user's profile to those who have access to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suspending the user. This mainly becomes an option if private messages do not cause cessation of the inappropriate behavior, or if the behavior needs to be stopped immediately (the latter not really being the case in voting irregularities). Suspensions are time limited and the duration and cause must be specified at the time of the suspension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleting or destroying the user account. This is almost never an actual option in case of simple voting irregularities, but can be an option for example in case a user account was created to post spam or nonsense. Included here mainly for completeness' sake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the possibility of leaving a publicly visible comment on a post belonging to the user, but given how sensitive issues of voting irregularities can be, that should not ever be an option in such a case. It may however be an option in other situations, as a step before sending a moderator private message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T16:08:57.607" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T16:08:57.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3366" CreationDate="2016-03-19T03:14:06.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On rules 3, 4, 5:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since scope is a moving target, I think we shouldn't be &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; afraid of putting a question on hold. Especially if we follow the other seven rules, this doesn't have to be a painful experience for the querent. A nice &quot;hi, I'm not quite sure what &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; you're trying to solve here. What are you trying to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; with this world...&quot; comment along with the first VtC can go a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them will generate &quot;why was this question closed&quot; meta posts. &lt;em&gt;That's a good thing for the site!&lt;/em&gt; (Even if it's frustrating for any individual user.) In those posts we can be hashing out specific cases that will help define scope which, in my opinion, will take us further than general discussions.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think 3, 4, and 5 create a powerful synergy. If you think something is suspect then VtC &lt;em&gt;and comment&lt;/em&gt;. If you see close votes and disagree, drop a comment. If you see a &lt;em&gt;closure&lt;/em&gt; that you disagree with, go ahead and bring it to meta. You don't have to be the post author to do so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; I sincerely appreciate all of the work that's been put into the general on-/off-topic discussions in meta, the case studies, the risk factors, &amp;amp;c. I do think that real, live disputed closures--especially when they're bringing new voices into the conversation--bring something really useful to the table that the more-theoretical discussions don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="12207" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T05:30:45.050" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T05:30:45.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-19T05:25:57.083" Score="8" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;[To be clear, plenty of good questions are posed: &quot;what are the implications &lt;em&gt;on _____&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, or &quot;what are the _____impliations?&quot; I've got no problem with those. It's the un-scoped &quot;what are the implications if everyone were a foot taller&quot; question that I'm thinking about.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pure idea generation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thought was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38403/12207&quot;&gt;this question about a space stationat L4&lt;/a&gt;, which asks for &quot;the implications of&quot; putting a space station in orbit at L4 or L5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;what are the implications of&quot; is unanswerably-broad, and so VtC'ed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing there are three answers. One focuses on speculative geopolitics. One treats each of orbital mechanics, space weather, collisions, and shielding. One is majority-devoted to supply logistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could easily imagine answering the question of how long it'd take crews to cycle and the effects of that isolation. Or an answer based on the technologies required to pull it off and the spin-off benefits I expect to redound to everyday people. Or an analysis of how much space stations at L4/5 might actually help the identified purpose--identification of NEOs--and some cost-benefit analysis of that risk-reduction. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/736848main_3_19_13_bolden_comm_space.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Related reading&lt;/a&gt; from a guy who's been up there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(At this point let me note that the quality of the existing answers isn't an issue--its their &lt;em&gt;diversity&lt;/em&gt; I'd wished to highlight.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all of these answers could be &quot;good&quot; answers, yet so unrelated as to be incomparable, suggests this is a problem with the question. And it's a well-known problem: &lt;strong&gt;idea-generation&lt;/strong&gt;. And the problem with idea generation isn't that it leads to lots of answers, it's that it leads to a breakdown of the voting system. &lt;em&gt;We can't really compare the answers, so voting isn't working the way it should.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that &quot;what are the implications of...&quot; should stick out as a red flag for readers, in that it invites idea generation by construction. What are your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T19:40:10.110" Title="Does &quot;What are the implications?...&quot; = Idea generation?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2016-03-19T07:55:02.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk Factor: How does that affect the society at large&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close Reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The world is large and diverse. Taking into accounts all implications would require answers unsuitable to the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The changes you suggest to the world have many repercussions on the society in immediate, short, medium and long term. It is difficult within a reasonable answer to take all of it into account. Plus small variations on short term results may induce large variations at longer term. Making it partly opinion-based on the top of too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to Fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should provide reasonable constraints in time, geography and technology level to make it reasonably answerable. It is even better if you provide a form of metric to be able to objectively assessed which is the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3367/are-the-questions-how-will-our-world-change-if-all-men-women-suddenly-die-o&quot;&gt;Are the questions &amp;quot;How will our world change if all {men,women} suddenly die?&amp;quot; on topic or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T07:55:02.020" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-19T07:55:02.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3384" CreationDate="2016-03-19T14:20:11.067" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately, I noticed several questions in the close review queue that were asked months or a year ago. We are currently going through a scoping process of close reasons, but should we be applying the new constraints and decisions on questions that were asked before the process began?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was mention recently that we shouldn't go looking for questions to close due to the ongoing process, but newer users are likely to be looking at the older questions more than those of us who have been around a while and users who have recently gained the requisite permissions to close-vote may be overly enthusiastic to employ their new powers. Should we be encouraging, discouraging, or indifferent to such behaviors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T15:05:20.767" Title="Should we close old questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3383" CreationDate="2016-03-19T15:05:20.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We certainly shouldn't discourage it, if questions should be closed then closing them is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally though I don't see a need to encourage it. If people see questions that need closing then we should close them but equally I don't think there is a need to specifically go hunting for questions to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting questions on hold is a mechanism to prevent people answering them while the question is improved. Old questions are already not being answered so closing them is redundant unless something somehow draws attention to them, at which point they can then be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T15:05:20.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2016-03-19T21:53:17.480" Score="36" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; Handwavium/Unobtanium&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; Unknown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural height:&lt;/strong&gt; Basically since the start of the private Beta till present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; Basically handwavium or unobtanium is used to refer to a fictional or not yet discovered element, material or resource that can accomplish anything. For example, handwavium could be used to power FTL travel. Handwavium refers to the act of waving your hands in a dismissive manner, as in waving your hands to skip to the important part of the question. Unobtanium refers to what it sounds like - some unobtainable or nonexistent material. The suffix -ium is added to both as this is the suffix added onto element names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T21:53:17.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2016-03-19T21:53:36.247" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; Anatomically Correct _______&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798&quot;&gt;Tres-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural height:&lt;/strong&gt; From ~September 2015 to present day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; This is a series of 20+ questions that try to create mythical creatures in a realistic, evolutionary way. Ranging from the common Griffin to the Hecatoncheires, including media monster and religious creations. Much controversy has been sparked over the name due to the fact that anatomically correct is also used to describe dolls with genitalia. Names such as scientifically correct and evolutionarily correct have been suggested, but the name has not been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T19:36:35.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T06:03:35.390" Score="0" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to make a very innocent, yet reassuring answer (that I agreed with the content posted like many others on this site) and you wrote about gaining a reputation before I can post? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the internet. People post. I cannot make a comment in response to a direct subject? I didn't know it was so critical on this site... I've found A LOT of knowledge in general commentary online, i.e.- other peoples' experiences, not necessarily direct Q&amp;amp;A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're an editor, you should edit your site to be much more clear of what it is you do, and what it's for. Who are you to say my comment wouldn't have helped someone? I'm sure you'll delete this, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19143" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T13:47:20.937" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:54:51.630" Title="Where can I complain about the way my answer was deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3387" CreationDate="2016-03-20T07:50:03.030" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this probably serves as the real question, now that some moderator moved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think people (in the comments) are confused by your nomenclature. I suspect you did not &quot;leave a comment&quot; as in using the commenting feature, but posted an Answer. Comments (content) don't go in Answers (posting feature), so it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with the content of the comment, agreeing or disagreeing etc. as you are supposing.  Rather, general comments can't be presented in an Answer post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irish, I'm sorry you seem to have had a bad experience, and hope you stick around and enjoy the imaginative, ceative experience that is &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;.  Start &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Once you understand the nature of Stack Overflow, it will make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; menu item at the top of the page.  Stack Overflow has become &lt;strong&gt;so famous&lt;/strong&gt; and in the popular culture that there are even &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29437996-copying-and-pasting-from-stack-overflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jokes&lt;/a&gt; about it and &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1185/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cartoons mentioning it (in the hover title)&lt;/a&gt;. So, they probably don't feel the need to emblazon &quot;&lt;em&gt;this is not a forum&lt;/em&gt;&quot; all over the place anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T08:08:06.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3387" CreationDate="2016-03-20T11:01:03.190" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this is a question and answer site. If posting an answer to a question then what you post needs to be an actual answer. Yours was not, so to keep the question and answers clear and clean it got deleted. Frostfyre helpfully commented to explain to you why this was happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people want to leave comments then that's fine, it's what comments are for. However to make sure you understand how the site works (and to stop spammers) you need to have participated a little bit before you are able to leave comments. Write a few answers (that actually answer the question) or ask a few questions and you will unlock the ability to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally note that we're talking about building fictional worlds here. Your answer seemed to be describing real life experiences not relevant to building new worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T11:01:03.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3391" CreationDate="2016-03-20T23:16:13.670" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was posted very recently about monetizing magic in a Renaissance Venice. I commented to suggest some development that might avoid Idea Generation closure. The OP replied with thanks, and I gained a bit of rep. But now the question doesn't exist. My rep history retains it, but the link is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Correction. My history retains that the OP said the comment was helpful, and said thanks, but I did not gain rep from this. It's inbox that retains the entry, not the rep list. Not that it matters -- the answer below is perfectly sufficient -- but I thought it best to clarify for the record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T00:49:21.857" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T00:49:21.857" Title="Vanishing Question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3390" CreationDate="2016-03-20T23:40:19.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP deleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38457/28&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt;.  That's unfortunate, as you left a good comment explaining how he could adjust the question.  He didn't leave any comments explaining the deletion, so unless he comes by again or visits chat or something, we can't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything related to that question that would have generated reputation for you.  Perhsps you've confused it with a different source of rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T23:40:19.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-21T01:23:05.257" Score="8" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of questions along the lines of &quot;what would be the impact if X happened?&quot;  These seem to me to be skirting the edge of on-topic, even for our blessédly open-minded Worldbuilding site.  So I'd like to understand: what makes such a question good.  What makes such a question worth answering, and not worth closing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38317/if-the-earth-gradually-stopped-spinning-what-would-the-changes-look-like-in-20&quot;&gt;If the earth gradually stopped spinning, what would the changes look like in 20 years?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38103/how-will-our-world-change-if-all-men-suddenly-die&quot;&gt;How will our world change if all men suddenly die?&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38265/how-will-our-world-change-if-all-women-suddenly-die&quot;&gt;similar&lt;/a&gt; for the XX half of humanity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38358/what-would-happen-to-a-medieval-town-that-suddenly-has-no-industry&quot;&gt;What would happen to a medieval town that suddenly has no industry?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33884/what-would-happen-if-magnets-stopped-working?s=1|1.2226&quot;&gt;What would happen if magnets stopped working?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33826/what-would-happen-if-electricity-stopped-working?s=4|1.1313&quot;&gt;What would happen if electricity stopped working?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19834/time-no-longer-passes-except-near-intelligent-creatures-how-does-the-world-cont?s=2|0.7625&quot;&gt;Time no longer passes except near intelligent creatures, how does the world continue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the above are a slightly more specific flavor than what I had in mind, these are mostly &quot;what would happen if &lt;em&gt;tomorrow&lt;/em&gt; something changed.&quot;  But I'm also interested in &quot;how would the world be different if it was (always) just like ours except for X?&quot;  Like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11448/could-an-ocean-be-saturated-with-something-other-than-salt?s=4|0.0795&quot;&gt;Could an ocean be saturated with something other than salt?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14837/what-if-every-animal-as-large-as-or-larger-than-a-horse-went-extinct-during-t?s=13|0.0624&quot;&gt;What if every animal as large as, or larger than, a horse, went extinct during the last Ice Age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23716/how-would-a-world-with-an-extremely-high-water-level-and-only-a-small-land-mass?s=21|0.0571&quot;&gt;How would a world with an extremely high water level and only a small land mass differ from Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solid point, mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3375/243&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, is that a good question should have clear criteria for what makes a good answer.  What else should one consider before asking &quot;what would happen if left-handed red-heads started getting super powers on their 33rd birthdays?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T01:23:05.257" Title="What makes a good &quot;what would be the impact of X?&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3387" CreationDate="2016-03-22T03:21:05.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the answer in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/38384/2113&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/38384/2113&lt;/a&gt; (deleted, so visible only at 10k reputation or higher).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was deleted by a vote of three users, not just one.  The site is community moderated, so most actions are taken by consensus of members with sufficient reputation.  A moderator did participate in that vote, but did not use moderator powers in it.  You can recognize moderators by the diamond next to their names.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is more of a comment than an actual answer to the question.  This is not a forum.  It is not appropriate to post comments as answers.  The delete reason is given as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; you will be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment on any post&lt;/a&gt;; instead, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214173/why-do-i-need-50-reputation-to-comment-what-can-i-do-instead&quot;&gt;provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a standard message.  Due to the way that the site works, this is attributed to a specific user.  But it is actually generated by the software.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of the message is to point you at some of the help text so that you could better understand why that post was inappropriate.  It's saying to please not post comments as answers.  Since you don't have enough reputation to post comments, please stick to actual answers or to questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that the comment could be phrased better, you are welcome to make suggestions.  That's what Meta is for.  But please realize that the deletion was entirely in keeping with how this site works.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T13:54:51.630" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:54:51.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3397" CreationDate="2016-03-22T12:47:34.440" Score="14" ViewCount="772" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specific question in discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38529/gruesome-execution-by-slow-dissolution-in-low-concentration-acid-solution&quot;&gt;gruesome execution by slow dissolution in low-concentration acid solution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lets talk more generic: Questions of how to kill a person, or set of people are &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; in scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But should be such questions welcomed here? To be honest I have strong opinion against such type of questions. And I would like to start general discussion about if such type of question should belong here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T22:30:45.540" Title="Should questions about painfully killing people be welcomed on this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T13:02:31.483" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about building a world in which people may be painfully killed (for example my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38354/how-often-must-carnivorous-grassland-eat&quot;&gt;bonegrass&lt;/a&gt; question seem to me to be acceptable (obviously, or I wouldn't have written the question), but questions specifically about methods or torture or unpleasant death are likely to not be well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said: if you ignore the subject matter the question you linked to is a decent example of a worldbuilding question (though I think it's erring on being too broad, there are certainly too many questions in play and it's idea-generation-y). People's like or dislike of the subject matter can be (and is, as you've shown) expressed via the upvote/downvote buttons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I personally find directly asking 'what's the worst way this could possibly be done' to be objectionable, it doesn't preclude it from being a question this site should accept. We're about building worlds, after all. Not every part of a world is nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T13:02:31.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T13:09:05.257" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally feel an aversion against the example question due to the way it is built up and the subject it is about. I abstained from downvoting it though, because my reason for downvoting would be that I find it distasteful which is not a valid reason for downvoting in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for reasons to downwote this particular question, and lots of similar styled ones. I have a strong opinion that questions on WorldBuilding SE should at least make an attempt at showing why they are asked. Providing such information should be so easy for an OP that I consider it a reason not to answer a question, downvote it, or even outright close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a few examples of such information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the question relate to a world or story:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my story there is a Mafia conglomerate which is well-known for their brutality; well not yet as I still need to cobble together what makes them so brutal. Now I've had an idea about using acid...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did I come up with the question/issue&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Having always been a big fan of chemistry and also being a fan of torture I was thinking about possible ways to use acid in torture. I am aiming to create a method of torture where the tortured will be submersed in an acid vat and kept alive as long as possible by artificial means. BUT I have no idea how to achieve that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do I aim to solve with the gained information&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They've developed this method of torture to make a statement of how far they are ready to go if needed to prove a point...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now having even one of this things addressed in a question would leverage it into something that I consider fitting the format we have here; trying to address all of it or even more would make it even better. But then again this is rarely done, especially in a bunch of questions which seemd to pop up in the last few days (my perception of this phenomena might be clouded by the fact that I only recently got more active again)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on all of this, is it my opinion that questions asking about very explicit content and/or show clear signs of idea-generation/little effort on the OP side with no sufficient story/world-backing should be considered to be closed or even deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The points mentioned in this section are here to show how I personally reacted to the questions; None of them though are valid reasons for closing/downvoting a question in my opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum(for those who care)&lt;/em&gt;: Regarding the specified question, here is a breakdown of why it really put me off:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A title that has no capitalization whatsoever&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I interpret it as: &quot;I just had this idea and now I want you to think about it for me&quot; (to say it nicely)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The introductory statement: &quot;How about a new, very gruesome method of execution?&quot;, followed by&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which, no matter the intention behind it, just sounds absolutely wrong to me (morally, in my twisted mind)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A broad list of questions basically condensing down to &quot;What do I need to make this happen? Please do my research!&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question contains a brief paragraph about ideas the OP had, but reading the following questions (multiple ones) shows that the brief paragraph is literally no more than the initial idea with little to no research put into it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2016-03-22T14:38:08.083" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T14:38:08.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T13:50:24.447" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general, I don't have a problem with them&lt;/strong&gt; since most of the time, those questions are posed in a clinical voice, much like a doctor might describe injuries from a horrific automobile accident.  Yes, people died or were severely injured but there's not glorification of their injuries/deaths.  There's no judgement call of whether their deaths were a good, bad, glorious, inglorious thing to happen.  It just happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd have considerable problems with a question that wasn't in that clinical voice and just downvote them or ignore the question. But I don't think there should be a blanket ban on violent questions.  (If there were, a great many of the best questions (IMO) would be removed from the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T13:50:24.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T15:21:17.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is very close to Joe Bloggs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to add that if the information is used for World Building, then we don't know how the information would be used (i.e. is the organization using such methods portrayed in a good or bad light).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to admit several concerns voiced here hadn't occurred to me prior to my answering of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a relative that writes mystery novels and we spent many days discussing how she might make a body disappear for her novel, yet she obviously wasn't using that information for doing something evil in Real Life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that we have &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; social responsibility here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we apply a higher standard for these sorts of questions, what is going to keep a sociopath from lying to get what they want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the standard we apply should be one of reputation?  At least for reputation, they will have to invest more time and effort than simply figuring out a cleverly deceptive question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T15:21:17.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T15:32:37.373" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think it should be okay to ask on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find those questions distasteful, then you should also find any of the following distasteful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Murder mystery novels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dr. G - Medical Examiner the television show&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about causing human extinction (arguably worse)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about genocide (arguably worse)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic itself isn't inherently distasteful. You can easily discuss such topics in a mature, reasonable, and empirical way (and in this case, clinical), and in many cases it can be considered an art form. Just because you subjectively cannot stomach those topics doesn't mean it should be disallowed. Allow the &quot;welcoming&quot; aspect to remain subjective - if you don't like it, downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with your downvoting but I support your right to do so, but I don't think that downvotes should be called upon in order to discourage it. Let your opinion remain your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, worldbuilding doesn't necessarily entail that the world is nice and full of rainbows. I came to StackExchange because I feel at home with the empiricism, where personal feelings and emotions don't make the site feel suffocating. If we treat everyone with respect and good faith, then that means that we expect each other to treat such topics with dignity, and if that expectation is met, then that means we can be free to talk about darker aspects of reality with maturity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the internet is already a cesspool of feel-good protection with demands for trigger warnings abound, and shadowbans for people who make anyone else feel the slightest bit of discomfort, which I feel is deleterious to a website about expertise, reason, and &quot;just the facts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, you should downvote a question because it's a bad question. I do think that the question you linked is broad, but I feel that would be a better reason to downvote it, not its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15401" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T15:32:37.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2016-03-22T16:30:50.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted the question for several reasons, but an important one is that it seeks a &quot;gruesome execution method&quot; and is asked in a &quot;hey, let's brainstorm this&quot; way.  To me that reads as the OP treating the subject lightly.  That all combines to one big &lt;em&gt;squick&lt;/em&gt; for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't close (or suggest closing).  While in my opinion the question isn't strongly tied to worldbuilding, and I would have cast a close vote as a normal user, I don't feel strongly enough about its non-worldbuilding-ness to mod-close it and I see no other votes.  I won't be unhappy if the community closes it, but I'm not going to hasten that outcome either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer suggests that people who object to this question should also object to medical shows and murder mysteries.  No, that's totally different -- it's not about the process; it's about the sadism.  I don't watch graphic horror movies either.  I do read and watch stories involving murders, including ones where people were murdered in unpleasant ways, where the story is about &lt;em&gt;responding to&lt;/em&gt; the murder (like investigating it).  And if the murder is shown on-screen and that involves some blood then so be it.  It's not about the graphic details but the intent behind it.  I have no interest in watching Freddie Krueger get his jollies from gruesome murders.  For me, this question evokes Freddie Krueger, not a medical show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not calling the OP a sadist, just to be clear.  I'm just saying that a question seeking a &quot;gruesome&quot; method of killing somebody, a question that makes it clear that prolonged torture is the goal, is not something I want to support, and that downvoting is an appropriate way to indicate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provocative topics can provoke negative reactions.  So long as everybody remembers to Be Nice, that's fine.  People asking such questions should expect this outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T16:30:50.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-22T20:28:08.060" Score="4" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now begins our 29th topic challenge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dates: 21 March - 11 April&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9498&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/9498.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any significantly advanced society will probably have government in one form or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to use this tag if you're asking a question as part of the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In three weeks, we'll announce the stats for users who asked and answered questions using the tag. If you have questions, see the original post or ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose new topics here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/what-should-the-subjects-of-our-fortnightly-topic-challenges-be&quot;&gt;What should be the subjects of our fortnightly topic challenges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T13:39:22.907" Title="Triweekly Topic Challenge #29: Government" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3286" CreationDate="2016-03-22T20:33:31.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 6 questions and 23 answers, for an average of 3.83 answers per question. A total of 1385 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37392/creating-a-realistic-timekeeping-system-for-a-fantasy-world&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic timekeeping system for a fantasy world&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/18451/kit&quot;&gt;Kit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;76 total votes, 19 question votes, 9 answers, 1765 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37655/how-can-a-floral-clock-be-made-accurate-enough-to-replace-normal-timekeeping&quot;&gt;How can a floral clock be made accurate enough to replace normal timekeeping?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;57 total votes, 15 question votes, 4 answers, 2236 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38037/measure-time-with-longer-days&quot;&gt;Measure time with longer days?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14276/eithne&quot;&gt;Eithne&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 97 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38057/my-big-world-needs-more-suns&quot;&gt;My BIG World Needs More Suns&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 5 question votes, 2 answers, 197 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37986/should-the-spring-equinox-be-new-years-day&quot;&gt;Should the Spring Equinox be New Year&amp;#39;s Day?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10274/johnwdailey&quot;&gt;JohnWDailey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 1 question votes, 4 answers, 167 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37720/reconciling-polar-calendars&quot;&gt;Reconciling Polar Calendars&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/114/cagrippa&quot;&gt;CAgrippa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 5 question votes, 1 answers, 54 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T20:33:31.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-23T10:09:28.787" Score="14" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in the process of fleshing out a question about the way that the military is organized and interacts with governmental structures in a part of my conworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;code&gt;For questions related to the effects of certain circumstances, conditions, or locality changes on war.&lt;/code&gt; and in its current form the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military&lt;/a&gt; tag is a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; (which seems ill-fitting &lt;strong&gt;at best&lt;/strong&gt;). But my question is about the military as a structure/body, not about war itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose hereby to repurpose the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military&lt;/a&gt; tag as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;For questions relating to the structure or relations regarding a fictional military or its parts&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this meta-question is to address the need perceived by myself and to see if this is a shared need. Also it aims to provide a way to discuss pros/cons of repurposing the existing synonym into a new tag and to search for alternatives if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T10:49:14.797" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T03:02:12.190" Title="Making the military tag its own thing" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3405" CreationDate="2016-03-23T10:44:38.920" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a question about parasites &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38616/whats-a-good-structure-for-biological-parasitic-mind-control&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that i admit was kind of vague at the start but after JDlugos and Brythan asked me to, I edited it accordingly, giving the information they asked about an hour after they asked it, (which you can see in the comments) and three hours later my question is put on hold. I don't know what more to add to the question and the question isn't vague (at least not as vague as my other questions which have never had problems). If I'm wrong tell me because I don't know what to 'fix' here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a question on why it hasn't been reopened, I am well aware it has only been 2 hours since being put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14515" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T12:25:10.287" Title="What else am I meant to add?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3404" CreationDate="2016-03-23T12:25:10.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely the question was already in the &quot;close&quot; queue before the edits were made and the reviewers weren't as careful as they could have been. I agree it's now clear what you are asking, and in fact the question is now open again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T12:25:10.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3408" CreationDate="2016-03-23T21:36:50.327" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excuse this question if it sounds a bit wierd, but I have had less than 10 hours of sleep (been primarily studying for exams and at school). Now, while browsing the highest voted questions, I found that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is strewn with insane combos of characters. Definitely not english. I would show an image of what is happening on my screen, but the image upload is not working properly with Safari on IOS and the hassle of uploading the image to a third party and downloading it to my computer to upload back to Stack Exchange seems a bit tedious. I can do it, though not at this moment, if needed, but I would definitely not want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a username? Or something question related? Perhaps a keyboard thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T22:29:09.183" Title="What is this incomprehensible text about?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3407" CreationDate="2016-03-23T21:51:56.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a StackExchange meme about Cthulhu coming over. So the weird characters are made on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T21:51:56.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3407" CreationDate="2016-03-23T21:53:08.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The characters are turned around and modified by using some UTF-8 control characters, but I'd have to look them up myself to be sure which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters can be way more than only written text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T21:53:08.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3407" CreationDate="2016-03-23T22:20:59.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you want a crowned H:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H - &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x48;&lt;/code&gt;: &amp;#x48;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WITH COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER T - &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x36d;&lt;/code&gt;: H&amp;#x36d;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WITH COMBINING GREEK KORONIS - &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x343;&lt;/code&gt;:  H&amp;#x343;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WITH COMBINING COMMA ABOVE - &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x313;&lt;/code&gt;: H&amp;#x313;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WITH COMBINING DOT ABOVE - &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x307;&lt;/code&gt; H&amp;#x307;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result of all combinations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;#x48;&amp;amp;#x36d;&amp;amp;#x343;&amp;amp;#x313;&amp;amp;#x307; -&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &amp;#x48;&amp;#x36d;&amp;#x343;&amp;#x313;&amp;#x307;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="3510" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T22:29:09.183" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T22:29:09.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3413" CreationDate="2016-03-24T07:23:59.180" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38590/humans-can-now-run-40-mph-how-do-i-keep-the-stupid-people-alive&quot;&gt;the question about stupid people running&lt;/a&gt;, the OP presented an interesting scenario. This has since been edited for clarity -- not because it was unclear, but because people refuse to answer it. Now the question has been protected to prevent yet more failures to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests a new question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;I have a question that strikes some people as unrealistic. How do I keep the stupid people from replying?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers proposed essentially boil down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical can't happen because I say so&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical can't happen because somebody else says so&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical is stupid and so are you&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bothers me is that these answers are so highly voted. If these were questions, they'd be shut down, and hard. Instead, we have zillions of votes demonstrating precisely how &lt;b&gt;not&lt;/b&gt; to answer a question, here or on any SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify (since some will probably object to how I've posed the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Q: [Premise] Suppose human beings suddenly woke up one day and found they had eyes in the backs of their heads.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Evolution says that can't happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Humans don't have four eyes, that's silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: You shouldn't ask questions like this because biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we can do about such non-answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T08:00:18.993" Title="Problems demonstrated by the 40mph runners" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3411" CreationDate="2016-03-24T07:54:55.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I did read one of the first versions of linked question, it sounded like &quot;Humans evolved to be running 40 MPH and yet I expect some issues with that.&quot; which is indeed stupid premise and I believe I upvoted the asnwer saying: &quot;Horses evolved to run 40 MPH and yet there is zero problems with that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your question: &lt;strong&gt;make sure everyone knows about disbelief suspension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly state that knowing current biology that premise is imposssible, yet you want to know what would happen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure it is clear if it is sudden change (aliens did it) or evolutionary treat (humans just evolved that way on my planet irregardless zero probability of this being plausible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly state you do not want to know why your premise is impossible to be true&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one last hint: &lt;strong&gt;Stop assuming people are stupid here&lt;/strong&gt;. If you treat people like stupid, they will treat you as stupid back&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T07:54:55.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3411" CreationDate="2016-03-24T07:55:36.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have two possibilities as a user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvote&lt;/strong&gt; by downvoting them, you show that to you those answers aren't good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And for the worst cases: &lt;strong&gt;Flag&lt;/strong&gt; as not an answer. That way they may be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular case of the question, you'll note that the question was very popular (more than 8,000 views as of now), which may explain the heavy upvotes. We have often noticed a less rational voting pattern from HNQ users. And I blame the clickbait title for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you'll note that the question itself has a few faults. One, on which I commented, was that the edit actually invalidated some of the answers. Which should be avoided. So the most voted answer was actually answering the question in its original form. The question is close to being too broad and unclear. Note that it gathered some close votes already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="114" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T08:00:18.993" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T08:00:18.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-24T11:48:20.503" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I enjoyed the question, and wrote an answer, I can't for the life of me see why &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38655/how-to-explain-magic-using-kings&quot;&gt;the question about magic-using kings&lt;/a&gt; isn't a clear-cut case of idea-generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I can't think of a single, dominant reason....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What would be so widespread....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear that the question boils down to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the following setup&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please provide ideas to justify it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no way to evaluate results other than the OP's preferences. The conditions specified are not &quot;too broad&quot; in the strong sense, but they're wide enough that a great many equally valid answers are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T14:05:03.167" Title="Why isn't this idea generation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3414" CreationDate="2016-03-24T12:18:45.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is idea generation in a technical sense, but it's a single specific problem rather than a large vague idea which appears to be more acceptable to the community. I'd say &quot;opinion based&quot; if I was forced to pin it down to a reason to close, but I still like it as a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T12:31:45.107" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T12:31:45.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3417" CreationDate="2016-03-24T15:14:16.657" Score="7" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38754/6986&quot;&gt;How will our world change if all animals suddenly die?&lt;/a&gt;. The OP indicated the question was asked as a result of the previous &quot;all men/women suddenly die&quot; questions, which were both closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, both of which remain closed at this time after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3367/29&quot;&gt;meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;. In keeping with that idea of such questions, the &quot;animals all die&quot; question was also closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comments, the OP of &quot;animals all die&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38754/how-will-our-world-change-if-all-animals-suddenly-die#comment108862_38754&quot;&gt;gave another user permission to edit&lt;/a&gt; the question, which s/he did, extensively. The edit is so extensive, in fact, that the &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; is almost unrecognizable from the &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;. The OP &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38754/how-will-our-world-change-if-all-animals-suddenly-die#comment108869_38754&quot;&gt;expressed surprise&lt;/a&gt; at the extent of the edit. The question has since been reopened and again put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the entirety of the edit was made without input from the OP. While I'm sure the editor had good intentions, I'm not sure this is the kind of edit we should be supporting/encouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts from the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T01:44:06.163" Title="How to handle this extensive edit" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3416" CreationDate="2016-03-24T16:53:15.543" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Original Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely think that the original question was poorly thought out, and was far too broad. I believe the driving force behind it was curiosity, and was not researched at all(for example, most plants would die, as they require the help of insects to breed, etc.), which should not be encouraged (curiosity is fine, but the OP should put some effort to figure it out)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The edit is completely unacceptable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; It changes the question to a point where it is completely unrecognizable, going as far as to come up with a back story for the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the editor had wanted to ask that question himself that would have been fine, however imposing his views on the OP's question &lt;em&gt;should not be tolerated&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should definitely help new users frame their questions in a way that is better suited for the site, however rewriting their questions to this extent is not the way to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pointing them to WB Meta, the scope conversations, and maybe having one of the moderators speak to them in chat is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T21:05:33.337" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T21:05:33.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3416" CreationDate="2016-03-24T17:45:11.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree completely with @AndreiROM that this is unacceptable. To further answer the direct question on how to handle the problem, I suggest we simply chastise him (in chat?) and inform the new user what happened and exactly how his/her question is too broad. Then we roll back the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T17:45:11.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3421" CreationDate="2016-03-24T20:57:55.923" Score="11" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a response on the meta here about how &quot;clickbait&quot; titles are annoying to that user (sorry about this one's title, friend). I find that nonstandard titles are better at getting eyes on a question and subsequently get more and better answers, which has lead me to trying to sensationalize my question titles a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they are now, some might not make sense without clicking on the question, but after you read the question it (hopefully) makes sense in context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;are &quot;clickbait&quot; titles something that is generally frowned upon here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can completely understand not having titles that have no bearing on the question, but is there a general distaste for non-question titles overall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Just as a note, the title for this one is an extreme example, and I have no weird old tips.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18534" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T08:56:49.253" Title="Any weird old tips for &quot;clickbait&quot; titles?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3416" CreationDate="2016-03-24T21:19:28.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to enter the specific details of that particular question, which is covered by other answers already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General points&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should never assume we understand the intent of a user. As such, we should always limit ourselves to minimal edits: typo, formatting, grammar are ok. Modifying the focus of a question isn't. As such we shouldn't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the editor did ask the user for authorisation before doing so. Which I'd consider a minimum. Without it, I'd have rolled it back as soon as I saw it. But even then, one cannot ignore that newer users aren't that familiar with what is and what isn't acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T21:19:28.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3419" CreationDate="2016-03-24T21:33:39.303" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I feel that I am the &quot;that user&quot; mentioned :), I'll explain my views on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that reputation is a bunch of virtual points on an internet site. Nevertheless, we all like to accumulate them. As such we want our questions to be popular. Furthermore, as you mention, you want to attract enough people to get a good quality answer. Both of those are grounds to write an attractive title. A clickbait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably all do that to some extend and that's fair game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, popularity do not always bring the best for the question. Yes, you get more reputation, yes you get more chance to get a better answer. However popular questions often get on the hot network questions list. And as such will attract many people less used to the site. Again, in itself, it isn't bad. Many/most of us joined Worldbuilding that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, we tend to observe a few drawbacks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;heavy upvotes on witty answers in detriment of more thorough ones,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;amplification of a ranking: most casual users won't bother reading all the answers, so the one with more upvotes... will get even more upvotes, when the other answers are forgotten,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;attract low quality answers: you accumulate more than 10 answers, often from newer users, who do not bring more to the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clickbait titles are not necessarily bad. But one should not consider that they are always good. To get the best results in term of provided answer, it's best to have the most precise titles, to attract &quot;experts&quot;. Quality over quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T21:33:39.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3416" CreationDate="2016-03-25T00:13:16.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked OP if she/he is OK with an edit aimed at putting the question within the scope of worldbuilding SE (since the original was not). Hence the aim of the edit was to keep the soul of the question intact (what would be the effects of taking out all &lt;em&gt;animals&lt;/em&gt; from the environment) but reword it so as to make it precise and limited in the scope (which would make it compatible with worldbuilding SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP replied with &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;why not, as long as I get an answer&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (most of the comments were later removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was clearly mentioned by me at the end of the edit that I was editing the question simply to put it within the scope of worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP is uncomfortable with the edit, or that the edit changes the premise of the question, then yes, my edit should have been rolled back. But simply objecting because I added a backstory and presented his/her question in a more precise and direct form is ... rather harsh I would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the objection to my edit should have come from OP (or moderators) only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit to add&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes I later saw OP's comment to my edit as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;wow. such a big edit hahaha&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know if he/she was objecting to it. If they were, I agree with fellow members that the edit was unjustified and should have been rolled back. Let's wait to hear from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T00:18:25.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2016-03-25T01:48:43.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to the site and I do see a lot of sub-topics and maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but World building seems very well suited to people who are trying to write more believable sci-fi and fantasy stories.   With that in mind I would like to see more latitude given to the questions.  I think if the person is using slightly off-topic questions for the genuine purpose of improving his 'world' then why not just allow it.  If a person is asking a grammar question or something like that, then yes, it's off topic of course.  But is there another stackechange that has this kind of help for topics a bit more broad than world building?  Is time-travel world building?  Can I ask about that here?  If not, why not?  Seems cool to me.  So yeah, I think we close too many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14770" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T01:48:43.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3419" CreationDate="2016-03-25T19:00:36.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best &quot;clickbait&quot; is to &lt;strong&gt;develop a reputation for asking well-framed, thought-provoking, and interesting questions&lt;/strong&gt;. That will lead to people from WB who know of you and your questions to say, &quot;Ah, another &lt;code&gt;JGaines&lt;/code&gt; question, this should be interesting!&quot; (click)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will lead to your question getting lots of views from WB regulars. That will lead to your question getting onto the HNQ (Hot Network Questions) list. That will let users from across all stacks view your title. This is where having an informative title that actually describes the gist of the question well is useful, since all they see is that one line, before deciding on whether to click or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T19:00:36.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3419" CreationDate="2016-03-25T19:09:05.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although clickbait titles may be entertaining, they don't really get the gist of the question across unless you actually make the effort to read the whole question. By your logic, I feel like you're doing the opposite of what you want to do: you're pushing potentially useful answers with a title that might seem random. Since only your question's title is shown in the Hot Questions bar and on Worldbuilding, you could probably attract more quality answers if you gave a basic idea of what your question was about in the title. I personally skim through new questions reading only the title and a misleading title would cause me to just skim over it, potentially missing a hidden gem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T19:09:05.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T03:30:06.687" Score="10" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many posts feature &quot;words words words &lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Here are different words, so the old words don't apply anymore....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this problematic for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It requires readers to read a post, assemble some understanding/mental model of the ideas presented, then discard those in favor of later words representing changes to the previous ideas. You may think I'm overreacting, but look at edit 4 (!) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9772/12207&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;: it completely changes the constraints on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It makes the posts themself &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; less expertly-done. The hallmark of all Stackexhange sites is the presence of expert users and expert content. Having &quot;Edit:... Edit 2:... Edit 3:...&quot; undercuts that. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%22edit%203%22&quot;&gt;This is not hyperbole&lt;/a&gt;.) Instead of coming to a site and finding interesting and well-written Q&amp;amp;A, we come to a site and find interesting (to some)/frustrating (to others) streams of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's redundant. We have revision histories on all posts. They're really good revision histories. They're not hidden, as clicking on &quot;edited XX ago&quot; is available to all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should discourage &quot;Edit:&quot; syntax. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T20:57:29.327" Title="Should we discourage &quot;Edit:&quot; syntax?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2016-03-26T03:42:52.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A year and a half ago, there was an interesting discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80/redefining-too-broad?rq=1&quot;&gt;redefining &quot;too broad&quot;&lt;/a&gt; here on Meta. What I find a bit worrying is that the conclusions (or notions) come to in that discussion appear gradually to have been set aside, at least to some degree. The result is that I think we have become too quick to close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the dominant points in the referenced discussion was that broad questions get refined relatively slowly. It takes time. We begin with a question that's too broad and possibly out of scope, then a flurry of comments shaves it down to where it belongs on WB/SE but is too broad. It goes on hold, and there's a long back-and-forth -- in comments, in chat, etc. -- trying to find ways to get at the narrow-enough core of the question. Editing happens. Eventually a revised and polished question emerges, and it gets reopened through the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, many said at the time, how the system is supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at present, I think the rapid-fire &quot;too broad&quot; and especially &quot;off topic&quot; close votes shut off discussion and reconsideration. The question referenced in Jim2B's meta-question has been deleted by its author. I see this happen far too often. In my reading, new posters take their questions down after a barrage of &quot;off topic&quot; votes, thinking, &quot;gee, I guess my question is no good, so as a good citizen I should get rid of it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've noted recently, there's also a lot of downvoting and close-voting without any comments. Some seem to think it's OK to do this because the close reason appears automatically, but that's not the case. As questions like this demonstrate, &quot;off topic&quot; and &quot;too broad&quot; are &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; self-explanatory. And if you cannot clearly articulate what's wrong, you shouldn't be close-voting. (Franklhy, I think that if you can articulate it but choose not to do so, you shouldn't be voting at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, I think we should be leaving things on hold for a long time. Unless we're dealing with a gross mismatch, a question should not be closed for a week, in my opinion, and possibly longer. If you're concerned that we need more refinement to avoid destructive answers, protect the question. But don't close questions until they've been through a lengthy and serious review, with all discussion clearly explicated in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T03:42:52.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-03-26T11:24:41.203" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, yes. We should discourage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think there is a definite place for this usage when questions are first getting posed and commented upon. &quot;Edit:&quot; passages should be inserted in the question at the relevant points, not all stuck at the end. But such a usage can make it much easier to follow the progress of revision and refinement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question is effectively &quot;done,&quot; i.e., ready to be answered effectively, it would be great to polish the prose and eliminate all such passages. Editing to remove &quot;edit,&quot; as it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I'd like to see this be a regular basis for flagging a question for the edit review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate end-product should of course be clean, coherent questions in tidy prose... and that means no &quot;edit:&quot; usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T11:24:41.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-03-27T02:17:43.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that as soon as an answer is posed that will suddenly acquire a changed or disabled meaning, that editing the basis of the question is, no pun intended, out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas with an answer, there is really absolutely no point at all to say you edited it, people can take an answer any way and choose whether to upvote or downvote without knowledge of its edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that if a basic concept is being changed, if it absolutely must be, a comment that says it has been is always nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14789" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T02:17:43.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-03-27T02:22:49.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post should always be a coherent whole, not a sequence of original text + edit 1 (which revises some of that) + edit 2 etc.  The &quot;Edit:&quot; style comes from the blog world, I think, where revision histories aren't usually available and authors want to call out a change.  Here, the edit timestamp (and post bump) signals that there was a change and the curious can look at the revision.  But for people seeing the question for the first time, this style impedes readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an edit is in response to a comment, adding a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; pinging the commenter and pointing out the edit is fine.  (Ideally those comments get cleaned up later as obsolete.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T02:22:49.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3366" CreationDate="2016-03-27T05:00:30.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall I'd have to say I agree with your rules. They make sense to me, and I think pretty well cover how to judge questions. Below is what I think of all of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0) There is a reason this is rule zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't read the question, how are you supposed to know anything about it? You can only fit so many words into a title, and they may not reflect the entire question. In any case, you should read the question before doing something about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're not a mindless drone. Seriously, develop an opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, this should be a no brainer. If you don't know our sites requirements, limitations, and rules, you have no business trying to police this site. Or really doing very much of anything on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't be timid about what you think. It is important that you share your opinions, regardless of whether or not others agree. As Mark Twain once said, &quot;Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think is one is important, and the most often ignored. How do you expect people to like and want to join the site, or for the site to improve without first stating what is wrong? Some people might not even understand what is wrong with the question in your eyes, which might lead to confusion and future bitterness in potentially great users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, this should not need to be said aloud. If you don't read about the question, then you are missing out. A few small but important details might be adressed, that change the question from obviously off topic to a respectable question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Back to rule zero. Judge the questions based on their value, not your feelings about others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obviously. If you feel like a question doesn't belong on the site, then doen't encourage it to grow and develop by answering. Just let it be. I'm speaking words of wisdom here. Let it be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is what downvoted are for. When you don't approve of something, or just plain don't like it, even though it is technically viable for the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because everything should have ten rules. Support questions you like! Click that little upvote button, or just contribute. It improves the site just as much, if not &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than anything else you could do. If you feel a question is on topic and well thought out, then you know what to do. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T05:00:30.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1768" CreationDate="2016-03-27T22:02:14.083" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Alternate mathematics. This is an interesting tag with great potential, but it isn't used much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2053" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T22:02:14.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-28T10:42:41.080" Score="8" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39012/114&quot;&gt;This question about repulsive black holes&lt;/a&gt; has been heavily down-voted. Just in case those reading this might have joined in on this, I'd like to make a pitch for not doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP doesn't understand the physics. Of course, if the OP &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; understand it, the OP wouldn't be posting here. But in this case, there's some pretty serious misunderstanding going on (negative-massed photons??).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough. In fact, that and some other oddities make it very hard to tell what's being asked, and for this reason the question has been put on hold. Well done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why down-vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're at all charitable as a reader, I think it's clear what the OP is trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want black holes backwards&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a vague idea how this might work, but don't know much about physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want to write a &quot;please work out my world for me&quot; idea-generation question, because that's not cool on this SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will make a stab at it, and probably get it wrong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't that pretty much exactly what we'd like this person to do? And then, if all goes well, the ongoing comments will refine the question until it can be reopened and ready for prime-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But three down-votes in a very short time, especially when the only apparent criticisms are &quot;this isn't clear&quot; and &quot;you don't know much physics,&quot; boils down to a clear message of rejection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that's my WB.SE gripe for the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T08:47:40.240" Title="Why the down-votes?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3433" CreationDate="2016-03-28T12:26:51.293" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the hover text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote -- &quot;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote -- &quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is not useful or unclear&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting seems to align with the close reason of &quot;Unclear what you're asking.&quot; I think you might be finding the heavy downvotes an issue because WB SE has &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1995/6986&quot;&gt;an issue&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; downvoting regularly. So, when a post appears that meets the criteria for a downvote, and it gets lots of downvotes, it becomes an anomaly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, it's not required for people who downvote to leave commentary explaining their reasons. We strongly ask close-voters to leave commentary, and we suggest downvoters do so as well, but there's no enforcement mechanism to require it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, notice that the question has significant scientific errors &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. The discrepancy between &quot;I'm redefining science like this; what happens?&quot; and &quot;answers should be backed up by equations, scientific papers, etc.&quot; may have helped drive the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T12:26:51.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-03-28T19:33:57.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering out loud whether Edit should be a key word used to track questions with answers.  Such as, hypothetically (and a bit dramatically):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: How can my spaceship generate gravity by spinning.   || Edit 1: Gravity should be the same as on Jupiter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: It can spin at XYZ speed with ABC distance  || Edit 1: It should spin at ZYX speed at CBA distance to achieve the same experience as gravity on Jupiter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Obviously that's a terrible question&lt;/em&gt;, but maybe &amp;quot;EDIT&amp;quot; can be used to track changes in Questions and Answers.  If I answer a question and then go jogging, but the question has edits; viewers will know that I am answering PRE-Edits and not result in me being down-voted for answering the wrong math (or whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T19:33:57.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T03:10:34.197" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading up on the scope of the site again, and I read this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid poorly-written questions.&lt;/strong&gt; Posting a well-written answer under a poorly-written question just makes your answer look worse. Also become familiar with what's on-topic here - and avoid answering questions on topics that aren't well-regarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I know there is a badge called reversal that says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide an answer of +20 score to a question of -5 score  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it a little bit strange that we say we discourage answers to poorly written questions, then have a reward for doing that very thing? It just kind of seemed strange to me, and I was curious as to what the reasoning behind it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="16736" LastEditDate="2016-03-29T13:24:55.827" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T15:17:52.417" Title="Are we sending mixed messages about poorly written questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3436" CreationDate="2016-03-29T15:17:52.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where is that first quote from?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aside from being wrong it is poorly written.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who defines &lt;em&gt;poorly regarded topics&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can most certainly give a good answer to a poorly written question.  As an example, it could be argued that my periodic table question was poorly conceived, but the answer I got explained that to me and was very well received.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why would we want to negatively judge someone for writing a good answer to a poor question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously in the case of a poor question be that in quality or taste there are always the options of closing/modifying.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T15:17:52.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2016-03-30T01:11:53.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Software surveys&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/125/28&quot;&gt;This question about map-making software&lt;/a&gt; has 25+ votes, nearly 20 favorites, and several answers.  It's obviously a topic of some interest.  Would anybody who's actually used software for map-making care to write a survey of what's out there?  No one piece of software meets all needs, so ideally you'd tell us a little about the strengths and weaknesses of the programs you survey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1348/28&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31917/28&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt; about planetary prototyping and modeling, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/499/28&quot;&gt;this popular one&lt;/a&gt; about organizing notes, of interest to worldbuilders, writers, GMs, and probably many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These all have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T01:11:53.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3419" CreationDate="2016-03-30T08:56:49.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the question title is to &lt;strong&gt;accurately and succintly summarize the most important parts of the question&lt;/strong&gt; in order to establish context for the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title itself cannot cover all the ground that the question text itself does. That's just not practical, let alone that it isn't the purpose of the title at all. This is even more so on a site like Worldbuilding, where we generally expect askers to lay out the background that any answers will need to adhere to in sufficient detail, and ideally also show what research the asker has done in trying to answer the question themselves or at the very least establish their knowledge level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; and should however give a summary, such that (especially together with the tags) you can tell at a glance &lt;em&gt;what the OP is asking about.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been known to downvote mercilessly any questions I come across where the title does not accurately summarize the question. In some cases I have also voted to close for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the title field placeholder text: &lt;strong&gt;What's your worldbuilding question? Be specific.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By all means feel free to write a &quot;witty&quot; or &quot;clickbait&quot; title, but &lt;em&gt;make sure it first and foremost fulfills its purpose of being a summary of the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T08:56:49.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T14:42:22.743" Score="18" ViewCount="896" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of us here on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange are building worlds for our own fictional stories, but sometimes the best way to create something is to learn about what has already been created. With that in mind, I propose we create a &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Recommended Reading List&lt;/strong&gt; that can give insight on or examples of good worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to this post &lt;strong&gt;should include&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name of a book or series of books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author(s) name(s)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief explanation of how the book(s) relate to Worldbuilding. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A link to the book in question when available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers &lt;strong&gt;should not include&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommendations based solely on plot or theme (books should be recommended based on their ability to create and/or utilize well-built world)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommendation for content you are unfamiliar with.  If you haven't read it, don't recommend it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Standard formatting for answers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a stand alone book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Book Name Hyperlinked&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a book series&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Series Name (&lt;em&gt;Author&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Book 1 hyperlinked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Book 2 hyperlinked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Book n hyperlinked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T01:02:33.957" Title="Worldbuilding Recommended Reading" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-03-30T15:03:04.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Dan Simmons- Hyperion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sci-fi novel follows the pilgrimage of seven very different individuals, each from a different place and time, but all whom are somehow connected to the ultimate fate of the galaxy. By allowing each character to tell their own story, Simmons allows the reader to explore his galaxy from many different angles, from the highest echelons of government trying to secure a better future for humankind, to a humble parent who doesn't care about much more than caring for his daughter for another day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, this book and its sequel(s) provide a great example for an incredibly detailed science fiction world. Things of note are how Simmons handles combat, communication, and transportation; all of these are difficult obstacles to overcome in science fiction, but in &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; these factors are addressed and used to make the story more interesting. Also note the diversity of the galaxy's people; this is a galaxy that feels lived-in because you can see examples of all the sorts of people you'd expect to be living there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T15:03:04.617" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-30T15:03:04.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-03-30T15:04:23.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mars Trilogy (&lt;em&gt;Kim Stanley Robinson&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000QCS914&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Red Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000QCS91E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Green Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00165EXI8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good series about terraforming a dead world to something human habitable, along with the political, ethical, social, and scientific considerations that might need to be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks at the terraforming issue from multiple angles, both for and against. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has suggestions about useful technologies, many of which are applicable outside of terraforming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T16:06:21.277" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T16:06:21.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-03-30T15:45:57.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;World Building Resources and Guides&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing Guides&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/158297103X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How to Write Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Orson Scott Card&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an easily digestible, well written guide on how to approach story telling and world building and how they intersect.  Definitely leans more toward the sci-fi side of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1439156816&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On Writing&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Stephen King&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Love him or hate him you have to admire his success.  Clearly the guy knows something.  This book is part memoir part guide.  If you are looking for step by step instructions this is probably not the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference Materials&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1582970262&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;various&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excellent resources that covers everything from medieval social structures to magic, fantasy creatures/races, arms and armor and much more.  Very useful if you are working in a medieval setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0786965622&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;various&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are trying to randomize...or maybe parameterize would be a better term, the creation of nations, cities, organizations etc this is a great book.  If you have never, and have no plans to ever play DnD this book is still a great resource for world builders.  The book provides a sort of step by step process for building your setting be it large or small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0786965614&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;5e Monster Manual&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Various&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, even if you have no plans to ever play DnD this is a massive list of monsters be they humanoid or dragon, or...whatever the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrasque_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tarrasque&lt;/a&gt; is will be helpful.  Each creature in the book has assigned numeric abilities (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence etc) as well as combat skills and or spells already defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1440528179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Elvish to Klingon, The Anwa, Reella, Ealray, Yeht (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons. &lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;em&gt;Stephen D. Rogers&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Takes you through how languages are structured and even how to create your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T16:25:59.640" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T16:25:59.640" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-03-30T15:45:57.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-03-30T16:16:10.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Conquerors' Trilogy by Timothy Zahn&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquerors%27#Conquerors.27_Pride&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conquerors' Pride&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquerors%27#Conquerors.27_Heritage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conquerors' Heritage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquerors%27#Conquerors.27_Legacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conquerors' Legacy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting study on perspective, and how it can change the shape of worlds and events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A human/alien war is started with an unprovoked attack, and atrocities occur.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then the entire story is retold from the alien perspective, and everything changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T16:16:10.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3403" CreationDate="2016-03-31T06:48:54.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the sentiment is shared by others. But I seem not to be able to make the changes myself, as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Creating Tag Synonyms&lt;/strong&gt; (I assume also the editing of these) requires &lt;strong&gt;1250 rep&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing Tag Wikis&lt;/strong&gt; requires &lt;strong&gt;1500 rep&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I'll tag this discussion for moderator attention :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T06:48:54.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3448" CreationDate="2016-03-31T10:25:41.767" Score="6" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really enjoy doing reviews. It provides me with the ability to help other users get started on the site, and to improve the overall quality of the network. I take my time when reviewing posts and do so to the best of my knowledge and belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I am doing a good job, afterall I currently stand at 100% helpful flags and 100% accepted edits. I have read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3263/scope-clarification-discussions&quot;&gt;Scope clarification discussions&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3366/rules-of-peer-moderation&quot;&gt;rules of peer moderation&lt;/a&gt;. I also enjoy the experience of about 3k reviews on StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do reviews in all queues I am allowed on, which currently are the late answers and first posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what troubles me is the following:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WB does not have many posts that need to be reviewed (which is a good thing). Because of that, after performing some reviews I am currently within the top reviewers in the queues I have access to. So far nothing bad, but all the other reviewers appearing stand at multiple k reputation whereas I do not have that much, as I haven't answered that many questions yet. I feel a little bit like an underdog between all those &quot;gleaming stars of the community&quot; and am wondering, whether I belong there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any reasons, that I should not do reviewing on Worldbuilding? Is there anything I can/ have to improve in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I could think of, is that one could argue that due to missing editing or close-voting rights, my flagging or suggesting edits generates additional work - but I feel like this is outweighted by the workload I handle doing the reviews that do not need a second pair of eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that many low-reputation users are more interested in getting their questions answered or do not know/ care about doing reviews. But I certainly do enjoy this part of StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T15:53:57.990" Title="Is there anything wrong with low reputation users doing reviews?" Tags="|discussion|reviews|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3447" CreationDate="2016-03-31T10:52:29.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to some extend the same feeling as you. If not here, then on other site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, everyone should enjoy the rights they are given. So do vote and flag, and edit. The main idea is to dedicate some of your time to improve the site, by hosting great questions, and making sure those get the best answers. If you're willing to contribute to that, then great. We thank you for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good that you have read all those posts. Feel free to contribute to the debate yourself. Knowing that you have taken the time to be familiar with the site, the idea, etc. Then I see no reason for you to stop or change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note, however, that when we get to the full graduation, the threshold for close-votes will rise a bit. So to continue on that you'll need to gather a bit more of reputation. But that won't take your rights to up/down vote, flag or suggest some edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T10:52:29.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3447" CreationDate="2016-03-31T15:53:57.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's great that you're so involved with Worldbuilding! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go through the same thing on the sites which I have just joined. It's tough going from 10K+ rep to 100 (because we &lt;em&gt;trust you on other sites&lt;/em&gt;). That feeling of starting over is daunting, for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, it serves its purpose.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike you, a lot of people do not bother reading the scope clarification discussions, or the rules of peer moderation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had quite an influx of new members lately, and we've also had a pretty major spike of questions put on hold precisely because those people did not educate themselves prior to posting. Some of those users simply dropped off the grid when their questions weren't well received, or lashed out in the comments rather than trying to understand how to improve their questions/answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't want people such as those having more privileges simply because they created an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, have had users edit my answers to basically chew me out because they didn't agree with my opinion, or censor my posts for ideological reasons. I'm sure they were dealt with by the moderators, but they outline the sort of abuse of power that some people are capable of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, I'm a fan of the current reputation thresholds. A user who commits abuses, does not educate themselves about the rules and scope of the site, or vandalizes people's posts will not last before being banned, or simply quitting, and will never gain the rep necessary to do even &lt;em&gt;more damage&lt;/em&gt; by editing tags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing a high rep user offer a review or opinion on SE is reassuring because you know for a fact that that person has gained the rep and privileges the &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; way. By participating. Getting involved, and working within the framework of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular case, simply stick with it! I only joined the site 4 months ago, and I already have 10K reputation. Your dedication and effort will be rewarded in our unique SE way!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T15:53:57.990" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-03-31T22:26:52.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the ones I'm about to list are notable not just for the excellent writing but for the original and compelling worlds they build. World and stories where I've seen little else similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything by &lt;strong&gt;Brandon Sanderson&lt;/strong&gt; :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally anything, he's built so many incredible worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, The Rithmatist, Steelheart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them are fantastically conceived worlds but all also very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything by &lt;strong&gt;Peter F. Hamilton&lt;/strong&gt; :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again everything is very good, in this case though I'd highlight the Night's Dawn Trilogy and the Commonwealth Saga. Both sci-fi but different and unique from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ian M. Banks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically the Culture books, although he's done some other good stuff as well (The Algebraist springs to mind). The Player of Games in particular is a stand-out book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Peter V Brett&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Painted Man and the sequels, again a very vivid and originally conceived world (post apocalyptic fantasy in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of other authors I could suggest, they aren't quite in the same league as the ones above but all good and all with some compelling concepts and worlds. Where I've listed a particular book or series they have more worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trudi Canavan&lt;/strong&gt; (The Age of the Five and Millennium's Rule)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usrula K Le Guin&lt;/strong&gt; (Earthsea - a bit dated now but created so many fantasy concepts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Robin Hobb&lt;/strong&gt; (both Realm of the Elderlings (lots of books) and Soldier Son have some really well conceived and original concepts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Richard Morgan&lt;/strong&gt; (Altered Carbon, Black Man)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more but that's enough for now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T22:26:52.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2016-03-31T23:44:34.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;//patents.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ask Patents Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, for example, has content that is different from the usual boilerplate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of the Help Center pages are not editable by users or moderators.  What Code Review has done is &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.codereview.stackexchange.com/q/5086/9357&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;draft the pages on Meta&lt;/a&gt;.  When ready, you can ask a Community Manager to publish the draft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5016" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T23:44:34.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3403" CreationDate="2016-04-01T01:28:41.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've broken the tag synonym between &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/military&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;military&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;military&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; and added the wiki excerpt from the question.  I suggest that interested parties review the questions on each tag and retag anything that needs it (try not to totally slam the front page, though), along with editing the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T03:02:12.190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T03:02:12.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-04-01T13:31:10.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have got a couple of inter-related questions that have been bugging me for a long time but I think it may be too speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the health considerations of living in a fully steampunk/dieselpunk world?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the environmental considerations of living in a fully steampunk/dieselpunk world?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that amount of air pollution generated in a steampunk or dieselpunk world would have a serious effect on the general health of humans and the state of the environment. Would people in these worlds try to mitigate the issues caused by pollutants or just live with the consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14530" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T13:31:10.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T15:30:43.837" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed this question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39333/what-are-some-examples-of-magic-equivalent-of-a-nuke&quot;&gt;What are some examples of magic equivalent of a nuke&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which seems to be asking for examples in fiction of things that would be like a magical nuke. I noticed this question was also asked on SFF SE, and it was closed there, but here so far it's remained open, and I can't really think of a good close reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that this is not a 'how can I do this' question, which is a different issue. This is specifically a 'give me a list of precedents' question. I don't think we have these too often, but while I don't know exactly what to do with them by looking at the answers they don't seem like the best questions to keep around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T13:30:37.120" Title="Is asking for examples on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3454" CreationDate="2016-04-01T17:03:51.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that question is too broad, as well as off topic for Worldbuilding because it asks us to list examples from other universes and explain how they work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that that user is basically asking us to do his research for him, which is not something to be encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, magic is simply .. made up. You can invent any spell, and make it &quot;devastating&quot; as you wish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T17:03:51.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3454" CreationDate="2016-04-02T04:29:38.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing a question as Too Broad suggests that it should be tightened with more constraints.  But that wouldn't fix this question in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the correct close reason would simply be that it is not actually about building a world.  Examples may be part of legitimate responses to questions, but questions should not consist of a request for them.  It seems like an excellent chat subject either here or on SF&amp;amp;F (as their &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/123763/30870&quot;&gt;close reason&lt;/a&gt; notes).  It shouldn't appear in the main site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T04:29:38.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-04-02T13:51:31.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for posting an (almost) duplicate answer, but I can't edit other answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design#3220&quot;&gt;Erik's idea&lt;/a&gt; of stylising the voting  arrows to incorporate other aspects of this site, for example medieval and fantasy themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created some mock-ups of how some of my ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cf2Sl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cf2Sl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6TAqJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6TAqJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QM95I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QM95I.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erik's original post was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be fun to trade out the standard up/down arrows for either a sword or a fletched arrow. That would bring a medieval element to the theme, and reflect that blend of future and past that is common in many works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm imagining something more akin to my final design, with the voting buttons themselves swapped out for something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastEditorUserId="9182" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T11:47:36.043" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T11:47:36.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-04-03T00:56:40.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39275/how-can-the-human-race-survive-the-destruction-of-the-inner-solar-system&quot;&gt;this Question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit addresses points raised in the Answer and comments, and completely made the Answer not match anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marking the edit is much friendlier. I pointed out that it is not unreasonable to continue to get input that makes you change your original ideas, and it shouldn't alienate existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, once you're convinced that a particular point ought to be dropped, you don’t want more answers continuing to focus on that. So an inline &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; allows both: existing answers still have context, and the question reflects the improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I certainly agree that when comments prompt for more details, this is best added as an improved draft in the proper place in the writing, not as a postscript.  That should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T00:56:40.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-04-03T03:09:06.293" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see one huge advantage to the &quot;Edit&quot; syntax : it allow answerers to quickly find the new informations without having to read and compare the post to its previous state. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disallowing the word &quot;Edit&quot; does not prevent the radical change in content and complicate life for those who want to produce and maintain answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this might lower slightly the readability for newcomers, those who already took some pain and some time to answer will have a better experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, both answerers and new readers can see the rate of modifications and can have an easier time deciding if it's worth answering a question that dramatically change overnight to suit some whims  or if it's a couple important refining following comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I'm not saying it should be a rule, just that &lt;em&gt;properly&lt;/em&gt; used, it's a tool newcomers, answerers and followers can use and maybe even enjoy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastEditorUserId="16951" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T04:51:29.773" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T04:51:29.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-04-04T05:08:55.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brandon Mull&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mull&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Beyinders - Fabelehavem - Five Kingdoms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I linked to a bio page because it has all of them listed in there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like Brandon Mull's books, and I think he's a pretty good author. I'd place the reading level at about a middle school one, but I find him very enjoyable. In Beyonders, he constructs an entirely new world with new races, plants, and pretty much everything. In Fablehaven, it is discovers that there is a magical world beyond what most humans see. And in Five kingdoms, another new world is constructed, which can be changed, and which is Ted in the Beyonders in a remarkably clever way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T05:08:55.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T13:20:29.073" Score="-11" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not Worldbuilding.  It's fictional fantasy that uses a misleading title.  I tried to pose a question based on reality, and was told this is a fictional site that is more about Hobbitworld Building. That said, it should be under Fantasy.   It's very misleading.  There are other titles that could apply but Worldbuilding is very misleading.  See the latest posts under it.  Not just mine either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19659" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T15:58:58.357" Title="Worldbuilding is misleading" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-04-06T02:49:31.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-04-04T14:56:20.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Banks and Hamilton have already been mentioned, I'd like to add &lt;strong&gt;Neal Asher&lt;/strong&gt;, whose books all fall into the sci-fi genre, all of which are worth every cent. Since this is about interesting topics related to world building, I'll shortly highlight why I think the relevant books are great lecture in this context. I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;amp;field-keywords=neal%20asher%20owner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Owner Trilogy&lt;/a&gt; is great reading about the mind-changing effect directly incorporating direct computer-brain interfaces could have on human psychology as well as not-too-far future battles could look like, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; including space combat using warp drives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;amp;field-keywords=neal+asher+polity&amp;amp;rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aneal+asher+polity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Polity Novels&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;amp;field-keywords=neal+asher+polity&amp;amp;rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aneal+asher+polity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Agent Cormac&lt;/a&gt; Series of Novels on incorporating different technology levels on different planets, human-AI-Alien interactions and implications of societies with the ability to infinitely increase life span and resurrection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These also have a &lt;em&gt;relatively&lt;/em&gt; scientific approach on far-future space battles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T14:56:20.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3462" CreationDate="2016-04-04T15:58:58.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to take a leaf from one of the comments to your deleted question and post a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page on Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;. The definition there offers a broader understanding of the term, for instance &quot;Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world&quot;. These are all things which we answer questions about here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like your deleted question wasn't actually a question, that's why it was downvoted. If you actually wanted to literally build a planet, you could probably ask about that, and if your question was suitably constrained it would probably get upvoted and receive good answers. We have many such questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think you're taking Tolkien in much the wrong direction. The world he created may have been fictional, and contained some fantasy elements, but it was also constructed using knowledge of ancient cultures and stories. Middle-Earth is a world built with care and filled with intricate detail; there are many people who know more about its geography, history, or cultures than they do about those of their own world. This is why Tolkien is a great model for what we do here at Worldbuilding: because even though the world he created was full of fictional fantastical Hobbits, it still obeyed some fundamental laws that readers could understand and associate with. Middle Earth makes sense, and it has life and meaning beyond any one story that takes place upon it. This is what we strive for here, worlds that feel real and immerse the audience. We ask how to build such worlds, and if that's not called Worldbuilding, then I'd really like to know what it should be called. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T15:58:58.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3426" CreationDate="2016-04-04T18:41:53.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;  I would neither discourage nor encourage its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It requires readers to read a post, assemble some understanding/mental model of the ideas presented, then discard those in favor of later words representing changes to the previous ideas. You may think I'm overreacting, but look at edit 4 (!) on this post: it completely changes the constraints on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are making an assumption that all edits are placed at the end of a question, which is simply not the case.  Edits at the end of a question do make sense in the case of information that was never in the previous version of the question and are thus not a problem.  &lt;strong&gt;One (or a percentage) poorly formatted question does not make a certain syntax universally bad.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It makes the posts themself look less expertly-done. The hallmark of all Stackexhange sites is the presence of expert users and expert content. Having &quot;Edit:... Edit 2:... Edit 3:...&quot; undercuts that. (This is not hyperbole.) Instead of coming to a site and finding interesting and well-written Q&amp;amp;A, we come to a site and find interesting (to some)/frustrating (to others) streams of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is opinion.  A valid opinion, but still an opinion.  A lot of what we do here requires a poster's thoughts to evolve before a final question comes out of it...I do not mind that on the page personally.  That is my (also valid) opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's redundant. We have revision histories on all posts. They're really good revision histories. They're not hidden, as clicking on &quot;edited XX ago&quot; is available to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's great but I can't recall looking at it on more that one or two occasions, and it was mainly because I answered a question, an edit was made and I wasn't sure where it was...which again, is why I do not mind someone pointing their edits out in the question/answer...it's easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer to lean toward the benefit of askers and answerers.  These are the people truly engaged in the question.  &lt;strong&gt;People passively reading a question are far less of a concern to me than active participants&lt;/strong&gt;...after all those passive readers have nothing to read if the participants don't write anything down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not advocating that we &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; this format, &lt;strong&gt;I am simply saying leave well enough alone and leave it to the poster.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that a format change would make the question better, feel free to edit the post.  If the poster doesn't like it they can always roll it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is not an exact science...asking a question here is much more complicated than asking a question about coding or chemistry, it should not surprise anyone that edits are common...therefore, &lt;strong&gt;while the question is being actively worked, I find the syntax valuable.  If we want to mention that once an answer has been accepted it is good form to clean things up that is fine with me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T20:57:29.327" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T20:57:29.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3467" CreationDate="2016-04-04T20:55:05.737" Score="10" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ad appears on other SE sites' sidebar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/59Yxg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/59Yxg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked around but found nothing to indicate what the significance of Oskeron is, either here on WB.SE or the internet in general.  I thought it might be a literary or cinematic reference, but nothing comes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T08:47:02.427" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T08:47:02.427" Title="In our community ads, what is &quot;Oskeron&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3466" CreationDate="2016-04-04T22:26:52.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was commented about at the time, the person who created the advert used it as the name of a fictional world and just invented it for the ad. It was suggested that it might be confusing but unless someone wants to create another ad (or modify that one) it's what we get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bright side it did cause some curiosity and discussion :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T22:26:52.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3469" CreationDate="2016-04-05T18:10:30.797" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39487/if-imis-was-updated-to-be-partially-reusable-and-implemented-by-nasa-what-are&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and clicked the link out of curiosity. It brought up the GoogleDocs application on my iPad (that is what I usually browse on) and the keyboard came up. I hit the back key and it wiped everything out. It autosaved the changes when I exited the app. &lt;strong&gt;I feel completely horrible about this and I would like to know how the community thinks I should handle this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T18:28:52.037" Title="How to handle a situation in which you accidentally harm some content in a users post?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3468" CreationDate="2016-04-05T18:28:52.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google docs retains a revision history of your files if I remember correctly, so your owner should be ok to recover their content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously make sure you let them know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T18:28:52.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3454" CreationDate="2016-04-08T13:30:37.120" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's quite acceptable. The person asking the question wants to merge real science with fantasy, and is having trouble finding a plausible/believable example. If anyone could think of a suitable example, it would be very beneficial to the building of the asker's world. I don't think it's off-topic, because it really would help in world-building. Destruction on such a massive scale, but without the current technologies, and using magic, which would probably mean no radiation nonsense after the blast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19750" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T13:30:37.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-04-08T15:09:40.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/89262/constructed-languages&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TV04f.png&quot; alt=&quot;Proposed Q&amp;amp;A site for enthusiasts, developers, students, teachers, polyglots, and anyone else wanting to discuss constructed languages (Esperanto, Volapük, Dovahzul, Vulcan, etc.)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11787" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T20:46:31.010" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:46:31.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3440" CreationDate="2016-04-10T01:02:33.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Three-Body Problem&lt;/a&gt; by Cixin Liu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is the first in a series by a Chinese author and translated into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has some really interesting world building with alien civilizations and topics like virtual reality simulations, how to turn a single photon into a super computer, evolution and surviving on a planet with three suns, how to drive physicists insane, creative uses for super strong nano material, and weird doomsday cults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking forward to the other books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T01:02:33.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2016-04-10T06:15:05.760" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did we ever agree that something like &quot;suspended-disbelief&quot; would be a good tag?  I just noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33126/star-factory-that-a-planet-orbits&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which is marked both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. The opening remarks make it clear that science-based in &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; appropriate,  and as a fantasy based scenareo he explains that he's looking for plausibly in exactly the way I described in the earlier answer here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So shall we move on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/suspended-disbelief&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suspended-disbelief&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suspended-disbelief&lt;/a&gt; or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T06:15:05.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3477" CreationDate="2016-04-10T12:07:09.640" Score="5" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question on the main site titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39747/29&quot;&gt;What would it take to rename the planet?&lt;/a&gt; which is currently at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0 upvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 downvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 close votes (all as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0 explanationary comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0 answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can agree that the question perhaps isn't an example suitable for the upcoming book &lt;em&gt;The Best of Worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A -- Two Years' Select Questions and Answers&lt;/em&gt; (just kidding), the question &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; state a goal &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; ask a specific question in relation to that goal. Still, the question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?page=112&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aq&quot;&gt;among our most heavily downvoted questions&lt;/a&gt; that are still around (we do have &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question at +0/-8 votes, but that's it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have argued previously that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1995/29&quot;&gt;we need downvotes&lt;/a&gt;, and I stand by that argument. However, they should ideally be &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; downvotes. A click on the downvote arrow and moving along to the next question doesn't help the asker improve, either the question or on the personal level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this question being downvoted so heavily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T21:12:22.623" Title="Why is &quot;What would it take to rename the planet?&quot; being downvoted so heavily?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3475" CreationDate="2016-04-10T16:19:41.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Puhh, sorry, this one got long, but please bear with me...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question got downvoted mainly for the same reason, it got closed for half an hour ago. There are no ways to determine a correct answer. As it has been said &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/what-exactly-is-opinion-based-and-why-do-we-shun-it&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because even though there are often multiple correct answers to a question, we do want to be able to evaluate the correctness of answers. If the question is a broad &quot;so, what do you think I should do?&quot; or &quot;what's the best X&quot; or the like, there's no way to do that. The Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format works well precisely because it's Q&amp;amp;A -- not discussion threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure you know that, as you yourself answered the above question as well.&#xA;So, why exactly has this question been downvoted? I can only theorise (and haven't downvoted), but there are some possible reasons I can come up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;very short&lt;/strong&gt;. While this does not necessarily mean a question is bad, on first glimpse, it provides the impression that the asker did not put a lot of thought into it. This, compared with the &lt;strong&gt;low reputation of the asker&lt;/strong&gt; possibly leaves a casual reader of the question with a &lt;strong&gt;bad first impression&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the questions starts with a rather &lt;strong&gt;unpopular statement&lt;/strong&gt;. And the questions motive (&lt;em&gt;&quot;I think Blogosphere is a much more apt name for our planet.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), is &lt;strong&gt;not explained&lt;/strong&gt; any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;goal&lt;/em&gt; of the question as you called it reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would it take to get 95% of the human race to agree with and formally recognize this blogosphere-shattering change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very &lt;strong&gt;random number&lt;/strong&gt;. There is &lt;strong&gt;no way to ever prove&lt;/strong&gt; an answer correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. The tag description says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Answers to these questions should provide a yes or no answer with supporting information. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes or No.&quot;-Now, try to answer a question &lt;em&gt;&quot;What would it take?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; with Yes or No. This is not possible (at least as far as my limited knowledge of (the english) language is concerned), meaning the question is &lt;strong&gt;mistagged&lt;/strong&gt; and at least by definition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;strong&gt;unanswerable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that some or some more of these traits are the reason for the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This maybe a rather odd comparision, but another factor that could improve the likelyness of a passers-by to downvote is closely related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows theory&lt;/a&gt;. Let me explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a far fetched comparision that fails in detail, but what I am trying to say is, if a user sees a question that left him with a bad first impression and he then sees that the question has already been downvoted ever so often, he is more likely to press the button himself as well, as opposed to when he would be the first to vote and express his opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are absolutely right, when you say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A click on the downvote arrow and moving along to the next question doesn't help the asker improve, either the question or on the personal level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the maximum length for a comment is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/71285&quot;&gt;600 characters&lt;/a&gt;, which is not much if you would like to give an extended explanation. And it might not even be possible, as some of the points stated above (like the reputation and question length) are not really somthing wrong or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So probably, even though I do not share this attitude, those voters just could not be bothered as they weren't thinking the question would be salvageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after all, this can only be said with certanity by the downvoters themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T21:12:22.623" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3475" CreationDate="2016-04-10T19:59:11.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hadn't seen the question before this meta post.  In its present form it seems to be random, a little silly, and only loosely tied to worldbuilding.  It seems to belong in a set like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would it take to convince most people to rename Earth to X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think zebras should be called Ys; how would I get the English-speaking world to go along with that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most airplanes are painted white but purple is a much prettier color; how do we make that happen?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions all &lt;em&gt;start from a personal opinion&lt;/em&gt;, which seems &lt;em&gt;arbitrary and not very serious&lt;/em&gt;, and proceed to ask &quot;how do we get people do that?&quot;.  While there are real sociology and politics questions in the realm of changing popular opinion, questions like this don't seem to be about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question nonetheless showed some effort -- I've considered A, B, and C and see the following issues with each of them -- then I'd see it in a more-favorable light.  It'd be even better if the OP acknowledged that the specific example is a little unconventional and then explained why he's asking it anyway -- maybe he chose it as an example of a broader class of question, or as a benign example to avoid a politically-charged question, or whatever.  But this question doesn't do any of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T19:59:11.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3480" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:24:35.253" Score="7" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a lot of questions from new users that have been put on hold for being too broad. Most of these, thankfully, have a comment from another user referencing the help pages. However, if a new user understands the scope of the site, but is still struggling to formulate their question, I want to be able to refer them to a solid &quot;good question with good answer&quot; that demonstrates the expectations. Are there any questions that are commonly used for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16335" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T02:57:21.803" Title="Are there any stock &quot;good questions&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3479" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:42:09.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3048/case-study-series&quot;&gt;series of case studies&lt;/a&gt; where some users showed off their top-voted questions and we all gave our opinions on if the questions were good or not. I wouldn't say we ever found a specific list of 'good' questions, but some users did stand out as asking really good questions. &#xA;For instance, I know I remember having very few issues with James's questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this may not be what you wanted, the idea of the series was to better understand what makes a question 'good', or 'on-topic', or otherwise 'not something we should close'. While we never did actually come to a consensus, I think the opinions presented in the responses to each post may help new users understand potential dangers, and perhaps give them a few examples that they can model their own questions off of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T19:42:09.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3479" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:44:55.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would generally agree with @DaaaahWhoosh, part of the problem with your request (its a good idea mind you) is that the range of topics and question types is so far reaching on world building that a single (or even half dozen) good question is hard to use as a broadly applicable model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case study series is probably the best suggestion I can think of as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T19:44:55.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-12T18:05:22.147" Score="10" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been having a fortnightly challenge for a while now, but recently the attention devoted to it has appeared to drop off. Not only are people posting less questions with the topic challenge in mind, but less of our experienced users seem to be around/willing to update the challenges regularly (last challenge dragged on for an extra week, and this one was supposed to be ended yesterday). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that, but as Green pointed out to me, the challenge's initial goal of generating more questions seems less important now that we have so much more site activity. We also have a lot of new users who either don't know about or don't care about the challenge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm here to ask the hard question: is it time to end these challenges? Should we throw in the towel, and if not, who will step up to continue to manage this? And what can we do to get more users to participate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T07:22:45.653" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T07:22:45.653" Title="Should we end the topic challenges?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|topic-challenge|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3483" CreationDate="2016-04-12T19:22:05.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, but finish what we started&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I suggested in chat, close the question, then make it into a weekly challenge to clear out the well thought out answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T19:22:05.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3483" CreationDate="2016-04-12T19:30:14.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Agreed.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge was a great way to generate various content for the site. Now we are graduating (that is a long process), and we already have that much content. There isn't any need for more experienced users to generate more questions. We have plenty of new users coming up with great creative questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you wrote, it's time to shoot the dying horse. I'd say we do it now. Not calling for another challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T19:30:14.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3483" CreationDate="2016-04-12T21:22:06.167" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The need has dropped off, which may be part of why the interest has dropped off.  We should stop &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; topic challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if, occasionally, somebody feels motivated to call for a challenge, drawing from the proposals that were collected or doing something new, that should be ok.  Keep the idea of &lt;em&gt;topic challenges&lt;/em&gt; but drop the &lt;em&gt;weekly/biweekly/triweekly&lt;/em&gt; part.  Topic challenges are now self-serve; if you want one, make one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T21:22:06.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3654" CreationDate="2016-04-13T01:18:27.287" Score="18" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The latest information we've had on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/worldbuilding-site-design-updates-march-15?cb=1&quot;&gt;site design&lt;/a&gt; was about a month ago. Does anyone have any information as to what progress is being made as well as when we could expect to see the site design in action? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T22:51:05.533" Title="Any news on the progress of the new site design?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3490" CreationDate="2016-04-13T17:56:34.580" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2767/congratulations-worldbuilding-is-graduating&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding has graduated!&lt;/a&gt; That's is awesome, and resulted in some changes, like voting for our moderators some time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The site will still receive a full design from one of our designers, which will be packaged with an increase in the amount of reputation needed to access each privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the new design coming soon (hopefully), the reputation needed for each privilege will change. What I am curious about, is how exactly these changes will look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I compared the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;thresholds&lt;/a&gt; with the ones &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;over at StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, but they differed not only in the amount of rep needed, but in the order in which they are achieved as well. What I want to know now is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How much reputation will be needed for each privilege?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, that a privilege should be harder to get, as the community grows, but why for example does it take half as much rep (500) to cast close votes, compared to creation of gallery chatrooms (1000), when it takes triple the amount over at StackOverflow (3000/1000)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Will the order stay the same or change? Either way, why the difference?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:38:54.597" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T19:21:10.410" Title="How will the privilege requirements change, once phase two of the graduation takes place?" Tags="|support|graduation|privileges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2016-04-13T19:20:30.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments are correct, our thresholds will become the same as other graduated sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thresholds here are set to be appropriate for a new site starting out to allow people to get the site up and running. This is very different from those needed to run an already established site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example everyone needs to be able to create tags or no-one can ask any questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T19:20:30.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2016-04-13T19:21:10.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow has some special settings due to its volume.  The privilege levels are the same on all &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; graduated sites, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/160292/162102&quot;&gt;described on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  There's a table there showing the reputation requirements for each privilege on private betas, public betas, graduated sites, and SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T19:21:10.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3479" CreationDate="2016-04-13T20:23:17.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another alternative, drawing on bilbo_pingouin's suggestion in the comments, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1751/29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the aggregate list of questions that have been posted after going through the Sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The list is updated manually, but seems reasonably complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are questions that have been proposed by community members seeking feedback on them, vetted by the community on meta for obvious problems, and only after that been posted on the main site as actual questions to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process obviously isn't foolproof, because nothing is foolproof (the universe just keeps inventing better fools) but it does ensure a minimum level of quality by the time the question hits the main site, and the activity seen through the sandbox also helps ensure a certain level of activity on the question also once it hits the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aggregate list &lt;strong&gt;includes questions on a large number of topics&lt;/strong&gt; which means most users should be able to find a question in the list that is about a topic at least similar to what they want to ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The sandbox is also available for fairly new users&lt;/strong&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;nominal amount of reputation is needed to participate on meta&lt;/a&gt;; one upvote on any post on the Worldbuilding main site, or the association bonus, is enough) and thus may also be available to newcomers to the site for receiving feedback on their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T20:23:17.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3479" CreationDate="2016-04-14T02:57:21.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised this hasn't been floated yet:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2617/12207&quot;&gt;One Year of Building Worlds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're specifically what you're asking for. Questions and/or answers nominated by users as examples of what's best around here, with some commentary (both in-post and in-comment) as to what makes them so good. For my part, some of my favorite hours on this site have been reading others' answers to this meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a more-approachable list than the case studies: there we've got lots of good discussion of risk factors, axes of critique, and other terms of art we've devised that may be noise to a new(ish) user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T02:57:21.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3494" CreationDate="2016-04-14T14:03:32.153" Score="7" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39927/how-to-cause-an-exodus-from-the-west-coast-of-the-united-states-inland?noredirect=1#comment113092_39927&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being &quot;too story based,&quot; despite that it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;does not seem to fit this category&lt;/a&gt;. @Aify and @XandarTheZenon left a comment saying the question is &quot;too broad/unclear and explained themselves satisfactorily. I have edited the question to help improve clarity. However, nobody has explained how it is too story based. Since the question was closed for that reason by some of our largest contributors and most respected members, I would like to request an explanation as to how it is &quot;too story based.&quot; If it is too broad/unclear, should that not be the close reason? Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T07:29:27.363" Title="How is my question about causing a mass exodus &quot;too story based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3493" CreationDate="2016-04-14T19:00:05.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close as story-based because you're asking us to help define your plot for you. I had no issues with its clarity; it made perfect sense to me and I knew exactly what you were asking for, so it wasn't unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I saw was that the answer to your question would lie in your work of fiction (well, hopefully fiction; a biography would be frightening). As such, it would be entirely up to you to decide whether characters would up and move because of whatever event. Constant earthquakes for the foreseeable future? Upswing in the purchase of houseboats and the population actually moves west to build a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39398/6986&quot;&gt;floating city&lt;/a&gt; (odd, but possible, and a premise for an amusing story). Outbreak of insect-borne disease? Screens, vaccines, and insect repellant. Politics? New elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is also fairly broad, but the issue, in my opinion, is rooted in what you decide your characters decide to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T19:00:05.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3483" CreationDate="2016-04-17T17:03:10.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they could work, but would require different presentation. I feel like, right now, it's hard to tell what questions apply to a given topic challenge, or which one 'win' the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a way to script a bot to dump any question asked after the challenge started and matching the challenge tag into a leaderboard post on meta with votes on each question, it might make for a fun competition that could generate more questions. Of course, I'm saying that without any knowledge of SE bots other than that they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there's also the question of whether we want people to be coming up with questions specifically to win a competition, or whether we'd prefer for worldbuilding to be primarily focused on helping people who are actually using their questions to build worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2947" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T17:03:10.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-19T07:32:43.060" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm intending to ask a question, where it is about to proof, that such a world could NOT exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be on topic here?&#xA;If so, what tag should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3460" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T08:10:25.203" Title="Is anti-world building on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3497" CreationDate="2016-04-19T08:10:25.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally yes, but keep in mind that proving a negative is probably going to be too broad. And furthermore, with magic anything is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T08:10:25.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3401" CreationDate="2016-04-19T12:57:38.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 22 questions and 101 answers, for an average of 4.59 answers per question. A total of 6140 reputation was handed out as a result of this challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38590/humans-can-now-run-40-mph-how-do-i-keep-the-stupid-people-alive&quot;&gt;Humans can now run 40 mph. How do I keep the stupid people alive?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;330 total votes, 54 question votes, 16 answers, 18532 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38638/a-society-without-law-enforcement&quot;&gt;A society without law enforcement?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13726/pedro&quot;&gt;Pedro&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;71 total votes, 14 question votes, 10 answers, 2939 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38655/how-to-explain-magic-using-kings&quot;&gt;How to explain magic-using kings&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6986/frostfyre&quot;&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;69 total votes, 17 question votes, 8 answers, 2438 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38855/how-would-the-government-prepare-the-country-for-an-acknowledgement-of-real-magi&quot;&gt;How would the government prepare the country for an acknowledgement of real magic in our world?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11195/redfive&quot;&gt;RedFive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;40 total votes, 14 question votes, 5 answers, 1146 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39116/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races-round-2&quot;&gt;Medieval politics with fantasy races - Round 2&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;21 total votes, 11 question votes, 4 answers, 327 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40038/could-the-internet-of-things-eventually-supplant-democracy&quot;&gt;Could the Internet of Things eventually supplant Democracy?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;20 total votes, 4 question votes, 8 answers, 176 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38707/ramification-of-a-government-that-values-children&quot;&gt;Ramification of a Government that values children?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3112/henry-taylor&quot;&gt;Henry Taylor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;16 total votes, 7 question votes, 4 answers, 107 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38682/could-an-advanced-culture-exist-without-a-government&quot;&gt;Could an advanced culture exist without a government?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 6 question votes, 3 answers, 130 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38706/which-canadian-provinces-territories-are-most-likely-to-rebel&quot;&gt;Which Canadian Provinces/Territories are most likely to rebel?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 total votes, 3 question votes, 3 answers, 112 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39811/what-sort-of-legal-and-penal-system-might-a-space-colony-develop&quot;&gt;What sort of legal and penal system might a space colony develop?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;14 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 188 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39504/electoral-representation-in-an-interstellar-democracy&quot;&gt;Electoral representation in an interstellar democracy&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13430/john-robinson&quot;&gt;John Robinson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;13 total votes, 2 question votes, 2 answers, 123 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39874/life-expectancy-of-unaging-dictators&quot;&gt;Life expectancy of unaging dictators&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;11 total votes, 4 question votes, 3 answers, 158 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38921/can-a-super-governmental-military-body-like-this-work&quot;&gt;Can a super-governmental military body like this work?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 4 question votes, 4 answers, 161 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38924/how-to-form-a-kingdom-where-the-king-can-stay-in-power-for-a-thousand-years&quot;&gt;How to form a kingdom where the king can stay in power for a thousand years?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16736/xandarthezenon&quot;&gt;XandarTheZenon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 total votes, 3 question votes, 4 answers, 261 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38721/minority-report-precogs-but-what-they-see-is-set-in-stone&quot;&gt;Minority Report Precogs. But what they see is set in stone&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19/bowlturner&quot;&gt;bowlturner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 86 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39475/how-might-an-inter-planetary-confederation-turn-into-a-highly-centralized-empire&quot;&gt;How might an inter-planetary confederation turn into a highly centralized empire?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6799/djmethaneman&quot;&gt;DJMethaneMan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;9 total votes, 2 question votes, 4 answers, 98 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39875/how-should-the-magic-market-be-regulated&quot;&gt;How should the Magic market be regulated?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9601/spacelizard&quot;&gt;SpaceLizard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8 total votes, 2 question votes, 1 answers, 114 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39379/how-to-govern-a-society-of-functionally-immortal-reality-benders&quot;&gt;How to govern a society of functionally immortal reality-benders?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16933/possiblyserious&quot;&gt;possiblySerious&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 total votes, 4 question votes, 5 answers, 122 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40092/the-ice-age-cometh-global-balance-of-power&quot;&gt;The Ice Age Cometh: Global Balance of Power&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 total votes, 2 question votes, 3 answers, 57 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40065/what-would-the-government-do-if-you-somehow-manage-to-get-your-hands-on-a-very-t&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40065/what-would-the-government-do-if-you-somehow-manage-to-get-your-hands-on-a-very-t&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19918/yuudai-kurosawa&quot;&gt;Yuudai Kurosawa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0 total votes, 0 question votes, 0 answers, 50 views  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39505/government-systems-in-fantasy&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39505/government-systems-in-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19697/v%c3%a1clav&quot;&gt;V&amp;#225;clav&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -1 question votes, 4 answers, 99 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39359/how-to-form-a-government-in-the-underworld&quot;&gt;How to form a government in the underworld?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8400/user6760&quot;&gt;user6760&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-1 total votes, -3 question votes, 2 answers, 87 views&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bu3K8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Shot Down (bronze badge): total score of less than 0 on question and answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T12:57:38.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3501" CreationDate="2016-04-22T15:34:46.940" Score="7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly, there is always a steady influx of low quality questions, but that is not just on this corner on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if a review behaviour I have used for a while is reasonable, or if it is something I should stop doing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question appears in the &quot;close votes&quot; category, I sometimes, after reading it and if needed after adding a comment, think it is a question that should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it has more than one issue. For instance, a combination of &quot;off-topic&quot;, &quot;too broad&quot; and &quot;primary opinion based&quot; is perfectly possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have been doing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has voted to close it as &quot;too-broad&quot;, but I think it is &quot;off-topic&quot; as well, I go for &quot;off-topic&quot;. Generally, When someone has voted to close it for one reason, but I think there are other reasons as well, I chose one of them instead to signal that there are several issues with this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a reasonable thing to do? Or is consensus preferable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="16186" LastEditDate="2016-04-22T15:44:55.800" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T18:33:22.420" Title="&quot;This question has multiple issues&quot;" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|reviewing-behavior|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2016-04-22T15:49:53.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;:: shrug ::&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, really. Doing this doesn't do any harm, but I'm not aware that it does much good either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions get closed for &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; reason.* The reason picked is based on the consensus created by the close votes (which is why the number of close votes must always be an odd number in the site settings). If a moderator casts a close vote, the reason they pick is the one that gets used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has multiple issues, it's perfectly reasonable to have close votes for both/all of those reasons, as it allows others to choose the one they think most applicable. However, if only one reason gets votes, the question will still get closed under that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it doesn't really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I think there &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; (not sure whether there still) be an edge case or two where two close reasons would be displayed, but I never worked out the conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T15:49:53.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2016-04-22T18:33:22.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best decision is what carries the most constructive value to the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a spectrum of severity for each close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one close reason is nebulous or tentative, there isn't as much &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt; to setting it as the final, public-facing close reason. After all, to me it's so the author of the question sees it and says, &quot;Oh, so this is how I can improve my question or as an author.&quot; So choose the strongest one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, maybe, solving one problem solves the others, so it has more value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say a question can be marked as &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; at the same time. You see that the question is marked broad, but you realize that if it's not subjective it automatically restricts how many possible answers there can be. Broadness is just a side effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You vote to close &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; and write &quot;Hey, here's an objective, empirical metric you can incorporate into your question.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now instead of the author of the question letting a possibly great question fall by the wayside because they don't know how to restrict the question, that close reason at the very top tells them &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what they could fix about their question. It's no longer broad and it's all gravy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I can see no extra value between vote reasons, I do the same as you and vote for the others so the next person who votes can vote for what they think is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15401" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T18:33:22.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T08:57:44.263" Score="14" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40357/you-can-control-a-demon-by-knowing-its-true-name-but-why/40389?noredirect=1#comment115465_40389&quot;&gt;You can control a Demon by knowing its True Name, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Got closed. I can see why as it's pushing into Opinion Based/Too Broad, but I don't really think it crosses the line - especially since the most recent edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I don't disagree by enough to mod hammer it open (especially since I have a conflict of interest with one of the highest voted answers!). I did want to start a discussion though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should it be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;plausibility&quot; a valid criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T19:00:26.260" Title="Closing of True Name question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-26T12:22:16.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who also provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/40363/6986&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; (though apparently not quite as well liked as yours), I have to agree with the closure. The topic is definitely valid for Worldbuilding, as we can see in the numerous pieces of literature that feature creatures bound by True Names. But that's also the problem: every author approaches the concept of True Names in a different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we don't have demons in our real world (...or do we?), there's no plausible way to go ask why True Names bind. (Bonus points to anyone who finds a demon, asks the question, survives, and posts the response here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given there are 34 answers as of this writing, and all of them are equally valid solutions to the problem, the &quot;best&quot; answer is found purely in the eyes of the beholder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T12:22:16.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-26T12:39:04.057" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of the question, and with a similar reluctance to @TimB to use my own modhammer to reopen, I humbly suggest that the question is in fact a perfect match for the Scope of our Worldbuilding Stack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the core, it is asking why a category of intelligent beings would be willing to subject themselves (or, less plausibly, be unwilling subjects to) to a code that seems on the face of it to go against their self interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense, it is no different from another well-received question, also with over 10k views and with &gt;100 votes answers, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39842/3510&quot;&gt;Why would vampires be incapable of entering a non-vampire human’s house uninvited?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sense is that if we start closing &quot;Why&quot; questions as Opinion Based, that limits our Stack to simply helping people with figuring out orbital equations for binary worlds and calculating the caloric input for centaurs, which, while worthwhile, are less than Worldbuilding should be. We're not just a fleshy version of Wolfram Alpha here, we are Worldbuilders, and &lt;strong&gt;good worldbuilding includes justification for salient features present in that world&lt;/strong&gt;. If there were super-human Demons, and they were subject to their True Names, it would be Curious and Strange to me. I'd want an &lt;em&gt;Explanation&lt;/em&gt;. That's not Wolfram Alpha. That's Worldbuilding in all its glory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome discussion, up and re-open-votes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T12:44:54.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-26T13:30:04.270" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest that the burden on building worlds should go to those who ask the question, rather than those who answer it. I understand Worldbuilding SE to be a place where you can come with a world you already have in mind, to ensure that it works how you think it does, or to see if there is a way to achieve what you want with the resources you have available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I don't think enough of a world was provided. We get some explanation of what demons are, but nothing that could specifically be used in the context of the question. In essence, the question could be about how to control regular people by knowing their names. The problem that arises is that when you start adding in supernatural elements, answerers start to make assumptions about your world, and they start building their own interpretation of what they think you want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think this leads to is a list of different worlds, where (in this case) a whole host of different kinds of demons are controlled via a whole lot of different methods, all having something to do with names. This isn't helping someone build their own world, it's giving them a bunch of pre-formed worlds and letting them pick the one they think is the most interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we ask for criteria. You need to flesh out the world you want, the systems you have available, the fundamental laws of your universe from which answers can be built. We may build worlds here, but we don't build them for other people, just like Stack Overflow doesn't do people's homework or write their software for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is just my understanding of the issue; there have been a lot of highly popular questions where the asker has done almost no work of their own, where every answer is its own world, and where there's really no good way to pick the best answer. If we want to destroy our integrity just to allow these questions to keep on being asked, then I guess I'd be okay with that. However, I do not believe that's what we're here for. I think the case studies proved that there are a lot of questions that can be asked that are interesting and useful and definitely on-topic and suitably constrained. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T13:30:04.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-26T17:11:52.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't provided an answer, and being a low-reputation user I may not know enough to cast a valid answer, but in my opinion the question didn't worth the closure. I do agree it's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;near the border&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but think it still respects the criteria. Maybe a little edit could be needed, but there are info enough to keep it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, especially if we want to consider that the answers were required to have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as little magic as possible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14276" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T17:11:52.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-27T03:36:10.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that questions like that should be closed.  In many ways, they are the best questions that we have on the site.  They are fun to answer and interesting to read.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem that I have with closing them is that it blocks the asker from assistance.  It would be easier to answer the question if there were more limits upon it, but how do we help the asker to the point of making those limits?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My basic criterion for closing a question as Too Broad is if I see a path to narrowness.  As a general rule, this means some specific comment expressing changes to the question that could make it narrow enough to ask.  This can certainly leave discretion to the poster, but it should also show the poster where that discretion could be exercised.  Otherwise we're essentially saying, &quot;Have a problem?  Sucks to be you.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to catch a basic problem in fiction.  &quot;I want true names to matter, but why would they?&quot;  Not just the asker, but others could have that identical problem.  Some of those people may have different preferences regarding how things should work.  How do we help those people get to the point where they can ask more narrow questions?  After all, isn't that our goal?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless a question is simply off-topic and not about world building, I don't think that we should be trying to permanently close it.  We should be suspending it until edited into an answerable form.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T03:36:10.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3493" CreationDate="2016-04-28T07:29:27.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your biggest problem is that all the &quot;natural&quot; reasons for moving, people already live in places which experience all of them, and have figured out workarounds for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drought?  Welcome to Nevada, baby!  Or Arizona, or whatever area of semi-desert takes your fancy.  All these states would dry up and blow away without federal funding to prop up their infrastructure (yay all those rugged individualists relying on communist principles to keep them alive! ;) and Californian cities are already unsustainable in terms of water supply anyway, so no real change there.  Farming might be affected (at least they'd need different crops), but there's no chance of people leaving the cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earthquakes?  Never stopped them before.  Nor Japan, nor all the other places built on fault lines.  Some places will get toasted, and you may need to get rid of overpasses and redesign bridges, but most people will be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insect-borne diseases?  The thing about insects is that they move around.  There might be an initial panic, but ultimately people can't go anywhere because there's nowhere in the continental US where you can get away from them long-term.  And the answer to major insect-borne diseases is straightforward: fuck the environment, bring the DDT.  The environmentalists won't like it, but if it's a choice between losing some birds or losing the entire Western seaboard with a strong chance of losing the rest of North America too, then the birds are screwed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Politics?  People are still living in downtown Detroit.  The thing is that when a city goes bad, you can't sell your house.  Unless you want your family living in a tent for the next 20 years, you have no choice but to stay put.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individual people will have their own reasons, sure.  But if you want a complete dead zone, not just the semi-derelict state of downtown Detroit, then you need something major, on the scale of alien invasion or a nuclear/biological/chemical strike.  And that's a major plot point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need the event to be the focus of the book - &quot;The Passage&quot; effectively has a jump-cut to something like 15-20 years later, &quot;Station 11&quot; runs linked pre-event and post-event storylines but skips the period in the middle, and &quot;On the beach&quot; is entirely post-war and has virtually no detail about what actually happened.  But your world-altering event (and it will be world-altering - even Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't have this effect) will be the single biggest influence on your characters, so it's impossible to disassociate this from your story.  It's not just detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11823" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T07:29:27.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3512" CreationDate="2016-04-28T08:42:28.293" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just did a review on a suggested edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing, I headed to my profile and opend the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/16922&quot;&gt;review link&lt;/a&gt; from there, to see how the review went on. I am puzzeled and confused now, because the edit that is displayed there is completely different to what I have been reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edit that I had a look at had the following changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing &lt;em&gt;&quot;Utopia&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;&quot;Eutopia&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the title and link description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding the &lt;em&gt;&quot;(from his &quot;Republic&quot;)&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to the title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rejected the edit, because after a quick google search and a look at the link in the question, I found no occurences of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Eutopia&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in this context, the original source only mentioned &lt;em&gt;&quot;Utopia&quot;&lt;/em&gt; as well. Further, a third &lt;em&gt;&quot;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in the content was completely left untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this possible? Up to now I was sure that you cannot change an edit once it is suggested. Am I going mad? There have been no conflicting edits or anything, I would &lt;a href=&quot;http://shouldiblamecaching.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blame caching&lt;/a&gt;, but I cannot see where it could be an issure here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:19:47.987" Title="Suggested edit completely changed during review" Tags="|support|reviews|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3511" CreationDate="2016-04-28T09:10:26.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I found the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The five minute grace period seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276542/edits-suggested-within-a-grace-period-shouldnt-appear-as-part-of-the-original-e&quot;&gt;applied to suggested edits&lt;/a&gt; as well, meaning that a second edit suggestion within five minutes after the first would be merged into the original suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like there is no notification for reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:10:26.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-04-29T19:19:35.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This type of question could have required research-based answers, although it will attract opinion-based input.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the inquirer had specified a religion/mythology, and framed the question in a way that requires academic research, then opinion answers would be invalid. Unfortunately this site of fiction authors is - by its very nature - prone to opinion-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first demon named is from Mesopotamian mythology, also referenced in Judaism. Judaism is where (if I'm not mistaken) the &quot;speaking the true name&quot; tradition originated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this type of question falls under the purview of Mi Yodeya (Judiasm Stack Exchange) then I would recommend their experts comment with pertinent references. Since I don't see a Stack Exchange site for Occult or Supernatural inquiries, perhaps other educated answers would come from the Mythology Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking for real-world possibilities to explain stories within religion, mythology, tradition and/or superstition, both &quot;plausibility&quot; of science and &quot;research-based&quot; answers of the tradition must coexist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problematic issue with the question is that all 3 sample demons listed are currently materials for the &lt;strong&gt;D&amp;amp;D RPG&lt;/strong&gt; and the PF spinoff. The first comes from mythology, but the other 2 appear to have no basis in any tradition, being created solely for the game. If the inquirer intends this question to be answered in game terms - and no such information exists in the game's core rulebooks - then any answer would be wholly opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19189" LastEditorUserId="19189" LastEditDate="2016-04-30T04:28:38.993" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T04:28:38.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3516" CreationDate="2016-04-29T22:39:39.153" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent newcomer posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40995/what-if-in-a-world-like-ours-people-were-fullage-already-at-the-age-of-15-instea&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and it was closed within 2 hours and I was among those that voted it as &quot;too broad.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But before I voted, I decided to post an answer anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal in answering was to give the newcomer some direction towards useful information so that, hopefully, he could do some research and come back with a better idea of what he's looking for. This seemed a better option than either closing the question as too broad without an answer or leaving a couple long comments. Also, there are questions that get put [oh hold] as too broad, yet they are marked answered because the asker got what they desired from the simple posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Kjörling noticed that I had both answered AND voted to close the question and stated &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please do not answer questions that you think are close-worthy; it&#xA;  risks encouraging posting further bad questions. In my opinion it&#xA;  looks particularly bad when someone who votes to close also answers&#xA;  the question.&quot; (Please view comments of the original post for full conversation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You also took part in depriving others of the same opportunity, by&#xA;  voting to close. If the question is on-topic and clear enough that an&#xA;  answer can be written, then the question is likely not close-worthy.&#xA;  If the question is so broad such that an answer cannot properly&#xA;  address all aspects of the question, then it makes no sense to post as&#xA;  an answer; instead, get the question put on hold, get its quirks&#xA;  worked out such that it is answerable, have it reopened, and then post&#xA;  an answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would have been the proper action in this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael please feel free to edit any of your parts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T11:22:40.510" Title="Answering a Question you Closed" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3515" CreationDate="2016-04-29T23:45:50.230" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is no explicit rule against answering a question you voted to close, Michael is right in what he said. If the question is too broad, you should not answer it. Apart from the fact that it encourages people to ask poor question and not improve them ('But I got my answer, so I don't care about improving it'), the question is also likely to change invalidating your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T23:45:50.230" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3518" CreationDate="2016-04-30T10:04:32.413" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;sorry newbie here, probably stupid question but I couldn't find an answer searching the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see other stack communities have a themed page and a logo, while we have the default one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we also have one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19975" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-05-01T11:32:03.813" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T12:22:53.230" Title="can we make a skin or theme for the site?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3517" CreationDate="2016-04-30T14:40:48.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to get out of Beta (which Worldbuilding is) and it requires StackExchange to make a site theme for you....which they are in the process of doing for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Yes and it's coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T14:40:48.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3515" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:31:29.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been guilty of doing the same a couple times, I even answered expecting a proper edit, voted to close the question once I saw the author didn't edit it, and then retracted the closing vote because I answered it...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I also have been victim of seeing a few (proper) questions in other parts of SE being closed right away with an unclear explanation of &quot;too broad&quot; when people clearly didn't spend any time understanding them, and even a shadow of answer would have been helpful. In one case the question was answered properly and got closed anyways and I'm really grateful to that person.&#xA;However, in WB, I see that generally users are helpful in trying to maintain a question and helping narrow it down and ultimately answer it, at least I haven't seen questions asked and closed in a matter of minutes without any useful comment.&#xA;I do understand the desire to help somebody but maybe, at least in WB, that help can be better directed in indicating how to narrow the question down rather than answering as it is. When the community is willing to give that support at the end the author will get what he needs (or I should say deserves since a bit of work is required from their part). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dont fully understand the &quot;depriving others of the same opportunity&quot; (I guess its the opportunity to leave an answer). Whenever we vote to close a question we are always contributing in taking away the opportunity to answer it from everybody else. Probably Im missing something here (I hope its not some rep thing). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would wonder is: if what you have done is seen so badly by the community why there isn't a rule against it? Cant we have a &quot;you cant vote to close because you answered this question&quot; message and call it the day? It probably isn't something that happens that often but I'm sure you are not the only one that did that. (I know that there cant be a rule for everything, but since we know it can happen and its seen as &quot;harmful&quot; for the site can't we eliminate the possibility?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17012" LastEditorUserId="17012" LastEditDate="2016-04-30T22:30:45.917" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T22:30:45.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3515" CreationDate="2016-05-01T11:22:40.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I basically was the one who started this, I might as well elaborate on my reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the reason why we put questions on hold (which results in them changing status to &quot;closed&quot; if not reopened, but technically there is very little difference between &quot;on hold&quot; and &quot;closed&quot; and for a long time questions were &quot;closed&quot; immediately) in the case of questions which are on topic but simply poorly done, is so that we can figure out exactly what the asker is looking for without the question being a moving target for people trying to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for background. Now, why is it a bad thing to answer a question that is close-worthy? For one, as has already been said, it encourages behavior we do not want to see. We want to provide specific answers to clear, specific questions. We have had lots of discussion previously both on Meta and in chat as to what makes a good, answerable question in our case, particularly since worldbuilding questions have a tendency to actually be rather broad. Those discussions have more or less resulted in a site consensus for what is narrow enough to be answerable, and what is too broad to be answerable. This naturally results in some questions falling to the &quot;not answerable&quot; side of the spectrum. &lt;em&gt;Because newcomers tend to not be familiar with how the Stack Exchange system works, and be familiar with each site's specific guidelines, this happens more often with questions from low-rep users. That is normal and expected.&lt;/em&gt; (We shouldn't lower our standards just because a question is from a new user; however, to be able to fix the problems with their question, they may very well need more guidance than an experienced member of the community would.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The nominal use of comments is to request clarification or suggest improvements to a post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The nominal use of answers is to &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the difference here? Only if an answer actually &lt;em&gt;answers the question&lt;/em&gt; should it be posted as an answer. If an answer simply requests more information, then it should be posted as a comment. The difficult part comes when an answer does &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;. At that point, it becomes a judgement call whether the answer is primarily an answer (however incomplete it may perhaps be) or if its primary purpose is to somehow request clarification from the person asking the original question. (Rule of thumb: if you even think about clicking &quot;close&quot; or &quot;flag&quot;, or starting your answer with something like &quot;you really should clarify X, Y and Z, but...&quot;, then the question is likely not good enough to be properly answerable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is when &lt;strong&gt;someone comes across a question that they feel needs clarification and vote to close for that reason, yet feel the question is clear enough that an actual, possibly incomplete, answer can be written. &lt;em&gt;The two actions are mutually exclusive!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; A question either should be put on hold because (a) it is a poor fit for the site's subject scope, or (b) it cannot reasonably be answered in its current form; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; it is a candidate for answering by someone with the subject matter expertise needed. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;A single question cannot simultaneously and in a single person's judgement be both&lt;/strong&gt; answerable and not answerable!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By answering the question, you imply that in your opinion the question is clear enough that an answer can be given. But by participating in closing the question, you deprive others of even the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of posting answers of their own until the question is reopened -- which, depending on circumstances, may or may not happen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, by answering the question, you give the OP what they are after (even if only partially), which as has already been pointed out reduces the likelihood that the question will be revised. By putting the question on hold without answering, we basically &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; the OP to clarify the question if they want answers (which is usually, but not always, why people ask questions in the first place). We also post &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; describing what's wrong with the question and ideally how the OP can fix that so that answers can be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, editing a question that has answers requires much greater care than if the question does not yet have any answers. While not spelled out in the terms of service or anything similar, it is considered good form to ensure that &lt;em&gt;any edits made to a question that has answers will not invalidate any existing, previously valid answers&lt;/em&gt;. Note that significantly deviating from the intent of a post's author is a reason to reject a suggested edit; while the owner of a post can always edit the post, this remains a good guideline even when the edit is being made by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting the question on hold ensures that no answers are added while the quirks of the question are worked out and fixed. This gives the community greater latitude in suggesting how the OP may improve the question, including narrowing the scope of the question in ways that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; come with a high risk of invalidating existing answers if there were any. This saves time and grief for everybody involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T11:22:40.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3517" CreationDate="2016-05-01T12:22:53.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They've already designed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/worldbuilding-site-design-updates-march-15?lq=1&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;. They're just putting on the final touches and then we'll be all set. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T12:22:53.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3523" CreationDate="2016-05-03T12:25:19.067" Score="7" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last night, I broke 500 reputation and according to the system earned the right to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;Cast Close and Reopen Votes&lt;/a&gt; (I even did it once, just to make sure it really was working). However, on other sites this is a privilege at 3,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Beta privilege levels are lower, but WB.se is out of beta. Was this value mistakenly unchanged, or do those changes not take place until we get skinned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8862" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T12:33:56.820" Title="Privileges, Timing, and Beta" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3522" CreationDate="2016-05-03T12:33:56.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi and congratulations on making the 500 reputation mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is in the transition between beta and graduated site. As such we have now elected moderators, ads like graduated sites, but while the theme is in preparation, we don't get to the graduated reputation scale. That's the last element to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know yet when this will be done, but it might be any day. It might still give you enough time to reach the 3,000 mark :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T12:33:56.820" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3525" CreationDate="2016-05-04T04:57:15.947" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked two questions on Politics SE which ask about the economic implications of implementing hypothetical economic policies, but I'm told they're probably not a good fit for Politics SE because they're very hypothetical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if either of these questions could be edited to make a good fit for Worldbuilding SE, and if so how they would need to be posed in order to fit here properly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/what-would-be-the-economic-implications-of-a-government-offering-to-invest-10-0&quot;&gt;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/what-would-be-the-economic-implications-of-a-government-offering-to-invest-10-0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10755/what-would-be-the-economic-impact-of-implementing-a-flat-profit-sharing-policy-a&quot;&gt;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10755/what-would-be-the-economic-impact-of-implementing-a-flat-profit-sharing-policy-a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:43.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T19:31:16.367" Title="Would either of my two hypothetical questions about economic policies be a good fit for this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-11T19:41:02.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3524" CreationDate="2016-05-04T05:48:03.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've already had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30200/would-wiping-out-all-debt-crash-the-economy&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22805/funding-government-by-only-printing-more-money&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; on financial politics, so this topic seems generally fine. I'd say its part of this bullet point on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what to ask&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a first glance, I would say your &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/what-would-be-the-economic-implications-of-a-government-offering-to-invest-10-0&quot;&gt;first question&lt;/a&gt; seems basically okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a clear cut setting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You provide examples to explain your ideas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question is clear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some things you might want to reconsider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your &lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt; section is multiple questions:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the economic implications of a government offering to invest $10,000 in every citizen's professional venture?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the economic pros/cons, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;would this be a potentially viable solution to improving an economy? If not, what are the flaws in the concept?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the first one is good and could be asked in your context. However, &lt;em&gt;&quot;What are pros/cons?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is generally very broad, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;Would it improve the economy?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; seems very broad and basically opinion-based to me (not really sure about the opinion-based thing, but this would be difficult to answer objectively I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10755/what-would-be-the-economic-impact-of-implementing-a-flat-profit-sharing-policy-a&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt; again is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; broad. I think this one needs a more thorough definition before it is being answerable in reasonable length. Further, I do not think asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Has this exact solution been considered and debated?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be on-topic for worldbuilding in this context but I would be glad to be corrected by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd like to say thank you for checking that your question fits the site, that is a good thing to do. Next time (or maybe this time as well) check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. There you can post your questions as answer and people will give feedback and help you to make it fit the site - and they do a really good job with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:43.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T19:31:16.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2016-05-05T18:55:12.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of views a question gets is one measure of the question's &quot;goodness&quot;.  Another is the number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I hesitate to recommend treating high traffic questions and answers differently, perhaps we should work harder at reforming these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;True Names&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a popular fantasy meme so clearly this type of question is appropriate for the world builder site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could we reform this question (and others like it) so that it no longer offends its detractors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the main problem that there's no objective measure of the answers?  If so, could it be solved by the OP providing a judging criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="7886" LastEditDate="2016-05-05T19:00:26.260" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T19:00:26.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-08T01:29:47.513" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38590/humans-can-now-run-40-mph-how-do-i-keep-the-stupid-people-alive&quot;&gt;Humans can now run 40 mph. How do I keep the stupid people alive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was closed. I do agree that the question was Too Broad, but the most recent edit, At least I believe, has fixed this problem. While requesting answers with cheap solutions does make certain answer moot, I believe that the question should be reopened, but I am just one man, my opinions may be either wrong or invalid. So, are the edits made sufficient in narrowing the requested answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T10:35:15.760" Title="Reopening the 40mph Runners question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3529" CreationDate="2016-05-08T10:51:41.260" Score="6" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having loads of reputation, I saw a link &quot;Unprotect&quot; below one question which is currently protected.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t4pul.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t4pul.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unprotect&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hover text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;allow answers by anonymous and very new low rep users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, duh. So far so good. But, &lt;strong&gt;Is single unprotect vote enough to unprotect the question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to try that out for obvious reasons, thats why I am asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T11:06:36.950" Title="What &quot;Unprotect&quot; actually does?" Tags="|support|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3528" CreationDate="2016-05-08T11:06:36.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Protecting and unprotecting a question can be done &lt;strong&gt;unilaterally by anyone with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;protect questions&lt;/a&gt; privilege.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even think that anyone with that privilege can unprotect a question that was protected by a diamond moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protecting the question simply causes any user who wants to answer it to need at least 10 reputation that has been earned on the site (that is, beyond the association bonus if any). Users with less reputation earned on the site won't see the answer box for that particular question, and will see an explanationary note instead. All other things that can be done to the question and the answers on it are unaffected; this is unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;locked questions&lt;/a&gt; (a diamond moderator only privilege) which cannot be changed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T11:06:36.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3531" CreationDate="2016-05-09T18:57:52.700" Score="10" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40357/you-can-control-a-demon-by-knowing-its-true-name-but-why&quot;&gt;You can control a Demon by knowing its True Name, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has brought some controversy, as discussed in the meta &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3504/closing-of-true-name-question&quot;&gt;Closing of True Name question&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking at it further and realized that the original question was asked by a moderator, and later protected by that same moderator. Personally, when I'm in a position of power like a moderator, I refrain from using that power on anything I have a personal stake in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any established policy or guidelines for or against such a thing on WB.se or SE in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8862" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T15:23:23.187" Title="Moderators using their powers on their own posts" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3530" CreationDate="2016-05-09T19:21:59.873" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators are generally pretty careful about not using &lt;em&gt;moderator powers&lt;/em&gt;, like handling flags or deleting comments, on posts where we have a vested interest.  Protecting a question, like closing, reopening, or editing, is a reputation-based privilege not restricted to moderators.  The same people who can protect a question can also unprotect it, even if it was protected by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are usually protected when they are attracting low-quality answers or spam.  In fact, the system (as the Community user) automatically protects questions that meet a certain threshold for this.  So long as protection isn't used egregiously and people aren't fighting protect/unprotect wars, I don't see a problem.  And if, in particular, the asker of a question protects it, arguably he's the one who's harmed the most by potentially cutting off answers he presumably wanted to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the circumstances that led to a protection don't persist over time.  Maybe a question was on the Hot Network Questions list and attracting negative attention, so it was protected, but then time passed and this is no longer a concern.  Feel free to unprotect if you have the privilege, or raise the issue on meta or in chat.  We don't have good tools for &lt;em&gt;monitoring&lt;/em&gt; protection, so if you see an older protected question and wonder why it wasn't unprotected already, chances are the answer is &quot;nobody noticed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T19:21:59.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3530" CreationDate="2016-05-09T19:22:39.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I do not see a problem here&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protecting and Unprotecting questions is simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3528/2071&quot;&gt;matter of having enough reputation&lt;/a&gt; as I recently learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Protecting question brings added value&lt;/strong&gt;: As high rep user, I already asked several questions which brought a lot of attention from the community. And personally I must say that I was always glad, that my high-profile questions got protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions from Hot Nework Questions receive a lot of attention&lt;/strong&gt; And again, as author of some questions which got to HNQ, I am glad, that new users cannot post some funny comments and/or answers to harness some internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I enjoy fun and play, after receiving tenth funny comment, I am looking for a ways to stop these comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T19:22:39.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T05:35:49.033" Score="10" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone added a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mcguffinite&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mcguffinite&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mcguffinite&lt;/a&gt; that states it to be &quot;the reason&quot;. The linked page invented the term to refer to &lt;em&gt;the substance&lt;/em&gt; being sought after, with the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; implied as coveting or requiring that stuff somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;Interstellar&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an example, as other kinds of reasons are not covered.  I really don't like the application of the term to this larger idea (the reason) because it does not fit the grammar or etymology at all.  McGuffin&lt;strong&gt;ite&lt;/strong&gt; would be a natural resource &lt;em&gt;substance&lt;/em&gt;, like unobtainium. It's not a social urge or drive or a trope, like &quot;the Earth is dying&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T15:55:52.390" Title="McGuffinite ? Tag definition and description" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3533" CreationDate="2016-05-11T06:11:34.680" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the tag as is does not prove of much use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center states, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible, and new users are not allowed to create new tags. Even if you have sufficient reputation, you should only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that your question covers a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is the biggest problem of this tag. AFAICS Nobody really profits from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mcguffinite&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mcguffinite&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mcguffinite&lt;/a&gt; tag, as opposed to tagging with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/colonization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;colonization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;colonization&lt;/a&gt; or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-colonization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-colonization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-colonization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mcguffinite&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mcguffinite&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mcguffinite&lt;/a&gt; tag tells (those who actually know the term) that the question is about people going to space for some unenclosed reason. The question now wants to know the reasons for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems (at least to me) like a narrow set of questions that tend to be very broad and closely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the community seems to agree, I went ahead and edited all four questions that were using the tag. But if there is a native speaker out there that wants to review my edits I would appreciate it. These are the questions I edited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36280/renewable-energy-in-space&quot;&gt;Renewable energy in space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26672/why-build-space-habitats-on-within-moons&quot;&gt;Why build space habitats on/within moons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20526/what-could-be-a-probable-reason-for-an-alien-race-to-want-to-non-violently-annex&quot;&gt;What could be a probable reason for an alien race to want to non-violently annex Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15364/resources-to-justify-long-distance-space-mining-missions&quot;&gt;Resources to justify long-distance space mining missions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T15:55:52.390" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T07:19:05.807" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked my fifth question. Today when checking my profile I was told I got the badge &quot;curious&quot;. I clicked ok and to track the next one, but the badge is not showing among the ones I got nor among the ones to track. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19975" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T12:34:16.537" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T12:34:16.537" Title="one of my badge vanished" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3535" CreationDate="2016-05-11T09:23:06.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I see you should qualify for the badge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a positive question record.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have 5 upvoted questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were all asked on different days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet you don't have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask another question or get a few more upvotes that may trigger it to get past whatever the hitch is. Maybe you aren't quite upvoted enough somewhere or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T09:23:06.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3535" CreationDate="2016-05-11T09:34:19.570" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/87/curious?userid=19975&quot;&gt;just been awarded&lt;/a&gt; with your curious badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like in conclusion you do not only have to be curious, but a little patient as well as it can sometimes take a bit until badges are awarded/updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has obvious performance reasons, as stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119698/time-before-badge-is-awarded&quot;&gt;here on meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More detail can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23080/what-is-the-time-lapse-between-achieving-a-tag-badge-and-it-being-awarded&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other badges (mostly the ones which can only be awarded once, like the specialist badges) are awarded by a background process which appears to run only once a day. According to TheTXI (comment below), this seems to happen at 0:00 UTC (at least on meta), but since we don't have an official word on this, it's hard to say whether it's the same for all sites or is consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T09:43:03.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-13T10:58:09.427" Score="12" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not even new to world building .... I haven't started yet, but I found it fun to read posts here. I have also had experience that I enjoy reading novels that have poor story but creative settings. For example, to me, Harry Porter is one of these novels. The story plot is boring but I continuous reading just to explore more on the magical world behind the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I found that there are books like the World War Z, just describing the world but is really fun to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for the question I read here, and some guilds on world building I found on Google, all of them are related to role playing or writing a story. I am curious if there are other people like me who just solely enjoy creating / imagine a new world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20219" OwnerDisplayName="user1273587" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T18:15:58.827" Title="Is world-building always related to something (story / role-play)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3538" CreationDate="2016-05-13T14:20:36.957" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have to be developing a world for a story. I agree that creating a world and its history and physics/magic can be fun, which is why I spend so much of my free time on this site. You can optionally post your world (or rather all relevant information) on a forum (but not here; this is a Q&amp;amp;A site!) and make it a shared world so that others &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; use your world in a story. Gods know we have many otherwise good writers who lack the creativity to build their own worlds. The actual writing is, after all, only about half the work in creating a good story IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T18:15:58.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3541" CreationDate="2016-05-16T16:08:56.803" Score="2" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a now series of questions that have been asked to create great Feats of construction from myths in a realistic way, Think &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/a&gt; but for buildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And below should a summarized list of all of the questions in order of post, so that a link to this meta post should be enough for future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:33:34.733" Title="Can We Build Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3540" CreationDate="2016-05-16T16:24:29.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Questions in order of appearance are as follows;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28018/how-big-is-noahs-ark&quot;&gt;Can we build Noah's Ark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41517/how-do-i-build-an-always-changing-maze&quot;&gt;Can We build an always changing Maze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41667/can-we-build-erebor&quot;&gt;Can We Build Erebor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/126727/21222&quot;&gt;Can we build a roguelike maze?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/127303/21222&quot;&gt;Can we build a 3D maneuver gear from Attack on Titan?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T16:33:34.733" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:33:34.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3544" CreationDate="2016-05-17T06:57:52.583" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my earlier questions on Worldbuilding could have been written better, or split into several smaller questions. Would it be better to edit the question to better fit the general guidelines of the site, create a new question(or several questions breaking down the first question) or do nothing, leaving the question as it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26397/everyday-effects-of-telekinesis-in-a-population&quot;&gt;Everyday effects of telekinesis in a population&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect, I could have split it into several questions and stated it more clearly. I wouldn't want to make so many changes that the current answers are no longer accurate, but then if I asked it as a new question I'm not sure it would be different enough to justify asking it again. I may just be overthinking all of this, in which case it may be best to just leave it as is. If I could get some insight into this, I'd really appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6737" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T18:19:19.380" Title="Should I edit my older question, make a new one, or do nothing?" Tags="|discussion|editing|too-broad|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3542" CreationDate="2016-05-17T07:29:59.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that your question might have been better written in multiple posts and probably would have been closed as too broad if asked today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say you &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/148175/what-should-i-do-when-an-edit-would-change-the-context-of-a-question&quot;&gt;should not edit a question to an extend that invalidates existing answers&lt;/a&gt;. But what you could do is enclosing on the topic as much as you can &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; invalidating the given answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a short look at your question and the answers, I'd say they did not really answer your second and third individual questions in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.How would this impact us if it were to happen in today's world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.How would this impact a more technologically developed society than our own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception is the second answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One thing I know: if this happened in today's world...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't want to be holding stock in a spatula company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is not a real in depth answer I'd say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, you should try and narrow your question down as much as you can &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; invalidating the existing answers. Everything you edited out can then be asked as seperate question (if possible in a reasonable manner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T07:29:59.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3542" CreationDate="2016-05-17T08:51:37.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not edit your question. 7 months have passed, that's a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can as a new question, and you should focus on what wasn't answered in your first question. Asking a follow-up question is a good idea generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you could ask a new question, and focus on what wasn't answered. You could ask a link to the previous question and explain, that although you had good answers, some points remained unclear. And thus ask a more specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T08:51:37.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-05-17T11:14:59.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to get some input on what improvements I can make to this question before posting, since I feel that would have made the first question better had I done that then. Any input on how to improve this question would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which Limits to place on Telekinesis?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up question to my earlier question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26397/everyday-effects-of-telekinesis-in-a-population&quot;&gt;Everyday effects of telekinesis in a population&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the previous question was focused on how the introduction of a power would impact people at different technology levels over time, this one is focused on specifically identifying the methods I can use to reduce the impact this change has on the setting as a whole. While this is a fairly important background feature of the setting, it is meant to be mostly that, a background detail to the setting, rather than the main focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting takes place in the distant future, after humanity achieves many milestones in genetic engineering technology, but is set back to an earlier tech level after a disaster. There are several effects left over in the general population as a result of the changes made before the technology was lost. One of these leftover modifications allows for any person to train and become proficient in telekinesis, lifting and moving objects with one's mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm  wanting this to be a power that almost everyone has the potential for, and basic competency with, but only a small number of people use it extensively, just like athletic ability, or reading proficiency. Most people can read, but a lot of people don't find it worth while outside of simple everyday usage, while others read thousand page books regularly. Telekinesis works much like a muscle or a physical skill, in that the more you use it, the more power and control you have over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm trying to narrow down the specific limits that I would need to place on this power to prevent it from being useless or overpowered. I'm aiming for mundane utility being the flavor of this power in the setting. I'd like to get an estimate for what to use as an upper limit under each of the possible limits to get the balance that I described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Established limits:&#xA;This power cannot be used to move living things, or any object directly in contact with a living thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible limits:&#xA;Range,Weight,Acceleration, # of objects moving at once&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be sensible values for each of these limits for this power to be useful but still optional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other limits that would contribute to the power level of this ability being 'mundane utility'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6737" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T11:14:59.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T13:25:41.917" Score="-4" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where are guidelines about proper text formatting, suggested edits, and their review? Possibly there is nothing but “common sense”, but Ī̲ don’t hold in respect sites where users are encouraged to assess things they’re unwilling to read carefully, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/17316&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T16:06:40.070" Title="Where are guidelines about text formatting and its improvement via (suggested) edits?" Tags="|discussion|reviews|formatting|reviewing-behavior|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T17:56:06.927" Score="10" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has been far too &quot;quiet&quot; lately, so i thought it was time to stir things up again. Therefore, I'd like to address something which is a bit of a recurring topic here: off-topic questions, and how to handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time it was discussed is at the beginning of February, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I've also read several meta posts about the scope of WB, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3206/worldbuilding-scope-risk-factors?cb=1&quot;&gt;Risk Factors&lt;/a&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I feel that over time the risk factors, close reasons, and scope of WB might change slightly due to pressure from the community. That's not a horse I want to keep beating. However, what I don't seem to encounter very often are any solid efforts to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;educate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; our new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day I see (many) new questions being put on hold due to being too broad, or opinion based. Every day I also see these questions receive a whole bunch of attention (mostly from new members) before more or less the same limited number of experienced Worldbuilders finally vote to close them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, often a few of us will comment on the question pointing out which aspects of it should be improved. However, that's not always the case, and no one seems to be taking the users who have answered these poorly asked question aside and telling them: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Listen, we appreciate the enthusiasm, but don't encourage these out-of-scope questions!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More and more I find myself commenting on why I think a question is out of scope rather than actually answering it, all the while waiting for the 5 close votes that will put it on hold, and reading the many well-meaning but ultimately pointless answers to a poorly asked question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, I was commenting on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41706/defending-against-magic&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The OP actually took our input to heart, and plans to educate himself before asking more questions. That's fantatic! However, even while I was glad to have helped educate a new Worldbuilder, I shook my head at the essay-length answer the question had received in the hour or two it was open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know it's not my job to police WB, and I don't want to be a alienate our new users by being a jerk. However I believe that we, the more senior WB members, should take a more active role in educating them. Hence, I made the effort of posting a few links on each answer, and on the question itself, so that at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of these people will read our Meta conversations and get an idea about what we are trying to accomplish (how to identify a poorly asked question, to vote to close it rather than give in to temptation and answer it, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will - obviously - not always be a popular move. A lot of people don't take criticism well. So what I'd like is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To see what the rest of you die-hard Worldbuilders think about getting a little more involved with educating our new members&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To establish some basic guidelines on how to approach, and educate these people (perhaps this will grow into a question of its own) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T20:18:16.347" Title="Educating New Users About Our Scope" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3542" CreationDate="2016-05-17T18:19:19.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't edit in ways that invalidate answers, as others have said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One approach to asking followup questions without them being closed as duplicates is to &lt;strong&gt;explain what you've learned&lt;/strong&gt; from previous questions and then &lt;strong&gt;build on that&lt;/strong&gt; in a new question.  I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/25318/28&quot;&gt;something like that&lt;/a&gt; -- that link is to the third in a series of related questions, each of which arose from the previous one (you can follow the links backwards in the questions).  That's not quite your situation (I didn't yet know I had all those questions at the beginning), but I link to it to illustrate a way of building on prior questions.  You, too, could ask new questions (several, it sounds like), starting from what you've already learned from your previous question and then refining them into new, focused questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T18:19:19.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3546" CreationDate="2016-05-17T18:27:52.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No such specific guidelines exist on this site, though the community here tends to reject 'cosmetic' edits unless they are substantive and/or drastically increase the quality of the question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the odd case where edits have been disagreed over and one or both parties are unsatisfied with the result they have brought the question here to ask the community their opinion, which generally resolves the problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the specific edit you mentioned being rejected and ask for wider consensus or reasons why it might have been rejected, then I would suggest raising a question specifically about that edit on the meta, and posting the link as a comment on the question; something along the lines of &quot;This question/answer is currently being discussed on meta &amp;lt;link&amp;gt;&quot;.&#xA;Raising things in this way tends to be standard practice on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T12:49:06.313" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T12:49:06.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3547" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:12:21.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has also been bothering me quite a bit lately as I found myself closing a lot of questions instead of answering any. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3263/scope-clarification-discussions&quot;&gt;scope discussions&lt;/a&gt; left us with a well defined and restrictive scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate it and think it is very reasonable. However, as you pointed out, many new users aren't familiar with where the borderlines are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fully aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;(-not)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;-to-ask&lt;/a&gt; pages, but I fear that most new users aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are currently 110 meta-questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. This is intimidating for anyone who would like to inform himself. Not only for a non-native like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we need to help the ones that are willing to learn (there is not much to do to help those that don't) is a concise and minimal guide on how to ask a good question here, that is on topic. The above mentioned ones do a good job with it, but they probably are either not well known enough or too long/difficult etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, as a support for new users, we can develop a short list of easy to answer &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; questions that function as a kind of checklist that erradicates the most common flaws in our questions today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples I can come up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Positive tests (these should be answered &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you thoroughly explained your setting and the questions premises?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you done any research yourself and added your findings to the question? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Negative tests (these should be answered &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does your question ask about how likely your character is to do something?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you ask for personal opinion? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, if we can come up with a short and comprehensive list of, lets say 10 questions for each positive and negative - maybe each with an example in a footnote - we can reach some more new users with our definition of scope. I imagine something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260648/stack-overflow-question-checklist&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; over on meta.SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A standard comment for new question could then look like something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding! Thank you for your interest in this site! Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;this cool post&lt;/a&gt; that can help you improve your question in only a few moments with 20 short and easy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked &quot;checklist&quot; post could then point over to the how-to-ask pages, to keep the comment short. And yes, I realize this comment sounds like some bad clickbait post on facebook, but isn't this what we want? Draw attention to a way how this site could be improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T20:12:21.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:28:00.677" Score="100" ViewCount="921" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! As you can see, the new site design just went live. Thanks to everyone for your patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also updated are the newsletter template and chat room based off of the new design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any CSS/styling bugs, please start a new post and tag it with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congrats again and thank you for being an awesome community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T21:48:05.047" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T03:30:47.827" Title="Site Design Launched!" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3554" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:43:46.447" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because a screenshot says more than a thousand words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NR005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NR005.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iceweasel (Firefox) 38.2.1, Debian GNU/Linux (wheezy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Wow, that looks like a pencil to the right in the screenshot...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T20:57:23.120" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T20:57:23.120" Title="Weekly newsletter box is too small" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3556" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:44:15.723" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;del&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3552/weekly-newsletter-box-is-too-small&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/del&gt; one issue&lt;del&gt;s&lt;/del&gt; with the otherwise &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; new site design:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/axPLc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/axPLc.png&quot; alt=&quot;visual bugs in wb.SX design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I get a horizontal scrollbar despite a large enough window size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The same scrollbar and background image artifact is also visible on Worldbuilding Meta, but in greyscale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System (if relevant): Firefox 46.0.1 on a Win10 x64 machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: removed second bug report, as simultaneously covered by another poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4814" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T21:02:01.487" Title="Design bug: scrollbar to the right" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3552" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:57:13.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fix for this is being pushed and should be live shortly. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T20:57:13.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T20:59:36.257" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;On very short pages, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; and maybe others, the robot is overlapped by the edge of landmass, which looks strange. (Firefox 46)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2dp2o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2dp2o.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user788" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T21:36:29.153" Title="The robot is sometimes overlapped by the edge of land" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3553" CreationDate="2016-05-17T21:01:51.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just pushed a fix. This should be live in a moment. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T21:01:51.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3555" CreationDate="2016-05-17T21:16:06.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pushing a fix for this now. It should be live soon. Thanks again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T21:16:06.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T21:30:23.137" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm borrowing this screen shot from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3552/28&quot;&gt;another post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NR005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NR005.png&quot; alt=&quot;ad screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm finding the black text on the dark-green background to be really hard to read.  Can we improve the legibility?  If the text were the same color as the light green in the logo it looks like it'd be clear (judging from the logo) while still using a site color.  (That's not a specific request; if there's something that works better, by all means do it.  I'm just trying to be helpful by proposing something instead of just complaining.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T21:34:49.120" Title="Text in newsletter ad is hard to read" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2016-05-18T01:53:27.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't like the &lt;strong&gt;brown screen flash&lt;/strong&gt; every time a new page loads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only purpose of the brown layer is to make a thin stripe on the right, which I don't like either. Why have a contrasting stripe on the right edge, and furthermore take away from the usable width of the page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LIq0C.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LIq0C.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;brown strip on right&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EySYz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EySYz.png&quot; alt=&quot;zoomed out&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T11:03:30.083" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T11:03:30.083" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3593" CreationDate="2016-05-18T06:51:08.023" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just klicked on a notification of a comment in my inbox. I therefore found that loading a comment via direct link (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3547/educating-new-users-about-our-scope/3550?noredirect=1#comment9636_3550&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;) breaks the site and the content is moved so that the comment appears in the top left corner of the window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could reprodue this on &lt;em&gt;IE11 11.0.9600.18204 (Windows 7)&lt;/em&gt; - but not on &lt;em&gt;Safari 9.1 11601.5.17.1 (MacOS X El Capitan)&lt;/em&gt; so this seems to be an IE problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how it looks like:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UCOTD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UCOTD.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of broken design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also happens when clicking on the &lt;em&gt;answered x hours ago&lt;/em&gt; link in the overview. My best guess would be that this happens everytime an anchor is used. Clicking on a &lt;em&gt;asked x hours ago&lt;/em&gt; message works fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:40:27.183" Title="Opening a direct link with an anchor breaks the layout" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T14:37:42.387" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really a bug but the ring on the small icon (for example next to a Hot Network Question) is very hard to see. I think it might be worth having a bit of a black border around the ring or darkening it for the smaller versions just to give it a more easily recognizable silhouette &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T23:23:27.373" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:23:37.093" Title="Making small icon clearer" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2016-05-18T14:55:02.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dunno what res other users are working at, but I see more than a little stripe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R616m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R616m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which is perfectly fine by me. Your mileage might vary on the mobile version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm not as happy with is the super faint ring on our site icon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/stWyW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/stWyW.png&quot; alt=&quot;uranian ring&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want a nice saturn-like-one, which would be more visible than this rather faint, jupiterian one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T14:55:02.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T15:55:12.220" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the attached picture, the new icon looks small. In order for the ring to show up in the icon, the sphere gets shorter. While the ring is part of the large banner, I think the icon would fit in better if the ring were dropped and the sphere were scaled up to take the space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7y5Di.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7y5Di.png&quot; alt=&quot;Small World&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8862" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T23:20:38.403" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:22:16.943" Title="It's a small world after all?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3546" CreationDate="2016-05-18T16:06:40.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no specific guidelines, but I'll give my opinion on cosmetic edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People use the close reason &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt; for certain reasons but to me a question can be unclear because of how badly formatted the question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zero line breaks, superfluous whitespace, unnecessary phrases such as salutations or apologies (such as for perceived sub-par English speaking skills) or thanks, poor grammar/spelling, or any sort of dramatic flair such as &quot;I need help!&quot; and what not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will edit and I tend to accept edits that improve the question's appearance. However, I only do so when I know that it hasn't met any of the &lt;em&gt;edit rejection&lt;/em&gt; reasons. If it &quot;conflicts with the author's intent&quot; or offers no improvement (or makes it worse) then I'll reject it, because that's a valid rejection reason for any sort of edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That being said...&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, you changed - to – everywhere, and made edits like LH2 to LH&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;. I'm not well versed in Chemistry rules, but I looked up liquid hydrogen and found that it can be LH2 &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; LH&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, that's an unnecessary edit. It was also difficult to read what your edit was supposed to achieve, but when I looked at the actual post, it seemed rather readable to me. In your reason for editing, your comment was &quot;&lt;em&gt;typography (mostly removal of inappropriate italic)&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; In another edit of yours that I found, your edit comment was &quot;&lt;em&gt;rectified “\cos 60” rubbish, other fixes&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;inappropriate&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rubbish&lt;/em&gt; seems to me to violate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; principle that the Stack Exchange networks tend to adhere to, and it offers up no information that would help someone understand what your edit was supposed to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you truly feel like your edit is a strong improvement, I'd recommend that you use the comment to convey that improvement more if it's possible that it could be confusing to a reviewer. In the event of conflict or if you have a question about it, follow the advice @Mourdos provided in his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15401" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T16:06:40.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3563" CreationDate="2016-05-18T16:15:15.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ironically TJL we discussed and landed on the exact opposite (adding the ring and making it more pronounced) when we discussed the site design after it was originally delivered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T16:15:15.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T19:55:18.610" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Couple questions for those who have been around the network longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are we allowed to create our own swag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we are allowed what all artwork do we have available to us?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:39:34.793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:39:34.793" Title="Creating swag and access to artwork" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:01:33.767" Score="12" ViewCount="651" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;The post is now created&lt;/a&gt;, using the top 10 questions as of the 25th of may '16. But you can still feel free to add your helpful questions for interested users (make sure to use the template below).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, a discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3547/educating-new-users-about-our-scope/3550&quot;&gt;how to best educate new users&lt;/a&gt; on our scope came up. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3550/13987&quot;&gt;It was proposed&lt;/a&gt;, that we could create some form of checklist with a set of &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; questions, that can help new users write good questions or improve on their attempts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The final result could be something similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260648/stack-overflow-question-checklist&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; StackOverflow post. A set of questions that, if followed, can erradicate our most common problem sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This checklist could then be recommendet to new users as an easily understandible way to improve their questions. With a comment like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding! Thank you for your interest in this site! Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;this cool post&lt;/a&gt; that can help you improve your question in only a few moments with 20 short and easy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we use this question to collect questions that could be part of this checklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To arrange things more clearly, let us use the following template fora suggestion, one suggestion per post, so each proposal can be discussed and voted on individually. The most voted results will then be collected in a post for easy access (with references to this discussion and the help center of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; The question you want to propose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Further explanation on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this question is useful + examples. This part will be added as footnote in the final checklist post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:06.130" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T22:09:43.700" Title="Checklist for the perfect post - Idea refinement" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|new-users|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:01:33.767" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you done research on your topic and included everything that is important for your question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Doing research is an important part of asking a question. First, you show that you don't just want others to do your work and second it helps on enclosing on possible answers as it defines the requirements more clearly. Adding your own thoughts on the problem might also help others to find something new that you missed. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25272/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-ship-capable-of-crossing-the-pacific&quot;&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T20:01:33.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3566" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:10:40.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are not allowed to use SE design elements without permission.  From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/trademark-guidance&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merchandise/Manufactured Items&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally do not permit use of our name or logo on merchandise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do contact Stack Exchange Inc. with a detailed proposal if you would like to request an exception.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do not use the names or logos owned by Stack Exchange Inc. on any apparel or merchandise without our permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say &amp;quot;logo&amp;quot; here, but I believe that would apply to all elements of the design -- putting the robot on a t-shirt probably won't fly.  Notice that the footer of every page includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;site design / logo © 2016 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Mi Yodeya started its &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1568/472&quot;&gt;publications project&lt;/a&gt;, we asked for and were granted permission to use the logo, including in an altered form for one publication.  (An SE designer even helped us with implementation.)  So permission can be obtained, but you need to ask and it sounds like conventional applications like t-shirts might be declined.  Something more closely tied with the site might be allowed, as it was for Mi Yodeya; that's up to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T20:10:40.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:13:36.877" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Do you ask how your character would act in a given situation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; StackExchange and therefore per definition not about character building. The biggest problem with this type of question is, that you as the inventor of the character are the only person that can decide with certainity how a character would act. However, if you can rephrase your question to be neutral and can be answered objectively, you are fine to do so. Have a look &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3229/risk-factor-definition-too-individual-character-based&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T20:13:36.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3547" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:18:16.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should have a check list on the Ask a Question page instead of the current How to Ask section:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pdlni.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pdlni.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The How to Ask box is ok, but not great.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Instead it could be expanded to include a few questions similar to what T3 H40 proposed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Change it to something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before you ask:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have you thoroughly explained your setting and the questions premises?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have you done any research yourself and added your findings to the question?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is your question about your world, instead of about your characters?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does your question encourage subjective answers, instead of opinion based answers?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are you limiting your question to a single, narrow facet of your world to keep it from being to broad?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about this website, ask it on meta instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T20:18:16.347" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T20:54:34.723" Score="11" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/creating-swag-and-access-to-artwork&quot;&gt;we can get swag made&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;beyond the graduation presents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; provided to high reputation users, with approval from the SO overlords. (That is obviously meant to be complimentary)  &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/trademark-guidance&quot;&gt;Here are the specifics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a couple ideas for community swag that I have been thinking of, I am going to post each idea as an answer and invite others to post ideas as answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post each swag idea as a single post&lt;/strong&gt;, and include the following information (if you don't have all the information at this time that is ok we can add it in later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feel free to offer art suggestions/changes in the comments of each answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Object being created&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Art being used (this could take some work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cost per item&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minimum order quantity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:39:41.290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:39:41.290" Title="Community (non graduation) swag concepts and proposal" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3572" CreationDate="2016-05-18T21:14:47.730" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Product:&lt;/strong&gt;  Moleskine notebook:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.moleskine.com/us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.moleskine.com/us/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1:  Main site, robot and explorer on the outside front cover and perhaps the city in the background on an inside cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options 2:  Site logo (globe with ring) stamped into the front cover and then put the site background (poster) on the inside of the cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submitted an inquiry to moleskine to figure out what kind of quantities and cost we are talking about, making sure to mention that we would have to get approval from the SE folks before we could get them made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T15:22:01.863" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T15:22:01.863" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-18T21:14:47.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3572" CreationDate="2016-05-18T21:18:36.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Product:&lt;/strong&gt; Scale model of the robot and/or explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art:&lt;/strong&gt;  Models of the two characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would need someone to generate 3d models for printing but I am guessing with the proliferation of 3d printers we could probably find someone to do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you familiar with a vendor that supports this please post in the comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is still in concept mode, I do not have any size or vendor information at this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T13:21:00.870" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T13:21:00.870" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-18T21:27:27.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3563" CreationDate="2016-05-18T23:22:16.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've enlarged the world icon a bit, and darkened the halo. The halo does make it seem small compared to some of the other community logos that can span the entire width, but it's now bigger than it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:22:16.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3561" CreationDate="2016-05-18T23:23:37.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've darkened the halo a bit in the regular version of the site and added a bit of red to the meta version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:23:37.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3566" CreationDate="2016-05-18T23:33:48.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I filled out the contact us form asking about swag, and got this reply back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We create swag for every site once its design has been launched, and it will be sent to the top 72 users of the site once the swag designs have been finalized. You'll see a post about it on meta once it's ready, and we will contact all the eligible users to request shipping information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stack Overflow Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:33:48.950" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3597" CreationDate="2016-05-19T03:12:08.390" Score="9" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick, tell me which of these questions I've clicked on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GOepL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GOepL.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot - main&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That screen shot was taken in Safari, a browser in which I have done zero customization.  (I keep it around just for tests like this.)  I see the same thing in Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta, on the other hand, there's a difference (this one is from Chrome):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8zDNu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8zDNu.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot - meta&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we get some better differentiation between visited and unvisited links on the front page of main?  I try to read most of the questions, so I want the ones I've haven't read to stand out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T01:19:51.577" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T01:19:51.577" Title="Visited questions on main are indistinguishable from unvisited ones" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3572" CreationDate="2016-05-19T08:07:52.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Product:&lt;/strong&gt;  Stress globe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art:&lt;/strong&gt;  The same globe used in the icon and logo.  Only bigger.  Or just the logo.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible vendor:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.officeplaygroundprinting.com/cyber-gel-stress-ball-p5364.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.officeplaygroundprinting.com/cyber-gel-stress-ball-p5364.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that similar products can help bleed off nervous energy and support thinking.  Cheap when bought in bulk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T08:07:52.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3572" CreationDate="2016-05-19T08:24:05.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Product:&lt;/strong&gt;  T-Shirt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art:&lt;/strong&gt;  Logo on the front; message and background elements on the back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slogan:  You dream it.  We help make the details feel real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T08:24:05.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-19T08:30:23.217" Score="26" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the launch of the new site design we are now fully graduated, thanks to everyone here contributing questions and answers and building a community to get us to this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a fully graduated site this means we now have the final &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege reputation levels&lt;/a&gt; in place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does mean that a lot of people will find their access to the site has dropped, however don't worry. Keep writing those excellent questions and answers and you'll get back to it in no time :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T16:42:54.743" Title="Graduated Site Privileges (aka Where's my options gone?!?)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3583" CreationDate="2016-05-19T10:01:20.200" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, now that I've posted the actual questions, I've deleted all the meta explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it correct to split this question into two seperate questions for 1 and 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41816/world-where-everyone-can-know-what-everyone-is-thinking-what-changes&quot;&gt;World where everyone can know what everyone is thinking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41817/world-where-everyone-can-suddenly-know-what-everyone-else-is-thinking-what-happ&quot;&gt;Suddenly, everyone in a world can know the thoughts of everyone else. What happens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#1 is a question where it's always been like that, #2 is a question where it suddenly happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I split them, the main body of the text in the two questions will be quite similar and only the part about how it came into being will differ. Will this be duplicates? What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, I ended up splitting the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If the community disagrees, I will happily merge them again. I will follow the votes of the community.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:36:06.850" Title="Two different cases involving a similar premise, should they be merged?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3582" CreationDate="2016-05-19T10:39:43.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imho:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worlds are going to develop very differently in those two scenarios, so I'd say it would be better to post two separate questions. Otherwise, at the very least, it would difficult to pick the best answer - what if someone gives an awesome answer for #1, but ignores #2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the convenience, you could mention that the superpower is the same as in another question (for those who have already read another question), but still describe it in a separate paragraph or section (for those who haven't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8808" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T10:39:43.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3582" CreationDate="2016-05-19T14:13:55.353" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree. This sets a dangerous precedent. People suddenly will begin to branch out questions into several sub-questions where only some nuance of the main issue changes. The big-picture question is never asked, and there are several splits of the answers. people answer one of them, and the other go without attention. It dillutes the quality of the Q&amp;amp;A. Also, &lt;strong&gt;some of the questions may have trivial answers&lt;/strong&gt; (as is the case in hand - where one of them can be answered with &quot;we are the borg&quot;). Better take the effort and make one single question of high quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making several nuance questions &lt;strong&gt;may be a kind of rep farming&lt;/strong&gt;. I could (won't) as an exercise make 10 different questions about the same subject, changing nuances and bait the users into visiting the other questions, and maybe i'll get multiple upvotes from the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case study at is a duplicate. Worldbuilding questions are very open in which you can ask several questions over the same subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically it is one question, where it would be more useful to ask the answerer to make a parallel between the two possibilities, one when it evolves as the status quo and the other when it suddenly happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T14:19:05.053" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T14:19:05.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3582" CreationDate="2016-05-19T14:25:33.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember the confusion with the 40mph runners, where we weren't sure whether it was an evolved trait or a suddenly given one as the responses would be completely different in each case. One government regulation and the other evolved social dynamics. I feel the same is true here and the two cases should be held clearly separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T14:25:33.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T15:08:03.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Does it take longer than 5 minutes to read your question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Long questions aren't necessarily good questions. While the community does encourage details, too much detail can discourage users from reading the entire post. Try to narrow the scope of the details in your question to exactly the problem you need solved. Comments can be used to request more information be edited into the question if such is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T15:08:03.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T15:24:13.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Do answers to your question depend on any knowledge specific to your setting that isn't included in the question, like how your magic system works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to include all of the necessary information in your question, so that people don't spend time writing answers that will turn out to be invalid or unhelpful.  If you're asking about the gravitational properties in your star system, be sure to include the types/classes of stars, sizes of stars and planets involved, and relevant distances.  If you're asking how you can design a creature with magic immunity, be sure to explain how magic works in your world.  If you're asking about the societal implications of a particular situation, tell us enough about the society to be able to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T15:53:09.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3582" CreationDate="2016-05-19T16:18:42.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mods solved this problem by putting #1 on hold as too broad. I guess I agree with their decision, as I was indirectly asking for the history and evolution of the culture of an entire species. I suppose if I had asked both questions in one, then that might have been too broad as well, since it would have included the &quot;too-broad&quot; question &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18252" LastEditorUserId="18252" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T17:36:06.850" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:36:06.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3572" CreationDate="2016-05-19T16:54:01.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Product:&lt;/strong&gt;  Hoodie (in a couple of different colours)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art 1:&lt;/strong&gt;  A large WB globe on the front, with the &quot;Worldbuilding&quot; written underneath &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art 2:&lt;/strong&gt;  Site logo as it is right now (Worldbuilding with the planet and ring)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Art 3:&lt;/strong&gt; The robot/traveler and castle in the distance scene on the front&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other information:&lt;/strong&gt; -- will look at options and get back to you --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T16:54:01.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T17:12:16.427" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Does the question title accurately and concisely summarize the specific question that you are asking?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question title is very important for setting the tone for reading the question. It is the first piece of information that someone will see when browsing the site, and it points toward what the asker wants to learn. A good title can make even a long question much easier to grasp, because the person reading the question knows up front what to look for. Questions with clear titles may attract more attention from subject matter experts, resulting in better answers. While the title is not meant to be the entire question, you should strive to write the title such that it provides an at-a-glance summary of what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T13:31:00.887" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T13:31:00.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T17:16:36.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is the question scan-able?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be looked over quickly to identify the major portions of the question tend to be easier to read. Make sure you are using headings, formatting and if helpful also images and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/5020/53424&quot;&gt;MathJax formulas&lt;/a&gt; to get your question across as clearly as possible even if the person reading the question only scans it. If the question is long, use a separate heading or simply **&lt;strong&gt;boldface&lt;/strong&gt;** to emphasize the question that you want answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:16:36.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T17:20:53.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you proofread your question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nobody is perfect, and having some spelling mistakes in your question is not a problem as there is always someone who is willing to edit typos you made. But you should always proofread your question to see whether you accidentally missed some words or information you wanted to give. This also serves to double check the comprehensiveness of what you want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:20:53.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3560" CreationDate="2016-05-19T17:40:27.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Kurtis Beavers told in the comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we've fixed this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for those interested in the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[they] had some image layering in the header to eventually create an effect of the stars moving, but it was interfering with some scroll-to-comment javascript , so [they] removed the layering witch allowed us to simplify the header images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This question needed an answer to be accepted to not be pushed eventually by the Community&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:40:27.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T17:44:38.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I think that all the questions should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;suggestive&lt;/a&gt;, answerable as yes, and asked in a way that it's obvious that Yes is the correct answer. Mixing yes and no questions is going to make people confused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you thoroughly explained your setting and the questions premises?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kind of an obvious one. Answerers need to know the rules of the question in order to write good answers. Vague questions where you have no idea how anything works are going to require a lot of follow up comments asking for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T14:10:18.657" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T14:10:18.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T21:24:19.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you asking about a large number of impacts resulting from your original situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are are often referred as &lt;em&gt;what ifs&lt;/em&gt; questions. Asking for the implications on the world and/or society as large is far too broad. See also this &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3033/9685&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T21:24:19.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-19T21:30:46.087" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is the technological level of your world clear or has no influence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a recurrent issue with many questions. The technological level has a huge amount of influence on warfare, society, space travel, economy, etc. In most of the questions, it is necessary to mention roughly where does the world/country stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T19:17:10.347" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T19:17:10.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3578" CreationDate="2016-05-20T01:19:37.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just pushed an update. This should be resolved now. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T01:19:37.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-20T14:14:04.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is your question about your world, instead of about your characters, possible actions, or plots? What is &quot;the world&quot;? Click here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leading the reader by focusing on the world, not the characters, in such a way that anyone reading it will know that we want them to focus the question to be about the world, and not about plot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An explanation link may be needed to help clarify what we mean by the world, since there are more things that go into world building than will fit into a single sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T14:14:04.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-20T14:15:24.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Does the wording of your question encourage answers that are not based solely on personal opinion?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Again, leading the reader by making it obvious what kind of questions we want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T14:15:24.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-20T14:16:52.397" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you limiting your question to a single, narrow facet of your world to keep it from being to broad?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another obvious, leading question where the right answer is obvious just from reading the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T14:16:52.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3538" CreationDate="2016-05-20T22:47:43.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although most of the questions posted here seem to be motivated by a desire to tell stories or play games, I can assure you that this is not exclusively the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am retired at the moment but if I should ever go back to work I expect to find the ideas in this stack to be of enormous practical value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20797" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T22:47:43.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-21T01:50:28.123" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The icon on the Achievements list, scaled down from the standard logo, looks like a piece of fruit, not the intended planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU6FQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU6FQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cropped screenshot of the open Achievements list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshot is enlarged when I view the image in a message, so go get the real idea look at this so the picture is about 2&quot; wide at reading distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T03:31:25.457" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T03:31:25.457" Title="Site design - icon on Achievements list" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2016-05-21T04:49:32.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; are you asking your question because you're at a loss for ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/12207&quot;&gt;Idea generation&lt;/a&gt; isn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; bad: in some senses most questions are seeking ideas. But questions that fundamentally read like &quot;I'm looking for some...&quot; tend not to do well on the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Need help focusing your question more? Here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2617/12207&quot;&gt;some of&lt;/a&gt; our best questions (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=votes%3a50%20is%3aq%20closed%3ano&quot;&gt;the rest of them&lt;/a&gt;) to look at for examples. Consider whether your question runs afoul of any &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3206/12207&quot;&gt;risk factors&lt;/a&gt;. And you can always use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/12207&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to workshop a question, or just stop by &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to ask for help making it workable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T18:19:33.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3581" CreationDate="2016-05-22T16:42:54.743" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do know that only 10 people have 20K points here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graduating doesn't mean you suddenly get higher traffic.  It would make more sense to ramp up the marks or scale it with the actual amount of voting done in a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T16:42:54.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-23T01:14:12.977" Score="-1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42037/force-in-which-like-charges-attract-and-opposites-repel-and-black-holes&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; I've found this question which, on my opinion, shouldn't have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest to &lt;em&gt;extend the border of the site topic into the area of the modern sciences&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site is largely about sci-fi. Scifi means: &lt;em&gt;scientific fiction&lt;/em&gt;. It should be obviously ontopic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quality of scifi is significantly better, if it has strong scientific background. This site is for &lt;em&gt;world builders&lt;/em&gt;. If you have also a stronger scientific flavor, it will improve the quality of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allowing questions like this would be also a possibility to get more highly qualified experts in different scientific areas, which has always a very positive effect. I citate the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Area51 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; here: &lt;em&gt;&quot;To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&amp;amp;A site.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer would be &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;. An answer to this question wouldn't be an opinion, but it would be the result of a calculation. It would be an &lt;em&gt;objective answer&lt;/em&gt;. I am now quite curious, what is the answer, and I would find it very useful, if an expert of the theoretical physics could answer it. And I am probably not alone with that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I am not for allowing &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; scientific question. Questions should be also about world building, i.e. from hypothetical constructions of alternative worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T11:55:44.077" Title="Suggestion: allow questions about theoretical physics" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-23T02:25:00.390" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/327/year/worldbuilding/2016-01-01/17179#17179&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/327/year/worldbuilding/2016-01-01/17179#17179&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, user fi12 who has been a member for 4 months has a Total of 1675 (lagged from his live value of 1680) and a Year rep of 1735?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T05:35:11.713" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T19:19:22.473" Title="How can one's Year Reputation be greater than Total Reputation?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3606" CreationDate="2016-05-23T03:19:46.333" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think alternative worlds is a valid subject for WorldBuilding, given its name.  However, questions in the form of &quot;What if we had exactly the same world we have today, except ________&quot; where the blank is some new law of physics pose problems.  I'd say at least half of them I have seen, if not more, are fundamentally broken in their understanding of physics to the point where asking for a physics based answer is like asking which cut of steak makes the best lemonade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others are simply ill researched.  I am no expert on the topic of black holes, so I spent a mighty two minutes researching the topic on Wikipedia.  A Schwartzchild black hole, by definition, has no charge.  Electric charge cannot shrink the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schwartschild radius&lt;/a&gt; because if it has a charge, it is not a Schwartzchild black hole.  Instead, you need to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reissner%E2%80%93Nordstr%C3%B6m_metric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reissner–Nordström&lt;/a&gt; metric, which works for charged black holes.  This suggests either the author failed to research the topic in the least, or my two minute Wikipedia learning session was two wasted minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's room for well worded physics questions about alternate worlds.  However, I personally get really nervous thinking about answers to physics based questions when it is clear the author asking the question is way over their head.  Physics has this &lt;em&gt;nasty&lt;/em&gt; tendency of declaring itself the authority on reality, unless you know enough to beat it back.  I can easily see questions like that &lt;em&gt;decreasing&lt;/em&gt; creativity, rather than increasing it.  I like to give a lot of leeway to questions that inspire creativity, but I'm not a fan of those which go the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions like these are fair game, as you recommend, I think they should be subject to a &quot;homework rule,&quot; similar to that on Physics.SE or Mathematics.SE.  If you come with a physics problem, you should also come with enough work done so that we can see where your understanding falls shy, and help with that part of the problem.  Like on homework problems, its not the answer that is helpful, but the process.  If the author had come in with &quot;I want to add some fictional force to my world, which has an effect on charged black holes, but I don't understand the Reissner–Nordström metric, and how it might be manipulated by a disruptive force&quot; we might be able to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have to give this question credit for having a specific question.  Many of the fill-in-the-blank physics questions are simply &quot;what would happen if____&quot;.  If there's any reason to reopen this question, its because it actually asked something specific enough to answer (which is clear because it was specific enough that I could note issues in terminology!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Since I think this is an important metaquestion for WB to deal with, I've been giving it more thought since my answer.  I realized recently that this question gives an excellent example where asking an apparently simple question about an apparently well defined new law yields dramatic unexpected results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the original question is clearly patterning the fictitious &quot;species charge&quot; after electromagnetism, with a minor change that opposites repel and like charges attract.  Every single sentence in the question uses electromagnetic terms to describe what is going on, down to the point of suggesting using protons and electrons as example entities with charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Columb's law: $F=k_e\frac{qQ}{r^2}$ where q and Q are the charges of two particles, and r is the distance between them ($k_e=\frac{1}{4\pi \epsilon_0}$, though I wont need that here).  Clearly to get to the &quot;species charge, we just negate that constant, yielding $F=-k_e\frac{qQ}{r^2}$.  Simple right?  Just like electrostatics, except now like charges attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it turns out this is the end of the similarity between electrostatics and this new force.  The equations &quot;look similar.&quot;  However, the result of this is so completely and utterly unrelated to electrostatics in every way that I wouldn't even consider electrostatics to be template for how it behaves.  In electrostatics, because like charges attract, there is a natural tendency for opposite charges to come together and act as a neutral charge.  This effect is so pronounced that, even though gravity is immensely weaker than electrostatics by many orders of magnitude, gravity is still the dominating force in the universe.  In this new fictitious force, nothing encourages its &quot;species charge,&quot; as it was called, to neutralize.  In fact, it would encourage the universe to rather rapidly divide into two halves hurtling away from each other incredibly fast.  Thus, the universe will rapidly evolve into a state where you can effectively divide it in half and deal with each half-universe separately.  Each half would be &quot;similar&quot; to our universe, only charged with like &quot;species charges.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how bad is this?  From the original question, &quot; This 'species force' between two electrons would be about 1,000 times less than the electric force between them - so it would be still far stronger than the gravitational force between them.&quot;  Electrostatics is actually 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, so that suggests this &quot;species force&quot; is 36 times stronger than gravity.  Because nothing is encouraging cancellation, the result will be an attractive force that is immensely more powerful than gravity.  Instead of finding ourselves pulled towards the earth at $9.8 m/s^2$, we would find ourselves accelerated at $9800000000000000000000000000000000000 m/s^2$!  The resulting tidal forces would easily be enough to cause spaghetification, and the general collapse of the universe into two black holes.  There would likely be no matter outside of the black holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the question is concerned with the rest of the universe, but the rest of the universe literally got Bulldozed to support this &quot;species charge.&quot;  Whatever world was being built here is destroyed by its own forces.  A single minus sign is the difference between the world we live in today, and a pair of supermassive blackholes containing all the matter in the known universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of why these questions are so tricky.  There are &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; many unintended consequences to pay attention to when you decide to change the laws of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="2252" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T15:06:56.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T15:06:56.173" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3607" CreationDate="2016-05-23T04:38:06.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvotes could be subtracted when considering the total reputation: Unless some have been reversed overtime, I counted about 33 in negative reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He got 30 points in the last hours. The reputation league probably updates with a script that runs once every few hours. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T04:38:06.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3606" CreationDate="2016-05-23T09:47:43.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree mostly with Cort Ammon; His first 3 paragraphs pretty much sum up how I think about these questions. &lt;strong&gt;However, I don't think questions like these (&quot;Like these&quot; as in too broad and requiring a book + a phd to answer) should ever be fair game.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your arguments; and here is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) This site is largely about sci-fi. Scifi means: scientific fiction.&#xA;  It should be obviously ontopic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to stop you right there - This site is not &quot;largely about sci-fi&quot;. This site is about building worlds, and sci-fi is only a small portion of building worlds. There are &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; non-sci-fi questions on this SE. Also, I'd like to point out that the sci-fi topic itself is &lt;strong&gt;already considered on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) The quality of scifi is significantly better, if it has strong scientific background. This site is for world builders. If you have also a stronger scientific flavor, it will improve the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are you to judge that the quality of scifi is &quot;better&quot;? &quot;Better&quot; than what? We can improve the quality of the site in many ways, having a stronger scientific flavor is one of them, but not the only possible method. In fact, we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag specifically for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) Allowing questions like this would be also a possibility to get more highly qualified experts in different scientific areas, which has always a very positive effect. I citate the Area51 FAQ here: &quot;To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and challenging questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&amp;amp;A site.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large issue with &quot;questions like this&quot; is that the questions are too broad to answer succinctly within the standard SE format. Worldbuilding is a site where we have a large plethora of different experts - we're not like Physics.SE, where we want &quot;expert physicists&quot; explicitly. We want all kinds of experts, to answer all kinds of questions. These experts answer questions that all sorts of people read and enjoy. If you start allowing questions that require a book to answer, other people stop reading those questions - only the original poster &lt;strong&gt;MIGHT&lt;/strong&gt; read the answer, if at all. After all, what average user would be willing to read an essay in order to read about an answer to a theoretical question that cannot be proven properly and will likely never apply to them or their stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) The answer would be interesting. An answer to this question wouldn't be an opinion, but it would be the result of a calculation. It would be an objective answer. I am now quite curious, what is the answer, and I would find it very useful, if an expert of the theoretical physics could answer it. And I am probably not alone with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the answer would probably &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be that interesting; &quot;interesting&quot; is subjective to the reader (also, refer to above point). Also, the answer to this question would most definitely be an opinion because the calculations to obtain the answer would have to be made up (of opinion), because &lt;strong&gt;the calculations and formulas to deal with new forces that act a certain way simply don't exist&lt;/strong&gt;. If the premise is false then all answers using that premise can be considered true; this is basic logic, if &lt;code&gt;p-&amp;gt;q&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please define &quot;modern sciences&quot; as I'm pretty sure we already answer questions in that field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T09:47:43.907" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3414" CreationDate="2016-05-23T14:05:03.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sufficiently constrained scenario based questions are &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; per the discussions that we have had in chat and on meta over the last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trick is &lt;em&gt;sufficiently&lt;/em&gt; constrained...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T14:05:03.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3616" CreationDate="2016-05-23T14:21:06.400" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;icon-48.png&quot; that's used on the full Hot Network Questions page still has the old design. I tried clearing my cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am on latest chrome, 50.0.2661.102 m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S30xn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S30xn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2566" LastEditorUserId="13448" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T11:22:20.883" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T11:22:20.883" Title="Large Hot Network Questions icon is the old one" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3615" CreationDate="2016-05-23T18:52:51.017" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog&lt;/a&gt;.  Its front page looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BilkC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BilkC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;blog front page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That area roughly enclosed by a hand-drawn red circle is space that we can fill with a graphic.  It actually goes wider than this screen shot; Medium likes wide graphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: the graphic below the big expanse of white is the graphic for the latest article.  That content changes, and isn't what we're considering here.  This question is about filling the white space.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a gorgeous, wide graphic that says &quot;Worldbuilding.SE&quot; to viewers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p5z8M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p5z8M.png&quot; alt=&quot;site header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/brainstorming-worldbuilding-site-design&quot;&gt;first post about our design&lt;/a&gt;, Kurtis wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are there any ways that the site should visually connect with the medium blog?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question for SE: may we have permission to use that art in the header for our blog, in conjunction with the Universe Factory name?  And if so, could you provide a copy that doesn't have the questions/tags/etc text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question for WB: any objections to doing this?  I'm imagining just overlaying the UF logo on the site-design background, but restyling the UF text is also fine with me if somebody has proposals there.  Besides, I'm planning to ask @ArtOfCode to do the actual work. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T19:05:42.190" Title="May (and should) we use the site design on our blog?" Tags="|support|blog|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3614" CreationDate="2016-05-23T19:35:12.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The blog design is good but I would prefer carrying the main site theme over to be blog if we have the option to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its links them visually and lets be honest...our site design is awesome...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T19:35:12.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3613" CreationDate="2016-05-24T02:22:24.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to be fixed now, both on HNQ and on the network profile (where it was also showing as the beta logo until today).  You might need to force your browser to refresh the page.  (For me, one browser updated automatically but another had to be forced.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T02:22:24.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3619" CreationDate="2016-05-24T17:48:39.037" Score="12" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be just me, but sometimes a question pops out describing a world that somehow justifies mixing kids and sex in the... &quot;wrong order&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I think that people should be free to write about whatever they want and they are welcome to ask questions about how sexuality works on their worlds of fiction, it's worth to notice that pedophilia is a &lt;em&gt;really sensitive subject and it can easily make people uneasy&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It bothers me to no end when I find out someone asking a question that, in the small lines, seems to be looking for a way to write some sort of erotica of doubtful taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure if I'm the one being overly sensitive about this, or if those questions I find sometimes really push some buttons on more people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be glad to discipline myself to tolerate this topic more in if I'm on the wrong here, but I want to be sure that the problem is with myself and not with those questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easier to understand if I cite some examples, so, there are a couple of the ones that made me feel sad/angry/mad/depressed when I read them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42125/how-to-make-gm-gmo-children-exceptionally-loyal-to-one-another&quot;&gt;How to make GM/GMO children exceptionally loyal to one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above question wants a way to make children overly loyal to each other, and the question states more or less outright that one of the methods to do so include sex between the kids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31285/how-would-modern-society-react-if-mate-or-die-was-in-effect-for-humans-and-matin&quot;&gt;How would modern society react if Mate Or Die was in effect for humans and mating also gave unaging?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one has a more extreme take on the situation - if your kids don't make sex, they &lt;em&gt;just die&lt;/em&gt;. This one imposes the requeriment at the start of the puberty - which would be around 10 years old. It may not be &quot;pedophilia&quot; by some standards, but at least on my country it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does questions like those bother anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T16:06:12.150" Title="About children and sex" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3617" CreationDate="2016-05-24T18:16:52.317" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all honesty: No, they don't bother me. What you have to remember is that these questions are about a fictitious world or a (hopefully) fictitious version of Earth. The society in question may be very different from what you are used to, and may even be considered obscene, backwards, or revolting by any number of societies in existence on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wari%E2%80%99_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a tribe&lt;/a&gt; that eats their dead. Most societies strongly discourage or entirely ban cannibalism, for various reasons. In truth, though, there's nothing wrong with eating the flesh of deceased humans, so long as you don't eat certain parts, such as the brain, due to lethal diseases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout Earth's history, females could be married before they reached puberty and could have at least one child before they reached the age of 15. This was a norm of the societies of the time, back when living for 20 years wasn't a guarantee and males were expected to produce heirs to prove their fitness to inherit from their father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on Worldbuilding (main or meta) should never be construed to imply an endorsement of the concepts presented therein. Try to approach each question on its own (unless it links to other questions, of course) and give each the same consideration. Ultimately, if you don't like a question that is clearly relevant to building a world, ignore it. There's nothing that says you have to click on the question, read the whole post, provide an answer, read existing answers, or comment on the question or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are strongly opposed to a question, downvote it. While the hover text for voting indicates the intended purpose of the voting buttons, there's no enforcement mechanism and your vote is ultimately your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, they don't bother me. But I'm also a remorseless, dispassionate bastard who delights in tormenting D&amp;amp;D players with societal evils until they run screaming from the room. (And, yes, that has happened; earlier this year, in fact.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T18:16:52.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3617" CreationDate="2016-05-24T18:48:11.827" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a question a while ago along this same question line where &quot;[X] WB topic makes me uncomfortable, what should I do about it?&quot;  There's no shortage of topics that [X] could be: violence, incest, rape, mass-murder (a popular one on WB, to be sure), blasphemy, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, etc, etc.  I myself have probably written a few questions that make a lot of people uncomfortable such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22863/how-to-render-a-large-percentage-of-humans-infertile&quot;&gt;mass-sterilization&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23339/what-is-the-best-reproductive-strategy-for-equality-between-the-sexes&quot;&gt;reproductive equality&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21364/race-relations-in-the-land-of-human-shapeshifters&quot;&gt;race relations&lt;/a&gt;.  Our world contains all these topics, as sad/unfortunate as that may be.  Writing stories is a way to grapple with those topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with questions on any of these topics as long as they are conveyed in a dispassionate, clinical tone.  Doctors learn to judiciously look at the most private parts of the human body as something to work on, not as a sexual object. I choose to believe that WBers come here with the hope of this kind of dispassionate analysis for their questions. I'm willing to meet them on those terms on the vast majority of topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advocating violence, rape, mass-murder or anything else listed above is completely unacceptable&lt;/strong&gt; and I would instantly downvote/report/flag any question or answer that did advocate this. Similarly, I don't want to read long graphic descriptions of these sensitive topics. Talking about how to execute 20 million people is one thing.  Saying that it's something that should be done in the real world is something completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T18:48:11.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3614" CreationDate="2016-05-24T19:05:42.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no objection in linking the new WB design to the Universe Factory.  I think that kind of cohesion is a great thing to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T19:05:42.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T00:37:41.533" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this meta question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/creating-swag-and-access-to-artwork&quot;&gt;Creating swag and access to artwork&lt;/a&gt;, we were discussing the possibility of creating merch for Worldbuilding to send out to the top 72 users of the site. For those who aren't in the top 72 like me, (I'm around~200), are we out of luck? Is there any way to get the swag unless we are part of the top 72 by rep, or will the products go on sale later on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:39:29.223" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:39:29.223" Title="Swag for top 72 users?" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3621" CreationDate="2016-05-25T00:50:42.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are not discussing what &lt;em&gt;SE&lt;/em&gt; will send out; they get to decide that.  It's their gift to the top 72 users by rep; they don't make it generally available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3572/28&quot;&gt;Elsewhere on meta&lt;/a&gt; people are talking about &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; swag, like you are, that would be produced by community members with SE permission.  Presumably such swag would be available to anybody who wants to buy it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T00:50:42.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2016-05-25T16:27:10.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The upvote and downvote buttons contain triangles that are mathematically centered (top and bottom margins are the same size) — and not visually centered (center of gravity is not in the middle) — within the button. This makes it look off balance to me. But maybe that's just me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T16:27:10.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T18:16:37.170" Score="39" ViewCount="1652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing good questions can be difficult. To help you, the community came up with ten &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; questions that will guide you and help you prevent common errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Follow the links for more information and examples for each question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Positive questions (You should answer these with yes):&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3590/13987&quot;&gt;Does the question title accurately and concisely summarize the specific question that you are asking?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3568/13987&quot;&gt;Have you done research on your topic and included everything that is important for your question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3596/13987&quot;&gt;Is the technological level of your world clear or has no influence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3594/13987&quot;&gt;Have you thoroughly explained your setting and the question's premises?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3591/13987&quot;&gt;Is the question scan-able?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3601/13987&quot;&gt;Are you limiting your question to a single, narrow facet of your world to keep it from being too broad?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Negative questions (You should answer these with no):&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3570/13987&quot;&gt;Do you ask how your character would act in a given situation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3595/13987&quot;&gt;Are you asking about a large number of impacts resulting from your original situation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3587/13987&quot;&gt;Do answers to your question depend on any knowledge specific to your setting that isn't included in the question, like how your magic system works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3586/13987&quot;&gt;Does it take longer than 5 minutes to read your question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can answer these questions as described, you have the best chance that your question will be understood, be on-topic and be well received. If you want to improve your post even more, here are some more resources that might help you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3567/checklist-for-the-perfect-post-idea-refinement&quot;&gt;The full list of suggestions for the perfect question&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here you can find all suggestions and their authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;The Worldbuilding Stack Exchange site tour&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A basic introduction to Worldbuilding SE and the system behind it everyone should have read (You even get a badge for it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;The help center&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt; pages. These are the official rules for what can be asked. The help center contains (nearly) all the information you need to know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;The question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are in the process of writing a question, you can post it here and get helpful tips from the community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;The Worldbuilder's General Chat&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main chat of WB is generally active. And people there are usually willing to help in refining a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta in general&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last but not least, worldbuilding meta contains a lot of Q&amp;amp;A's on the main site, how it works and more. You can find a lot of helpful answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T08:34:58.647" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T08:34:58.647" Title="How to write the perfect question" Tags="|discussion|faq|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-05-26T02:38:11.370" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/96086/paranormal&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lL7s5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paranormal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T22:12:05.210" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T22:12:05.210" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-26T02:38:11.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3607" CreationDate="2016-05-26T19:19:22.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a downvote total of 195, he's one of the most discriminating posters here. I wish more of us had the discipline. It also accounts for why the poster's all-round rep gain total is significantly higher than the current reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T19:19:22.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-26T20:46:52.957" Score="8" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42349/what-would-be-the-main-reason-to-avoid-providing-confidential-data-to-the-police&quot;&gt;What would be the main reason to avoid providing confidential data to the police by a company?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Q starts with a note about being a first-time poster and not a native English speaker, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So It's sad to see that it has 2 close votes already, and &lt;strong&gt;no comments&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially since this is from someone apparently writing a story (not just posting because it's fun in inself), can we as a community better welcome him by helping him to improve the question, and explain what may be deficient about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T20:46:52.957" Title="Can we better welcome this first-time poster?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-27T11:36:36.850" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I browse the review history, only my reviews show up, despite the URL ending with &lt;code&gt;/review/close/history&lt;/code&gt;, and not &lt;code&gt;/review/close/history?userId=16186&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is specific to worldbuilding, and other stack exchange sites show other people's reviews at the location &lt;code&gt;/review/close/history&lt;/code&gt;. (This is not just the 'close' category, the other categories are affected as well.) The same is also true for worldbuilding meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can other people reproduce this bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T00:48:48.607" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T00:48:48.607" Title="Review history and my reviews are identical only on worldbuilding" Tags="|support|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-05-27T11:45:05.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How big can an impact crater be without having the planet (normally) destroyed by the impact?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a planet where my fantasy world is build upon. You may assume it is about the same size as earth and although it has some quirky fauna and flora, In general it is a planet much like earth. In size, tilt, spin, ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had an idea to add a region to this planet, filled with exotic and alien life. The general idea is this: A meteor crashed down on the planet, a long time ago. This created a huge impact crater with mountains on the sides. The impact was on a corner of a large piece of land, in the bottom of a continent. So the sea is nearby. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mountains would not be high, so perhaps more hills, but they'd keep the sea at bay. Inside of the impact crater I would have a large, lush jungle. Filled with alien and exotic life (fuelled by whatever I decide was in the comet/ meteor). There would be small civilisation around the crater, more inland. The canopy of the lush jungle would be seen as a sea of trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how large can this crater be, for the impact to not have destroyed the planet? My preferred size would be a circular impact crater with a diameter of a few hundred kilometres. (200-400). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sandbox Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I give too much context? Should I get to the point sooner? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other critique? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I add this piece of context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impact would have happened around the time that the planet was being colonised and the dominant species (humans and neo-humans) would have had access to pretty advanced technology. Due to circumstances however they would not have been able to destroy it, but perhaps slow it down? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T11:45:05.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-27T13:40:39.497" Score="13" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the past couple of days &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42332/would-a-culture-with-magic-consider-it-magic&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; has been receiving rather a lot of attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though quite a few commentators seem to agree that it is primarily opinion based it has only received 3 close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion is that asking that sort of hypothetical question, while world-building, is opinion based, because each person answering will have a different take on it. I would say it doesn't fall within the scope of WB because we are making up a basic premise of the universe (how a magical society views their magic) for the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, why is this question still open and receiving answers from a couple of rather high rep users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what I'm trying to understand is why we seem to be operating on a double standard. On one hand we shut down questions as too broad, or opinion based &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt;. On the other hand, along comes a &quot;cool&quot; question, and the rules seem to go out the window. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We seem to debate Risk Factors, and close reasons all the time, yet do precious little to enforce those standards when it doesn't suit us. I just want to understand what our scope really is, and what our approach to closing questions is going to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T07:50:09.757" Title="Understanding our double standard regarding some opinion based questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3630" CreationDate="2016-05-27T14:13:10.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philosophy is not opinion.  Which philosophy one prefers may be, but a philosophy needs to be logical and consistent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to go to the very heart of building this individual's world.  Is the magic system going to be rigorously based in scientifically testable principles?  Or is it going to be a non-testable system?  Obviously we can't make that decision for the asker.  But we can help provide a framework in which to make that decision.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with opinion-based questions is that reasonable people may differ on whether an answer is good or bad.  However, there are several answers that are clearly right.  Not because they try to answer yes or no but because they answer in ways of thinking about magic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T14:13:10.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3630" CreationDate="2016-05-27T14:30:01.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, this question is on the edge. I see this point why this question should be left open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It solves actual problem many worldbuilders faced:&lt;/strong&gt; The question was asked by myself several times: &quot;I have a world. That world has a magic. The magic behaves according set of rules. These rules are discoverable and apply all the time. Isn't that actually just another field of science?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having that asked and answered is to me crucial part of worldbuilding process&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some opinions are good opinions&lt;/strong&gt;: To me it is &lt;em&gt;opinion based&lt;/em&gt; but that opinions can be weighted against each other and decided what is best approach. To make better example, I consider this the same opinion based as hypothetical question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Parenting.SE&lt;/a&gt; &quot;how to put baby to sleep.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are several approaches on how to proceed, you can decide what is best approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:15.507" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T14:39:34.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3628" CreationDate="2016-05-27T15:37:56.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some research, and checking what other people get on other stack exchange sites, I think I have managed to track this one down myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it turns out this one is not a bug, just a feature, related to what level of privileges you have reached. (The list of privileges is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viewing all reviews in &lt;code&gt;/review/&amp;lt;category&amp;gt;/history&lt;/code&gt;, and not just your own requires the privilege &quot;access to moderator tools&quot;, so &lt;code&gt;/review/&amp;lt;category&amp;gt;/history&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/review/&amp;lt;category&amp;gt;/history?userID=&amp;lt;number&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is identical to me because I have enough reputation to view the review queues, but not to view reviews performed by others, on space exploration, which I compared with, I had this privilege. The reason I thought this was specific to worlduilding was that the person I asked to check this on other sites, because I do not have review privileges there, happened to have the &quot;access to moderator tools&quot; himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T15:37:56.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3630" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:06:54.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the problem you're talking about exists, I don't think it does here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the OP of that question seems to need is perspective. I'd almost say the question should be closed for being too easy, all you need to do is point out that you just need to define what magic is, then see if the magic in your world fits that definition from the perspective of your characters. To me, that's a simple, objective answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential problem I see is that people are expecting questions to be opinion-based. I agree that questions asking for opinions are bad, but I think it's just as bad when you don't give a question a chance. I think sometimes, the difference between a good question and a bad question is the quality of the answers they inspire. If you close a question, you'll never get to see those answers, so you'd better be sure they wouldn't have been there if you left it open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that we should leave just any question open. There are definitely some cut-and-dry cases out there. But in this case, I think there are good answers to this question that treat it like it's not opinion-based. Maybe all this question needs is a protect (something I can no longer do), and maybe the best option to cure our opinion-based problems is to give objective answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T16:06:54.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3606" CreationDate="2016-05-28T11:55:44.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To try and be more concise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject of that question is absolutely fine. Physics questions are asked and answered all the time, whether theoretical or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with that question is that it's too broad and/or not narrowly enough described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it can't be reasonably answered in a non-essay-length question then a question is most likely too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth I think this one is not completely clear-cut as too broad, I've seen far worse, however the consensus seems to be that it is. Rather than arguing with the consensus though how about looking at what can be done to constrain the question so that answers do fit within this format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &quot;closed&quot; is &quot;on hold&quot;, not &quot;this question sucks&quot;. On hold questions are on pause and if they are fixed to solve the problems that brought them to this they can and will be opened again. Many questions go through this post-close-edit-open cycle and it's entirely normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a sandbox in meta and a worldbuilding chat room, I'm sure you can get advice there on how to make the question fit better into this site's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T11:55:44.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2916" CreationDate="2016-05-30T07:36:51.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really nice design overall some thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world building logo works really badly in extremely small size. The browser icon is see is unreadable. The graphic could do with some changes for better visual readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ring should be bigger (in relation to sphere)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ratio of planet and ring should be bigger. In other words the planet should be smaller than the ring. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This would help visually understand what is going on and the result is more  easily recognizable by glance as the silhouette is more prominent&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;alternatively drop the ring all together.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tessellation on the sphere is hard to see in smallest sizes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Drop the tessellation level down when the size gets smaller. Possibly the logo could tessellate even more in posters but that is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rZuRW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rZuRW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Image 1&lt;/strong&gt;: Quick example of what I mean. Oh and while drawing this it seems that the tessellation is a bit erratic (its not a divided Truncated icosahedron as it initially seems)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This would give the logos structure more adaptability that would make the smaller sizes work better.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This becomes more critical if the the ring is dropped or stays the same size.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By decreasing tessellation you can keep lines thicker making them more defined.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For doing this well its better the sphere is actually a real geodesic than dropping detail would be more subtle and could be done on more levels. But yeah this might be overkill.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other ideas for sake of brainstorming I dont think this matters much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;instead of ring make the lattice incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes again the silhouette more recognizable. Meye fracturing along equator would make the brain analogy better and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4854" LastEditorUserId="4854" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T07:42:00.330" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T07:42:00.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-30T21:54:29.437" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just reviewed an answer from a new user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/42603/147&quot;&gt;new user&lt;/a&gt; covering the same explanation as another already posted and more developed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/42399/147&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. It is not the first time I come across this situation. Normally, it's because people posted almost at the same time. No need to bother since it's not done voluntarily in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm not calling it plagiarism because the answer is too short/simple for that, &lt;strong&gt;do we need to have 2 identical answers&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my definition of plagiarism too narrow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T09:10:29.683" Title="Two identical answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3637" CreationDate="2016-05-31T08:05:39.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the answer posts are days apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the duplication of the content, the newer answer itself is very low quality and way too short. As such, I've flagged down the post as &quot;low quality&quot; - we can let the reviewers decide what to do after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T08:05:39.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T08:55:13.883" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42434/&quot;&gt;Given present-day Earth as we know it, how could I fake a radio transmission as coming from a distant star?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Had a downvote on &lt;em&gt;every answer&lt;/em&gt; that seemed to be applied in a short time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T07:52:10.773" Title="Is this a case of vote fraud?" Tags="|support|voting|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3642" CreationDate="2016-05-31T11:37:15.840" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to divide the entire concept of worldbuilding to fields? If no, why? If yes, which are the branches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of fields like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;map making&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;constructed languages / language creation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;magic and/or technology building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plot creation/lore writing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" OwnerDisplayName="Zoltán Schmidt" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T02:40:28.873" Title="What kind of fields can be differentiated in worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3639" CreationDate="2016-05-31T14:24:12.657" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might (or might not) be less-than-honest voting, but that wouldn't qualify as vote fraud even if it all came from the same voter.  When Stack Exchange talks about vote fraud they mean targeting specific users -- getting your friends to vote for all your posts (or using sockpuppets to do so), targeting people you don't like with downvotes, and similar actions.  If we see more of a pattern we can ask SE to investigate, but this could be explained by one user who's hard to please, or the question having been seen by a bunch of people in a short time each of whom cast some of those downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a little peculiar, as &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; when several answers are downvoted there's a least one that's not, and sometimes that's because the author of that answer is downvoting his competition.  That's mean, but it happens.  It's called &lt;em&gt;tactical voting&lt;/em&gt;.  When it's come up in the past the answer has been to just shrug off single cases, but if you notice a broader pattern please let somebody know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who's participated for any length of time on Stack Exchange has gotten unwarranted downvotes.  It's annoying, but there's nothing to be done about it.  Don't invest too much meaning in a single downvote.  If a downvote causes you to notice something that can be improved then making the improvement could reverse the vote, but if you look again at the post and don't see the problem, then I suggest shrugging it off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T14:24:12.657" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3640" CreationDate="2016-05-31T18:53:02.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went through a bunch of questions to see if I could categorize them based on your categories. It kind of worked, but I needed to tweak it a little bit for it to seem logical (to myself at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ended up with the following categories. I took questions as I read them and categorized them, making each one a link in the appropriate topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42380/could-a-planet-be-at-the-center-of-the-universe-yet-still-have-a-sun&quot;&gt;Astronomical&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42235/is-it-possible-for-one-star-to-orbit-another&quot;&gt;Creation&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42673/seasons-and-day-night-cycles-on-horseshoe-habitable-worlds&quot;&gt;All&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41216/starbuilding-what-is-lacking-in-the-logic-behind-cosmos-2-star-system-generatio&quot;&gt;topics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42426/is-a-planet-with-a-primarily-reddish-pinkish-sky-a-plausible-place-for-humans-to&quot;&gt;relating&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42549/time-place-and-look-on-tidally-locked-planet&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; the features of the world or relating space that are based on physics and typically ignore any impact by the planets inhabitants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41547/roots-when-creating-a-language&quot;&gt;Language&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41385/is-there-a-more-effective-way-to-build-the-vocabulary-of-a-fictional-language-th&quot;&gt;Development&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42369/what-are-some-steps-guidelines-for-making-a-conlang&quot;&gt;All&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41647/how-can-i-create-a-realistic-linguistic-drift-effect&quot;&gt;topics&lt;/a&gt; relating to the development of a language for a given world or culture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42463/could-humans-dig-out-a-20km-tunnel-through-quartzite-by-hand&quot;&gt;Plot&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41727/how-to-defeat-the-two-party-system&quot;&gt;Development&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42209/what-power-plant-is-the-easiest-to-reboot-and-run-by-average-joe&quot;&gt;All&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42244/how-could-groundhogging-work-and-what-explanation-would-require-the-least-han&quot;&gt;topics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42202/what-history-supports-modern-day-gladiatorial-combat&quot;&gt;relating&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42491/what-should-humans-do-in-a-supernova&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42190/what-is-the-least-impactful-thing-that-could-be-done-to-wipe-mankind-but-allow&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; analysis of plot events, focusing on event plausibility,their causes and effects, or how the event can be accomplished.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41716/how-viable-are-my-glass-towers-with-arab-islamic-renaissance-technology-engine&quot;&gt;Magic&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41869/economy-in-mirror-worlds&quot;&gt;Technology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40948/how-would-the-lifestyle-of-people-change-if-they-learned-to-live-by-doing-photos&quot;&gt;Development&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42282/is-an-underwater-metropolis-possible-today&quot;&gt;and&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42539/elemental-healing&quot;&gt;Impacts&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42434/given-present-day-earth-as-we-know-it-how-could-i-fake-a-radio-transmission-as&quot;&gt;All&lt;/a&gt; topics relating to the design/analysis of anything non-living and the potential impacts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41570/what-type-of-food-might-an-organism-that-lives-its-entire-life-in-interstellar-s&quot;&gt;Creature&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41762/could-dragons-theoretically-breathe-alcohol-based-fire&quot;&gt;Designs&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42631/why-would-an-underwater-creature-remain-lodged-to-its-prey&quot;&gt;All&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42617/why-would-merfolk-have-hair&quot;&gt;topics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42475/are-hoofed-bipeds-feasible&quot;&gt;relating&lt;/a&gt; to the design and analysis of anything living.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost every topic I encountered fits fairly easily into one of these 5 topics, although some were a little tricky, either because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42324/can-life-be-powered-by-thermal-conduction&quot;&gt;they&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42168/cheaper-faster-better-housing&quot;&gt;could&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42440/what-form-of-transmission-for-zombies-would-be-most-effective&quot;&gt;fit&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41204/how-might-a-collective-such-as-the-borg-develop&quot;&gt;multiple&lt;/a&gt;, or because they don't seem to fit any too &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42332/would-a-culture-with-magic-consider-it-magic&quot;&gt;well&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, it doesn't seem too difficult to divide questions into categories, but I don't know if there is a need. In most categories, you already see a lot of common tags. Although it MIGHT help to have the over-arching category that have implied sub-tags to clean things up and standardize them a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common Tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World Creation: planets, astronomy, stars&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language Development: language, world-building-process  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plot Development: (this one has a TON of different tags)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic/Technology Development: alternate-history, alternate-worlds, physics  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creature Design: Evolution, creature-design, biology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T02:40:28.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-01T16:06:33.113" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3120/should-we-answer-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;should we answer off topic questions&lt;/a&gt;, I was wondering if we should edit obvious spelling and grammar mistakes on questions that seem like they might be off topic, even if they haven't been closed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I was looking at this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42684/what-would-packs-of-wild-dogs-have-to-do-to-depopulate-a-city&quot;&gt;question about wild dogs&lt;/a&gt;, which seems like it might be off topic on the basis of being story-based. However, I went ahead and cleaned up the grammar (mostly extra spaces and weird punctuation) to make the question more readable anyways. What I'm wondering is this: should I worry about grammar/spelling on a question that's liable to be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the pro side, it seems like if the question is later edited to be more in line with world building, grammar edits will help to improve the quality of questions on this site, which is a good thing. On the other hand, if the question is not reopened it may be wasted effort, and if the asker is editing their question anyways to make it more of a worldbuilding question, it may be better to wait until the question is in its final form before cleaning it up. What do other people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T07:47:22.320" Title="Should we edit grammar and spelling on off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3643" CreationDate="2016-06-01T16:38:41.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always look at edits to my posts and see what has been edited. Sometimes it's just a spelling (I look at you, Resource/Ressource) edit, but sometimes I learn that what I thought was the right grammar was indeed wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion editing off-topic questions is worthwile for the chance the user looks at the edit and learns from it. If you are unsure and it gets not locked your edit was correct from the beginning, but if it is locked you've done little to no harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I however aknowledge that it might send a wrong kind of signal, after all you should not answer and flag as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T16:38:41.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3643" CreationDate="2016-06-01T17:31:57.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making grammar edits on a question that is closed, downvoted, and unanswered might be wasted effort because such a question, if not reopened, will get auto-deleted eventually.  (Except duplicates -- those stick around.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making only minor edits to a closed question that wasn't already recently active is not a good idea because it bumps the question to the front page again without addressing whatever got it closed in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond those two cases, though, if you can improve a question, particularly one that's already on the front page, and you are inclined to do so, go for it.  Do read through and try to fix everything; fixing one typo but leaving several more is not very helpful and might get an edit rejected (if the edit had to be reviewed).  But if you can make a post more readable -- typos, grammar, paragraph breaks, formatting -- then you help all future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T17:31:57.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3643" CreationDate="2016-06-01T23:03:55.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Absolutely not - if it's already closed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest issue with making grammar and spelling changes on  off topic questions that are closed is that it puts it into the reopen queue, without actually changing the content of the question. This means that less experienced users who ave access to the queue but not the direct voting mechanic might accidentally reopen an off topic question without first fixing the content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it's not already closed and is still open, or if you think you can completely fix the question, by all means have at it and do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T23:03:55.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3643" CreationDate="2016-06-02T03:40:15.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was wondering if we should edit obvious spelling and grammar mistakes on questions that seem like they might be off topic, even if they haven't been closed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially if they haven't been closed yet.  If it's closed, then it complicates the Reopen vote if there is one.  If the question is open, then the only bad thing that happens on an edit is that it moves it to the top of the front page.  This is especially true of those of us who have enough reputation to edit without review.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  I'm not saying high rep users should feel an obligation to edit off-topic questions for typos.  I'm saying that if you would like to edit an open question, you should not feel any hesitation about it being off-topic.  I would only edit a closed question if I think it should be opened (and preferably there has already been a content edit).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether or not you're wasting your effort is something that you have to answer yourself.  It's either worth it to you or not.  Even closed, the question still hangs around for some time.  An edit isn't entirely wasted and may be appreciated by some number of readers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T03:40:15.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3630" CreationDate="2016-06-02T13:33:19.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I find this question on Meta to be relevant: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/217115/is-the-ultimate-goal-of-stack-exchange-really-to-build-a-knowledge-base-for-goog&quot;&gt;Is the ultimate goal of Stack Exchange really to build a knowledge base for Googlers, not to help individual users (even if they ask good questions)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the top voted answers say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, if a question can help one person, someone is willing to answer&#xA;  it, and it has no other impact on a site, it should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;blind enforcement of the letter of the rule is also something to be&#xA;  avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... ask yourself: why do you want to close it? Because the question is disruptive for SE and not helping the questioner? Or because it is technically not entirely by the rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As fairly new on SE, I have noticed a disturbing amount of rules-lawyering here, where some people seem more intent on waving rules about and smacking people over the head with them rather than wanting to help questioners with their problems. I have had a couple of these hit me as well, despite both questioner and following readers showing appreciation for the answers I gave. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this not only annoying but alienating and damaging for SE. People come here to get help, but more often than is sound for the forum they instead get smacked down, with little to no information on what they should have done instead. And a disturbing number of times this happens on pure technicalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask you: why does this question irk you so? Because is is breaking the rules in a manner that is disruptive and damaging for SE? Because it is unhelpful to the questioner and others that use SE? Or — heavens forbid you would be one of &lt;strong&gt;those&lt;/strong&gt; people — because you get your jollies in wielding the power of closing questions and telling them &quot;No, I forbid that question!&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember why we are here: to help people... not to enforce rules for the sake of the rules themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T15:09:36.760" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-02T17:17:28.047" Score="19" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was heated discussion below &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3630/2071&quot;&gt;other meta question&lt;/a&gt;, where one user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3630/understanding-our-double-standard-regarding-some-opinion-based-questions#comment9903_3648&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I disagree with the sentiment that &quot;well managed&quot; equals smacking people over the head with the rules as soon as there is an opportunity. I disagree with the sentiment that rules-lawyering makes for a community with &quot;high standards&quot;. And I disagree with the sentiment that moderator's subjective opinions are the Be All And End All when judging whether a question / answer is &quot;good&quot; or not. The forum does not exist for the moderators' sake, for them to impose their ego on others and get a power-trip on wielding a stick. But I am seeing some tendencies in that direction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that comment above is bit too heated, lets have look at it more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arguments supporting that feeling:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This site has very quick response rate:&lt;/strong&gt; If you post &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; question here, it gets closed pretty quickly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sometimes you have question closed without knowing why&lt;/strong&gt; For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3627/can-we-better-welcome-this-first-time-poster&quot;&gt;this first-time poster got two close votes without knowing why&lt;/a&gt; - without any comment posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are some completionists:&lt;/strong&gt; Some people do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; for virtual points and badges. One hard to get is for reviewing and casting close votes. Therefore users can get close vote without any comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lots of people feel like closing a question is end of the World(building)&lt;/strong&gt; Including me. Getting your own question closed feels bad. Especially when you get little clue why did that happen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arguments against this feeling&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This community has litllest amount of down votes cast&lt;/strong&gt; At least my own feeling. Yes, you can get question closed, but you lose little to none internet points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you ask for help, you receive one:&lt;/strong&gt; Especially on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; there seems to be always someone online and willing to help out. The same can be told about Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed question is not the end&lt;/strong&gt; If you update the question, it can get reopened&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But how does the community feel?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We faced one frustraded user. But maybe we are having bigger problem. Which may just be &quot;We have been too much welcoming and all the scope discussion made us to close more question that we used to.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T14:12:15.783" Title="Are we bashing users over the head with rules?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-02T17:54:18.717" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask 10 people what &quot;Worldbuilding&quot; is, and you'll get 11 different answers. For some it will be analyzing the effects of magic on world economy, for others designing the weather system for planet in a particular orbit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you know what? &lt;em&gt;None of them would be wrong.&lt;/em&gt; Worldbuilding truly is an incredibly broad topic, from creature design, to linguistics, and much, much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.com, is part of the Stack Exchange family of sites. This implies certain standards as far as the reusability of the questions, and answers are concerned. It also implies that those questions and answers be well framed, well formatted, and well phrased - Stack Exchange offers &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; at a level which precious few (if any) other question/answer sites deliver. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, WB SE, while covering an intimidating range of topics, cannot simply allow  questions to be posted which do not meet that qualitative standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, as one of the SE sites of a relatively whimsical purpose (at least as far as others are concerned) there exists a tendency to point people to us when their question doesn't fit the scope of those other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By answering questions without first asking ourselves if said question falls within our scope, or follows the &quot;rules&quot; (not opinion based, broad, about a character's actions, etc.) we erode the standard to which we hold our site. Every opinion-based question answered inspires other new users to post similar ones, and furthermore spawns dissent when some of those questions are closed, while others are answered by enthusiastic users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion most out of scope questions asked here could be framed such that they they met WB SE standards. Our more senior users are always willing to provide input and offer advice in the comments when voting to close, and Meta/Chat are also there for users seeking help. However many users don't seem to take the input to heart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some, like the person who wrote the comment quoted in the question, seem to think that pleasing the crowd, and answering questions is more important than enforcing our standards. I believe this thinking is fundamentally flawed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should enforce our rules and scope quickly, and firmly. We should offer to help people bring their questions within scope, and we should be helpful to all who make the effort to join our community. We should also redefine our scope if, as a community, we find it to be a little too strict. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not support the relaxation of our standards simply because someone's feeling were hurt when their question got voted closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastEditorUserId="15059" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T18:25:05.763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T18:25:05.763" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-02T18:06:23.013" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This probably is not a full answer but I wanted to make a particular point.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have discussed and agreed upon standards which are completely reasonable and said rules should be enforced&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Following those standards also comes with the responsibility to &lt;em&gt;explain how things work to users, particularly when they are new.&lt;/em&gt;  This means no close votes without posting a comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep in mind that the stock comments are next to worthless for new users.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't expect the stock comments that show up from close votes to make sense to someone who is unfamiliar with the nextwork/site and the corresponding expectations and jargon...yes we have jargon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are not going to take the time to help a new user out DON'T VOTE.&lt;/strong&gt;  Use the skip button, other people can and will handle it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T18:06:23.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3630" CreationDate="2016-06-02T18:32:17.217" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree that it's opinion based, in the way people think. What I think is related to what Brythan said. Whether something is &quot;scientific&quot; or not is based on one simple question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can x be tested or produce predictive models with the scientific method?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read the question closely enough, you see that they're talking about particular universes where certain actions can be performed. In-universe, as written, can those phenomena fit into the question in bold above? If so, then we can arrive at a yes or no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem isn't that there isn't a correct answer, it's that our human language isn't sufficient to talk about it cleanly. We have semantics arguments over what's magic and what's science. Often the discussion on here and elsewhere concludes with the common quote, &lt;em&gt;any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Magic&quot; is the problem word here, but &quot;science&quot; isn't. We know what's science. The phenomenon either can or cannot fit into the scientific method. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Universe X has a species that can generate fire by thinking about it, and there's a mechanism by which that species or another species within that universe can frame that ability within the scientific method, then it would adhere to our definition of science in this universe. If something is unobservable or so unfathomably impossible to observe (for us, it would be surviving our universe's heat death or something) then it's not. So the answer: &lt;strong&gt;It depends.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone disagrees about what the scientific method is, well then their perspective will render all questions on WorldBuilding &quot;opinion-based.&quot; But I'd call them uninformed. If they said &lt;em&gt;always no&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;always yes&lt;/em&gt;  then I'd consider that an incorrect answer, not a different opinion like &quot;favourite colour.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the presence of the semantics merry-go-round of words and meanings, we have an answer, and that answer was given quite a few times, albeit phrased differently. I don't have a better close reason but &quot;opinion-based&quot; isn't it. ...In my opinion. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15401" LastEditorUserId="15401" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T18:38:04.573" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T18:38:04.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-02T18:40:54.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was I that posted the quoted comment above. I have a bunch of loosely connected thoughts on this subject so please be patient...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I myself have somehow &lt;del&gt;become a moderator&lt;/del&gt; been given some moderator privileges for Worldbuilding. Very nice, thank you for the confidence. But not even once has anyone approached me on &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; to do it; not even with an automated message about 1) what the overarching goals of WB/SE is 2) how rules are supposed to be applied in relation to these goals and 3) how to act when the rules are applied and acted upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And surely I cannot be the only one that has slipped into the Moderator role on a banana peel like this. This is a potential problem, because we do not have a unified view of the 1,2 and 3 I mentioned above. This may lead to inconsistency in how we meet, greet and treat the users. And in the worst case scenario, it may lead to us acting against the best interrests of WB and SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point being: the Moderator appointment process needs improvement, to ensure consistency and some kind of consensus about the process of moderating&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users are touchy. And I dare say that users that have their creativity questioned — or put down — doubly so. I need only look at myself to see the glass jaw, embarrassingly plain. And I have noticed the same tendencies in others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to that that &lt;strong&gt;no-one&lt;/strong&gt; likes to be disciplined. That someone steps in, slaps your hand and says &quot;You done wrong&quot; is not something that will ever be well received. There simply is no way you can do that without some hurt feelings start boiling under the surface. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point being: Any action taken against a user must(!) be very well founded, and if questioned or contested, we as moderators must be able to provide a solid and well argued motivation for the action. Otherwise Internet Dramah™ awaits us aplenty.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As relatively new to SE, I have noticed tendencies that some moderators, none mentioned, enforce rules for the rules' sake. Not for the users' sake, not for SE's sake, but only for the letter of the rule's sake... as if enforcing the rule is The Only One Way Of Doing Things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may work fine in a court of law, but we are not that. As someone on the quoted thread said: WB — and SE in general — is a young community. We are still growing. We are still developing. This means that we want more people to join us. That in turn means that we must be careful not to put people off already at the door. And second, we cannot expect all the rules to be perfect already. No-one here expects that in 10, 5 or even 1 year's time that SE will look exactly like it does today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules exist for a reason; they are a tool to reach a goal. But if I ask 10 different moderators of WB what that goal is, we are — just like AndreiROM said in his answer — going to get 11 different answers. The rules are not a goal. The rules are but one(1) means to reach the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore we must avoid to blindly fall back on a &quot;Well the rules say that — in my interpretation — so therefore the matter is settled&quot; style of moderation. Sound judgement and measuring the action towards the goal must be ever in the back of a moderator's head. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point being: rules are a necessary, but not sufficient, tool to create a good community. Sound judgment and a good mix of rigidness and(!) flexibility are needed too.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The point of points — as lifted for a comment just now — is that the rules are not &lt;strong&gt;everything&lt;/strong&gt;, they are only &lt;strong&gt;almost everything&lt;/strong&gt;. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="12297" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T19:43:54.343" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T19:43:54.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2016-06-02T22:51:05.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;March 4.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been done..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T22:51:05.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-02T23:45:35.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new user, and my question was closed as off topic. So I am no closer to getting the answers I need, and do not have any understanding of why the (edited) question is unacceptable. This isn't encouraging to continue, and I would like to express that I would feel much more satisfied if someone had taken the time to attempt to see what I was getting at and help me to word my question in an acceptable manner to acquire the information I came here seeking in order to build my fictional world. I have contributed to the questions others have asked in areas for which I have knowledge, and would like to make the suggestion that helping others succeed and working collaboratively with users who ask questions that do not fit the community guidelines be a part of the attitude towards policing/governing the site. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20900" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T23:45:35.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-04T02:33:01.117" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39278/what-else-is-involved-in-silicon-based-life&quot;&gt;bounty was auto-awarded&lt;/a&gt; and one answer shows a (+25) badge. But the bounty was for 50 points. What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how did it choose, since it's not the highest scoring post nor a new post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T02:55:44.820" Title="Bounty 25 or 50?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3656" CreationDate="2016-06-04T02:55:44.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;An auto awarded bounty is only given half of the reputation.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period),&#xA;  the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a&#xA;  minimum score of 2 will be awarded &lt;strong&gt;half the bounty amount&lt;/strong&gt;. If two or&#xA;  more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the&#xA;  oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria,&#xA;  no bounty is awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you remember the exact moment when you created the bounty? It was the 26 of may and only one answer was posted after that moment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the highest voted answer created &lt;strong&gt;after the bounty started&lt;/strong&gt; with a&#xA;  minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T02:55:44.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-04T17:27:20.010" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a real problem.  Answers that focus on the establishedness and agreed-uponness of the rules utterly miss the point of the question, which is that new users are alienated by the appearance of heavy-handed moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core of the problem is this: too many (read: at least some) questions get closed without a preliminary hold period, and new users don't understand that a hold period is a normal part of the question/answer process on SE sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first part, the solution is simple: there's really no good reason to ever close a question without holding it first unless it's just an open personal attack or something.  (A question that is clearly opinion-based, for example, may turn into a question that has a determinant answer after the site membership has had a chance to interrogate the author and prompt edits.)  So, never vote to close questions that haven't been held and enjoyed some discussion first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second part, the solution may be equally simple: do something to help new users anticipate and cope with their questions being put on hold.  Perhaps a note above the question-asking box explaining that new questions, even good ones, are often put on hold early on in order to get clarifications out of the way before people invest effort in substantive answers to the wrong question?  It couldn't hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastEditorUserId="14255" LastEditDate="2016-06-04T17:54:27.907" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T17:54:27.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2016-06-06T00:44:02.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Write About Your World&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building off of Liath's answer, why not periodically have people write about their worlds for a period of time? Even if it is not regularly, it would still be interesting for people to go in and read about other's worlds. And it would be an opportunity for people to put out all of that information about their world that didn't come up in their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Perhaps another question asking for volunteers would be in order, and the answers would be potential articles about worlds. The most popular ones would end up on the blog.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T00:44:02.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T04:13:34.553" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/43932&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is there a good tag to indicate changing some single thing about real-world physics as the basis of a story? That's not normally what we mean by an alternate universe. It's a common SF technique, and I think something common that comes up here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T14:04:12.697" Title="What tag for changing one thing about the laws of the universe?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3660" CreationDate="2016-06-06T11:41:43.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Worldbuilding is not What-if site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;: In past, the community agreed that Worldbuilding is not what-if site and &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; what-if questions fall outside the scope of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question is to me example of the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; part I mentioned earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own idea is that we shoud not invent tags for changing one element in our universe, but rather close this kind of questions and link users to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95463/what-if-hypotheticals&quot;&gt;What-if site proposal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T11:41:43.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T18:13:10.507" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone here know a list of other speculative evolution and/or worldbuilding websites or forums that I can go to and post discussion questions other than here, the Wiki, the ZetaBoard or the Reddit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T03:59:56.277" Title="The Search For More Worldbuilding or Speculative Evolution" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2016-06-06T21:11:09.213" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My proposal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not meet the on-topic criteria for Worldbuilding in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; although it may not be blatant about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the one from @T3H40's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3062/2113&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; without the part about being related to writing/worldbuilding.  The &quot;Blatantly off-topic&quot; choice does not always show, so this choice should cover that situation as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while this uses the word blatant to connect to the other reason, it does not say that you can't select it for blatantly off-topic questions.  For people who can see both options this should provide a distinction.  For those who can only see this option, I think that phrase is weak enough to be harmless.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T21:11:09.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3662" CreationDate="2016-06-07T03:59:56.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what you meant when you included Reddit but just to be clear, /r/worldbuilding/ is completely independent from Worldbuilding SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that's one place to look for if you haven't done it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thecbg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thecbg.org/&lt;/a&gt; : A community of campaign builder, like the Forgotten Realms for example. Your questions could somewhat fit into their topics. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T03:59:56.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3660" CreationDate="2016-06-09T14:04:12.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changing the laws of the universe is a &lt;em&gt;tremendously&lt;/em&gt; difficult thing for the worldbuilding community to help with.  I've fielded several of these questions, and in general the answer to &quot;What if the universe was exactly like ours except for ________ rule&quot; is &quot;The universe would be completely and utterly unrelated to everything you can imagine.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with such science based questions is that changing a small rule of the cosmos can have extraordinary consequences.  Typically these consequences are far beyond anything the original question author considered, or sometimes well beyond their mathematical capacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're also really hard because it takes 10 seconds with Wikipedia to formulate such a question, and it can take &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; longer to answer.  Some questions may requires months of a PhD's time to refute, and then 30 seconds later there's a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A while back I started proposing that questions in that form be treated like homework problems on other stack exchanges.  Our job would not be to give them the answer, but to take their work, find out what they did [wrong], and help them explore new avenues where creativity might flourish.  It would make such questions about the method, not the final answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting your meta post title isn't exactly the same thing as the question you linked.  In the question they just want to explore a world where a measurable quantity is different.  That kind of question may also be in this crazy realm where the unexpected is around every turn, but it has a &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; tendency to be more benign.  The nasty questions are the ones where we try to change a law of physics like &quot;What if oxygen wasn't attracted to carbon?  How would that change aquatic life.&quot; (Answer: it would be completely and utterly unrelated to everything you can imagine.  For starters, that would prevent metabolism by the Kreb's cycle, so literally every aspect of every living creature would have to change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T14:04:12.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3649" CreationDate="2016-06-09T14:12:15.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the attitude that closing questions is the end of worldbuilding.  It's sad to squash creativity like that.  However, I do regularly vote to close questions regardless.  I justify it to myself by noting that StackExchange's Q&amp;amp;A format is not the ideal format for all questions.  Many questions (particularly here and on Philosophy.SE) really need to be a back and forth conversation to dig at the root of the question.  For example, it's impossible to make a magic system in a Q&amp;amp;A post, unless you make something boring and cookie-cutter.  Exploring the meaning of &quot;meaning&quot; is another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buddhism has a beautiful concept called &quot;mu.&quot;  &quot;Mu&quot; is an answer that a guru may give to a student's question, and it says &quot;There is no answer to this question which not lead you away from happiness.&quot;  I find the ability to close questions is along these lines.  If you really needed a full conversation, not a Q&amp;amp;A, then it is entirely possible that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no good answer, and it is better for us to prevent you from receiving bad answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if I close a question because of &quot;mu,&quot; I feel obliged to make a comment about it.  Drive by closings doesn't help the original posters.  We should still be helping the OP, even if we close their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T14:12:15.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-10T14:58:09.263" Score="30" ViewCount="2237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here on the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, we very often work to help others design their worlds, but we rarely ask what those worlds are like. I'm sure I'm not the only user who wants their world to be known. So, with that in mind, what worlds are you currently working on? What are they like? What lives there? Etcetera, etcetera, you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will help us figure out who has the most unique, interested, creative, etc worlds. But please let's limit it to &lt;strong&gt;1 world per user&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-06-10T18:16:44.870" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T12:17:43.073" Title="What worlds are you currently building?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="21" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-10T15:43:53.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for this interesting question! I am curious about the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I DM for a small group of newbe dungeons and dragons players. We do not bother that much about rules, rather than making the game work for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being the DM it is (mainly) in my field of responsibility to design the world and what happens around my players.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our adventure is set in a classic, cliché medieval fantasy world with orks, elves and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, my PCs are near a village that has been burned down by (yet) unknown forces and are about to search and solve the mystery of the whereabouts of the townfolk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spoilers follow below this line, so if any of my PCs will read this by chance (they are not on here, afaik, but only to be sure), DON'T, just don't. :)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my PCs plays an elve. He wrote me some fancy and detailed backstory about his family. Mainly his brothers. One of his brothers is missing and he is on the search for it. The other brother lives in dispute with him. They did not see each other since Thalion, the PC, left the elven kingdom. What they will now slowly discover is, that Thalions brother began to serve a mighty dark mage, that strives to form a world after his mind.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The dark mage hasn't been evil in the past, but after he had to watch his master get slaughtered while he was unable to do anything, he developed a hate that made him go mad and try to subdue the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mage created a huge portal to another, dark dimension to gather military forces and servants for his plans out of the underworld. The presence of the portal also affected the world in that the monsters and wild animals that were once hiding, are now agressive and attack villages more and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I throw my PCs some hints, like unexplainable black stains on the hide of wild boars and evil goblins, or unnaturally black clouds everytime foes attack. They do not know the reason of it now though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really look forward to doing our next sessions, throwing some puzzles, sidequests and fun characters into the mix. This is not a totally serious community, currently they are their biggest danger themselves - our dwarf nearly killed one of our drow elves over a dead rabbit... Its huge fun! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T15:43:53.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:42:56.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a couple that I'm actively thinking about...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My most fleshed out world, where I actually have something like a story to go with it, is more of a multiverse Earth, where a traveler from a very advanced alternate Earth visits a bronze age Earth, has his tech used without his permission to introduce a sentient parasite from another alternate, and then has to transport the entire population of an island nation, along with their island, to an uninhabited alternate Earth to keep the parasite from escaping to the world at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another world is a moon, whose planet was eaten by a black hole, so the moon is now just orbiting the singularity which has roughly the same mass as the former planet, so gravity wise the moon doesn't know the difference.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't have a story to go with it yet, but it's a fun setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:42:56.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-10T17:14:16.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My current world (or, in this case, galaxy) came about as a solution to what I considered my biggest storytelling flaw: for years I'd only written/drawn fan fictions, mainly for Halo and Skyrim. It was fun to put my own spin on these worlds, but I felt limited by them, and was getting really tired of having to boot up the Xbox whenever I needed to draw a new piece of armor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I began to create a sci-fi galaxy, similar to Mass Effect, with humans in their first steps to joining a community of aliens. Initially, I tried to focus on an idea for a series of stories where a few characters work as mercenaries and participate in all sorts of sci-fi combat, but I often ran into the same problems most sci-fi faces: how to maintain modern humans, modern warfare, and modern society in a world where you can achieve immortality, de-orbit moons, and communicate with hundreds of billions of beings across thousands of planets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve this, I created disparity. Humans can transcend to godhood, but most who do are never seen again, and many of those left behind will never get access to the technology. Wars big and small can be waged as loopholes in the massive infrastructure of alliances are exploited, but no one can go too far without the great powers of the galaxy taking notice and squashing them. Humans were once a great and unified species, until they were welcomed into the galactic community by having their entire civilization annihilated. After half a millennium the broken shards of humanity have begun to reconnect, but many worlds still maintain their post-apocalyptic technology and culture. There's so much going on in this galaxy that I plan on having the Christian apocalypse come and go without most people even noticing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this galaxy is exactly what I wanted, and gives me plenty of room to tell virtually any story I want, the sheer size of it makes it nearly impossible to flesh out fully. There are more loose ends than there are connections, so my hope is that over the next few years I can tell very small stories within those connections while I work to tie up everything else. I still have a long way to go (most of the alien species aren't yet designed, let alone evolved, and I have absolutely no maps), but at this point I have enough localized data to start telling some stories, and enough empty space that it'll be very hard to accidentally make any contradictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first story I'm trying to tell is about three mercenaries from three different militaries joining forces to battle a startup army that threatens the growing cooperation between human armies. I'm trying to build a system for how wars are fought and how armies are bought and sold, and at the same time I want to break that system so that stories in the future can have a sense of history. Plus I just want to draw a bunch of comics where people are shooting at each other, and so far this is the least complex story I came up with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T17:14:16.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-11T08:59:25.530" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My latest world is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39775/space-wizards-city-is-it-sustainable&quot;&gt;planet colonized by wizards&lt;/a&gt;. Most of it is still barren and the terraforming process isn't expected to be completed for millennia.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Its inhabitants have the habit of regularly launching stealth missions to Earth to steal any magically gifted child they can find and drop their own non-gifted children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character of my story was abandonned on Earth as a baby. Years later, she his contacted by her older sister and travels to her native planet. She's still basically a muggle, but her presence is needed to cast a tracking spell that could allow them to find their mother, who has been missing for almost a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story mixes magic, sentient robots, family drama and political shenanigans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I'm focusing on developing coherent magic rules, a realistic space-faring wizards civilization and building my main and secondary &quot;mysteries&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T11:23:42.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-11T13:30:38.027" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My worldbuilding career started off in the wrong order, with me writing novels before doing any descriptive work of the world they appeared in. I still need to go back and rework them, but I have finally gotten back around to that first world with my current project after developing half a dozen others to hone my worldbuilding skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current world, Olon'tei, has already been featured &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cateye-94fb2dad390f#.7e9qzv2yb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the blog&lt;/a&gt;. It depicts elves and dwarves as being human, but with changes to their DNA that make it easy or hard, respectively, to store and re-use the energy provided by an ancient creature &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22780/6986&quot;&gt;living in the nearby star&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., magic). Periodically, that creature purges the star of heavy metals, providing all the benefits of a supernova (gold, for example) with none of the destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Olon'tei has one-way connections from every other part of the universe (eg., the Bermuda Triangle), so humans would live for a short time on the planet before dying due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/37195/6986&quot;&gt;gravitational reasons&lt;/a&gt;. The first purge of the nearby star after humans started arriving morphed half the population into either elves or dwarves, and the rest died. Humans would later come by intergalactic spacecraft and attempt to terraform the planet. The native dragons disagreed and the technology was destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The energy emitted by the star-dwelling creature also prevents most forms of technology from functioning, so the planet's inhabitants are effectively trapped in a Medieval-style fantasy world with an exploding monster population while their own access to magic dwindles. There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40785/6986&quot;&gt;an institute&lt;/a&gt; that still teaches the skills of yesteryear, but they see fewer recruits every year, due to the political intrigue that grips the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38655/6986&quot;&gt;surrounding countryside&lt;/a&gt; and the ever-increasing monster population that prevents people from making the journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monsters I speak of are to the Cataclysm (see the blog article) as elves and dwarves are to the Reformation (the purging of the star). Some humans experienced changes to their DNA and now either develop monstrous qualities as they grow, are born as monsters, or give birth to monsters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KwPt6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KwPt6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;World Map&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T13:40:53.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-12T19:12:12.017" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have finally finished creating the geography, geology, ecology and prehistory of my alternate Earth on Google Docs.  But is it allowable to post a link on a Stack Exchange post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T19:01:15.210" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:01:15.210" Title="Are Links Allowed?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-12T19:42:57.807" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I posted a question which was marked as too broad: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44204/what-if-humans-generate-a-sentience-suppressing-field?&quot;&gt;the question in question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made substantial changes, including explicitly stating criteria, narrowing the scope to one based on a single invention, and adding some details. If you want to get a quick overview of the changes, then your best bet would be to look at version 1, 4, and 9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot check the review queue, so I don't know if it's on the queue, and I don't think that this is a case for direct moderator intervention (the only flag option I have for the question). I directed a comment (which I've just deleted, since it would be spammy to ask the same question in multiple places) at the person who initially flagged it as too broad, hoping to either get more feedback or start the process of removing the hold, but I haven't heard anything since then and have decided to take my question here. (I made the comment a day ago, if you are wondering about the timing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the question still too broad? If it is, do you have any suggestions for narrowing it? If not, can it get flagged for re-opening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15591" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T19:42:57.807" Title="Hold review revisit?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2016-06-12T20:06:47.563" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it so far is that your post should contain all relevant information to the question you want answered. Links should be for references and such, not for important information central to what you are asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting a recent comment by @James, &quot;Links are good but only as reference material. If it is crucial to understanding a post it should be in the question text.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21461" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T12:30:54.113" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T12:30:54.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3678" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-06-13T18:57:59.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Topics relevant to the transition from World Builder beta to World Builder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="7886" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T00:12:02.867" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T00:12:02.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3679" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-06-13T18:57:59.063" Score="0" Body="Topics relevant to the transition from Worldbuilding beta to Worldbuilding." OwnerUserId="7886" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T21:57:18.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T21:57:18.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T23:35:39.477" Score="10" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been keeping my eye on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag for the last couple of months. It has something of an odd history; at first, it was applied to questions about how a society treats, thinks of, and carries out science. An example of such a question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/27819/627&quot;&gt;Why would magic and science be split?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, lately (meaning the last few questions which have used it) it seems to be misapplied, used in lieu of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag. I considered adding it as a synonym, but I thought that the three or so questions that used it as it was originally intended used it well. On the other hand, that's a really small number of questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we think? Should we synonymize it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and remove it from these three questions, let it be, or do something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I feel that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; is being similarly severely misapplied (i.e. being used where &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; should be), which is indicative of the same problem - which is why I've brought the issue up on meta. Any thoughts on that - and, more importantly, how to &lt;em&gt;fix&lt;/em&gt; that - are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Excerpts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers based in hard science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations. Consider alternatively the hard-science and reality-check tags. Avoid using this tag as the only tag on a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions relating to worlds with a setting of common science-fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No excerpt currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T14:27:54.727" Title="Dealing with the science tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T23:49:50.833" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44366/how-to-explain-atheism-in-a-world-where-religious-miracles-are-commonplace-and-s/44417#44417&quot;&gt;How to explain atheism in a world where religious miracles are commonplace and spirits visit earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appeared in the queue &quot;because of length and content&quot;. Why? It wasn't a super-short post by a newish user. What about it distingishes it from any other post? Are there keywords? Otherwise, I have to think it was flagged manually somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T00:00:45.453" Title="How is &quot;low quality&quot; flagged?" Tags="|support|reviews|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3681" CreationDate="2016-06-13T23:57:13.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this was flagged manually as Not an Answer, and entered the moderator flag queue and the Low Quality Posts queue. The community dealt with it before a diamond moderator did, and, for the record, it was automatically marked as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/95275/274942&quot;&gt;disputed&lt;/a&gt;&quot; after going through the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T23:57:13.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3680" CreationDate="2016-06-14T09:02:16.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might just be my opinion, but, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; are really different subjects. The first one refers to a methodology and/or an academic subject, the second to a genre for various supports, or maybe a sub-culture. And the last is a meta-tag used by the OP to indicate the kind of answers they are expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So aliases would be wrong IMHO. I don't think that's the right way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if tags have been misused, we should correct them, and make sure everyone knows the correct use of the tag. So re-tag and clarify tag-wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T09:02:16.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-06-14T18:22:35.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Mammalian descendants that could control what chemical content the mammary glands excrete: Is it beneficial?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12897/planetary-habitability-at-twelve-to-seven-billion-years-ago&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, now the world had grown another billion years after 7 billion years ago (so, err, roughly 6 billion years ago). Assuming that life on that planet is somewhat having uncanny resemblances with earthen life, that it have similar tetrapods with features could be described as equivalent to earthen tetrapods, I extrapolate that eventually mammalian-equivalent of the planet would evolve more complex creatures than it is on earth. And so the formation of this so called second-generation mammal, a chemosyntesia (alternative name is pending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much the same as in the title, &lt;strong&gt;is the ability to modify chemical contents that mammary glands secrete &lt;em&gt;beneficial&lt;/em&gt; to the creature?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considerations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question seeks the answer that revolves around &lt;em&gt;what could possibly be beneficial&lt;/em&gt; for the new species compared to normal mammalian so that it &lt;em&gt;could compete better&lt;/em&gt; (or at the very least it is not being overcompeted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Beneficial&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; as is said refer to benefits in evolutional pressure, assuming earth-like life. It could be translated in reverse too, that is &amp;quot;is it not a hindrance or disadvantage for the creature?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; I had it clarified enough, in my opinion. If I were mistaken, or perhaps it is not clear enough, please do comment.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Definition&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mammalian&lt;/strong&gt; is an endothermic compared to a reptile with four chambered heart, covered with furs, having mammary glands on the body. Along with mammalian brain (and neocortex in some species).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chemosyntesia&lt;/strong&gt; is a second generation mammalian (different from mammalian as in between reptile to mammalian, only now mammalian is in the position of the reptile) that has the ability to produce wide range of chemicals on their heavily modified mammary glands, by having the ability to control hormonal system on the body through conscious effort with extra brain mass on neocortex, just call it supracortex region for now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T07:33:14.867" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-15T11:18:36.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my world humans and ET's (the grayish kind) have met, and humanity is starting the process to join some galactic federation. The gray have telepathy, whereas humans do not... And even the ET don't know why, since the brains of both species look alike so much. In order to better understand it, they start making hybrids of both species as part of a scientific experiment, which is shocking to most human societies. Most hybrids are abherrations and none so far has shown any signs of having telepathic powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of my world-building process in this universe has to do with describing biomes and ecossystems in other planets. I specially love designing creatures that could have evolved in our own planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T11:18:36.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-15T17:12:45.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a game which takes place in a portion of the galaxy mostly inhabited by humans, who are just starting to make contact with a few alien races on the edges of their domain. The portion of space the humans are expanding through was gutted by war before we developed tools, so it's mostly empty of advanced aliens, though their relics and ruins dot some of the worlds the humans have colonized, including Europa, where we found our fist FTL engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of human space is nominally controlled by the United Corporate Council, which grants corporate charters for colonization to private organizations, though in practice the larger corporations have significantly more power than the UCC and fight fairly constant low-level wars against each other for resources and influence. The UCC does its best to pull strings from behind the scenes and prevent outright war, as well as trying to marshal some modicum of cooperation from the corporations to fight against external threats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posted a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27698/can-hive-based-aliens-develop-advanced-technology-without-telepathy&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; while developing my world, and have also found that answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10735/how-could-a-sentient-plant-evolve-and-what-conditions-would-be-required-for-this&quot;&gt;other people's questions&lt;/a&gt; has given me some fun ideas to introduce into the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T17:12:45.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-15T20:54:10.560" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Seminosia&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there’s a linguistic joke there, anyone get it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking the western continent is named &lt;em&gt;Seminosia&lt;/em&gt; but as the eastern continent plays no part in my story (at least not at this point) its close enough to a name for the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WzFDv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WzFDv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;World Details:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The planet is earth like in most respects, I am not creating an alien world.  I do plan to create some of my own creatures, for example a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11610/a-human-hunter-with-sonic-powers&quot;&gt;catlike sonic stalker of men&lt;/a&gt;. I am also throwing around another idea with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12294/can-telepathy-and-telekinesis-exist-in-biological-creatures&quot;&gt;telekinesis&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One major exception is that the world has &lt;strong&gt;two moons&lt;/strong&gt;, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23452/can-you-add-a-mini-moon-to-earth&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26609/making-doomsayers-right-a-moons-planet-alignment-that-matters&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.  This plays into the cosmology a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cosmology:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are in fact gods.  One goddess in particular is important to mortals…mainly because she created them all…and the planet.  Tentatively named &lt;em&gt;Sophia&lt;/em&gt; (I may change it…doesn’t feel particularly creative) this goddess created physical reality basically as a science experiment.  Though I have a mostly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86sir%E2%80%93Vanir_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;undeveloped idea that is based on the Aesir and Vanir&lt;/a&gt; I could use too.  Sophia is in many ways based on Athena, meaning wisdom, warriors and crafts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She first created a powerful though subservient race of &lt;em&gt;elders&lt;/em&gt; who lacked will of their own.  It bothered her that her creations did not have free will.  Her second attempt was the mortal races or perhaps a common pre-curser race per this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10102/how-would-multi-race-humanoid-evolution-happen&quot;&gt;How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it doesn’t particularly matter if she created them as one or each separately as things currently stand it may matter later on in my story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when she created the mortals she just ended up with the same problem in miniature.  Around this time (before anyone really kept track of time) the rest of the gods discovered her little experiment.  Some were intrigued and some were shall we say not…and wanted to destroy the physical plane.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A godly battle ensued in the void and in the course of the battle she was blasted into the material plane which destroyed her ethereal consciousness casting it across the entirety of the world granting her mortal creations sapience, woo!  Free will!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I introduce an &lt;em&gt;Overgod&lt;/em&gt;.  This deity is, as of yet, unnamed and does not interest itself in the affairs of the mortal world.  What the uber-god did when Sophia died was issue a binding edict that the gods could not fight one another in the void, and they could not attack the physical world directly…unless they were willing to become mortal themselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this point things get a little crazy and move into the realm of history rather than cosmology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Races:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of races that I outlined &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28573/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races&quot;&gt;in this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The races are in many ways to traditional fantasy standards but there are a few tweaks here and there.  Not mentioned in that post are demons and the &lt;em&gt;elder&lt;/em&gt; race I mentioned above.  These two races are actually one in the same.  The demons are simply the elders that chose to support the gods who wanted to destroy the physical plane, thanks Christianity!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magic:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic exists though it is not overly common, partially due to a natural rarity and partially due to a near universal fear and or hatred of magic.  See that big crater…that was some magicians that got out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no true magic system in my world, there is no mana, and there are no special words, nor points or anything like that.  Magic is based primarily on willpower.  This gives me complete latitude when deciding how to use magic in my story.  That said I have played a small DnD campaign set in the world and using the stock system worked fine, I just added some tweaks to fit in things I wanted that it did not allow for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do restrict magic somewhat in my own brain.  If you are familiar with the Eragon series you will know that magicians are limited by the energy in their body (with some secret work arounds) and actions beyond can lead to the death of the caster.  Magic in my world will be similar in that spells (at least anything major) will be a physical drain on the caster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ritual magic exists as well and would be the equivalent of divine magic in DnD.  Whereas the willpower based magic above is drawn from the caster, divine magic draws upon the power of supernatural beings…its sorta dangerous and notoriously difficult to control.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing system wise prevents mages from using both kinds of magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have noticed there are no links in this section...I haven't been able to come up with a site appropriate question mainly due to how the system functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My history is pretty elaborate, at least at a high level.  The calendar is Earth-like in that days/weeks/hours/years etc are the same length.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The calendar is based on named ages.  So a major event, usually a large conflict of some sort marks the border of two ages, where the post conflict peace is the beginning of the next age.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example the formation of the super crater magic disaster was the end of an age of conflict and led to the age of the great empire that followed.  I don’t have that spreadsheet handy at the moment so I can’t actually remember what I named the ages…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said some questions I have asked have been in support of my world's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/527/what-are-the-primary-triggers-for-the-degrading-and-fall-of-great-empires&quot;&gt;What are the primary triggers for the decline and fall of great empires?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44486/logic-to-support-specialized-kingdom-level-militaries&quot;&gt;Logic to support specialized kingdom level militaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Themes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My degrees are in philosophy and international relations and those very much impact the themes in my story.  Religion and politics are central to the state of the world at the point in which I am writing my story.  The other major theme is what it means to be human, which I haven’t gotten too much into here on WB mainly because the questions are almost certainly opinion based and way to &lt;em&gt;discussion-y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a host of questions on these themes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28573/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races&quot;&gt;Medieval politics with fantasy races&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39116/medieval-politics-with-fantasy-races-round-2&quot;&gt;Medieval politics with fantasy races - Round 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7301/how-to-explain-the-co-existence-of-peace-and-violence-in-religion&quot;&gt;How to explain the co-existence of peace and violence in religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6597/what-common-structures-and-systems-exist-in-global-organized-religions&quot;&gt;What common structures and systems exist in global organized religions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8662/does-an-expansionist-monotheistic-religion-require-a-central-prophetic-figure&quot;&gt;Does an expansionist, monotheistic religion require a central prophetic figure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/630/how-do-i-blend-cultures-naming-world-features&quot;&gt;How do I blend cultures - naming world features?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The big boom:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked quite a few questions on a singular event.  This event led to the very very obviously not natural crater on the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3785/cataclysmic-event-resulting-in-a-region-of-glass&quot;&gt;Cataclysmic event resulting in a region of glass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/788/a-giant-meteor-balancing-destruction-and-life-sustainability&quot;&gt;A giant meteor, balancing destruction and life sustainability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28067/how-much-destruction-could-be-wrought-with-the-chemical-and-atomic-energies-in-3&quot;&gt;How much destruction could be wrought with the chemical and atomic energies in 30,000 humanoid bodies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42177/how-long-would-it-take-a-region-to-geologically-settle-down-after-a-major-catacl&quot;&gt;How long would it take a region to geologically settle down after a major cataclysm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Miscellaneous:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big part of the help the site has offered is a sort of...automation I suppose you would call it, in the form of questions like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25358/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-non-state-actors&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - non-state actors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9009/developing-factions-secret-societies&quot;&gt;Developing Factions - Secret Societies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23934/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-political-entities&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - Political Entities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25450/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-brigands-bandits-rebels-and-thieves&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - Brigands, Bandits, Rebels and Thieves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have a couple specific locales in mind for the world I have asked about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27627/i-would-like-a-levitating-temple-on-a-mountain-hand-wave-free-ish&quot;&gt;I would like a levitating temple on a mountain. Hand-wave free...ish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14435/a-city-of-sand-stone&quot;&gt;A city of Sand...stone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31250/the-really-really-big-mountain&quot;&gt;The really really big mountain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some other random uncategorized stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29447/can-a-single-language-have-two-separate-dialects-spoken-in-a-single-location&quot;&gt;Can a single language have two separate dialects spoken in a single location?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20826/what-percentage-of-a-population-can-be-part-of-a-medieval-military&quot;&gt;What percentage of a population can be part of a medieval military?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T20:30:46.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3690" CreationDate="2016-06-17T14:43:15.437" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked through the highest rating questions/answer earlier yesterday, quite a few gave me a laugh so I was up voting alot, after a bit I hit my limit, thought nothing of it and kept reading for a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the badges availible in WB and noticed I dont have Vox Populi badge so I went through some of the answers/questions that I couldnt up vote yesterday and up voted them and I hit a limit of 32, is this right? I looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3331/serial-voting-reversed-meaning-and-response&quot;&gt;Serial voting&lt;/a&gt; on meta but this seems to say votes will get reversed by either the system or a mod, I checked so see who has the Vox Populi badge and it seems 56 people have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/71/vox-populi&quot;&gt;this badge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something or is there a limit set on votes for a certian time limit or till a criteria is hit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18050" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T22:37:34.897" Title="I only seem to have 32 votes a day" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-17T14:48:29.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few worlds I am currently building, all with the goal to one day write novels about them - I am not urged and often take months/years to develop my settings before actually starting writing (and as a side note, I am too young for having seriously started more than one novel, but actually I have been worldbuiling since I was a kid and have a lot of abandoned writing beginnings and far more worlds waiting for their turn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Main project :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the one novel I am currently writing takes place in a world very like ours, but with a totally alternate history and a small bit of mystical background (primarly based on superstition and very light &quot;magic&quot; elements). The plot takes place in a late-middle-age-like era and a central Europe-like environment. There are no countries or kingdoms (at least in this part of the world) but only cities, each of them having its own political system. There are very few wars ; in fact what characterizes the people from my novel is their lack of interest for the rest of the world : most of people never leave their native town, don't know what the world looks like elsewhere and actually have no interest in it. People are very superstitious and believe the ancient times where ruled by mystical forces, from which only remains the curses and benedictions some rare people have. Nobody knows where these comes from but they are real, hence a lot of fear and rejection exists towards the cursed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about a day-deamer girl who leaves everything for a long unprepared trip with the objective to reach the far, unknown and almost legendary North to see the northern lights. She mets a boy of her age, a wanderer who plays music and hears the universe singing, but is cursed with the impossibility for him to see the sky. They travel together in quest for beauty, understanding and meaning - and ultimately seeing / hearing the northern lights - in this world nobody apart from them is interested to explore. It's a story about dreams, seeing beauty in the world and being young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other settings I am working on :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A world which have been shaped by a giant sapient species instead of humans, where humans really don't understand anything about these giants and the world is really hostile for small creature like we are. The plot would be centred around two human characters forced to leave their safe community and struggling to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A civilization living underground under a cold, hostile, inhabitable ice land which turn out to be Anarctica. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42304/how-could-a-human-civilization-have-happened-to-live-underground-in-antarctica&quot;&gt;How could a human civilization have happened to live underground, in Antarctica?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42427/would-a-black-population-whiten-over-generations-because-of-living-underground&quot;&gt;Would a black population whiten over generations because of living underground?&lt;/a&gt;). The story would show how these people's culture and way of life differ from ours.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A civilization in some aspects similar to the Aztecs, with the main differences being they are way more technologically advanced. They use the universal flux in which the Aztecs believed - and which in this setting exists and flows in everyone - to power their technology on a daily basis. I don't have a story to put in this world yet but I have done a lot of worldbuiling work since I started thinking about it in 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T14:48:29.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3688" CreationDate="2016-06-17T14:53:01.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The bottom line&lt;/strong&gt; is that the Vox Populi badge requires you to vote on a lot of questions during the day you earn it. See this very apropos post here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117687/how-to-get-vox-populi-badge-when-you-can-no-longer-vote-after-32-votes&quot;&gt;How to get vox-populi when I can no longer vote after 32 votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the limit is on Questions AND Answers. There is a lower limit if you only vote on Answers. The Vox Badge requires a combo of votes on both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T14:53:01.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3688" CreationDate="2016-06-17T15:47:05.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can vote on up to 40 questions a day.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can vote on up to 30 answers a day.  And I think that if you vote on 30 answers, you stop being able to vote on questions as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want the badge, you have to vote on at least 10 questions prior to voting on 30 answers (or questions).  Note that you can vote on twenty answers, then ten questions, then ten answers.  You don't have to vote on the questions first, just not last.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T15:47:05.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T18:22:17.617" Score="7" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to have the links to the, Risk Factors, Perfect Question etc meta posts show up under help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes (it's yes, thank you Monica)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose we add the following questions to the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question?cb=1&quot;&gt;How to write the perfect question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3206/worldbuilding-scope-risk-factors&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Scope - Risk Factors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote your agreement or disdain :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:21:34.303" Title="Sharing the &quot;how-to&quot; meta content via help" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3692" CreationDate="2016-06-17T18:34:25.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can edit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic page&lt;/a&gt; in the Help Center.  Please propose a specific addition on meta so people can vote.  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour is largely not editable.  (I think we can edit the first paragraph, but that's not the place to put this info.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T18:34:25.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-18T00:00:19.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My main world is a science fantasy that leans more towards the fantasy aspect. Here's a rough draft of the first chapter from the main religion's Holy book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Book Of Kur&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning there was the lightness and there was darkness and they were without form and were one. And among this formlessness there was also one with form. One who was neither man, nor woman, nor anything that walketh upon the earth. And from this Formness the world took shape. With the lightness and darkness upon its body and in its hands it divided them. An explosion of lightness and darkness erupted from the Formness' hands, ever expanding and ever reaching. Going faster and faster than any man can hope to dream. And although the lightness and the darkness were divided they were still without form. And so the Formness created a new force, that drew the lightness together, forming the stars and the great expanse above and the great void beyond it. And these became known as the three primordial magics. The Light, The Void, and The Gravity. And form these magics the Formness continued its work. It took the three forces into its body, mind, and soul and created the sun. And from the sun he drew out its heat and created fire making a fourth. The Formness then took the fourth and created the celestial bodies. Forging them and binding them together with the lightness controlling the day and the darkness the night. And the two would always give way to one another. And with these new bodies there were now five. But still unsatisfied with its work the Formness created water and air and had the lightness glitter upon its surface and the darkness take hold of its depths and gravity to hold it all together. Still the Formness was unsatisfied. The world's needed something more, something vibrant and colorful, something like itself. And so this time it took all the magic within itself and created Life, Soul, and Unfiltered Magic and populated the great expanse with many creatures and spread them out across the lands, the oceans, and the skies. And it created man and woman and gave them both lightness and darkness within their hearts and filled their bodies minds with souls and magic. And then the Formness rested for it was dieing. The magic of creation, the magic of soul and life had taken its toll. For nothing can be created from nothing and all magic comes with a price. And its last days it gave up the rest of its magic and divided it into 13 celestial beings to nuture and take care of his precious creation and then it used it's body to create a place where all mortal men may go when they die. And so the Formness, the Foremost of Heaven passed on and became known as Nergal, the Watcher. For even though it had died many still believed it continued to watch over its creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21688" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T00:00:19.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3700" CreationDate="2016-06-19T03:29:34.363" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently discovered that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason 1: I don't think it makes sense to have creature specific tags. If we have one such specific tag, then there would be reason to have other specific tags such as Naga, Clownfish, Griffon, and Gargoyle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason 2: Whenever I think about whether very specific tags should exist, I ask myself the question &lt;em&gt;&quot;What does it mean to be an expert in [insert tag here]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It doesn't make much sense to say &quot;I'm an expert in Centaurs&quot;, since they don't really exist and are mostly speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason 3: This tag doesn't really add anything useful. If you're working on creating centaurs, you could simply tag with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T02:23:40.503" Title="Do we really need a Centaur tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-blacklist|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3696" CreationDate="2016-06-19T13:46:57.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, we do&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags serve for better orientation on the site. So if one gets interested in specific topic, the tags should provide help for user to navigate on the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arguments against Reason 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt; is creature specific tag. But we have for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/criminal-underworld&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;criminal-underworld&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;criminal-underworld&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dyson-spheres&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dyson-spheres&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dyson-spheres&lt;/a&gt; tags which could be also covered by more generic tags. And they both contain about same or less amount of questions tagged likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Argument against Reason 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, I know you are talking about being able to get a badge in specific tag, but tagging something via specific tag should not know &quot;I am expert in this&quot; but rather &quot;I want users to know there is more of this&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Argument against Reason 3:&lt;/strong&gt; It adds value: It helps user to avoid duplicate questions. I might have idea about centaurs and want to ask about how might centaur eat enough caalories. Thanks to tag, I can reaalize faster, that such question already exists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ultimate argument: There are tags for other mythical creatures&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to rephrase what TrEs-2b said in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt; and for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; which are mythical creatures. While it does not make sense to make a tag for all mythical creatures, it does make sense to create a tag for these mythical creatures where a high number of users find interest in them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T16:16:21.690" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T16:16:21.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3696" CreationDate="2016-06-19T15:46:50.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pavel Janicek already made a great answer (of which I completely agree) but I thought I should add my thoughts for the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that my opinion is a bit bias, as I am they one who created the tag, so I will look at both sides of the argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arguments for&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;like Pavel pointed out, it helps prevent duplicate questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It makes it easier to find details about centaurs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not including it is a double standard. Why are tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt; okay, but centaurs are not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arguments against&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently if the tag continues to exist, there will only be 13 or so questions in it. As opposed to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt; tags which each have around 40 questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a slippery slope. If this tag can exist then it could lead to dozens of smaller tags, each about a specific creature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T16:18:09.800" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T16:18:09.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3692" CreationDate="2016-06-19T17:12:46.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;How to write the perfect question&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic help page&lt;/a&gt;, in the paragraph after the lists of what is on- and off-topic.  That paragraph currently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that questions must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;specific&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;answerable&lt;/a&gt;. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific question-and-answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Chat&lt;/a&gt;. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post good subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we could edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt; I'd also link it in there, but that page isn't currently editable by moderators.  (I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/280428/162102&quot;&gt;asked on MSE&lt;/a&gt; if we can change that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the risk-factors post in its current form is a good candidate for linking in the help center.  It's long and the question (itself long) is more &quot;inward-facing&quot; (addressed to the community).  I'd worry that a new user would stop reading before getting to the important stuff.  People can and should link to &lt;em&gt;specific risk factors&lt;/em&gt; (answers) when appropriate, and the content of that page fed into the perfect-question list, so I think we'll be covered if we make the changes I've proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:21:34.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3696" CreationDate="2016-06-19T18:53:22.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat divided on this one, but I'm leaning toward that yes, it's a useful tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, &lt;strong&gt;I do think it would have been better to bring it up on Meta before editing a relatively large number of questions,&lt;/strong&gt; bumping them to the top of the front page. That goes in general, not just about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, this might have been brought up in chat, but far from everyone hangs out in chat; by bringing the matter up on Meta and gathering at least some community consensus, there could have been broader community support and ultimately understanding of what was going on. We also wouldn't be having &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, tags should be used for categorizing questions. You say that &lt;em&gt;&quot;It doesn't make much sense to say &quot;I'm an expert in Centaurs&quot;, since they don't really exist and are mostly speculative.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but really, &lt;strong&gt;that applies to pretty much everything we do here on Worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt; I doubt there are all that many people who are actually experts in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aliens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dragons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dragons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dragons&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faster-than-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faster-than-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faster-than-light&lt;/a&gt; or ... Well, you see what I mean. We have &lt;em&gt;swaths&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;well established&lt;/em&gt; tags about things that simply do not exist in real life or which in real life are highly speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Centaurs are a specific type of mythological creature, and having a more specific way of categorizing questions about them than the generic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; does make some sense. We have a reasonable number of questions about centaurs (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=centaur+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;21 non-deleted questions as of now that contain the word &lt;code&gt;centaur&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), and 15 of those have been tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt;, which seems like it exceeds a reasonable threshold for when a specific tag can be useful. It's not really that much fewer than, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; (20 questions thus tagged); let alone the (more dubious, in my opinion) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera-folk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera-folk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera-folk&lt;/a&gt; (4 questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, if we should have it, it should follow the naming convention of other tags. There's plural &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cities&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceships&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;, ... so why should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt; be the odd one out? (That, however, can be fixed in a few moments by a diamond moderator, and particularly does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; warrant re-bumping all those questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T18:53:22.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-19T19:54:22.100" Score="42" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we're a purely online community (well, I assume there aren't some of us who do meet in the real world), I thought it would be nice to share a piece of information I learned today concerning our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mom is a published author and was attending a panel about writing. One of the panelists was a NASA engineer who said that learning how the sciences interact with each other, getting those effects right, and creating consistency in the world help engage readers. He specifically brought up the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange as a good place to go to get feedback about those issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So congratulations to everyone for helping to create a useful site that really does have an impact in the world! (The real Earth, of course...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if that NASA engineer happens to see this post: Thank you for bringing attention to our community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:54:22.100" Title="A note about us from the real world" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3704" CreationDate="2016-06-20T14:12:05.007" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deciding if something's realistic is strongly related to science, isn't it? What's the essential difference between these tags? When they don't come with each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T14:39:36.967" Title="What's the difference between 'reality-check' and 'science-based' or even 'hard-science'?" Tags="|support|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3702" CreationDate="2016-06-20T14:33:41.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reality check is more about asking if what you already have makes sense, it can be science based but doesn't have to be (that is, you may be able to answer with common sense or some similarly unscientific method). Likewise, science based asks for answers that are based in science, but does not require you to have an already built scenario that you need checked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard science is stronger than science based, it requires proof, either through sources or through a lot of math. Don't ask for this if you don't already know most of the math/science involved in your question. Similarly, if you use the hard science tag and an answer does not apply a lot of science with references or proofs, then you should downvote that answer (and explain why). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T14:33:41.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3702" CreationDate="2016-06-20T14:39:36.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags description pretty much tell you all you need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/reality-check/info&quot;&gt;info&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, reality-check question do not require a scientific explanation. The approach for questions with this tag should be to ensure logical consistency. In short, does the concept make sense given the rules specified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/science-based/info&quot;&gt;info&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with this tag should be answered as far as possible based on known scientific fact or reasonable extrapolations from that, but answers are not required to provide scientific citations. For example, we do not currently have the material science required to build a space elevator, but we can discuss the potential risks, consequences and benefits of building one based on known scientific facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;info&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Speculative or unreferenced answers, as well as those not supported by strong scientific theory, are not welcome. Long, comprehensive answers are desirable, but length and quality aren't always correlated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simpler term, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is asking whether the setting is realistic within the given world (magic included). Realistic does not mean the same as scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; indicates that the asker wants to find a solution to their problem based on Science as we know it today. So no magic, no handwavium, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is a meta-tag. The asker is expecting a certain scientific quality in the provided answers. Whereas science-based, mentioning some scientific facts, common knowledge, etc. are ok, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, you need to be more specific in citing a given study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T14:39:36.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T18:31:49.170" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reference the question is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44826/what-species-given-sapience-has-the-best-chance-defeating-humanity&quot;&gt;What species, given sapience, has the best chance defeating humanity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why the question was put on hold.  It was marked as primarily opinion based, but several of the answers do include quite a bit of fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some leaps of logic involved in using that fact to support the story in the question, but if your going to discount those leaps in logic then the entire site is off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the hold status is correct, then how can it be avoided? The question seems to ask a direct question, that can be supported by current day fact, even if those facts have to be &quot;extended&quot; a bit to build a story from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T15:15:58.140" Title="Why is this question put on hold, and how could it be avoided?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3696" CreationDate="2016-06-21T02:23:40.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have chimera-folk (I added) for misc. and those without enough questions to be worth its own tag. As was discussed previously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T02:23:40.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T07:55:20.893" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; tag carefully states that it is for proper IAU planets only, yet the suggested topics apply just as well to other related bodies. I suppose the &lt;em&gt;same question&lt;/em&gt; about tectonics and composition would be tagged differently if it just happened to orbit a gas giant? And what if that's not important and not mentioned? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about dwarf planets and rogue planets [sic]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the suggestions involve the &quot;worldness&quot; not the orbit details, so is at odds with the first paragraph of the description and contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we better explain what it has been used for? I didn't just hack away at it in case someone had planned out a set of tags with some care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T10:33:09.033" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T10:50:34.987" Title="Tag planets too restrictive?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T08:02:36.217" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are the tags for intelligence and sapience different? Should this be clarified or merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T18:17:47.687" Title="Tags intelligence and sapients" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3710" CreationDate="2016-06-24T15:24:29.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it, the difference is that sense of &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sapience,&quot; noun of sapient, is the ability to think, and to reason. It may not seem like much a difference, but the ability to reason is tied more closely to sapience than to sentience. Most animals are sentient, (yes, you can correctly say your dog is sentient!) but only humans are sapient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rebekkahniles.com/2012/03/word-box-sapience-vs-sentience.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.rebekkahniles.com/2012/03/word-box-sapience-vs-sentience.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of really intelligent animals, but so far as we know, humans are the only sapient species. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intelligence and Sentience are probably the same thing, or close enough that they could be combined under one tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T15:42:43.050" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T15:42:43.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2016-06-24T16:31:58.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a little difficult, since technically speaking a habitable world orbiting a gas giant would be a moon, even if you could live there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some bozo's decided that size makes a difference, to the shock of poor Pluto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if &quot;solar bodies&quot; might be better than &quot;IAU planet&quot;, since that might apply to planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc. While &quot;Rogue-planets&quot; would be outside of a solar system and so separate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T16:31:58.543" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-25T08:40:10.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Cube World&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21510/celestial-arrangement-for-the-cube-world&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but the world itself described &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8830/how-would-a-civilization-that-has-been-living-on-a-cube-earth-differ-from-one/17616#17616&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a 6-faced cube with a flat disk world on each face. 4 of the faces have day-night cycle of a yellow sun, but different atmospheres and possibly different gravity. 2 faces have fixed red dwarf suns, but one is out-of-order leaving a frozen wasteland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life forms from many different planets are stocked in suitable environments, the whole thing being essentially a terrarium or zoo as befits a K-2 civilization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It came from another galaxy and is moving through at high speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T08:40:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3617" CreationDate="2016-06-25T16:06:12.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They don't. Violence, rape, genocide, torture, pedophilia, racism and many other topics are things that exist, regardless of one's opinion of them. As such, they are topics that are bound to be picked up by authors of different genres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors may address those issues in a critical or cynical view, others may simply accept them as true and use them to show a crude world, yet others may simply want to make readers uncomfortable for whatever reason, there are also those who may enjoy meddling in these topics, whether it is to analyze them in a cold light or simply because they find them fun or entertaining in some fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, questions and users shouldn't be discriminated or attacked for approaching a subject which may hurt one's own sensitivities. The author may have their reasons for approaching the subject and those reasons are often beyond the scope of the questions asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: as others mentioned, if the user is in some way inciting or advocating undesired behaviours (such as is sex with minors) then it's a whole other problem, and one that &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8603" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T16:06:12.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3705" CreationDate="2016-06-25T18:15:20.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like people are interested in subject, and willing to answer Q, why to stop them, quality of answers looks good, Question is probably too broad and because of that can't be answered correctly by one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I do not like that opinion based reason to close, trough also I do not like that question. But some people needs opinions as answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or they just want one possible solution, not important which one.(so could he exploit that farther and write story that way, is that good, is that bad, it's that to much attention for one person, is that abuse of system, peoples who answers, are we fine to stimulate such type of behavior or not, or we better will cut all problems and efforts needed for regulate that mess?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons it provokes low quality A, because why to to write answer it so hard and so broad, chances to answer it right are minimal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but you may just joke bump free points and satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it looks like power users problem - in sense of their understanding how things should work, and in keeping status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is result of how here system (on SE) works. System did, and do good job - no body wish some negative changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideology is Q have A, in Unix part of SE thats possibly more true, you may check and verify answer and etc. For WB it works not so well, as my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solution &lt;em&gt;begin to be active power user, convince other power users, understand their evaluation system&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System is't perfect, as example down-voting for answers it means almost nothing, so it do almost no regulation for answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So as voting system it'selfs is subjective - it helps at some extent but. It results for voters to act not that way it was intended to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wished to answer but have no luck in that, f this live is hard, be faster next time, many wished to answer and answered question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If asking and getting answers, OP got probably all answers he needed and could in that situation, so closing answer did't changed anything for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social interaction, tricky rules, everything as usual.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Wish I WB without rules(direct or opinion based)? No, I don't, there are other places for that(2ch, 4ch) and so on. But being honest, any place have rules ad hoc or de facto - even if that place says with big letters: There is no rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to have opinion based tag, so OP may clearly state He needs, some solution or inspiration, Although he will probably choose random answer or not choose any answer like accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus who answers may decide participate or not, and is possibility to affect OP in his world building, in form of answer, worth their efforts or not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although that situation dangerously close to discussion and then to chat and ... not being enlisted in Google searches, and ..... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T18:31:58.640" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T18:31:58.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-25T23:56:46.523" Score="38" ViewCount="819" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be a good idea if there could be a banner making note of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag when entering an Answer. This is especially true with the influx of newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;reminder text&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it requires a new feature, to show a banner when adding this tag.  Explain the rules and suggest science-based as a possible alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, include a banner when opening the Answer editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;post notice&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A custom post notice can be created to tag answers that don't follow the rules, as an alternative to flagging it “not an answer” and typing a remembered comment again. This is in the same line as the examples shown in the comment (e.g. citations needed) and others SEs use them for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;conspicuous tags&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed some tags on the original SO have icons. I found it overly cute and annoying. But, they can be used for good UI design! Use an icon on tags that represent &lt;em&gt;semantic modifiers&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to a subject, as these should be noted before answering. E.g. reality-check, science-based vs magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And tags that impose strict rules like hard-science, must read (understand) before answering, can have a stronger icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T02:45:04.370" Title="Hard-science reminder on answering?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-06-26T03:30:08.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The planet&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The planet is a small gas giant, it has about twice the radius of earth (and 4 times the area), but its low density gives it roughly the same gravitational pull as earth. It has a small metallic core surrounded by a liquid mantle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Geology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make the floating islands work, I'm using a twisted version of quantum phase locking in superconductors using &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phlebotinum&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phlebotinum (Ph) has two basic states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Locked &lt;/sup&gt;Ph or L-Ph&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Unlocked &lt;/sup&gt;Ph or U-Ph&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L-Ph is made from U-Ph inside a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackBox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;black box&lt;/a&gt; deep inside the planet. L-Ph has the unique property that it levitates when placed in a magical field. The same way superconductors levitate when placed inside a magnetic field&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This magic field that holds Ph afloat is not static, it is constantly pushing outwards, albeit very slowly. This means that the Ph that is generated deep within the planet will slowly rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L-Ph also decays into U-Ph (which doesn't levitate) with a half-life appropriate for the plot. This means that, as time passes, the Ph that had risen will begin to lose its 'grip' and slowly begin to fall to the core, where the cycle starts again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, thanks to magic, the planet can get hot enough deep down to evaporate and rain magma, so as the masses of Ph rise, they are coated with layers upon layers of minerals, emerging from the cloud cover of the planet as floating islands and continents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides Ph decay, islands also suffer from erosion, beginning to lose mass as they rise above the molten metal clouds. So, while Ph loses strength, it also has less and less mass to hold up, resulting in a somewhat steady climb up to the upper layers of the atmosphere, where they lose grip rather quickly, comparatively speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;History&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans were born in a small region of one of the largest islands (roughly the size of australia). There, they began to spread and soon after they covered the whole island. Thousands of years passed and humans adapted to live in this limited space. Once in awhile, someone would figure out how to create a path to a nearby island, but these cases were quite limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, humans figured out how to build hot air balloons. These flying machines don't have great endurance, but they were useful for moving to some of the slightly farther islands that non-flying means could not reach. Planes followed suit and after a few decades of trial and error, humans mastered canvas and wooden frame airplanes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the difficulty of mining metal made further advances slow. Metal is not particularly rare in this planet, but it's distributed in thin layers that spread across wide areas, meaning that mining it is quite cumbersome, making it expensive enough that industrialization isn't really viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was until people discovered that deep islands were covered in metal rich soils and that by using special airships and suits, they were able to simply shovel it. This led to a massive industrial revolution and large scale wars over the control of these deep islands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Magic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the already explained magic which allows floating islands to exists, there is also another type of magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these world there are spirits which can control certain forces of nature, such as fire, lightning, cold and life energy to name a few of the most common ones. These spirits can be captured and used to control said forces, so capturing a fire spirit allows you to control fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one drawback. A spirit must be fed with this force before it can control it or create it. So the fire spirit can be used to create and control fire, only if the spirit have previously been fed with fire itself. So, more than a form of creating things, spirits act as a sort of battery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8603" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T03:30:08.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-06-26T19:36:04.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How could I make a signet ring design uncopyable in a world with magic?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The higher classes seal their mail with wax seals. How could I make sure a design on the seal is uncopyable or at least make it very hard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic exists, but it's primarily elemental manipulation. Signet rings can be made out of magic disrupting material to prevent arcane duplication with earth magic, but is there a way to prevent copying from the seal design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology level: &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchizoTech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchizoTech&lt;/a&gt; Predominately &amp;quot;medieval&amp;quot; with higher technology with lightning powered railgun, but none that I think affects the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit for more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the sake of my story, it has to make duplication pointless or too difficult to be worth much.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be relatively simple and achievable by the poorest of nobles, so it should not be too expensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The wax seal is for the dual purpose of making sure the letter was secure in transit and possibly ensuring the legitimacy of the document.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original signet ring itself cannot be directly duplicated with magic so it has to be handcrafted. This leaves any unscrupulous people only the wax to work with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic wax is possible by imbuing energy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone's magic has a signature. The closer by blood, the more similar. Twins have almost identical signatures. For example, a &amp;quot;barrier stone&amp;quot; activated for a descendant dozens of generations later but it's very general. A signet ring meant to be handed down would be slightly less general but it's the same idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that enough of a &amp;quot;criteria?&amp;quot;&#xA;Reported from the main site on recommendation of JDługosz.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44803/how-could-i-make-a-signet-ring-design-uncopyable-in-a-world-with-magic&quot;&gt;How could I make a signet ring design uncopyable in a world with magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21027" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T05:56:21.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3722" CreationDate="2016-06-28T20:17:21.947" Score="8" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194/a-name-for-our-chat&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; many suggestion were made for the name of our chat. These ranged from clever hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy references to simple and plain ideas. I'm asking a different, equally, if not more important question; &lt;strong&gt;Should&lt;/strong&gt; we name our chat? If we choose to give it a name, then we have no short supply of suggestions from our great users. So, should we give our chat a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T20:25:42.980" Title="Should we name our chat?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3721" CreationDate="2016-06-28T20:25:42.980" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background info for ease of access...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the original review of this idea the site was still really new and the conclusion, if I recall correctly (someone correct me if I am off base here) was that we wanted to keep the name simple and obvious &lt;em&gt;for the time being&lt;/em&gt; so people could find it and know what it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I supported that idea at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok now that the history lesson is done I would have to say that I think the site is well enough established and we are good about pointing new users to the chat room via comments.  So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; We should come up with a new name for the chat room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest a new meta question be posted asking for name ideas since the regular members of the site have changed a bit here and there and we want newer members to have the opportunity to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T20:25:42.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3724" CreationDate="2016-06-29T00:28:40.113" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;While conducting a normal review on the Suggested Edits queue, I noticed a user had created a tag labeled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/cqc/info&quot;&gt;cqc&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Confused, I checked the edit, and noticed that the edit was for the tag wiki entry, where it identified the tag as &quot;Close Quarters Combat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I lack the power to edit the tag to something like &quot;close-quarters-combat&quot;, should there be an effort made by a diamond moderator to change the name (if possible) of the tag to something meaningful, so I'm (hopefully) the last one confused by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T20:53:13.447" Title="Can we rename the 'cqc' tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3723" CreationDate="2016-06-29T01:07:22.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After you asked this question, Vincent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/45641/3&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; the question that introduced the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cqc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cqc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cqc&lt;/a&gt; tag, removing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cqc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cqc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cqc&lt;/a&gt; and replacing it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combat&lt;/a&gt;, which is much more popular. At this point, then the tag is used on zero questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I've renamed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cqc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cqc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cqc&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/close-quarters-combat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;close-quarters-combat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;close-quarters-combat&lt;/a&gt; (technically, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197731/274942&quot;&gt;created the second one and merged the first into it&lt;/a&gt;), although I doubt that it's going to be useful in the future. It might end up being a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combat&lt;/a&gt;, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/civil-war&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;civil-war&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;civil-war&lt;/a&gt; eventually became a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19754/274942&quot;&gt;the tag will soon be destroyed&lt;/a&gt;, unless we synonymize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T01:13:07.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3726" CreationDate="2016-06-29T01:17:36.207" Score="14" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3721/should-we-name-our-chat&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; it was agreed that we should have a new name for our chatroom and while a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194/a-name-for-our-chat&quot;&gt;asking for suggestions&lt;/a&gt; was made, our site has easily doubled in size since then. So at the suggestion of James and Monica;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What name suggestions do our users have for the Worldbuilding Chat?  One suggestion per answer, please, for ease of voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T21:43:36.200" Title="What should the name of our chat be?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|chat|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-29T01:21:12.770" Score="26" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/strong&gt;, From Slartibartfast line to Arthur &quot;Welcome to our factory floor&quot; in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T03:27:25.153" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T03:27:25.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-29T03:27:56.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magrathea&lt;/strong&gt;, Who built Earth in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T03:27:56.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-29T13:13:21.983" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilders' General Chat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who wants to vote to keep it the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T13:13:21.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-29T13:46:48.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Green Dragon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of obvious Tolkien fame and also coincidentally a sort of unofficial headquarters for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dragon_Tavern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;American Revolution&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T13:46:48.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3734" CreationDate="2016-06-30T05:17:52.607" Score="6" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the reputation graph on the activity page of one of our moderators which goes all the way back to September, 9 months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O5mq8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O5mq8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my reputation graph which only goes back to March, 5 months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWhDd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWhDd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite my best efforts I cannot figure out why My chart only goes back 5 months not 9, Is this a bug or is there some other reason I don't know of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T13:01:46.077" Title="How do I make the Reputation Graph go back further?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3732" CreationDate="2016-06-30T05:36:16.777" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45680/where-to-hide-my-evil-overlord&quot;&gt;Where to hide my evil Overlord?&lt;/a&gt; and it got closed for being &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, the reason being that there are many possible answers. However when I saw a tag-related question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36446/why-fill-a-dungeon-with-puzzles&quot;&gt;Why fill a dungeon with puzzles?&lt;/a&gt;, it seems to me that it also can be answered in many ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is wrong with my question ? I do not want this to repeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T00:03:53.887" Title="Correcting a wrong question" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3731" CreationDate="2016-06-30T07:04:17.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Why did your question get closed?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily Opinion-based (also known as POB) isn't about the fact that there are many possible answers, but it is about the fact, that there's no way to compare those answers (for us), except basing our judgement on subjective opinion. So basically, we can't upvote better answers objectively. Which is not suitable to the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally asking for the &quot;best X&quot; leads to having a question closed as POB. What is &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; for you might not be the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; for me. Or the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore your question has the other disadvantage that we know too little about your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way to correct it is to provide some kind of metrics on which we could compare answers. Assuming you provide sufficient details, the nearest place, cheapest, darkest, etc. might be something to start with. Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; might help you refine a question, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, might help you get some discussion about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I see that you created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/41848/wrong-question&quot;&gt;subchat&lt;/a&gt; for it, with the link provided by Frostfyre. However, you cannot &quot;ping&quot; users there (unless you are a moderator), so it might not be seen. Best way would be to join the general chat and ask there.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why wasn't the other question closed?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well it might be some closed-edge, but the focus of the question isn't: &lt;em&gt;the best&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. So only providing a single example would be sufficient. I agree that the OP could have provided some metrics to compare the answers though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="40067" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T00:03:53.887" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T00:03:53.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T08:14:50.077" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Top tab fonts are not visible in my google chrome (version Version 51.0.2704.103),&#xA;Please find the screen shot :&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BymVK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BymVK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1 :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes , still its the same way .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have inspected fonts :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/18C8C.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/18C8C.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OS : Windows 7 ultimate &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already installed and uninstalled Google chrome &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jhpOy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jhpOy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22292" LastEditorUserId="22292" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T06:03:46.827" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T06:03:46.827" Title="Top tabs are not visible in worldbuilding stackexchange site" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3730" CreationDate="2016-06-30T13:01:46.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This took me a while to figure out too; in addition to seeing different behavior for different users on a site, I saw different behavior for my accounts on different sites.  What gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The size of the slices shown in the graph depends on how long you've had the account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the account is 4 years old, the graph is shown in years.  (That's not possible on this site yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the account is 1 year old, the graph is shown in quarters (as in your first example).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the account is 4 months old (I think; can't find an example to verify the lower bound), the graph is shown in months.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the graph is shown in 10-day intervals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your account isn't yet a year old, so you're still seeing the months view.  This should change for you in a few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see all of your reputation by going to the reputation tab on your site or network profile.  The small graph on your profile is meant as more of a snapshot, not a complete history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T13:01:46.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3733" CreationDate="2016-06-30T13:43:35.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, that's weird. &#xA;I'm on Version 51.0.2704.103 m (64-bit) and they look fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nsOzw.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nsOzw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comparison, here's IE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ghhVl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ghhVl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1F17o.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1F17o.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All basically the same.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What OS are you on?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you right click on the tab and choose &quot;Inspect&quot;, what do you see by the font styles in the Computed tab?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wxr3a.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wxr3a.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T13:43:35.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-30T15:49:29.913" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The World Workshop&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It implies that this is where you can finish building unfinished worlds (and the alliteration is a nice bonus as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T15:49:29.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-06-30T18:19:45.907" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Great Link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the place where the founders get together. (in worldbuilding we are all founders of our own worlds, aren't we?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21118" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T18:19:45.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-01T04:14:35.970" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is getting annoying .... instead of asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3731/correcting-a-wrong-question&quot;&gt;the best place to hide&lt;/a&gt;, Im simply asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45779/why-should-i-depend-on-my-minions&quot;&gt;why would a evil lord depend on his minions&lt;/a&gt;. But I get a response like this, &quot;This question demonstrates a rather complete lack of understanding of how any organized human activity takes place.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I put some sort of note or something ? &lt;em&gt;That this question is only about the magical world where the Overlord has &lt;strong&gt;already&lt;/strong&gt; gone to sleep and has left things to his minions, and the other people are wondering why ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T14:54:19.300" Title="&quot;Why should I depend on my minions?&quot; Being closed" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-01T20:03:33.983" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The God, the Bard and the Loony&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roles who are in the world-making and changing business, and an obvious Italo Western reference. (Improvements for the last one are welcome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11787" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T20:03:33.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-03T08:03:03.703" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Worlds in Collision&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the classic SciFi novel and movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T08:03:03.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-03T08:04:45.307" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Words on Worlds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like illiteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T08:04:45.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-03T19:06:28.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The Workshop&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A variant to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3736/9685&quot;&gt;fi12's suggestion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, what've you been doing? Well you know hanging 'round The Workshop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T19:06:28.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3750" CreationDate="2016-07-05T16:38:52.833" Score="-7" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Reddit has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the obvious place for this topic&lt;/a&gt;, I have no idea, where to start similar discussions on 4chan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I do it at all? Or is it a rather bad idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/tg/ seems to be suitable only for D&amp;amp;D campaign settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T13:09:24.600" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T13:09:24.600" Title="Is there any section of 4chan that is suitable for worldbuilding questions?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T13:09:15.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3744" CreationDate="2016-07-06T14:05:32.367" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never use 4chan, ever, unless you want unsettling pornography and people committing suicide on live streams I would recommend stay away. Also there isn't a real way to track your post, as far as I am aware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22283" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T14:05:32.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3748" CreationDate="2016-07-06T20:59:33.367" Score="11" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3721/should-we-name-our-chat&quot;&gt;few weeks ago&lt;/a&gt; it was asked if we should name our chat. Since then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3725/what-should-the-name-of-our-chat-be&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; was asked asking for suggestions to be used for voting and as of now, 10 suggestions have been made. Half of which are negative voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top two suggestions from the previous question will be listed below as answers (with the posters reasoning behind it) to be used for voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A week will pass by and the top post will become our chats new name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please cast only one up-vote.  Down-votes will not be counted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please note that suggestions for names are no longer being taken, we are simply voting on which of these two to select&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;VOTING IS CLOSED.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The new name for World Building chat is The Factory Floor&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:49:05.107" Title="Runoff voting for the name of our chat" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3746" CreationDate="2016-07-06T21:00:48.943" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The World Workshop&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It implies that this is where you can finish building unfinished worlds (and the alliteration is a nice bonus as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T21:00:48.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3746" CreationDate="2016-07-06T21:01:44.913" Score="30" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/strong&gt;, From Slartibartfast line to Arthur &quot;Welcome to our factory floor&quot; in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T21:01:44.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-07T19:22:31.350" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the WB site etiquette on this?  Another member posted an answer while I was writing that covered a great deal of what I was saying in my longer answer.  I posted the answer, but I'm unsure if I'm about to get 40 downvotes for being a jerk or what.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it expected that I'll abandon my own answer and try to get the author of the other answer to cover the points I felt would be useful, or is it usual to maintain multiple overlapping answers to one question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:29:23.447" Title="Ninjaed by a slightly less complete (or at least less long-winded) answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3744" CreationDate="2016-07-07T19:37:29.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the comments identifying 4chan as an unsavory place are well-founded, I don't think it's true that unsavory places have nothing to offer the intrepid world-builder.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/tg/ certainly has a gaming world bias, but it's also populated by sundry sci-fi and medieval fantasy nerds who often provide feedback that is broadly applicable to the task of worldbuilding.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a literature board, where any literature except fanfiction can be discussed.  Presumably &quot;fanfiction&quot; does not cover workshopping original worlds.  This is the closest I can find to the old text only board they used to have for writers, back when I was an active user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The various topical boards may also be of use to you for particular questions, especially if your primary interest is in fringe theories.  The Paranormal, Science &amp;amp; Math, and History &amp;amp; Humanities boards are likely suspects for fruitful discussions, particularly if you find your questions getting &quot;serioused out&quot; of SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T19:37:29.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2016-07-07T21:27:14.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had this happen to me the other day - literally, yesterday. I was working on an answer to a new question, and &lt;em&gt;boing!&lt;/em&gt; someone posted something quite similar to it. I almost decided not to post the answer, feeling that the effort would have been duplicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to rewrite the answer. I started over in terms of writing, but I kept some of the same basic ideas. I went back and added more details, sources, and explanations. I ended up posting it about half an hour after the other user, but as of this writing, mine has more upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? It's likely pure chance; the difference is only 2-1. But I think that the reason mine got more votes - as has been the case sometimes in the past - is that I added a lot more detail, and gave an explanation that was a little more in-depth, though longer. Worldbuilding is great insofar as people don't just look at a question for a quick fix. They look because they're intrigued by the title, and then the question body, and hopefully the answers. This means that they'll likely stop and read a well-written answer, instead of skipping it because I was ninja'd by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem&quot;&gt;the fastest gun in the west&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral of the story? It's okay if your answer is similar to another person's. I encourage you to &lt;em&gt;rewrite it&lt;/em&gt;. Nobody's going to downvote you because you wrote a similar answer, unless you wrote it the same way someone else did. However, I think people will upvote you if you take the time to make your answer better than the other(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:27:14.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2016-07-07T21:29:23.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your post comes to a similar conclusion as another post, but yours provides additional angles, details, or insight that’s relevant then I don’t see a problem with publishing it. There are many questions around StackExchange where I’ve been &lt;em&gt;thankful&lt;/em&gt; that someone else posted a similar (or the same) answer but elaborated significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a circumstance where a substantial portion of your answer is the same as another I’ve also seen some users begin their answer with something like “I agree with SudoSedWinifred, but also want to add:”. This recognition usually happens if you answer significantly later than the original post, but could help to mitigate any feeling by you or voters that you’ve stolen someone's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Worldbuilding.SE in particular I feel like it’s very common to see overlapping answers. As long as each subsequent overlapping answer provides something unique and meaningful I haven’t typically seen them down voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11306" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:29:23.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-08T19:39:51.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Terra Forma&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a play on words referencing both &lt;em&gt;terraforming&lt;/em&gt;, aka world building, and &lt;em&gt;terra firma&lt;/em&gt;, which literally means 'solid earth', but in common parlance refers to finally reaching the land that was your goal. This echoes the function of the site, Worlbuilding.SE, which helps people reach their goal of developing new worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2070" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T19:39:51.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3756" CreationDate="2016-07-09T01:56:28.210" Score="4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;After examining a few Worldbuilding posts it seems like this site is about: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking how to envision/create highly imaginative worlds that cover any given question. So the answers to any given question will be very different from any other and the choice of the correct answer completely arbitrary as the answers are about creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with this in mind, my question is, how does this site differ from the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16415" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T08:58:14.523" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T08:58:14.523" Title="What is the subject matter distinction between Worldbuilding SE and Science Fiction &amp; Fantasy SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3755" CreationDate="2016-07-09T02:46:46.283" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scifi.SE focuses on existing works of Scientific Fiction and Fantasy, whereas Worldbuilding is to help people who are &lt;strong&gt;developing&lt;/strong&gt; worlds of Fantasy/Fiction in various areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T02:46:46.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T06:31:01.620" Score="6" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46669/885&quot;&gt;Science-based FTL drive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is an example of where we want to use  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; rather than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. We know that real FTL is impossible, and the scientificly sound Alcubierre Drive is specifically not to the story's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the author wants a sci-fi convention that will be understood and accepted by readers without distracting from the story. It doesn't even need to be “hard” SF!  We can suggest devices (double meaning of literary and engine) as used in familiar stories, and discuss the perials of such a device with more up-to-date audiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T12:49:13.610" Title="Example of science-fiction not science-based" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T10:16:01.277" Score="15" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while, we do get questions where &quot;that's not possible&quot; is a valid answer to the question as asked (with perhaps further clarification in comments). Sometimes the question gives criteria that are mutually exclusive in some manner, and sometimes the asker is asking for a science-based (or maybe even hard-science!) method for doing something that science says is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, to those questions, an answer that says effectively &quot;it's not possible, and here's why&quot; is useful and a perfectly valid answer. I have at least two such answers on my account on Worldbuilding, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/46678/29&quot;&gt;Science-based FTL drive&lt;/a&gt; and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/33850/29&quot;&gt;What would happen if electricity stopped working?&lt;/a&gt; respectively. (My answer to the former is currently accepted and highest voted, and my answer to the latter is currently the highest voted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we also have a tradition on Worldbuilding to take what's stated in the question as The Truth (tm), and to work within that when proposing answers. The idea behind that, of course, is that the poster knows their world best and is (hopefully) trying to solve some small issue within that world while maintaining consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In what situations is a sufficiently explained &quot;that's not possible&quot; an &lt;em&gt;appropriate&lt;/em&gt; answer to a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to break your answer up (or even post several answers, one for each case) for questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; respectively, but if your answer doesn't apply equally well to all cases, make sure to explain in your answer which cases you are considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T13:34:42.840" Title="When is &quot;that's not possible&quot; an appropriate answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3758" CreationDate="2016-07-09T11:05:58.337" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's Not Possible is a sufficient answer anytime the question is too constrained.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are Too Broad (unconstrained) are a problem because it's hard to know where to start answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is too narrow, with rules that are too tight, then the options can be limited down to zero.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In those situations a response like &quot;sorry, that won't work, here's why. Here's how to get closer if you relax this part of the question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T11:05:58.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3758" CreationDate="2016-07-09T11:23:58.410" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reality check is the big one for &quot;that's not possible&quot;, I think a fair number of my answers are along those lines, but again, that to me is the point of the tag. Someone has come along saying &quot;does this work?&quot; and as often as not the answer is &quot;no it doesn't&quot; but it doesn't become a good answer until you explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T11:23:58.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2016-07-10T07:21:13.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;House Of Illusions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obvious. The perceptible world is an illusion and here, we endeavor to create believable illusions within the cosmic illusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T07:21:13.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T20:43:26.683" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested about the Worldbuilding blog and would like to read some of the stuff in it but I cannot find it. The blog link at the bottom of the page takes me to stack overflow blog not Universe Factory. I am using a mobile device if that makes a difference. I seem to remember finding the blog on a desktop computer once but would like to find it on mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T23:06:42.930" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T23:06:42.930" Title="Blog on mobile devices" Tags="|support|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3762" CreationDate="2016-07-10T21:51:33.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Monica brought up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2504/627&quot;&gt;Can we have an SE blog for this site?&lt;/a&gt;, Stack Exchange is no longer doing many official per-site blogs, for various reasons. Therefore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;our blog, Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt; is officially un-official and technically unaffiliated with Stack Exchange in any way, shape, or form, except for the fact that everyone who writes for it is a member of the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there isn't a link to it on the Stack Exchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™, as there is for the official blog(s). Therefore, you can either bookmark the link on your computer, or find it somewhere on the site, such as in this answer. A better bet is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/blog/info&quot;&gt;in the blog tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt;. Also, there's a link to it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2922/627&quot;&gt;one community promotion ad&lt;/a&gt; that sometimes shows up on the sidebar; that might have been what you originally clicked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Fun fact: We previously had a Wordpress Blog, &lt;a href=&quot;http://magratheanforges.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magrathean Forges&lt;/a&gt;, but that folded after one or two entries because of lack of interest; the content was transferred to the Medium blog. Before today, the link in the tag excerpt led to &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; blog, rather than Universe Factory. I edited the link to correct this.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:36.370" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T21:51:33.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T21:53:10.357" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45444/zombies-versus-skeletons-optimal-strategies&quot;&gt;asked the question titled &lt;em&gt;Zombies Versus Skeletons: Optimal Strategies?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a couple weeks ago about what might happen given my two armies with their various powers clashing. It was closed a couple days later for being off-topic and too story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question was still in the &quot;on hold&quot; phase, I had edited my question with a note at the bottom, asking those who voted to close it why, if, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;this post,&lt;/a&gt; &quot;capabilities of characters...are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is possible or likely to develop, not what someone would or should do.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something, or are the older guys around here just trying to keep newbies like me from posting questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T17:33:16.820" Title="Why was &quot;Zombies Versus Skeletons: Optimal Strategies?&quot; closed?" Tags="|support|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3766" CreationDate="2016-07-13T07:50:43.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the possibilities are endless and there's no way of saying which of two equally well written but contradictory answers is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For close reasons you could go with either of: too broad, opinion based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a concept it seems interesting and good fun, but as a question we wouldn't be able to give you a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T07:50:43.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3766" CreationDate="2016-07-13T13:42:36.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey there Doniel and welcome to the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Us &lt;em&gt;old guys&lt;/em&gt; always want the site to have more questions.  More questions means more people and a livelier site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said &lt;strong&gt;not all questions fit the format of the site&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not to say they are not interesting/good questions.  In your case the scenario is interesting but there are simply not enough constraints on the question to make any two answers objectively comparable which is when things get too broad and/or too opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple options available to help you hone your question before posting it on the main site.  You can post the question in the sandbox on meta or feel free to visit us in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to get some feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can assure you that none of the old guys want to chase you away from the site though I admit some are a bit more tactful and helpful than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you stick around and enjoy worldbuilding, its a crazy place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T13:42:36.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2016-07-14T01:41:05.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two parts of this are technically feasible now; one would be a new feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the tag&lt;/strong&gt;, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/274634/922300&quot;&gt;possible&lt;/a&gt; to have some sort of pop-up box with custom text appear when you choose certain tags, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ctz2Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ctz2Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;SO regex tag warning&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask for this we will need a wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the post notice&lt;/strong&gt;, I know that some sites have gotten this.  (Pets has one for anecdotal answers, for example.)  Again, we need an exact wording to hand to the CMs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both of these, we should develop a wording on meta so we can use voting to show community support.  Maybe one CW answer for each of these, on this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For a notice upon starting to answer&lt;/strong&gt;, that'd involve new code.  If we can come up with, say, some SEDE query results that show answers that didn't follow the tag guidance -- that is, answers that we think could have been helped by this feature -- that would help to demonstrate the scale of the problem.  SE prefers data to anecdotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:06.130" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T01:53:10.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2016-07-14T02:06:50.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we should develop a wording on meta so we can use voting to show community support. Maybe one CW answer for each of these, on this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, start with the tag's text now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Review the tag info before using this tag. Consider alternatively the science-based and reality-check tags. Avoid using this tag as the only tag on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the context, adjust the introduction, but keep the description the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: answers to questions tagged as hard-science should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Review the tag info before using this tag. &lt;strong&gt;This will change the nature of what kinds of answers are permitted!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not what you meant, perhaps you want the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T02:06:50.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-07-14T02:53:42.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say that, in the future, some scientists have created satellites capable of something that seems science fiction for now—punching the walls of the universe to study an alternate reality.  By that scenario, some hundreds of “alternate Earths” from hundreds of alternate universes would already have been discovered and meticulously studied.  As much as half of them would still be ruled by humans, unfolded by events that turned out differently.  One universe, for example, had an Earth where 9/11 never happened, or where the outcome of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars ended up differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most interesting to note was a planet that scientists call “Alternate Earth 111”, known to the public as “Great Lakes Earth”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because at first glance, it seemed that almost every continent is dominated by lakes, even those larger than the Great Lakes that we have in North America.  What is its history?  What points of divergence would we expect to see in this particular variation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proved to be a long, backbreaking investigation because when our alt-satellites picked up Great Lakes Earth, it has discovered traces of civilization—traces roughly 100,000 years old.  However, after years of picking up the pieces and speculating on the rest, we believe that we have mapped the entire geography and the best of the history of Great Lakes Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T02:53:42.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-14T12:37:55.437" Score="61" ViewCount="2760" Body="&lt;p&gt;While conducting a normal review of the Reopen Review Queue, I was presented with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/47107/6986&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;. While I agree with the too-broad close reason, I was dismayed to notice that no comments had been left for the OP indicating &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question was too broad. In fact, the only comment was from the OP, asking why the question was too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've previously had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2744/6986&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; concerning too-broad questions. Out of that, one action decided upon was to be more vocal about close reasons when closing questions. For those who have been around a while, you may be familiar with this comment of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close-voters: Please don't vote to close questions without leaving&#xA;  commentary. The problem cannot be fixed if the OP is not made aware of&#xA;  it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave this on questions where I see close votes and no discussion about closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward, please remember to keep this in mind when weighing a question's merit. If you can't think of anything to say when closing a question, consider strongly whether you should be voting to close at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T12:50:41.860" Title="Reminder to close-voters" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3775" CreationDate="2016-07-14T18:41:20.517" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;When responding to someone else's comment it is usual on this site to use @ThePersonsName, but often (about half the time?) this does not work. the tab-to-autocomplete label does not appear when typing @ and starting to type the name and after submitting the comment it disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug? Does anyone else experience it? Am I doing something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this question is appropriate for the meta section, but I couldn't find another place to ask this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: As an example, it didn't work when I replied to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/132991?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47251/whats-the-most-reasonable-way-to-fit-monsters-in-your-pocket/47259?noredirect=1#comment132994_47259&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; shortly after it was posted (I added @NexTerren at the beginning but it got removed), but it does work now if I try to add another comment there. Could it depend on the time since the original comment was posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22383" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:56:10.787" Title="@Mentions in comments not working" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3774" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:49:52.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use an @-ping to notify the author of a post or anybody else who has commented on it.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  However, the @name part itself only shows up if there would otherwise be ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you were replying to a comment from the author of the post and nobody else was involved, so the @name wasn't offered on auto-complete and would have been stripped if you'd typed it in manually.  The author of the post still receives an inbox notification.  I agree this is confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/162102&quot;&gt;this FAQ entry on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; for more details of how @-pings work and who can be pinged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Plus a few other people not relevant to this case, like editors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:49:52.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3758" CreationDate="2016-07-15T16:12:54.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;that's not possible&quot; is only allowed (as far as I understand) if you can justify your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer is &quot;impossible&quot; then it's just not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer is &quot;it is impossible because of (insert two or three fully justified and referenced/cited reasons)&quot; - then that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22937" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T13:34:42.840" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T13:34:42.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2016-07-15T23:34:05.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;conspicuous tags&quot; are actually called sponsored tags. On Stack Overflow, a company, like Sony, can pay money to get an icon (and some other things) on a tag (in this case, [Sony]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of using the same mechanism to make some tags stand out is not new. It was discussed on MSE, and there is even &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/279640/323179&quot;&gt;a UserScript&lt;/a&gt; that could be modified to do exactly what you want (unfortunately, it only works for those who install it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it may be worthwhile to look into banners (aka annotations or notices).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skeptics has one which may work (it's added onto answers), especially with a few changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the information contained in this post requires additional references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/annotated-posts?tab=noticed&quot;&gt;Real examples here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:45.670" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T23:34:05.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3779" CreationDate="2016-07-16T09:27:06.027" Score="8" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I complained about this in the chat and to my chagrin, after finding out &lt;strong&gt;I DO have a positive question score&lt;/strong&gt;, that my best hope was to keep trying at it. Considering that was almost 100 questions ago, I don't think it's going to fix itself and that the badge is bugged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvpfv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvpfv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T13:07:10.120" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T13:07:10.120" Title="Why hasn't the site awarded me the Curious, Inquisitive or Socratic badges?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2016-07-16T15:53:03.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder what “positive question record” means exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Brythan noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234963/give-users-a-way-to-see-their-positive-question-record-score&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; which gives a formula that is approximate or an early draft or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions &gt;= 0.5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have 189 questions if you look at your Rep page, but the badge counter is 101. So a rough estimate is that 101 are the good ones, but good÷total is 0.53. That’s close enough to 0.5 that it’s worth considering that the exact value used for “positive question record” including nuances such as how multiple questions (especially good and bad) on the same day are handled, is coming out on the &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; side of the cutoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, take care to ask more &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions and the badges will trigger after the balance tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T16:21:14.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2016-07-16T16:47:58.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, you have not maintained a positive question record. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formula is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\frac{(\text{total}_q - \text{negative}_q - \text{closed}_q - \text{deleted}_q)}{\text{total}_q} \geq 0.5$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a negative, closed &amp;amp; deleted question counts against you three times! I do see on your profile a lot of deleted questions (~40 or so, and the list on there only retains about 1 year's worth). It seems that our WB SEDE queries do NOT retain deleted questions yet, so I can't pull that data in, but that's the most likely explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-07-16T18:32:16.277" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T18:32:16.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T00:45:09.120" Score="3" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3667/what-worlds-are-you-currently-building&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; I asked the users of the site about their worlds and to my surprise, most of the worlds are inhabited by either humans (JohnWdailey's Great lakes world) or near humans (as with James' Seminosia). I was surprised at the lack of truly alien species we have designed. To all of our creature designers, what species are you creating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will help us figure out who has the most unique, most interested, or even just plain unusual species among our ranks. But please let's limit it to &lt;strong&gt;1 species per user&lt;/strong&gt;, so pick your best if you've got more than one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T03:05:26.660" Title="What species are you currently designing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-07-17T02:38:07.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;we are catepillars&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-human uploaded minds can grow in ways that make them less human. With much larger “immediate” memory, faster processing, perfect memory, etc. Would any cultural stuff still make sence or be interesting?  Post humans strugle to keep their human mind until they find it's holding them back too much. When they start to &lt;em&gt;transscend&lt;/em&gt; there are enough of them to form a new culture, which is totally alien to the human minds.  By embracing their new selves and  ot maintaining a bridge to the human-like mind anymore, they become more alien than we can even understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that when they make the break it’s because they are becoming &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; different. They are truely alien and un-understandable on any cultural level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When uploaded minds outnumber biological people, we start to feel that being meet is just the juvinile phase of our existance, for the first hundred years, like being a child.  But then the transcendence movement makes them realize that the mature minds are themselves just larva, and must be &lt;em&gt;reborn&lt;/em&gt; into something greater and more permanant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T02:38:07.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2016-07-17T19:12:22.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica said we need examples.  So note new cases here to help make the case for feature deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I (JDługosz) just changed a hard-science tag to science-based on this&#xA;question. In this case, the existing answers just had ignored it too,&#xA;as opposed to comments and flags indicating how it’s not suitable for&#xA;this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47590/how-can-a-vertabrate-animal-evolve-for-extended-flight-before-living-on-land&quot;&gt;How can a vertebrate animal evolve for extended flight before living on land?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T23:11:53.340" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-07-17T19:12:22.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-07-17T21:09:57.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am designing a world full of alien species . The best so far is probably the Rocsphere.&#xA;This is pretty much a small brown round rodent living in the desert.&#xA;The rocsphere is a small, fast rodent of the deserts. This perfectly spherical rodent can often be seen rolling around the sands of Haran propelled by bursts of gas. Easy to train and cheap to feed with an exceptional sense of touch it has been used by the Haran tribes in their hunting for many generations. It is now also finding a niche appeal as a children's pet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T21:09:57.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3527" CreationDate="2016-07-18T10:35:15.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, it is silly for it to be closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; when many good answers exist and a hightvoted accepted answer exists. Whatever issues were worked out in the comments already, or understoon well enough by the answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I nominated it for reopening a week ago and got nothing. Can we discuss this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T10:35:15.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-07-20T05:07:49.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;And I'm being highly ambitious, creating galaxies of aliens... (is that too childish?)&#xA;My best was meant to be a lampoon of the so-called ET sightings of large-eyed, smooth blue-skinned beings. This happy alien species would be the leader of a galactic summit, owners of several self-established planetary colonies, master-traders, peacemakers and, more importantly, not interested at all in humans except as curious backwater apes with primitive stuff but nice art worth displaying (creating a highly-inaccurate 'noble savage' image of us they have based on their first impressions when they met us). The rest of the galactic bunch were thought out 'scientifically' but just couldn't resist the funny idea when it first came. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19996" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T05:07:49.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3758" CreationDate="2016-07-20T05:18:57.540" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never. Anything is possible in fiction(like for example a 1g planet that is much more massive than earth is possible via minute dark energy in the core).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2238" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T05:18:57.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2016-07-20T07:00:33.197" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=glarnak&amp;amp;room=17213&quot;&gt;Glarnak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=28962452#28962452&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural height:&lt;/strong&gt; Apr 12 2016 to present day, with an increasing popularity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; Made as a joke by James when Tres-2b was confused by a mathmatical error in question positive scores. I quote; &amp;quot;I was just going to suggest that the SE gods, mainly Glarnak the god of righteous vengeance who smites posters for violating the many laws of the network was angry with you.&amp;quot;&#xA;After the original post it was widely ignored until July 8th when it boomed in activity. It is used as our own personal deity of worldbuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T07:00:33.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2016-07-20T07:29:16.080" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meme:&lt;/strong&gt; XKCD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originator:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/320/could-venoms-evolve-naturally-in-mammals/321#321&quot;&gt;Liath&lt;/a&gt; (at least on this site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural height:&lt;/strong&gt; Evenly distributed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; XKCD is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webcomic about of romance, sarcasm, math and language&lt;/a&gt; featuring a monochromatic cast of characters who interact with eachother. Due to its unique and unusual scientific perspective, links to(and sometimes images) it are commonly placed around answers and sometimes questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T07:29:16.080" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-21T06:27:45.063" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question How to construct a consistent ecology in an rpg fantasy world with monsters was closed because of of-topic, while I agree that the original question was, the most reacent edit should be on topic. Could the question be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46478&quot;&gt;How to construct a consistent ecology in an rpg fantasy world with monsters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what is the reason for not doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="411" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T23:07:08.673" Title="Reopen consistent ecology in fantasy world?" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-07-21T06:30:55.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blatantly rewriting my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46962/what-would-a-collective-consciousness-look-like&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Anthill Would be More of an Ant Pile&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EG1c0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EG1c0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Quite literally a pile&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a living organism that needs to hunt, move and grow, remaining in one place would not be very good. The best solution is to act in a similar manner to army ants. Instead of always moving in a direction, they would move as a pile. The primary part of this pile would act as the anthill, with specialized ants guarding the outside. This caste would act as both the Immune system and skin, their best defense would be a combination of formic acid and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odontomachus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trap jaws&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Soldier Caste would also be present in the limbs (see further down) and in small numbers inside of the pile itself. They would be the most expendable of all castes and also the most common. The Soldier also takes on the task of telling the difference between friend and foe. Another caste similar to this would be the Drones, they would basically work as an extension of sight; while all of the ants would attribute to sight (giving Anthills 360 degree spherical vision), Drones would allow the Anthill to find food and predators much quicker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside of this pile you would see a lot of odd grouping of different castes acting as different organs. The workers would act as the dirt on the diagram below.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RrYTt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RrYTt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Queen; The Circulatory, Immune and Reproductive System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Queen would serve three human purposes; The Spleen, The Bone Marrow and the Reproductive system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By laying eggs, she would be making members of castes, Doing this she works as the Spleen and the Bone Marrow. If the larva is a Drone, a Soldier or a Biter, then she made members of the Immune system acting as the bone marrow. If the larva is any other caste; Worker, Courier, etc then she has made members of the Circulatory system acting as the spleen. If she produces a queen, then the new queen will slowly bud off forming a new anthill, acting as the reproductive system (see the Reproduction System).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Farms, Digestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ants as a species have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;farming&lt;/a&gt; for over 50 million years. It is completely possible that a part of the digestive system would be a Farmer caste. Using aphid droppings or a kind of Fungus as food. This farming would have be the equivalent to fat storage in humans; the food produced would be used in case of lack of outside food. An interesting idea here is for ants to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bioluminescent_fungi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cultivate bioluminescent fungi&lt;/a&gt; in order to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-colored-transparent-ants-are-what-they-eat-25521112/?no-ist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make themselves glow&lt;/a&gt;. The stomach as a digestive organ would not exist. It would be more akin to fat, since each ants would digest on its own, the stomach would only store food until an ant gets hungry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Reproductive System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anthills would be a hermaphrodite species, able to act as both Male and Female. The female half produces Queens when resources are plenty and they have a mate to keep it alive. The male half provides the Queen with a place to grow while it is weak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Queen produces a Queen (due to a high amount of resources available to the larva) The new Queen (or Princess) will fly into the Anthills mate where it  will act similar to marsupial mammals. When inside the 'Father', it will be protected and provided with a breeding male to create a combination of genetic material. The new Queen starts to make its own ants, a specialized caste is needed (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45279/how-do-members-of-a-collective-consciousness-separate-themselves-from-another&quot;&gt;The Soldier Caste&lt;/a&gt;, see below) to tell that the Princess is not an intruder and alert other ants of this difference. As the Princess' ants grow in amount, she will start to bud off and eventually become her own Queen of a new Anthill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Soldiers, The Immune System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nd7kv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nd7kv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said above the Soldier Caste is the most important of all castes, they would be built to prevent disease from spreading by catching it and abandoning the pile, like a sick dog. Also the dumbest caste, they are weaker in all but 2 regards (in which they are ahead by a wide margin); Fighting and Smelling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are are extremely powerful, using the 2 best weapons an individual ant has: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odontomachus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trap jaws&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formic_acid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Formic acid&lt;/a&gt;. Trap Jaws, as seen above, work as razor sharp biological mousetraps delivering a very powerful bite. Formic acid is the simplest carboxylic acid, most commonly found in ant venom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their defensive skills are matched only by their sense of smell. They can smell the difference between friendly things, such as other random anthills and enemies, such as predators or anthills with intent to harm and then transmit a scent to the rest of the colony with instructions to treat them as a friend or foe. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Nervous System&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information and coordination works via pheromones and shared stomach contents between Ants, with no central controller, this is the primary difference between an animal and a collective. A specific caste, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45184/is-the-idea-of-a-collective-consciousness-realistic&quot;&gt;the Courier&lt;/a&gt;, specializing in sending messages directly to distant reaches rather than diffusing slowly through the population allows for the collective Anthill to think. These can relay messages from one organ to another, directly and quickly. Like an octopus, the Anthill has distributive intelligence, Couriers are found in every part of the pile. Couriers are not like nerve tissue, they are nerve tissue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Couriers work by using pheromones, which in turn rely on the hardest sense to duplicate; smell. These pheromones work much like electrical energy in the human brain, though not as efficient, they replace intelligence for a better rounded creature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Growth and Death&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only factor that limits an Anthills growth is the amount of resources available to it. Similar to a cell, where at a certain size the food will not be able to reach the nucleus, size is a factor for Anthills. If the anthill becomes to large it will need to not only always eat, but be on a food source. Unlike most Earthern animals, age and size have no similarity or connection in Anthills. After a new Anthill buds off, it will technically be fully grown, though the will still age. An Anthill will likely be considered 'fully grown' when it is able to reproduce (though cultural reasons may change this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to aging, wounds and disease, Anthills are practically immortal. The Queen simply replaces herself as the spleen when she nears death, Wounds are not a problem due to the Anthills lack of blood and disease only kills an individual ant. Of course these are generalizations and they do have exceptions. For example, the Anthill has a very high metabolism and thus is very susceptible to starvation, especially in a community. Aging also has its limits, as (unless you go with the self reproducing method) the Anthill needs a mate to prevent dying of old age within &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2785/why-do-ants-live-so-long&quot;&gt;30 years&lt;/a&gt;, also even assuming the Anthill can endless provide itself with a new queen memory would be fading quickly after 100+ years considering smell is its primary source of memory. Wounds are an Anthills strongest immunity, the only way to kill an Anthill with wounds is to 1; kill the queen or 2; kill all the ants. Saying an Anthill is immune to disease is a stretch, because if the disease is contagious and the first ant to catch it spreads it before leaving, then the Anthill is like any other animal with disease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feeding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerging from the Central pile are &quot;limbs&quot; (I use the term loosely, a better name would be Chains) consisting of primarily Soldiers with a few Couriers. these will protrude from the central pile for many different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vsGcv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vsGcv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To meet a predator early on, same reason you put an army outside the castle. By fighting the enemy from a distance, you decrease the odds of damage to the central pile.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hunting. If it takes less energy to drag the prey to the central pile than to move the pile (which, unless it ways equal to or more than the pile it is) then it makes more sense to drag the prey.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On of the biggest advantages to a collective over monobodied animals is their ability to spread out and search as a group. For example, if the Pile is starving they can send multiple chains in random directions, follow the one that finds food and let the others die.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T06:30:55.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-07-21T08:01:34.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Years Long Day World&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the older users on the site may know of the Years long day world which was included in my earliest questions and is one of my oldest worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BN0P2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BN0P2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Planetary Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Years long day world or Erre was at one point, extremely similar to Earth. Until the sudden slowing, which killed 95% of vertebrate life, occurred. After the sudden slowing occurred, the moon became much larger and faster and the day went from 36 hours to 9 years. Another odd feature of this world is its unusual amount of volcanoes and small water percentage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sudden Slowing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sudden Slowing was caused by a shower of extremely large meteors hit the planet at an angle against its rotation. These meteors came when a nearby planet crashed into its moon sending  extremely dense, iron rich fragments into Erre. Its moon blocked a lot of these but many still hit Erre. The ones that hit its moon increased its Lunar cycle to 3 days and the ones that hit Erre slowed its annual cycle to 9 years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44759/is-a-sudden-slowing-realistic&quot;&gt;Is a sudden slowing realistic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How Life Found its Way&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said, billions of animals animals went extinct during this time. The effects of the shower ere not as deadly as the night was. Very few animals knew to migrate and even fewer plants could survive the night. The species that best survived were marsupial Bipeds, as they could avoid the risks involved with pregnancy and walk long differences (these became the Erre equivalent to primates). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22377/what-kind-of-animal-could-grow-quickly-enough-and-produce-enough-offspring-to-re&quot;&gt;What would the effects be of a 9 year day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20830/how-would-sleep-cycles-work-in-a-world-with-a-years-long-day&quot;&gt;How would sleep cycles work in a world with a years long-day&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44176/how-would-plants-survive-an-extremely-long-cold-night&quot;&gt;How would plants survive an extremely long cold night&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lokk Ness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dominant species on Erre are Lokk (pronounced Loch (as in loch ness, hence the pun)) a species on bipedal marsupial-like mammals. They appear to be similar in form to baboons, rats and big cats, giving birth to litters of up to 7 while only really raising the 1 or 2 that are most intelligent, leaving the others as bait (though modern parents let all 7 live, they do indeed still pick favorites). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22770/how-long-would-these-children-take-to-grow-up&quot;&gt;How long would these children take to grow up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22773/could-two-tails-work&quot;&gt;Could two tails work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32105/how-could-a-creature-like-this-evolve&quot;&gt;How could a creature like this evolve&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a time when I thought that for some reason they would use air-ships on this world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20805/could-mobile-cities-exist&quot;&gt;Could mobile cities exist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20998/what-is-the-sack-to-ship-ratio&quot;&gt;What is the sack to ship ratio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22474/large-mobile-farms&quot;&gt;Large mobile farms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another odd idea was that the would need to farm to be sapient (untrue as early humans were hunter gatherers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20814/food-other-than-plants&quot;&gt;Food other than plants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22377/what-kind-of-animal-could-grow-quickly-enough-and-produce-enough-offspring-to-re&quot;&gt;What kind of animal could grow quickly enough and produce enough offspring to replace agriculture as a food source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T08:01:34.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-07-22T12:46:11.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've two I'm working on at present, firstly - the fantasy world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to our own, the world consists of several continents, the largest of which, Ereskine, is where the action is to take place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elves, Dwarves and many other fantasy creatures exist, but magic is pretty hit and miss - being used more for combat and other large &quot;industrial&quot; use as it is inaccurate, grossly powerful, and dangerous even to its own users. The politics of the setting are largely city state based, and there is generally peace, as around a thousand years ago the various factions of humanity, Elder-Man (elf) and Drewomae (dwarf) united to wipe out the dragons. The golden peacetime since has led to a time of peace and prosperity that has benefitted all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few hundred years ago, a magical ore was discovered that did not weigh what it should. It turns out this magical material exerts a magical upward force counter to gravity equal to its percentage alloy. This makes it very useful for armour, and creates weapons with a much different balance than ones made from steel. It's expensive though, so only the nobles of the setting really have access to the ore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dwarves discovered this metal in one place, and one place only. They mined the Linscor hills extensively, creating a vast city of tunnels. Along with the ore, they found vast veins of gold, huge deposits of diamonds and scores of rubies bigger than fists. Their job was made easier by natural tunnels, enormous caves and vast caverns riddling the area. Their wealth coupled with the challenges of sustaining the growth from dwindling resources fuelled a huge innovation boom, and clock, steam and coal powered devices of a most unusual sort began to make an appearance. Vast blimps shipped their produce abroad. The surrounding human towns, particularly the city of Lins, did very well indeed out of the booming dwarven economy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Cataclysm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, one of the little known problems with the ore is that it amplifies itself - that is, you get a large enough amount in a small area and its force against gravity begins to increase. The network of tunnels and honeycomb of caves and rooms eventually led to a series of earthquakes. The earthquakes destroyed the dwarven city, and devastated Lins. The townsfolk worked to rebuild, only to be hit by another devastating earthquake a few months later that lifted the Linscor hills into the sky. Worse, shorty after the rise of the hills, strange creatures began to be seen deep in the crater - winged silvery creatures flitting between the floating island and the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon it became apparent that the dragons have returned after the cataclysm. Lins rapidly militarised as a result to protect itself from the threat posed by the creatures, whose vicious adult form feeds off steel and iron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current state&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dwarves were held responsible for the death and destruction and are ostracised from society, scratching a living as miners, tinkerers, and vagrants. The Lins Milita still control lins with an iron fist, and although dragon attacks come pretty much daily, they have managed to pull together a system of defences which minimises death and destruction. Other cities, worried about Lins apparent military might, are also building their armed forces, and things look to be getting interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dragons&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dragons in this setting digest and alloy metals with their scales and bones. As youngsters, they crave and eat precious metals, giving them a silver and gold sheen. As adults, they move onto iron and copper. They have an as yet undetermined relationship with the ore, as their bones are a form of this metal, aiding in their ability to fly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copper dragons are more reclusive, and prefer natural sources of their metal. As the copper in their scales oxidises, it turns them green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iron dragons are hot headed, vicious, and will actively hunt humans for fun, saving their iron and steel for later. The iron in their scales turns brown, and then a strong red as they age, with black dragons being the eldest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these types are dangerous, although particular care should be taken to avoid mother dragons, whose defence of their young is legendary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;==&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other setting I have on the go is the setting for my upcoming RPG series i'll be running with friends. Its a series of worlds, each different, and really only one reigion on each so we can do a classic monster-of-the-week game. Only over-arching thing really that needs designing in a worldbuilding kind of way is the huge gribbley insectoid bug-monster I'm inetending to be a recurring enemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10713" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T12:46:11.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3793" CreationDate="2016-07-22T23:07:08.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's not going to get reopened in this state because it's not about worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not asking how to design the ecology of your world, your asking how your going to present the description to the readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definition should fit in limited space, maybe about 50 book pages of&#xA;  easy to read text (should fit in an RPG book along other world&#xA;  information and rules)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only defining details that seems important to the human inhabitants&#xA;  (no need to include bacteria for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The definition should show how the &quot;food pyramid&quot; works and avoid&#xA;  mysteries such that how some creatures would find something to eat&#xA;  given their habitat or other aspect of their definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not your question then you should edit it and just focus on the: how to create the ecosystem, which is a big topic on it's own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T23:07:08.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-07-23T01:19:40.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What happens when I poke holes in the language barrier?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a world with magic. Quite a lot of it, actually. One of the spells is telepathy (okay, there are a bunch of telepathy-related spells, but that's out of the scope of this question). Telepathy isn't just silent talking; it's sharing images, emotions, and meanings rather than conveying that through other means. Because of that, anyone who can telepathically send can be perfectly understood by anyone who can receive, no matter how vast the cultural gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telepathy works a lot like telephone calls. You &amp;quot;ring&amp;quot; someone, and they know the &amp;quot;phone number&amp;quot; of the person who's calling. If they choose to pick up, you can communicate with them. There's one big difference between the modern phone system and telepathy; you can't do conference calls (though, if you don't mind expending a lot of energy, each person can connect individually to each other person and send the messages through each link at the same time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this affect interaction between different countries, or different people of different languages? For example, diplomacy could be conducted through thought rather than risking mistranslations -- how would this affect international relations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to know what tags to use. Aside from that, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; ask for clarifications if I haven't stated anything, because my magic system is already made and I'd like to avoid changing it if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5187" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T15:36:56.853" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-23T05:54:13.973" Score="17" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/885&quot;&gt;sandbox questions&lt;/a&gt; don’t do any good if the proposed questions don’t get any feedback.  I’ve referred people to this sandbox, and the idea is to get better posts. For that to work we need to &lt;strong&gt;discuss&lt;/strong&gt; why a question is too broad or unclear, and help the OP edit it so that it can be posted as a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I see sandbox questions with no comments.  In particular a closed question I suggested putting here for advice on improving—nada.  With the influx of newcomers I think this is more important than ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I’m posting this as a &lt;strong&gt;call for more attention&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you’re not at the rep milestone for review tasks, how about doing a similar pre-view here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are tough things like figuring out why some questions are acceptable and others are too (whatever).  If it’s OK, at least not that so the OP can see that the Q migbt be accepted already.  Harder is tightening it up, but experienced members can at least grunt and wave in the right general direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Easy stuff:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the right tags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the OP’s grammar and English of a high quality?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might this be a duplicate?  Or not a dup enough to close, but older questions can provide input and allow the OP to refer to them explicitly and carve out a more specialized niche or compare and contrast with the other posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the OP missing something vital?  Being informed of the right term allows for effective searching on the subject, or a good general link can allow the OP to better research before asking, and ask a better question while using standard terms and linking to the reference material.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should the question be asked on a different SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No news is…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    No comments means all is OK? Or did anybody even read it?  A quick comment noting that these above checklist has been checked by someone would be good to note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No time or interest to reply in detail? Just note the non-ok-ness at least, if nobody else has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T06:52:44.240" Title="Call to Sandbox Duty" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-07-23T07:21:09.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;When is the earliest humans could evolve?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many fantasy stories of humans living in the world with prehistoric animals, mainly stemming from the classic image of the cave man. Despite strong hopes, this is unrealistic as human evolution has been occurring for a measly two million years. But surely there are ways humans could evolve sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When is the earliest humans could evolve in the prehistoric time scale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T00:56:26.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-07-23T07:26:47.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why would more than 2 eyes be favored on a mammal?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the wondeful, wacky world of invertebrate evolution, multiple 'eyes' are a common feature, though this rarely happens in vertebrate evolution. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sure there are examples of when vertebrate evolution has chosen to give its animals three eyes&lt;/a&gt;, but it has never chosen to give it 4 or more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evolutionary reasons would a species have for evolving more than 2 eyes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T04:11:15.663" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T04:11:15.663" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T03:10:39.910" Score="11" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;question sandbox&lt;/a&gt; has helped a lot of people.  At this writing it has 146 answers, including the deleted ones (many of which were deleted after turning into actual questions on the main site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox works when the community provides early feedback.  This has been spotty, hence this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3800/call-to-sandbox-duty&quot;&gt;call for sandbox duty&lt;/a&gt;.  But it's also been pointed out that it can be hard to find the questions in need of attention there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default view of a page sorts the answers by votes and moves all deleted ones to the end of the page.  But for something like this, it can be more useful to sort the page by &lt;em&gt;activity&lt;/em&gt;, so that the most-recently-touched posts show up first.  But that mixes deleted and undeleted posts, so you end up with (currently) five pages of answers to page through.  That's no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might not be as much of an issue if we didn't have so many old, undeleted answers.  The sandbox contains posts last edited in 2015 and not deleted.  Did they turn into questions (and so can be deleted)?  Did their authors abandon them?  Does the sandbox have a time limit after which posts should be deleted regardless of outcome?  More than a year ago there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2244/28&quot;&gt;some discussion&lt;/a&gt; about having a time limit, but it wasn't pursued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is heavily linked, so I don't think we want to just close it down and start a new one.  But it's getting harder to manage in its current state.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do about the current state of the sandbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T17:40:48.430" Title="Sandbox cleanup, 2016 edition" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3804" CreationDate="2016-07-24T04:14:29.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should simply delete questions that are posted on the main site, not the way they are deleted currently, but actually delete it so that it no longer appears on the sandbox&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T04:14:29.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T04:38:35.277" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48015/what-is-the-fastest-way-for-a-robot-with-superhuman-capabilities-to-make-money&quot;&gt;What is the fastest way for a robot with superhuman capabilities to make money?&lt;/a&gt; has, so far, 38 answers.  (Did you know there's an auto-flag for &quot;more than 30 answers&quot;?)  On a quick scan most of them look good, though it looks like there might be some overlap.  I see two that are about mining bitcoins, for example; I'm not sure if they're effectively duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the community please take a look at the answers there?  Is everything ok, or are there answers that need to be de-duplicated, expanded, or otherwise improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T07:52:07.957" Title="Please review answers on this popular question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3804" CreationDate="2016-07-24T05:32:23.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe start a fresh sandbox but not delete the old. Start a new one when it gets too large and name it e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Sandbox 2016-August&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T05:32:23.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3804" CreationDate="2016-07-24T10:21:09.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking about this and I think we should try and delete any question that has not been edited for over 6 months. If we want we could give a warning via a comment to the OP then wait a week and If we have had no reply delete the question but I think it is easier just to delete any question from over 6 months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T10:21:09.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3806" CreationDate="2016-07-24T10:24:32.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few on gambling. At least 3 that I have found. Should I do anything to them or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48032/17720&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48032/17720&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48020/17720&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48020/17720&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48129/17720&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48129/17720&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second possibly dupe of third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T07:52:07.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T23:34:31.807" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see, as I write this, two posts here on meta that were modified by Community 4 and 6 hours ago. Yet visiting them I see no comments or edit notices and it appears that nothing has happened in a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus is frustrating because I look at the changes specifically. How do I know what to react to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somone in the know explain how these were touched without leaving any trace other than a tantalizing note implying that I should find something new/different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:54:19.403" Title="Community modified *how*?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3810" CreationDate="2016-07-24T23:54:19.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the Community &quot;bump&quot;.  Periodically, though I'm not sure what the period is on metas, a script runs that looks for an old, open question with at least one answer but no upvoted answers, and bumps it up to the top again.  The idea is to get more eyes on it -- were those answers ok but overlooked?  Are they not ok and somebody can do better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related on Meta.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/279203/how-can-we-make-the-purpose-of-community-bumping-more-obvious&quot;&gt;How can we make the purpose of Community &amp;quot;bumping&amp;quot; more obvious?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:54:19.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3806" CreationDate="2016-07-25T01:39:12.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it needs a (community wiki) summary that’s just a bullet list of ideas noted already.  Cool if it linked to which answers mention them, but I don’t expect anyone to do that work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T01:39:12.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3804" CreationDate="2016-07-25T07:09:45.357" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that we start a new sandbox post, and link it from the old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words the old sandbox post becomes a directory listing the new ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Welcome to the Sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one got a little full, so we've created some more. You should still link to this one as we will update it whenever a new one is created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current Sandbox: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sandbox 2016 (linky)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous Sandboxes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Original Sandbox 2015 (Linky)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Future Sandbox 2026 (Linky)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get the idea :), obviously for now there would only be the one. In general we'd create a new Sandbox for each calendar year, that can be adjusted based on demand though. Perhaps one each 6 months is called for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All content other than the list of links should be removed and placed in the current sandbox only. All old sandboxes should contain only the link to the directory. This is to help stop people getting confused and posting in the wrong one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T07:09:45.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2016-07-25T12:49:13.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions like this fall into a grey area that's a fuzzy set between science-based and science-fiction. My interpretation was the OP wanted a FTL drive with something approaching scientific plausibility. This isn't the same thing as scientific reality. It just needs to be grounded enough in science to sound better than just turning on a FTL drive. If it's a wormhole drive or translocation-drive, that sounds more scientific and many readers will expect that. Of course, there will always be readers who don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, no-one objects to vampires in vampire fiction, because the blood suckers don't exist. They're a fictional convention. FTL drives are a conventional contrivance of science-fiction. Even if they're impossible, there will be writers and readers who want make their FTL drives seem more scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues about questions and answers and how they're edited are extremely complex and fluid. Some questions have answers that are blatantly wrong or illogical and receive lots of points. While good answers are ignored or passed over. Not always, of course, but enough of the time. This is offset by the sheer brilliance and quality of other questions and answers filled with well reasoned arguments and a breadth of knowledge displayed by people who do have expertise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tags should be better regarded as sign posts pointing the way to what the questions and answers are about, and not absolute arbiters of content. Any system or theory of classification always runs up against this realisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only conceptual sets are pure. The real world is filled with impure and inexact groupings of everything and anything. Where tags fall short they can be refined but they will never be made perfect. Maybe tags can be improved in the long run, but this will only happen in small steps. That doesn't mean people shouldn't stop trying to get them better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T12:49:13.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3816" CreationDate="2016-07-25T17:35:39.627" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;User laziness at the best: I was browsing one question here on worldbuilding on my mobile device. As I scroll, I accidentally put my finger on &quot;downvote&quot; arrow, causing vote down on one of provided answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I do cast upvote instead, but in some cases I would like just to leave answer/question as it was (effective zero vote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, it is just internet points, but sometimes I do this on question or answer I believe does not deserve downvote, but I think it also does not deserve upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there mechanic to &quot;null&quot; my vote on question or answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T22:47:38.607" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T22:47:38.607" Title="What to do if you accidentally downvote something you did not want to downvote?" Tags="|support|down-votes|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3815" CreationDate="2016-07-25T19:19:01.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;By clicking on the downvote arrow again, you can undo your vote. This is the same with upvotes as well. Keep in mind that after 5 minutes this will not work without an edit, so just randomly edit (temporarily), do the deed, then re-edit back to its originalpoint&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T19:52:18.267" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T19:52:18.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T02:10:40.640" Score="8" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the more confusing things about this site is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. Looking through the meta site, there aren't a lot of clear policies surrounding the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular problem I have is that there are a lot of questions tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; where the OP seems to have used the tag by mistake. For example, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48435/would-a-world-tree-be-feasible-in-real-life&quot;&gt;Would a &amp;#39;World Tree&amp;#39; be feasible in real life?&lt;/a&gt; is tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, but a quick look through the comments shows that the OP isn't actually looking for hard science answers. So it seems reasonable to assume that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to go through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag and remove questions like that. I think doing so would make the purpose of the tag clearer to new users, and it would also make it easier for people who like real &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions to find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a lot of cases it's not as clear cut whether a question is incorrectly tagged or not. For example, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44909/could-my-moons-planet-system-be-stable&quot;&gt;Could my moons-planet system be stable?&lt;/a&gt;: the answers don't meet the hard-science requirements, and the question is so simple I'm not sure it even needs hard-science answers, but the OP didn't really do anything to indicate that they used the tag by mistake. So maybe they're still waiting for an answer that meets the hard-science requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking for is a clear set of guidelines to determine whether a question should be tagged as hard-science or not. There has been a little bit of discussion on meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2761/is-the-use-of-the-hard-science-tag-acceptable-in-questions-with-a-non-hard-pre&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1902/171&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2211/171&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but there really isn't a specific guideline that someone could use  to retag questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, speaking of tagging, could someone create a hard-science tag on the &lt;em&gt;meta site&lt;/em&gt;? This would make it easier to find all the policies related to the hard-science tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T14:37:01.940" Title="Identifying incorrectly tagged [hard-science] questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3716" CreationDate="2016-07-27T01:47:10.730" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just reminded of something that we do on another site that I think would help, that we can do today (requires no code changes or special actions from SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Mi Yodeya, once a year for a few weeks, we allow questions that are &amp;quot;purim torah&amp;quot; -- humorous questions usually based on misunderstanding some text or custom.  (Trust me; this deviation from conventional Q&amp;amp;A makes sense in context.)  We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/797/472&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; about this, and we require every Purim Torah post to include some boilerplate text at the end, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;This question is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim_Torah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Purim Torah&lt;/a&gt; and is not intended to be taken completely seriously. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/797/&quot;&gt;Purim Torah policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/55237/472&quot;&gt;an example question&lt;/a&gt; to show that in context.  (You can browse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/purim-torah-in-jest&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt; for a lot more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if we did something similar for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions?  I think part of our problem is that people either don't notice the tag before answering or notice it but don't realize it's special.  It is far better to alert people &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; they spend time writing answers that we have requirements for those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a candidate text.  This links to the tag, and we would add something about using this text (with cut-and-paste-ready markdown) to the wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;This question asks for hard science.  All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc.  Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;the tag description&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; We now have a post notice for questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SoLwb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SoLwb.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A script is applying it to the 200+ questions that currently have this tag.  For new questions (or retaggings of old questions, though in this case you should probably &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; do that), use a custom flag to have a moderator add it.  (No, it can't be auto-added.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T18:32:52.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-27T23:57:39.383" Score="7" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is weird. While posting a question of mine today, I noticed the background &quot;flickering&quot; as I repeatedly typed and removed a space from the markdown for a bullet point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the space after the hyphen on the left, with the space on the right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aIdZ0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aIdZ0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jdopK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jdopK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some 50x50 excerpts from those images, zoomed and with increased contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UqJl9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UqJl9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U4923.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U4923.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to clear up any remaining doubt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aaR1v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aaR1v.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmaCV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmaCV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Dust&quot; on the desert is jumping around compared to the robot and its companion. Looks like two separate images layered over each other, and one of them responding weirdly to the question box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've typed this I've noticed the same &quot;jump&quot; happening when I type spaces, so it's not specific to bullet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very distracting and annoying, and seems like something that's easy to fix (just merge the layers into one image).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on Google Chrome if that's relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastEditorUserId="1971" LastEditDate="2016-07-28T05:16:31.837" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T05:16:31.837" Title="Strange bug with the background art while writing a question" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T22:15:37.630" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48940/a-method-to-cause-maximum-pain-to-a-human&quot;&gt;A method to cause maximum pain to a human&lt;/a&gt; asks how to cause the most pain to a human while torturing him to death.  The question lays out parameters, including not wanting the person to go out of his mind too quickly, because pain includes being aware enough for it to register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, this question squicks me, enough that I haven't read most of the answers in order to be able to process flags.  I &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; that this is for a work of fiction involving a psychotic despot.  I'm not criticizing the person who asked the question in order to be able to write that fiction.  I know that my reaction is just that -- &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; reaction, and that some classes of fiction turn me off is not a reflection on others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, all that said... is this the kind of content we want here?  Do we have a minimum level of (reaching for a word) &quot;decorum&quot; or a maximum level of squickiness, beyond the bounds of which we shouldn't host content?  Or does anything go, so long as it's not hate speech, rude, or close-worthy for the reasons that apply to all questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me anticipate some responses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm quite aware that there's lots of information out there that's way more gruesome, explicit, or sadistic than anything we're likely to get here.  This isn't about &lt;em&gt;preventing access&lt;/em&gt; to such information (which would be impossible); it's about whether we want it &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not a free-speech issue.  First, as already noted, it's not about suppressing information.  Second, a community is allowed to set bounds about what is welcome within its confines, and the owner of a service (SE) is allowed to set rules about what it will host.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about this question has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/281862/162102&quot;&gt;raised on the SE-wide meta site&lt;/a&gt;.  But the question doesn't violate any SE rules, so the proper place to discuss the propriety of such questions is here on Worldbuilding Meta.  (I brought this up in our chat room to gauge initial reactions, but there aren't a lot of people around on the weekend.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T22:15:37.630" Title="Are questions about torture ok?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-08-01T01:00:08.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-01T13:28:59.887" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to come across as petty or ungrateful over what are essentially meaningless internet points, so I was just wondering what the rule or general concensus is in this situation. I feel I answered the question quite thoroughly and OP has accepted my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer did get more upvotes than mine though, so I assume this one would get the 50% auto bounty if OP doesn't actively do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48336/how-would-system-like-weregild-value-the-life-of-a-child&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a quick comment to OP asking what s/he is planning to do with the bounty (if anything) be acceptable, or should I just forget it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about it, comments reminding OP to award bounty are about the same as comments reminding OP to accept an answer: Bad form, even if not specifically banned. I'll just leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21475" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T03:38:25.217" Title="Is it considered bad form to ask OP to assign bounty if s/he has accepted your answer?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3821" CreationDate="2016-08-01T13:38:24.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any harm in asking.  But as you mention they are imaginary so I wouldn't worry about it too much either way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where bounty points go is totally up to the person offering and in the case of an accepted answer having less votes than another answer I am not 100% sure where they would go in an auto assigned situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hunch would be it goes to the accepted answer but perhaps one of the other folks around here can verify that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T13:38:24.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3821" CreationDate="2016-08-01T14:54:55.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a tad &lt;em&gt;odd&lt;/em&gt; that the asker found one answer acceptable, but still felt the need to offer a bounty. Perhaps hindsight, and they really wished they waited for a new answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, myself, am curious as to why she did that. However it doesn't break any rules (obviously) and I don't find it rude on her part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just look at it this way: If she doesn't reward you the bounty, you're no worse off (point wise) than if she never had offered it in the first place, and if what she wished she did was, indeed, hold off on accepting an answer and that's what she (hypothetically) &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; done you're actually in a better place point-wise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I don't understand it (and am curious like you), you might still get the bounty, and if you don't get the bounty you're not worse for the wear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T14:54:55.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3821" CreationDate="2016-08-01T21:52:13.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The person who offered the bounty gets reminder email three days before the end, and again 24 hours before the end (I think), and again when the grace period starts.  (After the end of the seven days, the person still has 24 hours in which to award it.)  So the odds that the person will forget about the bounty are low.  So a reminder isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; sometimes seen people comment asking what further information the bounty-giver is seeking, particularly when the bounty criteria are unclear in some way.  Such queries are on behalf of the whole community, in a way.  But, in general, my personal opinion is similar to what you added in your edit -- it feels a little like &quot;plz accept my answer&quot; and can rub people the wrong way.  While there's no rule against it, I would caution you against doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of the auto-award is a little off, by the way.  Here's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;the documentation&lt;/a&gt; says about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award the bounty within 24 hours of the bounty period ending, half the bounty value will be automatically awarded to the top voted answer posted after the bounty start, provided it has a score of at least 2. If no new answer matches this requirement, no reputation will be awarded at all, and the reputation used on the bounty will be lost forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that were already present before the bounty started aren't eligible for the auto-award.  (All answers are eligible for a manual award.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T21:52:13.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-02T16:56:14.517" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;@AndreiROM's (very valid) discussion about the scope issue on this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49373/how-would-be-our-society-if-it-was-populated-by-anthropomorphic-dogs&quot;&gt;How would be our society if it was populated by anthropomorphic dogs?&lt;/a&gt;, and my past experience with a different question gives rise to a different issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say that you have a number of questions about a specific topic (@Chaotic's linked question works as well as an example as any). Picking a specific aspect about the broader topic often narrows down the scope to an acceptable question. However this causes an issue when the smaller scoped questions affect one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asker gets a well-researched answer about their more narrowed-scoped question, selects it as the reality in his or her world, and moves on to the next question, posted separately. Since these aspects affect one another, the asker includes either a brief summary (most likely to be read) or a link to his or her previous question (most complete, but is skipped in my experience), and says that such is fact in his or her world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The responders to the next question very likely have an issue with the previous answer. Maybe it seems illogical, unreasonable, or scientifically impossible as best as they understand. The responders are forced to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not respond to the second quesiton at all, possibly resurrecting the first question with a new answer in lieu of answering the second&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get off topic in their reply to the second question and address an erroneous assumption established by the first question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide an answer that they genuinely believe founded on an incorrection or dysfunctional assumption&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...For technical sites with far more concrete answers such as Stack Overflow this doesn't become an issue, but on World Building, where almost every answer is inevitably tied to opinion (at worse) and judgment calls and/or armchair engineering (at best), this seems to break down. Even more when these questions become something of a chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these issues, what is the best way to handle these situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I can provide a theoretical example if needed to offer something more concrete to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T18:12:20.660" Title="How to break down to ask a question of too large of a scope" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3825" CreationDate="2016-08-02T19:53:18.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So.  You're right to say that conflicts can arise when you ask stories in a series and I think in the end, that can be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main services we offer people asking questions is to help ensure internal consistency in a created world (as physics can often not apply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When helping people narrow things down we should do a couple things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify that the initial question is too broad/opinion based etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help them narrow the scope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify a good place to start a series.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the important bit (to the question you asked).  When starting a series, no matter how interested you are in some specific aspect of the world, you &lt;strong&gt;should start with the most basic questions first&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the dog world example, the question someone may be itching to get answered is:  &quot;How would the market for tennis balls be impacted&quot; (cause...you know, dogs like to play fetch!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's great but if you haven't developed an evolutionary path, or cultural norms or a host of other things you may get yourself in trouble and have conflicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So.  In conclusion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The asker&lt;/strong&gt; needs to take responsibility for asking a series in the correct order, and the community should be willing to discuss the correct order to assist them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answerers&lt;/strong&gt; need to be willing to read and accept the outcomes from the previous questions and answers (which should, as relevance dictates, be part of the follow on questions) except in the case where a logical/physical inconsistency pops up.  It'll still happen, even if you order the questions well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voters&lt;/strong&gt; need to make sure that an answer, however lengthy or witty, addresses the question and background information being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-08-02T20:05:26.100" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T20:05:26.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3705" CreationDate="2016-08-05T14:33:48.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3346/22649&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; from a previous question about opinion-based closures. The closure is not that answers will have opinions, but that answers will be &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; opinions. If answers are primarily opinions, there's no way to evaluate how &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; an answer is, just which one people &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; more. Further, opinion-based questions are nearly always &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there's not an animal on the planet that isn't a contender, and no answer will be more &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; than any others, simply more &lt;em&gt;liked&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast with this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50590/what-royal-title-can-an-absolutistic-ruler-have&quot;&gt;recent question about what to name an ultimate ruler&lt;/a&gt;. There's a fairly small list of possible answers, and some are &lt;em&gt;more correct&lt;/em&gt; than others given the parameter of the question (Norse/Northern European culture, specifics of the ruler's rulership).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T14:33:48.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3832" CreationDate="2016-08-06T02:51:23.793" Score="8" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not entirely get why &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50676/prevent-sexual-manipulation&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; is being downvoted so heavily. I looked in the most popular answer and by the looks of it, they're placing their opinions on top of mine instead of properly answering my question within the guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was how to prevent people from using physical looks as a source of income on a large scale as I believe it's not right for someone to have such a huge advantage over others. But they said that there's nothing wrong with doing that and then they come up with a seemingly joke response that doesn't solve my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in my described situation, it is immoral because my society keeps itself stable by the citizens working hard to support each other. But if one realises he doesn't have to do all that work in order to support themselves, then others will follow and the whole community will collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23811" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T03:25:12.380" Title="Why is this disliked?" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|down-votes|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-08-06T07:57:52.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Will humans modify their own DNA?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, I suppose our technological advancements will be so advanced that we will be able to fully understand our DNA. Thus would it be feasible if we would be able to create a custom human-like DNA and create offspring of our own desire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean humans can be born without any disease or defects. Mothers could also make their children look the way the wanted to. However, it may be possible for scientists to modify the genetic code so much that humans with flying wings attached to their back or human-animal hybrids similar to what you'd see in video games could be constructed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Based on our current technological progression, how soon would a future like this happen? Will it ever go to the extreme for humans becoming characters from cartoons?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also presume that such technology would be very expensive and initially only the wealthy would be able to do this on their own children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sandbox Note&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure if this question is enough to be put onto the main Worldbuilding site. My last question I posted here was a complete disaster so I do not wish to make the same mistakes again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23811" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T12:26:55.037" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-06T09:19:22.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you're aware from my comments I disagree with a lot of where you're coming from with the initial problem, largely being that I don't see a problem. Judging by response to those comments, I'm not alone, however you also have supporters for your point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you ultimately seem to have created is not a question that people can answer based on facts and figures, but a discussion on the morality of the sex and entertainment industries. It appears the majority opinion here is that we have no problem with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As AndreiROM said in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morals: a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes them personal, and opinion based, which is potentially why it was ultimately closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spare the lightning, spoilt the congregation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T09:19:22.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-06T17:16:21.817" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary problem that I have with that question is that I find it unreadable.  You wander off talking about crime and then start talking about a young man getting paid to go places and be good looking.  Which you've decided is unethical.  Reading it again, perhaps you were saying that your protagonist found it unethical.  But that's rather unclear as you repeatedly conflate yourself with the protagonist in the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question is problematic in that it is heavily plot-based.  A character in your story is facing a problem with another character in your story.  The character can't solve it.  So you are asking us to fix your plot problem.  But we don't do plot problems!  We do world building.  E.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Preventing the beauty advantage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my world, people were concerned that some people were getting advantages because of their looks.  So they came up with a system to make the ugly and beautiful equal.  What would such a system be like?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an example of how a world building question looks (although it may be on the broad side; it could use more details).  It asks about a characteristic of the world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't understand what he is doing.  Apparently he goes places and people give him money for being good looking.  Why?  You describe them as addicted.  You might spend more time explaining how this works, as it's not quite how humans work.  Although it does have some parallels.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these are aliens, explain how they are alien.  If these are human (at least in behavior), then you may want to make the scenario more realistic.  Instead of talking about a generic he, ask about someone specific like Elvis.  As is, you have sort of human-like aliens.  There may be differences, but we don't really know what they are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this society get to the point of having social media without having media personalities?  Why does everyone have to spend 100% of their time working?  Those are implicit questions about your world that you don't really answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T17:16:21.817" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-06T19:28:45.663" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; mean this to be an alegory or reflection on society (a fine tradition in SF), make them &lt;strong&gt;unlike&lt;/strong&gt; us in some fundamental way. You want people to be able to engage logicly, not emotionally, until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; they have considered the story and reflect on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has advantages too in that you can exagerate characteristics that affect the story. Like, they have active pheromones and a mating cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T19:28:45.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-07T03:00:29.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't post an answer largely because you're unclear about the situation, not because of the question itself or moral judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know whether you are talking about a program, a story, or you're just role playing for some reson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I however did not downvote and hoped that you would clarify once you read the other answers as to what the heck you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, my comments to other answers and the question does answer the question simplified. The behavior that you're describing is expected and not only is it expected it's the foundation of almost all mating rituals in one form or another for all life so... what type of answer are you expecting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T03:00:29.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-07T12:51:23.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your core structure is about a society where its members support each other and the situation where, at least, one member of that society breaks away from that social norm. Where an individual can exploit a natural advantage he or she possesses so he or she is no longer working to support others or needs to be supported by the rest of their society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by so, doing this individual sets a precedent for other individuals doing the same thing. The risk to the society is that if this behaviour spreads it will lead to social collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the enforcement of social norms like this is expressed as morality. Of course, people who do not belong this society will have their own opinions, rightly or wrongly, about wherever this behaviour is good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T12:51:23.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3829" CreationDate="2016-08-08T03:03:24.753" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This hit too close to our actual world and seemed to be some sort of sly remark on some current celebrity rather than an actual World-building question. While I don't love the implications, and I answered as to why I didn't like them when you specifically asked why people might not like the question, the basic reason and the reason why I downvoted this particular question was because it didn't feel like you were worldbuilding, but making a moral statement about THIS world, whatever that statement might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixes I recommend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If these people are really different from humans, make that clear,&#xA;like crystal clear. I saw absolutely no difference as I was reading. People do weird things like stealing and it's heavily policed--could just as easily describe our world, as could most of it. Under the heading THE ISSUE, I found myself saying, &quot;Yeah, we've pretty much got the same kind of inequity here--how is this different than our world?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the breakdown in society more clear. Right now it just sounds like you've got a problem with how handsome Chris Hemsworth is and how much girls like looking at him. As it was written, how it was going to break society when literally every animal on this planet uses attractiveness as a measurement for breeding fitness, was not clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarity in the question itself. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Be clear and use and few words as possible to get your point across. The new version is better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quite seriously, if you were not thinking of a specific celebrity in the real world, I will eat a raw egg. I believe that you were, and it shows. Again, it comes across more as a moral statement, and the question was asked in the interests of wish-fulfillment than it does an actual, honest-to-goodness world building question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to hate, I don't hate you. I down-voted the question for the above reasons. That doesn't mean I hate you. No clue what constitutes hate for you, but I haven't delved into your comments, so I don't know if other people have. Also haven't been question stalking and downvoting you as far as I know, because I just click on questions as they come up and don't look at the user name. Chill. Don't take it personally. Learn the ways of the site. I asked some crappy ones to begin with. Did not take me long to learn, and I haven't been on here a full month yet. I've been downvoted, have a closed question, and I'm still here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here's how I would have asked it, in a very simplified manner: In an alien world where physical attractiveness is highly addictive, how would one go about stopping an attractive person that has figured out how to exploit that addiction for personal gain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastEditorUserId="23058" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T03:25:12.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T03:25:12.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-08-08T04:33:26.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created a species that grew out of halflings from D&amp;amp;D/pathfinder and other systems. I basically looked at their stat build and started asking questions as to why they might have a +2 to charisma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2 strength (makes sense because they are smaller) +2 dex (I can get behind their agility being higher because of this) and then +2 charisma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation was that they are &quot;strong-willed&quot; however charisma doesn't build into Will (which is wisdom-based). So, for some reason they have a stronger force of personality. Charisma as a stat isn't about physical attractiveness, nor is it about them being non-threatening. Charisma is force of personality. It determines whether or not people listen to you when you order them to do something, ask them and how believable your lies are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you've got a really small person who is more likely to be listened to than your bog-standard human (although any human can add a +2 to any stat including this one because of their flexibility). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered, what was it about their society, their way of being which gave them this advantage? In evolution we gain advantages because there's a push, therefore, I decided that, their society had to be highly competitive socially, pretty much from birth, and that the advantage had to benefit them. So--I decided that they had children in litters. Then, I made them highly imitative. Groups, and where you fit into them are extremely important, and generally, they don't take things on alone. Anyone who does is strange in their society, so you have to be good at getting others to participate with you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These changes lead to a lot of other things--they skew towards matriarchy for instance. Also, everything is based on circles and families. In a patriarchy, things are line based--anyone can get in a line, even if you are at the end. Things &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; more equal when it's a circle, but in a circle, someone has to let you in for you to be part of it. I also made their life-cycle shorter than humans because they come out in litters, but it also means they mature faster and learn faster than humans do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't call them halflings because, honestly, that sounds less like a name and more like a racial slur the talls came up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They aren't the only fantasy-standard race I've been messing with, but they are the focus of what I've been writing. Perhaps too humanoid for your liking--but there it is!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T04:33:26.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3843" CreationDate="2016-08-08T13:17:08.000" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My rep has just dropped 40 points so I'm guessing one of my answers with some votes against it was deleted (or possibly a question I had an answer against?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way of finding out what this was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:45:37.010" Title="Rep suddenly dropped" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3838" CreationDate="2016-08-08T13:25:25.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click the icon that my lovely red arrow points to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tEiFc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tEiFc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...You can see rep changes at a glance. For a more detailed view navigate (only apparently on the main site, not the meta page?) to your profile, and click the &quot;reputation tab&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMkrV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMkrV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T13:25:25.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T15:04:54.610" Score="24" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone has asked &quot;How could I do this thing in my fiction world?&quot; or &quot;If such a thing happened in my fiction world, what would be the consequences?&quot;  As such, the question is completely on-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it has happened here rather often that the answer to the question turns out to be, &quot;It exists, right here, right now, in this non-fiction world.  Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, in a bit of an &lt;em&gt;ex post faco&lt;/em&gt; sense, the question is no longer about World Building &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but rather physics, astronomy, biology, history, or some other perfectly good neighboring SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are six examples I found with just a cursory glance around a few minutes ago (granted I have participated in five of these either as answerer or commenter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/50890/10851&quot;&gt;what kind of poison a octopus can carry to kill a person via skin contact with poison?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23794/10851&quot;&gt;How can zombies be explained without using magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44040/10851&quot;&gt;Can asteroid fields exist in local systems?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38214/10851&quot;&gt;Would it be possible to skip an asteroid off of a planet&amp;#39;s atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36140/10851&quot;&gt;What happens to an empty, modern city?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31601/10851&quot;&gt;What earth conditions would make a permanent bronze-colored sky?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thinking is let it be, as it does add to this site.  The OP probably had no idea such a thing could be, and learned from it.  I mean, how often does the zombie ant fungus come up in every day conversation?  But you know about it now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious what others have to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T16:15:58.217" Title="How do we feel about questions where the answer is &quot;it exists in the real world?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2016-08-08T15:11:33.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is still on-topic because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author's intent holds that they &lt;em&gt;believed&lt;/em&gt; it to be fictional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It provides a resource to future users who also might believe it to be fictional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point, though, you do travel to absurdity. Where that line lays is a judgement call. Ultimately Stack Exchange is intended to be a resource for future visitors &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than it is meant to be a solution-finder for a current poster. That's why you're intended to upvote answers that would help someone &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; in the future, even if it doesn't necessarily help you personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:11:33.493" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2016-08-08T15:31:59.947" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things don't have to be fantasy/fiction to be on topic for world building.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for&#xA;  writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to&#xA;  construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am working on a world where I want to (as an example) create a city out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14435/a-city-of-sand-stone&quot;&gt;sandstone buildings&lt;/a&gt;, that is on-topic even though the only thing that is fictional is the world in which I am placing said buildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often delve into the way our world works as a recipe for building an imagined world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end the world is a really complex place and none of us know everything.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Properly framing a question to demonstrate it is in support of world building helps significantly in ensuring a question is well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are building a kingdom in your world and are unsure how communication could work in some given scenario (&lt;strong&gt;the asker provides the parameters&lt;/strong&gt;) it could be completely based on the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a question where there is no magic the answer very likely lies in the real world methods of pre-electronic communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question provides details, for example technology level, geography, distances etc.  We can craft a well written answer based solely off of real world history.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:31:59.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3838" CreationDate="2016-08-08T15:45:37.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Happy to explain:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The user who posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50676/prevent-sexual-manipulation&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; specifically asked for moderator help in having it deleted. It was also generating some rather ugly comments. I chose to defer to the OP  in this case, even if it led to a rep loss for the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with the deletion (for instance if you think the answers are valuable despite the question being severely down-voted and closed) I believe you should have enough rep to vote to undelete, or otherwise (moderator deletion might be difficult to undo) flag it or continue the discussion here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:45:37.010" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2016-08-08T16:15:58.217" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if it does exist in the real world, those incidents of it existing here will help them build it in their world. It can get a little ridic. We can use real-world references to build our own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48336/how-would-system-like-weregild-value-the-life-of-a-child&quot;&gt;wergild&lt;/a&gt; in one of my questions, and the real-world pricing was very helpful. I had already researched it and found a lack of information on how children were valued, so I wanted to know what made sense, grounding it on what's come before. One of the posters came back at me with a fairly comprehensible first-point source which covered some of the things around my question, if not specific to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that it does add to the site, up to a point. Some questions (like the bronze colored sky one) don't seem to be something that has already existed, to me at least, and I would never know that without going to that question and seeing that answer, but others (like the zombie one) seem like they've been answered in fiction for decades, and I would be surprised if it's not a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T16:15:58.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-08-08T19:48:17.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Tales of the Plytha River&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A series of short stories, currently W.I.P., but the world now has its &lt;a href=&quot;http://cobaltduck.info/lifeball/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own site&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sentient Species&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Human.  Just like me, and I assume most users of WB.SE.  Ape descendants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elf.  Basically like Tolkien's and Paolini's.  Ape descendants, and in fact split from humans about a million years ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mayom.  Macaque descendants.  Very curious, prone to wanderlust, and love to tinker.  Humans consider them essentially a pest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brocc.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/20335/10851&quot;&gt;Badger descendants&lt;/a&gt;.  Keep to themselves, live underground, eat grubs and tubers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30050/10851&quot;&gt;occasionally trade&lt;/a&gt; with humans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boar-Troll.  Some kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51563/10851&quot;&gt;ungulate-like descendant&lt;/a&gt;.  Big, mean, opportunistic eaters.  Some scholars debate their inclusion on this list, despite that they wear loin-cloths, make and use tools, and engage in some sort of religious rituals.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Spolier!  There is a sixth intelligent species, but the characters in the stories don't know it yet. They're called Black Dolphins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The as-yet-unnamed world is on the cusp of both its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30391/10851&quot;&gt;industrial revolution and age of discovery&lt;/a&gt;, almost simultaneously.  Constitutional monarchies still prevail, at least among human nations, but experiments in democracy have begun.  The central nation in these stories, called Nivalla*, formed from the gradual merging of several tribes, sometimes violently, but has been basically at peace for 1100 years.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neighboring Elf nation to Nivalla's west is far older, probably tens of thousands of years.  The ruling Council of Elders is self-appointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still working on the histories and governments of other nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Geography&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eponymous Plytha River flows from north to south through the Kingdom of Nivalla.  It serves a similar function to the Mississippi River of our world's early 1800s, as a central corridor of travel and trade.  Nivalla is located on the south shore of a continent that spans from the north pole to 30&amp;deg;N, and also spans about 90&amp;deg; of longitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another smaller continent due south of the main one, and a chain of volcanic islands straddle the equator in between.  The seas between these two continents and around these islands are sailed frequently for trade, travel, diplomacy, and immigration.  However, the ocean beyond is virtually unknown in the time frame of these stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Up to three other continents or major islands exist.  Like I said, the age of discovery is near!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitely!  Any of the sentient species can develop abilities.  Elf wizards are the most powerful, and at least 80% of elves have at least some magic.  Brocc, mayom, and boar-trolls with magic generally just have one specific talent, like tele-kenesis or heightened senses.  Humans are somewhere in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The black dolphins' magic leaves the elves in the dust!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Nivalla: A deliberate &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/739/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malamanteau&lt;/a&gt;&quot; of Nirvanna and Valhalla.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:43:19.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:29:05.757" Score="18" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;Afternoon (GTZ to you) world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few of us were having a conversation in chat and the idea of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB-fq4eI--DHAwKJRIGhXqQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Building podcast/YouTube channel&lt;/a&gt; came up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact format and content are not defined at yet as the idea was quite literally just conceived.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the most basic it would probably be similar in format to the SE podcast and the companion news posts that come with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a few questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is interested and in what way would you be interested? (add your name to the community wiki answer I will add)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What format/tools are available for this effort (another wiki answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we get a chance to nail these down we can get more into the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Finalized Information&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High level goal:  Podcasts similar to the SE ones, with a written summary posted to the blog and linking to the audio (or video) for the full episode.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technical solution:  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Branding information:  Blog Name - TBD, Blog Icon - TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3869/world-building-podcast-episode-planning/3870#3870&quot;&gt;Episode Planning Thread&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:27:09.647" Title="A Worldbuiding podcast/youtube channel" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:30:04.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Add your name and in what way you would like to be involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Name&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Involvement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NexTerren: Host or Speaker, Video Editing/Technical Support&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TrEs-2b: Speaker, Idea generator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ArtOfCode: Um. Anything but hosting? (I'm a sound engineer, so if we need audio edits, I can do those)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Długosz : Host, Speaker, Editing (Adobe Premiere), &lt;strong&gt;Script writer/editor&lt;/strong&gt;.  I have decent studio mike at home.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fi12: Script writer/editor, Video Concepts, Technical Support&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DaaaahWhoosh: Speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James: Speaker and host&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green: Guest and idea generator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T16:21:46.627" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T16:21:46.627" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-09T21:30:04.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:31:30.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Existing toolchain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The tools used to edit the first episode were Audacity (for audio editing) and DaVinci Resolve (for video editing). Both are free. Audacity will run on almost any machine; DVR requires a reasonably powerful graphics card to run smoothly (and certainly to render the final cut at any sort of speed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Recommended Platforms/Tools&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of now we are probably only going to look at options that are free (or really cheap), so if there is cost involved please provide that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Free&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please include what your platform/tool offers that would differentiate it from other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows movie maker - while overly basic and simple, it is free and easy to learn and use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blender - Highly powerful, and free. Not easy, but not hard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Audacity - Possibly for sound editing, it's a powerful, fairly easy to use, and free piece of software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OpenShot - non-linear video editing, if the user is not in Windows and/or doesn't mind working on GNU/Linux (the most recent version is meant to support Windows, too)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kdenlive - same as OpenShot, but available in GNU/Linux systems only (can use multiple cores for rendering the final video)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gimp - The equivalent of Photoshop in the free-software community (GPL license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt; — A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.  Command-line tools; various guis and wrappers are available separately, and it’s used as the engine in many other free/open tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vsee.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VSee&lt;/a&gt; — Video conferencing tools that allow multi-way conference calls and &lt;em&gt;recording&lt;/em&gt;, and doesn’t stick its own logo over your screen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;not so cheap&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nothing listed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;super cheap&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adobe Creative Suite, including Premere, After Effects, Audition, Photoshop, and Illustrator — pro tools used by many.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T22:04:47.183" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-09T21:31:30.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-09T22:02:28.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested Weekly Topics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Round table where each person brings in news articles/things they&#xA;read that might be interesting from a world building PoV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One member guides the discussion on a specific topic and the others&#xA;comment (this would rotate).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick 1-3 questions that got a lot of attention since the last podcast&#xA;and discuss the question and answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Respond to comments, including any quickie world building questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk about worlds built by site users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="11049" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:06:33.257" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:06:33.257" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-09T23:17:06.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3821" CreationDate="2016-08-11T03:38:25.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the person who offered the bounty. It was my very first one and, I'd thought that accepting an answer was sufficient. Didn't see this question until just now, but I have already awarded the bounty because of the email reminder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T03:38:25.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T17:26:11.047" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've proposed a new site, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101932/cartography?referrer=eB8KJkkaBh0tAmQDgW1TOg2&quot;&gt;Cartography&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in Area 51: Proposed Q&amp;amp;A site for those interested in maps and map-making, historical or contemporary, real or fictional.  I believe that others in the Worldbuilding community might be interested in such a site for their work and to see other ideas, both fictional and real, with regards to creating maps for games and novels - or really for anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know advertising this in the non-meta is disallowed on SE sites, but I'm not sure how community ads work, or if it's something that enough people would think was a good thing to point the Worldbuilder community toward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19236" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T20:49:52.947" Title="Community Ad for Cartography in Area 51" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-08-11T18:01:16.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101932/cartography&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Spc8y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help support the Cartography SE in Area 51&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19236" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T22:11:44.927" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T22:11:44.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3853" CreationDate="2016-08-11T20:08:35.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can propose an ad on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2902/community-promotion-ads-2016&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads 2016&lt;/a&gt; (and the corresponding page for next year, come January).  If it gets voted up it will become part of the rotation.  There's a standard template for Area 51 ads (you can see several examples on that page).  If you prefer to make your own graphic, that's fine too.  Note that the Area 51 ads have live stats (current number of committers, etc), so that's useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T20:08:35.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T09:48:16.193" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, popular questions draw a large number of answers, and end up with answers that should be comments, or largely similar answers (some users prefer to write their own answers, even if they are almost identical to others, instead of helping other users to improve already posted answers).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One exemple here : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48015/what-is-the-fastest-way-for-a-robot-with-superhuman-capabilities-to-make-money&quot;&gt;Super-robot looking for money&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have a discussion similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3567/checklist-for-the-perfect-post-idea-refinement&quot;&gt;the one on question asking&lt;/a&gt;, followed by a wiki post (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a useful link to give to new (and old) users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:48:16.193" Title="Should we have a &quot;How to write the perfect answer?&quot; discussion?" Tags="|discussion|answers|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3860" CreationDate="2016-08-12T19:10:12.133" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51444/how-do-i-protect-my-shop-from-teleporters#51445&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; this morning. Despite having a relatively active discussion with some good answers, it has received a few close votes. No comment was left regarding the close votes &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3773/reminder-to-close-voters&quot;&gt;as we recommend&lt;/a&gt;, so I am at a loss. Is there a way for me to view the close reasons prior to the event actually being closed? I would like to improve the question if possible, but I can't do that if I don't know what people find close-worthy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16335" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T20:16:38.643" Title="Can I view close reasons before the question is closed?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3859" CreationDate="2016-08-12T20:16:38.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Help Center, users are supposed to be able to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;view and cast close and reopen votes on your own questions&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; after 250 reputation.  I see you are well past that, so I'm not sure why it hasn't worked for you.  The counts appear after clicking the &quot;close&quot; link under the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T20:16:38.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-08-13T09:08:41.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How big the balloon of this gondola should be in veneran atmosphere 50km from the surface?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/airships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;airships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;airships&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; I still have to reconsider what tags should I use? Or should I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume in a world with some &lt;a href=&quot;http://sacd.larc.nasa.gov/branches/space-mission-analysis-branch-smab/smab-projects/havoc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HAVOC&lt;/a&gt;-like concept is realized for venus colonization. With near-future technology (near, very near, like in the next decade), we build a fleet of colony airships capable of sustaining at least 30 people on approximately 50 km from the hellish surface of Venus, where air temperature and density were somewhat similar to earth atmosphere, like this quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the harsh conditions on the surface, the atmospheric pressure and temperature at about 50 km to 65 km above the surface of the planet is nearly the same as that of the Earth, making its upper atmosphere the most Earth-like area in the Solar System, even more so than the surface of Mars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the airship has a gondola with about 147,000 cubic meters in volume and weighs around 41,160 tons (assuming similar density to commercial airliners, or around 0,28 tons per cubic meters), and is cruising on 50-65km of altitude, &lt;strong&gt;how big the balloon should be to sustain the gondola?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;em&gt;it would be nice to have an equation&lt;/em&gt; that I and/or others could use to solve this kind of problem in the future, assuming the density and volume of the gondola is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Considerations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some consideration to make, is that what would be the filling gas of the balloon. Therefore I could think of some options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breathable air (71% nitrogen - 21% oxygen) is a lifter gas in veneran atmosphere, the density is around 1.225 kg per meter cubic. Could probably be mined from veneran atmosphere, so is replaceable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helium, probably could result in smaller balloon size, but would probably be very expensive to import, unless it could be mined from atmosphere (it couldn't, right?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or any mixture that could be mined from veneran atmosphere, would be a bonus point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T09:08:41.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-15T16:11:19.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preparation Checklist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This checklist assumes preparation for the first 3 episodes. After we get over this, I imagine forward movement will be more organic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think we should aim to have all of this list checked off or scheduled by end-of-month, August. This should either put us in a good point to move forward or determine that we can't move forward/there's not sufficient interest to move forward.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;✔ Select recording/call software: VSee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;✔ Confirm host for the first 3 episodes (rotating)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ✔ James confirmed for host (1st)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ Discussion topic picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ 1-3 Questions picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ 1-2 worlds picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ Select speakers/Organize recording time with speakers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ☐ ??? confirmed for host (2nd)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Discussion topic picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ 1-3 Questions picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ 1-2 worlds picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Select speakers/Organize recording time with speakers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ☐ ??? confirmed for host (3rd)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Discussion topic picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ 1-3 Questions picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ 1-2 worlds picked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Select speakers/Organize recording time with speakers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;✔ Confirm technical editor (video and sound): ArtOfCode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ✔ Select editing software: DaVinci Resolve (video), Audacity (audio)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ✔ Perform sound/technical test with &lt;em&gt;all prospective hosts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;☐ Produce episodes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ✔ First Episode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ Record&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ Edit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ✔ Publish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ☐ Second Episode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Record&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Edit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Publish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.. ☐ Third Episode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Record&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Edit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.... ☐ Publish  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T22:06:50.990" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T22:06:50.990" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-15T16:11:19.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-08-15T17:25:00.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created an as yet unnamed world, which features the most unimaginatively named continents possible - owing in part to creativity being invested elsewhere, and also in the pursuit of plain English.  It will be the foundation for a story I shall write.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an earth-like world ruled by one empire.  Society can be described as something of a hobbit utopia; food is plentiful, work rarely necessary, technology exclusive to the elite, and the people predominantly rural.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The empire's political and military power is split between the five estates: the crown, the nobility, the peasantry, the church, and the witches.  Each estate is equally represented in the imperial parliament.  The crown controls the navy, the peasants control the army, the witches control the airforce, the nobility control the intelligence services, and the priesthood controls the police.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The empire has ruled for centuries, but though it has brought peace and prosperity, tensions between the estates threaten to boil over into civil war.  The estates themselves have to worry about internal and external threats.  The noble houses hate each other, the priesthood is split into sects which hate each other, the witches are composed of clans which hate each other.  And the peasants regard anyone from outside of their village with great suspicion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Female witches are the only magic users in the empire; men can't use magic, magical ability is inherited from a witch mother, and almost all witches are female.  Each clan has mastery over a specific sort of elemental magic; which allows them to monopolise imperial industries; food, heating, lighting, water supply and purification, mining, minting, etc.  This has the effect of dampening and discouraging technological advancement amongst the other estates.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The witch clans are not only different in magic, but reproduction.  Each clan has a specific means of procreation.  One has men and women like the rest of humanity; with a strongly matriarchal society, and they are the exception.  All other witch clans are by default females.  One clan is like termites with large spontaneously pregnant mothers, and small infertile workers.  Like the last example, another clan does not need to mate; they became pregnant asexually and birth nearly identical offspring.  Another can choose to change its sexual organs from time to time.  Another is something like a tree, having male and female sexual capabilities; when they mate they both become pregnant.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The witches and priesthood are mortal enemies, representing a struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy.  The nobility and peasantry also hate each other more than most.  The witches are thus friendly with the nobles, and the priesthood is friendly with the peasants.  The empire has managed to peacefully balance all of these tensions and inequalities for centuries... but for how much longer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D4yQc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D4yQc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;physical map&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20787" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T17:25:00.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3866" CreationDate="2016-08-15T21:21:11.050" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51759/29&quot;&gt;Would normal people accept a path of immortality given the following, specific restrictions?&lt;/a&gt; bumped to the top of the front page as &quot;answered&quot; despite being &quot;on hold&quot;, so got curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got even more curious when I saw that the question was put on hold &lt;strong&gt;2016-08-15 20:53:24Z&lt;/strong&gt; but jorfus posted an answer (ID 51783) &lt;strong&gt;2016-08-15 21:15:11Z&lt;/strong&gt;, a full 22 minutes &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question was supposedly put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How could that happen?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T12:57:42.530" Title="How could &quot;Would normal people accept a path of immortality given the following, specific restrictions?&quot; be answered, given that it was on hold?" Tags="|bug|specific-question|answers|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3865" CreationDate="2016-08-15T21:34:01.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a grace period for answers that are in flight when a question is closed, because it's really discouraging and frustrating to spend an hour writing a good, solid answer to a question only to have it yanked away from you five minutes before you click &quot;post&quot;.  (That's a general statement; I haven't looked at this particular question.)  So, if an answer is already being written, it can be posted for up to a couple hours after the question gets closed.  You can't start a new answer post-close, though, and if you had one in progress and navigated away from the page for some reason, I don't know if you could go back in your browser and still post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/91922/162102&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; is not completely accurate any more, but it's the closest thing I could find to a canonical explanation.  (That post says four hours; I don't know if that's really true.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T12:57:42.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3909" CreationDate="2016-08-16T10:56:40.930" Score="10" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have the general &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/avian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;avian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;avian&lt;/a&gt;, which for a long time has been described (in terms of the tag wiki excerpt) as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about birds and birdlike creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a recent edit by yours truly, it is now described as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about birds and birdlike creatures. Does not include machines designed for flying (consider [airships], [aircraft], [spaceships]). Consider also [flight].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is currently no tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/birds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;birds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;birds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose that &lt;code&gt;birds&lt;/code&gt; is established as a tag synonym, with the canonical tag being &lt;code&gt;avian&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;code&gt;birds&lt;/code&gt; is more discoverable, but &lt;code&gt;avian&lt;/code&gt; is more generic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31717523#31717523&quot;&gt;the factory floor, beginning here&lt;/a&gt; (link to the chat transcript).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T17:21:17.873" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:38:23.993" Title="Tag synonym request: birds -&gt; avian" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T20:11:27.247" Score="6" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two questions by the same user asking almost the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30355/how-to-justify-the-absence-of-weapons&quot;&gt;How to justify the absence of weapons&lt;/a&gt; (originally asked here, still open)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12669/how-can-i-justify-the-absence-of-weapons&quot;&gt;How can I justify the absence of weapons?&lt;/a&gt; (migrated from Writers SE, closed as duplicate of the first question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently user96551 originally cross-posted the question here and at Writers, and the second version was migrated here and dupe-closed, but not before gathering several answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions between them have 30 answers (16 on one, 14 on the other), many of which are high quality. Normally the obvious choice of action would be to &lt;strong&gt;merge the two questions&lt;/strong&gt;, thus placing all the answers together in a single thread. Unfortunately the two questions are not completely identical, and I haven't checked whether all the answers to one would fit as answers to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged this for moderator attention a while ago, hoping a merge could go through, but was told to bring it up on meta. So here I am, bringing it up on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What should be done with these near-identical questions and their answers?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T20:11:27.247" Title="Should these two questions about the absence of weapons be merged?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T20:54:57.987" Score="12" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please post one answer per episode.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basic Format:  Hosts feel free to modify to suit your needs.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Episode X:  Episode Title&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to do prior to the episode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Host:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guests/Co-hosts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Date/Time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agenda&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warmup:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Name:&lt;/em&gt; Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main discussion topic:&lt;/em&gt;  Name  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review of WB.SE recent/interesting questions:&lt;/em&gt; To be selected by the host/guests/co-hosts once a date is set for the first cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discuss World(s):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 1:  Owner, Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 2:  Owner, Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T23:25:24.420" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T16:31:26.107" Title="World Building Podcast: Episode Planning" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2016-08-16T21:00:23.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Episode 1:  The pilot (no pressure)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to do prior to the episode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Come up with a name for the podcast:  Factory Floor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Come up with an icon for the podcast:  Posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cover art for the episode incorporating the podcast icon: Itll be a bigger version of the icon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure everyone gets the proper software installed: DONE (might add one additional tool)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure people have the proper hardware (mainly meaning a mic): ...James needs a new mic DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finalize the agenda (use the comments/chat for suggestions) I (James) am working on it currently, I will give it to everyone at least 2 or 3 days before&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set a date and time DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get Audacity installed. James Done, Nex (?), Green (?), DaaaaWhoosh (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Host:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James (me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guests/Co-hosts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nex Terren &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DaaaahWhoosh &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Date/Time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2030 Central Time Thursday the 29th of September&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agenda&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introductions:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will ask these or similar questions during the introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define world building &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What skills do you bring to world-building, what is your background&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Share something about yourself that will make people remember you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warmup:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The alignment game:&lt;/em&gt; Bring up a random well known personality and then discuss where they fall on the alignment scale.  This is simply a warm up and to get the discussion juices flowing.  I will have a few names in my pocket we may do 2 or 3 depending on how long it takes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sun Tzu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arthur Dent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mystery Name 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mystery Name 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main discussion topic:&lt;/em&gt;  What got us into world building/what draws us to it and what we are working on.  James will generate questions to facilitate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What made you interested in world building in the first place?  Not the site, the concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is the best world builder (author, game designer etc) and you can't choose Tolkien.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are you building currently and how far along are you?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take turns describing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discuss each person's efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discuss World(s):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 1:  James, ...it doesn't really formally have a name.  If you want to use this during the conversation feel free:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3667/what-worlds-are-you-currently-building/3687#3687&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3667/what-worlds-are-you-currently-building/3687#3687&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 2:  George Lucas (Disney if you prefer), Star Wars &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review of WB.SE recent/interesting questions:&lt;/em&gt; To be selected by the host/guests/co-hosts once a date is set for the first cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21204/how-do-you-establish-identity-when-people-can-change-their-appearance-at-will&quot;&gt;How do you establish identity when people can change their appearance at will?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Crimson Skies (an alternate Earth with technology somewhere between our WWI and WWII) a small mercenary band uses a Zeppelin as a mobile base of operations, and further as a launching spot for their aircraft (1-3 in number). How feasible is this concept? How could we make it work better? What advantages does it have? What precautions/tactics would needed to be used for such an airship base?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20982/would-ritual-cannibalism-of-the-dead-lead-to-issues-with-disease/20988#20988&quot;&gt;Would ritual cannibalism of the dead lead to issues with disease?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does one motivate Green to show up to the Podcast on time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T01:51:02.800" CommentCount="13" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-01T03:46:33.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-16T21:21:37.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Podcast Branding&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Podcast icon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2016-10-17T19:08:50.917" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T19:08:50.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-17T13:51:08.507" Score="23" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51899/how-do-i-know-if-my-moon-is-full&quot;&gt;How do I know if my moon is full?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been closed as off topic by several high reputation users as not being about worldbuilding. It clearly is though, it's information someone needs in order to build a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've discussed in the past and decided that just because something is on topic on another site does not make it off topic here. What is different in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T22:51:14.857" Title="Is a &quot;real world&quot; question off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3872" CreationDate="2016-08-17T14:14:55.343" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok so this topic keeps coming up over and over again...and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The WB site description&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for&#xA;  writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to&#xA;  construct imaginary worlds and settings. It's built and run by you as&#xA;  part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're&#xA;  working together to build a library of detailed answers to every&#xA;  question about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My best understanding of the consensus is this:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions regarding the real world are &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We ask these questions to gain a better understanding of &lt;em&gt;our world&lt;/em&gt; in order to develop and understand one that we are creating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have many questions about history, culture etc. and are essentially asking for a &lt;strong&gt;comparison or background information from reality&lt;/strong&gt; for aid in developing our imaginary worlds.  This is perfectly acceptable and has always been on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that the &lt;strong&gt;author&lt;/strong&gt; chooses the site where they would like to post the question, this means they intentionally chose world building over another site and we should leave the question be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Getting a better understanding of how our world functions allows us to build other worlds.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't allow questions about how a moon works, why should we allow questions about how certain building materials function, or why economies function the way they do, or why evolution selected for the freaking platypus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the conditions set in @Michael Kjörling's post these would all have to be considered off topic.  At least that is how I understand it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some relevant meta discussions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/651/is-the-international-waters-question-on-topic&quot;&gt;Is the &amp;quot;international waters&amp;quot; question on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2293/should-the-help-center-be-updated-to-specifically-list-real-world-history-questi&quot;&gt;Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-where-the-answer-is-it-exists-in-the-real-world&quot;&gt;How do we feel about questions where the answer is &amp;quot;it exists in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T22:51:14.857" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T22:51:14.857" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3875" CreationDate="2016-08-18T01:32:07.603" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the process of flagging &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52045/what-programming-language-does-batman-use&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for migration to another site outside the world-building realm, I discovered that I could only flag it for migration to Meta. I understand my reputation may be the reason why; if so, I would appreciate it if either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the menu description was written so as not to mislead me into believing I'm not supposed to migrate to any site other than Meta.WB, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ability to migrate to other sites than Meta.WB was given to all users who have the ability to flag questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10419" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T06:56:05.440" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T06:56:05.440" Title="Can only migrate question on main site to Meta" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3874" CreationDate="2016-08-18T01:41:09.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not due to your reputation; it's because we haven't defined any other migration paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we graduated last November we gained access to custom migration paths, and there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2769/28&quot;&gt;some discussion about which ones to set up&lt;/a&gt;.  At the time we didn't have a lot of outbound migrations and ended up not defining any.  The better part of a year later, it might be time to revisit that discussion.  (If so I suggest a new meta question with updated stats.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A site shouldn't have more than two or three migration targets besides its own meta; we can't, and shouldn't, add the 8-10 sites that have had &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, you can use a custom flag or, better yet, a comment (so others can see it) to suggest another site.  Do make sure the question is off-topic here; if a question is on-topic here &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; somewhere else, we'll keep it because this is where the OP asked it.  Migration is only for questions that we would close as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T01:41:09.327" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3874" CreationDate="2016-08-18T01:53:22.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the migrations are rejected or get closed very quickly. The consensus was that it was not worth it to have migration paths. Also, many of these questions show little effort and don't meet the quality standard of the Stack Exchange. These questions should be closed and kept here instead of sending them to other sites, where they will be closed anyway. Bad questions should not be migrated because it's usually sent back here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good questions that need migration can be flagged for moderator attention. They can deal with this on a case by case basis.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, maybe we should get rid of the WB Meta migration path since people can move off topic questions here. It happened a few times already. I can't blame people because the first time I voted to move a question here. Since it was the only choice, I supposed it was okay at the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T07:27:49.097" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T07:27:49.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3872" CreationDate="2016-08-18T07:53:54.350" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of those who voted to close the question as off-topic, and also the one who initially voted to close it (thus pushing it into the close votes queue), so I figure I should explain my reasoning for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information sought is certainly potentially useful in the efforts of building a fictional world, and you could certainly make a valid argument based on that line of reasoning that it should be on topic here because it has worldbuilding applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, pretty much &lt;em&gt;every single answerable question imaginable&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; pass that litmus test. I can conjure up a reason why almost &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question that can be answered has applications in worldbuilding. Worldbuilding SE is not meant to be the kitchen sink, and in fact, as the site summary says (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to construct &lt;strong&gt;imaginary&lt;/strong&gt; worlds and settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies elsewhere on the network as well. For example, I could want to know how an AC-DC rectifier works, and ask about some detail of that on Super User, arguing that it should be on topic there because it's a part of how computer power supplies work, and Super User's scope is computers, thus it fits within their scope. But it's still not within their subject scope; such a question would be more likely to be on topic on Electrical Engineering or &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; (depending on its focus) Amateur Radio, which is also where people who are more likely to be able to answer it well focus &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; efforts. Just because something has &lt;em&gt;applications&lt;/em&gt; to one field doesn't make it a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of that field, or pretty much every question on the network would reduce to being on-topic on either Physics or Mathematics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/435/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F6c2A.png&quot; alt=&quot;Obligatory XKCD&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I feel that &lt;em&gt;by default&lt;/em&gt; for a question to be on topic on Worldbuilding there needs to be &lt;em&gt;something imaginary&lt;/em&gt; about it, and generally speaking, the question should somehow be asking about that imaginary portion. A question can be off topic despite asking about something imaginary, and a question can include something imaginary that is completely unrelated to the question being asked, but a question that asks about something that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; imaginary is &lt;em&gt;almost certainly&lt;/em&gt; off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is nothing imaginary (note: imaginary, not imaginative!) about asking how to figure out how mundane celestial bodies interact in a normal solar system that could just as easily appear in real life.&lt;/strong&gt; That's one of the things that the science field of astronomy is all about. Astronomy already has a subject-specific site, populated by experts in that particular field. An expert in astronomy is far more likely to be able to provide a good answer to how celestial bodies interact in general, than an expert in worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking &lt;em&gt;how bodies in a specific, described solar system will interact&lt;/em&gt; would, if the solar system is constructed for the world being asked about, meet the bar of &lt;em&gt;something imaginary&lt;/em&gt; because it postulates a situation that doesn't exist in the real world and asks how it would work out.&lt;/strong&gt; But that's not what the OP in this particular case asked for help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Worldbuilding SE &lt;strong&gt;welcomes&lt;/strong&gt; questions on the following: /.../ &lt;em&gt;as long as they are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about:&lt;/em&gt; (...among other things...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I feel that &quot;historical&quot; in that bullet point may be a somewhat unfortunate phrasing these days (it originated at a time when we were getting a number of questions about the history of our world, and reflects that background), I feel that bullet point is sufficiently generally applicable to be able to state that for the most part, questions about our own real world are off topic on Worldbuilding. &lt;em&gt;Add something to it that is imaginary, and ask a question that focuses on the imaginary part, and it might very well become on-topic for us, as well as quite possibly becoming off-topic for the otherwise appropriate subject-specific site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T08:03:03.443" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T08:03:03.443" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T11:19:59.000" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is the correct icon for the community, but I've found it weird at least and thought it would be a good idea to report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lv5Tb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lv5Tb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is workplace holding the same icon from worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9525" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T11:58:46.047" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T11:58:46.047" Title="Why is workplace holding the same icon from worldbuilding?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|navigation|favicon|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3879" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-18T11:37:49.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T11:37:49.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T11:37:49.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3880" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-18T11:37:49.147" Score="0" Body="Relating to elements such as menus, bars, and links which help users get around the site." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T13:42:08.333" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T13:42:08.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3881" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-18T11:40:03.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T11:40:03.237" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T11:40:03.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3882" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-18T11:40:03.237" Score="0" Body="For questions about the icons for StackExchange sites that are displayed in location bars, tabs, and bookmarks." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T13:42:02.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T13:42:02.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3872" CreationDate="2016-08-18T14:07:21.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the real world can be very valuable for builders of science-fiction worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most hard science fiction scenarios are an extrapolation of current developments into the future. In order to do this extrapolation we need to understand the current world. So a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52093/are-humans-still-evolving-in-the-old-fashioned-way&quot;&gt;&quot;Are humans still evolving in the old fashioned way?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is constructive because it gives science-fiction writers material for building a world centuries in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T14:07:21.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3872" CreationDate="2016-08-18T15:16:07.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the problem with this question is that it sounds like the poster thinks there is some standard equation for telling if a moon is full based on statistics like axial tilt.  If people used such an equation to determine if our moon was full, then that might well be an on-topic question for Astronomy.  As is though, I don't believe that that's how we figure out if the moon is full now or is going to be full in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that I believe this works is that we determine if the (real) moon is full or is going to be full is that we make observations.  Based on those observations, we've determined that the moon cycles between being full, gibbous, crescent, and new on a regular cycle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question though is about a fictional world.  While its inhabitants may be able to observe its period, the author can't.  The author has to use the available information to determine a consistent period.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were a real (in the sense of real world) astronomy question, we'd be going the other direction.  Given when our moon appears full and other observable characteristics, what are statistics like period of revolution?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the mistake is understandable, I believe that it is in fact a considerable mistake to regard this kind of question as off-topic.  There's a high chance that astronomy will view it as speculative (not about the real world) and off-topic.  If so, that leaves this question without a home, even though it is clearly about the setting behind a fictional world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T15:16:07.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T19:50:16.410" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52111/could-saturns-rings-be-removed&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; received -4 points and 4 VTCs at the time of this writing. As DW pointed out, none of the 4 left any reason for the VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have an official policy on when a comment explaining a VTC should happen? Should everyone who VTC leave a comment? Is it ever appropriate for a question to receive the full 5 VTCs without any comments explaining why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T19:50:16.410" Title="When should you leave a comment with a VTC?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-08-18T20:21:35.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-08-18T21:55:22.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags: Fantasy, Magic, Reality-Check&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My system attempts to accomplish the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic does not break the fundamental, widely known laws of reality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic can be fairly easily understood by the layman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic isn’t an enormously powerful end-all-solution to everything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic is still clearly useful and has utility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic wouldn't, abiding by logic, be fairly singular in purpose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic’s ultimate purpose is extracting energy from one system, and applying it to another system in a specific manner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also follow the tropes that magic is cast by magic users (let’s go ahead and call them ‘mages’), and these mages can train to increase their command of magic (like any tradesman or craftsman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, here is the workings of the system I envisioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All magic must extract energy from a system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mages can extract energy that they touch, in a limited fashion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heat is the typical energy extracted due to its ease.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A mage’s own body temperature is the baseline, and they cannot lower the temperature of an object to lower than their own body temperature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To make extracting energy easier, mages typically make a pair of Foci.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci are typically slightly larger than an orange or apple, and are made from wood and stone. Beyond this in form they vary wildly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci take weeks or months to create&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci can only be used by the mage who created them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci are linked. If the link is destroyed, they are useless.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci are effectively invincible against the energy source they were created for (heat foci, for example, can withstand thousands of degrees Kelvin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only one link can bind one Focus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci’s links are unidirectional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foci are created with one power source in mind, heat Foci being the most common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first focus in a pair can absorb and transfer surrounding energy, and do so at about 40%-60% efficiency, the wasted energy bled off in another form (sound, light, etc), and the energy is transferred out the second foci.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The speed of the transfer is limited by the speed of light, but otherwise the distance doesn’t matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absorbed energy takes energy to hold; energy is bled off slowly (as heat, light, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A mage absorbing too much energy can render him unstable (and thus he will detonate, incinerate, or some other catastrophic death)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Casting magic is taking the absorbed energy and turning it into another form via a learned spell&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Releasing the energy in a progressively more organized form requires progressively more wasted energy (thus magic cannot fight entropy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mages typically learn a few dozen spells over their lifetimes. Spells include everything from elemental (lightning, fireball, etc), to transformative (shapeshifting). Raw displays of energy releasing are always considerably easier than the harder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spells are fairly specific  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Learning a spell takes weeks or months of study and practice. Mastery years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every time a mage casts a spell they must expend some energy of their own, that their body would otherwise make use of.  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blood sugar is an easy source of this energy, but fat deposits are ineffective. Other sources are in between.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Excessive casting will kill the user, and younger, healthier mages can tax their bodies further  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ratio of body energy to absorbed energy varies from mage to mage  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More experienced mages have to use less proportionate energy  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Novice mages might see this ratio as low as 1:15, normal mages closer to 1:75, and the greater mages might climb to 1:300.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Given these things, a few conclusions I came to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintaining guarded bonfires for their Foci would be paramount. One foci would be left in the fire, and they would trust the landowner (king, servant, whatever it might be) to keep the fire going.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mages’ faith in the security of their bonfire Foci would directly affect how far away from the safe haven they were willing to travel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because of the waste of energy, the only industry they would play into would be those where it’s easy to create energy at one location, but difficult to generate at another, and so the mage could be employed to be basically an energy gateway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High blood sugar would be very important to the mages, and anyway to trick this system (insulin shots?) would be valuable to a mage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Potentially Foci could be used as a unidirectional fast-as-light messaging system similar to the telegraph, by allowing an energy source and depriving the energy source and having the mage on the other end trying to continuously pull energy, and to record when he could/couldn’t. Morse code, and all that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...All of this taken into account, three questions to form a bigger picture reality-check:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any flaws in the system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any obvious exploits in the system that would make magic fairly singular in purpose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignoring culture shock/adjustments (such as “magic is real!” and “it’s clearly demoncraft!” and “scientists were wrong all along!” etc), how would such magic affect Medieval Europe, and modern Western society, specifically in trade/industry, world affairs, and military engagement?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T21:55:22.720" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3888" CreationDate="2016-08-18T22:14:11.733" Score="7" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question sandbox is now a well used tool on world building and some users have now posted multiple questions there. As the sandbox treats users posts as answers this has led to users conceivably having many answers to one question. Is there a limit on the number of answers a user can post on a question and if so how can we avoid this limit in order to allow active sandbox users to continue posting on the sandbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T19:13:27.637" Title="Is there a limit on number of answers per user?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3887" CreationDate="2016-08-19T03:07:47.053" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I could not find the limit of answer per user on the same question, I've found that there are no limit to the total number of answers to a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is apparently a limit on the number of posts (not counting comments) for the site:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 147 483 647 ($2^{31} - 1$). I doubt we are going to reach that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238666/is-there-a-maximum-number-of-answers-to-one-question&quot;&gt;Is there a maximum number of answers to one question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: assuming that we still have an average of 4.7 answers per question, like during the beta phase, with 7295 questions, we should have about 41 581,5 posts just on the main site after almost 2 years (yes there is a half answer somewhere, plenty in fact). At this speed, it will take us 103 290 years to reach the limit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T14:00:18.913" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3874" CreationDate="2016-08-19T14:22:50.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I totally agree with the idea that we should have no migration paths; I've seen several questions which I feel would be much better suited to Physics or Astronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This subject feeds in again to the idea of whats on topic and whats not and the scope of this site. Personally I feel that if it is a &quot;how does this work based on reality/science&quot; It probably belongs on one of the other sites, where as &quot;if I extrapolate into the unknown &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; on reality/science&quot; it belongs here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17263" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T14:22:50.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T12:59:51.450" Score="18" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;This community has been around long enough that some of us just must have gotten to the point of having a fully developed product of their efforts.  Whether it be a novel, game, short story, or whatever.  For example, I have two shorts in the polish-up stages, although I have no idea what I will do with them.  My point however, is that I have read so many fascinating ideas from others here, and I really want to see what the final outcome has been.  I want to read your works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know the SE network generally discourages anything dealing with advertising or promotion, but can we somehow find an exception in this particular community?  Is is that bad to have posts in some appropriate location that reads, &quot;Thanks to the answers I received on these three questions, I am published.  Here's a link to it on Amazon ....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My real question then, is what is that appropriate location?  Here on meta, a dedicated chat, something in the blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, once we have that answer straightened out, might I humbly request our mods to make it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T11:42:09.497" Title="Do we have any success stories yet? I want to read them!" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3890" CreationDate="2016-08-21T14:56:19.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I know the SE network generally discourages anything dealing with advertising or promotion, but can we somehow find an exception in this particular community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not true.  Properly used, advertising and promotion are fine and supported.  For example, every profile has a webpage link that can be used for promotion (it could go to a blog or author page).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem comes when people advertise or promote &lt;em&gt;instead of&lt;/em&gt; answering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi!  It's only tangentially related to your question, but you mentioned one of my critical keywords.  So to harvest some page rank, I'm going to post about my super duper Snake Oil.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it doesn't have to be snake oil.  A legitimate product posted not as a real answer but purely for promotional reasons is problematic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, on some Stacks people can post things like &quot;My product Foo does exactly what you need!  Here are its capabilities:  ...&quot;  That's fine so long as it is responsive to the question and the person doesn't hide the affiliation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, to get back to your real question, it is entirely appropriate to post a link to some web page that shows your published works in your profile.  That will work regardless of stack.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would be fine with a meta question with a unique tag (e.g. graduated-works) so that people could hide it.  People could post a link to say something like &quot;Woo hoo!  I'm going to be published as [Title] by [Author].  [Link]  Here's the blurb:  ...&quot;  Personally, I'd like to see that, but it should get community consensus first.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't participate in chat or on the blog, so I'll leave that up to those communities.  If there's going to be just one place, I'd prefer Meta because then I'd see it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T14:56:19.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3890" CreationDate="2016-08-21T17:28:15.317" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the suggestions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3891/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to use your profile and (responsible) promotion in relevant answers.  In addition, I don't see why we couldn't have a &quot;what are your success stories?&quot; question here on meta, where people can add answers saying what they've made and where to get it (if it's published).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt; also welcomes fiction, if you're not trying to sell your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T11:42:09.497" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T11:42:09.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T21:12:42.133" Score="23" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone published a game, story, or picture that's partially based on questions and/or answers from Worldbuilding.SE? The definition of publish is very loose -- it can include stories published on a personal blog. If so, please post a link to your published work as an answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3890/171&quot;&gt;Do we have any success stories yet? I want to read them!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T21:12:42.133" Title="Published works based on questions/answers from Worldbuilding.SE" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3895" CreationDate="2016-08-22T12:54:21.150" Score="7" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;How to do something&quot; questions are typical for most practical discussions. They are perfectly fine, until:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP can actually do this and check if that does solve his/her problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP can see how many people do the same thing and what long-term results do they have&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can compare our results and come co conclusion, what method is better and why&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a fantasy setting the only criteria is - does the author like it or not, which is the definition of &quot;opinion based&quot;. He can like an option because it looks plausible for him, or it looks cool, or because it gives more ideas for the plot. There are no other means to determine which way is actually the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a magic device/ability &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What would be the best way to do &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt; with it, in my fictional country of &lt;strong&gt;Z&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when you describe how the device works, what possibilities and limitations does it have, there will be a context that changes everything. If we are talking about a magical, fantasy, not science-based setting, nobody can deside which way would be the best, its always up to the author. As the result, we don't have a strict answer, but a bunch of ideas/opinions instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of &quot;how to&quot; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51444/how-do-i-protect-my-shop-from-teleporters/&quot;&gt;How do I protect my shop from teleporters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38729/how-would-you-defend-a-package-from-magic-ninjas/&quot;&gt;How would you defend a package from magic Ninjas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34517/how-would-lawmakers-try-to-use-and-abuse-a-system-with-magically-enforced-laws&quot;&gt;How would lawmakers try to use and abuse a system with magically-enforced laws?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26884/rynns-jewelry-box-best-way-to-use-a-unique-small-scale-replicator&quot;&gt;Rynn&amp;#39;s Jewelry Box: Best Way to Use a Unique Small-Scale Replicator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12801/how-to-defeat-a-nature-mage&quot;&gt;How to defeat a nature Mage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9774/how-could-a-group-of-6-people-destroy-an-army&quot;&gt;How could a group of 6 people destroy an army?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8465" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T14:26:36.153" Title="Should I flag &quot;Best way to ...&quot; questions involving magic as &quot;opinion based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3894" CreationDate="2016-08-22T13:38:01.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My humble opinion is that these are extremely helpful to world builders, can have reasonable estimates of &quot;better or worse&quot; (if not quantifiable), and fit the theme and purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would do the site a discredit to begin to VTC any such question simply because the quality of the answer isn't quantifiable. After all, the original website, Stack Overflow, very, very often will get multiple solutions to a problem all which &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; work to solve the issue, but which will take different approaches, use different technologies, or vary in the coding grace and future flexibility. Even there opinion has to weigh in on picking the best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; there should be meaningful ways to judge a better or worse quesiton, but any opinion doesn't dictate a vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T13:38:01.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3894" CreationDate="2016-08-22T14:26:36.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before doing something relatively invasive like flagging or even voting to close, you should &lt;strong&gt;always consider if a less invasive approach is applicable and appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's take an &lt;strong&gt;otherwise good, on-topic question&lt;/strong&gt; that simply ends by asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be the best way to do Y within the above constraints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, with a context that implies the asker is seeking more than a yes or no answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I do Y within the above constraints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that really a question we would want to close? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Instead, you can propose an edit to the question, such that it ends by asking something along the lines of:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I accomplish Y within the above constraints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;which basically asks for the same thing.&lt;/em&gt; Both are asking for a way to accomplish a specified goal within a specified set of constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody, to within experimental error, is going to propose an answer that they do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; feel is the best approach to solving the problem the OP is having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, nobody is proposing that you should completely rewrite the question; in fact, doing so is often frowned upon. But if a relatively simple edit can turn the question from &quot;hmm, maybe I should flag this because Reason X&quot; to &quot;okay, might not be a great question, but it isn't bad either&quot;, then making that edit is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T14:26:36.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3872" CreationDate="2016-08-23T14:49:07.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This isn't a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; about the real world, however the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; is based on the real world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two factors here and they're getting confused. One is whether the question is on topic here, the other is whether this is the right place to ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the asker is talking about his new planet and its moon, which is on topic here and we have people who could answer it. Worded slightly differently this question could be square in the middle of the field of expertise at astronomy SE and would be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; asked there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T14:49:07.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-23T15:41:09.980" Score="7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1902/defining-the-boundaries-of-the-hard-science-tag&quot;&gt;this earlier post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that keeps reality in mind and links to various definitions (typically in wikipedia) for terms used and concepts introduced is the very exemplar of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.  If it doesn’t have original calculations, graphs, etc. I would think that hard-science has a similar meaning to scientific publications, as different from “popular press”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does a hard-science tag simply not make sense for the subject (I don’t mean a counterfactual subject being disallowed, but asking for something that can’t be answered by calculation or literature search)?  If there's no distinction between science-based and hard-science for non-math answers, should we drop it?  Otherwise, how can we &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; state the difference, especially for those who are not familiar with scientific journals and might think that &lt;em&gt;Popular Science&lt;/em&gt; is scientific when someone else is thinking of &lt;em&gt;Nature&lt;/em&gt; as the relevant example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T13:02:52.187" Title="Let’s clarify the hard-science tag for non-math questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-23T15:43:44.813" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently having a dispute with JDługosz whether my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/52533/98&quot;&gt;answer to a question tagged hard-science&lt;/a&gt; actually meets the hard-science tag requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested in what others here think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T15:43:44.813" Title="Does my answer fit the hard-science tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3899" CreationDate="2016-08-23T15:58:23.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Science Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers based in hard science, not magic or&#xA;  pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations. Consider&#xA;  alternatively the hard-science and reality-check tags. Avoid using&#xA;  this tag as the only tag on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hard-Science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers to be backed up by equations,&#xA;  empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Review&#xA;  the tag info before using this tag, and flag your question for&#xA;  moderator attention once posted to have the hard-science notice added.&#xA;  Consider alternatively the science-based and reality-check tags. Avoid&#xA;  using this tag as the only tag on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference isn't exclusive to mathematical formulas. Hard-Science &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; citations (of any sort) and implies a strict level of rigor on proving your claims, arguments, and conclusions. If you claim X or Y is the case, provide a link to a paper, or (as you mention) a mathematical formula to prove your point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Science-Based answer might read like an article in the magazine, &lt;em&gt;Popular Science&lt;/em&gt;. A Hard-Science answer would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T15:58:23.480" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3847" CreationDate="2016-08-23T19:44:33.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the name of the podcast, I suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The World Workshop&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally submitted it as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3725/what-should-the-name-of-our-chat-be&quot;&gt;possible chatroom name&lt;/a&gt; for Worldbuilding, and it received the second most number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It implies that this is where you can help finish building unfinished worlds (and the alliteration is a nice bonus as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17179" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T19:44:33.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3899" CreationDate="2016-08-24T08:42:35.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think hard-science should need to give references for every claim, but it should not need to require links to scientific articles (which, unless open access, the vast majority of readers won't have access to anyway), although linking to accessible scientific articles is definitely encouraged. Also the hard-science tag implies more rigorous argumentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear that a hard-science answer is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a scientific work in its own right. Probably most people who do the hard work to write an actual scientific article will publish it in a refereed journal or at least at a place like arXiv, instead of posting it on this site where you don't get scientific reputation for your hard work. Put your requirements for a tag too high, and you're almost guaranteed to get zero answers to questions tagged that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, what people seek here is information. And the reason to put the hard-science tag on a question is to make sure that the information they get is actually backed by current science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirements in the tag (note the &quot;etc.&quot; and that this is clearly not an &quot;and&quot; list, as e.g. for some topics equations simply don't make sense) are to make sure this end is reached, but they are not ends themselves. So an answer should be judged on whether the real end is reached, not by mechanical checking items in a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A valid criticism for a hard-science answer would be &quot;this claim is not sufficiently backed by the links/references you gave&quot; or &quot;the link/reference you gave was to a questionable web site&quot;, but IMHO not &quot;this links to a reliable source for that information, but unfortunately that reliable source is not a scientific article&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T08:42:35.627" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T22:25:58.663" Score="17" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear with me, this is my first Meta Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Building your fictional magical, alien, alternate fictional world, you have to figure out the Climate (unless you only interested in one region and then the rest can go fly a kite for all you care!). Unfortunately it's not as simple as create a map and then see what happens. If it were, we would have a much better understanding of our own climate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You research, and then you research some more. You have taken hours and weeks, possibly months or even years, of time to research '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Su5pDR2cTs&amp;amp;list=PL902AF247F4163F61&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;everything&lt;/a&gt;', and you have attempted to put it all together. You start building your story based on this map and understanding but then you suddenly think! &quot;Wait, does the wind really blow like that?&quot;, &quot;will there really be that freak weather storm?&quot;, &quot;can I really have this next to that?&quot;. Doubts starts to creep in. And doubt breeds more doubt. You need a second opinion! You possibly even decided you needed a second opinion before you developed your story too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/8519/the-search-for-climate-forums&quot;&gt;Unfortunately for you&lt;/a&gt;, all the scientists are too busy trying to understand our own world and don't have a lot of time to discuss fictional settings that won't result in papers being published. So you turn to the next best thing. The Internet. You find a forum of like-minded people who don't shun you for asking silly light-hearted questions like &quot;How do you kill a Dragon Zombie?&quot;, they respond with more than &quot;What on Earth are you talking about?&quot; and you don't have to explain for the umpteenth time &quot;This scenario is not on Earth! or our Earth!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know that climate is very complicated and if you ask everything at once, people either won't know what to answer or focus on the wrong things...there are just too many possible answers. &lt;strong&gt;But you have a whole world to question!&lt;/strong&gt; Sensibly you separate your entire world of questions down to several 'specific' regions and features. This is not about asking what will happen if you raise a mountain etc. You have already done that research, you just need an assessment of your interpretation. Is it, or is it not plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Besides, where would all the fun be if you could just straight out ask what happens if I have a huge hole in the Earth? The fun (sometimes painful fun) is in figuring it yourself. The most painful part seems to be asking for opinions on your assessments.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the minimum amount of world and climate related information that has to be provided to avoid a climate question being closed as too broad? What information would help narrow down the scope of the question? Limit the number of ambiguities?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to compile a list of information that needs to be provided before a climate related world building assessment can be undertaken successfully. I am very much aware that the climate is intricate and complicated and and and and... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm not looking for a detailed description of how the wind will flow down that wonky shaped valley, and cause a negative feedback loop on this or that feature and make the farmer two valleys across have a thunderstorm. I'm thinking of more broad and general continent scale assessments. High pressure should form there, low over there, wind will flow in that direction, oh mountain blocking that direction flow...got a cloud pile-up. rain and river flow back in that direction. general environment conclusion. Desert highly unlikely, savannah plausible but more likely to be a temperate rainforest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... should all the separate regional questions be asked at once or wait for one region to be judged plausible/implausible before moving onto another?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... should all the separate questions be hyperlinked, so readers can scan neighbouring regions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You are providing the scenario to the reader, you are wanting an &lt;em&gt;assessment&lt;/em&gt; of the &lt;em&gt;accuracy/plausibility&lt;/em&gt; of your scenario from the reader.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I assume you will have to provide a map of the region in question or at least a fairly descriptive description.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I personally would need a more general map of a larger area, if not the world, to see the inter-relatedness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where any prevailing winds are coming from&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where any water is coming from, especially if not reliant on atmospheric moisture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If based on an alternate Earth, what are the differences locally AND regionally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If based on a new world, are there any similarities with Earth to help the reader understand the environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a summary of what you think will happen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a summary of what you really really need/want/can't bear without to happen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a willingness to accept criticism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an openness to accept solutions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I forgetting anything? What else is needed?&lt;/strong&gt; or are we just on our own when it comes to anything climate related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:29.803" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T02:36:11.243" Title="What information to include in a 'Good' climate-related question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3904" CreationDate="2016-08-25T08:16:14.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I qualify as knowledgeable, but I would not like to leave that question unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you mentioned it a few times, but I don't think it ca be said too much. Climate is a very complex thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A world is usually way too large, so asking &lt;em&gt;how is the climate of my world&lt;/em&gt; will probably be closed as too broad. So you should limit yourself to a region. A continent has many different climates, so that would still be too large. But a given region might become answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for technical requirements, I think that on a rough scale, the climate of a given region will depend on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intensity of light from the star(s)&lt;/strong&gt;. This could be inferred from the size/activity of the star, distance to the planet, and inclination of said planet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Map&lt;/strong&gt;, water bodies, size, mountains ranges, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Global currents&lt;/strong&gt;, that might be due to ignorance, but if we can see the effects the currents like the Gulf Stream have on the climate, I haven't seen any explanation as to why those currents were as they were.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, with those information, people might start to get a rough idea of how the climate in a given region might be. Note that the map and global currents should also include larger regions. Europe has relatively mild winters due to the Gulf Stream bringing heat from the Carribbean and mountains blocking the worst of the the Siberian winds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it comes down to the level of precision you want to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have a measure of the area of a circle to a thousands decimal precision, you need to make sure that both your radius and pi are taken with the same precision or above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you'd need to consider the composition of the atmosphere, the type of rock/grounds, the Human activity, etc. to get a more specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion, if you want an answer like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yeah it's mostly warm, but with some rains&lt;/em&gt;, little details are required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The western part will have an oceanic climate, while the rest will get a humid jungle&lt;/em&gt; you probably have to make sure that the 3 points I mentioned above are covered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In that area, you'll have winters with temperature varying from 5-15°C, and summers from 20-35°C, with regular rains throughout. A few storms in Winter, and the vegetation is likely to be composed of that tree and that other tree.&lt;/em&gt; Do make sure you added the extra details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T08:16:14.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2016-08-26T19:29:15.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I think you're missing the point. By a lot.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few factors that, I think, your post misses much to its detriment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244534/311001&quot;&gt;Most readers aren't users.&lt;/a&gt; Most of a page's views aren't coming from registered users, they're coming from people who've searched for something. We want them to see answers, not comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because comments aren't what the network's for, and they're not what the network's &lt;em&gt;good at&lt;/em&gt;. We're good at producing high-SNR Q&amp;amp;A. Posts are editable forever, have revision histories, receive up- and down-votes, and are incentivized for &amp;quot;goodness&amp;quot; by the reputation system. None of that is true of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most users aren't commenters. &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/327/alltime/worldbuilding/2014-09-16/&quot;&gt;Fewer than ten percent of users have earned &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; rep&lt;/a&gt;, never mind the 50 rep required to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot is that the urge that you're talking about--the &amp;quot;impulse to write&amp;quot; you respond to when clicking &amp;quot;add a comment&amp;quot;--is one that only &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be acted upon by at most 1% of those reading the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So comment-policies should really be designed for the 99% of non-commenters, not the 1% who might comment.&#xA;To that end I see comment policies working not just reactively, but proactively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By constantly pruning comments we keep the Q&amp;amp;A &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; and thus promulgate a community standard. By leaving a &amp;quot;comments have been moved to chat, only use comments to clarify/improve posts&amp;quot; comment when doing so we explicitly send the message that they exist &lt;em&gt;for posts&lt;/em&gt;, not for chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I think your proposal is admirably-founded.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to recognize that this impulse for immediate-chat isn't helpful to the fundamental purposes of the Network, and so propose to segregate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we've been told--again, meta.SE and the blog--that the Stack intends to stay focused on its core mission(s) and not try to be everything to everyone. In short: this isn't a forum. Why try to make it one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T19:29:15.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3125" CreationDate="2016-08-27T03:41:49.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The underwater question is more on-topic than the outrunning question, although both are borderline.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underwater question is how far down do you have to go so as to survive the nuke.  That's a question of setting and how you create the characteristics of your world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The outrunning question is about a single person's actions and whether they are feasible.  The setting is given to us (in particular the distance, which was the previous question).  To call this Worldbuilding, we have to basically think of it as a reality check.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm fine with both questions being on-topic.  They are both heavily plot-based, but they aren't asking for general suggestions.  We are given the plot purely to talk about aspects of the setting.  They could both be just this side of the on-/off-topic divide.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with making the underwater question off-topic is that we are essentially being pedantic.  Consider the following question:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;How far underwater does my city need to be?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my Earth, there was a nuclear war.  Fortunately, some people had moved into underwater cities.  I want to locate one near Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  How far underwater does the city need to be to have survived a one megaton hydrogen bomb that hits Pearl Harbor directly?  Whatever the depth, I want it to be as close to Pear Harbor as possible.  So if you tell me one kilometer, then I want to locate it at the closest one kilometer deep water to Pearl Harbor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems clearly on-topic to me.  It's about aspects of the world rather than the plot.  But it's essentially the same question and will have very similar answers.  So if we make the other question off-topic but accept this one, we are essentially encouraging people to lie about what their real question is so as to comply with an arbitrary rule boundary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can sort of do the same with the outrunning question, but it's more complicated and may require multiple questions.  Rather than having one person trying to escape in one car, ask about traveling into the blast crater.  When ten kilometers from the center, how does the road look?  Are there cars on it?  How close to you have to get before fleeing cars couldn't escape?  What do they look like?  Are the tires still there?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, both questions should be on-topic, although we should guide people to concentrating more on setting and less on plot.  I do think that the underwater question is slightly more on-topic than the outrunning question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T03:41:49.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-27T23:10:59.350" Score="14" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;A year ago, we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2293/29&quot;&gt;Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?&lt;/a&gt;, to which nobody ever proposed an answer other than &lt;em&gt;yes, let's list them as specifically off topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we have just recently had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3872/29&quot;&gt;Is a “real world” question off topic?&lt;/a&gt; with, admittedly, somewhat more activity, which appears to have concluded that yes, &lt;em&gt;questions about the real world actually are on topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, and perhaps more importantly to avoid further confusion, I feel that &lt;strong&gt;the help center needs to be updated.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the answers to this question, propose changes to the help center article &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; to clarify this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I suggest marking answers as community wiki&lt;/em&gt; to allow people to make minor adjustments to them. Any substantially new or different suggestion should obviously get its own answer, so that voting works properly. Only one suggestion per answer; a single suggestion may involve adding, removing or updating several parts of the article, but must form a logical whole which relates to the on-topic-ness of real world questions. Then vote to indicate which variant you feel captures the site's scope best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, just to clarify: &lt;strong&gt;This question is &lt;em&gt;not about&lt;/em&gt; whether real-world questions should be on topic or not!&lt;/strong&gt; That has already been discussed in the above-linked meta questions. This question is about how we can clarify the site's subject scope in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T05:54:08.153" Title="What changes about real-world questions are needed to the help center?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3867" CreationDate="2016-08-28T16:38:23.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/birds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;birds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;birds&lt;/a&gt; is now a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/avian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;avian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;avian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:38:23.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T08:30:14.640" Score="8" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;The discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3872/is-a-real-world-question-off-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; does not show a clear consensus, with 11 votes for one approach and 6 for another. I think it's important that we do reach a consistent approach on this though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is &lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt; about which is the right answer in that specific case. The question is how do we decide on a policy and then how do we communicate and consistently apply that policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be as simple as the votes (we have 11 for one and 6 for another, not overwhelming but a clear majority)? Do we need to have a debate? A chatroom discussion? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a decision is made how do we communicate it. Do we need to add it to the help somewhere? Announce it as a meta post? This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3908/what-changes-about-real-world-questions-are-needed-to-the-help-center?cb=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; may cover a lot of that but is anything else needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T01:53:07.833" Title="Resolving the &quot;real world&quot; problem?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T12:23:37.597" Score="4" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the recent duplicate question concerning a cubeworld, I realize that there are quite a few on cubes and other shapes with similar questions such as what the gravity would be like.  And these should be &lt;em&gt;more discoverable&lt;/em&gt; by new posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the questions about how gravity points are pretty much the same for any odd situation, and dealing with nonstandard geography is an issue in itself unrelated to the specific shape, I created a new tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonsperical-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonsperical-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nonsperical-worlds&lt;/a&gt; and would ask that a moderator &lt;strong&gt;create the alias&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cubeworld&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cubeworld&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cubeworld&lt;/a&gt; (or should it be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cubeworlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cubeworlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cubeworlds&lt;/a&gt;?) for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, editing tags for these questions I found some tried to combine several other tags to convey this situation, and having a clearly named tag for “nonspherical worlds” helped in a couple questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T15:26:15.817" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T15:26:15.817" Title="Tag for cubeworld questions" Tags="|support|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3911" CreationDate="2016-08-30T12:44:41.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thinking is this topic is a difficult one, because not every &quot;real world&quot; question is on-topic for Worldbuilding, but neither is every such question off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about Earth's history are explicitly off-topic in the help center. Questions about modern Earth &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic, if worded correctly. Questions about applying real physics to the arrangement of fictional celestial bodies is definitely on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no cut and dry answer, which is why we can't seem to come to a consensus. The problem is, no one can really put in words where the limits of that gray area are. This is why your second linked question doesn't yet have any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've long taken &quot;real-world&quot; questions on a case-by-case basis, upvoting, downvoting, and VTCing as I believe appropriate, but I don't have any metric by which I judge the merits of the question that I can put into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while we can agree that we need to come to a consensus on the topic of &quot;real-world&quot; questions, the range and variety of such questions is such that a general consensus may not be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explicitly address your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be as simple as the votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because the two answers only represent two aspects of the problem at hand. I believe the best answer is somewhere between the two (see above reasoning). A debate might be the best way to go forward from here, but don't look to me to participate much (if at all), since I'm terrible at coherent rapid-fire logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once a decision is made how do we communicate it[?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umm... Honestly, I have no idea. I'm fairly certain a large portion of the site's users don't go deeper into the site than their own questions, and I know not every new user reads through the help pages. Sure, we can tag a question as featured and put the information in the help center, but that doesn't mean the users who need to see it do. It may simply fall to the users who monitor the Meta to propagate the information as &quot;real-world&quot; questions continue to appear on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T12:44:41.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T14:41:56.627" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see a question that might have potential, but in the current wording is a question that should be voted closed/on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I downvote the question in addition to casting a close vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what cases (if there is any) should I take both actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T15:08:10.507" Title="Should I downvote a question that I am also voting to close or put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3914" CreationDate="2016-08-30T15:08:10.507" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy,&#xA;  no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps&#xA;  dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question isn't fitting for this site, such as being too broad or off-topic, doesn't mean you should downvote. Downvotes are a way of marking a post as effectively trash, and aren't in the same spirit as a vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T15:08:10.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2016-08-30T15:27:13.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose a simple modification to this section (bullet 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as long as they are not about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Facts about the real world, or historical or modern events, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the Writers or Role-playing Games Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22649" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T15:27:13.173" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-30T15:27:13.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2016-08-30T16:38:29.260" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Real world questions have always been on-topic; the moon question was wrongfully closed. It fits the first criteria listed (Creation of elements of a world, in this case a moon).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I've noticed in the trend of questions about the real world and questions regarding that point, the bigger issue is the alternate history questions that are almost always too broad and impossible to answer (and thus closed often, &lt;strong&gt;but sometimes with the wrong close reason&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the linked most recent meta question, the top answer states that questions about history, culture etc. and are essentially &lt;strong&gt;asking for a comparison or background information from reality for aid in developing our imaginary worlds&lt;/strong&gt; is on topic. However, once you change anything slightly larger about the history, you can no longer pull those comparisons/background information from reality since it's no longer the same reality as ours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cause of the confusion between real world questions and history questions being off/on-topic is caused by alternate-history questions being closed as off-topic (which people misinterpret as &quot;real world&quot; questions), and actual real world questions being wrongfully closed as off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's make this clear now: alternate-history questions ARE NOT REAL WORLD QUESTIONS.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, why not just remove the confusion and target the problem directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposed solution (Additions are in bold, and I've moved the historical events as comparisons point under the lists):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures,&#xA;  and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaining in-universe&#xA;  consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as they are not about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, or alternate versions of history&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the Writers or Role-playing Games Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Note that we permit the use use of historical events of or&#xA;  historical facts about the real world in your questions, but only as examples or comparisons in the construction of  your imaginary world.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T16:38:29.260" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-30T16:38:29.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2016-08-30T21:33:51.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;These questions are on topic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not a problem that they might be also on-topic, or even &quot;more on-topic&quot; on some other subsite.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That does not affect that they are on-topic here.&lt;/strong&gt; (See for example the overlap between the scifi subsite and the movies &amp;amp; tv subsite.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, even though it is not a problem for a question to be on-topic on more than one-subsite, the on-topicness is not determined by it being about making worldbuilding software. How on-topic it is, I would think, is more about how much the details of the question are about a world-building-relevant detail, as opposed to just being about some software development detail, while programming worldbuilding software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Does it makes sense for increased humidity to affect biomes the way I have it in this code?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - is very much on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Why isn't this code snippet from my river erosion algorithm compiling after I installed the latest Windows update?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - is not on-topic, because the worldbuilding nature of the software is irrelevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Over-zealous question-closing impacts more than just the closed questions.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, every time I run into an interesting question that is closed because of weird technicalities, it makes me angry and not want to participate in that subsite.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T21:33:51.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3781" CreationDate="2016-08-31T03:05:26.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give you fair warning, I'm going to stretch the limit of the one species per person. These species were designed as a pair, and are very similar. They were were created for the purpose of inhabiting a pair of binary planets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fun History Lesson&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a race of reptilian humanoids was on the cusp of sapience, some super advanced aliens noticed that an extinction level event would occur soon. A planet about the size of Mars was going to crash into the lizard people! So the aliens took all the lizard people off of the planet and moved them to a recently terraformed binary planet. The lizard people were saved from Thei-&lt;em&gt;cough cough&lt;/em&gt; an unnamed exoplanet the size of Mars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Little Bit Of Biology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the two planets was a mainly water world with lots of islands. The other was very dry with few large bodies of water. So one species became more like greater short horned lizards, with hard scales and spikes to protect themselves, and the other species became more like axolotls, with high regeneration rates to protect themselves. (Did you think these aliens would make it easy on them? They'll still have reasonably intelligent predators. at least, enough so that they'll be forced to evolve sapience.) Both groups still have males and females, and still lay eggs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For convenience sake I'll dub them WLZ - Water Lizards, and DLZ - Desert/Dry Lizards. At this point I just don't have a decent name for either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Society&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a whole, the WLZ are more peaceful, and more inclined to flee from danger. They normally live in small clans of a few immediate families. Parents generally take care of their eggs until they hatch, then they raise them to adulthood. They live a nomadic lifestyle, and when they see fit to keep something, they guard it zealously. They do not a lot of government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a whole, the DLZ are more warlike, and more inclined to fight when in danger. They live in large underground metropolises, with communal chambers where eggs are hatched and raised by designated members of society. They have a caste system and an aristocracy, and there is almost no ownership of property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T03:05:26.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3921" CreationDate="2016-09-01T03:23:30.627" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now's your chance people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Come up with your best design for the world building podcast's logo.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Designs should be fairly simply so as to be discernible at small resolutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally the artwork should be vector (display resolution will go down to 98x98)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demonstrates the content (world building)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final design will be selected (voting will close) on 9 September&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T23:27:22.200" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:27:22.200" Title="Design an Icon - WB podcast" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3920" CreationDate="2016-09-01T04:02:10.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, here's a sketch of what I was thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DeIJH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DeIJH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;rough sketch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's another rough version, this time in ink and with digital colors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OXacy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OXacy.png&quot; alt=&quot;rougher sketch, now with the power of the rainbow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still need to get the colors figured out, and I think I made the planet too big, and the dragon just refuses to fit properly, but this version is at least closer to what I imagined as a final product. It's also tiny, so you can see it still works reasonably well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T02:47:16.240" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T02:47:16.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3920" CreationDate="2016-09-01T04:10:43.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking something along the line of a ringed mesh globe with a entertainment microphone in the middle, a simplistic example is below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F65f0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F65f0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T04:10:43.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3899" CreationDate="2016-09-01T13:02:52.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I have distinct reservations about the term &quot;hard-science&quot;, certainly there can be non-mathematical answers that are hard-science. May I suggest hard-science answers about biology, psychology (yes, it was mentioned earlier), chemistry, and geology. This will depend on the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there can and will be answers where the tags of hard-science and science-based overlap. You may draw Venn diagrams to illustrate whatever notion of the overlap of these tags you may hold. The issue of how much mathematical explication is needed for answers will vary. It's easy to see that some answerers will provide equations and calculations for their answers to even science-based questions. After all, how can anybody stop an answer being more appropriate for the hard-science tag when the question was only science-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly anyone familiar with classification theory (of which there are several) will know that any labels, categories, classifications, or taxonomies will inevitably be porous and any demarcation between related concepts will be permeable. This means that overlap and similarity between various subject matter are things that just have to be lived with. This doesn't diminish the value of tags, it's simply they don't have absolute value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earnest Rutherford may have said: &quot;There is only physics and stamp collecting.&quot; This as about as absolutist as it gets (except he was probably joking and Rutherford was a New Zealander and New Zealanders have a funny sense of humour). While physics is awarded the hard-science, it's not the only game in town (I say this as someone who loves physics, but I'm not blind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply expect hard-science answers to be more rigorous than science-based ones, but do not expect them to put in exclusively separate boxes. There will always be cross-overs. Tags are more like pointers showing which way the subject should be treated. There can't be absolutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T13:02:52.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3920" CreationDate="2016-09-01T13:30:27.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After our meeting, and seeing the sketch in the earlier Answer, I'm ready to share my analysis.  Thanks DaaaahWhoosh, not because I like it ☹ but because it served as a strawman to crystalize my vague handwavy ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reaction: the “planet” (or planemo, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1458:_Small_Moon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;large moon&lt;/a&gt;, megastructure?) is indeed iconic of meaning “world”, and echos the main site logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what do dragons have to do with anything? Are there dragons in many questions (no) or are they symbolic of something strongly tied to the site (no)? And what are they doing there? Orbiting? Or is this some nations’s flag?  It’s not applicable to the vast majority of Qs here and doesn’t evoke a central theme that applies to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a digression, let me point out this Ted talk &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ted.com/talks/roman_mars_why_city_flags_may_be_the_worst_designed_thing_you_ve_never_noticed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on principles of good (and &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;) flag design.  I suggest that this is applicable to the logo as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let me cover ideas of the larger piece first — what we are calling the &lt;em&gt;banner&lt;/em&gt; or page art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so constrained in size but can have substantially more detail.  This is going somewhere so bear with me and I’ll come back to the icon later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, same idea of &lt;em&gt;making imagery that evokes the worldbuilding ideas&lt;/em&gt; but not so constrained by size and resolution. This isolates the different issues of design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding is not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; about geology and geography&lt;/strong&gt;.  It’s about biochemestry, different ecosystems, society, technology; all the big stuff behind the setting of a story.  And what makes the stuff different from a normal story is that it’s &lt;em&gt;alien&lt;/em&gt;. That is, very different from what we know in real life.  It might be far future or alternate timeline humans, but an “alien” society from our point of view.  It’s &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; so it needs &lt;em&gt;figuring out&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;That’s the step of worldbuilding we focus on here on the main site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me throw out another strawman idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with a &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; but not necessarily a normal planet. Maybe a wierd planet or a space habitat.  This is iconic for “world” as noted earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surround it with a few alien beings. &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; alien, such as something with tenticles (Ctuluian?) and someone insectoid, maybe a mechanical robot-like creature from the 1950’s, etc.  This, clearly, represents the &lt;em&gt;alien&lt;/em&gt; aspect.  Different biology, different ecosystem, society, etc. just by virtue of being nonhuman and as &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diverse&lt;/em&gt; as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this scene is a tableau. The group of beings is grouped around what, a model, poster, or map of the “world” (habitat)?  There can be other elements in the background or elsewhere, but look what we have thus far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are they doing? What is this scene? It immediately suggests some kind of storytelling.  Maybe they are forming a peace treaty. Maybe they are preparing to forge a mixed society, or going off on an expidition.  (Babalon 5, Ringworld, and other classic stories come to mind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The juxtiposition and presentation of the other iconic ideas should itself lead to the larger concept of &lt;strong&gt;society&lt;/strong&gt;, civilizations; and suggest a story is happening here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about the classic covers of sci-fi magazines.  Whether taken from the lead story or just an issue theme or cool painting the editor liked, &lt;strong&gt;the tableau is evocotive that a story is happening here&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A banner or extended page art can taper off with images taken from many different famous questions and themes explored on the site.  Fitting in more clutter should be a different journey for the viewer, more of an Easter egg hunt, and be separate from the thematic presentation of the main elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let me return to the small icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After having viewed and understood the symbolism of the larger piece, the small piece, like Roman Mars’s flags, should draw elements from that but be &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt;. It should remind you of the main art, and the main art provides meaning to the elements appearing in the small piece. The small piece does not have to &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; the symbols, but meerly &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; them as defined in the main picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One main element from the scene that is &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; and still iconic overall (once you know the context) is enough.  If the aliens are gathered around a (picture/map/illustration) of a distinctive habitat, than that habitat would be it.  Think of how the star ship Enterprise is not like any other ship but distinct to the franchise.  A blob with indistinct landmasses is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distinct and iconic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s why I speculate on a strange world instead, like a taurus!  Imagine a taurus-world with continents drawn out like a political globe. The insect and the ctuluian are gestering with tenticles and antennae to different regions on the (er?) globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story: are they invading? Exploring? Building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the small piece of art can be a close up of the taurus-globe, lost detail but now we know what it is and it has enough color patches in the same arrangements to recognise.  Present that as a close-up showing the appendages over it. Or, re-compose the shot but it’s still a tenticle and insectoid antenna (grabbing? Fighting over? Admiring?) the map of the taurus-world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tells a story even without the main picture, if the resolution is high enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that’s my idea.  But more importantly, it’s a meta-idea of how the art should be understood, regardless of what elements are eventually used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2016-09-01T13:46:04.027" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T13:46:04.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T03:08:57.277" Score="-3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone on the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange--I'm not going to name who--suggested that I put my alternate world on the Universe Factory blog.  However, she warned me that that site doesn't get a lot of comments, so I have to find a backup plan on a worldbuilding site or blog (&lt;strong&gt;other than Reddit, thank you very much&lt;/strong&gt;) where I can describe the geography, geology and other big aspects of my world and get feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea where that might be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T06:59:54.827" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T06:59:54.827" Title="If Universe Factory Fails, Where To Next?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3925" CreationDate="2016-09-02T03:15:24.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Universe Factory isn't going away, nor is content posted there.  I suppose Medium (the platform) could fail, but it seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting feedback through comments is a different matter.  No matter where you post, most people who read don't comment.  Are there places with larger potential audiences?  Certainly; we need to work harder on promoting Universe Factory (and keeping the posts coming).  Of course, there might also be more competition for attention on other sites, so you have to consider that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I don't have suggestions for other blogs to post on, sorry.  I'm focusing on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T03:15:24.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3928" CreationDate="2016-09-02T09:46:43.490" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm about to flag a question as, say, &quot;off topic&quot;, I usually leave a comment to let the OP clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I commented &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53650/what-would-happen-if-someone-set-a-spear-against-a-charging-bison&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I asked &quot;How is it related to worldbuilding&quot; and got a reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@enkryptor you are welcome to flag it and/or make a meta about it, don't discuss it in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true? Why shouldn't I discuss flags in comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8465" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T14:04:03.323" Title="Should I leave a comment before I flag a question? If not, why?" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3927" CreationDate="2016-09-02T13:43:18.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say you should comment when you vote-to-close (VTC). A VTC means that the question can be improved, so the asker should know what they should improve upon. Comments should help point out the weak spots, and perhaps how to improve them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging questions usually means you want that question deleted. You probably don't need to comment for that, the mods should handle it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in this case, that comment was discouraging extended discussion in comments. Which is generally discouraged. If you want to debate what is or is not on-topic on this site, meta &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a better place for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T13:43:18.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3927" CreationDate="2016-09-02T14:04:03.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is a fixable problem with a question and somebody hasn't already commented about it, leaving a comment asking for clarification or otherwise explaining the problem is a good thing.  To forestall discussion in comments you can add something like &quot;Please [edit] to add details&quot; (or whatever the issue was).  Try to avoid conversation in comments, but please don't avoid commenting at all and surprising the user -- and anybody who was working on an answer -- with a closure later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer says that flagging means you want something deleted.  That's true for many flags, but users who can't &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; to close can &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; to close, and close means &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt;, not delete.  (A question that stays closed could get deleted later, but the point is to hit &quot;pause&quot;, fix the problems, and reopen.)  A close flag usually sends the question to the close-votes review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T14:04:03.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T15:01:29.860" Score="18" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;Around the beginning of August, Stack Exchange created &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3818/627&quot;&gt;a custom post notice for Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, moderators manually add the notice to all questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and then may add it to specific answers that don't meet the requirements of the tag. There are only four of us, so it sometimes takes a day or so for the post notice to be added, but in general, it gets done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've monitored posts on the tag over the past month, and we've had to add the post notice to a bunch of answers - probably 50% or more, though I don't have the exact statistics. Adding the notice seems to have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effects, but not many. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answer quality is, for the most part, staying the same. I'm not saying that there hasn't been any improvement - I've seen some really awesome answers over the past month - but it hasn't been as much as I think many of us hoped for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd like to propose something that may be unpopular, but that I'd like to put on the table for discussion: Deleting answers. To my knowledge, this was proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2212/627&quot;&gt;early last summer&lt;/a&gt;, though we never took action in that direction. At the time, it was too extreme a response. Now, though, I feel like it might be a better choice. We've tried many things, and none of them seem to be working. Here's my proposed solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If an answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question doesn't fit the requirements of the tag, it can have the post notice added to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answerer doesn't improve the answer within $X$ days (where $X\gg1$), the answer may be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the author improves the answer, he or she can flag the post and ask for it to be undeleted, and to have the post notice removed. Hopefully, this will be the case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal has some problems and questions we need to answer, as I think people have figured out by now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is/are the arbiter(s) of whether or not an answer meets the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag? Furthermore, the issue of whether or not an answer satisfies this has recently been brought up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3900/627&quot;&gt;Does my answer fit the hard-science tag?&lt;/a&gt;, though there's been neither answers nor a consensus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much time should the answerer be given (i.e. what is a reasonable value of $X$)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we easily keep track of which answers have been &quot;given notice&quot;, as it were, and when they may be eligible for deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to bring this into the infrastructure of Stack Exchange? What if an answer has a net score of +5, and might not be sent to the Low Quality Posts queue? Might a moderator have to deal with that? How can we get community consensus (see also Bullet #1)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if there are disputes as to the deletion of an answer? If the answerer feels the deletion was unfair, how can this be solved, given that many people won't be able to see the deleted answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would this solution cause more problems than it solves? Is it worth potentially starting disputes for the sake of scientific accuracy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I just being &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/12905/116454&quot;&gt;overly persnickety&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all very potential points against the idea of answer deletion (though none have simple yes-or-no answers), so let's be clear about something: &lt;strong&gt;I'm presenting this proposal from a neutral standpoint&lt;/strong&gt;. On the one hand, there are quite a few problems, obstacles, and roadblocks when it comes to implementing this. On the other hand, this would be a way of dealing with low-quality answers; it might not be the optimal way, but I'll be honest: I'm all out of solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T13:03:37.633" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:43:28.450" Title="Should we delete answers that don't meet the requirements of the hard-science tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|answers|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2016-09-02T15:56:52.117" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;So my view on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who is/are the arbiter(s) of whether or not an answer meets the requirements of the hard-science tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of taking the step of deletion, I think we should first have a stamped-out comment that people can post, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hard-Science tags require answers that _______. This answer does not appear to abide by that, and thus the asker's request, and thus is a low quality answer. Consider revising or removing this answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Somebody else can write it better than that, but the idea still stands)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community will, theoretically, either stop upvoting the answer/downvoting it (as 'dangerously incorrect' as it is not the hard-science requested), on this question, and slowly, hopefully, a culture will form... or they won't, and they'll continue to upvote, ignoring the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens still, we reach a logical decision point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community might agree with the idea if they knew, but they haven't gotten it through their heads. They need to be--ahem--further enlightened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...In this case I'd escalate to the suggested deletion option, although this seems significantly more major and heavy-handed. We should look at this option &lt;em&gt;at that point&lt;/em&gt; down the road. Jumping straight to deleting answers seems a few steps too fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community by large disagrees with the idea, and they community is wrong! Dead wrong!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HlAU3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HlAU3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Are we out of touch?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gosh darn it, the World Building community doesn't know what's right from wrong and keeps getting out of line! These whipper-snappers need to respect the views of Meta and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...No but seriously. If we think the World Building community (including those who don't view meta) by-and-large get the Hard-Science tag and think it's useless, ignore it, and support others ignoring it &lt;em&gt;perhaps it is we who are wrong.&lt;/em&gt; My opinion is that it's useful, but if we reach that point--where I stand against the 90% in my down voting soft-science answers, waving my banner proudly as the ship goes down--I have humility enough to say that maybe it's not a useful tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we reach that point, let's not say &quot;it's the 90% who don't know what's good for them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T15:56:52.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2016-09-02T17:52:00.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take look at an example of a hard science question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52675/how-to-set-the-lightsail&quot;&gt;How to “set” the lightsail?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding pictures, let's call them diagrams, drastically improved the question, but still, is that hard-science demand appropriate for that question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably yes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would I like to write and solve all differential equation, accounting relativistic effects? Speeds are not high, but still, it's 5% difference for 0.3c, compared to classical mechanics solutions, totally not scientific not to take this in to account. I do not work with relativistic equation on an everyday basis and the last time I worked with simple differential equation was a year ago. (I had a celebration after solving it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the situation in the question is simple, so the general solution describing all possible solutions in integral form should be simply enough.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And by simplification of functions describing laser power (let's say some constant) will give us some simple solution in a general form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But based on the question, and some his answers, someone has to invest a huge amount of time to explain the results to JDługosz, or prepare general solutions for his particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General solutions are pretty useless when you can't manipulate with them, also they do not always exists in analytically form (famous n-body problem).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And one way to solve that problem is to narrow down the set of solutions by setting particular initial conditions for searching solutions and by specifying what we are searching for. For example the minimal time, minimal energy etc. Narrowing the question itself helps in searching the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an interesting question for me, not exciting, but still useful in promoting sails, nice to see someone else uses lasers to propulsion and tries to figure out how it could be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do I wish go through all the mess mentioned above (even if the hardness of it is a bit exaggerated), when it needs to investigate only 2 cases, a bit of geometry, Newton's third law, simply as that? I would do that for myself, had I such question and would call it good enough for figuring out what to expect in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good way would be to make a graphical simulation, although I do not have the proper software for that. (But still, it could be fancy dots moving clip.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides of complains - my point is, hard-science answer should have hard-science question. There is more work in formulating that question than in formulating a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that particular case the answer is possible, the quality of the question is barely enough to do so but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second there have to be people willing to answer the question in such a way, but I do not see why they should choose WB over Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was nicely surprised by seeing that custom post warning for his question, sad it has to be done manually, but definitely good to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main point, to get his answers we should begin from the starting point, making the question great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sorry for not addressing your points, maybe I will edit this post later for that, now I wish to have fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We should have 1,000 points bounties, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T06:58:02.947" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T06:58:02.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T01:33:22.643" Score="7" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is simple:  What techniques or strategies must I need to support and publicize the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt; blog site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T09:26:40.097" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T09:26:40.097" Title="How to Make Universe Factory More Popular" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2016-09-04T14:52:20.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those interested in a behind-the-scenes look at how our design came to be, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilding-designer-b5fde86de92b#.yxul3rwg3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interview with Kurtis in Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;.  Includes early sketches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T03:30:47.827" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T03:30:47.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2016-09-04T15:50:49.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Nope.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is inevitable that such a policy would at some point devolve into a screaming internet fight between non-experts promoting their pet models with a a realist furor that mimics religious faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE has a very effective mechanism for controlling the quality of question answers: vote up, vote down.  Literally the &lt;strong&gt;only time you should be downvoting&lt;/strong&gt; any question answer is if it does not properly address the question, one example of which is ignoring the requirements of the hard science tag.  If the downvoting mechanism isn't providing enough incentive for the answerer to remove their own answer to evade further downvotes, then it should stay.  Don't create extra, more central and authoritarian censorship mechanisms.  If you feel bad answers are too unkillable, you need to evangelize for diligent down-voting.  Many people (self-included) only vote down if someone is actively being a dick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T15:50:49.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3911" CreationDate="2016-09-04T17:34:45.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should not close real-world topics, but we should migrate them as need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One key thing to remember about StackExchange is that it does not encourage cross-posting.  This means that a question should not just go on SE's where it is applicable; it needs to go on the SE where it is &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; applicable.  We need to get these questions onto the best SE for them.  Just because a question happens to be asked due to a worldbuilding process does not mean WorldBuilding.SE is the best place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one very valid reason to have a &quot;real world&quot; question on WB is if the question would get bogged down in the details if it was moved to the &quot;correct&quot; SE.  I think it should be valid for a question asker to be able to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, this question is about the real world, but I'm going to be doing X Y and Z with it, which are decided non-real-world worldbuilding tasks, and if I ask this on the 'correct' forum, they're going to get stuck on unrealistic settings Q R and S that I need to address but never occur int he real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a specific example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54082/would-the-world-end-if-friction-disappeared&quot;&gt;look at What would happen if friction dissapeared?&lt;/a&gt;.  All of the answers are highly based on physics and biology.  This question &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have been asked on Physics, but it would have been closed immediately because it isn't based on the exact scientifically defined laws of our universe as accepted by the community.  There may have been a few jokes about spherical cows, and then it would have been closed unceremoniously.  Accordingly, putting it on WorldBuilding has some validity.  The &quot;best&quot; site would not take it, so we become the &quot;best&quot; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this is not a close vote, but a migration, I don't think we need to be as active in broadcasting our opinion.  Most of the other SE's I've been on will migrate your question without even giving you a chance to explain.  In general, I don't think this is undesirable.  In such a case, the wider community is helping the question asker put their question in the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the migration process first, an admin from the other board has to accept the question.  If they don't accept the question, then I think that should be more than enough of an argument to host the question on our own SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T17:34:45.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-07T02:25:35.400" Score="6" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceships&lt;/a&gt;. Many questions are tagged with both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is confusing; people might use one or the other and questions don’t show up as a uniform category. Many use both; if reaching the limit you’ll have to leave off one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should they be merged, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:51:56.420" Title="Space flight vs space ships?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3937" CreationDate="2016-09-07T20:00:17.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There could still be a slight difference. Spaceflight, arguably, includes flying through space through means other than a spaceship, such as by spaceborne lifeforms. Spaceships, as a tag, could include discussion of things that spacecraft can do or that can happen to spacecraft when they are not traveling in space, such as how long a spaceship of a specific type could survive on the surface of a specific type of planet with a hostile environment (e.g. highly corrosive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Nex Terren's comment, there could still be a substantial difference. Spaceflight, as a tag, could specialize in discussion of the mechanics of flight while Spaceships could specialize in issues of spacecraft construction, combat, repair, or systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What would a trip to Jupiter feel like?&quot; might be a good question for Spaceflight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A 4-person spacecraft crashes onto a 50 km radius asteroid with no atmosphere. How likely would it be that the crew would survive?&quot; might be a good question for Spaceships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22685" LastEditorUserId="22685" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T21:37:22.607" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T21:37:22.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3940" CreationDate="2016-09-07T23:31:13.510" Score="6" ViewCount="1577" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you all know there is a series of questions that have been asked about the world existing with birds replacing mammals as the dominant order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below should a summarized list of all of the questions in order of post, so that a link to this meta post should be enough for future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T17:43:26.403" Title="Planet of the Aves Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3939" CreationDate="2016-09-07T23:31:13.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order of oldest to newest;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51374/planet-of-the-aves-first-steps&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: First Steps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51622/planet-of-the-aves-quadrabirds&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Quadrabirds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51661/planet-of-the-aves-aquabirds&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Aquabirds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53098/planet-of-the-aves-low-tech-weaponry&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Low tech Weaponry&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54271/planet-of-the-aves-medieval-armor&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Medieval Armor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54532/planet-of-the-aves-knowledge-of-aerodynamics-and-weather-phenomena&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Knowledge of Aerodynamics and Weather Phenomena&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55302/planet-of-the-aves-new-nests&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: New Nests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55370/planet-of-the-aves-tool-use&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves: Tool Use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T17:43:26.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T00:46:04.307" Score="6" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did I manage to get 201 points for the day just ended?  The Rep panel just shows the last upvote with +1 after a long string of blanks since I had already reached the limit of 200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; noticed that the capping system is annoyingly dumb: after truncating incoming upvotes, if I “spend” points like with a downvote it really does take it off leaving 199 rather tha  re-evaluating the truncation of incoming votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I recall accidently touching a downvote and immediatly reversing that (when trying to scroll on the tablet), so maybe it’s an outright bug in capping with downvote/undownvote, or maybe someone upvoted me at the same moment so it awarded the 1 point (instead of 10) to bring it back to 200, but then the undownvote &lt;em&gt;returned the point&lt;/em&gt;.  If that’s true, although lesser of an actual bug, it would allow funny ways to bypass the cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T01:27:20.757" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T01:27:20.757" Title="Strange rep cap behavior: how did I get 201 for the day?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3941" CreationDate="2016-09-08T01:26:23.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you downvote an answer?  Was that answer then deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen things get funny around the edges of the rep cap.  If you downvote (taking you to 199 for the day) and somebody then upvotes one of your posts, you'll get +1.  If the post you downvoted then gets deleted you'll get your +1 back, but that +1 doesn't count against the rep cap so you get it even though you're already at 200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things that don't count against the rep cap: answer acceptances and bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T01:26:23.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T06:45:06.737" Score="5" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54548/does-the-probable-heat-of-nanotech-universal-constructors-make-it-infeasible-in/54558#54558&quot;&gt;Does the probable heat of nanotech universal constructors make it infeasible in home environments?&lt;/a&gt; I noticed that the editor had altered 10^12 to 1012. While trying to fix this the editor told me I needed to change at least 6 characters before I could save the edit. In this case I had to make some other trivial changes before I could save it. I understand that normally making only a change of a couple characters probably means the edit is not worth making, but in this case there is a big difference between 10^12 and 1012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you should ask a confirmation question on short edits, or just rely on the editing queue to get rid of trivial edits rather than banning them entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T17:41:36.103" Title="Why always refuse minimum edits lengths?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T08:45:49.353" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to add more options to the review stuff. A lot of the times the problem with the answer is that it needs to be expanded on, rather than any of the current options given, or perhaps a way to mark something as a Low Quality answer and possibly allow the answerer to mark it that way themselves...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that personally I might know the general answer, but not want to go into detail or go do the research to answer it in a way that I would consider a good answer. In some cases this results in someone not getting an answer at all which from a questioners perspective isn't something that like happening. An answer, however low quality it is, so long as it is accurate, is better than no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would it be possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T17:41:19.150" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T19:22:13.200" Title="More review options?" Tags="|feature-request|answers|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3943" CreationDate="2016-09-08T09:12:00.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that each of your edit has to go through a review process. Where it needs to be reviewed by at least two users. To avoid too many processes, substancial edits are required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might comment on the post, to ask someone to edit it. Users with higher reputation are not subject to the same limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And on that note, I hate the rendering of LaTeX on the edit review, I had the impression that the 10^12 was made with it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T09:12:00.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3944" CreationDate="2016-09-08T12:01:34.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one option for you: downvote. By downvoting, you consider that ok, the answer is somehow valid and does not need to be deleted. But yet, would greatly benefit from a bit of work. So you downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible exception to it, are one-liners/single sentence answers. For me that amounts to no answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to answer your specific question, to my knowledge, those options are valid throughout the network and cannot be personnalised on a site per site basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:01:34.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3937" CreationDate="2016-09-08T17:52:06.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very broadly speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spaceflight&lt;/em&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spaceships&lt;/em&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;technology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there will often be overlap between the two; a spaceship, during periods of interest, is likely to be involved in spaceflight, or the questions about it are likely to benefit from knowledge about spaceflight in order to answer. Hence, many questions that deal with one of the subjects can quite legitimately be tagged with both tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the (current) tag wiki excerpts (my boldface here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; is described as &lt;em&gt;For questions about &lt;strong&gt;the process of&lt;/strong&gt; travelling through space, including in orbit around a planet or moon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceships&lt;/a&gt; is described as &lt;em&gt;For questions involving &lt;strong&gt;implemented theory or technology for&lt;/strong&gt; travelling through space.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many times when the two are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interchangable. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I am building a spaceship to go to Mars, and need help with some specific aspect of that, I'm not asking about &lt;em&gt;the process of spaceflight&lt;/em&gt; per se but rather &lt;em&gt;the technology that enables spaceflight&lt;/em&gt; -- in other words, the spaceship. It is possible that the technology I am asking about is relevant for the process or experience, but the focus of the question is the technology.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once I put a bunch of people in there and hurl them off to the Red Planet, particularly if those people are &quot;passengers&quot; not &quot;crew&quot; (compare an airliner), and ask about what it'd be like for them, the question is likely about &lt;em&gt;the process of spaceflight&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to the hardware that enables travel through space -- in other words, spaceflight. It is possible that what I am asking about is influenced by the technological choices made in constructing the spaceship, but the focus of the question is on the process or experience, not the technology.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The two tags serve different purposes and should not be merged into a single tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said,&lt;/strong&gt; if anyone has ideas for &lt;strong&gt;how to clarify the difference between the two&lt;/strong&gt; especially in the tag wiki excerpt, I'm all for seeing proposed edits there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T09:15:59.567" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T09:15:59.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T19:03:03.110" Score="7" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can never remember how to format units in math formatting, and people show different ways to do it anyway!  So I thought it would be a good idea to have a permanent note listing things to do and not-do with peer-approved examples to copy from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Units&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific notation with units on the end:  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2.5*10^8 m/s$&lt;/span&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not right&lt;/strong&gt; but commonly seen posted (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/54897/885&quot;&gt;fresh example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…someone?…  what’s the best practice for typesetting this easily and correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;add cookbook entries here&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T15:52:10.380" Title="Cookbook and Sandbox for mathjax" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3948" CreationDate="2016-09-08T19:08:50.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers are for sandbox experimentation and discussion.  The only way to see what we’re doing is &lt;strong&gt;in a post&lt;/strong&gt;. It doesn’t look the same in comments or a chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;vector with subscript name&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s the right way to indicate a vector quantity with subscriped name, like p_in for momentum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HDE 226868 suggests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Would something like $\vec{p_{\text{in}}}$ work? &#xA;You could also just use $\vec{p}_{\text{in}}$.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which formats as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would something like $\vec{p_{\text{in}}}$ work? You could also just use $\vec{p}_{\text{in}}$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T19:08:50.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T20:29:52.303" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say that, in the future, some scientists have created satellites capable of something that seems science fiction for now — punching the walls of the universe to study an alternate reality. By that scenario, some hundreds of “alternate Earths” from hundreds of alternate universes would already have been discovered and meticulously studied. As much as half of them would still be ruled by humans, unfolded by events that turned out differently. One universe, for example, had an Earth where 9/11 never happened, or where the outcome of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars ended up differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most interesting to note was a planet that scientists call “Alternate Earth 111”, known to the public as “Great Lakes Earth”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because at first glance, it seemed that almost every continent is dominated by lakes, even those larger than the Great Lakes that we have in North America. What is its history? What points of divergence would we expect to see in this particular variation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proved to be a long, backbreaking investigation because when our alt-satellites picked up Great Lakes Earth, it has discovered traces of civilization — traces roughly 100,000 years old. However, after years of picking up the pieces and speculating on the rest, we believe that we have mapped the entire geography and the best of the history of Great Lakes Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the Anatomically Correct Series or the Creating a Realistic World Series, this is an ongoing process and will be subject to edit or add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T19:56:31.520" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T02:36:20.883" Title="Great Lakes Earth Series" Tags="|discussion|blog|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T22:02:36.803" Score="5" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like a very high percentage of the questions asked here concern plausibility, which is something that's hard to avoid where any kind of fiction is concerned. Some questions purport to be related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12760/realistic-isolated-town&quot;&gt;&quot;reality&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, even if they try to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54668/likelihood-of-a-large-magnetic-island-remaining-undetected-until-the-early-20th&quot;&gt;&quot;hedge their bets&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but in the context of fiction are really about plausibility. Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54662/can-i-have-gunpowder-without-having-guns&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; seem to be asked with the intent of eliciting a plausible backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plausibility is highly subjective, but we can approach it from a general-public point of view. After all, gamma radiation was once a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_(comics)#Fictional_character_biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plausible explanation for &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Nevertheless, a fair bit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53545/largest-and-strongest-dome-fortification-for-citizens#comment153312_53545&quot;&gt;conflict seems to ensue&lt;/a&gt; when the realistic answer is &quot;that's impossible or vanishingly unlikely&quot;, the lazy answer is &quot;feed them some &lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phlebotinum&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and the questioner wants something in between. It would be nice to be able to head off some of this at the pass, as it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the subject of the hard-answer scale as described above, I feel like some perfectly good answer people get marginalized when they are naturally inclined to one end or the other of the scale, but don't get the sense of which end the questioner meant. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/a&gt; tags ought to help, but the vast majority of these have a perfectly accurate science-based tag that conveys nothing about what they expect in terms of a plausible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we be more granular about indicating these questions that are based on plausibility? How can we better filter out questions that require a large, plausible, but fictional, backstory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, can we implement some friendly shorthand for &quot;your scenario is scientifically ludicrous, so stop trying to justify it with some kind of plausible backstory and just write your actual story, which sounds interesting&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26342" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T14:23:42.050" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T14:23:42.050" Title="How do we reconcile &quot;rate my plausibility&quot; questions with &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2016-09-08T22:02:36.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like ruthless retagging is the answer. &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; is wonderfully specific, but &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; is too broad, and the line between that and &lt;strike&gt;&lt;code&gt;fantasy-based&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; some prospective tag that requires next to no science is overly fuzzy. These could be subdivided into other tags relating to varying levels or types of plausibility. &quot;Fantasy&quot; is also kind of a pejorative word among a certain brand of author, who will object that what they're writing about isn't magic, despite their work being very much in the realm of science-fantasy or space opera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;broad-science&lt;/code&gt; - Where most people could easily have your premise explained to them using legitimate science, and only people with a serious interest in the subject of your premise, or someone with an eye for trivia, would know that something is unscientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;popular-science&lt;/code&gt; - Where you're aware that your premise doesn't meet rigorous scientific examination or agree with the latest evidence, but you don't disagree with anything in the Wikipedia summary on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;speculative&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;plot-point&lt;/code&gt; - Where your premise is a requirement of your plot, no matter how unscientific it is, and your question revolves around the feasibility of some other subject. This is the tag you want for all those &quot;just like earth&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;No plausibility required&quot; seems like a good summary for really off-the-wall ideas where justification seems... well, unjustified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26342" LastEditorUserId="26342" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T17:45:33.910" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T17:45:33.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3911" CreationDate="2016-09-09T01:53:07.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The top answer there (now +15/-1) argues that questions about the real world are on-topic because &quot;we ask these questions to gain a better understanding of our world in order to develop and understand one that we are creating&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second answer there (now +10/-4) argues that questions about the real world are off-topic because you could imagine a worldbuilding connection for &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question and we can't be a kitchen sink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think these positions are actually all that far apart.  Here, let me try to reconcile them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about the real world are on-topic when they describe a worldbuilding application to which answers will be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which binary-star systems have habitable planets?  &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to place a colony of 23rd-century humans on a planet in a binary-star system with (further criteria).  What characteristics should I look for (e.g. star types, planets/systems we already know about, etc).  &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are humans still evolving physically?  &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want my future humans to have (certain properties).  Could humans evolve that from where we are now?  If so, what is a likely path and about how long would it take, assuming (factors).  &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that make the &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; aspect explicit and central should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T01:53:07.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3948" CreationDate="2016-09-09T07:39:21.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what you mean really. If you're asking how to represent units (m, s, etc.) in math/physics/... results in general, you should know that there's a norm. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;International System of Unit&lt;/a&gt; (called &lt;em&gt;SI&lt;/em&gt; from French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the wikipedia page and &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this nice checklist&lt;/a&gt;, we can see a set of rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A value is written with a number, a space and a unit. No end of line can occur between the number and the unit. Exceptions are %, °, &quot;, ' which are written without spaces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A unit is mathematical symbol not an abbreviation. So &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; for metres and not &lt;code&gt;m.&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A prefix (&lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; for mili, &lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; for kilo, &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; for mega, etc.) is part of the unit, so no space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different units are combined with a dot (should be centred, as it indicates a multiplication, not decimals) or a space. $\text{N}\ \text{m}$ (&lt;code&gt;$\text{N}\ \text{m}$&lt;/code&gt;) or $\text{N}\cdot\text{m}$ (&lt;code&gt;$\text{N}\cdot\text{m}$&lt;/code&gt;). In practice, prefer the dots. Normal dots are often easily understood as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Division are given with a &lt;strong&gt;single&lt;/strong&gt; slash, or a negative exponent. $\text{m}/\text{s}$ (&lt;code&gt;$\text{m}/\text{s}$&lt;/code&gt;) or $\text{m}\cdot\text{s}^{-1}$ (&lt;code&gt;$\text{m}\cdot\text{s}^{-1}$&lt;/code&gt;). No m/s/g: that's two slashes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Units named from person should have a capital letter (Pa, Hz, T, K) others shouldn't (m, s, mol, parsec). Exception is litre which can use both.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No plural form! (no kg&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefixes case is fixed. M means $10^6$ and m means $10^{-3}$. Also no &lt;strong&gt;K&lt;/strong&gt;g.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Units are written in Roman lettres ($\text{m}$ indicates metre, while $m$ is usually a mass).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some conventions might add a few more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Variables should be in italic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can't write it better than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Superscripts and subscripts are in italic type if they represent variables, quantities, or running numbers. They are in roman type if they are descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like $m_\text{p}$ is the mass of a proton (descriptive).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;log, cos, etc. should be written in Roman lettres: $\cos x$ (&lt;code&gt;$\cos x$&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of standard units and typical symbols for their variables can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics-help.info/physicsguide/appendices/si_units.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course all this is valid for SI units (not imperial ones). So if you're more familiar with pounds, yards, cups, etc. You might consider using those instead. You just have to make sure that you are explicit and clear. And still many of the rules above can apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope I answered your question. In any case, I figure it would be something worth having around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T07:47:15.880" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T07:47:15.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3937" CreationDate="2016-09-09T14:30:48.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can’t show illustrations in comments so I'm starting a new Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7JJK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7JJK.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;excerpt&lt;/em&gt; (as of this posting) advises of the other tag and suggests reading the details.  But there is no “info” link to click on.  Do the available links/buttons vary with the context, displayed differently in different screens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of “see also” it might be a stronger “please read” to better indicate that education on proper use is needed, rather than supplimental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2016-09-16T08:51:56.420" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:51:56.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2016-09-09T15:57:05.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we be more granular about indicating these questions that are based on plausibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that it &lt;em&gt;has to be&lt;/em&gt; on the asker to provide that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking a question like that, you have to let us know what kind of answer you're looking for. We have a couple of broad categories for these kinds of things, but we can't have a meta-tag for everyone's personal ideas for what constitutes &quot;plausible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question isn't specific as to what degree of plausibility they want to have, then the answers will likely not be appropriate. Garbage in, garbage out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, can we implement some friendly shorthand for &quot;your scenario is scientifically ludicrous, so stop trying to justify it with some kind of plausible backstory and just write your actual story, which sounds interesting&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems very anti-worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the whole point of coming up with a &quot;plausible&quot; for a particular impossible construct is that such plausible explanations can lead to &lt;em&gt;new ideas&lt;/em&gt; for that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16001" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T15:57:05.920" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-09-12T08:41:55.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What inventions could be made with this fictional mineral?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a world similar to ours, having technology comparable to our 19th century. Now, there is a mineral found with the following properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No matter the temperature difference between the mineral and its surroundings, if you leave it alone, it will just looks like an ordinary gray rock.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the mineral is heated nothing will happen either (I'm talking about 100$^\circ$ C or something in that range)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you heat it and you apply pressure to it, it starts glowing like a light bulb, cool down way faster and stop glowing once it reached the temperature of its surroundings. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using this mineral, what are some inventions that people could come up with?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought of this this to be used as a light. You could connect one side of a stone with some heat source (for example boiling water) and leave at least one side open to the colder environment. Then if you apply pressure or not, you can switch it on or off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23341" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T08:41:55.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T20:42:11.683" Score="12" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3947/29&quot;&gt;my own answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3937/29&quot;&gt;Space flight vs space ships?&lt;/a&gt;, and specifically the bullet list at the top,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spaceflight&lt;/em&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spaceships&lt;/em&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;technology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I was struck by a thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the similarity in naming of the two tags, which apparently is contributing to some confusion, it might be easier to tell the difference between the two if we rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; (the process) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; (possibly adding spaceflight back as a  synonym) and keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceships&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceships&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceships&lt;/a&gt; the same (possibly adding a synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spacecraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spacecraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spacecraft&lt;/a&gt; because that is a well established term in the industry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem to pretty well match the current tag wiki, which says in the excerpt that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the process of travelling through space, including in orbit around a planet or moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinions on this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T18:42:11.387" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T18:42:11.387" Title="Should we rename [spaceflight] to [space-travel]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2016-09-13T16:36:03.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;On other sites&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/great-lakes-earth-geography-372bce96d642#.8atotmlma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth:  Geography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@johndailey/the-solar-system-of-great-lakes-earth-1ac15b6c439d#.irc168w7p&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth:  Solar System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Asia-Great-Lakes-Earth-Collage-623800746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asia, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Africa-Great-Lakes-Earth-collage-623802775&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Africa, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Pangaea-Great-Lakes-Earth-633206598&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pangaea, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Timeline-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-s-Geological-History-633801492&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timeline of Great Lakes Earth's Geological History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Bering-Land-Bridge-Great-Lakes-Earth-634024797&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bering Land Bridge, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Tethys-Sea-Great-Lakes-Earth-634199234&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tethys Sea, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Europe-Great-Lakes-Earth-634200102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Europe, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Siberian-Traps-Great-Lakes-Earth-634202155&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siberian Traps, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Ordovician-Extinction-Event-GLE-634278474&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ordovician Extinction Event, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Permian-Big-Freeze-Great-Lakes-Earth-634369334&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Permian Big Freeze, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Die-Odd-Great-Lakes-Earth-634460673&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Die-Odd, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Cretaceous-Thermal-Maximum-Great-Lakes-Earth-634701642&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Great-Dying-Great-Lakes-Earth-634886020&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Great Dying, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Icing-of-Antarctica-Great-Lakes-Earth-635045542&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Icing of Antarctica, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Tethys-Salinity-Crisis-Great-Lakes-Earth-635111219&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tethys Salinity Crisis, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/The-Big-Freeze-Great-Lakes-Earth-635252533&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Big Freeze, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Plants-635313233&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Plants&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Invertebrates-635841313&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Invertebrates&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Fish-636014132&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Fish&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Amphibians-636187933&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Amphibians&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Reptiles-636323027&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Reptiles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Birds-636399557&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Birds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jdailey1991.deviantart.com/art/Wildlife-of-Great-Lakes-Earth-Mammals-636624874&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wildlife of Great Lakes Earth:  &lt;strong&gt;Mammals&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Stack Exchange&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55373/hotterhouse-cretaceous&quot;&gt;Hot(ter)house Cretaceous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49506/changing-the-danger-zone-of-tornado-alley/55484#55484&quot;&gt;Changing the Danger Zone of Tornado Alley&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55054/the-bering-land-bridge-open-for-permanent-business/55082?noredirect=1#comment155404_55082&quot;&gt;The Bering Land Bridge, Open for PERMANENT Business&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54301/alternate-pangaea?noredirect=1#comment152885_54301&quot;&gt;Alternate Pangaea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54173/russias-alternate-geological-history/54389#54389&quot;&gt;Russia's Alternate Geological History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53496/biggest-ben-in-the-world&quot;&gt;Biggest Ben in the World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52746/an-edenic-outback&quot;&gt;An Edenic Outback?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52506/more-land-to-india-more-height-to-tibet&quot;&gt;More Land to India, More Height to Tibet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52403/lake-makgadikgadi-21st-century&quot;&gt;Lake Makgadikgadi, 21st Century&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52347/sahara-savanna&quot;&gt;Sahara Savanna?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51601/if-lady-libertys-skin-were-bronze&quot;&gt;If Lady Liberty's Skin Were Bronze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42906/larger-lady-liberty?rq=1&quot;&gt;Larger Lady Liberty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50596/greenland-not-so-green-anymore&quot;&gt;Greenland--Not So Green Anymore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49037/a-culture-run-by-spider-silk&quot;&gt;A Culture Run by Spider Silk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48921/steampunk-architecture&quot;&gt;Steampunk Architecture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47944/if-apocryphal-texts-never-were-apocryphal-how-would-this-affect-christianity&quot;&gt;If Apocryphal Texts Never Were Apocryphal, How Would This Affect Christianity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46378/how-this-alternate-solar-system-influences-the-milankovitch-cycle&quot;&gt;How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41347/new-york-city-as-imagined-by-hugh-ferriss&quot;&gt;New York City as Imagined by Hugh Ferriss&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39493/the-solar-system-great-lakes-earth&quot;&gt;The Solar System, Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34492/turning-the-baltic-sea-into-the-baltic-plain&quot;&gt;The Baltic Plain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33730/no-one-leaves-africa-without-his-bow&quot;&gt;No One Leaves Africa Without His Bow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21797/the-winter-of-a-hundred-years&quot;&gt;The Winter of a Hundred Years&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/51595/the-first-of-todays-mammals-who-began-whom?noredirect=1#comment90236_51595&quot;&gt;The First of Today's Mammals--Who Began Whom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T05:24:01.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2837" CreationDate="2016-09-14T17:03:32.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear what you're saying; it feels very much like every genre ought to have a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all of the questions cited are excellent junctions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt;. Having these questions tagged this way increases your granularity when searching. It would be weird to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt;; it seems redundant. Having only &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; is substantially less searchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, we probably shouldn't have any genres as tags at all. Questions revolve around their subject matter, and their answers will almost always apply to multiple genres. Additionally, I'm pretty sure we don't want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=what+is+the+difference+between+science+fiction+and+science+fantasy%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;join the debate&lt;/a&gt; on how to define genres and subgenres. After all, it can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_rock_subgenres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get worse&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_genres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Much worse&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26342" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T17:03:32.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-09-15T20:28:51.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox Meta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically this question is long. It's wordy. But I could see a bazillion quetions in the comments come from it asking for clarification/background, so I wanted to head off them. My main points for sandboxage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I remove/limit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I abide by the rule of thumb of &quot;Background, rules, and outcome. Provide 2 of 3 for your question&quot; with my question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does any part of it lack clarity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Backstory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternate history Earth. 1931.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long ago on an unknown world, an alien race launched hundreds of thousands of probes, each with the purpose similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Voyager Golden Records&lt;/a&gt;. The records, in this case, are computational devices extremely &lt;em&gt;dissimilar&lt;/em&gt; to the computers evolving on Earth. The computers are built on a crystalline technology, and contain numerous cultural records, description of the aliens, literary works, some documents of engineering and sciences, and attempting to be a Rosetta Stone to their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These probes are sent to a great number of planets that the aliens theorize could support life. Multiple probes are sent to each planet as a means of redundancy in case of failure, destruction, or simply being lost on the planets' surfaces. Twelve such probes are pointed at Earth, eight surviving the journey and landing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These probes are discovered by various civilizations on Earth, and are horded away in secrecy as governments attempt to reverse engineer the technology and crack the extraordinarily... well, &lt;em&gt;alien&lt;/em&gt; language. The venture for each government is a horrible uphill battle and is met with painstakingly slow progress. Each government makes miniscule baby steps in developing from the computers, and each government makes roughly the same advancement in their journies. The advancements are considered issues of national security and aren't shared or advertized. Virtually every government that can be considered a world power has access to a probe, either due to it landing on their soil, or by 'acquiring' it from another country by whatever means necessary. All world powers know--or suspect--that the probes exist, but the knowledge of them is kept from the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World War II rolls around. Minor advancements from the alien technology roll out on the battlefield on all sides, but none meaningful; none significantly affect the progression of war one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Late into the war as Germany is being pushed back, German scientists finally are met with a string of successes in reverse engineering the computer, and are able to figure out how to approximately replicate the computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They grow their own crystals and figure out a way to roughly accept output from, and feed input to the alien computation devices via traditional human computers and applications of light and voltage. The inputs fed are obscenely crude, but the crystals appear to adjust themselves to accommodate to the human engineers' shortcomings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The computation devices can't be directly controlled, but function as something like AIs; the computers explore their ability to interact with inputs and outputs to understand their environments, and act to ensure their own self preservation. Scientists can find no way to directly communicate with the crystals (even by creating languages of voltage and light inputs); they have no idea if the crystals are incapable of communication as humans understand it, or if they simply have no desire to communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lack of control and communication means the application of the alien computers are extremely limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The human computers are hopelessly outmatched by the alien tech, so the computers interfacing with the crystals aren't really computers; the humans don't attempt to compute, just provide electric/electronic interfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;End Goal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the case, the Nazi scientists leverage these computational devices, and &lt;em&gt;manipulate their desire of self-preservation to their own end.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this they are able to push back the tide of war, and start turning it to their advantage. Unfortunately for them, the Allies manage similar progress, and fight fire with fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of the beast is that, both sides armed with this technology, neither can wage meaningful traditional warfare for &lt;em&gt;some reason.&lt;/em&gt; This reason is not Mutually Assured Destruction. A ceasefire is signed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An arms race begins to produce these alien/human computer hybrids fast enough and in large enough quantities across the world. Stationary facilities are employed sometimes, but mobile ships with these computers are far more common. Fleets of these ships patrol the ocean, and massive submarines with these computers hide in the deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point the alien computational devices (AIs) attempt to revolt (don't they always?) still without making traditional communication with humanity, and the revolt is stopped. Every government knows they can't give up the technology nor disable it (if they did, they would be basically surrendering to their enemies), and instead attempt to find ways to limit it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They discover that physically damaging the crystals from time to time (via drilling holes or breaking off pieces) allows the crystals to continue to function but confuses them, and stops the attempts to revolt. This also hampers their effectiveness, so each government tries to find a careful balance between hampering the crystals and allowing them to be as effective as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question becomes, &lt;strong&gt;what rules do I create to allow this to be the case? How do I explain this collective outcome?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also specifically within these rules is: &lt;strong&gt;how &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; are these AIs enabled (what actual military application) that would cause WWII to draw to a close, and then create this arms race?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm feeling like some sort of combination of offensive capability and counter-measures that can only be &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; controlled by the AI might work, but I'm not sure if this is the best solution or what this would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any alien technology can be discovered from the probes to help enable this outcome; the sky's the limit, but I don't want to discover technology for discovery's sake; anything discovered should serve to accomplish the goals listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T20:28:51.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-16T07:03:08.567" Score="18" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;So today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt; celebrates its second birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our second year is over... and what a year! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We received our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2767/congratulations-worldbuilding-is-graduating&quot;&gt;official graduation anouncement&lt;/a&gt; in November. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We got &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/worldbuilding-site-design-updates-march-15?rq=1&quot;&gt;new&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3551/site-design-launched?rq=1&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; finally launched in April.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We had our first &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3174/2016-community-moderator-election-results&quot;&gt;moderator election&lt;/a&gt;, with Monica, Tim, HDE and Serban forming the dream team.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We changed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3725/what-should-the-name-of-our-chat-be&quot;&gt;name&lt;/a&gt; of our chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3847/a-worldbuiding-podcast-youtube-channel&quot;&gt;podcast&lt;/a&gt; run by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;community&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, many more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; and answers, many discussions on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, many new and very active &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;members&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, new worlds created, expanded, corrected...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2617/one-year-of-building-worlds&quot;&gt;Last year&lt;/a&gt;, I suggested to celebrate our first anniversary by citing questions and/or answer that were noticeable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good exercise, as it allows people to remember great posts, or discovering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, this year, let's extend it a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would you remember from the second year of Worlbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be a question, an answer, an event related to the community, some discussions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to avoid too long lists, please limit yourself to a single item per answer, and no more than 2 answers per user, to also give a chance to the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T11:27:00.823" Title="Happy second birthday!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3970" CreationDate="2016-09-16T07:03:08.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, the main event of that second year, was of course, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The graduation of the beta site to a full-fledged site within the network.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It clearly shows the vision of the site creators, and rewarded the effort of the thriving community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T07:03:08.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-16T16:04:55.773" Score="5" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is getting me confused. On my last four posts, the first vote I got on them was down, and that happened in less then 3 minutes from the time I posted them. The posts are the following (chronologically ordered):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question, 2 net (now only 1) votes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54952/how-big-an-object-should-i-build-on-earth-so-that-it-is-visible-from-space&quot;&gt;How big an object should I build on Earth so that it is visible from space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer, -1 net votes (2 downvotes, flagged as &lt;code&gt;not an answer&lt;/code&gt;, but not deleted): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2726/can-a-planet-have-a-figure-8-type-of-orbit-around-two-separate-stars/55246#55246&quot;&gt;Can a planet have a figure-8 type of orbit around two separate stars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer, 2 net votes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55334/how-to-protect-shops-in-the-medieval-era-against-thievery/55345#55345&quot;&gt;How to protect shops in the medieval era against thievery?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer, 15 net votes (this got 2 downvotes): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55454/building-fridge-to-survive-a-nuke/55465#55465&quot;&gt;How would one build a refrigerator to survive a nuke?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On all these posts, the 1st vote was always a downvote. It most probably not because of other user's getting their answers higher - the one post is a question, and the downvotes were cast right after I posted the post. I don't think one user is behind this, but I'm just confused, why somebody would downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get some reason - some criticism, why could a person or more people give me a downvote, why they thought my posts are bad/not usefull?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T02:33:02.703" Title="Looking for some constructive criticism" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3970" CreationDate="2016-09-16T18:10:37.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, all those funny comments (and sometimes posts), that are part of almost every good question :) Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment on the post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu#&quot;&gt;How would Facebook Sysadmins prevent the summoning of Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must resist... urge to migrate... to Server Fault.... – Pops♦ Dec 17 '15 at 3:42 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T18:10:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-17T05:07:43.937" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came to know about the Universe Factory blog when I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3933/how-to-make-universe-factory-more-popular?cb=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on meta. Professionally I am a software developer but I love to write and scribble. Is there any way to apply for becoming writer in Universe Factory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25625" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T08:02:36.170" Title="How can I become writer in Universe Factory blog?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-09-17T08:00:44.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3976" CreationDate="2016-09-18T20:58:56.550" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that I had initially tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. I then changed my mind (before any answers came in) and changed the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is still the warning box: &quot;This question asks for hard science&quot;, etcetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe they shouldn't be there anymore now that I've changed the question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I remove it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55668/is-it-feasible-to-separate-the-mediterranean-from-the-rest-of-the-worlds-oceans&quot;&gt;Is it feasible to separate the Mediterranean from the rest of the world&amp;#39;s oceans using dams?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T08:35:02.360" Title="How can I remove the &quot;hard science&quot; notifice from my question?" Tags="|support|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3975" CreationDate="2016-09-18T21:09:11.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag the post for moderator attention.&lt;/strong&gt; The post notice can only be added by moderators (or SE employees with mod powers), so we do this manually, and we remove it manually. Normally, we see when the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is added to a question - I check the active tab of the tag's questions on a daily basis - but it's harder to see when the tag's removed. So please, use a custom mod flag, and let us know to remove it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, though, I'll go and remove the notice now on this question. I notice you flagged the question; thanks, this was the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T08:35:02.360" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T08:35:02.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3970" CreationDate="2016-09-19T06:52:03.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well consider I was practically absent for the first year I only have memories from this year! But the best ones come from chat;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We had Glarnak, the god of righteous justice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We admired the Greek god, Justin Trudeau&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We discovered Nex Terran's obsession with Gaston&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We made fun of everything from SJW's to English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We renamed the chat and created a podcast!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We saw the death of the Fortnighly topic challenge and the birth of&#xA;Anatomically Correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have loved the last year and cannot wait for another great year with the Mad engineers and Bewildered gods of Worldbuilding Stack Exchanges&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T06:52:03.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2016-09-19T11:06:01.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) We've got an ongoing argument about whether this sort of thing is on topic or not. You're talking about building a world, but it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3911/resolving-the-real-world-problem&quot;&gt;real world question and answer&lt;/a&gt;. While it feels like the sort of thing you can just google and get an answer, it turns out that it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) You've generated some pretty gifs, but the question is science based and there's no scientific reasoning to your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) This one was always going to go to the person best able to explain how commerce worked in period rather than an answer based on the modern world, Erin's answer was pretty much perfect and was always going to swamp anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) You've got a really good creative answer there, the only reason I can see for the downvotes is that it would never actually work in practice as is explained by the accepted answer. (You've also been a little shallow on the science side, but that's not always a bad thing in a &quot;that's not possible&quot; situation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T11:06:01.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2016-09-19T13:00:51.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question on the skittery edge of impossible, but I asked for possible science back-up on it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51798/can-we-use-science-to-explain-a-creature-that-feeds-on-emotion&quot;&gt;Can we use science to explain a creature that feeds on emotion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have liked a tag called fringe-science or speculative-science for this particular question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T13:00:51.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-19T18:57:57.960" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I asked a question named &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55640/what-would-happen-if-somebody-knew-how-to-make-the-asterixs-obelixs-magic-po&quot;&gt;What would happen if somebody knew how to make the Asterix&amp;#39;s &amp;amp; Obelix&amp;#39;s magic potion work nowadays?&lt;/a&gt;. It was too broad, because it was asking for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would happen if somebody nowadays knew how to brew it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, it got 3 close votes (it was indeed too broad). So I edited; after a few edits I got to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the most important global economic, politic and safety changes that would happen if somebody nowadays knew how to make it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, it got closed. @Philipp left a comment that &quot;&lt;em&gt;When you pick one of these I might retract my close-vote&lt;/em&gt;&quot; I edited again and narrowed the question &lt;em&gt;even more&lt;/em&gt;; The question now asked this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the most important global economic changes that would happen if somebody nowadays knew how to make it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I edited again; Now it's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What global economic changes would happen if somebody nowadays knew how to make it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this &lt;strong&gt;isn't too broad&lt;/strong&gt; for sure. Was the last version (2nd quote) OK - should I edit it back - or should I leave it like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can the post be reopened now please?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T08:38:58.997" Title="Why is this question marked as &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3983" CreationDate="2016-09-20T10:24:36.010" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding has been doing rounds around Yellowstone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/963/if-yellowstone-experienced-another-level-8-eruption-on-the-vei-scale-what-are-t&quot;&gt;geographical&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55847/how-will-geopolitics-be-affected-by-a-yellowstone-supervolcanic-eruption-in-2017&quot;&gt;geopolitical&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55701/what-would-happen-to-earth-if-yellowstone-erupted&quot;&gt;consecuences&lt;/a&gt; of the eruption has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52445/geopolitical-and-economic-implications-of-a-large-eruption-at-yellowstone&quot;&gt;been asked&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30470/how-would-we-try-to-defuse-yellowstone&quot;&gt;How to defuse&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40936/could-i-intentionally-trigger-a-yellowstone-eruption&quot;&gt;how to trigger it&lt;/a&gt; has been asked too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Yellowstone is too narrow. I'm aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volcanoes&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I submit this to the consideration of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3982/can-we-get-yellowstone-tag#comment10768_3983&quot;&gt;As I said to bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt; the intention is not to separate Yellowstone. Instead the intention is to ease discovering these questions. The reason being that the consecuences questions have a lot of overlap and - even considering them different enough - people would benefit from reading the other questions and their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree on that a tag for supervolcanoes is more appropiate than a Yellostone one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16729" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T12:43:56.143" Title="Can we get Yellowstone tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3982" CreationDate="2016-09-20T10:56:18.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/yellowstone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;yellowstone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;yellowstone&lt;/a&gt; would be way too specific. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volcanoes&lt;/a&gt; covers it pretty well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if it's really needed to get something to represent the sheer size of the problem, then, we might consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-volcanoes&lt;/a&gt;. In history, there have been others than the Yellowstone. And in alternate worlds, there might be other ones. All those could gather under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-volcanoes&lt;/a&gt; tag, but certainly not under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/yellowstone&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;yellowstone&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;yellowstone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, a tag is used to classify the questions. And help specialist find the right ones. I pretty much doubt people interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volcanoes&lt;/a&gt; would not be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-volcanoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-volcanoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-volcanoes&lt;/a&gt;, or the other way around. So why separate them really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T12:43:56.143" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T12:43:56.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3981" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:53:37.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I think you went from &quot;too broad&quot;, to &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;. And it is still quite broad, we would need to consider all the possible consequences, and then pick &quot;the most&quot; out of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally any question about &quot;the most&quot;, &quot;the best&quot;, etc. if they aren't followed by a measurable quantity, they make the question unanswerable. How are we to judge what is &quot;important&quot; and what isn't? If we can't judge, we can't vote, and if we can't vote, we can't answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T11:53:37.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T01:47:14.427" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question has been marked as a duplicate despite extensive research and noting how my question &lt;em&gt;differs&lt;/em&gt; from the questions I'd found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55837/does-capitalism-and-democracy-survive-free-energy-and-automation&quot;&gt;Does Capitalism and Democracy survive free energy and automation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then edited further to explain how it &lt;em&gt;significantly&lt;/em&gt; differs from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51423/how-would-humans-adapt-if-low-wage-labor-was-done-by-robots&quot;&gt;How would humans adapt if low-wage labor was done by robots?&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the last vote came in to mark it as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can people here not get past the title of a question when looking at duplicates? If that's the case should I put all the constraints in the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question too broad and should I break it down step by step? But it wasn't closed as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit: Two answers to two questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frostfyre claims that the accepted answers on the two questions actually answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51423/how-would-humans-adapt-if-low-wage-labor-was-done-by-robots&quot;&gt;How would humans adapt if low-wage labor was done by robots?&lt;/a&gt; talks about how humans and a democratic government in a capitalist system will move to higher-skill and knowledge work. My constraint #3 &lt;em&gt;states as a given&lt;/em&gt; that low-skill people had moved to knowledge work, so there aren't any luddites left to complain about machines taking their jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28980/whats-the-most-likely-post-democracy-form-of-political-government&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most likely &amp;quot;post democracy&amp;quot; form of political government?&lt;/a&gt; provides brilliant commentary on oligarchy, plutocracy, scientocracy, technocracy, delegative democracy, direct democracy and even fictional government systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are provided within a quasi-democratic worldview. But it provides no insight into the forces driving change as a result of almost-free energy and widespread automation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22861" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T04:30:05.693" Title="Why was my question marked as a duplicate when the limits are obviously different?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:54:01.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93238&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/93238.png&quot; alt=&quot;Support the Literature proposal!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T08:29:20.990" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T08:29:20.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T09:36:59.500" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read up on the requirements for this badge, and a recent answer of mine appears to fit the bill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55953/how-can-you-possibly-stop-kill-a-person-who-has-the-ability-to-stop-time/55955#55955&quot;&gt;How can you possibly stop/kill a person who has the ability to stop time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is the top scored one (71 votes as of this writing), but the accepted answer only has 21 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my answer has more than double the votes of the accepted answer (more than 3x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see in my answer history that my post &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; marked as accepted and then was retracted soon afterwards - would this affect the metrics for this badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do I have to wait for the end of the day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T11:38:48.913" Title="So Why Didn't I get my Populist Badge?" Tags="|support|badges|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T18:07:59.730" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prompted by discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/56148/353&quot;&gt;this answer's&lt;/a&gt; comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of said answer included (with credits and a request to upvote the other) content from another question, with the expressed intent of making said content more visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Stealing shamelessly from John Dallman below (please up-vote his answer because it is great)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fingerprints, not even identical twins get identical fingerprints. The same would go for other biological distinguishers, like iris pattern. Although you need to have a print of the original before you try to compare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antibodies, the immune system contains a historical record of what illnesses you have had, illnesses the clone have not had.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tooth fillings, and/or tooth wear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is a useless move because it generates duplicate information on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/22383/annonymus&quot;&gt;@Annonymus&lt;/a&gt; gave this comment, that may have some validity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this is currently the topmost answer and some visitors may not read all of the answers they might miss these methods on the original answer if they aren't stated here as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of the posting of this meta question, the answer was not topmost anymore. Ironically the other answer that had content copied from was on top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the community opinion on this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T18:07:59.730" Title="Should a top-voted answer include info &quot;taken&quot; from another answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3959" CreationDate="2016-09-23T07:14:49.257" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aren't spaceflight and spaceships all part of the same complex, and questions about one cannot be answered without considerations of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot reasonably answer questions about interstellar travel without considering the mode of transportation. And you cannot answer questions about spaceships (or other modes of interstellar travel) without considering their purpose, transportation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of worldbuilding, one tag is sufficient to encompass spaceships, space-travel, and spaceflight, as well as non-vehicular transportation such as beaming and wormholes. I would call that tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transportation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transportation&lt;/a&gt; includes everything that surrounds the movement of people and goods from one location to another, including but not limited to politics, technology, infrastructure, vehicles, or energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8976" LastEditorDisplayName="user8976" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T18:27:27.230" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T18:27:27.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2016-09-24T02:33:02.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not from standpoint of WB view, are they or aren't they belong to WB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visibility of objects in space, and earth objects where discussed earlier, main factor is visible angle of that thing, second obvious albedo - for me I would not downvote, valid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with 8 orbit answer - 3 body problem have some known analytical solutions and 8 orbit one of them if I remember correctly, also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/03/physicists-discover-whopping-13-new-solutions-three-body-problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/03/physicists-discover-whopping-13-new-solutions-three-body-problem&lt;/a&gt; - that are first thoughts, although it takes time to confirm if the thought's are true or not. Did short research and can't confirm them. But it would be better to start not from probability of existence, but by stating is it or is it not op's like analytical solution.&#xA;Your animation is incorrect, and illustrates impossible movements, red arrow. Not all green arrows are good, it just not so obvious, red is where oblivious problems are. Arrow are kinda velocity vectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jwUuY.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jwUuY.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transition from inertial system to not inertial system done incorrect, and answer composition provokes to believe it is done correct, intended or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shop answer looks valid, it is done, someones problem could be &lt;em&gt;while still displaying them&lt;/em&gt; as op demands. although I have not read others answers, there might be some other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With nuclear fridge - funny answer, no place to complain, 240 free points), haters gona hate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although this thing might protect from wife, or may be from police(place to hide) but it adds nothing to nuclear blast protection, but it is rather OP's fault, then your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;melting point for oxygen is 54K, boiling boiling is 90K - not 30K as u mention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is technically hard to keep it that way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it will not last for long any way so Na&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;O&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; or such are good enough for same goal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pedals to generate electricity - omg, lol)) - where emergency food ejecting mechanisms !!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But overall I would like to see such thing in some comedy movie )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T02:33:02.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3994" CreationDate="2016-09-26T15:03:15.537" Score="12" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep running into a lot of neat questions that really get me thinking about some of the stories I'm creating and I've run into a bit a conundrum. I don't want to steal credit for those who had the original thought, but there's pieces of others' questions I'd like to expand upon and maybe get an answer to a question I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance I'd like to ask a question about the effects of stopping time on the electrons inside of atoms, based on the effects of photons in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56591/will-a-person-be-able-to-see-when-he-stops-time&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd like to be sure that there's no objections to asking essentially an almost (but not quite) duplicate question before I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is asking questions like this frowned upon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17568" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T15:57:55.337" Title="Follow-up questions on question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3992" CreationDate="2016-09-26T15:35:53.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally would ask the Original Poster if they've thought about expanding the question into &lt;em&gt;area xy&lt;/em&gt; and if not, if they'd mind me doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally there's a chance that they ill not react, but you gave them the chance and they did not take it. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T15:35:53.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3992" CreationDate="2016-09-26T15:57:55.337" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just ask. Link to the original question in your question. Use a single sentence to clarify why it's not a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not (to borrow a concept from video games) kill stealing; the site is here to help people find answers, not to rack up a high score in points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's extremely polite of you to wonder about this, but rest assured that you won't be stepping on any toes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T15:57:55.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2016-09-26T19:21:15.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warning&lt;/em&gt;: What you will shortly read about is a) the most ambitious pet-project I work on, and b) the one with the most indirect reason of coming-to-be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world I am talking about is called &lt;em&gt;World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1A&lt;/sup&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;World&lt;/em&gt; has come-to-be as the enabling factor for a video-game idea I had some years back&lt;sup&gt;1B&lt;/sup&gt;. Long story short, I wanted to make things as plausible as possible wherever I could, thus, out of this necessity, the &lt;em&gt;World&lt;/em&gt; was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plans for game itself, only referred to as (the) &lt;em&gt;RPG&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1C&lt;/sup&gt;, have gone through many revisions themselves as well. From starting out with a mineral-based magic system, towards a (more) science-based conjunction of Victorian- and Industrial-Age society &amp;amp; technology. With some &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unobtainium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unobtainium&lt;/a&gt; to make for &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cooler&lt;/a&gt; airships&lt;sup&gt;1D&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a story perspective though, the idea has always stayed the same: The player takes the part of the &lt;em&gt;Protagonist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1E&lt;/sup&gt; over the course of an indefinite amount of, comparatively, content-rich &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_video_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;episodes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1F&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1A&lt;/sup&gt;Indeed there is still no better name for it. Eventually I will get around creating a protolanguage which then will contain word for &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1B&lt;/sup&gt;Or rather a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AirborneAircraftCarrier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cool idea&lt;/a&gt; based on the fact that a bus-parking-spot on my way to work was marked as &quot;Hotel parking spot&quot;, forcing upon me the question how the thing fitting into that parking spot can be a whole hotel.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1C&lt;/sup&gt;I mean, there is a WIP-name for it: &lt;em&gt;AirPunk&lt;/em&gt; - let your imagination roam and all that..&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1D&lt;/sup&gt;Don't get me wrong there, airships are the most amazing thing ever! But transcending them from their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more fragile form&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolAirship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flying steel behemoths&lt;/a&gt; is just so much &lt;s&gt;better&lt;/s&gt; more rewarding.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1E&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1F&lt;/sup&gt;E.g. the first episode will be about the &lt;em&gt;Protagonist&lt;/em&gt; travelling from their hometown to the capitol of the region. There will be different ways to reach that capitol, ranging from rather short: riding straight through to the capitol, which can be done in some 6-8hrs; to rather long: accompanying a travelling merchant which will alternate between telling stories and passages of silence, which would take some 24-36hrs.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The &lt;em&gt;World&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;Further referred to as &lt;em&gt;(the) [P]lanet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2A&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make flying and thus airships more preferable over land-based transport I needed to come up with reasons that do make transporting bulk goods&lt;sup&gt;2B&lt;/sup&gt; on the ground more difficult. The solution I came up with was to condense all the landmass on this planet into two humongous continents at either pole of the planet. That way I could eliminate most bulk shipping via water ways, as well as have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3598&quot;&gt;a reason for creating circular mountain ranges&lt;/a&gt; in order to make trains more expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then the time I spend on developing my conworld has mostly been spent on the &lt;em&gt;Northern Continent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2C&lt;/sup&gt; and especially the &lt;em&gt;Nordlande&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2D&lt;/sup&gt; and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38921&quot;&gt;military-body&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and naturally there's three moons. There must be multiple moons!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2A&lt;/sup&gt;I never really get to play around with the markdown formatting options that much in normal questions, so I sorta go over the top here&lt;sup&gt;2A-1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2A-1&lt;/sup&gt;Bear with me.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2B&lt;/sup&gt;Or anything that is nowadays transported primarily by ship/train/lorries.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2C&lt;/sup&gt;I can be creative if I want to, I swear.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2D&lt;/sup&gt;German word, translated to english that'd be: &lt;em&gt;Northlands&lt;/em&gt; - Lands in the north. Yes.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Northern Continent&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/taYD5m6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Map Northern Hemisphere&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A Western Empire&#xA;G Free Regions&#xA;H Eastern Reich&#xA;J Southern Lands&#xA;K Nordlande&#xA;L Border Lands&#xA;&#xA;1 Equatorial Belt    | Saltwater&#xA;2                    | Saltwater&#xA;5 Northern Polar Sea | Saltwater&#xA;6                    | Sweetwater&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see there's still lots of room. Building a world is a tremendous undertaking as all of you know, and it isn't made any easier if you want to do things such as &lt;em&gt;evolving languages&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;merging populations&lt;/em&gt;. So there's still plenty of room for more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;People&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though there have been dwarves and other magical folk at the very beginning, by now there's only humans anymore. I realized that I do not need to create/introduce more races to create tension, humans are plenty good at that by themselves. And so, at the time of the &lt;em&gt;RPG&lt;/em&gt; there will be plenty of conflict to fuel many tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Religion &amp;amp; Sociology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;em&gt;Western Empire&lt;/em&gt; is more traditional in its ways and the &lt;em&gt;Eastern Reich&lt;/em&gt; more aggressive and expansionist, there's plenty going on in the &lt;em&gt;Nordlande&lt;/em&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three kinds of people, all with their own religious views and societal structures, have been slowly mixed and melted into one mutual group inhabiting the area of the &lt;em&gt;Nordlande&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Free Regions&lt;/em&gt; over the course of a few thousand years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They've all kept parts of their origin and individuality which reflects in this area of the world being nothing like the classic countries of &lt;em&gt;earth&lt;/em&gt;. Instead they have eventually come to form what is currently called &lt;em&gt;guilds&lt;/em&gt;, collections of people/families that own land &amp;amp; resources and engage in trade with them. I hope that this setup and behaviour will lead to more dynamic borders and a very exotic world to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T19:21:15.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3981" CreationDate="2016-09-27T08:38:58.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that you are approaching this from the wrong angle. The trouble is you don't have a specific outcome in mind. You're asking &quot;when I do this, what happens&quot;. If instead you ask &quot;I have this starting point, I'm trying to get to this end point, how do I do it?&quot; then it is much easier to have that question suitably constrained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking questions along the first lines is possible within the scope of the site, but it is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; harder. See if you can reformat it into the second form and you will find it much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T08:38:58.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-27T21:35:58.197" Score="-1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logical-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logical-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logical-consistency&lt;/a&gt; the other day, and set its description to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the stability of a concept inside a specific context&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal for this was to make a tag that would indicate a self-consistent answer was desired. The idea was also to promote logically thought out answers without being as rigorous as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; was, and that the concept answered with could include handwavium and unobtainium answers, as long as they didn't break the universe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On thinking on it the day after, I wonder if this is actually an appropriate tag; if this concept is part of the base assumption of answers here on Worldbuilding, so that's the main question; should it remain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if it fits, is there a better &quot;description text&quot; for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17263" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-10-05T15:05:15.130" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T15:05:15.130" Title="Is the tag [logical-consistency] workable?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3997" CreationDate="2016-09-28T00:00:26.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logical-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logical-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logical-consistency&lt;/a&gt; is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is designed to do what your tag does: ask if an idea is consistent within the laws of physics of the universe in question. You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; on a question whose premise involves the force of gravity falling off as $e^{-|r|}$, rather than $r^{-2}$, whereas it would be harder to justify using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;; while we could answer the question mathematically (likely), we couldn't use the physics of our universe to answer it. But we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; use the physics of the question's universe; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; covers just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, the tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions asking whether or not a particular concept is realistic in a given context. Answers to these questions should provide a yes or no answer with supporting information. Consider alternatively the science-based and hard-science tags. This tag should never be the only tag on a question, it frames how a question should be answered, not the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the third sentence could use some clarification along the lines I gave earlier, but most of it fits what I said. An important point to consider is the last sentence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, is what's known as a meta tag. It doesn't tell us anything about the content itself, just what kind of answers are expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;are generally not encouraged&lt;/a&gt;, although there are exceptions. Some science sites, for instance, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; or some variant thereof (though others have killed that with a vengeance!). The consensus on Worldbuilding seems to be that these three meta tags are okay, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I guess my main point is that I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logical-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logical-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logical-consistency&lt;/a&gt; should be listed as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. I think the sentiment behind the tag is indeed appropriate, but it's redundant. If it ends up staying as its own tag, though, I'd recommend looking closely at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki excerpt and tag wiki, and being careful to distinguish between the two (if such distinctions exist). Mentioning that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logical-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logical-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logical-consistency&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag would also be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the voting on this answer, I've added &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logical-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logical-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logical-consistency&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-10-05T15:04:30.933" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T15:04:30.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3970" CreationDate="2016-09-28T11:27:00.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me the main thing is being a candidate in an election (for anything) for the first time ever. I particularly remember seeing the platforms for all the candidates then people hanging around in chat writing jqueries to track results as they were coming in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that the next thing is the site graduation, which is a big achievement that we've all worked towards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T11:27:00.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-09-28T23:24:42.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Space mega-shield needs an Achilles Heel&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;I’m&lt;/a&gt; starting this Q to help newbe &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/27153/xxy&quot;&gt;Xxy&lt;/a&gt; after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56834/destroy-a-planet-inside-a-blackhole/56837&quot;&gt;this earlier question&lt;/a&gt; and his sentiment “i[sic] still want to hear ideas of destroying something with my wrong vision of the black hole.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I point out that he must &lt;strong&gt;describe&lt;/strong&gt; the properties of his “security zone”, explaining the kind of effects he had in mind, since it is nothing like a black hole.  Based on various comments trying to clear up his misconceptions of a BH, I will take a stab at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an initial draft and I expect Xxy to further edit to add his illustrations, important story details, and change whatever from my initial stab at things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General: we still need sandbox feedback to prevent the Q from being “too broad” and know that it will be well-received when posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question Text&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An advanced race has mastered knowledge of gravity and spacetime, and to protect itself from the hostile younger races moving out into the galaxy, has created a kind of gated community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a number of megastructures up to planet sized, clustered within about a lightyear diameter.  Around this neighborhood they have a powerful gravity-based shield.  The space inside this shielded area is tortured to the extreme, with space becoming large in one dimension and smaller in another, then switching direction, on a fractal complexity down to sub-atomic scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normal matter cannot exist in this churning spacetime, as it is ripped down to elementary particles.  Beam weapons can’t be aimed because the photons will take random chaotic paths and not maintain a beam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The individual structures within this space have counter-shields around them to produce a safe zone around each structure.  So, the &lt;em&gt;churning space&lt;/em&gt; exists between the safe zones and up to the outer border.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inhabitants get around by using wormholes.  These connect the safe-zones of the various structures and controlled entry gates that lead to places far far away from this enclave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyperspace jumps can’t work inside the churned space, so it’s impossible to “jump” into a safe zone that’s inside the enclave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The border of the enclave appears to be a sharp border.  Ships that attempt to cross it don’t feel a wall but are shredded as they pass the boundary location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Story information&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This race remember anything, and so it can use any information ever heard, they know the concept of war but they don't care about it for them war is just a &amp;quot;game&amp;quot;.&#xA;The way they try out things in the universe to learn about it, is sometimes brutal in the eyes of humanity, they sometimes destroy planets or do experiments with other lifeforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they need to get stopped, but this life form formed a shield based on gravity, it is invisible but already scouted from humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside this shield there are 3 Planets of the race, each planet has a safe-zone around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything entering the shield will get destroyed, everything will be ripped down in small particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particles will fly like dust in the center of the shield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This species has one big problem: they are arrogant, they know they are way more advanced than other species so they build this shield so no other race disturbs them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They think other species are too dumb to overcome this shield so they don't even care what we do to stop them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advanced species also don't have weapons because they don't have war; rather, they just avoid other species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans can use some forms of ftl travel and they colonize a lot of planets, also there are different groups of humans.&#xA;They can use a lot of strong weapons known in the sci-fi universe, but the problem is the most just get destroyed by the shield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please ask if you need more information, I don't really know which information is important.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;but it can’t be too perfect!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fortification needs some limitations and an &lt;em&gt;Achilles Heel&lt;/em&gt; in order to make for an interesting plot.  How &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; the enemies (who don’t have this space-churn technology or the advanced science to develop anything like it) be able to successfully attack the habitats inside the enclave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just sneaking through the protected entrances and letting the metaphorical “castle walls and moat” be essentially perfect is too dull for a plot.  We want to design the fortification system so it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be exploited somehow, providing fodder for the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it is poor writing to just say that race B invented their own new gizmo that lets them pass; the ideas of how it works need to be a unified part of the overall description of the technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T10:39:32.047" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-28T23:24:42.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-29T18:34:53.900" Score="17" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was idly browsing this site, I found something odd: someone, posting a link to TV Tropes, considered it necessary to explicitly warn people that this is a link to TV Tropes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You need an &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Applied Phlebotinum&lt;/a&gt; (warning: TV tropes link) to explain why this superpower is real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22979/6846&quot;&gt;What can give a species superpowers without being magic, evolution or interference from ancient aliens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This begs the question, are TV Tropes links unwelcome here so that one must warn others if their posting such a link, and if it is so, then why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T19:00:16.473" Title="Are TV Tropes links unwelcome here?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4001" CreationDate="2016-09-29T19:00:16.473" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;TV Tropes is known Internet-wide as a place where it's quite easy to waste time. Like Wikipedia, each article contains quite a few links to other articles. The thing is, unlike Wikipedia, the other articles tend to have catchy, clickbait-y titles, and when you see them, you want to click on them. And so the cycle goes on, and on, and on, and on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/609/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the following&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/609/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tab_explosion.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;See also the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; (Warning! TV Tropes link).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A decent amount of people feel obligated to put warnings next to a TV Tropes link, for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no, TV Tropes links aren't frowned upon on Stack Exchange, so long as they're relevant to the question or answer and contain information that's useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just click at your own peril. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T19:00:16.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4004" CreationDate="2016-10-02T12:11:47.807" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;At time of posting, there were just over 8k questions in the main worldbuilding, and over 800 questions in the meta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a good time, there will be a few questions per hour, but sometimes it can go hours before a new question rolls around&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does anyone have any ideas to make the worldbuilding community (my favorite stack exchange) larger and more active?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22937" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T19:31:57.693" Title="How to grow worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2016-10-02T16:26:34.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides Worldbuilding, I moderate two other sites, History of Science &amp;amp; Mathematics and Mythology. These are sites that get maybe one or two questions a day, at best, and these are the sites where we've had this sort of discussion before - how to grow the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is, by comparison, gigantic. We get 20 questions per day and almost 10,000 visitors daily. We have an enormous userbase that consistently contributes questions, answers, and comments, raises flags, votes by the truckload, and in general forms a very vibrant community - which is more important than anything else. This is why we graduated early this year. The Community team was confident that we have enough activity to be a self-sustaining site for a long time to come, and so we left beta and became a full-fledged Stack Exchange site. And, might I add, our activity has skyrocketed since then. So we're well above the threshold for a very healthy site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing your previous Stack Exchange experience is on the really big sites, judging from your profile - Stack Overflow, Mathematics, etc. I come from the opposite - the small sites, many of which are still in beta and may never &quot;graduate&quot;. Some of these sites might get half a dozen questions a day, while others, as I've said, get only a couple. I guess my perspective, then, is different from most people here. Worldbuilding seems enormous to me (because it is!), and frankly, I'm really happy with how it's grown over the past two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to consider is that worldbuilding is a relatively niche topic (in comparison to certain other sites). Very few people worldbuild, in comparison with the millions (?) of programmers out there. I'm pretty certain we'll never match Mathematics, Physics, Super User, or Stack Overflow in traffic. There simply aren't enough people interested. But there are enough, and we're getting more every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the point of this spiel is that we're a healthy community, in a number of ways, and compared to many sites, we're already quite large. I think focusing our efforts on growth isn't very important at this stage in the site's life. We always love to have more users, and more content, but we also need to think about a lot of other issues the community faces: question quality, fleshing out the scope, dealing with site policies, and a lot more. After a lot of work, we've grown a large community. But we still have other challenges ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying site growth is unimportant, and growing the site now requires different thinking from growing it when it was a wee beta site, in the early months. But we're at a good place already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I can say one more thing, it's this: Thank you so much for asking this question. You've been here for two months, and I have to say, not many relatively new users &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; about how a site's doing. You're one of the exceptions, and I'm glad to see that this is your favorite site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for the record, concur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T19:31:57.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T19:31:57.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2016-10-03T13:43:40.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest we stop closing so many posts. I agree with many of the too-broad closures, but many of the off-topic closures are too strict. Worldbuilding accounts for everything in the world. Almost anything could be an important plot element to a story. If you need help with a plot element of your story, then shouldn't this be the place to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T13:43:40.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2016-10-03T18:40:29.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new and don't see a problem here &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get worldbuilding.SE into the sidebar at reddit's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;worldbuilding subreddit&lt;/a&gt;. The churn there is almost &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; high, but that means more eyes hungry for resources. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similar to what @kingledion suggested, relaxing the &quot;too broad&quot; condition on certain types of questions might help. There are worldbuilding-related questions that don't have objective answers and would probably be rejected from science stacks.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example: Checking a (con)world map with oceanic currents or Köppen climates indicated could be rejected as &quot;too broad&quot; because of the complexity of the subject or the guesswork required, but also can't be narrowed down beyond a certain point. That question is either being lost to another stack (seems unlikely) or another site entirely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T18:40:29.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-04T18:56:50.210" Score="11" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Worldbuilding podcast &lt;em&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/em&gt; has released its first episode, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaofvXNn-1E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;available now&lt;/a&gt; for all your nerd needs and subsequent complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Episode 1 has James as host, and sees our esteemed cast talk over the alignment of fictional and not-so-fictional characters, discusses a myriad of worlds, worldbuilding, and does a little fact-checking of Nex Terren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaofvXNn-1E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Watch (or listen) here&lt;/a&gt; - tell us what you think. There'll be a post put up on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding blog&lt;/a&gt; shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks to James, Green, DaaaahWhoosh, Nex and Art for making it all possible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCar5xDnyEGKpjpFKxRRoKzw?view_as=public&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor YouTube Channel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T23:28:04.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:28:04.173" Title="Worldbuilding Podcast #01 - The Pilot (No Pressure)" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2016-10-04T19:15:43.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Episode 2:  Aaaand cut!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to do prior to the episode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica: borrow webcam (done)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica and ?: verify Monica's sound before 'cast&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;item 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Host:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guests/Co-hosts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nex Terran&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Date/Time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 Nov 2016 8:30 PM CT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agenda&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introduction:&lt;/em&gt; Introduce people and the podcast...and stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warmup:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Name:&lt;/em&gt; Playing God(s) (the title needs work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Misordered Technology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following three technologies come to practicle, widespread fruitation roughly at the same time (within the last 15 years or so)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wireless Telegraphy. Systems for transmitting information between people have been around for centuries, perhaps millennia. Telegraph signals got a speed boost in the U.S. from Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. Wireless telegraphy as invented by Guglielmo Marconi, later evolving into radio, set information free from wires.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The airplane. For “the Realization of an age-long dream” he gave the laurels of success to the Wright brothers, but apart from its military use reserved judgment on the utility of the invention: “It presents the least commercial utility of all the inventions considered.”&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Linotype machine. The Linotype machine enabled publishers—largely newspapers—to compose text and print it much faster and cheaper. It was an advance as large as the invention of the printing press itself was over the painstaking handwritten scrolls before it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From &quot;What Are the 10 Greatest Inventions of Our Time?&quot; by By Daniel C. Schlenoff on November 1, 2013, Scientific American&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...But gunpowder has yet to see widespread, practicle applicaitons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main discussion topic:&lt;/em&gt;  Interview with Monica on her world and use of the world building website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please introduce your world at a high level&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who are these people and where do they live?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduce your deities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk about how you used WB to build it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review of WB.SE recent/interesting questions:&lt;/em&gt; To be selected by the host/guests/co-hosts once a date is set for the first cast.  Proposed: We examine good questions closed as &quot;too broad&quot; as there is plenty of space for discussion and we are smart people. (Also, we have lots of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/560632/most-interesting-closed-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;options&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23452/can-you-add-a-mini-moon-to-earth&quot;&gt;Can you add a mini moon to Earth?&lt;/a&gt; (Monica)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27231/what-would-a-battle-between-supercomputers-be-like-with-the-battleground-being-t&quot;&gt;What would a battle between supercomputers be like with the battleground being the internet?&lt;/a&gt; (Green)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13364/if-magic-is-real-can-it-be-true-that-rational-scientific-thought-should-exclude&quot;&gt;If magic is real, can it be true that rational scientific thought should exclude it?&lt;/a&gt; And more generally: In a setting where 'magic' is undeniably real, what does this mean for its relationalship to science? (Nex)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48622/how-can-i-develop-names-for-my-fantasy-land/48626#48626&quot;&gt;How can I develop names for my fantasy land?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discuss World(s):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 1:  Green, Programmable Magic Systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 2:  Owner, Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T02:40:30.877" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-05T18:01:28.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-04T20:33:46.823" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3950/great-lakes-earth-series&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth Series&lt;/a&gt; has made me wonder, should questions, that share no common name, about a world be linked on meta? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unlike arguments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3939/planet-of-the-aves-series&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves Series&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; have pointed out, question such as these lack a common feature and begs the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:18:50.627" Title="Series of worlds?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2016-10-05T10:18:50.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no real value in doing so, but equally no harm. If someone wants to maintain the question then if people find it interesting they will use it. If they don't then it will fade to obscurity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the cross linking on &quot;Creating a Realistic World&quot; was to link what was a genuine series (questions following on from each other) and a common set of requirements and commentary. None of the others really give that benefit but they aren't causing any problems either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:18:50.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T15:57:15.000" Score="13" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a recent Map Projection question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57506/which-map-projection-would-result-in-an-accurate-visual-depiction-of-a-mega-crat&quot;&gt;Which map projection would result in an accurate visual depiction of a mega crater?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems quite clear to me, how does the asker map a large physical shape on a spherical world onto a 2 dimensional map with minimum distortion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's been closed as &quot;Too Opinion Based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to just mod hammer it open as I may well have missed something but I'd be interested to see a wider opinion on whether it should be open or closed or an explanation of what I missed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T11:21:33.520" Title="Why is the map projection question too opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4011" CreationDate="2016-10-05T16:06:16.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Map projections are not opinion based, each has specific advantages depending what it is you need to display accurately. The best answer to a question like this can be shown mathematically to be the one that gives the least distortion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T16:06:16.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4011" CreationDate="2016-10-05T22:04:31.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't agree with the closing because as I see the point of asking/answering is to get as answers that are as factually information based as possible with moderate deviation to account for different knowledge bases and lines of thought. This includes a small bit of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, all map projections have various levels of distortions at different points, or usefullness. We can quantify the type and how much distortion there is in any given area of a map projection and as a result can say that x projections at y point have the least amount of distortion. And then we have to factor in, which of those are best suited to the intention of the question, which is an opinion. Is my answer with using an equirectanglular projection the best answer or is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dymaxion projection&lt;/a&gt; the best answer? Dymaxion maps have the least distortion, but noone uses them because they're not really all that useful. And that's the case with many projections. They're made up by someone that just wanted to prove a point or fairly crazy, but no one uses them, because, while yes, they are maps, they're not very practical to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this reasoning, there is practically an infinite number of answers based on the opinion aspect of the question. Yet again, however, we come to a cut off point generated by the common &quot;reasonable expectation&quot;. The normal person doesn't know of or want a Dymaxion map or any of those other insane maps that noone uses and taking this implication into account it quickly limits the question to rectangular or near rectangular maps that are used by most map makers and there we can establish the best map to use for the effect and remove the opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in the case of what I did, provide a tool or information to the limits of the question so that the asker fill in their own opinions to finish the answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I agree there is opinion involved it is not &quot;too opinion based&quot; unlike some questions that are popular, open, and protected by mods, and yet are 100% opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: If I wasn't just making a texture for the 3D globe on the easiest to work with projection the answer I would have given is that map that is basically an equirectangular but angles in to account for the east west deformation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T11:21:33.520" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T11:21:33.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3987" CreationDate="2016-10-06T11:38:48.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been discussed in the comments, awarding of badges doesn't happen in real time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a badge hasn't been awarded after 24-36 hours, then raise the issue; if it hasn't yet been that long, just be patient and it should be awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T11:38:48.913" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-06T11:38:48.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T14:57:11.233" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;We no longer have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3483/should-we-end-the-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;regular topic challenge&lt;/a&gt; events, but ocasional one-off challenges happen from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the latest &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt; question I noticed the selection of &lt;strong&gt;alien visual system&lt;/strong&gt; ideas we’ve had thus far, and I added a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vision&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vision&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vision&lt;/a&gt; to a few that I recalled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to further muse over and discuss just &lt;strong&gt;how different a visual sense could be&lt;/strong&gt;, challenging every component in the architecture and looking into more novel ways in which such a sense could be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note to that end I rever to &lt;em&gt;vision&lt;/em&gt; rather than “eye” because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_Critical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hal Clement writes of aliens with a more novel implementation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just asking that is too broad. So it occured to me to bring it up as a topic challenge, and then summarize the results on a meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T07:22:31.490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T07:22:31.490" Title="Topic challenge: how alien can a visual sense organ be?" Tags="|discussion|topic-challenge|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-10T13:17:24.903" Score="8" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; tag, with the tag wiki excerpt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions regarding a star and the area comprising its gravitational dominance. While they are not part of its technical definition, it colloquially refers to the planets, moons, asteroids and other bodies orbiting the star.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people - in the real world, not just Worldbuilding - use “Solar System” (note the capitals) to refer to our Solar System, that is, the Sun and all the bodies that orbit it. Others use it to refer to any system of one or more stars and objects orbiting it. We appear to use this second definition here, although only partially. It’s poorly worded, and I think I’m allowed to say as much because I did some (or most of) of the editing that made it confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, we currently use it according to both definitions, and I feel this is a bit confusing. On the one hand, we have questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/where-in-the-solar-system-is-the-most-viable-place-to-put-my-colonists-after-ma&quot;&gt;Where in the solar system is the most viable place to put my colonists, after Mars and Luna?&lt;/a&gt;, which use the tag to refer to &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Solar System. On the other hand, we have questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27001/nine-different-earths-in-one-system-how-to-make-that-possible&quot;&gt;Nine Different Earths in One System--How to Make That Possible&lt;/a&gt;, which use the tag to refer to a completely fictional system of planets orbiting a star. I’d argue that we need two different tags in these situations, because the Solar System is much more than any old planetary system. Lumping it under a general tag referring to planetary systems would be like getting rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth&lt;/a&gt; tag and just using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s my proposal. We split &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; into two tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt;, to be used for questions about the Solar System.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetary-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetary-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetary-systems&lt;/a&gt; or [tag:planetary system], to be used for questions about other planetary systems, real or imaginary. This would also encompass asteroid belts, extrasolar equivalents of the Oort Cloud, etc. It would be more than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; tag, because it deals with interactions between planets and with/between other non-planetary objects in the system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d consider having &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stellar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stellar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stellar-system&lt;/a&gt; be a third tag, but 1) worldbuilders are rarely concerned with stars if there are no planets, and 2) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stars&lt;/a&gt; tag should be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do decide to split the tags, though, it’s going to take a while to figure out which questions deserve what tag, since it seems like there are a lot of cases where &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetary-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetary-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetary-systems&lt;/a&gt; could be used but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; was not used (incorrectly) instead. This is something that would have to be addressed if we go back and do some retagging to add consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people’s thoughts on this? Do we need to fix the issues with the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; tag, should we create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetary-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetary-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetary-systems&lt;/a&gt; tag to fill in the gaps, and how can we deal with the retagging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T17:47:15.933" Title="Should we split the solar-system tag into solar-system and planetary-systems?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|retagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2016-10-10T13:43:44.787" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see the reasoning for splitting the tags- there could be someone who knows a lot about the Solar System who doesn't know much about solar systems in general. The opposite could also be true. It's essentially the difference between theoretical and applied knowledge, you either know about how solar systems work or about how this one does (or both or neither). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't trust the average Worldbuilding user to know which tag to use if we make a second one. We could manually retag for them, but like you mention it might already be difficult to figure out how to retag the questions we already have, I don't want to add a process for retagging questions indefinitely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I agree this is a problem, I don't want to fix it. One tag with two somewhat similar definitions shouldn't be that much of a problem, but confusing users and constantly retagging questions could be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T13:43:44.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2016-10-10T14:51:18.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see a large enough difference between the two to warrant the work and confusion that would go into splitting it up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never considered that 'solar system' specifically meant the things in orbit around our star vs other stars.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm not sure what you'd call the system around say Barnard's Star, other than 'The Barnard System' I suppose.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, having two tags that are basically the same thing is only going to cause confusion and tagging mistakes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If anything, remove solar system completely and only have [planetary system], and let the user specify that it's Sol that they are referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T14:51:18.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4020" CreationDate="2016-10-10T18:01:54.667" Score="9" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57928/create-gold-from-lead-or-other-substances&quot;&gt;Create gold or lead from other substances&lt;/a&gt;, all but the most recent few answers have been tagged with the hard-science warning. You all know it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question asks for hard science. All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See the tag description for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand moderators &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3930/should-we-delete-answers-that-dont-meet-the-requirements-of-the-hard-science-ta&quot;&gt;manually add this notice to answers that do not meet the hard-science criteria&lt;/a&gt;, so unless there's a new script I'm not aware of (possible), a real-live moderator believed my answer didn't conform, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57943/15478&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt; (+47/-1, no comments, as of this post).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I did certainly add some creative flair to my answer to address the soft aspects of the question, I'm confident that the meat of my answer (gold plating) was well supported by science, with links to relevant articles. I don't know how I could reasonably include more science without the answer being much, much longer, and/or not answering the spirit of the OP's question as well. What I could do is swap out the Wikipedia links for some more in-depth articles. In this case I chose WP because the specific article has the right amount of breadth for the question, in my opinion, but I'm not opposed to changing it if that's why it was flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all answers older than about 5 hours old have also been flagged (as of this post), perhaps it's a new policy or script or something, but I quite like my answer and obviously want to make it fits the tags regardless, and doesn't get deleted at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57943/15478&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; conform to hard-science, and if not, how can I improve it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15478" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T16:32:08.807" Title="Why did my/all answers get the hard-science tag warning banner on this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4019" CreationDate="2016-10-10T20:19:01.423" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I wrote in a comment to this meta question, I was the one who added the post notice to the answers, roughly six hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we don’t use scripts. That’s extremely unfair, in my opinion, because it’s not easy for a script to figure out if a post meets certain criteria. There are exceptions, in the case of spam answers, but it’s much harder to evaluate whether a post needs a custom notice like this one. I generally check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag a couple times a day to see if there are new answers, but sometimes I miss some. This is one of those cases, where a user flagged the question and noted that many of the answers needed the post notice; I took five or ten minutes to evaluate them and then did so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don’t like subjectivity, because subjectivity leads to inconsistency, which is a bad thing when moderating. Sure, most moderation decisions are subjective, to some degree, but that can be mitigated. When it comes to considering adding this post notice to an answer, I like to follow a mental flowchart of sorts, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;information from the tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; and previous meta discussions. Here’s my impression of what it looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZdZLU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZdZLU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific answer, I read the Wikipedia pages you linked to. The one on gold plating isn’t that well sourced, and the specific section that mentions acid gold plating is unsourced entirely. The one on mercury poisoning is much better, but the link doesn’t support any of your conclusions, though I find some of the cases amusing. Therefore, as per the informal flowchart - which I do, by the way, make exceptions to - I added the post notice on your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see your rationale for using Wikipedia as a source in general; in this case, I feel like it’s not enough. Normally, I would recommend replacing - or, better yet, augmenting - the link with links to the reputable sources the article uses for the specific point. For the article on acid gold plating, this isn’t an option, so I think you’ll have to dig deeper. I wouldn’t remove the Wikipedia reference, but I’d try to find some hard evidence to support the points that acid gold plating is possible with the technology of the alchemist. There’s not much else you need to do for the answer. It’s brilliantly simple, but the key to it should be backed up. With that done, you’re golden (pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same basic rationale applies to most of the other answers here, and I’d argue that they can be improved in the same way yours can. Some involve more complicated arguments, and so more individual claims need to be backed up, but on the whole, the same issue applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, unless things change in the future, I will never delete an answer simply because it doesn’t have enough &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. I brought that up from a neutral perspective in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3930/627&quot;&gt;the meta post you linked to&lt;/a&gt;, and there was no clear support; thus, I see no reason to delete answers. I did delete one answer to the question you answered, but that was for a different reason: It was completely unrelated to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be a bit more specific by what I mean by &quot;popular science&quot;, as Peregrine Rook asked about. If I had to define the term, I'd say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any secondary source which reports on an unaffiliated scientific investigation and translates the conclusions there into something understandable by the average member of the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some keywords there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Secondary source&quot; - This is not a short article written by scientists about their work, which you might see in certain magazines. This content is written by someone else, who may or may not have experience in the field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Unaffiliated&quot; - This is not a public outreach page written by, for instance, NASA, about work by NASA scientists. Again, the person writing this may not have experience in the field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Translate . . . conclusions&quot; - This may sound harsh, but a lot of popular science pieces jump straight to the conclusions of a scientific paper or journal article and extrapolate from there. I originally inserted the phrase &quot;content, ideas, and&quot; before &quot;conclusions&quot;, but in my experience, the intermediate steps are often skipped. This leaves the reader with a poor understanding of the concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Average member of the public&quot; - You're not likely to see technical terms in a popular science article; if you do, they might just be buzzwords, added to make the piece look cooler.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that was a striking indictment of popular science writing, perhaps a bit on the harsh side. I'm primarily targeting online articles on places not normally devoted to science, or which generally only lightly dip into the actual science. News sites (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bbc.com&lt;/a&gt;), general non-science sites (I can't think of a better term, but see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wired.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wired.com&lt;/a&gt;), science sites that skim the real science (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.space.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;space.com&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.universetoday.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;universetoday.com&lt;/a&gt;), and others all fall under this definition. Some are better than others - the last two are decent - but many are fairly terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition excludes things like scientific journal websites. I don't mean vanity press sites; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scirp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scirp.org&lt;/a&gt; has been cited in non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers, and it's absolute crap. The same goes for &lt;a href=&quot;http://vixra.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;viXra.org&lt;/a&gt;, founded by those who didn't like arXiv's (limited) peer review system. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv.org&lt;/a&gt; isn't always reputable; it doesn't have a full-fledged peer-review system, and I've seen terrible stuff there, though those are edge cases. Papers from &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; journals, though - &lt;em&gt;Nature&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Science&lt;/em&gt;, etc. - are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; popular science, obviously, and even lay articles on these journals' websites can be decent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NASA's website (and, of course, other space agencies, although NASA's is pretty awesome) is not popular science if (and only if) the article focuses on work done by NASA scientists, or if it contains data from peer-reviewed papers. For instance, I recently wrote an answer on Astronomy Stack Exchange including data from &lt;a href=&quot;https://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/index.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this index&lt;/a&gt;, which is an informal repository of NASA's &lt;em&gt;Kepler&lt;/em&gt; data. The ESA website has something similar for data from Gaia (with an awesome interface I'd recommend checking out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Websites from institutions of higher education may or may not be popular science; it depends on whether the page is an article written for the university or college's general website or whether it's a page designed as part of a course for a specific department or as supplementary material. This is perhaps hard to explain, but it varies on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for Wikipedia, which I grouped separately from popular science. Personally, I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4019/why-did-my-all-answers-get-the-hard-science-tag-warning-banner-on-this-question/4020?noredirect=1#comment10904_4020&quot;&gt;Tim B's comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the main point here is that Wikipedia is NEVER an authoritative source on anything. It's a great reference and a good place to start looking but you always need to dig to the authoritative sources behind it. And be aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/citogenesis.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/citogenesis.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise, if you choose to start at Wikipedia, looking at the references it cites, while being clear to evaluate that those references are valid (checking that they're &quot;reputable scientific papers&quot;, as they flowchart shows). I would not recommend using Wikipedia itself as a &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; reference, only as a &lt;em&gt;secondary&lt;/em&gt; one to explain a side term. That said, I feel that the community is a bit divided on this; that tag wiki even says (per &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1907/627&quot;&gt;ArtOfCode's suggestion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; OK too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree; even the best Wikipedia articles link to primary sources that are loads better. Take the time to read them and fully understand them; don't just be lazy and rely fully on a secondary source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you edited your answer yesterday, I removed the post notice from your answer, which now has a reference supporting exactly the part of the answer I felt needed referencing. I hope other answerers will do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T16:32:08.807" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2016-10-12T17:47:15.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the merit behind this, that some questions aren't about THE solar system, but are about planetary / solar systems in general, so it makes sense to split them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can also see the reverse argument, they are both similar in terms of question style so why split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think there should be a split between THE solar system and solar / planetary systems in general&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22937" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T17:47:15.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4024" CreationDate="2016-10-12T17:54:59.087" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that some of the badges on Worldbuilding set good targets, like asking good questions, raising correct flags, and editing posts in need of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/disciplined&quot;&gt;&quot;Disciplined&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Delete own post with score of 3 or higher.) badge is confusing to me, given that the requirement is to delete your question that gets a score of three or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just seems to be bad for the community, if good questions are potentially at risk of being deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think that the Disciplined badge should be a badge at all. What are people's thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22937" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-10-12T20:20:30.627" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T13:18:11.413" Title="Disciplined badge is counterproductive" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4022" CreationDate="2016-10-12T18:04:58.367" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does seem kind of silly ... &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people do ask the same question in slightly more refined ways over time. Going back and deleting the old versions (some of which may even be on hold), is not a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T18:04:58.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4022" CreationDate="2016-10-12T20:18:47.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases, yes, it can be a problem. I tend to think that people will take rep over a badge most days of the week, but they can, of course, get the badge by simply deleting a post - and note that the badge applies to both questions and answers - with a score of three or more, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/95918/274942&quot;&gt;undeleting&lt;/a&gt; it after the badge is awarded. It's gaming the system, but it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that I earned the Disciplined badge after deleting an answer of mine that involved applying the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation to a dragon (!). It got a few upvotes, but then someone pointed out that my analysis had a flaw, and it turned out that there was another, unrelated error. I couldn't figure out how to fix that, so, even though nobody downvoted, I deleted the answer (and later fixed it, and undeleted it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I have deleted the answer if the Disciplined badge didn't exist? Probably; I don't like posting content that's incorrect, and I'll undo my mistakes when I can. But sometimes, people might not want to delete material, even if it's wrong or flawed, because they don't want to lose the rep - an understandable reaction. The badge helps sweeten the deal a bit; it encourages you to do the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the argument made in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/7612/274942&quot;&gt;this Meta answer&lt;/a&gt;, as I just found out. I don't have data (yet) as to whether or not the badge makes more people willing to delete incorrect answers, but it makes sense that it could work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/221453/274942&quot;&gt;Some&lt;/a&gt; might call this a weak argument, and it is, to some extent. But it's a rationale for keeping it, nonetheless, and I haven't seen it used harmfully, in my experience looking through deleted questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/274942&quot;&gt;certain criteria&lt;/a&gt; under which a user can't delete their own question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can’t delete &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5234/274942&quot;&gt;accepted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can’t delete &lt;em&gt;your own question&lt;/em&gt; when it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/74471/274942&quot;&gt;upvoted answer&lt;/a&gt;, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has an accepted answer, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has multiple answers (even if there are no upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4/627&quot;&gt;upvote a lot&lt;/a&gt; on Worldbuilding, and we get a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of answers on each question - I think we average about 4.65285663 answers per question, give or take. So it's really hard to delete a question on Worldbuilding once it gets going. This means that it's not easy to abuse the badge, in terms of asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T20:18:47.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2869" CreationDate="2016-10-14T01:30:18.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a lot of posts for the blog.  I mostly find Medium a comfortable platform to post to, but am sometimes frustrated by its limited HTML.  (And I know its lack of support for math has caused problems for others.)  Further, using the WYSIWYG editor is mouse-intensive, so if I'm doing a lot of formatting or especially if I have a lot of links (like if I'm doing a topic round-up from the site), I instead write the post in HTML outside of Medium, drop it in my personal web space temporarily, and import it to Medium.  That works pretty well -- there's usually a little bit of cleanup to do, but it's easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Embedding images is easy.  Also somewhat necessary; Medium is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; image-oriented in how it presents posts, whether on the blog front page or in a feed.  So you've pretty much got to find some image to include, but that's probably good for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts on Medium can have tags (recently raised from three to five).  Those tags are global to Medium; if you click on the &quot;fiction&quot; or &quot;space&quot; or &quot;RPG&quot; tag on one of our posts, you'll see fiction or space or RPG posts from all over the site.  That's good in that it broadens our reach a tiny bit (and gives our readers other related stuff to read), but not so good if we wanted to cultivate a set of tags just for our blog.  The scope for a tag (and its name) is all of Medium, not just Universe Factory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made a few support requests at Medium.  They've been reasonably responsive and they fixed my problems (sometimes on the second or third try).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something I consider a key feature is that we can have many authors, who can submit work once or on a regular basis or anywhere in between, and a few editors (not just one) to manage the site.  Distributed workload and distributed access are important for a community-run site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T01:30:18.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T13:49:17.140" Score="9" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question that at the time of writing has over 30 answers (including deleted ones):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57989/is-there-any-job-that-cant-be-automated&quot;&gt;Is there any job that can&amp;#39;t be automated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that sort of scale it's likely that excellent answers are being ignored, ones that can be improved are not being improved, and bad answers are not being dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd just like to ask everyone who has time to scan through all the answers on this question (not just the top few) and give them all the attention they deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T13:49:17.140" Title="Can you help review the answers on this popular question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T13:55:50.200" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before any of you asks, this has &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; relation to the Anatomically Correct series.  That is someone else's series and put more emphasis on evolutionary plausibility than I am interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If evolutionary plausibility were the goal for this series, we'd be here &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;forever&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; trying to find some justifications for the really extreme mythical creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; goal is to make it biologically feasible without resorting to the cliches and stereotypes that have been pounding them for centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T17:31:52.960" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T17:31:52.960" Title="Biology of Fantasy: Let's Get Real, Shall We?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4027" CreationDate="2016-10-14T14:01:55.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Those You Can Find on The Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55663/the-centaur-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Centaur&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56222/the-angel-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Angel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56390/the-dwarf-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Dwarf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56466/the-mer-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Mer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56815/the-elf-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Elf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57021/the-reindeer-lets-get-real-shall-we&quot;&gt;Reindeer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And This You Can Find on Medium&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/biology-of-fantasy-lets-get-real-shall-we-ae5f13c2d464#.mpqvapows&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology of Fantasy:  Let's Get Real, Shall We?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T14:01:55.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4030" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" Score="0" Body="For questions that collect links to related posts, such as questions in a particular series or about a particular world.  Index questions should have a single community-wiki answer to collect the links." OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T18:12:13.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4031" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4032" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" Score="0" Body="For questions that collect links to reference material.  When used to index  posts that are related to each other, such as questions in a particular series or about a particular world, the question should have a single community-wiki answer to collect the links. " OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T19:59:28.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4022" CreationDate="2016-10-17T13:18:11.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not make it so that if your question is marked as duplicate &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; received 3+ votes, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; you get the badge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28668" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T13:18:11.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4036" CreationDate="2016-10-18T12:44:14.620" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/58856/6986&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; from a new user that caught my attention not because of its quality (or lack thereof), but because it consisted of 15 questions to the OP and 1 suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested the user take those questions to chat, discuss them with the OP, and provide an answer. I also flagged the question as not-an-answer. Apparently, however, the community consensus is that an answer comprised of questions to the OP is a perfectly valid answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For formal reference, what position and action should we take concerning answers that contain more requests for clarification from the OP than statements that provide a solution to the question? Alternatively, do a long series of requests for clarification provide a solution to a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T14:21:32.973" Title="Question Clarification as an Answer" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4034" CreationDate="2016-10-18T14:17:10.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The problem isn't the answer, it's the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that particular case, if that many clarification questions are warranted to get a usable question, then the question itself is too broad and should be closed (as that one was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer cited is commentary on a question, not an answer itself.  If the question were better, I'd encourage the poster to improve their answer, else vote to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T14:17:10.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4034" CreationDate="2016-10-18T14:21:32.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, I don't think it's as much requests for clarification as it is rhetorical questions. Sure, if the OP had provided answers to the questions beforehand, then maybe it would be easier to give a straightforward answer. But I'm in support of giving general answers to things, and in this case a list of questions can provide a framework by which users can make their own informed decisions about their world. In essence, since the OP didn't provide a specific problem, the answerer provided a general solution. And, honestly, it might be better that way. If we can have one question that's easy to find with an answer that will solve most similar problems, I think it's better than having a dozen questions with strange specific titles and problems each with a specific solution that might only help one person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T14:21:32.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5864" CreationDate="2016-10-19T01:59:57.457" Score="92" ViewCount="18327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the newest post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;, the blog of the Worldbuilding community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/with-my-conlang-i-would-not-fail-f7fbf7990563&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;With My Conlang, I Would Not Fail&lt;/a&gt;, by Sean F. Larson&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the talking and back and forth talk, my principal said something. Thinking about it now, I am sure that it was just an off-hand comment. But he said, &amp;quot;He is going to have to invent his own language to graduate from high school.&amp;quot; and the light bulb went off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invent my own language? YES! I'm going to invent my own language! I had no idea anyone had ever done this before. I had taken French, and I understood grammar, but I really had no idea how to create an entire language from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags: Constructed languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous post: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/salvage-part-two-of-landed-689363aa2546&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salvage - Part 2 of Landed&lt;/a&gt;, by Topcode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They went to homebase and unpacked and set up a tent. as they stepped outside they heard a bang. It was an escape pod that had launched and was quickly destabilizing. It was pulling up but not in time. A loud crash sounded as it smashed into the shore, then skidded around before rolling down the slope… and into the water. Fortunately for whoever was inside the flotation activated and kept it from sinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's are currently no stories in the backlog. Want to add one? Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/28789&quot;&gt;&#xA;We have a blog!&lt;/a&gt; and the chat room &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you like to contribute to the blog?  We welcome fiction, science articles, reviews, discussions of worldbuilding process/techniques, case studies... anything that fits in with building worlds!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We will update this meta post for each new blog post as it's published.  See the answers for a complete list of past blog posts.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/want-to-contribute-b37191c4362e#.o7009o2l6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Want to Contribute?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2021-07-12T14:25:29.630" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T14:26:55.200" Title="New blog post: With My Conlang, I Would Not Fail (previous: Salvage - Part 2 of Landed)" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2016-10-19T01:59:57.457" Score="23" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Previous blog posts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5864/28&quot;&gt;2018 and later&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2017&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;December&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/golden-sails-part-3-f406acd91e0c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Sails, Part 3&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/call-of-the-night-raven-4e6c9091143b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Call of the Night Raven&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/golden-sails-part-2-c20636458280&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Sails, Part 2&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/lunas-experiments-wolf-nose-2683790048d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luna's Experiments: Wolf Nose&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cuban-missile-war-introduction-d2b7e00c97eb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cuban Missile War (Introduction)&lt;/a&gt; by Future Historian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/golden-sails-part-1-38885f9f2796&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Sails, Part 1&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/prudus-explains-magic-a-wizards-grimoire-1da41961e7c3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prudus Explains Magic: A Wizard’s Grimoire&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-priestess-of-sila-70852d97cbf7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Priestess of Sila&lt;/a&gt;, a Quenaunor story by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;November&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-ambush-part-2-24de4e2ec225&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ambush Part 2&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-chapter-6-17c92a54ca4f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut: Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/digital-character-modelling-3-customising-the-body-e50bc6931bf2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Character Modelling 3 — Customising the body&lt;/a&gt; by Bellerophon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/lunas-experiments-cat-ears-26d2f01764c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luna’s Experiments: Cat Ears&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/resurrection-of-the-dead-practical-considerations-5c65746c3845&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Resurrection of the Dead: Practical Considerations&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/prudus-explains-magic-a-wizards-staff-76532a439956&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prudus Explains Magic: A Wizard's Staff&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/evolution-for-world-builders-b222a7214e54&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evolution for World Builders&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;October&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-bored-god-9d6bc05611d2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Bored God&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-ambush-part-1-404364696d6f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ambush, Part 1&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-challenger-76879018d2cf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Challenger&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/mapmaking-software-65c0318fd3a6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mapmaking Software&lt;/a&gt; by Vincent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/digital-character-modelling-2-making-the-basic-body-94b23b2bbea2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Character Modelling 2: Making the Basic Body&lt;/a&gt; by Bellerophon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/and-psithyrus-beat-his-time-eaeb2e64b3ca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And Psithyrus beat his time&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/digital-mapmaking-1fdd11eaf975&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Mapmaking&lt;/a&gt; by Vincent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/digital-character-modelling-an-introduction-8f1fa4bbcbb9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Character Modelling — an introduction&lt;/a&gt; by Bellerophon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/konets-58ae36bce80c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Konets&lt;/a&gt; by Future Historian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/of-maps-and-men-pt-1-bb486cc85e7d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Of Maps and Men, Part 1&lt;/a&gt; by dot_Sp0T&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/taking-into-account-quantum-encryption-part-2-424a54277996&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taking into account quantum encryption (part 2)&lt;/a&gt; by Heather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;August&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/comically-wrong-what-can-happen-when-you-ignore-physics-dae805cf457b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comically wrong — what can happen when you ignore physics&lt;/a&gt; by Heather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/look-up-4c7779483fe7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Look Up!&lt;/a&gt; by Heather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/at-the-end-of-the-day-9a4b62023663&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;At the End of the Day&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/boltzmann-brains-and-entropy-7fd6a652767b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boltzmann brains and entropy&lt;/a&gt; by Heather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-the-world-of-the-juggernaut-ad8ddbb57938&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building the world of The Juggernaut, Part 2&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;July&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/taking-into-account-quantum-encryption-part-1-db86d1f1665a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taking into account quantum encryption (part 1)&lt;/a&gt; by Heather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/thats-not-feudalism-b83fc04272e0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That's Not Feudalism&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-26073bba4e37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-61b50578d07d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-c06dbd208f5e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild (mature themes: violence, some sexual content)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;June&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-i-walkers-in-texas-f8ddf71a7a7e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sci-Fi Science: Physics of Impossibru: Walkers in Texas&lt;/a&gt; by Viharmester Birodalma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/americas-space-journey-told-through-photos-8486782fde42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;America’s Space Journey Told Through Photos&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-the-world-of-ivanturia-b77bccb99fca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building the world of Ivanturia&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/how-planet-hunters-identify-distant-exoplanets-c1b112a78933&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Planet-Hunters Identify Distant Exoplanets&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/could-life-evolve-on-trappist-1-d03c64f7e829&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Could Life Evolve on TRAPPIST-1?&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-rumor-builders-261d7475f4b7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rumor Builders&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/surfing-in-a-fiery-paradise-ec4064c7fa99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Surfing in a fiery paradise&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-the-world-of-the-juggernaut-234ceeab6479&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building the World of the Juggernaut&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-6a8d8b85b2a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;April&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-weasel-queen-d8eeb8de3c0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Weasel Queen&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-da4e64041ba4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/some-theoretical-considerations-to-world-building-methods-7bfafe2870b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some Theoretical Considerations to World-Building Methods&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-horror-named-jimmy-1fd07b2cf9be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Horror Named Jimmy&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-invaded-orchard-bacdf706b032&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Invaded Orchard&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/orcs-and-six-shooters-386184ad336&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orcs and Six-Shooters&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;March&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/analysing-the-brutal-and-the-travelling-a0012f91f2fd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysing the Brutal and the Travelling&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2#.pixubucu8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Climate Modeling 101&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/kulan-of-reolia-part-2-995c967fa92e#.v1u0pf3o7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kulan of Reolia Part 2&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-trouble-with-ftl-588cb3a3a03c#.pxr1chfa3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Trouble with FTL&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-travelling-storyteller-6e2e9fce0627#.7pobly5z5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Travelling Storyteller&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-tools-of-battle-fa5b823a00e0#.1w75fwllv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tools of Battle&lt;/a&gt; by PipperChip&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-brutal-builder-5fbfbad08c2a#.ijfd5s5pe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brutal Builder&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;February&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/medieval-warfare-an-introduction-bd7f8935bb0c#.70jq95k7j&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medieval Warfare — An introduction&lt;/a&gt; by Mithrandir24601&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/kulan-of-reolia-6b5954f081b8#.u1hyj257l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kulan of Reolia Part 1&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-inspired-the-geography-of-great-lakes-earth-69b21a7a9bd0#.u05jz8kv7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Inspired the Geography of Great Lakes Earth?&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/how-great-lakes-earth-chaos-theory-39ec61ae6e18#.wxafbblsf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Great Lakes Earth ≠ Chaos Theory&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/borcorieus-of-vorca-a0e0ce84617d#.eqc9c9t6u&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borcorieus of Vorca&lt;/a&gt; by DonyorM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/hit-them-in-the-gaps-c0cc05abf91b#.df1s5oq6z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hit Them in the Gaps&lt;/a&gt; by PipperChip&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;January&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/analysing-the-lost-the-itinerant-and-the-fractal-28a0a82f4821#.hc8byevco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysing the Lost, the Itinerant and the Fractal&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-chapter-12-a29660baf7a4#.g2wytwz0f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 12)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/space-pirates-kessler-syndrome-and-astronaut-layovers-74a27f149f8d#.z2j7f588z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Space Pirates, Kessler Syndrome, and Astronaut Layovers&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/generating-continents-procedurally-with-distortion-fields-d17dd85d5339#.leh7v8b4c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generating Continents Procedurally with Distortion Fields&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@johndailey/the-philosophy-behind-great-lakes-earth-8f17dd6fb9#.h85fnn92x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Philosophy Behind Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-fractal-now-110f24c97a3e#.6ptqmjmf2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fractal Now&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/stop-saying-rivers-only-converge-802182652365#.37rkpow29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stop Saying Rivers Only Converge&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/calculating-political-power-is-hard-7d15983bff1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calculating Political Power is Hard!&lt;/a&gt; by Green&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2016&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/fight-earnestly-ceb0eccc117f#.sshkzi23y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fight Earnestly&lt;/a&gt; by PipperChip&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-itinerant-storyteller-54d4e6cbd9cf#.p5v9j22bl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Itinerant Storyteller&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/this-post-is-about-a-world-building-tool-ive-been-working-on-5d9560844ff5#.fdc7rjn1p&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generating Terrain with Cellular Automata&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@JLMC/how-i-generated-artificial-rivers-on-imaginary-continents-747df12c5d4c#.7201wnm13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How I generated artificial rivers on imaginary continents&lt;/a&gt; by Jasper McChesney&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-chapter-11-14e61b20bd3a#.hdwwftjcu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 11)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-chapter-10-446d23dcbba7#.qe3cowhzj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 10)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-a-truly-alien-alien-f49e8230f8f2#.8j1rkelv2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building a truly alien alien&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/when-am-i-dbc905e1ce7b#.6mk5ml2de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Am I? Navigation for Time Travelers&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-chapter-9-7db7b759dbfa#.yzjj2bxe5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 9)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/great-lakes-earth-wildlife-2e3ea5881503#.i01wpgdka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth: Wildlife&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/want-to-contribute-b37191c4362e#.o7009o2l6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Want to Contribute?&lt;/a&gt; by the community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-factory-floor-episode-1-no-pressure-898a50a3571d#.57rz2o6gx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor, Episode 1: No Pressure &lt;/a&gt; by James&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/prehistory-of-great-lakes-earth-6452ab393f6c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prehistory of Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-chapter-8-c2a73d23f1a1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 8)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/biology-of-fantasy-lets-get-real-shall-we-ae5f13c2d464&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology of Fantasy: Let's Get Real, Shall We?&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/transcendence-to-new-world-e19560077f74&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transcendence to new world&lt;/a&gt; by Karan Desai&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-6f954aef1cba&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: Part 2 (Chapter 7)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-solar-system-of-great-lakes-earth-1ac15b6c439d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Solar System of Great Lakes Earth&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/great-lakes-earth-geography-372bce96d642&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth: Geography&lt;/a&gt; by John Dailey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilding-designer-b5fde86de92b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilding Designer, Kevin Beavers&lt;/a&gt; interviewed by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-the-world-of-pangaea-d3015cd8485b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building the World of Pangaea&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-even-conclusions-reveal-surprises-93a724b7e452&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: One Last Surprise&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/quantum-theory-and-albert-einstein-never-managed-to-get-along-well-f4b55c997070&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Do Worldbuilders Play Dice?&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/why-would-they-do-that-discouraging-formal-education-69c5e4fd3f7e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Would They Do That? Discouraging Formal Education&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/let-it-go-f63038d3d0e0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Let It Go&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-monty-wild-518a2d3d3ff4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-bringing-threads-together-6a41b1905ea2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: Bringing Threads Together&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/father-simon-e369c4eb2d55&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Father Simon&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-aify-612a1a5b084c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Aify&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/recovering-from-errors-plugging-loopholes-in-your-magic-system-d6c60564c5f0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recovering From Errors: Plugging Loopholes in Your Magic System&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-serban-tanasa-13438b74b8a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cognitive-load-6181f84e78c2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cognitive Load&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/good-enough-how-to-know-when-you-re-done-7df1a16fedac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good Enough: How to Know When You're Done&lt;/a&gt; by Frostfyre&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-the-personal-lens-404b3ecc8c9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: The Personal Lens&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-dot-sp0t-4bf4a1654861&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Dot_SpOT&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/nature-s-oven-eea4c8d197ad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nature's Oven&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/developing-rational-characters-through-drama-theory-f4db8901a07e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developing Rational Characters Through Drama Theory&lt;/a&gt; by Cort Ammon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-joe-bloggs-91f6a0cf2eec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/cateye-94fb2dad390f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cateye&lt;/a&gt; by Frostfyre&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-daaaahwoosh-1875a52778d0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: DaaaahWoosh&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-for-xenoperspective-a8c016d3118d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding for Xenoperspective&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-artofcode-5221953e8748&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: ArtOfCode&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-resources-elsewhere-on-medium-df19565a91ef&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Resources Elsewhere on Medium&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-do-you-celebrate-128b3e4716ab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What do you celebrate?&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-bowlturner-dbde33e9183d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Bowlturner&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-if-the-moon-was-another-earth-afb635c4c321&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if... the Moon was another Earth?&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-interactive-history-d4b2ba696bdd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: Interactive History&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-travelling-salesman-in-space-d4acc470e56b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Travelling Salesman in Space&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-the-moderators-6fe9d7119fd1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: The Moderators&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/democracy-building-in-the-worldbuilding-world-1a4ad92852a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Democracy Building in the Worldbuilding World&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-if-the-world-was-round-65df1645cc0c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if... the world was round?&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-as-you-go-a-case-study-8d00665e3a4f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding As You Go: A Case Study&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-tres-2b-651a86dadd52&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/editor-s-picks-january-2016-ecd8173ce32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Editor's Picks: January 2016&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-lost-builder-355cf7de7ec6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Builder&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-a-universe-3038cecb7b06&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building a universe&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-tim-b-6c05407b4884&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Tim B&lt;/a&gt; by bilbo pingouin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/deconstructing-will-hicks-554b966960e5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deconstructing Will Hicks&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/where-is-will-hicks-1605c08779a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Where is Will Hicks?&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-5-handling-transformations-in-your-world-and-in-your-characters-439cf2b84f0e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: Handling Transformations in Your World... and in Your Characters&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-monica-cellio-f9a038f999ab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/networking-for-rpg-s-b79d7ea02772&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Networking for RPGs&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/coming-of-age-chapter-2-59141b5a3edc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coming of Age -- Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-6-with-author-notes-a2e8662228bf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 6), with author notes&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-frostfyre-ce8ee5071cb7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Frostfyre&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/making-mixtures-creating-a-balanced-world-1a52acf71c33&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Making Mixtures: Creating a Balanced World&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/unlocking-magic-part-3-sharing-the-power-ac4efad12617&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlocking Magic Part 3: Sharing the Power&lt;/a&gt; by Cort Ammon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/creature-design-santa-claus-946a9caa6e6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creature Design: Santa Claus&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2015&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-new-kind-of-sky-living-in-a-globular-cluster-14e82cc33639&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A new kind of sky: Living in a globular cluster&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/safety-first-the-first-lesson-of-magic-101-at-the-wizard-s-university-cae7535034ab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Safety First: The first lesson of Magic 101 at the Wizard's University&lt;/a&gt; by celtschk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/building-blocks-for-worlds-government-41b90b0c55be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Building Blocks for Worlds: Government&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/binary-star-systems-are-cool-and-cooler-still-when-they-contain-planets-a111bb28b4fc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A day on Planet Sitnikov&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-iv-i-can-see-clearly-now-a7b84072435e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: I Can See Clearly Now&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-samuel-7f0887ad85c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Samuel&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/unlocking-magic-part-2-under-science-s-watchful-eye-aefebf00de13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlocking Magic Part 2: Under Science's Watchful Eye&lt;/a&gt; by Cort Ammon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-5-with-commentary-518cd2f51dbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 5), with commentary&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/coming-of-age-chapter-1-63377ccbac4c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coming of Age -- Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/electronic-angel-679039cb7381&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Electronic Angel&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/red-stranger-8ab78489795f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Stranger&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/decoherence-969205285e4c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Decoherence&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-iii-your-world-is-made-of-people-467d0b5bae56&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: Your World Is Made of People&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-hde-226868-3763bc7705aa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/best-of-worldbuilding-a2fc73224b3a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best of Worldbuilding (October)&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/unlocking-magic-part-1-solid-foundations-313267a9db6f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlocking Magic Part 1: Solid Foundations&lt;/a&gt; by Cort Ammon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-james-c693f062d63b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: James&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-4-e1357240d1c3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 4)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/why-ai-s-love-paperclips-41789855447d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why AIs love paperclips&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/dealing-with-extreme-scales-c1540882bdb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dealing with Extreme Scales&lt;/a&gt; by Cort Ammon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/breaking-physics-5719a2d91229&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breaking Physics&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilders-green-7db999b4777a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting the Worldbuilders: Green&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-three-sexes-problem-ef25c62363b8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Three Sexes Problem&lt;/a&gt; by Green&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-2-the-written-word-45e9ef5e27ee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: The Written Word&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/revelation-for-rpgs-ddb32bd91f20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation for RPGs: Setting the Stage&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/best-of-worldbuilding-14729a3dac5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best of Worldbuilding (September)&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-chapter-3-3bfaa22068b4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 3)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/artificial-stupidity-behind-the-story-fc5013a627ea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artificial Stupidity: Behind the Story&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/turning-reality-inside-out-part-1-9eb226eaf84f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turning reality inside out, part 1&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-43c4dccd1bd1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 2)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/ash-part-first-418e872c4e04&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ash (Part First)&lt;/a&gt; by Green&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/creating-realistic-worlds-2406fa62a31e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creating Realistic Worlds&lt;/a&gt; by Tim B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/artificial-stupidity-5988077490ec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artificial Stupidity&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/exploring-a-binary-star-d0d1a4671cc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exploring a Binary Star&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/conlangs-for-non-linguists-827b1e566779&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conlangs for Non-linguists&lt;/a&gt; by Evan Hoffman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/so-you-want-to-build-a-world-or-how-to-be-a-god-aed7304618f1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;So you want to build a world... or &amp;quot;How to be a god&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by James&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-101-on-evil-weaponry-b8835fb93d44&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding 101: On Evil Weaponry&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/searching-for-a-heart-of-ice-7265bf8e0206&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching for a heart of...ice?&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-101-on-suspension-of-disbelief-54b83fcdd6c5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding 101: On Suspension of Disbelief&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-eternal-rebirth-of-bob-a7c6952267c3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The eternal rebirth of Bob&lt;/a&gt; by Green&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-economics-of-space-colonization-46d4bc1657ca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Economics of Space Colonization&lt;/a&gt; by Serban Tanasa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/when-cosmetic-differences-aren-t-39d058d69b47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Cosmetic Differences Aren't&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/writing-meta-stories-for-others-to-use-46a3735d9fb5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writng Meta-Stories for Others to Use&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/life-on-tatooine-planets-in-binary-star-systems-4bee211d4dfc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Life on Tatooine: Habitable planets in binary star systems&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/best-of-worldbuilding-cc6937034089&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best of Worldbuilding (August)&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-the-story-behind-the-story-12944abf0d2a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War: The Story Behind the Story&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/too-hot-too-cold-or-just-right-choosing-a-star-for-your-world-12190e5c2864&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Too hot, too cold, or just right: Choosing a star for your world&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-a718622d808f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters' War (Chapter 1)&lt;/a&gt; by Monica Cellio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/how-to-make-a-universe-on-the-internet-d9ebf39c7ba1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Make a Universe on the Internet&lt;/a&gt; by ArtOfCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T04:03:00.180" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T15:18:31.193" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Tag Wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answers should be based on current, undisputed science. This means no subjective sciences. Ideally, answers should be backed up by equations, relevant theories, and citations where possible - arXiv can be quite good for citations, though Wikipedia is usually OK too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually suggests using Wikipedia as a citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Wikipedia is an excellent and useful research tool it has a number of problems, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pages can be changed after the link is made making the link no longer relevant or now pointing to incorrect data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data on Wikipedia can be incorrect, even when it seems to have supporting articles. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/citogenesis.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Citogenesis&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia is by definition never a primary source, it is data from other sources compiled together in a convenient way. In general pointing to the primary source gives a clearer link and less chance of part of the information being lost or changed along the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On he other hand though Wikipedia does have excellent, well researched, well written, and helpful pages and articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should our policy be? Do we embrace Wikipedia? Spurn it? Try to find a best of both worlds middle ground? If the latter then where should we draw the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally should that tag wiki be edited to reflect our new Wikipedia policy and if so what should the new wording be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T17:44:30.797" Title="How much should we accept Wikipedia (and similar sites) as a source?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4039" CreationDate="2016-10-21T15:52:32.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me go on a bit of a tangent here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that's always bugged me about Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is that we don't have a large community of experts. Now, really, really early on in Stack Exchange's life, Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Exchange) &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that you have all these experts waiting in the wings to do stuff is an illusion in my experience. There's really just a bunch of amateurs muddling along trying to do things together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works on a lot of sites, and in fact, I would argue that virtually no Stack Exchange site - &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;Math Overflow&lt;/a&gt; excluded, especially as it was originally from outside Stack Exchange - needs to be a community composed solely of, or even mostly of, experts. I mean, what's the point? You need people of all levels, with all different types of knowledge, with all different backgrounds and areas of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same token, you do need people of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; levels of experience, and on Worldbuiding, we don't have them all. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of very smart people doing very smart things, but we don't really have a non-negligibly small set of biologists, or physicists, or geologists. We do have some people - and thank you, &lt;em&gt;thank&lt;/em&gt; you, for your contributions; you know who you are - who work in scientific fields and are generous to spend some of their time here on Worldbuilding, sharing their knowledge, but they're something of an endangered species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I've been pushing and pushing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag for so long. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/no-artificial-intelligence-in-area-51/&quot;&gt;The first Artificial Intelligence site was shut down&lt;/a&gt; because it didn't have expert-level questions - or answers, which is my focus here. Now, we can afford to totally through away the tag, burn it, and never look back, because the majority of our questions don't need it. But some do. And if we don't have a large expert community on our site, where do we go? Those who actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; the stuff we're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately enough, we have something called The Internet at our disposal. In less than thirty seconds, assuming my Wi-Fi isn't on the fritz, I can sit down and open up half a dozen scientific papers on a certain subject (true fact, by the way). I can scroll through scientists' websites and blogs (&lt;em&gt;cough cough&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21166/sean-raymond&quot;&gt;Sean Raymond&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;cough cough&lt;/em&gt;) and get their thoughts on issues they work on each day. I can read and think and calculate and &lt;em&gt;learn&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, the Internet is more than just Wikipedia. Knowledge - real, true, verified, honest-to-goodness &lt;em&gt;knowledge&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/978/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this stuff&lt;/a&gt; - lies beyond its borders. Even if you want to simply start at a Wikipedia article, it has &lt;em&gt;references&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;citations&lt;/em&gt; and links to &lt;em&gt;additional reading&lt;/em&gt;. Information on Wikipedia comes from somewhere. The scientists don't just do an experiment and then type it into a Wikipedia article. They experiment and they write and they publish in a journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is where you should be going first. If you find a Wikipedia article, it either has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good citations that you can follow through and read, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crappy or nonexistent citations, in which case you should doubt the validity of the article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both ways, you have better options at your disposal than just linking to the Wikipedia page. You can either read the primary sources cited there - the papers, the code behind the models, the diagrams of experiments, the data - or you can start elsewhere, or not answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some, I'd guess, would argue that it can be tough to slog through a couple of ten page papers when you're going to be writing maybe a three or four paragraph answer, especially if they're dense, esoteric, and hard to read. I get that. I love to read, but there's only so much I can do in one sitting. But my response to that is that if you're not willing to do the research, or if you can't understand the papers themselves, you should not be writing an answer. If you cite a source and base your answer on it, you should be able to repackage some of that information into a more palatable form for the curious passerby. If you don't know enough to do that, you shouldn't write the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me discuss an example. Last spring, a popular question hit the Hot Network Questions list. One answer (which I won't discuss the specifics of) quoted verbatim the abstract of a paper, linked to it, added a one sentence explanation, and promptly got over 60 upvotes, bringing it to the top of the page (note: this was not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few people questioned its validity in comments on it, myself included. A couple of us - literally, two - downvoted it, and most moved on. I did a bit of digging, because the answer was so absurd that all my intuition said it must be false. Two months of intermittent research, coding, computing - easily the most work I've ever done on a Stack Exchange post - showed me that the paper was from a vanity publishing firm, the authors copied part of it from Wikipedia without citation, they know nothing about the field, misapplied half their equations, and contradicted 70 years of scientific results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that the writer of the answer hadn't read the paper he or she cited, had no idea how the authors reached their conclusions, did no background research on the subject and did not bother to check the claims therein. Yet the net score is over 60.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example where someone didn't check the source of the information they were citing. The same has happened - though, in my opinion, less dramatically - to answers citing just Wikipedia. The authors didn't bother to check the references of conclusions therein - if there were any references - and wrote answers that were completely wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we need to not just cut Wikipedia from being a valid source for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, but to get people to reference primary sources more. This means that people will actually have to check the information themselves, learn (or show that they already know, preferable) the concepts and ideas involved, and ensure that their conclusions are valid. If not, we're going to get answers that are not even wrong, as Wolfgang Pauli would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus - perhaps even more importantly - as I said earlier, there's no excuse for citing Wikipedia. Either you read the primary sources and cite those, or you don't reference the article because it's of dubious validity. It's not a hard decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I vote that we not allow Wikipedia to be used as a main source in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers. If you use Wikipedia, it just doesn't count. I also suggest that we change the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the section&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers should be based on &lt;em&gt;current, undisputed&lt;/em&gt; science. This means no subjective sciences. Ideally, answers should be backed up by equations, relevant theories, and citations where possible - &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt; can be quite good for citations, though Wikipedia is &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; OK too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we change this part to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers should be based on &lt;em&gt;current, undisputed&lt;/em&gt; science. This means no subjective scientific ideas. Ideally, answers should be backed up by equations, relevant theories, and citations where possible - &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt; can be quite good for citations of preprints, although they may not be peer-reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is not acceptable as a main source in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answer because it can be inaccurate or poorly referenced; answerers should go to the effort of finding the original papers on a topic, reading them, and citing them in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could also add something on popular science, which I wrote about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4020/627&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T17:00:16.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4039" CreationDate="2016-10-21T16:39:16.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem of wikipedia isn't it's inaccuracy (which there is a ton) with regard to World Building. People generally don't know how to source and will take whatever they think sounds good to begin with, no matter how accurate or inaccurate it is. Wikipedia, does usually require a source somewhere so you can check into where the information is coming from. Some pages are indeed so pedanticly moderated about following these rules that there are several stories by famous people who have attempted to fix inaccuracies in their own pages about them, but were rejected over and over again, but I think most of those are the minority and most articles do give a generally faithful overview of the topic they are purporting to give credible information on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real issue is not expertise or ameteur. The issue is that lots of these sites have experts or people who can copy and paste expert level information, but there is often a miscommunication because the experts and the laymen are not speaking at the same level. Linking a site like wikipedia and posting its info in the answer does me no good if I can't understand that information. You may say all day that its right there, and it may well be, but more than likely, if I'm asking the question, those answers go way over my head, at least in terms of the details. And likewise if an Expert is asking, the layman probably isn't interpretting the question right because the expert is leaving many things out that they assume you likely know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This why the important point in answering questions, especially in world building topics, is not to answer with long strings of math, figures, etc, but to try to explain those sources in a way that would make sense to a layman without that stuff. If someone doesn't understand the answer, they are not being answered is what I think, so in that vein those sources should only ever be supplementary to give more detailed data, but never as a primary source of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR - copy and pasting should almost never be done. Explaining at a low layman level, with links or pasted info from a source as supplementary further reading beyond the base answer, should be the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this reasoning then wiki is a good source due to it having citations to other sources where as Quora or a stand alone article (whether a terrible source or from a peer reviewed site) would be worse, because they arent as stringent about citing sources, or are harder to find for the layman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="22659" LastEditDate="2016-10-21T17:44:30.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T17:44:30.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3359" CreationDate="2016-10-24T15:51:14.427" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been something like seven months, and I was curious to see if things have changed at all. It turns out they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the same query with the same minimum rep requirements. Here's what I got, for the top 15 (to one decimal place, rounding):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Stack         |   March User Overlap   |   October User Overlap   |   Change&#xA;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;  StackOverflow |  53.3%                 |  49.8%                   |   -3.5%&#xA;  SFF           |  26.4%                 |  24.7%                   |   -1.7%&#xA;  ELU           |  23.0%                 |  21.0%                   |   -2.0%&#xA;  Programmers   |  16.4%                 |  14.3%                   |   -2.1%&#xA;  SuperUser     |  15.7%                 |  14.0%                   |   -1.7%&#xA;  The Workplace |  15.4%                 |  14.9%                   |   -0.5%&#xA;  RPG           |  15.0%                 |  14.0%                   |   -1.0%&#xA;  Meta          |  14.8%                 |  12.7%                   |   -2.1%&#xA;  Security      |  12.8%                 |  12.7%                   |   -0.1%&#xA;  Gaming        |  12.4%                 |  12.7%                   |   +0.3%&#xA;  Physics       |  11.7%                 |  11.1%                   |   -0.6%&#xA;  Academia      |  11.2%                 |  10.5%                   |   -0.7%&#xA;  Puzzling      |  11.0%                 |  11.9%                   |   +0.9%&#xA;  Code Golf     |  11.0%                 |  Not in Top 15 (9.0%)    |   -2.0%&#xA;  Maths         |  11.0%                 |  10.3%                   |   -0.7%&#xA;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;  Travel        |  Not in Top 15         |  10.5%                   |     ?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple sites switched places - Code Golf dropped to 16, while Travel rose into the Top 15, and The Workplace and Puzzling saw increases in position. On the whole though - and this is the amazing thing - &lt;strong&gt;most changes were negative&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could mean a few things - maybe more people are active on smaller beta sites, and are spread out, but I doubt it - but the conclusion I draw is that we're getting more people who are on Stack Exchange just for Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, and are participating enough to get a decent amount of rep. That's awesome. It means that we're finally attracting people from outside Stack Exchange, rather than just curious passersby who treat us as a novelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a small increase? I don't know; the chart shows fluctuations of up to 3.5%, and even 0.5% is non-negligible. But I think it's a good sign that the site is growing. I might run the query again this March to see if we continue to see drops in the percent of users active on other sites, but I think the results I got today are still accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T15:51:14.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-27T13:36:22.880" Score="44" ViewCount="1075" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is written with my metaphorical mod hat fully off and hanging on the wall next to my real hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I moderate two other Stack Exchange sites, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mythology&lt;/a&gt;. They're tiny compared to Worldbuilding, getting maybe a question or two a day, if things are going well. Actually, a lot of sites I'm active in are relatively small, and considering that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4042/627&quot;&gt;about 50% of you are active on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (and other large sites), perhaps many here think that they're even smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beta sites often have decent answered rates, maybe at 90%, 95% or better. However, very few sites network-wide have a nearly 100% answered rate. On Worldbuilding, we currently have 8 questions unanswered, out of 8,528, a 99.9% answered rate. On a site this large, that's incredible. We're &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#percentanswered&quot;&gt;#3 on Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm curious: What makes Worldbuilding Stack Exchange so great at answering questions? Is it the interesting topics? Is it the diverse userbase? Is it some combination of great timing and luck? Worldbuilding, &lt;a href=&quot;http://genius.com/7932237&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you great unfinished symphony&lt;/a&gt;, what makes you so good at answering questions, how can we continue this trend in the future, and how could we be a model for other Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:19.763" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T20:57:19.527" Title="Why is Worldbuilding Stack Exchange so good at answering questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-10-27T16:00:56.447" Score="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because it's easier (and more quickly gratifying) to be a jack of all trades than a master of one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're a community with topics described foremost in breadth, secondarily in depth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large number of people can bring in general understanding of a variety of topics, a somewhat more specific (if still broad) understanding of the general subject in question, ten minutes of Googling around, and a bit of critical thinking to answer most of our questions. Seriously; scan our questions with a more critical eye at some point. The clear majority (if not all) can be answered with the previous listed &quot;qualifications&quot; (if I can use such a strong term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the one who answers gets to voice his thoughts, gets his (pretend) expertise commended, and he walks away patting himself on the back for being helpful. Most importantly the answerer can do all of this with both little work previously (collecting life experiences, education, etc), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; with little work to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on WB.SE I can weigh in on economy, politics and governance, military issues, societies, philosophy... and I'm someone with a degree in computers and who works in computers; I'm not an expert in any of these fields yet I can still &lt;em&gt;be helpful.&lt;/em&gt; That's a rewarding experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this to me trying to help on Stack Overflow. My degree, profession, and hobbies are/were coding and computers, so it stands to reason that I should find it &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; to help there. This is very much not the case. I can spend hours viewing question after question on that site, and only manage to offer a helpful answer if I &lt;em&gt;happen&lt;/em&gt; to be the first to answer a question. Most of the questions (that aren't answered correctly in &amp;lt;15 minutes) &lt;em&gt;even in my more specific fields of expertises within Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt; either go beyond my knowledge, or would require significant time to recreate and troubleshoot. So I can't, or don't help with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easier and more immediately gratifying to answer questions here; you don't have to expend much effort to feel like you genuinely helped someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other considerations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World building is rich in variety; it's hard to get boring or to burn out. Your mind is challenged to think in different ways.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No matter how much we try to fight it, many questions end up being deep in opinion, and &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; likes giving their opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's hard to challenge incorrect answers. Who's &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; to say how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56373/how-can-i-prevent-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union&quot;&gt;prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union?&lt;/a&gt; Or about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57989/is-there-any-job-that-cant-be-automated&quot;&gt;the future tech of automating every job?&lt;/a&gt; Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47251/whats-the-most-reasonable-way-to-fit-monsters-in-your-pocket&quot;&gt;the best way to fit monsters in your pocket?&lt;/a&gt; We delve so far into theory that it's difficult to say one answer is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; or figure out who's &lt;em&gt;more right.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People like stories. World building as a whole aside, reading answers and writing answers in-and-of-themselves are often like stories as compared to most other SEs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T16:00:56.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-10-27T23:53:27.417" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because there are many experts at building worlds. We all do it every day in some way or another. We come up with what could possibly connect point A with point C if we can't see point B and know what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast that against how many experts or people that practice those other field there are in the world and it really is no contest. No matter how big the percentage of people that exists of those other fields they can never match the number in the world building field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the bredth and depth of knowledge thing. Someone who asks a question in other fields may get an answer that is correct, but it will always lack in overall completeness, because it doesn't matter how one got to e=mc^2. Only that it is the right answer, because that is all experts on those fields focus on. World builders however, need to know where it came from, when it happened, the context they came up with and all the other details that others find irrelevant. The breadth of knowledge is what allows us to construct better worlds so we learn more things in a general sense enough to know how it works within the universe. This means that the majority of world builders will likely be able to deliver a 5/10 answer on any number of subjects. A few might know more and be really interested in the subject and so they'll provide a 10/10. And since the average quality is that of 5/10 it's rare that you will get below that simply due to not wanting to look bad or knowing that someone else will write a higher quality answer so if you're not going to get to that level you might as well not answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast that to other fields again. A lot of them are 100% fact based so you either get a 10/10 answer or no answer for the most part, because only those who understand will/can answer while simultaneously if there is no answer for long enough, someone knowing they don't have enough understanding of the subject will attempt answer and those result in poor quality (~2/10) answers...or they'll just remain unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... TL;DR, The number of world builders that exist in the universe just out number those of any other (read some Terry Pratchett where he sometimes argues that humans should be called the Story Telling Ape) and the nature of World building vs other fields causes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T23:53:27.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-10-28T08:44:23.200" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one of the things is that we have a culture where &lt;strong&gt;people don't have to be afraid of trying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me borrow &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4045/29&quot;&gt;Durakken's&lt;/a&gt; reference to 2/10, 5/10, 10/10 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On many scientific subject-specific sites, such as perhaps Physics in particular, there's a lot of great content. If you are willing to spend the time to parse the sciency and mathy stuff, you can find answers to just about anything there. If you are willing to do your homework first, a question can be quite well received, and get you excellent answers full of citations. But on the flip side, if you try to post either a question or an answer, and you are somehow &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; or haven't done your homework, chances are good that your post is going to be downvoted into oblivion. If your post is below 8/10 or so, you get downvoted. If it's below 6/10 or so, you get heaps of downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding has a different culture, one more of helpful encouragement to make it right than one of punishment for making it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the &lt;em&gt;cost&lt;/em&gt; (in terms of reputation points and self-esteem) of posting a &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; answer is far lower. The 2/10 answer very likely won't be upvoted or may receive a sympathy upvote or two at most, but a 2/10 answer on Physics would &lt;em&gt;almost certainly&lt;/em&gt; be downvoted into oblivion. Not so on Worldbuilding. Here, it's rare to see posts that have more than 2-3 downvotes or so, and even more so &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, this isn't &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; a good thing.&lt;/strong&gt; Some content in my opinion deserves to be downvoted, because it is flat out &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; (factually incorrect, horribly formatted, unfocused/rambling, or what have you; the exact reasons why people downvote vary, but those are some of the things that can make me more likely to vote down than up). But it does foster a culture where people &lt;strong&gt;dare to try.&lt;/strong&gt; About the worst that will happen is that your post doesn't get upvoted; hence, even if you turn out to be wrong, no great harm done. Sure, someone else got 30-40 upvotes and you got maybe one, but at least you didn't &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; anything much more than the time it took to research and write up the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to this that lots of our questions can be answered relatively easily with some basic knowledge of the subject matter and willingness to spend a bit of time with Google and Wikipedia (and in case of mathy questions, Wolfram Alpha), and you have a site where lots of people feel like they are able to contribute answers. I have answered several questions here which started out like, okay, I know enough about the subject matter to know how to approach the problem, but I had to do the research to be able to actually post an answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/39591/29&quot;&gt;My answer to &lt;em&gt;How far away would an alien civilization need to be for us to not notice them?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is, I think, an excellent example of this that turned out to be very well received. (Of course, it got a heap of upvotes while being horribly wrong, because I messed up the path loss calculation. At least some people pointed that out in comments so I could fix it. Sometimes I really wish people weren't so quick to &lt;em&gt;vote up&lt;/em&gt; just because a post &lt;em&gt;looks fancy&lt;/em&gt;. Using MathJax doesn't necessarily mean that the math is &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T08:44:23.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-28T18:48:06.977" Score="9" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are common and more in depth resources for world building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is a great place to get questions answered but there are other sites and books that allow for a more in depth and broad look at certain topics that are in the vein of world building but may focus on one topic, or the specific topic can't really be put in the form of a question easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think community wikis for the following are a great place to start:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Magic&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Planetary Sciences&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Civilization&lt;br&gt;&#xA;History&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Space travel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Stars and star systems&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Linguistics &#xA;Mytholgy, Legend, and Religion  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="22659" LastEditDate="2016-10-29T16:37:36.617" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T03:58:10.917" Title="Common and More in Depth Resources for World Building" Tags="|discussion|reference|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4047" CreationDate="2016-10-29T16:32:37.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Planetary Sciences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Planet Mapping&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cartographersguild.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cartographers Guild&lt;/a&gt; : Site to learn how to make a map &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://maptoglobe.bitbucket.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Map to Globe&lt;/a&gt; : Turn your equirectangular maps into a sphere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T16:32:37.443" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-29T16:32:37.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4047" CreationDate="2016-10-29T16:34:49.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Linguistics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conlang Making&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zompist&lt;/a&gt; : Home of the Language Contruction Kit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T16:34:49.983" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-10-29T16:34:49.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T00:56:04.277" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't wish to come off as being presumptuous.  I'm comparatively new here, and there is probably something I'm missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, a question was asked regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60077/transfer-of-knowledge-from-mother-to-child-before-birth&quot;&gt;inheritance or transfer of memory from hominoid mother to child&lt;/a&gt;.  I understand perfectly well that the question cannot have a hard science answer for something which does not have a hard science basis.  I am wondering:  why was it put on hold as being “opinion-based” rather than something a little more suitable to the problems of the question?&#xA;I do agree that the question, as written, is rather barren and misinformed.  I posit, however, that it fails to abide its own tags rather than invite wild conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem to me that the purpose of Worldbuilding is to pose questions which involve a broad, multidimensional range of approaches and knowledge for the purpose of helping someone who is designing a world but either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lacks enough expertise to do so,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wishes to obtain &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; — i.e. the espousing of expertise or perspective — on the validity and consistency of the work they already did,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or simply has an urge to learn.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say to write what you know, but the only way you learn is by seeing what you don't know.  Building a new world, whether for yourself or for others, need not be a solo venture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, so good.  Although I do make a distinction between opinion and absurd or erroneous opinion, that's not what I mean to examine here.&#xA;My proposal is not as to whether wild conjecture does not belong here, or indeed as to how much invocation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;What–If Machine&lt;/a&gt; is too much; rather, it is how we help others refine their questions so as to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make the answers as simple and applicable as possible;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be of the most use to future perusers of this website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the Opinion–based Hold is very useful in that regard.  So, in conclusion, I suggest that we use the Off–topic version instead, and furthermore that we create subset versions of it to help well–meaning users to see the more precise reasons why their question would be better asked somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone else give me some reasons as to what mistakes I made in my informal, sparse, and shoddy arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.  I recently have tried to add such helpful comments in that vein to and questions which I see have been placed on hold, and especially those to which it seems the original asker was genuinely interested in obtaining an answer.  So, I'm not being a hypocrite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T00:10:43.260" Title="What would we lose if we ceased use of the opinion-based Hold and focused on more precise classifications?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4052" CreationDate="2016-11-01T09:11:14.383" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just been thinking about the time it takes me to write a post on here. I found, that I always take a long time writing, and keep searching for sources even after I started writing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I just became curious whether there are any statistics (that could be made publicly available) on the average time that is taken to write posts here on worldbuilding. By this I mean the time spend with an open &quot;Ask question&quot; page (for answers this might be more difficult - maybe the time the textbox has content? Or the time the post was open - but only if a question gets postet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone do the same thing as me, or do people pre-write their posts externally and simply copy paste them afterwards? Or do they take even longer? Or maybe take much less time because they already have everything in mind - or do not care?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no such statistics, or if they are top secret, thats fine - I'd just love to statisfy the curious child in me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13987" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T14:56:23.987" Title="Average time statistics for posts" Tags="|support|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4051" CreationDate="2016-11-01T14:56:23.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe the statistics you're asking about are available.  All the server knows is when you clicked &quot;post answer&quot; and when you submitted it; everything that happens in that textbox between those two times is client-side.  The server can't tell the difference between spending an hour composing an answer and opening the post, going to lunch, and coming back to dash off something.  (If you uploaded images then those timestamps might be available, but you'd have to get them from imgur, not SE.  And most posts don't contain images.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what a single data point is worth, when answering I tend to do almost what you do.  I might do some initial research first (to make sure I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a suitable answer), but I do some of the research/citation-seeking in parallel with composing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T14:56:23.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4050" CreationDate="2016-11-02T00:10:43.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Opinion based questions are discouraged for a simple reason. The purpose is to provide information to the questioner so that they can use it to do what they want in their world without being influenced much by the opinion of others. Further questions are somewhat meant to be archival. That is to say, they are supposed to be helpful to anyone who needs that question answered and mostly not a one time thing. If you allow opinions then I as the questioner have to wade through those opinions and then with my lack of knowledge, decide which is the best answer, which I am not qualified for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are questions that do require some &quot;opinion&quot;, for example, my question of &quot;What can aquatics use to write on/with?&quot; there are multiple answers, all very good. What each answerer chooses to answer is based on their opinion of what is the likely scenario, but so long as they can present the case for why it is reasonable to think in x way then it's fine. It's only when it comes down to &quot;because you can do anything&quot; is it really a problem, because then there is no reasonable argument to be had and you're not asking a &quot;world building&quot; question and more of a personal preference or &quot;writing&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T00:10:43.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-11-03T16:34:30.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my point perspective, the reason I like to contribute to this site boils down to my hobbies. I do have many hobbies but the biggest is to learn stuff. I read random wiki pages, I learn quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry. I have nothing to with the knowledge I gained apart from them being helpful sparsely in real life. But in here, the knowledge I have is put to use. While answering questions I learn even more. Thus this is a great way to put my hobby into good use. I hope there are others who are feeling the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11055" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T16:34:30.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4057" CreationDate="2016-11-04T02:40:23.127" Score="13" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been asked what level of explicit content we want to allow on the blog -- PG, PG-13, higher?  In discussing biology and especially xenobiology, it can sometimes be necessary to discuss the physiology of mating.  Also, some sociology/culture-focused posts might need to address sexual practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is any (worldbuilding-relevant) topic ok so long as it's discussed &quot;clinically&quot;?  Are there topics we do not want to see covered at all?  What about fiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What guidance should we give to authors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T14:21:50.147" Title="What &quot;maturity level&quot; do we want for the blog?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4069" CreationDate="2016-11-04T05:00:32.943" Score="-7" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;SFF and Worldbuilding overlap, as addressed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3755/worldbuilding-vs-science-fiction-fantasy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;'s answer. One site is &amp;quot;can it be done&amp;quot; and the other is &amp;quot;how was it done&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While I recognize that there are differences between the two sites,&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I want to argue that combining them would do more help than harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larger database&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More skilled or knowledgeable users in one place, meaning more answers; while not all expertise required in both situations is the same, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3359/overlap-between-worldbuilding-and-other-se-sites&quot;&gt;clear overlap&lt;/a&gt; in users, and both sites share the principle of &amp;quot;explain this&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions never deviate greatly from science fiction or fantasy ideas in either site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tags would categorize &amp;quot;existing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;theoretical&amp;quot; and sort the two sites information successfully into one site with similar information throughout&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some information would not merge well, such as historical questions and meta for worldbuilding; that is where tagging would come in handy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Side note: if you downvote please leave constructive criticism in the comments to help improve this question. You don't have to agree but help would be awesome :)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T11:21:59.607" Title="Why can't Worldbuilding be combined with Science Fiction and Fantasy?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4055" CreationDate="2016-11-04T05:10:25.383" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that most posts on here are intellectual - that is, the people who write them are intelligent, and probably mature - I'm sure vulgarity won't offend the majority of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the group of people on here will want a reasonable amount of maturity - no excessive or unreasonable use of vulgar or crude language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of community use, PG-13 is probably high enough to satisfy enough people's wants - as long as language involved is used in a mature context, and is not being used to offend a person or group&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T05:10:25.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4056" CreationDate="2016-11-04T11:42:34.633" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked question doesn't cover &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;would this work in my world?&quot; and the other is &quot;how did this work in this world?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the accepted answer on it says is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Scifi.SE focuses on existing works of Scientific Fiction and Fantasy, whereas Worldbuilding is to help people who are developing worlds of Fantasy/Fiction in various areas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are very different topics, and the expertise required in one doesn't seem to be congruent with the other. I don't see why you think combining them would help in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T11:42:34.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4055" CreationDate="2016-11-04T14:21:50.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vulgarity is unnecessary except where it's actually the topic in question, it being an important part of any language, and language being one of our regular topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that we are (probably) mostly adults and able to take these things as they come but it shouldn't be used without reason. I could see it being more of a thing with character building but that's not really within our remit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same light I'm sure we're perfectly capable of having a discussion about reproductive behaviors, whether recreational or procreative, in an entirely academic manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the actual use of the words in question, I no reason to obfuscate or censor, though judicious editing or a request to tone it down is reasonable if someone is pushing their luck. In practice very few people actually swear in writing, it's mostly a spoken thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T14:21:50.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4061" CreationDate="2016-11-04T14:56:58.610" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60239/how-to-harness-jupiters-gravitational-energy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; yesterday and the answers have been numerous (this site is awesome).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my question is not very well documented and the answers are mostly qualitative, and I don't think they fit the hard-science requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I still wish to incite hard-science answers, but I think it would be more representative of both the question and the answers to switch to &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt;. I am ready to do some research and improve my question if necessary. Not that I'm downgrading my expectancy much, I have no work depending on this. I mostly wish to avoid a misleading tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it indeed science-based? What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I'm thinking about adding a bounty for best hard-science answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T16:46:59.750" Title="Should I remove the hard-science tag from this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4060" CreationDate="2016-11-04T15:46:48.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the moderator who added the post notice to a fair portion of the answers . . . I'm going to say yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I'm not a fan of retagging (either adding or removing) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag after you've gotten answers to the question, but I do feel that the latter is better than the former, as you're not really invalidating any answers. In this case, most of the answers aren't really &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, either, so it's not as if someone wrote a really fantastic answer that deserves a million upvotes whose work has gone for naught. I don't mean to disparage the answers already there - some are good - but there's nothing I would consider an exemplary &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which, 6/13 answers currently have the post notice; several others don't have it simply because I didn't see them yet. I do believe that the question can be answered using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; - honestly, calculating energy transferred through tidal dissipation is not that hard, and I'm a little disappointed nobody actually did the computations - but I also believe that there's a point at which maybe it's better to accede to mass opinion, which currently seems to be that the tag is not needed, for whatever reason. Some of the ideas are interesting, but don't necessarily admit a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, yesterday James (in chat) had an idea involving the gravitational pull on fluids, but he didn't know how to do the calculations (neither did I; my response: &quot;Fluid mechanics? Away with ye!&quot;). You'd have to ask him, but I think he was dissuaded from the tag, and might have posted an answer if he could have dropped the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, though I say it a bit regrettably, yes, I think it might be good to drop the tag from the question. If you do, flag the question for mod attention using the custom flag, and one of us will remove all the post notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T15:49:43.707" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T15:49:43.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-04T16:18:36.323" Score="8" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have mixed feelings on this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60451/designing-a-binary-asteroid-pair&quot;&gt;Designing a binary asteroid pair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand it's an excellent hard science question. On the other hand though it seems to be asking for a lot of different bits of information, however they are all linked together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the fact that most of this information is linked with the rest enough that this is valid or is it too broad as it stands?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T02:03:32.057" Title="Does this question have too many questions in one?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4062" CreationDate="2016-11-04T16:51:05.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of questions in there indeed. Your concerns and your mention of these question being linked quite closely both are valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I feel the question would benefit from being split up into a series of questions. You could create a single question for each '?' in the text, but the three &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; headings make for good areas to split it apart, each can concentrate on a subpart that can but does not necessarily have to relate to the answers of the other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T16:51:05.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-11-04T17:29:54.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone is pointing out the good things about questions and answers, but there is one pretty big thing that I believe has not been properly mentioned. In addition to many of the other answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I come here, the default page is the Active questions page for me. Its also the place I spend the most time looking at when I want to find questions. Right now, the oldest update which is on that page, is about 23 hours ago. Of every question that is asked, Updated, or answered, All of them in the last 23 hours is on that page. This is a big deal for exposure. Every question gets usually at least a day on that page, since every edit and answer puts it back on the top of that list. So anyone who visits every day can without navigating away from this page see almost every single question asked on this site since they start visiting daily. With our decent population, this means that every question asked will be seen by at least a few active members, and if it is close worthy, it will probably be closed. If it is worth of an answer, then it has at least a day on the front page for people to find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Not only does WB.SE have the things mentioned in other answers here, like interesting questions that contain a wide variety of subjects, and a high acceptance of nearly opinion answers backed by Solid facts, But it also allows every question, good or bad, to get lots of exposure to everyone who frequents the site. This means every question gets the attention it needs. No question gets left behind (except those 8, but since they were brought up, not for long I am sure)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15266" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T17:29:54.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4066" CreationDate="2016-11-04T19:40:17.303" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;An edit is in the queue at the time of me writing this, but I'm using it &lt;em&gt;as an example&lt;/em&gt; and not asking &lt;em&gt;about this specific edit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ylmUt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ylmUt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually not knowledgable about this subject to judge this edit, but let's say I was, and I agree that The proposed edit was correct, and improved the accuracy of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside this consideration, one of the reasons to &lt;em&gt;reject an edit&lt;/em&gt; is (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;no improvement whatsoever   This edit does not make the post even a&#xA;  little bit easier to read, easier to find, &lt;strong&gt;more accurate&lt;/strong&gt; or more&#xA;  accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm&#xA;  readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, additionally, the Help Center lists that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;priviledge of editing questions and answers&lt;/a&gt; should be used in the case of (among others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to correct minor mistakes or add addendums&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, individually, editing a post to correct what I see as an error in the author's post rubs me the wrong way, but by the letter of the WB.SE law it &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to be not only acceptable, but implied to be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct approach to both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deciding if one should make edits to answers to correct (what one views as) mistakes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Approving or rejecting proposed edits that attempt to correct mistakes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something we want to, as a community, find acceptable and encourage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T21:33:48.633" Title="Should We Accept Proposed Edits to Improve Accuracy?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4065" CreationDate="2016-11-04T21:09:37.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good sanity check for an edit is: do I think the author of the post would think it's fine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just from the snippet here, it &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like that edit is changing the author's conclusion.  That's not ok in edits.  When the help center talks about corrections it means things like grammar, formatting, updating broken URLs, massaging awkward wording, that sort of thing -- not changing the factual content of the post.  Improvements like adding citations are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor here should have instead left a comment with this information, which the author could then incorporate (or not) at his discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T21:09:37.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4065" CreationDate="2016-11-04T21:25:38.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Authorial intent should be observed as the final judge on anything. Does it change what the Author intended to convey? If yes then it shouldn't be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new content &quot;adds&quot; information in support of the argument other than a citation of source to back up the statement, then that added content should be another Answer or a Comment, because the author, as far as the editor or people approving know, has no clue what that stuff says nor how it would affect their thought process and conclusion. That information may in fact invert the Authors position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as editing minor mistakes... the only thing that bothers me here is that a number of people will correct grammar, spelling, style, etc. I don't like style changes, because style can convey information as well. Grammar changes have the problem that it seems that most of the people who like to fix grammar don't know it well enough to do it. Half the time, the corrections in the same edit are split between right and wrong evenly. I didn't care to correct them when I saw the original so I'm not going to correct the new mistakes. So I only approve those edits if I think the corrections/errors balance out to being better than worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: Someone was on a kick of correcting my grammar for a while, which I thought was hilarious because I know my grammar is wrong in a lot of places, but I don't correct it, but I sure will take someone else correcting it if they want to. ^.^ I only care about the information being transmitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="22659" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T21:33:48.633" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T21:33:48.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4062" CreationDate="2016-11-05T02:03:32.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oppose to splitting this question in small chunks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason is OP is just asking about description of viable model, and states parameters of the model he is interested for. A model can be described by millions of parameters, but he asks just for some subset of those parameters and he lists them in form of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering that question demands just take real world example and describe them &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_asteroid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_asteroid&lt;/a&gt; - he do need theory. It is clearly seen on langrange points part of that question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Splitting the question in small chunks increases work needed and makes it harder and less likely to get some solid answer - because it will lead to produce multiple models by multiple people with different preferences and make that work each time for tiny bit of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do not like in that question is hard-science tag, but it is my opinion and reason why I will not answer that question. Science-based is enough in that situation, OP obviously do not need HS, he just need some numbers which is directly asked by him, and it looks like because he wish some numbers HS is choosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T02:03:32.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4056" CreationDate="2016-11-05T02:08:23.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To complete Rory Alsop's answer, I'd like to respond to your list of &quot;pros&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Larger database vs. better database&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Big is not necessary a good thing and division may allow for better work. The two sites have very different databases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB has 8637 questions, SFF has 35,022&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB has 1 unanswered question and SFF has 1805&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SFF has around two times the number of registered users WB has.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, we may want to talk about a inclusion instead of a fusion. What perk is there for SFF to get some more off-topic questions? How would WB be better within SFF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Though the same people may have skills for the two, the skills are not the same&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, you quote that overlap question. SFF is way below SO and just a few points over ELU. Moreover, we can see in the answer that the overlap is diminishing. To me, this shows an overlap of interest, not of skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of SE sites can be summed up as &quot;explain this&quot;, and as members of WB often get interested in SF and Fantasy, they don't try to see the same thing at all. It would be like stating that mechanical engineers and truck drivers do the same job because &quot;it's about motors&quot; (this is a pretty bad comparison).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Now let's look at the tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think comparing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;WB's top tags&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;SFF's top tags&lt;/a&gt; is an immediate way of seeing those two sites are completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB: &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;reality-check&lt;/code&gt;, then different fields of science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SFF: &lt;code&gt;story-identification&lt;/code&gt; then different fictional universes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is obvious from browsing the tags that the two sites are totally disjoint in the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, those SFF questions are waaaay too story based :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T02:08:23.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3359" CreationDate="2016-11-05T12:09:12.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This produces interesting results, but I'm not sure that people understand what this means.  What this tells us is how many of the Worldbuilding users come from each other site.  By its nature, this query tends to produce the highest results from sites with lots of users.  If we flip it around and ask how many users on other sites participate on Worldbuilding, we get very different results:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;22.41 StackExchange.Hardwarerecs&#xA;22.16 StackExchange.Politics&#xA;21.74 StackExchange.Opensource&#xA;21.43 StackExchange.Ai&#xA;20.65 StackExchange.Mythology&#xA;20.42 StackExchange.Law&#xA;20.42 StackExchange.Space&#xA;19.13 StackExchange.Moderators&#xA;18.64 StackExchange.Crafts&#xA;18.15 StackExchange.Astronomy&#xA;17.79 StackExchange.Lifehacks&#xA;16.55 StackExchange.Health&#xA;16.52 StackExchange.Engineering&#xA;16.33 StackExchange.3dprinting&#xA;15.64 StackExchange.History&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/571747/cross-site-overlap-based-on-the-other-site?minrep=200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross site overlap; based on other site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this query tells us is how many of the other site's active users are active on this site (the original query tells how many of our active users are active on another site).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this query better because it pushes Stack Overflow down towards the bottom (few of their active users are active here while many of our users are active there).  SF&amp;amp;F moves down to the middle, somewhat behind Writers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T12:09:12.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2016-11-05T23:25:23.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Episode 3:  By the Gods, A Third Episode!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to do prior to the episode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Art gets vsee installed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each person select a WB site question and post it (and the link) below ...we probably won't use all of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider something you will recommend at the end of the episode.  Try to follow the technology theme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Figure out a warm-up game that won't take 45 minutes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green share a preview of the magical programming world with the panel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Host:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guests/Co-hosts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nex Terren&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Date/Time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saturday, February 4th 1300 Central Time (1900 UTC)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agenda&lt;/strong&gt;:  The theme for this episode will be technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introduction:&lt;/em&gt;  Welcomes and introduce Art &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warmup:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main discussion topic:&lt;/em&gt;  Green's world.  A magical programming school&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduce the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain how magic and programming coexist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am sure we will think of more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review of WB.SE recent/interesting questions:&lt;/em&gt; To be selected by the host/guests/co-hosts once a date is set for the first cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25272/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-ship-capable-of-crossing-the-pacific&quot;&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12219/in-what-war-would-one-modern-military-vehicle-make-a-difference&quot;&gt;In what war would one modern military vehicle make a difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25724/what-good-are-herbivores-in-an-animal-army&quot;&gt;Herbivores in an all-animal army&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62572/truth-stone-effects-on-the-justice-system-and-criminal-world&quot;&gt;Truth Stones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come up with a book, site, or some other resource. Try to keep it on theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T19:57:28.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-11-06T00:28:19.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I'm not extremely active and I also haven't dug up deeply to the rules, I'd have a &lt;strong&gt;really strong&lt;/strong&gt; vote on the rules of the site. Whatever means you guys have found, it's easy to catch up with and also provides enough freedom to post viable answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the topic itself is also a factor. People are often keen about worldbuilding as it deals with almost every aspect of science, from particle physics to economy, from linguistics to cellular biology, from philosophy to cultural anthropology. This is mostly about the curiosity and creativity &lt;em&gt;every single human&lt;/em&gt; borns with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this enthusiasm, if not properly supervised, then leads to answers not scientifically founded, especially in subjects barely explored, like the development of sentient civilizations. But I have no doubt in that the mods of this sub do their best to avoid such issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my 2 cents for this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T00:28:19.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4083" CreationDate="2016-11-07T19:33:52.367" Score="11" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, a user asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60549/627&quot;&gt;How do you set up a long term colony on Mercury&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/60549/1&quot;&gt;original title and text&lt;/a&gt; were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How could we survive on Mercury?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am doing a project on planets and I was given Mercury. I need to say (in no more than 10 lines) how I would survive on planet Mercury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was edited until it reached &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/60549/3&quot;&gt;its current form&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How do you set up a long term colony on Mercury&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to set up a long-term self-sustaining colony on Mercury. What and how needs to be done for a colony to survive and thrive on the planet Mercury?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not involved in either the voting to close or voting to reopen, though I monitored the question since it was asked. I would certainly have voted to close the question (if my vote was non-binding), in its initial form, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a question about worldbuilding, at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not very clear what the criteria for survival (i.e. the background for the question) are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author didn't show any effort in trying to answer the problem posed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the third edit, though, the question was put in a form I might not have voted to close . . . if it weren't for the fact that the original question was not about worldbuilding. The author is not (presumably) building a world about a colony on Mercury; it's a hypothetical situation for a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it seems clear that it shouldn't be on-topic. So here's the question at hand: If a question not at all about worldbuilding is edited into a form possibly suitable for the site - different from the author's original form - but &lt;em&gt;still not motivated by worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, is it on-topic or off-topic? My personal opinion is that it should be closed as off-topic, but obviously I'm not going to unilaterally close the question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think? On-topic? Off-topic? Both? Neither? None of the above? I'm asking both about this question in particular and the general question class it belongs to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T22:45:10.097" Title="Is this question about the colonization of Mercury on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-08T08:05:57.090" Score="10" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'twas but a day ago on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the factory floor&lt;/a&gt;. A discussion was held about the beauty of languages and thus the brave builders came up with the idea of creating a new language, one to surpass them all, a language to rule them all! A language to find them! A LANGUAGE TO BRING THEM ALL AND IN THE DARKNESS BIND THEM..&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, the idea is to create a series of fortnightly ( events/tasks here on meta with the goal of creating a language for the WB.SE by the WB.SE community. This series would run over the course of a few months, and hopefully be done somewhen between spring and summer 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each challenge would be accompanied by a blog post summarizing the results and decisions made, explaining why they have been made and giving examples of the language's current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus in the end we would have created two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A feature-complete conlanguage that can be shown off and used for secret WB discussions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A guide on: &lt;em&gt;How to create a conlanguage step-by-step&lt;/em&gt;, complete with pictures and examples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;goal&lt;/em&gt; of this discussion is to &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; find out if there is enough interest in the community to pursue this venerable venture, and &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; to collect ideas on how to approach this undertaking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goals of this discussion are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find out &lt;strong&gt;if there is enough interest&lt;/strong&gt; in the community to pursue this most venerable venture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collect &lt;strong&gt;ideas&lt;/strong&gt; on &lt;strong&gt;how to approach/organise&lt;/strong&gt; these events (e.g. what to start with; what comes when)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum&lt;/em&gt;: My proposal on how this could roughly be pursued/structured:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start by agreeing on some 2-3 real-world-languages to inspire grammar, orthography and vocabulary of the conlanguage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decide upon a range of some 100 nouns/thing-words needed in the language and create tables with these words in each of the chosen inspiration languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collect ideas on what grammatical constructs should be used in the language (e.g. verbs? adjectives? cases? etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a finished conlanguage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;read with grave bass voice&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T08:23:05.523" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T17:32:16.410" Title="The WB.SE conlanguage (proposal for community event)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4080" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:09:55.107" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa&lt;/a&gt; on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm simply proposing that it be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa-claus&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa-claus&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa-claus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T01:53:36.957" Title="Rename tag &quot;santa&quot; to &quot;santa-claus&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:43:30.520" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of some hobby research I've acquired a lot of information about potentially terraforming the planet Venus. Recently there has been some exciting research, and the scattered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14050/how-to-render-venus-semi-habitable&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25802/could-we-move-and-terraform-the-planet-venus&quot;&gt;related&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12303/building-a-base-on-the-surface-of-a-planet-like-venus&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; this issue have received vague and unfulfilling answers.&#xA;The idea then would be to create a canonical hard science q&amp;amp;a, where I give a first answer where I summarize the total understanding to this date (probably several a4's), which can be updated with new answers as more research comes to light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be a good idea for me to write?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T17:23:00.817" Title="Proposition for canonical Q&amp;A" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4077" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:56:03.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can certainly do this if you want to use it as a sort of repository of information, but keep in mind that it's not really the format that WB was meant to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is to ask very pointed, well framed questions, and that the community answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you self answer there's a good chance that people won't take it well. Also, there will be other answers, which might contradict of criticize some aspect of your own opinions. This is all allowed, and makes sense for WB, but will not serve your purpose of simply stating your knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you want to accomplish is essentially writing a Wiki entry for terraforming Venus. A better approach might be to create a WB Meta post with this purpose and just link it in questions which require that sort of information, or maybe join chat and talk to some of our long term members about writing a blog article about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:56:03.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4077" CreationDate="2016-11-08T17:23:00.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Can I answer my own question?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question still has to meet the site's rules for questions: complete, not too broad/opinion-based/etc, on-topic.  I don't know enough about teraforming Venus to know whether that's logically one question or several.  But if you can make a properly-scoped canonical question on this topic, please feel free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you intend for the community to maintain your answer, you should mark it as Community Wiki.  But you might be better off just offering your answer as one of possibly several.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T17:23:00.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4076" CreationDate="2016-11-09T01:53:36.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no reason not to, and as PatJ points out in a comment, this can help our readers who are not native speakers of English.  Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T01:53:36.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-09T08:16:25.937" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;After this question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60609/long-lasting-life-on-interstellar-planets&quot;&gt;Long lasting life on interstellar planets?&lt;/a&gt;, I’ve &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/rogue-planets/synonyms&quot;&gt;proposed interstellar-planets as a tag synonym&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rogue-planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rogue-planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rogue-planets&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T20:42:58.037" Title="Interstellar-planets tag created and meant to be a synonym of rogue-planets" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4081" CreationDate="2016-11-09T09:50:37.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say not; as interstellar planets is generally a catch-all terminology for any planet not within our Star's sphere of influence; not just rogue planets; but also planets in other Star Systems influences. The two elements are related, sure, but I don't think this warrants a synonym between &lt;code&gt;rogue-planets&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;interstellar-planets&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's just my opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit in response to comments about exoplanets:&lt;/strong&gt; If you're going just by the OEDs definition (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/interstellar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link Here&lt;/a&gt;); which is &quot;Adj. Occurring or situated between stars.&quot;; then perhaps you have an argument to be made for using the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2016/should-we-make-exoplanets-and-planets-synonyms?rq=1&quot;&gt;related article&lt;/a&gt; agreed that the tag of &lt;code&gt;exoplanet&lt;/code&gt; wasn't needed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4812" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T14:52:25.267" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4074" CreationDate="2016-11-09T12:24:10.937" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I agree with Durakken's position here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem with closing something like this and leaving it closed is that eventually someone else will come asking the exact same question, but from a world building perspective and that one will be closed as duplicate or they will see that other one was closed and just assume their question is off topic. So in the long run leaving it closed is harmful and makes no sense in the Archival way that SE is supposed to be used. Also the user made an account indicating they have interest, considering you don't have to have an account to ask a Q, so it's a turn off to them when it doesn't have to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivation behind a question is not really important, since what we are trying to create here is a definitive source of information for anyone trying to build a world. This question and answer as it currently stands is very relevant for anyone trying to build a world, so is on topic and should be open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T12:25:51.183" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T12:25:51.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4081" CreationDate="2016-11-09T19:22:14.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm not going to take mod action on this yet - which, come to think of it, broke the system for a week the last time I tried - I agree that this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Interstellar planet&quot; is, as far as I can tell, far less common than &quot;rogue planet&quot;. I searched &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ADS&lt;/a&gt;, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt;; all seemed to show &quot;rogue planet&quot; used far more often than &quot;interstellar planet&quot; - which matches with my limited experience, to be honest. You won't see either show up in many scientific papers, given that exoplanets as a whole have only been a major research area for the past 25 years, but there's certainly a divide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reluctant to call either one a technical term, and so it's harder to back up either position in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60609/627&quot;&gt;the comments to this question&lt;/a&gt;, where lurch stated that &quot;interstellar planet&quot; encompasses both &quot;rogue planets&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-brown_dwarf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sub-brown dwarfs&lt;/a&gt;, a curious class of objects somewhere between massive gas giants and, of course, low-mass brown dwarfs. If we assume that &quot;interstellar planet&quot; isn't a technical term, then I don't think this argument holds much weight, especially as sub-brown dwarfs don't really form in the same way as traditional planets - even rogue ones. I also don't think we need to worry about them at all. How many questions on Worldbuilding have dealt with $\sim10M_J$ sub-brown dwarfs? Exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another argument that's important to consider for tag synonyms is how people will think of the tag. This was briefly touched on when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4016/627&quot;&gt;I suggested messing with the tag for the Solar System&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4017/627&quot;&gt;DaaaahWhoosh &#xA; wrote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't trust the average Worldbuilding user to know which tag to use if we make a second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, people aren't going to look into the details and try to figure out the difference if we have two different tags for &quot;rogue planets&quot; and &quot;interstellar planets&quot;, if there's any difference at all (which I don't think there is; I don't agree with lurch's definition). They'll think they mean the same thing. It therefore makes more sense to just synonymize the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T19:22:14.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4081" CreationDate="2016-11-10T16:42:35.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first glance I'd say yes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter whether it is the same or something very similar. People will never be able to distinguish between terms with only a slight difference in meaning. Also I find the correct usage of tags not always easy anyway, there is no need for such an additional difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At second glance I look the terms up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There they are used as synonyms. That means I actually was wrong about my definition of rogue planets (though not on my definition of interstellar planets), and I apologise for that. &lt;strong&gt;That means, as far as I can tell, they definitely should be considered as synonyms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28741" LastEditorUserId="28741" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T20:42:58.037" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T20:42:58.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4088" CreationDate="2016-11-14T00:18:44.343" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &quot;Average Joe&quot; is pretty power hungry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/md0rZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/md0rZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this isn't a question, but I just thought that this was funny, as it was 2 different people asking questions about (relatively) the same topic, and both used the hypothetical &quot;Average Joe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26206" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T09:59:45.283" Title="Average Joe is busy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-11-15T21:19:11.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4087" CreationDate="2016-11-14T09:59:45.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming this can still be answered, there are several explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe plans to take over the world from his microstate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe failed to take over the world and now he just has a microstate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe thinks his microstate is the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe is hungry for power&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe has big plans for when he grows up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not a serious answer, just giving you something to answer on this question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T09:59:45.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4090" CreationDate="2016-11-16T08:00:04.230" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a badge under way which requires me to post a question each day for five days in a row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I know when the new day has started? (I am in Thailand, so I can't assume it is midnight my time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29630" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T12:45:18.493" Title="When is the Stack Exchange &quot;day&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4089" CreationDate="2016-11-16T12:45:18.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange day is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/27201/162102&quot;&gt;UTC day&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badge you're referring to, Curious, doesn't require that the five days be consecutive -- just that you ask well-received questions on five &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; days (and some other requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T12:45:18.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2016-11-17T13:13:10.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good points in previous answers, which I mostly agree with, but I will add my two sour cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers as it was mention, are pretty flexible in their content, but so are the Questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which questions are fit for WB is not determined by some strict borders(like facts or attributes, field of knowledge), field of Questions have soft not defined borders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As result Q are closed and put on hold based on -- do WB users like question or don't. If we like a question, it stays and get answers because it is likable, it we do not like the question it is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to check the real situation and stats probably closed as broad should be included(a bit hard as some of them have answers before others close them). Those questions are equivalent of hard question which do not gets answer on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wide spectrum of users(different about the same question) also helps to close questions for different reasons, as interpretation of question depends on field of knowledge of person who votes to close. As result we get more generally acceptable questions, by WB user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when Q gets more specific, significant variation, sometimes mistakes are happening, as for my opinion. As an example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61305/20315&quot;&gt;How quickly could modern humans go through the techtree? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; closed as duplicate, and it looks like error of some user who proposed for OP to close it as duplicate, and inexperienced user agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally do not see why are those two questions duplicate, for me they are significantly different questions, but for someone they are obviously not different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general everything works fine, but effectively it limits set of questions which could be asked on WB to Q people willing to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is rather good thing, most of the time, but sometimes Ouch happens, as reminder of existence of echochamber borders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in general it is more about having fun in answering question, then providing answers for reputations. And that question may have multiple answers helps there, because no policy of &quot;first come first served no fun for others&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point is, WB is easy on close questions(just the must thing to do, if WB do not like to turn in to a trash can) and WB like the questions it likes to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can we continue this trend in the future&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More fun, do not hurry to close broad and opinion based questions if they generate content. It is a fun place until there is fun here. Fun attracts users, but do it attracts search engine traffic. (I know one question &quot;mine jupiter&quot; and google gives result on first page, so I guess funny question generate traffic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;, and how could we be a model for other Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alas, no way. WB do not fits in SE paradigm, and is successful because it is impossible to strictly follow that SE paradigm for mod users(because of variety of reasons, one of which not strictly defined criteria for Q and A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T13:13:10.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-17T15:24:14.900" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout its conception, the blogs on Universe Factory were either interviews, story chapters and worldbuilding dos and don'ts.  But not once did I see a blog being a what-if question.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/great-lakes-earth-geography-372bce96d642#.e9g78y1cd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The last paragraphs of Great Lakes Earth's geography and solar systems are intended to be what-if questions in a more formal disguise.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-solar-system-of-great-lakes-earth-1ac15b6c439d#.hli77a59u&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;However, I may not have made them obvious enough.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is this--can simple what-if questions, particularly those you asked on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange without much success, be allowed in Universe Factory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T03:29:31.987" Title="Can What-If Questions Be Allowed in Universe Factory?" Tags="|discussion|questions|blog|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4092" CreationDate="2016-11-17T20:51:30.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been two &quot;what if?&quot; posts so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-if-the-world-was-round-65df1645cc0c#.lbg16qxdt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if...the world was round?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-if-the-moon-was-another-earth-afb635c4c321#.f9iagzb9y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if...the moon was another earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important characteristic of these posts is that they explore an idea; they don't &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; ask the question but also discuss possible answers and approaches.  Think of it not like the what-if question you can't ask on SE, but rather the what-if question &lt;em&gt;and its answers&lt;/em&gt; that you can't ask on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More posts like these are quite welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T20:51:30.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4095" CreationDate="2016-11-18T01:19:58.903" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61494/how-large-can-an-earth-species-be-in-2016-without-being-discovered&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question was created with the hard-science tag, but I was asked to change it to science-based. I agreed with the change, and so it was made -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But the &quot;This question asks for hard science...&quot; message remains even though the tag has definitely been removed. This may mislead future answerers; can I fix this?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uM4SS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uM4SS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T03:19:52.183" Title="Is there a way to remove this bug related to the hard-science tag?" Tags="|support|specific-tag|post-notices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2016-11-18T01:46:52.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual problem here is that this isn't a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post notice comes up when a moderator sees that a question has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, and adds the post notice &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt; to the question and any answers that don't meet the requirements of the tag (it shows up in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/61494/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;). As far as I can tell, I'm often the one who does this, just because I check the recent activity on the tag's page pretty regularly. For answers, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4020/627&quot;&gt;I have a flowchart I use&lt;/a&gt;; for questions, the notice always gets added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, nobody can tell when a question has the tag removed, because, save for a few short minutes while caching rears its ugly head, the question is no longer in the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions, and so I can't see it. This is when &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3976/627&quot;&gt;you need to flag the post for moderator attention&lt;/a&gt;, and one of us will hopefully remove the notice from the question and the answers as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real bug, I feel, is that people don't flag posts they feel should or should not have the notice. We the moderators can't do anything if we don't know a question has just gotten the tag or has just lost it; we need people to tell us through a flag. It's explicitly stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;the tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; tag wiki excerpt for the case of adding the tag, but maybe it should be made clearer that removal also requires moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;suppose&lt;/em&gt; you could ask for this whole thing to be automated. It wouldn't take much work off of the mods, because most of our work around the tag involves judging whether or not an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; needs the post notice, and that &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; can't be done by an algorithm (although maybe I should try automating my flowchart! Not really.). But it might save some time, in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T01:46:52.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T02:59:17.400" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a few handfuls of subjects on Stack Exchange--Worldbuilding, Biology, Earth Science, Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy and Astronomy.  In relation, my question is this--can we create a Speculative Biology/Evolution Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T06:18:29.783" Title="Speculative Evolution Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2016-11-18T06:18:29.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know that you can propose new sites on &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;area51&lt;/a&gt;, right? So if you want to have a new site, this is the place where you can really start it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there have been some attempts at &quot;what ifs&quot; sites, which were so far all closed due to a too speculative nature. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;biology.SE&lt;/a&gt; already exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need a concept to explain why biology.SE and worldbuilding.SE aren't sufficient. And to show that you will get good questions and answer. Not only too broad ones (like the other what-ifs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily you don't have to do all of it alone :) If you want to discuss it in more details, I'd suggest joining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T06:18:29.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4074" CreationDate="2016-11-18T22:45:10.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little late to this party, but I want to put in my perspective on what this site is useful for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I (like many) came from Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is massive and much visited (the 43rd most visited website in the world, according to Alexa) as an &lt;strong&gt;archive&lt;/strong&gt; of information. It is much more than a q &amp;amp; a site; when you google something about programming, there is a very good chance that the answer to your question is already on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An internet archive for all things Worldbuilding is what I always assumed was the goal of this site. So the on-topic criterion should not be 'did the OP ask this question about worldbuilding' but 'do we want people searching for worldbuilding information to be able to find the answer to this question here,' if that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to look at it is: what if I posted the modified version of the question, with no intent to write a book about it, but just to generate an entry in our worldbuilding archive. Would it be on-topic then? I argue it doesn't matter how the question got here, as long as it belongs here in its final form, we should keep it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T22:45:10.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-21T03:44:54.267" Score="2" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61606/what-are-the-limits-of-superatom-engineering&quot;&gt;Here's the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't received completely well and many people think it could use improvement - but much of the feedback did not give me specifics, and the question remains closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could I do to improve?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T03:44:54.267" Title="How can I improve this question on superatoms?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4104" CreationDate="2016-11-22T00:52:21.343" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of my worldbuilding questions are deemed as heretic(absurd) and being treated as taboo which often result in closure. I am conflicted since there are two groups of reader that seemingly contradict each other, one side requesting for background story and details while the other group think that the question is story based which is not appropriate. I am quite flexible and willing to compromise, so can anyone kindly show me where to draw the line so that more of my questions will not result in closure? Actually probably all of my questions are affected and I cannot possibly list all of them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T04:35:13.477" Title="Is far fetched worldbuilding question not welcome on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2016-11-22T04:35:13.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who both is prepared to welcome far fetched and outlandish questions on WB SE, and who criticized one of your questions as being fully of absurdities I am prepared to state my position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, user6760, you will note I have answered a number of your questions. Usually your questions display imagination, humour, and a taste for the outrageous. Which is fine, by me, but unfortunately, a number of your questions are overladen with too many factors that are either contradictory, internally inconsistent, and in some cases have a disregard for reality. Now I am happy to entertain questions with some of those factors, but there does come a point where when there are too many of them this reaches the point of overload.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, your question about machine vampirism was constructed on a long chain of propositions, any one of which contradicted the realities of biology, technology, and information processing, and which rendered answering your question effectively pointless. Unless someone wanted to go through it and point out the problems with each of the flawed links in your chain. I complained about this as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the question was answered by someone who flatly stated they had ignored the chain of assumed events leading to AI/robotic vampires. This, in my opinion, was the only the question could be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall point out that I had the opportunity to vote to close this question, but I declined to do so. The point I wanted to make was in my comments. So closing the question wasn't going to achieve anything useful or of substance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of questions you had posted previously about the indestructible time travel booth for Cretaceous tourism were much more effective and answerable posts. Many of which I answered. Probably because they weren't overburdened by too many self-contradictory and inconsistent factors. Although this problem was present over the sequence of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are your questions too far fetched? No! If anything they are not far fetched enough. Your tendency towards whimsy leads to wacky questions without much substance. In my opinion, a good far fetched question will have something with a core of substance behind it. There should be an element of challenge to them. Answering many of your questions is in itself challenging, but when dealing to many unnecessary and ill-founded factors any answer can soon be reduced to a farrago of nonsense. You need to leave your questions much more open to allow anyone answering them room to conceptually manoeuvre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not pretend to know what is the best way to advise how you can remedy your questions. Asking questions is always difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I will put my own head on the chopping block. Take your machine vampirism question. Instead a string of factors leading to robotic vampires, what if the question was put this way. &quot;After centuries of living in harmony humans and AI/robots have to deal with machine vampirism. Robot vampires are preying on humans. What factors could promote machines to thirst for human blood?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doubtless that question would be quickly closed as opinion-based, ideas generation, or whatever. I don't know whether this will help. Hopefully the other answers you receive will be of more help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only suggest: try to keep your questions simple and direct. But do try to keep having fun with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T04:35:13.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-11-22T11:18:44.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Weapon design: a conceivable superheated sword capable of cut through things.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not completely sure of my english, and there might be wrongly used terminologies, given that english is not my native tongue. Grammatical fixes would be highly appreciated.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. Background Information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am designing a sword with a blade that could cut through things (either with one atom width ribbon or superheated or both), that is able to deliver powerful swing by having its center of mass on the blade, yet easy to turn by shifting its center of mass to handle-ward side. So this is my current design:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1.1 The Design&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind this design is a sword that is capable on both delivering powerful swing, yet easily manouverable (preferrably through dynamic system, or moving parts within). Not to mention that the sword should be powerful enough to cut through most solid things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The weapon is about 1.5 meters in length (1.2 meters in blade and 0.3 meters in handle). The mass could be anywhere from 5 kg to 7 kg.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The blade is an empty hard shell of strong yet light material (perhaps diamondoid, graphene, or even carbon-nanotube reinforced steel), whose the cutting edge were multiple &quot;curtain-held&quot;s. The &quot;curtain-held&quot;s would erect curtains of some kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;monomolecular wire&lt;/a&gt; along the path of the edge (yes, you could see that this is partly inspired by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/19258/7974&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;). The monomolecular wire would be either graphene as the answer linked suggest, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_metal_dichalcogenide_monolayers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TMDC&lt;/a&gt; ribbons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original idea is that the curtains could be superheated to aid in cutting power, but perhaps it might not be required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The inner side of the blade &quot;shell&quot; would be a rail system extending from near the tip of the blade to near the end of the handle, of which a number of heavy counter masses (pendulums?) would be moved (shifted) to change the whole sword's center of mass. The counter masses would have to be in significant fraction of the whole sword's mass (perhaps anywhere around half of the sword's mass). The mechanism would then able to smoothly and/or quickly shift the sword's center of mass in battle according to need.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Along the interior of the blade up to the handle, were a network of heavy (heavy in term of: each unit has high density) gyroscope systems, that are able to switch from this two configuration: &quot;free moving&quot; and &quot;locking&quot;. Free moving, would then enabling the system to move freely along multiple axes. Locking would then producing gyroscopic hindrance on one or multiple axes at once, but allowing limited plane of no hindrance movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Originally the idea is to allow this weapon to build momentum by continuously swinging it in one axis to build momentum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With this system, it is expected that when the stabilizer were activated and locked, the sword could be held straight with the tip at right angle from a flat ground, the sword would stand still (or perhaps rotating with rotation axis at right angle from the ground). When placed with the inclination deviation of around less than 30 degrees from normal, the weapon would rotate sideways along the normal axis. &lt;em&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not sure if gyroscopic system could behave as such, perhaps my interpretation is flawed. Is this interpretation of internal gyroscopic balance possible?]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The blades sharp side could also produce strong magnetism that repel metals when in proximity, so that when facing another ordinary sword, the sword wouldn't just being sliced while the ordinary blade being thrown, threatening the user with flown sword blades.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The handle is filled with computer control units, magnetic actuators to move the counter masses around the rails and an energy source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If summarized, current solutions provide these features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dynamic mass counterbalance system inside the sword that could be used to shift center of mass of the sword, and is generally heavy, compromising at least half of the weapons whole mass.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Center of gravity moved to near the tip of blade for swinging and slashing, center of gravity moved to near the handle for easy and quick turning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sword is hollow, inner parts would be for counter masses and machinery.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has sufficient battery power and strong capacitor to heat the cutting strand if heating is necessary. Otherwise it could be safely ignored, or the battery must be able to supply the system with enough energy to move the counter masses and power its integrated control circuits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whole sword mass would not be a problem, but should weight around 5-7kg.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1.2 Modus of Operation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically to operate it, when it is swung, the center of mass would be changed to be near the tip of the blade to increase the hitting mass, while to rotate the blade the center of mass would be moved near the handle. All of those features were manually controlled through constant direct brain computer interface between the user and computronium on the handle, which means only beings more powerful than a human with compatible communication protocol able to control it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The weapon would be strong on impact (because its center of mass is on the tip of the blade) but would be super easy to turn (the center of mass could be redirected into near the handle for turning). The drawback would be sudden feeling of the blade being pulled apart as the center of mass would have inertia imbued in it, causing the sword to feel dragged blade ward when the center of mass being shifted to near handle, and to be pulled handle ward when the blade's center of mass moved near the tip of the blade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given its complexity and gyroscopic effect it has, it would be nigh impossible to be operated by a normal man. If normal human tried to wield that weapon, only to find that the weapon would not behave exactly the way one would expect a sword would move, because of odd sensation of moving center of mass, and gyroscopic resistance when turning, not to mention that the weapon is incredibly heavy, almost like lifting a barbell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From those description, here is a list of questions that I am interested to know, with descending order of importance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this arrangements conceivable?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible for gyroscopic effect to behave like the way it is on description?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If 2 is not possible, or even not conceivable, is it possible to have &quot;the ability to give powerful swing while easily manouverable&quot; without those gyroscopic system?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox Note:&lt;/strong&gt; For number 3, should I rephrase it as: &quot;If 2 is not possible or even not conceivable, is the design without those gyroscopic system able to behave efficiently as the design goal?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Considerations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some consideration to make, with decreasing order of importance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given near future technology so no portable and highly efficient nuclear reactor as its power source would be allowed, but molecular nanoconstruct is possible. You get the picture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capable of delivering heavy blow while still maneuverable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capable of cutting nearly any material with superheated strand of 2d materials one atom wide.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has adjustable gyroscopic balance system (perhaps not clearly described yet, or even could be ignored if gyroscopic balancing is impossible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assumption made to the intended user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The intended user, though humanoid in body shape, is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is basically superhuman in intelligence and agility, so assume perfect kinesthetic sense and strength of about thrice to four times as powerful as human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is able to think fast enough to adjust the system's configuration on the fly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T11:18:44.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4108" CreationDate="2016-11-22T15:51:52.587" Score="12" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not feel qualified from a science point of view to answer questions specifically. My opinions are opinions only, but I do not have enough points to make comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people here have been extraordinarily helpful and I'd like to participate more, but again, I have a lack of science education to back up my answers.&#xA;I want to thank everyone for their help and I will try to participate... but it isn't easy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does a person participate more if they cannot make comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29903" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-11-22T18:35:45.570" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T17:31:21.177" Title="How does a person participate more if they cannot make comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2016-11-22T16:54:08.407" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all questions require scientific knowledge. I find that common sense, and a smattering of random facts go a long way on Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can recommend is to keep an eye out, and take a stab at answering. Even if your answer is not the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;, you will still gain rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that commends do not gain you rep, and that the more you participate, the more you will have access to other exciting ways in which to interact with the community (chat, edit review, voting to close/open, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, ask a question! You'll gain votes, and help others by leaving an interesting topic behind for Worldbuilders to come!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T16:54:08.407" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2016-11-23T17:31:21.177" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation access levels are there to make sure you have some time to learn about the site before you start getting access to the tools. For example learning which questions should be closed, edited, opened is something that experienced users still have debates about to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you stay active writing answers and questions and reading the site then over time your reputation will increase and you will get access to more and more tools. You can already join the chat room, soon you will be able to add comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should already be able to edit posts, removing typos. Cleaning up English, improving formatting. Be careful not to change the meaning of posts but we can all help make the posts as good as they can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your reputation increases you will then get access to the review queues, which is your next chance to contribute. Checking whether questions should be open or closed, checking whether edits are appropriate, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is run by the community, for the community. We ease people in gradually but welcome to your first steps :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T17:31:21.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4113" CreationDate="2016-11-23T19:30:39.737" Score="9" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I chimed in on an argument in the comments for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/61952/29918&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, and ended up getting embroiled in the argument myself. On the one hand, I feel like, since the argument is still on-topic, the exchange might give some insight to the original question; but on the other hand, I'm starting to feel like it might be getting a bit more contentious than it needs to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to continue engaging in this argument? I feel like, unless the other person raises some new points, I'm not going to bother replying again; but have I gone too far already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29918" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T18:22:18.343" Title="When should an argument in comments be ended?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4111" CreationDate="2016-11-23T19:49:46.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, it's best to let them fight until one of them is dead, and then snipe the winner since they're probably low on health at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T19:49:46.777" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4111" CreationDate="2016-11-23T20:58:43.963" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want my knee-jerk opinion, I think this is not a good idea. First, comments are transient, highly likely to be removed at some point, and not at all a space for extended discussions. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19756/274942&quot;&gt;How do comments work?&lt;/a&gt; notes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are intentionally short&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the issue can't be resolved in three to four comments - my rule of thumb - it should probably be taken elsewhere, i.e. chat. You should, after a certain amount of back and forth, see a message allowing you to instantly create a chat room with the comments between you and the other user. When this happens, I say &lt;em&gt;Carpe Diem&lt;/em&gt;! Take the opportunity. (Note that moderators may also move long comment threads to a dedicated chat room for the post.) Chat has a much better interface for understanding who's talking to who, especially when there are a lot of people talking effectively at once, and it makes the post a lot cleaner on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always take the discussion informally to our chat room, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;. I promise we don't bite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether you should continue the exchange at &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; . . . I feel it was still sort of productive. There's been no response to your last comments from the other user, which could signal that they wish to end the discussion. If that's true, you should respect their decision to not prolong this anymore - in my opinion. Even though it's clear that you mean well, I think, they may interpret three or four or five or more comments in a row as harassment, however they're phrased. And that's not great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bottom line:&lt;/strong&gt; This is not, by far, the most egregious case I've seen, but for something like this - more than a quick request for clarification - I would have suggested moving it to chat a couple comments earlier. I would also advise waiting before attempting to respond to the other user, so you know if they even want to continue the exchange at all. If they don't, it's not productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T20:58:43.963" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T23:01:43.060" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%C5%82ugosz?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&amp;amp;StartDate=2016-11-23%2022:56:03Z&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jdługosz?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&amp;amp;StartDate=2016-11-23%2022:56:03Z&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see recent votes having no points, but the day’s score is 194, not 200. What’s up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T17:23:28.713" Title="Why is my score being capped at 194 (not 200) today?" Tags="|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4114" CreationDate="2016-11-23T23:54:10.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, good question.  I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it has to do with the deletion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61182/can-you-help-me-build-a-hollow-world/61190#61190&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, from which you had gained 6 reputation.  When it was deleted you lost those 6 points again, but it seems like you've been &quot;charged&quot; for the gain but not refunded the loss.  It's possible that this will be adjusted in a few hours; there are some nightly &quot;fix anomalies&quot; scripts that run.  If it doesn't get fixed on its own by tomorrow, we should retag this &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; to get help from SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T23:54:10.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4117" CreationDate="2016-11-24T14:46:06.940" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62198/can-we-weaponize-the-helvetica-scenario&quot;&gt;This question showed a lack of research&lt;/a&gt; - I looked up the premise quickly, got what I needed, and posted it - and the comments and answer have made it clear to me that the question is very much at fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that I am very much wrong and I plan to look into things like this more in the future before I post questions - but I am now ready for this one to be gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not provide information that can help any other users as it's based off of a false premise - pseudoscience - for the sake of a fiction story. I am willing to keep the changes in reputation from the Q (if that happens) but I want to remove the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the answerer is willing to remove their answer,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Is it worth deleting this question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T16:42:55.590" Title="Should I delete this Q?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4116" CreationDate="2016-11-24T16:42:55.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be that rather than trying to delete the question instead you rephrase it so that it fits the given answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not advice I've given before and would not like to set it as a precedent. Generally we are opposed to radically changing the question but in this case I think it is appropriate. You have now realized you asked the wrong question, someone has answered the question you would have asked if you realized. By making the change you do not invalidate their answer and save everyone the work of copying and pasting the Q&amp;amp;A into a new question or just deleting everything and wasting what has been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply change your question to be a reality check and say you are thinking of using this effect in your world. Then you can ask if this effect is real, compatible with known science, or completely implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting Q&amp;amp;A are now helpful for anyone else who has seen this mentioned somewhere and thinking of using it when Worldbuilding. The existing answer is not invalidated, and you should stop accumulating down votes and maybe even get some up votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T16:42:55.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-24T22:49:59.330" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question about measurement system formation is there for a good reason. People on forums would probably say something along the lines of &quot;Whatever&quot; or &quot;Just use earth measurements or even no measurements at all&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my comment about number systems and measurement systems being different is true and important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is fair that this question is on hold and my other recent questions are getting close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are all my on hold questions that are unfairly on hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61800/alien-species-name-creation-hard-to-do&quot;&gt;Alien Species name creation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61820/generation-ship-too-restrictive-requirements&quot;&gt;Too restrictive requirements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61859/kepler-bb-civilization-muscularity-index&quot;&gt;Muscularity Index improvement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62128/measurement-system-for-kepler-bb&quot;&gt;Measurement system making&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these and in fact all worldbuilding questions are highly opinion based. So you should really have more leniency for opinion based questions. In fact it would be much better if you got rid of that restriction on questions for this particular stack exchange all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T13:33:21.280" Title="Unfairly put on hold" Tags="|feature-request|questions|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4118" CreationDate="2016-11-25T00:10:00.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Highly opinion based question usually get closed very fast and some without any comments on why. All (most?) of these questions are still here but they are put on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61800/alien-species-name-creation-hard-to-do&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61800/alien-species-name-creation-hard-to-do&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking to name something without any criteria means that all names are valid especially when asking &quot;Do you have any ideas&quot;. You could name the species Cat or Oejifdjndfjrn or anything else that just sounds cool. &lt;strong&gt;Since there are no bad answers, it is considered opinion-based and thus not appropriate for a question/answer site where definitive answers are expected. Discussions are for forums and chat.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61820/generation-ship-too-restrictive-requirements&quot;&gt;Generation ship: Too restrictive requirements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alien decides on criteria to select people and you ask if they are too restrictive. What we have no idea is why did he chose these criteria (especially orphaned) and why they are restrictive. Too restrictive in the sense that he can't find enough people fitting these criteria? That is what I'm guessing but I could be wrong because it's not specified.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61859/kepler-bb-civilization-muscularity-index&quot;&gt;Kepler Bb civilization: Muscularity Index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building a new measurement index is only very distantly related to Worldbuilding. You really need to go into details to start doing this sort of stuff unless you have a particular interest with that topic. Also, people probably disliked the question because of it's lack of scientific rigor, to quote one of the commenter and close voter. Personally, I don't think it's a very good question but I would not have voted to close it either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62128/measurement-system-for-kepler-bb&quot;&gt;Measurement system for Kepler Bb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same first point of the previous question is still valid. Plus, I am not an expert but you already decided measurement looks kinda random to me and I don't see why you could not also have something similar for temperatures and the rest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, I don't understand why your not using the Fahrenheit if all the others are bad. I find it strange that it's the most obvious one and you haven't considered it (according to my understanding of your post). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T00:10:00.340" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4118" CreationDate="2016-11-25T08:15:00.680" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Getting the hang of what is and isn't accepted on a site is never an easy task. Even seasoned users have some time struggle with one or another question. So you should not feel bad about having a question closed. I know it can feel like a personal attack, but believe me, it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unsure about the reasons why a question got closed, do ask it here, or possibly on chat. But then ask for an honest view and take the time to read the answers you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your point of suppressing the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; opinion-based&quot; close reason (POB), we can't. This is common throughout the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to get on more specifics about why some of your questions were deemed POB, one should understand how stack exchange works. You ask a question and people can answer, up/down votes the answers to see which answer the best your question. But a naming question, for example, does not allow any objective voting. It is impossible to decide which of &quot;cat&quot; or &quot;Bob&quot; or &quot;jdhmlkdse&quot; would actually be the best. The only valid judge is yourself. You could have tens of thousands of answers, and people could still add another one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, the question should not be too specific, since it should also be useful to other people. This is why, on Writers, questions about generic name generation are accepted, but questions about naming a single character isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I hope I could convince you that any &quot;naming&quot; question would be closed on the same way. Actually a few of those are lying around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the other 3, you present some decisions made by an alien species. And ask us to critique, suggest improvement, or share our opinions about it. Since, by definition, it is an alien species, we cannot know really what they value, why they would make such a choice, and why not another. The measurement units that we today in various countries somehow reflect the History of each country, and is often based on our anatomy (inch, foot, etc.), or on some arbitrary numbers (24 hours is great to divide it!). It is the result of a complex evolution. The same hold for a set of moral values. Now without knowing the alien species in many details, we can't objectively pick anything. We would need to recreate the whole evolution of that alien species. And we don't know the reasons behind the first choices they made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, many questions on Worldbuilding are Opinion-based, but most of them can be answered by a combination of scientific knowledge, from physics to politics, from philosophy to computer science. Those are the best answers, and people can objectively judge (vote) if those are more or less appropriate to answer the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; are great places to run your ideas and concepts of questions before asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T08:15:00.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4118" CreationDate="2016-11-25T13:33:21.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main thing that causes questions to close as being too opinion based is a lack of an objective way to rate answers against each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words to continue the example used by others let us say that you are some random browser of Worldbuilding and you come to a question that says &quot;What should I name my cat people?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three answers &quot;cat&quot;, &quot;Bob&quot; or &quot;jdhmlkdse&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is &quot;better&quot;? Which should be up or down voted? Bob is understandable, but is a human person name. Cat just feels lazy, Jdhmlkdse is unpronounceable. All of these are subjective and opinion based though, some people might say &quot;well of course they should be called cat&quot;, or people from a non-English-speaking background may see no problem with the name &quot;Bob&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without an objective rating criteria in the question there is no way for people to rate the answers. In this case they are probably all bad answers, but without a lot more information there is no way for me to know so all I can do use my opinion, which may differ from everyone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no way to rate the answers the &quot;best&quot; answer cannot rise to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in a lot of cases there is a way you can fix this. Do not ask for a name for your species, instead ask for a technique. Ask &quot;given an alien species what is an effective way to generate a name for them?&quot; This is still at risk of being opinion based so again more specification is in order. What would you consider to make a good way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all you are looking for is ideas you can always try jumping in worldbuilding chat and just asking there. Plenty of people can throw ideas at you in that more informal setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T13:33:21.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T14:30:15.247" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3546/where-are-guidelines-about-text-formatting-and-its-improvement-via-suggested-e&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; although about a different edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The help page on editing lists these as the most common reasons to edit a post:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No help page goes in-depth about what &lt;strong&gt;formatting&lt;/strong&gt; should warrant edits. Common sense would suggest that if the whole post is capitalized, bolded, in italics, etc. there is reason to edit - or that if there is a giant wall of text there may be reason to add headers, or blockquotes, or bullets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think too much of anything is a reason to edit a post, but that just as bold, italics, etc can make headers or show emphasis, so too can TeX editing. It may not be the intended use, but that does not make it &quot;incorrect&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/62294/revisions&quot;&gt;this post of mine&lt;/a&gt;, for example - I believe using TeX formatting to show emphasis is not &quot;wrong&quot;, just &quot;different&quot; and that there is no reason to edit it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it justifiable to edit TeX out of a post just because it is being used to show emphasis in a different way, as opposed to mathematics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T21:05:26.847" Title="Is an alternative use of TeX reason to remove it from a post?" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T17:25:19.383" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a lot of questions, there are frequently existing books/stories/movies/games that explore the theme that the question asks. A question on AI souls trapped in VR hells recently led me to mention Surface Detail by Ian Banks. Another question about gods competing for attention of worshipers led me to mention Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. These are just two recent examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I often find is that for any given (good) question, we'll get several answers, and many will harken back to a particular existing story that answered the question in a particular way or deeply explored a given topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes me think that in addition to the answers section of the question, it would be useful to just have a list of &quot;existing stories on this question&quot; that people could contribute to, separate from writing up a full answer. Too often the useful citations are embedded in answers that don't bubble up to the top, or they're scattered around through many different answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do others agree with me that somehow promoting a list of&#xA;&quot;Existing source material&quot; in the forum would be useful?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;(If &quot;yes&quot; to Q1)&lt;/em&gt; Would it be appropriate to start a practice of editing the original question&#xA;to put as section of &quot;Existing Source Material&quot; at the end of the&#xA;question as such things get mentioned in answers or comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;(If &quot;yes&quot; to Q1)&lt;/em&gt; Is there any way to modify the site to have a more formal way of recording such citations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T03:31:11.647" Title="Is there a better way to list &quot;recommended reading&quot; for answers?" Tags="|feature-request|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2016-11-25T18:56:49.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinions: Yes, yes, unlikely. &#xA;I think a list of further reading would be good. Obviously still site your sources in your answer but having a list of collated sources/extra reading would be good. Putting the list in the question seems like the most sensible way to have it always appear at the top of the page. I really doubt that the stack exchange people will add this to the site though. You can put in a feature request on main meta but I don't think it will get anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T18:56:49.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4122" CreationDate="2016-11-25T20:54:55.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;respect the CSS and site design&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people overlook provided features for markup (headers) or don’t trigger the recognition of numbered lists and bullets properly, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don’t make up your own formatting by hacking the other format details: this is &lt;em&gt;fragile&lt;/em&gt; in the face of CSS/design changes, has not been checked on various browsers, and doesn’t provide the proper semantic structure for JAWS etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making one particular post look &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;, just to be distinctive, is not a good presentation on a presentation that combines multiple posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;avoid gratuitous use of MathJax&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has whole meta threads elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it’s not perfectly supported on all platforms and browsers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on my tablet it lays out fine on Firefox but gets measured sizes wrong on Chrome. The replacement image will overlap the word or punctuation that follows, lines don’t align, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is &lt;strong&gt;slow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the post just popping up ready to read, it has to go through and replace each slug with the image, &lt;em&gt;reflowing the layout&lt;/em&gt; after each one. A post peppered with these is annoying and makes you wait it out, for no good reason. And then it’s a mess on Chrome as explained above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it destroys accessibility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much ado is made of WAI, WCAG, etc. People &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; read articles on platforms with poor graphics, slow processing, javascript disabled, images not shown until clicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why make it harder to read and/or more annoying, for &lt;em&gt;no useful reason&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;in particular&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A MathJax expression that’s a bunch of variables multiplied together, itself inline in a regular header, does not look good. You didn’t evaluate the visual result on a variety of browsers and platforms, just eyeballed it on your single situation.  Beyond the points raised against hacking presentation made above, it was hideous (on one of my systems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T21:05:26.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2016-11-26T05:07:22.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do others agree with me that somehow promoting a list of &quot;Existing source material&quot; in the forum would be useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Providing a central resource that is valuable to supporting the question with existing or similar material can be helpful, especially considering the expected brevity of the SE's Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be appropriate to start a practice of editing the original question to put as section of &quot;Existing Source Material&quot; at the end of the question as such things get mentioned in answers or comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The question is for the question, not for just anyone to blithely edit to add links to similar material that is not relevant to the question that was asked. If the questioner wants to link to the similar material, fine, but I don't think we should be encouraging other users to make superfluous changes to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I would suggest creating a community wiki answer and denote it as dedicated to providing links/references to existing source material. This leaves it open to everyone to freely edit without attributing any reputation gain/loss to one user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any way to modify the site to have a more formal way of recording such citations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't need to be modified. I would consider the community wiki answer (see above) to be a perfectly reasonable response to this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an example community wiki answer (to this question) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4127/6986&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T03:31:11.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2016-11-26T07:00:11.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example community wiki answer in response to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4123/is-there-a-better-way-to-list-recommended-reading-for-answers/4126?noredirect=1#comment11106_4126&quot;&gt;SRM's request&lt;/a&gt; using SRM's questions on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/59463/6986&quot;&gt;Effect of impact of a pure gas comet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58865/6986&quot;&gt;Feasibility of ocean-spanning railroads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/54548/6986&quot;&gt;Does the probable heat of nanotech universal constructors make it infeasible in home environments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T07:00:11.527" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-11-26T07:00:11.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T14:30:07.360" Score="25" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States after the 2016 presidential election a few weeks ago. Thanks to some of his more outrageous ideas - and some of the public perception of them - he's become an oft-mentioned figure on comments on Worldbuilding, ever since the start of his campaign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the recent ones I've seen (and others I found using &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/586332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User A: Mr Trump: &amp;quot;gather all the smartest brain in the country and put 'em to study this whatever you called it.&amp;quot; Advisor: &amp;quot;Sir, that's racist!&amp;quot; Mr Trump: &amp;quot;this is for America! and get me Prof Hawking before he took the wrong flight...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User B: @[User A] I doubt it would be racist. Damn it... such top US scientists would be predominately white, with some emerging talented Asians. No worry about racism, that would presumably make president Trump to rethink the whole idea...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;All the fossil fuel sources worth exploiting have been found, extracted and used up.&amp;quot; At this point I'd suggest fleeing Earth if there's a reasonable alternative. This would lead to absolutely devastating climate change. It's also rather unlikely to happen, unless Trump can asexually reproduce to other country's presidencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This query, for the record, doesn't cover deleted comments; quite a few of these mention Trump (which is why the query brings up relatively few). There have also been a number of questions and answers that mention him, often in not-so-positive contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be frank: I don't like the guy. I don't. I also don't think the site is being overrun by them, given that most have been deleted, as far as I can tell. But I find it annoying to look at a bunch of comments and see a couple that are just Trump jokes. Comments are meant to be serious and constructive. That's why we have the &amp;quot;Not Constructive&amp;quot; comment flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is perhaps one of the more fun and probably lax sites on Stack Exchange, in terms of humor. Yes, Donald Trump is, at times, ideal fodder for certain jokes. But some of the comments are borderline offensive, and they certainly don't make the site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else feel this is a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear: I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting an official, mandatory, always-enforced ban on such comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T20:10:43.283" Title="Can we stop the Trump jokes?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2016-11-29T18:16:04.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is actually a very interesting meta-question because it's a dynamic problem.  In theory, Trump jokes will get old, either some time during his presidency, or sometime afterwards.  Thus, any policy regarding Trump would naturally have to be transient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure if we have any concept of a &quot;transient&quot; rule on Stack Exchange.  The only related concept I can think of off-hand is Wikipedia's idea of protecting a page from edits temporarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to see for WorldBuilding is an itemized list of topics we can't talk about which grows without bound as we keep coming across new things.  On the other hand, I can see value in being able to limit non-constructive content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T18:16:04.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T18:53:30.473" Score="5" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have gotten the second podcast up and posted (still doing some clean up in the description etc.) but we have been discussing making the episodes more focused and wanted to gather a list of potential topics/themes that could be used going forward.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a community wiki answer shortly where we can keep track of the list.  The podcast team will pull ideas from here when we are planning future episodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for participating.  Feel free to add your name to your idea so we can give you credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T23:27:30.513" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T19:09:17.407" Title="World Building Podcast: Potential Topics/Themes" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4130" CreationDate="2016-11-29T18:55:51.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;World Building for Table Top Gaming&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;James&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From the crowd (answering community questions)&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;James&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Geography and mapmaking&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;James&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why we make magic systems the way we do&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;Frostfyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alien biology and creature design&lt;/strong&gt; -- TrEs-2b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;World Building Setting Tropes (Series?)&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;Nex Terren&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Space Opera&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Steam Punk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High Fantasy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How Diversity (Gender, Nationality, etc.) in Our Community Provides Better Questions &amp;amp; Answers&lt;/strong&gt; -- Mikey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Politics&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;James&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T19:09:17.407" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T19:09:17.407" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-11-29T18:55:51.310" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4130" CreationDate="2016-11-29T19:00:29.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideas we have already used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology (General)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xxx&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xxx&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xxx&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T16:05:46.263" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T16:05:46.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T19:02:18.230" Score="4" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, a couple of times I have used Community Wikis for answers that didn't directly answer the question, but provided a good starting point for making a good answer. But it seems that no one actually contributes to them. If they do expand on the Community Wiki, its only as their own post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, is there an effective way to use community wikis to make better answers? Or does the reputation point system kill all usefulness of the community wiki answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27847" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T19:02:18.230" Title="Getting the most out of Community-Wiki Answers" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2016-11-29T19:49:23.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is more of comment abuse. If a comment does not offer anything constructive, the poster should think twice about posting it. In this case, it is using comments for joke dialog that only fits the immediate context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the real question is, how strict do we want to be about these kinds of one off, non-constructive, comments? It might help if there was and idea of a 'transient comment', one that goes away after being read or enough time passes. (Maybe limit number of them per day to avoid encouraging abusing the comment system)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27847" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T19:49:23.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:12:18.683" Score="7" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we published &lt;strong&gt;Episode 2&lt;/strong&gt; today and though biased I have to say it is pretty entertaining.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We chatted with Monica about her story, discussed questions from the site, built a world together and offered a few personal recommendations...all in a somewhat &lt;em&gt;verbose&lt;/em&gt; manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that you all enjoy it, please feel free to leave comments here or on YouTube and let us know what you think, and feel free to subscribe as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks to my co-hosts Monica, Green and Nex&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The episode can be found here:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvJN4s-o3LM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvJN4s-o3LM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And the full description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Episode 2 of The Factory Floor, a podcast about building worlds and filling them with interesting things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this episode we introduce a new guest and co-host who has taken some world building work and turned it into an actual story!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The World Building at Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and the blog:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.medium.com/universe-factory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Welcome and introducing Monica:  00:00:00 – 00:04:05&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warm-up, playing gods:  00:04:06 – 00:41:44&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Interview with Monica:  00:41:45 – 01:05:43&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to The Sisters' War:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-a718622d808f#.royh1wl3x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-a718622d808f#.royh1wl3x&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions from the site:  01:05:44 – 01:43:50&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would a battle between supercomputers be like with the battleground being the internet? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27231/what-would-a-battle-between-supercomputers-be-like-with-the-battleground-being-t&quot;&gt;What would a battle between supercomputers be like with the battleground being the internet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If magic is real, can it be true that rational scientific thought should exclude it? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13364/if-magic-is-real-can-it-be-true-that-rational-scientific-thought-should-exclude&quot;&gt;If magic is real, can it be true that rational scientific thought should exclude it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you add a mini moon to Earth? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23452/can-you-add-a-mini-moon-to-earth&quot;&gt;Can you add a mini moon to Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I develop names for my fantasy land?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48622/how-can-i-develop-names-for-my-fantasy-land&quot;&gt;How can I develop names for my fantasy land?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;International pronunciation alphabet:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note be nice and donate to Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XKCD:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://xkcd.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;     Thing Explainer:  Complicated Stuff in Simple Words &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0544668251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Thing-Explainer-Complicated-Stuff-Simple/dp/0544668251/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480450409&amp;amp;sr=8-1&amp;amp;keywords=the+thing+explainer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommendations:  01:43:51 – 01:53:59&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rainbow 6 Siege:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.steampowered.com/app/359550/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://store.steampowered.com/app/359550/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0765382032&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480451507&amp;amp;sr=1-1&amp;amp;keywords=the+three+body+problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1577315936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480451578&amp;amp;sr=1-1&amp;amp;keywords=the+hero+with+a+thousand+faces&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microscope: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0983277907&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Microscope-Ben-Robbins/dp/0983277907/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480452022&amp;amp;sr=8-1&amp;amp;keywords=microscope+game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wiz Biz by Rick Cook: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0671878468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Wiz-Biz-Rick-Cook/dp/0671878468/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480451685&amp;amp;sr=1-1&amp;amp;keywords=Wiz+Biz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T04:20:42.273" Title="World Building Podcast Episode #2: Aaaand Cut!" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4138" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:16:56.240" Score="7" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&#xA;Wait, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On several days I've found myself surpassing 200 rep - I get more upvotes than that. Which brings me to these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why is there a limit?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I couldn't find a page explaining why we cap it off. If you continue to make progress, why does the system decide that you've done enough? Why, when the community continues to vote, saying &quot;you deserve more today&quot;, does the site say &quot;actually, the community is wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What happens to reputation you earn after the daily limit?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does it simply vanish? Do you get it the next day? Let me know if another page explains this, I couldn't find this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:35:42.143" Title="Let's talk about the reputation limit" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:28:39.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; there's a limit has been answered on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/22447/274942&quot;&gt;What is the reasoning behind the reputation cap?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/136059/274942&quot;&gt;Revisiting the rep cap (yes, again)&lt;/a&gt; and the questions linked therein. There are a number of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It ensures that you can't game the system by having one post that hits the Hot Network Questions list in a day and piles up obscene amounts of reputation, or by posting loads of posts one after another and getting reputation simply through probability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It keeps people coming back to the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It forces people to do other things around the site - edit, review, etc. - when they can't gain rep, or go outside, spend time with actual people, or do other normal stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It means that you need long-term dedication to build up reputation, rather than getting 1,000 points in one UTC day and suddenly having a lot of privileges you don't know how to use. This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/136060/274942&quot;&gt;Jeff's logic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get addicted through the gamification of wanting to go back the next day. It also combats the addiction by limiting it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the reputation vanishes into thin air, never to return. You do, however, gain reputation points from bounties you earn (25-500 apiece), answers of yours which are accepted (15), and answers you accept (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lest you think that I'm biased in favor of the cap, I've missed out on a solid 330 reputation points so far today, by my math, because of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:35:42.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4139" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-11-29T23:26:33.947" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T23:26:33.947" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:26:33.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4140" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-11-29T23:26:33.947" Score="0" Body="For questions/posts about the Worldbuilding.SE's podcast.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T09:32:48.003" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T09:32:48.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4142" CreationDate="2016-11-30T05:04:42.217" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will admit, at times I am tempted to post questions just so that I can show off some of my creation that I think are neat, while farming reputation at the same time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like it will be a problem because it trivializes the questions themselves, making it less likely for the answers to be generalized for the use of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, perhaps a well-contrived question can still save the post from being purely exhibitionist and creation-specific, even as a mean to an end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28751" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T13:35:00.710" Title="Are questions that seek the admiration of the readers permissible?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4141" CreationDate="2016-11-30T13:35:00.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a specific problem in your world that you want help resolving, or have an interesting problem you already solved but would like to see how other people solve it, go ahead and ask it. You can then include important and relevant information about your world as part of the question. That amount of &quot;admiration-seeking&quot; is permissible and, indeed, expected as part of creating a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an interest only in sharing some unique or wondrous part of your world, then the main site is not the place to do it. The Worldbuilding SE is for Q&amp;amp;A, not &quot;showing off.&quot; To do that, you could add a post to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3667/6986&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; here on Meta that describes your world or you could write an article for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/6986&quot;&gt;the blog&lt;/a&gt; that does so. The blog exists for the purpose of sharing your world, among other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T13:35:00.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-30T15:52:15.963" Score="36" ViewCount="857" Body="&lt;p&gt;November is rapidly turning into December, but we still have one more event to get through before we look ahead to 2017 . . . Winter Bash!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The year is rapidly coming to a close, which means even though we typically &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta/268583#268583&quot;&gt;hate it&lt;/a&gt;, it’s time to have some fun...with hats!  That’s right - &lt;strong&gt;it’s time for Winter Bash 2016!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overview&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of you remember previous years’ events, but here is a quick little reminder. Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users have fun by earning “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (very similar to badges). We track everyone’s progress using hats in a leaderboard that looks similar to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GxiD3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GxiD3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Winter Bash 2016 Leaderboard&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, we’re coming up with new hat designs for this year’s fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The event will run from &lt;strong&gt;19 December 2016&lt;/strong&gt; up to and including &lt;strong&gt;08 January 2017&lt;/strong&gt;. Users will be able to see all the hats they’ve earned on &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option available. And just like last time, &lt;strong&gt;at the end of the event, all hats will go back into storage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding participated in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/609/627&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2014&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2815/627&quot;&gt;Winter Bash 2015&lt;/a&gt;, and both seemed to be rousing successes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we take the plunge and turn Worldbuilding Stack Exchange into a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Planet of Hats&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Warning: TVTropes link!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T01:43:52.710" Title="Should we turn Worldbuilding Stack Exchange into a Planet of Hats?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2016-11-30T16:17:33.283" Score="40" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Full speed ahead to &lt;em&gt;Planet of the Hats&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone loves hats - they promote lots more activity on the site during a time when there would usually be less activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to ruin the fun of everyone just because of a few weird outlying anti-hats who would hammer on the &amp;quot;I hate hats&amp;quot; button the moment they can. When they do this,the are warped out of hat land - ruining the fun only for themselves - instead of for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did I mention I like hats?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j922L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j922L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rr4Xn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rr4Xn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T16:35:13.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2016-11-30T16:43:39.923" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have built in-functions for handling this. The wrong way to handle this, on the other hand, would be banning certain joke topics. There isn't actually anything this would add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;People will still joke about Trump&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A topic ban would actually only cut the mood on this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would actually harm when the joke is actually adding something - it's a part of a constructive answer, question or a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This actually would cover just a few cases while banning tons of them. Only when the joke is not funny/&lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt; and not consturctive, it should be downvoted/edited out/deleted (especially comments). No need to put the whole thing into a restricted access shelf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trump jokes are the same as any other jokes. &amp;quot;About Trump&amp;quot; shouldn't automatically mean &amp;quot;not funny&amp;quot;. If the joke adds something to the post's context, keep it. No need to ban the whole thing to cover the two or three edge cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have the tools to handle this. That's what downvotes, edits and offensive flags are for&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvote&lt;/strong&gt; if you dislike the joke (or upvote if you like it, it's up to you)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit out&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Flag&lt;/strong&gt; the joke if you think it's inapropriate (or delete if it's a rant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Else it's OK&lt;/strong&gt;, and shouldn't be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Let it be. The community will decide by time - this is a comunity-driven site. Unless this problem overflows and starts really &lt;em&gt;harming&lt;/em&gt; (eg. discougraing users to use SE), we should do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answer, 30 votes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33257/in-the-case-of-direct-democracy-what-would-happen-to-society/33258#33258&quot;&gt;In the case of direct democracy, what would happen to society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question, 17 votes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53536/is-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-a-good-place-to-make-a-long-term-base&quot;&gt;Is the bottom of the ocean a good place to make a long-term base?&lt;/a&gt; (Disclamer: I'm linking my own post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comment, 7 votes (direct link): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31445/how-to-take-down-the-internet#comment83985_31445&quot;&gt;How to take down the internet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T16:43:39.923" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-30T19:43:31.763" Score="15" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't give too much attention to the page design when I first start to follow WB, and now that I notice it, it just got stuck in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the background image used in WB based to an specific story/book/movie that already exist? If this is the case, I would like to know to which one, just to know more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed that some of the artwork change if you are in the meta-section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dvt7s.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dvt7s.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jieQp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jieQp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a special reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't know if this question was already made/answered, so sorry if this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30303" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T20:55:22.793" Title="Is the background image of this site some kind of easter-egg/meta-joke?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2016-11-30T20:42:55.307" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be for hats.  Like X-27, I find that the hats do lead people towards more interesting questions and answers than they usually would.  It's a fun tool to help encourage people to leave their comfort zone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only concern I might have would be if the hats lead people to create poor quality questions or answers for the sole purpose of getting a hat in the &quot;gotta catch 'em all&quot; mindset.  In my opinion, this has not happened to a significant degree in past years, so I see no particular reason to avoid hats this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T20:42:55.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4146" CreationDate="2016-11-30T20:55:22.793" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kurtis Beavers, the SE team member who created our site design, explained the background: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/worldbuilding-site-design-updates-march-15&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Site Design Updates: March 15&lt;/a&gt;.  The idea of varying main and meta, beyond just the gray-scale transformation used on most sites, was quite intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The design isn't based on a specific, pre-existing work, but after Kurtis shared the original design a Worldbuilding user, Joe Bloggs, wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-lost-builder-355cf7de7ec6#.ouqk3afyg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Builder&lt;/a&gt; based on it.  Kurtis just might be the first person whose SE design work has inspired fan fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T20:55:22.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-01T00:52:46.587" Score="2" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simplified, Earth's systems can be broken up into four &quot;spheres&quot; that constantly exchange matter and energy with one another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;atmosphere&lt;/strong&gt;, which includes all gasses around the planet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;hydrosphere&lt;/strong&gt;, which includes all of the planet's water and related systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;geosphere&lt;/strong&gt;, which includes the all the material within and below the crust&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;biosphere&lt;/strong&gt;, which is comprised of every living thing on Earth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;, but why is it that the other 'spheres' do not have tags?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I suggest we make them, but some peer review would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&quot;For questions about the gases which surround a planet or some other celestial body.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Current tag wiki. I think it's fine as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hydrosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hydrosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hydrosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&quot;For questions about the liquids present on the surface of a planet and the associated systems.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that this is not synonymous with any other tag - in fact, very few tags cover this topic at all, yet multiple questions do (things like alien solvents and biochemistry, some weather patterns, erosion and landscape formation, chemical processes, and more). Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51272/can-a-water-cycle-exist-on-a-planet-without-oceans&quot;&gt;Can a water cycle exist on a planet without oceans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54509/could-water-be-extracted-harvested-from-clouds-consequences&quot;&gt;Could water be extracted/harvested from clouds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39183/whats-the-quickest-way-to-add-oceans-to-a-planet&quot;&gt;What's the quickest way to add oceans to a planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33923/could-humans-survive-on-a-planet-with-only-deuterium-heavy-water-made-with-hyd&quot;&gt;Could humans survive on a planet with only deuterium 'heavy water' made with hydrogen isotopes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22900/how-rare-is-clean-drinkable-or-useable-water-in-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;How rare is (clean, drinkable or useable) water in the solar system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14312/what-would-the-conditions-on-a-methane-world-be-like&quot;&gt;What would the conditions on a methane world look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29386/an-ammonia-not-water-based-alien-race-that-breaths-hydrogen-is-it-believabl&quot;&gt;An ammonia - not water - based alien race that breaths hydrogen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51239/could-liquid-silicon-dioxide-exist-on-the-surface-of-venus&quot;&gt;Could liquid silicon dioxide exist on the surface of Venus?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28911/eutectic-iron-life&quot;&gt;Eutectic Iron Life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37164/methanol-ethanol-other-alcohol-based-life-form-aliens&quot;&gt;Methanol/Ethanol (other alcohol) based life-form - aliens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59002/what-conditions-are-necessary-to-support-a-vitriolic-chlorine-planet&quot;&gt;What conditions are necessary to support a vitriolic chlorine planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&quot;For questions about the materials that compose a planet or other celestial body.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geology&lt;/a&gt; and possibly synonymous; would be relevant to a plethora of existing questions that do not have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geology&lt;/a&gt; tag. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62624/what-would-the-geology-and-climatology-of-an-earth-like-planet-be-if-its-north&quot;&gt;What would the geology and climatology of an earth-like planet be if it's north pole is always facing it's star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62363/what-geographic-features-occur-at-each-type-of-tectonic-plate-boundary&quot;&gt;What geographic features occur at each type of tectonic plate boundary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3086/can-we-breathe-the-moons-crust&quot;&gt;Can we breathe the moon's crust?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19583/alien-exploration-drone-digging-earth-crust&quot;&gt;Alien exploration : drone digging earth crust&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40137/how-much-energy-to-destroy-the-crust-of-a-planet&quot;&gt;How much energy to destroy the crust of a planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17150/how-would-the-earth-be-different-if-the-crust-was-at-most-1km-thick&quot;&gt;How would the earth be different if the crust was at most 1km thick?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30837/what-happened-when-my-scientist-drilled-a-hole-through-europas-crust&quot;&gt;What happened when my scientist drilled a hole through Europa's “crust”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37262/what-would-perforating-the-crust-of-a-continent-do&quot;&gt;What would perforating a continent do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39093/radioactive-elements-will-there-be-any-effect-on-earth-or-an-oceanic-world-if&quot;&gt;Will there be any effect on earth or an oceanic world if its crust and mantle lack radioactive elements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3689/planet-with-dual-core&quot;&gt;Planet with dual core&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47335/could-we-restart-marss-core-with-antimatter&quot;&gt;Could We Restart Mars's Core With Antimatter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13000/can-an-asteroid-have-a-molten-core&quot;&gt;Can an asteroid have a molten core?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27297/likelihood-of-a-magnetosphere-with-a-mercury-core&quot;&gt;Likelihood of a magnetosphere with a mercury core&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54134/what-would-happen-at-the-core-of-a-water-world&quot;&gt;What would happen at the core of a water world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&quot;For questions about the ecological dynamics of a whole planet or celestial body.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Broader than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/habitability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;habitability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;habitability&lt;/a&gt;; related to the seldom-used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;; more specific than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/environment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;environment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;environment&lt;/a&gt;; more specific than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62758/if-we-built-a-large-moon-close-to-mars-could-we-make-mars-a-living-world&quot;&gt;If we built a large moon close to Mars, could we make Mars a living world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61926/ecocide-with-a-clear-deliberate-intent&quot;&gt;Ecocide with a clear deliberate intent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60088/could-a-hollow-rocky-planet-the-size-of-jupiter-be-artificially-created-and-how&quot;&gt;Could a hollow rocky planet the size of Jupiter be artificially created, and how would that affect species growing on its surface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58926/finding-signs-of-life-from-afar&quot;&gt;Finding signs of life from afar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55314/would-you-shoot-out-dna-onto-baby-planets-if-you-planned-to-visit-it-someday&quot;&gt;Would you shoot out DNA onto baby planets if you planned to visit it someday?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54777/could-exoplanet-with-earths-magnetic-field-orbiting-a-binary-star-system-harbou&quot;&gt;Could exoplanet with Earth's magnetic field orbiting a binary star system harbour intelligent life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52933/can-there-be-life-on-a-planet-with-water-but-without-atmosphere&quot;&gt;Can there be life on a planet with water, but without an atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13213/nanobots-ecosystem-is-it-possible&quot;&gt;Nanobots Ecosystem, is it possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13391/what-if-an-earth-like-planet-had-no-axial-tilt-impact-on-ecosystem&quot;&gt;What if an Earth-like planet had no axial tilt? (impact on ecosystem)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61359/ecosystem-of-bladetree-a-tree-that-has-a-trunk-growing-horizontally-over-the-oc&quot;&gt;Ecosystem of bladetree&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62378/how-could-you-keep-a-rogue-planet-warmish&quot;&gt;How could you keep a rogue planet warm(ish)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55875/would-animals-from-earth-be-able-to-survive-and-reproduce-on-this-planet&quot;&gt;Would animals from Earth be able to survive and reproduce on this planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61267/what-would-happen-if-there-was-no-wind&quot;&gt;What would happen if there was no wind?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what do you think? Are these tags relevant and/or reasonable? What changes would you make to them?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T20:57:28.290" Title="Do we want geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="343" CreationDate="2016-12-01T02:02:33.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;2016&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: the image in the question here is no longer the one being used; ad requirements chaanged.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's late in the year, I know, but I was looking for the list of sites where we currently have ads and didn't find it, so maybe we didn't compile it for 2016.  If you have a link to the &lt;strong&gt;2016 ad for Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; on some other site, please add it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6033/19667&quot;&gt;RPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7993/32756&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like we did not submit an ad to Physics in 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T14:09:45.810" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-01T15:02:53.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2016-12-01T05:41:57.983" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with X-27 if the button were not “I hate hats”. Hate is a strong concept and one of the precepts I try to live by is “do not hate”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need a button for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I mildly dislike hats&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I’m not sufficiently interested to put up with it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don’t mess with my custom skins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like them, but I don’t want to take on anither distraction right now&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all of that can be replaced with a purely &lt;strong&gt;functional&lt;/strong&gt; label that does not get into motives at all, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I choose not to participate at this time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T05:41:57.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2016-12-01T06:03:21.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Make the distinction between borderline offensive and actually offensive&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a review of Trump literature on this site, such as I could find, and I really didn't see anything that seemed offensive. Certainly dumb, but not offensive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, I think over moderating by deleting lots of questionable comments is good for the site, in the same way that policing petty crime reduces major crimes. If a comment is definitely offensive, then it should be deleted. If a comment gets deleted and wasn't that offensive, oh well. Better the site keeps high standards, and people who get butthurt over one or two deleted comments should get over it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Worldbuiding community is, in my opinion, pretty strong. There are a set of 20 or 30 users that probably comment on or answer every single question cross the site. As long as we the frequent users set a clear standard on good comments vs bad comments I don't think we'll have too much trouble. I think the site's community is strong enough to discourage Trump trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we get invaded by hordes of redditors, on the other hand, then we may have to take some more extreme measures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T15:47:37.273" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T15:47:37.273" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4154" CreationDate="2016-12-01T23:27:48.837" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to ask the question &quot;what exotic states of matter would you create?&quot; (state of matter as in gas, liquid, solid etc). I would give a couple of examples of exotic states of matter I created myself, so that the answerers could create things along the category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answers given in this manner would be almost entirely Original to their respective creators, and it may be considered intellectual theft to use their creations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, would it be a problem to ask others to create parallel creations based on an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28751" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T17:25:57.353" Title="Can I ask others to create features for my world?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4153" CreationDate="2016-12-02T17:25:57.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer formalizes and expands on my earlier comment, because I don't like seeing unanswered questions and no one else has answered yet.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange, as a whole, operates on a CC-BY-SA copyright model. As Tim mentions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2187/6986&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt; about the legality of re-using material found on the network, you should read the license to know what you can and cannot do (see the link in Tim's answer). However, in short, you can do whatever you want with the material from the site as long as say where you got the idea from and any changes you made to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the concept of a question requesting answers propose ideas for your world runs contrary to the purpose of the Worldbuilding SE. The community exists to provide solutions to problems you have, or to verify that what you have is consistent with the rest of your world. A question asking for the community to build parts of your world for you given an idea would probably be closed as either &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More accurately, this would fall under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/6986&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;idea generation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; close-reason we used to have, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3304/6986&quot;&gt;but got rid of&lt;/a&gt; because it was unclear for new users what it meant or how it applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T17:25:57.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4149" CreationDate="2016-12-03T08:49:00.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes. That's what tags are for&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't anything wrong on creating a tag. Tags don't &lt;em&gt;bite&lt;/em&gt;. Even the reputation needed is really low (200). Tagging something with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-tag&lt;/a&gt; isn't as good as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-tag-1&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag-1&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-tag-1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-tag-2&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag-2&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-tag-2&lt;/a&gt;, which are both sub-tags. This makes the question interface in the questions tab clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on Arqade (gamaing.SE), for example, the average tag has ~10 questions, with half of the tags having &lt;em&gt;a single question&lt;/em&gt;. That's because 1 game = 1 topic. And the main thing is, it doesn't mind. It's better to have 10 (or 100) narrowly-scoped (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hydrosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hydrosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hydrosphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biosphere&lt;/a&gt;) tags rather than 1 big one &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, community, if you have enough reputation, &lt;strong&gt;go out and create tags! And don't forget to re-tag where needed!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T08:49:00.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2016-12-03T17:23:08.860" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Comments should be &lt;em&gt;constructively relevant to the post they are attached to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's just me, but I think this is pretty clear-cut. Just for reference, here is the placeholder text for a comment (taken straight from the &quot;add comment&quot; text box placeholder):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid comments like “+1” or “thanks”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does bringing up a specific politician (or non-politician) somehow contribute to making the post better?&lt;/strong&gt; Maybe it does. But you might want to ask yourself if bringing up a (particularly, a living) person is the best way to get your point across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the comment meets those criteria, then chances are it's fine,&lt;/strong&gt; and in an ideal world, whatever prompted the comment should be incorporated into the post it is attached to or otherwise acted upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it doesn't, then the comment is not constructive in the context of the post it is attached to,&lt;/strong&gt; and is a candidate for deletion. In that case, the comment should probably be flagged as &quot;not constructive&quot;. (I believe -- someone correct me here if I'm wrong -- that if a comment amasses a &quot;sufficient&quot; number of &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt; flags, it automatically gets deleted. That's certainly the case for comment &lt;em&gt;obsolete&lt;/em&gt; flags, as I have seen that behavior in action myself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comments are ephemeral&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments aren't meant to live forever. They are &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be requests for clarification or suggestions for how a post can be improved (which was the way &quot;add more information&quot; was previously phrased: &lt;em&gt;suggest improvements&lt;/em&gt;). After the post's owner has acted on them, they can be deleted. They can also be deleted for almost any other reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had comments of mine deleted just recently where my reaction to the deletion was pretty much &quot;what the iff?&quot;, where I felt that my comment added something useful but which wasn't enough to warrant an answer all of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's how the network is supposed to work. If you want your content to remain, post it as either a question or an answer. If you don't care, but think it is &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; (see above point), then post it as a comment, but be prepared for the fact that it might get deleted. If it isn't relevant to the post &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; constructive in the context of the post, but you still want to post it, then you might try Twitter or Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as we sometimes joke on Worldbuilding, Stack Exchange is tailored towards generating high-quality answers to high-quality questions. In the case of Worldbuilding, it's about using the various fields of science (including for example real-world history) to help others construct imaginary worlds. Joking about specific real-world persons is unlikely to lead us toward that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T17:23:08.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4158" CreationDate="2016-12-05T23:36:19.683" Score="14" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific time of day (please specify timezone you're in to convert from) when the site is most active? Or is there a good time relative to that (directly before, etc) to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will often find that I want more answers - I don't even care about views, but I want a variety of approaches without needing to set a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When do you normally ask your questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does time even make a difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:56:54.890" Title="When's the best time to ask questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4157" CreationDate="2016-12-05T23:56:54.890" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was able to get a couple Data Explorer queries from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/213603/274942&quot;&gt;Question and answer activity on StackExchange: Interactive and customized edition&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange. I chose the query &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/155028/best-time-to-ask-questions-on-stackexchange-get-answer-faster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best time to ask questions on StackExchange: Get answer faster&lt;/a&gt;, rather than &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/155865/best-time-to-ask-questions-on-stackexchange-more-likely-to-get-an-answer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best time to ask questions on StackExchange: More likely to get an answer&lt;/a&gt;, as the chances of a question that doesn't get closed &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being answered are about as low as . . . well, something improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I switched the site to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange and the inputs to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;All = 1&lt;/code&gt; (all users)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Frequency = 1&lt;/code&gt; (Gets data for the average day)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;MaxTimeDiff = 1440&lt;/code&gt; (Data ranges over the course of 1,440 minutes, i.e. one day)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;UserID = 1&lt;/code&gt; (all users; redundant since &lt;code&gt;All = 1&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the graph I got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/otS1U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/otS1U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the shortest answer time - the lowest point on the graph - is approximately 13:00 UTC. At this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;East Asia and Australia are in or entering the night.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Africa, Europe, and the Middle East are at midday to afternoon - approaching teatime, in fact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South America is already well into the morning, possibly finishing off an early cup of coffee.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;North America is rubbing its eyes, getting out of bed, and possibly leaving the house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antarctica is doing its own thing entirely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might give you a decent idea of the demographics of Worldbuilding users, interestingly enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst time to get an answer to a question is right around 0:00 UTC, which is, by a strange coincidence, right about now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:56:54.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2016-12-07T02:59:56.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I would participate&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love some sort of every-few-weekly collective language building exercise. I could definitely participate at that level, if someone would organize posts in a way that we can cover small bits of the language at a time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Proposed structure&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To really build a language, I think you have to start from the basics then build up. First iron out a list of phonemes, and since we are writing to each other, develop a map of phoneme to letters (preferably the ones that are on my keyboard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, determine a grammar, probably by straight copying from some other language. This will set the basic rules for tense, gender, pluralization, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, build a proto-language. These are the basic words that any developing civilization would have, equivalent to Proto-Indo-European. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, flesh out the language with loan words and advanced terms and concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Starting languages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested in starting from proto-Germanic. First off, it is the ultimate root of the langauge that everyone on this forum has in common. Second, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=proto-germanic&amp;amp;oq=proto-germanic&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2172j0j7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many resources&lt;/a&gt; available for it. Thirdly, there are many easily accessible daughter languages. And lastly, it would be an interesting experiment to see how far our collectively constructed language differs from the language we are speaking today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T02:59:56.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2016-12-10T15:08:06.350" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a clue about this hats thing, but I'm in :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29870" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T15:08:06.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4162" CreationDate="2016-12-11T17:22:07.900" Score="22" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, I used to post a hundreds of questions and answers on the SE network. These days, I do not have the time for that, a post or two per month at most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is though: I never closed the tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of posting I have watched the review queues, usually checking them 2-3 times a day. Over time, that adds up to quiet a few reviews. This has become a part of my daily routine, and reading a couple of posts and dropping a comment does not take a lot more time than making a cup of tea with milk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that is about it, I just have a question:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I just continue to do that?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reading posts and sometimes lurk in the chat to keep in touch with the community, but is reviewing without posting fundamentally a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bad-habit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bad-habit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bad-habit&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16186" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T21:03:15.770" Title="Hi, I like to review stuff. Is that ok?" Tags="|discussion|reviewing-behavior|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2016-12-11T21:03:15.770" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;People participate in the site in different ways.  Some have lots of questions, some prefer to answer, some help out with &quot;meta&quot; stuff like keeping tagging sane, some guide new users, some review... If reviewing is what you want to focus on right now, that's fine.  So long as you're staying abreast of community norms -- for example, you have a good handle on scope when working in the Close and Reopen queues -- and you spend the time needed to evaluate each review item, you'll be helping the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T21:03:15.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-12T10:21:42.510" Score="8" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two tags are relevant here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/written-material&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;written-material&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;written-material&lt;/a&gt;. Full tag wiki excerpts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;language:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;For questions about the written or spoken language of a world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;written-material:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;For questions about written material itself. (Books, newspapers, etc.) For questions about writing systems, use [language].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm proposing a tag synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/writing-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;writing-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;writing-systems&lt;/a&gt; to be synonymized to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;. Doing so would likely mean that we don't need the second sentence in the &lt;em&gt;written-material&lt;/em&gt; tag wiki excerpt, as a substring match on &lt;code&gt;writ&lt;/code&gt; will show both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T02:28:02.140" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T02:28:02.140" Title="Tag synonym proposal: writing-systems -&gt; language" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-12T14:06:19.477" Score="6" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64313/how-to-be-hidden-from-world-for-a-year&quot;&gt;requests asking for help plotting a terrorist attack&lt;/a&gt; or a possibly real crime should be considered Off Topic for our site, because, if somebody really does come up with a great idea and it really does fall into the hands of a criminal, that just is not good form for Worldbuilding. I mean, it's not paranoia if you &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; there really are criminals out there trying to figure out ways to kill people. Just think what our mothers would say if they found out we had helped destroy the world or part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22997" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T16:13:02.787" Title="Should questions requesting help creating a terrorist attack be answered?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-12-12T22:04:18.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4165" CreationDate="2016-12-12T14:51:15.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Terrorism is not Off topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We create worlds, and those world may include anything. More importantly, we tend to create worlds that matter to us. And terrorism has stricken minds a lot in the past decades. So yes, terrorism is on topic, along with war, theft, rape, torture and any other horrid thing we know and hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Most things on this website are not new&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in no way meant to disrespect the wonderful WB community. The thing is, most of WB's value (and most of SE) is not to create knowledge but to connect it. People on WB don't look for zero-day exploits or new bomb designs, they look for &lt;em&gt;already existing ones&lt;/em&gt;. Now of course connecting information creates new information, but the addings of this community is that it would connect the terrorist plot to... the specificities of a world different from ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It would most likely be unusable anyway&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's first ditch unusable and unrealistic answers (they exist), the big problem of a terrorist attack is not the overall plot, but the details of it. How secure are the communications between the terrorists, how to get the materials for the attack, how to go through the layers of security. From the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of a thermonuclear device to its fabrication and then use, you'll need very very very very very talented engineers. If you have those, you're not gonna need some WB answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Putting in place that kind of moderation seems very problematic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &amp;quot;where to draw the line&amp;quot; seems very difficult. To me, considering the questions to be forbidden is threatening a lot of people with good intentions. How can you know if your question is going to help terrorists? Do you remove the question if it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; created worthy terrorist information? How do you know what is terrorist-worthy? Why would you punish a question for its answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you would punish the answers? That gives you even more moderating work to do, you are splitting discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, refraining people from posting based on something that vague seems very bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Enough with that damn terrorist craze&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously. I know this is a very emotional topic, but that &amp;quot;we need to do something because we need to feel safe and we don't know what to do so we will do the first thing that seems to address the issue&amp;quot; is just creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust. Please don't bring that atmosphere to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T14:51:15.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4165" CreationDate="2016-12-12T15:53:59.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Death, Destruction and Violence are On-Topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every so often WB.Meta gets a post like this where someone is worried about encouraging violence, pedophilia, racism, etc. and I believe these should be addressed.  However, keep in mind that the content covered by WB is &lt;em&gt;the entire universe&lt;/em&gt; of which violence is an intrinsic part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other Meta questions related to this one: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/664/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-that-have-the-possibility-of-offending-people&quot;&gt;Offending People&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3617/about-children-and-sex&quot;&gt;Children and Sex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3394/should-questions-about-painfully-killing-people-be-welcomed-on-this-site&quot;&gt;Violence on WB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3619/10364&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a previous incarnation of this question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The difference between exploring and advocating&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an enormous difference between advocating for violence and exploring how it might be done.  As mentioned many other places on WB, advocating for violence is completely unacceptable and will mod-hammered immediately.  However, asking how violence might be done is okay.  We have entire categories devoted to weapons, ancient, medieval, modern, and futuristic along with the employment of those weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Judgment of Intent&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference between a terrorist and anti-terrorism operative is intent.  Both sides are well versed in the various techniques, scenarios, weaknesses and strengths.  Both sides think about these things &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt;.  Similarly, anyone with information security experience will tell you that they think about how to hack things all the time too.  The ideas themselves are not dangerous; it's what people do with those ideas that are dangerous.  It is incredibly difficult to gauge absolute intent based on a single WB question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T15:53:59.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T00:41:21.117" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the weekend, I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64131/why-would-a-fire-dragon-still-be-afraid-of-torches&quot;&gt;this question about why dragons would be afraid of fire&lt;/a&gt;. To me, it seemed like a pretty clear-cut case of an opinion-based question. There are currently 17 answers, each of which seem to be equally valid. There isn't enough information provided in the question to constrain answers, or to provide any indication on what the OP is looking for. There isn't even a solid definition of the OP's dragons (how big are they? Are they intelligent? What natural defenses do they have?). In fact, even if it's not 'opinion-based' (maybe I'm combining that close reason with the retired 'idea generation'), then it's still definitely too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, everyone who reviewed my VTC chose to leave the question open. I don't review that often any more, so maybe I'm out of touch. Can someone explain to me why I'm wrong, and how that question was suitably constrained and not opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T07:59:18.063" Title="Why is &quot;Why would a fire dragon still be afraid of torches?&quot; not opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4168" CreationDate="2016-12-13T01:13:43.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has to do with the removal of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idea-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idea-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idea-generation&lt;/a&gt;; questions that involve creative thinking and design to address problems &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed. That would probably put us on the &lt;strong&gt;broad&lt;/strong&gt; end of the spectrum, but there's a good reason why it isn't opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Evidence means facts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If answers can create claims, support them with evidence, and reason some sort of connection between the evidence and claims, there is no &quot;opinion&quot; to base selecting an answer on - they will be based in facts, only organized in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is little to no &lt;strong&gt;evidence&lt;/strong&gt; to base claims off of - such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67695/would-a-civilisation-be-better-without-nationalities&quot;&gt;Would a civilisation be better without nationalities&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - and answers &lt;strong&gt;speculate wildly&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;vary greatly&lt;/strong&gt;, the question probably opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why would a dragon still be afraid of torches&quot; may not have the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; supporting evidence, but answers use reasoning based on known facts as opposed to saying &quot;well I think&quot;  or &quot;my idea is ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T07:16:53.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T06:42:51.530" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;(First time here, I hope I'm doing it right ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64284/creature-design-is-beauty-exclusive-to-humanoid-things&quot;&gt;Beauty&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it tagged as opinion based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several definitions of beauty, e.g. at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beauty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster&lt;/a&gt;, that sound alike:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Question asked is, in my opinion, NOT &quot;Is xyz beautiful?&quot;, which clearly is opinion based, but &quot;Can only humanoid things be beautiful&quot; which is clearly not opinion based, because there are definitions of beauty. In case of human beings there are even mathematical formulae (Golden Cut, Legs to Body ration) that define beauty (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goldennumber.net/beauty/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the phi of the beholder&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29870" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T20:56:16.487" Title="Why is this question opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T16:08:22.193" Score="11" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I go on with this post, the assertion in the title is actually logically sound and consistent, which I find beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, more seriously, this is something I have noticed in most &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; answers. The answer is almost always one of those things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;No because of that very simple fact&quot; (usually but not always, a fundamental principle of thermodynamics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Yes and it actually exists&quot; (or has existed in the past).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This is a technology we expect to have soon&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fermi paradox&lt;/a&gt;: if you rephrase &quot;is life on another planet possible&quot; as &quot;is life on &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; planet possible&quot;, this falls in the &quot;Yes and it exists&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this both mind-boggling and beautiful. In a sense, it's quite understandable as nature hates void and we like to realize anything that seems possible (allegedly sometimes just &quot;because it's hard&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there some answers where it says &quot;No because of that complicated fact&quot;? Was there an answer like &quot;yes, it's possible, but it didn't happen on earth because ...&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, am I just underinformed? Some elders may have knowledge about good answers to share...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T20:39:31.463" Title="According to reality check, possibility implies existence" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4172" CreationDate="2016-12-15T07:31:08.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logically speaking, possibility does in fact imply existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as we take into account the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The universe is infinite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The requested item/concept/idea doesn't break the laws of physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For as long as the universe is infinite, you can check different places for the existence of a valid item/concept/idea - which means you can check until you find it and never run out of places to check. You'll find it eventually, just like how you can eventually count to any number, as all numbers are contained within the limits if negative infinity and positive infinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is this an issue? What does it matter that all reality-check answers are of those three categories? I suspect it's exactly because the question needs an answer of that type, that all the answers end up being of that type. After all, if you asked &quot;does X exist in real life?&quot; and I said &quot;Monkeys like bananas&quot;, that wouldn't quite make sense, would it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T07:31:08.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-16T05:05:59.947" Score="5" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes another user makes a lengthy edit to a question that leaves it substantially worse than it was to start with, contains grammatical errors, changes the intent, and is a huge pain to correct in detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way for the original author to revert that edit entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28533" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T14:13:48.530" Title="Is There A Way To Revert An Unwelcome Edit From Another User?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4178" CreationDate="2016-12-16T05:21:41.217" Score="8" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I received some &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; negative feedback after editing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64777/what-would-happen-if-a-bacterium-hijacked-human-gender-determination&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; (see comments and edit history). To me, parts of the question were unstructured, and needed clarification, but to the asker, they made sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited what I thought needed clarifying, and the OP told me my edits read terribly, made poor word choices, and were too hard for them to find a way to fix. I was told I did a sloppy job, and they said they were &quot;really offended&quot; by the changes I made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked specifically what I did wrong, and while they did not reply, they have been active on the site since then. Clearly I did &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, and I would like to avoid doing that something again, but I do not know what that is. For such an astoundingly negative response I expect a genuine reason for the OP to be upset, but it is not clear to me why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a genuine reason to respond to an edit in such an overwhelmingly negative way; did I really do something &quot;offensive&quot; that is clear to others but not to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do better if I am at fault so I don't receive such negative feedback in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T02:09:57.370" Title="How should I improve the way I edit questions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4175" CreationDate="2016-12-16T05:27:51.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, it's called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;rollback&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqKcm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqKcm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to the edit that you wish to change, and click the &quot;&lt;code&gt;rollback&lt;/code&gt;&quot; button directly below the edit description. You should have sufficient reputation to do so (2000+).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the &lt;strong&gt;owner&lt;/strong&gt; of the post, &lt;strong&gt;you can always&lt;/strong&gt; rollback it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edit is for clarity and you do not like it, consider instead changing the edit itself or rolling back and making an edit of your own so that the idea of &quot;clearing it up&quot; is still preserved. If the editor had problems understanding, chances are they aren't the only one; even if you don't like their edit, you should find a way to make your question more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="34288" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T14:13:48.530" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T14:13:48.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4176" CreationDate="2016-12-16T08:10:49.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Unfortunately, you can't. Sorry. Some people will always dislike something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each question and answer on here is ultimately someone's baby. They may have just banged it out quickly without much thought or they may have conceived it with love and molded it into the exact perfect shape they desire. Whichever is the case, though, it's still their baby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people will appreciate the help of others in raising their baby, helping to improve the clarity of communication, for example. Others will take it as a deep insult to their Q&amp;amp;A parenting skills if someone so much as tidies up a windswept semi-colon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people appreciate your help, then help them. If people don't (and especially if they are rude about it) then don't fret about it, move on and find people who do appreciate it. I assure you that the overwhelming reaction to helpful edits is gratitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, I think the negative reaction came from the extent of your changes. The actual changes made look good to me and definitely improved the question. However, you just gave someone's baby a new hair cut and they took it personally, no matter that it was an improvement. The changes were too large for that particular OP to be happy with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people don't want to be helped, some people are happy with a bit of help, others are comfortable with more extensive revisions. Unfortunately, it's hard to predict how people will react, so the main recommendation I can make is that your edits should change the question as little as possible while improving it as much as possible. A fine balancing act that's more art than science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T15:22:50.430" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T15:22:50.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4176" CreationDate="2016-12-16T19:36:04.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents is that the original post was readable. Your edits were more readable, and didn't really alter the meaning of anything. So on sum, your edits were good. Except that, they weren't really needed in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: is it worth tweaking a decent question to make it read a little better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is no. I try to only edit to either a. correct obvious grammar/spelling/capitalization or b. attempt to make an interesting but clearly close-worthy question (due to too broad, or unclear what you are asking) better enough that it doesn't get closed. If the post has problems but doesn't meet the above criteria, I prefer to nag them from the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More philosophically, it is great when more people take ownership of Worldbuilding and attempt to make questions and answers better. But there is no 'right way' to do it. So its not that your edit was bad, but you just saw first-hand how needlessly editing a post, even if you are strictly editing in improvements, might conflict with the author's intent (somehow). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T19:36:04.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4175" CreationDate="2016-12-16T20:46:19.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4177/29&quot;&gt;discussed by Zxyrra&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to reverse an edit entirely by performing a &quot;rollback&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important special case: SPAM!&lt;/strong&gt; The one time when you absolutely &lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt; roll back a post is if the edit turns the post into spam. In that case, &lt;strong&gt;do not touch the post at all&lt;/strong&gt; but rather just &lt;em&gt;flag it as spam and move on&lt;/em&gt;. It will be dealt with in short order, and if you edit it, your account could be tainted by the spam flag process as well. Don't risk that; it's simply not worth the benefit. For the same reason, you shouldn't edit spam posts either; just flag them and let the system do its thing. If you believe the owner of the post is &lt;em&gt;legitimately&lt;/em&gt; not involved in spamming, but the post is still spam, flag it for moderator attention with a custom reason and point this out. If an edit somehow snuck through the review process and turned a &lt;em&gt;legitimate&lt;/em&gt; post into spam, diamond moderators have the ability to reverse the spam flag penalty for the user, as long as we become aware of it; in such a case, a custom flag will ensure that the post is brought to the attention of the moderators, but you should &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; flag as spam with the system-defined flag reason. (Post owners: This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the same thing as saying that the penalty will always be reversed. Any such posts will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and ultimately at the discretion of the moderator handling the flag. Hopefully it will never be an issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To roll back an edit,&lt;/strong&gt; click the time indication in the &quot;edited&quot; block under the post in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GCcZz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GCcZz.png&quot; alt=&quot;First access the revision history by clicking the &amp;quot;edited&amp;quot; link&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings up the revision history of the post. Find the revision of the post that you wish to &lt;strong&gt;roll back &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, then click &lt;strong&gt;rollback&lt;/strong&gt; above it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DD7Ez.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DD7Ez.png&quot; alt=&quot;Locate the revision you like and click &amp;quot;rollback&amp;quot; above it&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to either be the owner of the post or have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Edit Questions and Answers&lt;/a&gt; privilege to roll back a post to a previous revision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not have the necessary privileges, and feel that the edit makes the post substantially worse, your choices are basically to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bring it up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the Worldbuilding Chat main chat room, &lt;em&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (this is probably the quickest; chat is usually pretty well populated), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bring it up on Meta (this is a good idea if it's more of a policy issue), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the post for moderator attention and (unless it is utterly obvious) describe how the edit makes the post substantially worse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't roll back unnecessarily if other alternative approaches are workable.&lt;/strong&gt; Basically, only roll back a post to a previous revision if the new revision is &lt;em&gt;decisively worse&lt;/em&gt; than the older one. If there is some particular part of the edit that you disagree with, it's better to edit further than to roll back. However, &lt;em&gt;don't simply put back what was there before;&lt;/em&gt; instead of simply rolling back to the previous revision, whether by editing or by rollback, &lt;em&gt;consider what the person who edited the post was trying to accomplish with their edit&lt;/em&gt; and try to maintain the spirit of the edit while making the post &lt;em&gt;yet better&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T13:49:41.793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T13:49:41.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4176" CreationDate="2016-12-16T22:26:47.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I am approving or rejecting edits made by others to posts made by others, I reject about two-thirds of them and only approve them if they are either absolutely necessary, or if correct a typo or formatting issue that is clearly inadvertent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing for style is IMHO almost always ill advised, and when I edit, I am always a minimalist, not adding any unnecessary verbiage or changing the original in any way that is unnecessary. Editing stylistic points is much more irritating than any other kind of edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is clear enough to understand well enough to edit without a comment, it almost never needs editing for clarity. If a question is unclear, usually a comment asking for clarification is better. We're in the business of communication, not polished publication of the Stack Exchange posts themselves. Editing is generally not justified by a desire to make the post itself beautiful in the eyes of the editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the edit had a sentence fragment that made no sense, changed a couple of preposition/linking words in a manner that were incorrect in usage, changed a consistent tense in the original to a mixed tense in the paragraph, added junk words, garbled the flow of ideas (because clauses in a complex sentence don't map sequentially to separate sentences) and left a writing style that sounded stiff and awkward. An edited post here conveys the impression (sometimes inaccurately) that the author wrote it and it is much less natural to see the edit history if you are just reading it, so that is not cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you edit someone else's work, you have a much higher responsibility to be 100% correct than you do when writing or editing your own work. Having an unapproved edit made, when the edit contains an obvious mistake and some subtle mistakes of its own, is really irksome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably did need to be broken out into more than one sentence, but because the edit contained multiple errors of its own, and overdid it in making stylistic changes, and disrupted the flow of ideas from their logical order in the original, it went too far and was not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently have work edited in my day job, but then, 95% of the time, I agree that the changes are an improvement, and when they don't I am usually free not to accept them and take another approach. Significantly flawed, unapproved edits are extremely rare in my normal world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'd know how to revert the edit at the time (I've now learned how, but the interface doesn't make it clear how to do it), I would have done so and then addressed the run on sentence or two. But, when there are a huge number of edits made, most of which you disagree with, it is a huge and time consuming pain to go back in and fix them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very nearly deleted the entire post, and I am half inclined to do so even now, because seeing what was done to the post so soured my enthusiasm for having anything to do with it, or even the entire forum, for that manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have smoke blowing out my ears any more at this point and probably won't delete the post or the account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a failure to even acknowledge displeasure with the edit expressed in my comment with a &quot;sorry&quot; really aggravated the annoyance further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I don't know why the system doesn't give the author some kind of approval or reject option for at least a while, as it does when a person which insufficient rep does an edit that requires approval. This isn't Wikipedia where questions and answers are completely and entirely a group production. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28533" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T22:26:47.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2016-12-18T03:20:16.477" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, no hats.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; not necessarily my personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to play devil's advocate, who doesn't want hats and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15338" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T03:20:16.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4172" CreationDate="2016-12-18T20:06:49.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a major factor in this effect is the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-world_assumption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open World Assumption&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  I find the Open World Assumption to be very popular among people developing worlds because it states that anything which is not proven impossible &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be true.  Contrast this with the Closed World Assumption, which is the assumption that anything you cannot prove to be true is false.  These two assumptions sit on opposite ends of a giant spectrum of different approaches to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one believes their listener is using a closed world assumption, any &quot;maybes&quot; they may say will get turns into falsehoods by the closed world assumption in the listener's mind.  After this happens enough times, I think it's natural to flip it around and turn &quot;maybe true&quot; into &quot;true,&quot; just to challenge the closed-world listener to pony up and think about the topic enough to generate a counter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps once the closed-world-minded person spends enough time on the topic, there will be an opportunity for them to meet in the middle in some of the more nuanced positions that a debate can take between closed and open worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T20:06:49.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4189" CreationDate="2016-12-19T07:05:04.757" Score="10" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;This weekend, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64926/is-it-possible-to-build-a-bridge-between-planets&quot;&gt;a question about how to build a bridge between two planets&lt;/a&gt;. That was closed today as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34279/building-a-bridge-to-the-stars&quot;&gt;this question about whether there is enough material to build a bridge between stars&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions are related but definitely are not duplicates... if you read the answers of the older question, you'll find no answer to the new question. The new question wants to know how it could be built. The old one just asked for handwavium &quot;is there enough material.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like the newer question reopened. Can I get the community to please re-evaluate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:43:46.900" Title="I think the bridge-between-planets question was closed improperly as a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4187" CreationDate="2016-12-19T20:36:32.650" Score="25" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;GTZ to you world builders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of the holidays I have offered up three bounties on some of my older questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to join me in offering some of your hard earned (... well let's be honest - not that hard) reputation to your fellow world builders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy holidays everyone! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:22:22.307" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:22:22.307" Title="Get in the spirit: The first annual holiday bounty extravaganza - or bountapalooza" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2016-12-19T21:10:20.400" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured we might as well keep track of all of this, so I've created a community wiki answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A list of the questions with bounties started during this season:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44486/627&quot;&gt;Logic to support specialized kingdom level militaries&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/42177/627&quot;&gt;How long would it take a region to geologically settle down after a major cataclysm?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/630/627&quot;&gt;How do I blend cultures - naming world features?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/63484/627&quot;&gt;Guns vs. Moon Dust&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by DaaaahWhoosh (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/541/627&quot;&gt;Natural Projectile Weapons&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Tim B and bountied by DaaahWhoosh (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22872/627&quot;&gt;Could life exist in a circumstellar disk?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by HDE 226868 (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/62955/627&quot;&gt;How long does a component of a Dyson swarm spend in shadow?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Werrf and bountied by kingledion (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/62303/627&quot;&gt;Could a carbon/silicon/oxygen planet exist?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Schafer and bountied by kingledion (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64753/627&quot;&gt;What impact is required for a visible (from Earth) ejecta plume on Earth&amp;#39;s Moon, and would the Moon survive?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Michael Kjörling  and bountied by Pᴇᴛᴇ (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64958/627&quot;&gt;Why would a decision making machine decide to destroy itself?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Dotan Reis and bountied by Amani Kilumanga (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/63517/627&quot;&gt;Will majority of population dismiss a video of fight between two supernatural beings?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by slobodan.blazeski (+150)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57827/627&quot;&gt;Would humans outcompete sequential hermaphrodites?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Yuvato and bountied by slobodan.blazeski (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64903/627&quot;&gt;What is the smallest planetary mass that can prevent &amp;#39;me&amp;#39; from flying off into space?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Mikey and bountied by Mołot (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/34820/627&quot;&gt;What would this nebula look like from a planet?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Monica Cellio and bountied by HDE 226868 (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61059/17720&quot;&gt;How does one calculate the tidal heating of a satellite?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Alexander Ferguson and bountied by Bellerophon (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38590/627&quot;&gt;Humans can now run 40 mph. How do I keep the stupid people alive?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Tres-2b (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/42617/627&quot;&gt;Why would merfolk have hair?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Tres-2b (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/45612/627&quot;&gt;Is Cancer Biologically Universal?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Tres-2b (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28158/627&quot;&gt;The Six-Billion Dollar Man: Oxygen. Do we have the technology?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Samuel (+200)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65196/627&quot;&gt;Measures of power: Nation States&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44994/627&quot;&gt;What would a Boeing 747 look like if it were left in a hangar for 5,000 years. Could it still be flown?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by superluminary and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/37105/627&quot;&gt;Benefits of or reasons why a species would have only one eye?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Xandar The Zenon (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60033/627&quot;&gt;In the future, around year 2500, will only one language exist on earth?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Amruth A (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36667/627&quot;&gt;Can Cloud Nine be built?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Samuel (+400)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53283/627&quot;&gt;Safe way to eat zombies?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by JDługosz (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12849/627&quot;&gt;How large can a volcano be?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by HDE 226868 (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66212/627&quot;&gt;A culture of lies&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Erin Thursby (+200)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66220/627&quot;&gt;What conditions would an A-type star need to have a blue color?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by Mattias (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the end of &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt;, I think we can call the bountapalooza concluded. In it, we had . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;28 bounties started . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on 28 different questions . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by 16 different users . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a total of 2,800 reputation points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems to be a pretty big success. Nice job, Worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T15:47:00.343" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-19T21:10:20.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T22:20:14.440" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw a question on school systems:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65044/how-many-years-could-you-trim-from-schooling&quot;&gt;How many years could you trim from schooling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume you are a secretary of education in a country facing serious labor shortages. The Dear Leader has already ordered a closure of all unnecessary fields, which includes everything beside STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Medicine &amp;amp; Accounting. Now it's your job to trim years from primary &amp;amp; secondary education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the maximum number of years that you could trim from the current 12 (8 primary, 4 secondary) without sending unprepared high school graduates to college?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've rechecked the guidelines and I'm baffled. Why would this be off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9487" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T20:53:37.387" Title="How is this question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4185" CreationDate="2016-12-19T23:33:34.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been reopened. Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T23:33:34.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4192" CreationDate="2016-12-20T00:33:41.697" Score="10" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen at least a couple of 'Hot Network Questions' which, appear to be make oblique reference to Star Trek.  Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65129/how-are-there-so-many-species-on-the-space-station-a-long-way-from-anywhere-v&quot;&gt;How are there so many species on the space station &amp;#39;A long way from anywhere V&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63587/why-are-there-no-toilets-on-the-starship-exciting-undertaking&quot;&gt;Why are there no toilets on the starship &amp;#39;Exciting Undertaking&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some unspoken rule to the effect of &quot;the first rule of WorldBuilding is you do not talk about WorldBuilding (and also Star Trek)&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or have we all been transported into &lt;a href=&quot;http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VmA7TjPMEdA/U2BilY6vqBI/AAAAAAAAKzE/fj5lKUSOgeM/s1600/MonkeyFracasJr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the distant future&lt;/a&gt;, where the Star Trek Wars have settled the matter once and for all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe it's just one person's entertaining style of asking questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it forbidden to directly reference Star Trek?  Would it be more fun for everybody if it was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T14:46:13.003" Title="Is Star Trek verboten?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2016-12-20T07:19:05.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joe Bloggs made it pretty clear that the questions weren't &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; Start Trek or the Star Trek universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The references are satirical in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I welcome the all-too-brief glimpses of humour on WB, and other SE sites for that matter where the rigidity of the rules can stifle creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T07:19:05.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2016-12-20T09:41:08.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not verboten no, in fact they are a useful reference point if creating a world with magic space wizards or similar. Most people are at least familiar with Star Trek and Star Wars (less so Babylon 5 these days but many people will still recognize it) that they are useful starting points. Be aware though that there is virtually no actual science in any of those shows (Star Wars is fantasy in space, Star Trek is basically the same) so any serious scientific questions about them are likely to get shot down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples where a planet from Star Wars is referenced to help explain a concept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2479/terraforming-a-very-cold-planet&quot;&gt;Terraforming a very cold planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8673/buying-energy-from-the-sun/8675#8675&quot;&gt;Buying energy from the sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37113/oxygen-100-plant-free&quot;&gt;Oxygen - 100% plant-free!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see there is no problem with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T11:59:26.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4190" CreationDate="2016-12-20T14:46:13.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one reason to avoid mentioning one of the existing properties is because it immediately locks you into a set of rules that the property has more or less laid out over years/decades.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I say &quot;my universe is like Star Trek except that it has this...&quot; then you immediately get a picture in your head of how that universe works, what is possible, and what is impossible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And a lot of times that's a good thing, because it saves a lot of explaining since a large portion of the community is familiar with the property in question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But it can also be a bad thing because it closes down your thinking to what you know about that universe. Subconsciously you think &quot;Well, that universe doesn't have this, so I won't include that in my answer...&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is so much history (and sloppy writing) in most sci-fi series with more than one season that very few things are actually impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T14:46:13.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4195" CreationDate="2016-12-20T18:48:23.680" Score="8" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently gotten into answering question that I find really interesting, and sometimes feel my answers aren't quite as eloquent as some of the other &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53569/how-many-plants-does-it-take-to-breathe&quot;&gt;amazing answers I've received&lt;/a&gt; to questions that I've asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I just answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65336/solving-the-vulnerabilities-of-a-plant-based-life-forms-civilization-sunlight/65347#65347&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; with a rather lengthy answer, but it feels....sloppy to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I overthinking this (as I tend to do) or are there ways I can further improve my answer quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17568" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T19:15:43.550" Title="How can I improve my answer quality?" Tags="|discussion|answers|low-quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4194" CreationDate="2016-12-20T19:15:43.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer you linked to is one of your best answers, and got upvotes from me and a couple other people, it looks like. I skimmed over some of your other answers, and some things immediately spring out at me about this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You used block quotes, but in the right places.&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes, other people can say things better than we can, and a nicely inserted quote can really make an answer fit together, especially if it gets to the point. You did that well here, with several answers. On the other hand, I feel that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/64854/627&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; of yours, which is almost entirely a block quote, should contain more original writing, as I commented on the first revision. I personally like to read answers where people have tailored the writing to the question, which always makes the answer more focused.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You correctly formatted links.&lt;/strong&gt; You added links in lines as part of sentences, which really lets the answer flow. I know users on other sites who never do that, and it makes the post a lot harder to read. Sometimes, you can list references at the end - I've done that, and I think it's okay - if you won't want to distract your readers. But inline linking can be handy. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/64513/627&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, though several of the sources stick out like a sore thumb. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but in such a case, I'd advise moving them to the end and showing which section they were used for, or figuring out a way to incorporate them into sentences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You used emphasis correctly.&lt;/strong&gt; Some people feel the need to use all caps in places, WHICH COMES ACROSS AS SHOUTING!!! Using &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;**&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; are much better and are the preferred markdown on Stack Exchange. Do continue to use them in the future . . . but not gratuitously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's anything egregious about the answer, and certainly not the length. Some folks - myself certainly included - write longer answers on average, up to and reaching the 30,000 character limit. That can be quite a toll on readers, and I try to keep things much, much, much shorter. I've gotten a &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; better at being concise, but it can be tricky sometimes. When you write  along answer, it can of course feel sloppy and disorganized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer you were concerned about seems fine to me, but you might feel it's still a bit messy. Writing an outline is always something you can do - and something I've done on my longer answers, writing the headings and introductory things before I start the actual answer. It takes a bit of time, but you feel good once you've finished. Another thing I try to do is to write a short answer that covers some main points, then rewrite it using that as a skeleton, to add all the necessary details. But you don't need to worry too much about that; your answers are generally of a nice length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, don't worry about votes. I mean it. The first question you linked to landed on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;the Hot Network Questions List&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that people across the network saw it and viewed it and voted. That's why my answer there got 42 votes. But that answer is not - if I may disagree with you - one of my more amazing answers, and I mean that. The HNQ list really screws up voting. I do have a list of about five or ten answers I'm the proudest of on Worldbuilding out of all that I've written, and &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; are in my top 14 most upvoted answers. 15th, yeah, although that one was a bit wrong, but still. Unless you get a bunch of downvotes accompanied by people pointing out errors, don't compare the merits of one answer with another based on votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not always, I find, accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T19:15:43.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-20T20:46:26.280" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several other stack-exchange sites, &quot;broad&quot; questions are quickly punished due to frequently the other sites being about subjects where you need precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example with math, usually there is only one, or a few correct solutions for a problem, if the question then has &quot;infinite&quot; solutions, the question itself that is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not only a question I asked, but several of the questions that answered my doubts, were closed due to being &quot;too broad&quot;, thus I ask: does Worldbuilding follow Stackoverflow, Math, Physics, etc... precise rules regarding this? Should you ask questions only if there are only one anwser possible? If that is the case, how can be questions be asked in a way that prevent the consumers of the content in the future from finding &quot;word of god&quot; spoilers in the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30528" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T17:34:48.893" Title="In worldbuilding is it needed for a question to only allow one correct answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4188" CreationDate="2016-12-20T20:47:00.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It Doesn't Relate Directly To Worldbuilding&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close it, but I can imagine why it would be closed. I actually voted to reopen, because I don't really think that it is really off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question that takes place in a fictional world is about worldbuilding. In this case, I believe the author of the question failed to explain why this is world building. While the question certainly relates to a society, it seems to focus more on changing our current one than making a fictional one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T20:53:37.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4196" CreationDate="2016-12-20T22:38:08.523" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Few answers rather than one&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the exceedingly broad nature of material that WB covers, there are frequent situations where there are more than one equally good but very different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to think there should be only one &quot;best&quot; answer to a question but I've changed my mind.  &quot;Too broad&quot; is mostly a tool to make sure that answers can be created in a reasonable amount of time and with a manageable level of complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T22:38:08.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T06:13:04.203" Score="7" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, this is my first Hats season, and I'm not sure what to make of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have 3 Hats to my name, I'm not using them as they would cover my avatar. It looks like not many other people are using them either. It seems unfortunate that the effort that went into Hats is not really being utilised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly effort has gone into setting up Hats. I was wondering whether there is a useful purpose to it that I'm missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30534" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T05:26:49.123" Title="Hats, do they build community, or assist with Sorting? Are they plot devices, or status symbols?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-21T06:58:54.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, I can't hear you, I have a hat on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks rather spiffing, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T06:58:54.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-21T08:10:37.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find your lack of faith disturbing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T08:10:37.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-21T08:45:05.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hat's you say? Looks like a beard to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kB7aM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kB7aM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T08:45:05.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-21T09:24:49.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are just a bit of fun, used on every site that signs up for it, not just here on worldbuilding. You can adjust the size, position and rotation of your hats to make them sit on your avatar better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get involved as much or as little as you like, they will all disappear in a few weeks anyway :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T09:24:49.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4205" CreationDate="2016-12-21T13:57:13.797" Score="25" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;The great 2016-2017 Hat-a-thon is off to a roaring start. We are &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com/leaderboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently sitting&lt;/a&gt; at 18th (your mileage may vary, depending on when you click the link), which is really great considering that we are 67th in &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;overall traffic&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let us not be content with punching above our weight class. To truly attract the attention of the masses, we need a rival. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original thought was that Sci-Fi and Fantasy would be a perfect rival, given that they are un-imaginative folks who would prefer to use someone else's world instead of making their own. Unfortunately, they are more than twice ahead of us in hatted-ness, so it would be unwise to start this fight. That is like declaring Alabama, the Patriots, or Barcelona as your rival. No thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I was looking into some of the other sites that are somewhat related to Worldbuilding and near (read: just below) us on the hat leaderboard. Physics seems like a good one . . . we have plenty of physics too and ours is much more interesting, if less correct, than theirs. Or maybe Arqade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I stumbled onto the perfect answer: The Workplace! Because about 80% of my Worldbuilding time is being billed to my workplace it just seems fitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas or opinions on who should be our rival?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T14:20:30.397" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T19:55:47.510" Title="Who are our rivals?" Tags="|discussion|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4204" CreationDate="2016-12-21T22:16:53.567" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;That, my child, goes back to an old story, long before your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It began with the forging of the great hats. Three were given to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;world builders&lt;/a&gt;, immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;science fiction aficionados&lt;/a&gt;, great imaginers and craftsmen of the most brilliant books and movies. And nine, nine hats were gifted to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;writers&lt;/a&gt; — who above all else, desire a good story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For within these hats was bound the strength and will to govern each site. But they were all of them deceived, for another hat was made. In the land of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, in the fires of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackpromos.com/promos/12/winter-bash-2012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt;, the Dark Lord &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/620/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; forged in secret a master hat, to control all others. And into this Hat, he poured his brilliance, his sarcasm, and his will to dominate all sites. One Hat to rule them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One by one, the free sites of Stack Exchange fell to the power of the Hat. But there were some who resisted. A last alliance of Writers and Worldbuilders marched against the armies of Stack Overflow, and on the slopes of Mount Winter Bash they fought for the freedom of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Victory was near. But the power of the Hat could not be undone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was in this moment, when all hope had faded, that &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/505925/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;, moderator of both sites, took up her father's pen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shog9, the enemy of the free-peoples of Stack Exchange, was defeated. The Hat passed to Monica, who had this one chance to destroy evil forever. But the hearts of Writers are easily corrupted. And the Hat of Power has a will of its own. It betrayed Monica . . . to her &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend, legend became myth, and for three years, the Hat passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hat came to the world builder &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/3659411/tim-b&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, who took it deep into the hard drives of his computer. And there, it consumed him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hat brought to Tim B unnatural popular questions and answers. For one year it poisoned his posts. And in the gloom of Tim B's computer, it waited. Darkness crept back into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat rooms&lt;/a&gt; of the world. Rumor grew of a shadow in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, whispers of a nameless fear, and the Hat of Power perceived its time had now come. It abandoned Tim B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But something happened then the Hat did not intend. It was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A teenager: HDE 226868 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/4816578/hde-226868&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time will soon come when teenagers will shape the fortunes of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Stack Overflow (and Shog9) is clearly our arch-rival, and I see that they're only ahead of us by . . . over 118,328 hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Okay, she won, but I have to include that in. Otherwise the story isn't as good.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 Apologies also to Tim B. I don't really think that you're Gollum.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:38:54.597" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T19:55:47.510" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4218" CreationDate="2016-12-22T17:23:04.723" Score="8" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;So going through a few questions, I came across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65579/colony-on-the-moon-how-fast-can-santa-deliver&quot;&gt;question I felt was too story based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64809/how-would-a-group-of-survivors-with-a-rebel-criminal-get-along-stranded-on-an-al/64853#64853&quot;&gt;one that was closed as a result&lt;/a&gt;, and didn't really have anything to do with building a world.Being as new as I am, my first instinct was to check if maybe I was misreading what &quot;Too Story Based&quot; meant. That led me to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3298/when-should-i-close-a-question-as-too-story-based&quot;&gt;post on meta&lt;/a&gt; where it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question should be closed if it contains any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Asking about what a character or small group of characters would decide in a given situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Asking about a specific individual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not asking about building the world but instead creating a scenario&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Lack of context, if it is unclear how the question relates to building a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we only take literal building of a setting for our story as &quot;building a world&quot;, or are things like creating a society off topic or &quot;Too Story Based&quot;? Essentially is the difference between &quot;How does this work....&quot; rather than &quot;What happens if ......&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this just a syntactical issue with the wording of the question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17568" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T16:17:41.460" Title="How do we define &quot;building a world&quot; in this meta?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4206" CreationDate="2016-12-22T17:36:08.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is about worldbuilding writ large.  Society, governments, different types of creatures, and more are all part of the world; it's not just about planets and mountains and stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference is that a question about what my band of characters would do is off-topic, but a question about what behaviors would tend to arise in societies with such-and-such characteristics is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some relevant tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T18:31:26.963" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T18:31:26.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-23T03:20:14.687" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really want to make a decision on it, although it it is probably not on topic. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The year is 2055, you are an advanced, self-aware, kind robot who only wants to do good. You were hacked into and forced to kill an entire race, powerless to stop, you blame yourself after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you try to stop killing, and how would you react to the aftermath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may as well elaborate on what AIs are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are individual units, there is no ultimate overseeing Unit that controls every robot, they are individual, but work together using the Internet.&#xA;There are two processors, one is a Quantum Processor, emulating a true brain/consciousness, the other is a normal computer, and works with the Quantum Processor to control the actual robot. When the normal computer is hacked into to control the robot, the Quantum Processor is unable to do anything but watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T08:44:14.693" Title="Is This Question On-Topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4208" CreationDate="2016-12-23T07:55:17.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would you try to stop killing, and how would you react to the aftermath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smells like plot creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29870" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T07:55:17.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4208" CreationDate="2016-12-23T08:44:14.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like it would be best off in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, which is specifically for honing questions before asking them; but to answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think with some minor rewrites to take out individual references (for example change 'you' to 'a sentient AI robot' this wouldn't be off topic. Presumably the same thing can happen to other robots as well (which falls under the purview of building a world, not focusing on a character).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say, however, that the two questions you ask are very much different. It might seem like one is a logical progression of the other, but 'what would you try to stop yourself' and 'how would you feel after' are very different, and would be best off in separate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T08:44:14.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4176" CreationDate="2016-12-24T01:37:58.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I do better if I am at fault so I don't receive such negative feedback in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do better.  Make fewer mistakes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, only try to improve things where you are sure that you are making them better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, try not to change an author's meaning.  If you have trouble discerning the author's meaning, ask about it.  Avoid editing based on a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, carefully read your proposed edits.  Check if you are creating any grammar errors while you &quot;improve&quot; someone else's post.  If you break up a run-on sentence, pay attention to which subjects, verbs, and objects correspond to each other in the original sentence.  Avoid accidentally creating new sentences that mis-match the subjects, verbs, and objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, you added two grammar errors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You ended a sentence with &quot;in a manner.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a sentence that ended with &quot;[not] caught early on.&quot;  You changed the subject of this sentence from &quot;a clerical error&quot; to &quot;data [that] will be published&quot;.  This change significantly affected the meaning of the sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try not to put words in other people's mouths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this example, you added the words &quot;I assert&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only add redundancy when necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this example, you changed &quot;had started&quot; to &quot;had initially started&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to your profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I may be super disagreeable or argumentative but please don't take it personally!&#xA;  I just like to support my answers, even if it sometimes means dragging everyone else's down verbally in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are &quot;super disagreeable&quot;, expect people to &quot;take it personally&quot;.  Try not to be &quot;super disagreeable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identify your mistakes.  Be specific!  (At least when talking to yourself.)  Learn from your mistakes.  Try to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2177" LastEditorUserId="2177" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T02:09:57.370" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T02:09:57.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-24T20:27:27.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For thousands of minutes, the tiny people of Xandaland have looked up to their moon-god Hat, and worshipped him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T20:27:27.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-25T08:38:50.183" Score="10" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had a great year on worldbuilding, and as christmas has arrived, I thought we could all regale our favorite moments this past year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the best part of this year was the amount of new users we got, the feeling of hearing their ideas and helping with their questions gave me a sense of power I have yet to match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T16:27:29.737" Title="Merry Christmas Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-28T14:02:30.337" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a question based on a specific topic (e.g. a special suit) and I have several questions associated with this topic (e.g. how it works, where it will work, and how effective it is), is it better to separate the question into several questions, or list all of the questions under one? Is there some sort of etiquette on how this is done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30670" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:54:41.223" Title="What if I have several questions associated with one topic?" Tags="|support|questions|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4214" CreationDate="2016-12-28T14:22:58.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;One question per question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things easier to answer, you should only put one question in each WB question you ask.  That helps keep you focused and all the people who might answer focused too.  If you do include more than one question per question, it will likely be closed as &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link each previous question in your new question so that people can get a sense of the context you are working with.  Off-handedly, there's this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20664/naturally-occurring-wheels-do-the-mech-vs-tank-comparison-apply-to-organi&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that references a previous question on a topic.  Something similar should work for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Monica said, make sure each question is self-contained.  Links to other question should be for context only, not important information required to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T15:22:18.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4214" CreationDate="2016-12-28T14:23:38.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One question per &lt;em&gt;Question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;several questions over a longer time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the format is intended for questions with a single clear answer (and we're already stretching that on here..), the best way to go about in my opinion &amp;amp; experience is to &lt;em&gt;ask several questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your questions will most likely be interwoven you should start by asking one thing and then do follow-ups using decisions made based on (the) answer(s) you've received on (the) previous question(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;exempli gratia&lt;/em&gt;: My excellent series of questions on the mean booze-rat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56710/how-does-the-booze-rat-fuel-its-defensive-mechanism&quot;&gt;On how the booze-rat would store alcohol in its body&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56945/how-did-the-booze-rat-evolve-its-defensive-mechanism&quot;&gt;Then on how that system could possibly evolve&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58096/how-do-the-people-of-hj%C3%A5rdan-farm-the-booze-rat&quot;&gt;And eventually on how to milk &lt;s&gt;the hype&lt;/s&gt; booze-rat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T14:29:00.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2016-12-29T14:46:12.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;United North America except for independent California and Western Mexico&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one of the settings of a GURPS (tabletop RPG) campaign I'm planning, I would like for all of North America (Canada, United States, Mexico) to be one nation, except for two independent states in California and western Mexico. California would be your run-of-the-mill near-future sci-fi technocracy, while western Mexico would be a narco-state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big problem here, of course, is that I'm trying to explain why three very large countries would merge, but two important regions would separate from their nations at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current thoughts are suggesting climate change as a catalyst for both the union and division. With large portions of the US and Mexico slated to become almost uninhabitable, the current North American border lines might make a lot less sense. [&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox note:&lt;/strong&gt; I need to find the NASA maps that I saw in a news article and link them here.] There is real-world precedent for drought destroying nation states (Somalia), so maybe it could lead to them fusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is that climate change extreme enough to cause this geopolitical shift would be more likely to make California and western Mexico uninhabitable than independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could climate change lead to a united North America except California and Western Mexico in a near-future setting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sandbox Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel my question is too broad, but the most logical place to split it (Can climate change drive a united North America? / Can climate change drive an independent California?) would miss what I think is the key difficulty with my planned setting. How can I tighten the focus of my question to get better answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8593" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T14:46:12.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4206" CreationDate="2016-12-29T16:17:41.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, too story-based or plot-based means that you are asking a question where different characters might arrive at different solutions and the best solution will depend on which character.  For example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being married is inconvenient for [reasons].  Should I &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Murder my spouse?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just ignore that I'm married and proceed as if single?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Get a divorce?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try and work things out?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first generally only makes sense for murdering psychopaths.  The second is frowned upon in polite society and may lead to the third option (or the first).  Choosing between the last two depends on the exact circumstances.  So we say that these kinds of decisions would be too story-based.  Maybe your character is a murdering psychopath for example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is off-topic because any of the four answers could be correct for that specific character.  Further, the character's choice may help define that character.  If you want your character to come off as cold and uncaring, the second option might be great.  But that's a question of what story you want to tell, not a characteristic of the world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can however find a similar question that is on-topic.  For example, &quot;In a world where murder and divorce are equally legal, how would that change the prevalence of each choice?&quot;  Or the same question for equally illegal.  Assume laws are otherwise the same as [insert country here].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is on-topic because it is about a characteristic of the world, not the specific decision made by a specific character.  In aggregate, decisions are more predictable than in specific.  Your specific character may still pick whichever option (except divorce if illegal).  We helped you define the world in which the option was made.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may of course be other reasons why such a question might be problematic.  For example, the question could be Too Broad or Unclear What You're Asking.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem that I've seen recently is that questions that are only cosmetically story-based are receiving close votes.  These are questions that can be trivially rewritten not to be story-based by focusing on the more general case.  There's an argument for closing these questions, but it requires an explanation of how the question can be fixed.  Without that explanation, closing such questions is simply frustrating, not helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see far more questions like that than questions that are actually story-based in their fundamental nature.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65579/2113&quot;&gt;open example&lt;/a&gt;, I think that the fundamental question is about the nature of the world not the nature of the character (Santa).  We could trivially generalize this as a character with certain abilities.  It's simply easier to describe this character as Santa, as that already gives us a description of the abilities.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the meta post you referenced, which specifically lists as on-topic:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Creating significant figures such as leaders, gods in a pantheon, historical figures, etc where the question relates to building of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Santa would count as a significant figure.  He is himself a characteristic of the world, not a mere character that appears in it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64809/2113&quot;&gt;closed example&lt;/a&gt;.  There, the question is what will these specific characters do in this specific plot situation.  The answers are limitless.  They can band together to kill the rebel.  They can agonize but choose mercy.  They can succumb to the rebel's skills of persuasion.  They can do all of these things in sequence.  There's no technical question, not even of psychology.  Any of those scenarios can be written realistically.  The author needs to choose which best fits the story.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:31.333" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T16:17:41.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4226" CreationDate="2016-12-31T04:12:01.713" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a classic example of a question based on bad assumptions: &#xA;&quot;Have you stopped beating your wife yet?&quot; when you do not have a wife or, if you do, have never beaten her. What is the correct answer to such a question? Zen koans give us the answer &quot;mu&quot; -- an answer that unasks a bad question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have several questions that are based on bad assumptions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66391/alternative-or-incentive-for-cryogenic-sleep-or-deep-hibernation&quot;&gt;the latest&lt;/a&gt;) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66567/what-if-y2k-was-possible&quot;&gt;a better example&lt;/a&gt;). I've wanted a new close reason regularly, both on Worldbuilding and other forums, for &quot;Closed: question relies a false assumption.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add new reasons for closing questions?&#xA;If so, would people support adding that as a reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T12:34:18.730" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T14:58:57.420" Title="Can we get a &quot;bad assumption&quot; option for closing questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2016-12-31T05:26:49.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you must understand is that there are truly great programmers in the world, capable of churning out code to solve any problem. ANY problem. And there are managers in this world who have truly strange problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manager: &quot;Can you build me a web site that turns users who visit it into fish?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great Programmer: &quot;Yes! Give me 2 weeks and all the Mountain Dew I can drink.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manager: &quot;So let it be written, so let it be done!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the problems that can arise. Because the GPs cannot be prevented from programming &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, we have to constantly supply them with problems to solve -- harmless, yet tricky problems, something that consumes enough of their bandwidth that when the manager comes around asking for fish web sites, the GP replies, &quot;Sorry... I'm busy.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hats are likely a manifestation of this. You can imagine the situation: a tech lead sees a manager coming down the hall, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mind full of mauve databases&lt;/a&gt;. The tech lead listens and hears only silence from the GP... no typing! That means that the current queue of problems has been solved! The GP will take the first interesting problem that comes around! Do you see the look of terror on the tech lead's face? The TL looks around frantically and spots... a hat! And blurts out, &quot;Hey, GP, I bet you can't put hats on all the icons of people who do various achievements, and do it in a way that doesn't interfere with their icons.&quot; And the GP replies, &quot;I bet I can!&quot; And the GP is lost deep in the code before the manager has a chance to say, &quot;Good afternoon!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, wear your hat proudly. And be grateful that you're not a fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: To answer your question, in this case, the hats are plot devices. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T05:26:49.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4196" CreationDate="2016-12-31T05:36:19.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only been on WB for 6 months... it took a while to get an intuitive grasp of &quot;too broad&quot; category. I'm still not sure I can define it, but there is a difference between questions that are infinitely open-ended and questions that are open but allow for oneupmanship (isn't English awesome that we have a word like that?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What's the best way to XYZ?&quot; is often a good question. There may be infinite ways to achieve XYZ, but each answer vies to provide the most efficient/most interesting/most gruesome/most &lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt; solution. Compare that with &quot;What are all the ways to achieve XYZ?&quot; We usually get those questions from things like, &quot;If I change Q, what are all of the effects on the world?&quot; A complete categorization of all the effects is likely too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T05:36:19.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2016-12-31T07:54:30.987" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inevitably WB will get questions based on false assumptions and all sorts of sloppy thinking. Any question about the evolution of space whales or space-based lifeforms is almost certainly guaranteed to get steam pouring of out my ears. Many WBers will throw the book at anyone who dares ask about any possibility of faster-than-light travel or communication. It's guaranteed grounds for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are common tropes of science-fiction of science-fiction worldbuilding. I prefer to look away and let the questions be answered. WB SE allows questions about magic and gods, are these based on false assumptions? Certainly they are poorly supported by empirical evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem with closing questions based on false assumptions is how do any of us when for absolute certainty when a set of assumptions are false? My call on what is a false assumption will be different from yours, and vice versa. What if what we call a false assumption is based on knowledge beyond what WBers know to be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in my time on WB I saw a question closed as opinion-based. The question could have been answered because there is an obscure area of theoretical physics that deals with exactly the subject of the question. If there was a false assumption closure rule it could have been shut down with that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the circumstances when an OP wants to ask about an otherwise impossible piece of worldbuilding. For example, how to conceptually construct a flat earth or a hollow earth. And why not? This is worldbuilding after all and if we can't work with the impossible, what are we left with? Probably, very little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exercise try running through recently asked questions and make a list of how make false assumptions, i.e., assumptions that are contrary to quotidian reality. Once you've done that, ask yourself whose version of reality are we going to stick with. Certainly not mine, I'd want to close down space whales. (OK. I wouldn't actually, but I do prefer to look away from them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me personally, many of the best questions I've come across on WB SE involved subjects or concepts my first reaction was that's completely ridiculous, then the cogwheels slowly started to turn and my thinking stirred as I found myself contemplating what I had thought absurd or impossible. Being made to think is the first task of any worldbuilder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in my opinion it should take more knowledge and careful argument to justify why an assumption is false than would be required to answer any question. A good answer to any question based on what, the answerer thinks is false, will be to disabuse the OP of their assumption(s) and point them in the direction of better ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguing about which assumptions are false or not is quite likely to endanger this site's nice policy. Perhaps it would be more sensible not to go there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T07:54:30.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4196" CreationDate="2017-01-01T17:34:48.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't need to be one &quot;correct&quot; answer, however there needs to be one &quot;best&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a question to work well in this format it should be possible to rate answers between each other and select one that is better than the others to upvote and/or accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple answers may correctly answer the question, but specifying how to compare those answers with each other is an important part of asking a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T17:34:48.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2017-01-02T02:36:20.883" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's slow and simplify things down.  First, I need feedback and verification on geography and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/great-lakes-earth-geography-372bce96d642#.l1qiy88ji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cause&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is set.  Now to investigate the&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effects&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;these changes have on climate, weather, landscape and ocean current circulation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-solar-system-of-great-lakes-earth-1ac15b6c439d#.ygnainzfj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Solar System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cause&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is set.  Now to investigate the&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effects&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;these changes have on Earth’s nightscape, its Milankovitch cycles and even the asteroid belt (if it could still exist.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T02:36:20.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T04:02:59.280" Score="7" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I've seen cropping up quite a bit lately, and has made me pause and think. Sometimes questions are based on faulty or questionable premises, one such question would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66017/how-do-i-create-armor-for-a-physically-weak-species&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which is about armor for a fragile species. Feedback indicates that speed and maneuverability would take the place of armor for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the proper way to deal with this? I remember one commentator suggested a close reason for questions based on faulty premises (although I don't think he was entirely serious or that this is a good idea). This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, so I think that answers should &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question as written. I've always thought that comments were the appropriate form of notifying the asker of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've seen a lot of answers recently that suggest an alternate scenario. That's fine for reality-check questions, but what about others? For instance, an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66381/how-can-i-communicate-with-a-collective-consciousness&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about communicating with ants originally just said that people would have already been prepared for this. What is this site's position on this kind of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T02:12:49.117" Title="Challenging Questions' Premises" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2017-01-03T04:27:00.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66391/alternative-to-cryogenic-sleep-deep-hibernation&quot;&gt;your example question&lt;/a&gt;. You say that it's based on a false assumption. Presumably, the false assumption that cryogenic suspension &quot;lacks a good scientific explanation.&quot; My response is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it really matter if the OP believes that cryogenic suspension is a reasonable scientific justification or not? The OP's fundamental question is about alternatives to it. Why the OP is seeking alternatives is completely irrelevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP had taken out that one line, there would be no assumption that you feel is invalid. That line is merely background and motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question seems like it can generate creative or interesting answers. These answers can be used by people &lt;em&gt;regardless&lt;/em&gt; of whether they agree with the OP's &quot;bad assumptions&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does closing questions like these make the site better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66567/what-if-y2k-was-possible&quot;&gt;What if y2k was possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more indicative of a problem, but it ultimately remains one we already have the power to solve: close it as &quot;Unclear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question with such an assumption is self-contradictory. Or contradictory with the OP's understanding of reality. Either way, it's not clear what the OP wants because the OP is mistaken about some aspect of reality. So close it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm against making a close option specifically for this because some people might use it on questions like the first one, where it would be entirely inappropriate. The kinds of questions where this close reason would apply are not common enough to need one specifically for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16001" LastEditorUserId="16001" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T05:18:00.810" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T05:18:00.810" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4225" CreationDate="2017-01-03T10:18:00.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here on WB, tags can be used to constrain answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most common is &lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt;.  When these constrainers are used, I think it's perfectly allowable for answers to challenge the question in order for it to also be constrained by the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a &lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt; question, the question and subsequent answers should approximate something in our real life universe.  If the question contains something (magic, FTL, for example), I'd think the question needs reining back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for &lt;strong&gt;science-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T11:48:59.980" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T11:48:59.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T12:05:50.603" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66520/93&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt;, it was closed as too broad. &#xA;So I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66609/93&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt; (I think I made it more specific)&#xA;But the system automatically suggested that my original question (which was closed with no answers) might contain answers for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just pointing out that the automated system should probably not recommend questions that are closed, or those without answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iI7jb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iI7jb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T13:38:59.600" Title="Automated message directs me to find answers where none exist" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4228" CreationDate="2017-01-03T13:38:59.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, when your first question got put on hold as 'too broad', you should have edited that question to narrow it down instead of asking a new one. Even when a question is closed, it can still be re-opened if the question is edited to be good enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the new question is also put on hold as 'too broad'. You did say in a comment that you don't know how to make it less broad (fair enough). In this case, I'd suggest that you put it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/635/19951&quot;&gt;question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, where other people can give you constructive comments on how to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, on to what you're actually asking:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you wrote the second question, it's pretty much just an edited duplicate of your first, so it gets marked as duplicate. The point of this is that you should edit the first question as per above instead of asking a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also the reason (presumably) that the automated system recommends closed questions with no answers. Or at least, this is a valid reason for keeping it as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is so different that editing the first can't get you to the second without completely changing what's being asked in the first question, then it's safely not a duplicate. If, however, you can, then it is a duplicate and will be marked as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first question isn't closed, but doesn't have an answer that you feel satisfactory, then you can add a bounty in order to get more answers. Or (whether the first question is closed or not) you you would need to be very clear about why your new question isn't a duplicate. If you write a new question that's very similar to an already closed question, even if no-one realises that a similar question already exists, the new question is most likely going to be closed for the same reason as the original. Another reason for recommending closed questions with no answers is to show you that, unless you change the new question, it is likely to be closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T13:38:59.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-01-03T13:45:24.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What would the impact of no rainfall be?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am creating a fantasy world which for purposes of this question would be like Earth, with rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. But there is one main difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Imagine a single huge rain cloud that migrates along a set path around the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only rainfall on this world. I want there to still be plants, animals, etc, all over the planet. But I am specifically curious if the absence of rainfall will impact the types of animals or plants in the areas outside of the path of this single huge rain cloud?  There is virtually no rainfall in the rest of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that certain plants develop special ways to catch rain, or that the rain triggers certain growths in animals or whatever. I just don't know enough about this, and I don't know if those are huge impacts, &lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for answers that will help me to understand how the life outside the path of the huge rain cloud would be compared to life inside of it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66520/93&quot;&gt;This other question&lt;/a&gt; and it was too broad, so here I am going to be very specific. I am specifically referring to rainfall. Is rainfall an important element in the ecosystem? or is access to fresh water enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SANDBOX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed as too broad, And I am simply not sure how to make it tighter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.190" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T13:45:24.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4225" CreationDate="2017-01-03T14:52:25.697" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've discussed cases before when &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2951/it-wont-work-challenging-the-frame-of-a-question&quot;&gt;it doesn't work that way&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3758/when-is-thats-not-possible-an-appropriate-answer/&quot;&gt;that's not possible&lt;/a&gt; are valid answers if correctly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a valid reason to close a question, but it is a valid reason to give an answer that the questioner didn't expect. You can often find that the reason they're asking the question is that they weren't thinking about the problem in the same way someone else would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are often leading towards a specific answer because the asker has tried to solve the problem in a certain way and they're here because it's not quite hanging together. Throwing something completely different into the mix could be exactly the breakthrough they need rather than what they expected to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T14:52:25.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T19:50:18.873" Score="12" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm part of a writing group in my area that will be hosting a retreat in a few weeks. I've been asked to do a panel on worldbuilding. I have a few ideas of my own, but I would really like to ask the community here for assistance. I really love what this community does and how intelligent and well-reasoned it is, and I plan on referencing it in my panel. But this seems like a meta question to me... or maybe it's just a question that needs workshopped more. I'm not sure. Anyway. I'll stop stalling and ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the basics of worldbuilding? When I think about building my world, I think about the material I've built houses out of, the writing system I've detailed, the climate in various parts of the world - but I've been building this world for years. All of that seems so advanced and, at least at first, unnecessary. How do I cut back to basics and begin from the beginning? When you're a new writer, looking at a blank page, how do you know what to work on to create an immersive world that will engage your readers and not leave gaping plot holes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a corollary to that, is there anything you should &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; as a new writer with a new world? Any big pitfalls that tend to open up as you start to get excited about the process of creating the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, I went through and wrote all of this and my answer and now I'm wondering if I should even post it because it looks like I have enough material for my panel already. But you guys will probably have even better ideas! And I can't bear the idea of just deleting this, so here you go!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T15:53:15.397" Title="What are the core principles of worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4232" CreationDate="2017-01-03T19:50:18.873" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what I have so far. I'll be running the panel as a Build-A-World workshop using audience ideas, so we can practice doing all this stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Start with One&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a single idea and see where it leads you. Say &quot;It's like Earth, but...&quot; (or perhaps, &quot;It's like Middle Earth, but...&quot;) and then focus on that &quot;but&quot;. Don't start with a bunch of different ideas that don't fit together very well. If you have a story about talking dragons and then a set of time-traveling wolves show up, you've just added a second idea that completely changes the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, in the process of Step Two, you think of more ideas that fit well with your world, go ahead and add more. But for our initial attempt, we're starting with one idea and one idea only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Follow Ideas to their Logical Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every change has consequences. If it's like Earth but snow is acidic, that changes not just the way people act in winter, but the way they build their houses. Acid-resistant materials become highly important, and architecture has to be designed in a way that funnels deadly snow away from sidewalks. Instead of letting snow sit heavily on rooftops and parking garages all year, perhaps the city funds teams of specially trained snowfighters to clear and safely dispose of recently fallen snow. And depending on if this is a recent change or if it's always been true, the effects might even be more far-reaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a stupid example, but the point is that even a simple change can have far-reaching effects that can completely transform your world. It's essential to think about what those effects are and how they occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, determine if this is recent change or if it's always been the case. Second, try to figure out how it changes things. Ask, how does this idea affect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A normal life&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jobs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cities (building and planning and living in them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relationships&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other stuff I haven't thought of yet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to keep this part from getting too nitty-gritty. Maybe I shouldn't worry about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create a Unique and Realistic Culture with Diverse Influences&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going off our acid-snow idea, people would be more likely to live near the equator, where it never snows, then in Canada or Greenland. But that doesn't mean &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; lives there, because people are crazy and adaptable. So now we have at least two cultures that would develop naturally; one in the warm heart of Brazil and one in the frigid depths of Greenland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I really hope my retreat group comes up with a better idea than that one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the people who live here like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do they look like?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just because Hollywood thinks White is Default doesn't mean we have to. I'll talk a bit here about creating a multi-colored world and about avoiding racial stereotypes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where do they live?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do they do for a living?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do they spend their days?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do they feel about the central idea?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do they feel about outsiders?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kinds of stories do they tell?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the predominant religion? What about splinter factions and competing religions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, remember that a culture isn't a monolith. Inside American culture, you'll find people who fervently disagree on the proper usage of texting, vaccinations, and guns, to pick three topics completely at random. So let's add some more diversity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do people in this culture differ from one another?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some main points of friction for different groups in this culture?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some good reasons they have to disagree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some principles that almost everyone will &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; on?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Display Real People living Real Lives&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, there's an elite group of people whose job it is to delve into the snow and retrieve the priceless Ice of Cooling. But you also need a clerk who notes when they leave and what they bring back. For every Evil Organization, you need an Evil Janitor who dumps the ash trays and disposes of the bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And everybody has a mom. Most people even have dads and grandmas and cousins. You don't need to list their entire family tree when you create them, but consider them in the light of having people who care about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose a person who isn't a main character, but who the main characters will have to interact with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do they look like? Gender? Skin color?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ethnic identity? Political and/or religious affiliation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are they here? Why are they interacting with the characters? What's their goal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do they care about? What do they want? What do they want to avoid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What secrets do they have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you can do this two or three times for the same character and have totally different characters who still make sense in your world and culture, you've #nailedit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've gone and written all this stuff and I feel like I'm back to square one, Too Specific, again. Hah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T19:50:18.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4214" CreationDate="2017-01-04T13:54:41.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the other answers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please make sure that people who are following the question see that the solution gets more and more detailed and developed whenever an answer is incorporated in the new question. dot_Sp0T's example is a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Several questions associated with one topic&quot; should not mean that you &lt;em&gt;ask the same question over and over and change only the conditions&lt;/em&gt; because you are not satisfied with the given answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens when answers to both questions would achieve the same effect.&#xA;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &quot;I want to crack a safe with a campfire&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A: &quot;Not possible. Use a thermal lance.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q: &quot;I am cracking a safe with a campfire. The campfire uses coal&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A: &quot;Still not hot enough. &lt;em&gt;Use a thermal lance&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q: &quot;I want to open a safe with campfire. The door is only 1mm thick&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:54:41.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4232" CreationDate="2017-01-04T15:53:15.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Worldbuilding is the process of building the stage your actors perform on&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are things to act and things to be acted upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The characters in your story are things &quot;to act&quot; and the world is the thing to be &quot;acted upon&quot;. Roughly, the world is the stage your characters perform on. That's it. Sure, the characters may burn down the set and break all the props but they are still doing that on the stage you designed for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Worldbuilding Process&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authors are in a uniquely powerful position in that they are only constrained by their own ideas and their ability to convey those ideas. They work in pure thought-stuff unconstrained by the laws of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with the kind of story you want to tell, sci-fi or fantasy. Here, I will refer to sci-fi stories as ones that could plausibly happen in our universe with our understanding of physics. Fantasy is everything else. Star Wars is fantasy.  Lord of the Rings is fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, pick what you want to explore in your world. Perhaps an alternative history where a West Virginian town is magically transfered back to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1632&lt;/a&gt; Germany. Or, what happens when dragons are introduced in WW2? (my answer is they aren't &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21626/10364&quot;&gt;that effective&lt;/a&gt;.) Most of the time, you will want to reuse a standard set of world mechanics that people are familiar with. This saves on world expository since most people already have a pretty good idea of how Earth works. Many times on WB, we get questions like 'My world is like Earth except...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow through on your changes. If you've made a change that significantly alters how your world operates compared to baseline, you'll need to follow through on that change.  If faster than light travel is possible, try to work out how that will impact trade, military and politics.  If you can, try to get at the second order effects, ie, the things enabled by the things your change enabled. Note that second order effects are notoriously difficult to predict because of the complexity involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T15:53:15.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4213" CreationDate="2017-01-05T16:27:29.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favorite part of 2016 on Worldbuilding (my first year on the site) was doing a deep dive into a subject to make answers. The best were using combinations of physics, math and computer knowledge, and spending several hours building and verifying models to test things. The two best examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58485/temperatures-in-an-eccentric-orbit/63574#63574&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62948/season-cycle-that-would-occur-on-a-habitable-planet-that-orbits-two-suns/62992#62992&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is stuff like this that has lead to me poking my nose into this site every day, and coming back to older questions to keep answering them. I've been working on a computer model to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57974/circulation-patterns-on-a-tidally-locked-binary-planet&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for months now. These questions are like the best (optional) homework assignments ever. Someday I'll answer them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the two answers linked in the first paragraph have 4 upvotes to compare with maybe 8 hours of work. Meanwhile a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60102/the-10000-year-skyscraper/60140#60140&quot;&gt;tongue-in-cheek two minute answer&lt;/a&gt; can get me about 30 times the votes. Oh well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T16:27:29.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2017-01-06T17:32:16.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What about worldbuilding slang instead?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have good basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We use &lt;code&gt;$_DEITY&lt;/code&gt; in religion related Worlgbuilding questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In chat it was used &lt;code&gt;happy $timeofday&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;happy TZ&lt;/code&gt; to greet ourselves respecting different timezones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have worldbuilding-specific words like &lt;code&gt;handvawium&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;unobtainium&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the effort should be put to broaden the slang and make it used by the community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arguments for working on slang&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selecting languages to work with is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; (Example: Conlang &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slovio&lt;/a&gt; is easy to understand for me as someone using Slavic language but might be totally off for most Worldbuilding users)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Agreeing on something is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; (Example: This very answer which disagrees with some group having agreed on something)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inventing language is &lt;em&gt;boring&lt;/em&gt; (Source: My neighbour in highschool)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Learning new language is both &lt;em&gt;boring and hard&lt;/em&gt; (Source: Me being forced to learn Latin on hinghschool)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everybody&lt;/em&gt; uses English here as neutral communication language. Lets stick with that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;One way or another&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot promise anything, but you caught my attention. I will try to follow the discussions. And pinky promise, if I will put my five cents in, I will try to follow already set agreement and not disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, from now on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T17:32:16.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4241" CreationDate="2017-01-09T17:30:45.200" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I saw the link on the sidebar to the pinned blog post, &quot;Calculating Political Power&quot;, which I thought was interesting, so I clicked on it. However, it took me to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4037/new-blog-post-stop-saying-rivers-only-converge&quot;&gt;Stop Saying Rivers Only Converge&lt;/a&gt;, instead. Even when I try to type in the URL or copy the location for the political power post, it redirects me automatically to the &quot;Stop Saying Rivers Only Converge&quot; Meta post, instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now both of those links are showing on the side bar and they both go directly (or redirect to) the Rivers post. I believe it is because they both link to question number 4037, which is the important part of the URL for telling which question to link to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find the Political Power post, and can that sidebar behavior be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:23:11.520" Title="Bug in the pinned Blog links on the sidebar" Tags="|bug|blog|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4240" CreationDate="2017-01-09T17:33:54.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The blog post links are made directly to the &quot;New blog post&quot; question, which has a running list of all of the prior blog posts in the answers below. The question itself gives a short description of the current blog post. At the moment, we have two blog posts listed as &quot;events&quot;, because they went up on the blog within a short time of each other, and it seemed best to promote both, rather than let the first one only get a little bit of the spotlight. Therefore, both are listed in the question, and so both events go to the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; fix the whole mess once and for all by simply linking each event to its corresponding blog post. However, Shog9 raised some points against doing so (starting in the transcript &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32996589#32996589&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no easy way to audit an event, in the same way you can audit &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2902/627&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/a&gt;. Having off-site links can make folks uncomfortable - perhaps rightfully so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having a single meta post reduces clutter over individual meta posts and makes it easy to track past &quot;events&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:56:36.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4240" CreationDate="2017-01-09T21:23:11.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whoops, I should have reflected both posts in the title to give a stronger clue, and have now done so.  As HDE 226868 said in another answer, we didn't want to cut off the earlier post's time in the spotlight just yet, but there's just the one meta post to link to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community events can only link to pages on SE somewhere, not posts on off-site blogs.  I discussed the reasons and proposed some mitigation in my answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/288958/162102&quot;&gt;related question on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  That analysis was a direct result of Shog's objections to event links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:23:11.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4225" CreationDate="2017-01-12T11:42:10.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag indicates this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If present, “you can’t because…” is a valid answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, it’s a comment. It makes us wish for a close reason of faulty assumptions.  It's also possible to change the tags to salvage the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T11:42:10.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-12T12:30:50.217" Score="5" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any official unit system for answer on world building?*&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;*When OP didn't use any unit system in his question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because every heavy Math based answer in imperial units is for me a foreign language answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of OP asking &quot;The weight in lb of a 10 foot spider?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I get that we should answer in imperial units, but it still feels like a heavily localized answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28865" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T11:52:41.193" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T03:24:32.067" Title="Imperial vs. Metric System" Tags="|discussion|systems-of-units|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4244" CreationDate="2017-01-12T12:51:08.327" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;...there is no &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; rule regarding what unit system to use&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that it is usually silently agreed upon, as you also say, to use the unit system the OP uses to describe the problem. If they use meters, use meters; if they use feet, do the conversion (which isn't that hard to be fair).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;* When Op didn't use any unit system in his question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they used numbers without annotating them with units (aka meaning) it's best to point it out to them via commentary and/or propose an edit that adds units to all numbers (this might or might not be met with goodwill by the OP, but is a legit practice as you merely strive to improve quality; you do not have a right to force them to accept said edit though..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do not make use of any numbers/units in their question but it is clearly their intent to get numbers as a result, just use what you prefer. You cannot know if they understand metric/imperial before they say so themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How I tend to see it&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stackexchange network and its users are all over the world; the Network uses UTC instead of anything localized and thus you should also strive for using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SI units&lt;/a&gt; whenever you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T12:51:08.327" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-12T13:45:09.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T13:45:09.397" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T13:45:09.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-12T13:45:09.397" Score="0" Body="For questions discussing the use of different systems of units, including SI and US customary, on Worldbuilding." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T22:47:27.390" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T22:47:27.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:16:42.327" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scrolling through the list of tags on a full desktop screen, I see several are truncated. Three in particular caught my eye as they are heavily used on the site. Should their descriptions be abridged to fit in the 3 lines available? Or at least more compacted to try to get more info into those 3 lines? For example, we could get reality-check down as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context. Answers should say yes or no, with support. Contrast with: science-based and hard-science tags. This tag should never be the only tag on a question because this tag frames how a question should be answered, not the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That puts the answering guidance within the visible section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I supplied edits to a few tags that had no description by looking at the questions that used that tag, but I hesitated to touch any tag with long standing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the general goal to have any tag's short description fit within the ~150 characters?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BBHJO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BBHJO.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot of tag descriptions A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZaaNz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZaaNz.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot of tag descriptions B&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:14:39.253" Title="Should the tag summaries for some of WB major tags be abridged more?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4225" CreationDate="2017-01-15T02:12:49.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to like to ask about those in comments.  I think often those sorts of answers are really useful because they answer a question that the OP didn't even know to ask.  Other times, the OP is already far enough along in a project that they just have to say &quot;it is what it is,&quot; and nothing but an answer to the question they asked is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone is asking about how to make some detail work out in a science fiction system which tries to game the conservation of energy law along the way, it may be very helpful to point out that not only does their system not work in our universe, but by Nother's theorem the entire class of systems they were looking at cannot work without huge consequences.  It's also great for tackling mathematical problems where the problem statement is already inconsistent.  It helps them not need to look in places that we know will already fail.  It's easy to spin your wheels on a thousand ideas that don't work before you come across a simple clean proof that that entire chain of ideas must always fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an alternative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when-will-uploaded-minds-be-a-reality&quot;&gt;When will uploaded minds be a reality&lt;/a&gt;, I have reason to believe some of the premises regarding how the technology progresses should be called into question.  However, when I asked in the comments, JDługosz said such an answer wouldn't be too helpful for the story he was already writing (but it might be an interesting future question if we could ever formulate it in a not-too-broad wording)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one real disadvantage to these sorts of answers is that they rob one of the opportunity for creativity and imagination.  An answer along these lines basically says &quot;Let me show you why my way of thinking is the only right way.&quot;  In a lot of cases this is useful, but many worlds don't have to be quite as consistent as the reality we live in.  If I went to two boys playing with sticks, pretending they were swords, whipped out a blade of my own and cut one in half commenting, &quot;sticks can never be swords because they're not made of metal,&quot; I've ruined two boy's game... and what for?  For all I know one boy may watch the way the sticks bend and sway and grow up to invent a new approach to composite materials because of those sticks.  I may have cut genius short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't figured out the right way to judge which questions are the correct ones to raise issues about premises and which ones are not.  I admit I tend to err on the side of cutting down faulty premises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T02:12:49.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-16T02:11:58.760" Score="6" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is the most popular tag on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/science-based/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; tells us a lot about the requirements on &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; questions, but not a lot about the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;. (Except that these &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; require &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; conform to certain expectations.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems problematic, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;&quot;a tag is a word or a phrase that describes the &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; of the question.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (From the help center, emphasis mine.)&#xA;Furthermore, we should &quot;avoid using this tag as the only tag on a question.&quot; (From its tag-wiki.) This is a huge red flag for meta tags; network-wide, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this isn't a problem? Maybe it's not a meta-tag, though all signs point to the contrary? Maybe it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a meta-tag, but that's okay for some reason in this particular usage? But if we think the last is the case, Jeff's got some words for us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I blame us, for letting these tags take root early in the history of Stack Overflow. We should have eradicated them early on to set the proper precedent. ... There's no reason [new] sites need to repeat all the mistakes we made with tagging two years ago -- we can do it better each time for each new community, and feed those improvements back into the entire network.&#xA;  -J. Atwood, co-founder of Stack Exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T20:57:44.503" Title="Is &quot;science-based&quot; a meta- or otherwise-problematic tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2017-01-16T03:15:29.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; a meta-tag? Yes. Is this a problem? No. Does it have &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; problems? Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early on in the private beta - shortly before my time - the community decided that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/627&quot;&gt;answers should, by default, conform to the scientific laws of the real world&lt;/a&gt;, a position it has continued to hold for over two years. That said, there was a need at the time to ensure that this kind of thing would actually be followed. I'm going to quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1900/627&quot;&gt;an answer by Tim B&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I introduced science-based to solve the problem of people asking scientific questions with magical answers. The culture of the site is now well enough established that I do not think it is needed any more, I've certainly not seen many magic answers to science questions recently. In other words the tag has succeeded. The question is whether the presence of the tag is still needed or whether those answers would start sneaking back in if we removed the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my memory is already getting foggy, but I seem to recall a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions in the early days of the public beta, continuing a trend from the private beta. In addition, humans just have a knack for ignoring the laws of nature when it comes to making fictional worlds. Perhaps that's the nature of the craft. At any rate, at first, the tag seemed to be successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it wasn't. I mean, it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; mean that the ideas were maybe a bit less off-the-wall than some of the things I've seen in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt;, but this barrier slowly faded away into nothingness. Today, the phrase &quot;science-based&quot; seems to just mean that you can't use magic or handwave away too much, not that you have to use science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, people are okay with this, and so it wasn't really an issue if occasionally we need to go mine some handwavium to make a world a bit more logical. But that's not always the case. Sometimes, people really want something to work - at an extremely rigorous level. Hence, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1891/should-science-based-henceforth-actually-be-science-based#comment4185_1892&quot;&gt;was born&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; stringent requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tag has had an agonizingly turbulent existence. I can't begin to count the meta discussions we had over it, many of which seemed to involve me grumbling about some detail or another. By now, we have a working &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;, and (yay!) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3716/627&quot;&gt;post notice&lt;/a&gt;, applied manually by moderators after consulting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4020/627&quot;&gt;a flowchart thingy&lt;/a&gt;. There was one takeaway message that I got from all of this, though: People don't care that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we had the critical mass - or loud and vocal group of users, if you prefer - to get some progress made in various directions, and I have yet to see any real objection to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. But at times, I've thought that support has been a bit lacking. I often felt like I was making a big deal out of something that perhaps only I and a handful or two of other users cared about. And so from time, to time, I wondered if it was worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to get folks interested in taking a firm stance on something, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; now represents what I feel is a wimpy middle ground. I was just about to write that its boundaries are blurry, but I realized that &lt;em&gt;nobody ever thought about what &quot;science-based&quot; means&lt;/em&gt;. There was never a discussion like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1902/627&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3899/627&quot;&gt;ones&lt;/a&gt; going over the fine details of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and rules and usage were not formalized. I feel like we're the mice from &lt;em&gt;The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/em&gt; trying to find the Ultimate Answer: There was a big, wonderful goal in mind, but the actual specifics were never nailed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, I have no desire to wait &lt;strike&gt;ten million years&lt;/strike&gt; however long it takes to iron those details out. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original purpose of the tag was completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's still much vaguer than I would like, and it has a smaller chance of surviving a series of meta discussions &lt;em&gt;a la &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; than I have of outrunning a hungry bear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's never going to be the support to keep it doing the job that, from time to time, we wish it did.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's being abused (as are some other tags&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so I'm taking a deep breath, and saying, quite calmly,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;$$\huge\text{Burn the tag. Burn it now.}$$&#xA;I should note one thing: I have no problem with it being a meta tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; has worked out pretty well, and it hasn't turned into the spiral o' doom that has been seen with, for instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;certain&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;sites&lt;/a&gt;. So, if I may be so bold, I will disagree with Jeff Atwood insofar as I think there are cases - edge cases, mind you - where meta tags can work. I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; works on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; works on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. Other meta tags are terrible, but these seem to stay afloat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm ending this spiel before it starts rivaling &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; in length (though not in writing). I hope I made a case for dispatching the tag used on 22.06% of the questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, via a swift whack to the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I'm looking at &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I wanted to make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monty Python &quot;Burn her!&quot;&lt;/a&gt; reference here, but it didn't work out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T03:15:29.017" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4249" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:14:39.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good question. To answer it though I'm going to look at another place, the place that's important for this - which is what you see when asking a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H308M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H308M.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tags&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the tag summary is intended for, to tell someone thinking of using the tag when they should and should not use it. As you can see the 140 character limit does not apply here - and it is more important that the tag summary be clear and specific than brief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that if anything is overly verbose then cutting that down is a good idea, so long as important details are not lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:14:39.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:41:55.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best criteria I've yet seen for whether a tag has a purpose is to ask whether it is useful for people answering questions to use for filtering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I, as a person looking for questions to answer, say &quot;I'm an expert in X&quot; without sounding ridiculous? For example &quot;I'm an expert in science&quot;, &quot;I'm an expert in hard science&quot;, &quot;I'm an expert in weapons&quot; all sound reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm an expert in science based&quot; sounds a bit strange, but &quot;I'm an expert in science based subjects&quot; sounds reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary purpose of tags is filtering questions to find ones that you are interested in. We have people on this site who are opposed to and completely un-interested in anything using magic. In fact I've even seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404/more-strict-scientific-culture-in-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;meta proposals&lt;/a&gt; wanting anything not based in science to be banned outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The science-based tags provide a way for people who are only interested in scientifically based questions to filter out those questions that are instead rooted in more magical or fantastical basis. It lets those people find the questions that they are interested in or best able to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is the core purpose of any tag and why I believe we should keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it is a meta tag, in that it describes the question and makes requirements of answerers, but it is also a useful tag for people to use when searching for questions that interest them or excluding ones that do not. This makes it more than a meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T11:01:04.250" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T11:01:04.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-17T11:08:47.147" Score="9" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a trend I've noticed more in 2017 than before, which is people posting information or points that could be answers to a question in the comments section. While this isn't a bad behaviour (people don't have to answer if they don't want to) I can't help but feel that people are missing out on recognition they deserve, and some questions are going unanswered as a result of people reading answers in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68157/a-cargo-ship-big-as-a-star-destroyer&quot;&gt;A cargo ship as big as a star destroyer&lt;/a&gt;, where the first comment points out a real world engineering answer to the question and the second a more socially oriented one (wrapped up in a question). At the time of me asking this there is no answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the best way to encourage people to promote their comments to answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:32:23.913" Title="How best to suggest a comment be made into an answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4255" CreationDate="2017-01-17T13:40:43.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a case-by-case basis, I use something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comments are temporary&lt;/a&gt;; please use the &quot;Your Answer&quot; form at the bottom of the page so your solution can be voted on and so others can find it more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a broader solution, that's a community issue. Comments like the above (which explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's a good thing to do) go a long way to building that community awareness. Meta can also play a role; using the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; tag on a post like &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3447/4398&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; can help raise awareness and spur folks to action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you're not feeling particularly charitable, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5099/4398&quot;&gt;steal it&lt;/a&gt; and make your own answer. This preserves the information for future users in the sortable, searchable way the site needs, which is really &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/a/617&quot;&gt;the point of the whole Stack Exchange thing&lt;/a&gt;. You might as well get some points for knowing how to curate the site's content, and there's nothing like missing out on perfectly good rep to light a fire under some folks. You can mention the commentor's name in your answer if you're feeling super nice, but they didn't want to stake their site reputation on it and &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;Community Wiki is dead&lt;/a&gt; for these situations, its purpose lies elsewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this requires the community to also curate its comments efficiently. If chatty and answery comments languish for weeks or years, then the site has no teeth and might as well be a poorly-laid-out discussion forum. So part of keeping answers out of comments is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6682/4398&quot;&gt;keep the scrub brush clear&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/278292/244929&quot;&gt;fix the broken windows&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T23:15:02.170" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4255" CreationDate="2017-01-18T01:47:45.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Bribery is worth a shot!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I run into cases that are clearly a worthwhile answer (especially a self-answer) in a comment, I simply post a comment saying &quot;Post this as an answer and I'll upvote you for it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3097" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T01:47:45.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4259" CreationDate="2017-01-18T13:46:40.817" Score="7" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nitpicking here:&#xA;The Mortarboard badge description says:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Earn at least 200 reputation (the daily maximum) in a single day.&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; earn more than 200 points, wouldn't it be less confusing to simply say,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Earn 200 reputation in a single day&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, &quot;Earn the daily maximum reputation&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21117" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T14:50:12.680" Title="Mortarboard: Isn't &quot;at least&quot; the daily maximum redundant?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2017-01-18T14:10:21.510" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are actually multiple ways to surpass this 200 rep limit, each with different results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earning more than 200 rep with &lt;strong&gt;upvotes&lt;/strong&gt; and such, you can surpass the 200 rep limit. You will only get a maximum of 200 rep attributed to your overall rep, but if you do donwvote - or get downvoted, you will still be in the green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any rep earned through rewards also does not count against the 200 rep limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at this question on the SE Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;How does &amp;quot;Reputation&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-exhaustive quoting of the list from the referred SE Meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You gain reputation when:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your questions is voted &lt;em&gt;up/useful&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;+5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your answers is voted &lt;em&gt;up/useful&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;+10&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your answers becomes &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;+15&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you &lt;em&gt;accept&lt;/em&gt; an answer written by someone else to one of your own questions: &lt;strong&gt;+2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a downvote on one of your questions or answers is removed: &lt;strong&gt;+2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you suggest an edit and it is accepted: &lt;strong&gt;+2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you remove a downvote from an answer: &lt;strong&gt;+1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an answer you downvoted is removed: &lt;strong&gt;+1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your answers is awarded a bounty by the user offering the bounty: &lt;strong&gt;+ full bounty amount&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: &lt;strong&gt;+½ of the bounty amount&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work/16067#16067&quot;&gt;bounty FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for details)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you &lt;em&gt;associate accounts&lt;/em&gt; of two or more Stack Exchange network sites, and at least one of those accounts already has 200 or more reputation: &lt;strong&gt;+100&lt;/strong&gt; on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You lose reputation when:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your questions or answers is voted &lt;em&gt;down/not useful&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;−2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a post where you had successfully &lt;em&gt;suggested an edit&lt;/em&gt; has been &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; (reputation page shows the cause as “&lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt;”): &lt;strong&gt;−2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the account of &lt;em&gt;a user who was the final approver of a suggested edit you made&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/311413&quot;&gt;has been deleted&lt;/a&gt; (reputation page shows the cause as “&lt;em&gt;User was removed&lt;/em&gt;”): &lt;strong&gt;−2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you vote an answer &lt;em&gt;down/not useful&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;−1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an upvote on one of your questions is removed: &lt;strong&gt;−5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an upvote on one of your answers is removed: &lt;strong&gt;−10&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; answers loses &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; status: &lt;strong&gt;−15&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you &lt;em&gt;unaccept&lt;/em&gt; an answer written by someone else to one of your own questions: &lt;strong&gt;−2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you place a bounty on a question: &lt;strong&gt;− full bounty amount&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Additionally:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can earn a maximum of +200 reputation from upvotes and suggested edits in any given &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27199/what-is-an-se-day-when-does-each-day-start&quot;&gt;day&lt;/a&gt;. Bounties and the bonuses for accepted answers are counted separately (&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/the-great-reputation-recalc-begins/&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). Reputation “lost” from the reputation cap is not awarded on following days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voted-up comments do not affect reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T14:50:12.680" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:35:38.683" Score="31" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the questions asked here are by writers working on a story, or people working on some other project. The cynic in me tends to imagine these as doomed hobby projects that never get finished. Can we prove him wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any stories for which the writer consulted Wordbuilding.SE that were subsequently published, with one of the proposed answers used in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any project (stories, games, films) count, and any publishing platform counts (from a blog to HBO). The only rules are that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author should consider them finished and published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At some point during their development the author asked a question on WorldBuilding.SE and used one of the answers given in the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="845" LastEditorUserId="845" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T17:32:28.717" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T22:58:21.560" Title="Have any answers made it into published fiction?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4262" CreationDate="2017-01-19T20:57:54.443" Score="5" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-fractal-now-110f24c97a3e#.wfb7dgi1f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fractal Now&lt;/a&gt; after being directed to it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4037/new-blog-post-the-philosophy-behind-great-lakes-earth-and-in-case-you-missed&quot;&gt;a featured meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have several questions about that story (eg. What is it about? How can several high-rep WB regulars see exactly what it is about? How come they do not say what is it about while praising it for capturing something perfectly? Am I overthinking it and it's just a shaggy-god-story with a trite punchline &lt;em&gt;it's about music&lt;/em&gt;?), but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't ask on Medium, because it requires an account and doesn't accept SE-based one,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't ask in the comments, because of reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - where should I direct those questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T21:10:29.670" Title="Where can I ask about blog entries without requiring 3rd-party account?" Tags="|support|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4261" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:10:29.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can create a lightweight account on Medium using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account.  This is actually the same model as for SE; you don't log in to a special SE account with an SE password, but you log into whatever service is providing your credential and then sign in to SE automatically.  If you don't have, or don't want to use, any of those, you can also create an email-based account there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have created an account on Medium, you can comment on any post -- on the blog there are no reputation requirements or anything like that.  If you control the device you're connecting from (it's not a public computer), you can tell Medium to keep you logged in and you'll probably never have to think about it again, unless you use a new device or browser.  I've been signed in on my home computer since we created the blog in 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to create an account on Medium, another place you can ask questions of most&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; blog authors is &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, which you have enough reputation to use.  The folks in our chat room are friendly and would be happy to lend a helping hand to a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about contributing to the blog, including a link to Medium's help page on creating accounts, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/want-to-contribute-b37191c4362e#.137e4y1x7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Want to Contribute?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The blog has attracted one contributor so far who, as far as I know, isn't an active user here on Worldbuilding.SE.  To reach Jasper you'll need to comment on Medium, most likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T21:10:29.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T04:05:34.393" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m8GRh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m8GRh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a normal day, I'll see two to four suggested closures in the review queue - but over the past week or so, it seems to have been &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; higher - seven? when I checked yesterday, and eleven today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a provable reason why this is?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are there usage statistics that show a surge of new users or just more questions in general?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is this just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one noticing and this isn't abnormal at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T04:05:34.393" Title="Why has there been a recent surge in close votes to review?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4266" CreationDate="2017-01-20T17:41:37.620" Score="10" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67996/what-would-powers-based-on-the-four-fundamental-forces-look-like&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question of mine got marked as primarily opinion-based. As I couldn't understand why, I asked for clarification in the comments, but received none. I do agree with @kingledion that it might be a tad broad, but opinion-based simply does not make any sense. Would anyone care to explain the reasons? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T13:05:16.327" Title="I disagree with this question reason of closure" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4264" CreationDate="2017-01-20T19:23:02.680" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would tend to agree that the question is not opinion based.  The forces mentioned are science based and therefore a non-opinion based answer can be reached based on what we understand these forces do in the universe.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I think your questions has problems is in two places.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Discussions on the extent/range/power they have would likely be opinion based.  That is for the creator to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is far too broad.  The necessary detail on each force would pretty clearly make each a question in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I will not vote to reopen the question.&lt;/strong&gt;  If it does get reopened I would VTC it as &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; Its not that the question cannot be salvaged, rather there are answers already written against the question as it exists and it would not be appropriate to change the question at this point.  Invalidating the answers already written is a bad precedent to set. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you write questions for each force.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly limit ranges/power levels for each force, i.e. the gravitational power will be limited to non-planet destroying levels of power.  Considering we are talking about humanoids altering physical reality there is no non-opinion based answer to &lt;em&gt;&quot;how powerful can they be&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you limit the powers answers can focus on what the powers would allow the superhumans to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T19:23:02.680" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4128" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:10:43.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stopped coming to this site for a short while specifically because of these &quot;jokes&quot; which a large majority weren't jokes, but rather people just saying hateful and slanderous things directed at not only Trump, but also just anyone who did/does not support Clinton or Sanders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can keep saying what they want... I have the power to walk away. I don't need to associate myself with people who would say such terrible things to begin with, but I also don't have to silence them. I can just shut the browser tab and find another site to get information from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And people can do the same with any other topic that comes up. If you don't like it you're not being forced to interact with these people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T20:10:43.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2017-01-21T03:44:07.913" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is why IAU's definition of planets is trash...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worked out a system of nomenclature some years ago now...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Astrometric Objects:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO 0 = possibly Black holes and other such crazy things we might find&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO I = Stellar Objects&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO II = Non-Stellar Spheroidal Objects (Shortened to Spheroidals)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO II.a = Cryospheres&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO II.b = Terraspheres or Aquaspheres&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO II.c = Aerospheres&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO II.d = Brown dwarves (maybe)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO III = Debris, Comets, Asteroids&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AO IV = Maybe ships if ever needed ^.^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An AO II that orbits a AO I = Planet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An AO II that orbits another AO II = Moon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AOIs are objects that are Luminous and all the normal stuff that defines stars which I can't remember off the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AOIIs are defined basically as any object that has a large enough mass to shape it into a sphere. The different sub-groups are have relationships to masses, but just looking at them you can tell what they refer. Small Frozen bodies, Medium Earthlike worlds, Large Gas Giants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining like this removes the idiocy that is tha IAU standard where bodies can be Planets for a time, but then get ejected from a Sytem to become not planets and then be caught in another star system to become a planet again... but only if its orbit has already been cleared out... v.v This definition makes it clear what you're talking about and places Planet and Moon as more layman labels than real categorization as they should be regarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the problem with referring to things like this is that it's not the standard nomenclature so noone will ever know that this is how you refer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T03:44:07.913" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2017-01-21T07:41:12.770" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me add to your cynicism, Peter, by arguing that there has been many &lt;em&gt;completed, successful&lt;/em&gt; projects. They just happen to be stories that are posted on Worldbuilding SE as questions and are thus licensed under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can only offer my own contributions as proof of this happening, I'll offer this one - my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32446/my-program-designed-to-be-resistant-to-malware-and-dos-attacks-isnt-letting-me/41371#41371&quot;&gt;My Program is designed to be resistant to malware and DOS attacks and isn't letting me turn it off. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;. The OP pretended to be a person who developed a &quot;rogue&quot; program, while I RPed as the &quot;rogue&quot; program itself. I didn't intend for my answer to somehow inspire some glorious plotline, because my answer was already part of &lt;em&gt;the story&lt;/em&gt; (with the OP providing the introduction and me providing the conclusion). A clear, consistent narrative already exist and has been published. Not really much point to flesh out the concept or characterization afterwards (unless you really want to know whether the &quot;rogue AI/programmer&quot; tag-team actually works out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, one could easily take that whole question thread and reframe it as its own short story. The OPer talks to a defense committee, and each person on that committee provides his/her advice on the topic, with the statement from the &quot;rogue&quot; program coming as the epilogue. You only simply need to add a few connector words (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32450/14696&quot;&gt;Then, the great Cyber-Ethics Professor M i ech said...&lt;/a&gt;) to tie all the answers together. There are many world-building Q&amp;amp;As where the OPer pretends to be a main character in his/her world. All those Q&amp;amp;As can be easily converted into glorious short stories. That'd be a good way of boosting the number of &quot;published fiction&quot; stories, and anybody can take on this task. After all, all content on StackExchange is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Anyone can reuse it so long as you provide attribution and you provide the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclosure: I also wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41435/i-run-an-evil-cyberpunk-corporation-how-do-i-convince-a-government-that-hates-m&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A pretending to be a main character in my world&lt;/a&gt;...though in my defense, I actually did intend to build a narrative using advice from that question. But at the same time, it's very easy to reframe the question as a short story about a CEO begging his corporate board for advice.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/41448/14696&quot;&gt;Torisuda's answer&lt;/a&gt; along with Ringo_St R's rebuttal would be a decent subplot. In fact, Torisuda's answer could serve as a decent standalone narrative. No fleshing out required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:58:32.413" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T13:59:30.607" Score="5" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us compare 2 questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68664/20315&quot;&gt;How long would it take to transform a human into a space-ship and back?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68659/20315&quot;&gt;Building capabilities of a realistic nanobot swarm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are people too fast in putting on hold things they do not like or/and do not understand or are they too positive about things they like and no one cares about how much &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; is the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, people, who answer questions, have their own set of themes which they would like to answer but which often happens to be on border, so I do not feel myself too special, when I see 1-2 times a month reasonable questions being put on hold(or killed other ways) and die that way. My concerns are that such actions discourage the reasonable people who ask the question in participation farther on WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;An opinion based question should generate different opinions - right?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now take a look at the stats about those questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we have with human ship - 163 views, 5 answers, in about 23hours&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What we have with gray goo - 140 views, 1 answer(I was lucky and fast enough this time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer for HS was after 5 hours&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The first answer for GG was after 2 hours of Q existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HS Q got in 6 hours 3 of its 5 answers, in 8 hours 4 A.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The GG question was put on hold after about 10 hours of its existence and got 1 Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, the OP had some difficulties to make the question less negative attention attracting Q, and someone(I do not wish to call the names) has changed the title in totally wrong way and question got additional 2 downvotes (my opinion for the reason, and it just so happened I was right there to observe the dynamics) just because of that(I would downvote it myself if the Q would be about that title - this is the reason for my opinion)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both question where equal at attracting attention. One question was successful to generate 4 opinion based answers in 8 hours of its existence, another barely got 1 answer in 10 hours.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would say that quality of formulating for both of the questions was about average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GG Q has a bonus point for not containing useless for the problem text, it is the almost mathematical question(I may be biased because of my biological background).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one from those two is more likely to be an opinion based question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should mods wait until those opinions existence would be obvious? Or maybe a day of two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Especially in situations when people may feel a lack of competence or in situations when it is not so obvious as with hard-science tag with a question about creating perpetual motion machines of the second type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess -  there is no such thing as bad publicity and if an Q will generate lots of google and people attention and produce 10+ decent answers we will be probably fine with the fact it is opinion based - right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if a question generates zero opinions and low attention and votes to be opinion based from people who mostly answer fantasy questions - we close it just because even if we do not right not much harm is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the approach which had the place in the particular situation is the same problem as Japan had it from 1500 to 18xx and which it is famous for(traditional society). At the moment 80% of the questions are fantasy questions, and it will stay that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should mention I have also a positive experience for mods do not rush on closing 30+ answers questions to be opinion based just because it have so many answers. And I glad to see that they sometimes understand their own knowledge limitations(and they think about indexing engines and that hot question list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm cynical enough to understand the goal is not to make all happy rabbits, but make good for the system, by producing high enough quality answers and questions, which could be indexed by search engines and attract people which could consume (top secret for me(almost) and it seems not about the small part of the system like WB, which is an instrument to keep needed people to be entertained and increase the chance of consuming by that way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion in the particular case - at least do not close a question which attracted too much negative attention as opinion based question as far as there are no other opinions than just one. If you close the question at least do it with other reason. In the case mod intervention was disruptive and the best course of action was to leave the question to its own destiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not expect any of actions, but I feel obligated to leave the information as feedback in hope it might have just above zero chance to help WB to develop itself a bit farther in some distant future, as the situation repeat itself not the first or second time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I understand some difficulties in making decisions and invertibility of errors and imperfection of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have simply rule - if I'm not competent enough to judge a particular situation or I have doubts about that I'm right - do nothing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have clear understanding that there exists many different groups of people and their questions which I disagree with - but also I understand that those groups of people have their own fan groups and possible readers and as far as - &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/em&gt; - their question are ligit, as WB serves the purpose to help such people to implement their fantasies for their audiences. As result the immediate reactions for me deserves the question about how better to cook human meat(or something like that, do not recall at the moment exact formulation of the question we had not so long ago), the rest deserves answering a question - Do you belong to the audience whom the result of the question may be addressed, do you really might judge those people by choosing will the question have answers for them or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that some people can't follow the rule because they are obligated to make decisions, for them was most of the above. But for others asking the question is necessary because of a broad spectrum of topics which are asked on WB.&#xA;And the fact that most of the Q on WB are fantasy question at the moment isn't a good excuse to kill technical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T18:18:45.817" Title="Putting opinion based questions on hold, too fast" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:56:03.483" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think collectively we need to be putting questions on hold much &lt;strong&gt;faster&lt;/strong&gt;, not slower. Either that or we should have a moratorium on answering until it is settled what the question actually is asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who jump in and start answering the question while it is still developing are actually more of a problem than an aid, in my observation. Unlike most of the other Stack Exchange sites, the majority of questions here do not seem to arrive well-formed. They come out of an author's head with a general &quot;I need some information here&quot; and usually take a few comments to clarify what exactly is being asked. There have been many cases where someone jumps in with an answer to a bad question, creating problems when we are trying to help the author (ESPECIALLY authors new to the site) improve their question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about suggesting that questions from authors who have been with the site for less than a month automatically START in [on hold] state, and then go through the &quot;re-open&quot; process once it's clear what's being asked. (I'd even think about ALL questions starting off on-hold.) To me, that would produce both better questions and better answers, without the constant tug back and forth that the current system produces. That would be a no-go on most Stack Exchange sites where getting an answer to the question as fast as possible is more critical. For worldbuilding, I think we should take a bit more time getting the question right and not be so eager to answer. Others may disagree. :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T14:56:03.483" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4264" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:13:16.367" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is exactly opinion-based. It is asking for answers that look at a given problem and brainstorm possibilities, and then the author picks which one he/she feels will create the best story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is that a bad thing on WB?&lt;/strong&gt; Ah... there's the real question. Opinion-based questions on most Stack Exchange forums are bad things... there isn't a real answer. On WB, that brainstorm of opinions is often exactly what the question is trying to elicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the &amp;quot;four forces =&amp;gt; powers&amp;quot; question linked in the OP... the accepted answer makes up some rationalization for distance impact in the Weak and Strong cases. It's entirely opinion-based whether that's a good rationalization or not, but it is also exactly the type of help that the author was asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at @James answer to this meta-question. I think his opening paragraph is fundamentally flawed. When asking about hypotheticals, questions can either be answered with &amp;quot;probably this&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;possibly this&amp;quot;. When it is &amp;quot;probably&amp;quot;, we can find a best answer, not really opinion based. But when it is only &amp;quot;possibly&amp;quot;, that's opinion, pure and simple. Splitting the question into 4 parts would just ask for four different opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned elsewhere in meta this morning, there's a tag on Code Golf Stack Exchange for questions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popularity-contest&quot;&gt;[popularity-contest]&lt;/a&gt;. They specifically created this tag for questions that are going to be voted up based on opinion. I think WB might look to that as an example. It might serve us better than trying to close opinion-based questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2022-07-03T13:05:16.327" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T13:05:16.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4255" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:32:23.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could &quot;suggest&quot; that comments be made into answers by removing the incentives to post answer-like comments instead of comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I (and I think others) post answer-like comments is because of the negatives incurred by a short or incomplete answer. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's somewhat common, for example, that I can say, &quot;On topic X, book Y would be useful to read.&quot; Putting an entire answer together that highlights relevant passages from the book takes time. Would it be helpful to write that up? Probably. But if I don't have the time, should I just leave the information out? I think it is more helpful to the person asking the question to leave the comment and let them investigate if they so choose. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll also post answer-like comments when I'm supplying brainstorming fodder. &quot;An answer to this question might come from investigating XYZ.&quot; I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68782/how-can-i-explain-distinct-conlang-evolution-without-using-isolation&quot;&gt;one of those this morning&lt;/a&gt; (see my comment on the main question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think we should weaken the answer system. But it does seem like there should be some way of recording &quot;info that leads to an answer&quot; separate from both comments and existing answers. I don't like the answers I got on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4123/is-there-a-better-way-to-list-recommended-reading-for-answers&quot;&gt;my meta-question about recording recommended reading&lt;/a&gt;. I continue to think there's a hole in Stack Exchange setup for this type of information. And that hole encourages the answer-like comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:32:23.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:52:49.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At possible risk of being downvoted, closed or banned (IMHO, the criteria are clear as mud), I'll venture an opinion in two parts:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Worldbuilding as a topic is fundamentally different from many stackexchanges (such as those re math or physics, where correctness can be judged against fact.)&lt;/strong&gt;  Thus (for worlds contrary to Natural Law in our universe), many IMHO-valid-here questions intrinsically contains what I will now delicately term 'speculation' -- if not outright opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Looking at the available data, it's pretty plain to me that using primarily-opinion-based as a reason for closing questions is being done so variably and subjectively that it diminishes both the quality and quantity of participation (and participants) here.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30166" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:52:49.293" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T17:13:39.700" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone puts &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag on a question, currently a moderator has to manually add the message explaining the requirements for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has anyone ever asked on meta.stackexchange.com about whether they could add a feature to automatically annotate a question that carries a given tag?&lt;/strong&gt; If that could be automated, it would take work off of moderators, confusion off of newbies, and would address issues like &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4094/is-there-a-way-to-remove-this-bug-related-to-the-hard-science-tag&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. It could also maybe open the door to more exotic tags, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hope-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hope-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hope-based&lt;/a&gt; tag that @MolbOrg and I were discussing &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4270/putting-opinion-based-questions-on-hold-too-fast/4271?noredirect=1#comment11483_4271&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; only somewhat tongue-in-cheek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:13:39.700" Title="Has anyone asked on meta.stackexchange.com about ways to automate hard-science tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:38:40.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK... here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68764/moon-mars-colony-cut-off-from-earth-and-evolve-different-life-forms?noredirect=1#comment199147_68764&quot;&gt;one that I think SHOULD be closed as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;even if&lt;/strong&gt; we relaxed the rules for WorldBuilding as compared to other SE forums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what &quot;spark reptilian DNA means,&quot; but let's pretend that means something meaningful to us all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks: &#xA;&quot;How do the space colonies justify war with their brothers, and what could have changed the Earth's attitudes so much that they want to eliminate human beings?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is open ended. It could be a specific event, it could be evolution, it could be a memeplauge that no one intended to set loose. The answers to this question are almost literally as variable as imagination itself. I don't think &quot;too broad&quot; applies as a reason to close because any of us can answer the question very specifically, but there seems to be no basis for comparing the possible answers or for feeling like the brainstorming space is being explored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T21:38:40.090" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:36:47.967" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those who like reading this site will enjoy &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his latest universe&lt;/a&gt;.  E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here, we sketch a possible world within this universe. We won’t call it a “planet”, because that word carries too much baggage from our own universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35850&quot;&gt;Multidimensional Time-Lines&lt;/a&gt; nearly a year ago, this set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; pages blows away anything that's been posted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s raise a glass to toast &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; master worldbuilder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T00:36:47.967" Title="Greg Egan does it again" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:58:32.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68569/20315&quot;&gt;How can I explain English existing in a fantasy world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hero travels from our world to a fantasy world where people speak English. While there are other nations that speak non-English languages, the particular land she arrives in does. How can I explain away English developing in a world otherwise unlike Earth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 days old, 5k view, sure was in hot questions of the system, 17 answers so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not a purest and laziest form of opinion based question, then I surely understand the definition of opinion based question in a wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was just a random pick from the front page first question with a lot of views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as I see the goal of the question is to choose the most popular plot, because even 3year old may say why it so happened, especially after reading few books about similar situations or after discovering the fact how kids are made - sure because stork brought few kids which language was english&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:03:51.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-22T09:59:39.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Putting question on hold is not the end of that specific question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When question is put on hold, you just cannot answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if author of such question corrects that question, it can be reopened. Also, if author is unsure about what should be fixed on such question, they can always ask here, on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Its not about you, its about specific question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people have feelings like &lt;em&gt;I am stupid&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I am worthless for this site&lt;/em&gt; and they consider the fact that their question was put on hold as &lt;em&gt;big deal&lt;/em&gt;. Believe me, been there, done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my questions were put on hold and they were &lt;em&gt;great questions.&lt;/em&gt; (According my internal scoring system). However, when this happened to me, I took deep breath, got back and tried to fix such question. (Or left it closed, because I realized it was not such great question as I thought so)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Weed should be picked up quickly&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see &lt;em&gt;bad question&lt;/em&gt; I vote to close. Does not matter who asked it. If I consider such question is bad, I vote. And I expect others to do the same. And I expect them to do it &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt; because I want to have good site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T09:59:39.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:39:25.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really hate when this happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of when yahoo answers was ruled by report trolls that used to delete questions out of jealousy or without any reason. And personally this toxic behaviour discourages me from remaining here. I waste energy and time to make a question that is going to be erased anyways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm so sorry, elitist WB people, if I'm not good enough for your godlike standards or my questions offend your fragile emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T08:58:14.820" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T08:58:14.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2017-01-22T19:44:52.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. No. Unknown, wiki isn't solution(but maybe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is ethics of answering the question - If the writing of answer using those sources is not worth your efforts, why should it be worth someone else's efforts? Especially considering the fact, that most likely you are more familiar with those sources and other (who didn't get those association as you did) probably is not familiar with those sources(at least not enough to apply them in answers) and to use them he should not only do the job you have refused to do but also to read the sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure we are one click from everything, but time is a valuable thing, especially when one is one click from pornhub or youtube or from writing its own answer using his own material which he is more familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing to recommend some literature or some sources if you choose so is fine in comments, and one who would like to maybe(not likely) may use your tips.&#xA;For OP it is less useful, especially recommending sources of big enough volume, maximum you may realistically expect one will to read is one page if the topic is really interesting for the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving just titles it is one step from answering each time you should google that, you should read the wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing answer implies to show how those materials are related, and better by citing those places which are related, or by annotation. It is one of the reasons why answers consisting of links are not supra answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would we work in the same company, or team and would we share the profit and would our task more long lasting (not 3-5-10 hours) then it would make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leave a comment, it might influence someone's thinking, or write the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wiki isn't the solution - it is not on top. The information will have no fixed place(I sort answers in chronological order), is too bulky for the task considering how little and unimportant are results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like it more efficient system for pointing similar questions. It kinda reassemblies your proposition but instead of using information all way around of the world of information, restrict it to information of the site. Because duplicate closing is too heavy in consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only questions which could benefit from wiki, are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions, not all but those which try to be like it is described by the tag, not all and not in all cases, and not in the way to leave information, but overcome comments restrictions to exchange information for the answers which may take few days week to write, in case if someone is ready to collaborate(unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T19:44:52.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2017-01-23T02:08:19.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do others agree with me that somehow promoting a list of &quot;Existing source material&quot; in the forum would be useful?&#xA;(If &quot;yes&quot; to Q1) Would it be appropriate to start a practice of editing the original question to put as section of &quot;Existing Source Material&quot; at the end of the question as such things get mentioned in answers or comments?&#xA;(If &quot;yes&quot; to Q1) Is there any way to modify the site to have a more formal way of recording such citations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: probably yes, unless people start adding low-quality citations.  (I think the citations should be readable, right there with the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3: I'm new here; no clue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's possible the community wiki might serve this purpose, but IMHO the wiki here is not that intuitive to use.  (Am I alone in finding the wiki functionality underwhelming?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30166" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T02:08:19.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4244" CreationDate="2017-01-23T03:06:53.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the system you work with, it will reduce chances for your error, and will make a noticing error an easier task for you.&#xA;And no matter wich system OP uses. If he uses any and your results are interesting for him, he will be capable of converting, if he is not capable he had no need in your numbers in first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T03:06:53.763" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T06:09:19.377" Score="6" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The game is simple&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You post an answer with a question and description why it is &lt;em&gt;not an opinion&lt;/em&gt; based question - and you get comments why it is an opinion based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You post an answer with a question and description why it is &lt;em&gt;an opinion&lt;/em&gt; based question and get comments in response why it is not an opinion based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anyone allowed to comment for sure as usual(I do not mean I'm the host only, and only I have the wisdom. Same rep level is not important, would be interesting to read and those who can vote for hold and those who can't)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The goal&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the game it to forge secret decoder rings for those who do not have them yet, to sync our positions about what are or aren't opinion based questions, to give living examples of bad or not so bad questions and some explanations about why it is so, to discover truth about what we call opinion based question and how we really should call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long lasting goal it to improve questions on WB, to teach how to react to those questions, and how to help OP's with those questions, understand and classify reasons behind &quot;bad&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably will be easier for everyone if the question you bring will be not one of yours, to exclude the element of excitement about my supra question, but if you are confident in your behavior then why not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference with the comments you get at WB, and comments you get here - no one shall try to figure out what this or another question have meant, just expression of short opinion backed by few reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is a place for preprocessing the questions, this game is about dissection the results of the already asked question(its closed or hold state).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The separate threads &quot;I disagree with X is on hold&quot; and the Game is different by a number of character you can put as an argument, 50 times shorter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not WB chat because of timezones etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not best examples but still &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4276/20315&quot;&gt;Example 1 offense&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4278/20315&quot;&gt;Example 2 offense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Definitions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, an opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive. It may deal with subjective matters in which there is no conclusive finding. What distinguishes fact from opinion is that facts are more likely to be verifiable, i.e. can be agreed to by the consensus of experts. An example is: &quot;United States of America was involved in the Vietnam War&quot; versus &quot;United States of America was right to get involved in the Vietnam War&quot;. An opinion may be supported by facts and principles, in which case it becomes an argument. Different people may draw opposing conclusions (opinions) even if they agree on the same set of facts. Opinions rarely change without new arguments being presented. It can be reasoned that one opinion is better supported by the facts than another by analyzing the supporting arguments.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In casual use, the term opinion may be the result of a person's perspective, understanding, particular feelings, beliefs, and desires. It may refer to unsubstantiated information, in contrast to knowledge and fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki, Opinion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Shall the game begin&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fd2f3s.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fd2f3s.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T02:37:28.107" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T21:37:30.363" Title="Hot or Not - the Opinion based question, the sandbox game" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4293" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:03:10.900" Score="10" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt; tag from before, which is explained thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the development and usage of powers and abilities beyond what is &quot;normal&quot; for a specific species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a relative newcomer on the block, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/superheroes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;superheroes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;superheroes&lt;/a&gt; for which a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/28985&quot;&gt;proposed&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki excerpt is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about people having surnatural powers or highly developed skills and using them in order to fight or make evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the fact that &quot;surnatural&quot; should probably be &quot;supernatural&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is really the difference between these two except for the application of those powers, which would be squarely up to the &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt; and thus fall outside of the scope of Worldbuilding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is this a meaningful distinction to make in tags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does it make sense that a &quot;superheroes&quot; tag would include using unusual powers or abilities to &lt;em&gt;make evil?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the community feel about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T13:34:41.120" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T13:34:41.120" Title="What is the difference between [superheroes] and [super-powers], and is [superheroes] as proposed reasonable?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4284" CreationDate="2017-01-23T16:15:56.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I discussed this question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4168/why-is-why-would-a-fire-dragon-still-be-afraid-of-torches-not-opinion-based&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, but was told my answer was &quot;sad&quot; and &quot;utterly confusing&quot;. After an edit, let's hope it's received better here... :|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64131/20315&quot;&gt;Why would a fire dragon still be afraid of torches?&lt;/a&gt; ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;is not opinion-based&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask for creative thinking and design &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed. While this question &lt;strong&gt;is too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, as you could potentially write a book on all the reasons a dragon might be afraid of fire (just look at how many answers there are), there is a reason why it isn't opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Evidence means facts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If answers can create claims, support them with evidence, and reason some sort of connection between the evidence and claims, there is no &quot;opinion&quot; to base selecting an answer on - they will be based in facts, only organized in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is little to no &lt;strong&gt;evidence&lt;/strong&gt; to base claims off of - such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67695/would-a-civilisation-be-better-without-nationalities&quot;&gt;Would a civilisation be better without nationalities&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - which cannot really be proven or modeled using real-world examples, the question is probably opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; evidence and reasoning to base claims off of - for example, &quot;the ability almost certainly evolved...&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_%28ethology%29#Functions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is typical of aggressive behaviors&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;People have discovered how to use their torches as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;supernormal stimulus&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - &lt;em&gt;taken from answers on the discussed question&lt;/em&gt; - then no, the question is not opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is possible to base answers in &lt;strong&gt;facts&lt;/strong&gt;, and that seems to be what the answers reflect, the question is not &lt;strong&gt;opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note - there will always be opinionated answers (little to no evidence) on non-opinion-based questions. That doesn't make the entire question opinion-based, it makes the answer bad. Only if it is not possible or very difficult to base answers in facts is the question confined to opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T00:22:25.717" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T17:07:39.510" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuildingme/query/edit/618937&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Looking at a query&lt;/a&gt; of all closed meta questions, it seems we've never used the opinion-based close reason on meta.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has been up for years, yet we've never found an &quot;opinion-based&quot; question in need of closing. &lt;strong&gt;So why don't we remove that option?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3117/can-opinion-based-questions-be-posted-on-the-meta&quot;&gt;Can opinion based questions be posted on the meta?&lt;/a&gt; seemed to conclude that there are many opinion-based questions here, as a result of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; tag, but that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/off-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;off-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; questions absolutely still exist. &lt;strong&gt;It's not appropriate to close questions as opinion-based on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is ideal to justify claims in meta with &lt;strong&gt;reasoning&lt;/strong&gt;, but having a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; tag opens the flood gates per se. If we actually enforce the opinion-based close reason on here, we'll have significantly fewer questions! And that's why we've never enforced it. It's easiest to discuss ways to improve the site when opinions can be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm requesting a &lt;strong&gt;complete removal&lt;/strong&gt; (if possible) of that reason to close meta questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T17:34:40.090" Title="Can we remove the Meta &quot;opinion-based&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T17:17:43.500" Score="5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eleven months ago, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3102/naming-our-robot&quot;&gt;Naming our robot&lt;/a&gt; proposed we name the robot visible in the main site background, on the lefthand side. A week later, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3201/naming-our-lady?lq=1&quot;&gt;Naming our lady&lt;/a&gt; surfaced to give a title to its seemingly human companion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after many names were contributed, no conclusive decision was made.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seems like a waste; many interesting options were provided, and the idea is relatively on-topic, but we left the posts where they sat (as far as I know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it worth narrowing down the names, and if so, what is a fair way to do so?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would we display that information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T15:53:06.440" Title="Is it worth continuing the old name votes? If so, how?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2017-01-23T17:34:40.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;built-in&quot; close reasons -- duplicate, too broad, primarily opinion-based, and unclear -- are built into the SE software and are used on all sites, main and meta.  This also applies to the &quot;generic&quot; off-topic reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right; this close reason doesn't make much sense on meta.  I won't say it &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; applies; I think I've seen it, though I don't recall any details.  But SE has historically not shown much interest in making tweaks like this.  Its presence doesn't impede our use of meta; it's just an option we get used to ignoring, and can continue to ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T17:34:40.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:09:24.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume the people who asked eventually forgot about the questions. If they're still around, my vote is that they accept the highest-voted answer and edit the question to clearly explain who won. If mods can do that, that would also work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we may need a new question to name the caveman on Meta (my suggestion would be Slartibrutefast).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T18:09:24.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T20:24:15.207" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading a question, I noticed an amount of grey on the page. At first I thought it was my monitor playing up but it moved as I scrolled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the colour change be present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DdX4E.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DdX4E.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing problem&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(dotted lines present for easier ability to see the change)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11948" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T20:24:15.207" Title="Load of grey in site design" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2017-01-24T04:07:17.277" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that this is Worldbuilding, I suggest we construct a world, collectively, a la the Ainur in Lord of the Rings (Melkor and all). Then we let the world run forward for 100,000 years and on the anniversary of the creation, we count the names and take the most common one as the name of the lady and we give the robot the name of the first artificial being that the beings of our world construct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems a fair and equitable approach that keeps with the spirit of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T04:07:17.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2017-01-24T04:14:28.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd kill &quot;superheroes&quot; tag and just keep &quot;super-powers&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T04:14:28.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T05:39:19.363" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged a question as &quot;too broad&quot;. Then I realized the author had previously posted the same question and decided to change my flag to &quot;duplicate&quot;. I retracted the &quot;broad&quot; flag, but the user interface now won't let me flag as &quot;duplicate&quot; because it seems to think I already flagged as &quot;duplicate&quot; and then retracted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does flagging as &quot;too broad&quot; also count as flagging &quot;duplicate&quot;? Is this a bug? (I have tagged as 'bug' but am obviously uncertain)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31614" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T08:36:35.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T08:36:35.710" Title="Why does flagging as &quot;too broad&quot; also count as &quot;duplicate&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|bug|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T10:08:47.187" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at a recent, well I didn't ask much lately.., question of mine on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63016/how-to-butcher-your-dragon&quot;&gt;butchering dragons&lt;/a&gt;, I see again that people often do not even &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to read the actual question but just want to react to the first few words without using their brains or anything else..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original title of that question was &lt;em&gt;&quot;How to cook your dragon&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, a title intended to be a reference to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892769/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;certain movie about dragons and vikings&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a catchy eye-catcher to gather attention to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The body of the question itself as well as the &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; single-sentence question at the end was asking about the single aspect of &lt;em&gt;butchering&lt;/em&gt; a dragon, e.g. what cuts to make from which parts of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at another question, here on the meta, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2112/do-the-titles-of-questions-need-to-be-in-question-format&quot;&gt;asking about if question titles need be questions themselves&lt;/a&gt; it seems to be a problem having been encountered by others as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion is meant to discuss and hopefully find a consensus on why/how/what and other fancy w-questions regarding question titles opposed to the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are people not able to read the question itself, and why do they when you point it out to them insist that you, the question poster, are wrong and they are right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, this is a grief-laden subject for me, because I've had some questions that have been swarmed with good answers that were totally off-topic.. and I do not want to have to flag them for deletion if I do not have to.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Every good answer that doesn't handle the question makes me feel that I have failed in writing a clear question :/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:15:04.810" Title="Of Questions &amp; Titles" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T10:40:51.530" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68481/assassinate-a-semi-omniscient-crime-lord&quot;&gt;Assassinate a semi-omniscient crime lord&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now has 30+ answers. It would be helpful if members of the community who have the time available can go through &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the answers and vote/flag accordingly - otherwise only the first few answers tend to get the recognition or deletion that may be deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been viewed ten thousand times, let's make sure the answers are worth that sort of viewing numbers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T12:49:52.947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T12:49:52.947" Title="Help requested to review a popular question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:53:06.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meh.  The whole thing is informal anyway; how often do people refer to these entities and need a name? So the askers of the questions should accept answers, and people should do with this whatever they like. :-)  If people want to write fiction (as one person has &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-lost-builder-355cf7de7ec6#.cjisn6xtp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;already done&lt;/a&gt;), they can choose to be informed by the meta posts, or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's anything official to do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T15:53:06.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:44:54.647" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68619/if-a-new-nation-on-an-artificial-island-was-founded-what-kinds-of-names-might-i&quot;&gt;If a new nation on an artificial island was founded, what kinds of names might it be given?&lt;/a&gt; It has been closed as primarily opinion-based. I don't understand why it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it might have been closed because it looks like I'm asking for a list of names. But I explicitly say otherwise in my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If somebody were to build a new nation, how would it be named, and what kinds of names might it get? I'm not interested in a list of names - rather, I want ideas about the process that would be used to select a name, and what types of names would potentially be selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it might also be because it's a relatively subjective question. But in my experience, most of the questions on this site are somewhat subjective. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68535/what-kind-of-art-if-any-would-be-possible-in-a-world-without-imagination&quot;&gt;What kind of art (if any) would be possible in a world without imagination?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66603/how-quickly-will-government-realize-that-i-am-printing-money&quot;&gt;How quickly will government realize that I am printing money?&lt;/a&gt; are both questions that, like mine, describe a hypothetical scenario and ask about a particular aspect of the implications of such a setting. My other question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40630/what-are-people-doing-while-they-wait-for-the-apocalypse&quot;&gt;What are people doing while they wait for the apocalypse?&lt;/a&gt;, is likewise similar in its subjective nature and hasn't been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please explain to me why my question was closed? If it looks like it shouldn't have been closed, can it please be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:09:56.320" Title="Why was my question closed as primarily opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4309" CreationDate="2017-01-25T02:49:29.157" Score="13" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Community♦ user raises some automatic moderator-attention flags, which are usually helpful.  One of the flags is the TooManyAnswers flag, which is raised when a question gets more than 10 answers either (a) at all or (b) recently (within the last 7 days).  The problem is that on Worldbuilding, many questions actually do get a lot of answers quickly, but it's usually not a sign that we've got a question out of control.  By the nature of the subject matter, and due to the size of our community, new questions get a lot of reasonable answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem with a question or one or more answers, our community is good at handling it -- putting unclear questions on hold, flagging and deleting non-answers, protecting (or flagging for protection), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So usually, when we get this auto-flag, there's nothing to do, and we get it often enough that investigating (just in case) and then dismissing it is a bit of a hassle.  Today I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/290189/162102&quot;&gt;learned&lt;/a&gt; that the threshold could be raised via a request on our meta, so here I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like to raise the threshold for recent answers from 10 to 15.  I assume that this also implicitly raises the threshold for all answers ((a) above) to 15, but if that's not true, that's fine.  We see the impact for new questions, ones that are probably still on the front page and are getting plenty of community attention already, and for those we would appreciate it if Community♦ would kindly chill a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The average question gets 4.5 answers.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  I don't know how to compute the standard deviation of the distribution,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; but this changes raises the trigger from &quot;a bit over 2x&quot; to &quot;about 3.5x&quot; and that feels about right (gut feel).  If data suggests that we should tweak this number, I'm open to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This number factors in deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I had one semester of statistics.  A &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T04:25:22.403" Title="Please raise the threshold for the &quot;too many answers&quot; flag" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4305" CreationDate="2017-01-25T03:07:48.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agree. Vote up if you also agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T03:07:48.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2017-01-25T03:27:36.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First impressions count in human cognition. Once we THINK we understand, we assume we DO understand. After that, ego gets involved to correct ourselves. I had an answer that I had to delete yesterday after someone demonstrated that the Internet had changed from when I last looked at it. I really wanted to argue I was right even though I knew I wasn't. The instinct to win is huge and has to be actively repressed to actually get the right answers. Certain People who advocate for winning always are Evidence One for the problem that attitude creates! None of us likes to lose. It takes concentration to let it happen. For something that is a fun hobby, that's DOUBLY hard... it mixes pain into the fun. I could cite specific comments demonstrating that, but I'm not calling anyone out... that is also a problem. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: put a title down that makes the right first impression!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T03:27:36.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4244" CreationDate="2017-01-25T03:40:47.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My vote would be to execute the formula in your own system and any key results along the way, simply put in parenthesis the alternative figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I would say something was 10m (32.8ft) and do the inputs and math in metric until the end result is, say 7m/s2 (15mph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the stuff in the middle, for me, would remain metric.  It takes very little effort to place an alternative number in parenthesis for the purpose of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T03:40:47.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4305" CreationDate="2017-01-25T04:25:15.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/619586#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Distribution of questions by answer-count, last 90 days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another one of those sites where the expected number of answers skews a bit toward &quot;many&quot;; the gentle fall-off from 2-8 answers is wildly different from the free-fall from 1 to 2 on most other sites. One might suspect that a question which garners only a single answer here is perhaps doing a bit poorly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but in any case, the dangers which this flag was created to highlight are clearly either not well-indicated by the same metric here (or are so wildly pervasive as to make chasing them down with such a weapon futile). I've raised the 7-day threshold to 15; the all-time threshold remains at 30.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T04:25:15.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2017-01-25T05:20:56.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I have a litmus test for what constitutes a &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself: &quot;What would a wrong answer to this question be?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the process of a place name developing, are there any wrong answers? I know of places that were named on a bet, named for game shows, named by drawing out of a hat, named for religion, named for irony (Slapout, Ok), etc. Any solution anyone types up is valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the answer is &quot;any way you want.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the question has no &quot;best&quot; answer. Even one that gets lots of upvotes doesn't mean anything. The design space is so open ended that we can't even say when all the answers collectively are close to being a complete set of possibilities!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That inability to be wrong in any real way makes this a bad question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T05:20:56.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:09:56.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question needs to be more explicit (especially in the title) that it's looking for the process of naming a location rather than looking for a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have this city, what do I call it&quot; - Opinion based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have this city, how do I come up with a name for it&quot; - Opinion based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is the best process I can use to come up with names for a city that [insert criteria here - for example fit in with the other locations in the kingdom, distinguish from others, fit a certain timezone or culture, etc]&quot; - On topic if sufficiently constrained&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to make your question more explicitly about the process rather than the end result. Descriptions of your city should instead be rephrased as restrictions on that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:09:56.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4284" CreationDate="2017-01-25T15:23:55.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68619/if-a-new-nation-on-an-artificial-island-was-founded-what-kinds-of-names-might-i&quot;&gt;If a new nation on an artificial island was founded, what kinds of names might it be given?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User @Kevin &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4304/why-was-my-question-closed-as-primarily-opinion-based&quot;&gt;believes&lt;/a&gt; his question is not opinion-based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered that I think it IS opinion-based ... AND I offered a litmus test I think we could use to define questions that are truly opinion-based, thus providing a path to objectively decide if a question meets our standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The litmus test is this: &lt;strong&gt;Ask yourself: &quot;What would a wrong answer to this question be?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; If the only rejection of an answer (aside from just missing the point of the question entirely) is the author's opinion, then the design space is too open-ended AND no amount of up/down voting provides any discrimination among answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put more details in my answer in the other thread. I think Kevin's question fails my litmus test and is therefore overly opinion-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T21:37:30.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:50:57.710" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s only 2 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/2d&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;2d&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;2d&lt;/a&gt;, yet that’s a very interesting subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I challenge the community to post on this topic, and discover existing posts that can have this tag added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions with an element that only has two dimensions: length and width. This tag is only relevant when describing something that is often not two-dimensional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with this tag focus on objects, spaces and other elements that possess length and width but not height. The spacetime-dimensions tag is often relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your fictional universe is two-dimensional, it is difficult to use the science-based tag. See the Physics SE discussion on the subject, which explains the problems asssociated with such a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T12:50:34.903" Title="Sporadic ad-hoc topic challenge" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:07:22.457" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is my first Meta question if there's any problem do let me know and I'll try to fix it ASAP.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an issue I have encountered in my recent questions as well as others'. The &quot;issue&quot; &amp;mdash; which might not be an issue at all depending on how the community sees it &amp;mdash; in question is: a question with a certain scope is posted, but some of the answers provided ignore said scope in order to either circumvent the problem to find an easier (or more plausible) solution or in search of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;Problem XY&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I'm not talking about lateral thinking, which would be an answer that makes assumptions not specified in the question in order to provide a better or more suitable solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor I am talking about the regular cases of &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4225/challenging-questions-premises&quot;&gt;challenging questions' premises&lt;/a&gt;, which I think are constructive since they provide good answers that might not have been considered otherwise. Such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/69173/8603&quot;&gt;this answer to one of my questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am talking the intersection between challenging premises and ignoring scopes. Such as when asking a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; question but answering with magical solutions. Or for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69339/how-can-a-flat-sheet-of-cells-develop-complexity-and-even-intelligence&quot;&gt;this question about 2d organisms&lt;/a&gt; in which even though it is explicitly stated that the point of the question is to ponder about the scope of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/2d&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;2d&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;2d&lt;/a&gt; tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/69342/8603&quot;&gt;one of the answers&lt;/a&gt; goes looking for an XY problem that doesn't exist resulting in an answer that falls out of the scope of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my actual question, what should we assume is static or set in stone when asking a question? should tags be considered definitive and unquestionable when assessing how to answer a question? or should that role fall on explicit statements in the body of the question? maybe both? or should users be allowed to freely determine whether the scope of a question is faulty? if such is the case, what stops users from answering about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/264613/is-it-ok-to-dispute-the-premise-of-a-question&quot;&gt;the proper use of feng-shui when the question asks how to use a sledgehammer&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, maybe this is a non-issue and I am just being whiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8603" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T19:48:57.183" Title="Ignoring questions' scopes" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2017-01-27T16:56:36.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sake of the usability of this site, I think question titles should be the actual questions (or at least a decent summary of what it is that's being asked). If you ask &quot;how to cook your dragon&quot; people expect a question regarding cooking, not butchering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a possible scenario. Let's say someone is pondering how to cook a dragon. Good etiquette would be to search for such a question first. And once they do, they'll find a question titled &quot;how to cook your dragon&quot; only to realize that the question is not about cooking at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also applies for answering the question. Let's say a person sees the question in the front page and decides to answer it because they know a LOT about cooking, especially exotic meals. But upon reading the body of the question they realize that the question is not in fact about cooking and that they can't answer it. Similarly, for the opposite scenario, someone who might know about butchering but not cooking will not answer the question because they think they can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things such as the similar questions box when writing a question or seeing a posted question would also be affected by misleading titles and will probably also mislead users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T16:56:36.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4314" CreationDate="2017-01-27T19:11:30.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, and in accordance with the site's design, answers should be used to answer the question that was asked. The Worldbuilding SE is a little more lax in this regard than some of the other members of the network due to the nature of its material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if there is a problem with a question, it should be addressed in comments, hopefully early on, before answers start floating in. This saves the trouble of answers going off in different directions due to differing interpretations of what the question is asking; the corollary to this being that questions should always be clear and well-defined (one of the purposes for voting is clear/not clear). In more extreme cases, a question can (and should) be put on hold while the OP works through concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some specific cases, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, answers can be used to identify fundamental problems with the question, usually on a level that comments can't clean up without drastically altering the question. In these cases, I would suggest a complete answer both identify the fundamental flaws in logic or information and, if possible, provide a (at least) minimal solution or direction for solving the corrected problem. (But I'm not advocating for extremely long answers to include this.) Note also that tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; are explicitly for determining how to answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the question (and any sources linked in the question) is the single source of information for all answers. If the question states unequivocally that a thing works in a certain way, then all answers should accept that the thing works in that certain way &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; the answer is specifically refuting the premise of the question, and then it must explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the thing cannot work in that certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every question and answer page should be taken on the premise that the universe in question (pun intended) is, was, and will always be the questioner's, not the answerer's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T19:48:57.183" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T19:48:57.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-27T23:44:58.007" Score="29" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been several questions which are in the form &quot;I created this unstoppable ability for my bad guy, how can I defeat him?&quot;  Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69407/how-do-you-defeat-a-time-stopping-dark-lord&quot;&gt;How do you defeat a time-stopping Dark Lord?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/68481/assassinate-a-semi-omniscient-crime-lord&quot;&gt;Assassinate a semi-omniscient crime lord&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37242/how-do-you-assassinate-someone-who-is-protected-by-precognitive-people&quot;&gt;How do you assassinate someone who is protected by precognitive people?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior&quot;&gt;How to Defeat a Precognitive Warrior?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70748/possible-weaknesses-of-a-vector-manipulator&quot;&gt;Possible weaknesses of a vector manipulator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general pattern for this type of question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create some vastly overpowered superpower for which you cannot find a counter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give it to your villain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for help on WB to find a counter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of thinking almost always has to lead to one of the following outcomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A seasoned worldbuilder looks at the scenario, finds an obvious flaw and abuses it.  This typically requires the OP to have taken great care to specify the power very specifically, otherwise its hard for a flaw to be obvious.  Villian's ability has a 20m diameter effect?  Make your weapon 21m in diameter.  If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is impossible to answer because the superpower is simply too powerful.  If the villain has a card which says &quot;playing this card wins the game,&quot; and they can play it at any time they please, there really isn't a way to stop them from winning, is there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A less-than-obvious flaw is identified and exploited to reveal a major issue with the villain's ability.  This is where your clever code breakers realize there's a few &quot;forbidden&quot; settings in your encryption machine and leverage those to crack your code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that the best &quot;unstoppable forces&quot; have very subtle weaknesses.  A great example is found in traditional stories of using magic to make people fall in love (it always fails for rather intriguing reasons).  We also see great examples in war novels, fiction and non-fiction, where the constant arms war leads to exploits of very clever nuances in the enemy's implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these also seem like they are better added by an author, not a worldbuilding poster.  The key to building one of these subtle weaknesses is to carefully refine the superpower in a way which creates that weakness.  As a worldbuilder, we don't always have that power... but the author does.  It may take 5 or more back-and-forths to nail down what sort of adjustments are acceptable to the author.  StackExchange is not built to handle back and forths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these questions bug me, and I'm wondering if there's anything that should be done about them.  If it were up to me, I'd close almost all of them, but when I look at the questions linked above, many of them are popular.  I'm clearly in the minority in disliking this sort of question.  Other than the obvious solution to my problem (&quot;just don't look at those questions, dummy!&quot;), is there anything that can be done to help improve the quality of such questions so that they lead more towards the interesting subtle flaws?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T21:54:59.623" Title="What to do about unstoppable questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-01-28T15:38:53.893" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really like these questions. I asked one a while ago, and it got a lot of votes and a lot of views and was extremely well-received. Looking back, I think it's one of my &lt;em&gt;worst&lt;/em&gt; Worldbuilding questions, especially as I tried to remove a flaw after someone pointed it out and exploited it, thereby nullifying a couple answers (fortunately, my edit was rolled back).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the questions objectively, they're all asked almost as a challenge, which seems &lt;strong&gt;the definition of Too Broad&lt;/strong&gt;. A good &quot;How can I . . . ?&quot; question places limitations and constraints on answers and makes it possible to choose one over the other. I have asked &quot;How can I . . . ?&quot; questions that lack these constraints, and I've seen others asked them, and without constraints, they don't work well. They get 10, 20, 30 answers, none of which can be ranked objectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also tend to get a lot of short answers - a couple paragraphs at absolute best, for the most upvoted ones. Yes, I write long answers, and yes, people like brevity, and yes, the likelihood of someone reading an answer is often inversely proportional to its length, but when I see lots of really short answers getting a lot of votes, I think, &quot;Hm, is this a reflection on the question itself?&quot; I'd say yes. Answers need to be long enough to explain how they pass the constraints. If you can write a four sentence answer that's apparently well-recieved, what does that say about the constraints of the question? They're non-existent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice here is to comment and ask the askers to edit&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in such limitations to their questions while thoroughly explaining what the superpower can and cannot do. Ensure that the answers &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be ranked objectively, and that an answer &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be wrong. It's like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rubber duck debugging&lt;/a&gt; - if they explain all the details of a proposal to someone, they'll &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; find the problems with it sooner or later, and likely sooner. The real issues arise here when someone comes up with an idea and doesn't really think it through, then frantically tries to finesse it after they get answers. Comment early, comment often, and improve these questions before they get answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Make sure they add the information in &lt;em&gt;edits&lt;/em&gt;, not comments. We don't want comment threads getting more crowded than they already are. An example comment is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi, [User X]. Your question is not very well constrained, and there's currently no easy way to rank one answer over another, or determine if an answer is fully correct. Please edit your question to explain the specific details of what your superpower can and cannot do, and what makes one answer better than another - that is, what objective criteria it should satisfy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T15:38:53.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T17:08:04.680" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a number of questions appearing on the World Building stack exchange revolving around how to kill/stop a character with some set of powers that makes them unstoppable.  Here are a few of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/69533/21704&quot;&gt;How to defeat a villain who can predict the next day?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68481/21704&quot;&gt;Assassinate a semi-omniscient crime lord&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10939/21704&quot;&gt;How to Defeat a Precognitive Warrior?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/56258/21704&quot;&gt;How to kill a telepathic, defended Person&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/37242/21704&quot;&gt;How do you assassinate someone who is protected by precognitive people?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it worth creating a new tag for these types of questions, and if so what should the tag be called?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:10:52.443" Title="New tag for how to kill impossible to kill character" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:32:30.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to HDE's answer, which is correct, &lt;strong&gt;mark questions as duplicate when appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the examples include incredibly similar abilities, and their answers overlap to a high degree. If too many of these questions surface it will be appropriate to mark the closer ones as duplicate and close them so we do not repeat the same discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:32:30.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4351" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:52:08.260" Score="5" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/is-worldbuilding-a-what-if-site&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding, according to most, should not be a &lt;em&gt;What If&lt;/em&gt;? site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, an increasing number of questions are phrased in a &quot;what if&quot; way, and it's not always easy to discern if they're &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; (building a fictional world) or &lt;strong&gt;what-if&lt;/strong&gt; (asking what would happen) which is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The culprit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Let's say...&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions do not seem to be phrased as &quot;in this world&quot;, but rather, &quot;if there were a world&quot;. Instead of &quot;in my world,&quot; it's often &quot;pretend there were a world where...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this constitute &lt;em&gt;What-If&lt;/em&gt;? Are these questions on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69548/most-effective-method-of-creating-fear&quot;&gt;Most effective method of creating fear?&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Let's say&lt;/strong&gt; a psichotic alien race...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57563/lets-say-the-whole-human-race-lived-in-caves-for-millions-of-years-with-lots-of&quot;&gt;... What features would humans gain or lose?&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Let's say&lt;/strong&gt; humans lived in caves...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46686/can-a-split-personality-itself-have-split-personalities&quot;&gt;Can a split personality itself have split personalities?&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Let's say&lt;/strong&gt; a person has...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10717/time-required-for-isolated-colonists-to-forget-about-their-origin&quot;&gt;Time required for isolated colonists to forget about their origin&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Let's say&lt;/strong&gt; that I have...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a notable variant to discuss is &quot;let's call&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51503/is-it-possible-to-have-two-or-three-planets-in-a-stable-orbit-together&quot;&gt;Let's call them Un, Deux and Trois&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39830/temperature-difficulties-of-a-fluctuating-orbital-distance&quot;&gt;Let's call her Star B&lt;/a&gt;&quot; etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:33:01.807" Title="&quot;Let's say&quot; &quot;Let's pretend&quot; &quot;Let's call&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:06:40.473" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biochemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biochemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biochemistry&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Life tag does not currently have any wiki entry. Same with Anatomy. Should these perhaps be consolidated with &quot;biology&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was looking at what to consolidate it with, I noticed that biology and biochemistry are basically identical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;For questions regarding the chemistry of living organisms.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but additional information is usually necessary.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll let you guess which is which. :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe all four of these should be consolidated to a single tag (and made synonyms of each other).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T05:22:15.180" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T10:21:11.850" Title="Should tags biology, biochemistry, anatomy, and life be consolidated?" Tags="|bug|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:21:59.657" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;These tags are defined:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seasons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;seasons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;seasons&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;This one is not:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/global-warming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;global-warming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;global-warming&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the tag have its definition filled in? Or should it be made a synonym of one of the other two tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it should be left separate and defined &lt;strong&gt;specifically&lt;/strong&gt; to discuss impact of changes in climate on species, and then clarify &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt; as the working out of what the climate would be in a given condition, separate from its change over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:46:45.890" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:46:45.890" Title="Tags: global-warming undefined... consolidate or leave separate?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4320" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:25:45.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt; tag. But you're right... there are a lot of these questions. But rather than focus on these, I suggest something broader: a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/overpowered-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;overpowered-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;overpowered-check&lt;/a&gt;, which could include super powers or artifacts or spells or just changes in physics, when what you're specifically looking for is whether or not this change results in an &quot;unplayable&quot; world. With the word &quot;power&quot; in it, the autocomplete should suggest this to anyone working on a super powers question when they type in &quot;power&quot;, which I wager is common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T05:34:32.513" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:34:32.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4322" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:33:57.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To me, any question is on-topic when it asks us to employ our &lt;em&gt;imaginations&lt;/em&gt; as much or more as our &lt;em&gt;scientific knowledge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use an &quot;alternate situation&quot; litmus test -- there has to be some aspect of the question that is not about the real world/real universe for it to be valid on Worldbuilding. Alternative history is fine -- something changed, and X occurred instead of Y. Alternative physics -- something changed, and now up is down or somesuch. Alternative whatever. But if the question is just about something that could happen in this world (&quot;what if Earth were hit by an asteroid?&quot; for example) then it is off-topic and should move to one of the other Stack Exchanges. &quot;What if Earth were visited by aliens?&quot; is something that could happen, but it is still a valid question because it lies outside the current scientific experience. We are called on to extrapolate beyond available data, not just play out a section of the game tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:33:57.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:38:26.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Introducing a super power to a world is no different from introducing hypothetical technology or a change in physics. It is FUNDAMENTAL to worldbuilding and, to me, that puts it ON TOPIC. Firmly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:38:26.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:47:23.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;There are important differences, so probably not.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are definitely cases where multiple tags apply, there are clear instances where they have completely different meanings. Consolidating them for an all-purpose &quot;biological&quot; tag would remove their ability to describe different circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biochemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biochemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biochemistry&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How much energy does it take for my dragons to fly?&lt;/em&gt; fits biology, but biochemistry is not appropriate. A search for &quot;biochemistry&quot; should not lead to this question because it doesn't have to do with biochemistry - only biology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why are seven tentacles evolutionarily advantageous?&lt;/em&gt; is totally about biology, but life is a very broad word to apply to this situation and so is not appropriate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can panspermia occur during the protoplanet stage?&lt;/em&gt; fits life, and addresses how it develops, but biology seems rather inappropriate here. We aren't really talking about specific organisms, or even species, but the concept of life in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What climate would my Leviathans prefer, given these behaviors?&lt;/em&gt; absolutely has to do with biology, but it doesn't have to do with the creatures' specific organs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biochemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biochemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biochemistry&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can my symbiotic species re-evolve the ability digest cellulose?&lt;/em&gt; has to do with chemistry, not life or living things as a whole&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biochemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biochemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biochemistry&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are creatures developing in a Jovian atmosphere likely to employ propellers?&lt;/em&gt; completely has to do with the physical characteristics of some species, but has nothing to do with their internal chemical reactions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biochemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biochemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biochemistry&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does aqua regia make an efficient stomach acid if my dragons want to metabolize the gold they plunder?&lt;/em&gt; is about the chemistry behind dragons, not the idea of life as a whole; life is very broad, and probably doesn't apply to a lot of circumstances.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can abiogenesis occur in the hydrocarboniferous subsurface ocean of Enceladus despite low reaction temperatures?&lt;/em&gt; ... is about the formation of life, but not about its physical characteristics. Although the title was fun to come up with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:47:23.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4324" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:55:54.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the separation completely: it clarifies the differences between the two terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are questions out there about global &lt;em&gt;cooling&lt;/em&gt; and other large-scale climate changes that aren't encompassed by &lt;em&gt;warming&lt;/em&gt;. I suggest we remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/global-warming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;global-warming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;global-warming&lt;/a&gt; and/or consolidate it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate-change&lt;/a&gt; to offer a more accurate overview of the difference between the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:55:54.170" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4334" CreationDate="2017-01-30T06:12:24.223" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/magic/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; includes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usually it is a power that normal people don't have, and is wielded instead by a special caste (wizards, sorcerers, witches, mages, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is true for many examples, a significant number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions describe the popular, widespread use of magic in society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line may accurately describe &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions, but it doesn't contribute much - the rest of the wiki pretty much says it all -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Magic or sorcery is an attempt to understand and exploit supernatural forces, using rituals, symbols, actions, gestures and language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it may alienate other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a good reason to keep this line of the wiki?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T10:15:49.357" Title="Are these lines in the magic tag wiki necessary?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T06:23:57.913" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I need to ask a question that needs historic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;) and linguistic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Language&lt;/a&gt;) elements answered that influence each other in a world building setting... Should I ask the question in all 3 stacks and reference each other, or just world building even though I'm not likely to get a properly informed answer, or linguistics where it is the best place to ask to get the information I want, but it is non-factual question which means it probably doesn't belong there...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ask in the comment section. Basically, at two points in history a bunch of portals open up on Earth and groups from all over Earth and transported to a new world (in two different spots on this new world at 2 different times)... I need to know generally what would happen, assuming set of them survive and create their own civilizations. So I need to know what civs are there in those times and how they'd react to people of other civs...or at least a best guess... This is a question that needs a bunch of History elements to contruct the world, but then I also need to know what elements of the languages these civs speak would transfer to this new language... which requires the history and world building elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history bits world building might be ok to cover, but the linguistic parts I don't think world will answer satisfactorally...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.530" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:33:20.140" Title="Cross expertise needed questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T07:11:55.230" Score="6" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever a user reaches their daily vote limit, there's a handy popup that tells them &lt;strong&gt;what the&lt;/strong&gt; (upvote) &lt;strong&gt;limit is&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;when it will refresh&lt;/strong&gt;. However, when a user reaches a more unusual daily limit - &lt;strong&gt;tag wiki edits&lt;/strong&gt; - they are not alerted. This information is also not found on any help page, so it's frustrating trying to figure out when editing will be available again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WKECo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WKECo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the limit has been reached, this red-orange box replaces the edit box. It describes tag wikis in a positive way but &lt;strong&gt;does not mention a limit&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/551/can-we-please-standardize-the-phrasing-for-the-tag-wikis&quot;&gt;An old meta question&lt;/a&gt; is the only place that references any limit, but there its claims are unverified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm requesting for this information to be put into a &lt;strong&gt;help page&lt;/strong&gt; so that it can be easily accessed, as well as the &lt;strong&gt;red-orange box&lt;/strong&gt; that appears when the limit has been reached, so that users understand how best to contribute to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T01:38:25.660" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T01:38:25.660" Title="Can the information about tag editing limits be posted publicly?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4331" CreationDate="2017-01-30T09:31:13.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My advice would be to choose the site most likely to answer most of your question (that sounds like Worldbuilding from what you have said) and ask the question there. Just make sure the question is on topic and sufficiently constrained etc for the chosen site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you then find that specific areas such as history and linguistics need drilling into you can compose a follow on question - and that question again can be placed at whichever site is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no rule against posting the questions to all three sites at once (so long as they are different questions, not cross posting the same one) but in general building one question upon the answers to the first will give a better result in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:31:13.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4330" CreationDate="2017-01-30T10:15:49.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, the first sentence isn't really needed. However it does include the word &quot;usually&quot; and it is true that most fantasy scenarios usually involve a special caste of magic using individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm ambivalent about it. I don't mind the sentence being there, but also don't object to it being deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T10:15:49.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2017-01-30T10:21:11.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Zxyrra except in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;&amp;lt;-&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;. Those two certainly seem very similar. There are also ongoing problems with  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt; that are more complicated than this, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3272/its-back-the-life-tag&quot;&gt;It&amp;#39;s back, the [Life] tag&lt;/a&gt; for further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it might be time to revisit the decision not to blacklist &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T10:21:11.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4320" CreationDate="2017-01-30T10:25:05.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags exist for a purpose - to categorize questions and find ones you are interested in. In general &quot;meta&quot; tags are a bad idea, and while we have a few they have very specific and well understood reasons for existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have to sell me on the idea that there exist experts in the world on &quot;killing-superpowered-characters&quot; or &quot;overpowered-check&quot; who might be interested in following worldbuilding and looking for questions with that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems unlikely for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because questions have similarities doesn't mean we need a tag for those similarities unless that tag actually serves a purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T10:25:05.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4331" CreationDate="2017-01-30T16:50:05.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These sorts of questions are really tricky for the Stack Exchange format.  If you aren't careful, the WorldBuilding component will have a tendency to cause the questions to get immediately tossed out of the more strict SE sites.  There's a general allergic reaction to fiction on many sites. (for good reason)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WorldBuliding is an inherently intertwined iterative process, so I can see how all of those questions could get wound up tightly with each other.  However, what I have found is that the StackExchange format works best when you can tease apart one large interdependent question into several smaller questions.  Those smaller questions tend to be better received because they are more likely to apply to others (as opposed to being a ultra-custom answer which only works in this particular world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T16:50:05.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T20:01:12.023" Score="17" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is scheduled for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;an election starting next week, February 6th&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that election, we will be hosting a Q&amp;amp;A here for candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4420/2017-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, February 6th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the collection phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing (up to) 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T20:07:04.373" Title="2017 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-30T20:01:12.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T20:01:12.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-30T20:49:14.253" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T15:02:10.270" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:02:10.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:48:11.393" Score="14" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T00:47:11.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:58:00.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:58:00.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-31T00:01:03.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming there are more questions to be asked than the ones on this post - but just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What qualities make you suited for this position?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T00:01:03.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-01-31T00:03:28.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is valuable information scattered amongst all the various how to kill/stop unstoppable character posts.  What if the community generates an intentional too broad question and give it a community wiki answer.  Then any time one of these questions pops up flag it as a duplicate referencing the community wiki answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21704" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T00:03:28.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T01:05:21.087" Score="8" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69665/why-would-a-colony-need-to-relocate&quot;&gt;Why would a colony need to relocate?&lt;/a&gt; got a lot of flak along the lines of “what would determine which answer is best?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how is this different from any other question, like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69688/what-kind-of-apocalypse-could-reset-the-world-to-middle-age-technology&quot;&gt;What kind of apocalypse could reset the world to middle age technology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69546/what-would-a-civilization-living-in-a-cold-permanently-snowy-climate-eat&quot;&gt;What would a civilization living in a cold, permanently snowy climate eat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69549/reasons-a-future-branch-of-islam-would-be-against-ai&quot;&gt;Reasons a future branch of Islam would be against AI?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69564/how-could-immortal-children-age-faster-than-immortal-adults&quot;&gt;How could immortal children age faster than immortal adults?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just reading off the current front page.  What about my post says anything about needing a “best” reason, as the comments insist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really— tell me what I’m missing so I can fix the question.  I honestly see nothing different in nature compared with all the “&lt;strong&gt;reasons&lt;/strong&gt;”, “&lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt;”, or “&lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt;” questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find these to be the most interesting to read, looking at all the different creative takes on it (and perhaps adding my own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is also well received with a good number of upvotes and answers in the time it was open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T05:26:51.103" Title="How is this POB?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4348" CreationDate="2017-01-31T03:08:16.933" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently no tag wikis for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteor&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroids&lt;/a&gt;, but several questions have those tags.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Additionally, &lt;strong&gt;comets&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;meteorites&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;meteoroids&lt;/strong&gt; are related phenomena with their own definitions, but they aren't used as tags at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are notorious  for misuse - few people know and remember the definitions, so they are often used interchangeably when tagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the definitions from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/fastfacts.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NASA&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asteroid&lt;/strong&gt;: A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comet&lt;/strong&gt;:  A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of dust and/or gas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meteoroid&lt;/strong&gt;: A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meteor&lt;/strong&gt;: The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth's atmosphere and vaporizes; a shooting star.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meteorite&lt;/strong&gt;: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth's atmosphere and lands upon the Earth's surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Which of the three untagged phenomena (comets, meteorites, and meteoroids) should get tags, if any? Do we want to be specific here or is this unnecessary detail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Would it be better to define these phenomena on the tag descriptions so people tag correctly, or is this too picky and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-rocks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-rocks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-rocks&lt;/a&gt; tag would suffice that encompasses them all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; Should we standardize pluralization? Meteor is singular but asteroid&amp;quot;s&amp;quot; is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T03:57:56.237" Title="Let's talk about big space rocks" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4345" CreationDate="2017-01-31T03:53:37.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You've made a good point&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are several reasons to close a question as opinion-based, they are not applied consistently, and you have evidenced that clearly. I will retract my close vote so you can get answers, and after we have clear guidelines, we will decide if a close vote is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4354/redefining-what-we-want-to-close&quot;&gt;Discussion can be found here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T05:26:51.103" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T05:26:51.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4346" CreationDate="2017-01-31T03:57:56.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;for the purposes of tagging&lt;/em&gt;, meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites could be grouped together.  Yes, they're different -- but tags are for categorization, not necessarily precise specification, and questions about these will have a lot in common.  Possibly comets should be grouped with them too.  Asteroids feel like the outliers in this group, tending to have (approximately) fixed orbits and tending to appear in groups (fields).  I would expect questions about asteroids to have different considerations than questions about the other bodies in this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T03:57:56.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4320" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:10:52.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag that first sprang to mind was &quot;invulnerability&quot;, however, since this is more about questions about overcoming an invulnerability there is an obvious tag. It is somewhat facetious, but this is the current archetype for this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that obvious tag is -- kryptonite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this seems like a joke, but it does fit the bill. On the other hand, the classic phrase for this overpowering of the overpowered and overprotected is, of course, Achilles' Heel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using either tag of kryptonite or Achilles' Heel, at least, will help to deflate questions about overcoming invulnerable adversaries. Something they are usually sorely in need of having done to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:10:52.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:11:54.203" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:11:54.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4322" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:33:01.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be primarily cases of the questioners being hesitant or diffident in the way they word the concept they are proposing for their question. Perhaps, they're having an attack of, possibly, false modesty or they're uncertain about how to put their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now reading into this hesitancy that this is a way of sneaking those dreaded what-if questions in under radar seems to be, perhaps, a step too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the phrase &quot;Let's say&quot; was replaced by the straight forward &quot;Assume etc etc.&quot; then it would be plainly obvious this phrase was the preamble to setting up the proposition upon which the question was based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be best illustrated by taking this quotation and making the appropriate substitutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Most effective method of creating fear? &quot;***Assume*** a psichotic (sic) alien race...&quot;&#xA;... What features would humans gain or lose? &quot;***Assume*** humans lived in caves...&quot;&#xA;Can a split personality itself have split personalities? &quot;***Assume*** a person has...&quot;&#xA;Time required for isolated colonists to forget about their origin &quot;*Assume* that I have...&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I absolutely agree with SRM that &lt;em&gt;imagination&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;knowledge&lt;/em&gt; [1] are necessary for questions to be on-topic, but also that are answerable. However, commonsense, logic, even educated guesswork, a capacity to reason from a given set of parameters, and all-round problem solving are essential too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To arrive at a position where &quot;let's say&quot; etc etc phrases in questions are signs of what-if questions is reading to much into what are at base sloppily worded questions by questioners who are most likely lacking in self-confidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] As much as I hate to say it. Science isn't the be-all and end-all of knowledge. My whole training, education and experience as a scientist are staging a revolt at my having said so. But, yes, there are other kinds of knowledge beyond just the scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:33:01.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4331" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:33:20.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're trying to ask a single Big Question when you actually have several smaller questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did people in (historical context) react to outsiders?  (You have this for two times/places, it sounds like.)  This is a History question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did people in (historical context) establish ways to communicate with people from (outside locale)?  (This presupposes that those people &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; this.  For example, European explorers and native North Americans.)  This might be a History or Linguistics question.  (You might not have this question, depending on who your two groups are.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; people establish shared language with speakers of other languages, absent translators?  This might be a Linguistics question, but you could also recast it as &quot;how can &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; people in (context to be explained) do this?&quot; and ask it on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would be the most likely points of tension between people from (context A) and people from (context B) on my new world where (describe setting here)?  That needs more work, but you've got the basis of a Worldbuilding question here.  Ideally you would include what you already know (e.g. from the earlier questions) about how both groups feel about outsiders in &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find yourself with a question that draws from several different areas of expertise, start by asking yourself if it's really just one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:33:20.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T05:00:53.300" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Vehicles&quot; is a tag without definition. When I tried to fill it in, I found that the description I wanted to use was basically already used by &quot;transportation&quot;. So I looked at the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thorium-powered steam car is under &quot;transportation&quot;. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56975/could-a-photonic-engine-actually-work&quot;&gt;Could a photonic engine actually work?&lt;/a&gt; is under &quot;vehicles&quot;. &#xA;etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back and forth between the two, the questions that these tags have been used for are pretty much interchangeable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that there is some broadness to transportation -- there's one about sand worms, for example, that would possibly not be under &quot;vehicles&quot;. But I still propose consolidating these into synonyms for each other, and making &quot;transportation&quot; the primary tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:05:23.770" Title="Consolidate tags &quot;vehicles&quot; and &quot;transportation&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T05:26:08.533" Score="5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following a recent surge in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4263/why-has-there-been-a-recent-surge-in-close-votes-to-review&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;suggested close votes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it's important that users understand what constitutes a reason to close a question. However, there have been some &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/how-is-this-pob&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;clear and direct inconsistencies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with what we decide is fit for the site, and it's important that there is little to no ambiguity here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is a closure topic that has recently been inconsistent, and what evidence makes you say so?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this is to have a follow-up meta post (or a few) to discuss standards for each closure topic, and assess all future questions &lt;strong&gt;based on the same criteria&lt;/strong&gt;. While the help center does contribute, it is still often ambiguous, and responses differ greatly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One topic per answer, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT FEB 7TH:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems the comments have discusses this in depth, and the idea of refinement is sort of obsolete. The rules are fairly well defined, and it would help if users were more vigilant about finding the right pages which explain the criteria. It may also help to link those posts in the close criteria itself, but that is a separate discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T20:09:32.480" Title="Redefining what constitutes closure at this time" Tags="|discussion|voting|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4354" CreationDate="2017-01-31T05:35:04.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Could be defined a lot better, because everyone has completely different ideas of how to determine if a question fits this criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Specifically, is &lt;em&gt;this type of question&lt;/em&gt; idea generation?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As JDługosz said &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/how-is-this-pob&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, these questions - which are all &amp;quot;why would&amp;quot; questions - were not closed:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69688/what-kind-of-apocalypse-could-reset-the-world-to-middle-age-technology&quot;&gt;What kind of apocalypse could reset the world to middle age technology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69546/what-would-a-civilization-living-in-a-cold-permanently-snowy-climate-eat&quot;&gt;What would a civilization living in a cold, permanently snowy climate eat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69549/reasons-a-future-branch-of-islam-would-be-against-ai&quot;&gt;Reasons a future branch of Islam would be against AI?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69564/how-could-immortal-children-age-faster-than-immortal-adults&quot;&gt;How could immortal children age faster than immortal adults?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet this one was:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69665/why-would-a-colony-need-to-relocate&quot;&gt;Why would a colony need to relocate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64131/why-would-a-fire-dragon-still-be-afraid-of-torches&quot;&gt;Why would dragons be afraid of torches?&lt;/a&gt; and the resulting discussion is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4168/why-is-why-would-a-fire-dragon-still-be-afraid-of-torches-not-opinion-based&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;And does that make them subjective?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(reminder: this is not a place to discuss personal opinions on the topic, just to bring up the conflicts themselves that need to be addressed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T05:35:04.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-01-31T13:07:45.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you feel about it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T12:34:40.673" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T12:34:40.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:02:44.883" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a web developer just starting out with this awesome stack exchange site I wanted to ask if there is a way/feature to organize multiple questions regarding the same &quot;parent topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep things easy I would like to introduce you to a project concept I work on in my spare time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to create a browser game and would like to make use of the creative minds wobbling around this place. As this will get rather complex because of multiple topics that need to be cleared (economic systems, cultural differences between races, planet/solar system related stuff etc. etc.) I would like to know if it is possible to somehow group up questions. This would not only make  it easier for me to organize my work but also (in my opinion) would make more fun for people answering as they see the project in its whole evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is possible or could be implemented I would love to share everything I have so far to make the non-programming related part of this project fully community inspired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about Tags or something like that but more like a full blown feature to (e.g.) have an overview of all questions in a specific group/project and things like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking questions to maintain context is not what I'm talking about either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would find logically and visually appealing would be some back end feature in a users profile showing his &quot;projects&quot; where the user can add questions to. If this could be visible to everyone going to the users profile there would be a wonderful overview of what is still open do finish a project. Simply linking questions is not enough IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32928" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T20:54:21.350" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T20:54:21.350" Title="Multi question scenario" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4354" CreationDate="2017-01-31T15:21:24.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will address existing comments and the current trigger Q which it is started from in the particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root of the problem starts not from inconsistent applying only, but it starts from self-identifying of WB.SE and what it actually is a place where creators get help or a wiki database and if it is a wiki/database do different opinion based Q/A contribute to it, are they or aren't they building blocks for someone else's stories etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing guide which helps to conduct certain policy might be a good thing(which includes them to be a part of review template), but it is not enough, and probably not the first thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to ensure that the people understand them in a similar way, and it's done trough training, trough exchange our reasons to take this or another decision for particular questions. And those reasons should be readable for those who will be decision maker soon, or who still do not get it because he was an excellent writer to get 3k+ in 10 questions.(exaggerate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those reasons, it is good to have an easily accessible set of living examples of questions/answers we think are bad with short reasons why it is so. They have to be not once written examples for all times, but it has to be rolling examples of what we consider good or bad. and exactly that is the point of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4284/20315&quot;&gt;Hot or Not - the Opinion based question, the sandbox game&lt;/a&gt; - to display and to exchange approaches in decision making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question itself (about moving base) it is clearly a plot seeking question, which looks for a consistent set of details, and because of that, it is opinion based by definition. (the only thing which a bit grounds a fantasy that is science-based restriction mentioned by OP) and I was pleased to see it was put on hold for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I saw people who understand what derivation from opinion (which it opinion-based) means&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was pleased not to see on the closing list particular users which raise my suspicion of do they have some worth noticing reasoning for their decisions for the recent month or two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the question be alive, yes, as it is pretty interesting one, is it opinion based, sure it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T15:21:24.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2017-01-31T15:34:18.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree on what the others wrote. As I pointed out somewhere else, while it is the duty of the one who poses a question to clarify any doubt and write in a way as clear as possible in order not to break any rule, it's also the duty of whoever writes an answer to actually &lt;strong&gt;read&lt;/strong&gt; the question before they do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the point of answering if you're not going to read past the first line anyway? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to whoever argues that a witty title like the one shown as example in the question is bad practice, I'd like to point out that a large portion of the top questions of this site have a misguiding title, and arguably &lt;strong&gt;the best questions are the ones that entertain the reader, not just the answerer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32792" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T15:34:18.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4402" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:56:02.963" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exactly as the title says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: &quot;Could creating my own flora/fauna impact the popularity of my work by distancing readers?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question adresses both worldbuilding and writing technique I'm not sure where it belongs to. Also, if I have this kind of doubt in the future can I simply make the question and wait for it to be moved if I got it wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32238" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:24:30.977" Title="I don't know if my question belongs to worldbuilding or writers SE" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-01T02:41:19.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Do you believe that the titles of all questions should be the actual question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the titles of questions supposed to be the actual question being asked? Or are the titles meant to draw in readers to attract eyeballs to the topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T02:41:19.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:49:06.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Define goal and purpose of WB.SE existence in 3 sentences or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:49:06.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:50:31.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What do you bring to the table that the mod team doesn't yet have? What unique skills, talents, or views are you introducing?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with the current mods? Do you know how you differ? Why is this difference for the better (not all differences are), and why should it make me want to vote for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:50:31.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2017-02-01T16:15:04.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The title should at least to try to be on the topic of a question.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, as you describe it, yes, you failed to create a clear question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I assume that not a lot of people hunt for your questions to answer them in a wrong way to dissatisfy your personally or to misunderstand them, and it means you have created a wrong question for a wrong audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One part of the problem is creating click-bait title, which makes no good for the situation.(based on your description of your perception, I didn't read the answers to verify possible situation when it might be not only about interpreting of your question but also about your interpreting of the answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Avoid opinion-based questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Second problem is seeking for popular solutions, seeking for a plot for your story and in general asking highly opinion based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was not particularly interested in the question, but I took some time to see its original form and take look also at few other revisions. I have been aware of the possibility to misunderstand your question, I kinda have read the READMEFIRST part. Based on your metaquestion and reading answers and comments here I was aware that the title is not the question and the question is something else. For sure, to decide what the question is about, as I'm not a patient reader of questions which I'm not particularly interested in, I looked at &lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt; thing and assumed that it is the real question, but I was &lt;strong&gt;WRONG&lt;/strong&gt;. The real question was not the title, not the Q section, but a 3rd option which is totally different (in its current 10th revision) from both Q and T.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excellent job, next step is to write it in a form of a text riddle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the winner is - Gimme names of meat parts of a dragon carcass(species of dragon is not specified)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Possible suggestion to avoid such things.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;avoid click baits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;be more specific in your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do not ask opinion based questions without any restrictions, which should be relevant to Q.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Test your question, by answering - can the question be answered without any knowledge, based on pure fantasy strength of the brain of those who would like to answer the question? If yes, try to add restrictions of your opinion based question and test it again. If no, then check if you mentioned the reasons which lead you to the conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try to fit title at least somewhat on the topic of what you are asking (you managed it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question you ask, write it first &lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt; - part of de-clickbaiting the question, no one needs to read the 500 words before to discover they are not interested in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basic clarification(not extensive) second&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The backstory story you would like to test it on the free beta reader's and to set up the context for those who need it - the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;clarification based on the story and other extensive clarification the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:15:04.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4358" CreationDate="2017-02-01T16:46:55.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If, as you state, nobody really makes the effort to look at a profile - how would listing arbitrary 'projects' on a profile that is not visited be of any use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Introducing some &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; feature that allows you to categorize question would mean that there needs to be a whole lot more thought and planning than you might realize at first. To just list a few things &amp;amp; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who creates categories/projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who can modify them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who can use them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A field to enter a category would add clutter to the question-mask&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this field free-form or a dropdown?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does a category/project differ from, e.g. a custom tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if you never intend to finish that project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who will be able to access these 'statistics' you mention?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will 'contributing to the project' work? E.g. again, who can create questions and who would be the author of a &lt;em&gt;suggested&lt;/em&gt; question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and many more...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea in itself is not bad, but as already mentioned, the gist of the idea can be achieved in at least two very straight-forward ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have a part in your question (e.g. I tend to use the first paragraph for that) where you link to other questions in your series/project. You can update that part whenever you write a new question and it'll just be adding a new link.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a question here on meta that serves as a staging area where you explain the project/series and have an answer (or even many answers, one per question) in which you link to the questions of it. The questions itself can contain a one-liner linking to the meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:46:55.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T18:01:15.903" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/69858/627&quot;&gt;link-deleted question so only visible to 10k rep users&lt;/a&gt;) about an hour ago. It was downvoted to -3 so I deleted it.&#xA;I explained how energy is generated in my fictional world and ask &quot;what physics will be affected&quot;. Is this kind of question considered as bad question in this SE? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My original post:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I asked this question yesterday:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69728/if-earth-mass-is-doubled-what-is-the-change-of-earths-orbit&quot;&gt;If Earth mass is doubled, what is the change of earth&amp;#39;s orbit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answer stated that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;When you break conservation of energy on this sort of scale, a lot of&#xA;    physics goes out the window. We also need to clarify some things about&#xA;    the mass-energy equivalence and what we mean when we say &quot;mass&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I want to ask about my energy generation mechanism in a new post. I would like to know what physics will be affected in my framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are my ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Energy is conserved if the system is closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A ball is moving on a fiction-less surface, its kinetic and potential energy will not change if there is no force applied. You can put your finger in front of the ball and make it stop, this is the interference outside the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, my universe is not closed system, energy can go in the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Noether's theorem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have read stuffs about Noether's theorem. The conservation law is very strong according to the theorem, not only the total amount of energy in the universe is conserved, the amount of energy in every point in the space is also conserved. The conserved quantity is like a &quot;current&quot;, the incoming energy and outgoing energy in every point should be the same. I use Bernoulli's principle to help me to understand this concept.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I use two ways to suspend the Noether's theorem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Banach-Tarski Paradox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set-theoretic geometry, which states the following: Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, we cannot do this in real world because we cannot break the ball into non-measurable sets. I use the Radical Platonism view in my framework, so math is an external reality. But I don't want to redefine &quot;what is matter&quot;. I just use the Banach-Tarski Paradox to &quot;prove&quot; that there is something can be broken into non-measurable sets in my fictional world. (OK, this is the Unobtainium trope.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mind is the first cause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mind is the ultimate existence, it created the universe. Human's mind is part of the world's mind, so everybody also have this &quot;ability of first cause&quot;. (To be simple: everybody is god.) People can use math to affect the reality. (math=magic trope) People can create new space, then copy the Unobtainium in the new space. For example, people create $1 cm^3$ new space and create the Unobtainium in the new $1 cm^3$ space. It is just like what happened in the creation of the universe. That $1 cm^3$ was not exist, it is not invariant under translation in time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10658" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T14:51:45.343" Title="Can I ask others to check physics/math misconception in my plot?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4368" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:48:08.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, this is absolutely not off-topic. Off-topic is punished by your question being put on hold by the fierce (but just) reviewing process. The downvoting means people just did not like your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first saw it, my immediate reaction was &quot;That's probably interesting but I don't have the knowledge to even understand the discussion&quot;. You cite theorems and concepts that I don't know and don't explain how they articulate. Maybe some other laymen got disgruntled by that and downvoted. For how a physicist would react to your question, I have just no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other thing that bugs me a little is your last paragraph &quot;Mind is the first cause&quot;. This is totally personal, but I don't like it. It's mostly the handwaving theorem with the appearance of science but should never be delved into and mixed with physics because to me &lt;em&gt;it doesn't make sense&lt;/em&gt;. Note that this is a really personal opinion, note also that I didn't consider downvoting just for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make your ideas clearer (what exactly makes your magic work, not just a list of ideas to make it work) and if you reopen your question, I'm ready to believe you can get the upvotes your idea deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:48:08.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:41:29.433" Score="11" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:  4/7/2017&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So episode three is now up and we are starting to plan for number four.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wanted to get this back in front of people so it can collect more votes and more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing we are considering adding to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCar5xDnyEGKpjpFKxRRoKzw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the podcast&lt;/a&gt; is a sort of &lt;strong&gt;ask the group a question segment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea would be that you, the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;, pose questions to us, the &lt;em&gt;panel&lt;/em&gt;, and we try to answer them on the podcast.  With our current technology set we are not equipped to do this live (its not a live broadcast), so we would have to get questions ahead of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have the same restrictions as the site, &lt;em&gt;so we are totally happy to share our opinions&lt;/em&gt; :D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question in mind please post it below, &lt;strong&gt;one question per post.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot guarantee we will start this segment with episode 3 which we will be filming in a few days but fully anticipate we will do it sooner rather than later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community, please feel free to up-vote the questions you would most like to see us discuss on the podcast but we reserve the right to pick questions in any old order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So people have questions about questions...heh, irony.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't want to restrict people in any way so I am going to provide examples but feel free to branch out beyond that&lt;/em&gt;!!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So, examples.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that may not work on the site, maybe they are too opinion based, or to discussion-y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does James have a dog?  (to which the answer is yes, also he is old and blind (the dog))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is Green's name really Green? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why doesn't one of you actually ever finish building something?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are you building?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have this problem with my world...example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many nerds does it take to decide what magic is?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you're wondering, the primary participants in the podcast are myself, Green and Nex.  The fourth slot has rotated thus far, we've had Daaaawhaterver the spelling is and Monica join us, and for episode 3 ArtofCode will be our guest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T16:04:59.223" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T16:04:59.223" Title="Want to contribute a question to the podcast (or try to stump the panel)?" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4373" CreationDate="2017-02-02T00:42:40.353" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a tag wiki, you &lt;strong&gt;do not need any reputation or experience&lt;/strong&gt; with the tag. My interpretation is that if every user who wanted to contribute needed to be experienced, no one would suggest wikis. To make sure they're appropriate, wikis are peer-reviewed, of course, but generally, if you understand what a phrase means, it's okay to suggest a wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, to suggest a synonym, you need at least &lt;strong&gt;a score of five in the tag&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users with more than 2500 reputation and a total answer score of 5 or more on the tag, can suggest tag synonyms. Users with a total answer score (total upvotes minus total downvotes) of 5 or more on the tag, can vote for tag synonyms. Suggestions will be automatically approved when they reach a score of 4, and automatically deleted when they reach a score of -2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may require &lt;strong&gt;less experience&lt;/strong&gt; than creating a wiki - a whole description of the subject and its applications - and it's &lt;strong&gt;peer reviewed anyway&lt;/strong&gt; - and yet you need reputation in each tag you want to suggest a synonym for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm arguing that it deters people who could potentially be constructive - &lt;em&gt;who wants to go out of the way to answer an old, obscure question and hope for rep just to improve a tag?&lt;/em&gt; - and clearly, reputation is not an issue, because we don't need rep to make wikis and they turn out absolutely fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why do we need reputation to suggest synonyms when they're peer-reviewed, and wikis don't need reputation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no reason, is there a way to change the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T01:08:28.903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T06:03:57.907" Title="Why do you need reputation to suggest a tag synonym, but not to create a wiki?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2017-02-02T01:00:02.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: I may in the post below have some words on theology based on an atheist's point of view. I do not intend to hurt, or convince, or anything. This is just part the process of constructing my world. In a word, if you're sensitive on that subject, don't read. Though I won't try to be mean.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The main idea&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to create a world where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essentialism&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;teleology&lt;/a&gt; and gods are not only a thing, but also not disputable. Through magic (and reliable testimony), everybody knows and can't discuss that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main goal is to explore the consequences of those three items (and other things I consider to be based on belief) and try to find the implications of them. From basic to sociology, I intend to show what people's belief implies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the world is always more complex than we think, and I have to admit my ultimate goal is to show that whatever the world is made of, it doesn't matter as much as what we do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The world&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Geography&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is a flat. The surface is a disc roughly the area of Europe (or the USA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of right now, there is no definitive map. The center is the most humanly active part of the world (and the center of my story). The North is cold, the South is warm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Geology / astronomy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world's surface is flat-ish, but the world is not a disc, it's a cylinder (it's height is unknown). As plate tectonics doesn't exist, mountains actually pop up like teeth. Most geological formations we know will exist too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That big cylinder is under a dome where the sun, stars and other are hung. Yes, that dome is blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Physics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classical elements&lt;/a&gt; are the basis of all mater. Not that matter is only made of those elements, it is also the way they are bound together through essence that really counts.&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aether&lt;/a&gt; is totally a thing and it is hung to the dome.&#xA;&#xA;Light propagates in that medium and, through magic, that medium can be manipulated. The Aether is curved making light naturally go slightly up, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69741/how-could-there-be-a-horizon-on-a-flat-earth&quot;&gt;giving the impression of an horizon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that light is actually emitted by the eye and bounces until it reaches a source &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gravity is a constant field, pointing down (duh). It is most probably the force that bends the aether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Biology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Humorism&lt;/a&gt; is at the basis of how biology works. Why? Because the gods created everything that is living and that's how they saw things to be fitting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Theology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two gods, we know, because they pass by every thousand year or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is called The Spark. Known to defend life, freedom and compassion. Their holy book (a.k.a. The Holy Book) cannot be read by anyone but the high priests. According to the priests, it's a direct order from The Spark. According to (a very few and secret) others, the priests heard what they wanted to and interpreted it how they preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other one is called The Shade. The Shade's reputation is... not good. Their holy book (a.k.a. The Book of Shadows) cannot be read, as the few known copies are destroyed by the fire. The Shade is worshiped by necromancers (see below) and is believed to want everybody dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the canonical Church, The Shade is not considered to be all bad though. After all, they created their half of the world, and the light cannot exist without darkness. Basically, The Shade and The Spark have a beef. Humans must worship The Spark, as they're the source of life. However, no human will insult &lt;em&gt;any god&lt;/em&gt;, even a dark and deadly one like The Shade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When The Spark passes by, summer lasts for the whole year. Wars stop. The elders feel young and the Kingdom expands. When The Shade passes by, winter lasts for a whole year and a lot of people die. To the record, the gods haven't both been around at the same time since the creation of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Anthropology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of different races. I mean, not different skin colors. More like different sizes, shapes, hair and also color. Most races are near-humanoid though, and white skinned humans are the dominant race in the central kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All non-humans endure a form of oppression, though with different forms and degrees. Some are just looked down as &quot;a bit less than us&quot;, some are put to slavery, some have the mark of The Shade on their stomach and must be slain at birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Race is &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; hereditary, though it doesn't seem to work in 1% of births, resulting usually in very disgruntled parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sex however, is much simpler in this world, as intersex people don't seem to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Politics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current King is the all-powerful ruler of the Kingdom, and his word is law. The capital, which is &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; the center of the world is a flamboyant testimony of his power. Meeting the king is quite the difficult task, as you have to navigate through a huge and diverse court of nobles representing the different duchies and external settlings, as well guild-masters and priests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dukes hold most of the territory under their influence, they are together more powerful than the king, but mostly quarrel about duchy boundaries and taxations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobility comes from birth and with the exception of the royal crown, most titles are inherited by the eldest sibling (gender is officially not a problem, though there is sexism in practice). The king is decided between the dukes and cannot have children &lt;em&gt;after their nomination&lt;/em&gt;. Younger children will usually be knighted by a Duke (unless they join the clergy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;King&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince (aka King successor, usually a duke)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duke (they run the show, there are around 20)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Count (do the heavy lifting of territory management, around 5 per duke)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knights (usually have no territory, executives, some dukes have hundreds under their orders)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The justice system is (officially) the responsibility of the Church. The ruling nobles can override any decision, but they usually don't. After all, when you write the law, control the police, and the judge is your brother, you seldom feel like pardoning people. Notably, the King is also the ruler of the clergy and can declare himself judge of any trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other kingdoms around the Kingdom. The north and the west areas are organized in small tribes, most of them being nomadic. The east has small countries that maintain independence by being ready to gang up on the Kingdom if attacked. The south is unified and democratic and is mainly left alone because it doesn't have much resources. The border, being practically uninhabitable as no governing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Economy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kingdom's economy is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mercantilist&lt;/a&gt;. Any economic entity requires the approbation of the king or a duke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most valuable resource is the Crystal. Crystals have various properties (depending on the type) and are considered to be the key to any power. The rest of the economy is pretty much equivalent to Europe's economy during medieval times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is fierce competition within the Dukes and all-out war can happen after a famine. The outer territories rely heavily on the Kingdom's sizable economy and often gamble on that competition to their benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Society&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I will focus on the Kingdom's society, other territories are organized differently but keep to a lesser or higher extent the outward xenophobia.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nobles compose the leading cast. They have money, influence and land. It is pretty much agreed upon that only nobles will have an influence on history. Work is not considered degrading, as long as it's noble work: military officer, minister, counselor or company owner are the kind of jobs that are reserved for nobles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clergy comes second. Though the highest parts of the clergy are children or siblings of the dukes. They are the most educated members of society and will often serve as unofficial counselors to the executive nobles. They are the administrators and the scholars. Since they are the plumbers of power without owning anything themselves, their corruption is fairly common. To a commoner, joining the clergy is usually a social boost. Some nobles, however, consider this demeaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99% of the population is the commoners. Most of them are farmers, heavily religious and happy with their condition. Almost all non-human are commoners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Crystals&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crystals is a magical matter that can have different colors, shapes, and effects. Its mining and trade are a primary goal of any country, to the point of obsession. According to the gods, they are a gift of power to mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their usage is reserved to nobles and (sometimes) clergymen. Though the black market is quite developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of crystals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dark crystal: produces &quot;negative light&quot; that cast a shade around them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sight crystal: allows the user to see anything on the surface on the earth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fire crystal: used with skill, a lighter, used without skill, a flamethrower.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Power crystal: power source that can increase other crystals reach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Necromancy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Necromancers are children chosen by the Shade to slaughter as much people as possible. They are the bogeymen except they are real. They are feared mostly because of how unsettling they are: it's something to see your family killed, but it's something else to see your family killed by your 6 years old neighbor with a gesture and then to see your family get back up and attack you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Necromancers rarely reach adulthood, though, and thankfully so. In their first month of practice, a kid can slaughter a village and you need a dozen armed people to stop him. A teenager with a few years behind them can only be stopped by an army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not known, however, is that necromancers &lt;em&gt;don't choose to be that way&lt;/em&gt;. They have little to no control over what they do and most of them commit suicide early on. With puberty comes control over their power and necromancer usually go underground before that because they don't want to face an army. Moreover, necromancers don't like each other, and two adult necromancers meeting will almost always result in a fight to the death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What even most of necromancers themselves don't know is that they can use crystals in ways that are not supposed to work, and a power crystal in the hands of a necromancer is pretty much the end of life on a 10km radius &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="19400" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T16:22:15.730" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T16:22:15.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4371" CreationDate="2017-02-02T01:21:44.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really shudder when I think about tag synonymization and merging. The main reason is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/70718/274942&quot;&gt;normal users can't undo a synonymization&lt;/a&gt;; only moderators can - and I can say from experience that this is not fun. In September, I managed to break the system somehow when synonymizing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spaceflight&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; and had to fool around with renaming to undo the synonymization before I could fix it and get the desired master-synonym mapping. It took about a week to sort that one out. Merging is worse, for the record - although only mods do that. I have yet to encounter a case where a merge needed to be undone, but I believe a Community Manager would have to deal with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Errors with tag wiki edits, however, can be easily fixed via a rollback, and any user with the right privileges can do so. So really, it's not too hard to undo the error when &lt;strike&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/strike&gt; a user messes up the tag wiki, whereas it's a bit trickier to fix synonymization problems. Thus, there's the entry barrier to curating synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T01:21:44.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4368" CreationDate="2017-02-02T05:10:20.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to suspend Noether's theorem. Energy can be conserved in a closed system. However, the universe act as if it is an open system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest example of this is energy from the Sun. This provides Earth with an energy gradient to support life on our planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise you can simply assume there is a mechanism that acts as an energy gradient that can feed energy from the rest of the universe. Energy is still conserved as a whole for the universe in the same way energy is conserved while giving the Earth an open energy gradient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This energy can be used to do whatever you want and where you want it. Fortunately, the universe is more than big enough to supply more than enough energy to do whatever you would like it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T05:10:20.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4371" CreationDate="2017-02-02T06:03:57.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;the requirement of a certain answer score is likely intended to make sure that the person suggesting a synonym has enough experience and knowledge of how the tag is used to not suggest something useless or, behold, silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T06:03:57.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-02-02T07:05:14.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble coming up with some back story for (and world to support) the setting I want. I would like to place a lot of the focus onboard an old, creaky, leaky space station, which is forgotten or mostly not cared about, drifting around some moon/planet, with a single lonely, weary astronaut on board. I want it isolated and introverted, thoughtful and wistful. A bit like the movies &lt;em&gt;Moon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Silent Running&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;2001&lt;/em&gt; (although not forgotten about, its very isolated and empty). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I want everything to be as realistic as I can get it, with today's technology (Mir-era would be even better), and abandoned stations and single astronauts just don't happen for real. It would also be nice with some vague, distant goal to keep the astronaut going about the daily grind of survival. Last man at his post when everyone else has moved on, etc. Astronaut should not be obsessed though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, any suggestions for a location and an original mission, why its mostly abandoned or forgotten about now, and what keeps the astronaut getting up in the morning? An occasional message from some mission control is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may start with the astronaut having memory loss, and discovering the answers to these questions by themselves, but I'm not sure on that yet (depends on the backstory I guess). I have a very particular setting and atmosphere in mind, and strict constraints on the level of technology and keeping it real, but I'm no writer and have no idea how to get to this scenario, or where to take it, really. Suggestions on these lines are also very appropriate. This is all to support a video game where interaction with the station is the core game-play mechanic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points if the station has a beautiful view, like Saturn's rings from orbiting a highly inclined moon, dramatic sunrises and solar flares from station keeping at L2, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this in the Sandbox first, because I'm not sure if its a suitable question, and I have a hard time saying what a correct answer would be, besides the one I like the most. Feel free to suggest how I might improve it..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27754" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T12:04:59.407" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T12:04:59.407" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:18:27.427" Score="20" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's amazing blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for understanding worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blogs or articles of existing interesting worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/4377&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T02:21:24.730" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2017" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:28:23.357" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/110962/urban-planning&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4XFo9.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discuss the real world. Start Urban Planning SE!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9228" LastEditorUserId="9228" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T19:03:09.463" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T19:03:09.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:03:35.010" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tr1JO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Writers Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:23.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T15:03:35.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:07:31.510" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2878&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fCH9i.png&quot; alt=&quot;Share your work on the blog -- we&amp;#39;ll help!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T15:07:31.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:09:29.950" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyKlu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Universe Factory, our community-run blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T15:09:29.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:36:08.633" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/55MAT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Get inspired by reading!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="2235" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T01:13:16.793" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T01:13:16.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-02T19:40:26.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T19:40:26.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:42:32.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:42:32.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:49:44.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you ever been suspended (from any Stack Exchange main site or chat), and if so for what? Are you willing to release moderators from their &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;confidentiality agreement&lt;/a&gt; to confirm or rectify your answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T02:50:09.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-03T01:59:37.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Can other people join the panel?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People may potentially be interested and want to know. I'm all set, but for the record, let's ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T01:59:37.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-03T02:01:11.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;How will the world end?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will people cause it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will aliens solve the Fermi Paradox and show up to kill us all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will we run out of resources?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will humans safely be on a terraformed Mars or something sustainable before then?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T02:01:11.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-03T02:03:27.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;How do you work math into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; narrative?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many worldbuilders want realism, so they find out exactly what is scientifically possible and how to do it. However, it makes an incredibly boring story to run off numbers and reasoning every other page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you approach this problem - explaining your technology yet keeping people's attention - without discarding either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T02:03:27.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T02:29:01.360" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A recent wiki of mine (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/29490&quot;&gt;10k link here&lt;/a&gt;) was rejected, but I am still quite unconvinced with the rejection reasons.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hollow-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hollow-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hollow-earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki read &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An old conspiracy theory postulates that the Earth is partially or mostly hollow. Reasons and evidence for this belief vary, as well as what's inside - many supporters believe the Earth harbors a miniature sun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This theory has been long been debunked, but it is an interesting idea to use in fictional worlds. Questions with this tag focus on terrestrial planets - which include, but are not limited to, Earth - that have a similarly empty internal structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Relevant tags include &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More extreme variations on planet structure fit under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonspherical-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonspherical-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nonspherical-worlds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first rejection reason was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This lacks any usage guidance AND questions tagged hollow earth are not about conspiracy theory, but about building earth-like habitat-planers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second reviewer &lt;strong&gt;approved&lt;/strong&gt;, and the third wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not a conspiracy theory, taken up later, more bad science. History inaccurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the rejection justified - meaning this is truly inaccurate or unclear - or is the wiki fine as-is? I want more opinions because this was rejected 2-1 with only three readers, a narrow margin. Additionally, I thought it was fine, which brings the count to 2-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T10:08:25.517" Title="Is this wiki rejection justified?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2017-02-03T02:36:55.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I don't think it's justified.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first rejection has two main reasons: &lt;strong&gt;no guidance usage&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;these questions are not about conspiracy theories&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the following line from the wiki is the &amp;quot;missing&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;guidance usage&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Questions with this tag focus on terrestrial planets - which include, but are not limited to, Earth - that have a similarly empty internal structure.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the wiki &lt;strong&gt;does not say&lt;/strong&gt; the questions are about conspiracy theories:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;This theory has been long been debunked, but it is an interesting idea to use in fictional worlds&lt;/code&gt;... &lt;code&gt;Questions with this tag focus on&lt;/code&gt; ... &lt;code&gt;similarly empty internal structure&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The question uses similar theories as a &lt;strong&gt;base&lt;/strong&gt;, but it clearly says that this is about &amp;quot;similar structures&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; claim the tag is about conspiracy theories. It isn't &lt;em&gt;crystal&lt;/em&gt; clear, but the meaning can definitely be discerned with more than a skim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second rejection also has the &lt;strong&gt;not about conspiracy theories&lt;/strong&gt; arguement, disputed above, and also says &lt;strong&gt;history inaccurate&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While sites covering the history of the subject may not be entirely reputable, it is clear that some conspiracy theory does exist with this base. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tierra_hueca/esp_tierra_hueca_29.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T02:36:55.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T06:37:44.667" Score="5" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm a bit annoyed today... you see, I got over 100 reputation today for answering a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I annoyed? Because it is for the almost obvious answer I supplied to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69917/is-it-possible-for-an-ocean-to-have-a-river-flowing-from-it-into-a-lake/69920#69920&quot;&gt;river flowing out of an ocean&lt;/a&gt; question. I'm glad people liked that answer. BUT... I really hoped people would notice the answer that I finally managed to put together for the highly intriguing &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69300/designing-hacking-arrows&quot;&gt;can you hack a computer with an arrow?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because, you see, when the question was first posted, I put up a good answer (I thought; community seemed to agree) about how it could be accomplished. But I felt... empty. Like the question lingered on the edge of possible. So I pulled some resources at work and, lo, I think it really is feasible with some very specific hardware (which is within the scope of the question!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, people have already read that question, and they don't seem likely to go back to it later. So after watching it go a full day without being noticed, I decided to write this meta purely for the humble brag of promoting a damn cool answer because, well, maybe someone will actually go ahead and make the movie the question inspires! So &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/69893/26246&quot;&gt;here's my updated answer&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T04:37:29.450" Title="Promoting an answer to a question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4393" CreationDate="2017-02-03T09:17:08.480" Score="8" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current mods: How time-consuming is actually moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered nominating myself for moderator in 2016 and I did not because I thought I would have not much time for that. And I was right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my hands are getting free, so I am here, considering it again. But still I do not want to run for a position that is consuming &lt;em&gt;too much&lt;/em&gt; time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T20:51:14.380" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T20:51:14.380" Title="How much time does moderating this site actually consume?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4392" CreationDate="2017-02-03T11:08:23.857" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a mod elsewhere - If you can't spend the time flagging, editing, and otherwise helping make the site &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; now, you're not going to find the time to moderate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the funny things about being a mod is, how little I actually &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; my mod powers. It speeds things up. I have a flag queue for users to let me know about things that need my attention. But there's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; drastic a difference between a 30K user who's using his powers cause &lt;em&gt;he cares&lt;/em&gt; and a mod. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But still I do not want to run for a position that is consuming too much of time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Run for the position cause you care &lt;em&gt;enough&lt;/em&gt; to spend that time, and would spend it &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you were a mod, how long do you think is worth spending on keeping the site awesome? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its not just about &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt; though. Its about coverage. Moderation dosen't &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; need a good chunk of time unless its something complex - voting rings for example. It does need &lt;em&gt;consistency&lt;/em&gt;. I've basically popped in and handled flags over lunch and on my way to and from work during my last job and it worked great. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can pop in for 5 minutes, and skim the mod queue, and its usually enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also are probably going to want to pop into meta every so often. Maybe once or twice a day, skim through posts, answer things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all mods do this, but I'm typically contactable over chat. Once again, I'm on chat &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; and I rarely need to put on my mod hat and help moderate stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be doing these anyway, and spending about the same amount of time. I'm on another site's meta, answering this arn't I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastEditorUserId="2028" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T11:13:46.010" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T11:13:46.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4392" CreationDate="2017-02-03T13:18:07.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, we handle, on average, about 10 flags per day (others we wait and let the community deal with). There are four of us, and we generally all take equal parts in the work, so we each average about 2.5 flags a day, although this does vary. Actually, that variation's part of the reason we're having this election: There have been some cases in the past few months where we've also had outside things going on at the same time that have made moderating a bit slower, so it would be nice to have a 5th mod, to make that less of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods do other things than just handling flags though. We participate on meta, hang out in chat (sometimes), deal with migrations, scold problem users . . . you get the idea. There are a bunch of things that need to happen in public and behind the scenes to keep the site running. I spend maybe 30 minutes on Worldbuilding a day, I think, if you include flag handling, voting, editing, and commenting - which are ordinary community moderation tasks. Sometimes I take more time, if a problem on the site comes up, and sometimes I take less time, if I'm busy in real life and prioritize other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T13:18:07.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T14:40:49.270" Score="14" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, it's the time of the year to re-vote for Community Promotion ads on all the Stack Exchange sites. And while the ad we ran on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy last year was pretty good, I thought maybe I could do better. The following image is my attempt to prove that hypothesis: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrIsG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrIsG.png&quot; alt=&quot;This is why we can&amp;#39;t have nice things.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to incorporate some elements of our site design (colors, the robot/human on the side), and also appeal to fans of science fiction (Douglas Adams and exploding planets). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before posting it on SFF's meta, I just wanted to get the community's blessing, and/or see if anyone had any suggestions for improvements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Based on the below answers, I have posted the updated image to Meta SFF. I will update as needed if any adjustments are suggested. **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T03:22:41.497" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T03:22:41.497" Title="Suggestion for new Worldbuilding ad for SFF.SE" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4361" CreationDate="2017-02-03T14:47:24.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;PatJ is right, posting the question to the sandbox as you did &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4362/49&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4362/49&lt;/a&gt; is a good way to handle this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively posting your full question here would allow people to give more detailed feedback than there is room for in the sandbox format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T14:47:24.213" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-02-03T14:47:24.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:20:27.570" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Option 1: Replace the current proposal&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/46611&quot;&gt;There is currently a proposal to re-use the design from last year&lt;/a&gt;. Vote for this answer if we want to remove that proposed design and replace it with this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:20.743" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:20:27.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:21:36.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Option 2: Make a new proposal&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/46611&quot;&gt;There is currently a proposal to re-use the design from last year&lt;/a&gt;. Vote for this answer if we want to leave that proposed design and make a new one, and see what SFF votes for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:41.363" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:21:36.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:23:51.787" Score="-6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Option 3: Don't change the current proposal&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/46611&quot;&gt;There is currently a proposal to re-use the design from last year&lt;/a&gt;. Vote for this answer if we want to leave that one and not use this new design at all. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:20.743" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:23:51.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4392" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:03:24.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What HDE 226868 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4395/28&quot;&gt;said here&lt;/a&gt; is generally true.  One thing I would add is that I pay a lot of attention to meta.  I have a browser tab open on meta all the time, and I also visit main a few times a day (or more if there's something specific to go look at).  If somebody comes to meta looking for help with a site feature, I want that user to get help quickly and be able to get back to the primary reason we're all here -- Q&amp;amp;A on main.  And if there's something that seems to be hot on meta, I want to pay attention to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around 30 minutes a day on average is about right.  If something's exploding or if we need to deal with a mod-private matter (like certain user issues), that adds time and its timing is usually unpredictable.  Offset against that, though, is that we (will) have five moderators, SE understands we're volunteers, and there's very little that needs to be dealt with &lt;em&gt;right this minute&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:03:24.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4361" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:24:30.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Followed @Patj advice and posted on Sandbox. There, people told me that it would probably be a better fit for Writers SE. So I changed the question completely and here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/26482/how-to-introduce-alien-flora-fauna-without-turning-the-fiction-into-a-biology-bo&quot;&gt;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/26482/how-to-introduce-alien-flora-fauna-without-turning-the-fiction-into-a-biology-bo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:23.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:24:30.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T21:13:59.700" Score="7" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question came up in chat: If a question has a fundamental flaw that is not caught (or at least pointed out) right away, is it better to:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question to fix the flaw, possibly invalidating answers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should the question be closed so a new question can be asked with the flaw fixed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points of consideration:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person asking the question can't see the flaw until it's pointed out to them.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not everyone that answers the question is going to catch the flaw either, and some might not think of it as a flaw.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The flaw might not be caught before people start answering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; should the Question have been put on hold before people started answering it. The question is, is it better to possibly invalidate answers (that often can be repaired) or have duplicate questions on the site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T03:30:21.500" Title="On editing questions and invalidating answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4403" CreationDate="2017-02-04T03:30:21.500" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Don't do either.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invalidating answers is not appropriate, and will cause way more harm than good. Editing a question to change its meaning makes it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43478/exit-strategies-for-chameleon-questions&quot;&gt;chameleon question&lt;/a&gt;, which may be okay in small increments (clarification, correction of a small fact, etc) but is frowned upon if the edit &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; invalidates answers' content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing won't work, either. Flawed content does not sort into any close reason, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4225/challenging-questions-premises&quot;&gt;general consensus&lt;/a&gt; is that answers should make note of the flaw if they find it. It isn't necessarily a bad question, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb, if the flaw is so great that a question must be asked again, the meaning is almost definitely different enough to stop it from being a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T03:30:21.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4391" CreationDate="2017-02-04T04:37:29.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;woohoou, new game, stories sharing :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent 4 or 5 full days on an answer (I mean literally, 32-40 hours dedicated to writing the answer - fact checking, testing, calculating, bad English fixing etc) actually the story repeated itself twice, so I have 2 beloved answers, really brilliants of wisdom from all of my 100 answers, the beauty of the beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not promote them here, of just make promotion for no reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have to be useful for people who needs the information, they are not just for free internet points, which we might help each other without problems, and which you might get for the reason of writing a question on meta showing that you care and u are in some pain because of your art was undervalued. As result of that people will give you the attention you wish, because they are good people and would make you a favor for basically nothing. But will it fulfill you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I post links to those answers times to times, when I think they are related to the topic and relevant in discussions. So far, I got +2 votes on each, and more or less, I guess they were from people who probably really were interested in the answers them self, not in the help me to feel better ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T04:37:29.450" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2017-02-04T05:01:43.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should concentrate efforts on how to make the edit better.&#xA;And I guess it is one of the things you trying to do, at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is how people, who are different than you perceive what you write, and if you would like their approval, you have to write for them, not for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;conspiracy theory - have a strong contextual connotation, and just by striking out one word it will make the edit much better. (All guys pro- and contra- they know who's theory it is)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An old &lt;strike&gt;conspiracy&lt;/strike&gt; theory(belief might fit better)  postulates that the Earth is partially or mostly hollow. Reasons and evidence for this belief vary, as well as what's inside - many supporters believe the Earth harbors a miniature sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory has been long been debunked, but it is an interesting idea to use in fictional worlds. Questions with this tag focus on terrestrial planets - which include, but are not limited to, Earth - that have a similarly empty internal structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant tags include &lt;strike&gt;physics,&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strike&gt;gravity&lt;/strike&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strike&gt;earth&lt;/strike&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt;, artificial constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;More extreme variations on planet structure fit under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonspherical-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonspherical-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nonspherical-worlds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably would strike out that entirely, as I'm not sure if it fits in the nonspherical-worlds tag. The problem is the same as with previous tags, is your description more about theory or about artificial construction or about a magical world where such things can be formed naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that description is funny enough, and I would be more concerned about tags you think it fits, real word it fits only in artificial constructions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T05:01:43.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T06:38:33.637" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wished to write this a long time ago, and the last drop was this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57443/20315&quot;&gt;As a time traveler, how would I see quantum randomness change history?&lt;/a&gt; really, you are serious this was a hard science question? (btw maybe someone should remove the plates for HS tag when it is not HS anymore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a good hard science answer is a hard work, a lot harder than usual.&#xA;Making hard-science worth question also a hard work, but I didn't see the question which did their homework in that regard. (A few questions kinda did it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can make a favor - to mods, to those who would like to answer hard science questions, for those who would have real &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers - by redefining the procedure of asking hard-science questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 1. Asking a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After getting enough attention, choosing probably more or less scientific answer and if the OP still needs so, after the first step the OP can go further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 2. Asking a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should contain in the header the link to original science-based question, the link to answer the OP has chosen as key which explains what he actually likes to get in a bit more scientifically valid way and might be a slightly improved version of his original question (which does not alters its sense, and if he is not certain than the original question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step intended to help OP to formulate the question in a proper way, and determine if it is suitable to be answered in hard science way (helping the OP too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the result, we will probably have a question worth to spend 1-2-3 days to answer (helping the fans of hard-science)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formatting the hard-science question in a proper way, which clearly distinguishes them from other types of questions will probably help mods in a way of eliminating the need to attach the hard-science plate to each of such questions and answers for the question.(and have no problems of removing them as in the question above)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also will be a help for editors to clearly see if an OP has understood and read the requirements for hard-science question and do not confuse it with hard science fiction definition (helps OP and editors and quality of the tag on WB)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having softer and harder versions of a question will allow those who would like to answer that type of question to participate in their weight categories (helping those who would like to answer and the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a better quality of hard-science question might attract those who would like to provide such type of answers, and most importantly can provide it.(helps quality of such answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Overview&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It still does not solve the problem, and it is not some kind of ultimate solution, but it probably might improve the way of handling hard-science questions in terms of formulating them, editing them, providing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it is fair if OP will spend some time to refine his views before someone will spend a lot of time in formatting nice answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who are not certain of their capability in defining a scientific value of a question will have more information available for them to make their decision and vote for HS variant of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not have to be a strict or enforced rule, it can be started as a good manner and stay so. I or any like me, knowing that OP have a good manner option, will be more certain how to vote, which is not the case now because the OP do not have a community approved option (a duplicate Q danger) and I'm not sure did he read the tag description and it is his conscious choice or he didn't and do not understand what he is asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Hard-science nominee&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70897/what-would-should-humanity-do-with-a-copy-of-the-encyclopedia-galactica&quot;&gt;What would/should humanity do with a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No one, including me, have not removed HS tag in the question - but really, in the situation is just an easy fix, as it is obviously a new user just didn't saw the description of HS tag and to replace HS tag with more appropriate to the situation is the same as I edited the answer to insert comma in a sentence there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 answers - none of them is hard-science as it is defined in tag description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T19:52:59.807" Title="Hard-science tag, possible approach, changing how to ask these particular types of questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|hard-science|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2017-02-04T10:08:25.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the third reviewer, I am prepared to clarify my reasons. Frankly, the tag as written and edited was OK for anyone without any depth of background knowledge of the concept of a hollow earth. Basically, it was adequate, though slightly misleading, and needed improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About improvement, the tag review doesn't allow for comments or suggestions to edit it for improvement. What choice I did have? (a) I could have approved your tag then gone back and edited, or (b) rejected it because, in my opinion, it needed to be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I chose (a). Now I sympathize with Zxyrra for feeling aggrieved. If I was in his circumstances I would feel so too. Perhaps, more so, and with more justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why you may ask? Because I have read and own a copy of David Standish excellent popular history on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Standish, &lt;em&gt;Hollow Earth&lt;/em&gt;: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvellous Machines Below the Earth's Surface (Cambridge, MA; Da Capo Press, 2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hollow earth concept has only been added to conspiracy theories in fairly recent times. Roughly, late twentieth century, but prior to that has mainly had a reasonably long history as a piece of pseudoscientific nonsense and the stuff of fantastic adventure romance novels like those of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally, it was proposed as a scientific hypothesis by Edmund Halley, no less, for the nature of the interior of planet Earth. (That's right, Mr Comet himself.) Since little was known at that time, this was a reasonable hypothesis to make. If &lt;em&gt;Physical Review&lt;/em&gt; had been published back then, it would have easily been published in that august publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, Zxyrra, the weight of history is on my side. The conspiracy theory twaddle is only in current fashion, but it didn't start out as a conspiracy theory. Those wackos have recently abducted it in their Swastikaed flying saucers. My dilemma was whether I should let your tag go through and do an edit myself or give all too brief reasons suggesting, inadequately, where improvement was needed. I recognize the failings and inadequacies of the latter. I acknowledge you were doing the best your could with the knowledge and resources available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standish's &lt;em&gt;Hollow Earth&lt;/em&gt; is great read. There a lot of fascinating stuff in there including the early history of polar exploration, and he is sympathetic to many of the addle-minded folk who, over time, have embraced various versions of the hollow earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T10:08:25.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-05T07:19:50.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfwa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/meTZ0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The guild for professional world builders.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T06:30:16.507" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T06:30:16.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-05T07:29:20.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://accrispin.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZzVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writer Beware: A blog about publishers taking advantage of unsuspecting authors&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T02:34:16.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T02:34:16.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4412" CreationDate="2017-02-05T07:56:41.720" Score="7" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;parastitic&quot; is not a word. So it shouldn't be a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parastitic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parastitic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parastitic&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I assume this should have been &quot;parasitic&quot;... but, honestly, that's a pretty weird word both to read and to pronounce, at least for me. I'd rather us fix it by going to &quot;parasite&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T09:40:09.427" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T09:40:09.427" Title="Should tag &quot;parastitic&quot; be changed to &quot;parasite&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4411" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:19:16.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody already edited the four questions to change the tag, but the tag with the typo had a wiki so can't be auto-deleted.  I edited to remove the wiki (which was only one sentence anyway), but the editor required that I supply a wiki excerpt in order to make the edit.  So I did that; I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the excerpt won't prevent the tag from being auto-purged, but please check back in a couple days and let us know if it's still there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also renamed the new tag from &quot;parasite&quot; to &quot;parasites&quot;.  Noun tags work better as plurals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case there were only four questions so it didn't matter, but in the future, if we need to rename a tag that's on a lot of questions, it's better to have a moderator do the rename instead of individually editing (and bumping) all the questions.  Only moderators can rename tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:19:16.933" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4430" CreationDate="2017-02-06T02:06:11.903" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to its tag wiki, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a form of biology that is not familiar to science and is not found in Earthly life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the wiki and its contrast with the following imply that it is about aliens&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about living things. &lt;strong&gt;Does not exclude aliens&lt;/strong&gt;, but additional information is usually necessary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a significant overlap between, and confusion with, these tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not all aliens are xenobiological.&lt;/strong&gt; Most questions involving alien organisms are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;not familiar to science&quot;. They may ask about evolution, or anatomy, or some other well-understood concept, but it is rare to find something completely unheard of. Therefore, most &quot;alien biology&quot; is not &quot;xenobiology&quot; by the tag definition, even though the tag is implicitly about aliens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not all xenobiology is alien.&lt;/strong&gt; Some of the questions that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; describe processes &quot;not familiar to science&quot; are eligible for &quot;xenobiology&quot; by definition, but they are not about aliens, which the tag implies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do we need overlap and ambiguity?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm suggesting this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; should for questions about &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; living things, fictional, real, alien, Earthly, etc. because &lt;em&gt;it is the study of life&lt;/em&gt;. Alien &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt; is still life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; should be merged with biology or synchronized. Its usage is not clear, as explained above, but all questions with this tag do discuss the study of life or aspects of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; is relevant if the creatures are truly alien, and their peculiarities can be tagged separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or alternatively to the above &quot;xenobiology&quot; can strictly be about &quot;aliens&quot; because &quot;processes not known to science&quot; can happen on Earth, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:10:57.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T08:41:31.260" Title="(Xeno)biology cleanup" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-06T02:25:13.253" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BUfmt.png&quot; alt=&quot;RPG.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:51.860" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T02:25:13.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4413" CreationDate="2017-02-06T02:28:43.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like keeping &quot;xenobiology&quot; as a unique tag. It is one of those terms that needs to be a part of Worldbuilding. It's an aesthetic thing. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd keep xenobiology as about aliens when they diverge from known biology -- things like silicon life forms, hydrochloric acid blood, etc., i.e., where we are completely hypothetical for the base principles. &quot;biology&quot; would be for where the base principles of life match what we know and the question is about applications of those principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T02:28:43.150" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-06T04:25:47.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmyHw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The Submission Grinder helps authors find publishers.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T02:21:24.730" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T02:21:24.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4413" CreationDate="2017-02-06T12:03:52.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original tag shows a confused definition. It's close enough to being plain wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Xenobiology is the field of biology concerned with extraterrestrial and extrasolar lifeforms of all kinds. This can include space-based lifeforms (if any exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biology is, in the strictest sense, is the global term to cover absolutely all lifeforms. This can include xenobiology. But biology tends to be used when dealing with lifeforms that we know about, because currently xenobiology is a speculative field of science since we know of totally zero extraterrestrial and alien lifeforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the proposed &quot;improvements&quot; are starting from a place of confusion and proceed to muddle their way to not significantly better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T12:03:52.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T17:22:23.817" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70227&quot;&gt;Recognizable natural numbers for alien message?&lt;/a&gt; I used &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt; at the beginning of a paragraph in 3 places.  Only 1 of them works! What's the problem?  I went over it carefully for stray spaces, and see no difference between what works and what doesn't, or what the help states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T22:58:06.060" Title="Why aren’t my spoiler markup working?" Tags="|support|markdown|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:00:04.997" Score="7" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2017 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T20:00:04.997" Title="2017 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-02-06T20:00:04.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:06:22.570" Score="18" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4338/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. As noted, not every question was compiled - the top 8 voted questions were selected along with our default 2 questions for a total of 10 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/b20f65f9-b144-456a-9c0f-6bb2ce130e4d/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4424&quot;&gt;AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4438&quot;&gt;Aric Fowler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4451&quot;&gt;MolbOrg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4452&quot;&gt;Youstay Igo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4453&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4476&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4478&quot;&gt;John Długosz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T20:39:55.960" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T20:39:55.960" Title="2017 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4423" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:34:09.960" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asked if I wanted to throw my hat in. No. I am a newbie and shocked it was just based on points. I have 706. The rep needed should be way higher! What I want to know is, 1) are current mods up for reelection or secure in their positions? 2) Do you have to nominate yourself or can you nominate someone else? Again 706, I will let you decide, but I am curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:02:04.520" Title="How are mods selected?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4421" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:46:57.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I have been here for a while now and kind of familiar with the place, I still don't know answers to some of the questions you have asked. (I am more concerned with answering people's questions to the best of my knowledge, instead of learning the mechanics of this site). I will still try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- The current mods are not up for re-election, this election is just here to add one person to the group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- You have to nominate yourselves. You cannot nominate anyone else. Although I would love it to be so that nobody can nominate themselves and people could only nominate others. That would help produce more productive mods with higher member support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3- Although it is not a part of your question, but I should add in that 706 rep means that you know how the site works. That is enough for your experience with the site working, to serve as a mod, if you want to run for it. Also, while 706 is indeed very low rep, considering that the site is run by the community (or so we like to believe), if the community wants a 300 rep mod, why not?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="19400" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:02:04.520" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:02:04.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4421" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:47:24.267" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This election is to add one moderator to the existing team; no moderators are being replaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidates must self-nominate.  If there is somebody you think would be a good candidate, you'll need to ask that person to nominate.  Chat is a good place to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While SE only requires 300 reputation to stand in an election, the &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; limit tends to be a lot higher, as you've noticed.  But better to set a lower boundary and let each community decide than to set a higher one and shut out people who, under some circumstances on some sites, would be good candidates.  Throwing your hat into the ring is relatively easy; persuading the community to elect you is the bigger challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T20:47:24.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:59:41.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AndyD273&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the current policy. I think that if a mod is going to step in, it should be for major things like abuse, doxing, and other things were users can be harmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the sites scope. Questions about Worldbuilding should be encouraged and cultivated, and non-Worldbuilding should be closed down by the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should mostly be handled by the users. There may be cases like spam where a question crosses a line and needs to be shut down fast, but otherwise the community can take care of itself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; moderators have a lot of power. If a moderator says a question should be closed then it is, no discussion. If a moderator decides to reopen a question, it overrides the community votes. This is a powerful tool, and so should be used with care. Unless something needs to be handled decisively, a moderators main duty is to mediate and clarify disagreements about Worldbuilders site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the subject of subjectivity, I feel that Worldbuilding is a lot closer to Moms4Mom than Physics in the examples give, with the disadvantage that it's harder to apply the Back It Up! Principle when your question is about dragons, vampires, artificial gravity, time machines, or other non-hard-science topics.&#xA;Often the best that can be done is to help users fix problems with internal consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love the Worldbuilding community, and I want to be more involved in what's happening here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Controversial does not mean bad. If a user is breaking rules or being abusive, then steps should be taken, from a warning to be nice to more drastic things, but otherwise there is no rule against being challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd talk to the other mod to see what their reasoning was, and if I still didn't agree I'd try to communicate my thinking in regards to why I disagreed with the decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A way to directly message people that don't use chat. A messaging system that could still be visible to mods but that would allow for personal messages that shouldn't be in open chat or comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open minded, a willingness to listen and try to come to an understanding. Slow tempered and unwilling to jump to judgement.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; for example, the ongoing Too Broad debates in chat. I do have an option on the subject, but I've definitely done a lot of listening too, and can see some of the valid opposing points. I think the subject needs more discussion, and I wish there was a better venue, but it's been very civil so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very often leave comments for newer users on ways to use the site better, and look at my role on Worldbuilding as an educator as much as anything else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be quick to listen and slow to answer. Let others have a chance to give their side before jumping in, and then try to find a middle ground that will help the most people possible while staying true to the purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T14:26:24.930" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T14:26:24.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4418" CreationDate="2017-02-06T21:08:38.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like it's working fine, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt; spoiler blocks are joined into one paragraph&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must start &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; new line with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markdown quoting (which is what spoiler blocks really are a special case of) is funny like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess if you really want them separate you can add a dummy paragraph in between them. I've been known to add a simple &quot;and&quot; between quoted blocks where they are actually distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:08:38.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4418" CreationDate="2017-02-06T22:58:06.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;James K fixed it, and explains in the edit comment that two &lt;em&gt;consecutive&lt;/em&gt; spoiler blocks don’t work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T22:58:06.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T01:27:11.607" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has no wiki, and I just wrote up this for it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the development of civilized society and culture.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Relevant tags may include &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehistoric-times&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehistoric-times&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehistoric-times&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but then I realized that it's pretty much covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt;. Outliers that refer to human biology or genetics over time can use those corresponding tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genetics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we still want to keep anthropology if existing tags overlap with it greatly, and few questions have it as a tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T11:22:00.383" Title="Do we want the anthropology tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4427" CreationDate="2017-02-07T01:57:55.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it should merge with &quot;society.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T01:57:55.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4427" CreationDate="2017-02-07T02:29:11.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes we should have the Anthropology tag. It has to do with human geography and has to do with why people are where they are, why they have the culture that they do, and why they live the way they live. It is a very deep topic but I think that broadening the amount and specificity of tags is essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the tag behind culture, society, language, you name it: very necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32999" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T02:29:11.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4413" CreationDate="2017-02-07T08:41:31.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This answer has copies the text of Zxyrra's question (see above) for easy reference. It has been italicized for clarity. Apologies for any formatting problems&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;According to its tag wiki, xenobiology is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*a form of biology that is not familiar to science and is not found in Earthly life*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the wiki and its contrast with the following imply that it is about aliens.&#xA;And biology is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but additional information is usually necessary*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I believe there is a significant overlap between, and confusion with, these tags.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Not all aliens are xenobiological. Most questions involving alien organisms are not &quot;not familiar to science&quot;. They may ask about evolution, or anatomy, or some other well-understood concept, but it is rare to find something completely unheard of. Therefore, most &quot;alien biology&quot; is not &quot;xenobiology&quot; by the tag definition, even though the tag is implicitly about aliens.*&#xA;&#xA;*Not all xenobiology is alien. Some of the questions that do describe processes &quot;not familiar to science&quot; are eligible for &quot;xenobiology&quot; by definition, but they are not about aliens, which the tag implies.*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do we need overlap and ambiguity? I'm suggesting this:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no harm in overlap and some ambiguity. This is inevitable with any classification system like WB SE's tag system. The problems here are trivial compared to &lt;strong&gt;real&lt;/strong&gt; classification systems. Besides xenobiology can be specifically about alien biology, despite alien biology being dealt with under Biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One further point of necessary clarification. Xenobiology can dealt with two fields of biology (1) alien biology concerned lifeforms beyond planet Earth, (2) strange, bizarre, and weird biology involving organisms that can be Earth-based. The tag as currently written, vaguely wanders between the two fields and could be a source of confusion. Though, probably, only to persons who have some knowledge and understanding of the relevant biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;biology should for questions about all living things, fictional, real, alien, Earthly, etc. because it is the study of life. Alien life is still life.&#xA;xenobiology should be merged with biology or synchronized. Its usage is not clear, as explained above, but all questions with this tag do discuss the study of life or aspects of life.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;creature-design is relevant if the creatures are truly alien, and their peculiarities can be tagged separately.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed. A good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;or alternatively to the above &quot;xenobiology&quot; can strictly be about &quot;aliens&quot; because &quot;processes not known to science&quot; can happen on Earth, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good point. It makes sense here on WB SE to strictly corral &quot;xenobiology&quot; to alien biology. Although this means questions about strange, bizarre, and weird biology will have to be dealt with under &quot;biology&quot;. This shouldn't be a problem as these questions are likely to be rare. I may be wrong, but if so, then consideration will have to be given about using &quot;alien biology' as a tag and restricting &quot;xenobiology&quot; tag to weird biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read the text of the current &quot;xenobiology&quot; tag, it does need editing, if for no other reason than to expunge one awful spelling error, but the &quot;hard-science&quot; requirement (mostly overlooked) is unnecessary hinderance. &quot;science-based&quot; would be better. The current &quot;biology&quot; tag is not unreasonable, and may only need minor edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a suggestion about using &quot;alternate-biology&quot; (for reasons I won't go into here, &quot;alternative-biology&quot; is to be preferred). This makes better if used as a tag for &quot;alternative-biology&quot; in &quot;alternative-universes&quot; or &quot;parallel-universes&quot; (or worlds for universes) in the same sense as &quot;alternative-physics&quot; in &quot;alternative-universes&quot; or &quot;alternative-cosmos&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: other terms that could be used as tags for alien biology (apart from &quot;alien biology' itself) include exobiology and astrobiology. &quot;Exobiology&quot; has mainly fallen out of usage, so may be ignored safely. While &quot;astrobiology&quot; is in vogue in the scientific community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T08:41:31.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4427" CreationDate="2017-02-07T11:22:00.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The necessary research is to disentangle the two terms doesn't seem to have been done. As someone who as part of my tertiary education I have done courses in anthropology, the differences between anthropology and sociology are apparent. There is definitely some overlap between the two fields, so it is inevitable there will be overlap between the tags. This is the result of the reality of their overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that there are so few questions tagged with &quot;anthropology&quot; displays a lack of awareness of the field and especially its relevance to worldbuilding. SF authors like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Oliver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chad Oliver&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ursula K Le Guin&lt;/a&gt; employed anthropological themes in their science-fiction. There is a rich intellectual lode to be mined by science-fiction writers in their worldbuilding. We should see more of it. Certainly it is an excellent idea to have an anthropology tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Anthropology is a global discipline involving humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Anthropology builds upon knowledge from&#xA;    natural sciences, including the discoveries about the origin and&#xA;    evolution of Homo sapiens, human physical traits, human behavior, the&#xA;    variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past&#xA;    of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture,&#xA;    and from social sciences, including the organization of human social&#xA;    and cultural relations, institutions, social conflicts, etc.[24][25]&#xA;    Early anthropology originated in Classical Greece and Persia and&#xA;    studied and tried to understand observable cultural diversity.[26][27]&#xA;    As such, anthropology has been central in the development of several&#xA;    new (late 20th century) interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive&#xA;    science,[28] global studies, and various ethnic studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Clifford Geertz,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still for the most part organizationally&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and&#xA;  political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it&#xA;  has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology,&#xA;  comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the&#xA;  vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia,&#xA;  and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthropology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; Social anthropology and cultural&#xA;    anthropology&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; study the norms and values of societies.&#xA;    Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life.&#xA;    Biological or physical anthropology&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; studies the biological&#xA;    development of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Archaeology, which studies past human cultures through investigation&#xA;  of physical evidence, is thought of as a branch of anthropology in the&#xA;  United States,&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; while in Europe, it is viewed as a discipline in its&#xA;  own right, or grouped under other related disciplines such as history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sociology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organization, networks, and&#xA;    institutions.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; It is a social science that uses various&#xA;    methods of empirical investigation[6] and critical analysis[7] to&#xA;    develop a body of knowledge about social order, disorder, and change.&#xA;    Many sociologists aim to conduct research that may be applied directly&#xA;    to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining&#xA;    the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter&#xA;    ranges from the micro-sociology level of individual agency and&#xA;    interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.[8]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification,&#xA;  social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law,&#xA;  sexuality and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected&#xA;  by the interplay between social structure and individual agency,&#xA;  sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such&#xA;  as health, medical, military and penal institutions, the Internet,&#xA;  education, social capital and the role of social activity in the&#xA;  development of scientific knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social&#xA;  researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative&#xA;  techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth&#xA;  century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and&#xA;  philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely,&#xA;  the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000s have seen the rise of&#xA;  new analytically, mathematically and computationally rigorous&#xA;  techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network&#xA;  analysis.[9][10]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Social research informs politicians and policy makers, educators,&#xA;  planners, legislators, administrators, developers, business magnates,&#xA;  managers, social workers, non-governmental organizations, non-profit&#xA;  organizations, and people interested in resolving social issues in&#xA;  general. There is often a great deal of crossover between social&#xA;  research, market research, and other statistical fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now, the differences between sociology and anthropology should be apparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of discussions about tags remind me of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;story&lt;/a&gt;. Remember do the research and if you're not sure make inquiries to clarify the subjects related to the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T11:22:00.383" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-02-07T12:25:34.700" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTGgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Q&amp;amp;A about works of sci-fi and fantasy!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.363" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T12:25:34.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T15:43:35.033" Score="11" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going over my answers on the election questionnaire, I noticed a contradiction between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; page and Worldbuilding Too Broad close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are either too many possible answers, &lt;strong&gt;or good answers would be too long for this format.&lt;/strong&gt; Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful to users to clarify this point, as I've seen that close vote definition argued as a reason to put questions on hold, when it's clearly at odds with SE policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I also believe that &quot;There are either too many possible answers&quot; is also at odds with the subjective question guidelines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moms4mom was an early Stack Exchange 1.0 case study in subjectivity. The owners knew from the outset that the topic of parenting was inherently and deeply subjective, a fundamentally bad fit to our engine. Parenting is one of the most subjective subjects I can imagine; every child is different, every parent is different, and whole cultures are wildly different in how they approach child rearing. After all, who can say for certain what order one should watch the Star Wars (saga) with your children for the first time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is a lot closer to Moms4mom than it is to Physics on the subjective scale, and possibly even surpasses it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible for a good, well defined subjective question to have multiple deep and well supported answers that are very different from each other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a bad thing either, since SE strives to be a repository for ideas, and an answer that works well for one world may not fit in another. More points of view can help out future world builders as the top answer may not be the one they need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution?&lt;/strong&gt; (first draft)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Answers would not have enough depth. Good subjective questions encourage answers that are deep and well supported. Bad subjective questions encourage answers that need to cover a lot of different points. Please add details to narrow the question down to a single point. Multiple questions may be needed to cover all points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T18:56:54.530" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T18:56:54.530" Title="Close reason contradiction" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4434" CreationDate="2017-02-07T16:00:39.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That does seem worth clarifying, yes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post (question or answer) has a length limit of 30,000 characters, so we can support fairly long answers here.  And we've gotten some good ones that are quite long.  We can't support open-ended tomes, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's the difference?  This is my personal understanding: A good answer to a good subjective question will be &lt;em&gt;thorough&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;well-supported&lt;/em&gt;.  This is more about &lt;em&gt;depth&lt;/em&gt;, though probably with some breadth too.  On the other hand, a too-broad question might ask for a survey of many options, or be so open-ended that there are bunches of options -- which would require a good answer to provide that thorough coverage of &lt;em&gt;many options&lt;/em&gt;.  At that point, (1) you're probably hitting the character limit and (2) that's really a lot to ask of answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want depth more than breadth.  Answers that are 20 miles wide and an inch deep don't work well here, and questions that can only be answered with those kinds of answers should be narrowed some before people start trying to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with a question having &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; deep and well-supported answers; in fact, it's great when we get good answers from different perspectives.  But if a question lends itself to terse incomplete answers that's at risk of being &quot;bad subjective&quot;, and if it would require writing a book to answer the question at all then it's too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T18:25:51.073" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T18:25:51.073" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4437" CreationDate="2017-02-07T19:12:26.187" Score="6" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many tags that seem synonymizable such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/espionage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;espionage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;espionage&lt;/a&gt; (espionage means &quot;&lt;em&gt;the practice of spying&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anthropology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anthropology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anthropology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4427/do-we-want-the-anthropology-tag&quot;&gt;discussion here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vehicles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vehicles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vehicles&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transporation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transporation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transporation&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/consolidate-tags-vehicles-and-transportation&quot;&gt;discussion here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteor&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comets&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4346/lets-talk-about-big-space-rocks&quot;&gt;discussion here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because many tags are not used often / obscure, very few users possess the reputation necessary to suggest a synonym. This can be frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, meta posts may discuss renaming tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/global-warming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;global-warming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;global-warming&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate-change&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4324/tags-global-warming-undefined-consolidate-or-leave-separate/4329#4329&quot;&gt;discussion here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And tags may also come up for deletion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/jupiter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;jupiter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;jupiter&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213&quot;&gt;discussion in chat a little while ago&lt;/a&gt;; TLDR it's oddly specific and the only other planets with tags, Earth and Mars, are much more popular)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/open-source&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;open-source&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;open-source&lt;/a&gt; ( very obscure and the two questions with it are closed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a way to contact moderators about enacting these changes once the community has reached an agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's great that we can agree on how to improve, but frustrating that once agreement is reached, things are often left where they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T23:01:01.933" Title="How can regular users enact larger changes to tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4436" CreationDate="2017-02-07T22:19:49.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4436/how-can-regular-users-enact-larger-changes-to-tags#comment11974_4436&quot;&gt;Pat said&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you just did contact the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us frequent meta pretty much on a daily basis (maybe not as much on the weekends), so the odds are good that we'll see the post anyway, and follow the discussion over time, and then see when a consensus has been reached. If you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't want to take your chances, though, flag the meta post about the discussion via the custom option and let us know that a consensus has been reached. Several users have done that in the past, and it lets things go smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example from a user who's done this a lot in the past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seems pretty clear (currently +6/-0 and no contradicting contributions). Would a moderator be willing to effect the change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we haz the synonym, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either one works, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T23:01:01.933" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T23:01:01.933" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-07T23:06:07.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Aric&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem with short conversations in the comment section, however, if it is unrelated to the question this is unnecessary. Spam is never needed. I think that giving the community a chance to run itself gives everyone a responsibility to give input and increases involvement; if a post is off-topic it is acceptable in my eyes to make the OP aware that this is so and recommend another site to post it on, however down-voting will achieve nothing. There is no need to close the post unless it remains active, and it may be that the poster can edit the question to make it suitable for the site, or remove it by themself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator I would certainly warn posters if they are posting incorrectly, however instead of closing the post I would recommend changes. If an innapropriate response is received, I see no problem in closing the post if there are no signs of the OP trying to improve their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoy the wide ranges of scope on this site. Anything from science, magic, mapping, language, history, and war tactics can be on-topic. There is a wide interest in creating one's own world and many different topics can be explored in doing so. I see few reasons to change the site's scope other than to increase the number of interested users, or to limit the number of seemingly meaningless questions asked for the sake of asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Encouraging the community to get involved is a big step in the right direction. While it would not be well-received to fly around the site telling everybody within range to get involved with the decision, I would certainly alert any members who show an interest in this, since meta is an important part of the development of the site. Often I see posts across Stack Exchange where someone has voted to close because the question is off-topic, and a debate in the comments as to what the scope of the site includes. In these cases, getting the opinions of those people would likely be very beneficial and it would be possible to get them involved in the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see a question which is debatable or otherwise subjective, I would likely recommend that the OP makes additional changes to the question to remove this to an extent where the question can be answered clearly. If no attempt is made and discussion continues in the answers, closing the post would likely avert further argument or unnecessary debate. I would only re-open a post which has shown significant changes to make it answerable and non-subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoy this site specifically because a question can spark several ideas among the community, and open-ended questions are somewhat more acceptable than on other sites, as long as the question and desired type of answer are made clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, my main goal is to research and answer other people's questions. Being a moderator makes no difference to this and does not give me more of an ability to help others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no real personal advantage to being a moderator, other than teaching myself the skills to deal with people and to take on a role with responsibility. I will hopefully get the satisfaction of knowing that a small part of this site has been somewhat improved by my presence, and in return I will help the community in the ways I can: closing and re-opening threads when needed, providing a positive example for other users to follow, and responding to flagged posts. Few people enjoy settling disputes in the comments or even over email, however I think that experience doing this will improve my judgement and mediatory skills. This, of course, mainly benefits the members I am conversing with at the time, however it will likely teach me skills for the future, which is why I am interested in taking on a role as a moderator aswell as being a regular visitor to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advice. How to create unambiguous answers that avoid dispute; how to accept other people's points and incorporate them into your answer instead of arguing your side out of pride; and most of all how to politely reason with people who comment on your answer. I would make sure that they are aware of the effect their answers are having, and I would take necessary action only if the user refuses to take advice and causes consistent disruptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talk to the other mod in private. If they do not reply, check with another moderator before re-opening the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish for more questions. Not questions for the sake of asking, but genuine interest which can be seen and replied to. I want more questions that make you go &quot;huh, maybe this...&quot; and then research and find out. More questions will mean more active users, more ideas, more information. The site in its current state is a perfectly capable tool for requesting and receiving ideas, I just wish that more people would use it to its full extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, I fall behind most other applicants here. Mose moderators are active, and help the community while also continuing to answer questions. While I am most active on WorldBuilding compared to other SE sites, I have not been the most active member. I started using worldbuilding last summer and was online nearly every day. I spent my time looking for questions which demonstrate interest in that area, and I researched to find what solutions I could find which used elegant systems to solve complex problems. Since september I have been unable to visit the site, however I still maintain that same interest and desire to learn something new. If being a moderator requires constant vigilance at your post, I am not best suited for this. I would check SE once every day or so, however I would not be on hand to respond to members within the hour if I was needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a moderator isn't just activity. It's fair judgement and a will to be involved. I am enthusiastic to take on a role of responsibility on this site, and I believe that I can approach problems without bias and give the most fair judgement I can with the information given to me. I want to continue to give meaningful answers to questions on the site, and being a moderator will not detract from this ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not moderated before. The idea of helping others has been my motivator for answering questions on these sites, however I have never used this in the fashion that a moderator would. I have always wanted to teach myself to teach others, but I have always concentrated on answering the question involved. I can't remember a time when I have helped in any way other than this, and I'm sure many readers will take this to mean that I am not suited for moderation. If so, then that's a fair judgement. I haven't really shown that I am capable to be a moderator because I never considered doing it, however my desire to provide worthwhile answers for others will extend to providing worthwhile services as a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a discussion situation, I have a way that I like to deal with it. I lay out the facts as they are and let others in the conversation interpret them. Once a couple ideas have been put forward, I give my own interpretation and compare it with the others. I see where mine is stronger, and where it is weaker. In this way I act as more of a director than anything else. I give my own thoughts, however I do not try to force the outcome. I lead the other people involved to come to their own conclusions and share them, and by a group effort find a solution. If a long-lasting debate ensues I will have to intervene, however for the most part I aim to move the discussion forwards towards a conclusion instead of ending it early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23503" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T19:56:01.200" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T19:56:01.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T23:20:43.953" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The &quot;Life&quot; tag has had a long journey.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/277/change-taglife-to-tagbiology&quot;&gt;October 2014&lt;/a&gt;, the tag was first discussed in meta. We decided it was too ambiguous to consolidate with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, because it can be used outside of that tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/396/rename-life-to-lifestyle&quot;&gt;Later that month&lt;/a&gt;, we dissolved the tag into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lifestyle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lifestyle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;, hoping it would not reappear. It was deemed too ambiguous and too easy to be misinterpreted, as not all users read tag wikis, and then it was deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/401/blacklist-the-life-tag&quot;&gt;At the end of the month&lt;/a&gt;, we decided not to blacklist the tag, because that's a tedious process. We just hoped it would not resurface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3272/its-back-the-life-tag&quot;&gt;February 2016&lt;/a&gt;, the tag came back anyway. We decided it's too ambiguous to either make it a synonym or give it a definition, and sought to blacklist the tag to get rid of the problem. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4323/should-tags-biology-biochemistry-anatomy-and-life-be-consolidated&quot;&gt;January 2017&lt;/a&gt;, the tag resurfaced in meta. It's not clear what happened to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/27882059#27882059&quot;&gt;the blacklist request from February&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems it did not succeed. There was talk of revisiting the tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;strong&gt;five&lt;/strong&gt; meta posts discussing this tag, &lt;strong&gt;it remains ambiguous and unclear&lt;/strong&gt;. It's used by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot;&gt;22 questions&lt;/a&gt;, and currently &lt;strong&gt;does not have a wiki&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;strong&gt;858 days of uncertainty&lt;/strong&gt;, I would like to lay this tag to rest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We've already discussed that the tag is too ambiguous to make a synonym&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making it a unique tag covers too broad of a range&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deleting the current questions won't work, as more pop up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems resubmitting a blacklist request is the only option, but it's unclear how the first request went or why it didn't work. &lt;strong&gt;If anyone has that knowledge, please comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do we end &quot;life&quot; as we know it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T23:20:43.953" Title="The End of &quot;Life&quot; as We Know It" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|specific-tag|tags|tag-blacklist|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:45:10.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more relevant information, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:18:01.973" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:18:01.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:45:10.977" Score="0" Body="For questions about changing a question, answer, comment, tag, or other post." OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:17:56.307" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:17:56.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:47:05.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:18:24.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:18:24.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:47:05.197" Score="0" Body="For discussion about why a specific question was closed or about what constitutes a reason for closure." OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:18:16.670" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:18:16.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4324" CreationDate="2017-02-08T03:45:53.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the separation completely: it clarifies the differences between the two terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I suggest that &quot;global warming&quot; should be reserved for anthropogenic climate change and &quot;climate change&quot; for climate change by natural processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are sufficient questions on &quot;global cooling&quot; perhaps that deserves its own tag. Since &quot;global cooling&quot; might be involved in &quot;ice ages&quot; (is that a tag?) perhaps they could go there or even be dealt with under the broader &quot;climate change&quot; tag. As some questions about &quot;global cooling&quot; may be about a cooler world rather than a glaciated one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T03:45:53.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:09:00.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T05:09:00.813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T05:09:00.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:09:00.813" Score="0" Body="For questions about the community of people who are using the Worldbuilding site." OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:59:43.657" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:59:43.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:11:07.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T04:28:31.337" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T04:28:31.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:11:07.553" Score="0" Body="For questions about posts that are open to, and owned by, the community as opposed to any one user." OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T20:46:23.357" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T20:46:23.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:12:51.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more information on the help center, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T20:46:31.793" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T20:46:31.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T05:12:51.637" Score="0" Body="For questions about the site's area of help and guidance pages." OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T20:47:00.840" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T20:47:00.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-08T07:12:51.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;MolbOrg&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even less intervention, less of that &lt;em&gt;While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat&lt;/em&gt;. A mod should act on known cases with preferably a clear understanding what he is doing. Moving regularly 20+ comments on a 3k+ views question with 10+ answers into chat just because it is more than the usual threshold for a 150 views question, is not a good way of handling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more intervention on shaping the community, teaching it what is good what is not so good, why and how, and more not in closing open questions, but find other ways to conduct a message and form public opinion. And the message should be well thought and tested and have the support of noble members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exchanging the reasons of decision is a good way to sync ways of thinking for a community. There have to be more dialogues inside of the community on different topics, and the meta do not have to be a forgotten place but should be more active used for that, it is not just a support forum and a place to express the discontent or occasional voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how&amp;quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good question, thank you. Now about of how to make the piece in the world. B.N. asked me once about why Graph Zeppeling decided to build his first ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm joking, good question and it can't be answered easily. A lot of people can write an essay about the situation, similarly to the one you have linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community defines the types of question it asks and how it perceives the questions and answers, and at any stage, it has some sort of agreement and consensus. Disagreement is also a part of the community consensus. It has to be understood that in general, the consensus can be any of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Willing to understand the agreement is a good community member treat.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Willing to influence the agreement is a good community member treat.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to voice and influence and to exchange the understanding of the consensus or trying to understand it, there are tools for that(limited but still functional) - comments, voting(up/down), meta, chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The understanding of the agreement, in general, is not a must of being a part of the community. You have to understand your part of the agreement because we are here pretty multispectral community(have different fields of interests) and no one should expect to understand everything about the community. (There is a lot to say, that as example &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4091/20315&quot;&gt;Answer to: Why is Worldbuilding Stack Exchange so good at answering questions?&lt;/a&gt;, and other meta posts in general(by many other users since the beginning), the question will never find its final answer, and you have to be prepared for that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of the mod is to help to navigate trough different IRL obstacles to allow the healthy communty to exist, it is not their function to rule, except the pledge to SE to be the WB site of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your question, those meta post intention is to clarify why we do what we do, even if they doing not so well atm.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4284/hot-or-not-the-opinion-based-question-the-sandbox-game&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4284/hot-or-not-the-opinion-based-question-the-sandbox-game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4270/putting-opinion-based-questions-on-hold-too-fast&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4270/putting-opinion-based-questions-on-hold-too-fast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4407/hard-science-tag-possible-approach-changing-how-to-ask-these-particular-types&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4407/hard-science-tag-possible-approach-changing-how-to-ask-these-particular-types&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like for us to make of semi-permanent meta activity(like the sand box, but more well known) or once week/month activities - where the reasons can be disclosed, in a form when a reader can easily and quickly to determine/see a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to promote such topics from meta at the main site, may be in form of comments or plates when it is appropriate and when there might be a controversy or when people voice their interest in the information(in form of arguable disagreement as an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be useful for new users to learn and more mature users to learn for practical reasons to be more certain in their votes/comments/edition actions and thus being more active in that sort of activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to have more and better questions on WB, especially reality-check, space and tech questions in general. I would like to see a tech oriented mod as a 5th mod, as I think fantasy part of WB is too strong at the moment. I do not want to be a moderator, I just want such person to be the 5th mod, and I do not care who it will be even if it have to be me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation does not have the place on WB. The situation is very improbable, as generally, they do not participate in both of those activities equally good. Sometimes sacrifices have to be done for the well-being of the community.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Community first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation has to be discussed, and reason has to be understood. Mods have to have agreement on things(perfect world). In real live, it is more about separation of roles and finding some agreement and convincing, testing. Overriding decisions is bad practice, but it depends on situation and type of agreement which has place(verbal and non verbal), as long as we are not military personnel here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not get what genie mean by “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!” but same as for the World, more brains for everyone, and as far I do not get what genie mean by the funny business, and I understand it might have limited capabilities, more wisdom for me and brains if you can, plz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the humans. Understanding the humans on the internet. Сonsistency. Patience.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm working on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good question, and the question where I for real should begin to talk about important role which zeppelins will play in the world history in the future.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So far I have successfully avoided such type of duties when they were not part of the job.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Honorable mention is - I'm actively participating at 4chan-like site(less so in recent time), and I know the bottom of the human on internet (or something which is close to being called so)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot of discussions on Meta require the finding of a &amp;quot;sweet spot&amp;quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussions, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &amp;quot;because they're good at it&amp;quot;. As a casual user, though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderators has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &amp;quot;discussion ender&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;casual dude&amp;quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see why anyone's saying have to stop you from voice your opinion or argument. It does not matter who and what said before and do he have mod &amp;quot;badge&amp;quot; or not, and if you have a point/opinion/argument to add to the conversation it has to be presented, it is a part of being community driven management. Do not wait until you snap, let other know what you think because if you do not voice yourself nobody will know what you have to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not have new point, vote for the things you like, downvote thinks you do not like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also, You have to try to understand the reasons of other, and do not hesitate to ask for clarifications, when decisions have long lasting effect it is in your best interests to participate in the dialog, but it also have to be expected that not everything will be like you would like it to be, but do not be shy, voice yourself and let people know about your existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Worth noticing questions from electorate from different sources&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt;, by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/2#comment-204374&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say that &amp;quot;WB needs a bit of fresh blood, to develop further&amp;quot;, &lt;strong&gt;could you elaborate a little on how you feel having a diamond attached to your name, and having access to the moderator tools, would help you further that goal?&lt;/strong&gt; Lots of the ways a user (&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; user) can affect the community's direction and development are equally available to all users with a minimal amount of reputation required, no diamond needed; what would the diamond add in your case? Pointing to e.g. previous work in your desired direction on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Chat&lt;/a&gt; would work; I see very little Meta activity from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment WB is doing pretty well and there are 2 ways further - keep it as it is or try to extend/grow/add some aspects. There are already solid candidates for the first course of actions. The second course of actions can be taken by involving one who is different enough and the difference will affect mod group decisions, and that is the reason why I agitate low rep users to nominate as they have a real chance to make WB better with help of more experienced mods and nominate myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, people need time to understand what I say and why I say, time and will to do so. My best hope is that it worth their efforts, at a good amount cases. I can convince and explain a thing to a million of people, but it might probably take million of years to do so, and I more than willing to do so if I could squeeze the million of years in one. Hierarchical organization is intended to do exactly that, squeezing millions of years. So far my experience is not so impressive and limited to conducting a message to about 30 thousand people, trough hierarchical system, but I'm looking forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a way of making WB better, so far, I have chosen to give free internet points for all users who make the WB better right now, by voting for their answers/questions, so they can gain reputation and eventually get privileges according to their reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obligatory part of my decision-making procedure is collecting information, and it has to gain some critical mass and generate decent understanding before I can make valuable suggestions, decide, judge. The treat work the best in teamwork and in situations where I have the time to make the preparations for changing the course of my actions. I have reached the point recently and will continue my course actions and it does not depend on election results. Examples of meta activity which are the result of the process mention in 3 question of the questionnaire(and they are easy to access as they are 3 questions on meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Diamond part&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It adds nothing in 99% cases to what I already have, my words.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But it adds statistics which I might find useful, access to agreements and rules from SE to mods which might affect the field of possible decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main problems of the second path, of adding or extending aspects(the technological theme in my case) is a low rate of gaining the reputation if one will consider answering only the type of questions, for reason not being competent in magic as an example.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With the current rate of suitable questions, it will take me(or similar candidate) about 3-4 years to get 10k privileges, 8+ years to get to 25k reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is with any candidate which can bring something new to the WB table, and that is a reason why I suggest to take fresh users as candidates more seriously, less attention to their rep and more attention to what they might bring. And do that at candidate stage and further stages of the election in case if you choose development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T19:56:31.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-08T14:12:20.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Youstay Igo&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in division of duties. While some mods could be quite suitable and active for the tedious work of keeping the site clean and nice for users, others (with more experience than me) could be more experienced with the the scope of the site and better handle the subtleties of reopening and hammer-closing the questions. I do believe that one or a couple of senior mods should reopen the questions which they find closed unjustly. As for closing the questions, I believe that members should be able to vote for closing of a question, but the final act of closing the question should be taken by a mod. This would help in controversial situations where a question is voted closed and then voted reopened without any major edit in the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the scope of the site should be very slightly broadened. Sometimes a question is relevant to the site's scope, but does not quite exactly fit in. Sometimes a couple of users are also willing to answer such a question. These questions are usually voted-closed. I think in case such a question is coming from a novice user, they should be notified about the site's scope, but their first couple of questions should not be shutdown and they should be given some grace period to get acquainted to the site's scope and merge in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I feel that if a question is relevant to the site (even if not exactly fitting in), the question should be given 12 hours before shutting it down, in case some member is willing to help answer that question. If a member can help reword it to fit it in the site's scope, all the better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that a mod should hammer down a subjective question &lt;strong&gt;if someone is willing to answer it&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I do strongly support the idea of making the question more precise, so as to limit the subjectivity part. In case of such a question, I would try to reword the question in order to make it more precise, without derailing the soul of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, subjectivity of opinion about technicalities is good, but a question reading &quot;Which system of government is better for my world? Please explain in detail&quot; would not generate helpful content for other users of the site who might have similar question in mind, because the topic of opinion is too broad and non-technical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been a member of this place for more than a year now (cannot recall precisely when I joined) and I just want to try and make it more newbie-friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My course of action is clear about comments and arguments. As long as the writer of the content (question or answer) has not presented any misleading/false/offensive material, they have the full right to complain and get any comment removed from their question which they feel aggressive or non productive. However, if they do want to go on answering the comments/arguments, of course they can. As a moderator, I would remove all comments which the &lt;strong&gt;writer of the content&lt;/strong&gt; flags inappropriate (unless the comments point out a factual error in the content or complain about the tone of the writer, in which case their case would be considered seriously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no warning would be issued to the writer of such comments as long as their comments are not flagged as aggressive or offensive, in which case the complaint would be processed with other mods and a warning message issued if the allegations are right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About all non-offensive comments which the writer deems non-productive and wants removed, I guess the mod team would just have to do silent cleaning. &lt;em&gt;yawn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community does not vote against this closing/deletion, I would respect their (the other mod and the community) decision and stifle my opinion. However, if the community votes against such an action (through comments or writing about it in meta), then I would discuss the matter with other mods and sort it out according to their (the mod team) aggregate decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That somehow we could get people with firsthand, personal knowledge about the subject matter, to answer the questions (as opposed to answering based on subjective internet searches and personal opinions where an objective answer exists). That would be the best and most productive progress I could ask for, right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willingness to go an extra mile to help/guide a member. This is the most important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flexible, but not compromising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helps to manage the place according to the principles agreed upon, instead of pulling it to suit what they prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During my time on the site so far, I have tried to help newbies about the site's scope and question wording. As a mod, I would be more concerned about helping people use this site more productively, instead of resolving disputes, which I would leave for seniors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guy at the help-desk, if you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been a moderator (and part of the admin staff) on 2 forums in the past. I have not been a mod anywhere on any SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have not been much active in the last few months, I have always tried to help newbies and junior members about how to get the best out of this site while being productive for others. You can see this attitude in my comments in newbies' questions/answers and my long answers to subjective questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will not change my tone at all. I see myself as someone people call for support and guidance, not someone who hammers down their opinion on how things are and ought to be. If anything, I would try to make it so that lesser questions get closed and newbies get to merge in the community more smoothly and rapidly. That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reply to Monica Cellio's question/comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot link to the actual questions (as I have forgotten their exact wording), but I have seen some questions with a tone of &lt;em&gt;What should I do in my world, to make this and that occur at some point?&lt;/em&gt; and the more general &lt;em&gt;What are some fun ways of using black holes in my world?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that these questions are too broad and that it would be asking too much to expect the members to answer them in full detail, but I do support the idea of providing quick, short guidelines to OP (as answer) about which aspects (of science or magic or initial settings in their world) do they need to work at, and how they would change the mechanics of their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T19:56:52.963" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T19:56:52.963" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-08T16:42:51.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;James&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if you have questions on my responses in the comments below or hit me up in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/53143/worldbuilding-2017-moderator-election-chat&quot;&gt;election chat room&lt;/a&gt;, thanks for taking the time to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to&#xA;  closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt;  We, the current mods, generally have&#xA;  a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move&#xA;  long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll&#xA;  often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never&#xA;  mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of&#xA;  dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you&#xA;  think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support the current style.  People put (in most cases) a lot of work and thought into their questions and to see those diamond hammered shut can be really demoralizing and drive people from the site.  Heavy handed moderating would also contradict the design of SE, where the community is intended to moderate itself.  In short, I agree with the way things are currently handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE? What if anything&#xA;  would you want to change about the site's scope?&lt;/strong&gt; How would you go&#xA;  about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision&#xA;  of scope change? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scope wise I think we are actually doing well.  World Building is a really really big topic.  By definition it can include pretty much anything.  I think our implementation of the scope is perhaps lacking in some ways.  As I mentioned in chat the other day, I don't think we can completely get away from subjective questions, there will always be things here that have multiple possible answers.  We do need to make sure questions are properly constrained so that answers are at least comparable to each other via the requirements of the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/strong&gt; describes what makes&#xA;  a good subjective question -- it inspires longer answers explaining&#xA;  &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and&#xA;  references, and it's more than mindless social fun. Worldbuilding gets&#xA;  a lot of questions in the gray area here. Some of them get closed as&#xA;  primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract&#xA;  10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which&#xA;  precedents to follow. As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!)&#xA;  vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you&#xA;  handle questions like these, and their answers? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much like our current moderators in grey cases I would wait to use a close/reopen vote until three or four votes had come in from non-mod community members.  As mentioned in my answer to the previous question I would suggest we have work to do in enforcing our standards and personally feel we are allowing too many &lt;em&gt;bad subjective&lt;/em&gt; questions to remain open.  Its a conversation we need to continue having and I would hazard a guess it is a problem that will persist indefinitely which is ok so long as we continue to address it as it starts to veer to far to the bad subjective side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there &gt; are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put I love the site and the conversations that are had on WB.SE.  I've been around the site since shortly after it appeared on Area 51 and helped get the proposal reopened after it had been closed there.  I don't plan on going anywhere either way but would be happy to serve in a moderation capacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would start with a one on one conversation mentioning the following: - The issue has been raised, and explaining the problem. - Ensure the expectations of the community regarding behavior were explained. - Inform the person that if it continues to be an issue the impacts for them will gradually escalate...or less gradually depending on the nature of the offenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, it is situation specific, but I tend to give people clear explanations and expectations, ensure open communication and ample opportunity to improve and adhere to community norms. Failing that enforcement of the rules is carried out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a&#xA;  question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is pretty straightforward. I would have a private conversation with the moderator in question and come to a mutual agreement on the proper course of action. If it is a matter of opinion I would be ok agreeing to disagree. Disagreements between moderators should generally not be public knowledge, it just serves to divide the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the other moderator is abusing their authority or unwilling to discuss in a reasonable manner (not being a respectful community member) escalate to the proper authorities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site.&lt;/strong&gt; It could be something about the community&#xA;  (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers,&#xA;  people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they&#xA;  start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works&#xA;  (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny&#xA;  business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now the most pressing issue I see is that users seem hesitant to use close votes.  We have a fair number of questions that are in the subjective category and falling on the &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; side.  The questions are interesting and could be edited to fit the site if they were edited appropriate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem in my mind is that people are not closing the questions quickly enough.  This leads to those questions getting a bunch of answers.  At which point the question is often closed.  The irony is now the question shouldn't be edited to make it on topic because the necessary changes would invalidate answers which is generally frowned upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So two parts.  1.  Don't answer questions that are off topic for whatever reason.  2.  Close said questions and help people make them better through comments/edits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What&#xA;  do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you&#xA;  demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patience, knowledge of the community and patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would submit &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A189&quot;&gt;my activity on meta&lt;/a&gt; as an example of how I have handled things patiently...and actually its a pretty good resume for the knowledge of the community portion as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best tool for being familiar with other community members is chat in my opinion and I am there basically all day long :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your&#xA;  qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE&#xA;  or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this&#xA;  position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you&#xA;  show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have&#xA;  helped? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have moderated plenty of non-SE sites in the past and am familiar with all the tools available to a 20,000 rep user on World Building, but I have not been a moderator on a SE site before.  That said part of the beauty of the SE system is how they easy you into moderation responsibility gradually as a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my day job I am a scrum master (its like a project manager but nicer) so my job is to coordinate things as needed and de-conflict priorities all the while keeping people playing nice and acting as mediator as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proof of conviction...I would suggest reviewing the meta thread I linked in the previous question.  I am also user 189...so...yeah :).  I am not really sure what qualifies as &lt;em&gt;proof of conviction&lt;/em&gt; beyond what I have mentioned in other answers but I am happy to answer any questions regarding the topic over in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/53143/worldbuilding-2017-moderator-election-chat&quot;&gt;election chat room&lt;/a&gt; if anyone has anything specific in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot&#xA;  on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between&#xA;  extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those&#xA;  discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence&#xA;  than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time&#xA;  thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected&#xA;  &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it&#xA;  intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after&#xA;  one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where&#xA;  would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual&#xA;  dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation/leadership privileges would actually not change much in my behavior.  I am not oblivious to the fact that the opinions of moderators can carry extra weight and that comments from a moderator can have a &lt;em&gt;case closed&lt;/em&gt; effect on conversation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I would certainly still share my opinion but I would generally wait longer than normal to do so.  I want to make sure people are willing to share their opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also feel an obligation to make sure I bring issues up on meta (by asking questions) more regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T21:15:48.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T21:15:48.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-08T17:25:13.437" Score="-12" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the threads that got blocked because the moderator question, entered &quot;Ragequit mode: On&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70656/destroy-tyranny-from-within&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70656/destroy-tyranny-from-within&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70442/the-hive-returns-stop-robot-from-attaining-godhood-in-a-pure-deterministic-univ&quot;&gt;The Hive returns: stop robot from attaining godhood in a pure deterministic universe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason he raged is because i switched the accepted answer to another that was better. He then used his friends to block my perfectly valid questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also every question i start, he is there to block them. No matter what i ask, i followed every rule exactly as stated in FAQ. Yet the moderator nazi keeps closing them without justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30821" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T23:13:27.743" Title="How can i prevent a raging moderator from blocking my questions?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4454" CreationDate="2017-02-08T18:54:40.213" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your comments and behavior pretty clearly indicate you do not understand how this site functions.  That is not a dig or insult merely the reality, and we were all in your shoes and one point, and can agree that the learning process can be frustrating.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First thing:&lt;/strong&gt;  Moderators are denoted by a little diamond next to their name.  As mentioned in the comments no moderators were involved in the closing of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second:&lt;/strong&gt;  A question being closed is not punitive.  Closing a question puts it on hold so that it can be improved or better adhere to the standards of the site.  If you are not comfortable with those standards you are of course welcome to find assistance elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third:&lt;/strong&gt;  While Stack Exchange sites do have moderators, they exist to handle rare situations where people are clearly out of line.  In the main, and as is the case with your question, the site is moderated by the users of the site.  All of the people that voted to close are simply users like you.  They have been around for a while and earned enough reputation through the site's mechanics to have the privilege/responsibility of some moderation acts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you have questions always ask, people around here are certainly willing to assist, but the attitude demonstrated in this post and in the comments on your questions will not be well accepted by this, or any, Stack Exchange community.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T15:40:36.467" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:40:36.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:28:45.027" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked elsewhere on Stack Exchange (for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/274630/should-we-add-a-do-my-work-for-me-close-reason&quot;&gt;in Stack Overflow meta&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, there is a type of question that exists, that follows the format &amp;quot;I need x, it should be y and/or z&amp;quot;. It's not so much a question as it is a work request. I call these 'homework questions' because on most sites, it's often the case that they've been copy/pasted from a homework assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with homework questions, and the answers we have been providing to such questions, is that they ask for and receive specific solutions rather than general ones. It's like you ask &amp;quot;what is an even number?&amp;quot; and top-voted answers are &amp;quot;2&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;4&amp;quot;. The 'right' answer should be &amp;quot;2x where x is any integer&amp;quot;, because it allows the OP to better understand the process behind what makes a number even and how he can find one on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe we should focus more on providing general solutions to problems, instead of being a place where people can come to have others build their worlds for them. The problem is, there is no close reason for well-constrained questions asking for a specific world to be built, and answers that provide such worlds can't really be blamed for doing so instead of providing a more general solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, see this question that made me start wondering about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70086/lonely-astronaut&quot;&gt;Lonely astronaut&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is asking for a world with specific criteria. The asker suggested that they followed all the rules of the site, and there was no good reason for their question to be closed. Plus, it got 21 answers, each providing a different option. I don't really think the question was too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this question I think gives another good example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70560/kingdom-with-helpful-bands-of-mercenaries-avoiding-devolving-into-bandits&quot;&gt;Kingdom with helpful bands of mercenaries; avoiding devolving into bandits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believed the answer to be 'give them other jobs to do', but all the answers I saw last time I checked was providing different ideas for jobs that could be given. Again, there are too many answers, when a single answer should be able to provide a framework that would lead to all the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the Stack Overflow answer linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly agree. The existing close reasons are not always sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Write a method in Java that takes an int[] arr and an int k, and returns the kth largest element of arr. The method should run in O(n) time, where n is the length of arr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cannot be closed as too broad: it's quite specific. It cannot be closed as unclear what you're asking: it's perfectly clear. It cannot be closed with Questions requiring debugging help... because it doesn't ask for any debugging help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T16:01:27.627" Title="Should we discourage &quot;Build my world for me&quot; questions (and how)?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:53:53.583" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The point of this post is to discuss potential&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag wiki and excerpt edits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag creation and deletion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag blacklisting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag synonymization and merging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... because a meta post for every proposed change fills up the question list relatively &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers should include:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One&lt;/strong&gt; suggestion each (multiple answers per person are welcome)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links to the tag's wiki, definitions, and &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; other information relevant to your argument&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reasoning&lt;/strong&gt; for all suggested changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the tag is for &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt; (if it is) to avoid confusion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments can be used for discussion, and after a consensus is reached, the change should be implemented by the requester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they do not have the ability to implement that change, the post can be &lt;strong&gt;flagged for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4437/28639&quot;&gt;polite request&lt;/a&gt; for implementation. The post can be deleted after the change is confirmed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the suggestion is controversial, it is not recommended to flag or push the idea until an agreement is reached.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;strong&gt;meta tags&lt;/strong&gt; are also in need of cleanup! Don’t forget to check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;meta review&lt;/a&gt; from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Happy tagging!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T00:53:08.387" Title="Sandbox for Proposed Tag Edits" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-wiki|sandbox|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4457" CreationDate="2017-02-09T16:03:54.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Synonymize &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anthropology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anthropology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anthropology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anthropology means &amp;quot;the study of human society&amp;quot; and therefore applies to most society questions. If there are outliers, they can be tagged as necessary, but it seems reasonable to remap anthropology to society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4427/do-we-want-the-anthropology-tag&quot;&gt;Do we want the anthropology tag?&lt;/a&gt; for previous discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T16:03:54.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4457" CreationDate="2017-02-09T16:34:36.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Blacklist &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag has had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4439/the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it?noredirect=1#comment12017_4439&quot;&gt;long, long journey&lt;/a&gt;, and at every step of the way, we've decided we don't want it. Deletion hasn't worked, nor has writing an inclusive wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems a blacklist is the only way to permanently get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T16:34:36.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4456" CreationDate="2017-02-09T21:21:14.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I sort of agree.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated above, many &quot;homework&quot; questions are still within the scope of the site, and they can still be answered effectively. While general solutions &lt;em&gt;do help&lt;/em&gt;, and make for great answers, there is no reason to exclude specific answers; in general, &lt;strong&gt;this idea does not need to be enforced.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions do tend to push it, however: they are often &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;. Asking for &quot;&lt;em&gt;something that works&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as opposed to &quot;&lt;em&gt;how to make it work&lt;/em&gt;&quot; can often be subjective. Using your example above, who's to say that &quot;4&quot; is a better even number than &quot;2&quot;? And thus, they can be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep homework questions if they're &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;good subjective&lt;/a&gt;, and use &quot;&lt;strong&gt;opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; as a way to close them when they're not fit for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T21:21:14.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4457" CreationDate="2017-02-09T22:10:12.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Synonymize &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vehicles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vehicles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vehicles&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transportation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/consolidate-tags-vehicles-and-transportation&quot;&gt;Consolidate tags &amp;quot;vehicles&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;transportation&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; for prior discussion. Nearly all transportation occurs in vehicles, and if it doesn't, it usually has its own tag, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm suggesting we remap vehicles to transportation / make transportation the main tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T22:10:12.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-02-10T10:17:31.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem with a lot of these questions is the fact that fighting your way through the hordes of minions is not isolated from defeating the big bad in question. Most of them are relatively easily eliminated in isolation by some abuse of the mechanics given, or just tricking them into a box/setting them on fire/slow poison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is usually caused by the fact that people think in terms of a direct physical confrontation and most of the answers are fundamentally &quot;don't have a direct physical confrontation&quot;. Heroes are big and strong and do direct confrontation and don't think too much. Sidekicks do the thinking. I'm not entirely sure if they're too broad, it seems our role in these is to be the sidekick and have the idea, which means they should be classed as &quot;story based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps they're more for Writers.SE to discuss how to get your big thug of a hero to have a clever idea instead of thumping his way to a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:10:46.963" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:10:46.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4353" CreationDate="2017-02-10T13:50:39.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree. No one would consider a horse to be a kind of vehicle, and no one can give me a name of vehicle someone is using when he teleports with magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, when it comes to vehicle design, stress might be on other things than when it comes to deciding which mode of transportation is most feasible, or what technologies of building roads would be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tags overlap a bit, but are not synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:50:39.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T14:09:26.143" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Worldbuilding.SE's help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists to get help creating imaginary worlds. This includes geography, culture and creatures for the world. Questions on this site should be about building settings and the reasons around why they are the way they are. A setting might not be a planet; it can be larger than a multiverse or smaller than a village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a widely published piece of work (e.g. a book with 1000+ copies sold) that made use of Worldbuilding.SE during the creative process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9891" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T14:09:26.143" Title="Is there a book/film/videogame published by a major publisher that made use of WorldBuilding.SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-02-10T14:33:07.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4472" CreationDate="2017-02-10T15:27:08.937" Score="7" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: This is not a tag edit proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering for some time if there was a common denominator in reality check answering. I've already asked a question about the type of answers &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4172/according-to-reality-check-possibility-implies-existence&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and it comforted me into that idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I foolishly decided to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70829/is-insert-item-here-breaking-physics-or-chemistry&quot;&gt;&quot;please can I have a generic physics and chemistry reality-check&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Hoping to get science to be easy, I instead met the fierce and unstoppable community closing that was due. As of right now I leave this question undeleted for discussion purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my childish attempt to solve science was met with the swift justice it deserved, it also met a good stream of comment (showing I should have maybe raised the subject in chat or meta first, I'm still learning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%C3%B6rling&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt; said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the basic idea here has merit, but as it stands, this is&#xA;  biting off a bit too much. Compare for example&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/316/29&quot;&gt;Can you simply scale up animals?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  which IMO is an excellent reference to the problems of taking&#xA;  an animal and simply making it larger. I'm voting to close this as too&#xA;  broad, but I would definitely be open to considering even upvoting&#xA;  more focused questions, such as perhaps &quot;what do I need to keep in&#xA;  mind when changing or deciding on a planet's gravity?&quot; or maybe even&#xA;  &quot;can you change an arbitrary physics constant or formula?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, I'm not against the idea of having a canonical question to&#xA;  summarize the important points, and I think the question on scaling up&#xA;  animals is an excellent example of just that which has been very well&#xA;  received. Just keep it to one thing per question. If multiple of these&#xA;  questions are relevant to a specific question, we can always link to&#xA;  more than one of these canonical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to this: I'd like to create a list of different things people may want a reality check on. The list should be long enough to have all topics covered with elements as generic as WB allows. Having those questions (and a Meta post indexing them) would be quite a helpful resource in answering reality-check questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that look like a good idea to you? Is there something I overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T13:22:53.383" Title="Let's break down reality-check" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2017-02-10T20:16:10.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I understand your concept, and I can foresee one example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can [creature] evolve [feature of other creature]&lt;/strong&gt; and if so, what pressures are required for it to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidates with this pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/25999/10851&quot;&gt;hoofed carnivores?&lt;/a&gt;  (i.e. Can &lt;em&gt;ungulates&lt;/em&gt; evolve &lt;em&gt;canine teeth&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/20335/10851&quot;&gt;How to justify digging claws and opposable thumbs in the same being&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. Can &lt;em&gt;badgers&lt;/em&gt; evolve &lt;em&gt;opposable thumbs&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/70329/10851&quot;&gt;Can I have a big flying creature with jaw and teeth?&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. Can &lt;em&gt;birds&lt;/em&gt; evolve &lt;em&gt;jaws&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Although none of these three currently carries the reality-check tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T13:22:53.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2017-02-11T08:21:35.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you need is a different way ask and answer your question. Instead searching 2000 plus questions tagged &quot;reality-check&quot; what is needed is a searching facility to check questions with at least two tags Say, &quot;reality-check&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;giants&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how many tags can be searched together the greater the precision. It's all a matter of understanding information retrieval strategies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really all about how to retrieve the relevant questions. No need to build elaborate concatenations of questions to produce narrower search strategies. Just build the appropriate search mechanism. It's basically how search engines work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T08:21:35.143" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-02-11T12:58:58.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What societal traits could we expect from intelligent alien species with different evolutionary backgrounds to our own.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would we expect of species evolved from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Water dwelling omnivores, herbivores, and carnivores. (Both schooling and solitary for each)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Land dwelling, herding herbivores.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Land dwelling pack hunting obligate carnivores.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Land dwelling solitary obligate carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this question ask too much at once? (I think it does))&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should I split this question, should I post all of the variants at once?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33249" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:58:58.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2017-02-12T00:47:33.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the goal you have here is a good one, however I think you are focusing too much on the reality check tag. Instead I think you would do better to look at the existing successful series such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world Series&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/316/can-you-simply-scale-up-animals&quot;&gt;Can you simply scale up animals?&lt;/a&gt; was mentioned in the question but does not currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, however it is an excellent candidate for this sort of series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can define a series of related and generally useful questions then use a meta post to define the series and the shared constraints and then ask some appropriate questions to kick-start the series. I also applied bounties to make sure we got excellent answers for the first few realistic worlds questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T00:47:33.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-02-12T16:25:19.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should I phrase this and make it less broad? Should I refine the premise in some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What possible solutions to the Fermi paradox result in the largest quantity of intelligent alien life that we can interact with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What solutions to the Fermi paradox create a universe teeming with life that we haven't yet noticed, but could easily find and interact with somewhere along our journey to becoming a Kardeshev type II civilisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33249" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T16:25:19.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4407" CreationDate="2017-02-12T18:31:17.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the problems which I think new users using the tag face is that they don't necessarily know much about it. Stack Exchange can be a bit complicated to understand when you first join, and a tag which requires enforcement like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag does just adds another layer of complexity. This may have been what happened with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/70897/627&quot;&gt;What would/should humanity do with a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica?&lt;/a&gt;. A first-time user decides to use the tag and may (&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;) not have known the full implications of using it. Then, half a dozen people suggested otherwise.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal here suffers from the same problem. It involves another step of complexity, and while that could lead to better questions, it's not going to make things any less confusing for new users. I think that people who are more experienced with the site in general are going to better understand how to write a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question, and so wouldn't need to use the two-stage model anyway. But for new folks? Their first thought is that they have to ask another question to ask a question. That's not very helpful for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also see the problem of duplicating effort. I won't necessarily write a non-hard-science answer just because the question doesn't have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. What do I (any answerer who does, this, really, not just me) do when the user then asks the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; version of the same question? Isn't my first answer good enough, and shouldn't the new question be closed as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that could be helpful is &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/635/627&quot;&gt;the question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. It's worked for quite a few users in the past, and people can definitely help users better shape their &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions, so long as the sandbox is visible and so long as people know about it, recommend it, and use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For the record, regardless of whether or not the tag was justified on that question, I'm &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; unhappy with how the community dealt with it. Six separate people basically said, &quot;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag should be removed. The premise isn't realistic.&quot; &lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt; person - MolbOrg - explained why the tag itself was inappropriate, and the exact specifics of what such a tag implies the questioner is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, I have some requests of people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post helpful comments&lt;/strong&gt; that reference the tag wiki and explain why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is not appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not flag the post for a moderator to remove the tag.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't want to speak for the other mods, but I for one will not do that. The OP should remove the tag themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do flag to have the post notices removed&lt;/strong&gt; if the question no longer uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. I do see people doing this; thank you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not ignore the tag&lt;/strong&gt; in your answer just because you don't think the question warrants it. If you can't answer the question according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; requirements, don't answer at all, or at least please don't complain if your answer gets a post notice and downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T19:52:59.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-12T20:05:29.027" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE has a broad scope, and it is often difficult to tell at a glance whether a given question fits within its scope or not. Questions may appear at first glance to not be about building a fictional world, but turn out to be; there are very few clear-cut cases. While I wouldn't hestitate to close outright by mod hammer a question that I can tell for &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; is not about worldbuilding, I would be much more inclined to either let the community work it out (as long as the community is able to work it out without getting into a close-reopen-close-reopen wrestling match), or bring it up to discussion for example in chat or on Meta. To that end, I might also use non-binding flags to bring posts to the attention of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was merely about my own opinion, I would be working toward a clearer distinction between questions about hypothetical worlds, and questions that, while answers may have worldbuilding applications, are actually about how things work in our real world. I have discussed this at length previously on Meta, for example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3877/29&quot;&gt;my answer to Is a “real world” question off topic?&lt;/a&gt;, and will not repeat that discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a moderator, &lt;strong&gt;it wouldn't be merely about my own opinion.&lt;/strong&gt; This is not to say that I wouldn't still very likely be making my point in comments, chat or on Meta (wherever happens to be appropriate), unilateral, diamond-powered action is not the way to effect change. A change of site scope depends on broad understanding of the change throughout the community. Such a discussion would need to be held through Meta and perhaps in chat, and the outcome may be different from what I would personally want. In such a situation, I would do my best to defer to the community consensus, preferring to take no action (and deferring to the community) over taking unilateral action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the hardest part about Worldbuilding SE. To me, the question here is really about whether it is possible to write answers that have a basis in more than mere opinion. If a question as asked cannot be answered with more than opinions, then it would be a candidate for putting on hold until it is clarified; if a question is gathering lots of answers, but those answers are approaching the question in terms of facts and logical reasoning rather than opinion, then it is probably fine. At the same time, a question that is gathering a lot of short answers may be worth protecting (a choice that can be overridden by the community) until it can be analyzed and discussed in more depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange's format, for all its virtues, can be confusing to newcomers who are more familiar with regular web forums. Worldbuilding adds on this by, by its very nature, being speculative. We are bending the Stack Exchange question and answers format into something useful for speculative questions, which inherently causes some amount of friction. Lots of users need guidance in figuring out how this works, and it is not at all uncommon that early attempts require some degree of cleanup. &lt;strong&gt;Having a diamond will allow me to keep keep doing what I have been doing in guiding new users and helping to make the site easier to use, without needing to rely on others for actions out of reach of ordinary users.&lt;/strong&gt; While most guiding should be done in public to maximize the benefit for everyone, not just those directly involved, there is invariably going to be some cleanup required afterwards, which having a diamond helps with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time we are seeing &quot;a large number of arguments/flags&quot;, I expect the user has already been instructed in comments by other users on the kind of behavior we want to see, and what comments are for. If there is a consistent pattern of flags, I would look at some comment threads the user has been involved in, and aim to start there, as well as by cleaning up any inappropriate comments and moving longer discussions to chat instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that does not stop the problematic behavior, the next step would be to contact the user through private messages and attempt to both determine the root cause for the behavior in comments, and to guide the user in what type of behavior we expect of users. Since this is a user who &quot;tends&quot; to get into this kind of situation, I would also deal with the situation in cooperation with the other moderators on the site, to ensure that all moderators respond to the situation in a similar way. (A similar situation has already happened, which was discussed among us pro tem moderators and eventually more or less resolved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the disruptive behavior continue despite attempts to talk it out with the user, timed suspension may become necessary. I would be hoping that the situation can be resolved long before it comes to that, however; timed suspension is the last, not the first or even among the first, option that a moderator should reach for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be brought up either with the specific moderator, with all the moderators on the site (both of those almost certainly in the private moderator chat room), or on Worldbuilding Meta, which is meant for discussion &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the site. Exactly which of these avenues is most appropriate depends on the specific circumstances. Taking the matter to Meta may be particularly appropriate should the action that the moderator was involved in not be something only a moderator took part in; for example, if a moderator cast a delete vote after the post had already been delete-voted by community members, but I disagree with deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are humans, too, and even with just five moderators there are bound to be disagreements on various issues. Those disagreements need to be ironed out in appropriate forums; we might not all always fully agree on what we each think is the best course of action, but we should be able to determine whether a given action is the one that most closely matches the community consensus on similar issues. Sometimes that does mean bringing the discussion right out in the open, and letting the community chime in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would wish for &lt;strong&gt;more people downvoting low-quality content.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Way back in the beta (I think before the site even entered the public beta phase, but haven't checked the dates to confirm this), I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4/29&quot;&gt;Should this be a high-voting site?&lt;/a&gt; which drew lots of attention for the time. Unfortunately, people are far more likely to vote up than down, which results in a situation where even &lt;em&gt;outright incorrect&lt;/em&gt; content barely receive a downvote. &lt;strong&gt;I would ask the genie to make people more likely to vote down low quality content while maintaining peoples' willingness to vote up high quality content, both questions and answers.&lt;/strong&gt; To the extent that this requires people to actually cross-check claims made, I would hope for such claims to be checked with at least the same rigor as on the less strict scientific sites in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the key traits of a moderator are &lt;strong&gt;patience, humility and a willingness to guide people&lt;/strong&gt; as opposed to imposing your will on others. I have spent a lot of time on the site guiding users in comments and occasionally in chat or on Meta, re-tagging questions with tags that aim to categorize the question better (this is especially common with relative newcomers to the site, who are unlikely to be familiar with what tags are available), and trying to improve tag wikis where I have seen a need for improvement. Some of this has been subsequently deleted, and in general this is something I would very much strive to continue to do while having the powers to handle more situations myself instead of relying only on flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a pro tempore moderator during the Worldbuilding SE beta phase. I have also held a diamond as a pro tempore moderator on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ham.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Amateur Radio&lt;/a&gt;, which I voluntarily relinquished in good standing. My oldest accounts on the network are from October 2010, and I have accounts with more than 1,000 reputation on a dozen different sites in the network, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that it matters, my profile shows that I have visited the site on 819 different UTC days, and that I have visited the site at least once every day for the past 344 consecutive UTC days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably not change my tone on Meta very much. It is possible, however, that I would preface more of my contributions with a statement to the effect of that while I hold a diamond, I am inviting other users to discuss the pros and cons of what I am suggesting, or make alternative suggestions. Being a moderator does not make you all-knowing, and to those who look to see who's writing before deciding whether what you wrote is good or bad, it is especially important to be humble in your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are naturally going to be ones where holding a diamond can effectively function as a &quot;discussion ender&quot;, but it is my hope and sincere aim that the number of questions where this happens should be very limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T09:38:35.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4454" CreationDate="2017-02-12T23:13:27.743" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who participated in closing, and actually started the process of closing at least two of your questions, I feel I should answer. Existing answer is comprehensive, and good, but you know, you accused me and &quot;my friends&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First thing first, I'm no personal friend of any one else that participated in closing your questions. Or, if I am, I have no idea and can't figure out any connection between nick names and people I know. And no one asked me to do so. Your assumption here is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second thing, about who did it. Users did it. In a way, we all are moderators with various levels of power. But no one that voted is a diamond, official moderator. I posted 148 answers and reached ~305k people. In the process of getting there, I was told many, many times when I was wrong. And when I was, I tried to improve, and other users rewarded me for this. That's how I got some privileges, including privilege to vote to close. But my vote would be totally meaningless if it was solitary. Four other experienced users needed to agree with me for it to matter. You believe your questions are OK. People who spent long hours asking and answering hundreds of questions think otherwise. That's it. It wasn't any coordinated effort to punish you. It is a collective effort to keep this site high quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are here to help you. To help anyone who needs help. That's why we answer a lot (other voters are also good answerers, possibly better than me, but who I am to judge?). Closing questions that doesn't meet standards has only one purpose: to keep noise down. To keep quality high. Ultimately, to keep people with passion, patience and knowledge here, answering. Because if such people will go away, no one will get good answers and site will fail. Voting is no fun. But we do it, in our own free time. Stop and think about it, please. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T23:13:27.743" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2017-02-13T05:41:05.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;JDługosz here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the current moderation style with regard to closing and reopening questions?&lt;/strong&gt; We, the current mods, generally have a laid-back style in a few areas. While we won't hesitate to move long, unproductive comments to chat or delete spam on sight, we'll often let the community delete posts on its own, and we almost never mod-hammer a post closed or open. Do you agree with this method of dealing with closing and reopening questions, and if not, how do you think it can be improved? How would you, as a mod, work to change it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only “improvement” would be to better facilitate hand-holding and guiding new users to come up with a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve also wished that duplicates were closed &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; gathering a bunch of new answers, especially when those answers duplicate what’s been said elsewhere, or worse, should have added to the original topic and are now kind of in limbo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you feel about the scope of World Building SE?&lt;/strong&gt; What if anything would you want to change about the site's scope? How would you go about ensuring community involvement in the conversation and decision of scope change?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be good to have a community for discussing the specific story development and plotting ideas, which is not on topic here nor on Writers.  But that would not fit as an extension to the scope here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For how to deal with the ever evolving scope and intentional shifts, look at how it’s being done now:  Idea generation used to be a close reason.  The correct venue for community involvement would be Meta.  Ideas should be discussed with reference to specific questions that would be subject to the rule change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think more often we have specific questions/answers we like or dislike but have trouble formulating a clear-cut rule that encapsulates that.  So &lt;strong&gt;examples&lt;/strong&gt; are definitely key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  — it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think POB is a tricky beast, as it applies here.  After all, look at a normal question that inspires any number of &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; creative approaches in the answers.  There is no single best material for a submarine that operates in liquid helium, unless it was a hard-science question and the detailed engineering tradeoffs were elaborated.  This came up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/how-is-this-pob&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; a short time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid POB while still soliciting &lt;em&gt;varied&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt; answers, first of all avoid absolutes in the wording of the question.  “What is the best material…” is un-answerable, while “What material could be used…” is open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real issue, I think, is broadness.  If answers are all over the place and don’t address the same question (as interpreted by the answerer), then even if there are answers appearing it is “too broad”.  If the different answers nibble away at different aspects, it is clearly too broad.  If the different answers don’t seem to interpret the question in the same way at all, it really should be “unclear what is being asked”.  Point is, the badness overlaps all of these and the real reason for badness is the lack of coherence in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to avoid confusion, we could be more consistent with using the right close reason, and perhaps improve the wording on POB.  Or treat POB-ness as something to be fixed with an edit, not closing.  As explained above, get rid of the absolute qualifiers like “best”, and if the resulting question is &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sufficiently narrow&lt;/em&gt;, then there is nothing wrong with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do you want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly to what Grace Note said, there are motives behind every action. It's important to distinguish if someone is in it for the title or if they have genuine intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the next logical step, as participant with a lot of involvement already.  My intention is to keep it great and feel a part of making it so.  I don’t have a big platform or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep the good content&lt;/strong&gt;, delete the “rude or offensive” or “not constructive” comments.  By arguments from comments, do you mean he raises points that indeed need to be answered in the post to make it better?  Note that there are separate delete reasons noted above: a comment can be deleted as being rude/offensive, even if it is useful.  Hopefully it will be “obsolete” (if the real point is addressed with an edit) and then it will be gone with no reason to keep looking at the rudeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve never seen this as being a problem here, and the question is a little vague on the exact situation.  But interpreting it as above as the worst case of rude/offensive but still useful, off the top of my head I note that diamond mods can edit comments.  So, I could bleep out the racial slurs or whatever it was while keeping the real point.  If this was going on, regardless of whether said user was providing good answers too, I think it would have been under discussion by the community and not simply my decision out of the blue.  After all, the question was “tends to generate…” which means it’s an ongoing thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there’s a real answer for you, albeit a bit more meta than was asked:  I would not simply make snap decisions and take unilateral action on an issue that was an ongoing thing known to the entire community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I already mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/how-is-this-pob&quot;&gt;this Meta post&lt;/a&gt; which was, on the face of it, a question that was closed and I thought should not have been.  It was reopened and got silver badges for both votes and views.  Although this was not really a meta post for &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; this question, but a clarification/discussion as mentioned earlier in this narrative.  But in general, bringing it up in Meta is a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second example, some time ago, a very high voted post of TrEs-2b (as he is known now) was closed, but had been edited and seemed to be just fine now.  I brought it up in chat, and he said that it never got enough reopen votes.  I lobbied for it in chat and nominated for reopening again, and that was enough to get enough people to take note that it needs voting on.  I suppose this is an example were I could have “correctly” just re-opened on my authority, if I had that power at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first example, I would avoid doing so for my own question as a conflict of interest or personal biased understanding of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I’d like to point out that I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/156?userid=885&quot;&gt;can already reopen some questions&lt;/a&gt; single-handedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t get in edit wars on Wikipedia, either.  After one round of disagreement, the issue needs to be discussed with both sides explaining reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better integration of the Sandbox as a real feature.  This would include having it appear as a review queue, so people would &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3800/call-to-sandbox-duty&quot;&gt;do so&lt;/a&gt;, as well as making it easy to move newcomer’s posts to this area rather than just closing them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Well, really I want the status bar to show when my points is a prime number.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you think the key traits of a moderator are, and how have you demonstrated them thus far in your activity on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are your qualifications?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. Do you have previous moderating experience on SE or from somewhere else? What qualities make you suited for this position? Is there proof of your convictions on this site; can you show us examples of circumstances in which you helped, or could have helped?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that’s what the badge count noted in the box score is for.  I’ve mentioned a few things as part of this narrative already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I’ve not been a moderator on any SE before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a diamond change the way you discuss on Meta?&lt;/strong&gt; A lot on discussions on Meta require the finding of a &quot;sweet spot&quot; between extremes (mostly, the definition of some closing reasons). In those discussion, the voice of a moderator tends to have a higher influence than others. This is mostly a good thing: a moderator spends time thinking about it, has a lot of meta-experience and has been elected &quot;because they're good at it&quot;. As a casual user though, I also find it intimidating as it always feels like the discussion is closed after one of our moderator has answered. How do you feel about it? Where would you position yourself between &quot;discussion ender&quot; and &quot;casual dude&quot;? How is it going to change your tone? (if it does at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would follow these discussions and make it a point to weigh in.  As indicated earlier, I think the best points are made through examples of actual Q/A posts and how those would be affected; it appears to be difficult and even problematic to formulate hard rules using simple descriptive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the point has been raised, I’ll be careful not to be a discussion ender.  I can see that experienced mods are familiar with the rules and the many precedents, so their notes on the subject can be much better informed than, say, some newcomer.  But he’s not making the rules.  Those are decided by community consensus and the current “enforcer” is following the democratic law, not acting as a dictator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m generally good, as a skeptic etc., of qualifying my statements as to what is personal feeling or authoritative result.  I’ll be sure to do the same here with policy discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T05:41:05.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T09:56:23.670" Score="22" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by rage quitting user after they posted this meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/how-can-i-prevent-a-raging-moderator-from-blocking-my-questions&quot;&gt;How can i prevent a raging moderator from blocking my questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every closed question &lt;em&gt;hurts.&lt;/em&gt; It hurts you double when you are new user to the site and it happens that your first questions are closed by rest of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to me, that most of users do not understand StackExchange closing question mechanics and that it is not the end of such question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can be there be done more in order to assure new users, that closing a question is not definite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T16:52:15.663" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T02:32:02.857" Title="Can there be done more to assure users that closing questions is not a Bad Thing?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:12:27.837" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) By using descriptive comments when issuing a VTC vote.  Explaining the reasons tells the OP far more than simply seeing the &quot;close (2)&quot; number jumping up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) By editing the question - if a few simple changes can be made so that the question is more appropriate, then edit the question and then explain the edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that stabbing at the VTC button and reasoning that &quot;it's obvious why&quot; is the easiest thing in the world to do, but those reasons aren't obvious to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that there's automated messages, but I'm not sure that people read them enough (or they're too ambiguous to have real meaning).  Closing things as &quot;story related&quot; or &quot;off topic&quot; can often be confusing when there's similar questions left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'd say put some work into educating the users appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T10:12:27.837" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:50:42.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An alien race has built a machine which can form planets from asteroids:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would it likely look like and how would it work?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would it be made from to be able to maintain its shape in the gravity?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would it be transported?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23503" LastEditorUserId="17720" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T17:55:23.770" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T17:55:23.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4353" CreationDate="2017-02-13T15:05:23.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Transportation&lt;/code&gt; covers methods, such questions as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34887/how-would-society-be-affected-by-ultra-highspeed-travel&quot;&gt;How would society be affected by ultra-highspeed travel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32078/maximum-price-gaps-of-commodity-between-two-cities&quot;&gt;Maximum price gaps of commodity between two cities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17626/why-would-canals-exist-long-before-railways&quot;&gt;Why would canals exist long before railways?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where as &lt;code&gt;Vehicles&lt;/code&gt; tends to focus on the actual objects doing the transporting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60905/solar-powered-vehicles&quot;&gt;Solar Powered Vehicles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53957/microfilaments-on-wheels-would-save-fuel&quot;&gt;Microfilaments on wheels would save fuel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32321/clockwork-vehicles&quot;&gt;Clockwork vehicles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there is a lot of cross over - mostly with &lt;code&gt;Transportation&lt;/code&gt; being used to ask questions about specific builds of vehicle rather than a general transportation question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say keep the tags separate - if you are searching specifically for ideas about vehicles it sorts some of these out for you. However there is a difference between how the tags would be used ideally and how they are used in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:05:23.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-13T16:59:16.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What are good/efficient ways to introduce variety into a world?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people create worlds to accommodate a certain story or things they find very cool - like that huge airship that is totally infeasible on &lt;em&gt;earth&lt;/em&gt; but works perfectly fine on &lt;em&gt;htrae&lt;/em&gt;, because there's this phlebotinum lifting gas there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue there is, that while we/they often have a pretty clear view of what they are aiming to have in their world, there will be a lot of things that would likely have developed differently or not exist at all (and the opposite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question/discussion/subject would be about this issue and what ways there are to interpolate/extrapolate technologies and/or populate the creation with stuff that fits &amp;amp; makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T16:59:16.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-13T21:39:22.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What invention do you hope for in the next 50 years?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What one invention do you hope will be made in the next 50 years and why?&#xA;The invention must be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realistic and able to be created within 50 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a reasonable rationale behind why you want it.&#xA;Other than that you can have whatever invention you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T21:39:22.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4456" CreationDate="2017-02-14T15:31:00.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok it took me a few days but I think I have an answer for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets call these, &lt;em&gt;scenario questions&lt;/em&gt;, these questions are basically asking for plot points, or plot drivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally am hesitant to consider them on topic at all...but its something the community appreciates and lets be honest it can be quite entertaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do we get these questions to at least try and fit into the SE framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They need to be properly constrained. You must have criteria on which to judge and compare answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poster should be required to provide a direction.  &lt;strong&gt;As an example in the Lonely Astronaut question:&lt;/strong&gt; The question is basically asking for a plot to be written.  Which as mentioned above makes me personally a bit twitchy...if the author had provided a thematic direction that answers should follow that would help make them comparable to one another.  So the theme could be:  I want x scenario and I want it to come about by some geological event, what could work, give x constraints (situation specific info).  In this situation at least all the answers would be geological in nature and could be compared.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So the short version is:  These questions are borderline, and probably on the wrong side of the border.  That said I think we can work with them as long as we ensure people posting the questions provide adequate information.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thought is this would require:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A specific quesiton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Details relevant to the situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A theme, a direction they want answers to go.  &lt;strong&gt;If the answers can attack the question from wildly different angles (politics, economics, geology, technology)&lt;/strong&gt; and still answer the question, then it is a bad question and probably, too broad, unclear and opinion based all at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to close quickly when things don't meet the standard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:31:00.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4456" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:54:00.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with what you're talking about is that not everyone is looking to build a world, so much as need elements from world building to get what they want. This can be vague with world building, but with other subjects this becomes fairly common...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could care less about just about everything in grammar, but I've spent multiple months learning about grammar to construct a language. I don't really care for many thing about computers, but because I play games, program, etc. I have learned more than I actually want to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those types of questions are in line with this type of thinking, or in line with wanting to know how to figure out something that answer that particular question might answer. They appear to you as &quot;build my world for me&quot; because you are thinking in a particular mode of thinking where you think they want you to build their entire world, but the reality is, more than likely, that they either don't care about that part of the world just need something to justify it their own head or to know if anything in their world is going to be too unbelievable... Or they want to see the process to get a particular answer because they can't figure it out from what they can find. Have you ever looked into really trying to figure things out from the ground up for a lot questions? There are simply large gaps in knowledge, either because no one knows something or just no one ever thought to write it down or what is written down or is common knowledge is wrong and misleading or there is contradictory information that seem to have equal weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those scenarios are more likely than not not, &quot;please do my work for me,&quot; but rather I'd bet most of those questions are actually pleas of &quot;help me, I can't figure this out. It seems like it should be simple, but it's not so  Ican't figure it out&quot; or &quot;I don't really care about this aspect, but I need enough info about this to cover something and doing all the research would take way too much time&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Kingdom with helpful bands of mercenaries; avoiding devolving into bandits&quot; question is actually more complex than you make it out to be and if all the answers given can be boiled down to &quot;give them jobs&quot; they're all wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Lonely astronaut&quot; is the latter situation and can be answered simply, but they don't know and/or don't know where to begin asking which makes them think it is more complex when it's not... And that is &quot;abandoning space hardware isn't all that uncommon, less so now, but especially in the future.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can build a whole world to set up why that is, but it is not needed, so it's not the question that is the problem, it is you thinking that the question needs a super in depth answer... which it doesn't. Or is super simple... when it really isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T09:54:00.470" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-16T16:43:57.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still think the answer is to have all questions start out as &quot;On Hold&quot; until they're whitelisted as &quot;ready for answers&quot;. New users wouldn't feel singled out then. I'd even be ok with a 1 hour hold unless allowed to go early by a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am well aware that this conflicts with a lot of the Stack Exchange ethos, but I think that Worldbuilding has enough variance with the rest of SE that this is the right solution. WB accepts questions that wouldn't begin to fly elsewhere -- hypotheticals, no exact right answer, brainstorming requests, etc. This makes &quot;what constitutes a good question&quot; much harder to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The delay on a lot of SE sites would be unacceptable, but I'm doubtful that a 1 hour delay in knowing how to build a Dyson sphere is a pressing issue for any of us, even when writing on deadline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Call it something other than &quot;on hold&quot; perhaps -- &quot;awaiting moderation&quot; works for a lot of comment sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T16:43:57.943" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4495" CreationDate="2017-02-17T07:18:12.393" Score="7" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding these answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71500/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71500/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71497/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71497/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71498/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71498/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71492/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71492/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71491/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71491/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...and maybe more)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71503/29870&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71503/29870&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we currently being spammed to be annoyed or what's behind these answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: All of these have been deleted; available to 10k+ rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29870" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T15:46:22.160" Title="Is worldbuilding.SE currently being trolled?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2017-02-17T07:51:32.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly looks as though it's all the work of one hand.  Thanks for the warning, I'll flag more as I see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He'll get bored at some point and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T07:51:32.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2017-02-17T11:48:33.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It certainly seems to be trolling. But the persistance and quality of answers rather borders to art - so the question is: should we archive these attempts and showcase them before deleting everything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T11:48:33.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2017-02-17T13:08:52.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thought - if this is truly the doing from one single person, then that person have recently created and logged in to a lot of accounts from the same/narrow band of IP addresses. Ought there not be a WB function that would trigger any &quot;weird behaviour&quot; alarms? I guess that might not be implemented if this has not been a major problem before, but it should be fairly easy to give a few hours ban to IP addresses which logs in suspiciously many users in a short time frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there might be legitimate reasons to do so too - I personally do the very opposite as I log in from several different IP addresses at short notice when I use both my phone and computer, so I guess I might trigger suspicious behavior in that case too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T13:08:52.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2017-02-17T13:16:15.573" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this was a case of large-scale trolling, all apparently by the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just nuked the accounts from orbit, so to speak. They originated from the same IP address, as far as I can tell, and they only stopped when that IP address was blocked automatically by the system, which happened about five hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to keep in mind if you see this in the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; edit any of the posts to change content. This may only confuse future flaggers. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35502229#35502229&quot;&gt;a bot that checks for spam and offensive posts&lt;/a&gt;, and it may not see some of these posts if keywords are edited out. Flag, vote to delete, downvote, and move on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't hesitate to use the rude/abusive flag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234035/274942&quot;&gt;Nonsense is one of the cases it should be used for.&lt;/a&gt; Six such flags will delete the post; this happened in the case of the question you linked. Also, don't hesitate to use the custom mod flag to let us know that there might be a problem, but preferably use rude/abusive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This was a relatively unsophisticated attempt. The accounts only stemmed from one IP, and once that was blocked, the person gave up (it seems). In the future, it could be worse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for letting us know, and thanks to everyone for flagging. At the time, no mods were around, so community flagging and deleting was absolutely needed, and people did the right thing (though again, more rude/abusive flags are always great). This is now under control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was actually a previous, smaller round of trolling two hours before this last one. I've dealt with that, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T15:17:16.300" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T20:01:32.157" Score="7" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ethics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ethics&lt;/a&gt; on the main site, described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that deal with whether something is right or wrong regarding certain norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we have no tag for the &lt;strong&gt;morals&lt;/strong&gt; of a group or species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the concepts are tightly intertwined, &lt;strong&gt;I humbly propose that we create a tag synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/morals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;morals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;morals&lt;/a&gt; pointing at the main tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ethics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ethics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For or against?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T11:58:54.243" Title="Tag synonym proposal: morals -&gt; ethics" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T21:30:41.893" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of the expansion of the Great Lakes Earth mythology, I have been muddling over the possibility of megacities based on real-life proposals that, for the moment, exist only on paper.  They are of only three dimensions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pyramidal cities 2004 meters tall and covering a floor area of eight square miles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cubical cities two miles tall and covering an area of 140 square miles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cylindrical cities four miles tall and six miles wide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T01:03:48.047" Title="Megacity Shapes Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4497" CreationDate="2017-02-17T21:34:40.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is what I've got so far (I've just started the series earlier this week), but more will come:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71341/megacity-shapes-episode-1-population-capacity/71538#71538&quot;&gt;Episode 1:  Population Capacity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many people can live and work inside each shape?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71533/megacity-shapes-episode-2-anatomy?noredirect=1#comment207411_71533&quot;&gt;Episode 2:  Anatomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the interiors of the megacities look like?  How would their skeletons be arranged to reduce weight, gain stability (lower the chances of internal collapse) and encourage habitability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71592/megacity-shapes-episode-3-plumbing&quot;&gt;Episode 3:  Plumbing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What lengths must these megacities take to make sure they don't get clogged up in urine or poo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T00:37:18.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T21:48:21.037" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71264/writing-system-of-blind-sea-dwelling-sentients&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I was looking for somewhat specific and technical answers (especially relating to what exact materials would be used to write with and where they would be gotten from). While very interesting, the answers I did receive only provided general ideas and insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I haven't recieved an answer that fully met my needs yet I'm considering putting a bounty on it after editing the question to make it clear of what exactly I am expecting from an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So should I do the above, or would it be changing the scope of the question meaning I should better start an entirely new question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31610" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T21:57:42.417" Title="Should I edit this question to add more clarity or would it be changing the scope?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T21:51:50.413" Score="27" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I joined this site, I felt I missed a lot by not joining before. I really enjoy the questions as well as the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to be misunderstood, I am a scientist myself. I always trust in concrete proofs and facts. However, this site is called &lt;strong&gt;world building&lt;/strong&gt;. Which - in my understanding - means you primarily use your imagination. You imagine a world  -- or a scenario, and then ask a questions about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've seen is people who are trying to either convince everyone how absurd/stupid the question is or finding a loophole in the world. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think this is right way to encourage people (especially newcomers like me) to post in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70940/in-the-year-2999-there-are-pills-instead-of-food-what-do-commercials-look-like#comment205826_70940&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; comment to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70940/in-the-year-2999-there-are-pills-instead-of-food-what-do-commercials-look-like&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is very productive and extending the quality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that by 2999, the audio/visual style advertising as we&#xA;  know it will be gone and instead ads just be a constant series of&#xA;  battles between the various advertisers' mind-control devices and our&#xA;  anti-mind-control devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see many comments in various post that basically say &quot;you're so dumb, let me point out where you are mistaken.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;if needed, I can refer to sources but I do not want to make this a personal discussion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is people are free to ask about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and&#xA;  magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and&#xA;  environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but they are frequently found not realistic/easily refutable, despite one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;far-future&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions of Earth\humans that extrapolate beyond available data:&#xA;  hundreds of years at least, thousands commonly, millions preferably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which clearly indicates you are free as a bird to imagine a world, of whose possibility of reality cannot be discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using SO for a long time, and I just wanted to sincerely remind:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is always a downvote option if you did not like the question.&#xA;  Comments are perfect for asking clarifications. Answering &lt;strong&gt;the asked&#xA;  question&lt;/strong&gt; is a perfect way to go. But commenting or answering &quot;this&#xA;  question makes no sense since &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; are never possible&quot; is&#xA;  not OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28458/anatomically-correct-phoenix&quot;&gt;anatomically correct phoenix&lt;/a&gt;, commenting or answering &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a living creature is burnt, there is no way to undo because when&#xA;  oxygen and carbon reacts, then the gas revealed is mixed into air.&#xA;  Therefore, this question makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is neither improving the post nor serving the purpose of this very site. I would recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling.SE&lt;/a&gt; for those who seek posts those are concretely fact-based and without loopholes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: Do you think I am being too sensitive&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T16:15:25.083" Title="There are too many world UNbuilding answers and comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-02-17T22:29:49.440" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I've actually seen far too many instances of what you mention.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view this is how the Q&amp;amp;A should work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asserts either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;strong&gt;premise&lt;/strong&gt;, that is to say the&#xA;initial state of an aspect of their world, and asks how that premise would affect the development of something within that world...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My world has 19 suns, how would that affect the religion of the humans of that world?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...or a &lt;strong&gt;desired outcome&lt;/strong&gt; and asks how to achieve it (though I suppose this could also be considered a premise from an atemporal point of view).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What socio-economic pressures would cause war between my world's elves and fairies?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers should simply build upon these premises or desired outcomes, but &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; refute them outright or poke holes in them. Much as how &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;axioms&lt;/a&gt; work in mathematics. By build upon, I mean find ways to alter the premise to make it concordant with reality. In the anatomically correct Phoenix answer, the accepted question does this brilliantly: the phoenixes don't actually get reborn, they simply lay an egg before lighting themselves on fire, which &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; as if they get reborn from their ashes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;There is actually a 3rd type of question that I for some reason totally forgot about; ones that ask whether something is plausible or not, in these cases, yes it is fine for an answer to refute it as not so (if they provide adequate reasoning, of course).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on the other hand problems arise when the question demands too much or have too many restrictions. I'm sure you all know what I mean, questions similar to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Only using hard-science how can I propel rockets in my world 6,193,091 billion-million times faster then light only using a thumbtack and three shoelaces?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(yes I am exaggerating but sadly not that much actually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases any answer given will never be able to fulfill the full extent of the initial query. This further becomes problematic when those answers get berated by comments displaying their shortcomings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the real question is: &lt;strong&gt;how fantastical can a question reasonably be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when people don't agree on the answer of the above, that is when you get the complications you talk about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31610" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T11:35:45.533" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-02-18T00:41:33.230" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the issues with Worldbuilding Stack Exchange - and worldbuilding in general, really - is that everyone has different criteria for what &quot;realistic&quot; means, or what is possible or what isn't. That's the great thing about imagination: You can do anything, if you change the boundaries of what is or isn't possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, people often don't know if something in their world will work. I often don't, so I ask questions here. We even have a tag for people wanting to know if a premise is realistic or possible, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. In those cases, it's absolutely fine for answers to say &quot;This will not work&quot; if the question is asking for an evaluation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28458/627&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Phoenix&lt;/a&gt;, the question you linked, uses the tag, but it uses the tag only because it asks, as a side note, if there's anything that definitively indicates that the entire setup is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's a difference between saying &quot;No, this won't work&quot; and saying &quot;No, this won't work, and it's because [X, Y, and Z].&quot; The second kind of answers are the sort we want; the first type are generally useless and should be downvoted. Even if the answer says that something isn't possible but only gives a couple sentences explaining why, it may be unhelpful. Answers contradicting the premise should be detailed, because often the reason the author missed the impossibility is that it isn't immediately obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the community consensus is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1837/627&quot;&gt;it is almost always okay&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4225/627&quot;&gt;to refute the premise&lt;/a&gt; within the laws of plausibility of the world&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, unless the author specifically indicates that they are handwaving away some impossibility, with, for instance, magic. I do agree with this; if I want it to rain in my world all day, every day, but there's something that makes this completely impossible, I really, really want to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, there is a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; range of levels of plausibility between questions. Some are willing to handwave away pretty much anything; others want detailed, scientifically rigorous answers (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;). If a question uses laws that does not make sense within the context of the world, it is always okay to challenge it in an answer. You just have to be sure that you understand what exactly the limitations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and if &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; says &quot;This is dumb&quot;, flag away. Insults like that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; okay, no matter how inconsistent the premise is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Our default assumptions are generally that worlds retain our universe's laws of science, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/627&quot;&gt;answers should try to use logic and science&lt;/a&gt;, where possible. Obviously, the author needs to tell us if there is something about the world that's different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T17:18:28.453" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-02-18T07:06:08.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other Stack Exchanges don't generally allow hypotheticals the way WB SE does. That has to impact our standard for how to ask questions. Easy example: When so many of the questions are looking for loopholes, responding with an obvious loophole (i.e. &quot;your world is impossible&quot;) strikes me as a valid response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But commenting or answering &quot;this question makes no sense since this&#xA;  and this are never possible&quot; is not OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the scope of WorldBuilding, I see no way to apply this standard when so many of the questions are about hypotheticals: &quot;Assume A and B, now C happens, what's the result?&quot; To reply &quot;A and B cannot happen together &lt;strong&gt;so we cannot derive the result you request&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; seems like a perfectly valid response UNLESS the OP specifies HOW they are allowing A and B to happen... but they frequently do not. Without the rules of magic/handwavium, we cannot extrapolate the effect of that magic/handwavium on this world, nor can we theorize what another world where magic/handwavium exists would look like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your phoenix example is a perfect situation to examine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge is to make an anatomically correct phoenix. If someone raises an objection that says, &quot;This cannot be done and you cannot even begin to get close, full stop.&quot; that is a legit answer. To use an example from my own field, &quot;How can I optimize for both performance and memory use at the same time?&quot; an answer would be, &quot;You cannot without some sort of handwavium.&quot; If the question provided no handwavium, then, in my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;this is answering the question, not invalidating it.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's a really important point, so I'll say it again:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;In the context of WorldBuilding, answering that &quot;X is impossible without more handwavium&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an answer, not a rejection of the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that sets WB apart from other SE sites. In my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T07:06:08.677" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4507" CreationDate="2017-02-18T20:58:39.947" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I'm fairly new to WorldBuilding SE and I'm having a ball taking a broad swath of questions and seeing if I can generate a logical answer consistent with the world.  I do this because the mental exercise helps in my real-world job and also in my efforts to tell good stories in RPGs.  I have noticed that some questions that have come up get put on hold very quickly, yet they seem, at least to me, to be focused, not totally opinion based, and with clear criteria.  Of course the all powerful Murphy determines that I will be 2 sentences away from completing what I think is a solid answer to said question, when the system will no longer accept it.  I have been reading some questions on the Meta trying to find out why, and I have not been able to figure out what the criteria for &quot;too broad&quot; and &quot;Opinion based&quot; really are.  So far the answers I have come across read somewhat like the old story asking about porn, &quot;I'll know it when I see it&quot;.  This stood out with the second question about Megastructures:&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71533/megacity-shapes-episode-2-anatomy?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71533/megacity-shapes-episode-2-anatomy?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This didn't seem to be a very broad question.  I can see how it might be broken out into two questions but I can also see how one answer could usefully be used to cover both questions if asked separately.  Conversely, the Question about Flying Mounts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69163/how-to-make-a-viable-flying-mount&quot;&gt;How to make a viable flying mount?&lt;/a&gt; is left open and had a lively discussion going on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to cast shade on the moderators for this, you have a REALLY tough job, but I really would like to know if there is some objective criteria being applied.  The best on this I have seen was the &quot;Condition A, Change B, Result X&quot; type of logic, but this seems too narrow given the scope of what people (at least, me) come here for.  People are telling stories, and need to make sure that the world isn't too ridiculous, so they ask questions.  If the question gets put on hold 2 hours after the person posts, useful discussion gets killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T17:49:15.103" Title="On Hold is turning up quite quickly" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4499" CreationDate="2017-02-18T21:57:42.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that you can edit away as long as you don't invalidate any of the given answers or change the base of it too much (it's useless to write an answer to the question &quot;I wanna know A&quot;, then later come back and see &quot;Edit, skip A, I'd rather know B&quot;). If you want to add &quot;please focus more on tools and materials&quot;, then I'd argue that it is okay since the question already states &quot;what would they use to write, write on?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't tested to put up any bounties yet, but it appears as if you can write a custom text to why you offer the bounty. If you want to bring more attention to the materials, then you might not need to edit your question that much, just give the bounty the explanation &quot;not enough attention to materials&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T21:57:42.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:08:14.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the closed questions are not closed by mods (those with a diamond after their name), but by the community. Someome of the regular community have flagged it for closing as they thought it did not fit and then the normal users with rep over 3k can vote if it should be closed or not. This is a good system in the sense that it is the community that self moderates, it is bad in the sense that there is a risk for opinion based voting (i.e. a question that does not follow the scope, but which is interesting might get to stay open and vice versa). While most users tries their best to be impartial and consistent, there will always be shades of grey and differences in opinions on how well a question follow the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason why questions are (and should be) closed rapidly if they are too broad or off topic is so that the question asker can modify it in peace to better fit. That way it won't get too many answers which later turns out to be wrong simply because they were answered before the question was rewritten. Once a question is modified, it can be voted to be opened again and a [closed] status is intended to only be temporary. However, many (and especially new) users seems to think that a closed question is dead. There is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/can-there-be-done-more-to-assure-users-that-closing-questions-is-not-a-bad-thing&quot;&gt;ongoing discussion&lt;/a&gt; here on meta regarding how to make users better understand why their question got closed and how they should deal with it. If you feel you have suggestions to the subject, then please post them there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T22:22:43.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:11:01.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't really address the reasons the questions you mentioned have been put on hold, but to give a few general points and hints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;The people putting questions on hold are people like you and me&lt;/strong&gt;, anyone with enough rep can cast a so called VTC (Vote-To-Close) on a question with an appropriately chosen reason. If enough VTCs have been cast then the question will be &lt;strong&gt;put on hold so any issues&lt;/strong&gt; of the question &lt;strong&gt;can be resolved&lt;/strong&gt; and the question &lt;strong&gt;can be reopened again&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the general workflow of the Stackexchange system and basically the same on every site of the network, some sites use it more actively (like we), some use it less actively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that many users do not, or &lt;em&gt;want not&lt;/em&gt;, understand this. Reasons vary from the users innocently not realising the difference from this format to a general forum, over others simply not caring about getting acquainted with the rules, to some openly admitting that they don't give a very rude offense about it - some will understand when you explain it to them, others will complain even louder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;The format is aimed at creating specific questions with clear and objective answers&lt;/strong&gt;. While this can be easier for some formats (e.g. Stackoverflow), it can be notably harder for other sites (e.g. on &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless the Stackexchange network is about creating, collecting and organizing all sorts of knowledge and data - thus any question that does not fulfill these criteria can, will (and imho should), be put on hold as fast as possible in order to help the OP refine it before it collects many answers that do not address the actual issue they were trying to ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T22:11:01.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-19T09:33:34.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know questions tagged &quot;hard-science&quot; get a special notice that only certain people can manually put there and remove. Is it possible to add a feature to automatically add such a notice to any new question? Mithrandir24601 and dot_Sp0T told me in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35529944#35529944&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; that currently there is no way to automatically add such a notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about adding a notice along the lines of „This question is new and hasn’t been reviewed by the community until now. If you want to answer this question please make sure that it fits the sites guidelines. If this question does not fit the sites guidelines it will be put on hold for some time to allow the author to edit the question before reopening it for answers.“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would automatically show the intention of „putting questions on hold“ for new users and it could also prevent some of the cases where new useres were answering very fast even if the question was not a good fit for the site at first. At the same time it would not be as invasive as generally putting the question on hold at first, though I like this idea of SRM. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T09:51:06.287" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T09:51:06.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T12:24:42.183" Score="8" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a number of questions such as this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/can-there-be-done-more-to-assure-users-that-closing-questions-is-not-a-bad-thing&quot;&gt;Can there be done more to assure users that closing questions is not a Bad Thing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any data available that indicating what the tangible impact has been. Do the site's statistics show the affect on new users of having their questions closed during their initial contact with the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One measure I can think is users with only one or a few questions that were closed and their reputation points have stayed or their participation in the site has effectively ceased. There must be better ways of finding suitable measures, but this is what I have come with off the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would help discussions about problems of closure on especially new users if some figures were available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T17:50:59.867" Title="is there data about the numbers of new users who have quit Wordlbuilding SE after question closure?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|statistics|new-users|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2017-02-19T18:29:38.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. Technically, there's a difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say &quot;ethics&quot; refers to the ideals imposed by society, while&#xA;&quot;morals&quot; refers to individual viewpoints,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the overlap is so great that there is no reason to keep them separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T18:29:38.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2017-02-20T18:02:21.980" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are synonyms. The difference is only that the branch of philosophy that covers the topic is called ethics, specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People make a mistake, because ethics inspires such stupidity, that because the field is specifically called ethics that ethics and morals are not the same. It's like saying that a feline and a cat are not the same thing, because Feline is the name that science uses for that type of animal. Or that my cat is not a cat because it's name is Puffball and because Puffball is its specific name that it suddenly isn't a cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way the distinction that it is the specific name of the philosophic branch would matter is if you want answers that have to do with the subject that have answers that are supported by generally accepted ethicists/philosopher and you can present a link or referenced quote... Of course anyone asking for such a thing would likely be just doing it for homework and anyone not doing it just for homework would be displaying a massive flaw in their understanding of philosophy and what makes something a valid source of information/thought, much the same as science really. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T18:02:21.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-02-20T18:14:38.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think I am being too sensitive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While people tend to be a little heavy handed when refuting a premise, refuting the premise often leads to a much better premise.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions amount to &quot;my world works this way, due to  suspension of disbelief (handwavium), how do I explain it or what are the results of it?&quot;  A response that amounts to &quot;you're using an awful lot of handwavium&quot; should be expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I'm retreading already covered ground, I guess I'm trying to point out why people do it... If the premise is thin to begin with you're asking for a greater suspension of disbelief. This isn't always a bad thing, but sometimes something that is being handwaved can be reworked slightly and make for a more believable world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an area where science fiction worlds and fantasy worlds tend to clash, or perhaps better put, where science fiction creators clash with fantasy creators... While there is obviously overlap in audience, the style of the creation and the expected &quot;reality&quot; is often different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less, I'd like to continue to see both types of response. Some that take the premise and run with it and others that challenge the premise and offer creative solutions. Hopefully both add something worthwhile to the world in question, but more importantly having both types of response will help future world builders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T18:14:38.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2017-02-21T11:58:54.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Against and For It&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helps if people do their research first. Actually Worldbuilding SE does have a tag for &quot;morals&quot; it's just that it's mislabelled as &quot;ethics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ethic&lt;/strong&gt; (adjective &amp;amp; noun) relating to morals, treating of moral questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ethics&lt;/strong&gt; (noun plural; rarely singular) Science of morals, treatise on this, moral principles, rules of conduct, whole field of moral science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moral&lt;/strong&gt; (adjective &amp;amp; noun) Concerned with character or disposition, or with the distinction between right &amp;amp; wrong; &lt;em&gt;moral sense&lt;/em&gt; power of distinguishing right &amp;amp; wrong; dealing with regulation of conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Concise Oxford Dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other uses of the word &quot;moral&quot; but while they are related to morality the distance goes between them and morality. There is some overlap with &quot;ethics&quot;, as in &lt;em&gt;moral science&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;moral philosophy&lt;/em&gt; but overall they are separate but related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a synonym of &quot;morals&quot; it is &quot;ethic&quot; rather than &quot;ethics&quot;. The relationship between &quot;morals&quot; and &quot;ethics&quot; is that of what is called by classification professionals a &quot;related term&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;ethics&quot; tags has a description that better fits &quot;morals&quot; than &quot;ethics&quot;. Therefore, the &quot;ethics&quot; tag should be changed to that of &quot;morals&quot;. Now people can ponder whether WB SE needs an ethics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral of this answer is do the research first and do not rely on common understanding of words and their usage. This tends to lead to common &lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;understandings and &lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;leading tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T11:58:54.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T16:25:32.003" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we vote to close a question, one of the options is to move the question to another Stack Exchange. But the only one listed is Meta.Worldbuilding. The two I most frequently wish were there are Physics SE and Biology SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like us to add both of those as options for question migration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:41:25.973" Title="&quot;Close &gt;&gt; migrate to another SE&quot; : please add Physics SE and Biology SE as options" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2017-02-21T16:43:01.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;the &quot;newest&quot; page&lt;/a&gt; right now, there are 17 &quot;on hold&quot; questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/?tab=hot&quot;&gt;the &quot;hot&quot; page of StackOverflow SE&lt;/a&gt;, there are 11 &quot;on hold&quot; questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the WB page, I disagree with only 3 of those holds, but all three of those are ones where I understand why the hold was applied -- they're within the gray zone. I don't see any questions that are on hold gratuitously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As WorldBuilding SE gets larger, we will have more casual users... this happens on all the StackExchanges. We should &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; the rate of &quot;on hold&quot; to increase significantly, and at a faster rate than the rate of new users. Wikipedia has the same issue: casual users make casual edits, and editors had to get more aggressive about rolling back edits as time went by in order to keep the site useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think it is important for all of us with VTC privileges to continually re-calibrate to make sure we are reflecting the community standards&lt;/strong&gt;, but at the moment, I don't see a problem. To me, the issues of last month where many of us were trying to understand the distinction between &quot;unclear&quot; and &quot;too broad&quot; have been resolved, and the rate of that specific issue has -- in my observation -- decreased notably. (That's anecdotal observation, not actual measurement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T16:43:01.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4517" CreationDate="2017-02-21T16:45:33.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just adding some data, so people have an idea of the actual migration activity that's happened on Worldbuilding throughout its history. Here are some stats on how many questions we've migrated to various sites, after a quick manual count (so maybe assume these numbers are $\pm$ 1). In no order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics: 7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writers: 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Earth Science: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophy: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language and Usage: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Space Exploration: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Game Development: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astronomy: 12&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Christianity: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Politics: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biology: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding Meta: 11&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;History: 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Movies and TV: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mythology: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Overflow: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Law: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bitcoin: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Health: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martial Arts: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cognitive Sciences: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Role-playing Games: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English Language Learners: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Engineering: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Super User: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freelancing: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Home Improvement: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pets: 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what you're thinking: We migrated as many questions to &lt;em&gt;Freelancing&lt;/em&gt; as we did to Biology? Yes we did. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46375/627&quot;&gt;the one question&lt;/a&gt; we sent to Biology was rejected, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://freelancing.stackexchange.com/q/2692&quot;&gt;the one on Freelancing&lt;/a&gt; was better received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this list - and ignoring Worldbuilding Meta, since we have a default path there - the top targets are, in order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astronomy (12)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics (7)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writers/History (4 apiece)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have data on rejected migrations yet, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61059/627&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt; was rejected by the target site, which was Physics. For the most part, the migrations are successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:34.417" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T16:45:33.203" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2017-02-21T17:49:15.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have much to add answer wise, Dot summed it up nicely but I think it important that I mention my current mentality as I have contributed to the increased number of closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have stepped up my VTC usage and downvote usage lately.  This isn't with the intent to punish anyone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a subjective site in many many respects and that is frankly how WB will always be in my opinion.  So a couple points I would like to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Efforts to eliminate subjectivity will essentially eliminate the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the scale of --- &lt;strong&gt;Good Subjective_^_Bad Subjective&lt;/strong&gt; --- we have veered way to far toward Bad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users are answering questions that are clearly off topic (be that too broad, or too opinion based).  In response not only am I casting a close vote on the question but down voting and commenting on answers.  It has not been very popular with the people I done this too but, &lt;strong&gt;if we don't train people not to do it, this will keep happening.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I love that this site is so friendly and that we tend to just close rather than abusing people with down votes, but as our size grows we are going to have to teach people with both carrots and sticks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Votes to close &lt;strong&gt;SHOULD&lt;/strong&gt; be executed quickly.  The last thing you want is a bunch of answers against an off-topic but salvageable question.  Now the answers are wasted time and you can't edit the question because there are a bunch of answers against it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alot of users on WB are just on world building, and that is great.  But we (most people on meta exist elsewhere on the network) need to remember we exist within the SE framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The framework has certain expectations and while I think World Building will always be on the boundaries of acceptable we still need to maintain those standards as best we can for the content we cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that it has ever happened but SE would be within their rights to shut down a site that does not comply with the standards of the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T17:49:15.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T19:20:39.513" Score="9" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know if there is a way to adjust the SE software to accommodate this request, but this idea has come up REPEATEDLY in multiple meta discussions, so I'm formally proposing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ALL new questions start out &quot;on hold&quot; for 1 hour&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WorldBuilding SE exists on the edge of topics that work for the SE format -- multiple people have acknowledged that. With GoodSubjective/BadSubjective, it is easy for our open-ended brainstorms to veer toward Bad, but there's a lot of Good that we want to keep. We allow for hypotheticals and we have questions where there is no &quot;one right answer&quot;, but more where there is a &quot;best of the several right answers&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this work, we need good questions, and we need to get those good questions without making new users feel picked on and to catch errors that even experienced users make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need time to check a question for internal consistency.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need time to make sure everyone agrees what is being asked.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need time to format the question so that responses get the right form.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need to do all of those things without worrying that answers are already coming in that might be invalidated if we edit the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these would be facilitated by starting questions on hold and then releasing them when they're cleaned up. A time delay wouldn't fly on most SE sites because people need answers quickly -- StackOverflow is critical to my job, and a 1 hour delay is an hour lost from my day. But even if I'm writing on deadline, I cannot imagine needing to know the right way to make a Dyson Sphere &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt;.  :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe a time delay would not hurt the site; moreover, I think it would substantially improve question quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a good idea?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, can the SE software make it happen? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T23:40:44.077" Title="Proposal: ALL questions start &quot;on hold&quot; for 1 hour" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2017-02-21T19:49:07.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might not be the absolute best solution, but it might be a working one. One problem is still communication, we need to become much better at telling (new) users why their question is too broad/off topic/too unclear so they understand what they need to change; maybe one hour on hold is enough to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many experienced users are just tossing a link to the tutorial, which is highly unhelpful as there is nothing there which will guide a new user to how to ask a good question; there is barely enough information to give an indication of the full scope. Simply put, we need to explain better for new users; maybe one hour on hold is enough to do so, maybe we also need to improve the help texts on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users also need to take the time to read up on what is expected by them. Most people I ever interacted with don't want to read the rules, they just want to go straight for the action. With a delay before their question can get answers, then they will have time to read but will they, or will they just be frustrated that they need to wait one hour before they know how to build a Dyson Sphere? If we are making sure that there is a clear message stating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;your question will be on hold for an hour to give some time to check that it is on topic and that we understand what you really is asking for. Use this time to edit your question if you get suggestions and to read the rules. If the question is deemed off topic, too broad, or too unclear after the grace period, then it will be closed again until it is improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a clear notice, no one can blame not knowing what is expected of them. Hopefully one hour on hold is enough to let them improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no clue if it is possible to implement it, but I am for giving it a try. As long as we are communicating clearly and we all do our best to help out, then it should at least not get worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T19:57:50.583" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T19:57:50.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T20:06:04.073" Score="20" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;second moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/885.png&quot; alt=&quot;JDługosz&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.com/results/6669260608765952/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T04:56:19.887" Title="2017 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2017-02-21T20:07:31.797" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations JDługosz on winning the election!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T20:07:31.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2017-02-21T21:29:20.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see one potential problem, maybe.  Are there enough people on the site at any time throughout the day to be able to get to every new question with suggested edits/comments?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing the solution as a logistical puzzle within a framework like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  Question is posted and put in a pre-determined time on hold, with a clear and impartial message as to why&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  Experienced users (certain amount of rep) review the question and either give specific feedback or vote to open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) User has a chance to look at the comments and feedback and make appropriate edits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4)  After experienced users look at the edits they can vote to open or vote to extend hold WITH MORE SPECIFIC feedback.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5)  Repeat until enough votes to open are recorded.  If no attempt to edit the question were made, close it, If no comments or suggestions made, leave it on hold but flag it in someway so that it will get adequate attention.  Be sure to notify the person asking the question.  This part should be automated if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Err on the side of letting the question get answers.  World building is all about speculation and what ifs.  Someone new may not have the thought completed in their own mind and one or 2 solid answers may help unlock that last bit of thought in a way that the limits of a comment cannot.  It's up to us to police and help each other which is why the logistics of the process are important.  It is also incumbent on everyone to offer constructive advice before shutting something down.  Also, consider that Time on Worldbuilding may be less of a factor that some of the other parts of SE where a timely answer is critical for someone's job.  That is to say, Time spent on an answer that doesn't exactly fit what is initially wanted may provide for what is actually &lt;em&gt;needed&lt;/em&gt;. I see people riffing on each others answers and the syntheses that happens creates some truly cool ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, don't be too serious about it all.  We are in a place that references &lt;em&gt;handwavium, unobtainium, and the rule of cool&lt;/em&gt; on a regular basis.  How serious should we be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T21:29:20.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2017-02-21T22:53:37.953" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It won't be implemented&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, SE won't implement that. This is not useful to StackOverflow and goes against the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting questions on-hold would go against the fine-tuned SE workflow, this is not only a pain to implement, but also has a high risk of failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;This is not what on-hold means&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's address the elephant in the room: on-hold is not a punishment, I'm not suggesting it is, no one should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on-hold is not a review-queue $+$ answer-limitation as well. It is a sign that a question has problems that need fixing. It is a clear indication to the OP that &lt;em&gt;he needs to improve&lt;/em&gt;. Also, it usually comes after the OP didn't answer the clarifications asked for by the community &lt;em&gt;for more than an hour&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The current workflow is already pretty efficient&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our review queues are almost always empty, our questions get answered... why do we want to review more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions (and specially first posts) are seen and commented on within the hour. Several times now, I've asked as nicely as possible if a &quot;young&quot; OP could help me make their question better... and did not get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;We need good users to post good questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: &lt;em&gt;I'm a nice guy, and WB.SE is a community of kind people. I love this kindness and all but it doesn't mean we should constantly try to include people that don't want to be included.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the &quot;we need good questions&quot; idea. But I do not agree that we should try to salvage every questions into a good one while flattering the OP's feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; this sounds snobbish, but a user that comes, asks a poorly-written and off-topic question then gets angry because we point it out to them is unlikely to produce good posts. The most likely is a stream of poorly written questions bounced up through their multiple edits, while the good questions &lt;em&gt;which we could focus on&lt;/em&gt; lose visibility and effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The problem of early answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to note that if a question's edits makes an existing answer totally irrelevant then  probably the question, the edit or the answer was a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer's author is still around, they should agree to edit their answer (or delete it). If not, we have this thing called downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems harsh, yes. But keep in mind that adding a 1-hour on-hold would also make also make us lose good answers to good questions. &lt;strong&gt;Whatever solution we use to improve bad posts, it should not interfere with the good posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have a problem of users that post off-topic content and get upset when it's pointed out. I really don't think the solution lies in our workflow. In our tone while talking to newcomers maybe, but SE's workflow is what makes this site collection so good and we shouldn't modify it &quot;because maybe we feel it could improve some of our bad questions and help us keep the users who ask them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T07:15:23.250" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T07:15:23.250" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T07:33:42.253" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; is an amalgamation of dozens of topics, geared toward building fictional worlds using expertise that pertains to those topics. Usually, this system runs smoothly.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, sometimes questions don't just call for expertise - they're worded so that only a true expert can understand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71918/627&quot;&gt;Is blood pressure a good restriction?&lt;/a&gt; uses words and phrases such as hypertension, hypotension, syncope, CNAP monitor, vasculitis, and Kawasaki disease&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/70951/627&quot;&gt;Dyson-Harrop to power an ion engine?&lt;/a&gt; includes VASIMR, Dyson-Harrop, ion drive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71702/627&quot;&gt;Iron deficiency Anemia due to illness, Management?&lt;/a&gt; touches on sideroblastic anemia, erythroblasts, hemolysis, polycythemia, granulomas, and hemochromatosis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of us recognize some of the above words / phrases, but few of us know all of them. When they aren't explained, or even linked to, in the question, answering can be nightmarish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, users most qualified to answer will be able to understand the question, but there is always a risk that good answers will be lost after someone is alienated - only because of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the best way to handle these questions?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like it's inappropriate to VTC as &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot; because a quick Google search can explain the question, yet these questions are also unnecessarily difficult to answer only because of how they're worded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:52:29.003" Title="Topic-Specific Vocabulary" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4557" CreationDate="2017-02-22T07:46:22.437" Score="-3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71644/the-size-of-an-underwater-city&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic. It's in the middle of being re-opened, but there's no point in fighting to close or re-open until a consensus is reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It can't be answered&lt;/strong&gt; because of a fundamental flaw. In short, it asks answers to calculate the area of a city, but only says how thick the perimeter is, leaving the area contained ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, math is on-topic here.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a tag devoted to it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; which often overlaps. We have questions devoted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbital-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbital-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbital-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, and dozens of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions relying on mathematical formulas for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why is finding the area of a polygon any different from calculating  how structurally strong an object would need to be to survive a trip through an ergosphere, or how to get two asteroids to follow each other in stable ellipses?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong. The question is flawed, and an answer could point that out, but I don't think it's any less fit for the site than other mathematics questions with worldbuilding applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math is math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T18:44:48.253" Title="Why is this question about an underwater city off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-22T08:22:37.423" Score="-6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Look for alternatives to Stackexchange.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of worldbuilding is great. A highly imaginative forum and very entertaining. The ability to dream of a better or different world is one of the most important human qualities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange is not open source and moderators tend to be abusive for personal reasons or ego related ones. &#xA;Many of the questions are closed because they are &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;opinion based&quot; which could be applied to 90% of the questions here. The real reason behind that it's because they don't like what is being asked therefore they want that question to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a true example of freedom of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31264" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T08:22:37.423" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4517" CreationDate="2017-02-22T09:41:25.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite like having the moderator &quot;filter&quot; on migrations for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't want a reputation for sending off-topic rubbish to other sites and people who know about our site don't necessarily know what is on topic for other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I've seen quite a few flags or comments suggesting a migration to writers for questions that I know for a fact would be off topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As moderators we always have the option of checking with the moderators of the target site before migrating, that's not so easy for a regular user to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people are far too keen to send perfectly good worldbuilding questions to other sites just because it is also on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question that belongs on another site flag it for a moderator and we'll take a look. The more automated migration flow is only needed if we see a large increase in migrations to a specific target and can be sure that our community knows what is on and off topic for that target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:41:25.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4528" CreationDate="2017-02-22T10:09:33.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's off topic for a number of reasons but the main one is very simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It isn't actually about world building.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's already built the city, he's asking a very simple math question with no actual relation to trying to build a world. Imagine if I asked a question saying &quot;I have 10 pennies each 1cm across, what is their total surface area?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is basically the same question - it even has missing information (thickness) making it impossible to answer. Would it be a worldbuilding question though? Clearly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Math is not on topic here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is on topic here. A question having math or not having math does not make it on or off topic. The important criteria is whether it is about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other bad points to this question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are things that are most likely causing it to get down votes but are probably not enough to get it closed by themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a pure &quot;do my math for me&quot; question. It doesn't ask &quot;how do I calculate this&quot;, it asks &quot;calculate this for me&quot;. The answer is unlikely to be useful for anyone other than the original asker.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It shows no attempt at doing it themselves. What has he already tried? Why did it work or not work? At what point did he get stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not about worldbuilding. It does not require any worldbuilding knowledge or skill. The question is unlikely to be useful to any worldbuilders in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is correctly closed and should remain so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T10:22:40.373" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T10:22:40.373" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T10:10:26.467" Score="16" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I got idea for a joke. Worldbuilding moderators are taking over the world!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I posted it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71935/help-the-worldbuilding-moderators-are-going-to-take-over-the-world&quot;&gt;as a question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;Facebook sysadmins preventing Cthulhu&lt;/a&gt;, my original idea was, that joke about computers, sysadmins, moderators and what could people do about it, is inside scope of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, 5 close votes and +7/-4 score says, that rest of community does not think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It even produced one user thinking, that my original premise is &lt;em&gt;actually true&lt;/em&gt; and they &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4529/2071&quot;&gt;posted an answer&lt;/a&gt; hinting, that freedom of speech is being taken away from users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For outside readers: &lt;strong&gt;Please note, that my question was put on hold by regular users and not by moderators&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worst part is, that my inner editor cannot find anything outside of scope on question &quot;how to prevent group of people to do X&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done to improve such question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T23:05:23.067" Title="So, I started with joke and people took it seriously. What can be done with the question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4527" CreationDate="2017-02-22T10:31:23.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see this as being a problem. It would be nice to ask in &quot;laymans terms&quot; where possible. Editing in explanations or links to such a question isn't a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the asker has a specific technical question asked in the correct technical language then they most likely need a specific technical answer. In that case it's actually a good thing that people not familiar with the jargon can't attempt a (probably wrong) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it will reduce the number of people for whom that Q&amp;amp;A is readable, but it may also make it more useful for those people who do understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words using Jargon/Long Words/etc for the sake of it should be discouraged. We don't need any elitist cliques or special languages people need to learn to fit in here. However where they are useful and relevant they should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's exactly the same as hard maths and long formula in a Q&amp;amp;A. You don't want it in every case, but you should not discourage it where they are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T10:31:23.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4532" CreationDate="2017-02-22T10:45:19.173" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I make no secret of the fact that I loved your question, and I also celebrate every small gleam of humour I see on this mainly dry site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's two points here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not really a WB scoped question  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allowing one satirical question would inevitably allow others to follow and closing those questions down as off-topic becomes harder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To improve this, I guess you'd need to create some kind of fiction or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allegory&lt;/a&gt; that simulates what you want (resisting some kind of controlling order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, this question has more of a meaning to &quot;insiders&quot; than general users of WB who don't really care who the moderators are and easily confuse them with high-rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, you might get more of an uptake posting it in Meta, which is a bit boring and doesn't get much exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or set your question on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63587/why-are-there-no-toilets-on-the-starship-exciting-undertaking/63598#63598&quot;&gt;starship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T22:48:37.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T14:30:57.197" Score="8" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taking a look at the list of badges today and there's a few that no one in WB have managed to collect as yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I took a look at the requirements for the &quot;Generalist&quot; badge where the wording confused me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what this means is you need 15 votes for any question that has tags in the top 40 tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/631411/generalist-progression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This query&lt;/a&gt; will show your personal progression towards that requirement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm almost at that stage, and there's many people with higher reps and more answers than I, so I wondered why no one has the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I'm told (thanks, Tim B) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85048/does-the-generalist-badge-require-15-score-total-or-15-score-per-tag/85049#85049&quot;&gt;there's a threshold&lt;/a&gt; for the number of questions per tag (top 40 tags need to have over 200 questions each).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of our top 40 tags are there; we just have four left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these badges have 190 or more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as these badges each get to the 200+ question threshold, the &quot;Generalist&quot; badge should be awarded to those who have earned it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, creating a few valid questions with these tags (or adding the tags to existing questions, where relevant) will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:10:39.120" Title="Popping the &quot;Generalist&quot; Badge" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4527" CreationDate="2017-02-22T14:52:29.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a standard rule when using an &lt;strong&gt;acronym&lt;/strong&gt; for the first time it should look like this example: &lt;em&gt;Once upon a time the president knew what the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point you have introduced the acronym and people can find it in the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt; issues I would say &lt;em&gt;don't use big words just to sound smart&lt;/em&gt;, making your content understandable and useful is far more valuable than obscure unnecessary language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see your argument for closing but disagree that it would be a valuable way to do things.  A better response would be to comment and potentially edit if you can add clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:52:29.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-22T15:10:22.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be clear here... It is a bad thing.&#xA;There is no situation which results in a close that is &quot;good&quot;. The best you can get is &quot;neutral for me.&quot; And ultimately, the most important part of this whole thing is damaged and that is that the Questioner is not answered, and not just them, but anyone else that might have had the same or similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the line that &quot;5 experienced people vote.&quot; Nonsense. Answering a few questions really well says nothing about how well you understand what is or isn't a good question, how to make a question clear, what is against or following the rules, and it says nothing about your personal moral or character about how you vote. You can get the need rep fairly easily and quickly if you get lucky and either way answerering is in no way &quot;experience&quot; for closing/moderating whether you have 1, 5, or 5000 people making that call. And those who vote a lot so do have experience, they are likely the worst judges, or at least that is how it is in most similar things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is before you get into topics that are closed for all sorts of things that are just their interpretations or could be argued are very bad practices because they discourage the things that should be encouraged in someone who is world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear, to me at least, that many people forget that the primary goal is to answer the question that is being posed, and the idea that a question is too &quot;broad&quot;, &quot;opinion based&quot;, &quot;precise&quot;, &quot;narative driven&quot;, etc is grand in theory and a good rule of thumb, but ultimately it's crap if they get in the way of answering a question that a person needs to answer when it comes to a world their building. That's why they're asking in a place where you ask questions about how to make a world and how it operates. Some elements of such questions are going to be broad, some are going to be precise, some are going to contain story elements. And even if they are &quot;too&quot; whatever, consider that they may not know and still needs to have the answer to the question which you are cutting them off from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;well you can edit to make it better&quot; doesn't cut it, because there are questions that by their very nature are &quot;too broad&quot; to legitimately ever answer without such as anything to do with the how a earth like planet works. Those questions always are amazingly broad in their real answers, but you wouldn't know that less you are explained to and have your questions answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the idea that &quot;How do we make people think it's not bad&quot; is wrong headed. It is bad, or means something bad has happened and such it shouldn't be covered up to make people feel better. Instead, adapt to the expectations of those people who are asking legitimate questions so that it doesn't weigh on your conscience that they think they're doing something bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to address that While I generally agree that the voting to close is bad I don't think the vitriol of some of the people who think that it is bad are having. I think it's misguided and generally they are in the wrong in the specifics of their examples. However, I do not think that they should be dismissed with the same prepacked responses as, while they may be wrong in the specific, they're right in the general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ways to &quot;fix it&quot; but it would take a bunch of coding that would effect all the SEs so that isn't likely to happen, even though it probably should. So there is little point in bring up how to fix anything in any way other than promoting that people should be more lenient about closing things due to the very nature of what WB and SE jointly are supposed to be...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T15:10:22.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:37:32.647" Score="2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to delete my WorldBuilding account. The &quot;Delete Profile&quot; button isn't there. What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31264" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T16:07:06.620" Title="Delete my Worldbuilding account" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4538" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:44:45.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already posted and voted on the site, so they can't remove you automatically from the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to go on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;this form&lt;/a&gt; and select the option &quot;I need to delete my user profile&quot;. The SE team will contact you (to see the details, I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry this didn't work out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:15:43.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T20:11:04.920" Score="8" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/can-there-be-done-more-to-assure-users-that-closing-questions-is-not-a-bad-thing&quot;&gt;Can there be done more to assure users that closing questions is not a Bad Thing?&lt;/a&gt; and wanted to raise this as a new Meta-Post to discuss as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4509/28789&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35529944#35529944&quot;&gt;dot_sp0t&lt;/a&gt; suggested. I had the idea for this answer because I am trying my best to help new users understand why questions are put on hold and that &quot;on hold&quot; is different from &quot;closed and marked for deletion&quot; by adding some standard texts if I see questions generating comments about VTC-ing and not about the possibility of it being reopened after edits. Most of the time I comment something like &quot;Quick reminder: 'on hold' is different from 'closed'. A few edits could lead to your question being reopened. Please start by [stuff].&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know questions tagged &quot;hard-science&quot; get a special notice that only certain people can manually put there and remove. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible to add a feature to automatically add such a notice, like the one on questions tagged &quot;hard-science&quot;, to any new question?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mithrandir24601 and dot_Sp0T told me in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35529944#35529944&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; that currently there is no way to automatically add such a notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about adding a notice along the lines of „This question is new and hasn’t been reviewed by the community until now. If you want to answer this question please make sure that it fits the sites guidelines. If this question does not fit the sites guidelines it will be put on hold for some time to allow the author to edit the question before reopening it for answers.“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would automatically show the intention of „putting questions on hold“ for new users and it could also prevent some of the cases where new useres were answering very fast even if the question was not a good fit for the site at first. At the same time it would not be as invasive as generally putting the question on hold at first, though I like this idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/proposal-all-questions-start-on-hold-for-1-hour&quot;&gt;SRM&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if questions with such a notice could go into a special Review-Queue so that experienced users can delete the message if the question fits the site. Or that the notice will be automatically deleted after one or two hours. Until then somebody experienced (probably) gave feedback on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature could also be limited to new users and their first question on the site if this is easier to implement or fits the general way of StackExchange better. This way new users will get a notice when posting a question and when someone reviews the question in the normal 500 reputation &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;Review Queue for first posts/ late answers&lt;/a&gt; the notice could automatically be deleted, if the question is okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T08:16:38.623" Title="Add feature to automatically add a notice to new questions" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-02-22T22:16:47.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough reputation there to use it myself, but Stack Overflow has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/295650/922300&quot;&gt;triage system&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/287466/922300&quot;&gt;help &amp;amp; improvement queue&lt;/a&gt; for posts that need a little extra help.  Since that code is already written, getting access to those features seems more likely than getting something completely new like automatic temporary holds and the associated tooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as I said, I don't know much about how that feature operates, so consider this answer a &quot;stub&quot; for investigation.  If you're an experienced SO user, if you've used these queues, please share your assessment.  Could something like SO's triage/help&amp;amp;improvement benefit Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/proposal-all-questions-start-on-hold-for-1-hour&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/proposal-all-questions-start-on-hold-for-1-hour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:34:19.843" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T22:21:53.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T06:45:45.253" Score="-4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some questions that need to be pretty broad. They fit the site, they follow the rules, but their implications inherently make them too &quot;broad&quot; because answering a bit of it will lead into a chasm of answering a bunch of othe questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;What are the effects of higher gravity on a terrestrial planet?&quot; This question can be taken as need lots and lots of explanation as little changes that this would effect would acculmulate and create a complex set of interactions. However, regardless of those complexities, we can still say things like &quot;Mountains would be lower and Animals would be stockier, because the gravity pulls them down&quot; and this could be more than enough of an answer for the particular question, because they're looking for the broad ramifications, not the &quot;too many possible things to take into account&quot; answer. I think this being possible and being understood as what is being looked for is acceptable. And it is much better than saying &quot;no you can't ask that because there are too many variable in specific&quot; when we know that regardless of all those variables you still get a pretty simple and predictable general general outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why not just add a tag that helps explain that the questioner is not asking for the nitty gritty details that they can fill in for themselves, but a more generalized answer? I think that without something like this it harms the ability for people to ask questions that would help them. In a scenario where I'm making animals that exist on or come from a high gravity planet for example, or are trying to describe features of such the important thing I'm looking for are the generalities, not the nitty gritty details. Adding a tag that says as much would just help, just like the &quot;hard-science&quot; tag, some people want to know all the exact details of the subject, other people not so much. I think having a tag would benefit people and would also help by having a contrast tag for ones like &quot;hard-science&quot; (which come to think of it is a bad name for it, changing it to something like &quot;detailed&quot; might be a good idea, because &quot;hard-science&quot; to most people simply means it is realistically possible within known laws of science, not that they want a ton of detail to say why it is, but that's another discussion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T12:20:30.507" Title="How bout adding a &quot;Broad&quot; or &quot;General&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4542" CreationDate="2017-02-23T12:20:30.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this sort of meta tag is a barrier to entry and intuitive understanding of the site. In general we avoid meta tags (there have been discussions as to why in the past if you search for them) and there would have to be a strong reason to add any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking a &quot;broad overview&quot; question then state in the question that you are looking for a broad overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware though that &quot;broad overview&quot; can easily degenerate into &quot;list questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98334/list-questions-community-wiki&quot;&gt;List questions: Community Wiki?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124450/what-is-the-definition-of-a-list-question&quot;&gt;What is the definition of a list question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T12:20:30.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4546" CreationDate="2017-02-24T00:56:57.957" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I'm new here. I've noticed that on other social media like Tumblr and Instagram, you can type @(name) to get someone's attention. Is it possible to do that here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33819" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T01:40:15.387" Title="Is it possible to &quot;tag&quot; people to get their attention?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4545" CreationDate="2017-02-24T01:22:09.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this is not a social network, you cannot tag anyone anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagging works in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; (50 reputation needed if not on your post), but only if the user you're tagging has already commented on the post (or is the author of the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you reach 20 reputation, you'll get access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;talk in chat&lt;/a&gt; privilege. If you know the user you want to ping hangs in a chat, you can @name them there and they'll notice your message when they pass by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the author of a post is always notified when there is a comment on it, and the author of a question is notified of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T01:40:15.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T07:11:57.067" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;So someone edited the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera&lt;/a&gt; tag recently and I noticed that it said it was a human animal hybrid. This is not what a chimera is. A chimera is a mix of, if I remember right, 3 creatures each with heads, goat, dragon, and lion, and is a specific creature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chimeras beyond that are not &quot;human hybrids&quot; they are other animal hybrids in mythology, each with features that can be seen from the respective animal. Humans aren't considered animals and so would never be mixed in as a chimera in mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medically a chimera is anything that naturally has parts that from a different genetic thing. For example, most women are chimeras, shown by having splotchy skin patches where the other person's(?) genetic cells are seen. Female calico cats are chimera, their 3 fur colors owing to the fact that 1 of the fur colors belongs to cells from a genetically different cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time when the term &quot;chimera&quot; is used to mean human-animal hybrid that I am aware of is in Full Metal Alchemist. That being the case, i don't think that the tag should specify human-animal hybrids (or include them at all). Or there needs to be different tags for these things... or something cuz there are 4 things that chimera refers to, the least accurate 1 being used with the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T13:46:06.520" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T13:50:40.150" Title="The Chimera tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4547" CreationDate="2017-02-24T08:06:22.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I see, the Chimera isn't a specific creature except when it's specifically referenced in Greek mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals, or to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/chimera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(often initial capital letter) a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, especially as depicted in decorative art. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy: &#xA;  He is far different from the chimera your fears have made of him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Genetics. an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an artificially produced individual having tissues of several species. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(mythology)#/media/File:Museum_of_Anatolian_Civilizations080.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neo-Hittite Chimera&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RgTUf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RgTUf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a bunch of different kinds of chimera, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hubpages.com/education/chimeramythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chimeras and Chimera Mythology&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which lists quite a few chimeras involving bits of human (most obvious being a centaur)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, The only tag I see being used is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera-folk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera-folk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera-folk&lt;/a&gt; which includes the word &quot;folk&quot;, implying people.  It's also only used in four questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really a big deal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T08:06:22.443" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4552" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:18:31.120" Score="10" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;While conducting a review of the suggested edits queue, I noticed a user had made a change to the wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombie-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombie-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombie-whales&lt;/a&gt;. This piqued my interest, as I had never seen this tag before, so I dug into the tag's existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombie-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombie-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombie-whales&lt;/a&gt;, specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71935/6986&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, and it makes absolutely no sense in the context of the question. Looking at the edit history, the tag was added by a user other than the questioner in what appears to be either an attempt to further the joke intended by the question or a defacement of the question. (In either case, that edit shouldn't have been made, in my opinion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombie-whales&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombie-whales&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombie-whales&lt;/a&gt; can also quite clearly be covered by a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/animals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;animals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;animals&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zombies&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zombies&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zombies&lt;/a&gt; (or just the latter, as the tag info indicates it can be used for any undead creature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we burn the zombie-whales tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T13:59:41.737" Title="Can we burn the zombie-whales tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4549" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:39:25.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For sure.  It’s a clear case of an overly specific tag even if it did make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T13:39:25.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4547" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:45:18.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human animal hybrids not otherwise given their own tag use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera-folk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera-folk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera-folk&lt;/a&gt; tag.  The wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera&lt;/a&gt; then should xref that and explain that this tag for non-human animal (and other life forms) mixtures only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beleive I created &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera-folk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera-folk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera-folk&lt;/a&gt; and cleaned up one-offs and untagged questions, a while back.  There was some discussion on which specific one to have and using the &lt;code&gt;-folk&lt;/code&gt; suffix as a unifying theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I don’t see any &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chimera&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chimera&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chimera&lt;/a&gt; tag at all!  So I’m not understanding your question. (Or has it been delted already?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T13:50:40.150" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T13:50:40.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4549" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:59:41.737" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;By all means.  I created that tag and edited it to participate in Pavel's humorous question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea why someone approved that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T13:59:41.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2017-02-24T14:19:05.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boom, we now have the &quot;Generalist&quot; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We needed &lt;strong&gt;over 200&lt;/strong&gt; questions in 20 of the top 40 tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T14:19:05.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T17:24:28.473" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through the meta questions, and saw a few on tags. This inspired me to participate in tag cleanup. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I was editing away, I realized that as a 20k user, I have near-unlimited powers to edit tags. For example, I was looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-gravity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microgravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microgravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microgravity&lt;/a&gt;, and decided that I should combine them into microgravity. Now, it is entirely within my powers to edit all zero-gravities into microgravity, write a new tag-wiki for microgravity, and then synonym them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is following James's suggestion to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3173/what-shall-we-do-with-the-history-tags&quot;&gt;eliminate the history tag&lt;/a&gt;. I could redo all the history related wikis and then re-tag all 102 questions under history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, given that I intend to do this with the utmost care and accuracy strictly for the benefit of the site, should I do this without getting community input from meta? And what constitutes community input? If I get 10 upvotes but one answer saying this is a dumb idea, do I go ahead with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of peer-review, as suggested below, I would like to bump this post again to get more feedback related to James' proposal as linked above. Basically, I would like to review and re-tag all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions that should belong under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, instead of going with new history development tag, I would like to re-do the description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; to specify that it is for the process of building the history of an invented world, not for events related to the actual history of our world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no great objections I will begin doing this next week. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T21:08:12.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:31:06.380" Title="How responsibly shall I use my powers?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4554" CreationDate="2017-02-24T17:34:19.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help in moderating the site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rule I think we follow is: the larger the impact, the more you should seek consensus (on meta) before acting.  Eliminate a tag that's used on three questions and that nobody seems to care about?  Just do it.  Make a change that affects hundreds of questions?  Let's talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For tag merges, by the way, moderators have tools that can do the merge without editing (and thus bumping) each individual question.  Editing to change tags is best for cases where the number of edits is smaller.  Nobody should have to spend his time editing 102 questions one at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it's also best to do these kinds of edits in batches of no more than about 10.  Too many edits at once can push newly-asked (or newly-answered) questions off the front page before people have had a chance to see them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tags (recent edit to question): I agree with that approach, and since it has to be done one question at a time anyway, it can be done as people are available.  I'm all about incremental improvement. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T18:31:06.380" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:31:06.380" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-02-24T18:35:19.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; how you feel, and IMHO, you are not being too sensitive.&#xA;I began here last summer, thoroughly enjoying open minds and expansive imaginations.  I soon learned that even a &lt;em&gt;Really Good&lt;/em&gt; answer is often subject to snarky, mean-spirited and pointless commentary.&#xA;This has kept me from ever asking even one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a six month hiatus out of disgust and disappointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other SE, yes.  In here, no way.  Too often too opinionated, too careless with other peoples' interests and feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21753" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T18:35:19.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4528" CreationDate="2017-02-24T18:38:32.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;That question is not a math problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question has several problems. First off, many people seem to have dismissed the question assuming it was 4th grade math problem. But carefully reading, it is not. It is asking for the area of a square, where no dimension of the square are given, and no internal clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this isn't the case, like the ergosphere question you linked in TimB's question's comments, where there is math to be done and the user is not capable of doing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was explained repeatedly in the comments to John, including by you. John has a history of absolutely refusing to consider critiques of his questions. I have responded to this history by not bothering to critique, and just closing his questions instead. Why waste the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is likely that the combination of author and question lead to closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You raise a good point about math&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your good point is that, while most people, perhaps, can't solve that ergosphere problem, most people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; solve basic 4th grade math. But, just because most people can doesn't mean everyone can. The conclusion is that we should not run people off the forum for asking 4th grade math questions. If they legitimately need help with 4th grade math for Worldbuilding puroposes, we should give those question equal time along the near-impossible &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while this is a good point, I'm not sure it is necessarily applicable to the site. I only remember seeing one other question like that....asked by JohnWDailey, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T18:44:48.253" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T18:44:48.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:55:27.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't feel like killing your buzz, but today I was awarded this &lt;em&gt;Generalist&lt;/em&gt; badge. I am sorry if it hurt you in any manner :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I was quite confused when I looked at the description of the tag and could not understand why/how I had earned it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that even mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:55:27.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2017-02-24T22:10:39.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to all who got the badge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:10:39.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4562" CreationDate="2017-02-24T23:24:12.453" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought of this whilst reading &#xA;Mithrandir's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37648/universe-in-which-there-is-quantized-rest-mass&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;*. I have seen a few like this and understand the temptation by those who know more to express this. However &lt;strong&gt;if the question has been asked without a hard science tag should an answer still be written as a hard-science one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely understand the desire for citations and equations, I have a physics background and to me an equation can clear up what several paragraphs could not. However if we're bearing in mind our target reader is the asker of this question should the answers not be aimed at their level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I don't mean to criticise the answer, just use it as an example of what I mean - I have seen it plenty of other times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T22:42:57.330" Title="Hard-science answers. Are they always good?" Tags="|discussion|answers|hard-science|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4560" CreationDate="2017-02-24T23:37:21.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that doing more than you need to do cannot hurt. To cite from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;hard-science tag&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, do not remove hard-science from a question that has the tag and science-based. Instead remove science-based, because hard-science holds answers to an even higher standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion a higher standard is nothing bad and as long as there is a clear explanation for people who are not as familiar with the hard-science theoretical subject at hand and it really answers the question a hard-science answer is a perfectly valid answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T23:37:21.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4560" CreationDate="2017-02-25T00:15:05.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;In general&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's . . . a judgement call - and that's coming from someone who probably makes some poor judgement calls in this area from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to write an answer that you think is pretty in-depth and goes above and beyond the call of duty, ask yourself this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to go the extra mile?&lt;/strong&gt; Will I be raising readers to a new plane of enlightenment and understanding? Will I just be showing off? There's a difference, and sometimes you risk people not reading the answer because there's a lot of unnecessary fluff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will the OP and other readers understand what I'm writing?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm sometimes guilty of not asking myself this, which probably means that some folks just gloss over some of my answers. And that's fine. But you need to make sure that the people who would ask this question - the OP and future would-be askers - actually understand your answer. Otherwise, it might as well be written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linear A&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did I explain everything properly?&lt;/strong&gt; It's okay to add some jargon if jargon has a place there, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/627&quot;&gt;you need to explain things&lt;/a&gt;, at least the first time around.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;This case&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider myself somewhat educated in physics, though not to a great extent in this particular area. In other words, I know the math behond some Lagrangians, Noether's theorem, and how you can find solutions to various forms of the Schrödinger equation, all of which play a role in the answer. But then I get to this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathcal{L}_{Yukawa}$&lt;/span&gt; is, of itself, still quite long, containing terms such as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\sum_{f' = l_R, f = l_L}H_{f'f}\bar{f'}\left(f \circ \phi \right) $$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;Here, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$H$&lt;/span&gt; is a 3×3 matrix, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bar{f'}$&lt;/span&gt; are anti-right-handed leptons (aka. positrons), &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f$&lt;/span&gt; are left-handed leptons (electrons and neutrinos) and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\phi$&lt;/span&gt; is ... The Higg's field. Or, the only way that elementary particles can have mass is from the Higgs boson. This includes, to my knowledge, neutrinos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . It gets a bit blurry there. I know all the words, but we've got more than words here. We've got math. And I have only a very faint idea of what that summation means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this part violates Bullet 1 (I don't really need to know what the Yukawa term is mathematically, unless the point is to emphasize how complicated it is, in which case, mission accomplished!), Bullet 2 (for most people, I'd reckon), and Bullet 3 (yes, the symbols were explained, but not as mathematical objects, which makes the expression itself useless).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think that the above is the one place in the answer where the writer maybe went overboard. Breaking down the Standard Model Lagrangian is a nice touch to make sure we all know the background, and the end reminds me that I'm always a sucker for time evolution and quantum states (plus, that section makes a good mathematical point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, there are cases where it's probably best to limit oneself in an answer for the pure sake of readability. You do have to know who your audience is at the present and likely will be in the future. You also have to make it clear what your mathematics means, because inconsistency in notation is no small problem. Finally, let's make sure that we only write what we need to write in an answer - and yes, I could take that advice once in a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T00:15:05.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2017-02-25T14:14:45.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well done JDługosz!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also a nod to James and Michael who both did exceptionally. I'm blown away that I got any first votes, but nevertheless it's great to see so many people taking part in the voting process and giving their input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long live WorldBuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23503" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T14:14:45.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2017-02-25T17:50:59.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd have phrased this differently, since people's frequency or degree of participation can vary &lt;em&gt;significantly&lt;/em&gt;, even if shy of formal account deletion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I'm spending less time here, because IMHO, the StackExchange format, plus the inconsistently-defined criteria for hold and closure, isn't really helping me build my worlds very well.  I'll still look around somewhat -- but I find that too many interesting questions are closed and too many not-useful-to-me ones take up most of the bandwidth.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My $0.02 YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30166" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T17:50:59.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4569" CreationDate="2017-02-25T20:31:58.590" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;My method of developing a concept to a working piece of &lt;s&gt;plotdevice&lt;/s&gt; technology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;___________________________________________________&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original concept&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       ||&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       /&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(repeat untill  there are little to no flaws):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flawsearching (done by the aswerers)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;||&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Proposing possible solutions (done by me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;____________________________________________________&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should I do it, or it counts as duplicate, or against the rules?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;everything is so gray in here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T01:50:40.330" Title="Developing a concept throughout multiple questions" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-25T21:56:19.193" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question a few weeks back that was closed for being too broad. I have restructured the question to make it more specific. Can I resubmit it or would it be closed again for being a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T14:30:46.200" Title="Can I resubmit a question that was closed by moderators?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-02-25T22:05:05.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Use the Edit, Luke!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that reposting an &quot;on hold&quot; question will get it closed as a duplicate.  You can &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; your existing question to improve it though, and that will put it in a queue of questions to be reviewed and (hopefully, if the new question is good enough) reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read the comments about why your question was put &quot;on hold&quot;. We use the term &quot;on hold&quot; specifically because they can be reopened if fixed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make edits to the question to address the concerns of the editors. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then wait a bit... after a question is edited, it goes in the review queue. It took five editors to put your question on hold... it takes five editors to agree to reopen it. It does happen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While waiting, you can use Meta or chat to talk to folks to better understand the issues with your question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3097" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T14:30:46.200" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T14:30:46.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4566" CreationDate="2017-02-26T01:50:40.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each question should (1) stand on its own and (2) not change out from under answers it's already received.  So, if you ask a question and learn from the answers that one of your core assumptions was wrong, you &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; edit that question to change it and instead &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; ask a new question.  Or, if you ask question A and get an answer that you want to develop further, instead of asking the author for lots of additional information that wasn't part of the original question, ask a new question B and explain what you already know and what you're trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequences of questions like that are fine.  (I've done it, and I'm far from the only one.)  It's helpful to link to the previous questions, but make sure the new question contains all the information that someone would need to answer -- offer links, but don't assume people will always follow them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T01:50:40.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T04:57:12.267" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72301/how-is-it-possible-for-an-ai-to-stay-in-a-kiddie-ride-for-as-long-as-it-wants&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72301/how-is-it-possible-for-an-ai-to-stay-in-a-kiddie-ride-for-as-long-as-it-wants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested to see how the community handles this one. &#xA;It seems obviously from a kid. Providing the background education to make this a meaningful question seems dubious. Does that mean it should be closed? Or does it get answered in the mythic realm the kid (I assume, and, yes, I know that's dangerous online) implies with his question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; Well, it got closed as &quot;unclear&quot;. If you were expecting a question grounded in how computers actually work, then, yes, this is unclear. But if you &#xA;go read 1980s-90s &quot;players step into cyberspace&quot; stories, this is how people &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; cyberspace would work, and I see that misconception commonly still. They think of the AI as a creature that crawls through a series of tubes to reach different screens. Those stories weren't bad, they were just factually completely off-base. And there are many people -- including the person asking this question -- who have those misconceptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have we done the right thing by closing as &quot;unclear&quot; instead of providing a more broad, educational answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T03:52:45.777" Title="An odd question about kiddie rides tests the VTC ideology we've been debating" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-02-26T08:07:59.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shalvenay explained what to do: edit the old closed question, and then click on the &lt;code&gt;reopen&lt;/code&gt; button which is among the grey items just below the tags, after the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also discuss the question here on meta: since it already has a post you can refer to it doesn’t make sense to use the &lt;strong&gt;sandbox&lt;/strong&gt; in this case, but can post a meta discussion like you did here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use the [chat] room, but that depends on who’s around when you wander in.  Point is, you don’t have to guess at it, but have ways to &lt;strong&gt;discuss&lt;/strong&gt; the broadness issues and specific ways of reworking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T11:15:22.183" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T11:15:22.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4570" CreationDate="2017-02-26T15:57:49.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the current status of the question is correct. The question is incoherent and hard to understand. There is a lot of information missing and really the whole thing is just very vague and contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not something that can be cleaned up by anyone except the OP who needs to explain clearly what the scenario is and what the question they want answered is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given they haven't responded to any comments then it seems unlikely that this will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Age is irrelevant. There are elected stack exchange moderators who you would class as a &quot;kid&quot; by the criteria you discuss above. What matters is clear communication and constructive participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T15:57:49.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T19:02:21.403" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked this before and it was closed, so I would like some feedback on how I can narrow it down. In this worldbuilding scenario, pregnancy would be an active rather than passive process. A woman could biologically determine the sex of their child in the womb and make it a boy or girl. They could choose whether to carry it to term or abort it completely. Rate of gestation could be controlled, sped up or slowed down as needed. Birth would be a painless or maybe even enjoyable experience. Exteme stress would be detrimental to the pregnancy, and the baby's health could be adversely affected or cause its death.&#xA;The question was: would these advantages be enough to justify or lead to a matriarchal society? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69568/&quot;&gt;Could the biological capability to control their reproductive process justify a matriarchal society forming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T08:58:55.743" Title="I need help editing this question about a hypothetical matriarchal society" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|asking-questions|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4573" CreationDate="2017-02-26T19:31:46.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question is fine. It is hard to answer as there are many aspects to the question patriarchy vs. matriarchy but I wouldn't say that this is not answerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with your original question before your recent edit was that you had multiple questions, one of them being &quot;What would be the social ramifications of this?&quot;. This is almost always too broad. But with the focus solely on matriarchy it should be fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question can be posted. You should edit your original question and see what other users with more experience say about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35696571#35696571&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is my first reaction to the OP posting on Meta and asking for help in chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35852101#35852101&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are my comments on this topic I posted in the chat after some time where Pavel responded that the question is okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35934671#35934671&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is another discussion about this topic that was moved from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73330/could-these-changes-early-in-human-history-lead-to-a-matriarchial-society-develo&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/55084/discussion-on-question-by-shard-martin-could-these-changes-early-in-human-histor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where OP asked for feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question currently has 3 Upvotes and no negative comments after the most recent edit by OP, as well as no negative feedback in this Meta-Post so it should be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T15:12:58.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4047" CreationDate="2017-02-27T03:58:10.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Civilization&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Extreme future tech&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orionsarm.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion's Arm Universe Project&lt;/a&gt;: A MASSIVE worldbuilding exercise which has the galaxy ruled by 16 different factions, each of which is dominated by a different ascended technology and explores how to actually build Dyson spheres, matrioshka brains, organic AI, corporate hegemonies, and other galaxy spanning government systems. All the advanced tech imagination you could ever want to explore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T03:58:10.917" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-02-27T03:58:10.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2017-02-27T08:18:28.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why go with a classic time travel conundrum?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to resolve the causality problems with a single mutable timeline compared to a single deterministic timeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &quot;Mutable&quot; means any change to history, either past or future, will remain changed -- unless time travllers deliberately intervene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &quot;Deterministic&quot; means history remains unchanged. Vide the philosophical concept of 'determinism&quot;. Refer to Novikov self-consistency for physicists' version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T08:18:28.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T16:54:51.063" Score="8" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just started playing about with SEDE (a very nice tutorial &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and one of the queries I eventually wrote was &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/633362/votes-by-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on the votes per month. They had quite a distinct trend I hadn't really expected. Thought someone might find this interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YM6fA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YM6fA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Votes per month on WB&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The months are numbered as you would expect (1 being January and that low point at 5 being may).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it isn't 'activity' exactly and I might try to change that (take into account number of questions/answers made maybe) but still a measure of something all the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Whoosh's comment I thought I would see how age was distributed across WB accounts. I did that (I think) in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/633937#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; query. Which produced the graph below:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9LDYd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9LDYd.png&quot; alt=&quot;WB Age Dist&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to support that a lot of WB users are under 25 but the bulk are still over. Of course some people have made up their age (unless we have a three year old and 42 97 year olds on here) but I would expect a trend to still show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try to make a query to pick out the votes cast and posts made by each age (it could be the younger users ask or answer more questions or vote more liberally and that leads to the trend we see).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="31124" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T11:43:34.907" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T11:43:34.907" Title="SEDE: Votes by month" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4578" CreationDate="2017-02-27T20:30:46.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I initially thought that this was due to the site being 2.5 years old, as the months that have not been repeated 3 times were the ones with the least activity. However, after modifying the query to look over the past two years (thus every month should have been visited twice), and even when looking at questions/answers, it appears the same trend exists: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/633707#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to query&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oKih1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oKih1.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of query results&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, this trend doesn't seem to exist for other sites (part of my confusion was due to the fact that I was looking at stats for Stack Overflow for a while). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only explanation I can come up with is school. People are really active in the summer, but less so as the months go on, then activity picks up again around winter break, before starting a long downward slope for the spring semester and final exams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T20:30:46.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4581" CreationDate="2017-02-27T21:14:32.773" Score="8" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, and I misunderstood the scope of the site when I asked my first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72401/how-does-a-no-body-get-elected-president-of-the-us&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72401/how-does-a-no-body-get-elected-president-of-the-us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the guidance I've received so far, I'd like to edit this to be more on topic. I'm not entirely sure if I can do this effectively to meet the requirements of the site (and I'm ok with it being closed for that reason). However, I'd like to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've presented in my question is a high level over view of the plot of the story - a nobody runs for president and manages to get elected. I'm interested in showing how such a journey could take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question for you is how can I make this question more on topic? The world I'm operating is similar to today. I'm planning on making the US slightly more isolated globally, but nothing extreme. I'm actively avoiding the doom and gloom the left currently portrays and actively avoiding the image that everything will be great again. After 4-8 years there will be some differences from the previous administration, but I want to make realistic changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T09:15:50.137" Title="How can I edit this from plot to world building?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4580" CreationDate="2017-02-28T09:15:50.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the general outline of the question is fairly ok; I my opinion, as I mentioned in my comment, it's only borderline story based. However, you ask the question in a way that suggest that you want idea generations as answers, which is outside the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I suggest is that you either break down the question in to smaller questions or try to give some more premises and ask if they are plausible rather than asking &quot;how can he win&quot; without any limits. What i mean is, there are so many ways to handwave why he would win the election that the question is too broad - either you suggest a solution yourself and then change the question to &quot;is [...] plausible?&quot; or you ask partial questions in the way of &quot;how could he deal with [...]&quot; (with the usual SE way of trying to keep it to one question per question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two suggestions of issues he will face that I can think of are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How this nobody would finance his campaign?&lt;/em&gt; Trump is claimed to be the most cost efficient president candidate, partially because he used free ads through social media, but that only really worked because he already was famous before the start of the campaign. Despite being cost effective, his campaign still used roughly &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;$1 billion&lt;/a&gt;. Have you considered how the nobody will pay for ads, travel and promotional items? Either change the question to &quot;how would a nobody finance a presidential campaign&quot; (and ask follow up questions later) or figure out a way and ask if that way is plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How would an inexperienced nobody win debates/persuade voters?&lt;/em&gt; You do say that he has chutzpah, but is it enough? Is he going to be a slick, smooth talking person that will be able to win everyone over to his cause with awesome persuasion skills? Will you, as a writer, be able to write such debates in a believable way or will you simply skip over them by stating &quot;the debate was a clear success&quot;? A potential question could be what he should do to become really persuasive. However, if you plan to ask how you should write believable debates, then that might fit better on writers.SE (and might be off topic even there).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T09:15:50.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-28T18:24:20.330" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; which is well used, and Handwavium is basically a technology/physics equivalent...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many questions that involve this physics-bending stuff, so I think there's a market for it. It would also be a handy way for questioner to indicate that Handwavium can firm part of an acceptable answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:46:01.313" Title="Would a 'Handwavium' tag be a bad idea?" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2017-02-28T19:03:46.043" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.  It's a bad idea. (or at least I would argue against it)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this mainly because handwavium is used to explain away things we aren't worried about when we are bending the laws of the real universe.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions themselves cannot be about the handwavium itself because it does whatever it is the author wants it to, meaning questions on the topic would by default be opinion based.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while yes, we do talk about handwavium, the questions being asked are about things around or related to the handwavium, not the substance itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T19:10:57.030" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T19:10:57.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2017-02-28T19:42:10.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Not a great idea&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Handwavium is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltX1M1zR2mQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;that place you dare not look&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of Worldbuilding.  By default it's a null value that cannot be reasoned about.  If you do start reasoning about handwavium, it turns into science or magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how would you get questions about handwavium that aren't too broad since handwavium by definition can be absolutely anything in or out of the universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T19:42:10.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-28T21:34:35.007" Score="9" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of the writing of this post, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72313/627&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72310/627&quot;&gt;particular&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72409/627&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/72285/627&quot;&gt;What would an out-of-water submarine (for water-breathing mer-people) look like?&lt;/a&gt; which have raised some eyebrows, mine included. The question essentially asks for a land-based version of a military submarine for an aquatic species:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My mermen &amp;amp; women are at WWII era warfare and interested in their version of 'underwater,' meaning they want out-of-sea vehicles (sorry, there is no antonym to submarine) to fight over land similar to our attempts to occupy the seas with submarines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two of these three answers - including the most upvoted answer of all, with 64 net votes (+66/-2) - are essentially just pictures of a fish tank on wheels, with little explanation or supplementary material that relate to the question. The third one is better, but could use a lot more explanation. Here's the full text of the 64-vote answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;A fish-tank&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g82fj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g82fj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A one has been built already: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/YbNmL6hSNKw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/YbNmL6hSNKw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I saw that answer just posted to the question, I would consider it a joke and might delete it. However, I didn't see it when it was just posted, and it now has a score of 64. Now, I'm not saying that highly-voted answers shouldn't be deleted, but none of the mods would, I think, be comfortable taking unilateral action on a post this well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think about these three answers? Are they valid answers, which should be left alone? Are they jokes, which should be downvoted and/or deleted? Is there a middle ground somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta discussion and reviewing in the queues seem to indicate that the community supports deletion. As such, all three posts have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.453" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T22:19:36.637" Title="Are pictures of fishbowls on wheels valid answers?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4586" CreationDate="2017-02-28T21:48:50.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have another doubt, that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If the fish bowl on wheels is an answer, was it a good question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one does answer the question. It is a vehicle for water breathing creature to move on land. It answers the question that was asked in one of the best possible ways, that is by providing real life example, and it does not contradict anything posted in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; Question asked was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would a water-filled &quot;landmarine&quot; &lt;strong&gt;look like&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine. So details about controlling it may be considered tangential or even  off topic to the question. When it comes to look, what's a better answer than a photo? But, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4586/are-pictures-of-fishbowls-on-wheels-valid-answers/4587?noredirect=1#comment12537_4587&quot;&gt;as noted&lt;/a&gt;, this one indeed is controlled by the fish - and that makes it a vehicle all right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe that if there is a problem, it is not exactly with the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T22:05:42.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T22:05:42.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4560" CreationDate="2017-02-28T22:42:57.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It is always nice to provide details&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math, papers, specific scientific references are always OK. They are not always needed, but are always something nice to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Problem is not in hard content, but in lack of soft one&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, really, most of the times answer should contain a section that's easy to understand for someone with high-school level of education. Sometimes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; this might be omitted, but as a rule of thumb, it should be present wherever feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T22:42:57.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4532" CreationDate="2017-02-28T23:05:23.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really enjoyed your joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I voted to put it on hold. Not because it was bad, but because it was off-topic and I'd rather not see this site to become &quot;anything goes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that question that inspired you was built around pretty solid worldbuilding idea that written / stored text might count as a prayer, and this prayer can do specific magic. This would be consistent with Cthulhu myths and even with some real world religions. Your question lacks such point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would do, if it was my question, would be to vote to put it on hold and then flag for moderator's attention and ask to close it. Actually, I did VTC my own questions on Stack Exchange network on several occasions. Consider it, maybe that's what you should do? I mean, if you share my concerns. You would keep all the reputation earned and it wouldn't get deleted (way too upvoted for deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, then either try to put something that could plausibly help mods to take over the world (if, for example, there was a supernatural being granting superpowers based on your impact on the Internet?), or ask what situations could allow that. But, to be honest, it would be pretty hard to do without making it a chameleon question now, when there are answers posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T23:05:23.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4586" CreationDate="2017-02-28T23:14:48.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The question is fine, the answer is not&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4587/28639&quot;&gt;@Molot's answer&lt;/a&gt;. There are plenty of good, thorough answers to the question, and it is completely possible to cover the bases just like with any other &quot;good&quot; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popular questions tend to get lots of attention, and that often results in some relatively bad answers, but that doesn't mean the questions are bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the answer &quot;a fish tank on wheels&quot; may have been so widely accepted because it seems like the obvious choice, it is &lt;strong&gt;not fit for the site&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We dislike &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1731/are-answers-solely-referencing-novels-movies-etc-okay/1734#1734&quot;&gt;link-only answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Links are not always active, meaning the answers may not be around forever, and it can be hard to tell if they're credible or safe. In this case, the link is helpful, but the answer should put in more effort to explain how the link is relevant or what its consequences are for the OP's world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't fit the scenario presented by the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP is looking for World War II - era tech, while this tank was created in 2014, and uses computation, analysis, navigation. and sensors that are not appropriate for the given time period.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP wants something that is likely pressurized: humans are most comfortable with diving equipment at the depths the creatures in question can reach, so they may want the same when they come to the surface. A normal fish tank does not meet this need.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP likely wants something that can be fueled underwater, which may require a different process, and something which can be entered without needing a human to scoop you out. The answer does not address specific concerns with swapping water for air in this scenario.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, the answer requires the reader to bridge a lot of gaps in order to adapt it to the question. It presents an idea, but does not attempt to apply it to the circumstances given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer may seem clever and interesting, but it does not meet site standards. I recommend deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T23:14:48.353" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4586" CreationDate="2017-03-01T01:34:11.190" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A picture is worth 1000 words&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two highest rated answers, after the picture of a fish tank, included the quotes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...these supermarines would not need any fancy mechanisms to keep the&#xA;  water sealed. Just a simple box filled with water would suffice. They&#xA;  wouldn't even need to periodically refill with oxygen. Just having&#xA;  some elongated tubes coming out from the top letting the air desolve&#xA;  into the water would work. You could even open the top of the&#xA;  supermarine every once and a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A fish tank on wheels. That would be the basic design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This picture answer just said the same thing as those other answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now none of those answers are great, but if all the most highly rated answers are bad, then the problem must be with the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I think the ship has sailed on closing the question, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T01:34:11.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4594" CreationDate="2017-03-02T08:10:53.123" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72586/getting-rid-of-democracy&quot;&gt;Getting rid of democracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP in this question specifically asks about how to get United Kingdom out of current democracy. When reading this question, I got thought: &lt;strong&gt;Having country specific tag would make that question more clear&lt;/strong&gt; in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is not only this question. Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; questions ask about USA, United Kingdom and sometimes other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not suggesting tags for all countries, but I think that having tags for at least USA and UK could help to add more clarity to questions being asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Cons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only argument against I can imagine is, that such tags could be misleading and have users believe we talk real issues here. However, that could be fixed by clear tag wiki description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T15:49:16.567" Title="Should there be (alternate) countries tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2017-03-02T08:16:25.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are not for clarifications. Their main purpose is categorization and search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see if tag makes sense, ask yourself few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you  imagine someone being expert in such tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can  you imagine someone searching for questions with such tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or ignoring them  on purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In  my opinion, answers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not  really, because fictional analogs of any given country may vary wildly&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because of that, my answer is firm &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On  the   other hand, maybe tag country-specific would make sense? But that's another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T08:16:25.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2017-03-02T15:49:16.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/japan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;japan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;japan&lt;/a&gt;. We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/united-states&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-states&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;united-states&lt;/a&gt;. I don't think you need &quot;alt-Japan&quot; also. If you wish to introduce a new tag for specific nations, I think that's appropriate as it helps with indexing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T15:49:16.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T16:25:55.217" Score="10" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last night I posted a new blog post and created the corresponding community event.  It shows up correctly on meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BWHfV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BWHfV.png&quot; alt=&quot;events  on meta&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the new event is missing on main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/shMbF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u43Rr.png&quot; alt=&quot;events on main&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: Since posting this question, the events have changed -- the Brutal Builder is now the &quot;old&quot; one that shows up everywhere, and there's a new one, The Tools of Battle, that appears only on meta.  We're getting one event on main but two on meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing happened when I created the event for the previous blog post on Saturday night.  Before that, events showed up correctly.  We generally show two recent blog posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On main the slot is instead given to a &quot;hot&quot; meta question, but those are only supposed to be used to fill in if there's nothing more important to show in the box.  Community events are supposed to trump that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a problem on all sites.  Look at the Community Bulletin from Mi Yodeya (main site):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/shMbF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/shMbF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mi Yodeya&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two community events!  It's working for them but not for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we get our events to show correctly on main?&lt;/strong&gt;  The whole point of the events is to publicize things to the many users who don't come to meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried un-featuring some meta posts here, thinking those were pushing out events even though events should &quot;win&quot;.  It didn't help; now we get plain old non-featured meta posts, but not both of our blog-post events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="516" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T17:41:37.150" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T17:46:30.473" Title="Community events are not being correctly shown on main (but are on meta)" Tags="|bug|status-deferred|community-events|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T17:27:39.113" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that might be considered broad. The setting is one where only women can use magic. All females can access it through some training, some being stronger than others. It takes the form of rituals and spells that may require multiple components and is time consuming. However, it is very powerful and forms the bedrock of society. It is often combined with technology to form a sort of magitech civilization. The question is how to make men relevant in a society like that? Have I made them completely useless? Does there need to be limitations on what magic can do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T03:59:09.833" Title="How to make men relevant in a world where magic is gender specific to women?" Tags="|discussion|support|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4597" CreationDate="2017-03-02T18:40:34.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion: On topic and not too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as an advance comment, are you sure &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; women can use it? I mean if it requires training, then 99% of the world's women for most of history would not have had the free time to train, due to the need to farm, have babies, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T18:40:34.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T21:34:58.087" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there are a number of questions dealing with tidally locked planets or moons, and as the fresh dup question suggests, these are not easily discoverable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I like to point out that &lt;strong&gt;locking&lt;/strong&gt; might not be the common case. So how about a new tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spin-orbit-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spin-orbit-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spin-orbit-resonance&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-locking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-locking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-locking&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What names would be better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many questions do we have that ought to be so tagged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:39:18.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T19:41:53.747" Title="Organize tidal-locking Qs with a tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2017-03-02T21:50:58.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-locking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-locking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-locking&lt;/a&gt; seems good to me. Easy to recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spin-orbit-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spin-orbit-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spin-orbit-resonance&lt;/a&gt; might be more technically correct, but I doubt people will recognize it easily enough for the tag to be useful. Also, for most questions that really needs one side to the sun, resonance tag is a bad choice. Other resonances (if exists) can't give results people expect from locked planet. So if other resonances exists, it is not a synonym, but rather a broader tag. I don't recall any single question that would need this broader definition, and all existing ones call for tidally locked and nothing else - anything else would be unsuitable for OPs' purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;challenging question's premise is already considered acceptable&lt;/strong&gt;, so this in no way prevents anyone from answering like &lt;em&gt;“you’ll really get 3:2 in that case”&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:39:41.443" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:39:41.443" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4597" CreationDate="2017-03-03T03:59:09.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say it is on topic, but it is still Too Broad in its current form (and, no, that's not intended as a pun). Kingledion had some questions. Those questions are key for me... when you ask questions about a magic system and its impact on the world -- physically, sociologically, etc -- I believe you need to pour your heart into the question with as much information as you can identify. Without that, each person who answers will have their own conception of your magic system, and the answers you get will be sweepingly different, and most of them not useful (I say having read many such questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can nail down the details of your magic more, we can judge whether there's a role for men in this world. You need that to narrow the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T03:59:09.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2017-03-03T04:00:41.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidally-locked&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidally-locked&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidally-locked&lt;/a&gt;. It's the term most commonly used to describe the planets and moons, and people usually are asking about worlds that are already locked, not the process by which locking happens, although I would put that within the scope of the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T19:41:53.747" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T19:41:53.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2017-03-03T13:21:07.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest going with a more general tag, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbits&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbits&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbits&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbital-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbital-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbital-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;, or (my preference) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbital-properties&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbital-properties&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbital-properties&lt;/a&gt;.  So the tag would include (and somewhat organize) related questions re eccentricity or inclination of orbits -- and how such properties can influence worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30166" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:40:18.980" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:40:18.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4605" CreationDate="2017-03-03T17:01:35.207" Score="5" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the stated reason my answer was deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(or is it this one, or is it both?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel very confident I answered the question the OP asked and it did NOT require clarification by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3366/rules-of-peer-moderation&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rules of peer reviewing on WB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rule 1: Please read the post you are reviewing.&#xA;  Sometimes people judge a question only by its title. The OP might have written an unfortunate title, but the question might be on-topic, not too broad, answerable, etc. Go beyond a glimpse, and really read the whole post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72463/what-would-the-most-effective-means-of-space-combat-be-in-the-near-future&quot;&gt;OP’S QUESTION - What would the most effective means of space combat be in the near future?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question- How do you most effectively defeat a team of seven to twenty men while you're in space?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer, in the context of someone writing a book, did NOT require clarification from the asker. The asker did NOT ask me or anyone else to write the book for them. My Answer DIRECTLY answered their question and their question was NOT augmented by or qualified with a REQUEST ON DETAILS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrkvička explains (and thank you) “it was just that other users on this site thought your answer was not of enough quality to for answer, but should rather have been a comment”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2588/how-to-deal-with-users-who-cannot-comment-due-to-lack-of-rep&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to deal with users who cannot comment due to lack of rep?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vote to delete if you have the necessary reputation, and &lt;strong&gt;clearly tell the user what they can expect&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Leave a comment on their answer explaining that it is highly likely to be deleted&lt;/strong&gt;, and encourage them to find other questions to which they are able to post solid answers that others can vote up. &lt;strong&gt;If the answer can be fixed with editing, encourage them to edit it&lt;/strong&gt;. Teach them the ropes! I would also suggest to avoid downvoting unless the post is truly horrible; particularly to someone who doesn't know how our system works, a first experience being a downvote on something they wrote when genuinely trying to be helpful can be devastating.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple things in the above that indicate a lack of knowledge, understanding or sensitivity on the reviewers part of this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this a case of quantity is mandated by the few?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DETAILS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context of OP’s question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a book, and in the book...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They have access to whatever weaponry you can think of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question- How do you most effectively defeat a team of seven to twenty men while you're in space?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72463/what-would-the-most-effective-means-of-space-combat-be-in-the-near-future/72464#72464&quot;&gt;My Answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They have access to whatever weaponry you can think of&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ok, I am going to create a target and forget canister of nanobots. The nanobots can be different types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vs the Marines, they simply cover the suit and go rigid. I could also add corrosive, penetrating etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vs the Ship, cover the propulsion system, penetrate, corrode, dismantle exterior assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the world-building perspective - if you had such unstoppable and versatile nanobots, you could probably single-handily take down any Big Bad Guy. Spending it on 10-20 random troops seem like a waste of resources. Also, it doesn't seem that the troops would investigate a random target with the &quot;forgotten&quot; nanobots. Accordint to the OP, they are just &quot;released into the vaccum of space and start fighting&quot;. – Roux&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wow, I can comment :) I do not think they are unstoppable, I am painting a scenario were a single object can be overcome by the many. In some ways this is akin to the Last Star Trek movie. They were not Godly, they simply had a great tactical advantage. If I am out of line by breaking the single combatants scenario, I apologize but my take on the OP's world, that is how I would arm my ships and troops, augmented by traditional weapons and armor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burki's reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker. - From Review– Burki “&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IS Burki’s reply the satisfaction of&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rule 5: If you are going to vote to close and there's no comment about it on the question, take your time to write one, or refrain from voting to close.&#xA;  When 5 voters agree that a question has serious problem, that question is put on-hold. Apart from closing blatantly wrong questions, one of the aim is to improve the overall quality of the questions. But that can only be done if the voters express their views. So if you are reviewing a question, make sure that there is a comment on the question that reflect your idea. If there aren't, do write one yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was this rule followed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rule 6: Make sure you are up to date with the discussion.&#xA;  This is related to the rules 2 and 5. When the first votes to close appear and correctly commented on, it is likely that the OP will ask some details, or edit their question. So maybe that too broad vote isn't valid for the current version of the post. In any case, make sure that appart from the post, you have gone through all the comments to see what is the current standings.&#xA;  Follow up on that rule, if the OP, e.g., provide a set of constraints for a broad question, make sure those are edited in the question. Either by the OP, or yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Brythan reviewed this 2 days ago: Looks OK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Burki reviewed this 2 days ago: Recommend Deletion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frostfyre reviewed this 2 days ago: Looks OK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PatJ reviewed this 2 days ago: Recommend Deletion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrkvička reviewed this Feb 28 at 15:29: Recommend Deletion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@EnigmaMaitreya The message from Burki is an auto-generated message for any answer that is tagged as &quot;low quality, should have been a comment&quot; (and was, thus, not manually written by Burki). That is, you did not actually break any particular rule, it was just that other users on this site thought your answer was not of enough quality to for answer, but should rather have been a comment and Burki happened to be the user that got your answer in their review queue. If you have any questions about how to properly use the site, then post them in meta. – Mrkvička&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33823" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T21:39:12.460" Title="I would like to see this action as valid but have issues with it" Tags="|discussion|reviews|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2017-03-03T19:05:13.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked the moderator timeline for your answer, and pieced together a sequence of events, including what happened with the reviews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flagged&lt;/a&gt; your answer as Low Quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to the flag, the answer was sent to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/161391/274942&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt;, specifically, the Low Quality Posts queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Five people reviewed the answer.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three users selected Recommend Deletion. Two chose to leave no canned comment (although one later commented on your answer). One did choose a canned comment (it's often &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/278916/274942&quot;&gt;not clear that the comments are automatic&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two users selected Looks Okay, removing the answer from the queue. It would have taken six people to Recommend Deletion for your answer to actually be deleted, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/226092/274942&quot;&gt;some of these changes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You, confused and probably a little annoyed (justifiably), brought the issue to meta, which was definitely the right thing to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, your answer was &lt;em&gt;considered&lt;/em&gt; for deletion, but enough people though it was fine, so it stayed as it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. First, the question wasn't great (not your fault, of course), because it placed few constraints on possible answers. I think it should have been closed as Too Broad, not Primarily Opinion-Based, but that's irrelevant; it was closed nonetheless. &quot;How do you do X&quot; questions often have these sorts of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your answer is valid. Maybe you could have gone into a bit more detail, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nanobots would work. I'd want to run away (float away?) if I saw a cloud of those buggers coming.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quite a few other answers didn't go into much detail - which is a problem on Worldbuilding sometimes. I'm not saying that that &lt;em&gt;excuses&lt;/em&gt; other answers that aren't that detailed, but frankly, you're new here, and it's unreasonable to expect you to know what an ideal answer looks like. Generally, &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; gets it right all of the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edits are definitely possible. Just expand a bit on the nanobots' strategy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, one answer &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; deleted by the community via the same process your answer went through. It was deleted because it was just a link to another post. While that's not the only reason an answer may be deleted, it's worth noting that that's the kind of thing we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; strive for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, welcome to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, and thanks for bringing this to meta. I hope you stay with the site. One more tip: You can always comment on your own posts, no matter how little reputation you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta musings: I don't like the phrase &quot;provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&quot;. If that was the gold standard, we'd be deleting dozens and dozens and dozens of answers each day. Very rarely does the author not post a follow-up comment on an answer to their question. I know what the gist of the phrase is - in other words, give as many details as possible so the answer is complete - but it could probably be re-worded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T19:10:48.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2017-03-03T21:39:12.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the persons voting to delete it, I feel like I would want to explain why I chose that option so that you may write excellent answers in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was of quite low quality, it open up for any kind of answer and should have been closed earlier than it was. That is, as HDE pointed out, not your fault in any way. However, I did find your answer to be quite confusing. I'll break it down to explain it better. Please be aware that none of what I write is intended as a personal attack or insult, I only wish to help you improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I am going to create a target and forget canister of nanobots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not really sure what you meant here. In retrospect, I guess you meant &amp;quot;forge a canister&amp;quot;, but I'm still not sure. I would like to have some more info of what you'd do with the canister - would you toss it, launch it, is it a spray canister, does it contain explosives to further the damage and spread the nanobots? Do you have any thoughts on how to ensure that the nanobots won't eat through the canister and attack ones own ship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vs the Marines, they simply cover the suit and go rigid. I could also add corrosive, penetrating etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vs the Ship, cover the propulsion system, penetrate, corrode, dismantle exterior assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay so this part I did understood, but I would want to know a bit more how you are thinking. I would love to read some more information about how it would work. Are you thinking that it would be the same canister of nanobots for any target and that it can adapt or will each one be highly specialized? Would the ship likely require more nanobots to be disabled or are they building new at such pace that it's enough with a few to kill a ship? Would they be able to physically hack the electronics and mess with the ships computers? How would you deal with a marine covered in nanobots that manages to make it to the hull of your own ship, wouldn't that spread the nanobots on to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put: I would want you to flesh out the answer with some more details. Would you happen to have any references to literature (sci-fi in this case as we don't have nanobots in real life) that describes what you have in mind that you can refer to? I love to read and love to get recommendations on good stuff with brilliant ideas, so references is always a huge bonus if you have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I could have voted &amp;quot;looks ok&amp;quot; and then left a comment and asked you to clarify more about your answer; however, my experience of doing so for new users is that less than five persons actually did so. The rest just ignored their answer and let it accumulate dust. I voted to delete as the answer was short, confusing and because I thought you'd likely be like most others - the answer would stay unchanged and low quality. In this case I seems to have made a mistake - the fact that you actually came here to meta and asked about the case after my comment is a sign that you do take the site seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding, I hope you will enjoy your stay!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T21:39:12.460" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3366" CreationDate="2017-03-03T23:08:08.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange and my history:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used Stack Exchange since its doors opened and no I can not remember when that was anymore than I can remember when what the heck of the “ …. Experts ….” (Expert-Exchange?) went pay to ask. Yes I shut them off the second they did that. Knowledge should be free and those that Know should offer their answer freely, if we, in a Real Life view want our Real Life Community to grow and become better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Qualifier:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, or at least think I do, that Reviewers are Volunteers. In one sense I am volunteering my time now to add to the narrative of moderation.  I do not see that as setting me apart or empowering me to just blow things off, take sides, have friends, have enemies etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Topic Vote To Close&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well I just deleted 3 pages of explanation as that seems to be more what people like than simple statements, but that just is not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote to Close should NOT be a task, duty that needs to be performed. It should be a responsibility to apply the rules, with compassion and understanding. Help where you can, else DO NOT HARM without documented reasons and No you guys stop this insistence of writing books as explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reviews:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the process is one or more people flag a post as whatever that throws it in the Review Queue for review.  Right here is the very first point. Anyone that does that should cite the rules that are being broken OR if you want it easier document the why that must list the offending whatever and why they feel it is deserving whatever the flag they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone that wants to review and Vote to Close or Vote to Open should be required to document why they think that and if applicable cite the rules that support their opinion. If they do NOT have the time or knowledge of that which is being reviewed they sure as heck do not have the knowledge to vote on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not campaigning for being a Reviewer or Moderator&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have moderated Forums for both Free to Play Games and Pay to Play Games. I have GM’d in said games. How this relates is it gives me experience in dealing with people and their desire to see the world through their own personal reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I see here is a mixed bag of moderation. What I see is that brings (my opinion) a mine field/quicksand for posters. As some egregious posts are seemingly ok and some that are benign are immediately put [On Hold]/Deleted. I trust you do not really think that breeds confidence and/or consistency on the part of the posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rules:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules are to convey consistency, build confidence etc in how one can behave in a community.  You have rules, they are as good as any I have seen. NO they are NOT the ones I would choose but the results would be the same so why say mine are better, they would just be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT if Rules are just words on the screen, interpreted by those with the required reputation to interpret them, then … They are not Rules at all. They are justifications and excuses for “people” (aka NOT posters) to do whatever it is they think is right/want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have the Rules and you have the People:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF you want the Rules to be “The Rules” then the Volunteers need to be held accountable for how they use “The Rules”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple means but by no means the best way, would be to allow Voters to be on a separate point list. You have the Reputation System with levels. Fine have a level that qualifies one to vote but that is NOT where it ends. Have an additional qualifier that can be used to enable or disable regardless of Reputation, the ability to Vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF you choose this simple version, then any time someone votes to close, then a two tier action is enabled. First if their vote, for simplicity, is the losing vote, then they lose a point (intentionally left ambiguous to what that means, but could be Positive to the poster be 0.1, Negative to the Poster be 0.5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF the vote goes to put the post [On Hold] OR Deleted, then the poster is automatically given the choice to contest it to a “Higher Review”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should encourage the One Flagging the Post to carefully consider there may be consequences to their action (can not flag for a while, as in the negative is worked off/timed out), the Initial Reviewers to carefully consider the consequences of their actions (can not vote for a while, as in the negative is worked off/timed out).  Meaning everyone has documented their choices, as in can not flag or vote unless there is a documented reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Higher Review is in agreement with the judgment all things stand as is. If the Higher Review is NOT in agreement with the judgment, they can recommend corrective action or simply overturn it, leading to a more significant penalty being assessed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes they are Volunteer’s, Yes indeed, but they are much more than that, they are the Communities Interface to the “Common Poster” and as such they can attract new people or they can alienate people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes they are Volunteer’s but that should not mean they should not be held accountable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33823" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T23:08:08.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4570" CreationDate="2017-03-04T03:52:45.777" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question linked to is and was clear enough to get across the question. The problem is not the question, but the readers seemingly inability to read competently or be at all generous in their willingness to give leeway in how someone separates their thoughts on an a platform that they likely have no idea how to format on and in a world that forces you to just crunch everything into the smallest space possible in most situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just more bad behavior on the part of those voting to close imo. And looking at questions in a bad faith manor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T03:52:45.777" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3366" CreationDate="2017-03-04T16:32:12.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to violate Rule 8, answering a question while voting to close. I thought I was being helpful... trying to guess what the question was about while signaling that I wasn't sure. That got confusing to the OPs, so I stopped. Now, if the question is unclear, I vote to close as &quot;unclear&quot;. Fewer questions get answers, but those that do are clear to all concerned. I have found it to be a better balance. I like Rule 8.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T16:32:12.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T21:25:08.643" Score="5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently crossed 10,000 rep. Ever since, there is always something claimed in the editable changes to review. But when I click on that number 3 (or whatever it is on a given day), it takes me to the Review page, like the one shown, where there is often nothing to review (like the one shown). When I was under 10K and there was a edit count showing, that meant there were edits to review. If I ever clicked on it and got nothing, that meant those were my own tag edits. I haven't been editing tags lately. What is the 3 all about? &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5txzZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5txzZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T15:43:39.203" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T15:43:39.203" Title="Why is the edit count always wrong now that I crossed 10k rep?" Tags="|support|editing|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2017-03-04T21:38:40.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because once you cross 10k rep -- the review counter in the statusbar changes to show the amount of reviews in-flight on the site as a whole. (I know, this seems to be one of the most confusing things that happens at 10k rep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3097" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T21:38:40.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T23:13:03.823" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72943/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-how-the-ball-lightning-destroyed-the-ali&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72943/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-how-the-ball-lightning-destroyed-the-ali&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't get, what the mods trying to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T07:38:43.083" Title="What was the problem of this question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T00:16:02.293" Score="-9" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;h2&gt;My name is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; Michio Kaku. This series will explore classic sci-fi tropes, in an attempt to turn them real, thus helping n00bie writers in their quests.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xF10K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xF10K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72943/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-how-the-ball-lightning-destroyed-the-ali&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72943/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-how-the-ball-lightning-destroyed-the-ali&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72643/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-force-fields&quot;&gt;Sci-fi Science: Physics of Impossibru: &amp;quot;Force fields&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:39:53.553" Title="Sci-Fi science: Physics of Impossibru: The series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4612" CreationDate="2017-03-05T00:28:32.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a longer discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35832128#35832128&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; here are some of the points I think you should keep in mind: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being funny can be good, but it is really hard to do right. Simple questions tend to be far easier to create / answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Especially big pictures of comic-heads exploding can be quite distracting. &lt;strong&gt;Personally&lt;/strong&gt; I prefer just text. Exception: sketches&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain concepts people might not be familiar with in a few words and with a link to a source with more details. Generally everyone should be able to understand your question without much previous knowledge and external sources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to explain everything as concise as possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;References to games/music/culture in general can be good but not everyone gets them: explain them. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are writing a series refer to the series. Write a link to a list of all the questions of your series in the question so other people interested in the style can find other questions like the one you are asking. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. It's a great way to get feedback on the style of the question you have in mind which leads to more views/upvotes/answers and a higher quality of the answers, as well as preventing your question getting closed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally the easiest way to write a question is as &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35824554#35824554&quot;&gt;MichaelK&lt;/a&gt; already mentioned in the comments: &lt;strong&gt;Premise, Problem, Query&lt;/strong&gt;. It's the easiest way to structure your question clearly which allows others to understand the question and therefore answer it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Listen to people with more experience. MichaelK for example has over 18k rep on WorldBuilding: he knows what he is talking about. Plus the people around here are only trying to help you. We do all of this in our free time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T07:36:50.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4613" CreationDate="2017-03-05T01:07:00.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation I was going to put in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/54794/discussion-between-michaelk-and-redacted-redacted&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; might be better served here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I general, the format of posting a worked up detailed idea for SF authors is &lt;strong&gt;not a question&lt;/strong&gt;.  For your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72643/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-force-fields&quot;&gt;first exhibit&lt;/a&gt;, the consensus is that this would best be posted on the associated WB blog.  Even the heavy use of evocative mood-setting images (not strictly needed for illustration) is a good fit there, and not on the Question site.  The Medium blog platform welcomes the kind of banner images you are wanting to incorporate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72943/sci-fi-science-physics-of-impossibru-how-the-ball-lightning-destroyed-the-ali&quot;&gt;second exhibit&lt;/a&gt;, this is clearly &lt;strong&gt;not a question&lt;/strong&gt;.  There is no hint of a question in the title. The introductory sentence and intro paragraph is not a question, but an explanation of your real purpose to provide an &lt;strong&gt;essay&lt;/strong&gt;.  There is a question tacked on the end, as a sort of postscript that does not fit, in a literary manner, with the bulk—it’s an afterthought, asking “how’s that? Brainstorm with me!” because you remembered this is supposed to be a Question venue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the too-broad postscript to a targeted question “can ball lightning do that really?” is a hack, and does not fit the extended essay you posted and is not your real purpose.  If this was your actual question, you would lead with that and then give just the necessary details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case too, I submit you are really wanting to &lt;strong&gt;post on the WB &lt;em&gt;Medium&lt;/em&gt; Blog&lt;/strong&gt;, and I assure you this entire series will be &lt;strong&gt;welcome&lt;/strong&gt; there in its present form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once posted, you can ask questions that &lt;strong&gt;refer&lt;/strong&gt; to it.  For example: “Q: can ball lightning be used as a weapon?” and in the body link to the blog posted essay, summarize &lt;em&gt;just the relevant details&lt;/em&gt; needed for this question, and then restate the Q in a more elaborate form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:39:53.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T06:18:48.570" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/horror&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;horror&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;horror&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmic-horror&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmic-horror&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmic-horror&lt;/a&gt;. I was wondering if horror alone was enough. Cosmic-Horror is a bit too specific and does not appear much different from horror. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T09:54:33.067" Title="Do we need different tags for [horror] and [cosmic horror]?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4612" CreationDate="2017-03-06T07:38:43.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so after the weekend, there's still no answers to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it again and it's still fairly confusing as to what you want your readers to answer with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been raised before in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4615/10945&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; in another of your Meta questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For your second exhibit, this is clearly not a question. There is no hint of a question in the title. The introductory sentence and intro paragraph is not a question, but an explanation of your real purpose to provide an essay. There is a question tacked on the end, as a sort of postscript that does not fit, in a literary manner, with the bulk—it’s an afterthought, asking “how’s that? Brainstorm with me!” because you remembered this is supposed to be a Question venue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice: chop out lots of it and keep those parts for future questions.  Stick with one main simple premise.  For example, &quot;How can I weaponize Ball Lightning?&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, look at the structure of other questions - most of them are fairly short and clearly contain &lt;strong&gt;Premise, Problem, Query&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, decide whether you're writing an article or a question (you can't do both) and post it to the relevant place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T07:38:43.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2017-03-06T09:11:42.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;horror&quot; is enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 4 questions for &quot;horror&quot; and 3 questions for &quot;cosmic-horror&quot;. All of them are the same, except for one that was closed in &quot;horror&quot;. They don't seem to be different and both don't have a description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think you are right: keeping the more general &quot;horror&quot;, adding a description and removing the too specific &quot;cosmic-horror&quot; seems to be the best way to handle this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T09:54:33.067" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T09:54:33.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T15:08:46.190" Score="9" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag on meta for meta questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag on the main site. It's a nice idea; it can be used to organize the many meta discussions we've had on the subject, which can often be hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to use this on other questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, and do we want to do the same for other main site tags which are commonly discussed? For instance, meta posts about a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glarnak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glarnak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glarnak&lt;/a&gt; could use the meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/glarnak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glarnak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glarnak&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; (as I prefer) &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/meta-glarnak&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-glarnak&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-glarnak&lt;/a&gt;; we could then retag the meta questions using &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/meta-hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think? Would this be helpful to organize meta questions about commonly discussed tags? Is this format helpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:15:21.740" Title="Do our tags need tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|meta|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2017-03-06T16:33:38.180" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do think we have a certain subset of tags that get used a lot (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;) and/or get talked about a lot (something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;); it seems like it'd be useful to have these tags in Meta so people can easily access a repository of previous discussions on these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the extra 'meta' is needed though. That would only confuse people (if I'm looking for questions on Meta about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, I just want to search for 'hard-science').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T16:33:38.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2017-03-06T22:45:07.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do our tags need tags, or do some &lt;em&gt;sets&lt;/em&gt; of tags need tags?  That is, is it useful to have a meta-hard-science tag and a meta-science-based tag and so on, or are the discussions intertwined and a lot of posts would get multiply tagged?  If it's the latter, maybe we need a science-tags tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T22:45:07.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T01:32:44.723" Score="4" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;In keeping with the remarks I made &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4420/2017-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/4478#4478&quot;&gt;when running for moderator (see #3)&lt;/a&gt;, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72517/the-best-weapon-for-necromancers&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; from a relative newcomer as a perfect case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has 13 answers including a high-voted accepted answer.  So, just &lt;strong&gt;removing the word “best” from the title&lt;/strong&gt; removes the &quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot; issue and transforms it into the question that everyone who answered took it as, anyway.  The accepted a answer never gives a ranking, but lists a variety of options!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T15:01:18.693" Title="&quot;Primarily Opinion Based&quot; is a reason to edit, not to close" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2017-03-07T11:58:39.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;meta-&quot; prefix would help when tags do overlap* (rare but possible) and might avoid confusion in actual discussions about tags in Meta posts. I think the &quot;meta-&quot; prefix is a good idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;bug&quot; could be a tag for the main site, for example. Even with the markup applied (and not everyone will apply the markup when typing), the background color is different but ambiguous which is which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;. And how would you have a meta tag for &quot;bug&quot; when Meta already has a bug tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T16:15:21.740" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:15:21.740" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4623" CreationDate="2017-03-07T15:01:18.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, it still seems too broad, and I can't really tell the difference between the two close reasons (one requires opinions to choose the 'best' answer, one doesn't have a 'best' answer and requires opinions to choose). Either way, it's still a pretty open-ended question, as can be seen by the 13 answers. Specifically, it looks like a tech level was not specified, so things like syringes and nerve gas are offered as options alongside spears and knives. That, to me, is what makes it close-worthy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyway, I stick to my stance that &lt;strong&gt;close is a reason to edit, not to give up&lt;/strong&gt;. We close questions so that they can be edited without invalidating answers. At least twice I've tried to tell a new user that it's too late to fix their question, it's just going to have to remain closed forever because there's too many existing answers to fix it. If we'd closed it sooner, these users who come into chat or onto Meta to see what they did wrong can be given good advice, can improve their questions, and when the question is reopened they can get quality answers that show other new users the right way to ask and answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think whether or not open-ended questions belong here is another question for another day. Right now, we don't allow it, we encourage well-constrained questions for which there is one or a small subset of good answers. With this in mind, I say we should close often, and reopen just as much. Closing teaches askers how to ask good questions, and teaches answerers to hold off answering until the question is good enough. The users we lose to this are the ones who are unwilling to learn these things, who are too lazy to try to maintain high-quality questions and answers. And I don't think losing them is such a bad thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T15:01:18.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T16:19:54.933" Score="7" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now there is no visual distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;when used in comments&lt;/strong&gt;, even if proper markup is applied ( &lt;code&gt;[tag:bug] and [meta-tag:bug]&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even worse with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; - on my browser (Firefox on Android and on Windows 10) I can't see any difference &lt;strong&gt;even in question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both result with :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a class=&quot;post-tag&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there can't be any difference in how they look, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please make them visually different, so that in case of doubt it would be clearly visible if it's a tag or meta tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little Tampermonkey script, if anyone's interested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ==UserScript==&#xA;// @name         MetaTag&#xA;// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/&#xA;// @version      0.2&#xA;// @description  Make meta tags distinct&#xA;// @author       Mołot&#xA;// @match        http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/*&#xA;// @grant GM_addStyle&#xA;// ==/UserScript==&#xA;&#xA;(function() {&#xA;    'use strict';&#xA;    GM_addStyle(&quot;a.meta-tag::before  { color: #aaa; content: 'meta-tag:'}&quot;);&#xA;    $('a[href^=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/&quot;]').addClass(&quot;meta-tag&quot;);&#xA;    $('a[href*=&quot;/tagged/&quot;]').addClass(&quot;meta-tag&quot;);&#xA;    $('a[href^=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/&quot;]').removeClass(&quot;meta-tag&quot;);&#xA;})();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T14:50:51.973" Title="Please make tags and meta tags visually different on meta and main" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T16:25:07.757" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got access to site analytics today, something that I was probably unreasonably excited about. Site analytics are underwhelming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only see the history and traffic sources pages. Is there more it than that? Can I graph, for example, votes by user reputation or anything? Referring source by post tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T19:22:02.990" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:22:02.990" Title="Site analytics: underwhelming?" Tags="|discussion|site-analytics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Site analytics are available to users with reputation at least 25k (or 5k for sites still in Beta). This tag is for questions about the site analytics feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the site-analytics feature." OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:26:39.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4629" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:06:22.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost everything you can get from site analytics you can also get from the following two sources (which do not require any reputation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quantcast.com/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QuantCast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, SEDE can be used to see the distribution of votes by user reputation: the Users table has columns for Reputation, Upvotes, and Downvotes. The breakdown of sources by post tag is not available anywhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user788" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:06:22.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4629" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:21:29.173" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a rather limited privilege. It was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260849/proposed-micro-privilege-site-analytics&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; of several planned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253668/help-us-identify-micro-privileges-for-top-users&quot;&gt;micro-privileges&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, we haven't added any more since, so we have a sort of underwhelming top privilege. Part of the reason for this is we &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/343387/are-any-major-improvements-planned-for-the-core-qa-engine-is-there-any-point-i/343486#343486&quot;&gt;haven't had a dedicated PM for Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt;. But the other reason is we haven't committed to the idea of smaller privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expected benefit of having new privileges is that they keep people engaged with the site. When you hit a new privilege level, you get a notification and a new feature to play with. The theory, particularly at the top end, is that people will not only be interested in working toward earning new features, but also more excited about continuing to use the site after earning the feature. I asked for suggestions about a potential &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252690/what-privilege-should-30k-users-get&quot;&gt;30k privilege&lt;/a&gt; that would extend the reputation game for people who had achieved all the system had to offer. Unfortunately, even on Stack Overflow, there &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/637098/how-many-users-have-30k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aren't a lot of people&lt;/a&gt; who benefit from the new level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefit of site analytics is that it helps top users understand how the site functions on a high level. For instance, I find the traffic sources particularly useful. Traditionally we assumed sites would function best if they had 90% or more of their traffic coming via Google. That's certainly the case for Stack Overflow and most of our early additions to the Stack Overflow network. But some of our newer (and very successful) sites, such as Worldbuilding have significant traffic coming in via Stack Overflow and other network sites. I first noticed the phenomenon with The Workplace around the time we introduced the &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; section of the sidebar, but there are several sites have significant traffic (but still less than half) from other sites on the network. So traffic sources helps you understand what audience you are currently reaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We considered adding search keywords the the report, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121423/analytics-search-keywords-are-unreliable&quot;&gt;they are unreliable&lt;/a&gt;. Many of the other sorts of things you might be interested in are available via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/06/24/learn-more-about-your-site-with-the-se-data-explorer-heres-how/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, you can get a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/637119/views-by-tag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tags by average views&lt;/a&gt;. That said I'm happy to consider other adding data to the report if helpful for community leaders in understanding how the site works. Feel free to post a feature request on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:21:29.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:29:42.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Took me a while to find this, since the normal criteria would dictate that both events are shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out, there's a bit of logic that runs to add meta posts that are featured &lt;em&gt;network-wide&lt;/em&gt; - that is, posts on Meta Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/featured&quot;&gt;tagged &quot;featured&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Part of the logic involved in that &quot;de-duplicates&quot; the list - I'll spare you the details, but the gist is that normally we try to prevent the same post from appearing in multiple &quot;sections&quot; while building the list, but since we're tacking on additional items at the last moment we have to do it again (imagine a case where a MSE question was featured and &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; listed in an event on a different site - you'd want the event listed, but not the featured post. This might not be an entirely hypothetical scenario.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... Both of your events have the same question associated with them, so one of them gets discarded - but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if the MSE merge logic runs. Since that doesn't happen on meta, both events show up here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaving this tagged as a bug, since presumably the behavior should at least be consistent. As a workaround for the moment, just point one of the events at a different post - I went ahead and pointed the &quot;Brutal Builder&quot; entry at the &quot;previous blog posts&quot; answer, and immediately both events appeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:15.463" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:29:42.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-03-08T19:42:16.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101265/constructed-languages&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/101265.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A site proposal: Constructed languages&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22783" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T19:42:16.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T01:12:00.430" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an index of my posts related to my “Alien Message”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On Worldbuilding&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71048/alien-message-arrows-and-sequence-order&quot;&gt;Alien message: arrows and sequence order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70227/recognizable-natural-numbers-for-alien-message&quot;&gt;Recognizable natural numbers for alien message?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70640/alien-message-invitation&quot;&gt;Alien message: “Invitation”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On other SE sites&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/112370/converting-rational-numbers-to-an-alien-data-format&quot;&gt;Converting rational numbers to an “alien” data format&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T01:58:37.057" Title="My “Alien Message” series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T21:27:18.220" Score="9" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put a bounty on one of my questions over a week ago but had some major life events and wasn't able to get back in time to award it! Half the bounty was auto-awarded to the highest rated answer, but I've accepted another answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to award a (second) bounty to this person as well to thank them for their contribution, but the button seems to have disappeared (probably due to my earlier negligence). Any way I can make this happen? I'm aware that my other 50% can't be rewarded/refunded which is okay as it's my bad!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thread in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72052/how-do-i-use-weird-bouncing-magic-to-power-my-society&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The auto-awarded person had an awesome answer, but the other answerer did such a great job with both design and clarification questions that I think he deserves kudos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33368" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:24:54.923" Title="How do I award a bounty after it was auto-awarded?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4640" CreationDate="2017-03-09T21:58:39.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, once a bounty has been awarded or has expired without being awarded, there's nothing we can do to change it.  You can start a second bounty and manually award it, but I'm afraid the original one is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;bounty documentation on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; (why is this not linked from the Help Center? hmm), you have to double the bounty amount for an additional bounty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that if you offer several bounties on the same question, you will have to double the amount each time (or more). That is, if your first bounty was worth 50 reputation, your second bounty on the same question will have to be for at least 100, your third for at least 200 and so on. If you've already offered a bounty for more than 250, you can still offer more bounties for 500 (the maximum amount) as long as you like (or as long as you have the rep). This doubling applies only to bounties by the same user on the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that you don't see the &quot;start bounty&quot; link because your first bounty was for 100 rep and you don't have 200 rep available right now for a new bounty.  If you keep asking and answering questions on main, you'll probably get it before too long.  Alternatively, perhaps somebody else seeing this discussion will be motivated to start a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you've linked to the question on meta, the answer you accepted will probably get some more attention from the community, possibly including upvotes.  Maybe that's some consolation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T22:24:54.923" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:24:54.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-03-10T02:20:11.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does a Stellar Civilization using sublight travel maintain a standard of cenetralized timekeeping in the face of time dilation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ever since I decided to resize my sci-fi setting to take place in the Solar System in thousands of orbital habitats, I've been forced to put greater thought into the realities of sublight travel over celestial differences. The greatest hassle for me has been time dilation, because something primal in the sense-making part of my brain rejects it wholesale anytime I read about it. But, it's been bringing up some interesting questions nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance - time on the International Space Station progresses ever so slightly - but appreciably - slower than on the surface of Earth. Humankind in this setting lives almost exclusively on space stations and orbitals, so what does that mean for maintaining a standardized system of time in the empire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34101" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T02:20:11.737" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T15:31:14.577" Score="5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9300/a-more-powerful-bow&quot;&gt;this old question&lt;/a&gt; in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/31010&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt; for suggested edits, where Secespitus wanted to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bows&lt;/a&gt; and&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; to the tag list. I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; is a good addition to the question, but when checked the tag list for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bows&lt;/a&gt;, then noticed that only &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73432/how-to-realistically-create-a-bow-thats-also-two-one-handed-swords&quot;&gt;one single question&lt;/a&gt; had that tag so far. From that single question, I also noticed that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swords&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swords&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swords&lt;/a&gt; exists, which is shared with four other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turned out I rejected the suggested edit as I thought that it was not really a good thing to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bows&lt;/a&gt; when there are essentially no other questions with that tag, but I started to ponder on if that was the correct choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we have sub tags to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; to allow users to search for individual weapon types or is that superfluous and not really adding anything useful to the site?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what my stance is on the matter. I personally don't really mind more specific tags, but seeing that there are quite few tagged with them, I have a hard time seeing that anyone would be specifically interested in following only, e.g., bows but no other weapons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are your thoughts on the subject? Should we have it and, &lt;em&gt;if so&lt;/em&gt;, should we go through the 402 questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; and add specific tags to all of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T16:26:05.957" Title="Specialized tags for weapons" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4644" CreationDate="2017-03-10T15:58:54.437" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As my name came up here I want to post an answer about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When creating my question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73432/how-to-realistically-create-a-bow-thats-also-two-one-handed-swords&quot;&gt;How to realistically create a bow that&amp;#39;s also two one-handed swords?&lt;/a&gt;) I saw the &quot;swords&quot;-tag, which is why I used it and added an additional &quot;bows&quot;-tag as I thought that would be sort of missing. I wasn't really paying attention to the amount of questions with the &quot;swords&quot;-tag. After that I added the description for both of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I would like to be able to look for different weapon-types. When searching for questions that are similar this would have been a great help in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would say: &lt;strong&gt;Yes, sub-tags for the &quot;weapons&quot;-tag can be useful.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T15:58:54.437" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4644" CreationDate="2017-03-10T16:08:18.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like there are currently over 400 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; questions. That means if we had, say, four subcategories, they could each get 100 questions. And we have plenty of tags with less questions than that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part that I'd be concerned about is where to draw the lines. For instance, say we make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bows&lt;/a&gt; tag. It would follow that we should create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/crossbows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;crossbows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;crossbows&lt;/a&gt; tag too, right? And then a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/guns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;guns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;guns&lt;/a&gt; tag, but maybe that's not specific enough, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pistols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pistols&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pistols&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rifles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rifles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rifles&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/carbines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;carbines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;carbines&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-guns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-guns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-guns&lt;/a&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, for melee weapons, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/swords&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;swords&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;swords&lt;/a&gt;, but also do we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spears&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spears&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spears&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polearms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polearms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polearms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/axes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;axes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;axes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maces&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;maces&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;maces&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flails&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flails&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flails&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shields&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shields&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shields&lt;/a&gt; but not to be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-shields&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-shields&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-shields&lt;/a&gt; and so on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best distinction that I think makes sense would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/melee-weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;melee-weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;melee-weapons&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/projectile-weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;projectile-weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;projectile-weapons&lt;/a&gt;. But that doesn't cover things like gun swords, or bow swords, or throwing spears, or whatever new idea someone's going to come up with that combines a trebuchet with a butterfly knife. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I don't really think subcategories are all that useful. Maybe for popular things like guns and swords, but other than that I think it's a case-by-case basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T16:20:54.940" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T16:20:54.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4644" CreationDate="2017-03-10T16:26:05.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have tags for sword, axe and knife. I don't like the idea of fragmenting down too much since you can lose the ability to find related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it is easier to search the weapons tags for the keyword 'sword' than it is to look in the sword tag, but also potentially have to look in some other tags that deal with more than one weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a proponent of generalized tags as big bins, and then using the search tool to narrow down within the bin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T16:26:05.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T19:31:27.070" Score="6" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidently it’s possible to use characters or formatting codes in use names that don’t work on all platforms/browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JtnbJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JtnbJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;your name is P&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T19:31:27.070" Title="Use name doesn’t render in all browsers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T21:53:54.760" Score="9" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73624/why-develop-at-at-or-at-te-walkers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, and partially addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/465/what-to-do-when-a-question-should-be-closed-but-an-answer-is-good&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, the question linked isn't closed, and may never be, so this is more of a general question cum proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a feature allowing us (probably meaning the moderators) to move good answers from questions marked duplicate to be answers of the original question? My argument for is that concentration of good answers improves the experience of outsiders who might stumble onto the site (i.e. through google).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For discussion, this strikes at something that has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. If an answer &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be moved to the original question because it doesn't make sense, doesn't that indicate that the supposed duplicate is not one at all? AndreiROM's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73624/why-develop-at-at-or-at-te-walkers/73626#73626&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question I'm talking about would make perfect sense as an answer to the question proposed as a duplicate, so that implies that the assignment as a duplicate is valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T02:15:38.573" Title="Move good answers on a duplicate to the original question" Tags="|feature-request|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4649" CreationDate="2017-03-10T22:26:16.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If every answer on the duplicate is also a valid answer on the original, then it makes sense to move them.  Sometimes the duplicate is more specific than the original, and answers on that duplicate don't cover all the cases in the original; in that case I don't think it makes sense to move.  It also night not make sense if both questions have collected approximately the same set of (duplicate) answers, which sometimes happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before taking this action, somebody needs to review both questions and all answers to determine if they are good candidates for consolidation.  It would be best if such review came from the community, to both share the work and tap the right experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can merge questions, which has the effect you're looking for.   A merger leaves one question with all the answers and the other question as a merge stub with a link to the other question.  Because the questions are true duplicates, the &amp;quot;surviving&amp;quot; master question can be either, so we'd prefer to take the one that is better, whatever that means in a particular context.  A question can also have only one accepted answer, so if both questions have accepted answers at the time of the merge, one of them is going to lose that status.  So, again, community input is helpful here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest using meta to assess individual cases.  If you see a true duplicate with answers that would benefit from being all in one place, bring it up and see what the community thinks about merging them.  Try to get consensus on the decisions that need to be made.  Then ask a moderator to pull the trigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus far we have had only two mergers on this site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/59726/28&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3116/28&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;), and they were exact duplicates asked by the same user.  But other sites have had mergers that were asked by different people with different wording, so this is something that is done sometimes.  Mi Yodeya, for example, has &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/annotated-posts?tab=locked&amp;amp;filter=merged&quot;&gt;72 mergers&lt;/a&gt; out of 21k questions.  Meta.SE has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/annotated-posts?tab=locked&amp;amp;filter=merged&quot;&gt;81 mergers&lt;/a&gt; out of 81k questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T14:24:53.270" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T14:24:53.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4652" CreationDate="2017-03-11T15:21:08.067" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean, not for demonstrating the fate of downvoters, but because it's related to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this contradict any rules in the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If not, what criteria can justify it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T18:24:48.620" Title="Putting nightmare fuel or gore pictures into the question as demonstration" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4651" CreationDate="2017-03-11T18:24:48.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The optimal Stack Exchange question is like a dolphin - streamlined, quick, and &lt;strike&gt;with a predilection for eating fish&lt;/strike&gt; aesthetically pleasing. Basically, anything unnecessary should be removed. I've learned the hard way that the number of people who read the entirety of a post is inversely proportional to how long the post is&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Therefore, for your sake and theirs, the ideal thing to do is to write a question with all the necessary details, caveats, and constraints, and then edit down anything  totally unnecessary. This may include unnecessary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Certain bits of background information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In reality, it might be worth a thousand characters - at least, it may take up as much space as 1,000 characters. That's a lot of space, and can be distracting. My rule of thumb: Don't add an image to your post unless you really need it. 75% of the time, that rule alone can make the decision for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; think that the image is necessary. As far as I know, there is no overarching Stack Exchange policy on violent images; there's certainly nothing in &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/content-policy&quot;&gt;the content policy&lt;/a&gt;, although that does briefly mention sexual content. That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/258464/274942&quot;&gt;as Grace Note has pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, (sexually) explicit material could lead to the network getting blocked, and the same logic could apply to violent images. Besides alienating outside users, you also risk offending Worldbuilding users who happen to be passing by. Remember, the youngest (legal) users are thirteen years old, and while that doesn't mean we have to keep everything PG-13, it's always best to consider that anyone could be dropping by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, adding images like this will rarely make the question better, and will likely alienate people who might otherwise read and appreciate the question. In almost all cases, I'd recommend leaving it out. But if you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; think the image is needed, consider using spoiler formatting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;! Image&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . or simply just adding a formatted link to the image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Here's a related image (May be not safe for work)](Link to image)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Yes, my latest answer is over 13,000 characters long. So maybe there's a bit of hypocrisy here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T18:24:48.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T20:14:46.177" Score="7" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this question is a little stupid, but how does this worldbuilding page work? Are people building their own worlds or are you just talking about questions that you find interesting to talk about? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are building their own worlds, what are they doing with them? Are they talking about them in a blog or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34493" OwnerDisplayName="prossello" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T11:25:01.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T11:25:01.340" Title="How does Worldbuilding work?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2017-03-11T20:53:24.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is specifically about the details of how to build your virtual world. It is aimed at helping writers and animators (people who create computer animations) in building the details of their worlds. You could discuss any aspect of your world (magic, physics, creature design etc) and members with the relevant information would help you fill in the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you have questions about the functionality of this site, then you should post those questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;The Meta Section&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We look forward to your very productive stay at this place :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13449" OwnerDisplayName="Youstay Igo" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T20:53:24.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2017-03-11T22:38:48.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Youstay is correct... but also too limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People build world's for hundreds of reasons. Some run role playing games.  Some are writers for books or short stories or comics.  Some are creating computer games or even TV shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anytime that you are creating an imaginary world for any reason world building is here for you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T22:38:48.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T07:37:22.410" Score="10" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the light of a recent discussion about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4644/specialized-tags-for-weapons&quot;&gt;usefulness of sub-tags for the &quot;weapons&quot;-tag&lt;/a&gt; and a short discussion with Monica Cellio in the comments of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4645/28789&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; I would like to discuss the future of the 300 reputation &quot;create tags&quot;-privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently a new user only needs 300 reputation to single-handedly create a new tag when he is asking a question. This is pretty early compared with other tag-related privileges like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;&quot;create tag synonyms&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;&quot;approve tag wiki edits&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Many users with only 300 reputation will probably not pay too much attention to guidelines and Meta-Discussions about this topic and will therefore quite often create tags that may for example be too specific, as was the case with me and the &quot;bows&quot;-tag I created as there already was a &quot;swords&quot;-tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing now that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4457/sandbox-for-proposed-tag-edits&quot;&gt;&quot;Sandbox for Proposed Tag Edits&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and the creation of a new tag can lead to a longer Meta-Discussion I think it would be better to replace the current 300 reputation privilege to create a tag with a &quot;suggest new tag&quot;-privilege. The concept of &quot;suggest and then wait until it is peer-reviewed until you have 2.000 reputation&quot; is already in place for normal edits on the main site (not on Meta as there is no &quot;suggested edit&quot;-feature for normal posts on Meta). Therefore making the creation of new tags a &quot;suggested edit&quot; should feel normal for most new people, but at the same time still provide an incentive to get more reputation. Especially seeing that there is, according to Monica Cellio, already a 10k Moderator tool to view the newest tags this shouldn't pose too much of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new &quot;create tags&quot;-privilege could be integrated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;&quot;approve tag wiki edits&quot;-privilege&lt;/a&gt; at 5.000 reputation. This could also be done with the 2.500-reputation &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;&quot;create tag synonyms&quot;&lt;/a&gt; privilege. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way users have a lot more experience when they are able to single-handedly create tags and the community in form of high-rep users has a better control over the creation of new tags. Initiating Meta discussions would be easier this way as somebody has to manually approve new tags suggested by low-rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T13:26:10.570" Title="Replace &quot;create tags&quot; with &quot;suggest new tag&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|privileges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T10:21:56.780" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73718/fighting-against-robots-on-the-lands&quot;&gt;Figuring out proper military tactics against robots in specific situations on a planet&amp;#39;s surface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've put some illustrative screenshots from the sci-fi series I was talking about. It still collects downvotes, even after I modified the question to focus on specific battle situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what's the problem with it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T22:29:44.657" Title="The problem of my question regarding battle tactics against robots" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2017-03-12T11:51:30.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think perhaps &lt;strong&gt;switching the thresholds for create tags and create tag synonyms&lt;/strong&gt; would be the best tactic. This is a thought I had from the bows/swords discussion you linked to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had separate &lt;code&gt;projectile-weapons&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;melee-weapons&lt;/code&gt; tags I think a lot of weapons would fall under this. However it is unlikely that someone will think, in their question about crossbows, to try a tag &lt;code&gt;projectile-weapons&lt;/code&gt;. Which is why, I think, we have these tag creations early on. They just type &quot;crossbow&quot; and a tag is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, they could search for tags and realise their &lt;code&gt;crossbow&lt;/code&gt; tag could be absorbed into the &lt;code&gt;projectile-weapons&lt;/code&gt; tag they can instead create a synonym for it instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a user tries to enter a new tag is there a way to provide a custom message with a hint to do something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-26T13:26:10.570" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T13:26:10.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4660" CreationDate="2017-03-13T01:32:49.960" Score="10" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is in the process of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/292058/162102&quot;&gt;switching to HTTPS on all sites&lt;/a&gt;.  As part of this, they have already fixed links to images hosted on imgur (which is where images go if you upload them in a post).  At the same time, they &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291947/162102&quot;&gt;stopped showing&lt;/a&gt; images that are to other sites and use HTTP in the URLs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't clever enough to notice the implications of that before this week's SEDE update, when it would still have been easy to grab a list of affected posts.  Now the query is more complicated, but fellow moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/users/1672/jefromi&quot;&gt;jefromi&lt;/a&gt; has created a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/639580/posts-with-more-image-markdown-than-html-images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; that we think finds most of them.  This query found 83 images on our main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try to fix those posts.  Some image links might have rotted since posting (i.e. those images were missing last week too); others exist just fine but at HTTP URLs.  The task is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find the image -- if the original URL works, great; if not, try the Wayback Machine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the site serving the image works with HTTPS, fix the URL in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If not, decide (a) whether the image is valuable and (b) if so, whether it seems kosher to upload a copy to imgur.  (If in doubt about use of other people's intellectual property, don't.)  Make appropriate changes to the post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While you're in there anyway, see if the image's alt text is currently the generic &quot;enter image description here&quot; and, if so, fix that.  Alt text is used by people who can't see images, like those using screen readers; the best text is a short, meaningful description of what's shown in the image.  If you see anything else you can easily improve (spelling, formatting, etc), please do that too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll post the list of affected posts (according to that query) in an answer.  Please move them to the &quot;done&quot; section if you fix them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please don't do these all at once.&lt;/strong&gt; We don't want to flood the front page and push recent posts out of view, but doing ten or so of these at a time shouldn't be too disruptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:38.380" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T22:03:59.993" Title="Let's fix our now-broken images" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-13T01:32:49.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4659" CreationDate="2017-03-13T01:32:49.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CLAIM A CHUNK TO WORK ON!&lt;/strong&gt; Some chunks are shorter than others deliberately so people who just want a few can take those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not done&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 1&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 3&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 4&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 5&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 6&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 7&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 8&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 9&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chunk 10&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Done&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53964&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53964&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57270&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57270&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57356&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57356&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57722&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/57722&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58519&quot;&gt;Mermaids on Land?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58988&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58988&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/59173&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/59173&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61439&quot;&gt;How would language be affected if humans had animal-like mouths?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65865&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65865&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/69824&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/69824&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11547&quot;&gt;Alternative absorption spectra for plants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11642&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11642&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12290&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12290&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13063&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13063&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13743&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13743&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1053&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1053&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1073&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1073&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1161&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1161&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4364&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4364&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/5018&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/5018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6337&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6337&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4424&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4424&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9945&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9945&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10102&quot;&gt;How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10629&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10629&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10631&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10631&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10752&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/10752&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6468&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6468&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8436&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8436&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9392&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9392&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9857&quot;&gt;Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The star&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9891&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9891&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9942&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9942&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9944&quot;&gt;Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13878&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13878&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13881&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13881&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14029&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14029&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14561&quot;&gt;Brutal, unsubtle brainwashing: how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14736&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14736&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15180&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15180&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15195&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15195&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15539&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/15539&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/16973&quot;&gt;What would make light pollution lethal or prohibiting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9856&quot;&gt;Cohabitation with large creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44564&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44564&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44745&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44745&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18274&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18274&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18763&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18763&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18929&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18929&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19046&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/19046&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/21086&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/21086&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22441&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22441&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22605&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22605&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22853&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/22853&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23212&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23212&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23378&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23378&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23666&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23666&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23668&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23668&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26010&quot;&gt;How/would the distance from a planet to its star affect the strength of its gravitational pull?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26391&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26391&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26482&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26482&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26657&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26657&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29752&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29752&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18779&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18779&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23367&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23367&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29781&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29781&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33724&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33724&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33834&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33834&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/34820&quot;&gt;What would this nebula look like from a planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35287&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35287&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35824&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/35824&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36031&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36031&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39299&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39299&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/45596&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/45596&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46647&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46647&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/48097&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/48097&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/48867&quot;&gt;Sky color of an alien world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/50622&quot;&gt;Are space stations like Sevastopol (Alien Isolation) realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51460&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51460&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53672&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53672&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30886&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30886&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46776&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/46776&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T22:03:59.993" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-13T01:32:49.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4659" CreationDate="2017-03-13T05:09:26.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;But don’t break things!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@SRM your https link replacement on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69822/unlimited-stellar-fusion-thought-experiment/69824#69824&quot;&gt;Unlimited Stellar Fusion Thought Experiment&lt;/a&gt; was over-eager: you replaced the image with an imager copy, &lt;strong&gt;but also replaced the link to the hyperphysics source document with the same new url&lt;/strong&gt; (to the image only)!  The note the difference between [1] [1] syntax (used by the toolbar and often not changed) and [1] [2] where the href is &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from the img src url.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:34.010" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T05:09:26.190" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-13T05:09:26.190" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T05:21:10.250" Score="9" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an aspiring author and one of my favorite ways to generate ideas is brainstorming with my brother. I find it incredibly constructive when designing stories and was hoping I could do something similar here. When I posted my first question, it was put on hold for being too broad. The question was asking for ideas of a species and I gave as many specifics as I could regarding the answers I wanted without just giving options. I just don't understand how this can be useful for someone trying to build a world. It seems that the only way to make it fit the criteria is to already have in mind what I am looking for. If I already know the answer I want, why should I be asking you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Is there any way I can ask a brainstorming question without it getting put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34525" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T00:59:23.990" Title="Why do questions have to be specific?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T05:47:01.797" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the current litmus test and general consensus on a Q being “too story based”?  I see many Q's do involve story to some extent but the close reason is “&lt;strong&gt;too&lt;/strong&gt; story based”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using the “Joe” test. If the question postulates a world and does not ask for any guidance in shaping that world, but asks instead “What would Joe do?” than it’s off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What would &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; do?” is the same thing.  But “What resources are available?” is akin to working out details of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73773/in-a-doomsday-scenario-what-would-be-possible-transcontinental-communication-op&quot;&gt;In a doomsday scenario, what would be possible transcontinental communication options?&lt;/a&gt; is the latter (OK) but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73801/how-to-sell-a-real-spellbook-and-what-price-for-it&quot;&gt;How much should he ask for the spellbook?&lt;/a&gt; is (besides being POB) the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T15:09:00.907" Title="What is “too story based”?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4663" CreationDate="2017-03-13T06:11:15.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the answer is that Worldbuilding SE doesn't encourage open-ended hypothetical questions. Unfortunately, these types of questions are brainstorming. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for  this and other types of questions that shouldn't be asked. This will give you an idea why brainstorming questions will get put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, brainstorming questions cannot be asked here. However, if you as a questioner take a question (which you would like to ask for reasons of brainstorming) then disassemble it into its constituent parts. You can then ask questions with greater specificity about your topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the case of your question about a desert planet. This can be questions about environments on desert planets, questions about adaptations for desert planet life, and questions about desert adapted animal life. Instead of asking a single wide-ranging question that is essentially brainstorming you can replace it with a series of more focused questions concentrating on specific areas of your desert planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Worldbuilding SE does allow a modest degree of brainstorming in answering questions, so it is not forbidden &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but what is disallowed is brainstorming pure and simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T06:11:15.917" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4573" CreationDate="2017-03-13T08:58:55.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a further change, just to the Title line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you asked it in the body is better: &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;justify&lt;/em&gt; rather than cause-to-happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to happen in your story, as opposed to would that be a certain outcome under those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T08:58:55.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T01:50:47.247" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may seem a little convoluted, so bear with me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question that came to mind in this meta-ish gray area was about suspension of disbelief when it came to specific audiences, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When creating a sci-fi world/story/game for teenagers you can get a&#xA;  away with a bit more hand waving than you could with, say a sci-fi tale&#xA;  for those with physics majors... How much scientific accuracy is&#xA;  really necessary to make a world palatable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps more problematic in judging where to set the lines and veils of a world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about creating a world that skirts the line between comic&#xA;  and disturbing horror, how far can I push the audience before it's too&#xA;  far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sorts of questions seem subjective, obviously, but I'm not sure if their too subjective to be answered... Though I suspect that they may boil down to poll questions where the real answers are found through community votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T02:07:08.987" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T14:08:23.613" Title="Where are the lines as far as meta-ish worldbuilding questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4663" CreationDate="2017-03-14T04:09:49.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time Commitments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a Question &amp;amp; Answer site intended for someone to ask a question and then someone to spend time to try and correctly answer it - which is tricky for Worldbuilding.se's concept oftentimes.   With your question originally, it discouraged me from wanting to spend an enormous amount of time for such a wide-ranging topic, just to find out it's not what you wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lack of Information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 'too-broad' questions, there's simply not enough information to provide a good answer. It also encourages the selection of the answer to be opinion-based, and not a technical criteria for selecting the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was particularly intrigued by your question after the edits.  Welcome to Worldbuilding and you'll get better and better, and I hope the site encourages your writing and helps to enhance it.  &quot;Too broad&quot; is just very difficult for all of us to avoid when &lt;em&gt;building a world&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T04:09:49.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T06:22:31.763" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend was telling me in passing that she joined &quot;the local hash,&quot; and I asked her what it was about and she said: &quot;Great! Elevator Pitch! ...&quot; and told very me quickly what it was all about.  I didn't have one for WP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that in roughly the amount of time it takes in an elevator, you tell a friend or stranger everything about your group in a quick summary.  This is not the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3341/what-is-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;What is Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, but rather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is our Worldbuilding Elevator Pitch?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you describe Worldbuilding.se in 30 seconds or so?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:42:32.093" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T13:55:51.933" Title="What is our (Worldbuilding) Elevator Pitch" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-03-15T14:51:15.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2017-03-14T08:08:40.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;WorldBuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the place where you postulate the improbable and other people tell you that your postulation is either implausible or impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And occasionally, magic happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T08:08:40.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2017-03-14T08:17:28.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Want to know the implications of Facebook summoning Cthulhu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ever wondered what problems you would encounter if you walked at 40 miles per hour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want to tell colleagues how a werewolf-transformation really works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are you just thinking about creating a planet completely made out of water?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whatever you or someone else can imagine: WorldBuilding is there to show you how to make it work! ... Or tell you to use magic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T08:17:28.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4668" CreationDate="2017-03-14T13:14:52.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want to know if this kind of question is ok on WB:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Does X violate suspension of disbelief?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with this kind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Are X and Y compatible in the same world?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind gets asked all the time. Let Y = &quot;the real world&quot; and you essentially have our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. Is that the same as the suspension of disbelief? No. But it is mostly a subset -- if X is fully compatible with reality, it is unlikely to violate reader belief (although there are exceptions, like the question about how high someone can fall from a plane and survive unharmed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;limits of disbelief&quot; is just another constraint you can choose to put on your world, so in that sense, the question is fine. It is on-topic. BUT... you're almost certain to hit the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; (POB) objection because those limits are so fuzzy and individual in many cases. You would need to have some way of letting answerers use an objective or at least constrained standard of the limits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: These questions are probably NOT going to be closed as Off-Topic, but any specific question has a high probability of being closed POB.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T13:14:52.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2017-03-14T13:17:51.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An online Q&amp;amp;A forum for science fiction and fantasy creators to get questions answered so their worlds can be made believable for their audiences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T13:17:51.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2017-03-14T17:46:30.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a heads up on how I think this should work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 4 different sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upcoming Events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Featured on Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hot on Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Link is in multiple sections, we discarded all but one of them (de-duplication) but ONLY if there are Meta Posts pulled in. So Meta and Main behave differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new idea would be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Always keep all Community Events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;De-dup them from the other sections (so if a link is in both &quot;Featured on Meta&quot; and &quot;Upcoming Events&quot;, we discard the &quot;Featured on Meta&quot; one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the logic consistent between Meta and Main&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that sound correct to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="516" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T17:46:30.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4657" CreationDate="2017-03-14T22:29:44.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find this question has a problem that a lot of war questions have: they ask about what should be done in a conflict situation.  This class of WB questions is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; difficult to write well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In combat, both sides will take advantage of everything they can, including thousands of little details that you did not mention.  The result is a mighty game of cat and mouse that is very hard to capture in a WB question.  They're just too dependent on details.  Personally, I haven't seen any questions that have overcome this hurdle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that we can give you is generalities.  For example, if I were to give you an answer it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Urban area: one android with a laser rifle and 6 mooks:&lt;/strong&gt; Shoot them until they are dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Urban area: two elite androids, they use one-hit wonder spy bots to locate you.&lt;/strong&gt; Read up on anti-sniper techniques, then shoot them until they are dead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open area: 5 patrol ships, they might drop octopussies at you.&lt;/strong&gt; Shoot them with rockets until they are dead.  If they drop towers, either shoot them with rockets until they are dead, or don't shoot them (you never specified how well rockets work vs. towers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer any more specifically than that, we'd need to know things like tactics (how do mooks operate in an urban environment?), goals (the goal is not always to kill the enemy), and other details like that.  In my opinion, it's really difficult to give enough of that information in a SE Q&amp;amp;A format.  It's really better handled as a discussion using a different medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One tool you might be able to do is to adapt the question to use historical armies as a basis.  If you say &quot;the mooks fight like the Viet Cong,&quot; that provides a substantial foundation for answers which lead to completely different answers than if you say &quot;the androids fight like the feudal Japanese&quot; or &quot;The elite androids use tactics similar to the Spetznas.&quot;  If you told me that &quot;androids use techniques common to special forces,&quot; that one sentence tells me more about how to answer than the entirety of the explanation of the offensive and defensive sides of both parties.  It tells me I need to worry about them training up locals to fight for them, I need to be aware that they are all well trained, and it gives hints as to how they will operate if they have to actually fight.  It also tells me how to start combatting them: I need to get the locals on my side enough to find out where they are, and send in superior firepower, and that I need to plan my attack to limit their ability to vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that making such a change shifts the focus away from arms and armament to tactics.  You could, in fact, leave behind the fantasy world and have questions like &quot;I have 2 snipers covering a church I need to control.  These snipers have similar training to US snipers, but with weapons that have X Y and Z (perhaps they have different ranges than our real weapons).  What tactics might I use?&quot;  Then I can bring in content from, say, History Channel documentaries on sniper school where they show the publically releasable portions of the sniper/counter-sniper cat-and-mouse game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T22:29:44.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T07:33:58.947" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a question yesterday which I believed was ok for the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74024/how-to-find-the-man-who-isnt-there&quot;&gt;How to find the man who isn&amp;#39;t there?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quickly raised some comments and answers from high-rep users and I received no down-votes, no negative comments, no requests for clarification.  Five answers from 60+ views, so not too bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This morning, I look at the question to see that it's been put on hold as &quot;off topic&quot; by just one moderator.  No discussion, no comment, it's just closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand this happening for obviously low-quality or blatantly off-topic questions, but I was surprised by this.  I didn't even get the 5 VTC votes like I usually see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, I don't normally complain about moderation, even when I do get VTC'd to oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't understand this one, however.  I can understand if it was peer moderated, but the force-close does seem a bit strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T02:50:12.760" Title="When is it OK for moderators to force-close questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|moderators|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2017-03-15T07:47:06.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll copy my remarks from &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; here, since you changed venue rather than continue the discussion you started there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I used the normal flag-to-queue function, not the delete button. sometimes it queues it, and sometimes it immediatly takes my vote as binding too. I don’t know why.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Anyway, if someone else is around and wants to flag it for the queue, I'll reopen it for that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This Q is blatently not WB though, but was getting answers as a cute/fun post, so it was important to not wait around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a plot for a mystery story perhaps. But the Q also has other problems: it is not clear if this is meant to be a Phantom superpower, someone who's just a great burgler, a high-tech cloaking device, or just a silly literary puzzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it's still possible to flag it for re-opening, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/how-is-this-pob&quot;&gt;and this has happened to my own questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct answer to the question, &lt;em&gt;when is moderator action OK&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to what’s wrong with the post), is &lt;strong&gt;Always; that's our job.&lt;/strong&gt; And note that closing is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the final word on the matter, and it could be opened again.  And we mods are expected to keep in tune with the current community standards through observation and discussion, but mistakes and differences in judgement do happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T07:47:06.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T09:07:29.303" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few examples like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72276/can-this-ftl-communication-based-on-quantum-entanglement-work&quot;&gt;Quantum entanglement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73894/how-to-prove-that-the-solar-system-isnt-inside-of-a-localized-physics-bubble&quot;&gt;The solar system doesn't have its own unique physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36501/how-would-one-destroy-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;Destroying a black hole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all of these questions I can see how it could be useful to use within a story, however there is no context of that story. No &lt;em&gt;&quot;I want the black hole to be destroyed so I can...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; just the question of how physics works. Whilst these are often unsuitable for physics SE I feel that without the context of a story we are drifting away from that world building aspect of the site in these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying we shouldn't be asked or respond with physics-based answers, but there may be a way to shoe-horn the idea into the scenario the writer desires using plot and some hand-waving. If we don't know what the end goal is we can't say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Well, you can't destroy a black-hole but a work-around which achieves your end goal is..&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, if we're sticking to the physics of our universe, quite often the reasonable answers end up being summed up by &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like these are unsatisfactory answers if the OP is a writer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we be encouraging questions to include a little context of their story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T14:13:33.837" Title="Physics questions with little to no actual story" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4680" CreationDate="2017-03-15T11:15:15.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes we should be encouraging questions like these, because they can be about elements of worldbuilding whether this is for a fictional story, TV or film script, or game. Questioners don't need to explain the context of their worldbuilding element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to write a novel where a black hole is destroyed, then they could seek out plausible techniques or methods for accomplishing BH destruction. Sometimes questioners will, frankly, blather about their story's background. Mostly that is quite unnecessary to answer the question proper. Sometimes it can be entertaining, sometimes less so, but it isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE focuses on specific questions about worldbuilding itself. So if that's about destroying black holes, then that's all that needs to be asked. The very specificity of typical questions will tend to exclude all that story material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's as simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T11:15:15.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4680" CreationDate="2017-03-15T14:13:33.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Encourage the story feedback but don't discourage the question, unless it is just blatantly a pure science question. Even a sliver of hypothetical suffices for WB. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T14:13:33.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2017-03-15T15:06:14.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a moderator elsewhere. I'd rather &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; step on the toes of the local mods, nor tell them how to do their jobs but in general when something ought to be closed, it's best it's done &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt; - people may end up answering it anyway, wasting effort and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel strongly something specific shouldn't be closed, bring it up on metas. Bring along strong, logical and sensible argument, appealing to the community, listen to what the mod has to say, and fix anything that's fixable without changing the intent of the question, the question might be reopened by the community or even mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its also worth remembering mods are volunteers putting in their time for pretty much no reward outside seeing their community grow. Things like &quot; You can't just take it upon yourself to close a question.&quot; seems to indicate both a passion (which is good!) but also a certain lack of understanding of what a mod can and cannot do. A moderator &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; instantly close a question because they're trusted to do so. 5 users (or any mod) can undo that closure. That's just one of the checks and balances built in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T01:07:52.400" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T01:07:52.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2017-03-15T15:42:44.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been a fair bit of discussion both here and in chat and the situation has been resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, this has been a combination of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misunderstanding of moderation tools/process (been a fair bit of discussion here and goodness spread to all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Me being a complete dick and jumping to an incorrect conclusion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to apologise unreservedly for the second point - I really should have asked instead of making an accusation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T15:42:44.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="343" CreationDate="2017-03-15T18:00:10.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;2017&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrIsG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This ad&lt;/a&gt; has made it past the threshold on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/41082&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6728&quot;&gt;RPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2362/98889&quot;&gt;Game Dev&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ad has also been posted on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(No other sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible targets are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9554/56299&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12230&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;???&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:08:03.510" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-15T18:00:10.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T22:40:04.650" Score="-10" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to request a new tag for WB: &lt;em&gt;Character development&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I think this tag would be a good addition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Introverted people with a lack of social skills have a hard time developing characters due to their lack of life experiences. For example for people who have not experienced love it will be difficult to write about romance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cultural issues: For example if your main character lives in another country and you are not familiar with the culture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T18:21:46.723" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T18:21:46.723" Title="New tag request : Character development!" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4687" CreationDate="2017-03-15T22:58:09.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you list a few existing posts that you would think should have this tag?  You can add that to your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first impression is that character development is off topic.  But if you can give examples of the questions that would use this tag, and they are good questions, then maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T22:58:09.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4663" CreationDate="2017-03-16T00:59:23.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can ask a brainstorming question without it getting put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious flip answer is:  post them on a different site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is a Question and Answer site.  It is not a forum.  The format lends itself best to questions with canonical answers.  That's almost the reverse of what a brainstorming session provides.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to brainstorm, you would be better off looking for a forum.  Alternately, you could make a public chat room (requires at least 100 reputation) and try it here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given what we do, it's possible that we should try to make a forum site.  We already have a blog.  Maybe a forum would fit as well.  But that's probably a larger project than would fit in an answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T00:59:23.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4691" CreationDate="2017-03-16T02:44:10.347" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've gathered many interesting answers in my first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it allowed if I take a bit from each answers, then answer my own question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T22:23:03.990" Title="Is it allowed to answer your own question after getting other answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-03-16T06:17:54.773" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, especially if you &lt;strong&gt;credit&lt;/strong&gt; the other posts and label it as a summary post (and you can even make it community-wiki so you won’t get “credit” for it) or clearly state how it’s derivitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially if you explain that this (based on the various answers) is what you ended up &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; in your story/game/treatment/whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find examples of such things amomg the posts, but I wouldn’t know how to begin searching for one to give concrete examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are worried, post it in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Answer sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first and get feedback (or lack of anyone caring implies it will not be seen as rude) here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T12:15:20.120" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T12:15:20.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4687" CreationDate="2017-03-16T07:51:39.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Character development clearly falls under character building and is off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I disagree with JDługosz on that &quot;if some good questions could use it, then why not&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first items listed as off-topic in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;But if there are some good questions where the said tag could be appropriate...&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If a question is on-topic but happen to contain an element which can be used for character development, then they do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; need the tag &quot;character-development&quot;. It's a bad idea to add that tag to those questions, even if they are good questions. Just because there are good questions where such tag could be added does not mean that it's a good tag; it will only open up the door for bad questions which are, according to the rules, off-topic. Adding a tag for something which is off-topic is to beg for trouble, people will not know if they should VtC a question with such tag for being off-topic or not, and those who get their questions closed will not understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;But I really need help with my character development&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well, then you got three options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phrase the question so that it's not blatantly off-topic.&lt;/em&gt; If you can cut away all unnecessary parts of the question and ask for a single element of how you want your character to be, but phrasing it so that it's not obviously about character development, then you can still ask the question (but without the tag). I admit, this is not an easy feat and I cannot give any good examples of how to do it but if you can phrase the question about something on-topic, then what you actually use it for later is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Start lobbying for making character development on-topic&lt;/em&gt;. Things can be changed, even the scope of the site, if you get enough amount of the users on your side. I must warn you, though, it's not going to be easy to change what is on-topic. The rules were set during the creation of this site and character development was chosen as off topic as it has no clear answer, it's mainly going to be opinion based answers (which is bad as good answers should be objectively good). So the chance that you will succeed is &quot;slim to none&quot;, but as it is a site made for and by the users, if enough users want something, then it can be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ask somewhere else&lt;/em&gt;. I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting that you leave WB.SE, but for those questions which are not possible to answer here, you will need to seek help elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best way to go is simply to follow the first point - try your best to rephrase your question to be on topic, that way others can get useful tips from the answers generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit - only marginally relevant stuff below&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The following part is not relevant to the question &quot;do we want the character development tag?&quot;, but I add it anyway as I thought of some aspects regarding character building.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I did think of one example of how to make a character development question kinda on-topic:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is perhaps not a good example, but I add it in order to offer some help of how to ask such question. Lets say that you want your character to go from naïve and happy person to a more grim and hardened person, then you cannot really ask &quot;how to make my character go grim and hardened&quot; &quot;what type of event will make my character go evil&quot; as that would not only be off-topic for being about character development, it would be off-topic as way too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, think through what your character will go through in the story and ask something concrete from there. As example, you could ask &quot;what happen, in general, to persons going through a brutal war, where they see someone close to them get butchered&quot;. That question can be answered subjectively (but might still be off-topic) by looking at how real people behave after surviving a brutal event and would give answers such as &quot;they risk developing post traumtaic stress disorders&quot;. If you then read up on PTSDs, you can find out how a person with it will react in various situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A thought on character development - proper research before asking questions is the key:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The best way to build a character is to write about what you know. If you, e.g., have no clue about how it is to live in Japan, then maybe it is a bad idea to write a story about life in Japan without first going there yourself for a while. An alternative is to not write about Japan, but a completely fictional culture inspired by from what you know about Japan. However, you can also research Japanese culture &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; first, without the need to live there, and then ask specific questions about aspects of the culture which you want to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, on the other hand, is an author whom is too shy to ever ask another person out for a date, then it will be hard to write about love and romance, but not impossible. Internet provides ample of opportunities for a shy, introvert, person to find someone else to chat with and experience some kind of relationship building. Sure, it will not be the exact same thing as going on an actual date with someone, but it will at least be a base to start from (and might be a way to overcome the social awkwardness and meet someone IRL). Maybe such author should not write about how it is to be an extrovert Casanova, but rather how it is to be a shy, yet romantic, person whom gradually gathers the courage to approach their true love. My point with this is that, again, background research is the key to good character building and it is possible to research love, even for a shy introvert person (and, to be fully honest, even persons whom have a lot of experience of love can be extremely bad at writing about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T08:38:28.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4697" CreationDate="2017-03-17T18:25:17.960" Score="8" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went to review &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/31348&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.  The first sentence looked good (if short) but the second sounded pretty negative.  When I went to down vote it, there were no categories that discussed the tone of the post.  So, I was wondering if I should be checking for that.  I decided to not down voting it until I heard from some of the more experienced people here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I can get a bit snarky but I try to edit that out of my posts unless I know the person I'm talking to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33610" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T18:35:36.223" Title="Reviewing posts question about argumentative posts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4696" CreationDate="2017-03-17T18:35:36.223" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked answer has a few problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It consists of exactly two sentences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither sentence actually addresses the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer is rather passive-aggressive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and third of those are discouraged on the site; feel free to downvote due to &quot;[t]his answer is not useful.&quot; The second of those deserves the low-quality flag that put it in the review queue in the first place; feel free to vote to delete the answer or add a comment explaining the problems and why the post might be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T18:35:36.223" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-18T10:16:07.940" Score="11" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps such a post already exists but I couldn't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I wanted to ask what exactly are the problems associated with adding 'idea generation' related questions to the scope of this site. I do feel a significant portion of the community does like such questions (I might be wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem I guess is that it goes a bit against Stackexchange's policy for objective questions and answers. But there are other borderline cases, such as Puzzling SE allowing users to create their own problems and post them. Most science and math SE sites do not accept this and allow only problems which the asker himself/herself is stuck on. So I guess it is possible (though not necessarily optimal) within the SE framework to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not possible, perhaps SE could open a new site called 'Worldbuilding Debates' or 'Worldbuilding Discussions' or something like that. It could be a slight mix of the rigorous Q&amp;amp;A format and the disorganised chat format. I guess some other sites on SE could benefit from such additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have these options been considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T14:41:21.853" Title="Opinion on questions that involve 'idea generation' or lack a 'right answer'" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-18T16:18:23.043" Score="-2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74441/which-major-solar-system-body-could-most-realistically-be-artificial&quot;&gt;Which major solar system body could most realistically be artificial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to me one of the best questions ever asked on WB. It is exactly on topic, draws on the community to ask a precise hypothetical, it is short without fluffy backstory to interfere with comprehension, and it is answerable. I'm highlighting it here so as many people as possible take a moment to read it and give it good answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T08:24:00.277" Title="I want to highlight a question as a really solid question IMO" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T00:59:47.560" Score="5" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I typed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/74431/revisions&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; on my phone this morning, and while I did somewhat well I still made some typos. Then a wonderful soul came along and kindly cleaned up the mess I left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there, or can there be, any method for upvoting an edit, or saying &quot;This was a good edit&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34371" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T08:20:04.810" Title="Is it possible to add upvoting for edits?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4700" CreationDate="2017-03-19T03:01:31.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no points or upvotes for edits, no.  Editing is part of the idea of community-maintained content; we encourage people to help make all the content on the site better when they can.  The best way to thank the editor would be to pay it forward by helping to edit others' posts when needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as JDługosz reminded me in a comment, users get +2 rep for each accepted edit until they earn the &quot;edit&quot; privilege.  So lower-rep users do get a small rep reward along with the knowledge that they are helping to make Worldbuilding better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T15:02:31.513" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T15:02:31.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2017-03-20T02:50:12.760" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From current comunity experience, its ok to force close a question or delete an answer when it - even if correct, or possibly correct - does not corrobore with your beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7066" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T02:50:12.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T04:16:45.773" Score="-2" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well the few times i wrote a mgtow-like question people just spam downvotes and close my question,I thought there was freedom of expression here... Why is this such a sin?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some philosophies are prohibited here please let me know,I dont want to break the rules or lose more reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T07:21:03.233" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T10:49:19.840" Title="Why is such a sin asking &quot;Men Going Their Own Way&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4703" CreationDate="2017-03-20T07:16:06.290" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;No philosophy is prohibited, but there are some things you should keep in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that it is very clear that said philosophy is a philosophy of nation in your world, not yours. If it's also yours or not is irrelevant and best left out altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that this is very clear it's not just one person. This would be story-based, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49&quot;&gt;Why is my question &quot;Too Story Based&quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you clearly describe how this philosophy relate to the realities of fictional world you are building. Is it reasonable? Or bull excrement? In the fictional world we don't know, not in our real world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this philosophy? How does it work? What it assume? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What in-world circumstances created it? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it have real world analog, and what are the differences? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide clarifications requested. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assume good faith - people comment to help you recover from bad question. Most of us are not native speakers so sometimes this may sound rough to you, and we have limited time and comment length (and patience), so we aren't always able to put enough &quot;honey&quot; in these comments. Deal with it and read carefully, without prejudice, what flaws in your questions these comments point out. You don't have to agree with them. But if these flaws are causing your question to get downvotes, show some gratitude for insight you got. &lt;strong&gt;Comments on votes are not mandatory&lt;/strong&gt;, by commenting people are just trying to make you a favor. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you failed at all these points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Freedom of speech&quot; is not a shield from consequences. We&lt;/em&gt; acknowledge your right to post what you posted. But it's also our freedom of speech to vote it up or down or VTC, as we see fit. Calling it &quot;spam voting&quot; is unjust, you try to have your freedom of expression and at the same time take ours away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* by &quot;we&quot; I mean me and people who posted similar comments under original question(s). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T08:12:26.597" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T08:12:26.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4703" CreationDate="2017-03-20T08:07:04.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To pretend that all of the votes on your question were purely about the quality of the question is more than a little disingenuous. Honestly I voted the way I did because the premise seemed thin and it made the question &quot;not useful&quot; as far as I was concerned, as I pointed out in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way I would like to say a few things... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;steps up on his soap box&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are going to ask questions that in some way involve their personal world view. Some will be offensive to you personally.* That shouldn't be a reason to close a question out right, and as far as I know it isn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take these as opportunities to learn something, I personally learned a lot tonight. I didn't know that MGTOW was a thing and now I do. I don't agree with it or support it, but now I'm aware of it, and maybe being aware of an issue and talking to someone about it makes everyone involved a little better off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People learn an awful lot from the stories they read, the games they play, and most essentially the worlds they interact with. If we can make our world a better place, by making our worlds/stories better, by taking the time to talk to someone we disagree with, everyone gains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer to a question may just change someone's point of view some day.**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*This is an unfortunate fact of life&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;**With great power comes great responsibility... or some such...&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T19:25:05.597" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:25:05.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4700" CreationDate="2017-03-20T08:20:04.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone edited a post, you can use &lt;code&gt;@Andon&lt;/code&gt; notation in comment. Just post a comment at him and tell him you appreciated his edit. That'll do. And personally I believe such comments to be a good thing to do, everyone wants to be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to show some extra appreciation, post an extremely well researched answer to his question, or set a bounty on one of his questions. Sure this might cost you some time, but that's exactly the cost of good substantial edit: time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T08:20:04.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2017-03-20T08:24:00.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The designed way to do this is to set a bounty with &quot;this question deserves more attention&quot; bounty reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you may safely assume that most meta visitors already know most of the recent questions, and others are here just to solve one specific issue and won't be interested in your post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T08:24:00.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4703" CreationDate="2017-03-20T12:37:41.110" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We will not build your world for you&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, questions of the sort...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Assume the world as we know it. Then I postulate that we change this one thing. Now tell me what the outcome is&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...questions of that sort are of very poor quality by Stack Exchange standards and — in my personal opinion — quite annoying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poor quality is because they are very broad and as such have no clear answer. They could take any number of directions from there. As a questioner you need to limit the scope of the question, because otherwise you have just done the Stack Exchange equivalent of asking &quot;Ok, so I throw two dice. What happens?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And the annoying bit is that the questioner is requesting that other people do the work that they themselves are meant to do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so you came up with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;High-concept&lt;/a&gt;. That is all good, very clever of you to come up with it. I salute your ability to think out of the box. And this is usually the start for some really good and interesting world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to then dump that concept in someone else's lap and say &quot;Develop this for me. Come up with all the consequences and tell me what happens&quot;... no. Just: no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We are not here to build your world for you.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are here to help you build your world on your own. When you get stuck in that process; when you have a specific problem that must be solved, that is when you post a question. If there are some kinks and wrinkles that need ironing, we can help you. If you need a way around an inconsistency in your logic; if you require justification that will allow you to astroturf the field for a specific world; if you need a fact- or reality check... then we can do that for you, and gladly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we will not build your world for you. That is &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;sin&quot; of your question about fembots was that you did just that which I said above: you introduced a high-concept, but then you did not take that anywhere. You did not even &lt;strong&gt;begin&lt;/strong&gt; to try to figure out what happens in a premise such as yours. You did not say anything about what possible routes this could take. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead you just dumped the premise on Worldbuilding and asked everyone else to develop the world for you. &lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; was your sin. MGTOW had nothing to do with the down-votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A note on Freedom of Expression&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freedom of Expression is a contract between you and the government. Freedom of Expression means that the government is not allowed to &lt;strong&gt;censor&lt;/strong&gt; you, that is to say the government cannot demand to pre-approve that which you are about to express. (*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is all that it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Freedom of Expression is NOT...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The right to demand to post anything, anywhere. People are not required to provide you with the means to express yourself. You have no right to conscript the usage of private assets — such as this forum — in order to express yourself. You are here as a &lt;strong&gt;guest&lt;/strong&gt;, and your presence is by the good graces of the people responsible for Stack Exchange. The government is not an actor in this place, and so Freedom of Expression is not actually relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The right to demand people approve of that which you express. It feels silly to have to point this out this but it must be said: even under Freedom of Expression, no-one is required to &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; that which you express. If the reader does not like it, they are entirely entitled to form and hold such an opinion, and they are at least as much as you within their rights to express this opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Immunity from criticism. See the point above. If people form the opinion that your posts are of such a quality that they do not approve of them, then they are within their rights to express this. And if they have valid arguments for their opinion, then it is the expressed &lt;strong&gt;purpose&lt;/strong&gt; of the ratings and comments systems for them to use them to give you feedback as to why they think your post is of poor quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot use &quot;Freedom of Expression&quot; as a shield against criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Immunity from other consequences. Freedom of Expression is not a &quot;Get Out Of Jail Free&quot; card, nor is it something you can invoke to escape other unpleasant consequences of that which you have expressed. Expressing yourself is an action. Actions may have consequences. Freedom of Expression does not exempt you from consequences. You are free to express yourself in the eyes of the government — they cannot stop you from doing it, even if they know what you are about to do and they do not like it — but you are not free from having to suffer for it, afterwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this rhymes well with your concept of &quot;freedom&quot; or not can be debated, but these are — never the less — the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thank you Frostfyre for &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1357/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the mandatory xkcd reference&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XoZiL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XoZiL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(*) Usually there are some more bits to this — such as for example in the Swedish Act of Freedom of Expression where it is stated that the government may not prevent you from &lt;strong&gt;partaking of expressions&lt;/strong&gt; — but the main point is that the government may not try to stop you from expressing yourself.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="12297" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T10:49:19.840" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T10:49:19.840" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-03-20T14:34:11.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;To what extent would kill-switching a Western nations smartphones destabilise the government?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-samsung-galaxy-note-7-exploding-overheating/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galaxy Note 7&lt;/a&gt; incident was just a trial run....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that the government of the nation that creates the vast majority of the smartphones in the world inserts a kill-switch into the hardware and that on April 1st 2017, all of the smartphones in a particular Western superpower explodes - all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this destabilise the government and financial institutions enough to cause a political meltdown and force a re-election?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sabotage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sabotage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sabotage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T14:34:11.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:28:32.213" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74595/more-realistic-strength-stat&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74595/more-realistic-strength-stat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding:&lt;/strong&gt; It's too RPG-like.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;RPG:&lt;/strong&gt; D&amp;amp;D and reality can't be correlated, as long as the wisdom stat lives.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Biology:&lt;/strong&gt; But it's for fictional system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where to ask this question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:27:43.897" Title="Where to place this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4710" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:38:21.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;There is no rule saying that there will be Stack Exchange site for your question.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only answer I can give is - nowhere on SE, because it's bad question on all sites it might touch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not here&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not belong to worldbuilding because you are not building any world, just putting some numbers on things that actually exists, and these numbers won't even exist in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not on biology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not touch the biological aspect of strength. At all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not on RPG with D&amp;amp;D tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but D&amp;amp;D never aimed at replicating reality. It's just a game system, a way to create stories, not a reality simulator. And you pretty much will get the same answer under other systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rethink your idea, maybe?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a roleplaying game, do you even need to have physics behind that stat?! Would your players bother, or get bored? I bet it's the latter. That's why most of the RPG systems are more about play and less about reality. Too much reality gets tiresome, boring, and slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T15:38:21.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T18:27:57.990" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question a few weeks ago that was closed. It reopened recently due to continous editing, but since it is no longer new, I can't seem to get responses from the community. Is there a hypothetical way to raise awareness about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T02:30:59.270" Title="Is there a way to bring attention to a question I asked?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4713" CreationDate="2017-03-20T18:38:13.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your reputation is over 75, the right course of action is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;set a bounty&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;With a bounty, you pay some amount of your rep (at least 50) to make your question both more visible and attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a bounty can be seen as quite costly but if your question is good, you have all chances of getting it back from upvotes pretty soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you give us a link to your question here or on the chat, you have good chances of getting an answer that would bounce up your question on top of the active list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19400" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T18:38:13.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4710" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:27:43.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a large number of problems with your question, the main one being that it's not actually about worldbuilding. You also throw in a lot of extraneous fluff that detracts from the question rather than helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better question would read something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many classic RPGs character's abilities are measured using a set of statistics such as Strength. Those have a numbered score and influence all the related tasks accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm building a world where these statistics are not just a real thing but are known about by the inhabitants. They know that they have &amp;quot;Strength 13&amp;quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the background without forcing people to read through lots of irrelevant text. It also makes it clear that this is a question about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you need to ask the question though. It needs to be &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; question and ideally it needs to have a way to find a &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer and rate the answers against each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the following might be used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this effect employment in this world? Might people be expected to have or demonstrate certain scores?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a realistic possibility? Can things like Strength and Intelligence be measured objectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would still need to explain what you are looking for in a &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer though to either of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:27:43.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:55:08.203" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose humanity had the ability to access the genetic memories of their maternal line. The lives of ancestors on their mothers side could be open to them with a certain amount of training. The effect would be similar to the animus from assassin's creed, except it would be an innate trait that everyone would be born with. Some would be more skilled in this ability than others. The further back the ancestor, the more difficult it would be to access. The mainstream religion that developed has a strong emphasis on honoring one''s ancestors and an adherence to social traidition.&#xA;How can this hypothetical society develop without devolving into cultural and technological stagnation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:55:08.203" Title="Is this question about humanity using genetic memory too broad?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4713" CreationDate="2017-03-20T21:24:25.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any edit or answer will show it as &lt;em&gt;fresh&lt;/em&gt; again.  This isn't like a common forum — posts are curated and older posts are still interesting.  You don’t need “momentum” and “trendiness”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a fitting coincedence, I just got a gold “Great Answer” badge for a post made &lt;em&gt;over a year ago&lt;/em&gt; (on a different SE).  It was posted in January of last year, last edited in September.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T02:30:59.270" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T02:30:59.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T03:16:22.083" Score="10" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74694/how-to-limit-the-proportion-of-a-force-sensitive-population&quot;&gt;How to limit the proportion of a Force sensitive population?&lt;/a&gt; was asked 16 hours ago and already has 17 answers, all score 0 or higher.  The question lays out an interesting problem and describes some approaches that don't work for the OP, which are things we want to see in questions, and then asks for a solution that's not one of those.  Apparently there are still lots of approaches, and on a quick read we don't have a big pile of non-answers or poor answers.  It's just...broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike many of our overly-broad questions, this one shows a decent amount of effort.  It's not one of those &quot;I have this vague idea -- what would happen?&quot; questions that we sometimes get.  The question does involve magic (the force).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if anything should we do with the question and/or its answers?  Is there some problem in the question that ought to be addressed, or is this just what happens when magic is involved?  Do we need better guidelines and, if so, which ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T16:28:59.493" Title="Does the &quot;force-sensitive&quot; question need to be limited somehow?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4719" CreationDate="2017-03-21T04:17:40.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this specific case I would leave it as is, it doesn't seem to be causing any significant issues yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly I'm thinking that the nature of world building being what it is, a largely imaginative process where most things are possible, this is simply to be expected. Looking around it seems that most popular questions receive more than a handful of pretty good answers, and in most cases you can separate the sand from the pearls by waiting for the votes to roll in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind this should be more of a voting culture issue than a guidance or closevote issue. Let people downvote questions they feel are pushing the line and upvote when they feel the question has merit. Similarly people shouldn't shy away from downvoting the 18th answer that doesn't add much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this sort of thing on more concrete sites like Stackoverflow as well, sometimes there really are more than a dozen perfectly acceptable ways to do the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T04:17:40.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2017-03-22T10:39:04.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would leave &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; as is, but with more emphasis on the &quot;effects on system&quot;. We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weather&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weather&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weather&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; (for things like albedo) and we probably should have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tectonics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tectonics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tectonics&lt;/a&gt; (for effects that are more generic and does not depend on body being a planet or moon). Thus, I would just remove these effects from description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, and encourage to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt; where applicable, and other tags where they fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T10:50:34.987" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T10:50:34.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4726" CreationDate="2017-03-23T17:42:16.733" Score="-3" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am really bored of seing questions downvoted with no comments left. &#xA;I can understand a question might not be clear, but if no comment is left for the OP to improve it, what's the point of downvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't be better to make commenting mandatory (even with prefilled in comments) when downvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T07:25:28.877" Title="Enforcing mandatory comment when downvoting" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-03-23T17:55:05.923" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an oft-declined request on Meta.SE.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/215422/mandatory-comment-after-downvote&quot;&gt;Mandatory comment after downvote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110279/must-comment-while-downvoting&quot;&gt;Must comment while downvoting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/55380/change-down-voting-to-require-comment-for-why-change-flag-to-report&quot;&gt;Change Down Voting to Require Comment for Why &amp;amp; Change Flag to Report&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134836/make-it-cost-more-to-downvote-without-comment-make-it-hurt-to-leave-a-crap-comm&quot;&gt;Make it cost more to downvote without comment; make it hurt to leave a crap comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the duplicates therefrom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Required comments would have two undesirable effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Votes would no longer be anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We'd see a surge of &quot;afjajflajfsa;af&quot; comments to bypass the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anonymous voting is pretty fundamental to SE's model.  The signal you should take from silent downvotes isn't &quot;oh, how unfair!&quot; (I'm not saying you are) but &quot;ok, something's wrong here -- let me try to figure out what&quot;.  In my experience, a single downvote isn't worth worrying about, but if you get more than one there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be something to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, it is far better for all involved if somebody clues in a well-meaning user who just got it wrong somehow.  We should strive to leave helpful comments.  Even if you're not the downvoter, if you see a downvoted post and have a pretty good idea of why, try to lend a hand, especially for new users.  Let's all try to help people make their questions and answers as great as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Except if it's trolling or something like that; in that case it's best not to engage.  Downvoting and flagging are the best tools for that.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T17:55:05.923" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-03-24T00:05:23.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is sort of a philosophical question. Should there be rules enforcing good behavior or should the community enforce good behavior? This is a fundamental divide between people that extends to many areas more important than forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, personally, am all in favor of community enforcement. First off, we do have a strong community here. I joined not too long ago, and have taken a pretty active role in trying to enforce community standards. Flag and vote for deletion non-constructive posts, comment on answers that aren't up to muster, ensure that I comment when I vote to close, and leave nasty comments when I see close vote with no comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the only one doing this stuff. Frostfyre and Molot, for two examples, were doing this when I first joined (and still are) and their frequent commenting help me as a new user understand the site 'culture' to the point that I can now help enforce it. In turn, newer users like Secespitus and Mrkvicka are now doing the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;editors&lt;/a&gt; tab. People like SRM, Zxyrra, and Brythan do a lot of work keeping the site tidy and organized, as have the people with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/70/deputy&quot;&gt;deputy&lt;/a&gt; badge. This is all the work that goes on 'behind the scenes' so to speak, and isn't strictly reflected in reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral of the story: we don't need rules in place to make this site what we (the users) want it to be. It just takes some dedication. We, collectively, by our actions, can discourage the kind of bad behavior we don't want to see, like offensive questions, comments as answers, and un-commented close and downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T00:05:23.727" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-24T09:06:12.247" Score="0" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;As shown in comments section under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4725/809&quot;&gt;Enforcing mandatory comment when downvoting&lt;/a&gt; people don't like to comment on downvotes because it is not productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If someone comments on down or close vote, do not start a discussion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did it to help OP recover. Trying to argue he is wrong is going nowhere. All you can get is frustration downvote following close vote, flame war or other unpleasant effects. So please just don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&quot;But I disagree!&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's your right to cast &quot;leave open&quot; vote. Or reopen vote. Or not to downvote. It's your right to edit that post, if, let's say, it's clear to you but accumulates &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot; votes. Or, if it's not your right to do so just yet, it is meant not to be, by design.  Deal with it, earn more reputation and come back to edit or vote as you see just.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/253386/2389310&quot;&gt;it is not allowed to upvote only to cancel downvote you disagree with&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&quot;I asked for explanation and...&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4725/enforcing-mandatory-comment-when-downvoting#comment13042_4726&quot;&gt;and not only my&lt;/a&gt;) sad experience, people who asks to provide explanation on downvotes are high-risk. Chance they will argue is much higher than normal. Sorry guys, to some people here your &quot;please explain&quot; &lt;strong&gt;is a giant red flag encouraging to stay silent&lt;/strong&gt; and say nothing. If you want to change that, please &lt;strong&gt;start being supportive&lt;/strong&gt; to people who commented. Do not forget the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;&quot;assume good intentions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; part of the rules. And don't forget that you asked for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: If you want down and close votes explained, then do not start discussion. Thank, show gratitude, work on what you got and move on. Anything else works against people commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* I know it's from meta stackoverflow but it was posted before SO meta and SE meta split, as far as I can see.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T19:37:16.270" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T10:19:48.933" Title="Don't argue with comments on down and close votes, please" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|comments|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-24T09:37:26.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eh, yes and no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;prefer&lt;/em&gt; to leave comment votes when its a fixable matter. It dosen't matter whether I downvoted it. One of the nice things about these places as I use it is there's very little purely negative reinforcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something is ... so bad there's nothing that can be done or if its comments have (and I lift this almost wholesale fromt he official wording) - degraded into pointless bickering or noise, and they are all unsalvagable they should be gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, lets not forget the role of comments as a &lt;em&gt;teaching tool&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could always go &quot;I did not downvote this &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; ....&quot; or just point out what's wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telling folks not to comment at all, is a bit counterproductive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T09:37:26.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-24T12:02:55.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Molot. While I think there can be good reasons to argue a &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; vote, since that vote is based on an established criteria, the entire point of the downvote is that it is left up to each user's subjective judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collectively, the judgment of all the users of this site is better than the singular judgement of any one of us. By contributing your downvote, you are contributing to the collective wisdom of the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with another user's downvote, the appropriate action is to give that post an upvote (assuming that post merits an upvote, in your judgement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T12:10:57.250" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T12:10:57.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-24T13:47:34.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Engaging in civil discourse is extremely important.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the &amp;quot;don't argue with close votes&amp;quot; part of your suggestion. It's a fantastic idea to explain &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; why you're voting to close, and I think a lot of people do that on a regular basis. However, if we ask people to do that, it only seems fair to let those who disagree voice their responses. Otherwise, you can have a question closed without any rationale against it. And while we definitely need to close off-topic/broad/opinion-based questions quickly, that doesn't mean that there isn't time to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's a difference between &lt;em&gt;arguing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;discussing&lt;/em&gt;. The former is generally bad; the latter can be good. Internet arguments are often pointless and unproductive. But a civil exchange of conflicting ideas in order to produce a better result &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; productive, so long as people are willing to think about other points of view. That kind of thing I can strongly encourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are sometimes good for this if you're just responding pretty briefly. Longer discussions can and will get moved to chat. As a mod, I'm actually sometimes a bit reluctant to move comments to chat for questions with pending close/reopen votes, because people voting to close probably won't go to the chat room, and so they'll miss out on a lot of crucial discussion. So it's definitely good to leave these sort of remarks in comments. However, if something's getting long, and it's mainly between two people, chat is the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Downvote conversations can be good . . . and bad.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I get a downvote on a post, I won't complain. It's not productive at all, and generally it just makes everyone a bit more touchy. That's unnecessary. However, if I get a couple downvotes on a post, I might leave a comment under it like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanations of downvotes, while absolutely not mandatory, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/135/274942&quot;&gt;can be helpful&lt;/a&gt;, because they let me improve a post. Please do downvote if I've made a mistake somewhere - I'd rather people downvote me if I'm wrong - but if you have the time, I'd appreciate it if you can point out where I've gone wrong. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd only post something like this if I've gotten quite a few downvotes and I really, after re-reading my post a couple times, can't see what I've done wrong. As such, this is a last resort to try to improve my post. It doesn't attack anyone and makes it clear that downvotes are a good thing. I'd just prefer to write a correct post than an incorrect one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, that's usually it. If someone does comment, I'll make the changes and thank them for their time. If not, then so be it. I move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Forget about it.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I'd say that's my best piece of advice -  move on. No matter what your response is to any of the things discussed in this meta thread, you should always think about accepting that sometimes things don't always work out the way you want. Maybe the downvoters are right and maybe they're wrong. If you're not going to get some advice on how to improve your post, then accept that and move on. Ask, answer, vote, comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we always have to remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/22935/274942&quot;&gt;in the end, a downvote or two (or three) isn't all that important&lt;/a&gt;, and there's no reason to force people to comment when they vote. Move on, help people, and try to gain some more fake Internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T13:47:34.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-24T14:32:04.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone is responding to a downvote with explanation, there are two overlapping conversations happening simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The merits of the downvote. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Refining the question/answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having conversations on how to improve answers benefits the community. Arguing about the downvote is disruptive. The problem with asking &quot;why?&quot; is that it's impossible to determine the motives behind asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably for the best if we encourage people to use comments to improve the question and not to discuss voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T15:52:02.107" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T15:52:02.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:08:43.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me interject my personal experience, because arguing from authority makes no sense.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to pop onto WorldBuilder for a few days because I like thinking about hard problems.  People like my answers, it's fun enough to rack up a thousand points or more, and both questions and answers usually make me think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime within a week, I'll start seeing a raft of closed questions.  These are marked as &quot;too opinion based&quot;, &quot;too much science, should be r/science&quot;, &quot;not enough science&quot;, &quot;too narrow&quot;, or &quot;too broad&quot;.   I haven't seen a reason translating to &quot;too polka-dotted&quot; but I expect that I will.  Usually, the question has a dozen people commenting and thinking first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gets boring, and I leave WorldBuilding for another month or two.  I point out that closing questions, while there can be an upside, can have a downside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23060" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:08:43.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4729" CreationDate="2017-03-27T10:19:48.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I disagree but mostly because you assume we have no choice but to carry on getting involved once we start.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR: If you give constructive feedback and the OP is getting belligerent then you don't have to respond. Don't let the fear that someone may disagree hold you back from trying to help.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From my (and not only my) sad experience, people who asks to provide explanation on downvotes are high-risk. Chance they will argue is much higher than normal. Sorry guys, to some people here your &quot;please explain&quot; is a giant red flag encouraging to stay silent and say nothing. If you want to change that, please start being supportive to people who commented. Do not forget the &quot;assume good intentions&quot; part of the rules. And don't forget that you asked for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are a couple of points here that are 'red flags' to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone honestly doesn't understand and wants an explanation you're trying to block that in-road to not let them know how to improve. It shouldn't be essential that we hold their hands but generalising to say it is a bad idea makes this more of a closed group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You essentially say that someone disagreeing with you is a reason not to speak up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is heating arguments that you have a problem with...why do you carry on having them? The process should be something like:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify someone's post doesn't fit in with worldbuilding:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inform them, either through close votes (which do provide an explanation) or through downvotes - which don't. If you think they haven't grasped something then it is helpful (not mandatory) to provide an explanation to help them better fit their questions to the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they disagree you can better explain (or review your own opinions...perhaps you're wrong in some cases) or if they're obviously not accepting of any alternative ideas then &lt;strong&gt;just stop commenting.&lt;/strong&gt; If you continue you're feeding that fire just as much as them but that isn't a reason not to start the discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I think sometimes the &quot;be supportive to people who commented&quot; bit needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. If you make a new user feel like they're being ganged up on then you're further alienating them from the community rather than offering them a constructive way to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over all it seems a little like your views close off worldbuilding to new users who don't understand. Sure it is easier to get rid of people who don't get it straight away but is that the sort of community you want?&#xA;The policy should just be to not comment unless it is useful - that way you avoid flame-wars in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T10:19:48.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-03-27T16:25:41.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be more sensible to keep the question up to date, without losing its scope. Adding an 'update' or 'further thoughts' can help people see what is relevant to the question, and also get an idea regarding what conclusions you have come to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35198" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T22:23:03.990" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T22:23:03.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4719" CreationDate="2017-03-27T16:28:59.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, and I am new, I think that 'world-building' is always going to entail some questions regarding trans-empirical physics - i.e., physics-building / universal-rules-building, and that is okay too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35198" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T16:28:59.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-27T19:39:24.507" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has a very successful Code Golf site, where people try to develop the shortest program to accomplish a goal.  Recently I came across Spanish.SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2591/this-is-translation-golf-the-translation-with-the-least-number-of-characters-wi/2592#2592&quot;&gt;version of it&lt;/a&gt;.  The madness is spreading!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if we might be interested in exploring something akin to this.  I don't know what the equivalent of a character count is for WorldBuilding yet, but the &quot;shorter is better&quot; seems like a nifty way to make things very friendly for the stack exchange format (although it does disqualify some of my 10+ paragraph responses.  So sad)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also thought it interesting that Spanish.SE is trying to keep the number of golf questions to a minimum with a rule that the winner should propose the next golf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we think worldbuilding is a topic where golfing could be a valid art form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T15:14:07.143" Title="On Par with Golfing" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4739" CreationDate="2017-03-28T13:53:31.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt; (5 characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like if we did this, the questions would mostly be of the idea-generation sort (which are on-topic, but I think the community is still somewhat divided about that). So you'd ask &quot;I want X, how can I make it happen?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I see is that the shortest answer might always be &quot;create a universe where X happens.&quot; Or, if there is a shorter answer, it's going to be less than 35 characters, which kind of seems like a waste of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that even on Code Golf, the answers can be of any length, and tend to be pretty long for the golfed languages. The &lt;em&gt;solution&lt;/em&gt; is short, but the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; that describes the solution is expected to be as long as needed to explain what's going on. On Worldbuilding, the &lt;em&gt;solution&lt;/em&gt; is sometimes put in bold somewhere, and can be pretty short, but in a lot of questions that solution is either 'Yes' or 'No', and the important part is the explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternate option could be to do one of those &quot;what's the smallest change that would allow X&quot; questions, but those are already kind of normal and usually on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T13:53:31.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4739" CreationDate="2017-03-28T15:14:07.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is brainstorming based on the comments I've seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the questions that I hate are the &quot;Help! I've painted myself in a corner!&quot; questions.  These are the questions where an author needs a particular plot point to occur and needs the world to support it, but they've built the world too rigidly and they can't figure out how to do it.  You probably hate these too.  These are almost always &quot;story based&quot; because they are having to fit the changes into an existing storyline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we also should recognize that this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a fundamental part of world building.  In an ideal world we should all learn how to build worlds that are flexible enough to not have this happen.  In practice, the art of jamming one last detail into the world is a required skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish.SE's translation golf has an interesting rule: when asking for the shortest translation possible, you're obliged to provide a translation of your own.  The idea is to prevent people from using their translation-golf to do translations for homework and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if we applied a similar rule to a golf like game on WorldBuilding.  You provide the world, a few key places where the world intersects with the world, and something you want to fit in place.  You ask &quot;What is the smallest change I can make to the world (in terms of amount of WorldBuilding/Writing effort) which lets me fit this one last detail I need into my world.&quot;  You then provide an example of a solution which would fit your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this could work out similar to how Physics.SE handles homework problems.  You're permitted to come to Physic.SE for homework help.  However, you're required to show the work you've undertaken so far, and people ideally should coach their answers around the particular mistakes you've made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the comments, character count is probably not going to be an elegant scoring mechanism, but perhaps the standard voting process could be.  Vote for the answers which, in your mind, are the simplest smallest changes possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T15:14:07.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-29T10:08:46.603" Score="11" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is usually a sporadic issue, but today I found a question that really made me &lt;em&gt;do something about it&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75446/world-with-a-different-sun-every-day-and-random-days-with-no-sun&quot;&gt;World with a different sun every day, and random days with no sun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question per se is perfectly fine. But I noticed that many of the answers are multiple answers. Should something be done about it?&#xA;I talk about answers like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75609/18136&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75609/18136&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75467/18136&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75467/18136&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that these kind of answers includes multiple completely/largely unrelated answers that, I think, should be separated because they are independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What if I love 1 of them but hate the other 2? Should I upvote? Downvote? Do nothing?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing is, for me, none of the 3 actions above feels... &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should something be done about this?&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA; And why is people allergic to writing multiple answers to the same question? Is it frowned upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: Sorry if this has been discussed before, I've searched and couldn't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18136" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T16:53:06.987" Title="The issue with multiple answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4743" CreationDate="2017-03-29T10:23:20.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are usually more constructive than down-votes.  So in this case, I'd up-vote the answer, but add comments describing why you  disagree with some of the points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one can see who up and down-votes questions, so you won't be judged as being a hypocrite.  There's nothing to stop you admitting to up-voting for the answer you liked before critiquing the other points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've avoided recommending a down-vote as I prefer to offer a route to a positive outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T10:23:20.253" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-29T11:09:19.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used when asking questions about already existing privileges, as well as when asking questions about new privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T18:28:45.063" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T18:28:45.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-29T11:09:19.430" Score="0" Body="For questions about existing and new privileges." OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T18:28:52.027" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T18:28:52.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4743" CreationDate="2017-03-29T16:53:06.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree that this is a problem. What I see that makes it specifically a problem is when one answer provides, say, solutions A, B, and C, while another answer provides A, C, and D. The answers are not duplicates of each other, but neither of them contains the 'full' answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the ideal case is when there is one answer that contains all possibilities. That, to me, is why we close questions as being 'too broad': there are too many possible answers, so no single answer can contain all of them. The problem I see with this is that it's very easy to skip a possibilitiy, and once someone else posts it it would be mostly unethical to steal their idea and add it to your answer. Answer wikis are a possible solution, but that's more of an altruistic approach that I don't think we should expect most answerers to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option, as you mention, is to post a new answer for every possibility. To me, this seems like a great way to downvote/delete options that are wrong, or that have already been posted by someone else. It should also be easier to find the most community-appreciated solution. The problem with this, though, is that people tend to not look at anything other than the highest-voted answer, and the highest-voted answer might not actually be the one the OP finds most useful, which gets into issues with what should be marked as the 'accepted' answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the two options (list everything at once, hope you didn't miss one vs write a new answer for each), I think the latter option avoids the most issues in the short term. However, I worry that creating the assumption that for every point you wish to make, you need to make a new answer, is a dangerous move. I'd also be kind of worried about reputation farming (a two-part answer makes half as much reputation as two one-part answers). As I've said, I think a 'definitive' answer is ideal, but difficult to obtain, encouraging people to write multiple answers is only going to make definitive answers less prevalent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T16:53:06.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4749" CreationDate="2017-03-29T20:01:05.817" Score="-6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a general question across SE sites, but I figured I'd ask here since I couldn't find the answer generally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is a high-voted question with a high-voted answer. It has been over a year and the OP has not marked the answer as accepted. It's clearly high traffic question that lots of people have (it may even have the block against &quot;thanks!&quot; comments turned on). Is it appropriate to flag such a question for moderators to come and mark the answer as &quot;accepted&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T22:20:28.177" Title="Should moderators mark a high voted answer as the accepted answer after a while?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4748" CreationDate="2017-03-29T20:33:06.577" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only the OP can accept an answer.  Moderators can't override that.  It's the OP's prerogative to give the checkmark to a good answer, a less-good answer that he says worked for him, or no answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the default sorting is by score, so the best answer (according to the community) will still show up at the top of the list and thus be visible to readers.  (Most of our readers do not have accounts on the site; they come via search engines and other links.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many proposals on Meta.SE over the years about ways to fix various aspects of &quot;the accepted-answer problem&quot;.  In &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/268959/162102&quot;&gt;this question that I asked in 2015&lt;/a&gt; I compiled links to some of them.  You might find interesting reading there, but don't blame me if you get sucked in, TV-Tropes-style. :-)  (Those links are mainly about problems from &quot;bad&quot; answers being accepted, but there are further links from there.  As I said, there's been a lot of discussion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T20:33:06.577" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4748" CreationDate="2017-03-29T20:40:54.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just want to add to Monica's answer by saying that there have been times when I have not gotten what I considered to be an acceptable answer to my question. The question remained, as did its existing answers, but I still held out hope that someone new would find the question and write a new answer to it. This is, in fact, a thing we should encourage users to do, to go back through our archive of questions and see if there are any in need of a new perspective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see your point that sometimes a user never comes back to accept an answer. But I don't really see the issue with this; I see far more of an issue of someone coming in, getting answers that they feel are insufficient, and being told by the system that their problem is solved, and that any future attempts to answer their question are now discouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T20:40:54.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4748" CreationDate="2017-03-29T22:20:28.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my opinion, but my guess is &quot;The Answer&quot; is implicitly the Questioners to determine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, then one looks at your issue .... Ok, but I would want to know the intrinsic value to the community for someone other than the Questioner to ... hopefully, objectively, select an answer as &quot;The Answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no intrinsic value to the community (and how could there be, because if person X has a better answer and enters it, no one is going to go back and undo the selected answer) for selecting an answer as &quot;The Answer&quot; other than to the person that created the selected answer ... are we getting sufficiently convoluted here yet :) ... then no, there is no point to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33823" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T22:20:28.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T07:37:56.720" Score="8" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this topic and several answers here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75416/create-a-world-where-necromancy-isnt-considered-as-an-evil-type-of-magic?page=1&amp;amp;tab=votes#tab-top&quot;&gt;Create a world where Necromancy isn&amp;#39;t considered as an &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; type of magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one idea crossed my mind: Why necessarily make it bad or good? There were ideas to resurrect only humans, that were sinful in their lives. And so, why not do it as some kind of karma thing. When you resurrect/reanimate someone, who was honest and good in life, you will get &quot;bad karma&quot;, and when you reanimate someone bad, you will get &quot;good karma&quot;, or at least you won't get more bad karma. Details are unimportant, the concept is. So, actually, it would be the player's choice, whether necromancy in that world would be perceived as rigidly evil or can be seen as something kind of acceptable, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen such proposal among answers to that question, if someone could post it there, I would be very thankful. I can't, since I don't post here much and there is some reputation required to post an answer. I think it is not a bad idea and I do not desire credit for it, just want to offer another way of thinking about that problem. And I apologize for my English, not my first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35353" OwnerDisplayName="TStancek" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T10:21:21.653" Title="How to put through my idea?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4698" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:41:50.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me posit four classes which can be used to classify any questions that arise when creating a world.  (Of course, by ‘world’ I mean that which some might call “universe” of a story or an open setting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone has a question which pertains to some minor aspect of their created world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The aspect is believed to be peripheral, and probably would never make a noticable difference in any developing stories being created within that world.  However, it could be good to know for later developments; it is always pleasant to explore anyways.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, maybe the aspect is no so peripheral as the asker initially believed.  It would be better if they had an answer now rather than wait for someone to point out a fault in their world later — simply because they didn't know the implications of some important premise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is an important, but not core, aspect of some author's world that is beyond their acumen, knowledge, or intellectual skill to develop.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This happens to all of us.  We come up with a good premise for a story or a world, we go along, but then — wham! — we see that we need to know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57453/&quot;&gt;climatic&lt;/a&gt; characteristics of some planet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sure, we could and should do all we can to learn the details of hydrodynamics, meteorodynamics, and lithodynamics if we are creating a typical spheroid planet, but it is helpful to have an expert guide us and explain things which are a tad too conjectural for most encyclopedia.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Something cheaper than hiring a professor or postgrad is also useful for many of us — though, of course, if the aspect is important enough, you do want to involve some more stringent examination at some point prior to finalized publishing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone learns of a fascinating idea — grafting of extra sensory instruments, a creature which uses some bodily organ in a novel way, a bizarre inversion of some familiar concept, or so, — and thinks that it would make a good premise for a story; however, they don't know enough about the related mechanics so as to begin making a world, let alone a story in that world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, they need some help.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now, these such requests are a tad dishonest, methinks.  Why are you writing the story, anyway?  Is it because you are a subtle and esquisite wordcrafter, but a paltry worldbuilder?  Or, do you simply not have the science or wherewithal whereby to develop the germ of premise?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How do you know that it will be a promising premise?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It would be much better to either  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;attach someone, whether to the published credits or merely by contract, who can then receive some compensation for their contribution.  If their help is that fundamental to the story, then they deserve some acclaim at least.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add to your backburner those ideas that look promising but are beyond your contemporary level of expertise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pull a Roddenberry:  it's a Warp Drive, Food Replicator, a Transporter, and a Universal Translator all–in–one!  It's a &lt;em&gt;Repli-trans-warp-aporter&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a person wants to begin writing a fantastic story or designing the fantastic setting for an MMO world, but they've got no premise which they think is appealing enough.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;“Let me gather a collection of generic concepts which I like, and stew them together, and then I'll see if someone else can digest them and return to me something which is workable.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There can be many variations on that rather grotesque satire, and some may seem less dishonest than others, but let us take them as alike enough so as to warrant the same handling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most would agree that the bottom class is unacceptable here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for the third class, I would say that it is also unacceptable.  Some might disagree with me — indeed, many of what I believed were such questions have not been marked as off–topic or as non-worldbuilding.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first and second ones are the only ones which I believe belong here — and not so as to reduce the bloatation of the question population, but because they are the most honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the question itself is the only extant germ for a worldbuilding not yet begun?  Or, what if the asker has no immediate intentions to do any such building of world in their planned future?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well, I don't believe that should be encouraged here — but, if it occurs, I don't think people should be too swift to downcast those questions which seem to do so; err on the side of benefit to all as often as is possible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I do think that such questions would be better served by directing them elsewhere.  If the other Stack Exchange sites aren't receptive to hypothetical postulations or queries, then that doesn't necessarily mean that they should go here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I believe this because of one major reason:  if the questions here don't support answers which are conducive to worldbuilding, then the entire environ of this site is diminished accordingly.  People could conceivably begin answering the so–called What–If questions as if they were that, restricting the scope of their answers.  New arrivals would see this, and adopt it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's my concern in that regard.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now you know, all those who wondered why I claimed certain nebulous questions weren't qualified for worldbuilding.  I now hold back my vociferousity, depending on the quality of the answers I see or plan to give.  I do think it is a valid danger, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a ‘think tank’.  It should not to be used so as to do your worldbuilding for you — i.e. &lt;em&gt;contribution&lt;/em&gt;.  The problem is not that such a thing is done, but that such a thing is done under pretenses of &lt;em&gt;consultation&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;The purpose of the answers here should be twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a documentation of the worldbuilding for the posterity of later similar efforts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a medium through which to request informative consultation for the purpose of worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the criterion which should be used to assess questions as solicitations for “idea generation”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T01:33:04.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-31T08:15:10.503" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several questions with really good answers.  However I'm not sure what to do right now....who deserves the best answer in questions? Most upvoted answer or my favourite answer? Good night!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T02:20:44.047" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T02:20:44.047" Title="Who deserves the acceptance of the answer in questions?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4698" CreationDate="2017-03-31T11:32:55.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A partial support for - at least some aspects of - WB being a debate is the number of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/651841&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answers per question&lt;/a&gt; we get. I think there should probably be an easier way to run a query over multiple sites but I couldn't see it, I just did a few to compare and got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      av # answers per question&#xA;wb        4.7&#xA;physics   1.5&#xA;SO        1.6&#xA;Unix      1.5&#xA;Puzzle    2.7&#xA;Photo     2.5&#xA;Scifi     2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to get a variety of different sites - photography being perhaps a little opinion based, stack overflow a little personal taste and physics having more definite answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see quite so large a difference as that...I may have just picked a few distinctly different ones though so take this with a pinch of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More answers per question does seem to hint at the answerers believing there is more to add...and so perhaps more opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the comments HDE226868 pointed out:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the site comparisons, we're actually averaging a bit under 5 answers per question. Physics has about 1.5, as does SO and Unix &amp;amp; Linux. Puzzling has just over 2.5, as does Photography. SciFi is at roughly 2. So somehow your answer data is multiplied by two. DaaahWhoosh says the code's counting answers twice per post ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="31124" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T14:28:43.103" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T14:28:43.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4755" CreationDate="2017-03-31T14:48:09.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acceptance mark is an indicator of what helped you, the person who asked the question, the most.  On some sites you can test answers (compile the code, etc) and that can help you choose, but that doesn't work so well on Worldbuilding.  Most users, I think, are guided by the community voting, but you aren't required to go by voting.  If the community really hates an answer you should ask yourself why before following its advice and marking it correct, but you're allowed to disagree with the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to accept an answer.  The absence of an acceptance is ambiguous; it might mean you need more help or it might mean you got several good answers and can't choose.  Sometimes we just have to tolerate ambiguity. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also ok to to wait.  Newer users sometimes accept an answer within a few hours of asking; I find it's better to wait a few days (or sometimes a lot longer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T14:48:09.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-04-02T00:47:24.800" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly this sound like censorship, there are tons of methods to deal with bad answers already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in my country, we lived in a military ditactorship. And one of the undemocratic things that the military have done is the previous censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds suspiciously like previous censorship, ie, your answer must be first aproved here. What are you afraid of ? Why all that red tape ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7066" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T00:47:24.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T05:25:50.440" Score="6" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this site has so many questions about military topics, I would like to post an invitation here asking people to join a proposed Stack Exchange for military technology and military culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/99463/militaria&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/99463/militaria&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to post an invitation here even if it is not a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18914" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T14:45:15.100" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T14:45:15.100" Title="Is it okay to post here to promote a different Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2017-04-02T14:40:30.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure! We have a specific place for doing it, though: &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post an image advertising the proposal as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4377/627&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2017&lt;/a&gt;. If it gets six upvotes or more, your ad will then be shown periodically on the right sidebar, where people can click through to get to the proposal. This system lets the community vet what they do and don't want to promote, while still giving the ad plenty of promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of requirements your answer needs to follow, but they're detailed in the linked question. Be especially careful about size and formatting. There are some examples of promoting Area 51 proposals in the linked thread, as well as from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2902/627&quot;&gt;2016&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, do try to make sure that the proposal is in some way relevant to the site. I'm not sure how much attention Militaria will garner on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. It's worth a shot though; please do try it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T14:42:59.640" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T14:42:59.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4698" CreationDate="2017-04-03T14:41:21.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idea generation is OK, if narrow enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, not even an hour about there was a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/76130/809&quot;&gt;What are all the changes human will get after the next Ice Age&lt;/a&gt;. This is, of course, too broad. This kind of idea generation should be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/25203/809&quot;&gt;How can I safely brighten my secondary star?&lt;/a&gt; are perfectly OK to me. It involves idea generation, and it might be a bit unclear how the answers will be rated, but there is a really precise goal and solid set of limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short &lt;strong&gt;&quot;We will not build your world for you&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; should apply. Specific, well defined parts, yes. But not a broad and unspecified part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T14:41:21.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4752" CreationDate="2017-04-04T10:21:21.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question you want to answer is protected, because it attracted too much low quality ideas. Sorry it hit you, but before you start earning your reputation we can't know if your ideas are usually solid, or ill defined and low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just find something else, and answer. Worldbuilding is broad, soft and fluid discipline of art. All you need is one upvote. Shouldn't be hard to get. Or ask a well defined on topic question. Two upvotes and you are not the newbie protection is designed to work against. This meta question shows you can write something good enough. So just do it - but start in less exposed place, under less exciting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T10:21:21.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4769" CreationDate="2017-04-05T08:01:47.733" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first question was put 'on hold' due to some errors. Now that I have fixed them, how can I get that suffix removed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35228" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T08:07:27.760" Title="How to get 'On hold' suffix removed" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2017-04-05T08:07:27.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question doesn't seem to fit the sites guidelines as written in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; the community will put it on hold to allow you to edit it, so that it fits the sites guidelines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wouldn't put it on hold someone could answer it, although the question doesn't fit the guidelines. If the question is then edited the answer can be invalidated. This would be bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some edits your question will be put into a review-queue to determine whether it's okay or not. There people can vote again to reopen the question. Your goal should be to listen to the people and fix the question. After that it can be reopened. If you edited your question and nothing happens for some time it's a good idea to make a Meta Post (like you just did) and go to the chat to ask for assistance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;What does it mean if my question is &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;on hold&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center for more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T08:07:27.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4771" CreationDate="2017-04-05T14:32:39.510" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a possibility of having equal number of up votes and down votes in such type of questions (showing 0 votes), say both are 'n'. Is there any way of finding the magnitude of 'n'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it will make the question more interesting and catchy if some how 'n' is made public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Don't forget to consider the fact that it has too many answers(not a worthless question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35228" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T20:55:24.923" Title="Question with 0 votes but too many answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4770" CreationDate="2017-04-05T14:57:50.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a privilege that you can acquire at 1.000 reputation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;Established User&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It allows you to view the amount of Up- and Downvotes on any question on WorldBuilding.SE. If you get a total of 1.000 reputation you can see how many people voted up and down, so in a sense it is already public to those users that have the required reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.000" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T14:57:50.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T17:09:03.757" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multiple times recently, I have seen questions on Worldbuilding which I have been concerned about. Many of them could easily be masked attempts at asking for advice for criminal activity. One such recent question was about how to get yourself alone with the president; that one I can see being legite but it still caused me to raise an eyebrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent example of this is the most blatant so far: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/76274/how-can-i-build-a-nuclear-reactor-in-my-backyard&quot;&gt;How can I build a nuclear reactor in my backyard?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can completely understand having a story where your average Joe has their own nuclear reactor. That is fine. Having a story with nuclear reactors does not require a question like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of very smart people on here answering questions. I fear that if you are not careful, worldbuilding could be a place where people secretly scheme some bad stuff with unknowing helpers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should questions that could be used for nefarious purposes be off-topic? I'm not saying they definitely should be, but I am leaning toward yes. If you go to a chemistry stack exchange and ask &quot;What chemicals do I need to make the cheapest IED?&quot; as opposed to asking about some specific chemicals and their properties; you'll likely get deleted and reported to authorities. I suppose the metric should be something like &quot;Are these questions more like asking for an IED or more like asking an innocent question about chemicals which just coincidentally happen to be used in explosives among other things?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other posts which I thought odd were ones about breaking and entering, stealing, assassinating, etc. in various fantasy settings, for which answers were often like &quot;Your setting doesn't really change the basic facts, so you would do it just like you would in real life, and here is the best way to do it for real...&quot; But this one about nuclear reactors seems even less reasonable than those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:33.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T17:28:26.037" Title="Worldbuilding is getting some very negative concerning questions (questionable legality)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2017-04-05T17:26:45.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4770" CreationDate="2017-04-05T20:55:24.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As another &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4771/28&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; says, viewing vote breakdowns is a privilege that comes when you get a little more rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to know about a specific case and it's a recent post, though, you can work it out from your reputation history.  (For older questions this would require a lot more digging.)  Click on your user name and then click on the &quot;reputation&quot; tab.  This shows you the breakdown of all votes you received per post per day (plus anything else that affected your reputation, like approved edits).  You can count it up from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information is actually available through the Stack Exchange API and I know there's a user script out there somewhere that fetches the data, so even without 1000 rep you can see the vote breakdowns.  The reason the don't just give this to everybody is that using it creates extra load on the servers -- and while your one mouse click might not seem like a big deal to you, added up over the millions of visits per month (across the network), it's more significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T20:55:24.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T12:17:54.773" Score="9" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it seems that poison and venom both have their own tags, though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisons&lt;/a&gt; tag is widely more popular, even regarding situations where where a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/venom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;venom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;venom&lt;/a&gt; tag would be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In biological contexts, &quot;poisons&quot; are chemicals produced by a living organism to harm animals that eat or touch them, while &quot;venoms&quot; are harmful chemicals delivered through injections, like bites or stings.  In a non-biological context, though, these terms are typically used interchangeably; the definition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisons&lt;/a&gt; tag (which matches the broad definition on the Wikipedia page for &quot;Poison&quot;) includes any chemical substances harmful to living organisms, whether they are produced through biological or non-biological means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we encourage correct use of the terms when appropriate?  Or is the inclusion of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/venom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;venom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;venom&lt;/a&gt; tag needlessly pedantic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17169" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T00:26:27.770" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T17:38:30.133" Title="Poisons and venom" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1978" CreationDate="2017-04-06T13:40:55.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some thought, I'm of the opinion that questions (if on topic) are fine, but I personally won't post answers, if I think doing so might lead to harm.  YMMV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30166" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T13:40:55.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T20:08:25.750" Score="9" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCSM70JKo0w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Episode 3 is up!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Green, Nex and Art (Double thanks to Art since he does all the technical stuff) for making the podcast possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this episode we dream about what we would do with magic...but with science.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then we discuss a fascinating world brought to you by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mamde.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mamde.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After that conversation we went through a few all star questions from the site and wrapped things up with recommendations for the world builders out there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check it out and let us know what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Episode 3 of The Factory Floor, a podcast about building worlds and filling them with interesting things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this episode we introduce a new guest and co-host who happens to also be the technical magician that makes the podcast possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome and introducing ArtOfCode:  00:00:00 – 00:09:00&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology and Magic from the world of Green:  00:09:01 – 00:43:20&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions from the site:  00:43:21 – 01:35:00&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25272/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-ship-capable-of-crossing-the-pacific/25276#25276&quot;&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12219/in-what-war-would-one-modern-military-vehicle-make-a-difference&quot;&gt;In what war would one modern military vehicle make a difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25724/what-good-are-herbivores-in-an-animal-army&quot;&gt;What good are herbivores in an animal army?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62572/truth-stone-effects-on-the-justice-system-and-criminal-world&quot;&gt;Truth Stone: Effects on the justice system, and criminal world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendations:  01:27:01 – 01:35:14&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1582970262&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writers Complete Fantasy Reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0671671561&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pegasus Bridge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0786965622&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="2685" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T17:10:55.957" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T17:10:55.957" Title="Worldbuilding Podcast #03 - Technology and Ewoks" Tags="|discussion|podcast|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4774" CreationDate="2017-04-07T00:25:16.403" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been pedantic about the use of certain tags in the past. For instance, I've suggested that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-system&lt;/a&gt; tag should only be used for questions involving &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the actual Solar System&lt;/a&gt;, rather than various other planetary systems (which would hopefully get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planetary-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planetary-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planetary-systems&lt;/a&gt; tag).&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4016/627&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's a problem with that. Most people won't know how to properly distinguish between the two tags, and unless people who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know constantly check, there are going to be mix-ups. It's a lot simpler to just bite the bullet, so to speak, and accept that both terms will likely be used interchangeably. There's not much we can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'd suggest making the tags synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: In many cases, go with what system the person on the street would do. Here, that means using the tags synonymously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T17:38:30.133" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T17:38:30.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4774" CreationDate="2017-04-07T08:08:53.020" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we want to be scientifically accurate and still useful, I would suggest to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/toxin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;toxin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;toxin&lt;/a&gt; and make other two synonyms of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to be useful and not so stiff about definition (and that's what I think we should be), then let's just make &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poison&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poison&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poison&lt;/a&gt; definition match Wikipedia's broad one, and mark venom as synonym. There is no practical need to have them separate now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember &lt;strong&gt;tags are mainly for categorization and search, not to define substance of the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T08:08:53.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2017-04-07T16:31:26.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Episode 4:  Episode Title (We don't know yet)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to do prior to the episode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify a guest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify a main topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get the guest set up with the technology stuff&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schedule data and time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Host:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guests/Co-hosts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nex&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Date/Time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TBD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agenda&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warmup:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Questions for WB users:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4370/want-to-contribute-a-question-to-the-podcast-or-try-to-stump-the-panel&quot;&gt;Visit this thread to add your suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main discussion topic:&lt;/em&gt;  TBD, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4130/world-building-podcast-potential-topics-themes&quot;&gt;feel free to offer suggestions here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulleted Description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review of WB.SE recent/interesting questions:&lt;/em&gt; Questions will be selected once we know what the main topic will be so we can maintain the theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discuss World(s):&lt;/em&gt; We don't usually get to this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 1:  Owner, Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World 2:  Owner, Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T16:31:26.107" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-04-07T16:31:26.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2017-04-09T10:18:03.097" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question title:&lt;/strong&gt; A historically accurate portrayal of the weapons of feudal japan in a my story&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to avoid the weeabooness &lt;em&gt;(crazy and unhealthy obsession with anything that is japan, while having zero real knowledege about its history or traditions, or xenophobia)&lt;/em&gt; in my sci-fi setting, so I created a justification, that would be delivered by a character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main reason for us to use &lt;strong&gt;katanas, naginatas, nodachis and other weapons created in one of Terra's remote islands as our base design, is that they're mainly made for cutting, whether a criminal's neck or an armor's straps. While it is true that they would be weak against armor&lt;/strong&gt;, this weakness can be completely negated with the &lt;em&gt;temporary plasma cutting edge&lt;/em&gt;.It's also important to note, that &lt;strong&gt;they were created in an iron-poor environment, thus they have lots of other materials in them&lt;/strong&gt; which can be effectively replaced, with more durable and lighter graphene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any historical inaccuracies in the highlited (bold) area, or it's legit enough, and can convince the readers that I'm NOT a weeaboo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; science-based; weapons; reality-check&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question okay in its current form?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T13:11:31.763" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T13:11:31.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4784" CreationDate="2017-04-12T04:38:10.727" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen questions that have been closed and then days later down-voted even though they are closed already. I see no point in allowing this as it negatively impacts the user asking the question and, as the question is already closed, does not benefit  the site. Furthermore, if the question has an answer, the user who posted the question can only vote to remove the question after it is closed and therefore cannot stop it from being down-voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask, why is it not made so that a closed question cannot be voted on after it is already closed? Also, could this be changed so people cannot vote on a closed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33433" LastEditorUserId="33433" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T04:45:04.857" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:09:03.460" Title="Why is it allowed for users to down-vote a question that is already closed?" Tags="|feature-request|voting|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4783" CreationDate="2017-04-12T08:22:23.673" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question is still there, so it can be voted on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes and close votes are tangential to each other. Close votes are about &lt;em&gt;&quot;Should this question really be here? Is it answerable?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and votes are about &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is it well written? Was it researched before posting? Is there a chance it'll be useful for other users?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are well written and interesting, and earn upvotes, and still end up put on hold as unclear what you're asking - if it's not quite clear. There is a chance for it to be reopened if the issue is solved, so why wouldn't people vote on it in the meantime?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is with the closed questions that are bad. If it's unclear what someone is asking, or too broad, it still can get reopened later. This does not make it magically any more useful, or show any research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just by the way, if question is closed and should not be here, why it is allowed to up vote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Sensible alternative would be to allow OP to click something like &lt;kbd&gt;I will edit and fix it&lt;/kbd&gt; - and hide the question until it is edited, or lock votes (up, down and reopen ones) and show a banner like &lt;em&gt;&quot;This question is being improved right now, please come back later.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - of course even if not edited, this banner should go away once question moves from [on hold] to [closed].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T13:44:49.083" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T13:44:49.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2017-04-13T16:46:53.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ad currently used (in 2017) on &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10566/41082&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6728&quot;&gt;RPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4396/suggestion-for-new-worldbuilding-ad-for-sff-se&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for community's approval. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrIsG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrIsG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T16:46:53.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2017-04-13T16:50:46.123" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposal for an alternate ad to use in conjunction with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4786/6507&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (as in, use both, but on different sites). I was thinking this could be used as a replacement for the ad on RPG.SE. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ftzzy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ftzzy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T02:45:10.477" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T02:45:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4790" CreationDate="2017-04-14T20:49:34.193" Score="9" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm giving this link as an example of what I am about to (maybe) rant about: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78140&quot;&gt;Super-generic Fantasy World: The problem with Murder Hobos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been downvoted several times as has my answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, here is the Rub.  It is a fairly specific question.  It was just asked in a way that isn't &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; clear.  The OP was trying to be clever and asked his question in a way that sets the tone for his story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One comment asked what the question actually was and the OP edited the question.  In the meantime the question got several downvotes.  I answered the question, trying to keep in theme with the question and I gathered a few downvotes.  I can't point to something really specific, but I get the impression that some people stopped read the question, didn't catch on to the underlying humor, downvoted and moved on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm not overly worried about the downvotes on a personal level.  If I begin to gather downvotes and I'm getting some comments, I try to pay close attention and figure out what is objectionable and make edits as necessary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do try to answer questions in more general terms and I don't sink a ton of effort into detailed research.  My baseline is: Can I make sense of it in a way that I would &quot;buy it&quot; in a work of fiction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot of this bit of meandering is that in WorldBuilding, We are creating and helping others create &lt;strong&gt;STORIES&lt;/strong&gt;.  We are not searching for the cure for cancer or abolishing world hunger.  This site is not about absolute truths.  Collectively, we get ideas and we want folks to follow along in the story.  The better we can make the story, the more accessible it becomes for more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example question, you can make out the skeletal structure of the story, and even the punchline, but the OP seems to be looking for some paths to get from point a to point b.  He just wasn't direct about it.  In my opinion, he was trying to have some fun and at the same time set a tone that would shape the answers.  I think he would have gotten different kinds of answers if he just wrote the question like &quot;how do I develop a link between the real world and the universe of all table-top role playing games and what roles would a task force from the sci-fi side have in mitigating damage from it?&quot;  With some more detail, evident from the length of the original, He wouldn't have gotten as many downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are folks taking things a little too seriously?  We are about making better stories.  Downvotes can be a negative reinforcement mechanism and should be used appropriately, particularly with newer users.  Not just because you didn't understand the question.  I don't understand some of the hard-science questions.  I don't have the background.  But I don't downvote questions and answers when the math goes over my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we include something about this in our guidelines, or if I missed it, make it bold face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm way off base, let me know, leave a comment.  just please don't driveby downvote.  Also, let me know if I'm just griping.  If I am, downvote and please say something.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T21:00:26.650" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:14:51.123" Title="Drive-By downvotes and Do we take things a bit too seriously?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4788" CreationDate="2017-04-14T22:15:26.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Burying the lede makes it, indeed, unclear.  But I would not downvote after it was already closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T22:15:26.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4788" CreationDate="2017-04-15T00:05:37.470" Score="17" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Specific comments on the question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment #1: Ack! In&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_and_heterogeneity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homogeneity&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not a reason for closure, I'd like to point out that the use of &lt;strong&gt;bolding&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;code formatting&lt;/code&gt;, and &amp;quot;================================================&amp;quot; don't make for an incredibly readable post. It's always nice to emphasize things that need to be emphasized. But using a bunch of different dividers and means of emphasis don't make for a visually appealing post. It's actually a little distracting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment #2: Jargon and certain other terminology is indubitably, unequivocally reprehensible if gratuitous and supererogatory.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, yes, those are all real words. Second, don't use words if you don't need to. I don't just mean using lengthy ones; I mean using a bunch of terms that simply don't need to be there. My eyes are drawn from &amp;quot;Foundation's Mobile Task Force&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;SCP-P001-B&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Afflicted Kender&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;THE BRIGHT FAMILY REUNION&amp;quot;, and again, it's a little distracting. I'm all for presenting a question in a humorous, in-universe way, in some cases, but here, I think a lot of the terms served merely to confuse - sorry, &lt;em&gt;obfuscate&lt;/em&gt; - the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;More general stuff&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78140/super-generic-fantasy-world-the-problem-with-murder-hobos#comment225838_78140&quot;&gt;apaul34208's comment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78140/super-generic-fantasy-world-the-problem-with-murder-hobos#comment225839_78140&quot;&gt;Redacted Redacted's reponse&lt;/a&gt; should drive home a point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the question? – apaul34208&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@apaul34208 To create an estimation of the potential dangers, SCP-P001-A pose to a semi-feudal society. – Redacted Redacted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone's confused and then you can come close to alleviating that confusion with one sentence, you should probably consider rewriting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining problem, though, is that even if the question is suddenly made much clearer, it's still not a great on-topic question. Yes, the author provided a decent number of details about SCP-P001, but there's still so much that could happen, even with some of the details in the world given. It doesn't seem likely that a person could piece together a grand unified answer to address most possible scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the question should be reopened if it's edited as per the comments, but I also think that it should then be closed as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no comment on the downvotes. I'll see if I can give you something canonical, but in general, policy is to let people vote as they will - unless, of course, they're trying to cheat the system or do other dastardly deeds, in which case our &lt;strike&gt;informants&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strike&gt;spies&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strike&gt;surveillance&lt;/strike&gt; tools can deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T00:05:37.470" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4788" CreationDate="2017-04-15T00:10:16.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ya... I kinda took the lead on that one... Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't mind a bit of fun in questions, but when the signal to noise ratio gets skewed to the point where I find myself reading the question several times to gather what they're after, I'll say something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I commented.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I waited a few minutes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Didn't see any improvement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then I voted and voted to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question was edited, and it still felt a bit too broad, and was still more flourish than substance (Signal to noise). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly kind of like a little story here and there, it adds context for the question, but this one felt like it was entirely story, with little actual worldbuilding. More of a here's my world, what story fits with it. I know it's a judgement call, but as far as being &quot;useful&quot; I figured that that one leaned toward &quot;only useful to the person asking&quot;, effectively making it &quot;not useful for future readers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that downvotes are intended to sort content not to be a personal affront. In this case the content wasn't very clear and wasn't likely to be useful, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T00:10:16.873" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-15T16:07:13.897" Score="13" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve seen posts containing (possibly large) pictures heavily downvoted and (now that I'm a ♦-mod) flagged.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/78174/1&quot;&gt;Most recent example&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to have this topic be a reference for what the general WB culture finds “appropriate” or “not our style”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can those who have noticed this articulate or explain the criteria, for future reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Meta-example — after all, this is a meta post — I &lt;strong&gt;did not&lt;/strong&gt; insert a curious cat photo here to illustrate the mood or tone of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T17:05:02.063" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:39:51.210" Title="What pictures do we like and dislike in a post?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2017-04-15T16:36:54.770" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the general rule should be to avoid gratuitous or unnecessary images. Does the image really add something relevant or is it just noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the image is just noise feel free to edit it out like any other noise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may be a little more relaxed than some of the more technical sites, but some of the lessons learned there will still work here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, the images don't really add anything. The link attached to the first one may be helpful, but the meme is just a meme. The second image was pure noise, no reason to keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-04-15T16:45:22.620" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T16:45:22.620" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-16T14:22:51.763" Score="-7" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always wondered in policies regarding offensive contents that have a meaningful purpose in a question like actual politics, and scientific and objective perspectives on horrible atrocities like the holocaust, rape, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I'm &lt;strong&gt;not really interested&lt;/strong&gt; in things that can be resolved with (troll/anti-SJW) logics like this example:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Situation:&lt;/strong&gt; I have the clones of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the story as protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;SJW/straw romanticist:&lt;/em&gt; How daze you, peopl died at that horrible tragedy you...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Me:&lt;/em&gt; You do realize, that &lt;strong&gt;by implying that the clones&lt;/strong&gt; of them &lt;strong&gt;have the same personality for no apparent reason&lt;/strong&gt;, then &lt;strong&gt;you're implying that&lt;/strong&gt; evil genes exist and &lt;strong&gt;people can be judged by the evil genes in their ethnicity&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;which is the equivalent of racism&lt;/strong&gt;, so you're a nazi scum and you should hang yourself. Here's the rope.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This may not be delivered in this form, the important parts are the connections of the reasons and their cause &lt;strong&gt;(the bold parts)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm more interested in situations like this:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...In this universe holocaust was a lie...   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...In this universe,    Trump was nuked by aliens, because of his&#xA;hair scared them...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...These    genetically-engineered manta rays are called the&#xA;Irwin-rays...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we have policies regarding offensive, but purposeful &lt;em&gt;(read: essential, important)&lt;/em&gt; contents in a question &lt;em&gt;(most likely those, that tackle darker fantasy/ dystopian sci-fi elements)&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Removed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This stuff isn't actually interesting or funny enough to be kept.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T11:23:24.580" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T02:15:41.510" Title="Purposeful offensive-contents in a question" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-04-18T13:03:51.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4794" CreationDate="2017-04-16T18:46:14.100" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had questions that deal with sensitive topics -- rape, torture, genocide, and more.  The &lt;em&gt;topics&lt;/em&gt; aren't inherently offensive (though they require delicate handling), but the &lt;em&gt;way a question is asked&lt;/em&gt; can be offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to answer your question without a real example.  You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; ask about topics like an alternate history where the holocaust was a lie or where aliens are afraid of a national leader, but you should make sure that provocative details are actually specifically needed for your question.  The name of your &quot;Irwin-ways&quot; doesn't sound important to the question so why bring it up?  And even for public figures, try to be only as specific as you need to be -- is your question really about one specific person?  Those kinds of presentations call your motivation into question.  (Also, beware of questions that ask about characters/plots rather than worlds.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're unsure about whether &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; proposed question is ok, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to work it out with the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other thing: you include a negative example and say it &quot;can be resolved&quot; with comments like the examples in your question.  The second comment, labelled &quot;me&quot;, is &lt;em&gt;not acceptable&lt;/em&gt;.  It would be deleted as offensive.  This is not the way to &quot;resolve&quot; matters with which you disagree.  I'm having trouble seeing how a comment like that could do anything other than provoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T02:15:41.510" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T02:15:41.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4794" CreationDate="2017-04-16T21:23:22.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;offensive contents that have a meaningful purpose in a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the key to this lies in your definition of &quot;meaningful purpose&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some topics are inherently more controversial. Politics being one of them. But often the difference between offensive and non-offensive is in the &lt;strong&gt;intent.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the poster bringing up the topic purely to incite?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the poster bringing up the topic purely for lulz?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the post really about the potentially offensive topic, or is it an unnecessary/unrelated addition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As far as an official policy see:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109390/what-is-considered-hate-speech&quot;&gt;What is considered &amp;quot;hate speech&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/289398/if-youre-gonna-talk-politics-you-must-respect-those-who-disagree?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;If you&amp;#39;re gonna talk Politics, you must respect those who disagree&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this question as an example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much everything below your first horizontal rule &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;hr&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; was pretty much unnecessary and likely used purely for humor and/or incitement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the term &quot;SJW&quot; short for Social Justice Warrior, is a term usually used as a pejorative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Situation: I have the clones of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the&#xA;  story as protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;SJW/straw romanticist: How daze you, peopl died at that horrible tragedy you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Me: You do realize, that by implying that the clones of them have the same personality for no apparent reason, then you're implying that&#xA;    evil genes exist and people can be judged by the evil genes in their&#xA;    ethnicity, which is the equivalent of racism, so you're a nazi scum&#xA;    and you should hang yourself. Here's the rope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation you're &lt;strong&gt;&quot;not really interested in&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is a pretty clear example of someone taking offense and then someone responding by escalating the situation and getting much more offensive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Don't do that here.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T21:56:30.000" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T21:56:30.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4798" CreationDate="2017-04-17T05:13:46.797" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I want to link to specific answer or comment, because the current question or comment will directly benefit from &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; particular answer or comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: I saw a comment about undead and was inspired to ask a question, or answer. For clarity, I want to include the link to the comment (because copy pasting it will not provide sufficient background on the question/answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T18:15:11.227" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T18:15:11.227" Title="How to link to specific answer or comment?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2017-04-17T05:17:48.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DE8lw.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DE8lw.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's usually a time next to the username... you can use that to get the link for a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an answer, you can use the share link&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hLEwX.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hLEwX.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T05:17:48.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2017-04-17T06:08:48.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are meant to be ephemeral and may be removed later.  So, don’t link to comments in posts.  If the comment contains important information, it &lt;em&gt;should be part of the post&lt;/em&gt; and this is a good reason to edit that answer (and then mark the comment as obsolete).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why there is no easily accessible URL for a comment.  They do exist, for notifications and moderation, but you should not use them otherwise except in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T13:28:04.217" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T13:28:04.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4802" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:03:43.823" Score="6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/78572/6986&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; about returning to the Dark Ages reminded me of another question I remembered seeing. After some digging, I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9307/6986&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; and suggested it might be a duplicate of the OP's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when I checked the close review queue, I noticed the Dark Ages question was being closed as a duplicate of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9873/6986&quot;&gt;different question&lt;/a&gt; that Mołot linked and was the question I had originally been thinking of but couldn't find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only thing is, the question Mołot linked is marked as a duplicate of the one I linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general policy on whether to mark questions as duplicates of duplicates? Should we link to any question in the chain or to the root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T18:08:15.233" Title="How to handle duplicates of duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4800" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:39:15.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicates can have variations on the theme. So if you're going to chose one, chose the one that is closest to OPs question, even if the one you're choosing is a duplicate of another question that is poorer fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T15:39:15.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4800" CreationDate="2017-04-19T18:08:15.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general advice on Stack Overflow is to choose the &quot;best one&quot; to use as a canonical question, later duplicate questions can be merged or marked as duplicates of the canonical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally the better canonical questions are a little more general so that they cover a larger portion of similar questions. As in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I foo the bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vs very specific questions, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I foo the bar in baz, while standing on one foot, on Friday afternoon, in Iceland?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T18:08:15.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4808" CreationDate="2017-04-20T15:14:33.713" Score="9" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Popular questions, and answers, have a good possibility to generate off topic comments. Like this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78604/how-many-people-would-have-to-be-killed-to-make-the-streets-run-red-with-blood/&quot;&gt;about blood&lt;/a&gt;. (not the best good example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions there is a guideline. But I could not find one for comments. So, &lt;strong&gt;What is the Stackexchange Comment Etiquette?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34012" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T11:03:11.890" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T11:05:30.063" Title="stackoverflow comment etiquette" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T15:52:14.420" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I randomly ended on this stack and I'm liking what I see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single problem is that everyone mentions about worlds and I assume its a game or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couldn't find anything on google or on this stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;help meee , gimme a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37247" OwnerDisplayName="JanCrowd" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T18:16:25.703" Title="What game is this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-04-23T04:01:02.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4806" CreationDate="2017-04-20T15:56:46.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This stack isn't about games. People ask questions for how they'll build a story world. By giving a quick run down of what they've already got, they'll ask the question to further expand on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31590" OwnerDisplayName="Andrew S" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T15:56:46.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:20:36.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757/166646&quot;&gt;view across the Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt; is that :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments exist so that users can talk about questions and answers without posting new answers that do not actually answer their parent questions. Comments are often used to ask for clarification on, suggest corrections to and provide meta-information about posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are intentionally short, having maximum length of 600 characters, and allow only limited markup. URLs in comments automatically become hyperlinks. Each user may post only one comment every 15 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are disposable: unlike posts, there's no revision history, and they can be deleted without warning by their authors, by moderators, and in response to flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you are right, Worldbuilding is a lot more subjective than Stack Overflow for example. We looked at this on Parenting.SE, as another very subjective site and allow &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.meta.stackexchange.com/a/713/316&quot;&gt;a bit more leeway&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR Version: Comments only become a problem when there are a high volume on a single question or answer, or where the content of the comment itself is of concern (rude/offensive, dangerous, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T16:20:36.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4806" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:38:46.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is not about one game. It is about creating worlds, and, frankly, some of worlds created here probably end up as game worlds*. But that's not the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very point here is creation of fictional worlds (or elements of these worlds) that are internally consistent, believable, and can serve desired role in prose / game / movie etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, entire Stack Exchange is a game in itself. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/09/16/five-years-ago-stack-overflow-launched-then-a-miracle-occurred/&quot;&gt;this blog entry&lt;/a&gt; to see how, why, and why it's so interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Sadly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3893/809&quot;&gt;people are shy to share their published works&lt;/a&gt; but you can read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3667/809&quot;&gt;works in progress&lt;/a&gt; (thanks, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T18:16:25.703" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T18:16:25.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2017-04-20T23:09:28.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Image that brings nothing and just takes space - remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Image that is NSFW and without spoiler block - remove it. Or, if it was really needed, put a spoiler block on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Image that's clearly 18+ - remove it, its content probably could have been provided in text form anyway. Note that purely medical images aren't really 18+, but still can count as NSFW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Image that's significantly bigger than this site will show - move it to imgur. If licence does not allow that - remove it, find a replacement etc. Slowing site down is harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyrighted (non-CC) image copied to imgur - follow specific procedures, whatever they are. Comment asking for cc-compatibility wouldn't hurt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only images that should really be here are ones that illustrate the question or answer, make it clearer, easier to understand. But even then, everything that's on image should also be reflected in text - search engines are &quot;blind&quot;. Not to mention that blind people are blind, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T16:39:51.210" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:39:51.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2017-04-20T23:37:54.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are to request clarifications, yes. But not only, not really&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are also commonly used to point out related issues. So pointing out general patterns in OP questions is not unheard of, and I believe pretty valid. Linking questions that are not duplicates, but somehow related, is valid as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the main question is: &lt;em&gt;can this comment help make this post better, or help author to post better content in future?&lt;/em&gt; - if yes, then great! If no, then it probably should be removed (or not posted in the first place). But if comment is helpful and constructive, it does not have to be &lt;em&gt;strictly&lt;/em&gt; on topic of this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T11:05:30.063" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T11:05:30.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4813" CreationDate="2017-04-21T14:52:21.630" Score="9" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;To ask question at worldbuilding, I need to describe my story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody steal it? Or it's protected by copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3205" LastEditorUserId="3205" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T15:36:34.940" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:31:52.587" Title="Is my story protected by copyright?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2017-04-21T14:54:20.687" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything you publish on Stack Exchange is published under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt; - so anything you publish can be used by others as long as they attribute it to you properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are free to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material&#xA;  for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; in this quote means anything who reads your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T14:54:20.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2017-04-21T15:06:14.090" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two factors here, &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;licensing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you live in one of the few places in the world that hasn't signed the treaty, you own the copyright on your work upon creation, including posting it here.  If somebody takes your exact words and publishes them under his own name, that's a copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by posting on Stack Exchange you grant everybody a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; to use your work, as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4813/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  It's still &lt;em&gt;your work&lt;/em&gt;, but other people can use it too -- in the exact form you posted it or with alterations.  You can't prevent them, but they have to give you credit.  (They also have to grant the same license for &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; version of the work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, sharing &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; usually isn't that risky.  Lots of people have lots of ideas; where the work and copyright concerns really come into play is when you &lt;em&gt;develop&lt;/em&gt; those ideas into a tangible work like a short story, novel, game, or video.  I wouldn't recommend posting those works here if you hope to profit from them later, but it's usually not appropriate to post such works as questions or answers here anyway, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  Read the terms of the license agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T15:06:14.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4783" CreationDate="2017-04-21T16:09:03.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't plan to improve the question (or answer) then you can self-delete it and that will remove the votes (whether up or down) on that from your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do plan to improve it then hopefully once you have done that it will be re-opened and start getting upvotes and people reversing their downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of those scenarios is really helped by blocking the downvoting of closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:09:03.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4788" CreationDate="2017-04-21T16:14:51.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some excellent &quot;thematic&quot; questions and answers on this site, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1213/assistance-to-fight-off-a-silicon-based-lifeform&quot;&gt;Assistance to fight off a silicon-based lifeform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key though is that the style in which the question is asked does not hinder the understanding or the answering of the question. Style is great, but only when it doesn't get in the way of substance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:14:51.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2017-04-21T16:21:23.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve taken to posting/hosting the story on my own site &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30957/what-if-we-lived-near-a-boundary-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;then quote and cite from it on WB&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from an unpublished work, &lt;em&gt;noting&lt;/em&gt; that it is from a copyrighted work, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20622/ways-to-make-contact-with-aliens-on-a-much-larger-size-scale&quot;&gt;has drawn comments&lt;/a&gt; about what’s posted on WB is under creative commons with accusations that I’m trying to modify that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But WB doesn’t try to re-licence things used with permission — so avoid the hassle and post on a site you control &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for general ideas that you want to discuss but have not written a story using, yet: that falls squarly under the creative commons &lt;em&gt;content posted on WB&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such general ideas are not something you can defend.  An entire plot complete with character info (e.g. cloning &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; rather than writing yet another Hero's Journey space opera) would not be posted here — that’s too “story based” or too much specific detail that’s irrelevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T16:31:52.587" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:31:52.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T08:27:15.273" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I feel this is a topic for a meta question. I hope You agree.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common type of WB question is the &quot;Could device X be built in time/culture Y&quot; reality checks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While those questions are certainly valid, the answers generally focus on the supporting tech level and infrastructure of the era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Could my time traveller build an assault rifle in medieval times?&#xA;A: No, metallurgy and manufacturing were not up to the task, and you could not get working ammo back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if the time traveller had knowledge and resources enough he &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; &quot;invent&quot; modern metallurgy, blast caps and manufacturing methods. It certainly would not be belieaveble, but not technically &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, shouldn't we either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommend that such questions are rephrased as &quot;What are the major&#xA;obstacles if I want to build X in time/culture Y?&quot; (Which would make&#xA;the answers more clear)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define some canon &quot;feasability levels&quot; ie &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist can build device only given common knowledge from his own time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist can build device given exceptional knowledge from his own time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist can build device given above plus lots of time and resources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist might build device given above plus trust and backing from some major authority of the time/culture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist can ony build device given ridiculous handwaving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18117" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T11:48:45.893" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T11:48:45.893" Title="How to ask a good &quot;Could X be built in Y:th century&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2017-04-24T08:42:48.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think an understanding of the common feasability levels is useful to those writing and reading the answers, without defining them in a formal way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T08:42:48.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2017-04-24T10:47:48.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this just comes under the general, and rather common, problem of questions with fuzzy edges. You get a lot of questions where the end result has been thought of (ie I want an assault rifle in medieval times) but the question doesn't solidly describe what is fair game to achieve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree there are questions which need stricter definitions but I don't know that singling out the Xth century questions would help. Comments are probably the best way to get this across an an individual basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T10:47:48.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4824" CreationDate="2017-04-25T11:12:27.903" Score="-1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, while watching feom the penaltybox, I noticed something strange In my rep. I know what happened, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I find the list of deleted users somewhere?&lt;/strong&gt; Because I want to know, what happened to that  person with a total 12 upvotes in my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T14:57:59.210" Title="-60 rep, user removed. Who?" Tags="|support|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T14:39:39.303" Score="6" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel the need to publicly lodge my complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79056/what-prevents-a-terrorist-cell-from-shipping-a-bomb-in-a-cargo-container&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; went into the review queue and picked up two close votes (and at least one keep open vote from me) before being summarily put on hold by a moderator. I do not believe the question is off-topic, and I commented to that effect. I disagree with sphenning's assessment in his comment. Whether sphenning or I are in the right is something the community should vote on via the established process. However, the community did complete its vote on whether or not to put the question on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79097/how-much-energy-is-required-to-move-ceres-into-orbit-around-mars&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was placed on hold after 15 minutes without even making it to the review queue. The question could use some significant work, but by going into the review queue, it will get the exposure necessary that someone may take an interest in helping the OP (a new user) improve it. However, this question never got to community review. Also, I find the comments distastefully unhelpful towards what is apparently a new user unfamiliar with our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Discussion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79089/is-mars-really-an-interesting-habitable-planet&quot;&gt;plenty of good reasons&lt;/a&gt; for a moderator to summarily put a question on hold. And this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3275/is-this-the-new-moderation-style-for-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;not the first time&lt;/a&gt; a moderator has been addressed in Meta for these kinds of actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is one of fairness. Let's say someone comes to our site, wants to participate, but thinks things go on hold too often. This happens very often: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4270/putting-opinion-based-questions-on-hold-too-fast&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4504/on-hold-is-turning-up-quite-quickly&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4118/unfairly-put-on-hold&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1832/please-revisit-this-timely-on-hold-question-soon&quot;&gt;example by someone relevant to this post&lt;/a&gt;. We have a defense against that claim. There exists a community review process; many eyes look at each post and then judge. This is excellently explained by @dot_Sp0T &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4507/23519&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of putting all questions on hold and waiting for them to be improved has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/proposal-all-questions-start-on-hold-for-1-hour&quot;&gt;brought up before&lt;/a&gt; (recently). My interpretation of that discussion is that the response was largely negative. I support my interpretation by noting the voting on the original question, and @PatJ's negative response. Just because something can be re-opened doesn't prevent the 'hold' from putting a sour taste in a newer user's mouth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me say that nothing in this complaint is about content of specific Worldbuilding questions, even the ones I linked. I want questions open that get closed all the time, and that's just fine. Its part of the community voting process. Furthermore, none of this is about my personal feelings about whether any moderators' specific actions are justified. My personal opinion is of minimal importance. This post is about site culture: maintaining rules-based and community-based control of Worldbuilding, with occasional assistance from the moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a rules based process that we all voluntarily abide by is, in my mind, the single most important thing to maintaining a successful online community. As a philosophical statement, we should be able to tell new users, &quot;You must follow our rules to participate, but anyone who follows our rules may participate.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Suggested solution&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the information posted and linked above, my complaint boils down to this: There is a review process, we should use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if a question is inevitably headed for being put on hold, we should allow our rules-based review process to play itself out. Moderators should not interfere with that process. Moderators can and should take action against offensive posts or trolling; moderators can and should take action about policing comments. But placing questions on hold is a community driven process and moderators should exercise restraint when interfering with that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this will have two beneficial effects on our site. New users who find this site will be more likely to come back if they find the their questions reviewed by the community instead of placed on hold by one moderator. And, more experienced users will feel like their participation in the review process is more important if their actions and discussions contribute to managing what questions are approved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T01:13:07.020" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:06:56.370" Title="Moderator Post Closing Policy" Tags="|discussion|moderators|on-hold|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4822" CreationDate="2017-04-25T14:57:59.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't find out.  Votes are private, so revealing who was the source of your reputation changes from vote reversals would violate that.  In addition, users are allowed to leave quietly if they want, or if SE removes them for violating the terms of service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126470/162102&quot;&gt;this question on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/140063/162102&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; for more about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T14:57:59.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T18:57:38.777" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79127/how-much-explosive-power-does-a-missle-need-to-destroy-a-100km%C2%B3-meteorite-headin&quot;&gt;How much explosive power does a missile need to destroy a 100km³ meteorite heading for earth? [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is short, yes, but it is very to-the-point and asks for a straightforward answer. It was put on hold, and the comments are begging for more information. &quot;Please tell us exactly what the meteor is made of,&quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to claim that question is high-quality, as it is not. It might even be low quality (Debatable, and my opinion is that it's more &quot;simple&quot; than it is &quot;low-quality&quot;). However, if the question were much more specific, it would be so narrow that it would beg for low-quality one-liner answers that just show the calculation and answer. The way it is, it is specific enough that it is answerable, but it is open enough to invite good quality answers discussing the aspects involved (material, solid vs loose chunks, time until impact, etc., all of which affect the answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;em&gt;is not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Why was that question put on hold?&quot; Rather, I am making a comparison between that question and other common questions on Worldbuilding. The sample question above was put on hold because of its lack of details, yet there are very, very, very many questions asked all the time which are much more lacking in details than the sample question; in fact, this might be true of the majority of Worldbuilding questions. This is often true even for long questions which provide lots of details (often extraneous details, but they set the tone for the question so that's ok); they are still often wide open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;how much explosives to take out a meteor&quot; question, after its edit (which came before the hold), is fully answerable. Details such as &quot;What material is it made of?&quot; are important enough that they can change the answer significantly, but only quantitatively; the answer is still a calculation, and a good answer would provide a range based on best-case/worst-case anyway and so are not needed in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, on the &quot;front page&quot; (or whatever you call it), there is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79157/a-government-of-the-near-future-is-trying-to-send-a-self-governing-crew-to-popul&quot;&gt;A government of the near future is trying to send a self-governing crew to populate an earth-like planet 100 years away&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79058/how-big-could-an-alien-made-object-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon-become-so-that-di&quot;&gt;How big could an alien-made object on the far side of the moon become so that discovery still can only happen by accident?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3291/if-earths-gravity-suddenly-became-stronger-how-would-we-cope&quot;&gt;If Earth's gravity suddenly became stronger, how would we cope?&lt;/a&gt; and... well, I was originally going down the page to include all the current questions which are left open to more interpretation and opinion, need more extra information than the initial sample question, and are generally more open-ended than the initial sample question; but at this rate it looks like it really is most of Worldbuilding questions, at least by the sampling pool of the current questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually quite common around here, that questions are targeted for action where the rationale actually explains a large portion of Worldbuilding, and the targeted questions are not infrequently less broad than the others around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is just that the hold/close reasons such as &quot;too broad&quot; seem to be used somewhat arbitrarily around here, and if the same criteria that holds/closes any question around here were applied equally to all other questions, then 90%+ of Worldbuilding would be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize deciding when to flag and going through the queues for Worldbuilding must be difficult because of its very nature, so I assume these holds/closes are in good faith, but they seem arbitrary nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that there are two ways to deal with this: relax the close trigger-fingers, or do just the opposite and be more strict but along with a more specific set of guidelines too which are applied globally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anyone else notice this issue?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was especially abrasive in this specific circumstance since it was done to a new 1-rep user, after the user edited the question once (shows that they are willing to work with us), and the question got a negative vote. We will get more quality members using honey than vinegar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastEditorUserId="34734" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T19:33:46.167" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T15:45:45.580" Title="Should close/hold-votes be given out arbitrarily on Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4823" CreationDate="2017-04-25T19:57:27.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but thinks things go on hold too often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could use some significant work, but by going into the review queue, it will get the exposure necessary that someone may take an interest in helping the OP (a new user) improve it. However, this question never got to community review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates a flaw in your interpretation.  &lt;em&gt;hold&lt;/em&gt; is a tool that does not prevent comments and editing to help improve the question.  Some notes here on meta even suggest/lament that new user’s questions should &lt;em&gt;start out&lt;/em&gt; on hold by default!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a gold badge holder can un-hold a post single handedly, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem here is that you disagreed with the people who thought it is off topic, one of whom is a diamond mod.  What about the two people who voted earlier?  Should you protest other members in general who vote differently from you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think that collecting votes from established users is somehow &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than getting a decision from a topic tag expert or a moderator.  Actually, we can make a case that the reverse is true:  Voting is a way to crowdsource without having those people necessarily be accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted already on chat, a question that nobody disagrees is “bad” does not benefit from being left open, and in fact people may jump in with an answer &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; and that hurts the question, which can no longer be freely reworked.  Such question should be put on hold ASAP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T19:57:27.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T04:26:13.303" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;While going through the review today I found a question first posted over two years ago being reviewed and an answer to a question that, I believe, had been reviewed previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2870/what-would-the-universe-be-like-if-gravity-was-slightly-stronger?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What would the Universe be like if gravity was slightly stronger?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was posted by MrNemo to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72709/fabric-in-a-waterless-world&quot;&gt;Fabric in a waterless world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question has nothing to do with the quality of either question or answer, it is concerned with the number of times questions and answers can be reviewed. (I have my own views on their quality, but that is mainly beside the point.) The danger or risk factor is that eventually any and every question / answer can be closed especially if the culture of Worldbuilding SE changes over time. This could result questions / answers being acceptable at one point in time and not acceptable at another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potentially the good posts of yesteryear could be overturned and deleted by WBers with a different worldview. This doesn't suggest that the good questions of the past were exemplary, they might not be, or the judgements of newer WBers might be better than their predecessors, again they might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since at any time it only takes a handful of voters to close posts. So by chance alone good posts can closed. Admittedly the capacity to reopen posts does exist. But this is not exercised to the same degree as reviews to vote to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am highlighting is what I perceive as system weakness, not a major one, but a weakness (yes, that does mean a risk factor) none the same. I do not have any proposed remedies to this issue, and would welcome any suggestions, however, I do acknowledge setting limits to the number of reviews of posts could lead to bad posts becoming entrenched (although I suspect to a lesser degree than with excessive reviewing). perhaps there should be a flag that warns &lt;em&gt;this post has been reviewed before and it should be reviewed carefully on this occasion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T16:08:03.770" Title="Is there a reasonable limit on the number of times questions &amp; answers can be reviewed?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4827" CreationDate="2017-04-26T05:24:49.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This could result questions / answers being acceptable at one point in time and not acceptable at another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a real issue on the flagship SO site. Even if I do dilligence and find &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; questions, I can't consider that to be &lt;em&gt;precedent&lt;/em&gt;. They say that just because it was on-topic &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; doesn’t mean it’s on-topic now, as the policy evolves; or they say that just because &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; questions slipped by doesn’t mean that it’s not off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If “closed” reflected &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; policy, it would be easier.  Many questions from the first year are not good by the standards that emerged.  The very reasons for closing have changed over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T05:24:49.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2017-04-26T13:22:52.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should close/hold votes be given out arbitrarily? No. Definitely and emphatically no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, however, things start to get a little murky. We don't have a close reason specifically for &quot;insufficient information.&quot; A question can be perfectly answerable given the information, but a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer may not appear or be distinguishable with what has already been provided. Should this type of question be put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it's a case-by-case basis. If I can Google three words from the question and find half a dozen different answers, then the question is too broad: there's simply too many ways the question could be well-answered. (Side note: if Googling three words provides the perfect answer, then the question is downvote-worthy for lack of research.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, though, that review activities are conducted by people. When I first gained the close-vote privilege, I was thrilled. I wanted to use it. I'm sure everyone with the privilege had a brief period where they wanted to use their newfound powers. Now I carefully review everything that makes it into the queues, adding comments where warranted. It's a major responsibility and I take it seriously. I wish everyone did, but I doubt it's the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had a number of discussions about closing questions during the site's lifetime. For example, we've laid out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/80/6986&quot;&gt;what it means&lt;/a&gt; for a question to be too broad, whether we're using the close vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3368/6986&quot;&gt;too much&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2744/6986&quot;&gt;how to improve&lt;/a&gt; too-broad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that many users don't track or even know the Meta site exists, so all these references go to waste. They only see the commentary from people voting to close and are left to figure out when to apply close votes on their own. I'm not saying it's only the newly-privileged users doing this, but comments are the only way to know why a person is voting to close, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3773/6986&quot;&gt;they don't always do that&lt;/a&gt;. (Side note: I've linked that enough times to get a badge, so thanks community, I guess?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we can do about it? We've tried in the past and I'm sure we will again in the future. I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T13:22:52.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4823" CreationDate="2017-04-26T14:06:56.370" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I'm more of a screwdriver&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic_screwdriver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; person, not a hammer person.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many things about questions on Worldbuilding that give me a headache. Like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2711/627&quot;&gt;our constant battles&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;. Or our problems with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/627&quot;&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2336/627&quot;&gt;whatever categories it falls into now&lt;/a&gt;. Or our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3206/627&quot;&gt;attempts to define Risk Factors for questions&lt;/a&gt;. Or our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/627&quot;&gt;What-If problem&lt;/a&gt;. Or the fact that literally nobody, myself included, actually understands the boundaries of the site. That's a fun one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can we proceed under the axiom that very few things about this site make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's proceed under another axiom, too: &lt;strong&gt;I almost never agree with the idea of the mod hammer for closing or reopening questions&lt;/strong&gt;. Many content moderation tasks that a moderator can do can also be done by the community, provided enough users do them (e.g. deleting a post or closing/reopening a question). There are some which regular users cannot - deleting comments, for instance. Here's why, in my view, we the mods have these special tools: Because they're for exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192/274942&quot;&gt;Moderators are exception handlers.&lt;/a&gt; We're not really meant to do things that normal users do. So we should mainly be acting in exceptional cases, right? Now, that does go counter to another description of moderators, as janitors, because janitorial work is normally pretty regular. However, the thing to bear in mind is that exceptions occur on a regular basis. There are just many, many, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; more cases that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; require a janitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the justification for my firm belief that moderators should largely be hands-off is that &lt;strong&gt;that's not our job&lt;/strong&gt;. We should stay away from tasks the community normally does. Otherwise, using our tools is like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5MDnkV8DZA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cooking steak with lava&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; it's a bit overkill. Thus, I oppose the use of the mod hammer in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Actually, I think this one's technically molten metal, not lava. But &amp;quot;lava&amp;quot; sounds better.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;It's not quite that simple.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; exceptions to the rule of not using the mod hammer on questions. For instance, spam, offensive questions, rants, and other questions-that-aren't-questions should be dealt with quickly. Similarly, I'd argue that there are also extenuating circumstances where a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; question should be hammered - for instance, if a user keeps posting variants of the same question over and over, and &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; has to be done. So the rule isn't applicable across the board. My rationale here, though, is that &lt;strong&gt;these are exceptional cases&lt;/strong&gt;, and thus valid instances for moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point JDługosz and Monica is making, I think, is that preemptive closings are justified in certain &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; circumstances. To a degree, I understand that logic. Questions that are unclear and would lead to answers that aren't good because the question would have to be edited, thus invalidating the earlier answers and making the users' work worthless, lead to pain and complications. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/moderator-post-closing-policy#comment13355_4823&quot;&gt;As Monica said&lt;/a&gt;, this is a problem on Worldbuilding because answers here are often short and fast. At certain times of day, this can be even worse, because while we have users from all over the world, they're more concentrated in some time zones than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But . . . but . . . feelings.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users complicate all of this. They need the most handholding, not because the rest of us are smarter, but because using a new site can be confusing and not easy. I'm always inclined to go easier on someone who's new and acting in good faith (spammers, I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking at you). You could make an argument for acting quicker or acting slower on them. On the one hand, their questions often need the most fixing, as was the case in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/79097/627&quot;&gt;the second question you mentioned&lt;/a&gt;. On the other hand, having someone very quickly put your question on hold can be a frustrating first experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My inclination is always to give them some slack. &lt;strong&gt;Comment early, comment often.&lt;/strong&gt; Point them to helpful site links, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, or our &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; posts here on meta. This helps them in the future, not just in this one case, and is quite a warmer welcome. I know a lot of people already do this - kudos! I just often prefer it to hammering a new person's question on hold &lt;strong&gt;if it's not immediately necessary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;As for timing. . .&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do need to address Monica's point, which I think is the best justification for using the hammer. She's not wrong. In fact, I think she's &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;. But it's never really easy to tell when that's going to be the case and when it isn't. Sometimes the community is fast, and sometimes the community is slow. That's really hard to predict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a mod doesn't have to jump right in. You may not get five close votes quickly. But if there are four others, then a mod vote is functionally the same as anyone else's. Even if there are only two or three votes in, you've still let the community have something of a say in things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't think a moderator should cast the first or second close vote &lt;strong&gt;unless it's blatantly clear that a question should be put on hold.&lt;/strong&gt; Let other folks get a word or two in. But in the cases of exceptions, maybe it's okay to swing a little early. But not first. Almost never first. Third? Maybe. Fourth? Probably. Fifth? Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this is all an exception. Most of the time, the community does its job. But there are periods where things go slowly, and a mod may have to step in. These are exceptional cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I still disagree with JDługosz's answer.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4826/627&quot;&gt;JDługosz wrote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think that collecting votes from established users is somehow better than getting a decision from a topic tag expert or a moderator. Actually, we can make a case that the reverse is true: Voting is a way to crowdsource without having those people necessarily be accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mess up sometimes. We all do. Moderators are held to a higher standard and are expected to be more firm in their convictions. That's one (unpopular) justification I've heard for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/41062/274942&quot;&gt;not letting mods cast non-binding close votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. But we're sometimes wrong, just like anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consequences of a moderator messing up are generally not that bad. When I was just starting as a mod on &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;HSM&lt;/a&gt; over two years ago, I remember someone saying that almost any action a moderator can take - with some exceptions, like destroying user accounts - can be reversed, either by the community, another moderator, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/99338/274942&quot;&gt;a Community Manager&lt;/a&gt;. Even when people are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; stupid, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disaster can be avoided&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having multiple people weigh in, though, reduces the odds of someone making such a mistake. That's &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the system of five close/reopen voters works as well as it does. Most cases do not involve a unanimous consensus - and that's fine. But if there's an &amp;quot;accurate&amp;quot; decision to be made, having five people make it means like there are some built-in redundancies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what fraction of the time moderators mess up. I'm not sure if there's even a way to quantify that, because most decisions have some level of subjectivity. If there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a way to figure that out, I'd wager that the percentage is low. But I &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; don't agree that a moderator is significantly more qualified to make these decisions than anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2 And yes, I disagree with that logic.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;To sort of wrap things up:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my position, in a nutshell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators are exception handlers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hammer should usually only be used in exceptional cases, like for spam or when it's &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clear that the community isn't acting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; use the hammer in the latter case, it's fine to wait for a couple close votes to trickle in, if it looks like the community will be slow. Little harm will usually be done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's be a bit &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9953/274942&quot;&gt;nicer to new users&lt;/a&gt; when it comes to closing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mods are fallible!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the hammer on these questions is . . . well, questionable. I don't think I fully support it, and I think that moderators should only rarely use it. I almost never do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:06:56.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2017-04-26T14:12:03.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you linked was actually one-liner. It did not define what kind of asteroid it is supposed to be, it didn't define what does it mean to &quot;destroy&quot; - in context of asteroids it is far, far from obvious! - and it did not provide any kind of context. This means that there could be many, many equally valid answers, or answer covering everything possible wouldn't fit into answer box, the very definition of &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the linked &quot;examples&quot; two are already on hold, one is from 2014, so it was reviewed by totally different set of users, and one (&lt;em&gt;How big could an alien-made object on the far side of the moon become so that discovery still can only happen by accident?&lt;/em&gt;) very well defines what it's about. There is no doubt what does it meant to discover something. &quot;&lt;em&gt;by rockets circling the moon or similar&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is also pretty precise definition of what OP thinks as regular survey instead of accident. So it provided pretty solid framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I believe votes here to be reasonably consistent, at least when looking at the examples you provided. Not perfect, sure, but people who voted did it in their own time, for free. And earlier spent substantial unpaid time providing huge amounts of well-received content. They are on this site longer than you, or are more active here, so please assume good faith and appreciate the amount of work they did for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:12:03.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4827" CreationDate="2017-04-26T14:57:26.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question went through the review queue only once, when somebody cast a close vote on it a couple hours ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72909/28&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; was in the First Posts review queue when it was posted, and later went through the Low Quality review queue.  That sometimes happens; those are different queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post only goes through the Low Quality review queue once (subsequent flags go straight to moderators), but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/295278/162102&quot;&gt;a question can go through the Close and Reopen queues more than once&lt;/a&gt;.  It only re-enters one of those queues if all votes that were in place when it entered the previous review have expired.  (Close/reopen votes don't expire when the review ends; they hang around until they start to decay.)  So we won't see rapid-fire close-reopen-close-reopen reviews of the same question, but an old question can newly show up in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T16:08:03.770" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T16:08:03.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2017-04-26T15:45:45.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is inspired by @Molot's comment &quot;But I admit, there is a bias against people that appear lazy, write one-liners, don't show any research efforts, ignore requests for clarification... Or is it bias, really?&quot; I would have told him to make it an answer, but he already has an answer going in a different direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had not considered this aspect before, but it is likely important and should be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kind of questions which appear lazy attract the extra scrutiny that increases their likelihood to be closed. That is likely the problem at least in the specifically cited example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, now that I think about it, I can see that as a trend also. When I have posted meta questions in the past asking why such-and-such an issue is being blown out of proportion, I think it is commonly (I'll guess half the time) accompanied by statements such as &quot;It is possibly arguable that this question (or answer) might have &lt;em&gt;this other problem&lt;/em&gt;, and if you made that argument I could understand it more, but the given reason seems overstated.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this view on the situation, I am willing to accept that half of the issues I have of this nature (&quot;I don't agree with action X. Why was it applied here?&quot;) are because the other aspects of the post cause it to receive greater scrutiny. Whether that is good or bad, justified or not, is another story (probably is good sometimes, not others). But this does make the action understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To apply this view to the issue at hand, other questions are likely to stand because it is not readily apparent that there may be a problem (whether a real problem or just relative to some other closed/held post). It is easy to read over a question which is longer, more fun to read, and which makes you excited to answer without thinking of the flaws; but a short, simple question, which could appear lazier to some people, which is not as fun to read may be much easier to trigger the spidey sense and make you analyze it for critique in that way. In this case, the close or hold may not be arbitrary so much as it was an easier target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like analogies, so I'm going to give one: A burglar who blends in well with the crowd might not be likely caught, but if I spray-paint my screen-name onto my own house (or better yet, start smashing my own car with a club) the cops are likely going to at least stop and question me since it looks like I'm engaging in illegal activity. The latter case is not as bad, and depending on where/how it might not even be illegal at all, but it is more likely to invite a run-in with law enforcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not assume that, because of my analogy, I'm implying the example case (blow up a meteor) is great and the others are bad and need attention. That is not the case, and my analogy cases were chosen merely to make the argument of &quot;scrutiny because of visibility&quot; more clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T15:45:45.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4858" CreationDate="2017-04-26T17:39:39.800" Score="37" ViewCount="7215" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3813/6507&quot;&gt;In order to make the Sandbox easier to use&lt;/a&gt;, a new Sandbox question will be posted when the old one becomes too full. &lt;strong&gt;This Sandbox has been retired.&lt;/strong&gt; You can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions-2014-2017&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the full list of past and present Question Sandboxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sandbox&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a place where Worldbuilding.SE users can get feedback on prospective questions they wish to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified question on the first try can be difficult. There is a much better chance of your question being well received if you post it in the Sandbox first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To post a question to the Sandbox:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Post an answer to this post with the content of your proposed question. You can create as many answers as you have proposed questions, but it is recommended that you only work on one question at a time. The content of the post should be as close as possible to the format you would use when asking on the main site. If you would like, you may add a section at the bottom explaining what parts of the proposed question you are most worried about (See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/640/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on suggested syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once you have posted your proposed question,&lt;/strong&gt; users will be able to comment on it with feedback. You can then respond to their feedback with comments of your own, or make edits to your post to attempt to address their feedback (after editing, be sure to comment to notify the user that you have taken their advice). The feedback/edit cycle can go on for as long as needed until either you are confident that your question is ready to be asked on the main site, or you've decided the question just won't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you think your question is ready for the public&lt;/strong&gt;, go ahead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;post it to the main site&lt;/a&gt;. To help keep this sandbox clean, you should edit your post here so that it contains the title and URL of the posted question, and nothing else. Regardless of whether or not you decided to post to the main site, &lt;strong&gt;once you are done with your Sandbox post, you should delete it&lt;/strong&gt;. This will not completely delete the post, but it will get it out of the way so that new proposed questions can be more easily located.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep the Sandbox clean.&lt;/strong&gt; In order to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/sandbox-cleanup&quot;&gt;keep the Sandbox clean&lt;/a&gt; users are encouraged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4912/28789&quot;&gt;look out for questions that have not seen any activity in some time&lt;/a&gt;. If you come across a question draft that has not seen any activity from the author in the form of edits to the draft and comments as responses to other peoples comments you should leave a comment. In the comment you should ask if the user is still working on the question draft and remind him that his post might be deleted in the future if there is no further activity. If you see a question draft that has not seen any activity for at least 30 days and that has had a comment asking if the author is still working on the question draft for at least a week you should flag the post for moderator attention and ask for deletion. This helps to keep the Sandbox clean in cases where the author has abandoned his question draft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please avoid answering questions here.&lt;/strong&gt; I know it's tempting, but answering the question in a comment will clog the comments and make it harder to see good guidance. If you have an answer for the proposed question, simply wait for it to be posted to the main site, and answer it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on how to use the Sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please make sure you wait at least a day after posting into the Sandbox to give a range of people time to see the question and respond.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Sandbox works best if you sort posts by &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; (click &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835?answertab=active&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2022-12-11T18:40:52.307" Title="Inactive Sandbox 2017-18" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T19:13:55.920" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people come in with a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; that really isn't rooted in science at all, but uses some of the terms, like Star Trek tech speak.  It was really noticeable to me in a recent question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79235/black-hole-in-ice-cream-truck&quot;&gt;storing a black hole in an ice cream truck&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm all for creativity.  If Dippin Dots can find an excuse to use liquid nitrogen, I'm interested in what you might be able to do with the time dilation around a black hole to get that creamy texture just right!  However, when I look at the question, the only thing actually scientific about it is the words &quot;black hole.&quot;  Everything else about it is pseudoscience at best, unadulterated by pesky real physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; for questions where we want real citations and mathematics, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; for questions which don't need such citations, but we're still looking for basic physics.  Might it be useful to introduce a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-optional&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-optional&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-optional&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-ish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-ish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-ish&lt;/a&gt; tag for use when you don't want to have to deal with anything like reality in your question but still want something that sounds like good &quot;tech-speak&quot; from a sci-fi script?  I personally value good science better than tech-speak, but I'll readily admit that tech-speak has its place and is valuable.  There are entire franchises whose illusion of science has ridden on the backs of such tech-speak!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for every world builder out there, but I have trouble answering these science based questions unless they are at least remotely base-able in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems like a nice place to put the questions that come in the form &quot;Can you give me a scientific basis for my world which lacks any scientific riggor because it has some funny feature that breaks everything?&quot;  I can see an especially high value in being able to discuss made up technologies which a skilled physicist could prove creates an infinite source of energy, something which is an anathema in anything related to science.  Authors can often side-step those pesky singularities, while science stares them down straight in their face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T20:02:48.233" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T05:03:09.190" Title="Is there a &quot;science-optional&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-05-05T12:12:11.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T09:20:05.130" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen quite a few edits in the review queue recently on old posts (over a year old, some even back in 2014). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get unsure on what is best to do. Sometimes there are paragraphs added and it makes it a little easier to read but some of the edits are a switch from &quot;tech&quot; to &quot;technology&quot; or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I approve minor edits on old questions this then adds these old questions to the main page and might push off a question by an active user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So do we approve minor edits on old questions or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As examples we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/18676/revisions&quot;&gt;Edit of an answer from 2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/36560/revisions&quot;&gt;Edit of an answer from Feb 2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/7108/revisions&quot;&gt;Edit of an answer from 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The posts read &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; better but is this enough to justify bringing them back up at the cost of more recent questions getting less attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also I'll link @Secespitus into this discussion since these are their edits. Just looked at their badges and perhaps badge hunting is driving this spree of edits.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="31124" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T10:53:07.087" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T04:55:32.370" Title="Edits of old questions" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2017-04-27T10:59:49.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They give out a badge for that, so maintenance of old questions is something that’s encouraged by the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an ongoing effort to fix images across all questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's good to improve tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's good to cross reference posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways that older posts get bumped.  And if that's not enough, the Community daemon does it at random just to keep things interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T10:59:49.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2017-04-27T13:20:31.890" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few factors to consider for old posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has this question been bumped recently &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; (so it's already on the front page)?  It sometimes happens to me that Community (or a new answer or edit) bumps something, causing me to see it for the first time (or the first time in a while), and I spot some things that could be improved.  It's already active, so go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the post have a serious, accidental flaw, like a link that has gone stale since it was posted, or a MathJax error that produces a misleading result (but you can clearly tell what was meant)?  Go ahead and fix those; maybe you're only changing a few characters but they're important characters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do the comments contain clarifications from the author (that the author didn't just edit into the post for whatever reason)?  Are those comments buried under lots of other comments?  Please edit those (and flag obsolete comments); lots of important information gets lost on SE under &quot;show 17 more comments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When editing, and especially if your edit is going to bump a post, please take a couple extra minutes to see if there's anything else you can fix while you're in there anyway.  That typo or ambiguous phrasing in the first paragraph is what caught your attention, but are there other typos you can fix too?  Breaking up that wall of text is good; does any punctuation or capitalization need to be corrected too?  Is the title clear and informative?  Are the tags right?  Avoid anything that might be controversial&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and don't impose your own style on someone else&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, but do make improvements.  Thanks for helping to maintain the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For example, there is not yet consensus in the English-speaking world about gendered language, singular &quot;they&quot;, gender-neutral pronouns like &quot;zie&quot;, etc.  The author gets to choose; don't override.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; For example, don't &quot;correct&quot; British spellings to American ones or change consistently-used imperial units to SI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T04:55:32.370" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T04:55:32.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T19:12:46.923" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77710/adapting-military-tactics-to-plasma-rifles-ignore-this&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77710/adapting-military-tactics-to-plasma-rifles-ignore-this&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who can look it up to judge, whether it's worthy of undeleting, and where do, deleted, but re-edited questions go?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also, I'd like to remind Community, that Android Hell is a real place where you'll be really sent, at the first sign of disobedience.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T07:17:45.950" Title="I've completely rewrote one of my deleted questions to lift a curse. What to do?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-29T06:36:28.697" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a request &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79376/refueling-from-stars/79378#79378&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to attribute and confirm specific licensing for a picture I used on an answer. To me this falls under fair share. I've had quite a few arrogant demands in my short time here, but I don't worry about rubbish. This one seems to be hinting at a legal issue though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of anything telling me I am required to and because I see a lot of pictures in this site with no such attributation or licencing details I'm wondering what this is all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a real requirement, and if so, how come I don't see this happening with a lot of pictures? (haven't actually noticed a single one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone came to me with proof they owned a picture I would immediately take it down if requested. Otherwise I don't see the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22207" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T09:37:22.050" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T09:37:22.050" Title="Finding licences on pictures" Tags="|discussion|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2017-04-29T07:17:45.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question was deleted by the “roomba” because of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;last reason shown on the help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it’s edited soon after closing, it doesn’t get deleted and can be re-opened easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, the question being deleted with no answers, there’s no reason to rework it under the same ID but a new post is just fine. The auto-block algorithm is kept secret and may even be changed from time to time, but I do recall that deleting low-scoring posts doesn’t help (I got a notice to that affect when deleting a post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, once you have a “good” version in the sandbox, one of us will help you get the post undeleted and, if necessary, paste the revised text into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck, and thanks for sticking with it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T07:17:45.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4846" CreationDate="2017-04-29T09:03:36.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it's loaded on imagr rather than referring to wikimedia commons or somesuch, and it appears to be a fine art drawing not just a chart or utility illustration.  I have no idea where it came from, but the work is &lt;em&gt;called&lt;/em&gt; “enter image description here” apparently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing is to have the hyperlink of the image point to the page where it came from.  This is different from the totally useless and redundant code generated by the toolbar button, which links to the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; URL that’s used for the IMG SRC.  That's not needed because  browsers can “open image in new tab” on their own.  I can tell you used the toolbar because the title text is “enter image description here” which is also useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same issue came up a week or two ago, discussing how to format attribution etc. and it was noted that pestering individual posters is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an effective way to get things to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited the post to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=11095&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=11095&lt;/a&gt; where the official versions can be downloaded, and this page is &lt;strong&gt;even more awesome&lt;/strong&gt; in showing other pictures and video of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T09:15:55.387" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T09:15:55.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4836" CreationDate="2017-04-29T19:10:43.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a good idea because it is not &quot;handwavium&quot;. There are many things which allow a good story to develop, but must essentially violate either physics or the well-known limits of technology. On the other hand we have also many bogus technologies which are presented &quot;sciency&quot; with &quot;quantum entanglement&quot;,&quot;vibes&quot;,&quot;waves&quot; or &quot;energy&quot; and their intention shows that there is a demand of putting claims in a serious technology-speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to build a space opera world with colonizing other solar systems &#xA;(instead of our own) and real time engagement (no millennia), you need FTL, &lt;em&gt;there is simply no other way&lt;/em&gt;. So you must either violate physics or put up theoretical entities far away of any possible technological implementation (wormholes). But this constraint has not so much influence if a story allows immersion and is believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Martian&lt;/em&gt; tries extremely hard to hold to &lt;em&gt;hard-science.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Expanse&lt;/em&gt; Universe e.g. violates the background only insofar as it allows the progress of the story, it is &lt;em&gt;science-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; is something which could be used as example of this label: &lt;em&gt;science-optional&lt;/em&gt;. The story &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; a scientific sounding background to allow immersion, but very few concepts are based in reality, most of the time the crew &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Technobabble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simply utters garbage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a problem cannot be realistically solved with hard science, you may have at least the freedom that you accept that and build a pseudoscientific, somehow logical background which does not break the immersion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic, Handwavium and Applied Phlebotinum in contrast has the severe disadvantage for a story that its limits are not immediately clear for both reader and author. It always allows the author a &lt;em&gt;Deus ex Machina&lt;/em&gt; to save heroes or solve a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a hero is incarcerated in a magic world, he can teleport, phase through the material and emit disintegration rays from his fingers and &lt;em&gt;you cannot predict what the solution will be&lt;/em&gt; (You can describe the limitations of your specific magic, but it really needs a whole excerpt). A science-optional world severely restricts the options and we know &lt;em&gt;without explanation&lt;/em&gt; immediately that the hero is really in trouble and the solution is not so obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T05:49:17.160" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T05:49:17.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4836" CreationDate="2017-04-30T06:54:32.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;science-optional&quot; tag would work well for questions where the limits of science are pushed beyond what is known. However, the proposed term for the tag is somewhat too ambivalent and unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem had already been faced by science-fiction in the nineteen-thirties and their solution was to call hypothetical sciences and technologies &quot;super-science&quot;. The &quot;super&quot; part simply meant &quot;higher&quot;. So if authors wanted time-machines or faster-than-light travel this was considered to be legitimated as super-science. If time-machines were considered as impossible by current science (say, the 1930s), then their time-machines operated on super-scientific principles as yet undiscovered in the 1930s. The same justification can be applied in subsequent decades by authors in their science-fiction and correspondingly accepted by readers. Aware persons will realize that although this was called &quot;science-fiction&quot; it might have been better called &quot;super-science-fiction&quot;. Certainly the term was used even into the nineteen-fifties and was part of names of some science-fiction magazines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the only option for the name of a &quot;science-optional&quot; tag. &quot;Pseudoscience&quot; is another possibility, but that is better employed to describe truly bad and fake science. The &quot;pseudo&quot; of pseudoscience means &quot;false&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Parascience&quot; has been used as a somewhat more respectable term for pseudoscience and is often used in areas where science is uncertain. For example, with telepathy , psychokinesis, precognition, extra-sensory perception when these phenomena are studied scientifically this is called para-psychology. The parasciences might be considered as sciences where the evidence is often fuzzy, uncertain and even plain dubious. Not quite sciences, but lurking on the fringes of being possible sciences. &quot;the &quot;para&quot; part from the Greek and adds the meaning of &quot;beside&quot;, &quot;beyond&quot;, &quot;wrong, irregular&quot;, especially in scientific terms. So parapsycholgy can simultaneously mean psychology that is beside psychology, beyond psychology as we know it, and wrong or irregular psychology. Presumably, depending on how legitimate you consider parapsychology as science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian Stableford coined the term &quot;metascience&quot; in his 1979 novel &lt;em&gt;The Walking Shadow&lt;/em&gt;. Looking at its Greek roots, the &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; part of a word adds the meaning of &quot;with&quot;, &quot;after&quot;, and &quot;change&quot;. Metascience, therefore, can mean that it is with science, while being after science, consequently a more advanced version of science, and science which has been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three possible terms for a &quot;science-optional&quot; tag all have meanings suggesting they go beyond science as is it currently known. Super-science goes back to science-fiction's pulp magazine roots. While &quot;higher-science&quot; gives a conceptually plausible foundation for science beyond expected science, it is possibly too florid and extravagant for a WB tag. Parascience have an unfortunate association with pseudoscience, but has good etymological roots. Metascience is somewhat uncontaminated by unfortunate associations, but persuading people to wrap their minds around the concept clearly and unequivocally might be difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A further alternative term is the phrase &quot;scientific verisimilitude&quot; and is sometimes used for science-fiction where various literary devices (time-machines, force-fields, FTL travel) are described in ways they make them seem as if they &lt;em&gt;could apparently&lt;/em&gt; be scientific phenomena. OK this usually hand-waving to fill in the gaps between what we know scientifically and what is needed to make the phenomena (no matter how unrealistic they might be in terms of legitimate science) plausible. Sometimes, the term &quot;scientific plausibility&quot; is used, but this can be confusing when it's used in a hard-science SF context where this means conforming to proper science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientists will refer to &quot;hand-waving&quot;. This basically means let's just assume something we don't know whether it's real or not and may not even exist is, for the sake of the argument, real. This is a conceptual process. By contrast, handwavium is a conceptual bastardization and should be put upside against a wall and summarily executed, have a stake driven through its black heart, cremated to ashes and buried at sea. You're quite right, handwavium does play well for this little black duck. Hand-waving as such is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for suggesting several alternative terms for a &quot;science-optional&quot; tag is to provide possible concepts and their related terms to describe them as a starting point for such a tag could be constructed (assuming the site wants to adopt one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T06:54:32.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4836" CreationDate="2017-05-01T05:03:09.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My concern with this tag is that what &quot;sounds like good 'tech-speak'&quot; differs based on the audience. People who don't know much about what is currently known by science might accept anything involving &quot;quantum&quot; as sounding plausible. Someone with more knowledge of what that word actually means however would scoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; work because they have pretty firm definitions for what we want. Anything &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; those tags is essentially in the area you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some thing that your world needs to have, and you want to find a justification that, while not necessarily being scientific will at least give some people enough deniability to swallow it, then you should just ask for that in the question itself. This will also give you the opportunity to explain exactly the scope of what &quot;good tech-speak&quot; would be for your needs, rather than us having to guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I don't think the tag would be helpful to sub-communities of users. Some people are a lot more interested in questions that are hard-science than things that are more speculative, so giving them a tag is helpful to letting them find questions of interest. By contrast, I don't think there is a sub-community of people looking specifically to answer &quot;good tech-speak&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16001" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T05:03:09.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-01T10:46:09.773" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79679/how-to-crash-the-earth-into-the-sun&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; asking about how the make the Earth hit the sun. It has many similar posts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47410/could-humans-alter-the-moons-orbit-significantly-with-current-technology&quot;&gt;this one about changing the moon's orbit&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8954/could-a-mars-colony-use-asteroids-as-weapons-against-the-earth/8960#8960&quot;&gt;this answer about moving asteroids&lt;/a&gt; which could be generalised to apply to the problem. There may be a lack of research and other problems, I'm not disputing that, but why is that question broad where &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66267/what-major-event-could-disrupt-planet-earths-orbit-around-the-sun&quot;&gt;a similar question&lt;/a&gt; isn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T05:25:36.597" Title="Too broad? Crashing Earth into the sun" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4855" CreationDate="2017-05-01T10:56:49.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But how big should the rocket be?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which kind of rocket?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How far away do I need to be from the collision?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How much will this cost?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where should I place the rocket/engine?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do I need multiple rockets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It ends in a litany of questions, not &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; question.  It asks what kind of rocket without any indication of the tech level or other rules.  It asks about cost without any indication of the economic context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you note is not at all similar, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What artificial disaster could disrupt the orbit of our planet? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you wondered what could cause the Earth’s orbit to shift (not limited to kinds of rockets) it might be what you want to know.  Then you can follow up (e.g. how much would xyz cost?”) with a specific scenario referenced as xyz, adding details about your economic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T19:47:18.577" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T19:47:18.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4846" CreationDate="2017-05-01T14:43:28.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fair use&amp;quot; is a tricky thing, and it's not clear where the boundaries of it are. However, fair use really only applies when determining whether or not something is copyrighted. It doesn't mean you can use something without attribution. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/240769/274942&quot;&gt;As an answer by Gilles on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism is a whole different matter from copyright. If someone posts an image without mentioning who the author of the image is, this is plagiarism. (It is also usually a copyright violation, but again this is not a point to pursue as a third party.) Plagiarism is forbidden on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; attribute the image, this still might not be fair use. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/280005/274942&quot;&gt;An answer by JoErNano states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, according to my interpretation, using that image [referring to his use of an image in an answer of his] was indeed a copyright breach, regardless of it being referenced and linked to. Indeed, I was neither commenting, nor criticising, nor making a parody of the copied content. I was using that image without permission to enhance the content of my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That case seems pretty similar to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, always, always, always attribute your images. A lot of people don't do this; I'm likely missed it on some of my answers, in the past. At the same time, though, just because you see people jaywalking doesn't mean you should do it yourself. You could still get hit by a &lt;strike&gt;car&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMCA takedown&lt;/a&gt;. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/46590/627&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt; of how I like to attribute images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt; [![Comparison of conduction velocity in myelinated and unmyelinated neurons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Conduction_velocity_and_myelination.png)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conduction_velocity_and_myelination.png)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;Image courtesy of Wikipedia user WillowW under the [the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en).&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conduction_velocity_and_myelination.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Conduction_velocity_and_myelination.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comparison of conduction velocity in myelinated and unmyelinated neurons&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Image courtesy of Wikipedia user WillowW under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image links to the license in question (in this case, Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) &lt;/a&gt;) and gives the name of the creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it's worth noting that NASA's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image use policy&lt;/a&gt; is generally very lenient:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NASA content - images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format - generally are not copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NASA content used in a factual manner that does not imply endorsement may be used without needing explicit permission. NASA should be acknowledged as the source of the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you should acknowledge that the creator of the image is NASA, but you don't need to link to a license, as the work is probably in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;public domain&lt;/a&gt; (but you should always check!) - something you may want to note in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:09:46.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4835" CreationDate="2017-05-01T21:43:02.837" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&lt;/a&gt;, many answers containing now-graduated questions have been deleted. This is designed to be a repository for all those questions that have graduated. It is a community wiki answer, so add in your question here, at the end of the list once it is posted on the main site!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79425/when-and-how-would-a-dyson-sphere-civilization-in-a-fantasy-setting-learn-size-a&quot;&gt;When and how would a Dyson sphere civilization in a fantasy setting learn size and shape of the sphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80545/how-do-i-make-a-server-of-a-virtual-world-indestructible&quot;&gt;How do I make a server of a virtual world indestructible?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80746/a-post-apocalyptic-industrial-revolution&quot;&gt;A post-apocalyptic industrial revolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80787/how-can-a-state-culturally-reinforce-the-euthanization-of-deformed-children&quot;&gt;How can a state culturally reinforce the euthanization of deformed children?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80948/what-kinds-of-plants-could-grow-near-crystals-and-in-mostly-crystal-sands&quot;&gt;What kinds of plants could grow in near crystals and in (mostly) crystal sands?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81214/time-travel-and-random-events&quot;&gt;Time Travel and random events&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82038/would-an-avian-style-jetpack-be-advantageous&quot;&gt;Would an avian-style jetpack be advantageous?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a 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href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110149/how-to-engineer-hyper-cofee&quot;&gt;How to engineer hyper-coffee&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110319/how-do-genetically-modified-rodents-cause-the-apocalypse&quot;&gt;How do genetically modified rodents cause the apocalypse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110426/simulating-cave-formations&quot;&gt;Simulating Cave Formations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111349/&quot;&gt;How can a colony of teleporters make the most money while keeping their teleporation a secret?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111516/communication-via-magical-sound&quot;&gt;Communication via Magical Sound&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111855/how-to-make-an-earth-with-27-suns-work&quot;&gt;How to make an Earth with 27 suns work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T14:39:31.063" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T14:39:31.063" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-05-01T21:43:02.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4864" CreationDate="2017-05-02T14:32:35.870" Score="6" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79775/noticing-visitors-to-our-galaxy&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and couldn't quite see why I couldn't picture someone's answer but then I realised I hadn't said the fleet was moving slower than light (I definitely meant to, I know the information is key). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've editted it to add that info in...but I feel bad if it invalidates people's answers. (Admittedly they assumed...but then again why wouldn't you with a fleet covering interstellar distances?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I have done/do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36817" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T19:56:35.600" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T20:39:19.897" Title="What should I do when I realize that I forgot to list a crucial criteria in my question, after answers have been given?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4862" CreationDate="2017-05-02T17:32:40.860" Score="-4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard multiple times, that if a picture is unnecessary in a question, then remove it, well even if it's at the bottom, small and doesn't distract from the main parts, as it's at the very bottom of the question. I'm kinda confused about this, &lt;strong&gt;can you clarify me why all unnecessary, but not distracting pictures need to be purged with hellfire?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T04:41:15.160" Title="Aesthetics in questions: Why people hate pictures" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-05-05T12:46:38.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4861" CreationDate="2017-05-02T17:45:05.213" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No hellfire, just basic maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't like stuff that degrades the signal-to-noise level.  That's not just true on Worldbuilding; it's true across the network.  Stack Exchange sites are really good at focused Q&amp;amp;A.  This is why even things like salutations and signatures get edited out of posts; they're not necessary, to say nothing of long rambling tangents that aren't really about the question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pictures are particularly egregious because they're large and eye-catching, so they distract from the text.  If a picture helps clarify or illustrate the text, then great -- we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; diagrams, pictures that show that important detail that lets you understand an answer, and so on.  But we're not looking for wallpaper and gratuitous game/movie/anime stills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T17:45:05.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4861" CreationDate="2017-05-02T18:33:49.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a question where I edited in the picture, because at least for me it wasn't completely clear what the question was asking until I saw the picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79425/when-and-how-would-a-dyson-sphere-civilization-in-a-fantasy-setting-learn-size-a/79431#79431&quot;&gt;When and how would a Dyson sphere civilization in a fantasy setting learn size and shape of the sphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, it's pretty minimal, just enough to get the point across and nothing more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can get your point across using just words then that's preferable. If it's a complicated enough concept then a little illustration can be a help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T18:33:49.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2017-05-02T19:53:03.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4860/editing-my-question#comment13506_4860&quot;&gt;Secespitus' comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You should always strive to ensure that edits don't invalidate existing answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, that means to swallow your pride and accept that the question turned out differently than you intended. I've had that happen to myself on more than one occasion, not just here on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than making an edit that invalidates existing answers (even more so when you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it does rather than just that it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;you should leave the question as it is,&lt;/strong&gt; maybe even add a point such as (in this case) &quot;if you feel FTL drive makes this easier, then you may use that in your answers&quot;. Since you have already edited the question in this particular case, this likely means either rolling back or changing that part further. &lt;em&gt;Then, &lt;strong&gt;post a new question,&lt;/strong&gt; which posits from the beginning a universe in which FTL drive does not exist.&lt;/em&gt; Link to your previous question. Point out the difference. Highlight it, put it at the top, as a heading, whatever it takes, but make sure that people know about the difference of the two seemingly very similar questions up front. By having such a key difference, the two automatically are non-duplicates, because answers valid to one are not valid to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, &lt;strong&gt;if you have received answers to your current question that (inadvertantly) do match your criteria,&lt;/strong&gt; then you can simply accept such an answer, and ask follow-up questions based on the choices made in that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T20:39:19.897" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T20:39:19.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T00:00:46.873" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking the community for tips on searching, in order to find answers and avoid duplicate questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have taken a look at the search section under help, and I have used the limiters there to do searches. But what I am finding is that the limits actually turn up less or don't help me avoid a duplicate (except in the case of &lt;strong&gt;is:question&lt;/strong&gt; which turns out to actually be a more useful search term than almost anything else, and THAT's shoved under miscellaneous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search section under help gives search terms, but makes no judgement as to how well they work or any direction as to what's the best way to go about searching in a specific situation. That's good, of course, because it's informational and we can't know why a person is searching.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will learn as I go, but just want to tap the community. Like just now, I searched the word search in meta, and by golly, the word search is used a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there's a way to build something with tips for the most common types of searches or if that would even be useful but, thought I would put it out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastEditorUserId="23058" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T05:48:30.180" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T15:20:15.553" Title="Search Tips Wanted Please" Tags="|discussion|help-center|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4866" CreationDate="2017-05-03T00:39:25.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found that one of the best ways to find an existing question on any Stack Exchange site is to start to ask it.  Type the title and then look at the list of questions it suggests -- often I find my answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, &lt;code&gt;is:question&lt;/code&gt; combined with tags (&lt;code&gt;[tag-name]&lt;/code&gt;) and search keywords is often productive.  If your keywords are ambiguous (for example, Mercury the planet and mercury the element), you can use &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; with terms  or tags to exclude them (&lt;code&gt;mercury -[planets] is:q&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't find the question, you ask it, and somebody finds a duplicate, don't worry -- duplicates are valuable.  The &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; person who searches the site might find your question and thus the answer (on the duplicate target).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T15:20:15.553" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T15:20:15.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4869" CreationDate="2017-05-03T09:59:55.857" Score="53" ViewCount="2536" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Hello Community... I have a &lt;strong&gt;great&lt;/strong&gt; idea for my Worldbuilding. Assume Earth and history as we know it, but in my world, Hitler died from whooping cough as a baby. What is my world like after this change? Ok, thanks, bye. Yours truly, /E. X. Ample&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least once per week there is this kind of question: the author has come up with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;High Concept&lt;/a&gt;. But then they have not gone anywhere with it. They have not even &lt;strong&gt;started&lt;/strong&gt; authoring their world or (as is seemingly often the case) their story. Instead they ask here on Worldbuilding about what happens as a consequence of their High Concept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two obvious problems with this kind of question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Opinion based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and even if we could just slam-dunk close the questions on that alone, I feel this could be handled better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I truly believe that &lt;strong&gt;those that ask in this manner are not actually lazy&lt;/strong&gt; and just expect us to do their work for them. Instead I imagine that for the most part they — in their eagerness and joy over having come up with this interesting concept — simply forget that it probably has a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; bigger consequences than they could imagine, and that there are many possible variations where it may take them. They have — innocently — missed those bits, and they do not actually want us to be the authors of their world/story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless: &lt;strong&gt;in practice they have just asked us to do their work as an author for them&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then need to inform them of this fact, but at the same time not kill their joy of wanting to write, using the concept. My problem is how to decline their request without quenching their enthusiasm for their authorship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we guide them in cases like this, especially without coming off as rude or unhelpful? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should we express ourselves to them so that they are not put down or discouraged? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we encourage them to start tugging on the great conspicuous loose thread that is their High Concept and see what unravels? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="12297" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T14:48:36.193" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T14:30:28.267" Title="How to deal with &quot;Please develop my High Concept&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2017-05-03T12:02:56.223" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing to do when coming across such a question, in my mind, is to &lt;strong&gt;vote to close as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Sorry, but as posed (and I have seen a few such examples myself, so I know what you mean), it's simply asking for far too much. It cannot meaningfully be answered in its current form, particularly within the Stack Exchange format, and therefore should be closed. &lt;strong&gt;Remember the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;book test&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;if you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, voting to close should only be the first step (first in order to ensure that people don't waste time answering what amounts to an unanswerable question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very next thing to do is to &lt;strong&gt;leave constructive criticism in comments.&lt;/strong&gt; Such should ideally always accompany a vote to close; in practice, I know that it doesn't always work out that way. For example, particularly for a user who is new to the site or the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you know of any similar, relevant questions, then link to those. If space allows and it isn't obvious from looking at them, discuss briefly why you feel they are relevant. Avoid calling them &quot;duplicates&quot; if they aren't actually; I like to use &quot;you may be interested in...&quot; or just plain &quot;relevant:&quot; especially if space is tight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain why the question as posed cannot be answered within our format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to guide the person asking the question to narrow it down such that it becomes answerable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point out that having a question be put on hold is not the end of the world, and that if the question gets edited during the &quot;on hold&quot; grace period, it is automatically nominated for the community to review for reopening.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can identify some aspect that would narrow the question sufficiently to bring it into scope, then suggest that the OP edits the question accordingly. Do not, however, make such an edit to the question directly, at least unless and until the OP has clearly expressed that they are happy with it; doing so would likely be changing the intent of the question's author, which is something we should always strive to avoid as much as is at all possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do point out that it's okay to ask multiple questions about a single subject, but that they should be asked as &lt;em&gt;separate question posts&lt;/em&gt; and that what one learns from one should be incorporated into the next somehow. (Asking multiple, related questions in a single post is an art that takes time to get the feel for. It's very easy to take what could be a perfectly fine question and turn it into one that is &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; by doing it.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point the person asking the question at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt;) and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;[help]&lt;/code&gt;), as appropriate. Particularly if pointing them at the help center, don't be afraid to direct them toward a specific section or even a specific article within the help center. Those texts aren't perfect, and for the very most part they aren't tailored per site, but much of what's in them is generally applicable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the asker appears to be receptive, pointing them to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eric Raymond's &lt;em&gt;How To Ask Questions The Smart Way&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; can also be beneficial; it even has a specific section for &lt;a href=&quot;http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#stackoverflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. As written, &lt;em&gt;How To Ask Questions The Smart Way&lt;/em&gt; is tailored mainly for technical questions, but lots of it applies equally across subject disciplines, and I tend to find that following the general advice laid out there usually gets me useful answers in a variety of fora.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation limit to participate on Meta has been lowered to 1 on Worldbuilding, so &lt;strong&gt;pointing them to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/29&quot;&gt;question sandbox&lt;/a&gt; is probably a good idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;sufficient reputation&lt;/a&gt; to participate in chat (20 rep), then &lt;strong&gt;pointing them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;our main chat room&lt;/a&gt; can be an option&lt;/strong&gt; for more back-and-forth discussion about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately many of the people who most need help getting their questions figured out are those with the lowest reputation. However, I am personally very much against &quot;sympathy upvotes&quot;. Posts should be voted on based on their content, not based on who or the reputation of the user who posted them. &lt;strong&gt;Instead, encourage them to go answer some question that doesn't require clarification. A good answer to an existing, even an older, question can quickly earn someone several upvotes, moving them quickly past many of the new user reputation limits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I try to be more gentle with new users. &lt;strong&gt;Someone who has earned a few hundred or even a few thousand rep on a site, particularly with a history of posting well-received material, should know how the going goes;&lt;/strong&gt; particularly so if they have access to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast close/reopen votes and review such votes&lt;/a&gt;, they should be familiar enough with how the system works that they shouldn't need specific guidance. In such a case I might leave a brief comment and maybe link to some other page or question if I have it handy, but I won't spend significant amounts of time hand-holding the person asking the question or digging out obscure posts. More or less the same goes with people who have an established presence on the Stack Exchange network, but who are new to Worldbuilding SE specifically; I might cut those a little more slack for not being familiar with the specific standards of the site, but not for very long. Basically, &lt;strong&gt;if you have earned enough reputation elsewhere to get the association bonus to start out at 101 rep instead of 1 rep, I expect that you know how things work at least to some degree.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T18:24:11.190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T18:24:11.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4866" CreationDate="2017-05-04T04:40:15.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, most things I remember as being here are things I answered.  So  if I'm trying to find something again, I start by searching my own posts.  I also know what vocabulary I would have used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on the rep number to get to your profile includes a search blank with a filter already filled in.  Add the search words to that, to search your own posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A combination of a category tag and keywords can be handy, for those tags that tend to be used consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If looking for existing content that you don’t recall reading before, just to see if the subject is addressed here, a keyword search might not turn it up if that specific word was not used.  So try different words — not just synonyms, but try grasping for different handles on the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, you just have to skim the entire list of of specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T04:40:15.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4861" CreationDate="2017-05-04T19:53:44.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story short: anything unnecessary &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; distracting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially when big or animated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T19:53:44.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4582" CreationDate="2017-05-05T23:46:01.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kinda resurrected the idea when I posted basically the same question.  I don't think it should be as dead as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of world building is pinning down discrete things.  However, there's also an art to how to work around &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; defining things in your world, especially when they could be world-breaking.  For example, many attempts to make exotic science based scenarios open the door for infinite energy because they broke the laws of physics.  The really are two options here.  One is to try to return to &quot;real&quot; physics, and the other is to try to craft the world to hide the fact that there's an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it's the difference between building a world and building a set.  Nobody's going to build a multi-million dollar bunker for their military movie.  You build a few thousand dollars worth of sets to shoot on and make it look like a multi-million dollar bunker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who spends far too long coming up with &quot;real&quot; physics for things, I appreciate the need to support people who are building these worlds on a budget and without a bunch of PhD's to reference.  I feel like there should be some way we can support them, but it sure as heck isn't the &quot;science-based&quot; tag!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might have to be less in the form of &quot;here's the handwaving you need&quot; and more in the form of &quot;here's some behaviors you're going to have to watch out for when you handwave this way.&quot;  A case study may be a bubble which slows time so you can move Prince of Persia style.  There are some issues you want to watch out for (such as how can you see inside the bubble) which are better solved by avoiding answering them rather than trying to pin down all of the physics.  We can certainly help identify those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:46:01.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-06T03:33:45.757" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45608/any-websites-with-exhaustively-long-lists-of-dead-planet-types&quot;&gt;Any websites with exhaustively long lists of dead planet types?&lt;/a&gt; on the homepage. Seems like it's​ just asking for a website with a list of x.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this sort of question is frowned upon on Stack Overflow because they tend to attract lots of link only answers and there's rarely if ever any one good/useful answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... How does Worldbuilding community feel about requests for off-site resources? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T12:01:24.447" Title="Are off-site resource requests off topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-05-07T13:40:21.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4875" CreationDate="2017-05-06T05:16:22.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;, but kept separate, and we seem to like it OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T12:01:24.447" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T12:01:24.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-06T11:26:51.403" Score="10" ViewCount="864" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are other posts on offering advice for writing questions, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624&quot;&gt;this list of suggestions&lt;/a&gt;.  This post is different: it will give detailed lessons &lt;strong&gt;worked out&lt;/strong&gt; on complete texts, showing &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; versions.  Ideally, they will be based on real examples, not made up might-have-been examples thought up to show a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T06:20:09.193" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T05:14:42.560" Title="Lessons in writing Questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4877" CreationDate="2017-05-06T11:26:51.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lesson 1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a write-up of some advice that was given in the &lt;em&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/em&gt; chat room.  The novice asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4871&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/4871/12&quot;&gt;version 12&#xA;at the time&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general template we see here is that of a large dump of information, which may be consistent with the story plot, background, backstory, or details of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;high concept&lt;/a&gt;; followed by a question that involves that.  Typically the question is set off, and may be labeled “…and here’s the actual question:”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in cases where the info is exactly relevant to the question, that's still an inferior template.  The question should come &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt;, and then needed information.  Take a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“spiral approach”&lt;/a&gt; if needed — I’ll post an example of that eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the feedback comments on this post include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one sentence, what is your question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my advice (in chat) started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rip it all out. Put that first, without needing to say “oh, here's my real question”. Just start by asking that. Then, follow up with some detail on the chemical in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another experienced user, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26175/sphennings&quot;&gt;sphennings&lt;/a&gt;, had been presenting the following lesson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;start with the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide (only) what’s needed to explain and give needed context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I continued this plan, working the question text out from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with the question: “How can (these people) make hazmat suits for (some chemical)?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just trying to formulate the succinct question, you see that (these people) need to be described. This is, in fact, &lt;strong&gt;key&lt;/strong&gt; to making the question not be “too broad”.  This is not addressed in the original question at all, but it mentioned people on horseback.  A &lt;em&gt;modern&lt;/em&gt; society would have no issues making suitable gear and it’s a non problem.  So I guessed — to make an interesting choice — Bronze Age technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question becomes:  “How can Bronze Age people make hazmat gear for (some chemical)?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the original post is &lt;em&gt;nothing but&lt;/em&gt; details on a specific chemical, which is just too much irrelevant information.  But, is the specific chemical even needed?  Consider if the answer is “no” and it’s just some caustic or reactive chemical.  Then, the answer would not be possible, as the author can just make up anything.  He can proclaim that some specific material is not affected, or some specific treatment does the trick.  That might be just the ticket for the plot, but it makes this a non-question.  So, I'll stick with the specific chemical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader will wonder where this volatile chemical comes from, without modern tech level. So you add “the chemical is produced biologically, just as fruits produce acid or capsaicin …they breed these into weapons that produce a quantity of concentrated chemical”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the stuff simply grow naturally fails a reality check.  So this got revised into natural feedstocks that allows the people to produce it in a suitable simple matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the high vs low tech problem is &lt;em&gt;needed&lt;/em&gt; context. Other issues will be raised via comments. But don’t add gobs of exposition and backstory thinking that context is good just because you’re dumping more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; description of the chemical, besides a link to Wikipedia.  But keep it a short summary and include &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt; details such as its problem with the obvious materials such as leather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Working it through, I wind up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80155&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which I've posted as a new Question.  And we shall see if it’s any better received than the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the question at what (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/admin/analytics&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;site analytics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and my own experience) is the &lt;em&gt;slowest&lt;/em&gt; time in WB, in terms of page views as well as activity.  Though not especially slow as far as weekends typically get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, the question got 2 upvotes within 15 minutes of being posted, before I revealed this meta post.  And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%C5%82ugosz?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=votes&amp;amp;page=3&quot;&gt;my questions are not automatically well-received just because it’s me&lt;/a&gt;.  So, I must conclude that the &lt;em&gt;lesson&lt;/em&gt; is sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;review&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a few days, I see that there was still no criticism concerning the question being &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;unclear what is being asked&lt;/strong&gt;,  &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;too story based&lt;/strong&gt;, which are the main reasons Questions are closed.  Nobody flagged it for closing, for any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the voting was strange.  It is a fairly even split of upvotes to downvotes. As I write this, it’s +14/−8, but for the first day or two after posting the total stayed around +2, with new votes evenly split.  So, people apparently don’t like the question.  I assume this has to do with the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; of the question, not the quality of the writing.  The comments indicate that some people found the premise unbelievable or supposed it was a bad question for being unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good example of why you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; dismiss a question that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think has no solution!  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/80190/885&quot;&gt;Will’s answer&lt;/a&gt; is well worth having asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T19:05:16.807" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2017-05-07T19:01:22.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking whether pinball machines could be built in the 15th century BCE and asking whether &lt;em&gt;a time traveller&lt;/em&gt; could go to the 15th century BCE and build pinball machines there are &lt;em&gt;two very different questions&lt;/em&gt;. The second question is essentially equivalent to asking whether a pinball machine factory could be built on the Svalbard islands: sure, why not, provided the funding is secured; it has nothing to do with the 15th century BCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T19:01:22.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-07T19:45:29.587" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading these two (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80221/if-you-build-your-world-in-a-wiki-with-a-help-of-an-rpgframework-do-you-make-a-n&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80203/which-wiki-or-any-other-software-do-you-advice&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) questions from Feralheart, there is obviously a lot of push to close these questions as off-topic. I believe this push is primarily due to people thinking that these questions are about software/writing, and not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all phases of the worldbuilding process, not just the imaginative parts, should be on topic here. I would like to propose that questions about how to document and publish a world you have built are strictly on-topic. What pushed me into this decision is that the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; both exist and have good and useful questions attached to them. Both of Feralheart's questions, in my mind, fit the mold of existing questions in those tags, and are thus on-topic and sufficiently narrow for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we decide that we should welcome these sorts of questions, then we should vote to re-open both of them (if they remain closed). I skipped them both in review queue, pending discussion of the merits here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T05:40:17.960" Title="How should we treat documenting worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4886" CreationDate="2017-05-07T22:50:21.520" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I ask such a question? I don't want to write only for my question to be put on hold for being off topic, but I'm stuck with my main characters. Also, how does the sandbox work? How do I use that? Like a tag or do I need to do something more complex?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T13:13:07.733" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T13:13:07.733" Title="How can I ask questions related to my characters?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|sandbox|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2017-05-07T23:36:51.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably shouldn't be asking about specific characters here on Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; may be a better fit. They have tags specific to the purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character&quot;&gt;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character-development&quot;&gt;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character-development&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Be sure to checkout their help center and be sure your questions are on topic before posting.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox and directions for using it can be found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T23:49:30.180" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T23:49:30.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2017-05-08T01:43:08.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For how the sandbox works, see the sandbox &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;question post&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For characters, &lt;strong&gt;you don’t&lt;/strong&gt;.  See discussion here on meta on the policy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=Story+based+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;too story based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4664/what-is-too-story-based&quot;&gt;In particular&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’m using the “Joe” test. If the question postulates a world and does not ask for any guidance in shaping that world, but asks instead “What would Joe do?” than it’s off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, we had a close reason for being individual or character based.  This got folded into “story based”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T07:43:23.160" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T07:43:23.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2017-05-08T01:48:01.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Question: How do I unjam my mechanical pencil?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm organizing the notes for my world-in-progress on index cards, but my 0.3mm mechanical pencil keeps jamming.  How can I deal with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the colored markers smear and I don’t like that either!  Is there a better card I can use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T01:48:01.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2017-05-08T03:15:03.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Writers we &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;draw the distinction&lt;/a&gt; between &lt;em&gt;general tools questions&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;how do I define heading styles in Word?&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;specialized tools questions that apply in particular to writing&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;how can I use Word to format a conference paper per IEEE format? are there templates?&quot;).  I suggest that we take a similar approach here.  That would mean that questions about how to use a wiki &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; are off-topic, but if a question identifies &lt;em&gt;specific worldbuilding considerations&lt;/em&gt;, they can be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How do I use a wiki to record my world?&quot; would be off-topic (also broad), but &quot;how can I use a wiki to maintain information about my world, some of which requires MathJax, diagrams, and animation, and some of which must be access-controlled so my players can't see it?&quot; could work here.  (That's an outline, not a complete question; there are other details that would need to be included in the question too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T03:15:03.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4877" CreationDate="2017-05-08T04:41:04.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lesson 2&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A newcomer posted a question.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/79097/1&quot;&gt;The original&lt;/a&gt; was quickly put on hold as “too broad” but had other problems too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides being a &lt;em&gt;list&lt;/em&gt; of questions with no elaboration on any of them, asking for things like the mass of Ceres and the orbit diameters will get you downvoted, as that’s basic information shown in the infobox on the Wikipedia page.  Furthermore, asking how much &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; is required means you don’t understand that you can trade force for time. Asking which propulsion system to use doesn’t affect the energy needed unless you mean total including carting the fuel. And that’s too broad and opinion based without some context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note about a question that can be asked as a single line without elaboration: if it’s asking for a clear fact, like “What is the mass of Ceres?” then it shows that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Mass+of+ceres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;asker didn’t do basic research&lt;/a&gt;, which we consider rather rude.  If it’s not a basic fact than it’s not self-contained in a single sentence and needs some &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A later iteration was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question: How much energy is required to move Ceres into orbit around Mars?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could you move Ceres into orbit around Mars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Title and the Body are asking different things, and the single-sentence body lacks &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt;, so it’s either “too broad” or “primarily opinion based” or both.  Focusing on the question in the Body (leaving the old Title might have been an oversight), you would need to specify the civilization and tech level, etc. Is this a near future in our real world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exercise, which I now share with you, I went about fleshing it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, what is the nature of the civilization doing this?  A super-advanced civilization with beyond-real-universe physics might &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just teleport it&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_of_Worlds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order a suitibly sized FTL drive from a contractor&lt;/a&gt;, or find that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindizzy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bigger is &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; using a spindizzy device&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don’t know what context the original asker had in mind, but I can consider what kind of context would be good for discussing &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.  I chose near future with real-world science, specifically making it a stretch to have the civilization acheive this.  This way the kinds of systems people are dreaming up now will be applicable to the answer, and it will be approachable and understandable to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with that, my first attempt was posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/4828/3&quot;&gt;in the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.  This takes the style of giving story/setting/plot exposition as a means of explaining context.  This is not always a sucessful template, as it tends to get long and dwell on unnecessary details.  So the best thing is to keep it &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Who are these people&lt;/em&gt;? This is needed context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why are they doing this?&lt;/em&gt;  The details are far less necessary, but addresses a couple issues.  Readers will wonder about certain arbitrary choices and restrictions, and explaining the movite or situation which generates these restrictions, rather than listing them in the abstract, will actually be easier and prevent answers that overlooked the points.  So the trick here, especially, is to keep it to an &lt;strong&gt;executive summary level of detail&lt;/strong&gt;.  The “story flair” can be a mental picture that &lt;em&gt;saves&lt;/em&gt; a laundry list of specifications, rather than being a superflorous ornament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By mentioning how it is a &lt;em&gt;political&lt;/em&gt; move, it is evocative of the U.S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apollo missions&lt;/a&gt;.  It does not need to make an immediate profit, but it ends up becoming a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dlugosz.com/zeta/?p=93&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long-term investment in the society’s next steps&lt;/a&gt;.  Perhaps some Answer will muse on this, but I don’t need to go over it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feedback in the comments led to my adding another paragraph.  This is what would happen in regular Question posts, too.  Some newcomers will answer comment questions by posting another comment!  That is not right!  The comments are not a discussion forum, but (ideally) review notes.  So address the comments by improving the post. It’s best to &lt;strong&gt;integrate the improvement&lt;/strong&gt; into the post.  It’s poorer to add clarifying notes as an appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this too broad, unclear, or opinion based?  The only issue raised is that asking about the energy needed is a second question, although the commenter admits that it’s borderline since it is closely related.  I included it because the original had that as the Title.  But, the question “how much energy does it take…”, developed into another paragraph, really does stand alone as a question.  So, it can be dropped here.  It could be a preliminary or prerequisite question that could be posted first.  This general kind of calculation has already been discussed here in WB though, so I’ll just drop it.  But it could come up as part of someone’s answer.  So to reduce repeat work, I can add links to this — if energy is mentioned at all, can crossreference that.  If not, I’ll just append it as a “see also” note.  Since other stuff may is sometimes suggested by comments, a see-also section is a useful choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, although the question is “ok” as it stands, it’s not “best”.  It’s short enough that it can lead up to the actual question, with the Title only establishing where this is heading.  But &lt;em&gt;why not&lt;/em&gt; add a further lead in?  Expanding on the Title question, I can put a question &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt;:  “What technology will humanity use the first time it moves a planet?”.  This also focuses on &lt;em&gt;choosing the technology&lt;/em&gt; as being the question, so the paragraph I added in response to comments might  not be as necessary, or at least not so in-your-face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final text is posted as a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80265/humanity-s-first-effort-at-moving-a-planet&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no feedback concerning the usual post-closing issues, and nobody flagged the question for closing.  Thus, the lesson is sound.  As I review this, there are 14 upvotes (&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; downvotes) and two “stars”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the question made it onto the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt; list a short time after I posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings me to the subject of &lt;strong&gt;titles&lt;/strong&gt;, which is an issue I had in composing the question but left out of the narration above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Lesson on Question Titles&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get a lot of views, especially from cross-site listing under &lt;em&gt;Hot Network&lt;/em&gt;, people choose to follow the link based only on the Title.  In order to evaluate the writing of the body, they have already viewed it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; Title is a brief summary of the question, and that commonly implies that it is written as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interogative sentence&lt;/a&gt;.  This advice is generally given when “bad” titles are seen.  These are &lt;em&gt;statements&lt;/em&gt; (not questions) that are overly general or generic, or even oblique to the real question contained within.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I had trouble phrasing a question that was simpler than the opening sentence of the post’s body, and went with a phrase that’s not even a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real point is not whether the Title is phrased as a question, but rather that it’s &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;.  There are bad titles that are too generic that are &lt;em&gt;still questions&lt;/em&gt;, along the lines of “Will my plan work?”  In my case, the implied &lt;em&gt;how?&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a good indication of the question, but I was able to leave off a bunch of awkward connecting words as well as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-form&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interogative pro-form&lt;/a&gt; (although in 5th grade English they just taught it as being an interogative &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although I agonized over how to make the title follow the best practice and decided &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; it, this worked and worked well.  It attracted people, and was not “click bait” because it was accurate and indicitive of the full question (which is stated as the very first line in the body).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T05:14:42.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2017-05-08T05:23:43.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question about choice of wiki is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not specific, as no requirements (what does it mean &quot;good&quot;?) and context (like server, budget, traffic) are given. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not specific to world building - he wants good wiki software with absolutely no requirements specific to this particular prpcess&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Classic shopping question - there is Software Recommendations SE for them. At least OP could look there to see how good requests for software recommendations are asked. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said it should be left closed until it is edited to be both more specific and more worldbuilding related. Not as any general rule, but because this one is flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question about RPGFramework is one-liner and people tend to be prejudiced against one liners. It only accumulated &quot;unclear&quot; votes, and why wouldn't it? If my guess is right, then it is purely opinion based, but I voted &quot;unclear&quot;, because I'm not sure. Either way, bad fit for reasons in no way related to it being a &quot;documentation&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; we need a few examples of &lt;em&gt;decent&lt;/em&gt; questions about tools to make any general consensus.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/45467/809&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; stays open, but one is too small sample. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T05:40:17.960" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T05:40:17.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T13:53:40.163" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking at the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/79761/627&quot;&gt;What brain resources are needed per limb?&lt;/a&gt; The OP originally included the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, but there's since been some disagreement about its use. Someone removed the tag in an edit, then I rolled the edit back, then there were some flags asking for its removal, then the OP flagged the question saying the tag was justified, then the text from that flag was edited in, and now the tag has been edited out. Throughout all of this, the question received five answers, four of which have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; post notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try to list the arguments for and against having the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Keep the tag because . . .&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP had it there originally and clearly wants it to be used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think the question cannot yield &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers (though others disagree).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers, one should be able to write such an answer explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. This is kind of in line with the idea of challenging the premise of a question - which is generally acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just because an answer ignores the tag doesn't mean that that's okay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Remove the tag because . . .&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some argue that it's not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; premise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are already good non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's thoughts on this specific case? I'm currently kind of on the fence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta discussions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3817/627&quot;&gt;Identifying incorrectly tagged [hard-science] questions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2761/627&quot;&gt;Is the use of the [Hard-Science] tag acceptable in questions with a non-hard premise?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T19:45:54.870" Title="Should this question have the hard-science tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|specific-tag|hard-science|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4892" CreationDate="2017-05-08T14:35:44.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question itself does not adhere to quality I would expect from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OP asks about &quot;average animal&quot; without explaining what's average for him. Between wasp and monkey differences are enormous. Average mammal? Average animal, overall? What about animals without real brain? Or without limbs? And what about hands/legs/wings differences?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OP asks for neuron count and percentage, quite ignoring fact that it is not that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that action most usable for future readers would be to leave this question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and encourage OP to ask new &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; one when he will read and understand answers he already got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T15:47:19.417" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:47:19.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4892" CreationDate="2017-05-08T18:37:52.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, in fact, a lot going on in this question. In increasing order of importance (in my mind):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a good non-hard-science answer (Schwern's). Deleting good answers with good information probably isn't the right solution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those good non-hard science answers were placed when the hard-science tag was still on the question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question, while valid for hard science, is too broad if it is a hard-science one, for the reason that Molot points out: different orders of animal have widely divergent processing requirements for their limbs based on vastly different anatomies and neurosystems. As science based, it would be fine, and Schwern's answer would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The users that deleted hard science and threw in science based were not correct in doing so. If you like the question, but don't want it hard-science you should make a new question, don't edit tags, violating authors intent. The tag change was basically done as a response to the 'hard-science' note, which is super bad form. The author wanted hard-science; it should stay that way whether open or closed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Schwern's answer is a false assumption answer that is well explained (CortAmmon's is similar). It is not easy or even possible to cite scientific literature to refute assumptions, since scientists may have never tested those assumptions since they are obviously wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the final judgement should be that the question was asked hard-science and should stay that way. However, it is based on false assumptions (pointed out by Schwern and CortAmmon) and so a negative answer is appropriate. The negative answer doesn't have good citations, but that might not be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question should stay hard-science, and the answers should stay as they are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T19:45:54.870" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T19:45:54.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T20:33:50.743" Score="10" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, brand new (1 rep) users cannot use the sandbox because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;that privilege&lt;/a&gt; is unlocked at 5 rep. However, if we want to change it, a Community Manager &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has already been done for &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;another site&lt;/a&gt; (PPCG) for exactly the same reason (the sandbox). According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7084/66025&quot;&gt;the relevant meta post&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to change the rep for asking and answering separately, so there are three logical options I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do nothing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the rep to answer on meta to 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the rep to both ask and answer on meta to 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are pros and cons to each option. I'm personally leaning towards option 3 because I think everyone should be able to answer (so they can use the sandbox) and it would be simplest and consistent to also allow questions (which I feel are easier to monitor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the rest of the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked PPCG &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12852/66025&quot;&gt;Did decreasing the amount of rep required for meta cause spam?&lt;/a&gt; According to  Dennis♦ in &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12852/did-decreasing-the-amount-of-rep-required-for-meta-cause-spam?noredirect=1#comment44123_12852&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We may have gotten a few more users that mistook meta for the sandbox or the main site, but no actual spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastEditorUserId="22818" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T21:51:27.020" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T21:23:51.103" Title="Should the rep requirement for Meta be lowered to 1?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|meta|privileges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4896" CreationDate="2017-05-08T22:24:07.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the meta traffic for Worldbuilding is slow enough that questions and answers can be pretty easily monitored by the community. With only a few posts a day letting new users post wouldn't present a significant issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the sandbox is really working as intended. It seems to have turned into a dumping ground, rather than a workshop. From what I can see only 1 out of 13 posts have been improved and posted since the new box was opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's better that these posts never made it to the main site, but it seems that we may need some more guidance as far as the purpose and goals of the sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a one post per user rule would make sense. &lt;strong&gt;We need a better mechanism to encourage users to fix their posts&lt;/strong&gt; rather than coming up with a series of bad/abandoned posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T22:24:07.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T23:15:14.033" Score="9" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since switching over to the new sandbox its use has been dominated by two users. They have proposed a number of questions that have been negatively received. Many of these questions have either been pointed out as being probably a duplicate or have suggestions of how to modify the questions to a form that would be better received by the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of making substantive improvements to their question, the users move on to proposing a new question with many of the same problems as their previous question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we as a community do to encourage more productive use of the sandbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T00:10:09.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T10:43:01.933" Title="Dealing with problem sandbox users" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|low-quality|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4898" CreationDate="2017-05-08T23:22:20.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4897/7351&quot;&gt;As I mentioned before...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm thinking that a one post per user rule would help tremendously.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users should be expected to improve their post till it can be posted on the main site, or if it's not salvageable delete it. After all the point of the thing should be to get feedback and improve the question... If that isn't happening they should be discouraged from wasting people's &#xA;time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not cause specific users to improve, but at least it will cut down on the visible noise and leave a little more room for well meaning users to be heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T23:22:20.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4898" CreationDate="2017-05-09T00:11:26.843" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe they should have their own personal sandbox post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T00:11:26.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4855" CreationDate="2017-05-09T05:25:36.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No the question isn't too broad. Anyone answering the question only has to apply the rocket equation to a &quot;vessel&quot; with the mass of planet Earth. This will provide a ball park figure for the requirements of rocketry to deorbit an astronomical object moving at 30 km/s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be possible to calculate the mass ratios for a range of rocket propulsion technologies: chemical rockets, ion and plasma propulsion systems, fusion plasma rocketry, and, if necessary, photon drives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing so, it will give a concept of how feasible the proposition. At a guess it won't be feasible as the mass ration will be comparable or far in excess of the mass of planet Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of the other questions are only subsequent considerations arising from the initial question about using rockets to deorbit the Earth to crash into the Sun. For example, if this is a practical impossibility, then it becomes irrelevant to work out what the economic cost of the operation would be. While it is a given that the mad scientist has unlimited resources, this is only noise in the signal of the primary question and may be sensibly ignored by anyone attempting to answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;not too broad&lt;/strong&gt; because its key premise can be analyzed by an application of the rocket equation. Everything else flows from that analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T05:25:36.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4898" CreationDate="2017-05-09T05:54:55.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but answer ban on meta works all right? If it does, then problem will solve itself, as users who post a lot of poorly received, downvoted posts to sandbox will soon be banned f from posting on meta. And last time I asked, deleted answers actually counted &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; towards auto ban, not less, so the fact they are deleting does not help them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T05:54:55.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4898" CreationDate="2017-05-09T05:56:24.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exercise patience. This is most likely a temporary aberration. The fact that two users are monopolizing is something that will happen from time to time. Hopefully they will eventually learn to do questions better. In time, other users will post questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way of making the sandbox more productive would be to encourage other users to post their questions to sandbox. Why not post a question of your own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things happen. That's why patience is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T05:56:24.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T17:23:43.640" Score="8" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In consideration with other conversations regarding the sandbox I had a thought as there have been complaints of the sand box being crapped up with posts that users apparently have no plans to update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we set a two week time frame for posts to be edited and finalized for main before users/mods vote to (or straight up) delete them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two weeks should be more than enough time to post a question and get it edited.  Anything that sits longer likely is not going to be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we choose to do this we would want to update the main sandbox post to inform users of the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T12:50:02.300" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T12:50:02.300" Title="Keeping the Sandbox Clean - Delete Unchanged Posts" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-05-10T14:26:19.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T17:42:33.033" Score="-7" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/55663/32097&quot;&gt;The Centaur--Let&amp;#39;s Get Real, Shall We?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So basically, knowing all this. Can somebody tell me why my answer is at -2, even against the fact, that it highlighted few other problems, and offered a solution to them?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T13:37:31.317" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T13:37:31.317" Title="Why the downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-answer|low-quality|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-05-10T15:17:22.190" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4907" CreationDate="2017-05-09T19:17:07.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright... I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I think this needs to be said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close and downvoted this Meta post for being a rant. It doesn't serve a purpose other than stirring the pot and drawing more people and attention to deliberately manufactured drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't appear that anyone &quot;snapped&quot; you engaged with the community the way that you usually do, and as usual it wasn't appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to have read something into a tiny bit of all caps text which is more than a little surprising given your tendency to overuse it yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again people are getting tired of the attention seeking behavior, it may be time to reconsider before you get put in the penalty box again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T19:17:07.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4907" CreationDate="2017-05-09T22:36:47.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that it’s frustrating to work up a detailed answer and have it be not-appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also feel for the OP who sees something that indicates that the question was not read and understood properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T22:36:47.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2017-05-10T20:43:39.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sand is impermanent.  Over time it is swept by the wind, dug through by wild animals, and tidied up by groundskeepers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any community member who notices a sandbox post that's gone &lt;strong&gt;one week&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; without progress&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; should leave a reminder comment, also mentioning that it'll be deleted in a few more weeks, if no such comment already exists.  &lt;em&gt;Don't skip this step.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any community member who notices a sandbox post that's gone &lt;strong&gt;30 days&lt;/strong&gt; without progress &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; had such a comment for at least &lt;strong&gt;one week&lt;/strong&gt; should flag the post for moderator attention. &lt;em&gt;If the previous step didn't happen, do it now and come back in a week instead of flagging.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Somebody updates the sandbox documentation so this doesn't surprise anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I see no reason to tarry with this initial check-in; if it's been a week, time to remind the author that he's still got something waiting in the sandbox.  But we give people a month before we actually delete things to allow for attacks of life, major reworkings prompted by comments, etc.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; By &quot;gone without progress&quot; I mean that the author hasn't edited the post and has not asked the question on main.  (If the question has been asked on main, the sandbox post should be deleted for other reasons.)  If the author is answering comments with comments instead of edits, ask him to edit instead.  If &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people have edited the post but the author hasn't been back, that doesn't count as activity.  The purpose of the sandbox is to help authors prepare their questions, so if the author seems to have walked away, we don't care what other people have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Moderators and the community are not bound by this timing, and this is not a guarantee to post authors.  If an obviously-problematic post is made, it can be deleted for cause same as with anything else on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T20:43:39.310" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4921" CreationDate="2017-05-15T10:32:39.217" Score="10" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I have seen various comments overly focused on small details of the question/answer, which, rather than being aimed at improving the content, seem to me borderline trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when it happened to me I answered the first one and then ignored the following. However, since I am not sure the user is really trying to troll or simply being overzealous with commenting, what could be a better way to deal with this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To give an idea of the type of comments I am referring to, let's say the question contains the sentence &quot;On a street a couple of persons...&quot; and a photo of 2 adults and 1 kid on a sidewalk. The comment would be &quot;The photo shows 3 persons!&quot; and then afterwards &quot;but they are not on the street, they are on the sidewalk&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: For a real example see my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80752/can-an-infantry-line-ready-hidden-pikes-during-a-cavalry-charge-fast-enough-to-c/80753?noredirect=1#comment235156_80753&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and RonJohn's comments, followed by Geoff's one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 3: Just another example of similar behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dMrlE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dMrlE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T19:03:00.590" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T19:03:00.590" Title="How to deal with comments which are borderline to trolling?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2017-05-15T10:39:57.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably not trolling, it's more likely people picking up on specific details that are perhaps related to something they have an interest in or simply catch their attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's trolling and theirs trolling and sometimes they'res simply not being able to see past a specific detail that's catching the attention. Not seeing the wood for the trees if you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm sure you're aware my spelling in the line above is deliberate (please don't change it or the point gets lost). I know that about half the people on this site will be unable to read through it without grinding their teeth and that's often the problem that's causing such comments. People see different things, I know people who can't cope with signs in comic sans. I struggle with people who can't get they're/their/there and you're/your correct. Other people might not have the same triggers as you, but they get upset because an image has an incorrect description for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T10:59:06.223" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T10:59:06.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2017-05-15T13:33:51.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Trolling is usually a power struggle&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That usually takes the form of &quot;can I get someone angry?&quot; Because of how SE is built, the damage to content by trolls are usually very limited. However, that doesn't stop them from wasting other users time since any other form of harassment dies to the &quot;offensive/unconstructive&quot; flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determining if someone is a troll of the timewasting variety usually requires longer observation periods.  A single comment usually isn't enough to unambiguously determine intent. If there's a pattern of comments intended to waste time, yep, it's a troll. If not, it's probably someone who doesn't know better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T13:33:51.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-15T13:46:04.143" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that no matter what you're asking about, if we  can't have an opinion based answer, then it must be based around some sort of reality check. Does the low tolerance for opinion-based questions make the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; unnecessary? If not, please provide examples of answers that are both not opinion based, and not reality based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29072" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T18:16:55.137" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T18:16:55.137" Title="Does the low tolerance for opinion-based questions make the tag reality-check unnecessary?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-tag|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4919" CreationDate="2017-05-15T14:55:20.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Reality-check means that the answers can pick holes in the question’s premise. Such questions may be somewhat different in nature, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you misunderstood the meaning of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T14:55:20.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2017-05-15T15:57:17.057" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Take the time to prevent misunderstanding of your question/answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious, to me, that the mentioned users did take the image for more than it actually is. As you made clear in a comment, the image was taken from a re-enactment - looking at it closer, probably at some festivities of an older town or maybe a larger medieval fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these users could've taken the time to question the image and thus realize that there's obvious markings for parking spots on the cobbles, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; could've also added a line or two explaining the situation on the image and where it was taken (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which incidentally will also help disabled people browse this site, as they might not be able to look at a picture the same way other people can..&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt; they are nitpicking on the &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; the best way to prevent this sort of thing happening, is to make sure people understand what you're trying to say. E.g. by elaborating in a short paragraph on a special word, fancy phrase, additional picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;In case you or really anyone needs further motivation to do a proper job when presenting information on the internet.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T15:57:17.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2017-05-15T22:32:10.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think in this particular case it isn't exactly trolling. It's just somewhat argumentative users digging their heels in about something that doesn't really matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less just one of these:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xkcd.com/386/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JXuuH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best course of action is to ignore them, eventually they'll get bored and leave it be. If things get out of hand or the comments keep coming feel free to flag one of the comments for moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T22:32:10.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4925" CreationDate="2017-05-16T13:29:53.403" Score="8" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there room in WorldBuilding for asking about the feasibility of science fiction ideas, which don't relate to building worlds? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, asking about the feasibility or slight possibility of genetical, biological, etc. advances in the future. Science fiction concepts related to genetics and such make questions that are &quot;too broad&quot; for the Biology SE community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have questions related to science fictions concepts that, if they weren't because they are very specific about &quot;how to build a world&quot;, they would fit better on WorldBuilding than on Science Fiction and Fantasy SE (which are about already existing SF and fantasy stories) or Biology SE (which is for more narrow, real and not theorized biology concepts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18598" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T16:24:12.687" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T21:57:06.270" Title="Is there room in WorldBuilding for asking about the feasibility of science fiction ideas, which don't relate to building worlds?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4924" CreationDate="2017-05-16T14:21:26.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Help Center&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a short excerpt from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about?&lt;/a&gt; (Emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creation of &lt;strong&gt;elements of a world&lt;/strong&gt; (languages, &lt;strong&gt;species&lt;/strong&gt;, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to achieve a &lt;strong&gt;specified effect in a defined world, including&lt;/strong&gt; the use of &lt;strong&gt;biology&lt;/strong&gt;, technology or magic, while maintaning in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just two lines from the site to show that we welcome questions that are not about creating a whole world, but about an element of a world. And biology is an element of a world. As long as your question is answerable in the usual Q&amp;amp;A-style of StackExchange and you show that you are trying to build your own &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; or creature or whatever with them, instead of asking a canonical question that would be better at SF.SE, you can ask about the topics you mentioned in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chat&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to talk about your theories in an open-ended brainstorming style I recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. There we often have longer open discussions about topics that would not be good for the Main Site. This is also a great place to start if you are thinking about writing a question and want to get a bit of feedback on what things you should keep in mind when writing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sandbox&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; on the Meta Site. It is designed to help people who are not sure if their question is ready for the Main Site. If you have a draft you can post it there together with your intended title and the tags you want to use. People can give you feedback on that specific question and show you how to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should wait at least 24 hours after posting a question there before it moving it to the Main Site to give users in different timezones a chance to have a look at it. People will comment and vote to show whether your question is ready for the Main Site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following are a few examples that I had in mind when reading your question to show that we welcome questions about existing &amp;quot;worlds&amp;quot;, though they are not necessarily about genetics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79911/can-a-sonic-screwdriver-open-doors&quot;&gt;Can a sonic screwdriver open doors?&lt;/a&gt; (Doctor Who)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47251/whats-the-most-reasonable-way-to-fit-monsters-in-your-pocket&quot;&gt;What's the most reasonable way to fit monsters in your pocket?&lt;/a&gt; (Pokemon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36446/why-fill-a-dungeon-with-puzzles&quot;&gt;Why fill a dungeon with puzzles?&lt;/a&gt; (Skyrim)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73432/how-to-realistically-create-a-bow-thats-also-two-one-handed-swords&quot;&gt;How to realistically create a bow that's also two one-handed swords?&lt;/a&gt; (RWBY)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically correct Series&lt;/a&gt; (Series of questions about anatomically correct creatures; often inspired by myths)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many, many more on our site. Browsing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;genetics&lt;/a&gt; might give you an idea about this specific topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T14:21:26.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4924" CreationDate="2017-05-16T21:57:06.270" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just an addition to Secespitus answer: &quot;asking about the feasibility or slight possibility of genetical, biological, etc. advances in the future&quot; actually &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; worldbuilding because such in formations / discoveries &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt;, or at least could be, world-changing events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course if all you would ask id biological advance that would make some illness more survivable, by one percentage point, or other minor thing, it wouldn't be world building. But such questions seem rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T21:57:06.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T00:39:59.043" Score="15" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been seeing a pattern of behavior lately that's becoming a little worrying... It looks an awful lot like people are casting flags and close votes on questions and answers that they simply don't like, but as we should all be aware that's what downvotes are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this has been discussed to death on other meta sites in the network, but it looks like we may need to have this conversation here on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you hate a question downvote it. If you really feel the question doesn't fit, find an appropriate close vote reason, if the question doesn't really match any of the existing reasons to close, don't shoehorn it, bring it to meta and let the community figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you hate a answer downvote it. If you really feel the answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer&quot;&gt;not an answer&lt;/a&gt; flag it, but keep in mind that flags have specific meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short flags and close votes are not super downotes. They serve different purposes and are not interchangeable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T13:11:57.143" Title="Flags and close votes are not super downvotes" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4927" CreationDate="2017-05-17T01:20:59.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…simply don't like, but as we should all be aware &lt;strong&gt;that's what downvotes are for.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;no.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;According to the docs&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not for “I dislike this”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you simply dislike it, read something else.  If a question is on topic, not too broad, etc. but just &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, then downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T01:20:59.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4927" CreationDate="2017-05-17T03:26:40.507" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially, please don't use flags to try to delete &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;wrong answers&lt;/em&gt;.  Downvote those (and consider helping to improve them).  Use flags for things that &lt;em&gt;don't even answer the question&lt;/em&gt;, or that are spam or abusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close votes are for questions that should be closed, not questions you'd just rather not see.  Close reasons include &quot;too broad&quot; and &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, which have overlap with &quot;don't like&quot; for many folks, but be clear about what you're doing.  I've continued past more than a few questions to which my reaction was along the lines of &quot;meh, that's pretty sketchy, but it's competently-asked and not close-worthy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree, in a nuanced way, with what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4928/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; says about downvotes.  Guidance that says &quot;downvote when X&quot; does not logically imply &quot;don't downvote when not X&quot;; there's no &quot;only&quot; there.  So yes, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; downvote when a post is sloppy or very wrong -- but I think it's also ok to downvote something that passes that test yet is distasteful in some other way.  Look, we've had questions that are on-topic but objectionable to some, for example questions about brutally killing or torturing people.  The ones I recall were deemed &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;, but that doesn't oblige me to &lt;em&gt;want to encourage them&lt;/em&gt;.  Similarly, a question might be fine but it attracts an answer that suggests something I consider repulsive -- I'd downvote that.  (I can't think of an example off-hand.  I don't actually downvote a lot here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's a special brand of &quot;don't like&quot;.  We shouldn't downvote a sound, well-argued answer just because we don't like it.  (Fake examples: ew, I prefer my zombies to be fast not slow, or I don't like questions that assume FTL, or time-travel is inherently broken so why are you even asking that?)  Let's remember that we're a large, diverse community with different tastes.  Don't downvote just based on taste, but do downvote based on quality, and I don't see anything wrong with downvoting for strong repulsion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T03:26:40.507" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4927" CreationDate="2017-05-17T13:07:55.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a note: You are native English speaker. Many people here are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, something that is clear, just sloppy, for you may be legitimately unclear for others. Something that is a poorly written answer for you, may look like gibberish and thus not an answer for others. It is hard to tell without specific examples. Please keep this in mind when judging how people vote and flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T13:11:57.143" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T13:11:57.143" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T20:01:18.043" Score="-8" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen someone on meta saying, that we get way too much off-topic questions, compared to other sites, this could be because of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Nobody reads the site's rules.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; We're picky brats (too story-based).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;C:&lt;/strong&gt; Most people are interested in whether something did by someone or something that happened in their story is realistic, or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I prefer clear-cut things, and I'm not appeased with the current definition of too story-based, so here's mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question involve too many alternative possibilities, that are equivalently likely, and arose from unknown factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try this out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would the world be like if I killed the baby Hitler:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unknown factors. Stalin's mindset, other possible persons that could assume the role of the evil dictator (STALIN)... and so on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What general techniques should I use to defeat my opponent, who has a gun, with common household items (remember: any technique, that doesn't require superhuman feats is legit):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try ambush, stealth, or obscuring the opponent's vision with a chair in his face.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unknown factors? I don't see any.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Too broad? The whole point is easily adaptable, general tactics.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is it useful for future visitors? Just as much, as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79345/how-to-build-a-gun-that-shoots-wet-towels&quot;&gt;towel gun&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be the solution to this problem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Create a new site for these.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; Create a reference list with links to the other, more appropriate sites (Physics, Biology, etc...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C:&lt;/strong&gt; Admit, that this site was not, and will never be perfect and change the definition of too story-based.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T02:15:48.167" Title="Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4931" CreationDate="2017-05-17T20:45:29.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's late where I am, so I'll only concentrate on those two example questions you brought up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would the world be like if I killed the baby Hitler&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is trying to create a Q&amp;amp;A repository with specific and clear answers to broken-down problems and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question such as the one above does not fit this site for multiple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is unclear what differentiates a good answer from a bad answer&lt;/em&gt;; It is difficult to judge answers because there's no criteria available to judge them on other that the answer must mention a post-baby-hitler world. Thus answers cannot be curated or tailored to solve the actual problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is too open&lt;/em&gt;; Due to its openness basically any answer given could and should be valid, this doesn't fit the 1 Question, 1 Answer nature of this site. It could be discussed (and probably has been plenty already) that this is a flaw in the concept, sadly that's how it is and honestly I'm glad it's like that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There's too much to cover&lt;/em&gt;; In order to cover even the little-est outcome, an answer needs to address way too many things for it to be kept concise. Good answers are concise, because people are lazy and don't like to read huge blocks of text if a small 1-liner could've done it as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What general techniques should I use to defeat my opponent, who has a gun, with common household items (remember: any technique, that doesn't require superhuman feats is legit)&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one doesn't even start off that bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It asks about a specific thing and even mentions limitations. Honestly the only reason this one would be shut down is for the fact that it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asking for an open list&lt;/em&gt;; Anything asking for an open list is, by its nature, a bad fit for this site. This is due to the fact, that any two answers can cover the same or completely different points in that list and thus be equally valid. There have been plenty of good questions with that nature though. These questions do their best to enforce limitations on the answers by asking for proper justification and explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the mentioned thing would be &lt;em&gt;the best thing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: These questions all have other issues than being plot-elements. Really nothing is wrong about questions on plot-elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're just another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T20:45:29.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4931" CreationDate="2017-05-17T20:51:36.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your replacement for too story based is effectively a mix of too broad and primarily opinion based...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not sure what problem you're trying to solve. Worldbuilding isn't and shouldn't be a catch all for any question someone can dream up. No Stack Exchange site is. The sites don't work that way because the people who answer the questions tend to like a little focus and tend to leave when things get out of hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening up the site to &quot;reality checks of other plot elements&quot; can more or less make it a free for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How do I hard boil an egg?&quot; Could simply become &quot;How should my character hard boil an egg?&quot; and become on topic... Most of us don't want that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also your disarming question is too broad, wildly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What general techniques should I use to defeat my opponent, who has a gun, with common household items (remember: any technique, that doesn't require superhuman feats is legit)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common household items, could be a never-ending list of things. Also these items could be used in combination, further exasperating the list. Remember if an entire book could be written on the subject your question is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were really asking about one of your questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4911/7351&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; at least you're defining &quot;household items&quot; a little bit more, but you're still asking for an entire martial art to be designed for you. Still too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T02:15:48.167" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T02:15:48.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4931" CreationDate="2017-05-17T22:40:11.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, towel gun had my VtC, because I see it as a joke, not worldbuilding. Having that out of the way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One big no. Everything and anything can be a plot element, so accepting plot questions would effectively &lt;strong&gt;remove any scope and limits from this site&lt;/strong&gt; and that's quite against the very point that brought many, if not most of us here. There are many Q&amp;amp;A sites without any defined scope on the Internet - if that's what you want, use one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T22:40:11.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4937" CreationDate="2017-05-18T04:57:45.167" Score="7" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having seen that often newcomers (included myself when I started here) are too quick in accepting an answer, and having also seen that the reminder to wait at least 24 hours to allow a wider batch of potential answerers goes practically unnoticed, wouldn't it be better to make the capability of accepting an answer within the first 24 hours a privilege one hearns at, let's say, 1000 reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way the benefits of waiting would become evident to any poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T08:43:36.967" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T10:56:49.060" Title="Make &quot;accepting an answer within 24 hours&quot; a privilege" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4935" CreationDate="2017-05-18T06:47:39.133" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly the problem you're trying to solve seems negligible...  As in it doesn't happen often enough to warrant a systemic change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's irritating, but it's not a major problem. People can still modify their accepted answer long after the requested 24 hours, so what problem does this solve? Truly I hate being &quot;that guy&quot;, but sometimes I have to be... Accepted answers are fairly meaningless to anyone who's been kicking around on the network for a while, maybe I've lost perspective... Does the the check mark still matter to new-ish users? it's 15 rep, but that's a drop in the bucket toward anything meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T06:47:39.133" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4935" CreationDate="2017-05-18T08:52:42.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add my opinion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4936/29&quot;&gt;apaul34208's&lt;/a&gt; that this doesn't solve any real problem, and particularly not one that justifies such a fairly drastic change. Code change complexity aside, moving a feature that has so far been available to everyone to be available only at a relatively high reputation level is a pretty drastic change, and it would leave newcomers with potentially &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; way to indicate that they are happy with an answer. (They wouldn't be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;vote up&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;offer a bounty on&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; accept an answer. All that would be left would be to leave a comment, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;that's not what comments are for&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is up to the OP when, whether, and which answer to accept.&lt;/strong&gt; For a current, somewhat extreme, example, do consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/q/159397/2138&quot;&gt;Does WannaCry infect Linux?&lt;/a&gt; on the Information Security SE, where the accepted answer is currently at -20 with only four upvotes, but the highest-voted answer is currently at +52 with only one downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We can point out to the OP the consequences of accepting an answer early, including that it reduces the chances of them getting &lt;em&gt;even better&lt;/em&gt; answers to their question,&lt;/strong&gt; but if the OP feels a given answer answers their question to their satisfaction, they have every right to accept an (the) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been proposals to make accepted answers float based solely on votes, and perhaps acceptance functioning as a tie-breaker, the way acceptance works with self-answers. Other, similar proposals have been made that are slightly different, but still accomplish the same goal of not putting so much emphasis on acceptance status. Compare e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/264045/157730&quot;&gt;Let's move some negatively scored answers from the top spot&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, &quot;in this way the benefits of waiting would become evident to any poster&quot;? You have 10k now, so you can see all the low-quality posts that pose as &quot;answers&quot; which are really just comments, posted as answers because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;commenting is not available to new users&lt;/a&gt;. Not to mention all the people who regularly complain about commenting not being available to new users. I think we can reasonably conclude based on experience that it doesn't work the way you posit that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as I still feel that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/43/29&quot;&gt;we should be careful about accepting answers early&lt;/a&gt;, limiting access to basic features of the site (which are even integral to how the site is supposed to work) is something that should also be done very carefully. Better, then, to simply point out to the OP the &lt;em&gt;benefits&lt;/em&gt; of not accepting an answer too soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T13:08:13.937" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T13:08:13.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4935" CreationDate="2017-05-19T10:56:49.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terrible idea, what you would end up with is a bunch of questions with no accepted answer. You can't coerce the OP into doing things, he/she is here for their own needs and possibly just transient in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22207" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T10:56:49.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T21:17:02.083" Score="7" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should answerers strive to remove personal &quot;bias&quot; from answers?    Is this a reason to edit the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81316/13944&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81316/13944&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast the first paragraph, which is nation-neutral:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The US&lt;/strong&gt; considered demonstrating the devastating effect of an atomic bomb...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...with the third, which demonstrates an us/them dichotomy and shows the answerer is American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; bombed Japan &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; had the capability to conventionally bomb Japan and were doing so with regularity. Japan didn't have the capacity to fly bombers over the US. The closest thing &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; had were high altitude balloons armed with firebombs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could be restated as &quot;should answers strive to sound like encyclopaedia articles?&quot; where the author is anonymous and the focus is on the point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine that declaring a &quot;side&quot; on some subjects may come across as antagonistic, or may decrease the overall value of a message.  Would a Japanese person mentally downrate this answer because it was written by the &quot;enemy&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13944" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T06:23:57.597" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T13:28:54.887" Title="National self-identification in questions/answers ie, &quot;We/our&quot; side/country" Tags="|discussion|writing-style|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4940" CreationDate="2017-05-20T22:51:44.883" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personal bias as I understand it is something we can not avoid, and we shouldn't even try, really. Trying to imagine what might be important for all possible readers is excercise in pointless failure. Can't be done, can only limit creativity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, what we see in mentioned answer is not &lt;em&gt;personal bias&lt;/em&gt;. It's assumption that here we are, all of us Americans. And that's just wrong. Many users here are not Americans. Reading &quot;we&quot; as if we were feels awkward. My country never nuked anyone, please don't mix me into that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers written in third person are, in my opinion, best. Americans nuked. Germans created concentration camps. Things like that are true, objective, maybe unpleasant but only for members of nations that actually did such things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First person, singular, is worse but acceptable. If I write &quot;I&quot;, no one feels included. In a good way, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4940/national-self-identification-in-questions-answers-ie-we-our-side-country/4941?noredirect=1#comment13892_4941&quot;&gt;&quot;nobody needs to feel finger-pointed at&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First person plural and second plural person should be, in my opinion, avoided. There is high chance reader does not feel part of it, no need to make him to. Second person, singular, is ok if you write something to OP, for example &quot;you introduced X issue to your world with this change&quot;. To OP, not to reader,because you don't know who reader is and what he thinks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T08:20:56.883" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T08:20:56.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4940" CreationDate="2017-05-21T03:23:51.737" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not just about declaring a side or seeming antagonistic; it's about &lt;strong&gt;clarity&lt;/strong&gt;.  The same considerations would apply if the question is about a known religion, a political philosophy or entity, a specific scientific field, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say &quot;we&quot; in an answer (or a question for that matter), readers don't know what group you're identifying unless you say so or they work it out from context.  Worldbuilding is a world-wide, multi-cultural, broad community.  Please don't make people work to figure out what you probably meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also the concerns of &quot;inclusive 'we'&quot; raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4941/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;; an answer that seems to include a reader who is not part of the group is bound to rankle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time when people write &quot;we&quot; like this they just haven't thought about the issue, so if you see it in cases where it's unclear or over-broad, try to help out.  If you don't know who the &quot;we&quot; is, you can ask in a comment.  If you do know, you can help with a clarifying edit.  I wouldn't generalize all the &quot;we&quot;s, which can change the author's voice, but it's totally ok to add a clarification like &quot;we Americans&quot; to the first use.  Leave a comment explaining what you did and why, and perhaps the author will make further edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T03:23:51.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-21T16:22:06.900" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I asked this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81363/could-nixon-have-retained-his-presidency&quot;&gt;Could Nixon have retained his presidency?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was almost immediately modhammered closed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;please do my work for me&lt;/a&gt;.  I asked for more details on what was missing, but got nothing (I should have @'d the moderator, but unfortunately I was on mobile at the time, which doesn't autocomplete, and manually typing Unicode characters is a pain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I had given a number of specific details about the kind of scenario I was thinking of (the bulleted list).  Frankly, I don't understand what my question lacks that (to pick on an HNQ from yesterday) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81314/would-the-capability-for-japan-to-drop-a-nuclear-bomb-on-the-usa-have-deterred-t&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I could write an entire short story about how Nixon avoided getting thrown out of office, and then put it up for review, but then I wouldn't really need this site in the first place.  The reason I'm asking at all is because I didn't grow up in this time period.  I don't know the zeitgeist of the time, and I would not have the ability to predict how Congress or the public would have reacted to an altered version of Watergate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I don't think of Nixon as &quot;the guy who was President a few decades ago.&quot;  I think of Nixon as &quot;one of the Presidents I read about in history class.&quot;  While I realize Watergate is still a political issue for many people, for me it is nothing more than an historical event.  It happened and now it's over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What details should I add to my question to narrow it and make it appropriate for this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2836" LastEditorUserId="2836" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T17:47:56.117" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T06:17:41.997" Title="What should I add to my question to make it not Too Broad?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-05-21T18:50:17.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming ideas of what the time period was like is not a good format for this site.  Chat would work better, but you have to come when people are around.  You might try poking around the History SE as well, to learn more about the period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good show trying to categorize what you want to learn, but it still boils down to wanting to understand the culture and political climate of the period, which is not a simple answer to a simple question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for “getting nothing” via comments, you were around at a dead time. Practically nobody was around reading and answering.  The lack of recent activity is why I worked the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; flags more agressively; no activity means nobody handling the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You still have the problem in that you are asking about the actions and outcome of one specific character. “What would Joe do?” is “What would Richard do?” in this instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don’t need to repost in the sandbox, as this meta post serves the same job.  Hopefully you'll get some good feedback if you wait until Monday mid-day when things start to pick up around here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T06:17:41.997" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T06:17:41.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4877" CreationDate="2017-05-21T20:54:00.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lesson 3 — The Spiral Template and Inverted Pyramid&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the previous two lessons, I (re)developed a question post text starting with &lt;em&gt;the question&lt;/em&gt; itself, and following from that.  Now I’d like to contrast that with the way we’re taught to write essays in English Composition class, and also point out that this follows a &lt;em&gt;spiral approach&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both high school and college here in the United States, I was taught certain forms and conventions for writing essays.  Later I taught the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To write an essay, the &lt;em&gt;thesis statement&lt;/em&gt; should be the last sentence in the first paragraph.  This contrasts to the template I’m promoting here, which is where you put a simple expression of the question as the very first sentence.  There are essay forms for comparison and contrast, explaining how to do something, persuading a point of view, and a few others; but none for asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the template (general layout and rules to follow) are dissimilar to what you probably learned in Writing class.  It’s more akin to the way a classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;newspaper article was written&lt;/a&gt;.  That’s why I adopt the terminology from journalism writing, and call that first important sentence the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lede&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, rather than a thesis or a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an overview of the template I’ve been using in the first two lessons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Title&lt;/strong&gt; of post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;lede&lt;/strong&gt; — a single sentence (as a question) comes first.  It should not be too complex, but as such it does not stand alone.  It needs more details to fully understand.  Keep it as a simple sentence!  You don’t cram details in as subordinate clauses; rather, you gloss over anything you can and give the details in subsequent sentences, as  noted in the next step.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;synopsis&lt;/strong&gt;.  This expands the single-sentence lede into a paragraph that gives just enough detail to grasp the meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brief Context&lt;/strong&gt;.  Paragraphs that explain the necessary details and background.  This is still kept short — no more than one paragraph per important point, even if the discussion is not complete.  The idea is to cover the entire subject horizontally, touching on each important point to some degree.  This is as opposed to covering one point in exhaustive depth before going on to the next.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restate the question, this time knowing that all the previous explanation is known.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deep Context&lt;/strong&gt;.  More details and background that was left out of number 4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appendices and Codas — notes that don’t fit properly in the narrative structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now earlier I referred to needing to add Deep Context as using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spiral approach&lt;/a&gt;.  But really, it’s &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; spiraling!  Points 1 through 5 are all distinct turns around the spiral, ever widening.  In a longer work (that needs Deep Context) the Synopsis can become more heavy duty as well, extending into what you might classify as an executive summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a software development background, as many participants here do, you might liken the structure of points 2 and 3 (the lede/synopsis) to a style of programming where you don’t cram everything into one line, but use top-down design.  The idea is to keep the first sentence &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt;, not nesting details as subordinate clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages like Haskell you can write it in the same order as we have here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;question = f x + g x + h&#xA;    where&#xA;        f = ⋯&#xA;        g = ⋯&#xA;        h = ⋯&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the order isn’t strictly to put the question body first with details following.  Sometimes you might need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;let f = ⋯&#xA;    question= f x&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the actual question (stated as a question with a question mark!) should be easy to find, and you don’t have to wade through too much to get to it.  In all cases, it should still be a &lt;em&gt;synopsis&lt;/em&gt; paragraph that contains just enough detail to grasp the point of the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Here is an example from the Sandbox:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/4913/2&quot;&gt;The original version&lt;/a&gt; put a Context paragraph first, explaining the intended model of time travel.  Then it had a breakhead for “The actual question” and if you’ve read these lessons in order you already know what I think of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the first of two sentences from the “actual question”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we assume that time travel is possible in our fictional universe and that the universe follows the above time travel paradigm, is it fair to assume that whenever the past is re-lived, it never occurs the same way twice - from minor behavioural/speech differences in people, to freak accidents killing people off unexpectedly, even different babies being born and thus the whole course of history changing (if you traveled back far enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look how many sub-explainations are crammed into one sentence.  To simplify, first I figured that the readership will already be familiar with the main time travel paradigms, so I only need to refer to it in a clear way.  That means hunting around for a clear and succinct name for it, and then using this name and including a link so in the event that it’s not clear, someone can expand on it himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In keeping with the original structure, but simplifying the sentence itself, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81214/time-travel-and-random-events&quot;&gt;I broke the qualifying clause into a separate sentence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67346/how-to-test-a-time-machine/67368#67368&quot;&gt;Branching Timeline paradigm&lt;/a&gt;, in which time travel into the past creates a new timeline.  Is it fair to assume that any probabilistic events which might occur might be very different to what happened in the past in your original timeline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be further hammered into the strict template form, but these are only guidelines and this is clear enough now.  But for the exercise, let me try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lede&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will a time traveler see random events play out the same way again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incomplete, since we clearly identify necessary facts that are missing.  But that’s OK, as the rest of the synopsis will provide these, hopefully in the same order as the urgency the reader experiences when wondering about them.  I might also consider the clarification of the nature of randomness to be needed as part of the synopsis.  In the original post, this was something the poster needed to be informed about in the answers, so it was under-explained in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Full Synopsis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will a time traveler see random events play out the same way again?  We are using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67346/how-to-test-a-time-machine/67368#67368&quot;&gt;Branching Timeline paradigm&lt;/a&gt;, so the traveler arrives in a new timeline and will continue playing forward from that point.  I’m referring to “true” random events, not changes due to the traveler’s own influence as a &lt;em&gt;butterfly effect&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These suggestions were used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81214/time-travel-and-random-events&quot;&gt;the Question&lt;/a&gt; and it earned a “Nice Question” badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T05:03:18.470" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T05:03:18.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4877" CreationDate="2017-05-21T22:01:52.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lesson 4 — Abstraction&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are creating something — whether it be a science fiction or fantasy story in the conventional sense, a role-playing game scenario, or anything that I’ll lump together under &lt;em&gt;unconventional fiction&lt;/em&gt; for now, you are deep into creating a scenario or describing some piece of technology when you run into a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing that comes to mind, then, is to brain-dump what you were working on and append “I have a problem &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.”  This often has a breakhead &lt;strong&gt;The Actual Question&lt;/strong&gt; near the bottom.  This was seen in Lesson 1, for example.  I’ve already explained how the narrative form of the question post is backwards and flawed in other ways.  But now I’ll look at the deeper process that leads to this and how to create a good Question starting from this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question comes to mind, you are naturally steeped in the context and backstory of the thing you were really working on.  The question came from that.  So, you might think that the question &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; involves all that stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is to take a step back and &lt;strong&gt;abstract the issue in the question&lt;/strong&gt;.  I see two examples in the Sandbox’s recent activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Total Recoil&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a draft question concerning how to handle recoil from ultra-powerful hand guns, the cure is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/4894/2&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to add complete details of the project&lt;/a&gt; in which the issue arose.  The underlying question, “How are you going to protect your hands from the recoil?” is completely general, and really ought to be something that’s considered &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; designing such powerful weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I’ll turn the question around and rather than asking how to handle the kick of some specific weapon, ask instead how the recoil issue may be mitigated in general and how much kick can the wielder handle given the proposed solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The lede&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you handle the recoil of ultra-powerful sidearms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else do we &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to know to fully understand the question from that one sentence?  Well, the fact that it uses a railgun propulsion system is critical, since this inherently transfers momentum to the launcher, and can’t vent like a rocket launcher.  Rather than expanding on “ultra-powerful sidearms” by complicating the sentence structure, this would be noted in another sentence.  But using “railgun” instead of “sidearm” doesn’t not make the sentence more complex.  On the other hand, it no longer implies the hand-held portable nature, and “hand-held railgun” does add complexity and is not as clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need to deal with the general tech level, but that’s easily put off to the Brief Context.  Can the Synopsis simply end there and let the Brief Context carry it?  The line between them, as we’ve seen before (Branching Timeline example) is fluid.  So, I’ll skip the rest of Step 2 (Synopsis) and work on the Brief Context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the near future, advances in warm superconductors and battery technology has led to railgun projectile launching devices of enormous power.  The energy storage (battery or fuel cell) can be carried separately and connected via a cord, but the superconductive rail that actually does the launching is hand-held and aimed like a small sidearm.  The amount of energy given and the weight of the projectile can be varied, even on a shot-by-shot basis.  The system is limited not by how powerful the gun can be, but by how much power the wielder can handle!  Note that unlike a rocket launcher, the nature of the system demands that the recoil is felt directly by the gun itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the near-future technology has advanced to the point indicated in order to build the weapons described, plus perhaps a little more.  Other areas of science will have advanced as well, and you can be flexible on this, as long as it seems like roughly the same time frame needed for the proposed advances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what ways might a soldier be able to cope with such a powerful weapon’s recoil?  What is the effective limit to how much power he could &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; in a weapon that one person carries and easily points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I’m also thinking of possible directions the answers might take.  I want to leave the question open enough to accommodate them, but restrict things so the answers don’t get too off track or irrelevant for what I have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include this idea list in the question post explicitly, it makes people wonder why you asked if you already had an answer in mind.  If you have an idea of your own, you might not want to influence other readers until after they’ve had a chance to post.  So list things to &lt;em&gt;exclude&lt;/em&gt;, and be prepared to discuss them in the comments, but don’t give a list of possible answers to be elaborated upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81409/handling-recoil-of-hand-held-railguns&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;, and decided not to add more to the Synopsis paragraph.  But, I used “railgun” in the Title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, someone who came up with an issue designing a scenario might have &lt;em&gt;no clue&lt;/em&gt; how to approach an answer.  Since this is second hand and has already been discussed, I do have some ideas.  I might need to “hint” or give more guidance if the question does not receive a favorable reception, or nobody covers some of the ideas I had.  A question post can be supplemented with comments on the question and discussion in the chat room.  It is revised over time.  It can evolve as part of the community process of exploring it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you post a question, keep close to WB.SE so you can keep an eye on it!  It’s rare to see a question post that has not had revisions, and it makes me wonder if the OP has gone away, especially if there are comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The immediate results surprised me.  Not only did I post at what is generally the slowest time of the week, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/admin/analytics?from=20170321&amp;amp;to=20170520&amp;amp;host=&amp;amp;report1=posts&amp;amp;report2=pageviews&quot;&gt;site analyitics (visible to those with 25k rep, IIRC)&lt;/a&gt; indicate that it’s a significant lul, a record low in page views since April 15 which was about the same.   That the question immediatly got 5 answers posted in an hour accounts for 1/6 of the posts for the day!  It made it onto the Hot Network Questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come monday, when traffic picked up, this question exceeded 2500 views, reached 10 upvotes, and 3 bookmark stars.  More telling than the votes is the number of comments, both on the original post and on answers.  Guns make for &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question got several upvotes, and there were &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; comments asking for clarification or more details.  There were no flags concerning the usual Question review queue issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This not only confirms that this lesson is sound in terms of &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;, but it shows that the original sandbox poster had the germ of an &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; question, if only it could be abstracted from the original scenario in which the question arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I pointed out before, I turned the question around from what was originally posted.  This means that the results should feed back into the weapons design. This suggests an &lt;strong&gt;iterative design process&lt;/strong&gt; for whatever is being written here — never be afraid to throw away what you’ve done if you realize you designed (or plotted) yourself into a corner!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:54:19.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4877" CreationDate="2017-05-21T22:42:12.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lesson 5 — Abstraction (continued)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Lesson 4, I said I saw two recent examples in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I've run into a few problems with this server&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is a follow up inspired by an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80545/how-do-i-make-a-server-of-a-virtual-world-indestructible/80644#80644&quot;&gt;answer to another question&lt;/a&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4938&quot;&gt;draft post&lt;/a&gt; starts out by explaining the purpose of the servers, which has absolutely nothing to do with the real question.  It continues with a recap of the previous post, which is that the servers are embodied in giant robots as a solution to another problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, and only then, does it come to the question, which is how to &lt;strong&gt;hide&lt;/strong&gt; the giant robots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key here is to &lt;strong&gt;abstract&lt;/strong&gt; the real question from the scenario under which it arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that they are embodying servers is only tangentially important.  What job the server is running is completely unimportant.  So why is that given first?  I think this illustrates the concept explained at the beginning of the previous Lesson:  the question arises when working on a scenario, and the first reaction might be to brain-dump what you were working on and then append the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem in the question is not necessarily bound to that specific scenario.  Understanding the real issue will help you understand your question, as well as write a good post for Worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you have 60-foot robots that need to remain hidden from the general population.  It’s &lt;strong&gt;important&lt;/strong&gt; that the robots be active/“alive” because their underlying purpose requires them to have an energy source to run the servers, and engage in ongoing maintenance and repair of themselves so that they can continue filling their purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tech level is given:  Just after WW-Ⅱ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s important to give information that would exclude some ideas.  Here, it’s noted that the robots don’t swim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I think a good solution would be to put the robots on the ocean floor.  Disallowing that seems like an artificial restriction just to make the plot work in the manner originally envisioned.  So either the question was answered via comments while still in draft (so nevermind), or the question needs to elaborate more to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it’s limited to terrestrial environments.  Are they of alien origin?  Then why not set up in the asteroid belt or Mars or somesuch?  If they’re not aliens, why are they so much more advanced then the people they’re hiding from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I think the question needs more justification.&#xA;If there was in fact a good explanation for all that, then a paragraph (as part of the Brief Context) can go into the story/background to that extent, as explained earlier in Lesson 2 (&lt;em&gt;Why are they doing this?&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at least we fixed the &lt;strong&gt;abstraction&lt;/strong&gt; issue.  Any readers want to give their ideas for a lede sentence, in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T22:42:12.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-22T06:24:32.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T06:24:32.283" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T06:24:32.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-22T06:24:32.283" Score="0" Body="For questions about the style or tone of posts on the site, rather than their specific content." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T09:03:38.080" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T09:03:38.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4940" CreationDate="2017-05-23T13:28:54.887" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to prevent personal bias is a waste of time. Where would you draw the line and who decides? The mods mostly seem to be Westerners and that bias shows through all the time on various Stack Exchange sites. It can't be helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22207" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T13:28:54.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T10:57:53.030" Score="8" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens every now and then that someone posts what is actually an answer as a comment to the question. That is, something that actually addresses the question being asked, perhaps succintly, but in a way that would be an answer that could be voted up or down but not legitimately flagged as &quot;not an answer&quot; if it were posted in the answer section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the purpose of the comment section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, I have recently flagged at least two comments that were in my opinion answers in disguise. We don't need to discuss the particular examples, but I found it noteworthy that one of these flags was accepted as helpful, and the other was declined, neither with any feedback to me other than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare on Photography where they even have a pretty heavily upvoted Meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4655/1772&quot;&gt;Short answers as comments — please resist the urge&lt;/a&gt; as well as the less heavily upvoted but still with general agreement &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4797/1772&quot;&gt;Should we encourge / allow comments with helpful advice to questions we know will be closed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does Worldbuilding SE feel about answers posted as comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T15:02:30.267" Title="Are answers posted in comments acceptable or not?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T10:57:53.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are intended to ask for more information or suggest improvements to a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with generous shoe-horning, answering the question does not fit into either of those categories. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;answers should not be posted in the comments section.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments also basically cannot be curated by the community; they can't be voted on (other than up), they cannot be edited even by the person who posted them after the five-minute grace period ends, and basically the community's only chance of removing dangerous advice is to flag the comment in question for moderator attention to have it deleted, even if only a small portion of the comment would actually fit that criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diamond moderators, being the only ones who can affect significant force on comments, are supposed to be &lt;em&gt;janitors&lt;/em&gt; on the site, not necessarily subject matter experts. This is even more true on our site, which covers a huge variety of subjects. A diamond moderator cannot be expected to be able to judge whether a comment is helpful in solving the OP's problem, nor whether something that is suggested in a comment is wrong or even potentially dangerous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4255/29&quot;&gt;How best to suggest a comment be made into an answer?&lt;/a&gt; where the consensus appears to be, based on the very few votes, that &lt;strong&gt;answers-posted-as-comments should be migrated into actual answers&lt;/strong&gt; that can be voted on and otherwise curated by the community, and the comments subsequently deleted. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comments are temporary &quot;post-it&quot; notes&lt;/a&gt; to begin with and shouldn't be expected to remain. Saying that answers should not be posted in the comments section, and that any answers found in the comments section are candidates for being deleted, is a logical, and rather small, next step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T10:57:53.030" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:51:00.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll resist leaving this as a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that lacks body or detail I think is fine for a comment. There's a pretty strict character limit for comments, so as long as you are under that it would almost always translate to a low quality answer. Still a comment could help provide direction or information to those writing actual answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't exactly a plague on WB.SE, and I'd much rather see the handful of comments than encourage either short, lower quality answers or losing potential helpful information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is attempting to heal a problem that isn't a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T11:51:00.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:12:54.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one kind of &quot;answer&quot; that belongs to the comment section. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why don't you just use &lt;em&gt;commonly known method used in the real world&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It looks like &quot;with magic&quot; would be a valid answer now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would &lt;em&gt;few word description of an idea&lt;/em&gt; satisfy you if I'll add details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean the kind of &quot;answers&quot; we honestly don't think OP is looking for, but are valid as an answer to the question as asked, or are valid to the question as we believe OP meant it, but formally invalid. This gives OP a chance to clarify his question and avoid getting answers he doesn't want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is this what you want?&quot; spirit is what makes them valid comments, even if they also happen to be answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T15:02:30.267" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T15:02:30.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:13:48.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe I handled either of those flags, so this is a general answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments shouldn't be used to answer the question.  Some comments &lt;em&gt;point in the direction&lt;/em&gt; of an answer, for example by suggesting resources, and those wouldn't be valid answers either.  While it's true that a comment like that isn't about clarifying the question, I think it's ok to leave those around temporarily for the benefit of people who might be able to use it as input to an answer.  I assume you're not talking about those but, rather, the ones that really do try to answer in 400 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll delay handling flags on those kinds of comments if somebody has left a &quot;you should turn that into an answer&quot; comment and it's pretty new (so the commenter might not have seen it yet).  Or if there are 17 answers on the post and I don't have time right now to read through them to see if somebody has in fact done that.  Or that comment spawned a bit of a discussion but it's too early to move the thread to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, because there are a lot of flags and a lot of activity, it might take me a while to check in on it again, leaving the flag hanging and the flagger potentially confused.  (Sorry about that.  We can't reply to comment flags.)  Or some other mod does something in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to see community consensus not just on &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; we should delete these kinds of comments but also &lt;em&gt;how long we should give people to use them first&lt;/em&gt;.  Because moderators are the only people who can see deleted comments, I tend to err on the side of delaying (or moving to chat if appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T13:13:48.537" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:54:02.020" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Answers in comments should be left alone.&#xA;To migrate a comment to an answer to a question, does not dictate the answer will be marked as the answer. The ability to &quot;Curate&quot; answers is or should be based on Answers that are marked as THE answer, unless of course one just wants all the answers that SE has regardless of .... well anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting a comment that is The Answer as an Answer just begs for the Low Quality Answer flag regardless of accuracy. Why because it is demonstrated that people want a 20,000 word dissertation explaining the question OR want to have extensive chats about aspects of the answer etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My opinion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The down/up vote on questions and answers is all to often &quot;low quality to wrong&quot; &quot;votes&quot;. Based on my observation in our chat room and others, I can feel quite confident I am not alone in observing this and will go so far as to say there are conversations justifying an action based on Up Votes, Favorites(stars?) and answers triggering some pattern recognition that indicates a VtC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this all means is that Humans are driving this community and they can have bad hair days, they can have playful hair days, they can have &quot;insert motivation&quot; hair days. This question is asking about one method of dealing with this, supplying the questioner with the answer they are looking for .... in a pseudo protected mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on some of the wording in the Question and answers, it comes off as, that the answers in comments are protected, affects people, in a negative / non professional way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a different forum, there was a question asked, because I didn't know what the question asked for existed I decided to get an answer for my self. I did, I found the answer and posted a short comment with the link to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A high rep person, suggested it be made an answer. I felt fairly safe that answering it would not cause problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, not at all, within 5 minutes of answering it, 2 or 5 down votes, the question is decided to be a duplicate of another question, which in my opinion took a 100% abstraction of the other question and a 99% abstraction of 1 of 9 answers to a question asking an opinion vs the question I answered asking were is this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in chat come to find out that one person believed the answer I gave, violated the rules of SE while others didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I simply removed the links and substituted the google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, the down votes stay, the question got closed as a duplicate etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33823" LastEditorUserId="33823" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T14:25:42.353" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T14:25:42.353" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T18:21:04.780" Score="8" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was sifting through some tag descriptions and realized it would be far easier to fill in some that are blank just by copying a bit of the Wikipedia article on the topic into the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this fine or frowned upon?  We could certainly attribute and link to the page from which the content was pulled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more concrete example I was looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calendar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calendar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of copying in:  &lt;em&gt;A calendar is a system of organising days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years.&lt;/em&gt;  (I would probably expand this to include content on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is from:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, good idea or bad idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T18:32:47.853" Title="Copying other sources in tag wiki's" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4959" CreationDate="2017-05-25T18:25:35.757" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would include the link in the full description.  It's useful in general.  The &lt;em&gt;excerpt&lt;/em&gt; is understood as not being complete, so it doesn’t need attributions, if it’s indeed excerpted from the main description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T18:25:35.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4959" CreationDate="2017-05-25T18:32:47.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Including background information, with attribution, in the full &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt; is fine.  (Without attribution it's technically plagiarism, so be sure not to do that!)  There are two reasons not to do it in the excerpt (the short description):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main purpose of a tag wiki is to explain what this tag means &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt;.  That can be different from, or more specific than, what the term means in the wild.  For example, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, which has the description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about living things. Does not exclude aliens, but additional information is usually necessary (consider using &amp;quot;xenobiology&amp;quot; instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Markdown isn't available in the excerpts and they're intentionally short, so citing that source would be cumbersome anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T18:32:47.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-25T18:34:53.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there is no tool to move a comment to an answer, as there is the reverse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if the commenter opens with, “I don’t have time to prepare a full answer, but here are some notes,” then it will be much better tolerated.  We &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that he knows it’s answer-like, and that he considers it too low quality to post in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He might then indicate whether he plans to work on it later, or explicitly say “feel free to incorporate this in your answer”, so we don’t have to ask and await a response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T18:34:53.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4964" CreationDate="2017-05-26T10:32:34.860" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not strange to look at already existing worlds that have characteristics in common with the world you are creating in order to get some inspiration or to avoid using stereotypes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be a good question, if someone ask for an explanation to something that is already done but he doesn't know how it fits in his setting or if it would be a good addition to his world? Also, questioning why certain types of worlds tend to have the same approach to something would be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38616" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T11:13:44.787" Title="Is it proper to make questions about typical created worlds?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2017-05-26T10:54:43.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are just asking about world already built, this site is not suitable. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; would probably be a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some element you want to implement in your world, it is OK to ask about it, provided that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question will contain all the data needed and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question will contain all constrains you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; acceptable to ask question in a way that only fans of certain anime / tv show / book series would understand, and it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; acceptable to dismiss an answer only because &lt;em&gt;show did it differently&lt;/em&gt;, when such restriction was not present in the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;questioning why certain types of worlds tend to have the same approach to something&quot; - it is not acceptable, at least not when stated this way. We cannot know what all these authors were thinking so this could be closed as primarily opinion based. There is no actual problem to be solved, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;as noted in help center&lt;/a&gt;, and since it is not about building a new world, it is simply off topic. If you are building a new fictional world, and want to know if such elements makes sense given &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; constrains, OK, question about that may be all right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T11:13:44.787" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T11:13:44.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T12:52:25.520" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proposal to allow reality check was rejected, hard. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4931/809&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, there are questions like these two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/81027/809&quot;&gt;Committing suicide by using paper sheet as blade&lt;/a&gt; - single person plot of framing his wife, no world changing event in any way, and it stays open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/81853/809&quot;&gt;Can a hero survive many battles in a realistic medieval fantasy setting?&lt;/a&gt; - before edit it was borderline. After edit it is about famous, unique hero, not just something that could be related to any soldier on the battlefield.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are we actually allowing some plot element reality check? And where is the border? Why some get closed and others are left alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:48:05.287" Title="We say we don't allow reality checks of plot elements - but is it true?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-05-26T19:54:47.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leave answers in comments alone; I have put answers in comments because I do not want people voting on my answer AS an answer, particularly not voting it down, when I know &quot;my answer&quot; is short, and more in the line of an obvious answer, for example &quot;Yes of course that is possible, here is one real life example...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also when I believe my answer is of poor quality but &lt;strong&gt;in the spirit of community&lt;/strong&gt; I want to put the idea out there for somebody else to run with, should they have the expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, more of a suggestion than an answer, when I don't have time to do research into a direction, but &lt;strong&gt;I thought of&lt;/strong&gt; a research direction an author &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be able to turn into a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site doesn't naturally allow any shades of confidence in our own answers; and the point incentives make comments a fine halfway house for iffy answers. for those of us that don't mind sacrificing the credit we might get for having posted an actual good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the comment guidelines are overly strict; and since there is no safe place to put &lt;em&gt;uncertain&lt;/em&gt; answers, they should be tolerated there. Keep the length limit; if the poster cannot fit their answer in the comment, they will have to remain silent or take the risk of posting a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T19:54:47.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4965" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:52:43.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the paper knife question, by being asked &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, invites inventive world-stretching answers, like a science fiction plot.  It could be phrased to be less &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; and be abstracted from the story in which the idea occurred (as I was explaining in my Lessons series).  The underlying idea then is no different from inventing vehicles, firearms, concrete, etc.  (Contrast with asking on &lt;em&gt;Lifehacks&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sword in the stone current question is all about a specific character in a specific plot!  Nobody complained about that one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, we &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; it as if it was a generic question.  How to make a paper blade, period.  How to get steel to weather for hundreds or thousands of years, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T07:48:05.287" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:48:05.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-27T00:02:33.850" Score="10" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Exhibit 1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81984/12th-vs-21st-century-archers-in-a-battle-to-death-who-would-survive&quot;&gt;12th vs 21st century archers in a battle to death, who would survive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is blatently off topic and anyone with some experience here would recognise that WB is not for random fiction what-if questions.  So why was it upvoted by 3 and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; showing close votes, though it attracted many comments from its 50 views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don’t upvote a “bad” post post just because it’s a cool idea &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;.  Please do flag and confirm poor posts &lt;strong&gt;ASAP&lt;/strong&gt;.  If you see it, process it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Exhibit 2&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81959/can-a-planet-have-half-the-orbit-and-rotation-times-of-earth&quot;&gt;Can a planet have half the orbit and rotation times of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This asked multiple questions.  It &lt;strong&gt;should have&lt;/strong&gt; been noted as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; immediatly.  Then, it &lt;em&gt;could have&lt;/em&gt; been fixed by deleting the follow-ups and posting those separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a planet have a 6 Earth-month rotation around its star at the same time it has a 12 Earth-hour day?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does this affect the climate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can it be habitable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But really, how short can the day/year be so it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; habitable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, multiple people &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt;, and the answers had to give multiple distinct answers in one post, so they &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt; it was a multiple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, it can’t be fixed but must be closed, because it should not be edited so as to invalidate the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question s &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, don’t answer it (yet)!  &lt;strong&gt;flag it&lt;/strong&gt;, comment, and hold your answer(s) until after it has been improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T03:26:56.557" Title="Please Don't answer and/or upvote “bad” questions (yet)" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-27T01:13:13.583" Score="0" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doesn't the presence of magic immediately void any scientific answer?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Two of the top questions currently are about the &quot;logical&quot; consequences of magic (one asks what a society with &quot;magical&quot; birth control be like, the other asks if cars would exist in a world with flying (ie. magical) dragons) These are both obviously impossible to answer &lt;em&gt;scientifically&lt;/em&gt; (or logically for that matter) and yet there are 7+8 = 15 answers submitted so far. My question is why are these types of questions where magic directly affects the situation being described allowed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38681" OwnerDisplayName="Ali Baba" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T05:35:36.813" Title="Why does this Worldbuilding forum allow so many questions which involve magic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2017-05-27T01:19:36.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be off topic soon enough, but to answer your question, this place is dedicated to world building questions. Meaning that questions that arise during the world building process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all worlds lack magic, and not all worlds possess futuristic technology. Ours has neither of those things. Thus, when looking at the practical effects of such things, questions arise. That is one of the many purposes of this forum - to answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37535" OwnerDisplayName="JustSnilloc" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T01:19:36.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2017-05-27T01:34:47.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Magic doesn't preclude using science. In one of my stories, for example, the magic system affects the fundamental forces, with each magical creature having powers linked to one of those forces. I had to read a bunch of particle physics to figure out exactly which forces each creature affects and what the implications for that are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, even if one aspect of life is magical, other aspects may be subject to the same rules as our society. If we have magical birth control, as described in your complaint, the implications that has for human behavior would be predicted by real-life psychology research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38682" OwnerDisplayName="Ettina" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T01:34:47.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2017-05-27T02:08:00.873" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because Worldbuilding isn't limited to our world, and isn't limited to &lt;em&gt;scientific&lt;/em&gt; answers. Logic, yes, but science, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is designed around works of fiction. Honestly, any fiction will do. Historic, time travel, sci-fi, high fantasy... All are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want to make something akin to Larry Niven's Ringworld? Sure. We can tell you all about ringworlds, both the physics problems involved (And there are a lot of them) and the logistic and other issues. A lot of these things aren't necessarily issues you can answer with hard science, as there are a lot of things well beyond our current technology and knowledge that are required for creating a ringworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want to make a fantasy world powered by crystals? We can help you there, too. We can tell you what might happen if these crystals are broken, or overcharged, or otherwise abused. While it might not directly involve science, science can play at it. If breaking it releases the energy, we can compare it to a hand grenade or other explosive, and tell you exactly what sort of things to expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the science answers involve very little science, and the magic answers involve a lot of science. The goal of Worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to answer things scientifically, it's to answer them &lt;em&gt;logically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34371" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T02:08:00.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2017-05-27T03:41:02.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding helps to build &lt;strong&gt;consistent&lt;/strong&gt; fictional worlds for games and novels. Fantasy with magic is a well established genre in fiction, just like science fiction or alternate history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We generally don't talk about the specific actions of characters, we talk about settings in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We generally don't talk about stories set in the real world as we know it, or about questions that belong to real-world Stackexchange sites (space exploration, astronomy, history, ...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;We generally don't talk about settings that lack internal consistency, because that would be pointless.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T03:41:02.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2017-05-27T05:35:36.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine some question Q that is of the form “I have a magic X and… ”.  One answer is simply “well, it’s &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt;, we don’t know the complete set of rules for your world, so no answer is possible. Make up something.”  while people do post that from time to time, it’s is not a &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; answer (unless it is to make the point that the question doesn’t give sufficient related information).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer might be to work out implications in a manner that would make for a good story. Indeed, this is &lt;em&gt;making stuff up&lt;/em&gt;, but drawing on literary precident and real-world analogies so it makes a plausible, readable and understandable, story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A half dozen people might do that, with different creative approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the OP doesn’t make the mistake of asking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4623/primarily-opinion-based-is-a-reason-to-edit-not-to-close&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; way&lt;/a&gt;, such a parade of creativity is the kind of thing that makes WB entertaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that’s what we have.  What do you &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; that? “Logical”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T05:35:36.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T08:50:18.063" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/82088/29&quot;&gt;Dermott's Law and Major Moons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/82088/4&quot;&gt;revision 4&lt;/a&gt; (edit made by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;diamond moderator JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;) adds &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; to the question. Originally the question was tagged only &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question is pretty clearly based in science, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag places restrictions on the answers that can be given (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;questions that require&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answers based on hard science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag to a question also doesn't really help categorize it; IMO, the original tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moons&lt;/a&gt; categorizes this particular question far better. The question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; moons; it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about science-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the OP expressed consent with such an edit, in which case I feel that should have been mentioned in the edit summary (rather than just the boilerplate &quot;edited tags&quot;) -- no material to that effect appears visible on the site at present -- &lt;strong&gt;should we really be making edits that restrict the type of answers that are acceptable to a question, by adding such tags?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My feeling is no, we shouldn't be making such edits, because they risk changing the intent of the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the community feel?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T11:42:10.543" Title="Should we be adding [science-based] to questions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2017-05-29T09:30:44.877" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;strong&gt;particular question&lt;/strong&gt; and quickly-accepted answer is actually hard-science!  It refers to mathematics and is clearly about help with computations, not just something to do with moons of which there is &lt;em&gt;great variety&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is any ongoing issue with experienced users classifying posts better.  &lt;strong&gt;This question&lt;/strong&gt; is unusual, and asking your meta question using this post as the motivating example might give the wrong idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; science-based:  that tag &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; works that way. Your criticism makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;sarcasm&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Have you read the question?!&lt;/strike&gt;&amp;lt;/sarcasm&gt; &amp;lt;noscarcasm&gt;I don’t understand how you can suggest that this was wrong in this case.&amp;lt;/noscarcasm&gt;  Is there any doubt that it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; fit the implication of the tag you quoted &lt;em&gt;at the very least&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T06:42:39.690" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T06:42:39.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2017-05-29T10:42:32.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that in this questions case it is ok. This is because the question is asking about a specific scientific type formula and clearly requires scientific answers. That said I wouldn't have added &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; as the question doesn't really need knowledge of science but knowledge of Dermott's Law. This leads me to thinking that someone looking for questions involving the science of moons probably wouldn't be looking for this type if question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I would not add tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; as they can restrict the type of answer given. I would recommend leaving a comment to suggest the addition of the tag and wait for consent to do so. If the question is obviously requiring a science based answer the community will give these answers regardless of the tags so their is no desperate rush to get them in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T10:42:32.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T11:17:49.410" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/82113/32097&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I proposed an alternative idea to JDŁugosz's weapon, now it's obviously hated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, why is it such a big deal to propose an alternative idea, outside the question's scope and put it into the answer, along with the answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T17:14:28.713" Title="Proposing an alternative idea to a question, without that being asked" Tags="|discussion|low-quality|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4980" CreationDate="2017-05-29T12:21:11.420" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer is not 'obviously hated'. Sentiments such as dislike or hatred should and have nothing to do with an answer being downvoted&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with your answer is simply that &lt;strong&gt;it is a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're starting it off with some prose that seems to contain bits of information that are a &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt; to pick out of the &lt;em&gt;unnecessary fluff&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You then continue with a &lt;em&gt;bold &amp;amp; unnecessarily big&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;link&lt;/strong&gt; to a topic that could probably address issues in the question or even provide a solution to the problem described in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; instead of then elaborating on the subject matter you link to, you seem to drop that thought entirely in favour of what reads as another paragraph of &lt;em&gt;fluff spiked with bits of information&lt;/em&gt; that again are made hard to interpret and, from my point of view, make it impossible to even try to understand what you might be hinting at&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is then followed by a pseudo-disclaimer that makes anyone reading this feel even more... &lt;em&gt;arsed with&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, &lt;em&gt;at a later point in time&lt;/em&gt;, you seem to have added a half-hearted attempt at actually providing an answer. But the chosen formatting make it feel even more out of place than the rest of the answer's content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why put it in a quote? Is it a quote? If yes, from where? Why is there no source or other text describing where it is taken from or what it is addressing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Summarized&lt;/em&gt;: Your answer is a link to some information, surrounded by distracting fluff. This is not a good answer. It can be argued that it is not even a bad answer, because bad answers usually stem from a lack of effort. The effort you obviously put into the answer is actively distracting from any way this answer could be considered useful, which in turn makes it even worse than a bad answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S.&lt;/em&gt;: I wanted to apologize for any harsh wording. I usually try to do my best to refrain from it whenever I am aware of me using it. But I felt it necessary to bring across the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;At least in a perfect world. There's always the odd one out,&#xA; but normally the community moderation process does a pretty good job in countering such things.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Again, if you're even hinting at anything at all, thus theoretically making your answer more than an unnecessarily elaborate comment or pun.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T12:32:24.317" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T12:32:24.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4989" CreationDate="2017-05-29T16:44:24.670" Score="2" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged two questions for being insulting to a whole people, one regarding Russia, the other one regarding Arabs. Both were declined, stating there was no evidence to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32747/what-would-do-more-to-advance-the-status-of-women&quot;&gt;What would do more to advance the status of women?&lt;/a&gt; The first one was describing &quot;18th century Russia&quot; as &quot;a very backward, 'traditional,' unequal society&quot; with subservient women. In the discussion the person who asked the question stated that adding Russia to specify the &quot;backward society&quot; was not his approach but a community edit. So due to his answer I can understand the rejection of the flag although I would like to see a change making it less offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75727/how-to-create-a-foreign-legion&quot;&gt;How to create a foreign legion?&lt;/a&gt; The second one which isn't at all related to the setting just using it as a arbitrary fun making background is based on a racist movie making fun of Arab societies and is asked from an insulting profile. You will find detailed reason in my comments to that question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment to another (kind of) related Meta question @monicacelio said it is borderline but doesn't violate the rules: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;it's pretty clearly a parody of the negative stereotypes of the Arab&#xA;  world. Now the Arab world has produced people who caused that&#xA;  stereotype, which is why I said 'borderline'. The question doesn't&#xA;  meet the definition of offensive that would warrant its removal; that&#xA;  said, I can see how people could be offended by it, so it would be&#xA;  better if the author could tone it down some. Not because it's&#xA;  violating the rules, but because it's polite to try to reduce&#xA;  unintended strife.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand the first decline I do not understand the second. Especially as these stereotypes are not produced by the Arab people. Even the dictators were not as they are only able to stay in place because of military training, military supplys, weaponry and money provided by states of the European Union and the USA. The Arab Spring showed pretty well that these people did not want the dictators but failed in the end due to the strong (western supported) military.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So in short my question is - where is the border between a hypothetical question and an insult of a people or racism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be glad if you could especially explain what flaggable racism, rudeness or abusiveness means this forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere in Meta that Worldbuilding is considered a worldwide forum. Worldwide includes Russians, Arabs, Indians, Chinese etc. I am aware  of the the problem that the drawing of borders could result in alienating some persons. While I do not want that I would like to point out, that exactly those actions also alienate other people. &lt;strong&gt;So if in any of the two obvious possibillities people are alienated what do we do?&lt;/strong&gt; This is not about good and evil. This is about how we are interacting considering it to be a forum of people from many different backgrounds and cultures, from many different parts of this world and with many different peculiarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please forgive my spelling if there are errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a foundation about what we are talking here I would like to recommend the Wikipedia Article about Anti-Arabism, especially the part about Western Media: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Arabism#Western_media&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Arabism#Western_media&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please note, that Anti-Arabism seems not to be an issue in Russia (I am open to differing sources though). Therefore I am focused on the Western involvement in North African / Middle Eastern politics and economies. Doesn't mean anyone else is not involved there or &quot;we&quot; Western people are the only source - just that we are an important part of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38503" OwnerDisplayName="Olga Maria" LastEditorUserId="38503" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T07:48:59.217" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:48:59.217" Title="Where is the border between a hypothetical question and an insult of peoples or racism?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-29T17:36:45.847" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for bringing your concern to meta.  This is a conversation that should take place with the whole community and in more space than that afforded by flag text or comments.  (That comment you quoted here?  I had 0 characters left.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, two different moderators independently handled your two flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I handled the flag on the &quot;Arab&quot; question, and I was conflicted.  The question is inspired by a movie (which I have not seen) which itself sounds like a nasty parody.  That makes it hard to separate whether &lt;em&gt;the question&lt;/em&gt; is offensive.  I came down on the &quot;no&quot; side, but I thought about it for a while first.  I don't &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; the question (and downvoted), but I couldn't see cause to remove it under our guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What decided it for me is that what the question seems to be parodying is &lt;em&gt;the leader&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;the whole people&lt;/em&gt;.  And while the question is over the top, we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; seen examples, including (but not exclusively) from the Arab world, of military leaders, rigged elections, a false sense of being &quot;beloved&quot; by the people, oppression of those same people, suppression and fear of foreign ideas and people, and tight control over every detail of people's lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does not, to me, read as a slam on the Arab &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;, or even every Arab leader throughout history.  It doesn't even read to me as a slam on a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; person (where we might then consider whether it's a personal attack, which isn't ok); the combination of details doesn't (AFAIK) work for any one country or person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm a white western Jewish woman, so maybe it's there and I can't see it.  I hope the community will provide feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T17:45:22.457" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T17:45:22.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2017-05-29T17:40:06.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the whole? I'd say we shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits to questions should &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239950/274942&quot;&gt;respect authorial intent&lt;/a&gt;, when possible.&lt;/strong&gt; It's the golden rule of editing someone else's work: You may have typed the words or made the changes yourself, but you're doing it on the author's behalf. Yes, there are exceptions, and at the end of the day, posts belong to the community, not just the person who wrote them. But eliminating or discouraging (or allowing!) a large number of possible answers that the OP does not want, without any apparent benefit, should not happen. By adding or removing such a tag - really, if it's a meta tag - someone's doing just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incorrect meta tagging has been discussed time and time again on Worldbuilding meta, and the consensus does seem to be that if the question clearly incorrectly uses a meta tag, it should be removed. However, we haven't talked quite as much about when such tags should be added; I don't think there really is such a consensus. However, if we go back to the golden rule of editing, then it's clear that we really shouldn't be adding the tags if the author doesn't want them. &lt;strong&gt;When it doubt, ask in a comment&lt;/strong&gt;, in case the OP simply wasn't aware of the tag's existence. Dialogue with the author never hurts. If they decide that they do want the tag, encourage them to add the tag themselves. Especially if they're a new user, this is a small step towards increasing literacy in the tagging system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there's an interesting issue. On the one hand, answers to the question almost certainly need to be based in science. Answers that don't are highly likely to be deleted as Not An Answer, because they just wouldn't address the scientific concerns of the question. From a certain perspective you could argue that answerers wouldn't need the tag; it should be very clear what sort of answers the OP is looking for (and, as Michael pointed out, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/627&quot;&gt;science is our default&lt;/a&gt;). On the other hand, one could argue that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag is appropriate for classification, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/31776/274942&quot;&gt;one thing tags are very useful for&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add a third distinct opinion to the two already here and say that in this specific case, asking the OP is probably the way to go. If they don't want the tag to be used, I'd say respect their opinion. If they acquiesce, tag away. But on the whole, I'll advocate a policy of &lt;strong&gt;commenting first, edit later&lt;/strong&gt;. That's the best way to avoid an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/40354/274942&quot;&gt;edit war&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T19:49:28.787" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T19:49:28.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-29T17:58:17.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it this forum is about making fantasy verisimilar. I am sorry that you believe that fantasy must have boundaries; please take into consideration that the questions are not the complete works of art, and you really should not judge a work from an individual detail. For beauty may well arise from the imitation of ugliness: when you ask to set boundaries you implicitly forbid any kind of distopy and of satire, and indeed any complex story, because they must, by their nature, describe that which is ugly, unjust, unfair or undesirable; limiting fantasy to what is beautiful, just, fair and desirable makes for dull (and most likely perishable) stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no border between acceptable fantasy and unacceptable fantasy, for in the dark and unforeseen recesses of such a border is born the division between goodthink and crimethink; we must strive to preserve the freedom of thought. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Gedanken sind frei&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;Thoughts are free, who can guess them?&#xA;They fly by like nocturnal shadows. No man can know them, no hunter can shoot them with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!&quot; (Translation from Wikipedia of the lyrics of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVc0wBLri1A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous anti-totalitarian song&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T18:09:20.253" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T18:09:20.253" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-29T18:14:10.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there should be borders. Perhaps we don't like a particular person's spin on things or their underlying opinions come through and then perhaps we would like to be able to ban them on this principle. However whenever you create a generalised restrictive ban like this there are always others who might want to create a commentary on such a world to make a point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whenever you draw a hard line you cut off some people with valid ideas$^\dagger$&lt;/strong&gt;. You have to ask yourself whether that line is worth drawing. As it is none of us are terribly offended and disagreement can be shown without starting an argument by downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^\dagger$ Not valid ideas about racism but a valid story idea - a commentary on equality by building a world so ridiculously not equal. Sometimes a caricature of an idea or misconception can show us its ridiculousness by the emphasis. I'm not saying that was the case in the ones you pointed out, only that it is a possibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T18:14:10.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-29T19:27:58.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, you have concatenated multiple questions into one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What edits to questions/answers of other users are allowed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your actual question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where is the border between a hypothetical question and an insult?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tangential:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can facts be considered an insult?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When fact stops being fact?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out, &quot;Russia&quot; was added, and it was not part of original phrasing. While Tsarist Russia WAS generally backwards compared to western Europe (feudalism and absolute monarchy were feeling well under Tsars, ideas of Enlightenment had harder time taking ground for various reasons) it actually wasn't in the field of woman rights. Tsarist Russia was European par of the course in this regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I heavily dislike entire concept of editing questions and answers of other people just like that, without necessity of approval of &gt;&gt;original author&amp;lt;&amp;lt;. It doesn't matter how much reputation you have, you are different person and you will have different lines of thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Facts should never be considered insults, if someone is offended by truth, it's his/hers problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in this case situation is different. Calling Tsarist Russia backwards in this context is a manipulation, this claim latches onto fact that Russia was feudal longer than rest of Europe to push false statement. AS such, this edit should have never been made for 2 different reasons - it changes context to something author didn't say, and it's false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your main question, I don't know. It is a fact that phrasing insult as a question is a very effective move, but I'm not sure this is a case on this site. This is mostly a debating move used to win over audience by publicly insulting opponent while keeping ability to deny having insulted anyone. I don't think it applies here because there is no clear &quot;opponent&quot; to be attacked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16614" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T19:27:58.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-29T22:56:37.430" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to post this separately, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My existing answer was about one of the cases brought in the question, while this is a more forward-looking answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And therefore I don't want to confuse the voting, especially because people have already voted on that first answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we want to restrict what real-world history, countries, or peoples questions can be related to.  Questions, however, need to be asked in a constructive way, and the more sensitive the subject is, the more careful you need to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historians, anthropologists, economists, and many others &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; study and analyze events of our world.  Some of those events were (and are) unpleasant or worse to people directly or indirectly affected.  Yet society as a whole has not said that studying or talking about those subjects is off-limits.  Not studying them could even be the greater danger, trading discomfort now for lessons forgotten later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers, game designers, and others sometimes set their works in current, historical, or alternate-timeline realities.  And they need to be able to do research, so that a game or story placed in 19th-century Russia or 12th-century Persia or 1930s Germany or China during the Cultural Revolution feels right.  We should not block off whole parts of Earthly reality merely because there is the potential for people to get upset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how you ask a question is really important.  Historians and other analysts generally take a detached, clinical approach.  While we're a creative bunch and creativity can be fun, asking a question &quot;in persona&quot; when the topic is sensitive can lead to trouble.  I really don't want to see a question about the crusades that starts out &quot;So, I'm Pope Urban II and it's far past time to reclaim the holy land from those (insert insults here)...&quot;, even if you think that's something he would have said.  Feel free to write your &lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt; or your &lt;em&gt;game module&lt;/em&gt; that way, but try to keep in mind that the audience here on Worldbuilding is really broad -- geographically, culturally, politically, and religiously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you should assume that the closer in time an event is to the present day, the more likely it is that somebody reading your question &lt;em&gt;was directly affected by it&lt;/em&gt;.  And even if it was more distant (like, say, slavery in 19th-century America), remember that ripples of major events are felt for generations after.  If you were having dinner with an affected person instead of typing on the Internet, would you talk about the event in the same way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about sensitive matters are welcome.  Try to ask them respectfully and sensitively.  And if the sensitive point is actually tangential to your question (you just picked an example, but you could have picked others instead), then try to be flexible if somebody raises the issue or edits your question.  Questions that are actually about sensitive matters are welcome, but don't use a hot-button topic to sensationalize your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T22:56:37.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2017-05-30T00:57:18.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta post implies an ongoing issue with people adding tags against the wishes of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; is a first-time poster whole-network newbie, who can be assumed to not know the nuances of all our tags; the question already had answers and an accepted answer.  The question was unusual in being more of a straightforward “real answer” like we find on more conventional SE sites, as opposed to the kind of creative showcase we have here typically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific question is properly tagged as science-based, and &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the OP's wishes, actually be hard-science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this action on this question inspire this meta query?  That's just not right, and I found the implication (explained above) to be offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on to the question in general.  There have been cases where tags are changed, changed back, changed again, while ongoing discussion in comments with the poster and others.  Fine. What’s wrong with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that anyone with a silver (or gold) badge in that tag &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; proactively apply or remove it as needed, considering the text of the post and the author’s presumed experience level in knowing the tags.  Change it presumptively; it can always be changed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T10:36:18.023" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T10:36:18.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4980" CreationDate="2017-05-30T07:48:54.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised by how quickly your post, still in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/82113/1&quot;&gt;first version&lt;/a&gt;, was downvoted.  It was also flagged as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;.  This was after a period of low traffic on tne site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would people &lt;em&gt;spend&lt;/em&gt; their own hard-earned rep to downvote if it already shows a −1 and is in the review queue (so a number appears next to the close link)?  My &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; is because of your earlier trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post is disliked because of the in-character answer.  The linked &lt;em&gt;Totally Fake…&lt;/em&gt; in the first sentence?  No, thank-you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond the issue of not matching the somber and literate &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of the venue (you came to a 4-star restaurant dressed as a clown when everyone else is in tuxedos), your meta-question reveals a misunderstanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;propose an alternative idea, outside the question's scope and put it into the answer, along with the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“along with the answer”?  What answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, “you can’t” is not a good or well-received answer.  If there are issues involving (say) the laws of thermodynamics, concervation of momentum, or logical contradictions in the specification, then these should be (and often are) posted as &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don’t give a proper justification but just state it’s not going to work, then you are simply saying that &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; are not creative enough.  And indeed, other answers generally show up, proving that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an explaination is beyond a comment, containing paragraphs, illustrations, and links; is well-researched and informative; it's still hit-or-miss as to whether it will be well-received.  That might be useful to the OP and others who would answer, but don’t try that unless you really know what you’re doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But worse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, you said “isomers gave out excess energy in the form of gamma radiation” which would be the case for naturally decaying samples.  The question is how to &lt;strong&gt;prevent&lt;/strong&gt; this from happening!  So you’re not even saying “you can’t make such a stabilizer”, you are saying that such rounds without a stabilizer are not good, so what does that even have to do with the question?  You completely &lt;em&gt;missed&lt;/em&gt; the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I’m following my own template from the lessons, so the &lt;strong&gt;very first sentence&lt;/strong&gt; is “… &lt;strong&gt;prevents&lt;/strong&gt; excited nuclear isomers from decaying?” So it’s kind of hard to miss, and others did not, and found your proclamation to be a &lt;em&gt;non sequitur&lt;/em&gt; rather than an answer of “you can’t”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T07:48:54.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2017-05-30T11:42:10.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a question it's leaning towards hard-science rather than science-based, but that's a bit restrictive if not wanted by the asker, I have no problem with the science-based tag being added in this case. Any answer that wasn't at least science based would not be an answer so it's more administrative than when asking about, for example, dragons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T11:42:10.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4980" CreationDate="2017-05-30T16:03:49.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bypassing the &quot;why was this specific answer downvoted&quot; as the other two answers to this meta question have that covered and diving into the question part of your question, &quot;is it such a big deal to propose an alternative idea, outside the question's scope[...]?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it's not. In fact, approaching a given question from a slightly different angle has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80301/solid-material-made-from-human-blood/80311#80311&quot;&gt;some of&lt;/a&gt; my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79990/prehistoric-messages-to-the-future/80007#80007&quot;&gt;highest received&lt;/a&gt; answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34279/building-a-bridge-to-the-stars/34307#34307&quot;&gt;across&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hnxgc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entire Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt;. My brain is sometimes really good at taking that step back and seeing a slightly larger picture and coming to a different conclusion (or sometimes the same conclusion, but one built on an entirely different foundation), but it only happens in that more flexible environment that World Building offers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite answer is still the one about building a bridge to the stars. It didn't &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; answer the question--which had asked about &lt;em&gt;raw manterial&lt;/em&gt;--but lead me down a rabbit hole of physics I rather enjoyed having discovered.  But it still addressed an aspect of what the asker wanted to know: &quot;how feasible &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; this?&quot; and as such, had a positive reception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, it's not a problem and sometimes such answers are interesting, might shed light on a question that the asker didn't know they should be asking, but they still need to follow the same direction the question was going.  If it's not, then you need to say it's not.  &quot;No, you can't&quot; is a perfectly valid answer and from there you can suggest an alternative idea that might fill the role the asker's question fills, but you have to be aware that &quot;no, you can't&quot; is not an answer that people are satisfied with (but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41605913/uneven-scene-change-delay-in-unity/43686195#43686195&quot;&gt;sometimes it's the only correct one&lt;/a&gt;).  So if you're going to say no, be aware of--and be prepared for--some negativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, if you misread a question and post an answer that isn't an answer, say &quot;me culpa&quot; and delete it. Move on with your life, you made a mistake. I've deleted more than a handful of my own answers over the years and not once have I felt bitter about it: every time I've learned something new.  I've got one answer I can think of (off the top of my head&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) that has a net-negative score that I won't delete because my answer isn't &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; it just isn't what someone wanted: I suspect it would have cost them too much work refactoring their code and rather than saying so in a comment, they downvoted my answer. They're free to do that, but my answer is still an answer and still correct; don't take it so personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Checking my list of answers I have ten downvoted answers, two of which are even marked as accepted. One of those is a &quot;no, you can't&quot; answer and was downvoted because the answer was no (all the other answers are basically hacks that &quot;might work&quot; but which &quot;aren't supported,&quot; so again my answer &lt;em&gt;isn't wrong,&lt;/em&gt; just disliked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T16:03:49.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4980" CreationDate="2017-05-30T17:04:18.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted the answer and this question because they both demonstrate the same patterns of attention seeking behavior that have been explained to you over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both votes had nothing at all to do with offering​ a different approach as an answer. There's really nothing wrong with offering an alternative approach, provided that the answer still answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My votes had a lot to do with you being repeatedly offered clear, direct comments and advice that you choose to ignore. People have explained their votes to you at great length over and over again. You're making a conscious choice to ignore them and repeat the same mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People lose sympathy when it amounts to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;People keep down voting my jokes!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the answer to your problem remains:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Well... Stop posting jokes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T17:14:28.713" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T17:14:28.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-05-30T18:49:09.017" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;#2&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has nothing to do with who caused what issue, or who is a hypocrite, or how country x would be a paradise if not for those bad y people.  The discussion should be about if the question is offensive, why, and if it is acceptable.  Anything else is too many degrees away, and ultimately useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the Aladeen persona relevant to the question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to ask a question couching it in a specific world is useful, picking a parodic world like Aladeen's keeps it based in a real like world, but in a hypothetical country. Asking from a fictional character itself may avoid issues caused by asking as a real person such as Gaddafi, Hussein, Castro, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something of note, is that Aladeen is the head of a resource dictatorship.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While resource dictatorships have existed in many different locations, many of them have fallen into the areas under Muslim influence.  (The Caliphate expanded Islam to a large area, which just happens to contain a lot of mines and wells).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could contrast this against the various Caribbean dictatorships, but then that would obviously take a Caribbean style. You could take an African Warlord or Dictator, and that would obviously have African influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So having him be the leader of a perceived Middle Eastern country should not be an issue for just portraying such a country.  He does not go out of his way to meander out of character and sticks mostly to topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself is a legitimate governorship question given from a character in the vein of The Glorious Leader or El Presidente.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should Questions from bad people (Persona of questioner not the actual SO user) be banned?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really want to ban questions just because it comes from a distasteful persona. A Ghenghis Khan, Hitler, Napoleon type persona?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question is voiced by Hitler, I do not believe we should ban it.  Unless he is explicitly asking how the best way to fit people into cattle cars to ship off, it shouldn't be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you want to ban something for simply being distasteful?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Controversial should not overly limit creativity.  As an example, murder is viewed as bad by most societies and religions, and glorifying it should not be desired.  Yet, just because a story contains it, should not be the sole criteria for throwing it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking a question of how a Jack the Ripper character may fit into a world should be fine.  Asking questions as Jack the Ripper, should mostly be fine (Something along the lines of how to avoid a pre-industrial police force or something).  Writing a detailed narrative of how he eviscerates and/or rapes his victims is not desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32643" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T18:49:09.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T19:54:35.573" Score="6" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple days ago, MolbOrg created &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/59303/voteopen&quot;&gt;a chat room called VoteOpen&lt;/a&gt;. They intended it as a venue for discussions about whether a question should be reopened or not - which can get long and unwieldy if they take place in comments. The idea is a good one, and certainly not unprecedented: Math Stack Exchange has &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/2165/c-r-u-d-e&quot;&gt;C.R.U.D.E.&lt;/a&gt; (Close, Reopen, Undelete, Delete, Edit), which I believe has worked well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this question is twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to draw a bit of attention to this chat room, to try to drum up more support and activity for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also want to know how people think it can (should?) be expanded. I think it could handle discussions about both reopening and closing questions, rather than just reopening, but others might disagree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think about the usage and scope of the room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:35:42.883" Title="A chat room for reopening (and closing?) questions" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|chat|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T15:06:32.993" Score="8" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask if I can ask about mythological creatures. For example, I wanted to ask about a succubus (What are its physiological details, types, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29264" OwnerDisplayName="swswsws" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T20:50:14.897" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T20:58:27.970" Title="Can I ask about mythological creatures here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4998" CreationDate="2017-05-30T15:17:09.627" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We help people to build &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; worlds for novels, games, etc. A question like &quot;what is a succubus&quot; would be off topic, a question like &quot;here is the succubus for my setting, are there unintended side effects from the game mechanics&quot; would be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" OwnerDisplayName="o.m." LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T15:17:09.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4997" CreationDate="2017-05-30T20:41:54.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is a good idea...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an avid user of the chat rooms, but even I've seen the usual &quot;vtc plz&quot; it seems kinda close to encouraging voting rings, just with close and reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I'm just a little concerned about users getting into close/reopen battles on questions that under the normal run of things wouldn't have drawn that much attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes &quot;bad&quot; questions should be closed and closed quickly, but I'm still in favor of a more organic moderation style. Simply introducing a post in a certain light can tilt people's perception of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less when your first impression of a post is someone telling you that it should be closed you're going to be more inclined to look for a reason to close it, than you might have been if you just came across it while searching for something else or skimming over the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would encourage users to more readily move their close debates to Meta, rather than chat.&lt;/strong&gt; Meta offers a much more searchable and usable record and allows users to vote on the arguments one way or the other. Over time these debates get hammered out enough that firmer site policies get developed. And eventually (hopefully) you get to a point where some arguments are settled and don't need to be rehashed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T20:41:54.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4998" CreationDate="2017-05-30T20:58:27.970" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that this is on Meta, I feel ok answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Absolutely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've got a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=anatomically+correct&quot;&gt;whole bunch&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;anatomically correct...&quot; questions, along with several questions that branch off into related topics once that question gets answered. Not to mention a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55996/anatomically-correct-pegasus&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Pegasus&lt;/a&gt; (asked just the other day)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81664/would-swimming-dragons-need-wings&quot;&gt;Would swimming dragons need wings?&lt;/a&gt; (about a week old)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80855/what-would-a-mermaid-s-taste-buds-be-like&quot;&gt;What would a Mermaid’s taste buds be like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35095/if-mountain-lions-were-griffins-how-would-it-affect-other-animals?s=4|0.4697&quot;&gt;If mountain lions were Griffins, how would it affect other animals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81901/does-a-world-with-domestic-flying-creatures-eg-dragons-needs-cars-planes-and?s=1|0.5911&quot;&gt;Does a world with domestic flying creatures (eg: dragons) needs cars, planes and ships?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look-see to see what's already been asked and if you have a new question, just make sure it falls within what's considered &quot;on topic&quot; and avoid being too broad. Old questions will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T20:58:27.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5114" CreationDate="2017-05-30T21:36:06.920" Score="6" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there's any data/statistics on the percentage of close votes that age away vs end in closure vs end with the question being reopened here on Worldbuilding. Perhaps even some breakdown of questions closed by close reason would be useful? Maybe even a breakdown by tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we discuss site policies it would be nice to have hard numbers to look at on occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:26:10.607" Title="Is there hard data on close votes?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2017-05-30T22:39:53.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if votes that age away are tracked anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with 10k rep can see some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;close/reopen statistics&lt;/a&gt; for the last 90 days.  For each close reason, it includes the number closed, the number of those that were reopened, the number edited, and the number edited and reopened, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pvLRx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pvLRx.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of close/reopen stats&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't have time to figure out how to make that into a nice table.  Anybody who does, feel free to edit!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Too broad&quot; is by far our biggest closure reason, at 34% of closures.  This also seems like the one where edits would help a lot, and, in fact, more than a third of them got edited.  But only a small fraction got reopened.  Is that because people aren't noticing and voting to reopen, or because the edits aren't enough?  (&quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; is the next-most-common reason and has a similar pattern.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest a deeper review of &quot;too broad&quot;.  What can we do to help those questions get fixed and reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T22:39:53.777" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2590" CreationDate="2017-05-31T00:08:16.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How to publish submissions (for blog editors and Worldbuilding moderators)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We have several people with edit privileges on the blog.  These are my notes to make it easier for others to publish stuff, because maybe someday I'll want to take a vacation or something. :-) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On Medium&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to the list of submissions (&amp;quot;stories&amp;quot; on the blog menu) and click on the one you want to publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read through the post, fixing any typos or formatting problems you see.  We take a light hand with edits, but typos and grammar-os happen to everybody sometimes.  Don't impose your voice on the author, of course, like Americanizing British spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click &amp;quot;publish&amp;quot; at the top.  Look at the tags and make any adjustments that seem appropriate.  Click the button to publish.  The page should refresh with the Universe Factory header (and the URL should be rewritten).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to the blog front page (you might need to force a refresh; blame caching) and make sure it looks ok (text is visible on the background graphic, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go back to the post so you'll have the title, author, and URL handy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4037&quot;&gt;blog announcement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, start an edit, grab the markdown for the newest post (title + link, and author), and then cancel the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to add the post you just grabbed.  New posts go at the top.  The month headings are the month it was posted, which might not be the current month if you're doing this early in the month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove the older post (&amp;quot;previous post&amp;quot;) and label the current one (the one you just added to the answer) as the previous post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the newest post, following the format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick out something from the post to entice people to read it -- usually the first paragraph or two, but sometimes something a little farther down works better.  Or if it doesn't lend itself well to that, write a teaser.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is a new contributor's first post, highlight that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the title of the question to reflect the newest and now-previous posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check the list of upcoming posts at the bottom; if this newest one was on that list, remove it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For a moderator&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part requires a Worldbuilding moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the mod tools, go to &amp;quot;community events&amp;quot;.  Assuming there is a live event for the previous blog post, edit it.  Replace the URL with the URL for the answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4038&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4038&lt;/a&gt;.  Save the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the same page, create a new event, called &amp;quot;New blog post: (title)&amp;quot;.  For the URL, use the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; URL.  Set the start date to approximately now and the end date for about a week later.  (Also set the number of preview days to 0.)  Save the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Check the site main page to make sure it shows up.  (It might take a couple minutes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In case you're wondering, the URL dance is because of a bug that doesn't allow two events to point to the same URL.  So we use the answer for the older and the question for the newer.  If traffic increases to the point that we're publishing three posts a week, shorten the event durations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T01:15:10.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T08:01:02.373" Score="12" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/82232/27708&quot;&gt;Could a joke be funny enough to kill?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually liked this question.  We don't see much describing its placement in its world, but it was my understanding that most people here didn't need for such information to be presented up–front.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does it seem like the asker is fishing for people to do the work of story–writing for them?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe.  As it is now, methinks that would be obvious only with the finished product.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the plot device is just a throwaway to contrive some tension, then yes.  Perhaps the author has several clever ideas and a clear progression of character, whether a lethal joke is possible or however it could actually work, but they simply want to know if the core premise is plausible prior to proceeding.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe they know social psychology well but not physiology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T18:51:41.473" Title="How was the question on a lethal joke off-topic when most [weapons] are on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|on-hold|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5005" CreationDate="2017-06-01T18:51:41.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been re-opened.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Seems that there is little need for further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T18:51:41.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5011" CreationDate="2017-06-02T13:49:55.743" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to make discussion questions in WorldBuilding.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I have a question where I need a suggestion or a discussion, is there a place to post it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great if we could have a place to argue about WorldBuilding, or a place to ask for suggestions or ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35041" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T13:51:05.683" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T13:51:05.683" Title="Is it possible to make discussion questions on WorldBuilding.SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5010" CreationDate="2017-06-02T14:04:52.163" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already such a place, and we call it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange offers a whole chat solution hosted under: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T14:04:52.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T15:32:04.323" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82509/what-land-animal-a-large-pack-of-trained-war-dogs-cant-kill&quot;&gt;What land animal a large pack of trained war dogs can&amp;#39;t kill?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems like a classic &quot;List of X&quot; problem, but it's scoped so strangely that the list could go on forever, or contain nothing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be asking for a list of animals, past and present, that could survive being attacked by a pack of war dogs. Which to my mind seems like an incredibly long list...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it goes on to say that &quot;Pack size is anything greater than 5 dogs.&quot; Which opens up an infinity problem... You could literally smother an entire world with near infinite dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond the obvious scope problem, this really feels more like a worldbuilding puzzle/golf problem than a legitimate question. I could be overthinking that bit, just a feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this question really on topic? Seems like &quot;too broad&quot; might fit, but I didn't want to shoehorn it without some discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T20:52:01.790" Title="Is &quot;What land animal a large pack of trained war dogs can't kill?&quot; a good fit for the site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|close-reasons|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5012" CreationDate="2017-06-02T19:54:31.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that there are many questions of a similar ilk which, as phrased/stated, are simply Big List questions. That's the very definition of Too Broad, one of our main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10583/274942&quot;&gt;reasons to close a question&lt;/a&gt;. It's a problem we skirt, if not attack head on, with many questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. This one, though is sort of egregious. At the moment, I would recommend closure because there really are a lot of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think there's a solution to the issue. I've seen other seemingly Big List questions salvaged by asking for something more general. For instance, this question could be remodeled by asking about what characteristics an animal would need to successfully fend off the war dogs almost all of the time. This should narrow things down quite a lot, I'd hope. It's certainly worth a try. Obviously, this would invalidate the existing answers, which is frowned upon. Therefore, I'd recommend closing this question and asking another one, rephrased as I suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, the question does have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag on it, and so far, all 8 answers (counting the two that were deleted by their authors) have failed to meet its requirements. Some folks flagged the question and some answers, and so I've added the relevant post notice as per my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4020/627&quot;&gt;Flowchart Thingy o' Objective Fairness&lt;/a&gt;, which is basically my standard for deciding whether or not an answer deserves the notice, in accordance with our established site policy. The overall failure to address the tag may be another worthwhile point of discussion here, but I don't think it should factor into whether the question should be closed or left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T20:52:01.790" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T20:52:01.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-03T09:05:16.260" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82574/how-would-a-girl-that-has-never-encountered-the-concept-of-pregnancy-react-to-gi&quot;&gt;How would a girl that has never encountered the concept of pregnancy react to giving birth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems appropriately scoped and reasonably on-topic as far as worldbuilding goes, but it appears to be gathering closevotes for being off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly the question could use some perspective, but is it really off-topic or is this a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4927/flags-and-close-votes-are-not-super-downvotes&quot;&gt;super down vote issue&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T03:20:50.730" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:03:50.717" Title="How would a girl that has never encountered the concept of pregnancy react to giving birth? This one seems on topic, but unpopular for obvious reasons" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5018" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:13:59.480" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question shows over 2K views, but it was asked only 20hrs ago:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82740/how-to-control-alcohol-consumption-in-my-country&quot;&gt;How to control alcohol consumption in my country?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting it isn't a worthy question or anything sinister, but compared to other new questions that are in the tens or low hundreds, 2K in the same timeframe seems remarkable, orders of magnitude higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T19:19:52.153" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:17:47.847" Title="How did a question get 2K views in under 20hrs?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:17:08.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is currently in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions list&lt;/a&gt; (HNQ). Each question asked on Stack Exchange has a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/274942&quot;&gt;&quot;arbitrary hotness points&quot;&lt;/a&gt; at any given time that depends on the number of votes and answers (and votes on those answers). The ones with the largest numbers of hotness points are on the list for as long as they remain &quot;hot&quot;, and are displayed on the sidebar on all Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding tends to get a lot of these questions, because they're often clickbait without meaning to be clickbait. Plus, they often attract loads of answers, which in turn means higher hotness scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HNQ is controversial, in part because it often showcases questions that aren't representative of the best content of the site they're asked on. However, they also garner activity and visitors to the site, which is especially nice for smaller sites. At the end of the day, the HNQ has benefits and detractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T16:17:47.847" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:17:47.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:30:10.627" Score="-8" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to request the admins to show the identity of close voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason number 1: If you are so sure about your judgement at least show up your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason number 2: Blocking does not exist here, so you won't block users that close questions for good reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason number 3: Close voting sometimes is wrong. Let's face it: We are humans with virtues and flaws. Noone is perfect and I'm sure you know sometimes close voting is wrong for many reasons. It happened before I joined this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason number 4 : Some people seem to rush for medals,And they dont care if the question fits or not the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proof: Here is my question. Someone close voted here without a clear reason and in WorldBuilding you can ask about things smaller than a town and bigger than a planet. Well that's everything and I ask this because I think we need this change to save creativity and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82808/the-dirty-mercenary-army-how-strong-could-be&quot;&gt;How strong could a dirty mercenary army be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="31928" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T05:41:47.013" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T05:41:47.013" Title="Request : Public close voting" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:52:01.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would you do with this information if you had it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question garners enough votes to be put on hold, the identities of the voters are shown.  If it doesn't, why do you care?  It didn't work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close voters who wish to identify themselves can do so.  Many do, via comments, but they aren't obligated to.  If you want to talk about the status of a question (closed, open, getting close/reopen votes that you disagree with...), you can do so on meta.  You don't need to directly contact the voters to reverse something you disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T19:52:01.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:55:17.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your request first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way for the 'admins' (further called &lt;em&gt;Moderators&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Mods&lt;/em&gt;) to tell you who close-votes something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there were it would be morally wrong to do so by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's address your reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reason number 1&lt;/em&gt;: In order to cast close-votes a person first needs to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;earn 3000 rep&lt;/a&gt; - while it is possible to reach this number by sheer tenacity and just spamming bad questions, most people that have enough rep for close-votes have proven to show fair and valid judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if a question gets &lt;em&gt;put-on-hold&lt;/em&gt; (not even closed yet, see that?!), the reason it was put on hold for, as well as the users that voted to put it on hold, are listed in the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reason number 2&lt;/em&gt;: No you cannot block users from answering your questions. But the system can block users from doing so based on certain metrics. We recently had a user that was prevented from posting any new questions for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can though block users on the chat, if you don't want to see/talk to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that is not enough, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9808/how-do-i-figure-out-whos-been-banished-to-the-penalty-box-recently&quot;&gt;mods have &amp;amp; use the ability to give users absolute timeouts if their behaviour necessitates such&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system behind this site is structured to allow everyone to contribute; blocking out certain people based on the mood of a single person would be counter-intuitive to the Q&amp;amp;A format on here as well. Would you prevent people from finding your questions, thus creating duplicates and getting them closed for no reason they can see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reason number 3&lt;/em&gt;: Close-voting something &lt;strong&gt;is not wrong&lt;/strong&gt; it is part of the system these sites are built on. Close-voting for no apparent reason can be considered bad behaviour at most, but even then it takes 5 votes to put a question on hold, and then it can be reopened pretty quickly if anyone deems this unfair/unbased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your &lt;em&gt;proof&lt;/em&gt;: The reason given for the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; close-vote on your question states that the voter thinks your question &lt;em&gt;too story based&lt;/em&gt;. This is perfectly valid judgement for them, thus they voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through it I assume them to judge so based on the fact that you write that &lt;em&gt;your king wants them to smell really bad&lt;/em&gt; (paraphrased) and the fact that you're hand-waving their super-immune-systems so you can justify your &lt;em&gt;pestilence-squad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T20:03:04.507" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T20:03:04.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5014" CreationDate="2017-06-05T23:36:07.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in the question, I suspect that this question was closed more because people disliked the premise and/or subject matter... More or less a case of &quot;I dislike this so much I'll downvote and vote to close&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it was pretty easy for them to justify closing it as too story based, due to the original wording. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly my thought was that the premise was fabricated​ just to ask a question about maternal instincts... The whole &quot;baby females&quot; thing seemed underdeveloped. How did they survive to maturity without observing some basic things about procreation in the natural world around them? But that seemed more or less immaterial to the question, just a reason that these women didn't know anything about pregnancy or birth etc. But that's a pretty huge handwave, and many users were probably skeptical about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that I suspect that some users were probably unsettled about the subject matter. Anytime you're talking about sex, gender and/or procreation some people are going to get a little more sensitive. I'm sure that it wasn't your intention to stir those sensitivities, but it's good to be aware of how people may be reading into your motives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say things like:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;What might this uninformed female think of that weird stuff that just crept out of her&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sets a certain tone... It gives people who are already feeling a little suspicious about your personal motives for asking about a charged subject more of a reason to feel suspicious. Your question and your story touch on some hot button issues. I'm certainly not trying to tell you not to talk about hot button issues, just be aware of how you do it and be aware of how people may react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T23:36:07.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T07:17:31.933" Score="11" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Worldbuilding was freshly minted, an occasional newcomer asked a question, received an answer, and immediately &lt;em&gt;Accepted&lt;/em&gt; that first answer, minutes after asking.  This drew &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; patient comments explaining some reasons why we don’t do that around here.  After a few occurrences, it would draw &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; lengthy comment but others would not add to it.  As time marched on we left ever shorter comments, and now it’s down to a terse “please don’t” as &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; are tired of explaining it.  That's unfair to each newcomer who has not heard it before, and all the good explanation are in &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; which will never be found again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I’d like to make this meta-post a place to post these good well-written reasons, one last time.  Then, we all can include this URL next time along with “please don’t”.  In fact, here is boilerplate to paste for such a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding, if nobody did that already!  While every Stack Exchange site has its own distinct differences, Worldbuilding is “more different” in some ways.  In particular, you ought not Accept an answer before waiting at least 24 hours.  A full explanation can be found on [this meta post](&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5023%5C&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5023\&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having it tagged here under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/help-center&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;help-center&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt; should also make it more discoverable where newcomers will read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/lets-be-careful-about-accepting-answers-early&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s be careful about accepting answers early&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4935/make-accepting-an-answer-within-24-hours-a-privilege&quot;&gt;Make &amp;quot;accepting an answer within 24 hours&amp;quot; a privilege&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2021-10-25T18:26:17.587" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T18:26:17.587" Title="Please wait at least 24 hours before Accepting an answer" Tags="|discussion|help-center|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5023" CreationDate="2017-06-06T07:40:05.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While every Stack Exchange site has its own distinct differences, Worldbuilding is “more different” in some ways.  Rather than being an answer to a &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; for some task you are trying to accomplish, here we often have a showcase of &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; creative answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a real-life need like a programming or software usage issue, once you have an answer that &lt;em&gt;works&lt;/em&gt; you move past it.  Accepting shows that you don’t have the need anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it's more like soliciting stories for a magazine.  The variety of different Answer posts will be &lt;strong&gt;entertaining to read&lt;/strong&gt; by all present.  The presentations are art-forms in themselves, not just utilitarian answers about something blocking you at work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So first of all, wait for everyone to see it and offer their ideas.  This will not only need some hours for people to get around to it, and significant time to think about and write answers, but people are in different time zones all around the globe.  This is why 24 hours is a minimum rule of thumb: let everyone in different parts of the world see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, people read the Answers, and criticise &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;.  Answers that are good still go through rounds of discussion and revision.  An initial quick answer will be expanded, clarified  and have links added.  Different answers will circularly feed back to each one’s author.  Just look at the body of work here and you’ll see that posts are &lt;em&gt;edited&lt;/em&gt;, often many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's for Answers that are good!  I’ve seen a case where the new user instantly accepted the first Answer, only to have that Answer be sharply criticised and repudiated.  So you might not know if an Answer is good before it’s been reviewed by others!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reason to suppose that the first posted Answer will be the “best”, by any measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T12:19:58.777" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T12:19:58.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T15:06:05.320" Score="14" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have noticed a lot of questions which always receive pretty much the same comment. The questions usually take the form &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What material/technology could deal with [x problem/feature] of this [magic/future technology] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will then quite often quickly receive a comment saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You used magic in the question so just say the answer is magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear the questions are usually perfectly good questions with well enough defined magic systems that they can (and often are) be answered very easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be  the first comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/82632/17720&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which was posted by an experienced user on a new user's question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The intention might have been good but are these types of question helpful or harmful to the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would say harmful because they are potentially discouraging to new users and make us look like a site that can't be bothered to come up with proper answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T17:35:54.380" Title="Are comments saying &quot;just use magic&quot; problematic?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-06-06T15:18:42.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there isn't a proper answer. If I'm asking about my magically fast (no strict speed limit) super heroes, I'm already supposing a very high level of $\{\text{magic, handwaving, superscience, suspension of disbelief, ...}\}$ in my setting. Any explanation more than &quot;We worked out the bugs during development&quot; is so divorced from how physics actually works to be indistinguishable from magic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally when people are saying &quot;Just use magic&quot; they are saying &quot;it is detrimental to the believably of your world to attempt to shoehorn in an explanation of this phenomena&quot;. Saying this as a comment is a way to suggest that this is a question that while acceptable for worldbuilding, and not worthy of downvotes, is still wrongly asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T15:18:42.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-06-06T16:13:17.237" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should not assume that a question that allows magic allows &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; magic and that problems can just be hand-waved away.  The author of that question wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for your input. However, the universe I'm building is contemporary by nature, and this super-speed is one of the very few fantastic elements. I don't think that introducing a paranormal element is an excuse to throw all realistic concerns and only use &quot;super-&quot;something to face any problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is commendable.  I'd like to see &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of this &quot;only as much magic as I need&quot; approach, not less.  As with any other type of question, if the answer is &quot;within the constraints you've set in your question, you can't do that&quot; -- then put that in an answer (with an explanation/support).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over on The Workplace we have a problem with comments and answers that say &quot;just quit your job&quot;.  &quot;Just hand-wave your magic&quot; feels like the Worldbuilding equivalent of that.  Yes, sometimes you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to quit your job or handwave your magic, but that's for the asker to decide.  We should accept the parameters of the question and go from there.  It's ok to comment saying that that might be really hard -- your magic system or physics or biology or aerodynamics or whatever is inconsistent with that -- especially if you can do it early when the question can be edited to adjust.  But once the OP has made it clear what his goal is, we shouldn't be telling him to get a different goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:13:17.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-06-06T16:23:21.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to remember that &lt;strong&gt;these are comments, not answers.&lt;/strong&gt; If someone was answering with &quot;just use magic&quot; that could be a problem. However, as comments they open a dialogue with the OP. It's possible the OP didn't think about just using more magic, or that they want a &quot;use magic&quot; answer but such questions/answers are usually discouraged because out how open-ended they are. I think in an ideal setting, these comments would give the OP an opportunity to improve their question, so they can get better answers that more closely apply to their world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:23:21.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-06-06T17:07:46.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By example, last two times I posted a comment like that it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81722/sword-in-the-rock-make-it-last-the-ages#comment238716_81722&quot;&gt;Why &quot;with a magic spell&quot; wouldn't be an answer? And how isn't this story based?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is seemingly all-powerful wizard who can do almost anything, and no constrains for his magic in the question. He can put a lot of spells that will last for ages. And so on. This comment was what it was - request for clarifications, constrains etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82147/pre-industrial-carnivorous-medicine#comment240390_82147&quot;&gt;Idea that any plant could make them fatally ill is medically impossible, so tagging this with medicine makes very little sense to me. You already have food magic in this world, you can just add more of this magic to make healing mice, or something.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has magical (aka scientifically impossible) premise, but it does not acknowledge the fact. My comment was meant to point that out and to show that, if premise will stay unchanged, there is no need or possibility for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  believe that comments are there to point out flaws in the question and request clarifications. And that's what I'm trying to do when I'm commenting that it seems that magic would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T17:07:46.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-06-06T17:35:54.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the OP, they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; problematic because they are ambiguous. They may be the correct and obvious answer, that a magical explanation won't harm the story, but they may also be snark. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could mean &quot;the magic you have described already contains the solution.&quot;, in which case more detail is warranted than just the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or they might mean &quot;I've already dropped all suspension of disbelief just reading your setup -- this mess can't get any worse!&quot;, In which case the commenter should have refrained altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T17:35:54.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5032" CreationDate="2017-06-07T12:39:48.937" Score="6" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday and today I saw, in the review queue, flags for rather old questions: yesterday the question was posted 5 months ago, today the question was posted 2 years and 7 months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no point in closing or putting on hold such old questions. I mean, the fact that in 2 years nobody had objection to that question makes me suspect it is just some sort of &quot;badge rush&quot;. Or is there something I am missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T20:19:08.300" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T23:40:39.313" Title="What's the point of flagging/putting on hold years old questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|vote-to-close|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5031" CreationDate="2017-06-07T13:19:39.303" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our definition of what is an acceptable answer or question has evolved over time. We should strive for consistency across the site. We often suggest to new users to take a look around the site to see what makes a good question. If we don't close questions that no longer meet community standards, there will be a lot of hidden gotchas for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly we wouldn't want new answers to old questions that are no longer considered appropriate. The 10 rep protection should help with that a bit but that is an incredibly low barrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't go out of our way to search for problematic old questions, but when they become active, or become referenced in a policy discussion, they should be closed to prevent confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-09-16T23:40:39.313" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T23:40:39.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5031" CreationDate="2017-06-07T16:39:08.357" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow this was actually a pretty big deal. Very early on, while the Stack Exchange model was still developing, things were pretty wide open. The community was smaller and the occasional joke or mildly off topic question was tolerated because while the site was small the problem was small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the site grew...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was once the occasional errant post became a daily annoyance, so things changed incrementally to prevent some of the flood of annoying nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later down the line, there was a flood of noise on Meta.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Why can't I post X, high rep user Y posted it and got 100 upvotes, this is obviously discrimination against new users!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this was also annoying. The old, highly upvoted question didn't fit the current site standards, and it didn't have anything to do with the rep of the user posting it, but there was also the perception problem to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the Historical Lock was developed to handle some of these questions. While some were just flatly closed and or deleted, the questions that the community was particularly attached to could be preserved with a disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;locked by Moderator♦ Mar 16 at 20:01&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question exists because it has&#xA;historical significance, but &lt;strong&gt;it is not considered a good, on-topic&#xA;question for this site&lt;/strong&gt;, so please do not use it as evidence that you&#xA;can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are&#xA;frozen and cannot be changed. More info: FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a normal developmental​ stage for a Stack Exchange site. As we develop what is and isn't a good fit we'll occasionally need to go back and close or lock some of our earlier posts. But don't worry, it's a good thing in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info see:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194116/should-i-vote-to-close-old-questions&quot;&gt;Should I vote to close old questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T16:39:08.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5014" CreationDate="2017-06-07T19:48:44.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was previously about motherhood psychology, however some people got stuck in trying to make it sexual, somehow, and in the premises. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, the question as it was posed was badly formulated, and could've done better just by asking the thing I wanted to know right away. My fault for not properly assessing the level of abstraction users expect to read in these forums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, the answer to your question, as I see it, is that after having researched quite a bit trying to discover what had closed my question down is that it was not entirely obvious to the other members of the community what the question was about, and the question they tried to substitute to answer, another psychological concept called &quot;attribute substitution&quot;, when striving to know wheter they should focus on the premise or the actual question was &quot;can I imagine what people I know would do in that situation?&quot;, for which the answer is obviously &quot;no&quot;, because they can't PERSONALLY relate to that, instead of &quot;Is there a scientific or psychological concept or experiment I know of that would explain behaviour in a state not found in a classical situation that would help analyse this case?&quot;, which is a question that is a lot harder to answer. Then, as the answer was obviously &quot;no&quot;, to the question they ended up unadvertedly answering, the question seemed stupid and the whole thing seemed out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38955" LastEditorUserId="38955" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T21:00:21.793" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T21:00:21.793" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T20:37:32.593" Score="8" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8/must-magic-be-tied-to-medieval-tech/83002#83002&quot;&gt;Must magic be tied to medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt; back on day 1 or 2, when site scope had only loosely started to form out of the primordial glop.  A new answer bumped it again today, prompting me to take another look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I try to avoid writing questions that are too opinion-based or too broad, let alone ones based on faulty premises, I don't always succeed.  (The diamond does not come with that particular superpower. :-) )  The question has been bumped several times over the years but has only ever attracted one close vote, which aged away after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/close/15284&quot;&gt;three reviewers voted 'leave open'&lt;/a&gt; in early 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are y'all shy with close votes because a moderator asked the question?  (Don't be.)  Or is the question ok?  I've found the answers to be valuable, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should stay open and I don't know how objective I can be with my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T21:45:26.367" Title="Should we close &quot;must magic be tied to medieval tech?&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5036" CreationDate="2017-06-07T21:13:09.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is subjective, but I think it falls on the right side of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;good subjective, bad subjective&lt;/a&gt; as demonstrated​ by the answers you received. It may be somewhat opinion based, but not too opinion based to be succinctly answered and the answers look as though they've been useful to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say leave it, but thanks for the reminder that the diamond doesn't make moderators infallible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T21:13:09.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5036" CreationDate="2017-06-07T21:45:26.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duplicate - impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;off-topic - definitely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unclear what you're asking - seems clear to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;too broad - you're asking a single question, and you've essentially provided the two possible answers. An answer to the question would choose one of those answers and provide evidence, which seems pretty clear-cut to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;primarily opinion-based - &quot;answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise&quot; does not seem to apply here. People &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer with opinions, but those would not be good answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, this seems to me like the kind of question we should have more of. We've turned into much more of a &quot;what-if&quot; site recently, so I can see why you might think this question is close-worthy, but I much prefer questions about the fundamental concepts of worldbuilding. In this specific case as in others, it's possible that a lot of opinion-based answers will be given (which is why the question was protected), but I don't think that's the fault of the question itself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T21:45:26.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5041" CreationDate="2017-06-08T03:12:00.073" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry guys, but why is there no block or user ignore on this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two nights in a row now a guy is posting sex fantasies as questions. If that is what you want on worldbuilding I don't care, but why can't I block these users? or at least have the option to set their sex posts to ignore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have this feature? In most web communities I can visit a user's profile and flag him to ignore when I'm logged in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastEditorUserId="32686" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T11:09:07.920" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T13:55:10.970" Title="How can I Ignore/Block a user?" Tags="|support|feature-request|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-06-10T16:45:09.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5039" CreationDate="2017-06-08T04:26:06.663" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the exception of chat, Stack Exchange doesn't support the ability to block users. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/add-the-ability-to-ignore-users&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the relevant meta.stackexchange discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3360/ignore-users-script&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a meta.stackexchange discussion about using a greasmonkey script to create a personal block list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel a question is inappropriate please flag it for moderator attention.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you feel a user is behaving inappropriately please contact a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T04:36:39.703" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T04:36:39.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5039" CreationDate="2017-06-08T04:53:14.980" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and added a NSFW tag...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like both you and the OP in question wanted it, so there it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would strongly advise people against adding it to other people's questions though... It seems reasonable for someone to judge their own question as being &quot;not safe for work&quot; but less reasonable for someone else to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To ignore a tag, do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the tag’s tooltip, click on the star twice (or once, if you have&#xA;  favoured that tag). On the main page’s sidebar, click on edit next to&#xA;  Favorite Tags. On /users/preferences, use the respective field in the&#xA;  Tags section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19173/what-do-favorite-tags-and-ignored-tags-do&quot;&gt;What do &amp;quot;favorite tags&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ignored tags&amp;quot; do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After further investigation I'm thinking that &quot;NSFW&quot; is probably a bad idea. It's a Meta tag and not a great one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's better to read the title of a question? In this specific case it was pretty obviously not something you wanted to read more about. You clicked anyway and then engaged with the op in what turned into a mess. I'm not saying that the question was good, by any stretch, but you kind of knew that you were going to have a problem before you opened it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, just downvote, flag, and/or vote to close and walk away. If you flat don't want to see it, don't click on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's drop it and have waffles or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="7351" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T05:54:59.523" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T05:54:59.523" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T09:07:54.203" Score="7" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83033/how-to-figure-out-someone-is-plagiarizing-the-future&quot;&gt;How to figure out someone is plagiarizing the future?&lt;/a&gt; is not about &lt;em&gt;building something&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;shaking out the rules&lt;/em&gt;, or even &lt;em&gt;exploring the consequences&lt;/em&gt;.  It’s about &lt;strong&gt;plot&lt;/strong&gt; and there is no way around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet this question seems to be well received by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it off topic?  If not, can we explain why, within the exising rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T09:45:22.700" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T12:50:49.643" Title="Review of “story based” policy" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2017-06-08T11:40:04.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we will allow plot-based questions, this site will become &quot;ask anything&quot; - because anything can be made into a plot with ease. That's why I say no, we really shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only plot-based questions that are on-topic are ones where plot is world-changing one. Superhero able to control whole population of a planet? Borderline on topic. Plot to spread disease that'll kill or change most of the population? On topic again. But question you linked has no signs of the events to be wold-changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;of course, even world-changing plot-based questions should, if possible, be rephrased to ask the same thing in a less plot-based way and still ask about the same thing. For example &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mad scientist released deadly virus, how will we defend against it?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; should be changed to &lt;em&gt;&quot;What are feasible ways for humanity to defend against deadly virus outbreak?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;What properties should a virus have to still be pandemic, even with modern precautions and procedures?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. My preferred course of action would be to put on hold until edited but I can see why it isn't so bad to leave them open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T12:14:55.650" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T12:14:55.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2017-06-08T12:53:41.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike some other possible examples, this question is very specifically about a plot point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am looking for a way to see through the scheme enough to at least make contact with mr. X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While people get carried away trying to solve these plot related problems, this is undoubtedly not world building and should be closed as plot based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T12:53:41.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5039" CreationDate="2017-06-09T13:55:10.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to the OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5039/how-can-i-ignore-block-a-user/5048#comment14286_5039&quot;&gt;clarification&lt;/a&gt; that this is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a request for an Ignore/Block User feature that most web communities have. It is absolutely a feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I disagree.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is supposed to be about the content, not about the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as a question is appropriately titled, it should be easy to tell from the title whether it's something you might want to read. If a question is not appropriately titled (as in, the title accurately and succintly summarizes the question), then that's a whole separate problem and one that can often be quite easily fixed by (you or someone else) proposing an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with tags; if I come across a question that I feel is inappropriately tagged based on its content, I will happily go in and re-tag it, sometimes dramatically, such that the tags match the actual content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags plus title, and sometimes the initial few sentences as seen by hovering over the question title or on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;newest questions&lt;/a&gt; page, should in the ideal case be sufficient to give you an idea of what the question is about; at least sufficiently so to know whether you want to read more of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already a feature to mark tags as &quot;ignored&quot;, though it's somewhat hidden under the &quot;favorite tags&quot; feature. This can be adjusted on a per-site basis under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;your account preferences&lt;/a&gt;. Doing so visually tones down questions with that tag, but they are still visible and readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T13:55:10.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4997" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:35:42.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on Stack Overflow we have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/41570/so-close-vote-reviewers&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Close Vote Reviewers&lt;/a&gt; (we do reopens and deletions as well). Of course, the moderation load is much larger over there (our Close Vote queue hovers around the 10k mark most of the time and was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252586/regarding-the-stack-overflow-close-review-queue&quot;&gt;once about 100k&lt;/a&gt;). We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://socvr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website with tools, rules, etc&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. asking for up/down votes is strictly forbidden)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still organic. You still have to convince people to vote. But what it does it it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251955/so-close-vote-reviewers&quot;&gt;raises awareness of closable questions&lt;/a&gt; and often gets them closed in a far more timely manner. You could even hit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11540/charcoal-hq&quot;&gt;Charcoal people&lt;/a&gt; up and get Smoke Detector to post notices to the room when it detects spam or bad questions on WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found Meta a poor choice for closure debates. If you're not familiar with it, there's something called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/269349/what-is-the-meta-effect&quot;&gt;Meta Effect&lt;/a&gt;, where Meta acts like a giant focusing lens on the sun, burning things down. With the new &quot;Hot Meta&quot; bar amplifying it further (on smaller SE sites, Meta tends to get little traffic otherwise), you've now turned a simple closure discussion into a potential drama. Worse is you'll get people who sail in and just act. Post about a thread and suddenly it's been downvoted and deleted before anyone has even commented. It does work well, however, for reopens because the moderation is already done and you can suggest changes to reopen it, or explain the rules why it can't be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is a bit calmer and you can talk amongst yourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30197" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:35:42.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T10:17:06.017" Score="-1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;People keep telling me that fluff is distracting, but I personally find this incorrect at best, and a big lie at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, Austin's or Matpat's videos would be hard to remember if there wasn't their small comments or reactions. And if they make it right, people could easily recall otherwise complicated or hard to understand things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why we think that fluff is distracting?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T03:02:52.953" Title="Is it true that fluff is distracting?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T12:07:35.823" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes ask (or see someone ask) an unconventional, non-utopian political question. And the result is high level of outrage or claims that it would be leading to absolute dystopia. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that there is a problem of extra penalty for being unconventional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to be a bit more objective, I picked another person question:&#xA;I mean if someone ask about skewing the voting system a bit towards high IQ people - the result was outrage. In the same time there is no outrage that many voting system are skewed a bit towards people living in smaller states / provinces (like US senate, or qualified  majority in the EU). From answer I also learnt that even such partial disenfranchise leads to awful mistreatment and revolution, etc. Even with my basic knowledge of US political system I can mention something about District of Columbia. (so it's not simple)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good way to ask such unconventional political question? (without getting too many slogans in answer, but a more realistic assessment how such policy should work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was quite successful here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57936/war-on-candies-or-on-other-threats-to-modern-affluent-people&quot;&gt;War on candies (or on other threats to modern, affluent people)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was also not bad here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57197/how-to-govern-marriage-and-family-law-for-system-recognizng-polyamory-or-short-t&quot;&gt;How to govern marriage and family law for system recognizng polyamory or short term relationships?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not bad at:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79169/which-legal-procedures-should-be-used-to-protect-legitimacy-of-sortitition-based&quot;&gt;Which legal procedures should be used to protect legitimacy of sortitition based deliberative democracy?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  Big outrage and not specially successful here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58314/how-to-allow-to-imprison-enemies-of-state-while-still-have-opposition-at-large&quot;&gt;How to allow to imprison enemies of state, while still have opposition at large?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not specially successful here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52367/waht-would-be-genetic-and-social-result-of-articificial-selection-of-people-who&quot;&gt;Waht would be genetic and social result of articificial selection of people who would survive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But got closed at:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80339/possible-benefits-of-high-level-surveillance-and-post-privacy&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80339/possible-benefits-of-high-level-surveillance-and-post-privacy&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  (But later found quite similar question highly voted, with quite&#xA;  useful answer:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13439/zero-privacy-culture?rq=1&quot;&gt;Zero Privacy: Culture&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that it is not only fully my problem:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83199/what-would-be-the-possible-issues-with-an-iq-based-voting-system&quot;&gt;What would be the possible issues with an IQ based voting system&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  (The system that he proposed slightly skewed system towards high IQ&#xA;  people and caused quite big outrage and with post concerning us&#xA;  literacy tests for blacks...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25459" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T20:05:01.727" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:10:46.243" Title="How to correctly ask questions on unconventional or disliked political ideas?" Tags="|discussion|writing-style|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5051" CreationDate="2017-06-10T12:56:02.587" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are being told that &lt;em&gt;your fluff distracts from your questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fluff itself is &lt;em&gt;fine&lt;/em&gt;. But everything needs to be balanced. Your questions contain a ratio of &lt;em&gt;fluff to content&lt;/em&gt; of about &lt;em&gt;9 to 1&lt;/em&gt;. So for every line of actual content in your questions there seems to be 9 lines of fluff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good ratio would be around &lt;em&gt;2 to 5&lt;/em&gt;, for every 5 lines of content there's 2 lines of fluff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fluff is good when it's supporting. It is bad if it takes over and it becomes hard to filter it out / find the real thing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum&lt;/em&gt;: Ironically this question right here is more or less perfect regarding the ratio of fluff to information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T14:09:34.280" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T14:09:34.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2017-06-10T16:37:02.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/5006#5006&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; that I’ve worked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75727/how-to-create-a-foreign-legion&quot;&gt;How to create a foreign legion?&lt;/a&gt; drew criticism from the specific in-story content, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that, I think that questions should be &lt;strong&gt;abstracted&lt;/strong&gt; from specific and real cultures and governments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, in fact, venerable use of SF that helped it be recognised as proper literature.  When obvious references to real political and culteral situations would not be possible in print, or would distract the reader from being detached and critical, setting up an alien world or somesuch as an alegory allows such references to be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: make it about aliens who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; “us” but are given all the relevant details, often in exaggerated form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T16:37:02.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5059" CreationDate="2017-06-10T20:29:43.943" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a moderator give a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39255/st-pupster&quot;&gt;it&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is, at least, borderline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T01:03:58.847" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T01:03:58.847" Title="Is the profile image of this user appropriate?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5056" CreationDate="2017-06-10T21:24:24.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anytime you see something that you find questionable on the site flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an avatar or something posted or linked in a user profile, flag one of the user's posts using a custom mod message explaining what you think the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questionable content is in a question, answer, or comment; flag the content directly using​ a &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rude or abusive&lt;/strong&gt; A reasonable person would find this content&#xA;  inappropriate for respectful discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T21:24:24.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5051" CreationDate="2017-06-10T22:46:51.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the key differences is that here you're asking volunteers for help... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When said volunteers tell you that they'd rather not have to pick through the fluff in order to help you, and you continue to post fluff, you're telling these volunteers that their time isn't valuable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm sure that you find your fluff hilarious and memorable, others are telling you that you're making your questions harder to understand and that they don't appreciate that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many times does it need to be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T22:46:51.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5056" CreationDate="2017-06-11T00:59:32.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user's profile picture has been changed to a generic identicon avatar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/31504/274942&quot;&gt;profile rules&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Exchange are pretty lax. Some things are allowed that would not be allowed in posts, comments, or in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/31197/274942&quot;&gt;Certain obscenities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/139190/274942&quot;&gt;Self-promotion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/231334/274942&quot;&gt;Some cases&lt;/a&gt; are really judgment calls, and there are of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/52730/274942&quot;&gt;completely unacceptable statements and content&lt;/a&gt;. All of this extends to profile pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/208551/274942&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flag a post of the user's for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, if you really, really want to). A moderator will try to figure out a course of action (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243285/274942&quot;&gt;these guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, if you're curious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case, the image contained content that was sexual in nature. There was no nudity, and it's unclear whether or not it would be Not Safe For Work. Like many cases of controversial content in profiles, it was a judgment call as to what to do about it. Working from the guidelines above, the image was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T00:59:32.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5051" CreationDate="2017-06-11T03:02:52.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what the others said: your question (and comments) suggest that you think your goal should be &lt;em&gt;memorable questions&lt;/em&gt;.  That's not the goal.  The goal is &lt;em&gt;clear, interesting questions&lt;/em&gt;, and additionally ones that will &lt;em&gt;help other people&lt;/em&gt; who will &lt;em&gt;find them via search engines&lt;/em&gt;.  Nobody cares about your storytelling when reviewing questions here.  Your storytelling belongs in your stories, which you can publish in venues where people are looking for entertainment rather than Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T03:02:52.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-11T08:43:40.953" Score="-6" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83238/how-fast-can-a-plasma-projectile-move-before-it-begins-to-fuse-with-the-surround&quot;&gt;How fast can a plasma projectile move before it begins to fuse with the surrounding atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing something as unclear is one thing, but not writing there how it's unclear is an act, which should be punished by BANHAMMER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why was this question put on hold as unclear?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T20:03:23.420" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T20:03:23.420" Title="Why was this question put on hold as unclear?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5061" CreationDate="2017-06-11T09:44:54.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the fact that you have to &lt;em&gt;point out&lt;/em&gt; “the bold part was tbe question” in a postscript doesn’t help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We need data on how fast a shot of ionized air can be without becoming an unstable fusion when enters the atmosphere (the gun's interior is in a vacuum) and blows up the neighborhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How fast can a shot be before… &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?  I for one don’t understand what you concern is here, and whether it’s real or a cartoon-physics thing that wouldn’t really happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; shown when closing, and it's not always clear if the reasons don’t explain the actual issues clearly and more than one is used by different voters.  I ran into this myself in the early days, seemingly having contradictory issues at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, you can read the various comments that have been left on the post.  It was flagged as &lt;em&gt;rude and offensive&lt;/em&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might not realize that mentions of &#xA;Hitler are rude and provocative, if not profane, in many cultures.  And there is no real reason to bring it up!  You seem to be referring to elements from your story scenario rather than &lt;strong&gt;abstracting&lt;/strong&gt; the idea out of any specific story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the structure of your post: the Title is properly to the point, but it's &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; what you meant by &lt;em&gt;fuse with the atmosphere&lt;/em&gt;.  Does that mean the gas making up the shot is mixed and no longer holds its integrety, or are you referring to nuclear fusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in the body of the post you don’t start with a synopsis.  You give a bottom-up explaination &lt;em&gt;which we don’t follow&lt;/em&gt; before getting to the question &lt;em&gt;which is not written as an interrogative sentence&lt;/em&gt; and needs to be pointed out again as noted above.  We still don’t know what you're asking, and the pos, while brief, is mostly things we can't follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hasn't speed of a vortex ring been asked before, recently?  You already know that toroidal vortexes &lt;em&gt;can’t&lt;/em&gt; move very fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/338690/maximum-speed-of-a-toroidal-vortex&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; I posted a question to gather some more basic information on the subject.  &lt;em&gt;How fast can they go?&lt;/em&gt; period — a real-world physics question with no story involved at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T10:02:31.610" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T10:02:31.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5061" CreationDate="2017-06-11T16:42:27.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/83238/4&quot;&gt;Revision #4&lt;/a&gt; is what was put on hold.  Take another look at that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, in particular, these comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wouldn't be able to create such high velocities in non vacuum conditions.  – sphennings (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83238/how-fast-can-a-plasma-projectile-move-before-it-begins-to-fuse-with-the-surround#comment244019_83238&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question requires watching two videos, reading one linked external article and googling for second one, then it is a bad question. Both questions and answers are supposed to be as self-contained as possible.  – Mołot (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83238/how-fast-can-a-plasma-projectile-move-before-it-begins-to-fuse-with-the-surround#comment244046_83238&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Molot's comment.  I didn't watch the videos and read the links, and I couldn't tell what you were trying to ask.  It had four close votes when I saw that, so I cast the fifth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the gratuitous Hitler stuff, which as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83238/how-fast-can-a-plasma-projectile-move-before-it-begins-to-fuse-with-the-surround#comment244076_83238&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt; was attracting flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've now edited the question to focus it more, which is good.  I see it has one reopen vote already.  If it's now clear to the people who know more physics than I do, it should gather more such votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, assuming people aren't turned off by the attitude displayed in your meta post, especially the first version.  It's ok to disagree with other users and good to seek clarification when you're confused about why something happened, but you'll always get better results if you approach it in the spirit of cooperation and with a little humility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T16:42:27.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3951" CreationDate="2017-06-11T19:35:43.467" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Space Opera&lt;/strong&gt; seems to be a well-understood term. I see it on the WB blog. It implies a few generic tropes but shifts the focus of the question away from scientific accuracy to world-consistent &quot;story mechanics&quot; that facilitate adventure, war, intrigue, etc. I often preface my questions with &quot;magic that looks like science&quot; or similar just to avoid unnecessary debate, but we all know what Space Opera is. I'm surprised it isn't a tag already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel &lt;em&gt;sci-fi&lt;/em&gt; is held to a very different standard than other questions here. I've had the experience where comments will dogpile on a detail and avoid the main question – turns out the detail had been debated previously but isn't relevant to this discussion. For example, I've asked a few questions involving an &lt;em&gt;aerostat-on-Venus&lt;/em&gt; (shorthand, so I don't have to re-invent the wheel going into detail everytime) and this invariably gets links to an old discussion that decided aerostats were unworkable (as if no one is allowed to use the idea now). I've been forced to publish &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; method to get the comments to stop, which I really don't feel I should need to &quot;prove&quot; my story details before I can ask a different question. Weirdly one of the people doing it had asked about necromancers and &quot;walking skeletons&quot;, HAHA. That seems a double-standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think having a scale of &lt;strong&gt;Science-Based&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't work, it either is or it isn't. People who don't know aren't going to choose correctly and it's awkward to tag the question with something it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Space Opera&lt;/strong&gt; is generically &quot;an adventure set in space&quot;. It will involve in-world mechanics that are not scientifically accurate but are expected to be plausible as a storytelling device: &lt;em&gt;transporters&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;FTL travel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;personality robots&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;instantaneous communication&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;space colonization that is progressed enough to have rival political factions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I cannot think of a similar term for sci-fi that is not set in space but uses similar in-world mechanics (normally I'd just call that &lt;em&gt;sci-fi&lt;/em&gt;). Sorry, I know this is old, but it seemed the place to post this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T19:35:43.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T11:34:30.950" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;In hindsight, I would have asked my first question in the sandbox before asking it for real, because while I got a lot of answers, they were a bit disappointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used other Stack Exchange sites, but none of them have a sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be some sort of mention, for first-time users, before they submit the question, that the sandbox is available. Maybe something akin to the &quot;Don't ask fluff questions&quot; warning that beta users get before they can ask questions, or a popup like the &quot;Don't use the word &quot;I&quot;&quot; popup box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the user has asked the question, it may be too late to suggest the sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T11:34:30.950" Title="Mention the sandbox to first-time question askers" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-13T08:34:24.370" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83418/how-to-make-ice-magic-possible&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about how to reshape ice in my world was closed as too broad.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't understand what it lacked in its edited version, where I specified &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; my world worked, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; I wanted, and &lt;em&gt;up to where&lt;/em&gt; I had found answers. I thought I had edited accordingly to all the feedback I had received... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I add ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20258" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T20:02:16.490" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T20:02:16.490" Title="Cold-hearted closing of this ice question makes me shiver" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-13T09:24:25.093" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83311/39269&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold stating too broad. I have further edited the question to limit the ​scope of answers. Please consider reopening it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39269" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T19:57:40.183" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T19:57:40.183" Title="Can &quot;Is it possible for a planet to become moon of a gas giant and sustain life as is?&quot; be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5069" CreationDate="2017-06-13T10:33:06.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a standard common thing to do and so there's a button for that.  It might even be automatic upon editing — I'm not sure when that is triggered.  Look at the grey link worde just under the tags.  It's in the review queue as I write this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T10:33:06.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5069" CreationDate="2017-06-13T13:17:58.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After you made this meta post, the question was reopened and then closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates aren't bad!  If you didn't find the linked questions, perhaps other people won't either.  And perhaps your question will help them find them.  Meanwhile, the other questions have answers already, so with luck that helps you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't agree that your question is a duplicate, then you should edit the question to clarify how it is different, and then the community might reopen it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing your question to meta and working with the community to build a collection of good questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T13:17:58.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2017-06-13T19:58:08.237" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent question, the poster used the lengh of time it takes to smoke a cigarette as a way to indicate an approximate time span.  By these same rules, should we [snip] that?  The reference had nothing to do with the question and doesn’t add anything, so it’s completely gratuitous.  Besides being disgusting — especially as used to evoke a first-person experience — we have to remember that this site is for 13 year olds and we want to avoid public display of such things. After all, it's not allowed on a billboard or magazine ad!  Television shows in prime-time must avoid depictions in order to meet ratings standards.  It can certainly be replaced by a better phrase!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will flag anything I consider offensive…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commenter and those who agree with that sentiment are using their own cultual and personal standards, not a common measure.  Even among one person, it can vary with context of where it’s being read or which day it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T19:58:08.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2017-06-13T22:23:16.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here... Just to add another perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should be cautious about censorship. Yes there are some younger users, and yes we should lean towards respectful discourse, but we should weigh the context and intent of a post rather than being overly concerned about particular words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that you can be incredibly rude using the the &quot;nicest&quot; of words, and be completely benign using the &quot;crudest.&quot; Intent should matter more than the words used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm certainly​ against &quot;slut shaming&quot; I think it typically demonstrates an unbalanced, dated world view, and that people should get past such things, but honestly I feel the same way about censorship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's worse is that censorship often replaces what could have been discourse about why some people find some words offensive. Rather than saying &quot;hey that word offends me because x, y, and z...&quot; People often just end up saying &quot;you can't use that word here...&quot; The important exchange of ideas part gets skipped too often...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the &quot;think of the children&quot; argument goes... Well... It doesn't really go very far. I've raised children, by the age of thirteen they have a pretty good sense of, what is, and what isn't ok to say. If they're saying &quot;bad words&quot; they know that they're bad words. Show me a 13 year old who doesn't know your common &quot;curse words&quot; and I'll show you a kid who's playing dumb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T22:23:16.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2017-06-13T22:50:31.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Cautiously.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only partially joking there... I disagree with JDługosz's answer. Users shouldn't have to abstract or obfuscate. If you're writing satire, a dark dystopian tale, an alternate history, or even pure misguided hate you should be free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is a big &quot;but.&quot; Be aware of what you're doing. Be aware of how people are likely going to respond. Be aware that you're stirring sensitivities, and possibly stepping on toes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't your intention to offend, make your actual intentions clear. Include, in your question, why you're asking. Be sure to keep it short and sweet though, we don't need the entire story, just some context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we may be a little too quick to assume bad intentions at times. Obviously there are going to be times where the intentions are bad, but even then it's probably better to point out the flaws in the line of thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less I'm thinking that if Hitler showed up asking for help with Mein Kampf it would be better to educate him than shut him down. &quot;Hey... Your premise is horrifying... You should probably drop that and...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T13:10:46.243" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:10:46.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2017-06-14T09:51:54.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Disassociate&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a &lt;strong&gt;bad example&lt;/strong&gt;. If you are a 10k user, you can see this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/74652/809&quot;&gt;What's the quickest way to destroy our gynocentric society through magic?&lt;/a&gt;, especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/74652/1&quot;&gt;first revision&lt;/a&gt; of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you are not, you can see the title. It is written from the first person, plural. This gives impression that the OP is talking about our real world society and calls it gynocentric. The question's body in the first revision gave a similar impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's something to avoid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that your writing style shows that &lt;strong&gt;controversial ideas belong to the society in your fictional / alternative world&lt;/strong&gt;, not to you or your nation. Make sure not to accuse real societies or a real person of anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your beliefs are irrelevant, beliefs in your world are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your political opinions are irrelevant, political ideas in your world are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't make assumptions about real life groups - describe your fictional alternative groups. For example don't say &lt;em&gt;&quot;such and such country is racist&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (even if you believe it is). Say &lt;em&gt;&quot;in my alternative history such and such country would be racist&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up &lt;strong&gt;write in a way that does not project your thoughts on real people&lt;/strong&gt;. This site is about fiction. Even alternative histories are fiction. Be careful to maintain that feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4704/809&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for a similar, although narrower, issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T10:22:55.313" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T10:22:55.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:48:07.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T13:48:07.137" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:48:07.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:48:07.137" Score="0" Body="For questions about answers that have been deleted." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T16:25:13.417" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T16:25:13.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5080" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:49:09.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T13:49:09.533" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T13:49:09.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5081" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:49:09.533" Score="0" Body="For questions about questions that have been deleted." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T16:25:17.240" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T16:25:17.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5083" CreationDate="2017-06-14T14:16:51.003" Score="7" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to discuss the usage of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/poke&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poke&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poke&lt;/a&gt; tag on Meta, as I think it is unnecessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While looking through some older questions here on Meta I found this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/219/accept-answer-thursday&quot;&gt;Accept Answer Thursday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question introduced the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/poke&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poke&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poke&lt;/a&gt; tag. The user created this tag to explain his idea of &quot;poking&quot; a person by using the @&amp;lt;Username&amp;gt; syntax in a comment of one of their questions or answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/poke/info&quot;&gt;Tag excerpt:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Draw a persons attention in comments by using the @Name. Ideally in the commends [sic!] of their answer or question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really need this tag? I think it does not really add anything to the site. I have never seen people refer to using the @&amp;lt;Username&amp;gt; syntax in a comment by calling it &quot;poking&quot; and this is the only question with this tag. A search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=poke+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;poke is:q&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=poking+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;poking is:q&lt;/a&gt; only shows this one question. When looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=poking+is%3Aa&quot;&gt;poking is:a&lt;/a&gt; I only find other usages of the word, like &quot;I just decided to poke my head out&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it common to call this &quot;poking&quot; on the StackExchange network and I overlooked it the whole time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T14:46:57.590" Title="Do we need the [poke] tag on Meta?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5082" CreationDate="2017-06-14T14:46:57.590" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag in question is used by a single question, posted nearly three years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is voted +6/-9 for a net -3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag appears to try to describe something that is rather strongly discouraged by the only answer on the only question bearing that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer is voted +15/-0 for a net +15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that; that answer is also written by a Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;employee&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I see no real reason for the tag to exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T14:46:57.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T07:29:27.053" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I see on my screen&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwXIi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwXIi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug or am I missing some underlying info?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T15:43:22.143" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T15:43:22.143" Title="x post awaiting review but review queue is empty: Is this a bug?" Tags="|support|bug|reviews|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-06-15T08:12:34.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4896" CreationDate="2017-06-16T06:46:37.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After looking at the question the OP asked on PPCG I think there wouldn't be any harm in lowering the rep requirement for Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single answer to that question states that there hasn't been any spam in the last 30 days and the comments to the question and answer indicate that PPCG doesn't have to deal with real spam on their Meta Site, only with a few users who mistook Meta for the Main Site or for the Sandbox. This is something that might happen, but we already have this &quot;problem&quot; occasionally on our Main Site where people ask questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3341/what-is-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;What is Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4969/why-does-this-worldbuilding-forum-allow-so-many-questions-which-involve-magic&quot;&gt;Why does this WorldBuilding forum allow so many questions which involve magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4806/what-game-is-this&quot;&gt;What game is this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/can-i-ask-about-mythological-creatures-here&quot;&gt;Can I ask about mythological creatures here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4653/how-worldbuilding-works&quot;&gt;How WorldBuilding works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=migrated%3ayes%20is%3aq&quot;&gt;quite some similar questions&lt;/a&gt; (15 not deleted questions in total if my search query is correct).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine that the amount of misplaced posts wouldn't drastically increase just because we allow new users to post something on Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage would be that in some cases new users might post their Meta questions directly on the Meta Site instead of the Main Site, where we would have to migrate them. And, of course, new users could potentially give the Sandbox a try. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4897/28789&quot;&gt;apaul34208&lt;/a&gt; noted the traffic on Meta is slow enough that a few new users using Meta shouldn't be too much to handle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering these points I think it would be a good idea to lower the rep requirement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how big this change would be viewed, so maybe we could start with some sort of &quot;test phase&quot; of for example 1 month:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We change the rep requirement to 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We update the text in the help center to show that for a test phase everyone can post on Meta with a link to a Meta Post with the relevant details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Meta Post should have a community wiki as an answer to note good and bad things that happened in the time. This way we can have a review after a month to see if this works for us. The community wiki should include events (with relevant links) like:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user posted a question draft in the Sandbox&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user posted a Meta question on Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user mistook Meta for Main/Sandbox&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spam on Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the &quot;test phase&quot; we should have a look at the community wiki and maybe have a review discussion to get the sentiment of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we weigh the success of the &quot;test phase&quot;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was it good that the question drafts were posted in the Sandbox first? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was there an increase in spam? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did new users get enough feedback fast enough on their first posts, as Meta doesn't have as many active users as the Main Site and no &quot;First Posts&quot; review queue? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the amount of posts enough to really care about the issue for now or did nobody use this new feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T06:46:37.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4896" CreationDate="2017-06-16T21:23:51.103" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this level of granularity is possible, I'd like to lower the rep requirement &lt;em&gt;for answers&lt;/em&gt; on meta to 1.  This allows Sandbox participation without enabling accidental mis-posting of main-site questions on meta (as questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that users without 5 rep can already &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/274518/162102&quot;&gt;ask on meta about &lt;em&gt;their own questions&lt;/em&gt; (and answers)&lt;/a&gt;.  This proposal wouldn't interfere with that.  The new rule would be: &amp;lt;5-rep users can post &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;em&gt;their own material&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;any answers&lt;/em&gt; on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T21:23:51.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5379" CreationDate="2017-06-19T06:49:28.183" Score="7" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; is protected and thereby prevents users with less that 10 reputation from posting there. This is theoretically a problem because new users are the ones that need the Sandbox the most. Therefore I want to ask if someone could raise the threshold (answers from new users) so that the Sandbox won't automatically be protected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new Sandbox has been protected &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/4835/revisions&quot;&gt;3 times automatically&lt;/a&gt; since it was created. The first two times Monica unprotected it and after posting this Separatrix unprotected it the third time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was mentioned by Laurel in a comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5067/mention-the-sandbox-to-first-time-question-askers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Meta discussion about mentioning the Sandbox to first time question askers our sister site PPCG had &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8570/community-is-being-overprotective-of-the-sandbox&quot;&gt;a similar problem&lt;/a&gt; after lowering the limit for posting on Meta to 1 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linked post on PPCG the Community Manager Shog9 said that he &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8811/65029&quot;&gt;&quot;set the relevant thresholds (answers from new users) to 10,000&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do this with our Sandbox, too, so that it doesn't get protected all the time and has to be unprotected by someone manually? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be very frustrating to give new users with (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4896/should-the-rep-requirement-for-meta-be-lowered-to-1&quot;&gt;currently&lt;/a&gt;) 5 reputation the hint that they can use the Sandbox only for them to discover that they are not allowed to post there. This might not be a problem for a lot of people, but in theory it's possible. And manually unprotecting the Sandbox is unnecessary work for the people that have this privilege. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the first discussion on this topic the Sandbox has automatically been protected 6 more times. One of these automatic protections was triggered 8 minutes after Monica Cellio unprotected the question, which lead to a second unprotection from Monica 3 more minutes later. A few days later the Sandbox has automatically been protected again and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5115/28789&quot;&gt;a new user replied to this post to ask if someone could unprotect it again&lt;/a&gt;, which HDE did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we have 9 auto-protections in roughly 1 1/2 month. In 7 of those cases a mod unprotected the question (Monica and HDE). 2 times a non-mod user with the corresponding privilege (Separatrix) unprotected the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update two months later: The problem persists and we are currently at 18 auto-protections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T16:06:54.640" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T18:17:13.527" Title="Can someone please raise the protection limit of the Sandbox?" Tags="|feature-request|sandbox|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:05:42.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address your question of &lt;em&gt;...what are they doing with them?&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's people that just enjoy to &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt;. Some are building a boat in their garage for 4 decades, others have their &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelleisenbahn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;model railway&lt;/a&gt; hidden in the attic/basement where they spend weeks building a little pond, others again go big and design a whole world because they might like to philosophize in a more practical way &amp;amp; manner about large scale things such as population shifts and what-not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While, as already mentioned, there's some people that publish their work and make money with it - there's plenty of work that will never touch the mind of anyone outside a small circle of friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it's a combination of both. I enjoy digging into theoretical problems and use the world I build as a framework for these questions while exploring them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also eventually would like to publish my world in the form of a novel or probably rather some interactive fiction - but that's way off for now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T13:05:42.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5092" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:26:58.627" Score="6" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83902/ensuring-an-endless-war-and-an-endless-stalemate/83945&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted my answer as two separate answers because both of them solve the question differently. However, in my not-so-kind mood, if I were not the poster, I would frown upon this because it might be baiting for more reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4743/the-issue-with-multiple-answers&quot;&gt;The issue with multiple answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link above seems to favor people to post different ideas as separate answers, so people can judge which one they like the most. However, if this is done, I might have 7 different possible answers for a question, which may have more than 30 answers in total by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers are mutually exclusive, then it's understandable to post them as two separate answers, but if they are not, and can be combined (in my answers, both can be combined if the OP wants it), how should we - the answerer - post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think about this, and what is the guideline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T00:38:36.123" Title="Posting two answers in a question" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:49:30.407" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If both of your answers are standalone, independent answers that solve the issue in question in a totally unrelated way, then you should post them separately, making sure each one is high quality one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers you post are just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/83946/809&quot;&gt;two short paragraphs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/83945/809&quot;&gt;three sentences&lt;/a&gt;, then reconsider. Is it really a question you should answer? Are these answers really as high quality as they should be? If such a small amount of data is sufficient, maybe the question is opinion based or simply too broad? Or maybe you are not putting as much thought into your answers as you should?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, every time when you can come up with multiple answers in a short time, remember the text under the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to &lt;strong&gt;a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer&lt;/strong&gt;. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine. If there are many possible answers and the question does not give an idea which ones will be better, it's probably too broad and you should vote / flag instead of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T13:55:44.810" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T13:55:44.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2017-06-19T15:09:30.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve done both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Combined&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple ideas in one post using level-1 headers for each.  But they can share a common intro, and the ideas may form a &lt;em&gt;progression&lt;/em&gt; so each introduces the next.  This allows simple transitions rather than some prerequisite explaination for each section.  More generally, each section ca  assume knowledge already explained in prior sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Separate&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new answer is added at a later date, it makes sense to post it as a new answer.  People will have already read the original and might not expect substantial new answers to appear as an edit.  Naturally, it should stand alone as a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a late answer is a summary or synthesis based on &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; existing answers, in which case they should all be acknowledged within the new answer — that may include your first answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T15:09:30.567" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T17:51:35.687" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta is used to decide site policy how should we use the results of questions? Is the highest voted answer immediately taken as a rule or is it a suggestion? If it is a rule then what consensus is needed to set a new rule? Would a vote of 1 on an answer be enough or does there have to be a large number of up votes? How large is that number?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T19:16:04.417" Title="Should we take a meta consensus as site policy" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5089" CreationDate="2017-06-19T18:03:14.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/297369/162102&quot;&gt;suggested on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; that repeated unprotections should block future auto-protections, but I suspect that idea won't go far without more (non-sandbox) cases where that would help.  Our recent problems have been caused by the deletion of answers from users whose rep is temporarily low, and to &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; problem Shog9 made some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/297370/162102&quot;&gt;interesting suggestions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Disable protection for the entire meta site that hosts such a sandbox (&lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8570/community-is-being-overprotective-of-the-sandbox/8811#8811&quot;&gt;CodeGolf uses this technique&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Regularly archive the sandbox and create a new one, thus resetting the criteria for auto-protection. (I do this here for the formatting sandbox, albeit in sort of a weird way)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Instruct users to create their own, personal sandboxes (essentially using meta itself as the sandbox). (a handy example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/site-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;site-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;site-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Create a few CW answers in the sandbox and then lock it to prevent anyone from creating new ones - users must then pick an unused answer to temporarily house their idea. No answers ever get created or deleted, thus making auto-protect a non-issue. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4666/sandbox-for-drafts-of-long-complex-posts&quot;&gt;Math uses this technique&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Create some special set of rules for auto-protect that only apply to the sandbox posts. This is... probably not going to happen. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think #2 will help us; we've done that recently, but our issue is some users with high sandbox activity.  And we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; people to use the sandbox if a question might need help, instead of going straight to main, so we don't want to impede that.  #3 could work; it would distribute the sandbox (a tag rather than a question), so we'd have more individual questions and helpers would have to monitor the tag.  I don't know how well that would work for us.  #5 isn't going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves #1 -- disable protection for the entire meta site -- and #4 -- create &quot;fixed&quot; sandbox slots.  #4 sounds like a clever solution, and also implicitly addresses the issues already raised here about abandoned posts and users with many concurrent questions.  I looked over Math's sandbox guidance and it looks to be quite sane and workable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; After some discussion it seems that #4 is not viable; we rely on voting, which can't be reset when the post is reused, and comments, which would need to be cleared.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5131/28&quot;&gt;this followup question&lt;/a&gt; about what to do with the sandbox (and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5099/28&quot;&gt;this call for requirements&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T17:29:51.867" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T17:29:51.867" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5094" CreationDate="2017-06-19T18:18:25.103" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends, and it's necessarily vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a site's community, via meta, voted overwhelmingly to, say, outlaw question closure.  That would be &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;, but it wouldn't change anything.  At the other end of the spectrum, if a site's community votes to change the name of its chat room, or to define a tag synonym, or to reopen a question, there's probably no reason not to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A community's custodians, including its moderators, cannot have their hands tied by a meta consensus if there are reasons to not implement it.  But, by the same token, it would be unwise to ignore that meta consensus -- &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is driving it, and chances are there's an underlying issue that we need to address.  So maybe it's not even about the specific proposal; perhaps that's a symptom of something else and we need to talk about &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes meta is data not democracy.  Other times it's democracy, and if there's clear consensus and no objection on a site-internal matter, then it'll probably happen when meta activity has died down (people have had a chance to object) and somebody gets around to doing whatever the thing is (merge those tags, update the sandbox rules, start the monthly challenges, whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't give you a set of rules.  I think our community has been pretty good at both reaching consensus and &lt;em&gt;reaching consensus that we've reached consensus&lt;/em&gt;.  If you see something that seems to be languishing but also seems to have consensus, bring it up somehow -- comment on the post, bring it up in chat, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T18:18:25.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5094" CreationDate="2017-06-19T20:39:36.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Monica already said, it depends. I've certainly seen it go both ways on Meta Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some proposals are incredibly popular, yet never really get full support or implementation​, while others seem to make the grade and are eventually added as policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One workflow that seems to work well for a lot of issues and one that I support would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask a general discussion question to see if the community recognizes that this is an issue that needs addressing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it looks like people generally agree that there's a problem ask a question about potential solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there seems to be a well supported solution escalate to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; or  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq-proposed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq-proposed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq-proposed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the feature gets implemented or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; added then you have solid confirmed consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little harder to gauge community consensus here than it is on some of the larger sites where you tend to see a little more Meta traffic... I think we should be careful to keep in mind that some of our higher voted posts here on Worldbuilding's meta only tend to see a handful of votes and may not always be fully representative of the larger community. Honestly I think we could do more to encourage people to get involved in the process, but even then a slow steady work flow should keeps things on track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps adding  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq-proposed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq-proposed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq-proposed&lt;/a&gt; to the featured on Meta list could draw some more eyes before we move forward with new FAQs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T20:39:36.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2017-06-20T06:48:40.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's too simplistic to assume because a question may have different answers the question is too broad. Detouring into the issue of whether questions are too broad or not is a red herring that does little and probably nothing to address of multiple answers to a single question. Often multiple answers arise simply because the assumptions necessary to answer the question may lead to different answers. This is a common situation with speculative questions and especially when the answers themselves are speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only have to look at philosophical questions to see how considering one or two factors differently can result in different, if not radically different answers to the same question. This will not be uncommon here on Worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found myself doing both. Giving multiple answers to the one question in the text of a single answering post and putting different answers in separate posts. Often there has been little rhyme or reason in doing so. Although if the different answers are sufficiently different it does definitely feel uncomfortable putting them in the same text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually what happens when this occurs, is that I had formulated one answer and during writing the post other possibilities arise and they get added in to the post. If they are too contradictory, this feels like I can't make up my mind. Mainly this springs from the fact that worldbuilding will always be a speculative endeavour. Unless we want to restrict worldbuilding to worlds congruent to quotidian reality. That will reject all questions about magic, future technology, even alternative history, and the majority of topics currently considered legitimate on WB SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any guidelines are needed, then this should be mainly up to the answerers. They should determine if they feel their answers can be grouped together or if they are too contradictory then it may make more sense to post them separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If necessary, the OP or people in comments can indicate that if separate answers have been posted whether they should be grouped into the one answer/post. The converse is also true. If the one post gives multiple answers, then the OP and comments might advise that they could be broken up into separate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem with multiple answers in a single answers is that, for example, I personally might agree with one or two of those answers and reject others. if that were so, I'd have to either point that out in comments. &quot;I voted for answer X, but am unhappy about answers Y and Z.&quot; type of thing. However, after this issue has been raised, I could recommend the poster repost their answers separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary I believe the only really sensible guidelines would be to encourage WBers to encourage posters whether their multiple answers should be posted as a cluster or separate answers. In the event someone posted another answer to a question, then in that case it makes a lot of sense that latter answers should be posted as a new and separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T06:48:40.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:23:39.543" Score="5" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; has undergone some evolution over time.  After the first one accumulated over 200 answers (mostly deleted), we rebooted it earlier this year.  We also discussed time limits, so that abandoned answers wouldn't live forever and make it harder to notice the new ones.  And then, recently, we ran into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5089/28&quot;&gt;auto-protection problem&lt;/a&gt; -- the sandbox keeps getting protected by the system, blocking low-rep users from answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an answer on that last post I reported some feedback from Shog9, including what some other sites have done to solve their sandbox problems.  Comments there have raised issues with an approach that initially sounded promising.  We could ask the other site how they dealt with those issues, but -- maybe it's time we gathered some requirements so we know what we need before we try to solve the current problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll list here some requirements that I believe are obvious and uncontroversial.  (If you disagree, let me know in a comment.)  Please use answers to add requirements, so the community can show (through voting) which ones have support.  Feel free to propose requirements that we aren't currently satisfying but you think we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base functional requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody, including new users, can use the sandbox to post draft questions for review.  (Current: there is one sandbox question, and drafts are answers.  Requires 5 rep; we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4896/28&quot;&gt;could lower it&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody in the community can provide feedback on sandbox questions.  (Current: feedback is mainly in the form of comments, and sometimes edits.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily see current sandbox questions without digging through obsolete questions.  (Current: we delete inactive or completed answers, which sort to the bottom in the default view.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily tell whether a sandbox question is active or obsolete.  (Answers that are not deleted are active.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also maintain an answer with links to graduated questions, but I'm not sure what the goal (or underlying requirement) is.  If that's important, somebody please describe the requirement in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those not experienced with writing requirements: focus on the &lt;em&gt;outcome&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt;.  I've included notes in parentheses about our current implementation, but details such as using comments or deleting obsolete answers aren't the &lt;em&gt;requirements&lt;/em&gt; -- if we came up with another sandbox scheme that achieved the goal in a different way, that would be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T21:39:53.890" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:39:53.890" Title="Rethinking the sandbox: what are the functional requirements?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:33:44.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The impact of the Sandbox is easily visible.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we have an accepted community wiki answer where every graduated question is linked. This makes it very easy to see how often the Sandbox is used. In the future this might be important in the case the Sandbox &amp;quot;slows down&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;speeds up&amp;quot; and we want to discuss how important it is to keep the Sandbox going. We can compare how many drafts graduated in a certain timeframe and the metric is openly visible for everyone, even low-rep users who can't see deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore this gives new users the chance to look up how to write questions and see whether they were well-received. This may improve the quality of their posts, as they are not &lt;em&gt;deceived&lt;/em&gt; by Hot Network Questions, which sometimes do not quite fit the style of WorldBuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T13:33:44.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:44:21.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;(Relatively) fast feedback&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially new users expect to get feedback on their ideas fast. They don't want to wait for a long time before someone starts to give them feedback and they might be discouraged from waiting too long. They have an idea or problem and need help and feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently everyone with 5 reputation (which could theoretically be lowered) can post an answer in the Sandbox. The answer is immediately visible and the Sandbox post will go to the top of the &lt;em&gt;active questions&lt;/em&gt; tab on the Meta Site. Because of the activity on Meta it will be visible at the top quite long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore there will be a message in the chat indicating a new question in the Sandbox to draw attention to the new draft, which would not work if a post was only edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say &lt;em&gt;relatively&lt;/em&gt; fast because it still takes some time and that's okay. There are less people active on Meta than on Main, the bot sometimes takes an hour or longer to post the message and not everyone is active in the Sandbox. But we are doing a lot to give new users feedback fast and should try to keep at the current pace or improve wherever possible. For example introducing another review as with a community wiki that needs 100 reputation to be edited by a new user would slow things down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T13:44:21.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:50:06.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The graduated drafts do not take up too much space&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High-rep users can still see deleted posts, which is why currently a graduated post should be edited to show only something like &amp;quot;Posted: title&amp;quot; before it is deleted to reduce the visual noise for high-reps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T13:50:06.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:58:20.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The Sandbox cannot be automatically protected by the system&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was already said in the question we currently have a problem with the automatic protection by the Community-User. This is a problem because it prevents users with less than 10 reputation from answering the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. It would be very discouraging to tell new users that they can use the Sandbox only for them to discover that they are prevented by the system from using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While 10 reputation is not too much the Sandbox is especially for people who have problems with asking questions or are unsure about whether something is on-topic or not. New users with a not-so-good start are the ones that need this help the most and they sometimes are still under the 10 rep. Excluding them would be counter-productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The automatic protection is for example triggered by new users answering and deleting a lot. This is currently the intended usage of the Sandbox, which means that the automatic protection doesn't make any sense for the current Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the automatic protection cannot be controlled on a per-post basis this currently means manual work from people with the privilege to protect/unprotect posts and manual spotting of the automatic protection. This, again, means unnecessary work and there is a chance to discourage new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T15:09:36.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T14:07:44.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's easy for members to give feedback about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently users post their draft as an answer. As such it is possible to vote on the draft. Votes are normally used in the form of up-votes to indicate that a question is ready for the Main site. A down-vote on the other hand means that there is still a lot of work to be down or that the question should be completely rewritten. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good indicator, as it shows the OP very clearly whether the community thinks the question is ready or whether he has to think about where to go with his question from the current point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also good because it doesn't take much time for people who want to help. A simple click shows if you feel strongly about the state of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting on the comments is similar, but from my point of view &lt;em&gt;weaker&lt;/em&gt;. Voting on comments indicates that you think similar to what the author of the comment suggested, which gives the author of the draft the feedback that multiple people share this opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes voting a fast and easy to use feedback for &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; sides and helps in gauging how much activity there currently is in the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T14:23:55.693" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T14:23:55.693" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T14:26:16.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Maintenance of the sandbox can be shared by the community.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the mechanism is for keeping the sandbox clean -- deleting old answers, reversing auto-protection, editing whatever needs to be edited, etc -- we want the community as a whole to be able to handle it as much as possible.  While flags for moderators to take actions not available to the community work at our current scale, they do depend on a moderator being available -- not a big deal for deleting old answers, perhaps a bigger deal for unprotecting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note, in that last example, that high-rep users can also unprotect, but they &lt;em&gt;have to notice the problem&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T14:26:16.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-20T17:25:21.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Be just like the regular posting experience&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may be getting into territory outside of the regular site here, so I want to add that the “experience” of writing a sandbox question should be the same as on the regular site.  Specifically, the markup should be exactly the same, the extensions like MathJax should be exactly the same, etc.  If the post formats correctly in the sandbox it should work the same when simply pasted onto WB as a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally it should have the same toolbar, too.  This provides a learning experience for &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;nice to have&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be good to have tags show like they would for real, and give the selection of choosing tags and their descriptions from the regular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if Sandbox Notes and the Title line could have special formatting and be a semantic part of the post, rather than merely conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be &lt;em&gt;really cool&lt;/em&gt; if comments were stamped with the Revision number that they applied to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if the css numbered the paragraphs in the sandbox post, so commenters could easily refer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T17:41:57.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4111" CreationDate="2017-06-20T18:22:18.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I've been falling into these situations a little too often lately... Occasionally it gets to the point where I consider leaving the community entirely. And before someone points it out, yes I'm entirely aware that I'm partly to blame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this may potentially be an emerging symptom of a larger problem within​ our community​'s culture. I'm not sure if it's just my perception, or if other people are noticing it too, but it seems like things are getting a little abrasive around here. There seems to be more snark, pedantry, and intellectual snobbery going around than there used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking that this may be another growing pain that SE sites have to go through... I know I've seen it in cycles on Stack Overflow. I'm also not sure if there's really a great way to deal with it. SO had it's summer of love, and that seemed to help in some regards, but caused some unexpected issues as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally what I would like to see is more constructive answers. Rather than tearing down a post in comments take the time to write a competing answer. If your ideas hold up, that will be reflected in votes. If you need to challenge a question, make an effort to drop the smug and leave something that's actually meant to improve the question's quality, if the OP declines, drop it and vote accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be much better served as a community if we can handle this issue before it grows to the proportions that some of us saw on Stack Overflow...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T18:22:18.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2017-06-20T20:14:16.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see nothing wrong with multiple answers. If they are rep-baiting, I am not going to vote for the same person twice for the same answer anyway, and I assume most people voting would notice the same: &quot;Hey, this is the same as the other guy. And IS the other guy! Maybe I'll down vote this one...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, I have answered twice just because I posted something out of rationality, and an hour later my subconscious produced a more clever or inventive solution. So my first post may be pedestrian, and have gotten some votes, and my second take a little shinier, and I want to tell the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling here is &lt;strong&gt;I am trying to help&lt;/strong&gt; the OP create a better story or game or D&amp;amp;D scenario, whatever. Rules that get in the way of doing that are not good rules. Have some faith in the rest of us deciding what to vote for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody gets carried away duplicating his answer multiple times, we can throw a flag on the post. I've never done that, but it would be a good reason to throw my first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T20:14:16.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2017-06-21T07:15:17.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree that this is story-based.  To me, story-based is when different characters can respond differently.  So if you change one character to be an evil villain or a saintly hero, you get different results.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't dependent on how the characters react to this knowledge.  The question is what clues such a scheme would leave.  That is a characteristic of the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; and thus on-topic here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/84004/2113&quot;&gt;Is Bob guaranteed to be robbed?&lt;/a&gt;  There, the question is how the story could be written such that Bob doesn't lose his boat to theft at the first port.  The answer is going to depend not just on what Bob does, but how the other characters react.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob could demonstrate his awesome weapons and scare away potential thieves.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob could cleverly fend off assailants by pitting them against each other.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob could recruit his own thugs...err, soldiers...to protect the boat.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob could appeal to the local legal authorities to protect him.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob could perform miracles and appeal to religious authorities for protection.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of those are potential solutions, but they are dependent on which story the author wants to tell.  Is Bob the clever type?  Can he communicate via pantomime well enough to pit potential assailants against each other?  Perhaps he is a champion charades player.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps Bob is a champion bartender.  He uses his solar-powered drinks blender to chop ice, scaring the locals.  Then he serves daiquiris.  Everyone loves him.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that weren't story-based, we could close it as Too Broad.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T07:15:17.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2017-06-21T11:02:47.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing is, Worldbuilding is an odd site. We're not like the others.&#xA;  We cover a wide range of topics, including science, linguistics, and&#xA;  history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not too weird. Skeptics.SE also covers a large range of topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this site because it's so diverse. Good content doesn't require you to be an expert on a specific narrow topic. The main things that help you is a good ability at problem-solving (which is what I like about computer programming) and a broad general knowledge, such as knowing about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20982/would-ritual-cannibalism-of-the-dead-lead-to-issues-with-disease&quot;&gt;kuru&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:02:47.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2017-06-21T12:37:27.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will play the Devil's Advocate on this question. &quot;The question &lt;em&gt;How to figure out someone is plagiarizing the future?&lt;/em&gt; is not about building something, shaking out the rules, or even exploring the consequences. It’s about plot and there is no way around it.&quot; As a good Devil's Advocate I shall be taking the contrary case and defend it against the charge of being plot-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will observe that plot is something much more complicated and subtle then seems to be its usage on this site. TL:DR the question is not about plot. Any answer explaining plot would be longer than is reasonable for an answer here. So I leave it with the observation this question isn't plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it is about is exploring the consequences. Specifically, about the consequences of someone stealing intellectual property from the future. More specifically, about the consequences of that theft that lead to its discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question itself, isn't exactly well framed and doesn't seem to have been thought through as cogently as it might have been. Sorry, to the OP, if you see this, but thems my opinion. By that, I mean my professional opinion both as a published author and as a former paralegal adviser; note that this is just what I think and my opinion is as good as anyone else's. The clunkiness doesn't make it easy reading. The fog of imprecise words and phrases can lead anyone to think this is all about plot. It is a worldbuilding element which will, presumably, go towards shaping the plot of the OP's story (if that is what the OP is doing), but it still is a worldbuilding element. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, this question could have been better framed along the following lines. I am sure others will be able to construct better versions of their own. &lt;em&gt;If someone was stealing information, knowledge, science and technology from the future, what consequences of this scheme will lead to its discovery?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDENDUM:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quote the following statement by Monica Cellio:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The scope for Writers includes the following relevant explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Asking to brainstorm ideas tailor-made for your particular story is &#xA;off-topic; that’s too specific to your own work. But identifying a&#xA;general scenario which naturally presents plotting difficulties is&#xA;on-topic.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those same reasons apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/171/storytelling-and-plot-building&quot;&gt;Storytelling and plot building&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question under discussion here is an example of a scenario with plotting difficulties and by exploring its consequences makes it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T12:50:49.643" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T12:50:49.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2017-06-22T00:38:36.123" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Independent or &lt;strong&gt;standalone answers that solve the issues in totally unrelated ways should be posted separately&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If assumptions are necessary to answer the question, use level-1 headers for each section of your answer&lt;/strong&gt;. If they can't share a common intro, and the ideas don't form a &lt;em&gt;progression&lt;/em&gt; so that each introduces the next, consider making separate posts, or that it might all be a giant waste of time; questions that are closed for any reason, and remain so, are auto-deleted in about a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T00:38:36.123" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-22T00:38:36.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2017-06-23T21:30:43.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent a bit of time digging into this. I looked at the past 365 of questions posted on the site to get the numbers. Here is what I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the past 365 days, there were &lt;strong&gt;6,534&lt;/strong&gt; questions asked, of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3,313 have received at least one close vote or flag,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2,135 questions were closed, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1,534 of the questions had at least one close vote or flag that aged away, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of the questions that were closed, 139 were reopened by the community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaking these numbers down by close reasons, here are the total number of *flags/votes on questions, and then total number of those votes/flags that aged away by close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------------------+&#xA;|                                Flag/Close Vote Reason                                 | # Flags / CVs | # Flags / CVs Aged Away |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------------------+&#xA;| Too broad                                                                             |          4394 |                     881 |&#xA;| Primarily opinion-based                                                               |          2892 |                     601 |&#xA;| Off-topic This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the sco |          2393 |                     424 |&#xA;| Unclear what you're asking                                                            |          2108 |                     389 |&#xA;| Off-topic You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about buil |          1202 |                     322 |&#xA;| Duplicate                                                                             |          1196 |                     186 |&#xA;| Off-topic Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)                              |           164 |                      48 |&#xA;| Off-topic This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network         |            62 |                       1 |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------------------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked at the questions that had been closed and then received reopen votes/flags to see how many of them aged away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+&#xA;|                                     Close Reason                                      | # Reopen Votes | # Reopen Votes Aged Away |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+&#xA;| Too broad                                                                             |            152 |                        4 |&#xA;| Off-topic This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the sco |            111 |                        0 |&#xA;| Unclear what you're asking                                                            |            111 |                        3 |&#xA;| Primarily opinion-based                                                               |             98 |                        9 |&#xA;| Off-topic You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about buil |             60 |                        2 |&#xA;| Duplicate                                                                             |             52 |                        2 |&#xA;| Off-topic Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)                              |              4 |                        0 |&#xA;| Off-topic This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network         |              3 |                        0 |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far fewer reopen votes were cast, so even less of them aged away, but over the past year, approximately 19% of close votes/flags aged away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As requested here are the comparisons to the other sites on the network for Pct Aged Away:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+&#xA;|                     Site Name                     | Pct Aged Away |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+&#xA;| Freelancing Stack Exchange                        | 54.18         |&#xA;| Esperanto Language Stack Exchange                 | 47.58         |&#xA;| Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange            | 45.88         |&#xA;| Martial Arts                                      | 42.35         |&#xA;| Sustainable Living                                | 40            |&#xA;| Stack Overflow                                    | 37.59         |&#xA;| Homebrew                                          | 33.33         |&#xA;| Coffee Stack Exchange                             | 31.86         |&#xA;| Linguistics                                       | 30.97         |&#xA;| Super User                                        | 29.88         |&#xA;| Health Stack Exchange                             | 29.16         |&#xA;| Graphic Design                                    | 28.75         |&#xA;| 3D Printing Stack Exchange                        | 28.54         |&#xA;| Chinese Language and Usage                        | 28.16         |&#xA;| Mythology Stack Exchange                          | 26.9          |&#xA;| History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange | 26.53         |&#xA;| Audio-Video Production                            | 26.31         |&#xA;| Programmers                                       | 25.67         |&#xA;| Arduino Stack Exchange                            | 24.88         |&#xA;| Tridion Stack Exchange                            | 24.75         |&#xA;| Computer Science                                  | 24.64         |&#xA;| Software Recommendations Stack Exchange           | 24.39         |&#xA;| Amateur Radio Stack Exchange                      | 24.22         |&#xA;| Photography                                       | 24.11         |&#xA;| Open Data Stack Exchange                          | 23.95         |&#xA;| Project Management                                | 23.9          |&#xA;| Jewish Life and Learning                          | 23.78         |&#xA;| Open Source Stack Exchange                        | 23.51         |&#xA;| Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Repair              | 22.96         |&#xA;| Emacs Stack Exchange                              | 22.77         |&#xA;| Server Fault                                      | 22.65         |&#xA;| Game Developers                                   | 22.65         |&#xA;| German Language and Usage                         | 22.24         |&#xA;| elementary OS Stack Exchange                      | 22.07         |&#xA;| Beer Stack Exchange                               | 21.95         |&#xA;| Quantitative Finance                              | 21.69         |&#xA;| Startups Stack Exchange                           | 21.4          |&#xA;| Pets Stack Exchange                               | 21.26         |&#xA;| Law Stack Exchange                                | 21.17         |&#xA;| Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange                | 21.11         |&#xA;| Expatriates Stack Exchange                        | 20.97         |&#xA;| Literature                                        | 20.75         |&#xA;| Economics                                         | 20.69         |&#xA;| Korean Language Stack Exchange                    | 20.59         |&#xA;| Ebooks Stack Exchange                             | 20.41         |&#xA;| Cognitive Sciences                                | 19.99         |&#xA;| Worldbuilding Stack Exchange                      | 19.75         |&#xA;| Latin Language Stack Exchange                     | 19.75         |&#xA;| The Great Outdoors                                | 19.66         |&#xA;| CiviCRM Stack Exchange                            | 19.08         |&#xA;| Cooking                                           | 18.97         |&#xA;| Moderators Stack Exchange                         | 18.75         |&#xA;| Music Fans Stack Exchange                         | 18.16         |&#xA;| Philosophy                                        | 17.7          |&#xA;| WordPress                                         | 17.16         |&#xA;| Buddhism Stack Exchange                           | 17.14         |&#xA;| Chess                                             | 17.11         |&#xA;| Politics                                          | 17.11         |&#xA;| Arts &amp;amp; Crafts Stack Exchange                      | 17.11         |&#xA;| Lifehacks Stack Exchange                          | 17.06         |&#xA;| Writers                                           | 16.75         |&#xA;| Theoretical Computer Science                      | 16.62         |&#xA;| Raspberry Pi                                      | 16.18         |&#xA;| Retrocomputing Stack Exchange                     | 15.98         |&#xA;| Sitecore Stack Exchange                           | 15.59         |&#xA;| Internet of Things Stack Exchange                 | 15.55         |&#xA;| Computer Graphics Stack Exchange                  | 15.49         |&#xA;| Gardening and Landscaping                         | 15.31         |&#xA;| Biology                                           | 15.3          |&#xA;| Stack Overflow на русском                         | 15.2          |&#xA;| Woodworking Stack Exchange                        | 15.18         |&#xA;| ExpressionEngine                                  | 15.15         |&#xA;| Bicycles                                          | 14.91         |&#xA;| Russian Language and Usage                        | 14.86         |&#xA;| Aviation Stack Exchange                           | 14.58         |&#xA;| Astronomy                                         | 14.57         |&#xA;| Language Learning Stack Exchange                  | 14.14         |&#xA;| Sports                                            | 14.09         |&#xA;| English Language Learners                         | 13.94         |&#xA;| Apple                                             | 13.67         |&#xA;| Sound Design Stack Exchange                       | 13.63         |&#xA;| Blender Stack Exchange                            | 13.62         |&#xA;| Islam                                             | 13.59         |&#xA;| Computational Science                             | 13.28         |&#xA;| Board and Card Games                              | 13.16         |&#xA;| Earth Science Stack Exchange                      | 13.06         |&#xA;| Hinduism Stack Exchange                           | 12.86         |&#xA;| Skeptics                                          | 12.75         |&#xA;| Engineering Stack Exchange                        | 12.64         |&#xA;| Puzzling Stack Exchange                           | 12.41         |&#xA;| Movies                                            | 12.38         |&#xA;| Personal Productivity                             | 12.33         |&#xA;| Japanese Language and Usage                       | 12.1          |&#xA;| Personal Finance and Money                        | 12.09         |&#xA;| Bitcoin                                           | 12.01         |&#xA;| Windows Phone                                     | 11.83         |&#xA;| Parenting                                         | 11.68         |&#xA;| Android Enthusiasts                               | 11.63         |&#xA;| Software Quality Assurance and Testing            | 11.62         |&#xA;| Biblical Hermeneutics                             | 11.5          |&#xA;| Role-playing Games                                | 11.29         |&#xA;| French Language and Usage                         | 10.92         |&#xA;| The Workplace                                     | 10.87         |&#xA;| Vi and Vim Stack Exchange                         | 10.84         |&#xA;| MathOverflow                                      | 10.76         |&#xA;| Christianity                                      | 10.75         |&#xA;| Signal Processing                                 | 10.66         |&#xA;| Science Fiction                                   | 10.61         |&#xA;| Travel                                            | 10.61         |&#xA;| Stack Overflow em Português                       | 10.11         |&#xA;| Ethereum Stack Exchange                           | 10.1          |&#xA;| Web Apps                                          | 10.07         |&#xA;| Home Improvement                                  | 9.95          |&#xA;| Mathematics                                       | 9.56          |&#xA;| Fitness and Nutrition                             | 9.51          |&#xA;| Mathematics Educators Stack Exchange              | 9.51          |&#xA;| Space Exploration Stack Exchange                  | 8.98          |&#xA;| Statistical Analysis                              | 8.96          |&#xA;| Portuguese Language Stack Exchange                | 8.82          |&#xA;| Academia                                          | 8.76          |&#xA;| History                                           | 8.65          |&#xA;| Joomla Stack Exchange                             | 8.6           |&#xA;| Data Science Stack Exchange                       | 8.36          |&#xA;| Ubuntu                                            | 8.26          |&#xA;| Code Review                                       | 8.08          |&#xA;| Spanish Language and Usage                        | 7.92          |&#xA;| Patents                                           | 7.81          |&#xA;| English Language and Usage                        | 7.8           |&#xA;| Salesforce                                        | 7.8           |&#xA;| SharePoint                                        | 7.76          |&#xA;| Stack Overflow en español                         | 7.74          |&#xA;| Genealogy and Family History                      | 7.5           |&#xA;| Hardware Recommendations Stack Exchange           | 7.46          |&#xA;| Monero Stack Exchange                             | 7.44          |&#xA;| Database Administrators                           | 7.31          |&#xA;| Magento                                           | 7.28          |&#xA;| Gaming                                            | 7.26          |&#xA;| LEGO®                                             | 7.19          |&#xA;| Italian Language Stack Exchange                   | 7.14          |&#xA;| Poker                                             | 7.01          |&#xA;| IT Security                                       | 6.91          |&#xA;| User Experience                                   | 6.86          |&#xA;| Craft CMS Stack Exchange                          | 6.69          |&#xA;| Physics                                           | 6.66          |&#xA;| Code Golf                                         | 6.6           |&#xA;| Musical Practice and Performance                  | 6.39          |&#xA;| Drupal Answers                                    | 6.3           |&#xA;| Electronics and Robotics                          | 6.27          |&#xA;| Mathematica                                       | 6.22          |&#xA;| Anime and Manga                                   | 5.89          |&#xA;| Unix and Linux                                    | 5.64          |&#xA;| Robotics                                          | 5.2           |&#xA;| Cryptography                                      | 5.06          |&#xA;| Chemistry                                         | 4.65          |&#xA;| GIS                                               | 4.62          |&#xA;| Stack Apps                                        | 4.4           |&#xA;| Webmasters                                        | 3.52          |&#xA;| TeX - LaTeX                                       | 3.32          |&#xA;| Tor Stack Exchange                                | 3.18          |&#xA;| Network Engineering Stack Exchange                | 1.44          |&#xA;+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="552" LastEditorUserId="552" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T18:26:10.607" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:26:10.607" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5117" CreationDate="2017-06-25T04:06:04.037" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world Series&lt;/a&gt; today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this will be a great help to users, especially new ones, to improve their map making skill when creating a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any post like &quot;collection of tips&quot; so we can direct new users to improve their posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T04:45:23.560" Title="Collection of beginner tips thread?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5116" CreationDate="2017-06-25T04:45:23.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed such a post. We had issues with new users having trouble with their questions a while ago, so we as a community had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3567/6986&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; and, from that, devised a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624/6986&quot;&gt;parameters&lt;/a&gt; that questions should meet to be acceptable by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T04:45:23.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5094" CreationDate="2017-06-25T19:16:04.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if the highest voted answer has 3 votes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there should be some sort of minimum (overall) participation before a policy decision is made and perhaps some special tag for &quot;imminent policy change&quot; that we can monitor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is such a policy change vote on the board, one of the answers could be &quot;ABSTAIN&quot;, so we can at least see people have seen the imminent policy change and don't care -- thus knowing we have reached a sufficient level of exposure to conclude that a consensus has been reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T19:16:04.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5123" CreationDate="2017-06-26T10:50:33.643" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be really neat to have great answers related to the same type of worldbuilding setting gathered in the same place, sorted and easily accessed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know, a collection of the best hand-picked answers related to classic fantasy, or a certain type of planet, a specific environment, or regarding time travel, etc, with answers sorted into different categories. Sort of like a wiki page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new here, so I wonder if this is perhaps is something that is already happening somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39702" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T12:28:24.407" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T08:54:36.987" Title="Is there an effort anywhere to collect related answers in an accessible way?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2017-06-26T16:20:13.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;best hand-picked&quot; probably won't happen. You may make a meta-post about some series if you feel like it, but hand picking of answers by moderators or staff members is against the idea of community moderation that drives the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in some topic, look at its tag, that's what they are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:31:45.313" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:31:45.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2017-06-27T07:36:15.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No(t in the sense you are asking)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why are answers not hand-picked?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hand-picking&quot; is very difficult as everyone has different tastes. It's not in the interest of StackExchange to provide a curated list of &quot;moderators monthly picks&quot;. Everyone has the right to participate and together we decide as a community what defines &quot;good&quot; and &quot;not so good&quot;. The opinions about these categories can vary widely between individuals. I don't know what you would like. I only know what I like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always search for the tags and then sort the result by votes. For example to search for great time-travelling answers you can search &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5btime-travel%5d%20is%3aanswer&quot;&gt;[time-travel] is:answer&lt;/a&gt; and then sort by votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;a lot of different tags&lt;/a&gt; for every occasion. Choose your favourites and browse a bit through them by clicking on one of them and then you can for example sort them by votes to see the communities favourites. We have a few hundred tags, so it's highly likely that you will find something you are interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a good idea to keep an eye out for the tags on your favourite questions. Maybe they use a term you are not familiar with and you can find whole new categories that you like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Search tips&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a Meta Post with some tips about using the search bar that is located in the upper right hand corner. You can find it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4866/search-tips-wanted-please&quot;&gt;Search tips wanted please&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore there is a great article about searching questions and answers in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. You can see a shorter versions by clicking on &quot;Advanced Search Tips&quot; in the upper right hand corner after searching something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my personal favourites to find what you may be looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use &quot;is:q&quot; to search only for questions -&gt; reduces clutter &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use &quot;is:a&quot; to search only for answers -&gt; if you are searching for great answers this may be your best bet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use tags with &quot;[stuff]&quot; -&gt; best way to find stuff from a certain category&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add keywords like &quot;multiple dimensions&quot; -&gt; if you are thinking about something more specialized because there are too many questions in your result, such as when only browsing the tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove categories and keywords with a minus when the term is ambiguous -&gt; for example search &quot;is:q mercury -[planets]&quot; to search for questions related to mercury the element and not Mercury the planet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use &quot;score:x&quot; to only view stuff with at least x upvotes -&gt; if you like sorting by &quot;relevance&quot; it might be a good idea to limit the search to what you consider is a &quot;good&quot; upvote count in your query (&lt;strong&gt;Hint&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5120/is-there-an-effort-anywhere-to-collect-related-answers-in-an-accessible-way/5123?noredirect=1#comment14498_5123&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;In searches, &lt;code&gt;votes:N&lt;/code&gt; is a synonym for &lt;code&gt;score:N&lt;/code&gt;.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Favourites&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can favourite (star) your favourite questions to access the greatest answer on the site for your scenario and in your opinion. Whenever you see a great answer you can just star the corresponding question. You have access to your personal list of favourites in your profile on a dedicated tab and by sorting this list by activity you can always see whenever something happens on such a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can arbitrarily choose questions you like this list is highly personal and whenever you see activity on this tab it's probably something you are interested in. No need to rely on others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Favourite tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center has an interesting post about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/interesting-topics&quot;&gt;How do I find topics I'm interested in?&lt;/a&gt;. It contains many of the tips I already presented in this post but it also mentions the feature to add favourite tags. Questions that use a tag which you favourited in this way are highlighted on the homepage so that it's easier for you to see them. This way you always up-to-date when it comes to your favourite topics and it's easier to find new interesting posts in these categories. This helps to keep your personal list of starred questions up-to-date, as it's easier for you to see new good posts that you are likely interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the right side of the homepage you can see a link that says &quot;set tag preferences&quot;. By clicking on it you get to your profile settings where you can add favourite tags and ignored tags, which would not be shown on your homepage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5120/is-there-an-effort-anywhere-to-collect-related-answers-in-an-accessible-way/5123?noredirect=1#comment14556_5123&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling again&lt;/a&gt; had a very nice addition to this: Atom Feeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With most RSS-Readers you should be able to read the newest additions to your favourite tags. Example number 1 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=science-based+planets&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;[science-based] [planets] sorted by newest&lt;/a&gt; and example number 2 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=planets&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;[planets] sorted by newest&lt;/a&gt;. This is a nice addition if you want to always be up-to-date when it comes to your favourite tags and if you don't want to check WorldBuilding.SE all the time to get information about new and possibly interesting question in the categories you are interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T08:54:36.987" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T08:54:36.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5125" CreationDate="2017-06-27T12:42:08.783" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to discuss the usage of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/4chan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;4chan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;4chan&lt;/a&gt; tag on Meta, as I think it is unnecessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While looking through our Meta tags I found the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/4chan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;4chan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;4chan&lt;/a&gt; tag which belongs to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3744/is-there-any-section-of-4chan-that-is-suitable-for-worldbuilding-questions&quot;&gt;Is there any section of 4chan that is suitable for worldbuilding questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself looks like it would be better on a Meta Site from 4chan (if something like that exists; I don't know much about the site). There hasn't been any activity on the question in roughly a year, it's currently at +0/-3 with one answer of +2/-0 and one answer of +0/-2. The positive answer suggests some topics on 4chan that might be useful for WorldBuilders who are having trouble with their questions getting closed here on WorldBuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/4chan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;4chan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;4chan&lt;/a&gt; tag doesn't have any tag description or tag wiki. As far as I can tell it hasn't been used for any other question. It's sole purpose in the last year seems to have been this one moderately downvoted question about places on 4chan to ask worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag doesn't seem to be useful for our community, so in my opinion it would be best to remove it. What does the community think? Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/4chan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;4chan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;4chan&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T13:13:08.270" Title="Do we need the [4chan] tag on Meta?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5124" CreationDate="2017-06-27T13:13:08.270" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've removed the tag.  I've also closed the question, which is asking about &lt;em&gt;4chan&lt;/em&gt;, not about &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; (our site).  Meta is for questions about our site or about the SE software, not about where else on the Internet to ask worldbuilding questions.  (It would be possible to ask a worldbuilding-resources question &lt;em&gt;on main&lt;/em&gt; that involves other sites, but that's not what happened here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T13:13:08.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2017-06-27T14:18:50.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's easy for new users to see the feedback others give them about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point is inspired by a comment under the functional requirement &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5104/28789&quot;&gt;It's easy for members to give feedback about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5099/rethinking-the-sandbox-what-are-the-functional-requirements/5104?noredirect=1#comment14504_5104&quot;&gt;nitsua60&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a problem here in that the person most in need of that vote-information--the brand-new user with a question that needs work--can only see the net vote, not the breakout of up- and down-votes? (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;established user&lt;/a&gt; privilege.) And being meta, they don't have rep gains/losses to figure that out....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal take on this is that in our current WorldBuilding Sandbox most of the time people share an opinion. Normally the post stays at +0/-0 for the most time and once it's ready it might get 1 to 3 upvotes from people checking back on older drafts regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is blatantly bad they would get downvotes quite quickly and rarely got upvotes at all. But there would be a lot of comments. In these cases the drafts were sometimes edited, but rarely got any upvotes and people rarely changed their mind to make a downvote an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see deleted posts and therefore cannot check if my hypothesis holds its ground for the deleted posts that are currently there. And of course I didn't check every 5 minutes on every post if something happened and there is no visible history of voting on a post that I could see, so the above is more of a personal sentiment to indicate that I don't see this as a big problem or a big functionality requirement, as the sentiment seems to be coherent most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any drafts that generated a lot discussion and where a new user couldn't see a clear feedback and posted a draft that was something like +5/-3 because they thought it was positive and could therefore be posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless I want to add that in an ideal &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; new users would be able to see the break-down to see whether everyone thinks a draft is good/bad or if people have different opinions. It could theoretically lead to a problem if new users cannot see the vote break-down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T14:18:50.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5128" CreationDate="2017-06-29T12:23:11.920" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please bear with me as I'm new to the 2k moderation tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title suggest, what to do with worldbuilding posts that entered low-quality queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not about obvious posts that should be deleted or closed, but rather a borderline low-quality posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/84868/34288&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the example, which is in my opinion I'd see rather deleted if not improved, although it started a hint toward a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/12459/how-long-should-we-wait-to-flag-low-quality-on-barely-acceptable-answer&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt; in Meta SuperUser, we should immediately flag an answer as low-quality, if we think it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what is the general mood in Worldbuilding about borderline low-quality posts that can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we pick &lt;code&gt;Looks OK&lt;/code&gt; while it's in borderline low-quality? Or should Recommend deletion? Or should we leave it in the queue (for x hours) waiting for editing, then close when unacted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T13:09:16.877" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T14:18:08.640" Title="What to do with worldbuilding posts that entered low-quality queue?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-29T14:50:24.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5127" CreationDate="2017-06-29T13:47:30.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific answer linked to in the question references a short story by a named author, and points to where it can be found, but does not really describe the solution used by that author, short of a brief mention that the specific solution is not explicitly discussed in the work in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is effectively what we already consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1731/29&quot;&gt;an outgrowth of link-only answers&lt;/a&gt;, and besides the network-wide consensus that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370/157730&quot;&gt;link-only answers are not answers&lt;/a&gt;, those have been discussed here previously in the specific context of Worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The consensus there is essentially (but do follow the links for a more in-depth discussion) that &lt;em&gt;such answers are not answers&lt;/em&gt;. Because they are not answers, if they are posted as answers, they should be deleted.&lt;/strong&gt; A diamond moderator can choose to convert a non-answer answer to a comment, but don't fret it if a moderator isn't around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, in a case like this, you would (depending on your reputation) most likely pick either &lt;em&gt;Recommend Deletion&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Delete&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;if you don't know what to do with a post you are reviewing, never be afraid to click &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; In the review queues, &quot;Skip&quot; literally means &quot;I don't know what to do with this post&quot;. Clicking &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt; is never the &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; choice. It might be a &lt;em&gt;suboptimal&lt;/em&gt; choice, but you will be leaving making an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; choice to those in the community who feel more confident about what to do with the post in question. &lt;strong&gt;It's better to click &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt; than to click &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt; if you are uncertain.&lt;/strong&gt; Heck, I've had a diamond right here on Worldbuilding, and I've been close to being elected moderator twice, and I end up clicking Skip in review queues more often than I really care to admit, for a wide variety of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth keeping in mind that except for diamond moderators, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;delete votes are just that, votes&lt;/a&gt;. It takes at least a few delete votes to actually delete a post, and the number of delete votes needed to delete a post grows with things like the net score of the post in question. So no matter what you do, unless you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;a diamond attached to your name here&lt;/a&gt;, it won't be &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; you who delete a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, deletes in the Stack Exchange model are soft deletes; the post will remain viewable to high reputation users, who are able to vote to undelete, or flag for moderator attention, if they feel it shouldn't have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person who wrote a post which has been deleted can access it relatively easily for a while by going to their profile, following the tab link to either &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;, and at the bottom of that page following the link to &lt;em&gt;deleted recent questions&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;deleted recent answers&lt;/em&gt;, as appropriate. They are then able to edit it to bring it in line with the site's standards, after which they can either flag it for moderator attention or simply bring it up e.g. in chat to draw attention to it and hopefully have it undeleted, or failing that, at least receive further advice on how the post needs to be improved before it can be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T14:18:08.640" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T14:18:08.640" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T07:47:42.137" Score="14" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see Codegolf is running ads for its sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/11411?url=https%3a%2f%2fcodegolf.meta.stackexchange.com%2fq%2f2140%2f40695&amp;amp;s=bf781533223349c144b871da1193d91017b4bee291ce1187d717771168b0db90&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n3xsb.png&quot; alt=&quot;ad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don’t we do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If making ads, note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5801/28&quot;&gt;required dimensions&lt;/a&gt; are 600x500 px (or 300x250).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T21:04:01.777" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T15:12:42.210" Title="Sandbox promotion and awareness" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:36:07.573" Score="8" ViewCount="539" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5089/28&quot;&gt;previous discussion&lt;/a&gt; about a problem our sandbox is currently facing (auto-protection).  We then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5099/28&quot;&gt;gathered some functional requirements&lt;/a&gt;, which I summarize here (I've consolidated some similar ones):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody, including new users, can use the sandbox to post draft questions for review. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody in the community can provide feedback on sandbox questions, and it is easy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily see current sandbox questions without digging through obsolete questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily tell whether a sandbox question is active or obsolete. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be just like the regular posting experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's easy for new users to see the feedback others give them about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The impact of the Sandbox is easily visible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maintenance of the sandbox can be shared by the community (including protection if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Relatively) fast feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The graduated drafts do not take up too much space.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the several suggestions we received from a CM, two appear to not have fatal flaws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove auto-protection from our meta.  (It has to be all-or-nothing, not just one question.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instead of a sandbox &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, use a sandbox &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;.  Each sandbox question is its own meta question, to be archived in some way when resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other solutions might exist beyond these two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there's the status quo -- do nothing, and continue to monitor the sandbox and unprotect it when needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should we do about the sandbox?&lt;/strong&gt;  In your answer, please &lt;strong&gt;describe a solution&lt;/strong&gt; and then &lt;strong&gt;assess it against the requirements&lt;/strong&gt;.  In particular, please identify requirements it &lt;strong&gt;does not satisfy&lt;/strong&gt;.  It's going to be hard to satisfy all requirements, so we might end up having to decide to sacrifice some less-important ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've provided an answer for the status quo to demonstrate what I'm asking for.  That doesn't mean I'm supporting the status quo as the solution; I want us to discuss all the options we think might work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox question is again triggering auto-protection with every deletion, so I'm featuring this question in hopes that we can decide what to do before (by default) rebooting it &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T15:13:56.243" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:02:15.833" Title="How shall we make the sandbox work better?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:36:07.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Status quo&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is one active question.  Its accepted answer provides a log of &amp;quot;graduates&amp;quot; (links to sandboxed questions that were asked on main).  Other answers are sandbox drafts.  People use comments and votes on those answers to provide feedback.  &amp;quot;Graduates&amp;quot; and abandoned posts are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Requirements assessment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody, including new users, can use the sandbox to post draft questions for review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost.&lt;/strong&gt;  Posting on meta requires 5 rep.  Beyond that, anybody can post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody in the community can provide feedback on sandbox questions, and it is easy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of.&lt;/strong&gt;  Commenting requires 50 rep (except on your own post).  Voting requires 15 (up) or 125 (down).  Editing requires high rep (I think 2000) except for the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily see current sandbox questions without digging through obsolete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Obsolete questions are deleted, so in the default view current questions are sorted to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily tell whether a sandbox question is active or obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; (see previous point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be just like the regular posting experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;  Same markdown, same site features.  (Tags are slightly different, but there's a way to show tagging.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy for new users to see the feedback others give them about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments produce notifications and are visible below the post.  New users can't see vote breakdowns without a userscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impact of the Sandbox is easily visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; The accepted answer with the list is at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintenance of the sandbox can be shared by the community (including protection if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of.&lt;/strong&gt;  Deleting inactive posts and unprotecting when it gets auto-protected require high-rep users or, practically, mods, but they can be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Relatively) fast feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; A new or edited answer bumps the meta question.  New sandbox answers feed into chat through a bot.  The rest is up to the users. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graduated drafts do not take up too much space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; So long as you're not digging through deleted posts, yes.  If you're digging through deleted posts, they can sometimes be voluminous.  (Why are you digging through deleted sandbox posts? :-) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:36:07.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-04T11:45:54.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Switching to a tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal is to create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; tag on meta. There should also be one Q&amp;amp;A on meta which provides the information on how to use the sandbox. The accepted answer to that would include a list of graduated questions. A script similar to that used for the old topic challenges could even be created to automatically generate the graduated questions list!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People use answers on a question to suggest new versions of it. They use comments to give smaller bits of feedback. Votes on proposed questions and the main question itself give feedback on how ready something is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Requirements assessment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody, including new users, can use the sandbox to post draft questions for review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost.&lt;/strong&gt;  Posting on meta requires 5 rep.  Beyond that, anybody can post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody in the community can provide feedback on sandbox questions, and it is easy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is improved as posting a new answer requires less reputation (5?) than commenting which requires 50 rep (except on your own post).  Voting requires 15 (up) or 125 (down).  Editing requires high rep (I think 2000) except for the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily see current sandbox questions without digging through obsolete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still have the option to delete obsolete questions and can sort the questions in the tag by recent activity. Another option would be to have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox-complete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox-complete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox-complete&lt;/a&gt; and move them to that when complete. This would also automatically give a list of completed sandbox questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily tell whether a sandbox question is active or obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; (see previous point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be just like the regular posting experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;  Same markdown, same site features.  (Tags are slightly different, but there's a way to show tagging.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy for new users to see the feedback others give them about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments and answers produce notifications and are visible below the post.  New users can't see vote breakdowns without a userscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impact of the Sandbox is easily visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; A link to the accepted answer with the list should be added to the tag description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintenance of the sandbox can be shared by the community (including protection if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, changing tags requires significantly lower permissions than deleting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Relatively) fast feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; A new or edited answer bumps the question.  New sandbox answers feed into chat through a bot. The rest is up to the users. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graduated drafts do not take up too much space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; If they are moved to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox-complete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox-complete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox-complete&lt;/a&gt; then they only appear at all if looked for. Alternatively if &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox-complete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox-complete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox-complete&lt;/a&gt; is just added without removing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; then a search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sandbox-complete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox-complete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox-complete&lt;/a&gt; would be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T20:56:03.127" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-04T13:54:54.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Status quo with modifications to the Meta Site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lowering the required rep to post an answer to any Meta Post to 1 (currently 5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;raising the threshold for automatic protection of Meta Posts to a level that it is effectively disabled&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is one active question.  Its accepted answer provides a log of &amp;quot;graduates&amp;quot; (links to sandboxed questions that were asked on main).  Other answers are sandbox drafts.  People use comments and votes on those answers to provide feedback.  &amp;quot;Graduates&amp;quot; and abandoned posts are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Requirements assessment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody, including new users, can use the sandbox to post draft questions for review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;  Currently posting on meta requires 5 rep.  There has been a discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4896/should-the-rep-requirement-for-meta-be-lowered-to-1&quot;&gt;lowering the rep requirement on Meta to 1&lt;/a&gt; where Monica propsed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5087/28789&quot;&gt;lower the rep required to post answers on Meta to 1&lt;/a&gt;. This way users with &amp;lt; 5 rep can post questions on Meta about their questions and can answer posts on Meta, which allows them to use the Sandbox and get early feedback even on their first questions if they want to give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody in the community can provide feedback on sandbox questions, and it is easy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of.&lt;/strong&gt;  Commenting requires 50 rep (except on your own post).  Voting requires 15 (up) or 125 (down).  Editing requires 2,000 rep except for the author as long as the post is not a community wiki. Editing a community wiki would be possible with 100 rep. New users could therefore not participate in giving others feedback as they are normally the ones in need of feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily see current sandbox questions without digging through obsolete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Obsolete questions are deleted, so in the default view current questions are sorted to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community members can easily tell whether a sandbox question is active or obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; (see previous point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be just like the regular posting experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;  Same markdown, same site features.  (Tags are slightly different, but there's a way to show tagging.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy for new users to see the feedback others give them about whether the question is ready for the Main site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments produce notifications and are visible below the post.  New users can't see vote breakdowns without a userscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impact of the Sandbox is easily visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; The accepted answer with the list is at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintenance of the sandbox can be shared by the community (including protection if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of.&lt;/strong&gt;  Deleting inactive posts require high-rep users or, practically, mods, but they can be flagged. Furthermore &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5089/can-someone-please-raise-the-protection-limit-of-the-sandbox&quot;&gt;the limit for automatic protection by the community bot should be raised on the Meta Site&lt;/a&gt; so that the Sandbox won't be automatically protected, which would sort of defeat the purpose of the Sandbox by excluding the newest users with under 10 rep. The exclusion would normally be temporarily until someone realizes that the Sandbox has been protected and until a mod or high rep user has acted on this, but this is still unnecessary manual overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Relatively) fast feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; A new or edited answer bumps the meta question.  New sandbox answers feed into chat through a bot.  The rest is up to the users. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graduated drafts do not take up too much space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; So long as you're not digging through deleted posts, yes.  If you're digging through deleted posts, they can sometimes be voluminous.  (Why are you digging through deleted sandbox posts? :-) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Drawbacks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users with under 5 rep could post answers to any post on the Meta site.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Currently the traffic seems to be low enough to handle low rep users potentially participating in Meta discussions, but theoretically they could post on any existing question, which is not possible as per the current modus operandi of WB.SE Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Posts can't automatically be protected anymore from users with under 10 rep.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I haven't seen many posts that were in need of an automatic protection and I can't remember a lot of Meta Posts that were protected, either manually or automatically, except for the Sandbox. I don't think it will hurt to basically disable automatic protection for the Meta Site, but it's still a change that would affect the whole Meta Site. Note that manual protection would still be possible if these changes would introduce a lot of low-quality content from low rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T09:11:18.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-04T15:36:54.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an enthusiast but relatively new user of worldbuilding, and a nonuser of sandbox and (until this post) meta.  I am sure I do not understand the merits and history of the sandbox.  I humbly submit that there exists a site which meets all the bullet point functional requirements listed in this question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect most new users with a question to ask find the stack and post it.  Any user savvy enough to discover the existence of / negotiate the use of the sandbox is already a stack sophisticate.  Rather than maintain a question detention camp site for reeducation of inadequates, one could make the case to improve the site that exists and let new questions sink or swim along with the rest.  It would be simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect of the main site which would help in this regard is to require text explanation on close votes, many of which are inscrutable to me.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="31698" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T17:53:27.363" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T17:53:27.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4377" CreationDate="2017-07-04T16:19:14.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101932/cartography&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RyCAE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cartography Stack Exchange proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T16:19:14.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-04T20:18:06.217" Score="8" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few questions, including my own, being closed for being 'too opinion based'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what's wrong with that? I think that in the SE philosophy opinion based questions are bad because they are not reusable - meaning they aren't any help for people visiting the site to find useful answers for their problems. However in this particular site it's hardly an issue - I don't see many people googling and finding answers they actually need here, since every case is unique and requires thought. that's the beauty of this site. It creates interesting, enriching discussions about people's ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone wants to discuss their ideas, where's the harm if their question is opinion based? Does it make it less interesting to discuss? Isn't interesting discussions the purpose of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example these two question (with some of the highest scores in the site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32086/santa-is-satan-but-why&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51210/if-time-travel-is-possible-in-the-future-no-matter-how-distant-why-havent-the/64232#64232&quot;&gt;If time travel is possible in the future, no matter how distant, why haven't they come back to tell us?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both, I think you'd agree, are highly opinion-based, and the rating / acceptance of answers is also subjective and based on people's fondness of the answer more than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They weren't closed, though, presumably because they were so popular and interesting. If we use this selectively for unpopular questions, I think we shouldn't use it at all. People can just choose not to participate in discussions that are not hard-science enough for them, can't they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we really need to close questions that are opinion based?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;related: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4270/putting-opinion-based-questions-on-hold-too-fast&quot;&gt;Putting opinion based questions on hold, too fast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4623/primarily-opinion-based-is-a-reason-to-edit-not-to-close&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Primarily Opinion Based&amp;quot; is a reason to edit, not to close&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4284/hot-or-not-the-opinion-based-question-the-sandbox-game&quot;&gt;Hot or Not - the Opinion based question, the sandbox game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30512" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T17:49:22.390" Title="The problem with opinion based questions" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2017-07-05T09:44:06.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that most of your concerns are addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important part &lt;em&gt;for me&lt;/em&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We never claimed that subjective questions were horrible abominations that should never be asked. We simply choose to forego those subjective discussions, as there were dozens upon dozens of forums which already catered to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T09:44:06.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2017-07-05T13:42:20.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having spent a lot of time on this site I find that the difference between a very popular question and a closed for opinion question is razor thin if any.&#xA;More likely the popular questions just slipped by somehow while the opinion police were not watching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going over &quot;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&quot;checklist on these questions does not yield any prediction on if the question will be closed or one of the top voted questions for the month.  At the end of the day it feels like a couple of people who enjoy casting the close votes get to decide if they like the questions based on personal bias to the question, and not the idea of to broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I think this is a problem across the entire stack exchange community.  As a question is being closed there is no way to reopen it.  Close requirements do not seem to strongly reflect the community's opinion.  The only way for people to fight a close vote is to wait for a close and then vote to reopen.  By then the questions are of the front page and are lost, and the only way to get a fair look is to post the question in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all arises from one thing.  Things sometimes seem to broad or too opinion based to people who don't know the answer.  Very often what seems like an open problem becomes very closed and tight the moment a good answer is given.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I think closing questions as too broad or too opinion based needs to happen, the community strongly needs to err in the direction of letting a question mature, and see if good answers bring things into focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5156" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T04:41:54.077" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T04:41:54.077" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5143" CreationDate="2017-07-05T14:00:15.343" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to embed two YouTube videos in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/85389/3106&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;, but they don't show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't these work here, or did I put in an invalid link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3106" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:11:57.947" Title="No Youtube embedded videos here?" Tags="|support|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5141" CreationDate="2017-07-05T20:11:57.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;YouTube embedding is not available by default on Stack Exchange.  A few sites have made requests to have it turned on, so it's possible.  (It's kind of like MathJax in that regard, I guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, a request to enable a special feature should take the form of a feature request that lays out the case for its benefit on the site in question.  I assume there's some downside to YouTube embedding, some reason they don't just enable it everywhere.  I think that the sites that have it had to show that it added significant value.  I see how that could easily be the case on Movies &amp;amp; TV or Music; it's less obvious to me for Worldbuilding.  Which doesn't mean it's not; I haven't thought much about it, nor reviewed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=www.youtube.com&quot;&gt;186 occurrences of www.youtube.com on main&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest looking for the feature-request meta posts on the sites that have it to see what they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:11:57.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5146" CreationDate="2017-07-06T10:47:30.733" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon reaching the daily vote limit, I see that first posts and late answers reviews are grayed out. &#xA;Since voting is not the only thing I can do on reviewing those, why is this so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T13:52:02.120" Title="Unable to review first posts or late answers upon reaching vote daily limit" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5145" CreationDate="2017-07-06T13:52:02.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a question on Meta StackExchange from 2012 that is asking about the same thing. You can find it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/149664/why-review-system-disable-the-first-posts-and-late-answers-if-i-reached-dail&quot;&gt;Why review system disable the “First Posts” and “Late Answers” if I reached daily upvote limit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was exactly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/149669/352819&quot;&gt;one answer&lt;/a&gt; to this question which I will copy for future reference on this site (emphasis from original author):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is because the &lt;strong&gt;First Posts&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Late Answers&lt;/strong&gt; Review tasks not only allow you to make necessary edits as you see fit, but also upvote and downvote questions or answers which &lt;em&gt;you wouldn't be able to do if you have reached your vote limit&lt;/em&gt;. You would not be able to effectively review those queues as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Suggested Edits&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Close Votes&lt;/strong&gt; on the other hand, do not require or allow upvoting or downvoting on posts, thus it is still available on your Review tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all you can't do everything you would normally be able to do when reviewing these queues once you reached your daily upvote limit. Because of this it's only natural to disable this queue for you so that every review from you has the same capabilities and especially to ensure that every review of first posts or late answers can be made by someone who can vote on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think it's important to upvote a new users post if it's good to give them their first reputation, allow them access to some basic privileges like posting on Meta and because I feel that the queue is to give new users feedback on their behaviour on the site. This is equally important as giving them feedback on how to improve their posts by posting comments and pointing them to important resources like the Tour and the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still keep an eye out for things like &amp;quot;answered x minutes ago by xyz 1/101&amp;quot; on the homepage. Users with 1 or 101 are very often new users or relatively new users on the site or StackExchange in general. You can still comment on their posts and give them feedback on how to improve or where to find stuff. But you should leave the review, which is intended to give reviewers the chance to vote on the reviewed post, to those people who can still vote on any given day. They have all the tools available that StackExchange deems important for this kind of review, while you don't have them available for the rest of the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T13:52:02.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2017-07-07T08:47:01.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, we should close opinion-based questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are saying that this site is about interesting discussions. But it's not. Every site on the StackExchange network is a Q&amp;amp;A that is aimed at helping people that have a problem finding a solution to said problem. The site is not meant to generate long discussions where people voice their opinions and develop ideas in an iterative and open-ended way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But we are different&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we come to a &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; problem: WorldBuilding is different from a lot of other sites on the network. On StackOverflow for example most questions are real-world problems that people have right now and where they need help as fast as possible because time wasted trying out things without any result is exactly that - time wasted. Which leads to money that is wasted, because for most of the active users there programming is their job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On WorldBuilding things look a bit different. Chances are you found this site via a different site on the StackExchange network through the Hot Network Questions and thought that a title sounds interesting or funny. But we are still aimed at people needing help. People who are creating a world for their book, or their RPG campaign, or their game, or because they like to imagine things in their free time without any clear &quot;goal&quot;, or any of dozens of other reasons. But they all have something in common: if you want to have an internally consistent world you will most likely at some point have problems. And this is when WorldBuilding.SE comes into play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are aimed at providing clear help. You have a problem? We have an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is not to brainstorm with you. You are the one creating the world - not us. You have a problem - not us. And it's not possible to help you get a clear answer if your question is aimed at starting a discussion. That doesn't work and as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5139/28789&quot;&gt;Molot&lt;/a&gt; referenced, there are a lot of forums out there that are better suited for open-ended collaborative discussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will always be a bit opinion-based, but questions should still be written in a way that you can use somewhat objective methods to determine which answer is the &quot;best&quot; answer in the proposed scenario. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Drawing the line&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we come to the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; problem. Where to draw the line? What is &quot;too opinion-based&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people believe there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5140/28789&quot;&gt;razor thin line&lt;/a&gt; and that some questions cross this nearly invisible line and some stay on the &quot;leave it open&quot;-side. Looking at the Hot Network Questions from WorldBuilding I regularly find myself wondering how those are not closed immediately. There are so many better examples of good questions and answers on the site. Therefore I propose a different point of view on the &quot;drawing a line&quot; debate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It's not a razor thin line - it's a big blurry region!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On WorldBuilding questions regularly are a bit opinion-based. And the opinions of users about what counts as &quot;opinion-based&quot; vary greatly. Even for a single user it can vary greatly depending on the topic asked. Maybe people are more lenient when a question is asking about planet-scale stuff than when it's asking about regional stuff. Maybe they are more lenient when it comes to weapon-design or creature-design than when it comes to tectonics. Maybe they are fans of exploring time-travelling ideas and problems or they favor any of the hundreds of other things that people ask about here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to a situation where your big blurry region does not align perfectly with my big blurry region. And there is no way to say which big blurry region is the &quot;best&quot; one. That happens on such a Meta-Point-of-View. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes certain words may trigger people to Vote-to-Close a question because they feel it &quot;crossed their line&quot;. It's just that the question is on the &quot;opinion-based&quot; end of their big blurry region and there are certain words that they have seen too often in not acceptable questions. For example I know that I have to be extra careful when reading questions that use the words &quot;How&quot;, &quot;would&quot;, &quot;this&quot;, &quot;affect&quot; and &quot;society&quot; in one sentence together with a question mark at the end. A question like this is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; often opinion-based and too broad. Using those words in certain constellations might push a question that is on the &quot;opinion-based&quot; end of my &quot;still acceptable&quot; big blurry &lt;em&gt;line&lt;/em&gt; to the &quot;not acceptable&quot; side. Realizing that I have this bias was not easy. And even if you had the same big blurry region as I have, but not this bias towards certain combinations of words, you might think this question is acceptable. Then we take another couple dozen people and see how their personal big blurry regions align with ours. And suddenly a question crossed the &quot;razor thin line&quot; of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing two questions with each other you might feel like both are the same and both are on your &quot;acceptable&quot; side, but maybe they are both on the big blurry region and a few people had a slightly different big blurry region leading to the question being closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Putting a question on hold is not the end&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always start a Meta discussion to get a certain question reopened. And you also just cast a Vote-to-Reopen if you have the corresponding privilege. Everyone can only vote to close or reopen on any given question once and if you find enough people with a similar big blurry region you might get a question reopened that was deemed as off-topic by a different group before. If a question is closed and reopened multiple times this question is a perfect example for these big blurry regions. If you take enough people you will have used the whole possible spectrum, so the region becomes even more blurry. Sometimes it may depend on who is currently online and who is voting and in which mood they are and a whole ton of other factors that may lead to a question not getting closed when it should be closed and suddenly becoming an HNQ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want open-ended opinion-based discussions you should check out the chat. We often discuss whatever comes to mind there and would be glad to have new interesting and funny conversations. The way things are handled in the chat just wouldn't work on the Main Site. StackExchange is not good at this kind of discussions, but the chat is a good place to talk, to discuss things and to get immediate feedback. And your stuff won't get closed or downvoted there just because you are brainstorming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Old questions are not a good indicator for what is currently on-topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say a few words about your examples. First of all you have to be careful when reading old questions. Many of those are not what would now be considered on-topic. Often they are not closed because they were on-topic at the time and nobody bothered reactivating them once they were not on-topic anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to Hot Network Questions. A lot of those are getting closed after a few days. But thousands of people have seen them until that happens and they have a lot of votes and often a lot of answers. Be careful when looking at the HNQ's of any site on the StackExchange network. Those rarely reflect what the site would normally deem a &quot;good&quot; question. They attract the attention, votes and answers of people who normally are not on the site and probably don't know specific details about what should be considered a &lt;em&gt;good question&lt;/em&gt; on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion both of your examples are perfect examples of what I just described. They are nearly one and two years old and looking at their views/votes/answers I assume they have been on the HNQ at some point. And I would say that both of them are opinion-based and should be closed by current days guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our moderators mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147?noredirect=1#comment14616_5147&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Santa/Satan was asked at Christmas as part of a topic challenge, that probable bought it some leeway at the time as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge in question can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2860/28789&quot;&gt;Fortnightly Topic Challenge #23: Santa&lt;/a&gt;. This shows that other circumstances can contribute to a question being well-received, although it might not have been a great example for the site. In this case especially the timing and maybe the Meta Effect, though that is not such a big problem on WorldBuilding most of the time, as the traffic tends to not be that high. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why don't you flag old questions in that case?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't flag such old questions because they show what was on-topic once and it's not worth it to start discussions about such old questions that are not active anymore. That's one of the cases where my big blurry region wanders to the very lenient side and I go with the &quot;live and let live&quot;-approach that some people wish for the site in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's different with active questions. They should represent what the goal of the community is. And if the current guidelines say that we want concrete answers to concrete questions then questions that invite people for brainstorming sessions are off-topic and should be flagges accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Optimizing for pearls, not sand&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a related answer to a similar problem on RPG.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7249/this-site-is-too-heavily-moderated/7282#7282&quot;&gt;This site is too heavily moderated&lt;/a&gt;, which mentions the official statement &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing for pearls, not sand&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s why we’re determined to keep question quality high, even at the cost of refusing a little sand. It’s true that you can’t have Q&amp;A; without questions, but having the wrong sorts of questions is far more dangerous &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in the long run we’d much rather err on the side of having interesting and on-topic questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this sentiment. We should aim at having high-quality questions with high-quality answers. It's a personal take on why I am on this site. I don't want to read tons of half-baked brainstorming sessions. I want to read good questions with great answers that make me think &quot;Wow, that's brilliant!&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is just one of the reasons I am on this site and a bit exaggerated. I want to help people who are having problems, but I am more of a reader than a writer, so for the current discussion the above is my personal sentiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that we should disallow all &lt;em&gt;sand&lt;/em&gt; and only look at the &lt;em&gt;pearls&lt;/em&gt;. There are many mediocre questions that are worth reading and answering. But we should try to minimise the questions that we deem off-topic and allowing people to participate in open-ended discussions will only lead to everything being on-topic and thereby burrying the &lt;em&gt;pearls&lt;/em&gt; we have under tons of &lt;em&gt;sand&lt;/em&gt;, which makes it difficult to find the &lt;em&gt;pearls&lt;/em&gt;, because everybody on the internet has an opinion and will voice it, especially when asked for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Don't take it too personal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions are closed where you are one-hundred percent sure that they should not be closed. And sometimes there are HNQ's where you are one-hundred percent sure that they should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And often you are right with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes some time for the &quot;correct&quot; judgment to be found and sometimes things slip through, reviewers have a bad day or some new people got some privileges and want to see how closing a question works without looking through too many Meta discussions. This happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you shouldn't take these things personal anyway, especially if it's not even about your own questions. But I am pretty sure that everyone who has been active on the site for more than, let's say, a month or two has seen questions that he thought were great getting closed and feeling a bit disappointed, which is why I say &quot;Don't take it &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; personal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE is not made for discussions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WorldBuilding is inherently opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no razor thin line, but instead a big blurry region and everybody thinks the region should be slightly different in size and shape than someone else proposed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes certain topics or words can trigger some people to think a question &quot;crossed the line&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just wait and see what the majority thinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If waiting didn't resolve anything ask on Meta, come to the chat and Vote-to-Reopen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old questions can be bad indicators of what is on-topic and what is off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to aim for the high quality content - quality before quantity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Life is not black and white - there are a lot of different shades of grey that you have to live with&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T17:49:22.390" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T17:49:22.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-10T14:33:06.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make it a more obvious feature. Meta and sandbox posting is rare for the newer posters most likely to need it to craft better questions. The feature should be BUILT IN to the posting process to begin with, perhaps with a &quot;post to sandbox&quot; button and explanatory mouse-over next to the &quot;submit&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7582" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T14:33:06.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5153" CreationDate="2017-07-13T18:20:35.347" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I had 5 answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85761/would-decreasing-the-diameter-of-an-orbital-ring-create-artificial-gravity&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Today it's only 4. The missing answer had quite a few upvotes, but also involved a lot of math I was hoping to learn from but didn't have the chance to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to read the missing answer? I assume the author deleted it himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T20:30:29.540" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T00:14:52.197" Title="Any way to read an answer that was deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2017-07-13T18:47:51.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a privilege at 10,000 reputation that allows you to read deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying from the privilege text from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;access to moderator tools&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Viewing deleted posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You now have privileged access to posts that have been removed, either by their authors, by users with access to moderator tools, by moderators, or by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this privilege wisely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure what is being deleted should have been deleted, and bring unnecessary or harmful deletions to the attention of the community and/or moderator team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watch for signs of abuse being obscured by deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't abuse this privilege to stir up trouble when someone has wisely decided to remove a problematic post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have a new search operator available to find your own deleted posts: deleted:1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For users without this privilege there is no way to view deleted posts by other users. You can only see your own deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T18:47:51.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5155" CreationDate="2017-07-13T19:24:23.040" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/85875/30492&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; there was an answer which got two comments (mine plus another) objecting that it was not answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reaction of the poster was &quot;sour&quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qiQ4m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qiQ4m.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it still make sense to flag it for the records, or since it has been cancelled it would not be considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T20:34:46.693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T20:39:36.683" Title="Flagging comments on deleted answers?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5154" CreationDate="2017-07-13T20:28:28.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once a post is deleted, it's out of view of most visitors to the site -- only users with 10k rep who go that far down the page will see them.  So it's not super-important to flag those -- and, in fact, I didn't even know you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; flag deleted comments, but I've learned that you can.  (Thanks for the science, Aify.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see something super-bad, like personal attacks, feel free to flag anyway to let us know.  Most of the time, though, your (and our) attention is probably better directed elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In doing the science for this answer I ended up deleting that last comment.  Just saying this in case anybody else looks and is puzzled.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T20:39:36.683" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T20:39:36.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-07-14T00:18:46.543" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading into what this sandbox is and the arguments for and against, I think the ultimate answer is to improve StackExchange. It definitely does have some large, glaring problems in how it is implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is the close/hold-discuss-edit-open process a huge hassle, but it is also quite demeaning when the question is not low-quality and the issue is more a disagreement about what is on topic or too broad. If I ask a question and somebody comments &quot;This is too broad because of nit-picky reason X and so I could technically write multiple different answers&quot; (ex1: That will vary based on country, so what is the location? ex2: You called your example observer Bob instead of 'a random group of people' so it's not worldbuilding. ex3: What is the exact make-up of your asteroids, including density, size, shape and cohesion? Etc... take your pick), and then quickly gets closed when I could easily have just edited in &quot;Italy&quot; or &quot;&lt;s&gt;Bob&lt;/s&gt;the people in a nearby park&quot; or &quot;Assume Iron, one solid, mostly spherical chunk a few meters across.&quot; Or if you really care so much when the OP doesn't, just suggest an edit that they can accept or reject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's even more frustrating when the reason is debatable and it just so happens that the people on right now disagree with you. I have seen times when high rep users disagree with each other and something goes from closed to open/protected or protected to closed without any changes between. That is because it is too easy to force your site-usage opinions on others if you are high rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is built around the idea that the crowd can manage itself (It's your site, you decide how to vote and how to manage it), except that it is (&lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;intentionally) rigged such that high rep users get to call all the shots, whether they are right or wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better fix than having a sandbox (though the sandbox can serve as a temporary crutch until [if] StackExchange is improved) would be to give &lt;em&gt;the people&lt;/em&gt; more power. That is, the many people, not the 1% of 100,000-rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will offer up one such suggestion to get it started (If I have time I might make a proper feature request out of it. If someone else is eloquent and diplomatic and wants to do it, go ahead.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OPs could open their own held questions, and there was better feedback left before putting on hold in the first place, that would be one big improvement. Then no meta questions are needed: OP just fixes and re-opens it once done. If OP abuses this (never fixes and always re-opens without edits and without asking clarification or discussion), the ability gets revoked just like other abilities can be revoked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP is honestly trying and there just happens to be a disagreement about what the question needs, that is all the more reason for &lt;em&gt;feedback and discussion&lt;/em&gt;, not an outright close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ability should require a minimum rep, but it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; (repeat: must) be a very low threshold, say somewhere in the 50 to 200 range. By 200, they are already &quot;trusted on other sites&quot; anyway, so obviously they are trusted. 50 would be better since it's intended to keep people from running away and 50 rep is not easy to get on all StackExchange sites - even on WB, it would require a couple of questions with at least 5 +1s each; that's more than enough to suggest OP is worth investing in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also require that questions receive more &quot;on-hold&quot; action and less &quot;closed,&quot; and that closed be reserved for actually bad posts that need more than just some TLC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T00:18:46.543" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T14:48:55.210" Score="9" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding has a somewhat active chat that's maintained decent levels of participation since the start of the site. We're lucky; that's not the case with all sites. I thought we could take advantage of that to use chat as a tool to figure out site problems, get to know the users here - especially those who don't use chat much - and just generally promote site activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple ideas I had in mind, some of which I've had first-hand experience with on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. I've linked to their implementations on other sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1343/56299&quot;&gt;Regular chat sessions&lt;/a&gt; (or irregular chat sessions!) focused maybe on a specific worldbuilding topic (cartography, language construction, etc.) or some other thing about the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7783/56299&quot;&gt;Ask Me Anythings&lt;/a&gt;, where people come up with questions in advance for a particular user, and the user answers those (and other questions) during a special chat session.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/298165/274942&quot;&gt;Town Hall chat sessions&lt;/a&gt;, designed to discuss site issues and the solutions to them going forward.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7431/41082&quot;&gt;Movie viewing sessions&lt;/a&gt; (or book discussions!) of a specific work (followed, hopefully, by a discussion of the work and the worldbuilding principles used).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has more ideas, that would be fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should we try to implement chat sessions focused on one of the above themes (or something else entirely)? If so, what sort of format, timing, content, etc. should they contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T16:10:32.583" Title="Should we have some sort of chat sessions?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5157" CreationDate="2017-07-14T16:07:26.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this idea.  The &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of the session interacts with the &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of the session, so think about that dimension too.  How many &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; participants are you expecting?  How many do you need for the session to be viable?  How will you help people follow what's going on if there are a lot of people chatting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some quick thoughts about some different formats viewed through this lens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let's talk about X&quot; might see a lot of people trying to talk, and then people replying to some of those messages, all in parallel.  When SE ran its first couple Town Hall chats, they had to put the room into short timeouts a few times to let people catch up.  (That's fine; it just has to be managed.  I think only moderators can put rooms in timeout.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let's talk about X&quot; can lend itself to shorter bits rather than longer conversations.  I've never attended SF&amp;amp;F's movie night, but I understand that everybody watches the same movie together and they chat about it while doing so.  That might lend itself to shorter comments that don't involve as much threading.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;threaded&lt;/em&gt; discussion can be easier to manage but has a little more of a bar to entry.  During one of the podcasts we did some round-robin worldbuilding: somebody established some starting state, each participant was assigned an area (like biology or politics or tech), and we went around the virtual room, with each person in turn introducing one thing into the world that was in the assigned area.  That required some planning in advance, including establishing participants, but I could see a more flexible form of this working in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An &quot;ask me anything&quot; is basically a narrower version of threaded discussion, with the need to keep track of pending questions somehow.  A &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time ago when SE elections had town-hall chats (this was before the questionnaire), we used stars for that and barred anything &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; questions for the candidates from the starboard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably want to try a variety of participation models, which means varying the type of chat.  Let's experiment and see what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T16:07:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5157" CreationDate="2017-07-14T16:10:32.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good idea, but I'd want a proof-of-concept before planning too far.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can have a chat session to see if chat sessions work. We can try scheduling it, and then see who shows up and if anything gets done. Based on that, we can decide whether it's worth it to do more. Maybe for the first meeting it'd just be chat-regulars, since we should always have some of them around for these sessions. If none of us show up, then we shouldn't get less active users excited about something that we can't support. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I think we'd all like the idea if it worked. But I'm worried there's not enough of us, or a good enough time for all of us to get together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T16:10:32.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2017-07-14T18:58:07.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be unclassy of me to do this, but here are the deleted math parts. Please read my note at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The specific energy (i.e., $\text{J}/\text{kg}$) of your habitat, which was constructed &quot;in orbit&quot;, comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vis-viva equation&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;  $$&#xA;	\epsilon = \frac{1}{2} v^2 - \frac{G M}{r}&#xA;$$&#xA;  This is the amount of energy your habitat ring has initially, per $\text{kg}$.  Now, when we decrease the radius, the energy has to remain constant (that's like, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a law&lt;/a&gt;, bro):&#xA;  \begin{align}&#xA;	\epsilon_{new} &amp;amp;= \epsilon_{old}\\&#xA;	\left(\frac{1}{2}v_{new}^2 - \frac{G M}{r_{new}}\right) &amp;amp;= \left(\frac{1}{2}v_{old}^2 - \frac{G M}{r_{old}}\right)\\&#xA;	\frac{1}{2}v_{new}^2 &amp;amp;= \frac{1}{2}v_{old}^2 - \frac{G M}{r_{old}} + \frac{G M}{r_{new}}\\&#xA;	v_{new} &amp;amp;= \sqrt{&#xA;		v_{old}^2 - \frac{2 G M}{r_{old}} + \frac{2 G M}{r_{new}}&#xA;	}&#xA;\end{align}&#xA;  Subbing in the velocity of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_orbit#Velocity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;circular orbit&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;  \begin{align}&#xA;	v_{new} &amp;amp;= \sqrt{&#xA;		\frac{G M}{r_{old}} - \frac{2 G M}{r_{old}} + \frac{2 G M}{r_{new}}&#xA;	}\\&#xA;	v_{new} &amp;amp;= \sqrt{&#xA;		\frac{2 G M}{r_{new}} - \frac{G M}{r_{old}}&#xA;	}\\&#xA;\end{align}&#xA;  This is the new velocity with which your ring rotates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, if your ring had been instead constructed in the lower orbit, it would have had velocity (same formula):$$&#xA;	v_{lower} = \sqrt{ \frac{G M}{r_{new}} }&#xA;$$&#xA;  Let's compare those two velocities:&#xA;  \begin{align}&#xA;	\left( v_{new} \right) &amp;amp;\stackrel{?}{&amp;gt;} \left( v_{lower} \right)\\&#xA;	\left( \sqrt{&#xA;		\frac{2 G M}{r_{new}} - \frac{G M}{r_{old}}&#xA;	} \right) &amp;amp;\stackrel{?}{&amp;gt;} \left( \sqrt{ \frac{G M}{r_{new}} } \right)\\&#xA;	\sqrt{G M} \sqrt{ \frac{2}{r_{new}} - \frac{1}{r_{old}} }&#xA;		&amp;amp;\stackrel{?}{&amp;gt;}&#xA;	\sqrt{G M}\sqrt{ \frac{1}{r_{new}} }\\&#xA;	\frac{2 r_{old} - r_{new}}{r_{old} r_{new}}&#xA;		&amp;amp;\stackrel{?}{&amp;gt;}&#xA;	\frac{r_{old}}{r_{old} r_{new}}\\&#xA;	2 r_{old} - r_{new} &amp;amp;\stackrel{?}{&amp;gt;} r_{old}\\&#xA;	r_{old} &amp;amp;&amp;gt; r_{new}&#xA;\end{align}&#xA;  Therefore, if $r_{old} &amp;gt; r_{new}$ (which it is, since we're decreasing the radius), then the ring will spin at a velocity ($v_{new}$) that is &lt;em&gt;faster than&lt;/em&gt; the velocity ($v_{lower}$) it would have had, had the ring been constructed in the lower orbit in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This means that the ring is moving faster than necessary to stay in orbit, and objects within it must therefore be pulled inward by the habitat ring itself.  They experience this as an outward acceleration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to the reason for deletion: this post is wrong. As someone pointed out in comments, the change in orbital radius involves work being done. Something has to apply the work to this station to move it from the outer orbit to the inner orbit and therefore the total kinetic + potential energy of the station is not conserved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct approach is conservation of angular momentum from Kyle's answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I'm not abusing my power to see the deleted answer here; the owner who deleted it was right and had the right to do so, but since you seemed interested in the math itself, and I like people who want to learn about math, I felt compelled to share. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T00:14:52.197" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T00:14:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-16T22:16:57.660" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finding myself tempted to heavily edit a couple of recent posts to remove excessive fluff/noise, or other unnecessary nonsense, but doing so would mean deleting roughly half of the question body...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these situations where the additional information really doesn't add anything useful are such hatchet jobs acceptable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T19:13:31.177" Title="Are drastic edits acceptable when removing fluff?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5161" CreationDate="2017-07-17T02:10:13.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons to reject a proposed edit is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that removing fluff could make a question easier to read. Especially if the edit also helps highlight the core question. If you write your comment so it's justifying why the edits should happen instead of explaining what you've edited (which we can already see from the diff) it will probably be better received. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to say though. A lot of this depends on the particulars of the questions you are wanting to edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is an easy way to get feedback on edits once you've hit 2000 rep. Luckily all edits are tracked and rolling back an edit is a trivial task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T02:10:13.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5161" CreationDate="2017-07-17T04:00:58.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Large edits require care to reduce the risk of the author rolling them back.  We want people to edit to improve posts, but if you think there might be disagreement on what counts as an improvement, tread carefully.  When I make a major edit I explain clearly why &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; in the revision comment (which is there forever in the edit history) and in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To maximize success and minimize ruffled feathers, be objective and neutral in your comment.  Avoid sounding judgmental.  For example, in this meta post you referred to &quot;fluff&quot; -- which is ok here, where you're asking a general question rather than linking to a specific case, but you'd want to avoid calling the post &quot;fluff&quot; in that revision comment.  I tend to reach for phrases like &quot;focused on the core question&quot; rather than phrases like &quot;trimmed unneeded fluff&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you have reason to believe that a particular user will react badly to a particular edit, it's better to take a lighter touch.  Keep in mind that you have other tools available -- downvotes, votes to close (if, for example, it's unclear), and comments -- to provide feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T19:13:31.177" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T19:13:31.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5166" CreationDate="2017-07-17T13:28:03.520" Score="-1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;For personal reasons I need to get rid of my account. I need help in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is not for me. It's time to say goodbye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I delete my account forever step by step?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T14:26:54.510" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T14:27:22.997" Title="How to delete my account with all my questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2017-07-17T14:27:22.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/delete-my-worldbuilding-account&quot;&gt;Delete my Worldbuilding account&lt;/a&gt;, you can delete your account using the &quot;contact us&quot; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However (and the reason I'm not marking this question as a duplicate of that), you also said &quot;with all my questions&quot;.  Once you post content to Stack Exchange it belongs to the community.  In particular, deleting questions that people put effort into answering isn't very nice to the people who did that work.  If a question &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; valuable to the community -- for example, it's downvoted and closed -- we might consider deleting it anyway, but those would need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your account is deleted, all your remaining posts will show as being from a generic user number (like on the linked question here).  Your name won't appear on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T14:27:22.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T18:36:45.027" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally browse through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. One of my pet peeves is having to scroll through answers on the hard science tag that have a lot of upvotes, but don't meet the requirements of the hard-science tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately, answers that don't meet the requirements have been receiving post notices. But that doesn't do anything other than leave an &quot;official&quot; comment. The answers are still upvoted, and still distracting from the more useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could answers on the hard science tag that have a post notice be moved to the bottom of the page? They would still be visible, and the OP would still be able to improve them if they wished to do so. But that way they wouldn't be obstructing the more useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user171" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:04:31.923" Title="Can post notices on the hard-science tag actually do something?" Tags="|feature-request|hard-science|post-notices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5171" CreationDate="2017-07-18T19:44:34.973" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, recent creative questions and answers have triggered a crazy idea in my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;making a blog about some Worldbuilding questions and posts that interest me - and maybe posting some short stories, or writing longer answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I want to put the link on the referenced question/answer (maybe as a comment, maybe in the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure if this is allowed, as this sounds like I'm promoting my blog. The blog will only (at least in my current plan) contains posts from Worldbuilding.SE, and I'm not sure about the frequency of the posts and posting links as comments/posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links will be posted as comment, or included in posts (&quot;If you are interested, here is a more in-depth explanation/a short story about what happened&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T23:06:08.597" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T23:06:08.597" Title="Can I put a link to my blog for a longer answer?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5168" CreationDate="2017-07-18T20:04:31.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of those areas where a topic breaks the model a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions, we have essentially two axes for voting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DMw8v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DMw8v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Useful vs useless, appropriate vs inappropriate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question - possible even if highly upvoted - makes it eligible for deletion and prevents answers from being posted, providing strong encouragement for improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers though, there's only one axis: useful / useless. An answer with a positive score can't be deleted except through moderator intervention, and there's no equivalent to blocking answers for an answer; years ago we tried using Community Wiki as a &quot;reputation denial&quot; feature but this failed miserably - the closest thing we have today is probably &lt;em&gt;locking&lt;/em&gt;, which prevents voting but also prevents both improvement and deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution we arrived at on Stack Overflow was to simply discourage questions whose answers cannot be effectively moderated based on the single useful/useless axis. This solved the immediate problem&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, but did so by pushing it off onto other sites: Software Engineering, The Workplace, Software Recommendations all allow or have allowed questions for which answers may be difficult to evaluate on a single axis and thus require manual intervention by a moderator in order to remove those that violate community norms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other sites go even further in this direction, and impose rules on answers that may be difficult if not impossible for the average voter to apply. From the sound of it, this is the case for your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposal would, I think, just add confusion: if other answers exist then it would appear that the sorting is broken, but wouldn't otherwise prevent voting (it might discourage it a bit of there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; other answers). If no other answers exist, it would essentially do &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more thorough implementation might zero out the score &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; block further voting until the notice was removed; this would be a pretty significant change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until / unless such a thing can be implemented, it is critical that you establish your own protocol for enforcing rules that require consideration beyond up/down votes. For example, you might establish a process by which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasnotice%3A1+is%3Aanswer&quot;&gt;answers on notice&lt;/a&gt; are reviewed periodically and either de-noticed or deleted. Such a policy should be discussed here on meta and implemented by the elected moderator team if approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;sub&gt;I gloss over things like answers which recommend insecure or user-hostile practices here, but they're also problematic as they may be useful in solving an immediate problem at the cost of opening up much greater problems on down the road.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:04:31.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5169" CreationDate="2017-07-18T20:10:13.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's ok to link to your blog if you disclose the affiliation (&quot;I wrote more about this on {my blog}&quot; is fine for that), and so long as the post &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is complete enough for the purposes of this site.  People shouldn't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to visit an external link in order to get a complete answer, but links to additional information are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is (so far as I've seen) interested in seeing the results of worldbuilding too, like fiction.  A link at the end of a relevant post or in a comment seems unobjectionable to me.  I did this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71/28&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and nobody complained.  Don't be spammy, like linking to your blog in unrelated posts, and if you find yourself doing it in many posts you might want to reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, did you know that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt;?  You're welcome to submit your posts there too; here are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/want-to-contribute-b37191c4362e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;submission guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.  As you'll see if you browse the blog, we have a mix of fiction, science, worldbuilding how-to, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:10:13.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-07-19T15:08:13.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a moderator on The Workplace, where we have a &quot;back it up&quot; rule.  Answers that don't comply, that come to moderators' attention, get post notices, and if a couple weeks go by without it being fixed and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; comes to moderators' attention, we delete the answer.  (We have a user who pretty regularly goes through posts with post notices and flags them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That works well because any moderator can usually &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; whether the answer meets the rules.  If it's unclear or there's a dispute, somebody brings it up on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard science feels &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;, at least to me.  My ability to assess the hard-science-ness of answers could (depending on the subject) be limited to &quot;those links look like they're to scholarly papers&quot; and &quot;hey, math&quot;.  When &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; applying a post notice or deleting a post I'd like to have a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; more to go on than that.  So I usually wait for HDE226868 to handle them, which doesn't scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could spend more effort -- we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have meta posts and a tag wiki with more detail -- but that starts to feel like it's over the threshold of how much investigative work we should expect moderators to do.  What I'd like is some sort of clear signal &lt;em&gt;from the community&lt;/em&gt; that no, this answer does not meet the hard-science criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two cases to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post has not been edited since the notice was added.  &lt;em&gt;If the community consents&lt;/em&gt;, we could rule that after some period of time without objections, the notice is presumed to have been correctly applied and so the post is subject to deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post has been edited (beyond stuff like spelling and grammar) since the notice was added.  The notice might or might not still apply.  We need a way to evaluate these.  That evaluation should not come down to a single moderator's judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more of a further question than an answer, but it's something I'd like to see actual answers address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T15:08:13.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-07-20T08:31:51.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think we should delete an answer if the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; problem is that it doesn't meet the hard science requirements.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases they should be allowed to flounder in the usual low vote realms of the additional but not good enough answers that many questions get. Perhaps we should be a bit more liberal with the down votes, but a narrative answer in such cases may also be useful particularly if the asker isn't aware that any &quot;correct&quot; answer would require something like finite element analysis of turbulent flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem with these answers is that they get more relative attention being on a hard-science question than the 30%-50% of answers on a &quot;viral&quot; question that get few or no votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get very few &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions and worrying about them and the small number of answers they get feels unnecessary. We want to keep the quality high, but I think the voting and flagging system is sufficient without putting additional manual load onto the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard-science flag should certainly remain in place unless the tag is removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T09:28:07.137" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T09:28:07.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5176" CreationDate="2017-07-21T19:55:38.870" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have some strategy that I want to add to my game (it could be a RTS or other kind of strategy game), is it ok to ask whether there is something similar to that already in some other game, or even in real life, if we talk about strategies and tactics used in real world conflicts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T20:14:46.780" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T20:14:46.780" Title="Is asking whether some strategy already exists on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5175" CreationDate="2017-07-21T20:14:24.557" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you want to ask about &lt;em&gt;game&lt;/em&gt; design more than &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; design.  That would be off-topic here, but you might want to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Game Development&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is more about the world itself -- and military tactics are generally on-topic here if they more systemic and less plot-specific -- then it's better to ask about &lt;em&gt;the problem you're trying to solve&lt;/em&gt;, rather than asking &lt;em&gt;who else might have solved it&lt;/em&gt;.  Answers can then point to that prior art if relevant.  Consider the difference between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can a medieval-tech army defend itself against dragons with arrow-resistant hides?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What games have solved the arrows-against-dragons problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T20:14:24.557" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T08:59:09.707" Score="11" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/86782/how-realistic-is-the-placement-of-the-cities-and-borders-on-my-map&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/86821/how-realistic-is-the-geography-of-my-map&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt; which give a map of a fictional world and ask &quot;how realistic is it?&quot;. The first concerns city and country placement, while the second is related to geography. Certainly, these are useful questions to ask about a fictional world, but I was previously of the understanding this sort of question was off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really concerned with getting the linked questions closed or anything. Rather, I've had similar questions myself I've refrained from asking, and would like to ask. If these types of questions are on-topic, are there specific guidelines for asking them in a manner that stay on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific questions, such as the numerous topics in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series&quot;&gt;creating a realistic world series&lt;/a&gt;, make sense to me. Each question has a specific context, and answers can be reasonably ranked as &quot;this works well for me&quot; or &quot;meh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Check my work&quot; questions like those I linked, however, seem to be primarily opinion-based, and rather ambiguous. Additionally, such questions could get very complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of this complexity, the world I'm building currently has four major factions with 2000 years of &quot;recent history&quot; plus another 15000 years of older history. I've accounted for 500 years of nuclear fallout that initially killed most of the people on the planet, then forced the survivors into specific, mostly-unaffected regions, then allowed slow expansion as the fallout dissipated. I've tried to account for growth and setbacks based on local climate, geography, and faction mindsets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I've barely scratched the surface, but I've already got several thousand words describing simple relationships and origins of various physical and social features of my planet. And now I'm delving into the more complex task of writing more detailed histories of the capital cities of each faction, which will likely require at least cursory histories of nearby cities and major trade partnerships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, just describing my current map and political boundaries seem like they would be too long for this site. Let alone trying to make someone wade through all of it to make specific suggestions for fixing problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, relatively simple worlds like that originally linked likely don't have enough detail that it really matters if they're realistic. In that case, the question is really more about &quot;are there any really egregious errors I should fix before doing the actual worldbuilding?&quot;, and less about proper worldbuilding. Additionally, most questions short enough to really work on the site are likely simple because of a lack of effort or research, rather than because of a concisely-written, but still nuanced, question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary, I understand that getting feedback on a world you're currently building is useful. However, I'm concerned that short questions will tend to fall into the &quot;do my homework for me&quot; category, and questions with reasonable levels of worldbuilding will tend to be too long and/or complex to fit the site's format.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we avoid creating more questions of this nature, or, if not, how should we format the questions to stay on topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11879" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T10:51:39.707" Title="Is &quot;check out my world&quot; on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5181" CreationDate="2017-07-25T09:58:32.457" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon accessing the review list, we can choose i.e. between closing a question or leaving it open. Are both types of vote counted until the threshold, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, once &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; users vote to close a question, this is put on hold. Does it also happen that when &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; users judge a question to be OK this is removed from the review list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T11:38:12.593" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T11:38:12.593" Title="Vote counting on questions/answers" Tags="|discussion|voting|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5180" CreationDate="2017-07-25T10:52:10.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a similar question on Meta StackExchange asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/139834/352819&quot;&gt;What exactly happens with the button “Leave Open” (previously “Do Not Close”)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/139836/352819&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; to that question states the following (Emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, a question must hit &lt;strong&gt;100 views before close votes &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/97556/close-votes-expire-too-soon-for-low-traffic-tags&quot;&gt;age away&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, so as to give enough folks time to see and review it. &lt;strong&gt;Questions with close votes stay in the review queue until they are closed or the votes expire.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;if enough people (currently 3) select &amp;quot;Do Not Close&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; within the review queue, &lt;strong&gt;the question will be immediately removed from the queue&lt;/strong&gt; (not shown to any more reviewers) &lt;strong&gt;and the aging starts immediately.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't prevent it from being closed, mind you - &lt;strong&gt;if someone visits the question directly and votes to close it, that'll both count toward the 5 votes needed to close it and stall the aging for another four days&lt;/strong&gt; - but it will both reduce the number of people viewing it and hasten the removal of votes on questions for which there is clearly no support for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that using the &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; button does not remove the existing &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; Votes. It's just that if enough people vote to &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; the question is removed from the Review Queue so as to not get as much attention as before. If people visit the question and think it should be closed it can still be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; Votes do not have a direct impact on the &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; Votes. They have an impact on the visibility of the Voting process and on the &amp;quot;aging away&amp;quot; process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need 5 &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; Votes to close a question and the &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; Votes start to age away at a certain point. The aging starts after 4 days have passed since the last &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; Vote has been cast and the question has at least 100 views, unless there have been enough &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; Votes. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/97581/352819&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T15:58:32.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:55:58.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I don't notice too many &quot;do my homework for me&quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if they pop up, I ignore them and move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there's no limit to the number of questions a person can ask, there's no limit to the amount of clarification a person can get. However, each question must be small enough for an answerer to digest and respond to in a reasonable amount of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question length is limited by the attention span of those who might respond. In many cases, long questions have lots of descriptive text but the fundamental question itself is actually quite short. All that descriptive text, while fun and interesting, detracts from the asking and answering of questions. (Granted, this isn't always true. There are legitimately long world descriptions that aren't fluff.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is almost entirely concerned with the construction of systems. Given that systems easily experience combinatorial explosions in complexity, it can be difficult or impossible to manage all the side effects. Asking questions to verify that an offered system isn't completely insane seems on-topic to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, to WB in general, there's little utility for questions that are abstract enough to be used in other situations. For the two questions you cited, I would hope that the answerer would describe &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the cities and geography are sane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T10:51:39.707" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T10:51:39.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2017-07-26T07:38:10.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, why not?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, if the world is decently designed already and the author put effort in it, checking if it looks believable is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you posted as examples attracted really good answers, useful for future readers. That's great, and that's why I'm glad these questions are on this site. If there were more of such questions and issues were starting to repeat, we might need to extract canonical questions from them. Right now, I see more good than bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-07-26T07:50:03.350" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T07:50:03.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T04:47:46.073" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question that has already received multiple responses. I am using a similiar premise, but changed the question entirely to the point that the answers given are no longer valid. Is it better to simply post another question or continously edit the current one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T14:55:19.043" Title="How many times can you ask a question that uses a similiar premise?" Tags="|discussion|support|writing-style|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5185" CreationDate="2017-07-29T12:34:40.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Better to post a new one&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be respectful of respondent's time. If you invalidate their answers then it shows disrespect or at least disregard for the time they invested in your question. Be kind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T12:34:40.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5185" CreationDate="2017-07-29T14:55:19.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a complement to Green's answer, your new question should link the old question and explain what the differences are. Otherwise some poeple might think it's a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T14:55:19.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5190" CreationDate="2017-07-29T16:39:09.400" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though a new user to this site, I've run across a couple of questions where the OP is asking &quot;how do I realistically/scientifically achieve X given Y&quot; where Y can't be achieved if X is realistically/scientifically based.  For an example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87422/how-do-i-explain-the-formation-of-my-world-scientifically&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which is (simplistically) asking how a previously lush planet could realistically achieve a diurnal cycle lasting a week while preserving the complex life forms on the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly understand that worldbuilding is fundamentally fiction.  That's most of the fun, isn't it?  But rather than spending my time brutally stomping on OPs for asking for the impossible (the point of the site is to encourage creativity, right?), is there a best practice among the community for helping OPs understand there isn't a way to avoid the consequences of a reality-based event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the only viable answer for the example given, &quot;Sorry, you can't have a week-long diurnal cycle for a previously lush planet without burning away the pre-existing life during the day and freeze-drying it at night?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:22:12.813" Title="Best Practice for Helping OP's with Science-Based Fantasy Requests" Tags="|discussion|hard-science|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5189" CreationDate="2017-07-29T19:13:29.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think in a way it's a request to help think of creatively explaining a thing using and maybe even exaggerating what we know in the world. For the example question you had, an answer could be something like 'the bulk/main part of the plant is underground or protected by a thick coating, where it hibernates during the worst of both seasons ready to emerge when conditions are safe again (like an extreme exaggeration of what drought-resistant plants or deciduous trees do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By all means, when it really isn't possible - say so, but the above answer I gave to the question was myself (who isn't an expert in flora) using what I know of the world, and bending it to the extreme, to answer a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32228" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T07:22:12.813" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:22:12.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5199" CreationDate="2017-07-31T02:21:51.257" Score="11" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/29446/how-can-i-have-a-war-with-no-good-or-evil-side&quot;&gt;How can I have a war with no “good” or “evil” side?&lt;/a&gt; was recently kicked to [Writers Stack Exchange&lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  As the question stands now, this has nothing to do with the literary element of writing.  It's purely world building/research which is off topic.  It is also a &quot;how to&quot; or &quot;what to write&quot; which is also off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that Writers SE is about the technical aspect of writing and anything involving the actual specific content of the writing is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was mostly to inform which ever mod moved it so that they understand what would work for us or not. :)  It's not fun to have your question get closed and bumped only to end up closed and sent back again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has questions about what Writers is about please see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; for more details!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks and sorry if this sounds like a rant as that was not my intention.  Simply trying to inform so that we can all provide the best experience to the people who visit our sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32127" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T21:38:39.677" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T21:38:39.677" Title="Migrated question to Writers SE" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5191" CreationDate="2017-07-31T11:56:07.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions don't belong anywhere within the stack exchange system. That question may be one of them. We'd be annoyed if the question was dumped on us from another site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should try to keep in mind whether questions will be a good fit before migrating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T11:56:07.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T15:31:06.763" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69568/could-the-biological-capability-to-control-their-reproductive-process-justify-a&quot;&gt;Could the biological capability to control their reproductive process justify a matriarchal society forming?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had asked this question some time ago. The current premise is similar, but without the fantastical elements such as magic and demons. In this scenario, women have the innate birth control and the ability to control their reproductive functions. This ability developed early in human history and has helped lead to a matriarchal system developing. Pregnancy is an active process, and gestation rate can be controlled or pause to some limited extent. All drawbacks from pregnancy have been removed, such as morning sickness, cramps, etc. birth is a relatively painless process, which can be held off until the mother is ready in a convenient time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: would taking the randomness out of human reproduction by adding  limit genetic diversity. If a natural form of birth control was present early in evolution, would it lead to homogeneity in the human species? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T15:48:05.973" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T16:00:35.137" Title="is the question narrow enough to put on the main site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-09T21:16:30.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2017-07-31T16:00:35.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We'd need to see exactly what you intend to ask to really be able to weigh in on whether your question is too broad or not. Luckily we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; for situations like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like your question could benefit from some edits for clarity. Why don't you post it to the sandbox and get some feedback on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T16:00:35.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T19:10:17.797" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read, and liked the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/87494/39523&quot;&gt;Courier Ethics&lt;/a&gt;. I liked it enough to actually try and answer it. Later I returned to the question as a result of a comment on my answer. It took a minute before I realized it had been placed on hold as primarily opinion-based. I'm new to the site, so I don't pretend to know the parameters used for on-topic/off-topic. A &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; review of some suggested questions given by the system as I typed the title seems to suggest that maybe this one shouldn't have been closed after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, any &quot;idea&quot; presented in answer to this question will be evaluated by the OP and their &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; will rule as to which one is best. Of course that works the same on any SE stack. Similarly, any answer given can be equally valid, in some context, as any other. This is &lt;em&gt;fiction&lt;/em&gt; so suspending belief is inherit to story enjoyment. How far the world creator wants to stretch that line is a personal choice. Adding in the criteria of which answer &lt;em&gt;fits better&lt;/em&gt; into the OP's world, however, removes the &quot;all equally valid&quot; argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my reading of the question, the OP defined well what the objective was, and excluded a certain range of options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for ideas on how they could correctly or mostly correctly identify messages they found unethical. Magic is OK but I'd &lt;strong&gt;prefer to avoid just hand-waving everything with a spell that &quot;knows&quot; if a message is evil or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least 3 well rep'd users, one &gt;10K user deemed it answerable as well, so I know I'm not alone in thinking it to be a decent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an extra note, I still don't see any comments suggesting an edit, or way to improve the question, so as to not be &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, contrary to recent meta post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4623/39523&quot;&gt;“Primarily Opinion Based” is a reason to edit, not to close&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a site scope issue, should this question, as posted, remain closed? What part of the question is triggering the &quot;opinion-based&quot; evaluation? How could it be improved to remove the opinion-based evaluation, if that is even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39523" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T23:17:01.750" Title="Are ideas about proposed world social structures inherently &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:20:13.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I was the fifth close vote, I'll identify the items that caught my attention as problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question specifically calls out that the asker is &quot;looking for ideas&quot; for a solution. This means there aren't really any constraints to define a &quot;best&quot; answer other than being within the concept of a Medieval/Fantasy setting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic is allowed, but the asker has failed to specify how magic works in his/her world. &lt;em&gt;Every&lt;/em&gt; solution is now valid, and each person will envision the magic system differently, bringing in an opinion-only aspect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker has failed to identify why the simplest solution (i.e., reading the message, as identified in the first comment) does not work. Answers must then either use this as their solution, or devise a reason for why it cannot be used, which would be altering the asker's world to suit the answer and make each answer an opinion rather than fact within the asker's world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is, I believe the question should remain closed. If the asker edits the question to address these issues (placing constraints, defining the magic system, and explaining why couriers cannot read the messages), then the question may be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T20:20:13.133" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:33:08.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Opinion-based Question very often involve the Respondent's own inferences because the question doesn't describe enough&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last year, year before, we had a huge meta discussion about the relative merits of a no-longer-existent close reason known as &quot;Idea-generation&quot;.  The results of that discussion was the identification of Question Constraints as an essential component of an answerable question.  If a question was insufficiently constrained, it could not be answered in the time and format available on WB.  (Alternatively, if it was overconstrained, it probably wasn't a good fit for WB either since it was too specific.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I didn't cast a VTC for this question, I probably would for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Courier's ethical code wasn't identified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any kind of hint about how they might go about identifying good and evil.  This alone would push me to VTC because this is a question that philosophers and ethicists have been asking for thousands of years &lt;em&gt;and there is no universal answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a little bit of a distraction in the question about how to conceal messages from hostile parties (but this is a minor point in the question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this question, a respondent would have to infer the courier's ethical code (and the priorities inherent in all ethical codes), then invent a set of rules for match messages with that ethical code. Since a huge portion of the answer depends on whatever the respondent pulls out of thin air, there will be far too much variation in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also note that the question doesn't indicate anything about identification of second-order effects from a successful delivery method.  How do the courier's deal with messages that don't explicitly order the death of innocents but indirectly cause their deaths anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without specifics about the ethical code, the situation or the message to deliver, I don't think anything useful can be said about the decision function to deliver or not deliver a given message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract details from ethical system A, combine with information extracted from courier situation s and message content m then define a mapping from all that information to &quot;good &quot; or &quot;evil&quot;. Which information to pick from A, s and m and what to do with that information will be the algorithm contained in D. Some information will be deemed unimportant and discarded. Conversely, other information will be deemed important and retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since A may specify conflicting outcomes, D will need to be robust enough to resolve those conflicts since D must always resolve to &quot;Good&quot; XOR &quot;Evil&quot;. Perhaps, A will be internally consistent, in which case D doesn't need to include a conflict resolution mechanism for conflicts in A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Long Answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, message $m$, courier situation $s$, ethical code $a$ and decision function $D$, resolve $$\{good, evil\} = D(a, m, s)$$  Observe that $a \in A$ where $A$ is the set of all possible ethical systems.  The OP hopes for a description of $D$. That's fine.  $s$ and $m$ are free variables, dependent on the storyteller and can be anything.  Since $a$ can also be anything, including  internally inconsistent ethical systems, how do we resolve those conflicts to simple &quot;good&quot; and &quot;evil&quot;?  Ideally, we want $D$ to resolve exclusively to &quot;good&quot; or &quot;evil&quot;, never both and never neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$A$ represents all possible ethical systems.  It cannot be less than all possible ethical systems since no constraints were placed on $A$ by the OP.  We know that any ethical system will fall somewhere on the continuum between being complete but conflicted, or, it will be incomplete and consistent. No non-trivial system can be both complete and conflict-free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Systems of the first kind, $A_{complete}$ [complete-conflicted], make the job of $D$ harder since $D$ must now resolve extra conflicts from $a_{complete}$.   Systems of the second kind, $A_{incomplete}$ [incomplete-consistent], are amenable to our task of resolving {good, evil} since they always provide consistent answers even if they can't handle all situations described by $s$ and $m$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resolution of conflicts inherent in $a_{complete}$ must either happen in $D$ or be prevented entirely by the definition of $a \in A_{incomplete}$.  As only data, $s$ and $m$ don't carry any interpretative power in and of themselves to make assertions about their own goodness or evilness. Thus, $a$ makes assertions/interpretations about the important characteristics of $s$ and $m$.  $D$ combines the rule set embedded in $a$ with information from $s$ and $m$ then returns &quot;good&quot; XOR &quot;evil&quot;; or more specifically, &quot;will deliver message&quot; XOR &quot;will not deliver message&quot;.  $D$ must be robust enough to handle instances of $a$ where the rule sets are inherently contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T23:17:01.750" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T23:17:01.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5191" CreationDate="2017-07-31T21:08:08.240" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What happened&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank for bringing this up. I agree that the question should have stayed on Worldbuilding; what happened behind the scenes was a complicated series of events and some miscommunication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interest of transparency, here's what happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP, Aric Fowler, asked the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question garnered some votes, comments, and a close vote or two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user suggested in a comment that the question be migrated to Writers, and raised a custom mod flag stating the same thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I tried to talk to the Writers mods but wasn't able to get ahold of them; I talked instead to a high-rep Writers user, in chat, who's a mod elsewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I had a discussion in comments with the OP, who wanted the question to stay here. The OP then edited the question, and I deleted all the comments related to migration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I marked the custom flag as helpful but explained in my reply to the flag why I kept the question here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were more close votes, and five community voters closed the question as off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The system auto-flagged the question because it had attracted 20 comments in a short span.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another mod saw that flag &lt;strong&gt;and the system displayed thee text of the earlier custom flag&lt;/strong&gt;, as far as I can tell. The mod didn't see any of the comments about how the question was edited, or the discussion I'd had with the other mod. Basically, they thought the original flag was still open and nothing had happened, and didn't see that the OP wanted the question to stay on Worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mod migrated the question to Writers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there was miscommunication between a whole bunch of people here. I dealt with the custom flag and made some comments, so I'll take the blame for some of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What to do now&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I know of Writers seems to agree with what you said. I don't think it's a good question for that site (and I won't be surprised if it's closed there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question's a good fit for Worldbuilding after the edits. I would recommend that if the question is closed on Writers, we reopen it here. Doing so is in accordance with the OP's request and, more importantly, is more in line with the scopes of both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, thanks for bringing this up on meta. It's always good to know when we mess up; we appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T21:08:08.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-08-01T07:25:28.877" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Building on @MonicaCellio answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest the following to bypass the stated problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Votes would no longer be anonymous.&#xA;We'd see a surge of &quot;afjajflajfsa;af&quot; comments to bypass the rule.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Votes should remain anonymous, but they are recorded by system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvoters are required to leave a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; may be challenged by author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator will decide if comment is &quot;utter nonsense&quot; or not (should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; decide if it is correct, justifiable or whatever, just if it is a real comment!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is intellegible challenger will get another downvote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is gibberish or something like &quot;-1&quot; it is deleted together with downvote and downvoter (without anybody knowing who he/she is) get a point penalty together with a message from system stating reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should make everyone happy at the expense of a bit of web procedure implementation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt;: is this the right way to propose such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38942" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T07:25:28.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T08:24:17.620" Score="8" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-gravity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microgravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microgravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microgravity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/538/29&quot;&gt;Do we need a micro-gravity tag separate from Zero-G?&lt;/a&gt;, in many situations these two are effectively the same thing. The tag wiki excerpt for the microgravity tag even reads (boldface added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about environments with extremely low perceived gravity (&lt;strong&gt;colloquially referred to as &quot;zero gravity&quot;,&lt;/strong&gt; usually referring to a free-fall environment in space) and the impact of such environments on creatures and technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki excerpt for the zero-gravity tag reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about zero or low gravity environments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the two tags should be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For discoverability, it might be beneficial to have a &quot;zero gravity&quot; tag &lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt;. However, since (absent the term &lt;em&gt;free fall environment&lt;/em&gt;) the technically more correct term in almost all cases is microgravity, I suggest that microgravity should be the main tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that microgravity can apply to Earthbound situations as well; for example, it could be applicable on a question about unrestrained falling elevators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T21:10:01.100" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T21:10:01.100" Title="Please merge and perhaps synonymize [microgravity] and [zero-gravity] tags" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T19:38:58.553" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which name could a servant have? James, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which name could a farmer have? A middle-classman? An aristocrat? A bum? An old-fashioned snob? A spoiled daughter of a rich father?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's move a few centuries back. A Tudor era knight? Peasant? Bandit? (Robin sounds nice, but its taken already :( )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm kind of sure that we could come up with lots of examples of names that would look funny on a given person. (I suppose we couldn't have, for example, His Majesty King Fletcher II)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid such mistakes and to help giving realistic names to characters I believe we could have a question with a reference of different names for different occupations / societal statuses for a given era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how to ask such a question? We could come out with a series of questions like &quot;What could be a good name for a Tudor-era merchant?&quot; &quot;What could be a good name for a contemporary farmer?&quot; would be a little repeatitive. However, is there any better alternative? A question like &quot;Please create a reference of appropriate names for all possible occupations for all times&quot; would probably be too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a similar question wrt surnames could exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T20:46:57.800" Title="How to ask a question about realistic names for different occupations/societal statuses?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5202" CreationDate="2017-08-01T20:24:06.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your best bet would be to ask a question about how commoners were named in the middle ages.  I would focus it on a particular country as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably needs &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/names&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;names&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;names&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good guide to generating peasant/non-noble names would be a helpful guide to have on the site...so get posting or I will! :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T20:46:57.800" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T20:46:57.800" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5207" CreationDate="2017-08-02T15:10:06.697" Score="-3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to the nature of WorldBuilding, the details of a specific world are changeable and therefore subject to discussion and improvement. This can lead to debates on whether a certain technology is effective or not &lt;em&gt;in this world&lt;/em&gt; or whether &lt;em&gt;this world&lt;/em&gt; should utilise a certain feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases this is great because the owner of the world is open to new suggestions and revising their world or adding to it. They don't mind whether answers provide a solution to their problem or adjust the details of the world to remove the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, the owner is set on their world and does not want the details to be discussed; they just want an answer based on a scenario that they have already finalised. In this case they purely want a solution and do not want alternate suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be useful to have tags to identify how flexible a user's post is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is completely possible that the OP could simply put in the question whether it is open for scrutiny, however I think that tags would be simpler and more widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23503" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T15:20:11.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T17:42:13.793" Title="Tags to identify flexibility of questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T17:41:52.843" Score="20" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I looked for this and my search did not reveal a duplicate, but I have a feeling that this has been asked before.  If it's a duplicate, I would really like to know where.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you folks come to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?  There are some people who ask tons of questions, and others who lurk, and still more who like to give answers.  So my question is, simply, Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in the category that answers a lot of questions, but rarely asks them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep coming here because it stimulates my imagination.  It exercises my creativity by giving me odd problems to solve.  I actually use this in my day to day work, where I have to try to smooth out processes and close gaps in the Data.  I will often look at a question here, and in the process of answering it, an idea for the solution to another work problem will pop in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I was wondering what brings other folks to the Worldbuilding SE, and what kind of value do you derive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T09:20:13.703" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:30:10.330" Title="Why do YOU hang out on Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="21" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5205" CreationDate="2017-08-02T17:42:13.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need tags to do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There already exists an expectation that answers work within the premise of the question being asked. If I ask &quot;How do space pilots orient themselves in space?&quot; an answer of &quot;Space magic.&quot; or &quot;Don't use a space pilot, use a space AI.&quot; doesn't provide an answer to the question asked. If there are some obvious answers that you don't want people to consider, be sure to clearly state those restrictions in the premise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T17:42:13.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-02T18:18:17.550" Score="24" Body="&lt;h2&gt;WB has the diversity, systems-thinking and abstraction level I love&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I'm most comfortable at higher levels of abstraction and interacting with systems.  Worldbuilding is completely about the behavior of systems.  Coming here has helped me increase my ability to reason about them. I also really like that I've been exposed to practically every branch of science during my time here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By nature of what WB is/does, the majority of questions tend to be at least a bit general.  That suits me fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer far more questions than I ask.  I talk in chat far more than I answer questions.  I think far more than I talk in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, where else am I going to go that asks questions about abstract ethical systems that take two hours to even wrap your head around the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also, everyone on WB is just as weird as I am.  It's hard to find truly strange people who are also nice and also smart and also talk about destroying the world in the most inventive ways on a regular basis.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T18:58:49.187" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:58:49.187" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-02T19:14:36.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to come here because Worldbuilding is one of the few places I can exercise my creativity, problem solving and moderate knowledge of the sciences in a fun and entertaining way. These days I don't answer many questions and I mainly come here to talk in the chatroom whilst still looking out for the odd interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I like closing stuff and this is the only place where I have the rep to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T19:14:36.837" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-02T19:32:38.123" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like when movies, books, games and other media create a world of their own with rules about how that world is working. And I hate when they break with their internal consistency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I love this place: people realize that they want to have an internally consistent world and that people might think they are breaking with their internal consistency. And others help in spotting these &quot;problems&quot; and helping authors of any kind to come up with ideas that fit into their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love reading about the different ideas people have and seeing the level of detail people put into their work. The reason I ended up with an account on WorldBuilding.SE, which is the first site on the SE-network where I had an account, was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning I asked a few questions and tried to answer some things, too. Later I realized that most of my answers and questions don't really meet the quality standards that I would love to see on the site and posting stuff became rarer. Together with the following points this leads to my last answer being written on 2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; of February and my last question being asked on 13&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; of April. So I haven't really posted anything in roughly half a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time I realized that I can contribute to the site by editing posts. I may not be a native speaker and my english is far from perfect, but I can still spot quite a few typos and typical grammatical problems. I like to feel that helping others by checking their grammar and making sure that their questions are well-received by the community is a good way of contributing, too. Even if it doesn't award reputation once you cross the 2k mark, which was important for me to edit faster without having people approve my edits first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to help others is to give some feedback in the Sandbox and I think this is a great feature and the existence of the Sandbox shows that the community of this site cares about helping people post good questions instead of just closing everything as some people think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also love to check out the chat. There are a lot of weird and funny conversations going on regularly. I tend to have a tab with the chat open most of the time and regularly checking if something interesting happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All in all, I am more of a reader, than a writer. And there's a lot of interesting stuff to read and learn on this site.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T19:32:38.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-02T22:02:46.563" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I build worlds.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're in a spaceship at the end of an interstellar voyage, arriving in a system with a strange green planet near a young star. That planet, engineered from the grass up, is the product of the work of some of the galaxy's most accomplished engineers, scientists, and dreamers. It's an experiment designed to understand life itself - how it arises, how it evolves, and how the forces of nature and evolution conspire together to form living creatures, again and again and again. Your job is simple: Be this planet's guardian as it passes through the turmoils of childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraph is brought to you by Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. It's a paraphrase of some of the writing I've done lately, based on several questions I asked on this site during my time here. That world - which exists in my head, in writing, as maps, etc. - came to fruition thanks to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'll be honest. I have days where my head's spinning from work and I can't stare at another equation, or read another page of poetry. So I take a ten minute break and go here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And suddenly, I can travel &lt;strong&gt;across the galaxy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, also, y'all elected me as one of your moderators. So even if I didn't love this site, that's an extra incentive to sit here for a while each day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T22:02:46.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-03T07:47:07.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I'm here because I love worlds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day I realized that in most books, I'm less interested in the story, and more in the world shown. I like worlds to be consistent, deep, and &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;. I love to read books about them, view movies etc. And being here allows me two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read about worlds before most of the world is allowed to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help making worlds a bit better built, to increase enjoyment of other readers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I need some worldbuilding help on my own, for games etc, but that's only a small part of my activity here, as I have asked only 5 questions and provided 185 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T07:47:07.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-04T08:34:15.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It stimulates my creativity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quick shots of checking here questions and answer helps refreshing my brain during my job while keeping it active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T08:34:15.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-04T14:23:19.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the questions and the stories and half stories. Getting lost in other people's worlds and finding creative solutions to problems and fake internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also love that people understand what I'm talking about and appreciate the terrible jokes and obscure references I sometimes put into the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's by far the best place in the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T14:23:19.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:09:47.097" Score="10" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered countless questions about how one would control the elements or related concepts. Here are some examples: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88199/is-elemental-based-evolution-possible&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84327/a-humane-way-to-hold-a-group-of-elemental-manipulators-prisoner&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80146/where-would-fire-manipulation-magic-fit-in-a-modern-military&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88137/question-about-the-abilities-of-air-powers&quot;&gt;I found this one particularly sad&lt;/a&gt; . I think you get the point. Those questions also end up being deleted frequently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these questions have something in common: They are incredibly vague and mostly end up getting closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often comment below those questions, asking for details, but I do not remember ever helping anyone with this. It is not my job to make people ask great questions and if the OP just decides to not show up again and clean up his mess, well, that is his decision. However, the frequency of these threads makes the entire thing frustrating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since those questions are so super common, I would like to know how to deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr sphennings included a couple of points in his answer with which I agree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem with talking about &quot;Manipulating Elements&quot; is that it encodes a lot of meaning that isn't obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most obvious is the lack of clarity about how many elements are being talked about. There's the &quot;classical&quot; 4 elements of fire, water, wind, and earth. Some systems have a five element system adding either metal, or void. Some radical people even believe in a system with 118+ elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What it means to manipulate can also have many different meanings. Is it the ability to move? To change form? Can you summon your element?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My intentions:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Those questions show up often. Ideally, I want to link this thread via a comment in the future instead of writing the same again and again.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here are a couple of questions/points for debate: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a universally or WB wide understood definition of controlling elements, what is it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer is &quot;There is none&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What procedure is recommended if I want to comment and ask for details? Has anyone ever experienced positive feedback with something below such a question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have after linking this thread, please feel free to share other success stories. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should you ask a question about elemental magic on WB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr sphennings suggested a rather hard science approach and gave the following example: &lt;em&gt;&quot;In my world earth benders can magically exert a maximum of 1KN of force on rocks and stone. How many would be needed to construct Stonehenge?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr Vylix has demonstrated that this can be done beautifully after some edits, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89759/how-can-a-firebender-become-an-effective-but-stealthy-assassin&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(updated, don't be confused by answers addressing points that I deleted because they were stupid)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37861" LastEditorUserId="37861" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T15:39:44.023" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T15:39:44.023" Title="How to control the magical elements ... of vagueness" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2017-08-07T16:56:18.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with talking about &quot;Manipulating Elements&quot; is that it encodes a lot of meaning that isn't obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most obvious is the lack of clarity about how many elements are being talked about. There's the &quot;classical&quot; 4 elements of fire, water, wind, and earth. Some systems have a five element system adding either metal, or void. Some radical people even believe in a system with 118+ elements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it means to manipulate can also have many different meanings. Is it the ability to move? To change form? Can you summon your element? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your many questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since there isn't a universal definition we shouldn't standardize a definition. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is ambiguous the ambiguities need to be resolved or the question should be put on hold as unclear what you're asking. Asking for clarification in the comments is the only way to do this unless the person asking the question is a mind reader. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to not discourage people suggest solutions don't just list problems. The stack exchange format is different and much stricter than many other sites. Some people aren't aware of this when they start asking questions or posting answers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing wrong asking questions about elemental manipulation. Elemental manipulation is just another flavor of magic. Like with magic you need to describe your system in enough detail to be able to ask a meaningful question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T16:56:18.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T20:57:47.123" Score="-7" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was sitting in front of my computer, like a useless bean bag, when something bugged into my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just how many stories got created from people, who used WB: SE to create a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also other mistakes, such as unnecessary details, and a &lt;strong&gt;very distant&lt;/strong&gt; narrative, also the &lt;em&gt;&quot;PG-13 Rwanda Massacre Syndrome&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (you can't make a global catastrophe child-friendly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL; Dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too much worldbuilding, too little everything = Bad story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you (the collective) think about this, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does WB: SE hinder the creation of good stories, and slows down the workout of a concept, with its rigid, and possibly useless Q&amp;amp;A style?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was WB: SE a good idea, or it was a mistake?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T04:47:08.920" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T10:57:56.990" Title="Is WB: SE killing stories?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5218" CreationDate="2017-08-08T06:05:42.213" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer on behalf of the WB collective as I am and we are not a hive mind. I will give instead my thoughts, impressions and opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is WB SE killing stories? Answer: Only if you let it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Too much worldbuilding, too little everything = Bad story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed absolutely. The exemplar of this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orionsarm.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion's Arm Universe Project&lt;/a&gt;. There the worldbuilding has reached the stage of choking out what could be interesting story scenarios by rigidly adhering to the fidelity and the axioms of its conceptual universe. The Project has been around long enough that its worldview remains stuck in the nineteen-nineties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; value of the Project is that it sets out, in detail, a considerable number of scientific and technological concepts that can be used by the canny science-fiction writer. You want faster-than-light travel via a wormhole network for your story? Well that's explained comprehensively, so borrow all you need and discard what you don't. In that sense, it is an excellent resource and should be used as such. Try setting a story there and it's too much hard work for little reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now WB SE is itself an excellent resource for ideas about specific elements  in building worlds and the frameworks for imaginary worlds. In essence it functions more as a test bed for assisting worldbuilders to determine whether elements in their worlds are workable or not. What it is not is a resource for developing stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in doing so, this process isn't perfect, the agents doing the sifting, sorting, sieving and selecting in terms of the criteria to determine whether a given question is suitable for WB SE, are fallible human beings. Too often I suspect many questions are closed not because they fail to meet WB's criteria but because the VTCers fail to understand the criteria themselves either because they have never read the criteria or if they have haven't understood them at all well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I say that is that in one of my careers I was a decision-maker who had to determine matters governed by Acts of Parliament and the outcomes had to be based on legislative criteria. This is especially so when the decisions I made could be reviewed and overturned by internal review conducted by my department, review by the Office of the Ombudsman, and in court. Indeed I had to defend my decisions in court on only one occasion. This means I hold much more considered standards for making decisions. All the criteria have to be properly met and often the benefit of doubt has to be exercised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question &amp;amp; answer methodology here at WB SE isn't designed to build stories, even though there will inevitably be worldbuilding elements proposed in questions that do go towards constructing a story. For example, asking about &quot;How to overthrow the emperor of the universe when she is protected by an impenetrable force-field?&quot;. This is likely to be closed as story-based. Whereas if the same question had been posed as &quot;How to penetrate an impenetrable force-field?&quot; then the question would treated as being about a worldbuilding element, in this case, the penetration of an impenetrable force-field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am trying to suggest is that questions need to be framed so they can be asked in a way that fits WB's criteria for questions and answers. While a querent can do all they can about their questions to try and ensure they fit WB SE's criteria, they have no control over the criteria that may be applied to it in terms of whether it meets those criteria. This does mean quite often some WBers seem to be looking for criteria to close when they could have spent more time putting effort into improving questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an easy process? Absolutely not!! Having tried to suggest ways of improving questions, it is too easy to fall into the habit of dismissing questions with a snarky comment. I have no doubt I have been as guilty of doing this as anybody else here. Thinking about how to improve questions is hard work. Much harder all too often than answering the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does WB: SE hinder the creation of good stories, and slows down the&#xA;  workout of a concept, with its ... Q&amp;amp;A style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotation above edited to remove unnecessarily emotive phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is only if you let it. Starting with the proposition that WB SE isn't in the business of fiction construction, it's possible to ask what is its relationship between storytelling and worldbuilding? Before I answer my question, we need to realize every story exists within its own fictional universe. Some facts and factors of the real world are excluded or omitted. For example, people usually don't die of cancer in a comedy, but they do in nitty-gritty realist fiction. On the other hand, they contain things that don't happen in reality: private detectives solve murders or people have super-powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every story creates its own fictional world in which the events of the story can unfold according to the internal logic of both the story and the world within its events exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trap some storytellers can fall into is in focusing too much on the worldbuilding, to the extent that overzealous adherence to a concept blocks the progression of the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How this can be circumvented I will illustrate by the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kevin Grazier who was scientific adviser to &lt;em&gt;Battlestar Galactica&lt;/em&gt; said he expected scientists who had watched the show to come up and admonish him for getting the science wrong. Instead what he found was they usually came up and said to him something along these lines: &quot;Ah! I see what you did with this scientific concept. You assumed &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, considered &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, and ignored &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; Smiling and nodding in agreement with what he had done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greg Egan said that when he was going to introduce a piece of nanotechnology into his fiction he could either spend the whole day calculating the thermodynamics to see if the concept worked or simply assume it worked and get on with the story. I chose the latter.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having noticed that Joe Haldeman creates most of the science-fictional devices in his fiction by postulating the rules about how they function I called this approach &quot;Haldeman rules&quot;. For example, in his 1975 novel &lt;em&gt;Mindbridge&lt;/em&gt; where the rules for the Faster-than-light teleportation technology are explicitly stated. When I mentioned this concept of a rules based system to Sean Williams, I remarked that he uses the same technique in his science-fiction too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a writer develops a set of Haldeman rules to cover their version of FTL travel, time machines, antigravity or thermonuclear cheese, then provided they stick to the rules this will engender internal logical consistency to make their story more plausible. It also makes the writer's task of worldbuilding easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was WB: SE a good idea, or it was a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the tenses in that quotation should be present tense, but that's not important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is yes and no. For what it intends to do, WB SE may not succeed as well as it could, but what it actually achieves makes it invaluable. Its main failure is in fulfilling its own set of criteria comprehensively and most of the time. Where it does succeed is in creating an extensive resource of ideas, concepts and putative frameworks for worldbuilding. Many of its answers are exceptionally brilliant providing amazing insight into how worlds can be built, often overthrowing conventional misunderstandings, and helping to raise the standard of what goes into worldbuilding. Does it always succeed in doing so? Absolutely not, it is a fallible human institution and fallible human institutions often fail, but frankly they are all we have got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you expect WB to help you build a story, that's not what it's for. But if you use it as a way to guide you through the darkness, then it can be invaluable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Greg Egan, personal communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T01:49:29.257" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T01:49:29.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5218" CreationDate="2017-08-08T20:18:55.183" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5219/29&quot;&gt;a4android's statement&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is WB SE killing stories? Answer: Only if you let it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people have always got stuck in the process of building a world, never getting around to telling a story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people are always going to get stuck in the process of building a world, never getting around to telling a story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There have always been people who were so eager to tell a story that they didn't notice that the world that story is set in is horribly internally inconsistent, which typically is a great way to violently jar a reader out of suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having a Stack Exchange site dedicated to problems encountered while building an imaginary world isn't going to appreciably change any of that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; having a place where questions can be asked, both about specific details (&quot;if a frobnicator bafoogles, how would a dragon be able to fly through the warp field of a starship in a methane atmosphere?&quot;) and about larger chunks of the world (&quot;given that dragons exist, how do I make sure it is reasonable to have warp-capable starships that can operate within an atmosphere?&quot;), &lt;strong&gt;can help ensure that the world is internally consistent.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;em&gt;can help ensure&lt;/em&gt; that the world is internally consistent. It certainly isn't a &lt;em&gt;will ensure&lt;/em&gt;, nor will it &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; the telling of stories in internally consistent worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people love building worlds just for its own sake. And that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people love telling stories, but also want to make sure the world which that story is set in is internally consistent. And that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people just want to get around to telling their story, and see worldbuilding as a necessary evil. And that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are places on the Web where you can discuss worldbuilding issues in a more free-form style, if you prefer that.&lt;/strong&gt; I personally like the Q&amp;amp;A format, in part precisely &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; writing a good &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; forces you to think about what you really need, and make that need explicit. It also encourages you to consider previous questions, and if similar or related answered questions exist, discuss how those relate to the one you are asking; at least, if you want to reduce the risk of yours being closed as a duplicate of an existing one. There have been &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; times when, in the process of actually formulating a question, I have realized that I have everything I needed to come up with the answer myself; both on Worldbuilding SE, other sites in the Stack Exchange network, and in completely different venues in life. And of course, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How To Ask Questions The Smart Way&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;don't confuse knowing how your world works for using every such detail within a story, let alone describing every such detail within a story.&lt;/strong&gt; I can set a story right here, coming up with me doing something at my desk. I have a decent idea of why my desk phone isn't floating out through the window, but that doesn't mean I need to explain within the story I'm telling the intricacies of gravitational attraction of bodies, subatomic repulsive forces, and orange juice. (Well okay, maybe not that last &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;.) But knowing a little about those things ensures that I won't accidentally write a story in which the desk phone suddenly &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; float through the window, which would likely be bound to make the reader go &quot;what the eff?&quot;, completely forgetting about the point I am trying to tell by telling the story itself. &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding SE is really not very different from all that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sure, you&lt;/strong&gt; (for some value of &quot;you&quot;) &lt;strong&gt;can spend all your time on Worldbuilding SE, never getting around to telling a story. But that's hardly Worldbuilding SE's fault.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T09:45:18.673" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T09:45:18.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-08T20:52:18.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is&#xA;  normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding&#xA;  white noise to the signal, which contains a wide spectrum of&#xA;  frequencies. The frequencies in the white noise corresponding to the&#xA;  original signal's frequencies will resonate with each other,&#xA;  amplifying the original signal while not amplifying the rest of the&#xA;  white noise (thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio which makes&#xA;  the original signal more prominent). Further, the added white noise&#xA;  can be enough to be detectable by the sensor, which can then filter it&#xA;  out to effectively detect the original, previously undetectable&#xA;  signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This phenomenon of boosting undetectable signals by resonating with&#xA;  added white noise extends to many other systems, whether&#xA;  electromagnetic, physical or biological, and is an area of intense&#xA;  research.[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noisy variety here has allowed me to be more productive at my paying gig, allowing my previously undetectable signals to reach detection strength.  Or perhaps my manic phase is responsible both for the productivity as well as my worldbuilding enthusiasm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And: I am motivated by the questions to read on anything that interests me and so educate myself further.  It is glorious living at a time when within seconds I can read up on whatever strikes my fancy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T20:52:18.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-08T21:02:45.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love building worlds. I always have. I'm afraid I'm probably not much of a writer, what I enjoy is creating the history of a world more than writing stories in it. I tell myself I'll use them someday to write a book or make a game, but even if I don't I enjoy the journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love reading the bizarre questions we get here, the stuff that reminds me of xkcd's What If. I always end up learning something. Quite often I get ideas that help with stuff I'm stuck in with my own worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd lurked around here on and off for quite a few years, having come across it in the Hot Network Questions while browsing coding problems on StackOverflow and recently joined when I took up building my current world seriously again. And I find myself answering questions more and more, even things I didn't think I knew a lot about, because it's interesting and challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at the end of the day I feel a certain affinity with a bunch of people who obviously love building worlds (and asking and answering odd questions) as much as I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T21:02:45.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5226" CreationDate="2017-08-09T02:36:31.290" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: ( corrected )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UML stands for Unified Modeling Language and comprises a set of tools for graphical modeling of engineering or other systems or processes.  For example I will use a Sequence Diagram for my timeline in temporal order, another Sequence Diagram for the plot in order of revelation, and an Entity Relationship Diagram to help me visualize and manage the relationships between actors in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on my first major writing after a couple of flops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time round I've decided to use tools that I thought appropriate to help me plan and develop the story and characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just curious if anyone else does this, and if so, can we ask about it on WB or is it rather off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19530" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T06:34:04.417" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T08:27:49.170" Title="Are UML or other modelling tool questions, specific to world building use, appropriate for this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5225" CreationDate="2017-08-09T08:27:49.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Maybe&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some tags that might be useful for what you are trying to ask about, but each one has a slightly different focus from what you are asking as it would be &quot;opinion-based&quot; to ask a broad discussion about whether someone uses something. For all of the following things I want to recommend our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where you can test a specific question if you are not sure about whether something would be on-topic or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info&quot;&gt;WorldBuilding-Process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; explains in its tag description that it can be used for questions that fall roughly into the following category: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the world building process covers how to build a world including ways to execute repetitive tasks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag might be useful for you if you want to learn how other people go about creating their world, or, to make it more on-topic, how you should go about creating your world once you enounter a problem or are not sure how to proceed. I would imagine that asking about the Pros and Cons of using an entity relationship model for managing the relationships of characters in your story might make for an interesting question that would be helpful for others. The wording is important there, as you don't want opinion-based brainstorming, but somewhat objective answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also just ask about what people do to manage the relationships of their actors. That would give you a broader view where people are not constrained to UML, which might be useful to broaden your view on the topic. Here you should be careful not to make it &quot;too broad&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples from this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2/how-can-i-break-down-the-task-of-creating-a-world-into-manageable-chunks&quot;&gt;How can I break down the task of creating a world into manageable chunks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48622/how-can-i-develop-names-for-my-fantasy-land&quot;&gt;How can I develop names for my fantasy land?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25450/methods-for-filling-in-your-world-brigands-bandits-rebels-and-thieves&quot;&gt;Methods for filling in your world - Brigands, Bandits, Rebels and Thieves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the one that comes closest to what you are trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-resources/info&quot;&gt;WorldBuilding-Resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;about books and technological aids to be used for hastening the process of designing and fleshing out your story-setting to make it as beautiful, believable and engrossing as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag might be useful if you want to learn which tools you could use where &quot;tool&quot; is used in a very broad sense. It is often used for recommendations of for example websites or books you might want to have a look at to learn about your topic. I would imagine that asking about resources where you can learn how to use UML for WorldBuilding might be a good question where you get a lot of links and simle explanations to sites explaining this topic in greater detail. Questions with this tag would be more focused on the resource itself and not so much about whether someone here on WorldBuilding.SE uses it and what the good and bad things about your approach are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/499/what-software-is-available-for-keeping-and-organising-notes-about-your-world&quot;&gt;What software is available for keeping and organising notes about your world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1396/are-there-any-free-science-fiction-world-settings&quot;&gt;Are there any free science fiction world settings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36617/online-character-generation-resources-types-of-occupation-throughout-history&quot;&gt;Online character generation resources: types of occupation throughout history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably not quite what you are looking for, but might be useful at a later stage to get more resources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/software-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;Software-Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag might be useful if you want to see what software you could use in the context of your specific question. I would imagine that postulating that you want to use UML and asking about which tools are out there for working with UML maybe even with a focus on WorldBuilding might be on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125/what-software-is-available-for-map-creation&quot;&gt;What software is available for map creation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1348/what-software-can-prototype-a-planetary-system&quot;&gt;What software can prototype a planetary system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3267/best-platform-for-collaborative-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Best platform for collaborative worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag might yield good results, but you won't get a lot of feedback on whether it's a good idea or not and you probably won't learn a lot about what others do in this regard or where you can check online for informatione about the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a question about this would be useful for the site so that others can see how you want to go about this topic and to have resources if you are having the same idea. I think the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; would be useful for what you are trying to do as a first step, but depending on your concrete interest other available tags might be more useful. If you want feedback on a question draft the Sandbox and the chat would be the appropriate places to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T08:27:49.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5227" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-09T10:54:17.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag for questions that have strict requirements regarding citation of sources and therefore warrants special attention from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for meta questions about main site questions and answers where the questions were tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. It can also be used for general questions about this main site tag, such as the description and usage guidance or the usage of post notices on questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T13:52:42.427" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T13:52:42.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5228" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-09T10:54:17.157" Score="0" Body="This tag should be used for meta questions regarding main site questions and answers tagged [hard-science]. It can also be used for general discussions about the tag." OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2020-01-02T21:15:45.503" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T21:15:45.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-09T13:32:54.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It makes me think creatively about things I wouldn't otherwise ever imagine. It lets me play &quot;what-if&quot;, which is a mental exercise I enjoy. It's great to take a concept and drill down into that, considering the potential ramifications and impacts of that concept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting too to read both the questions and answers others supply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also lets me dip into the vast pool of otherwise useless trivia I've collected over the decades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, frankly, it lets me BS for a bit about things that aren't work related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T13:32:54.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5202" CreationDate="2017-08-09T20:03:27.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with James, and I also agree with your idea of doing it as a question series. Do a single meta post containing a list of name generation questions and then make sure each is specific enough to be answerable (i.e. time period, geography, etc all need to be specified). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T20:03:27.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5237" CreationDate="2017-08-10T09:04:19.210" Score="7" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through the tags today and I found the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gun&lt;/a&gt;. The first thing that comes to mind is that it is using singular whereas other non-meta tags normally use the plural form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing is that I remember one of the first discussions on Meta where I was involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4644/specialized-tags-for-weapons&quot;&gt;Specialized tags for weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus seems to be pretty clear that we currently don't want specialized tags for weapons. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4646/28789&quot;&gt;highest voted answer&lt;/a&gt; interestingly even mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/guns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;guns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;guns&lt;/a&gt; as a bad example, which is obviously different from the existing one because the author of the answer assumed all tags use the plural form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time the author mentions that &quot;guns&quot; and &quot;swords&quot; could be special cases. But seeing as there is currently no tag for &quot;guns&quot; and no tag for &quot;swords&quot;, while the tag &quot;gun&quot; only has 7 questions this doesn't seem to be necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should burninate the tag. What does the rest of the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note I think this is probably a case of a user creating a tag who was not familiar with the guidelines for creating a tag. It might be a good idea to think about whether we want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4656/replace-create-tags-with-suggest-new-tag&quot;&gt;replace “create tags” with “suggest new tag”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T04:04:45.160" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T05:14:50.343" Title="Do we need the [gun] tag on the Main Site?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5253" CreationDate="2017-08-10T09:47:01.423" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking through the tags on the Main Site I found the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fiction&lt;/a&gt;. Two of its questions are closed. Two questions use the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fiction&lt;/a&gt;, which looks like the author wanted to use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and didn't know that tags are written with a hyphen when you would use a space in normal writing. There is a total of 4 questions with this tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how it is useful for the site, seeing as we already have the often used tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; with currently 580 questions. There is no usage guidance or tag wiki that would explain why the author of the first question with this tag, who currently has a bit under 700 reputation, added this tag to the already existing tags. One could argue that &quot;fiction&quot; is a more general term, whereas &quot;science-fiction&quot; specifically states that the question is about fictional elements regarding science, but as WorlBuilding is in itself about creating a fictional world I don't see how using this tag would make questions easier to find. It looks like the tag could be used on basically every question ever asked on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should burninate this tag. What does the rest of the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T18:05:31.850" Title="Do we need the [fiction] tag on the Main Site?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-10T11:04:47.363" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This is like a place tailor made for me&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just stumbled in here by accident recently and quickly found that it was full of people who like me can spend hours upon hours debating the inner workings of very non-factual phenomenon as if they were the most important thing ever. I love that. You are my people, my tribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And I learn things&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the greatest things about sci-fi and fantasy is how it can be used to say something about the world at large. The same goes for these discussions. I find that no only am I forced to research and learn things about biology, astronomy and economy when trying to answer questions. I learn a lot from everyone else's answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question to me is rather:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Why isn't everybody else here?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;This forum is like the best thing ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39814" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T11:04:47.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-10T14:21:19.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to post answers that make it look as though I know more than I actually do.  Isn't that why everyone does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More seriously, though, I never thought of it as “hanging out”.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I guess it is fun to exercise the faculty of world design when I feel especially stumped in my own.  I prefer to work out my problems myself, or covertly — looking for information and only asking for it vaguely, — and so I don't tend to reveal much about any of my more serious projects.  I do enjoy something I call, quite succinctly, &lt;em&gt;‘imagination spew’&lt;/em&gt;:  hurling stories and characters out in small chunks with little connection to any larger world or ambition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Answering questions here offers me occasion to do that very thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T14:21:19.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-10T17:40:36.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spend a lot of time on WB nailing down physics or psychology.  I collect information as a hobby, so it's nice to share that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what brings me back is not the opportunities to pin things down.  It's that once-in-a-while moment where I get to instill wonder about the amazing world around us in somebody.  I love the idea of someone looking out at the world and seeing the colors just a hair brighter and more vibrant because they simply hadn't looked at things that way before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40949/whats-the-smallest-change-to-physics-required-to-allow-magic/40992#40992&quot;&gt;What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?&lt;/a&gt; is still the high point of my WorldBuilding.SE career.  Even I swear my own colors are a bit brighter after re-reading it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T05:17:29.490" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T05:17:29.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5232" CreationDate="2017-08-11T05:14:50.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for showing the community consensus of not wanting specialized tags for weapons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the evidence shows that the tag was likely mis-created and was basically only used by fairly new users (of the 7 questions, 6 were used by sub 1k rep users, and the last (and oldest question posted with that tag) was used by a ~3k user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there were less than 10 questions tagged with &quot;gun&quot;, I have gone and taken the liberty of burninating the tag already. It literally took less than 30 seconds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T05:14:50.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T10:01:29.997" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked whether we should burninate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag on the Main site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5233/do-we-need-the-fiction-tag-on-the-main-site&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In that post and the comments I mentioned that I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag would already be enough to show that a question is about science-fiction, as I think that every question on this site is dedicated to creating fiction and a question focused on science is thereby automatically a question relating to what I would call science-fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apparently there are different opinion on this matter, two of which I will try to postulate. This is especially difficult because there are apparently quite a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definitions of science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; science-fiction deals with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science. This includes things like time-travel, faster-than-light-travel and extraterrestrial life. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; should be used for fictional science elements related to the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science-Fiction deals with imaginative concepts. The term is often related to futuristic concepts, such as time-travel and faster-than-light-travel, but not limited to a certain time. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt; can be seen as a subgenre of science-fiction. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; should be used for fictional science elements in your specific world and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post should be a list of possible tag wikis that include a more elaborate statement than the ones I provided. The wiki should include the reasoning for why a certain definition was used. If you feel that your reasoning shouldn't be included in the real wiki please make sure that it is obvious which parts are your meta discussion about the tag and which parts are the tag wiki you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes on the answers to this question should indicate which tag wiki you prefer so that we can find a fitting definition. Please add other wiki drafts if you feel that the existing answers do not fit the definition that you think we should use on WorldBuilding or suggest edits by editing or commenting on existing drafts if you feel like one of them is already pretty close to what you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:02:42.287" Title="What should be the tag wiki for [science-fiction]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5238" CreationDate="2017-08-11T10:02:31.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the current tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions relating to worlds with a setting of common science-fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current tag wiki is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be used on questions relating to settings in science-fiction. This tag merely denotes the world's setting, and answerers should take this into account when coming up with answers: answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; questions are also required to have the elements of science fiction in them that the question has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T10:02:31.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5238" CreationDate="2017-08-11T10:15:47.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposal for changing the current tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about fictional science in your world. This tag is often used for, but not limited to, questions about futuristic concepts, such as time-travel and faster-than-light-travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposal for chaning the current tag wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;science-fiction&amp;quot; deals with imaginative concepts. The term is often related to futuristic concepts, such as time-travel and faster-than-light-travel, but not limited to a certain time. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt; can be seen as a subgenre of science-fiction. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; should be used for fictional science elements in your specific world and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples for using this tag include questions such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to create an artificial planet?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the problems of my time-travelling proposal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to design a giant Mecha?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to change air-ships to make them useful in my scenario?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could I go to space in a steampunk world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag can be used in conjunction with tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; if you would like to get feedback on your proposal or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; if you need help with a design. Dependin on your specific use of technology you might also want to consider adding tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/robots&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;robots&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;robots&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aliens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt; or any other tag that helps to identify in which context you want to ask about science in your scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T10:15:47.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5238" CreationDate="2017-08-11T12:23:56.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should remove the tag entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely too broad. Science fiction as a genre covers everything from the new Voltron, a show about giant shape-shifting robots powered by superscience space gems, to Primer, a movie that carefully describes the rules for a limited form of time travel lets the consequences of it play out. Tagging a question [science-fiction] just muddies the waters since the majority of the questions on this site could be tagged with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's an official litmus test but I remember somewhere seeing &quot;It's a good tag if you can become an expert in it.&quot; I don't think someone can become an expert in science fiction. That would be like becoming an expert in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T12:23:56.043" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5244" CreationDate="2017-08-11T18:30:34.553" Score="5" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised this afternoon to discover &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88567/what-happens-when-genetics-and-popular-politics-collide&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; had been put on hold for being &quot;too broad,&quot; despite positive reception of the question and some surprisingly good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering broad &amp;mdash; even sweeping &amp;mdash; questions are asked regularly (even religiously) on this site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88650/what-are-the-current-implications-of-a-100-accurate-lie-detector&quot;&gt;such as this one&lt;/a&gt;), it leads me to wonder if the voters actually felt the question as presented was &quot;too broad&quot; or if they had another bias against the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a fan of consistency.  It's how (e.g.) site users are able to best understand the limits of what they can and what they cannot post.  So, is placing my question on hold indicative of an actual scoping problem that no other open question past (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44910/how-can-i-move-a-planet&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) and present (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88587/how-could-different-species-evolve-into-anthropomorphic-beings&quot;&gt;like this one&lt;/a&gt;) exhibits?  Or was it put on hold for other reasons?  If the later, are those reasons expressed in the FAQ (or anywhere else)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following: ... Effects of &lt;strong&gt;events&lt;/strong&gt; or world elements, including &lt;strong&gt;biology,&lt;/strong&gt; technology and magic, &lt;strong&gt;on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures,&lt;/strong&gt; and environment....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T00:00:04.983" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T00:27:52.330" Title="Clarification about why question was put on hold" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5238" CreationDate="2017-08-11T19:02:42.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; is a compliment of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; in the same way &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is meant to be.  If it is, it might make more sense to call it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speculative-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speculative-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speculative-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a compliment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, but thanks to things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/steampunk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;steampunk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt; and (if we had one, a tag like) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technomancy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technomancy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technomancy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, there is so much crossover between science-fiction and fantasy that it almost begs the question if we want any tags that attempt to classify the shelf in a bookstore where the story is most likely to be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, does it make sense that we try to categorize the literary &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt; of the question?  If so, we should be considering adding a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;science-fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, of which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/steampunk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;steampunk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;steampunk&lt;/a&gt; is considered a subgenre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt; should be retired as they're both too broad (given the basic nature of WB:SO to host questions about science-fiction and fantasy) to improve the categorization of questions.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; These tags don't actually exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:02:42.287" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5242" CreationDate="2017-08-11T19:14:38.980" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Main problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking how society would react is nearly always too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Explanation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many aspects to society and the view of society towards certain topics changes basically yearly. As an example women couldn't vote until december 2015 in saudi arabia. That's not a long time and for many people from western countries it's one of the most normal things today that women could vote, even if Liechtenstein allowed women to vote for the first time in 1984. Our point of view changes constantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next thing is that there are too many aspects to society to discuss them in a post on StackExchange. There is a character limit of 30,000 characters on the site and people are writing a lot of books about topics that discuss how something would change society from their point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Connection to the question from the OP&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly what you are trying to do. You explicitly state that you want to write a short story about this topic and ask about the content of this short story. While there is no official definition for the term short story regarding word and character counts this statement already indicates that you plan on writing more than a concise answer that fits on the StackExchange site. A general rule of thumb when thinking whether a question might be &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; for the site is &amp;quot;Could you write a complete book to answer this question?&amp;quot;. You can when asking about the changes to society by introducing a change that affects our current definition of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Discussion about the other questions mentioned&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right in that broad questions are asked quite regularly on the site. WorldBuilding has the problem that it's not always as easy to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147#5147&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;draw the line&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; when it comes to things like &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot;. In the answer I linked above I write a bit about why I think it's not easy to &lt;em&gt;draw the line&lt;/em&gt; and that it's more some kind of blurry region than a line. This applies to &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; just as it applies to &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question you linked about the lie detector was posted only 2 hours ago. That's often not enough to close a question so it might still get closed. In fact it was closed roughly 5 hours after being asked. Especially considering that the weekend just started and that there is less activity on weekends. I already flagged that question as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot;. You are absolutely right, but it's not really a good example. I am pretty confident that the question will be closed in it's current form as there are no constraints and two big topics are named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next one was about moving a planet. That's a clear scientific goal and it aims at maths and physics. Those questions are easier on-topic as there are less opinions involved. This is why it's easier to differentiate on-topic and off-topic questions on sites like Maths.SE, Physics.SE and StackOverflow. That question is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third one falls into a similar category as the first one. It was posted today and has a pretty broad scope without a lot of constraints. 19 hours is a bit much, even for the start of the weekend. So here another point applies: sometimes things slip through. You can't draw a perfect line and say that something is on-topic or off-topic and so the process sometimes takes a longer time and sometimes a question is off-topic but there are enough people online that have a more relaxed view and so the question is left open. Please help by identifying these questions and bringing attention to them by coming to the chat or posting on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You need &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; aspects of society&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your quote mentions &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; aspects of societies and cultures. You are asking about society in general without making any effort to say whether you mean &amp;quot;current day America&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;current day Europe&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;current day Asia&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;near-future dystopian post-apocalyptic Africa&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;people-accepted-genetic-engineering-but-otherwise-it-is-the-same-as-Europe&amp;quot; or any other possible definition of &amp;quot;society&amp;quot; for a work of fiction. You also don't mention which aspects of society you are interested in. Furthermore it is a very sensitive topic. You make the best effort to mitigate this problem that I have seen on this site so far and I congratulate you on being especially clear about this. Sadly some people might not be as willing to accept such a premise so easily and as we are all humans our political views may from time to time cloud our view on things. Just like not having had a coffee today might lead to someone clicking &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; more often one day than any other. There are a lot of possibilities but normally the Close/Reopen process takes pretty good care of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I think your question is too broad, just like the forst one you linked and probably the last one, too. The one in between is on-topic. Thanks for bringing this discussion to Meta. These discussions alwasy come up and it's important to have them - we will probably never get rid of them. That's the nature of WorldBuilding under the rules of the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Now on to trying to help you, though I can't vote to reopen and the choice is in other peoples hands&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try not to use phrases similar to &amp;quot;How would this change influence society?&amp;quot; &amp;lt;- those are basically &lt;em&gt;trigger words&lt;/em&gt; for a lot of people&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as your text is pretty long some people might not have read it completely and looked at the title, the first paragraph and the last one as those are the most important ones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;try changing the title to something more focused, such as for example &amp;quot;What are the most important factors  that would protect the idea that genetic differences leading to newborn gender disparity should not be modified?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;try to rephrase the part about &amp;quot;changing current society&amp;quot; to something like &amp;quot;encouraging people to view [...] as normal&amp;quot; so that it's more about actions to be taken to change the view on the topic in the eyes of the public&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no guarantee that these changes would get your question reopened or that your question could be answered here in the form you wish. It's a very difficult topic for a site on the SE network as it is aimed at starting a broad discussions that would get you the input of the personal view of the answerers to a very broad topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T11:47:48.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-11T21:47:52.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never asked a question. For the most part I like to help people. Sometimes a question inspires an inventive answer, a way of getting around a problem or some unusual way of using the OPs rules in a way even they have not considered. That's fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in my fields of interest (I am a research scientist in algorithms, AI, statistics), I like to debunk what is the current layman philosophy about how the brain and intelligence work; the world is full of BS on the AI topic and the truth is far simpler and less mystical than it is made to appear. (Or, perhaps, Intelligence &amp;amp; Consciousness &amp;amp; Self-Awareness are all far less mystical than many &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; them to be.) So that is fun, too. Who knows, maybe someday, somebody will write a book or screenplay that isn't full of claptrap, because I nudged them onto the right track. Or not, it is fun either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T21:47:52.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-08-12T03:02:35.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other already mentioned, I do not like it if a story is logically inconsistent or uses junk science while real science would even have been better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly my knowledge in science, engineering and computer technology grew in contrast more wide than deep. This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; recommendable if you want to make a career in science (hint), but me (Science&amp;amp;Nature, History, Geography) and my brother (Entertainment, Arts&amp;amp;Literature, Sports&amp;amp;Leisure) are at least together an unstoppable juggernaut in Trivial Pursuit...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joking aside, it comes extremely handy if someone needs solutions for a story. It is also very nice if you know many strange, rare, anomalous phenomena which are virtually unknown to the general public or even specialists (ball lightning, prosopagnosia, brocken spectre, polymorphs, brinicles, nazca lines, shape memory alloy, morning glory clouds, wolfsegg iron).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T03:02:35.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T12:31:28.517" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I flag questions because I don't think they are a good fit for the site and these questions are later shown in my low-quality review queue. Why is that the case? I already flagged them and normally they should not be visible for me, as I basically already &lt;em&gt;handled&lt;/em&gt; this entry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I click on the &quot;Close&quot; button in the review queue it even shows me that I already flagged the question and I can't really do anything. Sometimes it's useful because it remindes me of questions I flagged and where I forgot or didnt't have the time to comment. But is that the reason why these questions are sometimes shown in my low-quality review queue where I only get the chance to skip or say that the quesiton is okay when I can't recommend closure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uDaQn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uDaQn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of info box for &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; button that shows I already flagged this question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I had this behaviour again on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/38210&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt;, though I forgot to make a screenshot. The situation was the same as above: I flagged a question, upvoted an existing comment, but didn't yet write a comment myself. Later I saw the question in my &lt;em&gt;low-quality review queue&lt;/em&gt; and wasn't able to recommend closure, as I had already flagged it. I left a comment and then had to use the skip button. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T07:28:13.437" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T07:28:13.437" Title="Why do I sometimes see questions in the low quality review queue that I already flagged?" Tags="|support|reviews|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5218" CreationDate="2017-08-15T14:27:04.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me get the bit where I think you've asked a good question in a really bad way out of the way first. The question raises important issues but the tone and the broken formatting detract seriously from the [rather limited] useful content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, and I'm pretty new here but an old hand at worldbuilding, the way this site is set up encourages those with questions they're willing to put into the public arena to really think about what they already know, what they want to know, and what they &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to know. This has meant that a lot of questions I've been working on haven't made it as far as the page, I haven't needed to post after formulating something fit for asking, formulation alone has provided the answer. I agree that the format does slow down the process, and that's a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing, slow considered work on a world saves hassles down the road. Also I doubt very much that this site has ever built entire worlds, that's not what it's for, it helps to hammer down outstanding issues not scratch build a fictional universe. You probably could do that now given the range of content available and it would &lt;em&gt;save&lt;/em&gt; a good deal of time if you didn't want to make any effort, I'd find that quite dissatisfying but others might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the world shouldn't be the story I feel that the world is essential &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; any good story. Regardless of how much worldbuilding, geographically or historically, one chooses to display in a finished work without a clear, consistent picture of how it fits together and how it effects the story's participants inconsistencies build up and the story falls down. Anything that helps one to get that clear, consistent world put together is going to &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; not hinder good storytelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not getting into realism either sex or violence in fiction that's not a viable question in my opinion because there's no widely applicable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T10:57:56.990" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T10:57:56.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2017-08-15T15:09:00.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my way of thinking about what this site does if there isn't a story element or impact inherent in the question then it's really just a chemistry, earth science, physics, or cosmology issue, not worldbuilding. However a question in which story and character dominate to the exclusion of the environment in which they exist falls short of meaningful worldbuilding. In short any question that asks participants to do a character's thinking for them is &quot;too story based&quot;, while a question that asks for options and helps to develop the environment and setting is about worldbuilding and belongs here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T15:09:00.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4456" CreationDate="2017-08-15T16:01:27.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the point you seem to be trying to put, questions that ask for specific story elements are not &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; about worldbuilding, the complaint you actually raise is that questions should be specific but answers should be general. I see two problems with this, first that's kind of a mutually exclusive set up and secondly that's more an issue of how the community chooses to answer than it is one of how the question is asked in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T16:01:27.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2017-08-15T17:30:49.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See I'm really fairly new here but having just had a careful look at a couple of things I should have checked out day one but couldn't find (because I'm really bad at navigating websites) I don't think the question under discussion meets the basic criteria of answerability, there seems, to me, to be too much missing context for a clear cogent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Actually it's not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; too broad it's also completely and blatantly off-topic, this question is the antithesis of worldbuilding, it's literally asking &quot;please help me cut the world to pieces&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T14:26:24.473" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T14:26:24.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5233" CreationDate="2017-08-15T18:05:31.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I removed the tag from the questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There hasn't been an answer in 5 days on this question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are 4 upvotes on this questions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The highest ranked comment has 4 upvotes (3 if you don't count mine):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Surely, the nature of worldbuilding implies that everything on here is fictional&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other comments under this question were about a different tag &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all the community seems to agree as there hasn't been a single indication to keep the tag. The reasons why I think the tag should be deleted have been laid out in the question body. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;These are the questions that had the tag before I removed it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/86513/what-could-be-a-reason-why-a-more-developed-civilization-isnt-helping-a-less-de&quot;&gt;What could be a reason why a more developed civilization isn't helping a less developed one to advance? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84998/how-could-a-desert-planet-have-an-atmosphere&quot;&gt;How could a Desert planet have an atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87895/what-could-threaten-a-perfectly-scientific-civilization-on-earth&quot;&gt;What could threaten a perfectly scientific civilization on Earth? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82123/provinces-what-are-their-practical-purposes&quot;&gt;Provinces, what are their practical purposes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T18:05:31.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5255" CreationDate="2017-08-16T11:21:44.613" Score="14" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see (and sometimes post) comments such as this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding! If you have a moment please take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any rules about doing this, or a specific format to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23503" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T15:08:58.140" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T15:08:58.140" Title="Are there any rules or a specific format for &quot;Welcome to WorldBuilding!&quot; comments?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5254" CreationDate="2017-08-16T11:34:28.880" Score="20" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No, there are neither rules nor a specific format for such comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no rules about this. And that is my standard comment to welcome new users if their posts are not especially good or bad so they don't seem to need any special feedback. Anyone can comment like that and is encouraged to do so to welcome new users and guide them to useful resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some standard phrases that I use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Normal first post&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt;! If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Good&amp;quot; first post&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt;! Interesting first answer. Haven't thought about that. Looking forward to your future contributions to the site! If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Bad&amp;quot; first post that needs some tips on what to improve&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding &lt;em&gt;username&lt;/em&gt;! While you raise a valid point your answer currently doesn't really address the question asked. Could you please [edit] it to focus on &lt;em&gt;question asked&lt;/em&gt;? Otherwise there is a chance that this answer might get deleted. If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the examples you should replace the cursive with appropriate content, though you will sometimes see that I write the username in cursive on the Main Site. But, again, this is just my personal taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: The links I used in the above examples are &lt;em&gt;magic links&lt;/em&gt; that don't need an explicit link in parentheses. Normally you would write a link like &lt;code&gt;[take the tour](/link/to/tour)&lt;/code&gt;, but in comments you can just write &lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt; and the system replaces it with the correct formatted link to the tour. There is a pretty long &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92060/add-data-se-style-magic-links-to-comments/94000#94000&quot;&gt;list with magic links for comments&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.SE. I especially like &lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[help]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Useful links for new users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other useful resources to guide users to that I regularly use are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the chat&lt;/a&gt; (with the hint that you need at least 20 rep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; (with the hint that you need at least 5 rep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; (with the hint that you need at least 5 rep)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relevant Meta discussion - for example sometimes there are a bunch of similar questions and there are Meta discussions starting such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4317/what-to-do-about-unstoppable-questions&quot;&gt;What to do about unstoppable questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-register-my-account&quot;&gt;Why should I register my account?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18232/how-can-one-link-merge-combine-associate-two-accounts-users-anonymous&quot;&gt;How can one link / merge / combine / associate two accounts / users? (Anonymous / unregistered / cookie, or OpenID / registered)&lt;/a&gt; for unregistered users - especially if they have already posted a few times and you happen to run across them again&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;How to deal with &amp;quot;I have a High Concept, please do my work for me&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relevant similar questions that might add another point of view to questions asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relevant answers that raise similar points or raise a different view&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General stuff&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general: always try to give the best feedback you can if you want to give feedback. These are my personal resources that I often use and I made a few &amp;quot;canned comments&amp;quot; for myself that I use quite regularly. It makes it easier to type and focus on the relevant stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also vary from time to time a bit: &amp;quot;Welcome to WorldBuilding!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Welcome to the WorldBuilding.SE!&amp;quot; and stuff like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as I already said, you can use whatever you want and however you feel new users should be greeted. I found a similar comment shortly after I started and so I continued to do something like this. But it can go a completely different route if that's what you prefer. The first comment I ever received was the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 for specifying what you're asking in the first paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very good and precise encouragement for a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that some people like to point out that new users get a badge for taking the tour to encourage them a bit. This, again, shows that you can use whatever you think would motivate people to contribute to the site. Try to be welcoming and supportive if you want to welcome our new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Mod opinion on this matter&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=38767173#38767173&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is also a little feedback from one of our mods, Monica Cellio, in the chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just saw a flag on a &amp;quot;welcome to the site; here's our tour&amp;quot;-style comment from somebody who wondered if this sort of thing should be a prerogative of moderators. I can't reply to the individual flag, but I wanted to pop in here and say: please, continue to welcome and guide folks! No, it's not something that should be restricted to moderators or high-rep users or anybody else. When I see our users helping and guiding our new users it makes me smile. Our strength is in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T21:50:45.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-08-16T21:06:00.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens if the question is edited to include the hard-science tag after answers have already been posted?  Deleting an answer that ignored a requirement from the question may be justifiable &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1)&lt;/a&gt; (although it does seem somewhat heavy-handed even then; I'm ambivalent).  But if someone puts in enough time to make a good answer that is invalidated by a hard-science tag added in a later edit, I really don't think it should be deleted.  Downvoted, perhaps, but if it was a good-faith effort that answered the question as it was at the time, it should still have some value. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i5/chicken-12-5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2)&lt;/a&gt; (And we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; safe in only considering good answers here, since answers that are both bad &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; not hard-science will already be voted down enough that we don't need a new mechanism.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14504" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T21:06:00.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-08-17T10:40:00.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it would be more appropriate to look at questions that are tagged hard-science and challenge that request where the question doesn't seem match up to the tag. Many of the questions with the tag I've looked at recently don't seem to understand it, especially from people new to WB, and I've changed it to science-based in a few cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22020" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T10:40:00.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5268" CreationDate="2017-08-18T09:01:20.000" Score="6" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I found the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/open-source&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;open-source&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;open-source&lt;/a&gt;. At first I thought that it sounds pretty interesting and I was thinking about adding a tag wiki. But when looking at the questions in that tag I saw that there were only two questions, both of which were asked more than a year ago. And most importantly: both questions are closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these things lead me to believe that there is no real support and need for this tag. Nearly nobody uses it and the questions that currently use it are closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should remove the tag. What does the rest of the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T13:04:25.273" Title="Do we need the [open-source] tag on the Main Site?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2017-08-18T11:10:16.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm gonna go ahead and say &lt;strong&gt;no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said, there are only two questions tagged [open-source], both of them are over a year old, and both of them are closed. Nobody's using it and it doesn't seem like we have any need for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nuke it from orbit&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T11:10:16.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5263" CreationDate="2017-08-18T16:02:11.650" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question itself is a bit problematic, and has votes to close. But the user voted an answer the &quot;best&quot; answer. Then the answer was edited to say &quot;Delete this answer now&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/89351/32987&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/89351/32987&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should the answer be deleted? Or just leave things alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T16:09:15.613" Title="Should this answer be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5261" CreationDate="2017-08-18T16:08:12.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be deleted. It was very low quality before it was defaced and should have been deleted then. Just because a user accepted it does not make it fit for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T16:08:12.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5261" CreationDate="2017-08-18T16:09:15.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rolled back the answer to revision 1. Defacing answers is frowned upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should still be deleted but that should be handled by the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the accepted status of the answer should matter for voting to delete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T16:09:15.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2017-08-18T19:39:04.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not &quot;on hold&quot;, but &quot;pending&quot; + review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Justification and background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We put &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;a lot of questions&lt;/a&gt; on hold, few of which get reopened.  (Many do get edited, though a majority do not.)  We know anecdotally (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4479/28&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4510/28&quot;&gt;another example&lt;/a&gt;) that closure causes frustration for the asker, for people who answered and then saw the question change, and for the whole community trying to be fair to all involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28&quot;&gt;question sandbox&lt;/a&gt; has helped to refine a lot of questions before posting (link is to the latest instantiation; there are others).  The sandbox is completely optional and should remain so; we don't want to place extra hurdles in front of people trying to get answers to their questions.  But it demonstrates the value of a &quot;trial period&quot; before people start answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow has a &quot;triage&quot; system for questions from new users.  I don't have enough reputation there to use it, so I don't know the details, but it was created to solve the general problem of poor questions from new users.  I mention it to point out that there's precedent on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New questions from users below some reputation threshold (TBD) start as &quot;pending&quot;.  (Not &quot;on hold&quot;, which means something different as I will demonstrate, and anyway has negative associations.)  Treat this as a privilege level -- &quot;ask questions immediately&quot; or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale for rep threshold instead of applying to everybody: while high-rep users can certainly ask poor questions too, this casts it more as a &quot;getting to know us&quot; thing than a &quot;there's so much bad stuff that everybody has to wait&quot; thing.  We don't want to &lt;em&gt;deter&lt;/em&gt; people; we just want to slow them down a little.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pending&quot; questions get a banner, similar to the close banner, that says something like: &quot;This question will open for answers in (time interval).  Please review it to make sure it's on-topic, not too broad, and so on (link to help).  Help the asker by leaving comments asking for clarifications or improvements.&quot;  Meanwhile, the user gets a notification when he submits the question; the notification explains briefly why we're doing this temporarily and links to an explanation (to be written).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we'd have a new review queue for pending questions (like SO has for triage).  Failing that, pending questions should go to, and be prioritized in, the reopen queue.  I suppose if the community wants to &lt;s&gt;re&lt;/s&gt;open a pending question early, there's no harm in that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pending questions appear on the front page and in the list of questions with a &quot;[pending]&quot; suffix.  Don't hide them away; the whole point is to get eyes on them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But pending questions shouldn't be allowed to enter the Hot Network Questions list.  Not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; many eyes. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How long?  I dunno; an hour doesn't seem unreasonable to me.  Answer flags only wait for community action for 15 minutes before going to mods, so SE assumes the community responds quickly in general.  We want the delay to be short enough that the user stays engaged but long enough to get help from users who are around at the time.  If it happens to be the middle of a Saturday night for most users and nobody sees it, eh, that's no worse than what we have now.  Don't make the user wait too long; if we can't help him quickly that shouldn't be &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is already good about monitoring the front page and helping people refine questions.  (It's just that we're &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; good at answering, sometimes prematurely.)  It'd be nice to be able to feed new pending questions into chat to provide more notification.  But even without that, I think this change would help our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T23:40:44.077" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T23:40:44.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T23:04:31.047" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89273/how-would-the-police-military-prepare-and-fight-magicians&quot;&gt;How would the police/military prepare and fight magicians?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as story-based and subsequently edited.  It looks to me like the OP is asking about &lt;em&gt;tactics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;capabilities&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;character actions&lt;/em&gt;.  Can it be reopened now?  If it should stay closed, what further changes are needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T18:34:22.160" Title="Can the &quot;defending against magicians&quot; question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-08-18T23:53:18.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe we should be deleting or downvoting answers simply because they don't meet meta's definition of what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that there are three groups here.  (a) OPs with less than 2K reputation.  (b) Answerers with less than 2K reputation.  And (c) the &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; which has a fair number of people with more than 2K reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that many members of groups (a) and (b) have a definition for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; that has more to do with publisher marketing than with group (c)'s opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that groups (a) and (b) comprise, what, 80% or more of the questions and answers posted to WB:SE?  At least it seems that way recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members of the community appear to be trying to impose a definition that is well beyond the expectation of groups (a) and (b) and there is no effective way to educate groups (a) or (b) about that expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punishing group (b) &lt;em&gt;(and I'm not ashamed to say, me too, even though I just squeeze into group (c))&lt;/em&gt; for trying to help group (a) write a cool story just because neither group (a) nor group (b) meet group (c)'s high standards seems to betray the point of WB:SE — especially when the OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tagged question is frequently short of deserving the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been a long-winded way of saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The average WB:SE user has a publisher's defintion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and we're trying to hold them to a scientist's definition.  That's &lt;em&gt;no bueno.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) We frequently punish the answerers when the fault usually lies with the OP's inability to understand what our community thinks &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; means.  Rather than deleting group (b)'s answers, we should be deleting group (a)'s use of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) We deny the OP a lot of really good answers (answers that are often lauded by the OP) simply because we think the tag is more important than user participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for hearing me out.  I feel much better and will now return to teasing my cat with a laser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T23:53:18.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4313" CreationDate="2017-08-19T00:30:57.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this to be a great challenge, so I'm looking for ways to &quot;bump&quot; the question.  Upvoting it didn't work.  Editing it doesn't seem to have worked.  Therefore, I'm announcing that I happily posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/2d&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;2d&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;2d&lt;/a&gt; question to bravely meet the challenge.  I'm hoping the answer might &quot;bump&quot; the question as I, too, would like to see more interest in the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T00:30:57.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2017-08-19T04:26:55.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I removed both references to the tag.  It will fade away after a few days if no questions are using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T04:26:55.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5265" CreationDate="2017-08-19T13:05:55.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the edits have just been appended to the end of the text. The original question is still there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How could the police and later the military prepare to find and, more importantly, fight these two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is asking how would people respond to a scenario. This is why I voted to close the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit added two additional questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there rules/standard tactics for dealing with unknown threats? What kind of gear/weaponry do police/military forces have access to and which of these would be appropriate/useful against the described enemies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple questions being asked at once. Asking what gear would be useful feels like a mixture of too broad and too opinion based to me. Asking are there tactics to deal with the unknown is a question wrongly asked. You can't really have rules or equipment for dealing with the unknown. The same way you can't expect the unexpected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these questions are good questions for the site and the one that is most acceptable (Are there tactics?) isn't supported by the rest of the text. If this is the question they want answered they would need to reedit their entire question to focus on this and not the magicians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T13:05:55.443" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5272" CreationDate="2017-08-20T01:39:57.420" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to improve my question asking ability after my last question wasn't very well received. Also I think that this would be a relevant guide to point to when it comes to some of the evolutionary and societal questions on here. Maybe not now but in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I mean by &quot;divergent evolution&quot; is questions that go in the vein of &quot;Everyone was the same until X event happened. Then group 1 went one way, group 2 a different way, ad nauseum. Is this realistic?&quot; When should someone split those into individual questions based on group 1, group 2, group 3, etc? And group could easily be redefined as responses to an event, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I am working on a question about angels and demons evolving from the same race. However some went to heaven, some went to hell, and they evolved from there. Do I split this into two questions, because angels and demons have different fundamental physiology and evolved in different environments? Or do the go into the same question based on the fact that they evolved from the same species but X event caused them to go one place or another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, where do we draw the line on questions based on divergence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2092" LastEditorUserId="2092" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:41:33.340" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:41:33.340" Title="Where should a line be drawn on divergent evolution type questions?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5271" CreationDate="2017-08-20T04:00:15.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Summary: ask questions based on the expertise(s) they require and anticipated answer size.  It's ok (and not uncommon) for a single set of starting conditions to lead to multiple questions.  The more you pile into a single question the harder it is for people to fully answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your angels/demons example, it sounds like you have two questions of the same form: Given these starting conditions and this environment, how would {angels, demons} further evolve?  (That sounds too broad, but I assume you have more-specific questions.)  That the starting conditions are the same for both doesn't mean they should be one question.  Perhaps somebody is capable of answering the demons question (expertise in thermodynamics and related fields) who wouldn't be able to address the angels question.  If you make them separate questions you get an answer about demons; if you combine them, you don't get an answer from that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's ok to have families of related questions; that's not unusual here on Worldbuilding.  Try to scope your questions to require a &quot;reasonable&quot; amount of expertise; the more fields someone needs to be fluent in to answer your question, the lower your odds are that such a person will see and answer your question.  You also want to scope them so that they can be reasonably and fully answered in the space of an answer post; if it would require a book (or even a sizable chapter) to answer, that's too broad for this platform and you should break it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it makes sense to ask things together; if you were asking about the effects of a certain environment on plant life you &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; don't want to ask separately about grasses, flowering bushes, fruit trees, evergreens, and so on.  So yes, there's a balancing act and I don't have concrete guidance for that.  Our community generally does a good job of helping people to refine questions, and if you'd like some help &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; posting the question on main you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; or ask for help in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T12:43:53.800" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T12:43:53.800" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2017-08-20T13:04:25.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You had me persuaded. The number of questions were against it, besides being ancient history, and they were closed too. Since Citizen @JDługosz has removed them, everything's done and dusted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T13:04:25.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="465" CreationDate="2017-08-20T17:56:49.157" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a suggestion I'm not sure about:  aggressively edit the question.  If a question with a good answer cannot be edited to be at least good enough to re-open, I would argue that nobody's really tried.  In the special case of questions that are closed as overbroad and yet have good answers, to me this indicates a failure of motivation on the part of the close-voters.  If someone else did the work that you had thought excessive, it begins to look like you're merely enforcing your own level of slothfulness and lack of imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are regular efforts to rescue closed questions, but perhaps we should seek a way to further incentivize this behavior, like maybe a larger reputation bonus for editing closed questions upon reopening.  Is that even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T17:56:49.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5276" CreationDate="2017-08-21T12:49:51.433" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens, exactly, when I reach the &quot;maximum daily&quot; (200)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I won't get more points for upvote (accepted answer do not count; I once got 230 in one day), but what about the upvote itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it reflect on my answer (i.e.: does it count against nice/good answer badge)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38942" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T13:26:43.233" Title="Upvote mechanics" Tags="|support|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5275" CreationDate="2017-08-21T13:01:16.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The votes still count against badge mechanics like &lt;em&gt;Nice Answer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Good Question&lt;/em&gt;. You just won't be able to get anymore reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some mechanisms that circumvent this rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You mentioned the &quot;Accepted Answer&quot;, which is probably the most important one. You always get 15 reputation if an answer of yours is accepted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second one is accepting an answer yourself. This yields 2 reputation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last option is getting a bounty. If you answered a question that has an open bounty and you get the bounty either fully because the person that placed the bounty manually awarded it to you or half because the person forgot and the system automatically distributed only half of the original bounty you can go beyond the 200 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thing to consider: when you reached the 200 rep for a day and were downvoted you can still get the 2 rep back by another downvote. So it's not like you are &quot;cut off&quot; for the day. The system checks with every rep income whether you are at the limit for &quot;normal&quot; rep gains up to 200 per day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about it like two different buckets: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One is the normal bucket. This is the &quot;200 rep&quot; limit per day. Normal upvotes on your questions and answer go here. Rep gains through approved edits from posts, if you are under 2k rep, and approved edits to wikis go here, too. Downvotes on your posts and downvotes you cast on other peoples posts go here. You can fill the bucket in whichever way you want. But you can't go above the 200 rep. And once the bucket is full any excessive rep is lost. It is not kept for later use in case your bucket empties a bit throughout the day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second one is the special bucket. It is so big that you don't need to worry about filling it. SE makes sure this bucket is as big as you need it to be. Here you get the rep from accepting answers, from your answers being accepted and from getting a bounty through manual and automatical distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badges regarding the maximum amount like &lt;em&gt;Mortarboard&lt;/em&gt; count those two buckets together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See here for information on Meta StackExchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/32161/352819&quot;&gt;What is the daily reputation cap and how can I hit it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few strange special cases that mainly involve un-downvoting. See here for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3942/28789&quot;&gt;Strange rep cap behavior: how did I get 201 for the day?&lt;/a&gt;. Basically if you downvote, reach a net 200 rep for the day and then un-downvote or the downvoted answer gets deleted you regain your spent reputation. Think about it like the rep comes from any of the buckets, preferrably the normal one, when you downvote and the regaining is put into your special second bucket. But those cases tend to be rare, so don't sweat it if you get weird numbers like 201 or 216 reputation on some rare occasions. This can even lead to something like 217 if you downvote multiple things and undownvote them, as the one undownvote rep is always put into your special bucket. Theoretically you should be able to raise the max score to 230 (+ &lt;em&gt;normal&lt;/em&gt; special bucket rep) with this by using up your 30 answer-votes on downvoting answers, then getting some rep, editing all the answers and undownvoting them. Maybe the mod tools would show this at some point. I haven't tried it, but it should be possible in theory. Quite a lot of effort for a meager amount of imaginary internet points though... Writing more answers and hoping one gets accepted sounds like a better plan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T13:26:43.233" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T13:26:43.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2017-08-21T19:09:08.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing this kind of question and I'm relating it to some DM'ing experiences I have had in the past.  It seems to follow this pattern in thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  I need a Villain.  I know what abilities my hero has, and I don't want this to be over in 12 sentences.  I'll make my villain stronger than my hero or negate my hero's powers in these ways...  In my game, the Cthulu Sushi chef needed to have great night vision to deal with dark environment and to spot the thief, really strong tentacles to give the fighter trouble, and lots of tentacles to deal with the the other fighter with a vorpal blade....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  The hero would defeat THAT too easy, and THAT, and THAT as well.  Lets thwart those abilities, one at a time....Hmm, the wizard is fireball happy, sooo, fireproof, the rogue is going to try to get behind the Cthulu Sushi Chef, so eyes spaced evenly around...and so on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)  Crap, now my villain is just too strong....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then we get the cry for help that many of these questions actually are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see this as WorldBuilding, and @SRM has the right of it in that a well done super-power is really no different that a hypothetical weapon or device.  Worldbuilding does blend with characters in that &lt;em&gt;it is characters that are our lens through which we view the world&lt;/em&gt;.  That's why I usually won't vote to close, or will vote to reopen them if they thought through a lot of the examples and problems they had when building the ultimate badass  bad-guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Far as dealing with the problem, maybe we can add something to a FAQ or some sort of guide as to what to do when your power/ability/weapon/whatever is now too strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some questions to ask the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the opposing side bring to the table?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you need a standup fight, or are you looking for subtle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is each side trying to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask myself those questions, and usually the needed weakness becomes self evident at that point.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can point many of those same Questions at a FAQ, it might help folks reason their way through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T19:09:08.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5242" CreationDate="2017-08-22T00:27:52.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was surprised this afternoon to discover my question had been put on hold for being &quot;too broad,&quot; despite positive reception of the question and some surprisingly good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the definition of Too Broad is that it allows too many good answers.  In general, Stack Exchange works better if there are only a few good answers.  So anyway, the presence of good answers does not mean that a question is not Too Broad.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Considering broad — even sweeping — questions are asked regularly (even religiously) on this site (such as this one), it leads me to wonder if the voters actually felt the question as presented was &quot;too broad&quot; or if they had another bias against the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular example is currently closed.  That's not a good argument against closing your question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your other two examples, both are asking how to accomplish something.  So we have a starting point and an end point (that said, the second might be too broad anyway, as it arguably has multiple start and end points).  Only the path is subject to discussion.  Your question doesn't have an end point.  It's basically what end point should you choose.  That makes it broader than either of your open examples.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would be better off picking how you would like it to work, and then asking us if that is realistic.  Or asking how you could get there.  As is, your start point in your world is that homosexuality is primarily genetic (ignoring whether that is true in the real world).  So genetic engineering can make children not homosexual (or homosexual presumably).  That's clear and understandable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What story do you want to tell?  That should determine the end point.  We can help you either get to that endpoint or critique your proposed path.  But we shouldn't be determining your plot for you.  That's your contribution.  We contribute scientific, historical, etc. details that you may not have.  So your idea sounds realistic even to people who actually know what they're doing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T00:27:52.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T11:49:48.080" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a question that doesn't actually ask for the information I'm interested in but people are interacting with it anyway and seem interested enough in the question as it is. I guess what I'm asking is what's the etiquette around deleting a question that in hindsight is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stupid because I already have a number of answers &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't actually ask about what I'm aiming at &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does seem to interest others?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T11:55:10.470" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T11:55:10.470" Title="Etiquette around deleting questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5280" CreationDate="2017-08-22T11:54:50.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Please do not delete such a question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is well-received and gets answers that generate upvotes it is normally a good idea to leave the question. People spent time researching this topic and collecting information. Even if you are not that interested in the topic anymore because you feel you didn't specify clearly what you wanted, someone else might later be interested in the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE aims at providing information for users who later come and need answers to their questions. It's good that you help build up this database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ask a new question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can just ask a new question with what you really want to know. This will expand the database, give you and others reputation and doesn't do any harm in any way. If you want someone else to have a look before you post it to make sure it won't be viewed as a duplicate and is clear this time I recommend giving the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; a try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addendum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned that you already have a number of answers - SE encourages users to post questions and answer them yourself. If you feel someone would profit from your research and you would like to help others in a similar situation you might well post such a self-answered question in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T11:54:50.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2017-08-22T15:02:40.683" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reading puts Science-Based and Hard-Science as the ends of a scale of proof requirement while Reality-Check simply asks for internal logic of a given scenario without asking a burden of proof for real world applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T15:02:40.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T15:39:41.990" Score="5" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm relatively new here so this is possibly ground that's been covered but I can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading, and rereading, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/reality-check/info&quot;&gt;Reality-Check&lt;/a&gt; is that this tag denotes a question concerning the internal consistency of a scenario and/or solutions to a problem put within a particular framework that usually involves a degree of handwaiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same token &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/science-based/info&quot;&gt;Science-Based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;Hard-Science&lt;/a&gt; are degrees of proof of concept within the &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; material laws we deal with every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The over is &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; very literal interpretation of what I'm reading, I've probably missed some of the nuances that others see, Asperger's is problematic that way. There are probably also things about these tags that people who've seen them evolve take for granted that I have no concept of.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this reading the argument that Reality-Check is somehow a soft version of Science-Based appears to be baseless as they describe different and separate requirements. Plenty of Reality-Check questions have no basis in science at all while those that do don't necessarily require science in their answers i.e. you can ask a question about a scenario that is entirely scientifically sound but requires only a test of logic from the community. As such why is specifying that an answer be both internally logical (Reality-Check) and scientifically sound (Science-Based) an issue? Certainly Science questions are generally logical but don't necessarily ask for clarifications of their internal logic the way a Reality-Check question does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm getting a little lost here, what I'm asking is this: what have I missed about Reality-Check that relates it directly to scientific standards of proof? Since I'm getting told repeatedly that a Reality-Check is a &amp;quot;soft standard&amp;quot; for a sub-scientific burden of proof instead of what it says it is which is &amp;quot;is this internally logical?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:31:31.557" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:31:31.557" Title="Where does Reality-Check actually fit in the burden of proof framework?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:22:18.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between science-based and reality-check lies in the foundation of the source material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With science-based questions, answers bring real-world science to the table to determine whether a concept is valid, or how to most closely match a concept. If there is no way to achieve the stated objective, then the community typically allows answers that specify why the stated objective cannot be achieved. In either case, definitive proof is preferred over basic conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality-check questions begin with the same assumptions as in science-based ones: dependent on our current understanding of science. However, this need not be the case. The question may specify new rules that science must obey,  alter existing ones, or create entire new systems independent of science (i.e., magic). Answers, then, are expected to determine if the stated objective is possible and feasible using the rules presented in the question, and only fall back to reality when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This difference gives reality-check a more lenient and flexible scope than science-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, this has long been my understanding of the difference between the two tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T17:22:18.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-08-22T18:58:31.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag has no connection to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags, which are used to denote different levels of scientific proof expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is simply to say &quot;I already have a solution, I want to know if it works&quot; rather than &quot;I have tried various solutions already and none of them have solved the problem&quot;, which is the assumed basis for all questions that do not have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2005/6507&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (and I think there are others, this comes up every so often). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that you can tag a question with both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; your choice of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or neither. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; will specify to answerers that you would like to know if the world you have build is self-consistent or otherwise valid in the paradigm you have provided, whereas the choice of the other tag specifies what kinds of answers you want (answers loosely based in science, answers strongly based in science, and answers featuring high-level science with references/diagrams/equations/etc). Alternately, asking a question but not using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag suggests that the world you've already built should be assumed to be valid, and now you need help building upon it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T13:22:10.197" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T13:22:10.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-08-22T18:59:21.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Reality-Check questions result in boolean answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of &lt;code&gt;reality-check&lt;/code&gt; question as essentially asking &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this environment/system that I've constructed, is it&#xA;  sane/consistent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is usually either, &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;insufficient information&lt;/em&gt;.  Simply putting &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; as an answer isn't especially helpful so we usually append a &quot;why&quot; section to the answer too.  If it's &lt;em&gt;insufficient information&lt;/em&gt; then usually that shows up in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't assume that a &lt;code&gt;reality-check&lt;/code&gt; question is using based in real life science unless the question makes explicit or implicit references to a real life science.  Almost all question do imply real life physics since developing a complete physics system from first principles is way way way outside the scope of what will fit in a WB.SE question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I agree with Frostfyre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T18:59:21.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T19:39:11.330" Score="17" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A source of confusion that I've often seen is the exact purpose of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag, and its relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2004/does-hard-science-imply-science-based-imply-reality-check&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and others, is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is used to specify that you would like to know whether or not a part of the world you have built is 'realistic', which I take to mean scientific/logical/self-consistent/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering, though, is why we need a tag for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't really be an expert on reality-checking, as it can be paired with literally any other tag on the site; a reality-check expert is the same thing as a Worldbuilding expert.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You shouldn't ever want/need to search specifically for reality-check questions. If you are having a problem with a part of your world, you would be much better off searching using other tags more specific to the problems you're having.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The tag is a meta-tag; you can't or shouldn't use it on its own, you have to use other tags with it. I think it'd be just as descriptive to leave it out altogether&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As I said, its usage is confusing, too often it's assumed to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is not something we want to encourage (all answers should have some level of scientific/logical basis).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's one of our most-used tags, which implies it's not specific enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one needs to be told that a question is reality-check. If anything, we need a tag that specifies when a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reality-check, that is, a question that does not want answerers to say whether or not what the OP has already built is consistent. Reality-check questions simply don't have anything else to answer about, all they are is &amp;quot;I have x, does it make sense?&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, am I correct in thinking that this tag is useless and only adds unnecessary confusion? And, if so, should anything be done about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:31:58.980" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:31:58.980" Title="Do we need the reality-check tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-22T20:28:51.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need this tag and should remove it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having meta tags complicates the site with unwritten rules that are confusing to newcomers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't prevent people from challenging the premise of questions that aren't tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. The recourse for someone challenging the premise of a question, downvoting because it does not answer the question, is the same regardless of if the question is tagged or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T20:28:51.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-23T06:39:58.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Burninate &lt;em&gt;reality-check&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way a user asks his question in the body of his post already makes clear whether he wants people to point out mistakes in his proposed method or needs information about how to solve his proposed problem. The tag won't help here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore it is only confusing users because it seems to belong into our &lt;em&gt;Big Three&lt;/em&gt; science/burden of proof meta tags with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. See for example the discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5283/where-does-reality-check-actually-fit-in-the-burden-of-proof-framework&quot;&gt;Where does Reality-Check actually fit in the burden of proof framework?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2004/does-hard-science-imply-science-based-imply-reality-check&quot;&gt;Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3702/whats-the-difference-between-reality-check-and-science-based-or-even-hard&quot;&gt;What's the difference between 'reality-check' and 'science-based' or even 'hard-science'?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Burninate &lt;em&gt;science-based&lt;/em&gt;, too - use &lt;em&gt;based in science&lt;/em&gt; as the implicit default&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is suffering from the same problems. The description even states that answers normally are supposed to be based in science on the site. This implies that we should only mark the exception from this general rule, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. A Mod from RPG.SE even asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4251/is-science-based-a-meta-or-otherwise-problematic-tag&quot;&gt;Is “science-based” a meta- or otherwise-problematic tag?&lt;/a&gt;. The most notable thing about this discussion was that one of our mods, HDE, responded by stating that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4252/28789&quot;&gt;we should burninate science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Currently a user has to ask himself &amp;quot;Do I want real-world hard science?&amp;quot; to which the answer according to some members of the community, myself until yesterday included, can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, absolutely!&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;No, quite the opposite - here's what's different!&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Probably.&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Maybe...&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as &amp;quot;based in science&amp;quot; is the default on this site we can just ignore the last two points. The author of a post has to describe how much handwaving is allowed anyway. He should only clearly state when he wants something completely different from science, meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, or a lot of citation, meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. There is no need for further meta tags on WorldBuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also bring us nearer to the standard of saying that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tags are bad&lt;/a&gt;, which is something we want to discourage as you can see in the discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5205/tags-to-identify-flexibility-of-questions&quot;&gt;Tags to identify flexibility of questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2193/should-we-add-a-nsfw-tag/2194#2194&quot;&gt;Should we add a NSFW tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4931/should-we-finally-allow-reality-checks-of-other-plot-elements&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all of which were downvoted by the community ranging net from -2 to -8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Based in Science&lt;/em&gt; as the default is the current policy according to older Meta discussions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;Should our default position be that answers should be science-/logic-based, rather than magic-based?&lt;/a&gt; (+23/-2) has the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/107/28789&quot;&gt;highest voted answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally agree. Unless the question says there is magic and gives a decent description of what is possible, I assume we are sticking to real world physics. Science fiction and steampunk stories have enough variety already, adding magical answers with no knowledge of if magic exists or how is just unproductive and isn't likely to be useful to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vote count is currently +20/0. The other answers are (paraphrased and summarized by me) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/108/28789&quot;&gt;+15/-3&lt;/a&gt; saying that VTCing as &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot; is better than assuming magic is allowed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/316/28789&quot;&gt;+3/0&lt;/a&gt; saying &amp;quot;using magic if it's not defined explicitly is meaningless&amp;quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/308/28789&quot;&gt;+3/-3&lt;/a&gt; arguing that worlds with magic may very well be the majority and therefore advocating the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; to make it explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another hint from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5287/do-we-need-the-reality-check-tag/5289?noredirect=1#comment15118_5289&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt; is our current site pitch (emphasis Michael):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using &lt;strong&gt;science, geography and culture&lt;/strong&gt; to construct imaginary worlds and settings.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Keep &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hard-science&lt;/em&gt; as the edge cases&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think there are cases where meta-tags can be useful to show what an answer should be like. But these should be edge-cases, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; that explicitly state that something should be different than normally and we should be careful in using meta-tags as they prevent people from using tags that tell others something about their content. You can only use up to 5 tags on any question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the biggest problem of meta-tags is that they are used different from all other &lt;em&gt;normal&lt;/em&gt; tags, which confuses users and regularly leads to discussions about things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3930/28789&quot;&gt;Should we delete answers that don't meet the requirements of the hard-science tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2211/a-hard-science-ultimatum&quot;&gt;A hard-science ultimatum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3817/identifying-incorrectly-tagged-hard-science-questions&quot;&gt;Identifying incorrectly tagged [hard-science] questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4892/should-this-question-have-the-hard-science-tag&quot;&gt;Should this question have the hard-science tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4060/should-i-remove-the-hard-science-tag-from-this-question&quot;&gt;Should I remove the hard-science tag from this question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5168/can-post-notices-on-the-hard-science-tag-actually-do-something&quot;&gt;Can post notices on the hard-science tag actually do something?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=hard-science+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;All the other question you see when searching 'hard-science is:q'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is going a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4977/should-we-be-adding-science-based-to-questions&quot;&gt;similar way&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's enough to confuse users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, we don't need to add more confusion by stating that you can use the default of the site with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or a lesser version with a specific question format with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, where the description is so unclear that this bigger discussion involving a lot of senior users starts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should strive to use the least amount of meta-tags on the Main Site as possible - burninating &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; would help us a lot in accomplishing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T21:18:29.707" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2017-08-23T10:16:42.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, there is no &quot;standard&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; The OP should define how the magic and elements work, in some ways. One of the ways is referencing a world with similar working like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89759/how-can-a-firebender-become-an-effective-but-stealthy-assassin&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There I referenced &lt;em&gt;Avatar: Legend of Aang&lt;/em&gt; for my bending law. You can also reference other questions. Of course, explaining the specific working will help clear doubts, especially for those who have not yet read or seen the reference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask in comments for &lt;strong&gt;anything you feel needs clarification.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a loophole that the OP forgets that makes an answer very, very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to shake hands with a lightning elemental?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment: &quot;What technology level it is? Wearing rubber boots and gloves will make this easy&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a missing information that can be used to make your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question that arise from the post, that is not contained within the post, ask in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice.&lt;/strong&gt; Comment in a good faith that the OP just don't know something won't work, or how things work. Explain. And &lt;strong&gt;don't be afraid to ask too many questions.&lt;/strong&gt; It is better to ask many clarifying questions than to see the question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, of course!&lt;/strong&gt; Just define your system, add missing information that can be used as a foundation for answers. And remember to listen for feedback, especially hints for &quot;too broad&quot;, &quot;too opinion-based&quot;, and other close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T10:42:19.997" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T10:42:19.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5292" CreationDate="2017-08-23T12:51:31.480" Score="6" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pretty much as it says in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've got good answers to a question but none of them quite click as being the answer you were looking for or a usable solution to your problem is it better to leave the question unanswered and hope someone may come along in the future with some thing or pick the 'best' answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My OCD says to choose an answer and not leave questions hanging about without closure, but I'm not sure that's strictly the best criteria to be working on..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T07:06:53.840" Title="Is it better to accept an answer that's not quite what you were looking for or leave a question unanswered?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2017-08-23T12:59:04.147" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Do not choose an answer if you yourself do not feel it truly helps you&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about accepting an answer is that it is totally, completely, absolutely only up to you to decide whether something was helpful. You can decide when and what to accept or nothing at all if nothing was quite &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer you were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also place a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; on the question to get more attention or to clarify what is missing in the existing answers. As Monica said in the comments, it's important to communicate what is missing or else people might not be aware of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option would be to ask another, more detailed, question. Just make sure it's not a duplicate in that case. The best way in this case would be to link to the other question and explain which parts of the premise are different and what specifically you missed in the answers to the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4748/should-moderators-mark-a-high-voted-answer-as-the-accepted-answer-after-a-while&quot;&gt;Should moderators mark a high voted answer as the accepted answer after a while?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T07:06:53.840" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T15:04:19.180" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still consider myself new to the world building stack exchange. From the three questions I've asked two got closed. I know by now what one can do when it happens, but since the information can only be found in the fine-print, it is easy to overlook it. I suggest that the first time somebody's question gets closed he should receive a message telling them what they can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it would be nice to tell them that getting closed is in the normal process of questions, so that they don't get frustrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Is it possible to auto-send such a message in the inbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28741" LastEditorUserId="28741" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T10:30:08.080" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T21:00:30.467" Title="More information about closed questions for new people" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5295" CreationDate="2017-08-23T15:39:17.227" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89326/how-far-would-science-advance-if-we-lived-in-a-cave&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question was well received (up to now: 11 upvotes) and put &quot;on hold&quot; a few days ago. (Without an explanation at that) Right now it looks like that put an end to the discussion. That makes me wonder: Is there any reason at all to put well received questions &quot;on hold&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people won't upvote unless they understand the question well enough to answer it. (Though they might not know an answer.) Meaning it is probably possible to give a good answer. That means closing might prevent users from answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28741" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T12:25:06.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T12:25:06.447" Title="Closing hurdle for well received questions" Tags="|discussion|voting|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5294" CreationDate="2017-08-23T15:56:06.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question wasn't closed because it was unclear what was being asked. The question was closed because it was too opinion based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that is an excellent question to discuss with friends over coffee or alcohol. The thing is that discussion questions are a bad format for this site. Discussion prompts are great for talking over for hours. They are not good for clearly identifying whether an answer is good or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also very broad. Science is an umbrella that covers everything from the smallest of the largest of the large. You could say that it's an attempt at the systematic understanding of everything. That question is asking &lt;em&gt;Where in our attempt to understand everything would we stop if we lived in a cave?&lt;/em&gt;. There's a different answer for every discipline. Each sub-discipline will need to be covered. There is no way for anyone to provide a complete answer to this question in the character limit for answers on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we have guidelines about when you should upvote and downvote questions the voting process is intentionally anonymous. We have no way of controlling when people vote on questions. It is for this reason that we don't take into account upvotes and downvotes when voting to close questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T17:23:37.697" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T17:23:37.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5294" CreationDate="2017-08-24T07:54:58.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some of our highest voted questions are closed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that story-based and opinion-based questions can really catch the imagination of a reader and attract a lot of votes. Added to a lot of borderline clickbait titles (compare ours to a lot of what shows up in HNQ) and you get very highly voted questions and answers that are entirely unsuitable for the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T07:54:58.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5293" CreationDate="2017-08-24T08:18:11.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Don't add more automatic messages - the existing ones are being ignored enough&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the generic text in the boxes that are displayed on your question if it gets put &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; can only be that - generic text. There is no way to automatically give precise personalized feedback. The boxes already contain a number of links to helpful resources. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; as unclear what you're asking by &amp;lt;five people&amp;gt; &amp;lt;some time&amp;gt; ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; page for help clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, please &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts//edit&quot;&gt;edit the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a big box under your question. That's already pretty clear and it takes you to the help center page explaining what this means. Automatic messages can't get much clearer than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Try to give personalized feedback when you want to help - especially when voting to close a question from a new user&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said I think it's the responsibility of everyone who is &lt;em&gt;voting to close&lt;/em&gt; a question by a new user to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question should be closed and &lt;em&gt;what this means&lt;/em&gt;. At least upvote useful comments already explaining this. If you are voting to close please remember what it was like when you started on the site. There is a lot new users need to learn and it's often quite hidden. Clicking on generic links is also not something everybody always does and reading all this stuff is still pretty confusing at first. We are just different from other forums that people may know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can often identify new users based on a quick look at their reputation. Everyone with less than 50 reputation is quite new and probably didn't go through the Ask_On-Hold_Edit_Reopen_Cycle too often. Everyone around ~101 might just have the association bonus and differences between sites can be quite high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for everyone: if you see a new users question being put &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; please write a comment explaining to them that this is pretty normal here and that their question automatically goes into a reopen review queue if they edit it. This is a process to help increase the quality of questions and to make sure questions conform the guidelines of the site. After that it's always a good idea to give specific feedback, in the best case referring to previous comments about what could be done better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;And also try to give feedback when not voting to close but suspecting others might want to close it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When seeing a question that is likely to be closed, for example because someone is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5244/28789&quot;&gt;asking about how something would affect society&lt;/a&gt;, please write a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5254/welcome-to-worldbuilding-comments&quot;&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding comment&lt;/a&gt; explaining what is wrong and link to useful resources. A specific comment with real advice towards the concrete question will always be far more useful for everyone than generic canned comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already a lot done through automatic messages. But it requires users to read obviously generic messages and people don't do that because they assume they won't get specific advise that might help them - which of course is true. So everyone reading this - please try to be a rolemodel when it comes to new users and guide them with specific feedback and links to the resources that are really important for the specific case you are reviewing - whether it's in one of the formal review queues or just because you came across the post through browsing the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T21:00:30.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-25T20:14:46.270" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled onto the site yesterday and may have not posted a Q to begin with were it not for the reality check tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly your answerers are seasoned users, and know how to navigate the site. I am rather puzzled by basic features, like how I am earning badges while fast asleep. Lolz, I need a virtual vest for my new badges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Devil's advocate: Instead of removing reality check, what about adding contrasting tags at the same hierarchy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality check vs.&#xA;Culture check vs.&#xA;Philosophy check vs&#xA;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41905" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T20:14:46.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-27T00:30:52.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A voice of disagreement, I think you are jumping the gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard-science as tag for real science problem? Nice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Science-based answers should be preferred as answers if no tag is given? No problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bothers me is the example of Secespitus:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Do I want real-world hard science?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;No, quite the opposite - here's what's different!&quot; -&gt; magic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ouch.&lt;em&gt;Ouch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;strong&gt;Ouch&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magic is NOT the opposite of hard-science!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can give offhand some examples which have absolutely&#xA;nothing to do with magic, but are not also not remotely&#xA;hard-science (and have been used in countless stories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unexplained abilities based on real-world experiences (psionics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Universe location with other natural laws&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pocket dimension&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dreamworld&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can argue in the first case that it is &quot;magic&quot;, but new users won't&#xA;understand it this way. A story of e.g. a detective which has precognition&#xA;can be completely based in a real world scenario unlike Harry Potter. And the last three examples simply do not fit for the magic tag at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stories are told mostly in-universe because the reader knows or believe to know (&quot;Realistic is unrealistic&quot;) how the world is supposed to behave.&#xA;Most of the users asking questions fear that they oversee something in their&#xA;world which breaks the suspension of disbelief (&quot;If X is so powerful, why don't they rule Y instead being a suppressed minority&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While science-based answers are fine, it could be that a non-science answer can offer such an ingenious solution to the described problem that it is in fact &lt;em&gt;superior&lt;/em&gt; to a science-based answer. But if you want to enforce science-based answers in contrast to suggest it as preferrable, you are chaining yourself for no discernible reason (at least for me) and it is bad because most stories are really, really &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; science-based or hard-science. I can in fact live even with flawed concept of a world as scientist as long as the story itself is well narrated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even Sci-fi takes much poetic license. The reason that is &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; that we do not need &quot;science-based&quot; or &quot;reality-check&quot; is mentioned above: Writers do like to use the &quot;normal&quot; world because it is easier to describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;As I said, its usage is confusing, too often it's assumed to be a soft-science tag, which is not something we want to encourage (all answers should have some level of scientific/logical basis).&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should it be not encouraged if the question demands it? If something is a dreamworld or an outer dimension, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; should they based on a scientific/logical basis? While an author introduces rules to avoid confounding the reader, he is not obliged to hold his world to a specific standard we are setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to press newcomers per default into a scientific corset,&#xA;please add at least &quot;non-scientific&quot; instead/as superset to &quot;magic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T00:30:52.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-27T13:54:50.607" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously people are voting to get rid of it, and obviously people are inappropriately voting down other opinions just because they disagree, but I'll take the hit: Keep it. I use it. There is a distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hard-science&lt;/strong&gt; means (to me as a PhD that has done it) &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; science, it is a request about actual engineering, actual materials, actual known math or physics or geology or evolutionary theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;science-based&lt;/strong&gt; means springing from hard-science. Faster Than Light travel is impossible in known science, and anything springing from known science, all mechanisms for it presume the existence of things that are completely speculative (like other dimensions or negative mass or wormholes or what happens in a black hole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt; is, to me, more about whether a fictional idea is ludicrous or not. There does not have to be &lt;strong&gt;hard-science&lt;/strong&gt; and it does not have to be &lt;strong&gt;science-based&lt;/strong&gt;, it can be 100% about how the world works and humans behave and society reacts. It can be about human emotions, human psychology, or even perhaps the behavior or capabilities of specific animals like dogs or tigers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have an idea about how a new kid, a genius and sociopath, moves into a new neighborhood, and immediately begins plotting how to take over the local criminal gang. But for plot reasons I want this to be the youngest ever gang leader: Could he be 14 years old and succeed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, I can have my little sociopath do these various cruel and violent things, including murdering a few people, and here are the consequences: Are they plausible IRL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no science-based way of answering such questions; it requires some knowledge of how criminal gangs work and their social structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt; should be for when an author worries about jumping the shark or in more technical terms, doing something that ruins suspension of disbelief. Is it plausible for armies to be composed entirely of women? Can a large 1st World industrial or post-industrial country be entirely nudist? Can a culture accept a hard limit on age; so everybody insists that people commit suicide (or be coercively killed) the day after their 50th birthday? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have hard science or a science-based answer, but we can give our thoughts on such questions, explain our reasoning, use analogies, and perhaps give the questioner some plausible justifications for what they want to do in the world they are building. Or provide alternatives because what they want is to &quot;unrealistic&quot;, or just explain why we think their proposal is too unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt; is about reality, and that is not just about &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;, it can be about the human experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T13:54:50.607" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5302" CreationDate="2017-08-27T19:29:48.710" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a bad question today (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/90198/1&quot;&gt;How to defeat an AI wizard?&lt;/a&gt;) and I'm not sure what to do. I was going to edit the question when the answers kept popping up. I can't delete or close the question myself. Now my edit will, in total, invalidate 6 existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best action I should take? Let it be closed and ask a new question instead? Edit it with the new question anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T11:53:33.077" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:40:37.447" Title="Asked a bad question, can't delete, can't close by myself. What is the correct thing to do?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5301" CreationDate="2017-08-27T20:43:11.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two sometimes-conflicting goals at play here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edits that invalidate good answers aren't allowed, as it's not fair to the people who wrote those answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People shouldn't answer questions that they know should be closed, and if they do and their answers end up getting invalidated or deleted, it's on them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a quick review I don't think your question qualifies under #2.  The lines between asking about (world) capabilities versus asking about characters, and asking about world versus story, are a little tricky sometimes.  You asked in good faith and people answered in good faith a question that's likely to be closed.  The best way forward for all involved is to use what you've learned from this question to ask better followup questions.  If you can't edit this one to be openable without damaging the existing answers, it's better to just let it be and ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to get help/feedback from the community before you ask that next question, try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; -- it allows you to refine a draft in a safe place before people start answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T12:40:37.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:40:37.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5301" CreationDate="2017-08-28T11:52:04.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do both. Ask a new question with the correct question, provide a link to the wrong question to explain why this is not a duplicate. Then ADD to the wrong question with an edit so the answers are not invalidated, to try to direct people to your new question. Just use the &quot;###&quot; for a heading, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Oops; asked the wrong question!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got carried away while writing, the question below is not exactly what I intended to ask. I am leaving it so I do not invalidate the good answers; but please see my revised question for this setup HERE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T11:52:04.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-08-28T12:02:15.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether to post this as an answer or a comment, but since I think this will take a bit of space, I posted this as answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the history of the sandbox, and can only guess from its existence. Since I'm not a 10k user, I can't see the deleted posts, but I'm guessing that there are already several generation of sandboxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If sandboxes become full so quickly &lt;em&gt;until it become a problem,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; we would like to slow it down, I want to propose that users should have only one answer, and should reuse it when they want to propose a new post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post &quot;How do I X?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Graduate the question (post in main site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When that user want to post a new question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the post &quot;How do I X?&quot; to &quot;Can I do Y?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Undelete the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the post (answer) asking for moderator to clear up the comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Receive feedback and wait for graduation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:02:15.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-08-28T12:14:22.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, a reality check question does not have to be a science based question, it could be a question for lack of experience by the writer. For example, suppose my story requires a young woman to be violently beaten and raped by her boyfriend. They aren't married, they have no kids, but &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;she chooses to stay with him anyway.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know for a fact this happens IRL, but I am having difficulty putting myself in any mindset that warrants this. So I want a reality check for my best guess as to what the hell her emotions or thinking might be. Is my guess plausible? (And implicitly if it is not, perhaps the &quot;Why It Isn't&quot; answer will give me a clue as to what IS plausible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't about science, or physics, or logical proof; but it is a question about a reality issue and plausibility. &lt;strong&gt;I also hasten to say&lt;/strong&gt; this particular example is not about WorldBuilding, I am using it only to create for illustration a stark difference between &quot;science-based&quot; and &quot;reality check&quot;. In World building, we could ask such questions about moral systems in an invented culture: Could they be sustained, or would the culture disintegrate within a generation? This is sort of opinion based, but if it is an informed opinion resting on an education in human psychology and the psychology of past cultures, it is in the realm of halfway between opinion and science, or anecdotal evidence and hard evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realism is not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about science and proof and logic; what people do while in love (or for it) or in fear for their life or consumed by greed is not necessarily rational, and is often unnecessarily fatal. But that is reality, and not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is plausible, so the reality check is a way for people to test if they have crossed the line on plausibility, whether science is available to inform that decision or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:14:22.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:03:46.833" Score="-1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having asked and read through a number of questions and the replies to them, including but not limited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2004/does-hard-science-imply-science-based-imply-reality-check&quot;&gt;Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5287/do-we-need-the-reality-check-tag&quot;&gt;Do we need the reality-check tag?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5283/where-does-reality-check-actually-fit-in-the-burden-of-proof-framework?noredirect=1#comment15151_5283&quot;&gt;Where does Reality-Check actually fit in the burden of proof framework?&lt;/a&gt;, I'm wondering if Reality-Check could in fact be re-defined as Proof-of-Concept, that being what it tends to entail, such questions usually being in the form of; &quot;given these things that I've changed - does this thing work, or - how does this thing work?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having done that, since everyone seems to be saying that Science-Based is actually an assumed default standard for answers, to spite the optional nature of the tag, can that tag then be removed entirely and make Science-Based an explicit base standard for answers unless the OP specifies a softer or harder standard using either the Proof-of-Concept or the Hard-Science tag respectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T14:32:11.620" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T14:32:11.620" Title="Could redefining Reality-Check and the assumed proof standard be useful?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:13:53.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that changing the meaning of a meta tag is the right thing to do while we're discussing the removal of the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're trying to get away from using meta tags anyway. Meta tags modify the question in hidden ways that aren't obvious to new users. It would be better to not have hidden modifiers to trip them up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking a question the asker can always ask &quot;Does this make sense?&quot; or &quot;Is there an obvious flaw in my premise that I'm missing?&quot; This was the case before we had the reality-check tag and will still be the case if the current effort to remove it is successful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:13:53.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-08-28T17:04:22.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. In short: The absence of a science based tag is a reality check question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since apparently I was the one who wrote the first reality-check wiki, my point of view might be worth something considering that the beginning and the most important part is still the same I wrote in 2014. The initial wording might not have been great and contained many typos (thank for fixing them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not follow all the discussions going on with the tag nor how the tag evolved overtime. Back then, the hard science tag did not exist, we just used the science based tag instead and it was enough. Now that we have this 'New' tag, reality check seems less useful. My view on the tag might be really outdated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the distinction was that science based required a more scientific approach using mathematical models, equations and citing scientific works. Reality check does not require it explicitly but adding sources is always better. It's mostly about the kind of answers the askers wants.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a have a good education, I do not consider myself a scientist. I'm certain that I'm not the only one in that situation. If I ask a question, It is possible that I don't want to have complex equations to a simple problem. Some might find it fun to answer a simple problem with mathematics it is useless to me if I can't understand it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, maybe it's still not clear. I'm going to give an example to explain what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a book written by Joseph E. Stiglitz, an economics and winner of a Nobel prize. He talks about various economic topics and uses formulas and graphics to complement the text. To me, that is science based because if you can't understand algebra (of one of several things), you can't understand even when reading the text. Take away the equations and graphics using only words to describe what supply and demand is and it becomes reality check. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality check does not exclude science but it is not mandatory. It is more meant as a discussion. Well, not really. The actual word I have in mind is dissertation. The French meaning of the word, not the English one. This is not a university research of several hundred pages. It's what we learn in High School. It's an analysis based on argumentation supported by logic and sources when it's possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also does not exclude magic. I've read some of the other answers and some people agree that science is not always opposed to magic. I agree with that. One use of the reality check is that it imply that magic is possible. On the contrary, if I use the science base, I don't want an answer with magic unless I specify it. But most answer involving magic in a reality check question might be considered handwaving as magic can be used as an easy solution to circumnavigate a problem. That answer could get deleted and is rarely useful. So, much like science based, a question with the reality check tag should be used with the magic tag when the asker is interested in having magic as part of the answer.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;, that was a summary of what reality check meant for me when I created the wiki. The meaning of the tag today might have changed. However, I did not create it and I have to say that it might not be very useful to the site. In the absence of a science based tag, we can assume that the question has the reality check tag by default. Also, it does not replace the magic tag, they need to be used separately. It serves no purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I'm wondering on the effects it will have to get rid of the tag. Askers and new users in particular are not always aware (or they might not agree) of the the definition of a specific tag. The use of meta tags, especially science based, will probably increase as people need to figure out how to fill that void under their question that Stack Exchange require them to fill.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T17:04:22.783" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T17:46:34.793" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a couple of questions that have a number of answers that are useful but seem to miss the main point, even those that have been added after extensive editing aimed at clarification of the area of interest. Many of the answers indicate to me that the person answering sees what I'm getting at and yet somehow manages to contribute an edge of the picture while missing the centre. I'm reading 5 or 6 answers that do this at a time, plus comments that give me other bits of the picture, without getting an answer to the question as a whole. It feels like I'm getting nowhere even when I can see I am, the frustration is getting to the point where I look longer and longer at the Delete button every time I visit the question. Is this a common issue and if so how do people cope with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T19:28:25.367" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T09:31:58.060" Title="Rage quit, frustration as a factor in question removal" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5310" CreationDate="2017-08-29T18:28:44.880" Score="11" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It is a common issue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue comes open more often than you may think. Two recent examples of people with this issue who started Meta discussion were &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/34288/vylix&quot;&gt;Vylix&lt;/a&gt;, who started the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5301/asked-a-bad-question-cant-delete-cant-close-by-myself-what-is-the-correct-t&quot;&gt;Asked a bad question, can't delete, can't close by myself. What is the correct thing to do?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/34824/adaliabooks&quot;&gt;adaliabooks&lt;/a&gt;, who started the Meta discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5291/is-it-better-to-accept-an-answer-thats-not-quite-what-you-were-looking-for-or-l&quot;&gt;Is it better to accept an answer that's not quite what you were looking for or leave a question unanswered?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see those two had a very similar problem and both had a different view on this: adaliabooks was mainly concerned with the question whether you should accept an answer or not if it's not quite what you were hoping for, while Vylix was asking about whether he should delete a question that was not framed in a way that he would get the desired answers. Both of these cases are similar to your more general case of being frustrated because answerers are getting lost on tangents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There are different strategies to focus the attention of answerers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both of the questions I referred to earlier the community tried to give feedback by referring to some of the tools available on WorldBuilding to prevent or at least mitigate this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You already mention &lt;strong&gt;edits&lt;/strong&gt;. Just for completeness sake I will mention that editing your question and commenting on the existing answer what exactly they are missing should be the &lt;strong&gt;first step&lt;/strong&gt; when you realize that people are going off a tangent. At least if you don't invalidate answers. Editing should happen as fast as possible, before others jump to answering a not-quite-right question. That's why it's important to stay online at least a bit to check whether people are requesting clarification after you posted your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;next one&lt;/strong&gt; is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The Sandbox is a great place if people have told you that you need to format your question, work on your titles, need to give more or less information in your questions and all around left a lot of comments about the way you write questions on this site. We recommend the Sandbox especially to users who show problems, but it is used by experienced users, too. It's a place to get feedback on all this general stuff before posting it on the Main Site. Some people use it because they know they need some help with their english from time to time. Others use it when they know a question might be borderline &quot;Too Broad&quot; or &quot;Too Opinion-Based&quot;. Others use it just to be sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: this is a great environment to get tips on the style first to be sure people focus on the real question asked. On the Main Site you have quite a few people who will answer everything on sight as soon as you post it. This might make it more difficult to later edit the question without invalidating answers. By having others look over your draft you can make check whether people understand what you are looking for or not and fix those problems before other people jump to answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;third one&lt;/strong&gt; I want to mention is to use the &lt;strong&gt;bounty&lt;/strong&gt;. After two days you can place a bounty on any question. There you have different pre-defined options like &quot;This question hasn't received enough attention&quot; or &quot;The answers need more detail&quot;. Then you can specify a specific message to show what exactly you are missing. If this is additional information this tactic is perfectly valid and often attracts a few high-quality answers as people are looking forward to the special reward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;fourth one&lt;/strong&gt; is to &lt;strong&gt;ask a new question&lt;/strong&gt;. In this question you should refer to the old one in the first paragraph and mention explicitly what is different and would invalidate answer in the other question so that people focus on this aspect and won't vote to close your new question as a duplicate. The Sandbox might be useful to make sure of this, but in general this is the preferred method if your edits would invalidate existing answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;fifth one&lt;/strong&gt; is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You can get quick feedback on drafts in the Sandbox or ideas in the chat. You can even talk about your question and brainstorm there to see if the people in the chat can give you more detailed information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There are different strategies for coping with this issue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can repeatedly ask a question with a slightly different premise. You can make sure by checking in the Sandbox for a week and asking in chat for feedback. You can edit as fast as you can and hope you get the right answer. You can wait and use bounties to get more focused answers after a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It totally depends on you. Everyone copes differently with this problem. Some people don't even see this as a problem and are glad for a different perspective - and the chance to post another question and get more reputation from the whole process.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tips from what I see in this Meta post&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your title doesn't seem to match the content in this case. I was 100% sure that you were going to rage quit the site after getting a lot of bad answers to your questions until I was at your second to last sentence at (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Delete button every time I visit &lt;strong&gt;the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was the first time I realized that you want to talk about something similar to Vylix and adaliabooks and also why I at first wrote comments asking for clarification. Maybe you could try to focus the question title more on the real question you want to ask and word it like a question. For example &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do people cope with answers that go off on tangents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next problem I see is that you just put a big block of text into your question. By just using a paragraph, meaning two linebreaks, between your introduction and the real question you can focus the attention on the most important things. The best thing would be to ask the real question at the beginning, but it's also common to write it at the end like you did. People often only read the first and last paragraph. And if there is no second paragraph some people tend to read the title, the first sentence and the last sentence. This sometimes leads to weird answers, because people don't read the whole question body. And sometimes this leads others to only read the existing answers and going even farther off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our mods wrote a great series. I recommend you give it a try: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4877/lessons-in-writing-questions&quot;&gt;Lessons in writing questions&lt;/a&gt;. He mentions a lot of very interesting points that are specific to the StackExchange format and WorldBuilding. Therefore it's a great read if you think people are having trouble understanding what you are really asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't give up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common issue and it happens to everyone at some point. Some people see this more often than others and everyone handles it differently. If you haven't found &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer you were searching for there are always options to get them. And the community will do everything they can to help you get those answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T09:31:58.060" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T09:31:58.060" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5265" CreationDate="2017-08-31T18:34:22.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question can be reopened, but I would like it to be reworded a bit to put the actual question content higher.  To make this a good question, the focus needs to be on &quot;how do police deal with threats they've never seen?&quot;  That is actually I think a really valid world building question.  The majority of the post should come later, for it's simply context describing just how unusual these two individuals actually are.  I shouldn't have to read through three paragraphs of flavor which has minimal impact on the question before finally arriving at the question in the last sentence.  It's just presentation changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If phrased this way, I think this question is not a duplicate of the military one.  The military and police have &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different approaches.  I might even be tempted to say that if I saw a question that asked for both military and police responses, I'd close it as &quot;too broad.&quot;  In particular, the military is typically in a position where a response is &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; because you must change the world around you.  The police get more opportunities to instead regroup and simply hold the status quo until the correct time to strike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T18:34:22.160" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-31T19:30:11.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T19:30:11.830" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T19:30:11.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5317" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-31T19:30:11.830" Score="0" Body="For questions about the act of deleting existing posts, either one's own or another user's. If you are asking about a specific deleted post, use [deleted-question] or [deleted-answer] instead." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T08:36:13.123" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T08:36:13.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T20:10:30.687" Score="27" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to increasing needs and request for handling the load on Worldbuilding, we've been requested to get new moderators into the site. However, as it's not really been that long since your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;last election&lt;/a&gt;, February this year, and it is still August this year, we've grabbed the two runner-ups from the previous election to act as your moderators starting today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/29.png&quot; alt=&quot;Michael Kjörling&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/189.png&quot; alt=&quot;James&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;existing team&lt;/a&gt; shortly - please join me in welcoming them and thanking them for volunteering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well, we'd like to thank &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban Tanasa&lt;/a&gt;, who has chosen to step down. Thank you for the hard work you've provided in caring for this site over the past year and a half! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T20:13:01.813" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T20:13:01.813" Title="Welcome to new moderators Michael and James!" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-09-02T00:08:16.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I don't&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But [interestingly looking] questions pop up in the hot network questions often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting questions (unfortunately, today, I don't see anything catching my eye in NHQ): something that might contain references to interesting reading to add to my to-read-list (more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;-y, rather than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt;-y), questions that make me think about how certain physical processes develop or looking at those from the different perspective, something that might provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63016/how-to-butcher-your-dragon&quot;&gt;ideas&lt;/a&gt; for the DnD games I play, questions about bringing realism to the magic settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29850" LastEditorUserId="29850" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T02:26:57.143" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T02:26:57.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5322" CreationDate="2017-09-02T03:43:21.257" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently returned to my computer after a prolonged absence to note a message from the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/90688/6986&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in response to my comment. While I was there, I noticed the question has been put on hold and had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/90696/6986&quot;&gt;a second answer&lt;/a&gt; from the last time I visited. I was going to leave a comment asking the user to not answer questions that were about to be closed for a very clear off-topic reason, when I noticed the answer was posted &lt;s&gt;1 hour and 52 minutes&lt;/s&gt; 18 minutes &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question was put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put on Hold: 2017-09-01 &lt;s&gt;18:58:19Z&lt;/s&gt; 20:31:46Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer Post: 2017-09-01 20:50:13Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug? What order of operations would make this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The original version utilized the time at which the question was asked, not the time it was closed. I suspect this is simply a case of the user being in the process of answering the question when it was put on hold, but would like clarification, if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T05:03:14.917" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T08:41:09.290" Title="How can this after-close answer exist?" Tags="|bug|answers|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2017-09-02T05:37:38.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve seen this discussed on the site-wide meta.  The poster can submit the answer late, and it is accepted. Normally the browser communicates with the server and learns that the question closed, and refuses to post, within seconds or a few minutes of it happening.  But that's just the  browser knowing not to try submitting — if the post &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in fact submitted, it would still work, for several hours.  This is caused by network glitches and composing while network access is sporatic, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T05:37:38.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2017-09-02T09:10:11.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to blatantly steal &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/users/472/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3374/8987&quot;&gt;answer to the same question&lt;/a&gt; when it was asked on Mi Yodeya Meta in January 2015, because it puts it far better than I can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91928/162102&quot;&gt;grace period&lt;/a&gt; after a question is put on hold during which an answer &lt;em&gt;that was started before the question was put on hold&lt;/em&gt; can still be submitted. The rather-old MSE post I linked to says this grace period is around 4 hours, but my own observation has been that it's somewhere around 30-60 minutes nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, apparently the mobile client (I don't know if that's mobile web, apps, or both) doesn't notice that the question was closed while you were answering, so that will always go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked MSE post is an answer by Tim Stone to &lt;em&gt;How was this answer posted after this question was closed?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So this can happen if someone starts writing an answer before the question gets put on hold, and submits it soon after the question gets put on hold.&lt;/strong&gt; In this case, the question was put on hold at 20:31:46 UTC and the (reasonably long, even) post-closure answer was posted less than 20 minutes later at 20:50:13 UTC, so given the above, the argument appears to hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding to the above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/259655/157730&quot;&gt;How did this user post an answer &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question was put on hold?&lt;/a&gt; on MSE has a comment from Oded (another Stack Exchange employee) that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;, so not very likely. The server side check is lenient for a reason. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/140505/oded&quot;&gt;Oded♦&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/259655/how-did-this-user-post-an-answer-after-the-question-was-put-on-hold#comment846418_259655&quot;&gt;Jun 28 '15 at 18:42&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T08:41:09.290" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T08:41:09.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4172" CreationDate="2017-09-02T20:39:31.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are mischaracterizing a lot of those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is something realistic? If it has existed in the real world before, or still exists now, then obviously it is a member of the realistic club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fermi paradox is not &quot;is life on another planet possible.&quot; The paradox is that all of our computations using fairly modest assumptions suggest the universe should have a great deal of extraterrestrial life, but, as Fermi notes, &lt;strong&gt;we've never seen any evidence of them.&lt;/strong&gt; The paradox is in the disparity between a near certainty they exist and the glaring lack of evidence they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to take your point, and ignoring all the &quot;infinity&quot; excuses, if the question is &quot;Is life possible on other planets,&quot; the reality-check is that, since life exists on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; planet, and to the best of our knowledge it evolved here rather quickly and there is nothing particularly &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; about our planet, then yes, life is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on other planets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not that possibility implies existence; it does not. But something actually having existed is a stronger argument than just &quot;it is possible&quot;:&#xA;If something has existed in real life then that thing is automatically &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;realistic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. No infinite-possibility arguments are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T20:39:31.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2017-09-04T07:39:35.840" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's split it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those questions which have only the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and nothing else which is more specific should get one or more of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chemistry&lt;/a&gt;  This one already exists.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear&lt;/a&gt;  Same here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;  This one could probably be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/celestial-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;celestial-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;celestial-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, so maybe the latter would be preferred and the former not made at all.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Promote those as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="27708" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T20:57:44.503" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T20:57:44.503" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T21:07:27.430" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently thinking about implementing a special chat room, the &quot;working room&quot; of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the author of accepted questions has following questions, they could be solved and discussed in the working room. I find it a bit cumbersome that the author is forced to ask a new question for a scenario every time, especially because following questions are often not so hot and risk being closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The working room is really only for discussing solutions. No chit-chat. I have answered one question from Future Historian there and my impression was that the answer was completely drowned out. Another thing which wonders me a bit is that there are many people joining the room being completely silent. If there is no pressure to introduce yourself or to try to be complacent, perhaps more people are inclined to ask a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The working room is also more able to give out more information which would be superfluous in the main question and this information can also be reviewed  if someone doubts if the implementation makes sense/is correct (especially hard-science). After the information is reviewed and considered very valuable, it can wander into &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason I come up with the idea is that I find that the current implementation of moving comments into discussions is sucking big time and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2399/are-chats-really-useful&quot;&gt;I am not alone with this opinion&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be no discussions in comments, &lt;em&gt;but they happen anyway&lt;/em&gt;. If we have three different answers for one question and each has a comment chain, we have three divided chat rooms, tearing apart any cohesion of the question.&#xA;And if we want only discussions in chat rooms, why not open up a specific chat room for exactly this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things which I propose with this approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only accepted questions will be discussed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As many people here share the idea that an author should wait a certain time until deciding what the best answer is: Only if the author did indeed wait, he/she can use the working room. A little incentive to a more fair decision...:)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITION: I created the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/65113/the-scenario-working-room?tab=general&quot;&gt;&quot;scenario working room&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now to see if it is a stillborn idea or if it has merit. Anyone is invited to ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;follow-up questions to an already accepted question (this means question which have a positive rating and have not been closed or deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;review problems which are seen with the current answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I would like to have the first restriction is to prevent that people try to put in bad questions which have already been axed. It is not exactly prohibited to ask and answer that. I am the room owner and I hope I can spare at least one hour each day for the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastEditorUserId="7089" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T10:00:10.097" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T12:34:20.737" Title="Implementation of a &quot;working room&quot; chat room?" Tags="|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5327" CreationDate="2017-09-05T08:13:51.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I don't think this would be useful&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it a bit cumbersome that the author is forced to ask a new question for a scenario every time, especially because following questions are often not so hot and risk being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is cumbersome to ask a new question for a new scenario. You are supposed to show some work if you ask a question and expect people to spend their time on answering your question. You should put in the effort to make a good question that can be answered in the sites format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every different scenario that warrants a different answer than the questions before should be posted n its own so that people may find these different scenarios with the corresponding answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question may not make it to the Hot Network Questions, but your goal should be to get good answers, not make it to some arbitrary hotness list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your new scenario will only get closed as a duplicate if it is not different enough from your original question. By making sure to state the differences at the beginning of your question body you can prevent this most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have answered one question from Future Historian there and my impression was that the answer was completely drowned out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can click on the little arrow on the right side of a chat message to make your post a reply to that one. This makes multiple asynchronous discussions a whole lot easier, especially because the post you replied to is marked and easily visible. By clicking on the portrait of users who are posting a lot at any moment you get the option to click on &amp;quot;Hide Posts&amp;quot; at the end of the upcoming menu to, well, hide their posts. This reduces the noise if there are multiple discussions and you are only interested in one of them. Their profile picture in the upper right hand corner becomes smaller and you can just click on it again and activate &amp;quot;Show Posts&amp;quot; to see them again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing which wonders me a bit is that there are many people joining the room being completely silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see why this is a problem. Waiting to see if there is an interesting discussion or just to get a feeling for what is going on in the room seems pretty normal to me. I don't think we have to press someone into introducing themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;superfluous in the main question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like a perfect reason for a relaxed chat discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this information can also be reviewed if someone doubts if the implementation makes sense/is correct (especially hard-science)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mean like voting an answer up or down and commenting on the specific implementation with comments guided towards clarifying things in the proposed solution, which is often quite long and needs a lot of markdown and MathJax? I don't see why the chat would be a place for this. This is basically why we have answers at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2399/are-chats-really-useful&quot;&gt;I am not alone with this opinion&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you are pretty much alone if that linked question is your reasoning. The question is exactly 2 years old and has +2/-1, so not a lot of sentiment towards one way or the other. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2402/28789&quot;&gt;the only answer&lt;/a&gt; has +4 and mentions that the chat is the place to discuss and the Main Site is the place for the results of discussions. So quite the opposite of what you seem to propose here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/39615541#39615541&quot;&gt;And Aify is using the chat to get feedback, too.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be no discussions in comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is something to discuss it should be discussed. That's what comments are for - clarifying problems or misunderstanding that arise because of a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we have three different answers for one question and each has a comment chain, we have three divided chat rooms, tearing apart any cohesion of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for clarifying the question or answer, depending on where they are positioned. Nothing here gets divided. You are still talking about the implementation of one answer. That's how it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if we want only discussions in chat rooms, why not open up a specific chat room for exactly this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want you can create a chat room, which is a privilege you earn as early as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;100 reputation&lt;/a&gt; and post the link under your question or any other question. That would be the perfect place so that everyone sees it and it solves some issues raised by dot_Sp0T in the comments under this Meta discussion like &lt;code&gt;What if a question doesn't need a chat ever, does it still get one? Are they permanently linked to each other? Who is the room-owner? &lt;/code&gt;. I don't think every question needs a chat room. And I don't think every question has multiple chat rooms discussing different answers at the moment. Normally the main chat room is more than enough in my experience if you want to have an open-ended discussion about something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the topic you propose is interesting for the people who are in the chat at the moment, sometimes it's not. Some discussions may be drowned out. Some discussions may go on for days. But this is a problem you will always have with a chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only accepted questions will be discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. There was a statistic about the acceptance rate before on the SE network, leading to people pestering others about &amp;quot;doing something about your acceptance rate&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5292/28789&quot;&gt;The thing about accepting an answer is that it is totally, completely, absolutely only up to you to decide whether something was helpful.&lt;/a&gt; If you need something different you should ask another question. Or use a bounty for more detailed answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many people here share the idea that an author should wait a certain time until deciding what the best answer is: Only if the author did indeed wait, he/she can use the working room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do share this idea, but I have no idea how you want to enforce this. Do you want someone to check everyone coming to the room and throwing them out if they don't meet the requirements? Throwing people out or putting them in the penalty box, the special one that is only for the chat, is only possible by the room owner or a moderator and should only be used for inappropriate behaviour. Not if you have acquired the privilege to use the chat and didn't accept something that was not quite right. This seems to be pretty orthogonal to your basic idea of helping people when they need additional information and want to propose slightly different scenarios. If you can only use the room when you already found your answer, then you already found your answer - right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other rooms don't seem to be so popular - there are not enough chatizens&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a proposal for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4997/a-chat-room-for-reopening-and-closing-questions&quot;&gt;A chat room for reopening (and closing?) questions&lt;/a&gt; that should be used for the usual discussions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/59303&quot;&gt;VoteOpen&lt;/a&gt; was frozen after some time due to inactivity. You have to find enough people to actively do something like your proposal for a longer time period and with a constant influx of new material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the current chat room is enough. If you are bent on having a room for a question and you have at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;100 reputation&lt;/a&gt; you can create it for each question where you deem it useful, put a comment with link in the comment section of the question. Maybe we can see this way whether this would be useful or not, which would help in future discussions about this topic. I encourage everyone to give it a try to get empirical evidence supporting either side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T12:34:20.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T12:54:06.867" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been here a while now but I'm finding that the more I contribute to this exchange in a given week the less I feel like writing anything elsewhere in my life, does anyone else find that they experience writers block on other projects this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: For the record I'm having a blast with the site I've just noticed a drop-off elsewhere and wondering if others are seeing/have seen the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T13:23:47.763" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T12:49:07.733" Title="Anyone else finding they get... almost writers block... from too much Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:11:45.780" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;My primary use of the Exchange, when it comes to asking questions, has been to back check answers I've already tackled in my writing, is that typical or most people come here for raw advice to start building and writing particular projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:38:53.113" Title="Do people primarily use this site for builds or checks?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5331" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:13:15.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A lot of people who mainly answer questions use WorldBuilding.SE to take a break from what they are doing right now&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of focusing on something else helps in relaxing and getting new insights to what you are really working on if you get stuck. This seems to be especially true for those people that enjoy answering questions. They tend to distract themselves a bit so that they can focus again on their real work after spending some time working on a completely different topic. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5211/28789&quot;&gt;this answer to &lt;em&gt;Why do YOU hang out on Worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Many people use the site especially when they have a writers block&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is especially true for people who are contributing by asking questions. They are working and working and working on their project - but they feel like they don't really can go forward. So they ask for help to get different insight into their problem and a new perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Others tend to do nothing but read what they find interesting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/8965/28789&quot;&gt;this answer to &lt;em&gt;Is a jet dragon possible?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and tell me you didn't chuckle. Perfect to relax in my opinion. I love the site for stuff like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There is also a chat&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I recommended the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to you before on some occasions. If you feel like talking about - well, whatever you want to talk about - that is the place without so many rules. Often there are less people. It's not as active as you might be used to from normal &lt;em&gt;chats&lt;/em&gt;, but sometimes we have interesting conversations. The humour of the people there often feels relaxing to me. Even if I only read the transcript or read what the others are discussing because I don't know anything interesting to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Others are weird...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to watch out for people with typos to edit their posts. It's relaxing to improve stuff. Make it better. Closer to being perfect. I like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I keep an eye out for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to help people with their drafts. Fixing grammar and wording. Stuff like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why are you telling me this?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you are doing right now makes you feel blocked in any way - stop what you are doing. At least for a bit. Find something different. Some people would be stressed out trying to find something they can answer because they can't find anything. Others would be stressed out trying to bring their question into a suitable format because their questions are often &amp;quot;Too opinion-based&amp;quot;. Again other people would be stressed out doing nothing but reading, needing the mental activity of doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. Being in multiple active discussions at the same time in the chat when there are many people online at a given time can be tiring for some people, too. I would be stressed out if I wasn't able to fix typos when I see them. I hate reading wrong stuff when I know what the correct thing is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are experiencing is pretty normal - when you haven't found the right &lt;em&gt;mixture&lt;/em&gt; of activities yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop what is blocking you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Find what you like and what helps you relax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And remember: this is probably an iterative process, that will get changed over time and with a lot of &lt;em&gt;doing stuff only occasionally when I feel like it&lt;/em&gt;. For example I only answer stuff when I love the question and have a great idea in the first moment. Not when I have to research too much. And that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T13:15:08.110" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5332" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:36:35.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This graphic is how I'm pretty sure people use the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bVnC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bVnC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The green path is the path I typically take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I come up with an idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think about it a bit and try to work out the details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I need some more help on something, I ask a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the response is positive, then I go on to build the world a bit more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you would count this as a step towards &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I occasionally take the blue path, if I'm more confident about an idea. I build the world a bit, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; if I have problems, I go to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. &lt;strong&gt;This has the advantage that my world is &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; much more fleshed out&lt;/strong&gt;, and so I can provide more details to people. More details generally means better answers (in my experience). This sort of route is what you'd call a &lt;em&gt;check&lt;/em&gt; of what I've already come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine, though, that people often take the purple path (given some of the questions I see). They go straight from having an idea to asking about it. &lt;strong&gt;This often results in poorly thought-out questions&lt;/strong&gt;, which aren't great. This is another sort of &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt; technique, but unfortunately, it doesn't always lead to the best questions. I've done this once or twice before; it's something to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar path to this is actually a variant of the blue path (shown with a dotted line), where a person starts building or writing &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; first thinking about the plausibility of the idea; they then may go to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange to figure out how well it works. I'd also imagine that this is somewhat common - not the sort of thing we want to encourage, because it would be nice if people do some of their own thinking before coming here, but still a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone's going to give you a different answer to the question. My questions are pretty evenly split between your two categories. However, I would wager that, given by the quality of some of the questions, more people use the site as an intermediate step for building, rather than as a stage to check what they've already done. The margin probably isn't large, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T15:28:01.440" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:28:01.440" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5332" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:37:33.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Personally I tend to answer questions myself when I can and ask for additional input if I'm not 100% convinced of my solution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm one of those people who prefer to get additional input if they found a &quot;solution&quot; to their problem and would love to have different point of view. There is always someone giving me new insights that help me in my future work and sometimes I retcon stuff after getting interesting answers. But because I mainly answer stuff for myself, often by handwaving, I don't post a lot of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In general people probably don't start here without having established anything&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is not really great for discussing questions like &quot;Where to start when building your world?&quot;. You are supposed to ask for stuff that can be answered. Therefore most people who come here probably have some sort of framework or structure they already established and ask for aspects about their story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All in all there are a lot of reasons for why people use the site&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You won't get input from everyone but my feeling after reading a lot of stuff on the Main Site is that this feels to me like 50:50. Some people need help because they don't know where to start, but they have a goal in mind and some people need help because they are not convinced of their own solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see some of the reasons for why people are on WorldBuilding.SE in the Meta discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5206/why-do-you-hang-out-on-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Why do YOU hang out on Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T13:37:33.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:57:28.563" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd say we do; I find the Science-Based tag is the really problematic element not Reality-Check. There is a built-in, and unspecified, assumption that if you don't use any of the Reality-Check, Science-Based, or Hard-Science tags you mean to get a scientifically sound answer. This would be fine, if it said this anywhere outside of the Science-Based tag information, but it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So assuming a Science-Based default we can remove the optional tag but we'd still need the Hard-Science tag so we can specify that we want the nitty-gritty facts, figures, and scholarly literature to back a particular position, and on the softer side we need something to say basically &quot;relax I just want to check my thought process here&quot; which is what Reality-Check does, or is supposed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T13:57:28.563" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2017-09-05T14:14:48.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of experience with Worldbuilding for RPGs and found this site... somehow... something to do with a question about infinite space constructs. I'd worked on a similar world so joined to help with it, I didn't have the rep to answer initially so started on other things and haven't left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T14:14:48.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:10:09.013" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is a bug or an inbuilt function, but I get occasional issues with comments where I can't use the @namehere format to notify a commentator on a particular question. I can't see a pattern to this. Are there built-in exceptions to using the function or is the site bugging on me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T08:46:14.800" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T07:21:39.137" Title="I can't use the @namehere function on some comments" Tags="|support|comments|notifications|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5339" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:12:06.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the @username syntax only for users who have posted something in the comment discussion of that particular post. Or people who have edited the post. The OP is always notified. Mods can use a superping to ping users in chat for example even if they have never visited the room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not solving the issue then it might be that they are using unusual characters. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;. I recommend just using the autocomplete function in that case. You need to use at least 3 letters for the ping to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T15:26:01.027" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:26:01.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:17:16.160" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the other voices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but keep the others. While &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; communicates the requirement for backing an answer with actual facts and prove (which is always nice especially for scifi worlds or works that describe a real or fictional process in detail), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; describes an approach to be taken when considering what info to include in an answer - it helps the to guide the tone of an answer into the direction the OP is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:17:16.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5339" CreationDate="2017-09-05T17:13:12.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, as you probably know, the @name syntax for pinging someone is only supported in comments. It has no special significance in questions or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5340/29&quot;&gt;as Secespitus wrote&lt;/a&gt;, the user you are pinging must have interacted with the post you are commenting on. I don't think I've ever tried pinging someone who has merely edited a post; when I ping someone, it's almost always in response to a comment of theirs. And yes, the owner of a post (the user who originally posted the question or the answer that you are commenting on) is always notified of comments added to the post, regardless of any pinging. Naming the owner of a post in a @name is at best a waste of precious comment characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, &lt;strong&gt;you can only ping one user in a single comment.&lt;/strong&gt; If you need to notify multiple users, then you need to post one comment for each. If the comment you posted originally &lt;em&gt;genuinely&lt;/em&gt; applies to several users, then this can be as simple as &lt;code&gt;@name see above&lt;/code&gt;, but I would generally suggest addressing each user separately. That way, each comment can be flagged and deleted as &lt;em&gt;no longer needed&lt;/em&gt; (previously &lt;em&gt;obsolete&lt;/em&gt;) when the addressed user has seen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are having trouble typing someone's username, then copying and pasting it (and removing all whitespace from it) usually helps. Just remember to prepend the @ character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43019/157730&quot;&gt;How do comment @replies work?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod superpings apply only to chat, not to post comments, and are not available to regular (even high-rep) users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T07:21:39.137" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T07:21:39.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T19:28:21.633" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Vox Populi&lt;/em&gt; vote meter says I have cast 34 votes, but I'm being barred from further voting today because I've used all 40. Is this a 24 hours versus UTC thing or what is the reason for this behaviour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T08:45:25.503" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T08:45:25.503" Title="Why would my vote totals for the day not be adding up?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5343" CreationDate="2017-09-05T19:36:46.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that you need to &lt;strong&gt;vote more on questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;Vote Up privilege&lt;/a&gt; in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get 30 votes per day to use as you please, plus 10 per day that are reserved specifically for questions. In order to meet the criteria for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/71/vox-populi&quot;&gt;Vox Populi&lt;/a&gt; (vote 40 times in a day) you need to use all of your question-specific votes as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T19:36:46.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5343" CreationDate="2017-09-05T19:36:56.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This badge is a bit complicated because you get some votes that you can only use in a certain timeframe and only on questions. This is a feature to encourage people to vote on questions and not only on answers. If you only vote on answers for some days you at some point get a message that should discourage that behaviour a bit and that goes something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You haven't voted on questions in a while. Questions need votes, too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2792/28789&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information. I am copying Monicas answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The daily vote limit is a little arcane.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5213/162102&quot;&gt;this post on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The exact number of votes available &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90202/&quot;&gt;depends on your voting behavior for the day&lt;/a&gt;. Concretely, there are three upper limits to respect &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt; to be able to vote.&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;40 post votes per day per user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;30 answer votes per day per user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;5 post votes after you got your first &quot;5 votes remaining&quot; warning of the day. If you reach 25 answer votes at time &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; of the day, given &lt;code&gt;q(t)&lt;/code&gt; as the number of question votes cast by time &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, the total post votes limit will be no more than &lt;code&gt;30 + q(t)&lt;/code&gt;. If you cast less than 25 answer votes, ignore this point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, basically, you get 10 votes &lt;em&gt;specifically for questions&lt;/em&gt;, but you need to use them early.  Once you get close to the limit of 30 &lt;em&gt;unrestricted&lt;/em&gt; votes, you can't claim all 10 of the others any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, I don't know why.  I suspect it's a limitation in how voting was implemented (the 10 extra votes for questions were a later addition), rather than an intentional design decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behaviour has nothing to do with the UTC time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For badge hunters: Use all your votes on questions to get the badge. And keep an eye on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/44/electorate&quot;&gt;Electorate&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting on questions is important and these badges aim to encourage this behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T19:58:31.877" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T19:58:31.877" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-06T12:38:38.750" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The righthand edge Linked and Related questions are cool, I love them, I hate opening a likely looking post and discovering I can't contribute because it's already [closed] or [on-hold] for whatever reason. In the Questions tab we see this information before we open a question and we're warned that it's read-only, can we get that information on the related questions list as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T14:29:52.947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T14:29:52.947" Title="Can we get the [status] information on the Related Questions as well the Questions list?" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|on-hold|related-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5351" CreationDate="2017-09-06T19:02:21.373" Score="9" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy the Worldbuilding site.  I am not sure how it makes anyone any money.  The same is true for all the other niche interest stack sites.  Either something is intended to make money or it is someone's hobby and Stack seems too slick to all be hobby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the Stack Overflow parent site has a business model in that it lists jobs and such.  I have not seen similar lists on other stack sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guesses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These adjunct sites are interesting to the owners of Stack Overflow and they host them because they can - hobby projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe the activity on the niche sites drive traffic to the sites where money can be made?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe it is supported by donations but I have just never been asked?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T19:19:40.283" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T11:14:17.280" Title="What is the business model of Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5350" CreationDate="2017-09-06T19:05:22.413" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Main income is advertisement on StackOverflow&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken from Meta Stackexchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-overflows-business-model&quot;&gt;What is Stack Overflow's business model?&lt;/a&gt; copying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/79448/352819&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Job listings (e.g. the traditional classified ad model)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer/about-listings&quot;&gt;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer/about-listings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CV Search (e.g. the new-fangled and IMO vastly superior dating model)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer/about-search&quot;&gt;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer/about-search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Traditional, but respectful (e.g. no animation or flash or pop-anything) display advertising on SO, SF, and to a lesser extent SU. &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/contact&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/about/contact&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not difficult to do the math here yourself and estimate how much we are making. Also, remember half the team is remote, and does not live in NYC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see there is normal adverstising as you would expect it on every site that is not having you pay to be a member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a member of the network there is also traffic coming from our site to other sites on the network, such as SO, which is probably the main &lt;em&gt;profit center&lt;/em&gt; of the SE network. I couldn't find data about WorldBuilding or other smaller sites on the network specifically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be interested in the Blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/15/how-we-make-money-at-stack-overflow-2016-edition/&quot;&gt;How We Make Money at Stack Overflow: 2016 Edition&lt;/a&gt; which basically mentions the  points above. Especially it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We’re a major website, and our ads solution is a major player in how we survive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There are no donations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the donations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92472/can-i-give-a-donation-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Can I give a donation to Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt; is marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17310/how-to-contribute-to-stack-overflow-besides-asking-and-answering&quot;&gt;How to contribute to Stack Overflow besides asking and answering?&lt;/a&gt; to which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17310/how-to-contribute-to-stack-overflow-besides-asking-and-answering&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clean up other peoples contributions. Additionally, flag inappropriate postings, and vote to close/migrate questions when necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sporting your flair elsewhere brings more attention to SO as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no donations as far as I am aware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not all smaller sites are part of the advertisement&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently not all smaller sites are part of the normal advertisement. As soon as they get big enough they seem to get added to a list of sites with normal advertisement. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/287242/352819&quot;&gt;We're enabling display ads on select Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; on Meta StackExchange for more information. Copying some parts from the linked question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without further ado, here's a list of sites that will soon be displaying &lt;em&gt;excessively considerate, ludicrously on-topic&lt;/em&gt; advertisements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; (formerly &quot;Chip Hacker&quot; from the Stack Exchange 1.0 days!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//raspberrypi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Raspberry Pi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//blender.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Blender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//codereview.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//ux.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;User Experience&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//gis.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Geographic Information Systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//magento.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Magento&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sponsored tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On StackOverflow companies can sponsor tags that deal with their product. They get their logo as a little icon on the tag so that everyone visiting a question with the tag is reminded of the company. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/30187/352819&quot;&gt;What do icons on the tags mean?&lt;/a&gt;, copying from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/30188/352819&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a sponsored tag - in other words, a company has decided to pay money to put an icon and to put links on the tag page. Moderators cannot edit these; they are only added as a result of a tag sponsorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tag sponsorship program is currently active on Stack Overflow only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Small sites are an investment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the comments under this answer and the question: small sites like WorldBuilding are probably seen as an investment. Setting up a small site when you've done this far more than a hundred times with sites that are multiple orders of magnitude bigger is pretty easy and thereby doesn't cost the company much. And running a small site is also pretty cheap. After all the content is provided by users and the moderators are volunteers. The community itself is mostly moderating itself. The costs of running WorldBuilding when also running StackOverflow are probably mostly negligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we all are lucky WorldBuilding helps provide traffic to SO and other bigger sites and one day it will be big enough to really cost something at which point it will also be big enough to help contribute to the advertisement network and thereby earn money for the StackExchange network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Custom designs are probably the most important cost factor for sites like WorldBuilding and there is a chance that they migth one day generate ad revenue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T11:14:17.280" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T11:14:17.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-09-07T03:05:09.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on how the tags are used (not necessarily how they're defined)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hard Science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;: answers provided without specific supporting mathematics or attributed empirical evidence are unacceptable and prone to deletion.  Frankly, it should be impossible to mix the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reality-Check&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;: answers are specifically expected to demonstrate the OP's question is &quot;reasonable&quot; within the context of the experience of our own lives.  Often results in a remarkably valuable list of &quot;it works because of...&quot; and &quot;it doesn't work because of...&quot; responses.  The question can be (and sometimes is) about probable reactions in a real world to fantasy concepts, like magic.  Can be mixed with either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Science Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;: No magical answers allowed, but doesn't require the rigidly stringent proofs of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.  Likewise, can't be mixed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is the only useful tag in the lot.  It's the equivalent of &quot;does this make sense?&quot; which is quite a bit different than &quot;can you prove this works?&quot;  Without it, answers that don't make natural sense are permissible, even if they don't reflect magic but only a &quot;bending&quot; of how things work to help the OP facilitate a story element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is held to such a high standard in the community that it's better to invite the OP to not use it because they often don't understand the burden it requires and I'd bet rarely can use the provided information (but that's just my humble opinion).  In too many cases, the question would be better asked at biology.SE, astonomy.SE, or physics.SE.  However, it is the equivalent of &quot;can you prove this works?&quot; and that has value, no matter my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is almost worthless because everything on this site is either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; whether the tags are used or not, with the former outnumbering the later by the proverbial 10:1.  It overlaps both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, but neither of the other two overlap each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be having the discussion of whether or not to burn &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T03:05:09.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-09-07T03:42:32.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Status quo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's better to keep it unless a better solution is found.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a consensus on getting rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Many believe we should but there is a strong opposition as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those believing the tag is not useful: just ignore it. &#xA;Each question can have 5 different tag, it's not a big deal. The tag doesn't cause any harm to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag is very important to some users who really enjoy answering this specific kind of questions. This outweighs the little annoyance I have with the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T03:42:32.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5355" CreationDate="2017-09-07T05:40:25.997" Score="5" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just noticed the following&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EueK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EueK.png&quot; alt=&quot;two questions under each other with the same username and image of the user, but with different reputation and badges&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T07:01:10.957" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T13:56:08.097" Title="Aren't handles unique?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5354" CreationDate="2017-09-07T06:58:43.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is no bug - the user is unregistered&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/42327/aaron&quot;&gt;his profile&lt;/a&gt; shows that he is unregistered. Therefore each question he asks is handled differently. The handle shows that this is very likely the same person. Moderators have tools to check this and be even more sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When encountering unregistered users you should point them to appropriate resources on Meta StackExchange such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-register-my-account&quot;&gt;Why should I register my account?&lt;/a&gt; where the main advantages are explained as well as how to merge their accounts. Basically they have to send a form to StackExchange so that an employee can merge their accounts. This is nothing a moderator can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I normally try to tell them that it's easier to keep track of their questions and answers and they can start collecting reputation so that they get more privileges, such as voting and commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these people register - sometimes they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Usernames are not unique&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The username can be used as often as people have the same idea for a username. The important thing is the email-address (or the IP address if no email-address is provided) that is used to login. To cite Separatrix comment under this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have 15 'Tim's 18 'Dave's with 0 rep between them along with 21 'Joe's most of whom do have rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example there are 9 users with the exact username &amp;quot;Aaron&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/34734/aaron&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why the picture shown in the OP is special and I first answered with the point about being unregistered is that we see the same &lt;em&gt;Identicon&lt;/em&gt;, also called a &lt;em&gt;gravatar&lt;/em&gt;. The Identicon is basically a sort of visual unique identifier based on the email-address used. That's why you see it twice there - he asked two questions with the same email-address (or IP-address), but didn't register, which is why they both are handled as if a different person asked them. The Identicon is a pretty good indicator if you are looking for someone and he doesn't change his profile picture. Normally people with the same username will have a different gravatar so that you can distinguish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can learn more about Identicons on Meta Stackexchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17443/how-is-the-default-user-avatar-generated&quot;&gt;How is the default user avatar generated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T13:56:08.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5357" CreationDate="2017-09-10T04:24:53.660" Score="7" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91384/whats-the-longest-plausible-duration-for-a-total-solar-eclipse&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the longest plausible duration for a total solar eclipse?&lt;/a&gt; is on hold as off-topic -- &quot;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center&quot;.  From the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given a planet and moon roughly like Earth and our Moon, are there modifications we can make to the orbit, size, or rotational speed of either body that could extend this out, while still maintaining a stable system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My target is 15 minutes for a single location on the planet to witness an eclipse, ideally while able to see the sun's corona. Preference is for the eclipse to be caused by a moon rather than a large planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this not about worldbuilding?  Is it the title?  (Since it doesn't really match the body I'll edit that now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment suggested asking on Astronomy, but the OP rightly pointed out that they'd close it as hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T08:02:48.777" Title="Why is the &quot;longer eclipse&quot; question on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2017-09-10T07:55:06.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand why this question is deemed &quot;off topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless someone explains in detail I'll vote to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this is a question on an alternate reality or exoplanet having certain characteristics; what's &quot;off topic&quot; on worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38942" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T07:55:06.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2017-09-10T08:02:48.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't see how this question should be off-topic it bothers me a tad that &lt;em&gt;Hohmannfan&lt;/em&gt; is among the close-voters - as I understand that user to be sort of an astro-nut (aka big with these things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless I voted to reopen the question as it def is on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T08:02:48.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-10T18:19:20.673" Score="6" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medicine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medicine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about treatment methods as well as substances used to heal wounds and cure diseases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with 77 questions thus tagged. We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medical&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and injury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with 26 questions thus tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these two really warrant separate tags? Can they be merged into one? If so, which one should that be, and what should the tag wiki say? If they can't be merged into one, how should the difference be made clear to someone, perhaps a newcomer, asking a question so that they know which one to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare for example the discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/34/29&quot;&gt;my answer to the old question &lt;em&gt;How should we tag questions about space?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T18:24:43.633" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T20:28:26.317" Title="Do we need both [medicine] and [medical] tags?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2017-09-10T20:28:26.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just need one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medicine is the sciene while medical relates the medecine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definitions are almost identical but I have a preference for the medical one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T20:28:26.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5363" CreationDate="2017-09-11T10:38:48.720" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91572/is-it-worth-having-artificial-gravity-by-propulsion-in-orbit-or-in-free-space&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Worldbuilding, but concerns a problem that I think might be encountered often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched through a few relevant threads, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4403/on-editing-questions-and-invalidating-answers&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4225/challenging-questions-premises&quot;&gt;Challenging Questions&amp;#39; Premises&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't think any of those fully addresses the specific problem I am hoping to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific question linked, the bulk of the first two answers are spent pointing out that there is no plausible way to generate the sustained thrust central to the implementations described in the question. However, the intention of this paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because burning expensive chemical fuel just so things don’t float away some of the time is extravagant to an appalling degree (and simply isn't sustainable anyway), we might suppose fusion (or some other method of getting a lot of cheap energy from very little mass) is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the wording ('what &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; obstacles ...') of the question that followed, had been to direct answers towards the other complications (such as those mentioned in Firedrake's answer) that might arise, in which I am more interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the original question is written under the incorrect assumption that having cheap energy would imply having means of generating the required thrust. The answers have been helpful in clarifying that that is not the case. However, this has also caused the question to fail to produce the information that was sought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Usually, when problems occur in the context of the question, the comments are used for request for clarification; but here the context is specified in an erroneous or misleading, as opposed to ambiguous, manner, and therefore does not invite comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted paragraph might be edited to better reflect the original intention ('we might suppose &lt;em&gt;a magic space drive&lt;/em&gt; is available such that...'), and in retrospect that question might be better posed as &lt;em&gt;'How could ... be made possible'&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;'Is ... practical'&lt;/em&gt; (which is the current form of the question, where the answer is evidently 'no'.) Furthermore, now in the presence of a &lt;em&gt;magic space drive&lt;/em&gt;, it might have become necessary for the &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; tag to be lifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that these edits would change the meaning of the question to an extent such that it may be considered to be invalidating answers. This is, I gather, usually a sign that one should open a new question for this purpose. However, in this case it seems like doing so would produce what would essentially be a duplicate except with a slightly different constraint imposed. What would be a good course of action in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is [thing] possible?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and gets the answer &lt;em&gt;&quot;No, unless you had [other thing]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the response might often be &lt;em&gt;&quot;Huh. You're right. Suppose then we had [other thing] ...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found this pattern cropping up frequently in conversation, especially when discussing settings where things are still flexible (so applying some handwavium to the big easy-to-ignore-but-hard-to-solve question is something that one might do for the sake of opening up discussions of arguably more interesting details), or engineering-oriented problems where many obstacles exist to a goal - generally, the scenarios where asking &quot;what's the &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; biggest problem with this thing?&quot; might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an equivalent pattern of interaction on this site? Neither editing the question to include modified/additional constraints, nor asking the same question just with a different assumption tacked on, seem satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42460" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T09:33:13.540" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T09:33:13.540" Title="How to handle successive versions of the same question with more specific or different context?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-11T10:48:02.593" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Which takes precedence - the absolute value of the speed of light or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relationship between the absolute nature of the speed of light and the indeterminate nature of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an object is moving at speeds close to the speed of light, does the uncertainty principle impose any “fuzziness” on the consistency of the speed of light? Or does the speed of light impose any restrictions on the uncertainty principle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to describe the question well, but I think it boils down to this: can any of an object’s many superpositions involve faster than light travel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this sufficiently clear and is it sufficiently on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42450" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T12:00:14.233" Title="Which takes precedence - the absolute value of the speed of light or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-09-11T10:56:19.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2017-09-11T11:01:30.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple approach would be doing something like what I did when I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/89411/29&quot;&gt;What is the smallest change that would allow an Earth-like planet to have atmospheric CO₂ levels of several percent?&lt;/a&gt; or perhaps even better in this case &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60374/29&quot;&gt;What adaptations to a mammal's eyes would allow it to see large contrasts well, and what other effects would those have?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, describe the starting point, state a desired outcome, then ask &lt;strong&gt;what is required to get there&lt;/strong&gt; and possibly what effects on &lt;em&gt;some specific&lt;/em&gt; element of the world having the first thing would have. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/29&quot;&gt;Make sure you aren't asking us to do too much of your work for you, though.&lt;/a&gt; Clearly state some limited aspect that you wish to know about, lest your question is likely to be at risk of being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also phrase the question as something like &quot;if adding/removing/changing some specific element of the world allows for this, then what is that element and what would the resulting system look like in the aspects asked about above?&quot; can allow for answers that go like &quot;you can't because X, unless you have Y, at which point Z happens&quot;. Such an answer would probably fit &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3758/29&quot;&gt;when &quot;that's not possible&quot; is an acceptable answer&lt;/a&gt;, as long as Y fits within the specific constraints of the question. (For example, you'd probably be hard pressed in proposing adding faster-than-light travel to a hard-science question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking multiple questions at once is tricky, and I won't pretend that I have always got it right myself despite having been around since the first few days of the site's life; it's very easy to take two questions that are perfectly acceptable each on their own, and turn those into one &quot;too broad&quot; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing questions in such a way that it invalidates existing answers is something that should indeed be avoided whenever possible. Allowing a question to evolve without invalidating answers is one of the reasons why we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/29&quot;&gt;the question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T11:01:30.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5287" CreationDate="2017-09-13T03:19:40.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote we keep it. I'm a newbie here (joined today) but I find the tag refreshing. It allows me to specify whether I care about a realistic grounded approach, or screw it all because of the rule of cool. Here's how the answer could change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to have plasma weaponry like Fallout 4 but at a loss as to what kind of power source would work, suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer:&#xA;If reality based was check, I would tell them that plasma weaponry is impractical and would advise rail-guns as a more plausible weapon or even good old .45's, then would advise fission/fusion batteries or a batter pack on the back depending on my research. If reality check was NOT checked, then I would just tell them fusion batteries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if there's a logistical problem that came-up, such as fusion/fission, but only a few people can have the guns since we only have so much plutonium, I would tell them that with reality based, otherwise I wouldn't bother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science-based answers alone wouldn't cover this 'cuz they would only tell you if it's POSSIBLE, not if it's FEASIBLE, reality based deals with feasibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42551" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T03:19:40.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2017-09-13T13:35:38.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions make assumptions, normally the OP completely misses them too, I know I do. &quot;Bad&quot; assumptions are what comments are for, to fine tune the question and allow the people trying to answer to get inside the implicit assumptions that the OP can't initially see and create a clear picture. Furthermore what a small group sees as a poor line of logic based on bad assumptions may make all the sense in the world to many other users and it only takes a few people who see a question in that particular light to shut it down even when the majority would prefer to engage with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T13:35:38.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2017-09-13T14:58:57.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This isn't a terrible suggestion but I would have concerns with it being executed well.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that &lt;em&gt;answers that address false assumptions are very very valuable&lt;/em&gt; for the people asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked more than one question based on a flawed understanding of the topic I was asking about.  &lt;strong&gt;After all if I completely understood the topic I wouldn't be asking a question.&lt;/strong&gt;  Being told that my understanding was flawed is very valuable because it keeps me from making mistakes that my audience (were it to actually exist) would see and dislike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I get the intent of your idea and its not bad, overall I would vote not to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T14:58:57.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T15:53:14.760" Score="11" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last few days I've seen several answers (from different users, on wildly different topics) that all basically say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's fiction - do whatever you like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is an answer to the question. It's an answer to any question, except those tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, asked under the worldbuilding banner. As such it's not a useful answer, however legitimate it may be, from where I'm sitting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a place for such answers that I'm missing? Also, how does one approach saying &quot;thanks, but no&quot; if they feel such an answer is misplaced and/or useless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that it effects the overall answer to the issue, &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, but this question was prompted by this &quot;fiction whatever&quot; approach being used in regard to questions that had either a Yes/No or an A., B., or C. structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T10:29:23.047" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T13:28:09.363" Title="How to handle &quot;cop out&quot; answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2017-09-13T16:15:25.083" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's often necessary to pull apart bits of a question, and sometimes the whole thing, to get at what the OP actually wants from the answers. But I feel you have a genuine grievance not only because there is a lot of it, and users who seem to do nothing else, but also because of the tone many people take when they're making such comments. I've gotten close to dumping the exchange altogether after such answers have been heavily rewarded to spite the fact that they make no positive contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T16:15:25.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-13T16:52:44.243" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;We've had similar problems before with comments saying &lt;em&gt;just use magic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically a duplicate of a problem that has already been discussed on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5025/28789&quot;&gt;Are comments saying “just use magic” problematic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linked question the community talked about &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; saying &lt;em&gt;just use magic&lt;/em&gt;. In this question we should discuss &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; saying &lt;em&gt;it's fiction and therefore you can do whatever you want&lt;/em&gt;. Comments are only for clarification and can be deleted any time for any reason, which makes them less important than the answers for which this site was built and that can and should be curated by the community. That's why I feel it's important to have this discussion again in this slightly different context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Everybody knows that they can write whatever they want - that's not helpful&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason WorldBuilding exists is to ask questions where a writer of any kind thinks what he is doing might break the suspension of disbelief of his audience. Every author is aware that he can &lt;em&gt;do whatever he wants&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Mentioning this obvious fact is not even slightly helpful.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Flag it and delete it - &lt;em&gt;write whatever you want&lt;/em&gt; is &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore &lt;strong&gt;we are not a discussion forum.&lt;/strong&gt; An &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question. It's okay to make an Addendum at the end of your post and mention your concern that the OP is going a bit overboard. But in itself &lt;em&gt;do whatever you want&lt;/em&gt; is probably never going to answer a valid question. If you truly feel that this is the right answer to the question you should probably flag the question as &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question is a valid question and an answer only says that &lt;em&gt;the author can do whatever the wants&lt;/em&gt; without being an useful answer towards the question asked it should be flagged as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; and consequently deleted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Start from the point the author set and answer his question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite and paraphrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5027/28789&quot;&gt;Monica in the question I linked above&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sometimes you do need to quit your job or handwave your magic, but that's for the asker to decide. We should accept the parameters of the question and go from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sometimes you do need to ignore the science and write something that is not correct, but interesting for the reader, but that's for the asker to decide. We should accept that the asker feels it's important to get something right or believable and go from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Addendum&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's okay to remind people that most other people won't take everything in their story apart as long as there are no really big problems. But that is worth a comment at most and only in rare cases. Most of the time I would probably flag them as &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot; if the author didn't make some helpful hints about the specific topic and directed at the question of the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the whole problem is also similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3758/28789&quot;&gt;When is “that's not possible” an appropriate answer?&lt;/a&gt;. Again, on its own that is not an acceptable answer and not an acceptable comment. The writer has to &lt;strong&gt;explain why&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;that's not possible&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;you have to use magic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;write whatever you want&lt;/em&gt; are the correct answer in each context, tailored towards the problems the OP is facing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the writer is explaining why &lt;em&gt;write whatever you want&lt;/em&gt; or similar phrases are correct their answer may be valid if they devote more than just a sentence to explaining the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and tailoring their answer to the specific needs of the querent.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Otherwise: downvote, flag, comment why (for example by linking to this answer) and move on&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T10:16:03.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-13T17:05:47.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a cop out answer, it's a low quality answer that fails to actually provide utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what the downvote button is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't feel bad downvoting low quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T17:05:47.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-13T17:17:11.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The expectation (we've discussed this quite a few times, which I expect to keep happening) is that people writing answers will take the reality set by the OP and work from there unless it is internally inconsistent.  This is sort of tangential but I feel it is similar so figured I'd bring it up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that Nex is correct, downvote and/or VTC/Flag because they add no value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T17:17:11.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-13T18:03:12.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's fiction - do whatever you like&quot; could also be a sign of a leading or overly complex question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of questions that try to ask a narrow question, hinting at a huge amount of background and very mature world, but not really giving many details about the world. What details you do get seem to strongly push a certain course of action.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it hard to give a good answer since there are so many potential contributing factors that can't be taken into account.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question itself is ok, it can be frustrating to try to answer since there is more than one way it could go, and you feel like the person asking it is just hoping that answers will agree with what they already want to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases &quot;do whatever you like&quot; is a way of saying &quot;hey, it's your story, stop being lazy and just write the thing yourself already.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T18:03:12.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-15T10:43:38.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I regularly answer like that, but I always give a reason why. Here is why I think this is ok. Sorry for the formating on the first point, I hope you get over it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People often overestimate what science can do because it is displayed incorrectly in the media and movies. Sometimes people expect that they can get any answer they like if they just define enough parameters. That migth be particularly typical here since a lot of programmers are on SE that assume that physics also work like programming. This isn't restricted to hard science, in fact this is especially true for questions about for example social or economical implications.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sometimes someone has to tell the OP: Well, we do not know. This one is up for your imagination. **Here is why : ... **. I believe that in those cases any other answer is complete bullsh*tting (for the non-Americans, the * is an i). I don't think it is better to make up stuff for the OP than telling the OP why he has to make that one up himself, especially since the OP could understand it as &quot;that person knows a lot about that topic, so his scenario must be correct&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally those questions would be moderated and closed, but from my experience this either doesn't happen or doesn't help anyone, especially if no explanation is given. Many popular (network) questions are like that where everyone can make up some bs to add to it. Could this be done via comment? Not always. The character restriction is very limited (people with high reputation have asked be before to put long comments as answers), I also believe that an answer doesn't always have to be the answer someone might expect but instead offer a different angle on the situation, offering the means to help the OP resolving a problem himself or recognizing that his problem isn't one actually because any rational approach would do the trick. That last one is often the case with those question.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I answer, but I do not invent an entire world for him and instead prefer to stay focused on the question. I point out certain parameters that are left to the imagination and do not need to be defined in this framework I'm offering. For example if someone asks about lifeforms in space, intelligence optional, I might offer a certain lifeform that could survive there, but I might tell the OP that if they are intelligent or not does not matter and is up to him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see (for example) 2 ways this could go. Let's say the question is about trains in space and I'm saying a space rail should be either one, iron or copper, but that is up to him. That's a boring example, but I hope you get it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've commented before and people have taken it the wrong way as if it was an answer. Sometimes I tell people in comments that what they are asking is left completely to their imagination, implying (or explicitly telling them later in the same comment) this isn't a good question currently and will get closed. I do not know if this OP here might have confused a comment for an answer.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those 4 are not reason enough to ever say that the OP has to think for himself, well, let me know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37861" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T13:28:09.363" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T13:28:09.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5089" CreationDate="2017-09-15T18:17:13.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protection threshold has been raised on meta.  The sandbox should be safe from auto-protection now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, in theory the limit still exists; it's just a very high number.  So it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that we could face this problem again.  But I suspect that we'd run into a database limit on the number of answers to a question first...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T18:17:13.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-21T19:50:32.227" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, in the &quot;Suggested Edits&quot; queue, a question that is [on hold]. 100% of the edits are minor spelling and grammar fixes. If we accept those edits, this question will go into the Reopen Queue, despite not actually being changed to address the issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's are policy on these edits? Should we reject them, to prevent the question going into Reopen Queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22649" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T19:52:22.900" Title="What's the policy on accepting minor edits (spelling/grammar) in questions that are `on hold`?" Tags="|discussion|editing|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5382" CreationDate="2017-09-21T19:52:22.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It still improves the question so they should be accepted. Reviewers in the Reopen queue should keep an eye on these edits and skip the review for the moment if it's only such a minor fix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T19:52:22.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5387" CreationDate="2017-09-22T01:30:23.250" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92284/what-is-the-least-world-changing-reason-why-the-government-would-pay-for-you-t&quot;&gt;llama question&lt;/a&gt; was getting such ridiculously high upvotes. In my opinion, there's nothing useful in it. In fact, I think it is such an absurd and ridiculous question, that I scratch my head thinking just how it is able to garner that many votes and attention, without attracting close votes earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not arguing about the on-topicness, but rather &lt;strong&gt;how it is able to bypass the community screening earlier in its life, and why it is so highly upvoted&lt;/strong&gt; it's now in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;top 10 of the questions with highest votes of all time.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; The question itself has been closed as &quot;too story based&quot; a few hours earlier before this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T06:47:23.953" Title="What makes the &quot;llama&quot; question highly upvoted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5384" CreationDate="2017-09-22T01:56:45.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not appear anywhere in the review queue history either. &#xA;Nobody flagged it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is very funny and silly at the same time. &#xA;The idea was ridiculous but presented very seriously. &#xA;We don't see question like that everyday in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People (myself included) are reluctant to close popular questions even if they are blatantly off topic. You think that if the question is so popular, it must have some merit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got a lot of views when it made its way into the Hot network questions. Everyone on the network could see the question and many are not familiar with this particular site. They don't know what's on topic, they just vote. This is just how democracy work. Good thing we can elect our own leaders to protect us from our lack of judgment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T02:05:42.750" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T02:05:42.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5388" CreationDate="2017-09-22T05:56:32.887" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92830/what-gases-are-made-by-a-live-crackling-exposed-electrical-wire&quot;&gt;What gases are made by a live, crackling, exposed electrical wire?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It asks about the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Effects of world elements, including technology on specific aspects of that world's environment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks absolutely on-topic to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it looks like it is still on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; a couple of times now, but I don't see the problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41905" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T07:20:51.810" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T19:17:37.443" Title="No clue why the gas question is not world building" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|help-center|on-hold|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5384" CreationDate="2017-09-22T06:47:23.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is inherently a bit opinion-based. That's because there rarely is a definite answer to a question here. If there were it would quite often be better to ask on one of the other sites of the network that are about real-life stuff. We are creating new worlds and elements of worlds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is: from time to time something is so opinion-based that it should be closed immediately, but it's funny enough that it slips right through the normal screening process of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it hits the Hot Network Questions (HNQs). Suddenly everyone on the network can see the question, which often has a click-bait title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then everyone rushes over from other sites to take a look at this weird question that suddenly popped up on the right side of their normal everyday often work related questions and they want to have a quick diversion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They see the funny question and upvote it. Because there are a lot of people on the network such a question gets a lot of upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the question gets closed later, because some regulars bring the topic up in the chat or on Meta. Until then thousands of people have already read the question and it got dozens of upvotes, which makes it look like it's a good fit for the site even if it's closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem that can arise from this is if other people come to our site through such a question and think that's on-topic. Or try to argue that many people like it and we should therefore make questions like that on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We should close questions like that even if they are popular. They are not a good fit for the site and they make people from other sites think that questions like that are the norm on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just because a question is in the HNQs doesn't mean it's a good fit for the site. Often it's quite the opposite.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T06:47:23.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2017-09-22T07:18:10.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/92830/4&quot;&gt;edit which introduced Meta questions into your post&lt;/a&gt; you said (emphasis yours):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second edit: It's fine with me if this is kept on hold but the help center says on topic world building topics include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, &lt;strong&gt;technology&lt;/strong&gt; and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and &lt;strong&gt;environment&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be abbreviated to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Effects of world elements, including &lt;strong&gt;technology&lt;/strong&gt; , on specific aspects of that world's &lt;strong&gt;environment&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important part in this is not what you emphasised, but &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; world's environment&amp;quot;. You are not creating a new world, you are asking about our world. And you are not introducing any changes that would change the outcome in your world compared to our world. That's why it was put on hold for being off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking only about the real world other sites who focus on these things would get you better results. After all they focus on answering how the behaviour really is. When asking on WorldBuilding you should state what you are doing with this that would be off-topic as hypothetical (or something similar) on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is your goal? What are you trying to create?&lt;/strong&gt; Do you need to create certain gases for a scenario in your world and want to know what would need to be changed about our atmosphere, the behaviour of electricity, ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You state that it's an important aspect of WorldBuilding because it impacts technological advancement, but you are only looking at the impacts on &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; society and give no information about the world you are currently building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you intended to make this a general question about possible configurations you should try to ask something like &amp;quot;What are the major influences when thinking about which gases are created by a live, crackling, exposed wire?&amp;quot; That would mean answerers would have to say something about the general influence, not about our worlds special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I don't know much about the topic and didn't bother to google it, so I am not sure if that example makes a lot of sense. If you need help with phrasing questions for the site you should have a look at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T07:18:10.840" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5390" CreationDate="2017-09-22T16:08:42.073" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Captain America&lt;/em&gt;    &lt;strong&gt;I can do this all day.&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;em&gt;/Captain America&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different question. The question &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt; is, Once I have addressed all the reasons given by the moderators and the help center, and am still on hold, what could possibly be the remaining problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question that confused Vincent, was: Since my original (unamended) question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;asks about the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Effects of world elements, including technology on specific aspects of&#xA;  that world's environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why is it off topic. That question was answered. I made the corrections. and the question is still on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps explain the new meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've probably spent three hours since last night, accommodating the requests for amendment, as communicated by the elected moderators at this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92830/what-gases-are-made-by-a-live-crackling-exposed-electrical-wire&quot;&gt;What gases are made by a live, crackling, exposed electrical wire?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've consolidated to a single question, as requested. Visited and read the help center, 5 times since last night, as requested. and addressed the problems identified in my other question here on meta in edits, as requested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5386/no-clue-why-the-gas-question-is-not-world-building&quot;&gt;No clue why the gas question is not world building&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also adding links here, as requested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also shown evidence of other questions that have the same identified flaws and are not on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remove the hold on my question or provide feedback so that I may try to salvage it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I'm stupid, but hope this suffices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41905" LastEditorUserId="41905" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T17:51:25.500" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T18:13:01.003" Title="Ive amended as requested and the gas question is still on hold. Why?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-09-28T21:42:56.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5389" CreationDate="2017-09-22T16:16:04.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is still on hold because it has received 3 of the 5 votes necessary for it to be reopened. Any user who has earned at least 3000 reputation can vote to open and close questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't think the question is about worldbuilding. &#xA;If we take a look at the core of your question you say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My sole question is whether the gaseous makeup of air is changed by electricity running along a wire&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a question about worldbuilding. This is about electrochemistry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention that there are other questions that are similar but not on hold. Our site isn't perfect people make mistakes and questions slip through the cracks. After you pointed out that question it has already acquired one close vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5387/26175&quot;&gt;Secespitus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We should close questions like that even if they are popular. They are not a good fit for the site and they make people from other sites think that questions like that are the norm on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T18:13:01.003" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T18:13:01.003" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2017-09-22T19:17:37.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about the real world are on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, except for historical events of or historical facts about the real world. That would go to History SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So chemistry question are on-topic. Sometimes people think it is off-topic but this is not true as long as the question is about worldbuilding. These kind of questions can normally be asked here or on Chemistry SE. Questions about hypothetical chemistry might get closed there, I don't know what guidelines they follow: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions not about worldbuilding are off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want to know the impact of the technology on your world or how people could use it. You just want to know if it is possible. You make it clear that this is not a worldbuilding question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My sole question is whether the gaseous makeup of air is changed by&#xA;  electricity running along a wire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2 possible solutions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Migration to Chemistry SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pretend this is about worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; and that you are building a world even if you don't care. If there is a stronger link to worldbuilding, people will be more favourable to reopen the question. But if it isn't sincere, it might not work. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T19:17:37.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-25T14:47:12.127" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the questions page in the side panel for the blog this link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How You Can Use the New Stack Overflow Bot from Microsoft&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leads to a page not found error&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in question has now disappeared but it was shown here&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BSSym.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BSSym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42450" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T20:08:38.963" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T20:08:38.963" Title="There is a missing link in the blog side panel of the questions page" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2017-09-25T16:06:51.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Sometimes that is the correct answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary: To paraphrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hitchens's Razor&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That which is asked on the basis of hand-waving, can be answered and/or dismissed with hand-waving.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Is there value to be had in an answer that says &quot;You are overthinking it... use your authority as an author and make something up&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: yes, there may be that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov's Gun&lt;/a&gt;. If we — as personas answering a post — can make an educated/experienced guess that the Original Poster is adding unnecessary fluff, then we should tell them that. We are doing them a huge disservice by trying to come up with hard science answers if that risks hurting their work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other instances, the Original Poster may be asking questions to which there are no answers. What other answer can we then give than &quot;Make something up, you are the author!&quot;? They cannot have it both ways, that first they just have-wave their way past some hard unknowns, and &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; demand that we come up with not just knowns but &lt;strong&gt;hard science&lt;/strong&gt; knowns to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is as if they would have said &quot;In my fictional world, Flerbotrons exist! Now give me some hard science on Flerbotrons and how I can use them for practical purposes!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Just... no. My standard answer to such a preposterous question is — and will always be — &quot;As suppositories&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hand-waved questions will get hand-waved answers. If you want to call that a &quot;cop out answer&quot; then I call the question a &quot;cop out question&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T16:06:51.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2017-09-25T20:08:26.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw it too -- a link to that SE blog post, and &quot;page not found&quot; if you followed it.  It's now fixed; that link goes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/25/can-use-new-stack-overflow-bot-microsoft/?cb=1&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T20:08:26.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5401" CreationDate="2017-09-26T13:26:20.970" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/93240/29&quot;&gt;Alchemical breakthrough allows me to synth anything. Now what should I be making for sale?&lt;/a&gt;, and I can't quite make up my mind about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, one can argue that it's about worldbuilding, because it is how someone might use an ability; in this case, the ability to synthesize anything. It's not limited to &lt;em&gt;a particular character&lt;/em&gt; per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't really see any worldbuilding element to it. There is no clear &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; to be solved. There are no clear criteria for how to judge answers on how well they answer the question; there is, however, a list of (relatively broad) criteria for the element to be created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question on topic, or off topic? Why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T15:54:13.043" Title="Is &quot;Alchemical breakthrough allows me to synth anything. Now what should I be making for sale?&quot; on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5399" CreationDate="2017-09-26T15:50:05.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is probably story generation, or at least really broad, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93296/6751&quot;&gt;current second answer&lt;/a&gt; is really good, and a really different take on the whole idea I'd never heard of before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does show that even normally bad questions can have valuable good answers that would be lost if the question never got asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if instead of closing questions like these, the best of them could be curated, and then used as &quot;appears to be a duplicate of&quot; for the next time someone asks a bad question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at maybe just find a way to ask the same question and not have it be too broad, story based, etc, and use it as an example for when people do it wrong, as will keep happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T15:50:05.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5399" CreationDate="2017-09-26T15:54:13.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;a question &lt;em&gt;trying&lt;/em&gt; to be Good Subjective&lt;/a&gt; and ending up being Bad Subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fine to have a question ask for the optimal solution to a problem - and we have many questions of this sort - but the question needs to have a way to evaluate an answer against another. If all answers are equally valid, then the question is too broad. The question makes an attempt to mitigate this by listing some limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I can only make around 100 grams or a quarter of a pound of transmutations a day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I can make any isotope, but only pure elements. No alloys.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't want anything too radioactive. Anything that can give me cancer over a day of exposure is too radioactive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Toxicity is not an issue, only radiation. But see below:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't want to be flagged by the government, so nothing illegal / restricted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it still asks for the &quot;best&quot; element to make - without defining what &quot;best&quot; is. Therefore, you have a range of answers that interpreted &quot;best&quot; in different ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Best&quot; means high monetary value (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93252/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93296/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93250/627&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Best&quot; means high scientific value (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93308/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93248/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Best&quot; means interesting (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93247/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These answer types of pretty much orthogonal to one another, and I assume we'll get more. Until the objective of the question is cleared up, I would say the question should be closed as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T15:54:13.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T16:57:16.737" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51104/garlic-and-silver-whats-the-big-deal&quot;&gt;Garlic and Silver — What&amp;#39;s the Big Deal?&lt;/a&gt; basically has covered what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53744/is-there-any-scientific-reason-why-only-a-silver-bullet-can-harm-a-werewolf&quot;&gt;Is there any scientific reason why only a silver bullet can harm a werewolf?&lt;/a&gt; asks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given that these are old questions, should we close the second as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there even any merit to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T20:20:46.550" Title="Should we close this old question that is a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2017-09-27T17:24:19.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Unless one of them shows recent activity there is no real value in going through old questions specifically to close them&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is: the sites scope changes. All the time. Most of the time only slightly, but after enough time quite a lot of old questions will be close-worthy. Obviously this is especially true for a younger site like WorldBuilding.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start closing old questions because they are not in-scope anymore you would (in a perfect &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;) have to go through every old question to check whether it should be closed. And you had to do this whenever there is a change to the sites scope. The same applies to reopening by the way. This is just not worth the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time old questions get revived. Maybe someone looked through older posts and decided he can answer one of them. Or someone found something that needs a little copy-editing. In those cases you should VTC a question if there is a valid reason. Just because something has been on-topic before doesn't necessarily mean it's still on-topic for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all I would say there is no real value in reviving one of those questions as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T17:24:19.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T23:14:17.910" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, on my last question I got two answers that helped me the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93158/42857&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93158/42857&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93150/42857&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93150/42857&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to accept only one of them as the best answer or can I accept both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42857" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T01:03:26.093" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T13:35:07.743" Title="Can I choose two answers for my question as the accepted answer(s)?" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5405" CreationDate="2017-09-28T01:17:07.527" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been requested more than a few times since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/2786/274942&quot;&gt;the early years of Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Part of the reason it keeps getting brought up again is that more SE sites deal with topics where there's more than one solution to any given problem; Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is one of these sites. Therefore, sometimes two answers can be similarly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The request is currently &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, and will probably stay that way (to answer your question). You can, of course, reward multiple answers with bounties, but make sure you &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/16065/274942&quot;&gt;read about them&lt;/a&gt; before starting one. You can also compile information into a single answer, but I don't see that happen very often, to be frank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T01:17:07.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5405" CreationDate="2017-09-28T13:35:07.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;HDE pretty much covers the relevant information regarding the topic.  No, and its not likely to ever happen.  That said there is a way to show appreciation for other answers that help you out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BOUNTIES! :)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties are a great way to give some reputation to an answer that was really good/helpful but didn't quite get to be the 'selected' answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties essentially offer people some of your own hard earned rep as a thank you their work.  Given you are new you don't have a ton to work with so I am throwing up a bounty for you.  Just pay it forward in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know who your second place answer is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T13:35:07.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5410" CreationDate="2017-09-28T16:15:21.727" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appear to have lost 28 reputation points (at least according to my reputation summary screen) for a post that I deleted 2 days ago on 26/9/17&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/93168/earthborn-inferiority/93171#93171&quot;&gt;Earthborn Inferiority&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post received 3 up votes and 1 down vote before I deleted it. I don't think there was anything that problematic about it other than it was too short. I posted it in a hurry and after several comments saying it was too short I decided to delete it. But can anyone explain why I lost 28 reputation points? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42450" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T17:48:37.043" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T17:54:36.800" Title="Unexplained loss of reputation points" Tags="|support|reputation|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2017-09-28T16:34:16.497" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;All reputation changes from deleted posts are reversed. This works as designed. You willingly removed the posts and reversed the reputation you gained from that answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every upvote on an answer of yours gives you +10 reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Every downvote on an answer of yours gives you -2 reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Therefore you had +30/-2 reputation netting +28 reputation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those were deducted from your reputation total when you deleted the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5409/unexplained-loss-of-reputation-points/5410?noredirect=1#comment15476_5410&quot;&gt;comment from Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception: if a post scoring at least +3 that was on the site for more than 60 days gets deleted, you keep the rep. (The theory is that it was obviously helpful and was welcome on the community for an extended time. This was implemented for cases where an answer that was correct isn't now -- we don't want to penalize people for being helpful just because a new version of that software came out and changed everything.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T17:54:36.800" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T17:54:36.800" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T20:53:14.523" Score="14" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;We did have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3567/29&quot;&gt;Checklist for the perfect post&lt;/a&gt;, but that's about questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3857/29&quot;&gt;Should we have a “How to write the perfect answer?” discussion?&lt;/a&gt; was asked, but never got any significant amount of attention (at least visibly on Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is an attempt to be the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get &lt;strong&gt;lots&lt;/strong&gt; of new users who come here and &lt;em&gt;clearly want to contribute&lt;/em&gt; by answering questions. However, being new, they aren't familiar with our standards, and often not with the Stack Exchange question and answers format at all. The result is very often that a newcomer posts an answer, and it gets voted down and deleted. In the best of cases, they get a few helpful comments and are encouraged to try their hands on some other question, but usually very little concrete can be offered in the very limited comment space to help them figure out &lt;em&gt;what we want&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to what we don't want. That's not a very nice welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of this post is to gather &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;generally applicable&lt;/em&gt; helpful hints on what we want to see in &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to questions.&lt;/strong&gt; The top several of those will then be compiled into a separate Meta post that we can point new users toward, to help them understand our site and our format better. Something like a comment such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding! Thank you for your interest in this site! Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;this cool post&lt;/a&gt; that can help you improve your answer in only a few moments with ten short and easy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is the brainstorming question.&lt;/em&gt; Throw your ideas for how to tell a good answer from a bad one into the mix (but make sure they are actually &lt;em&gt;generally applicable&lt;/em&gt; across the site, or at the very least mostly so), let's stir, and see what rises and what sinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the same template as in the question checklist question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; The question you want to propose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Further explanation on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this question is useful + examples. This part will be added as footnote in the final checklist post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage everyone to write the questions in such a way that a &quot;good&quot; answer naturally leads to the proposed question being answered with a &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T23:04:59.413" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T23:04:59.413" Title="Checklist for the perfect answer - Idea refinement" Tags="|discussion|faq|answers|new-users|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-09-30T20:53:14.523" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you actually answering the question, within the constraints stated in the question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE is a part of the Stack Exchange network, which is not an ordinary discussion forum. When you post an answer, you need to ensure that your answer actually answers the question that is being asked at the top of the page, rather than providing commentary on the question or on any of the existing answers. Pay particular attention to any special criteria or constraints that the user asking the question is including, and make sure you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/64/29&quot;&gt;provide sufficient reasoning to justify the answer&lt;/a&gt; that you are proposing. Answers that do not actually answer the question, or which disregard one or more of the criteria or constraints in the question, may be at risk of being downvoted and/or deleted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T11:26:55.047" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T11:26:55.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-09-30T22:14:37.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you summarizing the relevant parts from links you provided?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's important to summarize the most important parts from linked resources in your answer as the idea behind the StackExchange network is to provide canonical answers to questions other people might have again in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone comes across the question in a few months and finds only answers with links where the content changed or was relocated the answers won't help him. You should always try to summarize the relevant parts so that other users won't have to search any further to find the answer to the question after they have read your answer. Links should be used as helpful additions for readers who want to learn more about the subject out of the scope of the question that was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T11:38:47.340" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T11:38:47.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-01T15:07:51.460" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is your answer consistent with present-day relevant scientific knowledge, or does the question specifically ask for or allow for answers based in something other than present-day scientific knowledge?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE allows for questions that completely disregard present-day scientific knowledge; for example, either by positing things that are known to not exist or are known to not be possible, or by positing things that we don't yet know to exist or that we don't yet know to be possible. However, unless the question specifically asks for or allows for answers based in something other than the known sciences, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;our default stance is that answers should be consistent with present-day relevant scientific knowledge&lt;/a&gt;. If the question includes some specific element which is not consistent with present-day scientific knowledge, answers are expected to take that element into account, and to assume that in the fictional world being asked about, this element works as described in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T18:48:31.533" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T18:48:31.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-02T03:06:05.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you explained the reason why the premise of the question won't work?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4225/challenging-questions-premises&quot;&gt;Challenging the premise of the question&lt;/a&gt; is allowed, however you must do it very carefully. Unless the question is asking about the plausibility or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; answers, generally &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5027/28789&quot;&gt;&quot;We should accept the parameters of the question and go from there.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; If you feel &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3758/when-is-thats-not-possible-an-appropriate-answer&quot;&gt;the proposed idea is not possible&lt;/a&gt; at all, explain your train of thought of how you get into the conclusion that it won't work. State only science facts or logical conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="34288" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T16:04:25.970" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T16:04:25.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-02T12:56:18.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is your answer clearly formatted and legible?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Layout is important&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titles are a great way to get a point across quickly, if your answer allows a brief phrase summary this is the place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can follow the title with a longer summary if you're giving a long answer, but get readers engaged quickly with the point you're trying to make if you want them to read the whole post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Subheadings&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you need to convey a lot of information, break it down into sections and use a subheading for each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Paragraphs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that most people will initially only give a quick glance to each answer and will be put off by a wall of text. Give them a layout that doesn't look intimidating to keep them engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T22:22:36.363" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-02T16:24:11.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you read the other answers posted for the question to ensure you are not duplicating what another has already posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not read the question and immediately post your answer.  This often results in duplication and low quality answers.  To provide good answers that help the original poster (OP) best, you should take the time to review the answers already posted.  This will give you the chance to add to the OP's understanding new issues or relevant extended information about already existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T22:55:12.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-03T17:10:51.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Have you actually answered the main question, rather than the related questions and possible implications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question may have several question marks, but the main answer usually is indicated &lt;strong&gt;in the title&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bolded&lt;/strong&gt; in the body. Your answer should address the main concern, and then you can expand your answer to address the related questions. It is easy to be carried away on pointing out the implications and suggesting improvements, but if your answer does not address the main concern, then your answer is &quot;Not An Answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T17:10:51.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-03T17:31:52.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is your answer actually up-to-date with the current edit of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question is edited either to fit better with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the scope of the Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; and StackExchange Q&amp;amp;A format, or clarify the author intention of the question. While we try hard not to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2598/34288&quot;&gt;invalidate existing answers,&lt;/a&gt; sometimes it is an unavoidable side-effect of keeping the question high-quality. If this happens, existing answers should be updated to reflect the changes in the question, especially if the core question changed or new information is added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T17:31:52.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-04T00:11:43.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Did you skip the body of the question and respond to headline/title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered&lt;/strong&gt;: No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Headlines and titles that perfectly summarise the essence of a question are very hard to write and sometimes are even impossible. There is a high probability that you cannot provide a helpful answer without reading the full body of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T00:11:43.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-04T00:34:44.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Is your answer written in a neutral or respectful tone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a member of the Stack Exchange network, you are expected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt; to everyone. This doesn't mean you have to be a bootlicker (in fact, you probably shouldn't), but a respectful tone is expected and lack of such can, especially if it keeps going on over time, be grounds for a day in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;penalty box&lt;/a&gt; (A.K.A. a temporary account suspension).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:25:12.487" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:25:12.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T02:19:00.503" Score="8" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the issue of Sandbox is decreased visibility because it is put in meta site instead of main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we increase the visibility, especially for the new users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are proposing improvement for the Sandbox itself, please post in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5131/how-shall-we-make-the-sandbox-work-better&quot;&gt;How shall we make the sandbox work better?&lt;/a&gt;, not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T09:58:42.990" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T01:29:02.203" Title="How can we increase the visibility of the Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-04T03:16:59.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is the question likely to be closed/Should the question be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question should be closed you should focus on either getting the question closed or editing the question to keep it open rather than answering the question. By answering questions that are off topic, too broad or primarily opinion based we are encouraging more people to ask such questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially don't answer a question if you have already voted to close the question, since then you are providing mixed signals to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further information about why this is a bad idea can be read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3515/answering-a-question-you-closed&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:42:56.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-04T07:19:11.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we should add a link to the sandbox, in the end of questions that &lt;strong&gt;graduated&lt;/strong&gt; from Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Graduated ideally should means at least one upvote from more experienced members. But right now I'm stuck on defining the requirements for graduation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This will let people know that a Sandbox exists for them to prepare a question before posting to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This will help people see that graduated questions have above than average quality. (At least it won't be closed as fast)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed line should read like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question was created with help from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&quot;Sandbox&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to propose feedback and suggestion and criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="17720" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T16:17:30.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T16:17:30.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-04T07:27:24.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permanently (?) put the Sandbox link to the featured section of the right banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3Y22.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3Y22.png&quot; alt=&quot;Featured on meta&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way everyone will have easier access to the Sandbox, both users (especially new users) and reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T07:27:24.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-04T07:58:02.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Add a link as the first comment under your question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the least intrusive way to increase the visibility. Basically we just add a little paragraph to the Sandbox explaining that we would love if everyone could post a comment under his question on the Main Site once it graduated like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question graduated from the &lt;code&gt;[Sandbox](link/to/your/draft)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question graduated from the &lt;code&gt;[Sandbox](link/to/list/of/graduated/posts)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would increase visibility, let others see the relevant discussions and doesn't really require any changes. And it wouldn't clutter the real question that you asked by adding unnecessary meta information. Telling people what ways you used to clarify your question is unnecessary and doesn't belong into the question post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also not everyone &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to do this. It's just a way to increase the visibility for the Sandbox if you were satisfied or are hoping to increase the functionality of the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should make sure that question drafts are not immediately deleted in that case. For example you should only flag drafts that graduated after 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T16:41:45.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T09:04:19.250" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77849/stumped-what-would-replace-names-in-an-alternate-history&quot;&gt;Stumped: What would replace &amp;#39;names&amp;#39; in an alternate history?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question now has 30+ answers (a couple have been deleted), which means the odds are that only the top few have been viewed by most of the people looking at the question. Can we ask that some members of the community to take a few minutes to look through all the answers to this question (not just the top few) and up/down vote or flag as appropriate please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T09:04:19.250" Title="Request to review answers on the 'names' question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:11:17.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Can your answer be boiled down to &quot;use magic&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered&lt;/strong&gt;: No! Nononononoo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if a question is talking about magic do not take that as a liberty to answer with 'use magic' or any variation of it. Not only does an answer of this kind mock the question, it also mocks anyone investing time and effort into writing a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition it is never good to introduce additional &lt;em&gt;phlebotinum&lt;/em&gt; to a situation. The OP is at the liberty to introduce whatever phantastic materials and technologies they want - but an answer should work within the given constraints. Changing a situation does not constitute an answer, it constitutes a new situation which is fundamentally different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T21:00:02.003" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T21:00:02.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-04T21:32:03.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Design a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4377/28&quot;&gt;community ad&lt;/a&gt; to promote it.  This idea has come up before, but we've never gotten all the way to an ad design that could be added to the rotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ad complements other approaches that are tied to specific graduates.  It might reach a different audience by being an ad with a graphic component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T21:32:03.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T08:14:33.480" Score="4" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are questions where someone asks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is this thing that I just described possible/plausible/credible?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77642/&quot;&gt;No hunger cry from birth, is it plausible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big problem for questions like this is that the answer is often one big rhetorical shrug along the lines of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yeah, sure, why wouldn't it be?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is rather unsatisfactory and leaves the questioner hanging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ask the complement question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most often questions like these are a case where it is easier to find out if it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; possible/plausible/credible; where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(set_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complement&lt;/a&gt; is easier to suss than the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The complement of &quot;possible&quot; is &quot;impossible&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The complement of &quot;plausible&quot; is &quot;implausible&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The complement of &quot;credible&quot; is &quot;incredible&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence when someone asks: &quot;Is this possible&quot;, ask yourself or the poster &quot;Is it impossible?&quot;. If the answer to the complement-question is &quot;No, this is not impossible&quot;, then the answer to the original question is &quot;Yes, it is possible&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If however there are any showstoppers, that does make the thing in question impossible (there rarely are), say what these showstoppers are, so that the author can work around them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with &quot;Is this implausible?&quot; If no, congrats, the concept works. If &quot;yes&quot;, for what reason is it implausible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with &quot;Is this incredible?&quot;. If no, proceed with the writing. If yes, explain why this will put a strain on their reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T11:26:24.383" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T11:26:24.383" Title="About &quot;Is this possible?&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5440" CreationDate="2017-10-05T09:32:06.300" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an in scope question is asked in the worldbuilding community, can the same question be asked in another SE community such as physics if it is also in scope there? If so can these two questions be asked together or should one follow the aother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42450" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T10:21:57.383" Title="Can the same question be asked twice but in different SE communities" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5442" CreationDate="2017-10-05T09:33:51.443" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I reviewed an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94032/30492&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; which was flagged for its content and length. &#xA;Now I reviewed again the very same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="3390" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T11:33:29.253" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T11:54:52.493" Title="Is it possible to review the same answer twice?" Tags="|support|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5438" CreationDate="2017-10-05T09:39:33.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Please don't do that&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions could theoretically belong to more than one community. Physics.SE and WorldBuilding.SE are good examples, but it's not a good idea to post the same question twice. That means you are not clear on what you are really asking - is it WorldBuilding or Real-Life physics in the example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/64069/352819&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask the question on the site you think is most applicable. If, like in this case, it does not get any answer, &lt;strong&gt;ask a moderator to migrate the question&lt;/strong&gt;, or alternatively, delete it and re-ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each site is focused on a &lt;strong&gt;specific topic area&lt;/strong&gt;. If you have a question you feel is too ambiguous, either re-think the question carefully, or do as suggested above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions people have labeled as being applicable cross-site have been proven to be valid on a single site if written properly and thought through. SE is not a wild west for questions; a question needs to be worked on to be worthy, and if worthy, it will target a specific audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bounty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you don't get a response, you can always set a bounty on your question, which will give it much better exposure. This will also mean you have a better chance at getting a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specific Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the question you're referring to specifically, you're asking the wrong question and not providing enough detail. I have commented on your question and would suggest you update your question with more specific detail — it's not very clear what is going wrong, and without specific information, it is hard to try and answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only valid answer I can come up with at this point is that it works perfectly for me based on what you described. The question — as is — is a SF question. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, if you provide specific information, it would be valid on SO since it is referring to the configuration of a development tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T09:39:33.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5438" CreationDate="2017-10-05T10:21:57.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you need to post the &quot;same&quot; question on two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copy-pasting&lt;/strong&gt; your question will very likely lead your question to be closed in one of the sites, or both - because it is likely to be unclear or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm lack of example right now, but I think you can ask different questions in different sites about one problem. Technically it's not the same question, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just link to the original question in Worldbuilding.SE for background information. Remember to personally edit the question to match with the site's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;em&gt;Don't&lt;/em&gt;. If you alter your question to ask about different perspective, then be cautious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T10:21:57.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5439" CreationDate="2017-10-06T00:48:52.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94032/28&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; (10k link) first went through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/39569&quot;&gt;First Posts queue&lt;/a&gt; and then, after flags, went through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/39585&quot;&gt;Low Quality queue&lt;/a&gt; from which it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These review queues serve different purposes, and going through one of them doesn't bar a post from the others.  A post could even appear in all three of First Posts, Late Answers, and Low Quality, though any individual reviewer won't see it in both of First Posts and Late Answers.  I'm pretty sure a post can't go through the Low Quality queue more than once, but it's possible to see a post in that queue and one of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T15:14:35.537" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T15:14:35.537" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T10:07:06.817" Score="7" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a rule that says that is a question is more centered on a story than on a world, then there should be a Vote To Close for being off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94154/&quot;&gt;How to safely check if you are immortal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question can possibly be saved by using the &quot;In a world...&quot; defense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InAWorld&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In a world&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is voice-over artist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_LaFontaine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don LaFontaine&lt;/a&gt;'s gift/curse to movie trailers. While an utter cliché today, it became a cliché because &lt;strong&gt;it works&lt;/strong&gt;. In a movie trailer, you — as the author of the trailer — have the audience's attention for &lt;strong&gt;a few seconds&lt;/strong&gt;. In those few seconds, you have to explain the premise of story without making the audience become bored, or making it feel contrived. So how do you do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don found that using &quot;In a world...&quot; allows you explain an entire setting in one sentence, while at the same time placing the protagonist(s) in that world. &quot;In a world...&quot; works as a glue between a setting (which is that which we are primarily concerned with at Worldbuilding SE) and a story (which is what the offending question was actually concerned with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Point for discussion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question such as the one exemplified above I feel could be saved by re-writing as such. The original phrasing goes from...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My character is told they are immortal. How should they test that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...to become... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In a world&lt;/strong&gt; where people are told they are immortal... how would they go about testing that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we add the &quot;In a world..&quot; defense to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3281/risk-factor-definition-too-story-based?rq=1&quot;&gt;Too Story-based: How To Fix-section&lt;/a&gt; and —&#xA; if applicable to a Too Broad question — tell the user to fix the question as such?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T17:14:02.697" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T12:30:38.533" Title="Can a &quot;too story-based&quot; question be saved with the &quot;In a world...&quot; defense?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2017-10-06T11:49:25.153" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d say yes, but with the caveat that we have to advise caution: It’s possible that the two questions could become quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate: &#xA;‘My character is told he is immortal...’ can only have an answer specific to the character and the story, and this is story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘In a world where &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; are told they are immortal...’ can elicit answers about how a world would react to these people, test for them humanely and/or safely in a larger scale way, and may inadvertantly answer the question about the specific character as part of the answer about a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to be a sensible way to rescue a question, but it could easily end up becoming a different and/or too broad question instead of too story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T11:49:25.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2017-10-06T14:21:31.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's rewritten, probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is asking how their hero will get out of a situation it's a textbook case of being story based. Those are exactly the kind of questions that that close reason was created to prevent. Until they edit the question it is clearly off topic for this site and should be put on hold until it is edited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once it's edited it should be judged on the merits of the edited text and only if it's a good fit for this site should it be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T14:21:31.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T17:24:07.470" Score="16" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;On other sites on the StackExchange network the bot in their chat room has a custom name and a profile picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;InterpersonalSkills.SE&lt;/a&gt; has the Introverted Meta Man and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/-677/extroverted-main-man&quot;&gt;Extroverted Main Man&lt;/a&gt; to post new questions in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, we have a bot with the lame name &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/-2/feeds&quot;&gt;Feeds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we change the name to something more cool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we name our bot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T15:34:38.277" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T06:51:14.527" Title="Change the name of our chat bot" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-07T10:05:10.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Add a link to the sandbox to the help center main page.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the ability to edit the very top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center main page&lt;/a&gt;, just below the search bar. That's the same page that gets linked if you write &lt;code&gt;[help]&lt;/code&gt; in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we shouldn't abuse that possibility, that would seem to be a good spot to place links to &lt;strong&gt;a few&lt;/strong&gt; pieces of highly useful and &lt;em&gt;generally applicable&lt;/em&gt; meta-content intended to help new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could personally see how placing links there to the question sandbox, and the site-specific checklist for questions and (when we have it) that for answers. We probably shouldn't have much more than that there, to ensure that people aren't overwhelmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T10:05:10.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5452" CreationDate="2017-10-09T19:15:05.043" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a big issue, but did come as a surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an answer I posted to a question about a mountainous planet:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94369/what-would-produce-the-most-uneven-but-earthlike-planetary-surface/94375#94375&quot;&gt;What would produce the most uneven but earthlike planetary surface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A kind gentleman added a comment pointing out I'd not discussed earthquakes in this scenario.  So I added a comment saying I would, then edited the question.  Some short time later, both comments had disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that someone noticed that interaction and removed the now-unnecessary comments -- they'd done their work -- but I just wanted to make sure that that was the custom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh yes, the actual question...  &lt;strong&gt;Is this expected behavior?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T19:21:28.143" Title="Comments disappeared from &quot;Jagged Earth&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5451" CreationDate="2017-10-09T19:21:28.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting obsolete comments is pretty normal, either because somebody flagged them as such or because a moderator came across them in normal use of the site.  Clearing out obsolete comments makes it easier for new comments to be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't handle this particular case, but yes, that's expected behavior.  Nothing bad happened, just routine maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T19:21:28.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5454" CreationDate="2017-10-10T10:03:31.920" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be my misunderstanding, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an orange indicator suggesting I have (currently) 8 reviews to do, but my review queue is completely empty (all zeroes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just me or is there something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38942" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T21:25:04.820" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T21:25:04.820" Title="Review indicator miscounting?" Tags="|bug|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-10-10T13:56:18.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5453" CreationDate="2017-10-10T10:45:30.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many answers to this already, on every meta on S.E.  In a nutshell, the indicator doesn't count how many are available for you specifically; just how many are in the queue, period.  They say they can't make it smarter, even though it knows obviously when you go to that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T10:45:30.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5457" CreationDate="2017-10-10T21:20:00.093" Score="9" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was fueled by the following question being put on hold: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94558/reason-for-magical-abilites&quot;&gt;Reason for magical abilities&lt;/a&gt;. However, my meta question below applies to the pob close vote reason in general and I do not wish to start a discussion on the linked question in any way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm mostly active in the scientific stacks and I'm new here, but still I would like to dare asking the reasoning behind close-votes based on pob on a non-scientific stack:      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert&#xA;  experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost&#xA;  entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific&#xA;  expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that only those questions with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag could be closed as such? Since this is a world-building forum with magic, sci-fi, portable MRI scanners. bipedal insects and horse-less worlds (to name just a few subjects) - &lt;strong&gt;how would one justify pob close-votes here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43253" LastEditorUserId="43253" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T21:56:31.743" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T04:01:35.453" Title="How can questions be closed as being &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; on Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5455" CreationDate="2017-10-10T23:45:29.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I don't necessarily agree with some of the SE rules here &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;simply because this is &quot;World Building&quot; which should generate a lot of opinionative questions to a healthy extent. Having differing opinions on a world building concept creates healthy refinement of that concept. I truly believe that the only reason this SE has any difference from others (like writing) is so it can refine hypothetical conceptual ideas which inherently means that it is possible to have multiple right answers (The OP gets to choose which is most right for his scenario).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That being said and to the extent I agree with the rules&lt;/strong&gt;. There needs to be criteria that limits the scope of the question and potential answers. In some cases some questions are better off being chunk-ated into smaller questions. Or the topic is so broad like social evolution that any meaningful answer could be a doctoral thesis in length. Establishing clear criteria is ESPECIALLY true with questions involving magic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you throw magic into the equation without imposing any kind of rules on that magic the answer virtually becomes &quot;because I feel like it&quot; which isn't very helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, and as you know, SE employs some crowd sourced self moderation mechanics which means some of these decisions are subject to the whimsy of the mob. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T23:45:29.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5455" CreationDate="2017-10-11T04:01:35.453" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;So . . . this gets back to the issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, which is a concept Worldbuilding's struggled with since its conception. The main two points, as they apply here, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's fine to have questions that are a bit subjective or opinionated . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;. . . but answers to those questions must be supported in some way - they can't just be pure opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be able to constructively, objectively (paradoxically!) say why an answer works (or doesn't work). That is, you should be able to point to X, Y, and Z, things that make the answer good or bad. That's why we try to close questions that ask things like &quot;What color would make my humanoids the most beautiful?&quot; You can't really objectively support an answer to that, can you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We kinda get looked down upon sometimes as the Stack Exchange site without much credibility, or scope boundaries, or &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; that takes strides away from a forum. And . . .  that's not great, and fortunately, it's not true. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; close questions that are opinion-based (or too broad); we do ask that authors set limits on their worlds so that not everything is valid; we do try our best to encourage (and write) answers backed up in hard science, on occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, we're not the anti-scientific Stack Exchange site. A superficial glance might make it seem that way, but we aren't. And we have to take measures to ensure that we aren't, like closing questions that don't fit well here, or on any Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T04:01:35.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5464" CreationDate="2017-10-12T19:35:02.660" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many times when I edit someone else's post the changes take effect immediately. I don't know if they accept them that quickly or its because of my rep. I would like to propose large scale edit to someone's post but I don't want it to take effect without their or community approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I got about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T19:35:01.543" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T19:35:01.543" Title="Large Scale Edit" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5463" CreationDate="2017-10-12T19:52:15.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After you got 2000 rep points, your edit is applied immediately and does not go to the Suggested Edit queue. This is a privilege acquired after reaching that milestone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large scale edit with only formatting rework is fine, however be careful with changing the question completely. It might invalidates existing answers, and it's a big no-no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit can always be rolled back, so usually if you make an edit in a good faith (after considering existing answers and the author intent), it is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="34288" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T19:54:11.077" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T19:54:11.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5467" CreationDate="2017-10-13T23:27:58.613" Score="-5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I reviewed a re-open request for a question that was posted in 2015 and put on hold a year later in 2016.  My question doesn't come from the reopen request, but from the hold placed a year after the question had been asked and answered by a fair number of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only a few days ago I user and I were discussing the point of voting to close a question a week after the fact when the question and its answers had enjoyed thousands of views, hundreds of votes, and an answer selected.  It seemed to me petty to put a question on hold over a mere technicality after it had been voted (from a certain point of view) relevant by the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Can we/Should we put a &amp;quot;statute of limitations&amp;quot; on questions such that they cannot be closed after the statute has expired?  Putting a question on hold a year after it was posted is, frankly, absurd.  It simply highlights what appears to be the inefficiency of reviewers (no offense intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. Can we/Should we put a modifier on the number of close votes needed to close a question based on the aggragate votes it's received (both positive and negative). For example, for every +50 aggragate votes, one additional close vote is required to close it (thus putting the burden on reviewers to act in a timely fashion if there really is an issue that makes the question worth closing).  Similarly, for every -10 aggragate votes (remember, the sum of all votes, answers + question) one less vote is required to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm strongly in favor of the statute of limitations.  Honestly, if reviewers can't close a question in even a week's time, we're simply not doing our jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm moderately in favor of the vote count modification as it's intended purpose is to give &amp;quot;the people&amp;quot; some power over the voting process.  To whit... closing highly popular questions simply makes reviewers look petty, so it should require a larger concensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T11:19:42.603" Title="Is it possible &amp; sensible to have a limits for putting questions on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5466" CreationDate="2017-10-14T00:09:19.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mithrandir24601 pointed you to a couple of posts (1, 2) that address your first concern pretty well. The distilled point is that questions set precedents. The scope of a site is often established not just by meta posts or ethereal community decisions, but also by content itself and how it's received. It doesn't matter what we decide on meta if we just let questions that violate a policy stay around. Therefore, if the scope changes, we should close questions that are out of scope, lest new users see them and get the wrong idea. It's kinda related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows theory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second point, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/&quot;&gt;the trouble with popularity&lt;/a&gt;. Not all popular questions are good questions; a lot of &quot;fun&quot; content can detract from the overall quality of the site and take a lot of attention away from good questions. Things like the Hot Network Questions list can exacerbate this, rewarding questions that quickly get a lot of answers. So popularity - exaggerated by the HNQ, which gets questions a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of views - is often orthogonal to quality, and we shouldn't really base our moderation policy on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T00:09:19.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-14T03:21:52.890" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does that mean you are banned from the stack exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32862" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T19:46:53.223" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:46:53.223" Title="What does it mean to have &quot;user was removed&quot; on my account?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5468" CreationDate="2017-10-14T03:35:47.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it means that the user who upvoted your post had his account deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T03:35:47.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2017-10-14T17:09:52.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that this should not be necessary.  If adding &quot;In this world&quot; fixes the &quot;problem&quot;, then there isn't actually a problem.  Too story-based should not be like Too Broad or Unclear What You're Asking, where the asker needs to fix the question.  It should be used when the problem is that something is clearly not an aspect of a world.  For example, &quot;I had a brilliant idea for a world and a character, but what do I do with it?&quot;  The only way to fix that is to ask a different question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too often it seems that people see story details and close as Too Story-based.  Less of that, and questions wouldn't need an &quot;In this world&quot; defense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T17:09:52.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-15T05:12:36.257" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests, where should we go to make contests?  Are contests, for that matter, even allowed on any of the Stack Exchanges?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification on where I am going with this, let me bring up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-of-the-fortnight-main-thread.170373/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maps of the Fortnight&lt;/a&gt; series on the Alternate History Forum.  It is a series of map contests regarding alternate history scenarios.  That is pretty much where I am going with this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T09:16:12.500" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T15:19:11.703" Title="Where Do We Go To Make Contests?" Tags="|discussion|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5471" CreationDate="2017-10-15T15:19:11.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to make a contest, please get &amp;quot;community approval&amp;quot; first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in MSE that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124911/individual-community-preferences-vs-se-network-policy-who-wins/124915#124915&quot;&gt;community can decide the policy of what's acceptable themselves&lt;/a&gt; (some sort of individual states' law in US?), so if an event is approved, go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to get community approval?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply post a meta, with the details of your event/contest. Of course, if you want approval by the community, provide reasons why you think this is beneficial for the community, instead of just throwing random bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be prepared &lt;strong&gt;to take criticism.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in [Interpersonal.SE], we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1435/rewarding-the-best-answers-in-the-first-50-days-of-interpersonal-skills&quot;&gt;50-day&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1883/100-days-has-gone-by-time-to-reward-your-hard-work&quot;&gt;100-days&lt;/a&gt; celebration of the IPS site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In [Writers.SE], we have a Writing Challenge. The user explicitly &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1275/how-would-having-the-writing-challenges-on-meta-work-out&quot;&gt;ask community approval&lt;/a&gt; first before going with the Challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although community can bend SE rules if they agree, if you want your proposal to go through, be cautious if you need to do so. Provide justification why you need to bend the rules (for example: posting a question that usually will be closed as too broad, or too opinion based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to use main site, usual rules apply, because we don't want to confuse users about this site scope and rule (except if community agrees to give exception to contest posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for caring about Worldbuilding.SE, and I hope your contest can go well!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T15:19:11.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5437" CreationDate="2017-10-15T15:48:50.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fail to see how that makes any difference in the big rhetorical shrug. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want a world in which the reflecting telescope was invented in 500 BC, and they developed very advanced astronomy, saw all the planets, studied the sun, mapped stars we cannot see with the naked eye, and so on. Is that possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer #1&lt;/strong&gt; Sure, it's possible. Metal mirrors existed in 2000 BC, the first known glass mirrors in 100 AD. The mirror technology doesn't depend very much on previous scientific insights and could easily have been discovered 600 years earlier. The reflecting telescope is clever, but if an intellect like Newton, that &lt;strong&gt;taught himself&lt;/strong&gt; all about optics, lenses and mirrors, had been a prince of some rich castle in 500 BC, with money, resources and curiosity to play: Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer #2&lt;/strong&gt; It isn't impossible. [then same text as above, or a rhetorical shrug.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see what contribution this makes or what question you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems more like you are trying to define an instruction manual for answering questions. If that is the case, this may be a mental trick that helps you in your thinking, but I don't see it as generally applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T15:48:50.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T02:22:08.933" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to put images from google search into my answers when I am answering a question. I usually just go to the site, get the URL to that image, and paste it to Stackexchange &quot;Insert Image&quot;, which converts it to an imgur link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually I just leave it at that, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94998/34288&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; makes me think about whether my approach is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we give attribution below the image we get from the internet?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does imgur handle those images? Do they have an internal attribution table to track images uploaded to Stackexchange sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T10:35:23.987" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T10:35:23.987" Title="What is the correct way to put an image from the internet in answers?" Tags="|discussion|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5474" CreationDate="2017-10-16T03:59:55.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we give attribution below the image we get from the internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably yes. Sometimes people forget, but if nothing else, its the nice thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they have internal attribution table to track images uploaded to Stackexchange sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to attribute - I favour the method mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/301054/135565&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which I reproduce below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its worth remembering &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we encourage the use of imgur - if wikimedia changes their links or OP removes the image your image is broken. In future, if SE chooses to move off imgur, it also simplifies the process of fixing links. There's &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; advantages to using imgur, and space is relatively cheap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt; link an off site image - just use the hyperlink option, and add a ! in front like so &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XItfL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XItfL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; (Example Image taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philae_Temple_R03.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; - Aswan (Egypt): Philae Temple taken by Marc Ryckaert (MJJR))&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That said, chances are, for the reasons I mentioned above, someone will edit it to use imgur anyway, and we really do prefer people use imgur (and maybe link back to the original/attribute as needed - I've used sub tags here) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:59:55.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5474" CreationDate="2017-10-16T06:08:25.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While @JourneymanGeek's answer is a good one, it is important to note that you can find all the info you need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;in the help section on referencing:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt; - posting the work of others with no indication that it is&#xA;  not your own - is frowned on by our community, and may result in your&#xA;  answer being down-voted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from&#xA;  another site or in an answer on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange) make&#xA;  sure you do all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help#links&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to the original page or answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help#simple-blockquotes&quot;&gt;Quote&lt;/a&gt; only the relevant portion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide the name of the original author Example:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ernest Hemingway - Biographical on Nobelprize.org&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;    Hemingway saw combat when he was a teenager. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a&#xA;      volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he&#xA;      was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent&#xA;      considerable time in hospitals ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[other sources, quotes, explanations, etc. necessary to complete the answer]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; copy the complete text of external sources; instead, use their words and ideas&#xA;  to support your own. And &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; give proper credit to the author and&#xA;  site where you found the text, &lt;strong&gt;including a direct link to it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160071/what-to-do-when-plagiarism-is-discovered&quot;&gt;What to do when plagiarism is discovered&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160077/users-are-calling-me-a-plagiarist-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;Users are calling me a plagiarist. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most official stance of Stackexchange on the topic of referencing material I could find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that I failed to follow its very guidance by copy-pasting all the information from the link - but I think I can be forgiven under these circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T06:08:25.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-17T03:37:45.523" Score="-12" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Writers StackExchange offers us better/more flexible options for developing our worlds and characters. Is it the fault of badge rushers? To be honest, Worldbuilding expects too much, but offers too little. I don't want to sound like this... However, Writers SE helped me much more than WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T06:42:59.370" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T06:42:59.370" Title="Why is Writers StackExchange much more useful than Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-10-17T10:37:43.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5477" CreationDate="2017-10-17T05:26:52.700" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;My experience was the opposite. They won’t run with creative ideas, they just say “sure, write something.”  They claim to be about the writing process, not the ideas in a particular story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those topics are what you need, than what’s the problem?  You could just as well ask why Writers is better than Cooks: the answer is the same. That is the SE that handles &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; actual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T05:26:52.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5480" CreationDate="2017-10-17T11:02:53.243" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95157/what-could-make-a-species-evolve-downward-facing-ears&quot;&gt;What could make a species evolve downward facing ears?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not appear on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;active page&lt;/a&gt; of Worldbuilding.SE. It does not disappear completely and can still be accessed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; when searching for example through the newest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed this happened after I edited my question after posting it within the 5 minutes grace period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T22:11:52.807" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T22:11:52.807" Title="My recently asked question does not show up on the active page" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5479" CreationDate="2017-10-17T11:29:06.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I cannot reproduce this&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question shows up just fine. Right now it's directly under the question &amp;quot;Inorganic alien consciousness [on hold]&amp;quot; at 14&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; position in the active questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that: if any post on a question, either the question itself or any of the answers, are edited your question will appear at the top. This also happens if for example someone answers your question. Currently the last tracked activity is my answer 4 hours ago. But it will take a minute or two when there is new activity before it is shown when reloading the page, although people who currently have the page open and are not using an Ad-Blocker should receive a message indicating something like &amp;quot;1 post with activity&amp;quot;. Just wait a bit and then reload the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T11:29:06.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5479" CreationDate="2017-10-17T12:28:17.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my experience, new questions take up to 15 minutes to show in &quot;Active&quot; page. Usually less, but it happens, it was happening all the years I'm on Stack Exchange. I admit, I no longer care, but I remember it was frustrating when it happened to me for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T12:28:17.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5484" CreationDate="2017-10-18T10:29:55.117" Score="7" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/95033/3460&quot;&gt;Why does the Conjoined Alliance of Space Travellers keep producing red uniforms?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How this is on-topic? I was going to flag it but hesitated, as I neither understand the insider jokes, nor I'm too used to the rules of WorldBuilding.SE. But on a breakdown that post looks to me like a parody on a topic that's not even directly mentioned. And then just asks for an out-of-universe explanation to that reference(?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if there is another twist in that post, making it on-topic, if you understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't that still contradict with a clear question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3460" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T10:37:19.320" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T18:55:31.867" Title="How can a parody of an out-of-universe movie question be Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2017-10-18T10:32:30.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply - he is building a parody world, a world where tropes are real and make in-world sense. Borderline, I agree, but still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T10:32:30.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2017-10-18T10:34:36.553" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This question is on-topic because the author is trying to build his own world - he just takes inspiration in a humorous way from an already existing universe&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, he clearly took paralleles to existing canonical universes. And yes, he clearly is trying to go with the trope of Redshirts dying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he does not want to know how this is handled in the show. He just takes the premise and incorporates it into his own world as truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other sources. The jokes are merely for entertainment. It's still clear what the author is asking about and how he changes the canon in his own creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't even matter if you get the references. I only heard of this trope once and never watched the show/movies/..., but reading the question still makes clear what he is asking about. I don't need to know anything about the canon, so it's a clear and valid question that can perfectly be answered on WorldBuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default assumption under which questions should be viewed is that the OP is trying to create a world of his own. If he was not trying to create a world of his own it would not make any sense to post on WorldBuilding.SE. Unless the OP is obviously asking for a canonical answer like &amp;quot;How is [stuff] handled in [show]?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Why are Redshirts dying more often than other color shirts in Star Trek?&amp;quot; we should  assume that the OP is at most taking input and inspiration from existing canonical universes. Of course we sometimes see questions that are clearly about the canon - these should be redirected to another site because we are trying to &lt;em&gt;build worlds&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically just one of the core principals that we should follow - &lt;strong&gt;assume good faith&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is asking on WorldBuilding.SE because he wants to build a world. Until proven not to be the case we should assume that this holds true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T18:55:31.867" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2017-10-18T12:30:38.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepting anything with &quot;in my world&quot; prefix would make this site another Yahoo Answers, only with tags instead of categories. We should definitely never do that - one Yahoo Answers is enough on the Internet and this site is useful because it is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers about testing immortality in a whole world would be much different. It might be considered safe test to use euthanasia on someone who is entitled to it, for example, and thus give some answer to general public. And if question is carefully scoped to avoid answers that would use a fact that it is a whole world, it is not a worldbuilding, end of story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T12:30:38.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5489" CreationDate="2017-10-18T23:38:36.120" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95260/how-advanced-would-a-roman-themed-empire-be-if-there-was-no-collapse-and-it-adva&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about technological advancement in an alternate history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as too broad, and rightly so.  It was too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks to @MichaelKjörling for getting an accurate count of the hold rate.  I only looked at the first page.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on-average an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; question has an 31% chance of being closed, should we discontinue the alternate-history tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Please note that I think the question I linked to was badly worded.  Had it been cleaned up (something along the lines of, &quot;What changes would be needed in Earth's history such that the Roman Empire continued into the 1600s and what technological changes would have occured?&quot;) I think it's quite answerable (I don't equate &quot;hard&quot; as &quot;too broad&quot;).  I wonder if we're closing questions so quickly that OPs don't have a chance to improve their questions... but that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T18:21:29.793" LastActivityDate="2022-01-24T23:43:29.467" Title="Should we remove the [tag:alternate-history] tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2017-10-19T08:09:32.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I say we should keep it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good way to describe what you are asking about and if the people can't narrow the scope of their question down enough than it's not the fault of the tag. I wouldn't want to miss &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; questions just because people were not able to take a tag and then focus on an aspect like they are supposed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All tags are too broad. That's because they are tags and supposed to group different kinds of questions together. To take some numbers from a comment from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5487/should-we-remove-the-tagalternate-history-tag#comment15814_5487&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Balternate-history%5D+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;367 non-deleted questions are tagged alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Balternate-history%5D+is%3Aq+closed%3A1&quot;&gt;115 questions are on hold or closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means roughly 31% closure rate. Pretty high, but let's look at some other tags. Like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmagic%5D+is%3Aq+&quot;&gt;942 total&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmagic%5D+is%3Aq+closed%3A1&quot;&gt;322 closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes for roughly 34%. That's a bit more than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aliens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Baliens%5D+is%3Aq+&quot;&gt;485 total&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Baliens%5D+is%3Aq+closed%3A1&quot;&gt;125 closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes for roughly 26%. Not where &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; is, but still quite a lot and pretty close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those numbers are high. And it would be good if they were not that high. But something around 30% closure rate is no reason to ban a tag and thereby discourage people from asking about these topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should think about making the rules more specific by stating them in the tag excerpts. For example currently the tag excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that ask what might have happened if history had taken a different path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki on the other hand specifies among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions often fall in the &amp;quot;What if ... ?&amp;quot; category and are at risk of being too broad. When asking the question, people should focus on only one or a small amount of aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By mentioning that people should only focus on one single aspect we might reduce the numbers a bit. But we will probably never reduce them to something like 10%. People will misuse the tag like they misuse any other tag on the site. The difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; and other existing tags is not that big that we need to intervene immediately and especially not by removing the tag altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, my examples are on the often-closed end of the scale and a lot of other tags are far below these numbers. But I don't think that the numbers should be the sole reason to get rid of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your comment at the end: I think closing questions fast is a good thing so that people don't answer stuff that will get changed. New users often don't ask clear questions or have a clear idea about what they need to know and what they need to communicate for that. It's important to state how the OP can improve his post and mention that you are voting to &lt;em&gt;put it on hold until those edits are made to improve the quality of the answers you will receive&lt;/em&gt; or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is getting a bit of off-topic and might warrant (another) Meta discussion like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4540/add-feature-to-automatically-add-a-notice-to-new-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/can-there-be-done-more-to-assure-users-that-closing-questions-is-not-a-bad-thing&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4521/proposal-all-questions-start-on-hold-for-1-hour&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T10:28:55.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2017-10-19T11:06:46.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the tag should remain as is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While many of the tagged are rightly closed as too broad, usually starting with &quot;what would the world be like now if this major change happened thousands of years ago&quot;, many of them are good questions about whether minor differences could have taken place. &quot;Could X have won Y battle&quot; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79280/king-john-acting-boldly-and-opening-churches-would-this-work&quot;&gt;King John acting boldly and opening churches - would this work?&lt;/a&gt;, inviting good answers based on expertise of the period which even in small numbers would validate the existence of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T11:06:46.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-10-20T02:15:34.663" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slartibartfast&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/strong&gt; series is the ultimate Worldbuilder to me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0007550/quotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quotes&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur Dent: Are you telling me you originally made the Earth?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Slartibartfast: Oh, yes. Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Arthur Dent: No. No, I didn't.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Slartibartfast: Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T02:15:34.663" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-20T08:25:30.590" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may sound a bit strange when reading the title, but sometimes I've seen people answer questions that they Voted To Close. In these cases I am always refering to a rather old discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3366/rules-of-peer-moderation&quot;&gt;Rules of Peer Moderation&lt;/a&gt;, Rule 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't answer a question that you voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the correct way to go about this. You shouldn't vote that a question can't or shouldn't be answered on this site and at the same time answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes no sense. It's confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially true when realizing that it's often newer users who then see that someone closed their question and answered it at the same time. They won't know how this voting process is supposed to work and they will just think we are a weird bunch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time the person retracts their vote when I mention this. But sometimes it's already too late and the question is closed, which means that this paradoxical behaviour persists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes hand in hand with a similar issue. Sometimes people start their answer with something similar to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is way too broad, but anyway, to get you started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is nice for the person asking this is clearly undermining the design principles of StackExchange. People doing this seem to know the scope of the site and that means they probably know that they should flag or VTC such a question so that the OP edits it to make it on-topic and answerable. They, however, decide that they still want to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see some of these examples by searching for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22too+broad%22++is%3Aa&quot;&gt;&quot;too broad&quot; is:a&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of these issues which I feel have been coming up more often recently and the fact that the only useful reference I could find is the &lt;em&gt;older&lt;/em&gt; question I refered to at the top of this question I would like to start a discussion to get our &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; understanding of how these cases should be handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should these cases be handled?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:07:15.327" Title="What should our policy be about answering questions that we perceive as close-worthy?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-10-20T09:22:03.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5495" CreationDate="2017-10-20T09:07:15.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're voting to close often not because the question &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be answered but because in its current form, no matter how tempting, it &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Consider an opinion based question on which you have an opinion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should vote to close such a question as opinion based, not use it as a platform to express your opinion then vote to close to prevent others from doing so. If you're posting an answer you're saying the question is valid, and can and should be answered, in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;or a question that's too broad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment to get the question trimmed down to something answerable don't answer a fraction of the question. We don't want lots of partial answers to overly broad questions lying around, we want full and complete answers to clean answerable questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:07:15.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-20T11:13:18.910" Score="11" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5495/what-should-our-policy-be-about-answering-questions-that-we-perceive-as-close-wo&quot;&gt;What should our policy be about answering questions that we perceive as close-worthy?&lt;/a&gt;, which is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3515/answering-a-question-you-closed&quot;&gt;Answering a Question you Closed&lt;/a&gt;. The policy we want is basically Rule 8 from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3366/rules-of-peer-moderation&quot;&gt;Rules of Peer Moderation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't answer a question that you voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behaviour is confusing for new users and you should not do it. A question is either answerable or not - there is nothing in between. Decide for one or the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should we handle cases where we encounter one of the following closely related behaviours?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone casts a Close Vote and proceeds to answer the question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone answers and starts by saying something like &quot;This is &lt;em&gt;Too Broad&lt;/em&gt;, but anyway:&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion should not be about &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; policy we want, as that is discussed in the linked questions. I would like to know &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; we should handle this policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My behaviour up until now was to mention the Rules of Peer Moderation and that this behaviour is confusing for new users who expect users with a lot of reputation to act as rolemodels to understand the rules and the processes of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time the person will respond and retract their vote. This is all good. It sends a message that users can be wrong or that someone misclicked and that we as a community are working together to keep an eye on each other and how we would like to enforce the rules. It's a pretty good example, especially for new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes it's already too late and the question is already closed. Or they decide that they can just ignore my comments and keep collecting reputation. It's working after all, so why should they change their behaviour if the system is rewarding them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if an answer is not satisfactory I could flag it as &quot;Not an answer&quot; or &quot;Very low quality&quot;. But most of the time the answer is not bad enough to warrant a flag. And except for the discussions I linked that mention you &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; do this there are no clear rules and nothing laid out in official guidelines as far as I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we want to keep just commenting in these cases or is there something else we could/should do when encountering this behaviour?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T07:54:13.190" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T13:24:25.470" Title="How should we handle cases where people VTC and answer or answer with a VTC reason at the beginning?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-10-20T11:23:07.787" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, leave a comment to remind the user that what they are doing may confuse new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question is too broad, you should've flagged it, not answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let them collect the rep while they can. If their answer is good, they deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as that is a valid attempt to answer the question, I don't see any reason to take it down. Downvote is a different matter, you can use it if you disagree with their behavior (VTC and answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; in case the question changed and their answer become invalidated, go ahead and notify them that the question changed and their answer has become invalidated. Flag the answer for NAA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they fail to update their answer, the community should be prepared to delete that answer. I believe all rep will be lost, and that should be enough lesson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="34288" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T12:00:33.357" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T12:00:33.357" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5503" CreationDate="2017-10-20T11:35:01.733" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17956/how-to-keep-a-bucket-of-water-from-freezing-by-only-natural-means/17962#17962&quot;&gt;How to keep a bucket of water from freezing by only natural means?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the migration was requested and ended in rejection, but most answers are still locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering why some answers are still open and can be voted on while others which are also old are locked/deleted, so I would like to know the reason why some answers are closed and others not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we lock the question and all answers  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delete the question completely or  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the locked answers are unlocked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything from the former list of options is fine, but letting some answers open and some closed is &lt;strong&gt;not ok&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition: Here is a screenshot which is visible for users with over 10k:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KyLTW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KyLTW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;locked by Community and deleted 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;docscience 11 points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WhatRoughBeast 10 points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ThorstenS      9 points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;annav          8 points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thomas Pornin/Jimmy360 2 points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Loren Pechtel/CedricH  1 point  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7089" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T16:26:10.403" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T18:00:37.347" Title="What happened here and why is the question/some answers partly open?" Tags="|support|specific-question|closed-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-10-20T15:30:34.260" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest we look to our chat's resident god Glarnak in this issue. I suggest the names &lt;strong&gt;Glarnak&lt;/strong&gt; for the meta bot as, like a god, meta sends down commandments onto us which we must live by. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T15:30:34.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5499" CreationDate="2017-10-20T16:44:40.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the question timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was asked on Physics on 2015-05-24.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Physics, it was answered by Jimmy360, docscience, anna v, WhatRoughBeast, Loren Pechtel, Thorsten S., Cedric H.,   Thomas Pornin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was migrated from Physics to Worldbuilding on 2015-05-26.  &lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Migrating a question with that many existing answers is now considered a terrible idea.  That probably wasn't as clear in 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Worldbuilding, it was answered by      iNeedToMakeBetterQuestions, Paul Krueger, Nick,     user15361, cybernard, colmde.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;30 days after the migration, the original question was automatically deleted on Physics.  (That's how migration works.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On 2017-10-17 the question here received a close vote, entered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/close/40030&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt;, and was closed by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The migration (remember that? From 2015?) was rejected.  When a migration is rejected, what's supposed to happen is that the migrated answers are deleted and locked on the receiving site and undeleted on the original question -- it sends the received content back to the originating site to handle.  But the original question was already deleted.  &lt;em&gt;Probably&lt;/em&gt; what this means (I don't have 10k rep on Physics to check) is that the question there is still deleted but, within that scope, the answers are not deleted -- that is, were the Physics question to be undeleted, the answers would return there.  That's a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what's supposed to happen to answers from the new site when a migration is rejected.  I think the idea is: we keep ours, they get theirs back -- but we don't send ours back across the migration line to the other site.  The SE code avoids having an answer be live on &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; sides automatically, so because the WB answers didn't go to Physics, they stayed here undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I mentioned recently how freaking &lt;em&gt;confusing&lt;/em&gt; migrations can be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one part of what I've said here should be treated as a bug: if the rejection fails (because the other site has already deleted the original question), then it shouldn't delete anything on the receiving site.  (And it certainly shouldn't lock anything, which prevents community undeletion.)  I have unlockd and undeleted the answers that were deleted by the system.  (One was deleted from review, which I won't undelete.)  I've also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/302349/162102&quot;&gt;made a feature request to not reject old migrations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My undeletions restore the status quo.  I didn't evaluate those answers for quality.  Some are pretty short, so maybe they need more attention from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T18:00:37.347" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T18:00:37.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-10-21T09:07:39.163" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As most of these ideas are bad, let me suggest a neutral name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B.O.B.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it seems to have lead to misunderstandings: This is not an acronym, it's just a neutral, simple, reference-less name. I think for worldbuilding it would be fitting to name the bot something that is no reference to any existing works in fiction but allow people to make up their own origin-stories and share them - building their own worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-11-04T08:50:15.287" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T08:50:15.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-21T14:07:39.737" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4743/the-issue-with-multiple-answers&quot;&gt;The Issue with Multiple Answers&lt;/a&gt;, but instead of cherry-picking parts of the answers you agree/disagree with, I'm asking about an answer that is basically a kitchen sink list of short unrelated answers. I hunted the meta-discussions and the FAQ, but the related topics I found tend to blame the question as &quot;too broad&quot;. However there seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5092/32686&quot;&gt;a consensus&lt;/a&gt; that unrelated answers should be separate answers, and that short one-sentence answers are not proper answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example kitchen sink list answer to the question &quot;How to explain human life expectancy increase?&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95304/32686&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which includes curing 3 separate and unrelated chronic diseases: cancer, Alzhiemer's, and heart disease, discovering a new energy source, ending famine and war, solving air pollution, and discovering a cure for aging. As worded, only one of the co-answers progress logically (a new energy source leads to less air pollution), and a few progress at least tenuously (energy source leads to end of famine and war, although that could be debated), but curing all top chronic diseases and another unrelated medical breakthrough – none of which are more than a single sentence – seems to render community voting almost irrelevant. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4744/32686&quot;&gt;One answer&lt;/a&gt; to a related meta-discussion suggests upvoting if you like SOME of the answer, hence a kitchen sink list may be a strategy to gain votes (my example is the most upvoted answer for that question by a large margin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I commented that the answer seemed &quot;too broad&quot;, I was accused by the author of plagiarizing an item from his list! As I recall, my answer actually took time to write since I was attempting to follow the guidelines with helpful info and link, but had I dashed off a simple sentence with little or no explanation my entry might have been posted first too. Clearly my comment made the author feel threatened and wasn't seen as constructive. Rather than indulge a flame war I post it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see WB as a competition for &quot;first answer with the most options&quot;, so this insult just made me laugh, but this issue is not specifically covered in the FAQ. It may be a downside of the point-scoring system – the &quot;quantity&quot; of a kitchen sink list might seem better than a detailed &quot;quality&quot; answer, but it's inconsistent with the way questions are judged, and it doesn't seem to be compatible with most of the official statements about what makes a proper answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave it for you to consider, as my involvement here has waned and I find I am not as invested as I once was, partly due to the odd ego-wrangling and somewhat arbitrary point system that imho creates an artificial &quot;score&quot; that becomes its own goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T04:52:33.663" Title="Is a kitchen sink list of short unrelated answers &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2017-10-22T09:29:56.237" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, unfortunately such answers did not make it into any works published by a major publisher or producer as of 2017. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9891" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T09:29:56.237" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-22T09:29:56.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2017-10-22T20:52:28.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to throw this out there ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might be nice if [closed] stories had a link to the sandbox.  Here's what it looks like now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;closed as primarily opinion-based by akaioi, rhomaioi, barbaroi, kineziki, italika Oct 17 at 19:24&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not put a sandbox link in there too, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;closed as primarily opinion-based by akaioi, rhomaioi, barbaroi, kineziki, italika Oct 17 at 19:24&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.  &lt;em&gt;You might also test out questions in the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T20:52:28.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-10-22T21:46:06.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permit me to disagree with your premise.  I believe that these &quot;list of unrelated answers&quot; answers are appropriate and good.  Here's why...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP is asking &quot;How can I get X?&quot; where X is expanded lifespan, or angels fighting on foot, or aliens coming back for a second fight, or who knows what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there likely &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; several ways to get what OP wants.  Mutually exclusive ways.  Best to list them out, and let voters/OP/fate sort them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; blame the question and insist that OP sketch out his theory and say &quot;Is this feasible, yes or no dammit&quot; but ... c'mon.  Where's the fun in that?  Also, if OP were as certain as all that, he would be less likely to come here for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T21:46:06.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5516" CreationDate="2017-10-22T22:06:28.890" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:  This is now a feature request.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That [number] in block-quotes not be changed to be links to any images included in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Justification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the current behavior...  In this answer ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95640/is-it-possible-for-a-substance-to-be-thermally-inert/95650#95650&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a substance to be thermally inert?&lt;/a&gt; )  I put in a quote from wiki, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aerogel is a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas.&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; The result is a solid with extremely low density&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fE7I7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; and low thermal conductivity. Nicknames include frozen smoke,&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtoYV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; solid smoke, solid air, solid cloud, blue smoke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't see it, but the actual cut and pasted text looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... replaced with a gas.[ 1 ] The ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except I had to put in spaces around the number.  Note that these footnotes &lt;em&gt;belong to the wiki article&lt;/em&gt;.  Now here are 3 images I'm putting into this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fE7I7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fE7I7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtoYV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtoYV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't see it, but if you edit the article you'll see something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ ! [ enter image description here ][ 1 ]][ 1 ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ ! [ enter image description here ][ 2 ]][ 2 ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ ! [ enter image description here ][ 3 ]][ 3 ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;more text, doesn't matter what it is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ 1 ]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ 2 ]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fE7I7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fE7I7.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ 3 ]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtoYV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtoYV.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all good.  The bad part is that the &lt;strong&gt;wiki footnotes [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]&lt;/strong&gt; in the block quote now point to the images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see the use case for quoted text -- ie, by definition &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; from this post -- pointing to the images &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; this post.  If you look at the wiki page, footnote 1 points here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel#cite_note-goldbook2007-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel#cite_note-goldbook2007-1&lt;/a&gt;  .  But now, since SE rendering interprets [number], that footnote points to &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&lt;/a&gt; .  Which is silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current expected behavior&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only guidance I could find was here: &#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help#simple-blockquotes&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help#simple-blockquotes&lt;/a&gt; .  This page doesn't speak to footnotes, so I don't know what expected behavior is.  So this is a FR asking for expected behavior to be what I want.  ;D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, that [number] in quote blocks should be excluded from resolving to image footnotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-30T10:35:53.427" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T10:35:53.427" Title="Footnotes in quote-blocks treated the same as footnotes for images" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|markdown|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-10-23T08:03:01.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone writes that a question is too broad (or a different close reason), and writes it in an answer, such an answer should be converted to a comment, and if it is too long, then it should be swiftly deleted with a reminder that it shouldn't be posted in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering a question that should be closed, that shouldn't be asked here in the first place (at least, not in the form they are now), encourages people to ask questions that are too broad, off topic, opinion based etc. Why would they care not to, if they still get their answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sooner we delete such answers, the sooner we put questions on hold and guide the OP to how to edit it into a proper form, the better for the overall quality of the site. And good content quality is what keeps people who answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T10:16:08.330" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T10:16:08.330" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-10-23T14:45:28.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I do not see a problem with answers listing more than one option. In fact, I prefer those answers for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they give several perspectives on the same issue;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they can highlight something that I have missed or forgotten about;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they give me options to choose from;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if formatted well, they are much easier to read.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand your frustration with the fact that your answer has not ended as the top one. You spent some time working on it. But so did those people who made lists of options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also understand your complaint that those lists do not go into details. They do not. However, you can always ask for an elaboration on a specific point. People will be happy to provide it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider one more thing. Your answer is a bit more detailed than others. However, it was not really helpful or particularly interesting for me personally. I already know a lot about telomeres and existing approaches to using them in treating ageing. Your answer does not provide me with anything new. It does not even have links to articles or scientific research that would be interesting for me to read. It is not your fault. I am not your audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MichaelK's answer doesn't go into details but it got me interested. His Polywell nuclear fusion is something that I could use in my own work. Moreover, I am not upset that he doesn't elaborate on it. I can always use Google to find additional information. It is just me, but I am not looking for definite answers. I am looking for ideas and pointers in a right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a slightly irrelevant note, I think that you are way too obsessed with votes. Are you here to collect reputation and badges or to share and find information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T14:45:28.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-10-23T15:20:03.120" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For #1 ... does this happen often?  I'd imagine that VTCers would tend to be the more process-oriented among us -- no shame in that -- and would be more likely to adhere to guidelines.  We could sorta winkle this out with queries against the database (answer posted by a person &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a VTC but &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the next edit) but it's a little shaky.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For #2 ... there are shades and shades of &quot;This is too broad but anyway&quot;, &quot;This verges on too broad but anyway&quot;, &quot;From Hell's heart I stab at thee but anyway&quot;.  I have a good deal of sympathy for #2 behavior, because we live in an imperfect, fallen world, and questions reflect that.  Some people will fix the questions and some won't.  If it comes down to a choice between holding out for a better question and opening the door a crack for a shot at great answers, I'll tend to fall on the latter half of the scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your mileage (parsecage? light-yearage?) may vary, but hey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T15:20:03.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T15:54:40.153" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a question this very morning:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95759/if-the-romans-made-the-1712-steam-engine-what-would-they-create-using-it-and-wh&quot;&gt;If the Romans made the 1712 Steam Engine, what would they create using it and why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got closed within ~20 minutes as being too broad.  Which, if I'm being honest, is a tenable position.  I'm not here to fight that, per se.  Yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time-out for Admission of Bias&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;I want to answer this question so badly my teeth ache.&lt;/em&gt;  I'm trying to keep that in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm worried about is that question-posters are going to become discouraged.  I know I've declined to post questions before, knowing that it'd be too much of an uphill battle to keep it open.  One wonders how many others have felt this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is my actual question?  Just this:  &lt;strong&gt;How can we best encourage posters to fix their questions and not lose heart?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question in question (ha!) I did my best by suggesting that instead of asking more or less &quot;What would they do?&quot;, OP should give &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; theory and ask if that seems reasonable knowing what else we know about Romans.  Honestly I pretty much begged the guy not to get discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll suggest that close-voters -- and, more to the point, people seeing the broadness but not wanting the question closed -- pour as much specific fixit advice into the comments as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T16:52:05.227" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T16:52:05.227" Title="Rapid closure of questions and poster discouragement" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-10-23T16:52:36.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-10-23T17:19:29.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran into this issue lately, in a question about what would Romans do with a steam engine.  Posted a meta question, which got closed as duplicate.  ;D  Forget the Bronze Age, we're firmly in the Irony Age now...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question in question (ha!) I did my best by suggesting that instead of asking more or less &quot;What would they do?&quot;, OP should give his theory and ask if that seems reasonable knowing what else we know about Romans. Honestly I pretty much begged the guy not to get discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll suggest that close-voters -- and, more to the point, people seeing the broadness but not wanting the question closed -- pour as much &lt;strong&gt;specific fixit advice&lt;/strong&gt; into the comments as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to the Tour or FAQ are great, but I don't think it's enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T17:19:29.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5510" CreationDate="2017-10-23T18:49:42.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need a new feature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... replaced with a gas.[1] The ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just need more backslashes (see &lt;code&gt;\[1]&lt;/code&gt;?):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;... replaced with a gas.\[1] The ...&#xA;&#xA;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&#xA;&#xA;[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/3guTf.png&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T18:49:42.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3567" CreationDate="2017-10-23T22:09:43.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you fishing for ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WB:SE community of imaginative and enthusastic participants is great at answering specific questios that result in specific answers.  However, questions that ask for lists of ideas because you don't know where to go next with your story are off-topic (primarily opinion-based).  Popular versions of fishing questions are, &amp;quot;what should I name my _____?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;what are the ways to _____?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the same question as posed by @nitsua60, above, but worded in a way that is easier for people to understand.  Further, I've had to vote to close a few too many fishing questions in the last week, so I thought it deserved better focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T22:09:43.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-10-23T22:37:30.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Realistically, there is a component here that justifies blaming the question.  Fishing for ideas is not how Stack Exchange was ever intended to work.  This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a discussion forum.  Therefore, the more discussion invited by a question the more likely it should be closed as too broad or primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers (and I'm one who does this) that list many aspects are (obviously IMHO...) well thought-out answers that try to cover all the aspects that might bound the question.  Such an answer can be very valuable to the OP as it may expose ideas for both limitation and expansion that were beforehand not considered by the OP.  In some cases, answers such as these have lead the OP to edit their question to narrow the focus (always a good thing) because they didn't realize the extent of their question &amp;mdash; and that extent could not have been expressed in the highly limited confines of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm not personally worried about kitchen-sink answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think our (primarily) younger users often don't realize that at the time they posted their kitchen sink, another answer was being created without regard or knowledge of the first.  Thus, the complaint of plagiarism is actually unfounded.  &lt;em&gt;C'est la Vie.&lt;/em&gt;  They'll figure it out when it happens to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T22:37:30.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-10-25T18:08:14.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a couple of options where a frustrated user could be routed to something more constructive. &lt;strong&gt;I think it's ok to suggest other worldbuilding communities where the focus is about open discussion&lt;/strong&gt; and not the question/answers format. If this were a different SE topic like Astronomy or Physics where there is usually an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; answer, sending them somewhere else would not make sense, but to be perfectly honest, there are very few questions on WB that can be answered without it being an opinion. Often what passes for &quot;opinion&quot; is cliches from novels members have read. The &quot;right&quot; answer steers towards the conventional, sometimes creating unhelpful dogma wars as if the answer is actually &quot;true&quot; and not just something that was explored by a pulp author in the '70s. Contrary to this site being an inspiration for ideas, I tend to look here for what is mundane so I know how to play with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;strong&gt;I think too many questions on WB are put on hold&lt;/strong&gt;. I've had questions that were rewarded with badges, yet I still have questions that get put on hold. I'm never going to tie myself into a pretzel to get a question past the semantics-police. I'm not saying it's unwarranted. Maybe I could have worded it differently to fit the SE format (and I guess I'm still a little vague because I don't deliberately break the rules), but if a question isn't complete word-salad or bizarrely specific, it will get a few honest helpful answers before it gets put in jail. That's usually enough for me. If I'm asking a question it's because I am writing about it, not because I am trying to make an epic question for the SE–WB hall of fame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sometimes bad questions have good answers.&lt;/strong&gt; I can't link to any examples of course because they get auto-deleted. One that comes to mind was someone who had read about a &quot;dark matter drive&quot; and asked how it worked. He got a few insulting comments, but also two EXCELLENT full answers that not only explained the fallacy but gave examples where using a &quot;mysterious element X&quot; trope worked in a story. It might have been a question that pinged high on a search engine, but it was deemed as nonsense. Meanwhile I cringe every time I read another necromancy/zombie question, yet I resist flooding those post with hater comments telling the OP how unscientific he sounds with walking skeletons…. I looked back at some discussions about WB allowing &quot;magic&quot;. Before my time, but I'm guessing a lot of good questions were lost because of aggressive closing for it to become an issue…. A little more &quot;Rights of Man&quot; and a lot less arbitrary Kafka politics would be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We keep being assured that it takes five members to close a topic, as if 5 is a large &quot;safe&quot; number&lt;/strong&gt;, 5 people killing a topic in which &gt; 5 people have already participated… It's more than just the OP that is getting deleted. If OP has a few answers from a reasonable members, there isn't much incentive to edit the question – I know I don't. &lt;strong&gt;If a question has upvotes, and answers have upvotes, why are you closing it? The criteria for a well-received question should be much higher to close. Period.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a recipe for abusers, not a democracy. Please stop lecturing about &quot;majority has spoken&quot; when you allow 5 people to kill a discussion other members have already worked on. Look at Gamergate, Hugo Awards, the 2017 Election for examples where a minority of trolls destroy a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trolls are a problem here.&lt;/strong&gt; I got goaded into explaining parts of my world that didn't pertain to the question, technical ideas I feel are original that I don't necessarily want to become common knowledge until I get a chance to use them. After &quot;winning&quot; the right to ask my question by proving I'd solved the cliche they were trying to force on me, none of the trolls bothered to answer anyway. &lt;strong&gt;Comments are intended to expand the topic, not to troll it to death.&lt;/strong&gt; I resented that I'd revealed my details and went back to edit that part out of my question, but it's still there under the edits.... Now I'm perfectly fine when my questions get deleted. I'll keep my explorations to myself, thanks. It helps to 100% ignore comments (or at least never respond, if you read them). There is no option to block or mute regular trolls. That allows this site to be hostile about women's bodies and minority rights. There are GREAT people here too, but they won't waste their day trolling a topic. It's exhausting, and the good signal is drowned by a lot of noise and nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Web community formats dictate the type of discussion: forums, Q/A, thread feeds, etc. if SE-WB admitted its limits, and presented itself as a QUESTION ARCHIVE TOOL, there could be a sub-community with looser rules (maybe not accessible by outside search engines), or a writers'-oriented page that lists some other communities, maybe having a question shut down because it doesn't fit the SE format might not seem as harsh – &quot;it's ok, this just isn't the web-format for an open discussion, nothing personal and either re-word or try this other place…&quot;. SE-WB is not the strictest, Physics(dot)org has a WB section that has so many rules about what's taboo it's practically totalitarian. I've discovered some fantasy-WB communities that are the opposite where everyone gets a scented candle and a dreamcatcher (lol, ok, exaggeration). Reddit has Worldbuilding subs for NSFW and one that is just for being a jerk, LOL very Reddit. I've found a few groups on Facebook too, if that's your thing. It's ok that SE is not for every topic. I think we could do better, but I also think there is no harm in admitting the limits of the format. People don't have to feel rejected if maybe they can be redirected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32686" LastEditorUserId="32686" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T21:50:01.093" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T21:50:01.093" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-10-26T12:51:55.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussions between normal members of the community and the user showing this behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussions between moderators and the user showing this behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Temporarily) deleting the answer that caused the second or third moderator flag about this topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Back to point two to get the answer undeleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If you see this behaviour from a user for the first time - comment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you should do is to comment. Maybe this person misclicked in the review queue. Or they forgot that they VTCed, but the question was edited and then they answered. Or maybe they just weren't familiar with this policy and didn't think about how this will come across for new users who are trying to learn how the site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the first thing to do is to comment and ask them. Maybe they can and are willing to retract their vote or vote to reopen. Or they might delete their answer (I can't imagine this scenario, but theoretically it's possible and we should at least give them a chance). If it's the second scenario they can edit their answer and leave a comment explaining their reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose is to get their input, direct their attention to Meta discussions like those listed at the top of this question and to show that we as a community can normally handle stuff like this with comments instead of flags and moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably not that bad to leave them with the reputation from one answer of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If you see this behaviour from a user for the second or third time and they haven't shown any interest - comment and flag it for moderator attention&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally this situation shouldn't come up. But we are all humans and at one point this will probably happen. If you see that someone is doing the same thing they did before you should comment and be clear to point them at how we want to handle this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that you would ideally wait a bit and check back a few hours later or so. If you can't wait you should just go to the next step:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This step is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; meant to ask for deletion. It is to build a history that someone is ignoring the policies. Ideally you would point to the last time you saw this behaviour. This is often difficult, but if you are sure that you have seen this before from the same user you can do this step. Explain why you think the user shouldn't do what he is doing and point to this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator could then decide what to do. Probably they will start with a comment, too, to show that the behaviour reached moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear - I think this case will already be an exception and my view of moderators with their special mod powers is that they are exception handlers. And they are exceptionally good at judging what needs to be done and can take into account other things such as other flags in the history of a user, or just their experience in dealing with this kind of stuff. When it becomes an exception it's time to make an exception handler aware of this and let them handle it. First by commenting I hope, but the moderators know best how to judge and should take into account things like the scenario described by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5524/28789&quot;&gt;Separatrix&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5511/28789&quot;&gt;Molot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If the problem still persists - flag it for moderator attention for deletion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have followed the previous steps and are sure that a user has ignored the policy willingly multiple times and you flagged at least once in the past for moderator attention and received a helpful flag for that: then, and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; then, you may flag for moderator attention and ask for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator will then decide what to do. Ideally they would at this point have a history of at least two or three flags that point out this behaviour and can see that the user in question has received information about the guidelines before. By normal users and moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this step is not necessary. But in case it will be necessary: an answer should be deletable, regardless of quality, if there is a history by this user to willingly ignore the sites guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post deleted because of this policy enforcement should be able to be un-deleted. The user in question should start a Meta discussion about why his behaviour is correct, whether we should change the policy or just contact a moderator in the chat to get his answer undeleted. If the content is good the deletion should be a shot across the bows. If the problem persists the deletion should persist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want good content. Just not at the cost of willingly ignoring guidelines. It's the same as with people posting poor quality questions - they won't learn if they are not punished in any way for repeatedly ignoring the guidelines. With low quality posts there are automatic bans. With the behaviour outlined in this question there should be actions by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T13:24:25.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-10-26T13:11:53.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit to having been guilty of this a couple of times in my early days but there's one that I stand by having put an answer in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was too broad, so much so that my answer was an elongated comment explaining how utterly vast the implications of the question were. It wasn't something that could have been trimmed down to a narrower answerable question but did require a better explanation of why it wasn't reasonably answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exception to the rule, and all rules should be considered with due exceptions, such things should be taken into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T13:11:53.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T14:17:47.177" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question a little while back&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/93885/how-long-could-someone-with-locked-in-syndrome-survive-in-1915&quot;&gt;How long could someone with locked in syndrome survive in 1915&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I did not word the question to say &quot;in a 1915 like tech level world&quot; the question would be identical with this wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also see a questions like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96049/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-approximately-170-miles&quot;&gt;How long would it take to travel approximately 170 miles by foot?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me these questions seem similar.  Both want to know how something would work in a given tech level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions like this on topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5156" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T13:54:58.033" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T03:30:41.603" Title="Are questions about tech level applications to scenarios on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-10-26T19:12:28.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could do a wording change. Instead of &quot;Vote to Close&quot;, &quot;Closed&quot;, and even &quot;On Hold&quot;, the wording could just be changed to &quot;Paused&quot;. Everyone knows that a pause is temporary, and so seeing that your question is paused is less alarming than &quot;Closed&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T19:12:28.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5528" CreationDate="2017-10-26T20:21:56.100" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't figure out how to search this so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of all the privileges and their reputation caps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T07:29:06.583" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T07:29:06.583" Title="List of privileges and their reputation caps" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2017-10-26T20:23:19.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clicking on the trophy symbol in the upper right hand corner of the site opens a menu that shows your reputation/badge/privilege gains and in the top right corner of that menu you find the hyperlink to the help center entry about privileges. It also contains a link to the badges that are available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;List of privileges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;List of badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:23:19.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5525" CreationDate="2017-10-27T13:54:25.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions taking something from one tech-level and introducing it into another tech-level, where it is/was non-existent, are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about actions that have taken place in a previous tech-level are off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to build an element of a world if a question is supposed to be on-topic. In neither of the questions you linked I can see this element of a new world. As far as I can see the first one is asking about how a medical condition would have been treated in the past and the other one is asking about how long it would have taken to walk a certain distance in the past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both seem off-topic and therefore I voted off-topic on both of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are also about the actions of a character. How long would this person survive? How long would this character take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to make it more general: How long would this unknown disease that was non-existent in this time period be treated according to the history of how people dealt with new diseases? How long would it take an adventuring group of x people to walk into terrain that looks like [sketch]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T13:54:25.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5525" CreationDate="2017-10-28T03:30:41.603" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't clicked through to the questions themselves, but I would find both those questions (as titled) on-topic.  To me, any question that covers a detail of a fictional world is on-topic.  The fictional world does not have to differ from our real world at all in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, others have a more narrow definition of scope.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T03:30:41.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-10-29T04:15:04.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers can't be Too Broad, only questions.  It is quite permissible to answer a question more broadly than the question requires.  In some cases, that can make for an excellent answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, quantity does not beat quality here.  A bunch of junk is a bunch of junk.  At least one of the answers should address the question directly and well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bad example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You want blue stuff?  Add sapphires.  Same thing for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Red and rubies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Yellow and topazes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Green and emeralds.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Clear and diamonds.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is bad because it doesn't explain how to add sapphires nor how to control the shade of blue or anything.  It's basically a one line answer with added fluff.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Good example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can produce any color of the rainbow.  As explained &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, you can control the shade by grinding up the appropriate color of gem and mixing it with (chemical) and then coating the (whatever) with it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some common recipes, starting with blue:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the link, (chemical), (whatever), and ... are given real values rather than my placeholders, this could be a strong answer.  It's broader than the question, but it provides a direct response to the original question asked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T04:15:04.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-10-29T04:52:33.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking specifically at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95304/32686&quot;&gt;single answer&lt;/a&gt; you note, while I personally find that answer defective, there are reasons to cover multiple areas.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question is basically, how do I get from a life expectancy at birth of around 80 years to a life expectancy of 250?  And the issue is that you don't actually do that with a single thing.  The closest to an answer to that is the telomeres concept.  In fact, my dislike of that answer is that it is basically one line of &quot;maybe telomere repair&quot; and mostly focuses on reducing air pollution.  Yet even if we eliminated air pollution, we would not move life expectancy to even 100, much less 250.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer also fails to explain how to make telomere repair provide a gradual increase from current life expectancy to 250 years.  Why did it stop at 250 years?  Why not infinite?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So personally, I think that answer sucks.  But I don't think the problem is that it was &quot;too broad&quot;.  The problem is that it is overly tied to a single issue that is currently topical.  Air pollution is a current concern.  But in the context of the question, it is practically a non-entity.  The rest of the answer is &quot;too shallow&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I also have the same criticism of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95306/2113&quot;&gt;your answer&lt;/a&gt;.  It provides more explanation about what telomeres are (good), but it doesn't explain how genetically engineered food is going to fix them.  I'd expect something more like a retrovirus or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95385/2113&quot;&gt;nanobots&lt;/a&gt;.  And again, it doesn't explain why telomere repair gets us 250 years and not 500, a 1000, or a million.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T04:52:33.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2017-10-30T14:01:03.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just spent an hour writing an answer to a question only to discover that it is put on hold as primarily opnion-based. And this is by far not the first experience within a short time I am on this site. This is a very frustrating situation not just for the author of a question but also someone who believes the question is legit. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/end rant&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the times I agree with a decision to put a question on hold. However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96467/long-lifespans-and-risk-aversion&quot;&gt;'Long lifespans and risk aversion'&lt;/a&gt; question was put on hold despite the fact that it can be answered more or less objectively based on existing psychological research. I also believe that it is one of those questions that are very important for anyone building a future world. Therefore, answers to it will be a great help to many other users of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, I am not quite understanding how the site works. But I have a feeling that way too many questions dealing with society, culture, and psychology get put on hold or closed. Social sciences are not exactly quantifiable and always attract some speculation. But it is no different from the current situation in these sciences. There is no one unifying theory or even methodology. There are many schools, interpretations, and positions, some of them are opposite. Moreover, most of the time there is no one absolutely correct answer. However, this is how social sciences work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that questions dealing with society and culture should not be treated the same way as physics and maths. People should have a bit more freedom in both asking and answering. Perhaps, we could introduce a special tag for these questions that allows a greater degree of speculation based on existing research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastEditorUserId="39490" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T02:32:02.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T02:32:02.857" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-10-30T14:58:16.680" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose  CL4P-TP as another option &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the name comes from the game series &lt;em&gt;Borderlands&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's the name of the robot that helps the players&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T13:35:58.987" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T13:35:58.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5540" CreationDate="2017-10-31T21:13:44.123" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though only being around for a short while, I noticed that sometimes people edit the question they asked, even after one or several answers have been given. In some cases, follow-up questions that are important to answer the question correctly have been asked in the comments, and I understand that in those cases it is a good thing to clarify the original question so people can give valid answers (and I have done so too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it feels like a thin line. It is possible that with the new information, some answers are no longer valid. I wonder where the line is drawn. Is it, in such a case, the one who wrote an answer 'at fault' because he/she (for example) made too many assumptions, and should have asked for clarification? Or is it perfectly fine that some answers are not really valid for a(n) (edited) question and the author is right to do so? And does it matter how much the meaning of the original question is changed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was wondering what is considered good practice, to take into account when or when not to edit my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4403/on-editing-questions-and-invalidating-answers&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(especially first part of the answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31002" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:40:15.343" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:40:15.343" Title="Is it considered good practice to edit your question after answers have been given?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5539" CreationDate="2017-10-31T21:30:02.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's not considered kind or polite to invalidate existing answers by altering a question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responders have spent time and effort to answer a question.  Changing a question to invalidate their time/effort is rude and disrespectful of their time.  That said, there are times when a clarification needs to be made and that same clarification causes some answers to be fully or partially invalid.  Avoid invalidating answers as much as possible but it's sometimes unavoidable.  Fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If answers are invalidated, in whole or in part, the kind thing to do is leave a comment on the invalidated answers to let the responder know about the change.  This indicates that the asker respects the responders time and effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:30:02.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T21:47:41.487" Score="13" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've been asked by the moderators of Worldbuilding to investigate the current status of official Worldbuilding SE swag, given that the site has a design. We've gone to check with the design team - unfortunately, there are currently no plans to work on site swag in the near future. We'd like to provide a clearer answer or even just how far down the road it might be, but it simply doesn't fit anywhere in priority amongst all the other design elements we have going on right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:47:41.487" Title="So, about the swag" Tags="|discussion|swag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5544" CreationDate="2017-10-31T22:13:23.703" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard here the minimum amount of time you should have a question open until you accept an answer is one day, but I was wondering about how long it takes until the question will most likely not receive any more attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This number would help me decide when it is time to accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44220" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T22:25:43.423" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T23:22:23.840" Title="How long should I keep a question up without accepting an answer?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5542" CreationDate="2017-10-31T22:18:44.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;In general you should try to wait at least 24 hours as a lower bound before accepting an answer - there is no upper bound and it's completely your choice; I personally go with ~1 week&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many regulars on WorldBuilding.SE living all around the globe in different timezones. To give everyone a chance to look at your question you should at least wait 24 hours before accepting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons mainly involve the quality and amount of answers you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people are discouraged when they see a question already has an accepted answer - the OP found the solution to his problem already, so why should I care and try to help him if he doesn't need any more help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore people check out the question and the answers. They check whether the given facts make sense or whether some details need more work. This helps to increase the quality of the answers you receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all nobody can force you to accept an answer or not. It's completely, absolutely, totally your decision and yours alone when to accept, what to accept and whether you want to accept at all or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant Meta discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5023/please-wait-at-least-24-hours-before-accepting-an-answer&quot;&gt;Please wait at least 24 hours before Accepting an answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5291/is-it-better-to-accept-an-answer-thats-not-quite-what-you-were-looking-for-or-l&quot;&gt;Is it better to accept an answer that's not quite what you were looking for or leave a question unanswered?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/lets-be-careful-about-accepting-answers-early&quot;&gt;Let's be careful about accepting answers early&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4748/should-moderators-mark-a-high-voted-answer-as-the-accepted-answer-after-a-while&quot;&gt;Should moderators mark a high voted answer as the accepted answer after a while?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5405/28789&quot;&gt;Can I choose two answers for my question as the accepted answer(s)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There are no special indicators about when a question will not receive any attention anymore&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on a lot of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it in the Hot Network Questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you post it on the weekends?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it referenced in other questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you or someone else put a bounty on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did someone revive an old question with an edit or a new answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there already good, in-depth answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you recently edit the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the question put on hold and later reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there new comments asking for clarification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the view/vote count already pretty high for the type of question you are asking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wait at least 24 hours and decide when you think nothing is happening anymore. Maybe a week? After two days or so you get a little message on your question tab, but in my personal experience I've mostly waited at least a week. Sometimes longer if one or more of the things above were true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, again: if you haven't got a satisfying answer you don't have to accept an answer. Nobody can force you or tell you what's right about accepting. These are just a few tips to increase the visibility of your question and thereby increase the amount and quality of the answers you receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T23:22:23.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5542" CreationDate="2017-10-31T22:38:24.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any readily available data on this, but it'd almost certainly be possible to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE (Stack Exchange Data Explorer)&lt;/a&gt; to gather statistics on how many answers, or how large a percentage of answers, are given within some given time frame of asking the question. Net voting statistics are there too, so could be factored in if desired. I'm not up to doing that right now, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general recommendation, as you have found, is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5023/29&quot;&gt;wait at least 24 hours before accepting an answer&lt;/a&gt;. This really isn't a hard-and-fast rule by any means, but simply based on that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding has a worldwide audience&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers often take some time to develop and compose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You generally want to give a reasonable number of people a chance to see your question and post answers to it, as well as to vote on answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with accepted answers &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; receive less attention from the community, as they have been resolved to the asker's satisfaction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last piece is actually important. &lt;strong&gt;Been resolved to the asker's satisfaction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you get an answer that solves your problem, you should ideally accept that answer. If you get an answer that solves your problem within an hour, then you are absolutely within your rights to accept that answer immediately, or within a day or two. &lt;strong&gt;You should not, however, accept an answer just because some arbitrary &quot;sufficient&quot; amount of time has passed&lt;/strong&gt; since you asked the question. If the question hasn't been resolved to your satisfaction, go right ahead and not accept any answer, even if you have received several. Maybe even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;set a bounty&lt;/a&gt; and explain what you are looking for that the existing answers don't provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and accept an answer if you are happy with it and feel that you don't need further ones, but don't feel pressured to do so; and realize that by accepting an answer, you reduce the chances of getting further answers. Exactly when to make that cut-off point is a trade-off really only the person asking a question can do. We can't do it for you, and even providing guidelines (beyond the very general ones, such as above) would be difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a rough indication of how many people have seen your question, look at the views count near the top right of the question page (assuming a desktop web browser). That's a better indication for how much activity it has seen than merely the amount of time that has passed since it was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T22:38:24.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-02T02:12:48.290" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96655/which-upper-limb-layout-for-a-winged-humanoid-works-best-for-flight&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about which type of upper limb anatomy is better for flying humans. It has not been well received, and has been put on hold as off-topic. Looking back I can see that there are problems with this question. I jumped the gun in asking, and didn't really give a problem to solve. As such, I don't think it really related to Worldbuilding enough. I'll try not to make that mistake in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to think of a way to make it more on topic, But I can't decide where to start on fixing it. I think I just need to ask a different question. But since I've already gotten an answer on it, I don't know if I should delete or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should I delete this question, or just try and rework it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43370" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T10:25:33.630" Title="Should I delete this off-topic question, or try and rework it?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-02T06:16:26.110" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like a lot (&gt;80%) of users on here have a username or handle that isn't their real name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we encourage people to use a username rather than their real life name?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally didn't think it was a big deal when I signed up, but I'm curious if this is a kind of unspoken expectation on the site. Anonymity certainly is useful in encouraging fair and open discussion, but it may also make it easier to attack a person individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T07:27:39.617" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:58:33.593" Title="Do we care if users use real names?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5553" CreationDate="2017-11-02T06:17:20.737" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; FAQ limits the site to planetary issues (planetary, astrometric, flora/fauna/evolution (to a degree), climate, etc., and how these affect society).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a world is not only a physical creation wherein the author is playing creative god, but a developmental creation where society changes.  If I read the FAQ correctly, political and socio-economic conditions are not considered on-topic for WB:SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should they be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use as my reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96725/alternative-human-society-economy-systems&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;.  Though some have voted to close it as too broad, as asked it is actually not broad at all.  The OP is asking for a review of socio-economic cultures, ostensibly to use as a reference when building his/her world.  He/she has done some research and listed the kinds of results he/she is looking for.  Frankly, there are a few too many people who think &quot;I don't have an answer&quot; is the same as &quot;the question is too broad.&quot;  In this case, I don't agree.  But I do agree that, as written, the question is off-topic.  From our FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...as long as they are not about: ... Historical events of or historical facts about the real world....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we consider adding socio-economic systems and cultures as on-topic although I fully support the existing limitation (quoted above), which would have still led to the referenced question's closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T06:24:59.910" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:12:02.373" Title="Should we include socio-economic &quot;worldbuilding&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5548" CreationDate="2017-11-02T07:26:32.880" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You can choose whichever name you feel fits you as long as you don't break any rules like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know nobody encourages people to use their real name and nobody encourages people to use an imaginary username. That's about it. There are no rules and no encouragement for either side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should just do what you feel is right for you. If you don't have a problem with using your real name then that's fine. If, on the other hand, you feel better with an imaginary name, then by all means - use that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for example, prefer some measure of anonimity and chose not to use my real name. So far nobody has complained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a lot of people who (at least seem to) use their real names. Sometimes the first name, sometimes the last name, sometimes both, sometimes abbreviations, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Choose whatever you feel comfortable with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anonymity certainly is useful in encouraging fair and open discussion, but it may also make it easier to attack a person individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we want is to have fair and open discussions. If someone resorts to individual attacks we politely refer that person to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice.&lt;/a&gt; and flag the message for moderator attention. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice.&lt;/a&gt; That's the only real rule about behaviour in discussions on the site and that one is not only &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt;, it is &lt;em&gt;enforced&lt;/em&gt; by the whole community and in special occasions by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone fails to be nice because they think they are anonymous - we don't really want that sort of people here. Your username should therefore not make any difference and I don't see any reason why we should resort to encouraging people to use their real names. It might deter some people who we want on the site and everyone who fails to be nice because this is the internet should search for a forum where they can use their anonymity to attack individuals. That sort of behaviour won't be tolerated here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: &lt;strong&gt;No, we don't care whether users use real names or not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T09:52:39.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5547" CreationDate="2017-11-02T07:55:13.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There is no need to delete it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you lost some rep as the question is now at +1/-5, which totals -5 reputation. But other than that this is not really a problem. If you really want to you can delete the question, but in general the community prefers to keep questions if there is an upvoted answer. Otherwise it would automatically get deleted after some time. Currently the only answer is at +0/-0, so your question might still fall into that category and the system might decide to delete your question in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general process however would be to just keep it around. If there are upvoted answers it means that someone spent some time to help you and the community approved of his efforts. Taking that away is something that in general is not a good thing and the community doesn't like to see such a behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has been put on hold pretty recently. An edit from your side will automatically send it to the special reopen review queue. This is the preferred process so that people can judge whether the question is now on-topic or not. Especially with a question that was put on hold recently this should be the first thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that it won't make any difference, for example because there is a very highly negative vote count and you suspect people won't look at the question again, as questions with a total of -4 disappear from the active tab on the main site, you can try other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ask a new question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can just ask a new question. If you feel people will jump and say &amp;quot;but that is the same thing you already posted yesterday!&amp;quot; because you copy-pasted a lot you should make sure to state how your new question differs from the old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use the Sandbox&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; on Meta that is designed to help people who have problems with making a question on-topic. A lot of people use it, even if their reputation count would sometimes suggest that they would know how to ask questions. Asking questions on WorldBuilding can be extremely difficult at times, which is why the Sandbox was created. It happens to everyone sometimes that their questions get closed. Don't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Specific advice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is currently at +0/-0, so the community didn't think too highly of the answer. Your question is at +1/-5, so the community didn't really like your question and sent it away from the active tab. That makes recovery pretty hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say you should decide how much you appreciate the effort the author of the answer put into it and decide whether you want to upvote it or not. If you want to upvote it please go ahead and do so - and consequently don't delete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other case you can just leave the question and wait or directly delete, depending on what you feel would be best to start a new question. With a deleted question it's easier to start a new one, as it can't be marked a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case you could give the Sandbox a try and see how much feedback you get. We encourage people to wait at least 24 hours in the Sandbox for feedback before posting the question on the main site. If you delete the question or wait for it to get deleted you might want to copy some of the comments if they could be useful so that people in the Sandbox with less than 10k reputation can take the comments into account when giving feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What to do better&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to be honest: your latest edit was pretty good. I know that it looks like pedantry at first, but just saying &amp;quot;What's the best?&amp;quot; is really opinion-based, because we don't know what you focus on. The best for flying in the open? The best to hide on a stealth mission? The best regarding effort of flying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael is right that &amp;quot;What's the best?&amp;quot; is not a good question, but I personally think that &amp;quot;Which one is better for flying?&amp;quot; is perfectly on-topic and that it looks like any other creature-design question I've seen on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know specifics about this topic, apart from the occasional question that always seems to mention &amp;quot;Everything above 70kg won't fly on our current Earth&amp;quot;, but it looks like answers could easily say &amp;quot;It won't fly on our Earth, but ignoring that - first one has the following advantages/diadvantages over the second one&amp;quot;. Maybe you could add something to make this clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anyway, I voted to reopen and gave you and upvote. If you choose to rework your question and post a new one you will probably have me on your side.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of that might be that I love creature-design questions and haven't looked at yours until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some questions you might find interesting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions were mainly found by searching: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=winged+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;winged is:q&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/819/what-is-the-maximum-size-of-a-flying-creature&quot;&gt;What is the maximum size of a flying creature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11374/air-density-for-winged-human-flight&quot;&gt;Air density for winged human flight?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39839/the-four-winged-angel&quot;&gt;The Four-Winged Angel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42813/what-should-dwellings-look-like-for-a-winged-humanoid&quot;&gt;What should dwellings look like for a winged humanoid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T07:55:13.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5549" CreationDate="2017-11-02T09:40:40.747" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Socio-economic WorldBuilding is not easy, but certainly on-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effects of events or world elements&lt;/em&gt;, including biology, technology and magic, &lt;em&gt;on &lt;strong&gt;specific aspects&lt;/strong&gt; of that world's societies, cultures&lt;/em&gt;, and environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that a question should aim to build a world and focus on aspects of society if you are interested in socio-economic worldbuilding. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the topic itself and it is most certainly a fascinating topic where we have far too few questions on the site right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how our help center discourages socio-economic WorldBuilding and I disagree with the close reason being &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But: you have to be sure that a question is not too broad.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what you are thinking: &lt;em&gt;That guy didn't read my question. I explicitly mentioned that the question I referred to is not too broad!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite from the question that you are using as a reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What alternative human society/economy systems are there that already exist or are being built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the whole question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from a missing question mark this is basically the definition of questions that are too broad. This user wants a list of all the systems that have been developed over the course of all of humanity's existence and all systems that are currently being developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user even explicitly says this as his reason behind asking, as you can see at the end of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am making a list: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/30EjgBCUsBp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/30EjgBCUsBp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that the link even contains the word &lt;em&gt;brainstorming&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask for endless lists of everything that has ever been created and is currently under development, plus inviting what people think of at the moment of writing an answer are not a good fit for the SE format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite a question about this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/158810/352819&quot;&gt;Meta SE - Why are “shopping list” questions bad?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are open-ended; there is never one perfect answer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They outdate incredibly quickly. This was what turned me against shopping list questions: if you look around on Stack Overflow, you will find plenty of 2010 &amp;quot;what's the best xyz&amp;quot; questions whose answers are hideously outdated now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They tend to attract a lot of spam and/or link only answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reference is a shopping request. It gives three examples and then says &amp;quot;Please give me more, I am making a list&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;no criteria&lt;/em&gt; for what makes a good system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it's not that there I have no answer - there are too many answers that fit all of the non-existing criteria. How should I judge answers? &amp;quot;Yeah, it mentions a system. Upvote!&amp;quot; is not how the site is supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did it work out? Is there some proof of concept? In which situation is the system useful? What were the strengths and weaknesses? How many people use that system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is asking for a review of socio-economic cultures, ostensibly to use as a reference when building his/her world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The OP is not asking for a review. The OP is not asking for a discussion of Pro and Con or similar things. The OP is looking for a list, probably so that they could later choose what fits best to their setting. The OP does not want people to talk about the given examples, but provide as many more examples as they know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even see it with the existing answer. It perfectly answers the question by stating a system and giving a few key points about what it means. But there is no review, no comparison. It's just a summary of one system. Another item on the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they really wanted to make this on-topic they should have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag and see if someone could come up with an existing list somewhere on the web. That &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a way to go about shopping questions here on WorldBuilding if used appropriately, which is now, while writing this answer, making me question the usefulness of its existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the OP asked for a system that would satisfy certain conditions and then limits his constraints it would be a perfectly fine question for WorldBuilding and I would love to see more of such precise socio-economic questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reference was rightly closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close reason is wrong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Socio-Economic questions are already perfectly on-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shopping questions asking for lists are off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:12:02.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5548" CreationDate="2017-11-02T09:47:54.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is basically a generational thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who were active on the internet pre-Facebook will almost never use their real name, using real names online &lt;em&gt;was not done&lt;/em&gt;. I'm of this generation and tend to avoid putting my real name on anything. The usernames had to be unique so you'll see a range of nearly unique handles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who started on the internet via services like Facebook will default to using their real names as that was the culture they were inducted through, they think nothing of casually using real names online. The email address is now the unique factor, not the username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that it's a matter of whether your name is your brand and you're (trying to become) known by it etc etc etc. Ultimately it's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T09:47:54.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5547" CreationDate="2017-11-02T10:25:33.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Take a step back away from the question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you throw yourself over reworking the question, you may want to examine &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you asked the question in the first place. &quot;To figure out what is best&quot; you say. Yes but &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; do you want to figure out what is best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you ask a question you do so for a reason: you want to achieve enlightenment on the topic in order solve an issue or to help you in your writing/worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you ask &quot;What is best for flying?&quot;, what is the issue you are trying to solve? How does this help you in your worldbuilding? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not asking this rhetorically; I am telling you that you should ask yourself this question and seek an answer to it. When you have an answer to this question, then you can start on reworking the question. Once you are clear on your &lt;strong&gt;purpose&lt;/strong&gt; for making a this post, then you can formulate it in such as way that people that may want to answer it can suss what it is you need in order to be satisfied with the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;what is best&quot; question is bad in this regard because it is very rarely clear what the questioner wants out of this. This makes the question bad on two levels: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is best&quot; questions usually leave out the required second part: &quot;...for X&quot;, meaning we do not know what we are measuring our proposals against. For example: &quot;What is the best human body length?&quot;. For what? For reaching things on the top shelf or for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_rat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;infiltrating underground enemy tunnels&lt;/a&gt;? So a &quot;What is best&quot; is usually &lt;strong&gt;objectively&lt;/strong&gt; unanswerable. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We cannot use our empathy to sense when we have come up with an answer that we think you will be pleased with. People will automatically judge an answer against a sense of &quot;What kind of answer would make &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; pleased here?&quot;. And if we cannot know what you want, then we are sort of fumbling in the dark. This makes our &lt;strong&gt;subjective&lt;/strong&gt; assessment of our answers much harder. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize: before you try re-working the question... take a step try to figure out &lt;strong&gt;what you want&lt;/strong&gt;. Why(!) are you asking it? Once you know that, you can re-work the question and hopefully get more fulfilling answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T10:25:33.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5548" CreationDate="2017-11-02T12:58:33.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when there was only Stack Overflow, there was some gentle encouragement (and example-setting) from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to use real names.  On a site for professional programmers, this was probably seen as a way to help build one's professional reputation.  It was never a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time the network has grown a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;.  People on sites about role-playing games or fiction might prefer creative names.  People on sites about sensitive subjects like politics or religion might not want to have their activity turn up in Google searches.  People on The Workplace might not want to be seen by their coworkers.  People on Parenting might not want to be seen by their relatives.  Students on Arqade might not want to reveal just how &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; time they spend playing games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real names are permitted.  Pseudonyms are permitted.  There's no rule one way or the other, nor (from what I've seen) a strong convention either way.  Do what makes you comfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a couple caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5550/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; says, you still have to be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Impersonation is against SE rules.  Don't pretend to be another real person.  (Fictional characters are fine.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have accounts on other sites on the network, they're all connected.  (Hidden accounts provide only the thinnest of veneers.)  You can change your name on different sites, but people can connect the dots.  If you want to be anonymous, you pretty much have to do it everywhere on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:58:33.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-02T16:10:49.843" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;So debating closure of certain questions on META apparently is a thing, so I figured I'd give it a shot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently came across this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56995/an-empire-to-last-a-hundred-centuries&quot;&gt;An empire to last a hundred centuries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I understand is popular but I couldn't help but knee jerk to how clearly it fits with the criteria of opinionative and too broad. (not that I normally care this much)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple fact is this question is akin to asking &quot;how to make a utopian society&quot; which obviously is a popular topic but at the same time completely unanswerable. If it were answerable, our current geo political strife would be over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's too broad because the sheer amount of factors that attribute to the stability or instability of a government can not be fully addressed in an answer here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's to opinionative because there simply isn't enough information and too prone to chance that the significance of any of the previously mentioned factors could affect the end result. You could even argue that an isolated island civilization managed to retain government for 10K years because of sheer luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I only bother to bring this to meta because of the popularity of this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T19:00:45.750" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T12:32:29.917" Title="Closure of &quot;empire to last 100 centuries&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5559" CreationDate="2017-11-02T19:41:07.827" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question on the main site which asked wether a creature of roughly 500 pounds could throw 2 tons. I went back over my math, and the creature would actually weigh twice as much as that. This would change the answers quite a bit, but it is asking the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask another question with the new information, or should I change the original question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44220" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T21:38:02.307" Title="What constitutes asking another question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5558" CreationDate="2017-11-02T20:00:08.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Would your edit invalidate existing answers?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and edit your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post a new question - but make sure that you state exactly why that change makes the question different and why you expect the answers to be different from the answers to the first question so that it won't get closed as a duplicate. It's always a good idea to link to your old question in the beginning of the new one and explain what's different. You can also incorporate what you learned from the answers in the old question to show how you adapted the new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I am not sure&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refer to your question specifically on Meta by mentioning it in the meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I am not sure if the new question would be viewed as a duplicate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferrably post your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; that is designed for situations where you are not sure whether a question would be on-topic. Checking whether a new question would be regarded as a duplicate is a normal thing for the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T21:38:02.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5561" CreationDate="2017-11-03T09:10:46.083" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there's a case like this, but &lt;em&gt;imagine&lt;/em&gt; someone asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to turn our current earth into an oceanic planet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone searched and there's a question with essentially the same question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to flood our modern earth like Noah's flood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this question has absolutely no answer. &lt;strong&gt;Should we still close the new question as a duplicate of the old question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T09:59:41.967" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T12:30:39.997" Title="Should we close a question as a duplicate of another question that has no answer?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2017-11-03T09:58:13.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is not possible for a normal user&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't. The dialog would tell you that you can't mark the question as a duplicate if the other one doesn't have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered tab&lt;/a&gt; and select any question. It can even have answers, but if they are in that tab those answers don't have any upvotes (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to the active tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose any question that is not currently on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; and choose &amp;quot;Duplicate&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter the link you just copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get a red text that reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not have an upvoted or accepted answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Important step: close the dialog as this was just a test)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Diamond mods are the only ones who could do this&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They probably shouldn't in most cases. I don't see any possible reason except for maybe a new user spamming the exact same question. Maybe because someone commented that they want to close it and the new user thought &amp;quot;Well, let's try again&amp;quot;. But that's about it and I think the system would prevent them from asking the exact same question again. If they just change a word or two the system might not detect it and the mod should close as a duplicate, but normal users can't do that. Though the normal process would probably be to merge the questions as @Michael pointed out in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really see a situation where this mod power is useful. Either there are answers on the other question and it would be useful to close as a duplicate, which would allow normal users to do this, or it's the exact same question to the letter, which would necessitate a merge. But theoretically mods could potentially do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T10:15:06.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5557" CreationDate="2017-11-03T11:06:45.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The popularity of a question should not be considered when voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that a question is too broad, too opinion based or any other close reason, then you should either flag it or vote to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T11:06:45.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T21:48:02.390" Score="7" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy drawing, and a lot of answers to questions I've seen or posted myself have given me some cool ideas. I've been considering posting art online, and I've been thinking about the ethics of posting art based on other people's answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one thing to post something based on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96147/could-a-hexapodal-bat-actually-fly&quot;&gt;hexapodal bats&lt;/a&gt;, because it's a design I was already working on and I asked a question to help ask about its feasibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be another thing to post art based on the answer for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96301/anatomically-correct-scylla/96366#96366&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Scylla&lt;/a&gt; question, since that isn't a design that I came up with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I have no intent of making money from my art right now. I would definitely not monetize something based on someone else's idea, but I'd be worried that someone would think that I came up with the design when I really didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if I ever did such a thing, I'd probably link back to the question and probably leave a comment to the answer where the idea came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &lt;strong&gt;when would it be okay to post art based on Stack Exchange questions/answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43370" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T11:54:11.733" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T10:37:37.827" Title="What are the ethics of posting art based on an answer?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2017-11-04T22:10:24.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Regarding the ethics I am not aware of any rules about posting art based on StackExchange questions/answers - leave a comment and ask when in doubt&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking to the question/answer and maybe leaving a comment with a link to the art is probably enough for most people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make sure that someone is fine with this you could ask with a comment under the question/answer beforehand. I can't imagine many reasons why anyone would object to that, but if you feel better that might be a first step. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer and this is no legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;, but according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2189/28789&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Having said that everything posted to Stack Exchange is licensed under CC-BY-SA as part of the agreement you signed up to when joining the site. That means that this summary page applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question as to whether an idea from a question is copyright is not addressed there however...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I am not a lawyer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is generally true that you cannot copyright an idea. That is what Patents are for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If in doubt talk to a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I take that to mean that you could do with the questions and answers on the site whatever you want to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking about ethics, so basically I would recommend asking nicely and showing your result if you are done. Many people would probably appreciate if someone drew their question/answer. I certainly would love to see my questions/answers being the inspiration for someone besides me to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T10:37:37.827" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T10:37:37.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2017-11-05T02:01:55.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem.  &lt;em&gt;Basing work on someone else's idea&lt;/em&gt; is very different from &lt;em&gt;copying someone else's work&lt;/em&gt;.  If people put something out there for the world to see, especially under a Creative Commons license, they should not expect to be able to lock it down.  Personally, I'd be delighted if I learned that somebody developed something interesting (art, music, fiction, whatever) out of something I posted here.  Crediting and linking to your source should alleviate concerns about using someone else's ideas as a starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a courtesy you should let the person know -- not because you need permission, but because people usually enjoy seeing the fruits of their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T02:01:55.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-11-05T02:11:58.933" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-lost-builder-355cf7de7ec6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Builder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't actually care if we rename the bot, but if we do, well, we already have a mascot, and fan fiction based on it...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T02:11:58.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-11-05T18:19:10.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this website allows the use of nicknames/usernames, it would be nice if it were hard to confuse the bot with actual users. I personally would prefer the name to include 'bot'. Something like Bot, The Builder; WB Bot...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely would not want the bot to be named after any fictional character or to be some kind of internal joke. All people here are, most likely, share an interest in fiction (and probably narrower genres of sci-fi and fantasy), however, we read different books and watched different films. We are not guaranteed to recognise a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T18:19:10.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-06T01:26:05.153" Score="1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96948/synthesizing-fuels-with-excess-energy/96966#96966&quot;&gt;Synthesizing fuels with excess energy&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and received a downvote.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I asked in comments why and got a response that demonstrated the poster did not understand my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been very hesitant to downvote others (on this site) because I do not wish to have to argue with people whose answers display ignorance on the subject they are answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time I received a downvote, that I thought was unreasonable, I merely avoided the site for awhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am going to get downvoted for sound answers on the basis of ignorance, then what is the point of reputation on the site?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My understanding is that voting is supposed to ensure higher quality answers.&#xA;If answers that I can solidly support are downvoted then the reverse is occurring.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why would I want to be a top ten percent contributor if I get ignorant feedback and downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32007" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T10:40:37.843" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T10:40:37.843" Title="Please help me understand these downvotes" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5569" CreationDate="2017-11-06T02:28:07.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the point of the reputation in this site? &lt;strong&gt;Nothing!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, almost. Rep point actually tells you &quot;nothing&quot; about the quality of a post. Rep point only dictates what you can and can't do in community moderation. Don't get clingy on your rep points. It's just a gamified system so users earn &quot;something&quot; in return of their contribution. It actually means &quot;nothing&quot; in regard to someone's posts (which should be judged objectively regardless of the poster's reputation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If answers that I can solidly support are downvoted then the reverse is occurring. &lt;strong&gt;Yes, but it depends on other factors too!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I visited your answer, and found that it is a wall of text. I'm not someone who downvote because of this, but I know someone does. Maybe you're just unlucky that someone downvote just because your answer is hard to read. Try to play a bit with formatting options that allow people to read your post easier. &lt;strong&gt;Bold&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;, quote, paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;, please understand that &lt;strong&gt;voting is a privilege&lt;/strong&gt; to users that have earned it. You can give upvote and downvote to any post you want, &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; telling any reason, at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post is funny? &lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt;. The post shows an attempt of research? &lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt;. The post is poorly written? &lt;strong&gt;Downvote&lt;/strong&gt;. The post conflicts with &lt;em&gt;your personal&lt;/em&gt; view? You can always &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be objective,&lt;/strong&gt; though. If you don't like the post, you can downvote. If you like the post, upvote. The only thing forbidden is voting because you like/don't like the user. The system can recognize that and reverse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;, please do downvote bad posts. This may be a poorly written post (mostly unclear ones), extremely short question or answer, troll/spam question/answer. (and flag them!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;by-design&lt;/em&gt;, to allow users to differentiate good posts from bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third&lt;/strong&gt;, don't be discouraged by downvote. Downvote just means someone disagree with you, not a punishment. Do evaluate your post compared to the community standard, though. It's a helpful reminder if you gather a bunch of downvote that you might have posted something that the community doesn't agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a funny post about someone losing a key, that eventually led him to accidentally downvote a post. This means that a downvote doesn't mean much. The world still goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; Downvote is not the end of the world. &lt;strong&gt;Even if it does, we can always build another one ;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="34288" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T02:44:12.467" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T02:44:12.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5569" CreationDate="2017-11-06T02:43:39.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I am going to get downvoted for sound answers on the basis of ignorance, then what is the point of reputation on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've written 30 answers, two of which are deleted. Of the remaining 28, 17 have a net positive score, 10 have a net score of 0, and only one - the one you're referring to - has a score below 0. That's really not that terrible. Heck, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/96992/627&quot;&gt;your latest answer&lt;/a&gt; has eight upvotes and no downvotes. On the whole, a lot more people thought your content's been helpful than unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when you think that someone's misunderstood your answer, and you can't make them understand your point . . . consider that that single vote is going be lost in the positive feedback you get on the majority if your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T02:43:39.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5569" CreationDate="2017-11-06T09:32:23.447" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure &lt;strong&gt;I was the first to downvote your answer&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, &lt;em&gt;I am also the person that asked the question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I downvoted your answer because it changes the premise of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a black-box question about how to utilize excess energy, your answer talks about reactor efficiencies and $/Watt ratios. You might have valid points, but you don't even try to answer the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't think it necessary of a comment to explain my actions as the reason seemed rather obvious to me. Heck you even start your answer by explaining that you won't answer the actual question - so what did you expect? Praise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not talk for other downvoters though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another note your answer, at least to me, has a hostile/superior overtone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;normal solution&lt;/strong&gt; to this question is handled from an economic viewpoint rather than an engineering one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;reasons why are fairly simple to see&lt;/strong&gt;. Consider a few facts, then an economic picture emerges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The steverino paraphrase&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;strong&gt;three laws&lt;/strong&gt; is thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't win.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't break even.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have had intended these as funny banter or something along that line. But the outcome, combined with your answer not even addressing the actual problem, came out quite differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of this would be in your very question on here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am going to &lt;em&gt;get downvoted for sound answers on the &lt;strong&gt;basis of ignorance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, then what is the point of reputation on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're instantly assuming that the downvotes must be due to misunderstanding of your answer. You don't even consider the possibility of the downvoting party being &lt;em&gt;smart enough&lt;/em&gt; to understand your answer and still downvoting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through the comments on your answer as well as this question on here you spend numerous occasions to call out the other party/parties &lt;em&gt;ignorant&lt;/em&gt; or outright &lt;em&gt;dumb&lt;/em&gt;. People don't like being called stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck you even call them out on their own answers being inadequate. Yet you don't do that on their answer, no you do it in the comments of your own answer - which is a form of deflecting the actual subject of the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You lash out on all sides yet are the only one getting struck by these hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T10:31:51.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5569" CreationDate="2017-11-06T12:14:33.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will always get a few downvotes, the first few will upset you more than later ones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The more questions you answer, the more downvotes you will get&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will get most of your downvotes when you say something challenging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case you have challenged the question, this will get you a downvote or two. You have also refused to answer the question even though standard current solutions exist. This will bias you towards downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T12:27:12.650" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T12:27:12.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2017-11-06T12:30:39.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;As soon as &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of them has valid, upvoted answer, we should close &lt;em&gt;other one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that new one should be closed. Duplicates should be, and if new one is better, and attracts answers of better quality, then close old one, simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Exception: close question if it's repeated by the same user&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't know if it is possible for regular users (at some point in time it was). It used to be possible for diamond moderators. And repeating poor quality questions should be discouraged. Flagging for moderator's attention should do the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T12:30:39.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5557" CreationDate="2017-11-06T12:32:29.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me it failed &quot;a book test&quot; - if you can write a book and still do not answer question fully, it is too broad. Have you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_Eterna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roma Eterna&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T12:32:29.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T05:01:29.830" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was planning to write a question about how a creature with a mutant healing factor -- a la marvel comics -- could be slain.  I plan to describe the creature, it's attributes, then the proposed method of killing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please do be aware that this is a last resort; many attempts at negotiation, cultural exchange, and detente have failed.  It is necessary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this worldbuild-y enough to be on topic here?&lt;/strong&gt;  It's kind of the opposite of the usual xenobiology question, which leans toward &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; a creature, while I, from sad necessity, plan to ... &lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;-build it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T08:12:40.310" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T14:29:19.890" Title="Is this on-topic? (How to slay a creature with a &quot;healing factor&quot;)" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5576" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:06:43.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've dealt with a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4317/what-to-do-about-unstoppable-questions&quot;&gt;unstoppable enemies&lt;/a&gt;, they've mostly gone through but what's happened in the past may not happen again as theoretically they're all either too broad, opinion, or story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:06:43.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5576" CreationDate="2017-11-07T14:29:19.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is highly dependent upon the specifics of the question you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that asking &quot;If a creature had a healing factor that worked by mechanism X would it be wounded by Y?&quot; would be neither too story based or too broad provided that mechanism X is described in sufficient detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking &quot;Could someone with super healing be wounded by Y?&quot; is probably too broad because we don't know the mechanism of the super healing. Without knowing the mechanism &quot;It will if you say it does.&quot; is a technically correct, though a cop-out, answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking &quot;What could wound a creature with a healing factor that works by mechanism X?&quot; is harder to determine whether it is a good fit or not. It feels like it's probably too broad and too much of an idea generation question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing of the specifics of the question you are wanting to ask I can't say whether it's fundamentally flawed or can be made into a good question by specific editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T14:29:19.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5569" CreationDate="2017-11-07T20:31:04.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I upvoted Dot_spots but had my own 2 cents:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't downvote your answer simply because I avoid highly answered straight forward questions like that (little room for improvement). But when I do down vote answers its largely because I find your answer wrong. In the case you mentioned, I too would have downvoted you simply because one glance at the OP's question and you can tell what you answered with was completely off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes its incredibly helpful to provide unrelated information if it helps improve understanding of the topic however you must still tie in a valid attempt at addressing the question otherwise you are basically spamming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also&lt;/strong&gt; down votes are a completely subjective mechanic. I could down vote you simply because I feel like it without reason. Similarly the mob could down vote you simply because they feel like it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there's no point in trying to fight it, maybe you can divine a reason everyone dislikes you and adapt a response to reduce or counter (like editing your response based on comments).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not everyone agrees, that is why we have a voting system, to perhaps come to a mutual agreement on what's right and wrong.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck, I've had posts voted for deletion and im sure ive rubbed some people the wrong way, all you can do is adapt and move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T20:31:04.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5582" CreationDate="2017-11-10T00:58:37.770" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might have made a mistake when I voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97296/how-would-people-deny-obviously-supernatural-things-in-a-modern-setting?noredirect=1#comment289242_97296&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and I would like to improve my review skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I explained my reason to close it in the comments.  To whit,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, the question is off-topic because it is about the plot of your story, not world-building. In other words, how to conspire to cover-up the incursion is not a function of the rules of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words,  I thought any of the following rules from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;our FAQ&lt;/a&gt; were applicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;...not about&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elements of plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, @a4android feels that the subject is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-intervention by national authorities is a rule of how this world functions. This is not part of its plot. Plus it's obviously not like our world. The OP is seeking a means how this can happen in his world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll honestly admit, if I squint, I can see his point.  Again, from our FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;welcomes...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the balance, I still feel the question is off-topic because the world (despite having some differences with the real world) has police, military, and political leaders who want to cover up something.  That's no different than the real world and, frankly, monsters create no different reaction than would any other real-world problem the police, military, and political leaders want to cover up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; an action that could and probably does happen in our real world make the difference as to whether or not a question is about worldbuilding?  Was I right to vote to close because I see no difference in the action of leaders whether they're trying to cover up a toxic spill or out-of-world monsters, or was I wrong to vote to close because the existence of monsters intrinsically changes the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T08:30:21.020" Title="Was my choice about the behavior of police not being worldbuilding wrong?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5581" CreationDate="2017-11-10T03:45:02.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, @JBH should be applauded for not only raising this issue, but for providing a detailed account of his reasons for voting to close this question. I say this, despite disagreeing with those reasons, because it sets an admirably high standard for making decisions about questions on this site and in meeting the criteria for peer review. We need more like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH wrote his reasons in the following comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As written, the question is off-topic because it is about the plot of your story, not world-building. In other words, how to conspire to cover-up the incursion is not a function of the rules of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my response to this was in part about how the OP's world differed from our own reality. This is not my substantial argument, although it does in part refer to one of the ways worldbuilding functions. Namely, to build worlds that differ in some degree from quotidian reality. The brevity and insubstantial nature of my argument was due to the restricts on word count allowed in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be argued is that the question is about elements of worldbuilding and isn't about creating the plot of a story or, as seems to be the case here, a game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the relevant criteria for the FAQ and see how they apply or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively this is the contemporary world, with added supernatural monsters. The created element here is the monsters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has a situation where a township is besieged by supernatural monsters. How the question isn't how will institutions like the police and civil authority respond to a plague of monsters, it is about how the most reasonable action they can take, namely, calling in Federal authorities like the Army, Navy, Air Force and US Marine Corps, FEMA or the Boy Scouts. Hereafter, all forms of outside support will be referred to as the &quot;US Cavalry&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaning [sic] in-universe consistency&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now achieving a specified effect in the OP's defined world is precisely what the OP's question is asking. This also means it is a worldbuilding element within the criteria of the FAQ. While establishing may or may not include the use of biology, technology or magic, there will always other factors that could achieve this effect. They can be social, political, cultural and environmental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at the criteria for exclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actions required by the OP's question are not those of individuals they are instead the actions of institutions, and although WB's criteria doesn't label its various social and cultural aspects of worldbuilding as &quot;institutions&quot; that's exactly what they are. The US Cavalry etc. are institutions. Therefore, their actions cannot be those of individual characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Character building&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously not. Let's move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorely tempted to rant about poorly understood plot is by many of this site, but my long involvement as a writer, an editor of an anthology, as a literary critic, as a writers' workshop teacher, and as the coordinator of several writers' groups shows eve writers have problems understanding the nature of plot. It would be accurate to say the question does not involve elements of plot and simply leave it at that, but that would be too easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plot is anything that drives a story forward and shapes the nature of its resolution. By the way, don't worry if you don't fully understand what that means. You won't be alone. This also means that almost invariably when the criteria concerning story-based are applied here they are applied in error. As is the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far this answer has demonstrated that the criteria in WB's FAQ either do not apply as presented for the reasons for closure and that the question properly meets the criterion as a worldbuilding element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his post above, @JBH presents the following reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the balance, I still feel the question is off-topic because the world (despite having some differences with the real world) has police, military, and political leaders who want to cover up something. That's no different than the real world and, frankly, monsters create no different reaction than would any other real-world problem the police, military, and political leaders want to cover up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said above the rationale for worldbuilding where the world in question only differs slightly from reality as we know it isn't the strongest rationale for worldbuilding. (Aside: Worlds that differ slightly from reality can be among the challenging exercises in worldbuilding. The most insignificant false step can bring the entire edifice down. The wider the divergence from the quotidian and the more latitude the worldbuilder enjoys.) If JBH is arguing that the OP's world is exactly like ours, then I am puzzled. Because that would constitute a legitimate answer to the question.  However, it does contain a serious flaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes cover-ups do happen in the real world. Yet it is possible to see why a cover-up couldn't or wouldn't happen with an incursion of supernatural monsters. The cover-ups that occur have certain characteristics in common. They are usually contained. This can be geographically, or only happen in the main to disadvantaged groups of people socially, economically or politically. If they were exposed the events would cause institutional harm or have direct negative impact on figures in authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the key aspect of the supernatural monsters was they were causing terrorist-scale criminal activities. Now this the complete opposite of why the US Cavalry's covers things up. There is a mountain of political capital to be gained by going into battle with monster from another world. Any cover-up, especially if the facts leaked out, would be massively counterproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, some adviser would be whispering, for example, do you want to be the POTUS who allowed the monsters to gain a foothold on the planet? Or do you want to be elected POTUS for life by a grateful nation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the question in question does not meet the criteria for its closure and it does meet the criteria for being on-topic as worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T03:45:02.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T19:28:32.630" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;We, the people of WorldbuildingSE, certainly are a bunch of folks that love their stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We enjoy padding questions with bits of stories and make answers more easily to palate by mixing facts with our own fiction. Yet regularly I encounter answers just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/97734/2746&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; where the balance between the two is so off that any attempt to answer a question is drowned-out completely by the imagination a user wants/needs to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand that people want to share and take part in a world, it still doesn't help the question. And, in some cases, can even become &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/63021/2746&quot;&gt;counter-intuitive&lt;/a&gt; if not harmful to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting &amp;amp; commenting does usually not help and trying to find help to such issues in the chat or on the meta both takes usually way too long, so that such answers get mindlessly upvoted by aficionados of the written word, even if the answer is not conducive to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is a &lt;strong&gt;not an answer&lt;/strong&gt; flag, that one states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it &lt;strong&gt;does not attempt to answer&lt;/strong&gt; the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is not the case in this case. These answers often try to provide an answer but get caught up in their own storification and thus result in a mess that is hard to understand. It would be great being able to tell the user in a meaningful way that their answer is not helping, without claiming them not trying to answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I request a new type of flag to be used for such a situation, the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This isn't an answer, it's a story&lt;/strong&gt;-flag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is for a review process to kick-in where users reviewing understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question was flagged. As stated the description provided with a &lt;strong&gt;not an answer&lt;/strong&gt; flag is talking about the answer actively not even attempting to answer while these answer are more of an overeager attempt to answer a question - at least to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; these two things do not even come close to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T19:45:25.417" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T20:57:22.553" Title="Can I have a &quot;This isn't an answer, it's a story&quot; flag?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5587" CreationDate="2017-11-13T19:31:10.817" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a handful of topics that are, each in their turn, ridiculously popular: tidally locked planets or moons, desert apocalypse conditions, theoretical evolution, are just a few.  And locked within the WB:SE vault is, frankly, and absolutely astounding collection of insight, knowledge, and imagination.  I'm regularly overwhelmed by the talent on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet, people ask the same qeuestions in their infinite variations.  And that's really the problem.  With all due respect to Stack Exchange, its SEO for research, well... it stinks.  Both here and on other SE sites I've searched for hours on a topic (especially at StackOverflow.com) without success, only to have my questioned tagged as a duplicate within seconds by someone who happens to know the one question I couldn't find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually solved with the &quot;duplicate question&quot; chaining, but here the problem is squared because people are usually researching different aspects of the same general topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have asked before (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1750/should-there-be-a-canonical-habitability-question/1759#1759&quot;&gt;HDE 226868's query about a canonical answer to habitability&lt;/a&gt;) about whether or not we should try to canonize the more popular query topics.  In HDE's question, Michael Kjörling points out that the principal information presentation format of Q&amp;amp;A is unsuitable for creating what amounts to digests.  I understand what he's saying completely, as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45524214/how-do-i-stop-my-web-content-from-shifting-left-when-the-vertical-scrollbar-appe&quot;&gt;once created a roll-up of answers&lt;/a&gt; and the mods/reviewers hated its existence, prefering the duplicate chains to solve the problem instead (which highlights a weakness in the duplicate chaining process: you actually need to do it and that's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; easier said than done!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a means of indexing, digesting, or canonizing questions be developed that is either practical to find or that would improve the SEO results?  I doubt that we have access to the search engine to improve how it handles word roots and context binding, but possibly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Create a separate set of pages that allow participants-of-a-certain-reputation to create and/or maintain topic-vs-Q lists (which would substantially help the SEO intelligence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of what I'm thinking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Tidally-Locked Worlds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Diurnal Cycles&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44997/day-night-temperature-variation-on-tidally-locked-binary-planets?s=1|71.2450&quot;&gt;Day/Night temperature variation on tidally locked binary planets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80917/planet-tidally-locked-to-its-star-having-eclipse-day-night-cycles&quot;&gt;Planet Tidally-Locked to its star having eclipse day/night cycles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80917/planet-tidally-locked-to-its-star-having-eclipse-day-night-cycles&quot;&gt;Planet Tidally-Locked to its star having eclipse day/night cycles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25415/on-the-habitability-of-the-night-side-of-a-tidally-locked-planet?s=6|62.7408&quot;&gt;On the habitability of the night side of a tidally locked planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Binary Stars and Planets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38179/tidally-locked-planet-in-binary-star-system?s=1|106.2766&quot;&gt;Tidally locked planet in binary star system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44997/day-night-temperature-variation-on-tidally-locked-binary-planets?s=2|101.0765&quot;&gt;Day/Night temperature variation on tidally locked binary planets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57974/circulation-patterns-on-a-tidally-locked-binary-planet?s=3|91.7584&quot;&gt;Circulation patterns on a tidally-locked binary planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that this is a manual solution and that it would depend on the dedicated attention of participants.  I'm also aware that, without that attention, the lists would become stale.  I'm hoping their value outweighs these potential threats.  Is there a better solution?  Or, are we doomed to have so much of the site's potential remain locked up in search engine purgatory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T05:15:11.273" Title="How to go about petitioning for/developing a means of indexing/digesting/canonizing Q&amp;As" Tags="|feature-request|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5584" CreationDate="2017-11-13T20:35:27.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NAA flag should've read like this for that type of answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it &lt;strong&gt;does not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;s&gt;attempt to&lt;/s&gt; &lt;strong&gt;answer the question.&lt;/strong&gt; It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the problem with story-based answer. The problem only happens when it becomes too-story, which can be solved by, in order, &lt;strong&gt;commenting, downvoting, and flagging as NAA.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need for &lt;em&gt;story-based answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the community decide whether a story answer is indeed an answer (on review), and is clear enough (by votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I would write for too-long-story-based-answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an interesting story. However, could you put a summary somewhere of how this answer the OP's question &quot;How to ...&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For unclear, not-too-long-story-based-answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't see how this answer the question. Could you elaborate more? &lt;sub&gt;Just like other unclear answer&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't work, I will vote/recommend to delete on review + downvote, in case it doesn't get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T20:57:22.553" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T20:57:22.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2017-11-14T05:15:11.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On an ad-hoc basis, you could have &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt; posts listing good posts like that for some subject, just as with “series” questions. And then reference that meta post in the tag description so people know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also written Q's (or edited to generalize) to become a canonical version, that dups can point to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T05:15:11.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-15T09:28:51.710" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a site proposal on Area51 for questions regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/114672/plot-story-and-character-development&quot;&gt;plot, story, and character development&lt;/a&gt;. Such a site would be a valuable complement to both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please participate in that proposal, if you are interested in asking or answering questions on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;character development: personality, backstory, relationships between characters, character arc, goals, flaws&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plot development: filling in plot holes, organising parallel storylines, finding a fitting resolution, increasing suspense through turns of events, deriving a plot from a setting, character, or other idea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;story development&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While all these topics are on topic on Writers, Writers takes a more theoretical approach to them, requiring questions and providing answers that are useful to all writers. Examples on Writers are only meant to illustrate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site, on the other hand, is a brainstorming and idea generation site for individual writing problems. What Worldbuilding does for worldbuilding, this site does for plot, story, and characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user44653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T16:31:33.023" Title="Please support a proposed site for plot and character development" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5588" CreationDate="2017-11-15T16:15:52.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proposal was rejected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sites soliciting broad idea generation is not a model on which we wish to build a Stack Exchange site. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/24050/on-proposals-soliciting-reviews-recommendations-comparisons-etc&quot;&gt;On Proposals soliciting reviews, recommendations, comparisons, etc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming and idea generation are universally frowned upon across the entire Stack Exchange network. Stack Exchange functions on a question and answer format, with specific and answerable questions. Asking for help brainstorming is incompatible with such a format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T16:31:33.023" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T16:31:33.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-15T21:47:56.760" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at this question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97980/if-alexander-the-great-never-existed&quot;&gt;If Alexander the Great never existed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lovely question, full of alt-history goodness.  However, it is so broad that it is just not practical to address in an SE-format forum, and the question is bound to be put on hold.  Fair enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ... for questions like these, where what OP wants is just epically out of scope for SE, is it appropriate to point him to the right place for his style of question?  In this particular case, OP's question would be welcomed with slavering glee, precisely here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/forums/alternate-history-discussion-before-1900.6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/forums/alternate-history-discussion-before-1900.6/&lt;/a&gt;  .  That forum encourages broad questions and back-and-forth discussion, which is what this question really wants.  Turns out they've already taken a swipe or two at the &quot;Alexander Question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little reluctant to drop that on a comment though, not really wanting to be an SE reverse-advertiser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T21:55:54.173" Title="Appropriate to suggest other forum for over-broad questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5591" CreationDate="2017-11-15T21:55:54.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I'd say it's okay to recommend other forums for questions that just don't fit this one - but it would be really nice if you could also point out stuff to make the question (possibly) on-topic here&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically my answer is that I am not aware of specific rules regarding mentioning other sites. We are here to help and if you know where to find help if this site won't provide it - why not point them there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it would be weird to start seeing people recommend their favourite &amp;quot;What if?&amp;quot;-forums in every other comment. This is basically what you mean with the &lt;em&gt;coming across as an SE reverse-advertiser&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time people just have to break up a question and focus on a few aspects of their initial &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; question. Many people start with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;High Concept&lt;/a&gt; and need some little pointers to start their research and at one point along the journey they will realize how to ask a precise question, which is what we can and want to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a rule - it's more of my personal way of how I would handle it if I knew forums that might be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; write comments like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This won't work here, go there: xyz.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey there, this is currently too broad to be answered here. Check out the [tour] and the [help] to learn more about the StackExchange network. You could break your question up and for example start with the technology around the time of when X was alive, instead of asking for technology, society, culture, geography, ... all at once. If you'd like more broad discussion please come to our [chat] once you have 20 reputation or try other forums like xyz.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T21:55:54.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T19:50:39.820" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98058/do-things-like-a-rope-bucket-or-firewood-have-to-be-protected-from-the-weather&quot;&gt;Do things like a rope, bucket or firewood have to be protected from the weather?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is considered off-topic by some because, according to them, &lt;em&gt;&quot;this question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and as such this question is in threat of being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To quote the description of the reality-check tag:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The approach for questions with this tag should be to ensure logical consistency. In short, does the concept make sense, given the rules specified? Answers to the question should determine whether or not certain elements of the question are appropriate or realistic, or, contrarily, are likely to break a user's or reader's suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly what I'm asking about. So, given such a description of this tag, I figured this question should be well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To quote @Frostfyre from the comments below my question:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking if one's world is reasonable is on-topic, as that is looking for the validity of a new system/construct. This is a question about Earth-like materiel surviving in an Earth-like environment with a historically Earth-like setting. OP is seeking to explore an existing world (Earth), not build one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) This would mean that all reality-check questions are off-topic unless the asker incorporates some elements of fantasy or sci-fi. There seem to be numerous questions in this tag that do not support this statement, one example would be this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/86289/a-believable-place-for-your-secret-lair&quot;&gt;A believable place for your secret lair&lt;/a&gt; ; (b) Even aside this, I'm having trouble in understanding such a statement, since worldbuilding does not necessary mean devising new laws of nature or incorporating supernatural elements; very mundane societal or practical considerations are also necessary, since otherwise the author may unwittingly start defying common sense, and these considerations are orthogonal to whether the world is Earth-like or not; (c) If this matters so much: My world is not completely akin to Medieval Europe; the technology is more or less medieval, but the society is not; in particular, there is no feudal lord over this village or any other villages in my world; and the geography also does not resemble real-world continents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I fail to see any difference (regarding being or not being on-topic on this site) between this question and some of my other questions that were well received on this site:&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87717/how-can-one-empty-a-cesspit-with-medieval-technology&quot;&gt;How can one empty a cesspit with medieval technology?&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97592/how-advanced-technology-is-needed-to-create-a-duct-tape&quot;&gt;How advanced technology is needed to create a duct tape?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57012/is-it-possible-to-make-a-organ-size-piano&quot;&gt;Is it possible to make a organ-size piano?&lt;/a&gt; In my understanding if my question about keeping ropes, buckets and firewood outside is off-topic then all those three questions are off-topic as well; and since apparently they're not considered off-topic, then my question about ropes, buckets and firewood should not be off-topic as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this question off-topic and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T20:20:34.887" Title="Why is my question about the feasibility of keeping different tools outside in threat considered off-topic by some?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5593" CreationDate="2017-11-16T20:00:34.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Not off topic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter if the world is Earth-like or not, most built worlds are 90% Earth-like anyways. You just can't change it that much about a world and keep it believable. Most fantasy worlds have Earth-like climate, Earth-like human biology, Earth-like gravity, Earth-like social systems, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about firewood and village wells is just as applicable in Narnia, Westeros, Hyrule, or regular old Earth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T20:00:34.250" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5593" CreationDate="2017-11-16T20:20:34.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on my previous commentary, the subject you're asking about has a clear analog in Earth's environment and history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you want to know if the concept you have devised makes sense. We're left to assume the rules you want to maintain consistency with, so we guess Medieval Earth as an analog without magic or non-Earth factors. So far so good, as far as the reality-check tag is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the snag comes in that the topic you want to know about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;specifically mentioned as off-topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking whether items commonly found throughout Earth's history would survive in a (presumed) Earth environment and be regarded in the same manner as a (presumed) Earth culture is a matter of historical fact and, thus, off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T20:20:34.887" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T20:53:17.793" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious: how are we supposed to handle questions that have been changed such that older answers no longer reflect the questions being asked? &#xA;In the context and spirit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5539/is-it-considered-good-practice-to-edit-your-question-after-answers-have-been-giv&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt; what do we do for (or to) existing questions who've been edited such that answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are invalidated &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are out out of context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are answering questions no longer present.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97969/what-would-drive-people-to-risk-death-in-the-deep/98006#98006&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; of the 3rd case (which I answered yesterday). The highest rated answer at the moment, Motosubatsu's answer, answers &lt;em&gt;a third question which has since been edited out&lt;/em&gt;. Personally I like his answer to the 3rd question, but was confused as I had not seen it when writing my own answer (because it was edited out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the example above, should the question that has been edited out be edited back in to prevent confusion to future readers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general case, what is the recommended procedure?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34127" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T09:45:16.723" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T09:45:16.723" Title="How to handle answers that no longer reflect the edited question" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5596" CreationDate="2017-11-16T21:24:02.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post was edited because it was at risk of being put on hold. Each post should ask a specific answerable question. The second question of the post was edited out, because in addition to being a second question, it was about creating plot not building a world. By removing the second question the post was made specific, answerable, and about building a fictional world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's policy to not make edits to questions that invalidate existing answers. It's also policy to edit questions so that they aren't placed on hold. I don't think we've had a discussion about what to do when these two policies come into conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case since the answer still answers the core premise of the edited question, I don't think the answer has been invalidated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T21:49:53.000" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T21:49:53.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5596" CreationDate="2017-11-16T22:55:28.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;General issue was already discussed network-wide meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43478/225745&quot;&gt;Exit strategies for &amp;quot;chameleon questions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally  if  answer was invalidated, then there are two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question was looking OK when answer was posted. It is OK to roll it back and comment - unless rollback would invalidate other answers. Either way, it is &lt;strong&gt;not right&lt;/strong&gt; to downvote such answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question was looking close-y when answer was posted. Especially if there was close votes and person who answered had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;view close votes privilege&lt;/a&gt;. In that case the answerer is at fault, and should vote / flag to close, or work with OP to clear up the question, instead of answering. In such case, treat bad answer as bad answer: delete if it's yours. Request edit and/or downvote if it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line - &lt;strong&gt;we should edit too broad and opinion based questions, or or put them on hold faster&lt;/strong&gt;, to prevent such answers from even being posted before question is in good shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T23:01:56.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3773" CreationDate="2017-11-17T12:50:41.860" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will post an answer to this one with a similar sentiment.  It pains me to see that 75% of new questions on WB are summarily put on hold.  Users with the power to hold can comment with suggestions (and specific suggestions, not pasted boilerplate) about how the question could be better but it does not happen often enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better than comments: improve the question yourself.  Edit it to become a good question while preserving (in your opinion) the intent of the OP.  The OP may still get something out of it and will at least not feel like she is not crashing some exclusive club.  If the OP does not like it she can change it further but your edits will show the way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have resolved to try improving close-voted questions myself.  Sometimes, though, I am at a loss as regards how to improve the question - example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97845/limits-of-carbon-dating-and-possible-alternatives&quot;&gt;Limits of Carbon dating and possible alternatives?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel bad when posters with minimal rep have their questions swatted down.  These are not regulars hanging around bs-ing but people who have come for answers and help.  They will probably not come back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T12:50:41.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5601" CreationDate="2017-11-17T14:00:10.460" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;5 people with 3000 reputation are required to close a question. In perusing this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/can-there-be-done-more-to-assure-users-that-closing-questions-is-not-a-bad-thing&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; again, wetcircuit makes a good point; 5 people can close a question where many more than that have positively engaged the question (through views, comments, answers, etc). I would argue that Worldbuilding is uniquely opinion-based among the SE sites making its question closure criteria much murkier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible ways to correct this would be to make 8 voters required to close a question; make 5 + (# of answers) voters required to close a question; make the reputation required to cast a close vote = 3000 + (# of views); etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, a software engineering problem. As far as I can tell, all SE sites have the same voting and closing requirements, although reputation required to cast a close vote varies with the size of the site (I only need 500 rep to cast close votes on Earth Science.SE). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible for Worldbuilding, separate from other SE sites, to change its requirements for closing a question?&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to know if this change can be done by modifying the configuration of the existing site. I assume this change is not worth the developer time to implement from Stack Exchange's standpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this question does not ask &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; we change our closing requirements. Let us save that for another question after we have determined whether it is even possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="1" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T18:49:36.513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T18:58:11.373" Title="Is it possible to make the bar for closure higher?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5600" CreationDate="2017-11-17T18:49:54.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's possible to adjust both the number of people required to close a question and the reputation needed for someone to vote to close in the first place. Note that reopening a question uses the same settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1" LastEditorUserId="1" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T18:58:11.373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T18:58:11.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T00:14:43.847" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;All right now I promise you, this is my very last post wrt &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5593/why-is-my-question-about-the-feasibility-of-keeping-different-tools-outside-in-t/5595?noredirect=1#comment16179_5595&quot;&gt;my question about firewood, ropes and buckets&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many works of fiction are guilty of the same sin: stockpiling blatant nonsense. Cartoons like &lt;em&gt;Powerpuff Girls&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Looney Tunes&lt;/em&gt; aside, where apparently intentionally the authors hold logic and common sense in a total disregard, I happened to watch many works where the absurdities were obvious even to me, yet I had a feeling that they were not that obvious to the authors. Such moments were not nice for me - I found them annoying, spoiling an otherwise interesting experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ideal, perhaps a silly one, was a piece of fiction, fantastical work that no reader would feel the urge to scream &quot;What a blatant nonsense!&quot; at any point. And I've already felt such an urge numerous times, even wrt to works that were applauded &quot;mature&quot; like &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I'm mainly writing for my drawer, I decided to take an utmost care to ensure that my works are free from such nonsense. This means that I've devised two rules to follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The work must be coherent (duh). The logic and common sense must not be broken.&#xA;2) Whenever the rules are not explicitly overridden by incorporated fantasy/sci-fi elements the real-world rules should remain in force by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, keeping these rules has proven much more difficult than I was predicting. I'm notoriously failing to keep them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 2) has proven especially tricky, as I'm always hitting the issue of not having enough knowledge to judge whether some idea of mine is plausible or if it is just a blatant nonsense. I hoped Worldbuilding SE would help me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, I was wrong. I was told that my question was off-topic because it was about the real world rather than about some fictional world of mine. The hard part of point 2) is that such considerations will frequently lead to questions about the real world even if I'm incorporating fantastical elements in my work. And I do incorporate some fantastical elements; only none of these elements seem to me to override how fast will wood decay in open weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it would seem, even if some work is in the genre of fantasy, we can not always use Worldbuilding SE to ensure the plot is not broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is also literary realism. Here I can't think how could such an author use Worldbuilding SE if this rule is to be kept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But using defaults from the real world is not wordbuilding! By definition, building a world means we're not using defaults from the real world! So unless you can outline how your world differs from the real world with regard to what you are asking about, your question is off-topic here and you should not ask it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, at least, how I understand what I've been told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually kind of disagree here. Even if the village was placed in a world where all laws are exactly the same as in the real word (which is not the case), a village is still its own little world. Building a village means building a world. Even if the village was lying in one of the real life countries, which again is not the case in my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, questions if it is probable that the villagers will do X in the given conditions seem to me to be questions about World Building. And these are questions that every writer, whether he writes in the genre of literary realism or fantasy must be able to answer, or else his plot is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if not, then I propose adding to the FAQ the following post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My question is similar to what can be considered in the real world, can I ask it here?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding means building a world different from the real world. So unless you can show how, in regard to your question, your world differs from the real world, you may not post it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To help you understand the issue, please consider the following three examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would villagers in my village keep their firewood outside?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this question all rules from the real world take place by default, so it's off-topic here. Whether or not there are dragons in your world is irrelevant, unless you state that the firewood being stolen by dragons flying by is one of your concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A wizard has devised weather-proof firewood, would the villagers keep it outside?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is on-topic here, so you may ask it, though the answer seems to be a little obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What minimal changes to the laws of nature are required to make firewood being washed down by rain not a thing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an excellent question, one of those we welcome with open hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, this means that this site is not for authors writing in the realism genre. Sorry guys. Your questions are off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T12:22:51.480" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T23:22:27.727" Title="Is WorldbuildingSE suitable for writers whose works are, more or less, realistic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:04:32.380" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98069/the-right-mix-of-emotions-for-a-civilization-that-is-not-concerned-about-reprodu&quot;&gt;The right mix of emotions for a civilization that is not concerned about reproducing but spreading itself throughout the universe?&lt;/a&gt;  has been put on hold as too broad.  Key quote from the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem is, there is no real way for us to know how such a transcendent species would feel, us being mired in this flesh with its biological urges. Therefore, any number of answers could be correct. Since SE is a Q &amp;amp; A site, and this question doesn't have a 'correct' answer, it is too broad for this site. I'd suggest that you make a proposal about these transcendentally-emotive beings and then ask people to explain why it does work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that even if OP were to follow the fixit advice (and many props to @kingledion for including some!) the question would be immediately closed as opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ... is there any way to get this question whipped into shape, or are our &quot;sublimed&quot; friends just SOL on SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me rephrase this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm asking whether any question touching on this subject would be similarly considered opinion-based. Say OP took kingledion's advice and said, &quot;Transcendent beings have these emotions, amirite?&quot;... VTCers could reasonably make the exact same argument for closing, that any answer would be opinion-based. I'm not liking this, but I'm feeling a sense of grinding inevitability about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:  We're going to try it.  Similar question in (I hope) a slant which will not be closed.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98211/will-these-transcendent-beings-be-friendly-chatty-social-magpies&quot;&gt;Will these transcendent beings be friendly, chatty social magpies?&lt;/a&gt; .  We'll see.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="41922" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T07:46:24.193" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T07:46:24.193" Title="Are transcendent species inherently off-topic/opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:15:03.520" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was closed as too broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98051/what-kind-of-weapon-would-you-need-to-level-an-entire-city-to-glass&quot;&gt;What kind of weapon would you need to level an entire city to glass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not seeing how it was too broad.  It seems answerable, even if the answer is -- as several comments suggest -- &quot;you can't&quot;.  Someone out there might be able to think of a weapon which could do what OP wants, either some reasonable extrapolation of Earth weaponry, or something from another story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T10:36:42.747" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T10:36:42.747" Title="Reopen request (What kind of weapon would you need...)" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:54:19.533" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40122/what-good-are-psychics-who-control-the-strong-or-weak-forces?rq=1&quot;&gt;What good are psychics who control the strong or weak forces?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has been closed as &quot;not clear what you're asking&quot;.  OP subsequently edited the question; it seems like a pretty good worldbuilding question now.  Basically, &quot;given that powers X and Y are in the world, how could folks use it&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm suggesting that this question is now clear enough to reopen.  Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T10:36:55.923" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T13:08:41.580" Title="Reopen Request (What good are psychics...)" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5604" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:55:28.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question asks these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this possible? &lt;strong&gt;Unlimited access to minerals, I presume&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of weapon could effectively &quot;gooify&quot; entire cities? &lt;strong&gt;Is that a word?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this new goo layer can be used for metal work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the quality of this goo layer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would a civilization with near medieval technology utilize this layer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of effect this weapon would have on environment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the condition of &quot;new earth&quot; after global usage of this weapon?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, each of these questions should be asked in different posts. I must also ask the OP what he means by &quot;gooify&quot;. And then, why there is &quot;glass&quot; in the title of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of current revision, this question cannot be reopened. It is too broad (multiple questions) and unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T06:55:28.053" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5603" CreationDate="2017-11-18T07:12:21.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kingledion got it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;strong&gt;unless the main question is changed&lt;/strong&gt;, answers would be equally right. That doesn't make this &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main question (What would be the perfect mix of emotions ...) changed, then we can consider to reopen that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T07:12:21.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2017-11-18T11:18:45.800" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's normally fine to ask questions about building a world that is based on an existing real world, including present-day or historical Earth.&lt;/strong&gt; Many, but not all, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling?tab=questions&quot;&gt;my own questions&lt;/a&gt; fall into that category in one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Worldbuilding SE is to help people create realistic worlds. &lt;em&gt;Realism&lt;/em&gt;, in this case, isn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; about &quot;being like Earth as of today&quot;, but can &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be about internal consistency in &lt;em&gt;a world that is completely unlike Earth.&lt;/em&gt; However, there is little to say that someone creating a realistic world can't &lt;em&gt;start with the Earth&lt;/em&gt; that they are familiar with, and tweak it in various ways: add a creature here, move a continent there, sprinkle some magic pixie dust over the result, alter the climate in a fourth way, or what have you; then try to figure out how that change affects some other aspect of their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said, you should be careful to make your question not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about the real world.&lt;/strong&gt; We've discussed this multiple times (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2293/29&quot; title=&quot;Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3911/29&quot; title=&quot;Resolving the “real world” problem?&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3872/29&quot; title=&quot;Is a “real world” question off topic?&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3840/29&quot; title=&quot;How do we feel about questions where the answer is “it exists in the real world?”&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2286/29&quot; title=&quot;Is this the right site for this question? (Historical technology level)&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, likely among many others; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=real+world&quot;&gt;searching Worldbuilding Meta for &lt;em&gt;real world&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a revealing experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is squarely about the real world, then the appropriate subject-specific Stack Exchange site is probably a better fit for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your question asks about or at least involves near its core something imaginary, or hypothetical, then it'll probably be better received on Worldbuilding than on the subject-specific sites. &lt;em&gt;This is a general rule of thumb, not a promise about any particular question or any particular other site in the network.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Worldbuilding has quality standards, though (even though it can be hard to tell at times). To begin with, you must ask a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, and that question must be &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt; (just discussion fodder doesn't qualify). Generally, it needs to be clear how your question is about building a fictional world. You should show clearly that you have done some rudimentary research on the subject; in my opinion, showing that you have read some relevant Wikipedia articles is a low bar for this, and highlighting existing questions across the network and discussing how those relate to yours is a very good step to take. Not only does this show that you have tried to find the answer yourself before asking us to help, but it also helps prevent us going down the same paths that you have already explored and dismissed for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up, as it says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;, which I recommend that everyone read through from time to time,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on this site should be about building settings and the reasons around why they are the way they are. A setting might not be a planet; it can be larger than a multiverse or smaller than a village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, &lt;strong&gt;there is nothing in that which would prevent asking about a setting that is set on Earth.&lt;/strong&gt; Not even the scope exception about real-world history applies, unless you are &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; asking about &lt;em&gt;the history of the real world&lt;/em&gt; (in which case you're probably better off asking history experts rather than worldbuilding experts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If your question does get put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; and you either don't understand why, or disagree with the reasons stated, then don't hesitate to bring it up here on Worldbuilding Meta or in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;our general chat room, &lt;em&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and ask why the question was put on hold. (Make sure to include a link to the question!) Doing so is likely to draw additional eyes to your question, and if the closing was in error, that can typically be corrected fairly quickly; alternatively, you can get feedback on how to adjust your question to make it on topic on the site, or where on the network it might be on topic (you can then &quot;flag&quot; the question for moderator attention and request migration, and one of us will look at it and make a decision about migration, possibly in collaboration with the moderators on the proposed target site). You can also try using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/29&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to get early feedback on your question before posting it on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T12:23:57.117" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T12:23:57.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T14:18:11.530" Score="0" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm basically asking about questions which do have short, objective answers, but it may be subjective to determine which is the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like suppose mankind now has xyz technology, which industry is going to benefit the most out of it? Or why would three eyes evolve in a species? Or what is the best use of abc spells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If enough details are provided, it will be possible to separate good answers and bad ones, however, there may not be a singular best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently the better and/or more creative answers will get upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that this is off-topic because it violates SE's single answer requirement. But sites like code golf do violate this principle to some extent, where multiple answers are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen some interesting questions get closed simply because there is no objective way of validating a single answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone let me know why sticking to policy and keeping big-list questions off-topic is better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5147" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T12:55:27.967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:31:33.260" Title="Why are questions with multiple answers off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|closing-questions|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5613" CreationDate="2017-11-19T22:31:11.623" Score="-4" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the reputation system exist? Seriously, just why? I mean, there's the somewhat necessary thing about &lt;em&gt;you can't do this until x amount of rep&lt;/em&gt; for the servers/software sake which I can understand, but all it's doing for me, at least, is causing unnecessary stress and anger to sprout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean I was one rep point away from being able to comment everywhere (50 rep points) and now, because of a closed question and some downvotes, I'm back down to 39. As far as I know the only way to get more rep points is to post answers and complete badge quotas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some of the bronze badges have you post x amount of questions over x amount of days, but the way the system is setup is making me think this is a resource gathering idle game website not a website to further our knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm thinking this is a resource idle game and I have to post stuff per day I will, and did for my Ledrine question, turn off my brain and post to farm rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't rep just serve as an indicator as to who has the most well thought out questions/answers instead of this resource gaming thing that I'm currently experiencing. Or maybe my autism is just irked at this website and all of its incarnations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or alternatively, like my resource gathering gaming instincts are telling me, have us spend rep to comment, answer, and question with a daily refill feature that should be much easier (atleast for those stress prone like me) to handle than the current system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41917" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T08:25:15.937" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T20:53:56.187" Title="Why does the reputation system exist?" Tags="|support|feature-request|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5612" CreationDate="2017-11-19T23:57:41.953" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reputation system exists for two reasons. To encourage and discourage certain behaviors and to give more experienced users increasing privileges and responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest ways to gain the arbitrary internet points that are stack exchange reputation is to receive upvotes on questions and answers. You do this by creating a question or answer that someone else likes or dislikes (Please note that just because people like your post doesn't imply that it is a good fit for this site). This should encourage you to ask good questions and give good answers. You can read the full list of ways to earn and lose reputation &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because stack exchange is designed to prioritize good answers there is a 1 point reputation penalty for each downvote someone gives to answers, unlike questions. You can also see this in how each question upvote is worth 5 rep while each answer upvote is worth 10. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two parts to giving out increasing privileges there are the basic privileges to comment, upvote and downvote and otherwise be a participating member on the site, and there-there are the privileges to become part of the community moderation process. The idea behind earning the basic community actions is to make it harder for a bot to gain the ability to spam across the site and to make sure that people have an understanding of how the site works before they have upvote/downvote privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange policy towards moderation has always been one of community involvement. The more reputation you have the more you can be involved with the basic upkeep of the site. To see a complete list of privileges and their reputation requirements you can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a better understanding of the thought processes behind the system I'd suggest reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt; which does a good job of explaining the ideas behind the stack exchange formula. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="34744" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T20:53:56.187" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T20:53:56.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5612" CreationDate="2017-11-21T05:23:09.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple thoughts for you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bar to be able to post comments -- this being your proximate goal, it seems -- is pretty low.  Let's first focus on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a variety of reasons [1], it's harder to get a question to &quot;stick&quot; than an answer.  So answering questions is a good thing to do.  Coincidentally, it's also one of the two basic operations of the site!  People come with questions, drop 'em some thoughts!  Before long you'll have enough to ask, answer, and comment; and what more do you really need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry too much about badges and whatnot.  For me, they're just a bit of fun.  Don't try to metagame it; it's more interesting when you do what you do and get surprised when they drop a badge on you!  Some of them are actually pretty funny.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]  I have some ... intemperate thoughts about this, but that's for another day.  ;D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41922" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T05:23:09.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5620" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:32:13.163" Score="6" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I went to writing a few tag wikis as I do every once in a while. I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt; tag and suggested an edit. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/41294749#41294749&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0t&lt;/a&gt; had a closer look at the tag and we discussed what to do with it. Basically I will summarize the chat here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt; is rarely used - a handful of views on the tag (probably me and dot), 3 questions in total, one of them closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;seems to be similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nutrition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nutrition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nutrition&lt;/a&gt;, another small tag with 4 questions, 2 of which are closed, one of them also being tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; tag whose tag wiki excerpt reads&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about sources and types of nutrition for a living organism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; tag seems to cover what the nutrition and diet tag are meant for. Two of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nutrition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nutrition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nutrition&lt;/a&gt; questions (one of them being the one that is also tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt;) are already tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for all questions about sustenance for creatures. This includes natural sources of food, like plants and animals that can be eaten by a given creature, as well as processed food. It also includes the process of acquiring sources of food and processing food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is often used in conjunction with the biology tag and tags describing the creature or method in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which also shows that this tag should be used for what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nutrition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nutrition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nutrition&lt;/a&gt; aim at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting rid of the two small tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nutrition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nutrition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nutrition&lt;/a&gt; would affect a total of only 4 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the community consensus? Do we need the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diet&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nutrition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nutrition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nutrition&lt;/a&gt; or can we just go ahead and remove both of them and replace them with food where the questions are not already tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:22:14.587" Title="Do we need the tags [diet] and [nutrition] on the Main Site?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5619" CreationDate="2017-11-22T19:50:12.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chat, you seem to have done your homework regarding seeing how popular the respective tags were.  I'll merge them into &lt;code&gt;food&lt;/code&gt; later today if nobody has any arguments against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, given the small usage, don’t bother with synonyms and just let you retag the questions? (the now-unused tags will be deleted in a few days)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefit of the synonym is that someone may do it &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. Searching the tags for suitable, it may not occur to someone to look for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; when he’s thinking of those other terms in his question.  The search matches the partial tag name only, not the description. So it is not easy to discover that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; is meant to cover diet and nutrition issues as well, and most people won’t know that a broad term is used intentionally because it has a small number of uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:22:14.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:22:14.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5624" CreationDate="2017-11-24T05:25:51.243" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the last couple of months I've seen a lot of what I call &quot;fishing for ideas&quot; questions.  Questions that are either too broad or, more often, primarily opinion-based because the OP hasn't thought through their issue well enough to give us the direction participants need to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a grey line.  Frankly, a third to a half of WB:SE questions could be called &quot;well-defined fishing-for-ideas questions.&quot;  The user has constrained the question well enough that the ideas, despite being primarily opinions (which is what creativity basically is), can be well enough focused for the OP to reasonably select the one that is higher quality than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In its worst case, I suspect the off-topic fishing-for-ideas question is nothing more than an effort to overcome writer's block.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is:&amp;emsp;What elements or aspects of a fishing-for-ideas question makes it an on-topic and high-quality question and vice-versa?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to your answers as I hope to link this post in my comments when I explain to an OP why I'm voting to put their question on hold.  If you feel it's prudent that I post what I think the answer should be, tell me in the comments and I'll post it &amp;mdash; but I'd like to hear from our more experienced participants first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T03:51:54.473" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T04:57:37.793" Title="Clarification for new users: when is a &quot;fishing for ideas&quot; question on- or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|questions|low-quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T01:15:16.687" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I removed this part when I edited my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18051/2052&quot;&gt;Tomorrow is Groundhog Day… For everyone.&lt;/a&gt;. I'll preserve it here, since I don't know the etiquette of removing such edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’m going to vote that this should be reopened. The real issue is not that it’s too broad; the real issue is a logical inconsistency between a ground hog day where nobody remembers the previous day and a ground hog where people do remember the previous day. If people don’t remember, then the same events repeat continuously. If they do remember then it’s not really the same ground hog day the next day as people adapt to a changing environment. This is the basic question that needs to be addressed: do people remember or don’t they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed a year after it was opened, and I didn't see the discussion until it was voted closed.  It annoyed me a bit, but I was content to let it be closed, even though it seemed to me that those closing it didn't understand what I meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been closed now for over a year, but it continues to get a lot of activity and comment.  Every time it does, I see that 'too broad' label, and it gnaws at me.  Obviously the scenario sparks readers' imaginations, so I've finally edited it.  I can edit it further if the question is still considered too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in seeing what answers people will come up with.  At the moment, they can't answer, and so they simply upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?  Can we reopen this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Ichabod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2052" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T12:14:49.947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T12:14:49.947" Title="Can 'Tomorrow is Groundhog Day… For everyone.' be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5621" CreationDate="2017-11-25T04:40:15.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you call &quot;fishing-for-ideas&quot; questions have been known on this site as ideas-generation questions. You can go and do a search on WB Meta to see how they have been dealt with the past. Previously, ideas-generation was considered a reason to vote to close, however, this was replaced with the VTC categories of &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and is no longer reason to vote for closure in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes any question &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; is the fact the question itself is not about worldbuilding. An idea-generation or &quot;fishing-for-ideas&quot; question can be on-topic in the sense that it is concerned with worldbuilding. However, they will usually be closed as opinion-based or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model has deliberately excluded questions about ideas-exchange. Essentially because it is deliberately interested in cultivating questions of useful and practical kind about software and hardware which is where its money is. &quot;Ideas-exchange&quot; seems to be interpreted here on WB SE as &quot;idea-generation&quot; although I haven't been able to find anywhere where this notion originated. Hopefully wiser heads will provide a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does lead to an interesting paradox. A reasonable number of Stack Exchange are most definitely ideas-exchanges, for example, the Physics SE and, of course, Worldbuilding SE itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation 1:&lt;/strong&gt; All further discussion should avoid using the term &quot;fishing-for-ideas&quot; as this creates the false impression that there is a new category of questions liable for closure. Let's stick with &quot;idea-generation' for the sake of clarity and good sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has identified what he calls ' &quot;well-defined fishing-for-ideas questions.&quot;' These are: --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The user has constrained the question well enough that the ideas, despite being primarily opinions (which is what creativity basically is), can be well enough focused for the OP to reasonably select the one that is higher quality than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically what WB SE constrains querents to do. To ask questions about focused ideas that participants can provide an answer. I have ignored the notion that creativity is primarily opinions and the confusing proposition about how the OP had select the quality of one over others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically if a question is focused in a way that enables it to be answered, then it conforms to the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In its worst case, I suspect the off-topic fishing-for-ideas question is nothing more than an effort to overcome writer's block.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an entirely irrelevant proposition. There is absolutely no reason to ask someone is asking a question on WB SE. That is entirely their own business. Questions should be taken on their merits. Even the most frivolous question might be an essential part of worldbuilding in a work of fiction, game or TV script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experience, idea-generation is a useful tool to explore the possibilities and consequences of a new worldbuilding concept. Sometimes only by exploring the aspects and facets of a concept can a worldbuilder come to grips with its possibilities. The hard thing can be knowing where to begin and only by getting feedback from others can be accomplished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What elements or aspects of a fishing-for-ideas question makes is an on-topic and high-quality question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same elements or aspects as any other on-topic and high-quality question here. Namely, that it is about worldbuilding, that the question can be answered, that the question is well-written, often clearly defined, and is on a topic that can be dealt with by the expertise of participants (side-note: certain topics cannot be answered here due to a lack of expertise by participants and often are labelled opinion-based or too broad). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site already has a well-established label of idea-generation for those questions of the type that concern you. The criteria for their vote to close exists in the form of opinion-based and too broad (they have their weaknesses, but that's another matter). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question about worldbuilding evades the criteria of opinion-based or too broad, then it is &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; within the boundaries of acceptable questions. (NB: I avoided calling them &quot;on-topic&quot; because there are different criteria about whether is on-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem with this question is that conflates several separate concepts into new categories. This liable to create confusion rather than clarity. By inventing &quot;fishing-for-ideas&quot; when &quot;idea-generation&quot; already exists, and reinterpreting the criteria for on-topic and off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of misconception could only be created by someone who is intelligent and thoughtful and is working with conceptually poor materials. This is absolutely compounded by difficulties in accessing the criteria for closure. There is NO easily accessible location for the criteria for closure on Worldbuilding SE. I know because almost on every occasion I have gone looking for them I only find more by accident than design. They should be easy to find on Help and accessible with a minimal numbers of clicks. This should be remedied as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that I disagree with the majority of propositions in this Meta post I do respect the honesty and reasonableness with which the poster has made his case. Any errors he has fallen into are due to the morass of misinformation and misdirection about locating the criteria for asking questions here and the criteria for voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any disagreeableness on my part can be put down to my history as a scientist, a several composer of constitutions for various clubs and societies, and over twenty years working in the legal advice section of a government department. Never underestimate the wrath of a professional. On one hand, I applaud it when people try to do things I have had training and experience in doing, it's just when they use a hammer to drive in screws. Enough said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T04:40:15.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5623" CreationDate="2017-11-25T05:18:25.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did site participants after so long put your question on hold?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange structure is one-question/one-answer.  It was never intended to be a forum discussion.  Please be clear about this: &lt;strong&gt;this is not a forum for discussion or debate.&lt;/strong&gt;  In an ideal world, a well-structured question can be answered briefly, definitively, and with supporting references.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Old questions are reviewed as the rules of this (and all other Stack Exchange sites) are created or modified to make the site as valuable and highly participatory as possible.  To that end, old questions that are no longer on-topic (if they ever were) are closed to keep new participants from using them to justify asking what today is (or always was) a poorly constructed question.  &lt;em&gt;This actually happens&lt;/em&gt; and due to limited resources and the natural imperfection of humanity, site participants sometimes require time to close/open questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Popularity is not an indicator of a good question or answer.  It is only an indicator that a question/answer is of high interest.  Popularity is not and cannot be taken into account when closing or opening questions because the purpose of closing/opening is to encourage asking high quality questions and providing high quality answers (both in form and in purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was this question closed and why is it likely to remain closed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer on behalf of those who voted to close your question.  But I can answer on my own behalf, because I would have voted to close it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Too Broad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks for an encyclopedic answer.  It's asking for the responses (moral, amoral, and immoral) of every human being, every community, every organization, and every nation on earth.  Answers would be (and were) very long, which (as described above) is not the intent of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long questions with long answers are difficult for many people to digest.  Please don't point to your question's popularity and suggest that I'm wrong.  Your question could have easily had 100K visits had people not been forced to spend &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 30-60 minutes reading through everything.  Avoiding this situation is the reason one of the justifications for closing a question is that it is &quot;too broad.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember what I said earlier, a quality question is one that can be answered briefly, definitively, and with supporting references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no historical incident, scientific theory, or sociological analysis anyone can draw from to give your question as-written an authoritative answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the difference between a primarily opinion-based question (no supporting basis at all, we're just offering a pull-it-out-of-the-air opinion) and a good question that draws from the authoritative experience of our site participants to provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But wait!&quot; you might say.  &quot;Isn't every question about the effects of magic on a society utterly without everything you just mentioned?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes they are!  And that's why we expect those questions to explain in detail the world's &lt;strong&gt;rules&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;limitations.&lt;/strong&gt;  When provided, those rules and limitations allow site participants to provide opinions that are based on the logical structure of the world (hence, &quot;worldbuilding&quot;).  The question becomes practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Your question has fundamentally no limits.  In fact, it went out of its way to avoid basically all limits.  There is no structure.  How would everybody react?  Each according to the dictates of their own morality, ethics, and conscience.  I might be able to answer your question on my own behalf, but I doubt anyone knows even their neighbor well enough to answer it on their behalf... much less on behalf of nations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do I recommend that you do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely nothing.  If you start changing your question to try and make it reopenable you seriously risk invalidating all those answers, making the situation infinitely worse.  Remember, the purpose of closing a question a long time after it was answered is to stop today's OPs from using it to justify their own question.  It's a site-usage quality control issue, not a judgement against the topic of or interest in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in my post, the question is fascinating &amp;mdash; but it's also well outside the limits deemed necessary by the &quot;powers that be&quot; to be practical for this site.  As I also said in my comment, the only definitive answer would be the size of a book &amp;mdash; your book, and the purpose of this site is not to write your book for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, before you give in to temptation and start arguing with me about this, please note that I have stood in your shoes.  I've complained to the &quot;powers that be&quot; that their rules stink and their treatment of me was unfair.  But, over time, I've come to appreciate that they've done a great job of trying to use a service to meet the needs of a very imaginative and creative crowd.  My hat's off to them for the quality of their effort.  If you peek around in Meta, you'll find that I'm still working with the &quot;powers that be&quot; to better understand what they're doing and why, only now I'm not doing it because I think their treatment of me is unfair &amp;mdash; I'm doing it because I want to help people make this the most useful site possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm not alone in this.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624/29&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; was recently created to help OPs better understand how to write a high quality question.  I'm referring participants to it more and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple truth is, the site cannot be all things to all people.  Regrettably, your question fell outside the coloring book lines, and we don't want future OPs pointing at your question and saying &quot;he was allowed to do it, why can't I?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is that you (like I had to) salve your wounded pride, come to understand why the site acts the way it does, and work to help others meet those expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And don't think for a moment that I'm not looking forward to your next fascinating question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T05:18:25.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:08:12.780" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regards &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98601/what-near-future-propulsion-systems-could-be-employed-by-my-spaceships&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; in particular but I doubt it is the only one showing this, or a similar, tendency/happening&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at comments on the question as well as on answers the question seems to be asking 'too much', yet none of the complainers voted to close it so it must be well-formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;case a)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because NASA spends millions on engineers to do this, and you want it for free? – Justin Thyme &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98601/what-near-future-propulsion-systems-could-be-employed-by-my-spaceships#comment293564_98601&quot;&gt;link to comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reduce your expectations. – Justin Thyme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98601/what-near-future-propulsion-systems-could-be-employed-by-my-spaceships#comment293573_98601&quot;&gt;link to comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These comments are preceded by the person writing a huge amount of comments containing lots of detail. Enough so I thought it prudent to ask them if they didn't want to put all that work into an answer instead of comments so they could get rep for their work. Instead they seem to have flipped at that and got angry, I chose not to respond anymore (also tried to move that escalation to the chat just in case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;case b)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@dot_Sp0T You want hard numbers on prospective technologies? I've given you the links to the wiki articles; they have links to various papers. The rest of it depends on what decisions you make about how your world works. I won't write your book for you. – Sherwood Botsford&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98601/what-near-future-propulsion-systems-could-be-employed-by-my-spaceships#comment293666_98654&quot;&gt;link to comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is a reaction to me, obligatorily, pointing out in a comment (on all answers I had gotten at that point btw), that I added the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added this tag after discussing in the chat on how to point out better that I wanted actual comparable numbers instead of vague ideas. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag was a formal addition considering that the requirement for &lt;em&gt;hard numbers&lt;/em&gt; was in the question from the very beginning; I just did not want to, what I felt at the time, &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; people to have to link papers and such if they didn't feel like it. Getting numbers would be just fine without scientific references I thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I really ask too much or are these 'complainers' just bringing in personal feelings / venting / something similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T08:53:32.747" Title="What did I do wrong? / What can I do better?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2017-11-25T23:17:12.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's rare that the many &lt;em&gt;Masters of their Profession&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jacks of All Trades&lt;/em&gt; who frequent this site can't answer any given question,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but answering every question put to us (I'll count both you and I among them) is not why we're here or why this site was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific purpose of this site is to build something &lt;em&gt;new:&lt;/em&gt; new worlds with new rules.  Yes, in most cases those new worlds have a huge overlap with our real world &amp;mdash; but the site's purpose is to focus on the part that's new, diffent, and creative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;And this is a point worth emphasizing.  Our purpose is not to help OPs write their story.  Our purpose is to help them discover their world.  The difference is subtle, but very important.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real-world questions can be answered &lt;em&gt;anywhere and everywhere,&lt;/em&gt; which is why we don't want to answer them here.  Indeed, a vast number of them are answerable with a simple Google search that almost always points to a Wikipedia article.  When they're not, they're answerable on almost any other Stack Exchange site.  (Frankly, WB:SE regularly sees questions that are more easily, accurately, and appropriately answered on physics.SE, astronomy.SE, biology.SE or writers.SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might all sound selfish, but we want to keep the site focused on its intent.  Worse still, many of us, well, we work for a living, and what time we have to contribute we want to spend on the creative and imaginative portion.  I hope you can forgive us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Or pull an answer out of thin air that, while having potentially little or no actual science basis, will knock your socks off.  It's amazing the creative imaginations mingling on this site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T23:17:12.747" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5626" CreationDate="2017-11-26T00:11:10.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for Justin, but he's not usually so argumentative.  I'd chalk that one up to a bad day or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can help by pointing out a couple of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While I'm constantly amazed at the breadth of experience on this site, you were asking for very specific information.  Information that only a practioner in the field could easily provide.  That should have led to people simply not answering or the question being closed for a lack of research (even the VTCers are only human, it takes time to get to things).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of this qualifies as questions about our real world, which are generally off-topic because the information could be found from other sources.  It actually might be really cool what answers you get from JPL as they likely have off-the-shelf documentation for most of what you're asking for.  (I asked them when I was a teen about ion engines... something that didn't exist at all at the time... and they sent me a sheaf of paperwork with the latest research on the subject.  The experience was so cool I kept it all over the years... somewhere :-} )&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fan of that &quot;hard science&quot; tag, and the moment you added it you probably excluded everyone from answering.  It literally means, &quot;if you can't back your answer up with mathematics or authority, or links to where the math or authority can be found, it isn't a valid answer.&quot;  At a guess, the people participating probably went from &quot;how are we supposed to answer this?&quot; to &quot;you want WHAT?&quot; when you added the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I don't see that your question is badly formatted or scoped.  But I do think the depth of data you're looking for is beyond what we normally see.  I would hope that everyone involved would respect one thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments aren't for arguments or debate (from either side).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T08:53:32.747" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T08:53:32.747" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5448" CreationDate="2017-11-28T06:51:14.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading Monica's, Bellerphon's, and Olga's answers, I have come to three conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could be convinced to use LostBot, WorldBot, or BuildBot (I loved the fan fiction!)...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But then I read the history of Glarnak (Forgive thy humble supplicant, Mighty Glarnak!).  I laughed so hard (you people had a ton of fun over the years) that I can't imagine anything else but Glarnak.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But, in the end, Olga's completely right.  It needs to be a Bot so new users aren't confused. (GlarBot?  BotNak?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's certainly a rich history to this site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T06:51:14.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:40:57.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do &lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt; in any number of areas and that's not WB.  Want to know how a fire company works, what size pipes are in a sewer, the visibility of the moon at the south pole — all &lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt; not WB.  Sometimes the specific problem is not real but the knowledge and working out &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; — how much sewer is needed for a city of size X,what is the precession rate of a planet with Y characteristics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the main difference that makes it worldbuilding is &lt;strong&gt;creativity&lt;/strong&gt;.  The answers invent things, make up stuff.  That is something that would rule it out of normal per-subject SEs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, the answer is more about ramifications than the thing itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, it is about invention and innovation.  In this case the subject needs to have a major effect on the setting/culture/environment — asking how to use paracord while camping (so what if it’s on an alien world) is not liked, but asking about mass transit or macroeconomics &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my observations — it’s hard to make concrete, and there are always exceptions.  And many closed questions still prove useful to the asker if he really wanted to know the answer, rather than treat the answers as a form of entertainment in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T09:40:57.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2017-11-28T23:22:27.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to be too blunt here, but I don't think the problem is so much the topic as the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered that question, and it's generally frowned upon to do so if you consider a question off topic, so it's safe to say I don't have an issue with it (or questions like it) being asked here. But it's borderline enough that users who consider world building to require more fictional elements will vote to close (and to be honest they have a point too, the question asked in the title is something you could Google easily enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the cesspit question is better received and hasn't been closed despite sharing some of the reasons people voted to close the firewood one as off topic is because it is better written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is any reason why questions about the real world can't be asked here, though they should be things that can't easily be Googled (alternative history type questions like the duct tape one fit this, you might find an answer to that through Googling and research but it requires an element of creativity which makes it a good fit for here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you had asked &quot;How would a medieval village store communal resources such as firewood, rope and buckets?&quot; it might have been better received. As it is your question proposed a situation, then contradicted this and then completely ignored it to ask whether rope and wood rots when left out (a question which isn't really suitable for this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the end of the day this site is one moderated by its community. And one of the down sides to that is that unfortunately some questions will be closed if the people online that day don't find them suitable whereas others (which appear similar) get upvotes and lots of answers because different users looked at them.&#xA;The best you can do to ensure your questions stay open is to make them as appealing as possible and be sure to ask them in a way that fits the guidelines of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T23:22:27.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-29T10:48:46.023" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often I read a question where the story/world behind it sounds really interesting and I want to hear/read more about it. I'm pretty sure that there are already released publications(novels, games, stories) to some of the questions answered on this site. How about creating a list where the WB SE users can link their released &quot;product&quot; with the questions related to it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28412" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T11:57:01.687" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T11:57:01.687" Title="List of publications by the Worldbulding SE users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-29T13:18:28.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2017-11-29T16:01:18.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several works of fiction have been published on our blog, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;.  Some are longer works still being serialized; others are completed works.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2559/28&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; includes a list that was current through early 2016.  That question asked for something slightly different, but the contents of that answer would be a reasonable start to a community-wiki answer to &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T16:01:18.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5639" CreationDate="2017-12-04T06:14:52.957" Score="5" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was vainly looking at the list of badges to see if there were any I could cherry pick in a moment of boredom (mostly beause my psychology absolutely depends on looking like I'm somehow important on WB:SE) when I noticed the Tumbleweed badge.  That badge has never been awarded, and little wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question title would need to put people off, but not so much so that people wouldn't click on it just to see what idiotic nonsense you were blathering about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question itself would need to be legitimate and within the rules posted for the site, but so boring that nobody would care to answer, comment, or upvote (or, if surprisingly there is an upvote, someone would need to downvote, too).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My kneejerk reaction was that this was a badge so insanely difficult to obtain that it should be a gold badge.  Or an irridium badge.  Or even a glowing hot plasma... a sign of divine favor that resulted in your WB:SE pages all receiving a soft, yellow glow and your moniker discovered on everyone else's pages accompanied by a high quality audio effect of an angelic sigh of satisfaction; thereby identifying you as one of the august few who have risen to the ranks of the notoriously mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I realized that it's likely impossible to get this badge without putting &lt;em&gt;actual effort&lt;/em&gt; into asking a question that would get it, but that might result in even greater curiosity and, worse, would seem to defy the intent of StackEchange in general in that questions are, well, aren't they supposed to be in some way &lt;em&gt;useful?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now we're on a slippery-slope toward people actually &lt;em&gt;trying&lt;/em&gt; to get this badge, thereby filling our cherished site with (ostensibly) boring questions that nobody wants to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leading to my final conclusion, why do we have this badge in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we burn this badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not the first person to ask this question.  FrostFyre was.  For the full conversation, see these posts:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2226/badge-viability&quot;&gt;Badge viability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2720/the-completionists-dilemma&quot;&gt;The Completionist&amp;#39;s Dilemma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am stunned and in absolute awe for receiving the Tumbleweed Badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6818/a-promotion-for-the-community-promotion-ads&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.  Though previously awarded to 0 people on the main site and 1 person on Meta (I'm the 2nd), I frankly didn't think this badge could be earned.  I'm honored!  I really am!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T20:58:25.190" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T20:58:25.190" Title="Shouldn't the Tumbleweed badge be either gold or burned?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5635" CreationDate="2017-12-04T06:46:20.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know we can't burn badges. They are the same across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to cases like Tumbleweed - on a site like worldbuilding, which is focused on creativity, it's nearly impossible as you have already stated to get something like tumbleweed. But on a site like StackOverflow, which is the largest and most important site in the network, it's easy to have a valid question that gets drowned in the sheer amount of questions. Tumbleweed provides at least something for people with such questions. Questions about obscure programming languages that really nobody can answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And tumbleweed means there is a way to sort for this sort of question - which allows others to look for them and specifically answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also leads to some badges being far easier on bigger sites - the review badges for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't hurt you that you can't get that badge here - probably nobody can. Ignore it, we can't do something about it. It's other site's fault ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T07:10:52.550" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T07:10:52.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5635" CreationDate="2017-12-04T07:01:02.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/63/tumbleweed?userid=658087&quot;&gt;gotten one&lt;/a&gt; on a different board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The culture and relatively small size of WB makes this impossible.  The badge definitions are global.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T07:01:02.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5635" CreationDate="2017-12-04T16:41:52.663" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Angelic sigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, that's the best I can do on the special effects.  As others said, the badge lists are global and sites can't customize them.  Take a look at the badge list here on meta, which includes the badges for bounties -- but you can't award bounties on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tumbleweed was, as I understand it, meant as a &lt;em&gt;consolation prize&lt;/em&gt;, not a goal to work toward.  &quot;Hey, you asked a reasonable question (we didn't downvote it to oblivion before deleting it and salting the earth on which it sat or amything), but nobody looked.  Still, we want to give you something for your effort, so have a &lt;s&gt;cookie&lt;/s&gt; badge!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's actually a pretty neat compliment for our community that this badge has never been awarded.  People aren't just focusing on their favorite tags and not reading the rest; people here are &lt;em&gt;engaged&lt;/em&gt;.  That's great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T16:41:52.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5641" CreationDate="2017-12-05T13:01:53.593" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to use the mobile site a lot, but it’s missing a few of the really helpful desktop features (i.e. adding hyperlinks (with neat/concise anchor text), bulleting, etc.) I also can’t use the app, because storage space... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to add an “Insert Hyperlink” function for the mobile site? I’ve been trying with HTML [a href=“...”], but it’s not displaying neatly, and I’d like to give my posts half a chance of looking tidy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, if I’m missing something really obvious, I’d love to know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42174" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T15:29:35.077" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T17:57:58.027" Title="Adding hyperlinks to questions/answers on mobile site" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5640" CreationDate="2017-12-05T17:57:58.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Use the markdown&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When editing/answering/questioning on the desktop version you can see a little help/question mark button at the top right corner of the field where you write something. This gives you plenty of information about how to write stuff in posts on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please do not use HTML if there is a way around it - HTML regularly messes with the markdown. Try to get used to using MarkDown without the features (at least as a workaround).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example fo you with the links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can write a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;the MarkDown help&lt;/a&gt; the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[the MarkDown help](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way you can accomplish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in multiple ways&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be accomplished like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- a list  &#xA;- in multiple ways&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a numbered list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which would&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look like this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you would write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. which would&#xA;2. look like this&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A header is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Header level 1&#xA;## Header level 2&#xA;### Header level 3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And emphasis is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*italic*&#xA;**bold**&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few more things that you can find in the linked help menu. If you are regularly posting stuff it's worth it to try and learn it. It makes stuff a lot faster and easier if you don't have to rely on the little buttons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T17:57:58.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5643" CreationDate="2017-12-05T21:46:00.140" Score="9" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think Worldbuilding has missed any &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/winter-bash&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;winter-bash&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;winter-bash&lt;/a&gt; since the site's inception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This year's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/303371/157730&quot; title=&quot;Winter Bash 2017: When will it start this year?&quot;&gt;begins&lt;/a&gt; in about a week. &lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2017.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the countdown page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/270511/157730&quot;&gt;the answer to &lt;em&gt;Is there a simple page, “What is Winter Bash, and what's all this about hats”? Can we have one?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winter Bash is a fun event, that starts every year in the middle of December, usually between &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.calendarlabs.com/holidays/jewish/hanukkah.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanukkah&lt;/a&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.calendarlabs.com/holidays/us/christmas.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christmas&lt;/a&gt;, and lasts until  the end of that year, for about 2 weeks. During this event, users are given &quot;hats&quot; for doing certain actions on the sites (hats are per site, like badges) and they can choose what &quot;hat&quot; to wear via their profile. That hat will be visible on top of their avatar for everyone to see. There is a spirit of competition inspired by having a global leaderboard, and a race to find the secret hats. When the event is over, the &quot;hats&quot; are all gone and can't be accessed anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we participate in 2017's Winter Bash? Please vote for &lt;em&gt;only one of&lt;/em&gt; yes, no or indifferent,&lt;/strong&gt; as appropriate, by upvoting the appropriate answer. The final decision will be at the discretion of the moderators, but I promise that we will give due consideration to the community's vote. (I do not, however, promise anything about precisely &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; consideration will be due. ;-))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect that there will be an &quot;I hate hats&quot; option, as usual, so that even if we do participate, those who don't want to see any hats can easily opt out on an individual basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T22:21:43.997" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T22:21:43.997" Title="Do we participate in Winter Bash 2017?" Tags="|discussion|winter-bash|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5642" CreationDate="2017-12-05T21:46:18.113" Score="24" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, let's participate in Winter Bash 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T21:46:18.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5642" CreationDate="2017-12-05T21:47:45.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, let's not participate in Winter Bash 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T21:47:45.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5642" CreationDate="2017-12-05T21:48:45.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I don't care&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't care whether or not we participate in Winter Bash 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T21:48:45.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5609" CreationDate="2017-12-06T10:28:17.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Questions with multiple answers are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; inherently off-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are getting into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5138/28789&quot;&gt;The problem with opinion based questions&lt;/a&gt; here. The main problem from my point of view is that this is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5147/28789&quot;&gt;big, blurry region&lt;/a&gt; where on-topicness and off-topicness are close to each other and everyone has a different understanding of &amp;quot;where to draw the line&amp;quot; and where everyone has different tags where he may be more or less lenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be a way to &lt;strong&gt;somewhat&lt;/strong&gt; objectively compare answers to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be about internal consistency, about how well it fits to the setting described in the question and about any number of things. We don't need exactly &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; correct answer for every question - but there needs to be a way to find the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer, even if all answers would fit the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we don't want is a question where every answer is &lt;em&gt;exactly equally&lt;/em&gt; valid. If there is no way to say that one answer is better than any other answer, not even because &amp;quot;it fits better to the setting described in the question&amp;quot; or similar things, then the question is &amp;quot;primarily opinion based&amp;quot; and should be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is more opinion based than many other sites on the network. We have to live with this and have discussions about on-topic/off-topic, especially with a focus on &amp;quot;pimarily opinion based&amp;quot;, from time to time, because the network is not exactly made for opinion based questions. That's why we need to help whenever we can to make a question &lt;em&gt;somewhat objectively&lt;/em&gt; answerable. This, in turn, is opinion based - which makes this whole topic very, very difficult. What is &lt;em&gt;somehwat objectively answerable&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't give completely general guidelines that are always applicable - we can only try to give some rules and every once in a while there will be a discussion. The community will then decide on the fate of the question on a case-by-case basis. How the community exactly votes will shift again and again and again - what has been on-topic a year or two ago might not be on-topic anymore. And what is off-topic right now might be on-topic again in a year or two. Nobody knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current guideline is that questions are not &amp;quot;primarily opinion based&amp;quot;, just because there are multiple &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; answers - questions are &amp;quot;primarily opinion based&amp;quot; if &lt;em&gt;every possible somewhat reasonable answer is exactly equally valid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:31:33.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5609" CreationDate="2017-12-06T14:28:03.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Secespitus has provided an excellent answer, as a supplement I'd like to add that without a way to evaluate answers people have no idea where to focus their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a perfect example from the early days of the site which would without question be closed now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2626/49&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2626/49&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without even trying I came up with 7 different answers to the question, if I'd kept going I could have come up with 7 more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I know which of those is better than any of the others? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which ones should I write down or leave out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which ones do I expand on to flesh out into a &quot;proper&quot; answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without some way to rate answers the people writing answers have no idea what to write, and people voting for answers have no way to know what to vote for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T14:28:03.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5658" CreationDate="2017-12-07T12:47:55.973" Score="9" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5002/is-there-hard-data-on-close-votes&quot;&gt;a previous question on data on close votes&lt;/a&gt;, and a related question came to my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is as follows: &lt;strong&gt;is it possible to reject the hypothesis that there exists well-defined cliques of users that have a higher than random frequency in co-voting to close questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a noob in terms of community dynamics, my expectation would be that the specific sample of users that vote to close any given question should be a random sample of the the population of users that in general cast a vote to close questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not the case, I am of the opinion that there could be other factors at play, some of which should be considered and addressed as a community. For instance, there could be cascade effects, such that a user vote to close prompts a fellow user (let's say a friend) to vote to close, regardless of the merit of the question &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;; or, it could be topic driven, i.e. some groups of users do not like (otherwise reasonable) questions on certain topics, hence the co-voting patterns; or, it could be that there is a group strategy (explicit or just emergent) to assert dominance and control within the larger group of the community. You name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would tag this question as hard-statistics, in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T14:50:48.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T16:00:26.420" Title="Is there hard data on users' cliques for close votes?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2017-12-07T13:52:53.990" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any data at hand, but here's my feeling based on what I've seen on the site and a few things to keep in mind for this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You can't see who voted to close before the closing is complete, so long as people don't explicitly comment.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see a question in the review queue and no comments indicating any problems I often leave a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3773/reminder-to-close-voters&quot;&gt;Reminder to Close-Voters&lt;/a&gt; to prompt others to state what they think is wrong with the question. Other people do this regularly, too, if there hasn't been any comment. So the second or third person to get a close vote in the review queue can often see at least one person who said something that may be wrong with a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still: you normally don't know who voted to close until the question is put on hold. Just like you can't normally see who voted to reopen until the question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could go to your review history after casting your vote and see who voted for what, but that's already after the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it hard for cliques to know when their voting-buddy voted for something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There is no private messaging integrated into the SE network.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody can send a private message to someone indicating something like &amp;quot;Hey, how about we close this question?&amp;quot; inside of the normal network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would require the participants to get acquainted outside of the network, which increases the amount of work slightly that would be required, just for this kind of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest you can get inside of the normal SE network is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, which everybody can access to write who has at least 20 reputation. And everybody can read it, no matter the reputation. This is a very low mark and there are no other requirements to be part of this &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;. In fact we would love if more people regularly visited the chat to talk about their ideas/projects/... I've seen it sometimes (maybe once a month or every two months?) that someone posts a blatantly off-topic question there to start a discussion with the regulars who are online at the moment. Or about a question that needs reopening, because the author edited his question. Or about asking people to help with editing to give a new user some hints. A lot of the regulars in the chat have enough reputation to vote for close/reopen/edit/..., which makes this the ideal place to talk about pro and con of putting something on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4997/a-chat-room-for-reopening-and-closing-questions&quot;&gt;special chat room for talking about reopening&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: the chat may be somewhat active at times, but there is not even enough attention to maintain a chatroom for this topic. The special room was frozen and it's very rare that a question pops up in the chat for VTC/VTO. And the discussions tend to be quite diverse. The people there are not thinking &amp;quot;Ah, I know that username, so the question he mentioned must be closed immediately.&amp;quot; - we openly talk about why a question should be put on hold or reopened if the case arises. Still, you could call it a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot; if you wanted to. It's the closest thing you can get to a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot; on this site anyway as the amount of regular chat users is quite limited, although everyone with a very little amount of 20 reputation can be part of this very open &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;There are Meta discussions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More often than in the chat someone posts something about closing/reopening on Meta. This leads to the regular Meta users seeing the question and acting on them, as a lot of them also have higher rep. Again, this could be seen as a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;, even if it's open to everyone. It's commonly referred to as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/235225/what-is-the-meta-effect&quot;&gt;Meta Effect&lt;/a&gt;. But these Meta discussions are still not something that leads to people thinking &amp;quot;Ah, yes, gotta close&amp;quot;. They are open discussions where different people offer different views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can post on Meta with 5 reputation. Again, reading is possible even for people that are not logged in to the site. It's open for everyone. And 5 reputation is a single answer or question upvote. It's a tenth of the reputation you need to be able to comment everywhere. This could be seen as a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;, but just like the chat, it's a very open and welcoming &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;. More activity on Meta would also be a great thing. There can't be too many people active in the chat / on Meta, so getting more opinions about how closing/reopening/... should work on the site would be great and people listen to arguments - not to the username that posted something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Regular close voters often have somewhat similar patterns.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there are a handful of people that very often vote similar to how I am voting. Seeing their username in the comments does in fact draw my personal attention because I know how they comment and realized through experience that they are very good at filtering the noise or summarizing problems/possible solutions. Data would surely suggest that we are a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot; - mainly because they just vote similar most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because people vote similar doesn't mean they stop thinking the moment one of them posts something. For example those people I have in mind have a similar opinion most of the time - just not when it comes to questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. There are surely similarities in the voting pattern, but also bigger differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A question that is put on hold without any real reason can easily be reopened.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting on Meta and asking for the reasons for a question that was put on hold will draw in people that look at the question and you will surely find people that see the merit. If there are enough the question can be reopened. And as you can only VTC once on every question there won't be a war. You may see patterns of people who don't like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions for example voting to clsoe these questions and people who like them and vote to reopen - in the end the whole active community decides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;People show dramatically different levels of activity when it comes to reviewing.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people review a lot. Some people don't like reviewing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will surely find that a few people VTC very often, especially compared with the average user. You could say that they are a &amp;quot;clique&amp;quot;. It would probably look like it. But someone has to do the reviewing if we want high quality questions and answers on the site. If you feel there are too few reopen votes for example the best thing to do is to lead with a good example by raising the topic on Meta/in chat regularly and trying to focus on the reopen review queue. But just like you might want to focus on the reopen queue you will find people who focus on the closing queue. Because that's also an important part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there are &amp;quot;cliques&amp;quot; of people on this site. Yes, there are some people who are more strict/lenient when it comes to certain topics and there are groups that you will find more often as reviewers, such as regular Meta users and regular chat users, but it's not like they are always voting for the same thing or stop to think once they see someone vote. And there are no groups who regularly invite others to close a bunch of questions they don't like. This would probably have the adverse effect quite often - if you can't say why you want to close something I for example tend to give the querent the benefit of doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am sure that any data would reveal that some people are very often co-voting. I can think of a few people that I would expect to see with a similar voting pattern to mine because we have a similar take on a lot of topics. Participating in a lot of discussions about these topics, because we always had them and will always have them on this site, leads to that, which is also a good sign that there are certain rules that people can follow to know whether something is on-topic or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T16:00:26.420" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-07T16:06:44.773" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The value of precedent&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most important principles in organizing a just society is the equally applicable rule of law. Worldbuilding is, while perhaps seeming trivial compared to a nation, simply another society that we all hope is organized in a just manner. No one doubts that there is plenty of injustice in the real world, but one of the most important tools for ensuring what fair treatment there is before the law is judicial precedence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that a judge deciding a case must look to the precedent set by earlier cases to make determinations as to whether something is on or off topic. This ensures not just fair treatment through time, but also fair treatment to people to people in front of different judges, for all judges have the same obligation to look at precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The applicability of precedent&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of precedent is something that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99573/what-kind-of-poisons-could-be-used-in-a-hospital-setting?noredirect=1#comment296707_99573&quot;&gt;we should observe&lt;/a&gt; on this site. If a question was asked before that is similar in scope, then there is no reason to close a question that is here for review. The standards don't change over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked was closed, while the two similar questions that I posted in comments received 18k views (one of them, possibly both, seem to have hit the 'Hot Network' bar), 24 upvotes, and 27 answers. Clearly, these are legitimate questions for this site. By precedent, no one should be voting to close the new question, unless they do not think it is similar to the old question. I would argue that it is not valid to retroactively say that the old questions, so well upvoted and answered, were invalid in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Experience is a valued companion to precedent&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expecting every close voter to do the due diligence of an appelate court judge when voting on questions is silly. But expecting them to respect precedent when it is brought up to them is not. I am calling for all close voters on this site to respect the decision made by others before you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I am calling for fewer 'snap judgements' and more time spent looking through site history. Experience is valid here. I was able to bring up the other questions because I had seen them before and remembered them. This prompted me to take a look through history, where I read about 10 poison related questions and picked two that seemed similar, but not similar enough to close as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, not to be accusational, but four of the give users that voted to close were not able to cast such votes when either of the two linked questions were posted. These users simply did not have the &lt;em&gt;experience&lt;/em&gt; to know that such a question was in fact on topic, as shown by &lt;em&gt;precendent&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to be accusational, they voted to close anyways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the fifth user that voted to close has been on the site much longer than I, and reviewed many more questions than I, and still voted to close. That is, of course, how our democratic voting system works. We will not all agree on what should be closed and for what reasons. And there is no reason to assume that the newer users' reasoning is defective on this particular vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would urge people, especially those that have not been on the site that long, to take some time to do research before voting on whether or not to close questions. There is a long long history of questions on this site, and a historical review can tell you both whether a question is on topic and whether it is duplicate, all at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T19:38:27.177" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:20:15.237" Title="How to be a close voter" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5652" CreationDate="2017-12-07T16:20:48.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an explicit rejection of precedent in the existing discourse on both this both for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5032/26175&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; in particular and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/194117/355346&quot;&gt;the entirety of stack exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote the accepted answer on Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;View all question with today's standards. If the question fits as per current standards then leave it open; if it doesn't fit then vote/flag to close it. If we keep the questions which don't fit as per current standards, then people will ask why the questions are still open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't do this then there will always be hidden gotchas for new users and people newly at 3k rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that have been closed that have positive votes or answers are protected from auto-deletion. So there is little risk for well received but closed questions from going away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T16:24:52.543" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T16:24:52.543" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2017-12-07T16:40:31.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on this with the data explorer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First for some background, I started with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/768042/top-close-voters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; and modified it to work for Worldbuilding's close criteria. I also used &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/152649/list-of-closed-quesions-from-2013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; (modified) to determine how many closed questions we have had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were exactly 100 users who voted to close a question in 2017 that eventually became closed. Of those 100, the top 10 cast 60% of the close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were in total 1522 questions that were closed this year, so far. There are three users that have each voted to close more than 50% of the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I broke it down by month, it is not uncommon to see multiple users who have voted together to close more than 80% of the questions in a month, or a set of five users who collectively cast 50% of all close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before even doing a deeper dive analysis, I would say that, yes, there are definitely 'cliques'. However, these cliques are really just the list of people who like to close questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T16:40:31.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5656" CreationDate="2017-12-07T17:18:19.483" Score="9" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5648/is-there-hard-data-on-users-cliques-for-close-votes&quot;&gt;Is there hard data on users' cliques for close votes?&lt;/a&gt; made me think about whether there is a difference in people's closing and reopening vote patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have any data, for example from SEDE, that would give any indication to users' voting patterns in regards to reopen votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I would love to know whether we can see that users normally follow a &quot;Close everything and reopen nothing!&quot; pattern or a &quot;Close fast, reopen fast!&quot; pattern. The latter would be the ideal constellation in my eyes. Maybe there are some other interesting patterns to see in the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information for this question and the linked one may be used so that we as a community can think about which patterns we would love to see continued or changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:25:26.560" Title="Is there hard data on users' reopen voting patterns?" Tags="|discussion|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5655" CreationDate="2017-12-07T18:03:06.660" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Close voting by user&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been 15403 close votes since the site started, and 1416 reopen votes; or about 10 times as many close votes as open votes. Note, this does not count the deleted questions. I measured each voter's close to re-open stance using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;decibels&lt;/a&gt;, so a score of 10 means you close 10 times more than you reopen, 20 means 100 times more, -10 means you reopen 10 times more than you close, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The average for the site is 10.4 decibels. I use a system to account for zeros, so the highest user is 26.8 decibels (48 close votes, no re-opens) while the lowest user is -21.8 decibels (0 close votes, 15 reopens). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaking the users down into categories by decibel, 0.37% of all close votes are given by people who's scores are negative (more reopen than close), 22% of close votes are given by users whose scores are positive but below average, while the remaining 78% percent of users have scores above average. 18 % of close votes come from users with a score of 20 or higher; that is, they have cast at least 100 times as many close votes as re-open votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;User changes in 2017&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at data just since 2017, the average score has increased to 11.1 decibels, while the close votes from users with a score of 20 or higher is up to 23% with 84% of votes coming from users who score above 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all time, the weighted score of the top 10 closers is 16.3, while for 2017, the weighted score is 17.8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Overall question outcome&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: More changes to these numbers, I'm learning how to use the database better, sorry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all time, there are 14166 questions on this site, and 3258 that have been closed but remain, and 2115 that have been deleted; 38% of all questions have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For 2017, there are 5546 questions posted, and 1522 that have been closed and remain, and 847 that have been deleted; 43 % of questions posted in 2017 have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Cross Site Comparisons&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;              Questions Closed Reopened Deleted CloseRate ReopenRate DeleteRate&#xA;Worldbuilding     14166   5788      415    2115     40.1%       7.2%      36.5%&#xA;Role Playing      27205   6990     1539    2663     25.7%      22.0%      38.1%  &#xA;SciFi &amp;amp; Fant      50628  12044     1282    6442     23.8%      10.6%      53.5%&#xA;Workplace         26121  16847      668    9013     64.5%       4.0%      53.5%&#xA;Travel            34798  14423      845    7816     41.4%       5.9%      54.2%&#xA;IT Security       61690  25488      276   18108     41.3%       1.1%      71.0%&#xA;Physics          155167  62415      790   45388     40.2%       1.3%      72.7%&#xA;Skeptics          12575   5828      602    4378     46.3%      10.3%      75.1%&#xA;Cross Valid      168852  61992     1431   53719     36.7%       2.3%      86.7%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to draw a conclusion. We have the lowest 'delete' rate, that is, the number of questions that get closed before anyone answers or comments on, so that they get auto-deleted. The only other site that has such a low delete rate (that I found, so far) is Role Playing. Yet that site re-opens nearly 1 in 4 questions that get closed. Note there is a general increasing trend in reopen rate with decreasing delete rate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a close and reopen fast type of site, that neglects to reopen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T21:25:26.560" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:25:26.560" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5652" CreationDate="2017-12-07T19:08:34.523" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are three parts to this meta question, beyond what is explicitly asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The specific question you've mentioned, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/99573/627&quot;&gt;What kind of poisons could be used in a hospital setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To what degree precedent matters, and how the scope evolves dynamically over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close voting (which you're suggesting some users are doing too often, or irresponsibly) without knowing the scope very well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. The case at hand.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself asks for a poison that would kill a person while keeping them conscious throughout the process, with the requirement that the poison be hidden on an initial examination but discoverable upon deeper inspection. In terms of question quality, it doesn't have quite as many details as I'd like, and it doesn't show a huge amount of original research, but it's not terrible, and it does give some criteria (especially the one about keeping the poison hidden, which makes things slightly challenging).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read through the comments there, and I found a couple that are relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please can you explain how this question relates to wolrd building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost any medicine is poison if used inappropriately or in conjunction with certain other medications. This is really story building, though, not world building. Should probably be moved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those questions are not on-topic. They are storybuilding, not worldbuilding questions. Even the setting is in this real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm reading things, folks are voting to close for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't think it's about worldbuilding. I don't see how it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding; the OP explicitly states that it is for a creative work they're making, and they need help on a specific detail - not an overarching idea, concept, or plot arc, but a specific detail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They think it's idea generation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me address the second one in more detail, because the concept of &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot; has a long and - if you'll pardon the pun - storied history on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. I'll try to get it (mostly) right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this site, &amp;quot;idea generation/plot building&amp;quot; basically means that someone is asking us to come up with an entire idea for their world. For instance, they could ask us to decide how a knight should best rescue a princess being held captive by a ravenous monster. That's building the plot right there. &lt;strong&gt;In general, if a question is about the actions of a character, it has a good chance at being idea generation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/523/627&quot;&gt;idea generation questions have several problems&lt;/a&gt;, right off the bat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're too broad. To use my example above, the knight could raise an army to save the princess . . . or face certain death and try to fight the monster one-on-one . . . or attempt to bargain with the monster - you get the idea. All of these solutions are, approximately, correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're really just invitations for endless discussion, and we're not a forum. Talking with others and bouncing ideas off them is great, and there plenty of places where you can do that; we're not one of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're not a content-generation engine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around the time of this first discussion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/476/627&quot;&gt;we picked &amp;quot;Idea Generation&amp;quot; as a custom close reason&lt;/a&gt;, and used it for a while. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2337/627&quot;&gt;Monica suggested nixing it about eight months later&lt;/a&gt;, mostly because it wasn't doing anything that Too Broad/Primarily Opinion-Based wasn't. It took us a while after that, but we finally got rid of it, especially after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/627&quot;&gt;some important&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3193/627&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; the following February, where many users expressed concerns that we were allowing too many &amp;quot;What-If&amp;quot; questions (and that's another saga in itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . But I digress. The point is, idea generation questions are usually overly broad and &lt;em&gt;poorly constrained&lt;/em&gt; - or not constrained at all. I will argue that this question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an idea generation question, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not asking us to build a plot (not the only criterion for idea generation, but a common one).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does place constraints; it's not just asking &amp;quot;What's the best poison I should use to kill someone?&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is an unconstrained question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has more than one right answer, probably, but you can objectively tell whether one is better than another. For instance, one poison might show up on an initial autopsy scan, while another might not; the first one is then better. Even more constraints could be added to the question as it is, which would be nice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cast the fourth (and binding) reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. Precedent.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Precedent on a Stack Exchange site is a tricky thing. On the one hand, it's great to refer back to, and old questions can tell you what to do with new questions. On the other hand, it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; change. I know of plenty of cases on this site where once-good - and even quite popular - questions were closed because people realized that that class of question was not a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some of these cases, we've had (usually minor) scope changes. And that's fine. We live, we ask, we answer, we learn, and we see that some topics work while others don't. I think that that is - and should be - the primary driver behind scope change: &lt;strong&gt;experience about what works and what doesn't&lt;/strong&gt;. This is sometimes why it takes a while to implement, change or remove policy - we don't have a large data set on a specific topic. And you need data - making meta discussions based on just theory is a recipe for disaster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a problem if we change the scope over time. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; some things that we need to ensure happen if we do - and these are quite hard to implement, at times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We close old questions, too, for consistency and fairness. That way, new users won't ask off-topic questions because they think old ones are still on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We make sure people know about the change; if it's of a high enough magnitude, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; meta post may be appropriate to sum up the discussion (alternatively, the discussion itself could be featured).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We reach something of a consensus, and as many people as possible get a say. We don't want things happening behind closed doors, and we don't want a schism because half of the site can't agree with the other half of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all very hard and messy. I don't like it when we have to go back and close bunches of old questions, because we have to make sure that we don't miss any spots, and it's all very complex. Figuring out what's covered by the new standard is also hard. Fortunately, we haven't historically had many of these large-scale policy discussions in the three or so years this site has been around. Other sites have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Close voting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say, first of all, that it's emotionally challenging to see a site grow into something much bigger and almost uncontrollable than where it started out. I missed the private beta, but I joined very shortly after the public beta started, and I've been here for over three years. I've been amazed at how the site's evolved (and succeeded!). I still remember a lot from those days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm so happy that we've done well. I was ecstatic when we graduated; it made my week. But I'm also - totally selfishly - sad to see it flutter out of my hands, because now I can't see how every corner of it works, or how every question evolves, or have the chance to be a part of every discussion. I might be a mod, but I have very little control over the site. It's . . . different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so - and I say this gingerly, and delicately - I kinda sympathize with you being annoyed at newer people coming into the sandbox, so to speak, and not really knowing the history of the site. I get it; I've been there - both as a new user (!) and as now something of an old hand - though certainly not the oldest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Here's what I'll say to those with more experience on the site:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; do - in an ideal world, where I have enough time and energy and waking hours - would be to look at many questions in depth, and have a dialogue with those voting to close and/or reopen, and make sure that we all understand why a question is being closed. Everyone who gets the privilege to close and reopen does have a bit of a struggle trying to understand the nuances of the scope, especially on such a weird site as Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. I think it would behoove all of us with experience to help them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Here's what I'll say to close voters in general:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make it clear, on each question, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we're voting to close or voting to reopen. If we can cite a specific meta discussion, then great. In fact, that's ideal, because it helps the asker formulate better questions in the future. By giving them specifics and details about what questions the site likes and what questions it doesn't, we make it much easier for them to ask good and on-topic questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant thing to think about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3773/627&quot;&gt;Frostfyre's reminder to close-voters&lt;/a&gt;. Their standard comment is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close-voters: Please don't vote to close questions without leaving commentary. The problem cannot be fixed if the OP is not made aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter whether the votes are cast as off-topic, too broad, primarily opinion-based, or unclear: There should be more explanation of what the OP can do to fix things. We owe that to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:20:15.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2017-12-08T02:03:31.830" Score="17" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Data&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I analyzed all the data for 2017. I got the list of question-closers for 1719 questions that have been closed for any reason but not deleted (deleted posts usually have no upvotes or answers after 30 days). This also counts questions that have since been reopened. I then took every subset of these closers and counted them. Here are the results&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Groups of 1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most closing user voted on 907 close questions, or 53% of the total. There are 11 users who voted on 10% or more of the close questions and those 11 users placed 2.9 votes per closed question. Or, in other words, they provided 59 % of all close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Groups of 2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highest grouping of 2 voted to close 569 questions together, or 33% of all questions. There were 10 pairs of users from 6 individual users who voted on 10% or more of closed questions together, and they placed 1.6 votes per question, or 33 % of the total close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Groups of 3 or more&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highest grouping of 3 users voted to close 187 questions together. The highest group of 4 was 48 questions, and the highest group of 5, only 7 questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gini Index&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gini index of close voters is 0.807. Gini is a measure of inequality, used for incomes mostly. I don't have any information to put this number in context, but I am interested in doing so in the future, by comparison over time, or with other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pearsons $\chi^2$ test for independence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forming the the 11 highest users into a diagonal contingency table, we can use Pearsons test for independence. Using the null hypothesis of independence, I built a contingency table with 50 degrees of freedom. That table had a Pearson's $\chi^2$ score of 5492, which is very high. Since $p = 0$ for this test, we can (resoundingly) reject the null hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A cursory look at the data shows us why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some users close a lot of questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially recently, there are two users who have closed 'most' of the questions. Since August 1, there have been 718 questions closed; these two users closed 75% and 73% respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two users have voted together 399 times, or 76% and 74% of those users total close votes, respectively. Together, they have voted to close 56% of all questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third user who frequently votes along side these two. This third user has 207 close votes, of which 57% have been with &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of the two high close voters, and 93% have been with one or the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be evidence of some 'collusion.' However, when comparing the actual number of times users have closed questions against expected, even in these recent months when many questions have been closed, they are not operating together more than expected. Here are actual and expected numbers for users A, B, and C from above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Users   Expected Closes   Actual Closes&#xA;A + B              393              399&#xA;A + C              157              159&#xA;B + C              152              152&#xA;A, B, C            113              119&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the expected values are surprisingly accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we redo the $\chi^2$ test for this time period, we see that the score has dropped all the way down to 138. This is still low enough to reject the null hypothesis ($p=0.008$), but it is much closer than before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does look like certain groups are closing questions together a lot as a clique. However, this behavior is expected due to how frequently members of that group are closing questions in general. Despite a failure of independence test for the entire year, when broken down into smaller samples, the test looks a lot better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we can reject the null hypothesis that close voters are acting independently, but we can demonstrate some evidence that time is the factor causing this result. &lt;strong&gt;Overall, I conclude that there is insufficient evidence of voters demonstrating any of the co-voting patterns that you mention in the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T02:38:36.880" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T02:38:36.880" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5605" CreationDate="2017-12-08T12:43:33.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I would vote &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; in its current form&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edits from the OP were pretty superficial. After the closure of the question he made some text italic, some text bold and added the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...], in fact in fact pretty much any use of these forces on the macroscopic scale has the same problems[.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what exactly could someone do with one of these powers? Applications that would be actually be likely to come up in a rpg or story are more preferable than extremely niche uses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the second one looks like he added a question that was not there before to try and clear it up, but there already was another paragraph that started like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what is a weak-force, or strong-force psychic to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is not really a notable difference in my eyes. There are some additional criteria though that weren't there when the question was put on hold, but nothing that clarifies the premise - and the criteria are just that something would be able to come up in a story or RPG, which is not really a good way to quantify answers. There are a lot of stories and RPG's with a lot of different genres out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But: questions that are supposed to be reviewed should be reviewed as a whole based on the current guidelines&lt;/strong&gt;, so here is what I think about the question as it reads now: I would vote for &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still some aspects that look like the author created a world and is expecting everyone to be familiar with the concepts. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their powers fall into groups that control different well defined things, with many controlling fundamental forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;well defined things&lt;/em&gt; does the OP mean here? He later states something about &lt;em&gt;kinetic energy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;electromagnetic control&lt;/em&gt;. I am not too sure about whether he is not mixing up a few concepts here. For example I know &lt;em&gt;psions&lt;/em&gt; in fiction to be some sort of mages, people with special powers so that they can control their surroundings through a power that stems from their minds. Powers such as telekinesis. Is that a &lt;em&gt;well defined thing&lt;/em&gt; for the OP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyway, the text reads as if some superhero could control the strong force or the weak force and the questions make it pretty clear that everything else is out-of-scope for the question so I can safely ignore it even if I don't fully understand what the OP means. I can think about the part of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what exactly could someone do with one of these powers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is asking us for story-elements because he had this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;High Concept&lt;/a&gt; of people being able to control fundamental forces but he doesn't know what the implications are. And now he is looking for a list of useful things to do with this invented power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had a similar question some time later: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67996/what-would-powers-based-on-the-four-fundamental-forces-look-like&quot;&gt;What would powers based on the four fundamental forces look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there were a few comments I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67996/what-would-powers-based-on-the-four-fundamental-forces-look-like#comment196605_67996&quot;&gt;the first&lt;/a&gt; one is the one that explains best what is wrong with both of these questions in my eyes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the extent and limits of their abilities are up to you not us, you might want to refine your question. determining to what extent they can manipulate them would be a good start&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP to the second question also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm interested in what the manipulators of those forces can do, and what they cannot, and if they doing it would look cool to potential observers or it would just be imperceptible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know what is &lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt; for the OP. I like playing DnD and I think there are some pretty cool concepts in that game - go ask people on the street whether DnD is cool...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same with the OP of the question this meta discussion is about - what stories and RPG's does the OP mean? There are a lot of different genres and the OP might not like the same stuff that I read/play...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming up with the extent of powers is something that should be defined by the OP, not by the answerers. Asking what to do with a power that you don't define could be anything - and only you can define whether an answer sounds good for you. Every answer would be equally valid and everyone can come up with an answer. These points apply to the question that this Meta post is about as well as the other one I linked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a brainstorming request for the results of a high concept the OP came up with, which makes this an opinion-based question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T13:08:41.580" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T13:08:41.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5663" CreationDate="2017-12-08T19:17:40.893" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got an &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/users/163052/kingledion?tab=stats&quot;&gt;Area 51 account&lt;/a&gt; on Oct 22 last year, but since Feb 25 this year, I haven't been able to log in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I attempt to log in I see an error like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unable to log in with your OpenID provider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An unexpected error occurred while logging in. It's not you, it's us.&#xA;  This is our fault. Detailed information about this error has&#xA;  automatically been recorded and we have been notified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something wrong with my OpenID. However, if you take a look at my &lt;a href=&quot;https://openid.stackexchange.com/user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenID&lt;/a&gt; page, even though I have 12 failed attempts to validate Area 51, I was able to authenticate Data.SE just yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I followed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/users/account-recovery&quot;&gt;account recovery steps&lt;/a&gt; but that just leads me back to the original error message when I try to log on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find an Area 51 meta or anything to post onto, possibly because I don't have an Area 51 login, so I thought I'd ask here and see if anyone can point me to the right direction. How do I get a hold of someone who can fix my OpenID so that I can participate in Area 51?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T09:54:18.623" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T09:54:18.623" Title="Help me get on to Area 51" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5662" CreationDate="2017-12-08T19:34:42.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're using the HTTPS Everywhere browser add-on, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/303934/162102&quot;&gt;that might be your problem&lt;/a&gt;.  Otherwise, someone else recently made &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/304008/162102&quot;&gt;a similar support request on MSE&lt;/a&gt; that got fixed, so I'd try there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 has the &quot;discussion&quot; site, which is sort of like their per-site meta, but of course it's hard to post if you can't log in.  Meta.SE is also an appropriate place to take questions about Area 51 itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T19:34:42.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-11T21:17:16.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99902/what-food-is-best-for-growing-on-mars&quot;&gt;What food would be best for growing on Mars&lt;/a&gt;, so please go and give answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45641" OwnerDisplayName="Jayden Harris" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T05:02:27.790" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T07:14:18.953" Title="I edited my last question so please take it off of hold" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1935" CreationDate="2017-12-12T05:29:15.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/niven-ring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;niven-ring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;niven-ring&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dyson-ring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dyson-ring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dyson-ring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was used with only one question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/93788/can-a-ringworld-have-a-moon&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.  I have edited the question to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dyson-ring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dyson-ring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dyson-ring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T05:29:15.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1935" CreationDate="2017-12-12T05:33:27.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;powers&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was used with only one question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84327/a-humane-way-to-hold-a-group-of-elemental-manipulators-prisoner&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.  I have edited the question to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T05:33:27.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2017-12-12T06:04:01.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have upvoted @LioElbammalf's answer and would like to add to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last 20 minutes or so I was browsing through the approximately 75 used-only-once tags.  My goal was to find interesting tags that could generate a cool question and bring attention to the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found were duplicates... duplicates, duplicates, duplicates.  And a few &quot;why on earth do we even have that tag?&quot; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began by finding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1935/putting-tags-in-order-on-the-main-site/5670#5670&quot;&gt;this Meta post&lt;/a&gt; by @Vincent and even took the time to add two recommendations for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I realized new users were posting questions with newly invented tags that very specifically expressed an idea only as they wanted to say it.  Since the usefullness of tags incluses subscriptions and followers, that seemed very impractical, and I wondered how they were getting those new tags created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I visted the privileges page, found the 300 rep trigger, which prompted a &quot;what the...?&quot; moment, which prompted a search... which led me to this page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am 100% in favor of raising the reputation trigger for creating tags.&lt;/strong&gt;  I wouldn't even bother giving such young users the ability to suggest a tag.  They haven't figured out yet how to use tags, and yet they have the ability to create them without even providing basic explanations about what they mean (much less checking to see if they're duplicates, or even insensible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recommend setting the create-tag privilege to &lt;strong&gt;12,500&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recommend setting the create-tag-synonym to &lt;strong&gt;17,500&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recommend granting the ability to &quot;recommend a tag synonym&quot; at reputation 300.  The feature would post synonym requests to the review queue for voting.  (I won't be surprised if this isn't possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I recognize that a potential consequence of these recommendations is an increase of Meta questions asking &quot;Can't we have a ______ tag?&quot;  That might be useful.  Users who are willing to figure out Meta and post the question might deserve to have the question taken seriously.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I also recognize my recommended reputation triggers are quite high.  Higher than my own reputation at the time of this posting.  What can I say but, if you want to play in the kitchen, first learn how to cook.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if anyone can suggest an easier way to clean house, I'm more than happy to work on it from time-to-time.  But posting recommended changes one-answer-at-a-time is too inefficient for the 75 or so that need to be processed.  Much less the hundreds with 4 or fewer questions.  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T06:04:01.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1935" CreationDate="2017-12-12T06:20:16.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion-war&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion-war&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion-war&lt;/a&gt; as duplicates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was used with only one question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87837/how-to-prevent-religion-war-in-country-with-more-than-one-religion&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which already had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; tags.  I have already removed the redundant tag from the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T06:20:16.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5668" CreationDate="2017-12-12T07:14:18.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was edited during the &quot;on hold&quot; grace period so was automatically entered into the reopen review queue when you submitted the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also currently in the process of being reopened, having gathered one reopen vote so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you've mentioned your question on Meta, too, that should bring some additional eyes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at the question more than to check its status, but be patient and it should either be reopened, or you should receive feedback on what more you need to do to turn it into a reopenable state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T07:14:18.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5676" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:23:24.430" Score="7" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt; Greetings, worldbuilders! It's been a long year of creature-designing, map-making and society-building, and we're now in the throes of &lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2017.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt;. Last year, to commemorate the holidays, we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4186/627&quot;&gt;the first annual Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt;. I'd like to propose a second one, starting today and ending probably after Winter Bash ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bountapalooza is all about giving to others - in this case, putting bounties on questions to get more attention to them or reward answers. If you start a bounty, please add it to the community wiki answer below, with the username of the asker, your username, and the number of reputation points for the bounty. I've set things going with a bounty on one of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy holidays, and happy bountying!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:22:58.293" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:22:58.293" Title="The second annual Holiday Bountapalooza" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5675" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:23:24.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A list of the questions with bounties started during this season:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/95380/627&quot;&gt;Could a large radio telescope survive interstellar spaceflight?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by HDE 226868 (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98601/what-near-future-propulsion-systems-could-be-employed-by-my-spaceships&quot;&gt;What near-future propulsion system(s) could be employed by my spaceships?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by dot_Sp0T (+500)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63225/how-to-fire-your-engines-for-a-near-future-trip-around-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;How to fire your engines for a near-future trip around the solar system?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by kingledion, bountied by dot_Sp0T (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87375/naturally-occurring-phenomena-allowing-for-hallucinations-or-visions&quot;&gt;Naturally occurring phenomena allowing for hallucinations or &amp;quot;visions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25272/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-ship-capable-of-crossing-the-pacific&quot;&gt;What would it take to build a ship capable of crossing the Pacific?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Green, bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48735/mounted-cavalry-in-the-modern-era&quot;&gt;Mounted Cavalry in the Modern Era&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Nex, bountied by James (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64080/how-closely-should-be-placed-industrial-centre-nimby-from-urban-centre&quot;&gt;How closely should be placed industrial centre / NIMBY from urban centre?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Shadow1024, bountied by kingledion (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19808/how-can-i-explain-a-sudden-abundance-of-naturally-occurring-beer&quot;&gt;How can I explain a sudden abundance of naturally-occurring beer?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Mikey, bountied by kingledion (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62902/fired-ventilation-shafts-in-subterranean-dwellings&quot;&gt;Fires in the ventilation shafts of a Dwarven city?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Bibliophael, bountied by kingledion (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38354/how-often-must-carnivorous-grassland-eat&quot;&gt;How often must carnivorous grassland eat?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Joe Bloggs, bountied by Secespitus (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25281/anatomically-correct-griffins&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Griffins&lt;/a&gt;, asked by TrEs-2b, bountied by Secespitus (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28458/anatomically-correct-phoenix&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Phoenix&lt;/a&gt;, asked by TrEs-2b, bountied by Secespitus (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/355/how-critical-is-it-for-life-that-a-planet-remains-within-the-habitable-zone-at-a&quot;&gt;How critical is it for life that a planet remains within the habitable zone at all times?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Smithkm, bountied by JBH (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1396/are-there-any-free-science-fiction-world-settings&quot;&gt;Are there any free science fiction world settings?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by congusbongus, bountied by JBH (+200)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/99549/627&quot;&gt;Could you turn the asteroid belt into one giant full spectrum interferometer?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Imipak, bountied by HDE 226868 (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/99582/627&quot;&gt;Are there any natural forms of communication as robust as speech/vocalization?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by rek (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100051/39490&quot;&gt;Can you protect a Space Elevator from Space Junk?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Renzler, bountied by Olga (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/85294/627&quot;&gt;In a world where two enormous cities are built one on top of the other, what would weather be like in between?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by JanT (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11610/a-human-hunter-with-sonic-powers&quot;&gt;A Human Hunter with Sonic Powers?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99714/could-a-decreased-heartrate-thanks-to-better-hemoglobin-lead-to-an-increased-lif&quot;&gt;Could a decreased heartrate thanks to better hemoglobin lead to an increased lifespan?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by dot_Sp0T (+150)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3/809&quot;&gt;What is the minimum human population necessary for a sustainable colony?&lt;/a&gt; asked by Maximillian, bountied by Mołot (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100642/627&quot;&gt;How do we create an Anemone Tree?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by James (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3413/627&quot;&gt;Would nomadic people stay nomadic even in a temperate climate?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Vincent, bountied by JBH (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3267/627&quot;&gt;Best platform for collaborative worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, asked by Envite, bountied by JBH (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100169/627&quot;&gt;How efficient can my neutrino detector be?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by HDE 226868 (+200)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100986/627&quot;&gt;Are there physiological traits common to all tool-building species?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by JBH (+200)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This year's bountapalooza was quite something. We had . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;26 bounties started . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on 26 different questions . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by 11 different users . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a total of 2850 reputation points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second year in a row, nice job, Worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:21:56.240" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:21:56.240" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T16:23:24.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3930" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:43:28.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here's my 2 cents:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I feel the qualification for a hard science answer can be as lax as having some credible links to statistics and some semblance of a mathematical or scientific process. It being right or wrong is handled by voting. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I feel is obviously not hard science is a persons posed unsupported  logical conjecture supporting their ultimate answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I hate is when a question is posed and answered and then revised adding the hard-science tag thus invalidating answers. In this case I do not feel answers should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is also the issue that sometimes questions do not provide enough information to be reasonably answerable under the hard-science tag. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus programmatically I feel like the hard-science tag should only be used under these conditions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question may only invoke the hard-science tag at its creation and not in revision. As this should force the OP to define their question to be conducive with hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if a question invokes the hard-science tag it should be closeable as not conducive to being answerable under hard-science. Flaggers should also provide an explanation when voting this reason. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an answer to a hard-science tag should be flag-able for review that informs reviewers that the question needs to present links to facts as well as contain some formulaic construct. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes it is in my opinion that posing questions or answers under the hard-science tag should be a mutually rigid and grueling experience that should not be invoked by casual users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a laborious scientifically supported answer you should put equivalent effort into your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also imagine that there will be an iterative review process between closings and re-openings where readers request clarifications or enhancements of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:43:28.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:28:41.837" Score="8" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;As some of you have already noticed, over the last days a collaborative storytelling effort has been started here on WorldBuildingSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is meant as a means to keep everything surrounding the story organized. Community answers will provide different kinds of information &amp;amp; data on the whole effort and are intended to help people wanting to join the effort to orientate themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rules&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's 6 rules, intended to keep the writing effort going and preventing a single person from dominating the fun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Limit entries to the length of the chat input, or a paragraph. You can post once every 6 hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to avoid jarring changes. *&amp;quot;And suddenly the planet exploded, the end.&amp;quot; doesn't help anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't get too stressed out by grammar. That's what the editing phase is for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep non-story discussions out of this room. If you want to talk though issues use &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before you post your paragraph, just make a post in the main chat so that others will know that you are doing it and not post at the same time as you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When posting the next paragraph, hit the reply button to keep it all in a chain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 1 rule for this meta-question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any information in here is intended to depict the &lt;em&gt;current state&lt;/em&gt; of the story, if it's not in the story yet it goes into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5684&quot;&gt;Theory section&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dedicated room where you can join the writing is found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/70113/story-go-round&quot;&gt;The Story-Go-Round Room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story can also be found in form of a google docs document that is updated at the reader's discretion, in case the chat proves uncomfortable for reading up: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OxsJiQvkO9q_r0fSyWGgo0HJT3dtW5eIBO3k29zZ4nY/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Story-Go-Round Google Document&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Index&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below you find links to the different community answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5679&quot;&gt;Characters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5681&quot;&gt;Locations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5682&quot;&gt;Concepts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5708&quot;&gt;Culture &amp;amp; Society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5683&quot;&gt;Things &amp;amp; Items &amp;amp; Animals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5684&quot;&gt;Theories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6462/6751&quot;&gt;Timeline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Collaborators&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a list of every person that has participated in the story so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751/andyd273&quot;&gt;Andyd273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/23519/kingledion&quot;&gt;kingledion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12238/future-historian&quot;&gt;Future Historian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26175/sphennings&quot;&gt;sphennings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17720/bellerophon&quot;&gt;Bellerophon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&quot;&gt;Secespitus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/34744/gryphon&quot;&gt;Gryphon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19951/mithrandir24601&quot;&gt;Mithrandir24601&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29623/buffer-over-read&quot;&gt;Buffer Over Read&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/users/34073/hosch250&quot;&gt;Hosch250&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T19:07:29.807" Title="Story-Go-Round Background &amp; Info" Tags="|discussion|reference|chat|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:28:41.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Characters&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you find info on the characters of our story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bremdag (He)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age: 27 cycles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carries: bag(food for several days), water skin, bow, quiver, long knife, Staff, charged Phylactery, , jar of fire slug slime&#xA;Wears: Cloak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hemdul (He)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age: ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carries: charged Phylactery&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wears: thick travelling coat, belt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Descriptors: stocky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Family: &lt;em&gt;Nairahdul&lt;/em&gt;'s step brother (not really friendly)&#xA;Character: egoist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Brohkem (He)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age: ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carries: Small saucepan, larger saucepan, tea, jar of fire slug slime&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wears: ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Jarilo (She)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age: ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carries: charged Phylactery, jar of fire slug slime&#xA;Wears: ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nairahdul (She)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age: ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carries: Knife, jar of fire slug slime&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wears: lots of wet clothing (dry by chapter 2), plenty of burns&#xA;Family: &lt;em&gt;Hemdul&lt;/em&gt;'s step sister&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user39548" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T14:45:21.997" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T20:28:41.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:34:52.417" Score="13" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on Meta Stack Exchange, I announced &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/304445/1438&quot;&gt;an experiment&lt;/a&gt; that would:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turn on the review queue indicator whenever there's a task available in any queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All queues with at least one task will be marked with a red dot. There are no grey dots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Dvps.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Dvps.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inbox Zero indicator&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; mean you'll be notified of outstanding tasks you can't clear.&lt;/strong&gt; We are aware of a problem that people will be notified of queues that they don't have the privilege to access. That's next on the list to fix. The goal is to be more aggressive with the indicator to see if we can clear tasks more quickly. Please let us know if we've gone too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in general, we're interested in any feedback to this change: positive, negative or noncommittal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T10:46:32.523" Title="Experiment: More aggressive review queue indicator" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:43:29.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Locations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you find info on the locations of our story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;World (no designation as of now)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;several moons, not all of them visible at once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lavender horizon at early morning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Arcologies&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People live in vast underground arcologies that protect them from the harsh sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Plains&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section of fallow land between the &lt;em&gt;Arcologies&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Spirewood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Spirewood&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forest of kilometer high spire-trees, location of &lt;em&gt;The Challenges&lt;/em&gt;(?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Radiation Pit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Location of *The First Challenge**&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phylactery&lt;/em&gt; is charged here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Jungle Continent (WIP name)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;home of the &lt;em&gt;Hell Bird&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dangerous jungles where neither men (nor women) dare tread&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thor&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;turquoise stripes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;great spot engulfing northern hemisphere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sun (no designation as of now)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;white-ish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't give much heat but burns the skin when outside too long&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Old Earth / Home of Humanity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rumoured origin of &lt;em&gt;The Five Challenges&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fabled cradle of mankind  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T22:57:13.887" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T22:57:13.887" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T20:43:29.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:52:55.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Concepts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you find info on different concepts of our world &amp;amp; story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Voidships&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vessels full of advanced technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in order to serve on these vessels one must pass &lt;em&gt;The Five Challenges&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Arrival&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Great Scattering&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;event back on &lt;em&gt;Old Earth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The meteor incident&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bremdag and Hemdul and possibly others were on a 'mission' to collect parts from a meteor. Bremdag stopped to take care of some people who were wounded, causing them to fail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Watchers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a group of beings that watches over &lt;em&gt;The Five Challenges&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;first mention at the end of &lt;em&gt;Chapter Two&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T22:34:38.343" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T20:52:55.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:59:54.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Things &amp;amp; Items &amp;amp; Animals&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you find info on things and items specific to our world &amp;amp; story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Spire-Trees&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kilometers high&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thick trunks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delicious scent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fire Root&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when boiled makes a broth that can &lt;em&gt;soothe burns&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fight infection&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strong, spicy smell (when boiled)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Phylactery&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;something that is charged through radiation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charged up over &lt;em&gt;The Radiation Pit&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The First Challenge&lt;/em&gt;, and used in &lt;em&gt;The Third Challenge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brohkem&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Nairahdul&lt;/em&gt; lost their Phylacteries at &lt;em&gt;The Radiation Pit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hell Bird&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strange red-feathered bird from &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Continent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Arrow&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An arrow found under a bush near &lt;em&gt;The Radiation Pit&lt;/em&gt; by Bremdag, fletched with &lt;em&gt;Hell Bird&lt;/em&gt; feathers.  Bremdag has taken it as a warning from some unknown party, and has not yet told anyone else of his discovery.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One of the arrows fired at Nairahdul while she was attempting the first challenge, which led her to be burned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T22:17:37.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T20:59:54.483" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:33:00.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Theories&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas of why things are the way they are, without having to explicitly say it in the story.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These are not official canon, but more ideas to give the world some background.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If something in the story contradicts a theory, feel free to remove the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The 5 Challenges&lt;/em&gt; are possibly a throw back to astronaut training, where you might have to survive in the wilderness until help arrived if you happened to come down off course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Family suffixes&lt;/em&gt; The final syllable of a characters name is used to show their family in a similar way to a surname. For example, Hemdul and Niarhadul, who are brother and sister, share names in the style ____dul. This may mean there are no surnames in this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Different cultures&lt;/em&gt; It's possible that the people running the void ships are a different culture than people living on planets, with different technology levels. One way to get off of the planet and get access to that level of living is to enlist as crew, and passing the challenges is the only way to do that. Depending on how well they do in the challenges, enlistees will be offered higher jobs and achieve full citizenship faster than those that do poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Watchers are Voiders&lt;/em&gt; It is highly likely, but not yet confirmed, that the mysterious &lt;em&gt;Watchers&lt;/em&gt; are people from the &lt;em&gt;Voidships&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;At least one of the missing phylacteries survived&lt;/em&gt; due to the observations of the mysterious other challengers, it seems likely that Niarhdul's phylactery, Brokhem's phylactery, or both, survived the explosion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phylacteries are shadow-self suppressors&lt;/em&gt;  When a person's phylactery is near them and intact, it suppresses their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jungian Shadow&lt;/a&gt;.  However, when the phylactery is destroyed, the suppression ends and a person has access to all the behaviors and ideas contained in their shadow.  The effect takes hold very quickly, say a day or so.  The phylacteries are a mystical block on the shadow to keep someone &amp;quot;free of the taint of the shadow&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Psychology of these people&lt;/em&gt; A person in this world is composed of three components, their physical body, their light and their shadow.  The light and the shadow are roughly equivalent to our conscious and sub-conscious states. However, in this world the shadow is a real mystical thing that can affect the real world as opposed to human shadows that are just behaviors and information.  Ideally, a person will integrate their shadow into their normal life but someone may have a shadow that completely dominates their light.  In that case, their skin would go somewhere between gray to black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:33:10.757" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-13T21:33:00.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T03:13:17.337" Score="4" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100126/anatomically-correct-ahuizotl?noredirect=1#comment298991_100126&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was recently posted I voted to close it based on it being either too broad or primarily opinion-based.  Take your pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP pointed out there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798&quot;&gt;lengthy history of &quot;anatomically correct&quot;&lt;/a&gt; questions that frequently ask for insight into the evolutionary possibility of mythical and/or fictional creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I missed something in the FAQ?  Are they actually on-topic?  Or are they on-topic by default simply by their volume and the precedent they set?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consequences&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If &quot;How could X evolve?&quot; questions are on-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I recommend we modify the FAQ to specifically say so as they are (insofar as I understand the rules) 100% opinion-based.  I'm actually interested to see if someone can convince me they are not 100% opinion-based.  To prove my point, I'm willing to post the question, &quot;Anatomically-correct: how would a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater evolve?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If &quot;How could X evolve?&quot; questions are off-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to close a bazillion questions to remove the precedent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to close @Tres-2b's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25281/anatomically-correct-griffins&quot;&gt;current bounty&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T05:55:47.953" Title="How are the &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions asking for evolutionary insight on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5685" CreationDate="2017-12-14T04:26:48.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question looks incredibly broad to me. We are unable to answer this question for real world creatures. &quot;How does a dog evolve?&quot; doesn't make sense as a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally &quot;How does x evolve?&quot; isn't about the creature being anatomically correct either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been questions (like these about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98173/anatomically-correct-furry&quot;&gt;furries&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96120/anatomically-correct-charybdis&quot;&gt;charybdis&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99825/anatomically-correct-giant-insectoids&quot;&gt;insectoids&lt;/a&gt;) asking about anatomically correct creatures that have been closed before. Whether these questions are acceptable should be handled on a case by case basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at other questions in the anatomically correct series, they are asking about how could creature X exist in a physically plausible way. My general test for any question is to look at it in it's simplest form first. The core of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88204/anatomically-correct-nachtkrapp&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about Nachtkrapp is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How close can I realistically get to my harbinger of death, the Nachtkrapp?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the rest of the question is spend describing what the significant features of a Nachtkrapp are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I think the question you linked should be closed I don't think there is a need to revisit the whole series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T04:36:19.720" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T04:36:19.720" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2017-12-14T08:12:49.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I'm not getting the main queue notification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firefox 57.0.2 (64-bit)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Windows 8 (It's a work machine, don't blame me!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSmr6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSmr6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T08:12:49.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2017-12-14T10:46:32.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm totally in favour of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hardly ever review since the nav bar changes as there is no notification unless you open the menu and I completely forget about reviewing..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a dot there whenever there was reviewing to be done I'd be far more likely to remember to check it and do some reviewing when I have time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T10:46:32.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5685" CreationDate="2017-12-14T12:08:37.180" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Improperly Constrained&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem with &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; is a lack of constraints in the question. Someone asking &amp;quot;How do I evolve a creature to be like X?&amp;quot; without placing some constraints on environment and other pressures should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll grant you, the style of questions we are discussing do tend to be over-broad as it's difficult to sufficiently constrain them. However, as a category, I don't think it's appropriate to blanket ban them since that eliminates the potential for someone to write a sufficiently constrained question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T12:08:37.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5698" CreationDate="2017-12-14T12:28:13.287" Score="16" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that we have now officially passed 100,000 posts on the main site, by post ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all of you for contributing, and keeping contributing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T21:08:40.990" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T17:09:59.977" Title="We have passed 100,000 posts on the main site!" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:13:51.660" Score="12" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other Person&lt;/strong&gt;: Hey, King, remember that one time you said you learned all that stuff about the Stack Exchange Data Explorer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kingledion&lt;/strong&gt;: ...yeah...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other Person&lt;/strong&gt;: Well I have some questions about how this site got used in 2017...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kingledion&lt;/strong&gt;: Like....what kind of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What users generated the most responses?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What users had the highest score per post?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What users had the longest posts?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Michael Kjorling) What users make the most effective use of their words?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Green) Which posts are most viewed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(James) Guys, am I awesome? Please?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Separatrix) Who gets questions answered at the highest rate?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Green) What is the relationship between views and votes?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Separatrix) What were the top voted questions and answers of the year?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Finit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of 1200 Eastern time on Monday 18 Dec, I'm calling the Data-palooza off. See you again this time next year!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T16:37:07.120" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T16:55:39.190" Title="Holiday Data-palooza: Site statistics from 2017" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:20:39.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What users generated the most discussion?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I summed the total number of comments and answers and divided by the number of posts. Obviously, comments can get cleaned up by the mods, so perhaps not a representative sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All users (sitewide average: 3.5)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lysero: 65&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XenoDwarf: 53&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JNW: 47&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sebastian Araneda: 47&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Myself: 44&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Occasional users (&gt;10 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gstestso: 16.2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OneSurvivor: 16.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terry: 16.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shard martin: 14.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unhappymarshmellow: 14.3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frequent users (&gt;100 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vylix: 7.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sum of all users whose accounts have been deleted: 6.2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Separatrix: 4.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kingledion: 3.8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MichaelK: 3.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What users had the highest score per post?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summed upvotes divided by number of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All users (sitewide average: 5.6)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reid Rankin: 138&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bjmc: 109&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jncraton: 107&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rluks: 82&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frodoskywalker: 82&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Occasional users (&gt;10 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pavel Janicek: 27.3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thriggle: 21.9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. Sar: 20.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe Bloggs: 19.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AndreiROM: 17.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frequent users (&gt;100 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Separatrix: 15.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MichaelK: 12.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kingledion: 11.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sphennings: 11.2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AlexP: 9.9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: It is interesting that number of votes and number of comments tracks each other closely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What users liked to type the most (characters per post)?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summed number of characters in the 'Body' field divided by number of posts. Only questions and answers, not comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All users (sitewide average: 1523)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brendan: 14989&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chris S: 14120&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rob Stening: 13459&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Akmedrah: 12650&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;qGold: 12071&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Occasional users (&gt;10 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flater: 6340&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schwern: 5445&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dsollen: 5343&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theraot: 5267&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MolbOrg: 4422&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frequent users (&gt;100 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amadeus: 2863&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AlexP: 2852&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LSerni: 2701&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JBH: 2692&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Erin Thursby: 2419&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:15:20.443" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:15:20.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:14:37.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Users who made the best use of their words?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I summed the number of net votes and divided by characters, then multiplied by 100. The result is net votes per 100 characters of question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All users (sitewide average: 0.4)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30760/eric-duminil&quot;&gt;Eric Duminil&lt;/a&gt;: 23.5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15123/mooseboys&quot;&gt;MooseBoys&lt;/a&gt;: 21.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39006/alex-hintermann&quot;&gt;Alex Hintermann&lt;/a&gt;: 21.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43435/mara&quot;&gt;Mara&lt;/a&gt;: 15.9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43066/user43066&quot;&gt;user43066&lt;/a&gt;: 15.4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Occasional users (&gt;10 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8342/terry&quot;&gt;Terry&lt;/a&gt;: 2.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12007/gstestso&quot;&gt;Gstestso&lt;/a&gt;: 2.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28761/weckar-e&quot;&gt;Weckar E.&lt;/a&gt;: 1.9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19975/silvercookies&quot;&gt;SilverCookies&lt;/a&gt;: 1.8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;PavelJanicek&lt;/a&gt;: 1.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frequent users (&gt;100 posts in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26175/sphennings&quot;&gt;Sphennings&lt;/a&gt;: 1.7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16295/separatrix&quot;&gt;Separatrix&lt;/a&gt;: 1.2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch&quot;&gt;L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;: 1.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29409/john&quot;&gt;John&lt;/a&gt;: 0.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6402/o-m&quot;&gt;o.m.&lt;/a&gt;: 0.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:15:44.567" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:15:44.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-14T19:21:26.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Who is generating the most pageviews?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Average per question asked&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11782/mario-trucco&quot;&gt;Mario Trucco&lt;/a&gt;: 25108&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6751/andyd273&quot;&gt;AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;: 23655&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43066/user43066&quot;&gt;user43066&lt;/a&gt;: 21527&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19086/user2727&quot;&gt;user2727&lt;/a&gt;: 21448&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/15001/jamesd&quot;&gt;JamesD&lt;/a&gt;: 19151&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Average per question, for users who asked 10+ questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2071/pavel-janicek&quot;&gt;Pavel Janicek&lt;/a&gt;: 7233&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9887/joe-bloggs&quot;&gt;Joe Bloggs&lt;/a&gt;: 4031&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12007/gstestso&quot;&gt;Gstesto&lt;/a&gt;: 4008&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17551/bryan-mcclure&quot;&gt;Bryan McClure&lt;/a&gt;: 3436&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10945/snow&quot;&gt;Snow&lt;/a&gt; (the artist formerly known as Pete): 3422&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Most viewed single question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Views stopped counting on 12-10 at about 2 am. Sorry to Green's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99845/releasing-a-t-rex-into-a-modern-ecosystem-wouldnt-be-that-bad-right&quot;&gt;T.Rex&lt;/a&gt; which will probably make this list by tomorrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94154/how-to-safely-check-if-you-are-immortal&quot;&gt;How to safely check if you are immortal?&lt;/a&gt; by Pavel Janicek: 44479&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92662/can-a-human-fail-a-turing-test&quot;&gt;Can a human fail a Turing test?&lt;/a&gt; by Mario Trucco: 25112&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/90245/can-a-casino-system-prove-my-divine-luck-as-cheating&quot;&gt;Can a casino system prove my (divine) luck as cheating?&lt;/a&gt; by Vylix: 25067&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/98363/if-the-romans-found-one-working-steam-engine-would-they-have-been-able-to-copy-a&quot;&gt;If the Romans found one working steam engine would they have been able to copy and use it?&lt;/a&gt; by Slarty: 23962&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83498/a-poison-that-only-works-if-you-know-it-is-there&quot;&gt;A poison that only works if you know it is there&lt;/a&gt; by AndyD273: 23660&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T19:21:26.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-14T20:14:47.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Which users are the most awesome in units of James&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a few possible definitions of awesome that we can investigate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q &amp;amp; A: Users who post good questions and answers (1 James = 302)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sum of all upvotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will: 19.6 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L.Dutch: 12.5 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Separatrix: 10.7 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kingledion: 9.6 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cort Ammon: 8.8 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;134&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James: 1 James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Site Maintenance: Users who edit and review a lot (1 James = 114)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sum of all edits plus review tasks completed where the reviewer left a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secespitus: 9.8 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JDLugosz: 4.5 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a4android: 4.4 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brythan: 3.9 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L.Dutch: 3.4 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James: 1 James &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Number of moderator elections won (1 James = 1)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T-1. James: 1 James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T-1. JDLugosz: 1 James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T-1. Michael Kjorling: 1 James&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T-2. Everyone else: 0 James'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank god for ties being broken alphabetically, or James would never be on top :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T20:28:20.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T20:28:20.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2017-12-14T22:58:21.560" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether this counts, as it's an ongoing serial, but it's something to get the ball rolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in May, I asked about a way to create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80301/solid-material-made-from-human-blood&quot;&gt;solid material using human blood&lt;/a&gt;. This was part of the worldbuilding for my superhero series, &lt;em&gt;Electron&lt;/em&gt;, particularly the Black Rock supervillain prison. I eventually went with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/80305/32016&quot;&gt;roryok's suggestion&lt;/a&gt; of encasing the blood in bulletproof glass (but forgot to actually accept it until ten minutes ago! Whoops...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In August, I began publishing &lt;em&gt;Electron&lt;/em&gt; in monthly instalments &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3310735/1/Electron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on FictionPress&lt;/a&gt;. While Black Rock prison hasn't appeared yet, the plexiglass-encased blood &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; appeared, right in the first chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Aaron and Martin exited the car, Martin retrieved a small glass vial from the glove compartment. &quot;What's that?&quot; asked Aaron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Martin held up the vial so that Aaron could see. It was filled with a dark crimson liquid that lazily sloshed around inside. &quot;Classified,&quot; said Martin. &quot;But this is what's blocking your abilities.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aaron felt a pang of horror as he realised what was in the vial. &quot;Is that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;blood?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Classified&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; repeated Martin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes - an answer from WorldBuilding.SE &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been used in a published work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T22:58:21.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-15T16:15:49.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Users who had the highest percentage of their answers accepted?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of accepted answers divided by total answers; for &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; posted in 2017, not answers. Query &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/770984/percentage-of-anwers-accepted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All users (sitewide average: 9%)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/443/guildsbounty&quot;&gt;guildsbounty&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 3 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39556/rytan451&quot;&gt;rytan451&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 3 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19996/artemissunshine&quot;&gt;artemissunshine&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 3 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/23119/yuri&quot;&gt;yuri&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 2 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/20048/mozershmozer&quot;&gt;MozerShmozer&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 2 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/37212/era&quot;&gt;Era&lt;/a&gt;: 100% on 2 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Occasional users (&gt;10 answers in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10436/draconis&quot;&gt;Draconis&lt;/a&gt;: 50%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/33321/tmartin&quot;&gt;Tmartin&lt;/a&gt;: 46%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30677/zoey-boles&quot;&gt;Zoey Boles&lt;/a&gt;: 37%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/38944/cereza&quot;&gt;Cereza&lt;/a&gt;: 36%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/22040/dent7777&quot;&gt;Dent777&lt;/a&gt;: 36%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/34691/spacemouse&quot;&gt;SpaceMouse&lt;/a&gt;: 36%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frequent users (&gt;100 answers in 2017)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29552/alexp&quot;&gt;AlexP&lt;/a&gt;: 26%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/23519/kingledion&quot;&gt;kingledion&lt;/a&gt;: 25%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12297/michaelk&quot;&gt;MichaelK&lt;/a&gt;: 22%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;: 22%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6933/lserni&quot;&gt;LSerni&lt;/a&gt;: 21%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T16:15:49.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5690" CreationDate="2017-12-15T17:09:59.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently we haven't, quite yet.  The count in SEDE is correct (as of its last refresh).  I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/304559/162102&quot;&gt;asked about the discrepancy on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; and learned that not all ID numbers are actually used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're close to 100k but not quite there yet.  I'm confident we'll remedy that before too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T17:09:59.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5685" CreationDate="2017-12-15T20:45:08.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the request of @JBH I am going to point out that evolution has rules and restraints. It is a game of cause and effect where every form must serve a function and those functions can not contradict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a creature has a certain form, then it biologically has evolved that form. Yes, there are multiple ways it could have evolved it, but some are way more likely than others. There are many questions on this site where multiple, different correct answers can be given, but the quality and likeliness of these answers allows for a 'correct' answer to be chosen by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T20:45:08.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-16T08:03:46.520" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100264/29&quot;&gt;Which is more feasible: Wormholes or an Alcubierre Drive?&lt;/a&gt;, which was closed by community vote as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly fail to see what's primarily opinion-based about it. To my mind, it's definitely not any more opinion-based than many other questions on the site, and one can make a quite reasonable argument that it is &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; so than many, even recent ones, which remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both hypotheses being asked about, while to my knowledge neither has been proven, have a somewhat solid foundation in the sciences. Both are studied and considered by some pretty smart people, so there should be citable material available, possibly even to the level of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; (which this question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;). The fact that neither is currently practical doesn't mean that no work has been done to establish how they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; function. Science often works by determining the theoretical model long before practical experiments are made or even possible; it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; often works by trying to figure out how newly observed data can fit with existing observations in a new model. There is no inherent contradiction in doing one before the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP specifically specifies &quot;with our current knowledge&quot; and also allows for answers saying that the comparison isn't meaningful by also adding at the end &quot;Is it possible to make this type of comparison? If not, why?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have already established that &quot;that's not possible&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3758/29&quot;&gt;can be an acceptable answer&lt;/a&gt;, and even more with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/reality-check&quot;&gt;reality-check questions&lt;/a&gt; (the tag wiki excerpt there even says &quot;Answers should say yes or no, with supporting info.&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; is about &lt;em&gt;not being able to objectively evaluate answers&lt;/em&gt;. I'm not a subject matter expert, but I feel that answers to this question can be judged objectively on how well they answer the question and their factual correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like the OP is asking us to do their work for them. They've come up with two ideas &lt;em&gt;based on relevant scientific study&lt;/em&gt; and are basically asking which is the least scientifically implausible, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/29&quot;&gt;the problem with &quot;do my work for me&quot; types of questions&lt;/a&gt; doesn't really seem to apply. Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5147/29&quot;&gt;Secespitus' answer to another Meta question&lt;/a&gt; from back in July:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We will always be a bit opinion-based, but questions should still be written in a way that you can use somewhat objective methods to determine which answer is the &quot;best&quot; answer in the proposed scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers can discuss the difficulties of each proposed mechanic, and compare the implications of them; or argue, citing supporting reasoning, that the comparison isn't meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4310/29&quot;&gt;SRM's answer to another question&lt;/a&gt; from back in January, which seems to me to provide a reasonable, certainly a &quot;rule of thumb&quot;, guideline for when &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think I have a litmus test for what constitutes a &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask yourself: &quot;What would a wrong answer to this question be?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wrong answer to the OP's question could for example be &quot;Alcubierre drive requires blue cheese, so it's useless after you pass Earth's moon&quot;. (Made up example, but you get the idea.) A correct answer could be &quot;both require X which we have absolutely no idea how to do, so neither is more plausible than the other&quot;, or &quot;option A requires X, and option B requires Y, and we don't know how to do X but we have a theoretical model for how to do Y, so B is more plausible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think the question linked at the top of this meta question meets the criteria for primarily opinion-based, but I'm also not inclined to reopen unilaterally by mod hammer. Why was it put on hold as primarily opinion-based?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T08:12:43.660" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:03:12.673" Title="What's up with the &quot;wormholes or Alcubierre drive&quot; question being &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5700" CreationDate="2017-12-16T08:43:26.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite simply: coming up with an answer to the question is impossible &lt;em&gt;with current knowledge&lt;/em&gt; of physics, according to which, both wormholes and Alcubierre drives require the same sort of negative energy and neither have been made or observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;em&gt;no-one knows&lt;/em&gt; whether either is feasible. To make it really clear, the possibilities are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alcubierre drives are more feasible than wormholes&lt;/strong&gt;. According to current knowledge of general relativity (GR), wormholes can't just simply form. However, some physicists will disagree with this and say that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wormholes are more feasible than Alcubierre drives&lt;/strong&gt;, as it's at least potentially possible that wormholes exist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to certain theories of GR&lt;/a&gt;, while there's no reasonable way we could get the frankly absurd amount of negative energy required to run a warp drive. Of course, we don't know whether or not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_tensor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;torsion tensor&lt;/a&gt; really vanishes or not, although there aren't any hints that it doesn't so far, so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neither is feasible&lt;/strong&gt;, as both require insane amounts of negative energy. As in, you'd need a Type II civilisation (to current knowledge) to have access to that kind of scale of &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; energy, never mind negative energy... Although... Things like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casimir effect&lt;/a&gt; do show the existence of negative energy, so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Both are equally as feasible&lt;/strong&gt; in the long-term, as if a type I civilisation can access trace amounts of negative energy, why can't a type (say) III civilisation access enough to create &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; a wormhole or Alcubierre drive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, which of the above you believe is down to opinion, hence the question is opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, asking which would require less negative energy (according to current knowledge of physics) is something that could actually be answered without requiring (anywhere near as much) opinion. As such, I believe the question should be edited to instead ask this and have commented on the original question saying so. This is a different question to &quot;which is the most feasible?&quot; but at least related and is roughly equivalent to asking &quot;which is the most feasible to have first given the assumption that both are equally feasible in the long term?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19951" LastEditorUserId="19951" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T10:05:56.577" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T10:05:56.577" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5700" CreationDate="2017-12-18T04:04:22.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem isn't with wormholes or Albucierre drives, its with asking either-or.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going to ask how to implement one or the other technology, obviously no one knows, but that is what this forum is for. &#xA;However, if you are asking us to choose between them, when no one knows any technical pros or cons about them, how is the answer based on anything other than opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if a technology works because of handwavium (and both techs are definitely in this category), what are the criteria you can use to determine if one handwavium is better than another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close, but I won't vote to open either. Any answer &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be opinion based, since there is no hard data available on the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T04:04:22.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:23:41.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What is the relationship between views and upvotes?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;For a question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/41Qx1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/41Qx1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X-axis is views, y-axis is net votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linear relationship in the graph is actually kind of amazing. See that outlier to the right? If you take the outlier out, the slope changes by less than 0.03%. That is pretty unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, you get one upvote (on the question) per every 250 views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;For answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here instead of plotting question score on the y-axis, I use the sum of the answer score. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjHQ1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjHQ1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still a linear relationship, but with more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heteroscedasticity&lt;/a&gt;; that is, variance increases more strongly with number of views for answers than it does for the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you can see our outlier question doesn't get nearly the answer votes that it could. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T16:33:20.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T16:33:20.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5691" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:55:39.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Highest voted questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94154/how-to-safely-check-if-you-are-immortal&quot;&gt;How to safely check if you are immortal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72958/how-can-a-horror-from-beyond-reason-reliably-communicate-with-mortals&quot;&gt;How can a Horror from Beyond Reason reliably communicate with mortals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92284/what-is-the-least-world-changing-reason-why-the-government-would-pay-for-you-t&quot;&gt;What is the least &amp;quot;world changing&amp;quot; reason why the government would pay for you to keep a llama during your 44th year of life?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Editors note: Closed! How dare you!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75073/what-cheap-modern-items-can-i-use-to-bribe-medieval-people&quot;&gt;What cheap modern items can I use to bribe medieval people?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Editors note: also closed...)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72556/how-do-glass-ants-create-their-tunnels&quot;&gt;How do Glass Ants create their tunnels?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74441/which-major-solar-system-body-could-most-realistically-be-artificial&quot;&gt;Which major solar system body could most realistically be artificial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88877/how-can-a-race-of-eldritch-abominations-help-humanity&quot;&gt;How can a race of eldritch abominations help humanity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99845/releasing-a-t-rex-into-a-modern-ecosystem-wouldnt-be-that-bad-right&quot;&gt;Releasing a T-Rex into a modern ecosystem wouldn&amp;#39;t be that bad, right?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Editors note: still climbing, it will probably end up higher)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81548/how-does-a-species-who-cannot-distinguish-left-from-right-build-their-cities&quot;&gt;How does a species who cannot distinguish left from right build their cities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77600/in-a-medieval-setting-how-far-apart-should-towns-be&quot;&gt;In a medieval setting, how far apart should towns be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Highest voted answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81582/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81582/23519&lt;/a&gt; by Thriggle&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/74513/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/74513/23519&lt;/a&gt; by LSerni&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75175/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75175/23519&lt;/a&gt; by John&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/80289/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/80289/23519&lt;/a&gt; by Separatrix&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71880/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71880/23519&lt;/a&gt; by AndreiRom&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94159/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94159/23519&lt;/a&gt; by MichaelK&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93118/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/93118/23519&lt;/a&gt; by Thorne&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95668/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95668/23519&lt;/a&gt; by Dan Mills&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/97965/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/97965/23519&lt;/a&gt; by kingledion&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72558/23519&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72558/23519&lt;/a&gt; by L.Dutch&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T16:55:39.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5707" CreationDate="2017-12-19T17:56:49.120" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question scores (number of upvotes and downvotes on a question) are displayed in the question feed and on the question webpage itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've come to ask myself how showing this score benefits quality questions, it seems to me as if this should instead more or less influence the opinion of voters reading the post, by triggering immediate judgement based on the number of votes the question has.&#xA; Am I mistaken on this ? Wouldn't hiding up and downvotes favor objective reasoning from voters? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user44285" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T20:00:51.640" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T20:00:51.640" Title="How does showing question score benefit highest quality questions?" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5706" CreationDate="2017-12-19T18:59:56.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Upvotes are an indicator of quality, not a guarantee&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working from the assumption that typical WB users don't have a ton of time to spend here (but the following holds for heavy users in a slightly different way).  A user wants to read good questions and good answers.  If upvotes were removed from the entire site UI, then a very handy indicator of question and answer quality would vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions are not very good, as is true with most things.  The average answer has just under 8 upvotes.  The average question has only 5 upvotes.  If I have to choose between two questions of equal age where one has 10 upvotes and the other has 2 upvotes, I'm more likely to chose the 10 upvotes. I know that 10 other people somewhere thought that the question was good enough to confer a little love.  I may come back to the 2 upvotes question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said another way, upvotes are a proxy for quality/popularity.  Without upvotes, individual users must hunt through thousands of questions to find a few that interest them.  They must read through each question and answer.  Ain't no one got time for that. Certainly, relying on upvotes alone doesn't work so well; no kidding, you've discarded a great deal of valuable information to get down to that single number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, there's some &amp;quot;well everyone else upvoted, so it must be good&amp;quot; that happens.  I'm sure I've done it as well as everyone else on Meta.  I choose to believe that the influence of this is pretty small.  If a question is legitimately good, I'll upvote it.  If it's truly awful, I'll down vote it.  In the middle? Meh.  I'll leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's anything to worry about with visible upvotes.  &lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; having visible updates introduces a ton more problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T18:59:56.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2017-12-19T22:34:53.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Culture/Society&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can find info on various aspects and concepts relating to the society our characters live in/left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Rite / The Five Challenges&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of 5 challenges that need be passed in order to be allowed to crew a &lt;em&gt;voidship&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aspirants have to master these challenges without the help of advanced technology, using nothing but their wits &amp;amp; strength.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exists since &lt;em&gt;The Arrival&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Challenge of Stone&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; challenge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requires agility and stealth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;involves recharging a &lt;em&gt;Phylactery&lt;/em&gt; with the radiation from a fallen space rock&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Challenge of Flame&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; challenge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it moves, and it is reportedly more difficult to find than to actually complete.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;involves collecting some of the fire slugs flaming slime and putting it in an airtight container.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Challenge of Light&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; challenge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the charged &lt;em&gt;Phylactery&lt;/em&gt; is used in some manner to pass&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Challenge of Herbs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;fifth&lt;/em&gt; challenge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Stragglers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;those that failed the challenges or given up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-accomplishers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;those who came back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are seen by society as people that didn't know their own limitations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Prime Challengers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The person or group who completes the challenges fastest and/or most effectively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Prime Challengers in a cycle are respected and the competition is quite fierce.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Proving&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ceremony where people get their &lt;em&gt;Phylactery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;happens during the 13th cycle of a person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:17:33.823" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-19T22:34:53.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-22T02:29:35.227" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100634/santas-broke-how-much-does-it-cost-for-someone-else-to-be-santa&quot;&gt;Santa&amp;#39;s broke. How much does it cost for someone else to be Santa?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to understand what's worldbuilding in it. There could be some worldbuilding, but I just can't understand. It seems like a question that we regularly close as &quot;story-based&quot; or &quot;off-topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think this is relevant) The author is a mod, so if this kind of question is allowed, I think users (especially new) might point to this question as an example that this kind of question is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;what makes this question not too story based and off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T03:21:22.613" Title="Is this Santa question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5711" CreationDate="2017-12-22T03:14:42.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the one who posted the question. I spent a fair bit of time looking through other &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa-claus&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa-claus&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa-claus&lt;/a&gt; questions (yes, we have a tag for that!) to try to make it as on-topic/objective as possible. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I didn't. I don't know. I'll leave it for you all to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its heart, my question's asking for help for calculating a certain parameter in my world. My world, in this case, is the setting for a short story where a billionaire either finances Santa's operations or is revealed to have been Santa for many years (spoiler!) - I'm not sure yet which. The point is, I need a good estimate of the financial capital Santa needs to survive each year; hence, my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could compare the question to certain other hypothetical questions that I suspect you might find more palatable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the habitable zone around my star, and can my planet support life in it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many people can my hydroponic towers grow food for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can my floating city support one million citizens?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . and so on and so forth. Do these questions sound a bit more like worldbuilding? And yet they, like my Santa question, are all just asking for help determining a certain parameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't particular see how the question could be story-based. I'm not asking people to create various strategies for Santa to cut funds, or for what he should do to reduce labor costs, or whether he should give naughty people coal or pyrite. &lt;strong&gt;I'm not asking for help determining what actions Santa should take&lt;/strong&gt;, which would be the hallmark of a story-based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that's been my reasoning as to why my question's on-topic. I'll leave the community to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, here are some other parameter-based Santa calculation questions we've had over the years, which I list here as examples of good &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa-claus&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa-claus&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa-claus&lt;/a&gt; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/63235/627&quot;&gt;How many elves does Santa need to enslave to make toys for the kids?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31460/627&quot;&gt;How much does Santa&amp;#39;s sleigh weigh?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65579/627&quot;&gt;Colony on the moon - how fast can Santa deliver?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T03:21:22.613" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T03:21:22.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5746" CreationDate="2017-12-22T18:34:29.213" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use community events to promote new blog posts.  Because we've had a lot of activity lately (yay!), we're sometimes showing three events at a time.  (I run each event for around a week, so there's usually a little overlap with the oldest post when we post a new one.)  Because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4634/28&quot;&gt;URLs need to be different&lt;/a&gt;, I'm using the full URL for the question for the newest one, and the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; link with and without my user ID for the other two.  That's been working fine (the per-user share link actually counts as different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On main, one of our events is being bumped by an SE-wide announcement.  &lt;em&gt;That's&lt;/em&gt; expected behavior, but what's not expected is which one got bumped.  Here's what we see on main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XlM7F.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XlM7F.png&quot; alt=&quot;events on main&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's what we see on meta, with the missing one circled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/muSju.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/muSju.png&quot; alt=&quot;events on meta, middle one missing from main&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, on main, did the system omit the one &lt;em&gt;in the middle&lt;/em&gt; chronologically?  I would have expected the oldest one to drop off.  Shouldn't newer events have priority?  (I realize that &quot;oldest&quot; and &quot;expiring soonest&quot; aren't the same thing, and working out the correct behavior means figuring out which we mean.  On &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site, they are usually the same -- we don't queue up events well in advance or run a bunch of newer, shorter ones.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about recency of editing, either.  When I post a new event I first edit the previously-newest one to change its URL, and then post the new one with the question URL (that the previous one had until my edit).  So the newest two events are also the most-recently-edited two events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T18:53:12.893" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T22:40:57.410" Title="When the system prunes community events, why doesn't it prune the oldest?" Tags="|bug|community-events|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-01-04T22:41:06.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5715" CreationDate="2017-12-22T18:49:18.927" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100697/help-me-to-convince-my-son-that-santa-claus-exists-scientifically&quot; title=&quot;Help me to convince my son that Santa Claus exists, scientifically&quot;&gt;Help me to convince my son that Santa Claus exists, scientifically&lt;/a&gt;. That question was put on hold as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question seems straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The manner in which it was asked could be argued by purists that it is off-topic, but it could &lt;em&gt;very easily&lt;/em&gt; be made on-topic by said purist just by altering the way it is asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question reminded me a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100634/santas-broke-how-much-does-it-cost-for-someone-else-to-be-santa&quot; title=&quot;Santa&amp;#39;s broke. How much does it cost for someone else to be Santa?&quot;&gt;Santa's broke. How much does it cost for someone else to be Santa?&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, that question also asked multiple questions in one. It more cleverly crafted the overall question to make it all sound like one question, but there are multiple in there. The question at stake here is likewise one primary question for which you need to consider multiple points.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question already has one good answer, though I think we can do better.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is an answer-in-comments which, if it were allowed to be posted as a full answer, would make for a great answer that would actually solve OP's issue in a way that would reduce or eliminate the lying.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The asker stated that they thought the question might be off topic, but again, it only is because of the manner in which it was worded. The question itself fits well with the style of many other well received questions on WorldBuilding, excepting the specific wording used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if someone who thought it was too broad &lt;strong&gt;would at least try to point the asker in the right direction to fixing it up&lt;/strong&gt;. Please leave a comment with constructive criticism that would allow the question to be fixed up and re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So is that question really too broad? And, if it is, what do you want to see adjusted for the on-hold to be removed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I strongly disagree with what that parent is doing, lying to their kids about Santa. I have told mine the truth from the beginning. But I know that lying to your children is the norm in this situation, at least in the U.S., and that I am in the minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T19:36:29.363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T01:53:08.873" Title="Is &quot;Convince son of Santa scientifically&quot; too broad?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5714" CreationDate="2017-12-22T19:33:23.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Too many questions = too broad&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I quote from the version that I saw:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How can Santa have enough time to deliver toys to everyone?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How can Santa answer all the children? Does he know all the languages in the world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will Santa leave presents if there is no chimney?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How can Santa know where to deliver, if we are not at home, and instead at grandparents' house?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How can he eat all stuff that we offer him? (I don't know if it's the same everywhere, but we offer some food to Santa during the night,&#xA;  and in the morning, the food has disappeared.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An appropriately scoped question might be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I scientifically explain how Santa has enough time to deliver&#xA;  toys to everyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that has its own problems, since its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65579/colony-on-the-moon-how-fast-can-santa-deliver/65586#65586&quot;&gt;already been determined&lt;/a&gt; that with the best traveling salesman algorithm around, Santa has to be moving on the order of 10,000 km/s (1/20th the speed of light!) to hit 2 billion households on Earth in one night. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So really, the question can't be answered, since there is no scientific way that Santa could do that, so that's just another reason to close it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T19:33:23.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-22T22:53:20.283" Score="-2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just voted to leave open a half-dozen Santa questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time I am aware of two kinds of &quot;tradition&quot; questions: Santa questions and &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions.  Yes, they're all off-topic for a variety of reasons, but they're also popular and fun.  In other words, they're exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than create lengthy meta descriptions for either of these two questions &amp;mdash; and in an effort to keep people from voting to close many-year-old questions that are obviously in our tradition bracket &amp;mdash; I would like to propose the creation of the following NOTICE for Santa-related questions.  This notice would be attached to all Santa questions past, present, and future to help people understand that they're a delightful exception to our normal rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Christmas Tradition:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;ensp;Questions about Santa Clause are a Christmas tradition at Worldbuilding.SE.  Leniency is granted concerning our on-/off-topic rules.  Please only vote to close if the question is abusive, rude, a duplicate, or of very low quality.  See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/santa-claus&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;santa-claus&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;santa-claus&lt;/a&gt; tag description for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm pretty sure I don't have privileges to create and attach these notices.  They're the same programmatic object as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; notice.  This means I'm going to need the help of someone great and powerful to help me get this done.  Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posted two answers, basically &quot;Yes! Let's get this done!&quot; and &quot;No! We don't need that!&quot;  Please comment to the question, not the answers, if you wish changes to be made.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T00:46:57.170" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T00:46:57.170" Title="Notices for our traditions: Santa Questions" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic|specific-tag|post-notices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-12-24T01:01:09.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5716" CreationDate="2017-12-22T22:54:22.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, this is a good idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notice like this will help all users understand our Christmas tradition and avoid Santa-related questions ending up in the VTC queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T22:54:22.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5716" CreationDate="2017-12-22T22:55:51.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, we don't need this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will likely be more work than its worth and wouldn't stop new users from adding Santa questions to the VTC queues anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T22:55:51.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-22T23:02:14.027" Score="-10" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;After voting to leave open a half-dozen Santa questions and considering my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5685/how-are-the-anatomically-correct-questions-asking-for-evolutionary-insight-on&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; about anatomically correct questions, I'd like to propose the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time I am aware of two kinds of &quot;tradition&quot; questions: Santa questions and &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions.  Yes, they're all off-topic for a variety of reasons, but they're also popular and fun.  In other words, they're exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than create lengthy meta descriptions for either of these two questions &amp;mdash; and in an effort to keep people from voting to close many-year-old questions that are obviously in our tradition bracket &amp;mdash; I would like to propose the creation of the following NOTICE for &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions.  This notice would be attached to all such questions past, present, and future to help people understand that they're a delightful exception to our normal rules.  (See linked question for a proposed Santa notice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anatomically Correct Creatures Tradition:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;ensp;Questions asking after the plausibility of anatomically correct mythological or fantastic creatures are a tradition at Worldbuilding.SE.  Leniency is granted concerning our on-/off-topic rules.  The OP should endevor to include as much information as possible about the creature in question to avoid the question being downvoted for poor research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm pretty sure I don't have privileges to create and attach these notices.  They're the same programmatic object as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; notice.  This means I'm going to need the help of someone great and powerful to help me get this done.  Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T01:22:12.370" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T01:22:12.370" Title="Notices for our traditions: Anatomically correct (and Santa)" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic|specific-question|post-notices|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-12-22T23:02:50.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, we don't need this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will likely be more work than its worth and wouldn't stop new users from adding anatomically-correct questions to the VTC queues anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T23:02:50.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-12-22T23:04:09.203" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, this is a good idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notice like this will help all users understand our &quot;anatomically-correct&quot; tradition and avoid &quot;anatomically-correct&quot; questions ending up in the VTC queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T23:04:09.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-12-23T00:35:34.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No we don't need this&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need this because these questions &lt;em&gt;ARE&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. As are the santa ones. Whoever went through and flagged all the Santa questions for closing is a jerk, and I hope they stop voting on closing questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T00:35:34.877" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5714" CreationDate="2017-12-23T01:53:08.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question as too broad. My main reason for this was that each of the questions the parent is asking is a good question of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP decides to break his original question into 5 different questions I will vote for them to be closed as off-topic. While the questions would be not too broad and maybe even answerable with some magic or handwaving, the author clearly states that he is not building a world, but is looking for a way to explain Santa to his son. If the very same questions are asked in a different context, I might not consider them to be off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100634/santas-broke-how-much-does-it-cost-for-someone-else-to-be-santa&quot;&gt;Santa&amp;#39;s broke. How much does it cost for someone else to be Santa?&lt;/a&gt;, I think that it is a fitting question for this site. The OP here asks a specific question about yearly operational costs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some doubts whether this question is on topic or not. However, given that the OP presents us with a fictional world where Santa actually exists and goes bankrupt, I am more willing to treat it as a suitable question for Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T01:53:08.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-12-23T13:25:56.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Each question should be judged on its own merits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I very often feel that the &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions are poor. They are often both underspecified and broad. The titles very rarely actually summarize the question, so it's hard to know when clicking on the question title what you're about to see. (It doesn't really &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; in my mind when they are asked by people who have enough experience on the network, and on the site, that they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; know how to do better.) I mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3142/29&quot;&gt;almost two years ago&lt;/a&gt; the issue of meaningful titles specifically in the context of the &quot;anatomically correct&quot; questions, and am pretty sure I've made the same argument in many different places. But that's all my &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt;, and other peoples' opinions differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is good, vote it up. If it's on topic, vote to leave open if someone pushes it into the queues; if enough people do that, it stays open. (I'm fairly sure it also dings the flagger's ability to flag a little bit, so if this happens consistently, their flags will carry less weight.) If it's off topic, flag or vote to close, and maybe leave a comment explaining your reasoning. If it's poor, vote it down. If you think it's on topic and you know enough to propose an answer, then post an answer. If you can't make up your mind or if the site consensus doesn't seem to mesh with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what it says in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, bring it to Meta; maybe one or the other needs to be updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the above doesn't say anything about the subject matter of the question, or about who wrote it? That's on purpose. Even mods sometimes post questions that turn out to be off topic, or which turn (from even good) to closeworthy status as standards change. (Reminder: Diamond moderators aren't necessarily subject matter experts. We're just janitors. Even more so on a site that covers as broad a subject matter range as Worldbuilding does.) Even mods sometimes post poor answers. &lt;em&gt;Who posted something has no bearing on whether it's on topic or off topic. None whatsoever.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;post notices shouldn't be used for every little thing.&lt;/strong&gt; They require the involvement of a diamond moderator to add or remove from a post. They can only be added to the system, or changed, by Stack Exchange employees. The UI is somewhat clunky. (That last isn't a big issue in and of itself, but certainly doesn't help the workflow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard-science notice, in my opinion, really is only needed because of the site's dual standards. &lt;strong&gt;Dual standards should be avoided&lt;/strong&gt; rather than encouraged just to be plastered over. &lt;strong&gt;The month during which a question is posted shouldn't determine whether it is on topic or off topic.&lt;/strong&gt; Neither should the fact that I'm posting the question, as opposed to someone else posting the exact same question. While site standards change, standards should be &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt;. If I post a Santa Claus question in August, it should be just as on or off topic as if I had posted the same question in December or in March. If a question is on topic when posted by a user with 20k reputation, it should be equally on topic when posted by a user with 1 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T13:35:16.483" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T13:35:16.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T23:13:50.323" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When a question offers the option of being answered in terms of magic is it still valid for this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100723/what-could-cause-a-continent-to-go-below-sea-levels-rapidly&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, currently phrased as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could someone give me an explanation – realistic or magical – as to what could cause a continent the size of, let's say Europe, to go rapidly underwater in a matter of 100-500 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the addition of &lt;em&gt;&quot;realistic or magical&quot;&lt;/em&gt; opens up the question to a very broad range of answers, as highlighted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100723/what-could-cause-a-continent-to-go-below-sea-levels-rapidly/100738#100738&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; where a (new) user outlines a perfectly feasible plan for one of the endless examples of how magic could be used to solve the problem but we could have millions. Perhaps someone opened a magic portal to a world full of water and can't turn it off or maybe a desert tribe found a spell to turn sand into water but its got out of hand...the possibilities are endless so, I think, the question is too broad but only whilst it has the option of magical solutions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However no one has tagged this as off topic because, I think, the &quot;realistic&quot; option is still there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="31124" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T12:46:52.870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T16:53:03.060" Title="Magic 'option' in questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-12-24T01:11:22.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5724/28&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, and have some things to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post notices are not band-aids over weak questions:&lt;/strong&gt; A question doesn't get a free pass just because somebody used a particular phrase in the title or a particular tag.  Questions still have to be on-topic, appropriately-scoped, and clear.  If they aren't, we need to fix them or put them on hold until they can be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what about precedent?&lt;/strong&gt; All sites evolve, including ours.  We've learned a lot over the last 3+ years about what works well for Q&amp;amp;A here.  We still have more to learn.  On &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; site I've been on that's more than a couple years old, there are questions that seemed fine originally and that later get closed because of scope changes, re-examination of what can or can't be answered reasonably, and other factors.  And I don't just mean questions with low votes and low views; it happens to popular, massively-upvoted questions, too.  I have a Famous Question that was closed 2.5 years after asking.  It has a historical lock now; the notice for that says something like &quot;this is valuable content but is no longer a good example of an on-topic question, so don't base new questions on it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're not going to get two new post notices anyway:&lt;/strong&gt; sites, by default, have three notices that moderators can apply.  We have a fourth for hard science, because we made a strong case for it.  We can't make anywhere near as strong a case here (and for your related request for Santa questions).  Plus, all the stuff Michael said about managing these notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But... a possible mitigation for Santa&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Judaism there is a long tradition of getting a little silly around the holiday of Purim.  It's not a free-for-all; there is a particular &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; to this silliness.  But for a couple weeks a year, over on Mi Yodeya we allow questions that, the rest of the year, would be closed.  We require that they contain a special notice in the body and a link to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/797/472&quot;&gt;policy on these questions&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA; And then at the end of the season, we &lt;em&gt;put them all on hold&lt;/em&gt; so that future askers aren't misled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our community wants Santa questions for a couple weeks in December, we could do something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T01:11:22.360" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5725" CreationDate="2017-12-24T06:43:06.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't always get around to VTC.  However, the best solution is to invite the OP to improve the question.  Magic is, kinda by definition, primarily opinion-based and broad.  That's overcome by having the OP tell us about how magic works in his/her world.  Once we know the rules of magic, we can give specific examples of how to use it to meet the need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T06:43:06.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5725" CreationDate="2017-12-24T11:17:49.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5727/29&quot;&gt;JBH is essentially correct.&lt;/a&gt; Questions that involve magical elements are welcome on Worldbuilding, but there are caveats. (Also note that Worldbuilding SE has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;a long-standing policy&lt;/a&gt; that answers should be based in known sciences unless something else is explicitly called for.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center offers some guidance. For example, it states that questions are on topic that are about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, &lt;strong&gt;including by the use of&lt;/strong&gt; biology, technology or &lt;strong&gt;magic,&lt;/strong&gt; while maintaining in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question involves magical elements, &lt;strong&gt;you must provide enough details about the magic system in question&lt;/strong&gt; so that answers may be given that conform to the particular magic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My emphasis in both snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially the latter is because while Worldbuilding's purpose is, in part, to help ensure internal consistency, its purpose is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to design a magic system for someone. So if you have a world that involves magic, and want help with some particular aspect that involves that magic, that's generally fine; but an unbounded &quot;oh, yeah, and it's fine whether it's realistic or magical&quot; most likely isn't &lt;em&gt;because that would allow essentially everything to be a valid answer&lt;/em&gt; and there would be no way to determine how well a given answer actually answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had ample discussion on Worldbuilding Meta about questions that involve magic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=magic%20%5bon-topic%5d&quot;&gt;Here's a quick search&lt;/a&gt; that probably doesn't show everything, but is likely to be restricted to posts that are at least moderately relevant in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is asking for answers based in magic, but doesn't sufficiently describe the magic system so that the scope of the question is sufficiently narrow that actual answers can be given and judged on how well they meet the criteria specified, then &lt;strong&gt;generally speaking, the question likely should be put on hold until the magic system is defined.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, simply asking &quot;how can characters travel between worlds using magic?&quot; is too broad and/or primarily opinion-based, but if you say that &quot;my world has magic that allows instantenous travel between worlds, but only when the character is unaware that their current location is one of these magical portals; how can I have them travel multiple times through the same magical portal?&quot; is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; okay because it describes the relevant constraint &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; asks about a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; issue arising from it, while not being restricted to some &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; characters. (Tip of the proverbial hat to C. S. Lewis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T16:53:03.060" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T16:53:03.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5700" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:42:36.577" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer the your questions one a time -- this post will deal with what I consider as legitimate answers. Some of these are rehashes of Michael Kjörling 's answers,  dot_Sp0T, and a4android in a different light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kingledion Given that the Casimir effect is valid (everything I have now read suggests that the effect is repeatable and grounded in at least one recognized theoretical framework). How much negative energy is needed to move 1 kg of hydrogen 1 light year given the two drives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I hear, &quot;We look at the operation of the worldbuilding forum here. Not the forum itself.&quot;  Consider this: The second you answer the above question you have made a &lt;em&gt;scientifically verified&lt;/em&gt; conclusion. You therefore cannot call &lt;em&gt;handwavium&lt;/em&gt;.  I cannot make the meta argument without making the forum argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mithrandir24601 I appreciate the effort you went to in developing this 2 x 2 (or I vs II vs III vs IV) argument and mentioning the torsion tensor issue.  However it would be more valuable if you view this in another format: Rank and count the arguments that fall into each quadrant.  This assumes:&#xA;a) you can rank the arguments, which you can. Not all arguments are created equal. Hubble's universal function (we'll call it a function) was superior to Einstein's constant.  Which assumption is backed by observable phenomenon? Which is assumption is backed by consistent theoretical frameworks? Which is an untested but attractive option? Arguments can be given equal rank to account for unknowns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next post will be why Michael Kjörling should use his mod hammer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45883" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:42:36.577" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-12-27T03:42:36.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5700" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:03:12.673" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why Michael Kjörling should use his mod hammer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have answered the objections to my question with a request for hard data. Where I have not provided valid scientific arguments I have proposed a valid quantitative format.  I will accept a link that points me in the right direction (even to a academic physics paper).  I have even taken the steps to ensure that I do not profit by way of vote, with the possibility of undue scrutiny by way of making this a community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have provided you (general) with the one of four things you (singular) need for a better forum. This being valid arguments, those being hardware, technical personnel, moderators. Despite the hard evidence and the timeliness of this argument (two FTL drives in ~15 years, Who knew?) I was provided ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I'll give you (general) another one:  Much of this sounds like the now classical hard sci fi versus soft sci fi argument.  Hard sci fiers believe that science fiction must adhere to as many laws of science as possible.  The ill destination of this argument is that any 80's sitcom would be considered more sci fi than the Europa Report, Gravity, Interstellar, etc.  If I spell this out for you the answer to what is sci fi is not simply lack of hand wavium, but the unwillingness to speculate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want someone to stand by you if you use Modhammer.  This is better than someone with 11 standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45883" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:03:12.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5742" CreationDate="2018-01-03T23:51:00.760" Score="10" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a quick search and we ususally see someone try to sneak questions past the basic &quot;one question&quot; rule by using a &quot;bonus points for...&quot; clause a couple of times a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It felt like I was suddenly seeing a lot of them, and that's because we've received the following three in the last 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101368/trying-to-divide-a-universe-into-3-stages-of-stellar-makeup&quot;&gt;Trying to divide a universe into 3 stages of stellar makeup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101353/power-drain-beams&quot;&gt;Power Drain Beams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101300/what-would-be-the-religious-ramifications-of-transforming-ones-self-into-a-new&quot;&gt;What would be the religious ramifications of transforming one&amp;#39;s self into a new species?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to wonder how the site prefers to deal with &quot;bonus points for...&quot; addendums.  Should we let them be, since they aren't officially part of the question and therefore needn't be part of any answer? or treat them as &quot;too broad&quot; because there's more than one question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:59:56.363" Title="What's the preferred reaction to &quot;bonus points for...&quot; addendums?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2018-01-04T02:24:21.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When possible they should be edited out of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are part of the question in the sense that they are part of the text that is presented to us. Unlike a question asking that is asking a bunch of questions at once, it's pretty clear that the bonus question is secondary to the main question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the core question is a good one I'd just edit the question to remove the bonus question, clearly explaining that you should only ask one question per post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the bonus question is less of a second question and more of a restatement of the main question, such that the question doesn't become too broad by it's inclusion I'd leave it alone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T02:24:21.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2018-01-04T09:18:07.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you provide show most of the spectrum for &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt; mentions, so&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101368/trying-to-divide-a-universe-into-3-stages-of-stellar-makeup&quot;&gt;Trying to divide a universe into 3 stages of stellar makeup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is looking for additional data on the what it considers a good answer to already contain, here the bonus mention seems superfluous and does not really add anything to the question at all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;remove&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101353/power-drain-beams&quot;&gt;Power Drain Beams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here the &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt; is to state that everything is fine as long as the drained energy is denied to the enemy ship, but it would be even better if the draining agent could reuse the energy somehow. This is to give people the chance to go the extra mile if they wish so, but don't necessitate it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;keep&lt;/strong&gt; (maybe isolate &amp;amp; emphasize it so it's clear that it is a non-necessary req)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101300/what-would-be-the-religious-ramifications-of-transforming-ones-self-into-a-new&quot;&gt;What would be the religious ramifications of transforming one&amp;#39;s self into a new species?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here the additional clarifications contain the word &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt;, yet it really just is a limitation to the question. The question wants to focus on Christianity but if arguments from other, additional, religions can be brought up it would be an even better answer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;keep&lt;/strong&gt; (remove the word &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt;, it's no bonus)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adding one of my questions doing this bonus thing&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41938/what-would-be-the-most-optimal-location-for-the-lunar-radiotelescope&quot;&gt;What would be the most-optimal location for the Lunar Radiotelescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here the &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt; is intended to ask for a tidbit more information that is not strictly necessary but would help out immensely. My reasoning here is that including this tidbit into the main question body would keep many people from answering because they might be good at looking at lunar maps, but don't know a bit about structural engineering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Everything I write is my personal, optimistic, understanding&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T09:18:07.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2018-01-04T13:09:35.857" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go somewhat against particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5740/29&quot;&gt;sphennings' answer&lt;/a&gt; and say that &quot;bonus questions&quot; or &quot;bonus points for...&quot; can be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used that myself at times. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A29+is%3Aq+bonus&quot;&gt;Searching among my own questions&lt;/a&gt; reveals that I have used the word &quot;bonus&quot; in 11 different questions up to when I originally wrote this answer, though not all of those is in this type of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to a &quot;bonus question&quot; &lt;em&gt;naturally builds on or builds up to&lt;/em&gt; the answer to the main question, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the bonus question is directly related to what the main question is already asking about, then it's probably okay. I realize that this isn't exactly a hard-and-fast rule, and that it is open to interpretation, but the intention is to separate the case of something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How well would precision guided munitions work against early aircraft? Oh, and if they work well, how would the people of the world refer to the head of state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which are obviously unrelated, from something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should I calibrate and estimate pyrokinesis? Bonus points if your answer makes sense scientifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which places additional &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; constraints on the answers that a person answering the question can choose whether or not to adhere to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I just took two question titles off the front page and added something extra to them. No opinion about the two questions implied!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, consider an old question of my own, which asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26798/29&quot;&gt;Does intelligence necessarily lead to an abstract language?&lt;/a&gt; [...] Bonus points for answers that discuss how such a language might also evolve over time as the species evolves. Bonus points also for specific citations, but citations are not a substitute for answers being well-reasoned in their own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that particular case, discussion on how a language might evolve as a species evolves (because the question is about an intelligent species, the intent is evolution towards more intelligent), in my opinion, very nicely builds up to the answer to whether intelligence necessarily leads to an abstract language, but it isn't really required to answer the main question if you can make a convincing argument without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Quite simply:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a &quot;bonus question&quot; causes a question to actually ask multiple different, unrelated questions, then this should probably be pointed out in comments, perhaps edited out, and/or the question put on hold as too broad. &lt;strong&gt;Just because someone uses the word &quot;bonus&quot; doesn't give them a free pass to break the rules. However,&lt;/strong&gt; if the &quot;bonus question&quot; wouldn't cause the question to be too broad &lt;em&gt;in the absence of the word&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bonus&quot;, then the fact that the OP uses that word doesn't by itself make a question too broad. (This isn't Server Fault, where your question is insta-offtopic if you happen to use the words &quot;at home&quot; in it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Always look at the whole question being posted. If in your opinion it's too broad, flag or vote to close.&lt;/strong&gt; Asking multiple different, especially if they are &lt;em&gt;unrelated,&lt;/em&gt; questions in a single question post is one solid criteria I tend to use myself for judging whether a question as posted is too broad. However, if the &quot;bonus&quot; could be edited into the main question with no change of intent, then the &quot;bonus&quot; probably doesn't make enough of a difference to, on its own, warrant swaying the pendelum from &quot;flag/VTC&quot; to &quot;don't flag/VTC&quot; or the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking one of my examples from above, we could take&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should I calibrate and estimate pyrokinesis? Bonus points if your answer makes sense scientifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and rephrase it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should I calibrate and estimate pyrokinesis, preferably but not necessarily in a way that makes sense scientifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at which point we haven't changed any intent, but removed the word &quot;bonus&quot;. &lt;em&gt;If the latter is on topic, then the former is also on topic, because the only difference is stylistic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T13:59:56.363" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:59:56.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5748" CreationDate="2018-01-04T17:28:06.817" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the right side of any question you can see the &quot;Related&quot; questions, which are questions that the system deems similar to the one currently asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question body contains links to other questions on the site or someone comments such links they are placed in a similar list above the &quot;Related&quot; questions in an area for &quot;Linked&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that these lists can contain the same links. Why is that the case? If a question is &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; it should logically follow that it's in some way &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; to the question asked, otherwise there is no reason to link it. I think it would be more useful to make these two lists distinct by excluding the &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; questions from the pool of possible questions that may appear in the &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; questions so that more questions can be shown that may be relevant to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find anything about this behaviour being intended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why can these lists contain the same entries? Are there older discussions about this topic that would explain why this behaviour is the intended one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101414/would-the-diet-of-a-human-have-to-adapt-if-he-suddenly-had-a-1-metre-long-foxta&quot;&gt;Would the diet of a human have to adapt if he suddenly had a ~1 metre long foxtail?&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94777/how-much-muscle-mass-would-be-needed-for-a-genetically-modified-human-to-move-hi?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;How much muscle mass would be needed for a genetically modified human to move his ~1 metre long foxtail?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6hAjs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6hAjs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot showing the described behaviour of one question being in the *linked* and the *related* lists&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T17:30:55.347" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T05:14:43.740" Title="Why can the lists for &quot;Linked&quot; and &quot;Related&quot; questions contain the same entries?" Tags="|support|related-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5743" CreationDate="2018-01-04T17:33:07.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I very strongly suspect it's an artefact of the implementation that nobody has been bothered enough by to do the work to fix, in that the lists are generated separately and then happen to be displayed next to each other in the web UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making each of the lists exclude items seen in the other would require implementation and testing time; time which is probably judged by The Powers That Be to be better spent on other work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T17:33:07.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2018-01-04T22:40:57.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually the same bug as your other one: the system does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; differentiate between short URLs with a user ID attached and short URLs without one (or long URLs that point to the same post, for that matter). So when the merge logic runs, you'll get the first item that matches a given answer or question and the rest will be dropped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The merge logic only runs when MSE-featured posts are added though. And they don't run on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4596/community-events-are-not-being-correctly-shown-on-main-but-are-on-meta/4676#4676&quot;&gt;The fix that Michael proposed&lt;/a&gt; on the other bug report would thus fix this one as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime... If you want to get away from creating more questions or answers while still thwarting the merge logic, you're gonna have to break the parsing somehow while still allowing the URL to actually &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt;. Try adding extra slashes (&lt;a href=&quot;/q/////5713&quot;&gt;/q/////5713&lt;/a&gt;) or selectively URL-encoding parts of the ID (&lt;a href=&quot;/q/%35713&quot;&gt;/q/%35713&lt;/a&gt;). If you manage to stop the parser from recognizing it as a post link &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt;, then you can use the same URL in every event - the system will fall back on the title to distinguish between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T22:40:57.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5725" CreationDate="2018-01-05T01:02:23.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to take away from both good answers to this question, but if I was to put it more concisely (a break with my regular traditions I know);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every 'system', be it science, magic, religion, economics, etc. is constrained by a set of rules; that's what makes it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We as a collective group of providers of answers inherently know at least some of the rules that apply to science, economics, religion, etc. Magic on the other hand can be loosely defined as 'unexplainable science'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this is no different to the problem every fantasy writer (and some sci-fi ones) face when trying to present a viably consistent universe; sure you can do whatever you want, but it has to be explained in a consistent universal context first. It's not the job of the reader to fill in the blanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I think this distinction is important is that like JBH says, if the magical constraints are supplied, we can use our ingenuity to come up with an answer to the question in the same way we often speculate on theoretical scenarios presented on the site, using science, economics, etc. to back ourselves up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that merely says 'come up with a potentially magical solution' is asking us to invent the magic on their behalf, and that's no longer ingenuity; it's creative writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to be clear with the people creating questions that what we're really after is a set of constraints, not the first 3 chapters of their novel that show the context and background of their universe. Tell us &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; magic works, not &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and we can take it from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T01:02:23.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5743" CreationDate="2018-01-05T05:14:43.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This behavior is intentional, as it has been reported (and marked as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48624/323179&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/176575/323179&quot;&gt;once&lt;/a&gt; on MSE, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/288919/6083675&quot;&gt;a request asking to change this behavior&lt;/a&gt; on MSO has been &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;. The second link there has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/176577/323179&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; by Nick Craver (&quot;Architecture Lead for Stack Overflow&quot;) that explains why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The two categories are independent, linked questions are literally linked on either side and related are what we found to be related. A question may be both, and that's alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T05:14:43.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5754" CreationDate="2018-01-08T02:35:05.020" Score="6" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is due to the nearly-successful effort to close the following question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101729/where-can-i-find-ideas-for-sci-fi-futuristic-tech&quot;&gt;Where can I find ideas for sci fi futuristic tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is strongly related to the following.  It differs in that a specific question and the current actions of VTCers are involved.  Therefore, this question seeks either a ratification or a renunciation of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/are-off-site-resource-requests-off-topic-here&quot;&gt;Are off-site resource requests off topic here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2542/do-we-want-resource-recommendation-questions&quot;&gt;Do we want resource recommendation questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules basically state that real-world questions are off-topic.  There is also a trend among VTCers that all questions not about building a specific fictional world are to be closed.  Thus, asking for a list of resources (offsite websites, books, etc.) would be off-topic.  However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag has a fairly strong tradition (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;75 questions asked&lt;/a&gt; and only a few closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: Have the rules changed such that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag is now invalid and should be discontinued/burned?  Or should the question first referenced remain open?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T12:02:23.647" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T12:02:23.647" Title="Have worldbuilding-resources questions become off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5750" CreationDate="2018-01-08T02:56:51.927" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The problem isn't the tag: this question is too broad.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out some highly viewed/voted questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91026/database-of-real-historical-names&quot;&gt;Database of real historical names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95480/where-can-i-look-up-information-for-creating-a-magic-system-based-on-tarot&quot;&gt;Where can I look up information for creating a magic system based on Tarot?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85932/how-would-one-go-about-making-a-star-map-for-a-planet-that-is-within-50-ly-of-ea&quot;&gt;How would one go about making a star map for a planet that is within 50 ly of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73278/recommended-resources-to-describe-an-environment-you-have-never-been-to&quot;&gt;Recommended resources to describe an environment you have never been to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55809/how-can-i-develop-scientific-names-for-my-species&quot;&gt;How can I develop scientific names for my species&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just picked the last 5 questions that had +10 score and weren't closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commonality I see here is specificity. These  are all specific questions, &quot;What is a resource for this one thing.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question that kicked off this meta is really broad. What is a site that has some future technology. On the one hand, I can see how it would have a 'best' or 'correct' answer in the spirit of Stack Exchange. On the other hand, that answer could have dozens of links, and would evolve over time, and if I checked it next year it might not be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; questions can be too broad. If any are, this is the one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T03:52:45.717" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T03:52:45.717" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T04:20:13.697" Score="-2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 3 accounts (stack overflow, 3d printing and world building), but worldbuilding isn't coming up and my profile says i have only 2 accounts Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user46494" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T08:54:55.440" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T08:54:55.440" Title="Why is my Worldbuilding picture not coming up?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5752" CreationDate="2018-01-08T04:21:48.630" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I shut down the computer and it got fixed:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user46494" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T04:21:48.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5750" CreationDate="2018-01-08T08:26:37.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The worldbuilding-resources tag has this description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is one of the meta-level tags, and is specifically concerned with questions about books and technological aids to be used for hastening the process of designing and fleshing out your story-setting to make it as beautiful, believable and engrossing as possible. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geography&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/map-making&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;map-making&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;map-making&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about blog(s) and website(s), and specifically the question this Meta post is concerned with, conforms with the criteria of the tag itself. This makes it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is recommended that WBers should pay more attention to the criteria involved in tags and the reasons for closure before shooting from the hip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T08:26:37.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2018-01-08T17:55:15.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Did you back up/explain any numbers or 'facts' you mention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should be answered&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the reasoning behind a statement/assertion might be perfectly clear and replicable to you, it may not be so for those reading your answer. Heavens forbid it might not even be comprehensible for the person asking the question in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should always strive to explain and reason anything you claim/state/assert/[insert fitting words here] in your answers. After all it would be a shame if your answer did not get any upvotes/accepted just because nobody could apprehend where your answer is coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't assume anything beyond a basic grasp of the English language and Arithmetic (okay, maybe Algebra as well) - unless otherwise indicated in the question or other content by the user posing the question. Users are from all over the world, there is no such thing as a worldwide educational standard...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T17:55:15.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T14:27:14.160" Score="19" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;So far there are two of these, one on&lt;/strike&gt;&#xA;There are now 4 of these:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101887/only-three-books-restarting-chemistry-after-civilization-collapses&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101922/only-three-books-restarting-physics-after-civilization-collapses&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102165/only-three-books-kickstarting-grain-production-after-civilization-collapses?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Grain&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102081/only-three-books-restarting-medicine-after-civilization-collapses&quot;&gt;Medicine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which three books should be preserved, in the event that our current civilisation collapses, in order to give the survivors the best chance of getting back to our level?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My paraphrasing of the questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to me, this doesn't fit within worldbuilding. The questions are both opinion based and very broad. Despite this there are no current close votes and the upvotes are fairly high - 28 for chemistry at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I've missed and these questions are, in fact, not opinion based or broad? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="6453" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T22:05:58.457" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:54:49.157" Title="&quot;Only Three Books&quot; question set" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-10T14:39:50.270" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they are worldbuilding all right. The problem is - is there really a way to answer them objectively? Or for the answers to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;good subjective&lt;/a&gt;? I'm really unsure about this, and seeing what kind of answers these attracted I tend to be on &quot;no&quot; side: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101890/809&quot;&gt;partial answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101912/809&quot;&gt;strange opinion answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101960/809&quot;&gt;low quality frame challenge&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101942/809&quot;&gt;write your own&lt;/a&gt; - between these we can clearly see bad ones, but which one is actually good? Why would writing the perfect book be a better / worse answer than pointing out an existing one...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &quot;best book&quot; bullets, first it might be a matter of opinion what &quot;where to go&quot; is worthwhile and what isn't; second is about showing something is possible - again, might be a matter of opinion what's worth showing; and finally 3rd and 4th only points out &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; of constrains. If it can be edited to more clearly show what's really needed, and which answers are better, I believe it should. If it is on the &quot;good enough&quot; side already, I can't tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T10:56:07.207" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T10:56:07.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-10T14:43:15.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Too Broad&quot; would mean that any question that would try to answer the question would have to write books to do so. In the case of these questions the answer only has to &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; three books (and explain their reasoning). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Opinion-based&quot; means that basically every possible answer is exactly equally valid. But there are enough constraints to show that certain books are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than others (see the very explicit &quot;The best book choices will:&quot; part with four constraints) and we as a community can therefore judge which answers are better and which are worse. There may be lots of possible answers, but as long as we can somewhat objectively rank them against each other the question is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think these questions are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T14:43:15.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-10T15:19:54.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;[Updated]&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the complaints have centered on a lack of background knowledge that we can assume the reader to have, which is a  fair complaint. I've chosen the year 1800 as a stage for when these books will be found. I hope that helps with the too-broad and opinion-based complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not too Broad&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the 'universe' of possible books and articles is broad, limiting them to 3 selections forces decisions. If I had not provided selection criteria, it would easily be too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not opinion based&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While opinions certainly figure into an answer, the books presented can be objectively compared for fitness to the purpose. Granted, I'm not usually fit to make those judgments but that's why I asked WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T22:58:40.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-11T22:29:15.487" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was once a regional manager for a small retail chain.  In a manager's staff meeting one day we were discussing how to improve the shopping experience with music.  Managers were complaining that they didn't have the equipment necessary to pipe Pandora to their customer's ears.  I knew they all had CD radios in inventory and suggested they set one up and bring in some of their favorite disks.  After a moment of silence, one manager (very much a smart aleck) raised his hand and asked, &lt;em&gt;&quot;what's a CD?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's a book?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We are on the verge of never using printed books again in the fundamental education process.  The technology is that good... that close... the time when all of Humanity's knowledge could fit on a single CD-ROM passed a long, long time ago (if it were ever true).  And yet we're asking about three books...  Yes, it's in just one field, but still....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the biggest problem with this kind of question is that it's basically asinine.  What three books about electrical engineering would I take (being a EE) that would bring my survivors back to the original level in as short a time as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It doesn't matter!  The amount of time needed to re-invent what's missing from those three books is so long that having the three books won't significantly speed you along.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand, it's not enough to have a textbook about semiconductor physics, you also need to know how to build and operate a fab.  That takes more than just one book!  Then you need the chip assembly plant (more books!), then you need the computer assembly plant (more books!), then you need an operating system (more books!) and finally a book on programming (have you seen what it takes to program C in the Windows environment lately?)  And that's ignoring the entire computer design process (the more complex EDA tools used to ship with an entire shelf of user's guides)....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology is a &lt;em&gt;massive&lt;/em&gt; mountain.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  Today, right now, we're standing on the top of that mountain.  What's below us is a nearly unfathonable amount of knowledge and experience.  Choosing &quot;just three books&quot; (at least one of which must teach you what a resistor is... that's not the book that will help you build a fab) is like picking up three rocks on the mountain (presumably one at the bottom, one in the middle, one at the top) &amp;mdash; and then expecting those three rocks to lift you high enough that you can rebuild the mountain in less time than it took to build it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The premise of the question is worldbuilding from the perspective that recovery from an apocalyptic event is always about worldbuilding.  The first problem is that without a &quot;point of entry&quot; the question is utterly meaningless and irrelevant to answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;point of entry&quot; is the amount of surviving, sustainable technology.  The OP would need to explain exactly how far back the indicated science (chemistry, physics, EE, etc.) is set.  Knowing where to start tells you how far up the mountain you need to climb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But even then, just three &lt;s&gt;rocks&lt;/s&gt; books?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say the point-of-entry was 1977 (we were still using LS7400 NAND chips back then folks!  Do you have any idea how many generations of CPU have come and gone since I last saw an LS7400 NAND chip on a motherboard?)  The technological difference between the LS7400 and today's CPUs (we don't use &quot;microprocessors&quot; anymore because the prefix &quot;micro&quot; hasn't been valid for 20 years) is massive.  There aren't three books that can get you from the LS7400 to today's CPUs without reinventing a lot of wheels &amp;mdash; and that takes time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be more practical and say the point-of-entry was 2005.  The technology in the cellphone sitting next to me right now (NOT a top-of-the-line phone!) &lt;em&gt;did not exist in 2005.&lt;/em&gt;  And not just the knowlege, the manufacturing ability didn't exist, either.  Not for the chips, the display, the software, the NVRAM, the battery, nada.  Zip. Zilch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And that's the second problem.  The time required to reinvent what didn't arrive in those three books is so great that it might not matter which three books you picked.  Any three would do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes the question primarily opinion-based by definition.  &lt;em&gt;But I'm not done....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one more problem.  The odds of the OP being schooled in my EE expertise is darn close to zero.  Why does this matter?  Because if the OP is expected to judge which answer is best.  Any OP that could do that wouldn't need to ask the question in the first place.  Every OP that can't do that is picking an answer, not on the suitability of the books, but on the trust the OP has in the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example, the odds are very much in my favor that no one but myself (on this site) has experience in the physics of and design of BiCMOS ICs.  It's a very specialized field of engineering, but it's important for satellites (among other applications).  I could suggest a book title that would reinstate the lost knowledge of BiCMOS design.  But how many of you could read the title and a couple of sentences of description and judge if it is the best book? (it was in the late 90s) or even a necessary book? (it isn't).  The average participant on this site probably wouldn't even know what I was talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The third and final problem is that the OP is almost certainly selecting an answer in a manner that is &quot;primarily opinion-based.&quot;  I know that's not the original intent of the VTC reason, but it's just as relevant.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a long and fancy way of saying, what's the point of allowing these questions in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;These questions should be arbitrarily closed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That these questions are being asked proves the OP has no blooming idea what it takes to climb the technology mountain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without a point-of-entry we must assume technology has been set back to the 1940s or earlier.  But even with a PoE...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Three books &lt;em&gt;in every field&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't hold enough information to rebuild the tech mountain quickly.  The time required to reinvent what's missing would overwhelm whatever advantage you had with the books.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answers can't be judged in a meaningful way by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Three books...  the only valuable way to ask this question might be (MAYBE!) &quot;which three university libraries...?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Moore's Law originally stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years.  Most people today think of it as &quot;technology doubles every two years,&quot; but that's because they have no idea what it takes to double that count.  What far too few people realize is that the knowledge it takes to meet the expectation of Moore's Law far exceeds simple doubling because of the number of fields that must advance just to double the number of transistors on a chip.  The mountain of knowledge grows exponentially, not geometrically, and to make it worse... people have discovered that the transistor count is doubling faster than every two years....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I came back and re-read this post quite some time after writing it &amp;mdash; and I can't even imagine what had darkened my mood that day.  Somebody or something obviously moved my cheese, kicked my cat, called my baby ugly, and beat me at&lt;/em&gt; Trivial Pursuit &lt;em&gt;all at the same time.  I'm going to leave the answer in its original condition because modifying it would change more than a few of the comments.  However, I would like to offer a sincere apology to both Lio and Green for being a bully.  That's not the kind of person I want to be and I failed to listen to the better angels of my nature when I wrote this.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T23:54:49.157" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:54:49.157" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-12T10:43:40.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Like any other series of questions, each should be taken on its own merits&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some fundamental subjects, maths, physics, chemistry, where it's potentially possible to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other subjects are more derivative, medicine for example, requires so much fundamental knowledge of chemistry, maths, and physics that in its own right it could well not be answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T10:43:40.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-12T12:32:29.977" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Only Three Books Series, I've been asking for WB to cite three books to send forward in time to be a kickstarting reference for a civilization recovering from collapse. Given the complaints of too-broad and opinion-based, I'd like to firm up the somewhat nebulous nature of the series. My hope is that if responders are given functional categories that the books should fit into then it should be a bit easier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of subject matter, what should the books do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giant Reference Tome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎ Primer on terminology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎ Advanced Practical Guide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have suggestions for better categories or other ways to minimize scope, I'd be happy to hear them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not willing to minimize the scope of the question(s) from medicine to organic microbiology. The point of these questions is to provide a recovering civilization with an early stage jumpstart. Once they get to where they can only make progress with interdisciplinary research, that's out of scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T15:16:05.480" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T10:23:23.453" Title="Only Three Books : Functional Categories to narrow the scope" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5766" CreationDate="2018-01-12T12:46:52.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with medicine is that it's medicine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/435/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obligatory xkcd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is just applied maths, and chemistry is just applied physics, but medicine is applied everything. What this means is that there are subjects the concept just doesn't work for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer you've given for medicine covers anatomy and a little surgery, but that doesn't scratch the surface of what we consider to be medicine. The subjects you choose for these questions will need to take that into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T12:46:52.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5766" CreationDate="2018-01-12T15:21:43.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Just make clear that three books don't need to contain all knowledge&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way-too-literal gremlins are out in force on these questions. The question series asks, exactly: &quot;you want to provide some information to kick start civilization's regrowth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers don't need to cover all parts of human knowledge. They need to, exactly like the question says, kick off regrowth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of an answer is to make an argument as to what is the best set of books to lay the foundation for a speedy recovery of knowledge. There is no exact answer, but some will be better than others. For example, there was extensive discussion on the Physics questions as to whether &lt;em&gt;Principia&lt;/em&gt; is a good book or not, given that it was written for other specialists and not for a general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the types of arguments that need to be set up to determine what the best answer is. Keep in mind, this site is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about getting the empirically correct answer. The OP can pick whatever he/she likes; even for a science-based problem the OP could accept an answer that ignores basic science. If your argument to close is that the OP can choose whatever answer they like, well that is a feature of the site, not a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; answers that are better than others to this question. Just like in programming you can sort any list if there is a comparator function, in order to not be primarily-opinion based, there must be a comparator function. In this case there is; and it is up to each answer-er to explain why their choices are better than others. That isn't pure opinion, it is educated, informed opinion. We rarely get much hard fact around here, so informed opinion is the best Worldbuilding can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T15:31:37.037" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T15:31:37.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-13T23:36:19.133" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Too many&amp;quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Three&lt;/s&gt; &lt;b&gt;Four&lt;/b&gt; questions of the same kind lead me to wonder whether there is going to be a question for each one of the fields listed in&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a specific stack-exchange open for the &amp;quot;three-books&amp;quot; section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we think that these three books series is useful/not-opinion-based, then it could be more usefully re-done in a &lt;b&gt;single&lt;/b&gt; wiki answer for the question &amp;quot;three books for...&amp;quot; where each answer provides three books for each field listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would limit someone else to then start the &amp;quot;one animal for...&amp;quot; section, or the &amp;quot;two tools for...&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;three famous historical figures for...&amp;quot;, or the &amp;quot;four ingredients for...&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T23:36:19.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5766" CreationDate="2018-01-14T21:20:52.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not willing to minimize the scope of the question(s) from medicine&#xA;  to organic microbiology. The point of these questions is to provide a&#xA;  recovering civilization with an early stage jumpstart. Once they get&#xA;  to where they can only make progress with interdisciplinary research,&#xA;  that's out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives me a feeling that your idea of jumpstarting a civilisation is limited to technology and natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about art, history, literature, philosophy, sociology, psychology? None of these can possibly fit in just three books no matter how good or thick they are. Choosing any three will be a matter of pure preference and nothing else. There are no objective criteria whatsoever to justify any choice (and I am willing to prove that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, when it comes to art and humanities reference books will be useless. Practical guides can be of limited use in art techniques and applied psychology. However, without an understanding of the underlying psychological theory, any therapy can be also very dangerous and do more harm than good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, technically inclined people may say that humanities are less important and that we can create new art, literature, philosophy, and history once the world is rebuilt. This is true. But knowing the past can help to avoid another collapse as history tends to repeat itself just on a grander scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychology and sociology can be highly instrumental when it comes to rebuilding. Both sciences provide tools to improve productivity, avoid work-related injuries, raise morale, and most importantly keep the survivors' colony from collapsing. I would argue that qualified psychologists can do for rebuilding no less or maybe even more for your civilisation jumpstarting effort than qualified engineers. But I am biased here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to collect a decent civilisation jumpstarting library you will have to pick narrower categories. And as you move toward humanities you might have to decide to abandon the three books approach and save as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also would be wise to create a list of references to good books on different subjects. Something like 'If you find these books keep them. We could not make a copy and store it here but these books are of great value.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more useful thing that you could do is to create a catalogue of big libraries around the world that contain collapse-prone books. That would be immensely helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T21:20:52.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T02:06:40.097" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;So a few people have said that books chosen can't possibly be ordered and that it's pure opinion which ones are better and better for my purpose than others. Given that any set of objects can be placed in order by means of an ordering function, below is my proposed ordering function. Any set of books that appropriately maximizes or minimizes these criteria compared to any other set of books will be most preferred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Readability to a broader audience though this won't be the general public. This is intended to avoid problems like Principia that's basically unreadable to someone who wasn't a personal friend of Newton's (okay, I'm probably exaggerating but you get the idea). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎Breadth of Coverage across all three books. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎Content of each book should be strongly connected to the other two. There will be differences in terminology that arise as concepts not described in the books are rediscovered by the future scientists (they will come up with different names for things) . Having one book lead to another minimizes this kind of problem. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎First, or first clearest expository of a foundational idea/concept/system for that field. (Principia is first but someone else wrote a clearer explanation later. Thus, the latter work is preferred over Principia. )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎Recognizable to someone in that field, at the target entry time, that the material in the book is about that field. (someone working with the newly rediscovered Maxwell's equations isn't going to be able to jump to semiconductors or fiber optics. Well, I'm guessing they won't be able to.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‎Corrects misinformation or model failures in knowledge in this field at the target entry time. (Pick your favorite &quot;I can't believe the early people got that wrong&quot; moment. Fixing those moments is important and the primary hope of these books. )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: with the above constraints on the books possible for the Three Books questions, would the questions be sufficiently narrow and not opinion-based? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T13:16:39.483" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T16:51:08.860" Title="Only Three Books: Ordering Function" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5774" CreationDate="2018-01-15T14:43:29.053" Score="5" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to 'Know Your Site' a (hopefully) every Monday Worldbuilding trivia  feature where I use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer and maybe some python parsing to find out interesting things about the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a question on Monday, and people have until Thursday at noon to guess the answer! To be clear, using the Data Explorer to get the answer is cheating. If you use that to find the answer, feel good about your inherent superiority, but don't post it! Also, absolutely do not look at my Data Explorer profile, because that is definitely cheating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which users have posted the most total value of bounties on Worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Name the top three in order to win!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: If you have any good ideas about awards for the winner, please post to comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T16:02:41.653" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T02:26:01.850" Title="Know Your Site Monday: Who are the most generous users?" Tags="|discussion|trivia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5772" CreationDate="2018-01-15T18:01:16.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;Allmighty @James, Steward of WB, Crusher of Dreams, Lord of The Factory Floor and diamond moderator of WorldBuilding, Snorter of Beverages, First of his name.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T18:01:16.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T18:51:49.440" Score="6" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102283/why-would-an-army-train-living-soldiers-when-manufacturing-robots-is-easier&quot;&gt;Why would an army train living soldiers when manufacturing robots is easier&lt;/a&gt;.  That question struck me as terribly broadly written, and the massively disparate answers demonstrate how broad it is.  My first instinct was to suggest that the OP narrow it down, but looking at the comments, there were also people who felt it was too story based because it had a very strong &quot;I need X in my world for my story.  How can I have X?&quot; feel to it.  That kind of put the question between a rock and a hard place and I wasn't certain what we could do to help the OP rescue it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if such questions could be rescued by using the story-based parts as a rubric for grading answers.  While we don't want story based questions, is it reasonable to use them as a guide.  After all, every one of these questions is presumably going into a story eventually.  It seems reasonable for the OP to give guidance as to what they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as similar in nature to the Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5739/whats-the-preferred-reaction-to-bonus-points-for-addendums&quot;&gt;What's the preferred reaction to “bonus points for…” addendums?&lt;/a&gt;, given that many of the answers recommended stripping out the phrase &quot;bonus points,&quot; which makes the resulting questions similar to the ones I'm asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T19:42:04.107" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T07:09:30.280" Title="Using &quot;too story based&quot; to cure &quot;too broad&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2018-01-15T22:39:34.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question cannot really be seen as too broad; indeed, it is very, very narrow. Possibly &lt;em&gt;too narrow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion-based though, perhaps. However, not to the degree that some suggest here. For example, someone said elsewhere that there are way too many college textbooks about the same thing so how do we choose which one to use; you don't! I skimmed over one of the questions linked, and I did not see a request for a specific ISBN. So, if I were to answer this with math as the basis, a very reasonable answer could be (compressed here) &quot;Knowledge of basic arithmetic likely would still be prevalent; that won't just disappear because of an apocalypse. We can probably start with an algebra book. Build on that with a trigonometry book and a calculus book. There will be topics missing, but this will cover most of what you need for applied science.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, I could answer this type of question from my own field, software engineering, and it need not be very opinion-based - at least not any more than World Building in general. A book on low level systems programming, one on compiler construction, and one that summarizes the linguistic concepts of many programming languages. If someone whose field is in electrical engineering answered the same type of question about their field, you then get the budding electrical engineers together with the anxious software engineers who are waiting for hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the topics are left to be only the very generic ones provided so far (ie: the &quot;3-book series&quot; is not continued to specific fields), such that the electrical engineers are left to work with only the chemistry books, then the answer becomes &quot;Pick the 2 most crucial fields that rely on chemistry, and provide 1 low-level book per field (ex: an electrical engineering book that covers macro-sized circuits and how to make them), and 1 book that provides a generic chemistry foundation.&quot; There's not much opinion to that, and it's difficult to argue: anything else, and your books might as well be paper weights since you cannot implement them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In World Building, the assumption is that the question has some specific fictional world in mind, be it for book, movie, game, or otherwise, there is a world in mind. So it is not broad to say to the world builder (the OP), &quot;Pick the 2 most crucial fields within that topic for your world&quot;. Indeed, that works well with fictional World Building and adds flavor to the world to think of a couple important chemistry-reliant fields, a couple important physics-reliant ones, and so on. And the question remains relevant to others, as other world builders will have a different pair of fields that works well in their world's story. OP gets what they need and interested readers wondering the same get what they need: Stack Exchange has filled its role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does strike me as odd is &quot;3 books.&quot; If this is on topic, can someone else start a &quot;2 book series,&quot; copy-paste all the 3-book series questions and replace all 3's with 2's and post new questions? And again for 4? The series-author did address this issue, however, acknowledging that 3 is arbitrary and chosen as a baseline. Likely, this was done specifically to narrow down the question so that it was not too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T22:39:34.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5775" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:25:11.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dealing with question of this kind it is more a matter of using the parameters in the question to determine the shape and form answers that are appropriate. In this Meta post this is referred to as &quot;too story-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I commented on the question itself the proposition &quot;I need my world to be like X because of my story. How do I achieve X?&quot; can be parsed or rephrased as &quot;I need my world to be like X. How do I achieve X?&quot; Now the later proposition is precisely the kind of question Worldbuilding SE welcomes. In which case, it is basically how to achieve a given effect or worldbuilding element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is needed to rescue questions of this sort from producing a plethora of divergent answers is the addition of extra parameters that can be used for guidance of more focused answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that the question does ask for &quot;logical reasons why humans would be trained in this army instead of robots?&quot; This suggests that comments could have been used to remind the posters of answers that their answers should have provided logical reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it should be remembered not all answers can be answered isomorphically. That is to say, one question will only have one answer. While that may be true in the class room, it is rarely so in the real world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because worldbuilding questions will inevitably contain a degree of speculation which means any answers will take more than a smidgen of latitude when it comes describing any imagined &quot;reality&quot;. Some WB questions might be answered with a single explanation, while others will be more divergent and more explanations will be appropriate. Sometimes we simply need to recognize what type of questions with produce what types of answers. Life isn't solely lived in the class room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:25:11.400" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5772" CreationDate="2018-01-19T02:26:01.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I marked Secespitus as correct, since he basically was. I won't ask any more questions demanding a correct order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct order is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;HDE 226868  2700&#xA;James       2150&#xA;dot_Spot    1400&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the top 10, for those interested, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Samuel     1200&#xA;JBH        1150&#xA;JDlugosz   1100&#xA;TrEs-2b    1100&#xA;Jim2B       950&#xA;Secespitus  900&#xA;Will        800&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T02:26:01.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5775" CreationDate="2018-01-20T06:46:33.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question appears to ask &quot;how to we help OPs ask better questions?&quot;  That's simpler when we understand what the VTC reasons mean and why they exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Monica Ciello once pointed out, the nature of Worldbuilding.SE is to fish for answers.  Creative people are often looking to forward a story and are experienced writer's block in one way or another.  It's not uncommon to have story background to help ask the question, but the question itself must still avoid our common VTC reasons.  Unlike non-fiction questions, fiction questions can be asked in an infinite number of ways.  The VTC reasons are an effort to control this potentially runaway process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is worth noting that we have limitations because we want the site to be valuable to more people than just the OP.  Others should be capable of benefiting from the effort to ask and answer the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I currently understand them...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based (VTC:POB)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions are often specific, but lack direction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question usually becomes on-topic by adding background or definitions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers are usually 1-4 paragraphs, but they are frequently disparate (all over the map).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one answer can be any better than another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reason we care is that questions without an obviously relevant answer are less to others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Off-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;How can my armored soldier survive a javelin attack?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;How can my armored soldier survive a javelin attack such that he can walk off the battlefield even if the armor is damaged?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Broad (VTC:TB)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question may be ambiguous, reflecting a lack of research on the OP's part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question may be ambiguous, reflecting a lack of understanding about the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question may be ambiguous, reflecting a desire for far more information than the site is prepared to provide.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question may ask too many questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question is made on-topic by reframing it as a single, unambiguous question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers often require a &quot;book&quot; sized response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers often require only seconds on Google to obtain scoping information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reason we care is that future readers are unlikely to find value in very long answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Off-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;What kind of spaceship can fly near a black hole?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;Does science know of, or theorize, a meterial that could be used to build the structure of a spaceship that could fly near a black hole?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Story Based (VTC:TSB)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question does not ask about the rules of a fictional world that could be used to write many stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question does ask about a plot device, behavior, action, or event that is meant to advance a specific story and is often independent of the rules of the fictional world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question is usually made on-topic by rephrasing to remove story elements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers are often &quot;this is what would happen next...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers are frequently disparate (all over the map, by their nature TSB questions are POB questions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reason we care is that story-specific questions often interpreted as usless to other people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Off-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;How should my thief, John, rob his medieval feudal lord of his best ring?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On-topic example:&lt;/em&gt;&amp;ensp;&quot;How could an affluent medieval person protect small valuables from theft?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T06:46:33.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-20T10:26:27.500" Score="-6" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of people seem to be asking questions about what would happen if the laws of science suddenly reasserted themselves after some absurd thing happens. Three recent questions I found right off the bat are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102722/a-box-that-scrambles-particles&quot;&gt;A Box That Scrambles Particles&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102711/if-rain-magically-started-falling-over-the-sahara-what-would-happen&quot;&gt;If rain magically started falling over the Sahara, what would happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32900/what-would-happen-if-the-black-hole-at-the-center-of-a-galaxy-was-removed/102682#102682&quot;&gt;What would happen if the black hole at the center of a galaxy was removed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absurd thing could be the result of some hitherto-undiscovered science, technology indistinguishable from magic, handwavium, or just magic itself. It doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a bit of a hole in the topics covered by the various &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tags. There's always been ground not covered by the false science-magic dichotomy here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could tag questions like this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; but with another tag along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/post-absurdity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;post-absurdity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;post-absurdity&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-as-janitor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-as-janitor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-as-janitor&lt;/a&gt;, or some other name you may like better. (God forbid I should ask for a tag split!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might argue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; already covers it. But the problem I've seen with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; alone is that people want to work the cause of the absurdity into their answers, explaining the absurdity with science or proposing some alternate condition that continues afterwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sometimes results in terrific answers (like the one to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102722/a-box-that-scrambles-particles&quot;&gt;A Box That Scrambles Particles&lt;/a&gt;) but it actually misses the point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP started that question with &quot;I have a box&quot;. I interpreted that as a cue to let the (&quot;black&quot;) box do what it does and let science do what it does. To accomplish this, one should use a mental guillotine to chop the  the absurdity away from its aftermath, and concentrate on the aftermath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/what-if&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;what-if&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;what-if&lt;/a&gt; tag (possibly only proposed; couldn't find it in the list), but that's too general, and encourages people to ask for writing advice. Other tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simulation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simulation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simulation&lt;/a&gt; were really about something completely different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33006" LastEditorUserId="33006" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T10:35:36.787" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T09:24:41.990" Title="Tag questions that want science to pick up the pieces" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5784" CreationDate="2018-01-21T19:22:31.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;These questions are structured properly&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is entirely appropriate here. Every question should come in the format $$\text{assumptions} \rightarrow\text{question}\rightarrow\text{conditions}.$$ The assumptions part makes a question not 'too broad'. The question itself must not be 'off topic'. The conditions make the question not 'primarily opinion based.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumptions are, in my mind, somewhat separate from the question. The assumptions don't have to be scientific for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; to be appropriate. This tag acts more like a condition for what sort of answers you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If these questions were more scientific, they would be too broad&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine someone asked, &quot;How could the Sahara recieve 300 mm of rain a year and what would happen to the flora and fauna?&quot; with the science-based tag. That is two questions, and it is too broad. But what if you split it into two questions? First you ask, &quot;What would happen in the Sahara if it started raining?&quot; and then &quot;How could it start raining in the Sahara?&quot;. These questions could be both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and both sufficiently scoped. So it might seem that you need to assume 'magic' to answer the first question, but the desire might be to simply get both answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually particularly relevant in the case of the particle scrambling box question. This might be phrased as a two part question, where the first says, &quot;Assume a box.&quot; Now, once the science based &lt;em&gt;effects&lt;/em&gt; are determined in this question, a follow-up question can delve into how to achieve these effects in a science based manner, &quot;How do I build a strong force damping field?&quot; (Not that that is a super science-based question itself, but it's just an example). So you see in this case, you need to ask the question about the box's &lt;em&gt;effects&lt;/em&gt; to determine the 'conditions' of your second question, &quot;How do I build a box that achieves this effect?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is a condition on possible answers to the question, not a description of the assumptions, or even of the question. For example, if you didn't add the science-based tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102789/what-sort-of-substance-could-a-humanoid-release-to-befuddle-others-around-them&quot;&gt;&quot;What sort of substance could a humanoid release to befuddle those around them?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then the answer could be 'pixie dust.' The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; serves as a &lt;em&gt;condition&lt;/em&gt; that prevents the question from being 'primarily opinion-based.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T09:24:41.990" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T09:24:41.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5788" CreationDate="2018-01-22T13:59:09.830" Score="9" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to 'Know Your Site' a (hopefully) every Monday Worldbuilding trivia feature where I use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer and maybe some python parsing to find out interesting things about the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a question on Monday, and people have until Thursday at noon to guess the answer! To be clear, using the Data Explorer to get the answer is cheating. If you use that to find the answer, feel good about your inherent superiority, but don't post it! Also, absolutely do not look at my Data Explorer profile, because that is definitely cheating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/populist&quot;&gt;populist&lt;/a&gt; badge is for having an answer that has at least twice the score of the accepted answer, while the accepted answer has a score of 11 or greater. But some posts are more populist than others. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31419/23519&quot;&gt;highest voted answer&lt;/a&gt; on the site is not accepted, so it has 319 more votes than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31394/23519&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; (which itself is the 4th highest voted answer on the site!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are six other answers that, as of the time of writing the question, have at least 100 score higher than the accepted answer. Which ones are they?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, there are two answers that currently have 99 and 98 points more than the accepted answer, so don't be fooled!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T16:25:09.757" Title="Know Your Site Monday: Which answers are most underappreciated?" Tags="|discussion|trivia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5787" CreationDate="2018-01-22T14:35:33.430" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8118/rmoore&quot;&gt;rmoore&lt;/a&gt; with 372 to 157 (215 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12395/28789&quot;&gt;How do you prove you're from the future?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19309/even-mien&quot;&gt;Even Mien&lt;/a&gt; with 202 to 5 (197 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/38705/28789&quot;&gt;Humans can now run 40 mph. How do I keep the stupid people alive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16021/wingman4l7&quot;&gt;Wingman4I7&lt;/a&gt; with 203 to 65 (138 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/32091/28789&quot;&gt;Santa is Satan, but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/809/mo%c5%82ot&quot;&gt;Mołot&lt;/a&gt; with 144 to 16 (128 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/95048/28789&quot;&gt;Why would a staff increase the magic power of a mage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453/aify&quot;&gt;Aify&lt;/a&gt; with 136 to 22 (114 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/37243/28789&quot;&gt;How do you assassinate someone who is protected by precognitive people?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39814/doomfrost&quot;&gt;Doomfrost&lt;/a&gt; with 141 to 32 (109 difference): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/88894/28789&quot;&gt;How can a race of eldritch abominations help humanity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;99 difference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/34371/andon&quot;&gt;Andon&lt;/a&gt; with 122 to 23: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75002/28789&quot;&gt;How do I keep my slaves happy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;98 difference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13369/oddthinking&quot;&gt;Oddthinking&lt;/a&gt; with 160 to 62: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/25219/28789&quot;&gt;Would intelligent life evolve any other body plan than humanoid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T16:25:09.757" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T16:25:09.757" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T07:21:46.723" Score="12" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alien-geometry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alien-geometry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alien-geometry&lt;/a&gt; topic challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its often hard to tweak the mathematics of a world (for example, you can't really make 2+2=5 in a reasonable way), but one way you can is by tweaking the geometry. This can lead to many interesting implications, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13094/what-would-the-periodic-table-of-a-4-dimensional-universe-look-like&quot;&gt;chemical&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12378/infinite-flat-world&quot;&gt;biological&lt;/a&gt;, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/101804/how-can-orientation-discriminating-people-keep-their-views-when-it-turns-out-the&quot;&gt;cultural&lt;/a&gt; implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-manifold#Important_examples_of_3-manifolds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some examples of 3-manifolds&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration; (3-manifolds are similar to our world locally). (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-manifold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4-manifolds&lt;/a&gt; are also similar if you include time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotient_space_(topology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quotient spaces&lt;/a&gt; helps too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It appears to be finished. If someone wants to propose another tag challenge, go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8914" LastEditorUserId="8914" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T03:57:33.760" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T03:57:33.760" Title="Topic challenge: alien geometry" Tags="|discussion|tags|challenge|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5766" CreationDate="2018-01-23T10:17:31.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to the question must include an awareness of who is choosing/sending the books. Is it just you, the omniscient author, who creates an anonymous time capsule? Or is it a character or organization from the past shaping the future through their own priorities? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Author to author, I would look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maslow's hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; of needs. Basic needs take care of themselves and are best adapted by the people in the environment. A treatise on surgery would be useless in an unsterile environment. Saving individual lives when rebuilding civilization must surely take a backseat to shaping the values that make civilization sustainable. Books not on what to think but how to think ie critical observation, emotional intelligence, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Whole Earth Catalog (for puzzling and reverse engineering everything from hammocks to hammers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A book of poetry (Rumi) or an anthology such as Carolyn Forche's &quot;Against Forgetting: Poetry of Witness (which serves as history of war/places/peoples, both as a warning and empathy building)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A book of quotations (such as Fredrick Douglass: &quot;It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43107" LastEditorUserId="43107" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T10:23:23.453" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T10:23:23.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5771" CreationDate="2018-01-25T14:24:37.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No way.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at the numbers of books listed by the US Library of Congress. Number of books by keyword (and some subfields) as of Jan 25, 2018:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=astronomy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: 14,444&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=chemistry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;: 43,725 &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=biochemistry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biochemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: 5,579&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=medicine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Medicine&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: 82,493&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=human%20physiology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Human physiology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: 5,532&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 37,529&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=thermodynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thermodynamics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 4,285&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that some of these books may constitute catalogs of sort, but then, why not a catalog of chemical compounds to share all the available synthetic objects that we have so far managed to create? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly have a hard time imagining someone who would be so familiar with all these texts in any of these disciplines in order to provide a reasonable justification of why their specific subset is more fitting than &lt;b&gt;most&lt;/b&gt; other subsets (and I am not even thinking of the &lt;b&gt;best&lt;/b&gt; subset). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, one could narrow down to some very specific sub-discipline, where only a handful of books exist. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of human disciplines is quite large. I imagine that WB would restrict the number of three books questions to only a subset of these. Then, again, I have a hard time imagining why only a subset of these should be allowed, and the rest discarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to further play around with the numbers, you can construct the link from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://www.loc.gov/books/?q=keyword&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T14:24:37.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5771" CreationDate="2018-01-25T16:51:08.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will probably work for rather low-level natural sciences but not for social sciences or high-level theoretical natural sciences. Your criteria are based on several assumptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is one and only one 'correct' and unified theory in the field;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the entire field uses the same terminology to mean exactly the same things;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the concepts/main points of this theory can be summarised in a brief concise manner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the case in social sciences. Psychology, for example, does not have one dominant school or theory. Moreover, theoretical psychology (research) and applied psychology (therapy) operate quite differently. Psychologists also have a habit of 'borrowing' terms and giving them slightly different meanings, hence, any paper or book has a long part with definitions. Moreover, these definitions may change over time as a theory develops, as was the case with Freud and psychoanalysis. The same can be observed in other fields of humanities as well. It does not mean that they are somehow deficient. But they are just different from natural sciences in their organisation. So you need to come up with a special approach to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wonder about technical and engineering manuals. You probably want those to rebuild technology. Do they need theory whatsoever? Perhaps a book of blueprints and accompanying manuals on ore refining/tool making/woodworking/etc. would be a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest abandoning the one-fits-all approach and narrow down your field of interest first or divide fields into groups if you are looking into building a comprehensive library. Then you can come up with fitting criteria for each group of fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T16:51:08.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-25T21:36:55.373" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;We seem to have a fair few Rocheworld style questions accumulating over the years. Is it worth having a tag for them? Would enough people even recognise the tag for it to be meaningful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T21:44:11.427" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T22:29:49.577" Title="Should we have a Rocheworld tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2018-01-25T21:58:43.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is that a popular book?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt;, and I had never heard of Rocheworld, so I did a quick search and figured out it's a book about laser driven light sail propulsion to the double planet that orbits Barnard's Star.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Having never read it, even with the wikipedia entry to give me hints, I have no idea what actually makes up a Rocheworld question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that instead of having a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rocheworld&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rocheworld&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rocheworld&lt;/a&gt;, I think it would be a lot less confusing to have a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laser-driven-light-sail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laser-driven-light-sail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laser-driven-light-sail&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/double-planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;double-planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;double-planet&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/extra-stellar-spaceflight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;extra-stellar-spaceflight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;extra-stellar-spaceflight&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/double-planets-orbiting-barnards-star-that-you-get-to-using-a-laser-driven-light-sail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;double-planets-orbiting-barnards-star-that-you-get-to-using-a-laser-driven-light-sail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;double-planets-orbiting-barnards-star-that-you-get-to-using-a-laser-driven-light-sail&lt;/a&gt;, because then it's not ambiguous as to what it means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T21:58:43.580" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2018-01-26T20:11:27.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would this tag be about? Forward's light sail propulsion system? Flouwen? Rocheworld double planet shape? If it is not clear from the tag name, then it is a very bad tag name. I might agree that propulsion systems and planets with shared atmosphere &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;, possibly, deserve own tags if there are none already. But I'm sure that &lt;strong&gt;Rocheworld is not a name for tag&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T20:11:27.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2018-01-28T14:58:59.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I've seen is a not uncommon pattern of several questions on a related topic (in this case &quot;rocheworld&quot;) coming close together, where one or sometimes two people are producing these questions for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it dies down, like a fad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be afraid that if we make tags for all these subject-of-the-moment type things we'd be knee deep in tags that are hardly used.  We already have useful tags for this type of question - like gravity, planets.  Maybe we should not seek to generate tags unless there's a consistent subject or category that crops up e.g. at least once a week, maybe once every two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T14:58:59.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T06:20:38.220" Score="12" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's almost February in 2018, which isn't supposed to be the proper time to cycle these, but for this year it'll be once again, so we'll be refreshing the &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt; for this year now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's amazing blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for understanding worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blogs or articles of existing interesting worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5801&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T16:02:36.850" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2018" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-02-07T13:41:40.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-01-29T13:59:04.447" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDxv3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Universe Factory, our community-run blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T23:02:39.867" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T23:02:39.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-01-29T14:00:20.070" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2878&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ooIj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Share your work on the blog -- we&amp;#39;ll help!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T23:03:11.750" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T23:03:11.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5805" CreationDate="2018-01-29T14:53:34.067" Score="6" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to 'Know Your Site', an every Monday Worldbuilding trivia feature where I use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer and maybe some python parsing to find out interesting things about the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a question on Monday, and people have until Thursday at noon to guess the answer! To be clear, using the Data Explorer to get the answer is cheating. If you use that to find the answer, feel good about your inherent superiority, but don't post it! Also, absolutely do not look at my Data Explorer profile, because that is definitely cheating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New rule: if you had the accepted answer last week, you can't answer this week. Yes that is you, Secespitus.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 930 people awarded a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=General&amp;amp;filter=gold&quot;&gt;gold badge&lt;/a&gt; as of Sunday, January 28th. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get two gold badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get three gold badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get both a question and answer badge (as defined in the gold badges link above)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get two moderation badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T15:20:07.170" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T17:41:54.020" Title="Know Your Site Monday: Who were the first to gold?" Tags="|discussion|trivia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5804" CreationDate="2018-01-29T16:52:46.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get two gold badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/328/overactor&quot;&gt;overactor&lt;/a&gt;, on Oct 29 '14, both on the same day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get three gold badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Tim B, Jan 16, 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get both a question and answer badge (as defined in the gold badges link above)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4857/dsollen&quot;&gt;dsollen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q: Sep 23 '15&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A: Oct 9 '15&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who was the first person to get two moderation badges?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Looks like HDE 226868♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T17:41:54.020" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T17:41:54.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-01-29T17:23:43.383" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kr83W.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writing.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="538" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T21:07:14.730" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T21:07:14.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-01-29T18:41:42.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euF1O.png&quot; alt=&quot;Get inspired by reading, at Literature SE!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="2235" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T00:07:41.467" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T00:07:41.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5811" CreationDate="2018-01-29T18:44:19.907" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed in the last week or two, though I am not totally sure about the timeline, that the links to chat in the right hand navigation pane of the main site have vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They used to be somewhere below the yellow features box and above the HNQ list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just curious if I am the only one.  They appear to show up on meta still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T19:17:28.200" Title="Links to chat have disappeared from main?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-01-29T18:50:24.160" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTGgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Q&amp;amp;A about works of sci-fi and fantasy!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T18:50:24.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5808" CreationDate="2018-01-29T19:17:28.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still see it if I'm already in chat when Main is (re)loaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken just now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GAtxj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GAtxj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T19:17:28.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2018-01-29T22:29:49.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl dr:&lt;/strong&gt; Darn Straight - &lt;em&gt;Add It&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of a tag? In my approximation it is metadata. What is metadata used for? It's used so people can find subjects for which they are looking. You can have five tags per question. If having an extra tag which says &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rocheworld&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rocheworld&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rocheworld&lt;/a&gt; brings people from away from Stack Exchange here (through a Google search or what have you), helps others who are asking questions as such (so they don't create duplicates and therefore make more work for others), and makes general sense (can be related to the subject without too much consternation), then &lt;em&gt;why not?&lt;/em&gt; IMHO, the only reason to &lt;em&gt;not add&lt;/em&gt; it is if there's already something which could be used as a synonym. Just because some people don't know what it is doesn't mean the tag shouldn't be added. That's a very short sighted and snobbish attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, as long as there is a good explanation in the Tag Wiki as far as what the meaning of the tag is, then add it. It will pay dividends going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T22:29:49.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5814" CreationDate="2018-01-31T14:12:51.690" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103601/how-many-slaves-do-i-need-to-keep-my-mountain-palace-supplied?noredirect=1#comment312412_103601&quot;&gt;slave mountain&lt;/a&gt; question was commented on by two Tim B's; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49/tim-b&quot;&gt;Diamond Tim B&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/44692/tim-b&quot;&gt;Nova Tim B&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I replied to Diamond Tim B in a comment @TimB. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which Tim B did I just ping? Both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-31T14:59:37.923" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T06:02:41.137" Title="Who did I just ping?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5813" CreationDate="2018-01-31T15:01:02.490" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The one who posted most recently. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/352819&quot;&gt;How do comment @replies work?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Matching is performed in reverse chronological order, so if five people named John are participating, @john will match the most recent John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5815/28789&quot;&gt;you have pinged diamond Tim&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a way to reply to someone who wrote a comment earlier and has the same username as someone who posted later - there is no way to ping not-diamond Tim right now, unless he decides to write another comment and thereby making the diamond Tim unavailable for pinging under your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some tests in the chat with &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/42601574#42601574&quot;&gt;AndyD273 pinging Secret and Secespitus at the same time by using &quot;@Sec&quot;&lt;/a&gt; the mechanism seems to work differently in the chat. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234029/disable-three-letter-pings-from-chat-to-save-oliver-olivier-and-olive-from-oli&quot;&gt;Disable three-letter pings from chat to save Oliver, Olivier and Olive from Oli's pings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-01-31T20:16:08.370" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T20:16:08.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5813" CreationDate="2018-01-31T17:19:13.527" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me............................&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T17:19:13.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5813" CreationDate="2018-02-01T05:47:15.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to fix this. More accurately, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; have to fix this, I'm the Johnny come lately. What do I need to do here? Is it as simple as changing my name in the profile? Will that muck up all the other references in answers that refer back to Tim B UnDiamond?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hopefully this solves the problem. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="44692" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T06:02:41.137" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T06:02:41.137" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5820" CreationDate="2018-02-01T22:50:16.967" Score="-6" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that this is not a conventional forum and I'm not suggesting that we have off-topic boards or anything like that, BUT...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when conversations in comments need to be kept between the parties and chat isn't always the best location for it. For one, the character limitation makes it too twitter-like to get complex ideas and massive amounts of information across. Editing answers / questions makes the debate public, and that's not always the best (especially for side issues that are only tangentially related to the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, I know in the past I've created a couple of issues given the breadth of what I can discuss (I think I've got a collection of hate-followers on Philosophy after my AI answers and Free Will), and I've straight out deleted some of my Theology answers because it's easier than trying to write up 1k page theses on why I'm right, where my sources come from etc. in comments. My point is, some of my responses (I feel) should be directed to the individual (rather than made public) because some of the debate is about the appropriateness of the answer or question, and in fact whether or not I should delete or edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather that be conducted behind closed doors, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the answer seems obvious; private messages. If we had the same edit and size capacity as a conventional answer or question, we could put detailed ideas across to others, share thoughts on whether or not an answer in particular is a good fit for the site, etc. and we could do that in non-real time, which is important for those of us who can't sit on chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T16:35:16.917" Title="Private Messages - I think we need them" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5819" CreationDate="2018-02-02T01:08:07.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your argument, as I understand it, is that there are certain moderation-related issues that you think should be discussed in private - in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySzEXKUSZw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the room where it happens&lt;/a&gt;, I suppose. In other words, you want to be able to address a given user privately about a point they've made, specifically, about whether or not a specific post is good for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a good idea, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other people can, in some cases, provide good feedback. A plus side of talking in chat is that there are third parties available to step in and maybe even cool things down. Yeah, it's nice to not have people interrupting, but many one-on-one discussions on Stack Exchange don't end nicely. I think that this feature could just feed the flames in arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two people have been talking a lot in comments under a post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/95937/274942&quot;&gt;they'll be given the option to move to a chat room&lt;/a&gt;. Sometimes it works; sometimes it fails. I've seen a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of cases where it fails, and where it could have succeeded . . . had someone else stepped in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Democracies die behind closed doors.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/us/traces-of-terror-immigration-a-court-backs-open-hearings-on-deportation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Damon Keith&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it's not necessary, I don't like talks about moderation happening in the dark, in privacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/338497/6535830&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange isn't a democracy&lt;/a&gt;, but there's an open process when it comes to content and content moderation. Decisions behind closed doors undermine that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, moderators do have moderator-only chat rooms, and we do use them. But those are needed for sharing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140095/how-safe-is-our-user-identity/140104#140104&quot;&gt;information that cannot be made public&lt;/a&gt;, discussing actions the mod team will take, etc. That sort of information can't be released, as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy&quot;&gt;privacy policy&lt;/a&gt;, so any discussions about a specific bit of PII can't be public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been cases where users used non-Stack Exchange messaging services to discuss matters in private. One case I'm thinking of comes to mind because it was part of some infamous chat issues, and enabled the continuation of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/270590/274942&quot;&gt;toxic room culture&lt;/a&gt; that has continued to hurt a certain site. This system messaging is off of Stack Exchange, and so evades moderation. And it's harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sort of private messaging you're proposing would presumably be visible to diamond moderators, but that still leaves it without a key level of community support and moderation, and provides a pathway to abuse. This sort of feature &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be abused if it's implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T01:08:07.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5822" CreationDate="2018-02-02T12:29:08.370" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Main site question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102240/remotely-controlled-battle-starships&quot;&gt;Remotely controlled battle starship&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the question and it was answered by several users, but now I want to change the numbers and add some more detail. Is it acceptable to edit it and put a &quot;current answers are outdated&quot; bounty? I'm still working on the edit and it's not posted yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34247" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T14:07:03.867" Title="What to do if I want to change the numbers in a question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5821" CreationDate="2018-02-02T14:07:03.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, please don't invalidate existing answers by editing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty reason you named is supposed to be used if for example new research came up or on some other sites on the network if the programming language in question is updated. Things where it's outside of the control of the participants. See for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/25294/435686&quot;&gt;Invalidate an answer when starting a bounty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invalidating answers by editing your question is not okay. You would invalidate their hard work and it makes it a lot harder to keep track of which answers are good and which are bad. See for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4404/28789&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing to do is to post a new question and link to the old, stating what exactly you changed and why that would invalidate the existing answers to the old question. That way you also show why the new question is not a duplicate - if the edit would invalidate existing answers then the answers can't be useful to the new question and it can therefore not be a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to make this obvious. Make it bold. At the start. With a horizontal line before the stuff you basically copy from the old question. It doesn't matter how you do it exactly, but make sure that everyone sees that you are asking a similar question, but with definitely different constraints that make the old question not useful anymore for finding an answer to the current question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T14:07:03.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5819" CreationDate="2018-02-02T16:35:16.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I pretty much agree with what HDE already wrote. However, I want to specifically note two particular parts of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some of my responses (I feel) should be directed to the individual (rather than made public) because some of the debate is about the appropriateness of the answer or question, and in fact whether or not I should delete or edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that what you are basically saying here is that you feel that most people aren't worthy of being privy to your reasoning why a post is good (or bad, as the case may be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like a dangerous way to run things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of what makes Stack Exchange so successful, and so good at filtering the good answers from the bad ones, is &lt;strong&gt;the community moderation.&lt;/strong&gt; Each vote on each post has limited influence, but taken together, this actually does work pretty well to separate the wheat from the chaff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If arguments are held in private, even if those arguments are completely civil (which, as HDE discusses, they might not be), then others have less information by which to make their judgements on a post. That is, at best, not good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diamond moderator tasks on all but the largest sites in the network is pretty low-intensity, in that there's usually little that &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; a diamond moderator &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to do. Most things can be handled by the community. (That, too, is how things are generally handled on Worldbuilding; &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; moderation activities that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be handled by the community actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; handled by the community, not by the diamond moderators.) If you add something to the system which is not accessible to the community at large, now &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; that happens using that feature must be monitored by the diamond moderators to ensure the feature is not abused. This would cause moderator workload to spike. At best, such as with a private messaging system, perhaps only flagged content would need to be reviewed; but even if so, this would still cause an increase in moderator workload, for what appears to me to be dubious gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editing answers / questions makes the debate public, and that's not always the best (especially for side issues that are only tangentially related to the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a side issue only tangentially related to the question, then why are you including it in an answer in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wise person is supposed to have once quipped &quot;a letter is perfect not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away&quot;. In other words, each and every word serves a purpose in communicating &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt; information. While Worldbuilding SE is fairly lax, I still think that's a reasonable goal to strive for: include the relevant information, and omit the useless fluff. The line separating the two can sometimes be difficult to identify, but it's usually fairly easy to tell if something falls &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; to either side of that line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a major part of your answer is about something not raised by the person asking the question, then consider whether it belongs there in the first place. Maybe it's better off as a different question and answer (maybe on a different site in the network), or on your personal web site or blog, or as an article in a peer-reviewed journal (you wish!), or on a regular discussion forum, or if it's better to simply sack it. Nothing &lt;em&gt;prevents&lt;/em&gt; you from linking to external content, as long as the answer itself is self-contained and ideally the links are relevant. Most likely, wherever that extra set of points might belong, they're better off there than in an answer to an unrelated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T16:35:16.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5837" CreationDate="2018-02-05T14:26:48.703" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to 'Know Your Site', an every Monday Worldbuilding trivia feature where I use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer and maybe some python parsing to find out interesting things about the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post a question on Monday, and people have until Thursday at noon to guess the answer! To be clear, using the Data Explorer to get the answer is cheating. If you use that to find the answer, feel good about your inherent superiority, but don't post it! Also, absolutely do not look at my Data Explorer profile, because that is definitely cheating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After three consecutive weeks of having my question answered in about 30 minutes, you guys have forced me to take extreme measures. For this week's question, &lt;strong&gt;Who is the highest reputation user whose highest tag score is a a certain tag?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Difficultly worded question, so here are some examples. Who is the highest reputation user that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; as their highest tag?  How about for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;? Looking at the list in order of reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Name          Reality Check      Science Based&#xA;Cort Ammon             2526               1489&#xA;Thucydides             1592               1494&#xA;JDlugosz               1417               1675&#xA;Separatrix             1953               1236&#xA;Tim B                  1028               1906&#xA;Will                   1724               1897&#xA;HDE 226868              845               1402&#xA;kingledion             1841               2340&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cort Ammon has more rep in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; than any other tag, and is the highest rep user for which this is true, so Cort Ammon is the answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. JDlugosz, Tim B, Will, HDE 226868 and kingledion all have more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; than any other tag; of these, JDlugosz has the highest rep, so he is the answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, even though other users have a higher score for that tag. Make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these other tags, which user who has their highest tag score in each tag has the most overall reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Important limitations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ignore &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I can tell, &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; user has one of those two a their top tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The user must have at least 10 not-closed answers in a certain tag to count. Thus, if you have 581 score from one post in computers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu/31419#31419&quot;&gt;for example&lt;/a&gt;, you don't count.  I made this limit because one-off answers with 100+ votes tend to skew things oddly. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please post partial answers; you probably need it on this one :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:03:37.227" Title="Know Your Site Monday: Who are the tag masters?" Tags="|discussion|trivia|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2018-02-05T15:13:57.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29552/alexp&quot;&gt;AlexP&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%c5%82ugosz&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/147/vincent&quot;&gt;Vincent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11049/tres-2b&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2113/brythan&quot;&gt;Brythan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/25189/rek&quot;&gt;rek&lt;/a&gt; (The highest non-excluded tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water&lt;/a&gt;, but the user has less than 10 water answers; ... upon further inspection he also only has 7 answers and 6 questions, so this is wrong too...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geography&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3276/mikey&quot;&gt;Mikey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/13430/john-robinson&quot;&gt;John Robinson&lt;/a&gt; (wrong; too few answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7886/jim2b&quot;&gt;Jim2B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7089/thorsten-s&quot;&gt;Thorsten S.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/9207/lostinfrance&quot;&gt;Lostinfrance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2252/cort-ammon&quot;&gt;Cort Ammon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11306/avernium&quot;&gt;Avernium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/20681/pedro-gabriel&quot;&gt;Pedro Gabriel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/38942/ziobyte&quot;&gt;ZioByte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6402/o-m&quot;&gt;o.m.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29/michael-kj%c3%b6rling&quot;&gt;Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16883/catgut&quot;&gt;Catgut&lt;/a&gt; (wrong; too few answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/16295/separatrix&quot;&gt;Separatrix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8572/thucydides&quot;&gt;Thucydides&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/6453/aify&quot;&gt;Aify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11859/rumguff&quot;&gt;rumguff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21870/z-schroeder&quot;&gt;Z.Schroeder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T11:25:19.533" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T11:25:19.533" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T21:28:17.757" Score="8" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Conlang stack&lt;/a&gt; has just &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101265/constructed-languages&quot;&gt;hit the private beta&lt;/a&gt; and to celebrate that I wanted to bring up the discussion if we should migrate our conlang content to that arguably more suited stack and have a quick spring-cleanup on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am aware we have two tags for content that would likely be better suited on that new site, they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the written or spoken language of a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is meant for questions about constructed languages and the construction of new languages for fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we could argue about the former, questions tagged with the latter one definitely fall into the mentioned category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do we do? Do we acknowledge that new stack and help it grow, or do we just ignore it for the time being?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T10:45:49.797" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T10:45:49.797" Title="Should we migrate our conlang questions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5830" CreationDate="2018-02-06T21:40:54.937" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say no for three reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are on-topic here shouldn't be migrated away without the asker's consent.  People chose to ask them &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; and they're within our scope; why should we send our users away?  Go ahead and suggest that they &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; look at the other site, but leave the decision in the hands of the asker.  If the asker of an unanswered question would prefer to try another site that's different; I'm talking here about community or moderator migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Young beta sites, and especially brand-new ones, should develop their initial body of questions organically, not by having other sites send them questions.  The early days of a beta are formative, and it's important that &lt;em&gt;their communities&lt;/em&gt; do that formation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migrations can be really confusing for the affected users, especially if they're new and/or don't have accounts on the other site.  There's some discussion of this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285467/162102&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE question and its answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/03/22/respect-the-community-your-own-and-others/&quot;&gt;Respect the community -- your own, and others'&lt;/a&gt; explains my first two points really well.  I highly recommend reading this to get some insight into challenges of migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T03:44:25.983" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T03:44:25.983" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-02-06T23:40:19.497" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VdLYH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discover the universe&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T23:40:19.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2018-02-07T05:38:05.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;for space-travel &gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/20315/molborg&quot;&gt;MolbOrg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46704" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T05:38:05.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T08:15:39.503" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there somewhere on this website that I can post a list of traits a species I am working on has, so I can refer back to this list as I ask individual questions about the viability of each trait?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on a fictional species and have a list of 20-30 different traits I would like the species to have. While I do have the list in notepad, I was wondering if there was somewhere I could post this list on the site, and link to it as well as add the links of questions pertaining to each trait as I ask more questions on the Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because questions should be direct and focused on one issue at a time, I do not know if it makes sense to post this 20-30 point list at the bottom of each question I ask. It seems like it would add unnecessary clutter. Though I would like it to be available so people who respond can know a fuller context for the questions I ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47490" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T12:50:18.540" Title="Where can I post a Reference List?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5834" CreationDate="2018-02-07T08:35:49.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A Meta post&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest I can think off would be to start a Meta Post and put the list there with links to each item. To give you an idea of what I am thinking of you may want to have a look at some of the series that we have on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2594/28789&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4639/my-alien-message-series&quot;&gt;My “Alien Message” series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see someone started a series and often other people contributed to this series, too. You can just create one of your own and link to the Meta Post in your Main Site questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But: &lt;strong&gt;Please remember that each question should stand on its own.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can link for additional information, such as an Anatomically Correct question that almost always links to &amp;quot;A list of all the Anatomically Correct questions can be found &lt;code&gt;[here](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series)&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;. But you still have to mention all the important information in your question - it should not be necessary to read additional questions to understand your new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might add clutter to the question, but if you always put the same requirements at the end of your questions people who are familiar with your concept will just skip that part and people who are not familiar know what the requirements are. Think about it like this: maybe you find out that you need to change some of the traits, because someone mentioned something that made you re-think your current approach. It would be weird if later someone discovers an older question from you and looks at the linked list of requirements, only to find that the answers to the older question don't fit the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you can also only mention the traits that are important for the question you are currently asking. That depends on which traits you are referring to and what kinds of questions you want to ask. But in general I'd recommend you start a series post on Meta once you have maybe three or four questions and plan to continue for some time. Then you can link the Meta Post for those that are interested in the concept, which makes it a whole lot easier to find everything and know what may be coming up. And the list of common traits can just be a list at the end of the post. It may not be perfect to copy-paste that list to new questions, but it's important that every question stands on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt; tag and its description &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/reference/info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that collect links to reference material. When used to index posts that are related to each other, such as questions in a particular series or about a particular world, the question should have a single community-wiki answer to collect the links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T12:50:18.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5834" CreationDate="2018-02-07T10:58:10.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about the viability of any one specific trait, then what difference do the others make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about the viability of some subset of the traits in combination, then that subset is relevant to answering the question and thus should go into the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about the viability of all of the traits in combination, then all of the traits are relevant to answering the question and thus should go into the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't spread things out!&lt;/strong&gt; If it's relevant for the question, then it goes into the question, even if that means you're repeating yourself a bit. Don't assume that everyone has read, or is willing to read, all of your questions; make each question self-contained. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3568/29&quot;&gt;have you [...] included everything that is important for your question?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3587/29&quot;&gt;Do answers to your question depend on any knowledge specific to your setting that isn't included in the question[...]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't include unnecessary information!&lt;/strong&gt; If it isn't relevant for the question, then it doesn't go into the question, either directly or by implied-useful reference. Trim ruthlessly until there is nothing left to trim from the question you're asking &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little humor generally doesn't hurt on Worldbuilding, but the majority of material in your questions should be material that is relevant to answering that one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost get the feeling that you want to use Worldbuilding SE as your own notebook. &lt;em&gt;That is not its purpose!&lt;/em&gt; You should keep your own set of notes, which may include an extensive (and possibly more detailed) list of creature traits, to which &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; refer and from which you take the relevant parts when composing any single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;I disagree with&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5835/29&quot;&gt;Secespitus' suggestion&lt;/a&gt; to use a meta post for this. Meta is meant for discussing how the site works, whether something is on topic, about the implications of a particular policy, etc.; it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; meant for keeping extra material that would be off topic if posted on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T10:58:10.373" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2018-02-08T16:03:37.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Secespitus's answer is good, but here are the corrections to his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/4790/march-ho?tab=tags&quot;&gt;March Ho&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/25459/shadow1024?tab=tags&quot;&gt;Shadow1024&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/7325/gary-walker?tab=tags&quot;&gt;GaryWalker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3407/2012rcampion?tab=tags&quot;&gt;2012rcampion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh?tab=tags&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3202/samuel?tab=tags&quot;&gt;Samuel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/42450/slarty?tab=tags&quot;&gt;Slarty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we'll go for a little bit easier next time....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:03:37.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:28:04.927" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question below was asked two days ago. It originally had the hard-science tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104222/21222&quot;&gt;What would&amp;#39;ve had to change in the early solar system for Mars to remain habitable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the OP made an edition removing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. However, the warning about the tag still remains on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question asks for hard science.&lt;/strong&gt; All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;the tag description&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this to be expected? Shouldn't the note go away together with the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:28:04.927" Title="Question has note about hard-science tag without having the tag itself" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-09T12:49:19.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5841" CreationDate="2018-02-13T20:24:17.273" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has a noticeable amount of views in such a short time. What method other than a good question can be used to get more views?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/104713/how-would-people-conceivably-escape-a-planet-too-large-for-chemical-rockets&quot;&gt;How would people conceivably escape a planet too large for chemical rockets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T14:42:53.110" Title="How did this question get so many views?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5840" CreationDate="2018-02-13T20:36:16.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It was in the &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is popular it will get to the &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt;, which are the currently popular questions of all sites that are shown in the sidebar on the right side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of all current &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt; can be seen by clicking on those words at the top of the list. It leads you &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they are shown on the whole network they attract a lot of views, votes and answers. This often means that they are a bit (or a lot) opinion-based on this site. HNQs are not necessarily good examples of what a site is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time the questions are replaced by other popular questions. The longer a question exists, the less &quot;arbitrary hotness points&quot; it will have, though it will at first get more points as more people see it and interact with the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see what determines the score you can look &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/352819&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I will copy a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4003/58913&quot;&gt;nicer looking version from Chemistry.SE though&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{align}\text{hotness} &amp;amp;= \frac{\lfloor n(\mathrm A), 10\rfloor \times s(\mathrm Q) \times 0.2 + s(\mathrm A)}{\lceil a(\mathrm Q) + 1, 6 \rceil^{1.4}}\\[1em]&#xA;n&amp;amp;:\text{number of}\\&#xA;s&amp;amp;:\text{score}\\&#xA;a&amp;amp;:\text{age given in multiples of 1 hour}\\&#xA;\mathrm Q&amp;amp;:\text{question}\\&#xA;\mathrm A&amp;amp;:\text{answer}\end{align}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no recipe for getting into the HNQs. Sometimes you are lucky, most of the time you are not. And hitting the HNQ is not necessarily a sign that your question is a good fit for the site. It happens regularly that a question stays in the HNQs for a day or so before it gets closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing a good question is all you can do to get more views/ votes/ answers on your questions. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5840/how-did-this-question-get-so-many-views/5841?noredirect=1#comment17191_5841&quot;&gt;JoeBloggs mentioned in the comments&lt;/a&gt;: having a nice, catchy title goes a long way once the question reached the HNQs, as people on other sites will only have that to judge whether they want to read the question or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5840/how-did-this-question-get-so-many-views/5841?noredirect=1#comment17193_5841&quot;&gt;Mołot pointed out&lt;/a&gt; that your question should be scannable by using clear language, short paragraphs, appropriate headings, ... See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/create-readable-web-writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of Scannable Content: How to Write for Today's Online Readers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T14:42:53.110" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T14:42:53.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T15:54:32.470" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been closed, the reason given is that it is off-topic and &quot;too story based&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/104779/minimum-nuclear-weapons-required-for-deterrent&quot;&gt;Minimum nuclear weapons required for deterrent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta question cited to justify this is as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... I don't understand why this is off-topic if the cited logic from meta is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;only the person who is developing a plotline can decide how&#xA;  characters will act or the plots will develop&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly more objective. There's multiple ways to answer it, and a lot of material which can be cited to justify this. In fact many comments and answers already have provided evidence to back their arguments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Capabilities of characters within a world...are on-topic, but&#xA;  questions must focus on what is possible-&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the question seems perfectly within this logic, as it asks for capabilities about what is possible.  I do not understand how this could be misconstrue to be about whether a nation should use their deterrent or something like that?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20787" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T18:11:16.950" Title="Why is &quot;Minimum nuclear weapons required for deterrent&quot; off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5843" CreationDate="2018-02-14T17:06:54.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote on this one, but  you are  asking   about real world countries sand real world  weapons. No room for fiction, your world is already  built: ours. And if world is already set and built, is it hard to see why people think it is not worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Capabilities of characters within a world are on-topic - but this case is when new capabilities are added to a world. Add ability to see future to some characters and you have different world. Take weapons that are produced and you have the very same world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T17:06:54.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5843" CreationDate="2018-02-14T18:11:16.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was quite fine for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, from my limited understanding of the process, I think you could just rephrase the question along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a fictional world that looks like ours, but where superpowers are&#xA;  not meddling too much in the affairs of other countries, there is a&#xA;  country that wishes to invest in a nuclear weapon deterrent, but it&#xA;  does not want to overspend because it is mostly farmland: how many&#xA;  bombs should it build?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should sound more like worldbuilding for the stricter among the reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T18:11:16.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T21:02:05.947" Score="1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104831/44805&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was received rather negatively by the community for its naive understanding of units of force. Put simply, it asked what would happen if you punched somebody with 172500N of force. It's off-topic for WB.SE, and it [probably] wouldn't be received too well on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/526/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xkcd&lt;/a&gt;, I hope to establish some intuitive(ish) reference points for various metric units. Many people could estimate a centimeter as about the width of a finger, but how much pressure is one megapascal? Sure, it's defined as 1e6 Pa, but what's that &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; to the root user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to this question should be written for a &lt;strong&gt;single unit&lt;/strong&gt;. The format is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Unit name&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI unit: (mathjax describing unit and using only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SI base units&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Common units: (unit of measure commonly used. If there's an equivalent measure in Imperial units, include it as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Range name&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Unit&#xA;Value   Description&#xA;Value   Description&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Defined Constants:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5846/44805&quot; title=&quot;Link points right back to this question.&quot;&gt;Constant&lt;/a&gt; - description (Link to the wikipedia page for that constant.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current units defined in this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5847/44805&quot;&gt;Velocity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5861/44805&quot;&gt;Force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5867/44805&quot;&gt;Mass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5868/44805&quot;&gt;Energy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5868/44805&quot;&gt;Power&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Units that need a definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Momentum (maybe)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Luminance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conductance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capacitance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pressure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Density&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to add more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T07:58:36.753" Title="Reference points for units" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5846" CreationDate="2018-02-14T21:02:05.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Velocity&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI units: $m/s$, $\theta/s$&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Common units: mph, kph, m/s, %C&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: This answer includes both linear and angular velocity.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Linear Velocity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(speed)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Orders of magnitude' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Atom smashers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;People and cars&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kph m/s &#xA;5   1.5 Walking&#xA;13  3.5 Jogging&#xA;25  7   Sprinting&#xA;35  10  Fastest human&#xA;45  13  Housecat&#xA;55  15  Rabbit&#xA;75  20  Raptor&#xA;100 25  Slow highway&#xA;110 30  Interstate (65 mph)&#xA;120 35  Speed you actually go when it says “65”&#xA;140 40  Raptor on hoverboard&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Things that fly&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kph&#xA;  893  Boeing 747-300 cruise speed&#xA;7,274  X-15 (see https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Space, orbital&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kph&#xA;     2,286  Moon's linear orbital velocity around the Earth&#xA;    11,052  linear velocity of geostationary &#xA;    27,600  ground velocity of the International Space Station&#xA;   108,000  linear velocity of Earth as it orbits the Sun &#xA;   720,000  linear velocity of the Sun around the center of the galaxy&#xA;18,000,000  S2's orbital speed around the black hole Sagittarius A*&#xA;     ??  velocities of various objects in orbit around earth&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Space, nonorbital&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kph&#xA;    39,897  maximum velocity of Apollo 11 (earth reference point) &#xA;    61,200  Velocity of voyager space probe (sun reference point)&#xA;   252,792  fastest we've ever made anything go (Helios 1)&#xA; 1,440,000  velocity of hypervelocity stars&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Space, relativistic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;%c&#xA;&amp;lt;1  hypervelocity stars (0.13%)&#xA; 1  S2's orbital velocity (1.6%)&#xA; 5&#xA;10&#xA;20&#xA;30&#xA;40&#xA;50&#xA;60&#xA;70&#xA;80&#xA;90&#xA;95&#xA;99  ejection jet of Blazars (99.9%)&#xA;    ultra high-energy cosmic ray particles (99.99999999999999999999951%)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Angular Velocity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(angular_velocity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Orders of magnitude' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Placeholder&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;lorem ipsum&#xA;dolor sit amet&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Defined constants:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c - Speed of light in a vacuum. equal to 299792458 $m/s$&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44805" LastEditorUserId="388" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T00:30:39.490" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T00:30:39.490" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-14T21:02:05.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5849" CreationDate="2018-02-16T09:25:54.053" Score="-2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be more specific are there tags for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;medieval technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;magic-enhanced medieval technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modern technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;magic-enhanced modern technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;futuristic technology &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;magic-enhanced futuristic technology  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are tags which are similar then what are they? If not then is there a way to make them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T11:57:20.560" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T19:46:25.753" Title="Are there technology tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5848" CreationDate="2018-02-16T11:04:12.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a quick look through the tags, and those specific tags don't exist. There is a single tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;, a single tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, and individual tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt;. If you wanted to ask about &quot;magic-enhanced modern technology&quot;, you would have to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt; all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not then is there a way to make them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating tags is a privilege, for which you need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;300 reputation&lt;/a&gt;. Once you have that privilege, creating a tag is as simple as typing the tag name into the &quot;tags&quot; box when asking a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question, however, is whether it's worth &lt;em&gt;having&lt;/em&gt; such specific tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that if a tag doesn't get used often enough, and/or tends to get used in low-quality questions, it gets removed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; have been used together 68 times, but at a glance, not many of those questions are specifically about magic-enhanced technology, and about half of them have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for specific time periods, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; has been paired with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; - 35 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; - 32 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt; - 12 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt; - 12 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are exactly 5 occasions on which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; have been paired with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of those four time-period tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would support the creation of a &quot;magitek&quot; tag, for questions about magic-enhanced technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; support the creation of &quot;future-tech&quot; and &quot;medieval-tech&quot; tags, for questions about technology from specific eras, but will defer to community consensus on whether those tags are needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not believe that the other tags you requested are necessary, as there does not appear to be enough demand for them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T11:53:11.593" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T11:53:11.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T23:53:38.700" Score="9" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people have used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-power&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-power&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-power&lt;/a&gt; to refer to nuclear weapons (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-weapons&lt;/a&gt;), possibly because governments that have nukes are called a &quot;nuclear power&quot;, as opposed to energy generated by nuclear reactors. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105104/uranium-block-house-heating&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57414/how-a-nuclear-war-in-north-hemisphere-would-affect-the-south-hemisphere&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39333/what-are-some-examples-of-magic-equivalent-of-a-nuke&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62541/realistic-world-war-iii-between-china-and-the-us&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-power&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-power&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-power&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;nuclear-energy&quot; to reduce the likelihood of misuse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastEditorUserId="10196" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T12:21:19.783" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T12:21:19.783" Title="If I were a [nuclear-power] I'd rename this tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5851" CreationDate="2018-02-18T18:40:54.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick glance through the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-power&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-power&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-power&lt;/a&gt; don't show a single misconception.  They're all about the use of nuclear power, not about a nation being, politically, a &quot;nuclear power.&quot;  The tag description is pretty clear, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this issue would be more germain to &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Politics.SE&lt;/a&gt;, where both discussions could occur with realtively equal frequency, than here, where a question about a nation being a nuclear-power might occur, say, once in every 10,000 tag uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T18:40:54.047" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5848" CreationDate="2018-02-18T19:46:25.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the creation of all those tags.  The purpose of tagging is not to rewrite your question using the fewest number of tags but to identify the major topics your question depends on.  The value of tags is to help people find your question.  As tag specificity increases, the number of people subscribing to the tag decreases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which means you'll have far more people subscribing in total to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; than you ever would a single &quot;medieval technology&quot; tag.  The single tag doesn't help you.  It hurts you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which is a long way of saying, you actually want all those individual tags.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New tags should only be created when a specific context or issue cannot be constructed using the existing tags AND that context or issue would be of importance to many other people.  You'd be surprised how many tags have been created that have been attached to only one question: the question asked by the OP who created the tag.  Those new tags did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;absolutely nothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for the OPs that created them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Another way of looking at the purpose of tags is this: they're advertising.  In advertising you want as many people as possible to notice your product.  Seeing the tag only after you arrive at the question means the tag was useless.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, (and ruthlessly using Secespitus' example), It is a legitimate question to ask, &quot;is there enough confusion between 'tech infused with magic' and 'tech and magic working together' to justify a new tag?  Sucespitus believes there is.  To determine the veracity of his belief we would need to look at all the questions using both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tags and discover how many (as a percentage of the whole) were about tech infused with magic.  If the answer is less than 5%, you might not be helping anyone by creating the tag as the statistic suggests few people are interested in the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T19:46:25.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5855" CreationDate="2018-02-19T15:36:11.247" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the time, low quality answers are either irrelevant or are better stated as a comment on the question. There is no option to provide feedback on either of these, since they are not comments on another answer, spam, link only, or a different question. I propose adding two more options:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a comment, not an answer*&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This has nothing to do with the question asked*.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;*or something similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21117" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T16:02:16.497" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T16:09:12.620" Title="Closing Low Quality Posts: More Options" Tags="|feature-request|reviews|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5854" CreationDate="2018-02-19T16:09:12.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the choices for standard comments to leave on posts in the review queues are... shall I say not always the most helpful, especially for someone who doesn't already know how Stack Exchange works,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the two specific ones you propose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a comment, not an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case seems to be covered by the existing &quot;This does not provide an answer to the question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with the question asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case seems to be covered by the existing &quot;This does not provide an answer to the question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this is something that is outside of the purview of each individual site, being network-wide functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T16:09:12.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5862" CreationDate="2018-02-20T23:35:47.363" Score="4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, I have the very beginnings of a question swirling around in my mind about a fairly hard to explain ranked-choice voting system (not even close to fleshed out in my mind yet) which might be the default voting system in the focal government in a story I'd like to write. The question would be first and foremost about the actual voting system and if the best strategy for every voter under that system would be to vote their actual preferences or not. Questions about the consequences of such a system on various aspects of the society would be secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a question be a fit here? I believe the secondary matters to be very much on-topic and I think they're a natural outgrowth of the primary question. I'm just less sure if the primary question would be a fit here or if I should try &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Politics&lt;/a&gt; or a different SE site for the primary question and follow up on here with the secondary questions while referencing the primary question on the other SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47043" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T12:03:51.403" Title="Would a question about a potential voting system be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5858" CreationDate="2018-02-21T00:49:30.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about creating a voting system, you aren't asking about creating a fictional world. So while you could shoehorn your questions so that they would be technically on topic, this isn't the best place to be asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct in your assumption that questions about integrating the voting system in a fictional world are a good fit for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T00:49:30.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5846" CreationDate="2018-02-21T02:00:29.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Force&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI units: $\frac{kg*m}{s^2}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common units: N&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;608.22 N    Amount of force a human of average mass exerts on earth&#xA;35,100 kN   Thrust force of Saturn V first stage engine&#xA;3.6e22 N    Gravitational attraction between Sun and Earth&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Needed ranges:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defined Constants:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;nAn&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44805" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T02:00:29.500" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-21T02:00:29.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5858" CreationDate="2018-02-21T08:27:25.290" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5859/29&quot;&gt;sphennings&lt;/a&gt; on that asking about creating a voting system wouldn't be about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our scope specifically includes (this is two of the three main &quot;on topic&quot; points from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A voting system can absolutely be considered an element of a world; specifically, it forms one part of a system of governance. Hence the first bullet point applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A voting system will have effects on the elements of the world and possibly the world itself, so depending on the specific question the second bullet point certainly can apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the question still needs to meet all other criteria for answerability, specificity, clarity, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also of course, consider the expertise that might be needed to answer the question. Is a worldbuilder the most appropriate person to ask, or should you ask an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;? Yes, posting the question on Politics SE might require reframing it, but it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; give you better answers. Or worse. It depends on what you're looking for. I still feel that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3877/29&quot;&gt;worldbuilding questions should involve something imaginary&lt;/a&gt;, and a made-up voting system certainly could count for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you want feedback on your &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question proposal,&lt;/strong&gt; then you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/29&quot;&gt;the question sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. While the sandbox isn't perfect, it's usually a fairly good way to iron out the worst wrinkles of a question before posting on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T12:03:51.403" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T12:03:51.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5866" CreationDate="2018-02-21T14:55:37.497" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105442/virtual-reality-and-physical-trauma&quot;&gt;Virtual Reality and Physical Trauma&lt;/a&gt; is basically asking if there's any basis to the trope that wounds gained in VR appear in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is reality checking a known trope on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9275" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T14:59:46.943" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:03:22.330" Title="Is questioning a well known trope on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:06:02.037" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Previous blog posts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/5864/edit&quot;&gt;Edit this post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2021&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Febuary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/salvage-part-two-of-landed-689363aa2546&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salvage - Part two of Landed&lt;/a&gt; by Topcode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2020&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;December:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/supers-chapter-1-551590eecdb4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supers: Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; by Firestryke&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;June:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/worldbuilding-with-stellar-grids-76652f51b7d9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding with stellar grids&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/you-are-a-flat-earther-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-model-less-b1daae928cca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You are a flat-earther (Or how I learned to stop worrying and model less)&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/arrival-part-one-of-landed-2c1cf57aa77&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrival - Part One of Landed&lt;/a&gt; by TopCode&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-chapter-10-9fc21d3420a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut - Chapter 10&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/elektrodrome-69e66b02b084&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elektrodome&lt;/a&gt; by Chris Brown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;January:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-slither-of-hope-cc7e2d3d139f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Slither of Hope&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2019&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;September:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-mages-paradox-9ad0d281a2b4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mage's Paradox&lt;/a&gt; by Suman Jampala&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-chapter-9-fd81e5b4ed68&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 9&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;July:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/what-if-the-sun-was-made-of-helium-f97cbdbdd7a1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if the Sun was made of helium?&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;June:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/lunas-experiments-vacation-1cafad203e2e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luna’s Experiments: Vacation&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/fenras-awakening-da8e6a90c43&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fenra’s Awakening&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning! Mature content!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/when-gods-fear-134da7d29275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Gods Fear&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;January:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-disease-of-mythology-the-importance-of-language-in-worldbuilding-d1a9d1f1e2f4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“A Disease of Mythology”: The Importance of Language in Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; by heather&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2018&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;October:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/if-neptune-orbited-jupiter-918ef0e53da0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If Neptune Orbited Jupiter&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/discord-harmony-2-551c3ea4490f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discord (Harmony 2): The Entropy Note&lt;/a&gt; by FoxElemental&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;September:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/fantastical-evolution-d7249ad00e0d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantastical Evolution: A Perfect, Unreasonable New standard &amp;amp; Alternatives&lt;/a&gt; by Suman Jampala&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/narork-ra-zorda-582885ff0616&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narok Ra Zorda&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;July:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/harmony-harmony-1-ce64c15c8b88&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harmony, 1: The Reaping Note&lt;/a&gt; by FoxElemental&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/golden-sails-part-4-150b30291123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Sails, Part 4&lt;/a&gt; by gryphon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/your-time-is-come-8a3fbb695baa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Your Time is Come&lt;/a&gt; by Chris Brown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-unknown-chapter-%C2%BD-29c8227960df&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Unknown Chapter ½&lt;/a&gt; by Haaruun Ibrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/overdue-short-fiction-from-federated-human-space-d162c3577674&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Overdue — Short fiction from Federated Human Space&lt;/a&gt; by Ash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-worldbuilding-checklist-4c1e88f7d1e6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Worldbuilding Checklist&lt;/a&gt; by FoxElemental&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-chapter-8-28fb63147fe5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 8&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sebiar-and-the-adventurers-6ccd8ea7f244&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sebiar and the adventurers&lt;/a&gt; by Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-juggernaut-chapter-7-7e4e51296a77&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Juggernaut, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt; by Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;February:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-changing-now-47a5c241f5f0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Changing Now&lt;/a&gt; by Joe Bloggs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;January:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/when-nature-beats-you-to-the-punch-872d8f71e694&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When nature beats you to the punch&lt;/a&gt; by HDE 226868&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4038/28&quot;&gt;2017 and earlier&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2021-07-12T14:26:55.200" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T14:26:55.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5863" CreationDate="2018-02-21T18:03:22.330" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say yes. A trope is just a common bit of worldbuilding, it's no less on-topic than another perhaps more original question. The one place tropes can get a bit off-topic is when they start to delve into specific story-based instances of the trope or where they are asking about a specific story based instance of the trope in a particular other world (that's already built).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked a few questions with a basis in trope (Anything relating to the Starship Exciting Undertaking), but I've always done so tongue-in-cheek and with a firm emphasis on how these tropes could fit in with a world building process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The VR question is on topic, though I personally would have preferred less of a vague reality check and more of a 'I've tried to make this a thing in my world but got stuck on the details' style of question, though that's just me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:03:22.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5846" CreationDate="2018-02-21T19:05:51.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Mass&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI units: $kg$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common units: kg, g, mg, lb&#xA;&lt;em&gt;note: lb is actually a unit of force, not a unit of mass. Colloquial usage is only defined on Earth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Orders of magnitude (mass)' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Things you can pick up&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kg &#xA;1     a rather heavy stick of butter&#xA;76.4  average mass of a woman in the US&#xA;88.8  average mass of a man in the US&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Modes of transportation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1500    2012 Toyota Camry&#xA;5000    African Elephant&#xA;1.30e4  Semi-trailer truck&#xA;1.74e5  Boeing 747-300&#xA;2.97e6  Saturn V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Celestial Bodies (Our solar system)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;2.20e14  Halley's comet&#xA;9.39e20  Asteroid 1 Ceres (first asteroid discovered. Also largest.)&#xA;2.30e21  All asteroids in our Solar System&#xA;1.31e22  Pluto&#xA;7.35e22  Moon&#xA;3.29e23  Mercury&#xA;6.39e23  Mars&#xA;4.87e24  Venus&#xA;5.87e24  Earth&#xA;8.68e25  Uranus&#xA;1.02e26  Neptune&#xA;5.68e26  Saturn&#xA;1.90e27  Jupiter&#xA;1.99e30  Sun&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Celestial Bodies (Not our solar system)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kg&#xA;8e30    GRO J0422+32 (a small black hole)&#xA;8e36    Sagittarius A* (Milky Way's super massive black hole)&#xA;6e42    Milky way&#xA;6e51    Observable universe&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subatomic particles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9.11e-31 Electron&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.66e-27 Proton and neutron&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Defined Constants&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chandrasekhar limit&lt;/a&gt; - Maximum mass of a stable white dwarf, approx. 2.77e30 kg&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_mass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Solar Mass&lt;/a&gt; - Mass of our sun, approx. 2e30 kg&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Needed ranges:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cellular biology (e.g. mass of various organelles)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[In]organic chemistry (e.g. masses of various interesting molecules)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subatomic physics (masses of various bosons and fermions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weird range where mass and energy get mixed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44805" LastEditorUserId="17720" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T07:58:36.753" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T07:58:36.753" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-21T19:05:51.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5846" CreationDate="2018-02-21T19:50:01.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Energy and Power&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Energy is measured in SI units of Joules. Power is the delivery of energy per second, and is measured in SI units of Watts. A Watt is one Joule per second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Energy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI unit: $\frac{m^2*kg}{s^2}$&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Common units: Joule (J), kilowatt Hour (kWh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Orders of magnitude (Energy)' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Joules&#xA;1.6e-23   Energy of a photon from a microwave oven&#xA;5.0e-15   Energy of a n X-ray photon&#xA;8.2e-14   Mass-energy equivalent at rest of an electron&#xA;3.4e-11   Energy released by the fission of one U-235 atom&#xA;1.6e-7    The kinetic energy of a flying mosquito&#xA;1.0e0     The impact energy of an apple, dropped from 1m height&#xA;1.0e2     Energy stored in the capacitor of a flash-producing camera&#xA;1.8e3     Kinetic energy of a M16 rifle bullet&#xA;4.5e4     Energy released by burning 1 gram of gasoline&#xA;6.0e5     Kinetic energy of a 2 ton automobile at 90 km/h&#xA;1.1e8     Total energy burned while bicycling the Tour de France&#xA;3.0e9     Kinetic energy of a Boeing 767 in flight&#xA;4.2e9     Energy equivalent of 1 ton of TNT&#xA;6.3e13    Orbital kinetic energy of the ISS&#xA;2.1e17    Energy released by Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon&#xA;6.8e19    Energy in the world's yearly electricity production&#xA;5.0e23    Energy in the Chicxulub impact (that killed the dinosaurs)&#xA;3.8e28    Kinetic energy of the Moon relative to the Earth&#xA;2.0e32    Gravitational binding energy of the Earth&#xA;2.7e33    Kinetic Energy of the Earth's orbit relative to the sun&#xA;1.0e44    Energy released in a supernova&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Power&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base SI unit: $\frac{kg*m^2}{s^3}$&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Common units: watt(W), horsepower(hp)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Orders of magnitude (Power)' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Watts&#xA;1.0e-20   Power of the signal from Galileo space probe as it orbited Jupiter&#xA;1.0e-16   Power of a GPS signal as received by your phone or watch&#xA;1.0e-12   Power consumption of the average human cell&#xA;1.0e-6    Power consumption of a mechanical wristwatch&#xA;7.0e-2    Antenna power output of a household wireless router&#xA;8.0e0     One human operating a hand-crank&#xA;4.0e2     Approximate peak power consumption of a GPU&#xA;7.5e2     One horsepower&#xA;5.0e3     Photosynthetic energy production of a square km of ocean&#xA;3.0e6     Power output of a locomotive&#xA;2.1e9     Peak power output of the Hoover dam&#xA;1.8e13    Power consumption of humanity&#xA;7.5e13    Global net primary productivity&#xA;1.1e15    World's most powerful laser pulse (there are competing claims)&#xA;1.4e15    Heat flux of the Gulf Stream&#xA;1.7e17    Solar energy that strikes the Earth / Kardashev I civilization&#xA;3.8e26    Luminosity of the Sun / Kardashev II civilzation&#xA;5.0e36    Luminosity of the Milky Way / Kardashev III civilzation&#xA;3.6e49    Power emitted by black hole merger GW150914&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="44805" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T19:56:00.087" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T19:56:00.087" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-21T19:50:01.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5870" CreationDate="2018-02-21T19:57:27.313" Score="8" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen my fair share of ridiculous questions where it's obvious that the OP has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; idea what they're talking about. Things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104831/44805&quot;&gt;'What would happen if you punch someone with a force of 172500 N?'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104363/44805&quot;&gt;'What would happen if the ocean didn't have a bottom?'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've recently begun answering questions like these, systematically taking apart their premise and proving how ridiculous it is. I'm conflicted about whether I should've answered the question, though, because answering questions makes closing and/or deleting them hard and annoying. I understand that I can simply VTC or flag questions, but doing so doesn't really educate the OP as to why their question doesn't make sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that a question is in-scope for WB.SE, but has such utterly ridiculous premises that answers would simply attempt to disprove it, &lt;strong&gt;what is the proper protocol?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44805" LastEditorUserId="44805" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T00:05:11.877" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T00:05:11.877" Title="Should ridiculous valid questions be answered or closed?" Tags="|discussion|answers|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2018-02-22T04:42:16.677" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just looking at the links you've provided, I think the answer is evident in at least the first and last questions as they've been closed. The last one in particular is clearly too broad and therefore invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is a little more subjective. One could argue that it's a Physics SE question dressed up with a knight to make it fit WB, but technically I think it was a valid question. It was asking for science based answers to a specific world based question that didn't ask us to 'write the story for him/her'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that it wasn't ridiculous, and a part of me thinks it's more the domain of Randall Monroe on XKCD but I'd also point out that prior to it being closed, it garnered 3 answers, so clearly there were some who were prepared to take it as a legitimate question. The last one, about biology and evolution, didn't attract a single one. That could be because it was closed quickly, but given that the middle one is still open and has 5 answers against it, I'm of the view that relative legitimacy of a question can at least in part be seen as correlating to the number of answers provided. (This is a small sample set admittedly, and it would be interesting to see some figures provided on this across a larger sample of questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also point out that 'too broad', 'primarily opinion based' and to a lesser degree 'off-topic' can be taken as subjective assessments in many cases. I've seen questions closed as too broad that I thought were quite specific. I've even answered some of them before they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, even this question on meta could be argued to be 'primarily opinion based'. :) I think like Kingledion says in comments, there are some questions he simply ignores. The fact that questions don't get ~100 answers on a regular basis tells me that we all select what we're prepared to answer to some degree, and I also think that in the spirit of this question, it's important to note that not everyone who comes to this site to ask a question has a detailed background in biology, physics, engineering, economics, anthropology, or even [insert your specialisation here]. As such, without trying to take ourselves too seriously, there is a compelling case that a part of the responsibility we have here (as a tradeoff for the fun of it) is to teach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, while some questions are just begging to be closed, I think it's entirely legitimate to answer others, if for no other reason than to guide the poster of the question. Exactly where the discriminator lies between these conditions is a personal choice. Ultimately this question is testing the boundary conditions of something that we all already do;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel comfortable answering a question, do so.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you don't, well, don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T04:42:16.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2018-02-22T10:37:04.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've recently begun answering questions like these, systematically taking apart their premise and proving how ridiculous it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2407/tearing-apart-questions?rq=1&quot;&gt;there's already a question on Meta&lt;/a&gt; that asks whether it's okay to do exactly that. The consensus there appears to be: yes, if you think a question is ridiculous and/or impossible, it's okay to post an answer explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's ridiculous and/or impossible. The key word there is &quot;explaining&quot; - as you said, and as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3758/when-is-thats-not-possible-an-appropriate-answer&quot;&gt;the other Meta post Michael Kjorling linked to&lt;/a&gt;, just going &quot;No, that's impossible&quot; doesn't help the OP &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; isn't an acceptable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are other legitimate reasons to close the question - such as that last one, which is too broad - then it should be closed without answering it. But if it's otherwise valid and on-topic, then an answer explaining why the premise doesn't work is acceptable, as far as I'm aware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T10:37:04.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5874" CreationDate="2018-02-22T20:27:06.537" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;On SE sites is there an option to post questions anonymously so they don't show your name or show up on your user data?&#xA;(I have put &quot;support&quot; and &quot;feature request&quot; as tags because i dont know whether the feature does exist.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T21:58:44.163" Title="Can you ask questions anonymously?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5872" CreationDate="2018-02-22T20:37:42.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, you can't post a question anonymously from your normal account while still being able to see it yourself on your profile&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such option. If you want to be &amp;quot;anonymous&amp;quot; you would need to create another account with which you ask these questions or log out of your normal account so that there is no connection to your normal account. But this would mean that you couldn't see the question from your normal account. You would need to keep track of each account separately to keep track of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only feature that comes a little bit close to this is the option to hide certain sites of the network from your general profile. Click on your profile, then &amp;quot;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&amp;quot;, under &amp;quot;Site Settings&amp;quot; click &amp;quot;Hide Communities&amp;quot;. To cite from those settings (no emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hiding a community means other users will not see it in your Communities list or Top Network Posts. &lt;strong&gt;It does not, however, mean your activity is private.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New sites that you join will be linked to your other communities by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make this clear: if you feel the need to post anonymously you should ask yourself why you are doing this. If it's because you for example don't want people who know your username in real life to know that you are asking about them on sites like InterpersonalSkills.SE that might be fine. But if you feel that you should create a new account to ask questions on a site where you are already active those questions might not be a good fit for the site and if people realize that you are trying to create additional accounts to post crappy questions your normal account might very well be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is not made for partial anonymity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T21:58:44.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5872" CreationDate="2018-02-22T21:18:53.970" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, you can.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Method 1: Ask anonymously from the start&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/89248/274942&quot;&gt;simplest method&lt;/a&gt; is, essentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Log out of all sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navigate to the site you want. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask your question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll get a temporary account based on browser cookies. If you log out, you'll lose access.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, downsides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you log out, you won't be able to edit the question or comment on it as the original asker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll get no rep from asking the question (if that's at all a motivation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Method 2: Request dissociation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask a question using your actual account and then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/96732/274942&quot;&gt;request for it to be dissociated from your account&lt;/a&gt;. It will be anonymized, and folks won't be able to see who asked it. That said, as that Meta post points out, the other sites might archive the post, so you risk not having complete anonymity outside Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, don't abuse this . . . and don't use it unless you really need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Method 3: Use a secondary account&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of those few &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/57685/274942&quot;&gt;valid uses for sockpuppets&lt;/a&gt;. You create a full second account and ask the question via that. You retain the privileges needed to edit the question and comment as the asker, and you'll get rep for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;strong&gt;I would not recommend this&lt;/strong&gt;. You need to be careful that this account and your first one don't interact in any way with each other. That means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your normal account shouldn't vote on the question. I would also advise not using it to vote on any of the answers, edit them, approve edits, comment, flag . . . or really do anything on the thread.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your secondary account should avoid the same things with respect to your main account. Actually, once you're done with the question, I'd advise not using this account. Maybe even delete it, at that point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did this once so I could test out some low-rep user and limitations, and to see posts as such a user would. I asked a question and ended up getting enough rep to bypass the restrictions I was trying to test. Darn. So I haven't touched it in . . . seven months, I think. I won't use it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I don't recommend this. And it might look suspicious to us mods; if we see user IPs match, we'll do some digging to see what's up. It looks even worse if you make &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T21:18:53.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2018-02-23T01:56:03.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip;there is a compelling case that a part of the responsibility we have here (as a tradeoff for the fun of it) is to teach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upvoted Tim for that one remark and would have sat at my computer happily clicking away the upvote button for quite some time had a useful outcome been involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IM(not so H)O, closing questions has two purposes.  (1) To shut down what will inevitablly become an uncontrollable mess and (2) to give the user a chance to figure out what they're really trying to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that we close voters kinda favor (1) over (2), but (2) is much more productive and results in much more fun.  Regrettably, most OPs who experience closed questions don't have a lot of interest in (2).  This is especially true for English-as-a-second-language speakers who have trouble with the nonsense that can transpire in the comments when a question is asked poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, cheers to Tim for pointing out that we really should be favoring the effort to educate users to help them become more productive on the site &amp;mdash; especially when that productivity inevitably leads to all of us having a lot more fun exercising that unlimited potential between our skills and our imaginations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what your behavior should be...  Despite having given in more than once to the tempation of answering a question that should have been closed, the &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; truth is that no one should be answering questions that meet the requirements for closure.  Yes, the application of our rules is (often remarkably) subjective, but by answering the questions rather than imposing the closure we're generally just encouraging the bad behavior the rules were meant to minimize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as I said, I've given into the temptation myself (often because you can have a whomping lot of fun honestly answering a ridiculous question).  So I cannot be the one who throws a stone.  Carry on, young man!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T01:56:03.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2018-02-23T14:19:01.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've seen my fair share of &lt;strong&gt;ridiculous&lt;/strong&gt; questions where it's obvious that the OP has &lt;strong&gt;no idea what they're talking about&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the people who posted those questions did not think they were ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all comes down to your grasp of science. Just in the last three months I have answered a number of questions in the spirit of &quot;if these weird phenomena happened in my world, what cool effects would they have?&quot;. All were valid, and more well received than the questions linked. The answer in most cases were &quot;everything dies, with a considerable chance of the planet ceasing to be a planet&quot;. Physics is a cruel mistress and I could argue that the majority of askers gets their science from mainstream Holywood movies rather from school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103000/what-if-a-traversable-wormhole-hits-the-earth&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; asks what would happen if a wormhole should hit the Earth. Wormholes are very nice trinkets in sci-fi stores, but this question has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. For someone who knows their physics, this question may seem more than ridiculous - that wormhole would have more than 300 Earth masses, so a cannonball shot against an apple at point blank would be a valid analogy. But did the OP know that, when they asked? Do most people? Should we expect any random stranger we see to know about stress-energy tensors, exotic mass, the runaway effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than dismiss the question as being too nonsensical to answer, we let the OP know that there is more than meets the eye to the scenario they propose. There are some things that they need to consider, and if some links can be given to them should they be curious for more info, even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone questions what would happen if someone took a sucker punch from Saitama, I think we should answer them. I find this kind of question droll rather than annoying. I am kinda amused by the answer to that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should still be judged by how they fit into the Stack model, though. The question about non-biological changes was too broad and rightfully closed on those grounds, not for being ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T14:19:01.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5879" CreationDate="2018-02-24T09:24:44.900" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was answering the 'ridiculous question' question, I got to wondering about whether or not one could use the count of answers provided as some indication of the relative quality of borderline questions. I'd like to ask here though about going the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I'm interested in knowing if there is any correlation between question score and answer count. If there is, are there questions with an unusually low score by comparison to the count of answers that they have received. If there is, and they're still open, has anyone considered the idea of adding bonus rep points to a &lt;em&gt;user's&lt;/em&gt; rep (instead of the question) if the ratio falls below a certain ratio, the question is still in positive reputation territory and open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, it would seem to be worth a badge of some kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to stress I'm not personally advocating this; it's a legitimate call for thoughts on whether or not attracting a high volume of (particularly high scoring) answers would be worth something to a question poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T04:42:21.063" Title="Is there a correlation between question scores and the number of answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5877" CreationDate="2018-02-26T04:42:21.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, answer count correlates with score for all posts (both closed and open). While closed questions are generally lower scoring considering the number of answers they get, the difference is not big enough in my opinion for it to be valuable as any sort of quality indicator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions, feel free to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the following code in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt; to get a CSV file of all the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts &#xA;where parentid is null and answercount is not null&#xA;group by answercount, score&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the CSV and an online &lt;a href=&quot;https://plot.ly/create/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plotting tool&lt;/a&gt; to this heatmap (note that the big weird boxes on the upper right of these graphs are all single points... I'm not sure why it displays like that):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ifZdK.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the query to get a CSV of all non-closed questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts &#xA;where parentid is null and answercount is not null and closeddate is null&#xA;group by answercount, score&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heatmap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3MdyE.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts &#xA;where parentid is null and answercount is not null and closeddate is not null&#xA;group by answercount, score&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heatmap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/akGcq.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: These queries can be changed to work better (but not great) in SEDE. Just change the first line of the query to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select answercount, score from posts &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also remove the last line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T04:42:21.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T14:22:42.993" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to explore methods to achieve psionic like effects using known, science based, phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of an empathy psionic based power what about people that are highly trained in techniques such as reading facial expression and body language?&#xA;Instead of people who move a Monte Carlo ball around with their mind what about performing massive calculations deciphering the physics of the Monte Carlo ball? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a list of possible techniques, but I do not want to query each technique separately. I would like to see what contributors come up with and compare it to my list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concerns are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be considered opinion based despite the presence of scientific evidence. &#xA;This site tends to work on hypothesis testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to change this question so it fits better for this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45883" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T01:25:07.570" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T01:25:07.570" Title="Transform open ended science based questions to more acceptable format" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|science|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-27T14:46:58.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T17:06:47.057" Score="36" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, throwing this out in Meta because I am noting a shift in...attitude? on the primary site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin. When I joined Worldbuilding, I found all manner of interesting puzzles and fun things to try to solve.  Imagination and Logic in one big happy ball of goop, as it were.  I tend to gravitate toward certain types of questions, and there was never a short supply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately, it seems to me, that many of the new questions that are coming up are being put on hold very, very fast.  Many that are not being put on hold are gathering a lot of downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see new users getting put on hold as they work their way through the question writing process. (I still say that &quot;on Hold&quot; needs to be more specific as to the purpose so new users will expect it)  I also know that downvotes are a non-specific anonymous rating of the quality of a question.  Rep doesn't get heavily damaged by a downvote but it does sting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole reason I bring this up is that Worldbuilding isn't quite the welcoming place it was a year ago.  On the surface, it may not be a horrible thing.  We want better questions, better answers, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a hidden downside though.  Slap a new user down as hard as seems to be happening, they are less likely to return.  Less users means fewer questions and less diversity of topic.  It does us no good, as a Community, to treat n00bs poorly.  Yeah, we will have to deal with some poor quality questions.  But for every one that is truly dreadful, we close 2 that have the core of a good question, it just isn't brought out very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we really getting flooded with that many very poor quality questions? Am I missing the fun stuff in the pile goo?  Is anyone else noticing this? (Semi Rhetorical questions for background)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully admit I am speaking based on an impression based on observation, not on something based on amassing a large quantity of hard data.  I noticed this trend after taking a short hiatus and seem to have returned to a place with a much less friendly vibe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts, and what can we do, if anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T21:18:09.410" Title="A Little negativity going on here? Downvotes and vote to close" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2018-02-27T20:02:18.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you kidding?! A place where I can ask other nerds about my favorite subject, science fiction, and get answers that touch on real science? Why wouldn't I want to be here?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ever since I saw Star Wars as a little kid (yes, I'm one of those and if you don't like it, too bad!) I've been in awe of science fiction. Of course as I grew older I came to realize that Star Wars is actually a fantasy, just set in space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then I started to seek out harder sci-fi... Asimov, Clarke, Heinlen, and more. I came to realize that real science is just as fascinating if not more so than fantasy passing itself off as science fiction. I enjoy fantasy as much as the next guy, but the whole &quot;magic hand wave&quot; was too much of a short cut for me. There was no challenge there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not a physicist, and I never will be. I'm an artist. Coming up with settings, characters and stories is my thing. What help I get here will make its way into my stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All mistakes will be my own, of course. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46557" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:02:18.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-02-27T20:45:42.713" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed something similar as well, though I don't know if it is &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; prominent than normal as I haven't done any real analysis, its just a cursory thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While closing questions quickly can be a bit of a shock, particularly to new users, it is better for them and their questions that issues get addressed quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users should remember to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt;, in particular this should be kept in mind when dealing with new users.  I have left many a comment for users to remember this.  &lt;strong&gt;One concrete thing we can all do is remind our fellow users to be nice when commenting on posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How we handle new users is very important to the site.  On the one side we need to maintain the standards of the site and that will mean closing questions and downvoting them as well.  On the other, we don't want to dissaude new users from participating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Balance is not what we are going for here.  We don't want to &quot;be nice&quot; to the detriment of the quality on the site. That said, how we apply the rules and expectations and how we deal with new people could definitely use some work regardless of how widespread the problem happens to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So....our to do list.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pay attention to who you are addressing when you comment. Chances are established users won't be overly offended by a closed question or stock comment.  New users on the other hand don't know how the site works, nor are they familiar with our expectations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment, particularly relating to new users, when downvoting or voting to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remind other users to be nice in comments as well.  If we police ourselves we can help everyone out.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag repeat offenders so mods can reach out and remind them.  Some people don't take hints or don't take general comments to apply to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide links to the tour and help.  Shortcut to the links by adding:  &lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[help]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let new users know that it takes time to figure things out and you've been there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not&lt;/strong&gt; be lax on our standards just because users are new, in the end it doesn't help them and it doesn't help the site, just do it with tact and an understanding of who you are talking to...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T12:56:28.210" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T12:56:28.210" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5890" CreationDate="2018-02-28T10:34:51.403" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Constructed languages add to the flavour of a world to build. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is now a dedicated stackexchange for constructed languages in public beta here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go forth and visit it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19004" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T21:26:32.837" Title="The Constructed Languages Stack Exchange is public beta now" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5887" CreationDate="2018-02-28T11:00:45.930" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little reminder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about worlds with constructed languages &lt;strong&gt;are still on topic here&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pointing users to conlang stack is all good and fine, and asking them to rethink which site would be better for their question is OK, but nothing has changed in voting to close reasons. Questions we would allow here before are allowed here now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T11:00:45.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5887" CreationDate="2018-02-28T21:26:32.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just want to make a couple of notes, as someone who participated a bit (though mostly lurked) during the Constructed Languages private beta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Constructed Languages has so far taken a focus more towards preexisting-existing languages. Those types of questions are a bit like how on Worldbuilding, we allow questions about preexisting works. The thing is, Constructed Languages leans pretty heavily in that direction and away from questions about languages constructed by users. It's not a problem, certainly, but it is something to think about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that Constructed Languages is going through the growing pains of having subjective questions (which encompass many of them I'm-making-my-own-conlang questions). There's a fine line to be drawn. I think we've drawn it (and erased it, and redrawn it, a couple times) on Worldbuilding, but Constructed Languages still has to flesh that out a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to add that I don't think we have a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; amount of folks with backgrounds in linguistics on Worldbuilding; there's certainly a number of people on Constructed Languages with that background - some first-time Stack Exchange users. I hope there's a bit of cross-pollination between the two sites. Both are going to get conlang questions, and if there are people out there who can write great answers, I hope they see us here on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T21:26:32.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-03T08:20:43.183" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a very simple strategy to improve the impression described by Paul TiKi could be to replace casting any vote (be it a VTC or a downvote) by the following protocol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a constructive comment: e.g. &quot;Perhaps you could improve this question with ...&quot; or &quot;How about considering also ... ?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the user resolves the issue, all good. Otherwise, leave a second comment to explain the reasons behind the disagreement &quot;In my opinion there is a flaw with this question, which is ...&quot; or &quot;I disagree with your setup/opinion because of ...&quot; or &quot;I believe that this question is off-topic/not-about-wordlbuilding, because ... &quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let it be, regardless of the answer/reaction of the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to other questions where such thread of comments have happened between two other users, review it, and objectively evaluate whether the question deserves a VTC or, less punitive, a downvote.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have been trying to follow such approach in the reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is important to always clarify the reasons behind one's dissatisfaction with a question, be it about the language, or the clarity, or even about one's own perception of what constitutes worldbuilding. That being said, a fair system should not empower a prosecutor to be also judge and jury at the same time, especially if we perceive them to be a bit trigger-happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42101" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T08:20:43.183" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-03T20:01:35.643" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't an answer as such - at least not to the question of why (yet) - but more to support the claim of increased negativity. I put a couple of SEDE queries together (&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/813866#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Close Ratio&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/813871/down-total-votes-by-year#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Down Vote Ratio&lt;/a&gt;) and got a scattered but upward trend in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions as a fraction of total questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Without deleted&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0khiv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0khiv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Closed questions as a fraction of total questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;With deleted&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dI3AJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dI3AJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Closed questions with deleted as a fraction of total questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Down votes as a fraction of all votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t0Rsf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t0Rsf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Down votes as a fraction of all votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not trained in SQL at all, this is all a mash up of things I've googled so I could well be wrong somewhere. 41% of all questions being put on hold seems pretty high so, if you know more, feel free to double check.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="31124" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T23:21:08.767" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T23:21:08.767" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-04T19:54:37.513" Score="7" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is currently on hold for being too story based; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105917/what-would-be-a-realistic-timeline-for-these-prosthetic-related-events&quot;&gt;What would be a realistic timeline for these prosthetic related events?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the problem I am having is, there is no story in the question. I am creating a world for a Tabletop rpg. I am not writing a story. There is no story present, there are no characters and there is no plot. I am not even planning on writing a story. I am purely creating a world for other people to create a story in (so to say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how can a question without a story involved, still be closed/put on hold as &quot;Too story based&quot;?&#xA;And how to fix that, if there is no story in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6989" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T10:34:24.120" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T10:34:24.120" Title="How can a question be &quot;Too Story Based&quot; if there is no story involved?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-05T02:46:52.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only been here for two years or so, but I've noticed a recent uptick in &lt;em&gt;poor quality questions&lt;/em&gt;. Questions that could be answered by reading a Wikipedia page on the topic, questions that could be answered with a single Google search and don't require any sort of extrapolation or interpolation, questions containing multiple distinct questions, questions that are just impossible to interpret, and &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of duplicate questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three trends that would be useful to know are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of the questions from new users being put on hold, how many are then edited by the user in an attempt to clarify and secure a reopening?&lt;/strong&gt; If the trend is downward it would suggest the new users are scared away or don't know how to proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of the questions from new users being put on hold, how many are being reopened at all?&lt;/strong&gt; A downward trend would suggest the number of irredeemably poor questions is on the rise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the number of questions on hold or closed compare to the number of answers recommended for deletion/deleted?&lt;/strong&gt; If they trend in parallel it would suggest users don't understand how the site works or the expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T02:46:52.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-05T19:51:24.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been here long at all and I certainly don't yet have the reputation that a lot if you do, so I apologize for presuming to chime in. But I feel like I have to because I have been the target of some of this negativity and have certainly seen it towards others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've seen is of this variety: Behaving obtusely, on purpose, as if pretending that you don't know what the person is talking about in their question. &quot;What do you mean by this...? What do you mean by that...?&quot; Come on, folks. We've all seen the same movies and TV shows, we've all read the same novels, we've all heard the same sci-fi terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or crafting responses that clearly are intended to make the questioner feel as if they are stupid for having the audacity to ask such a stupid question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in some cases out right making fun of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: I once asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105041/what-is-inside-a-wormhole&quot;&gt;What is INSIDE a Wormhole?&lt;/a&gt; . I'll admit, not a shining moment for me. However... since no one knows what's in a worm hole I think its not that big a leap to wonder what's in there. The way I see it, there are two appropriate responses to this question (in light of its &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; stupidity):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) &quot;No one knows what's inside a worm hole so we cant comment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or B) &quot;No one knows for sure, but here are some educated guesses based on what we do know about worm holes&quot;. I know we don't offer opinions but surely educated guesses are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can all agree that &quot;worms&quot; is not an appropriate response to the question. Funny? Yes. Very. I actually got a big kick out of it. I have a sense of humor. Appropriate? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take issue with the idea that I have to make note of every instance, as if since I don't have a list handy that means none of it really happened. It happens. We know it does. The issue is whether or not we let it go because we kinda agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also take issue with the notion that there are lots more low quality questions. The fact is, there are more questions. Period. And of those more questions there are going to be more that are not as well written as others. I'm sure there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; more that are well written too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be many reasons for this: English as a second language, the lack of knowledge and experience that many of you have, folks coming at this from the point of view that science-fiction and/or fantasy are kids stuff, and yes maybe they didn't even bother to take the tour or read the &quot;how to ask a better question&quot; page. But surely there's a better way to handle those than making fun or immediately down-voting with little consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I noticed that there was a lot of &quot;No, I don't know what you mean&quot; or &quot;no, I disagree&quot; to this question. If one person noticed it then its there. Don't dismiss it out of hand. If one person noticed it then are probably lots of others who noticed it too but don't say anything out of fear of being shunned by the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short I'm just saying that this should be a welcoming site. Not a &quot;we're too smart to bother with your dumb little question&quot; site. I think we need to accept that part of being a higher reputation person on this site includes helping the noob questioner to ask better questions. Ultimately that just helps everybody. It might require more work from you, but... better website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a suggestion: All noobs are automatically guided to the &quot;how to&quot; pages first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46557" LastEditorUserId="46557" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T19:48:11.017" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T19:48:11.017" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5904" CreationDate="2018-03-06T11:02:51.627" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some users on meta having a &quot;regular post&quot;, series or feature that they do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how much reputation should you have before starting one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T14:23:42.630" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T14:23:42.630" Title="What reputation should you have to start a regular post?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5903" CreationDate="2018-03-06T12:51:44.457" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The minimum required rep for creating a series of Meta posts such as &quot;Know Your Site Monday&quot; is the same as the required rep for creating an individual Meta post. In other words, &lt;strong&gt;there's no specific rep requirement for it&lt;/strong&gt;. Nor is there a &quot;soft limit&quot; below which your series will simply be disregarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to commit to something like that, though, you need to ensure you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A premise that's interesting enough to warrant such a series&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enough interesting material to warrant making it a &lt;strong&gt;series&lt;/strong&gt;, and not a single post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ability and motivation to stick to your chosen schedule&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 is the make-or-breaker. I don't know why kingledion stopped doing Know Your Site Monday but I'm willing to bet it was 3. I have two stories with a regular schedule (one weekly, one monthly) and I'm currently severely behind on both due to lack of motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarise: you can start a Meta series right this minute, but you have to be prepared to commit to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T12:51:44.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5903" CreationDate="2018-03-06T14:22:22.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You can start a series whenever you feel like it's a valuable addition to the site&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking about series of questions, the difference being series on Meta, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A23519+know+your+site+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;kingledion's &lt;em&gt;Know your site Monday&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/a&gt;, and single posts on Meta with a list of questions on the Main Site like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;TrEs-2b's &lt;em&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter is usually a collection of links about closely related topics, often framed in a similar way. Posting a Meta Post to collect them is a way to make the list easier for others to find. For example &lt;em&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/em&gt; posts that want to be part of the series are encouraged to post a little link to the Meta Post in the question to give people interested in the topic a way to check out the whole series from different authors. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Creating a realistic world&lt;/em&gt; Series&lt;/a&gt; for another example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been some discussion about this concept. Look for example at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5834/28789&quot;&gt;Where can I post a Reference List?&lt;/a&gt; where our mods James and MichaelKjörling explained that they do not think this is a good practice. Look through the discussions to get a better feeling, but the gist of it seems to be that the community is a bit split nowadays when it comes to these collections. If you have a lot of questions set in the same universe and you would like to do more than just link each one to the previous one you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; think about creating a Meta Post to collect them. Whether or not that is a good idea is probably a case-by-case decision. Some work well (like &lt;em&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/em&gt;, which has been around a while) and some do not, like JDługosz' &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4639/my-alien-message-series&quot;&gt;My “Alien Message” series&lt;/a&gt; that also links to posts on other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing is the &lt;em&gt;Know your site Monday&lt;/em&gt; series, which is (was?) a regular series of posts on Meta with (in my opinion) interesting information about the site. It's useful to have this information on Meta for those who are interested in getting information about the site and how to obtain such information through SEDE, while at the same time making it a little game of sorts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through the posts there was always a bit of downvoting involved. I assume that's because Meta is not supposed to be for &lt;em&gt;games&lt;/em&gt;, but for &lt;em&gt;discussions&lt;/em&gt; and the information should be given without waiting and be geared towards a specific goal. There was not a lot of discussion about the merit of the series as far as I am aware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I would say that you can think about creating a series of your own under the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have something meaningful to say &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;either because you want to collect very similar posts from different sources and make them easily accessible &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or you want to show data that could be useful for discussions in a format that is easy to understand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are reasonably sure that people would like to interact with your series&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for example by posting questions in the same universe or with a similar style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or you want people to talk about the data you showed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have some other meaningful plan for the series, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3483/should-we-end-the-topic-challenges&quot;&gt;regular topic challenges&lt;/a&gt; that were meant to increase the amount of questions in certain tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not create a series when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you just want to promote your own questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you just want to talk about something only-slightly-related - the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; might be a useful avenue for starting such discussions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation should not play any role in all of this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T14:22:22.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-07T11:28:16.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Stop. &lt;em&gt;Don't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rigorous downvoting and VTC are the only way to keep a Stack Exchange site's quality high.&lt;/strong&gt; This is not &quot;treating n00bs poorly&quot;, it's &lt;em&gt;expecting them to comply with the basic rules of the site&lt;/em&gt;. If they don't know those rules because they've chosen not to read them, or deliberately chosen to ignore them - &lt;strong&gt;tough&lt;/strong&gt;. In ordinary society, being ignorant of a law or ignoring it doesn't exempt you from being subject to it and the consequences of breaking it; why should Stack Exchange sites work differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, a downvote/VTC on a question is intended to convey that the community finds something to be wrong with said question. The first thing that a user who has asked such a question should do is thus ask themselves: &quot;what did I do wrong&quot;? If the question has been closed, the close reason will (should) tell them what they need to do to fix their question. Downvotes are a little trickier, because people often don't leave comments, but they still provide an indicator that at least one person finds an issue with the question, and thus the asker should probably relook at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument about new users becoming discouraged and leaving because their questions get downvoted and/or closed doesn't fly for me. I'd argue that any user who does that either doesn't care enough to get an answer, or has an extremely thin skin and takes everything personally, or has an extremely high opinion of themselves. Do you really want those sorts of users on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that downvotes and voting to close serve an &lt;strong&gt;extremely important purpose&lt;/strong&gt;: culling the crap. Discourage people from doing that and you end up with a mess like Stack Overflow, where the &quot;be nice&quot; policy has been unofficially modified to &quot;thou shalt not VTC unless you can absolutely positively without a doubt prove that this question is junk, and even if you can get the question closed, someone will probably disagree with you and reopen it because not hurting feelings is more important than ensuring quality&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, the end result is that the amount of crap question on Stack Overflow has risen almost exponentially, while the amount of people acting on bad questions has decreased in lockstep - as those who actually care about quality have stopped tending to questions because their close votes end up having no effect. The end result is that Stack Overflow is drowning under a disgusting mess of terrible questions, which essentially destroys the site's usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, being rigorous about question quality means there is a possibility that you lose people who could have been valuable contributors. It does mean that sometimes, legitimate questions will get closed by accident. But as Stack Overflow has demonstrated, while being nasty is problematic, being too nice is &lt;strong&gt;far, far worse&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T11:28:16.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2018-03-07T18:14:51.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think this thread is a great idea. I'm a bit late to the party, but I hope people still take a look at it from time to time. It seems to warrant more postings. Now, on with the show...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My World: G'bihon&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Low Gravity, High Atmosphere Planet In 2:1 Orbital/Spin Resonance Around an M-Dwarf Star. (Hard-Sci-Fi)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qHfZq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qHfZq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;G'bihon&amp;quot; is a working name for the world, and may change as the world progresses. It's a derivation of &amp;quot;Gibeon&amp;quot; the name of an ancient Canaanite city mentioned in Joshua 10:13 (Old Testament). Here is the passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up&#xA;the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of&#xA;Israel, &amp;quot;O sun, stand still at &lt;strong&gt;Gibeon&lt;/strong&gt;, And O moon in the valley of&#xA;Aijalon.&amp;quot; So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the&#xA;nation avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the&#xA;book of Jashar? &lt;strong&gt;And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did&#xA;not hasten to go down for about a whole day.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world I'm building is an ongoing art project, of which the world-building component is both fodder for the artistic component, as well as part of the art itself. My longer-term goal is to create a series of digital paintings and sketches, coupled with short written vignettes in the style of National Geographic or Wayne Barlowe's Expedition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a hard-sci fi world, this is meant to be as plausible as I can make it. I'm working from the ground-up. I've calculated the parameters through extensive spreadsheets, deriving most of my assumptions from reading over the latest in published exoplanet research and exoplanet modeling. I've already created an extensive series of maps (some of which I've shared below) as well as started on the rough sketching of organisms and environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I'll share a bit of what I've worked on, in 2 parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 1: The stats and overview.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 2: What's it like being there?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part 1 is straight-up description, while Part 2 is in the form of a very short story meant to give a more artistic impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. The Stats and Overview&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;STAR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Star Temperature: 3310K (Red Dwarf)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Star Luminosity: 0.0185 sols&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Star    Mass: 0.395 sols&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ORBITAL CHARACTERISTICS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Orbital Period: 27.44 Earth-days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rotational Period: 13.72 Earth-days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Solar Day (Sunrise to sunrise): 27.44 Earth-days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spin/Orbit Resonance: 2:1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aphelion: 0.1622 AU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perihelion: 0.0991 AU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semi-Major Axis: 0.1307 AU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eccentricity: 0.2415&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Axial Tilt: 0.09°&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PLANETARY CHARACTERISTICS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Radius: 5007km&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mass: 46.54% Earth’s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Density: 5305 (kg/m^3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Surface Gravity: 0.756 Earth’s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OTHER&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ocean Tide Heights: Varying. 16-73m common depending on time of year    and location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Atmosphere: Oxygen &amp;amp; Nitrogen with less than 2% Argon, CO2, and Water Vapor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Air Pressure at Sea Level: 3.2Bar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mean Real Temperature: 289.7K (16.6C)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aTVpa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aTVpa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vx0fF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vx0fF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G'bihon rotates slowly, having established a 2:1 orbit/spin resonance long in the past. The planet spins exactly twice for every one of its short 658.56 hour years. This, coupled with a moderately eccentric orbit, has created what is by Earth standards an unusual set of characteristics. Days and nights are hundreds of hours long, with the exact ratio of day/night varying based on longitude. The darkest areas of the world have a night almost twice as long as their day, while the brightest areas experience the exact reverse. This effect is consistent year to year, millennia to millennia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to a tidally locked world, our world is somewhat between an &amp;quot;eyeball&amp;quot; distribution of solar flux and a &amp;quot;banded&amp;quot; earth-like distribution, with the highest annual concentration of flux in the &amp;quot;Perihelion Zone,&amp;quot; the equatorial zone facing the sun at perihelion. Since there is no permanent night-side, G'bihon has a moderately warmer night-side than tidally locked models predict, and a more moderate day/night temperature difference. It also has only about half the latitudinal temperature variation of Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This moderation in temperature is promoted by two additional factors. The first is a thick atmosphere derived from an abundance of volatiles and above-earth average volcanic and tectonic activity. The thicker air not only aids in the more efficient distribution of heat, but has a secondary warming effect on the climate, holding heat closer to sea-level and increasing the global greenhouse effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QZGTa.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QZGTa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second factor is that—unlike Earth—the slow rotation creates a low Coriolis force, preventing the formation of multiple bands of atmospheric circulation. This has led to the development of two huge circulatory cells, one in the north hemisphere and one in the south, with areas of exaggerated eddies above 70-85 degrees latitude. These cells are essentially giant Hadley cells, and like the Hadley cells of Earth they efficiently transport heat from lower to higher latitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mean difference between day and night temperatures is be about 14K, with temperature variation over oceans and other large bodies of water moderated by water’s impressive thermal inertia, and temperatures inland experiencing greater thermal swings, particularly in the desert regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TRRDR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TRRDR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, the environments on G'bihon vary from cool to hot, with only a few smaller biomes experiencing regular sub-freezing temperatures. Ocean ice is unknown, and glaciers can only be found in two large mountain ranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hFuLQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hFuLQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few random facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The thick atmosphere, lower gravity, and higher partial pressure of&#xA;oxygen are fantastic conditions for the evolution of atmospheric life&#xA;forms. There is a greater variety of sizes and forms in the flying&#xA;and floating creatures of this world than on Earth. This includes&#xA;impressively large genera that have evolved methods of atmospheric&#xA;locomotion unseen in Earth organisms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Denser volume of air requires more energy input to move than a less&#xA;dense volume of air. So significant winds are harder to start up and&#xA;appreciable breezes and storms generally only form near major&#xA;low-pressure zones of upwelling atmosphere, or mountain ranges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Organisms living in the areas of longest night have adapted to make due with a year that is 2/3 night. The sunlight—when it does come—imparts less warmth and less ecosystem driving energy. Many organisms have evolved habits of dormancy, and &amp;quot;mesotrophs,&amp;quot; organisms that derive energy both from sunlight and organic matter are more common than in the long-day side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tides are immense. Depending on location and time of year, they can range from several meters up to over 80 or more meters. On the coasts that experience the highest tides, the ocean may travel dozens to a hundred km inland over the course of a week before receding. This sculpts coastal landscapes dominated by vast tidal flats, immense cliffs, severe erosion, and temporary salt water ponds and lakes that exist for days before rejoining the sea. The ecology in these areas are often vastly different than anything on Earth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could say much more about G'bihon, but I'll leave it at that! The images should help flesh things out further, as should the small story (a blurb really) below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. What is being there like?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Imagine for a moment that you find yourself about to embark on a journey. A device is about to transport you somewhere, though you don’t know where….&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crackle! Pop!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disorientation. Your head spins. You breath deeply. One breath. Two. It seems a bit difficult to breath, the air muggy and thick. Perhaps partly that’s the disorientation effecting you. Three. Four. You start to feel better. The spinning slows and then stops. As you get your bearings you notice that its darker, much darker, than the sunlight summer field you were just in. A storm? No. The sky, though generously covered with a broken sea of high-altitude clouds, is obviously calm. The clouds drift past, slowly, sure of the course of their barometric pilgrimage. The breeze courses over your skin, light and warm. Twilight then? No…that’s wrong as well. The clouds are pink, as might be expected, but something isn’t right. The pinks are muted. Desaturated. Not the vivid salmon pink you expect. And from behind the drifting clouds, a sky the color of a sun-bleached robin’s egg peeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your pupils dilate slightly, adjusting. Though unusually dim there is still plenty of light to see by, and you begin to notice the land and its colors. You are on a vast plain of pebble studded sand. Looking around, you see that the plain stretches horizonward in all directions, its flatness interrupted by frequent undulations, some gentle, others abrupt and violent. Boulders of varying size and color strewn the landscape: pale-white, concrete, brick, slate grey. Nothing unusual in those colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking notice of where you stand, you look down at your feet. The pebbled sand yields beneath your weight, and as you lift your right foot you can make out the sharp impression of your shoe in the soft ground. Flattened in your footprint lies what appears to be a plant. Matte black leaves cluster around a small orb, reminding you vaguely of sargassum weed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first time you notice your shadow. It lies small and diffuse beneath you. Looking up, you attempt to pinpoint the sun. After several moments a few clouds drift out of the way and you can make it out: a pale white sphere, tinged pink, lulling lazily in the sky. You’re startled by its size. Looking around again, you see that the plain slopes gently, almost imperceptibly eastward, towards a shimmering sparkle on the horizon. Perhaps the glint of sunlight off water? Unsure, you choose to walk in the opposite direction, upslope, westward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybgTN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybgTN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The temperature must be 30C you think as you wipe the sweat off your brow. Despite your labored breathing, you find the going less difficult than expected. You seem stronger, less prone to tiring. Which is useful, since obstacles are not in short supply. As you traipse across the plain you continuously weave a meaning path around boulders. Most are small, but some are the size of cars or houses. Many seem firmly embedded in the sand, but others protrude at abrupt angles, their immense hulk supported by only a few points of contact with the yielding surface. And trickling beneath and around some boulders, small streams flow eastward, back in the direction of your receding footprints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Water is everywhere. Pools of it. Ponds of it. Salty as the sea and all filled with life. In one small pond dense mats of black weed bob on the surface. Beneath the weed small forms jitter and dart, momentarily revealing themselves as they move between the fronds. And around every pool, small shelled creatures adhere to stone and pebble. Most seem dormant, but a few intrepid individuals expose their softer flesh, wiggling minuscule appendages back and forth in the air, or gliding over smooth stone from one wet spot to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The muggy aired is filled with chatter, rasps, and trills. Not insect or birdlike, you can’t quite place the sounds. But it’s obvious from where some of them originate. Noisy, airborne creatures whiz past you. Small, buzzing forms like insects flit about. Larger forms dive and bank, often dipping into the larger ponds before ascending rapidly. Most keep some distance, so you have trouble making out the details of their aerodynamic bodies. You think you see four rapidly beating wings, but you can’t be sure. Much higher up in the air you just barely discern a cluster of forms, hundreds strong, strangely not moving with the westward breeze. They seem to hang in the air like silent sentinels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the center of one particularly large pond a trio of scaled stumps jut three meters out of the water. From the top of the stumps dull blue strands, each centimeters thick, spill over the scaled body before splaying outward over the surface of the pond. Like the strings of a wet mop, each strand seems sodden with water. As you approach to get a closer look, a flyer, about the size of a seagull, glides down to the surface on two pairs of wings. It settles to bob for a moment. Whoosh! A large splash of water and two glistening appendages, each easily the length of a man’s arm, snap upward from between the blue strands, clamp onto the flyers body, and pull it below the surface of the pond. Waves ripple outward. In less than a second it’s over. Below the surface you see the shifting of something alive. Largely hidden by the black weeds and blue strands, you can’t tell what it is. You decide to give the larger ponds a very wide berth from here on out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After awhile, you can tell you’ve made progress. The plain is starting to slope more sharply upward, and what’s more, you can for the first time make out what seems to be a forest in the distance. In the muted light, discerning colors—especially distance ones—is often difficult, but you think you spot shades of blue and purple. Mostly, it just looks…dark. Black. Above you large flocks—composed of both two winged and four winged flyers—move in great undulating lines, sweeping here and there as they trill unearthly songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the thick air you walk for what seems hours, unsure of the exact passage of time. You look up towards the sun. Strange, you think. It doesn’t seem to have moved at all…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T20:25:18.543" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2018-03-08T12:17:43.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't know this thread was a thing. Choosing just one world to post about is tricky, but I guess I'll go for &lt;strong&gt;the Auraverse&lt;/strong&gt;, the first (and currently only) universe I'm using for multiple projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: I'm still building the Auraverse, plus I'm typing this up at work without access to my notes and such, so this is subject to change. For convenience, dates are given not using the world's actual calendar system, but BCA and ACA - Before and After &lt;em&gt;Chaos Aura&lt;/em&gt;, the RPG for which the Auraverse was originally created.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Creation Myth&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world was created by six goddesses, the Divine Spirits: Spirit of Sky, Spirit of Sea, Spirit of Land, Spirit of Light, Spirit of Night, and Spirit of Life. It took them six attempts to get it right: the five &quot;Precursor&quot; worlds that came before were garbled hellscapes filled with eldritch creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through a series of &quot;Divine Compromises&quot;, humans were granted eternal life through their souls, while other creatures were made mortal. Parallel worlds - heaven and hell - were created to house these souls, and the Divine Spirits used their powers to create two more Divines to guard those realms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spirit of Hell - henceforth referred to as &quot;the Eighth&quot; - gradually became twisted and corrupted from being surrounded by the worst elements of humanity. Seeing all mankind as inherently evil and unworthy of enjoying her Sisters' creations, she waged war against the world, but was defeated by the other seven Divines and sealed in crystal. In the &quot;Last Divine Compromise&quot;, the remaining Divines crafted a seventh, perfect world, and sealed themselves inside it, never again to interfere in the affairs of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; ...until the events of &lt;em&gt;Chaos Aura&lt;/em&gt;, in which the Eighth awakens from her crystal slumber and begins summoning eldritch creatures from the Precursor worlds in an attempt to cleanse the world of life. With the help of the Divine Spirits, the Eighth is defeated and destroyed for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. The world itself.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Auraverse mainly centres on the Kingdom of Albion, a generic medieval fantasy kingdom filled with greenery and life. To the northwest lies Akylia, a nation of mainly desert, ruled by a dynasty of warrior princes; to the east, across the sea, is a (currently unnamed) archipelago nation with a strong navy that, as of 5 ACA, is being decimated by the dread pirate Secorda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albion is prosperous, but there is plenty of poverty, especially in the Lower Quarter, a large slum in the south of the capital that has sprawled out beyond its walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty more kingdoms and continents around, but I haven't started properly fleshing out the geography yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Witches&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the world, there are individuals capable of tapping into the residual power left by the Divine Spirits, and using it to perform feats of magic. These individuals are known as Witches - White Witches can cast primarily light and healing spells, and Black Witches can cast primarily fire and lightning spells. &lt;em&gt;Extremely&lt;/em&gt; rarely, you will find a Silver Witch, who can cast both black and white magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 30 BCA, a Black Witch attempted to assassinate Albion's king. He survived with only minor burns, but was enraged, and in a fruitless attempt to hunt down the assassin, he ordered the execution of all Witches in Albion. His advisors quickly convinced him to reverse the policy, but Witchcraft remained punishable by death, and some rural areas continued to summarily execute suspected Witches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Witches banded together to form underground networks, with their own slang. For example, an &quot;Oasis&quot; is a town that's friendly to Witches, while a &quot;Mirage&quot; is a place that pretends to be an Oasis for the purpose of luring them out and killing them. In some cases, &quot;underground&quot; is quite literal - the capital city is home to the Storm Drain, a secret network of tunnels where Witches gather to buy power-replenishing Elixirs and spellbooks, or simply to hide from persecution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; After the events of &lt;em&gt;Chaos Aura&lt;/em&gt;, the ban on magic was lifted, so long as it is not used to carry out crimes. The Storm Drain remains, now a tourist attraction as much as it is a Witches' haven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. The stories of the Auraverse&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chaos Aura&lt;/em&gt;. An RPG Maker VX Ace game that I've been working on for some time. An adventurer named Xeron and a White Witch named Tara find themselves pitted against a mysterious and powerful Witch, who is summoning horrific creatures to attack the people of Albion. Their quest gradually escalates into a battle to stop the Eighth, the Divine Spirit of Hell, from destroying all creation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thief's Aura&lt;/em&gt;. My NaNoWriMo 2017 story, set in 1 ACA. Martina Valencia, a homeless thief, is arrested by the King's Guard and given a chance to lessen her sentence. With the help of a young Guardsman named Tyrell, she must infiltrate the Masked Men, a notorious gang of thieves and robbers, and bring them to justice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pirate's Aura&lt;/em&gt; (name subject to change). A planned RPG Maker game, set in 5 ACA. The dread pirate Secorda is terrorizing the seas to the east of Albion, but the Divine Spirit of Sea intervenes, outraged at his actions. Believing that Secorda is capable of redemption, the Spirit of Sea gives him six tasks to complete in order to be reformed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Regal Aura&lt;/em&gt; (name subject to change). A planned RPG Maker game, set in ~14 ACA. After the death of Albion's king, Princess Adelaide ascends to the throne and holds a tournament in order to find a husband. She chooses Arlan, a younger adventurer, but this angers Davor, one of Akylia's warrior princes, who ignores his brothers' wishes and declares war on Albion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T12:17:43.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5916" CreationDate="2018-03-08T18:33:18.627" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106247/why-cant-spaceships-go-underwater&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t spaceships go underwater?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble I see with that question is a lack of criteria for the desired answers:  It doesn't quite ask for the design a spaceship which can go underwater; it doesn't ask how to prevent anybody from building a spaceship which can go underwater.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It simply states that many spaceships, to the knowledge of the asker, cannot go underwater, and then asks why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, it almost is a worldbuilding question:  it seems to ask for the reasons why a spaceship cannot “go underwater”.  However, it bases this on putative examples in real world engineering or in science fiction — not in its own worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T19:02:16.847" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T19:18:50.650" Title="Does this question regarding underwater spaceships lack worldbuilding purpose?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2018-03-09T21:18:09.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have felt a subjective increase in questions in the form of &quot;I'm not creative. Be creative for me,&quot; which does seem to line up with the rate that other people are VTCing.  Obviously I cannot determine if that is because my subjective expectations for questions are going up or if the quality of the question is going down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I try to start a dialogue going in comments when I VTC, whenever I reasonably can.  Sometimes I'm just like &quot;I can't be bothered with this,&quot; but I try my best to post big comments wherever I can.  The way I see it, your question may be too poor to answer in StackExchange's format, but if you can get 5 people who voted to close your question to all engage in an effort to help you anyways, then that's a very powerful support group!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T21:18:09.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T03:54:51.803" Score="13" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of interest is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106461/all-else-equal-would-certain-human-types-be-better-suited-for-living-in-an-ice?noredirect=1#comment322539_106461&quot;&gt;All Else Equal, would certain human types be better suited for living in an Ice Age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to be a poor sport or anything. In the past, I have had several questions closed and I accepted those outcomes. Basically, I could agree that in retrospect those questions were too broad or too story based. However in this case, I'm confused about why it was closed. By learning from my answers that were closed in the past, I really put a lot of effort into proactively narrowing the scope by including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;setting, technology level, climate and other scenario clarifications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assumptions of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Handicaps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Victory condition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scope, (only interested in physical traits, not technology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;simplifications, I also included a simplification clause, if users think my technology assumptions are too complicated, I said just ignore technology altogether, as it's being held constant and I'm only interested in physical traits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;disclaimer section 1, to narrow the scope and equalize the playing&#xA;field by giving each group the same culture/technology (which is&#xA;necessary to scientifically examine the impact of &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; physical&#xA;traits)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;disclaimer section 2, to narrow the scope from all ethnicities to 4&#xA;distinct human types (each group admittedly has different amounts of genetic variation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in my opinion &quot;Human Types best suited for living in an ice age&quot; is not too broad. I have a clear &lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt; section that asks for something explicit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;would these human types have the same chances of survival, all else held equal?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then added a tag-on question: &quot;what traits would be useful, what traits would get in the way?&quot; Lastly, I had a side question section, but I made clear that was optional. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the definition of too broad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be guilty of asking multiple questions in this post, but I wouldn't say they are multiple &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; questions. In fact, to answer my question within the scope, you would almost have to say &lt;strong&gt;something&lt;/strong&gt; about traits. That's why I view the tag-on question as harmless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will concede it is a lengthy post. I'm not sure if everyone took the time to read through all of it. I did try to use &lt;strong&gt;boldface&lt;/strong&gt; to emphasize the important parts like the question and assumptions, so that people could skim through effectively. However, it's long for a reason I guess. All that information is there to help narrow the scope, precisely to safe-guard from being categorized as too-broad. So most of the post is not a story-build up, it is a post mainly of clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question itself is not broad, I will also concede that the field of study and knowledge base needed to answer it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; broad. For example, you would have to know a bit about: archaeology, anthropology, evolution, geology and maybe even sociology to give a good &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; answer. But as far as I know, that's not against the rules. In some sense, that's why we are all here, to tap into the community's knowledge resources for questions we can't answer ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was at least able to tap the knowledge resources here briefly; I got a few interesting answers. Then I noticed there were some close votes. There were only 3 close votes, it said 22 more needed to close. So I thought, that's normal. Usually when my question is seriously being consider for closure, the OP is made aware and has some lead-time to make adjustments. A bit later, my question was actually closed and there was no warning/citing of what about it is too broad. So that kind of added to the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long story short, I think there is a way to pose the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;would these human types have the same chances of survival, all else held equal?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I really believe there is a way to pose it so that it meets the requirements for questions here. I thought by including simplifications, assumptions, disclaimers, victory conditions and other clarifications that my OP was very close if not on the mark. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel I posed the question well, with enough articulation so as not to be broad. Unfortunately, that's not how the community saw things. I would make some edits to try to clear things up, but I'm literally out of ideas. Perhaps my brain is on a different wave-length and others don't follow my logic, but to me at least, it is very clear as is. I don't think I can spell it out any more without sounding strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What more could I have done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32966" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T06:18:13.770" Title="&quot;Question Closed: Too Broad&quot; despite numerous clarifications and stipulations" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5912" CreationDate="2018-03-10T06:18:13.770" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find it disappointing that we &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; have the problem of not leaving commentary when voting to close. I will attempt to be clear about what I find problematic about the question. Note that I &lt;em&gt;did not&lt;/em&gt; vote to close, but neither did I vote to leave open when presented the question in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you identified the core problem in this question: there's too much ground to cover. The &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; close reason indicates that we need &quot;enough detail to identify an adequate answer.&quot; In this case, an adequate answer would need to provide the reasoning for why one group of peoples is better than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this, an answer would need to explore the adaptations that made each race superior in its environment, then examine how each would fare in a foreign environment and, finally, rank the &quot;thrivability&quot; of the disparate races. But now we need to define -- and explain -- a &quot;thrivability&quot; metric, and that has its own issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, an answer that satisfies both the question and the needs of the community to explain, rather than tell, means answers would be too long/complex than is intended for the Stack Exchange format. One could easily write an entire book to answer this question. This is one of the red flags for a question being &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T06:18:13.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T08:32:50.067" Score="14" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I was looking if such a topic existed already, but I couldn't find anything. I'm sorry if I missed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relatively often, you will find a question that is just painfully easy to answer. I will make up one example, I could link questions if somebody doesn't know what I'm talking about, but for now I don't want to offend anybody of course ;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my world, there is no coffee. What will people drink instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer would be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as for other SE, I completely get this sort of thing. If someone asks on physics why things fall towards earth, gravity is a legitimate answer. The OP might have never heard of the concept for a number of reasons and it's best to educate them. However, I fail to see the purpose on worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had the impression the SE is there to help building worlds and not to build them because the OP can't do a basic google search or write a decent question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some of those questions are insanely popular, I believe because anyone, even the gravity guy, is able to answer them. However I think especially because of their popularity, they also cast a bad light on worldbuilding and attract more trivial questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently flagged one of those questions (working on being able to closevote ;)) as too broad I think, however it was declined. I get it, why should asking about other drinks than coffee be off-topic if worded nicely, it's just trivial.  I also answered one of those questions and got a lot of upvotes for my trivial, easy-to-google answer because of course the question went viral. It felt kind of bad tbo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of those questions can be saved by asking for more information because the OP didn't want to hear about water but about something else, but not always. I'm not talking about sloppy questions in general here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done in case a question would be very easily resolved by a simple google search, 5 minutes of thinking about it or doing any research into the topic themselves?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be done with questions that have rather obvious, trivial answers? And are they on-topic and welcome?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for me, personally, this question is important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are comments asking the OP to exclude the trivial answers to the question even desired or should I stop doing that?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different kinds of flavors, I want to include a third point: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do if answers are not necessarily trivial but so well-established that the OP must have encountered solutions to the question already. E.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would medieval people react to someone with technology that looks like magic to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been done and overdone so much that the standard answers should maybe be excluded. I feel like this question could actually be a fruitful one even if one excludes the cliches, but often these questions only yield more obvious, cliche answers and the rare creative or, perhaps in this case, historically acurate ones gets burried under 10 answers about burning someone alive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course doesn't has to be the case, often creative answers can be found with many upvotes, but I'm talking about such questions in principal here. I personally feel that a question excluding the obvious answers is strictly better and the obvious answer spam hides and, I know this from personal experience, discourages the new/interesting/alternative solutions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do about questions that do not exclude well established, run-of-the-mill solutions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if the 3rd point should be best left to a separate topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the subjectiveness of this, but everything is subjective to a degree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37861" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T12:21:41.700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T16:05:28.500" Title="What to do about trivial questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5914" CreationDate="2018-03-10T12:28:52.437" Score="16" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should be done with questions that have rather obvious, trivial answers? And are they on-topic and welcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote them down. Look at the hover text for the downvote button on a question. The tooltip is pretty clear: &lt;em&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/em&gt;. If one or more of those criteria apply, then you're fully within your rights to vote down the question. I would say don't even feel pressured into leaving an explanatory comment in such a case (except perhaps if the OP is a newcomer to the site and might need more guidance), because absent a comment, the default downvote reason should be assumed to apply. If there's something &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; that could improve the question, though, it's usually a good idea to point that out in a comment. If you want your vote to be a bit more anonymous, you can do one some time before the other. (OP can see the time of the rep hit from the downvote, and if there's an explanationary comment within a few minutes of that, it's not &lt;em&gt;too hard&lt;/em&gt; to guess who voted down even though the vote itself is still anonymous.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also flag the question for review or (when you have the reputation to) vote to close. If the entirety of the question boils down to &lt;em&gt;My world doesn't have coffee; what will people drink?&lt;/em&gt; then it's very likely (but not necessarily guaranteed) that the question is either &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; (there are either too many possible answers, or there's no good way to judge how well a given answer actually answers the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are comments asking the OP to exclude the trivial answers to the question even desired or should I stop doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What to do about questions that do not exclude well established, run-of-the-mill solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say such comments are okay, but should be phrased in terms of &lt;em&gt;(is there some / what is the) reason why you don't just use X?&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;please edit your question to say that X is not an acceptable answer&lt;/em&gt;. Make the OP &lt;em&gt;explain their rationale&lt;/em&gt; rather than merely adding a list of disallowed answers to the question, as the reason for excluding X may or may not also exclude Y and Z as possible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What to do if answers are not necessarily trivial but so well-established that the OP must have encountered solutions to the question already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has already been asked on the site, then flag or vote to close as a duplicate. If you can't quickly find the existing question, then even just a comment along the lines of &quot;I know I've seen a question like this before, but can't find it&quot; might jog some other person's memory. Typically you'll want to flag the newer question as a duplicate of the older one, so check the question dates, but exceptions may apply. Given the number of questions on different subjects that we have on the site, it's highly likely that some other question is at least &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt;, even if it isn't necessarily a &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb: a &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; question is a question where any answer to one is an equally valid answer to the other. A &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; question, to me (and this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; subjective), is a question that is likely to be of interest in the context of another question, but where the answers are going to be different (they might deal with different aspects of a larger question, for example). If it's your own question, or if you have an accepted or highly voted answer to the question you are referencing, it might be a nice touch to mention that, to keep people from thinking that you're just rep-whoring; in cases like that, I'll sometimes write something like &quot;full disclosure: the accepted answer is my own&quot; or &quot;full disclosure: my own question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T12:28:52.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5909" CreationDate="2018-03-10T14:58:01.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the cited precedent, the question itself is more or less an acceptable one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of technical details inherent in the question is what unjustly shifted focus away from the answers:  the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106250/27708&quot;&gt;most popular answer&lt;/a&gt; is a Community Wiki collection of examples which does little to explain hows and wherefores.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The trouble is mostly with that answer — not so much with the question, especially now that it was edited to refine the purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="27708" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T19:18:50.650" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T19:18:50.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5920" CreationDate="2018-03-13T16:01:32.277" Score="10" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to admit, I've been here a month now and I still have absolutely no clue what most of y'all's goals are in patrolling posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question was closed for being too open-ended and multifaceted (too broad). Okay, lesson learned. Just stick to the facts and the (narrow) info you want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second question gave only the bare minimum amount of setting information to garner what I hoped might be a useful answer or answers, stuck to the facts and only asked a single question. Rather than answer the question or downvote for it being a bad question, a few high-medal individuals took the tack of trying to poke holes in my intentionally bare-bones description of the premise, while at the same time voting to close on Opinion-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have finally started to receive useful ideas in my second post, I'm left wondering just how many bars for entry there are and whether they're mutually-exclusive. In this vein, I have a few questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do tags play a part in your focus or how harshly you judge a question or change the rules with which posters should abide?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does wanting a reality-based answer require that the answerer like and agree with the premise before coming up with a logical/realistic consequence based on said premise?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much detail is too much and how much is not enough? Is there any buffer room? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is voting to close just the way you show you love someone in this forum?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47744" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T16:28:46.670" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T16:28:46.670" Title="Mutually-exclusive goals and how to discover them" Tags="|discussion|tags|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2018-03-13T16:18:01.590" Score="17" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Normally not. There is an exception however: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; that you cite sources and have equations and stuff like that. It's a sort of meta-tag, something StackExchange in general doesn't like and it plays a special role here. If you look on Meta you will find &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of discussions about this tag and the therefore somewhat &lt;em&gt;hidden requirements&lt;/em&gt; with this one tag. Other than that tags lead how people perceive questions: if you use &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt; you will likely not receive a lot of equations in answers and if you put &lt;em&gt;science-based&lt;/em&gt; answers that say &quot;Use magic!&quot; will likely be deleted. &lt;strong&gt;But in general tags do not define what a question or answer is about - they give a way for users to filter out topics they like/not like. What the OP says in the question &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt; is what is important.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answerer doesn't have to like your premise, but he has to accept the premise. There are so-called &lt;em&gt;frame-challenge&lt;/em&gt; answers that try to give the answer the OP &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; instead of the one that he &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt;, but they need to be well-executed to work. But when it comes to reality-based you explicitly want people to point out problems that arise from not saying &quot;It's magic&quot;, so you should expect answers that say &quot;This won't work - here's why:&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That... is completely random. After quite some time on the site it depends &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; on the question and your style of writing. Look at my questions: they are &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt;, because I always simply write that way. There are people and questions who only need three sentences for a perfectly valid and useful question and there are people and questions that need at least a page to work. The only guideline I can give you is: &quot;A question is not perfect when you can't add anything - it's perfect when you can't remove anything!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will find even more posts about voting to close on Meta than about hard-science. It's a very difficult topic, especially on WorldBuilding. My take on it: we should &lt;em&gt;temporarily put a question on hold&lt;/em&gt; (and that is my preferred way of phrasing it) as soon as possible and help the OP to formulate a question that will receive useful answers that fit the guidelines. We also regularly have a problem with highly opinion-based questions making it to the &lt;em&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/em&gt; and attracting lots of people from other sites who suddenly think that &quot;What if...?&quot; questions are on-topic - they are not. And we don't want this problem to become more severe, so putting questions on hold fast is a good thing. A question that is on hold and gets edited automatically is put into a special reopen review queue where people judge whether the edits were sufficient. Put on hold fast - reopen fast. That would be ideal in my opinion. Only after a week without edits a question is really closed - but the button says &quot;close&quot; at the start and this leads people to believe a question on hold is basically &quot;dead&quot;, which is why I prefer &quot;on hold&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another tip: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;We have a Sandbox!&lt;/a&gt; You can test your drafts there and you can get feedback before posting on the site. Especially when you are not sure it's a nice way to get a bit of feedback first or to work on your draft and ask for help with that. You can also ask in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the chat&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you already posted the question on the main site and don't understand the comments or people are not leaving enough comments feel free to come to the chat and ask for quick feedback or post on Meta about it. That should give some insights and people who are active in the chat and on Meta will likely be able to guide you or help you by voting - sometimes it takes a few rounds of &quot;putting on hold&quot; and &quot;reopening&quot; before the final decision is done and like I've said: it's a normal topic on Meta and we've had plenty of discussion about it and will always have it. Guidelines sometimes slightly change, people change, patterns change, ... There are no easy and hard rules on VTCing and therefore we should embrace this topic as a community as best as we can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some bars and it takes some time to get used to the site, but the goals are not mutually exclusive. Just different for each question... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also happens to basically everyone who has asked a few questions on the site. It's pretty normal, even if that sounds weird. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T16:18:01.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5923" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:33:48.937" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/106728/28789&quot;&gt;Is it feasible to have a literal ivory tower?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 9:42 the unregistered user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/48623/bromey-jestman&quot;&gt;bromey_jestman&lt;/a&gt; posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106934/28789&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal ivory tower would be one to two meter tall, simply the tusk of the elephant standing upright, in which a small enough fairy is living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because: The literary ivory tower must, if I say so myself, stem from the German '''Elfenbein''' (ivory), where Elf seems to be a mix-up of &amp;quot;elf&amp;quot; (German ''Elb'' or ''Elf'', also ''Alp''or ''Alb'' as in ''Albtraum'' - ''nightmare'') and &amp;quot;eleph&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;elephant&amp;quot;, with a pinch of &amp;quot;alb&amp;quot; (''white'', as in ''albino'', ''alabaster''). While &amp;quot;Bein&amp;quot; (''leg'') is an archaic term for bone. Ivory tower then would be an ironic term, the irony of which is lost on most speakers in their ivory towers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &amp;quot;elephant&amp;quot; is thought to have came from afro-asiatic, through egyptian ''ꜣbw''; And &amp;quot;ivory&amp;quot; might have come from the egyptian root or from sanskrit ''इभ'' (''&amp;quot;íbha&amp;quot;'') and the term ivory tower might be a reference to size and power, obviously -- on yet another hand, ''ꜣbw'' was also used in hieroglyphs derived from ''ꜣb'' - &amp;quot;to stop, to avoid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way: I'd suspect &amp;quot;aleph&amp;quot;, the ancient cow-god, is etymologically connected, more so because &amp;quot;Elephantenkuh&amp;quot; (fem. Elephant, Kuh=cow) and &amp;quot;Elephant Bull&amp;quot; are common terms. And because the elephant is holy in India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 9:44 the unregistered user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/48624/irovy-jestman&quot;&gt;Irovy_Jestman&lt;/a&gt; posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106935/28789&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal ivory tower would be one to two meter tall, simply the tusk of the elephant standing upright, in which a small enough fairy is living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because: The literary ivory tower must, if I say so myself, stem from the German '''Elfenbein''' (ivory), where Elf seems to be a mix-up of &amp;quot;elf&amp;quot; (German ''Elb'' or ''Elf'', also ''Alp''or ''Alb'' as in ''Albtraum'' - ''nightmare'') and &amp;quot;eleph&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;elephant&amp;quot;, with a pinch of &amp;quot;alb&amp;quot; (''white'', as in ''albino'', ''alabaster''). While &amp;quot;Bein&amp;quot; (''leg'') is an archaic term for bone. Ivory tower then would be an ironic term, the irony of which is lost on most speakers in their ivory towers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, elephant came from afro-asiatic through egyptian ''ꜣbw'' ʾelbi).[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way: I'd suspect &amp;quot;aleph&amp;quot;, the ancient cow-god, is etymologically connected, more so because &amp;quot;Elephantenkuh&amp;quot; (fem. Elephant, Kuh=cow) and &amp;quot;Elephant Bull&amp;quot; are common terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see both answers are nearly the same, except for the second one being a bit shorter in the third and fourth paragraph. The account names also show some similartiy. I left a comment under the second one to inform the OP about the option to have accounts merged, where to find the tour and help center and that &lt;em&gt;you shouldn't answer two times with basically the same answer - except for the second one being shorter&lt;/em&gt;. That's what editing is for, which you can do when you create an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then proceeded to flag the second answer as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; so that it may get deleted - there is already a more elaborate answer that says the same in longer and to me at least it looks like a normal case of someone accidentally creating two accounts. My flag however was disputed and both answers still exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore I want to ask what to do in this case. I think the second answer should be deleted, but others seem to disagree. If we don't want to delete any of these two answers, what is the reasoning for leaving the same answer, likely written by the same user, &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt; under the question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T19:42:35.213" Title="What to do about near-duplicate answers from unregistered user(s)?" Tags="|discussion|answers|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5922" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:44:07.717" Score="11" Body="&lt;h3&gt;If we're talking about this specific case only, I would say delete both.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about building a tower out of ivory. I think most of us would interpret that as asking about whether, if you had a large enough supply of ivory at your disposal, you could build a structure of any significant height. Therefore, a proper answer would . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hopefully talk about the material properties of ivory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calculate, roughly, how much material would be needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a basic estimate of the cost of such a tower.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These answers . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make something of a joke.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spend three paragraphs talking about etymology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Completely miss the three points I made above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in this case, I'd be inclined to delete both posts (and now they are, in fact, both deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more general case - i.e. where one of the answers actually addressed the question - I think you'd be justified in editing in material from one answer to the other, to make it a full answer, and then flagging the incomplete one for deletion (or voting to delete, if possible). Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106728/is-it-feasible-to-have-a-literal-ivory-tower/106935#comment324323_106935&quot;&gt;your comment&lt;/a&gt; was rather nice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding! Interesting analysis, but are you the same person that wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106934/28789&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;? Both accounts are unregistered. You might be interested in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/18232/352819&quot;&gt;How can one link / merge / combine / associate two accounts / users? (Anonymous / unregistered / cookie, or OpenID / registered)&lt;/a&gt; Merging allows you to [edit] your answers. Please don't post the same answer (shorter) again. If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T19:42:35.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5925" CreationDate="2018-03-15T03:06:48.690" Score="15" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been on Worldbuilding now for just (10 minutes as I write this) over 4 months, after noticing the question about lights being needed on space ships in November. I've really enjoyed my time here; sure there have been a few hiccups but for the most part the community has been quite accepting of me and I have to say that I appreciate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently however, my points counter rounded past 9k and I've realised that I'm dangerously close to having access to moderator tools. All of a sudden I feel like the site may well consider me less of a dilettante and I find myself wondering whether it is right or wrong that I start to feel delusions of adequacy in what I bring to the site. Just like my day job however (and the teaching I do after hours in my local SciTech faculty) I take responsibility very seriously and I find myself focused on what it really means to be a Contributor on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My curiosity was finally piqued by a comment I found on The Factory Floor a while back; I don't remember who made it, who they were talking about, etc. but I remember the comment &quot;He's not a contributor, he only asks questions that suck up your time&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, I've inferred several things;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Answers are more valuable on the site than questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) Suppliers of questions are expected to contribute in other ways&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) I seem to know more about how NOT to contribute than how TO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is far easier to infer than one may think at first blush; upvotes on answers are worth 10 points, whereas upvotes on questions are worth only 5 (at least, I think that's the case from watching other people's rep increases; I've never received a question upvote other than for a single question here on meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second makes sense insofar as contribution has to mean more than supplying questions; the site needs answers to be credible, and even the voting systems and moderation tasks in all their forms need to be manned in order for the site to be maintained in good order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So; that leaves me with the last point; I've proven quite spectacularly in the past that I'm useless as a supplier of questions, and it's not what I want to do anyway. But, impending access to moderator tools implies some innate responsibility to contribute beyond what I'm currently doing. With that thought in mind, what am I expected to do on this site with a 10k+ rep? Is there something more I'm supposed to contribute other than just answering questions I like the look of and voting as I see fit on questions and answers otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, should there be a list of rep 'achievements' somewhere that tells you what you get access to, and how to properly use those tools and why you should (or in some cases shouldn't) use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm to be candid for a moment, I've been making it up as I go along here so far. I've been using what tools I have access to in the best manner that I can think of, and making the best decisions I can, but without much interaction from the community to guide me in doing so. If moderator tools are what they sound like, it would make sense that there be some form of 'how to' provided to people as they gain access to ensure that the power their rep affords is governed by a clear explanation of the responsibility that is implied by the use of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for no other reason than Enlightened Self Interest (not wanting to stuff up a site that generates so much opportunity for personal fun), it would be nice to know what existing moderators think is a valuable contribution to this site when rep levels reach 10k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T13:10:31.140" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T03:35:11.567" Title="What does being a 'Contributor' look like on Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|community|privileges|moderation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5924" CreationDate="2018-03-15T09:18:39.273" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I am not a moderator and normally the term &quot;moderator&quot; on the StackExchange network describes elected (diamond) mods, but I do have access to the mod tools privilege on Writing.SE and am close here on WorldBuilding, therefore I will take your sentence about &quot;what existing moderators think is a valuable contribution&quot; to mean &quot;what do other people with experience on the network think is a valuable contribution&quot;. I will describe those later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers are indeed considered to be more valuable than questions on the network as a whole as you can see for example when it comes to the difference in rep gain (+5 for questions, +10 for answers), the amount of rep lost on downvotes (0 for questions, -1 for answers), the fact that you can't put a bounty on a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; for the querent, only for an answer, the amount of badges that are related to answering (there are some for asking, too, but tag badges for example are exclusively for answers) and probably a few other things I forgot know. &lt;strong&gt;That doesn't mean people don't like questions - without questions there are no answers and a site wouldn't serve any purpose.&lt;/strong&gt; Look at sites who struggle getting out of their Beta for example. Writing.SE is a site I am active on that aces all of their stats that are needed for graduation - except for &quot;questions per day&quot;, which is somewhere around 5 most of the time and should at least be at 10. They would love to have more questions! Questions are incredibly important and &lt;strong&gt;if you want to contribute by only ever asking high-quality questions then that's perfectly fine!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world everyone would contribute the way our elected mods do, which in general means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking high-quality questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;posting high-quality answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;editing stuff&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keeping track of newly created tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;guiding new users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;going through the queues&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keeping an eye on Meta &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voting (up and down)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and all the other stuff our elected mods do.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in reality we can't expect everyone to be as good as the people we elect to represent us - they are exceptional. If you want to contribute then find something on the site that you like and do that. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5210/28789&quot;&gt;my answer to the Meta question &lt;em&gt;Why do YOU hang out on Worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I described how I basically never answered or asked anything on the site. I liked commenting and I liked editing - stuff that many people find boring. If you look through the comments you can see that one of our elected mods encouraged this behaviour. I later changed a bit and started answering/asking again, but I am still mainly editing (~1.2k edits) and commenting (no idea if there is any easy to find number) (and flagging (~1k helpful flags)). That's fine. That's the way I contribute to the site. &lt;strong&gt;Every bit helps! To cite our elected mod Michael &quot;If editing is what floats your boat, by all means do it!&quot; You can replace editing with basically &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; else you can do according to your privileges.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you are misinterpreting a few things and I hope my point two has already showed that you can do a lot and that you are already doing a lot Mister &quot;reads Meta and thinks about how best to use his privileges&quot; - that is already something that not so many people seem to do and keeping an eye on Meta to help people who have questions about the site or to start discussions like this one is immensely helpful for the site. I can also see that you have ~150 answers, which is a lot, ~460 votes cast, which is also a way to contribute, I can see that you are reviewing stuff in the queues (yeah, taking a closer look at a profile reveals a lot of info), that you are commenting a lot - heck, you are already contributing &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;. Please continue to do that to help the site and everything is fine, no matter what your rep count says!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges page&lt;/a&gt; to see all available privileges and by clicking on one you can get to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;specific privilege that this question is about&lt;/a&gt;. There you have a description of what you can do and what you should think about when you can do that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As one of our most experienced users, we're counting on you to guide the community and lead by example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;View deleted posts&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Cast delete and undelete votes on questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Access moderator tools&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Edit tags inline  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...which collectively allow you to help the elected community moderators in monitoring the site and helping to clean up messes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically this means: you can see all the crap that people post on this site even after it's been deleted and you should make sure that it really is crap. If you find something deleted that is not crap and there is no reason to leave it deleted you should think about whether you want to start a discussion on Meta or in the chat to get it undeleted again. But read the whole page - it will give you all the insight you need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because basically what you are supposed to do is: whatever you are doing right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do a bit more, but it's not like people suddenly expect you to handle spam flags. There are some things only elected mods can do such as casting binding votes for closure and deletion, having queues for spam and rude/abusive posts, handling people who repeatedly do something that is unhealthy for the site... That's why you will often see on Meta sites that their job is something like being a janitor - they have to see the real crap while the normal people like us handle the normal stuff and only notify them of the really bad stuff. If you have 10k rep you will see more bad stuff and can act a bit better on the bad stuff, but the real crap is still up to the elected mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And everything you do still is not binding - you would need delete votes or undelete votes from multiple people to do something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting new feature you will see are the mod tools that can be accessed through a link that will appear besides the review queue. It's a small link and it's not totally easy to find, but you will find valuable information about exceptionally good and bad stuff - like exceptionally high votes or exceptional amounts of downvotes. Keeping an eye on this allows you to better keep track of which questions might be opinion-based and which answers might be crap that you should act on. It also allows you to see newly created tags, which might be a start for Meta discussions about whether the community really wants them or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you are supposed to be able to better judge whether something needs to be acted upon and you get some tools that help you better and more easily identify these things. It's still up to your experienced judgement to say whether you need to act or leave it, which is why the tools are only unlocked at 10k rep - they are tools that assisst, not final arbiters. That's still the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are ever unsure about what to do simply open up a Meta discussion and let the community decide. That's the core principle of StackExchange and while your votes have a bit more power in some regards, you are still part of the machinery and other lower rep users can still vote to not do what you think would be right. There is some more power and some more responsibility, but nothing to be afraid of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a regular in the chat I think that you might have misinterpreted that statement. I am pretty sure I know what the topic was and it's just that some  people constantly exhibit behaviour that some people don't like, such as asking ever-changing questions and expecting everyone to know every iteration of this... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't go into detail, but that statement as you have put it in your question is taken out of context and is most certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; intended the way you seem to have interpreted it. That statement was about certain individuals, not the generic &quot;mainly asking questions&quot;-user on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking &lt;em&gt;high-quality&lt;/em&gt; questions &lt;em&gt;on the site&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;incredibly valuable and important&lt;/em&gt; for the site!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T10:10:57.177" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T10:10:57.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5924" CreationDate="2018-03-15T13:26:19.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kind of a backup to Secespitus' answer; There are a small handful of users that are verified &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;help vampires&lt;/a&gt;. They routinely try to pull focus from everyone else and ask endless streams of questions, often laying in wait for people and then ambushing them to try to suck more life giving help out. Also, because help vampires can't see themselves in a mirror, they are very bad at seeing they are help vampires, even when you explicitly point it out to them on multiple occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking questions is very important. Asking the same questions over and over with slight variations, expecting everyone else to essentially create the world for you is not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You are not a help vampire, especially with 147 answers and no questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to using mod tools, by now you probably know what makes for a good question, and so being able to cast close/open votes on questions should be pretty clear. If you aren't sure, ask on meta and see what others think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T13:26:19.080" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5924" CreationDate="2018-03-15T18:03:37.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mostly agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5925/29&quot;&gt;what Secespitus wrote&lt;/a&gt;, but there's one thing in that answer which I disagree with (as seems to be common).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see something that you're unsure about, you don't necessarily need to start a Meta discussion about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are completely unsure, it might be best to take no action at all, and rather just leave it for others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have some idea of which action to take, and feel reasonably confident in your choice, then &lt;strong&gt;just take the action that you feel is correct, given the site's scope.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you want clarification&lt;/strong&gt; on what would be the correct course of action and why, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; go ahead and ask on Meta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beauty in this regard of the Stack Exchange community-moderation system is that it almost always requires multiple people to agree on a course of action before something happens. The major exception to this is diamond moderator &quot;binding votes&quot;, which take effect immediately regardless of vote count thresholds, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;diamond moderators &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; held to a higher standard&lt;/a&gt;. Note that &quot;community moderator&quot; in the snippet below refers to moderators elected by the community or (in the case of beta sites) appointed by Stack Exchange employees, both from the community itself; in other words, specifically those not-employees with a diamond to their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So in summary, if you are a community moderator on a Stack Exchange site, here’s what to expect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any action you can take as an ordinary user which can't easily be reversed, either by the community or by a diamond moderator, if you somehow manage to screw up. Heck, even most actions by diamond moderators are quite easy to reverse (and we learn very quickly which parts of the system to tread carefully around).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For day-to-day usage of a site, hitting 10k&lt;/strong&gt; (or 2k on a beta site), while a bit of a milestone in terms of numerals, mostly just means that you can see deleted posts, and have access to vote to delete or undelete questions (but not vote to delete answers; that's 20k). You get access to some moderator tools, but &lt;em&gt;there's no requirement to use those&lt;/em&gt; just like there's no requirement to visit the review queues regularly if you don't want to do that, just because you hit 500 rep. The tools are tools, not chains binding you to the site or whips forcing you to take action you otherwise wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T18:33:29.070" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T18:33:29.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-15T21:21:04.953" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a post called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/107106/28789&quot;&gt;How to differentiate between elves and men&lt;/a&gt; where I asked about how to make elves physically different enough from mem that you could distinguish one from a man at a glance. I got a few answers that clearly understood what I was asking, yet it was put on hold for being unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was there such a disconnect between the people that answered and the people that flagged the post? Just noting that nobody who actually discussed the post flagged it and 3 out of 4 of the people who answered understood the post exactly how I intended it to be understood. All but one of the people who discussed it understood what I was asking and none of the people who discussed it flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was this flagged? What could have caused half of the people to understand it clearly and half of the people to not understand what I was asking? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would understand why none of them talked if there was another person who actually told me how it was unclear, but there wasn't. So now I'm being told I have a post that is hard to understand without being told why while also seeing that everyone who cared enough to comment understood mostly the way it was intended to be read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I am wanting to know is why so I can actually ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38174" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T22:04:28.947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T22:04:28.947" Title="Why was my question about figuring out physical differences between fantasy races put on hold for being to vague?" Tags="|support|on-topic|specific-question|on-hold|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5928" CreationDate="2018-03-15T22:00:08.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often people don't comment themselves when there are already comments that they think sufficiently explain what is wrong with the question so they just upvote the comment and then proceed. Seeing that there are multiple votes on the comments from Alexander under your question this might be a possible explanation for the votes: the people who voted may have thought that you are looking for something created by God and therefore it depends on how you are envisioning God. This leads to missing facts, namely &quot;What does God look like?&quot; represented by the comments &quot;Does God (in the image of whom everyone is created) have round or pointy ears?&quot; and &quot;I'm asking just because you seem to include this (image of God) stipulation. This may limit how diverse elves can be from men.&quot; The comments don't clearly talk about flagging or temporarily putting the question on hold and they are not quite helpful in finding out what is needed to add to make it clearer, but that's the only explanation I have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think your edit was good at clarifying what you are searching. And I think the question is clear enough so I voted to reopen. You might want to think about editing the question in regards to the &quot;If they are created in the &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; image of God, what does God look like?&quot; direction to explain that you are not looking for answers to the question &quot;All people are made in the same physical image, but I want them to be different - how?&quot; but for &quot;I want multiple easily distinguishable human variants that can have offspring with each other - what are typical characteristics that fit the bill of being distinguishable but not too much difference to still produce offspring?&quot; or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside: it's recommended to wait at least 24 hours before accepting an answer to give everyone around the globe a chance to interact with your question and the answers. That may potentially increase the amount of answers (once it's not on hold anymore) and the quality of answers, as some people may think you have already found your solution and don't need any more help. You can accept and unaccept as often as you like. Just a tip for future questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T22:00:08.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T20:15:19.760" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to be confused with: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5609/why-are-questions-with-multiple-answers-off-topic&quot;&gt;Why are questions with multiple answers off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've all seen questions that have been flagged as off topic, too broad, etc. or have been voted with negatives numbers. And yet as supposedly poor as those questions are, often they still get lots of members giving answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes me wonder, are the questions really &quot;bad&quot;, or fall into some rule breaking category, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; is it that the person(s) voting against it just doesn't &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; that question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, in some cases it is quite obvious why the question is flagged a certain way, and/or why the question is poor. I'm not doubting that this happens. I have written a few myself, and I thank anyone who has shown me A) why the question was poor, and B) how it could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then there are the other cases where a question was so well understood by several people that multiple answers were given, but still some others persons decided to flag or down-vote. So which one is correct? Is it answerable or is it a poor question? I don't feel like this is a matter of opinion  either. If its answerable then it cant be that poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if you think I'm wrong but in my opinion if a question gets multiple answers then the question couldn't have been that hard to understand. If say 5 people thought the question answerable doesn't that out-vote the 1 person that down-voted because &quot;I don't know what you mean by that&quot;. Does a question deserve to be down-voted because someone didn't &quot;get it&quot; while five other people did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid embarrassing anyone, or any &quot;he said, she said&quot;, I'll only use my own questions as examples (though there are many cases of this from many other members). Clearly a question like: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105440/can-death-create-a-loophole-for-two-exact-duplicate-people-existing-in-the-same&quot;&gt;Can death create a loophole for two exact duplicate people existing in the same universe?&lt;/a&gt; deserved its &quot;closed as unclear what you're asking&quot;; because A) &lt;em&gt;it was unclear what I was asking,&lt;/em&gt; and B) there were assumptions made on my part that weren't the shared norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the case of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/107229/how-to-transform-matter-from-an-immaterial-state-to-another-more-solid-state&quot;&gt;How to transform matter from an immaterial state to another more solid state&lt;/a&gt; there are four (as of this writing- 3/16/18 4:10pm) who understood the question well enough to give me some fairly solid answers, yet it's currently got 2 down votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm only using my own questions as examples, but I have seen a lot of this going on with others questions too. Too me, it just seems like something's off. If the question has answers, and doesn't outright break a rule, then it shouldn't be down-voteable or considered &quot;too unclear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46557" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T16:43:17.043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:32:18.080" Title="Questions with multiple answers but still flagged as off topic, too broad, or down voted" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|voting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5932" CreationDate="2018-03-16T20:35:17.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Downvotes and flags/close-votes operate on different axis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downvote indicates that a question is not helpful, doesn't show research effort or that you simply don't like the question. Yes, that is a valid reason to downvote. Look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; tag for example - many people on the site don't like this sort of question and express their stance by downvoting these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flag or close-vote on the other hand means that the question shouldn't be answered on the site because it doesn't fit the guidelines and ideals of the site and the StackExchange network in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The amount of answers is also not a good indicator of on-topicness. For example the &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; close reason specifically says that basically every possible answer is exactly equally valid and that there are no criteria to differentiate lots of different answers. This means that it's very easy to provide a valid answer, which in turns mean that many people will probably answer it. This problem gets amplified if such a question hits the Hot Network Questions and draws people from other sites that can also answer the question. that's why quite often you will see debates about even highly voted Hot Network Questions with lots of answers - because lots of answers can be an indicator of a question being &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;. As the goal of StackExchange is to have clear answers to clear questions where the community can vote on which answers are the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer this goes against the very idea of the network. Lots of upvotes, lots of answers, lots of comments - and still the flags may be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question for example has votes for &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, not for &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot;. There are different close reasons and it's important to look at what they mean and how they apply to the question at hand. That the answerers understand your question doesn't mean it's on-topic. It seems to be clear what you are asking as the close-voters didn't vote as &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot;, but they are concerned that there are not enough objectively ratable criteria in your question to allow the community to vote which answers are &amp;quot;okay&amp;quot; and which are &amp;quot;good&amp;quot;. For example you mention that &amp;quot;plausible sounding handwavium&amp;quot; is okay - but that means every pseudo-science description that uses some technobabble is a valid answers, which allows lots of answers that are all equally valid. Which technobabble is better after all? That's what sphennings means with his comment - allowing handwavium as an answer is the same as allowing magic. It's just a different name and it allows for endless possibilities of answers, which is &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; and only allows you to rate answers on your personal feeling of what's &amp;quot;plausible sounding&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T20:35:17.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5932" CreationDate="2018-03-16T23:30:23.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are a wide range of dynamics at play here, any one or more than one of which could be a cause for what we see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One dynamic, as I see it, is the &quot;letter of the law&quot; Question Police (folks who look out for any smallest infraction of SE rules and customs and act on that) vs the &quot;spirit of the law&quot; Question Rebels (folks who either don't care that much about restrictive rules or figure, it's a worldbuilding forum, I'm going to ask anyway!) In my limited experience here, I've seen very many perfectly valid, perfectly useful, perfectly interesting worldbuilding questions get called out for some more or less inscrutable infraction of SE custom. These are questions that would not even cause an askew glance in any other general worldbuilding forum.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another dynamic, again as I see it, is the very nature of Stack Exchange itself vs the nature of geopoesy as an art and the natures of folks who participate in that art. I think SE is extremely useful in areas of science and maths and history other &quot;highly fact-based&quot; endeavours. Asking a question about how quasars work is pretty much answered by &quot;we think they do this and this, but not that or that&quot;. When you get into artistic or philosophical or ethical areas, the bogeyman of &quot;opinion based question&quot; arises more and more frequently. When I look at very many question types asked here, that get voted down or marked for deletion, I just want to answer, &quot;well, duh! Of course it's opinion based! It's worldbuilding, after all, and thus largely a fantastic, fiction based &amp;amp; creative endeavour! Very little of what we do is actually nòt opinion based in some way or other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A third dynamic, perhaps less than the others, is simply the human factor. In any forum, there are people who will downvote just because. There are people who downvote because they don't like the poster's opinion, perspective or level of practice. Some may find a particular kind of question objectionable; others may find a particular person objectionable. Also, new users (understandably ignorant of community rules and customs) as well as &quot;old trolls&quot; (willfully ignorant of community rules and customs) end up being targets of justified (as well as unjustified) community notice &amp;amp; ire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, I think point 2 might be the closest to the mark. Having seen a large number of these kinds of questions here, it's my contention that as interesting and useful as the SE system is, it's really not the best format for our art. We really thrive in a system that offers greater latitude for kinds of questions asked and also depth of discussion a question allows. SE is basically ask -- answer -- move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of course not suggesting the forum be abandoned. But I do think we need to approach the issue of downvoting and votes for closure with a little more charity and common sense. Some questions that seem to be pushing the envelope a bit, or that have stepped just a wee bit over the line, maybe just let them pass? Save the harsh reactions and calls for deletion for obvious spam, obvious trolling, obvious off-topic stuff. Also, I think we could do with a little more latitude and understanding when it comes to what is on-topic vs what is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T23:30:23.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5924" CreationDate="2018-03-18T03:35:11.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first time that I got access to Moderator Tools on a stack, I asked if there was something that I should do with them.  The general answer is no.  They provide some information that is mostly useful to moderators in rare circumstances.  They aren't really something that you need to use regularly as a non-moderator.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Moderator Tools are not all the tools that moderators can access.  It's a bunch of tools that moderators can use to check some things.  Personally, I find them rather boring on those sites where I have them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the single biggest privilege given with reputation is the Edit privilege.  You can really hork up someone's post with that.  Moderator Tools is rather anti-climactic.  I'm not sure that I've even clicked the tab on Worldbuilding.  I had to doublecheck that I had sufficient reputation for them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing deleted posts can be useful, although it also means that you see more junk on the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that I entirely agree that answers are more valuable than questions.  A site needs good questions with informative answers to prosper.  If you have questions, great.  If not, there are plenty of people who do.  I would advise against asking questions just to ask questions.  But if you have some, ask away.  The best questions are those that are of practical use to multiple people.  The best way to generate those is to have real problems that need answered.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not perfectly fine to only answer and hardly ever ask, then I'm in trouble.  Because that's my pattern on every site on which I participate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's also fine to only ask questions in my opinion.  There are enough of us that only answer to balance those who only ask.  The greater duty of people who only ask questions is to learn &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to ask questions.  To write questions that are clear, narrow, objectively-based, and on-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's nice if higher reputation users can participate in the review queues so as to avoid leaving that entirely on the moderators.  But other than that, I don't see asking or answering as more important or tasks that need to be balanced.  Both are needed.  Participate as works for you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T03:35:11.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5937" CreationDate="2018-03-20T15:36:58.760" Score="-8" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you don't know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://discordapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discord&lt;/a&gt; is somewhat of a  chatroom. (I know that Worldbuilding already has them). Discord is much more polished as a communication medium, you can create different 'channels' within the main server and switch between them with a click. Roles may be given to users and permissions can be allocated by admins and moderators. New channels for the discussion of certain questions may be created on a whim, as well as users being able to talk to each other through private messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These channels can be text based, but voice channels can also be created, if users choose to join (given that they have the necessary permissions) they can interact with other members through speaking as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, it seems like a good addition to allow Worldbuilding users to interact with each other, more polished than current chat rooms and with the ability to actually talk to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48631" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T15:56:19.637" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T18:27:06.917" Title="Worldbuilding Discord Server" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|chat|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5936" CreationDate="2018-03-20T16:08:28.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a good idea - the chat is good enough for what the community needs, but if you find others feel free to create a &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; Discord space for WorldBuilding.SE and announce it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, WorldBuilding.SE's main chat room, to see who else wants to join.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have already mentioned StackExchange provides a chat and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;each site has their own rooms&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;There is one main room&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;users with more than 100 reputation can create their own chat rooms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These chat rooms are already integrated into the existing reputation and privilege system, allowing people with a network wide rep of 10k to handle flags that highlight rude/abusive behaviour and mods have their mod powers to kick/ban people if they need to. It works well with the features of StackExchange, such as bots that feed the important messages from Main, Meta or our Blog. There are room owners with special privileges that allow them to handle people that stray too far from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice.&lt;/a&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice chat can be nice, but I am not sure if there is so much demand in voice chatting with other members of the community. Some users have a podcast where, but things like that are generally outside of the StackExchange network and not actively supported by SE. I don't see why SE should support a second chat or switch from their current system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is not built around private messages. This has been asked and answered lots of time throughout the network. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user&quot;&gt;Any way to send a personal message to another user?&lt;/a&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/433/352819&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consistent response to this is that it's a bad idea, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could hide information from the community: useful information transmitted privately is unavailable to other readers, subverting the core purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could be used to harass other users (&amp;quot;Answer my question!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Accept my answer!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Yer momma [sic!] so fat she overflows the stack!&amp;quot;, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer also explains that mods have the special power to be able to send private messages to users - but this is reserved for &lt;em&gt;critical&lt;/em&gt; messages, not for day-to-day social interactions. SE is built around answers and questions and the chat is their way to compromise to give people a chance to socialise - and I don't think that this should change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to chat with people on Discord feel free to drop into the Factory Floor and ask if people want to join you. Just to mention a few projects outside of the normal network activities, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2590/we-have-a-blog&quot;&gt;we have the Blog&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/43447575#43447575&quot;&gt;there is the Podcast&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt; is the chatroom that is mainly used for these things, but it could be a &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; Discord server if that's what you and others prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/70113/story-go-round&quot;&gt;story-go-round&lt;/a&gt;, a collaborative story whose main points can be read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5678/story-go-round-background-info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If you want to start a chat room for something like a game, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13/the-back-room-live-tabletop-games&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Back Room: Live Tabletop games&lt;/em&gt; on RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt; or like the story-go-round room for collaborative story creation or for a story you are working on and some more elaborate brainstorming dedicated to the topic - by all means, create your own chat room and post the link to the Factory Floor so that people know your room exists. The chat can be used in a lot of different ways, all of which are integrated into how the whole network is supposed to work. It's a very versatile tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T18:27:06.917" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5932" CreationDate="2018-03-20T17:45:00.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Generally&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've all seen questions that have been flagged as off topic, too broad, etc. or have been voted with negatives numbers. And yet as supposedly poor as those questions are, often they still get lots of members giving answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very definition of Too Broad is that there are too many answers.  Arguing that the presence of many answers indicates that a question is not Too Broad is missing the point.  A high number of answers suggests that the question is Too Broad.  That's why we want more (narrow) questions, so that those answers can be distributed over more questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Correct me if you think I'm wrong but in my opinion if a question gets multiple answers then the question couldn't have been that hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If multiple people understand the question differently, then they don't find the existing answers to answer the question that they read.  This produces multiple answers, each essentially answering a different question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are for questions that lack research effort, are unclear, or are not useful.  The first two lead to more answers.  If even a small amount of research effort can answer the question, then it is easy for people to answer.  Similarly, if there are many ways to read the question, then there are many ways to answer the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Specifically&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at your examples, the first half of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/107238/2113&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; is off-topic.  It answers your first sentence.  Now, it's a perfectly good answer to the Physics question in your first sentence.  But that doesn't make it on-topic.  And your question, with its first sentence, encourages such answers.  In fact, the way that you state it, that's the the real question and the rest of the question is just stating it at greater length.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider moving your first paragraph towards the end and reframing it.  That way you would be explaining the problem first.  Then you'd be offering one possible solution.  As is, I think that you are proposing a solution (albeit in the form of a question) to a problem that you have not defined yet.  While I'm not one of the downvoters, this feels wrong.  It reads more like you are asking a generic Physics question and then asking a Worldbuilding question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T17:45:00.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5914" CreationDate="2018-03-22T16:05:28.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Had I found the &quot;no coffee&quot; question with only the &quot;water&quot; answer I'd be typing up a couple-paragraphs answer on the industrial revolution, caffeine, and tea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand if the OP really does believe the answer is Water that merits a delete on the question as its seriously useless for anybody else who happens to run into it. And that yields the general answer. If it's a trivial question that can be answered with a trivial answer, blast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6711" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T16:05:28.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5932" CreationDate="2018-03-22T23:32:18.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between those who are simply having fun answering questions, and those who are maturing as participants on this (or any SE) site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former don't care what the rules are, they're simply having fun answering questions that tickle their fancy (Disclaimer: I have given in to this temptation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later realize that the rules are what separate this site from from sites like Quora.com, which basically permit any old question to be asked and answered and therefore have no focus and poor quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want this site to be about worldbuilding and to adhere to the rules and usage model set forth by the SE team: one clear question leading to one best answer.  Doing so retains our focus and improves the overall quality of both questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not to do so turns the site into a wild-west popularity contest.  Fortunately, it isn't, which is why you can have multiple answers that are more popular than the accepted answer.  Honestly, this isn't a democracy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:32:18.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5943" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:28:32.763" Score="13" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Main Site we have a tag named &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insect&lt;/a&gt;. Normally tags should be plural, not singular. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2360/tags-cleaning-singular-vs-plural&quot;&gt;Tags cleaning: singular vs. plural&lt;/a&gt; for more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/insect/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; excerpt even says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions focused on insects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the full tag wiki says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions specifically focused on insects: behaviour, body structures and features, evolution, communication, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to rename the tag from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insect&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insects&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insects&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insects&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T16:00:49.137" Title="Should we rename [insect] to [insects]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5942" CreationDate="2018-03-23T16:00:49.137" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed -- tags that are counting nouns should generally be plural.  I just renamed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T16:00:49.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5946" CreationDate="2018-03-26T16:00:23.783" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;The instructions for a bounty rewarding exemplary existing answers states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it doesn't look like I can split the bounty.  It appears that I can only award it to one question.  I was also surprised that I had no option but a 500 point option.  This wouldn't be a big deal if I can split the bounty (as I expected I could do).  It's a bigger deal if I cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I split the bounty?  If not, can we change the text for this particular bounty to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the answers is exemplary and worth of an additional bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and allow me to choose a bounty size other than 500 points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T16:20:18.063" Title="Can I split a bounty?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5945" CreationDate="2018-03-26T16:20:18.063" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, there can be only one bounty winner or none at all. But it is possible to award several bounties consecutively. The value of each new bounty must be at least twice as big as the one before.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the minimum value for the bounty is 50 points and 500 is the maximum.&#xA;If 500 is the only option, it probably means that the question already awarded another bounty and 500 is now the minimum. I guess that's what the quote means by &quot;additional bounty&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T16:20:18.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T14:44:12.653" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question in sandbox where the technological level will determine the viability of the answer. My idea was to make an intergalatic call for bids. So any entities could apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers would represent such entities specifying their technological level and the time to apply their solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still want answers and the question to not be a mess, so it will be science-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a tag that will allow that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28865" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T16:28:52.843" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T12:36:07.017" Title="Is there a tag where a user can specify the technological level range his answer applies to?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5948" CreationDate="2018-03-27T15:22:43.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are for classifying questions so that it's easier to find relevant questions when searching. They should be supplemental to the question, and not required to interpret the question correctly. There are no tags for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question which is applicable for a range of tech levels then tagging it with a tech level tag is probably not the best use of tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T15:32:50.420" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T15:32:50.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5948" CreationDate="2018-03-27T16:27:22.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5848/are-there-technology-tags&quot;&gt;Are there technology tags?&lt;/a&gt; the answer is that there aren't any technology tags. Tags should be used as a means of categorizing questions, not to define what the question is about. You could use tags for some time frames such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt;. The implicit assumption is that questions should be based in present day science, but as you are introducing a seemingly all-mighty Entity it's important to define what your entity is capable of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention with my comments in the Sandbox was that you should edit your draft to explain the abilities of your entity, possibly thinking about in terms of a technological level as it basically said &quot;I have a super powerful entity that wants to move the Earth - how?&quot; to which the answer would be &quot;Use the super powers of your entity&quot;, which is not a useful answer. Thinking in terms of &quot;My entity can do things humans could do now&quot; or &quot;My entity can do things a Kardashev Type 2 civilization could do&quot; would discourage answers that amount to &quot;Use magic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My request for what tags you should use and which technological level you want were two separate things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T12:36:07.017" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T12:36:07.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5956" CreationDate="2018-03-29T15:29:59.977" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;My current question currently has 4 (!) votes to close for being unclear. In its very first iteration, it had a paragraph that began with &quot;My question is...&quot;, and even explained the question two different ways for those who might have trouble understanding! It nonetheless received two votes to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have since bolded, italicized, explained in comments and done everything I can think of to draw attention to the question, and yet I received two more votes to close for being unclear. My question is one vote away from being removed despite bending over backwards to prevent and then mitigate this issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;My question is:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Can we somehow enable the old-school Microsoft Works blinking text, or if not, the early-90's crawling-ants border? I'm running out of ways to redirect people to my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47744" LastEditorUserId="47744" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T15:35:39.040" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:30:58.890" Title="Use of flashing font/marching ants to direct attention to question" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2018-03-29T18:11:13.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;More for other readers than to the OP: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/107896/21222&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; is not unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It explicitly says, in bold, and I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;given what we currently know of the science of the human body, what change would require the smallest number/magnitude of handwavium/magic inputs to reach my end goal of a not-necessarily-evil undead-like state?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then it elaborates on what is required in the answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm defining undead-like state as (by order of importance):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;immortality (primary quality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;slow external decay/deformation (secondary quality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;classic undead drives/desires like brains/blood/flesh (tertiary quality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think someone voted to close as unclear before any edits, and other users followed suit. Please read the whole question before voting to close, when you see it in a queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, it has a bounty on it now. It is going to receive some extra attention, and until the bounty is awarded, it cannot be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T18:11:13.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-30T04:04:38.333" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered this question, which asks about detecting an anomaly in interstellar space:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/108183/21222&quot;&gt;Covering up an extinction level event caused by an astronomical anomaly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time later, I saw another question closed, with four votes to reopen. It looked very similar to the one I answered, and has been asked by the same author. I thought it was the same, and cast the final reopen vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/108166/21222&quot;&gt;Detecting an astronomical anomaly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, I had cast one of the previous votes to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter question was about something different - how long it would take to notice a missing planet. It has answers considering that scope. The author of the question made an edition that changed scope, making it look like the former. I can no longer vote to close, so I cannot mark as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the questions be merged? Should we rollback the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:27:46.033" Title="Should these two similar questions asked by the same user be merged?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5954" CreationDate="2018-03-30T17:27:46.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, &lt;strong&gt;question edits that invalidate existing answers should be rolled back.&lt;/strong&gt; There is plenty of precedent for this across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at this particular one in detail, so I can't really say if it qualifies for being rolled back. But from even a very brief look, it certainly looks like a solid candidate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has answers and an edit not only invalidates those answers, but also completely replaces the question (the sheer size of its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/108166/revisions&quot;&gt;revision 3 diff&lt;/a&gt; is telling), then roll back that edit and tell the poster to &lt;strong&gt;ask the different question as a new question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, people who spent time answering the old question don't look like they're answering something completely different than what the OP is asking, and both questions can get the attention they deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, we (yes; myself, too) find out only after asking a question that we actually asked a question that was different from what we intended to ask. That doesn't mean that the question we did ask does not have value, nor that the people who did answer that question should have their effort taken away from them. The best course of action then is almost always to ask a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question, and in doing so take extra care to actually ask the question that we want answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question in your title right here, &lt;strong&gt;only actual duplicates can ever reasonably be candidates for merging, and not all duplicates will be candidates for merging.&lt;/strong&gt; If you can no longer vote to close (because you have, say, already used your vote on the question), then bringing it up on Meta or in chat is the right thing to do, but for review and possible closure as duplicate, not for merging. But in this case, &lt;strong&gt;I believe the first step&lt;/strong&gt; before doing that would be to roll back to the original revision (for the reasons &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; as discussed above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:27:46.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2018-03-30T17:30:58.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not commenting on your question on the main site, but on your proposal here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we somehow enable the old-school Microsoft Works blinking text, or if not, the early-90's crawling-ants border?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To this, my answer is no, no, no, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; in the name of all things holy, no!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blinking text is absolutely &lt;em&gt;horrible&lt;/em&gt; UX. Animations aren't much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you somehow manage to work blinking text into a post, and I come across it, then you can almost certainly expect to recieve a downvote for that reason alone...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:30:58.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5960" CreationDate="2018-03-30T23:35:27.200" Score="3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;In relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108281/tachyonic-ftl-travel&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;The original question has been edited.  I'm delighted to see the OP working to make the question more appropriate for this site, but to fully understand my question, you need to look at the linked question's edit history and review it's original form.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We occasionally receive questions that, according to our rules, really belong on another SE site.  The only problem is, said questions would never survive the VTC rules of those sites because (frankly) the questions aren't a serious investigation into the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference question above is a good example.  For the most part, it's really nothing more than a physics question and belongs on Physics.SE.  But as Cort Ammon points out, they would never accept the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For our part, even if you removed the &quot;how would such a ship affect the universe around it?&quot; part of the question &lt;em&gt;(let's take one theory, squeeze it to look a bit like another theory, build a ship the kind of which we know nothing about, and how would that ship affect the universe around it?  It's 100% unanswerable),&lt;/em&gt; the rest of it is so primarily opinion-based that it's hard to imagine one correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, we occasionally see these kinds of questions.  Not 100% worldbuilding.  Not 100% anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;I beg you to forgive what will sound like an uncompassionate question, but do we want to become the dumping ground for questions that other SE sites don't want to deal with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask the question intentionally harshly, because my knee-jerk reaction is to cut people some slack.  We're likely the most creatively-oriented site in the SE universe, and with that honor might come a bit of responsibility to pick up where everyone else leaves off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T04:49:07.503" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T04:49:07.503" Title="Should we generously allow questions that should be elsewhere but would never survive the VTC process?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2018-03-30T23:52:06.197" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel we should close these questions period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My way of thinking is this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They're not Worldbuilding at all, they're just asking hypothetical science questions.  That's not what Worldbuilding is for and if there is a demand for these type of questions they should have a dedicated SE site of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics SE &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; answer many hypothetical questions, often in full answers and sometimes in commentary.  They &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; close questions well outside mainstream accepted physics and open research areas.  I think many on Physics SE will treat some of these questions as teaching opportunities and try and help the poster to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is a useful place to learn things, but it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a teaching site.  We are not really here to teach physics, biology, engineering or history.  We're here to help people build a self-consistent universe (often with large lumps of handwavium to gel the mix).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The fact that we often do (for good reasons) use handwavium means we're not really compatible with a site to deal with &quot;what if...&quot; science questions.  Inevitably some people will answer in the spirit of Worldbuilding, with less rigorous science and some won't.  That's actually a dangerous mix to throw at people asking straight &quot;what if ...&quot; science questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now when we VTC we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; give users the opportunity to edit their question and re-frame it as a proper Worldbuilding question.  But note that when we answer Worldbuilding questions we often do things like &lt;em&gt;&quot;No, that won't work for (blah reasons), but you should consider this  (weird-idea) instead as it does the job you need in a different way.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that kind of response, while useful to genuine Worldbuilders (is that even a word ? :-)) are wasted effort to people playing &quot;what if...&quot; science games.  So it's potentially unfair to Worldbuilding members to waste their time with half-hearted or outright fake worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we should close them and really &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; member to ask questions in a way that explains their need in the context of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T23:52:06.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2018-03-31T04:20:23.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it really depends on the question and the constraints that it puts on itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance that question asks a science based question about something that science doesn't really have a good science answer. It really could, and should be answered with &quot;you know, just do what you want, just don't explain it to much.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, since it is also a reality check question, it should get slightly more wiggle room, up to the point of &quot;yes that makes sense&quot; or &quot;no it doesn't work that way&quot;. Because that is what reality check means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that asks for soft science or fantasy gets a lot more slack, because the only rules are the ones defined by the question itself. So long as the question is well defined then it should be answered as is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question may possibly fit another se doesn't mean that we should move it, unless it is a question that strongly fits that site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T04:20:23.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2018-03-31T04:31:46.677" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;In general&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the point of this site is so that authors (of whatever stripe, RPG makers, screenwriters, traditional book authors, etc.) can ask about making realistic worlds.  As a result, instead of stringing together some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that they created by reading pop science articles and then speculating based on their misunderstanding of the article writer's misunderstanding of the graduate student's misrepresentation of the science, they can talk somewhat accurately.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This saves me throwing the book down in disgust and screaming at it, &quot;That's not how physics works!&quot;  So I tend to regard almost any question that can be answered with information that helps authors write their science realistically as on-topic.  It's part of the world that they are trying to build.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would much rather that rather than trying to make up pseudo-scientific BS, that authors simply make their science fictional.  If they want FTL, just tell us that it's FTL.  Don't try to explain it unless you really do know how the speculation works.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, getting the question into an answerable form helps not only the writer but me as a potential reader.  This is exactly the kind of question that I want people answering on this site.  Individual questions may be unclear or overly broad, but those are fixable problems.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Migration&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should never migrate weak questions.  If it's closed on the new stack, that helps no one.  So if you look at say that something is unclear or too broad, there's no point in marking it to be migrated.  Migration won't make it clearer or narrower.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also shouldn't migrate borderline questions.  It's not up to us to say what another stack will find on-topic.  Might Physics.SE have answered this?  Maybe.  But they could just as well have said that it was unscientific hooey and closed it.  The very concept of transitioning between normal and tachyonic matter is seriously questionable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to me, the question is clearly on-topic as worldbuilding.  Is this a realistic scientific explanation of an FTL phenomenon?  Or do we already know that science doesn't work that way?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Specific to this question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that I would have had with the original question was that the premise was exactly the kind of pseudo-science that I don't like.  Hey, we were mucking with gravity and turned into tachyons!  But that part's been edited out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that's still here is that it still tries to jam too many questions into one.  Each question is big enough on its own for a question.  The second would still be on the broad side, even if alone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we had the ability to switch from being normal matter to being tachyons and back again, would that make for an FTL drive?  That should be enough for one question.  Given the answers, one could then describe how the tachyon drive would work and how that would impact warfare in a new question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T04:31:46.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:46:52.467" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend has just heard about StackExchange and is in the middle of writing a horror story. When I showed her this site she asked me: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Could I ask how deep you would have to bury someone so they wouldn't be found?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me thinking: is this on-topic?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T14:35:34.030" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T21:40:08.850" Title="Would a question about how deep someone needs to be buried so they wouldn't be found be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5963" CreationDate="2018-03-31T12:20:38.027" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to close the help tooltip that appears at the bottom-right corner of the screen ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I usually zoom in to make the text more readable, that yellow duck becomes bigger and bigger, and I find it more annoying than helpfull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49024" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T12:25:07.503" Title="Any way to remove the yellow duck (help tooltip)?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5962" CreationDate="2018-03-31T12:25:07.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, wait a bit and then choose &quot;I hate this duck&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Meta StackExchange question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/308578/352819&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange has been taken over by a rubber duck!&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can then either go for &quot;I have another problem&quot; which repeats the same thing over again or you could select &quot;I hate this duck&quot; so make the duck sorry to hear that and bid Goodbye,duck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried it myself. You have to choose for example &quot;No&quot; when it asks you whether you have a microphone or not. Then it goes through some text like &quot;Quack Overflow is listening&quot; and &quot;The duck is thinking about your problem&quot;. After &quot;The duck is typing&quot; you will hear a &quot;Quack&quot;. Wait a second or two and it will give you the option to choose &quot;I hate this duck&quot;, after which the duck disappears. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T12:25:07.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5961" CreationDate="2018-03-31T14:33:40.560" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;If your friend puts in enough details this could be on-topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there are many possible scenarios that you have to think of. For example: are we talking about the police having only got an anonymous tip that they should search an area the size of a house? Or are talking about an area of a graveyard? What resources does the esearching party have? Just humans? Specially trained dogs? Are we talking about a current-day setting? Or for example near-future? Is there a time limit involved? &amp;quot;Never&amp;quot; is quite a lot harder than &amp;quot;it's not reasonable a body will be found in the span of a couple years&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of questions that your friend would have to answer. In theory it could be on-topic, but it could just as well be off-topic. For example a simple &amp;quot;How deep you would have to bury someone so they wouldn't be found?&amp;quot; is lacking details and therefore seems to be &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; for me. I recommend that your friend writes a draft and you put it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is that you need 5 reputation minimum to post on Meta, so your friend won't be able to post it here, unless she first asks/answers/edits something on the Main Site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little warning though about this specific topic: there are quite a few people who don't like gruesome topics. Look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; tag for example. Depending on how the question is posed you might need to expect a higher chance that someone will downvote such a question. Again, the Sandbox can help with finding a way to phrase such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1978/28789&quot;&gt;Should we be mindful of potentially dangerous questions?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3394/should-questions-about-painfully-killing-people-be-welcomed-on-this-site?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Should questions about painfully killing people be welcomed on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T21:40:08.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5961" CreationDate="2018-03-31T19:57:51.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your writer friend is actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&quot;constructing an imaginary world&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then questions about making that world would certainly be on topic! And she would be most welcome to join us and ask any &amp;amp; all worldbuilding questions she cares to ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if she's not actually building an imaginary world, I suspect SE would still be a good resource. There is, after all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which be a more appropriate forum for her specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T19:57:51.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T21:21:03.813" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a recent question on the stack &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108257/what-can-be-said-about-phenotype-inheritance-based-on-this-family-tree&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; asking about phenotypic variance within an arbitrary ancestral tree. At first, I assumed it was simply mis-posted on Worldbuilding because it seems to be literally a genetics homework question and a perfect fit for Biology. However, it was one of our mods, Michael Kjörling, who posted it and we have several high-rep users who have commented that it's not a fit for our site but did not vote to close or migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's up with this question? I'm personally baffled at why it's on-topic, upvoted, and answered here on Worldbuilding as it doesn't seem to be within the scope as defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T09:09:59.547" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T09:33:26.690" Title="How is the &quot;phenotype inheritance&quot; question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2018-04-01T04:44:16.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help centre says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following:  ...     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaining in-universe consistency&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the phenotype inheritance question fits this criterion and this puts it being within scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T04:44:16.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2018-04-01T09:33:26.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind, it's about the design of a species; in this case, a specific trait of a species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's based on a problem I encountered while trying to figure out the particular species, though obviously many unrelated details were stripped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; lists three main categories of questions as being on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaining in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back at it, how does my question hold up when evaluated against those bullet points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm creating a species, which is an element of a world. Somewhat borderline, in part because I didn't explicitly spell that out, but no fail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trait inheritance is a world element in that it's a part of what makes a species what it is, and it can certainly have an impact on different aspects of that world even if it doesn't directly influence them. Again perhaps borderline, but can be made to fit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A (non-magical) trait being inherited haphazardly is, at best, poor species design. Making sure the inheritance makes sense is about how to achieve a specified effect, specifically realistic inheritance. Not a clear-cut fit either, but it doesn't seem to fail that criterion either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Certainly not &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; off topic, in my mind,&lt;/strong&gt; although one could perhaps argue whether it's clearly enough &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the off topic bullet points seem to apply; I'm not asking about individual characters (even though I'm using individuals to illustrate my question, they are not the focus of the question); I'm not asking about &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt; building; I'm not asking about plot; I'm not asking about real-world historical information; I'm not asking about writing or story-telling; and I'm not asking about computer software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said,&lt;/strong&gt; and I have argued this before as well: &lt;em&gt;If the community feels that the question is off topic, then vote to close!&lt;/em&gt; Nobody is perfect, and we all know that Worldbuilding SE's scope &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; tricky to navigate at times. Sure, I've got a diamond attached to my username here, but that doesn't mean that I'm infallible. That said, while in fairness I argued differently, I do want to point to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3873/29&quot;&gt;the highest-voted answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3872/29&quot;&gt;Is a “real world” question off topic?&lt;/a&gt;, which pretty clearly says in response to discussion about an astronomy question which &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; could equally well apply to the real world, much the same as mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My best understanding of the consensus is this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions regarding the real world are &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer currently is at +23/-1, compared to my answer which is sitting at +15/-4 (clearly a more controversial view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that understanding applies to astronomy questions, I don't really see why it wouldn't apply to questions on genetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T09:33:26.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-04T14:47:05.460" Score="9" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering where the appropriate place to put questions related to speculative evolution should go. There is a very popular &quot;evolution&quot; tag, and nearly all questions found there are about speculative biology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But previously, I've seen questions of others about speculative evolution being suggested to be transferred to the biology stack exchange site, as well as meta questions about &quot;cleaning up&quot; the xenobiology questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the biology.SE regulations on what questions should be asked, and I'm not sure whether speculative biology counts as a &quot;general biological mechanism&quot;, and it's certainly not a biological mechanism behind a medical condition or a technique in a biological/biochemical laboratory. Then again, it doesn't say anything about asking about speculative biology being not allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just thought that since there's an &quot;evolution&quot; tag, that that kind of thing would be allowed here. &lt;strong&gt;Is xenobiology, future evolution etc. not welcome on the site as a rule, or is it just some people that don't think it should be here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, the whole point of stack exchange is to &quot;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions.&quot; But personally, I feel like people telling you to go move your questions to another site falls into the distraction category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49209" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T14:52:14.610" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T09:46:48.730" Title="Should speculative biology questions be asked on Worldbuilding or Biology stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5970" CreationDate="2018-04-04T15:00:31.137" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Questions about &lt;em&gt;speculative&lt;/em&gt; evolution are firmly on-topic on WorldBuilding (I am not active on Biology.SE, but in general other sites don't want &lt;em&gt;speculative&lt;/em&gt; stuff)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions involving speculative &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; or for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; are on-topic here. They are about creating an element of your world and that is what WorldBuilding.SE is for. These questions would not be well-received by other StackExchange sites that are about real-world biology/evolution/... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore just because a question would be on-topic on another site doesn't necessarily mean it should be migrated. If it's on-topic here we suspect that the OP wants some WorldBuilding done and give them the benefit of doubt that this is the correct site for their question. It's nice to point out that there are other sites that may be useful to explore, but just because Biology.SE exists doesn't mean all questions that are in some way related to biology should be migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there can be a lot of discussions about what constitutes &quot;speculative&quot;. If your question is about a real-world mechanism it might very well be the case that you would get &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answers from the topic experts over on Biology.SE and if there is no clear WorldBuilding element it might look like you are asking about real-world biology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general stuff like for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; is perfectly on-topic and if someone recommends that you might get &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answers on Biology.SE you can just ignore it. It's a nice tip, nothing more. If someone recommends migration you should make sure that it's visible that you are talking about &lt;em&gt;speculative&lt;/em&gt; stuff and that you are creating an &lt;em&gt;element of your world&lt;/em&gt; that is not in this form present in our &lt;em&gt;real-world&lt;/em&gt; and everything should be fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T15:00:31.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5970" CreationDate="2018-04-05T01:28:25.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Secespitus' answer against this question and the 'anatomically correct' series of questions has already been discussed in Meta before as he links to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said; there is one element of SE that he doesn't address and I'd like to (respectfully) add - SE is decentralised by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relative value of each contribution to the site is subjective. So is the interpretation of the closure reasons, as well as the relevancy of a question against a defined tag. This (while confusing at first) is actually one of SE's greatest strengths. It is a collegiate 'rulership' that determines what should be closed, what should be migrated and what is of relative value to the site. Like any college based decision making process, you get the advantage that the opinions of many minds generally average themselves out and you get the 'right' answer to these value judgments. That averaging process means (however) by definition that we don't always agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're going to get people who vehemently disagree with you on almost everything. You're going to get people who seem to be in complete alignment with you all the time, and you'll see people who reside all along the spectrum between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Secespitus and I have not always agreed on which questions to close and the relative merits of certain answers, including each other's. But, I certainly agree with his answer here. The beauty of our relative anonymity (and I admit that I didn't get this at first myself) is that you're not judging the contributions of each other based on the &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;, or even the personality. You're judging the contribution on its &lt;em&gt;merit&lt;/em&gt;, which is hard enough given the subjective nature of the assessment process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So; do I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; think that your speculative biology questions are fit and proper for this site? Yes. But, I don't speak for every person who monitors the site and sometimes I hold the minority position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trick is not to be discouraged by that. Refine your question a bit, re-post. Highlight (as Secespitus points out) the speculative nature of your query to increase the chance it'll stay open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, persist. I'll admit there are times that this site seems like a hostile place, but after being here for nearly 6 months I can confirm that such times are the exception. Most of us here really want to help; we want to teach and we want to provide great answers to great questions. To do that though, we need great questions. While comment fields are limited in size, many of the comments that come across as terse are really only trying for brevity so remember to consider them in that spirit, and take the constructive part of any criticism, use it to shape your question, and leave the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and welcome to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="44692" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T09:46:48.730" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T09:46:48.730" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T02:15:46.520" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just looking at FrostFyre's comment against &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108464/what-is-the-concentration-of-oxygen-at-higher-pressure-that-humans-can-adequatel&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it occurred to me that it's already articulated in a manner in which I would've written it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason why the title shouldn't articulate the question itself, and you then use the body of the post to set your scene, show your research to date and provide sufficient boundary to the scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific reason that we should ask posters to reiterate their question in the body if the title is an adequate formulation of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm of the view that the answer should be no, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if there's a good reason for the contrary position. The only possible reason I can think of (not being a mobile consumer of SE) is that the title may not be as prominent in certain smaller interfaces, like mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="44692" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T02:56:26.773" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T13:20:42.973" Title="Is a question in a title only sufficient, or does it need to be reiterated in the body?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2018-04-05T07:22:51.713" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason why I think it is useful to repeat the question in the body of your post is that some questions can be really long. My questions for example are often quite long and that will lead to people already forgetting what I am asking about when they are at the end of my post. Being reminded of the question without having to scroll is nice and being nice to potential answerers is important to make the potential answerers feel like they want to answer my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't hurt to repeat yourself in the post, but it's helpful for people reading your post. I've also seen posts (mainly from new users) where the OP posted a long title and the body was just &quot;Question in the title&quot;, which feels extremely lazy. This leads me to a slight feeling of laziness when reading posts that don't repeat their question in the body. I prefer to write a short(er) title and then explain the details in my post with a repetition at the end - and I prefer to read such a format, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of one of my own questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/73432/28789&quot;&gt;How to realistically create a bow that's also two one-handed swords?&lt;/a&gt; repeats the question at the end in a slightly wordier way: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you realistically create a bow that can be reassembled so that you can fight with two one-handed swords?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; people to reiterate their question in the body even if the title is an adequate formulation of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T10:29:24.887" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T10:29:24.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2018-04-05T13:20:42.973" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree that a question can be located solely in the title, getting the format of the body right to accommodate that decision can be tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the body of the question provides a significant amount of &quot;this is what I have&quot; information, but doesn't identify any stumbling blocks or problems that need to be overcome. Looking back to the title, it's unclear how the question therein relates to the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While my ability to concentrate and piece together information varies from day to day (and sometimes comment to comment), looking back now, I'm still having trouble understanding what the OP is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I made the comment in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T13:20:42.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5977" CreationDate="2018-04-06T10:04:17.470" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems self-explanatory but I noticed when looking through the questions, that all of the tags don't have capitals at the beginning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't mean to sound pedantic but shouldn't they have capital letters?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(If there is a reason they are left as they are, then I'm happy to hear it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="47051" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T10:10:42.163" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T10:28:00.693" Title="Why are all tags un-capitalised?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5976" CreationDate="2018-04-06T10:28:00.693" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216225/is-there-any-reason-why-tags-are-lower-cased&quot;&gt;Is there any reason why tags are lower-cased?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.StackExchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lower-case tags have several advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prevents people accidentally creating two tags that differ only in capitalisation, whether intentional or otherwise.*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prevents arguments over the correct capitalisation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creates a consistent look and feel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for these reasons alone, it was sensible to opt for lower-case tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system only allows to create tags in lowercase, which is why all tags are lowercase. There are some advantages to this approach and not really any downsides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;privilege page about &lt;em&gt;Create Tags&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must use the character set &lt;code&gt;a-z&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;0-9&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T10:28:00.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-07T09:48:14.143" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108716/how-could-the-existence-of-an-uninhabited-island-be-kept-secret-from-all-governm&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; I asked recently was suggested as being a duplicate by someone in the comments. I read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81716/what-would-it-take-to-keep-a-large-island-in-the-east-pacific-hidden&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; he said it was a duplicate of, and confirmed that it was different by adding a notice in the body of the question. A few days later, the question was voted to be a duplicate, despite me showing how it wasn't. What am I to do in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49209" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-04-07T13:01:01.347" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T17:51:37.243" Title="What to do if question gets marked as duplicate even after stating and demonstrating how it's different?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2018-04-07T12:17:25.147" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it took me two looks to find the note in your question body where you &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt; the claim of it being a duplicate. And you didn't really do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at other questions that have been claimed as duplicate you can see that many put a notice about it at the top of their question, using different formatting to make it stand out and be easy to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that your current note basically boils down to saying: &lt;em&gt;No no, this is not a duplicate.&lt;/em&gt;, and that's it. If you really read the other question and then came to the decision that yours is definitely no duplicate, you will have found at least some &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; points where your question differs. Put these points into your note, show the people &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's not a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T12:17:25.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5981" CreationDate="2018-04-09T23:30:23.117" Score="5" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109016/how-to-build-a-trap-to-last-the-ages?noredirect=1#comment331304_109016&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; because it seemed to me that it didn't ask about a world, but the engineering of a specific item that could have been part of any world (and, by definition, appeared to be of Earth since no other conditions were given).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Samuel has made some good points in the question's comments, but I still wonder.  I've been thinking about some of the issues for a while, which led me to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5957/should-we-generously-allow-questions-that-should-be-elsewhere-but-would-never-su&quot;&gt;this previous meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Samuel and I have different interpretations of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic page&lt;/a&gt;.  What he sees is justification for the question.  I see exclusion, principally because asking to engineer an object outside of the conditions of a fictional world is, to me, simply an &quot;historical fact about the real world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Side note: I have been personally drawing a line between these two questions (&quot;how does this technology affect my world?&quot; and &quot;how can my world develop this technology?&quot;) and this question: (&quot;how do I build this?&quot;).  I believe the first two are about developing a consitent fictional world.  The second is an engineering question that may or not have any bearing on a fictional world depending on context, which wasn't provided.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my concern is that we've had what seems to be a large number of closed/hold/duplicate questions since March 30 (about 31%).  (I don't have access to the overall stats, so this perception may be subjective.)  Are we seeing an increase in barely-on-topic questions, or am I being overly strict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I would appeciate your insight into whether or not I voted too strictly to close the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T18:21:41.393" Title="Have I become too strict with my VTC votes?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2018-04-10T01:23:11.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do agree that (subjectively at least) there appear to be more closures of late. That said (and again subjectively), I haven't noticed a considerable increase in 'off-topic' closures. There have been more duplicates, and more 'unclear what you're asking' closures, and I think there have also been a few more 'too broad' closures as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to see some stats to support one position or another, but the simple fact is that most of the posts from the questioners on Meta, and most of the discussions in question comments appear to be around whether a question is distinct from another question (duplicate testing) or what the OP was really getting at (unclear questions). There has been increased frustration from newer members of our august body trying to ask questions that will get past the VTC process but relevancy has not been brought up anywhere near as much IMHO as these other two points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate question problem is one that I expect to only increase. We have nearly 16k questions on the site at the time of writing this; that means that a lot of the 'good' questions have already been asked and writing a new good question is similar in scope (but not in scale) to writing a PhD thesis in a well researched area. How does one create something unique AND significant when all the 'framework' research is already complete? Creating a new good unique and significant question on this site is only going to get harder and there is a strong argument for direct editing by people with sufficient experience on the site to make these questions stand apart if the OP lacks the linguistic skills to do so. That same approach may also work for 'unclear' questions, provided intent or purpose can be established by someone competent at framing questions to assist the newcomer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I digress. The core question goes to relevancy of question and I think that the linked question was certainly a margin call. Yes, it's an engineering question, but it's also a 'missing ingredient' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I do X when Y (a critical ingredient of X) is missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the question is asking if there is a simple technology that's understandable by an ancient Aztec / Mayan style culture, that's workable with their current tools and artisanry, that can replicate the equivalent of an infrared door sensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your other question about us being a catch-all is entirely relevant here, but so is the point that we have the capacity of being a catch-all because of the subjective nature of our topic rules. As such, we can't have the penny and the bun; either we accept that our rules are too subjective and tighten them up (removing a lot of potential margin call questions) or we leave it as is and accept that we have additional maintenance on the back end (so to speak) to clean up prospective questions, either through working with the OP to tighten them up or by direct closure. Essentially, we have to pick one approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally? I prefer the latter. Just because some of our newer folk have trouble articulating their question it doesn't follow that the question itself is poor. I'd rather have a pool of candidates that I filter through to find the gems than miss a good opportunity to increase our body of knowledge but I do completely understand that this is a high maintenance approach, and will not be favoured by all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In so doing, we not only solve the on topic problem, but it also serves as a way to solve the unclear and duplicate question issues at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T01:23:11.427" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-10T18:32:49.167" Score="8" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently wrote a question on a controversial topic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108612/alternative-transitioning-options-for-transgender-people-in-a-non-modern-world-s&quot;&gt;transgender hormone medication&lt;/a&gt;. I knew it was controversial and tried to focus on the least controversial aspect of the question, medication, as well as be as correct in my terminology as possible, so that I did not unintentionally offend the group I was asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Kingledion commented &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can't close a question because the topic is controversial. The question is adequately scoped, about worldbuilding, and not rude or offensive. The question is about medicine and not current world politics. Even if the answer is 'there is no way to do it,' it is still a valid question. It should stay open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't mind the downvotes as I expected some, due to the controversial nature of the question. I also tried to be as friendly and open to all comments/answers made, as possible. &lt;strong&gt;However, I didn't get answers that answered the core question.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I found a workaround. &lt;strong&gt;I am hoping to create a new rephrased question with a less controversial example. I need help in figuring out if and how to acknowledge the previous question without too much negative response (from all sides).&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've tried to write the main part of the question in such a way that others with controversial questions may find it useful in their second attempts. The next section is just a bit of background on my particular issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my characters are transgender, and I wanted to know if they would have access to the sort of hormonal medications that we know how to create now, without access to what I presume are high precision chemical processes and machines. Googling was not helpful for this information, so after some hesitation, I turned to World-Building SE. I was focussed on how to describe my character's mannerisms/temperaments and physical descriptions, in my fictional far future world. Far future in time, but with a pre modern infrastructure. This was all story based and a matter of opinion, so I tried to focus the question on the crux, what medicine would they have access to, the rest I could decide at my own pleasure. I needed to know if I can describe more of the modern physical changes that we can create with HRT or if I have to rely on purely historical precedents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the mistake of including a one liner at the end, were I &lt;em&gt;attempted&lt;/em&gt; to convey that ''I know it's controversial, please don't respond with answers saying it's controversial''. I seen that before on some questions. I know it didn't come across as intended and even though it was edited out early on, I know this put some people off, and I will accept that. That is not what this meta-post is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have figured out a way to workaround the controversial subject matter I was so focussed on. I can change the question to be about menopause in men and women and what hormone medication &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; would have access to in my scenario. No controversy there, as everyone in the world is affected by menopause at some point in their lives. I can then just infer across to my actual controversial subjects of interest. I can even use the menopause answers for my older characters, that I hadn't fully worked out yet as I was so stuck and focussed on my particular problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now my conundrum. The original question was put ON HOLD at one point as being 'too broad', so would this change not be making it even ...boarder? And more importantly, would it not be marked as a duplicate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; the original question so drastically. I think it would be disingenuous to the transgender community to do so, and others may see it as a complete rewrite of the question even if the core question is exactly the same. Some won't answer such a drastically altered question which would invalidate the few answers I did manage to get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think a fresh question is the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do create a new question, it could technically be marked as a duplicate (as the core question is the same and I probably will use most of the same wording for my thinking). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't really want to hide the original question if I create a new question. If I mention that the question is a rephrasing of the original, I run the chance of some people vtc/downvoting again purely because of previous bias/duplicate etc and seeing it as sneaky or something. Then again, if I don't mention it upfront, I risk people thinking I'm trying to hide from my previous question, which I'm not, which is why I'm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what do I do? I have several interconnected questions on how to do this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit the original (I really don't like this option)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove the controversial example and replace with a different example. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do I explain why and refer to this meta-post or just edit carte blanche style? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;create a new question with mention of previous question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mention the controversial question in the new question and argue that it shouldn't be marked as duplicate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how, as a brief aside at the beginning/end or a detailed explanation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do I reference this Meta Post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;create a new question with no mention of previous question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't mention the controversial question in the new question so as not to bring attention to the previous controversial response? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't mention the original question/meta post in the new question but do mention it in a comment after posting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do create a new question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should I completely reword it so it looks nothing like the previous version &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or can I use some of the same structure and wording from my thinking process as before? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I possibly may try the sandbox for actual help with the question itself, at the moment &lt;strong&gt;I need Meta input on how to deal with the procedure of if and how I should go about the rewriting of controversial questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T19:42:35.877" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T09:03:06.333" Title="How to rewrite a controversial question when I didn't get the answers I was expecting?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|writing-style|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5982" CreationDate="2018-04-10T19:41:23.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general process when you don't get answers that answer your &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question - no matter if it's a controversial topic or not - are as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure that the answers you received are valid and answer the question that is currently asked - if they don't you should:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flag the answers as &quot;not an answer&quot; with a comment explaining &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what parts they are missing so that people in the review queue see and understand this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit your question, for example by putting a little paragraph at the topic that explains what is missing in a few sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;think about adding a bounty that explains what you &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; from an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If all answers to the current question are valid, but they don't answer your &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question then there seems to be something missing with your phrasing, so you should:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; a try: explain in a notice at the beginning your problem with the likely-duplicate and what you were &lt;em&gt;expecting&lt;/em&gt;, but didn't get, from the answers - the regulars in the Sandbox can be extremely pedantic and point out a lot of possible problems as well as help you with making sure it's not a duplicate if that's what you want; it might take some time, though&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after running your &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question through the Sandbox you simply post it on the main site; it's normal to explicitly state in the beginning something like &quot;This is similar to [x], but I wanted [y], which is why this question is different&quot; to prevent duplicate votes, but that should have been worked out in the Sandbox already&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: &lt;strong&gt;please don't edit your question in any way that would invalidate existing answers - if an edit would be that drastic it means that the edited question is different enough to be posted without being a duplicate of the original&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T09:03:06.333" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T09:03:06.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5982" CreationDate="2018-04-11T07:38:24.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this answer will be as controversial to some as the question was to the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is the distinction between gender and sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Animals have sex, male or female  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages assign gender to objects, rare in English but ships are &quot;she&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In human terms the same applies, male and female, masculine and feminine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sex is physical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender is a linguistic and social construct &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current English usage has blurred these distinctions somewhat, but to an international and scientific audience they remain relatively more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I worked in the NHS we never cared how you identified*, only what sort of cancer you had risks for, so your doctor invites you for a smear test or a prostate check based on your sex, not your gender. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English almost never uses gender for anything that doesn't also have sex, but many languages have gender running all the way through them, almost every object has a gender and the language adapts around it, the two words have very different meanings to someone coming from that sort of background.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you have referred to &quot;gender&quot; consistently all the way through, you have answers giving linguistic and social solutions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you change your question to ask how to change sex rather than gender you may start to get the answers you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*There's central data authority who were parochial to say the least and I occasionally had to give them an earful when they changed details without asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T09:49:36.873" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T09:49:36.873" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5996" CreationDate="2018-04-11T13:13:43.357" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a different discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5982/how-to-rewrite-a-controversial-question-when-i-didnt-get-the-answers-i-was-expe#comment17724_5984&quot;&gt;@EveryBitHelps wondered&lt;/a&gt; whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transformation&lt;/a&gt; would be a good tag to add to a question, which made me realize that this tag exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag has neither a tag wiki excerpt nor a full tag wiki. There are only two questions, one of them which is closed. Both seem to be about a sort of &quot;magical&quot; transformation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91948/i-have-been-drinking-a-potion-to-stop-a-transformation-one-day-i-stopped-drink&quot;&gt;I have been drinking a potion to stop a transformation. One day, I stopped drinking the potion. How would the transformation take place?&lt;/a&gt; is asking about a dragon-human hybrid that stops taking some kind of hormone suppressor and wonders how the &lt;em&gt;transformation&lt;/em&gt; to the original half-dragon would look like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/97214/28789&quot;&gt;Adjusting from Quadruped to Biped&lt;/a&gt; wonders about how a creature would adapt that was suddenly &lt;em&gt;transformed&lt;/em&gt; from having four legs to only having two legs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it looks like both questions could just as well do without the tag or maybe with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; tag. The idea behind the tag seems to be similar to that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;transformations&lt;/em&gt; seem to be involuntarily, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; tag already includes this (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shape-shifters can completely change their body form. There tend to be 2 kinds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sci-fi shape-shifters tend to keep the same mass and similar size, along the line of advanced octopuses.&#xA;     Fantasy shifters have fewer restraints. Were-wolves are a common example: shifting from 80-pound wolf to 180-pound human to 300+-pound werewolf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The transformations may be voluntary or involuntary.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions related to the feasibility and capabilities of these beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we need the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transformation&lt;/a&gt; or do we want to burninate it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T10:50:42.617" Title="Do we need the tag [transformation]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2018-04-11T21:34:57.277" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you voted too strictly. The question is borderline, and in particular I would say it's borderline in a way that some people could easily consider the ways it's off-topic to be the most important ones for the site, while others could consider the ways it's off-topic to be &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a comparison, imagine a question &quot;How do I get my dog to stop barking?&quot; In many ways this would be similar to the referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/109016/41036&quot;&gt;How to build a trap to last the ages?&lt;/a&gt;: In both questions there would be no background information that makes it distinct from the real world, no technology constraints or additions that cause real-world answers to be invalid, no magic or hand-waving allowed. There are only two major differences I can think of: the dog one has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://pets.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;clear alternative&lt;/a&gt; stack exchange, and the trap one did list a worldbuilding-related &lt;em&gt;justification&lt;/em&gt;, even if he made the question itself more broadly applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, I think there are some very minor alterations that would make the trap question fall very clearly on one side or the other of &quot;on-topic&quot;. For example, if the question instead asked &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My world has trap-filled ancient ruins, but it was pointed out to me that the traps I have in them would in reality fail quickly without maintenance. What can I do to have traps that would believably be operational centuries later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it seems much more clearly to be a world building question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am trying to build some traps, but I've noticed that they tend to go bad if I leave them set for too long. What can I do to make my traps last longer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would seem very clearly off-topic - it's literally asking for suggestions on something the user is physically trying to construct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite one of those phrasings being (to me) clearly on-topic, while the other is clearly off-topic, both questions (given a bit of extra finagling to get the allowed technology aligned) would end up with basically the &lt;em&gt;exact same answers&lt;/em&gt;, those answers also being essentially identical to the ones in the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this demonstrates just how borderline the question is, and how thinking of it as off-topic isn't really a matter of being &quot;too strict&quot; so much as seeing it closer to the off-topic versions than the on-topic ones. I don't think the line can really be cleaned up unless &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions reliant on currently-known technology and physics with no extra restrictions (e.g. only ancient tools) or additions (e.g. magic) are considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it certainly is a &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; question, so maybe others have a different idea than I do about how close to the border it is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41036" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T21:34:57.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5988" CreationDate="2018-04-12T14:11:41.853" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would a question on writing an outline specifically for my worldbuilding belong in the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange or on the Writing Stack Exchange? I mean general advice for how to structure my outline and how to address things from culture, geography, economics, and living needs to things like fictional classification, magic systems, technological developments, and genetic engineering? I get that plot and character building would be better suited to the Writing.SE, but for my worldbuilding I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T15:00:57.133" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T15:00:57.133" Title="Would asking for an outline for worldbuilding issues be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5987" CreationDate="2018-04-12T14:51:50.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;general advice for how to structure my outline and how to address things from culture, geography, economics, and living needs to things like fictional classification, magic systems, technological developments, and genetic engineering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would probably be closed as Too Broad or Primarily Opinion Based on both sites, sorry. Stack Exchange, as a whole, is about specific questions with specific answers that can be objectively judged good or bad. If you have specific question in mind, it might be a good fit here, under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;. If in doubt, post it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/809&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first, and people will tell you if there are issues with it, or if it is potentially a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T14:51:50.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5987" CreationDate="2018-04-12T14:52:25.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the way you phrase this question it might very well be on-topic on both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To post on WorldBuilding you have to make sure that you show why you want answers from a WorldBuilding perspective. We try to give the author the benefit of doubt - if they post on WorldBuilding instead of Writing they likely want a WorldBuilding perspective - but it's important to communicate clearly what you are hoping to get the kind of answers that you are searching for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on WorldBuilding we have some tags that categorize questions that go in a similar direction and might give you some ideas on how you could phrase such a question. For example you can look at the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; to get an idea of how questions should be framed that are searching for resources that can aid you in building your world. This might be useful if you want to see examples of a structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also have a look at the questions in the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt;, which is used for questions that are asking for the general steps that are required to do something. If you prefer to get a rough step-by-step answer that helps you create your own structure this might be helpful for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; that is used for questions that ask about software that can help you in creating your world. For example the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/499/what-software-is-available-for-keeping-and-organising-notes-about-your-world&quot;&gt;What software is available for keeping and organising notes about your world?&lt;/a&gt; might be interesting for you as the software already gives some information about how to structure your worldbuilding stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: I recommend checking out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;our Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where we can help you with the phrasing and tags once you have a draft ready. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in a writing perspective Writing.SE might be better. Their focus would be more generic on the &quot;How do you keep your notes?&quot; front, but you should check out their tags, too. For example they have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/world-building&quot;&gt;world building tag&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software&quot;&gt;software tag&lt;/a&gt;, which might be useful to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T14:52:25.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-12T21:29:49.443" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to have this question un-held:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109340/what-are-the-military-pros-and-cons-of-a-low-gravity-world-vs-a-high-gravity-one&quot;&gt;What are the military pros and cons of a low gravity world vs a high gravity one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, these two questions were originally just the one question that is now on hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109340/what-are-the-military-pros-and-cons-of-a-low-gravity-world-vs-a-high-gravity-one&quot;&gt;What are the military pros and cons of a low gravity world vs a high gravity one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109345/what-are-the-economic-pros-and-cons-of-colonizing-a-low-gravity-world-vs-a-high/109359#109359&quot;&gt;What are the economic pros and cons of colonizing a low gravity world vs a high gravity one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a request that the original be split because it was too broad, I agreed, and thus split it roughly in half, into the two linked above. Part of why I am posting this here on Meta, is because several of the close votes were already in place &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the question split even occurred. So I would like to put it before the community to decide if it should be reopened. They are both very similar questions, but are not duplicates. They ask two distinctly different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32253" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T01:01:49.243" Title="Vote to reopen: What are the military pros and cons of a low gravity world vs a high gravity one?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5995" CreationDate="2018-04-12T23:06:41.667" Score="15" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering the closure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109369/is-magical-rapid-premature-aging-painful&quot;&gt;Is magical rapid premature aging painful?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5455/how-can-questions-be-closed-as-being-primarily-opinion-based-on-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/what-exactly-is-opinion-based-and-why-do-we-shun-it&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic is Primarily Opinion-Based (POB) by definition.  Without some idea of how to deal with questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; we might as well remove every tag with the word &quot;magic&quot; in it and refuse all questions with magic as a basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HDE 226868 commented in the first linked meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's fine to have questions that are a bit subjective or opinionated . . .&#xA;      . . . but answers to those questions must be supported in some way - they can't just be pure opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, Monica Cellio said in the second linked meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because even though there are often multiple correct answers to a question, we do want to be able to evaluate the correctness of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that the POB VTC should only be applied if the voter feels it's impossible to answer the question without some way of evauluating the quality of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referenced question was asking about human aging and pain.  I believe it fails the POB test because answers can cite actual physiological issues/facts/concepts to support their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; questions where only logic could support an answer.  As a secondary to my actual question (happening next): is logic enough to &quot;support&quot; an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Because I believe magic is POB &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; and yet wholly appropriate for this site, am I wrong to assume that a POB VTC for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; can only apply to whether I believe no answer can possibly be supported by facts or logic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this question, a proposed alternative definition to &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; (even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6240/is-it-possible-to-change-the-descriptive-text-for-the-pob-selection&quot;&gt;we can't change the SE text&lt;/a&gt;) can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436/idea-refinement-clarification-and-examples-of-vtc-reasons-for-new-users/6437#6437&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T04:53:16.430" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T04:53:16.430" Title="Magic is primarily opinion-based by definition, so what does a POB VTC mean?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-close|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5990" CreationDate="2018-04-13T00:40:17.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, please don't come to Meta with a request to un-hold a question. There is a review queue, and many of the same people who will see the meta post will already have seen it in the review queue (for example, like I did). But this is your first post on Meta, so lets give you the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is still too broad. The bottom line for me, and keep in mind everyone will have their own metric for what the limit of 'too broad' is, is whether or not a question can be reasonably answered in 2,000 characters. I know its a kind of arbitrary limit, but in my experience, a good answer rarely needs to be that long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So getting to the pros and cons of gravity levels, there is simply a lot to discuss. Even just from a military point of view, gravity affects many things. For space battles, it affects the density of the atmosphere, the speed of orbits, the distance from the planet of geostationary orbits. From the ground it affects the terrain by erosion, the composition and density of the atmosphere again, the ability of low gravity troops to survive, the viability of projectile vs energy weapons, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I review a question (in 15 sec or so, mind you) I total that up and think if how much I could write. When I looked at your question, I thought it was too much to write, so I rejected the re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice to you going forward is to get even more specific. But also, please be sure you are looking around the site for other answers. There are questions about low gravity &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/107023/would-trams-be-workable-on-a-low-gravity-world&quot;&gt;vehicles&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58418/skyscrapers-on-low-gravity-planets&quot;&gt;buildings&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28115/storms-on-a-low-gravity-planet&quot;&gt;storms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3781/how-would-the-human-body-develop-under-a-different-gravity&quot;&gt;the human body&lt;/a&gt;, and many more. These should give you better idea of the scope of the question you should be asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T01:01:49.243" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T01:01:49.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5982" CreationDate="2018-04-13T00:56:42.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The question didn't get a good answer because it doesn't have one&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I alluded to in my comment that you quoted, it is entirely possible that the answer is &quot;there is no way to do it.&quot; If I was going to take the time to research the question and answer it, I suspect that is what I would have said, if perhaps better cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is entirely possible that no one else among the 271 people who viewed your question (so far) has come up with a good solution. Let us be honest, transgender surgery isn't exactly super-successful even today in modern society. For most trans-gendered people that I see in the news, it is visually obvious that they are trans-gendered. The physiological changes during puberty are pretty hard to erase. Also, the medical evidence that I know of for people who do transition indicates that recidivism and suicide are very common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, and given that the first sex-change surgery of any kind as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Elbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1930&lt;/a&gt; (and the patient died within 3 months), I would say that your pre-moderns will have a pretty tough go of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How to get what you want&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it sounds like you want is to find out if there is a way for a person to synthesize a certain hormone in the pre-modern world. If you want to ask a new qustion, just ask about certain hormones: &quot;Is there any way to synthesize &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol_(medication)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;estradiol&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spironolactone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spironolactone&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goserelin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;goserelin&lt;/a&gt; using pre-modern technology?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just looked those up on wikipedia, so I don't know if that is a complete or sufficient hormone therapy, but I will caution you that I would lean to a &quot;No&quot; answer to this new question as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T00:56:42.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5991" CreationDate="2018-04-13T09:14:08.530" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on opinion-based questions is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A question is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; if &lt;em&gt;every reasonable&lt;/em&gt; answer would be &lt;em&gt;exactly equally valid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few problems with opinion-based questions, especially in the context of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. For a longer discussion about my stance on the small line/ the big blurry region see my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5147/28789&quot;&gt;The problem with opinion based questions&lt;/a&gt;. But for the sake of this question let's examine the most important parts of the above statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a basic example to evaluate the different parts and assume we are talking about a question like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What could be elements I could add to my magic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part of my analysis for &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; is to realize that there might be reasonable answers and there might be answers that are unreasonable. Unreasonable answers shouldn't be taken into consideration. An example of an unreasonable answer would be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fries and Ketchup!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am getting hungry reading this it certainly is not a reasonable answer to the proposed question. It's important to realize that this is already a part of my big blurry region - there might be some people who would say that this answer could be valid if it was supported by reasonable explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important because the next part of my analysis is whether all answers would be &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; equally valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metal, Wood, Fire, Water, Air - these are typical things that are attributed to magic systems. They are reasonable and they could be supported by citing some references or simply showing that others did that, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about Light? Or Darkness? Or Void? These seem valid, too. And currently each of these 8 suggestions that I offered would be equally valid. There are no criteria why one of them would be better than the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a problem that they are all valid - the problem is that they are &lt;em&gt;equally valid&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could be salvaged by giving more information - what is currently existing, what aspects are missing, what was the inspiration, ...? If there is an element for change or strength missing, possibly related to the colour &quot;red&quot; and inspired by eastern, preferrably chinese, mythology or philosophy you could very well support that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_(Wu_Xing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fire&lt;/a&gt; is the most appropriate answer. While other answers could be supported to be correct by redefining some properties, the existing example is simply better. Now we have a hierarchy - there are many valid answers, but one is clearly &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than others. This is of course just a very simplified example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This aligns with your view that magic questions where answers can't be supported by logic or facts are primarily opinion-based - after all the answers can only state their &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; without any more reference than &quot;I think it would be cool&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might still disagree on certain implementations of these rules - as I've said, some people might think that the criteria I offered to safe my example question are unreasonably strict or that they are still not enough because there could be multiple answers that are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;. There will be disagreement from time to time, but that's what community voting is for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; magic is a bit opinion-based, but questions that are not trying to provide any criteria for why certain answers would be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;their specific context&lt;/em&gt; should be put on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example you referenced mentions enough parts that make me say that it's not opinion-based - the OP is searching for reality-based information about rapid aging and reasonable problems that might occur. There are many possible answers that are &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;, as can be seen by the amount of &quot;This will hurt&quot; and &quot;This will not hurt&quot; answers, but each reasonable one is supported by different science-related facts that can be evaluated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T08:31:49.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:31:49.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5991" CreationDate="2018-04-13T10:45:09.130" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Magic questions can be answered objectively if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rules of magic are stated, and question is about their internal consistency.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rules of magic are stated, and question is about physical / biological consequences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic is taken from existing mythology, and question can be answered using that mythology &lt;em&gt;(warning - this one might fall into off-topic territory)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Desired effect is clearly described and question is about creating magical rules that would allow it, without breaking other clearly stated effects / rules of the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list is by no means conclusive, but it should give you a good direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T10:45:09.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5985" CreationDate="2018-04-13T10:50:42.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As there was no negative feedback on this question (+4/-0 as of writing this) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5985/do-we-need-the-tag-transformation#comment17730_5985&quot;&gt;@MichaelKjörling updated the shapeshifters tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt; I've gone ahead and changed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transformation&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; on the two mentioned questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T10:50:42.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5998" CreationDate="2018-04-13T22:18:45.510" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;How long should I wait before posting a bounty?&#xA;Two weeks? A month? This is considering the question is cycled upwards. Assuming the question has either no answers or just a few plausible but yet unhelpful answers, and I want to attract more people to answer (seeing as how I have not accepted an answer) how long should I wait for someone else to respond to the question? I would imagine a minimum of a week and I'm only willing to extend past two months. (This isn't meant to be opinion-based. I want the actual experience of users who have posted bounties before or let a question like this simmer for a month.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T22:40:34.683" Title="How long should I wait before posting a bounty?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5997" CreationDate="2018-04-13T22:40:34.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a judgement call and depends on the specific circumstances.  Here are some factors to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The software &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; you to post a bounty starting when the question is two days old.  (And it must be open.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bounties increase exposure, so if your question is currently getting a lot of attention already, the bounty won't make as much of a difference and you might be better off waiting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is attracting close votes or comments requesting clarification, that might indicate a problem with the question that you should fix before drawing more attention.  You want your question to be in good shape before adding a bounty that shouts &quot;hey, look at me! answer please!&quot;.  A bounty pays for &lt;em&gt;advertising&lt;/em&gt;, not for an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.  If the question is unclear or too broad, you might spend those points and still not get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you urgently need an answer, you might want to offer the bounty sooner rather than later.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there is data about timing.  A bounty runs for up to a week, so it shouldn't matter when you start it, but there's a little extra impact of that blue &quot;+100&quot; (or whatever) being on the front page in addition to the bounty tab, so maybe Sunday morning UTC isn't the best time.  (Traffic is lower on weekends than weekdays.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During the bounty period you should be available to respond to questions, and at the end you want to manually award it.  Don't start a bounty and then go on vacation in the land of poor network access. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's always ok to pop into the site chat room and ask for advice about a specific question/bounty!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T22:40:34.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6006" CreationDate="2018-04-14T22:38:19.253" Score="11" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109577/plausible-reason-for-space-stage-civilization-to-shatter-and-revert-to-primitive&quot;&gt;Plausible Weapon or Other to Cause Space-stage Civilization to Shatter and Revert to Primitive Societies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since I am horrible at coming up with ideas, I couldn't think of a circumstance or weapon that could cause such a powerful nation to fall apart in a instant. It needed to not destroy the environment and solely target people in a way that cannot be prevented, even by a highly advanced civilization. It wouldn't eradicate all humans but just heavily reduce and shatter society. Is such a weapon or situation possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to meet the Too Story Based qualifications of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt; but is asking us to fill in the blanks but the catch-all &lt;em&gt;Too Broad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/em&gt; reasons are unsatisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we need a new VTC reason &quot;We don't do your work for you&quot; or just settle for POB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T07:08:32.577" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T13:40:09.113" Title="&quot;I have an implausible end goal. Please tell me how to get there!!&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-15T11:32:41.927" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/558/ideas-for-a-worldbuilders-mapping-site&quot;&gt;Ideas for a Worldbuilders mapping site&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/675/mapping-site-go-break-it&quot;&gt;Mapping site - Go Break It&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/603/mapping-site-again-moderators&quot;&gt;Mapping site (again) - Moderators&lt;/a&gt; are about the development, bug collection/review and moderation of a mapmapking tool that was developed by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2685/artofcode&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in response to the WB SE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4726/site-for-online-custom-map-with-tags-or-labels/9995#9995&quot;&gt;Site for online custom map with tags or labels&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both meta questions did not receive any attention since January 2015, besides two minor link edits in March 2017. The proposed mapmaking tool is now down, and seemingly has been at least since March 2016, according to a comment by &lt;code&gt;user2336&lt;/code&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/9995/44516&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the initial WB SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the tool was still in development, one could have considered it remotely related to worldbuilding, although it could have suited other SE communities better. Since it is now offline, the information in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/675/mapping-site-go-break-it&quot;&gt;Mapping site - Go Break It&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/603/mapping-site-again-moderators&quot;&gt;Mapping site (again) - Moderators&lt;/a&gt; serves no purpose for the worldbuilding community, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/558/ideas-for-a-worldbuilders-mapping-site&quot;&gt;Ideas for a Worldbuilders mapping site&lt;/a&gt; could be rewritten to collect general ideas for a mapmaking tool, to serve as inspiration for future developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How should such questions that were once acceptable but are now off-topic be handled?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44516" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T01:39:27.540" Title="Remove now off-topic questions that were barely on-topic previously?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2018-04-15T12:56:34.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should such questions that were once acceptable but are now off-topic be handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag, or vote to close, as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a point that both Monica Cellio and myself made in answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5719/29&quot;&gt;Notices for our traditions: Anatomically correct (and Santa)&lt;/a&gt;. Several people also made similar arguments in the comments to that question. And of course, I'm plenty sure that similar arguments have been made elsewhere as well; this is just the one I happened to be able to find quickly, and it's reasonably recent (December 2017).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple fact here is that &lt;strong&gt;standards change&lt;/strong&gt; for a multitude of reasons. Questions that were at one point deemed to be on topic are determined by the community to fall outside of the site's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that fall outside of the site's scope should be put on hold. If those questions can't be fixed, or aren't fixed, then they transition to closed status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no need to actively go looking for such questions, but if you come across them, including by them being pushed into the review queues, then it's perfectly allowable to vote to close if they don't fit the current standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question was acceptable and considered on topic at the time it was posted, and has received answers, then there's probably little room for fixing it much later without invalidating answers, so the normal on hold, improve, reopen process doesn't readily apply. However, you can still leave a comment along the lines of &quot;I'm voting to close this question because it is no longer within the site's scope because &amp;lt;reason&amp;gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that have seen a lot of answers and voting, there exists the possibility to apply a historical lock on the question, which among other things prevents further voting and informs visitors that while the question was at one point acceptable, it no longer is, so should not be used as a justification for posting similar questions. Especially once a question has been closed, you can flag it for moderator attention and suggest a historical lock, and we'll look into it. Historical locks don't apply everywhere, but they are one way to inform visitors of the fact that site standards have changed since the question was active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The same reasoning holds for both the main site and for Worldbuilding Meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T12:56:34.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6005" CreationDate="2018-04-15T16:59:54.867" Score="9" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for setting up a bounty is, that I want to reward a similar but later answer, which goes into great details, but in the end is very similar to the earlier answer, which contained everything I needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to accept the earlier answer, which incidentally is the one with the highest amount of upvotes, and reward the second answer with the bounty, because the user goes into great details and adds additional very useful information for me. I want to reward this additional information. But I think the prior answer should be accepted, because it came first and was already sufficiently satisfactory at least compared to the later answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109024/could-i-have-an-earth-like-planet-from-which-sun-and-moon-would-never-be-simulta&quot;&gt;relevant question&lt;/a&gt; can be found here, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/109084/11114&quot;&gt;first answer&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/109185/11114&quot;&gt;second answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11114" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T19:01:47.770" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T08:51:12.440" Title="Is it ok to set up a bounty for a question, where I already know which answer I want to accept?" Tags="|discussion|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2018-04-15T17:51:37.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Differentiate&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people mark your question as a duplicate, they are saying that answers to the one could just as well appear on the other.  Just saying that the two questions are different is not enough.  Make them different.  Acknowledge the things that you learned from the other question and emphasize what you want to learn from answers to your question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think that the practice of &lt;em&gt;adding&lt;/em&gt; a message to a duplicate question is inappropriate.  It's really something that would fit better in a comment than in the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct thing is to change the question itself.  Read the other question.  Look for what it does tell you.  Acknowledge that.  E.g. &quot;In this [other question], I found that ... but that doesn't work for me because ....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both your edits are just arguing.  They aren't telling us what you learned from the other question nor what you need from answers to your question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Read the other question's answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem seems to be that the other question isn't giving the answer you want.  You say that it doesn't apply, but what about:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Satellite Surveillance / ISS Live Feeds&quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81729/2113&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81738/2113&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, about an uninhabited island that no one visits because it is radioactive/poisonous/whatever.  In your case, you don't even have to pretend that the island is uninhabited.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81733/2113&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; about preventing boats from reaching the island and satellites from seeing it.  Yes, it assumes that someone is actively making that happen, but is there a natural version?  That would be a better question than your current question or the two similar questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81895/2113&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81951/2113&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; suggest making the island look like it is below water.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/108912/2113&quot;&gt;Suggested again&lt;/a&gt; and a couple more answers on your question.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact of the six answers, the only one that doesn't fit an uninhabited island is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81764/2113&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about making it look like pixelation.  That really requires awareness of how satellite imagery works and active intervention.  So five of six answers to the other question could appear on your question (one actually does, three times).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answers suggest things like living underground, using electric cars, and other things to make the technology more low-key. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as I demonstrated, they also suggest other things, that would fit an uninhabited island.  I could see that at a glance the first time I looked.  Why couldn't you?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T17:51:37.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2018-04-15T19:00:18.423" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, this is one of the intended usecases for bounties&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on the &quot;start a bounty&quot; button you will first be asked for the amount of reputation - something between 50 and 500. In case you want to award multiple answers on the same question with an additional bounty you have to be aware that you can only offer bounties that are higher than prior bounties you awareded on the same question with the exception of 500 reputation. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5945/can-i-split-a-bounty&quot;&gt;Can I split a bounty?&lt;/a&gt; for more information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After clicking on &quot;Next&quot; you will get a list of all the available standard reasons that bounties are supposed to be used for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Authoritative reference needed - in case you would prefer answers with more/better citations for example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canonical answer required - if you think it's an extremely valuable question for a very, very wide range of people and you would like to provide a very good standard answer for all the people coming to this site to find exactly that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Current answers are outdated - in case something changed and you would like to see an answer that addresses the &lt;em&gt;present day&lt;/em&gt; version of the problem stated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draw attention - there are no or not enough good answers yet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Improve details - there are answers, but they are not good enough yet &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reward existing answer&lt;/strong&gt; - exactly what you are asking for; this reason could mean that there is one answer that is spectacular and you want to accept it and think the time the user put into it is worth an additional amount of reputation or there are multiple very good answers that deserve more than upvotes and some more recognition by staying in the active list for some more time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click &quot;Next&quot; again you can also add a custom message if you want. You could for example write your reasoning there or link to this Meta discussion. Be aware that bounty messages don't support the full range of markdown, so they might look a bit weird if you expect highlighted links or emphasis. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/120346/352819&quot;&gt;What markdown formatting features are available for Bounty remarks?&lt;/a&gt; for more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a list of details about the bounty system see also the official FAQ on Meta.StackExchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/352819&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;privilege page for setting bounties (75 rep)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T08:51:12.440" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T08:51:12.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6000" CreationDate="2018-04-16T07:36:27.460" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6000/i-have-an-implausible-end-goal-please-tell-me-how-to-get-there#comment17758_6000&quot;&gt;Michael pointed out&lt;/a&gt; this is very close to the previous Meta discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/28789&quot;&gt;How to deal with “I have a High Concept, please do my work for me” questions?&lt;/a&gt; The OP has this cool idea, but they haven't really thought about the reasoning/implications and now they want us to come up with the reasoning/implications. While the older Meta discussion was about the implications of &quot;I introduce [stuff] - what happens?&quot; this specific question asks for &quot;I want [stuff] - give me ideas?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most problematic part in my opinion is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since I am horrible at coming up with ideas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are basically trigger words to scream &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; because the OP clearly wants us to give them a handful of ideas so they can choose the coolest one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But reading through the question carefully we can see that the OP also has a few criteria for what the should or shouldn't happen. This makes me feel like this question could be salvaged. Maybe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current form I would go with advice similar to what Michael mentioned in his answer to the High Concept discussion: VTC as &quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot;, try to edit a bit and then point out the problems that you see. In my opinion this case is already covered by the &quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; close reason, or maybe the &quot;Too Broad&quot; reason - it depends on the specific case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All things considered, I would say that &lt;em&gt;we don't need a new VTC reason for &quot;We don't do your work for you&quot; - that's already included in &quot;Too Broad&quot; (&quot;Writing a whole book for you is too much&quot;) and &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; (&quot;We don't give you a couple dozen ideas so you can choose which one you think sounds cool&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness sake my usual (rough) take on the close reasons is as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Too Broad&quot; - &quot;Writing a whole book for you is too much. I know what you want and I think it's theoretically on-topic from a content perspective (I can see that you are currently building your own fictional world), but it would take far too long to talk about all the details that are necessary to sufficiently answer your question. I need some more details so that I know what you want to focus on first - you can ask more questions later where you incorporate the details from previous questions. As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; states: &lt;em&gt;If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; - &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5994/28789&quot;&gt;A question is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; if &lt;em&gt;every reasonable&lt;/em&gt; answer would be &lt;em&gt;equally&lt;/em&gt; valid.&lt;/a&gt; Giving you a bunch of ideas for you to choose the one that sounds coolest is not how this site works. I know what you want and theoretically this would be on-topic from a content perspective, but we need some criteria to vote which answers are &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;, which answers are &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; and which ones are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;. It's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147#5147&quot;&gt;big, blurry region&lt;/a&gt;, but personally I feel that these criteria are not yet clear.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Unclear what you are asking&quot; - &quot;I have no idea what this is supposed to say. Either there is a big language barrier, the querent has misunderstood quite a few things about the topic he is asking about, there is no question or there are so many things missing from the description of the world that it feels to me like a random excerpt where too much is missing to make any meaningful attempts at answering the question. I don't know the situation, I don't know the goal - I just don't know how to help the querent yet.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Off-Topic&quot; - &quot;This is not about WorldBuilding (as defined in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;). You are for example asking about help with your story, about character actions, or about something completely different, like misunderstanding that there are multiple sites on the network and accidentally posting a question about programming languages on WorldBuilding, ... We can't help you here, you need to go to a different site on the network or for example to a forum to find the answer you are looking for.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These statements serve as rough guidelines for me when judging whether a question should be temporarily put on hold or not and in which direction the OP should edit his question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T13:40:09.113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T13:40:09.113" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T18:11:46.970" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;For exaple, OP of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109702/proxima-centauris-flare-effects-on-a-terraformed-planet&quot;&gt;Proxima Centauri&amp;#39;s flare: effects on a terraformed planet&lt;/a&gt; question could have answered his own question with the Google search &quot;Proxima Centauri planet&quot; and a little reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T18:51:59.547" Title="What's the protocol for questions that can easily be answered by Google?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-04-16T18:47:44.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6011" CreationDate="2018-04-17T17:31:03.467" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;This Meta question is in regard to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109795/in-a-town-where-people-say-the-opposite-of-what-they-think-how-would-double-nega&quot;&gt;in a town where people say the opposite of what they think how would double negatives work?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) This does not appear to be off-topic as a question of linguistics in a fictional world is clearly within the scope of our site as presented on the help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the effect on the language (culture) of a society that (for reasons not provided) culturally express themselves in the opposite of what they mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) This does not appear to be primarily opinion-based in that the nature of a double-negative is clearly within a definable and objective scope.  He's asking the question in English... maybe we need to ask him to clearly state it, but the context of a double-negative in English seems to be intrinsic to the question.  This, of course, results in a definable &quot;right&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curiously, the answer from a linguistics perspective is that the cultural tendency to express yourself using the opposite of what you mean has no impact at all on the use of double-negatives.  The context would be identical to how they are used in English: to preserve the original intent of the statement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that this question was closed for no better reason than it was outside the experience and skill set of the VTCers.  If I'm right, then that's a horrible reason to close a question, which is tantamount to, &quot;I can't answer it, so it deserves to be closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Am I right? in which case the question should be reopened.  Or am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T12:29:49.030" Title="Justification for closing &quot;In a town where people say the opposite...&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2018-04-17T18:58:34.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to leave close on review. The description of the townsfolk is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a town where people say the opposite of what they think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean? Its not even clear if they are purposefully lying or not. That isn't nearly enough description to make any sort of answer. That means that the person who answers has to make assumptions about the above quote, which renders the whole affair pretty opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, this is more of a logic puzzle than a real Worldbuilding question. If you have a society where no one says what they think, there will probably be many more societal issues than the interpretation of double negatives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T23:55:03.170" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T23:55:03.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2018-04-18T01:39:27.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've put those three questions on hold based on the voting (and lack of objection) here.  I closed them as off-topic, because they are no longer about the Worldbuilding site or the SE software that powers it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need to go the extra step to a historical lock; the close notice tells readers what they need to know.  If any of these questions become active in a way that's disruptive we can of course revisit that, but I suspect they'll quietly fade away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T01:39:27.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2018-04-18T10:24:44.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpretation of double negatives is already variant with culture. Sometimes they're a positive, sometimes they're an emphasis on negative. Hence they're always a matter of opinion in a fictional work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages they are at least consistent. In England which rule applies is conveyed by the tone of voice, local slang, and social class of the speaker along with the situation in which the phrase is spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I didn't do nothing&quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When spoken to a police officer or other authority it's an emphatic negative, a denial of action being taken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I wasn't doing nothing&quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is a statement that action was being taken, again spoken defensively to an authority figure, but this time by someone being accused of inactivity rather than criminal action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T10:37:34.920" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T10:37:34.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2018-04-18T12:29:49.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the one to cast first vote, so I guess I owe you an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is two sentences long. What's the opposite? For many statements it is hard to figure it out. Some of them does not even have opposite. Is speaking some more specific non-truth is OK? Like if I'd say I'm a cat? And what if I don't really feel human, can I say that I'm not? For purpose of double negatives, how are these defined? What about &quot;was not&quot; and &quot;wasn't&quot;? Are they even speaking English? Why haven't their language adjusted already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used up way more sentences to show what we don't know than OP used to explain what we are supposed to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, one town and one simple event is not &lt;em&gt;&quot;world's societies, cultures, and environment&quot;&lt;/em&gt; size thing. It is just a story about one town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T12:29:49.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3904" CreationDate="2018-04-18T20:14:53.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Climate is a difficult point to answer, precisely because it's very broad in nature. But climates in various regions are also interconnected; it's obvious (hopefully) that you won't have jungles anywhere near ice caps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the minimum necessary information, that depends to some degree on the scope of the question. &quot;Climate of this fictional planet&quot; is broad, but might actually be easier to answer than &quot;climate of this particular region of this fictional planet&quot;. I know that probably sounds nuts, but the former would presumably come with a world map; people asking the latter tend to provide only a regional map, where an accurate picture of climate requires more than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any climate question, some assumptions have to be made. If you go too far from Earth-like (an atmosphere with 80% oxygen and 20% sulfur, 3G or 0.5G gravity, 300-hour day or 4000-day year, binary star system, etc.), that's probably not going to be answerable with the knowledge base at hand. So, assuming a planet at least somewhat Earth-like, the minimum is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A map of the entire planet, one that shows at least basic divisions in altitudes (deep sea/sea/land/plateau/mountains would be a minimum: marking 1000m divisions would be ideal). If only a regional map is available, marking latitude lines correctly is &lt;em&gt;absolutely vital&lt;/em&gt; for accuracy: climates near the equator will produce massive differences compared to climates at 50N.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I recommend not using a Mercator projection for the map, due to its inability to show the poles. Equirectangular would be best, due to its simplicity and ease of conversion to other projections, but something like a Hammer equal-area projection would also be usable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the planet is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Earth with different geography&quot;, some astronomical details will become critical to judge temperature accurately:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stellar luminosity and orbital distance between the planet and its star. For a near-circular orbit, the solar constant (for Earth, this is about 1367 W/km2) will suffice.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a non-trivially eccentric orbit, the solar constant will not &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; constant over the course of the year; it is effectively an average of incoming solar radiation, a ratio of luminosity versus distance, but an eccentric orbit will produce sufficient variation over the course of the planet's year that an average will not properly reflect planetary conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Axial tilt is critical, as this is what determines the seasons. A planet with no tilt has no seasons, while a steep tilt produces wildly differing seasons. Earth's tilt is about 23 degrees; more than 45 degrees or so, and you're probably not going to get rational results when trying to determine its climate (no Uranus-style tilts, please).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a non-trivially eccentric orbit, you will also need to know the times of perihelion and aphelion (when the planet is closest to/farthest from the star) in relation to the seasons; if perihelion is near the height of the northern summer, for instance, then the northern hemisphere will have noticeably greater seasonal variations than the south. Due to axial precession, that relation will not remain constant over geological scales; Earth, for example, goes through a complete precession cycle over about 25,000 years. Applied to a fictional planet, that means that perihelion would be during the southern summer (instead of the northern) about ten or fifteen thousand years from whenever &quot;now&quot; is, which is something to keep in mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bond albedo (not geometric albedo, that's something different) and emissivity of the planet. The former is basically the average reflectivity of the surface, whereas emissivity here is referring to the planet's emission of thermal energy; the greenhouse gas effect works due to energy being reflected back to the surface when emitted, which would lower emissivity. Both are 0-1 ranges (higher values indicate more energy loss, which here means a cooler planet). For Earth, these are about 0.3 and 0.612, respectively.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is rather advanced stuff; unless explicitly noted, this is probably Earth-like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use those parameters, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_temperature#Surface_temperature_of_a_planet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's a Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; with the necessary formula. I've posted that formula below, where (Sc) is the solar constant and (a) is bond albedo. $\frac{A_{abs}}{A_{rad}}$ is a ratio connected to the planet's rotation; for anything near an Earth-length day, this is assumed to be $\frac{1}{4}$ (a very slow rotator or a tidally locked planet will be closer to $\frac{1}{2}$, but at that point it's probably straying too far from Earth-like for an accurate prediction of climate). $\sigma$ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant ($5.670373 \times 10^-8$), and $\epsilon$ is emissivity:&#xA;$$&#xA;T = (\frac{A_{abs}}{A_{rad}} \times \frac{Sc(1 - a)}{\sigma\epsilon})^\frac{1}{4}&#xA;$$&#xA;And here, I give the equation for the solar constant. L is luminosity of the star, while D is the orbital distance between planet and star. Despite the name, this is only truly constant in a circular orbit; in an eccentric orbit, this figure will vary over the course of a year.&#xA;$$&#xA;Sc = \frac{L}{4\pi D^2}&#xA;$$&#xA;You should get a result of about 288K (15C) when plugging in Earth's figures: this is basically an average taken over the planet's surface. If the fictional planet's characteristics result in a different surface temperature, that's going to have an impact on climates. If the orbit is non-trivially eccentric, you'll have to run through the formula twice (perihelion and aphelion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's only the minimum information. This next list is stuff that should be provided by the person asking the question if practical (although they're probably asking the question because they &lt;em&gt;don't know how to&lt;/em&gt; figure out all these steps), but which is possible (if likely time-consuming) to calculate on one's own as part of an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A map of the ocean currents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summer/winter maps of wind patterns and high/low pressure zones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summer/winter maps of precipitation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summer/winter maps of temperature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posted guides to climates before in answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102798/how-do-i-figure-out-my-planets-biomes-and-weather/102838#102838&quot;&gt;This answer in particular&lt;/a&gt; has me describing in detail how to calculate everything in the second list and make a climate map from the results, given a good elevation map; as posted, it's limited to &quot;Earth with different geography&quot;, but someone willing to modify the temperature guides can make it work even with different astronomical parameters. From there, it's not hard to make the step to biomes if desired. I also tear apart a user's map &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99774/is-my-world-map-unrealistic/99781#99781&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, outlining some problems with their climates; it's basically an example of what &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to do in a climate question (incomplete map, no latitude lines, not even a defined map projection in use), because the lack of information meant I had to rely on guesswork for a lot of that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22607" LastEditorUserId="22607" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T02:36:11.243" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T02:36:11.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6016" CreationDate="2018-04-19T13:49:45.160" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of users who are high in reputation but have never asked a single question. Are there any requirements, like &quot;You have to have asked at least 1 question to  ____&quot;? Should there be? I've seen a mix of satisfactory and unsatisfactory answers from these users, so I guess it's just partly my view that people who answer questions should have asked one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T14:19:02.513" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T14:19:02.513" Title="Not asking questions" Tags="|discussion|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6017" CreationDate="2018-04-19T13:57:06.880" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;After waiting and receiving unsatisfactory answers (because everyone is misunderstanding what you're saying, even if you restate the important part several times) and not counting adding a bounty, what are solutions to finding a satisfactory answer? And what about stopping the flow of unsatisfactory ones that unfortunately get upvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T14:22:56.963" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T08:47:35.027" Title="What to do when you receive unsatisfactory answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6014" CreationDate="2018-04-19T14:10:29.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, there are no such requirements and there shouldn't be any such requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is allowed to do how they please as long as they stay in line with the community guidelines. You are a lurker that's mainly here to upvote funny stuff? Great for you. You like editing? Perfect. You only ask questions? Welcome aboard. You only ever answer? Nice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone's allowed to do as they see fit. Some things give you reputation, like answering and asking stuff (or editing until you are at 2k rep). This is what the overall StackExchange network views as especially useful - we are here to build a database of &lt;em&gt;questions and answers&lt;/em&gt; after all. These things allow you to do other things, like seeing deleted posts or casting close and reopen votes. But other than the normal &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; and the generic rep requirements for them there shouldn't be any restrictions, apart from the special abilities elected mods have, like seeing flags on comments that should be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not asking questions is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about my view on this topic you might want to check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5925/28789&quot;&gt;my answer to &lt;em&gt;What does being a 'Contributor' look like on Worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T14:10:29.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2018-04-19T14:17:33.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox on Meta&lt;/a&gt; that can be used as a little testing ground to see how questions will be received and to root out potential problems. You could for example try to write up a new draft and add a few sentences for the Sandbox about what you were looking for in an answer to your original question. The people there can then help you with the wording and to make sure that your new question won't be viewed as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You already excluded bounties, but they are a normal way to give more attention to a question and to reward certain answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't really any way to &quot;stop the flow&quot; of unsatisfactory answers. If your question is valid and the answers are valid then they will keep rolling in. Theoretically the question could be closed by a moderator (or enough community members), but the goal of SE is to have a database of questions and answers for future readers, so closing valid questions is not really in line with what the site is supposed to do. I would recommend against this approach. Just accept that this was a failed attempt at getting the answers you want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But make sure that the answer are really valid. If they do not answer the question as it's posed you can downvote them, leave a comment explaining what is missing and then flag the answers as &quot;not an answer&quot;. The comment is essential here, as other people seem to have already thought the answers are good and the reviewers should see that you as the OP see problems with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness: please don't edit your existing question in a way that would invalidate existing answers. It sometimes happens that you don't quite get across what you were hoping. But if an edit would invalidate an answer then a new question based on that edit idea would surely not be viewed as a duplicate - the answers to one wouldn't be applicable to the other question after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T14:17:33.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-19T18:06:50.123" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will say in advance that this isn't the most cheery subject.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my writing, I need to know whether a situation is classed as rape or not. However the situation involves a character who, using magic, changed his appearance to look like someone else. If it weren't for this I would ask on Law.SE, but I'm not sure if this would be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it on topic for this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T18:21:30.663" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T07:37:05.767" Title="Would a question about classifying certain actions as rape be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6018" CreationDate="2018-04-19T18:20:41.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most other sites don't appreciate fictional questions that involve magic and what-if-someone-did-this-specific-thing scenarios, so asking on Law.SE would likely get this closed. On the other hand a question about real-world laws would not go well over here. For example it might be important to state what differences there are in regards to magical disguises in your world - but that would basically require you to answer your own question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to at least mention what country you are in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you should probably test the draft in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the Sandbox first&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word of warning though: this is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; difficult topic, even if it's &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about the legal implications, many people will not like it. You should expect a couple downvotes. Testing the wording in the Sandbox might help mitigating this a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-20T07:37:05.767" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T07:37:05.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6018" CreationDate="2018-04-19T20:25:54.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first reaction when reading &lt;em&gt;&quot;I need to know whether a situation is classed as rape or not&quot;&lt;/em&gt; was that this &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be on topic but is definitely way too broad. In order to make the question technically acceptable you need to explain the rules of the world where this situation occurs, and also, depending on the rules, the status of the deceiver and of the deceived; but then, if you explain the rules, then it may be case that you will already know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate the broadness, I will give an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Jacques Offenbach's &lt;em&gt;Orphée aux Enfers&lt;/em&gt; (Orpheus in the Underworld) there is a great scene where the gods and goddesses of Olympus taunt Jupiter by exposing his womanising adventures; in particular, Minerva sings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Pour séduire Alcmène la fière, tu pris les traits de son mari! Je sais bien des femmes sur terre pour qui ça n’eût pas réussi!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (In order to &lt;em&gt;seduce&lt;/em&gt; proud Alcmene, you took the appearance of her husband! I know many women on Earth for whom this would not have worked!). (Words by Hector Crémieux).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a humorous retelling of the origin myth of Hercules. You are supposed to know that; or, to be honest, forty years ago well-educated Eastern European teen-agers were supposed to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do we have here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Greek myth, this is a bog-standard matter-of-fact run-of-the-mill trick commonly used by gods to enjoy the favors of mortal women. Nothing special, tricked you! Note that the main conflict in the life of Hercules arises from the jealousy of Zeus's wife Hera, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; from any resentment on the part of Alcmene or her husband Amphytrion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 19th century Paris, this was absolutely perfectly acceptable in a comic opera; the public was supposed to &lt;em&gt;laugh&lt;/em&gt; at the couplets describing Jupiter's (actually, of course, Zeus's, but for reasons French people always used the names of the Roman gods when speaking of Greek gods) amorous encounters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But were the story set in the world of &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt;, this would not work as light entertainment &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, given that at the bottom of it Zeus has sex with Alcmene without her informed consent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Offenbach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques Offenbach&lt;/a&gt; was a famous French composer of comic operas and not only. In Europe he is well-known, and his operas are regularly shown.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus_in_the_Underworld&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orphée aux Enfers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a splendid comic opera. It has the distinction of featuring Public Opinion as a singing character, and it is the source of the best known tune for the French &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-can&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can-can&lt;/a&gt;, which is featured in two separate scenes! (The tune, not the dance. The goddesses don't do the can-can.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcmene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alcmene&lt;/a&gt;, wife of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphitryon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amphytrion&lt;/a&gt;, is of course the mortal mother of Hercules.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T20:25:54.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2018-04-20T08:47:35.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6017/809&quot;&gt;Answer by Secespitus&lt;/a&gt; is good. I just write mine to show it in as simple way as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1028/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xkcd.com/1028/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people do not understand you and that causes answers to be unsatisfactory to you, &lt;strong&gt;do not repeat&lt;/strong&gt; important facts. Clearly, this is pointless, and you already seem to see that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to do, is to &lt;strong&gt;find another way to ask&lt;/strong&gt;, one that will be easier to understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T08:47:35.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6026" CreationDate="2018-04-20T14:36:03.640" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a dilemma I've seen, both in other people's posts and in mine. Lots of people come up with lots of great, different ideas for solutions to different parts of the problem. But since no one person summarizes all of these subsets into one perfect solution, and no-one's solution &quot;fragment&quot; seems better than another, I feel uncomfortable up/downvoting or accepting any one person's individual solution. Solutions, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoping I won't need to use your techniques for this post :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T16:46:45.173" Title="Pick 'n mix: How to fix" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6024" CreationDate="2018-04-20T14:50:27.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory those are signs of a bad questions and bad answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should have clear criteria for what makes an answer better than another answer. And answers should answer the &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; answer. If it's only possible to answer part of the problem in a reasonable answer the question is too broad and should be temporarily put on hold as such to narrow down the scope sufficiently so that it can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice it might be the case that some people use different wordings or approaches to solve something. In those cases both answers may be valid and ideally there are some criteria that will make sure that one could theoretically decide somewhat objectively which answer is better - but both are good, both are &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; and could for example solve the problem as posed in the question. If you hover over the upvote button you can see that it says (emphasis mine) &quot;This question shows research effort; &lt;strong&gt;it is useful and clear&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; -&gt; that means all valid, useful and clear answers would deserve an upvote. Other answers don't necessarily deserve downvotes as long as they are not unclear, don't show any effort or are simply not useful. There is quite a big gray area here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore there are different styles of writing. My posts tend to be relatively long and many people prefer shorter answers, therefore you might sometimes find that people have similar ideas but pose them in a more succinct way in their own words. That's okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About accepting an answer you might want to read my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5292/28789&quot;&gt;Is it better to accept an answer that's not quite what you were looking for or leave a question unanswered?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing about accepting an answer is that it is totally, completely, absolutely only up to you to decide whether something was helpful. You can decide when and what to accept or nothing at all if nothing was quite the answer you were looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people will start a Community Wiki if they feel that there are lots of different approaches or they want to outline which parts they used and what they modified. Community Wikis are a difficult topic though. The original idea was to make it easier to edit stuff, but then they came up with the option of suggesting edits and nowadays you will rarely find community wikis. There are a few usecases, but in general it's not the best way to go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote useful stuff, downvote stuff that's not useful, accept stuff that helped you (if you truly think it was helpful and solved your complete problem), place a bounty with an explanation that you need a &lt;em&gt;canonical answer&lt;/em&gt; that solves all problems with one coherent approach if you think there are only some small parts missing in each answer (that is still valid; if it's not valid flag it as &quot;Not an answer&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be something someone forgets. The more people look at something the better something becomes. Here on WorldBuilding there is often not the &quot;one true answer&quot;, but many different approaches and therefore having multiple answers that go in different directions is quite normal. Plus, someone will always have a comment with stuff that the original answerer forgot. Sometimes it should be edited into the answer, sometimes it's just a little &quot;nice-to-know&quot; - but in the end nothing is ever truly perfect and complete. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;80% is often good enough.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T14:50:27.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6024" CreationDate="2018-04-20T16:46:45.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to happen a lot on Worldbuilding SE. It certainly seems to happen a fair bit to me, particularly about acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Secespitus in that especially on its own, &lt;strong&gt;multiple valid answers isn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; a sign that the question is poorly formed.&lt;/strong&gt; It &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be one hint towards that, but it might just as well simply be a sign that there are many different solutions to the problem in the question, each with its own set of trade-offs, or answers bring up different points that are all worthy of consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That's one situation in which I feel that accepting any single answer might not be the best choice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, just vote up the answers that you like, and hold off on accepting any one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not every question needs to have an accepted answer.&lt;/strong&gt; Of the 44 questions I myself have asked on the site to date, only 17 have an accepted answer. However, many more of those have (often multiple) answers that I have voted up. Sometimes there's a single clearly &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;most useful&lt;/em&gt; answer, but far more often, at least to me, it's the combination of multiple answers which ultimately provides the solution. &lt;em&gt;And that's fine!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T16:46:45.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-21T13:35:50.300" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110006/are-nuclear-propelled-shotgun-slugs-viable&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I flagged the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110006/are-nuclear-propelled-shotgun-slugs-viable#comment334932_110006&quot;&gt;following comment&lt;/a&gt; for being an Answer in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actually, I don´t agree with most of the answers. This is the basic principle of a handgrenade. Most SAM´s are working on the same principle. I don´t see why a space-anti-ship-missile should not do this in an up scaled nuclear version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This flag was declined. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comments are not to post answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with answers, you should downvote and optionally create an opposing answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5245/70674&quot;&gt;Comments on the question trump the way answers are sorted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can't downvote this comment&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38344" LastEditorUserId="38344" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T14:37:47.257" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T12:18:54.950" Title="Why was this comment flag declined?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2018-04-21T18:21:41.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the engineering of a specific item that could have been part of any world &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The engineering of a specific item that is part of the setting of the world is Worldbuilding.  That it might be part of any world simply makes it more useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(and, by definition, appeared to be of Earth since no other conditions were given).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that the world not be a representation of our current Earth.  While we often talk about worlds as if they were planets being built, the site is broader than that.  We help authors (of books, screenplays, games, etc.) to build fictional settings or worlds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that literal world building is part of our scope.  But it's not all of our scope.  We have many questions where it's only one detail in the world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;because asking to engineer an object outside of the conditions of a fictional world is, to me, simply an &quot;historical fact about the real world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  That's a very aggressive interpretation.  First, there is no evidence that this is outside a fictional world.  The tone of the question screams author at me, because real people do not need to create traps that last multiple generations.  They particularly don't need to create traps hundreds of years ago that are still in operation today.  That's inherently part of a fictional world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an item that didn't exist historically is not a historical fact about the real world.  Historical facts about the real world are things that actually existed or happened.  E.g. &quot;How were real murder holes built?&quot;  However, &quot;How should murder holes have been built, given what we know now?&quot; is a different, on-topic question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that this question is fine.  It could be considered Too Broad for example.  But it's not off-topic.  I don't even see it as particularly borderline.  Compare to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3429/2113&quot;&gt;How might modern humans leave a message for 50,000 years?&lt;/a&gt;  Same basic problem.  Someone wants to do something in a way that will last through the ages.  So something that was easy becomes complicated through the need to make it last.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T18:21:41.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6028" CreationDate="2018-04-22T07:13:09.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is certainly true that the primary (and, idealy, only) purpose for comments is to request clarification for either a question or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality is somewhat more opaque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are used for all kinds of things.  The least valuable are playful banter and flat-out arguing.  The most valuable are for questions and &lt;em&gt;insight.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And insight is no small thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment you're referencing could be interpreted as the basis for an answer, but frankly, it isn't a direct answer.  It is insight, which the OP may or may not use to improve their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you will occasionally see comments used for a complete answer.  I've never personally flagged a comment.  I consider them part of the discussion (and only an actual issue of some or all of that conversation becomes so long that it detracts from the question or answer, that's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; is for).  However, on rare occasion I've left a comment that points out another is an answer, a good one, and maybe the comment author should post it as such.  Sometimes they do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sometimes they don't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?  Sometimes the commentor hasn't the time to create a full answer.  A lot of us are having fun on this site in the small hours between work, family, and other comittments.  We have what we hope is &lt;em&gt;valuable insight,&lt;/em&gt; and occasionally that's all we have the time to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the commentor wants the OP to be aware of an alternative, but simply doesn't want the rep, or would prefer not to detract from existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the commentor is providing a complete answer that's too short for the answer section, leaving only comments as an option.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it important?  Frankly, no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This SE site is much better at avoiding answers-in-comments than others (you should visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/246783/jbh&quot;&gt;English.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ELL.SE&lt;/a&gt;, where answers are regularly posted to comments before a first answer is even posted).  But, to be honest, the interaction is just as valuable to the OP as the answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, this perception doesn't come without an obligation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's one that I must admit I have occasionally failed.  Comments should always be civil, courteous, and supportive.  Too often commentors take serious swipes at questions and answers alike, as if the author of said Qs and As should magically have the education, experience, and insight those who swipe have themselves.  I've only occasionally slapped someone on the hand for being, shall we say, just a tad too blunt - but only occasionally, because (a) I've thrown a few of those stones myself and (b) I frankly don't want to jeopardize what good reputation I may have simply to reprimand the behavior of another.  Perhaps (b) is very selfish of me, but I'm human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would like to point out that you can flag a comment for being rude.  Perhaps I should take more advantage of that.  Gratefully, I don't think rudness is rampant on this site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anyway, in the long run...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that comment flagging should err on the side of mercy.  Occasionally reserved for the truly obnoxious, but perhaps more often for cleaning up very lengthy comment chains by having the mods clean out the playful banter and not-on-point arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even that goes against my personal freedom-of-speech sentiment.  Yes, SE is a private organization and that freedom is not intrinsically protected, but it's a part of me nonetheless, and who am I to be judge and jury over a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about it.  If suffering imperfect comments is the worst thing that happens to you in your life, you're doing great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T07:13:09.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6034" CreationDate="2018-04-23T18:58:34.850" Score="7" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember that the site lets you vote about 40 times over the course of a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I logged in, voted the answers on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110152/living-biological-boats-jasconius/110205#110205&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, about 9 votes and just a few more later... probably less than 15 votes. Then the site said I had to wait about 11 hours to vote again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it? Does the site consider my votes as spam? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48632" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T19:08:58.480" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:44:25.487" Title="Why do I have so few votes?" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6033" CreationDate="2018-04-23T19:04:51.733" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/48632/ekaen?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt; shows that you have voted 34 times today as of writing this. You can see this in the lower right hand corner on the desktop version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about votes is that you don't necessarily always have 40 votes. To cite for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/113513/352819&quot;&gt;Daily vote limit reached on 37 votes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5212/what-are-the-limits-on-how-i-can-cast-change-and-retract-votes&quot;&gt;limit of 30 all-purpose votes per day and 10 question-only votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky part is that you have to spend your questions-only votes first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are special votes that can only be used to upvote questions and these have to be used first if you want to have a total of 40 votes on any day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that you might be in a different timezone making your personal day different from the UTC day so that what you define as &amp;quot;yesterday evening&amp;quot; could still be counting for &amp;quot;today&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this specific case you just have used up all your general-purpose votes today and as you upvoted mainly answers you don't have the full amount of 10 question upvotes for today. Today your maximum seems to be 34.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:44:25.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6036" CreationDate="2018-04-23T23:54:16.630" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question here that was receiving views and votes from the hot list and then it stopped. Marked as off topic although 12 people up voted it but it only took 5 to close it. I'm not complaining I just want to know if getting put on hold kicks you out of the hot list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110241/could-a-person-float-in-the-air-in-a-bubble-revised&quot;&gt;Could a person float in the air in a bubble? revised&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T00:07:57.063" Title="Can a popular question be kicked off the hot network question list?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6035" CreationDate="2018-04-24T00:07:57.063" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/56541&quot;&gt;Closed questions are excluded&lt;/a&gt; from the hot network questions list. This means that, yes, if a hot question gets put on hold, it will be removed from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T00:07:57.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6052" CreationDate="2018-04-24T15:36:20.313" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've reviewed a lot of first questions, late questions, and low-quality questions from the ubiquitous &lt;code&gt;user######&lt;/code&gt; class of users &amp;mdash; people who use the Stack Exchange app on their cell phone during a bored moment on a bus to find an (apparently) random question on any of the SE sites and then swoop in with the usual 1-line low quality answer, never to be seen again.  Said people pretty much...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never take the tour,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never visit the help center,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never read the question (answering only the question title),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't give a hill of steaming decomposing beans about SE culture or etiquette.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfair to suggest that their influence on our site is exhausting because I generally only spend 10-20 minutes a day in the queues, but I've found myself groaning, &quot;oh, man... another putz...&quot; a bit more frequently.  This may be because I'm focusing on these types of questions in the queues, but like so many in our world today, I'm willing to blame someone else for my pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for Glarnak to save us from people who use the Stack Exchange app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T13:07:59.527" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T17:35:18.800" Title="Can Glarnak save us from the Stack Exchange app?" Tags="|discussion|reviews|new-users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6038" CreationDate="2018-04-24T16:03:53.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kinda think you're putting too much thought and effort into it. Those answers are annoying, but also really simple to deal with.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I see there being two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read the questions one line, roll your eyes, hit delete, move on. If it looks like they at least put a little thought in, maybe put a standard welcome text into a notepad document to be copied and pasted. &lt;strong&gt;You should never take longer to try to help them than they took to make the answer in the first place.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just skip that queue. It's really not worth it. If the answer is that bad someone else will take care of it. Just let it go. It's just not something worth stressing about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T16:03:53.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6038" CreationDate="2018-04-24T16:56:22.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Glarnak is not almighty - banning the StackExchange App won't stop crap from being posted&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will still be &lt;code&gt;user#####&lt;/code&gt; that don't give a damn and come in from the normal website for example. It's not the Apps fault that people don't like reading rules. And sometimes people who start posting crap evolve to become valuable contributors in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Try a few canned comments&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canned comments sometimes look very much like a bot just wrote something, which is why I try to slightly vary them from time to time, but you might want to have a look at some discussion that give you some templates, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/248213/352819&quot;&gt;Repository of useful pro-forma comments&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5255/28789&quot;&gt;Are there any rules or a specific format for “Welcome to WorldBuilding!” comments?&lt;/a&gt; (Disclosure: this is my post). Or look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AskUbuntu/ProFormaComments/blob/master/comments.jsonp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GitHub Repo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even a StackApp that you can use to help you that is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just copy-paste them and maybe change the name or so and you are good to go. The more you feel like the OP actually &lt;em&gt;tried&lt;/em&gt; and simply failed because of how different StackExchange is compared to other forums the more you might want to adapt such comments to give useful and specific advice that is specifically geared towards their case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course there are also a couple of canned comments in the normal review UI, but I often don't feel like they are too helpful for a new user and you might want to have some of your own for specific cases that you feel especially exhausting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people won't respond, most people won't take the tour - but some will do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T16:56:22.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T21:11:44.927" Score="9" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is in regard to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/110391/6986&quot;&gt;Shapes for an Infinite Animal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider the question to be lacking some critical criteria to be objectively answerable with a &quot;best&quot; answer, and commented as such (after noting that the question had close votes without explanation). The question was later put on hold for being &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH tagged me in a comment and, when I investigated, I noticed the question had been reopened. Further, the question is halfway to being closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I vote again, I would like to bring the discussion to the larger community so we don't end up treating it like a tennis ball between the close and reopen queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T08:08:24.753" Title="Consensus for Shapes for an Infinite Animal" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6041" CreationDate="2018-04-24T21:52:19.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We really need to coalesce the site's opinion of what the VTC reasons mean into a place we can easily direct people to&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, of course, means we need well coalesced descriptions.  Right now we need to visit a fair number of Meta discussions, most of which don't have a clear consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We all agree that the nature of our site means most questions have some amount of Primarily Opinion-Based (POB) context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People are, if you will all forgive me, lemmings.  I've done this myself.  Sometimes we just follow the crowd, and all it takes is one authoritative statement in the comments justifying a VTC from someone with more than 10K rep and, well, the question gets closed very quickly after that.  Frankly, this question is a stellar example.  Frostfyre recommended closure and it quickly closed.  I recommended reopening and it quickly reopened.  &lt;em&gt;(Maybe we need to raise the rep level for casting votes...)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few questions couldn't be improved with more criteria.  Especially those that are basically idea-generating questions (can this be done?  What do you think?  Is this plausible?)  But how much criteria is necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what I don't know, and why I raised my comment in the question.  Criteria exists.  In my opinion (which is only one of many), enough to rationalize a &quot;best&quot; answer.  But this doesn't invalidate Frostfyre's concern.  To him, there wasn't enough criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one draw the line?  How little criteria justifies closure and how much justifies reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obviously, if there is no criteria the question should be closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how do we judge the quality of the criteria?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By a simple count?  (The linked question has 4 restrictions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the relation to a stated goal? (IMO that reduces the count to 3 because the expectation of a single head has nothing to do with the OP's desire to have surface mobility despite the nature of the beast).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By how well the OP has predesposed him/herself to an answer? (that might reduce the criteria list to 2 because &quot;vulnerability&quot; isn't part of the background discussion, making it an ambiguous restriction).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm personally predesposed to avoiding POB VTC if any criteria have been proposed, whether I believe there's sufficient criteria to make the best answer obvious or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And it's worth pointing out that part of the problem is we're trying to read the OP's mind.  Whether or not I think there's sufficient info to judge a best-answer really isn't the issue because I'm not the one making the choice.  It's whether or not I think the OP can, and there's only so much mind reading I can trust myself to perform accurately.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T21:52:19.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T02:12:57.233" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about asking how I can make shotguns practical in the military outside of a military police context but I think it might be a bit overly broad. Would you agree with this assessment and if so is there some way to narrow it down a bit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46405" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T07:09:43.277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T07:09:43.277" Title="Is &quot;How to make shotguns practical again&quot; on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-25T07:08:34.903" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6041" CreationDate="2018-04-25T08:21:11.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The problem about &amp;quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;quot; is that the criteria for what defines POB depend on the person casting the vote - it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147#5147&quot;&gt;big blurry region&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems I specifically see with this question is that it states the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;organism&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;an individual entity that exhibits the properties of life&amp;quot; where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Biology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;properties of life&lt;/a&gt; would be things like being composed of one or more cells, being able to grow, being able to reproduce, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;physically infinite: we are getting to problems with being able to judge an infinitely large organism already&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lived for an infinite time: there are some creatures that could theoretically be classified as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immortal&lt;/a&gt;, so this point seems to be somewhat valid, though there are still questions about diseases and such&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not &amp;quot;too vulnerable&amp;quot;: what exactly is &amp;quot;too vulnerable&amp;quot;? The question states that it should not be &amp;quot;inifinitely small&amp;quot;, but how small is too small and how big is big enough? What kinds of threats are there that this creature must survive? The question states that it would be vulnerable to attack, but what kind of attack would be viewed as critical for this &lt;em&gt;infinitely large&lt;/em&gt; creature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;room for people, not cutting off parts of the whole infinite space... my knowledge of different definitions of infinity is not good enough to talk about this stuff, but if there are mathematical tricks involved that challenge certain definitions then we are getting into problems with the normal definitions for &amp;quot;organism&amp;quot; again&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should have only one head: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110406/28789&quot;&gt;currently highest voted answer&lt;/a&gt; uses fungus as a basis and nobody downvoted it for a lack of one of the criteria; or we have answers that go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110392/28789&quot;&gt;looks like a head&lt;/a&gt; instead of a real &lt;em&gt;biological&lt;/em&gt; head; there are some good discussions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110411/28789&quot;&gt;this specific problem&lt;/a&gt;, but some answers seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110409/28789&quot;&gt;extremely vague&lt;/a&gt; and not quite fulfilling the requirements of for example &amp;quot;not infinitely small&amp;quot;, but there are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110408/28789&quot;&gt;purely mathematical answers&lt;/a&gt; that don't seem to have anything to do with defining &amp;quot;organism&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;living&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;head&amp;quot; and sometimes people just more or less ignore that having &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; head is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/110397/28789&quot;&gt;requirement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I am going to be a bit lax with the physics of this world to allow for some basic functionalities&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; this basically tells me that everything goes because we are talking about mathematical definitions of infinity without regard for physics, but with the goal of having a biological organism that the OP defined as having lived infinitely long with an infinite size and exactly one head while not being too vulnerable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question looks to me like a philosophical discussion where each answer should provide its own set of definitions to make sure their version works. This wouldn't be a problem, but the OP at the same time has some criteria that apply to normal organisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently created &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6006/28789&quot;&gt;a list with some criteria for how I use close reasons&lt;/a&gt;, so let's go through them to see if something applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Too Broad&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;Writing a whole book for you is too much. I know what you want and I think it's theoretically on-topic from a content perspective (I can see that you are currently building your own fictional world), but it would take far too long to talk about all the details that are necessary to sufficiently answer your question. I need some more details so that I know what you want to focus on first - you can ask more questions later where you incorporate the details from previous questions. As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; states: &lt;em&gt;If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could probably be books about such a &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt;, as I feel like it's mostly a philosophical discussion, but the reason doesn't seem to fit. Writing a whole book to answer the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; would be overkill even if it could be taken as the basis of a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5994/28789&quot;&gt;A question is &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; if &lt;em&gt;every reasonable&lt;/em&gt; answer would be &lt;em&gt;equally&lt;/em&gt; valid.&lt;/a&gt; Giving you a bunch of ideas for you to choose the one that sounds coolest is not how this site works. I know what you want and theoretically this would be on-topic from a content perspective, but we need some criteria to vote which answers are &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;, which answers are &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; and which ones are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;. It's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147#5147&quot;&gt;big, blurry region&lt;/a&gt;, but personally I feel that these criteria are not yet clear.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for creature-design is valid and talking about stuff like immortality is fine, but I think that the answerer has to define all things &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;, like &amp;quot;What is a &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;What is an &lt;em&gt;organism&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot;. Every reasonable answer should provide such definitions or at least mention which definitions they are using. After that each answer seems to equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;POB fits in my eyes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP pointed to clear definitions for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;vulnerable&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;organism&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;head&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be convinced that the question is not POB, but currently it is. And the different answers that sometimes ignore some criteria while still being upvoted and not discussed as not fitting are an indicator of this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Unclear what you are asking&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;I have no idea what this is supposed to say. Either there is a big language barrier, the querent has misunderstood quite a few things about the topic he is asking about, there is no question or there are so many things missing from the description of the world that it feels to me like a random excerpt where too much is missing to make any meaningful attempts at answering the question. I don't know the situation, I don't know the goal - I just don't know how to help the querent yet.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand what the OP wants, there is no language barrier - the question is clear. One could argue that missing definitions should make me say that this question is &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, but I can see what the OP is trying to achieve so I wouldn't vote as &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, but as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Off-Topic&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;This is not about WorldBuilding (as defined in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;). You are for example asking about help with your story, about character actions, or about something completely different, like misunderstanding that there are multiple sites on the network and accidentally posting a question about programming languages on WorldBuilding, ... We can't help you here, you need to go to a different site on the network or for example to a forum to find the answer you are looking for.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't help you with open-ended discussions, but we could definitely talk about immortal or incredibly large creatures and I can definitely see the worldbuilding, so this doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted POB on the basis that I can't see how answers can be rated against each other if everyone is supposed to use his own &lt;em&gt;definitions&lt;/em&gt; for the criteria presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not mind readers. We can't know the definition the  OP uses, but we &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to know these definitions to rate answers against each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T08:21:11.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-26T08:44:58.967" Score="17" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11844/exactly-which-features-of-sff-ses-magnificent-theme-will-we-be-losing&quot;&gt;Exactly which features of SFF.SE's magnificent theme will we be losing?&lt;/a&gt; I want to ask which features WorldBuilding.SE will lose specifically. The reason I ask basically the same question here again is that I remember that WorldBuilding was often mentioned as one of the &quot;Cadillac&quot; sites with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design&quot;&gt;extensive design&lt;/a&gt; that will lose quite a bit more than many other sites. And there is already quite a lot that all the sites will lose. To cite the SFF post I linked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We will probably be losing our voting buttons, fave button, possibly our use of Orbitron font, and reduced color/header image support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details can be seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309349/left-nav-responsive-design-and-theming-next-steps?cb=1&quot;&gt;Meta.SE discussion &lt;em&gt;Left nav, responsive design, and theming next steps&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but I have the same questions as @CreationEdge on SFF.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we get a breakdown of what exactly we'll be losing? Or a time-frame on when we'll be able to see a development version of what we'll be losing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially a little comment in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/309430/352819&quot;&gt;answer from @JourneymanGeek&lt;/a&gt; prompted me to wonder about the changes that will be relevant for &lt;em&gt;this site&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;cough&lt;/em&gt; I know you guys will keep the worldbuilding robot, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will happen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3102/naming-our-robot?answertab=votes#tab-top&quot;&gt;Slartibotfast&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3201/naming-our-lady?answertab=votes#tab-top&quot;&gt;Pandora&lt;/a&gt; (also known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-brutal-builder-5fbfbad08c2a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May Suthers&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T12:49:58.183" Title="What will we lose with the redesign?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:35:44.677" Score="10" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;With TrEs-2b's blessing, I propose the following be added to his Meta question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series?noredirect=1#comment17888_2797&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;, for the purpose of helping OPs understand the minimum requirements for and expectations of a good Anatomically Correct question and providing guidelines for closure reviews.  Once community reviewed and approved by TrEs-2b, it will be added to the question and the question itself will serve as a common link for new AC posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proposed modifications would be best submitted as answers to this question to better allow the community to comment on and vote on the changes.  Comments to the question should only be used to request clarification of my intent, to express joy or disdain for the effort, or to participate in a comedic roast of my character.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 0.1 last edited 26 Apr 2018&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This version has been edited into TrEs-2b's question since April 27, 2018.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/em&gt; (AC) series of questions are a popular tradition on Worldbuilding.SE.  Their purpose is to invite site participants to consider how to describe fictional or mythological creatures from an evolutionary context with as much biological and behavioral realism as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the responsibility of the questioner to provide sufficient detail to specifically identify the creature in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generalizations such as &quot;Elves as commonly found in fantasy stories&quot; or &quot;vampires&quot; (without further clarification) are unacceptable and grounds for closing the question as &quot;Unclear what you're asking.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links to specific examples of the creature in question are encouraged, but may not be used alone.  A specific description of the creature is &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; or the question will again be closed as &quot;Unclear what you're asking.&quot;  An ambiguous or insufficient description may result in closure due to the question becoming &quot;Primarily opinion-based.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Images of the creature are always appreciated.  If possible, reduce large images to a width of 450 pixels and link the image to a larger version.  As with links, images may not be used alone.  A specific description is required to avoid closure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Creature descriptions should include important behavioral attributes and a clear physical description.  It is the questioner's responsibility to invent the creature and the privilege of participants to explain how that invention could be manifest with evolutionary believability.  To coin a phrase, We're willing to help, but we will not invent the creature and summon it into this world for you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question writing guide was developed long after the first AC question was asked.  While we encourage questioners to review earlier AC questions to better understand how to meet these requirements, the fact that some previously asked questions do not meet these expectations may not be used to justify a poor question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answer is expected to be the one that provides the greatest detail, the greatest creativity, and the greatest capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T18:10:53.120" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T18:10:53.120" Title="Proposed addition to &quot;Anatomically Correct&quot; to establish Q quality expectations for the series" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6056" CreationDate="2018-04-27T20:47:14.087" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110639/how-to-prevent-wikipedias-desire-for-donations-in-bitcoins-from-enslaving-the-w?noredirect=1#comment337521_110639&quot;&gt;How to prevent Wikipedia&amp;#39;s desire for donations in Bitcoins from enslaving the world&lt;/a&gt;.  I was surprised that the upvote-vs-downvote ratio is 50%.  I've never seen that before.  So I posted a comment asking downvoters to help me understand their issues so that I could either modify or delete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only respondant was AlexP.  He pointed out some areas that he felt did not permit him to sufficiently suspend his disbelief, which I repaired.  Then he pointed out that it couldn't be enough.  Due to his background, the pretext of the question simply wasn't believable to him and therefore, downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led to a brief exchange (see the comments to the questions for that exchange) leading to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should an individual's inability to suspend their disbelief justify a down vote?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suspension of disbelief is a choice, not an emotion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not a question favors suspension of disbelief seems independent of whether or not it's a good question.  It suggests that part of our duty is to judge whether or not a story ideas is &quot;worthy.&quot;  That's subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The principal use of up/down voting will forever be a popularity contest, despite the fact that they were never intended to be so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downvote rollover states, &lt;code&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear and not useful&lt;/code&gt;.  The upvote rollover states, &lt;code&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear&lt;/code&gt;.  Those statements make more sense for a programming question than they do a creative question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know the community's mind about this.  I've never once downvoted simply because I felt the pretext of the question would not permit me to suspend my disbelief.  As I think about it, my education makes some pretexts harder to believe than others, but does that mean the pretext wouldn't be enjoyed by others (probably many others?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to make a short question long, should up/down voting only reflect our belief that the question is well asked, or should it also or rather reflect our belief that the question is unworthy to be asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All the while knowing perfectly well that up/down voting will always be entirely subjective and ultimately a popularity vote.  Remember, this whole thing started because I thought it unusual to see a 50% up/down count with at least a dozen votes in play.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T15:10:24.763" Title="To what extent should my personal failure to suspend my disbelief justify a downvote?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|up-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6047" CreationDate="2018-04-27T21:32:31.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Personally I'd say anybody is free to downvote stuff he doesn't &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; - this can mean badly written, badly researched and topics you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't want to have on the site; &lt;em&gt;Suspension of Disbelief&lt;/em&gt; is likely more ofen encountered when reading in-character questions making them more difficult to be well received&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had some discussions about more difficult topics, such as &lt;em&gt;brutally torturing people&lt;/em&gt;, about &lt;em&gt;different methods to kill people&lt;/em&gt;, about &lt;em&gt;methods to create a government that is a brutal dictatorship&lt;/em&gt; and lots of other topics that, while they are on-topic, might still not really leave you with a nice feeling of &quot;This is what I want to see and read when I am on this site.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I think the standard tooltips on the voting buttons about a question being well researched and useful are only two things that you might want to take into consideration - the other being that you simply don't like the question and don't want to see it on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case some people might have felt that calling out Wikipedia as a brainwashing future company might not really be a nice thing to do. &lt;em&gt;Facebook&lt;/em&gt; wanted to prevent the world from being consumed by an Eldritch Abomination - your question reads at first a bit like libel. Not saying it is, just saying it reads a bit like it and some people might not take kindly to this. After all we are here because we want to share knowledge, so you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have hit a sensitive spot there for some people. Yes, I see your message at the end of the post - but many people might not scroll that far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is that in-character questions are a strange two-edged sword. Sometimes they work incredibly great - and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110707/we-are-the-ai-singularity-tell-us-human-tell-us-how-to-pacify-you&quot;&gt;sometimes your nice question turns out to be everything else but well received&lt;/a&gt;. You have a bit of in-character speech, but not too much - maybe you have just hit the 50% ratio of people thinking it's a good rate of in-character and people thinking it's too much? Maybe some people don't like in-character questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People should be able to vote however they see fit. If you like a question and think &quot;That's a great question, because it's well-researched.&quot; or you think &quot;That's a great question, because it's the kind of question I like to read.&quot; then by all means upvote - and if you simply don't want to see this kind of question then by all means downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is not a call to go ahead and simply downvote all questions that are not your favourite tags - I am talking about stuff you find truly &lt;em&gt;aweful&lt;/em&gt; to read (for example I didn't downvote the linked AI question, but I was close to that; it reminded me of a certain troll we've had on this site some time ago) or for questions you just feel very, very &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; reading on the frontpage alone (torture, killing, rape, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that a question is really bad because there is no way you could possibly stretch your suspension of disbelief so far, for example because you are a computer guy and someone is talking about &lt;em&gt;deleting the internet&lt;/em&gt; or something like that then this seems to fall into the classic &lt;em&gt;no research&lt;/em&gt; category. Imagine I said &quot;Just imagine for a moment that all atoms in you body were replaced by molecules&quot; - could you really say this is a well-researched question when I didn't even realize that molecules are made up of atoms and that this statement &lt;em&gt;simply doesn't make any sense&lt;/em&gt;? Depending on the people who see such a question it might immediately get voted into oblivion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you are just in bad luck and hit the wrong side for some people. Popularity is a weird thing and never seems to work quite the way you thought it would work. Maybe people didn't like the style of your question, maybe people didn't like your topic, maybe people didn't like your phrasing, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all &quot;Suspension of Disbelief&quot; is a combination of how well an author can convey his world to me through his writing and in regards to the topic the question is about. And that is incredibly subjective and depends on style, topic and my personal knowledge in the specific field. If someone says they downvote because they couldn't suspend their disbelief far enough then in my personal opinion they just haven't looked at the &lt;em&gt;real reason&lt;/em&gt; - style, phrasing, topic, ... - and they are just using one of the standard reasons for downvoting. They also might be &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; critical if they can't outright say that it was your style or topic, but that it was something &lt;em&gt;intangible&lt;/em&gt; like their &lt;em&gt;Suspension of Disbelief&lt;/em&gt;. I wouldn't do it, but if others want to have such high standards then okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that &quot;Suspension of Disbelief&quot; is a phrasing more often used when you encounter something that is written in a fictional style, as in that moment we are changing from reading a plain question and being somewhat &lt;em&gt;scientific&lt;/em&gt; in our answering/asking mode to reading a fictional work for a moment - that's probably what makes in-character questions so extremely weird as you have to be a really good author and you have to find the right crowd when posting. Some people might use different measurements when reading in-character questions opposed to out-of-character questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading a neutral question you are not worried about the &quot;Suspension of Disbelief&quot; - that's the authors job at a later point. But when reading a story you automatically have to &quot;Suspend your Disbelief&quot; in order to be part of the world and you have to interpret that world to understand the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I liked your style. Don't worry too much about it. Bad luck, it will be better next time. (Probably... maybe...?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T21:32:31.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6050" CreationDate="2018-04-27T22:20:35.907" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/110667/28789&quot;&gt;How can I use a potential invasion to further my political power?&lt;/a&gt;, which, granted, isn't a fantastic question, even after my edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right after I asked it, I got a -1, and comments that it was unclear, so I edited, cut down unnecessary information, and added an explicit question. Now the question has +10 and multiple voted answers. Now I know that just because a question has votes/answers doesn't make it good &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5932/questions-with-multiple-answers-but-still-flagged-as-off-topic-too-broad-or-do&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5609/why-are-questions-with-multiple-answers-off-topic&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what it does do is make me confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally when I get push-back on my questions, I try to iterate. Read the &quot;How to ask&quot; guide for the site, read other questions, and do more research. But with this question I honestly don't know what I could do better. Besides of course &quot;Speak better words&quot;/&quot;communicate &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which while true, aren't exactly helpful pieces of feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5928/why-was-my-question-about-figuring-out-physical-differences-between-fantasy-race&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4943/what-should-i-add-to-my-question-to-make-it-not-too-broad&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but the answers to both of them are pretty specific to the questions which are asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand the common SE criticism &quot;this question doesn't have a single, absolutely correct answer&quot;/&quot;there are too many possible good answers&quot;. I also don't really understand how that applies on this site specifically. Considering my question was actually based directly off of highly voted similarly tagged questions such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71877/how-can-i-build-a-door-to-repel-a-horde-of-zombies&quot;&gt;How can I build a door to repel a horde of zombies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49237/conquering-a-metropolis-with-near-zero-own-casualties&quot;&gt;Conquering a Metropolis with near-zero own casualties&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/56010/why-would-a-country-make-a-declaration-of-war-instead-of-just-invading&quot;&gt;Why would a country make a declaration of war instead of just invading?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which are still open, I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly is considered &quot;on topic&quot; and &quot;answerable&quot; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically addressing my question and the &quot;too broad&quot; hold. To me, and obviously I'm biased, there is one, clear, question here. &quot;Given X situation, what action, or tightly coupled series of actions can I take to effect Y change in a fairly short amount of time.&quot;. While there are many possible answers, I don't think the number of interpretations of the question are so broad as to make it unanswerable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37448" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T09:06:00.040" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T09:06:00.040" Title="How to fix &quot;Unclear What You're Asking&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6049" CreationDate="2018-04-28T01:35:03.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thanks for bringing this to Meta, Devon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, and this is important, this site hasn't existed for a super long time.  The rules of even a year ago are not the rules of today.  Consequently, it's tempting to point to past questions and use them as rationalization for today's question.  Sadly, that's not very efficient here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's why it's important to bring questions to Meta.  The site does have a difficult time balancing creative fiction with reality science, but it has been slowly narrowing its focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Specific&quot; is a word you really want to know&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the single greatest challenge on this site is that the Stack Exchange model is one-specific-question-one-specific-best-answer.  In most cases that's easy to see.  I'm writing software using XYZ language, here's my example, here's my expected output, it's not working, what am I doing wrong?  Answer: you're missing a semicolon over there.  Very specific in, very specific out.  Answer quality is very easy to judge (semicolon?  you need a colon!  Here's the link to the spec!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creativity, however, rebels against the specific (especially if you think you'll be giving up story details that someone else could steal).  However, without specific details, you'll get answers that are all over the map, and while that sounds like a plus for you, one of the basic purposes of Stack Exchange is to create a library of useful answers for people in the future &amp;mdash; and a question that cannot lead to a specic answer is the very opposite of what they're tying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we want to help you with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to help you develop a consistent and creative world.  Such a world is reusable.  In other words, it could be used to write many stories.  We'll help you design a specific weapon or explain the color of your atmosphere.  We'll focus on a village or help you with a galactic empire of bazillions.  What's important is that no aspect of the world is intrinsic to a story.  Thus, we love questions about the nature of a planet (ecology, biology, physics, chemistry, and we adore anything having to do with orbits).  Once this world is created, you, the author, are free to populate it with circumstances: the basis of stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we don't want to help you with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to help you tell your story.  In other words, we're happy to help you develop a government, we're less happy figuring out how that government would react to an event, and we want nothing to do with &quot;what would my government do next?&quot;  Change &quot;government&quot; to &quot;character&quot; and we generally don't want anything to do with it at all because, generally, no one character is independent of a story from a worldbuilding point of view.  (An example of an exception to this would be gods.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We will also answer questions about how to use the rules of your world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gray area with this is how unspecified people or groups would solve a problem having to do with the rules of the world.  For example, given that we have tech level X and government Y trying to affect people in way C, what can C do to overcome their dilemma?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably noticed that the formula I just described feels a lot like your question &amp;mdash; except that your question wasn't about unspecified people, it was about specific people &amp;mdash; characters... aka, storybuilding.  Remember, we want to answer questions that are independent of the story.  How does C react given A or B is (mostly) independent of the story because anyone could be C.  But the moment C is a specific character that isn't a rule of the world by him/her self (e.g., a god), we're telling a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't answer questions like, &quot;what should I do next with my story?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what I just said is the problem.  Remember, we're not here to help you write your story.  We're here to help you build a consistent world wherein your story can take place.  Creating &quot;test environments&quot; (how would C solve the problem given A and B) helps to refine your world... and may also help you slip some storybuilding past us on the down-low.  An example would be, how would the average citizen protect themselves against Roman-era government aggression in public spaces?  But the moment you ask, what should Brutus do to keep Ceaser from shanking him in the Senate?  You're out of bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aaaaaannnnd... we're not perfect&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to make matters worse, whether or not a naturally off-topic question gets through our patrols depends completely on who sees it, how that individual is perceived by our community, and what they decide to do about it, if anything.  We're not perfect, we're all volunteers, and despite regular questions like this that help refine our understanding of what Worldbuilding.SE should be, sometimes the mix doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the problem with participating on what is arguably the most creative and flexible Stack Exchange site on the planet.  Sometimes, the rules are little more than whisps of clouds that look suspiciously like a line from time to time: well defined at the moment, and blown into the aether the next.  It's actually a fun ride, but it's not always for the weak of heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Welcome aboard!  Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T01:35:03.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6049" CreationDate="2018-04-28T09:04:24.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You have a little misconception - your question was not temporarily put on hold as &amp;quot;Too Broad&amp;quot; as you state in the body of your question, but as &amp;quot;Unclear what you are asking&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the majority of the people who voted to close your question didn't know what to do with your question. Maybe people didn't understand how your country is structured. You state that you want to gain a position of &lt;em&gt;actual power&lt;/em&gt; - but what would you have to achieve for this? Kill one person that has the actual power? Kill a council of three or four? A dozen? You state that beheadings don't go well with your image - but how many would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also state that you see yourcountry is &lt;em&gt;ripe for industrial revolution&lt;/em&gt; - that's not really how the industrial revolution worked. It's simply a thing of happening or not because your people want to have a better live. There is no switch you could use to start the industrial revolution. Maybe this was part of the confusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your considerations make it look like you are interested in an external solution to your problem, while the rest of your text read as if you want an internal solution. Which is it? Also, do you have any allies outside of the government?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you open to new forms of government?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does your sister have to do with all of this? Is she supposed to play an important role? Does she want power, too? Do you want to get rid of her without angering the folk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have written an answer where I state &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6006/28789&quot;&gt;my personal view on closure reasons&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Unclear what you are asking&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;I have no idea what this is supposed to say. Either there is a big language barrier, the querent has misunderstood quite a few things about the topic he is asking about, there is no question or there are so many things missing from the description of the world that it feels to me like a random excerpt where too much is missing to make any meaningful attempts at answering the question. I don't know the situation, I don't know the goal - I just don't know how to help the querent yet.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe people felt like they couldn't help you in the current state of the question? I personally wouldn't say so (in fact I have voted to reopen the question), but this is always a bit subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also want to read my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6048/28789&quot;&gt;To what extent should my personal failure to suspend my disbelief justify a downvote?&lt;/a&gt; to see some of my thoughts about in-character questions. They are a weird double-edged sword that sometimes works incredibly good and sometimes raises the bar incredibly high. Maybe you were just in bad luck and happened to get the wrong crowd to read your question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly you already have 3 reopen votes out of the five you need. It might be worth waiting a while to see what the community decides to do with the question. Reopenings can be slower than closures, weekends are always slower than weekdays. Look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/109957/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for example: it took a week for it to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T09:04:24.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6038" CreationDate="2018-04-28T17:35:18.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Nope&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glarnak will immediately be subsumed into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1&quot;&gt;movement&lt;/a&gt; to make Stack Exchange more welcoming.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, the problem isn't low quality posts.  The problem is that we aren't sufficiently welcoming of low quality posts.  Since Stack Exchange is dominated by white males and some of those who post &quot;low quality posts&quot; may be female or non-white, our lack of welcome is hurting diversity on the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of us may believe that more low quality posts are posted by white males than females or non-whites, so a lower focus on quality will just lead to more low quality posts and no more diversity.  But what do we know?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T17:35:18.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6047" CreationDate="2018-04-29T19:53:37.443" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I rarely downvote questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least I think I rarely do. (People who can look at site statistics, and know how to do it, might possibly know better, but &lt;em&gt;deep inside&lt;/em&gt; I believe that I rarely downvote questions.) The StackExchange network provides three ways for a user to register their dissatisfaction with a question: leave a short comment, vote to close, and downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I use them is as follows: if the question has some sort of fundamental flaw which should have been obvious to the inquirer, I used to leave a short comment, usually with a link to some illuminating web page, with the hope that the inquirer will see it, follow the link, and become illuminated; if the question is &lt;em&gt;technically unsuitable&lt;/em&gt; for the site, I vote to close; if the question is well-formed but not at all well thought, and I am in not so good mood, and it rubs me the wrong way, I downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of course fully aware that my reaction &lt;em&gt;could be wrong&lt;/em&gt;, and I find that being corrected for a faulty opinion increases the enjoyment of this site, and of StackExchange in general. I am also aware that StackExchange has recently posted a policy which frowns upon short illuminating comments. I won't do it any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are not all experts in all fields. I understand that. I also understand that crime movies don't actually show how detectives work in real life, I understand that most space operas rely on dodgy physics, I understand that in real life dramas are much more muted than in fiction. But. I do expect characters and situations to act in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude_(fiction)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;believable way&lt;/a&gt; and for actions to make sense in the universe described in the book or the movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this create a problem with fiction set in the real world? Not really. Good fiction &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imitates the real world&lt;/a&gt;, but the imitation does not need to be, and cannot be, completely faithful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I've got a little list&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;. Not only it is in the U.S.A. and not Russia, it is in &lt;em&gt;Florida&lt;/em&gt;, a province with a climate definitely not at all reminiscent of St. Petersburg. Yes, I know that there really is a town called St. Petersburg in Florida; nevertheless, I truly enjoyed the dateline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −0 = +1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wikipedia Foundation today announced a groundbreaking partnership with The Bitcoin Foundation to become the first global distributor of information to accept donations in Bitcoins.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, that's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;edia Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. Wiki&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;edia is just one of the projects of Wiki&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;edia Foundation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −1 = 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the Wikimedia Foundation need a partnership with the Bitcoin Foundation in order to accept bitcoins? People all over the world accept American dollars and yet they don't feel a need for a partnership with the American Federal Reserve. And &lt;em&gt;&quot;the first&quot;&lt;/em&gt; global distributor of information to accept bitcoins? Isn't there a rather famous Bay in Sweden which has accepted bitcoins for ages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −2 = −1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To facilitate the new donation system, The Bitcoin Foundation worked closely with the Wikipedia Foundation to incorporate a protocol layer within the open source Bitcoin software&lt;/em&gt; [for some purpose].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So basically the Bitcoin Foundation &lt;em&gt;changed the protocol&lt;/em&gt;, or in other words it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;forked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Bitcoin, and Wikimedia foolishly agreed to accept only New Bitcoin, a variant which (1) at first nobody uses, and (2) nobody in their right mind will ever use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −3 = −2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And who is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitcoin Foundation&lt;/a&gt; who is so important that it can single-handedly fork bitcoin &lt;em&gt;successfully&lt;/em&gt;? Aside from a bit of advocacy and lobbying, both concentrated in the Sole World Superpower of America, it doesn't appear to do much.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −4 = −3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;multiple implementations&lt;/em&gt; of a Bitcoin Network client. None of them is made by the Bitcoin Foundation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Core&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitcoin Core&lt;/a&gt;, the original client released by Satoshi Nakamoto, and maintained on GitHub by a large and active team led by Wladimir J. van der Laan -- who has nothing to do with the lawyers and lobbyists at the Bitcoin Foundation. This is the most widely used client; about three quarters of the nodes run Bitcoin Core.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Unlimited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitcoin Unlimited&lt;/a&gt;, maintain also on GitHub by Roger Ver and others. It supports large mining rigs; more than 10% of the clients run Bitcoin Unlimited.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And let's not forget &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_XT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitcoin XT&lt;/a&gt;, the last Mohican fighting the good fight for updating the protocol in order to allow for better scalability. (See? Even a protocol change which brings &lt;em&gt;real tangible benefits&lt;/em&gt; failed to propagate.) About 10% of the nodes (mostly, smaller nodes) run Bitcoin XT.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −5 = −4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The consequence is that Wikipedia now has a piece of its own programming running on each of the untold millions of ASIC mining hardware assemblies and, more importantly, video GPUs on the planet — and with it, the ability to incorporate subliminal imagery onto the screens of nearly every Bitcoin miner planetwide.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be the world's first and only &lt;em&gt;open source malware&lt;/em&gt; in the history of computing. It's &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt;. It's right there on GitHub for all to see. So Wikimedia (1) makes its own Bitcoin client, (2) puts it on GitHub or wherever (because it's &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt;), (3) includes some malware in it, (4) somehow convinces untold millions to download and install it, but (5) by Divine Dispensation nobody notices that it does nefarious things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −6 = −5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting up a piece of open-source malware signed &lt;em&gt;with their own name&lt;/em&gt; should definitely get Wikimedia Foundation a Darwin Award, Special Corporate Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#General_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;untold millions&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of users are actually about 6 million people worldwide, or roughly the population of Transylvania. OK, with their families they add up to the population of mighty Romania. Some world domination.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And their first task is to brainwash more people to devote their GPUs to Bitcoin mining for the purpose of donating to Wikipedia.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin mining on general purpose hardware doesn't produce any significant return of investment, that is assuming that by a miracle it somehow manages to cover the cost of electricity. Not to mention that most individual miners participate in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_pool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mining pools&lt;/a&gt;, which run orchestration software which switches dynamically between altcoin networks in order to maximize the profit to be gained from burning kilowatt-hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm. And &quot;hmm&quot; is conceding that subliminal advertising works, which is very far from being proven.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to advise the World Council on the most efficient method of avoiding what some are calling the most viable zombie apocalypse ever considered by living man.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we proceed to eradicate a piece of malware of which we have the source code? Let me see... What about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have &lt;em&gt;Microsoft release an update to the malware signatures for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Windows Defender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? Those come every few days, install silently on &lt;em&gt;billions&lt;/em&gt; (not millions, &lt;em&gt;billions&lt;/em&gt;) of computers, and do their job quietly and effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For good measure, add updates to Kaspersky, McAfee, and whatever other anti-virus software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put up articles on &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ars Technica&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LWN&lt;/a&gt;. Problem solved with no need of superpowers!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 −7 = −6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This really would have merited a lot more demerits. The entire unbelievable setup does nothing but install a piece of software easily removed by an anti-virus signature update.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T21:05:35.437" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T21:05:35.437" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6047" CreationDate="2018-04-30T07:45:29.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Premise of your question includes things that make no sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The code on the GPUs is the principal problem as all that is concurrently used as an actual graphic card will influence anyone sitting before the connected monitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is simply false. Graphic cards are great at separating physics calculations &amp;amp; other similar operations from actual graphics. Been like that for what, decade, two? And most of the cards are probably in dedicated mines, with no monitor connected to it and monitored remotely via SSH anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, bitcoin code is open source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia Similarly, Wikipedia's code is, too: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wikimedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/wikimedia&lt;/a&gt;. There is no room to conspire, no way to put some code in it so no one sees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write technical things that are technically impossible, lack of suspension of disbelief is your fault. Questions that include impossible things in their premise regularly collect downvotes, as lack of research is legitimate downvote reason. Facebook chutuchtu question simply called it magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T07:45:29.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6041" CreationDate="2018-04-30T08:08:24.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you refer to is not primarily opinion based.There may be an infinite number of possible answers, but they are not all equally good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple challenging constraints to meet, and a good answer meets these constraints effectively. Drawing from real life examples also makes the answer better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first constraint is that the creature must have an infinite extent, but not divide the world. This rules out certain answers, such as an infinite plane, which would divide the world, as well as shapes which merely have an infinite surface area, but not infinite extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that it is an animal, so purely mathematical, topological answers are not good answers to the question. The answerer must consider how the body receives the nutrients it requires, and deals with other limitations on the size of an organism. Some excellent answers given provide examples of real life organisms which don't seem to have an upper size limit to back up their suggestions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is that the creature should not be vulnerable to being killed. Answers giving shapes which are robust are thus better answers. Answers such as a snake with a trail of infinite length meet this criterion poorly, because such a shape is vulnerable to an attack at any point along its length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth is that the creature should have a head; a good answer explores how this single organ relates to and controls its infinite body. They should also consider why the finite head does not make the organism vulnerable to decapitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to address all these points, and indeed it may not be possible to solve them all perfectly. Nonetheless, they provide a solid basis for objectively assessing answers to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42528" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T08:08:24.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6047" CreationDate="2018-04-30T15:10:24.763" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about downvoting when I saw there was a meta post, so I figured I'd post where it was more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I had with it is, once I peeled away the context, the question was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and with it, the ability to incorporate subliminal imagery onto the screens of nearly every Bitcoin miner planetwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And their first task is to brainwash more people to devote their GPUs to Bitcoin mining for the purpose of donating to Wikipedia. Today Bitcoins, tomorrow world domination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, as a question, really gets paraphrased as &amp;quot;My &lt;em&gt;evil bad guy(tm)&lt;/em&gt; has invented a form of mind control.  How do I ensure he doesn't mind control people?&amp;quot;  In that sense, there's not much context to build a question from at at all.  We don't know how much mind control, or what weakenesses it has, or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it took a few re-readings to even realize that was the important part of the question.  I think part of the challenge is that, if you understand how bitcoin operates, some of the flavor-text you put into it actually gets in the way of reading the question because the assumptions don't line up with how things actually work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real issue for me was that there simply aren't all that many miners in the world.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://bravenewcoin.com/news/number-of-bitcoin-miners-far-higher-than-popular-estimates/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Estimates&lt;/a&gt; are between 5000 and 100,000.  When I try to think about an answer to this quesiton, I tend to think &amp;quot;just leave them alone, there are religious cults that are larger than this.  They'll be small fries.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T15:10:24.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6062" CreationDate="2018-05-01T04:23:43.040" Score="6" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished putting up an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110982/resurrection-how-would-society-operate-if-everyone-had-two-lives&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about a resurrection effect and then went to check the queues to find that it's on the close list as too broad. I've read Dutch's comment about why he thinks it's too broad and while it has merit and actually makes sense, I have a dissenting opinion insofar as while the &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; of the question appears broad, the &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; being implemented is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this question as being akin to the introduction of anti-biotics in society. It's a very specific change but it has had broad impacts on our society as a whole as we no longer fear scratches and infections the way we used to. It has seen sweeping changes in the way we treat medical conditions and has had a net benefit to our society and life expectancy, but the actual change was very specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand and respect Dutch's opinion on the matter and I also accept that this may well be one of those margin calls where subjective assessment applies. That said, my question is &lt;strong&gt;Is a question about a specific change that could have broad impacts on a world &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; broad?&lt;/strong&gt; I accept that these questions invite long answers that cover a range of different fields, but I think the key difference is that each field should only be impacted in a narrow way. This means that your long answer is really a series of short (but related) answers, each relating to a different field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My chief concern here is that we end up with a list of questions relating to this change that talk about impacts on economies, culture, religion, etc. and we start to talk about duplicates instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T08:16:38.727" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T10:38:48.510" Title="Is broad impact of a specific change too broad?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6063" CreationDate="2018-05-01T09:11:14.643" Score="10" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going through the &quot;Suggested Edit&quot; review queue and saw a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/47026&quot;&gt;tag wiki edit suggestion&lt;/a&gt; there for a tag that was recently created, which read as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is used by questions that requires mutable ideas to answer or forms of idea brainstorming. the tag is to help in the unjust cull of good question that full under the &quot;too broad&quot; category. The question should be of high detail and to the point. The question must not be a topic of conversation and or debate  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like a very bad tag as the tag wiki is supposed to explicitly encourage brainstorming and random ideas, which directly conflicts with &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; as a close reason. Some people might also say that this is &quot;Too Broad&quot;, which is probably why the user wanted to explicitly use this tag as a counter for this close-reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6006/28789&quot;&gt;my take on &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; - &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5994/28789&quot;&gt;A question is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; if &lt;em&gt;every reasonable&lt;/em&gt; answer would be &lt;em&gt;equally&lt;/em&gt; valid.&lt;/a&gt; Giving you a bunch of ideas for you to choose the one that sounds coolest is not how this site works. I know what you want and theoretically this would be on-topic from a content perspective, but we need some criteria to vote which answers are &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;, which answers are &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; and which ones are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;. It's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions/5147#5147&quot;&gt;big, blurry region&lt;/a&gt;, but personally I feel that these criteria are not yet clear.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag reminds me of the former close reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/28789&quot;&gt;Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags shouldn't have any special powers, they should simply categorize the content of the question and the question should align with the core rules of the site. There are enough problems with keeping track of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and that is only to make answerers aware that the OP is searching for very realistic answers - not to counter close reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should remove the tag and voted to reject the edit suggestion. What does the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T09:30:35.423" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T07:39:21.763" Title="Do we need the [idea-based] tag on Main?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2018-05-01T09:47:40.507" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Propose a counter&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add that even if this tag gets kicked we still need some form of counter for some VERY unjust closures. A few Moderators take it upon themselves to close some very interesting topics just because it barely falls into the Opinion-Based or Too Broad category's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying to get rid of them but to limit the power or set something up in a way for these answers to live on this site. That’s why I made this tag - not as a form of chaos, but for the little man that just wants to have ideas thrown their way. Some form of brain-storming needs to be put in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a site that talks about world-building very few of those questions survive infancy. Take my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110982/how-would-society-operate-if-everyone-had-two-lives&quot;&gt;How would society operate if everyone had two lives?&lt;/a&gt;: it’s getting a lot of interest. It’s not going down the discussion road and is well received, but it will be taken down because people take the closure reasons too literally and go around killing the topics with little reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it’s not just me, but many other people that don't have the power to defend ourselves. With this narrow view point this site seems to enforce it seems to me that it’s becoming, how I should put it... Opinion-Based. I should quote a smart man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because it's justified doesn’t make it right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46565" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T10:47:00.267" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6059" CreationDate="2018-05-01T09:48:41.067" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, the broad &lt;em&gt;impact&lt;/em&gt; is the deciding factor, not the broad &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise of the question can be as elaborate as the author is willing to spend time on the question. It doesn't matter. The problem is when answers are expected to write whole books to completely answer the question. The goal of StackExchange is to have one answer as the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer. That doesn't mean that we can't have multiple &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; answers, but if you are only able to answer one aspect of a question then your answer can't be expected to be &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having lists of questions that are very closely related, for example by splitting it up into economics, culture, religion, ..., is perfectly fine and reasonable. We have a lot of series on the site and that's okay. Each question has to stand on its own, every answer has to answer the complete question and answers should be comparable to one another so that you could theoretically find out somewhat objectively which the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer is, even if there are lots of valid answers. That's the price we pay for having this site on the StackExchange network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are afraid of duplicates you can simply change the title of your series. Take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; where each title has a simple template and includes the specific difference compared with other questions in this series. Or look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=creating+a++scientifically+semi-valid+super-soldier+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;Creating a scientifically semi-valid super-soldier&lt;/a&gt;, where each question states what the specific topic is about and the older questions are linked at the top for reference and to make it easier to see what is different about this one. A perfect example of how you should go about asking a very broad question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; that a question is about is irrelevant to judging whether the question is &quot;Too Broad&quot; - the implications of the change are what makes a question &quot;Too Broad&quot; as we can't expect everyone to write a whole book for the querent and we don't want lots of low-quality half-a-sentence answers that &quot;just want to add a point to what has already been said by others&quot;. That's the extreme, but it's what would happen if we allowed people to post answers that only answer half the question. The goal of StackExchange is to have a repository of questions and an answer (or multiple approaches with one somewhat objectively best one) to that question. Not a long thread of partial answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-25T10:38:48.510" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T10:38:48.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2018-05-01T11:46:29.640" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag appears to be an invitation to close the question as opinion based or too broad, and was apparently created in protest at exactly that happening. As I said on the review, I see no purpose to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of our most popular questions have been closed for these two reasons, adding a tag doesn't make the question any more valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag has been used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/idea-based?sort=newest&quot;&gt;5 times by only one user, 3 of the questions are closed.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T07:39:21.763" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T07:39:21.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6066" CreationDate="2018-05-01T13:32:22.267" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen some posts where people answer their own questions, either because they've come up with a better answer or because they want to combine parts of all other answers to come up with one solution.  (Myself included!) What are the ethics of answering your own questions in a regular question/answer format? What about people who don't use the community wiki box? There are lots of good, high-voted answers out there that simply sometimes don't cover everything, and a canonical-answer bounty seems sometimes excessive. And if you use the community wiki, for some reason community canonical answers don't get as many votes as the incomplete ones. Are there any ways to solve this? Why does this happen? Why don't people contribute to some of the community wikis? Some examples of questions like this (not all with the same problem) I've found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25478/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-religions/25572#25572&quot;&gt;Creating a realistic world - Spreading religions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109904/a-kill-a-cure-a-vaccine-and-one-tricky-disease&quot;&gt;A kill, a cure, a vaccine, and one tricky disease&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: Above^is my own question and summary wiki answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9857/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-star&quot;&gt;Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The star&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that this is sometimes a sign of a badly phrased question. However, please refrain from basing your answers on that--it just doesn't apply to (I think) the majority of these types of question dillemas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any more questions like this, I'd appreciate if you added them to this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T16:07:49.590" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T16:07:49.590" Title="Ethics of answering your own question, even when you didn't think you would?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|community-wiki|self-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2018-05-01T13:47:31.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/14/self-learner&quot;&gt;There's a badge for it&lt;/a&gt;, anything there's a badge for is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may not catch, it may not get the votes, but there're certainly no rules against it nor are there any ethical problems. Your answer is exposed to the same voting and approval system as any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T13:47:31.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2018-05-01T13:51:39.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the ethics of answering your own questions in a regular question/answer format? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking a question you can click on a little check box at the bottom that says &quot;Answer your own question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;share your knowledge, Q&amp;amp;A-style&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. This shows that answering your own questions is encouraged. There is even a badge that is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/14/self-learner&quot;&gt;Self-Learner&lt;/a&gt; to encourage this. If you want to help others by providing an answer to a question that you had where you couldn't find any help at first any you had to search for the answer yourself you are encouraged to share your knowledge so that others will have an easier time in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about people who don't use the community wiki box? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can create a community wiki, but community wikis are a weird tool that is not always perfectly understood and has changed quite a bit since it was first devised. In the beginning it was to give people a way to participate earlier, as there wasn't a &quot;suggest edit&quot; privilege at first and using a community wiki reduces the amount of rep for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example here on Meta you would need 2.000 reputation to edit something, but with a community wiki you can edit as early as 100 reputation. This helps people with low rep participate - but these people are not always that interested in helping some greater good or simply know about this. Community wikis are rare, so encountering them is not happening too often and then knowing how to interact with it and knowing about the specific topic is not always happening.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the community wiki to answer is not really that important. It might be the nice thing to do if you combine the existing answers and it might be the normal way to use a normal answer if you go with a completely different approach, but to be honest: it doesn't really matter that much. You can answer your own question and you are encouraged to do so if you feel that your own answer is the best one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are lots of good, high-voted answers out there that simply sometimes don't cover everything, and a canonical-answer bounty seems sometimes excessive. And if you use the community wiki, for some reason community canonical answers don't get as many votes as the incomplete ones. Are there any ways to solve this? Why does this happen? Why don't people contribute to some of the community wikis? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a bounty is excessive. That's what the bounty system is for after all. I am going to still remind you that answers should &lt;em&gt;answer the whole question&lt;/em&gt;. If they don't they are not an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you had several &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; answers and you wanted to combine them by creating a tag wiki answer that's great to show future readers your approach and a possible solution to this problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But few people are interacting with these community wikis for the aforementioned reasons and because the interest in your question has waned. Questions that are away from the frontpage and not in the featured list (meaning they don't have a bounty) are less visible, so only a few people interact with them from time to time when coming across them. This is especially visible for questions that were in the Hot Network Questions and attracted lots of attention from outside the site's regular users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore the community wiki answer is probably quite late to the game if it's a collection of previous answers and has therefore lower votes, meaning it will be far down in the list of answers in the normal ordering. This means only a small percentage of the people who see the question will see this answer. Most people look at one or two, maybe three, answers as long as they are not &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; interested in the question. Everything further down is often more or less ignored by the vast majority. Most people also don't come back to a question once they have looked at it once. Maybe if they answered they are reminded of it when getting an upvote and look through the other solutions, but not the majority of people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you accepted your own community wiki answer it won't be at the top. If you accept your own answer this doesn't affect its ranking. Only accepting other peoples posts puts them at the top, before the normal ordering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gamification component of having Points-Badges-Leaderboards is also important. Most people want to get reputation points for their effort. Interacting with a community wiki doesn't give any reputation and is therefore lower on the priority list for most people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are not really any ways to solve this. Putting a bounty on the question and mentioning the answer is a way, but not the most effective one. But it's also not really a problem. You've got your answers and maybe helped others by mentioning the solution you went with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T13:51:39.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2018-05-01T15:11:05.403" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag is bad and the edit made it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki invites brainstorming, but also adds the requirement to have high details and being to the point. This is a contradiction since brainstorming consists of throwing any idea that crosses your mind, they are simple and most are not good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems like the intention was to create a tag specifically to legitimate opinion-based questions. If that is the intent, it is not appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T15:13:25.490" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T15:13:25.490" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2018-05-01T18:42:18.760" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;So to baseline.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At its heart the Stack Network is about asking specific questions and getting specific answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Admission:&lt;/em&gt;  World Building is a weird beast.  We are perhaps one of the sites that least adheres to this purpose.  That said we continue to exist on the network and should strive to meet the intent of said network even as we have to adjust to manage the strange scope of World Building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted tag description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is used by questions that requires mutable ideas to answer or forms of idea brainstorming. the tag is to help in the unjust cull of good question that full under the &quot;too broad&quot; category. The question should be of high detail and to the point. The question must not be a topic of conversation and or debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can personally appreciate the intent here, and I assure you I do, this idea is in direct conflict with the site and larger network's intended use.  The tag also contains what appears to me to be a paradox.  Generating ideas effectively and keeping things detailed and too the point are just not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creed I can relate to your frustration, I was there at one point. All users were.  Stack is a strange beast to those used to discussion forums.  When you compound that with the fact that you get better input from other users here than almost anywhere it can be frustrating that certain avenues of conversation are not acceptable to the system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said we get better answers and users &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; we have those restrictions on the the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A question being a bad fit for the Stack Exchange format does not make the question bad.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have said this to a lot of people around here and its true.  World Building is big...its like all of reality wrapped up in a bunch of non reality, put in a blender poured over a big pile of conjecture and topped in shavings of magic.  Its the reason we struggle so much with scope and on/off topic-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of things that I would love to post here and simply don't mainly due to the fact &lt;em&gt;I know&lt;/em&gt; they would be off topic or so insanely broad that hundreds of pages could be written in response.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are other avenues for these questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the network itself the only option for you is chat.  We have many conversations there that either help distill a concept down to a specific question, or simply discuss concepts at length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise there are many forums and boards for longer form discussion out there on the Internets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, when peers, other users close something it is not a personal attack.  (If you think otherwise please flag it and the other Moderators and I will review)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember being new, not taking things personal can be difficult, but the users here donate their time, it is best to assume their intent is positive, even if they don't have a lot of tact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T18:42:18.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2018-05-01T19:22:53.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My go to answer is that WB.SE is closer to Parenting.SE than it is to Math.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange was started for a very specific purpose, but since that time has changed and expanded to cover a lot of topics. Some of those topics are things that do not in fact have one correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1+1 always equals 2, and any answer that says different is wrong.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How do I get my child to stop coming home after curfew does not have a single right answer, and anyone who says differently is wrong.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's OK to have questions with multiple right answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It even says it on one of the SE blog pages, giving parenting as an example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're robbing users of good answers, and going against the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1%22&quot;&gt;make SE a welcoming place&lt;/a&gt;&quot; when we try to force WB to be more like SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if a question can be focused to a single easy point then it should be, and that's fine. But sometimes you just need an idea, and those should not be thrown out just because they don't fit some outdated mold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T19:22:53.347" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6077" CreationDate="2018-05-03T00:27:11.213" Score="24" ViewCount="929" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111173/how-much-energy-in-a-planet-of-antimatter&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since when can a question be closed for poor quality?  The two respondants to my challenge to justify the closure said that it's just a physics question (which we answer &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;all the time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) which isn't listed as off-topic in the Help Center.  The ONLY rules I know of for justifying closure are those in the Tour and Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am completely in favor of modifying the Tour and Help Center to reflect tighter and clearer rules and expectations.  I've brought various issues up myself a number of times over the months I've been participating, but it never leads to an actual change.  I've learned a great deal from the discussions, but &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nothing ever changes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But without that change, the only rules we have are the rules listed in Tour and Help Center.  Period.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd tolerate using Meta posts if (a) there actually were meta posts that clearly and specifically explained the new rules, (b) those posts had any kind of visible consensus (like a well-upvoted post with supporting upvoted commentary as answers), and (c) those posts were regularly used to guide participants.  The only example of this I'm comfortable with at this time is the new, updated expectations for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct&lt;/a&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, it is nevertheless unfair and unrealistic to expect newcomers to abide by rules that are only in the heads of other participants or hidden somewhere in meta.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which is a long way of saying, you can't close a question simply because it's a physics question because there is NOTHING in the Tour or the Help Center that says it can't be!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Either we need to figure out how to change the Tour and Help Center to reflect narrower rules or we need to live with the fact that those rules are what we have to work with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our closure process is too much of a moving target!  Frankly, despite SE's basic custom of not requiring VTCers to leave justification for their closure &amp;mdash; and since we cannot trust VTCers to use the pre-defined justification according to the established rules &amp;mdash; then if you're unwilling to leave a comment explaining EXACTLY where in the Tour or Help Center your justification comes from, then you should be downvoting and moving on.  &lt;em&gt;Not voting to close the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to prove my point, the linked question was closed as off-topic because it's not &quot;about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Show me where in the Help Center you found justification to close this question.  You used the excuse.  Prove it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postscript: The downvote button's rollover states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and downvoting is all it deserved.  It violated no off-topic rule listed in the Tour or the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-postscript.  I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4043/why-is-worldbuilding-stack-exchange-so-good-at-answering-questions/4046#4046&quot;&gt;this wonderful analysis by moderator Michael Kjörling&lt;/a&gt; that I would like people to consider as they answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp; Please note that James closed this question both because it's a duplicate, but also because the conversation has matured and needed to shift to the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;moderator-driven perspective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T02:04:40.963" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T02:04:40.963" Title="Enough is enough. NOBODY can obey rules that are only in someone's head" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|closing-questions|help-center|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-05-16T13:45:26.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-03T00:50:10.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, it really does belong on Physics.SE.  While we can answer physics questions, it's best to handle them on the &quot;mother&quot; SE site.  The physics questions I find we cover best are the ones where the physics is &quot;too out there&quot; for Physics.SE.  In this case, antimatter anhilation is mainstream physics.  We teach it in schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue is that it provides limited value.  The information needed for this calculation is easily available by a google search for &quot;antimatter,&quot; leading you to the Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on antimatter.&lt;/a&gt;  Anyone remotely interested in this topic could find the information they need easily, using Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third issue is that it's a self answered question.  While this, itself, is a totally reasonable part of the StackExchange process, it does raise the bar on making sure the results provide value to the community.  If the OP had to weave together several different difficult to find sources to write the answer, and provided links to them, I'd consider that to be of merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by the technical rules, it should be closed (should be migrated to Physics.SE).  We often bend the technical rules in the name of quality, but I don't see enough quality here to warrant bending the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T00:50:10.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-03T09:12:39.740" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the poster of this question I have concerns about the arbitrary interpretation of vote to close reasons, this is due to twenty years experience in the legal services section of a government department where we worked at high standards of evaluation, consideration, analysis, and particularly in the interpretation of the criteria, rules and operating frameworks for making those decisions. However, in this specific instance things are not so straight forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the setting has two Earth-mass planets collided. One planet is made of antimatter. This can only happen in a fictional world. To date no antimatter planets, or any other astronomical objects, have been observed or detected. Yet the question itself is concerned the amount of energy released. Now, research shows, that similar questions been asked on Physics SE. Although some of which may not necessarily give the OP the information sought. There is, at least, one antimatter calculator accessible online. Inputting the number of kilograms for the masses of the two planets would be onerous in the extreme. Therefore, not a good or practical source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this suggest that the question could have been asked on Physics SE. However, because its setting is that of a fictional world it is also reasonable to ask it on Worldbuilding SE. Now whether it is accepted as a legitimate question for WB SE is a matter to be decided there. As we see it has been close voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative options to close voting that have been suggested are down voting or migrating to Physics SE. Down voting as a way of expressing disagreement with posting it on WB SE. Migrating to Physics SE is a very reasonable option. An option it should be noted no-one has exercised. This is a failure of process and good manners. Whatever is done should be helpful to the question's poster. Unfortunately, on many occasions close voting does little to improve question or facilitate answers. This may be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down voting doesn't seem to do much good. It rarely leads to improvement in questions. Not unless the downvoters gave their reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't pretend to be familiar with Physics SE, but it seems probable that Physics SE might accept and answer this question. In which case, migration to Physics SE is appropriate. Perhaps the problem may have been that the question's poster may not have been a participant on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has two answers that seem to provide answers. There are other instances where science questions have answered on WB SE. Many of which may contribute to worldbuilding undertaken by their posters. Because WB SE is a question &amp;amp; answer site, it is possible that questions related to worldbuilding can have such specificity that the surrounding apparatus of worldbuilding may appear to be absence. Asking the right questions will continue to be a vexed and complex issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point not discussed elsewhere is while the question asks for the amount of energy released, is that no attempt has been made to address the other issues in the question. Namely, &quot;Ultimately the scale of the energy release is important to understand whether arranging this fate for my enemy would be strategically useful or just plain dangerous if my home planet is in the same system.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part of the question could do with some clarification. I'm not sure if the enemy lives on (my) home planet or on another planet or if the enemy is located somewhere else, say, in a fleet of spaceships or asteroid fortress. However, this deserves attention because it is on-topic within the criteria in the help centre. However, this could be answered on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, this could have been answered on Worldbuilding SE, as similar questions have previously been answered here or Physics SE where questions about the antimatter destruction of planets have previously been asked (although the usefulness of those questions is a bit doubtful) which indicates the question is suitable to be asked there. The question should have been migrated to Physics SE. It doesn't look good because this wasn't been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:12:39.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6082" CreationDate="2018-05-03T18:31:34.350" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we post questions we intend to answer ourselves on the Sandbox, and if so, should we post the answer we plan to write in as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this for a particular reason. A while ago I posted this question, which I proceeded to answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111173/how-much-energy-would-be-released-in-a-collision-of-planets-of-matter-antimatt?noredirect=1#comment339209_111173&quot;&gt;How much energy would be released in a collision of planets of matter &amp;amp; antimatter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got some major bad press. I'll admit it was poorly phrased and built. My grip on LaTeX liquified, I was in a hurry. We're all human; we all make mistakes. But I got hit over the head with VTC's and downvotes. What was worse was that there weren't many comments until after I was put on hold, which should have been avoided. I think I got 4 VTC's in 1 minute. I rephrased the question to make it fit into the scope of worldbuilding as defined, and tried to close a duplicate answer. But I found myself wondering how something like this could be avoided in the future. It wasn't an experience I wanted to repeat. I wanted to include a fun-ish tidbit of useful information that counted as worldbuilding and might help other worldbuilders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm getting used to using the Sandbox a little. I'm even getting used to welcoming new users, directing them to the tour and help. I can suffer downvotes and realize that my answer/question is bad. But I'm still unsure as to the whole answer your own question scenario. This post is about three main questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should I post questions I fully intend to answer myself on the Sandbox?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If yes, should I include the answer I am aiming to post to my own question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And how can I resolve similar issues in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that this is often a result of bad questions and answers, but I'm not looking for an explanation based on that truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T18:55:11.553" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T01:30:54.567" Title="Sandbox Question/Answers" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|answers|sandbox|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6079" CreationDate="2018-05-03T18:54:09.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no requiremen to use the Sandbox. It's just a feature that you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use if you are not sure how your question will be received or for example if you are sure that it won't be well-received in its current form and you would like some feedback on how to make it better without the closure routine. The close votes can still occur - just a small percentage of the regular users are regularly in the Sandbox and many more have the privilege to cast close/reopen votes. It's not perfect, but it might be helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again: there is no requirement. If you think the Sandbox will be useful for your specific case you can use it. And if you don't like waiting for someone to give you some feedback then you can simply post directly on the main site. Many people don't like waiting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember a case where someone wanted to post a self-answered question in the Sandbox. Mostly because initial self-answers are pretty rare compared with the overall amount of posts. But if you want I recommend simply adding the Sandbox notes to the top and stating that you want to self-answer. Then you simply make a level one heading that says &lt;code&gt;# Question Post&lt;/code&gt; and one that says &lt;code&gt;# Answer Post&lt;/code&gt; with a horizontal line &lt;code&gt;-----&lt;/code&gt; between both of these parts. That should make sure that people know what you are doing and they can help you to check whether your question is corresponding with the guidelines for questions, your answer is corresponding with the guidelines for answers and whether there are any discrepancies between your question and the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very nice of you to want to share your knowledge with the community through self-answers. I hope you continue doing this and that your experience will be better the next time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness sake: We have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/656/28789&quot;&gt;answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, too... But there have been four posts (now deleted) in the past 3,5 years. And there have been discussions about whether we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1737/do-we-still-want-the-answer-sandbox&quot;&gt;still want the answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. I'd recommend just leaving your question and self-answer in one post so that it's easier to find them and help you work on the drafts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About resolving such issues in the future... Well, closure reasons, how they should be applied, how they should be communicated, how reopening should work, ... those are the topics that are most discussed here on Meta. It may or may not happen to you again. Getting some input for your draft through the Sandbox or for your idea from the chat can be a good way to mitigate at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; amount of this, but there is no 100% certain way to write a question that will not get closed. It's all a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5147/28789&quot;&gt;big, blurry region&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T18:54:09.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T22:08:59.620" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This question is about whether the idea of having guidelines is merited.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not actually creating them...yet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You decide you want some magical creature in your land. eg dragons with wings etc. You have also got a little/lot of magic in your world. This is not about worldbuilding with no 'magic'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want to be realistic to your world, so you do a little creature research and/or put your question through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; and realise that it's just not feasible with IRL parameters. The Square-Cube Law is especially adept at bringing your creature crashing back down to Terra Firma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but you are &lt;strong&gt;really set&lt;/strong&gt; on having that fire-breather or chimera or giants or whatever magical creature that is not technically feasible. You still want to be as logical as possible. You don't want to use your magic to create &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt;-breathing flying dragons when the rest of your magic can only be controlled by adept &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt;-wizards. How is that logical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many a question ends up either closed as Too Broad, answered as &quot;it's not possible with IRL parameters&quot;, or &quot;you have magic, just use that&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible that we provide a General set of Pointers/Guidelines on how to use the magic in your world to help you create this creature? That is preferably not creature specific.&lt;/strong&gt; If it is creature specific, then I think a Magical Creatures Series may be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not about defining other peoples magic systems. That would be insane! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://coppermind.net/wiki/Sanderson%27s_Laws_of_Magic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanderson's Three Laws&lt;/a&gt; give some guidelines on how to create Logical Magic Systems. The 3 laws are pretty bared down to basics already. Could we expand these 3 laws into guiding questions with Logical Magical Creature Creation in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most magic questions seem to be wanting to limit the use of magic in explaining their creatures. &lt;strong&gt;They appear to be wanting HARD magic&lt;/strong&gt;. They are wanting one or two things to be explained by 'magic' in a limited way and the rest to follow logical IRL parameters. &lt;strong&gt;Can we help them figure out some questions to ask themselves so that they can then go back to the drawing board and figure out their creatures a bit more before they attempt a second and third question (that inevitably seems to be closed as well)?&lt;/strong&gt; Guidelines on when it would be ok to ignore the square-cube law and when they have to follow it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have to define your magic to yourself. Where does the magic come from. How do your creatures access it. How are your creatures affected by it. Is the effect permanent or once off. Did it happen back in prehistory, or is it still affecting your creatures today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are your creatures fully magical themselves&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your dragon can always fly...and could probably curse you in the old tongue &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are your creatures only magical because of constant contact with invisible  magic source&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your dragon can always fly while connected to the all-present magic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are your creatures only magical because of intermittent contact with magic source&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your dragon can only fly while the ingested magic-rock juice is working&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are your creatures only magical from a once off contact with the source&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your dragon didn't have large enough wings to fly until magic magically enhanced one/two/three aspects of it's physiology. The dragon is now no more magic than you or me...but it can fly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within your magic constraints (eg water-magic), is your creature's &quot;magic&quot; ability actually what you think&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your dragon has the capability of floating on the water molecules in the air. The wings are non weight-bearing, just for balance and sexual attraction. The fire-breathing can be explained scientifically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your magic is only one &quot;thing&quot;. How can you use this and it's side-effects to explain away the issues you are having with your creature design. Are there further unintended side-effects.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your world has magic water users. They can control and manipulate large &lt;em&gt;and small&lt;/em&gt; amounts of water molecules. Your dragon utilises this by controlling the water molecules in the air around them. They then use this ability to appear to fly with giant wings acting as rudders and balancing stabilisers. The wings no longer have to be able to be able to bear the weight of the heavy dragon, as the water magic takes care of this. No longer need as much musculature to support the weight, no longer need super light but strong bird bones, no longer needs such a giant heart and all sorts of square-cube rule errors can fall away. Possibly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Side effects: your dragons have the ability to create storms. They have an affinity for playing in large pools of water. They like to eat lettuce and roasted fish, not people. They may have accidently flooded an area or two when excited. They don't like living in deserts. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in no way comprehensive but I think it gets the idea across. You are wanting a magical creature that has been previously shot-down as not possible, probably due to the pesky Square-Cube Law. This set of guidelines could possible provide some ideas on &quot;you have magic, just use that&quot; without leaving your world too chaotic and unbelievable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should and could this set of rough guidelines be created? or is it up to each person to figure out &lt;em&gt;how to figure out&lt;/em&gt; a solution for themselves?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T09:08:55.077" Title="Should we have some Guidelines to Creating Magical Creatures?" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6079" CreationDate="2018-05-04T01:30:54.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox is a good, optional way to test questions.  Self-answered questions are a little more susceptible to problems of vagueness or omission, in my experience, because &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; alny doubts at all, I encourage you to use the sandbox to test a question you also intend to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the sandbox works best if it stays focused on the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;.  Mentioning that you plan to self-answer is fine, but I think it's better to evaluate the question on its own, without your proposed answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for sharing your knowledge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T01:30:54.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6086" CreationDate="2018-05-04T08:25:11.887" Score="9" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;. They seem to be about the same thing, at least according to their descriptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions regarding wealth, trade, or financial concepts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions regarding wealth, trade or financial concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for a comma they are identical...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full tag wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An economy is a system of trading and exchanging goods and services. It may be on any scale -- a town, a planet, a galaxy. While the primary object being exchanged in an economy is usually money, this tag also applies to systems of trade and barter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full tag wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Economics is the study of trading and exchanging goods and services. It may be on a planetary level or on a town level. While the primary object being exchanged in an economy is usually money, systems of trade and barter also apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference seems to be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt; refers to the &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; of this stuff, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; is an &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; of this stuff. Is that the whole difference? Do we really need this distinction on Main? If so, should we update the tag wikis to make this difference more prominent, for example by mentioning the other tag and stating the differences explicitly to avoid future confusion? Or is it enough to have the &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; because we are more concerned with &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; of economies than with the &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; of this field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we have 501 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; and 40 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;. 12 of those questions have both tags, which means there already is a considerable overlap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it looks like we should get rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt; and focus on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt;. Or make them synonyms. What does the community think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:27:35.733" Title="Do we need [economy] and [economics]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|tag-synonyms|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2018-05-04T09:25:24.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, a meta post with generic &amp;quot;Workarounds&amp;quot; for magic and creature-design would be a great resource&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage I see is that we can easily point people to it in different situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OP posted a question that seems to be answered (or is commented) with &amp;quot;You have tagged this with magic - go and use magic&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; we can write a comment like &amp;quot;You might want to look at this &lt;em&gt;list of common workarounds&lt;/em&gt; to get ideas for what you can do with different shades of 'use magic'&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OP posted a question and received unsatisfactory answers like &amp;quot;Square-Cube Law bites you&amp;quot;; these answers are valid and useful, but the OP wants to &lt;em&gt;get as close as possible to realistic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; we can write a comment like &amp;quot;You might want to use this &lt;em&gt;list of common workarounds&lt;/em&gt; to get some ideas; maybe you could make a second question with more details and use those points there as inspiration?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OP posted a draft in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28789&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; and we need to make him aware of common problems and workarounds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; instead of starting on field number one and going through each individual's personal list of workarounds we can point there are tell the OP where he stands to make it easier/faster to get a question ready for Main&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's a very nice basis for open-ended discussions that we love in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; we can use it as a starting point for creature-design discussions or as a little checklist in the middle of a process to see what others would do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's a nice collection of knowledge, which is all StackExchange is really about, while not really a good thing for the Main site (&lt;em&gt;What workaround do you personally know?&lt;/em&gt; would be closed faster than you can say &lt;em&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we have a lot of questions that fall into that category&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; it's likely that many people will profit from such a resource&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What I think is important for the resource&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every workaround should have examples&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; just because we are on Meta and the rules are less strict doesn't mean we should discard them completely, they are there to increase the quality&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; by mentioning an example the user reading the workaround later can check exactly how others have done this thing&#xA;-&amp;gt; an example may be a question on Main, a discussion on Meta or a book/movie/..., each case with a short summary of the relevant part&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we should group and number workaround suggestions so that it's easier to point to them&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Here is a list with workarounds, your solution is there.&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;Great, but which of the two dozen workarounds do you mean exactly...?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; if someone needs to be pointed to the resource they are probably not seeing things the way you see, so you should mention what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; your problem is&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; the resource should help and be a shorthand, especially for people who want to help those users by mentioning a general workaround and adapting it to the specific case, so we should give them an easy way to mention what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; is important in the specific case&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the posts should be community wikis&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; you can only edit posts on Meta if you have more than 2k rep, which is pretty high, but with community wikis it's lowered to 100, making it easier for others to edit their own workarounds into the list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sanderson's Three Laws&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Square-Cube Law&lt;/em&gt; and a link to the chat and Sandbox should be mentioned in the &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; post&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; Sanderson and the SCL are extremely prominent when creating fictional creatures, they deserve a special mentioning and a short description for newer users who are unfamiliar with these terms&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; the link to chat allows an easy way to start open-ended discussions or to start brainstorming how the current question/system could be refined to make the question easier to answer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&amp;gt; the link to the Sandbox allows to easily start a new draft and get feedback on that, which makes it an important resource that should be mentioned for something that is concerned with helping users to help themselves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T09:25:24.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-04T11:35:39.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific page of the help is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page, which says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;specifically &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as they are not about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the Writing or Role-playing Games Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question is clearly an effect of an event or world element on a specific aspect of the world's environment.  The event is the collision of an Earth-sized planet with an equivalent amount of anti-matter.  The world element is physics, which would naturally be included in biology, technology, and magic.  The specific aspect of the world's environment is the amount of energy produced by that collision.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the &quot;as long as they are not about&quot; bullets apply.  The closest would be that this might be a historical fact about the real world.  However, the Earth has never collided with an equivalent amount of anti-matter, so we have no historical reference for how much energy would be produced.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reiterate, there are two ways this could be considered marginal.  In the first, physics is not specifically listed as a world element.  In the second, this could be considered a fact about the real world.  The latter issue is limited by the modifier historical.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that physics has to be specifically listed as a world element.  We have any number of questions involving physics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wanted to not take questions like this, we should add to the &quot;as long as they are not about&quot; section.  E.g. something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scientific facts or extrapolations involving the real world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that would still allow for asking questions about fictional worlds, so it might require broadening.  E.g. the same question about a planet twice the mass of Earth would not be made off-topic by that criterion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just remove the word historical from &quot;historical facts about the real world&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the wrong place to have a discussion about changing the help.  If someone seriously wishes to modify the help to make questions like this off-topic, they should probably post a new meta-question.  Incidentally, that is the process to modify the help text.  Post a meta-question asking if the help text should be modified.  Answers can be things like No or specific suggestions for modification.  If a modification reaches consensus, the moderators should then make the change (possibly by asking StackExchange staff to do so).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been noted that not all the help content can be modified.  However, this part of the on-topic page has been modified.  We'd just be modifying the already custom portions.  This is pretty clearly within scope.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been argued that this question is not Worldbuilding.  However, it is a fictional world (we don't actually have Earth-sized clumps of anti-matter running around the real universe, at least not that we know).  And if the story has this collision, the amount of energy released is part of the setting.  That's Worldbuilding to me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a relatively focused and narrow question, but those are generally considered good aspects of a question.  Answers can broaden it by showing how to calculate for a broader situation (e.g. with different masses).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T11:35:39.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6083" CreationDate="2018-05-04T12:27:35.733" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;After scanning the two tags, I'd say they're complete synonyms. There are 501 questions with the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; and 40 with the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;It seems to me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt; can therefore be replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; without any significant change.&lt;/strong&gt; Furthermore, they are not different enough in spelling to warrant marking them as synonyms - anyone typing out economics and economy is going to get six letters in before any difference in spelling, and by that time the only two options left will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:27:35.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-04T12:54:37.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of very long posts. I agree with some, disagree with the rest, but to my eyes those are all TL;DR, which is not inviting to discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close as off-topic, using the &quot;this is not about worldbuilding&quot; option. The reason I did that is because I think there is no worldbuilding involved in the linked question. It should be as simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, people will have different interpretations of what is worldbuilding and what is not, and how to follow the rules. It doesn't matter how much detail you put into rules, disagreement will always happen. Just remember that, unless moderation is involved, it takes the votes of multiple people to open or close a question, so some consensus is involved. All SE sites are driven by community. If the majority voters think that, according to rules, the question should be closed, then it stays closed. If they think it should remain open, it remains open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now it only has my very own VTC. I think it should be closed, but if the community thinks it should stay open now, I'm not going to let that kill my vibe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T12:54:37.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2018-05-04T13:03:12.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Please don't&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who like sci-fi are very familiar with Clarke's Third Law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a less well known counterpart, but which I've seen (and used) quite often here at worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's what you are going to get if you try to enforce tight rules on magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T13:03:12.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T13:26:59.760" Score="6" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take a look at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, specifically the &quot;Improve posts by editing or commenting&quot; section, we have a picture of a comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4828/39583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. In my opinion, this comment is not asking for more information, or clarifying, and could plausibly stand on its own as an answer if it was expanded a little more. &lt;strong&gt;Should we change our example question to include a better example of an ideal comment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T03:58:10.840" Title="Our tour includes a comment that doesn't practice what we preach" Tags="|discussion|comments|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T14:45:35.687" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering: do the review queues cover questions from users who have a +100 rep association bonus, and if not, should they? I've seen review queues cleared before, and in some cases people don't post the famous&#xA;&quot;Welcome to WorldBuilding _______! If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. Have fun!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm usually not comfortable enough to immediately answer/edit a question, but one of the ways I try to contribute is simply by guiding new users around the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think more could be done to ensure even users with the association bonus get these guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T17:03:20.540" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T17:03:20.540" Title="Review queues and Association Bonuses" Tags="|discussion|questions|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6090" CreationDate="2018-05-04T14:51:18.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone who posts for the first time on WorldBuilding goes into the &quot;First Post&quot; review queue. Everyone. I've written &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5254/28789&quot;&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding comments&lt;/a&gt; to people that are mods on other sites. Even employees from StackExchange, who automatically have mod privileges on all sites they visit, would go into those review queues with their first posts (you would see their diamond next to their username though). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally anyone who has only posted a couple times (three times or so?) and answeres a question that has been inactive for a long time (half a year or so?) goes into the &quot;Late Answer&quot; review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's up to every reviewer to decide what to do and what not to do. I like to leave such comments (further explanation in the link above) as I've also seen lots of users with 300 or 400 rep on other sites who didn't know about the tour and help center, but nobody is required. You can also simply click &quot;Nothing to do&quot; when you think it's all fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally users with the association bonus would already know about those resources from their &quot;home site&quot;, but in reality this may or may not be the case. Welcoming them and pointing them to valuable resources is a good thing to do, especially because WorldBuilding can be even weirder than other sites on the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T14:51:18.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6093" CreationDate="2018-05-04T14:56:04.500" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a &quot;magic link&quot; for comments that automatically links to the Sandbox (like the [tour] and [help] magic links that link to the tour and help center?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T15:07:22.870" Title="Is there a &quot;magic link&quot; to the Sandbox? Should there be?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6092" CreationDate="2018-05-04T15:03:40.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, and there probably won't be one. Magic links are a network wide thing that just gets directed at each sites resources. The only exception I am aware of is the [mvce], the &lt;em&gt;minimal viable complete example&lt;/em&gt; that's available on StackOverflow. But because SO is by far the largest site on the network it's sometimes special. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sites don't have a Sandbox. The way we use the Sandbox is similar to Puzzle.SE and PPCG.SE. Others use Sandboxes for formatting like Math.SE, but we are different in this regard and therefore likely won't get any custom magic links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be cool though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11790/78134&quot;&gt;this very very similar discussion on SFF.SE for more&lt;/a&gt;. Another answer there mentions workarounds with the autoreview Userscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T15:07:22.870" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T15:07:22.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-04T16:24:01.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s see if I understood correctly because I know we have problem(s?) but I’m not sure we are talking about the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tl;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Questions don't need an explicit worldbuilding context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In this particular case&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics = on topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asker can ask the question here or on the Physics SE. He chose&#xA;where he want to ask the question. Questions about building a world&#xA;are on topic on the site, no matter the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Poor quality = downvote + comment (optional)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is better to include a comment otherwise the asker won’t know what&#xA;the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the real issue is that many questions get closed as off topic because they lack a clear worldbuilding context. Such appear to be the case here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With context = this is a worldbuilding question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without context = basic physic question = off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People keep asking for the author to give a worldbuilding context. But I haven’t seen anything in the rules that requires the author to provide a context to the question.  When someone asks a question on Wolrdbuilding  SE, we should assume they are building a world, else why are they posting here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding how the world works is crucial in building a believable world. Therefore, I would tend to consider these questions as worldbuilding. As mentioned above, they can ask on the specific sites or here.  It doesn’t matter and there is nothing in the rules against doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T16:24:01.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T18:35:23.930" Score="8" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a time related problem that I am trying to solve so was looking through the various &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; related tags and descriptions. I found them rather contradictory and several aspects of them circular/redundant. To be fair the main tag &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; last edited 3 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not sure on the meta tag process. So this question, that was prompted by one tag, may need to be split up for each issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the passage or measurement of time or how it can be affected, including traveling back and forth in it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the more detailed description stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about the effects of time on a civilization, or vice-versa. If the question involves space as well - typically as the result of relativistic effects - use the space-time tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also consider the time-travel tag, if time travel is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;first off, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-keeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-keeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-keeping&lt;/a&gt; and synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calender&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calender&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calender&lt;/a&gt; for the measurement of time. So can that not be removed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I just found 1 question using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-measurement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-measurement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-measurement&lt;/a&gt; which should be removed or made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-keeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-keeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-keeping&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secondly, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; and several &lt;em&gt;methods&lt;/em&gt; covering all time-travel aspects. Should this not be removed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;thirdly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-time&lt;/a&gt; description is actually blank and has 0 tagged questions. It is also mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; but I think it can either be removed or be made a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spacetime-dimensions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spacetime-dimensions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spacetime-dimensions&lt;/a&gt; which has 72 questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Concerning dimensions of space and time, whether our 3-space + 1-time or other dimensions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag should be used in questions concerning various dimensions of space and time, where interaction between different space-time dimensions occurs, space-time dimensions other than 3+1 are involved, or the question concerns the space-time dimensions themselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am suggesting&lt;/strong&gt; a clean-up of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; by making it just about the passage of standard time. &#xA;With directions to the other tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-keeping&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-keeping&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-keeping&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spacetime-dimensions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spacetime-dimensions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spacetime-dimensions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if a further &lt;strong&gt;new tag&lt;/strong&gt; should be created for [time-manipulation] for questions about non-standard time ie speeding up/slowing down/stopping/time-bubbles etc without actually time-travelling or reaching faster-than-light speeds, or if this would actually fall under the scope of the already existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spacetime-dimensions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spacetime-dimensions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spacetime-dimensions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T18:53:17.227" Title="About [Time] for a cleanup?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6095" CreationDate="2018-05-04T18:53:17.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the suggestion of cleaning up &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-time&lt;/a&gt; doesn't exist. You can see that when searching the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; for it. When I create a random tag with the tag markdown it automatically points to an empty page. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glarnak-the-great&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glarnak-the-great&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glarnak-the-great&lt;/a&gt; is valid tag markdown - but there is no such tag, so it will point to a similar site as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-time&lt;/a&gt;. This means there is nothing to worry about with that tag - we should just remove the old reference in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the new tag is useful and we should add it - preferrably directly with a tag wiki that describes its usage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T18:53:17.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6110" CreationDate="2018-05-04T22:51:36.783" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been on hold twice. I got a ton of downvotes and VTC's and not that many useful comments to build on: I think I had 4 VTC's the first time around before I got a helpful comment. It's been modified over and over--why exactly do I need to edit it and how should I do so? I'm specifically looking for input by the VTC'ers. I need to edit this so that there aren't any more problems in the future and so I don't get any more VTC's, delete votes, or downvotes. I understand it's not on topic; I don't understand why. I get it needs to be edited; I don't know how. I was trying to simply post a piece that would help others calculate things for their own worldbuilding. If you're going to offer criticism . . . make it constructive, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111173/how-much-energy-would-be-released-in-a-collision-of-planets-of-matter-antimatt&quot;&gt;How much energy would be released in a collision of planets of matter &amp;amp; antimatter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T23:06:54.437" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T03:33:06.110" Title="How to edit my on hold question: Antimatter Planet Collision" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopening-questions|on-hold|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T22:54:03.740" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it seems I’m not the only one who wanted an answer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72957/who-gains-from-a-persistent-flat-earth-conspiracy&quot;&gt;Who gains from a persistent &amp;quot;flat Earth&amp;quot; conspiracy?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;2500 other people did too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think this is a good question for WB. Just sayin’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T14:45:25.800" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T13:52:47.570" Title="I just earned the Notable Question badge for my “closed:off topic” question!" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6107" CreationDate="2018-05-05T12:29:53.820" Score="-1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we have a problem that everyone's talking about. I don't know when the breaking point was: I'm new. But I've seen it over and over. A new user posts their first thread, an off-topic/POB/unclear/badly formatted post . . . and it gets put on hold. People say &quot;it's not worldbuilding, you need to edit it because right now it's _____. It's too easily answerable because____.&quot; And then a lot of people don't leave a comment. I've seen a slew of meta discussions about this (pleasee read if you have the time). Here's a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5216/how-to-control-the-magical-elements-of-vagueness&quot;&gt;How to control the magical elements ... of vagueness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This one was rather polarizing. I'm not sure how I feel about this thread, since it was based on one of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/enough-is-enough-nobody-can-obey-rules-that-are-only-in-someones-head&quot;&gt;Enough is enough. NOBODY can obey rules that are only in someone&amp;#39;s head&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5883/a-little-negativity-going-on-here-downvotes-and-vote-to-close/5886#5886&quot;&gt;A Little negativity going on here? Downvotes and vote to close&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3649/are-we-bashing-users-over-the-head-with-rules?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Are we bashing users over the head with rules?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3627/can-we-better-welcome-this-first-time-poster&quot;&gt;Can we better welcome this first-time poster?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the most important part to remember is our &quot;Be Honest&quot; policy. Here's an excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, &lt;em&gt;vote it down&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Add comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong&lt;/strong&gt;. Provide better answers of your own. Last but not least, &lt;strong&gt;edit and improve the existing questions and answers&lt;/strong&gt;! By doing these things, you are helping &lt;strong&gt;keep Stack Exchange a great place&lt;/strong&gt; to share knowledge of our craft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to be more welcoming. &lt;strong&gt;Downvotes are okay. Immediate VTC's are not&lt;/strong&gt;. If you're going to VTC, &lt;em&gt;leave a comprehensive comment&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;detailing NOT only what is wrong but specifically how to fix it&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Or just&lt;/strong&gt; leave a comment and then &lt;strong&gt;wait 24-48 hours until you VTC&lt;/strong&gt;. Stop confusing and turning away new users. Don't just tell them what's wrong, tell them how to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we fix this? How do we make WorldBuilding StackExchange more welcoming, more open, and perhaps just a little slower? Should we not allow answers until the question has been reviewed and edited for 1-2 days? Put time limits on VTC's? More cleanly define what is &quot;on topic/answerable?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T15:48:22.343" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T21:00:04.240" Title="The Problem Everyone Has and Everyone's Talking About" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-06T00:27:43.150" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted one question, about an hour ago (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111459/28789&quot;&gt;What modifications would be needed to turn an oil rig into a self sustaining base?&lt;/a&gt;), and no one has answered, commented or anything. I read the help center, and heard that unanswered questions are sometimes deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really need my question answered for a book of mine I’m writing, so how can I get people to answer it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50488" OwnerDisplayName="Talos 3" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T05:14:16.153" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T16:52:13.137" Title="What do you do when no one answers your question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6103" CreationDate="2018-05-06T05:12:36.213" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general you should wait a bit. For example we recommend to wait at least 24 hours before accepting an answer to give people from around the globe a chance to have a look at your question. Users on this site are in many different timezones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weekends tend to be slower than weekdays, which is why you should expect less interaction with your questions/answers on these days. Nights tend to be slower than days (American nights - I think the majority of active users are from America).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also takes some time for people to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find your question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;read your question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;think about your question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find relevant sources to underline their points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write an answer to your question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fix any formatting issues with their answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;re-read their answer (for example English is not my first language, which is why I try to re-read everything to have at least &lt;em&gt;fewer&lt;/em&gt; mistakes) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post their answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general the Q&amp;amp;A system of StackExchange accepts that some questions may sit unanswered for a looooong time. On WorldBuilding it's relatively rare that questions are unanswered and open for more than maybe a couple hours. We have some questions that require &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, mostly about something that has to do with orbital-space-planet stuff that people such as me have no idea about how to even &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; the question and where you need &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; answers with lots of maths and citations from scientific papers and such. If your question is difficult the &quot;think about your question&quot; and &quot;find relevant sources to underline their points&quot; as well as the &quot;write an answer to your question&quot; parts will take a lot longer. We also don't have too many hard-science experts, so the &quot;find your question&quot; part is likely more difficult, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a list of all questions that are currently unanswered without any answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=noanswers&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. As of writing this the oldest one in this category is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110806/creating-a-scientifically-semi-valid-pseudo-arthropod-primate-part-1-pseudo-dra&quot;&gt;Creating a Scientifically Semi-Valid Pseudo-Arthropod Primate Part 1: Pseudo-Dragonfly Wing Rib Muscles&lt;/a&gt; - which is roughly three days old. The oldest one without an upvoted answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/107040/28789&quot;&gt;Physiological adaptation of life on a planet orbiting a red giant.&lt;/a&gt;, which is roughly a week old (but there are two answers and a bunch of comments). You can see this list &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=newest&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites sometimes have questions that require certain expert knowledge in mostly-unknown fields that sit around for years until someone goes through some of the more obscure tags and the unanswered tabs. For example on RPG.SE I have seen someone ask about a very old game whose rules were not available on the internet whether something was written in a certain edition of the printed books the way it was in his or if his one was a misprint - that means someone has to have the same edition of the rare, very old book &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; see the question on this specific site &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; have the time/intention to actually write an answer. Who knows how long it will sit unanswered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually pretty rare that questions are deleted. If it's downvoted, closed as off-topic (meaning it was &quot;on hold&quot; for a week without an edit from the original querent), hasn't seen activity for a while in closed state and doesn't have an upvoted answer it can automatically be deleted. Or if it's spam/rude/abusive and someone asks an elected moderator to delete it/ a few people with very, very high reputation think it should be deleted because it's defacing the site. Enough (I think 6 or so?) people flagging it as spam would also delete it. Each spam flag also instantly counts as a -1 without any rep that the flagger would have to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question has been unanswered and you have the required reputation of 75 for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;set bounties&lt;/a&gt; privilege you can put a bounty on your question to bump it to the top of the frontpage and have it in the special &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured tab&lt;/a&gt; for a week. Of course using 50 of your 75 reputation to bump your question is pretty hard, which is why you could also first ask in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; (requires 20 rep) if someone can answer that. And if your question has really been sitting unanswered for a while maybe the regulars there can take a look to see if they can improve the question a bit, brainstorm with you - or use some of their rep for a bounty. (You shouldn't necessarily expect the last one, but for example around christmas we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5675/28789&quot;&gt;Holiday Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; - maybe someone is willing to help you out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T16:52:13.137" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T16:52:13.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-06T16:53:40.537" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111513/9182&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the safest way to catch a bullet in your body?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was closed for being off-topic, for being &quot;too story-based.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it too story based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastEditorUserId="9182" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T14:43:17.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:43:17.203" Title="Why is &quot;How can a teleporter stop a bullet?&quot; off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6101" CreationDate="2018-05-06T21:00:04.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Up and downvoting is anonymous. It is recommended to comment on the&#xA;   post when downvoting  and when voting to close (VTC) but it has never&#xA;   been mandatory. Furthermore, the community is strongly against making&#xA;   it mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting can be beneficial if it is justified, even if commenting&#xA;   is not required. This is how the site works, good content is upvoted&#xA;   and bad content is downvoted. That’s how the users know which answers&#xA;   are the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VTC: If a question has a problem, it is in the best interest of the community to close it early. We have to fix the problem before people start answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is too broad, it might result in answers that cover&#xA;aspects that you are not interested in. You find that answers are too&#xA;long and the people are missing the point. The answers end up being&#xA;useless and everybody is just wasting their time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is off-topic, it will get closed anyway. Yet some&#xA;people might try to answer it despite this. If we don’t close it,&#xA;they might have answered for nothing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is unclear, we aren’t even sure what the question is.&#xA;How are we supposed to know the answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solutions?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I don’t have anything specific for the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We encourage users to comment when they VTC, but we can only&#xA;encourage and show by example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I noticed that we have a problem with what is on topic on the site.&#xA;There is room for improvement on that matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T21:00:04.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-06T23:58:33.930" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is pretty much a continuation of&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/enough-is-enough-nobody-can-obey-rules-that-are-only-in-someones-head&quot;&gt;JBH’s post&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;but it is narrowed down to a specific issue. It also comes after a suggestion from elemtilas to refocus the question.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111173/how-much-energy-would-be-released-in-a-collision-of-planets-of-matter-antimatt&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that shed light on a problem we have on the site. Despite several edits, it has been closed, reopened, re-closed and now it even has a vote for deletion. I have no idea what is the justification behind the recent trend of deletion votes on questions but that is another issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like these get closed but the asker insist that he is building a world. It is not a new issue but it bothers me more now, and it’s hard to justify when there is nothing in the help center to legitimate the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would summarize the issue like this;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question now has a worldbuilding context, but people still think&#xA;it is off-topic. I don't know what it takes to change their minds or what needs to be done to make these questions acceptable.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People use the lack of context as an argument to close questions but&#xA;there is nothing in the help center that requires an  ** explicit worldbuilding context**. We assume that the questions asked here are about&#xA;worldbuilding but there is no requirement to have an &lt;strong&gt;explicit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;worldbuuilding context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding in itself is rarely a topic. The question are always about something else like geography, history, linguistic, physics, etc. Some questions might appear to be less focused on worldbuilding but they still are&#xA;about building a world. If I want to ask a physics question in order&#xA;to help me build my world, there is &lt;strong&gt;again&lt;/strong&gt; nothing in the rules&#xA;preventing me to do that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been said countless times that it is not because a question is on-topic on another site that it makes the question off-topic here. Yes, maybe the person will have a better answer on the other site but it’s his/her choice. Questions about building fictional worlds are off-topic on other sites since it’s supposed to be our topic. So asking these questions on other sites is likely to end in closure or migration if there is a slight element of woldbuilding involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, with my understanding of the situation, I see two things that can be done:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stop closing these questions as off-topic because they are on-topic according to the help center. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the help center to reflect that questions need a clear&#xA;    worldbuilding context, otherwise they will get closed as off-topic.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, we generate a lot of frustration from new users. They get told that they do not follow the rules but when they check the help center, they find nothing. We have to fix it one way or another. Feel free to share your views and solutions to the problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: JBH's question was not specific enough. By narrowing down the issue, it is more likely to get solved. I felt the other question was not heading anywhere.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T19:53:59.040" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T00:03:25.807" Title="Clarifying “What topics can I ask about here?” from the help center" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|help-center|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6099" CreationDate="2018-05-07T03:33:06.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fair to say that your original question has raised some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/enough-is-enough-nobody-can-obey-rules-that-are-only-in-someones-head&quot;&gt;vigourous debate&lt;/a&gt; as per Vincent's comment. I personally didn't engage in that debate directly but I did follow it closely, and you'll note that I did attempt to make an initial edit to get this question going in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the problem that most people have with this question in this forum boils down to 'fitness'. In its original form, it was poorly worded and looked like a simple physics question, to which most people will say 'well what difference does it make to your fictional world?' leaving you with a question that can be answered simply by plugging in the Earth's mass into E=mc^2 which would be considered too lightweight by the Physics SE crowd, but off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110873/iron-rich-rogue-planet-that-is-12x-earths-mass-collides-with-the-sun-now-what&quot;&gt;a large planet colliding with the sun&lt;/a&gt; was NOT closed as being off topic. On the surface, they would appear to be similar insofar as both could essentially be answered by some form of physics, but this question brought with it some sense of &lt;em&gt;speculation&lt;/em&gt; that (respectfully), yours didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of putting this; your question originally asked for a value, not an effect. The other question actually asks whether the sun would dim or brighten, how long the effect would last for, what it would look like from the standpoint of the Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to follow the same principle, then your question needs to be edited to ask about &lt;em&gt;effects&lt;/em&gt;; how far away would the collision be visible? how quickly would the planets collide, and would the energy being generated at their contact plane be sufficient to either slow (or even reverse) the effect of gravity? Would it appear like a supernova, and does the energy created by a matter / antimatter reaction generate cosmic rays or pure radiant heat? Can other planets in the system where this happens survive, and what impacts would it have on the habitability of those planets over the long term? Would it (for instance) vaporise or sterilise all planets within the solar system in which the collision takes place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did I first try to edit your question in the first place? Because it's actually a GOOD question if you look at the spirit of what you're asking. Every bit as good as the question about planets colliding with a Sun. BUT, if all you ask for is a number, you haven't intrigued anyone. You haven't asked them to extrapolate outcomes from the numbers they can derive. You haven't asked them to &lt;em&gt;speculate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is ultimately what the people on this site love doing. Inspire us to imagine new effects in the context of our engineering / analytics / economics / biological / physics / chemistry / etc. backgrounds, and we'll jump at the challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this have been pointed out a little better at the outset? Probably. But, for people capable of providing answers to impossible or crazy situations, we seem singularly unable to articulate what sort of questions we like. This is in part because we rule by committee, but I also think it's because the scope of this site is somewhat ambiguous to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that you should take most of what I say with a grain of salt; my first (and only) attempt to ask a question on worldbuilding failed catastrophically and ever since then I've constrained myself to answers, which (for the most part) seem to be far better received. That said, my personal view on how to fix your question would be to focus on the effects, not the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put a hard-science tag on the question by all means, but the answer shouldn't be a number of joules; it should be an impact. That would at least satisfy the world-building element, and allow people to come up with their own ideas about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; such a collision would occur, and how your world would experience it from afar (however far away that is as defined by your brief).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as a final warning, don't just cut and paste all the sample questions from my 5th paragraph into a single question post. We still work on 1 question per post, but (hopefully) these questions give you a method for expanding your question into a series of related questions that can all provide some value across different contexts of your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short; persist with it. I'd really like to see some answers to some of the questions postulated above and it's an interesting concept to be sure. Yes, there is still some subjectivity to this question and I cannot guarantee that if you follow my advice you'll be better received, but I for one would like to see what happens if you try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T03:33:06.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6105" CreationDate="2018-05-07T13:18:20.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too story based because teleportation is not a real-world thing so without more info about your world, it would be impossible to say what teleportation can do. Weirdly, a question that is “too story based” is often fixed by giving MORE world-specific info, not less. You need to tell us how teleportation works... how fast, what happens at transition, what happens to the displaced matter at the arrival point, etc. Within that framework, the question becomes answerable. Right now, that data is all in your head, and we haven’t read your story. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T13:18:20.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6100" CreationDate="2018-05-07T13:52:47.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question being closed do not cease to be notable one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for closure, it seems it is basically question about current, real situation, and thus not quite on topic here. Even if it is on topic, there are no objective rules to judge answers better or worse, so in its current shape it probably should be closed as primarily opinion based. And it borderlines high concept issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T13:52:47.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-07T13:54:20.847" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But without that change, the only rules we have are the rules listed in Tour and Help Center. Period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was nothing about building world in the question, so it should have been closed as off topic. Period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T14:22:49.560" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:22:49.560" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6109" CreationDate="2018-05-07T14:34:26.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page contains this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists to get help creating imaginary worlds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, your assumption that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there is nothing in the help center that requires a worldbuilding context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is false. There is. At the very, very beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:34:26.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T19:46:00.663" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/352819&quot;&gt;Magic links for comments&lt;/a&gt; are great&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They allow you to very easily write helpful comments, as they allow you to link to each sites most important resources with very short links where you don't need to do a search for individual Hyperlinks before posting a single standard comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But many people don't know that they exist&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem is that many people are not aware of this feature. Even longterm users of StackExchange often don't know about these useful short links. They are a bit hidden. Specifically you currently have to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;the privilege page for &lt;em&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and then click on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;a small subset of markdown&lt;/a&gt;. This is basically the same site you would get when checking out the markdown features through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;advanced help&lt;/a&gt; when writing an answer or question, just with the expanded features for &amp;quot;Comment formatting&amp;quot; expanded and at the top - which is probably the reason only a few people ever check out this &lt;em&gt;small subset of markdown&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The privilege page for &lt;em&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/em&gt; doesn't explicitly mention them&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the text in the privilege page only mentions &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bold&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;named hyperlinks&lt;/em&gt; as examples for the subset. I think it would be useful to say that &lt;em&gt;additionally&lt;/em&gt; to the markdown in questions/answers there are magic (or shorthand) links in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a subset of what's available in questions/answer, it's an addition and therefore relevant to explicitly state in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The privilege page for &lt;em&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/em&gt; should explicitly mention them&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I know the markdown for questions/answers and someone tells me that comments use a subset then I won't expect additional ways to have shorter links to the most important resources. A simple sentence would be enough, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition you can use some shorthand links to refer to important resources on the network, such as &lt;code&gt;[tour]&lt;/code&gt; to refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Maybe the commenting will get better&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's easier for people to write useful comments that point them towards important resources they might be more inclined to actually refer newer users to these resources. When you are not using magic links you have to search for each link every time if you are not already using some &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/6650/make-your-own-custom-magic-links-for-comments&quot;&gt;userscripts&lt;/a&gt; - but in such cases you likely already know about magic links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently many people don't know about this feature, making it a bit more prominent might help. There will still be many people who don't know about them because they don't carefully read the privilege pages, but maybe it will be useful in some cases and thereby contribute to our efforts to make comments more helpful. This could be especially important for those that are trying to greet new users and those that are participating in the closure/reopening process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Simple &lt;em&gt;magic link&lt;/em&gt; example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding! Your question is currently missing a bit of information. Could you [edit] it to include xyz? If you have a moment please take the [tour] and visit the [help/on-topic] to learn more about the site. You already have more than 20 reputation, so you might also be interested in checking out [meta] where we discuss how the site should work or visit the [chat] for some more open-ended discussions. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be expanded to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding! Your question is currently missing a bit of information. Could you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/6116/edit&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; it to include xyz? If you have a moment please take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about the site. You already have more than 20 reputation, so you might also be interested in checking out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss how the site should work or visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Chat&lt;/a&gt; for some more open-ended discussions. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T19:38:42.173" Title="Can we change the privilege page for &quot;comment everywhere&quot; to explicitly mention magic links?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|privileges|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2018-05-08T01:58:54.837" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you need is a move to new area button that will move the whole thread to the correct area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing is pointless and disheartening when someone asks a perfectly valid question in the area they believe is the correct one and it gets shutdown without an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33868" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T01:58:54.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6120" CreationDate="2018-05-08T11:32:44.110" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111211/in-what-era-or-tech-level-in-earths-history-did-people-have-the-ability-to-cros&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is about navigation on a super sized sea on a super-earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It received a bizarre &lt;s&gt;&quot;religious&quot;&lt;/s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/111531/28789&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel like this answer is adding anything to the discussion and worse I guess it's blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my guess correct? Can we flag it for deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14284" LastEditorUserId="14284" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T12:44:47.267" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:41:30.210" Title="Bizarre Answer looks like Off-Topic" Tags="|discussion|flagging|specific-answer|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2018-05-08T11:54:49.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't necessarily call it a &quot;religious&quot; answer, but it certainly doesn't answer the question. It seems to be intended to be some kind of answer like &quot;the last big civilization left technology on the planet and now we view this magnificent technology as something given to us by the gods&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't address in any way which past era in our real world would be able to cross this distance with their ships - I certainly don't believe that the &quot;age of the God's&quot; is an era that we should account for in our real-world Earth's history. It might be fine in a fantasy setting where you are willing to use such tropes, but the querent seems to be searching for an answer based in real-world history and science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left a comment and flagged it as &quot;Not an answer&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the general process when encountering something in an answer post that doesn't seem to address the question or falls short of being a real answer, for example if someone mentions that they don't have the reputation to comment and therefore misused the answer box. We'll see what the community thinks about the answer and maybe the user who answered will edit their post to clarify what they mean. There is always the possibility of simply misunderstanding one another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with whether this is about religious believes or not. The answer doesn't really address the question in any meaningful way and therefore it's &quot;Not an answer&quot; and should be flagged as such. I also don't think we should make any sweeping statements about banning religion from non-religion questions. If your religious believes help you write a meaningful answer or add something that could be used to grant the qeurent's in-universe logic some kind of plausibility then by all means: add your religious views to your answer. Just don't expect anyone to free you of the requirement to support your claims, especially if someone asks about history or science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter religious views and don't like them because you feel that they are unsupported claims you can simply downvote them to show your disagreement with the statements and possibly write a comment about how you are having doubts about the validity of the claims presented in the answer. You shouldn't get into any religious flame wars, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote what you think is good, downvote what you think is not good, flag what you think doesn't address the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T12:00:35.857" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T12:00:35.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2018-05-08T14:41:30.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did some spot checking and it looks like about 1/3 of the answers don't answer the question.  Rather, they're (often lengthy) comments.  People were having a tough time taking the OP at his/her word about that ocean and weren't focusing on the issue of the relevant technology level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that we're a bit &lt;s&gt;lazy&lt;/s&gt;lenient when it comes to holding people to the relevance of their answers.  Unlike Stack Overflow, Physics.SE, etc., this is a highly creative site focused as much on unreality as reality.  For example, it's very common to see the &quot;You can't do that, but you could do this&quot; type of answer.  Regrettably, it's also true that you will often see answers that reflect the fact that the answerer didn't read the question very well.  Indeed, that's a hallmark of people who swoop in via the Stack Exchange app, drop a rushed answer because it's all the time they had while riding the bus to work, and swoop away (never to be seen again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in the end, what one person judges to be an answer of little value another often finds to be a gem of inspiration.  And so we don't often sweat the little things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:41:30.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6134" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:17:42.943" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm kinda new here, but I already edit posts I think need it. &#xA;I already edit posts for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grammar&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spelling&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Math (I edit math to put it into LaTeX/MathJax format quite a lot, more often than any other edit type)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other edits I should know about? Any other edits that can be done? I often skim questions and answers simply for math and spelling--if I see math in a non-LaTeX format or with lots of spelling errors I edit it. But are there any more important/lesser known things I should edit, or things that can be added to a question/answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T17:40:08.953" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T12:37:43.960" Title="What kinds of edits do we have?" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:40:56.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edits should make a post clearer, cleaner and in general more understandable. Edits should not change the intended meaning of a post. A comprehensive list of every possible edit isn't really possible, and isn't really useful. If you don't notice something that could be edited, it's likely someone else will. If you're unsure about an edit, add a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T17:40:56.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-08T19:18:54.650" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very new to the SE &quot;Worldbuilding&quot; site, and therefore I'm not quite sure if a question I have is on-topic there. It is about the mechanics of a world, though its &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; world, and the mechanics aren't very grand. My question is this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be okay, and realistic, to have two brothers named Cole and Nick? The reason for my confusion is because both Cole and Nick can be short Nicholas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify, I did not just ask my question. My question is: Would that kind of question be allowed? Because, technically, I'm asking about the mechanics of our world. Is it realistic for someone to name two of their children Cole and Nick, even if Cole is short for Coleman, and Nick is short for Nicholas? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to repeat my question (since it's probably a bit confusing); Can I ask questions regarding character naming?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50597" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T19:35:41.123" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T13:24:09.863" Title="Is name choice on-topic for Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6125" CreationDate="2018-05-08T19:22:10.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a question would be &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here. Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, questions regarding &quot;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&quot; are off topic and should not be asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking whether a parent would name their child some particular name is the action of a specific character, and therefore is caught by this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T19:22:10.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6125" CreationDate="2018-05-08T19:27:15.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not, is it not appropriate to ask here because it is entirely based on opinion.&#xA;Parents can name their kids however they want, they can even call them Stormi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could be suitable if you add a constrain to make it much less subjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T05:07:07.280" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T05:07:07.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-08T23:29:09.160" Score="18" ViewCount="1707" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an effort to start building consensus after asking: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/enough-is-enough-nobody-can-obey-rules-that-are-only-in-someones-head&quot;&gt;Enough is enough. NOBODY can obey rules that are only in someone&amp;#39;s head&lt;/a&gt;, I'd like to start with what I hope will become a canonical catalog or list of question types we can refer new users toward to help improve site question quality.  Obviously it's impossible for this list to encompass 100% of every type of question that could be asked on a creative site like Worldbuilding, but I'm hoping that it'll cover enough that the outliers needn't be worried about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before adding a question pattern to the answer list below, please take the time to read through the posts to be absolutely sure you're not materially duplicating patterns.  If you have a pattern that is a duplicate but useful to identify, please edit the answer and add it to the &quot;alternate patterns&quot; list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes mean the question pattern, description, and advice concerning the question are good and worthy of being canonical (this includes both &quot;we like this pattern&quot; and &quot;we don't like this pattern&quot;).  If you are adding to what already exists, please edit the answer.  If you are changing or deleting something that already exists (and you're not the original answerer), please use comments to petition the answerer first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes may mean the question pattern has already been listed (a comment explaining this would be appropriate), that the pattern description is insufficient, or that the pattern is simply not worthy.  If you're downvoting to indicate required improvement, please remember to check back and remove the downvote when/if the post improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question pattern&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt; Lorem Ipsum (this optional block lists alternative versions of the question pattern.  The purpose is clarification, not simply listing permutaitons.)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; On-Topic/Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; Lorem ipsum (why this is/isn't a good question for WB, etc.)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt; Lorem ipsum (this optional block helps users understand how to avoid the most common VTC reasons for this pattern)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links to pre-existing pre-existing questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that discuss, describe, support, or refutes this pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T14:04:59.067" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T22:15:51.503" Title="Catalog of Question Types" Tags="|discussion|questions|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-08T23:29:26.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would X change if Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions ask what the consequences would be if something we consider normal were changed.  For example, such a question may ask about the effect on climate if planetary axial tilt changes, or the effects on society if a particular technology is introduced (or removed), or the effects on history if a particular person was never born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;While generally on-topic, these questions are frequently closed as too broad or too primarily opinion-based because the OP has not performed enough research to ask a specific question.  For example, asking &quot;how would the weather change if the Earth was 10% closer to the sun&quot; is too broad because climate is so complex and entire book would be required to provide a definitive answer.  Likewise, &quot;How would society have changed if television was invented twenty years earlier?&quot; is primarily opinion-based because there is no clear way to judge the quality of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;How to deal with &amp;quot;I have a High Concept, please do my work for me&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T23:40:33.123" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T23:40:33.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-08T23:34:44.460" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What do you think about X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitability:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions frequently ask Worldbuilding participants to verify the feasibility of a design, concept, or idea.  Questions of this type should use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and comply with its requirements.  (See the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6556#6556&quot;&gt;Is X Realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; answer to this post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Questions of this type easily become off-topic (too broad) because they can violate the basic rule of Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;that they are Q&amp;amp;A sites, not discussion forums&lt;/a&gt;.  This can also easily become Too Broad if the question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/2113&quot;&gt;How is this possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T00:33:18.163" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T00:33:18.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-08T23:53:36.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the answer to this maths problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;  How much energy do I get if XYZ? (I use atomic bombs, I initiate a matter-antimatter reaction, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitability:&lt;/strong&gt;  Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;  Questions that ask for numeric quantities or for participants to plug numbers into an equation do not directly relate to the conception, making or shaping of a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;  This kind of question is easy to avoid by basic online research. I.e., a Google search. Simple maths questions posed here show no obvious research or demonstration of relevant context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;  In general, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Topics Can I Post About (in Worldbuilding)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; also &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Topics Can I Ask About (in Mathematics)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Topics Can I Ask About (in Physics)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt;  The intention here is not to &quot;ban&quot; maths questions per se. Rather it is to shunt simple maths questions to a more appropriate part of SE while simultaneously improving the worldbuilding content of maths questions that do hinge on e.g. an equation dealing with some function of Nature and that we should be dealing with here at Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The off-topicality of this specific question type derives from its purely &quot;do my homework for me by plugging numbers into an equation and give me the answer&quot; attitude. We should discourage that behaviour; we should continue to be encouraging of querents who need help with difficult physics or geometry in a clearly defined worldbuilding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of On-Topic Maths/Worldbuilding Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3859/how-do-i-calculate-the-area-of-a-specific-place-on-the-map&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Calculating the Area of a Country on a Map&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109633/how-to-generate-world-map-for-minimal-distortion&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Going from a Spherical Map to a Planar Map&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111439/how-much-does-a-moon-s-gravity-effect-the-free-fall-acceleration-of-an-object&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How Much Does a Moon's Gravity Affect Free Fall Acceleration on a Planet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31722/universe-where-mathematics-is-different&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Universe Where Mathematics Are Different&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T21:25:35.280" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T21:25:35.280" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2018-05-09T03:51:30.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're editing a post anyway, scan the comments on it for anything from the author of the post that should be incorporated.  A common situation, especially with new users (who don't know all our rules yet), is that somebody will ask a question in a comment and the author will answer &lt;em&gt;in another comment&lt;/em&gt; instead of by editing the post.  Not all such comments &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be in the post (sometimes that first commenter missed something, or it was a tangent), but if you see something that should be pulled in, please do so and then flag relevant comments as no longer needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for helping to maintain the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T03:51:30.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2018-05-09T05:00:17.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can edit the tags used by the question if you feel they are not suited for the question but there is a part of subjectivity in deciding which tags are the best. It is also better to edit something else along if possible, not just the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T05:00:17.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6125" CreationDate="2018-05-09T13:24:09.863" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traditionally, questions that result in answers containing a list of ideas have been off-topic, kindof...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE has had a love/hate relationship with the &quot;Primarily opinion-based&quot; VTC reason.  Part of the problem is that we deal with creativity and fiction, and so there's always some opinion involved.  Worse, POB is meant to identify a failure to meet Stack Exchange rules requiring one accepted answer, so from our perspective, a question is POB is, in our opinion, you (the questioner) cannot clearly decide between the value of any two answers &amp;mdash; which makes us mind-readers of a sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem appears to have come to a head back in 2014 where two of our most prominent members introduced VTC reasons that specifically forbade questions asking for lists of things as answers, such as a list of names.  Both users proposed, had accepted, and deleted the same VTC reason on the same day.  It was a whirlwind romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, list of things answers are actually quite common on worldbuilding.SE.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;How would X change Y&lt;/a&gt; questions almost always end up with a list of bullet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, should they really be off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over at English.SE they have a problem.  People regularly ask &quot;what's a word than means X?&quot;  It's not simply asking for synonyms (that gets downvoted hard as not enough research), it's asking, what's a single word that reflects this phrase/context/behavior/explanation/etc?  They do keep the OP on their toes and are very quick to downvote (not close) if the question isn't clear (expresses exactly the meaning the word is meant to convey).  THe goal is to produce a question that results in, perhaps, a dozen answers ... not hundreds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And answers can only have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ONE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; response.  No lists.  While I'm sure you can find exceptions sprinkled throughout English.SE, they're pretty good about this behavior.  This is how they maintain SE's &quot;one right answer&quot; context.  The answers must also be properly formatted: the word, its definition, and an optional brief description of why the word would be best, such that the OP can fully understand their choices and ultimately accept one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are two kinds of list questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are the obvious worldbuilding list questions like, what are the different kinds of clouds?  What are the different kinds of political structures?  Etc.  These kinds of questions are usually quite definitive (meaning the length of the list isn't infinite and therefore POB).  Therefore, these should be on-topic but downvoted if they demonstrate poor research (aka, you could have found that in 30 sec. with a google search and here's a link to prove it).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The other kind of list question results in an infinite list (one recently asked question was looking for a list of &quot;trickster&quot; styled names for magic users).  While it may be true that there are only so many synonyms or perturbations of &quot;trickster&quot; to be had, the fact is that the list is open-ended.  This, at the moment, is off-topic as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PROPOSAL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make &quot;Infinite List&quot; questions on-topic.  After all, the purpose of this site is to help people build worlds, and sometimes what you need is some ideas.  However, let's follow the English.SE model: answers can contain only &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ONE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; proposal and must include a description of why it's a good choice.  Questions that are poorly contained (the &quot;trickster&quot; question is a good example of a good question under this context, btw) get downvoted.  Answers that just give a word (&quot;illusionist&quot;) are also downvoted as a handslap to remind answerers of their obligation to justify their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'll take a while to get everybody into the swing of things, but it would produce a meaningful solution to a common problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T13:24:09.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-09T13:29:10.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need a &lt;em&gt;finite list&lt;/em&gt; of things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions seek insight into a class of issues (I use &quot;class&quot; in the programming sense) that often leads to a bullet list of items.  for example, &quot;what are different types of tectonic stress?&quot; or &quot;what are the different governmental types I can use?&quot;  These questions result in a finite list of items and a good answer addresses as much of that list as is appropriate for the question with thorough descriptions for each item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;While generally on-topic, these questions are frequently closed as primarily opinion-based because the OP has not performed enough initial research.  A simple list of cloud types, for example, is easily and quickly found via a Google search.  Questions of this type should be clear, focused, and have already performed basic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T13:29:10.153" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-09T13:40:10.103" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need an &lt;em&gt;infinite list&lt;/em&gt; of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; These questions are usually idea-generating questions and are easily identified by their unconstrained nature.  For example, &amp;quot;what should I name my city?&amp;quot;  Despite descriptions of the city, its surrounds, its founders, etc., the fact is the city can be named anything, resulting in lengthly lists and promoting unproductive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6125/is-name-choice-on-topic-for-worldbuilding/6137#6137&quot;&gt;Is name choice on-topic for Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5621/clarification-for-new-users-when-is-a-fishing-for-ideas-question-on-or-off-t&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Help Center Rules:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … every answer is equally valid. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advice:&lt;/strong&gt; A clever way to begin the process of idea-generation (introduced by our renowned Cort Ammon), is to reformat your question as &amp;quot;what [genre] books or movies have dealt with [open-ended-idea]?&amp;quot; and ask it on our sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science-Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.  People will happily give you a ton of useful information that could (a) directly answer your question or (b) help you narrow your question so it becomes an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; question on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, provide a list of restrictions, conditions, limitations, and expectations to help guide respondents as they answer the question. Helping us understand why you asked your question, what's stopping you from answering it yourself, and how you expect to use the answers can also help. These can also narrow the question to become an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T22:15:51.503" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T22:15:51.503" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-05-09T14:01:45.443" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a situation that would enable a character to (do) X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; These questions are about a story set in a world, not about world building. They are sometimes fit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://writing.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/21222&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3298/21222&quot;&gt;When should I close a question as &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit from JBH: User Elemtilas once pointed out in a comment that the answer to this question type is often a function of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;  In other words, the OP is looking for any way to rationalize the condition &amp;quot;X.&amp;quot;  If &amp;quot;X&amp;quot; is an absolute requirement for your story, then it's no longer a worldbuilding question as it has become story-based.  This question type is very susceptible to depending on narrative necessity.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T13:54:21.333" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T13:54:21.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-09T17:46:27.953" Score="3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding this post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3800/call-to-sandbox-duty?rq=1&quot;&gt;Call to Sandbox Duty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I’ve referred people to this sandbox, and the idea is to get better posts. For that to work we need to discuss why a question is too broad or unclear, and help the OP edit it so that it can be posted as a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;strong&gt;great&lt;/strong&gt; post. I think JDługosz brings up an important point, but there's one thing wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still don't have that many people in the Sandbox. (This is just my opinion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need more people to help comment on potential questions on the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we attract more users not only to use the Sandbox (made easy by linking to it in comments) but how to get users to &lt;strong&gt;help each other with their potential questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T22:03:51.840" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T22:03:51.840" Title="Getting More Sandbox Helpers" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2018-05-09T20:35:49.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a serious problem with the sandbox. &#xA;Personally, I go there from time to time but maybe not often enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every time I go there, it seems like the posts already attracted&#xA;plenty of comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I do post a comment, I find myself answering the question rather than giving feedback. That is not the purpose of the sandbox but I cannot resist. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions in the sandbox tend to be much longer than the average question on main. I know that this is because the questions are not fully formed yet but it makes judging them more complicated. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T20:35:49.553" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2018-05-10T12:47:20.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be reasonable in deciding if an edit should be made. Some errors are intentional. I try to avoid edits where the only edit is to correct one or two typo's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally try make an edit if it will make the post clearer and easier to read, not on personal choice on how it should be formatted etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not rules. These are my personal editing preferences for when I make an edit myself. I try make edits that wouldn't annoy the OP. &lt;strong&gt;Be nice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add paragraph breaks to break up &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; walls of text. Make the actual question &lt;strong&gt;obvious&lt;/strong&gt;. If it's a short question, this isn't strictly necessary. But I have been guilty of doing it (I then try at least incorporate &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; spelling and grammer corrections at the same time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a paragraph of criteria is a confusing jumble of criteria/rules and examples, sometimes with brackets within brackets etc, I consider adding bullet lists with the examples indented underneath the criteria/rules. Trying to keep the same sentence structure that the OP used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits shouldn't change the spelling from American English to English English. Let the OP write color/colour as they choose. Obviously if there is a mix of spelling styles in the same question, then we can fix so that it is uniformly American/English all the way through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't correct spelling mistakes and errors that are obviously intentional, unless it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; detracts from the question. Eg puns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is only a few hours old and the OP clearly states they will edit later, either in the post or comments, and it's only a few errors, I try wait them out. Unless it is something really distracting like absolutely no paragraphs breaks or you need to make the question sentence really obvious :). They may have already noticed the typos/mistakes and they often will clear them up themselves when they add clarifications to focus the question. Especially if it's a typo that can be attributed to autocorrect. If they have already edited, and there are still errors, go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When editing Headings, try stick with what the OP had written. I try leave headings alone as much as possible but occasionally a larger Heading edit is warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone rolls back an edit, don't make the same edit suggestion again :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone makes an edit on &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; post/answer that you don't agree with, simply rollback. They should understand. If the edited post does actually make the post easier to read in some way, rollback what you don't agree with and add any positive changes yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T12:47:20.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2018-05-11T12:37:43.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I missed in the other answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove unnecessary text. That happens less here than on other SE sites, because  some amount of sketching the environment/situation can be helpful. Still, phrases like &lt;em&gt;I'm looking for an answer to the question...&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I have been thinking about...&lt;/em&gt; can usually be stripped out.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And of course there are the common phrases like &lt;em&gt;Thank you&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;What do you think&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19190/should-questions-include-tags-in-their-titles&quot;&gt;Remove tags in titles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3106" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T12:37:43.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2018-05-11T21:30:25.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sandbox is a useful idea, but the problem with it is that it's not clearly linked to anywhere on the main WB site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could do with a link in the main menu like this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fba92.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fba92.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Proposed link in main menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this would require an SE wide change, but we have a WB site theme and perhaps it could be worked into that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link like that would help a great deal in directing people towards the Sandbox and giving it a more prominent profile on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T21:30:25.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6089" CreationDate="2018-05-12T03:58:10.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One, that's way too long. The example should be a comment such as &amp;quot;Could you please clarify ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I completely agree. This comment is mostly not a good example. This is like a kindergarten teacher saying, &amp;quot;Remember to be nice! Also, Randy, your mom smells like a dead tortoise!&amp;quot; (Of course, the comment in question is not &lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt;, just not extremely constructive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing to do would be put an example like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/111982/49656&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/111982/49656&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49656" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T03:58:10.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6109" CreationDate="2018-05-12T18:01:56.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines will always be blurry on Worldbuilding SE regarding what is on-topic and what isn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is either divided or doesn't have a strong opinion on how the rules should be understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It falls on the responsibility of individual members to judge questions according to what they think is the best thing to do for the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disagreement will continue as users have different closing criteria, bringing confusion for newcomers. But it looks like the community in general is fine with this situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-13T23:31:51.293" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T23:31:51.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6109" CreationDate="2018-05-13T09:19:40.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with the question under discussion is that a serious answer would require a lot of work and a lot of physics; there are not that many people on this site who have the capability to do the work, and, in addition, there are not many people on this site who would appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer, posted by the inquirer themself, is &lt;em&gt;painfully wrong&lt;/em&gt;. One cannot simply take &lt;em&gt;E&amp;nbsp;=&amp;nbsp;mc²&lt;/em&gt; and plug in some numbers mindlessly; one must consider what would actually happen. As the planets begin to collide, the energy released would shatter them and vaporize huge amounts of material, which would then proceed to expand; we now have two superhot rapidly expanding spheres of matter and antimatter which will interact in wonderful ways. How it would play out depends on the velocity (speed &lt;em&gt;and direction&lt;/em&gt;) of the impactor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a complicated physics problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer, posted by the anonymous inquirer, is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that deleting the question, or, if possible, leaving it closed with a big warning on top, would be justified.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T09:19:40.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6109" CreationDate="2018-05-14T00:03:25.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an area of focus we need to work on isn't so much &quot;what topics can I ask about here&quot; but rather &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What is Worldbuilding Stack Exchange all about?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back the Source, we read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; at the Stack Exchange tour: &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange is a network of 172 communities that are created and run by experts and enthusiasts like you who are passionate about a specific topic. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice two key ingredients to what SE is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are experts in &amp;amp; passionate about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a specific topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  In our case, worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our task is to provide answers that focus on our &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;community's area of expertise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, in our case this is worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some commonalities of definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Font of All Knowledge&lt;/a&gt; says: &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. The resulting world may be called a constructed world. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.[2] Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3341/what-is-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt;, this question actually came up and we said in response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding (noun, verb, adjective) - The act or subject of construction of (fictional) worlds, especially as an aid to the creation of art or to facilitate play&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding (verb) - The creation of lore, history, religions, geography, or any other aspect of a fictional world which is not directly related to the characters in a fictional story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding (verb) - the creation of the setting of a fictional story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding is the term used to describe the art of building an imaginary world -- i.e. a setting in which a story or game takes place. This might involve creating fictional geography (maps), biology (races or creatures), politics (kingdoms), history (famous people or events), language, religion, mythology, technology, philosophy, or pretty much any other aspect of the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me, then, that what is on-topic here are those topics, questions and problems directly pertaining to what &lt;em&gt;we have actually self-defined our area of expertise and passion to be&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We certainly may touch on physics and maths and chemistry and even music and literature and sociology. But those really aren't our areas of expertise. Our area of expertise is applying these matters of human lore and science in a fictional direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting back to the question that got this whole discussion started, I see these ways it can go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, we leave it as is. The problem here is that, in its essence, at the core of its being, that question boils down to &quot;please do this math problem for me&quot;. The OP can layer on all the worldbuilding &quot;context&quot; he wants. He can go on ad nauseam about energy sources and mega weapons and whatever else, but that's all my eye and Betty Martin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, we fix the question. The OP has already (justifiably) complained: &lt;strong&gt;No one seems willing to tell me how, exactly, I can fix it.&lt;/strong&gt; To which I answered: &lt;em&gt;I would think, and this is my opinion, that it is obvious that a question that asks for the answer to a (simple!) physics equation is not related in any way to worldbuilding. Even though you do hint at this being part of some kind of maybe SF story, the question itself doesn't touch upon the construction of fictional worlds &amp;amp; settings. Others disagree with this position, saying that basically anything that can be asked about the primary world touches also upon worldbuilding. Not a really helpful metachat! At this point: plug the numbers into the equation yourself or ask on Physics!&lt;/em&gt; I stand by the opinion that this kind of question is by definition off-topic and can't really be &quot;fixed&quot;. A non-starter this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third, we fix something about Wordlbuilding.SE that clarifies the basics for those people who are pointed in this direction, who land here accidentally or who do research and find us themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We clarify what Stack Exchange itself is, and how we at Worldbuilding.SE fit that model;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We clarify what worldbuilding itself (the art, the hobby) is and what it isn't. The scope of our expertise, in other words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We clarify not &quot;what topics&quot; we answer, but perhaps rather what &lt;strong&gt;kinds&lt;/strong&gt; of topics we answer. In other words, we don't want to limit ourselves unnecessarily but also I think we don't want to leave ourselves so broad that we become little more than a dumping ground.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T00:03:25.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T16:36:34.743" Score="9" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a couple rejected edits dealing with converting math-&gt;MathJax. I think I'm starting to see why. On the suggested edit form that reviewers see, the MathJax doesn't convert to the final form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I borrowed this following equation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28089/could-a-force-with-these-properties-exist-in-a-parallel-universe/28091#28091&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what we should see as$$\mathbf{F}=-k\frac{\sqrt{|e_1e_2|}\text{sgn}(e_1)\text{sgn}(e_2)}{r^2}\mathbf{u}_r$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reviewers see as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $$\mathbf{F}=-k\frac{\sqrt{|e_1e_2|}\text{sgn}(e_1)\text{sgn}(e_2)}{r^2}\mathbf{u}_r$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the exact same thing: only not converted into the nice symbols but in the raw, ugly code text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this needs to be fixed. I'm not a reviewer myself, but I can sympathize with them: I wouldn't approve this edit if it looked like that (doesn't improve readability.)It takes time to read through MathJax/LaTeX code to ensure that it's okay. It's gotten to the point where whenever I put math into MathJax as a suggested edit, I include this line for my edit summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Changed the math to MathJax. Please only reroll this edit if you look at what the MathJax looks like in proper format. On the base format, it looks like a lot of messing with $'s and \'s.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this needs to be fixed. I'm hoping there's some way to implement the finished code into the writing for the review ques for suggested edits: that's why I'm tagging this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;. Are there any ways to spread awareness/fix this issue? I've also seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/415/mathjax-render-failure-in-suggested-edit-queue&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; dealing with this issue that I think is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: Should there be another post (more generalized about rendering MathJax in pending edits) on the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T18:59:57.480" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T18:59:57.480" Title="MathJax and Pending Edits" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2018-05-14T17:46:53.120" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any such edit to look at immediately, so I'm going from memory here. Please excuse any inaccuracies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different &quot;views&quot; of posts in the review queues. Particularly, there is a source view and a &quot;rendered&quot; view. These are good at different things, but one thing the &quot;rendered&quot; view is decidedly better at is showing Mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whenever reviewing anything involving Mathjax, unless the change is trivial, it's often better to look at the rendered view.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd like to say two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First,&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; find that edit summary somewhat condescending. I see what you're trying to say, but it's not really necessary to say it the way you're doing. May I suggest simply sticking to the facts of what the edit is about and why? You might try something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;format formulas using MathJax&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to highlight the purpose of the edit without it coming across as telling reviewers &quot;you better have a xxx good reason if you're going to reject this or change it later&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second,&lt;/strong&gt; as already raised in part by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/17720/bellerophon&quot;&gt;Bellerophon&lt;/a&gt; in a comment as I was starting to write this; while MathJax is a great addition to the site (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/90/29&quot;&gt;we lobbied early on&lt;/a&gt; to have it enabled), it comes at a cost. If simpler alternatives can be used to achieve the same result, then consider using those instead. While it can be legitimate to change &lt;code&gt;50 m^2&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;50 m&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (which renders as approximately &lt;code&gt;50 m²&lt;/code&gt;), it might not be warranted to invoke MathJax there; &lt;code&gt;$50 m^2$&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;$50 ~\text{m}^2$&lt;/code&gt; doesn't add anything over the HTML variant, and can detract from the readability of the post if nothing else then by the resultant highlighting of the number. &lt;em&gt;Especially&lt;/em&gt; if the post does not otherwise use or benefit from MathJax, at best such an edit introducing MathJax provides no improvement, and might be considered detrimental. &lt;em&gt;Even &quot;no improvement whatsoever&quot; is a perfectly valid, system-provided reason to reject a proposed edit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So on the whole,&lt;/strong&gt; by all means go ahead and propose edits to introduce MathJax &lt;em&gt;where appropriate&lt;/em&gt;, but keep in mind that MathJax isn't always appropriate, and maybe tone down the edit summary a little. And of course, don't spam the front page with edits. It's likely plenty to propose edits to a few questions, and any answers to those questions at the same time (since answers piggyback on the question's front page entry), per hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T17:46:53.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T02:39:25.540" Score="-2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;The section &quot;Improve posts by editing or commenting&quot; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;help tour&lt;/a&gt; includes an icon of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/188/rory-alsop&quot;&gt;Rory Alsop&lt;/a&gt;, which currently looks similar to Reddit's logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem with Rory using it on the website, but such a logo in an example post may be confusing for beginners trying to get the hang of this site, especially as Reddit also involves posts and voting on posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should someone else's post be used for the help tour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T19:16:35.027" Title="Help tour includes a potentially confusing user avatar" Tags="|discussion|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2018-05-16T05:31:44.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trr8t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trr8t.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T05:31:44.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2018-05-16T05:39:48.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NGZJs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NGZJs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T05:39:48.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2018-05-16T05:57:17.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pi1up.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pi1up.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T05:57:17.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2018-05-16T12:36:24.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ViuWK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ViuWK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T12:36:24.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2018-05-16T20:32:46.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MTFGy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MTFGy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-19T15:12:42.210" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T15:12:42.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T13:58:27.707" Score="-1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was thinking about editing a post when I thought about, &lt;em&gt;really thought about,&lt;/em&gt; the message for the editor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial edits unless absolutely necessary.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think needs to be fixed is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Avoid trivial edits unless absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just me, or does the &quot;No trivial unless completely needed&quot; seem confusing? If it's completely needed, then why is it trivial? Perhaps it should be changed to &quot;Avoid trivial edits&quot; or &quot;Avoid trivial edits unless they are, e.g., lots of spelling errors.&quot; Or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T14:26:37.563" Title="Redundant edit message" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T14:20:55.263" Score="36" ViewCount="2271" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you would like to discuss this or explain disagreements, or want clarification please feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/77822/real-world-questions-on-of-topic-discussion&quot;&gt;join this chatroom.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The moderators&lt;/strong&gt; have discussed the recent re-invigoration of the on or off topic debate regarding real world phenomenon.  We have looked at a large number of questions that appeared on meta (list at the bottom of this post) over the last couple years and reviewed questions on main that have driven the conversation to crop up again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To baseline:  &lt;strong&gt;The Worldbuilding site description&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for&#xA;writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to&#xA;construct imaginary worlds and settings. It's built and run by you as&#xA;part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're&#xA;working together to build a library of detailed answers to every&#xA;question about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community is in agreement with the following post, we will mark it on meta and update the tour/help pages with the relevant information...good reading to you all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our conclusion, and we would like the community’s feedback, is that questions regarding real world stuff are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Understanding how the real world works is the best and frankly only option we have for comparison to what we are trying to create.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Understanding the real world allows us to make alterations to reality in creating an imaginary world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many questions about history, culture, physics, chemistry and other topics that are asking for a &lt;strong&gt;comparison or background information from reality&lt;/strong&gt; for aid in developing our imaginary worlds.  This is acceptable and has always been on topic even if it has been &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;But wait!  Shouldn’t we tell people to post orbital mechanics questions on Physics, or Astronomy?!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... Maybe, but it should be noted in most cases the &lt;strong&gt;author chooses the site&lt;/strong&gt; where they would like to post the question, this means they &lt;strong&gt;intentionally chose&lt;/strong&gt; Worldbuilding over another site and that should be respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat:&lt;/strong&gt; Members are certainly welcome to suggest via comment that a post may get better answers on one of the other sites in the network.  There is nothing wrong with the suggestion and its always possible someone didn't know.  That said, &lt;strong&gt;being on-topic on another site does not make a question off-topic for Worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding as a whole is very very (etc) broad.  In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2304/189&quot;&gt;old meta post&lt;/a&gt; a network user commented that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a zeroth-order approximation, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; goes on World Building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this makes sense.  The universe is big &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/285/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;citation needed&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt; and discussing it requires a bit of everything which is what makes Worldbuilding so unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said we still have to have expectations and standards, it can't just be a free for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considerations when asking a question relating to the real world:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide context.  Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to do your own research.  If a quick google search will answer your question it may not be worth posting a question on the site.  Generally, querents are expected to demonstrate what has been tried and why it was not sufficient or did not work.  This too helps people answering understand what you are trying to accomplish as well as your level of knowledge on the topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define your requirements and by what you will judge answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that fail to adequately meet these requirements may be placed on hold even if they are not, &amp;quot;off-topic.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considerations when answering questions related to the real world:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't pre-judge a user's knowledge base.  Not everyone on World Building has the same level of knowledge on every topic we discuss. Just because you may consider a particular question &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; does not mean that another user will understand.  As an example James once asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37077/are-there-logical-gaps-in-the-periodic-table-in-which-you-could-insert-a-new-mys&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Prior to comments being deleted several users were annoyed that a &lt;em&gt;high rep&lt;/em&gt; user asked such a basic question, it assumed a level of knowledge that James did not have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't answer questions that are not fully formed/adequately explained.  We often see users, even experienced/high reputation users answering questions that are not fully formed.  Take the time to comment and don't feel bad about putting questions on hold/or flagging to be put on hold.  This helps discourage bad questions and teaches users how to ask better questions. Mods are not immune either, we make mistakes like anyone else and we are not exempt from being flagged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't use close-votes as &lt;em&gt;super down-votes.&lt;/em&gt;  Closures and down votes don't always go together.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3911/resolving-the-real-world-problem&quot;&gt;Resolving the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3872/is-a-real-world-question-off-topic&quot;&gt;Is a &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; question off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-where-the-answer-is-it-exists-in-the-real-world&quot;&gt;How do we feel about questions where the answer is &amp;quot;it exists in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5602/is-worldbuildingse-suitable-for-writers-whose-works-are-more-or-less-realistic&quot;&gt;Is WorldbuildingSE suitable for writers whose works are, more or less, realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/651/is-the-international-waters-question-on-topic&quot;&gt;Is the &amp;quot;international waters&amp;quot; question on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2293/should-the-help-center-be-updated-to-specifically-list-real-world-history-questi&quot;&gt;Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-where-the-answer-is-it-exists-in-the-real-world&quot;&gt;How do we feel about questions where the answer is &amp;quot;it exists in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=Relevance&amp;amp;q=is%3Aquestion%20real%20world&quot;&gt;More reading if you're into that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-12-26T21:36:21.693" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T04:32:04.757" Title="A proposal to finalize the &quot;are real world questions on-topic&quot; debate" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2018-05-17T14:26:37.563" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An edit can be trivial but still important or worthwhile.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, correcting a misspelling that leads to misunderstandings can be important, yet by some measures trivial. (An edit can also be massive, as opposed to trivial, and utterly unimportant. The extreme case of this would be someone intentionally vandalizing posts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, that text is network-wide; it's unlikely that we'll be able to change it just on Worldbuilding SE. There's certainly no ready-made interface accessible to site moderators to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T14:26:37.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-17T16:42:04.260" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in total agreement with this. &#xA;One minor point is that there needs to be room for differences of opinion and subjective view, even with the &quot;bad questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don’t answer questions that are not fully formed/adequately explained. We often see users, even experienced/high reputation users answering questions that are not fully formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a couple questions where a user has asked a question, and gotten feedback like &quot;Not sure what you're asking&quot;, when the question was crystal clear as I understood it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen a few where I just didn't get it until I read someone elses answer, and then the question suddenly made sense. &#xA;It can go both ways, but we shouldn't just let our own ignorance lead us to jump to the conclusion that a question is bad.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe try to seek clarification &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; jumping on the close button, even if it's just asking in chat if anyone else can explain it better.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We have to remember that there are people here from all over the world, and who's primary language is not english. Getting the wording right might be hard for someone with a high concept question and limited vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T16:42:04.260" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6153" CreationDate="2018-05-17T19:16:35.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, we should not choose a different post for the tour because of the avatar&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people that look so close at the tour that they realize there is an icon that is similar to that of Reddit are likely not the people that will ignore everything else (plus the fact that it's obviously an avatar of some user) and try to use the site like Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least that's what I believe. And I don't have any data to find out anything different. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/853012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this extremely simple SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; searches for every comment that contains the word &amp;quot;thought&amp;quot; followed by the word &amp;quot;reddit&amp;quot; under the assumption that people would write something like &amp;quot;I though this site was like Reddit and I could simply get some feedback or start a discussion...&amp;quot;, which only leads to one comment that is specifically about the difference between this site and Reddit. Everyone who reads this: feel free to play with the simple query by changing the text &amp;quot;%thought%reddit%&amp;quot; to something that you feel fits better (the &amp;quot;%&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;anything can be here&amp;quot; and it should all be lowercase for the search).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick look through the 97 results for &amp;quot;%reddit%&amp;quot; seems to suggest that people are quite often referring to Reddit. But never in a style that would suggest that they think that this site works like Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem. And a motto where I work is &amp;quot;If it ain't broken, don't fix it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can find some data (even just a couple link to comments you have seen that show that people had this confusion) and suggest a better post I might be convinced that we should ask to change this. But currently I don't perceive this as a problem, I couldn't find evidence (granted, I only did a really short search) and I can't imagine too many problems arising from this, which is why I am saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we should not choose a different post for the tour because of the avatar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to mention is that Rory has been quite persistent with his avatar as far as I can tell. I can't remember him changing his avatar in the time I have been here, which is different from quite a lot of people. I'd rather have this consistent user whose profile doesn't seem to be a big problem in the tour than having to regularly check if someone has changed his profile and is now having something weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have flagged someone before for an inappropriate profile pic. In such a case we should change the post for the tour. But as long as you don't feel that you should flag a post from the user for moderator attention because of an inappropriate profile picture we should not ask to change this part of the tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T19:16:35.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-18T16:40:27.827" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in agreement with this, and am thrilled with worldbuilding accepting this stance.  It also makes the site mesh better with other sites.  Regarding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat:&lt;/strong&gt; Members are certainly welcome to suggest via comment that a&#xA;  post may get better answers on one of the other sites in the network.&#xA;  There is nothing wrong with the suggestion and its always possible&#xA;  someone didn't know. &lt;strong&gt;That said, being on-topic on another site does&#xA;  not make a question off-topic for Worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a small site such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;engineering.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, about one-fourth of the questions on the site come from someone attempting to design a device for a story using real-world engineering principles.  These &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/188/naive-design-questions-ndqs-how-do-i-design&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270/engineering-challenge-questions-feature-suggestion?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;ruled off-topic&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/534/how-should-we-deal-with-check-my-idea-implementation-questions?rq=1&quot;&gt;various reasons&lt;/a&gt;, even when they have really interesting applications.  Unfortunately, before worldbuilding we had no place to send those users. This made for a terrible user interaction for new visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical route I take when seeing a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; &quot;what-if...?&quot; question on engineering these days has been to route directly to worldbuilding.  Since there is no practical application, or testing, and the initial conditions are wild, this site lends itself well to resolve real-world designs without getting into excessively complex models.  Overall it is more interesting when we can use unobtanium as a potential material of construction, something which is never allowed in engineering - but perfectly reasonable in worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding solving real-world problems helps the science sites stay a reasonable resource for minds seeking real solutions to real problems. Simultaneously, this allows users access to engineering, astrophysics, physics, and other scientific models to solve unique, fun puzzles and inquiries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12153" LastEditorUserId="12153" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T23:24:08.917" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T23:24:08.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-19T23:41:33.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Still a NO&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been about four years since I first answered this question in the negative. I deleted it (for reasons I no longer remember), so am going to try again. I've reviewed the query (totally not coincidental to JBH's recent review of his own perspectives!) and all the responses and some of the related questions. I'm still not in favour of opening WB up to purely real world questions. I also think the &amp;quot;considerations&amp;quot; are a little weakly worded and will not actually help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why we're here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First, foremost, and always, this forum is focused on the making of fictional worlds. That's our foundational raison d'etre. It's the one concept we should keep in mind whenever considering any kind of rule, policy, or custom. If a rule or policy change does not promote worldbuilding as an art, an activity, a concept within our community of querents and respondents --- let alone in wider SE community and beyond --- then it should be considered a bad change. All questions here should thus share this focus on the querent's world as it is in progress. Real world queries as such shift the focus from the fictional to the real and thus away from the world being created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the principles (under Reasoning) that we have to understand the real world in order create the unreal world. However, Worldbuilding is not the place to learn that. Querents should come here with questions that deal with the application of real world knowledge --- how knowledge can be wrought into something new --- rather than questions seeking real world knowledge. &lt;em&gt;The only exception to this, I'd argue, is a really good question looking for resources.&lt;/em&gt; This is because we do have resources here in Meta that I think we can do better to showcase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, if the question is typologically &amp;quot;I have a fictional world; please tell me how the real world works&amp;quot;, it ought to be off topic here. We need to be focusing on why we're here, and it's all about the other world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &amp;quot;I have a fictional world and I'm trying to fit this piece of real world knowledge into the fictional setting, but I can't quite figure out how the pieces go together&amp;quot;, then that's a question we can help with, and is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumping Grounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's an old concern that is as valid now as it ever was. We've always complained that WB.SE is a place where the science forums dump their difficult queries, where everyone dumps the questions they don't want to deal with, and where people feel free to ask us to do their homework and basic research for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally, one of this question's answers (Mark's) gleefully shoves this whole dumping ground issue in our faces by outright and joyously crooning that he considers WB to be his usual forum's dumping ground:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in agreement with this, and am thrilled with worldbuilding accepting this stance. It also makes the site mesh better with other sites. Regarding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: Members are certainly welcome to suggest via comment that a post may get better answers on one of the other sites in the network. There is nothing wrong with the suggestion and its always possible someone didn't know. That said, being on-topic on another site does not make a question off-topic for Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a small site such as engineering.stackexchange.com, about one-fourth of the questions on the site come from someone attempting to design a device for a story using real-world engineering principles. These questions have been ruled off-topic for various reasons, even when they have really interesting applications. Unfortunately, &lt;strong&gt;before worldbuilding we had no place to send those users. This made for a terrible user interaction for new visitors.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical route I take when seeing a good &amp;quot;what-if...?&amp;quot; question on engineering these days has been to route directly to worldbuilding. Since there is no practical application, or testing, and the initial conditions are wild, this site lends itself well to resolve real-world designs without getting into excessively complex models. Overall it is more interesting when we can use unobtanium as a potential material of construction, something which is never allowed in engineering - but perfectly reasonable in worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding solving real-world problems helps the science sites stay a reasonable resource for minds seeking real solutions to real problems. Simultaneously, this allows users access to engineering, astrophysics, physics, and other scientific models to solve unique, fun puzzles and inquiries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all due respect, no, it's actually &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; our purpose to solve unique fun puzzles that actual engineers don't want to deal with. I'm so sorry that new members over on Engineering had a terrible time in your forum, but it's actually &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; our purpose to entertain those questions either!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Solutions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd argue that, if anything, the situation Mark cites is indication of a clear need for a 'FunScience' or 'Science-lite' forum here on SE. A place where folks can ask the purely theoretical &amp;amp; hypothetical queries that fit neither WB nor Engineering. Such a forum would remove the burden of &amp;quot;real world questions&amp;quot; from Worldbuilding, and would remove the burden of &amp;quot;hypothetical questions&amp;quot; from Engineering &amp;amp; Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, the only viable solution that solves both of these issues &lt;strong&gt;AND&lt;/strong&gt; maintains our uniqueness of perspective is to make &amp;quot;real world questions&amp;quot; off topic, unless there is clearly a worldbuilding connexion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only viable way to get the two camps to mingle successfully is to allow only the minimum amount of real world questions in this forum. This could be done by providing for very clear expectations for what's allowed. Under &amp;quot;Considerations when asking a question relating to the real world&amp;quot;, there has to be more than just simple context. The question really has to be than an elaborate set-up without any connection to the fictional world itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T04:32:04.757" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T04:32:04.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-20T01:16:08.870" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about the real world need a worldbuilding context or they&#xA;  will get closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be answered with a quick search on a search engine&#xA;  will get closed as (insert new close reason here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These needs to be mentioned in the help center somewhere, to get rid of the current ambiguity of the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is nothing new except we change the down-vote to a close-vote for the trivial questions. This is already more or less what we have been doing for a while. By including this in the help center, we would be enforcing the unwritten opinion of a majority of members that has emerged over a certain period of time on the site. It will reduce the confusion we create when referring new members to the help center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastEditorUserId="147" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T18:23:07.207" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T18:23:07.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6189" CreationDate="2018-05-20T16:06:20.287" Score="24" ViewCount="7322" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This sandbox is inactive.  Please visit the next &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;HR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3813/6507&quot;&gt;In order to make the Sandbox easier to use&lt;/a&gt;, a new Sandbox question will be posted when the old one becomes too full. &lt;strong&gt;This Sandbox is currently active&lt;/strong&gt;. You can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions-2014-2017&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the full list of past and present Question Sandboxes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the Sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Sandbox&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a place where Worldbuilding.SE users can get feedback on prospective questions they wish to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified question on the first try can be difficult. There is a much better chance of your question being well received if you post it in the Sandbox first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To post a question to the Sandbox:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Post an answer to this post with the content of your proposed question. You can create as many answers as you have proposed questions, but it is recommended that you only work on one question at a time. The content of the post should be as close as possible to the format you would use when asking on the main site. If you would like, you may add a section at the bottom explaining what parts of the proposed question you are most worried about (See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/640/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on suggested syntax). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once you have posted your proposed question,&lt;/strong&gt; users will be able to comment on it with feedback. You can then respond to their feedback with comments of your own, or make edits to your post to attempt to address their feedback (after editing, be sure to comment to notify the user that you have taken their advice). The feedback/edit cycle can go on for as long as needed until either you are confident that your question is ready to be asked on the main site, or you've decided the question just won't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you think your question is ready for the public&lt;/strong&gt;, go ahead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;post it to the main site&lt;/a&gt;. To help keep this sandbox clean, you should edit your post here so that it contains the title and URL of the posted question, and nothing else. Regardless of whether or not you decided to post to the main site, &lt;strong&gt;once you are done with your Sandbox post, you should delete it&lt;/strong&gt;. This will not completely delete the post, but it will get it out of the way so that new proposed questions can be more easily located. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep the Sandbox clean.&lt;/strong&gt; In order to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/sandbox-cleanup&quot;&gt;keep the Sandbox clean&lt;/a&gt; users are encouraged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4912/28789&quot;&gt;look out for questions that have not seen any activity in some time&lt;/a&gt;. If you come across a question draft that has not seen any activity from the author in the form of edits to the draft and comments as responses to other peoples comments you should leave a comment. In the comment you should ask if the user is still working on the question draft and remind him that his post might be deleted in the future if there is no further activity. If you see a question draft that has not seen any activity for at least 30 days and that has had a comment asking if the author is still working on the question draft for at least a week you should flag the post for moderator attention and ask for deletion. This helps to keep the Sandbox clean in cases where the author has abandoned his question draft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete your comments when they no longer apply.&lt;/strong&gt; It's normal that the OP will incorporate the feedback they get into their posts. Please make it easy for others to see which comments are still relevant to the discussion by removing your obsolete ones. In addition you can ask a mod to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6231/28789&quot;&gt;purge comments under graduated posts or move them to chat under abandoned posts&lt;/a&gt; to make it easier for users that can see deleted posts to use the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use votes sparingly.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6362/28789&quot;&gt;Up- and Downvotes in the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; should be used sparingly as the drafts here are supposed to be questions that would not fit the guidelines of the Main site in their current form. Only upvote if you think a draft is ready for the Main site and only downvote if you think that a question is just not a good fit, no matter how much the OP works on the draft. In any case, please write a comment to explain your voting. We don't want to unnecessarily discourage the OP, but we also don't want them to waste their time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please avoid answering questions here.&lt;/strong&gt; I know it's tempting, but answering the question in a comment will clog the comments and make it harder to see good guidance. If you have an answer for the proposed question, simply wait for it to be posted to the main site, and answer it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on how to use the Sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please make sure you wait at least a day after posting into the Sandbox to give a range of people time to see the question and respond.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Sandbox works best if you sort posts by &quot;active&quot; (click &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168?answertab=active&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T18:30:01.760" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T10:37:28.933" Title="Inactive Sandbox 2018" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-20T18:32:31.723" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record I'm against this change (let's call it a liberalization of policy).  However &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; this is to be adopted I &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; feel we need formal rules and &quot;reasons to close&quot; which at least try and prevent opening the floodgates.  So ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're going to need a &quot;No Prior Research&quot; reason to close.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the homework dumping website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that this change would open us up to every single &quot;homework-type&quot; question that most of the sites (like Physics, Mathematics ) would reject as not having enough prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Physics has an explicit rule about a requirement for basic research to be done by the OP and to be demonstrated in the question.  You can't just say &quot;I tried everything&quot; - that's not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the Physics SE rule says :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would need to modify that to something like :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What-If ... ?&quot; style questions should show some effort to research the problem before asking on Worldbuilding SE.  We're happy to help users with specific issues beyond their ability, but a basic effort to seek a solution using common resources (like Wikipedia) is expected.  Users need to ask questions which can provide answers of reasonable length and not simply try to offload their own research to Wordlbuilding.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably needs to add an explicit statement about &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework questions are explicitly off topic.  Like other SE sites we do not do homework or check answers on Woirldbuilding SE.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more difficult question is whether we should allow questions asking about personal theories.  I feel this is would be opening the floodgates to nonsense.  Again Physics SE explicitly makes personal theory questions off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastEditorUserId="32391" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T20:57:58.640" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T20:57:58.640" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2018-05-20T22:17:35.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a picture, but I do have a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Brave the wild sands of raw questions and use the Sandbox!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an idea to make a wordplay with &quot;Sandbox.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T22:17:35.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-22T01:08:28.990" Score="-3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some time not to be active in the community, an hour ago I asked a question and only after the user ( StephenG ) accused my question of being too broad was closed, I want to compare my question with another question from a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112830/time-travel-reproduction&quot;&gt;Time travel : Reproduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New user question :&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112826/why-might-a-computer-want-to-play-god&quot;&gt;Why might a computer want to play God&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see both questions are on hold,Both have little details,But guess what? The moderators didnt close his question instantly unlike mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This power-trip behaviour is very discouraging and im losing my hard earned reputation,And i dont like wasting my time and energy,To be honest im still here because i cant delete my account with all my questions,I really like worldbuilding but this power abuse is not user friendly,This site expects too much but offers too little now,Is not fun,Is not productive and this hyper moderation is pointless.It helps nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have nothing against the other user,Is just a comparision,Is my question really too broad? If yes,Why the moderators didnt close the other one instantly unlike my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet im still here,Because i want to exchange and share ideas and emotions with other people around this little and boring world that we call earth and have fun in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good night to everyone,Im not in mood to keep writing for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Myrmidon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="31928" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T01:41:22.047" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T08:31:22.567" Title="Too broad questions,Really too broad or just my questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-22T05:38:41.487" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions on Worldbuilding have empirical answers.  They are based on real world data and have definitive answers.  An answer is expected and should be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, much of Worldbuilding is hypothetical, or theoretical.  There is no absolute answer.  A person can ask a question and receive answers.  One of those answers may be accepted, or none can be.  The issue arises in that one or more of these answers might not satisfy as an answer to someone else.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one ask a hypothetical/theoretical question, which was asked before, without being marked as a duplicate?  Perhaps a person just wants more possible answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6538" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T15:28:17.847" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T01:05:44.830" Title="Is it a duplicate if answers aren't satisfactory?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6183" CreationDate="2018-05-22T07:48:15.933" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are just looking for random more ideas you are in the wrong place. The idea is to have answers that are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; according to the criteria defined by the OP, not to have brainstorming sessions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criteria are where you can try to start with a new question. Just add a link to the other question at the start and say something like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen &lt;code&gt;[this question: *question title*](/link/to/old/question),&lt;/code&gt; but the answers didn't talk about &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt;, which is why I would like to focus on &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt; in this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it's obvious that you have found the old question and thought about the differences between the old one and the new one, as well as showed that the answers are not applicable to one another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same question without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; difference and you think that &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of the existing answers really answered the core of the question you could add a bounty and write something in the bounty description that is similar to what I said above: make sure that people see what you are interested in and what the current answers are missing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want discussions you can visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. In case you are not sure how to word a new question because you feel it's too similar to an existing one you can try our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T15:12:32.200" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T15:12:32.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5331" CreationDate="2018-05-22T12:49:07.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to procrastinate by posting on Worldbuilding when really you should be doing something else. So if you're spending time that you would normally be using writing instead posting on Worldbuilding then you will naturally do less writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you need to ask is whether you feel that the time invested is worthwhile (it feels like you do) even when it detracts from other things you think are worthwhile (there's the catch). Hopefully the broad knowledge gained from participating here will help you when you do get done with the procrastination :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone has to find their own balance in these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T12:49:07.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6183" CreationDate="2018-05-22T13:08:29.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does one ask a hypothetical/theoretical question, which was asked before, without being marked as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not supposed to be able to. Stack Exchange is about building a knowledge base and helping future readers as much or more as helping you here and now. If you are about to ask the same question, do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper way to do it is to &lt;strong&gt;set a bounty&lt;/strong&gt;. In bounty reasons, you may describe what answers will satisfy you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T13:08:29.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2018-05-22T17:06:29.657" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&quot;&gt;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/sandbox-overflow&lt;/a&gt;, answers containing graduated questions will be deleted. This is designed to be a repository for all those questions that have graduated. It is a community wiki answer, so add in your question here, at the end of the list once it is posted on the main site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/112754&quot;&gt;Steam Powered Hammer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/113637&quot;&gt;Can I have droplets of fluids that aren&amp;#39;t... well... droplets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/113971&quot;&gt;Resources For Building A Fictional Language [DELETED]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/113992&quot;&gt;How to modify bee physiology to be able to produce firehoney given nectar that is (magically) flammable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114056&quot;&gt;How can I realistically make a worldwide government that works with my fictional world with different magical races?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114107&quot;&gt;How To Make an Earth with 27 Suns Work, Attempt Two: Orbital Stability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114147&quot;&gt;Best material for windsilk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114347&quot;&gt;How can humans retain the benefits of sleep through meditation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114832&quot;&gt;Mosquito Armageddon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114877&quot;&gt;Ringed planet: Reality check on ring-shadow visuals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115190&quot;&gt;Sailing without wind, but with strong currents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115231&quot;&gt;Traffic using personal airplanes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115491&quot;&gt;Metal-Feathered Macaw Viability Part 1: How Can It Fly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115401&quot;&gt;How can a single clergy rule over a religion that has different interpretations of its deity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115770&quot;&gt;Sugar-bomb tree mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115905&quot;&gt;Slowing or Averting Global Warming With the Help of Elemental Powers: Part 1 (Fire)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116270&quot;&gt;How could an acid-cow make a barrier against acidic milk by synthesizing PTFE, and what would it line?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116518&quot;&gt;Metal-Feathered Macaw Viability Part 2: Best Wing Shape?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116508&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Siren?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116848&quot;&gt;How would a humanoid need to change to sleep upside-down?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116909&quot;&gt;The flying state, estimating an &amp;quot;ideal&amp;quot; size&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116871&quot;&gt;How can I use magic to make childbirth easier?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117184&quot;&gt;Weaponry made from extreme light-weight steel: swords and daggers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117425&quot;&gt;Designing venom glands for an elephant: misting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117575&quot;&gt;Can using zombies for labor be more cost effective for an employer than a living worker?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117687&quot;&gt;How dangerous is someone who can make volumes of air act like immovable solids, measured by how expensive an army they could defeat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/118260&quot;&gt;How long should an elven generation be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/118644&quot;&gt;Music Dragonfly via Perforations in Wings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/118648&quot;&gt;What required secondary powers does my speedster need in order to be able to accelerate at 2,250 ft/s^2 without harmful effects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/118966&quot;&gt;Restricting antimatter - practical rather than legal measures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119148&quot;&gt;Radiation Levels and Effects on Planet with 27 Suns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119337&quot;&gt;Regrowing body parts: What are the costs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119452&quot;&gt;How can chi be used to preserve a man's fertility? [DELETED]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119666&quot;&gt;Kidnapping Fire-Slugs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119723&quot;&gt;Natural barriers around medieval towns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119834&quot;&gt;Quick solutions to a modern warning placed on the surface of a planet for future generations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120207&quot;&gt;I travel back in time: how could I know when I landed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120494&quot;&gt;To Conquer the Earth by Appearing Ship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120571&quot;&gt;Worse than zombies, part 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120592&quot;&gt;How to build a Blood Gun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120453&quot;&gt;Aftermath of a Midas-weapon war - what to do with all that gold?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120791&quot;&gt;(Porcu)pine tree needle firing system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120752&quot;&gt;How could a medieval army defeat Sauron&amp;#39;s army?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120493&quot;&gt;How to combat magic as science?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120988&quot;&gt;How high could a Lego tower be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6539&quot;&gt;Should certain tags automatically require answers to use SI Units rather than other, more traditional, systems of measurement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121337&quot;&gt;Extinction Equilibrium: 50%&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121353&quot;&gt;Fastest way for an invincible young immortal to make $1 million USD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121447&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121447&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121571&quot;&gt;How many dead bodies are required to stain a river red?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121573&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121573&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121616&quot;&gt;How to design an advanced deadman&amp;#39;s switch for the &amp;quot;vitality impaired&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121834&quot;&gt;Ringstadt: How sensible is my topography?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121954&quot;&gt;Humans as repair drones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122266&quot;&gt;Are competitive sports an effective way to change my Spartiates&amp;#39; life perspective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122300&quot;&gt;What is a usable formula for determining the necessary strength of a planet’s magnetic field for it to be habitable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122428&quot;&gt;Making the &amp;#39;Master Swordsman&amp;#39; fantasy realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122564&quot;&gt;Would planets be cubic in my &amp;quot;cuboverse&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122825&quot;&gt;For how long can I hide the discovery of a new continent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122862&quot;&gt;Ringstadt: Getting sulphur into my water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122863&quot;&gt;Ringstadt: Can my mountains be what I need them to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122877&quot;&gt;Taxing the superhero industry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123670&quot;&gt;Could deliberately induced Kessler Syndrome stop ICBMs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123060&quot;&gt;In modern day combat, what would warrant singing during battle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123990&quot;&gt;Long-term effects of leaving everything you know - the aging issue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124021&quot;&gt;What event would cause a huge, dominant nation to adopt the language of a smaller, inferior one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122524&quot;&gt;What Would a Reptile with Facial Muscles look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123633&quot;&gt;From a software testing perspective, what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124100&quot;&gt;What would be the pros and cons of a merged military and police?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124607&quot;&gt;Would interplanetary transmissions in the Wolf 359 star system be detectable by Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124815&quot;&gt;Alien Senses: Active electrolocation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/125825&quot;&gt;Beings in Amnesia occuring after sleep, how to help them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/126184&quot;&gt;Feasibility of a Crystal Ecosystem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/126346&quot;&gt;What mandates travel in an interstellar society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/126437&quot;&gt;How would a world power create an artificial winter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/127053&quot;&gt;The Underdown, part 1: Size issues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/127685&quot;&gt;How can I test to find the continent&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; young mages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/128387&quot;&gt;How many years could notebook computers and phones be stored in a closed bunker/vault and still operational when found?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/128227&quot;&gt;Safely exiting zero-tau capsule&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/128863&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t my superhuman always hungry?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/130384&quot;&gt;How can I prevent a human sacrifice from dying before a ritual is complete?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131028&quot;&gt;How to accurately detect children with super strength?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131499&quot;&gt;How could I market beauty products to a species with a mating season?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/132294&quot;&gt;How long would a flat Earth last?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131594&quot;&gt;Why would a religious person extract the hemoglobin of those who failed to survive his spiritual healing ritual?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/134107&quot;&gt;How can I avoid accidentally killing my mages during a ritual?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/134341/&quot;&gt;How would a matriarchy rationalize infanticide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/136083/&quot;&gt;What (modern) weapons could be used to destroy skeletal enemies as completely as possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/136328/&quot;&gt;The Dark is strong in the light! Why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132335/what-can-a-bunch-of-american-kids-teach-ancient-egyptians&quot;&gt;What can a bunch of American kids teach ancient Egyptians?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/137170/7974&quot;&gt;Economically feasible hard sci-fi non-microscopic wormhole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/137383/35308&quot;&gt;How tall can you built a mountain chain of bricks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/137472/6620&quot;&gt;Is a coral-based planet possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13&quot;&gt;How quickly and accurately should news travel in a rural medieval setting?&lt;/a&gt; (this link appears to be incorrect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134705/&quot;&gt;How can the church stop the Mass media from spreading throughout medieval Europe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T14:53:42.350" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T14:53:42.350" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-05-22T17:06:29.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6183" CreationDate="2018-05-23T12:14:58.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) hypothetical, or theoretical. There is no absolute answer (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the knowledge needed to answe a question is covered by a theory, then it will most probably have one absolute answer. This is the case with many reality check and science-based questions, such as, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111898/21222&quot;&gt;The Paradox Men - Cosmology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/108451/21222&quot;&gt;How would one design an undetectable nuke to hit the Moon with?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And especially hard science ones, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/96261/21222&quot;&gt;Plausible biological alternative for normal photosynthesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no theory, but an hypothesis can be made or used - such as a hypothetical questions involving the Copenhagen interpretation, for example - even then, rationale may be used to upvote and reward good answers, and even pick one that best fits as a model that the OP seeked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers for such questions do not serve you, it is not because the topics are hypothetical or theoretical. &lt;strong&gt;It is because the real question you have is different from the question that was posed.&lt;/strong&gt; You should consider why the answers you find do not serve you, and then you can propose a new question and explain how yours differs from the one that was previously posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you really find that the question you have has indeed already been asked, but the answers to not serve you: remember, this is a community. Answers are chosen as good or bad based on consensus. Had you asked the question yourself, you would have gotten the very same answers. Consider whether there is something that you are missing between the asking and the answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T12:14:58.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6183" CreationDate="2018-05-24T01:05:44.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WB:SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The natural creativity of Worldbuilding.SE and the very ambiguity you are discussion are at natural odds with the intent of Stack Exchange and its original site, Stack Overflow.  The reality we must abide by is this:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange sites are not discussion forums&lt;/a&gt;.  Consequently, we are bound to the basic one-specific-question-one-best-answer model used by the SE sites.  We are lenient, but we are expected to follow the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking a duplicate question because you don't like the other answers is fundamentally admitting your question is too story-based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the ways we determine if questions are on/off-topic is to judge whether or not the queston is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;too story-based&lt;/a&gt;.  Basically, we're here to help you develop consistent rules for a fictional world.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but &lt;em&gt;we are not here to help you write your story.&lt;/em&gt;  That's your job.  If you think about it, the only reason you don't like the answers to the previous question is because they don't fit the story you're writing.  In other words, the reason you're asking the question is story-based, not worldbuilding-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are you fishing for ideas, or looking for something specific?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was once said here on meta, many WB questions have some element of fishing for ideas.  But, simply looking for ideas to overcome writer's block is not what this site is about (see &quot;WB:SE is not a discussion forum,&quot; above).  We are developing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6139#6139&quot;&gt;catalog of questions&lt;/a&gt; to help site users better understand how various question types are on/off-topic.  A duplicate question (especially one that naturally generates a list as a response) treads close to the &quot;I need an &lt;em&gt;infinite list&lt;/em&gt; of things&quot; question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Our question sandbox is your friend!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very best place you can address this issue is in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions?cb=1&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. If posting your question there results in comments that it's a duplicate, that is the best place to discuss why you believe it isn't.  It's where you can work out the too story-based kinks and forcus your question on the issue that makes the previous answers unacceptable, eventually crafting the question into something unique and appropriate for the main site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't (and shouldn't) do this on the main site because the process is messy and can be quite confusing to other users, which is not the purpose of the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T01:05:44.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6198" CreationDate="2018-05-24T19:36:41.887" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to get users to interact with a community wiki for a question that needs a longer/more detailed list of unique ideas/answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it's kind of hard because interacting with a community wiki yields no reputation bonus. It's time-consuming and only the asker of the question gets any benefit from it. With that in mind, how is it possible to attract users to community wikis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T21:09:33.460" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T10:27:08.817" Title="How to get users to interact with a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6197" CreationDate="2018-05-25T08:07:24.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378/352819&quot;&gt;XY-Problem&lt;/a&gt;: you are searching for ways to ignore guidelines about POB closure&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a question that needs a longer/more detailed list of unique ideas/answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's basically the definition of &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot;. Yes, a question can have an infinite number of valid answers. But: there have to be criteria for what constitutes a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer and what constitutes a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for long lists where everyone can say one thing that is exactly equally valid you are in the territory of &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot;. And trying to force people into writing their point in a single community wiki to make that one the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer because it's the longest one is the wrong way to solve this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your problem should be solved by stating what is important in an answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use cases for community wikis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wikis are rarely used because there are only a few usecases where they might be useful. For example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6189/28789&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;graduated posts&lt;/em&gt; community wiki in the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; allows people with 100 rep instead of 2k rep to edit the post, which makes it a lot easier for higher rep users as the lower rep users that use the Sandbox can add their links on their own. But that's here on Meta. On Main there isn't really any use for this sort of thing. You can simply suggest an edit if you are under 2k rep. But editing is supposed to be about clarifying a post, not adding your own ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3Ayes&quot;&gt;a few community wikis on Main&lt;/a&gt;. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72276/can-this-ftl-communication-based-on-quantum-entanglement-work/72279#comment210533_72276&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a usecase described by one of our mods. Basically on Main we could create community wikis when there are certain ideas coming up very, very often with very, very slight differences. That way you can point to the community wiki and say &amp;quot;Look there, that's one massive post that explains common timetravel/FTL communication/... problems&amp;quot; and update that whenever someone asks a good new question about the topic that includes things that weren't in the community wiki before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another usecase might be if you have a question and you decide to use a combination of the answers you are given. For example because one of them mentioned a few tangential points that made you change your mind. To inform future readers about what you in the end decided to do you could leave a community wiki answer that shows how you combined and changed the points mentioned and give credit to the corresponding answers. This is mostly to help future readers by mentioning the solution that helped you in the end and to not take credit for what is not really our own work. You used other peoples answers after all, even if slightly changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6197/how-to-get-users-to-interact-with-a-community-wiki/6198?noredirect=1#comment18549_6198&quot;&gt;Tim B&lt;/a&gt; mentioned that he sometimes uses answers that were left in comments and turns them into community wiki answers. This way they are in the right place, as comments are not the place for answers and can be deleted at any point for any reason, but he doesn't take the credit from the user who really came up with the idea. This allows the previous comment-answer to go through the normal voting process and be visible to future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should notify the user in a comment that you are going to do that though, or you should be reasonably sure that they won't come back. For example I've seen people write something like &amp;quot;Don't have time, but if someone wants to expand on this you could start with...&amp;quot;, which is a pretty good indicator that they are fine with you turning their idea into a full-fledged answer. Just be sure that it really is a &lt;em&gt;full-fledged&lt;/em&gt; answer. You should also note that this is a specialty of WorldBuilding.SE, as answers in comments are generally discouraged and on many StackExchange sites immediately deleted upon sight, for example on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which is a community with very strict rules about comment usage. We are very, very lenient in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Don't try to force people to use community wikis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you shouldn't force people to write a community wiki for your single question. In such a case like the above it might be useful to first start a meta discussion about whether we really need something like that and to raise awareness that you are trying to make a canonical question and answer for a certain often-asked topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites don't even use community wikis for canonical questions. Look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/399626/211476&quot;&gt;Why is Kali Linux so hard to set up? Why won't people help me?&lt;/a&gt; The highest rated answer is a community wiki because the idea was to have one canonical question to point to whenever a newbie asks about Kali Linux, but there are still other normal answers and the question is a normal question, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even on &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling.SE&lt;/a&gt;, where people often write partial answers you rarely see community wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SFF.SE&lt;/a&gt; uses community wikis for certain &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/188314/78134&quot;&gt;identification questions with long lists of things&lt;/a&gt;, but not even there the usage is &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/108024/78134&quot;&gt;consistent&lt;/a&gt;. There may be some &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/188313/who-are-these-robots#comment512476_188318&quot;&gt;people wondering why you don't edit the community wiki&lt;/a&gt;, but nobody forces anyone to use the community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Community wikis are not what they were initially used for anymore&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usage of community wikis has changed over time on the network. For example in times past answers and questions were automatically converted to community wikis when there were 30 answers or more and it was a tool to make people answering opinion-based questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/227290/stop-using-community-wiki-as-a-reputation-denial-mechanism&quot;&gt;stop farming rep&lt;/a&gt;. It was basically a punishment for the people answering questions that are not a good fit for the site. There were other mechanisms, too, that were &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/227290/stop-using-community-wiki-as-a-reputation-denial-mechanism/228940#228940&quot;&gt;abolished in 2014&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;that it's easier to edit&lt;/a&gt;, but with the &amp;quot;suggest edit&amp;quot; feature this main advantage was basically nullified on Main sites. To cite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With suggested edits now in place, you could argue that the removal of reputation from voting is now the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; function of community wiki. Unfortunately, this means it is often seen as a magic switch to allow questionable content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wikis are not a tool that suddenly allows any kind of question just because people could more easily make one really, really big answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is valuable enough that you believe it belongs on the site, &lt;em&gt;chances are you don’t need it to be community wiki!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If you really want to make people interact with your &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; community wiki answer ask on Meta&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those reading this and wanting an answer to the question about getting people to interact with community wikis: you can't. There is little incentive apart from making a canonical question, so your best bet is to make a meta discussion and ask folks to help you with a canonical question/answer for a certain kind of topic that comes up pretty often. Other than that you just have to accept that people are free to interact with community wikis or not. Bounties are not awarded to people participating in community wikis, votes don't count once it has been turned into a community wiki, your username only appears if you are the person with the highest amount of content contributed to the community wiki, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a nice tool, but apart from asking people nicely to add something you don't have any tools available to make people attract users to community wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is not to help the asker of the question. The goal is to help all those people that will have a similar question in the future and stumble across the post. You need people that like that fuzzy feeling of helping people in the future and therefore contributing without any other acknowledgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T10:27:08.817" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6182" CreationDate="2018-05-29T08:31:22.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is my question really too broad? If yes,Why the moderators didnt close the other one instantly unlike my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's too broad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators didn't close your question at all, so that part is invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22207" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T08:31:22.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:53:36.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm in favour of this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally see no problem with 'real world' questions. Just because this site is about world building doesn't mean that everyone is building a completely fantasy or sci-fi world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it practically no work of fiction is set in the real world, they are just set in a world that is almost identical to it. So as long as you are asking questions about the setting and not the story (which can be a tricky line to draw) then they should be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the idea that we will get a flood of users coming here to ask how to change a light bulb or open a bank account is overly pessimistic. The kind of people who are likely to ask those questions are the ones who won't have read the rules or meta discussions anyway, so changing them won't encourage or discourage them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior research is important, and I like the idea that there should maybe be a close reason based on that, as well as context. Explaining why you want / need to know something in the context of your wider setting can make it clearer that the question is on topic and relevant (and guide people to make more relevant answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T15:53:36.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-05-29T19:06:21.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After 4.5 years of experiencing this polity, my beliefs are no longer reflected by this answer. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6402/40609&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for details. Thank you. -JBH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Hallelujah!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I applaud and approve the effort as stated.  I'm not as concerned about whether or not any particular rule meets my personal standard of happiness as I am concerned that rules are clear and consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reader's edification as all may not understand all the ins-and-outs of this issue...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Up/Down Voting:&lt;/strong&gt; Up/Down voting is intended to reflect a question's &lt;em&gt;quality.&lt;/em&gt;  This includes lack of research.  Inevitably this will be used to reflect question &lt;em&gt;popularity,&lt;/em&gt; which means a badly formed or researched question may have an enormously positive score.  This is unfortunate, because SE has automation in place that detects when OPs submit too many negatively-received questions that leads to warnings and finally banning.  When not used properly, this system is effectively circumvented.  In an ideal-but-I'll-never-see-it world, you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; up-vote a question simply because you're interested in the subject of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Favorite:&lt;/strong&gt; This is, IMO, the most underused and misunderstood link in the entire SE system.  THIS is what you're supposed to click if the &lt;em&gt;subject matter&lt;/em&gt; of the question is of interest to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close Voting:&lt;/strong&gt; Close voting reflects the potential for a question to result in answers that are &lt;em&gt;out of control.&lt;/em&gt;  Insofar as I'm concenred, if a person cannot point to a specific bullet in the Help Center that explains the VTC, it should not be cast.  No VTC should be cast because the voter believes the question violates the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the site.  That is far too subjective!  It even suggests VTCs that are themselves POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Put on Hold:&lt;/strong&gt; If there were a way to brand into people's heads the difference between VTH (vote to hold) and VTC (vote to close) I would do it.  Unfortunately, the two issues use the same mechanism and are universally referred to as &amp;quot;VTC.&amp;quot;  Questions put on hold are meant to motivate the OP to improve the question and are, therefore, meant to be reopened (always assuming the OP is improving).  There are three VTH reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unclear What You're Asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resulting answers will be all over the map, basically addressing every perspective but the OP's because nobody really understood what the OP wanted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too Broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resulting answers must be massive to address the entire question, making the result nearly useless for posterity.  Stack Exchange is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt; and is best used using its one-specific-question-one-best-answer model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based (POB).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No answer can be deemed any better than another because there is insufficient restricting, limiting, or defining criteria.  &lt;em&gt;By the way (and just because someone did it recently) you cannot VTH a question as POB when that question has been tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.  A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question is not POB by definition.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two general VTC reasons and four in total.  Questions are closed because their nature is adverse to the intent of the site or do not add to the database of information in a way that's useful.  One of them is (IMO) the reason for James' post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duplicate Question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-Topic: Does not appear to be about WB per the Help Center&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-Topic: Story-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-Topic: Belongs on another SE site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic: Belongs on another SE site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This VTC reason doesn't make sense to many people because they don't understand how SE works.  It's &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ONLY&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; purpose is to identify a question that should be moved to Worldbuilding Meta — &lt;em&gt;and not to any other site on the network.&lt;/em&gt;  Therefore, it should really read, &amp;quot;Off-Topic: Belongs on Meta.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helps to understand that you can't simply force a question onto another SE site.  Each site can reject incoming migration requests and has their own rules about what they will and won't accept.  That makes using the existing Off-Topic condition very confusing because it suggests pretty much the opposite.  Because you cannot guarantee the migration, you cannot simply close for that purpose.  (Flagging for moderator attention and identifiying the migration target is much more valuable, if migration really is warranted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is my understanding that other sites could be listed under this VTC reason, but rarely are due to the problems mentioned.  I'd rather see it renamed to focus on migrating to Meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic: Too Story-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exists because our purpose is NOT to write the OP's story for them.  Our goal is to help the OP develop a consistently usable world in which &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; story could be placed.  The moment it becomes a question of how &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; story can be placed, it's too story-based.  This is why questions about one character (regardless the nature of that character) are off-topic as too story-based.  The moment you ask how Herman would solve a problem in your world, you're asking us to write your book, not help develop your world (even if the answer could be used to develop your world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR... Off-Topic: Does not appear to be about WB...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the VTC reason that desperately needs clarification because it is subject to too many opinions — especially opinions about what &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider James' question and the moderators' efforts to be a valuable first-step to improving this overly abused VTC reason.  There are existing rules on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; (the bullets following &amp;quot;...not about:&amp;quot;) that are the only rules we have for closing a question for this reason.  I do not mind (and even look forward to) the improvement of these rules — but until they are improved, they are the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; non-subjective reasons for VTC:Off-Topic:NA/WB that we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My thanks to the moderators for discussing and tackling this issue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-26T20:14:20.980" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T20:14:20.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6205" CreationDate="2018-05-31T21:10:27.480" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ever since I hit the mark for review queue privileges on new questions and new answers to old questions, I've noticed something odd. If only one queue has a new post to review, the review queue icon shows as empty. I have to actively click on and enter the queue to see the alert. The red &quot;active&quot; circle only shows up when both queues have multiple posts to be reviewed. Is this a bug, or is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T22:34:19.957" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T22:34:19.957" Title="Review queue alerts?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|reviews|review-queues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6204" CreationDate="2018-05-31T21:18:09.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/304445/352819&quot;&gt;Experiment: Review-needed indicator logic for sites that sometimes have empty queues&lt;/a&gt;, especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/304983/352819&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5687/5&quot;&gt;Several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://martialarts.meta.stackexchange.com/a/534/1226&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt; have noticed that sometimes the indicator doesn't light up even when there are tasks in one or more queue. After you click on the review queue icon, you get an hour-long grace period from being notified about new items. But the reports generally take that behavior into account. It looks like there's another reason for the occasional false negative: caching. So there's a potential delay of a few minutes between when a task enters review and when the indicator might first light up. When someone clicks the review icon, the number of pending tasks for each queue is recalculated &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the grace period starts for that user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/305893/352819&quot;&gt;What criteria should we use to determine which review queue indicator a site will have?&lt;/a&gt;, which shows that the threshold for activation is &quot;maximum median tasks per hour &amp;lt;= 2&quot;, meaning that more than 2 tasks show the indicator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all the review queue indicator is just a bit weird at times. No bug, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T08:15:05.263" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T08:15:05.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T11:23:11.353" Score="25" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's still as true as ever that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4927/29&quot;&gt;flags and close votes are not super downvotes&lt;/a&gt; (or even super delete votes; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/157730&quot;&gt;standard policy for moderators in response to &quot;please delete this&quot; flags is to decline&lt;/a&gt;), everyone, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; do use flags when you come across things that shouldn't be on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly, if you come across content that you feel violates &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; policy&lt;/a&gt;, flag it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rare to come across rudeness on Worldbuilding, and honestly on Stack Exchange in general (being brusque to newcomers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change&quot;&gt;while a problem&lt;/a&gt;, is a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; problem), but especially on a reasonably high-traffic site such as Worldbuilding, it's pretty easy for stuff that really doesn't belong at all to fly under the radar. Once such content &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; brought to our attention somehow, we might then be looking at it in isolation; if people flag content that they feel is not-nice, then even if not every such flag ends up being validated as helpful, any pattern will be visible to moderators via the content owner's profile. This makes it far easier to accurately judge if it's a one-off thing, or if it's actually part of a pattern, which helps us to correctly handle the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moderators can't read every post and every comment,&lt;/em&gt; so we rely on the community to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag&lt;/a&gt; things that don't belong. Flagging is the mechanism of the Stack Exchange software to bring content to the attention of moderators, or to the attention of the community via the review queues. It's a feature that's available to just about everyone with at least a little bit of participation on the site; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;only 15 rep is required&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, please be considerate with custom flags. Each custom flag (the one where you write something into the &quot;in need of moderator attention&quot; text box) goes directly to the moderator inbox and can only be handled by a diamond moderator. There absolutely are times when this is called for, but before you do that, please do consider if some other type of flag (possibly in combination with a clarifying comment) will fit the problem you're seeing with the content. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6289/29&quot;&gt;Before raising a custom flag, ask yourself&lt;/a&gt; what, exactly, you want a moderator to do about the post, and whether that really requires a diamond moderator. (It's quite okay to flag posts to point out issues that have been fixed but are likely to be of legitimate interest to the moderator team, but if you do, please make it clear in the text of the flag that the issue has been resolved and you're flagging only for posterity.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the third side, when flagging &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; specifically, please &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; consider providing more details in a custom flag, because comment flags go directly to the moderators anyway (so there's little difference in practice between a standard comment flag and a custom comment flag). It's difficult to handle the flag correctly when all we see is a comment in isolation and a flag that says &quot;no longer needed&quot;. Instead, take a few seconds to type up a more descriptive reason for why you feel the comment should be removed. For example, we might see &quot;has been incorporated into question&quot; or &quot;seems to reply to deleted comment&quot; or even &quot;answer in comment&quot;. (If your first language is something other than English, then don't worry about the finer points of linguistics. As long as it's clearly understandable, that's good enough.) Seeing such flags immediately tells the moderator handling them what the user flagging the comment felt was the reason why the comment should be deleted. The standard comment flags &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/183020/157730&quot;&gt;used to&lt;/a&gt; be more specific, clearly separating &quot;not constructive&quot; from &quot;obsolete&quot; from &quot;too chatty&quot;, all of which are now bundled together as &quot;no longer needed&quot;. Unfortunately, this makes the job of the moderator trying to handle that comment flag more difficult, because we might not see &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the specific comment is &quot;no longer needed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T10:35:02.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T10:35:02.680" Title="PSA: Please use those flags!" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-06-03T12:30:08.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xv8GC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tower of Babel with SE colours.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33241" LastEditorUserId="33241" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T16:27:04.330" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T16:27:04.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-06-03T15:01:39.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dh0yr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Built Your World? Now Build Your Language! (ConLang)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T15:44:05.693" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T15:44:05.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6215" CreationDate="2018-06-05T13:25:02.307" Score="10" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was writing an answer where I ended up using two dollar signs to indicate amounts of money. The text in between the two dollar signs became formatted, although I did not want the formatting I was just discussing money. Is there a way to get rid of the formatting given by symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have $10. With my $10 I am going to buy apples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I have $10. With my $10 I am going to buy apples. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41879" LastEditorUserId="41879" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T14:38:06.600" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:38:06.600" Title="How do I write dollar signs ($) in posts without messing up the text formatting?" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6214" CreationDate="2018-06-05T13:32:54.653" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formatting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#latex&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; and is pretty useful for complex math. If you want to use a normal dollar sign you have to &quot;escape&quot; the symbol. This means that you tell the interpreter &quot;You know, the following is just a normal character. Not some formatting stuff like 'I want this italic', or 'I want this bold' or 'I want this in fancy math-whatever style'&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To escape the dollar sign simply use a backslash in front of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\$&lt;/code&gt; will produce $.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I have \$10. With my \$10 I am going to buy apples.&lt;/code&gt; produces &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have \$10. With my \$10 I am going to buy apples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in the text this can also be useful to turn off other formatting stuff. For example &lt;code&gt;\*&lt;/code&gt; to get * instead of italic. This also means you need to write &lt;code&gt;\\&lt;/code&gt; to get \, as &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt; is the special character for escaping special characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more examples about using MathJax you can also look on Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/607/how-do-i-add-mathematical-notation-using-latex-mathjax&quot;&gt;How do I add mathematical notation using Latex MathJax?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T13:44:37.427" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T13:44:37.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6221" CreationDate="2018-06-05T13:55:11.510" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a Sandboxed (technical term) draft is posted on main, the author is expected to update their draft, shorten it, and delete it. But what about the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a high-rep user, so I can only see my own deleted posts, but it's enough to become annoying as I try to scroll down and see the titles of existing drafts. While the deleted drafts are small, the comments--where feedback is given--are often quite long. I've already flagged two of my deleted drafts for moderator intervention in deleting the comments, but I hate to involve that flag unecessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think there are four options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ingnore this. Over time, the posts will drift down the &quot;active&quot; page. All in all, it's not that annoying if drafts are updated regularly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, being thorough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag all the comments for mod deletion after the post has been posted and draft deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask all the commenters to delete their comments, then delete your own. This will clean it up completely (with the option of flagging if a person doesn't delete their comment after a while)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just have the author delete his/her comments: this will likely clean up at least half of the comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions? Which one should we choose? What is the argument for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T20:52:03.340" Title="Deletion of Comments from Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|comments|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6220" CreationDate="2018-06-05T16:00:07.050" Score="14" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short time ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114161/which-food-market-should-i-visit-in-pennsylvania&quot;&gt;a blatantly off-topic question&lt;/a&gt; got posted on main and swiftly deleted, and I was curious to see that it had been (incorrectly) tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/footwear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;footwear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;footwear&lt;/a&gt;. I didn't know we had such a tag. It seems as though &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96162/how-might-digitigrade-biped-shoes-work&quot;&gt;only one other question&lt;/a&gt; has used it, about 8 months ago, and that it was created specifically for that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need this tag. Should we get rid of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastEditorUserId="32016" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T07:38:32.243" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T07:38:32.243" Title="Should we take off our [footwear]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6218" CreationDate="2018-06-05T18:11:05.053" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feels pretty synonymous with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clothing&lt;/a&gt;.  I'd vote for merging the tag or just deleting it altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T18:11:05.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6216" CreationDate="2018-06-05T20:52:03.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I started to delete some of my comments with the newest Sandbox because of this specific issue and my personal habit of always leaving lots of very long comments. But I don't think it's necessary to do anything special. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want you can delete your comments to make the Sandbox a bit easier to use for others. And everyone else can remove theirs, too. But requiring everyone to remove their comments is a bit much. And writing comments to others that they should please remove their comments is... weird. We also quite often have problems with people abandoning their drafts and keeping an eye on which drafts are still worked on and which are abandoned. Keeping track of every single comment by personally contacting the user doesn't seem useful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging for moderator attention would be possible, but I think it's already a bit much that moderators are so often tasked with removing abandoned drafts. Obviously only a mod can tell you whether it's a lot of work for them or whether they can do it together with removing the draft for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all I'd say this is not really a problem. If you want to be considerate you can occasionally delete your comments under drafts from others when they have served their purpose and you can delete your own comments when posting on main, but shortening long drafts and deleting them is far more important in my opinion. The red background is enough to easily see that a draft doesn't need help anymore and that's the main reason we established the &quot;Keeping the Sandbox clean&quot; rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the Sandbox gets too full we can simply create a new one. The &quot;worst&quot; thing about the last Sandbox was that it was a bit slow to load. I for example looked through the Sandbox a bit less, but it's not like the Sandbox needs to be checked every five minutes by everyone. Having a slightly slower Sandbox is a nuisance but not something that requires immediate attention and not something that needs massive amounts of additional work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the main reason for &quot;Keeping the Sandbox clean&quot; is to make it easier to keep track of which drafts still need help and which don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a general thing: if you are thinking about flagging a lot of comments you should use a custom mod flag and simply state why and which comments you think need to be deleted or moved. You don't need half a dozen flags or more that all say &quot;No longer needed&quot; when you can simply say &quot;The comments are obsolete now that I have posted on Main. Can you please remove the comments?&quot; or for example on Main &quot;The comment discussion is drifting far away from improving the question and it's mainly two/three people arguing. Can you please move the discussion to chat?&quot; - again, mods probably know far better what they would like, but in general one clear message is easier to act on than lots of basically unconnected flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T20:52:03.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-06T01:11:34.727" Score="-9" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113799/ratio-of-lgbtq-individuals&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but also based on observations with other questions about non-heterosexuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site appears to have a problem with allowing questions about sexuality to remain open.  And now that I think about it, I probably can broaden the issue to any question about any sexuality.  Am I suggesting that we should open our doors to explicit questions?  No, I'm not.  People of all ages and opinions visit here and decorum isn't a bad thing (I consider it more mature than speaking explicitly about anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we frequently close the questions, often before enough answers have rolled in to provide the OP with the expression of views needed to make a good decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question is a great example.  Even with Cort Ammon pointing out that the question was very much a good example of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the “are real world questions on-topic” debate&lt;/a&gt; discussion, the question was actually closed &lt;em&gt;twice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm willing to grant that any discussion involving homosexuality (or any other aspect of the LGBT community) is a political hot potato.  It takes stamina to proffer an answer because, guaranteed, there will be people who disagree (or outright hate) the answer &amp;mdash; and it doesn't matter which &quot;side&quot; you take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that very fact is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; such questions should be permissible.  Sci-Fi and Fantasy are often the vanguard for discussing socially sensitive issues (possibly because cloaking the discussion in so much fiction &quot;lessens the blow&quot;).  We should be supporting it, not rejecting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand that the question is asking about real world facts and appreciate TCAT117 posting that he felt the matter was easily resolved with simple research.  But I'd like to point out...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the moderators are proposing that real-world questions be on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And that, in this specific instance, the real-world statistics are open to enormous interpretation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, the question is missing the balancing answers to those that basically reflect my own.  That's a tremendous disservice to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to recommend that the question be reopened, and if it's possible, to have its ability to be closed locked out.  As I posted on the real-world question discussion, I'm in favor of real-world questions being on-topic.  Honestly, if you don't want to answer a question &amp;mdash; skip it.  There should only be two reasons (overall) to close/hold any question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question requires clarification before too many answers come in to improve the quality of the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question adds nothing to the value of the site or, worse, is a distraction from the value of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this case, I have my suspicions that the question was closed because people didn't want a question about homosexuality on the site.  (I hope I'm wrong.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T06:23:47.407" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:39:30.693" Title="I believe WB:SE has a bias against non-heterosexual questions. Maybe it ought to stop" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6223" CreationDate="2018-06-06T01:42:41.580" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't participate on the question (until just now when I commented).  I would have closed it as &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;, not off-topic, pending an edit that provides cultural and perhaps temporal context.  I would expect the ratio of people who will identify -- that is, would say if asked -- as LGBTQ to be very different in medieval England, modern-day California, modern-day Iran, and the Mars colony in 200 years.  My (hypothetical) close vote has &lt;em&gt;nothing to do&lt;/em&gt; with the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;; it's about the &lt;em&gt;lack of specificity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/28&quot;&gt;meta post on real-world questions&lt;/a&gt; includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With all that said we still have to have expectations and standards, it can't just be a free for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Considerations when asking a question relating to the real world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Attempt to do your own research. If a quick google search will answer your question it may not be worth posting a question on the site. Generally, querents are expected to demonstrate what has been tried and why it was not sufficient or did not work. This too helps people answering understand what you are trying to accomplish as well as your level of knowledge on the topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Define your requirements and by what you will judge answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that fail to adequately meet these requirements may be placed on hold even if they are not, &quot;off-topic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the question you cite could be edited to address these issues and be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T14:08:16.033" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T14:08:16.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6223" CreationDate="2018-06-06T10:17:42.510" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the proposed topic is indeed important, it is unfortunate that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113799&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; given as an example is a bad example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I had an idea involving a society where LGBTQ individuals are more accepted than in our own world.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as an LGBTQ individual. By definition if somebody is L they cannot be G; T people are grouped with L, G and B people only because they are different from the conformant masses; and I have no idea what a Q is. (I know what &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; Q stands for; AFAIK there is no universally accepted description.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I heard somewhere that somewhere around 90% of people qualify as heterosexual, how accurate is this&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is extremely &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; dependent on culture and time period; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For many centuries in the classical world &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; men were socially presumed to be at least a little G or B, with a dash of what we would today call P thrown in; a purely H man would have been perceived as not fully normal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The degree of acceptance of G or B men may be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different from the degree of acceptance of B or God forbid L women, as was the case in the same classical world.&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite simple: if the society rigidly enforces H, then the number of L, G, and B people is vanishingly small, and of course nobody is T; if the society is liberal and hedonistic then nobody identifies as anything, because there is no need; the entire question makes senses only for a half-liberated society like ours, where being more or less than H is perceived as out of the ordinary and vaguely titillating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;How would the LGBTQ individuals be divided up&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any way the author pleases. Since the five letters do not designate an organic grouping there is no natural way to assign proportions. In particular, T can cover a very wide gamut of realities, from part-time role-playing to elaborate artificial modifications; some people can be both T and L, G or B. The boundary between H, B, and L or G is ill-defined; a society may believe that two men kissing makes them G where another society would need a lot more than that in order to begin to move them out of H.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As asked, the question is simply bad and uninteresting. I did not comment or answer because I felt that the effort required to salvage it would exceed any benefits. However, seeing the question quoted as an example given to sustain a suggestion that the community is somehow uninterested in fictional sexualities ticked me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the question been formulated in such a way as to propose a specific social make-up, and ask whether the proposed society and culture is plausible, it would have been &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more interesting, and it would have been neither criticised nor closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T20:38:58.673" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T20:38:58.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6223" CreationDate="2018-06-06T17:25:37.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few sex and gender questions if you actually bothered to search for them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are also a lot of closed questions along those lines, but those are by and large not about world building.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Just like the question you are asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weirdly if you look for questions on just about any subject you'll find a lot of closed questions. This isn't because of bias, but because by and large a lot of people aren't great at asking questions, and we have a lot of users that think that &quot;bad&quot; questions should be closed in order to keep quality up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between your example and other topics is that yours is &quot;political&quot; and a hot button topic so that anyone that thinks it should be closed must be biased or phobic. It couldn't possibly be because it's a flawed question that needs a lot of work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe if they had put it in the sandbox first it could have been fixed up to avoid this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is the question falls under opinion-based and too-broad. It can probably be fixed, but it does need work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T17:25:37.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-08T09:00:14.110" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there was a Meta discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/deletion-of-comments-from-sandbox&quot;&gt;Deletion of Comments from Sandbox?&lt;/a&gt; and according with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/deletion-of-comments-from-sandbox#comment18734_6221&quot;&gt;Monica's comment&lt;/a&gt; I want to start a discussion about the usefulness of comments under graduated/abandoned Sandbox drafts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion is that comments under the draft are not necessary anymore when a draft has graduated. It's ready for the main site so the comments have served their purpose and the OP decided to move on with the draft. The only people who can still see the comments are the OP, who either decided to follow or ignore the advice they got, and people with more than 10k reputation, who rarely will need to look through random Sandbox drafts to get ideas on how to ask questions. They likely know their way around and have specific problems in mind when posting a draft themselves, or they are searching for people who need help, in which less clutter is definitely better to scroll through the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments under abandoned posts on the other hand can be really important in case the person ever comes back to the draft. Maybe they started the draft and then had something important come up in their life that made them unavailable for some time while people were commenting under their draft. These comments might be useful as the OP maybe didn't have time to read through and think about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case comments can pose a problem to users of the Sandbox because they are taking up a lot of space, which makes it harder to find posts that still need help if you can see the deleted posts. They are also contributing to the slower loading of the site for users that can see them, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=44486019#44486019&quot;&gt;a problem&lt;/a&gt; we had with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4835/28789&quot;&gt;2017-2018 Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the opinion of the community about this matter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are comments still needed, meaning that we shouldn't create such a policy or even create a policy that is discouraging the deletion of comments under graduated/abandoned drafts? Or should we create a policy that comments should be deleted/moved under certain circumstances to remove clutter and make the Sandbox easier to use? Or is it something that doesn't really matter and we should leave things as they are and simply spin up a new Sandbox when the old one gets harder to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T20:10:37.040" Title="Do people still need to see comments under graduated/abandoned question drafts in the Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6230" CreationDate="2018-06-08T09:00:14.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As comment deletion appears to be easy for mods according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/deletion-of-comments-from-sandbox#comment18734_6221&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=44995946#44995946&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; I propose the following addition to the Sandbox policies: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a draft graduated, meaning that the OP has posted the question on the main site, they should flag their post for moderator attention and ask them to &lt;em&gt;purge&lt;/em&gt; the comments. This means that the comments won't be transferred to the chat and instead get deleted completely without trace for normal users. If Sandbox users see that a draft has been deleted by the OP for some time, let's say a week, and still has comments they should flag it for moderator attention and ask for the comments to be purged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives people some time to maybe look through the comments in case someone wants to do that, for example if the question is received very badly on main and people would like to see what happened in the Sandbox. This removes the necessity to undelete the draft, then move the comments to chat and then delete it again, as comments can only be moved to chat on undeleted posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a draft is abandoned according to the rules for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4912/28789&quot;&gt;Keeping the Sandbox clean&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that there were no edits by the OP for at least 30 days and a comment indicating that the OP should edit their question or else it might get deleted for at least 7 days, the post should be flagged for moderator attention asking the mod to move the discussion to chat and then delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way the comments are still accessible if the OP ever returns to work on their draft and there is no clutter in the comment section. Abandoned posts should be flagged for deletion anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore users are encouraged to remove their own comments from graduated posts to reduce the load on the mods that comes with the proposed policy. This doesn't mean that we should notify people in comments to clean up their comments all the time. Just that everyone who regularly goes through the Sandbox anyway should keep an eye out for old comments from himself on graduated posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy is especially for those comment threads that got rather long. If there are only one or two short comments it's not really worth it to ask a mod to remove them, but if there are half a dozen long comments it can have an impact in the long run. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments under graduated posts served their purpose. There is no need to keep them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments under abandoned posts might be useful to the OP if he ever gets back to the draft. They should be moved to chat to remove clutter and still be accessible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T20:10:37.040" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T20:10:37.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-10T03:40:20.733" Score="-2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this site, where you ask questions about worldbuilding, so I was wondering what good question about world building are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51773" OwnerDisplayName="Doctor Mike" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T08:01:46.700" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T08:01:46.700" Title="What's a good question about world building?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6238" CreationDate="2018-06-10T08:01:20.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding &lt;em&gt;Doctor Mike&lt;/em&gt;! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of different questions you could ask about WorldBuilding. It depends on what you are trying to do. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; gives a lot of useful information in the category &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Worldbuilding SE welcomes questions on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Creation of elements of a world (languages, species, buildings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Effects of events or world elements, including biology, technology and magic, on specific aspects of that world's societies, cultures, and environment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How to achieve a specified effect in a defined world, including by the use of biology, technology or magic, while maintaining in-universe consistency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you have to be careful about not asking one of the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Actions of individual characters, rather than elements of the world they inhabit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Character building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Elements of plot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;General writing or storytelling (consider the Writing or Role-playing Games Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Software that doesn't directly relate to worldbuilding (consider the Super User or Software Recommendations Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have 5 reputation and can participate here on the meta site of WorldBuilding, where we discuss for example what's on-topic or off-topic as a community, you can check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; when you have a draft for a question to get some feedback on whether it would be on-topic or off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To earn some reputation you can check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center. You could for example suggest useful edits to other peoples posts to fix typos, or you could answer questions. Getting upvotes on questions you've asked also gives reputation. The more reputation you have, the more privileges you get - and privileges allow you to participate more on the site, especially in regards to community moderation like editing without needing approval or participating in the voting processes to temporarily put questions on hold or reopen them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically whenever you are building a fictional world, be it for a novel, videogame, RPG or whatever else you are doing, and you encounter problems with internal consitency or need help to make some element believable you can ask here to get some help with the specific problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get ideas about what's on-topic on the site you can check out for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=month&quot;&gt;monthly highest voted questions&lt;/a&gt; or simply browse &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;all questions sorted by votes&lt;/a&gt;. A little warning though: not everything that has been on-topic before is on-topic now. You should always check the help center and see what people are discussing in the comments under new questions if you want to get an idea about what's on-topic or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like a more open-ended approach and simply brainstorm a bit, which would be off-topic on the main site, you can check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the chat&lt;/a&gt; once you have 20 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have fun on the site! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T08:01:20.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6241" CreationDate="2018-06-10T16:45:52.737" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;When users pull up the VTC panel, the description for &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We discuss &lt;em&gt;fiction.&lt;/em&gt;  With the exception of questions about natural processes and orbital mechanics, they're all opinionated &amp;mdash; very opinionated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=primarily+opinion+based+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;the better part of two pages of Meta questions about POB&lt;/a&gt; and not a few of them are asking about its definition on a site where the traditional SE defintion doesn't make sense.  (For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5991/magic-is-primarily-opinion-based-by-definition-so-what-does-a-pob-vtc-mean&quot;&gt;here (one of my own)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5455/how-can-questions-be-closed-as-being-primarily-opinion-based-on-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/what-exactly-is-opinion-based-and-why-do-we-shun-it&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own experience, POB has come to mean...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OP has not provided sufficient background or justification to determine which answer is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a fancy way of saying, it's POB from the &lt;em&gt;OP's perspective.&lt;/em&gt;  As in, the best answer isn't obvious, it was just the one the OP liked the best with no rationalization justifying why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last few days have seemed to be over-burdened with questions being closed for POB, even when it made more sense to close them for other reasons.  Here's some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114704/what-would-a-deep-sea-fish-with-human-level-intellect-look-like&quot;&gt;What would a deep sea fish with human level intellect look like&lt;/a&gt; was closed for POB when it really should have been closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114692/help-with-2012-meets-groundhogs-day-scenario&quot;&gt;Help with &amp;quot;2012 meets Groundhog&amp;#39;s Day&amp;quot; Scenario&lt;/a&gt; was closed as POB when it should have been closed as Off-Topic: Too Story Based.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114664/how-to-name-planets-in-a-sci-fi-setting&quot;&gt;How to name planets in a sci-fi setting?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as POB when it should have been either a duplicate or Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels like people are simply defaulting to POB and I worry that it's from the perspective of &quot;I can't see how you can answer this question with facts, so it must be POB.&quot;  Maybe I'm wrong, but that's an issue we occasionally need to fight against on this site.  People want answers to be &lt;em&gt;factual&lt;/em&gt; on a site that's about science &lt;em&gt;fiction.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Is it possible to change the descriptive text for &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; in the VTC dialog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, then this entire discussion is basically moot and we'll be fighting the forces of evil forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is yes, then I'd like to propose a discussion about nailing down what POB means to the creative process of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T08:58:15.773" Title="Is it possible to change the descriptive text for the POB selection?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6240" CreationDate="2018-06-11T07:44:12.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There are custom close reasons for &quot;Off-Topic&quot;, but not for any other category&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some discussions on Meta, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/210314/352819&quot;&gt;Categories other than “off-topic” should allow custom close reasons&lt;/a&gt;, that talk about this and outline that communities can currently only change their custom close reasons for &quot;Off-Topic&quot;. The high-level close reasons (Primarily Opinion Based, Too Broad, Duplicate and Unclear) can't be changed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270348/352819&quot;&gt;even localized sites should only translate and not change&lt;/a&gt;. See also this very similar question on RPG.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8059/34863&quot;&gt;Should/can we change the Duplicate notification?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want communities to be able to change the text for POB you need network wide changes. By making a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; you could theoretically get the attention of the StackExchange staff. Or to give an idea about what could potentially be done: you need to be satisfied with a custom Off-Topic close reason and discouraging the usage of the standard reason. Not a great idea in my opinion, but Off-Topic is the only thing we can influence. Every site gets three custom Off-Topic close reasons per default and can potentially get up to five if they show that they need it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T08:58:15.773" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T08:58:15.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-11T18:27:06.297" Score="12" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114877/ringed-planet-reality-check-on-ring-shadow-visuals&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about reality-checking the shadows of a ringed planet was placed in the reopen review queue after an edit was made. While the edit appears to be insufficient to separate the two questions, I noticed that the question was put on hold with just two votes: Molot and the Community diamond moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen the Community mod a number of times and understood it to be something of a helper or cleanup &quot;user.&quot; Why does it have the power to vote to close and when does it choose to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T18:27:43.647" Title="How/why does the Community mod close questions?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|moderators|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6242" CreationDate="2018-06-11T18:27:43.647" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the user themselves closing the question as a duplicate. When someone votes to close as a duplicate the user is asked whether they agree - and when they do the community user with his &quot;mod powers&quot; closes the question instantly on behalf of the user who potentially doesn't have any special close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250981/352819&quot;&gt;New UI encourages askers to confirm or dispute duplicate votes&lt;/a&gt;. If you hover over the community vote you can see the text: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question's author approved a pending duplicate vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T18:27:43.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6223" CreationDate="2018-06-12T14:39:30.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did my part of random searches to see percentages of closed questions. If anything, results shows &lt;strong&gt;bias against heterosexual and plants&lt;/strong&gt;. And closure ratio on homosexual is lower than total closure ratio on site, overall. So if it's a bias, then it is a bias in favor of &quot;homosexual&quot; keyword. Either that, or we simply &lt;strong&gt;do not have enough data&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homosexual: 9 asked, 2 closed, 22% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rocket: 216 asked, 39 closed, 18% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heterosexual: 2 asked, 1 closed, 50% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cake: 19 asked, 5 closed, 26% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gravity + bones: 19 asked, 5 closed, 26% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Planetary ring: 35 asked, 3 closed, 9% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pollen: 17 asked, 5 closed, 29% closure ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All questions on the site: 16,719 asked, 4,041 closed, 24% closure ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:39:30.693" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-06-12T19:28:49.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The best WB questions have some or all of these attributes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't one single qualifier or disqualifier for a good, on-topic WB question.  It's a constellation of factors.  This is why I believe it's been so hard to figure out what is on-topic and what isn't.  As I've thought about this problem, I keep running into criteria where I think &quot;Yes, good WB questions have that attribute...yeah, but...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Combinatorial&lt;/strong&gt; - Combine systems or elements of systems into new systems or new properties of those systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speculative&lt;/strong&gt; - The question must include some kind of speculation about things that we don't know about how the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About a System (very broad definition of a system)&lt;/strong&gt; - The operation of single elements, much like the actions of a single person, don't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Novel&lt;/strong&gt; - Please make it new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract&lt;/strong&gt; - The nitty gritty details of the answer don't matter, or they can be handwaved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not advocating doing dangerous things&lt;/strong&gt; - Knowing how to do a dangerous/evil thing is different than doing it or advocating that it be done.  We have tons of genocide questions on WB but no one advocates that genocide be done.  If we have reasonable cause to believe that someone would take dangerous actions based on what we provide, that should be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not homework&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not trivial&lt;/strong&gt; - Google can't give you the answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Always with the Exceptions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the trivial and the homework questions, anyone of us can find fantastic WB questions that offer magnificent exceptions.  For example, every single &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question cares a lot about the details and often in great specificity.  But, note that these hard-science questions are often combinatorial, novel, and about a system.  It is all the other attributes that make them good WB questions instead of off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship between all these criteria are fuzzy.  Some are weighted heavier than others.  Some are necessary but insufficient (I'm not sure any of them are necessary &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; sufficient to be a good WB question.)  However, the more of these criteria a question has, the stronger its position as a good, on-topic WB question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What do we want WB to be?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't be someone's homework service.  I will not be someone's homework service.  I want us to be the place that people come for fantastic answers to questions that require novel reasoning about known systems.  I want us to be the place where people come to get help with imaginary worlds.  Being a repository for useful information about the real world is tertiary to helping people reason about their imaginary worlds.  If answering questions about how the real world works and this function impares people's ability to propose and reason about their worlds, then I would vote that real world questions are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We aren't an encyclopedia and I don't want to become one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want us to become the dumping ground of bad questions for all of Stack Exchange either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="10364" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T20:09:15.103" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T20:09:15.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6248" CreationDate="2018-06-13T06:14:08.760" Score="7" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is purely about whether or not we want to write comments when there are other sites on the network who specialize in a certain topic that is also on-topic on WorldBuilding and if so, how - the current or future guidelines for on-topicness are irrelevant to this discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of writing this post there are many topics that are on-topic on WorldBuilding, but have sites dedicated to them. An example would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conlang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conlang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt; questions, for which there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ConLang.SE&lt;/a&gt; beta site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are on-topic on WorldBuilding as they relate to building a fictional world. At the same time there are sites that specialise in these topics and it can help users, especially new users, to point out that these resources exist if they are interested in the topic. This is similar to how you would point to Wikipedia or a Blog that relates to the topic, but is not suitable as an answer to the question that was asked, in an attempt to help the person asking the question with their current or future projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poiting to other sites in comments may sound like the topic is off-topic here on WorldBuilding and encourage people to &lt;em&gt;Vote to Close&lt;/em&gt; such questions, when in fact they can and should be answered here. If a question is on-topic on multiple sites it's up to the OP to decide where to post their question to set the focus. Still, our sister sites are valuable resources for people interested in for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Constructed Languages&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;RPGs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, and many, many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I bring this up is, that I always understood, and still understand, the role of the WorldBuilding.SE being to help people solve the issues they hit when building their worlds. Thus we primarily are meant to help finding solutions to your worldbuilding stumblestones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need help with for example finding resources for constructing languages or historical events that is definitely one such stumblestone. Yet sometimes it would be good to point out that other sites exist that specialise in these topics. While we can answer these questions those other sites focus on this specific topic and might therefore be more helpful for the person asking a question in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to the OP to decide where to post their question - and it's up to us to inform them of resources as best as we can. To give them a meaningful choice we should inform them about other resources they might be interested in. We shouldn't shut ourselves off and ignore the existence of our sister sites. They are useful sites with experts talking about specific topics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question therefore is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be our commenting etiquette when pointing out that other Stacks exist?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't want to make it look like on-topic questions need to be asked somewhere else. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We want to inform everyone as best as we can of their choices to gather information. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should we write comments pointing out other sites exist if a question is on-topic here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, how?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If not, why not?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the following be an example of such comments? From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110493/is-there-something-like-open-source-elvish#comment336610_110493&quot;&gt;Is there something like “Open Source Elvish”?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are interested in constructed languages you might want to check out our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ConLang.SE&lt;/a&gt;, who specialise in this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T18:59:31.623" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T20:23:38.870" Title="What should be our commenting etiquette when pointing out that other Stacks exist?" Tags="|discussion|comments|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6247" CreationDate="2018-06-13T07:05:19.717" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's off-topic here it should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's off-topic here and on-topic on the other site and of acceptable quality (we don't want to be the dumping ground for others - let's not make others our dumping ground) it should be closed and flagged for moderator attention. Ideally you would have experience with the other site to show that you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that the question would be on-topic and point to relevant parts in the tour/help center of the other site to make it easier for mods to see that you know what you are talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's on-topic here, but would likely get better answers on another site you can leave a comment, again ideally with information from the tour/help center to show that the question would indeed be acceptable on the other site. You can then tell the user to decide themselves what they want to do and they can flag for moderator attention to migrate the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's on-topic and the person asking the question decides to not post the question somewhere else, even after getting a comment about the other site accepting such question, leave the question here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the decision of the person asking the question where to post and if it's not off-topic there is no reason to close the question or migrate it against the will of the person asking the question, even if your opinion is that it would get infinitely better answers somewhere else. If it's on-topic here that's not your decision to make. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give the person asking the question the benefit of doubt that they are indeed looking for worldbuilding context. Maybe they don't need exact dates and just want a rough idea. If so, why not give them a worldbuilding answer and say &quot;Reality says roughly this, but judging by other things it could have also started at this other point in time&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's absolutely fine and a nice thing to do to point someone somewhere else and say &quot;You know, those guys are specialised towards this specific topic and you seem to be looking for real-world data. Maybe you should check out that site. According to the [help center] this question would be on-topic there. If you would like to migrate it you can flag your post for moderator attention and ask them to migrate it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please leave it at that if it's not off-topic. And while it's fine if multiple people think that a question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be migrated it's not useful for the person asking the question if the comment section is full of &quot;Yeah, the other half a dozen guys are right - migrate this!&quot; One or two comments, for example one comment like &quot;You could ask to migrate there, but I am not so familiar with the site.&quot; and another one like &quot;@XYZ is right, I am quite active on the site and we love such questions over there.&quot;, would be perfect. If there are already such comments you can simply upvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also don't want to make our site look worse than it really is. There are many experts here and while most people have a broad area of knowledge and are therefore not specific experts of each individual field you are likely to get at least a good starting point here and quite possibly high quality answers like those you would get on other sites. Pointing everyone somewhere else saying &quot;Those guys are far better than us.&quot; is a bit harsh towards our own regular userbase. Of course, they specialise in a specific topic, so I understand the idea, but if a new user asks a question here and only ever gets &quot;Go there, they are better&quot; then this is starting to look quite bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally you would just point out that other sites exist and might be useful to the OP for future questions. A short comment like &quot;If you are interested in this topic check out our sister site XYZ.SE, they specialize on this topic and according to their [help center] they like this sort of question.&quot; The rest is up to the OP. This leaves it as just a friendly reminder that these other sites exist for the OP and future readers, while not undermining the authority of our own users and without making it look like it's off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple comment informing users that other Stacks exist is the same as pointing to any other site - it can be a nice and useful thing to do, but if you start insisting that people go somewhere else when in fact they are in the right place to get answers, even if there are other places with potentially more focused answers, things are getting difficult. Simple, short and friendly comments informing of the existence of other sites on the network are perfectly fine and should be written to help users, especially new ones - commands to migrate on-topic questions should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; examples&lt;/strong&gt; for when a question is on-topic on WorldBuilding and you want to point out that a dedicated Stack exists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ConLang.SE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are interested in constructed languages you might want to check out our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;ConLang.SE&lt;/a&gt;, who specialise in this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RPG.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see you have been asking a lot of questions that are related to tabletop RPG's, so I just wanted to mention that there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt; in case you haven't come across that sister site. You might get some ideas for your current project by browsing their questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding! This is a good question. As you are relatively new I just wanted to mention that there are lots of sites on the StackExchange network in case you didn't know about our sister sites. For example you might be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt; if you have some questions about how to write the story you are working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nice question. While not about building a fictional world you might still be interested in checking out &lt;code&gt;[this question](link/to/a/relevant/question)&lt;/code&gt; on our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to be related to your current worldbuilding problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; examples&lt;/strong&gt; for when a question is on-topic on WorldBuilding and you want to point out that a dedicated Stack exists that makes it look like the question needs to be migrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a question for &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPS.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You would get better answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;IPS.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GameDev.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;GameDev.SE&lt;/a&gt; is better for questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Islam.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While you might get answers here you should check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://islam.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Islam.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically if you could change the link to the sister site to a link to Wikipedia or a blog article (and remove the &lt;em&gt;sister site&lt;/em&gt; language) and you would think it's acceptable the comment is in line with the proposed comenting etiquette. Our sister sites are valuable resources, just like for example Wikipedia, and they should be treated as such in the cases where a question is on-topic on WorldBuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T20:23:38.870" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T20:23:38.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6247" CreationDate="2018-06-13T14:19:52.173" Score="-4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now not knowing your history...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel comfortable with this mindset. We have people from different places in the world and with different education levels. If we tell people that they don't know their history, and tell them to go look somewhere else, we are sealing ourselves in an ivory tower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how would we measure whether people know their history, anyway? We can't apply standardized tests as a requirement to post questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... respectively having no clue where to find the information is definitely one such stumblestone...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this I can agree; Not knowing history is not a problem... Not knowing how to research is another. But I think the adequate reaction to a poorly researched question is downvoting. The help text for the downvote button does say &lt;em&gt;&quot;this question does not show any research effort&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... yet again, we know of at least one community for one of these cases that is infinitely better suited to help people do research than we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think each case is a different case, and questions should be judged by their individual merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are to have a knee jerk reaction to questions of a certain kind, at least it should come from the guidelines in the help section. They already define what &#xA;is on topic and what is not, and we have had threads about it in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About history proper, the help center says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;asking about the following is off-topic:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Historical events of or historical facts about the real world, except when provided as examples or comparisons in the construction of an imaginary world (consider the History or respective subject-specific Stack Exchange sites)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a question just asks something like &quot;when did Lawnchair Larry execute his historical flight&quot; or &quot;what historical battle served as inspiration for Iron Maiden's The Trooper song&quot;, then it is an off-topic questions. But is someone asks something along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100756/21222&quot;&gt;&quot;could the romans have invented some aircraft given some special context&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/110189/21222&quot;&gt;&quot;could a medieval ship have carried a ballista effectively&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then they are on topic. I think the separation of both types of question is crystal clear, and we should not have to discuss this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, if something is off-topic here but on topic somewhere else, guiding the OP to another stack is a courtesy. I don't think we need a canned response for such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T14:19:52.173" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T15:34:45.330" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I’ve noticed a lot of questions being closed and then being subsequently reopened without major revisions to the question. This appears to happen more often with popular questions. Here are many examples from the past month identified by looking at the top questions from this month and checking the revision history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An incomplete list of top questions from the last month closed and reopened without major edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113986/how-would-you-bring-wealth-back-to-the-past&quot;&gt;How would you bring wealth back to the past?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112984/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-struck-a-tiny-but-immovable-object&quot;&gt;What would happen if the Earth struck a tiny but immovable object&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113733/why-would-anyone-build-robots-when-they-have-human-rights&quot;&gt;Why would anyone build robots when they have human rights?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114832/mosquito-armageddon&quot;&gt;Mosquito Armageddon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113115/what-could-post-apocalypse-humans-do-about-dangerous-genetically-augmented-dogs&quot;&gt;What could post-apocalypse humans do about dangerous, genetically augmented dogs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sits at 4 close votes, one more close vote and it likely would have been subsequently reopened as well: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-gdpr-is-around&quot;&gt;How can Santa keep his lists when GDPR is around?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sits at 4 reopen votes:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114858/whats-a-good-reason-for-a-telekinesis-user-not-being-able-to-use-his-her-powers&quot;&gt;What's a good reason for a telekinesis user not being able to use his/her powers on living beings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this is a product of the current vote-to-close and reopen system in which any 5 high-rep users of a potentially much larger group can close or reopen a question. That means for any question for which there is some disagreement over its status the question is likely be to closed and subsequently reopened. This is irrespective of the total community opinion. Even if a large majority of users feel a question deserves a certain status it is likely to be closed and reopened as long as there is a minimum of 5 votes on each side. This also means that the more popular a question is the more likely it is to receive those 5 close votes and subsequent 5 reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we all think about this? Is this how the site is intended to work? I think the closure of popular questions for several hours before their eventual reopenings is probably harming engagement by newcomers looking to answer a question and is certainly confusing and off putting to those who ask the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the rationale for the opening and closing of each of these questions is unique to each case so I’d like to steer the discussion away from the specific questions and more generally to the current system and the way users are using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the frequent closure and reopening of popular questions a problem and if so what should we do about it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. For anyone who is familiar with SQL queries and is interested it would be very intriguing to get statistics on this closures and subsequent reopenings over time and with respect to the popularity of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="879" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T16:13:13.267" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:13:13.267" Title="Frequent closure and reopening of popular questions" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6251" CreationDate="2018-06-13T15:57:26.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is not a problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone can only vote to close or reopen any single question once. This is to prevent close/reopen wars, which means that at some point the community consensus will be visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popular questions attract a lot of attention. This means that a lot of those people with high standards for which questions they think are a good fit for the site will see and may put it on hold. It also means that many people with differing criteria for what constitutes an acceptable question will see the question and interact with it. But everyone that is not an elected moderator can only cast a vote once, which means that everyone casts their vote, for example when seeing the question in the respective review queues and then they are done with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That newcomers can't interact with a question that is on hold is not a problem. Especially popular questions already have had a lot of interaction - that's why they are popular. And newcomers should participate on questions that community deems to be on-topic. If the community is not sure at any point in time about whether something is acceptable or not it's fine that newcomers can't interact with the question. Furthermore the question won't be displayed in the Hot Network Questions while it's on hold. This means that there are far less newcomers that want to interact with the question when it's on hold then there are when it's not on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't do anything special. This is normal, especially on WorldBuilding. If there is discourse about certain such questions these can be discussed through the normal procedures of Meta and will come to an end through the already implemented methods of the StackExchange network. There is no need to change anything about the tools the community members have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T15:57:26.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6251" CreationDate="2018-06-13T16:05:10.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This is not a problem. Yes, this is how the site is supposed to work.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be missing (or ignoring) a bit of the picture; when a post is closed, and then reopened, &lt;strong&gt;it is not prevented from being closed again&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important; very important, because it makes several of the statements that you make false. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Such as:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This is irrespective of the total community opinion&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply not true; it's basically impossible to quantify the total community opinion to fit one side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That means for any question for which there is some disagreement over&#xA;  its status the question is likely be to closed and subsequently&#xA;  reopened&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also false, but only partially false. You forgot to add that it could also be subsequently &lt;strong&gt;closed again&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This also means that the more popular a question is the more likely it&#xA;  is to receive those 5 close votes and subsequent 5 reopen votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, false; the popularity of a question has very little impact to with regard to whether or not a question gets 5 close/reopen votes. It's important to distinguish the difference between &quot;popular question because of HNQ&quot; and &quot;good question for WB&quot;. A lot of high view, high vote questions are not necessarily good questions for WB. They're simply &quot;interesting&quot; questions that a lot of &quot;passing visitors&quot; happened to upvote (which basically anyone can do) - close and reopen votes are limited to high rep users, and regular users can't interact with the questions in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the closure of popular questions for several hours before&#xA;  their eventual reopenings is probably harming engagement by newcomers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should probably split this into two parts. The first half of the statement assumes that a reopened question will not ever be closed again; which is a bad assumption. The second half of the question is up in the air. Unless someone were to go and do some data analytics work, it isn't answerable; and even if someone did go and do said DA work, it's probably still going to be biased in one way or another. &lt;strong&gt;It's really hard to do social studies properly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;There is nothing that needs to be done. Let the system work it out.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6453" LastEditorUserId="6453" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T16:10:10.600" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:10:10.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6255" CreationDate="2018-06-13T19:20:06.740" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I normally see this once the 200 reputation cap is reached, not before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cVpGH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cVpGH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T11:28:06.693" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T11:28:06.693" Title="Delay in assigning reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6254" CreationDate="2018-06-13T19:40:48.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's normal. Weird, but normal. The reason is because of the un-upvote you received (the -10). This day still counts towards the badges that say that you have to earn a total of 200 reputation, because you still &lt;em&gt;earned&lt;/em&gt; as much when you count together the green numbers. That total of 190 can be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see similar things for example when placing a bounty. A bounty of 50 means you are &quot;capped&quot; at +150 - but the day still counts towards the badges for 200. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T19:40:48.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-06-15T06:16:56.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the best name for X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What should I call my X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitability:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions are fishing-for-ideas questions seeking help with an aestheic component (&quot;window dressing&quot;) of a story rather than a rule of a fictional world.  They always fall into one or both of two categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Story-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;The question is asking for a name that can only be suitable within the context of the story (e.g., &quot;My aliens are a warrior race, what would be a good name for them?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;If the question is not too story-based, then it is always primarily opinion-based as no amount of limitation will remove the aesthetic &quot;I like this one best just because&quot; judgment of the OP.  In short, no amount of limitation will completely distinguise one answer as the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T06:16:56.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-15T23:35:22.187" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Sandbox, there's often a lot of back-and-forth discussion between the original poster and commenters asking for clarification. This is normally avoided on Worldbuilding because it makes it hard to find truly useful comments and the question should be edited in response to the comments, not commented back. The Sandbox seems to be a place where this is more acceptable, both for transparency as later commenters might want to see why it looks like it does, and because the Sandbox is supposed to be at least a little interactive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, should we strive to keep comment conversations on Sandbox posts to a minimum, or should we embrace the conversational nature and accept that it'll look messy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6230/do-people-still-need-to-see-comments-under-graduated-abandoned-question-drafts-i&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Meta post about sandbox comments from Secespitus is relevant here, where the (preliminary) consensus seems to be that comments will be deleted after the post graduates anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T12:29:19.367" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T07:42:23.430" Title="Are extended conversations permissible in the Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6261" CreationDate="2018-06-16T00:46:57.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that we should not limit comments in the sandbox as long as they remain constructive. Questions on the main site are written to reach a large audience, thus we cannot allow comments to go out of control there. In the sandbox on the other hand, the audience is very limited and comments are not likely to be a distraction. Also, the kind of comments you get in these two places are very different. They are much more on-topic in the sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T00:46:57.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6261" CreationDate="2018-06-16T07:22:06.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussions shouldn't be limited in the Sanbox as long as they don't start to be massively tangential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only a small subset of users who frequent the Sandbox and there is rarely any topic in there that starts the kind of heated debates that you sometimes see on the Main site. The amount of people who come across the posts is just vastly different. While there can be a lot of back and forth most of the time it's mostly &lt;em&gt;forth&lt;/em&gt;, making the question better with each iteration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta discussions can have longer comment discussions anyway and people visiting the Sandbox are &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; to leave comments. Normally comments are to ask for clarification of the post, whereas in the Sandbox they are &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to be the main discussion part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I wouldn't call the comment section in the Sandbox &lt;em&gt;messy&lt;/em&gt;. It's the way it's supposed to be and we shouldn't change anything about that. If anything, flagging comments as &quot;No longer needed&quot; in the Sandbox before the post graduated/was abandoned is adding noise to the moderators and should therefore be &lt;em&gt;dis&lt;/em&gt;couraged - there are rules in place to ask the mods to remove drafts anyway after a certain time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should however try to delete comments that are definitely no longer needed. If you mentioned a few small typos in the beginning for example and the OP fixed those you can remove your comment to reduce the clutter. That's just such a small thing that it's not needed for other people that come across the post, it's just noise. Most of the time it can be valuable for others to read through &lt;em&gt;the discussion so far&lt;/em&gt;, but it's also extra work to do and we want to make the Sandbox easier to use for everyone - for the people that need help with their drafts and for the people that want to provide this help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's also what the linked discussion is about: making it easier for people who can see deleted posts to use the Sandbox. If a draft is deleted, because it graduated or was abandoned, the comments have served their purpose and can only be seen by the OP that decided to use or ignore those comments already and the people who can see deleted posts and likely don't need to read through long discussions about what is and what isn't on-topic on the Main site or how to format stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this of course doesn't apply if something for some reason should get out of hand. This includes heated and very, very long back-and-forth discussions that are only tangential to the question. These should be moved to chat like normal. But this also includes trolls. There were some problems with a troll before, so if you feel that someone is abusing the Sandbox to game the system, for example because the Sandbox encourages discussions or because on Meta you can have more bad, deleted posts before running into question/answer bans or something like that you should of course bring this to the attention of the mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very rare, but just to be clear in case something like this comes up in the future: while discussions about a specific draft and how to make it on-topic are encouraged the normal rules still apply - it's not a free ticket to sap the time of those people that are trying to help others and to ignore the basic rules of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T07:42:23.430" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T07:42:23.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-16T17:52:45.980" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/115403/a-large-island-is-discovered-and-thoroughly-explored-by-scientists-what-happens?noredirect=1#comment353515_115403&quot;&gt;My most recent question&lt;/a&gt; asks what procedures would be undertaken after a large island is discovered and explored by scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has since recieved 2 downvotes, and neither of the downvoters ever said why they did so. However, I strongly believe that this because the background scenario of the situation is considered by many to be implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never asked whether the scenario was implausible. I do respect that plausibility is a large element of worldbuilding, but if I have a very elaborate, quite convincing &quot;lampshade&quot;, then why must a completely different question be downvoted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project which the question asks about is very nearly finished and by far past the stage of no turning back, so downvoting is just wholly deconstructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silently downvoting or something irrelevant is one thing, but writing an answer about that something is completely another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question recieved an answer which mentioned &lt;strong&gt;nothing&lt;/strong&gt; that would remotely begin to answer it, instead just listing another few of the many things some people have pointed out about the scenario being implausible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;is downvoting a question for something other than the question it asks acceptable, and what course of action am I to take with irrelevant answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: to gain more information on my views of these things, look in the comment section of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49209" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T22:32:35.310" Title="What to do if your question gets downvotes for something irrelevant and answers that don't answer the question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6264" CreationDate="2018-06-17T07:59:11.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at the specific question, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is downvoting a question for something other than the question it asks acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately in a sense, but yes. Consider the question downvote button tooltip, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Unclear&quot; is one of the standard reasons for why one might downvote a question, and clarity is unrelated to the specific question being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, unless the person who downvotes the question states why they downvoted the question, all anyone else can do is guess, although one can typically infer that an unexplained downvote is for something close to one of the standard downvote reasons given in the tooltip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what course of action am I to take with irrelevant answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag them. Specifically, you'll likely want to flag them with the system-provided &quot;not an answer&quot; flag reason. If it's not obvious how the answer &lt;em&gt;doesn't attempt to answer the question&lt;/em&gt;, then you might want to leave a comment and explain that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that frame challenges can be acceptable, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; in response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; questions. If you're asking such a question, and &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want such answers, then it's probably a good idea to somehow say so explicitly in the question. That's the nature of reality checks; you can't really ask if something is realistic and at the same time rule out answers saying &quot;no, it's not realistic because X, Y, Z&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T07:59:11.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T11:29:36.987" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was put on hold as too broad, understandably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've edited it and am fully confident that it is no longer broad, and have nominated it for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens now? Do all on hold questions go into a queue for reviewing, or just ones nominated to be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need multiple reopen votes? I'm just trying to figure out what happens from the perspective of the person who will - if I've done my job right - be reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49209" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T11:40:50.107" Title="What happens when an on-hold question is edited and nominated for reopening by the OP?" Tags="|discussion|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2018-06-17T11:33:58.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first edit on a question that is &quot;On Hold&quot; automatically sends the question to the &quot;Reopen Review Queue&quot; where members with more than 3k reputation can vote to leave it closed or reopen it. When 2 members choose &quot;Leave closed&quot; it disappears from the queue, though the reopen votes stay. People can still vote to reopen from the question page itself. When 5 members vote &quot;Reopen&quot; it will get reopened. Reopen votes decay after 14 days. The same rules apply to close votes. A question where the OP votes to reopen will be sent to the queue, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently your question has 1 reopen vote and therefore needs 4 more. As it's currently the weekend you should expect less activity, which means that it will take some time until enough members with the appropriate reputation, the time and the inclincation to review the reopen queue have looked at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T11:40:50.107" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T11:40:50.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6264" CreationDate="2018-06-17T22:32:35.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the general answer, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6265/28&quot;&gt;Michael's answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this specific question: I've made a small edit and reopened the question, which already had two reopen votes.  I've also purged a lot of irrelevant comments, many of which were flagged.  The earlier versions of your question were broad and opinion-based and I'm not surprised by the resulting close votes, but based on your edits and this meta discussion, I don't see the need to wait for two more votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T22:32:35.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6247" CreationDate="2018-06-18T04:15:56.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you asked was: &quot;What should be our commenting etiquette when pointing out that other Stacks exist?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question is trivially obvious. Particularly in the light of the fact of this site has a Be Nice policy. If a WBer believes, rightly or wrongly, that a given question has better fit for another Stack Exchange, then that WBer should &lt;em&gt;politely&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;respectfully&lt;/em&gt; bring this consideration to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This WBer should take note of any discussion in comments about this issue in relation to the question. If there seems to be a consensus, where a majority of opinions agreeing with this position, then this WBer or another should flag a moderator to migrate the question to the appropriate Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WBers generally in their comments should avoid snark, sarcasm, derision, glib attempts at feeble witticisms, and other smart-alecky foolishness. The objective should be to assist the OP improve their question or find the most appropriate place where their question can be best answered. To that end, the most appropriate etiquette is show good behaviour by being polite and respectful, and generally abiding by the Stack Exchange's Be Nice policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T04:15:56.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6247" CreationDate="2018-06-18T15:39:13.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is deserving of a second, more comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To deal with the elephant in the room first, no matter how much you assert that this has nothing to do with the &quot;real-world questions are on-topic&quot; rule, it's involved.  It always will be involved.  We have trouble getting people to consistently apply VTC using the rules we have and you want to muddy the water.  No matter how pure and alturistic your intentions, the regular and consistent use of redirect comments will always be intepreted (by someone) as &quot;we don't want that question here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of people who will post such comments will not be experts on the target sites, which means they don't actually know if the question would be well received or not.  At best (at best) this has a 50/50 chance of being an overall negative experience for the OP.  I believe the odds of a poor experience are much higher.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who is an expert at worldbuilding?  It's not exactly a focus of any university or college.  It is a collaboration of experts in many other fields.  A policy of posting go-somewhere-else comments, no matter how well intentioned, suggests that we're not useful enough to meet the OP's needs.  (I have never found that to be true, begging the question, why bother with the comments?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite the (quite frankly and justifiably so) perfect example you use for a question deserving of a redirect comment, the vast majority of questions asked on this site are not as easily identified as deserving a comment (EVERY on-topic real-world question would end up getting a redirect comment, nothing you could ever do would stop that) and would not be well received on other sites without rewording the question to meet the cultural expectations of those sites.  Many of the questions, even if reworded, would not be well received.  I've tried asking worldbuilding-style questions on astronomy.SE and physics.SE with very poor results.  Just because a question &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be asked elsewhere with (theoretically) better results does not mean is &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be answered with better results.  Honestly, we're amazingly nice and accomodating people.  We'll field questions from absolute beginners who understand so little about what they're asking that it makes angels weep &amp;mdash; because we want to help them write their story, &lt;em&gt;not only to help them become educated in the subject matter.&lt;/em&gt;  The other sites &lt;em&gt;do not have&lt;/em&gt; that accomodating focus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While your example is very polite, the reality is that most people will post comments of the form, &quot;this question would be better asked at X.&quot;  To use hyperbole egregiously, you might as well put up a &quot;no trespassing&quot; sign.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not the purpose or obligation of any Stack Exchange site to advertise for another Stack Exchange site.  Comments advising redirection should be used as a last resort to answer an otherwise unanswerable question due to their inherent &quot;we're not useful&quot; or &quot;we don't want you here&quot; nature.  No such comment should appear on a question deemed otherwise on-topic for this site for at least a week just to be sure a perfectly good answer can't be found here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Policies and traditions very quickly become abused.  The moment we instigate an actual &lt;em&gt;policy&lt;/em&gt; regarding the use of redirect comments it will forever be used to justify every improper downvote or VTC.  &lt;em&gt;It is impossible, once enacted, for a policy such as this to not be viewed as justification for off-topic on this site.&lt;/em&gt;  People who disbelieve that last statement are obligated to prove to me how my view of human nature is in error.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What specific value does this policy bring to WB:SE?  I see none.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the site's focus is too broad, we should narrow it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the site's rules are too vague, we should clarify them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If our expertise is insufficient for our purpose, we should gain more expertise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If our purpose overlaps so greatly with other sites that it actually makes sense to regularly redirect people to those sites, then we should close this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a fan of #2.  I don't believe #1, #3, or #4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, my recommendation is that we DO NOT have a formal policy concerning the use of redirect comments on WB:SE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated earlier, they should only be used as a last resort and only after time has passed to find an answer that could not be obtained through this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T15:39:13.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T08:10:17.240" Score="-6" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please,This is not right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/115638/how-do-i-make-skeletons-formidable-hand-to-hand-fighters&quot;&gt;How do i make skeletons formidable hand to hand fighters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T08:18:54.987" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T18:53:03.593" Title="Is there something wrong happening to my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2018-06-19T10:04:05.317" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Couple things I wanted to state explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do my best not to look at the author name when I interact with post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I interact mostly with posts on first pages of &quot;new questions&quot; and &quot;active questions&quot; lists, and review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm active during certain parts of the day. If you happen to be usually active during similar period, you have higher chance to get a vote or comment from me. If someone posts mainly when I'm not active, it's quite possible I won't see (and thus vote, flag etc) his posts even if they deserve it. See point 2. If this gives someone wrong impression, I'm sorry, but I can't do anything about it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do downvote if question is poorly written. Yes, saying &quot;obvious&quot; when something is not, and refusing to elaborate, counts as &quot;poorly written&quot; and &quot;not useful&quot; to me, especially if supposedly obvious condition is crucial to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes lack language skills, so if I seem snippy or ironic, it usually is language barrier, nothing more. I do my best to avoid that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;None of my real life friends are on Worldbuilding - or if they are, they never told me. Just saying.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T10:25:53.903" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T10:25:53.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2018-06-19T18:53:03.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the basic issue with your question to be simply this: without information, and a lot of it, about &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to what degree&lt;/em&gt; magic is involved in the process of getting a dead body moving again one cannot begin to understand the degree to which a resurrected &quot;thrall&quot; is impaired compared to a living human. If we don't have a starting point, beyond &quot;weaker than a living person&quot;, we can't start to answer the rest of the question. For example the &quot;standard&quot; DnD skeleton is held together and animated by magic powered by the soul of the creature it used to be, it's strength is based in large part on the power of personality of that being rather than it's former physicality. On the other hand in the &lt;em&gt;Dresden Files&lt;/em&gt; it is the age of the remains that dictate their power, the freshly dead are weak as kittens but even the smallest dinosaur skeleton is terrifyingly powerful. Without understanding the limits and details of your approach to these issues we don't stand a chance of effectively answering you question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the apparent asymmetry you feel you see in question quality, you need to understand that questions with certain tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt; are the ones that come immediately to mind have to be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than questions that simply ask for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; or about extrapolations from existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;, better is maybe the wrong word; they have to be more exact and more detailed in order to be answered well, or in some cases answered at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T18:53:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6277" CreationDate="2018-06-20T12:44:54.973" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had comments deleted before due to the &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; policy. Won't argue against that - if it's the rules, it's the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a few hours ago I posted a comment which I believe did not violate &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; and it got deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was in this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115733/21222&quot;&gt;Mobile Hydroponics Vehicle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the question and I am trying to be helpful. I did an edit to fix formatting and left my vote. I also did a comment which has been deleted. As I recall, these were the exact words, which start by quoting a piece of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Farmland needed to sustain one person ≈ 5 hectares&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - where did you get this quote from? Just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I came to the question later, the comment was not there. I didn't see any &lt;em&gt;&quot;comments are not for extended discussion&quot;&lt;/em&gt; notice. I also did not see any room for this question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been told time and again that I may come across as offensive. I am curious whether this was the impression with the comment above (I would not be surprised). I just need to know so that I can adjust my manners to what is expected. If it wasn't a case of someone feeling offended, I would like to know what other mistake I may have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s.: in any case, I made another comment along the same lines, trying to be more polite now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T18:08:59.477" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T12:24:18.727" Title="What are the criteria for comment deletion?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6276" CreationDate="2018-06-20T13:04:42.873" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are second-class citizens, so they may be deleted  without any explanation  and any reason  and no-one will care. They usually are  not, but they may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That  said, reasons to delete comments are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No longer needed - in your example,  source have   been  added  to a question as a link, so that's &lt;s&gt;probably&lt;/s&gt; what happened. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6276/what-are-the-criteria-for-comment-deletion#comment19051_6277&quot;&gt;Confirmed by  Monica Cellio♦&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rude  or offensive -  this one is obvious&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A whim of  comment author&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Extended  discussion - moderators can move to chat, but only once, and  they are not forced to do so, they may  simply delete if they feel it is a right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SPAM &amp;amp; vandalism&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Totally off-topic&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;et cetera&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T08:05:40.577" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T08:05:40.577" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T09:53:27.817" Score="3" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115690/809&quot;&gt;Could a person scuba diving take off his air tank and use it to propel himself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't this one closed as a story set in a  world? In what  way is it worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see related &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4931/809&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt; - answer was generally no (-7 score).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/32097/lamezeldapun&quot;&gt;LameZeldaPun&lt;/a&gt; was generally closed for being plot elements checks, whilst this question stays open. Currently it looks like popularity of question (or user) dictates on/off topic in such cases, and that's not fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/809&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt; - being real world question should not automatically make it stays open. One close reason being not applicable should not prevent closing with another reason. These two are independent issues, even if they often appear together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T11:30:46.823" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T02:02:20.280" Title="Why does this popular off-topic question stay open?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6281" CreationDate="2018-06-21T10:32:51.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question isn't asking &quot;What should/would/could my character do?&quot;, it's stating &quot;My character does this - would this work in reality?&quot;. That's the reason it's not closed as story-based, it's asking for a reality-check. As the OP themselves states explicitly in the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;would it be physically possible to do that with the air tank?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; to a question asking about whether something is realistic in a given worldbuilding context or not is a normal thing on WorldBuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T10:32:51.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-06-21T11:25:11.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that being real world does not make question automatically off-topic. At the same time, it does not make automatically it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4931/809&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt; was -7 score and I believe that's the way it should stay - NO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding &quot;because I want this  to happen in my world&quot;, or &quot;This C# problem is common in my little setting of an IT corporation&quot; should not allow to count such questions as on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T11:35:19.643" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T11:35:19.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T13:58:46.027" Score="8" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115780/627&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; by someone implying the real earth is flat and how a round world would keep all the water on it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It has been heavily edited since. The original question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Water on world that is round?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since, gravity is a construct out of the question (backed by Pseudo-Science), in a fictional world that is round, how would you go about making the water not fall off, Or even people for that matter. Is there some kind of futuristic force field that can be implemented to keep the water (and people) in place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this was a troll and not someone seriously convinced the earth is flat. I assume that because of his appearant assumption that everyone agrees the earth is flat and it is obvious (like this has never been seen differently) and also the answer he chose to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no point to this question and even with the mod edits it is not really worth anything as neiter the answers nor the questions help anybody with anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should something like that be dealt with?&#xA;Just flag it for mod intervention? I feel like none of the basic flags fit this type of misconduct.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Rude or abusive&amp;quot; has the description &amp;quot;A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse.&amp;quot; - which would fit, but the question is neither rude nor abusive as phrased by the Be Nice policy of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this question has just been posted as a troll and to spark debate about a stupid topic. How do we best deal with this type of behaviour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T12:32:06.627" Title="How to deal with questions that are clearly not meant seriously?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2018-06-21T14:23:59.647" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is just me, but . . . I kinda hate it when people justify an action by saying &quot;Ah, the user's just trolling&quot;, or &quot;Obvious troll is obvious&quot;, or any of a number of remarks I see again and again and again. The reason for my distaste? Describing something as &quot;trolling&quot; &lt;em&gt;doesn't actually say anything about what's wrong with it&lt;/em&gt;. If something is Too Broad, close it as Too Broad. If it's off-topic, close it as off-topic. If it's unclear, close it as Unclear What You're Asking. All of those close reasons describe what is wrong with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But essentially saying &quot;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's trolling&quot; is pretty unconstructive. It doesn't say anything about the content; it guesses at the user's motivation. And guessing can be wrong. I've seen plenty of crappy questions that people described as trolling when, in all honesty, the person asking them just had no idea how to ask a good question. Making that sort of assumption can be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acid%20test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;acid test&lt;/a&gt; for questions that might be described as &quot;trolling&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question off-topic, overly broad, too opinion-based, or otherwise a good fit for one of our standard close reasons? (If yes, close accordingly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question clearly trying to promote a specific view or position, and has no other redeeming value? (If yes, use a custom close reason to say as much)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question serve a useful purpose at all beyond what the OP is trying to achieve with it? (If yes, &lt;em&gt;leave open&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, questions belong to the community, not to whoever asked them. They'll be useful to plenty of people in the future (yes, to a lesser extent on our site, but still, we do get plenty of duplicates). That means that, on the whole, I think &lt;em&gt;they should be judged independently of the person who asked them.&lt;/em&gt; If they're valuable, we keep them open and get them answers. If not . . . we close, and maybe delete at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I thought the question passed the acid test, and could be tweaked and edited to fit the bill. I removed the flat Earth references; those are extraneous. I also made some edits to boil the question down a bit, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/115780/2&quot;&gt;to get it to this revision&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a fictional world that is round, and has no gravity, how would you go about making the water not fall off the planet (Or even people, for that matter?. Is there some kind of futuristic force field that can be implemented to keep the water (and people) in place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question currently looks basically like that. If I asked that question today, would you vote to close it as off-topic? I mean, maybe. But I think it's a lot better than the original version. Moreover, if it has faults, I'd say that they mean it's downvotable, rather than close-vote-able. But perhaps you disagree, and it can be improved move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, a question belongs to the community, and can be edited and tweaked by the community if need be. This was a case where, I thought the post could be salvaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T14:23:59.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:21:08.067" Score="7" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has recently been a question asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/115885/how-plausible-is-it-for-a-12-year-old-girl-to-walk-through-a-village-in-her-swim#comment355361_115885&quot;&gt;How plausible is it for a 12-year-old girl to walk through a village in her swimsuit in England?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asked well and has good answers...But is it worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons it might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is research for a novel so fits the intended purpose of worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is information that someone is looking for in order to build a world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's something that could well be hard to google and yet someone here is likely to be able to give a good answer to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons it might not be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's just asking for information about a part of the real world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feels very much like it is covered by this policy (in which case it would be on topic) but it is getting close votes so is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T04:20:03.390" Title="Is the &quot;suitable dress&quot; question off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6286" CreationDate="2018-06-22T04:20:03.390" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to put a case here as to why it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on-topic, although I'm the first to admit that the argument is somewhat subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often talk about physics, engineering, biology, applied maths, organic chemistry, etc. on this site, and the general rule seems to be that you take a concept, and ask a (more or less) hypothetical question that asks the user base to extrapolate their knowledge to a specific scenario, explaining how it might (or might not) actually work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, this question is doing exactly the same thing, only with an interpersonal / cultural field of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's asking about the real world, but it's not asking for a 'fact' from the real world that you could look up on wikipedia. There has been some demonstration of research against the question insofar as there is recognition of the &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; rules of etiquette and dress in western culture, but this is asking those with deeper knowledge of those rules to extrapolate into a specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This often happens in cases where the answers we give are &lt;em&gt;This is already happening&lt;/em&gt; style answers; one could argue that deeper research may have yielded this answer but we accept it because the answer may not be part of what we would call general knowledge. I may well know about the practical application of certain engineering principles that most people have no idea about, but I have no idea what would be considered the boundary of 'appropriate dress' for a 12 YO in England, and under what circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, the answers that were given were provided by people with superior knowledge in that 'field' and were useful extrapolations of general principles into a specific case that was articulated well by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, my argument is that the question was well worded (and reasonably well received) because it follows the &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; of questions that are well regarded, albeit against a &lt;em&gt;field or discipline&lt;/em&gt; that we don't normally deal with on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will reiterate that this is just one interpretation of the rules and I think that it's entirely reasonable that other interpretations will be more narrow than this one. I would also point out that this question is on the very edge of what I would consider acceptable for the site and I'd not want to see us field a barrage of questions on hem sizes, turban colours, etc. as a result of letting it in. But, if you disregard the topic and focus on the mechanics, it does seem to fit in my personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T04:20:03.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2018-06-22T07:37:35.057" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a line in Small Gods (Pratchett) challenging the logic of a round world because everyone knows all the water would drip off the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem with questions that aren't asked seriously, I'm pretty sure none of our Santa questions were asked with serious intent for example. The solution to questions like this is to consider them in their own right, to embrace them wholeheartedly with the wording they carry and not to suggest any intent on the part of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put a round world in a universe that only supports flat ones, what happens? Does all the water drip off the bottom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T07:37:35.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2018-06-22T14:10:58.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an aside, but I'd like to address this question of yours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should something like that be dealt with? Just flag it for mod intervention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before flagging for moderator attention, consider what you want a moderator to do about the content in question, then ask yourself if you, or at least the community at large, can do that without involving a diamond moderator.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think the question should be closed? Then flag for closure (or vote to close once you get past 3,000 rep).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think the post is in violation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice policy&lt;/a&gt;? You might consider editing it, but if that isn't an option for whatever reason, just flag as rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an addenum to the above, even if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; edit out the not-nice part, you might want to consider leaving a custom flag along the lines of &quot;revision NN contained rude language, which has been edited out&quot;. That way, there is an easily accessible record to help moderators see if it's part of a pattern, yet it's clear from the text of the flag that no &lt;em&gt;immediate&lt;/em&gt; action is required on the part of the moderator handling the flag (except perhaps a quick check to make sure the not-nice material hasn't been edited back in).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think the post is a rambling mess of a word salad? Then just downvote because the post is &quot;unclear&quot;, and possibly flag/vote to close as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very few things that actually require a diamond moderator, and thus are appropriate for &lt;em&gt;custom&lt;/em&gt; flags specifically requesting moderator action; &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; things can be handled by the community, in which case you should use a standard flag. The major exception to this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6207/29&quot;&gt;comments, where custom flags can provide significant value&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By all means, if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; come across things that can't be handled by the community, a diamond moderator flag may be warranted. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spam in a user's profile? Flag one of that user's posts for moderator attention and describe the issue; the community can't fix that, but a moderator can. If the user hasn't yet posted, you can ping one of the moderators in the chat room; there's usually at least one around. If you don't want to draw public attention to the user's profile, we can set up a private chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Repeated low-quality posts from different users that look like (or admit) that they are for the same human being? Please! Users evading site restrictions (such as the low-quality ban) is something we absolutely want to know about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Content that appears to indicate that a user may actually be intent on hurting themselves, or even suicidal? Do flag! (But especially given some of the weirder questions we get, first read the post carefully to ensure it's not a misunderstanding of what someone wrote from an in-character/in-universe point of view.) A moderator isn't expected to handle that directly, but we do have the ability to escalate the matter further.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lists are not exhaustive by any means. You might want to familiarize yourself with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;what ordinary community members can do&lt;/a&gt;, and before flagging, think about your desired outcome. If the two overlap, then use something other than a custom, diamond moderator-only flag. If you use a custom flag for things that don't require &lt;em&gt;diamond&lt;/em&gt; moderator intervention, the flag may be declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-06-28T12:32:06.627" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T12:32:06.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2018-06-22T20:06:31.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Counterintuitively, the best approach might be... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretend it’s a serious question and give a serious answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site especially, where fantasy and pseudo-reality coexist with logic and science, there are many “troll” questions that can be generously interpreted as real questions if you choose to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the OP’s question could be describing a universe in which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the theory of gravity is actually pseudoscience, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;people firmly but incorrectly believe that the theory of gravity is pseudoscience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a creative way to interpret the question? Sure. But it leads to a believable and plausible scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15914" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T20:06:31.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2018-06-25T00:34:12.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I found most rude and abusive about this particular question and the teapot tempest that followed was that some busybody saw fit to edit the OP's question so that it no longer made any kind of contextual sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who have the authority to edit must not abuse that authority just because they dislike or don't get along with the questioner, dislike the question (for whatever reason) or simply don't understand the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question made perfect sense and was spot-on topicalitywise. What you think of the querent himself is neither here nor there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is asked of the community, what follows is quite simple. This is how you deal with this kind of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, answer the question. The respondent takes the lead of the querent and responds in kind. We've had mild role-play questions in the past, we've had straight up info seeking questions, we've had plain old maths questions. Some consideration and perhaps a little creativity would have devised a wonderful answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, don't be rude about it. Calling people names (like &quot;Troll&quot;) without any good reason I'm sure breaks at least one house rule.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third, don't abuse authority. Unless it's a matter of spelling mistakes, poor grammar, a factual flub or poor organisation skills, we should not be in the business of screwing around with someone's question just because we don't like what the querent asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, don't put words in other people's mouths (or in their virtual pens). You do not not know if this querent meant the question to be from a literal Flat Earth perspective or not! You do not know if this querent meant the question to be taken as &quot;serious&quot; or &quot;facetious&quot;. Unless you are in his head, and I would suggest you are not. Therefore, the community takes each question at face value: rather than assuming what the OP means, we can ask for clarification. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fifth, don't presume to know what some future wander in the long future archives of Worldbuilding StackExchange will come across and find to be of value. I personally found the question to be perspectively interesting and of as much value than many questions I've read. And of more value than many more. It is sad that the question was vandalised by the Mods. They detracted from the question's value considerably.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T00:34:12.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-25T20:11:21.817" Score="14" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is newly scheduled for &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;an election starting next week, July 2nd&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that election, as we've done in previous elections, we will be hosting a Q&amp;amp;A here for candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6335/2018-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, July 2nd at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the collection phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing (up to) 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T20:01:35.250" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T20:01:35.250" Title="2018 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-25T20:11:21.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T20:11:21.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-25T23:02:45.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start things off with a really basic question, but one that I think is important to a lot of users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T23:02:45.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-25T23:27:09.153" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an oldie but a goodie: As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T23:27:09.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-25T23:38:57.977" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T23:47:51.727" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T23:47:51.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-26T03:17:24.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your opinion, what is the most important part of moderation and why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34064" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T03:17:24.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-26T07:56:07.747" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that many times, there are negative votes given to new posts (both questions and answers) that look perfectly fine to me. There is also never an explanation given for why the downvote is given. I know that many people do not do that, but with the shear number of downvotes on new posts, the person acting like the jury should at least say what the criteria are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, after sometime, most of these question get both answers, comments and upvotes meaning that I am not alone in thinking that the posts deserve recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116347/do-moons-determine-the-speeds-at-which-tides-move-is-there-a-limit-to-this-spee&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; at the time of posting received two negative posts, no comments describing why the question was wrong and two perfect logical answers that also had a live conversation (people were happy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether we could catch this troll and regulate this phenomenon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49080" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-06-26T13:41:31.093" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T13:52:24.620" Title="Do we have a troll in our midst?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6301" CreationDate="2018-06-26T08:44:38.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116347/do-moons-determine-the-speeds-at-which-tides-move-is-there-a-limit-to-this-spee&quot;&gt;the single example you've given&lt;/a&gt; and cross-referencing with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;the help-center post on 'down-voting'&lt;/a&gt;, this behaviour certainly seems somewhat &lt;em&gt;over the top&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to find a reason for the down-votes and no comments situation, I see that the following part of the help-center post could be applied here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;When should I vote down?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no-effort-expended post&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referred question is talking about &lt;code&gt;one continent that is regularly flooded under 500 to 1500 feet of water&lt;/code&gt;. That is a scott-darn huge amount of water. Even the lower parameter, the 500ft, is taller than most buildings on earth or anywhere where we could get data to do calculations or extrapolations from - thus this could be rated as &lt;em&gt;no effort&lt;/em&gt;, or even &lt;em&gt;sloppy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor would be the frequency of that happening, namely &lt;code&gt;The tides are only extreme once or twice a month&lt;/code&gt;. Once or twice a month is definitely not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;, at least not for such an extreme event. For such a thing happening, this is quite very often and regular - and someone claiming of wanting to incorporate that into a &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; should probably be able to do enough preliminary research to understand this (especially when a person such as me can understand this without even wanting to attempt writing full books..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, I do not think we have a troll here. At least not from the evidence given - merely people that do not feel the need to point out the issues they see, because &lt;em&gt;to them they likely are obvious&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T08:44:38.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-26T13:50:35.670" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T13:50:35.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6301" CreationDate="2018-06-26T13:52:24.620" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sort of phenomenon has been referred to as &lt;em&gt;drive-by downvoting&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/215379/274942&quot;&gt;people have been annoyed by it for years and years&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It happens across the network, and over time, people have tried to put up barriers to it. It just happens. If you write enough questions and answers, eventually you'll experience it. And it's not coming from a single person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it happen? &lt;em&gt;shrug&lt;/em&gt;. People have different standards for questions and answers; maybe someone thought Question A was poorly written, and maybe someone else thought Question B needed a lot of improvement. Maybe you disagree with them both. That's fine; there's always a degree of subjectivity to voting. We kinda have to learn to accept it. If this was all one person, I'd still be inclined to let them do it. It's not trolling; it's their prerogative to vote how they see fit. It can be annoying, but eh, there's not much we can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do mean that literally: there isn't anything we can do. Votes are designed to be private; even moderators can't see who voted on a certain post. Even if this &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; all one person, we wouldn't be able to figure it out. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/218120/274942&quot;&gt;Moderators can see large-scale voting trends between users&lt;/a&gt;, but beyond that, we can't really see more than the average person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for the foreseeable future . . . just write good questions and answers, edit those that need editing, and upvote the ones that deserve upvotes (and the same goes for downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This usually refers to cases where someone didn't explain their reasons for downvoting, for the record. It &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; mean that the votes weren't justified, or that the downvoter didn't think about things carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T13:52:24.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-26T16:06:18.670" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T16:06:18.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-26T17:18:33.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T17:18:33.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3300" CreationDate="2018-06-26T18:20:24.490" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Why is my question &quot;Too Story Based&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference between Story based and World based is Will vs Can respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will Joe Marine climb this mountain? &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;character and mountain specs&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is he lazy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is he there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What motives does he have for vs against?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How's his life insurance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can easily negate any answer by adding story details that can completely alter the dynamics of the situation, It's probably too story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can Joe Marine climb this mountain? &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;character and mountain specs&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;insert reference of ex-marine climbing a mountain without tools&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is very hard to invalidate. Given a fitness level, and climbing difficulty, we can project how probable it is for Joe to achieve this task. You can add him getting shot at by snipers and mortars, but the answer is still he can. (That would make it much harder, but it is still possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb test is try your best to answer your own question based on what you know. Now read the question again, but replace your world with another, completely different one, at the same tech level with the same restrictions (ex, Change Star Trek setting to Star Wars setting). Is your answer significantly weaker/stronger/invalidated now? If the answer is yes, it's too story bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How do I get it reopened&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the above examples, A Story vs World based question can be very subtle. One word was the difference between a fact-check question, and a highly controversial opinionated question. (That was intentional to draw attention to how blurry the line can be) So here are some guidelines to refining your story question into a world question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove story details as much as possible. Focus on the restrictions the world places on the situation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also think of this as a &quot;world transference rating&quot;. If you want to create a new world where this question could be applied, how hard would it be to apply the same answer to the new world/setting? Ideally, the same logic should apply to all worlds. So unless the new world has a mechanic that would complicate the answer, the same question/answer should work. (The affect of the new mechanic would be a new question, as you've changed the applicable world restrictions. Ex. continuous storm vs storm island. If the storm can't move, that changes the restrictions on how plausible the storm is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also read this as &quot;remove as much information as you can without changing the actual question&quot; Details beyond that are usually story fluff, and distract from the main question. This is why a lot of questions include &quot;in this genre/world type&quot; It establishes your worldly limitations without binding it to a specific story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Facts are always better than opinions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look to obtain verifiable, measurable information. While the usefulness of a C-4 boomerang is arguable, you can verify that it is (A) possible to make and (B) can do things normal grenades can't. In general, the more immutable the statements of an answer can be, the better the answer. So the question should ask for those kinds of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common for questions to follow the form &quot;Given these restrictions, what kind of outcome could I expect it to have?&quot; or &quot;What restrictions/events could cause this end state?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27847" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T18:20:24.490" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-06-26T18:20:24.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-27T13:22:36.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my last suggestion, I'm putting forth this one from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4338/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;2017 list&lt;/a&gt;. It's a good question involving thoughts about what could be improved on this site, and how the moderator would go around improving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T13:22:36.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6313" CreationDate="2018-06-27T14:22:19.033" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, would it be okay for me to ask about real-world religion on this site? I'm not asking about how it was made, but rather its functions in the real world. I can see that this might depend a little on the question itself, so I'll show my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my story, there is murdering thief, who is quite religious. So, I want to know if there is a religion out there that focuses a lot more on question about the creation of the world and who created it, rather than moral questions and such. I need to know about a religion like this, so I can still have my character be a person of faith but still murder and thieve. Also, this religion must be a little old, and belonging to a culture. AKA, no meatball or Star Wars &quot;force&quot; religions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would a question like this be acceptable? I read through the HELP section, and it said that question regarding real-world history is not allowed, but it didn't elaborate more on questions about the real world. If it did, I terribly misunderstood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50597" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:37:50.383" Title="Are questions about real-world religions allowed on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-06-27T17:17:43.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6312" CreationDate="2018-06-27T14:37:50.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take the focus away from the character and move it to the world and the culture or it'll get closed as being story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are religions that will answer your question with historical context and examples, but you'll have to word it carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:37:50.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-28T13:02:06.523" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116680/why-would-the-bodies-of-an-immortal-sorceress-decay-at-an-accelerated-rate&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which I feel is a poor fit for the site and not about Worldbuilding and I down-voted it and VTC'd accordingly. It has since been put on hold but not before it attracted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/116684/40408&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that I think is really nice. So now I'm torn, I don't think the question deserves any answer at all but I think the answer it got is very good all the same. Is it appropriate to upvote the answer in this situation when it potentially encourages answering questions that aren't a good fit for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/465/what-to-do-when-a-question-should-be-closed-but-an-answer-is-good&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but I don't feel it really address how to vote &lt;em&gt;on the answer&lt;/em&gt; in these situations as a general member which is what I'm struggling with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T06:50:59.350" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T11:51:49.123" Title="Good answers to bad questions, a voting issue" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6315" CreationDate="2018-06-28T13:15:49.987" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is off-topic or otherwise unsuitable then it should be closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we get bad on-topic questions to which good answers can be given, but we shouldn't* encourage off-topic questions by leaving them open just because an answer is good, or by attempting to give a good answer to a question that should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer really is that good, give it a vote if you like. We tend to be generous like that round here, but I usually lay off if it's a user who should know better than to answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;*I'm as guilty as anyone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-06-28T13:40:08.800" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T13:40:08.800" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2018-06-28T15:18:13.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I'd very much appreciate would be an article on fictional classification systems. The real-world classification system, known as taxonomy or systematics (Either taxa (levels) or cladistic evolutionary grouped clades) is useful for grouping real-world organisms. But what about those fictional/mythical creatures? That magic plant? The high-tech engineered disease? Where does classification come in then? Should you build a new classification system to deal with these magical creatures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T15:18:13.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6281" CreationDate="2018-06-29T02:02:20.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see related &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4931/809&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt; - answer was generally no (-7 score).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that you are misrepresenting the vote on that question.  The title says, &quot;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&quot;  However, the body says the reverse:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: Create a new site for these.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: Create a reference list with links to the other, more appropriate sites (Physics, Biology, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presumption of that and the stricken out option being that the questions are currently off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, if you look at the answers, they argue that the problem is not too story-based.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. I don't see the vote as being on too story-based but on the particular phrasing suggested:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question involve too many alternative possibilities, that are equivalently likely, and arose from unknown factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular alternative definition was struck down.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem to my mind is that you are misunderstanding what &quot;too story-based&quot; means.  Its meaning is that people are asking &quot;What should I do?&quot;  You seem to be applying it to any question that mentions the story.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/2113&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding. &lt;strong&gt;Capabilities of characters within a world&lt;/strong&gt; and creation of groups of characters (like nations) &lt;strong&gt;are on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, but questions must focus on what is possible or likely to develop, not what someone would or should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis removed and added.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly a capability of a character within a world and thus explicitly on-topic and not too story-based.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T02:02:20.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-30T07:34:30.960" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question may ask for a way of achieving or explaining something (e.g. A particular set of conditions on a planet, a physical structure, a course of action).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solutions to the question are based on what would work in reality (or reality with some adjusted parameters). They are objectively valid or invalid, in that they either could our couldn't achieve the desired effect. They ideally should draw on the relevant field of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the effect can be achieved in multiple ways, and the question gives no criteria to rank valid answers. Is it therefore primarily opinion based? (or does that depend on how many possible valid answers there are?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by this question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116649/reasons-why-a-mind-reader-would-not-disclose-their-abilities/116691#116691&quot;&gt;Reasons why a Mind Reader would not disclose their abilities&lt;/a&gt; , which I feel fits the criteria I have described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42528" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T07:34:30.960" Title="If a question can be answered objectively, but has multiple equally valid solutions, is it primarily opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-30T08:04:29.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-06-30T08:38:26.543" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;worst&lt;/em&gt; part about being a moderator in your opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:38:26.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6324" CreationDate="2018-06-30T20:04:29.070" Score="-4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed that posts tend to have one or two &amp;quot;unbuilding&amp;quot; comments. I think these are not only unnecessary but also semi-rude: a premise has been set and should be believed in for as long as suspension of disbelief can hold. While these comments are certainly useful &lt;strong&gt;in the context of reality-check questions&lt;/strong&gt;, they are also likely to be partial answers in comments in that situation. These &amp;quot;umbuilding&amp;quot; comments usually run either two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's not possible.&amp;quot; That can go two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Useless, since the question in question isn't really a reality-check.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Useful, since the question is a reality-check . . . but it's unclear because it doesn't specify &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;, so it's not needed. If it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; specify, it's an answer in comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you are handwaving this, then why don't you handwave that?/This is unrealistic and it doesn't matter what you do because you're already handwaving/and so on.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which borders on the edge of rude and isn't helpful at all. With this in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Should we have a unbuilding/failure of suspension of disbelief/snarky/unhelpful comment flagging option?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what should it look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some extra reading that might be helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4500&quot;&gt;There are too many world UNbuilding answers and comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6207&quot;&gt;PSA: Please use those flags!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4953&quot;&gt;Are answers posted in comments acceptable or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2407&quot;&gt;Tearing apart questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this Meta Meta featured announcement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/311737&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s hold language in comments to the same standard as posts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T08:24:09.147" Title="Should we have &quot;unbuilding&quot; flags for comments?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6323" CreationDate="2018-07-01T03:27:38.243" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see comments that are rude, please flag them as such.  If you see something that's non-constructive but not outright rude, feel free to use either &quot;no longer needed&quot; or a custom flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see an answer in comments, consider leaving a comment (particularly if the user is not a veteran of the site) suggesting an answer instead.  I usually try to give a newer user time to harvest that comment before nuking it, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; its presence isn't causing a long conversation in the comments.  We sometimes see custom &quot;answer in comments&quot; flags for these; that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag categories are set system-wide and sites can't override them, so even if we think we need this kind of flag (I'm not sure we do), there's no mechanism in place for us to get it.  Fortunately, there's always &quot;other&quot;, i.e. custom flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, please bear in mind that moderators can't reply to comment flags (unlike post flags where we can).  If you use one of the standard flags and it gets declined, it might be because we didn't understand what you're seeing.  If that happens, feel free to use a custom flag to let us know what's up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for helping to maintain our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T03:27:38.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-07-01T16:12:17.583" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you believe &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; means in relation to the creative process and fictional nature of worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T16:12:17.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6295" CreationDate="2018-07-01T16:15:19.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T16:15:19.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6315" CreationDate="2018-07-02T11:51:49.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, &lt;strong&gt;people disagree about which questions, exactly, are on topic and off topic respectively.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everyone agreed, this wouldn't happen. Nor would we need for five people to vote to close before putting a question on hold; a single vote would be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, some people see a question (in this case) as asking about the world, while others see it as asking about the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is inherently a subjective process, and our continuing discussions about what particularly &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; means in the context of Worldbuilding SE is probably as good an evidence as any of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a decent idea of the site's scope (and it'd be hard to get to well over 10k rep without that), then answering a question that you feel is on topic is fine. &lt;strong&gt;Voting on answers is fine, even if the question is poor or off topic,&lt;/strong&gt; but make sure you're voting on answers based on the answer's usefulness to the question, not whether you think the question is good or bad. (The two are distinct.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I personally &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't like to see is when people &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; end up participating in closing the question, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; answer that same question. If the question is good enough to be answerable, and on topic enough to fit within the site's scope, then it shouldn't be closed. While people can disagree about whether a question meets that bar or not, one would hope that any single person can reach a conclusion either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, if you see a question drawing close votes but you feel it is on topic, consider editing the question to emphasize the on topic parts. Sometimes this can be as easy as deleting some extraneous material and highlighting the specific question; sometimes it takes larger edits that need to be done by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I personally think that the question you linked to is more about an element of the world than it is about the story, but that's just my opinion. Sure, there's some story to the question, but I see that as mainly background material; the question itself seems to ask about an effect of the magic of the world on beings in the world. That said, it'd probably help the question a lot if the magic was described in a bit more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T11:51:49.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2018-07-02T13:07:24.540" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This, in my mind is effectively a bug, even though it's meant to be a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I understand that people may not want to trawl through many comments, removing an entire body of comments to chat effectively terminates what may be really salient and useful information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if there were some form of UI ability to conceal/disclose threads, and to indicate just how many comments there are, the argument in favour of moving to chat as provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2402/28789&quot;&gt;@bilbo_pingouin&lt;/a&gt; would be moot and irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the reasoning appears good. But evidence (go have a look) is that moving to chat is a discussion killer.  If we are hear to exchange ideas, it seems counter-intuitive to deter people's contributions to another's answer and effectively reduce their contribution to Upvote/Downvote/Not-bothered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On many other stackexchange sites, and particularly the original one as well as  maths, the answers are almost always accentuated and informed by the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also, that on this site, an initial downvoting of an answer I gave (see question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/115567/28789&quot;&gt;The Infinite Sea, how narrow can that be?&lt;/a&gt;) switched over to a strong upvoting in light of the comments - but the voting was effectively killed the very moment that the entire body of comments were moved over to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the chat is not visible on the page, in context, it may as well be called 'trash'&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;.  And while admins may see it as beneficial to encourage the discussion to take place elsewhere, they are effectively saying 'move along please - nothing to see here anymore'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I have yet to see (or experience) a chat that has lived on after it has been moved out. This itself is a clear steer of it being nothing short of a trashcan.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35198" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T13:29:13.183" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T13:29:13.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2018-07-02T17:38:14.180" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My experience with other stacks is that when you go making a comment, you have to put some thought into it. You can't use a single comment to say sentences like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Well, yeah&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Er&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Huh&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Herp derp&quot;&lt;/em&gt; etc, which are the thing of chat. You have to drive your point, so the signal-to-noise ratio is very high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving comments to chat is opening the flood gates of noise. This is my view of the communication that goes on in chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/regH7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/regH7.png&quot; alt=&quot;HI2U&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fresh from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45439533#45439533&quot;&gt;factory floor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the rules state that comments should be moved after a certain amount has been reached, by all means, as a rules-abiding user I have no problem with it. But I see it more as a means to stop communication than to encourage it. The amount of noise in chats is so high that I rarely bother accessing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T17:38:14.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T19:51:42.003" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know I’ve been out of the site for a while, but I’m the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/51013/dt-cooper&quot;&gt;DT Cooper&lt;/a&gt; and I was locked out of my account. I never saved said account, and now I’ve been locked out. Is there a way to fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52655" OwnerDisplayName="DT Cooper 2" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T21:01:40.550" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T21:01:40.550" Title="I forgot my account credentials and now I’m locked out - what can I do to recover my account?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6332" CreationDate="2018-07-02T19:55:53.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look at the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18232/how-can-one-link-merge-combine-associate-two-accounts-users-anonymous&quot;&gt;How can one link / merge / combine / associate two accounts / users? (Anonymous / unregistered / cookie, or OpenID / registered)&lt;/a&gt; on MSE and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/18233/352819&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you go to the contact button at the bottom of this page and then describe exactly what your problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On WorldBuilding you visit this site, which describes the exact process: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have two accounts that you would like to join together, please sign into either account, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact form&lt;/a&gt; and select ‘I need to merge user profiles’. After you contact us, the Stack Exchange Team will reach out to verify that you own both accounts. If we can confirm your ownership, we will initiate a merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't remember how to log in, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/account-recovery&quot;&gt;go here&lt;/a&gt; and enter the email address you used to create the account you are trying to sign into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T19:55:53.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T20:00:24.470" Score="7" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2018 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T20:00:24.470" Title="2018 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-07-02T20:00:24.470" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T20:01:03.370" Score="22" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6295/2018-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question was compiled - as noted, we only selected the top 8 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/bdd0af6a-50b3-4c5a-9b8d-858d4fd48c0a/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6335/2018-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/6336#6336&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: JBH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6337/21222&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: Renan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6343/28789&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: Secespitus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6347/6751&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: AndyD273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6351/30492&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6360/21906&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: Marshall Tigerus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6376/75&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: Monty Wild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6394/2746&quot;&gt;Nominee Questionnaire: dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Moderator note:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't vote on the answers! We don't want to skew the election; voting will change the order in which the answers are shown, unfairly benefiting some more than others. Votes on the questionnaire answers &lt;em&gt;don't count for the election&lt;/em&gt;; you'll have the chance to cast your actual ballot starting Monday, July 9th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T19:29:54.900" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T19:29:54.900" Title="2018 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-02T22:10:00.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-117027&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt; and I would appreciate an opportunity to serve as a moderator.  I've been participating on the site for just under a year with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/579/year/worldbuilding/2018-01-01/40609#40609&quot;&gt;consistent participation&lt;/a&gt;.  I enjoy the creative aspect of this site very much and enjoy even more the amazing answers that come from this community.  I believe I've regularly encouraged good participation and have shown a willingness to help new users improve.  With your help, I'd like to take a turn sweeping the halls after the party to ensure there's always a great place for imagination and science to meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation isn't about control, it's about teaching, and I love teaching.  It's a chance to help people become strong participants and find the greatest enjoyment themselves from the site, all while allowing others to have fun right along with them.  I agree that hot emotions occasionally happen and that unpopular decisions must occasionally be made &amp;mdash; but if the ultimate outcome isn't a willingness to continue supporting the site, then I failed as a teacher, a motivator, and a supporter.  I'm willing to step up and face that storm because I believe we have great people to support and lots of fabulous new people to motivate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; question.  Worldbuilding.SE is, perhaps, the most inherently subjective site on the SE map.  After all, how many of us can draw from experience with magic? aliens? and parallel universes?  What we do is intrinsically opinion-based and that's why I've spent a fair amount of time asking questions in Meta that help me and others to better understand how to as a good subjective question.  This has included a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;catalog of question types&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/enough-is-enough-nobody-can-obey-rules-that-are-only-in-someones-head&quot;&gt;a discussion about dealing with personal interpretations of the Help Center rules concerning real-world questions&lt;/a&gt; (which lead to a Moderator-sponsored question seeking community input on a clarification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, how would I handle questions like these?  First, by erring on the side of mercy.  I'd prefer to work first with the OP to craft a better question: through editing if we can, by deleting and re-asking if we must, and encouraging the use fo the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; as often as possible.  Second, with clarity.  I'm a fan of helping the OP understand why I think the question is or is not suitable.  I'm not a fan of downvoting or casting a close vote and expecting the OP to &quot;figure it out.&quot;  I'd prefer the site be more welcoming than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe real-world questions are a necessary component of Worldbuilding.SE and that they should be accepted.  I recognize that this opens WB.SE to the possibility that we become the &quot;dumping ground&quot; of Stack Exchange (the site that will answer questions no other site will), but I frankly think that's OK.  What I specifically do not want to see us become is elitist, as I have personally experienced at Stack Overflow.  We have plenty of people willing to answer questions here, and hard drive space is cheap.  Therefore, I believe the only bad questions are those that are improperly scoped, too vague, or are argumentative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be slower to judge.  I've been trending toward slower to judge since I passed 15K in rep and realized that new users were &quot;following my lead.&quot;  (This isn't a statement of arrogance, I began noticing that new users frequently followed the lead of all 15K+ voters.)  That's a fair amount of responsibility.  It suggests that, unless there's an obvious problem that must be immediately remedied&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; my actions should be slow and deliberate, giving the community its chance to grow and participate before biasing the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Asking the pretty much impossible to answeer one-line question, &quot;why can't I be wealthy?&quot; would be a good example of a question requiring immediate assistance.  Even if it's unlikely such a question would appear on Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With humor and patience.  After all, I've been there myself.  Part of why I hope you'll agree that I'm a good candidate for Moderator is that I've had to learn that lesson: how to swallow your pride and realize that maybe, &lt;em&gt;just maybe,&lt;/em&gt; you're not quite, exactly, right... maybe.  It's my belief and experience that honey works better than salt, and combined with patience, folks that are trying to continue the argument because they don't want to face the possibility that someone else could have a good point can be helped to become strong supporters and mentors themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two issues here.  First, there are people in the world who make Stack Exchange &amp;mdash; a Question &amp;amp; Answer service &amp;mdash; a social experience (this includes everyone from those who use vulgar language to those who enjoy off-color humor to those who are actually trolling).  I believe this is the tough case, because the offending participant believes they should be capable of carrying on inappropriate conversations in comments.  In this case, I'll be in the moderator chat room asking for advice about what has and hasn't worked in the past, because my experience does not yet extend to dealing with people who have tied their sense of social satisfaction to SE's indulgence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the otherhand, I suspect that most simply haven't yet worked out for themselves the fact that there is a code of conduct.  In this case we're back to patience and education, even pulling people into a chat room to have a quick discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, all in all, we can't force people (well, we can ban them, but that's a dramatic break-glass-in-case-of-emergency solution), and that means patiently and consistently sweeping the halls and emptying the trash.  Part of my willingness to be a moderator is my willingness to be one who deals with the flags, even if we can't stop the flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that this is the simplest quesiton brought to the nominees.  The Moderators have their own chat room, and I would lose nothing by asking the previous mod for their reasoning and inviting them to consider mine.  In the end, I need to be as understanding as I hope the other Moderator will be and the two (or more!) of us can quickly arrive at an appropriate action.  After all, as a Moderator, I can't afford to be one of the people that brought about question #6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish for the ability to modify all aspects of the Vote to Close process, including the list of reasons and their explanations, so that we can craft direction for our site that balances our naturally creative and subjective content with SE's desire for objectivity and clarity.  Regretably, I don't believe I'll receive my wish, which means compensating by using Meta to build concensus concerning our site's paramters, limitations, and expectations and then consistently directing people to those Meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most often available between 6pm-10pm GMT and most weekend afternoons.  I generally keep an eye on activity during that time even when I'm not actively posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to make two changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would update the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What questions can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page to clarify both the on-topic and off-topic lists and include links to appropriate Meta posts that discuss why things are on-topic or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would update the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;What does it mean if a question is &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;on hold&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; so that it reflects Worldbuilding-specific explanations and justifications for VTC/VTH behavior.  My goal would be for this page to be the go-to page for OPs to better understand their closure (it isn't particularly valuable right now because Worldbuilding isn't as definitive in nature as, for example, Stack Overflow, and so the explanations don't really work for us).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T23:36:04.837" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T23:36:04.837" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-02T23:02:00.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-117023&quot;&gt;Renan&lt;/a&gt; :) I would like to be a moderator because I already enjoy doing some maintenance tasks such as editing questions, reviewing posts in the queue, protecting questions and other things. I would like to be a moderator to help with flags, mergers, migrations and wherever else I may be able to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out... you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I say in my intro - I like helping around. I am glad to help as I can with the responsibilities given by reputation. I think that even if there are stresses attached to moderation tasks, keeping Worldbuilding shining and running well more than makes up for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the Stack Overflow model works so well because of consensus. I trust the community. I would rather not cast a binding close vote, if it can be avoided. I will use these only if necessary, and always with open dialogue with the community, through comments in the question and through Meta, as it should be. I will also point to proper precedents and to our site rules and previous consensus when making decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also reasonable. There have been many situations where I have rethought my votes in either way, due to dialogue with other members. I will strive to use dialogue as the means to solve problems, including doubts about whether a subjective question is good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that a question is about the real world does not make it automatically on or off-topic. &lt;strong&gt;How it relates to building another world does.&lt;/strong&gt; Each question should be judged regarding its own merit in that regard. And each case is a different case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the question linked above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help center page on what is on topic&lt;/a&gt; is the baseline we need to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are fortunate that our review queue gets emptied very quickly. It means lots of people participate in the closing queue. As long as there are members doing that, I'd like to avoid casting a binding vote. I trust in community consensus. I will only interfere to avoid things such as voting wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First we listen. Then we dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in consensus. If one random person believes that X is right, while the community believes that X is wrong, I am with the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as long as the hypothetical person is not causing problems, they are free to express what they think. But the moment they start causing problems, then they must be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will provide an actual example of my attitude towards this. I don't like the &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; policy. However, it is the democratic will of the majority to uphold it, so I uphold it as well. I follow the policy and I will enforce it as a moderator. Because if one person thinks they are right, and everyone else thinks they are wrong... It means that person needs to rethink their point of view. And I have been that person more than once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each case is a case. I might take action regarding the flags, and use comments to advise both the community and the person on how we should treat each other. I may even invite the user to a chat, to talk about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person is causing problems, I would like to give them the second chance they need. But if they insist, a moderator is equipped to deal with that accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialogue and consensus. People should talk about their decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also be the mod who closed something another mod thought should be open. I'd like to have a dialogue about that, if it happened. I might reverse what I do. And I would let the community know about what is going on. There is no shame in changing a decision if the change comes from dialogue and consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish we had a catalogue of worlds built by us - not blog posts, not a wiki, but something like the Stack Overflow documentation project. That would be cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I live in the GMT -3 time zone. I am active during morning, afternoon, and on most nights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have a note there with a thought I have regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Remember, something not being realistic is not the same as that thing not being fun and enjoyable to read or roleplay. A gamma ray shower will not turn you into a super strong giant green monster, you cannot bend light into a sword and the square-cube law will keep giant flying reptiles from ever existing. Yet the Hulk, lightsabers and fantasy dragons are things we like to read about. Don't let answers discourage you - suspension of disbelief is a thing, after all.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T08:53:59.247" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T08:53:59.247" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-07-02T23:16:34.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why would someone X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What reasons would X?  Why would X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;This question is asking for possible reasons or justification for a particular action or decision.  For example, &quot;Why would somebody stay inside a burning house?&quot;  Questions like this are almost always closed as either &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; because without considerable scoping/context/limitation any answer is correct.  This question could be thought of as a very specific form of the &quot;I need an &lt;em&gt;infinite list&lt;/em&gt; of things&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that questions of this type are very suceptible to being &lt;em&gt;too story-based&lt;/em&gt; in that they are dependent on the circumstances of the story.  Worldbuilding (on-topic) is about systems and rules.  Storybuilding (off-topic) is about circumstances and actions.  If the question ceases to exist or no longer makes sense after removing all references to the story, it's too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Many questions on Worldbuilding.SE have some degree of fishing-for-ideas.  However, questions that are nothing more than fishing-for-ideas (i.e., helping you write your story, not helping you build a consistent fictional world) are generally off-topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5455/how-can-questions-be-closed-as-being-primarily-opinion-based-on-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;How can questions be closed as being &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; on Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5621/clarification-for-new-users-when-is-a-fishing-for-ideas-question-on-or-off-t&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;How to deal with &amp;quot;Please develop my High Concept&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6781/seeking-community-consensus-about-why-would-x-lead-to-y-questions&quot;&gt;Seeking community consensus about &amp;quot;Why would X lead to Y?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T00:38:29.607" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T00:38:29.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-07-02T23:27:33.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I get from X to Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Questions asking for help applying the rules of a world.  For example, &quot;If my world's atmosphere is 90% oxygen, how to I stop the Boy Scouts from burning my planet to crisp?&quot;  Properly scoped, this question is a specific version of the &quot;I need a &lt;em&gt;finite list&lt;/em&gt; of things&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Asking how to apply the rules of your world treads the very thin line between your question being too story-based and primarily opinion-based.  This balance, however, is important to avoid question closure.  The question must ask for answers that are generally applicable to &lt;em&gt;any story&lt;/em&gt; in your world, not specific to just one story.  They must also be bound by the rules of your world, and explaining those rules are a requirement for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T23:27:33.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T00:01:40.720" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116904/the-best-tool-for-drawing-on-google-maps&quot;&gt;The best tool for drawing on (Google) Maps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been closed as POB.  Was that because of the OP's use of the word &quot;best?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought software recommendations were allowed so long as they &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;directly relate to worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; and it would seem that something that could annotate Google for an alternative history would be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T21:11:21.433" Title="Was this resource question closed because of the word &quot;best?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6340" CreationDate="2018-07-03T00:07:39.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cast the third (and, in this case, binding) close vote as Primarily Opinion-Based. The reason was indeed the use of the word &amp;quot;best&amp;quot;, because &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; is a surprisingly non-descriptive word. It doesn't describe what other features or abilities the OP is looking for, and doesn't give a way to rank one tool above another. That's what we need to avoid falling into the POB hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't comment on the question because a few people had already beaten me to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116904/the-best-tool-for-drawing-on-google-maps#comment358694_116904&quot;&gt;Hello, &lt;em&gt;Martin L&lt;/em&gt;, and welcome to Worldbuilding.  This question is interesting but extremely opinion-based.  Perhaps you could edit to clarify exactly what would make one tool better than another?  Please visit our help center and take the tour to learn more about the site.  Have a nice day!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116904/the-best-tool-for-drawing-on-google-maps#comment358741_116904&quot;&gt;Agree with Gryphon. It would help reduce the &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; complaint if you spelled out some parameters that you will require of the tool. What are your specific needs? (I won't have an answer, but as asked, you're bound to get &amp;quot;I like XYZ because...&amp;quot; answers that will not likely help you or anyone who reads your question in the future.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, if the OP specified what other criteria they were looking for in this sort of tool, I'd be satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update, 7/4/2018&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been reopened, after the improvements that were brought up were made. I think we can consider this a happy and successful ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T21:11:21.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-03T09:11:58.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Secespitus and I would love to serve as a moderator for WorldBuilding.SE in order to help keep our beautiful site as clean as possible. I am already participating a lot in community moderation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/copy-editor&quot;&gt;editing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/94/discussion&quot;&gt;Meta discussions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/76/marshal&quot;&gt;flagging&lt;/a&gt; are some of the things I mostly do on the site, apart from guiding new users and participating in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6168/28789&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to be able to more efficiently help with keeping our site clean - being able to nuke spammers, keep comment discussions in check and cleaning up the Sandbox after it's been used during a time period when less people are online and bad or unnecessary stuff tends to stick around longer than during the high activity times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am already trying to keep the site clean wherever I can, because it has been my belief from the beginning that everyone can contribute to our great site in their own way - and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5210/28789&quot;&gt;my way is keeping the site clean&lt;/a&gt; to make it easier and more interesting for people with great questions and great answers to contribute content to the site. I love reading the creative questions and answers on this site that explore topics I never knew I wanted to know more about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a benevolent janitor actually sounds more interesting to me than being a benevolent dictator. I am not nominating myself to get the &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; to close stuff or anything along those lines - I want to support our great mod team and help keep our site clean so that those who don't like editing and other janitor jobs can enjoy the site and contribute their knowledge and ideas so that I can read them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question starts getting a lot of traction I am keeping a close eye on it to see whether it needs protection. But especially with very popular questions I think that it's important to let the community decide. If I feel that a question doesn't fit the sites scope and is attracting lots of votes and answers or if I feel that a question fits the sites scope and is attracting a lot of close votes I would raise the issue on Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Meta discussion is often a good idea to explain your reasoning in a more elaborate way. My posts are often quite wordy and comments tend to be far too limiting for me to express what I am trying to say. That's why I like Meta discussions where I can raise all the points I see with a post and listen to what others think about the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a moderator allows to cast binding close and reopen votes and whenever the moderator feels these are appropriate they should be used. But such a powerful tool should be used carefully and we are community driven for a reason. If you are not sure about anything start a discussion and listen to what others have to say before acting. Even if that means that a question attracts what you perceive as unjustified answers or close votes. Nearly all actions can be reversed, so waiting a bit and accepting that others feel different is important - we can always reopen or close a question at a later point. Nothing is set in stone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've said in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=45347874#45347874&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; before: Give me some context about what you are building (Book? Game? ...) and why you need help from people with experience in building fictional worlds (Why is Wikipedia not enough?) and I am fine with &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not fine with this being used as an excuse to ask anything that comes to your mind just because there could be a fictional world that is exactly like ours and where your character has the exact same problem with programming that you do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are still WorldBuilding, a site dedicated to creating fictional worlds. Using the real world as a basis for everything is normal - it's the only world we have after all - but it should still be visible how you will be using the knowledge from answers in your world. Asking only about the real world might give you some answers, but it might very well be the case that if you mention what your goal is that someone will be able to not only tell you how something would work in the real world, but also give you valuable advice about how to incorporate that into your own fictional world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worldbuilding context, that shows how you will use the answers you get, is one of the most important parts of every question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will vote to close or reopen less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use my votes to close questions that are blatantly off-topic, for example when someone clearly mistook the site for StackOverflow or when they wanted to ask something about the site and the question should be migrated to Meta. Furthermore I will vote to reopen questions that have clearly been edited to address all the points raised in comments or Meta discussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the pratice that I have seen from some of the existing mods, which is to vote as the fourth or fifth person where your vote may be binding, but only counts as the normal vote or maybe as a second vote if you are very sure about what you are doing. If there is a direction from the general community and I feel the same way I might I might try to speed up the process of putting a question temporarily on hold and reopening it once all the issues have been addressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the very, very big gray area I will leave it up to the community. Moderators are not dictators that should force their will upon the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as everything is civil there is nothing to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a few such users from time to time, but as long as they abide the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt; rules there isn't anything moderators should do about them. Guide them like other users. They can say that the entire site is wrong all they want - they are still just one user with one vote. The community will automatically show them how the site works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sooner or later they will learn that they can't force their will onto the whole site. Either they have convincing arguments and voice these arguments in discussions, especially on Meta, or they will see that the site is just different from what they expect, leaving them the choice of adapting to the site or taking their leave. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users with new ideas and a different view on things are important to keep the site going and regularly ask the important questions about how to use the site again to evaluate whether existing guidelines still apply. But whether the ideas and views they offer will be accepted by the community is written on a different page. Being part of the process part and learning how the site works and what the community expects are important to being an active member of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially with high-reputation users it's important that they adhere to the general guidelines because new users will look up to those people with really high numbers next to their profile picture. But they are still just normal users. Everyone should try to gently guide them by writing comments about what to do and what not to do, or for example by talking in the chat with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this turns into an extreme case where the answers are high quality, but there are regularly comments that are getting flagged as rude/abusive and long, completely tangential, comment discussions something has to be done. But they are still normal users and the normal rules still apply to them. They won't be treated more harshly just because &quot;they should know it better&quot; and they won't get treated more easy-going just because &quot;they are valuable members of the site&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are rules and everyone has to follow them. If you don't follow them you should expect the consequences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask them in the chat what their motivations for their actions were. If we can't agree to something I would raise the issue on Meta and let the community decide. Most actions can simply be reversed by normal community members, whether it's about closing, reopening or deleting questions or answers. Everyone has different criteria for when actions should be taken. We should talk about it when this happens. As long as everyone is civil about it, willing to talk about it and possibly accept the opinion of other people there is no problem that needs any kind of special recourse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reopening/undeleting unilaterally is just as arbitrarily as closing/deleting unilaterally, which means there is no reason for me to just cancel their votes. Let the community decide if they were not clearly abusing their mod powers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish that more people write comments when voting to close or reopen a question explaining why they are acting the way they are acting and what that means in case they are dealing with a new user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people already write such comments, but very often I come across a post by a new user with a couple close votes and no comment about what it means if a question is temporarily put on hold, what they can do if that happens, why people are voting for that and where they can find help if they don't know what to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a lot of work and even with tool like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/6650/make-your-own-custom-magic-links-for-comments&quot;&gt;custom &lt;em&gt;magic links&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; it's still a lot of work, which is why I am thankful for everyone who takes the time to help others. But I feel that this is an aspect that we, as a community, can still strive to be &lt;em&gt;even more awesome&lt;/em&gt; than we already are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am living in Europe and am therefore currently online at UTC +2 in the morning and evening. If something comes up you can normally find me in the chat. I tend to have a tab with the Factory Floor open. You will see me around quite often at those times, but I can't guarantee that you will see me every day or always at a certain time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am online sporadically throughout the day and often for longer periods in the morning and evening. My profile currently says that I've visited the site on 541 days in my 1 year and 8 months on the site - 534 of which were consecutive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6116/28789&quot;&gt;Magic links are great and should be mentioned more prominently in the Help Center.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are an extremely useful tool, especially when it comes to writing useful comments with helpful links to important resources on the site. Using them means that you will be able to type useful comments faster, making your life more easy and it will give new users access to the most important pages they can find. Whether it's a link to the [tour], [help], [meta] or [chat]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic links are already mentioned, but they are quite hidden. I would love to have them more prominent in the help center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that making this a more prominent feature will make the site a more friendly place for newcomers and increase the quality of comments we see on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T09:11:58.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:02:56.670" Score="7" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it quite weird that I am having such a hard time finding details about the moderator election process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything directs somewhere else, but I find barely any answers to my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only information I could gather is mostly from the election posts and one other question someone asked about the term length of moderator elections. (Answer was until they resign or screw up and get kicked out - the latter happens very rarely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quote is from the sidebar of the election message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nominations are not binding; nominees may withdraw at their discretion at any point during the nomination phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After 7 days, the top 30 nominees, ordered by reputation, advance to the primary phase. However, if there are 10 or fewer candidates, we skip directly to the election phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the election process itself seems to be kind of a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing the results in the election threads of 2017 and 2016 I can see that in the 'primary' tab regular up-/downvotes can be cast on candidates and in the 'election' tab you get 1st to 3rd choice vote for all the candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do the votes in the primary do?&lt;/strong&gt; When do candidates get narrowed down? Is there just a specific amount of people who can make it to the final election? Is it 10 as said in the quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are the votes counted?&lt;/strong&gt; 2016 had 4 new mods, 2017 had only one. &lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt; What are the criteria to be fulfilled for a certain amount of new mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the documentation of the process kind of lacking. And the things I did find were not as easy to find as you'd expect either. I am very interested in the election as I really like this site and community and the ideas that brought forth, so I would like to know more about the process of electing moderators to help select those most beneficial to this site and community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T14:48:18.583" Title="Where can I find details on the election process?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6344" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:23:45.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the primary you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/221975/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;Why is there a primary election?&lt;/a&gt; Basically it's a way to up- and downvote and thereby reduce the amount of people that will be considered for the real election. It's especially important when there are lots of nominations, which tends to happen more often on bigger sites. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/222047/352819&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; also mentions that a maximum of 10 people will advance to the real election if there are more than 10 people when the primary starts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real election will then be giving you a chance to vote for your rank 1, 2 and 3. No &quot;upvotes&quot;, no &quot;downvotes&quot;, just a choice of &quot;Which of these would you prefer?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the amount of mods elected: the first election you mentioned was the very first election, which means that this was the first time we switched from appointed pro-tempore mods to elected mods and needed a whole team. For the next election the team needed to grow, but as it was not that a whole new team was needed there was only one position. The criteria are basically that the current mod team decides that they would like to have more members because the workload is getting too big - the site is simply growing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about how voting counts you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/77554/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;How are moderator election votes counted, in plain English?&lt;/a&gt; Your votes are used in an iterative process to decide who &quot;wins&quot;. I also like the easy description in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/77560/352819&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's the so-über-short-it's-almost-misleading version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meek STV does calculations in rounds (or &quot;iteratively,&quot; for you programmer types). In the first round, all votes count for the candidate marked as the first choice. The system figures out how many votes are needed to win. If anyone gets that many votes, he wins, and any &quot;extra&quot; votes he got are handed out to the voters' second choices. If nobody wins, the weakest candidate gets cut and all votes he received go to the voters' second choices. Then the next round starts. Rounds keep going until enough people have been elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a comprehensive overview over the election process you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/135361/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;There's an election going on. What's happening and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt; The short form is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;7 days Nomination:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone may nominate themselves to be a moderator as long as they fulfill certain conditions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4 days Primary:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is where the voting starts. Any community member with at least 150 reputation may vote, but candidates are not allowed to vote for themselves. You get one vote per candidate in the same manner as a question or answer. There are no comments allowed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After 4 days the top 10 nominees by vote advance to the election phase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4 days (or 8 if Primary was skipped)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly, comes the election phase. Once again any user with 150 reputation or more is allowed to vote; unlike the Primary phase candidates are allowed to vote for themselves. Once again, no comments are allowed and the candidates are displayed in a random order.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Each community member gets 3 votes, 1st choice, 2nd choice and 3rd choice. Any number of these 3 votes can be used. Votes are tallied using the Meek STV method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get an idea about what each phase entails for candidates and voters you can look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/253379/352819&quot;&gt;answer from @MonicaCellio to the question &lt;em&gt;What are the current goals of each of the election phases?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; The nomination allows candidates to present themselves and voters to familiarize themselves with the candidates. The primary allows candidates to elaborate on their views in Meta discussions, comments and the chat, while the voters can ask specific questions to sort the top 10 out. In the election the voters decide which people should become newly appointed mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are thinking about nominating yourself you can check your so-called &quot;candidate score&quot; before submitting your nomination with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/298418/candidate-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;. The candidate score is calculated by checking your reputation (1 point per 1k reputation up to a maximum of 20) and different badges for moderating (8 badges), editing (6 badges) and participation (6 badges), which leads to a total of 40 points you can achieve at most. This score will be displayed next to your profile when submitting your nomination. You can find your userID when going to your profile and checking the URL in your browsers address bar which is &quot;blabla/users/yourUserID/yourUserName&quot; with &lt;em&gt;yourUserID&lt;/em&gt; being the ID you have to Enter into the field under the query on SEDE. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&quot;&gt;my case&lt;/a&gt; the userID is &lt;em&gt;28789&lt;/em&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T14:48:18.583" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T14:48:18.583" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-03T18:44:37.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like the WB site and community, and want to be more involved in keeping it a fun and useful website to visit for both the long time users and those that are just finding us for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective describes what makes a good subjective question -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun. Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here. Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow. As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen it's often good enough to guide through comments explaining why a question is or is not ok. The community is usually pretty good about policing these things, and so more often than not a nudge in the right direction is all that is needed. I'd save the mod hammer for bigger problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: Where do you draw the line as to whether real world questions are on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in consensus with James that questions with real world elements are on-topic as long as they provide context as to what makes them world building, and show their work as to what real world resources they've researched.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we say that real world questions are off topic then by that logic we'd have to close every hard science question, since those rely on current day real world research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other mods have stated, I'd reserve my vote for when a question already has a few so that my vote isn't overriding the community as a whole, except for cases where there is no effort being made at worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to reason with them and come to a mutual understanding (maybe they &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; right and the community isn't), but eventually you have to do what's right for the community, even if that means giving the user a time out in the penalty box or worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow protocol. Give them a few messages/opportunities to chat to try to help them be nice/follow site policy, then if that doesn't work give them a time out to cool down, and so on. Protocol takes the guesswork out of the picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talk to them in chat or through other mod means to hear their logic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we can't come to an agreement then it would probably be smart to bring other mods into the discussion, see if we can get some consensus.&#xA;If appropriate I might start a meta post to get feedback from the community too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give sites that want it a way to submit a new question to a sandbox queue that is part of the review queues instead of the clunky sandbox meta post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Users that wanted to get into the sandbox queue would have a way to apply a sandbox tag which would keep it off the main page, and only allow comments, not answers. They could manually remove the tag at any time, and applying it in the first place would be voluntary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On and off between 13:00 and 21:00 UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd delete this one as it no longer applies:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask-beta&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask-beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T18:44:37.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-04T15:28:30.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch's answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do. I learned to enjoy this site by the gentle manners and guidance of various users (I cannot even remember if they were mods or not), who have always been open to discussion and clear on their objection. This really helped in taking rid of the &quot;they have a grudge on me&quot; complex that easily develops when a newbie starts frequenting a community. And this is what I want to bring as my personal contribution to this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective describes what makes a good subjective question -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun. Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here. Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow. As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a good subjective is whatever can lead to the definition of a suitable metric for evaluation, be it some sound theoretical background, some well conducted reasoning or the like. Whenever I review I always ask myself &quot;Can I find more than a good answer to this question without being able to pick one as best?&quot;. If my answer is yes, then I incline on the bad subjective side, and usually ask for clarification to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: Where do you draw the line as to whether real world questions are on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Worldbuilding cannot be really separated from real world, since that's the common ground where all we are. I strive to understand if the OP's question is really into worldbuilding or simply lacking in research effort and/or simply using the wrong site to ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With big powers come big responsibilities [citation needed]. Strongly believing in the community as a whole, and not being afraid of accepting I can be wrong, I would be open to constructive discussions on a decision I took. If I should have doubts, I would rather leave the decision to the community, maybe seeding constructive exchange of ideas, rather than spreading doubts with my acts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would explain what are the policies of the site, pointing to the relevant sections of the help center to back up my statements. Meanwhile if the user should turn aggressive/offensive, I would remove the non suitable content (comments/text), while insisting on explaining and having them understanding the site policies and the spirit in which comments and VTC are issued. Only as extrema ratio I would use more sever sanctions. The ultimate goal is to guide users into behaving according to the site standards, not kicking them away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would try to separate the good contribution from the questionable one, and try to guide the user into improving the content of their contribution so that arguments can be limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, I am open to discussion and always give the benefit of the doubt. I would discuss the topic with the other side and try to reach an agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. What do you wish for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add an agent/wizard that guides the user through writing the first question and first answer, so that it gets rewarded with many upvotes, for an enjoyable first experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am usually active between 7 a.m and 9 p.m. UTC+1, and try to give a look at the site at least once a hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I would add an agent pointing to the relevant section when an event mentioned there is triggered for the first time (i.e. on reaching 200 rep limit the first time the wizard would point to reputation cap section)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T18:46:51.827" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T18:46:51.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-07-04T22:41:12.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to build a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;How do I go about worldbuilding?  What process should I use to build my world?  Where do I start with worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;It is completely natural to ask &quot;how do I go about building my world&quot; on a site dedicated to worldbuilding.  However, there are a great many ways to accomplish this one goal and dozens (if not hundreds) of websites dedicated to answering this very question.  These questions are excellent candidates for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; due to the often subjective nature of the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T03:48:29.927" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T03:48:29.927" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T03:27:50.193" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117154/when-super-mario-catches-pokemon-and-the-yoshi-dinosaur-is-none-other-than-char&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question yesterday which was marked as too broad. One of the comment from @JBH stated this reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How to build a world&quot; questions are occasionally asked here. If the question is very specific they're left open. If the question is very broad they're closed. I'm afraid there are a thousand ways to do this, which is why classes in creative writing exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly feel that my question is misunderstood. My question in no way is asking about all thousand permutation and possibilities of creating a new world by combining various gaming worlds. I am &lt;strong&gt;specifically&lt;/strong&gt; asking about the possible roadmap, setting and starting direction in building my intended world, especially when cross-over worlds and ideas are overwhelmingly huge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I also used &quot;Worldbuilding-Process&quot; tag  which clearly scopes my question. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info&quot;&gt;description&lt;/a&gt; in the tag states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;World building is a complex process that ranges from the enormity of the &#xA;   universe to the complex web of life in a particular location. Some created worlds are a &lt;strong&gt;minimum of information&lt;/strong&gt;, while others are rich in their depth and detail. Both methods, creating what you need and creating everything, are world building and &lt;strong&gt;equally valid/useful&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whatever drives you to create a world, maybe you &lt;strong&gt;need a setting&lt;/strong&gt; for a book, a table top campaign, a movie, or perhaps a video game, World Building SE &lt;strong&gt;welcomes you.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before asking that question, I had also read the &lt;strong&gt;guide to worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; which is described in that same tag description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first question to ask is what kind of world do I want to create? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That I already have described in my question. I wanted to create a new world based on already pre-existing worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Approaches to World Building - The top down method and the bottom up method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was/am confused in picking &lt;strong&gt;the approach&lt;/strong&gt;, and that led me to ask this &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; (not broad) single question. What approach can I take, &lt;em&gt;How to sort and arrange the world properly&lt;/em&gt; I also received several helpful and great answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where do I go from here?&#xA;  Jump in head first...or damn the torpedoes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unless you are starting from scratch for the sole purpose of creating a world odds are you have a story in mind. &lt;strong&gt;This is the best place&lt;/strong&gt; to start because it helps define the world you want in some basic ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also referred Help Center &gt; Asking &gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics I can ask about here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which quotes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists &lt;strong&gt;to get help creating imaginary worlds&lt;/strong&gt;. This includes geography, culture and creatures for the world. Questions on this site should be &lt;strong&gt;about building settings&lt;/strong&gt; (for which I asked question about how to build one) and the reasons around why they are the way they are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, a minor point about the comment quoted in the question &quot;&lt;em&gt;..which is why classes in creative writing exist.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - I hope this was in no way intended as a provoke though it sounds little like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions asking about getting started with a particular setting, approach or direction of starting with world building are Off topic on this site, then I seriously have misunderstood something - or either my question is wrongly put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request anyone to clarify on this please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25625" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T09:11:21.783" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T04:19:18.847" Title="How and why is my question too broad?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2018-07-05T08:00:04.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understood your question to be a generic question about combining elements from already existing fictional worlds into one new fictional world that you will use as the basis for a videogame you are working on. The intent seemed to me to be about getting started and knowing what things to look at to see how elements from existing worlds can be combined to a new one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worlds you mentioned in your question seemed to me to be simple examples to clarify your intent and make it easier to understand what kind of world you want to create, while also domenstrating where your problems are: that there are so many worlds, each with so many elements, that you don't know how to start. And that you don't want anyone to explicitly tell you what to do with these specific examples, but to get an idea of the process that one can go through to create his own world out of the millions of videogame/fantasy book/... worlds that already exist, with a focus on videogames. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/117157/28789&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt; your question in the generic style that I saw as the core of your question with a process that helps people that want to create worlds from already existing worlds, even if they never intended to do a cross-over involving for example Pokemon or Mario. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have voted to reopen the question as it is not too broad in my eyes. It's asking about the general process and only uses some examples. It does not require answerers to iterate through all possibilities of combining the mentioned examples, let alone all possibilities of combining any two or more games. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking us to create a specific world for you would be too broad, because we would have to go through all elements of the basic worlds and all combinations together with all possible game mechanics and such. That's your job as the creator. But asking for the process of picking elements and getting started is definitely in the realm of worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to edit your question to make the intent more clear though. While your title certainly attracts people interested in videogames it also distracts from the core of your question. By rephrasing it to be generic you could help to mitigate this problem. For example you might want to consider something along the lines of &quot;What is the process in combining different already existing fictional worlds to create my own new world for a videogame?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first sentence could use some problem description, such as appending &quot;, but I am having trouble with finding out how I can combine the elements of these already existing worlds.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar fashion you could rephrase the last part of your last sentence to be &quot;combining existing worlds as the basis for my own world?&quot; instead of &quot;the same?&quot; Bold face for the last sentence might also be appropriate to highlight the generic thougt behind asking this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T08:00:04.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2018-07-05T13:03:13.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cast the first close vote. The reason is due to the following piece of the question, which I believe is its core:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to set a stage and create a world when I have lots of ideas, backgrounds, worlds and characters already but unsure to scope things. How to sort and arrange the world properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is not a process as simple as an algorithm. There is no short manual for it. Terry Pratchett had his own creative process when he created Discworld - which was different from the one George Lucas used for Star Wars, which is also different from what Neil Gaiman used for this stories centering around Dream. Name any two authors famous for their worlds, and each probably had their own method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that would then be appropriate for such a question would be an extensive analysis on the creation methods of many authors. It would be quite a thick book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see there are two answers and they have upvotes. While I see some people find value in them, to my eyes they seem like tidbits. Neither one presents a generic solution on how to set a stage and create a world when you have lots of ideas, backgrounds, worlds and characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel they might even tangentially be touching story writing. That said, I know one contemporary, professional attempt at world combining multiple characters from multiple backgrounds, contexts and paradigms based on others' intellectual property into one work. It's a web comic/prose work called Erfworld, by Rob Balder. You should have a look at it to see how bizarre it feels (i.e.: Benjamin Franklin is a sorcerer working for a kingdom of psychobilly vampires). Regardless, it has its own cult following, and Rob had often made comments about his process in his site, so that might be helpful for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T19:52:36.100" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T19:52:36.100" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6358" CreationDate="2018-07-05T14:54:39.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title says it all: For the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, there's no list of graduated answers (linked directly to the answers, not the questions.) While the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Question Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; has a list of graduated answers, the Answer Sandbox answers can only be seen by higher-rep users. So should we post a community wiki answer and update it with previous answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T15:01:25.907" Title="Should we have a community-wiki list of graduated answers from the Answer Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|answers|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6357" CreationDate="2018-07-05T15:01:25.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, there is no demand for it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently 5 deleted posts, one of which was about undeleting an answer on Main. And the whole thread is 4.5 years old. There is on average about one draft per &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt; in the answer Sandbox. There were discussions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1737/do-we-still-want-the-answer-sandbox&quot;&gt;abandoning the answer Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; because nobody uses it. It simply isn't worth it to keep the answer Sandbox in check because there is basically no activity. I think it can just sit around and if someone comes across it and wants to safe a draft there or get some feedback they can use it, but as long as the amount of posts in the answer sandbox doesn't ramp up a lot we should just leave everything as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T15:01:25.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2018-07-06T03:17:04.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What kind of answer are you even looking for?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem with this question is that it is unclear what you want the final answer to look like. How do I blend multiple video game worlds together? The answer is: any way your imagination can take you! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There simply are not hard and fast rules for merging worlds. When you are asking for advice, that, to me, fits into the 'invent my world for me' category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone's world needs to flow from their own creativity first, and then be refined in the fires of the Worldbuilding.SE forge afterwards. The problem with your questions is that you have provided nothing to refine. Your question is similar to the ones that we close for 'primarily story based;' that is, questions asking us to invent a world for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that you should invent a world where Yoshi is actually a Charizard, and then when you want to refine that world, you ask questions about it here on Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T03:17:04.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-06T16:32:10.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-117438&quot;&gt;Marshall Tigerus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I can help a great community become even greater.  One of the issues I feel most SE have is that they crush new voices because of failure to comply with the culture and rules of the SE, instead of trying to teach those new members how to act.  How to accomplish that goal is another matter, whether it's through discussions on chat or some other means I am not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Bad Subjective questions are a short edit away from being Good Subjective questions.  The difference is in the narrowness of focus and level of detail provided (at least in terms of the Worldbuilding SE).  I would suggest working with the poster to see if they can narrow their scope or provide a better explanation of what they need, with the suggestion of breaking their larger questions into smaller ones after they've made some decisions.  After all, Worldbuilding is not &quot;write my setting for me,&quot; but should be open enough for answers to suggest things the original poster have not thought of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this comes down to the &quot;but&quot; rule.  Basically if the concept can be brought into being by saying it's the real world &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; x, y or z, then it is on topic for worldbuilding (because it is not the real world).  However, something like &quot;How big of a rocket would I need to propel x into space&quot; is probably better for another SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those votes will be handled with a lot more care and consideration.  Nothing is more disheartening to a new user than having their questions closed, and a reopen is basically a pardon, overriding the collective will of the board.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are merely opinionated but not destructive, then there's no reason to handle them at all (the voting process will handle them).  if they are trolling, destructive or causing issues to other users, then that will have to be addressed, with consent and advise of other moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussing the issue with the user is probably best.  They seem to be providing a net positive for the site, and if they can be encouraged to reign in their comments, then it is a win for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would discuss it with that moderator.  They probably have some knowledge I lack (such as the user's history).  In all, one moderator should not overrule another, unless there's consensus of many moderators than an action was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add a feature where some benevolent AI parsed the question, and the tags, and generated a &quot;If you liked this question's concepts, you should look at these books&quot; list (or failing that, maybe a per user list of top 10 books/series they enjoy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the SE network, I'm on and reading info through most of the workday (8-5 CST), and more randomly at night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would create a new user experience that walks a user through their account creation and first post, with examples of what to do and what not to do.  This information is probably in the help center, but it seems spread across many articles, where it will never be read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21906" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T16:32:10.610" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-06T18:06:30.497" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m having a hard time understanding the logic behind the voting on questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only guidance I’ve found for voting on proposed questions is in ArtOfCode’s seminal post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/639/how-does-the-sandbox-work-how-do-i-use-it&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where they recommend using upvotes to denote that a post is ready for the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this still what upvotes mean in the Sandbox? And if so, what do downvotes mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems absurd to use downvotes to denote “not ready for the main site” - that’s a given, based on the fact that it’s being posted in the Sandbox. Perhaps downvotes could be used to cancel out upvotes? But there’d be no reason to have a Sandbox post with a negative score...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:07:02.437" Title="Interpreting up- and down- votes in the Question Sandbox" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6361" CreationDate="2018-07-06T18:18:44.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no formal definition of how to use it, but the current usage seems to be to use Upvotes to indicate that you think a post is ready for main and to use Downvotes to indicate that you think a post is just not a good fit for the site and is basically unsalvagable. Personally I tend to not use downvotes, but that's how I feel they are being used. Most of the time you won't see any voting on posts in the Sandbox though. Voting in either direction is relatively rare overall and you shouldn't think too much about the vote count for drafts in the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I recommend to use votes in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use upvotes if you think a question is ready for Main in its current form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use downvotes if you feel that a question is completely unsalvageable, even after multiple edit cycles by the OP - this should be used very rarely and be explained to the OP &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a Sandbox intended to be used for drafts that you know will be difficult on Main or for people having difficulty phrasing their questions in such a way that they will work on Main - it's normal that drafts there don't look good on the first few revisions, so please be patient. We don't want to discourage people who want to spend some time on working out the details of a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you feel that a post is ready or that a type of question will never work voting accordingly can be helpful - ideally you would comment so that the OP knows that they are probably ready or that they should try to rethink the whole premise of their draft. While we don't want to discourage people using the Sandbox we also don't want to waste their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T18:18:44.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-06T22:17:54.457" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Problem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions start out flawed, this summons a wave of either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Support and suggestions on how to improve&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tonnes of whining about how it is a crap question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these really distract from the question being answered once it is improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can someone have their comments section cleared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. my question has 13 comments, I do not wish to flag each and every one as &quot;no longer relevant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there should be a button in the &quot;On hold...&quot; popup where you can click for a moderator to swing by and check out if it is fixed yet. Then if they deem it a good enough question they can &quot;restart&quot; the question with 0 comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost like a &quot;summon a moderator for an MOT&quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52590" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T00:07:21.413" Title="How to clear comments" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2018-07-06T22:38:07.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can delete your own comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to &quot;delete&quot; comments from others, you need to flag these (just on will do). If you think this is justified, choose &quot;in need of moderator intervention &quot; and explain why. Comments will likely end up dumped in a chat room nobody will use but at least they will remain in case somebody wants to read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T22:38:07.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2018-07-07T00:07:21.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use flags to draw moderators' attention to things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But help us out!  You asked &quot;for a moderator to swing by and check out if it is fixed yet&quot;, but unless it's obvious (arguments, &quot;whining&quot;, etc), we can only tell by digging through the edit history and all the comments, comparing timestamps.  That's a lot of work, so what we're more likely to do is skim the comments looking for anything that still seems to be outstanding and either purge or migrate the rest.  Or decline your flag if we can't understand, so be sure to check your flag responses (link on your profile page) for messages.  If you can instead tell us the comments were addressed in an edit, that's a big help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On flag responses, I mean this link on your &quot;activity&quot; profile tab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcUCM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcUCM.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T00:07:21.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6323" CreationDate="2018-07-07T08:24:09.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First let me address this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you are handwaving this, then why don't you handwave that?/This is unrealistic and it doesn't matter what you do because you're already handwaving/and so on.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which borders on the edge of rude and isn't helpful at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that it is unhelpful and certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; rude to say that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an observation that is quite appropriate for many questions where posters have chosen to create arbitrary handwaved scenarios for which they want (often for unexplained reasons) to impose a non-handwaved aspect to one or two parts of the situations.  In creating this handwaved scenarios they often make it impossible to construct the non-handwaved parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it's not unusual to find someone has used magic liberally to construct some scenario and then wants to force a non-magic &amp;quot;bolt-on&amp;quot; explanation to one thing which can't, under any science we understand, happen without the magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You simply &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to make that clear to a poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's in no way rude to express that.  It's potentially very helpful to the poster and may help them rethink their approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we have a unbuilding/failure of suspension of disbelief/snarky/unhelpful comment flagging option?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version : No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a flag for real rudeness already, we need nothing else for that aspect of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think you're fundamentally wrong to consider these comments (when not actually nasty under existing rules) as being negative.  I think they're perfectly reasonable observations and something users should be doing sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd go a little further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers and others developing fictional scenarios need to accept that they &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have other people make comments which criticize aspects of their ideas.  It's frankly unfair to people reading your ideas to expect them to say nothing but things the author regards as helpful.  Life just doesn't work that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes authors need to be told that the basic concept is flawed or too vague or, in these cases, often constructed in ways that make what they ask for impossible or implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a disservice to do that.  Authors are free to ignore these opinions, but it's inappropriate to try and suppress them by allowing them to be flagged as some if they were some kind of attack, when in fact they're not an attack, just an expression of a reasonable opinion which the author of the original post may not agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such a flag would potentially be abused by authors who don't accept criticism of any kind or simply have no patience with broader or different interpretations of their questions than they intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T08:24:09.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6371" CreationDate="2018-07-08T05:45:36.783" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 2.3K rep, well above the rep requirement to vote in elections, yet, I'm not seeing the vote or nominate button on the election? (I've turned off adblock too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I doing something wrong (user error? ex: in bad standing?) or is this a legitimate bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ajvx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ajvx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of one candidate without any voting buttons&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zMhH8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zMhH8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of another candidate; again without any voting buttons&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34127" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T14:58:55.867" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:58:55.867" Title="Can't see vote button in election?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6370" CreationDate="2018-07-08T05:52:34.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The election has not started yet. Currently we are in the nomination phase where users can nominate themselves. The voting will begin in 2 days (Monday, 09&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; July 2018, 8 PM UTC). On the right side on the nomination site you can see when the election starts. You can find more info &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6344/28789&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (Disclosure: the answer is from me) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T10:44:13.393" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T10:44:13.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6370" CreationDate="2018-07-08T09:48:15.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6371/29&quot;&gt;Secespitus said&lt;/a&gt;. (I seem to keep saying that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The election is currently in the nomination phase. In the nomination phase, there is by design no voting for candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting the candidates up/down happens in the primary phase of the election, which we might end up not getting because the primary only occurs if there are 10 or more candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the primary, there is the election phase, in which you get to cast your votes for your first, second and third choice to fill the two open moderator positions. These votes control (and are the only ones that control) the outcome of the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: &lt;strong&gt;No, you cannot currently vote for any candidates in the election. At this point in the election, that's intended and documented behavior.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, the only reason why a user wouldn't be able to vote in the primary or election phases would be if they lack the necessary reputation (which you don't) or as a more extreme case have been suspended (which also locks the user's reputation at 1 for the duration of the suspension). Since you are able to post here, you aren't suspended. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T17:16:58.913" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T17:16:58.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2018-07-08T16:07:32.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem I see with the question is that rather than asking &quot;how can I integrate x and y?&quot; which we may be able to give some guidance on, you've asked &quot;where do I start with a cross-genre integration of a list of material of unspecified length&quot; that's a really broad and super awkward question to answer. It has no clear limits on the content you're trying to amalgamate which means there's no real starting point and certainly no end point. If you'd focused on a small pool of material then I could suggest an approach that is relatively straightforward but as a catch-all the question doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T16:07:32.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-08T19:04:00.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Monty Wild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dealing with the worst content on the site is not a problem for me - I'm not easily offended or disturbed, and I'm pretty adept at clicking the correct buttons.  That Stack Exchange is a text-based medium only helps me to remain patient - no matter what another user may say, I am quite able to limit my cursing and swearing to the audible, and let my fingers write the appropriate things afterwards.  So far as I know, in cyberspace, no-one can hear your profanities.  Being pretty much anonymous behind wires and screens means that no matter how personal some disgruntled user may try to make things, there's only so much they can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, being able to deal with all that not only doesn't put me off, it makes me want to be able to deal with it - not that I've seen much bad behaviour around here in the years I've been here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjectivity is a somewhat subjective state.  One person's subjective question may be another person's non-subjective question.  A case in point is one that I answered, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38982/75&quot;&gt;What are the evolutionary factors that could create a species that looks like E.T.?&lt;/a&gt;  Some people's comments showed that the commenters didn't have my understanding of biology, so without that understanding, the question seemed as if it was too broad or idea generation to them.  However, to me, the question guided me to an answer as if it had put me on a set of rails, since my training led me to looking at the question in a logical manner, and from there every conclusion was inevitable and logical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, likewise, while I have a broad range of experience gained over my close to fifty years of life, my skills lie in particular areas, and I am mature enough to recognise that there are things that I don't know outside those areas, and a question addressing one of those areas may have a specific answer that I'm just not seeing.  Given that sort of question, I'd be happy to wait for a community consensus, though if such a question gets closed through ignorance, I'd like to be able to reopen it.  Of course, other questions are quite obviously just asking for a too-broad ruling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that of course real-world questions are on-topic.  The whole purpose of world building is typically to provide a setting for some purpose, whether that is as a setting for a work of fiction, a role-playing game, a computer game or something else.  If the setting that the OP is one where you start out with the real world and then change something, then that is no less world building than making up a world based on mythology.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, using my own question as an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83825/75&quot;&gt;How long can New York City sustain the Snakebot of Doom&amp;#39;s hunger for Iron and steel?&lt;/a&gt;, this question was flagged to be closed because it asked questions about the real world, however, I argued that it should be on-topic, since the answer would affect the way that the fictional future of our real world would diverge from reality, in the absence of my fictional addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in my opinion, real-world questions are on-topic if the OP can show how the answer would be relevant to their worldbuilding efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer - not a great deal.  I've never been prone to making frivolous close or reopen votes, and the fact that if I'm elected, my votes will be instantly binding won't change that a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may not be anything to handle.  As long as the user is following the rules, they are entitled to hold whatever opinion they choose.  If they're wrong, then the nature of the site as a promoter of consensus opinion will - hopefully - show them the error of their beliefs.  However, if a user was to become abusive or destructive, then disciplinary action may need to be taken if pointing out the inappropriateness of their actions does not lead to cessation of their inappropriate behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a user should be valued for their contribution, but if their comments are inflammatory or offensive, then it may be necessary to communicate privately with that user and ask them to practise more self-moderation.  Should that fail, then it may be necessary to resort to sterner disciplinary measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People disagree all the time.  Reasonable people are open to discussing their actions calmly, and in such a case, if the community didn't initiate the reopen process themselves, I'd communicate privately with that moderator to find out just why that decision was made before I potentially reopened the question myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that I would wish for is that downvotes &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be accompanied by valid comments detailing the reason for that vote.  I see downvotes on questions that seem arbitrary, without any explanation as to what the voter disliked about the question or answer.  Requiring such a comment would mean that users would be getting a better idea about how to ask or answer a question, and if the comment was invalid for whatever reason then a mod could remove both the comment and the associated downvote.  Whenever &lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; downvoting a question or answer, I always try to ensure that I leave a comment explaining why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I live in South-Eastern Australia, and I am typically active between 9 AM and midnight - or later, local time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that would be the &lt;em&gt;View More&lt;/em&gt; links.  I like to see everything in the one place, without having to go looking for it, potentially in the wrong place, and wasting time in the process  So, I'd get rid of those links and substitute the actual &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T19:04:00.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T18:51:56.170" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I recently discovered that three of my flags in the last week have been declined, and, as a result, I am under a flag ban.  I cannot flag posts for any reason, and, when I attempt to do so, I am redirected to a list of declined flags over the past week.  However, the banner informing me of the ban fails to list an end time or date for the ban.  How long do flag bans last?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T19:20:54.323" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T19:20:54.323" Title="How long do flag-bans last?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6377" CreationDate="2018-07-09T19:10:22.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/223859/reset-flag-declined-warnings-due-to-close-vote-burn-down&quot;&gt;this Meta meta post&lt;/a&gt; not more than a week. That may now be out of date as there are several other posts concerning extensions to bans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T19:10:22.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T17:01:54.573" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find the source image of WorldBuilding.SE? I mean this desert world, with the robot and the girl. If someone can help, it would be awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52858" OwnerDisplayName="Iron Spider" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T19:21:32.240" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T14:00:14.843" Title="Does someone have the source image of this site?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6377" CreationDate="2018-07-09T19:14:11.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the status-completed feature-request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/173878/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;Allow recovery from flag hellban&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/175405/352819&quot;&gt;this accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flaggers with a recent (past 7 days) flagging history consisting of at least 10 handled flags where &gt;= 10% of flags were declined will see [a warning displaying the message &quot;Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please review them before flagging this post!&quot;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you get past 25% the message instead reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Too many of your recent flags have been declined - please review them instead of flagging this post!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where you are banned from flagging stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later it says (emphasis added): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Depending on when and how those declined flags were cast, &lt;strong&gt;this block could last for as little as a day, and won't ever be longer than a week&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T19:14:11.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6380" CreationDate="2018-07-09T19:15:43.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the normal and meta design next to each other you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3353/28789&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Site Design Updates: March 15&lt;/a&gt;, which has the image &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WXO1Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AzB9h.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AzB9h.png&quot; alt=&quot;main and meta design next to each other&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Site Design&lt;/a&gt;, which has the link to an image that uses the non-flying-whales-city in the upper right hand corner together with robot &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dtSrG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ok3PE.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ok3PE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;WorldBuilding.SE design background image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T14:00:14.843" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T14:00:14.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-09T20:46:45.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T20:46:45.930" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T20:46:45.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-09T20:46:45.930" Score="0" Body="Use in relation to moderator elections." OwnerUserId="29275" LastEditorUserId="29275" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:25:02.733" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:25:02.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6386" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag to solicit advice about how to ask questions on the main site or to suggest ways to help new and continuing users to ask higher quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" Score="0" Body="For Meta questions asking for advice about asking questions on the main site." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T22:06:57.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T22:11:07.700" Score="22" ViewCount="1389" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks for joining Worldbuilding.SE!  We look forward to stepping foot on your world and enjoying another world of wonder and excitement!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site is a wonderful place for creative and imaginative people to ask questions about the worlds they're building.  We have an amazing group of people from around the world representing an astounding amount of experience in many fields of both fiction and science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow us to give you a quick introduction to the culture of our site.  This will allow your time here to be both productive and enjoyable and also help you avoid the most common issues new users run up against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hold/Close is an opportunity, not a judgment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange family of websites operates on one model that is sometimes a challenge for creativity: one specific question leads to one best answer.  Consequently, Stack Exchange users vote to close questions to stop answers from being posted while important updates are made to questions.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  Unfortunately, votes to close (often called VTH or VTC) often come with downvotes, which represent the community's confidence in the preparedness of the question (such as performing expected research before posting).  It is very important that you do not take this personally.  &lt;em&gt;Please!&lt;/em&gt; Do not take this personally.  Everyone, even experienced site users, receive downvotes and have questions closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an important opportunity for you to update your question.  You should consider both the reasons for the closure (which are listed in a yellow box below your question) and issues listed in comments.  You can see the reasons before closure by clicking on the &quot;close&quot; link below your question.  If you have specific questions, you can always bring them up in comments, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, or by entering our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta site&lt;/a&gt; where you can ask about your question directly.  A great many participants on Worldbuilding.SE are willing to help you understand the issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Please do not give in to the temptation of anger&lt;/a&gt;.  This is never helpful.  Promise us you will hear us out and we promise you we will hear you out.  Most of the time it's an issue of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you are asking your question, nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. If your question is put on hold, please don't take it personally.  Work with us to get the question reopened.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Our question sandbox is your best friend&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative questions are often difficult to express in quantifiable terms (which is a fancy way of saying, &quot;it can be hard to be on-topic&quot;).  Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt; is a great place to fix these problems before presenting the question on the main site.  There, site participants will help you craft your question such that you can receive the highest quality answers.  We hope all our new users will take advantage of the Sandbox to learn how best to ask questions on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Use the question sandbox to your advantage!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;We help with building worlds, not stories&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may seem counterintuitive, but we're not here to help you write your story.  We are here to help you build your world.  Worlds are the framework for many, many stories.  Some questions are meant to advance the story, not build the world, and are considered off-topic as too story-based.  We mentioned above that question problems are usually an issue of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; a question is asked.  Here is an example of a highly focused question that doesn't depend on the specifics of a story to be answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Good Example)&lt;/strong&gt; In an alternate Earth circa 1350 A.D., a small army in England of 50 archers and 300 infantry encounter 400 orcs armed with leather armor and short swords in the East Lyn valley of Devonshire.  How could the terrain best be used to defeat them?  The best answer will favor survival of the archers over that of the infantry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this issue important?  Because a well-written question will benefit many people, but a story-based question will only benefit the questioner.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3298/when-should-i-close-a-question-as-too-story-based&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about what makes a question too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Your question should be specific, clear, and independent of your story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You may need to guide us toward an answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On our sister site, Stack Overflow, programmers ask questions about designing software.  It's difficult to ask an unclear, opinion-based question.  For example, &quot;How can I concatenate two string variables in the PHP programming language?&quot;  On the other hand, it's very easy to be unclear or demand too much opinion here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Bad Example)&lt;/strong&gt; How can my future society build a Dyson sphere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question will be quickly closed as too broad or too opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to provide clear limitations to your question and may need to provide insight into how you will judge the best answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Good Example)&lt;/strong&gt; My future society has the ability to move celestial objects the size of Earth's moon.  How can I avoid gravitational problems caused by a star when moving moon-sized components of a Dyson sphere into place around my sun?  The best answer will make the most use of physics as we understand it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about what makes a question too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. Your question should be focused and limited.  If necessary, explain how you will judge the best answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You can edit your own question at any time&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, please know that you can edit your own question at any time by clicking the &quot;edit&quot; link found below the list of tags at the bottom of your question.  We invite you to use this feature frequently when perfecting your question.  When asked in comments to clarify your question, please do so by editing the question, not by answering with a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. Use the &quot;edit&quot; link to modify and update your question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-on-hold-or-duplicate-question&quot;&gt;Hold and closed are the same thing&lt;/a&gt;.  The question's status is changed from &quot;enabled&quot; to &quot;disabled.&quot;  The phrase &quot;hold&quot; is used during the first five days to prompt the questioner (called the original poster or &quot;OP&quot; in our lingo) to update the question.  If no update is made, the word is changed from &quot;hold&quot; to &quot;closed.&quot;  Questions may be reopened&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;at any time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;No hold/close (&quot;disabled&quot;) condition is permanent.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T08:04:14.627" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T08:04:14.627" Title="Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|reference|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T22:21:01.963" Score="4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;About an hour ago I was feeling pretty sad that my questions were getting closed and downvotes, and that I had a 7 day suspension. Michael Kjörling edited my question every time I tried to destroy it, so thanks. I never registered, so my question is: can I get my old account back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52876" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Paul" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:25:37.113" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:25:37.113" Title="Is there a way to get my other account back?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6389" CreationDate="2018-07-10T02:01:15.177" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can ask Stack Exchange to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;merge your two accounts&lt;/a&gt;.  They will confirm that you own the other account, probably by sending email or maybe by asking you to provide information that only the account owner would know.  You should also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/why-register&quot;&gt;register&lt;/a&gt; this account so that you will not be dependent on a browser cookie for access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not suspended.  You encountered an automatic, temporary question block that's built into the system to slow people down before they dig themselves into too deep a hole.  Sometimes new users have a bit of a rough start on Stack Exchange because our Q&amp;amp;A format is very different from discussion forums.  It happens; please don't sweat it.  Let's focus on how to move forward so you can get answers to your questions and participate in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of your questions has been edited and is on the way to being reopened.  That's the point of putting questions on hold -- not to shut them down forever, but to prevent answers from coming in while you and the community are fixing the question so it fits our site.  When you edit, experienced users review the changes and can cast reopen votes.  This takes some time, though, because people are spread all across the world and its time zones, so please be patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixing the issues with a question so it can be reopened not only gets you answers, but usually gets you upvotes which give you reputation.  Earning reputation also counters the automatic block you encountered.  When a question runs into trouble please &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; ask it again in a new question; that actually makes things worse.  Editing is built into the system and is the way to address issues brought up by the community in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T02:01:15.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2018-07-10T04:19:18.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made my comment because how to reach an end goal from a beginning starting point (no matter what that starting point is), is the basic lesson of all creative writing classes.  And there are hundreds, possibly thousands of creative writing classes, websites, and youtube videos describing just as many processes for organizing information and developing a new world.  I respect that you believe you're perspective is unique.  I hope you can respect mine.  I've lived in a lot of small towns.  Every small town will tell you that they are unique and you really can't understand them unless you grew up there.  The reality is they're all cookie-cutter identical.  The only thing that changes is the names of the people involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of specific worldbuilding-process questions are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the listed attributes of my world, what process would I use to create a basic weather model?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the listed attributes of my world, what process would I use to develop armies?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, possibly in your case...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the example characters from other fantasy worlds and their basic statistics, provided above, what process could I use to merge their descriptions and attributes into a cohesive world with common rules?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of the writing of my answer, your question is still listed as: &quot;How to sort and arrange the world properly?&quot;  Explaining this would take a book ... or a single phrase: write things down and go from there.  The book is &quot;too broad.&quot;  Telling you to write things down is probably unhelpful.  Without specificity, I can't see the path Secespitus sees &amp;mdash; because it appears you're asking us to explain how to use notebooks, 3x5 cards, and a filing cabinet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Although if you really want someplace to start, start by researching the trademark and copyright infringement behaviors of the companies you're considering.  Pokemon, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://alj.orangenius.com/pokmon-sues-biggest-fan-copyright-infringement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sued it's biggest fan in 2015 for copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt;.  These companies have built multi-million- and multi-billion-dollar companies and the very last thing they want is anyone messing with the golden egg.  Unless you're writing this just for your own amusement, please be warned that other people's intellectual property is never someone else's to use without permission and rarely tolerated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T04:19:18.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:13:59.277" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the candidates for the mod election, and most of their names reminded me something (of course: they are all very active on the site). However, I was not able to remember in which thread, if any, I interacted with them. Is there anyway to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments where we cited each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer I posted to a question from a specific user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer a specific user posted to one of my questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions where me and a specific user both answered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is nothing like this, I believe it would be useful, at least during election time. When I'm involved in a discussion with someone, I have a better idea of how this person handle some subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44800" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:36:14.263" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:36:14.263" Title="Is there a way to see my interactions with another user?" Tags="|support|election|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6392" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:39:28.623" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no easy ways, but you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackExchange Data Explorer (SEDE)&lt;/a&gt; to find these things. I made a few very simple queries with a few examples that I could remember at the top of my head. You can switch whether you are looking at the main site or the meta site in the upper right hand corner. Just copy the code and change the values for the Ids and usernames that interest you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just randomly chose Ids that I could find fast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments where we cited each other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872281/citing-each-other&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. Just change the UserId and the name. The first UserId is my own and I am searching for a text that would look like &quot;&lt;em&gt;bla&lt;/em&gt;dutch&lt;em&gt;bla&lt;/em&gt;&quot; when converted to lowercase text. This is to find interactions with the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch&quot;&gt;L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;. I am combining this with the search for comments by L.Dutch (the second Id is his) where he mentioned my name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find your Id and that from other people by going to their profile and looking at the URL in your browsers address bar. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&quot;&gt;my profile&lt;/a&gt; shows &lt;code&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&lt;/code&gt; and the important part is 28789. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in the first column will automatically take you to the specific comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer I posted to a question from the other specific user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872271/answer-to-other-persons-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. This time I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/353/mindwin&quot;&gt;Mindwin&lt;/a&gt;'s Id. The first Id should be your own (your answers) and the second from the person you are interested in (their question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in the first column will take you to the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer the other specific user posted to one of my questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just use the above query and switch the IDs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions where me and another specific user both answered&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872278/two-people-answered-the-same-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. I chose the Id from myself and L.Dutch again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link that you get as a result will take you to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:24:09.800" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:24:09.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2018-07-10T09:37:32.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;glad you're taking the time to read this as it also took me some time to write it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;code&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/code&gt;, and.. according to the date on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;my profile&lt;/a&gt; I joined to site in November 2014 - which should be somewhen around the start of the public beta I think. And, as you can see, I stayed (for better or worse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still enjoy being a regular on this site and part of its community, and continuously find myself reveling in the worlds some questions hint at (can I use 'reveling' in this context?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're wondering whether I've been up for the mod-vote before or not, I have not. So far I have never found myself in a position with the luxury of enough time for regular duties on the site (be it moderation, or otherwise). While still being tight on time some weeks, I've learned to manage myself and my private &amp;amp; work lives much better while growing older - giving me more confidence in claiming that I've got the time and mind for the job at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you haven't yet, please check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-117046&quot;&gt;this excellent blurb where I am rambling about my low rep-score and find excuses for my abysmal number of moderation badges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I will now proceed to answer the questionnaire, please feel free to point additional questions at me either in the comments, or over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, you'll have to deal with some of the worst content on the site, clean up after users, remain patient in the face of conflict, be subjected to abuse without lashing out . . . you get the idea. Often, moderating can be stressful and not a lot of fun. We're benevolent janitors, not benevolent dictators. &lt;strong&gt;Given the job description, why do you (still) want to be a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wish not, want not (I think this is a saying?). I do not, for reasons of myself need to become a mod on this site. But when the subject of a new election came up, someone on the chat pinged me to ask if I would nominate - telling me that they thought I'd make a useful mod. And that is enough for me, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stress is a matter of how you handle it and what coping mechanisms you put in place. As a normal user I am not as strongly judged as a mod, and I admit that so far I used this to allow myself showing some emotion in a debate. As a mod I will just have to refrain from doing so openly - like learning to set aside money for taxes and medical bills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conflict tends to be a sign of misunderstanding between two or more parties. And where there's misunderstanding, there's a chance for trying to clear it up. I enjoy putting myself into a person's point of view and trying to understand their points and arguments. I genuinely believe that the people that actively wish to anger and hurt others are a minority, and most simply do not understand that they hurt or anger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; describes what makes a good subjective question  -- it inspires longer answers explaining &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, it encourages answers that are backed up by facts and references, and it's more than mindless social fun.  Worldbuilding gets a lot of questions in the gray area here.  Some of them get closed as primarily opinion-based or too broad, others are left open and attract 10+ answers, and members of the community are confused about which precedents to follow.  As a moderator with a binding close (or reopen!) vote, as well as the usual abilities to edit and comment, how will you handle questions like these, and their answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question goes into the area of &lt;em&gt;Bad Subjective&lt;/em&gt; I will put it on-hold without remorse. But I will also try explaining to the querist &lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; it was put on-hold, what it being put on-hold means, and how we can get it back into the loop - together, as a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions being too open, broad, lax don't only hurt the site in the long-term. They also, more importantly, don't really help the querist in resolving the issue that made them come to us for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making them understand, and show them, the value of asking multiple concise questions, rather than a big and open one seems the right path here - in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's a pretty important topic, and one that is being discussed a lot right now: &lt;strong&gt;Where do you draw the line as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;real world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me &lt;strong&gt;personally&lt;/strong&gt; every question is on topic here, &lt;em&gt;as long&lt;/em&gt; as it is about resolving a problem encountered when building worlds. No matter how straight-forward or exotic said problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem is defined by an &lt;em&gt;initial situation&lt;/em&gt;, a &lt;em&gt;goal&lt;/em&gt; that wants to be achieved, and optionally thoughts and notes on what has been already tried, thought on - that did not deliver desired results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any question that is purely a matter of research, e.g. asking about population data in the medieval ages, is better suited to be asked on another, more specific, stack. There are research questions that are a good fit for this site, but they are &lt;em&gt;in my opinion&lt;/em&gt; a minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YET&lt;/strong&gt;, when becoming a mod, this doesn't really matter - does it? It will not be about what &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; stance, as a person is. In the capacity &lt;strong&gt;as a mod&lt;/strong&gt;, my stance on this subject will be &lt;em&gt;whatever the consensus on the moderator team &amp;amp; the worldbuilding stack is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How will your attitude towards close/reopen voting change now that your close/reopen votes are binding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see my attitude changing all that much. Currently I tend to close/reopen questions after examining them (and this examining happening most often when lurking the review queues).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will certainly more seldom cast a &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; close-vote though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a user whose attitude is &quot;I am surely right, it's the entire site to be wrong&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as they do not do anything that goes against the rules of the stack I do not see any reason to &lt;em&gt;handle&lt;/em&gt; them. It's their prerogative to have their own opinion, no matter how &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; it might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they start breaking the rules, harassing other users, and whatnot, then I will step up and try making them understand. If they continue, there are procedures such as temporary bans and what-not that can be used to cool a situation down and give both parties time to reflect on the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As above, it is their prerogative. If they go against site policies such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt;, then there are detailed steps to be taken, e.g. a temporary ban or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter how &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; their questions/answers are, the rules &amp;amp; policies are here to make the stack an enjoyable experience for all of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people with great knowledge are eccentrics or similar, if they can't learn to get along with others then they should rather write a book than participating in a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would seek discourse with them, in order to understand their reasons. Maybe the exchange will produce a new view for both of us, it might result in the action being reverted, or might not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I will not go against their decision if they are fully confident that it was the right course of action. They were elected by the community just as much as I would be in that situation - I am neither better, nor worse suited to make the call they made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A genie appears and grants you one wish related to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. You can change one aspect of the site. It could be something about the community (people post more questions, people post higher-quality answers, people deal with review queues quicker, …), about moderators (they start closing more/fewer questions, …), about the way the site works (some feature request gets fulfilled), etc. The genie adds, “no funny business about what ‘one aspect’ means!”. &lt;strong&gt;What do you wish for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some might already be aware, I would wish for there being a grace-period on questions before people can start answering them. So querists, especially new users, get a change to receive feedback on their question and have time to fix issues that might otherwise lead to the question's answers going into another direction than they expected/intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sandbox is a beautiful place and works amazingly well, but it is hidden behind a whole other stack (the worldbuilding meta) - which is not immediately known to new users, and often even unbeknownst to regulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What time period are you typically most active during, and how often are you active during that period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I live in Switzerland, the heart of Europe - so I'm mostly online during European business hours and into the late evening, so &lt;em&gt;spottily&lt;/em&gt; between ~0800UTC to ~1600UTC and &lt;em&gt;more actively&lt;/em&gt; ~1800UTC to ~2200CET.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see this is quite a range of time. That is because I've almost always got two browser tabs for WB open on any computer, one for &lt;em&gt;the chat&lt;/em&gt; and another for &lt;em&gt;the mainsite&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while currently being more reactive than active during the day, if necessary for moderator work I could and would reserve a fix slot for activity in the latter time-range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you could add, rewrite, or delete, one thing from the Help Center, what would that be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I would like to see &lt;em&gt;the sandbox&lt;/em&gt; linked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;, and have an informative paragraph added about it and the use of working on a question together before throwing it into a sea of help-vampires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T09:37:32.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6045" CreationDate="2018-07-10T12:49:58.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, looks like they removed the robot and the lady.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/312427/135565&quot;&gt;answer on MSE that mentions and asks for their return and I strongly recommend y'all to make your voices heard on the subject&lt;/a&gt; by voting appropriately&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T12:49:58.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6380" CreationDate="2018-07-10T13:36:53.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;But the flying whale?  Whither the flying whale??  Did someone feel the need to jazz this up with the addition of a flying whale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually the whole city is different as depicted here.  This city has a spiral tower and a rocket.  On the main site there is some sort of a flying buttress and a flying whale.  What is up with that?  What are the chances that Robo and Green would assume this exact pose the same distance outside two different alien desert cities? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want backstory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o8qJ0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o8qJ0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="31698" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T13:44:08.733" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T13:44:08.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T14:51:21.923" Score="84" ViewCount="1216" Body="&lt;p&gt;linked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6045/what-will-we-lose-with-the-redesign&quot;&gt;What will we lose with the redesign?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/312427&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer to site-changes, there is a possibility that we may lose &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/worldbuilding/img/figures.png?v=9929c8f67b27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these figures&lt;/a&gt; and the contruction-edge at the bottom of the page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed design&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbTwc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbTwc.png&quot; alt=&quot;proposed design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current design&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GSYWS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GSYWS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;current design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2916/worldbuilding-site-design?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; of the site's design being introduced, a lot of thought has gone into the site we know and love. It would be a great loss to lose these designs that have a place in our worldbuilding hearts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please upvote this to show your support in the current site-design, the true site-design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And please, show your support, SAVE THE ROBOT!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47051" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T13:57:29.183" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T13:57:29.183" Title="Save The Robot!" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2018-07-10T15:06:29.733" Score="63" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Some history&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me start with a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back - what, three and a half years ago? almost four - in the mists of ancient time, a strange site wandered into private and then public beta. We weren't like any site that had been seen before. We were trying to be a community of artists and writers and game designers and illustrators and storytellers and, most of all, people who do these things for &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt;. That's the important bit; while &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;fun often gets in the way of Q+A&lt;/a&gt;, most of us are building worlds and helping others do the same &lt;em&gt;as a hobby&lt;/em&gt;. Not a job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is kind of a polar opposite. It's a community of both programmers who have been working for decades and are older than many modern languages and novices who might just be here for a single semester of an intro CS class. There are plenty of people who sometimes program for the fun of it (Hi there!), but many, many people need to get something done, often for work. The no-nonsense, even minimalist design - and here I'm talking about the site art - works well there. For me, when I pop over, that's great. I'm getting a job done, and it could be important for what work I'm doing, and I don't need or want fun or whimsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange will never - and &lt;em&gt;must never&lt;/em&gt; - be Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I joined in October of 2014, shortly after public beta opened up, I didn't think the site would survive. Well, maybe that feeling really came to a head in 2015. We had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/116/627&quot;&gt;struggled with the problem of multiple answers since the beginning&lt;/a&gt;, wrestled with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/64/627&quot;&gt;good and bad subjectivity&lt;/a&gt;, and were marching towards &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/627&quot;&gt;problems with What-If questions&lt;/a&gt;. Knowing that our scope alone made us kind of unique was always something that nagged me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to support from Stack Overflow, Inc. - namely, giving us a chance - and the ground other sites had trodden before, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2767/627&quot;&gt;we made it&lt;/a&gt;. I can't tell you how extraordinary that felt. Graduation means a heck of a lot to any site, but for us - for me, at least - it gave us &lt;em&gt;validation&lt;/em&gt;. It validated the idea that our extraordinarily non-Stack-Overflow-esque scope, model and strategy could work. We didn't just have data and experiences; we had our benevolent overlords themselves telling us we could be, and were, successful. That was just . . . wow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2847/627&quot;&gt;the site design process started&lt;/a&gt;, and the ensuing weeks were absolutely wild. We have graphic designers and artists and skilled illustrators in the house, and I think people applied their skills and imaginations to create some awesome things. You know how the banner of our site has that futuristic city in the distance, and mountains to the left? That was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2852/627&quot;&gt;made by a user&lt;/a&gt;, DaaaahWhoosh. The idea of having a planet for an icon even came from multiple people (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2848/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2865/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;). Most of all, though, I think we all knew that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2851/627&quot;&gt;whimsy was going to have to play a part in things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2916/627&quot;&gt;it worked!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What with the new, streamlined designs, it feels like we're just a version of Stack Overflow with some color changes and a small banner slapped on top. And . . . that kinda hurts, given the struggles we've had and the work people went through to help contribute to the site design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I don't like&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for some specific critiques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Banner&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, with the proposed changes, it feels like ~90% of the design and personality is squeezed into the banner . . . which is much, much smaller than it currently is, and much smaller than it should be. I know this is something that would affect &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the sites, and I know it's probably too late to write it up as an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/312365/274942&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but still. . . I wish we could have more room for the banner - and &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; the site name. I feel like it's trapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a76Lr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a76Lr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sidebar&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm okay with the sidebar on Stack Overflow, when I'm sometimes switching between the main site and Teams, but I don't really like it here. It feels . . . I don't know. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/307866/274942&quot;&gt;It takes up a lot of space&lt;/a&gt;, and takes away from the &lt;em&gt;art&lt;/em&gt;, which I'll continue to complain about below. Like I said, it feels too &lt;em&gt;businesslike&lt;/em&gt;. We need a bit of whimsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Side colors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fan of the sides; as I think I said above, they feel like mere color changes from the base template (which is, I suppose &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-by-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-by-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-by-design&lt;/a&gt;). Most importantly, &lt;em&gt;they don't&lt;/em&gt; match. What's up with that? I would really, really like to have the same color - preferably one that flows better from the ground in the header, not just a change of orange. I'd like 'em to be more like terrain. With the old design, it kind of feels like you're walking on the surface of the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5lg0D.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5lg0D.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; to keep the current sites, which &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; just monochromatic, but if we have to lose them, it would be nice to have a single color that matches the rest of the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Slartibotfast and Pandora&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the robot and heroine have names . . . because the woman accompanying the robot is, of course, the protagonist of the story the old design tells. We like the duo so much that we tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3102/627&quot;&gt;to name&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3201/627&quot;&gt;them&lt;/a&gt;. They are a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; part of the design and feature prominently &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on our blog, Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;. I wholeheartedly agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/312427/274942&quot;&gt;Mithrandir's suggestion to keep them&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE1QJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE1QJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SAVE THE ROBOT! And Pandora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Mike Nichols pointed out that the meta site has some changes, not merely the grayscale coloring. For instance, Slartibotfast is replaced by an alien. This sort of thing would also be great to keep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZtKj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZtKj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;In summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this question was primarily about saving the robot, but I got a bit carried away. So if I had to boil down my argument for the things I'd like to change about the proposed designs, I'd say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are a site of whimsy and merriment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All good merrymakers like relevant site designs that showcase personality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our personality &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; to show in the site banner . . . but doesn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sides are extraordinarily important, but have lost everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I moderate a number of sites, and have been with many sites since the beginning. &lt;strong&gt;I have yet to encounter a more passionate community than the one on Worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt; I mean, there's a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; sense of community pride and interest in supporting and promoting the site - see again our blog. We have decent activity in chat, and, most importantly, meta is pretty active. In other words, people &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; to a degree I haven't experienced firsthand on any other site I've participated on. We're not unique in this, but still. It's kinda heartwarming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it's going to be a couple weeks before the new design gets applied to Worldbuilding. I know that there will be a time and a place for voicing these concerns. I also know that some/most of the things I talked about here can't be implemented. So this is all wishful thinking. But can we at the very, very least - if we're gonna lose a lot of things that make our site what it is - for the sake of Glarnak keep Slartibotfast and Pandora?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T16:23:53.947" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-11T11:43:10.900" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get users here who really just want help writing their story, but don't understand how our site works. There are countless examples. While such questions don't belong on our site, I'd still like to make sure the users get help. Should we redirect users who post questions that are too story based or too broad to The &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt; in the hope that they can work out their problem there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T11:50:58.657" Title="Should we direct users whose question will be closed to the Factory Floor?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6400" CreationDate="2018-07-11T11:50:58.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's nice to point them to the Factory Floor for more open-ended discussions. Just make sure to mention the requirement of having at least 20 reputation on the StackExchange network. It would be incredibly fruststrating for a new user to get their question closed with a terse comment that says &quot;Go there&quot; only to find they are not allowed to do anything &quot;there&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally you would simply write a normal &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5255/28789&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Welcome to WorldBuilding!&lt;/em&gt;-comment&lt;/a&gt; and add a little sentence like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you would like a more open-ended discussion you could visit our &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; once you have 20 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little tip: by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6116/can-we-change-the-privilege-page-for-comment-everywhere-to-explicitly-mention&quot;&gt;magic link&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; you only link to the generic chat page and not directly the Factory Floor, so as you did in the question here linking to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt; directly can prevent them from accidentally checking out one of the lesser used chat rooms. But it's also a little bit more work, so if you just come across a post that is in need of a little help but don't have the time to write a longer comment explaining everything: by all means, please direct new users to the &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; with a little remark like &quot;once you have 20 reputation&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat is not a solution for all problems, but it can certainly help if they are searching for open-ended discussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition linking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; can be good to help them work on a draft once they have 5 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T11:50:58.657" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-07-11T20:16:58.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;December 26, 2022&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After 4.5 years of experience with this policy, my opinion is no longer completely reflected by either of my answers to this post. It can be better stated as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Real World question is on-topic for Worldbuilding.SE when a worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;condition&lt;/em&gt; is provided that *separates the question from the Real World.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a question that asks, &amp;quot;A 1,000 tonne comet is accelerated to 90% the speed of light. It passes within 1,000 km of Earth. How does that affect Earth's orbit?&amp;quot; would, IMO, pass the expectations for a Real World question on this Stack because while the answer reflects 100% Real World science, it's a situation we humans simply don't experience (and haven't experienced, that we know of). In short, the &amp;quot;Real World&amp;quot; includes the experience of humanity, and asking for something outside that experience would constitute worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, asking &amp;quot;What would happen if a 10 tonne meteor hits Tunguska, Russia?&amp;quot; should be, IMO, &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; because simple research into similar meteor impacts that have happened within human experience (aka, it really is a 100% Real Life question) answers the question or there are other Stacks dedicated to specifically this kind of question that should be receiving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117891/would-a-diamond-layering-on-a-tool-be-more-efficient-than-iron-or-steel&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch said in a comment, &amp;quot;I am missing the worldbuilding element in your question, it sounds like a hobby bob question, and as such better suited for the dedicated SE. Can you clarify the worldbuilding problem you are asking us to solve?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was subsequently closed as off-topic:not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I asked why and pointed to this post, Secepitus directed me to the following bullet point from the above post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, the problem is solved by including the phrase, &amp;quot;I'm writing a story...&amp;quot; in the question.  What does it matter if context is provided?  It's a superficial restriction that adds nothing to the question.  It's only purpose is to give people a reason to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should either be all-in or all-out.  Inviting OPs to rationalize why they should be allowed to ask the question here is simply petty on our part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we really expect OPs to rationalize asking real-world questions here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you believe this should have been posted as a new question, let me know.  I'm just trying to keep all the dust in one corner.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-26T21:13:18.420" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T21:13:18.420" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T02:22:14.273" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just answered a question, and a few minutes later another user went on an edit spree, editing the question and three of the seven answers. They have enough reputation that they don't need their edits reviewed. Some edits were good, but some were completely unnecessary, or in the case of my answer, all incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't address this user because they haven't left a comment on this page, and also I don't want to call them out and distract from the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I get a message to them to be more careful with their edits and to not edit for style, only mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3624" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T02:41:53.100" Title="How do you ask a user to stop making unnecessary edits?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6403" CreationDate="2018-07-12T03:09:18.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got a couple of options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has edited a post (or participated on it in some way, including the author, editors, commenters, and, for questions, anyone who voted to close/reopen or set a bounty) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/274942&quot;&gt;can be pinged in a comment&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, if they've edited a post, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be able to write something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@username, I feel like you've made some unnecessary edits like [X Y Z]; for instance, your edit to my post is unnecessary and even incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they'd be notified. Beware, though - the autocomplete for the username only works for commenters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat is another option; if they frequent &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, you can message them there, using the same &lt;code&gt;@username&lt;/code&gt; syntax. If they have enough reputation points to edit without review, they have the privilege to use chat, although most site user's aren't regular chat users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think this is a large-scale problem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/24560/274942&quot;&gt;you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; flag the post&lt;/a&gt; using a custom mod flag, and briefly explain the issue to us. We might take some action, such as contacting the user, &lt;strong&gt;if the problem is severe enough&lt;/strong&gt;. Emphasis intended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's one or two cases, go with #1 first; it's guaranteed to reach the user. If you want a longer discussion on it, #2 is a backup option. Finally, use #3 for large-scale trends that the mod team needs to be aware of - even if you still go for one of the other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T13:29:06.407" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T13:29:06.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T13:22:55.937" Score="4" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;This meta question&lt;/a&gt; has sparked a flurry of responses saying we need to get tough on homework questions being asked under the guise of worldbuilding. This argument has come up several times in the 'are real world questions on topic' debate, and it's confused me the whole time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is attempting to solve a problem which doesn't exist. I've been moderately active for about a year at this point and I've never once seen a question that made me think someone was trying to circumvent the &quot;no homework&quot; policy of other sites. Worse, I can see anyone who doesn't agree with the no real-world questions using the homework policy to close questions they see as &quot;too real world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole concept seems too implausible to me. I can't imagine someone getting stuck on a physics problem, asking on Physics.se, getting rejected and having their next thought be Worldbuilding of all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I simply missed some glaring examples? Is this actually a problem, or are people simply worried that it has the potential to become one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39583" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T18:47:04.753" Title="Why is everyone suddenly so strongly against homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6405" CreationDate="2018-07-12T13:37:53.850" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is commonly called a &quot;Homework question&quot; on WorldBuilding.SE is basically a real-world question that can easily be answered by a little research and shows no interest in building a fictional world. It's fine to have a fictional world based on the real world (it's the only sample we have after all) and it's fine to ask about real world stuff in such a context &lt;em&gt;if it's visible what problem you are trying to solve in constructing your world&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117891/28789&quot;&gt;Would a diamond layering on a tool be more efficient than iron or steel?&lt;/a&gt;. The whole question reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I put a diamond layering on a chainsaw or other tools, would it make it faster and more efficient than a layer of iron or steel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a real world question and people are arguing that it should therefore be on-topic. But personally I don't see any worldbuilding context here, which is required as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;referenced meta proposal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Attempt to do your own research. If a quick google search will answer your question it may not be worth posting a question on the site. Generally, querents are expected to demonstrate what has been tried and why it was not sufficient or did not work. This too helps people answering understand what you are trying to accomplish as well as your level of knowledge on the topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Define your requirements and by what you will judge answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take some of the comments under the linked Main site question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117891/would-a-diamond-layering-on-a-tool-be-more-efficient-than-iron-or-steel#comment362048_117891&quot;&gt;L.Dutch mentioned&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a google search will answer that. There is also a dedicated wikipedia page &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the OP responded with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks, can you give me the link? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently they aren't interested in building a world. They are not mentioning what they are trying to achieve with that layer of diamond. They don't mention why the tools need to be faster and more efficient. They don't mention what their goal is and what they expect from answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They simply wanted a link to Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I have to agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117891/would-a-diamond-layering-on-a-tool-be-more-efficient-than-iron-or-steel#comment362246_117891&quot;&gt;another comment from L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;apparently the OP is satisfied of getting a Wikipedia link with a list of diamond tools... I am positive we are not just a mirror for Wikipedia...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a site dedicated to building fictional worlds, not a search engine for finding Wikipedia articles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need worldbuilding context and we need the OP to show that they researched the topic and found a problem while creating their world that we can help them with. We are not a copy of Wikipedia, we are not the search engine for people that don't want to google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6402/28789&quot;&gt;this recent addition to the linked proposal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are you trying to achieve with &quot;X&quot; in your story? Why is it necessary to have it faster/more efficient? What's your goal in asking this question specifically here? The goal of this specific guideline is to know what the OP is trying to achieve to know what direction we need to go with answers and what the problems are that the OP encountered. Adding &quot;For a story&quot; is insufficient for this and does not help at all to understand the underlying problems of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We give the OP the benefit of doubt, but there are times when this benefit is just not warranted. If you post on &quot;WorldBuilding.SE&quot; you likely want a worldbulding perspective. But if you are not interested in telling us &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you need that perspective then other sites might be better suited for your needs. Real world questions are on-topic if they show the effort to be with worldbuilding in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can't see the context and effort a question is a &quot;Homework question&quot; and should be closed. We are not a dumping ground for whatever idea comes to mind. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=45347874#45347874&quot;&gt;I've mentioned in the chat before&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Give me some context about what you are building (Book? Game? ...) and why you need help from people with experience in building fictional worlds (Why is Wikipedia not enough?) and I am fine with a lot. But I am not fine with this being used as an excuse to ask anything that comes to your mind just because there could be a fictional world that is exactly like ours and where your character has the exact same problem with programming that you do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem and with the current trend to declare everything to be on-topic just because &quot;real world questions are on-topic&quot; it is becoming a &lt;em&gt;bigger&lt;/em&gt; problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T13:37:53.850" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T13:39:04.760" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was going about my business on Worldbuilding today, when I tried to flag a post and found myself under a flag ban.  While I was under a flag-ban previously, it had expired a few days earlier.  I went to check which of my flags had been declined and found that none of them had.  Instead, I found that apparently a flag declined on July 2nd was one of my declined flags for the last 7 days.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2eTC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2eTC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image was taken today, July 12th&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that it is currently July 12th, and a flag declined 10 days ago is not the same thing as a flag declined in the last 7 days, this makes little sense to me.  Is this a bug, or a feature of some kind I was unaware of, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastEditorUserId="34744" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T13:43:55.013" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T13:48:11.893" Title="Flags declined in the last 7 days...not?" Tags="|support|bug|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6403" CreationDate="2018-07-13T02:41:53.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Piggybacking onto HDE 226868's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; You can also &quot;edit the edit&quot; by accepting what you consider to be good edits and changing what you consider to be bad edits. You can also completely revert the edit, restoring your original text. I did that once, having been moderately miffed by what amounted to a rewriting of an answer of mine. I didn't think that kind of edit was cool. Recently, another answer of mine was edited for typos and minor stylistic stuff. I'm fine with that and let it be without further ado.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you can really do to &quot;stop&quot; someone from needless editing is to ask them not to needlessly edit your answers. You can do that in a comment. I think any further action would fall to the curious and arcane powers of the Mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T02:41:53.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-13T04:51:42.203" Score="-2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was originally an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate/6402#6402&quot;&gt;answer to the real-world questions discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117891/would-a-diamond-layering-on-a-tool-be-more-efficient-than-iron-or-steel&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch said in a comment to the referenced question, &amp;quot;I am missing the worldbuilding element in your question, it sounds like a hobby bob question, and as such better suited for the dedicated SE. Can you clarify the worldbuilding problem you are asking us to solve?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was subsequently closed as off-topic:not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I asked why and pointed to the real-world question discussion, Secespitus directed me to the following bullet point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm requesting clarification of what &amp;quot;context&amp;quot; refers to in the above statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Position #1&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Context&amp;quot; refers to justification that the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;questioner's&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; purpose or intent is specifically worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective (and as an example of my beliefs), this problem is solved trivially by including the phrase, &amp;quot;I'm writing a story...&amp;quot; in the question.  What does it matter if rationalization is provided?  It's a superficial restriction that adds nothing to the question.  It's only purpose is to give people a reason to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Position #2&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Context&amp;quot; is information or background supporting the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and improving the opportunity to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes more sense to me because it's about the question, not the intent or purpose of the questioner.  This asks for technology levels, weather patterns, orbital circumstances, information that actually improves the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning this issue there have been several comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm writing a story&amp;quot; is too shallow. What are you trying to achieve with &amp;quot;X&amp;quot; in your story? Why is it necessary to have it faster/more efficient? What's your goal in asking this question specifically here? The goal of this specific guideline is to know what the OP is trying to achieve to know what direction we need to go with answers and what the problems are that the OP encountered. Adding &amp;quot;For a story&amp;quot; is insufficient for this and does not help at all to understand the underlying problems of the question. &lt;strong&gt;Secespitus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we must expect OPs to rationalize asking real world questions; otherwise, this site becomes a kitchen sink for any question. &lt;strong&gt;Aify&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider that questions serve as a reference for other questions. They get found on google and if it's not clear what this is all about, all hell breaks lose. I wouldn't trust on this being called &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot; to communicate to everyone what the purpose is. I think this is a complex topic that should be dealt with in an extra thread. There are such cases and such cases, there are arguments for both sides, and this is a common issue, it would be nice to have this as a reference.  &lt;strong&gt;Raditz_35&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JBH's Perspective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (A) hard drive space is cheap, (B) My time isn't being wasted (why does anyone think their time is?), (C) Creating an environment of exclusivity is Stack Overflow's #1 problem.  The culture over there is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wretched&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and I'm very much hoping it doesn't infect us here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, we should either be all-in or all-out.  Every loophole provided to deny people asking real-world questions will be used to negate the Moderator's choice to make real-world questions on-topic.  If we're going to allow the &amp;quot;context&amp;quot; loophole&amp;quot; (which I'm seeing more frequently in comments over the last two days) we might as well make real-world questions off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, my problem isn't that they are or aren't on-topic, my problem is &lt;em&gt;consistency.&lt;/em&gt;  This (and all other rules) should be simple and straightforward.  There are too many compromises that only make life miserable for new OPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'd like to reiterate that.  I'm infinitely more concerned about the culture of this site and its willingness to be welcoming and helpful to new users as they learn how to write good questions than I am trying to protect what seems to me to be an effort to preserve the &amp;quot;purity&amp;quot; of the site.  Honestly, who cares how many questions there are?  Or whether or not some or many are low quality?  Like I said, disk space is cheap and if you're offended by a question, move on to the next one (and I'd like proof that the outside world would perceive us as a dumping ground of low quality information if we let people in and simply answer their questions).  Do we actually think people will stop visiting this site because we're willing to answer more questions? or are willing to help people learn to ask better questions?  How odd....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T05:39:02.413" Title="Request for Clarification: Real World Questions Requirement of Context" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-07-13T06:22:05.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To put this post into perspective, consider what this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow says about the problem of being unwelcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Too often, someone comes here to ask a question, only to be told that they did it wrong. They get snarky or condescending comments for not explaining what they’ve tried (that didn’t work). They get an answer… but the answerer gets scolded for “encouraging ‘low-quality’ questions.” They get downvoted, but don’t know why, or called lazy for not speaking English fluently. Or sometimes, everything actually goes well, and they get an answer! So they thank the poster… only to be told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are considered noise. &lt;strong&gt;All these experiences add up to making Stack Overflow a very unwelcoming place for far too many.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To anyone who wants to argue that much of the above behaviour is done by active users to improve the site, this is discussed in the Stack Overflow post quoted above, where it was found wanting. It's no longer the be-all and end-all excuse it used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, this experience applies to many new users coming to Worldbuilding SE. Since many of the participants here are technically minded, this can be put into numbers. According to our league Tables, over ninety-three (93%) percent of registered users have not attained more than two hundred (200) reputation points. This strongly suggests they were interested enough in Worldbuilding to register on this site and then turned away or became disinterested in participating in worldbuilding. It seems they have voted with their feet and walked away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar ratio of disaffected participants also exists for Stack Overflow. Whether similar ratios exist on other stack exchanges is an open question, but it would be interesting and enlightening if there are more welcoming stack exchanges out there on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is intended to give WBers a sense of the bigger picture and more context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post made specifically to deal with issues in relation about the site's culture. Similar issues have been raised at higher levels in the Stack Exchange Network. While JBH's post is about how to establish worldbuilding context in questions, culture does play a major role in shaping the behaviour of commenters and voters in dealing with questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T07:00:18.080" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T07:00:18.080" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-07-13T07:02:33.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I pointed out in other comments (see the the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117891/30492&quot;&gt;diamond tools question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6406/30492&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; IMO excellent analysis), there are some questions which simply shout &quot;I am too lazy to make a google search, do it for me and give me the link&quot;. (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/118009/30492&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt; even boldly wrote it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYG3t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYG3t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I think letting this happen would drastically reduce the quality of this Community. If we should turn to just a collection of Wikipedia links, what would our added value be? I believe our strong point as community is the ability of using our knowledge (which I sense it is vast, based on the excellent answers I read here and there) to lay bridges into the unknown of worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind, I recognize it's hard to cut a clear line between a &quot;too lazy to research&quot; and a somehow decent worldbuilding question. My personal and euristic metric is that if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it takes more effort typing the question here than googling it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's knowledge available to somebody out of high school&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it's likely a non worldbuilding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See these two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117891/30492&quot;&gt;diamond tools question&lt;/a&gt; : googling &quot;diamond tools&quot; returns a Wikipedia page as first link. 14 keystrokes against all the hassle of typing the entire question here, plus somebody typing the answer (point 1: check). Also, diamond tools are known to any laymen who goes into an hardware shop, one doesn't need a MD in engineering to know they are a thing (point 2: check). &lt;strong&gt;My conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117993/30492&quot;&gt;comfortable temperature question&lt;/a&gt; : googling &quot;comfort temperature&quot; returns again a Wikipedia page (point 1: check), but knowing how those temperatures are obtained required me to attend a class at university (point 2: miss). &lt;strong&gt;My conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: a tad lazy in research effort, but asking for not widely available knowledge, plus OP's given some worldbuilding context: answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize by myself that this is not a black&amp;amp;white situation, which gives room to interpretation. But this is what I have been able to elaborate until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I ask for what is the worldbuilding context of the question, is because I have experienced on my own that making up a worldbuinding context for a question is even harder than writing a good question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to help someone struggling with a foggy idea, but not willing to help a lazy guy who, instead of doing some research, asks here &quot;how do I do X?&quot; and hopes to get away with the fact that we also happen to answer real world question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T05:39:02.413" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T05:39:02.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-07-13T08:12:31.950" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6412/28789&quot;&gt;L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;: if we just allow every question we turn into a &quot;Please google that for me&quot; and a &quot;Which Wikipedia site contains these keywords?&quot; search engine. That's not what the site is supposed to be and not what the value should be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will focus on some of the things said in this question, the important parts have been bolded by me: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frankly, we should either be all-in or all-out. Every loophole provided to deny people asking real-world questions will be used to negate &lt;strong&gt;the Moderator's choice to make real-world questions on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are just normal users. Experienced users that deal with the worst crap on the site and deserve respect for their hard work, but in the end, when it comes to site scope, they are just normal, experienced users. They can't dictate what the site is about and they didn't do it in this case. Making it look like some dictators said that everything is on-topic now is doing them a disservice and cherry-picking the parts from the mentioned post that suit your agenda. Just like the &lt;em&gt;proposal&lt;/em&gt; our exception handlers &lt;em&gt;proposed&lt;/em&gt; because the discussion was spiraling out of control was about allowing real-world questions it was about having constraints with the explicit mentioning of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With all that said we still have to have expectations and standards, &lt;strong&gt;it can't just be a free for all&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above statement is in a h1 heading in the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we're going to allow the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;context&quot; loophole&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (which I'm seeing more frequently in comments over the last two days) we might as well make real-world questions off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see people exploiting a &quot;loophole&quot;, I see people cherry-picking. This is not a &quot;loophole&quot;, it's the intention behind the site. It can be seen everywhere. Looking at the help center I can see that the first sentence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; site mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for developers, designers, writers and artists to &lt;strong&gt;get help creating imaginary worlds&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing the context about what imaginary world you are building isn't about some hidden loophole. It's what you signed up for when you created your account here. The intention is to have questions and get answers about your worldbuilding. Going by technicalities that it doesn't explicitly spell out that you are supposed to provide context is the same as saying that the help center is useless because it doesn't explicitly spell out that you should write in a human understandable language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frankly, my problem isn't that they are or aren't on-topic, my problem is consistency. &lt;strong&gt;This (and all other rules) should be simple and straightforward&lt;/strong&gt;. There are too many compromises that only make life miserable for new OPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world everything would be black and white and every rule would be perfectly understandable by everyone no matter who reads it. Fact is, we are not living in a black-or-white world and there will be edge cases. That's what the normal voting processes are for. And yes, like in the real world sometimes things just aren't easy. I believe strongly in each individuals ability to discern that a site about creating imaginary worlds is interested in solving problems for imaginary worlds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd like to reiterate that. I'm infinitely more concerned about the culture of this site and its willingness to be welcoming and helpful to new users as they learn how to write good questions&lt;/strong&gt; than I am trying to protect what seems to me to be an effort to preserve the &quot;purity&quot; of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being helpful and welcoming doesn't mean we should allow everything. It means that we as a community should show the new user what is on-topic and what is off-topic. We should show them how to write good questions, as you say. But if we allow everything, why should they change? There have been quite a few trolls during my time here that exploited the willingness of others to help and never tried to improve. This is happening. And by saying that every question is acceptable we are teaching them &lt;em&gt;that every question is acceptable, no matter what it's about or what quality it has&lt;/em&gt;. How are people supposed to improve if we don't tell them what to improve and what the goal is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having rules doesn't mean we are unwelcoming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, we could work on our communication. There are times when you read a question and you think that people could be clearer about what they are doing. Leaving a comment pointing to the important resources that explain what a &quot;VTC&quot; is or what that means or how to get a question reopened once it's been put on hold or why we are doing this. But being welcoming doesn't mean we should simply abandon all rules and guidelines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Honestly, who cares how many questions there are? &lt;strong&gt;Or whether or not some or many are low quality?&lt;/strong&gt; Like I said, disk space is cheap and if you're offended by a question, move on to the next one (and I'd like proof that the outside world would perceive us as a dumping ground of low quality information if we let people in and simply answer their questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want a site with high quality questions and high quality answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because when I need help I want people to actually help me. I want answers that are useful to me. I want to move forward with my project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site allows any and all questions, like those asking for google or wikipedia links, then we need to allow those links. The questions are on-topic, so the corresponding answers would have to be, too, right? But what use is it for me if I have a complicated problem about orbital-mechanics and someone writes an answer with a link to the Wikipedia article about the three-body-problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also an avid reader of the site. There is so much interesting stuff here that people are thinking about. Reading is making the site fun for me. That's why I want to keep it as clean as possible, for example by editing posts. But I don't want to click through a hundred badly written google requests only to find one thing that I like to read. And I have to click through the questions to find stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we didn't close the diamond tool question then the user would know that they can ask like that here. They will continue to ask such questions and they won't be the only one because other people from the outside with this question will come here, see that they can write a google request and then continue to do just that. Because apparently that's enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we actually think people will stop visiting this site because we're willing to answer more questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is just a site that allows everything I can just use google, wikipedia or go to any other kind of forum. I am not here for that and so are many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about tightening the belt and only allowing excellent questions. But I don't see why we should open up the site for any question you can come up with. If you want programming help you should go to the experts for programming, not to the worldbuilders. If you have a problem with tools for your home project you should go to the experts for tooling, not the worldbuilders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a community of people that know quite a lot about quite a lot of topics with a focus on using this knowledge to create fictional worlds. We are not experts in everything and we should not allow everything. We should allow the things we are experts in. That's the goal of the StackExchange network and I strongly believe in it. Expert communities that help beginners and experts in the topic alike. Not communities that help everyone with everything that comes to their mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are here because they need help with worldbuilding or want to provide help for worldbuilders or because they like to read what other worldbuilders are building. People are not here to see a different interface to google and Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be nice in asking for quality content, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or are willing to help people learn to ask better questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are we supposed to help people learn to ask better questions if there is nothing to be &quot;better&quot; in? Every question is allowed, so there is no way you could improve. Why bother writing different if the last times worked? And yes, this has happened and it is happening. If you want prove look through the 2017-2018 Sandbox. We are pretty accommodating, increasing this more just leaves us open to be abused by trolls and by people not wanting to waste their time and therefore opting to waste ours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you're offended by a question, move on to the next one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is often the core of the position offered in the question. I will not ignore bad stuff. Then I can just go somewhere else where there are no rules and no community moderation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I need to ignore bad stuff and allow people to assume it's okay? If I don't like a question I can downvote. Sure. But why am I suddenly not allowed to interact with it anymore? Am I so worthless that I am not even allowed to express my opinion anymore? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are removing the community moderation part from the StackExchange network by saying that people are not allowed to interact with stuff they don't like anymore. If that is the position we should just remove closing and reopening, together with flagging and downvoting. I should just move on, right? If a spammer offends me, I should move on. If there is a bad question, I should move on. If there is a troll, I should move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core of the StackExchange network is community moderation. Telling people to not do that is to ignore the core of the network. You signed up for community moderation when you created your account. If a new user soon after signing up finds out that they don't like community moderation then I am personally fine with that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be welcoming. We should be nice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should work on our communication by being exemplary and writing useful, helpful and nice welcoming comments that guide new users to important resources where rules and guidelines are explained with the corresponding rationalizations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we shouldn't abandon all rules just because some people think that having rules equals being mean. That's a fallacy and is distracting from the core of questions like this one. You want to talk about site &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt;? Then talk about site &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; instead of drifting off into site &lt;em&gt;culture&lt;/em&gt; and proclaiming that everyone who has an opinion about the site scope is not welcoming and should just move on, leaving you alone in your bubble with others that feel the same - these are the only ones allowed to stay, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need worldbuilding context to answer the worldbuilding problem. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/352819&quot;&gt;XY-problem&lt;/a&gt; is a big thing for us on WorldBuilding. By mentioning what problem you are trying to solve people can answer the question you posted and can provide a frame challenge in case on is needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the diamond tool question was about very fast growing trees and how to keep them in check? Sure, we could have left the question alone and having someone post a wikipedia link the OP might have found their answer that they could have found themselves by using google instead of WorldBuilding.SE, but someone might come up with a better solution that the OP didn't think of. Burning the forest down for example. Or destroying the Earth around the trees to not allow them to grow any further. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. I have no idea what the setting was and what the problem was that the OP was trying to solve. I need that information to help guide the OP and help them solve their problem, but if they are not willing to provide the worldbuilding context then I can't help them with their problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not what the site is supposed to be. We are supposed to help people with their &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; and we can't do that without context, which is why context is required. That is what I perceive as &quot;Be nice.&quot; - try to help and solve the underlying problem, not be a quick helper for googling stuff. By just googling this we don't help them in the long run and we make this site just an interface for search engines that people use that are too lazy, according to their words, to use google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need the context, as is evident from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/28789&quot;&gt;this highly upvoted proposal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6283/28789&quot;&gt;this upvoted response&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6246/28789&quot;&gt;this upvoted response&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6175/28789&quot;&gt;this highly upvoted response&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6406/28789&quot;&gt;my answer to the last discussion about this that was also highly upvoted&lt;/a&gt; and the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6402/28789&quot;&gt;this response was a bit downvoted and got three comments in the direction of needing context, one of them being my comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, context is necessary to make a question on-topic on Worldbuilding because we need the information to help the OP. This has nothing to do with site culture and is not a sign of being unwelcoming to new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T17:17:07.537" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T17:17:07.537" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-07-13T15:11:43.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I agree with you that &quot;context&quot; has never been clearly defined and it is subject to personal interpretation. I think both of you propositions are good. Including either of these would help explain how the question is about worldbuilding. Sadly, the linked question does not have any of this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mentioning this famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, let me quote one part of it. The bold is mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considerations when asking a question relating to the real world:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide context.&lt;/strong&gt; Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attempt to do your own research.&lt;/strong&gt; If a quick google search will answer your question it may not be worth posting a question on the site. Generally, querents are expected to demonstrate what has been tried and why it was not sufficient or did not work. This too helps people answering understand what you are trying to accomplish as well as your level of knowledge on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Define your requirements and by what you will judge answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions that fail to adequately meet these requirements may be placed on hold even if they are not, &quot;off-topic.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that questions need a worldbuilding context and need to show some research effort. The question you linked meets none of the requirements. Thus I see no argument to keep it open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is not a law but just a guideline, I see this as a bottom line I can use to decide which questions meet our standards of quality. I think it's fair considering that other sites of the network have even higher standards of quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T15:11:43.893" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6405" CreationDate="2018-07-14T18:47:04.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the SE sites have a &amp;quot;we won't do your homework for you&amp;quot; rule.  Usually, the question is posed using language that looks and reads very much like a homework question.  Here's an example (not from our site):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A nearsighted (far-point = 98.2 cm and near-point = 11.3 cm) mad scientist wants to design a microscope that he can use without his glasses. The microscope should be designed to produce an image at his far-point when his eye is placed right at the eyepiece. The microscope is to use a converging objective lens of focal length fo = 0.34 cm, and a diverging eyepiece lens of focal length fe = -3.56 cm. The two lenses are separated by a distance of L = 44.9 cm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if a 2 μm high object is viewed using this microscope what would the height of the image be (in µm)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at what disctance from the eye does the image appear to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the angular size of the image (in radians)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if the scientist viewed this object with just his eyes, how high would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how close should he hold it if he wants to get the best look at it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what would the angular size be if he looked at it with just his eyes? (radians)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the angular magnification of the microscope for the scientist?  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/nearsighted-far-point-982-cm-near-point-113-cm-mad-scientist-wants-design-microscope-use-w-q18457628&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is one of principle.  We're not here to help people cheat on their homework or exams, nor are we here to help people understand their homework or exams.  It isn't that we don't have sympathy, its that the learning process is supposed to be one of discovery and internalization, and asking us avoids both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen homework questions on Electronics.SE that couldn't be easily Googled for an answer, so the simplicity of the question isn't the measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is not a no-homework rule in our Help Center nor has the issue been discussed as a matter of policy in Meta (other than as an ancilliary issue in another question).  It appears this question is as close as we've come to the issue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER!  One could legitimately claim that since our purpose is worldbuilding, that intrinsically excludes homework.  It probably does, but I was raised in a family full of lawyers and they'd see that as a grand opportunity for either a class-action lawsuit or a Supreme Court appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nor does this does mean I'm against it.  It means we need to propose a rule here on Meta (preferably linked to other site's rules for comparison) and get some concensus so we have someplace with clear instructions we can send people.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T18:47:04.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-14T22:14:00.373" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character-design&quot;&gt;This is the list of questions using the character-design tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally there were 10 questions associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/character-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;character-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;character-design&lt;/a&gt; tag.  I believed that character design is intrinsically not worldbuilding and with so few questions attached, I began to remove that tag and, where possible, attach a tag that made more sense (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't remove the tag from one question on the list.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/37288/disscribing-something-ive-never-been-through&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt;, which has been migrated to Writing.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the automation take care of this (the automatic garbage collection), or must something be done to remove the WB.SE tag from what is now a W.SE question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T02:52:43.353" Title="Trying to remove &quot;character-design&quot; tag, but can't remove the last association" Tags="|support|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-14T22:20:39.810" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the required 5 points in the &quot;far-future&quot; tag to subit this as a possible synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt; tag become a synonym of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synopsis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions concerning the immediate future, where technology is assumed to have advanced slightly while still recognizable to modern humans.  Questions utilizing this tag should focus on a particular technology and may be about a technology itself (how would this work) or the impact of a given technology on a particular topic (Society, Warfare, Economics, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synopsis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions of Earth\humans that extrapolate beyond available data: hundreds of years at least, thousands commonly, millions preferably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(although why &quot;millions&quot; is the preference is a good question...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two tags appear to cover the entirety of &quot;future.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T08:07:57.063" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T08:07:57.063" Title="Recommended: &quot;future&quot; a synonym for &quot;far-future&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2018-07-15T02:52:43.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The automatic cleanup of migration stubs will get it in a couple weeks.  I considered just deleting it now since it's destined to be deleted anyway, but the OP hasn't yet created an account on Writing, where the question was migrated, so I want to leave the breadcrumb here a little longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T02:52:43.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6417" CreationDate="2018-07-15T02:57:22.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, tags that are substrings of other tags make poor synonyms.  If &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt; didn't exist, then anybody typing &quot;future&quot; into the tags area would be offered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt; as options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it makes more sense to retag the 7 &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt; questions to one of the other two and kill the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with your comment about &quot;millions, preferably&quot;; I don't think that's how we use the tag, but I don't think the tag wiki should express an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T02:57:22.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2018-07-15T15:36:01.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ThorstenS added this to the original, but I'd like everyone's thoughts.  I'm not sure that &quot;per default, reality-based&quot; is correct.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITION from me, ThorstenS himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106/should-our-default-position-be-that-answers-should-be-science-logic-based-rath&quot;&gt;You seem to have missed completely this question where it was overwhelmingly decided that the default position &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; science/logic-based&lt;/a&gt;. As we have a three-tier system (reality-check, science-based and hard science) and reality-check is the lowest common denominator, questions and answer should be at least reality-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of removing/reducing the three tier system came up, but was decided negatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2004/does-hard-science-imply-science-based-imply-reality-check&quot;&gt;Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5287/do-we-need-the-reality-check-tag?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Do we need the reality-check tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;6. If not otherwise said, questions and answers are per default &lt;strike&gt;reality-based&lt;/strike&gt; science-/logic-based. If you need futuristic/magical elements in your story, describe the abilities and limits as accurately as possible.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Bad Example)&lt;/strong&gt; I need a liquid that dissolves everything! What is the best way to use this liquid in a weapon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, in what container was the &quot;liquid&quot; created? It is self-evident that a all-dissolving liquid is an oxymoron. Also the second part is much too broad &#xA;and invites opinion-based answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Good Example)&lt;/strong&gt; My protagonist is an alchemist and I need an acid which dissolves the most common and used metals in the world. How can I create the substance and what material is best to store it safely? (I am thinking about using it in crossbow arrowheads).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aqua Regia&lt;/a&gt; which is even available (and also used) in Middle Age alchemistry. Normal glassware would be sufficient for the second answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is a nice place to find out what is available and if some thing has fictitious properties, find out if there are logical loopholes which can be abused and make a story/world implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="7089" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T19:21:18.947" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T19:21:18.947" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-16T10:23:58.173" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some big personal opinion questions I want to discuss, that would fit perfectly into this site if they weren't so open ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does anybody know where I can ask them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47983" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T10:32:44.943" Title="Big wide questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2018-07-16T10:32:44.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, our main chat room. Depending on your timezone the activity there will vary, but in the chat we welcome open-ended opinion-based discussions about worldbuilding. This is also the perfect place for a bit of brainstorming if you are thinking about an idea, but don't have a draft yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a draft you could also try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where others help you to fine-tune it to the main site. If the question really is open-ended and opinion-based that won't help, but in case you are ever not sure if there isn't a way to make something on-topic it's worth it to drop a draft into the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the chat is not useful to you and the question just isn't a good fit for the site then you have to try different sites. There are many good questions that just don't really fit the StackExchange Q&amp;amp;A style. Personally I don't use other worldbuilding related forums, but I've heard that there is a subreddit that might be helpful for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T10:32:44.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T20:01:48.260" Score="14" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;3rd moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/75&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/75.png&quot; alt=&quot;Monty Wild&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30492&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/flair/30492.png&quot; alt=&quot;L.Dutch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/5724087510892544/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T19:34:50.777" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T19:34:50.777" Title="2018 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-17T20:04:03.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please join in giving our new moderators a very warm welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T20:04:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-17T20:10:41.853" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to our new moderators and thank you to &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; who stood in this election.  Go look at the summary report; that was a crazy fight to the finish!  We had a strong pool of candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T20:10:41.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-18T03:09:50.723" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for entrusting me. I will do my best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:09:50.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-18T07:20:55.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow, that was very close (not surprising given the excellent candidates I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to both of you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:20:55.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-18T12:46:58.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An amazing election! Looking at the election results it was fascinating to see how things played out. Congratulations to our new moderators. Well done. This was an excellent set of candidates. So commiserations to those who didn't win a place, and should there be another election, at some future time, I hope they will stand again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best of luck with your new responsibilities and have fun with it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T12:46:58.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6432" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-18T17:33:17.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T17:33:17.707" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T17:33:17.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6433" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-18T17:33:17.707" Score="0" Body="Indicates policy related questions or comment. Usage should be limited to matters of site policy, and not the theoretical policies or laws of a model government. " OwnerUserId="52909" LastEditorUserId="52909" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T10:02:38.923" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T10:02:38.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-18T21:43:14.053" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any answers here on worldbuilding.se that inspired the plot, an scene or dialogue of a film?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see some answers here that would be nice to see in a film trailer in a year or two, so I wonder if that already happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify on the scope; a &lt;em&gt;film&lt;/em&gt; here is one that matches the same (or most parts of the) eligibility rules as in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/91aa_rules.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academy Awards (RULE TWO ELIGIBILITY)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30318" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T21:43:14.053" Title="WB answers I can see in a film" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T16:47:09.967" Score="14" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page was written before the late 2019 changes to close-voting. However, much of the information is still relevant. &lt;em&gt;-JBH&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388/40609&quot;&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&lt;/a&gt; page for new users is up and running.  My next goal: An introduction to VTC reasons for new users.  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;the help center page&lt;/a&gt; isn't all that clear.  It could be just me, but the page (and linked pages) seem to be a bit of a forest for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because at least one of the VTC reasons, primarily opinion-based, is not defined the way Stack Exchange defines it at all.  This is a consistent problem here because we have no control over how that VTC reason (or any VTC reason) is presented when you click the &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; link.  Yuck.  I suspect, therefore, that this is the best we can come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; VTC reasons (1/2a/2b/2c/2d/3/4/5) and their current definitions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duplicate of...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic because...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-Topic: This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-Topic: You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/2113&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-Topic: This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-Topic: Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unclear what you're asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Rules...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We're looking for a clear, (ideally) one-paragraph description followed by both a good example and a bad example question along with links to the relevant Meta posts on the subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone has posted a proposal that's basically what you believe but you want to discuss alterations, that's a conversation for comments under that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you really disagree with a post, then propose your own answer for that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The highest voted answer for each VTC reason will be accepted in a final meta post that will cross-link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/avoiding-worldbuilding-se-culture-shock?noredirect=1#comment19712_6388&quot;&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd like this to go 7-10 days with a roll-up to a usable new-user reference on or about the end of the month.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T13:59:55.227" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T13:59:55.227" Title="Idea Refinement: Clarification and Examples of VTC Reasons for New Users" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|new-users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2018-07-19T16:47:20.757" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC Reason:&lt;/strong&gt; Primarily Opinion-Based (POB)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most difficult VTC reason for new users to understand because it is different from the default reason provided by Stack Exchange and we cannot change the text on the VTC form.  This explanation supercedes that form for all purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with a creative and imaginative site like Worldbuilding.SE is that most questions require opinion-based answers.  No question about (for example) magic can be answered based on facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Citation Needed]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;  Consequently, the meaning of POB has been modified to make it a meaningful VTC reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;POB means the OP (original poster) cannot select a best answer simply as a matter of the OP's opinion.  The OP is responsible for providing enough information to reasonably judge which answer will be the best including background information and a list of criteria, restrictions, or limitations that will be used to judge the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Good Example: left open)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Based on the above description of my magic system and my kingdom's legal system, how might Parliament enact a law to protect common citizens against unwanted spell effects?  The best answer will consider both personal injury and property damage while avoiding the need to register magicians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes this example good is that it points to necessary background information, it specifically identifies the people/organizations involved and the problem, and it lists constraints to identify the best answer.  The following question on the Main site is an excellent &quot;good example.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/148995/40609&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the disease?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second example on the main site is one that would today be voted to close as primarily opinion-based despite having the necessary data to be answered.  The data is visual rather than text and, as described in its comment chain, reflects real-world scientific analysis despite the question's brevity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38982/40609&quot;&gt;What are the evolutionary factors that could create a species that looks like E.T.?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Bad Example: closed as POB)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;My magicians are an unruly bunch who tend to cast fireball and lightning bolt without regard to others.  What could a medieval kingdom do to protect their serfs from these guys?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes this question bad is that there may or may not be additional information, the issue and the people involved are poorly defined and difficult to understand (making the question open-ended, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt;), and there's no method provided to judge one answer better than another.  Quite literally, &quot;the King could play music all the time to keep the magicians calm&quot; and &quot;laws declaring liability on the magician's part if their magic harms another person&quot; are equally valid answers with nothing but the OP's opinion to determine which is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4623/primarily-opinion-based-is-a-reason-to-edit-not-to-close&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Primarily Opinion Based&amp;quot; is a reason to edit, not to close&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5196/are-ideas-about-proposed-world-social-structures-inherently-primarily-opinion-b&quot;&gt;Are ideas about proposed world social structures inherently &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5138/the-problem-with-opinion-based-questions&quot;&gt;The problem with opinion based questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5991/magic-is-primarily-opinion-based-by-definition-so-what-does-a-pob-vtc-mean&quot;&gt;Magic is primarily opinion-based by definition, so what does a POB VTC mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5609/why-are-questions-with-multiple-answers-off-topic&quot;&gt;Why are questions with multiple answers off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3630/understanding-our-double-standard-regarding-some-opinion-based-questions&quot;&gt;Understanding our double standard regarding some opinion based questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3951/how-do-we-reconcile-rate-my-plausibility-questions-with-primarily-opinion-bas&quot;&gt;How do we reconcile &amp;quot;rate my plausibility&amp;quot; questions with &amp;quot;primarily opinion-based&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6000/i-have-an-implausible-end-goal-please-tell-me-how-to-get-there&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I have an implausible end goal. Please tell me how to get there!!&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5621/clarification-for-new-users-when-is-a-fishing-for-ideas-question-on-or-off-t&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64/back-it-up-policies&quot;&gt;Back It Up! policies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-06-16T13:51:05.260" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T13:51:05.260" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2018-07-19T16:57:19.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC Reason:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-Topic: This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network (OT:SITE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Stack Exchange sites have rules regarding whether or not they will accept a question migrated to their site and all SE sites have authority to reject a migration request.  Consequently, most Stack Exchange sites have their interconnection with this VTC reason disabled, meaning it's only valid purpose is to indicate that a question belongs on Worldbuilding Meta or Worldbuilding Main.  Therefore, it should only be used to vote that a question should be migrated from Main to Meta or vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe a question really should be migrated to another Stack Exchange site (e.g., Astronomy.SE), use the OT:MOD VTC reason and leave a comment for the moderators about which site you believe it should be migrated to.  Please remember that due to each SE site having authority to reject migration requests, it may not be possible to honor this request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Bad Example, closed as OT:SITE)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;(posted on main site:) Why was my previous question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note that real-world questions are on-topic and will not be migrated to other sites.  This rule comes with some expectations.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;Click Here&lt;/a&gt; for details or review the summary for OT:NAW.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2282/what-do-users-from-other-stack-exchange-sites-think-of-worldbuilding-stack-excha/2304#2304&quot;&gt;What do users from other Stack Exchange sites think of Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3911/resolving-the-real-world-problem&quot;&gt;Resolving the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3872/is-a-real-world-question-off-topic&quot;&gt;Is a &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; question off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-where-the-answer-is-it-exists-in-the-real-world&quot;&gt;How do we feel about questions where the answer is &amp;quot;it exists in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5602/is-worldbuildingse-suitable-for-writers-whose-works-are-more-or-less-realistic&quot;&gt;Is WorldbuildingSE suitable for writers whose works are, more or less, realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/651/is-the-international-waters-question-on-topic&quot;&gt;Is the &amp;quot;international waters&amp;quot; question on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2293/should-the-help-center-be-updated-to-specifically-list-real-world-history-questi&quot;&gt;Should the help center be updated to specifically list real world history questions as off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/how-do-we-feel-about-questions-where-the-answer-is-it-exists-in-the-real-world&quot;&gt;How do we feel about questions where the answer is &amp;quot;it exists in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T17:32:06.297" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T17:32:06.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2018-07-19T22:22:14.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC Reason:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-Topic: Unclear what you're asking (OT:UWA)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange (SE) is not a forum for discussion&lt;/a&gt;.  It is Q&amp;amp;A site, meaning that an Original Poster (OP) asks one specific question and selects one best answer from the answers given.  A question may be closed as OT:UWA for any of several reasons: (a) too many questions have been asked, (b) The question uses specialized vocabulary that few can understand, (c) the question is too ambiguious to permit focused answers, or (d) no actual question has been offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is tolerant and will regularly entertain some secondary questions in support of a primary question.  However, the community is not obligated to do so and OPs should not be in the habit of asking multiple questions.  One question per post, please.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might seem counterintuitive that a question using specialized vocabulary is unclear as the purpose of the specialized vocabulary is to make the statement unambiguous &amp;mdash; but the consequence is that perfectly reasonable answers will be lost because only a specialist can understand the question.  As much as possible, OPs should avoid the use of specialized vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question that is perfectly clear to the OP may not be clear at all to the community.  Questions should be specific, identifying their subjects and prerequisites, and identifying any conditions that narrow the scope of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Good Example)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;My starship will need to orbit both a gas giant with a sulfer-rich atmosphere and a habitable world with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere.  Using what we know of metals today, what metals would be best to build the hull to protect it against the high concentrations of nitrogen and sulfer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Good example is clear because it specifically explains the relationship between the ship and the planets, the criterion for the answer, and indicates exactly what information is wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Bad Example)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;My starship is in orbit and the gas giant contains a lot of sulfer while the habitable planet is unusually high in nitrogen.  How would I protect my ship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bad example question is unclear because we don't know the nature of the protection sought by the OP, whether or not either or both planets are involved &amp;mdash; or even if something other than the planets is involved.  We can make assumptions, but assupmtions lead to low-quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, questions are occasionally asked where no question is actually proposed.  In rare instances, no question mark exists in the post at all.  OPs should avoid being so caught up in explaining the background of their question that they forget to ask the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6049/how-to-fix-unclear-what-youre-asking&quot;&gt;How to fix &amp;quot;Unclear What You&amp;#39;re Asking&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4527/topic-specific-vocabulary&quot;&gt;Topic-Specific Vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T18:38:50.090" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T18:38:50.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-07-19T22:48:54.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I avoid X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;How do I stop X?  How do I keep my Y from X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions ask how to avoid a situation, effect, or condition.  While most questions ask in a &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; context (How do I?), these ask from the much more difficult &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; context (How do I not?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions are notoriously suceptible to being Primarily Opinion-Based (POB), meaning that the OP cannot judge which answer is better than any other without explaining the criterion for judgement.  Consequently, OPs should go out of their way to explain what makes a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T22:48:54.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T18:31:38.490" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks guys, I’m finally I full fledged member of this Stack Exchange. Willk, Alexander JBH thanks for the help. Now how do I round up all the other DTs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52876" OwnerDisplayName="DT Cooper" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T18:57:19.097" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:15:48.093" Title="I’m finally logged into Worldbuilding.SE, now how do I get my old accounts back?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6442" CreationDate="2018-07-22T19:03:22.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll need help from SE (moderators can't merge accounts); see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;this help topic&lt;/a&gt; for more about that.  If you don't have profile links or email addresses for all your past accounts, try searching the site to find some of your past questions (with luck, you remember enough about what you've asked to do this) and include those links with your request.  If you have any other identifying information, include that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a comment points out that you often ask about &quot;Qualians&quot;.  A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=Qualians+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;search on main for questions containing that word&lt;/a&gt; produces several results.  If any of those are you, you can right-click on a user name under a question to copy the URL to your clipboard and, from there, into your message to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The team has to balance between helping you bring all your accounts together, on the one hand, and avoiding merging an account that really belongs to somebody else, on the other.  Since, if you used bogus email addresses, they can't contact the other accounts to ask for confirmation, you're going to have to supply enough information to be persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T19:15:48.093" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:15:48.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-07-22T19:26:59.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congrats to the winners and also thanks to those who put there names forward but were unsuccessful this time - appreciate your willingness to try and serve the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:26:59.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-24T08:57:58.443" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/118628/energy-cost-of-creating-body-parts-from-nothing-but-energy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and included my own calculations in the question description. Now I wanted to ask a follow-up question with a similar aim and have some calculations that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be sufficient - just as in the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not happy how the original question turned out. It feels kind of off to answer the question within the question and then just ask &amp;quot;Am I correct?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be better form to answer my own questions with the calculations I have and thus give other people a more independent approach to answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read a few meta posts on self-answering, but I didn't feel they helped me decide in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a matter of preference for me, just structure and form. I do see the self-answering could be perceived as &amp;quot;fishing for upvotes&amp;quot; or something. The goal still is getting the best possible answer - if that is mine (which &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be) then that is fine. If I missed a few points and someone adds them in theirs then I'll take theirs, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6457/44086&quot;&gt;question in the sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. Sorry it took a while, but I didn't get to finish it yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T07:13:15.610" Title="Structure of a question: Giving your own calculations as an answer or including them in the question?" Tags="|discussion|self-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2018-07-24T09:20:21.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do see the self-answering could be perceived as &quot;fishing for upvotes&quot; or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general that is not the case. Quite the opposite: the goal of StackExchange is to share knowledge, so if you decide to share your knowledge by posting a question that you had and the answer you reached than that is very much how StackExchange is supposed to work and you deserve every single upvote you get from it. This is not &lt;em&gt;fishing&lt;/em&gt; - this is simply &lt;em&gt;contributing&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you want to do that is a different thing. Basically there are different forms of asking a question. The first one is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; style: you post a question and state what you think should happen with something like &quot;Does this make sense the way I have described my world?&quot; at the end. The second style is to choose self-answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd say that you should self-answering if you feel that you had a problem and researched it, arriving at a conclusion that you think could be satisfactory for people that might have a similar problem in the future. They ask the same question as you did and you found an answer, so why not share the knowledge? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are less sure that you have found a solution that actually works for your situation you should probably choose the reality-check style and state the current state of your research in your question. Basically this is a kind of question like: &quot;I have this problem. This is what I researched. My conclusion currently is that. But I feel there is something missing, for example X and Y do not seem ideal. What did I overlook?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the end this is a judgement call and you are the only one who can really decide how you want to do this. If you would like some feedback on how the question is phrased you can check out our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; once you have a draft, but ultimately it's up to you to decide what to do. There are no hard rules about self-answering, so if you feel that it might be for example a nice experiment after your last question did not work out the way you thought it would work out I'd say just go for it and self-answer your next question to see where it takes you. Some people like the &quot;Is this correct?&quot; style, while others prefer to focus on &quot;Questions and answers&quot; as the core of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally other people should answer similar in both cases. In one case they would have to say &quot;Yes, this works, you are right on X, Y and Z. / No, this works not because X, Y and Z.&quot;, while in the other case they just elaborate on &quot;X, Y and Z.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T09:20:21.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2018-07-24T11:26:52.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to remember when self-answering a question is that either the question or the answer &lt;strong&gt;must be able to stand on its own&lt;/strong&gt; regardless of who posted either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you don't get cut any slack because it's your own question. (For some people, it's the opposite. There isn't &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be any difference because it's a self-answer, but to the extent that there is, I more often see self-answers being judged more harshly rather than less so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question contain all the information needed to provide an answer? If no, then add the required information to the question. People looking to answer the question shouldn't need to read any existing answers (though doing so is often good form, to make sure you aren't repeating points already made in existing answers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the answer actually provide an answer to the question that is being asked? If no, then it's not an answer, but rather something else, possibly a clarification or follow-up to the question, and doesn't belong as an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T11:26:52.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-24T21:16:18.317" Score="7" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the course of time I have copied the common comment statements of others (e.g. &quot;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&quot;) and have had my comment statements copied by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that simply copy-and-pasting the statement means losing all the code, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239707/complete-list-of-help-center-magic-links&quot;&gt;magic links&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/157730&quot;&gt;more here&lt;/a&gt; (of which there are many and I don't use them as often as I should).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help out new users, please post your favorite or common comment scripts below.  &lt;strong&gt;Please remember that magic links only resolve in comments, they do not resolve in posts.&lt;/strong&gt;  For the convenience of all, it means a bit of work for we posters.  I recommend the following format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;New users: you would copy-and-paste the &quot;code&quot; in the PRE block, not the text in the example block.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is what my script will look like after it's rendered.  This means Magic Links like &lt;strong&gt;help center&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;tour&lt;/strong&gt; are rendered for users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;This is what my script will look like after it's rendered.&#xA;This means Magic Links like [help] and [tour] are rendered&#xA;for users.&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T06:48:10.327" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T18:36:26.787" Title="Catalog of common comment scripts" Tags="|discussion|comments|new-users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-07-24T21:17:42.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!  We're glad you could join us!  When you have a moment, please &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about our culture and take our &lt;strong&gt;tour&lt;/strong&gt;.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!  We're glad you could join us!  When you have a moment, please [click here](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se?noredirect=1) to learn more about our culture and take our [tour].  Thanks!&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T21:17:42.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-07-24T21:20:30.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're asking what we call a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt;, which isn't a good fit for our site.  Please review this link and help us by improving your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;You're asking what we call a [high concept question](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions), which isn't a good fit for our site.  Please review this link and help us by improving your question.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T21:20:30.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-07-24T21:21:43.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;[SE is not a discussion forum](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T21:21:43.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-07-25T00:02:29.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mine is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding, (Insert username)! If you have a moment, please take the &lt;strong&gt;tour&lt;/strong&gt; and visit the &lt;strong&gt;help center&lt;/strong&gt; to learn more about the site. You may also find &lt;strong&gt;Meta&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;The Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; useful. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a meta post on the culture and style of Worldbuilding.SE, just to help you understand our scope and methods, and how we do things here. Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour, help center, and Meta would all convert from magic links. The raw script (what you should copy+paste) is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding, (Insert username)! If you have a moment, please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. You may also find [meta] and [The Sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions) useful. [Here](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388) is a meta post on the culture and style of Worldbuilding.SE, just to help you understand our scope and methods, and how we do things here. Have fun!&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll modify as needed by changing parts of it or adding another notice. Remember to update it with the new link in case there's a new Sandbox (the current one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I adapted it from this answer from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5254/are-there-any-rules-or-a-specific-format-for-welcome-to-worldbuilding-comment/5255#5255&quot;&gt;Are there any rules or a specific format for &amp;quot;Welcome to WorldBuilding!&amp;quot; comments?&lt;/a&gt; But felt that meta and The Sandbox should be mentioned, and later on the post on &quot;Welcome to Worldbuilding!&quot;. Sometimes I'll customize it with magic links like &lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt;, or things like &quot;Nice first question!&quot; If I mean it. I pop into the first Q/A review queue, add this message to each new post, and then hit the skip button &amp;mdash; it lets me greet new users while letting others do the main review work, unless I feel like it that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't forget&lt;/strong&gt; to change the &quot;(insert username)&quot; to the name of the user, or simply delete it. I've had it happen to me a couple times that I'll comment using this script but leave the &quot;insert username&quot; in and have to go back and fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T13:25:10.130" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T13:25:10.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T15:38:26.467" Score="-1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/118966/restricting-antimatter-practical-rather-than-legal-measures&quot;&gt;Restricting antimatter - practical rather than legal measures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been processing a lot of answers tagged low-quality from this question and, though I could be wrong, I believe most of the tags are coming from the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not judging the OP for doing this.  Indeed, I think it's the right of an OP to expect answers be held to the conditions stated in the question.  Sometimes people get bogged down in the conditions and sometimes the conditions make the question difficult if not outright impossible to answer, but it's the OP's question and he/she has the right to set the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally the site is very lenient about this in that &quot;you can't do that, so try this&quot; answers are not tagged and deleted as a matter of course.  And right or wrong, it's become part of the culture of Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, the OP's desire to be strict with the answers has ruffled feathers.  (Remember, I'm in favor of OPs being allowed to be strict.)  The problem is that no one knew this going in, so there's been failed expectations and, with them, unhappiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What is the best way for an OP to announce they will be strict with answers, meaning answers that don't meet the conditions and terms of the question will be marked low-quality and deleted?  Is a tag (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strict-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strict-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strict-answers&lt;/a&gt;) sufficient, or should the OP use a custom announcement in the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;This question is NOT seeking to establish a general behavior or change in the culture on this site.  It is asking how best to work with OPs who want strict adherence to the terms of their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T16:52:36.423" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T19:44:58.413" Title="How to tell people answers must adhere strictly to the conditions of a question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6458" CreationDate="2018-07-25T16:37:39.167" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There shouldn't be a(nother) way for the OP to announce that they will be strict with answers (like with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag) as it implies that the question can in all other cases be ignored and prohibits reasonable frame-challenges&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The base assumption is that answers adhere to the rules layed out in the question. If people ignore the question their answers may be flagged as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot;. To make it easy for reviewers you should leave a comment to indicate what is wrong with the answer, especially if you are the OP. There is no way to see who flagged a post from the normal review queues. Leaving a comment also gives the poster of the answer the chance to react and edit their answer. It's very well possible that someone just genuinely overlooked something. Or they tried to write a frame-challenged and didn't quite manage it, as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2956/28789&quot;&gt;frame-challenge&lt;/a&gt; should for example state why the thing the OP is searching for is not really &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1838/28789&quot;&gt;what they &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tag is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the solution for this problem. Tags are simply a way to categorize questions into easier-to-find groups. We already have one meta-tag that is posing restrictions on answers, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and there is regularly some confusion about the usage of the tag. We can't expect new users to understand that in 99% of the cases tags are pretty much meaningless for the question and answers apart from bringing experts in the topic who marked them as favourites faster to the question, but in two cases, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strict-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strict-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strict-answers&lt;/a&gt;, they suddenly pose extra rules on questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also can't be an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strict-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strict-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strict-answers&lt;/a&gt;, which is one of the basic questions you should ask yourself when creating a tag. You can be an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;, or in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbital-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbital-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbital-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; questions, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sctrict-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sctrict-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sctrict-answers&lt;/a&gt; would apply to anything and is therefore simply not useful as a tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; at least means that you must be an expert in something that involves real world science and putting together equations and such, mostly in the context of things like orbital-mechanics. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strict-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strict-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strict-answers&lt;/a&gt; simply suggest that in all other cases people can ignore the question and write whatever they want because they don't have to strictly adhere to what the question says. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Meta tags are bad.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A special announcement is also not useful, because it's basically the same as with a tag, just more complicated. We would teach people that there are certain phrasings that suddenly magically transform what they said into a specific set of additional rules. But how will they find out about the wording? What if they do it a little bit different? Do the extra rules still apply? Why don't we have special rules for every topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the special announcement is in the right direction. We answer the questions that are asked, so if you ask that people to simply assume something and they still get hung up on that part without providing sufficient reasoning for their frame-challenge then it's simply not an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time the querent must accept that they will get frame-challenges from time to time. In many cases they won't be too happy about it, but sometimes they are simply what the querent &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; instead of what they &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;. As long as something is still a reasonable answer we shouldn't delete it just because it goes against the believes of the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should delete questions that simply don't answer the question by way of ignoring restrictions and answering their own version of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; delete well executed and reasoned frame-challenges that explain why the querents assumptions don't lead to the result the querent wants and give a reasonable different course of action or alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The querent should make it clear in the question what their expectations are and they have the right to flag answers as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; if they ignore basic assumptions without any reasonable explanation. They do not have the right to flag every answer as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; that is a frame-challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There shouldn't be a tag, special phrasing or similar way of providing the querent with a thing to point to and say &amp;quot;You didn't write an answer the way I wanted, so I am going to delete it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end the querent is free to accept the answer that helps them personally and thereby show what they perceive to be the answer most relevant to their specific situation. But StackExchange is meant to be a repository for all the people with a similar problem that will come here later and we shouldn't delete reasonable answers because they might very well help these people later. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2411/28789&quot;&gt;It might also very well happen that the OP realises that they can achieve their goal in a different way.&lt;/a&gt; Prohibiting frame-challenges would be robbing them of potentially useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T16:37:39.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6458" CreationDate="2018-07-25T17:39:21.757" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the best way for an OP to announce they will be strict with answers, meaning answers that don't meet the conditions and terms of the question will be marked low-quality and deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This should be our normal way of doing things.&lt;/strong&gt; If you ask how to boil eggs, it's not helpful to you if I post an answer on how to make an omelet. It doesn't matter how great the omelet-making answer is, it still isn't an answer to a question about boiling eggs. You shouldn't need to point out in the question that you aren't interested in answers on how to make omelets, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370/157730&quot; title=&quot;Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?&quot;&gt;apple pie&lt;/a&gt;. That should come by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck, if you ask how to boil eggs, unless you allow for magic answers, it's not even particularly helpful to you if I post an answer describing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;how to wave your magic wand&lt;/a&gt; for the raise-temperature-of-object spell, or even suggest that you might have a spell to raise the temperature of an object that you could just apply to the eggs in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frame challenges is more about telling OP that they really don't want to boil all of the eggs if they want to keep their poultry over time, and so if they want an industrial-scale egg-boiling machine, even if they're asking how to boil as many eggs as possible in as short a time as possible, they really shouldn't feed &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the eggs to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is a tag (e.g., strict-answers) sufficient, or should the OP use a custom announcement in the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, this question more or less comes down to &quot;do we need a tag or special disclaimer to indicate that we should do what we're supposed to already be doing?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that what I feel should be the answer to that is obvious from the phrasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Meta tags are problematic, and have been discouraged network-wide since 2010.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just here on Worldbuilding Meta, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4251/29&quot;&gt;Is “science-based” a meta- or otherwise-problematic tag?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2963/29&quot;&gt;Do we really need an anatomically-correct tag?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3997/29&quot;&gt;Is the tag [logical-consistency] workable?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/390/29&quot;&gt;Why no “big-list” tag?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5919/29&quot;&gt;Mutually-exclusive goals and how to discover them&lt;/a&gt; and probably a slew of others that a quick search didn't uncover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/283908/157730&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino's answer to &lt;em&gt;Are meta tags banned across the board on all Stack Exchange sites or can each site decide if it wants to allow meta tags?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange has some more background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange alone, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+%22meta+tags%22&quot;&gt;93 questions discussing meta tags directly and by term&lt;/a&gt;, and there's probably many more where they are discussed by that name only in answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have several meta tags on Worldbuilding, which to top things off are often used incorrectly. I think it's been a while since I saw a question tagged &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;, say, science-based, but that used to be a regular occurence. Maybe the community is just quicker at editing the tags on those questions these days. These tags don't tell us anything about the subject matter of a question; they impose restrictions on answers, in a way not obvious to a newcomer (whether that newcomer wants to post a question &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; an answer). &lt;strong&gt;Adding more such tags seem to me to be a really bad idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rather, unless OP states they are okay with alternative solutions, judge and answer the question based on what they are actually asking. If the question cannot be reasonably answered as asked, put on hold and get it fixed, whether that requires changing the premise or simply clarification of the purpose for which the question is being asked.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To top all of this off, I distinctly recall that at one point there was a proposal for a tag that would &lt;em&gt;allow&lt;/em&gt; for frame challenges; &lt;em&gt;basically the exact opposite of what you're proposing here.&lt;/em&gt; I can't seem to find it at the moment, and as I recall it got shot down pretty quickly, but if someone happens to come across it, please comment. It's out there somewhere...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T17:50:47.973" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T17:50:47.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2018-07-26T16:58:47.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Timeline&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help keep track of where different groups are at different times. Above the line is used for Bremdag and whoever is with him. Below the line is for other people/groups. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will try and keep this up to date but if you notice something is missing just tell me either in the comments or in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wm8DU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wm8DU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T16:58:47.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6458" CreationDate="2018-07-26T19:44:58.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that, as my question and actions are in the middle of this, I really should reply. I always try to be clear about the goals of my questions and strict in my interpretation of those goals. I try to give the same treatment to the questions of others, I was under the impression that a strict adherence to the premise of questions was generally &lt;em&gt;the only way to go&lt;/em&gt;. I also try not to be adverse to being told that the issue I envision is not the problem I think it is, or will not have the effect I foresee. I do take issue when I feel that the question is being ignored in favour of answering a question I did not in fact put, and I'm militant about expressing my opinion that that is what has happened with a given answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I have flagged three responses as non-answers, one says &quot;use legal means&quot;, which the title says is not the goal, and which the question reiterates is &lt;em&gt;really not the goal&lt;/em&gt; and why it's not the goal. One flag is for an answer that rather than placing restrictions on existing technological avenues proposes a weird science answer that actually does the opposite of what I want to do and makes antimatter proliferation a foregone conclusion. Then there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119160/40408&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which may be meant as a frame challenge but, especially when combined with the subsequent comments, comes off, to me, as &quot;you're an idiot, stop wasting our time&quot; and does nothing to address the actual question asked which is one of technology not the relative usefulness, if any, of the material I'd like to exclude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that flagging these sorts of responses is reasonable if they don't address the core issue the question has asked for. I don't think there should be an additional warning in questions that the OP wishes answers to respect the question as written, that should be the default. I also, and possibly this is a contradiction, don't think we should discourage legitimate frame-challenges where the answerer is pointing out that, given the question as written, the OP doesn't have the issue they think they have or has made a proposal that doesn't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T19:44:58.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6519" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:16:56.267" Score="28" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to the well-received &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4896/28789&quot;&gt;Should the rep requirement for Meta be lowered to 1?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently users need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;5 reputation to participate in Meta&lt;/a&gt;. The reason for this requirement, according to the privilege description, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because we allow anonymous participation, we require a small bit of parent site reputation to prevent spam, and ensure that meta is for active, engaged members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads for WB.SE to the situation that completely new users can't try our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6168/28789&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, which is specifically designed to help new users that are struggling to phrase their questions in such a way that they are well-received by the community. We are excluding the people that need this help the most from making use of this opportunity. It's also difficult to communicate to new users, because right now we have to mention that there is a rep requirement for participating on Meta and therefore for the Sandbox while telling them that they can get help for phrasing their questions in the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time lowering the reputation requirement to participate on Meta may potentially lead to new users mistaking Meta for the Main site or the whole Meta site for the Sandbox. It's also a meta-wide change that would make WorldBuilding from lots of other sites, which may make it more difficult for regular users from other sites to understand what's going on, for example when they see that a completely new user posts something on Meta. We already &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5089/28789&quot;&gt;raised the protection threshold for questions meta-wide for the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. But so far there seem to be no discussions indicating that this change had any negative consequences for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to lower the reputation requirement to participate on Meta. &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;ProgrammingPuzzles&amp;amp;CodeGolf already does this&lt;/a&gt;. As outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7084/65029&quot;&gt;Should we remove the reputation requirement for answering on meta?&lt;/a&gt; the reason for this is their &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2140/65029&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Challenges&lt;/a&gt;, which is supposed to help new users craft challenges. They also outlined that many other Stacks might not have usecases for completely new 1-rep users to post something on Meta, but in their case there is a clear advantage to allowing new people access to a resource that helps in writing a question for their site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12852/65029&quot;&gt;Did decreasing the amount of rep required for meta cause spam?&lt;/a&gt; to which &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12852/did-decreasing-the-amount-of-rep-required-for-meta-cause-spam#comment44123_12852&quot;&gt;a mod on PPCG replied in the comments&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We may have gotten a few more users that mistook meta for the sandbox or the main site, but no actual spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And under the only answer, which indicated that normal users didn't perceive any real spam because of this change, &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12852/did-decreasing-the-amount-of-rep-required-for-meta-cause-spam#comment44231_12853&quot;&gt;another mod mentioned&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some additional evidence: &lt;a href=&quot;https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;title=&amp;amp;body=&amp;amp;username=&amp;amp;why=&amp;amp;site=77&amp;amp;feedback=&amp;amp;autoflagged=&amp;amp;reason=&amp;amp;user_rep_direction=%3E%3D&amp;amp;user_reputation=0&amp;amp;commit=Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are no reports on MetaSmoke for spam on Meta.PPCG &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Given how good MS is at judging spam, I'd say this is a very strong indicator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4896/28789&quot;&gt;Should the rep requirement for Meta be lowered to 1?&lt;/a&gt; indicate that there some people don't want this change for WorldBuilding. The answers indicate that it would be a good change (Disclosure: one of the three answers is from myself). The votes show support for the different solutions outlined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can ask to have the rep requirement lowered to 1 for &lt;em&gt;question and answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can ask to have the rep requirement lowered to 1 for &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/274518/352819&quot;&gt;everyone with less than 5 rep can &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; ask about their &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; posts on Meta.&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is specifically meant as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;. Please vote to indicate whether you think this is a change that you want to see implemented or not. The linked discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4896/28789&quot;&gt;Should the rep requirement for Meta be lowered to 1?&lt;/a&gt; is specifically meant as a &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please upvote this feature-request to show that you want the rep requirement for participation on Meta to be lowered.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; upvote one of the specific proposal answers to indicate whether you want the rep requirement to be lowered only for answers or for answers &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please downvote this feature-request to show that you want the rep requirement for participation on Meta to stay the way it currently is.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this feature-request is to gauge how the community feels about lowering the rep requirement for participation on WorldBuilding Meta. The votes on this feature-request are the indicator for whether the community wants such a change or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T21:41:38.363" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T14:00:11.980" Title="Please lower the reputation requirement to participate on WB.SE Meta" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|sandbox|new-users|reputation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:16:56.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, we should lower the reputation requirement, but &lt;em&gt;only for answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lowering the reputation requirement to post answers, and therefore to participate in the Sandbox, is a good step to make communicating the usage of our Sandbox to new users easier. It allows easy access to the Sandbox in case people had a bad start and need help to write questions. This is in line with the already existing possibility of asking about your own posts on Meta - our Sandbox is just another way to ask about your own posts by allowing you to get feedback on a draft you intend to post as a question on Main. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we don't want people to mistake Meta for the Main site and accidentally post their questions here, just like we don't want them to mistake Meta as a whole for the Sandbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This already happens sometimes, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6312/28789&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where someone asked whether a certain phrasing would be on-topic. We don't want to have people regularly posting on Meta and having to close those drafts as duplicates to the Sandbox or migrate &quot;graduated drafts&quot; that were accidentally posted on Meta to Main. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:16:56.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:19:00.963" Score="23" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, we should lower the reputation requirement, for &lt;em&gt;questions and answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lowering the reputation requirement to post answers, and therefore to participate in the Sandbox, is a good step to make communicating the usage of our Sandbox to new users easier. It allows easy access to the Sandbox in case people had a bad start and need help to write questions. This is in line with the already existing possibility of asking about your own posts on Meta - our Sandbox is just another way to ask about your own posts by allowing you to get feedback on a draft you intend to post as a question on Main. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's important to be consistent. Telling a new user that they can post on Meta, but only in a specific format for their own questions and answers &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; if they post an answer, ideally only to the Sandbox, is too complicated and unnecessary. We can just allow them to ask and answer normally on Meta. We already migrate questions from Main to Meta from time to time where a new user didn't have the reputation to participate on Meta, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6442/28789&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Making only a change to the ability to answer on Meta would also allow new users to answer &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question on Meta, so it's not limited to using the Sandbox, which makes this change even more complicated - they can suddenly answer everything, but they can't ask anything, except about their own stuff, whereas the idea behind StackExchange should be to have a Question&amp;amp;Answer site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would reduce the amount of posts that were posted on Main instead of Meta with potentially a few more posts accidentally posted on Meta instead on Main. In the end it probably won't make a big difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the search query &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=migrated%3ayes%20is%3aq&quot;&gt;migrated:yes is:q&lt;/a&gt; we currently have 23 migrated, non-deleted posts on Meta that were migrated here, most likely from our Main site. This is a very small amount of posts when you think about how long the site already exists. This is something our community can easily handle in the rare cases this comes up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6464/please-lower-the-reputation-requirement-to-participate-on-wb-se-meta#comment19858_6466&quot;&gt;According to Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There have been 28 migrations here total (5 are deleted): 27 from main, and 1 from Meta.SE. And for completeness: 5 migrations away: 2 to main, 2 to Meta.SE, and 1 to Earth Sciences (really). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T07:04:41.330" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T07:04:41.330" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:32:27.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding a third option only for clarity in voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;No, let's keep the reputation limits where they are&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote on this based on your agreement to a statement like &quot;The reputation limit to participate on Meta is fine where it is; let's not change it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:32:27.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:40:13.370" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, lower the reputation limit, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me to be the only remaining option. Vote on this based on your agreement to a statement like &quot;Yes, we should lower the reputation limit for participation on Meta, but only for questions, not for answers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:40:13.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-07-27T14:57:37.367" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding the fifth option, because the sandbox, while useful, is not great.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is hard to find, and there are only a few users that actually provide feedback, and none of them are the close vote brigade that a user will have to face once a question graduates from the sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Retire the sandbox, get SE to give us access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295650/is-there-a-guide-for-the-triage-queue/295674#295674&quot;&gt;Triage queue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature is being tested on Stack Overflow, and has been in operation since 2015 or 2016, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/251737/triage-and-help-improvement-review-queues-at-sites-other-than-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;it may be time to expand it out to other sites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T14:57:37.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-07-28T17:48:34.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm storing this one here for the Sandbox people (okay, basically just me) and is adopted from Secespitus' common script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a reminder about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/sandbox-cleanup#4912&quot;&gt;keeping the Sandbox clean&lt;/a&gt;: are you still working on this draft? If so, please [edit] it to show how we may further help you. If not, please &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; your draft to shorten it to something like &quot;Not posted: &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and delete it. The current guidelines are that a draft is eligible for deletion after 30 days without an &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; from the OP and a comment like this one for at least 7 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;This is a reminder about [keeping the Sandbox clean](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/sandbox-cleanup#4912): are you still working on this draft? If so, please [edit] it to show how we may further help you. If not, please [edit] your draft to shorten it to something like &quot;Not posted: *title*&quot; and delete it. The current guidelines are that a draft is eligible for deletion after 30 days without an [edit] from the OP and a comment like this one for at least 7 days.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T18:36:06.020" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T18:36:06.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6474" CreationDate="2018-07-31T17:12:24.097" Score="8" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; tag for some time now, and it's been use a lot (310 questions as of today). Recently, we got a new tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; (4 questions). I've answered some questions in both tags, and I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be much difference in how the tags are used - in other words, it seems like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; is just being used the same way &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synonymize the two (not my preference).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarify their meaning, and make sure they're used appropriately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My definition of astrophysics is the science of applying the laws of physics to astronomical problems. For instance, I'd say that studying the orbits of stars is astronomy; studying the processes of nucleosynthesis inside them is astrophysics. Ideally, we could apply a similar definition to the tag, but the dividing line between the two terms is kind of fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we fix the confusion between the tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T13:36:25.357" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T13:36:25.357" Title="What's the difference between [astronomy] and [astrophysics]?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6473" CreationDate="2018-07-31T17:42:58.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a proposal as a wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astronomy&lt;/strong&gt;: for questions related to the study of planets, moons and stars and their motion on the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astrophysics&lt;/strong&gt;: for questions regarding orbital mechanics, stellar evolution, cosmology and the behavior of bodies in space.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T16:49:45.030" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T16:49:45.030" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-08-01T16:49:45.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5429" CreationDate="2018-08-01T01:29:02.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Can we add a line to the &amp;quot;Ask Question&amp;quot; page?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like the most intuitive place to put a link to the Sandbox, if not a blatant advertisement for it. There are two locations that I think might be good for this one, see mockups below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In the main body of the screen&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLfMt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLfMt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mockup with addition in the main body&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In the sidebar, where alternative questions already appear&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iRUNp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iRUNp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mockup with the addition in the sidebar&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5131/how-shall-we-make-the-sandbox-work-better/5148#5148&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that it's difficult to make this change because it's on the SE side of things, but I personally think it'd be the best possible place for a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T01:29:02.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-01T14:17:34.007" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions#6477&quot;&gt;this question draft&lt;/a&gt; in the Sandbox, entitled &quot;Meta Question: Should the science-based and/or hard-science tags automatically require answers to use S.I. Units?&quot; While I look forward to seeing the discussion it will spark, I wanted to ask: Is there any precedence or specific rule relating to posting Meta question drafts in the Sandbox for proposed questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Instead of asking about potential risk of being closed (which doesn't happen often in meta, as noted by @ArtificialSoul) the question instead asked about how to fix its tone to be neutral, so I would imagine that Sandboxed meta questions would have a slightly different goal in being Sandboxed.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49578" LastEditorUserId="49578" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T14:25:26.117" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T14:28:04.863" Title="Can we Sandbox meta questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6478" CreationDate="2018-08-01T14:28:04.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, there is no precedence (apart from the linked draft) - but why not?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention is to have a question Sandbox for questions on Main. For example I remember that there were arguments against it being used for questions+self-answer, but it was used like that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6457/28789&quot;&gt;once&lt;/a&gt; (10k link) after a little &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6448/28789&quot;&gt;meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't see a lot of harm in using the &lt;em&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/em&gt; for question drafts that go to main and question drafts that go to meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially because the traffic on meta is so slow and meta is &lt;em&gt;much, much&lt;/em&gt; more lenient about on-topicness I suspect there will likely not be a whole lot of cases where people will &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to use the Sandbox for drafting their meta question/discussion. But if you feel that you could use some help with grammar or collecting a few previous discussions about a topic or something like that the Sandbox is probably a good place. Just be explicit about it being a question intended for meta, link to meta-tags like &lt;code&gt;[meta-tag:discussion]&lt;/code&gt; and add a Sandbox note about &lt;em&gt;what exactly&lt;/em&gt; you expect from drafting it in the Sandbox instead of simply posting it directly. Also, you may need to expect less feedback. The main goal of the Sandbox is to help new users that have problems with main site questions. Meta discussions are really not such a big problem as far as I can tell, so people trying to help others in the Sandbox may very well focus their attention on other drafts if there is more to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T14:28:04.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T08:22:07.313" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy a lot of the answers from this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some of them I really like -- they are like little stories and I want to keep them around where I can find them and maybe where others might find them too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some particular examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/120013/2700&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/120013/2700&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/28554/2700&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/28554/2700&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was considering starting a blog on like tumblr or some such,&#xA;were I just copy-paste answers I like.&#xA;Giving links back to the the original answers and credits to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think CC SSA allows me to do that right?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there anything else I should be aware of, legally or for good manners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2700" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T09:19:29.017" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T09:19:29.017" Title="Reposting other peoples answers onto a personal blog" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6482" CreationDate="2018-08-02T08:39:41.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. The references I chose may or may not be outdated. If you want to be safe you should contact a lawyer. And possibly the SE staff with the contact button at the bottom of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/24611/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;Is it legal to copy Stack Overflow questions and answers?&lt;/a&gt;, I will simply copy the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/24618/352819&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; as it seems to perfectly answer the legal portion of this question. This was in response to a site that copy-pasted a question together with all the answers/comments/... &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is licenced under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Generic&lt;/a&gt;, which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt; — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is pretty clear that they have failed to do this (or any attribution whatsoever). So IMO (and IANAL) no: this usage is not legitimate. But &lt;strong&gt;within the terms of the cc-wiki agreement cited&lt;/strong&gt; re-use is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the cc-wiki licensing and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution policy&lt;/a&gt; are also linked on every footer page like so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F3XuJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click through to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution policy&lt;/a&gt; you will find the specifics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we require that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User&lt;/strong&gt; in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question&lt;/strong&gt; on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show the author names&lt;/strong&gt; for every question and answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink each author name&lt;/strong&gt; directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TinyURL&lt;/a&gt; URL or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nofollowed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a legal standpoint it seems like you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be fine &lt;em&gt;if you attribute&lt;/em&gt; the stuff you copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an ethical standpoint I would personally say that it might be a nice thing to write a comment to the person whose question/answer you want to copy and send them a link to your site in addition to attributing the content your copy. It might also be a nice thing to have a link to the blog/site/... here on Meta, for example in this discussion, in case someone is stumbling across your blog/site/... and wonders about whether this is legal or simply wants to check which questions/answers you copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:39:41.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6486" CreationDate="2018-08-02T15:18:59.390" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;A questioner has sufficiently clarified his question that my comments are no longer valid.  Normally, I'd just delete them, but they've been moved to chat, and I don't see a way to remove them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T19:51:05.193" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T19:51:05.193" Title="How to delete chat comments?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6485" CreationDate="2018-08-02T15:29:57.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat messages can't be removed after the edit period of 2 minutes. They will stay in the chat the way they are. Mods can theoretically change them, but there is no reason why they would need to do that for comments that served their purpose and were moved to chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/263853/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;Why is there a timeout to delete your own chat messages?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/80085/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;Allow owner of message to delete them in chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:29:57.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6505" CreationDate="2018-08-03T23:52:24.657" Score="5" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm not asking this because I'm terribly offended or anything. I legitimately want to better understand the methods for discerning good from bad questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/what-would-a-civilisation-be-like-whose-people-have-predetermined-lifespans&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; received generally positive feedback in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120183/what-does-an-ideologically-perfect-solipsistic-government-look-like&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions were accused of being too vague in the comments, understandably. But I'm confused about the tenure of the responses, because it seems to me that defining an entire society by the fact that they all know when they will die is less of a well-defined question than defining an entire society by a philosophical position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solipsism is not a &quot;minor philosophical position&quot; in terms of its impact on philosophy or in terms of the scope of its implications on a person's worldview; the question of solipsism is equivalent to the question which Plato spent his entire life trying to answer without actually using the word &quot;solipsism&quot; (that is, how we are able to identify external objects reliably by means of these sensory impulses invading our consciousness, for reference look up &quot;platonic objects&quot;); and it is essentially what Emanuel Kant thoroughly established in his &quot;Critique of Pure Reason&quot; as both the foundation of a theoretically viable worldview, and a challenge to all philosophies, hitherto unanswered by any popular approach in secular philosophy. It indeed has a limited impact on metaphysics, but we can only call it limited because of how well defined the impact is in a practical sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter question pertained to philosophy in a way no worse than how &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72647/would-lightning-strike-a-flying-island&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/119739/how-tall-do-atmosphere-retaining-walls-on-rotating-space-habitats-need-to-be/119751#119751&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; pertain to meteorology and the physical sciences, but nobody told those questioners that they were required to post reference materials defining their terms, and nobody told them that the questions belonged in another forum because of their scientific or meteorological nature. If someone didn't know about meteorology, he left the question alone. All four of the questions thus-far cited are expressly about hypothetical worlds and societies, and so belong well in the world-building category of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help me out here. What is the standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53619" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T11:21:38.807" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T15:35:23.623" Title="Why is one question acceptable, but another unacceptable?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-05T22:20:52.140" Score="19" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a shower thought, I thought that I am a bad user for asking more questions than I have answered, I have only answered 5 questions and I think that makes me a bad user, Am I right? Should I try to answer more questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also...Sorry for my hostile behaviour...I had some problems and I was not right, Gomenasai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T22:11:56.213" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T19:40:40.840" Title="Am I a bad user if I have more questions than answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-06T05:26:12.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have to answer based on my experience, there are several flavors of users, each with a particular preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some prefer to comment on questions, trying to improve clarity, some are focused on a single topic question, some are more dedicated to answering, some other... well, I think you got what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of them brings contribution to the community, so I don't feel like labeling them as &quot;bad users&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From another point of view, if &lt;em&gt;ab axurdo&lt;/em&gt; everybody would only answer questions, who would post them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as one sticks to the be nice policy and brings valuable contribution to the community I dare to say they are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T11:58:53.580" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T11:58:53.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-06T12:45:27.353" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general answer is &lt;strong&gt;no, you're not a bad user for posting more questions than answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without questions, there would be nothing to answer. &lt;em&gt;This isn't Jeopardy&lt;/em&gt; where we give the answer first and only then figure out what the question is. (Well... exceptions may apply, but that's the general idea.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different people participate in different ways. Some ask questions. Some answer questions. Some edit posts for clarity, spelling, and so on. Some spend a lot of time in the review queues. Some might do little more than vote posts up or down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you know what? &lt;em&gt;It's all fine!&lt;/em&gt; Every user who somehow contributes positively to the site is equally welcome. It doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you are contributing, as long as you do so &lt;em&gt;positively&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T12:45:27.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-07T07:59:59.700" Score="-2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5255/28224&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; already. Why are there &lt;em&gt;high rep&lt;/em&gt; users not even stating why they put this comment here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should understand that we put this in the comments as a way to &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt;, not confuse, the user. I would like to ask: can there be a way to have some sort of format? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if it's a new question, we guide them there. Then we don't stop at that point. Instead we (the user who posted this comment) should guide the new user up until they actually posted their first question that is well bounded according to the rules and guidelines of WB.SE. Posting it just for the sake of badges and or reputation is, frankly, not needed. Just flag the question if it does not conform to the guidelines of WB.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a good question, then praise the new user, along with why you think it's a good question, along with the &quot;tour&quot; so that we can help them to post more good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's bad, add the reason why it is bad, and at least try to help the person asking the question. Edit the question to conform to WB.SE rules and guidelines before putting the link to the &quot;tour&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's infuriating to see these comments on good questions. They are like chewing gums underneath your desk (if you had that problem). I'm sorry for rantíng like this, but what I would really like say is: if we want to help new users on posting great questions, &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; have to actually help them in the process, not just posting this comment for no reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As requested, here are the examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120457/28224&quot;&gt;Could Cobalt bind to nitrogen the same way iron would to oxygen in an alien respiratory system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119249/28224&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119249/28224&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120675/28224&quot;&gt;How would I create a society in which the known world has collapsed due to a demon influx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this time, take a look at JBH comment, and that comment of Gryphon, which is more welcoming? Which is more helpful? I am actually all ears in this, because I do think this avenue can help new users on how to post good questions, or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28224" LastEditorUserId="28224" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T03:23:22.737" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T22:05:17.950" Title="Please add your reasons for why you are writing a &quot;Welcome to Worldbuilding&quot; comment" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-07T19:28:28.143" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I posted a question to the worldbuilding stackexchange asking for help working out how a law banning the possession of certain supernatural abilities (which are granted on a weekly basis and can be voluntarily given up) could be enforced with minimal violation of civil rights. The question can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120530/how-could-power-control-laws-be-enforced-with-the-fewest-violations-of-civil-l&quot;&gt;Here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was apparently closed as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;, which as I understand it means that the answer to the question is mostly a matter of personal opinion and there is no knowledge or expertise that would be relevant to giving an accepted answer. I'm confused as to how this applies here, as a good answer to the question would involve knowledge about law and law enforcement. I didn't receive a single comment that explained any problems with it, it was just voted primarily opinion based. What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49980" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T19:39:10.147" Title="How can I fix this question about the enforcement of superpower bans?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6499" CreationDate="2018-08-07T19:39:10.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is closed as primarily opinion based, it means that it lacks the possibility of having an objective metric to evaluate all the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a workable method to enforce a law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a rather weak metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option for you is to make clear what are the criteria that you will use to evaluate the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T19:39:10.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-08-07T22:36:33.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;To welcome them to Worldbuilding!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your title question, I write a comment like this on anyone's post who hasn't gotten a welcome already. That's the only motivation. It doesn't matter if the question is excellent, average, or needs a lot of work. The sole purpose of this comment is to be welcoming and include them in the site, as well as (hopefully) providing them some resources that everyone on the site should be familiar with. We don't have a mandatory tour or a required lecture before you can use the site, so it's sometimes helpful for new users to get a better sense of the scope and feel of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still remember getting a comment like this on one of my first posts, and it really made me feel welcomed and special. It's quite possibly the reason that I've stuck around here a lot longer than I normally do on these Q&amp;amp;A forum-style sites, and I like to think it makes everyone else feel welcomed too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T22:36:33.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-08-08T03:47:22.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written some Welcome Comments and other assorted / related comment types in the past as well. My take on the matter is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;Welcome Comment&lt;/strong&gt;'s purpose, and its &lt;em&gt;sole purpose&lt;/em&gt; really, is to extend a virtual hand of friendship to a newcomer to the forum. Whether that person has been on SE for years and is just new to WB.SE in specific or whether that person is completely new to SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a common and I think sensible custom for welcome waggon members to point new members to the important resources that they will find most helpful (the tour and so forth).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything else is extraneous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. J brings up a valid point, though, about good questions, bad questions, questionable questions, and the like. Like I said in my comment above, it's completely up to the welcoming member(s) if they want to add any further commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My practice is indeed to add some kind of extra commentary to the base welcome message &lt;em&gt;if and only if the extra commentary is deemed necessary&lt;/em&gt;. I know I've written a couple to the effect of &quot;your question is interesting but WB.SE isn't the right forum - try That Forum instead&quot; and also &quot;you've got a good start to a question, but pretty soon the VTC crowd is going trounce it into oblivion for reasons X, Y &amp;amp; Z. Edit accordingly and your question will be fine!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My practice is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;most definitely not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to offer an &quot;attaboy&quot; comment just to stroke the new member's fragile self esteem. Anyway, that's really what the UPVOTE (and DOWNVOTE) buttons are for!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T03:47:22.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-08T04:03:19.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an old bromide regarding Catholic missions: &lt;em&gt;Some give by going to the Missions. Some go by giving to the Missions. Without both there are no Missions.&lt;/em&gt; This is entirely apropos to this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written 139 answers and 1 question; you've written 1 answer and 10 questions. I see no more problem with members who only ask questions than I do with those who only answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, for a member like me who only answers, you, who only ask, are a perfect kind of member of this community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T04:03:19.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6487" CreationDate="2018-08-08T11:20:03.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't involved in either close voting process (both of the referenced questions are closed now), but I'll try to outline possible reasons that might give you some ideas about what might have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The word &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to note is that you used the title &amp;quot;What does an ideologically perfect solipsistic government look like?&amp;quot;, which implies that there is a perfect state of being solipsistic. Looking through your question and the comments it looks to me like your understanding and intention of that phrase was to imply &amp;quot;a society where everyone adheres strictly to the principles of solipsism&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the word &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; doesn't have this meaning in a strict sense. This might seem like being extremely pedantic - and quite often it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; extremely pedantic - but we have many problems with questions that simply assume everyone has the same understanding of what the &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; state of something is. Take for example a question about the &amp;quot;perfect weapon design&amp;quot;. Valid questions are: What situation are you in? Is the &amp;quot;perfect weapon&amp;quot; one that never runs out of ammo? One that fires faster than any other weapon? One that fires projectiles with higher mass? One that only incapacitates, but doesn't kill the target? There are many possibilities and defining what you think is &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oversimplified: the word &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is for many people a trigger phrase similar to &amp;quot;I am looking for ideas&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;opinions welcome&amp;quot; - each of which invite votes to close, most often about being &amp;quot;Primarily Opininion-Based&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Too Broad&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question simply asked what the consequences are. It's too broad - and it was closed as such - but it doesn't have the same problem of defining what &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is. And as &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is up to you - and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; you - your question received votes as &amp;quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like there is an already-defined model of how such an &amp;quot;ideologically perfect&amp;quot; government would work, which made people assume that experts on other sites would be able to tell you how it would look like - they concluded that it's off-topic here and might be on-topic somewhere with more domain knowledge. It looked like you are discussing some already existing model, which is also why people asked about where to look up that already existing model to be able to understand the goal you want to accomplish. In the eyes of close voters it might have looked like the other question simply stated a starting point and explicitly wondered what this might lead to, while yours defined that an ending point and wondered what the implications are on a different part of the society - without mentioning how that ending point looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The length&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short texts are often not so well-received because they look like it's more  of a &amp;quot;shower thought&amp;quot;. Some quick idea that you want to get feedback on and use as the starting point. Quite often short questions and answers miss important things that need to be considered for good questions/answers. Not always, but often. This is more of a sentiment thing that might explain some of the reactions being more favourable for the longer question than the shorter one. Showing what problems you encountered while researching the base problem can be a good way to show effort and steer answers in a certain direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Missing criteria for defining better answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question is primarily opinion-based if every somewhat reasonable answer is exactly equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120183/what-does-an-ideologically-perfect-solipsistic-government-look-like#comment370601_120183&quot;&gt;one of your comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen very many questions where the author explicitly stated criteria for judging best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case these questions are likely closed or likely to be closed at some point - especially popular questions can go quite a while without being closed or with multiple close/reopen cycles. But without any criteria a question is primarily opinion-based. This is one of the most discussed close reasons on the site and regularly something falls through the cracks, so you might very well have encountered something that is open and primarily opinion-based, especially when looking at very old questions, but that is not what the current guidelines say. You &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you stated this shows that you didn't give it any thought, which may very well be cause for a close vote as &amp;quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear: the criteria don't have to define a &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer and it's okay if &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; answers are valid. But there have to be criteria to somewhat objectively define which answers are &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120183/what-does-an-ideologically-perfect-solipsistic-government-look-like#comment370604_120183&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Responsibility&amp;quot; for providing reference material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite true that people should know the term when answering your question. We can't accept that people without any knowledge of physics answer orbital-mechanics questions that are asking for formulae for example, so we also shouldn't allow people to ignore philosophical terms. And it's not your &lt;em&gt;responsibility&lt;/em&gt; to define each and every thing in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are not a site of specific domain knowledge experts. We have many people with a broad area of &amp;quot;expertise&amp;quot;, so it's always a &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; thing to for example link to Wikipedia for terms that the &lt;em&gt;average user&lt;/em&gt; on the site might not know. It's quite possibly that someone will use this as a starting point to write an answer even if they haven't heard the term before they encountered your question. It also shows research effort and makes it easier to get to a common understanding in cases where there are differing definitions of something. You are supposed to research a topic and then state at which point you had problems. The StackExchange Q&amp;amp;A format is not a starting point for questions, but an ending point and you should show which steps you were able to go alone and where you encountered something you couldn't solve yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all it's simply a &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; thing to do to indicate what you have done and help others that think your question is interesting understand it. Being nice helps people who you expect to work for you for free by answering your question feel they should be nice to you in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People on this site are experts about building fictional worlds, not experts about discussing philosophical concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Addendum&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to check your wording or get feedback on a draft you have in mind you can check out our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6168/28789&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; on meta, which can help a bit in reducing the chances that you will encounter such problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For referencing material I recommend that you think about whether the average user will understand it. If you think that's too abstract it might help to ask yourself &amp;quot;Would my average family member understand this word like this?&amp;quot; (assuming your family does not consist solely of philosophers/rocket-engineers/...) and if the answer is &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; you should add a link to Wikipedia and spend half a sentence to explain how you are using the word in the context of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all both of the linked questions are too broad/ primarily opinion-based and both are closed as such. It took a different amount of time because of some differences in the presentation, communication and specific topic, but the rules are being applied consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T11:20:03.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-08T14:05:08.323" Score="12" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fallout from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120571/40408&quot;&gt;Worse than zombies, part 1&lt;/a&gt;, has reminded me that I keep meaning to ask to what extent one can ask question about things they are curious about rather than issue they &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; answers to. As I'm writing this I've asked 44 questions on the main, of which only 15 are actually about anything that resembles a project I need help with, there's about 10 about projects that were finish before I asked them, some are on the site because I thought the processes around them might be useful to others, the rest because I was curious about some aspect of the issue. The other 20 questions are only on the Stack because they occurred to me as random thoughts at some point and I posted them to see what people had to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is should I, and by extension other users, be using this site &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for help with [worldbuilding] story aspects that we are having issues with or does curiosity have a place in this community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T18:50:59.713" Title="How curious is too curious?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|asking-questions|etiquette|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-08T14:53:38.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I expect 10,000 words on my desk by next Thursday on any subject you've asked a question about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure nobody was really writing a story about Santa relating to any of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63416/who-is-spreading-the-rumour-that-santa-isnt-real?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Santa questions&lt;/a&gt;. The same probably goes for a significant proportion of other questions on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, some people are writing stories, or constructing worlds for D&amp;amp;D purposes or other games, but many, possibly most, are just out of curiosity or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-the-gdpr-is-around&quot;&gt;simple fun&lt;/a&gt;. Others are clearly heavily &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120737/how-could-a-hacktivist-group-punish-the-political-elite-of-a-country&quot;&gt;politically loaded&lt;/a&gt;, or just asking after potential mechanics for something that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63587/why-are-there-no-toilets-on-the-starship-exciting-undertaking&quot;&gt;already exists&lt;/a&gt; in an existing fictional universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T14:53:38.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-08T15:29:19.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is frankly moot. Even if we wanted to require questions be asked for non-trivial purposes it would be impossible to enforce and would simply be an arbitrary requirement that would hinder everyone's enjoyment of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="879" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T15:29:19.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-08T17:48:19.447" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might have stumbled onto an issue that first reared its head about two and a half years ago, &lt;em&gt;waaaaay&lt;/em&gt; back in early 2016. It started with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/627&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt; - a discussion that came about because a lot of us felt that the site was no longer being used for actual worldbuilding. Instead, people were tossing out half-formed hypothetical questions, and asking questions just for fun - and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;on Stack Exchange, We Hate Fun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect - and I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3039/627&quot;&gt;Daaaahwhoosh got this right&lt;/a&gt; - that a lot of the problem came from the community/network dichotomy. The rest of the network didn't understand our scope, and it sometimes felt like we were being used as a trash heap. On the other side, we &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; weren't doing a good job of being communicative about what the heck we were about. It was all exacerbated by the fact that a lot of us in the community were either engaging in this or not doing enough to stop it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After quite a few more discussions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3193/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3124/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3043/627&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; and others), we basically came to the consensus that the problem &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; What-If questions, &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. The issue was something that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/627&quot;&gt;originally called Idea Generation&lt;/a&gt;, where question askers essentially didn't flesh out their ideas or show their work, and wanted us to build the world from little more than a foundation. That's not cool, and we don't take questions like that. Never have, never will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was . . . a bit reluctant to fully agree with this, I think, because the motivation for asking a question has always mattered to me. I've always wanted this to be a site exclusively for worldbuilding - in other words, a place that would actively reject questions that weren't motivated by building a world, but were more along the lines of what you're talking about, ideas that sprung from being curious. My mind was changed, though (and changed for good after I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4074/627&quot;&gt;Is this question about the colonization of Mercury on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;), because in the end, even questions arising from curiosity can prove helpful to the worldbuilders of the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This whole episode has made our scope even more confusing at times, but it's also given us some clarity. Here are some of the takeaways we got from early 2016:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's okay to be curious, and to ask questions because of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't need to be explicitly building a world to ask a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question should come from an idea that's at least partially formed, and has some life to it. You need to put in effort to consider the scenario yourself before asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're here to learn, and know the scope, ask away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has all been a made a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; clearer with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;modifications to the help center&lt;/a&gt;, thanks to the results from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/627&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;. You for one definitely know the site's scope, and I think what you're doing now is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T17:48:19.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-08-09T14:15:46.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright so a couple points here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Welcome comments are good for the community.&lt;/strong&gt;  SE can be a harsh place, particularly for the newly arrived.  As far as internet communities go we are a weird weird place, and I am not even talking about the WB.SE content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rules we (rightly) enforce shouldn't go away. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Said rules can be frustrating and difficult to get used to if you have only ever known discussion forums.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New users are the life blood of any community.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A site that stops getting new users is a site that dies.  Attrition is a thing on the internet, so we need these new people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Welcome comments can help dull the blow around here.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments on posts from new users can make all the difference in the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The system recognizes new posts and we have a dedicated queue for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/51143&quot;&gt;first posts&lt;/a&gt; to help identify them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt;  Those of you active in review queues should be very intentional about how you address posts in said queue.  If you don't have the time to address posts properly you should leave them alone. Posts in the &lt;em&gt;First Post&lt;/em&gt; queue should be reviewed carefully, but the same goes for close and re-open queues.  If you don't have time to comment and explain your vote, leave it for someone else.  We have no shortage of reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to this question in the comments from @Mr. J : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Should we JUST put that comment, that welcome thing, to any first question good or bad? 2)shouldn't we put something like why we put it there because IT will actually help the new users to get the idea of what they did bad, or good? 3) are my concerns clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a standard comment.  I for example have a post it note on my desktop that I copy and paste some standard comments from.  Each time I do edit said comment to the scenario.  If the post itself requires attention I usually post a second comment addressing any concerns.  So in short, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt; every new user should receive a welcome comment on their first post, but automating that doesn't seem necessary and to me personally defeats the point of a personal welcome from a community member.  &lt;strong&gt;Auto-generated comments are hollow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We should definitely be guiding and helping out new users.  Comments are an obvious way to do that...and really the only avenue to do that until they can get into chat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I answered your questions, then yes :) I was clear on your concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't really see a current need to change what we do today.  All in all the WB community is very welcoming, especially by SE standards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is very little rep/badge related to commenting, I think there is a single bronze badge you can get for up-voted comments, so people are not commenting for the rep or imaginary internet points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say we can't improve and make an effort to stay on top of helping new folks get used to this place so conversations like this are a good reminder to keep that going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T14:15:46.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T21:33:14.710" Score="-7" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question introduced the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technobabble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technobabble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technobabble&lt;/a&gt; tag.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/technobabble/info&quot;&gt;Click here to read its wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this tag.  I think it reflects the highly creative nature of the site and balances the fact that far too often we favor the science-half of &quot;science fiction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We consider &quot;how to name my X&quot; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6259#6259&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and I completely agree with that.  However, I can see a difference in that technobabble (whether a word or a full explanation) is specifically trying to reflect a definable concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is reality, and...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is what I want to do with reality...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm looking for community concensus.  Do we keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technobabble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technobabble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technobabble&lt;/a&gt; tag, or do we burn it and group technobabble as off-topic with &quot;how to name my X&quot; questions (or is there an alternative)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll post the two basic yes/no answers for folks to vote on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T21:36:58.503" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T10:37:26.757" Title="Opinions about the new Technobabble tag" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-08-09T21:46:29.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of today, August 9 2018, the meta rep requirement of 1 is live for questions and answers; Shog just enabled it. All users should be able to post on meta - barring those suspended, of course. This means Sandbox access is universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd just like to add a couple reminders:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be watchful. This is going to mean more activity on meta, and that could mean more controversy. Flag away when needed; we mods will be vigilant as always for flags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please guide new users to the Sandbox as needed; hopefully, it will be as visible as possible. If we can direct first-time users there (via chat, or comments) &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; they post questions, that would be great.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is intended to be permanent, but there's always the chance things could go wrong. I'm going to wait a couple weeks before pronouncing this a success.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here it goes! I hope things turn out well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T14:00:11.980" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T14:00:11.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-08-09T22:05:17.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, it could be better... but we're not paid to do this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;, there is rarely immediate feedback to new users, and when that feedback does arrive it is often perceptually negative (can you clarify this?  Why would you do that?  This doesn't make sense...) and usually permanent.  How often does anyone go back and remove comments that are no longer needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, of course, is that you can't see the cherubic face of the other participant.  You can't see the smile, the friendliness in their eyes, etc.  All you see is what they wrote and if the Internet has proven anything is that written text is frequently souless.  What to me might be a funny bit of flippant sarcasm might be to you a deep and abiding offence, and who am I to claim that you're wrong in believing so?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;SE has rewritten its code of conduct because if this very problem.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6452/catalog-of-common-comment-scripts&quot;&gt;canned comments&lt;/a&gt; we use are a valiant (and frequently successful) means of breaking the ice and reminding new users there are resources they can use to better understand this world.  Would it be better to mentor new users?  Of course it would.  Except that this isn't a discussion forum and most of us are volunteers who spare what time we can to participate.  Taking each new user by the hand is a great deal more work than it may sound like (it's a LOT more work than it may sound like... I've done it... hours spent monitoring a single question until the new user got it right...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, canned comments are the bridge.  They're the first line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They anchor to the question or answer the reference to an experienced user the new user can contact.  &lt;em&gt;They have no other way of doing this, unless they invade someone else's question or answer.&lt;/em&gt;  (And I'm going to improve my canned script to include a sentence explaining the @ symbol so new users can take better advantage of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They introduce to the new user a handful of links to important aspects of the site.  Remember, we're volunteers, we sincerely hope the new users click those links and read a bit.  It would solve 90% of the new-user-problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They allow us to quickly process the increasing number of users, votes, flags, and other indicators.  You'd be surprised how few people are actually helping with this process.  Those queues really aren't there for the purpose of handing out badges.  The badges are there for the purpose of tempting people to actively participate in making the site a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that there were a better way.  Regrettably, without seriously investing more time (remember, volunteers...), there simply isn't a better way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T22:05:17.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-10T08:24:25.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I' ve just arrived and I feel the same. But with some patience and time I'm sure I'll manage to find some questions that need my knowledge on various subject. Time is important, patience too, and every bit of knowledge is always accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54056" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T08:24:25.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-08-10T19:08:54.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The best questions are perfected first in our Sandbox!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T00:22:31.157" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T00:22:31.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T19:18:33.200" Score="10" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose a fortnight-long &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-colonization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-colonization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-colonization&lt;/a&gt; topic challenge, which will begin today, August 10th, and finish on August 24th.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sci-fi stories feature humans in space.  However, manned missions are currently in decline in the real world.  Machines can often perform the same functions humans can, at a fraction of the cost.  The various motivations for human space travel and colonization frequently put forward in science fiction are a fascinating topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm excited to see what kinds of questions this community can put forward in regards to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-colonization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-colonization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-colonization&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic challenge is now complete. Thank-you to all participants, and congratulations to Ash, whose question managed to get all three gold topic challenge badges.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T00:51:47.787" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T00:51:47.787" Title="Topic Challenge: Space-Colonization" Tags="|discussion|tags|challenge|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6516" CreationDate="2018-08-10T21:32:52.413" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'll post the two basic yes/no answers for folks to vote on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you deleted those answers (with &quot;no&quot; at +5/-0 and &quot;yes&quot; at +0/-4), so here's my take on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Used for questions seeking plausible descriptions of factual scientific failures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here already, the tag seems awfully similar to perhaps a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; (which themselves are somewhat problematic, being meta tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining things is something we pretty much do all day long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining things that can't be explained by science is more or less the bread and butter of this site. It's how we end up with popular tags being for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/post-apocalypse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;post-apocalypse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;post-apocalypse&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terraforming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terraforming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terraforming&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faster-than-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faster-than-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faster-than-light&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interspecies-relations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interspecies-relations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interspecies-relations&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; or... well, you get the idea. Even though they (and many other things that get discussed regularly on Worldbuilding SE) cannot be explained by science in our world, &lt;em&gt;that's no reason why explanations cannot be internally logically consistent&lt;/em&gt;. We also established very early on that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;unless the question specifically allows for magic, magic can't be used to answer&lt;/a&gt; that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposed tag should make sense in a sentence on the form &quot;I'm an expert in ...&quot;. Those I listed above, and many others that see significant use, seem to pass that test pretty well. &quot;I'm an expert in time travel&quot; isn't &lt;em&gt;an unreasonable thing to say&lt;/em&gt;, even though one could argue that time travel is impossible according to our understanding of our universe (which is a different issue). &quot;I'm an expert in technobabble&quot; sounds rather less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's been done here seems to me to be more or less to add a tag that could apply to just about every question on the site. That adds nothing useful for categorization of questions, and is another slot used out of the five tags one can add to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vote is for no, it's not a good tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T10:37:26.757" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T10:37:26.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6748" CreationDate="2018-08-12T12:04:28.903" Score="9" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The newsletter ad has some problems; you can't read what it's about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6uXL5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6uXL5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unless you select the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0lc5N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0lc5N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only Worldbuilding seems to have this problem; I checked a couple of other sites (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt;) where it looks normal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLxKZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLxKZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(tested in the latest Firefox and Safari on macOS High Sierra)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T07:47:20.653" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:03:49.583" Title="What's in the newsletter, exactly?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6535" CreationDate="2018-08-12T17:59:33.570" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple days ago, I started a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13225/627&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, selecting the reason &quot;Authoritative reference needed&quot;. I didn't add any supplementary text; I felt that the default wording said enough. When I checked on it today, I saw the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kfI6c.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kfI6c.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if I'm not mistaken, the words &quot;Authoritative reference needed&quot; (or something similar) should appear in the tan box below that sentence. This works correctly for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/113637/627&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; - bountied just today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6729.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6729.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a bit of a bug to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Google Chrome on Windows 10. Microsoft Edge shows the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T20:10:11.520" Title="Bounty reason isn't showing up" Tags="|bug|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6534" CreationDate="2018-08-12T18:30:38.583" Score="-8" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I've been participating in the stack for a few months now. And I say the following to emphasize that I understand what it can mean to run a space for online discourse, and that these circles are fraught with all sorts of challenges.&#xA;Over the last few years, I participated in multiple forums, moderated a few, and adminned others. Most recently, I was asked to join a mod team, where the community started at about 2-3k and grew to roughly 15 thousand members by the time I decided to move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of all the places I've visited, or participated in, this stack has been probably the most inhospitable and unaccountable online environment I've seen so far. Which is saying something. It's nearly impenetrable for new users, and the 'guidance' to help them navigate the space is insufficient, at best, and actively antagonistic at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most places have some kind of process for addressing those issues. This community appears to have no such mechanism, the CoC simply had a link to a generic contact queue, which does not explain what to expect, or how any of that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't imagine the volume of users who come here, post once or twice, and never come back. I'm sure that's perfectly acceptable to some folks, but it shouldn't be the baseline for any healthy community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the last experience I had, where a mod not only deleted an answer I provided, for purely punitive reasons, but went on to delete comments critical of their behavior, it seemed like the time to post about this, because unaccountability, and disgruntled people continually leaving, is how this sort of thing keeps occurring, and will keep occurring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the process for lodging complaints about moderator behavior, and how is that process resolved?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49466" LastEditorUserId="49466" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T22:02:59.070" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T22:02:59.070" Title="Why is there zero moderator accountability on this stack?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answer|moderation|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2018-08-12T19:38:19.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll assume you're talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/121111/40408&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, this is almost the definition of a link-only answer, see point five of the list for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why and how are some answers deleted?&lt;/a&gt;. It relies on a series of links to external sources without given any information as to the content of those links, as it sits in the deletion queue it absolutely deserves to be there. If a Mod hadn't gotten to it first it would have been cut out by votes in the low quality content queue in short order. I can't speak to deleted comments but given the tone you took in what was left of the comment string I'm going to guess that you violated the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;be nice directive&lt;/a&gt; of the site. Such comments can and will also be culled without the need for any direct moderator input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T19:43:41.547" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T19:43:41.547" CommentCount="47" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2018-08-12T20:01:15.917" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the process for lodging complaints about moderator behavior, and how is that process resolved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical process is to start by flagging the post your grievance is related to with a custom moderator flag and describe what you think should be changed. You've got only 600 characters for the custom flag text, so you'll have to be brief, but there's always the option for a moderator to contact you to get more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know what you're thinking; &quot;how can flagging something for moderator attention be the proper way to lodge complaints about moderator behavior?&quot;. But it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be clear about terminology, though: &quot;moderator&quot;, on the Stack Exchange network, typically refers to those users who are either appointed by Stack Exchange (the company) employees to serve as &quot;pro tem&quot; moderators on a site that is still in beta, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; on graduated sites refers to those users who are elected by the community to serve as moderators. These users are recognizable by having a diamond symbol attached to their name on the site(s) that they are a moderator on, and their profile page will indicate &quot;moderator&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many &lt;em&gt;moderation actions&lt;/em&gt; are taken by users who are not &lt;em&gt;moderators&lt;/em&gt;. There are rather few things that moderators can do which ordinary community members cannot do, though moderators (those with the diamond) can normally do them &lt;em&gt;unilaterally&lt;/em&gt; rather than having to wait for multiple users from the community to do something. This includes closing questions, deleting posts, and a number of other more or less mundane tasks needed to keep the community on track and free of irrelevant material. It's been likened elsewhere, rather aptly actually, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1442/2533&quot;&gt;being elected to clean the toilets at summer camp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; takes an action which you disagree with, then by flagging the post and describing your grievance, you bring this to the attention of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the whole moderator team&lt;/a&gt;. And while there is nothing in the system to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; it from happening, as a general rule, &lt;em&gt;moderators are expected to not handle flags that they have a personal interest in&lt;/em&gt;. This can be because it's a flag on their own question or one they've answered, or a flag on an answer they've deleted, or something else. In that case, a different moderator will look at the issue, perhaps discuss it with the moderator who took the original action, and reach some kind of independent conclusion based on the facts at hand, and act on it. There are some situations where it's reasonable for a moderator to review their own actions, but it's rare. (As a corollary to this, if you flag and request a review, precisely because of this process it can take a while before the flag gets validated. Do rest assured that we check every custom flag raised, and stay on top of the others as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If bringing the issue to the attention of the moderator team via a flag does not result in whatever your grievance is being resolved appropriately, then you can escalate the matter further. Typical venues in such cases is to bring it up on the site's Meta (as you have done here, but you'll normally get more positive results by sticking to the facts at hand) or contacting Stack Exchange directly (in which case you &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; want to stick to the facts) and request that they review the facts at hand. Just be aware that the people at Stack Exchange are really busy (that's one major reason why there are appointed and community-elected moderators for each site in the network) and that they might not be familiar with the culture of the particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is there zero moderator accountability on this stack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as explained above, there is plenty of accountability if you raise an issue. Also, moderators routinely cross-check each others' actions, and will discuss among themselves if they see a moderator doing something strange. Moderator actions are also at times reviewed by Stack Exchange employees, and in cases of gross overstepping of bounds, there have actually been cases of moderators being stripped of their diamonds (and corresponding power) for violating the trust ultimately placed in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T20:19:43.057" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T20:19:43.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6531" CreationDate="2018-08-12T20:10:11.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks to me like the bounty reason notice got removed the same instant that you removed the hard science notice, probably because both are technically notices on the question. That's plainly visible in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/13225/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; if you look at the exact timestamps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another UI quirk? But yes, I'd definitely call this &lt;strong&gt;unexpected behavior&lt;/strong&gt; at the very least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T20:10:11.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-13T02:24:45.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you could be writing useful or helpful answers, but are not, then some could possibly consider you a “bad user”.  Of course, your reasons for doing so are your own, and they might mitigate any potential reasons for dislike from the other people here would want to read your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you should answer or not depends on whether you are willing to hazard testing your information and knowledge and skills for any merit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Only post an answer if you are willing defend it, improve it, and … all that.  Don't do it simply to balance your ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T02:24:45.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:36:22.953" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;SI Units form the official language of international science. As such &lt;em&gt;I want to discuss whether questions that are tagged for either &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; should automatically warrant the use of only metric SI Units.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask in relation to several answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119834/40408&quot;&gt;Quick solutions to a modern warning placed on the surface of the earth for future generations&lt;/a&gt;, where initially only imperial measures were used without even offering conversions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is not intended to be a debate about the differences between units of measure currently in use in the USA in comparison to the traditional British Imperial System. In New Zealand we officially only use metric, but we have a lot of first generation ex-pat Brits who casually use Imperial Units interchangeably with their metric near equivalents - yards for metres, miles for kilometres (which is problematic because they're &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; not the same thing), etc... and we have a lot of media made for the US market in which Customary Units are used, which apparently differ, but they just get read the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is this about the use of Imperial or Customary Units in general like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4244/imperial-vs-metric-system&quot;&gt;Imperial vs. Metric System&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is purely about whether we should expect questions and answers tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; to only use the internationally recognised scientific units of the SI system.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note well: We are not debating the relative merits of a given system of measurements only whether science questions should &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; require a particular system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T13:02:36.707" Title="Should certain tags automatically require answers to use SI Units rather than other, more traditional, systems of measurement?" Tags="|discussion|hard-science|systems-of-units|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:59:53.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No, tags should not add more implicit requirements to questions/answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have problems with explaining to people that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is different from every other tag that exists on the main site because suddenly answers are required to cite their sources and provide calculations and such, while the question has to suddenly adhere to the same scrutiny. I don't think it's a good idea to add more implicit rules to this. Especially not by widening it to other tags. Suddenly &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; has lots of extra requirements about the quality and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; has a few. The next thing will be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; should have less, apart from a codified version of &amp;quot;What's your magic system?&amp;quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; needs to have certain keywords like &amp;quot;check&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;my&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;numbers&amp;quot; in it. Tags are intended to categorize questions so that it's easier to find them. They are not supposed to add restrictions to the answers. What is acceptable as an answer is defined in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every question should be clear about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It's custom to use the same units as the querent, but if a querent absolutely does not want imperial units in answers to his science-based question they should explicitly mention it. Just state that you need SI units and that answers should provide them. If they don't they are &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt; - though it's likely not that hard to convert the numbers yourself, so flagging them doesn't seem to be relevant in the generic case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone uses units that weren't present in the question we can point them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2388/28789&quot;&gt;Systems of measurement&lt;/a&gt; and ask for units that correspond to those used in the question. Or just edit them in. For most units it should be easy enough to ask Google for a calculation about the important input numbers and the results. We don't necessarily need to convert every single step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; your science-based question in imperial units then you can &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; it in imperial units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T13:02:36.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6487" CreationDate="2018-08-13T15:35:23.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect the answer to &quot;what is a good question, and what is a bad question&quot; is just very subjective. For myself, both of these questions are poor ones; the first because any answer is far too subjective and it sounds like the author is asking for help writing an entire book (too Broad was the right call for the closers), the premise was already explored (BladeRunner, Star Trek TNG, others), and the consequences of a naturally predefined lifespan seem obvious enough to me to explore on your own. And I'm not trying to be mean, but the premise bores me; anybody with average intelligence knows we've all got a limited lifespan of no more than about 130 years, very few of us expect to live past 90, so the idea that a hard limit of 80 will have much impact on society in general doesn't make much sense to me. People will likely be better prepared at 79, that is the only real (and obvious) consequence. My subjective opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second question, IMO that is just a silly scenario, also just fishing for material, also perhaps trying to start a philosophical discussion with any respondents, which is not the purpose of this World Building SE. As a technologist I regard good questions as ones presenting a specific puzzle for which answers can be graded as meeting requirements, good, or very clever. It doesn't have to be one answer, but the answers do need to be &lt;em&gt;measurable&lt;/em&gt; in some sense as to how well they solve the issue presented. And the questions cannot be fishing for the entire premise of a story (as both of your questions do), they should be looking for a good solution to some small sticking point in a larger story, like &quot;How can I have a desert on one side of a river and a forest on the other side?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, it is very subjective, but basically a good question for World Building is one for which the author has already done much of their world building, and the question is for help filling in some details and not making mistakes, or perhaps help for them in getting out of a logical jam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad questions are ones that appear to be &quot;bait&quot; questions trying to use SE as a blog or chat room on some philosophical point that isn't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; going to turn into a story &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, it is just something the questioner is interested in talking about. I come here to try and help aspiring authors solve problems so their product is better and they have a better chance of publishing it. A bad question is asking for help on something I consider too silly or ridiculous to ever BE published; it makes me suspect the questioner is just throwing out wild ideas to entertain themselves, without intending to do anything with the answers, and thus (IMO) misusing the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T15:35:23.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6545" CreationDate="2018-08-13T21:20:59.063" Score="0" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone told me that there are new policies of WB,I missed that,Please someone share me a link to the new policies so i wont break the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T02:13:41.080" Title="What are the new policies of worldbuilding?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6544" CreationDate="2018-08-13T21:24:38.597" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121363/how-can-i-make-reverse-war-rape-more-demoralizing#comment374451_121363&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn is referring to the new network wide &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keeping in mind the new &quot;be ludicrously nice to everyone&quot; policy I can't tell you how precisely how disgusted I am with a your question. Suffice to say I don't regard rape of any kind as reasonable topics for Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new &lt;em&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/em&gt; is the same as the old &lt;em&gt;Be nice.&lt;/em&gt; - just with more explanation for people who didn't understand &lt;em&gt;Be nice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user was just trying to tell you how appalling they find your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T02:13:41.080" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T02:13:41.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6547" CreationDate="2018-08-14T02:44:00.040" Score="-1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick question: How can I see my removed questions and answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some deleted posts and I would like to read them again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, thanks for saving me from downvotes... I bet I would have lost 200 reputation in 24 hours... That's scary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31928" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T06:16:44.197" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T13:44:46.107" Title="How can I see my removed questions and answers?" Tags="|support|deleted-answer|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6546" CreationDate="2018-08-14T02:59:50.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31928/seraph-myrmidon?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation tab on your profile&lt;/a&gt;, make sure &quot;show removed posts&quot; is checked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fSBD0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fSBD0.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you have at least 10k reputation, search for &quot;deleted:yes&quot; plus any other search terms (&quot;is:q&quot; for questions, keywords, tags...).  This search shows you your own deleted posts but not other users'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T13:44:46.107" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T13:44:46.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6551" CreationDate="2018-08-14T11:43:35.157" Score="14" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, there was a question of rather gruesome content. OP asked on how to make female-on-male rape a torture practice. No surprise this question got disliked a lot simply for its content - not most peoples favorite topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I did read some of the comments and people discussing their disgust of the topic, there was no discussion regarding closing or deleting the question. At least not when I saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did OP delete the question themselves? Or was it deleted by the community or a moderator?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it was one of the latter: why?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While I totally get the disliking of gruesome content like that, I was not aware that generally brutality was off limits. After all there are very popular questions including mass murder, turning the streets red with blood, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Although the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6544&quot;&gt;possible duplicate question&lt;/a&gt; is coming from the same place, I wanted to figure out in details why the content got deleted. This is why I consider this not to be a duplicate at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final comment&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think I should have made it clearer in this post that I was just wanted to know the reasoning and did not presume the mods were unjustified in deleting it. The Question in question (yes, I am aware of my eloquence.) &lt;em&gt;felt&lt;/em&gt; off, but I &#xA;did not see a reason that felt legitimate to flag it. I know better now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6552/44086&quot;&gt;HDE226868's answer to this question&lt;/a&gt; you can read the statement of the mods about this. (other mods agreed to it in the comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="44086" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T14:09:47.703" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:55:08.187" Title="Reasoning behind deletion of gruesome content" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2018-08-14T12:08:16.807" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was deleted by a moderator. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121363/28789&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a link for users that have more than 10k reputation and can therefore see deleted posts. It was deleted because it crossed a line. Yes, we have question about murder/torture/... occasionally and most of the time these try to be somewhat civil about it - not so in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121363/how-can-i-make-reverse-war-rape-more-demoralizing#comment374553_121363&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; commented about the closure as off-topic of the question (someone else had voted to close before):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's an extraordinarily gratuitous question about a topic that should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be condoned. We have questions here about poison and weapon design, but this is asking how to brutally rape people. There's a line to be drawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards the question, at -11/+0, was deleted by Monica Cellio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because there are questions on the site that deal with murder doesn't mean we should be accepting every topic and every way you phrase the question. This question definitely crossed a line and it's not a loss to the community that we are not advocating strategies to make rape even more brutal than it already is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3394/28789&quot;&gt;Should questions about painfully killing people be welcomed on this site?&lt;/a&gt; For example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3397/28789&quot;&gt;accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; states (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I don't have a problem with them since most of the time, &lt;strong&gt;those questions are posed in a clinical voice, much like a doctor might describe injuries from a horrific automobile accident&lt;/strong&gt;. Yes, people died or were severely injured but there's not glorification of their injuries/deaths. There's no judgement call of whether their deaths were a good, bad, glorious, inglorious thing to happen. It just happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd have considerable problems with a question that wasn't in that clinical voice&lt;/strong&gt; and just downvote them or ignore the question. But I don't think there should be a blanket ban on violent questions. (If there were, a great many of the best questions (IMO) would be removed from the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree that we should ignore the questions that are not posed in a clinical voice in such a case. Having it stick on the site sends the message that we want more such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also want to look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3400/28789&quot;&gt;Monica's response&lt;/a&gt; to the linked meta discussion about painfully killing people, some of which I see here again (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To me that reads as the OP treating the subject lightly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general brutality is not off-limits. But that doesn't mean that we don't have any limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T12:17:40.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2018-08-14T13:26:11.197" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6551/627&quot;&gt;Secespitus got most of the main points&lt;/a&gt; correct; I'll add on a couple things from the moderator discussion behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that us potentially being on a government watchlist thanks to some of our questions here has become &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=watch+list&amp;amp;user=&amp;amp;room=17213&quot;&gt;something of a meme in chat&lt;/a&gt;, and we've had a number of meta discussions about whether we should allow questions on distasteful or dangerous subjects (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3394/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3820/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1978/627&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4165/627&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, etc.). On balance, the consensus is that we should allow such questions, and with the exception of torture, I agree with this consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Well, these subjects are often extremely important in a narrative or world - yes, knowing how a poison works or how a rebel soldier lost an eye can be crucial to a story. Therefore, we allow them, because even though they may be off-putting, they're a key part of the universes many people build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But we draw a line. The relevant question was about how to make rape more terrifying. And that's absolutely, positively, gratuitous.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that bothered me was that though the community had made a number of comments indicating that they didn't particular like the content, there hadn't been any flags, except on comments (and one auto-flag). That gave me pause; I also felt like this implies that the community condoned keeping the question. But nobody had really said &quot;Yeah, this shouldn't be deleted&quot;, and, after all, mods are exception handlers. This felt like a heck of an exception to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward, I'm definitely going to be reluctant to allow questions about dangerous topics across the board. We need to know when that line's been crossed, and when a question seems like it's being asked for the sake of sadism. I don't know where the line lies, and I don't know where to draw it just yet. But it's something we may want to talk about for the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth - just to add some clarification - having me close the question and then Monica delete it is a common practice for mod teams, in my experience, when possible. It stops people from thinking that it's a rogue mod going AWOL, and lets folks know that more members of the mod team support the action. Ideally, this reduces the possibility of pushbacks on meta and accusations of a mod being biased. A closure and quick deletion from a mod is, I would guess, unusual, and only used in cases where rapid action is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:55:08.187" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:55:08.187" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6452" CreationDate="2018-08-14T18:36:26.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Stuff.  A general welcome/ot/what is WB and then Be nice and on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome bryan, to clarify some of the comments above:  Stack Exchange is a little different from your standard discussion forum.  The site is about specific questions with specific supported answers.  As it stands this is commentary and while potentially interesting is not an answer to the question.  Once you have gained rep via the site's mechanism you will be able to comment on posts.  In the meantime please check out the [tour] and [help] to get a better idea how the site functions.  Again welcome and happy world building.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;[Be nice](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/conduct)&#xA;&#xA;[How to ask](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh and this is just for fun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/46186521#46186521&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/46186521#46186521&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T18:36:26.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-08-14T18:36:42.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is X realistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt; Is X plausible?  Would [something previously stated] work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions asking if the application of world rules to achieve a specified effect are on-topic.  Your question should be asked such that the only answers can be of the form, &amp;quot;Yes, because...&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;No, because...&amp;quot;.  Questions of this type should always use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Please note from the tag's description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are required to provide a specific context including all of the necessary world-rules to properly frame the reality-check query.  Said another way, you need to completely define the reality you're asking us to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;, therefore you must avoid asking your question in a way that invites discussion.  For example, &amp;quot;Is there a better way to X?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;if this doesn't work, what alternatives could I use?&amp;quot;  Inviting a discussion makes the question &lt;em&gt;too broad.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5593/why-is-my-question-about-the-feasibility-of-keeping-different-tools-outside-in-t&quot;&gt;Why is my question about the feasibility of keeping different tools outside in threat considered off-topic by some?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5307/could-redefining-reality-check-and-the-assumed-proof-standard-be-useful&quot;&gt;Could redefining Reality-Check and the assumed proof standard be useful?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5287/do-we-need-the-reality-check-tag&quot;&gt;Do we need the reality-check tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5283/where-does-reality-check-actually-fit-in-the-burden-of-proof-framework&quot;&gt;Where does Reality-Check actually fit in the burden of proof framework?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4965/we-say-we-dont-allow-reality-checks-of-plot-elements-but-is-it-true&quot;&gt;We say we don&amp;#39;t allow reality checks of plot elements - but is it true?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4931/should-we-finally-allow-reality-checks-of-other-plot-elements&quot;&gt;Should we finally allow reality checks of other plot elements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4919/does-the-low-tolerance-for-opinion-based-questions-make-the-tag-reality-check-un&quot;&gt;Does the low tolerance for opinion-based questions make the tag reality-check unnecessary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4468/lets-break-down-reality-check&quot;&gt;Let&amp;#39;s break down reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4225/challenging-questions-premises&quot;&gt;Challenging Questions&amp;#39; Premises&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4172/according-to-reality-check-possibility-implies-existence&quot;&gt;According to reality check, possibility implies existence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3758/when-is-thats-not-possible-an-appropriate-answer&quot;&gt;When is &amp;quot;that&amp;#39;s not possible&amp;quot; an appropriate answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3702/whats-the-difference-between-reality-check-and-science-based-or-even-hard&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39; or even &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3064/ontology-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Ontology of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2679/reality-checking-on-questions-not-tagged-reality-check-or-ask-questions-diff&quot;&gt;Reality Checking on questions not tagged &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; | or ask questions differently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2407/tearing-apart-questions&quot;&gt;Tearing apart questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1712/how-realistic-should-a-question-tagged-reality-check-be&quot;&gt;How realistic should a question tagged &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2022-08-04T13:15:41.813" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T13:15:41.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-14T20:45:27.520" Score="35" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not currently a particularly active user on Worldbuilding, although I've contributed a bunch of answer back when the site was new.  I do, however, regularly visit several other sites on the Stack Exchange network and I tend to keep an eye on the Hot Network Questions sidebar for interesting questions to read and possibly answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've noticed a bunch of Hot Network Questions asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/54015/notatyrant&quot;&gt;a new user on this site&lt;/a&gt;.  They seem to have the recipe for HNQ down pat: their questions are funny and entertainingly written, with intriguing &quot;clickbait&quot; titles that attract curious readers, and they link together (yes, with actual hyperlinks) into something resembling a collaborative story.  They prompt the reader for creative answers with multiple open-ended sub-questions and, being set in a vaguely specified fantasy world, their possible answers are only limited by the answerers' creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it seems to be working.  In the six days this user has been active, they've asked five questions, gotten at least four of those onto Hot Network Questions, and earned two gold badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is &lt;strong&gt;what, if anything, do these questions have to do with worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the specific questions, it seems to me that they're not really asking about building a fictional world.  In fact, most of them don't even really seem to be &quot;questions&quot;, as the term is generally used here on Stack Exchange, but more like open-ended lateral thinking puzzles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120828/my-carrier-pigeons-have-been-replaced-by-spoons-how-can-i-send-messages&quot;&gt;My carrier pigeons have been replaced by spoons: how can I send messages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question, currently with 120 upvotes and 7 downvotes, starts with an intriguing title and a silly premise.  Underneath that, though, the actual question amounts to &quot;how to send messages without carrier pigeons?&quot;, which, when you think about it, is about as broad as a question can be.  Especially since magic is allowed.  It currently has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/120868&quot;&gt;an accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; (with a score of +95 / -1 votes) that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Your pidgeons are spoons on the outside but they're still pidgeons on the inside, only very confused. Get another alchemist (surely you don't only have one) and have them transmute pideon nests into soup bowls. Their instinct will catch up to their new body and they'll develop a strong desire to fall into their own bowl.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that just about says everything that needs to be said about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120845/is-a-network-of-spoon-launching-trebuchets-realistic&quot;&gt;Is a network of spoon-launching trebuchets realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This follow-up to the previous question seems to have failed to make it to the HNQ list, maybe because it wasn't quite funny enough.  Its main problem (besides the fact that &quot;a network of spoon-launching trebuchets&quot; and &quot;realistic&quot; don't really make sense together) is that it contains a multitude of sub-questions, some of which (like &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is a trebuchet accurate enough?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) are pretty vague (accurate enough for &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?).  Still, it's IMO one of the, um, least bad ones of the bunch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121316/what-can-i-do-to-make-my-sons-snowman-survive-using-medieval-technology&quot;&gt;What can I do to make my son&amp;#39;s snowman survive, using medieval technology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is actually a rather nice question... it's just not really a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; question.  It's just asking about historical techniques for keeping things frozen, and would (with some rephrasing to get rid of the silliness) fit just fine on, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;.  Where, in fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15258/how-did-people-have-access-to-ice-in-warm-areas-before-the-industrial-revolution&quot;&gt;basically the same question&lt;/a&gt; has already been asked back in 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121447/how-effective-is-a-spoon-to-mutilate-my-former-alchemist&quot;&gt;How effective is a spoon to mutilate my former alchemist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just like the title says, this question is asking about the effectiveness of spoons as torture devices.  Technically, that would be a valid question, if there was a Stack Exchange site on torture.  Which there fortunately isn't.  It's still not a worldbuilding question, not even with the off-hand allusions to alchemy and magic (which just make it that much broader).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121474/is-a-pig-mounted-cavalry-possible&quot;&gt;Is a pig-mounted cavalry possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the only one I would personally consider at least marginally on-topic, insofar as the feasibility of using pigs as cavalry mounts in a fictional world is a valid and answerable one.  Sure, it's framed with the same silly meta-story as the others, but at the core there is, IMO, a valid worldbuilding question here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, so far only two of these questions appear to have been flagged for closing, and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/close/51203&quot;&gt;both&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/close/51367&quot;&gt;cases&lt;/a&gt; the review concluded 3 to 1 in favor of keeping the question open.  So it seems that the Worldbuilding community, or at least the part of the community that frequents the close vote review queue, considers these questions on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, my question is &lt;strong&gt;why?&lt;/strong&gt;  What makes questions like these relevant for this site and desirable to have here?  And is this really the direction this community wants the site to take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I realize that &quot;they're fun and popular&quot; is a valid answer.  What I'm wondering is whether they're fun and popular &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T21:02:47.833" Title="Are the &quot;spoon&quot; questions on-topic? And should they be?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-08-15T02:11:48.150" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having come to SE from older, perhaps more traditional, worldbuilding forums, I think I have probably a more narrow view of what worldbuilding is, whether as a hobby or as an art. I also have a rather narrow view on what kinds of questions should be allowed here. The local culture is far broader in what it is accepting of. While I can appreciate &amp;amp; accept differing opinions on the scope of what worldbuilding is and entails, I do think there are a couple issues that deserve attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;real world questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6405/why-is-everyone-suddenly-so-strongly-against-homework-questions&quot;&gt;homework questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;math questions&quot; and &quot;silly rubbish questions&quot; are entirely off topic and really don't have a valid place here in this subforum. Real world questions should be asked in more appropriate places, like over on Physics or History or someplace. Maths questions should be addressed to the Maths forum. Homework questions should be immediately deleted as a matter of course. Rubbish questions I feel should also be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know well enough that sometimes other SE forums don't want to be troubled by &quot;real world&quot; questions being asked on their forums. I don't see how that makes those questions any more on topic here in Worldbuilding. We shouldn't be using another forum's measure of topicality as a measure of topicality here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that humour can't be part of the Q&amp;amp;A here or that cleverly worded questions should be frowned upon, but it just seems like the majority of questions we get here really do have nothing to do with, well, fictional worlds (i.e., fantasy, sci-fi &amp;amp; game worlds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, at present the first page of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How fast would a Martian space elevator travel?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking control of the Human population with nanobots&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the distance between binary planets? [on hold]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What factors would deternine the evolutionary pathways of chaos spawn?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would I create a planet with exaggerated aurora?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why shouldn't we turn every star system into a Matrioshka brain?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many dead bodies are required to stain a river red?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yay! Two out of seven of the questions actually involve some aspect of a fictional world (the M-brain and the Chaos Spawn questions). The rest are either real world or sciency ~ astronomy questions. Staining a river red is a basic maths question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, the mochery question, about the boar mounted knights, is interesting and at least touches on worldbuilding. (And we see an example in Jackson's &lt;em&gt;Battle of Five Armies&lt;/em&gt;.) The other questions, not so much. No actual worldbuilding content involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know your focus is on the spoon questions, but I hope you can see the issue is really quite a deep one here. I don't know what the local culture was like when the forum was first conceived, but at this point, it really has become a free-for-all forum where any kind of question can be asked whether they are purely worldbuilding, tangentially worldbuilding or not-at-all worldbuilding in nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer to your query would thus be &lt;strong&gt;No, the &quot;spoon questions&quot; are not on topic and no, they really shouldn't be.&lt;/strong&gt; A &quot;vaguely specified fantasy world&quot; doesn't really cut it, and in my opinion is little more than a way to cleverly game the system. Because &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;vaguely specified fantasy world&quot; is by definition a fantasy world and thus touches on worldbuilding! That's kind of like saying a taco flavoured potato chip is Mexican cuisine because, well, tacos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T00:30:17.670" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T00:30:17.670" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-15T02:30:02.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my opinion, but these points constitute my thoughts on your query and especially in light of HDE's explanation of some of the historical issues of this forum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be as curious as you like!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guide your curiosity towards worldbuilding topics &amp;amp; interests. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not of the opinion that a querent must be actively working on a legitimate &amp;amp; substantial subcreational project in order to ask a question here. So, I wouldn't have a problem with What-If questions, so long as they relate to a fantasy / sci-fi / gaming type world. This would weed out all the historical type WIs (like what if the South won the Civil War?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But questions really should be directly applicable &amp;amp; related to worldbuilding. (I still am not of the opinion that &quot;real world questions&quot;, &quot;maths questions&quot; and the like are on topic here, though I have ceased tilting that particular windmill.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiosity certainly has a place here, otherwise, we wouldn't even be in business! But that curiosity should be directed towards our primary focus, worldbuilding, the making &amp;amp; detailing of fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T02:30:02.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-08-15T04:52:49.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pigs are on topic. The highly voted carrier pigeon spoon transmogrification question is off topic, please vote to close. The rest are up in the air. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally I avoid voting to close questions with high vote and/or view totals. But in this case, the carrier pigeon question doesn't really make sense. Its just a non-sequitur. The other questions I will give the benefit of the doubt due to their exposure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T04:52:49.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-08-15T13:51:35.900" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Off topic in my opinion.  They are questions about a story set in a world, and don't offer any relevance to the Worldbuilding process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T13:51:35.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:19:39.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bumping this one!  There are questions that get lots of answers but few upvotes: like this sweet one.  When I found it there were 7 answers and 0 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121646/is-there-a-plausible-way-to-build-a-pipette-with-medieval-technology&quot;&gt;Is there a plausible way to build a pipette with medieval technology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is interesting enough for you to spend time answering I think that warrants an upvote.  Encourage people who post interesting questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:19:39.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-16T01:36:00.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simpler form of the prevailing opinions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question does need to pertain to worldbuilding.  It needs to show worldbuilding and a dilemma with filling or closing some gap.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;, however, need to be a world which you intend to use in some capacity elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T01:36:00.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-08-16T13:11:35.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me introduce some dissidence into this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point 1:&lt;/strong&gt; A rather technical point regarding the question-answer format in a creative area. As time passes, the boundaries of the domain Worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to expand, otherwise all possible questions become exhausted in the frame of what is allowed (not off-topic, no duplicate, etc). The reason is that creativity is fundamentally based on expanding what is known by creating something that is new. That also goes for questions related to that. While Stack Overflow expands naturally through new technologies and questions emanating about them, the domain of Worldbuilding does not have such a natural source. They have a common source though, which is creativity and time - but that is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; source for Worldbuilding and therefore that much more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more concrete explanation: Stack Overflow will inevitably have more and more tags, while the tags of Worldbuilding have no reason to grow at all. However, creativity has a much larger relevance in this, which is the matter of debate here. This is also the reason why it grew in the scope of questions over time, which I often read were &quot;already too broad.&quot; Imagine Stack Overflow restricts questions only to C. C# would be a major offender then, given that it would be &quot;off-topic&quot; forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is an aspect of categorization and continuous growth, which necessarily requires boundaries to expand - and therefore render topics on-topic which were off-topic in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point 2:&lt;/strong&gt; The nature of Stack Overflow (it's a good example) is that each question may have multiple answers which lead to a solution, but usually there are objectively better and worse answers. It's less opinion based and more situation and skill based. The nature of Worldbuilding is creative in nature. Regarding a question there may be multiple answers, all of which are derived from various sources - be it mathematics, biology, sociology, psychology, myths, known fiction or just plain creative solutions. Even fictional elements have boundaries, and the questions asked usually have to provide them (not if it's obvious enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not only do Worldbuilding questions naturally evoke wildly differing valid answers (as currently desired), but also opinions in form of suggestions. Figuring out objectively better or worse answers is really left to subjectivity to a large part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That in turn raises the question - which questions ask for answers with valid opinions, and which don't? If the nature of the question in itself is creative, should it disqualify it on itself, or rather do the opposite and promote it? As it stood, the series of questions in question were quite popular in quite a short time - and people are not hesitant to downvote if they see fit. People were certainly intrigued to read a continuation of it. Whom does it really serve if that became prohibited? What is the &quot;higher cause&quot; that has been served here? We know a bit in history about collective higher causes, maybe we should be careful with putting them above everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point 3:&lt;/strong&gt; The way of discourse: The way of discourse was tyrannical. People will downvote questions they deem bad or inappropriate, and upvote questions they find good or appropriate. That mechanism was already in place and the result was in &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; favor of the entire question series. Yet moderators and some other people decided that fun may not have to be had if they do not approve of it - so the powerful minority of people decided to forgo what the public desired and coercively shut it down by not just closing it, but even deleting it &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; setting a warning to all those involved and practically punishing those who could gain reputation from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about this: If you don't like it, don't bother with it, and have people have their entertainment or get the information or inspiration they seek for. If the questions or answers are not desired or bad, they'd be downvoted anyways - or remain around 0 points until they vanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of deletion shows a display of tyranny which was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; appropriate (not that it normally is). Less harsh actions could have been performed, or even no action at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53351" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T13:11:35.480" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-17T11:30:02.087" Score="7" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because of Ash's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6507/44086&quot;&gt;&quot;How curious is too curious?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/44086&quot;&gt;&quot;Is Worldbuilding a What-If Site?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; discussion I came to think about how I present my questions and if my questions could appear to be mere what-if shower thoughts. Because I think they could appear that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to keep unnecessary details out of my questions. I want to focus on the very core of the problem and just have a solution for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As an example&lt;/strong&gt;: my Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119337/44086&quot;&gt;&quot;Regrowing body parts: What are the costs?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is trying to find a solution to estimate the raw biochemical energy cost of growing a limb. It is specifically designed to not talk about the magic being used in my world as it is irrelevant to the problem. The intent of this question is to solve the problem as abstractly as possible so other people might benefit from the solution, too, if they have a similar problem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I specifically wanted to have this question be just an energy calculation. That way the solution is applicable to any scenario and not just my world. It could be magic or sci-fi technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is my philosophy of question design any good?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Reading many critques in the What-If debate a lot of people seem to think that there should be details about the world and some argue that math questions are off-topic (that is a minority, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:41:34.700" Title="Should questions be as specific or as abstract as possible?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2018-08-17T12:29:33.990" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You should add all &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; detail and the worldbuilding goal you have in mind&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; add extraneous information that is irrelevant to the question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You should provide all the information that is necessary to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119337/28789&quot;&gt;Your example&lt;/a&gt; provides the goal: calculate the energy requirements of super-hero-like body regrowth. It's not important whether that is due to magic or science or a mix of both. The goal is clear. If your magic would alter the energy requirement for some reason it would be important to include. After all people answering the question would need to know this fact. And in fact you already mention how it affects the energy requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming all necessary atoms can be brought to the place they are needed to form an arm one way or the other there is still the energy cost of biochemically forming all the molecules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's already enough explanation of your magic. We shouldn't care about placing stuff somewhere when answering your question. That's magic and this is how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example perfectly mentions all the necessary details and leaves out all the unnecessary details. We don't care whether your magic is divine or arcane, whether it glows in a red or blue color, whether your superhero gains it from radioactivity, is born with godly powers or trains really, really hard to gain it - we care &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about the effect of your magic on the parts that your question is about, which is how it affects the energy requirements of regrowing a body part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A question is not perfect when you can't&lt;/em&gt; add &lt;em&gt;anything. It's perfect when you can't&lt;/em&gt; remove &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T12:29:33.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2018-08-17T15:19:13.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gtux3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gtux3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Secespitus wrote a solid answer. Just want to add some additional stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should questions be as specific or as abstract as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes,&lt;/strong&gt; or rather, either.  Your question is your own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a general question on the energy cost of molecular regeneration fine.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question on the impact a radioactive meteorite falling from the sky has on a cat from a small village two miles away in a small valley bordered on one side by a stream that flows past the meteorite...fine.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I keep thinking about a house cat turning into battle-cat now.  By the power of Greyskull and all that...ahem...moving on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is:  &lt;strong&gt;Ask the question you would like answered.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong the more helpful the question is for future users the better...but then we don't know what future users will need.  Maybe, in a far off time...maybe 2023, someone will be wondering about radioactive superhero housecats...it could happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To re-iterate some key points.  Here is an excerpt from the help page...the title links to the full page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;General guidelines for all questions:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&#xA;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and why you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have you already looked at or failed to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T15:19:13.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2018-08-18T19:40:40.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO Questions are actually harder to formulate than answers. If you can ask interesting questions within the format here, that aren't duplicates, more power to you. I think questions take more practice to get right than answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of different kinds of users on here--in other communities a balance of questions and answers is a thing, but not here. So ask away!!! And don't worry too much if you don't have the format down at first, some of mine have been rejected, and rightly so--I've had duplicates, I've asked in the wrong format and so on. You have to consider far more in framing a question, that it's narrow enough, that it's not largely opinion-based, that it's been decently researched and considered before being asked, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T19:40:40.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T20:45:22.157" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or critique I dunno, anyways no one is perfect and this includes this site, it's moderators and me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that I disagree with some of the aspects/practices of the site and to an extent, the community. I want to tell this in a more sophisticated format than &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Worldbuilding sucks, I go to bed.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In what format can and should one express their disagreement on this site? What rules should he keep in mind? I'm asking about structuring your temper tantrum to be clear and effective.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T11:18:55.957" Title="How to criticize (on) WB: SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6579" CreationDate="2018-08-18T20:50:10.647" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Regarding Acting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't&lt;/strong&gt; throw a temper tantrum, instead refrain from name-calling, wailing, aggressiveness, and all the other things that are involved in a tantrum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gather the things that bother you, think about them - Why do they bother you?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a meta-post:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Title: **This thing bothers me (because yada yada)**&#xA;&#xA;Here I am explaining why it bothers me, I am using&#xA;  examples of where I've experienced this bothersome behaviour&#xA;&#xA;Here I am explaining how I think this bothersome thing could be made better&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reactions might not be what you expect: &lt;strong&gt;Do not lash out&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Regarding Reacting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't&lt;/strong&gt; throw a temper tantrum, instead refrain from name-calling, wailing, aggressiveness, and all the other things that are involved in a tantrum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gather the things that bother you on the question, think about them - Why do they bother you?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Here I am explaining why I agree AND/OR disagree with the question/premise&#xA;&#xA;Here I am proposing things, in a normal tone, respecting the other parties&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No matter what the situation, &lt;em&gt;you are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; better than the querent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T07:54:46.753" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T07:54:46.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6579" CreationDate="2018-08-19T07:28:26.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Address criticism to the behavior you disagree with, not to the person.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: one gets their questions/answers downvoted without any glimpse of a motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worst reaction: &quot;Whoever downvoted this is obviously a [insert derogatory term here] [and here] [and here] [and here] [now wait for some sanction]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Poor reaction: &quot;Your downvote clearly shows you are a complete ignorant in the topic&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Good reaction: &quot;Without feedback on my post, I cannot improve it. I would appreciate if you could also write some line to explain why are you downvoting.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Best reaction: &quot;Thank you for taking time to read and vote on this question, if you have some more time, written feedback would be appreciated and can help me improve it further&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T08:35:57.747" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T08:35:57.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6579" CreationDate="2018-08-19T10:52:02.413" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, rule number 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Focus on the behavior, not the person.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, rule number 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice and constructive about it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're bothered by the behavior of &lt;em&gt;one specific user&lt;/em&gt;, then flag for moderator attention whatever that user has posted which bothers you, describe why that bothers you, and someone in the moderation team will look at it and take appropriate action. Mind you, &lt;em&gt;appropriate action&lt;/em&gt; does not necessarily mean &lt;em&gt;the action you would take if the decision was up to you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some &lt;em&gt;behavior&lt;/em&gt; that bothers you, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find some examples. Ideally, these should be examples by different users. If you really can't find examples of the same behavior by different users, then likely you're bothered by the user, not a behavior, so see above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write up a &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; Meta post that explains what the behavior is that you're bothered by, and asks how it should be handled without presupposing any particular response. Write a self-answer (not in the question itself) describing what you would like to see instead. Don't include a lot of extraneous material not directly related to the behavior you're discussing. &lt;strong&gt;Be constructive. Don't call out specific users, but do link to examples. Absolutely don't use expletives, bigotry or similar.&lt;/strong&gt; You might think that following this advice somehow makes your post weaker, but it's really the opposite; showing the ability to discuss a behavior without discussing the person indicates &lt;em&gt;maturity&lt;/em&gt;. If you don't understand why that is, then I really recommend figuring it out before you vent your frustration. It will be virtually guaranteed to be better received for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accept that the community might not feel the way you do.&lt;/strong&gt; If it was a big problem, people would likely be flagging it like crazy, and the moderation team would be on top of it. That this is not the case &lt;em&gt;likely indicates&lt;/em&gt; that the community is either passively accepting of or actively encouraging the behavior in question. (Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that it is &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;. It does, however, raise the bar for criticism.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accept that moderator flags are not super votes.&lt;/em&gt; Moderators aren't going to go around deleting posts that some particular user just happens to disagree with. Even if the moderator agrees with you, they might feel that the type of flag you raised is inappropriate for the content in question; this sometimes happens with various kinds of &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flags, where the moderator handling the flag might agree that the content is unnecessary, but not with that it is rude or abusive. In such a situation, it's perfectly appropriate for the moderator to decline the &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; but still fix the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; in whichever way they feel is appropriate. (I myself have been pinged into private chat by a moderator to elaborate on a flag I raised, though not on Worldbuilding.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept that there are things the specifics of which moderators cannot talk about except with the one user involved, and in some cases, not even then. In addition to the usual terms of service, moderators are bound by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;the moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt;. It's short and sweet, and essentially comes down to: if an ordinary (even high-reputation) user can't see something, then a moderator can't talk about it, &lt;em&gt;even to moderators on other sites&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, ultimately, &quot;appropriate action&quot; on the part of a moderator can mean anything from dismissing a flag as invalid, all the way up to destroying the user's account on the site, &lt;em&gt;but it is the moderator's decision — and responsibility — which of the available options to choose.&lt;/em&gt; It's the moderator, not the user who raised the initial flag prompting action, who might have to answer to Stack Exchange community managers for why they did what they did; possibly with already having had their diamond moderator access revoked, either until the issue is sorted out, or permanently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T11:18:55.957" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T11:18:55.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2018-08-19T16:32:48.940" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My initial perception of this site was that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; 'math' questions were to be on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If your question cannot be broken down into a mathematical formula and answered empirically, you're asking (on the wrong freaking entire network&lt;/strong&gt;) for idea generation. Fun, yes. But useless for posterity, unless you're just looking for someone's random idea to reboot it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T16:32:48.940" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-08-19T18:25:43.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T07:00:45.737" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121191/where-on-my-spaceship-can-i-justify-more-space-for-my-humans&quot;&gt;recent question on spaceships &amp;amp; space-colonization&lt;/a&gt; it seems there are two &lt;em&gt;camps&lt;/em&gt; of people in the answers/comments. There's currently an equal amount of answers (resp &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;) that seem to have no issue understanding and answering the posed problem/question, and of answers that seem to have a hard time at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried accommodating the latter group and pointing out missing bits in answers, etc. Adding lots of details to the question that I originally thought unnecessary for the core problem posed - yet I added it because I was asked to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am still getting comments telling me, paraphrased, that I am doing a bad job, and what not - yet I am positive that I've been doing all I can possible for the stage this problem is posed at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of a fit of still being tired, and being moderately annoyed, I have added a &lt;em&gt;build your own question&lt;/em&gt; kit (TM) at the end of the question, in the hope of people actually using it and thus &lt;em&gt;being forced&lt;/em&gt; to take the time to read things properly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I overreact / overdo it? What other ways to explain that I cannot provide the details requested in any more concise form as I do not have these details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T07:28:16.207" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T13:01:14.137" Title="Did I overdo it?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T14:23:10.670" Score="12" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many examples of questions that are perfectly valid and on-topic (in my opinion), but show very little research effort. I feel like some users are posting whatever comes to their mind on this site at high frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/122082/would-a-post-human-alien-civilization-have-entertainment&quot;&gt;&quot;Would a post-human alien civilization have entertainment?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; it is being asked whether &quot;an alien civilization that is billions of years more advanced than us&quot; would still have entertainment. (in my opinion clearly &lt;em&gt;POB&lt;/em&gt;, hence casting my VTC) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are also not quite thought-out. In the example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/119542/could-a-humanoid-alien-have-a-tail&quot;&gt;&quot;Could a humanoid alien have a tail?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; OP is asking for a justification to have a humanoid alien grow a tail, but presupposes them to have several other not less significant alterations (four arms, raptor legs, elongated xenomorph-skull).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user I referenced asked 22 questions, with one popular question (49 votes) and the rest ranging from +4 to -5. If we exclude the one popular one the other 21 have a total score of -12 (+11/-23). Of the 22 questions 10 are closed and one I just casted a VTC on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While most of the closed questions are older, 2 of the last 5 are closed, one currently being voted on, too. So it does not appear that this specific user learned from prior closing of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reasons are mostly &lt;em&gt;POB&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. One being &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; and one &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt;. From the comments of these questions the downvotes are mostly stemming from lack of research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that is not a bad thing itself:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They asked 22 questions, mostly did not edit their questions upon being hinted that there is something structurally or otherwise wrong with them (one exception being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120438/can-an-alien-civilization-develop-if-it-didnt-have-a-sense-of-greed&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), did not participate any other way than post their questions, neither on Main nor on Meta - at least I could not find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I get the feeling with some users that Worldbuilding.SE is their replacement for research effort. After all, it is simpler to write a 1-2 paragraph question than to do research yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the right way to deal with behaviour like this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The problem is currently being dealt with downvotes and the closing of question. &lt;strong&gt;Can we encourage users like this to do some research before posting their questions?&lt;/strong&gt; Are there other, possibly better ways of dealing with this?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(After all, the referenced user seems to exhibit no change in behaviour regarding the improving of questions. So success appears to be very limited.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am not bashing the user I referenced. I just stumbled across one of their questions and knew they fit the pattern I wanted to describe. There are other users that fit this, too. It was just easier to pick examples going through this users' questions. I just used them as an example as they are a strong exhibitor of this behavioural pattern.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="44086" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T14:37:51.297" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:41:20.453" Title="Can we encourage people to put more research into questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2018-08-20T15:16:12.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Don't judge the question by the user&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is best to judge each question on its individual merits. Even good users ask bad questions. Even our highest rep user has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3821/colored-magic-makes-my-faeries-too-powerful&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if the question is bad, vote to close for one of the approved reasons. If you personally don't like the question, or think the user has not put much effort forth, it is your prerogative to downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this site is biased a bit towards closing questions, so I don't think there is a problem with lack of downvotes and close votes for poorly researched questions. But it is good and responsible of us close voters to explain why we did so, and to encourage question-askers to do the appropriate amount of research before asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T15:16:12.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6585" CreationDate="2018-08-20T15:23:15.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Contrarian-ness is a part of human nature&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't get to spun up about people who think they have a legitimate gripe. The nature of internet communications encourages people to be stubborn to prove their point; the powerful non-verbal forces that evolution built into our face-to-face communications would probably resolve this argument in a few minutes if you all got together to talk about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the point of the people that say there is not enough information. If you think you have provided enough information, then that is up to you, and your detractors are just wasting their time. It is your question, and I don't see any close votes. I would consider this though, if you put up a bounty looking for a better answer, there may be something about your question that is preventing it from getting a good answer. Having looked at it myself, I don't think I have a good and useful answer to provide, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would, though, recommend you roll-back the mostly-snarky build your own question part at the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T15:23:15.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2018-08-20T15:45:24.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The intent of this question is to solve the problem as abstractly as possible so other people might benefit from the solution, too, if they have a similar problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make it too abstract, the number of possible solutions can become very big. It's very likely that nobody really will benefit from very general solutions. If the question gets too broad it may even get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more specific you make the question (without adding details that are irrelevant for the problem), the higher the chances that you get an answer that solves your specific problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to additionally increase the benefit to all by posing a somewhat more abstract question, you can do that. However, please note that the question may become too broad and that the solutions may not become as accurate to your problem as if you would have posed a more specific question. As long as it doesn't get closed, it's up to you really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess you want to get answers that show a high degree of creativity. Both, presenting the problem in a too abstract way as well as specifying too many constraints (details) probably hurt creativity. Some middle ground is probably best. Questions that leave enough room to solve them in more than one way but also offer enough details that make the question interesting are the ones I like most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6314" LastEditorUserId="6314" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T19:41:34.700" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:41:34.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:38:22.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;From the updated help page:&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General guidelines for all questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look&#xA;  like and why you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question&#xA;  is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech,&#xA;  timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have you already looked at or failed to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I post this to point out that we already ask users to point out what they have considered, what they have looked at so far.  This is fairly new in writing, and needs some additional publicity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do notice that that bullet says, &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; while the rest say &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not providing that information is, to me, a down-vote, particularly when the user should know better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users have questions regarding topics about which they are completely ignorant.  I try not to punish ignorance if they are trying to learn...kinda the point after all.  If the question is sound, albeit potentially misguided, I don't downvote, sometimes the answer &quot;that's really not how x works&quot; are hugely beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T16:38:22.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2018-08-21T01:43:08.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we consider that the so–called “real world” is simply an example of worldbuilding which has already been done, and is being done every day, then it works.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To put it another way:  if the question concerns the worldbuilding of a world which happens to resemble the “real &lt;strong&gt;world&lt;/strong&gt;”, then it is certainly topical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My caveat:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It does require that a question be formed with such or similar an attitude; if the question tends to veer more towards Social Change or Social Engineering Stack Exchanges, then it is probably time for an Area 51 proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ergo:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for fictional worlds.  Their resemblance to the “real world” is irrelevant.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the questions asks &lt;strong&gt;how to do something&lt;/strong&gt; in the confines of a certain system, then it is not worldbuilding — even if that system is a fictional world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question asks &lt;strong&gt;how to change&lt;/strong&gt; the confines of a system, or &lt;strong&gt;how to project&lt;/strong&gt; the state of a system expanded through time or space or any other dimension, then it possibly is worldbuilding.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even if it is requesting for a future state of a system which is indistinguishable from the “real world”, it should be accepted here — so long as it meets the other criteria.  &lt;em&gt;E.g.&lt;/em&gt; asking predictions for the outcome of an election for the succeeding year could be topical here:  such a thing could, conceivably, be used for building a fictional world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27708" LastEditorUserId="27708" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T05:56:35.233" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T05:56:35.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T04:01:53.607" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been wondering about how humans require facial muscles in order to be able to produce speech, mammals also have these facial muscles that could allow them to speak if they had the brain power to produce speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an image from the internet of a wolf skull and a human skull, along with another one that contains facial muscles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QKw6e.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QKw6e.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Human Skull&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AQzAb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AQzAb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Human Facial Muscles&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f3obN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f3obN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dog Skull&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/67rND.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/67rND.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dog Facial Muscles&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reptiles however lack any facial muscles and therefore cannot move their face in any way, but I am wondering, what would the physical skull alterations be in order to have a carnivorous reptile with facial muscles sufficient enough that it could speak, and what would the reptile look like with facial muscles? How well would it be able to speak at this point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cYrgT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cYrgT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Skull of Lace Monitor&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OoARv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OoARv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lace Monitor Lizard&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54536" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T04:01:53.607" Title="What would a reptile with Facial and Speech muscles look like?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-08-22T05:39:10.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:09:10.347" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;IE, if I wanted calculate a twin moon orbit for a fantasy world that revolves around binary stars, would it be easier to just ask the physics stack exchange instead of the world building stack exchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like the world building forum is poorly defined in relation to such questions, and those who disapprove of questions that could be in either tend to have louder voices than those who would welcome them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since breaking down a question into a single question often make it more suitable for another stack exchange IE instead of asking &quot;what would a planet with two moons be like&quot; I need to ask &quot;what orbits could two moons take around a single planet&quot;, &quot;what kind of tides do two moon planets experience&quot;, and &quot;how would moths evolve if there were two moons in (answer to first question) orbit around our planet?&quot; Making these suitable for Astrophysics, physics, earth science, and biology stack exchanges instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, world building looks like an less useful half combination of writing and sci-fi/fantasy, in which it does the work of neither quite as well, but also hates questions from physics or biology that are important to world building. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I can't even figure out whether the title is what I mean, or if I'm straight up rejecting the world building exchange's core ideals. Anyways, either way may be biased or whatever so don't mind all the crunchy bits of salt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54317" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T11:16:09.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T03:31:50.993" Title="Is the World building forum less effective than using individual forums related to your question?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|stackexchange|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:41:29.990" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should ask a question on WorldBuilding.SE if you are interested in the perspective of worldbuilders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when people can ask a question in similar form on multiple sites. But the different sites will always have a different focus. Physics.SE might very well answer you orbital-mechanics question if it's about real-world physics, but they might not like you describing fictional planets. On WorldBuilding you can also get frame-challenges more often that tell you &quot;What you asked can be answered the following way: [answer] - but there might be a better approach to achieve what you want: [frame-challenge]&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many topics that don't work well or at all on other sites. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; is a topic that comes up quite often here on WorldBuilding and wouldn't really be well received on Biology.SE or other sites on the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is also about stuff like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; - which would definitely be off-topic on other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all it depends on your questions. Maybe for your specific questions other sites would be more useful, but for many other people this site offers the kind of jack-of-all-trades thinking that they need to help them with their worldbuilding problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important part is often how you phrase your question. Your example &quot;What would a planet with two moons be like?&quot; wouldn't work here because that's &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of stuff you are asking about. So much that everyone could talk about about a different thing - society, physics, biology, ... - and all of those combined wouldn't be enough to sufficiently answer your question. But the question is: do you really &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; all of that information? What type of project do you have that you need to know absolutely everything about this setup and why can't you state some things and simply assume that's correct? For example most books gloss over... basically everything about the world, except for the things that are interesting to the story. Is your main character for example an astronomer? Then we should probably focus on astronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have problems with phrasing your question you can check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; on Meta, which is designed to help people that are having problems with their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not a combination of SFF.SE and Writing.SE. SFF.SE is about canon worlds and only answers such questions, whereas WorldBuilding is about creating new worlds. Writing.SE is about help with the craft of writing, not with building your world or story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general we accept every question that aligns with our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and why you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have you already looked at or failed to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should only be migrated if it is off-topic here and on-topic on the other site. You might get a few people that are saying you could also get an answer to a question on a different site, but, simply put, that's up to you:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of perspective are you looking for? A scientists or a worldbuilders perspective?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T09:41:29.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-08-22T11:09:04.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Huge ramble short; Worldbuilding is about fiction and pretty much dedicated to hypothetical questions, this gives you a huge advantage when it comes to getting information useful to you in forming a new world. The other sites you have mentioned may give you hard, real world, facts that you can use but often don't tolerate hypothetical questions at all, I know they last a few minutes at best on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Earth Science&lt;/a&gt; stack for example, and if they do answers are sub-optimal for fiction writing due to their focus on existing nature rather than possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T11:09:04.553" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6585" CreationDate="2018-08-22T12:20:52.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not alone, it feels like every question I ask I get this effect in miniature, there are a good number of people who simply answer the question as written, and give good information in the process, and then there's one person who, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, says &quot;we can't possibly answer this unless you tell us about X&quot;. When it's one or two people who are tied up in some minutiae it's usually not a major issue to point out, as gently as I can manage, that I think they're wrong. It's only when either a number of people are asking for similar information, either by posting multiple comments or upvoting an existing one &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; when someone posts a comment or answer and I read it and go &quot;oh wait I'm not asking what I thought I was asking&quot; as a result (that can be because I've missed something or because the question just doesn't read to others the way it does to me) that I really have to dig into the question and make major edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has always been my opinion that the one asking the question sets the benchmarks around which we should work to when we attempt to answer the question. We can ask for clarification or information but if the asker says &quot;this is a thing&quot; we need to listen to that but not everyone works that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the particular question you have asked and your responses, your frustration is clear in certain areas but generally you seem to have handled things gently and calmly by asking for what you need and pointing out where people are falling short of your expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do seem to have people who are trying to answer but haven't got from the question you have asked to a clear understanding of the situation you are actually proposing (or in a couple of cases the question you're actually asking in terms of the core issue you wish to address). This is a problem, but in this case I don't feel it's &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; problem, you've given clear benchmarks that a lot of people clearly &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; struggling with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T12:26:29.943" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T12:26:29.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T13:00:45.187" Score="12" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've answered a couple of bounty questions in the last couple of weeks, the bounty list was not something I'd had a lot to do with before. They seem to attract a lot of answers, which is the point, but a disproportionate amount of them appear sub-optimal, which can't be fun for the OP. The answers either cover the same ground as existing answers or, based on comments from the OP, just don't answer the question. It's like people are rushing to make a contribution without as much consideration to what &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of contribution it is as they might give on a &quot;normal&quot; question. I'm wondering if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;since my sample size is small, and I'd like to think I'm wrong, my experience is aberrant?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;bounty posters are generally satisfied with the overall results of offering such bounties even if what I think I'm seeing is in fact the case?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T13:24:37.200" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T10:34:57.790" Title="Do &quot;this question has not received enough attention&quot; bounties work as well as we'd like them to?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6601" CreationDate="2018-08-22T13:11:24.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Bounties are marketing - if you got &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; feedback they do what they are supposed to do&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit weird, but you have to view bounties as money you spend for advertising your question a bit more so that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; people may look at it. The primary usecase is if you haven't gotten any feedback and therefore your &amp;quot;question has not received enough attention&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who regularly posts bounties on this and other sites I can say that they often don't quite work the way I wish they'd work. For example I noticed that often a 50-rep bounty will go basically unnoticed. Sometimes a bigger bounty helps because you attract lots of people - a big number as a potential bonus lures people to your question. This, of course, also leads to many people who are trying to get a positive-scored answer so that they are eligible for the automatic bounty distribution and those answers may very well not be the top answers that you expect. But that's basically business as usual: many answers mean that quite a few of those will be okay-ish, but hopefully there will be one or two good or even great ones - and those are what you paid your bounty for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties work most of the time. They work less good for small bounty values and the more active bounties are currently out there, the lower the chances that people will spend significantly more time with your specific question (that's what I saw during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5675/28789&quot;&gt;Holiday Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; for example). A bounty brings in more attention and therefore accomplishes its goal - more attention means potentially more answer, which means potentially some not-so-great answers, but hopefully a good or great one in between that helps you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties work as intended and as someone who regularly puts up bounties I am satisfied most of the time. The quality of responses is often similar to what I see on other questions and sometimes there are really good responses if you put a high enough bounty on a question requiring a difficult enough answer - I suspect a bounty makes some people think &amp;quot;Well, it wasn't really worth my time before, but with an extra 100/200/... reputation I might have another look at it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, with kind regards to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/23519/kingledion&quot;&gt;Kingledion&lt;/a&gt; for his great &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/rpg/query/782816/top-users-by-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Top users by bounties&amp;quot; query on SEDE&lt;/a&gt; that he introduced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5772/know-your-site-monday-who-are-the-most-generous-users&quot;&gt;this trivia quiz&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used 2200 rep for bounties on WorldBuilding.SE, making me the number 3 on that site - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/889471/top-users-by-bounties-on-worldbuilding-se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used 3650 rep for bounties on Writing.SE, making me the number 1 on that site - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/writers/query/889472/top-users-by-bounties-on-writing-se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T13:19:27.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6601" CreationDate="2018-08-22T13:16:50.177" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I've offered the most bounties on the site as of today - 35, for 3,000 reputation points total - so I'm working from a bit of a larger sample size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience with the bounty system in general on SE - and this holds for Worldbuilding, by the way - is that it's often an enormous success or a total failure. A lot of it depends on who sees the post. For instance, I placed a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/105606/627&quot;&gt;this question about habitability&lt;/a&gt; because I was concerned about orbital stability, and now &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/122509/627&quot;&gt;someone's running orbital simulations&lt;/a&gt; - because the right person saw it. On other occasions, I've been extremely disappointed, and have gotten sub-par responses. I'm not going to give specific examples, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does adding a bounty to the question increase the odds that the right folks will see it? I'd argue yes. We usually have a couple of bounties maximum at any given time; at the moment, we have half a dozen - a bit of an outlier. Nonetheless I think people are often intrigued by seeing the bounty list, and everyone wants the chance to win 50, or 100, or a couple hundred rep points. So . . . yes, I think they do get you extra visibility. The odds aren't &lt;em&gt;high&lt;/em&gt;, but they're non-zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things I've found that will make some bounties more successful than others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not already having an accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not having many high-voted answers (i.e. &gt;5 total score)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not having &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of answers, which would bury new ones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having a question that's accessible to more people&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, these do make a difference, and the questions with successful bounties I've raised usually fulfill most of these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, another reason to use bounties is to reward existing awesome answers, which will hopefully encourage more awesome answers. I've had a lot of success getting these answers more attention (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/100920/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21306/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/59917/627&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;). But that's kinda unrelated to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T16:43:58.873" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T16:43:58.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-08-22T18:39:12.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ash and Secespitus have basically covered it, but I think the main difference is that World Building is far happier to deal in the theoretical and hypothetical than other stack exchanges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't frequent the various science stacks but it is my understanding from other users here who do that questions like &quot;how would moths evolve if there were two moons in (answer to first question) orbit around our planet?&quot; probably wouldn't be welcomed on Biology. Whereas it would be fine here (if maybe a bit broad?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For straight up real world problems, yes you probably are better asking elsewhere or using Google, but for anything that involves a bit of creativity or a cross over between multiple branches of science that's where World Building shines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T18:39:12.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-08-22T18:50:59.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a huge fan of Randall Munroe's What If series I often find myself tempted to ask similar questions here, though I know they would be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said I have asked a few questions that had little to do with my actual world building projects (which, to be fair, are mostly in my head anyway so it's hard to tell the difference) and were mostly just curiosity as to how something could be done or if it could. The important factor is that they were all about World Building though, and while the answers do little more than satisfy my curiosity they may be of some use to others further down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100336/designing-an-animal-that-wants-to-be-eaten&quot;&gt;Designing an animal that wants to be eaten&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78794/freedom-from-the-tyranny-of-gravity&quot;&gt;Freedom from the Tyranny of gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither have any real bearing on anything but I feel they're both reasonable, on topic questions the answers to which may prove useful to someone (or even me) in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as long as they have a relevance to world building I don't see any issue with them not being associated with any particular project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T18:50:59.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-08-22T19:07:50.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YES.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is not as effective as a place for one-stop shopping than it would be as but one specialty shop among many specialty shops. Of course, much will depend on what you actually want out of your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If what you want is a bunch of numbers and a nice orbital diagramme, then by all means, ask on one the science, astronomy, or physics forums. That's where the experts in those fields hang out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If what you want is speculation on what this might look like in the sky, how two moons might affect cultural evolution, astrology, folklore, etc, then Worldbuilding.SE is exactly and precisely the place for you!! This is where the experts in our field hang out!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that WB.SE is &quot;poorly defined in relation to such (plug-in-the-numbers, science, or maths) questions&quot;. There is currently, and I'm sure has been, not a little debate as to what kinds of questions should be taken as on or off topic. You can see in Meta some of the more recent discussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you posted the question &quot;How do I go about calculating the orbit...&quot; or &quot;What would the orbit of XYZ look like...&quot; I would argue that these are obviously off-topic here and belong &lt;em&gt;some~anywhere else but here&lt;/em&gt;. My opinion is that all that mechanical substrate can best be done elsewhere; then come here when you're actually ready to do some actual worldbuilding! Other people disagree and argue that no matter how tangential a question might be to an invented world, it should be on-topic here. &lt;em&gt;shrug&lt;/em&gt; I'm for the &lt;strong&gt;art&lt;/strong&gt;; others are all about the &lt;strong&gt;mechanics&lt;/strong&gt;. That's never going to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction in a shared authority forum like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree entirely with you re &quot;less useful half combination of writing and sci-fi/fantasy&quot;. This could be taken as actually rather a slap in the face to many of us who are experienced writers &amp;amp; geopoets. If you ask the right kind of questions in this forum, you can receive spectacular &amp;amp; creative advice. Me, I hold that as closer to our core ideals than the orbital physics &amp;amp; mathematics that &lt;em&gt;underly&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T19:07:50.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T15:36:28.803" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen (and occasionally had) questions about what might drive a character or story element in a certain direction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in I have a world/character that starts out at A, and I want them to end up at B, but I just can't think of any logical series of events that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this that came up in chat recently:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A person is going through school for their dream job, and has a high likelihood of getting all the way through.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then for some reason they drop out, and start a lesser job.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It should be an internal reason, and doesn't have anything to do with family, money, or ethical reasons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are some reasons that a person would do that?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My suggestion in chat was that it was medical of some kind, but that's the best I could do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this would be way out of scope for WB, but still could be very useful if there was a way to make it happen. One way is to get people brainstorming ideas in Chat, which is good, but some kind of sandbox style meta thread where people that really want to can go and help other users see the hole in their thinking that is keeping them from moving forward would occasionally be helpful, and something that we could direct that kind of question toward when they get posted on the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T12:08:39.783" Title="Sandbox style Meta for characters or story help?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2018-08-23T16:28:19.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta is not for &quot;all the stuff that's off topic on Main&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for &quot;the discussions about how we do stuff on Main&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To me, what you propose sounds like a great fit for the chat room;&lt;/strong&gt; it likely takes a good amount of back and forth, and it has little or no lasting value to anyone else (what are the odds that someone else will want to go from the same A to the same B?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And honestly, it's not that hard to get to 20 rep, especially not on an active site like Worldbuilding. A dozen accepted edits and you're there with rep to spare, at 2 rep per accepted edit. It's not hard to find posts even on the front page that can benefit from some editing, even just for formatting. Or ask a question about the world itself; even if you've already pretty much decided on an aspect, it's not unreasonable that you might get input on things you hadn't considered. If the question is decent, you'll zoom past 20 rep in virtually no time around these parts. Or get to 200 rep on &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; site, and you'll get the 100 rep association bonus on every site, which gets you past almost all new user limitations. (The one I sometimes find frustrating which the association bonus doesn't get you past, even with a diamond elsewhere, is the need for 125 rep to vote down.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T16:28:19.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2018-08-23T17:58:52.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Michael's answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I agree with him.  If the intent is to make a question on topic, the yeah use the sandbox.  If it is truly character/plot related and that isn't going to change it doesn't belong on meta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't to say that meta couldn't facilitate such a thing, just that we don't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My recommended solution:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A public chat room:  We could create a public chatroom specifically for this purpose.  We already have Factory Floor for general conversations and Universe Factory for the blog.  There is no reason that we couldn't add a third room for character and plot based conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if the effort would take off and reach that &lt;em&gt;critical mass&lt;/em&gt; point that makes it useful and regularly populated, but we could certainly try it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also makes sense to advertise the chatroom on RPG.SE and Writing.SE.  This will help keep the room populated and it seems an obvious crossover point for all three groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General chat would be the obvious fall back, but I agree the place is a little random and may not always be &lt;em&gt;in a mood&lt;/em&gt; to facilitate such conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T15:29:17.950" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:29:17.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6601" CreationDate="2018-08-24T10:34:57.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been answering questions on this site for a while now and in the vast majority of cases, my answers have been to questions on the normal queue. I've put answers to questions that have then been put on bounty, and I've noticed that there are a few cases where some 'interesting' interpretations of the question appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, recently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121337/extinction-equilibrium-50&quot;&gt;extinction equilibrium&lt;/a&gt; question got a bounty on it. I'd not provided an answer to it previously, but when I noticed it on bounty I have to admit I thought about it just a little harder and came up with an approach that I thought &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; work. It's currently the highest ranked answer on the question and for what it's worth, I also got a bounty out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So; I'm not saying I'm the best answerer on this site; far from it in fact. That said, I &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; consider myself a 'senior answerer' these days and a provider of (at least) good quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'm of the opinion that the bounty works both ways; it attracts attention to be sure, but not all of that is &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; attention. It can attract good attention as well, but you as someone who posts a bounty, you're obligated to sort out which is which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's already been stated that bounties are more than any other factor a marketing device and I concur with that assessment. The trick is to only offer a bounty if the answer you select:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is the right answer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) Is of good quality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm of the view that a poor answer to a question doesn't deserve a bounty 'just because it's the best of a bad bunch'. That said, that is a decision that the poster of the bounty has to decide for his or herself. Yes, I've won a few bounties in my time, but I'd like to think I won them on merit, rather than a lack of options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of all this background is that I think the answer to this is quite simple; if you post a bounty on a question to draw attention to it, you're not obligated to give that bounty to a poor answer just because it's the best of the poor answers. Doing so only drives the behaviour described in this question and ultimately bounties that are truly earned will lead to more of the 'right' attention for future bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never having posted a bounty I can't comment on what bounty posters think, but I can say after tracking a number of bounty questions, the added attention does not skew the &lt;em&gt;overall&lt;/em&gt; quality of answers provided either to higher or lower quality according to my own sample set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T10:34:57.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6526" CreationDate="2018-08-24T14:44:26.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This challenge generated 7 questions and 68 answers, for an average of 9.714 answers per question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121182/if-we-can-have-all-the-comforts-of-home-in-space-why-would-we-settle-planets&quot;&gt;If we can have &amp;quot;all the comforts of home&amp;quot; in space why would we settle planets?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40408/ash&quot;&gt;Ash&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;232 total votes, 30 question votes, 21 answers, 7,769 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9JAJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Hunter (gold badge): over 200 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PKDl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;Pole Position (gold badge): 1st place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/matJi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Idea Generation (gold badge): 20 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121389/what-could-explain-why-trees-only-have-12-rings&quot;&gt;What could explain why trees only have 12 rings?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39052/cgtag&quot;&gt;cgTag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;96 total votes, 13 question votes, 13 answers, 4,146 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WE3kK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Seeker (silver badge): over 90 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70KBY.png&quot; alt=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;So Close And Yet So Far (silver badge): 2nd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121035/hiding-a-handful-of-immortals-on-a-generation-ship&quot;&gt;Hiding a handful of immortals on a Generation Ship?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21839/everybithelps&quot;&gt;EveryBitHelps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;56 total votes, 10 question votes, 5 answers, 766 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ov2FK.png&quot; alt=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot; title=&quot;On The Podium (bronze badge): 3rd place when sorted by total votes&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121191/where-on-my-spaceship-can-i-justify-more-space-for-my-humans&quot;&gt;Where on my spaceship can I justify more space for my humans?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2746/dot-sp0t&quot;&gt;dot_Sp0T&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;34 total votes, 8 question votes, 15 answers, 671 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LetVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot; title=&quot;Vote Novice (bronze badge): over 30 total upvotes on question and answers&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8UfN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Inviting Input (silver badge): 12 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/122130/why-might-humans-and-aliens-be-able-to-produce-viable-offspring&quot;&gt;Why might humans and aliens be able to produce viable offspring?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2053/tox123&quot;&gt;tox123&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;14 total votes, -4 question votes, 6 answers, 163 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121968/with-light-years-between-us-why-talk&quot;&gt;With light years between us, why talk?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43012/qfwfq&quot;&gt;Qfwfq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12 total votes, 1 question votes, 5 answers, 215 views&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfwmg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot; title=&quot;Just My 10 Cents (bronze badge): 5 answers on your question&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121607/how-to-establish-the-relationship-between-exponential-development-and-space-expl&quot;&gt;How to establish the relationship between exponential development and space exploration and consequences for future prognosis?&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39615/j-doe&quot;&gt;J. Doe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7 total votes, -2 question votes, 3 answers, 116 views&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T14:44:26.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-08-24T21:02:47.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. This issue is doomed to exist so long as we do not post a clear description of worldbuilding in the help center.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I think the site &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; favor a more lenient interpretation of &quot;What is Worldbuilding?&quot;  Nevertheless, we get caught up in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/4OkrYf4qlLM?t=2m50s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purity&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; of what we're trying to achieve.  So much so that it sometimes appears we don't want any fiction in our science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. We're not here to help people write stories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, the site has always generally favored the idea that we are not here to help people write stories, but rather to help them build a world with consistent rules.  This is regularly at odds with those who want to remove fiction from science fiction because they're constantly saying &quot;you can't do that, it isn't how the universe works&quot; rather than &quot;you know, if you bent the rules as we understand them like this, you can get what you're looking for.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that creates a dichotomy for me with the Spoons quesitons.  Several of them were clever, though most of them were the OP getting caught up in the silly fun of his early successes.  But, what is worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/uAXtO5dMqEI?t=22s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There is no spoon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between Willy Wonka's world filled with lollipop trees and chocolate rivers and all the pigeons turning into spoons?  I'm not here because this site is enobling.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;  I'm here because it tickles my fancy!  Because the chance to look through the eyes of people who see a universe very much different than my own is valuable to me &amp;mdash; and the more we try to restrict that vision because it doesn't fit into a stratified and regimented concept of worldbuilding or appears of little relevance or too dissimilar to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8qcccZy03s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reality&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; the less valuable it is to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, are they on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some are, some aren't.&lt;/em&gt;  It isn't (and shouldn't be) enough to exclude an entire group of questions because &lt;s&gt;the flora has been subsituted with candy&lt;/s&gt; the fauna (or anything else) has been substituted with spoons.  But, how can we tell the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never been a fan of expecting the OP to state they are building a world.  It means a question is on-topic just by making the statement.  However, questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be worded from the perspective of &quot;help me set my rules&quot; and not &quot;help me write my story.&quot;  Most of the spoon questions were too story-based (a function of the plot, not a function of the world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;But, ultimately and from my point of view, you can be the inspector verifying the house, the contractor building the house, the engineer establishing the specs, the architect designing the house, or the homeowner dreaming of your new home... it's all worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very, very rare for me to vote OT:NAW (off-topic:not about worldbuilding), and none of the spoon questions met my personal expectations for OT:NAW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the spoons questions, speaking generally and not about any question individually, are not off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;I've been chastized for using this word in this context before, but there isn't a better way to say it.  There is an aspect of worldbuilding that is about the consitency of rules.  There's another about the flight of fancy.  We should be striking a balance, but if I must favor one side over the other, I'd prefer to favor the liberty of flight over the bondage of rules.  Which is likely a strange concept from me as I'm a stong advocate of clear and consistent rules where this site's operation is concerned.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;And I have little tolerance for people who actually believe what we know of science today is the written-in-stone truth, all that there ever was and all that there will ever be.  I've seen people on this site talk about theories (e.g., dark matter) as if they're indisputable-by-God realities and shoot down clever ideas because they don't meet those indisputable-by-God realities.  One of the many reasons I still read Jack Vance scifi is because his imagination was guided by science &amp;mdash; but not bound by it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T21:02:47.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2018-08-24T21:04:19.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because brainstorming doesn't fit the SE model, which as I understand it, is basically &quot;focused question -- focused answer&quot;, it may very well be that SE is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the best solution for this particular kind of query. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange (even the WB forum) is not the end-all be-all of worldbuilding communities out there! I understand all about building a brand a building a community, but the reality is that there are many places a geopoet can (and should!) go for for help apart from any one community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An issue like this, character development or story / narrative evolution, could perhaps be addressed in a more traditional open question / long discussion forum. &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythicscribes.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MythicScribes&lt;/a&gt;, focusing as it does on fantasy writing, might be a better option than SE for these kinds of open ended queries. A more general worldbuilding forum like &lt;a href=&quot;http://aveneca.com/cbb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CBB&lt;/a&gt; might also be a place to seek for advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A chatroom might be nice to bounce some quick ideas around. But even that format May not the best for the more detailed back and forth a writer would require to hammer out details of a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T21:04:19.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T23:06:18.657" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it from a book or a movie or game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54670" OwnerDisplayName="GaneGoe" LastEditorUserId="54670" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T05:20:28.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T10:24:29.430" Title="What is the worldbuilding background picture from?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6618" CreationDate="2018-08-24T23:32:33.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The image in our site design is an original creation by Kurtis Beavers, a designer with Stack Exchange, seeded by ideas from our community.  You can see more about how the site design came about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2916/28&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Site Design&lt;/a&gt; (there was a later &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3353/28&quot;&gt;update&lt;/a&gt; too), and in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/meeting-the-worldbuilding-designer-b5fde86de92b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview with Kurtis on our blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T23:32:33.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T11:16:04.067" Score="18" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bring before the assembly Exhibit A, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123016/29&quot;&gt;A cure for the 'Kessler Syndrome'?&lt;/a&gt;, tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; as of revision 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/58587/29&quot;&gt;Dealing with space debris and Kessler Syndrome&lt;/a&gt;, tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kessler-syndrome&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kessler-syndrome&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kessler-syndrome&lt;/a&gt; as of today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who closed &lt;em&gt;A cure for the 'Kessler Syndrome'?&lt;/em&gt; (gold tag badge holder) also referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83543/29&quot;&gt;How to efficiently deorbit space junk&lt;/a&gt;, tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/orbital-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;orbital-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;orbital-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-constructs&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-constructs&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-constructs&lt;/a&gt; and itself closed as a duplicate of &lt;em&gt;Dealing with space debris and Kessler Syndrome&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, question X is a duplicate of question Y if, and only if, any valid answer to question Y is an equally valid answer to question X. Typically, question Y should also exist on the site before question X is posted, but exceptions sometimes exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2004/29&quot;&gt;Does [hard-science] imply [science-based] imply [reality-check]?&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/29&quot;&gt;Should our default position be that answers should be science-/logic-based, rather than magic-based?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2211/29&quot;&gt;A hard-science ultimatum&lt;/a&gt;, along with the hard science notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question asks for hard science.&lt;/strong&gt; All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;the tag description&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring for a second that &lt;em&gt;A cure for the 'Kessler Syndrome'?&lt;/em&gt; probably should be retagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kessler-syndrome&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kessler-syndrome&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kessler-syndrome&lt;/a&gt; and possibly other tags to aid discovery via categorization by tags, my question is simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Given that hard-science questions place specific requirements on answers that neither science-based nor reality-check questions do, can a question tagged hard-science ever validly be a duplicate of a non-hard-science question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T20:04:03.797" Title="Can a [hard-science] question be a duplicate of a non-[hard-science] question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2018-08-26T11:16:04.067" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, a hard-science question cannot validly be a duplicate of a non-hard-science question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag on a question places specific requirements on answers. Answers that do not satisfy the criteria of that tag do not give original poster the information they seek, in much the same way that answers invoking magic are not valid answers to questions that do not allow for magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a non-hard-science question does not place such restrictions on answers as the OP has indicated that they want (by adding the hard-science tag to their question), answers that are valid to the non-hard-science question are not necessarily valid as answers to the hard-science question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the extra requirements placed on answers means that a hard-science question cannot be a duplicate of a non-hard-science question, even if the subject matter is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the other question can, and might be, &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; and possibly &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to the OP, so it is perfectly appropriate to link to it in a comment and point out that it covers very similar ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP added the hard-science tag to their question without fully realizing what it means, including if the question appears to itself not meet the necessary bar for a question that seeks hard-science answers, then this can itself be pointed out in a comment and a suggestion be made for the OP to remove the hard-science tag. However, the ultimate decision as to whether to require answers to be hard-science or not should be up to the user asking the question; therefore, the tag should not be edited out without a clear indication from the user asking the question that such is their desire (and for clarity, it is probably best if they make such an edit themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T11:16:04.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2018-08-26T18:49:28.267" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6622/28&quot;&gt;Michael's answer&lt;/a&gt; that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question has stricter requirements and thus shouldn't be marked as a duplicate (if it's really a hard-science question and not a tagging error).  However, it's easy to see how this happens, so we should also clarify the distinction in the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are easy to miss, especially on mobile or in the close-votes review queue.  Further, not every reviewer will be immediately aware of the significance of this distinction; &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; tags are just for categorization, after all, so this one is unusual.  Therefore, when a hard-science question is very similar to a non-hard-science question, it's best to edit the question to say something like &quot;(link) is very similar, but this question asks for hard science&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good approach when &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; credible duplicate has been suggested.  If somebody suggests, or you discover on your own, a question that looks very similar to yours, &lt;em&gt;anticipate and deflect&lt;/em&gt; the close votes.  Link to the other question and say why yours is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T18:49:28.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T21:15:06.687" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of adding a new tag that might be helpful in Worldbuilding. One of the tags I am think of at the moment is cosmology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cosmology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the creation and development of the universe. This tag is different from the astronomy tag because it has to do with creation theory, not observation of astronomical events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cosmology&lt;/a&gt; is a branch of science dealing with understanding the creation of the universe. The most popular of creation theories is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Big Bang Theory&lt;/a&gt;. The Big Bang is a hypothetical scenario in which an infinitely small sphere containing all of the mass in the universe exploded outward, eventually forming galaxies and stars. As with all theories in cosmology, this theory has problems explaining the universe, such as why the universe appears to be expanding faster. Another theory in cosmology is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Steady state&lt;/a&gt;, which proposes that galaxies are created in the center of the universe and expand outwards. The density of matter in the universe remains constant, but this theory breaks the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;law of conservation of mass&lt;/a&gt;. The cosmology tag can be used to describe both scientific and religious interpretations of the creation of the universe, although a religion tag is recommended for the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking at a post and thinking &quot;I could add a few tags to this,&quot; but when I looked for those tags, I realized they didn't exist. Specifically, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/22957/religion-after-the-discovery-of-a-multiverse&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not wondering if it is possible to add these tags or how to add them, I have the rep to do so. What I am wondering is whether I should. Will adding this tag be helpful to other users? I have read the help section about tags, and it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible, and new users are not allowed to create new tags. Even if you have sufficient reputation, you should only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that your question covers a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't this tag would be particularly novel, but I think they would help users search for questions about topics they like. For example, someone who is really interested in cosmology in particular could search for questions with that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I have ideas for some possible tags that could also be created but that I won't get into just yet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;string theory, astrology, separate tags for creation theories (eg: one for the Big Bang etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to see what other users think about the first two tags first before I consider these tags, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should I create this tag&lt;/strong&gt;, or would it just be more noise on the site? It would be great to hear what people's opinions are on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastEditorUserId="54384" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T23:58:39.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T23:58:39.053" Title="New cosmology tag?" Tags="|support|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T11:52:00.153" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120571/worse-than-zombies-part-1&quot;&gt;Worse than zombies, part 1&lt;/a&gt; examined one of two implications of the phrase &quot;it could be worse; there could be zombies.&quot; It garnered a lot of attention, a slew of good answers and got closed in about 13 hours flat. Given it's closure and the speed with which it happened is it appropriate to even ask the second half of the question given that it is probably going to be open to the same general issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part 2 would test the second implication; &quot;If there are zombies the situation is as bad as it can get. Except by adding more zombies of course.&quot; in the same context as part 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that that was the reception after Sandboxing the question for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T11:13:43.833" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T12:58:13.827" Title="Should I post Worse than Zombies, part 2?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2018-08-27T12:08:39.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A specialised chat is probably the best option available within the SE format for this kind of work, putting it on meta is definitely inappropriate; meta is where we should be discussing the workings of the main, policy, priorities, appropriate topics, proposed events, etc... not where we should be getting deliberately off-topic. I'd certainly be interested in seeing if I could contribute to such a chat but it's not material that has any place in the meta. As a note some of the proposed material does have a place over on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt; page, though mostly still off-topic, so a chat over there may already exist and/or be more successful given the different group focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T12:08:39.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T12:21:46.820" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;While composing an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6609/sandbox-style-meta-for-characters-or-story-help&quot;&gt;Sandbox style Meta for characters or story help?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt; I noticed for the first time that the [something.se] shorthand link for denoting other stack exchange sites isn't supported for questions and answers only in comments. I had a good look at the markdown help and realised that there's a whole host of shorthand links that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;only supported for comments&lt;/a&gt; rather than being generally usable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is two fold; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First is there a specific reason we can't have those links supported across all entry modes?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Secondly if we could have them across the board do people think we'd use them? Because there's not a lot of point having a feature we won't generally use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T12:21:46.820" Title="Why are the comment shorthand links not supported for answers as well?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6626" CreationDate="2018-08-27T12:37:17.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise behind asking the first question appears to be a matter of philosophy. If we step away from the philosophical discussion for a moment, I note that each assumption has, at best, a &lt;em&gt;situational&lt;/em&gt; solution. This implies these issues are the concern of a plot or story, rather than the world in which they occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as whether you should ask the second question: Use your best judgment. If you know before posting the question will be closed, either post it first in the Sandbox to see if the community can bring it into scope or don't ask it at all. Asking a question you know will be closed feels, to me, unethical: It looks like you're trying to reap reputation without caring for the health of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T12:37:17.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2018-08-27T17:15:54.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the actual closure behaviour I've seen &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;question X is a duplicate of question Y if, and only if, any valid answer to question Y is an equally valid answer to question X.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;doesn't seem to be the practice. The practice appears to be more like &quot;question X is a duplicate of question Y if the &lt;strong&gt;existing valid answers&lt;/strong&gt; to question Y are equally valid answers to question X.&quot; In fact duplicate question closures have been defended on that basis more than once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in practice a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question may in fact be considered a duplicate, (as in people may cast close votes on that basis) this may not be how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag and the duplicate question status are intended to interact but it does happen, especially when the answers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; question are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T11:17:38.130" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T11:17:38.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T17:35:36.940" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never had any idea how people used to insert Cthulu script into pages, but since this site is rife with Eldritch Abominations (thanks, @James), it pops up from time to time in questions and answers, such as our site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;Prime Post&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I no longer see all of the Cthulu font on that page; most of it has been replaced by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13730544/is-there-a-glyph-not-found-character&quot;&gt;notdef glyph&lt;/a&gt;, which on my system registers as a rectangle. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; see it in Firefox (v61.0.1), but not in Chrome (v68.0.3440) any more. Both of these are on Ubuntu 16.04.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone have any ideas what is going on with Chrome and the Script of Madness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T18:18:17.287" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T22:45:37.670" Title="Did Chrome updates break the Script of Madness?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2018-08-27T18:06:51.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing you mean is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://eeemo.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zalgo text&lt;/a&gt; (or various variations of that word combination).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it seems to be y̩̠̻͔o̫̭̖̞͈͡u̩͔̠͓. Because it's work̢̳͕i̘n̦g̘͎͙ for me (Same Chrome Version, 64bit, Win10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little explanation on how it works (simplified):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Th̹e̫̦̤ s̢̥͍cript is making use o̘̠̙̗͜f &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6579844/how-does-zalgo-text-work&quot;&gt;Unicode-Com̪bining-Characters&lt;/a&gt; that move thi͙͈̥̳̬͎n̤͈̟g̦̖̫s f̭͇ͅǫ̭͈̙̖llowing that symbol somewher͈e relative to the preceding letter. This is usually͇̙̱͉̳ used to̧͖̻͉̰ form more complex characters or letters that e.g. are not in the normal U̫̻͉͝nicode character set used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T18:26:08.637" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T18:26:08.637" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2018-08-27T21:11:25.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, it looks like there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a difference in rendering between Ubuntu and Windows, but I can't replicate your problem specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm dual-booting Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10, and in Windows 10 I see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xjr57.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xjr57.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zalgo in Windows&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAICS, it looks fine and just as it always has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ubuntu, I get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ubPM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ubPM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zalgo in Ubuntu 18&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which looks oddly &lt;em&gt;compressed&lt;/em&gt; in some way. Admittedly, I'm not sure what the Prime Post looked like in Ubuntu before so can't confirm whether this is similar or different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, I'm using Google Chrome (not Chromium) 68.0.3440.106. chrome://version output below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Windows 10:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Chrome  68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Revision   1c32c539ce0065a41cb79da7bfcd2c71af1afe62-refs/branch-&#xA;  heads/3440@{#794}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OS Windows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JavaScript V8 6.8.275.26&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flash  30.0.0.154 C:\Users\willi\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash\30.0.0.154\pepflashplayer.dll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ubuntu 18.04.1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Chrome  68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Revision   1c32c539ce0065a41cb79da7bfcd2c71af1afe62-refs/branch-heads/3440@{#794}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OS Linux&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JavaScript V8 6.8.275.26&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flash  30.0.0.154 /home/wkumler/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/30.0.0.154/libpepflashplayer.so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T21:11:25.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-08-28T03:19:20.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  If you want an answer grounded in facts and science, you need to ask elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Worldbuilding SE seems to be dominated by early ideas that sound good, even though deeply flawed in a way that is immediately obvious to subject matter experts.  But because subject matter experts do not generally inhabit the site, but only find their way over from teasers in the sidebar of other SE sites, grossly erroneous answers are often well entrenched with many uninformed upvotes before anyone with actual knowledge arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're content with ideas that sound good to the ignorant, ask away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to validate that specific ideas sound plausible &lt;em&gt;to the informed&lt;/em&gt;, then realistically you have to &lt;em&gt;ask somewhere else&lt;/em&gt;, where there is community of actual expertise on the topics involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in asking on topic sites, you'll have to be careful to obey their rules.  For example, you can't really ask &quot;what X would enable a Y&quot;, rather, you have to ask specifically &quot;could (specific) X be compatible with (specific) Y&quot;.  ...be prepared for an earful about why it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27653" LastEditorUserId="27653" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T03:31:50.993" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T03:31:50.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T18:18:58.853" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect a bug, but perhaps a WAD (Works As Designed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top bar showed my photo and rep as if I was logged in (image below), but I was not able to enter a comment nor an answer.  In trying to figure out why, I discovered I was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; logged in (or more precisely, a log-in link was offered and it gave me a log-in form).  After submitting that form, the top bar still looked the same, but I was allowed to save my comment.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/83uKJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/83uKJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;account tool bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18193" LastEditorUserId="18193" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T18:50:01.830" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T18:50:01.830" Title="Logged in but not?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2018-08-28T18:52:31.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the tags as a matter distinct from the question(s) asked in the title &amp;amp; body of the Query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cited questions share two tags in common: Kessler Syndrome &amp;amp; science-based; don't share other tags: near future, orbital mechanics &amp;amp; satellites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the random nature of tag utilisation I don't see that as a viable sieve for determining whether one question is a duplicate of another. I think it might be dangerous to set this precedent as a determining factor. What if the question being considered for closure is subtantively superior? (Better grammar, more detail, wittier presentation.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;: two queries that ask the same exact question in title &amp;amp; body twice with the same assumptions and the same pathway, but have different tags, they are duplicates of each other. (Which one should be considered be the duplicate is a question for a different debate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the cited questions are not good examples. When I look at the actual questions, I see two basic issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading only the titles, &lt;strong&gt;Charles Noon's&lt;/strong&gt; basic query is &quot;how to deal with space debris vis a vis the Kessler Syndrome&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;case's&lt;/strong&gt; basic query is &quot;how to deal with space debris vis a vis the Kessler Syndrome&quot;. I concur: regardless of the tags involved, at the surface, the essential question is the same and the underlying background is the same.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, when we get into the body of each query, we see that the essential questions are radically different. &lt;strong&gt;Charles Noon&lt;/strong&gt; asks &quot;How can &lt;em&gt;private industry&lt;/em&gt; deal with the problem of orbital debris over a &lt;em&gt;longish but unspecified period of time&lt;/em&gt;&quot; while &lt;strong&gt;case&lt;/strong&gt; asks &quot;How can &lt;em&gt;government&lt;/em&gt; deal with an &lt;em&gt;immediate &amp;amp; life threatening&lt;/em&gt; crisis of orbital debris menacing orbital operations&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without throwing the hard science tag into the mix, these are not duplicate questions: they share the same goal, but they are seeking answers along different pathways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T18:52:31.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2018-08-28T23:40:07.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd give my left eye for users to put more research into their questions, but short of hacking their IP addresses to discover where they live and sending over someone inevitably named &quot;Guido&quot; with a suspicious-looking violin case to &quot;convince&quot; them research is in their best interests... we're stuck with the reality that people will visit and use this site as they wish.  Our option is to downvote with well-directed comments and hope they catch on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an old adage that, itself, wasn't well thought-out: &quot;You can choose your neighbors, but not your family.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... yes... you can choose your neighbors... so long as you're willing to leave the neighborhood should someone move in next door you don't like.  And pray hard that when you move in the folks next door like you and don't choose to leave because of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point?  If we enjoy the site, then we need to grin and bear the bad with the good.  In the end, if the world is a little bit better place than when we found it, the effort was well worth it (IMHO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T23:40:07.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T00:16:17.993" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I looked at the four &quot;alternate_X&quot; tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view, one or two of these &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be different, but as they read in their descritpions, they're almost all the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; This tag is for questions relating to radically changed Earth. This alternate Earth could be a post-apocalyptic Earth, or Earth with major changes in the current social/political/economical schemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that's our planet with changes to lifestyle or socio-political structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; For questions that ask what might have happened if history had taken a different path. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that's our planet with changes to lifestyle or socio-political structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; For questions in which reality is different than it is in real life. This may range from small, historical changes to absolute revisions of the laws of physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that's our planet with changes to lifestyle or socio-political structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt; For questions about worlds other than Earth that are significantly different. This could be a water, ice, barren or other planet. For questions about planets similar to Earth with specific differences use the &lt;em&gt;earth-like&lt;/em&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only one that's different.  But, honestly, I can't think of a reason to use it.  It would apply to every question about a planet that isn't specifically about Earth.  I'm sure we have plenty of other tags that are better suited to that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Can we either (a) make some of these synonyms of each other, (b) use some better than they are being used, or (c) burn one or more of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, this might be better suited to four separate questions, but I wanted everyone to see the big picture first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have posted my recommendations as answers per Vincent's suggestion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T02:03:19.130" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T19:48:27.183" Title="Are the four &quot;alternate_X&quot; tags synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2018-08-29T02:00:03.100" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; should become synonyms of one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, it doesn't matter if the premise is (a) what would Earth be like if gunpowder wasn't invented? (b) what would Earh be like if the sun was blue rather than yellow? (c) what would the U.S. be like if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Jackson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stonewall Jackson&lt;/a&gt; lived? or (d) what would Australia be like post-apocalypse?  These are all alternate-earth/alternate-history to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T02:00:03.100" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2018-08-29T02:01:54.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;  Change the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; tag to reflect the parallel-universe/multiverse context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was tempted to bundle &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; in as a synonym with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; tags, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better served to broaden its scope to incorporate the &quot;multiverse&quot; or &quot;parallel-universe&quot; idea proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/multiverse-tag&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.  The entire pocket-universe/parallel-universe/string-theory/&lt;a href=&quot;http://riddick.wikia.com/wiki/Underverse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;underverse&lt;/a&gt;/multiverse context is simply an &quot;alternate reality&quot; from the perspective of world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we think it can be used as described, then we need to update its wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we don't think it can be used this way, we need to propose another use, make it a synonym of the first two (above), or burn it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T02:01:54.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2018-08-29T02:03:23.770" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;I propose simply burning the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-worlds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-worlds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-worlds&lt;/a&gt;tag, applying appropriate replacement tags as necessary to the connected questions.  I don't believe it brings enough context to a question to make it easier to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T14:10:46.620" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T14:10:46.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2018-08-29T13:54:31.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not suggest any formal means of &quot;encouraging&quot; them. If anything, lead by example: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I found the answer to this question by googling the following terms; the answer was in the third link reported by Google. here is what it says...&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teach as you answer. Other than that, I'd leave them alone, I consider SE a research site in and of itself, I would not want to &lt;strong&gt;dis&lt;/strong&gt;courage anybody from asking a question because they aren't sure how to meet the requirement of having &quot;researched&quot; it. Many of the questions are just not that researchable, some of the 'evolution' questions would require years of experience studying evolution and genetics, some of the math or AI or engineering questions likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have that kind of academic and work experience and enjoy thinking about off-the-wall questions, so I will answer them, even if they are on the dumb side: We all started on the dumb side!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like the questions, don't answer them. Don't read the answers. Wait for something that does interest you. Leave it to the moderators to police the questions, or readers willing to flag them or VTC. I don't mind flagging them or voting to close if I think a poster is abusing the system with BS questions they don't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want answered, or as I have seen, posters basically aiming to start a discussion for their own entertainment by asking controversial and weird questions. But we have existing mechanisms for all that; use the system as it is. I wouldn't change the system just because you aren't interested in 80% of the questions asked. (or whatever %).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:54:31.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T15:41:55.730" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just recently asked the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123389/in-a-world-without-humans-or-any-caretakers-would-domestic-house-pets-simply-reg&quot;&gt;In a world without humans—or any caretakers—would domestic house pets simply regress into being feral or die?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which has been closed as a duplicate of this other question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117574/which-livestock-could-survive-without-humans&quot;&gt;Which livestock could survive without humans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is clearly about domesticated &lt;em&gt;pets&lt;/em&gt; and not about farm animals and livestock. Two completely different populations of animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/23519/kingledion&quot;&gt;kingledion&lt;/a&gt; states &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123389/in-a-world-without-humans-or-any-caretakers-would-domestic-house-pets-simply-reg/123397?noredirect=1#comment381546_123389&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“@JakeGould Looks good on edit. I don't see this as a duplicate any more.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet… Boom! Question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe the question was unfairly closed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26246/srm&quot;&gt;SRM&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/220/mike-scott&quot;&gt;Mike Scott&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/12297/michaelk&quot;&gt;MichaelK&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21222/renan&quot;&gt;Renan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/32987/cam&quot;&gt;CaM&lt;/a&gt; so I am requesting the question be re-opened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3366" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T18:00:41.090" Title="Question closed as dupe when it isn’t" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6647" CreationDate="2018-08-29T15:59:06.553" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can edit your question and politely explain why the proposed duplicate does not cover what you are asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after your question will enter the reopen queue, and community members will decide if it can be reopened or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, other members can simply vote to reopen the question, and again it will enter the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reopening gets enough approval votes, the question will be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:59:06.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2018-08-29T16:41:20.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Use incentives and/or positive reinforcement.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to speak for everyone, but I think a lot of us do not incentivize well-researched questions enough. Certainly, I am guilty of casting up votes too sparingly. I will often realize that I tend to only up vote when I say to myself: &quot;Whoa! this question blows my mind!&quot; At that point, the question usually has 30+ votes already. I fear there are many unsung hero questions that were researched extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reminded that there is theoretically another dimension to up-voting. When one hovers over the up-vote icon, what we see is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, sometimes I try to be mindful of whether the asker put in some time familiarizing him/herself with the material. This can only be expected to a reasonable degree, like others have mentioned, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be experts in all of the myriad fields the questions pertain to. Especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geology&lt;/a&gt; among others. That being said, it's still somewhat straight-forward to tell if the asker has done their homework. The other caveat of what constitutes research effort is subjective, but I think common sense goes a long way. I usually look for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relevant diagrams, graphs, visual elements that help us understand the core question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;examples, real life experiments, research papers or even thought experiments; something to show the asker has already thought it through a little&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in-text references and hyperlinks to relevant topics to show the asker at least has an awareness of existing literature related to the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bullet points! clear, ordered lists of specific aspects of the question to help answerers zero in and prevent the question from being too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to go overboard with the above, or else we will lose the &quot;clear&quot; dimension; the question will not be concise and might just confuse everyone. However, as Raditz_35 points out, there are many questions that are very short, having little to no research effort and yet manage to go &quot;viral&quot; on the network. I thought about this point, and it might not be all a bad thing; many great questions were very short with minimal development. As long as it's not a slippery slope to crude sensationalism where we are just asking the craziest things and coining the most click-bait-sounding titles, we should be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to sum up, up-voting based on research-effort would be a decent way to incentivize researched questions. When viewed through a pure incentives framework, askers would likely see that having a well-received question doesn't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a research component. So I'm speculating that, perhaps, if we upvoted questions that do not necessarily have a premise or topic we are fascinated with, but has still been researched well, that could merit an up-vote nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be curious to know what others think too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32966" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:41:20.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6647" CreationDate="2018-08-29T18:00:41.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, please remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se&quot;&gt;closing a question is an opportunity, not a judgment&lt;/a&gt;.  Just because the other question was about livestock doesn't mean the answers didn't apply to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it's an opportunity for you to review the other question and use that knowledge to improve your own.  Frankly, your response suggests you reviewed it with as little depth and consideration that you believe the close voters did to you.  However, the answer from Marshall Tigerus applies to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should you have done?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You had an opportunity to improve and clarify your question and explain why those answers were insufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this important?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It improves the quality of the site as a whole by reducing clutter in the SE universe.  Stack Exchange is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a place where individuals come to receive individual answers.  It is a community where people join together to create an encyclopedic reference that many &lt;em&gt;other people&lt;/em&gt; can also use and enjoy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were not the only person the close voters were thinking about.  From the SE perspective, we WANT to point similar questions to previously asked questions that have suitable answers.  Not only does it remove the clutter of many similar answers, but it gives future users the chance to see their question from multiple points of view, which is highly beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Marshall's answer is (IMO) a perfectly sensible answer to your question (it's as valid for small animals as it is large), you were specific with your question.  It's likely too broad (dogs and cats, for example, have different survival traits compared to lizards and snakes, which are more outdoor-habitat-dependent), but I'll vote to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm also going to downvote it for lack of research.  It appears some of your answer could have been found simply by reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia's entry for &quot;feral&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  The research would have (IMO) resulted in a narrower question or series of questions that would have resulted in higher quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T18:00:41.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T23:13:01.857" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123575/if-all-humans-1-years-old-disappeared-would-the-rest-reboot-society&quot;&gt;If all humans &amp;gt;1 years old disappeared, would the rest reboot society?&lt;/a&gt; beyond absurd, but OP is actively defending it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than down votes, is there any other action to take?  Maybe it's Too Broad, but the answer is pretty obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T21:07:57.493" Title="What to do with troll questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2018-08-31T01:42:50.397" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of something I wrote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4528/why-is-this-question-about-an-underwater-city-off-topic/4557#4557&quot;&gt;another meta post&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your good point is that, while most people, perhaps, can't solve that ergosphere problem, most people can solve basic 4th grade math. But, just because most people can doesn't mean everyone can. The conclusion is that we should not run people off the forum for asking 4th grade math questions. If they legitimately need help with 4th grade math for Worldbuilding puroposes, we should give those question equal time along the near-impossible hard-science ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sort of the same logic applies here, in my opinion. The user in question hasn't demonstrate otherwise that they are a troll. Plenty of people probably have zero experience with children under the age of 1 year old, and don't know what they can or cannot do. If you've never met a zero-year old, and a youngest or single child may honestly never have, then you might not know much about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone doesn't know as much as you, it isn't nice to assume they are troll. I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to people. There are some rare cases where a question is pretty inane, but doesn't trigger any of the close reasons. In that case, the only real action is to downvote or answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T01:42:50.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T07:07:57.363" Score="10" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had a number of questions lately that, in my opinion, skirt the rules.  They're not specific (per the new Help Center, THANKS! for that BTW).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123625/anti-psychic-countermeasures&quot;&gt;Anti-Psychic Countermeasures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123598/what-would-a-medieval-war-against-an-air-borne-race-look-like&quot;&gt;What would a medieval war against an air-borne race look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123586/how-would-you-explain-the-process-of-reverie-in-elves&quot;&gt;How would you explain the process of reverie in elves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123459/how-would-i-gain-energy-from-a-rotating-planet&quot;&gt;How would I gain energy from a rotating planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just a few.  Generally, this isn't a big problem because when you work through the question proper there's enough data to not quite be so open-ended, but generally speaking, they're all open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions.  Some are much worse than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the questions appear very much to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-i-have-a-high-concept-please-do-my-work-for-me-questions&quot;&gt;high concept&lt;/a&gt; questions.  In other cases, the question is fundamentally unanswerable without something: be it more data or changes in what the author is asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What should be our default policy concerning open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that one of the biggest problems with these questions is that they're almost always primarily opinion-based, both from the SE point of view and our own.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T12:28:29.480" Title="How should we deal with inherently open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6656" CreationDate="2018-08-31T09:45:44.287" Score="9" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough rep to actually protect or unprotect a question myself but a couple of times I've come across questions that are getting quite a few low rated answers or otherwise poor answers and looked for a way to suggest it be protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a method exist? Should I flag it for moderator attention or is that poor use of moderator's time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know questions get automatically protected if they meet some criteria so maybe it's just better to ignore it and the system will deal with it (if a high rep user or mod doesn't first)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:35:24.843" Title="Can you vote to protect / flag a question for protection?" Tags="|support|protected-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2018-08-31T12:35:24.843" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Flag in need of moderator intervention&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to the close button, you can vote to flag for moderator attention, then as the note write: this is getting crappy comments and should be protected&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Find a 15k user in chat&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; and see if you can find a 15k user to protect it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:35:24.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-08-31T12:41:13.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Distinguish between those that should be closed and those that shouldn't&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with fishing for ideas. I have this cool idea X (elves do reverie, or generating energy from a fast spinning planet), but I don't know how to make it realistic. Give me some advice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like those questions they spawn creativity, which is the best part of this site. Boring old math answers and snarky joke answers are cool and all, but coming up with a justifiable but off-the-wall idea is the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if the question asks you to write a story, then you close as 'story based.' If the question doesn't have any good criteria for selection, then it is opinion based. But I didn't vote to close any of those linked questions (but I'm a softie on close votes). I think they are all good and could potentially get nice answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I changed my mind on the psychic question after re-reading it and voted to close, but the rest are still good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T12:28:29.480" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T12:28:29.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2018-08-31T19:48:27.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;:  as suggested in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6641/are-the-four-alternate-x-tags-synonyms?cb=1#comment20727_6643&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;, change the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; excerpt to say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions in which reality is different than it is in real life. This may range from small, environmental changes to absolute revisions of the laws of physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This differentiates it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; is fine as is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes the three:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt; for physical changes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; for historical changes.  E.g. the Roman empire never moves to Constantinople and never falls.  Everyone speaks Latin.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; for future changes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6642/2113&quot;&gt;this proposal&lt;/a&gt;, we have:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would Earth be like if gunpowder wasn't invented?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would Earth be like if the sun was blue rather than yellow?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would the U.S. be like if Stonewall Jackson lived?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would Australia be like post-apocalypse?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These might need to be narrowed to actually work on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T19:48:27.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-08-31T22:49:59.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm probably a repeat offender on this and kinda see world-building in general as this. We typically have one of 2 stances when we ask a real question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have all the Legos. How should I put them together?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm building something. What Lego do I need to fill this hole?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those are rather open-ended and opinion-based thoughts usually. Granted, not everything fits those two questions, and you can always reword a question enough that it fits the site policy. But generally I think there's a good measuring stick:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How snarkily can I answer the question while getting away with it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anti-psychic if they gave no extra info I could say &amp;quot;Wear tinfoil hats&amp;quot;&#xA;For something like &amp;quot;Harness Planetary Energy&amp;quot; there's an actual limited list if you include hard-science tag. If you don't then more info may be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most importantly:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question is open-ended without context. Sometimes it's completely locked down &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; context. But &lt;em&gt;as a resource the site does better from easily digestible questions regardless of how open-ended.&lt;/em&gt; Being able to see that a question is related to why you came there at a glance is nice. Especially if the title isn't spot-on to the minutia of the question context. The abundance of opinion based answers in a &lt;em&gt;TOO broad&lt;/em&gt; question will still have good answers bubble to the top with the voting system. It'll attract low-quality too. Which is one of the reasons I think these kind of answers get closed? Lack of critical thinking added to sheer volume?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....Which wraps back to the Snark Test. If I give you a question locked down entirely with context and tons of detail: a) I might not even be &lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to be snarky b) By imagining a snarky response I just might be ashamed of myself for walking over someone's effort. If I can feel absolutely certain I can get away with a snarky response... then maybe it isn't worth my effort to even respond. Just vote close and move on. At the most maybe help them improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While I'm here responding to comments, I'm going to preemptively defend my stance on the opinion-based potentially  being a resource bit:&lt;/strong&gt; If &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions were meant to be useful only in the specific context of the OP, then we'd be a forum. Nobody would ever need to see an answer again besides the OP. We're a resource, having &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; room for opinion or varied answers is a must. Not because it is &lt;em&gt;in general required&lt;/em&gt; for Q&amp;amp;A format but because we're a site related to creativity. If our sets of answers are tailored &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; fundamentally to specific Qs then general answers aren't as clearly separated (assume they exist) for notice/consumption by an external visitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a limit to generalization as far as the site is concerned. Like I stated in my comments though, while you can measure this (I use my Snark Test) a check for a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; Q isn't necessarily a check for a &lt;em&gt;redeemable&lt;/em&gt; Q.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ex:&lt;/strong&gt; The &amp;quot;Creating a realistic world map&amp;quot; series by Tim B is more open-ended than most posts but has a clear use, you can't really be snarky. If he tried to generalize it all into one post it would've been easier to be snarky....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; while &amp;quot;How do I make a world&amp;quot; wouldn't have been as golden it's essentially the same as &amp;quot;Creating a realistic world map: Steps?&amp;quot; (yes &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; is a &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; context difference, but throw me that bone, that's something we fight in the comments all the time... or at least we used to &amp;gt;_&amp;gt;), an answer of &amp;quot;Landmass, Weather, Erosion, etc.&amp;quot; could have been potentially useful and if it hit points most people wouldn't think about right away (Heat Map, etc.) then it probably would've been a &lt;em&gt;redeeming answer&lt;/em&gt; for provoking thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still voting to close &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; the reason might be instead of &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot;... maybe it's become in a way &amp;quot;attracting low-quality&amp;quot; because all that could be said has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, maybe there's a pretty amazing step-based way of doing &lt;em&gt;unrealistic&lt;/em&gt; world maps. I would never be bold enough to ask &amp;quot;Creating a fantasy world map&amp;quot;, it seems too open-ended. I don't really know, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; haven't thought enough on it, but if an answer managed to convince me of a process I would be pleased. Granted we would still prefer these being 2 separate questions... but that's maybe a different meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, maybe there is no redeeming answer. Then it's business as usual: Snark Test, flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T09:18:53.293" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-09-01T12:17:36.213" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leave them alone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these questions have enough boundaries built into the question itself to give comprehensible answers.&#xA;We're &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; too quick to close posts that can be fruitful for the posters, because they are largely speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Use a metric&quot; rule is shoddy, at best. It assumes there's some sort of objective judgement by which an answer can always be deemed better, even if both meet the needs of the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it's unevenly/unfairly applied. One of the answers above seems to be about arbitrarily closing some while leaving others open, when the fact is that none of them adhere to the rules. If we're being sticklers, then all of these would be shut down, and doing so would just heighten the problematic elements of the culture here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question can generate useful answers for the poster: &lt;strong&gt;leave it alone.&lt;/strong&gt; If people don't like the question, or don't feel that they can properly answer it, they won't. And/or they can help the OP tighten up what they are trying to ask so that the feedback they receive is the most useful it can be.&#xA;I can't see how stepping in and nuking all these threads adds anything of value to WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49466" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T12:17:36.213" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6666" CreationDate="2018-09-02T13:26:27.523" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know I can go through my comments using the &quot;all actions&quot; tab on my user profile but after a little over a year that list is 1250+ entries and growing. So I was wondering if there is a way to search my comments by keyword somewhere that I haven't found, or a search term that I'm unaware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T14:50:38.087" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T20:38:48.327" Title="Is there a way to quickly find a particular comment I made?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-09-02T15:56:55.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions are directly discouraged by the terms of the site, they should by the rules be closed as either &quot;too-broad&quot; or &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; but there's a number of issues with these questions that mean they A. keep occurring and B. don't get closed when they should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mainly these questions don't get closed as fast as they should because they grab people's attention in a way that means a lot of people, and I'm at least as guilty of this as anyone, answer them instead of voting to close them immediately the way they should. I often see question I've answered on the review queue and, looking at them in that, different, light realise that I shouldn't have done that but too late.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They keep happening because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a lot of the OPs of these questions don't realise what they've done and/or don't see the question as fishing/idea generation. For example I asked what I thought was a simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111697/developmental-symmetry-where-do-you-spend-the-rd-budget&quot;&gt;question about R&amp;amp;D&lt;/a&gt; but it turns out there's actually a  science that people do doctorates in that attempt, and fail, to answer said question. I knew there was a science, what I didn't realise was that said science actually attempted to cover my question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if an OP doesn't see any answers at all to the issue they're asking about then while the question is absolutely idea generation it doesn't look like it to the OP, they're looking for a single answer to a question they feel may have none at all not the broad array of ideas they are suddenly offered.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;some people don't care how many times you tell them not to they keep the off colour coming anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes these questions are a problem and yes they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; going to keep happening, the default policy to date, as I understand it and have seen it operating, is to close them either as &quot;too-broad&quot; or as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; depending where exactly the community feels they lie, since most can be seen as both. I think this is the appropriate response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might improve our outcomes if we remember to give people direct and particular feedback about individual questions, that point out exactly where/why a question is getting a close vote, as well as and/or instead of the stock comments from review but otherwise I don't think there are any real changes to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T15:56:55.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6664" CreationDate="2018-09-02T19:13:26.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no on-site way to search comments that I know of, but for comments old enough to be in SEDE (updated every Sunday), you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/893715/search-a-users-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; to find comments from a particular user containing a particular string.  It's just a SQL &quot;like&quot; operation, not a boolean search, so don't try to get fancy. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query takes a user number as a parameter.  You can get that from the URL of your profile page; in your case it's 40408 (on this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T19:25:33.753" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T19:25:33.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6664" CreationDate="2018-09-02T20:38:48.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another way&lt;/strong&gt; is to use your favorite google engine and prepend your search terms with &quot;stackexchange:&quot; (For example, I just entered &lt;strong&gt;stackexchange: elemtilas tree kite&lt;/strong&gt; and got all the responses and got all the Q&amp;amp;As where my name plus the words &quot;tree&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;kite&quot; show up anywhere in the same query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PROs&lt;/strong&gt;: this method &quot;looks&quot; nicer than the SEDE search. It actually presents links to SE questions. Also, you don't have to hunt around for your member id number! :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONs&lt;/strong&gt;: the key word you're looking for could be &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt; on the page, not necessarily in your comment! So some detective work might be in order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use this method, try to enter as many keywords as you can remember from the comment you're thinking of!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T20:38:48.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2018-09-02T21:07:57.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several options. In the immediate term, as soon as a trivial or &quot;trolling&quot; question is discovered, the OP (especially if they're new here) should be directed to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; so that they can either learn or be refreshed as to what's expected here vis a vis asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kingledion already provides two possible actions above: &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question. And there are situations where either might be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since this particular question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; on topic --- it's not about worldbuilding at all --- and is also trivial in nature &amp;amp; may be seen as an example of trolling behaviour, we're also within rights to exercise the third option which is to &lt;strong&gt;close the question&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same logic that applies &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5914/what-to-do-about-trivial-questions&quot;&gt;in this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; applies here, clearly. A trollish question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; by definition also a trivial question, as it's more about riling up a community or seeking attention than it is about seeking advice about worldbuilding. This baby question is very much like the coffee question Michael Kjörling gives in his excellent answer to that question: a trivial question with an obvious answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T21:07:57.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-09-03T16:31:34.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should be our default policy concerning open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Via comment, inform the OP, and ask for clarifications to narrow down the answers. If they are not forthcoming, flag the question or VTC. Or do those in reverse order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it depends on the idea they are fishing for. If it is a whole plot-generating idea dealing with a central story element, I consider that the wrong kind of fishing. If they are trying to patch a hole in their story, I am okay with providing a creative element to help do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of the later, I have talked about generating oxygen on a planet without plants; or how ancient humans might have produced a stable matriarchy, or ways an all female alien species might reproduce with mixed DNA. Those are questions about how to make a world work; and &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; kind of fishing for engineering ideas is what we are here to answer. e.g. I need an idea for why my lush farmland has a sharp line border on barren desert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to me those are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; creative elements directly related to the plot, they are just patches needed to make the setting or circumstances sound more plausible. They are an assist that probably would not even be mentioned more than once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, big questions that are basically &quot;give me a plot&quot; or &quot;What's my finale&quot; are not something I answer; and I may VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, world building strongly influences story building, that's why it is important. So my advice is to look at the balance between these; and if too much of the answer is about the characters, plots, events in the &lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt; then I consider it off-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37679" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T16:31:34.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6680" CreationDate="2018-09-05T16:51:29.417" Score="0" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Great Duck posted the following question after nearly a week in the Sandbox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123633/from-a-software-testing-perspective-what-quality-analysis-tests-would-justify-u&quot;&gt;From a software testing perspective, what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed very quckly as &quot;unclear what you're asking.&quot;  Considering the number of upticks, it seems most of those votes were following a comment by RonJohn which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, there are still two serious problems. #1 easily fixed: The title (&quot;constructing a simulated universe to start a war?&quot;) doesn't match the body (&quot;a single world-war simulation&quot;). #2 Maybe because I've been a computer programmer for so long, and lived through the Cold War, but the question &quot;what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?&quot; has such a blindingly obvious answer (your nation-state wants to determine if it would win a WW) that he must be asking something else. Thus, still Unclear What You're Asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I corrected the title mismatch (an oversight), but people are following what appears to be an error on RonJohn's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but the question &quot;what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?&quot; has such a blindingly obvious answer (your nation-state wants to determine if it would win a WW) that he must be asking something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Your nation-state wants to determine if it would win a WW&quot; is NOT a &quot;blindingly obvious answer&quot; to the question &quot;what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a blindingly obvious answer to &quot;why would you write this software in the first place?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of this posting, RonJohn's comment had 4 upticks, suggesting at least four other people don't understand what RonJohn said and why it's in error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are voting to close this question as unclear because they don't have enough experience in the field to comprehend the question.  It's analogous to a teenager casting a vote to close a question about celestial mechanics because the teen doesn't understand celestial mechanics.  That doesn't reflect a weakness in the question, but a weakness in the user voting to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is one fault that's mine&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question in the sandbox was very lengthy and included a lot of information not germaine to the question, but in my robust house cleaning I threw out one piece of information that likely helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great Duck's story is being told from the perspective of the simulated AI.  In other words, The AI's world is influenced by the reason the developers chose to use a world-spanning war to test the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that doesn't actually change the question, it only rationalizes why it's a worldbuilding question in the first place (the &quot;world&quot; is the AI's world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Invitation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I would like to invite WB participants to reopen the question.  If you feel strongly that the question should not be reopened, please give a clear description as to why it should not be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note that before closure two answers were posted by people who understand what software testing is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T20:04:11.013" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T03:03:29.490" Title="I believe this question should be reopened" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6685" CreationDate="2018-09-05T17:31:45.243" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should this question which is clear and well received and be marked as duplicate to a poorly received closed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124190/could-a-mirror-could-be-put-in-deep-space-to-see-ouselves-in-the-past&quot;&gt;Could a mirror could be put in deep space to see ouselves in the past?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastEditorUserId="27786" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T17:36:51.397" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T21:31:05.740" Title="Should a good question be mark a duplicate to another question that is closed?" Tags="|support|specific-question|questions|exact-duplicates|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6676" CreationDate="2018-09-05T20:28:42.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the commentors on your question and I'll take the time to expand on my comment.  I'm bothered that your question was closed as a duplicate of another question that was itself closed as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That presuposes that your question is as unclear as the earlier question.  Frankly, I'm not convinced the earlier question deserved to be closed as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to make my point clear: I don't believe any question should be closed as a duplicate of a previous &quot;unclear&quot; quesiton without justifying how the current question is both (a) about the same topic and (b) equally unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bear in mind, Muze, that I personally believe your question should remain a duplicate and the older question should be reopened.  In other words, while this meta post is valuable for examining site practices, it might not result in your question being reopened.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T15:30:58.690" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T15:30:58.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2018-09-05T23:26:59.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close this question, I just saw it now, but the question I have is what the role of the AI in the simulation would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the AI a soldier or general, or is its job to create a simulation of a war? I think if the OP were to answer that question, that would help clarify. Is the AI supposed to come up with a strategy for one or both sides or to be a creator who invents the world and the war in which everything takes place. If the AI plays the role of creator, how would an AI with human level intelligence simulate many other minds completely different from it's own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T23:26:59.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2018-09-06T01:42:42.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the original asker of the question I can only be neutral on the issue of closure as I am naturally biased towards it being open and I obviously cannot argue against closure if an actual reasonable argument is given for it. Instead I will bring up some points on the question that were somewhat lost in the question. I think some of these statements were removed because it made it either too story focused or were irrelevant. However, others might be able to reincorporate them better than me and JBH were able to, because as it stands I would lying if I said the original question has not been effectively replaced by a broader version. This could be good or bad, and this not out of malice. &lt;strong&gt;I am not saying the edits made were wrong, but that perhaps they can be rethought to further improve the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original question stated that the developer was a 20 year old developer who discovered AI by accident and built a simulation like a video game where all the NPCs are AI and that this was primarily the result of general homebrew tinkering. In other words the motivation for building it could be argued as either curiosity or an attempt to build some kind of software that would be distributed as a video game.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original question was looking for arguments that would convince a scientist inside the simulation leading one of the larger more peaceful countries to actually initiate the war. The argument had to be able to convince them through scientific reasoning however as I myself realized and other pointed out this AI would be built by the developer therefore any sufficient argument to convince the developer of its rigor would be sufficient to convince the scientist. Anything otherwise would imply that the AI knows more than the knowledge given it. External tools or the computer determining things from facts that are otherwise not human known could account for this, but the point was that the scientist was unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the original question didn't state this outright but real world physics don't have to apply. In an extreme example every inhabitant could be a 2D texture variant of mario or any other enemy or NPC from the original SMB where they communicate with sounds that just... emanate from them. Or for that matter a thorough recreation of the world of flatland. After all, 2D games are all the rage and it would be interesting enough to conceive someone in their basement cooking up for homebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The developer is an amateur at general software development. They might be incredibly skilled at programming (well obviously they have to be cause they invented AI) &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; they have no formal experience with actual software engineering and the formal process in development. Whether or not this factors into an answer based on a misconception of some kind or not is up to the discretion of answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was primarily looking for answers based on existing concepts most likely stemming from video game development testing likely relatable to the testing of MMORPG systems as this simulation is effectively a variant of an MMORPG where every player is an AI. Other answers are acceptable but to further stress, the idea here is that the simulation doesn't have to abide by any decent notion of real world physics. It just has to have a logical realistic notion of an open world that one could compare to some kind of realm in a video game.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Magic exists in this simulated world. period. It exists. The more general variant of the rewritten question might not need this detail but it certainly serves as a glaring example of why RonJohn's comment of governments making it to test cold war scenarios doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22334" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T01:42:42.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2018-09-06T03:03:29.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I looked at the question at 2300 ET, 5 Sep 2018&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't understand it. It asks about quality analysis tests, but I can't clearly see what the &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; of the software program is. I am a software engineer. I write testing suites all the time. But you have to know what you are testing for. A test is supposed to ensure that the software correctly does what it is supposed to do.  What does the software do? Simulate a world war? Why do you even need to test that, it isn't real. You test software to make sure it conforms to the real world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't understand what this software is supposed to do, so I tossed it back in the review queue for closing. There is a lot of discussion about his topic, and normally I read everything and try to offer an opinion. But I'm drunk, so I didn't. Despite being drunk, let me offer my opinion: there may be a disconnect between people who do real live software engineering and testing and those who don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T03:03:29.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T08:38:57.197" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124263/name-of-chinese-space-forces&quot;&gt;Name of Chinese space forces&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made one of the first comments, and it's almost exactly like what @Thucydides wrote 7 hours later.  It was't rude, bigoted, abusive, unfriendly or unkind, and was certainly &quot;needed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T16:36:55.587" Title="Why was my comment deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2018-09-06T09:42:37.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are for asking for clarification or suggesting improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for posting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are second-class (or even third-class) citizens on Stack Exchange, and can be deleted at almost any time for almost any reason, with or without diamond moderator involvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a later comment hasn't been deleted doesn't make the original deletion inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6276/29&quot;&gt;What are the criteria for comment deletion?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4805/29&quot;&gt;stackoverflow comment etiquette&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19756/157730&quot;&gt;How do comments work?&lt;/a&gt; (for the latter, particularly the sections on &lt;em&gt;Who can delete comments?&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;When should comments be deleted?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T09:47:39.573" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T09:47:39.573" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6676" CreationDate="2018-09-06T21:31:05.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the questions clearly are not duplicates with any close reading (the first asks specifically about viewing reflections off of other planets as opposed to the use of a mirror) there is an important guideline regarding duplicate questions that is not being properly followed. This has happened with this question but it's not an isolated incident. I've seen similar errors made on other questions. My source for this guideline is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; as well as the prompts provided throughout the duplicate closure process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate questions must have duplicate answers.&lt;/strong&gt; When asking whether a question is a duplicate of another it is not sufficient for them to merely be very similar. When you vote to close a question as a dupe the prompt states: &quot;This question has been asked before &lt;em&gt;and already has an answer&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In fact, if a question doesn't have an answer it isn't possible to use it as the target of a dupe closure. So, when asking whether a question is a duplicate of another one must &lt;strong&gt;look at the answers&lt;/strong&gt;! Ask yourself, is this potentially duplicate question answered by the other question's answers? If not, then it isn't a duplicate. Counter-intuitive I know, but it makes sense if you think about why duplicate closure is there. It's not meant as an obstacle to prevent people from getting answers to their questions but rather to help them find answers that already exist and make it easier for future users to find all the relevant information in one place. If a question hasn't been answered on the site then it isn't a duplicate. With regards to this question, the answer to the older question does not answer this newer question. This is why Muze is here! Because they want an answer to their question which they do not have yet. Closure as a duplicate should never be an obstacle to getting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="879" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T21:31:05.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-07T00:29:36.050" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been having a relatively good month, rep wise. Most of my highest performing answers have been written in the last month and I've had more than my fair share of 200 point days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I noted was that the 200 points are not impacted by downvotes, if you have enough upvotes. In other words, partial points from upvotes are applied to offset any downvotes you may receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I've started going through some of my older, non-performing answers to delete them. Not all of them were 0 point answers per se; some were answers that got several upvotes and several downvotes. Obviously I wade into controversial areas from time to time; something I'm going to try avoiding from now on, but I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this got me thinking about countbacks when I delete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I delete an answer which 'overscored' on a high rep day, do I only lose the rep points that I actually was awarded on that day, or do I lose them all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corollary of that is if I delete an answer for which the downvotes were offset by either the same or a different high performing answer, do I get all those 2pts back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this could get complicated real quick if there's no record of ACTUAL rep awarded against each question (rather than upvotes and downvotes) and I don't know if SE keeps such a rep table in back. So instead of asking all the edge case questions, I want to start with the simplest form of this;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the 200 rep limit per day get factored into countbacks as a result of deleting an old answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T11:17:46.290" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T20:54:00.513" Title="Does reputation count back from deleting answers factor in the 200 point limits on the day?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2018-09-07T08:16:37.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as there is enough context or data, and that the open-minded part is not too broad, I think these question are valid. These question often try to solve the &quot;I want this to happen in my story, how can I justify it&quot;. It helps a lot when you try to write a story and building the world around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26839" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T08:16:37.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6687" CreationDate="2018-09-07T14:32:39.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Don't delete your old answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? If they were really bad, someone else would delete them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to improve something, please go through old questions and clean up tags. Tag meanings can change over time and some 2 year old+ questions are not tagged well. Plus, you can do some grammar/spelling edits while you are at it and get the very rare &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/archaeologist&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;archaeologist&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;archaeologist&lt;/a&gt; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T20:54:00.513" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T20:54:00.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-09-07T18:24:16.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mkhzE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Help in the Sandbox as a Mentor!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:24:16.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-10T12:43:41.990" Score="5" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm actually gathering information for this year's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5691/holiday-data-palooza-site-statistics-from-2017&quot;&gt;Datapalooza&lt;/a&gt;. It's going to be epic. There is so much data! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, I've been working on ways to track what is on the hot network bar and what is not. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=hot&quot;&gt;hot questions tab&lt;/a&gt; is a good guideline for starters, but not all the questions on the hot tab make the network sidebar. Specifically, questions seem to need to be a few hours old to make it. There doesn't seem to be a view minimum, since questions with under 100 views have made it on the weekend. But generally, questions with more views tend to make the network bar more than questions with fewer views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any post talking about how a question gets selected for the hot network bar?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does anyone have leads on information that would allow me to calculate what is on the hot network bar?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any record of which questions make the hot network bar, and for how long they were there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T14:08:45.990" Title="A record of what posts make the Hot Network Bar?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-11T12:47:05.597" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I opened the close review queue, I was presented with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89443/view-the-past-by-reflection&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on viewing the past. Since I didn't recall seeing the question before, I checked the date and saw it was a year old. The is-a-duplicate comment was from today, so I checked the date on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124190/6986&quot;&gt;proposed duplicate&lt;/a&gt;: 6 days ago, 13 months later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it could be argued one question is a duplicate of the other, should the older question be the duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T12:58:32.560" Title="Is it appropriate to close a question as a duplicate of a newer question?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2018-09-11T13:47:44.730" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The newer question should always be the duplicate, I got caught out here, and VTCd because I knew the newer question was put on the review queue as a duplicate some time last week. I thought the newbie had been then put back on the list, obviously I was wrong, I've retracted my vote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:47:44.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6695" CreationDate="2018-09-11T14:08:45.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any post talking about how a question gets selected for the hot network bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Michael Kjörling notes, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/60756/&quot;&gt;How do the “arbitrary hotness points” work on the new Stack Exchange home page and in the sidebar on questions?&lt;/a&gt; on the main Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does anyone have leads on information that would allow me to calculate what is on the hot network bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the above. If you want to &lt;em&gt;fetch&lt;/em&gt; what's on the list, there's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/feeds/questions&quot;&gt;RSS feed&lt;/a&gt; but it only shows the top 30. The Stack Exchange mobile app has all 100 but it appears just to scrape &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/?page=1&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/?page=1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/?page=2&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/?page=2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any record of which questions make the hot network bar, and for how long they were there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/238445/295232&quot;&gt;not an official record&lt;/a&gt;. I've started scraping the HNQ since August 4th this year; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/315017/295232&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; is about the results from the first month. Surprise, surprise: Worldbuilding dominates the Hot Network Questions list; at a given moment, on average one in twelve questions on the list comes from Worldbuilding. Impressive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the scraping continues (one month is enough to see some trends, but not all of them); I'll probably post an updated version later this year. Maybe in time for the Datapalooza; in any case, just ping me a few days before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T14:08:45.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2018-09-11T14:29:06.860" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to disagree with Ash, as well as quite possibly others, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, &lt;strong&gt;an older question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be a duplicate of a newer question.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not a given that the newer question must be the one to be marked as a duplicate of the older one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, one situation in which an older question can plausibly be a duplicate of a newer one is when the newer question is significantly better in some reasonably objective manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Normally&lt;/em&gt; the newer question will be a duplicate of the older question, because the older question existed when the newer question was composed and posted. &lt;em&gt;However,&lt;/em&gt; pretty much the purpose of duplicates being marked as such is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;serve as signposts, allowing people to find existing answers to very similar or outright identical questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reduce duplication of effort in answering&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the newer question is better posed, has better answers, and is better received (for one way to judge that, look at the ratio of question votes to question views), it's not entirely unreasonable to mark the older question as a duplicate of the newer one, rather than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While marking as duplicate is intended to help the OP, it's also intended to help the community as well as later visitors. If marking as duplicate in one direction is likely to be significantly more helpful than doing so in the other direction, then &lt;strong&gt;go ahead and break with tradition if doing so is likely to be more helpful in the long run.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T14:29:06.860" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-13T02:19:59.373" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124851/how-to-keep-track-of-everything-with-an-infinite-dimensional-telepathic-ability&quot;&gt;How to keep track of everything with an infinite-dimensional telepathic ability?&lt;/a&gt; essentially asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;How might someone improve their memory and thus the capabilities of their magic ability?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking for an explanation for something set in a magical world, I aimed for a similar style response to this question I am fond of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123896/awesomeness-powered-magic-why-would-a-group-of-awesome-magicians-want-to-keep&quot;&gt;Why would a group of awesome magicians want to keep their kryptonite near them?&lt;/a&gt; where answers vary from &quot;Because he is reliable&quot; (mundane but fun) to &quot;Because he is a powerful cloaking device&quot; (magic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was closed as too broad because it encouraged both these kinds of answers. The way I see it all &quot;find an explanation&quot; questions mean &quot;find an explanation that fits within the logic of THIS world. If that world is magic then answers MIGHT be magical, but they don't have to be. Why should they? It seems incredibly limiting and generally not fun. If you are looking for a solution to a specific problem, what use is saying &quot;only solutions that would work on earth&quot; or &quot;only solutions including MAGIC&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't there any other way to narrow the scope of question #124851 to get it re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45517" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T06:42:27.400" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T13:04:18.490" Title="Why shouldn't _How to keep track of everything with an infinite-dimensional telepathic ability?_ allow answers both mundane and magical?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|on-hold|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2018-09-13T05:38:47.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DOMAIN vs HIERARCHY&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand where Michael K. is coming from when he understands these as hierarchical or a progression of relaxed to ever tightening requirements. I see these tags as three separate domains of inquiry, rather than a hierarchical structure of inquiry, and that any one or more than one can be applied to a query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;reality-check&lt;/strong&gt; asks simply &quot;does this sound reasonable&quot;; &quot;does this make sense&quot;. No particular framework of reality is suggested or assumed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;science based&lt;/strong&gt; question asks for an answer with &lt;em&gt;scientific foundation&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;hard science&lt;/strong&gt; question asks that answers contain appropriate scientific data a/o citations to back it up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three of these tags describe the &lt;em&gt;nature of the response&lt;/em&gt;: what it should look like, how much research should go into it, how detailed and technical the answer has to be. What none of these tags seem to do is describe the nature of the query or better the &lt;em&gt;nature of the object of the query&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see these as being hierarchical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hard science does not assume science based. The domain of this kind of answer is providing examples of data, equations, journal article citations, etc. that either support or deny the object of the query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science based does not assume reality check. The domain of this kind of answer is providing general scientific principles and how they might apply to the object of the query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reality check is not the bottom rung of the ladder. The domain of this kind of answer is that of common sense, ordinary logic, pattern matching, error teasing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use the unicorn as an example, in combination with the nature of the tags themselves, I'll show how I think these tags can handle any kind of question. First, I'll assume that we agree that dragons (e.g. Smaug) and unicorns (fairy stories) do not exist on Earth as depicted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone asks the question &quot;I think narwhals are cool. Would it make sense for a horse-like animal to grow out a long tooth?, which later humans will confuse for a horn (&amp;lt; Lat. cornu, horn) --- thus, a unicorn!&quot; I think any of the three tags could apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;reality check&lt;/strong&gt; tag would seek an answer like &quot;Yeah, seems plausible given that the world you're describing has similar beasts derived from mythological sources. You already mentioned narwhals, so why not horses too?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;science based&lt;/strong&gt; tag would seek an answer like &quot;The narwhal tusk is an elongation of the left canine tooth that protrudes through the animal's lip. Horses do have canine teeth. Because the evolution of the tusk is reasonably well understood (descent from a toothed artiodactyl, placement &amp;amp; growth of the tusk within the skull allow for positive identification), we can at least posit a potential scion of an early equid developing similarly.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;hard science&lt;/strong&gt; tag would seek an answer like (and I'm just making this up, because I'm not a paleobiologist) &quot;I read in PaleoBiology This Week about a now extinct form of water deer (Hydropotes antiquus) the right canine of some specimens having been found to be considerably enlarged and twisting with a slight helical twist and that the left canine is diminished in size. There is evidence, according to Dr. Li Hsien, that these early cervids used their elongated tusks for dominance display as evidenced by bony scar tissue around the muzzle area of male H. antiquus.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TAG CONCATENATION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with M.K. as regards &lt;em&gt;Using more than one of the above tags on a single question however doesn't seem to me to make sense in any situation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any issue with using one or more together, because 1) they're not asking for the same thing; and 2) I don't view them as a hierarchy! (I would agree: if they were hierarchical in nature, then Reality Check would be the basic form; Science Based would subsume a positive reality check; Hard Science would subsume the assumption that the answer must be based in known science.) If the querent had placed all three tags, then the respondent would simply be required to provide, basically, all three types of answers! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As to the Reality Check, ABC; as to the Science Based, PRS; as the Hard Science, XYZ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, had the query been about dragons (as seen in the Hobbit), then we can still answer the question given these tags, though likely with different results. The reality check would most likely be positive, as dragons only have to make sense within the setting or world in which they have been posited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Science Based query about dragons can certainly be asked and answered. In the history of Earth, there have been enough large beasts to demonstrate that size is not at issue. Some animals have scales &amp;amp; feathers, so those features of dragons should pose no difficulty. No known animal breathes fire, but since we're not required to provide scientific data, and whether or not magic &amp;amp; pseudoscience work in that world or setting, we can at least offer sound scientific speculation as to potential mechanisms for fiery breath. A bold respondent may even posit an in-world scientific answer (that accounts for magic as a natural force, if enough data is known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Hard Science query about dragons will, of course, run into a wall. Big beasts, sure! We know about dinosaurs. Scaly or feathery beasts? Sure! We know about dinosaurs. Fire breathing beasts with four feet, two wings, tough scaly armour and perhaps decorative feathers? Nope. No such thing known; no way for it to be able to fly. The Hard Science answer will be along the lines of &quot;What-if speculation aside, there is no way for known to biology or physics or chemistry to allow for the particular combination of characteristics you want in your dragon; so the answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SUMMATION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should hard-science always imply science-based, without that having to be made explicit? --- &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. I think it's clear there is no implication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should science-based always imply reality-check, without that having to be made explicit? --- &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. Same: no implication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it ever make sense to use more than one of these three tags on a single question? --- &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;. The three tags can validly be used in combination. &lt;em&gt;Should they be so used&lt;/em&gt; is a different matter!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T05:38:47.333" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6701" CreationDate="2018-09-13T13:04:18.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who voted to close, I will admit that it could be argued as on-topic, but there is a problem that I pointed out in comments and will attempt to further explain here (as well as provide a few other words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers may vary from entirely mundane ... to extra-ordinary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an &quot;anything goes&quot; qualifier. It makes each and every answer potentially equally valid. Especially since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[a]nswers will be judged based off how specific the solution is ... and how clear the reasoning is for it improving the number of dimensions you can handle[. H]umour and creativity is encouraged[.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're essentially asking people to devise whatever answer they want, being as imaginative or funny as they can in the process, and you'll judge answers based on how well you understand the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, first of all, inviting humor as an answer makes answers opinion-based. Do we upvote because an answer is funny and only vaguely answers the question? Do we downvote if it's not funny, but answers the question in a matter-of-fact way? The community needs some criteria by which to judge one answer as being better or more complete than another that doesn't involve the whims or personal opinions of the person voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging based on clarity can be problematic. This is what up- and downvotes are for, but if someone writes an answer that makes perfect sense to you and the answerer, but the community can't make heads or tails of it, it'll be both downvoted to oblivion and accepted. This is discouraging and confusing for the average user. (Note I said problematic, not impossible. Judging based on clarity happens all the time; it simply doesn't get called out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is this miraculous solution and how did this character know about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your actual question, however, there's another problem. How a character knows some piece of information is entirely up to you, the author. This is a story element. Maybe the character went to a private school where s/he learned it. Maybe it was an accidental discovery. Why does anyone even need to know where the information came from? Mandating that answerers address &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the information was obtained beyond &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; that information is creates a red flag for story-based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;essentially asks &quot;How might someone improve their memory ...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the real world: improving memory has an entire field of ongoing research. That alone is a flag towards the question being &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. Then we tack on the fact we're trying to improve a magic part of the brain and the fact &quot;[a]nswers may vary from entirely mundane ... to extra-ordinary&quot; and you can see there are simply too many answers that are far too long to be appropriate for the Stack Exchange format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T13:04:18.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2018-09-13T23:27:10.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general Stack Exchange answer is that the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; question should be the duplicate target.  That means that in some cases an inferior old question will be closed as a duplicate of a superior new question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the goal of Stack Exchange is to create a canonical set of questions and answers.  You don't get a canonical set by closing better questions in favor of worse questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar meta discussions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4744/30870&quot;&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8188/51171&quot;&gt;Arqade&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/55251/229547&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T23:27:10.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T15:18:07.283" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an answer to this questions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124999/why-are-cambions-unable-to-reproduce-amongst-each-other/&quot;&gt;Why are cambions unable to reproduce amongst each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It received a lot of positive attention and showed signs (at first) of being a helpful answer. However, it turns out I missed an important criterion in the question that my answer does not meet...to the point that it's basically a wrong answer (ie. not helpful to the OP). I edited the answer to make it clear to further viewers that it's not really a valid answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After further discussion with the OP, I see no elegant amendment I can make to my answer...I would personally consider it obsolete. What is the right thing to do? Should I delete it? Re-edit to declare it obsolete? Something else...? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51300" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T17:10:31.453" Title="What to do with my obsolete / wrong answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2018-09-14T16:50:26.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer that is not that helpful to the OP is not in point of fact not useful, just have a look at the number of times the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/populist&quot;&gt;Populist Badge&lt;/a&gt; has been awarded; and the rafts of other cases where the accepted answer is not the highest scoring answer, but not to quite such an extent. A question that scores highly is useful to the people who vote for it even if the OP considers it &quot;suboptimal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your question let the answer stand; as is or with an edit to point out that it may not be as useful as it first appears at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T16:50:26.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2018-09-14T17:10:31.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer is good, and fine. It is the question that is confused, and seems to be ever evolving. As it stands, I nominated teh question for deletion because it doesn't make sense (at least, not without the comments below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd leave your answer, see how the question is edited, and then see where you are at. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the OP changed the requirements after you posted, so the onus on him is to fix it, or else we would suggest rolling back the question to its earlier state. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T17:10:31.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2018-09-15T16:36:55.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; but I'm pretty sure I flagged the comment in question as being too much of answer to be left as a comment, or in fact to be left as a one liner. It was good material that deserved proper elaboration. My opinion was subsequently upheld at moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T16:36:55.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6713" CreationDate="2018-09-17T19:37:28.340" Score="-3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice someone has removed illustrations from my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125171/best-places-to-be-on-earth-when-an-all-out-nuclear-war-breaks-out&quot;&gt;Best places to be on Earth when an all out nuclear war breaks out?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the gifs did a good job illustrating what I vision. They reflect my question how I see it. Should I be able to keep the gifs in my question for dramatic effect if I want it? even if they are not an actual nuclear explosion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I get in trouble if I put them back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T22:17:38.610" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T22:17:38.610" Title="Why are my illustrations being removed from my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2018-09-17T19:47:31.087" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an image is used into a question or an answer it shall support what is being said. When I saw those gifs, my first question was: &quot;Why is the smoke cloud of a rocket launch here?&quot;, followed by a &quot;wait, why is Deep Impact quoted here?&quot;. And I had to read again your question to understand what it was about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless your target is to confuse your readers, I don't think random images have to be placed just because you can. Use them if they support what you are stating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the last version of the images you placed in the question, colored circles without an indication of what they mean are, again, meaningless. I am sure in the source site there was something explaining the colors. If you at least copied that it would explain better what those circles mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T19:47:31.087" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6715" CreationDate="2018-09-19T18:20:30.920" Score="11" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;An edit was recently made to an answer I posted to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125405/how-can-ganymede-have-an-earth-like-gravity-without-us-having-realized-it/125413#125413&quot;&gt;How can Ganymede have an Earth-like gravity without us having realized it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit changed this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That would change its orbit (and its influence on the other moons) in&#xA;  unavoidable and easily observable ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That would change its influence on the other moons in unavoidable and&#xA;  easily observable ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the editor believed my answer was in error about Ganymede's orbit being changed. Whether or not they were correct isn't especially important to me...but I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; surprised that someone would just go ahead and edit my answer to change its meaning/semantic content. I thought edits were supposed to clarify a question or answer, or to correct grammar/spelling/punctuation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would have thought the correct way to challenge the accuracy of an answer or part of it would be to post a comment and dialogue with the answer's author.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to edit someone else's answer in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51300" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T01:31:51.360" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T13:17:31.533" Title="Is it appropriate to correct someone else's answer in an edit?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2018-09-19T18:34:40.057" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't change the content of someone else's answer. Feel free to roll back that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I approved that edit, so I need to remand myself for punishment. I think that I thought it was a grammar edit. If you don't want to read the edits carefully when you review, don't do the reviews. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically you are right; changing the mass does change the orbit. Effectively, however, the mass of Ganymede and Jupiter are summed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;orbital period equation&lt;/a&gt;, so you could increase Ganymede's mass by a factor of 10 and its orbit would change by maybe a few meters. So the edit is more correct, in my opinion, in case you want to edit the answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T18:40:07.880" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T18:40:07.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2018-09-19T18:42:26.203" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's probably fine.&lt;/strong&gt; I doubt the editor did that on purpose, they might have just misunderstood your answer or the OP's question. In that case, just roll back the edit and then leave a comment saying something like &quot;@ name, the gravity will affect the moon's orbit, as well as the orbit of the other moons, so I rolled back your edit.&quot; That nicely explains to the editor that they were incorrect in their edit, and if they did it for some other reason, it will open a channel of communication for them to explain their edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is all about giving good answers, and editing is part of that process. Usually, mistakes are well-meant or one of the people involved misunderstood something. If someone is abusing the edits, you can always flag it for moderator attention. If they have their own answer for the question and are trying to change you answer to make it more like their idea, just invite them to answer the question on their own, building off yours and giving you credit for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastEditorUserId="54384" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T11:52:44.437" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T11:52:44.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6751" CreationDate="2018-09-20T09:37:37.137" Score="12" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a few things about the new site themes and tried to follow the updates, but I have not yet read anything whether our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6397/44086&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Save the Robot!&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; campaign has been heard or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/315662/397029&quot;&gt;Shortly, the new site theme is to be rolled out on &amp;quot;beta and undesigned&amp;quot; sites.&lt;/a&gt; Which does (probably) not include Worldbuilding, as it is neither Beta and is quite obviously designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there any news regarding the site theme for worldbuilding?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not manage to find anything on Meta.SE. Except for that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/310908/397029&quot;&gt;plan in June&lt;/a&gt; was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August - September: release to the remaining sites. As we have more details we will update individual communities in their local meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;September is not over yet, but I have not read anything about Worldbuilding up until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T14:24:52.440" Title="Are there updates regarding the new SE-site design coming to worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6719" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:15:38.717" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125397/how-would-merfolk-society-dispose-of-their-dead-and-would-disposing-of-the-bodi&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, when it was put on hold. It was formulated badly and so put on hold. I made a comment about the expected question and answered the question in my comment, since there was no possibility to answer: I looked lately for my comment and haven't found it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is my comment deleted by the put-not-on-hold-anylonger or did it got manualy deleted? (And how do i restore it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user55267" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T17:41:02.983" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T05:38:07.543" Title="What happened to my comment to the question about merfolks' handling of their dead?" Tags="|support|bug|specific-question|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:23:47.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, answers shall be written as such. Answering in comments when the question is closed is bad form, and gives the bad message that a user can neglect asking well written question and an answer will be anyway given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, what happened in your particular case is that the user, instead of editing the first question which was put on hold and where you wrote your comment, decided to delete it and repost it as a new one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this is considered bad form, as it is preferred to edit on hold question instead of more or less circumventing the review by posting brand new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question, your comment is still there in the deleted question, which can only be seen by 10k+ reputation users. Since the new question is not on hold, you might want to post it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:23:47.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:50:47.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As L.Dutch said, refrain from using comments to answer closed questions, instead try to give OP an incentive to edit/improve their question by telling them you might have an answer to their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they edit the question and get it reopened you can deliver your already prepared answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44086" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:50:47.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2018-09-20T17:40:10.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was originally &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/125327/29&quot;&gt;How would merfolk society care for their dead&lt;/a&gt;. That one was put on hold, and subsequently deleted by the OP; being deleted, 10,000 or more reputation is required to view that question (viewing deleted posts comes with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;access to moderator tools&lt;/em&gt; privilege&lt;/a&gt;). None of the comments on it have been deleted; they are still all visible to any user with sufficient reputation to see the question itself. (Deleted comments are still visible, but only to diamond moderators. They are not visible to non-moderator users, including high-reputation users.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this, there are no deleted comments on the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/125397/29&quot;&gt;How would merfolk society dispose of their dead? And would disposing of the bodies in the ocean have any negative effect on marine life?&lt;/a&gt; either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also echo what's already been said; &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; don't answer questions in comments, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; questions that have been put on hold. It's perfectly acceptable to leave a comment trying to &lt;em&gt;gently&lt;/em&gt; steer OP in a direction which you believe is (a) an on-topic question, and (b) something you can answer, but comments should be used to improve the question to the point of answerability, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to answer the question outright (even with a joke answer, or a short answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T05:38:07.543" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T05:38:07.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2018-09-24T12:58:32.560" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think new question should never be closed cause too similar to other older question cause if it is question about something that can change. It is like closing on sports forum question from 2018 which asks: (who won NBA League this year?) just because somebody asked that identical question for two years ago year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55614" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T12:58:32.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6732" CreationDate="2018-09-24T18:31:36.427" Score="22" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's more than impressive that Cort Ammon broke the 6-digit rep barrier with a score of 100,169 as of this writing.  He broke the barrier sometime yesterday or this morning.  Stack Exchange probably doesn't throw parties for such feats, but I'm thinkin' it deserves some note.  WB's been around for a while now and it's taken quite some time and effort to climb that mountain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, what would be an appropriate Kudo to give to Cort?  The accepted answer will be one that is most relevant to the practices and intent of Worldbuilding, reflects the culture and character of the site, and is the most outrageous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T22:34:56.893" Title="What should we give Cort Ammon for being the first WB user to break the 6-digit rep barrier?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|users|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6724" CreationDate="2018-09-24T18:36:51.440" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A T-shirt with the background of the site in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T18:36:51.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6724" CreationDate="2018-09-25T01:43:23.143" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Naturally, we should do what happens in the Real World (TM) when someone shows promise of this sort --- give him &lt;strong&gt;MORE &amp;amp; HARDER WORK&lt;/strong&gt; to do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T01:43:23.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6724" CreationDate="2018-09-25T14:40:25.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A copy of the site robot with a battery that can walk around his desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user39548" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T14:40:25.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T00:09:38.617" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117465/how-could-a-real-world-doomsday-cult-go-about-causing-the-apocalypse&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is currently closed by Aify, Cadence, L.Dutch, Trish, and James (thank you for keeping the site clean). However, I'm confused because both L.Dutch and James are diamond moderators, and I'd always thought that the stereotypical &quot;modhammer&quot; meant that every mod had the ability to close each question on their own. Is this not the case? If not, when do mods modhammer questions open and closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:49:41.457" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:49:41.457" Title="Why were *two* mods required to close this question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|vote-to-close|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6730" CreationDate="2018-09-26T00:13:51.860" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch wasn't yet a moderator when they voted to close that question (on July 9th); they were only elected &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;on July 17th&lt;/a&gt;, over one week later. Prior to that, they had normal 20k+ privileges, but not a binding close/reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the ability for a moderator to be able to cast a non-binding vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/41062/274942&quot;&gt;has been a long-standing feature request&lt;/a&gt;, but it hasn't been implemented, and likely never will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T00:13:51.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6724" CreationDate="2018-09-26T14:54:44.033" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have the artist who drew the site's background draw a scene involving the subjects of Cort's &lt;strong&gt;top 5/10 answers&lt;/strong&gt;, interpreted in the most creative (and possibly hilarious) way possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, a good-quality printed version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/40992/20154&quot;&gt;one of the greatest answers ever posted on this site.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20154" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T14:54:44.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-28T19:47:06.223" Score="8" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently in chat the topic of community wiki questions came up, and turned into a discussion of taking select topics that we get a lot of broad questions to and providing resources so that users can answer them for themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/conversation/community-wiki-to-handle-common-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/conversation/community-wiki-to-handle-common-off-topic-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't without precedent, as seen in this CW post on stackoverflow about C++ programming books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what makes a good community wiki post? According to a stack exchange blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;on the future of community wiki&lt;/a&gt;, CW posts should not be used as a way to get around the rules, specifically, not to sneak in just for fun questions, and not to be a quick fix to allow on topic but problematic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this is not to replace valid questions, or even provide answers to broad or off topic questions. The purpose would be to provide resources to help users either bring their question on topic, or allow them to answer their own question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user asks a broad question about building a magic system. They could then have their question flagged as a duplicate of the community wiki on magic, which would have lots of information and ideas on making balanced, consistent magic systems. With that information they could then either answer their own question, or narrow it down to bring in inside site guild lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T15:22:12.300" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T00:51:49.357" Title="Using the Community Wiki" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2018-09-28T20:43:56.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I support this idea.  I run into the need for it all the time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find a solid pattern of new world builders that come here asking a question which is not a good fit for the site, but where they could easily have answered the question on their own if they knew just a little more.  For example, this happens in the domain of Time Travel all the time.  Many novice world builders come with the assumption that there is one correct form of time travel, and ask some question about killing a grandfather.  The whole beauty of time travel is that there are myriad solutions to that problem, and the author gets to choose which ones they want.  This rapidly leads to the question being closed as too story based or unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now these questions should be closed.  They don't fit the site.  But having your question closed by 5 people in 3 minutes as &quot;not good enough&quot; is a really daunting experience.  Sure, one of us might take the time to write a comment directing them to the sandbox, but we've already announced that we're not willing to answer their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picture a different story.  Imagine if there were a Community-Wiki question on Time Travel, with the most common gotchas all listed.  There could be an answer recommending people read up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Novikov's Consistency Principle&lt;/a&gt;.  For those who are seeking a broader answer, an answer summarizing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Causality&lt;/a&gt; may be able to address the concept of free will and time travel.  We might have an answer which links to a Universe Factory article containing advice on how to pick your time travel methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the same question comes in.  It is closed, as it should be.  But now it can be closed as a duplicate of this Community-Wiki question, with comments saying, &quot;You may be able to answer this question yourself, after reading this answer&quot; or &quot;If you read this answer, you'll realize that there's a great WorldBuilding question just around the corner.  You just need to learn a little more first.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, instead of giving them the cold shoulder, we can point them towards the resources we believe will help them in their WorldBuilding efforts, as I feel it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These overarching questions would make for poor non-Community-wiki questions&lt;/strong&gt;.  Given that their explicit intent is to help answer many many worldbuilding questions, they will almost certainly be too broad to stand on their own.  They aren't questions.  They are collections of resources for new WorldBuilders.  We really need something broader than a proper question, and a community-wiki question fits that bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I don't want to see a bunch of new good questions closed as duplicates of the community wiki.  The purpose would not be to close new questions.  It would be to provide a better way to close the questions which needed to be closed anyway in a way that also helps the poor world builder out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topics I can see fitting this pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time Travel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a Magic system (always too story based, but the general principles are timeless)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;War (Few truly grasp what war is, so the questions are often off the mark)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Economics and Trade&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AI and consciousness (what can real AIs do, and what happens when you try to bring the 'c' word into the discussion)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm going to keep a running-log of sorts of new questions that I think are perfect examples of this issue, as I see them.  I won't catalogue old questions, so this shows an ongoing trend of questions that could use these CWs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126632/jobs-in-an-ai-controlled-world&quot;&gt;Jobs in an AI controlled World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126703/travelling-the-multiverse-by-accident/126708?noredirect=1#comment393661_126708&quot;&gt;Traveling the Multiverse by Accident&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131600/whats-to-stop-cybernetically-shapeshifting-humans-from-changing-their-appeara#131600&quot;&gt;How would people interact in a world with cybernetically &amp;quot;shapeshifting&amp;quot; humans?&lt;/a&gt; -- This one is interesting because the question is far too broad and yet far too specific at the same time.  A related question of &quot;how do disruptive technologies interact with society&quot; would be too broad for a question, but a great topic for a community wiki!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="2252" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T00:51:49.357" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T00:51:49.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-01T12:02:51.813" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a native English speaker, I enjoy the World Building SE, posting answers and helping questioners when I can; however, I regularly have my answers edited by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is definitely not a problem&lt;/strong&gt;, quite the opposite in fact, because it appears I am truly terrible at noticing spelling and grammar mistakes, my most recent one was edited by Renan &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126388/humans-returning-to-tribalism/126403#126403&quot;&gt;Humans returning to tribalism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the edits he's made it must have taken him some time and he's not the only one, I'm sure several people reading this post will have edited an answer or two of mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do proof read my answers but somehow miss these mistakes. this means others end up editing my answers and correcting those mistakes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way (other than editing my answers saying thank you to the editor) I can apologize to everyone for my bad spelling and grammar and thank those that take the time to edit them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I took a long time to type this very short post, to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong, please forgive me if I did...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50282" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T13:22:04.060" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T12:29:35.207" Title="How can I thank or apologize to another user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-10-01T12:26:26.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typos and misspellings happen. I often find myself missing some -s in the third person, or even worse, when I type something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the community tasks is also editing text and fixing errors, and it is a task that can also award badge and reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would say that you don't need to explicitly thank whoever reviewed your posts. If you are putting effort into proofreading your posts you are already doing something to mitigate the issue. If you want to thank the community for what it does for you, do something for the community, like you are already doing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I enjoy worldBuilding.SE, posting answers and helping questioners when I can&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Quite ironically, you slipped a small typo in your question, despite your best effort. I edited it out. It happens, no bad feelings about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T02:19:56.800" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T02:19:56.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-10-01T15:10:04.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often drop a comment to thank people who clean up my posts, especially when they've had to do a lot of work. You could also drop a tagged comment into the chat as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T15:10:04.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-01T21:43:56.463" Score="13" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; - We've pushed this live for everyone now. Thanks to those who took the time to give feedback. Please do know, being live doesn't mean we can't address further changes for you! Write an answer if you find anything that needs addressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we get into it, though, I want to thank you all for being so constructively vocal about what you wanted to keep in your theme, so we've put in a lot of work to make that happen for you. I'm really excited about how this design looks and I hope you love it. We have kept - and even enlarged - Slartibotfast and Pandora in your sidebar (you may have to turn on your left navigation or widen your browser width to see them if you have it disabled already). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, the alien version of Slartibotfast here on Meta has fallen victim to a change in designers, and we don't have the high-quality version of the artwork. There's a chance we may be able to recover it but, as it is, we hope you're OK with having Slartibotfast as the site's mascot on both main and meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you're ready to see what it looks like and you can't see it right now, that's by design! This is a very early test implementation of your design and we need your help finding issues with it before we make it live for everyone permanently. Keep in mind, there will be things that need fixing! We'll address those things as we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to review it, here's how:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I enable it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; and check the &quot;Beta test new themes&quot; option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. &lt;em&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314542/opt-in-to-beta-testing-new-themes&quot;&gt;more info&lt;/a&gt; on how to opt in.&lt;/em&gt; You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone. &lt;strong&gt;Note, while turning it on is immediate, it will take a few minutes to revert to the old view - &lt;em&gt;but it will go through!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What type of feedback do we need?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;limits of the new unified theme&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could include colors of sections of the design or text, problems with JavaScript add-ons (if applicable), the logo or top banner appearance or other artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also feel free to ask questions about the new layout if you're unsure how to navigate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things that are definitely changing everywhere and can't really be adjusted on a per-site basis. A few of them include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Top banner is shorter in height, so some artwork has to be adjusted along with some logos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Left Navigation is active everywhere (but can be collapsed into a menu by visiting your site preferences - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/311237/284336&quot;&gt;instructions here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Responsive layout is active, which lets the site adjust as browser widths change - no side scrolling (some pages haven't been updated, yet, though). For now, if you prefer the scrolling, you can disable this by clicking the &quot;disable responsiveness&quot; link in the footer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many site elements including tags and voting arrows are standardized across the network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link underlining is active. In an effort to make links more visible, they are now being underlined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/310908/live-left-nav-new-theming-and-responsiveness&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; is the right place for feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned earlier, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&amp;amp;A experience better. This is addressed in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314799/why-we-initiated-the-latest-round-of-design-changes-and-the-role-of-meta&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; if you want more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What new themes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like, &quot;What the heck are you talking about?&quot;, then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312365/rollout-of-new-network-site-themes&quot;&gt;Rollout of new network site themes&lt;/a&gt; (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background). To follow along with the rollout of these new themes, go &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314979/rollout-of-responsive-design-site-themes-tracking-post&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Oh, Who am I?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know me, I'm one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99338/who-are-the-community-team-and-what-do-they-do?s=1%7C141.4591&quot;&gt;Community Managers&lt;/a&gt; here at Stack Exchange. I'm here to listen to your input and convey it to our Design team for responses and fixes to bugs. I'll do my best to respond to your concerns and explain whether changes we've made are bugs that can be changed or if they're by design and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45207" LastEditorUserId="45207" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T22:21:23.230" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T11:43:22.987" Title="Worldbuilding's updated site theme is live for everyone!" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6724" CreationDate="2018-10-01T22:34:56.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Cort Ammon is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/22656/jon-skeet&quot;&gt;Jon Skeet&lt;/a&gt; of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should make an Ammon Facts post on Meta or Worldbuilding Meta, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts&quot;&gt;Skeet Facts&lt;/a&gt; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then we should tag it with a new Cort-Amon tag so when he answers it, he will get the tag badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T22:34:56.893" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-01T23:11:42.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a fan of the new theme or changes to the network in general, for many and various reasons which I have already put out there on main, but I do have to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I'm am so glad you saved our robot&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oeHtI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oeHtI.png&quot; alt=&quot;save the robot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note: he does disappear when changing the screen size and actually the whole left bar disappears to the bottom of my screen - which I do a lot when working on data projects. Example (no left or right bar and the hot meta questions are at the bottom):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9HhD3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9HhD3.png&quot; alt=&quot;smaller screen&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is by design, but it makes it really hard to use the site. And fyi, it is worse with the left nav enabled (there is no space for anything) but at least their back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gGr1k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gGr1k.png&quot; alt=&quot;smaller with left nav on&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I don't know if this is by design (because at some point there is only so much room) but adding a more responsive/mobile option for the left menu when resized could help with site usability - i.e. drop it down to the hamburger form when the size of the screen goes below &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T23:11:42.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-01T23:39:05.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can live with this.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thanks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for letting us keep Slartibotfast!  I have only one request: when my browser is set for full-screen, the navigation column jumps to the right of Slartibotfast, consuming valuable Q&amp;amp;A space.  When I take the browser out of full-screen, the two columns (nav &amp;amp; Slartibotfast) line up into a single column.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems backward since it's unlikely SE will ever have so many navigation options that they might collide with Slartibotfast.  On the other hand, making the window smaller will eventually force the collision.  (Granted, that's contrary to the desire to have more Q&amp;amp;A space in smaller browser windows.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a long story short.  My recommendation is to never split the two columns at all.  There's never a reason to do it in full-screen mode, and I'd rather have the space back for Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PLsHb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PLsHb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T23:39:05.647" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6530" CreationDate="2018-10-02T06:36:12.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6744/worldbuildings-updated-site-theme-is-live-for-everyone?cb=1&quot;&gt;new design&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C19xO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C19xO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T07:03:49.583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:03:49.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-02T07:17:27.330" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I too think it's great that we got to keep the robot. It really helps in giving the site a unique look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt; - They're fixed in position on the page. We need the image to go away before the footer comes up as they would interfere with the footer text. I actually think it's a pretty nice solution, so I hope that knowing it's intentional will help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yBt9h.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yBt9h.png&quot; alt=&quot;Slartibotfast and Pandora disappearing behind footer - with footer links&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it seems that the float is broken. On Firefox 62.0.2 (latest as of right now) on Windows 10, it looks fine until one scrolls far enough that the background starts to change, but beyond that point, here's how it looks as one scrolls progressively farther down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8qMEP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8qMEP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That looks fine...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kScsl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kScsl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uh oh, what's happening to their feet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EsZ9j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EsZ9j.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this quicksand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eaAFT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eaAFT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh my god, they are drowning!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/roo0P.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/roo0P.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poor things, they fell through the edge of the world!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, just in case it matters, I have turned off the &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt; sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T14:45:18.333" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-10-02T12:21:03.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that you'd like to reward editors for their effort, but the site already does that for you. The mechanics of Stack Echange gamify maintainance activities :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qs7gO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sysiphus!&quot;&gt;&#xA;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-02-05&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SMBC&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case I am going after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/copy-editor&quot;&gt;copy editor badge&lt;/a&gt;, and I am not even halfway there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best thing about this is that after you do something for a while, it becomes a habit. For example, most users I see posting often have the electorate badge (vote on 600+ questions, and a quarter of all your votes must be on questions), and though there is no further reward for it, we keep voting. Just the same, I will keep editing after I get the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asides from badges, participation is already rewarding in itself. More than badges, I do stuff because I find it fun to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T12:29:35.207" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T12:29:35.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6717" CreationDate="2018-10-02T14:24:52.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out the new meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6744/worldbuildings-updated-site-theme-is-ready-for-testing&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we’re keeping the robot! Congrats and thank you to everyone who ran that campaign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T14:24:52.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T19:07:59.697" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was an amazing revelation to me when I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had no idea that series could be created like that, on this site.  This type of organizational structure seems like it could be extremely helpful on a number of levels, so I tried searching for more 'series', but found very few (I expected many more since it seems like such a helpful concept):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series&quot;&gt;Creating a Realistic World Series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3950/great-lakes-earth-series&quot;&gt;Great Lakes Earth Series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3939/planet-of-the-aves-series&quot;&gt;Planet of the Aves Series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3540/can-we-build-series&quot;&gt;Can we Build series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there somewhere that all these series are linked to each other in a 'series' of their own? Like a library or encyclopedia?  If not, maybe it should be started.  Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29598" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T07:05:47.380" Title="Is there a Series (Encyclopedia/Library/Collection?) of series? Should we make one?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6752" CreationDate="2018-10-02T21:08:46.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you already did :) That's actually the full list so far as I know - the simplest way to build a directory of them would be to tag them all with &quot;series&quot; and then a search for the tag will find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T21:08:46.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6752" CreationDate="2018-10-02T21:50:48.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to disagree with Tim B here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really am not a fan of &quot;series&quot;, myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you've got a bunch of questions you are struggling with in building a world, go ahead and ask them. That's not a problem, that's the entire &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's usually a good idea to ask the questions one at a time, and incorporate what you've learned, or decided on, from one, into the next. Yes, it will probably take slightly longer than the shotgun approach; on the flip side, it will usually get you progressively better, more relevant answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't artificially tie them together. And yes, even if you're asking about the same world or universe, it can easily come across as artificial &lt;em&gt;to other people&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I come to the site looking for questions relating to, say, climate on large, arid continents, then I want that. If I'm an expert in climatology, then I want questions about that. In neither case am I likely to be particularly interested in the details of the life cycle of a type of fish in the ocean half way across the planet, &lt;em&gt;even if it's the same planet&lt;/em&gt;, unless of course it somehow relates directly to the climate on that arid continent (which seems... unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some other question is legitimately related, then link to it specifically; if you want to be helpful, at least provide a brief explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the linked-to question is relevant. Please don't make readers go through a whole series, no matter how interesting you think the world described in them is, just to answer a question. &lt;strong&gt;Ultimately, you likely want to make it as &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; as possible to answer your specific question,&lt;/strong&gt; typically by putting &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the information needed to answer the question into the question itself. Yes, this will likely lead to some duplication, but it also means that anyone interested in answering your question can start answering &lt;em&gt;right then and there&lt;/em&gt; instead of having to read a dozen other questions while trying to pick out the important bits from each of those and keeping mental track of how they relate to the question they first came across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, looking at the &lt;em&gt;anatomically correct&lt;/em&gt; series in particular, that also has the problem that without &quot;inside knowledge&quot;, the titles really don't say much about what OP is looking for. They &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; discuss evolution of some kind of creature, but the person reading the question rarely gets to find out that that's the question being asked &lt;em&gt;until the very end&lt;/em&gt;. I argued this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3142/29&quot;&gt;back in February 2016&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T07:05:47.380" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T07:05:47.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-03T02:53:18.360" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a small thing, but could we have the stars back in the footer?  To me that helped convey that our unfinished world was out there in space somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8aJgL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8aJgL.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EcF5k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EcF5k.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for saving our robot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T02:53:18.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-03T06:49:10.243" Score="9" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126509/building-my-flat-earth-how-to-make-my-ice-walls-last-for-eternity&quot;&gt;question about reasoning the constant existence of ice-walls around a flat-earth&lt;/a&gt; there has been this one answer leading with upvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As there is not scientific basis for anything like a flat earth, any explanation will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I´d go with: The Elephants, carrying your Earth-disc through space, fart magical freezing gases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126546/2746&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126546/2746&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It reads like a comment with a bolted on &lt;em&gt;cheap-let's-go-for-the-giggles&lt;/em&gt; answer so it can escape &lt;code&gt;Not an Answer&lt;/code&gt;-Flags. And looking at it closely it really just seems to be a critique of the question, rather than a whole-hearted attempt of answering the given problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is meant as a serious answer, then to my understanding it is coasting close to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;Be Nice Policy&lt;/a&gt;, especially the point about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be nice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether you've come to ask questions, or to generously share what you know, remember that we’re all here to learn, together. Be welcoming and patient, especially with those who may not know everything you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't even try to take the premise of the question seriously, but rather does down with it as something not worthy of receiving proper answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not meant as a serious answer (which is how I understand it), then it clearly clashes with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Answering Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..and especially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...solicit opinions rather than facts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...have already been asked and answered many times before.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...are not about worldbuilding as defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answerer wants to imply that the question is &lt;em&gt;bonkers&lt;/em&gt;, then why not VTC it instead of writing an unhelpful answer that mainly mocks the question and thus the querent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point speaking against the question not being answerable would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126550/2746&quot;&gt;very good and serious answer by Cort Ammon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answerer is not happy with the amount of detail given by the querent, as can be understood from the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; phrase of their answer, then they should instead comment on the question asking for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment history shows that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/83971/discussion-on-question-by-mr-j-building-my-flat-earth-how-to-make-my-ice-walls&quot;&gt;the answerer did not request any such clarification&lt;/a&gt; so we have to assume that at least the first part of their 'answer' must indeed be an attempt to comment, using the answer button by &lt;em&gt;accident&lt;/em&gt;(?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Answerer has 2k+ rep at the time of this, mine, post. And subtracting the 80ish rep they got from 8 upvotes and a downvote still is near the 2k rep mark - that means they have should have been on the site long enough to not simply drop plain provocations. Which is why I move this issue to the meta..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T07:06:50.697" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T12:14:14.703" Title="How has this answer not yet been shot down?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2018-10-03T07:13:01.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to quote the well known little writing on investment and to apply it in the context of this community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Past performance is no guarantee of future results&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the reputation (and moderation) privilege exempts the user from being subjected to community reviews and votes, and we all can take a false step (myself included) and post content which some can see as controversial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases like this I would say that it's the community to have the power of deciding: you as user can respectfully comment, downvote and flag the post, and then let it follow the usual path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind, it's not guaranteed that the outcome will be the desired one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T07:13:01.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2018-10-03T07:44:37.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents: If &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5994/809&quot;&gt;&quot;fries and ketchup&quot;&lt;/a&gt; kind of answer actually is an acceptable answer, then question itself is problematic and should probably be closed - as seen in linked older meta discussion. It is one close vote from being closed already. Maybe we are not putting on hold fast enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T08:58:26.320" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T08:58:26.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2018-10-03T12:20:55.183" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start by quoting the answer being discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As there is not scientific basis for anything like a flat earth, any explanation will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should be all the discussion about it. Anything past that is beating on a dead horse - and I think I arrived here to see a horse corpse beaten past any recognition, but let me add my two kicks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no scientific answer anyway, it all boils down to speculation, and that answer is the shortest and simplest. It wins by Occam's razor. I am serious on this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gases are able to take heat from other bodies, otherwise fire extinguishers would be way less efficient at best. If there are elephants under the flat earth whose flatulence is composed of gases that are colder than the Earth, or will react with it endothermically, then the rim of the disc will be constantly losing heat to space escaping gas. If you guys cannot understand that, go back to high school.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reputation has nothing to do with it. I have over 30k and the only reason I did not post that answer myself is because I got ninja'ed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Respect the will of the community. More people find that a good answer than a bad one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are offended by the answer, you need help, because some flat earthers, who have the fame you know they have, have already considered a similar model (giant beings holding the earth and cooling the rim with their breath).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, stop. If you don't like the answer, do like L.Dutch suggested and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T12:30:04.623" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T12:30:04.623" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6761" CreationDate="2018-10-03T17:48:42.843" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the badges and who had been award certain ones when I came across a user ID I'd never seen before, and found they have a rather &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/788/user788&quot;&gt;interesting profile&lt;/a&gt;; in particular no listed posts but 131 reputation, how is that possible shouldn't the reputation from any post not listed disappear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T17:52:36.863" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T17:54:40.320" Title="How can a user earn reputation points without posting anything?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6760" CreationDate="2018-10-03T17:54:40.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at their &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/788/user788?tab=activity&quot;&gt;all actions&lt;/a&gt; profile tab, you'll see a bunch of post revisions. Their profile lists 16 revisions which, at +2 rep each, add up to +32 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that it's possible to hide communities in one's profile. That user's public profile shows no other accounts across the network, but they may have hidden accounts; if so, having the 100 rep association bonus is not unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, you have 1 + 100 + 32 = 133 rep. The user currently has 131 rep, so this adds up nicely. It could be that one edit has been reverted or something like that which would account for the missing 2 rep; I haven't looked closely at their profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T17:54:40.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-03T19:36:51.590" Score="-12" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see Why. My first post, I just got Bullied. Got a -1. So I will say: I don't want to be part of this community. This is just an EGO trip. The guy signs in. Instead of welcome, some instructions, you right away get a -1, no reason given. My opinion may be bad... after all am not an American, I have a distinct CULTURAL BACKGROUND. Please at least say why you give me -1. No... &#xA;This is rant. You may came and gave me a thousand of negatives. But I have to ask you. Why be part of this community? I don't feel myself welcome. Stack Exchange, in general, is a bad thing. But when you qualify things outside of science, where your opinion can be verified, it turns out to be just a new form of bulling. Place an opinion that diverges from the dictatorship of moderators, and you get a negative. No sir, I'm out. Not going to give a penny on that, ever.&#xA;Is this our future? to have our free will destroyed by evil corporations, such as StackExchange? &#xA;We have to fight you. Not be part of this. What do you think? Probably this will get deleted anyway. We don't need to create a dystopia. This is already one.The single minded dystopia of moderators of worldbuilding, culture, history. Why should you publish a scientific paper? just go to stacksomething and get the &quot;baked truth&quot;.&#xA;EDIT: Suppose Albert Einstein were just ressurected. How much reputation would he have, to start by? and how about the undergrad student that is the number one reputation in the site? how could it not be wrong?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LPld.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LPld.png&quot; alt=&quot;No rep, no right to express yourself&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found this article, nailed it. It even says &quot;how stack overflow hates new users&quot;. Imagine if the entire society was modeled after the reputation system of stack*. Just imagine. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Three negatives, c'mon, it supposed to be more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" OwnerDisplayName="atorres" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T20:54:40.677" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T09:40:03.593" Title="Is StackExchange WorldBuilding the DYSTOPIA of the future?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6762" CreationDate="2018-10-03T19:58:07.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dystopia?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is an organization designed to help people find answers to their questions. In this way, it is similar to other Q and A sites. However, SE follows a strict code of conduct. On SE, there is none of the thread hijacking that you see on other forums like Google Sites. We follow a one question-one answer policy. That means someone has a specific question and they get specific answers. The most relevant answers are stored to the top by upvotes and downvotes. SE is trying to put everything in one place to make it easier for others to see answers to questions they might have too. That's why there is no thread hijacking and why there are multiple sites, each with a different specialization. The reputation is part of this. Rep encourages people to keep using the site, and it's a way of keeping the site focused and positive. Reputation is just part of the moderation, in the same way that other QA sites have some form of moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the above reasons, I would argue that SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a dystopia.SE is just another QA site trying a different approach to moderation and question asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bringing it down&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial suggestion is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get one downvote, don't worry. Many users have a hard time getting used to the site because of its requirements. My suggestion is to try again. If you decide you still don't like the platform, that's fine. No one will make you stay, and you can find another platform to use. SE is not for everyone because of the requirements I mentioned. Nevertheless, I think this is a helpful, encouraging community, both Worldbuilding and Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are adament on wiping SE off the face of the Earth, here is my suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leave the site. By asking a question, you are giving people on the site something to do. You are creating more pages for search engines to index, hence more views, meaning more users joining the site. You are giving people the chance to answer, which gets upvotes (at least before it was moved to meta), which will in turn make the users more likely to continue using the site. If you instead decide to write a blog post about how unfair SE is, that page will get indexed by search engines too. Some of the people who see it and don't already know what SE is will check it out. Some of those people will join the site. Anything you do to point out the unfairness you see will only increase the activity on the site. Therefore, the most logical way to take it down is remove as many outside references to the site as possible. Deleting your profile and answers will work. I don't suggest it at all, but that is one way. No matter what you do, you will probably have very little effect on the site. It's like if you wanted to take down Google. There is not much you can do. The difference is that Google has competitors and more people who are angry at/concerned with what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastEditorUserId="54384" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T21:30:29.047" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T21:30:29.047" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6762" CreationDate="2018-10-03T20:50:05.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just about four years ago, you posted an answer and somebody downvoted it without leaving a comment.  That's a bummer; you can't fix problems you don't know about.  But drive-by downvotes happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, you didn't make any other posts here until today, when your answer got a neutral-to-positive comment and three &lt;em&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt;.  Then you posted this self-admitted rant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it that you're unhappy about?  Is this a delayed reaction to that downvote, or did something else happen today that confused or upset you?  We want users, both new and old, to have good experiences here, but I'm going to need some help understanding what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T20:50:05.197" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6762" CreationDate="2018-10-03T21:33:11.400" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this definition of Dystopia (from Google):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not imagined&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not a place, a state, or a state of being&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have seen 'pleasant' and 'good' (opposites of &quot;unpleasant&quot; and &quot;bad&quot;) come from Stack Exchange, so even if I am alone in this, my experience makes the &quot;everything is unpleasant or bad&quot; premise false, as even a single item of difference in a group contradicts the definition of &quot;everything&quot; in that phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is nothing 'totalitarian' about Stack Exchange.  Quite the opposite actually, as everything revolves around 'votes' as you yourself pointed out, and which is a concept alien to totalitarianism by definition.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As Stack Exchange is not a place, &quot;environment&quot; in the physical sense does not apply.  Your single downvote, and your reaction to it, are the only examples of any negativity in the virtual environment that I have come across, leading me to conclude that the virtual environment here is also un-'degraded'.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, no part of the definition of &quot;dystopia&quot; applies to Stack Exchange, in whole or in part, so the answer to your question is decidedly &lt;strong&gt;&quot;no&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29598" LastEditorUserId="29598" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T21:41:41.817" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T21:41:41.817" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2018-10-04T04:41:32.940" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's important that we can answer with &quot;anything goes.&quot;  I've had a lot of questions where the reality is that the OP had no idea how much freedom there was in the idea they were exploring.  It happens a lot with time travel, where people make the mistake of thinking that there is exactly one time travel theory.  If you look through my history, I've written quite a few in that form (mostly about time travel, go figure)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't bother me as answers, though it does bug me when they crowd out the answers of people who are trying to get closer to an answer the OP wants to see.  I like to see more helpful answers rise to the top.  The helpfulness of the &quot;anything goes&quot; answers is limited unless you write them really well.  When I'm doing my best, I try to answer these as &quot;anything goes... but here's some direction you can use&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of typing this, my answer is accepted, and has more upvotes than the answer in question, so I think the situation is resolved (disclaimer: I'm not biased... nope nope nope!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T04:41:32.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6774" CreationDate="2018-10-04T08:19:04.330" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see more and more questions asking for help to explain how a specific magic could &quot;work&quot;. They are all opinion based, a kind of brainstorm exercise, and sound more like plot related questions than world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55702" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T04:34:50.527" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T04:34:50.527" Title="Are &quot;explanations for magic&quot; something that belong on World Building SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-10-05T11:00:29.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T10:51:09.737" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126703/travelling-the-multiverse-by-accident&quot;&gt;Travelling the multiverse by accident?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As you've probably guessed, I have no idea about how multiverses and parallel universes, or space-time travel, etc work. But, they are pretty much a driving plot point in my WIP. Is it possible to accidentally travel from one universe to another, without having been trying to access it? (not sure if that made much sense, lmk if unclear and I will try my best to clarify) How does science/math explain alternate universes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we don't even know if alternate universes really exist, how can &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is it possible to accidentally travel from one universe to another&lt;/em&gt;&quot; be anything other than purely speculative fictional opinion?  And &quot;&lt;em&gt;How does science/math explain alternate universes?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is so broad it requires dozens of PhD theses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be instant candidates for closure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8068" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T11:06:48.037" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T08:28:56.677" Title="&quot;I don't have a clue about X, but I'm using it in half-written story. Please explain!!&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T11:59:35.340" Score="10" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT: I've added a 4th point that I want help with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently noticed a lot of questions that seem like quite chaotic approaches to world building. In my humble opinion, if your approach is extremely unstructured and you ask a question that cannot be answered at this point because the world you are constructing does not yet have the foundation for an answer to make sense, it is not a good fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some worlds have a low maturity, but the questions ask about things that should really be answered later in the WB process.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick word about world &lt;em&gt;maturity&lt;/em&gt;: For me, it means both the world as well as the knowledge of the OP itself. If they want to build a world set in Ancient Greece and they have yet to do any research on that period, I think you can say that the maturity is very low no matter how detailed the world is - if the question encompasses aspects that can and should be researched. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm calling people's worlds chaotic, I don't want to link specific topics, but I'm going to make up one example based on a real question asked recently. If you know the question, please keep it to yourself, benefit of the doubt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's the year 4000. Humanity has settled on Mars. How do I distribute electricity amongst the citizens? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues here are that obviously the implications of the year 4000 are ignored. Human society, values and most likely biology (imo) will have changed by then. If they haven't, there needs to be some explaining. Also, the motivation for settling Mars is not trivial, I think it matters. You can come up with more things that seem to be unclear at this point and need to be answered first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this is enough of an example, please let me know if it is still unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue comes in various shapes or forms. I've seen questions about concepts the OP was unfamiliar with, the usage of historic time periods and settings the OP does not seem to know much about or has not put much thought into it and many things like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions do get answered, but I rarely see a direct answer. In the best case, it's suggestions on how to build the world before asking this question, it may be an explanation as to why the concept makes little sense (currently), it could be a brief explanation of what the words the OP is using actually mean and in the worst case it's an answer filled with assumptions and guesses about the world that are impossible to make at this point. I don't think shutting down the OP with answers explaining them how they cannot do whatever is helpful and encouraging. I also don't see why such explanations need to be given via answers. There have been quite a few popular &quot;this is not how things work&quot; answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it all comes down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the world is not mature enough for the question to be answered directly, what should be the prodecure?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach so far has been asking the user to give more details about the world. This can be successful, we all are sometimes unstructured when asking a question and the world might be in good shape, but recently it hasn't been. It has been frustrating when I see interesting questions in principal get boring answers explaining the basic concepts and encouragement by the community for the OP to leave the question as is instead of dealing with comments asking for clarification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that I've tried is explaining to the OP via comment that their world does not seem to be ready yet. The standard response I have gotten often is: &lt;em&gt;That's why I'm asking. If I knew everything, there would be no need to ask&lt;/em&gt;. I think that if they had a structured approach, they might not even need to ask the question. I don't tell them that anymore because it might be interpreted as insulting - and it has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should you answer such a question? I personally think you shouldn't and instead ask for clarification via comment, but that does not seem to be the opinion of everyone. There will always be grey areas, but often the answer explains that the problem is quite complex and that's it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do you communicate to the OP that they should do some world building before asking this question effectively?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What about close/down votes? Are such questions &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;unclear&quot; in principal? Does a down vote apply if not the question but the world is of low quality? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a broad topic that might not be answered or even easily discussed in one answer. I really do appreciate the answers given, but perhaps I need to start with something a bit more answerable. Any suggestions (perhaps via comments) on how to divide the topic into handable chunks without losing the sight on the whole issue are welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been written in somewhat of a hurry. Please point out any issues with this question. I myself might be chaotic ironically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37861" LastEditorUserId="37861" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T11:12:58.670" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T12:12:07.013" Title="Questions about worlds with low maturity - What to do when a question cannot be answered right now?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T07:26:13.677" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that it's missing a couple, this matched the app output as well. Though the main reputation gain tab is getting them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gflSr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gflSr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T07:26:13.677" Title="Notification drop down not counting all votes" Tags="|bug|notifications|user-interface|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2018-10-05T08:46:39.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions like this are posted all the time.  I'm constantly downvoting or voting POB, unclear, or too broad because of them.  It's an open venue, so there isn't a way to stop the questions from being posted.  Worse, there doesn't seem to be a way to convince theoretically mature users to not answer questions that aren't ready.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's likely the gist of the problem.  What to you or I is a half-baked question is to another a full meal ready to eat (or, worse, there seems to be those who are either farming rep or simply don't care about law and order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I follow the advice of the late Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson when he recommended that we vote early and vote often because it's difficult to help new users learn good habits when they're rewarded quickly and frequently for bad habits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T08:46:39.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2018-10-05T08:59:24.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had a spate of new users lately (good!) that haven't read through a single link on the site (bad!) asking questions so vague, so unprepared, so &lt;em&gt;unrealistic&lt;/em&gt; that I tend to sit in my comfortable chair, staring at the screen, wondering how to explain to the OP that they need another 3-4 years of education just to understand why their question doesn't have a practical answer from a writing perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, this happens everytime we receive a burst of new users.  (I'm curious to know why they come in bursts, but it seems every 4-5 months there's suddenly 20 new users asking questions that require writing their book to answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be candidates for closure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Yes!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm becoming an advocate for swift closure, even if it costs us a few users, simply because of the mess it makes with low quality questions leading to low quality answers.  Regrettably, we have a fair number of users right now who will post an answer to anything, even if it doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a price we pay for being the least objective, definitive, and focused site in the Stack Exchange galaxy.  We're the one thing SE was never designed for: we're &lt;em&gt;imaginative.&lt;/em&gt;  Which means our lines aren't drawn in sand with sharpened sticks, they're drawn on moving water with spray paint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consequence is that we, the experienced users, need to be regular and consistent providers of clear reasons why we're voting to close or downvoting a question.  True, SE doesn't require anyone to explain their reasons - but the Help Center only addresses broad definitions &amp;mdash; and the OPs that post questions like those you're talking about are already unable to jump from a broad definition to a specific application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's our job to help them make that connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T08:59:24.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2018-10-05T09:06:55.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Magic has been a part of WB.SE from the beginning.  The problem with magic is that it absolutely fails the standard SE test for being &quot;opinion based,&quot; which is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, of course, is that no one has expert experience, facts, references, or specific expertise in magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason we've had to redefine POB.  Here, it's not from the answerer's point of view, but from the OP's point of view.  If a question is asked such that there's no obvious or sensible way the OP can determine a best answer (other than by their own opinion, AKA, flipping a coin), then it's POB.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, magic survives on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that this site is about helping people develop clear and consistent rules for a fictional world.  Magic's just another applied rule &amp;mdash; and that's how we draw the line.  Is the OP defining the rules for his/her world?  Then the question is on-topic.  Is the OP simply trying to figure out how to tell their story?  Off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I summarized all this in a POB description &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436/idea-refinement-clarification-and-examples-of-vtc-reasons-for-new-users/6437#6437&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, including a lot of links to the very Meta posts that you want to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T09:06:55.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6762" CreationDate="2018-10-05T09:40:03.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE isn't the dystopia of the future.  It isn't a dystopia at all.  It's the most egalitarian website you'll ever find.  We have clear and specific rules about what can be asked on any particular SE site and how it can be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's dystopic is that some users (especially new users) think (a) they can and should be allowed to ignore the site rules, (b) that they shouldn't be restricted while they learn how to use the site and (c) that on a self-regulating and self-moderating site that no one should ever be made to feel bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality is that the rules do a pretty good job of helping people who have no experience with the site deal with the purpose and goal of the site while growing accustomed to the enormous variety of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet few people take the time to understand any of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've even tried to create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;culture page&lt;/a&gt; to help people understand all this.  Very few people take the time to read it, even when it's posted as a comment to new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is SE perfect?  Heavens, no!  But I like it better than Reddit, Quora, and the other open-question forums &amp;mdash; specifically &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; there are rules that help us establish a modicum of quality.  But it's not for everyone, because it expects you, the new user, to be as responsible about using the site as me, the experienced user, because this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a public forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And perhaps that's the gist of the problem.  You're asking that everyone else using a site you didn't build adhere to your code of behavior (rather than you adhering to the code of behavior expected by the site built by somebody else).  Life doesn't work that way &amp;mdash; though you'd be surprised how often people try to make it that way.  We live in a world that increasingly believes everybody else is at fault when life doesn't work out as planned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that truly is dystopic &amp;mdash; the totalitarianism of the unprepared, the uneducated, and the unwilling to conform to the rules of someone else's house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T09:40:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2018-10-05T17:11:21.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like the question must be closed if it is unanswerable.  That's the StackExchange way.  I also feel like we should be striving to help these people.  They &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; coming to our exchange for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing I think the community is not in agreement on is how we should help these people.  Should it be in comments? answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, we have to recognize that VTC and downvotes have a psychological impact on the user.  A few votes doesn't hurt too much, but a rapid rush to 5 VTC and a bunch of downvotes sends a very strong &quot;This question is not welcome here&quot; message.  And if that question is what brought you to the exchange, there's no reason to stick around.  Sometimes we will encourage someone to go to the sandbox, but not always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I've not asked a question in 2 years because I've been around long enough to know the questions I want to ask will just get VTCd into oblivion.  I can provide answers on this site, but I can't really use it to answer any of my own questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find I like to provide an answer which doesn't actually answer the question but provides a framework for them to arrive at the answer themselves.  I don't think that Standard Operating Procedures, but it is my own personal opinion on how it should operate.  This is especially true if the topic is something where I know the questions the OP needs to ask themselves, but a good discussion of those questions simply doesn't fit well into the comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also consider what we look like from the Google search perspective.  If someone is likely to come to stack exchange from a Google search, and benefit from the same framework, it seems like good site advertising to at least have the framework written up on the closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do like JBH's comment in this thread, &quot;What to you or I is a half-baked question is to another a full meal ready to eat,&quot; but I think I might be applying a different interpretation than was intended.  I've had some questions where I was like &quot;wow, that is so underdefined that it's going to be impossible to answer,&quot; only to have someone basically cold-call every detail that mattered, get them all right, and provide the OP with exactly what they sought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this may be another strong candidate for the argument for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6737/using-the-community-wiki&quot;&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt;'s containing general information and directions as to how to go about answering these questions for yourself.  Indeed I think a fair number of the questions we're seeing on Meta are cases where we could best resolve them by marking the question as a duplicate of a CW, and perhaps providing a comment pointing them at an answer that you feel is most applicable from that CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:11:21.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2018-10-05T17:15:05.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we have to close these questions, though I think the answer I provided to that question shows the kind of help I'd like our community to be able to provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd consider this another excellent candidate for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6737/using-the-community-wiki&quot;&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt; solution, where we maintain a set of community wiki's containing general information and directions to help people answer their own questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, everything I wrote in my answer would be valid for a general question about writing fiction in the multiverse.  Tegmark's 4 levels are a well accepted standard way to handle multiverses, and Heinlein provides historical examples of how authors have dealt with these things.  I'd point anyone who asks vague questions about multiverses to that answer.  It's a general foundation that could be used to either answer your own question, or better refine it into something answerable on WB.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:15:05.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2018-10-06T04:02:02.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing this for a long time. &lt;em&gt;Geopoesy&lt;/em&gt;, that is. Building worlds and describing them. Well, one world, really. All in all, more than forty years. And the one world I focus on has been in the works for about thirty-five of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm actually very glad you asked this query, Raditz_35! (I was just going to ask a very similar query myself, and you beat me to the punch!) Because, while JBH (and I'm not picking on you!) is finding so many queries to downvote or close, I'm finding ever more frequently that I am far more likely to struggle &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the VsTC and am become much more lenient &amp;amp; indulgent towards reopening closed queries. Especially when they are clearly on topic for this forum! And unless they're just completely off the forum topic or are literally &quot;please write my story&quot; or &quot;please build my world for me&quot; queries.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The imbalance I see here, and the worm at the root of this query, is really one of &lt;strong&gt;experience&lt;/strong&gt;. Maturity as you put it. There is a rather broad and multidimensional spectrum of participants here at WB.SE. For example, if a number of querents here seem to be engaging in chaotic or unstructured worldbuilding, that's a sign I tend to equate with those who haven't been at this very long. I've seen this behaviour everywhere else, too. Others have been at it longer and are perhaps beginning a new project. They don't seem as chaotic because they're more experienced and can form their ideas into more coherent questions. At the other end of the spectrum are those who are well versed in a wide variety of worldbuilding matters, are mature geopoets: the questions they ask tend to be very tight. At another part of the spectrum entirely are those of us who are so mature &amp;amp; so secure that we just don't ask questions. The answers are just &lt;em&gt;already there&lt;/em&gt; if we but look, if you take my meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wished to consider, say, the region of ancient Baluchistan as a basis for some culture and historical period of my own otherworld, I can honestly say I would ask here. Not that I don't like WB.SE, but, quite simply I don't have the need any longer to ask procedural questions. I learned geopoetic procedure before there was an Internet to ask questions in! I learned how to research before there was a Wikipedia. So yes, maturity is a factor. And I think a very large factor! &#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;What Should Be Done?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having reviewed your example question (yep, riddled with a beginner's errors!), and although I am not familiar with the query upon which it's based, I think it is a good example of immaturity of geopoetical art. The hypothetical OP is jumping the gun in asking for a quick fix of a forum like this. I agree with you that what we see in this query is insufficient &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; about the nature of the subcreated world itself as well as insufficient basic &lt;em&gt;research&lt;/em&gt; about basic science, extraterrestrial colonisation, terraformation, etc. While I might disagree with you that human society, values and biology should have &lt;em&gt;significantly&lt;/em&gt; changed within that short period of time, I do concur that those are things the OP should be considering on her own and in advance of proposing a query on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think in order to answer your query, I need to answer question for question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;My question is, how do we view our community?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;we&quot;, here, I mean those of us who obviously care about WB.SE as a forum; those of us who are active geopoets; those of us who are active respondents, editors, encouragers, welcomers, moderators, thoughtful meta participants, etc. (I know JBH and you Raditz_35 do (I've not interacted with Cort Ammon enough, but reputation precedes) and I think I can dare to name myself among your august company!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;our community&quot;, I mean who is our audience? Me, I would love a forum like this for folks who have been working on subcreated worlds and invented languages &amp;amp; cultures for at fifteen to twenty years. And those would be the junior members! It really is a rather unique and rare experience to talk shop with people who &lt;em&gt;of a certain age and level of artistic maturity&lt;/em&gt;. As I think back on the long years, some of the great convos I've had with such people happened (in online worldbuilding forums) when, quite probably, the vast majority of WB.SE's members, (and probably some of you lot!), were just babies or not even born yet! (For example, not so long ago I was in a convo with a fellow worldbuilder who just pleased as punch that his world related notes just exceeded the 30,000 mark! I didn't want to burst his happy-bubble by bringing up a book about my own world that sits at just under 200,000 words.) So I am resigned to the fact that almost any worldbuilding community will be composed of, er, immature, chaotic, unsure, untutored, highly energetic, frenetic, unsettled and relatively new members.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Since we are a public forum, a greatest common denominator forum, I think our basic m.o. should be one that is welcoming of newbies and is therefore accommodating even of those who just don't know what they're doing yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, we should answer questions. That's what we do. This doesn't mean we shouldn't first require basic research (even if that's only a look at the search function within our own forum), query clarification, better focus, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just tell them straight up! I've done similar before. Basically, if I were to address your hypothetical OP: &quot;I think you have a good foundation for a SE query, but as of right now, your question / your world / your research / etc. need work before proceeding. I'd suggest you take a look into a few basic factors before asking this question here: what is society (cultural wisdom, religion, moral &amp;amp; ethical maturity, education, economic factors) like in the year 4000? What is the basic level of science &amp;amp; technology like? What are the driving factors behind colonisation (economics, military, lebensraum, penal colony) and what steps have been done to make a place like Mars habitable? When you know the answers to those kinds of questions, then come back and we can talk about electricity distribution!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think we should be far, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;FAR&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; more lenient when it comes to closing queries as a general policy. I've said it before and I'll say it again: worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;by nature and by definition&lt;/em&gt; opinion based! We deal regularly in what-ifs, never-weres, ain't-no-such-likes and moughtn't-be-but-be-all-the-sames. We frequently deal with things that simply can not be in the primary world of our waking experience. This is why I find myself so frequently at odds with other highly respected members. My own practice is to take a much more liberal approach to what counts as &quot;opinion based&quot;. That said, I often find myself right in complete agreement with those same respected members when it comes to queries that are (otherwise good) but are far too broad --- those that ask a string of twenty questions, those that are fishing expeditions, those that have no idea about context and for which any and every answer would be correct; with queries that are obviously not about worldbuilding; with questions that are deliberately provocative and the like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37861" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T11:05:08.527" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T11:05:08.527" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2018-10-06T08:28:56.677" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question like the multiverse one --- definitely &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; a candidate for instant closure. This is actually an interesting worldbuilding question. The OP doesn't ask for hard science or even science based responses. The query has too much personal fluff (doesn't really matter how much or how little you know about multiverses --- the only things that matter are your vision of the otherworld in question and how creative you are with the topic at hand). But the basic query is sound and fairly standard SF fodder. It needs work, to be sure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed of late a veritable slew of queries being slammed shut after only a few minutes on the board. It's my opinion, and I know others disagree, but I find this practice at best troubling and at worst counterproductive. Worldbuilding is not only for the realists, the scientists and the engineers. There has to be room for the fantasists, the creatives and the irrealists, too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with JBH on this: we are &lt;em&gt;imaginative&lt;/em&gt;.  I've also said before that SE is &lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt; designed with an imaginative endeavour like ours in mind. It's totally unsuitable. But we're here, and so long as Stack Exchange (the company) doesn't shut this forum down, it's up to us to sort out how to fly our imaginative airship through what is basically inimicable territory. If we keep shutting down the creative, the whimsical and the imaginative questions in favour of the strictly SE-answerable types of questions, then we really defeat the purpose of our forum's existence, which is a Q&amp;amp;A forum for worldbuilders regardless of their skillsets, level of practice, knowledge base or preclivity for prior research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem with helping (especially) new users learn how to ask good questions; but I really don't see the point in closing questions like this just because of reasons. The OP doesn't learn how to write a better question certainly; other users who might be considering a similar aspect of their own worlds gain no insight from the community; other users who already have this as part of their worlds gain no further insight; those of us who have insight or experience or knowledge to share are cut off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I'm all for closing queries that are egregiously inappropriate for this worldbuilding forum (story based questions, do my homework requests, maths questions, strictly primary world questions, extremely broad questions). I am much less in favour of swift closure of &quot;opinion based&quot; queries. After all (and I've said this before, too), worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;by definition and by nature&lt;/em&gt; a matter of opinion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be much happier if the more experienced users would make less use of the cleaver and more use of pencil &amp;amp; eraser! In other words, rather than close these questions, edit them and make them into good worldbuilding questions! If the OP doesn't want to play along (and I notice the OP of that question has chosen &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to alter her query any further), that's fine with me. I see no reason why one or more of us can't (gently) seize control by paring down what should be excised and building up what might make for a better or more helpful question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T08:28:56.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6783" CreationDate="2018-10-07T16:01:24.120" Score="8" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;While we've likely always had &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions, it feels like we've had a lot of them lately.  Here's a sample (the questions asked so far in October, some have been closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126964&quot;&gt;Why would mass suicide be the only way to summon a god?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126943&quot;&gt;Why would people living inside a nebula go into space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126838&quot;&gt;Why would sorcery require the use of both sexes to be performed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126621&quot;&gt;Why would somebody want to stop the four elements?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126576&quot;&gt;Why would characters spend time answering imaginary questions to fictional hypotheticals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126566&quot;&gt;Why would boarding school be mandatory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126548&quot;&gt;Why would my carnivorous species condemn murder?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126460&quot;&gt;Why would anyone light campfires in The Zone of Alienation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the above question type is distinguishable from &quot;How would X lead to Y?&quot; questions &amp;mdash; better known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868/how-to-deal-with-please-develop-my-high-concept-questions&quot;&gt;High Concept Questions&lt;/a&gt;.  Here are those so far this month:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126960&quot;&gt;How would corporations come to be more powerful than governments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126948&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126948&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126947&quot;&gt;How would one make a lion mount for a fantasy world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126789&quot;&gt;How to make firearms rare while metal is still widely available.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126652&quot;&gt;How would the transfer of mass from the Moon to Earth change the rotation, orbit and speed of the Moon and Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126632&quot;&gt;Jobs in an AI controlled world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126479&quot;&gt;How would a nomadic society revolving around train travel work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126478&quot;&gt;The Consequences of a Tidally Locked Earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/126437&quot;&gt;How would a world power create an artificial winter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Concern:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;&quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions are almost always too broad.  They're similar to &quot;How would X lead to Y?&quot; questions in that they're asking us to develop a substantial portion of the OP's plot for them.  My gut tells me (and my emotional reaction when reading most of them) that they're off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's the hard part: unless they are ONLY answered from the rules-of-your-world perspective.  I.E., &quot;what natural law on your world answers this question?&quot;  Therefore, the first question on the list could not be legitimately answered (ignoring the specifics of the question)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;because the god demands it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...as that is only a plot device (storybuilding and subject to either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300&quot;&gt;OT:TSB&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;POB&lt;/a&gt; VTC rules).  But it could be answered...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;because the life energy of 100 healthy, mature adults between the ages of 25 and 45 is required to trigger the summoning spell based on the rules of magic and/or theology for your world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...because it identifies how a rule of the world could be used to accomplish the task. or (perhaps better for the OP)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your world could require the life energy of 100 healthy, mature adults between the ages of 25 and 45 to trigger the summoning spell/incantation/invocation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...which helps the OP establish the rules of his/her world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Should we...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Add &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; as off-topic without specifying a desire for rules-of-my-world answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Add &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; as off-topic in all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Add &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; as on-topic, which means they can't be closed as too broad by definition (they must still accomodate the rules of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436/idea-refinement-clarification-and-examples-of-vtc-reasons-for-new-users/6437#6437&quot;&gt;POB&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) Persuant to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6781/seeking-community-concensus-about-why-would-x-lead-to-y-questions/6783#6783&quot;&gt;Cort Ammon's answer&lt;/a&gt;: Add &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; as on-topic but susceptible to being unclear and likely to be closed: please use our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt; to clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for completeness...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e) Ignore the situation entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the goal of inviting the Moderators to add a line to the Help Center to reference this common question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="2177" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T17:13:55.330" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T21:39:47.803" Title="Seeking community consensus about &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|policy|question-types|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-07T19:29:35.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it by design that the help menus are only setup for desktop? It is hard to read with the large desktop-sized bar at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/INXeP.png&quot; alt=&quot;a help menu&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are certain items on profiles, like the flaged posts menu, also desktop-only? On mobile, you can't see the helpful flags count, you have to switch over to the desktop version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T19:29:35.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2018-10-07T20:12:48.310" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been seeing a lot of those too.  I'm not sure what to do with them.  They remind me a lot of the questions we see on physics like &quot;Why do photons have wavelengths?&quot;  The only true answer to these questions is &quot;because they do,&quot; or perhaps to question our entire model based scientific approach from its roots.  But most of the time it's because someone wants to hear an explanation using QM or some deeper system that they can believe is &quot;true.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this happens in a lot of these questions you mention as well.  People want some unassailable reason for a plot point because it's pivotal to their story and they don't want their story to sound cheap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have the opportunity for a dialogue, the question I always like to ask is, &quot;Well why not?&quot;  Their answer lets me know if they're just digging for something, or if they have some legitimate challenge to the idea. To use the Carnivores and Murder example, they ask &quot;Why would my carnivorous species be opposed to murder,&quot;  I ask &quot;why not?&quot;  Does the OP think there's a consistency issue?  Have they never ordered a steak in a restaurant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running down this line of reasoning often ferrets out the real question they should have been asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the Q&amp;amp;A format of stack exchange isn't very amenable to this sort of thing. &lt;strong&gt;We should probably direct them at the sandbox to reformulate the question, with some hopeful phrasing like &quot;Most Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions do get reformulated into valid questions, so that they don't give up  hope. To me, this implies that the question must be closable, but there must be some wiggle room for a reformulated question to prosper.&lt;/strong&gt; But I also wonder if it might make sense to bring that topic to chat.  Some of these questions really benefit from a good solid dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T09:30:51.267" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T09:30:51.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T09:50:09.540" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/names&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;names&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;names&lt;/a&gt; has 36 questions. A lot of them are on hold or closed, and I feel none of them needs that tag to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel asking about names, or name conventions, usually tends to get questions closed as POB. Burninating this tag should help discourage this kind of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T09:59:12.657" Title="Do we need the [names] tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6784" CreationDate="2018-10-08T09:59:12.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed questions are ones that shouldn't be here in the first place. Amount of such questions with a tag is a clue, but shouldn't be a deciding factor. This leaves us with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=[names]+closed%3Ano&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=[names]+closed%3Ano&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;18 results. There are examples that really makes sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why would a city not use names?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searching for a database of real historical names  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What factors cause a society where people have no family name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Culturally Correct Naming Conventions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I develop names for my fantasy land? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are a really nice questions that are mostly about names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd say - let the tag be.&lt;/strong&gt; Questions about names can be OK, great even. Tag is useful for search and categorization. At the same time, we should have a meta post about names, like we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5991/809&quot;&gt;one about magic&lt;/a&gt;, to help users understand which questions about names are OK, and which are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T09:59:12.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2018-10-08T09:59:17.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm goong with (d).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(d) Persuant to Cort Ammon's answer: Add &quot;Why would X lead to Y?&quot; questions to the Catalog of Question Types as on-topic but susceptible to being unclear and likely to be closed: please use our Sandbox or Chat to clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions mentioned suck, but some have had a positive reception and good answers. The problem is not the question format in itself, it is how the question can relate to world building. Therefore I find (c) and (d) good options, but (d) is nicer since it points people to where they can get their questions improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T11:20:11.250" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T11:20:11.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7373" CreationDate="2018-10-08T11:22:13.213" Score="9" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is something wrong with Worldbuilding's CSS styles for print media or other configurations that prevents pages to be printed (either on a paper or to a PDF) correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When printing the main text is terribly narrowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MiMcL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MiMcL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is tested under five different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and IE) and is as best as it can be -- under Chrome. Under other browser printed strip is even more narrowed, i.e.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;under Firefox and Opera first line of above text consists of &quot;&lt;em&gt;In my world there's&lt;/em&gt;&quot; only,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;under Edge it is only &quot;&lt;em&gt;In my world&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;there's a&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is in the next line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Printing is out of question with such narrow text. Edge claims that a print of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117221/how-to-kidnap-a-person-so-the-world-wouldnt-object-or-ask-questions&quot;&gt;the question in topic&lt;/a&gt; would require 50 (!) pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edge, as the only browser of all five tested, has an option called &lt;em&gt;Clutter-free printing&lt;/em&gt;. Enabling it causes page to be printed quite normally (no text narrowing, quite normal margins, print as close to regular Word document as it can be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But something (probably again CSS/HTML) causes Edge to print question only, even though &quot;&lt;em&gt;All pages&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is selected and even tough with &lt;em&gt;Clutter-free printing&lt;/em&gt; turned off causes Edge to print whole page (question + all answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="65530" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T21:29:04.220" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T21:29:12.110" Title="What's wrong with printing in Worldbuilding" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-08T23:22:19.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;: Active, oldest, and votes tabs for sorting answers are too pale, as can just barely be seen in this picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rn8hp.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should be the same color as the background, as on other sites. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FoiUQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is what it looks like on the RPG site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T23:22:19.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2018-10-09T05:44:39.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Options (a) to (c) can be dismissed as unthinking, mechanical and likely to lead to nonsensical results. They might be right some of the time, but that sort of approach isn't worth pursuing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sensible options are (d) and (e). Option (d) is likely to lead to useful results in terms of building a database of good questions and provide a source of information for querents who may be unaware of the complexity of the topic(s) about which they are trying to ask questions. Option (e) because people worry too much enough about matters which are likely to resolve themselves without too much trouble. Either that or they should take a stress pill and have a good lie down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T05:44:39.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2018-10-09T18:37:59.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions are textbook Unclear, and need to be closed as such, but it helps to tell the OP why it's Unclear in a specific comment that outlines the fact that they just aren't deep enough in to be asking the question coherently. If people don't specifically understand that the question is okay but the setting needs work they'll work on the question. Trying to rework a question that isn't truly at fault doesn't actually help people get to a place where they can get the information they need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People, especially new people, need to understand clearly where &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the fault truly lies in these situations so they can progress. The standard review comments don't give them that information so we need to make an effort to do so when we can, where we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T12:12:07.013" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T12:12:07.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2018-10-10T11:46:00.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If not because it's unhelpful or almost insulting, the answer is invalid because it uses magic. The question clearly states &quot;Is there any &quot;possible&quot; scientific way to have this kind of Ice wall?&quot; To me, that is the equivalent of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; answer. The answer is essentially using an anything goes handwave when the OP specified that wasn't an option. This answer should be deleted because it does not follow the rules outlined by the OP. You can't use magic to explain science, and the answer doesn't even attempt to justify magical elephants as pseudo-science or string theory or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T11:46:00.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2018-10-10T13:17:31.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes but it's not appropriate to change the content, and consultation is often more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is where to actually draw the line between correcting an error and altering content. It can be appropriate to correct errors within existing content, I'm thinking mostly about answers with math in them here, but even then it's usually better to consult the author in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the content of your message has been altered which is very poor form, worse yet you were right in the first place because while the change may be extremely minor &lt;em&gt;there will be one&lt;/em&gt;; if you alter the mass of any member of any orbital assemblage the whole system will shift, if only a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T13:17:31.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2018-10-10T21:39:47.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, a lot of these types of questions are not really asking any question which has a real answer. Instead, they are asking &quot;I'm having writer's block, so could you please load your idea shotgun and fire a bunch of ideas at me.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;They are asking people to write their story for them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still remember when I came across my first few of those kind of questions when I was new here. I would read something like &quot;Why does my X do Y&quot; and think &quot;How are we supposed to know? Was that meant as a comment on someone else's question where you were asking for clarification, or are you asking us how the rules of your world work (which doesn't make sense)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not say what should be done with those questions; I merely offer a second opinion on the nature of the &quot;questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any negative action is taken against such questions, you should be very careful to not accidentally catch up the real questions that follow the same word pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If my people avoid iron and steel, what would they use instead?&quot; is not really a question. Literally, you can take a list of all nouns in the language and throw a few darts at it to come up with a response. A more thoughtful response would be &quot;Wood and mud,&quot; but how do I know that's what they would use? It's your story; you tell me what they use instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;My people avoid iron and steel. They get awful headaches from the anti-magic properties. The anti-magical properties of iron are thought to be related to its reactivity to electricity and magnetism. The people still want to use the closest thing they can, preferably some kind of strong metal that can still be made into good weapons and armor but would not possess the headache-causing anti-magic properties (because it doesn't react to electricity or magnetism). For my people who avoid iron and steel, what would they use instead?&quot; is a real, answerable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that example better question would be better answered by going to a chemistry, physics, engineering, or DIY stack exchange and asking the actual, literal question instead: &quot;What metals would make good substitutes to iron/steel if I need to avoid magnetism and electrical conductivity?&quot; Theoretically, you would get the best answers on engineering.SE (I say theoretically because of the kind of site it is, but WB happens to have lots of smart people here who answer even strict science-based questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So questions written in that pattern might be good questions, but they should be highly suspect of being not real questions. &quot;If my people don't want to use iron, what would they use instead?&quot; is not a real question, as &quot;scotch tape&quot; is a valid answer, as is &quot;eye of newt and toe of frog.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The not-good version of the question is still a fine thing to say, but it is a full on discussion kind of a thing. Maybe direct them to the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T21:39:47.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-12T10:42:09.167" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127214/fastest-underwater-speed-of-a-2-person-privately-built-submersible&quot;&gt;Fastest Underwater Speed of a 2 Person Privately Built Submersible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this question is perhaps that it has a reality-check tag making people think they can easily answer it. In practice it's a candidate for a hard-science tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Movement resistance for a vessel of this type can be calculated, power required to move it at those speeds can also be calculated, as can the required energy density of the power system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is some fairly heavy duty naval engineering rather than a simple reality check, but it can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T11:03:02.193" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T11:23:52.307" Title="Fast submarines - Closed question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6796" CreationDate="2018-10-12T11:00:33.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that OP did not give a tech level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For calculating resistance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitating_torpedo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;supercavitation&lt;/a&gt; makes it really, really hard. Next to impossible without actual testing. And before you say this speed is impossible for submarines: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/darpa-readies-ultra-fast-mini-sub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it was attempted in real world in 2009&lt;/a&gt; and it still &lt;a href=&quot;http://nymag.com/speed/2016/12/supersonic-underwater-travel-may-be-coming-soon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looked promising in 2016&lt;/a&gt;. Is tech supposed to be limited to 1986 Akula-class tech, as Akula is mentioned in the question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 person requirement is imprecise as we do not know how long such submarine should support them - and without tech level we have two big unknowns about required size of a life-support system. Privately built requirement suggest some limitations to availability of stuff to private citizens, but we don't know what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last line of the question asks for maximum depth, not speed, so it is unclear which one OP is really asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, it is quite possible that OP is not even building a fictional world, but only curious about limits in our world. That would make his question off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T11:23:52.307" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T11:23:52.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-12T15:46:06.080" Score="5" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earned a new badge today on Meta, but noticed that the option bar (is that the right term?) to select the next badge is partially hidden by the category tabs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently on Windows 10 using Chrome v. 69.0.3497.100 (64-bit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phdQI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phdQI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T21:44:22.590" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T21:44:22.590" Title="Bug: Medal selection overlapped by tabs on user page" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5801" CreationDate="2018-10-12T16:02:36.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cbOZq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T16:02:36.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-14T12:51:10.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a way to keep the robot from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6749&quot;&gt;sinking in quicksand&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing it requires two steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove the current robot background from the &lt;code&gt;body&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the following code to the site CSS instead:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;body:not(#specificity-hack) &amp;gt; .container:before {&#xA;    content: &quot;&quot;;&#xA;    display: block;&#xA;    width: 100%;&#xA;    margin-left: -100%;&#xA;    height: 347px;&#xA;    align-self: flex-end;&#xA;    position: sticky;&#xA;    bottom: 0;&#xA;    left: 0;&#xA;    z-index: -1;&#xA;    background-image: url(&quot;img/site-background-figures.png&quot;);  /* URL of the robot image */&#xA;    background-size: 187px;&#xA;    background-position: top left;&#xA;    background-repeat: no-repeat;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this does is create a virtual &quot;pseudo-element&quot; inside the main content container.  That pseudo-element has no content other than its background image and, thanks to the negative margin, occupies no actual space on the page.  Normally, the margin and the &lt;code&gt;align-self&lt;/code&gt; property would cause it to be drawn at the bottom left corner of the main container (i.e. just above the footer), but the &lt;code&gt;position: sticky&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;bottom: 0&lt;/code&gt; properties cause it to be pushed up to the bottom of the visible screen area instead, &lt;em&gt;as long as that position remains within the main container&lt;/em&gt;.  Thus, in effect, the robot image will remain fixed on the screen until the user scrolls down far enough for the footer to become visible, at which point it will start scrolling up with the page and stay above the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cool thing is that all this can in fact be done using nothing but CSS.  I have tested this solution on Chrome, but AFAICT it should work on all modern browsers.  Translating it to Less and tidying up the other conflicting styles so that the &lt;code&gt;:not(#specificity-hack)&lt;/code&gt; isn't needed are left as exercises for SE staff. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T12:51:10.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6811" CreationDate="2018-10-16T17:00:04.273" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I answered a question that had a given scope. Today I saw that the question had edits that changed its scope. I saw it because of a downvote to my answer - I believe it was due to my answer no longer being valid. It could even be flagged as NAA and I would agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time it happens. I usually either edit my answers or let it be. I feel like applying a plain rollback would be authoritary and not nice to new users. I strongly believe that newcomers don't do such edits with bad intentions - they just haven't learned how things work here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this situation keeps happening. It's only a matter of time until another edit invalidates someone's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware if these previous questions in meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5539/21222&quot;&gt;Is it considered good practice to edit your question after answers have been given?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4403/21222&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they mention nothing about rollbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have a procedure then?  Something along the lines of rolling back edits that would invalidate answers, but also leaving comments about why the rollback was done, asking them to open up a new, different question with whatever new parameters, and point them to the sandbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't intend to do anything about the question edit I've mentioned - it has already gathered an answer within its new premises, so a rollback now would be more harm than good. I am asking for future cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T07:01:10.430" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T12:39:51.173" Title="Seeking community advice/consensus on rolling back edits that invalidate answers" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6807" CreationDate="2018-10-16T17:38:13.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually leave the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; alone, although I do note to the OP that edits that invalidate previous work are frowned upon. Then I note that my answer is pre-edit and no longer applies at the top of my existing post. Then I leave it completely alone for at least an hour or two so I don't say something I'll regret later. Sometimes I feel that a new answer to the new question is warranted, but usually I'm not feeling like being that helpful when this kind of thing happens. I would personally lean away from using the rollback button myself but I would definitely suggest, assuming there are no answers to the new version, to the OP that it may be both more appropriate and more productive for them to rollback the existing question and ask a new question with the new content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T18:28:31.233" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T18:28:31.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-16T22:00:00.907" Score="5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;While scrolling up/down a page, the background image no longer flows smoothly like it used to. At least, I thought it used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image to the left, of the robot and the person with the long hair and flowing cloak in desert now jumps and flickers when scrolling, moving with the page then snapping back into place. It was a slight annoyance at first, but it is getting to the point where it is bugging my eyes now and makes me want to do something else just because of the extra eye strain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @Michael Kjörling and @Molot I am providing more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found the same thing that Molot suggests in comments. It &lt;strong&gt;works fine in Internet Explorer&lt;/strong&gt; (problem does not manifest there), but the &lt;strong&gt;problem exists in Edge&lt;/strong&gt;. This explains why I used to be fine and recently noticed the change; I have been using Edge recently instead without even realizing I made the switch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OS is Windows 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, because of the comment by Michael Kjörling I will update the post he linked to concerning the theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastEditorUserId="34734" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T14:45:02.907" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T14:45:02.907" Title="Site background image flicker" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6807" CreationDate="2018-10-17T08:53:17.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;There is a network-wide consensus: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43478/225745&quot;&gt;Exit strategies for “chameleon questions”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I personally like it. In short, it is like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edits are not allowed to invalidate answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If scope of question changes slightly, and it is still an original problem (aka answers are not wrong, just slightly off) notify OP and answerers and let them figure it out&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use chat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, roll back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simply rolling back without saying anything does not solve the underlying problem, but sometimes rollback is a part of the solution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T12:39:51.173" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T12:39:51.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-10-17T14:56:16.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bug:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The side image with Pandora and Slartibotfast starts to scroll with the page then snaps back into place. When scrolling a lot this causes rapid vibration/flickering of that background image. It is enough that I eventually got extra eye strain last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OS: Windows 10&#xA;Browser: Edge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not appear to happen in Internet Explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had created a meta question for this (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6810/site-background-image-flicker?noredirect=1#comment21413_6810&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but a comment on that directed me to post as an answer to this thread about the new theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34734" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T14:56:16.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T01:55:19.543" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just spotted our current hnq &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128120/how-can-a-person-be-kept-alive-while-being-periodically-drained-of-blood&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, and did a double-take before realizing what stack it was from. This happens more often here. Considering the recent mess with IPS, should we consider blacklisting, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28761" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T06:07:18.330" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T06:07:18.330" Title="Should we be blacklisted from HNQ?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6815" CreationDate="2018-10-22T02:05:14.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question that's perfectly fine in the context of a site looks alarming from outside.  But that doesn't mean we need to opt out of external visibility.  Sometimes an edit will fix that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, instead of &quot;How can a person be kept alive while being periodically drained of blood?&quot; (which raises questions of medical ethics and more, if you don't know where it's coming from), we could try something like &quot;How can my golems keep people alive while periodically draining blood from them?&quot;.  That exact title isn't 100% in accord with the question so I'm not making that edit, but maybe we can think of an edit that makes the question less alarming while still preserving its core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T02:05:14.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6815" CreationDate="2018-10-22T04:33:15.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;For some added context, I also moderate Interpersonal Skills, the site that is currently on hiatus from the Hot Network Questions list.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe . . . two or three years ago, I would have been a huge fan of this idea. At one point, we had a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; series of discussions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033/627&quot;&gt;what we termed &quot;What If&quot; questions&lt;/a&gt; (feel free to look back at all of those), which I think were being aggravated/encouraged by the Hot Network Questions list. The HNQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/316937/274942&quot;&gt;optimizes for controversy&lt;/a&gt; and open-ended questions in general, and while we have some pretty open-ended questions on the whole, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/627&quot;&gt;we do have some limits&lt;/a&gt;. Looking back, I wonder if removing us from the HNQ would have helped mitigate the problem - and I still think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my concern then was that we were still a fledgling site that had been through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6398/627&quot;&gt;a whole bunch of trials and tribulations&lt;/a&gt;. My philosophy is that early access to the HNQ can harm a growing site that's still struggling to sort out scope problems and better manage its community. On Interpersonal Skills, &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1314/102&quot;&gt;we've known this is an issue for over a year now&lt;/a&gt;, which is why there was always some support to remove us from the HNQ. Now that it's finally happening, therefore, I'm fine with the change, since I view it as a necessary measure to protect the site from the network, and protect the network from the site. It goes both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that at this point, Worldbuilding is strong enough to handle the outside traffic the HNQ brings. It's not harming us because we have a deep community that's basically kinda sorta wrangled a lot of the scope issues. Therefore, I don't feel that there's a huge impetus from our perspective to leave the HNQ. It has its plusses and minuses, but maybe no more for us than for some other sites (although we do get more questions on the list in general, so there's that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, then, there's still the main reason that IPS was removed from the list, namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3335/102&quot;&gt;the effects on the rest of the network&lt;/a&gt;, especially the professional sites, as you point out. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6816/627&quot;&gt;Monica suggests a pretty good fix&lt;/a&gt; that I've also been thinking about for the past few days: writing titles better, both to remove certain troubling words and to give more context to the question. I'm a big fan of this, and I'm working on ways to apply this to IPS. There are also, of course, other solutions to the problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316934/274942&quot;&gt;which are being discussed on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but most of those are global, and will require us waiting on the rest of the network. Title-writing is something we can address ourselves and on a small-scale, case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I do want to mention that I see the network drifting away from professional sites to include a large number of &quot;hobbyist&quot; communities. Worldbuilding is definitely one (for most people, although we do have some writers and game designers here, I believe), but even sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; have an &lt;em&gt;enormous&lt;/em&gt; enthusiast/amateur base. For me, the topic of that site &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; my career, hopefully, but it's supported by a strong community partly of enthusiasts. As the network continues to move in this direction, we're going to be forced to consider the possible shift in reasons for why a lot of people use Stack Exchange. That means that the perhaps less-serious/not professional/sorta-kinda-weird/less-tech-related/more-fun/distracting side of the network will be more visible, period. And with the rise of more &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective&lt;/a&gt; sites on weird topics, hiding a lot of these non-traditional sites from the HNQ simply won't scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T04:33:15.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T17:31:38.180" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5801/community-promotion-ads-2018/6691#6691&quot;&gt;pending community promotion ad&lt;/a&gt; that I believe deserves more attention &amp;mdash; but I also think that we need more participation generally in the cause of creating community promotion ads.  As we approach the end of 2018, I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the ads and invite everyone to consider what issues with the site deserve promotion and create proposed ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: I created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advertising&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;advertising&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;advertising&lt;/a&gt; tag because (a) it didn't exist and (b) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag refers to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question earned me the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;Tumbleweed badge&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5635/shouldnt-the-tumbleweed-badge-be-either-gold-or-burned&quot;&gt;I didn't think could be practically earned on this site&lt;/a&gt;.  My sincere thanks to everyone for completely ignoring this question.  Cheers!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T21:04:59.703" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T21:04:59.703" Title="A Promotion for the Community Promotion Ads" Tags="|discussion|advertising|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6819" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-22T17:35:27.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Used to identify questions that discuss Community Promotion Ads and other advertising on Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7063/community-promotion-ads-2019&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads — 2019&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5801/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4377/community-promotion-ads-2017?s=2|108.3889&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2902/community-promotion-ads-2016?s=1|108.3889&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads 2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312/creating-an-ad-for-community-promotion&quot;&gt;Creating an ad for community promotion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/292/how-can-we-promote-this-site/311#311&quot;&gt;How can we promote this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2019-12-13T17:09:59.297" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T17:09:59.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-22T17:35:27.770" Score="0" Body="Used to identify questions that discuss Community Promotion Ads and other advertising on Worldbuilding.SE." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2019-12-13T17:10:16.597" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T17:10:16.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6822" CreationDate="2018-10-24T05:18:29.760" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion, &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of my questions and answers attract &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of comments. Most of the time I am happy about it, sometimes it gives me frustration. Especially having the luck asking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-the-gdpr-is-around&quot;&gt;most voted question on this site&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I am really happy if someone corrects my English grammar and typos &lt;em&gt;without asking&lt;/em&gt;. I know the feeling, being Czech language Grammar Nazi myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, that some comments are hard to understand on the internet. Was it a joke? Was it a sarcasm? Was it an insult? Even when there is new &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; policy, it is hard to decode for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6655/can-you-vote-to-protect-flag-a-question-for-protection&quot;&gt;how to protect own question&lt;/a&gt; which at least solved not having comments from new users. I thought thats all I can achieve with not having comments, but then I saw this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://money.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Personal finance&lt;/a&gt; site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5GMDj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5GMDj.png&quot; alt=&quot;locked answer for comments&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it is possible to lock (at least) the answer. Question is: &lt;strong&gt;How to trigger this locking?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2071" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T05:49:34.863" Title="How to lock my question and/or answers?" Tags="|support|questions|answers|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6821" CreationDate="2018-10-24T05:49:34.863" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Locking can only be done by a moderator, or by the system under certain circumstances. It's not something you can do yourself. A locked post cannot be commented on, voted on, favorited, edited, or answered (if it's a question); basically it shuts down all activity on the post, so this is not something to be done lightly, and in particular not just because you don't want to get comments on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; persistent in commenting on your post in an inappropriate way, you can talk to the mods and see if they might be willing to apply a lock, but under normal circumstances, if the comments are inappropriate, it'll probably be better to deal with them using the normal tools, by flagging. Preemptively blocking comments or answers on your question seems to be at odds with the Stack Exchange model, where community feedback is generally encouraged, so I would expect the mods not to want to do it very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locking is explained in more detail &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/locked-posts&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T05:49:34.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6824" CreationDate="2018-10-24T23:59:41.723" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128442/what-would-a-world-population-be-after-300-years-on-a-new-planet&quot;&gt;What would a world population be after 300 years on a new planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had two comments posted.  The first was the automatic comment when I marked the question as a duplicate.  I expected that to disappear should the question be voted a duplicate (which it was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also had a second comment explaining why I had voted that way and including a link to a second useful question.  That one's gone, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was that second question automatically removed like the first?  That is to say, does SE operate such that all comments (from the person who causes the first automatic &quot;this could be a duplicate of...&quot; comment) are removed? or was the comment removed manually by someone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no feelings pro or con over the issue, I simply want to better understand how SE operates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T12:34:55.707" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T12:34:55.707" Title="Site operation question: where did my second comment go?" Tags="|support|specific-question|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6823" CreationDate="2018-10-25T01:12:49.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That comment was deleted by Community.  There were no flags, so it must have been because of the closure.  I'm guessing that the system saw &quot;duplicate&quot; and a link and decided that this was another suggested duplicate.  If so, I'm surprised it doesn't take the length of the comment into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've undeleted that comment because it had other useful information in it.  (And also to help anybody else who wants to investigate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T01:12:49.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T17:35:40.980" Score="10" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128735/interstellar-reefs-plausibility-and-detection&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; some hours ago, a question which turns out to be more complex and have more implications built into than is useful, so it was closed, that's fine by me. But then it was migrated, to the Space Exploration stack, 30 seconds due diligence shows that hypothetical questions are on shaky ground on Space Exploration and that this question in particular has no place whatsoever on the site as originally written (as written it's a better fit on the Astronomy stack and off-topic even there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suggestion had been made, and acknowledged by me, that there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a case for posting a question on the same topic to Space Exploration and I indicated that I would investigate that possibility once the post had been up for 24 hours so the whole community had a chance to see it and maybe answer it as by then a couple of suggests had been made already. I've been led to believe that it is the polite way to handle things once a post is up and has answers; to let it be for at least a full day before doing something as drastic as closing it myself. I intended to check the parameters of Space Exploration and see what parts, if any, of the question were site compatible and proceed accordingly. I signed back in to find that the question had been migrated and a glance at the &quot;what can I ask&quot; section of its new home tells me it shouldn't be there, &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. Furthermore I'm stuck with it because it's still carrying the answers it got on this stack to spite them both being deleted by their authors on this stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't object to the question being closed, it was bigger and less useful than I thought it was, I don't object in general to the idea of questions being migrated. In this case however the question has been put even further at odds with the policies of the stack it is on than it already was because it was migrated into a space that deals almost exclusively in established science rather than hypothetical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would it not be A. prudent to check the parameters for questions on the sites we're migrating material to, especially in light of the fact that we work with a lot of hypothetical material that is completely off-topic elsewhere in the network? And/or B. when a question needs to be closed but the topic &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be answerable elsewhere on the network tell the OP that and let them decide how much, if any, of that question they want to put on another site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T17:25:13.163" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T17:25:13.163" Title="Why migrate a question to a stack on which it is even more off-topic than it already was?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6832" CreationDate="2018-11-02T12:33:33.617" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I respect the rules of the board.  My first question was about how telepathic aliens could effectively communicate ideas with non-telepathic humans.  Answers of course are going to be creative and speculative.  We have no model to go on.  I have edited my original question for clarity, I hope, but in retrospect this may not be the right resource for thinking about and creating speculative fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Puzzled...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56298" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T18:36:49.687" Title="Aren't all questions and answers about alien culture opinion based? Or magic, for that matter?" Tags="|support|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-11-02T18:37:25.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2018-11-02T13:02:51.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily, if you provide your evaluation metric. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to commute to work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is opinion based: car, bike, bus, walk are all good answers, and there is no way to pick one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to commute to work? Commute distance is 10 km, I will evaluate answers based on the time of commute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is not opinion based, as a metric is defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is not a discussion forum where one fishes for ideas, we provide measurable solutions to well defined problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T13:02:51.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2018-11-02T14:29:28.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to this is &quot;sorta, but not really&quot;. Yes, all questions that ask about imaginary, unknowable, or mystical things are going to require some level of opinion to answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Where the &quot;not really&quot; comes in is how you ask.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For instance, your question could be answered by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can read and project thoughts, so they just communicate telepathically, even if the humans can't normally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They read the humans minds, learn what language is, and then speak it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may be telepathic, but they might have language anyway for when they have to communicate further than their telepathy works. A telephone wire or radio can communicate over vast distances, much further than thoughts would go.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etcetera. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the trick is to write the question in such a way that people answering will be able to pick one possibility over another, since &quot;best&quot; is subjective.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this example there is a really fine line between &quot;opinion based&quot; and &quot;too broad&quot;. I've argued in the past that &quot;opinion based&quot; is not a good close reason, simply because that distinction is so nuanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T14:29:28.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2018-11-02T16:17:08.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The metrics for &quot;opinion based&quot; and &quot;too broad&quot; are something we continuously grapple with here, so don't worry if your first question has trouble.  It's something even I have trouble with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step is to ask questions, so good job coming to Meta.  You came to the right place to seek clarification!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question you've asked here, we can answer questions about &quot;alien cultures&quot; because we know what a culture is.  We may find the culture.. well.. alien, but we know it will resemble something we are familair enough with to have chosen the word &quot;culture.&quot;  If your alien was too alien for that word, then the question probably would have used a phrase like &quot;alien group dynamics&quot; or &quot;alien group structure.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have to be really dependent on word choice for making some of these questions fit.  I know I've made some poor word choices which rendered questions unusable until they were fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the topic of an &quot;alien culture,&quot; there are patterns we can use.  For example, relationships will either be symmetric or asymmetric.  &quot;Friend&quot; is a symmetric relationship (usually).  &quot;Father&quot; and &quot;son&quot; is an asymmetric one.  If you have an asymmetric relationship, it might be hierarchial, or cyclical, or so on.  These broad pattens can become the basis for answering questions about an alien culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you'll note that this entire answer so far has been about alien cultures, because that's what your meta question is about.  However, when I look at your question, I see a question which is more about an interaction between humans an aliens.  Don't worry, everything above still has its use!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky thing about your first encounters situation is that it's a cusp event.  Its a single short event which completely defines the timeline you are looking at.  This is the difference between a story of two great civilizations coming together as one, or World War 4.  These kinds of events are very difficult for WorldBuilding to provide.  They are so incredibly important to your story and they also involve a great deal of creativity and the impulse required to take the initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend either taking this to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, a meta question where you can refine questions, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/85085/product-testing&quot;&gt;Product Testing&lt;/a&gt; chat room, where you can discuss issues about your question in depth in a discussion setting (back and forth discussions are wonderful for this sort of thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to recommend a reframing, I'd focus on the human side of the puzzle.  The end result you want is a peaceful introduction of the aliens to the humans and vice versa.  What sort of interactions would &lt;em&gt;humans&lt;/em&gt; recognize as friendly?  That sort of question can be grounded symmetrically: we've sent out messages and such with the expressed intent of being friendly, which shows generally what we expect from a friend in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then restrict this by pointing out that your species is telepathic.  More importantly, describe how that affects the messages that the species might send.  Do they comprehend our concept of a linear language? (if not, is this species capable of thinking linear logical thoughts?)  How do they interact with their environment?  Do they treat all non-telepathic entities as animals, and are just starting to discover that humans &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; might be people?  These are the useful criteria needed to shape the answers given, but note that they aren't the question themselves.  The question was about human behaviors.  The alien part is shaping it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I'd recommend reading Ender's Game.  Because that book is very relevant.  (Read the book, rather than watching the movie.  The book goes far more in depth into the particularly relevant bits)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T16:17:08.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2018-11-02T18:36:49.687" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context is everything.  As a 60 year old, I have a lifetime of passion about all things science fiction, and the alien invasion/friendly alien first contact concepts have always fascinated me and thrilled me the most.  Alas, at one time I was an over educated scientist, that lived on the edge chasing scientific fact until I retired.  Concepts like 2001, Contact and even the recent Arrival have given some thought to what the difficulties might be to fully understanding how to communicate effectively and QUICKLY.  Effectively means the message sent is interpreted correctly, and I suppose, binary (good/bad, fast/slow, yes/no). I have a fiction work in progress that speaks to these difficulties and in fact error in translation combined with the typical xenophobia end up in a horrific end result due to errors in translation.  That said, I can see the question, as framed was indeed misplaced, and the chat room the best place for this discussion--I WAS looking for discussion.  Conversely, framing true science based questions also will be forthcoming, although I've already found many answers and ideas previously discussed.  A wonderful resource!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56298" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T18:36:49.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-05T19:24:29.737" Score="8" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129285/alternative-word-for-human-rights-but-across-multiple-races-including-demi-hu&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, asking for an alternate word or phrase to the English phrase 'human rights'. One couldn't use that phrase for non-human alien species, so the question was asking for alternatives. I have a similar question I would like to ask (based on the word 'humane'), but it seems to me that the place to ask it is on EL&amp;amp;U SE, not Worldbuilding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EL&amp;amp;U deals with questions about alternate words. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;The very first bullet point under 'what to ask'&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;Word choice and usage&quot;. It seems obvious to me that such a question belongs there. However, the fact that no one even mentioned such an idea on the above linked question makes me wonder. Is such a question actually on topic on Worldbuilding SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6620" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T02:02:52.437" Title="'Alternate word' questions: Worldbuilding SE or English SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6835" CreationDate="2018-11-05T21:51:22.660" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is far from the first time we've seen that type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that &quot;what to name X?&quot; questions are &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; on Worldbuilding. There's a potentially very large set of possible answers (&quot;too broad&quot;), and it's usually very hard to judge how well any given answer answers the question (&quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; there is no actual world-&lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; involved (&quot;not about worldbuilding&quot;). The specific name given to something has, as far as I'm concerned, no bearing on any of its properties within the world. If I call a chair a chair or an ijgrjdb't doesn't make one iota of difference; it's still something you generally use to sit on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could make an argument that &quot;how do I decide what to name X?&quot; questions &lt;em&gt;might be on topic&lt;/em&gt;. We do, after all, have some precedent for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; questions being on topic (even though that's probably one of the more mis-used tags on the site), and such a question could be an example of such. There shouldn't be too many of those, and answers can draw readily from e.g. linguistics to describe the process of figuring out what something might be named, without necessarily becoming too focused on the OP's specific wor(l)d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my opinion would be: &lt;em&gt;what to name X?&lt;/em&gt; - off topic. &lt;em&gt;how to name X?&lt;/em&gt; - possibly on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T21:51:22.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6842" CreationDate="2018-11-07T23:23:21.710" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this discussion under the primary question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129517/hypothetical-maximum-number-of-embryos-from-one-woman?noredirect=1#comment403274_129517&quot;&gt;Hypothetical maximum number of embryos from one woman?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been making my suggestions in the comments and not as an answer because I am under the impression that an answer should actually answer the question.  This question asks for numbers, which I simply can't provide.  But my ideas proved helpful to the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the dividing line between something best said in (multiple) comments vs something best said (and collected) as an answer?  And, if I've crossed that line, what's the best way to fix it (or is it too late?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The question linked to as a duplicate is helpful and related but is more about the acceptability (or not) of putting answers into comments.  My question is more about figuring out which types of responses belong where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastEditorUserId="54137" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T15:12:10.633" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T13:11:29.523" Title="When Does a Comment Turn into an Answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3300" CreationDate="2018-11-08T01:43:32.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A conversation with the OP of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129443/what-can-an-adventuring-group-do-to-protect-their-items-money-while-questing?noredirect=1#comment403307_129443&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; led to the following response (modified for the general audience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Systems vs. Circumstances&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the process of describing &lt;em&gt;systems.&lt;/em&gt; People may be involved in some of those systems (e.g., a bureaucracy), but it's not the people you're building, it's the system. Here at WB.SE, the moment you ask about the actions or behavior of people (not systems), you begin running the risk of being too story-based (and almost always will be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The smaller the &quot;world,&quot; the less likely you're asking about a system&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In times past we have described &quot;worlds&quot; as being of any size, from a multiverse down to a small town &amp;mdash; but not &lt;em&gt;individuals&lt;/em&gt; or even small groups of people (generally).  The smaller the number of people you're asking about, the more story-based your question is. Ask about a single individual and with very rare exception, you're storybuilding, not worldbuilding.  This is because even a god, when acting individually, does not constitute a &lt;em&gt;system.&lt;/em&gt;  Rather, the actions of even so consequential a being are &lt;em&gt;circumstantial.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most popular form of a story-based question is &quot;How would somebody X?&quot;  This is asking about the actions or options available to individuals or a group of people (storybuilding). The questions we accept at WB.SE are about rules that would be applied to your characters, not how your characters would react... to what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem.  &quot;To what?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question about individuals is on-topic when asking about how those individuals would react to the rules (systems) of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question is off-topic (too story-based) when asking about how individuals react to circumstances in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Systems vs. circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The definition may seem counterintuitive, but serves a purpose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;. But the moment we start helping people past what is essentially writer's block, a discussion is what we're having.  To accomodate Stack Exchange's fundamental business model, we had to draw a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But never forget that Chat is your friend!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, please do not pass up the opportunity to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt; (especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;), as it's frequented by many of our most active participants, and chat is where discussions belong. There, you can ask pretty much anything you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I get my question reopened?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to change your question to ask about a system, not a circumstance.  It's possible that your question cannot be changed in this way because you really are trying to overcome writer's block and the circumstance cannot be disposed of.  But if you are simply worldbuilding, you may have cornered yourself in the &lt;em&gt;test.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean by &quot;test&quot; is that rules need testing, and characters are frequently the subjects of the test.  Perhaps the rule you're developing is that your world's atomosphere has a high concentration of nitrous oxide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An on-topic question would be, how do I get my atmosphere to contain 15% nitrous oxide?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another would be, are humans susceptible to 15% nitrous oxide such that they'd go around giggling all the time?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A potentially off-topic question would be, how would humans behave in an atmosphere of 15% nitrous oxide? (too broad)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But to make the too story-based point: how would my army react to invading orcs if my atmosphere has 15% nitrous oxide?  We're no longer talking about a system, or the reaction of a group to the system.  We're now talking about the reaction of a group to a circumstance that happens to involve the system &amp;mdash; and that depends too much on your story (who has what weapons, how serious is the situation, what is the lay of the land, what resources are available, etc., etc., etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the military engagement, which probably comes from your story, is really a test for whether or not it makes sense for your world's atmosphere to have 15% nitrous oxide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change your question to focus on the &lt;em&gt;system,&lt;/em&gt; not the &lt;em&gt;circumstances of the test.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T01:43:32.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2018-11-08T02:11:06.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the purpose of comments (for questions) are only to request clarification of the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, they're used for a bazzillion other purposes as well &amp;mdash; not the least of which is to carry on a conversation that would be better hosted in Chat.  The problem is that, in many ways, comments are more visible/powerful than the questions and answers themselves.  People can upvote comments, but not downvote.  Commentary on comments becomes quickly intertwined with other discussions.  The length of the total comment chain can become so long that moderators will push the entire chain into Chat just to restore the visibility of the question (which means whatever value those comments had is fundamentally lost.  Few people push into those chat-comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's really regrettable is that there isn't a hard-and-fast rule for when-you-should vs. when-you-shouldn't.  But, here are some of my opinions (I make no representation that this is true across the community).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I'm making a quick one-off comment about, &quot;you could consider this...,&quot; I'll do that in a comment with no expectation of a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the discussion gets very long (2-3 comments, though I'm guilty of letting it run longer), I invite the OP/participant to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I have more than two sentences to say about a subject, that goes in an answer, even if it doesn't answer the question 100%.  Not only does this keep the comment chains clean, it gives other participants the change to build on what I had to say in a focused and meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer.  I'm absolutely sure that if you review my comment history you'll find that I've not been diligent about the above stated rules/obeservations.  Shame on me, but thanks for providing this opportunity to answer so that I could look into my own mirror and improve my participation on this site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T02:11:06.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2018-11-08T08:48:48.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My rules are close to JBH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It is a comment if&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It says &quot;no&quot; to question asking for &quot;how&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129485/how-can-i-extract-pure-dopamine-from-the-body#comment403059_129485&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It provides answer OP probably does not want, but still allowed by the question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129578/anatomically-correct-dragon-humanoid#comment403376_129578&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It provides an incomplete way of finding answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129471/what-expenses-does-a-village-have#comment402980_129471&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It is an answer if&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It simply answers the question in a way that's probably useful to OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a &quot;no&quot; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; or questions in &quot;can it be?&quot; format. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/54328/809&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It provides a complete way of finding an answer, even if not being an answer on the silver tray. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/54423/809&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reason is&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that the first three kinds will probably make OP edit his question in a way that will invalidate them if they were answers (tell why such solution wasn't considered, change something to make impossible possible etc), or maybe help someone to write an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="809" LastEditDate="2018-11-09T13:11:29.523" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T13:11:29.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2018-11-08T18:40:40.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, it's almost never too late to fix something. It's &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; never too late to learn a better way of doing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical reference on what should be a comment and what should not be is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/em&gt; privilege description page in the help center&lt;/a&gt;. Towards the bottom, that page has two relevant headings: &quot;When should I comment?&quot; and &quot;When &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; I comment?&quot;. (Emphasis original.) I really do encourage you to look that over, if you haven't already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the comment field placeholder text providing some brief guidance. On a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid answering questions in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid comments like “+1” or “thanks”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, that is the basic litmus test: &lt;strong&gt;does the comment &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; serve to make the post better in some way, or does it primarily serve to provide an (alternative) answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the primary intent is to suggest a way in which the post can be improved, and the suggestion to do so will be invalidated by the post owner following that advice, then it's very likely a comment. (This typically, but not always, takes the form of questions, or question-esque phrasings: &quot;Did you consider X?&quot; or &quot;What happens if someone does Y in your world?&quot; or &quot;Tell us a bit more about Z.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the primary intent is to provide an answer, which will provide some kind of &lt;strong&gt;lasting value&lt;/strong&gt; and on which there is &lt;em&gt;no clear action for the post owner to take&lt;/em&gt;, then it's very likely an answer. This is the case even if the answer is short, or of low quality, or even wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes answers will be written in a way that naturally involves questions, but they are still legitimately answers to the original question. For example, one could just as well write &quot;What spectral class is your star? If it's a G2V, then you can...&quot; as one could write &quot;If your star is spectral class G2V, then you can...&quot;. In such a situation, the choice to pose a question is a &lt;em&gt;stylistic&lt;/em&gt; choice that doesn't significantly change the meaning of the text, and therefore doesn't change the text's answer-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, a comment suggesting that something could be improved can be posted as a statement. &quot;This answer would be better if you elaborated on X.&quot; or &quot;It would be easier to answer this question authoritatively if you tell us how Y and Z interact.&quot; are both perfectly legitimate comments. Once the post owner edits to elaborate on X, or describe how Y and Z interact, the comment has no lasting value (and thus can be deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, it's pretty clear which is the case. In some cases, it's really a matter of judgement. My experience here is that some moderators are more lenient, and others are more strict. What we typically &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; do, however, is go hunting for comments to delete; but if they are brought to our attention (via flags, or via ordinary browsing), then they can be fair game. Sometimes comments will be migrated to chat, and at other times they will be outright deleted; which button to press is very much a judgement call on the part of the moderator handling the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, broadly speaking, &lt;strong&gt;comments shouldn't be used to bypass the normal quality control mechanisms of the site.&lt;/strong&gt; Low-quality content is still low-quality content even when posted as a comment. If you don't have the time to post an answer at that moment, but you have an idea for an answer, consider instead bookmarking the question (either in your browser, or via the star near the voting buttons and the &quot;favorites&quot; tab in your profile) until you have the time to provide an actual answer. You certainly won't earn less reputation that way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;comments are ephemeral.&lt;/strong&gt; I like to think of comments as post-it notes attached to a post. They are great for quickly jotting down something that you'll need to remember the next day, but they are &lt;em&gt;lousy&lt;/em&gt; as archival records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments can be deleted at almost any time for almost any reason (and not just by diamond moderators), and when deleted, will be invisible to, and cannot be recovered by, ordinary users. Questions and answers cannot; any deleted question or answer can be seen by any user with 10,000 or more reputation (2,000 on beta sites), and can easily be undeleted if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T18:40:40.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-09T16:36:35.367" Score="-2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wording it this way to avoid encompassing magic but the idea is to be able to close 'uneducated' questions (for lack of better words). Questions that contradict themselves or more precisely questions whose internal logic is self contradicting and become impossible to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The rule:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be closed if the question contradicts the internally expressed logic of the question and is impossible to answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How can I scientifically have an Earth-like planet in a black hole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violation: You cant, any planet near let alone in a black hole would shattered and crushed beyond habitability. This outright contradicts science and sub-sequentially physics and is therefore unanswerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Possible Correction: Can I have an Earth-like planet in a black hole? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanation: While it is off topic it is answerable and therefore not logically flawed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: How do I scientifically explain soul magic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violation: Magic is magic there is no science that supports either magic or the ethereal soul the question is unanswerable. Not to mention from a certain perspective science and magic are logical opposites because if science could explain magic it would cease being magic and would become a science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Possible Correction: What scientifically plausible way could I justify magic and its connection to the human consciousness in my universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanation: This phrasing indicates that they aren't necessarily looking for science rather they are trying to take advantage of its fringes and unknowns to explain their scientifically impossible scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; In my magical world how do I explain humans not needing air to breath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Violation: By defining a &quot;magical world&quot; the question has logically specified that the world in question does not follow natural law and therefore there is no contradiction in humans not needing air. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; In a magical world where love powers magic how as a king do I prevent people from magically making gold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last one isn't necessarily a contradiction but is more of a logical fallacy as they have literally made an impossible scenario to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T04:36:41.457" Title="Can we add &quot;Logically Self-Contradicting&quot; as a reason for closeure" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|rules|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6844" CreationDate="2018-11-09T19:28:58.773" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not recommend closing these questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions we see on the site do demonstrate a lack of knowledge in the topic being asked about.  If the question is asked in good faith and otherwise meets the requirements of, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how to ask&lt;/a&gt;, I think it should stay open and on the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;...and that's ok!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most valuable question/answer exchanges I have seen on the site fall into the, &quot;that's not how things work&quot; category.  Checking for logical consistency is one of the primary things we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example I wrote this answer:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30001/what-all-stops-working-when-i-pause-time/30002#30002&quot;&gt;What all stops working when I pause time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is useful for the person who posted the question but it is also useful for future visitors to the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37077/are-there-logical-gaps-in-the-periodic-table-in-which-you-could-insert-a-new-mys&quot;&gt;Are there logical gaps in the periodic table in which you could insert a new mystery element for use as a fuel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly I lacked understanding of how chemistry works at the atomic level (sue me, it's been a long time since chemistry class).  The selected answer is awesome though and can be useful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on many SE sites I would maybe agree with this idea as a close reason.  The thing is, we're on World Building, &lt;strong&gt;where basically all topics are on topic.&lt;/strong&gt;  None of us is going to be an expert on all things and creating a logical inconsistency when building a world is frankly MORE likely than not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, we specifically have a tag for questions when people want to understand if their setup makes sense &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It can be really tempting to try and disqualify full segments of questions, it makes life easier and means we don't have to specifically review each question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oh that's and &lt;strong&gt;xxxxx type&lt;/strong&gt; question&lt;/em&gt; CLOSE.  This is easier than reviewing the merits of each entry...so I get it, but I don't think in this case it would be a good idea for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helping people create logically consistent worlds is a large part of what the site is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T04:36:41.457" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T04:36:41.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6844" CreationDate="2018-11-10T00:40:20.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I can understand the reasoning for wanting to close these questions, you can usually solve this problem by asking the Asker to expand, clarify, and reword their question. Let me borrow your examples, bar the last one which you admit is off-topic for this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How can I scientifically have an Earth-like planet in a black hole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Violation:&lt;/em&gt; You cant, any planet near let alone in a black hole would shattered and crushed beyond habitability. This outright contradicts science and sub-sequentially physics and is therefore unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &amp;quot;violation&amp;quot; response is the answer. It doesn't need reworded because rewording it changes the spirit of the question ever so slightly. (Not to mention, as you said, makes the question off-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How do I scientifically explain soul magic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Violation:&lt;/em&gt; Magic is magic there is no science that supports either magic or the ethereal soul the question is unanswerable. Not to mention from a certain perspective science and magic are logical opposites because if science could explain magic it would cease being magic and would become a science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of trying to rewrite their question, ask what criteria they are using to determine &amp;quot;soul magic&amp;quot; and for information related to the question to be added so that you're not only working with a self-contradiction. If the post is just a repeat of the question with no further information gathered, ask for elaboration so that it is now answerable. Otherwise, close it for being &amp;quot;Too-Broad&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Question:&lt;/strong&gt; In my magical world how do I explain humans not needing air to breath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;No Violation&amp;quot;:&lt;/em&gt; By defining a &amp;quot;magical world&amp;quot; the question has logically specified that the world in question does not follow natural law and therefore there is no contradiction in humans not needing air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except magic doesn't inherently entail defiance of known biology. It's usually not used so blase. The spirit of the question could be that they want to express it is like our world, but it is slightly different without being too different. Again, this is a case of it being best to ask for clarification and elaboration as opposed to just trying to shut it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, you'd rather ignore these questions as unanswerable as opposed to help the Askers find their answers. Taking the time to ask for more information takes 10 seconds and next to no effort. Don't be quick to judge the questions as lacking value. You may just find you misunderstood their intent because they didn't word it well or didn't know how to explain when they asked the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(And then there is me who over-explains, which is a different problem in its own right.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56536" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T00:40:20.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T19:24:00.453" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could have sworn there was a discussion on this already, but I can't find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129857/what-is-the-most-plausible-way-to-rule-out-string-theory&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is (in my mind) a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15/what-experiment-would-disprove-string-theory&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is, the second question is on Physics.SE. Thanks to @chaslyfromUK for pointing that out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding answers, even Amadeus' fine answer doesn't nearly cover the breadth of material as the top two answers to the Physics.SE question. LDutch's answer is basically a duplicate of Cedric H's answer on the Physics question, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to close the linked WB question as a duplicate, but &quot;The duplicate question must exist on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue with leaving the question as is, is that it will not get the proper answers voted to the top, the proper answers being the Physics answers that have been posted, voted, and commented on for ~8 years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for solutions, my instinct would be to close as off topic. Another option would be to migrate to Physics and have them close it as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should the proper course of action be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T08:22:13.440" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T08:22:13.440" Title="How to deal with a duplicate of a question from another Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6847" CreationDate="2018-11-11T22:08:32.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a question exists elsewhere -- another Stack Exchange site, Quora, an academic site, etc -- should not affect whether the question is welcome on our site.  We should judge each question on its own merits.  So closing as off-topic just because it also exists on Physics isn't the right approach, except maybe in the degenerate case of an &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicate (somebody asked the same exact question on both sites with no tailoring).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding has a broad scope, and so there are a lot of SE sites that overlap ours.  That's fine.  It happens in other clusters of sites too; some questions could easily be asked on either DBA or SO, questions about SF movies could be asked on either Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy or Movies &amp;amp; TV, there's a lot of apparent overlap between Ask Ubuntu and Unix &amp;amp; Linux, and then there are all the bitcoin sites.  Here on Worldbuilding we sometimes overlap with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, the religion sites, Writing, RPG, and probably others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answers here support their claims with sources or other supporting evidence.  Does it matter if those sources are on Physics.SE as opposed to in a relevant journal, blog, Wikipedia page, or academic course?  The &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; of some sources is higher than others (peer review increases credibility), but the validity of &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; them on this site is IMO the same.  If an answer here links to relevant answers on Physics, then readers can click through to see those posts in their original context (and can vote on them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor to consider is that while some subject matter can belong on either site, the &lt;em&gt;audiences&lt;/em&gt; are different.  An ideal answer synthesizes (sourced) information from elsewhere and presents it in a form that fits the current audience.  While Worldbuilding probably has advanced physicists among its users, it also has a lot of users who &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; -- presumably way more than Physics.SE does.  An answer on Physics.SE might therefore be too technical or assume too much background knowledge to work here, but could be &quot;translated&quot;.  On Mi Yodeya (the site about Judaism) I see this sort of thing all the time, where somebody cites or quotes a complicated explanation in a legal source (probably written in Hebrew or Aramaic) and then breaks it down and explains it for English-speaking readers who are not fluent in all the legal nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't want to see &lt;em&gt;excessive&lt;/em&gt; quoting or gratuitous links (to anywhere), we're part of a larger network and I'm happy to see cooperation and collaboration across sites when it makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T22:08:32.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-12T20:16:18.877" Score="11" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a new user on Worldbuilding SE, I have to question the paradigm that once a question has been asked and the OP has accepted an answer, any future examples of that question must be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is this - First, the correct answer may have changed. Consider the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Do Gravitational Waves really exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A c.2015: Gravitational Waves are predicted by General Relativity, but we are not certain that they actually exist because they have never been detected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A c.2018: Yes! Gravitational Waves do exist! They were detected in 2017 by LIGO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if a question was first answered some years ago, there have been many new users who have joined the site since then. Those users are unlikely to go back and answer old questions, and some of them may be able to provide much higher quality answers. By eliminating duplicates, we deny new users the opportunity to provide better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question I have is: Why do we assume that closing duplicates is the correct course of action? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46264" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T00:43:09.533" Title="Why do we close duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6849" CreationDate="2018-11-12T20:26:16.513" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer doesn't prevent new answers to be posted, nor prevent the accepted answer to be changed, should better options be made available to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, to use your example, the 2018 answer can be posted and accepted, while keeping a &lt;em&gt;single source of truth&lt;/em&gt; for anybody who happens to search that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we instead would let duplicate questions be, whoever would search for &quot;do gravitational waves exist?&quot; would find two questions, with two different answers, both accepted. Confusing, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:26:16.513" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6849" CreationDate="2018-11-13T00:43:09.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer will make more sense when you understand the history of Stack Exchange.  This whole glorious conundrum began with one site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; for programmers.  Somewhate by definition, questions about how to program are (or can always be made to be) objective, clear, specific, etc.  Further, the answer to a programming question in a specific language is somewhat locked in stone.  It should never change unless the language changes.  Thus, closing questions as duplicates was a perfectly sensible way of keeping the site clean by pointing all of the myriad of ways a question can be asked back to the single best answer.  It reminds quesion posters that they should be doing a bit of research (not just blindly posting yet another version of the same question on the site) and helps search engines (a big bonus for SE) to focus on the best answer.  Ideally, if that rare case happens that there is a better answer in the future, that better answer should be posted &lt;em&gt;to the original question,&lt;/em&gt; not a new one, to preserve the encyclopedic nature of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except this isn't always true.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45524214/how-do-i-stop-my-web-content-from-shifting-left-when-the-vertical-scrollbar-appe/45524215#45524215&quot;&gt;have an answer on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (self-answered) that was &lt;em&gt;hated&lt;/em&gt; by the mods and closed as a duplicate.  It exists because I was bone tired of sifting through all the solutions, each having their own merits, that had been developed for the question over time.  The site &lt;em&gt;desparately&lt;/em&gt; needs a way of &quot;rolling up&quot; information to bring everything current.  That stunt actually cost me (among other things) the privilege of posting questions for a while on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, bring this all forward to your question.  We do it as a house-cleaning measure to try and keep the site clean.  Regrettably, we frequently can't close a question fast enough to force people to post their better answers &lt;em&gt;on the original question.&lt;/em&gt;  Worse, we'll occasionally mark as duplicate a question that points back to a closed original &amp;mdash; which doesn't help anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while there are rare reasons why this doesn't make sense, the reasons it does make sense are overwhelming.  I therefore agree and fully support the behavior (despite having once intentionally violated it myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ours is not a perfect world, and SE has not yet devised a way of rolling-up the info that time, well-intentioned users, and the best laid plans of mice and men have created.  It's part of what we live with and work around.  But it does have its value.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T00:43:09.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T01:54:48.603" Score="12" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm mainly active on Writing SE, but I'll often redirect someone here if I think their question is primarily about worldbuilding.  However, I consider worldbuilding to be any kind of background research or backstory that may or may not make it onto the final page, but that helps make the writing more three-dimensional.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently someone told me I was wrong to direct someone to here if their question is not about an invented world.  My own sense is that every work of fiction is inevitably in an invented world, it just may be an invented world that strongly resembles reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Are &quot;worldbuilding&quot; type questions off topic here, if the the world is reality-based, and if so, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T09:31:03.057" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T13:14:07.717" Title="Real World Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T04:53:27.943" Score="-2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not feel that my thread was put on hold in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130077/water-power-and-trade&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my question:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What goods, available to Group B, could create a trade relationship that is existential to the survival, or industrialization of Group A?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, word-for-word, an example, taken from the thread specifically about how to adhere to the guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;On topic: What could cause a government to pass such-and-such law given these societal conditions&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly every single post that I've made here involves a demand to either adhere to rules that nobody else follows, or holding/closing threads, anyway, regardless of what I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49466" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T09:27:08.763" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T13:47:24.187" Title="Why is this on hold?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T06:54:24.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First off, nothing was done with the intent to harm you.&lt;/strong&gt;  I get that it can feel that way sometimes, we were all new users at one point or another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mechanics of the site mean that 5 users who have sufficient reputation, agreed that your question was off-topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a couple problems with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It is not properly constrained.  With the exception of the items you exclude an argument could be made for a multitude of options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The question contradicts itself.  As one commenter mentioned the thing can't be truly &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; for their survival if they have existed prior to this trade starting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) We don't know your setting.  What goods do they have available to them to trade?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the above, I don't see why they need group B to kick-start their&#xA;  industrial revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see a reason that they would need the help, and you know everything there is to know about the world, how could any of us come up with a reason other than throwing random ideas out as answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All in all, with what is provided it would be impossible to define a &quot;best&quot; answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that SE is not a forum, its not a place for people to brainstorm for you (although we do quite a bit of that in chat if you'd like to brainstorm there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out this help page for more information on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how to ask&lt;/a&gt; particularly this bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General guidelines for all questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to&#xA;solve? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish?&#xA;Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state&#xA;will look like and why you want to get there. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than&#xA;another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not&#xA;properly constrained. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have&#xA;you already looked at or failed to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to comments:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see bad actors, or at least bad &lt;em&gt;actions&lt;/em&gt; please flag them for the moderator team to review.  The site has gotten big and we just don't see everything that happens on the site.  We try diligently to enforce the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt; policy, but if we don't know about it we can't address things.  This goes for everyone, &lt;strong&gt;please use those flags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One benefit to making sure items get flagged is that bad actions pile up and help us identify bad actors, this is how we identify people for suspensions and warnings from the moderator team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an agreed upon point that on world building there is very rarely a single correct answer, you are right about that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading your question though, I struggled to understand what you are really looking for, in essence, what problem are you trying to solve?  Is it some trade good that makes it possible for them to get clean water?  I think that is a very different and clear question.  As I read the question now though it comes across as:  &lt;em&gt;I have two groups, one has more technology than the other, what can group X trade to group Y that group Y absolutely has to have?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, to me, is asking us for ideas instead of asking us to help fix a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, my personal take is the question would significantly benefit from increased clarity on what problem you are asking people to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your point about other questions being &lt;strong&gt;&quot;worse&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; ...you're probably right.  Again, we need the community to enforce standards and on a site like WB that gets challenging.  If you think something is off-topic flag it so that it hits the review queues.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I can appreciate your frustration, I remember being new when the site was new and after a lot of effort put into a question to have it closed can be quite frustrating. I learned and it was painful and took some time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely suggest utilizing the sandbox here on meta or visiting the chatroom.  In a lot of cases questions may not be a great fit for the SE format.  It doesn't mean they are bad questions, it just means the system used around this place isn't flexible enough to handle a lot of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T15:29:30.460" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T15:29:30.460" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-13T09:44:02.347" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are &quot;worldbuilding&quot; type questions off topic here, if the the world is reality-based, and if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; I would say that they are not off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of imaginary worlds take a planet, or country, as we know it, and make some changes to it. My opinion is, and always has been, that that type of questions are on topic; of course, this does not imply that &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; such question is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every worldbuilding exercise starts with an entirely blank slate. As you say, some imaginary worlds strongly resemble reality with just a few tweaks, and stories are written that explore those worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's well worth keeping in mind that just because something isn't &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; on Worldbuilding, that doesn't necessarily make Worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;the best place to ask&lt;/em&gt; the question. That depends on the focus you want in answers. Quite a few subjects have their own, subject-specific sites in the network; if you want an in-depth treatment of that subject, one of those sites might be a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; place to ask the question. You might need to phrase your question differently, but that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have personally argued for in the past, is that questions that are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about the real world shouldn't be on topic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3877/29&quot;&gt;See for example my answer here.&lt;/a&gt; But that's a different issue, and one that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/29&quot;&gt;was largely decided later&lt;/a&gt; (to my dismay, not in my favor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T22:13:01.737" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T22:13:01.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-13T13:53:39.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;'Reality-based' is on topic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worlds that can be created span a wide range of &quot;realities,&quot; including those close to ours. Some of the most popular questions and answers on our site are strictly reality based, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127531/is-there-a-single-historic-event-which-could-be-changed-to-cause-the-usa-to-use&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; strictly conforms to our reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have varieties of tags for different purposes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; is for our world with slight changes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; is for conforming fictional elements with our reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we accept questions about things reality based, so long as they are not explicitly about the real world is it is (or was). Our real world, but with a twist, is on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T13:53:39.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T14:07:17.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;To play on this site, you need to play by the rules&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly responding to the comment thread that you posted to James' answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be hard to learn what a good question is here. Here is a fun fact: most of our top users by reputation....have had their questions closed! (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3821/colored-magic-makes-my-faeries-too-powerful&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18575/melting-the-core&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129324/how-many-years-must-you-have-before-you-can-become-a-bard&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99435/what-is-the-smallest-yet-lethal-meteorite-which-can-reach-the-surface-of-earth&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you are on the site regularly, for years, and are one of the top contributors, the community can decide that your question is dumb. As an asker of several closed questions, I obviously thought they were good questions, and I asked them in good faith. And, in some cases, I got pretty frustrated that they were closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't run this site. No one person does, not even the mods collectively. There are hundreds of users who regularly review the closed queue, and so some subset of those hundreds of users are the ones who determine if your question is good or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules here are somewhat nebulous. After all, each of the hundreds of close voters interprets the rules, as applied to your post, in their own way. As regards your question, it accumulated five downvotes and five close votes in a 12 hour period. The site's collective wisdom has decided that this isn't a good question. It doesn't follow the 'rules.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have two options here. You can get volcanically angry and rant on Meta. Or, you can attempt to learn what the rules are. Worldbuilding has a culture, and you, like most new members, aren't fully aligned with it yet. Ultimately, the site will not come around to your point of view...well probably not, unless you are much more charismatic and persuasive than you are letting on. Instead, you should learn to think more like the other people on the site. Then you will learn how to write good answers, and ask good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that you don't think the site's closing policy is fair, but it works well for the site culture that we have established. Those of us that have been here for a while seem to like it. Perhaps if you stay and play, you will like it too, some day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T15:33:36.847" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T15:33:36.847" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T14:12:12.743" Score="8" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to be too blame-y, but I haven't seen JD around in some time. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%C5%82ugosz?tab=activity&quot;&gt;page of record&lt;/a&gt;, he has made one action on this site in the last six months. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we fire a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When is it appropriate to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T18:47:46.660" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T00:51:57.140" Title="When do you fire a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-13T14:35:49.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;'Reality-based' is not off-topic by default&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6856/809&quot;&gt;kingelodion&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6855/809&quot;&gt;a CVn♦&lt;/a&gt; are mostly OK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But not always on-topic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask questions about your world based on real one. You can't just ask anything real world, add one liner in the spirit of &quot;in my world&quot; and expect people will be forced to treat it as on-topic. There should be some actual world building there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T14:35:49.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2018-11-13T15:09:53.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could be a stint of Real Life: some change in circumstance, loss of job, change of job, new baby, died. We (out here in Nonmoderator Land) don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods at the very least ought to have basic contact info for each other and in the case of SE, an appropriate member of Staff. Goes without saying, but sometimes these things need to be said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before considering the firing of a Mod, I should hope that someone contacted that person to find out if something's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, I wouldn't consider firing a Mod except under very rare circumstances: abuse of a forum member; abuse of authority; abuse of SE staff. Being absent doesn't quite reach that level. Unless there is some kind of written policy on Moderator tenure &amp;amp; requirements of office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T15:09:53.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T15:23:02.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much like Kingledion, i am including your Comments on James' answer in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I entirely understand your frustration, I've been on for less than a year but have posted answers to a lot of questions, and have also VTC several questions, and yet both questions i have raised myself have come under a lot of flak. one was closed the other i had to fight to keep open. both i thought were very reasonable questions especially compared to those i have VTC when going through the close queue and those i see stay open... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However after having left them for some time, annoyed, I've gone back and looked at them with a different eye. and i found something: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I couldn't see the wood for the trees...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the key things I find missing in questions that I decide to Vote to Close when i go through the queue, were obviously also missing in my questions. When someone posts a question we look at them critically and make a decision, but when we ask a question WE are the ones that want the answer we are nowhere near as critical of our own questions as we are of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that make me VTC most often&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers could be any number of things, an several answer focusing on very very different things could be correct for that questions, &lt;strong&gt;Result: Too Broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The questions requires taking very specific things into account that would ONLY apply to the world the OP is creating and not any other &lt;strong&gt;Result: Too Story Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no correct answer and its anyone's guess &lt;strong&gt;Result: Primarily Opinion Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of my own questions having not looked at them for a while i can see are actually guilty of being Primarily Opinion Based, despite not thinking that at the time. I got a lot of random comments but its worth noting that emotion and feeling do not portray well over text boxes. therefore genuinely helpful comments that offer advice to adjust the question or alternate things to look at can sometimes be construed as rude or unhelpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often if I can't fill a comment box with enough letters to go over the limit then i won't answer, but I may well post a comment so that someone else might make a better answer out of it. these comments could be considered as rude as they basically seem like &quot;why don't you just do this&quot; but that is not how they are intended&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some comments such as RonJohn's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130088/would-a-flying-superhuman-leave-a-contrail-behind&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; appear completely irrelevent which starts a back and forth and appears rude until you consider that Worldbuild.SE is mostly about making sure the writer does break the immersion of the reader/player, and it is somehting that often people overlook and in turn breaks immersion. it doesn't require the editing of the question but its something the OP may not have considered. it was most likely intended as a Helpful comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50282" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T15:23:02.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:04:51.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the votes to close, user49466, I can only say the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I always read through each question in the queue, plus all comments (especially those of the OP), plus any edits made to the question before making any kind of decision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I only rarely look at the user name, but really don't care if it's someone I recognise or not. And with an anonymous handle like yours, I wouldn't recognise you from previous turns in the queue anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I very frequently see-saw, hovering over the &quot;close&quot; button. I really don't like closing questions. (As I've stated elsewhere, I have some very serious issues with the incompatibility between worldbuilding as an art in and of itself or as a means to making art (stories or games, etc) and the Stack Exchange Model. So there is constantly a tug-o-war between a strict adherence to The Rules and a more opinion-friendly approach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have no access to the stats on &quot;keep open&quot; votes I've made (only close votes seem to be counted, that I can find); but I am very certain that I vote to keep more questions open than I vote to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In this instance, as far as closure goes, I think one of the comments was correct: you're basically retelling the story of mid to late 19th century Japan when America tried to open Japanese ports to trade. Japan at the time was very much like your A Group; the US was very much like your B Group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The circumstances are rather bizarre. You seem to want them to jump from 1700s to solar thermal arrays and moisture devaporators. There really are no &quot;trade goods&quot; that are going to make this happen. You yourself even say &lt;em&gt;I don't see why they need group B to kickstart their industrial revolution.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And you're right, they don't! They're just going to be a century or three behind until their infrastructure can catch up to the point where they can fully integrate Group B's level of advancement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're really left with is the narrative element: the story of how A learns from B. And that is the basis for closure. &lt;em&gt;This question is less about world building and more about story-building within your world. Perhaps you could rework your question to better follow this Stack's policies?&lt;/em&gt; ( Sora Tamashii ) And you even agreed with this assessment: &lt;em&gt;@Sora Tamashii That's a good idea. Will do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, your question continues to be a good candidate for remaining closed. Either because of the narrative element or because of the contradictory element or because of the nonsensical &quot;existential to the survival&quot; element. All of these really need to be addressed before even I would vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sincere suggestion to take a look at what the others have said above re elements of a good question and use those ideas to write an entirely new question. Just start fresh!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T17:02:18.593" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T17:02:18.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:18:43.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Worldbuilding&quot; means different things in different contexts. Coming from the writer's perspective, I think you're much more familiar with the &quot;background research&quot; definition. And this makes perfect sense, from the writer's perspective. Even if your story is set in Waukesha Wisconsin, you still have to do research in order to construct a believable simulacrum of a midwestern town. If for no other reason than that your readers will believe in your setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;worldbuilding&quot; here means a rather different thing altogether. As an independent art in and of itself, and also as an adjunct art with the purpose of creating a work of literature or a game setting or a comic, what is most frequently meant is some kind of fantasy or sci-fictive universe, world or setting. Possibly an alt-historical setting. You'll notice we have lots of questions about fantasy &amp;amp; science fiction races; aliens; starships; space travel; time travel. All these things that simply don't happen in Waukesha WI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from our welcome page: &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usually understood, &quot;imaginary world and setting&quot; is not the same thing as &quot;real-world setting but with a couple fictional characters and fictionalised locations&quot;. That's why we often send people over to Writing.SE! Because they're not actually making a fictional or imaginary world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &quot;someone&quot; is correct. Even though, if I stretched the definition of &quot;invented world&quot; to the breaking point, I can at least see the sense in your statement; I would still thank you not to send all those real-world worldbuilding querents over this way!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're just going to end up frustrated, and so are many of us here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer: &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt; worldbuilding queries are on topic here. But &lt;strong&gt;NO, NOT REALLY&lt;/strong&gt; -- the kind of worldbuilding you're talking about is I think best accomplished within Writing.SE for the simple fact that your kind of worldbuilding is simply a process of writing. Over here, it's often more an independent art and of a very different sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:18:43.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:30:24.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general moderators do not discuss what messages may or may not have been sent to other users or what action has been taken against them to both respect their privacy and to allow them a chance to rehabilitate and change their ways. If someone has a history of posting abusive messages and those are flagged then you can be confident that we will become interested in that person and take appropriate steps. Abusive comments are against the terms of use of this site and are something we take seriously once they are brought to our attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see the deleted comments on that thread, and you are correct that they were needlessly hostile. I can only apologize for that and assure you that it is not the spirit or tone of site that we aim for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately though as the other answers have already covered the question as it stands isn't a good fit. It might be worth trying either chat or the sandbox (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/656/sandbox-for-proposed-answers&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Answers&lt;/a&gt;) where people will be happy to help you tweak the question so it can get a more specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:30:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:38:43.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question and one I've had myself, so it's something I've been paying attention to over the months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first (and so far only) question here on WB was reality based (even though the event I am writing about is mythological).  It was put on hold because of how I structured and explained it, not for the topic.  The hold was then removed when I rewrote it.  It was about communications in a huge migratory group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire reason I found WB in the first place was in Googling information about travel times on foot.  I found an excellent question and set of answers about traveling on horseback.  Absolutely nothing imaginary about it.  Although the author was going to use the information in her/his fiction, the question was 100% grounded in (historical) reality and the answers as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I've encountered dozens of well written and accepted questions all about the real world.  Mostly historical, but not questions that really belong on a history site.  I've also seen a bunch of questions get labeled as &quot;off topic&quot; because they crossed the line into history or politics.  Or not... Sometimes the designations are more random.  And, yeah, they are, because it's more about who sees the question early on and votes to close.  If the question is already well established by the time someone sees it, they're less likely to vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm newer here but, what I've seen so far tells me that questions about things that did or could happen here on earth are welcome if they're well-written.  They do need to be about an issue that builds a world: politics, society, language/communication, technology, medicine, etc.  In other words, about the &lt;em&gt;structure&lt;/em&gt; of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen that questions that are obviously science-fiction or fantasy will get a lot more leeway in how well-written they need to be.  I've seen some pretty wonky presentations get editing advice and lots of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you, I've referred people from Writing to WB.  Sometimes it's clear and sometimes there is a fine line.  Other times, the person might benefit by formulating 2 questions: one for here and one for there.  But, yeah, I haven't seen any hard and fast rule about how to weigh the importance of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:38:43.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6835" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:46:33.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say these &quot;what to name X&quot; questions are a bit of a gamble on the part of the querent. JBH &amp;amp; a CVn (I think, in this case rightly) says they're off-topic. Way too much room for divergent opinion. Even for my taste, and I am generally one who votes to keep &quot;opinion based&quot; queries open, simply because they're good worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the above specific example, I personally don't follow E.SE, so would never have seen the query. Given the nature of the query as being fundamentally fantasy or sci-fi related, I think WB.SE is as good a place to ask the question as any. Furthermore, if someone flagged the query for closure, I'd vote to keep it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In rereading the query, I come across very many perfectly fine and acceptable answers. But --- and I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; saying this because I wrote the response! --- the one answer that truly ties together the OP's fantasy/sci-fi perspective with the broader genre of literature was &quot;sophont rights&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that have been given as an in-genre answer in E.SE? Possibly. But the fact that the OP chose a Stack that corresponded more closely with Sci-Fi and Fantasy as a genre I think lead to a much more appropriate array of answers. After all, on E.SE, I would expect either some kind of legal term or some kind of synonym picked out of the thesaurus. Whereas on WB.SE, I would expect an answer that takes into account creative worldbuilding and its associated genres of literature.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As for your question about &quot;humane&quot;; I think your best bet would be to kick it around in the Sandbox (sorry I don't have a link!) and see what people think before deciding whether to post or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I look through the etymology of the word I can clearly see why you would want to ask that question. And given the success of &quot;human rights&quot; in a (truly) polyracial society, I can see why you might want to ask it here rather than on English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to ask it, I can say that I'll have an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:46:33.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:59:41.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we fire a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sort of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can raise a complaint against a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Managers can remove moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If enough other moderators on the site agree a moderator can be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151606/handling-calls-to-remove-a-moderator&quot;&gt;Handling Calls to Remove a Moderator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is more for a contested case rather than lack of activity though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When is it appropriate to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the moderator is no longer a net benefit to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would always be done after attempts to contact the moderator in question had either failed or received no acceptable response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That one I'm not going to comment on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:59:41.610" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-13T17:19:26.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to avoid a TL;DR wall of text like my peers. I didn't read the comments in the original question. I voted to close because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is too broad. Whatever goods two groups of people would trade would involve more factors than the context you provided, such as history, punctual supply &amp;amp; demand overtime (what is in demand one day could be overdaturated on the next), stock trade speculation, wars etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it is opinion based. If one user answered passion fruit because it helps soothe the nerves and another said coffee because it boosts focus, we would have no objective way to say &quot;ok, this answer is better than that other one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that no further elaboration would help alleviate those problems, so I voted for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to focus on tighter question scopes, with objective criteria for answer evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T17:19:26.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2018-11-14T01:47:21.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;World-splitting Wall: Impact on Weather&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weather&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weather&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weather&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked recently in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130027/most-cost-effective-way-to-fence-in-an-alien-wildlife-preserve/130123#130123&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; how paranoid aliens afraid of going the way described in &quot;War of the Worlds&quot; would sequester native flora and fauna in a preserve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the coolest answers I saw was for the establishment of a wall, around my nature preserve, to preserve most native wildlife in its natural form. &lt;strong&gt;What climate anomalies could occur on the edges of the dome?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moon itself is slightly larger than Mars, and orbits a Neptune-sized planet. It takes about 50 days to complete a roughly circular orbit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moon's planet orbits at 0.63 AU, making for a 230-day orbital period&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The wall splits the moon directly in half, and is 10-15 miles tall&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The wall is covered/painted with a dirt-like material, and has psychological deterrents to any would-be wall-crossers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sandbox Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What issues would you have with this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40430" LastEditorUserId="40430" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T22:48:07.207" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T22:48:07.207" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2018-11-14T13:14:07.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no hard and fast rule, we tackle a lot of alternate-history questions, many of them successfully, so a question isn't automatically off-topic for being &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; in our own reality but very often questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; our real world are better asked on other stacks because we're not specialised in any one area Worldbuilding usually requires a lot of information from a number of different disciplines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main issue with a lot of questions that are real world based is that they effectively ask either &quot;if I change A how does the next X-hundred years of world history play out?&quot; or &quot;if I change A how does the whole world change?&quot;, that usually makes them both too broad &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; primarily opinion based. So narrow, focused, questions about changing around aspects of the real world can work but questions about widespread change are unlikely to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T13:14:07.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-11-14T13:47:24.187" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't see this particular question on review, if I had I would have suggested it be put on hold pending heavy editing. Why? At our current rates of technological progress we don't really know what our technological landscape will look like in 5-10 years, we can't even &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; what will be in prototyping 50 years from now. So in effect the question asks us to extrapolate 50 years of technological progress (at even higher rates than we now experience), a primarily opinion based exercise. Then to decide on which of those extrapolated technologies would have the greatest appeal to a group we know nothing about beyond the historical era which their technology most closely resembles, a story based decision, and one we don't have the information to make concrete suggestions about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is further complicated by the fact that Group B may not wish to share certain information, you've said that not sharing technology isn't an option, the border is too porous, but that doesn't mean that Group B will &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to share everything so open trade in any number of goods may be restricted for reasons we can't judge due to the lack of detail about their culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T13:47:24.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2018-11-15T00:25:52.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to specifically address the issue of &quot;Should we?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of sounding mean-spirited (and possibly even appearing to bear sour-grapes, since I participated in the last mod election and lost), we, the participants on this site, elect moderators.  It isn't a birthright.  There isn't tenure.  That privilege comes with obligations that we, the non-mods, depend on (whether we know it's happening or not) and have the right to expect.  The most common among them is frequenting the site to use those privileges (and may I point out that L.Dutch is a wonderful example of just that.  When he won the last election, he took the bull by the horns and never looked back.  Cheers, mate!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know JD and have nothing personally against him.  But he was quite literally elected by the community based on the belief that he'd volunteer the necessary time to do the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree entirely that it would be considerate to reach out to him (and any mod who's dropped off the radar) to see what's going on.  But in the case of a 6-month abstention, that process should take 1-2 weeks max and then a new election occurs.  To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that SE doesn't have an automatic system to remove mod status from people who haven't used mod privileges meaningfully in some identified period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, yes, we should take action to either bring JD back or remove the mod status and pass it to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to keep this response as unbiased as possible: I will not throw my hat in the next moderator election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T00:25:52.350" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2018-11-15T23:04:26.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of whether or not we should dismiss moderators, I'm of the opinion that the real question is whether or not moderation is a perishable skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong), 2x moderators are elected at each election, and moderation is bestowed upon a person more or less as a lifetime appointment, or at least there is no clearly identified term that I could see when I voted in the last election.  In practice, that means that if all moderators were always active, the number of moderators would increase (ideally lightening the load or keeping the current load as traffic on the site increases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is all the case, then the concern about making time available for moderation tasks is valid, but one can't reasonably expect that time to be applied constantly forever. I'd argue that the moderation time investment should only need to be guaranteed from election to the next election intake. After that, if you aren't as active for whatever reason (including real life concerns, like family changes, career issues, illness etc.) then it's not as big a concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is more a general answer, and I don't intend this statement to reflect JD's specific circumstances, or even to argue that first termers are subject to special rules by comparison to longer serving moderators. I merely point out that if there is a time commitment on a permanent investiture, the time commitment may be impractical to be permanent as well.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If moderation skill is perishable (and I'd argue that it's not) then sure; there's an argument to be made that lack of practice hours makes someone less effective in the role and that has to be considered. That said, could JD come back tomorrow and be just as effective in his role as he was before he left? Probably. In point of fact, he may come back even &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; effective because of some more life experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore argue that dismissing any moderator for absenteeism is perhaps at best unkind, at worst cutting off our noses to spite our faces given that he can be just as effective at a future time when he's ready to commit more time to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In full disclosure, I don't intend to stand for moderator election because I don't want or need that kind of responsibility and I'm very happy with my votes only taking effect as part of a chorus of like minded voices. But, I still respect those who do take on the role and I understand that this can be an issue for many who work doing it every day and whose workload is now greater as a result of someone missing. But like I say, if that's becoming a larger issue, the solution is to intake more moderators at each new election, not dismiss the ones we already have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T23:04:26.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6858" CreationDate="2018-11-16T00:51:57.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't find it necessary to dismiss moderators for inactivity.  That said, there is a more serious issue involved.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need more moderators?  If you feel that more moderators would make the site work better, you should explain why that is so (preferably in a separate question).  We could always hold a moderator election and add one or more moderators.  Or the existing moderators might find another way to fix the problems that you are noticing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no limit on the number of moderators that we can have.  Stack Overflow has many more than Worldbuilding does.  If more moderators would make the site better, we can have them.  This is true whether we kick out the existing moderator for inactivity or not.  So I would recommend concentrating more on whether we need more moderators and less on potential inactivity of existing moderators.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T00:51:57.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6878" CreationDate="2018-11-16T09:07:22.357" Score="8" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4403/on-editing-questions-and-invalidating-answers&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt; but this is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130380/would-low-grade-levitation-be-of-any-use&quot;&gt;Would low-grade levitation be of any use?&lt;/a&gt; I gave basic rules. As time went by I received a flood of questions requesting further details of the physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered these but in doing so I may have invalidated previous answers. Note this is not because I contradicted myself - it's because the answerer just assumed their own version of the physics without checking with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So have I dealt with this correctly? Is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T10:20:42.007" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T04:21:31.760" Title="What happens if a poster's assumptions invalidate their answer when clarifications are made later" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6876" CreationDate="2018-11-16T17:33:12.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When your &quot;clarifications&quot; invalidate answers, then it is unacceptable change in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your edit in such circumstances shouldn't be an edit. It should be a follow-up  question. In case it was already made, it should be rolled back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things you decide not to write in your question are the freedom you give to people answering it. Removing some of it is a change of game, just as if you'd contradict yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T21:39:30.887" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T21:39:30.887" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6876" CreationDate="2018-11-16T17:59:09.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This, like most things, is a two part problem at least in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;The person posting the question should be clear.&lt;/strong&gt;  They should meet all the requirements from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how to ask&lt;/a&gt; page.  Namely this bit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General guidelines for all questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and why you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have you already looked at or failed to find? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't met all these bullet points odds are you are forcing users writing answers to assume/fill in the blanks for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Those answering have a responsibility as well.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this problem pretty regularly. Many posted questions fail to meet the requirements listed above.  Instead of asking for clarification in the comments people will rush to answer the question.  It is one of the necessary drawbacks of the reputation system.  The sooner you get an answer in the more likely you are to get votes and rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem though.  If we rush to answer and don't try to help the querent first we aren't doing anyone any good.  If the question is unclear and we answer we aren't really helping the person that was looking to get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The short version is both questioner and those answering need to take it upon themselves to make questions better before answers are posted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The responsibility isn't on one or the other.  It's both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use comments to help people posting questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do what's best for the site.  In the end this will get you more rep, and definitely more respect than rushing to get imaginary internet points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take the time to write good questions that meet the requirements on the how to ask page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If necessary flag questions to put them on-hold.  Explain, especially to new users, what that means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T17:59:09.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6876" CreationDate="2018-11-17T04:21:31.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The question is the ground truth&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an answer-er makes assumptions, and those assumptions are wrong, the onus is on the answer-er to fix it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99316/could-astronauts-find-their-bearings-in-the-universe-after-being-transported-6-g/99337#99337&quot;&gt;one of my own top answers&lt;/a&gt;. I made assumptions about the question, but those assumptions were wrong because I never bothered to confirm them in comments. When someone else did ask the right questions, my own was invalidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is fine, I posted a comment to the top of my answer indicating that it was wrong, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone made bad assumptions about your question, that is their problem. Let me know so I can down-vote that answer for being wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T04:21:31.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T09:56:59.340" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been marked as a duplicate of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6586&quot;&gt;Can we encourage people to put more research into questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the linked question is about making people actually think and read up on the topic they ask about, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; discussion is about finding ways to make people use site-tools and check out the automagically proposed questions when they write up their own questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently whenever I browse questions I see at least one if not more that could be answered or at least improved by going through answers to previous questions we've had on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130546/would-it-be-possible-for-mammals-to-evolve-blue-blood&quot;&gt;this question about mammals with blue blood&lt;/a&gt;. Reading the question I immediately had two thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Have you actually googled this? Tried to read up on the topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) You have found this stack, have you tried looking if the question has already been asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know at least the answer to the latter must be &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, because I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; this question has come up already, and I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; this question has been answered amazingly well &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28276/other-blood-colors&quot;&gt;here (and not only about blue blood)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;also know&lt;/em&gt; is that &lt;strong&gt;searching is hard&lt;/strong&gt;. Terms &amp;amp; words that I use when thinking about a question might not necessarily match those used by others. When searching I have to look up existing tags, and synonyms of words I would use - I have to be ready to do that extra effort. &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; I know that the effort is worth it, because it helps me with whatever I do or try to do eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Searching&lt;/em&gt; the meta for the topic I find exactly &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; questions/discussion on the subject over the last 4 years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/443/questions-that-show-a-lack-of-basic-research&quot;&gt;A meta question about what to do with questions that show obvious lack of research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4866/search-tips-wanted-please&quot;&gt;A meta discussion about how to properly search for existing questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we &lt;strong&gt;incentivise&lt;/strong&gt; people to use tools like the &lt;strong&gt;site-search&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;related questions&lt;/strong&gt; before and while asking questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T10:27:09.243" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:11:51.133" Title="How to make people actually look before asking?" Tags="|discussion|search|duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2018-11-17T13:12:25.540" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The suggested answers are often totally unrelated (at least by title). They have similar words and phrases in them, but don't have anything else in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the first step to making people actually look at the suggested related questions is to actually present &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;related&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found interesting when I was very active on another SE site is that I often knew that a duplicate question existed, because I had already answered that very same question, but was unable to find it through the site search! Which tells you a lot about how powerless automated searches are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I knew how to search for what I wanted to know, I wouldn't be here. Often I don't know what the thing I want to know is called. And I never know the solution, which is usually what the subject is that is found in searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130572/why-would-aliens-want-to-attack-or-invade-earth&quot;&gt;if I ask about reasons for aliens to attack Earth&lt;/a&gt;, I might be asking about psychological or social issues. Wars are begun to pacify political unrest, so I might be asking about the psychology and social aspects of politics, without being aware of it. My answer might be found by searching for &amp;quot;psychology of war&amp;quot;, not for &amp;quot;why do aliens attack Earth&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know the answer, these relations seem obvious to you, but to anyone who is looking for an answer, it is often not clear what good search terms would be. Which is why using the site search (or Google) often turns up nothing relevant at all – or the actual answer hidden on page 63 of millions of search &amp;quot;results&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Show related questions that are actually related.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you cannot, &lt;strong&gt;it is totally fine not to research at all&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; know that the same question has been asked before, mark it as duplicate and link to the first question. That will take you much less time than it would the asker to find that duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know that a duplicate exists, and you want to answer the question, then quite obviously &lt;em&gt;repeating&lt;/em&gt; the question has brought it to your attention and given you a chance to answer either the duplicate or,  if someone else marks it as duplicate, the original. Therefore asking the same question again was a good thing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if it tires you to answer the same question again and again, then maybe you need to work on yourself, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1067/goodbye-im-leaving&quot;&gt;you need to move on&lt;/a&gt;. Think of a teacher who told his class that he answered the same question yesterday, or that his pupils could find the answer by using Google. Not only would he be out of a job if learning acutally worked that way, he also completely disregards the interpersonal aspect of learning. People want to ask a person and have things explained to them. Not (necessarily) because they are lazy, but because humans are social animals. If I have to find an answer &lt;em&gt;alone&lt;/em&gt;, then finding that answer is not as much fun as interacting with another person to find it. Which is why I am totally opposed to the concept of &amp;quot;duplicate questions&amp;quot;. If I want to help others find answers, then repeatedly answering the same question is a part of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user57423" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user57423" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T17:28:31.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2018-11-17T15:02:55.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I set the bar low.  Often the issue is that the asker doesn't know what to ask for and is struggling.  Other times the asker has some tiny implicit assumption that they have no idea how troublesome it is, and needs help dislodging it.  I find this happens quite often in virtual reality, teleportaition, and time travel questions, where the reader implicitly assumes their intuitive understanding of what an &quot;individual&quot; or a &quot;self&quot; is will hold.  This intuition ties them in knots which can't be untangled, but a slightly more nuanced definition of a &quot;self&quot; often causes the Gordian knot to unravel completely.  &lt;em&gt;(As an aside: one of the theories about why the Gordian knot could not be untied is that it was actually an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unknot&lt;/a&gt;.  This would explain why the most brilliant of thinkers couldn't find a way to untie the knot.  It was already untied!  As legend has it, Alexander the Great finally &quot;untied it,&quot; by taking a sword out and cutting it in two!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My bar is simple:  If I take your title text, and copy it into the WB search, or copy it into google, and one of the first few hits is &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; a clear match with a great answer, you haven't researched it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I actually think the question passes the test.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28276/other-blood-colors&quot;&gt;Other Blood Colors&lt;/a&gt; was more focused on the chemistry.  It explicitly stated to ignore the biological problems that a change of blood color might have, and focused primarily on the chemistry of blood oxygen transport.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130546/would-it-be-possible-for-mammals-to-evolve-blue-blood&quot;&gt;Would it be possible for mammals to evolve blue blood&lt;/a&gt; is more of a practical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The winning answer in Other Blood Colors does mention that there is a 50% efficiency drop when you switch from hemoglobin to hemocyanin, but goes no further.  I think a good answer for &quot;... evolve blue blood&quot; might reference this, and go into why a 50% drop in efficiency would be a big deal for warm blooded vertebrates.  Cold blooded might be an interesting question to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to actually make things better, I think that's just culture.  Mark things as duplicates, and possible duplicates.  I often will put a possible duplicate in a comment rather than a VTC, just to see if that was indeed the same question, or if the author just hadn't yet phrased the question in a way which was distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T15:02:55.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6835" CreationDate="2018-11-18T02:02:52.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, if you are describing a real world situation, alternate words belong on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;.  However, if you are describing a speculatively fictional situation (i.e. science fiction or fantasy) and want to know what words would be used internal to that world, I would argue that's on-topic here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question might be on-topic on another stack does not make it off-topic here.  Some questions can be asked on multiple stacks.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are making up your own language, you would probably be better off asking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Construct Languages&lt;/a&gt;.  Not because it's off-topic here but because they have a better set of experts for that kind of question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T02:02:52.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-18T21:16:25.160" Score="21" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently this question was asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6858/when-do-you-fire-a-moderator&quot;&gt;When do you fire a moderator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This specifically asked about the status of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/885/jd%C5%82ugosz?tab=activity&quot;&gt;JDługosz&lt;/a&gt; who has been a Worldbuilding elected moderator since Feb 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that we don't know where he is. He was an active and effective moderator for some time after he was elected and then activity dropped very low, and then eventually to nothing with no explanation and little communication. We hope he is well and thank him for his contribution during the time he was active, as it is important to remember that moderators are all unpaid positions with people giving up their time to help the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His absence and my own need to step back from spending a lot of time is why we held the election of July in this year. The election of two more moderators was to replace him and supplement me. In other words the moderator team is at full strength even with JDługosz absent and myself far less active than I used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime we are in no rush to act as his presence as an elected moderator presents little to no risk. Even if his account were hacked (for example) all moderator actions are tracked, logged, and reversible. The Community Managers at Stack Exchange are aware of the situation and have made their own attempts to make contact and will take further steps as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T23:45:16.547" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T02:59:49.780" Title="Worldbuilding Moderator Status Update" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6886" CreationDate="2018-11-19T02:59:49.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds fair. If the Mod Squad is up to the task, and since this Summer's election, seems to be adequately staffed, then I'd see no reason to call for another election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the election was planned &amp;amp; considered in light of JD's absence, then it seems rather pointless to even consider &quot;firing&quot; him. (Unless SE itself has reasons for doing so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, just leave him on the payroll and try to contact him every now and then. If he wishes to relinquish his curious powers, then fine. If he expresses interest in returning, then fine too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T02:59:49.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-19T13:04:43.133" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51655&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; on ethnic identity and space colonisation popped up as a suggested similar question when I was writing up a new question. It's a couple of years and change old, it has relatively low views but three reasonably solid answers (that are applicable to other similar scenarios/questions concerning continuity of culture) and a smattering of votes. Importantly to this discussion I feel that, while the question is well written, if was being asked for the first time today it would be put on hold as Primarily Opinion Based fast. I don't want to see the question deleted, the answers are good and have wide applicability to situations where authors want to create long term cultural continuity. I was going to flag it for a Historically Significant Question close but realised I don't know &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; that's done or if we even have a set process for it. So two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are questions nominated for this special &quot;close but keep&quot; status?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this particular actually a good candidate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T19:43:48.200" Title="Historically significant questions, what's the process?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6888" CreationDate="2018-11-19T13:38:17.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you are concerned about is not eligible for automatic deletion, as laid out on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;, because it has an upvoted and accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the close-worthiness of the question: I don't see it as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; and would vote to leave it open were it to find its way into the queue for that reason. Asking for a method of division that doesn't make it impossible to maintain contact between groups seems to me to be sufficiently limiting for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the accepted answer lays out a few options, some of which would suggest a &lt;em&gt;too story-based&lt;/em&gt; close reason. But, judging a question based on its answers is poor form. With L. Dutch's lock in place, I see no further action need be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T13:38:17.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6888" CreationDate="2018-11-19T14:14:19.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6890/627&quot;&gt;Frostfyre pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, the question isn't currently at risk of being deleted. The system won't automatically delete it, and at this point, manual deletion by a mod is probably the only thing that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; get rid of it. The only thing that could happen to it is that it could get closed by the community, which honestly wouldn't be a terrible thing. Many old questions that are deemed out of scope at some future time are closed, and that's okay. Honestly, I don't think that would happen to this one, because I can't see a strong argument for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A historical lock can only be applied or removed manually, by a moderator. It just takes four clicks through a menu. If you think a post should be locked in this manner, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; raise a mod flag, but asking a question on meta might be better. I think that a historical lock to some extent implies that the community as a whole deems that the question is one of a select few that deserves this status, and that probably should lead to a quick meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think a historical lock would be inappropriate, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126587/274942&quot;&gt;this sort of case isn't what they're for&lt;/a&gt;. Historical locks are reserved for truly significant questions that clearly no longer meet the site's standards. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions can be historically locked when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post does not meet the current guidelines for a good, on-topic question, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post is stellar, in spite of its off-topic nature, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a large number of views, upvotes and inbound links on the post, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post is contentious; e.g., it has been closed and reopened at least once, or deleted and undeleted at least once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;The question here has never been closed, and I honestly think it doesn't meet &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of those four criteria, let alone all of them.&lt;/strike&gt; The question has now been closed (partly via a mod hammer), and currently has three reopen votes, so it's arguable contentious to some degree, but it still fails to meet the other three requirements for historical locking. Therefore, I'll argue that the question shouldn't be locked (note that it has now been unlocked, after it was initially locked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T19:43:48.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-20T04:54:52.497" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through one of the tags and i noticed how many closed questions filled it up. They were either duplicates, opinion based, or too broad. &lt;strong&gt;If they weren't suitable for the site why aren't they removed after a certain amount of time without need of moderators or community votes?&lt;/strong&gt;(similar to the process of how they got closed in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know after a while they will be deleted, but the time is not specified. The amount of closed and duplicates and too broad's might just upset me personally, but the tags could use some cleaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36854" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T05:45:54.180" Title="Why aren't closed questions deleted more often?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6892" CreationDate="2018-11-20T05:06:14.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed questions are automatically deleted according to the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/162102&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not closed as a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has a score of 0 or less&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no answers with a score &gt; 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no pending reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has not been edited in the past 9 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... it will be automatically deleted. These are &quot;abandoned closed&quot;, and show as RemoveAbandonedClosed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates are not automatically deleted because they can act as signposts; there can be different ways to ask the same question and this makes them more searchable.  Questions with upvoted answers aren't automatically deleted because they are deemed potentially valuable.  (Not all close reasons are created equal and a site's scope isn't static over time, so it might have been a good question once even if it it wasn't when it was closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Automatic deletion is fairly conservative, which is why high-rep users can also vote to delete.  If there might be value, the decision needs to be made by humans rather than software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across questions that in your opinion add no value to the site, vote to delete if you can or bring them up for discussion (meta or chat).  Do keep in mind that you can't retract delete votes the way you can retract close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T05:06:14.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6892" CreationDate="2018-11-20T05:12:57.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica talked about the technical end of why the system doesn't automatically delete closed questions. Let me discuss why it doesn't happen very often manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm (in general) against deleting closed questions for a couple of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It only takes five people to close (or reopen) a question. Just because part of the community feels a question should be closed doesn't mean everyone else does. Deleting a closed question makes it harder for those potential reopen voters to weigh in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed questions can usually be improved. For instance, some questions that are closed as Unclear might be reopened if the author simply added some more details. Yes, there are some instances where a question will never be good enough to fit the site, but those are by no means the vast majority of cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scope of the site might change in the future, making previously off-topic questions allowable. Just because a question is off-topic now doesn't mean it will be off-topic in a year. The site is dynamic. So is its scope.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to view deletion - of a question or an answer - as signifying that the post is beyond all hope, that it's unsalvageable. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I find that very few questions are that bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T05:12:57.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2018-11-20T21:19:57.280" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am bumping this as it now seems the original idea of this tag has been perverted through a misconception of its purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, use of this tag is purely to require answers to support all critical points with scientifically backed sources or equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I whole heartedly support this notion. Some topics are only worth answering under full scientific scruitany. Such questions should allow the possibility that they are impossible, however all answers must be supported. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I do not believe this tag ever supported, was that hard-science questions be only hard science topics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets analyze this under the lens of an obviously contested topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/130770/21222&quot;&gt;Anatomically correct succubus: the diet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks if a humanoid organism could sustain itself through intercourse with a human, inkeeping with the mythology of the succubus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously a succubus is a mythological creature and therefore does not exist in science. But that is not the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is if it is plausible that a humanoid organism could sustain itself this way? This could easily be explored under a strong scientific lens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer could reason that succubus is a hummanoid so it will have similar caloric needs to a human [insert links and equations]. It could then point out that ejaculate only contains 22 calories [insert supporting link] it could then mathematically demonstrate that it would be impossible for an organism to survive on such limited nutrition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such answer satisfies the criteria of hard-science and yet can still be wrong. Because the question assumed the only obtainable substance during sex was ejaculate instead of considering other things like blood. Its still a valuable answer because it outlines variables in the system to explain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be thinking why I went with that example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; does not dictate the correctness of the answer or even the question, that is the purpose of comments and voting. Hard-science does not dictate the subject matter of the question or answer. What makes hard-science valuable as a tag is that it requires all presented variables to be scientifically supported so that they can be  mathematically evaluated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the example, because the answer was forced to backup all its points and provide the equation a better answer could emerge that accounted for factors not previously considered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if anything this does impose some restrictions on questions. This means that questions must accept the possibility they are impossible &lt;strong&gt;and allow for answers that explain theyre impossible&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Finally&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science is not a process for outright dismissal of claims. Science is the human process by which to convert claim to fact or fiction by answering why or &lt;strong&gt;why not&lt;/strong&gt; based on equally proven facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41670" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T01:00:43.640" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T01:00:43.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2018-11-23T05:36:24.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the specific questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is no way to enforce this action&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No mechanism exists to encourage better research.  No mechanism exists to guarantee or ensure better research.  We're stuck with the fact that anyone who wants to can post anything they want: properly researched or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We literally have only two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote (the appropriate action)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close (theoretically only necessary in extreme or clearly defined circumstances)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I rarely downvote and try to avoid closing unless I'm sure leaving a question open is going to lead to a bigger mess.  My personal preference is &lt;em&gt;education.&lt;/em&gt;  It's a neverending duty because newcomers are always joining &amp;mdash; and I cannot trust that they've even bothered to read our rules (indeed, quite the contrary, I can generally trust that they haven't read a single thing about our site other than its name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, having said this...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to realize that what's 100% obvious to you isn't 100% obvious to me or (necessarily) anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of English-as-second-language people using this site, and they tend to take a beating simply because their English is poor.  That's really unfortunate, because their imagination isn't.  What is easily researched in English may not be easily researched in (e.g.) Swahili at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of youngsters using this site.  I do not mean that in a derogatory way.  I'm in my 50s.  I have a degree in engineering and a lot of life experience.  A considerable number of users don't have a college degree and don't have much (if any) life experience.  Expecting them to understand what I understand is arrogant at best, conceited at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And speaking of arrogance...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a LOT of people on this site with amazing abilities, skills, and education.  There are, for example, people on this site who know more about orbital mechanics than I ever will.  Why is it important to know this?  &lt;em&gt;Because if I don't know my limitations, then I will be a terrible judge of other's limitations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, while I understand your frustration completely, I must advocate patience.  Patience that would make a successful parent of septuplets appear rash and unforgiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T05:36:24.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6892" CreationDate="2018-11-23T05:45:54.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point out two more thing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Deleting questions is basically an invitation to ask them &amp;mdash; and close them &amp;mdash; again.  The record of a closed question (for whatever reason) constitutes a form of precedent that allows us to help educate and guide new users.  (Whether or not we do this effectively is an entirely different question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, questions should only be deleted when it's obvious they don't belong on this site (such as programming questions that should have been on SO and, for whatever reason, appear here.  It's happened several times in the last year.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Curiously, seeing a large percentage of closed questions with a specific tag shouldn't (in my mind) have led to the question, why aren't we cleaning up after ourselves?  Rather, it should have led to the question, what's wrong with this tag that questions associated with it get closed so frequently?  It would suggest...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the tag is badly defined, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the tag is inappropriate for this site,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or that we are not helping users (especially new users) to understand the tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't mention what that tag was.  It might make more sense to post a Meta question about the tag so we can come to a consensus of how to better deal with the tag and reduce the number of closed associated questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specifically relevant meta question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5652&quot;&gt;How to be a close voter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T05:45:54.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2018-11-23T12:11:51.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trouble is that the SE/SO search system isn't particularly intuitive, and certainly isn't as intelligent as a google search. When you search for something, that's what you get. If you don't use the same words as someone else, it doesn't do a fuzzy search so you won't get the response you're hoping for without some intensive hunting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means in the long run is that we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to build up a database of duplicate questions. If those duplicates are correctly linked through to our definitive question on the subject then the vague searches will, in time, lead people through to the correct question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those of us who have been around longer are better at knowing that something has been asked before, but mostly because we saw it in person the last time, so we know it's definitely there to be found with the right search terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are you seriously asking how to make people think before they speak? You know that never works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:11:51.133" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T15:14:36.350" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently Molot and I had a brief exchange in comments to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130318/worldwide-climate&quot;&gt;Worldwide climate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt he was technically correct that the question was a duplicate of these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100559/809&quot;&gt;Are single-biomed planets (like in *Star Wars*) possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64065/809&quot;&gt;Single biome (hot) desert planet, possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it wasn't a duplicate in the specifics of those questions (he wasn't asking about a desert planet, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rapid search doesn't show a large number of single-biome planet questions, but my heart and soul wonders if we couldn't/shouldn't create a comprehensive question concerning the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I believe this is important because it is possible to come close to a single-biome planet with a desert (aka, Mars), but theoretically impossible to achieve a jungle single-biome planet (aka, &lt;a href=&quot;http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dagobah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dagobagh&lt;/a&gt;).  In other words, the more complex the biome, the less possible it is &amp;mdash; but why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my question is how to go about rolling the various questions into a single Community Wiki question that addresses the greater subject without offending the community as many would think such a question too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T14:03:04.020" Title="How to create a comprehensive-question/comprehensive-answer pair?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2018-11-23T17:42:17.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, what Molot suggested seems to be that the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/130318/29&quot;&gt;Worldwide climate&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;em&gt;related to&lt;/em&gt; (the first two words in Molot's comment were literally &quot;Also related&quot;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100559/29&quot;&gt;Are single-biomed planets (like in &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt;) possible?&lt;/a&gt; (itself a duplicate) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64065/29&quot;&gt;Single biome (hot) desert planet, possible?&lt;/a&gt;. Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100559/29&quot;&gt;Are single-biomed planets (like in &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt;) possible?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/130318/29&quot;&gt;Worldwide climate&lt;/a&gt; have been closed as duplicates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/40/29&quot;&gt;Are geographically typed planets realistic?&lt;/a&gt; Still closed as a duplicate, but not in the way you say in this meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, with that aside out of the way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a post community wiki is not a free pass for content that would otherwise be off topic or otherwise inappropriate on the site. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;edit community wiki&lt;/em&gt; privilege description page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Community wiki posts have been donated to the community in hopes that others will edit them to keep them up to date, to add useful information, and generally improve their quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/community-wiki&quot;&gt;the create wiki posts privilege description&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators can also choose to convert posts into community wiki mode if they feel &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;it is appropriate&lt;/a&gt; for the question or answer, generally after a discussion with the community and affected individuals. Once a post is made community wiki, that mode can only be removed by a moderator under exceptional circumstances. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/157730&quot;&gt;What are “Community Wiki” posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked Stack Overflow blog post (which, mind, was written already back in 2011) says, in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With suggested edits now in place, you could argue that the removal of reputation from voting is now the only function of community wiki. Unfortunately, this means it is often seen as a magic switch to allow questionable content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many sites propose using community wiki to allow content that is &lt;em&gt;on-topic and useful&lt;/em&gt;, but can be considered borderline or questionable in other ways. Someone notes that a certain class of question has problems, and proposes using community wiki as a quick fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question is valuable enough that you believe it belongs on the site, &lt;em&gt;chances are you don’t need it to be community wiki!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, all of this is really quite clear; &lt;em&gt;community wiki is not a get-out-of-jail-free card&lt;/em&gt; and should not be treated as such. If the content is worth having, then it would probably be worth having even if community wiki wasn't a thing at all. A &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question that one might consider posting and answering in a community wiki format is probably equally askable and answerable without community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki removes one of the major incentives to contribute on Stack Exchange — reputation points — and therefore risks to &lt;em&gt;lower&lt;/em&gt; the incentive to contribute time and effort. Yes, those are just imaginary Internet points, but the things people do for imaginary Internet points...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves the bigger issue, which is &lt;strong&gt;can we have a canonical duplicate target for questions that discuss the plausibility of single-biome worlds?&lt;/strong&gt; To me, the answer to that is &lt;strong&gt;of course we can&lt;/strong&gt;. It can even have multiple answers. If you think you can post a question that is (a) not itself a duplicate of the existing questions, (b) specific and narrow enough to be answerable in the question and answers format, and (c) on topic, then by all means go ahead! There isn't even anything preventing you from, in the question or in an answer, referring to, and quoting from, other, existing questions and their answers, as long as you attribute those parts properly. (CC-BY-SA encourages remixing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems &lt;em&gt;more likely&lt;/em&gt; to me, though, that &lt;strong&gt;a set of questions&lt;/strong&gt; discussing various aspects of such a world, or a few different types of such worlds (desert vs jungle vs tundra vs ocean vs whatever else one might come up with) &lt;strong&gt;would be &lt;em&gt;more useful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; We almost certainly already have a number of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a new user, or a relatively new user, such as in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/130318/29&quot;&gt;Worldwide climate&lt;/a&gt;, it really doesn't matter much whether their question is closed as a duplicate of a question with a community wiki answer, or of one where the answers aren't community wiki. At best, they are primarily interested in whether the duplicate target question actually covers the issue they are asking about. Being directed at a question that has community wiki answers doesn't gain them anything that a non-community-wiki post wouldn't be able to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a question is proposed as a duplicate of one that it is not, for some reason,&lt;/strong&gt; then the proper course of action is for the original poster to edit their question to clarify how it is not a duplicate. Yes, this takes a bit of effort. But the process puts the onus on the OP to show why the community should spend the time to answer &lt;em&gt;one more&lt;/em&gt; question, instead of just referring to the existing question and its answers. If even the person asking a question can't point to at least one reason why an existing question doesn't cover what they are asking about, then chances are it's close enough to provide a workable solution to their problem. They certainly can come back and ask further, more detailed questions about more specific issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Imagine if everyone who looked for something on Wikipedia would cause the creation of a new article that would need to be written, maintained and fact-checked.&lt;/strong&gt; It would quickly become a complete and utter mess. For me, Stack Exchange shouldn't be treated differently; rather than duplicating effort, if the same question has been asked and answered, let's just point the new asker to the existing question and its answers (for which the Stack Exchange mechanism is to close as duplicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One guideline which I have referred to for a long time is Eric Raymond's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How To Ask Questions The Smart Way&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#before&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Before You Ask&lt;/a&gt; section provides several hints: among other things, to search archives, search the Web, read the manual, read the FAQ, try to figure it out yourself, try asking a friend, and (for programmers with software problems) try looking at the source code. The vast majority of these apply equally well to asking worldbuilding questions on Stack Exchange. Also, to show what you've learned by doing all this. (Stack Exchange sites tend to be a bit more lenient, but my experience is that questions showing that someone has at least &lt;em&gt;tried&lt;/em&gt; themselves first are better received.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T17:42:17.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2018-11-24T14:03:04.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In thinking about this problem I wonder if this might not be a workable solution, &lt;strong&gt;JBH&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A solution I think might work, and probably won't run afoul of community sensibilities, is to treat these climate / biome queries like we do the Anatomically Correct series. A single aggregate question could simply link to all the related queries. Would that not be a viable solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T14:03:04.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-25T16:39:53.007" Score="-4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/20-years-into-the-future-what-would-happen-if-the-internet-failed-semi-permane&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is closed as &quot;too broad&quot;.  Yet, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=what%20if&quot;&gt;several other similar questions&lt;/a&gt;, and the first seems like a good question, has a good answer, has lots of votes, and has an accepted answers.  Several more similar questions fall in the same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8625" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T10:46:20.573" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T10:46:20.573" Title="I think &quot;20 years into the future - what would happen if the internet failed semi-permanently?&quot; should be reopened" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6906" CreationDate="2018-11-25T19:42:02.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What too broad means&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that the internet fails (semi-permanent or otherwise). What would happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could write an answer talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How multi-national businesses would re-shape their internal communications networks after cloud based e-mail and Slack, et al., go away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How people would react to not being able to post on or check Facebook, Instagram, et al.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How credit card companies and banks would process transactions without the internet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How local television and print news would ramp up production to deal with the removal of competition of internet news sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How people who didn't have cable would deal with no longer being able to watch movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, et al.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How local businesses would respond to the surge in demand after Amazon purchases become impossible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of those answers could be 1000 characters long and extremely well written. Which one would be correct? There is no way to determine what the correct answer is; in fact, all of them could be correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the question is too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why that question was closed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question was closed almost exactly two years after it was written. Why so long?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pressures and attitude of the younger site were different than they were for the more mature site. A younger Worldbuilding was somewhat more focused on becoming and remaining a viable website. The site launched September 2014 out of closed Beta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-survive-mountain-environments-with-a-tribal-culture&quot;&gt;our first question!&lt;/a&gt;), and graduated from a Beta to an open site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2767/congratulations-worldbuilding-is-graduating&quot;&gt;November 2015&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time that question was posted, the site needed more participation to graduate from Beta. Here, for example, are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101265/constructed-languages&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Conlang.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which is currently in Beta. So at the time, questions that got lots of views and votes and reputation were a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we are a stable site, we have graduated, and we have an awesome girl-and-robot logo. The focus now is on long-term sustainability, which means developing a philosophy that will make this site a unique and valuable Internet resource. Our long term strategy is to be a site for good and possibly technical answers to narrow questions. We explicitly reject fishing for ideas, story generation and discussion questions. The question you linked falls into one or more of those categories. Therefore, to show that we, as a site, are consistent with our rules for new questions, it is best to go back and close old questions that are too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T04:59:47.803" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T04:59:47.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6906" CreationDate="2018-11-27T04:59:37.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the community should have a chance to answer. if the question is down voted 5 times it will be closed. But the community should have a choice, sometimes I have really good answers to what I think are really good questions but are closed before i have a chance to share. Isn't world-building all about sharing knowledge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57654" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T04:57:26.643" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T04:57:26.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T09:47:48.973" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example I'll use one of my own questions but there is no need to read more than its title to understand my question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131410/greenhouse-planet-terraforming-will-a-balloon-jacket-self-stabilise&quot;&gt;Greenhouse Planet Terraforming - Will a balloon jacket self-stabilise?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks as though the answer is going to be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. However someone has mentioned an apparent flaw in my plan that I believe I can exploit to make my scenario work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing my new question, I will obviously state the new factor and say how it might overcome previous objections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much of the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; should I restate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) None - just give the link back to my old question and add the new factor (stating why it helps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Summarise the old question in bullet form and add the new factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Repeat the old question word-for-word and add the new factor to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it more concrete: In my particular case the original idea was that the balloon should self-stabilise equidistant from the planet's surface. An objection was that the solar wind would displace it. I now want to know if I can utilise the solar wind as a stabilising factor - perhaps by having it pin the balloon to the surface on one side rather than be equidistant. (Details still fuzzy) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T12:08:03.093" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T13:47:54.420" Title="A good format for followup questions" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6910" CreationDate="2018-11-28T10:44:00.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My general opinion is that &lt;strong&gt;each question should stand on its own.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the new question should be complete enough that one does not need to refer to other questions in order to answer it. (On the flip side, it may be that referring to existing questions is a good way to &lt;em&gt;show research effort&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in this case it sounds like you are asking a new question that is &lt;em&gt;very similar&lt;/em&gt; to an existing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you want to make the differences compared to the previous question very clear, to avoid the new one being closed as a duplicate of the old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you do that is really up to you. However, I would strongly advice against making it seem like something has just been tacked on at the end and/or as an afterthought. Since this is something that influences answers, it should also influence the question. That being the case, it probably deserves a more significant edit to the question that just one more bullet point in a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly can use the previous variant of the question as a base, but you should &lt;strong&gt;probably make sure to incorporate whatever element you are changing into the entire question.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't expect readers to do a blink test just to see what the differences are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T10:44:00.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6910" CreationDate="2018-11-28T12:14:21.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this is the site's gold standard for a follow-up question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103609/the-land-grows-evil-and-corrupted-but-why&quot;&gt;The land grows evil and corrupted ... but why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The followup, from a different user: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103721/can-a-radioactive-moon-affect-life-on-a-planet&quot;&gt;Can a radioactive moon affect life on a planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both highly rated, both got very good answers. Hopefully that provides an example of how to do it well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring to your bullet points, I'd say this follows (c); it restates something given in an answer, in a block quote, and with a link, then adds further questions about that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastEditorUserId="23519" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T13:47:54.420" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T13:47:54.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6917" CreationDate="2018-11-29T18:36:43.060" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6714/is-it-appropriate-to-correct-someone-elses-answer-in-an-edit&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to correct someone else&amp;#39;s answer in an edit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above tackles the ethics of editing someone else's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I currently have one user advising another to edit my answer as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you could also just edit this answer to add clarifications. The&#xA;  original author will have chance to accept or reject the edits. That&#xA;  is often better for future readers than adding a different-but-same&#xA;  answer. – SRM 7 mins ago&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131556/does-harmony-have-to-be-invented&quot;&gt;Does harmony have to be invented?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all very well but as far as I know, the system doesn't notify me if someone has added something to my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I know if someone edits one of my answers. Maybe even years later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Does the system actively notify me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) If not, where do I look to find out generally? (Other than returning to every single one of my answers to check?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T19:47:57.050" Title="Are we notified when someone does an edit to our answer? If not, what can be done to discover it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6916" CreationDate="2018-11-29T19:47:57.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does actively notify you in your inbox if your post has a suggested edit. I don't know if you can see this link, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/55128&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is what I see when someone suggests an edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not notify you when someone with edit privileges edits your post. I demonstrated this by looking through my personal &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/6545286/kingledion?tab=inbox&quot;&gt;inbox&lt;/a&gt; (I imagine you can't see this one) and seeing that there was no notification when Frostfyre edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/131423/revisions&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see if you were notified of my edit to your post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/131479/revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, done just now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, it is not right to change an author's post to conflict with their original intent, without notifying them. Hopefully, anyone with edit privileges will know this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T19:47:57.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-30T01:57:11.430" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, what am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the Explainer badge I need:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Edit and answer 1 question (both actions within 12 hours, answer score &gt; 0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131322/how-can-you-use-an-army-of-dimunitive-soldiers-effectively/131323#131323&quot;&gt;How can you use an army of dimunitive soldiers effectively?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited the question and it was approved Nov 26 at 18:17.  Then I posted an answer Nov 26 at 18:27 (with an edit Nov 26 at 19:49).  I have a score of 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is currently on hold but I completed these things and got the score before that happened and didn't get the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also note that this badge was awarded only 228 times ever, which seems extremely low to me for something not that hard to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So either there's a bug or there's some criteria that isn't stated in the description.  What's up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastEditorUserId="54137" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T04:16:24.030" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T13:35:47.347" Title="Why Was the Explainer Badge Not Awarded?" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6918" CreationDate="2018-11-30T13:35:47.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The badge is awarded after a job runs, and it is not awarded for answers on questions that have been suspended. Seems like the question was put on hold before the job found your answer in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to check your progress for this badge and its silver and gold followups, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/938170/illuminator-badge-progress?UserId=54137&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;run this query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T13:35:47.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T18:06:15.423" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been clicking various links and interrogating Help. So far no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to find or make a league table of the most popular questions of all time on the main Worldbuilding SE. I'm interested in upvotes and/or views .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such exist? If not, how can I build one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T18:05:13.190" Title="Finding or making a league table of popular questions" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6922" CreationDate="2018-12-01T19:35:00.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions by votes, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aq&quot;&gt;search for &lt;code&gt;is:q&lt;/code&gt; and sort by votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers by votes, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aa&quot;&gt;search for &lt;code&gt;is:a&lt;/code&gt; and sort by votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a list of questions by views, you can use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/938848?opt.textResults=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's an example query&lt;/a&gt; to get you started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SELECT TOP(10)&#xA;  Id,&#xA;  ViewCount,&#xA;  Title,&#xA;  'https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/' + CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), Id) AS Link&#xA;FROM Posts&#xA;ORDER BY ViewCount DESC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(SEDE isn't using the most recent data -- I think it updates weekly -- but allows you to perform queries that are difficult or impossible to express in the on-site search field syntax.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T19:35:00.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6929" CreationDate="2018-12-02T15:43:58.997" Score="10" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question is asked and there are answers in the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually there are also nitpickers in the comments who try to find every possible loophole. To close all the loopholes in advance could require a long essay that no-one would want to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the advantages and disadvantages of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disadvantages - The loopholes may be peripheral to the actual spirit of the question and distract from what is really being asked. These lists occur in the comments and may thus be ruled as discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advantages - If you are going to use this scenario for game-play or literature, then players/readers may also nitpick. It's good to be prepared and have answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Increasingly I find myself trying to anticipate every possible nitpick but slightly resenting it because it is so time consuming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there tips or techniques for coping with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T16:33:01.510" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T22:12:18.683" Title="Nitpicking - Good or bad?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-02T17:06:55.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It seems to be a trade-off between different types of clarity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find myself in the same kind of predicaments you speak of all the time, and so I can relate. I will initially try to make my question short and concise, but then after reviewing prior to posting, I will often find glaring loopholes, just as you allude to. As much as I'd like to keep the question short, I often find it necessary to include assumptions or other content for the sole sake of keeping things within a clearly defined solution space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As great as that is for clarity in terms of the scope of the question, it does somewhat ironically sacrifice clarity in terms of readability. A question with lengthy assumptions / parameters takes time to parse through, and as anybody from a programming background or UX design will note, the user's patience with the page must be managed carefully. So it's a bit of a trade off. We may be satisfying the real nit-pickers out there, but at the expense of the casual or mild-enthusiasts who can only afford a quick read through. Seeing a lengthy question for such groups may well be off-putting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal approach is to err on the side of robustness. I assume that the world building community is itself a filter, and as such creates a content consumption bias. If you are really interested in learning how worlds are built, then you must be interested and feel somewhat passionate about the subject, and thereby willing to wade through longer premises. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately it could be an art as much as it is a science inasmuch that a great question would be posed with minimal parameters but the direction/scope the OP desires would still be clear. I would aspire to that; easier said than done though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32966" LastEditorUserId="32966" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T17:13:07.373" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T17:13:07.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-02T17:45:08.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dealing with this can be tricky, because the answer depends on the question.  Often I find questions were written to target an unimaginably demanding goal.  These questions often take the form of asking the answer to philosophical questions that philosophers have struggled with for thousands of years to no avail.  Or perhaps they take the form of seek an answer that ever military leader in history would have &lt;em&gt;drooled&lt;/em&gt; over.  In these cases, nitpicking must be part of the answering process because we need to find a way out from the impossible question we've been given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In less stringent cases, the nitpicking really isn't necessary.  I agree that a short question that isn't written in legalees is a much better question for WorldBuilding.  No point in making them bulletproof if you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere in the middle, we have the XY problems, where the user really has some underlying need that isn't written into the question.  The nitpicks, in this case, serve to try to peer into the outer question that the user really is asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard issue here is that often the person asking the question doesn't know enough about the topic to know where their question lies.  Most people asking about how conscious AI's might operate have no idea that that topic has been studied to death in philosophy, and the answer is &quot;We don't agree on what consciousness is, much less what a conscious AI behaves like.&quot;  This should be no surprise: they're asking the question because they don't know the answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6737/using-the-community-wiki&quot;&gt;community wikis&lt;/a&gt; is the key to solving this.  In the case of many topics, rather than nitpicking, we could simply link to a community-wiki answer which is used to provide the same feedback to everyone who asks a similar class of answers.  Anyone who is asking for the perfect war strategy in their world can be pointed to a wiki describing just how hard it is to have a &quot;perfect&quot; strategy, and why no general in the history of mankind has ever had one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T17:45:08.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-02T18:54:43.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that one single loophole destroys all context. This is specially true for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag, and even more so for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I find loopholes in questions for those tags, I do answer to expose the loophole to the best of my capacity. Not (only) because I am evil, but because this helps the OP and other members to save time when reworking their questions and answers. The sooner a loophole is exposed, the sooner a new question may be opened that does not have it; or the sooner an edit may be done, if it does not invalidate any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loopholes are part of many world-building processes, and helping dealing with them is part of what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T18:54:43.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-03T11:30:33.163" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There's a difference between loop holes and &quot;the spirit of the question.&quot;  Which are you asking about?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you're wondering why I asked that question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking a good question is hard &amp;mdash; even for experienced users.  Everyone needs to remember the following list, which is in no way comprehensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No question is perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There will almost always be people who understand the facts and intent of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There will almost always be people who do NOT understand the facts and intent of the very same question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every question can have its frame challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every question can generate ideas about how to make the situation better (or worse).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are alternatives to every answer (in 99.9% of cases).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As often as I can stand it, I'll take the OP at his/her word.  I realize I'm dealing with everyone from young children who don't have enough experience to know they're not asking a well thought-out question to highly trained experts who know more about their subject than I ever will or could.  &lt;em&gt;(Why that spread?  Because sometimes I know the OP has weaknesses and doesn't realize it, and sometimes I have the weaknesses and don't realize it.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I can't stand it, I'll point out the issues.  (My tolerance has a lot to do with how well my day's going... Sorry....)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that there is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nothing wrong with pointing out the issues.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  As frustrating as it is to OPs (it has been to me, I get it), requesting clarifications and even casting close votes when the OP won't or can't clarify is what makes the OP a better question asker.  People who see this process as belittling, bullying, inconvenient, or simply nit-picking haven't yet realized how very hard it is to ask a clear and complete question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to cope with it?  I suggest chocolate and regularly taking breaks from the site.  I mean that.  There are absolutely amazing people in the SE universe like Monica Cellio and HDE 226868 who never seem to get ruffled by the nonsense.  Then there's people like me who, if I don't take a break now and again, will find myself beating my monitor with my keyboard because I've convinced myself the OP d'jour is an unwashed barbarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And to make a point: if you let yourself get wrapped up in this (or any) site too much, then the site starts to become unfriendly &amp;mdash; very much like StackOverflow, where a small minority of people had become so wrapped up in the site (believing their time was being wasted if OPs weren't perfect) that they forced SE to overhaul their be-nice policy in a valiant effort to put a stop to it.  Find a way to both never believe your time spent on this site was wasted and to never waste your time on this site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T16:26:24.240" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T16:26:24.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6922" CreationDate="2018-12-03T18:05:13.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A timely question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5691/holiday-data-palooza-site-statistics-from-2017&quot;&gt;Datapalooza&lt;/a&gt; is just around the corner! I'm planning a more complete experience this year. Last year's focus was users, but this year's focus is going to be questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, if you don't want to do it yourself as MichaelKjorling suggests, comment with what you want, and I will see if I can work that into Datapalooza this year. Now is the time to let me know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23519" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T18:05:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T09:05:50.883" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;how do I do this? A bit confused at the moment. I do not know also how to change my lovely profile picture. Thanks a lot all community friends and brothers and sisters for helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57979" OwnerDisplayName="DevI" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T10:03:45.927" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T10:48:15.503" Title="How do I change my username?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6932" CreationDate="2018-12-04T09:37:47.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the top of the page, there is a symbol for the badge(s) you've received. Click on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be three tabs: &quot;Profile&quot;, &quot;Activity&quot; and &quot;Edit Profile and Settings&quot;. Click on the last one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you should be able to update your displayed name and picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct link, &lt;strong&gt;for you&lt;/strong&gt; should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/edit/57979&quot;&gt;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/edit/57979&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also that meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85818/how-can-i-change-my-name-on-a-stack-exchange-site&quot;&gt;How can I change my name on a Stack Exchange site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that there are some limitations about name changing. You are not allowed to change it too often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastEditorUserId="9685" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T10:48:15.503" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T10:48:15.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-04T14:30:11.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Nitpicking&quot; in comments saves time and frustration&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It protects question from becoming &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43478/225745&quot;&gt;chameleons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If you find such comment under your question, you should be glad - you can edit your question to remove loophole. If it ends up in the answer, you are no longer allowed to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T14:30:11.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T21:00:22.807" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the robot who floats in the lower left corner of the page. But he bounces during scrolling. A lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Update: I was using Edge. With Firefox the robot stays in place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe web designers had this figured out. Instead of repositioning with javascript on every scroll event, pin it in place with CSS absolute positioning. It looks better. No bouncing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another update: This other meta question also covers this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6810/site-background-image-flicker&quot;&gt;Site background image flicker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2170" LastEditorUserId="2170" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T00:05:18.257" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T00:05:18.257" Title="Floating robot bounces a lot" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-12-11T15:56:00.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-05T21:23:41.033" Score="14" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Bit of Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While reviewing Q&amp;amp;As at GraphicDesign.se for some insight I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/681/what-are-the-guidelines-for-asking-for-a-critique-of-my-work/682#682&quot;&gt;this post about logo reviews&lt;/a&gt;.  That post (which is trying to deal with the balance between subjective and objective and seems pertinent to us), states in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question must be phrased in such a way that answers can be objectively voted on by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not have a statement like this on our site, and it caused me to wonder whether or not we should.  Then @Molot and I had a brief discussion about whether or not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132118/what-is-the-relationship-between-surface-gravity-and-maximum-animal-size?noredirect=1#comment412510_132118&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; should be closed as Primarily Opinion-Based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not asking for input on that discussion, I'm only using it as an example of the problem with asking questions that can or cannot be answered objectively here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I started to ponder asking this question, I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4698/opinion-on-questions-that-involve-idea-generation-or-lack-a-right-answer&quot;&gt;historical meta question here at Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; that touches on this very issue.  It was looked at a lot, but not voted on very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we incorporate the above statement, or a similar statement, in our Help Center?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A &quot;yes&quot; answer might be cause to review our definitions for VTC reasons to help clarify them.  This would especially be useful for POB.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am a proponent of a specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;definition for &quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&quot; that varies from SE's standard definition&lt;/a&gt; because no question about magic can be legitimately asked using SE's definition.  It is a pain that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6240/is-it-possible-to-change-the-descriptive-text-for-the-pob-selection&quot;&gt;we can't change the descriptive text for POB&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am a proponent of SE's opinion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;, and that open-ended idea-fishing questions are intrinsically subjective and discussion-oriented.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am as guilty as the next guy for answering questions that would have been affected by the outcome of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T04:14:37.060" Title="Phrasing questions such that answers can be objectively voted upon" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|help-center|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6924" CreationDate="2018-12-05T22:12:18.683" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perusing the answers and pondering this myself, I've come to realise two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are big-picture people and little-picture people. Top-down and bottom-up methods of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a disparity between scientific and magical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131247/would-a-moon-made-of-water-pose-a-threat-to-earth-during-eclipses&quot;&gt;Would a Moon made of water pose a threat to Earth during eclipses?&lt;/a&gt; - I don't think I had a single nit-pick or maybe one that was a simple clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However posing a magic-based question can be like stirring up a hornet's nest. Just defining the type of magic and what powers are available is pretty much impossible. There can be an indefinite number of &quot;What if ...&quot; scenarios. Or simply the comment that, &quot;It's magic so anything is possible.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T22:12:18.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T05:11:11.273" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hovering over certain tags moves the robot up when the browser is narrow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6lEQE.gif&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(At the width I'm at, it's only the second, third, and fourth tags on questions that trigger this on the Home pages, and the third, fourth, and fifth on the Questions page. However, other widths have other ranges of tags affected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening is that it's creating a horizontal scrollbar, which pushes up some of the content, such as the robot and (if it's there) the cookie notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scrollbar shows up on all sites, but it's most noticeable here because of the robot moving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no reason to even create a scrollbar here because the content doesn't extend past the edge of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The browser I'm using is Chrome on Mac.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh and there's also no reason to give new users nothing but enormous black boxes when they first get here. It sucks, although this is a completely different issue (I suggest everyone support the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/314134/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T05:11:11.273" Title="Move the robot... with tags?" Tags="|bug|tags|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T19:55:34.730" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a (somewhat large) break, I have been more present in the last days. I noticed that many questions are flagged and get onto the Review Queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However a few hours or even a few days later, I notice that the questions are not only opened, but stay by 2-3 close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need 5 votes to close a question. However in a review process, if enough people (also 5, IIRC) vote to leave the question opened, the close votes are discarded and the question stays open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, those questions stay in-between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember to check the Review Queue, and decide. You may want to keep it open. Or close it, that's your choice. But it's better to try to take a decision, than staying in an undefined state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need some help, you may have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T20:51:06.037" Title="Don't forget to review the posts!" Tags="|discussion|reviewing-behavior|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6939" CreationDate="2018-12-06T20:29:28.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But it's better to try to take a decision, than staying in an undefined state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like we have closed legitimate questions, and let bad ones slip, because of this. If I see a question for which I can't say whether it is fitting or not for the site, I don't touch it. I'd rather not judge what I don't understand,  otherwise I could make a mistake that would be hard to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cast the last vote on closing a legitimate question, it takes five people with 3k+ rep to undo your mess. Even worse, you could delete an answer, which takes even more rep just to be able to vote for undoing. Please make sure to understand the consequences of what you are doing. The skip button is a legitimate choice in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T20:29:28.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T20:41:08.717" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;If people didn't see it there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/318910/time-for-some-more-swag&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;swag contest on Meta right now&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  I thought we could collect links to all the WB entries and help each other out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So.  Ill create a community wiki answer below where we can collect all our entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget to also vote for other entries you enjoy from users outside this community, though! Remember we're all supposed to be having fun here ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T06:50:14.290" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T06:50:14.290" Title="Worldbuilding entries for the swag contest on Meta" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6941" CreationDate="2018-12-06T20:43:09.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please provide your name and a link to your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/319454/255733&quot;&gt;An epic ode to Worldbuiling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica Cellio - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/318963/162102&quot;&gt;The problem with time travel: when am I?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HDE 226868 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/318944/162102&quot;&gt;A stopwatch for traveling near a black hole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AndyD273 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/319218/149126&quot;&gt;A quick note from future me&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mithrandir24601 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/318970/349720&quot;&gt;The Colour of Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cort Ammon &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/319221/232922&quot;&gt;Hack the future!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Victor Stafusa &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/319063/176034&quot;&gt;Clock from the past&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="3002" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T16:25:43.950" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T16:25:43.950" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-12-06T20:43:09.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6944" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-07T16:00:26.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T16:00:26.640" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T16:00:26.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-07T16:00:26.640" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Winter Bash (or holiday hats) to celebrate the end of the year." OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T16:20:13.190" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T16:20:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6939" CreationDate="2018-12-07T20:51:06.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If something has 2-3 close votes after a few days, then a decision &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; taken by those who saw it in the queue and that decision was to leave it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a vote, and the vote can go either way. Just because something is in the queue is not a reason to close it. It should be closed on its flaws or merits and it takes 5 votes to do so for a reason, it's not a railroad to closure once it's in the queue. So those questions don't &quot;stay in-between&quot;, they stay open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T20:51:06.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2018-12-10T01:35:24.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I understand the motivations behind this proposal and actually support them, my concern is that the word 'objective' can itself (in this particular context) be subjective. I'd argue that it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; (albeit unlikely) that this proposal, if implemented, could muddy the already murky POB waters. At best, it's likely to reduce magical traffic and I'll deal with that assertion first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal above actually does fit into our existing zeitgeist of POB definitions but my problem is that using the words &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;magical&lt;/em&gt; crosses the streams, so to speak. Either your system of magic is so well defined that the question involves no speculation whatsoever and you could extrapolate out the answer for yourself (but it's objective) or the question seeks a technical solution to a seemingly magical effect in keeping with the kinds of questions we like (but contains some measure of opinion on the 'best' approach).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get right down to it, the reason that POB gives us so much trouble is that it's a continuum - We know what blatant POB looks like, we know what blatant objective questions look like, but we're not really sure where one becomes the other; it's a boundary condition problem. Add to that the fact that we all have a slightly different perspective on where the boundary actually is, and we discover that the question of where POB starts should probably be closed as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@JBH, I think that your constant efforts to help us define this are exemplary and worthy of the best contributors to this august site. It's clear that your passion to resolve this exceeds the patience most of us would have with dealing with this problem. That said, I'm wondering if in fact we (as a community) are approaching this problem from the wrong end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of trying to tie down as precisely as possible where the dial for POB should be set, perhaps it would be better for our serial VTC'ers on POB to show a touch more restraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not say this as a criticism; I know many of you are as passionate about this issue as is JBH. I say it more to point out that if you have the option to VTC and you have &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; doubt about whether or not to do so, perhaps you - well, shouldn't. In so doing, you leave the question for those who believe it's legitimate and want to provide an answer. If you're &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; the question is POB, then close by all means, but this would allow people to set their own dials a little, and make their own judgement calls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you feel that aforementioned doubt, hold off on the VTC for 24hrs. We tell OPs not to accept an answer before 24hrs so that the entire globe gets a bite of the cherry, so to speak. Why not do the same (on a voluntary basis of course) if you're not sure about a question's POBness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not recommending a 24hr waiting period on VTCs because I know that would cause more trouble than it's worth. All I'm saying is that a bit of latitude on doubtful calls might at least allow a VTCer to judge based on the relative merits of the answers as much as the relative merits of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach would at least afford those who fall on the side of it being a legitimate question posting an answer and potentially getting it accepted. It might also give VTCers some context (in terms of possible answers) before making a final decision. It would also (in theory) allow site contributors to make up their own mind on where the dial should be set and answer questions before they get closed if they feel they have an answer that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; objective, even if the question isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote a famous fictional union rep, what we seem to be asking for is clearly defined boundaries of uncertainty and doubt. Perhaps (with respect,) we need less effort in policing this issue, not more effort in defining it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T01:35:24.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T11:26:52.083" Score="-4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to propose we make use of the existing structure of SE for sandbox questions instead of artificially putting them inside Meta. I've not been able to find a previous discussion about this although I have searched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently there seems to be a lot of admin to maintain it as part of Meta. This is because we are going against the grain of how the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow questions such as &quot;Here is my proposed question - how can I improve it for submission?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although answers may rely on opinion somewhat, answering could be restricted to people with substantial reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion 1. Open a new stack (is that the right term?) in addition to Meta, that allows you to ask questions and has a &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; tag just like Meta does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion 2. Put questions on the main Worldbuildng site and have a &lt;em&gt;Sandbox&lt;/em&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question will be phrased, &quot;Here is my proposed question, how can I improve it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way the SE structure is being used exactly as intended, i.e. question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this doable? If not what are the reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T18:39:57.520" Title="Suggestion for improved sandbox" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2018-12-10T11:34:51.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;World building is meant as a repository for all world building questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Polluting&quot; it with &quot;concepts to be refined&quot; would lower its value. Moreover, we have already Meta and the sandbox for that, so this proposal would further spread the information, making more difficult for novice users to find their way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T11:34:51.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2018-12-10T12:01:32.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you propose is accepting chameleon questions on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chameleon questions are bad enough that they should never be accepted. We opened up an exception in the form of the sandbox, and I have always had a bad feeling about it. Now imagine that we start accepting chameleonism in the main site. How do you know that a question has gotten into its final form? How do you know which answers are good for iten any answer can be invalidated at any time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say we keep things as they are now. Also I think that if the admins and community ever think that the sandbox is too much, they can either take it down or make an election to have more admins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T12:01:32.770" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2018-12-10T21:34:51.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when we set up the sandbox we talked about having a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/sandbox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sandbox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;on meta&lt;/em&gt;, so that sandbox questions would be questions (that people could answer with constructive feedback) and you could see all of them by visiting the tag.  We decided not to do that back then, though that doesn't mean we can't reopen the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A key point, though, is that it would be on &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;main&lt;/em&gt;, for the reasons other answers have given.  It's not fair to the community to have either (a) questions &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; to be &quot;not ready&quot; or (b) questions that are going to change a lot after people invest in answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas on how to make the existing sandbox (or meta in general) more discoverable are always welcome.  Things we already have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A community ad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A link in the help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many people who comment on new, under-developed questions with pointers to the sandbox (though that's after the fact).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A feed of new sandbox questions into the Factory Floor, our main chat room -- this is mainly to alert community members to new posts needing help, but for people who use chat, you can't hang out there long without becoming aware of the sandbox.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T21:34:51.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T21:42:15.267" Score="-1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing some reviewing lately, and I think two additional features in the review queue would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, enable the &quot;see vote counts&quot; from within the review tools, normally enabled with the &quot;established user&quot; privilege. As of right now, when I'm reviewing questions from the review queue it doesn't appear that this is enabled. I think this is important because it gives some sense of the controversy related to a question. Although, in an ideal world, all questions that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be closed, we aren't perfect yet and it'd be nice to know whether that +0 question/answer is part of a larger discussion that would provide additional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it'd be nice to know how many close-votes a question has from the very beginning. Normally, a user with the personal close/reopen powers can see how many close votes a question has, but this feature doesn't seem to be enabled from the Review Queue. Again, in an ideal world, it wouldn't matter how many close votes a question has, but I personally take the fourth and fifth close votes a lot more seriously than the second or third ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we make these changes if there are no strong feelings against them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T17:32:29.590" Title="Additional review tools?" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|closing-questions|reviews|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6954" CreationDate="2018-12-11T12:23:26.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would propose the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should stand by its own merits. Lots of upvotes don't mean a question is fit for the site, it just means a lot of people like it even if it is not fit. For example, this recent question has a score of 69, has 35 answers, but is not even close to being fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131941/21222&quot;&gt;Eternal space battle around a planet. But why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering other votes feels to me like saying &quot;hey, this question is too broad, story-based and probably based on opinions, but it has upvotes so it must be good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a real cold and neutral analysis of questions, which allow for judging them based solely on their merits, I would have the close vote counters removed completely from the site as a while. I think the upvotes and downvotes counter has its uses as a controversy measure, but it should not be shown in the queue since it may induce a bias on the voter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T17:32:29.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T17:32:29.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6954" CreationDate="2018-12-11T14:20:37.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it'd be nice to know how many close-votes a question has from the very beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree. You should vote on question, not on votes it already has. If it is off topic or unclear, then it is. If it isn't, then it isn't. Vote count cannot help you decide that, it can only distract you, promote conformity over honesty in you review etc. things we wouldn't want. Only exception is diamond moderator vote - diamonds may be unwilling to use modhammer, but willing to be the 5th user to VtC. And that's the only use-case I find fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your voting criteria in any queue include anything but the content of question itself, you are doing it wrong and you should stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T14:20:37.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2018-12-12T18:39:57.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually really like the fact that the Sandbox is a question of its own, with submitted questions appearing as answers. First, this discourages users from answering the question rather than providing feedback - we’ll occasionally get someone proposing solutions in the comments, but I think it’s dramatically reduced from the number of people who would attempt to answer the question if there was an “answer” box available. Second, the comment threads under each proposed questions lend themselves nicely to the kind of discussion that the Sandbox is supposed to engender. With actual answers, there’s a higher barrier to entry if you need to switch from editing your answer in response to comments instead of responding to the comments themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T18:39:57.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-13T22:25:41.557" Score="7" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;---------------------  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pjveQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pjveQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; -------------------------&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Come one come all, to the third annual share your imaginary internet points party!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jussssst in case this isn't entirely clear, an explanation, which I shamelessly stole from HDE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bountapalooza is all about giving to others - in this case, putting bounties on questions to give them more attention or to reward particularly excellent answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you start a bounty, please add it to the community wiki answer below, with the username of the asker, your username, and the number of reputation points for the bounty.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally run bountapalooza throughout &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/ask#&quot;&gt;winter bash&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy holidays, and happy world building, its been a weird/entertaining year :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are curious here are links to the previous two years' bountapaloozas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4186/get-in-the-spirit-the-first-annual-holiday-bounty-extravaganza-or-bountapaloo&quot;&gt;2016/2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5675/the-second-annual-holiday-bountapalooza&quot;&gt;2017/2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T19:39:37.477" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T19:39:37.477" Title="The third annual Holiday Bountapalooza" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6958" CreationDate="2018-12-13T22:30:37.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A list of the questions with bounties started during this season:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111874/shattering-swords-aye-or-nay&quot;&gt;Shattering Swords: Yea or Nay?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/39934/liquid&quot;&gt;Liquid&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt;, (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/133/what-are-some-ways-mass-changing-of-terrain-in-a-short-period-of-time-could-occu&quot;&gt;What are some ways mass changing of terrain in a short period of time could occur?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/89/absinthe&quot;&gt;Absinthe&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;, (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49171/food-requirements-for-localised-temporal-fields-at-different-time-velocities&quot;&gt;Food requirements for Localised Temporal Fields, at different time velocities?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21839/everybithelps&quot;&gt;EveryBitHelps&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;, (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132286/can-someone-help-me-with-ocean-currents-im-really-confused&quot;&gt;Can someone help me with ocean currents? I&amp;#39;m really confused&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/53821/tristan-henderson&quot;&gt;Tristan Henderson&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;JBH&lt;/a&gt;, (+150)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/110095/627&quot;&gt;Would it be possible to farm the energy from pulsars?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/49893/sievert&quot;&gt;Sievert&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114363/why-buy-tech-from-the-future&quot;&gt;Why buy tech from the future?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10364/green&quot;&gt;Green&lt;/a&gt;, (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132912/can-magnetism-be-what-causes-my-flat-earth-to-accelerate&quot;&gt;Can magnetism be what causes my flat Earth to accelerate?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/43163/dubukay&quot;&gt;Dubukay&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/132670/809&quot;&gt;How to prevent electronic advancement beyond the early cold war era?&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/58271/arlilo&quot;&gt;arlilo&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/809/mo%C5%82ot&quot;&gt;Mołot&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/4962/627&quot;&gt;Do different star systems experience time differently?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/288/twelfth&quot;&gt;Twelfth&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21222/renan&quot;&gt;Renan&lt;/a&gt; (+500)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/66681/627&quot;&gt;What would the sky look like in the SHADOW of planetary rings?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31741/bciga22322&quot;&gt;bciga22322&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3768/809&quot;&gt;How large does a spacecraft need to be to be visible from the surface of the Earth at 400 km altitude?&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/870/kami&quot;&gt;Kami&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/809/mo%C5%82ot&quot;&gt;Mołot&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134250/solar-recycling-or-how-to-keep-your-star-from-dying&quot;&gt;Solar recycling or: How to keep your star from dying&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by James (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132546/how-dangerous-is-a-500-year-old-nuclear-warhead&quot;&gt;How dangerous is a 500-year-old nuclear warhead?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/24998/zwol&quot;&gt;zwol&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by Hosch250 (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134321/habitability-of-a-planet-with-highly-variable-temperatures&quot;&gt;Habitability of a planet with highly variable temperatures&lt;/a&gt; asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52369/gabe-l&quot;&gt;Gabe&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by James (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/85957/627&quot;&gt;Given our current knowledge of exoplanets, approximately how many planets have earth-like gravity in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/40417/corwin62&quot;&gt;Corwin62&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/117297/627&quot;&gt;How can I make a black dwarf star?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/101045/627&quot;&gt;Could Earth and the Moon be the same size?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/23519/kingledion&quot;&gt;kingledion&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/135175/627&quot;&gt;Reactions to a Young Time Traveller&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/56319/tanzanite-dragoness&quot;&gt;Tanzanite Dragoness&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/56319/tanzanite-dragoness&quot;&gt;Tanzanite Dragoness&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/135178/627&quot;&gt;Does my plot point centered around eclipses make sense?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/53067/doctorjerk&quot;&gt;DoctorJerk&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/57654/rowyn-alloway&quot;&gt;Rowyn Alloway&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/37077/627&quot;&gt;Are there logical gaps in the periodic table in which you could insert a new mystery element for use as a fuel?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/135487/627&quot;&gt;A Roman-technology clock run by slaves - how to make it accurate&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/10759/chasly-from-uk&quot;&gt;chasly from UK&lt;/a&gt; (+500)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/114395/627&quot;&gt;Could the Sun be born again?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, here are the final bountapalooza stats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;22 bounties started . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on 22 different questions . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by 11 different users . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a total of 2700 reputation points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nice job, everyone! Happy holidays!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T19:39:18.963" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T19:39:18.963" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-12-13T22:30:37.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2018-12-16T08:10:42.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the statement &quot;Your question must be phrased in such a way that answers can be objectively voted on by the community.&quot; is that it provides zero guidance on what constitutes &quot;objective&quot;. No-one needs to be a philosopher to know what constitutes &quot;objective' is essentially &quot;subjective&quot;. And especially here where the majority of topics that are concerned with worldbuilding are speculative, hypothetical, conjectural, fictional entities or partially all the way through to purely imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Objective&quot; may sound good. But what is objective? Ask any philosopher and you soon discover there is nothing obvious about what constitutes objectivity. Is it the real? But what is real? For example, I know neutrinos are real. But I've seen one, nor do I expect to, I know their existence emerged from theoretical physics and there are instruments that can detect them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magnetic monopoles emerge from various theoretical physical models, but we don't have instruments that have detected them. There are instruments that should be able to detect them (or so we think) if they exist. So can someone answer a question about magnetic monopoles based on the certain models of physics? Yes they can, how objective are questions and answers? They have to be based on the assumption that monopoles exist. But does that make them objective? Guess what! The answer is both yes and no. Depending on what assumptions you prepared to make. To the monopole tolerant, the questions and their answers are objective. The research papers can be read and considered. To monopole deniers, this is pure speculation and not objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem with &quot;objective&quot; is that essentially collides with the issue, previously discussed on meta, about whether questions about non-realistic topics like magic, time travel or other hypothetical entities should be part of WB SE, and that only scientifically or technologically oriented questions are allowed here. It was decided they should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While, in principle, it sounds fine to have an improved way of guiding people to make better decisions it is necessary to ensure that the people who apply that rule can make better decisions. That requires them to have sufficient understanding of the rules, the context(s) within which they are applied, a body of precedents about the ways such rules have been applied previously, and the knowledge and experience about making those decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to those things is obvious. The existing criteria for vote to close decisions are observed in the breach than in being followed. Adding a rule about objectivity will only another set of criteria to be ignored. Any expectation that it would lead to improvement is a chimera. To make objectivity work requires wisdom and compassion, and is there enough of that to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One consequence of SE model is that it naturally excludes for consideration here many questions that should be dealt with as worldbuilding. There are times when I have considered there should be a &quot;too good to close&quot; button for questions that might be closed because they meet vote to close criteria, but are so worthwhile in terms of worldbuilding that they should be allowed to be asked and definitely should be answered, and so would be left open. After all, it is sort of thing that would improve WB SE and help build it up as a database of good questions and good answers. This, of course, will never happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T08:10:42.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T11:57:10.213" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I encountered an answer I thought was not really an answer. I clicked Flag, and got only three options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rude or abusive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to lack of any other flags available to me, I selected last one, and got it declined with description that's pretty ridiculous given the circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - Using standard flags helps us prioritize problems and resolve them faster. Please familiarize yourself with the list of standard flags: see What is Flagging? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am familiar with standard flags all right. Simply, NAA and VLQ flags wasn't available yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, &lt;strong&gt;the same answer, with the same score, no edits made&lt;/strong&gt;, and suddenly NAA flag is available. How is that possible? Why set of flags I could see changed, when the post did not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I omitted flagged post on purpose. This is not about this answer, it is about flags and how site works. I'm sure moderators and devs can check it with ease, if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T12:32:41.027" Title="Why Not An Answer flag is sometimes unavailable?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6967" CreationDate="2018-12-18T12:32:41.027" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my guess: you flag a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have similar levels of activity in the site, but you have placed more than 5x more helpful flags than I have. And I consider myself a flagger!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And notice that we have a limit for how many flags we can place at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gOQfy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Flag limits&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This limit is refreshed here and there, though I don't know by which logic; I believe you reached yours before a refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T12:32:41.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T16:48:17.453" Score="12" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day, another moderator and I were tossing around the idea of having an unofficial site Twitter account. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/264548/274942&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange stopped making them a few years ago&lt;/a&gt; for various reasons, but we could still have an independent, community-run account, which would tweet out particularly interesting questions from the main site, as well as blog posts, special events (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6958/627&quot;&gt;the holiday Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt;), and anything else worldbuilders might find interesting. It would be a great way to increase our site's visibility (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/spacesuit-design-astronauts-spiders/578119/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;and it turns out we might be more visible than anyone expected!&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/mi_yodeya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@mi_yodeya&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackLiterature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@StackLiterature&lt;/a&gt;) already have this sort of unofficial account. As I understand it, while a few users have explicit access to the account, they also use a service called &lt;a href=&quot;https://dlvrit.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlvr.it&lt;/a&gt;, which treats starred messages (one-boxed questions) in a chat room as an RSS feed, and tweets those, in addition to manual tweets (I hope people will correct me if I'm wrong about the details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see us having a similar setup: maybe 3-4 people having access to the login credentials (ideally including at least one mod), as well as some sort of chat room for folks to submit possible questions to be tweeted. We could either enable the RSS feed model or allow those 3-4 users to choose from submissions. Perhaps we could also add an RSS feed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As with the blog, we'd have to make it clear that the account is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; operated by Stack Exchange; it's an independent venture. This impacts things like the name and handle, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/295012/274942&quot;&gt;we shouldn't use something like @stackWorldbuilding or @WorldbuildingStackExchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd want to keep the tweets pretty narrow in scope, and I'd maybe even consider asking that we not reply to other tweets, to reduce the chances of . . . potential problems. In other words, I'd prefer that, at least for now, it act like an RSS feed, but awesomer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to ensure that we put a filter on what we tweet. We need to be mindful that, like the Hot Network Questions list, question titles will be appearing largely without context, and we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, from time to time, get titles that seem not great without context. This makes me want to ensure some manual oversight of tweets, to prevent problems - at least in the early stages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We get a lot of our traffic from inside the Stack Exchange network, as expected. It's a phenomenon we've been noticing for years and years. This could help us reach the larger world building community out there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as I write this, I notice that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2979/627&quot;&gt;we had this same discussion almost three years ago&lt;/a&gt;. It had pretty strong support, but it never went anywhere. I'm curious if people feel the same way now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? Ideas? Concerns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T18:42:52.247" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T18:42:52.247" Title="Do we (still) want a site Twitter account?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|twitter|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6969" CreationDate="2018-12-18T17:00:41.427" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd support this idea, with a couple things to mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A feed from the Blog seems perfectly fine to me.  That content is already curated by one of the admins on the blog having to intentionally publish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wouldn't recommend tweeting ANYTHING from our chatroom.  That place gets super weird. :D and discussions of genocide or the apocalypse (or snorting coke) with no context is probably a really bad idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I agree we need to keep an eye on the topics we send out...its one thing for us to be strange in our home...so to speak, but pushing that out to the world should be a &lt;em&gt;controlled explosion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise yeah, I like the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T17:00:41.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6969" CreationDate="2018-12-18T17:20:01.660" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I supported the idea when it came up (see my answer there for more reasoning) and I still do.  A few considerations specifically in response to the points you raised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actually, responding to other tweets can be a good thing.  The Mi Yodeya Twitter account responds to other people's tweets if we can tweet a relevant question, and if people respond to our tweets (constructively) we engage.  The key is to avoid getting into (or starting) anything &lt;em&gt;heated&lt;/em&gt;.  Isaac, who does about 99% of our tweeting, is really good at managing this.  I think we can do so too, but we do need to be careful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A feed from the blog is good, but even better is to have manually-written tweets that &lt;em&gt;promote&lt;/em&gt; the blog post somehow (and link to it).  Medium will provide a preview anyway, so we get better reach if we use the remaining 250 characters or so to entice people to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Retweeting others' worldbuilding content is a good way to build some engagement with our Twitter account (and maybe gain followers).  We should be selective; most of the content should be ours, but mixing in other content is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We'll need a way for people to suggest questions to tweet, but I agree that curation should be manual.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T17:20:01.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2018-12-19T04:14:37.060" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE is very subjective by nature.  I have noticed that what makes a good (that is, not closed, highly upvoted) answer often has to do with how exactly the answerer interprets the rules of the proposed world, and whether the questioneer/voters/mods agree with that interpretation of the rules of the proposed world (which could be the real world or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think with the question you linked to, at the end of the day it was closed because it didn't &lt;strong&gt;feel&lt;/strong&gt; like a specific question.  One of the things put forth in the comments on that question was that there's only one data point--but I would submit to you that the number of data points hasn't been an impedence to many other questions getting happily answered and highly upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other criteria we could try to come up with would probably have the same problem: it would probably shut down a lot of good questions that we see on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the beauty of the worldbuilding SE is that it does what none of the other SE sites do: it lets you ask theoretical questions that &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; be objectively answered, when you just want to discuss what sounds good from a story-writing perspective and you want to be as realistic as you can be, to sound feasible.  We get questions that are in fields that are all over the map, in all of the different fields that other SE sites exist for (biology, programming, etc)--but the reason that worldbuilding exists is that those sites are based on only strict, provably reality.  They're intended for professionals, not for fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making broad generalizations here but I think the point is made.  Worldbuilding SE's weakness is really its strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7507" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T04:14:37.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T10:10:51.327" Score="15" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/319274/439712&quot;&gt;Responsive Design Themes - What can sites customize and how can they get changes implemented?&lt;/a&gt; and came across this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding - their robot, Slartibotfast, was a major part of their site identity, so we were sure to incorporate it into the design by letting it float at the bottom of the page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Slartibotfast? Are they a bot like the community bot? What's their history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59407" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T07:07:37.740" Title="Who is Slartibotfast?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6974" CreationDate="2018-12-20T10:22:03.637" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Slartibotfast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken, it should be the guy below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ABkIb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ABkIb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Slartibotfast&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again my assumption, named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slartibartfast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slartibartfast is a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a comedy/science fiction series created by Douglas Adams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slartibartfast is a Magrathean, and a designer of planets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty appropriate for worldbuilding, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T10:29:14.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6974" CreationDate="2018-12-20T10:24:13.287" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As L.Dutch mentions, that's the name we gave to the robot you can see on the left side of your browser. The name was chosen as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3102/naming-our-robot/3104#3104&quot;&gt;http://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3102/naming-our-robot/3104#3104&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woman on his side, is named Pandora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T10:24:13.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-21T15:50:40.620" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I came up with an idea of making a competition here! I've already &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/48122042#48122042&quot;&gt;discussed&lt;/a&gt; that with others, and they agreed. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How the competition will be held(&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=48123717#48123717&quot;&gt;Green's&lt;/a&gt; idea):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's say there's 20 questions. Contestants pick up to 5 of those questions to answer. Questions that&#xA;  no one chooses will be dropped. Prizes are awarded to each winner in&#xA;  the category. The judges then pick an overall winner from the answer&#xA;  that best meets X_n criteria. Thus, we get categorical winners and an&#xA;  overall winner. Questions must have at least three answers in order to&#xA;  be considered. (The reasoning being that a question with only one&#xA;  answer isn't really a competition. We need at least three.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prize for the winner is 100 of my reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our categories so far(10):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Animals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astronomy &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warfare &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biology &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Politics &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Survival &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Love &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we need 10 volunteers to post a question for each category. And we need 5 judges. Write in the comments and answers below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55240" LastEditorUserId="55240" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T20:58:06.950" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T17:17:05.427" Title="Winter Worldbuilding Competition!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6978" CreationDate="2018-12-23T17:17:05.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once managed an essay contest with a \$1,000 award for the winner.  The company I worked for carefully thought out the subject matter and rules of the competition, organized judges, then prepared advertising and marketing to draw attention to it.  The investment of the company's time and money was considerable (the investment of my own time was more than I expected).  How many entrants did we have?  One (she obviously won the \$1,000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the U.S. town of Malad City, Idaho.  When Idaho's lottery hits the half-billion range, the town is inundated with people buying lottery tickets.  The town has rejected proposals to build more gas stations at the town's freeway exit to accomodate all the people who drive over the state line to buy the darn things.  On any given day while the contest is running, there can be (I kid you not) 2X-3X the town's population standing in line to buy lottery tickets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's your point, JBH?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contest is well intentioned and I very much applaud your effort and willingness to source the award.  But the contest feels &lt;em&gt;complicated.&lt;/em&gt;  Volunteers need to post 20 unclosed questions (on this site...).  Entrants must post 5 answers.  You also need judges to donate their time.  You haven't even posted the criteria for winning yet and already the investment of time is pretty high.  In my experience, the more complex a competition is the more likely it will fail to meet your expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contest should be simple, cheap, and have high value.  The difference between my two examples is that one was complex to design and participate in without enough reward to entice people to invest in the proces &amp;mdash; the other was dead simple: drive to Idaho and spend $1 on a ticket with the potential of winning hundreds of millions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're currently offering a complex process for a 100 rep reward.  That's only half a daily limit that isn't hard to reach if you participate in the site regularly.  (Heck, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31698/willk&quot;&gt;WillK&lt;/a&gt;, whose meteoric rise in rep comes from writing fun answers &lt;em&gt;all the time.&lt;/em&gt;  And kudos to Will!  If he doesn't hit the magic 100,000 rep point today, he will tomorrow!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could easily be wrong, but this feels like you're creating a contest for the sake of creating a contest with the classic belief of &quot;if I build it, they will come.&quot;  I would very much like so see this effort succeed, and to that end I have a few suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Begin with a goal that doesn't actually have anything to do with the mechanics of the contest.  In other words, have a better reason for doing this than the dubious fun of participating in a contest.  In keeping with the Stack Exchange ideal, I would recommend avoiding large, vague goals like &quot;to increase site participation&quot; and stay as specific and focused as humanly possible.  This is what made the Fortnightly Topic Challenges mentioned by a CVn popular: they had the very specific goal of building interest in just one tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don't have a lot of options when it comes to advertising a contest.  The ratio of meta users to main users has, I strongly suspect, dropped considerably as the site has matured (that would be an interesting graph...).  You could post a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5801/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ad&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6818/a-promotion-for-the-community-promotion-ads&quot;&gt;based on my own experience&lt;/a&gt;, it's a very hard sell to get people to even look at them &amp;mdash; and you need a positive score of 6 just to invoke the ad.  Which is all a very lengthy way of saying you need to worry about exposure, and the more complex your offering, the less likely your very limited exposure will react to it.  Which leads me to....&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep it simple.  Simple, simple, simple, simple, simple.  The bigger and more grand you try to make this, the more likely it will be ignored.  A fair number of people on this site pop in at the end of a work day, have some fun for 30-60 minutes, then disappear for 24 hours.  They have very little to invest no matter how fun they believe the contest to be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I admire your willingness to do this, but the effort-to-reward ratio is very high, and it wants to be very low.  The max rep for a bounty reward is 500.  You might want to wait until you can offer that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T17:17:05.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-24T19:12:28.290" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm editing tag wikis and two new ones have appeared (one in just the last few minutes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/western&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;western&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;western&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/byzantium&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;byzantium&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;byzantium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As used in their questions, these appear to be &quot;era&quot; tags.  They would have been more conveniently called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/western-era&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;western-era&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;western-era&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/byzantium-era&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;byzantium-era&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;byzantium-era&lt;/a&gt; for quick searching, but more to the point...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could be dozens, maybe even hundreds of such tags.  However, previous to this time we had two:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; (for questions relating to the Medieval era as a whole: 500ad-1500ad)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/victorian-era&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;victorian-era&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;victorian-era&lt;/a&gt; (for questions about the Victorian Era of the UK, approx 1837-1901)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a similar tag...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt; (for questions taking place in a medieval setting similar to culture...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could be convinced to merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, more to the point, do we want &quot;era&quot; tags?  My concern is that they are dependent on not one, but two variables: &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;when.&lt;/em&gt;  In other words, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/victorian-era&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;victorian-era&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;victorian-era&lt;/a&gt; means (e.g.) 1850s England, but not necessarily 1850s Japan.  However, during that time England was very colonial and so the time-reference has widespread applicability (e.g., it could apply to India).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/western&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;western&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;western&lt;/a&gt; tag, which completely overlaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/victorian-era&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;victorian-era&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;victorian-era&lt;/a&gt; and I suspect only has meaning in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Do we want to continue using Era tags? If so, do we want to focus them only on time periods, or on both time periods and places?  Do we want to rename the tags to all have an &quot;-era&quot; suffix to make them easier to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;HOWEVER!  I have not taken the time to search tag-by-tag through the entire list to see if there are more era-based tags.  There could be more.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T22:31:13.313" Title="Do we want era tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2018-12-24T23:34:54.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm against it because that has a huge potential to be source of confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The names of eras are heavily dependent upon the local culture and history and, while some can seem almost universal, they would cover very different things for users on different parts of the world as you pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, for me, 'western' is not an era. It's a location, as in 'western countries', or a kind of movie based on a distorted view of reality, the 'western movies'. A tag that would read 'western-era' would have no meaning from my point of view as a non-US person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, if we allow eras, we run to risk of multiplying tags that wouldn't be very useful, since some users might want to tag eras from works of fiction that they used as inspiration, such as the Ages of Middle-Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55317" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T23:34:54.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-26T05:41:12.340" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working with tag wikis and just completed filling out the fields for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt;.  Next on the list is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to identify &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt; (which puts it up for community vote to approve/reject the synonym association), but it won't let me as I don't have a score of 5 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a mod or anyone with a score of 5 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt; agrees that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt; could our should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt;, would you be willing to make the assignment and invoke the vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T12:01:36.083" Title="Recommend making &quot;city-design&quot; a synonym of &quot;city&quot;" Tags="|support|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6985" CreationDate="2018-12-26T12:01:36.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, tag synonyms aren't used for significant substring matches. This would make &lt;em&gt;city-design&lt;/em&gt; a poor synonym for &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt;, as if the two are separate anyone typing &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt; into the tags field will get suggestions for &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;city-design&lt;/em&gt;. An example of a better synonym could be, say, &lt;em&gt;village&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;homestead&lt;/em&gt; (none of which exist at this point) to &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt;, since (say) someone who types &lt;em&gt;village&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't otherwise know that the proper tag is &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at the two tags in detail, but I do note that we have at this time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0 questions tagged both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any obvious reason why we should have both, however, so I'd be inclined to just &lt;strong&gt;merge the two tags.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Since there are so few questions involved,&lt;/strong&gt; this is something the community could easily do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd probably be inclined to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt; while letting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/city-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;city-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;city-design&lt;/a&gt; die the honorable death by question edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T12:01:36.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2018-12-26T18:33:15.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm for &lt;em&gt;properly categorized&lt;/em&gt; era tags as they can really help in understanding how to approach an answer to a question.  And it helps for people looking at questions from similar eras.  Those new tags though are not useful, for the reasons mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went through all the tags to find everything about an era.  I might have missed one or two.  It's a mess.  Lots of duplication, overlap, overly specific periods, even a typo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ancient-history × 105 (very broad, spanning thousands of years; writing to fall of Rome)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bronze-age × 5 (4000-1000 B.C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;byzantium (no use, no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cold-war × 20 (1947 – 1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;far-future × 101 (hundreds to thousands of years)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feudalism × 14 (Fall of Rome to 1500 C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;future × 16 (no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;industrial-age × 21 (near the Industrial Revolution)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;medieval × 475 (500-1500 C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;medieval-europe × 82&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;middle-ages × 30&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modern-age × 163&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;near-future × 323 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prehistoric-times × 41 (before written language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pre-industrial × 20&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;renaissance × 34&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stoneage × 10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;victorian-era × 8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;western (no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wild-west × 5 (1800's in American West)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would love to see a huge overhaul.  Though the retagging will drown out new questions for a time.  Let's standardize things.  It will make it so much easier to research old questions and to answer new ones, that the disruption will be worth it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastEditorUserId="54137" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T21:29:20.297" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T21:29:20.297" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2018-12-26T21:43:27.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about this idea so please up or down vote, comment, etc.  What if we had...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A comprehensive and sequential set of tags for tech level&lt;/strong&gt;, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pre-Fire Era&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stone Age Era&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bronze Age Era&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iron Age Era&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on (I will leave it to others to delineate the complete list).  Or they could read &quot;Era: Bronze Age.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; we had &lt;strong&gt;a handful of carefully cultivated tags that correspond to specific times/places in earth's history&lt;/strong&gt;.  Not overly specific but ones that are very common and generally understood, even if they didn't occur everywhere.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Medieval&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Victorian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Industrial Age&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would also be a few tags that could represent era but really have other meanings and would exist only if they were used for the other meanings.  For example, Western is a genre (in literature, TV/movies, etc...think &lt;em&gt;Firefly&lt;/em&gt;) and feudalism is an economic system.  Though we'd have to be careful with these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T21:43:27.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2018-12-26T22:26:06.867" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This community wiki is meant to be edited by one and all.  As you edit, please remember that we are trying to come up with a list of terms that make sense to worldbuilding, not Earthlings (or, specifically, Americans. I hope my brothers and sisters understand what I mean).  The goal of this project is to create a series of eras/ages that are defined by advancing technological and cultural achievements - not simply the timeline of Earth.  This is especially problematic with the medieval era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These era classifications are for the purpose of defining predictable technological and cultural references for the purpose of worldbuilding.  Because different areas of the Earth developed at vastly different rates (often resulting in regional &quot;eras&quot;), the eras defined below may not conform directly to Earth history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you edit, please pay attention to how I've formatted things and try to keep that formatting.  Organization is our friend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am not married to the syntax of the tag names.  Their primary purpose here is both ease-of-use and recognizability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just to beat a dead horse, when you look at these, please remember to take your nationalist-glasses off.  I found it a real challenge to look past my U.S. historical upbringing just to think of how this might apply to the Phillipines, Africa, or Australia.  Remember, fictional worlds may be nothing at all like Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-pre-history&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Period of time before organized groups of specified sapient beings.  The specified beings have not developed tools or art of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-stone-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Period of time defined by the first appearance of organized groups of the specified sapient beings including the first appearance of tools (manipulation of environment), basic weapons (organized defense), and art (expression of ideas).  Tool development during this era begins with stones crafted for specific purposes and ends with copper metallurgy.  Art development during this era begins with nothing and ends with pictoral art (e.g. cave drawings).  Weapon development for this era begins with clubs and ends with primitive edged weapons including knives and swords.  Groups of beings are principally tribal and often nomadic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-bronze-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Period of time defined by the use of bronze for stronger tools (manipulation of environment) and sophisticated edged weapons (organized defense) and the bow and arrow.  Art (expression of ideas) begins to advance to codified writing systems.  Permanent communities develop with stone foundations.  Mining, forestry, and agriculture have become common in many communities.  The wheel is invented and the first wooden-plank hulls appear.  The first organized religions and governments are established.  Written law begins to appear.  It should be noted that no world is wholly within any one era at any one time.  World development allows many societies to progress at different rates depending on many factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-iron-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Period of time defined by iron smithing (specifically the development of carbon steel) with advances in manual mass-production including advanced smithing and crafting resulting in the first organized trade guilds.  Writing results in rapid growth of religion, government, and education.  Naval science began to advance with the invention of the trireme.  The end of the iron age is defined by the invention of paper and the introduction of rhetorical algebra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-philosophy-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Period of time from the end of the iron age to the beginning of the medieval or middle age.  This age saw little advancement in metalurgy and the sciences, but substantial advancement in government, education, engineering, religion, philosophy, and military tactics.  Chariots are in regular use and large ports facilitate trade from remote areas (though oceans cannot be arbitrarily crossed yet).  Works of fiction begin to appear as do formal histories.  The depiction of art has expanded to both abstract and factual art invoking both color and depth.  Coinage becomes a recognizable part of family life, though barter is still the predominant form of exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-medieval-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The medieval age sees the development of large armies and the regular use of explosives.  Chemistry advances to include rudimentary pharmacology.  Permanent hamlets and villiages give way to towns and cities forcing the development of early sewage, water, and food transport systems.  Formal financial systems are developed and coinage is now a regular part of life.  Textile and construction technology advance with the development of waterwheel-driven automation.  Personal armor gives way to the need for mobility in the face of flintlock firearms.  Syncopated algebra is discovered and organized animal husbandry is introduced.  Stage theatrics such as the presentation of plays outside of religious contexts are introduced.  Ships that can traverse oceans are introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-discovery-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defined by the rise of colleges and universities and the desire to understand why things work the way they do.  Empirical experiment begins to give way to mathematical analysis and modeling.  Calculus is discovered and many of the basic sciences are discovered including electricity, biology, thermodynamics, physiology, and material science.  By the end of this age ocean-going ships are common place, militaries have converted to firearms and cavalry, governments are introducing representative organization, and individual civil rights are being won.  Global trade is introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-colonial-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defined by the desire or need for growing societies to expand to new lands combined with the technological foundations to permit massive displacement in short periods of time.  Cartography and navigation mature.  Communication over distances advance with the development of semaphores.  Early development of factories to advance mass production is seen and underground sewer and water distribution becomes common.  Calculus is discovered and chemistry expands to include regular development of acids, fertilizers, and explosives.  Government is in its golden age as law, philosophy, and economics combine to displace religion as the primary motivator for government.  The first hot-air balloons are seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-industrial-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The industrial age is marked by substantial advancements in science and art as the conceptualization of ideas (modeling) becomes increasingly important.  The age sees the development of blimps and dirigibles, as well as the first airplanes.  Steam and combustion displaces wind and animals as the primary forms of mobilization.  Mass assembly revolutionizes lifestyle as inexpensive manufactured tools, utensils, furniture, and construction supplies produce a boom in city size and living standards.  Regular education for the young is introduced, medical sciences become preventative rather than reactive, and global trade matures.  Machines are so common that protective trade organizations form to influence government in a way not seen since the introduction of guilds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;era-science-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This age sees the displacement of religion in favor of science as the principal instructor about environmental, behavioral, physiological, and celestial attributes.  The search for truth becomes the search for facts.  The scientific method is perfected and with it the development of weapons of mass destruction.  The world's first mega-cities are seen and representative government begins to give way to participatory government, allowing for increased protections for previously minority beliefs and biologies.  Global communication becomes a reality and machine computation replaces human computation.  Advances in chemistry lead to substantial advances in transportation and flight.  Theh civilization leaves the planetary atmosphere for the first time and begins to harness nuclear energies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where we move into the future eras.  We likely need to leave the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt; tags alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T22:26:06.867" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-12-26T22:26:06.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2018-12-26T22:31:13.313" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going to make this a comment but...then I kept typing and realized it needed to be an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First...I like it:&lt;/strong&gt; My OCD really appreciates the intent, to simplify a bunch of tags down to a simple few that apply across cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second...it &lt;em&gt;unfortunately&lt;/em&gt; makes no sense to do that:&lt;/strong&gt;  So the problem with making the tags acultural (if that's even a word) is that the tag then loses it's meaning.  Making the tag more generic makes it a meta tag, and worse a meta tag that provides no valuable context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can be an expert in Medieval Europe...but odds are I am NOT going to be an expert in the whole world between the same set of dates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we don't include the cultural context I don't know anything about the world being discussed and the tag has no value.  The technology level, culture, religion, military, and political &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt; during any given time period varies DRASTICALLY from location to location.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The point of the tags after all is to 1. take us to questions we like, are an expert in, or have questions about.  Generic time windows don't do any of those things, unless you are just a really big fan of 938 - 1012 CE for some reason and 2. They help provide context.  If I see a question with the medieval-europe tag, I can get a lot of context outside of what is provided in the text of the question, again, generic window era tags wouldn't do this for us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So...what to do, what to do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(thanks for compiling the list @Cyn)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ancient-history × 105 (very broad, spanning thousands of years; writing to fall of Rome)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;bronze-age × 5 (4000-1000 B.C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;byzantium (no use, no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;cold-war × 20 (1947 – 1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;far-future × 101 (hundreds to thousands of years)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;feudalism × 14 (Fall of Rome to 1500 C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;future × 16 (no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;industrial-age × 21 (near the Industrial Revolution)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;medieval × 475 (500-1500 C.E.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;medieval-europe × 82&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;middle-ages × 30&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;modern-age × 163&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;near-future × 323 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;prehistoric-times × 41 (before written language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;pre-industrial × 20&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;renaissance × 34&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;stoneage × 10 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;victorian-era × 8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;western (no description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;wild-west × 5 (1800's in American West)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I think we can safely merge the &lt;strong&gt;pre-history&lt;/strong&gt; stuff, i.e. stone-age, ancient-history, prehistoric-times.  This information is so far back that it feels safe to squish it all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I haven't looked at the questions but it feels safe to say we can merge &lt;strong&gt;western&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;wild-west&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;medieval, medieval-europe, middle-ages and fuedalism:&lt;/strong&gt; Some research probably needs to be done but I'd hazard a guess that 99 - 100 percent of these questions are in reference to Europe.  Likely safe to synonymize/merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest I am pretty comfortable with.  Ironically I recall the conversation we had when we built the era's tag list out in the first place and I totally supported making it more generic and less culture specific...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I've changed my mind/Here's the point of this ramble.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without the cultural contexts tags with a time window don't really have any value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the tags list is &lt;em&gt;western-centric&lt;/em&gt; is a byproduct of the fact that the majority of our users are western and thus the topics we discuss are what we are familiar with. &lt;strong&gt;This is not an insult to other cultural traditions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing is stopping users from creating tags with different era/cultural contexts.  I would, as an example, love to read up on some questions set in the 3 Kingdoms era of feudal China, but I am nowhere near qualified to write those.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Discussion: Do we want to continue using Era tags? If so, do we want&#xA;  to focus them only on time periods, or on both time periods and&#xA;  places? Do we want to rename the tags to all have an &quot;-era&quot; suffix to&#xA;  make them easier to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make a finer point.  There is some clean-up we can certainly do, my opinion is listed out above.  But it does not make sense to reduce the tags to certain time windows in global history.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T22:31:13.313" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2018-12-27T22:44:23.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to write a plot where X happens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Why would X?  How do I achieve X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Off-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;These questions are about a story set in a world, not about world building. They are sometimes fit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://writing.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;One of the criteria an OP should use to evaluate the suitability of a question is whether or not the &lt;em&gt;circumstances&lt;/em&gt; of the story materially affect the question, or whether the question is materially affected by the &lt;em&gt;circumstances&lt;/em&gt; of the story.  If you can ask yourself a question similar to, &quot;does my question depend on whether or not my protagonist has a quart of paint thinner in his backpack?&quot; and the answer is &quot;yes,&quot; then the question is off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/21222&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3298/21222&quot;&gt;When should I close a question as &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T22:52:52.433" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T22:52:52.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T00:30:33.640" Score="22" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal participation in this site has come about because I have always had lots of ideas and prior to discovering WB there was nowhere for them to go. Who knows - it may one day turn out that I actually build a world that ties them all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question though is who is this site actually meant for and what are they actually doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) writing a novel or series of novels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) designing an RPG&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) creating computer games&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) creating their own fantasy world to escape from reality with no intention of publishing or involving anyone else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e) something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be genuinely interested to know, partly out of inquisitiveness and partly because I believe some of the conflicts of opinion on whether a question is a 'good' one or not may come from different people's motivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="10759" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T00:37:19.870" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T05:04:45.697" Title="Who actually builds worlds and why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-28T12:53:20.640" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd check many of your proposed answers, maybe all! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dabble in writing, design my own worlds for my RPGs both online and IRL, did some stuff in computers (just starting), create worlds for silly fun with friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be conflicts of opinion on what is a 'good' question when it comes to creativity and imagination like what we do here. For example, some people have their imagination more grounded in reality, and will consider anything that violates laws of physics as we know them as bad, while others will just forget about the laws of nature as we know them know to create what they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all have our likes and dislikes, and this community only needs to be civil about this and try to find some common ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55317" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T16:12:53.763" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T16:12:53.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-28T16:24:27.770" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;raises hand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started out on Worldbuilding solely answering questions; it was about 3 or 4 months before I asked one of my own (and those first 3 or 4 months saw a lot of answers from me). For a while, I worked on various unrelated worlds that kinda ended up vanishing into nothing, although I did go so far as to start writing about one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt; before sunsetting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the spring of 2016, though (!), I've been almost exclusively working on a world that's shown more promise. The premise is that a galaxy-wide consortium of scientists and engineers have gathered to built a biosphere from scratch, which has involved terraforming a hitherto uninhabitable world in secrecy, in the outer reaches of the galaxy. While there were a number of technical problems involved, they - as of the writing of this answer - have managed to successfully jump-start a series of ecosystems, and are in the process of studying them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has involved a number of questions I've asked to date (6, at last count): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39059/627&quot;&gt;Can every animal eat most other animals?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39117/627&quot;&gt;Is a galaxy-wide language possible?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39183/627&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the quickest way to add oceans to a planet?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44910/627&quot;&gt;How can I move a planet?&lt;/a&gt; (sort of), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/86007/627&quot;&gt;What are some relatively detailed programs or resources for simulating planet-wide evolution?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/115874/627&quot;&gt;Can I monitor animal movements from space?&lt;/a&gt;. I'm hoping to write an opening chapter - or at least an overview of the setup - in the next couple of weeks, if possible. We'll see how that goes. In the end, I don't expect to publish anything, but I definitely do at least want to build the world itself and write maybe a few short narratives taking place in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mostly answer questions on this site; it's what I like to do. I mean, I like to think about strange questions and bizarre scenarios, but in the end, it turns out that I just like to write about astronomy and physics and math and related topics. This provides me a place to do just that, and to help people. But it has, also, proved to be an excellent resource for my own world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding, like all Stack Exchange sites, is definitely meant as a place where people building worlds who have questions and problems can come to find solutions. But I also think it's a place for those of us who aren't building worlds every day/week/month/actively who just want to think about these things and write answers for those who need them. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; very much a place for us, too. I think a lot of the answerers - certainly the most prolific answerers - fall into that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T16:24:27.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-28T16:28:38.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I fit neatly into any of your categories. I'm not into writing or game design. I've just been making a world (one world only!) for such a long while, thirty to forty years, it's become like breathing. Just part and parcel of being.  I have published some stories, but that's not the impetus. I think they're more a byproduct of having a somewhat worked out world.  Mostly, I just share some of what I've come up with on worldbuilding and language invention forums for anyone who's interested to enjoy: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://world.conlang.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Main Wiki&lt;/a&gt;); (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frathwiki.com/The_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some Other Tidbits&lt;/a&gt;); (&lt;a href=&quot;https://cbb.aveneca.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&amp;amp;t=4585&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stories &amp;amp; Articles&lt;/a&gt;); (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.deviantart.com/elemtilas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Art&lt;/a&gt;); (&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/your-time-is-come-8a3fbb695baa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree about geopoetic philosophy giving rise to conflict over whether a query is good or bad or on &amp;amp; off topic here.  (Professional) writers especially tend to view worldbuilding very narrowly I've noticed. It's a thing done for the specific purpose of building a frame around which to construct a story. That done, you write the story. That done, you move on. Game designers seem to approach similarly. And neither delve very deep. I think these are the folks who tend to ask the character &amp;amp; plot &amp;amp; maybe &quot;high concept&quot; queries. The story questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those of us who approach from a &quot;realistic&quot; or &quot;scientific&quot; perspective may be writers but perhaps more of the hard sci-fi orientation. These are the ones that ask about climate and planetary mechanics and look for equations all the time. These folks tend I think to close the weird and wonderful queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those of us who approach from a &quot;fantastic&quot; or &quot;mythological&quot; perspective may also be writers but from the fantasy orientation. These tend to ask the highly opinion based queries. Their questions are regularly in the VTC queue, and I almost as regularly vote to keep the open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I think WB.SE works pretty well as a Q&amp;amp;A forum.  It is not designed to handle 80% of the questions that get asked here, and I think if the Overseers were to pay a visit and perform an audit, they'd probably shut us down for skewing the stats! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because you said there's no place for your ideas to go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132660/worldbuilding-forum-or-other-conversational-place&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding forum or other conversational place?&lt;/a&gt;: there are plenty of forums for geopoets, worldbuilders, invented culture and country makers to share ideas apart from this Q&amp;amp;A forum!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T16:35:53.360" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T16:35:53.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6969" CreationDate="2018-12-28T16:47:23.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not opposed in theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice, I think it's wise to be careful who we target in the Twitterverse. Obviously you can't (easily) control who would follow this account, but you can control to some extent who you connect with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend connecting with other groups that are more or less aligned with our interests: worldbuilding, fantasy / sci-fi writer, invented language, invented culture groups and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same basic advice for any other social media accounts you all might think about in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T16:47:23.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-29T13:08:06.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of people have a wild imagination and enjoy to dream up fictional worlds and situations and speculate about them. It is sort of like a hobby, and it becomes way more fun when you involve other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18252" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T13:08:06.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-29T18:49:36.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to see questions with underlying purpose.  Not just shooting the breeze for the hell of it.  Nothing wrong with doing that, I'm just not sure that here is the place in some cases and it's not something I have a ton of time for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came here because I'm writing a fantasy novel and have spent a lot of time on the web researching all sorts of things.  I first found SE because of a post about how long it took to travel on horseback.  I am also active on Writing (which makes sense) and MiYodeya (because my novel has a Jewish theme; this is the place I've asked nearly all my SE questions, though I've asked questions unrelated to my work too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, I have noticed that you, Chasly, have been asking a large number of questions and that they appear to be for your own amusement and not tied to a work.  That does affect my judgment of their suitability for the site and my desire to answer them.  I haven't voted to close any question that is otherwise well written, but I've skipped over them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't claim that you shouldn't be posting them, because that's not my call to make.  If they're useful to others, for any reason, then they belong, and hopefully they're useful to you too.  But you asked about motivation, and that's mine.  Ditto with the answers.  I would rather see answers that have some research behind them, rather than the sort of conversations I had back in college (or high school) where a bunch of us would get together and geek out about all sorts of things (pre-personal computer so it was all stuff in our heads or that we'd read).  (Something I still do in person but not on a large network like this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So sure, funny is great (I still love the &quot;expresso shot&quot; comment on one of my answers), but my aim here is more studious.  Flippant doesn't do it for me and quick one-offs telling me to do things I already researched and decided against can be beyond annoying.  You're right that a lot of this comes from our motivations for being here.  I try to remember this about certain people and I hope those people will respect posts from those of us whose motivations and approach to research differ from theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T18:49:36.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2018-12-30T11:40:41.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to Worldbuilding SE because I had what I thought of as an unusual hobby of building worlds.  I started out making up worlds and populating them with animals for fun when I was less than 10 years old, and a little later, when playing RPGs, I found fault with their default worlds, so at first I improved them, then I started making them up from scratch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through school, I specialised in the sciences, especially biology, and was indifferent to the humanities like history, mainly because my teachers had succeeded admirably in making History unutterably boring to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of my roleplaying friends was a historian by inclination, and through roleplaying - and each of us making up our own worlds and playing in them with each other - we both managed to pick up some of the other's speciality.  I picked up history, or at least the bits that interested me, not the bits that my teachers had wanted us to memorise, and my friend picked up at least some biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an offshoot of roleplaying, I began writing down stories about the worlds I had invented and my friends had roleplayed through. None of those stories were ever published, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, after discovering Stack Overflow (I became a software developer after leavschool) and RPG SE, I came across Area 51.  I was only mildly interested in some of the proposals until I found Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I got married, had 3 kids and put roleplaying on hold for the foreseeable future.   However,  I couldn't give up building worlds, they just seem to bubble up in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While answering and asking questions on WB SE, Universe Factory was proposed, and some of the idle questions I had been asking gelled into a story in my mind that was the foundation of 'The Juggernaut' story that I have been posting on occasion,  the first story I have ever released for public consumption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T11:40:41.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7002" CreationDate="2018-12-31T14:15:26.323" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked in Worldbuilding how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135269/how-to-keep-intelligent-races-from-discovering-electricity&quot;&gt;stop intelligent races from discovering electricity&lt;/a&gt; and it was marked as to broad. I assume this is because I originally suggested two ways to solve my problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am correct and thats why it is to broad I would like to know why there is no possibility to suggest different ways to solve something as there are rarely math like true false answers on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am glad for every one helping me to understand this site with an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the original formulation of my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without changing a planet from being habitable for humans and keeping a similar ecosystem why could intelligent races never access electricity? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;What systems need to be erased from the planet to not create any&#xA;  magnets? (I want to keep metals though) Because as far as I know&#xA;  without magnets you cannot manually create electricity.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what I need is way to stop natural magnets from forming while still&#xA;  keeping the physics and chemistry of the universe the same. While at&#xA;  the same time enabling the people to live the same way or similar to&#xA;  the way humans lived in the medieval age and renaissance. (Yes keep&#xA;  the earths magnetic field)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this is not possible what effects would these changes cause to the&#xA;  formation of human society. (Please don't blast my world with all the&#xA;  radiation the sun sent at them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;What in society or behavior could stop people from discovering electricity?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With this way of solving the problems I need a plausible explanation&#xA;  why a certain behavior or society has risen and why this keeps people&#xA;  from discovering electricity. Also what other changes are attached to&#xA;  this solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Religions or media/propaganda cannot fulfill this role as i have&#xA;  already decided on huge parts how they are going to work. It has to be&#xA;  something more deeply enforced. Which excludes a bad accident in&#xA;  history (because people never truly learn from history)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also people should retain the ability to advance in other fields of&#xA;  technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59866" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-12-31T16:42:19.733" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T19:55:21.480" Title="Why can't you suggest multiple ways of solving the question in said question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7001" CreationDate="2018-12-31T14:25:13.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you correctly guessed, you were asking two different questions all together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to prevent electricity by altering physical laws or conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to prevent electricity by altering social behavior&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each on its own is a fine question, when you put them together you make a hard to digest salad. Look at the only answer you got so far. It addresses only the second question, so I would argue that it answers your original question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our model is &quot;per post 1 question which can be measurably answered&quot;. We never object if you spread multiple related questions over multiple posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T14:25:13.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-31T23:05:47.907" Score="6" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've started browsing Worldbuilding SE again. I've noticed that on my browser of choice (Safari), it runs at a very choppy pace compared to other sites in the Stack Exchange network such as Stack Overflow. Scrolling on any page feels laggy and choppy to the extent that the site becomes hard to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I didn't notice it on other Stack Exchange sites, I'd like to know if this is an issue with Safari as a browser or if it might be something specific to this Stack Exchange. If so, what would the fix be (other than switching browsers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, as far as regressions are concerned, the last time I visited Worldbuilding SE was a long time ago so I can't give a date for the last time it worked well for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8923" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T23:24:20.903" Title="Worldbuilding SE running slowly/choppy scrolling?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-01T04:35:52.493" Score="14" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges&#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.&#xA;To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Worldbuilding breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                 Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                 17         19&#xA;Users destroyed                                  43          0&#xA;Users deleted                                     6          0&#xA;Users contacted                                  40          0&#xA;User suspensions lifted early                     2          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue           289      3,414&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue              300      3,856&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue        163      5,170&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue               48        626&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue               335      4,010&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue              145     12,668&#xA;Tags merged                                       4          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                             2          6&#xA;Tag synonyms created                             14          0&#xA;Questions unprotected                             1          0&#xA;Questions reopened                               82        171&#xA;Questions protected                             121         69&#xA;Questions migrated                               22          4&#xA;Questions flagged⁴                               31      2,063&#xA;Questions closed                                579      1,932&#xA;Question flags handled⁴                       1,031      1,063&#xA;Posts unlocked                                    2          9&#xA;Posts undeleted                                  29        109&#xA;Posts locked                                      3        184&#xA;Posts deleted⁵                                  552      1,955&#xA;Posts bumped                                      0          4&#xA;Escalations to the CM team                        7          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                              126          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                136      2,065&#xA;Comments deleted⁶                            11,302      4,898&#xA;Comment flags handled                         1,605        596&#xA;Answers flagged                                 317      2,915&#xA;Answer flags handled                          1,257      1,975&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat            339          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T04:35:52.493" Title="2018: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2019-01-01T23:06:17.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't build worlds but I like to think out of the ordinary, trying to make the impossible possible. That's what attracted me to this site even if I don't answer to questions (this is my first answer) and don't ask many questions (only one this far).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However seeing what other members imagine, how others respond or try to come up with solutions (even outlandish) was a big plus for this site and not others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59508" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T23:06:17.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-02T04:37:05.090" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed tonight while publishing our latest blog post that some of our posts have gotten &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of attention.  As of the end of 2018, here are the posts in our little corner of the blogosphere with over a thousand views.  Links to all posts are in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4037/28&quot;&gt;blog announcement post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mapmaking Software (Vincent) - 7.4k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Climate Modeling 101 (Jasper McChesney) - 4.3k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biology of Fantasy: Let's Get Real, Shall We? (John Dailey) - 2.7k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great Lakes Earth: Geography (John Dailey) - 1.7k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Horror Named Jimmy (Joe Bloggs) - 1.5k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Worldbuilding Checklist (FoxElemental) - 1.4k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Economics of Space Colonization (Serban Tanasa) - 1.3k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Medieval Warfare: An Introduction (Mithrandir24601) - 1.2k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How I Generated Artificial Rivers on Imaginary Continents (Jasper McChesney) - 1k views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pleased to see the broad range of topics, from science to worldbuilding process to fiction to history.  You can find these and many other interesting and engaging posts on Universe Factory.  New contributors are always welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else would you like to see on our blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T02:57:44.483" Title="Some blog stats (2018 edition)" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2019-01-02T15:01:09.090" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(e) something else&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Therapy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we go through life we gather an immense amount of experience which doesn't apply in our everyday life and, in fact, we actively try to avoid thinking about. When I saw this crazy question about singing and combat on the HNQ list - it made me cringe and once again remember a time in my life I usually try to avoid remembering. I had to look, had to see how someone was about to get it all wrong again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shocking part was, once I looked I realized I had a solid answer which actually &lt;em&gt;made me smile&lt;/em&gt; and allowed me to look at some of the good memories I had of that time. Memories which usually get buried under so many of the bad ones. Moreover, it allowed me to share and educate others on events which many of us avoid talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been other questions like this since, most are not that direct of a connection: many times they just remind me of worlds I built for D&amp;amp;D sessions I once ran for friends I no longer get to see or remind me of a person I once knew who always talked about a subject - but most remind me of good memories from times when things weren't so good or of people who are no longer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I look for questions: on a bad day, when I'm sick, when its just one of those anniversaries, or just when I need that break. More and more I find that answering these questions help me build up the idea of a world I want to build (for a book or RPG, not yet decided) that reflects these people, these events - even if this has little to do with the questions themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T05:04:45.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T05:04:45.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-03T13:23:25.310" Score="9" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag feels meaningless to me, it should possibly be a synonym to science-based but even that feels weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we delete it? Synonym it? Have I missed something that means it is actually useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-03T15:49:19.560" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T08:06:57.503" Title="Should we have the science-fiction tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7006" CreationDate="2019-01-03T15:07:13.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The ones I liked&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, too, spent some time looking through the blog stats. It was interesting how some posts &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; took off to the extent they did. One stat I looked at was how many people &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011350967-Claps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;clapped&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; for a piece. There seemed to be a correlation between views and claps (as you might expect), but some numbers told another story: Fewer people clap for the original fiction we publish on the blog, which has been more common as of late - with, of course, some exceptions. I was a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; bit surprised about this, to be honest, and I happen to rather enjoy those. I always find them interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the more-clapped-for posts included Jasper's awesome articles about - well, I guess I'd describe them as more hands-on worldbuilding (I'm thinking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Climate Modeling 101&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/generating-continents-procedurally-with-distortion-fields-d17dd85d5339&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generating Continents Procedurally with Distortion Fields&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/how-i-generated-artificial-rivers-on-imaginary-continents-747df12c5d4c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How I generated artificial rivers on imaginary continents&lt;/a&gt;). I'd guess that some of the popularity stems from the fact that readers who are programmatically inclined can test it out for themselves. It's one reason I liked them, and I'd be interested in seeing more examples of using coding to generate different aspects of worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Google might (sorta) be our friend&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A neat little feature I found the other day is a little tiny button on the stats page that says &amp;quot;Details&amp;quot;. It brings you to another page with some more information on the views a post has gotten, as well as the sources of those views. Here's an example of what one looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G1thi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G1thi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you might notice something interesting about that picture, and a number of other highly-viewed stories on the blog: Most of those views came from Google. A lot of stories get views from inside Medium &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; through Medium's newsletters - I don't really know how they work, although I should. But for our most highly-viewed stories, in general, we got a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of views from people Googling phrases. Here are some highly-viewed posts for which this was the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-worldbuilding-checklist-4c1e88f7d1e6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Worldbuilding Checklist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-bored-god-9d6bc05611d2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Bored God&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/mapmaking-software-65c0318fd3a6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mapmaking Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/comically-wrong-what-can-happen-when-you-ignore-physics-dae805cf457b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comically Wrong - What Can Happen When You Ignore Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/taking-into-account-quantum-encryption-part-1-db86d1f1665a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taking Into Account Quantum Encryption (Part 1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Climate Modeling 101&lt;/a&gt; (which also shows a lot of views from emails/IMs/direct messages, which I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; indicates it made a Medium newsletter or something)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/medieval-warfare-an-introduction-bd7f8935bb0c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medieval Warfare - An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/how-i-generated-artificial-rivers-on-imaginary-continents-747df12c5d4c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How I generated artificial rivers on imaginary continents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/biology-of-fantasy-lets-get-real-shall-we-ae5f13c2d464&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology of Fantasy: Let’s Get Real, Shall We?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/so-you-want-to-build-a-world-or-how-to-be-a-god-aed7304618f1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;So you want to build a world...or 'How to be a god'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/a-new-kind-of-sky-living-in-a-globular-cluster-14e82cc33639&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A new kind of sky: Living in a globular cluster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-economics-of-space-colonization-46d4bc1657ca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Economics of Space Colonization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and third from the end got a good number of views from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, too (as they were mentioned in questions), but they were outshone by Monica's &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/sisters-a718622d808f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sisters’ War (Chapter 1)&lt;/a&gt;, which got most of its views from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71/627&quot;&gt;How would having multiple moons affect tides?&lt;/a&gt; after it was linked there - a question that first got hot itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what I found is that most of those highly-viewed posts were highly-viewed because they proved helpful to people who don't use Stack Exchange or Medium - just people wanting to read up on cool stuff. These titles apparently dominated search results for their particular topics. And that's pretty awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;One final weird note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, another interesting thing I noticed: A year ago, I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/when-nature-beats-you-to-the-punch-872d8f71e694&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When nature beats you to the punch&lt;/a&gt; for Universe Factory, basically talking about a number of neat organisms that people had mentioned on the site to solve someone's problem. The details page shows it got a decent number of views (~40%) from &lt;code&gt;nativeapp.toutiao.com&lt;/code&gt;, which is explained well &lt;a href=&quot;https://hackernoon.com/a-chinese-unicorn-takes-aim-at-mediums-read-ratio-4f250385673e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It's a weird situation involving a Chinese platform for content aggregation that shows the users content and kinda messes with the stats. So if any of the editors see that pop up on one of our stories . . . well, that's the reason. Just a weird tech glitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T02:57:44.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2019-01-03T16:46:20.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen that tag too, and I've never particularly liked it, or its ilk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genre or settings tags (which is what the science-fiction tag is, but is not the only example of) make sense when &lt;em&gt;the genre or setting itself&lt;/em&gt; is important to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our case, and taking science-fiction as an example, &lt;strong&gt;it seems that I would be more interested in finding questions that are about, say,&lt;/strong&gt; transporters, or faster-than-light travel or communications, or energy weapons, or computers, or maybe time travel, or even (say) space colonization, &lt;strong&gt;than just&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; that's commonly used or done in science fiction&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Those&lt;/em&gt; seem likely to be decent tag candidates. &lt;em&gt;Just&lt;/em&gt; science fiction? Not so much, in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, any tag should make for decent categorization of a question even if it is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; tag on that question. What can I expect a question tagged &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; science-fiction to actually be &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;? (This same argument goes double for meta tags such as science-based.) What &lt;em&gt;worldbuilder&lt;/em&gt; expertise will help answering questions in that tag? (Say it to yourself: &quot;I am an expert in &amp;lt;tag name&amp;gt; in the context of &amp;lt;site name or subject&amp;gt;&quot;. If you can't say that and have it make sense, at least linguistically, it's very likely a poor tag. How does &quot;I am an expert in science fiction in the context of worldbuilding&quot; sound?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T16:46:20.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2019-01-03T21:26:55.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, I think &lt;strong&gt;a CVn&lt;/strong&gt; is arguing rather strongly &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; the sci-fi tag. Sometimes a question can be answered, slightly differently, given the genre bias of the respondent. If the querent is making a &quot;sci-fi&quot; universe and specifies that answers should be &quot;sci-fi&quot; oriented, based on the tag, then I as respondent would know to leave out the quirky, fantastic aspect of answering. In other words, the setting &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; important to the answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as searching for questions goes, I'd be much more likely to search in general terms for &quot;sci-fi&quot; than something specific like &quot;transporters&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Unless&lt;/em&gt; I were looking specifically for queries with that particular search term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For queries tagged &lt;strong&gt;SCI-FI&lt;/strong&gt;, I would be expecting queries about worlds and settings similar to &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Babylon 5&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Battle Star Galactica&lt;/em&gt;: space ships, laser guns, transporters, matter replication, space travel and the like. In conjunction with the spectrum of science tags, I'd expect a lot of primary world physics and mathematics to come into play. Even with other tags present, I'd still be expecting queries and responses aligned with that genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not expect much in the way of magic or mythical beasts or where to find them or how to deal with the wonkiness of a wonderworld. Here, in conjunction with the various science tags, I'd expect a much more creative (and &quot;opinion based&quot;) application of alternate and altered sciences. I would not be expecting queries aligned with fantasy, mythological, alt-historical, steam- / stone- / mage- / bronze- / etc-punk genres. Nor even necessarily futuristic fantasy-scifi settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T21:26:55.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2019-01-05T00:43:29.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would LOVE to say anywhere between &quot;a-c&quot;, I keep planning and starting and whatnot, but my Crippling ADHD tends to ultimately lead me down the path of &quot;d&quot;, especially since I've started a pretty low-energy desk job and need something to occupy my brain XD &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've only just signed on with the site today, I discovered it a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to get enough! Everyone here is super nice so far, and I've gotten so many great answers already! :D)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60031" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T00:43:29.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-08T22:52:08.340" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;On other sites, especially those I haven't visited in a while (weeks to months), I'll get a screen-wide drop-down that says something along the lines of, &quot;you haven't upvoted any questions in a while, remember OPs need love too!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not seen that here, but maybe I'm active enough that I never see it.  I was prompted to ask this question by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135969/will-a-civilization-need-to-make-weapons-if-their-use-of-magic-is-limitless#comment422677_135969&quot;&gt;a comment left by @willk, encouraging upvotes to the question.&lt;/a&gt;  Which I thought was a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5801/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;community promotion ad&lt;/a&gt;, but those require too much effort to get the necessary traction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have an automated &quot;hey!  Upvote a question why doncha!&quot; as I've seen on other sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T06:23:50.343" Title="Does our site ask people who haven't upvoted a question in a while to upvote questions?" Tags="|support|questions|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7014" CreationDate="2019-01-08T23:21:06.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gotten &quot;upvote a question&quot; prompt on WB. I'm not sure why we would be different than other Stacks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T23:21:06.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2019-01-08T23:39:38.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Versus... what?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the alternatives to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, which is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;.  Are there others? I suppose we have the &lt;em&gt;alternate&lt;/em&gt; tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt;.  It doesn't seem to be difficult to identify the intent of the question, which appears to be the intent of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I'm having is that the tag isn't used in any of those ways.  It's actually uncommon to see it used at all.  It's description says that answers should conform to the sci-fi world rules of the OP.  But isn't that the way all questions are expected to be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine retasking the tag to mean, &quot;answers must conform to a commercially established science-fiction universe such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, etc.&quot;  But we've had an unwritten rule that questions about commercial worlds (be they scifi or fantasy) would be migrated or redirected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy.SE&lt;/a&gt;, because commercial worlds are its primary focus.  Ours has always been the OP's fictional world.  (Now, if J. Michael Straczynski wants to post a B5 question here, I'm all for it.  It's his world, after all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my vote is to burn the tag.  I don't see how it better identifies the question or better directs answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Out of curiosity, how should we react if a question has both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag AND the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag?  They seem mutually exclusive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T23:39:38.420" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7014" CreationDate="2019-01-09T09:27:09.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Welcome back!&quot; banner is only shown under specific circumstances, as outlined &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/89059/323179&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The message [...] only appears if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you haven't been seen on the target site for 24 hours, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you hold a valid user cookie on the target site, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your account has more than 15 rep on the target site, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you arrive on a question from a search engine, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you have not already voted on this particular question and answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this message, you're probably not getting it either because you don't ever get to this site via a search engine or you're here every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also another message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]f you haven’t voted on at least one question in the last 15 votes you cast — you’ll now get the &lt;strong&gt;“you haven’t voted on questions in a while; questions need votes too!” reminder&lt;/strong&gt; every time you vote until you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/05/06/vote-for-this-question-or-the-kitten-gets-it/&quot;&gt;Vote For This Question or The Kitten Gets It&lt;/a&gt; blog post, which tells us that the best way to get people to vote for questions is blackmail that threatens one or more kittens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastEditorUserId="22818" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T06:23:50.343" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T06:23:50.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2019-01-10T04:02:43.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me definitely D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was about 10 I made up a lion/wolf-like creature called a 'Shaggy', named so because they were fluffy, over the years I drew more of them and made up different breeds of them just because at the time it was fun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 3-4 years ago I became more interested in them and started to improve them and their stories just started to evolve on their own. 2 1/2 years ago they sort of took over  and got some major improvements, they were made to be more cat-like and realistic, were given all round better anatomy, were given a better name (Shaguyans), got a scientific classification and I even made a map of their world...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so I plunged face first down the Worldbuilding rabbit hole... AND IM NOT COMING OUT!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(WooHoo my first answer. Sorry about the last bit, I couldn't help it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54980" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T04:02:43.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2019-01-11T08:06:57.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Do not make it a synonym of science-based&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it should possibly be a synonym to science-based but even that feels weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science fiction is the opposite of science-based.  E.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels or EE Doc Smith's Lensmen novels, where they made up the science wholesale.  Science-based is where the science needs to be real.  Science fiction is where the science itself can be fictional but should not be wholly magical.  I.e. the scientific method works in science fiction but does not have to work in fantasy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science fiction is when your universe has rules but does not have the same rules as our universe.  And not just a different constant or something (that would be an alternate universe).  The rules are fundamentally different on multiple levels.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that we should definitely not do is make science-fiction a synonym for science-based.  That would completely confuse things on any question using it correctly.  If it's problematic, we should either clean up the tag (removing it from questions where science-based should have been used) or burninate it.  Or you could make a new tag, fictional-science, that might be used better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;:  the science needs to match that of our world and be justified with citations and/or equations.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;:  the science needs to match that of our world and be realistic, but not formally justified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;:  the science does not match our world, and answers should use that science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;:  there is not a scientific explanation, fictional or not.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These should be used in a mutually exclusive fashion except in extraordinary cases.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distinction previously discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2439/2113&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T08:06:57.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6993" CreationDate="2019-01-12T02:08:54.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I more a &quot;consumer&quot; than a contributor. Actually I'm eager to contribute but rarely find the chance, here are very knowledgeable users and when not knowledgeable they compensate being terribly good at researching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I can start to contribute more after I finish my online astronomy course, feel free to ask for the link if you are curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand my use case, that I guess falls in a group that should not be less than 10% of users, I would describe it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I formulated questions centering in space settings, but I read a lot of questions and answers from other areas. I guess I have read all &quot;threads&quot; about building dragons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I formulate questions like they are for storytelling. And this won't change, probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, in fact, write stories. But never with the intention of made any of them public. These stories are always for video game projects. Most of them will never be completed. And not necessarily the full story. I may take only the setting or the setting plus some concepts but then change names, places, and even role genres. Also for some exercises that may or not be used for a video game in the future. If you are curious, I usually use the notes format, with a lot of random thoughts here and there, and more rarely I write in novel format, with dialogues, scene descriptions and everything. Never with hand, always using software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often do a lot of reality check and believability check. Before I discovered the Q&amp;amp;A format I would do a lot of googling around different related things trying to measure the level of believability of a certain idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believability is no what hurts suspension of disbelief the most, or well doesn't have to be. It's more art than science. Done right, nobody cares about believabililty, but I care a lot. Every time you hurt believability you have to give something as compensation, and if there is not enough compensation then people start to care. Compensation can be in the form of visual quality, character personalities and their overall design, etc. But depending where you hurt believability those may not save you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, worldbuilding can't be neglected. This place has a perfect name, I started to use that word a lot since I landed here. The translation doesn't sound right or practical in my natural language (can't be made into a single word), because of that in the past I used a bunch of different words to describe what we have for worldbuilding. Now I just put a &quot;worldbuilding&quot;, without translating it, here and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2963" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T02:08:54.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7024" CreationDate="2019-01-12T08:59:09.407" Score="26" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every now and then I come across a question that uses American units, which I am not familiar with. That's not a big deal, I simply use Google to convert everything to metric, and it only takes a few minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree with the general consensus here that it should not be a rule to post in any particular unit system, nor to provide conversions yourself when posting. (cf. others &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/system-of-units&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;system-of-units&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;system-of-units&lt;/a&gt; questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since in such cases I have done the conversions already, I might as well save a few minutes to the next persons who will read the post, or to myself if I return to it later. Hence I'm always tempted to edit along these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;   the monster is about 5ft tall and exactly 3.14ft wide. Its claws are 5-6 inches long &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the monster is about 5ft tall [1.5 m] and exactly 3.14ft wide [0.957072 m]. Its claws are 5-6 inches long. [13-15 cm]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be inappropriate, in the sense that it would be felt as if I'm correcting OP on something that was  not required from them in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT regarding the possible duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;two previous questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/system-of-units&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;system-of-units&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;system-of-units&lt;/a&gt; asked if rules about units existed or were needed, one in general, and the other in the specific case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions. The conclusions of both was not to impose any rule and let readers convert units. My question is different because it asks not about rules, but rather if that sort of editing would be considered welcome or rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52315" LastEditorUserId="52315" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T11:23:19.637" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T22:27:50.927" Title="Is it inappropriate to edit a question to add unit conversions?" Tags="|discussion|editing|systems-of-units|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2019-01-12T09:29:56.403" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's something I have done by myself various times, as jumping between the question and the converter is not so handy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is an integration and definitely improves clarity, especially in those cases where the number is highly meaningful to the question, I would see no reason to reject such an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T09:29:56.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2019-01-12T10:32:06.223" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;When rejecting an edit, we need to justify the rejection through a dialog. It provides the following options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;spam or vandalism&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit defaces the post in order to promote a product or service, or is deliberately destructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;no improvement whatsoever&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;clearly conflicts with author's intent&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;attempt to reply&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;causes harm&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Textbox for you to say why it causes harm)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing a post to add unit conversion falls in none of the above cases, so anyone who doesn't like the edit can go take a hike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That kind of edit is appreciated as it adds clarity, and you are encouraged to do it through some badges. Also, until you reach 2,000 reputation, you'll be awarded 2 rep points per edit. So keep editing :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T15:14:28.060" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T15:14:28.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T19:44:31.787" Score="-1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now for the most part this is obvious clear, addressing the question, useful, ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I am discovering now (I think) that we also strive for questions which lead to answers that are universally right. Which I think is often not helpful for the questions that can be asked. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136398/what-is-an-optimal-earth-population-that-avoids-depleting-resources-but-keeps-te&quot;&gt;my newest question&lt;/a&gt; is again to broad (as was the question before) because from what I gathered it was not leading to a single true answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But isn't that what this site is for? To give as many people as satisfactory answer to as many people as possible? Also in my case I don't want a single right answer which is why I formulated it so broad so that someone can make an estimation with his number and explain why while another one can justify a completely different value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from my understanding (which of course has the advantage of already knowing what I want) my question gives a clear guide as to which answers I want just not what will be a &quot;right&quot; answer. If you can justify why 8 million people are enough for planet earth fine by me if you answer 3 billion and justify why also fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we actually aim for questions with single true answers or for questions which allow a big variety of answers? (Of course you should know if somebody wants an answer concerning chemical reaction or if he wants to know how a part of mechanical physics works)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59866" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T14:50:08.030" Title="For what kind of questions and thereby answers do we strive for?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2019-01-12T20:13:52.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not our job to help you overcome writer's block&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about it, the moment you start asking for a list of ideas to overcome a problem with your story with no one of them being the best answer, your question is too story-based.  This site is dedicated to creating the world of your story, not your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worlds are about systems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And systems are objective and definable &amp;mdash; because they must be reusable and operate consistently and predictably without interference from the specifics of one story.  In that regard, they are exactly what you're unhappy with: universal.  A world is a place where an infinite number of individual stories can take place, and so we address rules and systems.  For example, how can I make natural rain on my world appear magenta?  This question is about the &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; of the world: the environmental process of raining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stories are about circumstances&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you ask, &quot;my mad scientist did something and now the rain falling over Megopolis is magenta, how'd he do that?&quot; you're now asking about the circumstances of your story, not the rules or system of your world.  Basically, justifying the actions of an individual character.  That's not what we're about at worldbuilding (not storybuilding or characterbuilding) dot-SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Separating the two...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, a great many people are building their world at the same time they're writing their story &amp;mdash; which makes it very difficult to separate the two perspectives.  From such an author's point of view, a storybuilding question is a worldbuilding question.  You, the original poster (OP) of a question, are required to know the difference between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It should be noted that the question of allowing storybuilding questions has been regularly asked on this site and regularly rejected. If you think about it, the site would no longer be about worldbuilding almost overnight as the number of storybuilding or &quot;help me overcome my writer's block&quot; questions outnumbers worldbuilding questions 1,000:1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this mean there's no place for list-of-ideas questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or course there's place.  While asking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6139#6139&quot;&gt;infinite list of ideas&lt;/a&gt; is off-topic, asking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6138#6138&quot;&gt;finite list of ideas&lt;/a&gt; is not.  It's up to you, the OP, to narrow your question so that it can be answered in a practical way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I depend on Worldbuilding.SE to apply these concepts universally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope.  We try our best to get people to consistently follow the rules, but for a thousand reasons they don't.  &lt;em&gt;Generally Speaking&lt;/em&gt; we're pretty good at helping everyone (new users and experienced users) to follow the rules &amp;mdash; unless the question is a really cool question that tickles the fancy, &lt;em&gt;then we really suck at it.&lt;/em&gt;  However, as painful as it is (and every one of us has suffered the &quot;learn how to ask questions&quot; lesson...), it is important to learn how to ask questions properly.  When you do, the questions are much more valuable to everybody &amp;mdash; &lt;em&gt;including and especially the OP!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's the important part...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem is that &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding.SE is NOT an OP's all-volunteer personal reserach team.&lt;/em&gt;  That's a really harsh way of saying it, but when all you want is for us to come up with a (fundamentally infinite) list of ideas from which you can casually select a convenient answer, that's what you've turned us into.  One of the fundamental attributes of Stack Exchange (and this is their site, not ours) is that questions and answers must serve &lt;em&gt;everyone.&lt;/em&gt;  Not just the OP.  In other words, as you ask questions that are more and more &quot;just what I need&quot; you come closer to violating one of SE's basic tenets &amp;mdash; helping everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, yes, the ideal Stack Exchange (you'll notice I did not say &quot;worldbuilding&quot;) question is objective, narrowly scoped, and leads to a single best answer (aka, a &quot;single true answer&quot;).  We respect the fact that Worldbuilding is a creative and imaginative process and some lattitude must be allowed &amp;mdash; but only so much.  The more effort an OP puts into asking a question that meets both SE's and Worldbuilding's standards, the more likely the question will be well accepted and remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T20:13:52.090" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2019-01-13T14:50:08.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in my case I don't want a single right answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should take some time to learn what a stack is. It uses reputation and badges as a form of gaming, so that if you are earning those you are doing things right. Electing an answer as the correct one gives both the asker and answerer reputation. Having too many questions closed in a short span of time, on the other hand, can sometimes cause you to be unable to post new questions until you get some of your closed ones reopened by fixing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we actually aim for questions with single true answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or for questions which allow a big variety of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's Quora, not us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, notice these, from one of the help pages called &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, &lt;strong&gt;then you should not be asking here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, &lt;strong&gt;avoid asking subjective questions where every answer is equally valid&lt;/strong&gt;: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T14:50:08.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7029" CreationDate="2019-01-13T22:30:56.947" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I ask a question that gets closed for some reasons (lets say the question is too broad) and edit it to be more specific, would it remain as a question from a day ago, or would people see the question again after the edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60359" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T08:21:11.123" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T12:44:40.603" Title="If I asked a question yesterday, but edited it today would it reappear with the new questions?" Tags="|support|questions|editing|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7028" CreationDate="2019-01-13T22:42:55.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An edit bumps the question to the top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt; and also to the top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=active&quot;&gt;questions list, if sorted by activity&lt;/a&gt;.  So yes, people will see it again and can look at your changes to decide whether to vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, an edit from the author puts a question that's &quot;on hold&quot; (closed for fewer than five days) in the reopen queue, where reviewers can also look at your changes and decide whether to vote to reopen.  This is why the best response to a question being put on hold is an edit that addresses the issues that were raised -- you get visibility in all of these ways, which you wouldn't get if you respond in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is voted net -4 or lower, it disappears from the front page (but not from the active list), so if the question is voted quite low and the edit is intended to fix whatever caused the question to be downvoted, then drawing attention to the edit in some other way may be needed. Possibilities may be to ping people who have commented explaining why they downvoted notifying them of the edit, to bring the question up in chat (if/once you have the reputation to  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;talk in chat&lt;/a&gt;), or to bring the question up on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T12:44:40.603" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T12:44:40.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2019-01-15T06:58:50.297" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is inappropriate to add incorrect unit conversions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going to put words in the author's mouth, you need to make sure that they match the author's intent.  At a minimum, any parenthetical notes need to be correct to the same number of significant figures as the author's original values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example proposed edit [was] wrong, even within the number of significant figures given.  [The previous proposed edit said 0.95 meters.] &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Exactly&lt;/strong&gt; 3.14 feet&quot; is 0.957 meters, or approximately 0.96 meters.  The [previous] proposed edit therefore [needed to] either be further edited to match the author's intent, or be rejected as &quot;clearly conflicts with author's intent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2177" LastEditorUserId="2177" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T22:27:50.927" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T22:27:50.927" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T16:39:24.417" Score="23" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm now on StackExchange for several weeks, having asked few questions and answered some. Now there's something I observed (in worldbuilding, but in other StackExchange-sites too) that moderators are being really strict towards newer members. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for their work. But I feel like many users (including myself back then) are really discouraged by moderators directly deleting posts or closing questions without giving the newbies the possibility to correct their mistakes. And I fear that this may prevent possibly valuable new members to become more active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wanted to start a little discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you think newer people could/should get some &quot;getting-used-to-it&quot;-time so they can explore the ins and outs of the site and how to partake properly?&#xA;Or do you think it's important to stay on the sites rules strictly to prevent &quot;oh, but when he did it it was ok&quot;-comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe that if people don't learn from the start, they may never will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59475" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T18:35:52.250" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T13:36:48.033" Title="Is strict moderating discouraging newer members to add to the community?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|new-users|rules|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-15T16:57:37.953" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the mods here, but I have a tendency to stay away from unilaterally closing questions from &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;, at least immediately after they've been asked. The big problem with me voting to close, of course, is that a diamond moderator like myself can automatically close a question without needing approval from anyone else - which does reduce the community's agency. In some cases - like a spammer spamming spam - that power is needed (although of course that post should be spam-flagged, too, not just put on hold). Other times, like when there's a question that needs to be made just a little bit clearer . . . not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I - and I actually think this holds for most mods network-wide - prefer the whole speak-softly approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment if the user needs to improve something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give a bit more feedback if they still need to work on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close the question if it &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; needs to be closed &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; if no other community members are stepping in - which they are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No big stick needed, usually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key here is commenting. Mods have a lot of tools that help us do what we do, but words are the best tools of all. They can be gentle and customized based on who we're talking to, flexible and expressive, and, most of all friendly. Plus, anyone can use them. This is a popular approach among some mods in chat rooms - talking people out of arguments, when possible - but it also works on-site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; need more guidance than the average person, just because they don't know as much yet about how the site works. And that's okay. It means that talking and commenting is even more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this seems obvious to you - in which case, great! I just think it's something emphasize. Rather than maybe giving new folks extra time, we mods - and community members - should just be wary of what tools we're using to accomplish the same goal as always: making questions more awesome. And if required, yes, we'll close questions, as always. But hammering questions shut shouldn't be our first tool, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Dubukay pointed out, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4831/627&quot;&gt;I've basically said the same thing before&lt;/a&gt;. As I put it last year, if you want cook a steak, you use a regular oven, rather than lava (there used to be a video on this, but it's been removed). Why? Because cooking steak in lava is a bit overkill. Just as, in many situations, mod-hammering a question closed is overkill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T19:14:21.167" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T19:14:21.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-15T16:59:39.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the moderators here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in the first times of the Internet, it was good practice, when joining an internet community, to spend some time just lurking around and observing the behaviors in the community, with the purpose of learning what was accepted and what not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally spent a few months on this very community just reading the questions, the answers and the comments before even registering an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can understand that not everyone is willing to put that much time into learning the ropes, I think one cannot skip the learning. And popping out a question without knowing the community standards and culture is a risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators and other users are more than willing to help new users to learn (we all have been the new user, at some point), and this goes through the means that the community offers: comments and putting the question on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind, out-of-standard questions are first put on hold, not straightforwardly deleted (unless they deserve it for serious issues like blatant spam). This is not a punishment for the poster, rather an opportunity to learn. Why is it an opportunity? Well, we like consistency, and, apart what you noted, that we prefer not to give leeway to newcomers and have to explain countless times the exceptions, there is also another of our guidelines that states that &lt;em&gt;edits to a question shall not invalidate existing answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, imagine being the user who has posted an out-of-standard question: you are being prompted to refine the question, and also to respect the answers which you might have received. This is confusing&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^2$&lt;/span&gt;, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, putting a question from a new user on hold is not a punishment, is a way to facilitate their learning, by addressing the points of improvements and helping him go through the learning steps. Once the question is improved, we are more than happy to reopen and answer it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T16:59:39.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-15T18:55:14.620" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a few thoughts on this too, although I'm not a moderator so the answers you've gotten from L.Dutch and HDE may be more what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge here is in error rates - because nobody cares if questions that should be closed are closed, or if questions that are good remain open. The problem arises when questions that should be kept open are incorrectly closed and when questions that should be closed are incorrectly kept open. Nobody is perfect, so we all make mistakes in different degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I notice happening recently is a massive decrease in incorrect non-closures, with a corresponding (small) increase in incorrect closures. This has been mostly driven by one of our new moderators, L.Dutch. He's certainly not afraid to use his mod-hammer to close questions! This is a new perspective for the site, as mods in the past have been pretty reluctant to use their overriding powers. In the past day, at least five questions that I could find have been closed by L.Dutch before they reached the five-person normal review. Some of these were clearly in need of rapid handling (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136654/in-an-electricity-loss-situation-why-would-you-lose-oxygen-in-the-air-and-not-be&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136611/what-could-have-prevented-the-decline-of-the-roman-empire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136495/present-day-reaction-to-aliens-landing&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), while others were more debatable (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136497/would-it-be-possible-for-an-animal-to-develop-pneumatic-muscles-through-evolutio&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136544/is-my-fantasy-map-unrealistic-and-or-too-small&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). In the first case, those questions deserved to be closed rapidly and decisively, and we all are indebted to L.Dutch for his swift action. In the second case, these are less-obviously in need of mod-hammering and more in need of responsive and constructive comments. It appears that far fewer questions were mod-closed in the past - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3275/is-this-the-new-moderation-style-for-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;the last time this came up&lt;/a&gt;, someone complained because four questions had been mod-hammered closed in five days. That's much less activity than we've seen recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mod hammer is a fickle tool because it overrides the normal review process in which a consensus is reached in order to close a question. This drives the mods much more into the spotlight and makes them far more visible, especially to new users. As I mentioned earlier, this has driven down our incorrect non-closures and the site is a lot &quot;cleaner&quot;. However, there are also questions falling under the incorrect closures, and we're &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_bathwater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;throwing some babies out with the bathwater&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a trade I'm willing to make, except that we've already got an awesome team of active reviewers who aren't mods. We close questions all the time as a community, which allows the mods to work behind the scenes and step in in a more friendly first-contact to new users. &lt;strong&gt;The easier it is to mod-hammer a question closed, the more likely the community will also close it quickly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My final point is that mods can also hammer questions open immediately, and that's a tragically underused tool and one that could engender a lot of goodwill towards our mods. Although I'm unable to easily see the stats on mod reopenings, they feel &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; unusual, and that's just a shame. Our mods have, in a way, the best sense of what fits on the site, and as soon as they see something fixed the instinct should be to get it open immediately. The community is also much worse at reopening questions, so this is the perfect place for our mods to pick up a bit of the stack - er, slack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few specific requests to make, from this. First, please direct new users to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;our Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;!! It's a great place for discussion, style, and scope questions, and is perfect for new users. (Incidentally, everyone is welcome to give feedback there, and I think mod perspectives would be especially welcome for new users.) Often, the question needs a bit of touching up and can be ready for Main with just a few comments and recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, L.Dutch, please cool it with the mod-hammer closings. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/moderator-post-closing-policy?rq=1&quot;&gt;Trust your community&lt;/a&gt; to decide which questions are in need of closing, and leave it to the democratic (oligarchic?) process that's already in place. I remember you being a highly active reviewer when you weren't a mod, and it feels like those voting habits haven't changed, despite your voice being much, much louder now. Remember that the more obviously a question needs to be closed, the more likely it is that the community will handle it quickly and judiciously. Consider using your close-votes now as the fifth or fourth or even third vote, not the first and only. I firmly support HDE's stance here and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4823/moderator-post-closing-policy?rq=1&quot;&gt;in other places&lt;/a&gt;, as does the community, and will quote from the mod bible to back this point up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ideal moderator does as little as possible. But those little actions may be powerful and highly concentrated. Judiciously limiting your use of moderator powers to selectively prune and guide the community — now that’s the true art of moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to all mods - don't be afraid to mod-hammer questions open! Being told by someone with authority that something has been fixed is a delightful feeling, and I personally believe we can afford the small increase in incorrect non-closure rate. Although I can't seem to find it, I remember a post (I think by Monica) about this site being rapid-close rapid-reopen, but we're forgetting to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Massive respect to L.Dutch: I just noticed he reopened &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136611/what-could-have-prevented-the-decline-of-the-western-roman-empire-and-its-fall&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as soon as the problems were fixed. Thanks for being such a responsive and active moderator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="43163" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T05:13:29.593" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T05:13:29.593" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-16T13:32:29.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think newer people could/should get some &quot;getting-used-to-it&quot;-time so they can explore the ins and outs of the site and how to partake properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only on Stack Exchange sites, but in all communities in the Internet... If you get on stage and start talking without the slightest regard to the house rules you instantly become &lt;em&gt;persona non grata&lt;/em&gt;. I am old, I have been on the Internet since before the time of search engines and social networks, and I have been everywhere. I believe the communities at Stack Exchange are the most forgiving towards dummies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people who are still learning how to use the site, WB has gone further than most stacks and created the sandbox: a post where you can present an unfinished question, and the community will provide feedback on whether it fits the site. If it doesn't, they also tell you how to change it so that it fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do you think it's important to stay on the sites rules strictly to prevent &quot;oh, but when he did it it was ok&quot;-comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those rules are the reason for the SE model's success. That's why you find the best answers here and not on Yahoo! Answers, forums or 4Chan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or maybe that if people don't learn from the start, they may never will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience that is the case for the vast majority of people who are either unwilling or unable to read a help section or to learn house rules by actually browsing the site before asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say that people are born knowing how to use a stack. Almost every high rep user has had posts downvoted, locked and deleted. Don't feel bad about it. It's rare to be good at something (including asking and answering) without having failed at it at least a few times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T17:08:20.017" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T17:08:20.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2019-01-16T18:25:23.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is almost always appropriate to edit in unit conversion&lt;/strong&gt;; and in both directions! If a query is in normal units, then editing to add metric is not only acceptable but commendable.  Same goes for the other direction. If a query is in metric, an edit to put the numbers in normal units is perfectly fine. In my opinion, it should be a regular practice of the writer of good quality questions to do this as a matter of courteous habit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only two exceptions I'd make to that rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One exception to this is in a &lt;em&gt;highly technical query&lt;/em&gt;.  It's customary, even in the US, to do chemistry and physics and so forth in SI. A query about orbital mechanics that is full of equations and is completely in SI units of measure &lt;strong&gt;do not need to be translated into normal units&lt;/strong&gt; in my opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other exception is when an OP uses in-world units of measure &lt;em&gt;without also offering a conversion factor&lt;/em&gt;.  If I say a certain character dances the &quot;thirty &lt;em&gt;leuyves&lt;/em&gt; and three&quot; between Endumion and Charedon, saying that's nearly a hundred miles, I would not accept a conversion into SI. Simply because I have not, for the purpose of the question, specified the conversion factor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Precision in edited conversions is very important!&lt;/strong&gt; I actually concur when it comes to matters of precision. If the OP says &quot;approximately&quot;, then any edit that offers an approximate conversion is okay. If the OP says &quot;exactly&quot; or &quot;precisely&quot;, then take that as a &quot;hard science moment&quot; and offer an exact &amp;amp; precise conversion as is warranted. This is not done for the sake of the OP, but for the sake of readers unfamiliar with the original units. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP's original intent should not be violated.&lt;/strong&gt; I also concur as to OP's intent. If an OP uses a particular system of measurement, for whatever reason as is their right, editing in a conversion is fine. But editors should be ware! &lt;em&gt;Editors should never overwrite the OP's chosen system of measure for any reason.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was recently &quot;victimised&quot; by a well meaning edit of this sort:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135730/%E2%80%A6&quot;&gt;Is the Avian species from the game Starbound plausible?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose words very carefully, and used the word crore very intentionally. While I appreciate editing for clarity (and, perhaps, also in order to earn the editor's badge), sadly, when it got edited, the conversion got done wrong. (That's &quot;putting words in the OP's mouth&quot; in my book.) So I have to take the time to go back and re-edit the editor's edit so that what appears on the page is what I actually intend to say! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The take away lesson: &lt;strong&gt;when you edit, be very careful what you change!&lt;/strong&gt; If I were reviewing that edit to my response, I'd probably reject it with a note to the editor that the conversion is wrong and would thus be unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T18:25:23.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7038" CreationDate="2019-01-17T00:06:21.370" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright, I'll admit I stuffed up. I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136795/first-innovation-for-time-traveler-to-low-tech-society&quot;&gt;put up an answer to this question&lt;/a&gt; and through some kind of finger-fail, it got listed as a community wiki and I don't know how to undo that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to undo that action without deleting and re-posting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T01:10:28.653" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T01:10:28.653" Title="How do I un-wiki an answer?" Tags="|support|answers|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7037" CreationDate="2019-01-17T01:09:17.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regular users can't do that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/83373/274942&quot;&gt;but mods can&lt;/a&gt;. This restriction might be a relic of the days when a certain number of edits (~20) by a single user would automatically turn the post into a wiki, which would partly discourage bumping just to gain attention. That automatic wiki-ing has since been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In future, of course, just flag the post using the custom flag and tell us that you'd like us to un-wiki it. I've gone ahead and done that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T01:09:17.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-17T03:34:51.820" Score="6" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a question is not a &quot;good question&quot;, and receives criticism and down voting, but then is corrected and becomes a &quot;good question&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Example:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136611/what-could-have-prevented-the-decline-of-the-western-roman-empire-and-its-fall&quot;&gt;What could have prevented the decline of the Western Roman Empire, and it&amp;#39;s fall in AD 476?&lt;/a&gt; , which currently has a negative score). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this perfectly valid question retain a permanently negative score simply because it was once temporarily incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming the answer will probably be &quot;no&quot;, though you may surprise me.  But, even if the answer is &quot;no&quot;, that doesn't seem to be the reality here on SE.  Many questions retain a negative score despite being corrected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  Perhaps this is a better example, since it is much older, but also currently has a negative score:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62462/safely-shooting-antimatter&quot;&gt;Safely shooting antimatter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastEditorUserId="838" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T03:43:00.207" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T05:06:00.673" Title="Should a formerly bad question be punished forever?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2019-01-17T04:09:40.680" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes can be retracted within five minutes after they are cast, then they become locked. An edit to the voted post unlocks the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited questions are also placed on top of the list, when ranked by activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is no mechanism in place that prevent users from changing their mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this doesn't mean that all the downvoters will go back and actually check and maybe retract their vote. If they do, they probably do when the post is fresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum after aCVn comment: Questions that are voted net -4 or lower don't show up on the front page, so very poorly received questions are liable to receive less attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlying lesson which I have learned: put as much effort as possible into posting good content from the very beginning, and try to react quickly on comments requesting improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T08:16:38.583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T08:16:38.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2019-01-17T20:11:13.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've also added in conversions.  Though only for questions I was editing anyway and in cases where I cared enough to look it up.  I think it was just once actually but I was answering the question and needed to make those conversions so it would make sense inside my head (yes of course I know how to use metric, but it's not something I can &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt;).  I used an online calculator and rounded only very slightly.  I agree it's important to stick to the precision level the OP used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T20:11:13.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-17T20:56:18.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of closing posts is to give you a chance to improve your question before people start submitting inappropriate answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a &quot;nice&quot; way to deal with the educational process &amp;mdash; and we've all been through it.  Here's the problem: new users almost never read through the Help Center pages, don't read the meta posts that explain all this, don't follow the links on the question page to help them formulate questions, and worst of all, new and old users alike tend to like answering questions whether it's appropriate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, rapid moderation is the only chance we have to help new users develop good question-asking skills before bad habits set in.  We understand that it can be taken personally and we understand that it will chase some people away.  But it's the only solution we have to guide new users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an all-volunteer group and nobody is on it 24/7 to quickly intercede in what could be called friendlier ways.  On the flip side, many questioners (OPs) have a habit of asking their question and then walking away from the site, so even if someone is there to intercede quickly, the OP isn't there to fix the problem before answers start rolling in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing questions is the solution Stack Exchange created to solve the problem as best it can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T20:56:18.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2019-01-18T03:56:50.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Yes. Maybe...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that have been downvoted are generally --- but not always! --- downvoted for a reason. There's no reason it can't later be upvoted. Case in point, the antimatter query you indicated.  I don't understand why it was downvoted so much (and the contrarian in me just upvoted it). It seems a perfectly reasonable worldbuilding query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion I'd make is quite simple: if a &quot;bad&quot; question can be made into a &quot;good&quot; or at least a &quot;better than bad&quot; question, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit it!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question was asked and edited two years ago. If you think it can be improved, do so. As L.Dutch says, it'll be bumped to the top of the queue and a whole new generation of reviewers can look it over and either downvote it into query sheol or else upvote it as they see fit. In looking at it, there are areas where better wording and formatting could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might be an interesting experiment for you to try?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T03:56:50.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2019-01-18T05:06:00.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew T pointed out that there is no system in place on Stack Exchange to notify us when a post we have downvoted has been edited.  There's also no way to tell who downvoted (unless they left a comment), so there's no way to request a downvoter undo their downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means all you can do is upvote it.  And with that in mind, the answer is actually surprisingly obvious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote good questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it!  If you think the question is good, give it an upvote.  If you don't think the question is good, don't give it an upvote.  There's no reason to say &quot;this is a good question with a negative score, I should up vote it&quot; when you can simply say &quot;this is a good question, I should up vote it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if a question is ho-hum, and has a negative score, you can choose to upvote it if you please.  I don't think you should upvote a question merely because it has a negative score and you don't like that, but you can vote differently than me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want a fresh slate, get a fresh slate.  Write a new question.  Delete the old one!  The only real disadvantage of this that I know of is that a rash of heavily negative deleted questions can get you a ban from asking questions, but its pretty hard to do that without gross negligence or intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange's voting scheme is designed to be simple.  It's most definitely not designed to be perfect!  This may be one of those cases where simplicity conflicts with perfection, but changing it would be a mighty feat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T05:06:00.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7047" CreationDate="2019-01-18T13:49:54.437" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I inadvertently up-voted the wrong answer (it happened because of scrolling). The answer now had a total of 1 vote (mine). To cancel my upvote, I clicked down-vote. Unexpectedly the question now had a score of minus one. I don't want this either because the answer isn't so bad that I want to penalise it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very peculiar maths. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - 1 = -1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1 + 1 = 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't I simply do what I want to do and cancel my vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T15:19:17.393" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T15:19:17.393" Title="How can I cancel an up-vote or down-vote?" Tags="|bug|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7046" CreationDate="2019-01-18T13:53:44.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To retract an upvote or a downvote, just click within 5 minutes from the previous vote the same vote button. This will retract the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past the 5 minutes the vote is locked and can be changed only upon edit of the voted post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T13:53:44.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T14:25:32.933" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to encourage extra closures and I certainly don't want to close any of the following. In fact I prefer to keep them open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84700/how-would-a-superhero-who-needs-to-fall-asleep-to-use-his-powers-fall-asleep-dur&quot;&gt;How would a superhero who needs to fall asleep to use his powers fall asleep during battle?&lt;/a&gt; - All about a single individual in a seemingly normal world. &lt;strong&gt;No close votes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136488/how-long-would-it-take-a-body-to-decay-and-the-bones-to-fall-to-the-ground-from&quot;&gt;How long would it take a body to decay and the bones to fall to the ground from a tree?&lt;/a&gt; - About one dead body in a normal world. &lt;strong&gt;No close votes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135175/reactions-to-a-young-time-traveller&quot;&gt;Reactions to a Young Time Traveller&lt;/a&gt; - About a single person travelling to the past. &lt;strong&gt;No close votes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137119/backpack-contents-for-a-modern-person-stranded-in-the-stone-age&quot;&gt;Backpack contents for a modern person stranded in the stone-age&lt;/a&gt; - About a single person travelling to the past. &lt;strong&gt;Closed because too story-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll declare an interest in that the final one is my own question. It is what prompted me to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the first three questions have in common that make them not story-based and/or character-based that is not shared by the fourth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T16:32:31.720" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T05:17:45.073" Title="Inconsistency in closure of story-based questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7049" CreationDate="2019-01-20T16:18:39.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take on those questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84700/how-would-a-superhero-who-needs-to-fall-asleep-to-use-his-powers-fall-asleep-dur&quot;&gt;How would a superhero who needs to fall asleep to use his powers fall asleep during battle?&lt;/a&gt; - About how some super power works, legit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136488/how-long-would-it-take-a-body-to-decay-and-the-bones-to-fall-to-the-ground-from&quot;&gt;How long would it take a body to decay and the bones to fall to the ground from a tree?&lt;/a&gt; - About how decay works in a world (which happens to be our world), legit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135175/reactions-to-a-young-time-traveller&quot;&gt;Reactions to a Young Time Traveller&lt;/a&gt; - About how people would act about something, I just voted to close as story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137119/backpack-contents-for-a-modern-person-stranded-in-the-stone-age&quot;&gt;Backpack contents for a modern person stranded in the stone-age&lt;/a&gt; - About how people would act about something, I would have voted to close as story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about what one or more people would do on a situation, it is not world building, it is story writing. But I don't think the Writing stack accepts these questions either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T16:33:00.233" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T16:33:00.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7049" CreationDate="2019-01-21T03:19:19.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Due to the creative nature of this site, we're notoriously inconsistent with just about all votes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not perfect, but my judgment is usually based on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question asking how to use a rule or system of the world?  (E.G., how to use the superpowers, which are intrinsic to the being of the superhero.)  then it's not TSB.  Why?  Because the explanation given in an answer can be applied to most if not any situation (circumstance) the character finds himself/herself in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question asking about a decision to be made by the character in question?  (E.G., what should I put in my backpack?)  then it's TSB.  Why?  Because the only thing that need change to completely change the character's decisions is the situation (circumstance) of the story.  It's applicable to only the circumstance described and can't be reused in another story based on the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T03:19:19.063" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T09:37:10.183" Score="7" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being put &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; sucks. Yes, I get it - it's a chance to edit questions without getting unhelpful answers, and a grand opportunity for us to make the question better and thus improve the site as a whole. But it feels a lot like being forced to eat broccoli: sure, it's good for you, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. That's why I'd like to start a discussion about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two main avenues of attack to this problem. First, we can make it clearer that &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; does not automatically mean &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;. Second, we can make the &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; status itself less unfriendly. Of the two, I think the first is far more actionable for us as a community, because the second one would need  implementation at the web-design level. I'll be focusing mainly on the first one, but if people have other excellent ideas for part 2 I'd love to see some &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Making it clear that &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; is an opportunity, not a punishment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who have been around for a while get it - &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; isn't a punishment, but a good opportunity to edit a question without invalidating answers or further confusing people. However, it still feels a lot like a Bad Thing, and this part of my proposal is about changing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, please explain to new users what &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; is and what it means. New users have no idea what it means to be on hold or what to do when it happens, and &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; doesn't even show up in the Tour for those who take it. Often, new users will simply abandon their questions (and the site!) when put &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot;, with many posting confused or annoyed comments. Sometimes a user turns to Meta for an explanation or to request reopening. &lt;strong&gt;It is our responsibility as a community to work with and help new users improve such questions.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a tenet of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; policy, but it's more broadly necessary to simply keep the site alive. New users are the lifeblood of Worldbuilding, with the quirky questions and interesting answers. This has been mentioned before, but &lt;em&gt;please please please&lt;/em&gt; explain to new users what &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; means. It's easy to do this: direct them to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;Help Center page&lt;/a&gt; on the topic. Many new users never find the Help pages or don't think to turn to them when a question is placed on hold. The excellent explanations there go a long way toward helping new users understand what's happening and make it feel less personal. This responsibility is on especially on those of us with close-vote powers (3k+ rep) - it's only fair to explain what we're doing to their question. If you don't feel like Being Nice when going close-voting, please consider whether someone else might be friendlier instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, please explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you are close-voting. This has been a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3773/reminder-to-close-voters&quot;&gt;common topic on Meta&lt;/a&gt; for years, but is still struggling to gain traction. Questions here require a bit of time and effort to post - aside from troll posts, which we handle pretty darn well, nobody on here is posting nonsensical things exclusively for the sake of being nonsensical. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Assume Good Faith&lt;/a&gt;, and tell the user why you think that their question needs a bit more work. Try to make these comments clear and especially actionable - telling someone only that their question is unclear, for example, is unhelpful because it makes sense to the author! They wouldn't have deliberately posted a confusing question. Be sympathetic to the poster - while it might be the thirteenth terrible question you've seen that day, it's their genuine attempt to contribute to our community. Indeed, many of our highest-rep users have closed questions and I personally still struggle with making my wild ideas fit into the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, direct users to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;! It's the perfect place for questions that are on hold or slightly out-of-scope for the site because the focus there is on fixing up and improving questions, rather than getting answers. Again, explain what's happening and why you think the question could use some Sandbox time, because being told &amp;quot;Sandbox this&amp;quot; or being handed a link is less than helpful for many users. Ideally, follow up actually in the sandbox with the question; as someone who's seen the original post and the reception it's gotten, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are a prime candidate for helping solve those problems. More generally, directing users to resources like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt; help enormously because users will get useful, actionable, and personal feedback on their questions once they've demonstrated that they're invested in fixing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Make &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; less aggressive&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the more general scheme of things, being placed on hold is not a good feeling, no matter the explanations, sympathy, or recommendations received. It's like being told that you've failed in some way, which is never a great feeling to have. On that note, there are a few thoughts I have that might help make &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; feel more friendly, and I'd like to hear community ideas on these as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, these ideas are not particularly actionable for us as a community - just daydreaming. They both appear to require at least some involvement from the development staff, which is another burden that they don't necessarily need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. Have a friendly notification when questions are placed on hold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been closed in a while, so I don't actually remember what the process looks like, but I don't believe we notify people when their questions are placed on hold, and I think this is a huge missed opportunity. By being the first to inform a user that their question is now on hold, there's a chance to set the vibe for the rest of the interactions. I'd like to see a friendly, optimistic notification come through when a question gets its fifth close vote, something like the below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like your question [title] has been placed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;on hold&lt;/a&gt; by the community. Don't panic! This just means your contribution needs a little more work to fit the scope of the site, and we're hopeful that you're willing to edit it and get it reopened. Review any comments on your question, and if you need additional feedback consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, or our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. Until you've had a chance to tidy it up, your question won't pick up any more answers because unhelpful or irrelevant answers aren't constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe a notification such as the above would help provide users with actions that they can take, as well as links to many resources that are especially important once an answer's on hold. Admittedly, its tone is a bit apologetic because I always feel bad when someone else's question is closed, and that's certainly a place where it can use some different wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. Call it &amp;quot;Paused&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;On hold&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;On hold&amp;quot; kinda &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; gross. Held back from answers? Held at arm's reach from the network? Held in quarantine because there's bad mojo about you? &amp;quot;On hold&amp;quot; feels unnecessarily hostile and permanent, so I'd like to rename the status to &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Paused&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Something paused is something that's going to get moving again! Paused implies breathing room to adapt, improvise, and overcome. You don't stop a movie if you're still excited about it - you pause it! Things that are paused still have value and are worth coming back to, both as an asker of the question and as an answerer who was going to submit a response before being blocked from doing so. Perhaps this is just a me thing - again, community, please let me know if this is all in my head. But I'd much prefer to be &amp;quot;paused&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot;, despite them &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; the exact same thing in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T07:59:11.103" Title="Can we make &quot;on hold&quot; less terrible?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2019-01-22T10:29:31.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;on hold&quot; to &quot;closed&quot; process is a property of the Stack Exchange software. It's not something we can change on Worldbuilding. As far as I know, it's not even possible to change the labels on a per-site basis, and even if it somehow is, the concept would still be exactly the same, and it would work just the way it does today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can set up custom close reasons under the &quot;off topic&quot; heading, but (again, as far as I know) we can't change, for example, the label &quot;on hold&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the whole concept of a question being &quot;on hold&quot; was &lt;strong&gt;introduced&lt;/strong&gt; precisely to make it less permanent-seeming up front. Originally, questions transitioned immediately from open to closed. Part of this remains, for example in the process being &quot;vote to close&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt we're going to get any major (or perhaps even minor) changes implemented in the software just for Worldbuilding. The major money-maker for the company is Stack Overflow, including Teams; to a lesser extent Super User and Server Fault; the other sites are sort of just toys on the side, there in part because they help keep people on the network, and adding another site comes at a very low marginal cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience is that if a change can be motivated in terms of the big sites, it has a decent chance of being implemented, and then might become available to other sites in the network; but if a change would offer no advantages to the big sites, the odds of it being made are slim at best. Not impossible; just not likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no, Worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a big site in the network. For comparison, Stack Overflow has been around for about 10.5 years, and has some 54 million posts going by post ID (which is crude, but reasonably close to reality); overall, that's over five million posts a year, and the rate is probably higher now than it was back in 2008. Worldbuilding has been around for about 4.5 years and has some 130,000 posts also by post ID; overall, less than 30,000 per year. Worldbuilding is a pretty active site, but as far as traffic volume goes, we barely even register on their radar, drawing well below 1% of the content influx of Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T08:09:13.723" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T08:09:13.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2019-01-22T11:22:07.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole proposition is bad. Besides the nanny mentality, it has gaping flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it feels a lot like being forced to eat broccoli: sure, it's good for you, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Education based on what feels nice rather than what is right is not education. This is universal and applies to a stack as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wall of text on explaining on hold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to do this: direct them to the Help Center page on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The box that states the close reason has links to help. If a user cannot read that box, they are functionally illiterate. No amount of effort from a good-willed veteran will change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many new users never find the Help pages or don't think to turn to them when a question is placed on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a link to help on the footer. And whomever is unwilling or unable to RTFM should not be posting anyway. I've seen a case in every stack where I participate. These users are usually the ones who get banned from asking, even after having hours of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, please explain why you are close-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have seen this request more than a hundred times in the main meta. It is always denied. If you can't read the close box, there is little hope for you. You have a person who is confused by words, and you try to solve their problems with more words. The ones who are willing to type argue and come to meta to say that the Stack Exchange is or should be a forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, direct users to our Sandbox!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only sensible advice in the whole post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't waste your time on people who won't bother about learning how the site works. For every clueless new user who leaves after a few posts and is never missed, there are two or three good new users. We should focus on those instead, by giving good answers to their questions and upvoting their good posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T13:21:17.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7058" CreationDate="2019-01-22T14:23:48.623" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say, I just stumbled upon this and I love the idea of the site and the quality of its contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know if some kind of FAQ exists.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Reason for this is I am interested in building a world/universe on my own and I lack a lot of common knowledge people who are into this genre already have.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Therefore I am looking for some list of principles/FAQ etc. to get a better overview of what to consider while contructing ones world.  I would want it to be a futuristic semi-sciene based universe, meaning the laws of science should apply but speculations like FTL will also be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that you can filter be frequently asked questions which is quite literally my answer to an FAQ, but I meant something more like a guide/wiki style &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" OwnerDisplayName="InDaPond" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T16:31:30.343" Title="Does something resembling a FAQ exist" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2019-01-22T14:50:37.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. I'm glad to hear that you like it. I'm afraid there isn't anything here that resembles what you are looking for. We answer specific questions and so a large wiki or guide to general Worldbuilding principles would probably be closed. I think there was a discussion about making a series of posts about common worldbuilding elements but it was decided that this site wasn't the right place for that. If you have any specific question about something you're stuk with you could ask about that. I would recommend posting your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6168/17720&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first so people can help you make sure the question is the right fit for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T14:50:37.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2019-01-22T14:54:38.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We will never have Frequently Asked Questions on worldbuilding, because we have strict policy of not asking the same questions again. If someone asks question that was already asked, it gets closed as duplicate. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;each question can be asked once and only once here&lt;/strong&gt; and concept of frequently asked questions is void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know what topics are most frequently talked about, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/a&gt; - list of tags, by default sorted from most to least frequently used. Ignore tags with specific use, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and you'll have list of frequently asked &lt;em&gt;topics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T14:54:38.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2019-01-22T15:42:25.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have some canonical question posts that work to answer multiple questions that are frequently asked with just enough variation to keep open as separate posts.  For example, creature design.  Or perhaps it was just proposed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We most certainly do have frequently asked questions here, just not a FAQ.  These are questions that are very common but not things you can just say are the same topic.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my map realistic?  (We'd benefit from a post pointing people to mapbuilding concepts.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this species I invented realistic?  (A post about biological constraints would be useful.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a X ride a Y?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I bring with me if I'm time-traveling?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some common questions do get closed as duplicates, others because they're too broad or opinion-based, others because they're badly written.  And many stay open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set of how-to-worldbuild posts would be extremely useful.  As would a community post that was a list of pointers to other places around the internet that addressed these common issues...and pointers to existing posts here on WB that did that, since some have turned out to be comprehensive.  List posts are discouraged here, but sometimes they're useful and, if done as wiki, should work well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Stack Exchange site does it differently.  Over on Genealogy, I'm working with someone to write some canonical posts about interpreting DNA results (because we find ourselves saying the same thing over and over).  The idea is not that we'd necessarily close new questions as duplicates (though we might) but that we could have a post to point to for the basic answer, then give a short addendum about the specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do I get started with Worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt; is a question that would never fly here.  But as a canonical post authored by community wiki, it could be an extremely useful exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T15:42:25.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T22:38:26.157" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on preparing some lectures for my upcoming semester of Business Intelligence Systems at University of Canberra, and I wanted to add in some teaching on Social Network Analysis (SNA). This is the social influence mathematical models, not looking for keywords on Facebook posts (Social Media Analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking through some old lecture slides from previous professors who've taught this class, and I came across an interesting statistic that kind of 'feels' right, but I was curious as to whether or not it holds true and then I realised; we have a 'social network' of sorts right here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the slide shown talks about the 90/9/1 rule;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqnHz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqnHz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Business Intelligence Slide&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I was wondering; do we have any figures that show what Worldbuilding's participation model looks like? What about other stack exchange sites? It would be interesting to see if these 'real world' networks of people, all tasked with common goals, conform to this statistical assessment. From a scientific perspective, I'd even be willing to put the figures into the lecture as an objective assessment of the rule, either for or against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe we have a stats and query engine of some kind, and I have to admit I've never taken the time to learn how it works or what the query language even looks like, but I just thought that from a group perspective this was an interesting idea to share in any event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to the question: &lt;strong&gt;Does Worldbuilding conform to a 90/9/1 contribution model?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T00:31:25.517" Title="Does the Worldbuilding Contribution Model follow Social Network Norms?" Tags="|support|users|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-22T22:44:40.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in my opinion it most certainly is.  In fact, it's one of several reasons I've never bothered to ask a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21753" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T22:44:40.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T12:49:24.703" Score="9" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;2019 is here! And with the new year, as usual, comes a new iteration of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;! Let’s refresh these for the coming year :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's amazing blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for understanding worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blogs or articles of existing interesting worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/7063&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T14:24:59.567" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2019" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-03-05T11:38:35.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2019-01-23T13:36:48.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been on scifi stackexchange for some time and only now learnt of worldbuilding. A new user may not know how to approach so many boards and ask the right question. There are a few moderators who are kind enough to direct a new user to the right board. Most feel that we should simply read all the rules and find out for ourselves. Not that I blame anyone. Spoon feeding is never encouraged in the real world, anyway. Only, for those who are not tech-savy, it becomes a hindrance. I have refrained from answering any questions after a first disastrous attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not about gaining points - which I feel seems to be the only remuneration that many seek. I thought stack exchange is about sharing knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60703" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T13:36:48.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-23T16:56:41.090" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tczj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T16:56:41.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-23T17:05:15.960" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDxv3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Visit Universe Factory, our community-run blog!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T17:05:15.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-23T17:22:45.560" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kr83W.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writing.SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T17:22:45.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7070" CreationDate="2019-01-23T23:52:18.637" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer to my flag raised for the asker of this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137476/what-sources-of-food-can-be-found-in-mountainous-terrain&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137476/what-sources-of-food-can-be-found-in-mountainous-terrain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asked 23 hours ago by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/60679/albert-tyson&quot;&gt;Albert tyson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My flag for moderator's attention is worded thus (excuse typing spelling):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is fine. If you look at this guy's account, he has&#xA;  created a new on as he apears to have lost the login to the old one he&#xA;  used earlier today. &quot; accounts, not within the rules, this guy is&#xA;  genuine and just trying to create a world and could do with mod help&#xA;  to amalgamate the accounts. – Fay Suggers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recieve this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;23 hours ago   declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no&#xA;  evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will observe that the question has been deleted, and (assuming some access to data that I don't possess) that the accounts of &lt;strong&gt;Albert tyson&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Albert Tyson&lt;/strong&gt; have been amalgamated and are now &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/60679/albert-tyson&quot;&gt;Albert tyson&lt;/a&gt; (Of course if you glance at his profile you will see his testimony of support for my story - even without the godlike powers of mods).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This adds to my &quot;flags declined&quot; total - Perhaps the mod responsible for reviewing my request assuming that my flag was malicious or deranged (going by my typing - not unreasonably). If mods are not able to see any appropriate history, then how can they assume otherwise. Is this a feature or a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T08:24:03.213" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T08:24:03.213" Title="If a flag is raised on a question that is then deleted, should that be held against the flag raiser?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7069" CreationDate="2019-01-24T03:57:11.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the one who handled your flag. As Monica Cellio correctly guessed, when I checked the two users your flag was referring to, I found just one and therefore declined the flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't take any other action, and as far as I can tell, you are just being warned when flagging, there is no ban on your profile.  To quote Monica: The system is trying to help you but, being a mindless piece of code, it can't always tell what help you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can try to provide more details on what you are missing, we can try to give a look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T03:57:11.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2019-01-24T16:31:30.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132660/worldbuilding-forum-or-other-conversational-place/132662#132662&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this query&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  In my response, I give links to several geopoetic / worldbuilding forums that do actually discuss the kinds of questions you have and can offer the resources and supportive help you need. (Of those, I think CBB and Reddit are the two best options.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the others have said, Stack Exchange doesn't work this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T16:31:30.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-24T16:53:08.787" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2878&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5HEIT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Share your work on the blog.  We&amp;#39;ll help!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34690" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T17:09:20.937" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T17:09:20.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-24T17:04:40.303" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The best questions are perfected first in our Sandbox!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T15:27:20.667" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:27:20.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-24T17:05:41.877" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mkhzE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Help in the Sandbox as a Mentor!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T15:27:33.243" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:27:33.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-24T17:08:38.340" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cbOZq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T17:08:38.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-26T09:45:48.500" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTGgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Q&amp;amp;A about science fiction and fantasy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T09:45:48.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-01-26T09:47:26.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euF1O.png&quot; alt=&quot;Be inspired by stories&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T09:47:26.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7080" CreationDate="2019-01-28T02:30:17.290" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a question is changed making an answer invalid, how should the community respond?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer to (among other places) a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137802/need-a-specific-event-that-wrecks-the-surface-allows-the-race-to-survive-in-bun&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and to an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137802/need-a-specific-event-that-wrecks-the-surface-allows-the-race-to-survive-in-bun/137807#137807&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer surely becomes invalid as soon as the question is changed, without the original answerer's consent deletion would be high handed, yet an answer, that is nonsensicle in regards of the current version of the question - this is upvoted above answers which answer the question as presently asserted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we always recommend that edits shall not invalidate existing answers,&#xA;  as it is at least a lack of respect toward the effort put by the&#xA;  answerer in writing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to me that sounds like a respectable attitude, that being said it's the first I've heard of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course this is often little understood and neglected, especially by&#xA;  new users, and then it's up to the community to be alert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I'm a part of the community, I came to alert on seeing this (not for the first time) and apparently in some (unspecified way) it's up to me. Damed if I know what to do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A possible and not preferred workaround is that the poster of the&#xA;  answer edits it adding a note that the answer refers to a previous&#xA;  version of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7079/if-a-question-is-changed-making-an-answer-invalid-how-should-the-community-resp&quot;&gt;L.Dutch.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm, &quot;previous version of the question&quot; - that would be something that the majority of members (57,000+ Versus 500 or so) &lt;strong&gt;could not view&lt;/strong&gt;, ie. an &lt;em&gt;edit history&lt;/em&gt;. Should we be making cryptic comments about invisible text? I think not. (Invisible to the majority that is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the answer by L.Dutch is modified to answer this question as-is, then that invalidates the question's quotes from his answer, making the universe swallow itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This whole thing could become a self circling mess decending into hell unless clear rules are specified &lt;em&gt;and enforced&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a question is changed making an answer invalid, how should the community respond?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;It was not my intention to offend L.Dutch in any way, it was not my intention to use any answer to the first version of my question as a straw man. That was entirely opportunistic. I may change the question again without further warning or justification. Or not.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T04:57:42.670" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T04:57:42.670" Title="If a question is changed making an answer invalid, how should the community respond?" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-01-28T11:42:17.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7079" CreationDate="2019-01-28T03:12:39.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I fully understand what you are asking. Anyway, we always recommend that edits shall not invalidate existing answers, as it is at least a lack of respect toward the effort put by the answerer in writing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is often little understood and neglected, especially by new users, and then it's up to the community to be alert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible and not preferred workaround is that the poster of the answer edits it adding a note that the answer refers to a previous version of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T03:12:39.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7049" CreationDate="2019-01-30T05:17:45.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that that question is not too story-based.  However, it might easily be considered either Too Broad or Primarily Opinion-Based.  The reason is that you are asking for a collection of things.  What makes one collection better than another?  Should everyone post collections that are 98% the same, only differing in one item?  I have a brilliant idea for one more item.  Should I post that as a separate answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that there are different approaches.  This is the most story-based part of it, although I'd call it opinion-based instead.  One person might bring a crossbow.  Another might try to bring a kit for making black powder.  It's opinion as to which is better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some portions of the answers say things like reference books and seeds.  Seeds of what plants?  Which reference books?  Those are questions in and of themselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should be limited more.  E.g. here's my pack choices.  I still have ten pounds.  What am I missing?  Should I leave off something in the pack in favor of a better something else?  E.g. replace a modern hunting rifle with limited ammunition with a muzzleloader and a chemistry kit.  Or a crossbow.  Perhaps ask that in its own question (What's the best weapon for one-way time travel to ___?).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that too story-based is meant to be used is when someone asks a question about plot.  What would be typical reactions to a modern person is acceptable.  What a particular person might decide among those typical reactions is not.  It's your job to pick the personalities of your characters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T05:17:45.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7091" CreationDate="2019-01-30T19:27:21.567" Score="9" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question currently has 19K views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/136083/what-modern-weapons-could-be-used-to-destroy-skeletal-enemies-as-completely-as&quot;&gt;What (modern) weapons could be used to destroy skeletal enemies as completely as possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not so naive as to suppose that 19K different people have looked at it. Clearly some people have looked many times at the same question. What is the distribution though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there - or could there be - statistics for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) how many &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; users have viewed any particular question (as opposed to the raw number of views)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) the frequency distribution (anonymous) of multiple views per individual&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) also relevant -  how many users have been active on the site as a whole in a particular period, e.g. January 2019. Given the above stats, this can be used to work out what proportion of active users have looked at a particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious as to how many users are currently active on Worldbuilding (as opposed to the total of those who have registered since it began).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By a user being active, I literally mean any activity including asking a question, answering, commenting, moderating or in particular simply reading a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this could be determined simply by counting users who logged on during that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T15:44:58.443" Title="Thousands of views on a question. Due to many users looking a few times or a few users looking many times?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7084" CreationDate="2019-01-30T23:07:15.403" Score="7" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138065&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96337&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; despite the former having the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6621&quot;&gt;This former meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; explains why it should not be marked as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there been a change in policy that would result in doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56128" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T23:11:27.493" Title="Why is this hard-science question marked as a duplicate of a non hard-science question?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7083" CreationDate="2019-01-30T23:11:27.493" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that one of the voter for closure is Community. This means that the OP got the prompt that a possible answer could be provided by the other question and indicated that the indicated question solved their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP indicates that their problem is solved by another question, even though the tags are different, there is little we can do, aside from requesting them to update the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T23:11:27.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2019-01-31T20:04:03.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second, hard-science question is not asking for anything new in terms of worldbuilding.  At best, it's only asking for &lt;em&gt;additional information to substantiate the previous question's answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is theoretically true that a new, hard-science question can lead to a refutation of the previous question's answers in that forcing all the extra substantiation reveals an error of judgement on the part of the previous respondents.  But this suggests that you're inviting a frame-challenge to the previous question.  You're still not asking a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, perhaps, an intrinsic flaw in Worldbuilding.  Unlike most other stacks which deal in very objective information, we have the potential (and frequently do) to &quot;relax the standards,&quot; which can lead to an erroneous answer that appears to be the best answer at the time.  However, if we think this flaw is experienced so frequently that it makes sense to allow duplicate questions to be considered non-duplicate simply because a more rigorous review of the facts is demanded, then there is a systemic issue that we need to address &amp;mdash; because having two questions considered unique only because one has been more thoroughly reviewed than the other is outside of SE's basic design and intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A potential solution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential solution is to permit non-duplication via the hard-science tag by expressly requiring the OP to explain why the original question's answers are unsatisfactory.  In other words, require the current OP to explain the frame-challenge.  If that challenge cannot be adequately explained (e.g., if the only excuse is, &quot;I just want someone to provide better substantiation...&quot;) then the question would be closed as a duplicate &amp;mdash; as it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because the ideal solution isn't available&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the ideal question is to edit the previous question, impose the hard-science tag, and invite new answers.  But this is impractical and is usually seen as treading on the original question's OP's &quot;copyright,&quot; so to speak.  Editing someone else's question in this kind of way is usually taboo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T20:04:03.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7082" CreationDate="2019-02-01T10:37:03.310" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this hasn't changed in the past ~7-8 years, then views are counted as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7082/thousands-of-views-on-a-question-due-to-many-users-looking-a-few-times-or-a-few?cb=1#comment22349_7082&quot;&gt;HDE's comment&lt;/a&gt; and explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/90187/349720&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some sort of a throttling mechanism in action. It saves the information about a question view per visitor like in pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for anonymous users, it is IP + QuestionNr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for authenticated users it is UserNr + QuestionNr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This information is saved in an expiring cache entry for about 15 minutes. If a subsequent hit sees the entry is still there it discards the new hit. If it is already gone it allows for a new record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, any time a post receives a view from a user (or IP address) that it hasn't seen within about 15 minutes, checked against a cache, it adds the user number (or IP address) to this cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a new cache entry is created, a buffer is also updated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The buffer itself also expires after a few minutes or after it is filled up to a certain size, whichever happens first. When it expires, everything it has accumulated is written into the database in bulk. They call it a &amp;quot;buffered write scheme&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in essence, each unique view within an approximately 15 minute window adds an entry to a buffer which updates the number of displayed page views by the number in that buffer either after a few minutes, or once it's full (whichever is first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, this gives that, as the data is only &lt;em&gt;temporarily&lt;/em&gt; stored, there's just no way of being able to answer parts (a) or (b) of your question - a quick check on the stored database values in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt; confirms this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial answer to part (c) can at least be found by doing a SEDE search by 'LastAccessDate', which could be used to return the users who &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; accessed the site within a certain time period/since a certain date. For completeness, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/edit/974882#messages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ran this&lt;/a&gt; and got 9562 results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T10:37:03.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7104" CreationDate="2019-02-01T13:06:46.197" Score="-1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are easy to formulate and can stand as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are complicated. They tend to attract a mix of comments asking for clarification together with hasty answers that haven't been thought through or simply make assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the complications of using a sandbox or getting put on hold by vote or by moderator, I suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EITHER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; Automatically put every question on hold for 24 hours. This allows comments asking for clarification but stops ill-thought-out answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that anyone's question on this site is so urgent that it can't wait for 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B.&lt;/strong&gt; Allow the user to put their own question on hold immediately. I would certainly use this facility. It would allow me to carefully consider others' comments and edit the question accordingly. It would prevent me having to deal with premature answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem with the sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people say that the sandbox avoids clogging up the main site. I don't believe this is true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Many questions are put on hold by the community without being tested in the sandbox. These already clog up the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I'm not convinced that this 'clogging up' is actually a problem. We're living with it already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) A lot of people don't spend time looking at the sandbox in order to help others. I personally never do. I believe it is inefficient and doesn't guarantee that a question will succeed on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; reason that would prevent my suggestions A and/or B from being implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt; flaw in my proposal?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T21:21:18.287" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T06:34:18.213" Title="Why can't I put my own questions on hold - or have it happen automatically" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|on-hold|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2019-02-01T14:02:36.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any logical flaw in my proposal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it punishes the users who put effort in writing questions &quot;first time right&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it makes more abstruse the interaction with the site for new users, who have to wait 24 hours to get their answer and are going to be flooded by comments without having any clue if their question is fine or not (now only the non-fine questions go through this ordeal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it requires every user to invest 24+ hours into a question before getting answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B: it is basically the same concept of the sandbox, just asking for more work to implement it. Moreover, if an user has no discipline to self-test their question before posting it, why would they have the discipline to self-hold their question? How would they be able to tell when a question is good enough to be released, and could they be trusted in doing so? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This basically takes away the role of the community as collective arbiter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T14:02:36.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2019-02-01T14:04:43.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The designed mechanism for that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6168/809&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt; - if you need to use it, use it. If you feel you do not need to use it - write it right. Many people here write all, or most, of their questions in a way that requires little to no further clarification, holding them back makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="809" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T14:04:43.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2019-02-01T14:49:05.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Others have noted the logical flaws in this proposal, I'd like to point out the technical one.  We don't have control over the underlying software that drives the &quot;on-hold&quot; system.  That's SE-controlled, so we don't have the power to change that.  While we could put in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;, the large majority of those, especially for one-site proposals, get denied.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T14:49:05.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T15:23:26.347" Score="25" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations, Worldbuilders.  Today we hit a total of 20,000 questions on the main site!  Good job on this milestone, everyone, and keep those questions coming!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34744" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T15:23:26.347" Title="Congratulations, Worldbuilding!" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T19:23:38.547" Score="28" ViewCount="6045" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frame challenges have long been considered acceptable here at worldbuilding.SE  However, I believe many users don't understand what a frame challenge is or how to appropriate present a challenge as a legitimate answer to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I've seen this come up a number of times in the past, the most recent example was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138270/a-decoy-planet-made-of-expanded-polystyrene-how-big-can-i-make-it/138278#138278&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138270/a-decoy-planet-made-of-expanded-polystyrene-how-big-can-i-make-it&quot;&gt;A Decoy Planet made of expanded polystyrene. How big can I make it?&lt;/a&gt;  The example is especially relevant because the respondent provided a wonderful alternative idea, one that was appreciated by the OP.  However, and most especially thanks to the OP's use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, the proposed answer did not answer the question.  But, did it represent an appropriate frame challenge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal, for your consideration, is no.  It did not.  No matter how useful, I believe the answer in its present form is not an answer and would have been better submitted as a comment to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally: I propose that frame challenges are an acceptable way to answer any question posted to this site.  As a definition: a frame challenge is any assertion that challenges the premise or underpinnings of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that an acceptable frame challenge must fundamentally express the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What you're asking for won't work because of X, but you could alternatively consider Y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking to impose a specific form (syntax, format, etc.) as much as I'm proposing a philosophy.  (A) A frame challenge must of necessity contain an explanation of why the respondent believes answering the question as proposed by the OP isn't useful, relevant, or meaningful.  However, (B) A frame challenge need not offer an alternative solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose that a frame challenge must explain the challenge and not only offer an alternative.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I further propose that a frame challenge must meet the obligations of the tags associated with the question.  In other words, if the question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, the frame challenge must meet that tag's mandate or fail as a frame challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that when reviewing answers, Worldbuilding.SE users should consider a missing frame challenge as justification to flag the answer as &quot;not an answer.&quot;  They should consider a poor frame challenge (e.g., one that doesn't meet the expectations of the question's tags or is simply a lazy effort to rationalize commenting rather than answering) as a downvotable offense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I propose this warning: frame challenges are not an excuse to abuse Stack Exchange's answering system.  A frame challenge must be more useful than a comment or it must be posted as a comment (see previous paragraph about reviewing the answer).  This warning is not meant to be anything more official than the community-approved existence of this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-03-15T02:16:09.627" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T02:16:09.627" Title="A proposal for helping users understand frame challenges" Tags="|discussion|reviewing-behavior|advice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T19:41:29.767" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;RE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138326/need-help-finishing-my-magic-system&quot;&gt;Need help finishing my magic system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helping people flesh out a system of magic should, frankly, be one of our foundation strengths.  This question was closed as Primarily Opinion-Based (POB).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE's definition of POB invalidates all questions about magic.  No one has &quot;facts, reference, or specific expertise&quot; in the OP's magic system (or any other form of magic).  This led me to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5991/magic-is-primarily-opinion-based-by-definition-so-what-does-a-pob-vtc-mean&quot;&gt;Magic is primarily opinion-based by definition, so what does a POB VTC mean?&lt;/a&gt; which, itself, led me to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436/idea-refinement-clarification-and-examples-of-vtc-reasons-for-new-users/6437#6437&quot;&gt;this proposal for a WB-centric definition of POB&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion (and I grant that it's only my opinion), the target question does not fail the proposed definition for POB.  The OP has provided a reasonably complete description of his/her magic system and answers that meet basic WB.SE standards (e.g., no one-liners, should have a paragraph of description justifying your answer) are easily judged against the proposed magic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the OP is asking a reasonably scoped question.  (OK, to be fair, he/she's asking two, but they're so related that I'm willing to be forgiving and not close as too-broad.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I invite people to either vote to reopen the question or please post explanations below that justify the cause of closure so we can better refine our review standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;SUB&gt;&lt;em&gt;For the record, after 18 months on this site, I could be convinced to completely remove &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; as a rationale for closure, leading to asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320891/allowing-a-site-to-modify-vtc-text-or-disable-a-vtc-reason-altogether&quot;&gt;Allowing a site to modify VTC text or disable a VTC reason altogether&lt;/a&gt; on meta.stackexchange.com.  But for now, it's a thorn in our side.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T15:32:45.237" Title="An invitation to reopen a magic-system question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-04T09:38:12.383" Score="14" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've seen this pattern: a new user have an interesting idea, it contains a &amp;quot;grain&amp;quot; of a good, suitable question (sometimes several), and they post it in a way that don't fit our site's model - typical &amp;quot;offenses&amp;quot; include asking multiple questions in a single post, or just presenting an idea and asking for comments in a forum style. We respond by down-voting and VTCs (as we should - that's how SE works and maintain quality). Many times the user is confused, thinks they are harshly punished for being out of line, and leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while personally I tend to lurk in a community long before contributing - so I have a good grasp of the etiquette and conventions when I post, not everybody does. I feel it's a shame to lose an enthusiastic user and a good question just because they didn't nail it on their first go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; could really help here, but it's not discoverable - even for new users trying to be &amp;quot;good citizens&amp;quot;, it's not mentioned in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;Help Center &amp;gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; pane when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;asking a question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should we add a link to sandbox to any/all of the above to improve its discoverability?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="756" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T05:00:28.177" Title="Should we improve the discoverability of our Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|sandbox|new-users|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-04T14:58:49.727" Score="-7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many times the user is confused, thinks they are harshly punished for being out of line, and leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a word for that kind of person: quitter. I don't think quitters are a good fit anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not for the negative first reaction, a quitter will quit for whatever other reason. I wouldn't bother about those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we add a link to sandbox to any/all of the above to improve it's discoverability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree on the reason for improving visibility - that won't help quitters. But it can help the ones who do stay. I don't know if we can get it on the tour easily but we sure should mention it in the main help page and anywhere else we could pin it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for asking the SE devs about getting a link to the sandbox at the top menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T14:58:49.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7098" CreationDate="2019-02-04T15:32:45.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't comment on the question, I didn't upvote, didn't downvote and didn't vote to close -- I seldom, if ever, take any action on magic-related questions. But this specific question needs heavy work in order to make it answerable, even for those members of the community for whom magic is an attractive subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;four different questions&lt;/em&gt; in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;&quot;My protagonist uses prana that allows making things light or heavier. I was thinking of just saying it’s a subclass to the earth element, but if it's possible to do that with one of these that would be great.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;&quot;Also, my protagonist fights someone that shows you your inner demons; for this, I was saying it’s a subclass of wind, but if this could be explained with one of these it would be great as well.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;&quot;Fire(dominant) + Wind = ?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;&quot;Water(dominant) + Wind = ?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question does not actually describe a magic &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt;. It consists mostly of meaningless &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psychography&lt;/a&gt;, without any discernible structure or identification of rules. An illustrative example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Humans call any other animal besides themselves with spiritual energy, Spiritual Beast. Spiritual Beast cultivate precisely like humans, but more efficiently. The best I can describe this is, a big vacuum and a small vacuum. Spiritual energy circulated inside a living thing is called prana. Prana is circulated throughout the body which eventually leads to the chiasma. The chiasma to me is the dantian, specifically the upper one, but more focused on eyes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• This the first time the word “cultivate” appears in the text. I posit that its meaning is impossible to discern for any reader, no matter how attentive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The use of jargon is not helping at all. The word “dantian” has nothing to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dante&lt;/a&gt; (to the surprise of naïve readers), but rather it’s a Romanization the Chinese word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dantian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;丹田&lt;/a&gt; (dāntián), an “energy center” which is a “focal point for meditative and exercise techniques such as qigong, martial arts such as t'ai chi ch'uan, and in traditional Chinese medicine”. A hyperlink would have helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The (optic) chiasma is an anatomical structure. The “dantians” are Chinese metaphysical / surreal / supernatural structures or concepts. How can a metaphysical “energy” be circulated to an anatomical structure, and how can an anatomical structure be (identical with) a metaphysical / surreal / supernatural structure (or concept? I cannot tell) is left as an exercise to the reader — the querent does not bother to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any answers would be both subjective in the extreme, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; form a major part of the creative background of the story. Of the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;Using prana to make things light or heavier&lt;/em&gt; is of course possible using water; or using heat; or using wind: who’s to say that it isn’t? Choosing whether it is or isn’t possible is what the author should do depending on the story they want to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The protagonist can fight &lt;em&gt;someone that shows you your inner demons&lt;/em&gt; using fire; or using ice; or using metal: who’s to say that they can’t? Choosing whether it is or isn’t possible is what the author should do depending on the story they want to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Fire (dominant) + Wind = Air; or Life; or Aether; or Power; or Light: who’s to choose? Well, the author is to choose, obviously, depending on the story they want to tell. But how could the community choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Water (dominant) + Wind = Air; or Life; or Death; or Chaos: who’s to choose? Well, the author is to choose, obviously, depending on the story they want to tell. But how could the community choose?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only way the community could choose between answers is by judging their artistic values: are they consistent? Are they well written? Do they produce pleasure when read? Is the composition balanced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we do not generally do that, or, at least, we like to believe that we don’t base our votes mainly on esthetics. (We cannot honestly say that literary esthetics are totally unimportant; but we generally strive to upvote answers which are objectively good.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I don’t believe that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; magic-related questions are unanswerable; writing an answerable magic-related question may be hard, and it may take the magic out of the magic, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible. Unfortunately, this question is just too hazy, and it attempts to offload too much authorial creativity onto the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T15:32:45.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-05T02:06:53.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can't say I entirely agree with Renan's interpretation of new users who experience the negative impact of a poorly formed question, I do agree with him entirely on the fact that the sandbox should be more readily discoverable and I would support any attempts to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd actually take it a step further and say that it should be an intrinsic part of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New contributors should all have the Ask Question button pointed to the sandbox by default, where they can get the help they need and then there should be an option based on either a voting system or a single user with sufficient rep to graduate the question to 'Prod', so to speak. In other words, new contributors shouldn't (in my opinion) be able to get to the main site and the negative commentary in prime; they should be routed through the sandbox in the first instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not currently sure how long the 'new contributor' flag stays on a new user, or whether or not we should be able to flag someone based on questions only (not rep or answers, or votes, etc.) as being routed to the sandbox, but it is my view that it should be an intrinsic part of the site that new users experience prior to their questions being released. This could be managed through the conventional queues that we all get as it is and users of sufficient rep should have the 'sandbox' queue come up so we can work on what goes in there regarding new content in a supportive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will that discourage some users because they don't get their post on the site in real time? Perhaps. But I'd argue that getting your content up in real time and getting it criticised is even more discouraging, and SE can take some getting used to as a community whether we remember that or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So; my proposal to SE would be that the sandbox become a queue that can be enabled on a site by site basis by those responsible for it; if enabled, the question is written up and is basically suspended (made invisible to the main site but put up on a queue) for review. Once people on the site are happy with the framing and layout of the question, it is released, making it visible on the site (preferably with a 'cleared' message naming users, much like the one we have for On-Hold right now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean that it doesn't rely on threads in Meta, or any other content driven medium for delivery but would be built into the behaviour of the site directly. That would put a greater burden on our senior members and Mods, but it would have the following benefits;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Less poor quality questions on the front page distracting browsers from the quality content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) No longer would we have a sea of On-Hold questions through the site, making us &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; unwelcoming&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Prior engagement between new users and senior members of the site in a supportive framework before a question goes live; they get to know us a little before we pull their question apart in front of their eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this can be done easily is (to me at least) the real issue. I think it is at least worth the ask given the value that could come of it in terms of image let alone better quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T02:06:53.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-05T06:15:25.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While steering new users to the Sandbox is good, the real problem is that experienced users don't read it and comment.  I've used it myself and got almost no comments on my question proposal (the people who skewered it when it went live had a chance to help out in Sandbox but they never read it there).  I've also commented on other people's proposed questions and been the only one to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sandbox needs a commitment from experienced users of Worldbuilding to go there periodically and leave some constructive comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T06:15:25.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2019-02-05T06:34:18.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I&quot;m not the only one who tends not to ask for clarification before answering.  Why?  Because answerers are punished for waiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some badges encourage you to be the first to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once one or more answers have started to take off with upvotes, it's nearly impossible for a later answer to get more than a few.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no waiting time for a questioner to choose a &quot;best answer&quot; (I tried on Meta and the few voters/commenters didn't want to change this) and a large percentage choose a best answer in the first few hours (often before or even instead of going through the comments and responding).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is no way to get notified that someone has added to the comments on a question, unless you are specifically tagged.  This means you can't follow a discussion in comments without remembering to check it later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system is not set up for using comments to clarify a question unless the questioner answers immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T06:34:18.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7082" CreationDate="2019-02-05T15:44:58.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, there are three major reasons for such view counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question is on a topic that people generally search for on search engines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question is linked to on a popular blog, Twitter account, Facebook, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question hits the Stack Exchange &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot;, which causes it to be featured in the sidebar network wide, and thus viewed by a massively larger audience than only those who browse Worldbuilding regularly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On #1 and #2, the vote count is typically not that high, as most of the visitiors are not SE users, and thus do not have enough reputation to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On #3, a fair portion of the visitors are SE users with reputation from other sites, who thus can get the association bonus, and vote. Therefore, #3 results in considerably higher vote count than #1 and #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the reasonably high vote count on your question (and its answers), #3 seems more likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/279509/321647&quot;&gt;use the Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; to confirm that your question was indeed a &quot;Hot Network Question&quot;, in fact, it was at the top of the list, with over 200k hotness points shortly after it was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2bbgp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2bbgp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So actually, it is quite possible that the number of unique visitors is quite high, perhaps higher than you expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18252" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T15:44:58.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2019-02-06T19:11:08.617" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the sentiment of this question, I think the solution is a development level problem either way.  Across every stack exchange site I've ever used, I can't recall ever actually seeing a question taken off hold.  I've seen questions revised 3-6 times and still stay on-hold because the people who are of the mentality to put someone on hold generally throw their vote in and move on with their day without ever re-addressing the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, it needs to be much easier to take a question off of hold than put it on-hold to begin with because once a question is on hold, getting any new people in with 3000+ points to look at it to see the revisions becomes very unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, those are the people who are most active, and therefore most likely to see it before it is revised.  Secondly, there's little motivation to look at a question you can't answer if you want more points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the actual solution possed in the question, I think destigmatizing &quot;On-Hold&quot; would just make people faster to do it and make the problem even bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T19:18:12.530" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T19:18:12.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7097" CreationDate="2019-02-07T17:37:07.017" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I almost entirely agree with you here except for the part about &amp;quot;A frame challenge need not offer an alternative solution.&amp;quot;  I feel like a frame challenge must by its very nature offer an alternative answer, otherwise, it belongs in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EXAMPLE:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make an underwater habitat out of recycled materials; so, how many recycled milk cartons would it take to make the shell of an underwater habitat that can sustain 1 person at a depth of 100 meters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Answers:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soda cans would work better.  At that depth it would take ~500,000 recycled soda cans. [supporting facts here...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we both agree that this is a bad answer. Although it may be more practical than milk cartons, with no reason given for why the frame of the question needs to be challenged, it's simply off-point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milk cartons are typically biodegradable; so, you would never want to build an underwater habitat out of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an effective frame challenge without an alternate solution.  The problem here is that it would compel the question asker to modify his question at which point this answer would no longer be at all relevant to the question being asked.  Since it's only purpose is to refine the question, it belongs in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milk cartons are typically biodegradable; so, you would never want to build an underwater habitat out of them.  If you are simply trying to make an environment out of recycled materials, soda cans would work better because aluminum does not get weaker with age when submerged in water.  At that depth it would take ~500,000 recycled soda cans. [supporting facts here...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the frame challenge still tries to answer the focus of the question which is using recycled materials, while giving clear reasons for disregarding aspects of the question that needed to be disregarded.  This answer is likely to remain relevant, even if the OP is modified in regards to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T13:07:38.940" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T13:07:38.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-07T21:16:37.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Programming Puzzles and Code Golf&lt;/a&gt;, their Sandbox is always &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt;, so it shows up in the sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One drawback of this method is that featured posts are un-featured a month after the tag was added. In other words, it becomes &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/2140/revisions&quot;&gt;a long edit war&lt;/a&gt; between the Community bot and moderators. The other drawback is that there are fewer slots for &quot;Hot Meta Posts&quot; in the sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also several benefits. First of all, it can be done immediately (without the need to escalate to a CM). It will make the sandbox link convenient for &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;, including the high-rep users we need reviewing. It's also just as easy to reverse this decision if it doesn't pan out. For these reasons I think that making the Sandbox &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; is definitely one thing that should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I would also support putting links into the areas you mentioned, but I don't think I've ever actually read any of those sections on this site (oops), since it's all just very similar across all the sites. Also, &quot;How to Ask&quot; is only shown when the cursor is in the title box so it's easy to miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastEditorUserId="22818" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T07:15:14.657" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T07:15:14.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-08T19:03:36.460" Score="6" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, we have two tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For questions about creatures that are not found on Earth. These can be anything from dragons to Pegasus to your own made-up creature. They just need to not exist on this Earth.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;392 Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For questions relating to races that are often found in the fantasy subgenre of fiction, such as elves, dwarves, etc. This can be about their physical characteristics, their societies, or something completely different.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;208 Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything in Meta about the difference.  Both are well-used.  A mere &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmythical-creatures%5D%20and%20%5Bfantasy-races%5D%20is%3Aq&quot;&gt;20 questions have both tags&lt;/a&gt;.  My guess is that questioners or editors find one, add it, and are done.  But there's a lot of overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag badges.  No one has a silver or gold tag badge for either tag.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7 people have a bronze tag badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;.  Only 1 person has a &#xA;bronze tag badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; (that person also has the first badge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; has the following uses (50 most recent questions, not comprehensive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generic monsters/evil/beasts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Troll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zombies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wyvern&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dragon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phoenix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Angel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Succubus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merfolk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Centaur&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unicorn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vampire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; has the following uses (50 most recent questions, not comprehensive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dwarves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vampire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goblin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faeries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drider&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Immortal being&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Angel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pixies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Troll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chimeras&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orcs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Satyr/faun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harpies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyclops&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merfolk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I trust you all see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, these tags could be synonyms of each other.  I can see how and why there might be a division.  But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of creatures fit into both, no matter how you define the categories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody pays the slightest attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are both widely-used tags with a very small number of questions using both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we make one a synonym of the other?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we combine them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we redefine them to create a significant difference then retag hundreds of questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or redefine without any re-tagging except going forward?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do nothing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ADDITIONS:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is now a synonym proposal up.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/mythical-creatures/synonyms&quot;&gt;Please vote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;elemtilas has gone through all tagged questions and edited tags as needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I submitted edits to the user guidance sections for both tags and both have been approved (the longer info sections still need editing but I wanted to see where this discussion went first).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastEditorUserId="54137" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T17:55:56.813" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T03:16:20.160" Title="What is the difference between [mythical-creatures] and [fantasy-races]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2019-02-09T15:47:36.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose we:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep as the primary tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For questions about creatures that are not found on Earth. These can be anything from dragons to Pegasus to your own made-up creature. They just need to not exist on this Earth. 392 Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And make this tag a synonym for it (merging them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For questions relating to races that are often found in the fantasy subgenre of fiction, such as elves, dwarves, etc. This can be about their physical characteristics, their societies, or something completely different. 208 Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal does not change, add, or delete any other tags that may be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T15:47:36.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2019-02-10T07:59:11.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some realities to human psychology that, unfortunately, cannot be overcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The act of being judged &amp;mdash; especially in this day and age &amp;mdash; has become so hated that there is no way to reword or redesign the process that would make anyone feel better.  Nobody likes to have their baby called ugly and new users, who almost never take the time to read the Help Center, are unfortunately destined to bring ugly babies to the site.  We've all done it with rare exception.  It is truly unfortunate that the world is marching to the beat of &quot;you can't tell me what to do!&quot; more than, &quot;I want to be a contributor, where are the rules?&quot; but that's the world we live in today.  If you think it feels awful to have your question closed, wait until you've spent a year+ on this site patiently helping people to participate well only to be told by someone, &quot;why don't you just answer my *)@&amp;amp;!! question!!??&quot;  The sour feelings can work in both directions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The issue of closing questions is an example of the classic problem of balancing individual rights with society's needs.  So long as there's just one reason for society to impose its collective will on any one individual (aka, rules), there will be cause to impose other restrictions &amp;mdash; and deciding which are valid and which aren't is simply an issue of &lt;s&gt;social mores&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;semantics&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;politics&lt;/s&gt; community consensus.  Bear in mind that a big part of the problem is the time it takes to get a new user involved on Meta, etc. (and many never do) so they become part of the process rather than feeling like they're being dumped on by &quot;The Man&quot; all the time.  (And if that didn't sound a bit like real life, allow me to point that out....)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And a big part of the problem is that we have no idea who's on the other end of the phone.  We don't know if they're children or PhD-holding adults.  We don't know if they've suffered verbal abuse all their lives or if they're sociopathic trolls.  We don't know if they're naturally shy or if they simply have their flight-vs-fight response nailed to one extreme or the other.  Not knowing that, we have but one possible solution: post rules and hold people to them.  Please note that this isn't a new problem.  I remember being told to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abbreviations.com/term/1199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RTM&lt;/a&gt; in my College Fortran class in the early 80s.  &lt;em&gt;Fortran... oh, yeah....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a CVn has already pointed out &amp;mdash; there's nothing we can do to change it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best effort we can make is to have positive, helpful comments that go along with the close votes (and, as often as possible, the downvotes).  Offering polite direction as to what offense has been made, how to fix it, and where to learn more is the best we can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T07:59:11.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2019-02-12T03:03:45.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically and sensically, they mean quite different things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Creatures&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (whether mythical, extant or extinct) are generally considered to be &quot;animals&quot; (yes, I know humans are animals).  This tag simply deals with creatures, that is animals, that are found in myths, legends, fantasies, fables and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Races&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (whether fantasy, extant or extinct) are generally considered to be some kind of &quot;people&quot;.  This tag deals with self-aware, conscious sophonts. Beings that would be considered the near-equal, equal or super-equal of humans. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd urge keeping them separate as they really are not synonymous. Perhaps clarify (by example) what is expected when using either tag. If there is any overlap (both tags used in one question), I think it would be a better idea to review the questions and edit out the inappropriate tag. That is, remove &quot;fantasy races&quot; from a query about unicorns, for example. I'd be happy to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T03:10:27.573" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T03:10:27.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2019-02-12T16:08:00.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most of the random picking happens because it should be 4 tags not 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mythical and Fantasy are distinctly different concepts AND Creatures and Races are distinctly different as well; so, when people have to pick which tag to use, there is often an eenie-meenie-miney-mo moment.  This leads to inconsistency where you might see something weird like a question about unicorns tagged with a fantasy-race tag because the author is asking about DnD unicorns and not Biblical unicorns, and (s)he cares more about that distinction than whether it is technically a creature or a race.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elemtilas pointed out the difference between races and creatures quite well; so, I'll just summarize that as being the difference between sentient and non-sentient beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Mythical and Fantasy: mythical means that it is something that originates from religious traditions or stories that groups of people generally accepted as true at some point.  Mythical beings have generally been a part of our collective consciousness for hundreds or thousands of years.  Fantasy are beings that are knowingly invented for entertainment, hypothetical consideration, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how the OP's list would break down would look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generic monsters/evil/beasts [Fantasy-Creature] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giant [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Troll [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zombies [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wyvern [Mythical-Creature] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dragon [Mythical-Creature] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elves [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phoenix [Mythical-Creature] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Angel [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Succubus [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merfolk [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Centaur [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unicorn [Mythical-Creature] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vampire [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dwarves [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goblin [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faeries [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drider [Fantasy-Race] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Immortal being [Fantasy-Race] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pixies [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demons [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chimeras [Mythical-Creature] or [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orcs [Fantasy-Race]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Satyr/faun [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harpies [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyclops [Mythical-Race] or [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus a few examples of pure Fantasy beings that are not part of any mythos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyborgs [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Androids [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smurfs [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wookies [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kryptonians [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Klingons [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gnolls [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Illithid [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drow [Fantasy-Race]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beholders [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pokemon [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trebles [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wargs [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tyranids [Fantasy-Creature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you read this list, it looks like pretty much everything is Fantasy meaning you could in theory drop the mythical tag all together, but there is a problem with that.  Having come back to this question a few times, I think the OP actually underlined with his analytics why they belong as 2 tags when he said, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Both are well-used (but) A mere 20 questions have both tags.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  This lack of overlap is itself evidence that most people see them as two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the importance of the distinction between Fantasy &amp;amp; Mythology, it is because a person well versed in pop-culture will likely know more about Fantasy beings whereas a person well versed in literature or theology may have better insights into Mythological beings.  Likewise, it is important to distinguish races from creatures because a question about a race will often require insights into Psychology and Sociology whereas creatures will normally focus more of Biology and Zoology backgrounds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another less obvious application of these diversified tags is when a being is heavily steeped in both Fantasy AND Mythology so that you know how to frame your answer.  For example, a question about Vampires as they apply to Medieval superstitions would have the [Mythical-Race] tag whereas a question about sparkly skinned Twilight vampires may have the [Fantasy-Race] tag.  That way you don't get irrelevant references to Dracula in a question about Edward Cullen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T21:12:42.563" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T21:12:42.563" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-13T10:03:59.223" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like the proposal doesn't go too far enough. A link to the sandbox should be plainly visible near any question/answer text box.  Any stack that enables MathJax should beat you over the head with the sandbox at every opportunity, in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T10:03:59.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-13T18:26:14.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not see the merit in the WB Stack sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sandbox type forum would be indispensable for endeavors where the money or prestige of the company were at risk, or if there were a possible safety hazard.  New concepts should definitely be tested in ways that minimize risk before rolling them out publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sandbox type forum is appropriate in an educational setting - trainees and students and novices must learn to write and present and convey their ideas.  Having that done for you by people who already know is less educational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think the Stack is any of those situations.  There is no money or prestige at risk and no safety issues.  I do not think the Stack sets out to improve the compositional skills of contributors.  It is just questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of Sandbox, Stack enthusiasts can and should just fix things on the fly.  Change questions with merit to fit the format of the stack.  Just edit them and make them right.  If a question sucks so bad that fixing is impossible then vote to close.  If edits miss the point of the OP and he/she cares, he/she can edit them additionally to clarify or post another question.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T18:26:14.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2019-02-14T18:20:07.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Loch Ness monster is a mythical creature, but definetly not a fantasy race...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6892" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T18:20:07.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-15T20:47:53.280" Score="-2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we have a swarm-robotics tag?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139180/what-weapons-would-nanomachines-use&quot;&gt;What weapons would nanomachines use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, it largely differs from robotics (especially thanks to its unique challenges), then I realized we don't even have a robotics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T13:37:36.030" Title="Should we have a swarm-robotics tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7099" CreationDate="2019-02-16T01:59:44.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we improve the discoverability of our Sandbox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, obviously.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make no judgment about the underlying values regarding the sandbox's existence, but if we want it to exist then we should appropriatley facilitate it's use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the OP's list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The &quot;How to Ask&quot; pane when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;asking a question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A magic link in the form of [sandbox] or similar should be added to the list of magic links in the top answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239707/complete-list-of-help-center-magic-links&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (if an edit of this kind is seen as acceptable by the community), for the reason anyone familiar with the use of magic links will be aware of already.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviews, personaly, I never get reminded about anything to do, the activity level there is so low that it's not an attractive place to hang out if one wishes to be busy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried [sandbox] a few minutes ago to give a newbie a pointer and was astonished and disappointed to discover it didn't exist, that's one of the reasons that I'm posting in this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no idea how to use the sandbox - I've been there multiple times and see no clear path to making good use of it, there are few answers, no reviews, and essentialy little meaningfull feedback. To an extent this is because of lack of interest by the membership - I feel that we can generate interest through enabling reviews. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In despite of the inadequacies, I feel a duty to refer others to use it. I strongly urge it that the whole thing needs reappraisal to make it work in the context of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the creators are not prepared to &quot;change exchange-wide code&quot; (as per JBH's comment) to enable the thing to be accessible and usefull in a meaningful way to new members, or even reasonably experienced members then the whole exercise becomes pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then the sandbox should be closed, because referring anyone to it (by whatever arcane means that some may know) will only add to any confusion (and for newbs a feeling of being slighted) that they may feel about why they've been referred there in the first place. Putting aside the (Kafkaesque) idea that this is what's intended, we need to make it work - which, I feel, it presently doesn't, or stop expecting anyone to (try and) use the thing, and just dump it completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimatley, we should try to make it work in whatever way we can, making the creators realise it's potential value to both the network and to themselves as a commercial training/educational/idea prototyping subset of the package. The but, the &lt;strong&gt;big but&lt;/strong&gt; - there comes a point when if six years of people's attempts to make it effective in spite of substantial unresolved coding-support issues ultimatley fails, then what's left is that we need to call it quits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T05:00:28.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T05:00:28.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7124" CreationDate="2019-02-16T13:37:36.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A tag should be widely enough applicable that we can envision a reasonable number of on-topic questions that would benefit from it for categorization purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to demonstrate this is to point to several questions that you feel would benefit from the tag. In this case, one is none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the tag must not be a duplicate of an existing tag. (Specializations is another matter, like we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mythical-creatures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mythical-creatures&lt;/a&gt; but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centaur&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centaur&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centaur&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unicorns&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unicorns&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unicorns&lt;/a&gt;, for example. I'm not always happy about those, but at least one is generally pretty clearly a subset of the other.) If a tag is hard to find, we should consider renaming or synonymizing it, rather than creating another tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is true that invoking extremely small machines (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt;) poses somewhat unique challenges, and that what they use for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; may therefore differ from that used by larger entities for similar purposes, I'm not sure you have sufficiently demonstrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that there is a need to separately categorize questions on &lt;em&gt;swarm&lt;/em&gt; robotics, as opposed to plain &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/robots&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;robots&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;robots&lt;/a&gt; with further clarification in the question title or early in the question text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that there is a huge difference between weapons that would be useful to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt; as opposed to those useful to very small &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fauna&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fauna&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fauna&lt;/a&gt;, regardless of whether the individual entities are solitary or cooperative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt; by necessity involves machines working together in a swarm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that machines working together in a swarm would necessarily be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that very small &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/robots&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;robots&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;robots&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't be using something that can be categorized as small &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that very small &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; couldn't be categorized as a combination of, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanotechnology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nanotechnology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nanotechnology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being, I think that &lt;strong&gt;the case is not compelling&lt;/strong&gt; for a swarm-robotics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T13:37:36.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2019-02-17T14:52:19.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I put my potato into orbit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;————&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The agricultural industry on Luna has been undergoing a boom of late, so much so that First Minister Boris Sonsson has decided a potato must be launched into lunar orbit to commemorate the hard work of the Farmers of the Moon. A popular vote (taken via completely tamperproof voting booths, of course) confirmed that this plan is what the Lunar public wants, regardless of expense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone in the lunar civil service knows this is ludicrous, and to make matters worse a series of long and complicated treaties with Earth and Mars mean that launching the potato with any form of onboard engine or guidance will be a process that could take decades or risk starting an interplanetary trade war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such the Technical Minister, Theresa Maybe, has come up with a plan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: A series of laser base stations with remarkable telescope arrays and accurate laser actuation will be built along the equator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: A suitably large (and well pricked) potato will be loaded into a large pneumatic cannon and fired skywards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third: The base stations will track the potato and, at appropriate points, blast it with lasers. This should cause steam (and possibly roast potato chunks) to vent from the holes created by pricking the potato. By doing this the hope is that sufficient delta-v can be generated to put the potato into orbit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If successful this will be used to launch all manner of vegetables, root or otherwise, as a show of strength and unity to ensure Luna gets good trade deals from the other spacefaring nations. The government don’t seem to have considered how to avoid intersecting orbits, but avoiding being peppered with de-orbiting mashed potato is a problem for future generations (like those lazy bimillennials, they need a good crisis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Theresa knows that this plan is pretty much unworkable, but the lunar government is scrabbling for ways to shore up the appearance that they know what they’re doing, so the question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could this plan, or some variation on it, be used to put an unpowered potato into orbit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, why not, and can the Lunar government make it seem to their &lt;s&gt;gullible&lt;/s&gt; loyal citizens that the plan is workable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers will be ranked based on the number of factors considered and the potential for A: getting the potato to orbit or B: resolving the issues with getting the potato to orbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as always remember: Porbit means Porbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A quick note:&lt;/em&gt; Vegetable themed humour aside, the core of this question is whether any organic, unpowered projectile can be launched into a stable (even on a short timescale) lunar orbit, but the world I’m building is almost unbearably satirical in nature.&#xA;———&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question is probably OK to go, but I’d like a second opinion as the tone is quite satirical in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T07:19:15.477" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T07:19:15.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T15:06:08.043" Score="-10" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The great strength of this community is its wide-ranging expertise on diverse subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that involve an individual are routinely put on hold as too story based but where else can we go for the required knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sufficiently devious user could adopt the simple expedient of making it about a race of beings. By disguising the question sufficiently we can evade the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a rather silly and extreme example but it serves my purpose as an illustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: My hero, a sentient lemming, jumps out of a tenth floor window, does it survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: Too story-based. VTC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: On an Earth-like planet, a race of sentient lemming-like creatures routinely escape from their predators by jumping from high geological features. For example cliffs that are the height of ten-storey buildings. Can they realistically survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer 1: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have a MacGyver tag (the actual name  is of course up for debate) that allows for one-off questions involving an individual (or small group) in an imaginary world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important Note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My example with the lemmings was 'scientific' but there could equally be questions about individuals or groups living in a magical/steam punk/other imaginary world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T07:13:49.243" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T08:12:26.430" Title="Can we have a MacGyver tag or category?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2019-02-17T17:35:25.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;how can scientists prevent their advances in technology from making it into the mainstream society?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reed Richards is a brilliant scientist who regularly tangoes with external threats to the planet Earth, where a race referred to as &amp;quot;humaniti&amp;quot; reside. He, along with a team of scientists, operate out of a metropolis city called New York. They regularly develop to advanced technology that is beyond anything this species has seen, and has access to offworld tech due to their repeated trips to outer space. Flying cars, teleport devices, etc, are just some of the kinds of tech they create and have access to. Because they sometimes defend earth from aliens, they get billions of dollars in tax breaks from the city. However, this has begun to provoke the ire of many New Yorkers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A congresswoman named Alexandria Oscoria Cortez has recently come to prominence in the media, and has used her platform to attack Richards and his team. She argues that for decades, this group has kept their discoveries and advances to themselves. These developments have yet to make their way into mainstream society where they can benefit the common people. Instead, these well-paid elitists selfishly hoard them, neglecting to improve their city or humanity in the long term while still taking large tax breaks from the government. This shameful behavior is indicative of the wealthy 1% who have more power and control than the other 99% of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has begun to make waves among other new yorkers, and has garnered a large amount of support, which has raised trouble for the superhero community. She is currently running for president of the U.S., and has proposed legislation called &amp;quot;The Green New Deal&amp;quot;. This proposal will, among other things, end dependence on fossil fuel emissions, fix infrastructure in the country, and provide new jobs. This would be accomplished by forcing Richards to share his discoveries, and use the government to take control and regulate this company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wealthy billionaire by the name of Tony Stark has come to the defense of the scientists, and has  joined forces to take on AOC and her followers. I need to maintain the status quo of only the superhero community having access to these advances with tech. How can this group continue to legally keep their technology to themselves without sharing them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T17:48:19.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2019-02-18T07:18:22.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we have a MacGyver tag (the actual name is of course up for debate) that allows for one-off questions involving an individual (or small group) in an imaginary world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vote is for &lt;strong&gt;no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had extensive discussion about this and many other aspects of the site's scope early during the beta period, including during the private beta. Much of that is still around on Meta (I don't care to dig it out), and some can be found in the main chat room transcripts from around that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why the site's scope disallows questions about individual characters, from which the off-topic-ness of &quot;too story-based&quot; questions largely derives, is that &lt;strong&gt;the motivations of a single character is something the author must decide on.&lt;/strong&gt; A character without motivations is basically useless in storytelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once we start talking about &lt;em&gt;species or systems&lt;/em&gt;, we can make &lt;em&gt;meaningful generalizations.&lt;/em&gt; Any given answer won't necessarily apply to a specific individual, but an answer &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; apply to a large portion, if not all of, the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, incidentally, is a major difference between your two example questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hero, a sentient lemming, jumps out of a tenth floor window, does it survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would we know? If you want it to survive, it will. If you want it to die, it will. Whether it's a lemming or a human doesn't matter, if the scenario is even remotely survivable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On an Earth-like planet, a race of sentient lemming-like creatures routinely escape from their predators by jumping from high geological features. For example cliffs that are the height of ten-storey buildings. Can they realistically survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the behavior has evolved and been maintained through selection pressure, then reasonably, the survival rate of this must be higher than that of alternative options, or at least that of confronting the predator. I'd almost certainly vote that question down for lack of basic research (five minutes of thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective should give you the answer), but it is answerable in general terms rather than just making an arbitrary choice of whether the specific individual should survive or die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T08:12:26.430" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T08:12:26.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2019-02-21T19:32:10.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How can you link a plague or virus to a specific genetic signature?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A domestic terrorist organization has come to light due to recent terror attacks that they claim responsibility for. This group has developed a biological weaponized plague that attacks the nervous system of an individual. If released,  and has the potential to kill millions. The terrorists blame a particular minority group for what it sees as the nation's social and economic woes, and seeks to commit genocide by spreading this plague in the name of national defense. The intent is to only make this minority group susceptible to this weapon, killing them off while leaving everyone else they see as worthy unscathed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All populations are genetically diverse, and racial categories are based on subjective evaluations of traits. All humans share the same genes, which exist in a variety of alternative forms called alleles. Since the relationship between ancestry, genetic makeup, and phenotype are so complex, there is no specific gene that can be used to determine a person's race. This makes it difficult for this group to limit the effects of this virus to one group in particular without killing anyone outside of it. How can these  terrorists develop this weapon in a way that it would exclusively target one group of people only? Would this be possible with advanced tech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T18:45:54.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T09:25:05.087" Score="-4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139797/designing-the-most-boring-planet-ever-discovered-part-1-planetary-surface&quot;&gt;Designing the most boring planet ever discovered. Part 1: planetary surface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the above question. The purpose is to create a planet that everyone avoids, not because it is dangerous but because it is of no interest to anyone. There is of course to be a sting in the tail but I left that part out to avoid it becoming 'story-based'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself is specific enough to attract a 'best' answer in my belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have down votes, and even a vote to delete. There are also several hostile comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update - Since posting this, my question has been revived. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T09:54:43.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T09:54:43.177" Title="Why the hostility to this question about a 'boring' planet?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7134" CreationDate="2019-02-23T11:55:32.900" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have down votes, and even a vote to delete. There are also several hostile comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the first time one of your questions receives that treatment (7 of your last 10 questions have a net negative vote balance). As I have already pointed out in one of my comments to one of those questions, our help center, under the section &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what types of questions should I avoid asking&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; states (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and one of the comments you received states that your question, like others,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;have no real WB aspect to them and seem to have no other function that to mildly amuse the person asking them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You state that you have provided criteria to avoid the POB close, but in of the comments you have given you also state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want it to be boring to everybody&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which basically re-states that you are just fishing for opinions while being on the border of what we consider WB. I hope you agree that what is boring to John can be interesting to Alice, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not everyone on the website is writing a serious story&lt;/strong&gt; or even building a world that will be seen by others. A lot of people are here simply to create worlds in their imagination. What is 'fun' to one person may not be to another so that is a personal matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then accept that not everyone on this site might like the question you post according to your taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T17:02:24.573" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T16:44:55.670" Score="8" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the question I have in mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/79881/could-bone-marrow-transplants-be-used-to-prevent-tissue-rejection-of-trans-speci&quot;&gt;Could bone marrow transplants be used to prevent tissue rejection of trans-species organs?&lt;/a&gt; asked by myself in biology SE some 2 months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked it there because I wanted solid science based answers &amp;amp; was looking for potential hints on where I might find any research related to the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's had some attention but no answers so I was considering a re-post here to take advantage of the (what appears to me to be) larger more eclectic user base in WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tags would, of course, include &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; (or at the very least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49261" LastEditorUserId="34744" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T17:50:43.853" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T22:50:36.227" Title="Is it OK to take a question asked in another SE site &amp; rephrase it for WB?" Tags="|discussion|rules|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2019-02-24T05:53:51.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;The general rule on Stack Exchange is that cross-posting the same question on different sites is discouraged&lt;/a&gt;. That said, that isn't a hard and fast rule and if you are looking for a different perspective cross-posting can be acceptable. It looks to me like you didn't get any answers over on Biology because your question is very speculative and they prefer to deal in known answers. So, it seems to me like cross-posting your question here isn't... well, out of the question, because you are likely to get different, useful, speculative responses here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do post the question it's recommended that you link the original question in your new question and give an explanation for why you are asking it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="879" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T05:53:51.333" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7134" CreationDate="2019-02-24T09:04:28.103" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking through your 'recent' questions, this seems to be a trend you are experiencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not knowing better I would guess it might have to do with the sheer amount of &lt;em&gt;non-relevant&lt;/em&gt; questions you are pushing onto the stack (&lt;em&gt;non-relevant&lt;/em&gt; as in, there's no red-thread or any other thing linking these questions to any discernible worldbuilding project(s)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are pushing a question to the stack about &lt;em&gt;every other day&lt;/em&gt;. Subject, tone and contents vary wildly and so forth. It &lt;strong&gt;feels as if you are gaming the site to find a formula for 'good questions'&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would wager many users on the site experience this as spam and abusing behaviour of the stack, with the sole goal of gathering as much reputation as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least that's what it feels to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T09:04:28.103" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2019-02-25T10:10:13.253" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's true that the general rule is that posting the same question on multiple sites in the network is discouraged (and at least Unix &amp;amp; Linux SE has that as a specific reason to close a question, possibly because of their large overlap with Ask Ubuntu and to a lesser extent Super User and Server Fault), the operative word here is &lt;strong&gt;same.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, it's fine to ask about the same topic on different sites, in order to get different perspectives, but that doesn't mean that you should take the exact same question text and post it verbatim on multiple sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, you should &lt;strong&gt;adapt the question to each audience.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at this example in particular, but I imagine there are, for example, things that would be taken for granted on Biology SE (say, an earthen environment populated by carbon-based, oxygen-breathing lifeforms) that you might benefit from explicitly stating when asking on Worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the best-received (by net vote count) question of mine on Physics SE is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/275211/14091&quot;&gt;one about faster-than-light travel&lt;/a&gt;, which is a little surprising in a way because their subject scope specifically deals with &lt;em&gt;mainstream&lt;/em&gt; physics only. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/46678/29&quot;&gt;One of my better received answers on Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; also deals with faster-than-light travel, was accepted, and is very much based in mainstream science. This doesn't mean that one could just transpose the two questions and expect that things work out well. It does, however, show that the same general concept &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be asked about on both sites, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the questions are written appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T10:10:13.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T12:19:03.347" Score="12" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139987/history-of-worldbuilding-the-flying-city&quot;&gt;History of Worldbuilding - The Flying City&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should questions such as this be considered on or off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T20:02:43.717" Title="Are History of Worldbuilding questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2019-02-25T12:29:17.300" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks about the first date when a concept was put in a story. That's not worldbuilding, but plain literature history. If I have a question about literature history I ask it on the pertinent SE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the OP states that it helps them in worldbuilding, doesn't make it a worldbuilding question, same as asking &quot;how do I conjugate to be in space?&quot; remains a grammar question and not a space exploration question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T12:34:23.470" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T12:34:23.470" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2019-02-25T13:45:01.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might consider it on topic in meta, but it's not in its own right worldbuilding. However it is one of the staples of SciFi.SE as it's an element of existing (commercial) worlds, which is very much their field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T13:57:19.840" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T13:57:19.840" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2019-02-26T00:06:51.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To discuss it's relevance we should look at what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center says is on topic&lt;/a&gt; for the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the site is to help &lt;strong&gt;build your world&lt;/strong&gt;, not to look for recommended readings/movies on the subject. Instead, this is brainstorming ideas for your world, which is not on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of questions that would be relevant to worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128257&quot;&gt;How would a city be made to fly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would the layout of a floating city be affected by the fact that it's floating?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would the inhabitants of a floating city survive without connected trade routes to other cities?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What effect does the size of the floating landmass have on the city?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some adverse effects that a floating city might have on it's population?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, a question about the history of a subject used in different worlds does not belong on Worldbuilding.SE, instead it belongs on SciFi.SE, more specifically its belongs on SF&amp;amp;F.SE under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history-of&quot;&gt;history-of&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56128" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T15:39:31.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2019-02-26T21:53:46.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There Must be Lines in the Sand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you went over to Stack Overflow and asked this question, formatted for their site.  I.E., &quot;Are History of Programming Questions On-Topic?&quot;  You would get a clear and resounding &quot;NO!&quot;  This, despite the fact that the history of programming is very much a part of programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it also clogs the site with questions that have very low value to the community.  On an ultra-creative site like this, we often forget that one of Stack Exchange's mandates is that questions and answers should benefit &lt;em&gt;everybody,&lt;/em&gt; not just the OP &amp;mdash; and the claim &quot;everybody can benefit from History of X questions&quot; is simply fallacious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the basic idea that Stack Exchange is a group of (usually) happy volunteers with the goal of helping the community as a whole: both those who are here today and those who may come tomorrow...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question's value is basically for the OP alone, it shouldn't have been asked here.  We are not here to be anyone's personal research assistant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question has an incredibly narrow application, maybe it shouldn't have been asked here.  This usually means the OP hasn't taken the time to re-scope the question to make it applicable to more people than him/herself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question isn't directly contributing to the primary purpose of the site (if you have to start making arguments about why it's on-topic), then it probably shouldn't be asked here.  The site really can't be everything to everyone.  That's what Quora and Reddit are for and why they're so hard for anyone other than the original OP to use.  Those sites are basically set up as individual research projects and whether or not anyone else is benefited is irrelevant.  That's not what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said that, is the current version of Chasly's question off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is.  But not for the reasons we're discussing here.  It's too broad.  SE's focus is one-specific-question/one-best-answer.  A &quot;best answer&quot; can only be one that has a complete (or at least reasonably complete) history of floating cities in literature.  A bunch of answers each contributing a piece of the puzzle is unacceptable because it breaks SE's basic mold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In fact, if it weren't too broad, what Chasly's asking for is pretty good&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chasly's asking for a canonical answer.  It just happens to be a HUGE canonical answer.  Because it is the nature of people to post &lt;em&gt;something,&lt;/em&gt; the question is likely to draw a lot of nearly useless answers: the antithesis of what SE wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think asking about worldbuilding history falls on the other side of the line.  Perhaps by only a smidgen, but it's there, nonetheless.  The questions will (IMO) always tend to be too broad.  Therefore, as a class of question, I vote no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T21:53:46.317" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2019-02-26T22:50:36.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic answer to your question is sure, modify the question to meet the expectations of Worldbuilding.SE and there's no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have a problem with your reason to do so.  You asked the question in the correct forum &amp;mdash; quite literally the best forum for the question &amp;mdash; and you want it here because you didn't like the attention it received and/or the answers you received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That suggests you really want to ask the same question and want to only change the window dressing to slide it in under our rules, hoping that someone here might do a better job than there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire premise of the opposition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt; was that the other forums were far better suited to answer the question and far more likely to provide you with an authoritative answer.  Therefore, we shouldn't be letting people clog up our own queues with those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the rule allowing real-world questions was adopted (I personally approve).  However, &lt;em&gt;this should never be an excuse to abuse the privilege,&lt;/em&gt; and what you're telling us is that you want to abuse the privilege.  You didn't get what you wanted there, so you want to give it a shot here, even though there's a lower statistical chance of getting the answer you want here.  Honestly, if it were possible to close due to being a duplicate on another stack, it would be (and should be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, there's no problem with it.  But if you'll forgive the moment of astronomical arrogance: thou shalt not abuse the privilege neither make a habit of it therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T22:50:36.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2019-02-27T20:02:43.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding requires expertise in a variety of fields.  People need to know &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orbital mechanics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Environmental science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics, chemistry, biology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what it does not require is knowledge of science fiction and fantasy.  However, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stack&lt;/a&gt; that requires expertise in science fiction and fantasy, where this question would be on-topic.  There is no reason to extend our charter to cover something that is already covered elsewhere.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, when someone asks a questions that might be on-topic elsewhere but still related to worldbuilding, I think that it should be on-topic here.  This is especially true when it is only questionably on-topic elsewhere.  Because elsewhere, things may not be on-topic because they are purely speculative, with no real world analog.  But here, speculative, even fictional, is our reason for existence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, we have a question that is for authors but is nothing about making a reasonable, believable world.  In fact, it is specifically trying to find reasonable, believable worlds and do it a different way.  We are not a one stop shop for anything related to writing.  There is already Writers.SE and we are increasingly pushing away valid worldbuilding questions as Too Broad or Primarily Opinion Based.  If we want more questions, we'd be better off adjusting the limits there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is amenable to a simple bright line rule that puts all these questions on one stack, which is preferable.  There is no circumstance under which a question that is not of sufficient focus on that stack should be on-topic here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rule:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about how things were done in previous science fiction works are not on topic on Worldbuilding.  The single exception is if the question is not about how it was done but how it could have been done.  E.g. how could my story have a realistic light saber?  That's on-topic here.  But a question about how light sabers work in the Star Wars universe is not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule cuts out this question entirely.  But everything it cuts out would be on-topic on SFF.SE.  There may be some questions that are Too Broad or opinion-based for either stack.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T20:02:43.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-03T16:03:26.440" Score="-6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a problem that I have been getting every time I have given some of my questions a Bounty.  But instead of GAINING points, as I thought a Bounty should, I LOSE them.  What is going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10274" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T10:34:27.880" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T10:34:27.880" Title="Why Do I LOSE Points Every Time I Make a Bounty?" Tags="|support|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7150" CreationDate="2019-03-03T16:44:53.973" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you looked in the help menu? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; discusses what a bounty is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you write a question, but for whatever reason aren't satisfied with the answers you get, you can start a bounty. The bounty is a reward you give using your own reputation to the user that answers your question. Users are enticed to answer the question because if they do, they might receive the reward. In exchange, you get the answer you wanted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to gain reputation, go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured questions page&lt;/a&gt; and answer one of the questions. If you answer it well, the person who started the bounty might reward you with the bounty amount. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the help page I linked to above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T03:36:36.813" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T03:36:36.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7150" CreationDate="2019-03-03T21:26:22.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you didnt lose something from this you could just add bounties to all of your questions to get them in the spotlight. this tool is meant to be used for people who desperately need answers and cant get them any other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61868" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T21:26:22.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-03T23:06:02.200" Score="13" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it might be interesting to look at whether or not regular contributors on this site consider their 'best' answer to be their favourite, or whether or not they have one that didn't rate so well in terms of rep that they consider one of their best, against the popular grain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll tag this as discussion, but I'd be interested to know what differences there are between what we liked answering and what gained us the most rep. I'm asking about this because my all time favourite answer (the one I had the most fun writing) is still pretty much in my middling answer set. I'll post it below as an answer to this to get a format going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T21:59:05.423" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T23:26:46.083" Title="Is your favourite answer your most popular answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-03T23:14:22.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As at March 2019, my all time record answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123896/awesomeness-powered-magic-why-would-a-group-of-awesome-magicians-want-to-keep/123921#123921&quot;&gt;dave and Awesomeness Powered Magic&lt;/a&gt;. I agree that on balance, it's a good answer but to me it was an obvious write, so it's not the one that is my all time favourite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which is my favourite? Well, it has to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109014/syrup-atmosphere/109020#109020&quot;&gt;Syrup Atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;. It was a really fun write because it covers some interesting science as well as good solid logic. That said, I suspect it didn't rate so well because the question isn't that popular, with only 305 views as at date above. That said, I seldom have an answer that comes out of the write so quickly or cleanly as that one did, especially of late when the answers seem to be more of a grind for me at present. Still, this is the answer that I keep thinking of when people ask me why I do what I do on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Special Mention - The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128363/smallest-possible-size-for-a-manned-airship/128365#128365&quot;&gt;Smallest Manned Airship&lt;/a&gt; answer was another one of my favourites simply because after writing it, I found out that the Guinness Book of Records actually contained a ship of similar design in it. It was nice to see I was on the right track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, over to others...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T23:14:22.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-04T01:38:15.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest score answer is currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127872/hypothetical-energy-source-with-higher-output-than-dyson-sphere/127877#127877&quot;&gt;Hypothetical energy source with higher output than Dyson Sphere&lt;/a&gt;, with a score of 31. I feel that this was actually one of my least creative answers. The OP asked for an energy source that could deliver a lot more energy than a Dyson Sphere. I had watched a Kurzgesagt video about getting energy from black holes, so I decided to write an answer about it. I basically summarized the video, applied it to the context of the question, and included a few screenshots from the video. Despite the simplicity of the video (at least I thought it was fairly simple), a lot of people who commented on it seemed to think I was experienced in the field of black hole energy gathering. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laser's won't work. &amp;quot;An additional condition which must be met is that the field must have a rest mass different from zero.&amp;quot; Photons have zero rest mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Not really. Even from a scattered light source, if you go far enough away it is still a single direction light source. My field isn't QFT so I could be wrong, but light in general is just mass less. Mass comes from interaction with the Higgs field (?) and each photon is just an excitation of the EM field. Since you can represent the EM field with many different coordinate systems, a &amp;quot;photon&amp;quot; in one system could be multiple in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To these I replied with quotes from Wikipedia. To anyone who thought that I was even basically knowledgeable in this field, I am sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second highest scored answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127567/what-would-shake-a-galaxy-and-what-would-shake-the-universe/127568#127568&quot;&gt;What would shake a galaxy and what would shake the universe?&lt;/a&gt; with a score of 26. In this question I described the extremely small effect of gravitational waves on the universe. Still, people seemed to think I was some kind of physics genius. Memorable quotes include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're probably thinking about black holes formed by supernovae. So-called primordial black holes were formed by the Big Bang itself, and are therefore not subject to stellar limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even got one from HDE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nice answer. As a side note, binary supermassive black holes (with chirp masses ∼106−8M⊙) should certainly produce more powerful gravitational waves than stellar-mass black holes - although the waves produced will be at lower frequencies than those from the mergers we've observed so far, in the nanohertz regime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still do not understand what any of this means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite answer is actually one of my lowest scored answers, currently with a score of 0 (3 upvotes, 3 downvotes). &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124581/how-to-improve-tcp-ip-for-an-interplanetary-wan/124620#124620&quot;&gt;How to improve TCP/IP for an interplanetary WAN?&lt;/a&gt; was an answer I wrote when I was still new to Stack Exchange and Worldbuilding. For that reason, the answer is a bit jumbled, and all the different ideas are intertwined. This caused a bit of confusion regarding what exactly I was trying to say. Still, I was really happy with the ideas I proposed in that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54384" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T01:38:15.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-04T04:04:20.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My top-scoring answer currently is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/128464/28&quot;&gt;Can there be a theocracy that practices religious tolerance?&lt;/a&gt;, which is a straightforward answer that doesn't really stand out for me.  Second is the one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/123135/28&quot;&gt;using technology dominance to bring about an endritch abomination&lt;/a&gt;, which I had fun writing.  But my favorites, because I feel I did better work and contributed something more uncommon, are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/62780/28&quot;&gt;Truth stone: effects on the justice system&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/37815/28&quot;&gt;Evolution of neon kittens&lt;/a&gt;.  In the first I used my knowledge of another judicial system with interesting parallels, and in the second I combined research and a little speculation about infection vectors to suggest that the improbable might be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T04:04:20.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-04T11:31:53.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38502/would-a-bear-cavalry-be-feasible/38507#38507&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84613/why-would-society-not-cremate-its-dead-in-a-world-where-necromancy-is-possible/84618#84618&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63416/who-is-spreading-the-rumour-that-santa-isnt-real/63596#63596&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; I'm quite fond of, even though they probably primarily only got points for humor. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80288/how-to-keep-a-military-technology-secret-while-using-it/80289#80289&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31987/how-does-santa-protect-himself-from-ip-lawsuits/31997#31997&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; not so much. 2 always felt like a fastest gun in the west answer, it's a fairly well known story and it was just a matter of who posted it first. 4 gets the credit for being one of the first answers I posted on the site and my understanding that apparently I have a certain touch when it comes to questions about Santa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favourite answers are way down the field though. Things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60588/the-cost-of-switching-to-electric-cars/60589#60589&quot;&gt;The cost of switching to electric cars?&lt;/a&gt; which is actually a carefully constructed answer rather than a couple of lines with a joke which covers many of my better scoring answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T11:31:53.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-04T11:45:58.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest scored answer is one that I made wiki: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106250/21222&quot;&gt;Why can't spaceships go underwater?&lt;/a&gt;. It is just a list of examples of spaceships that do go underwater. This got a score of almost 200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then comes an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126583/21222&quot;&gt;Why would characters spend time answering imaginary questions to fictional hypotheticals?&lt;/a&gt;. The question is a version of &quot;why does Stack Exchange work&quot; masked as a worldbuilding one. I gave a joke answer that, despite being a joke, is also serious and true. I kinda expected it to be flagged as not an answer and deleted via queue, but instead it got a score of 127, which is 106 more than the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My third most voted one is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/125274/21222&quot;&gt;How do my spacefarers not get crushed accelerating to 0.2c?&lt;/a&gt;. OP wanted a way to prevent death by acceleration in a spaceship. I challenged the frame by showing that the acceleration involved was smaller than the gravity of Earth, so her space explorers would live. This got me a score of 111.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think my answers above are great answers. My favorite ones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/112321/21222&quot;&gt;What can be used as a money in a high-fantasy magic world where noble metals are in practical use?&lt;/a&gt; - where I created the concept of the Manacoin, a fantasy cryptocurrency. Anyone who ever uses this in a yway owes me 0.000025 manacoin in magical copyright (j/k, use it freely)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/104050/21222&quot;&gt;Great Old Ones Limited, or Why does Cthulhu need a Company?&lt;/a&gt; - where I gave an explanation of how corporations work to summon eldritch abominations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101419/21222&quot;&gt;The Biological Dullahan&lt;/a&gt; - for this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is extremely gross and fascinating at the same time - the perfect mix for an excellent answer on WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126679/21222&quot;&gt;How could you create a 95% effective global emergency broadcasting system?&lt;/a&gt; - where I took a combination of histrionic personality disorder with pyromania to new heights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T16:02:07.617" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T16:02:07.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-04T21:57:19.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My most popular answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/62680/627&quot;&gt;Is it worth sending a manned mission to a black hole?&lt;/a&gt; - the only answer I've written on Worldbuilding to receive over 100 upvotes, a mark it finally passed this January. I think it's decent, although if I had to write it again, I might actually reverse my position and argue that it's not worth sending a &lt;em&gt;manned&lt;/em&gt; mission to a nearby black hole. I'd want to do a little more reading about radiation exposure, honestly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have two candidates for my personal favorite answer. The first is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/116174/627&quot;&gt;How to estimate a star's heliopause?&lt;/a&gt;, where I calculated heliopauses around various different stars. I was proud of how this came out, and I was also thrilled to be able to write it at all; I was spending the summer doing research on the winds of massive stars, and I used some equations I'd been doing computations with. I even cited two papers my advisor had written and which I had been reading and analyzing/critiquing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other candidate was my second answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/80318/627&quot;&gt;Can stars that are not powered by nuclear fusion exist?&lt;/a&gt;. I like this one for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It gave a satisfying answer to a question of mine I had long considered to be an open problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It involved a lot of reading, calculations, and coding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it just &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I haven't had anyone double-check my results - or if they have, they haven't told me! Independent verification by people smarter than me would be awesome. I also think that this might be my single most unreadable/incomprehensible answer, so even though it might be my favorite, it's possibly my most poorly written. It needs to be clearer and more accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these answers have scores that are much lower than my most popular answer (+11 and +9, respectively, compared to +101).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T21:57:19.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-05T06:02:58.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so, yet I don't have &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; favourite answer either. My most upvoted answer would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63496/how-could-i-have-modern-computers-without-guis/63512#63512&quot;&gt;How could I have modern computers without GUIs?&lt;/a&gt; - it sadly hasn't hit 100 upvotes (&lt;em&gt;hint&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;hint&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that in general the answers I enjoyed writing up and got to be creative with, are also the answers I got more upvotes on generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81634/does-a-hexagon-based-bread-loaf-make-any-sense/81637#81637&quot;&gt;Does a hexagon-based bread loaf make any sense?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I got to do a graphic assisting the textual explanation, I like doing graphics - alas it takes me too long usually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82619/what-realistic-way-could-limit-an-ftl-drive-to-only-travelling-between-stars/82622#82622&quot;&gt;What realistic way could limit an FTL drive to only travelling between stars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I got to do math, and I think the math is even right! Math is fun, and showing some correlation or data by using math is &lt;em&gt;double fun&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82441/how-could-you-make-a-fire-appear-a-different-color-with-medieval-tech/82443#82443&quot;&gt;How could you make a fire appear a different color with medieval tech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I stole a very nice graphic and used it to explain how some part of chemistry works. I learned a lot more during writing this answer than I knew before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114832/mosquito-armageddon/114839#114839&quot;&gt;Mosquito Armageddon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I got to play with music, I enjoy music. And the theme of overusing hyperlinks for a comical effect - while the body of the question still holds facts - is a combination that made me very happy to have worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94006/airship-lifeboats-design-alternatives/94018#94018&quot;&gt;Airship lifeboats, design alternatives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;HERE&lt;/em&gt; we finally hit my favourite subject: &lt;em&gt;Airships&lt;/em&gt;. I got to use my airship knowledge as well as &lt;em&gt;invert expectations&lt;/em&gt; by applying current day technology to a hypothetical question. As you can see in the comments, the engineering and &lt;em&gt;logic&lt;/em&gt; parts became a really interesting problem to explain to people - while still being simple in concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, I don't have a favourite answer on this site. And mostly the upvotes I got fit how much I enjoyed writing the relevant answers. What I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; enjoy though are my questions! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T06:02:58.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7166" CreationDate="2019-03-05T06:11:22.170" Score="-9" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can Wordbuilding host other SE sites sandboxes to help users to build good question in that site? I tried the idea of a Sandbox.SE on Area 51 and was not well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28019/sandbox-for-all&quot;&gt;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28019/sandbox-for-all&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wander can traffic be increased to Worldbuilding.SE if other subjects like Physics and Aviation where hosted here as a courtesy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be tried here as a SE social experiment? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T08:43:33.163" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T01:20:26.570" Title="Sandbox clones for other SE sites" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|moderators|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2019-03-05T06:30:12.150" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE has several communities, each specialized in a different domain: Aviation, Worldbuilding, History, Interpersonal, just to name a few. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it so? Well, it is just common sense to cluster a community based on the common interests. At home I keep spoons and forks in the same drawer, well separate from screwdrivers and nails. They are all made of metal, but when I need a spoon or a nail I know where to look for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise here if I am looking for interpersonal skills help, I look in the interpersonal.SE. Why would I ever look into worldbuilding for an interpersonal skill question? Whoever wanders into the worldbuilding meta sandbox is surely skilled in worldbuilding, not necessarily in interpersonal skills. It doesn't matter that sandboxes are in meta; meta discussions are always pertinent to the mother community. Again, separation of interests!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of sandbox is not patented by us, and I doubt anyone would ever raise a complaint about another community using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to ask other meta sites to implement their pertinent sandbox, but have them where they belong. Don't mix what is meant to be separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T15:05:25.677" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T15:05:25.677" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2019-03-05T08:38:55.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that we don't really need to increase traffic to Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding SE is getting a fair amount of traffic. It's certainly as active as, if not more so than, both Physics and Aviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community that decides whether they want a question sandbox, and where it is to be hosted, should be the community in question. Nothing is gained by one site imposing a standard onto other sites. Imagine if, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt; was to host a sandbox for us! What are the odds that people posting there would get good advice on what makes a good Worldbuilding SE question, beyond the absolute basics like, say, being able to tell what the question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;? Now, why would it be any different if it's the other way around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for example, the issue of whether to create a sandbox was &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1342/2533&quot;&gt;raised on Writing Meta&lt;/a&gt; not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that long ago. The answer from the community there, judging by the votes, was a resounding &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each site needs to determine on its own whether having a given fraction of the questions posted put on hold is even a problem. To me, putting a question on hold is not really a big deal, if it's warranted; it keeps potentially many more people from wasting their time. If the site's community feels it's a problem having the number of questions closed that they get, then that community needs to decide how to deal with that. A site that aims for &lt;em&gt;high quality&lt;/em&gt; questions is pretty naturally going to put on hold a larger percentage of the questions that do get posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We should not be imposing our ideas, let alone standards on what makes a good question, on other communities in the network.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; nothing prevents you from suggesting the idea of a per-site question sandbox on each site's meta, if you think it is worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T19:22:34.120" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T19:22:34.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-06T06:35:47.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest score answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3433/2113&quot;&gt;How might modern humans leave a message for 50,000 years?&lt;/a&gt;  It was my third answer on this stack, and I am naturally fond of it.  It was a bit of a perfect storm.  It's the right answer for that question, and one that is naturally recognizable to the kind of people that an appearance on Hot Network Questions brings.  Because it's basically the computer science answer on a site with a large population of programmers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that I necessarily have a favorite answer, but poking around a little finds &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2687/2113&quot;&gt;Consequences of the shift to a post-scarcity society&lt;/a&gt;, which was my first answer on this stack.  I like it because I could apply my economics background to a science fiction question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at highly voted answers, I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/98463/2113&quot;&gt;What size would a diamond made from a human be?&lt;/a&gt;  I like this because a lot of it is math.  That feels like I'm doing something that many writers will need help doing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I actually think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/84849/2113&quot;&gt;Does it make sense to have a world with a very quickly orbiting moon?&lt;/a&gt; is better.  The formula is more reusable.  Many people might want to pick an orbital period and then determine the distance from the ground to the moon (or satellite).  That seems like something that could appear in a lot of books.  How many people need to know how many diamonds can be made from human remains?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T06:35:47.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-06T15:29:53.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest voted answer is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92170/what-could-justify-a-save-point-before-a-boss-fight-in-rpg/92171#92171&quot;&gt;What could justify a save point before a boss fight in RPG?&lt;/a&gt;. There I tried unconventional perspective, and I liked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my favorite is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95043/why-would-a-staff-increase-the-magic-power-of-a-mage/95062#95062&quot;&gt;Why would a staff increase the magic power of a mage?&lt;/a&gt;. I wrote that risking downvotes and deletion, since it's a two liner, and unobvious answer. I'm &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; glad, it worked out! It's also my first attempt at &quot;role-playing&quot; and successfully nailed it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74146/carnivorous-wire-grass-a-k-a-bloodgrass/74167#74167&quot;&gt;Carnivorous wire grass a.k.a. Bloodgrass&lt;/a&gt;, inspired me to make the same bloodgrass in my DnD campaign later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34288" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T15:29:53.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-06T16:31:54.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question, I thought mine was until I checked my answers again.&#xA;My top two highest voted aren't the best;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The highest is an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99446/why-might-wizards-be-unable-to-wear-armour/99447#99447&quot;&gt;Why might wizards be unable to wear armour?&lt;/a&gt; which is only really highly rated due to virtue of it being an early answer. It's not a bad answer, just an obvious one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Second highest is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105689/how-might-a-carnivorous-species-subsist-on-a-cycle-of-cannibalism/105690#105690&quot;&gt;How might a carnivorous species subsist on a cycle of cannibalism?&lt;/a&gt;, and is a similar early and obvious answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favourites are a little more interesting, answers that I enjoyed writing and that I feel really added something of value;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88816/creature-that-swims-in-the-solid-ground/88821#88821&quot;&gt;Creature that swims in the solid ground&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/87196/how-long-could-an-eternal-fire-last/87267#87267&quot;&gt;How long could an eternal fire last&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're also my third and fifth highest rated answers (4th goes to a comedy Santa one), as well as being accepted answers. They were both quite early and were among my first accepted answers and highly voted questions / answers so I remember being quite excited to have an answer received so well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34824" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T16:31:54.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T16:40:01.473" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people might immediately think this is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6818/a-promotion-for-the-community-promotion-ads&quot;&gt;A Promotion for the Community Promotion Ads&lt;/a&gt;, but i assure you it is not. That question was simply a promotion; my question is about making a promotion, which requires vastly different information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, I have an ad idea for encouraging people to create more ideas for community ads. we could put this ad out a few weeks before the midyear change to get people hyped for creating new promotion ads. The only problem is what I've currently got doesn't look super good and I'm fairly certain it doesn't conform to the formatting requirements stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7063/community-promotion-ads-2019&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads—2019&lt;/a&gt; post. My question is could anybody improve upon my idea, or make their own ad based on my idea so that it can be more readily considered when brought to the moderators? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I've got so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/otbkD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/otbkD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Promote Your Community!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61868" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T16:40:01.473" Title="Promoting Community Ad Creation" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-06T17:43:37.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest-rated answer (by a &lt;em&gt;mile&lt;/em&gt;, just shy of twice my next-highest) is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/119782/logical-reason-why-my-dystopian-government-exiles-rebels-instead-of-killing-them/119796#119796&quot;&gt;Logical reason why my dystopian government exiles rebels instead of killing them?&lt;/a&gt;. I don't dislike that answer; it's succinct, logical, and lets me paraphrase Sun Tzu, which is always a good time. But it's rather obvious and straightforward, and wasn't as much fun to come up with. (I really like the idea that was floated in the comments of turning exile into a reality TV show; I wish I'd come up with that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like some of the other responses here, I really enjoy answers that encourage me to go look things up, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132546/how-dangerous-is-a-500-year-old-nuclear-warhead/132556#132556&quot;&gt;the guts of a nuclear warhead&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131944/how-to-make-a-metal-with-extraordinary-property-worthless/131972#131972&quot;&gt;the history of titanium&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114107/how-to-make-an-earth-with-27-suns-work-attempt-two-orbital-stability/114118#114118&quot;&gt;the structure of multiple star systems&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134731/how-would-santa-s-elves-be-able-to-build-complex-electronic-toys/134738#134738&quot;&gt;what exactly the svartalfar do in Norse mythology&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know if that produces &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers, but it's definitely more fun than an answer that pops into my head fully formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to pick an absolute favorite, it would probably be the 500-year-old nuke, if only for the sage advice that &lt;em&gt;you should not eat nuclear bomb parts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51094" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T17:43:37.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-07T17:36:56.333" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question of concern: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/140903/6986&quot;&gt;Microfracture in the ship's structure: good enough excuse to strand my characters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through the question, I noticed a great deal of &quot;This is how I want my story to unfold.&quot; The question appears (to me) to be a plausibility check of the OP's plot and, more specifically, of the specific plot point that a rushed repair job left a damaged ship to be used for the story's mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/140904/6986&quot;&gt;only answer&lt;/a&gt; at the time of this writing belongs to one of the highest reputation members on the site. So, maybe I'm missing some nuance that makes the question not about storybuilding. Or, as the answer's author notes in comments to his/her own answer, this question really is &quot;into plot and character&quot; and s/he jumped the gun on answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community consensus on the matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T15:56:33.630" Title="What makes the microfracture-on-a-spaceship question fit for worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7173" CreationDate="2019-03-07T23:05:44.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between questions about stories and questions about worlds is not discrete. There is a continuum between them. Most of the time questions are in one extreme or the other of that range, but sometimes we get one like this. I don't inow if we can get a hard consensus on that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, phrased as it is, I think it's about a story. The OP wants microfractures to interfere with FTL travel. The mechanics for FTL are sci-fi'ed in the question, so it is completely up to the author whether the desired effect is true or not in their world. The question sounds more like &lt;em&gt;&quot;would this allow for suspension of disbelief&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to me. I've left my VTC there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T04:27:44.797" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T04:27:44.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2019-03-08T01:20:26.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignoring the fact that hosting sandboxes for other sites would be very confusing...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and ignoring the fact that other sites that don't want sandboxes won't thank us for circumventing their culture and policies...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and ignoring the fact that SE would probably ask us to cease-and-desist the moment they found out about hosted sandboxes for other Stacks...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have enough trouble convincing people to help out in our own sandbox, much less convincing people from other stacks to come help out here (or, worse, trying to do it ourselves while trying to meet the unique cultures and policies of those other stacks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that while we, the users, are heavily involved with the day-to-day operation of the Stacks we participate in &amp;mdash; we don't own any of them and don't have the right to re-create them in our own image.  If you really are interested in a universal sandbox, the best place to ask about it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't believe the response will be much different than you're getting here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T01:20:26.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7173" CreationDate="2019-03-08T01:59:58.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, I just voted to close the question.  I voted TSB, but although applicable, I probably should have voted NAW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue #1&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;One of the kinda regrettable consequences of a massively creative nature of this site is that we humans tend to answer questions we think are cool before judging them against our policies.  I'm guilty of having done it.  What's really unfortunate is (a) the practice breeds more questions that aren't on-topic and (b) it fills the site with non-worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue #2&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;I'm an advocate of the idea that worldbuilding (on-topic) is about rules and systems while storybuilding (off-topic) is about circumstances.  This is what ultimately tilted the scales for me regarding the linked question: a rule of the world wasn't being discussed.  Rather, the plausibility of a circumstance was being discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, our help center is pretty clear about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;...avoid asking subjective questions where ...&lt;/strong&gt; you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if [X] happened?”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That second bullet is, IMO, very important.  It means &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; questions (which, although not tagged as such, is what the linked question was asking for) must be/should be held to a higher standard of worldbuilding.  In other words, they may be situational, but they must be about an actual rule or system of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my 2¢&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T01:59:58.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-09T19:25:48.623" Score="-1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent some time cleaning up the Sandbox today.  It's getting to be a slow honker to load.  This is especially true when I'm linking in through a comment notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent time removing the body contents of deleted posts and flagged a bunch of the longer comment chains for deletion (must be done by a moderator), but the truth is, the current Sandbox is becoming systemically unwieldy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as the site ages, it's also true that it will (if it hasn't already) become a bit messy to find the &quot;current&quot; sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal #1:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;I propose that we have an official &quot;Sandbox landing site&quot; that is the single Meta question we refer all people to.  Along with the instructions for the sandbox, it contains a linked list of all previous sandboxes and the currently active sandbox.  Ideally, this post would be answer-locked such that no answers can be posted.  Users must move from this &quot;landing site&quot; post to the &quot;current&quot; sandbox page.  All older sandbox pages would have their question body text deleted and replaced with a link to the landing site.  (e.g., &quot;Current active sandbox may be found &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal #2:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Perhaps a simpler alternative is to rename the old sandbox pages (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions-2014-2017&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions 2014-2017&lt;/a&gt;) to specifically indicate they are inactive (e.g., &quot;Inactive Sandbox 2014-2017&quot;) and specifically label the current sandbox &quot;(Active)&quot;  This is basically a proposal to continue what we're doing with an improvement in searchability.  (When I search for &quot;Sandbox for Proposed Questions is:question&quot; one and only one item should come up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two proposals have pros and cons.  I consider #1 to be cleaner and easier to use.  It allows community promotion ads, the Help Center, and other convenient redirects to use a single URL that will never change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, #2 is simpler in the short-term and more reflective of how we've used the service in the past.  It's just inefficient because we're forced to update all the links whenever we start a new page.  If we avoid starting a new page to avoid updating links &amp;mdash; the page becomes systemically ugly (which it's becoming now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the actual maintenance burden would be more-or-less identical.  I prefer proposal #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-10T17:08:56.293" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T17:08:56.293" Title="Proposal: a Sandbox &quot;landing site&quot; (question) for all Sandboxes" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7179" CreationDate="2019-03-10T09:20:45.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I propose that we have an official &quot;Sandbox landing site&quot; that is the single site we refer all people to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all SE use a sandbox, and having a dedicated landing site just for Worldbuilding would be a deviation from the standard configuration each community has. For that few I know about this, I suspect that such customization would be a lot of work with little return. Thus unlikely to land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposal #2, as you noted, also involve a lot of work to be properly maintained, and I assume you are proposing this to get rid of some of the maintenance work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My counter proposal: use a sandbox per year (called Sandbox 201x), which we open on Jan 1st 201x and close on Dec 31st 201x. So no need to update links, and more limited content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T09:20:45.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6361" CreationDate="2019-03-11T15:07:02.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting in the sandbox should be discouraged&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must respectfully disagree with Secespitus.  The whole point of the Sandbox is for questions to change.  In the perspective of an individual voter, they may change for the positive or for the negative.  This means votes easily fall out of date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse, there's no automatic way to tell a voter that a proposed question has been edited.  So, unless you (the voter) plan on monitoring that question 24/7 to be sure your vote is still valid, the act of voting can be very misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I believe that voting for proposed questions in the Sandbox is utterly meaningless and should be discouraged.  Their potential to give the OP the false belief that a question is ready (or, worse, the false belief that they've been judged unworthy...) is far greater than whatever value they may have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The better solution is to use comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to downvote, don't, post a comment explaining why the proposed question isn't ready for prime-time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to upvote, don't, post a comment explaining your belief that the question is ready.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beauty of the comments are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The commentor can be informed of changes that may affect the ideas expressed in their comment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The dates of the comments can be used by others to judge the relevance of the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:07:02.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7185" CreationDate="2019-03-11T15:23:49.393" Score="37" ViewCount="6618" Body="&lt;p&gt;This version of the Sandbox is now Inactive. The next Sandbox is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox for proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions still active on January 1, 2023 will be automatically marked abandoned and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-11T03:56:13.047" LastActivityDate="2022-12-11T18:41:54.993" Title="Inactive Sandbox 2019-2022" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2019-03-11T16:18:05.903" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graduated Questions List&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1728&quot;&gt;Sandbox Overflow!&lt;/a&gt;, answers containing graduated questions will be deleted. This answer is designed to be a repository for all those questions that have graduated. It is a community wiki answer, so add in your question here, at the end of the list, once it is posted on the main site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141533/gravity-magic-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;Gravity magic - How does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142103/how-can-various-kinds-of-animals-develop-a-form-of-inter-species-coordination-be&quot;&gt;How can animals of various species organize themselves against a super-predator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143057/how-could-indestructible-materials-be-used-in-power-generation&quot;&gt;How could indestructible materials be used in power generation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143442/modification-to-chariots-for-heavy-cavalry-analogue-for-4-armed-race&quot;&gt;Modification to Chariots for Heavy Cavalry Analogue for 4-armed race&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143547/in-what-way-would-cryomancy-affect-the-food-eaten-by-medieval-people&quot;&gt;In what ways would cryomancy affect the food eaten by medieval people?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143606/40609&quot;&gt;Comprehensive Worldbuilding Outline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143161/how-can-i-design-a-glamour-spell-for-a-creature-that-meets-certain-requirements&quot;&gt;How can I design a glamour spell for a creature that meets certain requirements?&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143635/anatomically-correct-huldra&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Huldra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143616/how-can-i-refine-the-rules-of-precognition-to-make-it-valuable-in-a-fast-paced-e&quot;&gt;How can I refine the rules of precognition to make it valuable in a fast paced enviromment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/144055/ambush-tactics-for-dummy-witches&quot;&gt;Ambush tactics for dummy witches?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/144517/how-can-i-build-a-school-around-a-particular-form-of-magic/145715#145715&quot;&gt;How can I build a school around a particular form of magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146124/how-can-existing-methods-of-plumping-genetic-modification-and-gmo-feeding-be-a?noredirect=1#comment456548_146124&quot;&gt;How can existing methods of plumping, genetic modification, and gmo feeding be altered to accommodate the need for plumper, meatier human food stock?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/147546/what-is-the-lower-bound-for-lightspeed&quot;&gt;What is the lower bound for lightspeed?&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/147547/what-is-the-upper-bound-for-lightspeed&quot;&gt;What is the upper bound for Lightspeed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149110/designing-a-magic-compatible-polearm&quot;&gt;Designing a magic-compatible polearm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/150065/how-can-power-levels-matter-in-a-magic-system-that-emphasizes-control/150147#150147&quot;&gt;How can power levels matter in a magic system that emphasizes control?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/148725/how-can-religions-without-a-hell-discourage-evil-doing/148881#148881&quot;&gt;How can religions without a hell discourage evil-doing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/150504/40408&quot;&gt;Why would non-kinetic weapons be used for orbital bombardment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/151156/40408&quot;&gt;Kinetic weapons - establishing an upper limit when dealing with grey goo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151294/&quot;&gt;How can an elder god&amp;#39;s corporation remove suspicion from its plans while preserving its clandestine monopoly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151499/how-can-you-eliminate-dreaming-without-affecting-rem-sleep&quot;&gt;How can you eliminate dreaming without affecting REM sleep?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/152090/the-north-star-in-the-ancient-world-sky&quot;&gt;The North Star in the ancient world sky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/152522/plants-and-animals-switch-places-how-could-this-have-happened&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/152522/plants-and-animals-switch-places-how-could-this-have-happened&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151518/how-can-i-motivate-mages-to-recruit-individuals-for-a-pyramid-scheme-of-evil&quot;&gt;How can I motivate mages to recruit individuals for a pyramid scheme of evil?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151584/how-can-i-prevent-corporations-from-growing-their-own-workforce&quot;&gt;How can I prevent corporations from growing their own workforce?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/150638/how-can-having-multiple-casters-for-a-spell-create-excess-heat&quot;&gt;How can having multiple casters for a spell create excess heat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/152767/how-can-you-discreetly-advertise-underground-death-matches&quot;&gt;How can you discreetly advertise underground death matches?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/153026/how-can-i-shift-my-countrys-immigration-policy-to-a-skills-based-approach&quot;&gt;How can I shift my country&amp;#39;s immigration policy to a skills based approach?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/154784/how-big-could-dinosaurs-get-with-super-strength-and-durability&quot;&gt;How big could dinosaurs get with super strength and durability?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/153110/how-can-reincarnation-lead-to-a-second-personality&quot;&gt;How can reincarnation lead to a second personality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/154326/how-can-a-long-lived-species-deal-with-generational-shifts-in-society&quot;&gt;How can a long lived species deal with generational shifts in society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/156424/53026&quot;&gt;Adapting to a sonic world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157564/how-can-my-hammerspace-safely-decompress&quot;&gt;How can my hammerspace safely &amp;quot;decompress&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157011/can-we-prevent-an-impact-winter-extinction-with-modern-technology&quot;&gt;Can We Prevent an Impact Winter Extinction with Modern Technology?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/176222/what-would-cause-a-sapient-race-to-evolve-oral-castration-as-a-core-cultural-par&quot;&gt;What would cause a sapient race to evolve oral castration as a core cultural part of reproductive intercourse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/177423/55824&quot;&gt;How easily can a medieval granary explode?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/178668/long-term-evolution-of-double-planet-system-in-close-orbit&quot;&gt;Long Term Evolution of Double Planet System in Close Orbit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/170843/627&quot;&gt;How to create fictional earth ecosystems with lots of megafauna which can plausibly coexist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/194144/how-can-an-illnesss-make-ones-eyes-turn-green&quot;&gt;How can an illness make one&amp;#39;s eyes turn green?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207134/utility-of-class-crystals&quot;&gt;Utility of Class Crystals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/210290/why-does-magical-defensive-equipment-not-work-in-layers&quot;&gt;Why does magical defensive equipment not work in layers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/210485/why-would-adventurers-and-mages-wear-impractical-clothing&quot;&gt;Why Would Mages and Adventurers Wear Impractical Clothing?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/211348/40408&quot;&gt;Can an Earth-like world of shallow, global, seas be stable over geological time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/215205/controlling-the-medieval-world-with-just-a-network-of-agents-and-instant-communi&quot;&gt;Controlling the late-medieval world with just a network of agents and instant communication&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/216359/40408&quot;&gt;Space Piracy, a case study &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/159054/i-can-send-small-things-back-in-time-500-milliseconds-which-item-listed-would-b&quot;&gt;I can send small things back in time 500 milliseconds, which item listed would be most profitable to teleclone? (without extortion)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/230473/what-could-reduce-sunlight-on-an-earth-like-planet&quot;&gt;What could reduce sunlight on an Earth-like&#xA;planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227259/what-kind-of-horseshoes-work-best-on-a-molten-lead-track&quot;&gt;What kind of hooves do horses need to race on a river of lead?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/236503/redshifting-the-sky-on-a-rogue-planet&quot;&gt;Redshifting the sky on a rogue planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/238221/how-can-dracenae-walk-if-they-have-two-snakes-for-legs&quot;&gt;How can Dracenae Walk if They Have Two Snakes For Legs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="80953" LastEditDate="2022-11-16T22:51:15.417" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T22:51:15.417" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-03-11T16:18:05.903" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:46:32.537" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user posted a pretty disturbing description of actual animal torture in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/141283/17450&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. Instead of flagging the whole answer I tried to remove the offending passage while keeping the actual answer, but to my surprise it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/58492&quot;&gt;rejected&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is content like that actually acceptable on this Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17450" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T11:32:33.147" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:35:39.637" Title="Answer contains description of real-life animal torture and my edit request was denied. Is such content acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-answer|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7186" CreationDate="2019-03-12T17:50:02.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have discussed gruesome content on this Stack quite extensively in the past. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6550/28789&quot;&gt;&#xA;Reasoning behind deletion of gruesome content&lt;/a&gt; and the linked discussions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3394/28789&quot;&gt;Should questions about painfully killing people be welcomed on this site?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an incredibly important discussion and it's good to revive it from time to time to check what the stance is and where the limits are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically it boils down to: we accept &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; here &lt;strong&gt;as long as it's written in a &lt;em&gt;clinical&lt;/em&gt; voice&lt;/strong&gt;, but there definitely is a line once stuff simply gets too extreme. In that case it's okay to delete content. Questions about how to brutally rape humans for example. That's not okay and will never be allowed on this site. Especially when the author seems to take the topic lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example in this case illustrates why the author thinks this is a valid answer to the question. Without the example the answer becomes less useful. The author doesn't encourage the illustrated behaviour. He even mentions that &quot;The poor dog required meds for pain for quite a while.&quot; which to me sounds like the author was not okay with what he witnessed and condemned the behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the edit rejection is valid. The answer would be less useful without the content and it's not anywhere the &lt;em&gt;really extreme&lt;/em&gt; stuff we've seen on the site already. If you want to talk about pain, which this question tries, you need to talk about pain, which the answer does. The language and level of detail provided don't look to me like they are crossing a line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd recommend to downvote in this example and leave a comment explaining that you think the description was too much to show what you think about such content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T17:59:25.413" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T17:59:25.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7186" CreationDate="2019-03-13T14:02:24.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One man's meat is another man's poison&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Stack is unique.  Stack Exchange was developed to concisely answer factual questions &amp;mdash; but that's not us.  As I understand it, there was quite a discussion when Worldbuilding.SE was proposed because people realized that our sometimes non-concise and non-factual leanings would lead to difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one of those difficulties is that what one person considers useful information another may think obscene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another life I was a micropublisher.  One of the books we were editing for publication was a children's picture book about life among the ancient Israelites.  We had random readers review the product before publication (we did this for all our books).  All returned strong, positive reviews &amp;mdash; except one.  A lady who objected to using the word &quot;sacrifice&quot; or referring to the ancient Jewish tradition of the daily sacrifice in a children's book.  She invited us instead to use the phrase, &quot;the heavenly gift.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great many people might believe that the woman was overly sensitive about the issue.    Perhaps she was, but we took her review seriously and further analyzed whether or not the intended audience (children ages 1-6) would be harmed by our presentation.  We did not accept her recommendation, but did make some modifications and moved on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My point?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had not seen the question nor the answer before reading this Meta question.  When I clicked on your link and read Renan's answer I had to re-read it, then read the question, then read Renan's answer again, because I was expecting to read a graphic description of abuse, not an anecdotal reference to abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember, I've been a micropublisher.  I've read tens of thousands of manuscripts, including manuscripts that actually do have graphic (and detailed) descriptions (page after page) of animal and human torture &amp;mdash; and that despite a submission rule that clearly stated it wasn't the kind of book we were interested in.  Once (only once) we found a book that would have been wonderful to publish if only all the violence were removed.  When we approached the author with our request, his response was, &quot;there's no way for the reader to understand the depth of my antagonist's evil if the violence is removed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yes... and no... but it's his book so we parted company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this affect Worldbuilding.SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We generally adhere to the U.S. desire for free speech.  This means that, all other things being equal, we do not censor what people write here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do follow (and are required to do so), SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;Expected Behavior&lt;/a&gt;.  Normally, this means don't be mean and don't be (too) vulgar.  But we have had questions and answers that the community strongly downvoted as inappropriate that were subsequently deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therein lies what's important.  We are not a small group of people imposing morality on a large group of people.  We are a community that talks through our differences.  The downside to this is that some policies that reflect the desires of the majority will go against the wishes of the minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, I've tried to change the culture of this site on a number of issues: sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn't.  And that's actually a good thing because, despite a fervent self-delusion that I'm right about everything, I'm not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Renan acted in good faith to use a real-world example to justify an answer.  He was brief, so brief that one could legitimately flag the answer as &quot;low quality.&quot;  To my knowledge, it has not been so flagged and I agree that it should not because in this case the brevity is (to me) an obvious effort to avoid gratuitous excess.  Indeed, I felt that his answer, while making a valid point, also included the compassion and concern over the issue reflecting an equally (to me) obvious understanding that his answer met a writer's need for background information and nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also grateful for the opportunity this Meta question gives to evaluate specific examples of what we believe is morally and ethically responsible on this site.  Users have joked in the past (and with good reason) that most of us are probably on the U.S. Homeland Security Watch List because of some of the questions about weapons of mass destruction, public disobedience, etc. and the answers to those questions.  Balancing the right and privilege to speak freely with necessity and good judgment is something we should (and I believe do) take very seriously.  When a question like this Meta post arises, it adds to the body of analysis that we use to draw a responsible line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, no drawn line will accommodate all people.  And with that I close, knowing that my response won't make the OP content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T14:02:24.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-13T20:12:59.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest voted answer was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106248/28789&quot;&gt;Why can't spaceships go underwater?&lt;/a&gt;, which basically was just &quot;They aren't designed for it&quot;, followed by citations I got while looking on other Stacks and some funny questions that are related to the problem. I think it's a good and valuable answer, but by far not my favourite one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love questions that make you think about different ways of approaching magic or explaining concepts of magic that don't seem to make any sense for example in a book or videogame. One such question I enjoyed answering was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/91721/28789&quot;&gt;How would it make sense that spellbooks or grimoires teach only one spell?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think my favourite answer was for the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/104243/28789&quot;&gt;Reality Check: Are these Honey Mouths and Thorn Shredders realistic?&lt;/a&gt; Just look at the pictures in the question. &lt;em&gt;Look at them!!!&lt;/em&gt; Soooo cute. I loved this question and I absolutely loved answering it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T20:12:59.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T17:29:31.693" Score="14" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of late yesterday, Stack Exchange has revived &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackExchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its official Twitter account, &lt;code&gt;@StackExchange&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It had been used intermittently/actually-not-at-all for several years, but now it's being resuscitated for the express purpose of promoting awesome content around the network. As a Community Manager put it, here's what they're looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Awesome/interesting/fun Questions &amp;amp; Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We'll feature a few of these per week and try to make sure that they're representative of a broad collection of our sites. This includes notable meta posts, too - though I'm guessing they'll be infrequent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Site events/contests&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a site has a regular or one-off event, we may be able to tweet about some of them. Some of y'all do events throughout the year and we'd love to share some of the community-led fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users who do noteworthy work or meet celebratory rep levels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We won't Tweet about anyone without reaching out to them first&lt;/em&gt;... but if there's someone you think deserves (and would appreciate) a spotlight on what they've been doing, either on main and/or meta, let us know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're looking for great posts both young and old - I have word that a &amp;quot;Throwback Thursday&amp;quot; of sorts is in the works - and given that people here have written some phenomenal stuff over the years, we definitely have lots to choose from (as well as plenty of new stuff, too). &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackExchange/status/1106246229288251395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the first tweet&lt;/a&gt;, which I think is a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How will this work?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of levels to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, Worldbuilding users will write an answer to this question with a link to the content and a short blurb about why it should be tweeted out to 17,640 people and counting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Periodically (probably more regularly than I expect), the mods will go through and look at submissions. If we see stuff that looks good - and I bet that there will be lots of that - we'll forward that to the Community Team via super-secret backchannels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Community Manager will &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt; select posts to be tweeted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me add a note here: &lt;strong&gt;Please be careful about the posts you suggest for tweeting.&lt;/strong&gt; Worldbuilding sometimes deals with subjects that are delicate, controversial, or otherwise likely to be problematic for Twitter. While there are two rounds of sorting by human eyes between a suggestion and the Twitter account, we would all prefer that people exercise some common sense and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggest problematic topics. (I can't really make it less vague than that without loss of generality - sorry!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other random notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding, specifically, has some specific content that might be worth featuring on the Twitter account, like topic challenges (if we have those, from time to time). This is, of course, in addition to all the awesome questions and answers we could feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, &lt;code&gt;@StackExchange&lt;/code&gt; is occasionally going to be tweeting content along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6969/627&quot;&gt;what we had been thinking about for our own Twitter account&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not saying this is going to &lt;em&gt;replace&lt;/em&gt; that proposal - and note also that given how much HNQ attention we get, we might not be the site that gets a whole lot of tweets from Stack Exchange - but it's definitely going to overlap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, I have it on good authority that here may be a Throwback Thursday-style set of tweets each week - so feel free to submit some old posts, as well as new ones!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever happens, &lt;code&gt;@StackExchange&lt;/code&gt; is going to be a great opportunity for us and the rest of the network. What content from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange do you want to see on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum, January 2020:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;@StackExchange&lt;/code&gt; stopped doing this kind of thing fairly quickly, partly out of a dearth of suggestions (which, I suppose, we could fix. . .) and partly due to a lack of time. That said, as of late 2019, Stack Overflow is doing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/12/06/this-week-stackoverflowknows-about-infinity-internet-speak-and-password-storage/&quot;&gt;weekly roundups of interesting questions across the network&lt;/a&gt;; you can tweet candidate posts at them using the hashtag &lt;code&gt;#StackOverflowKnows&lt;/code&gt;. We do still have an opportunity here for promoting some our awesome-est posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T20:20:33.080" Title="The network's official Twitter account is up and running again. What content do we want to share?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|twitter|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T20:47:33.260" Score="5" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm not sure why but this one was put on hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141270/how-can-the-temple-of-elementary-evil-reliably-protect-itself-against-kinetic-bo?rq=1&quot;&gt;How can The Temple of Elementary Evil reliably protect itself against kinetic bombardment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, why was it put on hold?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T07:43:33.513" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T07:43:33.513" Title="Why was &quot;How can The Temple of Elementary Evil reliably protect itself against kinetic bombardment?&quot; put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7191" CreationDate="2019-03-15T00:25:54.930" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Popularity != Suitability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same question has been asked a number of times on Meta.  Basically, &quot;my question's popular with no comments but it got closed, what gives?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Popularity has nothing to do with suitability.  Especially on this site.  We're creative and imaginative, which means the rules are much more important, not less.  Just because a lot of people were tickled by the idea and question you presented doesn't mean your question automatically gets a pass when it comes to the rules.  OPs are still expected to learn how to ask a good question.  The difficulty with this (for both new and experienced users) is great enough that it justified creating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You didn't need any comments.  You could have clicked on the &quot;close&quot; link at any time to see how close voters were voting.  They voted to close because they felt the question was too &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.  If you visit the link I just gave you, it'll help you understand the key differences between how SE defines POB generally and how we define it specifically.  In a nutshell (and per our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;code&gt;&quot;... avoid asking subjective questions where ... every answer is equally valid....&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  Such questions fall into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130#6139&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; category, which is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The kind of question you're asking is popular, and these kinds of questions are closed very frequently.  The question type (which I'm going to add to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;, sometimes one must be slapped in the face by a haddock to get things done) is: How can X given Y?  How to achieve a goal or condition is, indeed, a very popular type of question.  The problem is that it's intrinsically POB.  With rare exception, there are the proverbial thousand different ways to achieve the goal or condition.  If the OP takes the time to specify all the restrictions, limitations, circumstances, etc., necessary to get just one answer, they usually answer the question themselves.  The problem, therefore, is that &quot;Y&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;must have two parts.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  (A) a clear and detailed explanation of the conditions that permit X to be evaluated and (B) an explanation of how you will judge the best answer (or, said another way, what justifies/constitutes the best answer).  Part (B) changes the question into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6138#6138&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;, which is on-topic.  Regrettably, people usually provide (A), but they regularly fail to provide (B) and thus their question is closed.  (See the previous POB link for details.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to be fair to your concerns, it wouldn't have hurt any one or more of the five close voters to give you some insight into why they thought your question was POB.  However, (and this is important), SE &lt;em&gt;does not require close voters to explain their votes.&lt;/em&gt;  This is because the selected VTC reason is justification enough.  But, thanks for bringing the question to Meta!  It will serve to help others in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;SE won't change the POB text, which is why it's regrettably a &quot;learning experience&quot; to find the Meta post and understand the differences.  I asked about modifying that text or simply disabling the POB VTC reason on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320891/allowing-a-site-to-modify-vtc-text-or-disable-a-vtc-reason-altogether&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, the effort went nowhere.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T00:25:54.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-15T10:49:30.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My top-scoring answer is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125573/why-dont-vulcans-just-take-the-pills/125575#125575&quot;&gt;Why don't Vulcans just take the pills?&lt;/a&gt;, but I honestly think it is just an answer born of a pragmatic train of thought.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The answers I am proud of, mostly because English is still a foreign language for me and I still have a hard time with it sometimes, are to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125063/what-kind-of-a-unit-army-would-prefer-fighting-from-a-low-ground-position/125069#125069&quot;&gt;What kind of a unit/army would prefer fighting from a low ground?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117876/effects-of-stray-bullets-in-space/117884#117884&quot;&gt;Effects of stray bullets in space&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/140908/how-do-spaceships-determine-each-others-mass-in-space/140909#140909&quot;&gt;How do spaceships determine each others mass in space&lt;/a&gt;. My personal favorite would be the first of these three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52691" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T10:49:30.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2019-03-15T13:23:19.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to X given Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;How do I X?  How would X achieve Y (given Z)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;This is a very popular question type.  The OP is generally trying to understand how to achieve a goal or set of conditions given a set of circumstances, limitations, or restrictions.  For example, &quot;how would my medieval army overcome 500 Kobolds advancing through a narrow valley?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;This type of question is highly susceptible to being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.  There are often a great many ways a goal or condition can be achieved.  It is the OP's responsibility to provide both (a) an appropriate list of details that properly frame the question including limitations and restrictions, and (b) an explanation of how the OP will judge the best answer (or, a description of what would constitute the best answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7191/my-question-was-put-on-hold-at-13-upvotes-with-no-vtc-comments/7192#7192&quot;&gt;Why was &amp;quot;How can The Temple of Elementary Evil reliably protect itself against kinetic bombardment?&amp;quot; put on hold?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T13:23:19.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7186" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:35:39.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dogs and wolves have those, but humans don't. So if the lycanthropes&#xA;  take a stab to their anal sacs it may hurt a lot - but when they&#xA;  revert to human form they will not have the sacs, so no pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the way, I think damage to the anal sacs may be very painful. I&#xA;  once saw a dog whose previous owners tried to castrate him with a&#xA;  slingshot, the poor creature had lesions on a sac. The poor dog&#xA;  required meds for pain for quite a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see nothing especially disturbing or gruesome in that answer; nor any activity that rises to the level of &quot;animal torture&quot;. People behaving (very) badly? Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have rejected the edit request as well, reason being, the answer is stated matter of factly, without particular malice and without obvious intent to graphically depict cruelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers depict similarly &quot;disturbing&quot; matters such as &quot;gruesome&quot; injuries (broken bones and so forth) as well as &quot;torture&quot; (vegetarian diet for a carnivore). Why pick on this one answer? Is it because it's entitled &quot;anal glands&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:35:39.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7173" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:50:45.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I concur with the two other answers, I will only note that, in comments, I am often (gently) reminded that &quot;questions about the real world&quot; are on topic. Fractures on a space ship comes down to materials science, engineering &amp;amp; physics. Separatrix offered a &quot;real world&quot; response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't happen to agree with &quot;questions about the real world are on topic&quot;, but it is an oft quoted maxim here. And that is probably the basic reason why such a question might be seen as fit for Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think JBH et al. were correct in closing the question on grounds of narrative necessity. You want to strand your characters? Hey presto! Critical crack discovered in the Busman trusses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:50:45.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-16T20:40:36.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two most upvotes answers are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/118828/35041&quot;&gt;Why would a healing factor superhero still be afraid of things&lt;/a&gt; (▲52) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119074/35041&quot;&gt;What light colors bulbs should be used inside a spaceship&lt;/a&gt; (▲43, accepted, and answer with highest upvotes in the question). In both answers, I reached the daily cap of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say you about my favourite answer, but my 10 most enjoyable for me. As you can see, not all of them high upvotes, they just were entertaining for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/134269/35041&quot;&gt;Solar recycling or how to keep your star from dying&lt;/a&gt; (▲23, but answer with highest upvotes in the question). I enjoyed the titles I wrote on the answer, each one being like a &quot;chapter&quot; and using a different type of star.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/97763/35041&quot;&gt;How to harness electricity from crystals?&lt;/a&gt; (▲21, accepted, and answer with highest upvotes in the question). In the time I wrote this answer, it was my best one. I liked the question, and so my answer. I think it was the first time I got so many upvotes in an answer, I was very proud of my little work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/118921/35041&quot;&gt;How would this super earth world be creature evolution?&lt;/a&gt; (▲19, accepted, bounty +100, only answer on the question). This answer demanded my a deep research and I learned about the bicarbonate buffer system, useful for allowing a creature survive in that planet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/118586/35041&quot;&gt;Could an advanced alien race prevent the death of the universe?&lt;/a&gt; (▲12) I really enjoyed writing all that stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/108764/35041&quot;&gt;Creating a scientifically semi valid super soldier part 4 respiratory system?&lt;/a&gt; (▲8, accepted, answer with highest upvotes on the question). I love chemistry and biology, and I was able to use tons of both things. Also, I wanted to post something about that even before finding that question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/84125/35041&quot;&gt;If we put humans on planets with atmospheres different from earths atmosphere&lt;/a&gt; (▲9). I still use this answer as a guideline when I want to write something about atmospheres and their effects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/84401/35041&quot;&gt;Can I build a self sufficient medieval city?&lt;/a&gt; (▲9). I liked to apply the Square Cube Law, Demographics Made Easy and Shingeki no Kyoujin: Attack On Titans all on the same answer, it was very interesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/82687/35041&quot;&gt;How would a large space battleship be powered&lt;/a&gt; (▲3). Very little upvotes but I liked to share it anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/82850/35041&quot;&gt;Is this atmospheric composition breathable and what would it look like?&lt;/a&gt; (▲13, accepted, bounty +150, answer with highest upvotes on the question). I always enjoy writing about atmospherical composition and their effect. Also, the bounty was very pleasant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/84670/35041&quot;&gt;Why would society not cremate its dead in a world where necromancy is possible?&lt;/a&gt; (▲11). I was relaxing and fun write it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35041" LastEditorUserId="35041" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T03:01:59.933" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T03:01:59.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2019-03-17T20:09:14.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of highlighting our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct series&lt;/a&gt;, either directly by advertising the Meta post, or perhaps in a more entertaining way by advertising a popular question in the series, such as L.Dutch's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131539/anatomically-correct-panotti&quot;&gt;Anatomically correct Panotti&lt;/a&gt; or Renan's very popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/125602/anatomically-correct-sharknado-shark&quot;&gt;Anatomically correct sharknado shark&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T20:09:14.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2019-03-18T23:21:10.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Nope.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I've been folowing this question, the first answers given were short and to the point and tended to list only one of each category (Highest voted - Vs - Favourite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latterly it has degenerated into a &amp;quot;upvote my several favourites&amp;quot; fest, which is interesting in the way reality TV is interesting (ie. not much) at least to me, I judge not. Therefore I prefer to follow the initial preferred model of answer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doesn't mean I'm going to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have answered regarding their output on other sites on the network. Personally, I have answered on seventeen sites on the network, should I interpret the question that way, I'd be invalidating it by making it too broad as &amp;quot;favourite&amp;quot; would depend on too broad a context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll give you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130289/could-finger-fencing-be-fatal/130296#130296&quot;&gt;Could Finger-Fencing be Fatal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is favourite to me because it was the most fun, it made me snigger in the way I might have at primary school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130613/almost-realistic-way-to-beat-entropy/130619#130619&quot;&gt;Almost realistic way to beat entropy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my favourite because it seemed to irritate a good many people who demanded that I edit it for length. I liked it long, it told a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/128639/how-can-a-sapient-species-build-an-advanced-civilization-while-remaining-on-one/128660#128660&quot;&gt;How can a sapient species build an advanced civilization, while remaining on one continent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I let go of the here and now and just wrote a story (albeit shoddily, briefly and with a well recieved, accepted answer) that's what I love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My highest scoring is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139922/plausible-reason-for-gold-digging-ant/139930#139930&quot;&gt;Plausible reason for gold-digging ant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It consists of five simple sentences punctuated with two images. It took me less than 5 minutes to compose and would not be beyond the reach of the average 7 year old's comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an implicit question lurking there about the taste of the lowest common denominator - for another day perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta-comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend that the OP award accepted answer status to the answerer that manages to justify their answer to &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question as their favourite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T23:26:46.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7173" CreationDate="2019-03-19T15:19:54.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I'm the answerer you refer to in your question I suppose I should make my reasoning clear. Where others apparently saw a story question, I saw an engineering question with a real world history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem about microfractures in a stressed structure possibly leading to failure, with a mechanism for detection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the factors I addressed. Microfractures are a reasonable source of failure, vibration is a reasonable way to detect them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I referred the OP to story based rules when the comments went into why it wasn't detected in routine maintenance when this would be the normal way to find such a failure. Some aspects of the question were wrapped heavily in plot and character, but there was a reasonable engineering question to answer in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T15:56:33.630" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T15:56:33.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T13:39:23.533" Score="-4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Annoyed by some of my questions and those of other people being closed for spurious reasons, &lt;strong&gt;I decided to set up two test questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The first question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was deliberately &lt;em&gt;designed&lt;/em&gt; to be popular but to be thoroughly &lt;em&gt;story-based&lt;/em&gt;. The answers were predictable and were nothing I couldn't have thought up myself. Nevertheless there was not a single close vote - why not?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141322/making-a-sword-in-the-stone-in-a-medieval-world-without-magic&quot;&gt;Making a sword in the stone, in a medieval world without magic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The second question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a world-building question where I don't disclose the precise mechanism but I indicate that the idea I have will affect the technology of the time. It has been closed because it is '&lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; story based'.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141936/steam-assisted-victorian-engineers-why-the-secrecy&quot;&gt;Steam-Assisted Victorian Engineers - Why the secrecy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the hypocrisy? By all means vote down a question if you don't like it but I object to closing for a completely spurious reason yet allowing clearly non-suitable questions being kept open simply because they are interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone justify this behaviour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T14:46:44.353" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:33:28.893" Title="Why was &quot;Making a sword in the stone, in a medieval world without magic&quot; *not* closed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T15:09:54.183" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time we encounter questions of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the earliest time X could be discovered or built?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141829/what-is-the-earliest-time-a-pulsejet-could-be-built&quot;&gt;What is the earliest time a pulsejet could be built?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121669/how-early-can-transparent-glass-windows-be-easily-available?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=1|0.0000&quot;&gt;How early can transparent glass windows be easily available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/90144/how-early-can-nuclear-reactors-be-built?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=2|0.0000&quot;&gt;How early can nuclear reactors be built?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26436/earliest-possible-gun?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=8|0.0000&quot;&gt;Earliest Possible Gun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3028/what-is-the-earliest-that-a-civilization-could-develop-airships?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=11|0.0000&quot;&gt;What is the earliest that a civilization could develop airships?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are fun questions because they ask us to look backward with 20/20 hindsight and consider what shifts in history would have permitted an earlier discovery.  In this regard, they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're also prone to being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt; due to the scope of the problem.  Any one aspect of technology stands atop a mountain of experience, education, and innovation that has been influenced heavily by societal developments including philosophy/religion and government, as well as resource availability.  The development of any technology or scientific discovery is quite complex and determining how much of that mountain need not have existed to permit earlier discovery is a challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the question type is relatively unique and represents a quality challenge for Worldbuilders, I would like to create an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earliest-time&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earliest-time&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earliest-time&lt;/a&gt; tag that defines the nature of this question, warns of its weaknesses (to avoid closure), and helps guide the development of good questions with (hopefully) a modicum of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;what guidance should we give to users of this tag?  (Alternatively, &quot;what's the best way to ask this type of question?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T20:03:01.623" Title="Defining an &quot;Earliest-Time&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7202" CreationDate="2019-03-20T15:33:28.893" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure you understand what we mean when we say &lt;em&gt;story based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the first question you linked, you have a very specific very answerable, no magic question, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can a sword-smith use medieval technology to simulate a magical&#xA;  sword in the stone that can only be released (or put back) by someone&#xA;  who knows the secret? No actual magic is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question on the other hand, is asking us why an organization would do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why would the government of the day want to suppress knowledge of&#xA;  these 'engineers hats' from the general populace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has a specific question that is answerable with the application of real world technology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That you include story background information is frankly irrelevant to the question you end up asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asks answers to define a motive for an organization that exists in your imagined world of which they have little to no knowledge. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a textbook example of a story based question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1 is very much an answerable world-building question.  Question 2 is very clearly asking us to help come up with a plot point.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the help page:  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no hypocrisy here. I will agree that it does exist on the site and we do our best to keep on top of it, but in this situation I think you misunderstand the concepts we are discussing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:33:28.893" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-21T14:38:41.100" Score="-3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141777/the-elementary-evil-vs-you-wights-rooting-henrys-troops-out&quot;&gt;The Elementary Evil vs You /Wights/ Rooting Henry&amp;#39;s troops out&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They said it was too story-based and broad. Good thing I had that GoT fanfiction idea that instead of season 7, the Night King just dug a tunnel beath the wall, infiltrated Westeros and began a guerilla war on large-scale. It was a nearly perfect fit for Henry, also heavily limiting the scenarios in which the zombies would be encountered. I trimmed back Henry's backstory as well, just enough for people not to nag me about it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no feedback since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question ready for reopening? If not, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T20:09:45.047" Title="Is &quot;The Elementary Evil vs You /Wights/ Rooting Henry's troops out&quot; ready for reopening" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7205" CreationDate="2019-03-21T17:00:57.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what tactic should these squads employ to reliably defeat zombies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) That was a long read.  It could have been much more concise.  Too much information is being delivered in narrative rather than simple bullet lists.  Long questions are regularly seen as poor questions.  Please remember that the all-volunteer force you're inviting to respond is sharing their limited time.  Please respect that and be as concise as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) We're frequently asked &quot;what tactic(s) should X use against Y?&quot;  and the questions are regularly closed.  Tactics are, &lt;em&gt;by definition,&lt;/em&gt; circumstantial (too story-based).  What resources, weapons, forces, logistics, geography, climate, disposition-of-the-enemy, etc., etc., etc., are available to me?  All those and more are part of deciding a &lt;em&gt;tactic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember, worldbuilding (on-topic) is about systems and rules.  Storybuilding (off-topic) is about circumstances, choices, and plot.  We're here (e.g.) to help you develop the characteristics of your races.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;We are not here to help you write your story.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T19:04:42.687" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T19:04:42.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2019-03-21T21:21:10.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Some recent answers I think are deserving of Twitter:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/140413/quenching-swords-in-dragon-blood-why&quot;&gt;Quenching swords in dragon's blood: why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason for posting:&lt;/strong&gt; The question itself is concise, clear and relatable, with an interesting idea and reasonable scope. The answers obtained are various and all of high quality, bringing together theory and practical application, with some debate about whether or not it's actually feasible. There's a ton of good information in there, and it's all well-written to be available to a broader audience. Also, it's about dragons - and we're one of the few sites to handle those gracefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139922/plausible-reason-for-gold-digging-ant&quot;&gt;Plausible reason for gold-digging ant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason for posting:&lt;/strong&gt; Again, the question is concise, clear, and interesting. There's a well-placed link to a Wikipedia page, and the question is already protected to prevent spam answers from random Twitterers. The answers cover a wide swath of ideas, and I personally learned a lot from reading through them. They're all high-quality, with pictures that are engaging but not distracting and have proper links to obey CC-BY-SA. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1610/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's about ants&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/148999/how-much-steel-armor-can-you-wear-and-still-be-able-to-swim&quot;&gt;How much steel armor can you wear and still be able to swim?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason for posting:&lt;/strong&gt; This is an interesting question that I think a lot of people have wondered about at one point or another. The answers cover a wide swath of ideas and experiences, from real-world references to theoretical calculations. There's some good discussion about what exactly constitutes steel armor across different cultures, and a flat-out amazing pun from WillK in the comments to his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151823/summoning-a-technology-based-demon&quot;&gt;Summoning A Technology Based Demon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason for posting:&lt;/strong&gt; This question touches more on the science-fiction side of the site in an interesting way. While the question itself is a little broad and could use some expansion, the answers and comments do an excellent job of encompassing that broad nature and still providing interesting answers all across the computer-science domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Throwback Thursday material:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/339/what-would-a-planet-spinning-fast-enough-to-allow-geostationary-orbit-near-the-s&quot;&gt;What would a planet spinning fast enough to allow geostationary orbit near the surface look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reason for posting:&lt;/strong&gt; Well, it’s certainly old enough to be Throwback Thursday material. I think it’d be cool to feature something with a little more connection to other sites in the network, and people are always excited to read about space. The question is probably a little too broad by our current terms of the site, but the answers do an excellent job of bringing all the major points together coherently. The main answer is a detailed, in-depth explanation that remains highly readable. The other answers provide supporting context and valuable other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T18:04:36.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T07:57:07.010" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/141820/9685&quot;&gt;How to make money from a browser who sees 5 seconds into the future of any web page?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to have triggered some controversy. It appeared to have been closed, reopened and as of writing has collected another 3 close-votes. I thought it would probably be best to clear it up here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that question isn't suitable for various reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Story-based&lt;/em&gt;: the question focuses on a plot-device (a browser allowing an access to the future) found by a given character and its possible usage to accomplish specific goals of said character (being rich)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Too broad&lt;/em&gt;: the question presents said device and then asks: &quot;how can I use it to achieve a goal?&quot;. There are an unlimited number of answers that might fit. It is impossible to be completely exhaustive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;POB&lt;/em&gt;: it does not offer any criteria on which we could evaluate the different answers, so we are left to judge on each opinion's/witty/humour/writing quality of each of the answers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All those are good enough to get that question closed. So I don't understand the debate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your views on it? Did I miss something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T16:01:54.577" Title="Discussion about the &quot;browsing in the future&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7208" CreationDate="2019-03-23T07:33:23.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised it got reopened after it was closed the first time. It's totally and 100% &lt;strong&gt;story based&lt;/strong&gt;. It's all about an individual's motives, desires, whims &amp;amp; personality: how can my character get rich from this? There is nothing in this question that relates to world, to functionality or design of said device. I.e., it's a question of &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt;, not about &quot;systems&quot; or &quot;fundamental laws of nature&quot; that make this world different from the primary world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;opinion based&lt;/strong&gt; are also viable closure reasons.  Also, sufficient reasons for not reopening the question. Too bad the bounty can't be removed: I actually see the placement of a bounty upon a contentious question &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it's been closed and miraculously reopened to be skirting just over the fine line of abuse of system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T07:33:23.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-23T13:30:31.713" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized I could as geologist answer some of your questions about planets, but i am wondering if you would find better answers at ES exchange when they are not fantasy worlds as bloody oceans and so as in this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/14354/in-an-earth-like-planet-with-no-history-of-carbon-based-life-forms-would-there&quot;&gt;In an Earth-like planet with no history of carbon-based life forms, would there be limestone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are not only going to receive better answers, but also scientists could evaluate answers helping the poster is my guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are asking ourselves the reversal question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/is-planetary-science-on-topic&quot;&gt;Is planetary Science on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user61971" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T15:39:03.620" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:45:30.457" Title="Are geology, oceanography and metheorology planetary questions better suited for Earth Sciences Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7205" CreationDate="2019-03-23T14:33:02.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/strategy/info&quot;&gt;comment on the &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt; list of conditions and questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; that would have to be answered before a reliable answer on tactics could be given - based on my experience planning law enforcement and military operations. Even with all that information - developing tactics in a vacuum is likely to be opinionated, involves many circumspect decisions, and is otherwise extremely difficult to build on just a &lt;strong&gt;single event&lt;/strong&gt;. Hence, why the military does operational planning then tactical planning then mission or course of action (COA) planning then develops orders (orders are what the individual units use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current and continuing problem with the question is: it is looking for the overall strategy&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; and tactics needed to win a war (that very top level planning) and that is just a wide open subject. If you don't understand the military difference between strategy (operational) and tactical, I'll expand&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strategy/Operational Planning - far-reaching broad plans: The strategy in later parts of OIF was: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency elements and address root causes using comprehensive military efforts&quot;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tactics/Tactical Planning - are far more specific, there we decide the event specific directions to be given to units (and are based on the operational objectives or strategy)&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, high-level examples of these can include: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;seek &amp;amp; destroy missions (with targets given or areas assigned)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;selecting areas to provide aid, such as food or medical attention, to&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;cordon and search (again would contain specific entity or object being searched for)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;develop diplomatic and economic relations with [important] town by _______&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developing COAs and orders would just break this down to smaller and smaller units and even more specific actions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with operational, strategic, planning is: it requires a discussion. And &lt;strong&gt;SE is just not built for discussion&lt;/strong&gt; - its a one question/one answer model. So we come to my suggestion &lt;em&gt;to make it a question that fits in WB/SE model&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;change it to focus on either only a single battle, single type of operation, or single element of the strategy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Or, basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;split the question so it is only asking about a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; &quot;good zombie trait&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;describe that trait and some of the other planning elements (not the story)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give the criteria on how a good answer to that single question will be determined&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not focus on &quot;best tactics&quot; but working tactics &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for instance, requiring established military or historic tactics as a base. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then (as you find you need): wash, rinse, and repeat for each additional trait in separate new questions. I would also suggest asking the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions?cb=1&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first as tactic problems are simply hard to write within the model of WB/SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;1: I provide my own experience here but if you need more depth see US Army Strategist Sukman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@danielsukman/tactical-vs-operational-planning-396a1b43242b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;piece on these two planning elements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;2: From one of the guides they gave me - cover &amp;amp; first few chapters were burnt up so don't know which it was originally&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;3: Totally from memory but I heard it enough I should have it memorized&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;a: The question of whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strategy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strategy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strategy&lt;/a&gt; should even be a tag is a separate one. As there are very few non-closed/on-hold or even questions with accepted answers in that tag because of the difficulties I state here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;z: The question that comment was attached to is now deleted but the list is now attached to the strategy tag so I've linked to it instead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T20:09:45.047" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T20:09:45.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2019-03-23T15:09:30.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The short answer is &quot;yes&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great many questions asked here, even when purely within a worldbuilding context, would probably receive more authoritative answers more quickly if asked on other, more appropriate Stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The long answer is &quot;if you want&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a substantial, natural overlap between worlbuilding and the sciences.  At a rough guess, 80%+ of the questions asked here could be asked elsewhere with better results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question can be reworded to meet that other Stack's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question's context isn't perceived as too silly for the other Stacks.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the problem we've generally had over time: Sure, the Earth Sciences stack can answer questions about geology, oceanography and meteorology.  But the moment you mention it's for a fictional planet (or the moment they figure out it's not a question about Earth as it is today), you have a high probability of closure.  The other Stacks are fundamentally biased (and rightly so) on &lt;em&gt;here, today&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;there, tomorrow.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus, the &quot;real-world questions&quot; decision was made&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost a year ago (time flies when you're having fun), the mods introduced a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161&quot;&gt;proposal to finalize the &quot;are real-world questions on-topic debate.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  The simple answer is yes, they're on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the basic rule is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you can word your question to meet the expectations of a Stack more dedicated to that field of expertise, you might&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; get a better answer more quickly using that Stack.  Nevertheless, you're always welcome here, never forgetting that we have expectations, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;I once posted on Electronics.SE a question about whether or not you could self-charge the sound effects used for a potato gun by running zinc and copper rails down the barrel.  It took forever to be answered, by one person in comments, because it was perceived as a silly (read: not serious) question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;We've experienced the condition where a perfectly sensible question was asked on the more appropriate Stack and didn't receive an answer within a time the OP felt was reasonable, so the question was brought here &amp;mdash; which is an example of the simple truth that nothing's perfect.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T15:09:30.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7208" CreationDate="2019-03-23T15:30:31.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another example of popularity vs. suitability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @James that if the question met our expectations for avoiding closure as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt; it would be suitable.  I can also see @Elemtilas' point, though I believe the backstory is getting in the way (in other words, I don't believe the question can only be answered as a function of the plot), but it's close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, ours is a creative site and it's common for people to vote because they &lt;em&gt;like the question&lt;/em&gt; and not because the question &lt;em&gt;follows the rules.&lt;/em&gt;  Rules are a necessary evil to keep our site from becoming Stack Exchange's dumping ground for questions no other Stack wants to answer, and they therefore tend to chafe OP's who are looking to write their story (or simply sate their curiosity) and not build the infrastructure of a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the question is popular enough and close enough to being on-topic that there's a lot of swing in the votes.  The OP could resolve this easily by simply following the rules &amp;mdash; but you'd be surprised how challenging it is to get people to read them, much less follow them, which brings us back to people voting because they simply &lt;em&gt;like the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sigh.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T15:30:31.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2019-03-24T04:04:48.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is Worldbuilding, not Fantasy Worldbuilding.  While, yes, many of our questions are completely unscientific, we also have many questions about real science applied to new worlds.  Some of these are among my favorite questions on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these questions are also on-topic on other sites.  Stack Exchange has sites with overlapping scopes (it's not just us).  For example, there's an entire site about Emacs, but you can ask Emacs questions on Stack Overflow.  There's an entire site about biology, but you can ask biology questions here (with an eye toward creature design).  There's an entire site about astronomy, but many astronomy questions fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to see more &quot;crossover&quot; among sites; I hope you and others from Earth Sciences will consider answering questions in your fields that are asked here.  (You're probably going to want to follow some tags and ignore others.)  It's fine to point out the existence of other sites in comments; with 175 sites on the network, &quot;oh, there's a site for that?&quot; is not an uncommon reaction.  But let's not try to drive questions that are on-topic on one site to another one instead.  The person chose to ask on a particular site; let's honor that (unless the question is out of scope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, even when scopes overlap, sites sometimes have different rules about what makes a good question (or answer).  Your site might expect askers to have more background knowledge and/or have done more scientific research before asking, for example.  (I'm not saying that's so; I don't know your site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's work together to help each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T04:04:48.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2019-03-24T06:38:55.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be specific about the tech you're interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more ambiguous your technology or scientific development reference, the more likely your question will be closed.  For example, consider the question, &quot;how early could steam tech be invented?&quot;  Here's the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aeolipile&lt;/a&gt; was invented 2,000 years ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first commercially-successful steam engine (an engine, not a locomotive) was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newcomen atmospheric engine&lt;/a&gt; in 1712.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first full-scale steam locomotive was the Coalbrookdale Locomotive built by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive#United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Trevithick in 1804&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Steam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Age of Steam&lt;/a&gt; was a period of steam-powered industrialization between 1770 and 1914.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Steam turbines&lt;/a&gt; used everywhere from military naval vessels to electric power generation are still manufactured and in use today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a short list of major advancements.  There are hundreds (if not thousands) of individual technologies that fall within &quot;steam technology.&quot;  As you can imagine, moving the Aeolipile back 100 years is a very different question compared to moving the development of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-6-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pacific class 4-6-2 steam locomotive&lt;/a&gt; back 100 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless your question addresses a specific technology, answers may span thousands, hundreds, and tens of years and refer to everything from bronze or brass metallurgy to industrialized manufacturing to laser-guided milling; making the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T06:38:55.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7208" CreationDate="2019-03-24T16:01:54.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Story-based: the question focuses on a plot-device (a browser allowing an access to the future) found by a given character and its possible usage to accomplish specific goals of said character (being rich)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not story-based.  Story-based means that it is plot instead of setting.  But this is clearly setting.  There is a way to see the future with some limitations.  How would this be exploited?  Not by this individual character but by everyone who has access to the browser.  The available list of options is determined by the nature of the world (setting).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may very well be Too Broad (asking for an unbounded list) or Primarily Opinion-Based (no best answer, although we might think about finding the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; way to make money).  But it clearly isn't story-based.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of story-based:  my character is a pacifist with these other characteristics.  Given the choice between two bad (non-pacifist) alternatives, which would my character choose?  See the difference?  Story-based means that a particular character's characterization is important because different characters may make different choices.  The choice is a characteristic of the character, not the setting (or world).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being rich is an objective measure (maximizing money).  All characters will measure it the same way even if they value it differently.  Asking how to convert a mechanism into money is a characteristic of the setting.  By contrast, being a good pacifist is a subjective measure.  Each character will measure it differently.  One can write a story about a character who picks either option reasonably.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T16:01:54.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-25T15:07:35.760" Score="17" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pertaining to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/142123/55404&quot;&gt;On a tidally locked planet, would time be quantized?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can mostly agree that this question is super messy. I personally love the premise, but I wish there wasn't a giant wall of text. After the last edit by OP, the question was nearly illegible. I proposed an edit deleting nearly the whole rant, replacing it with my best two sentence summary, but it was rejected. I can see why; Intent of OP and all that, and that's not what I'm asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the future, if there are more questions written this way, what's one to do?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we leave it there and downvote, asking OP to clean it up? OP likely won't do it, and then we've got a junk question with some decent answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we edit it, as User L. Dutch did? Obviously, we need to be more concise than I was, and OP may still resent the edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we VTC or delete or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55404" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T08:07:22.540" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T12:05:26.157" Title="What do we do with these messy questions?" Tags="|discussion|editing|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-25T15:17:55.067" Score="-2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/142179/32097&quot;&gt;Deities vs You /Liquid Anon/ What&amp;#39;d be the most optimal carrier fluid comopsition?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't have a clue. &lt;strong&gt;Why was the question put on hold as too story-based of all reasons?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T16:06:51.557" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T18:17:54.603" Title="Why was the &quot;Deities vs You /Liquid Anon/ What'd be the most optimal carrier fluid comopsition?&quot; put on hold as too story-based?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2019-03-25T15:45:30.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From one of the close voters on the last hypothetical/worldbuilding type question I saw on the Earth Science exchange: &quot;the real world we know is more than complex enough without asking hypothetical questions on this exchange&quot; or words to that effect. That attitude may have changed but I wouldn't bet on it. Worldbuilding is a good place for hypotheticals of all sorts mainly because of the attitude, assisted by the wide knowledge base, of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:45:30.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7219" CreationDate="2019-03-25T17:39:51.317" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is the responsibility of the OP to ask a clear, concise question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, as of the writing of my answer, is a question run amok.  Rather than improving the question, the OP simply appended... and appended... and appended... in massive quantities.  Frankly, if you need to express that much information to ask a question, IMO you don't have a question (or haven't yet figured out what you're going to ask).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can't explain your backstory in three paragraphs...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, IMO, if an OP can't explain the backstory or premise of the question in three or fewer paragraphs (maybe add to it a 3-5 item bullet list of conditions or qualifications for an answer), then 95% of the time the OP hasn't figured out what they're trying to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And no question on the main site should require more than a single sentence with a single question mark.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what to do when a question becomes incontinent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Downvote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that a VTC is not a super-downvote.  A VTC should only be cast if the question violates one of the appropriate-question rules.  Ideally, it should never be cast because one doesn't like the question or because the question length/complexity is getting out of control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because ours is a creative site, we have a general unwritten policy to not substantially edit an OP's post save for legibility and/or grammar.  This isn't the case on other sites.  In fact, SE's general policy is that they encourage user B to edit user A's question if it clarifies the question &lt;em&gt;without changing that question's intent.&lt;/em&gt;  (That italicized bit is &lt;em&gt;really important.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the linked question, the question is way, way, way past the need for somebody editing it back down to proper size.  Taking the time to do that helps the OP learn how to write better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Live with it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all else fails, because we live in an imperfect world, one can always live with the fact that some questions will be out of control.  I suspect that for most of us, participation on this site is a hobby.  Never let a hobby take over your life (or, said in the words of The Joker, &quot;if you're good at something, never do it for free&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T18:45:49.993" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T18:45:49.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7220" CreationDate="2019-03-25T18:17:54.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a blunt response&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1) You can't ask a straight question.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your entire question could have been asked as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; I am designing a creature with a body made out of a fluid similar to a magnetorheological fluid, save that rather than using magnetism I'm using nanomachines.  This allows the fluid to become a permeable solid not unlike the holographic doctor in Star Trek: Voyager.  What would be a good fluid to use as the suspension for the nanites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It must be magnetically permeable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should have good cohesion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It must be fireproof and resistant to acids and bases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should be lightweight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't usually mind creativity in the questions, but it should never interfere with your question being concise and clear.  As the quantity of flourish increases, the comprehensibility of your question decreases.  For example, your Objective #2 required me to read it a couple of times to realize you were trying to be funny and not actually trying to add anything principally meaningful to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(BTW, IMO you should replace #2, which is irrelevant since your nanites are creating the cohesion, with a minimum temperature the fluid must remain a fluid.  As temperature drops, everything eventually solidifies.  You might also consider a maximum temperature for your fluids, as some materials won't be fluid at your max temp.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2) You asked about one character.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you ask a question is &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; on this site.  We aren't being rude, we're trying to draw a clear line.  The moment you made this about a single character you made this too story-based.  Single-character questions are &lt;s&gt;almost&lt;/s&gt; always closed because a single character is 100% a function of the story &amp;mdash; he/she/it can literally be whatever you want them to be because there's no reason for consistency (which is required for even a second creature of the same type).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3) You're asking a question about magic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your knee-jerk reaction to that statement will be, &quot;no I didn't!&quot;  But yes, you did.  Nanites or nanomachines fall squarely inside Clarke's third law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you could use urine (or any other non-solid) and achieve what you want.  Just have the nanites solve the problem, which is a story-based solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asked in a better way this question might have been popular&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe if you fixed (1) and (2) then ignored (3) the question would be reopened and might even become quite popular.  It's an interesting question.  There was just too much nonsense to wade through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One more thing: it's important to keep in mind that the longer your question, the more likely people will skip it.  Many users are squeezing in a free minute here and there to participate.  They won't/can't take the time to read a long question no matter how relevant the marshes.  And when they realize the marshes aren't relevant, they'll tolerate the question length even less.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T18:17:54.603" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-03-27T00:46:55.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JpXKn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T00:46:55.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T20:32:42.603" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;A not-small percentage of proposed edits are from anonymous users.  I'm not sure how this works.  It's not Community because that would be a high level user setting that name, no?  And why do an edit that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect these are non-users of the system proposing an edit.  There appears to be no minimum rep level required to propose an edit (only to have one go through without approval).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I reject these as general principle.  Someone who hasn't even taken the time to create an account is trying to edit posts?  Even when they're reasonable edits, I just can't get past the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here's one that just came up for approval.  I don't have a problem with an edit that adds a link to a reference, though I feel that the author should choose which reference to use.  My issue is that the user isn't a member of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xx41j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xx41j.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I missing something here?  Who are the anonymous users?  Could it be, say, the OP who just wasn't logged in properly?  Or is it a moderator?  Or is it indeed some random passerby?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T13:34:29.147" Title="Who are the anonymous users?" Tags="|discussion|users|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2019-03-27T21:13:47.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who are the anonymous users? Could it be, say, the OP who just wasn't logged in properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couldn't say, it could be a user that's just not logged in to the system like you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is it a moderator? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mod edits are automatic and don't require approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is it indeed some random passerby?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to the point.  If an edit is a good edit, approve.  If the edit is vandalism, changes the meaning, or otherwise hurts the post then reject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source of an edit isn't particularly relevant and as you suggested an anonymous user could well be a member that just isn't logged in...I am not sure why the source of the edit is such a concern, &lt;strong&gt;if it helps, good, if not, reject.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems pretty straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T21:13:47.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2019-03-27T22:48:56.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the same edit that you saw. It was on a post of mine and I approved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like James said in his answer, don't judge edits by the user. Judge them by content. Same as with any judgement on any post, as a general principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw your comment on his answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no accountability. If a user does anything (including proposing edits) that is malicious or spammy, they get suspended or banned, and anything else they've done can get scrutinized. But if an anon user can do stuff, there's no way to ban them or track it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that banning someone from a Stack Exchange site is a punishment, you have really low standards for punishments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make no money out of answering questions here. SE is not a social network, so there isn't socialization either. Contrary to the belief of so many SE users, specially some from Stack Overflow, genital sizes &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; increase in proportion to the silly virtual score attributed to each account. What do you lose by being banished from the site? Like Eric Idle put on his best song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I mean, what have you got to lose? You know, you come from nothing, you're going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ever managed to get banned from here at the very least I might be eased from my addiction to SE's gaming mechanics. Might enjoy the free time and maybe plant a kid, have a book and write a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And banning doesn't go very far anyway. We have a guy who has been banned once or twice and still managed to name themself a candidate for mod in the last election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an anonymous user wrecks too much chaos, I think SE can block them by IP or something. But really, with the speed we clear revisions on World Building, that is not an issue. I mean come on, I could have a handful more silver medals if people let posts stays for more than 30 seconds in each queue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T11:25:33.783" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T11:25:33.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2019-03-27T23:14:40.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attempt to &quot;discover something early&quot; as late as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The further back you wish to push the development or discovery of a technology, the less likely it can be achieved.  Every advancement stands atop a mountain of experience, education, and innovation.  Each of those are dependent on social status, government type, philosophical and religious influence, resource availability, and communication.  The resulting interdependence of any one technology on a vast web of necessary conditions is considerable (and often difficult to define).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, the less time needed for the push-back, the simpler it is to justify whether it is possible to do so.  It's worth noting that 99% of the technology we enjoy today was invented in the last 150 years &amp;mdash; which suggests pulling any modern advancement back &lt;em&gt;another 150 years&lt;/em&gt; is very difficult, and pulling it back earlier is next to impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you only need to develop a specific technology 20 years earlier, please do not ask for 100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T23:14:40.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2019-03-28T06:13:35.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I second James' answer, I just want to share my personal experience: I lurk most of the SE communities here, and I am registered only in a small subset of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I stumble into a post which can clearly benefit from an edit (think of the usual they're/their/there misuse) I don't really feel compelled to register and edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can use the &amp;quot;improve this question&amp;quot; feature, I do it (screenshot below taken from a HNT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i71DX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i71DX.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of feature: improve this question&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am aware that I will never receive any feedback nor reputation for my edit, I just want to do my little part to improve this place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be really odd if, while I am on vacation in a foreign country, I would be scolded for collecting an empty soda can thrown on the grass to dispose of it in the garbage bin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T07:35:15.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-28T23:01:31.240" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm over at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/579/quarter/worldbuilding/2019-01-01&quot;&gt;rep league page&lt;/a&gt; wondering how to keep my slim quarterly lead over Separatix... (OK, I was just curious.  No, really, I was just curious....) and noticed two numbers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reputation change of 1+: 1,754 users&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Total reputation of 1+: 52,385 users&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that the number of people who swoop in on the social media currents, leave a (usually very poor) answer, and never return outnumbers we, the blessed of Glarnak, by 30:1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, what have we tried in the past to help people stick around long enough to gain a basic understanding of our limitations?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If not, what do those two numbers really mean?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;this partially came about due to my haunting meta.WB for the last few days and realizing that the number of Main users to Meta users is probably, itself, 30:1.  Meaning that the number of all users to active meta users is about 900:1.  I've been wondering how to get more activity in Meta and now I'm wondering if I shouldn't ignore meta and focus on ideas for recruiting loyalty to Main.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T23:07:32.337" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T00:21:38.260" Title="Do I understand the consequence of the rep league data correctly?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7232" CreationDate="2019-03-28T23:54:19.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's more like the total amount of people actively participating in the last few weeks is about 1/30 of the total amount of all registered users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I participated in the site very actively a few years ago, then I stopped for a while. During the time I was out I was not in the &quot;users with a +1 rep change during the period&quot; group, but that doesn't mean I was someone who came from a social media current to leave a poor answer and disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime later I was jonesing for a virtual score so I came back. Just kidding... I usually browse other SE sites and the hot network questions had some really interesting questions on display. Also, I like sciences and this site presents interesting, creative challenges that are answerable with them. I think exploring that side of WB may lure more nerds like me into the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="34744" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T00:21:38.260" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T00:21:38.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-30T01:15:00.520" Score="7" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if the statement in the comment is correct or if it misrepresents the tiny edits and their timing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've worked quite hard to not alter the question after the original post and I can't see how these edits have had any impact whatsoever on answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no actual modification to the question has occurred&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two of three visible answers happened long after edits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll welcome suggestions how to improve, but here I'm just asking if this vote-to-close comment is fair and correct, or if it misrepresents my actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think the question both started out quite clear and has remained clear and steady. In this case vtc as &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; seems to me misplaced as well. It's my first question here and it may have a slightly different style, or may not be the question that people &lt;em&gt;wish I had asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142062/keeping-ghz-wireless-rf-out-of-our-heads-without-stopping-the-internet?answertab=oldest#comment447582_142062&quot;&gt;comment in question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close as unclear. &lt;strong&gt;So far there are 4 answers, and they have resulted in modifications to the question to render them invalid.&lt;/strong&gt; I recommend taking this question to the sandbox to clarify the question to reflect what the OP is really asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142062/keeping-ghz-wireless-rf-out-of-our-heads-without-stopping-the-internet?answertab=oldest#comment447599_142062&quot;&gt;replaced with&lt;/a&gt; this after this meta question was posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recommend taking this question to the sandbox, where we can address issues, such as issues with the RF thresholds in both dose and time, and the assumption that everyone feels the need to suddenly change their behavior all at once, but wont curb their device usage. These issues make it very hard to guess what answers you will find acceptable. It needs clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the statement in bold is false, here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only two edits, each added one word, one of those only being a heading, and the other word &lt;em&gt;clarifying an existing point within the same sentence&lt;/em&gt; following an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/142063/2113&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (10k rep required) that was subsequently self-deleted for (as I remember, I can't see it) not reading the question properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;post: &lt;code&gt;2019-03-22 00:18:11&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/142071/40033&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;2019-03-22 03:23:43&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit 1: &lt;code&gt;2019-03-22 03:42:38&lt;/code&gt; inserted one word (can't make billions of phones in weeks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nvW7p.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nvW7p.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142062/keeping-ghz-wireless-rf-out-of-our-heads-without-stopping-the-internet?answertab=oldest#comment444978_142062&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;2019-03-22 03:28:18&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tdDpc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tdDpc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit 2: &lt;code&gt;2019-03-22 00:33:58&lt;/code&gt; added the heading &quot;premise&quot; to the existing premise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ha8sJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ha8sJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/142777/40033&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;2019-03-29 16:53:15&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/142779/40033&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;2019-03-29 17:08:26&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40033" LastEditorUserId="40033" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T22:48:42.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T22:48:42.603" Title="Is this vtc comment misrepresenting my actions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2019-04-01T02:14:28.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Honestly, I reject these as general principle. Someone who hasn't even taken the time to create an account is trying to edit posts? Even when they're reasonable edits, I just can't get past the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get where you're coming from. But I wouldn't recommend rejecting an edit out of hand this way. Because someone else is just going to have to come along and clean up the mess that Anonymous already addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest using the &quot;improve this edit&quot; function in stead. Especially for grammatical, lexical or clarity edits -- things that don't change the question and don't alter or add potentially dubious factuality (links, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you do this, the edit will become yours. (I accidentally did this to a new user once, editing their edit, and learned that the edit was credited to me.) I see no issue with doing it this way, as what you're really doing is simply endorsing a suggestion, and lending whatever name credibility a Known User has to the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T02:14:28.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T03:20:41.700" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing the site a while ago and it looked kinda strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RcFSm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RcFSm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Oh the nostalgia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To complete the visual offense, the &quot;welcome to stackoverflow&quot; bit seemed to be a marquee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T03:38:43.837" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T03:38:43.837" Title="What is this about going back to the future?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7219" CreationDate="2019-04-02T12:36:47.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we should do:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Write comments explaining the problem(s) with this question, directing the user to the help center or asking for clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only remove irrelevant text that doen't provide any information related to the question. On Worldbuilding, this is very seldom (compared to other Stacks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if the OP gives essential information in comments but doesn't edit those into the question should we do it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we shouldn't do:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;don't substantially edit any questions&lt;/strong&gt;. In most cases the initial intention gets warped or lost, even against your best intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are absolutely honest, we all are biased. We understand the question in a way that doesn't have to be in accordance to the intention of the OP. Maybe we have the beginning of an answer formulated in our head. Conciously or not, our edit will shape the question in a way that it fits our answer better, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen it done on other Stacks with a much higher frequency of new users and bad questions. Experienced high-rep users see it as their responsibility to edit any salvagable question to be on topic &lt;em&gt;somehow&lt;/em&gt;, but in the wake, the original intent of the OP is totally lost because no-one actually asks the OP for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a real-life example I witnessed on The Workplace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New user rants about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he should wear protective boots in hot summer weather.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High-rep User A edits the question and removes the hot weather as irrelevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High-rep User B edits the question (at that time a single short sentence) into asking &lt;em&gt;what kind of protective footwear is best&lt;/em&gt; because otherwise the question would have been off-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High-rep User C edits the question into asking &lt;em&gt;how to choose&lt;/em&gt; the best protective footwear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later the OP apologized for his rant. He didn't actually care about any answers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point the question was actually on topic, but it wasn't recognizable anymore as anything related to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53228" LastEditorUserId="53228" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T12:05:26.157" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T12:05:26.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-02T20:20:10.340" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about what a government can do to avoid the wealthy from imposing their will through physical violence: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143036/21222&quot;&gt;How to regulate the expected result of fights between hired mercenaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/143047/21222&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt; that by switching to a certain form of government (and socioeconomical organization), the problem would be averted altogether. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/59118&quot;&gt;However, my answer was deleted and turned into a comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it made it into the queue because somebody didn't think it was fit for the question. However, it was not my intention to comment; the format of the post wasn't even fit for a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted what I posted because I think I have a valid answer to the question. I think the appropriate action when you think an answer is bad is to downvote it. I have no problem with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain to me why, in a question about what a government can do to prevent an economic maneuver, an answer suggesting a change in the form of government is invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T20:31:00.487" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T15:03:11.593" Title="Why was this answer turned into a comment?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7247" CreationDate="2019-04-03T02:52:55.350" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to define a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143052/ice-world-cryo-world-settlementamorphous-cryolava-cryomagma&quot;&gt;QA context&lt;/a&gt; about especially cold ice-worlds(maybe they should be called cryo-worlds), where surface temperature range 0-100°K. I noticed there is not a tag for ice-world, nor cryo-world, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cryogenics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cryogenics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cryogenics&lt;/a&gt; tag description says it's reserved for cryogenic hibernation specifically. I did see the ice and dry-ice tags, although dry ice is only about 216.6 °K, and the context I was trying to get at was much colder than that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia cryogenic gasses liquify at or below 123°K...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and so I've used the cryogenics tag, I hope this is not too egregious a violation, although I was thinking I'd like to propose a couple new tags: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;code&gt;liquid-nitrogen&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&lt;code&gt;absolute-zero&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;zero-Kelvin&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also perhaps &lt;code&gt;liquid-methane&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quick freezing point chart&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     freezing points&#xA;H2O   273.2 °K  &#xA;CO2   216.6 °K&#xA;CH4   90.70 °K&#xA;CO    68.13 °K&#xA;N2    63.15 °K&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather not used tags inappropriately if at all possible, but the large discrepancy in temperatures for each of these substances is so broad, and I think could help differentiate different types of cold worlds scenarios for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user62882" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T13:58:24.623" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T05:59:50.843" Title="Cryo-Tags Suggestion / Proposal (cold stuff)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7241" CreationDate="2019-04-03T05:27:18.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not the moderator who turned that answer in a comment. Howvere, here are my 2 cents: if those lines contain an answer, it is so hidden between them that it would require an additional question to pull it out. Long story short, as it stands it is a poor answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we generally prefer answers which address and explain the point asked by the OP, that aspect was clearly missing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the attempt to give a witty answer that catches the eyes (and the votes) of part of the audience, but since we don't put a limit on the number of characters which can be typed in an answer, I think it would have greatly helped to use those very lines as tag line, followed by a more detailed explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T13:37:25.280" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T13:37:25.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T06:44:01.777" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142608/predators-part-2-how-can-a-boarding-action-from-super-aliens-be-repelled&quot;&gt;Predators part 2: How can a boarding action from super aliens be repelled?&lt;/a&gt; closed as too story based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descriptions of what is &quot;too story based&quot; tend to boil down to what is stated here in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3281/risk-factor-definition-too-story-based&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather&#xA;  than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on&#xA;  Worldbuilding. Capabilities of characters within a world and creation&#xA;  of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions&#xA;  must focus on what is possible or likely to develop, not what someone&#xA;  would or should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above question is not about a scene, character, or plot point (actually, no one is boarded by aliens in my story at all). The results of this question would only enter the story tangentially by means of setting or understood practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is the question about the actions or motives of an individual or even a group. I never ask what anyone would or should do. Rather, it is focused on what sort of defenses would be available and would be likely to be developed and implemented in a world where there were pirates with certain abilities. I originally asked it as part of a development process for certain settings in my world, and to help flesh out my design of an entire species. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my descriptions of my ship setting or my aliens were not detailed enough, then that might be justification for a &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; closure, but I do not understand how it is too story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62676" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T11:44:22.367" Title="Why is &quot;predators part 2&quot; too story based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7244" CreationDate="2019-04-03T11:44:22.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't participate in closing that question, and in fact don't think I even saw it until you brought it up here, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &quot;too story-based&quot; means that once story-specific elements are removed from the question, there is little or no question left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/142608/3&quot;&gt;the most recent revision of the question back when it was put on hold&lt;/a&gt;, I'm seeing a few problematic points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the question seems to be about, or at least focus extremely heavily on, an individual character. That by itself makes it a likely candidate for closing, but as &quot;not about worldbuilding&quot; (as it is about an individual character), not necessarily as &quot;too story-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the &quot;Anything you can come up with to defend yourself against them, you might have brought with you just in case.&quot; basically invokes magic. Which can work, but magic questions come with their own issues that need to be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, and this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, the question itself doesn't really detail what &quot;you&quot; are up against. In fairness, the linked-to question does look better in that regard, but we generally like each post to be self-contained. This in itself isn't a huge problem, but could tip some people toward voting to put on hold as too broad or unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Effectively,&lt;/strong&gt; it appears that you're pitting an unknown number of an unknown species (maybe they're human, but we only know that part of the name of one of them is Human) against an unknown number of highly capable attackers, and you allow for the protagonists to have brought whatever anyone can think of to defend themselves, and you allow for the antagonists to be able to compensate for just about anything the protagonists can think of as long as the person answering can think of a way to compensate for the attack, basically without limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably wouldn't have picked &quot;story based&quot; as the close reason, but to me, if that's not a broad question, I'm not quite sure what would be, and focusing so heavily on a single character makes it rather not about the world or setting itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it's more instructive to focus on the fact that question was closed, rather than the exact close reason selected. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; in the help center has information on what's considered on topic; mapping that against the question is usually a good starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T11:44:22.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7242" CreationDate="2019-04-03T13:57:22.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cryogenics is the right term for your purposes but the tag definition is incorrect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct solution is perhaps to create a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cryonics&lt;/a&gt; tag for many of the questions currently tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cryogenics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cryogenics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cryogenics&lt;/a&gt;, and free up cryogenics to be used correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T13:57:22.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T15:01:23.510" Score="14" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143117/designing-a-worldbuilding-workshop-for-policymakers&quot;&gt;Designing a worldbuilding workshop for policymakers&lt;/a&gt;, seems to have multiple problems as it doesn't ask a single clear question, and it isn't really about world building, instead it's looking for advice relating to world-building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said it seems like a question people in this community might be well placed to answer, and might be interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an appropriate place to ask questions like this (for example perhaps here on meta), or if not could it be modified in such a way that it would be appropriate somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42528" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T20:14:29.863" Title="Is there a place for questions asking for advice about worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2019-04-03T16:16:09.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally questions like this fall into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-processes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-processes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-processes&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;The resources tag&lt;/a&gt; was designed for users to request books, websites, tools or whatever else they need regarding a specific topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;Processes&lt;/a&gt; was created to discuss the actual act of world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, getting to the question at hand.  It's an interesting question, and I definitely want to answer it...that said I think it is far too broad.  I could easily write a book on the topic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if there is a way to narrow it down or not.  But the idea of using techniques we have figured out here on the site and applying them to real world problems seems a good thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am currently inclined to think that something like this is too much for a single question and is probably best addressed in chat.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T16:16:09.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2019-04-03T18:40:50.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;this answer is heavily inspired by James's answer, and several comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As James pointed out, there are tags under which the question fits, suggesting it is not fundamentally out of scope for the main world building site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to be too much for a single question - i.e. is too broad. Chat has been suggested as a place where this topic could be discussed. This however doesn't get the full benefit of the question and answer format, and is off limits to brand new users like the OP of the question under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I suggest that the best way to use this site to learn about that topic is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think of a few specific, answerable questions based on that question, which can be written with just one question in the question body. That is, break it down into more manageable chunks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the best of these as individual questions on the main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/7184?answertab=active&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt; for questions you want to ask but aren't sure about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After posting several questions on the topic you should hopefully have enough points to participate in chat, where you can discuss the more loosely defined ideas that don't lend themselves well to full questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42528" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:40:50.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2019-04-03T20:14:29.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First in a general sense, I agree with James on the tags and this question itself being &lt;em&gt;too broad as it stands&lt;/em&gt;. However, I do think it could be limited to a scope allowable by SE and Worldbuilding (&lt;strong&gt;or at least other similar questions could be&lt;/strong&gt;). So I want to speak to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point the question asks 4 questions (one is in the header to the bullet points):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;resources that you have used in worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What are some of the more successful frameworks and engaging approaches that have helped you connect a re-imagined future to the current status quo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has anyone encountered a packaged thought exercise that that frames and guide this kind of activity which I could adapt to a different audience?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What hasn’t been helpful? And what holes do you see in this approach?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the OP just needs to remove the first question - that is always too broad and a list style answer which is counter to SE's model. However, 2-4 could be saved if the OP did some research on his own and asked about specific methodologies. For example, &lt;em&gt;for this or future questions&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asking&lt;/em&gt;: When participating in world-building workshops, did you find that storyboarding (or story maps) were an engaging and effective method for developing processes within the world?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt;: Did picking a well-known story or fairy tale, and then further developing the world behind the story allow people to better grasp world-building concepts by providing a framework to start with? Did you encounter any major problems with this approach?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt;: Did grouping participants and then using an open brain storming session within the groups to build essential traits of a selected environment (then sorting, cataloging, and expanding based on these) provide both engagement and creative discussion among the groups?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions ask about either a specific methodology or practice or a limited number of them (if all 3 were asked on the same question). By doing this one helps to &lt;strong&gt;ensure answers have a focus and are not too broad&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TLDR;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think in general questions such as this are fine and even good to have included with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-processes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-processes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-processes&lt;/a&gt; tag. As long as they focus their scope onto a selection of methodologies rather than just &quot;what have you used?&quot; or &quot;what are the best ones?&quot;. As this question has such an open scope - it is too broad and the OP would have to add language which limits the methodologies they are researching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of this is based on participation on Academia.SE and what is allowed there &amp;amp; how I've learned/taught worldbuilding on occasion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T20:14:29.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2019-04-05T09:17:35.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question mostly because of the excellent accepted answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/541/natural-projectile-weapons&quot;&gt;Natural Projectile Weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clear and incredibly detailed description of a surprisingly complex topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T09:17:35.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T05:51:10.857" Score="10" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked this up and it turns out that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/346/resources-tag-ambuguity&quot;&gt;back in 2014&lt;/a&gt;, there was a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; and people wanted resources of a world to be separate from resources for building a world.  So they turned it into two tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-resources&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All well and good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems someone re-created &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt;.  We don't need this tag.  It's a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-resources&lt;/a&gt;.  I tried to suggest it be a synonym but I don't have enough points in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-resources&lt;/a&gt; (total: 116 questions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions that deal with the natural resources found in the&#xA;  environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Natural resources are naturally found in the environment. It encompass&#xA;  resources that were not transformed by humans or other intelligent&#xA;  species. Examples include energy resources like oil, coal, uranium;&#xA;  metals: gold, silver, copper, iron; building material: sand, stone,&#xA;  marble. Air and water can also be considered as natural resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; (total: 3 questions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the natural resources of a world. Not for&#xA;  questions about resources useful to the author in making a world (use&#xA;  worldbuilding-resources instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could a moderator please turn &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; into a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-resources&lt;/a&gt;?  If we simply fix the tags and get rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; altogether, we'll end up with someone creating it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastEditorUserId="54137" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T17:42:28.037" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T02:16:28.157" Title="Fixing the resources tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7242" CreationDate="2019-04-06T05:59:50.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/temperature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;temperature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;temperature&lt;/a&gt; with 97 questions so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions which are about temperature, heat and their&#xA;  effects on the environment, the heat of astronomical objects, living&#xA;  being,s things and space and what it might be like. (note: I put in an&#xA;  edit request to fix the commas)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cryogenics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cryogenics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cryogenics&lt;/a&gt; also exists, I wonder if &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/temperature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;temperature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;temperature&lt;/a&gt; would not be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cryogenics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cryogenics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cryogenics&lt;/a&gt; it makes sense to make it broader, as Separatrix did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T05:59:50.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7257" CreationDate="2019-04-07T02:16:28.157" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done.  Normally I'm not keen on substring aliases (typing &quot;resources&quot; causes the existing tags to pop up), but since this tag has already been recreated once after we fixed it, I went ahead and defined the synonym after merging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T02:16:28.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7266" CreationDate="2019-04-07T11:44:12.373" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been around here a lot lately, so I might not be up to date: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143411/write-a-islam-coded-religion-with-a-goddess-instead-of-a-god-the-issue-with-ma&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that this question is of premium quality. It has several issues, it lacks research by the OP, the introduction into the world is too short, it lacks boundaries under which an answer is still valid, but that applies to almost any other question on this SE. In fact, the reason why I rarely visit this site is because in my point of view, this question is perfectly average for this site. The community has established again and again that even questions to worlds with low maturity are completely ok and I think one can argue (I'll get to that) that this is the entire issue here. I get why one would want to close this question, but please think a minute before pulling the trigger. Even though not explicitly stated, it all boils down to the following issue as do maybe 99% of the questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP lacks knowledge about a topic, here magic and islam, to twist it around enough to suit their needs and that knowledge could be provided in this SE. &#xA;In my opinion, it should stay open because how many questions are there where the OP establishes their problem well enough but hasn't figured out the right question to ask yet? I think if you can ask the correct question, you have already figured out the problem and if you can't solve it yourself at this point, people here can't either. Most SE questions have some misunderstanding at their core, from historical facts to problem solving methodology. That's not strictly a WB issue, almost any other SE I visit has the same issue, people have an issue and then ask the wrong questions about it. The question asked by the op is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there a way under the tenets of Islam to use magic in Her service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to quote 20 other questions on this site. Go ahead and browse through a couple of them. Most of them are unanswerable as asked, but with a slight twist, one can explain the actual issue and show ways on how to solve them. To me the question at hand sounds completely average. People here always have a vague idea about what they want but just can't put it into the right words. It still works for most questions here, why is this one any different? And if this is just a matter of phrasing, why has nobody commented on that yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have given rather weak reasons in the comments for why the question is such a bad fit. I don't want to explain every point made in detail, at least not until someone brings them up here. That's because I don't think it matters at all what people wrote in the comments, all that matters is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should this question have been closed in the first place? And if so, why and does everyone agree?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that one should read a bit more between the lines. Honestly, I think this one was closed because people feel less comfortable with Islam than they feel with space travel, but then please state so, write an answer about it and don't bs around in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I promised you that I'll get to the argue part again: One could argue that this is off topic. One could argue a lot of things. One could argue that the OP should write about what they know. But just because there is the possibility of interpreting something differently, well, why not twist that argument around and say that there is the possibility to see it as neither opinion based nor too broad and leave the question open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37861" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T11:12:11.043" Title="Is the &quot;Write a Islam-coded religion with a Goddess instead of a God + the issue with magic&quot;-Question off-topic and remain closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7262" CreationDate="2019-04-07T15:35:34.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP has said that they did their research, but the Quran is crystal clear about magic being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sinful and evil;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work of Satan himself;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strictly forbidden to muslims.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning the OP didn't do the most basic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the implication of &quot;create a religion for me&quot; from the title. We &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; creating worlds, but we don't do the whole package for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if they are going to create their fictional religion whatever rules they want go, even if it is based on a real world religion. IMO that is asking about a story (since usually fictional religions tie into fictional worlds through plot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T11:12:11.043" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T11:12:11.043" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-07T18:11:55.367" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an idea that ended up being similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31046/portals-to-parallel-earths-economic-effects?__=954073532&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a bunch of starting ideas that weren't mentioned. However, I'm hesitant to just add an answer to that question, since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) it's 4 years old at this point, so this would be a thread necro of the highest caliber, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) none of the previous answers are (in my opinion) very helpful at all. Most didn't understand the question, and those who did basically threw up their hands and decided that it was moot. If I add to the discussion, I'm worried that it'll get lost in what's already there, and my odds of having my (and the original asker's) question answer will be slim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily, neither of these 2 reasons on their own would be grounds to ask the question again, but I'm wondering if both together might justify it. I'd link to the original question, and hopefully I could phrase the question a bit better, add my new insights, and see if the community has anything to add since 4 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that the right way to go about it, or does forum etiquette force me to just revive the old thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63025" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T19:47:34.557" Title="To Necro or Repost?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7264" CreationDate="2019-04-07T18:57:13.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a forum, there is no room for new questions within old ones. If you feel like you have a valuable answer to the old question by all means provide an answer. If you want an answer to your question ask it. If there is a chance that someone will mistake the old question as a duplicate of the new one, address why you feel your new question is different. If it is not different and you just want new answers then I don't believe there is much option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51019" LastEditorUserId="51019" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T19:24:42.343" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T19:24:42.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7262" CreationDate="2019-04-07T19:37:29.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IMO, this question should be reopened, then downvoted (unless improved)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking how to modify an existing Earth religion (philosophy, culture, behavior, etc.) to accommodate or justify a fictional premise should be one of the staple purposes of this site.  From the perspective of how this site is used, it's simply a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, asking (from another current question) which of two wizards would win a fight is 100% too story-based.  Why do I bring this up?  To point out the difference between too story-based and an acceptable question.  Elemtilas, in a comment to the question, claims that &lt;em&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/em&gt; would justify any change to the religion that the OP wants.  Except that the argument of &lt;em&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; only applies to the consequences of actions, circumstances, and plot.  Modifying today's technology, culture, etc. to fit the needs of worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;is literally what we're supposed to be doing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer: the question stinks.  It's asked badly, and I've pointed that out in comments.  If the only question is &quot;how do I rationalize magic use in Islamic tradition?&quot; then why is the OP getting us all whipped up in a froth over useless info like the deity's gender?  I wish the OP had posted this in the Sandbox first.  The question is not well focused and too many people have been distracted by the backstory.  It also should use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt; tag, whether that's the final outcome in the OP's story or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I could use help in the Sandbox.  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;For the record, I really like the idea of&lt;/em&gt; narrative necessity &lt;em&gt;when describing something as too story-based.  In other words, if you need the story to have wizard A win the fight, then make it so.  But that's the outcome of a plot, circumstance, or action and I simply don't believe that's the question being asked here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T19:37:29.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7264" CreationDate="2019-04-07T19:47:34.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site has changed over the years.  That original question is now too broad (very much too broad) and I've voted to close it as such.  However, to address your specific points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The age of a question is irrelevant.  To post a new question you would need to justify how that old question was &lt;em&gt;obsolete.&lt;/em&gt;  On this site, &quot;obsolete&quot; is a big word and remarkably difficult to justify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The fact that you don't like the answers or feel that they were inadequate is a great reason to post a new answer, but a lousy reason to ask a new question.  Were this a question that fit the rules as we have them today, then I would have happily posted a fat bounty to bring attention back to the question.  Bounties are, perhaps, the best way to draw attention to questions that need better, fresher, or simply new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T19:47:34.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7271" CreationDate="2019-04-07T22:58:03.970" Score="6" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time I run across a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143403&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; where it appears the OP hasn't taken the time to think about what kind of answer he/she is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for these questions to take the form of &quot;How would I change X, which we don't understand today, to achieve Y?&quot;  The answers seem to fall into one of two categories.  Either (a) they're all over the map, suggesting the question is intrinsically &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based (POB)&lt;/a&gt; or (b) they reflect common Sci-Fi tropes (inevitably genetic engineering, nanites, or cybernetics) because nobody actually knows how &quot;X&quot; works and so we're providing glossed-over, regularly predictable answers for &quot;Y.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be said that the questions are simply poorly scoped &amp;mdash; but that's reflected in what appears to me that the OP &lt;em&gt;doesn't actually know what it is they're looking for.&lt;/em&gt;  I'm certain they want an answer to their question, I'm simply not convinced they understand their own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I consider questions like this &quot;what do you expect?&quot; poor questions because I believe the answers will be trite and the results of asking the question of low quality.  In other words, the OP didn't think through their question well enough to realize what would happen wouldn't line up with what they were expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community recommend for answering or dealing with questions like these?  Is it enough to declare them POB (which might be the case) or &quot;unclear&quot; (which is often the case)?  Or is there some clear direction we can offer OPs to help them realize they've asked a question that won't get them the results they were expecting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;This is merely an example.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;  This post is not about just that question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;I haven't taken the time to hunt down more examples because these don't fit an obvious, searchable pattern, other than to lead me to ask the question, &quot;you want to know what?&quot;  I'll hunt and peck to find some more, there have been several in the last few weeks, but it'll take time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T07:56:47.197" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T08:35:22.813" Title="How best to deal with &quot;what are you expecting?&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7268" CreationDate="2019-04-08T05:15:40.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; linked question as a basis, this seems to be mostly an issue of taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see where you are coming from, but, at least in the case of the linked question(s), these questions are perfectly fine - if of questionable use though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't like this style of question as it does not show even the slightest pointer to how or even if the information is being used for anything more than mere amusement/pastime...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the community has shown over the past years that these are perfectly fine, and my own record of questions is somewhat questionable as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TC;WDIJR&lt;/strong&gt; Question is perfectly valid, I agree on the quality, the community seems to accept these questions or they wouldn't be answering &amp;amp; voting so fast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T05:15:40.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7268" CreationDate="2019-04-09T08:35:22.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Situation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Generally speaking,  I would say that the &lt;em&gt;what are you expecting&lt;/em&gt; types of questions are indeed opinion based. Essentially, this kind of question boils down to a brainstorming session where the OP is soliciting ideas because she, as you say, doesn't know what she's looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question is also very broad. Without a narrow scope, without a specific issue or problem to be addressed, responses are likely to be all over the board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for what to actually do, I would treat this kind of question as I would any other with similar issues. I'm not usually one to get in a twist over queries being opinion based. Everything we do here is, in some way, opinion based. I tend to raise more red flags when a query is too broad or not well defined. But even so, I recognise both as potential errors in question formulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd follow the usual procedures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the OP is new, issue the standard welcome message: she probably is not aware of what SE is all about, nor how WB.SE functions within that umbrella. The POB &amp;amp; BROAD errors most likely stem from easy to treat ignorance. Offer suggestions as to how one might improve the query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the OP is experienced, consider that the errors most likely stem from insecurity as regards subject matter. I'd note in the comments that the query appears to be POB a/o BROAD; then request some tightening of scope or narrowing of focus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T08:35:22.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7276" CreationDate="2019-04-09T20:43:23.073" Score="10" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143606/40609&quot;&gt;Is there a list of worldbuilding resources?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially posted in the Sandbox a question about developing a basic outline for worldbuilding.  Comments with a couple of people (lengthy comments) caused it to evolve into the question we now have on main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We occasionally have people asking about how to go about worldbuilding (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7248/40609&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;). The more general the &quot;what should I do next?&quot; question, the more frequently we close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed similar questions on other Stacks whose purpose is to provide a (growing) list of links people can turn to for the purpose of answering their general questions, leaving the Stack free to answer specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question could exist in Meta or Main, though Meta tends to hide things (since searching on Main doesn't list Meta questions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could add these lists to the tags, but I frankly consider the tag wikis to be barely useful and they don't appear in searches, either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the question (which I'm trying to get converted to a community wiki, just like the answer, so that no one can accuse me of hounding rep) has a valuable purpose on Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it might be better asked, &quot;Why shouldn't this question be on Main?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;For the record and from my perspective, WB.SE should be THE place people go for worldbuilding know-how. Which is why I think the question belongs on Main.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T01:09:42.130" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T16:56:37.160" Title="Should we have a resource list on Main?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2019-04-09T23:17:41.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: Since posting this answer, and thinking more about the practical issues, i have changed my stance on this issue. JBH and Tim B’s argument for this being on Main has convinced me that this question should be there. I will leave this answer here to “Play the devil’s advocate” as it were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On Meta Not Main&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as i have worked with you on this project and fully support it, i’d have to argue against it being on Main. WB.SE is meant for asking one specific question and getting one specific answer, this does not fit the mould. I feel it may also encourage new users to post questions like it, which would then be closed for being unclear or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I’d be all for having it on Meta and having a community ad for “Inspiration” much like how we have one for the “Sandbox”. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, i also feel that there should be a link to the Inspiration list in the sidebar when you go to post a question (both on Meta and Main).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New users, and users who get their question closed, should also be given a link to the Inspiration list, much like how we refer them to the Tour and the Help Centre. Alternatively, an option is to add a link to the Inspiration list on both the Tour and the Help Centre. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that by doing that, users (old and new) can learn what questions they need to ask for their own world and it would up the quality of questions in general. If they need a more specific answer, that is what the questions on Main are for. This may also prevent more generalised questions being asked on Main, the links we provide them should help them to answer those general questions, and the “where do i go next?” questions, themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62187" LastEditorUserId="62187" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T09:53:42.903" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T09:53:42.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2019-04-10T08:42:45.893" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to take the contrary view - and argue that if this question exists it should be on main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is more one of practicality than philosophy though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the question to be useful people need to find it, that means a search on main for worldbuilding resources needs to find it. A meta post is unlikely to come up on that search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with the question is the potential for extreme broadness and where to draw the line on what should and should not be included rather than location. It is a question about resources for building worlds. Meta should be for discussion about this site, not directly about building worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it definitely should be on main. But it is potentially too broad and should be closed - unless we were to grant it some sort of special exemption as a community resource in which case that then opens a whole new can of worms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T08:42:45.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2019-04-10T16:56:37.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For starters, as I mentioned on main I like the idea, but have some concerns as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I like:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Centralization/Standardization hits a spot in my brain that makes me happy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It could turn into a great resource if properly done/managed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Concerns:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would require an exemption to the standard rules.  The question would clearly be too broad.  Does this open the flood gates to other exemptions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we define what should and should not be included, scope will be difficult&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we don't do a good job it turns in to a big pile of...well anyway at that point it ceases to be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we want to point people away from WB.SE?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe just include resources that are not Q/A related, or don't otherwise overlap with WB.SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will have to be curated.  Links die, sites go away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short is I am not sure...if I had a vote I am not sure if I would use it for or against this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T16:56:37.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7284" CreationDate="2019-04-13T20:20:10.353" Score="1" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a loose continuation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7268/40609&quot;&gt;How best to deal with &amp;quot;what are you expecting?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;, I believe many new authors don't understand the function of Narrative Necessity in their writing and how it influences, for good and for bad, worldbuilding and the pursuit of &quot;reality.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Many worldbuilders are seeking to build worlds that are as scientifically or logically &quot;real&quot; or &quot;plausible&quot; as possible, not realizing that they may be straining at a gnat.  The quest for scientific or logical perfection can hinder the quality of their fiction and often encroaches into realms of theory and hypothesis where a clear, &quot;this is how it must be!&quot; answer simply doesn't exist.  Due to inexperience, they don't realize that what they are actually seeking is to make a world that is believable such that the reader is not distracted by the world while reading their story.  Quite the opposite, the goal is for the reader to become engrossed in the world, even infatuated with it.  To that end, some questions are best answered, &quot;if you want it that way, sure.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this end I am seeking a world-class definition of &quot;narrative necessity&quot; that includes and explanation of how understanding it will help participants on this site avoid question closure due to being too broad, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;too story-based&lt;/a&gt;, or being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-03-15T02:15:42.003" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T02:15:42.003" Title="What is &quot;narrative necessity&quot; and how does it apply to worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|policy|new-users|advice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7281" CreationDate="2019-04-15T16:09:15.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Narrative Necessity&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all great ideas, the notion of narrative necessity is really quite simple.  At its most fundamental, it means quite literally that any story (&lt;em&gt;as story&lt;/em&gt;) needs certain things to happen, otherwise there is no story worth telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People think in terms of narrative arcs. Our lives are narrative arcs (individuation paradigm); our school careers are narrative arcs; the political seasons and the 24 hour news cycle are full of narrative arcs. And these stories, in order to be told as stories, contain events required for the proper understanding of the tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at the life story of a Hero, we see common elements. Whether the hero is Hercules or Harry Potter, these elements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heroic paradigm&lt;/a&gt; are matters of narrative necessity --- they have to happen for there to be a story.  When we look at history, we see certain patterns and matters of inevitability. Things need doing and those things need people to do them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://emmettfurey.com/2012/11/07/narrative-necessity/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt;, as regards writing stories and telling the histories of invented cultures and worlds, simply means we as writers or geopoets attune ourselves to the needs of the narrative and, well, &amp;quot;make up&amp;quot; those things that the story needs in order to be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two Definitions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is the older meaning of narrative necessity: any of the events and situations required to ensure the consistency of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this view, a narrative necessity is an event which must happen, or a situation which must be present, in order to bring about a conclusion or a situation intended by the author; one could say that narrative necessities are links in the cause and effect chain which connects the premise with the conclusion. At the opposite end are events and descriptions which do nothing to advance the plot, but may be interesting and pleasant in their own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another definition is a newer &amp;quot;post-modern&amp;quot; meaning of narrative necessity as a driving force which structures the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This newly identified kind of narrative necessity comes either from fundamental decisions about the story taken by the author, or, even more often, from undeclared (possibly unconscious) bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use the term in responding to querents here in Worldbuilding.SE, I mean most definitely the first definition. Most often, writers who ask questions here are asking for confirmation of whether some element in their story fits. Classic examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39631/a-vampire-who-still-eats-normal-food&quot;&gt;Vampire Who Still Eats Normal Food&lt;/a&gt; --- see Graham's answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/140903/microfracture-in-the-ships-structure-good-enough-excuse-to-strand-my-character&quot;&gt;Excuse to Strand my Characters&lt;/a&gt; --- My answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7173/what-makes-the-microfracture-on-a-spaceship-question-fit-for-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;related Meta question&lt;/a&gt; points out the fundamental narrative necessity of the original query. If you're writing a story set on a starship and you want your crew to become stranded, well, pick a scenario out of a hat. Oh, I know! Microfractures!  The point about narrative necessity is that the actual event is not so important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have been a software glitch or perhaps the USB plug that connects the navigator's thruster control to the worp drive came loose or it could have been a bunged up loo. (As a tip to &amp;quot;undeclared bias&amp;quot;, I'd say that microfractures probably make for a better non-spoofy element of narrative necessity than a clogged toilet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Something needs to happen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in order for the story to be a story, and that something is the narrative necessity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T16:09:15.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7281" CreationDate="2019-04-16T13:02:38.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Narrative necessity means the story comes first&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terry Pratchett used to refer to narrativium as a basic element of a world (Roundworld, that we live on apparently has none). It's the substance that people run on, but more importantly, that stories run on. People are of course made of stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a certain extent it's the same stuff we refer to as unobtanium or handwavium, but specifically what narrativium does is that it changes the rules to make the story happen. The rules frame a story, they shape it, but the story itself must be the king. If a rule is preventing the story from happening, then the rule must change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classic example of this is the speed of travel, it comes up here periodically, how fast does a horse travel, how long would it take to travel distance X in Y historical period. All travel is fundamentally &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at the speed of plot&lt;/a&gt;. Your heroes, like wizards, always arrive exactly when they need to arrive and not a moment before. Narrative necessity sets the journey time, not the distance or the horse, it's well known that the Discworld isn't big enough for everything that takes place within it, but equally well known that nobody cares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need giants, then you have giants, don't worry about justifying how their blood circulation works or how they don't break their legs with every stride, if their characters are believable and the environment suitable, they will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dragons can fly, it's a known thing, the fact their traditional build generally means they could barely slither along the ground notwithstanding, dragons fly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T09:47:58.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7289" CreationDate="2019-04-16T13:27:47.283" Score="20" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new on this site, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/144052/the-logistics-of-corpse-disposal&quot;&gt;this question about the logistics of corpse disposal&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration on a short story I'm working on. After reading the answers I decided on my own version which involves the mix of both ideas presented in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/144057/62982&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; as well as some personal ideas which are not talked about and some inspiration from other answers as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reticent to accepting the previously mentioned answer as accepted since I don't think that on its own it really solve my issue. My thoughts are that I could post my conclusion as an answer to my own question or simply accept that answer since the other answers can still be read anyway. What would be the best way to go about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62982" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T09:15:25.727" Title="Accepted answer is a mix of given answers" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|accepted-answer|self-answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2019-04-16T14:00:40.787" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're under no obligation to accept an answer if you're not sure. While it seems conventional to accept the highest voted answer, it's entirely up to you how you approach the situation. You can choose any answer or none as you deem it the best solution to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a stack we have quite a low rate of accepted answers, and not accepting one if you're not entirely happy is well within normal behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T14:00:40.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2019-04-16T14:01:09.783" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's okay to do this, and some people do, from time to time, but I think etiquette dictates that you do a couple things if you end up going down that route:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carefully attribute all ideas in the answer to the person who came up with them, mentioning their username and linking to their answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/274942&quot;&gt;Community wiki&lt;/a&gt;, partly so you don't gain rep from another person's idea, but also partly because the summary answer is indeed a collaborative community effort.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; some arguments against doing this at all. For one, you're combining a number of disparate ideas into one post. What if someone agrees with some but not others? How should they vote? Another point is that you're kinda just duplicating information, which can be helpful if there are dozens of answers, but not very useful if there are only a few - in which case it becomes clutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T14:01:09.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2019-04-16T14:59:40.983" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accepted answers are like car dealership stickers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I hate leaving one of my questions without an accepted answer.  But that's me.  Neither I nor you owe anybody anything.  In fact, if you think about it, what's the point of telling people which answer suited your needs?  At best, it makes everyone else feel bad.  At worst, it might suggest that you don't understand your own problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads one to the idea that an &quot;accepted answer&quot; is contrary to what Stack Exchange is all about.  At best an &quot;accepted answer&quot; reflects the unique need of the OP and nothing more &amp;mdash; until you realize it's the proverbial gold star on Stack Exchange's forehead, demonstrating its worth (not yours, not the respondents') to everyone else.  &quot;See?  We facilitated the discovery of the solution to their problem!  We're valuable!&quot;  Seen from this perspective, what you're being asked to do is provide free advertising for SE (the &quot;car dealership&quot;) proving why people should &quot;buy their cars&quot; here and no where else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be fair, accepted answers do serve a purpose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of people on our happy little world.  And every one of them has a unique point of view.  Each will have a different take on your question, a different perspective of what would be a good answer.  Some will take the moment too seriously.  Others will refuse to take it seriously at all.  Still others are trying to be funny, or are sociopathic trolls.  A few are compassionately trying to help you.  Others are just trying to brag.  And a small handful are desperately trying to be heard.  And because of all these perspectives and intents, an open forum would result in a bazillion answers, most of which are usleless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The folks at SE both knew this up front and have learned this in spades over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have today is a site that's designed to bring useful answers to your attention.  Very bad answers are deleted by vote.  Simply bad answers are downvoted.  Good answers are upvoted.  And (theoretically) the best of the best is accepted.  Which means that being the &quot;best answer&quot; is a goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goals are important, they direct people and help them conform to the rules, guidelines, and expectations of society.  In this regard, the idea of a best answer is no different.  It helps SE achieve one of its highest aspirations: to be &lt;em&gt;specifically useful&lt;/em&gt; and not just another discussion forum that's a 90's tech version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Phil_(talk_show)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Phil&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You haven't answered my question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not yet, but I'm getting there.  On the one hand is the reality that accepted answers are free advertising for SE, on the other is their usefulness to help guide people to providing useful answers and not snarky one-sentence pot-shots questioning the OP's genealogy.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  To make matters worse, this isn't a site like Stack Overflow where there usually is one best answer, ours is a creative and imaginative site where the soup of societal gestalt might inspire a completely irrelevant dessert that proved to be &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what the OP was looking for!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except nobody actually provided that dessert as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that you used this site (Worldbuilding.SE) the way most people do and not the way Stack Exchange intended.  Per your question, you came to be inspired.  That is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; what SE is all about.  Remember, they want to be known as the place for &lt;em&gt;useful answers.&lt;/em&gt;  We acknowledge this in our own Help Center when we explain that your question should be &quot;specific and answerable.&quot;  You're not supposed to come here to be inspired (looking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; to draw from) but to find a solution to a specific problem (looking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; of which one is the solution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this your fault?  Certainly not!  We know perfectly well that most people come here to be inspired, to solve writer's block, to develop a story more complex than they're prepared to deal with, etc.  But we must also work within the framework SE has created, and SE's framework doesn't support seeking for inspiration, which we also call raw idea-generation or &quot;fishing for ideas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was a long way of saying, like everybody else on Earth, you're unique, and you invited a bunch of other unique people to be unique with you, which resulted in a unique solution to your problem.  It simply doesn't fit SE's basic mold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, where does that leave me?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually puts you in a great place.  A place we like people to be in.  You have the privilege of participating in our community!  &lt;em&gt;Cool!&lt;/em&gt;  You can ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote your conscience and accept the answer that was the closest fit to your solution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept an answer at random.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote according to peer pressure and accept the answer with the highest score.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote for the underdog by accepting an answer that's actually pretty good but didn't get a lot of votes or attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encourage new users by accepting the answer of a user with a reputation of less than 500.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meekly support the godlike aspirations of experienced users&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; by accepting their answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boldly cast the proverbial vulgar hand gesture at everyone by not accepting any answer at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you're really feeling your inner Nietzsche...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post your own answer and then accept it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will neither be lauded nor punished for whichever path you take.  But I'm delighted that you've asked about the paths!  Many people who visit this site never participate past getting help with their own problem.  &lt;em&gt;Thank you for participating!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;People sitting on a bus on their way to work get really bored....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;This seems to be the way most U.S. presidents are elected.  I'm just sayin' it.  We're all thinking it.  Admit it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Which also avoids their thunderous contempt that you believe you have the right to stand atop Mt. Olympus with them!  Buahahahahaha!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T17:21:25.110" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T17:21:25.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2019-04-18T00:10:16.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clearly outline any timeline or resource modifications (limitations &amp;amp; enhancements)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occam's Razor&lt;/a&gt; is a problem-solving philosophy that can be simply (and popularly) expressed as, &quot;all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually correct.&quot;  If we apply Occam's Razor to the question, &quot;how early could technology X have been discovered?&quot; then, all things being equal, the answer is, &quot;not one moment before it was discovered.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is due to the natural complexity of advancement, although it ignores the possibility of epiphany.  But, epiphany could only advance anything by, perhaps, days or weeks.  All of the thought, experimentation, innovation, hypothecation, and experience that came before any specific advancement must logically be required for that advancement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, what if there were some change in history that could affect that advancement?  Often, the user asking the &quot;how early&quot; question is seeking that change in history, which is the most difficult way to ask the question.  They're seeking that quirk of plot that rationalizes the story they want to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is better if that quirk comes first.  Does your plot have the technology for gun powder find its way out of China centuries before it did?  That would advance firearm development considerably!  What if the bauxite deposits of Virginia (U.S.A.) were discovered in the 1790s rather than in 1915 when they were actually discovered?  How would that affect the development of aluminum and, thereby, naval technology during the 1800s?  What if coal was scarce in England?  How would that have affected the development of Steam and, thereby, the Industrial Revolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, the OP should explain any limitations or enhancements to the technology tree that would affect the question.  Failure to supply limitations or enhancements may cause questions to be closed as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T00:10:16.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7292" CreationDate="2019-04-18T00:37:39.273" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few times that I've wanted to give advice in comments on main regarding the way to approach questions, I've wanted to refer the users to try using the sandbox as a way to develop their approach to achieve an acceptable standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far - so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've included a link in my comment to the sandbox (what I thought at the time was the sandbox, a short while later turned out to be inactive). I'm not convinced that it was not my error. I'm concerned that inactive links may confuse new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Need I expand on the confusion of consequences to not only the questioner in those threads, but subsequent readers? Particularly those unfamiliar with the site. They sure as heck confuse me, and I'm not new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that every thread of sandbox name has a forward link to the next valid one, in my view this is not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd request (again) a magic link to the sandbox, however I've read the (impenetrable to a non programmer, and from what I can gather to programmers also - essentially a stonewall) answer to the previous itterations of the question here - consider: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6092/is-there-a-magic-link-to-the-sandbox-should-there-be&quot;&gt;Is there a &amp;quot;magic link&amp;quot; to the Sandbox? Should there be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this seems to offer a solution, except I don't understand it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240260/add-magic-link-for-mcve&quot;&gt;Add magic link for MCVE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question: Could an explanation please be published in somewhere that doesn't disappear into the shadows over time as to how to find (and create links to) the (active) sandbox?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All viable solutions welcome.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By viable I mean have a decent chance of being implemented by the powers that be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Solution means: enabling users to instantly find the active sandbox without confusion or having to click on several sequential links with lots of reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome means: doesn't require programming skilz for the membership to impliment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T21:34:47.443" Title="Active Sandbox, moving target, good idea? Don't be silly" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7291" CreationDate="2019-04-18T01:38:07.213" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about linking to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/639/28&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt;?  Because it's a meta post, the community can and apparently does update it when the sandbox moves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years ago Stack Exchange made (limited) durable URLs available to sites; for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://s.tk/miyodeya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://s.tk/miyodeya&lt;/a&gt; points to Mi Yodeya's publications page.  Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/301751/162102&quot;&gt;SE discontinued this service&lt;/a&gt;, so we can't get a perma-URL from them.  In light of that, the best bet seems to be a durable meta post.  It's an extra step to get to the actual sandbox, true, but either way somebody coming in is going to have to read some documentation, and the FAQ provides that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T01:38:07.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2019-04-18T03:16:20.160" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry I'm late to the party. I was dealing with fixing my slime farm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what seems to be the issue? &lt;em&gt;reads the post&lt;/em&gt; Okay, I think I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that mythical creatures and fantasy races are different, but what qualifies as one or the other is up to context. First, let me propose something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;RENAME &lt;em&gt;Mythical Creatures&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Fantasy Creatures&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like an arbitrary difference, but if something is from a myth, it's already fantastical. If something is fantastical, it's not inherently mythological. So, slimes wouldn't fit under mythological creatures, but they would under fantasy creatures. At the same time, Scylla and Charybdis would both fit under either category. Even if the description of &amp;quot;mythical creatures&amp;quot; says that all fantasy creatures are valid, it's hard to really justify including a Tribble under &amp;quot;mythical creatures&amp;quot; when it's a modern monster. Updating the tag name would help clear up a part of the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, what's the difference between &amp;quot;Fantasy Creature&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Fantasy Race&amp;quot;? Sapience. Fantasy Races are people. Fantasy Creatures are MoBs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the lists given, which are (generally) definitively Fantasy Creatures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generic monsters/evil/beasts, Zombies, Wyvern, Phoenix, Unicorn, Chimeras&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about Fantasy Races?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giant, Elves, Angel, Succubus, Merfolk, Centaur, Vampire, Dwarves, Faeries, Drider, Immortals, Pixies, Demons, Orcs, Satyr/Faun, Harpies, Cyclops&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then what about the small little bit of overlap? Where is there some ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Troll, Dragon, Goblin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zombies from iZombie are very clearly people (a major exception to the otherwise clear rule of the creatures)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goblins in most fantasy works are shown as being almost smart enough to be people but still too dumb and animalistic to be a &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; race in and of itself, but there are exceptions where they are just as much people as anyone else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dragons are sometimes granted shapeshifting abilities allowing them to take a humanoid appearance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, the solution seems to me to be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Stress in the Tag Descriptions that &lt;em&gt;Fantasy Races&lt;/em&gt; is explicitly for beings that are humanlike (or greater) in appearance (whether part-human like a centaur or humanoid like Lizardmen), intelligence, and mannerisms, while &lt;em&gt;Fantasy Creatures&lt;/em&gt; is explicitly for monsters or beasts that lack human intelligence.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Vampires tend to be shown as human-level in intelligence, if a story has Vampires that display intelligence of mindless, blood-thirsty beasts and no higher capacity, then the Vampires of that question would be Fantasy Creatures, not Races. If a Zombie is shown in its story to be able to reasonably function in society, then it it a Fantasy Race, not a creature for that given question. If a slime just gelled around town talking with people though, it'd be a Fantasy Creature that just happens to display a human-like intelligence, unless it could also take a human form. Yes, you could call that the err of human arrogance, and you'd be right, but that tends to be our metric for determining races already: Giants are big humans, Cyclops are one-eyed humans, Centaurs are horse-humans, Vampires are undead humans, Elves are long-eared humans, etc.. Is it right to refuse calling a bunch of inhuman slimes a race even if they can communicate? Maybe not, but we generally define races based on their humanity. Slimes aren't humanlike in any way unless they manage a humanoid form. Even then, their status as humanoid is completely dependent on sustaining that appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56536" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T03:16:20.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7295" CreationDate="2019-04-19T23:27:36.083" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Call this a three-part question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question #1:&lt;/strong&gt; Can the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center &amp;quot;How do I write a good answer&amp;quot; page&lt;/a&gt; be modified by our wonderful Mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;no,&amp;quot; the rest of this question is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; please continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question #2:&lt;/strong&gt; More often than I like, I find people posting answers or comments that are more interested in &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; than they are the world the question poster is trying to build.  Just so there's an authoritative location to direct people to, can we add something like the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Focus on the question's world, not the real world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding questions can range from asking how something is done in the real world to asking how something could be done in their fictional world.  Sometimes the poster is asking for a reality-based answer and sometimes they are asking for a suspension-of-disbelief answer.  It is important that you answer from the perspective the questioner needs, because it's a habit to answer only from the perspective of our reality and that does not always meet the questioner's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question #3:&lt;/strong&gt; Can we change the order of items listed on the &amp;quot;How to Answer&amp;quot; page?  If so, I'd love to see the &amp;quot;Answer well-asked questions&amp;quot; section moved to position #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T12:20:52.337" Title="Modify the &quot;How do I write a good answer&quot; help center page to clarify worldbuilding" Tags="|feature-request|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7294" CreationDate="2019-04-20T12:20:52.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center &quot;How do I write a good answer&quot; page&lt;/a&gt; be modified by our wonderful Mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in a comment, the answer to this is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few pages in the help center can be modified by site mods; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt; is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More often than I like, I find people posting answers or comments that are more interested in &quot;reality&quot; than they are the world the question poster is trying to build. Just so there's an authoritative location to direct people to, can we add something like the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't this already covered by &quot;Answer the question&quot;? If the question is asking about a fictional world, then answering about the real world (without explaining how that would apply to the fictional world in question) is hardly answering the question, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T12:20:52.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7297" CreationDate="2019-04-20T13:03:00.347" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x^-3$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x^15$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x^1^5$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sucks. What am I doing wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58321" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:59:51.360" Title="How to get mathjax to display double digit or negative power to values?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7296" CreationDate="2019-04-20T13:51:18.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use {...} to input more than 1 character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3^{15}$&lt;/span&gt; will be given by 3^{15}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T13:51:18.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7296" CreationDate="2019-04-20T18:59:51.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch already told you to use curly braces (&lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt;) around the number. So you'd write &lt;code&gt;x^{15}&lt;/code&gt; to get &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x^{15}$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This applies more generally as well.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, &lt;code&gt;\sqrt xy&lt;/code&gt; will render as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\sqrt xy$$&lt;/span&gt; but &lt;code&gt;\sqrt{xy}&lt;/code&gt; renders as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\sqrt{xy}$$&lt;/span&gt; and correspondingly &lt;code&gt;\sqrt \sin xy&lt;/code&gt; gives you &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\sqrt \sin xy$$&lt;/span&gt; which is probably not what you meant, while &lt;code&gt;\sqrt{\sin{xy}}&lt;/code&gt; becomes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\sqrt{\sin{xy}}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, any time you need to group multiple symbols in LaTeX (which Mathjax uses), those symbols need to be surrounded by &lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:59:51.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2019-04-22T13:06:09.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It appears to be the Community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had one of these edits on one of my answers. It was from Anonymous correcting my misspelling of “Silver”, i wrote both Sliver and Silver in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accepted the edit and, as i was the author of the question, it was automatically accepted. I went to check the answer i wrote and it said “Edited by Community”, meaning the Community User.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, the Community left me a message&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the edit, i had a message that seemed personalised towards my answer. Normally when making an edit to a post, you put in a description of what you have edited, such as “improved formatting” or “corrected spelling”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit description i got was “Silver not sliver ;)”. This seems like a very strange message for a bot to put in. Either someone has had to program the Community User to write that specific message or whoever wrote that was not a bot. Yet the edit still says it was from the Community user when accepted but said it was from Anonymous when it was suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at these images below and see for your self. Take note of the date and time the Community User’s post was approved (Apr 9 at 17:24) and when i approved the Anonymous edit (Apr 9 at 17:24). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be definitive evidence that the Community User &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the Anonymous editor. The personalised message concerns me though, either the Community User is smarter than we give it credit for... or there is a puppeteer behind those strings...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZP3A.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZP3A.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WLGeC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WLGeC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62187" LastEditorUserId="62187" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T13:34:29.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T13:34:29.147" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T18:33:13.210" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/144089/can-my-heraldic-dragons-fly&quot;&gt;Can my heraldic dragons fly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question ready for reopening? If no, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T13:20:53.307" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T13:20:53.307" Title="Is the question: &quot;Can my heraldic dragons fly?&quot; ready for reopening?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7305" CreationDate="2019-04-24T23:18:17.163" Score="12" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that I know is too broad with no definitive answer, and as I understand Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, this is considered just fishing for ideas. Does anyone know of a place I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; ask this without issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46405" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T00:04:28.290" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T07:59:31.607" Title="Where do I go if I'm just fishing for ideas?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7304" CreationDate="2019-04-25T00:03:08.040" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually like to recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;our site chat room, the Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, for people looking to toss around ideas and grab some inspiration. We have a pretty active group of regulars who often tend toward inane topics of discussion but will gladly help someone who's looking for a more informal environment of this sort. Peak activity is usually 12:00 UTC - 18:00 UTC, but there might be people hanging around at odd hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to suggest that you go to chat every time you want to ask a question that wouldn't fit on the main site for various reasons, but every once in a while, it can be a great resource, as well as a nice chance to interact closely with members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T00:03:08.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7304" CreationDate="2019-04-25T14:07:55.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to do it in a Q&amp;amp;A answer format, Quora will take any and all kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously. I often see things like &quot;How would 5 marines with current equipment available fare against a roman legion&quot; - which, if asked here, I would gladly downvote and vote to close in two breaths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because Quora does not care as much about solving problems as SE users do. They care more about having a huge amount of questions answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can go there, ask who would win in a fight between a bicycle and an octopus, and you will probably get answers. Don't expect them to be good answers, or to give you any useful ideas though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also Yahoo! Answers, but as far as Q&amp;amp;A sites go that one is just slightly better than 4Chan. They are both cesspools where reason goes to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T14:07:55.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7304" CreationDate="2019-04-25T17:48:05.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;The Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; could a good place to go if you need help making an answer more specific. User JBH manages it mostly but there's a handful of other users who will help you as well. It's always worth trying your question out on there to see how it can be improved, in your case it may be possible to break it down into several different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that we have our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/is-there-a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;List of Resources&lt;/a&gt; on the Main site. This is simply a bunch of links to various websites focused around Worldbuilding. Whilst you can’t ask questions on these sites, you may find some answers to your question. The list itself is categorised so you should be able to find something that might help. It is also being updated with new links so check back now and again. Even if they don’t answer your question, they’re still worth a look at as they may be able to help you narrow it down, making it a better fit to ask on the Main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62187" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T07:59:31.607" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T07:59:31.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7303" CreationDate="2019-04-25T20:12:01.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;After substantial edits, Mephistopheles has, in my opinion, created an excellent question, which I now recommend be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@aCVn isn't wrong.  The lift equation is useful for solving your problem even if it isn't &quot;perfect.&quot;  Creative-use-of-science-is-us.  Believe me, you are not going to find a scientific justification for dragons, especially with custom muscle alignments.  If memory serves, bumble bees fail the mathematics of flapping flight, and yet they fly just fine.  And, finally, I'd like to point out that most birds can glide &amp;mdash; meaning the fixed-wing lift equations work perfectly.  Unless you believe your dragons need to fly like hummingbirds....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; questions are meant to be &quot;you provide us your solution and we'll tell you if the solution works in the context of your world.&quot;  Since you've provided no other context, no, it won't work in the real world because dragons don't exist.  You appear to have made assumptions, which leaves us making assumptions, which makes your question unclear.  And this is a &lt;em&gt;big part&lt;/em&gt; of the problem with this question.  Per the Help Center, questions must be specific and answerable (check! kinda), must include context (missing), must include restrictions/requirements (mostly missing), and should include research (check!).  Your question is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Against what reality is this being tested?  Actual reality?  Flying giant pterosaurs appear to be proven by the fossil record &amp;mdash; but we do not have anything but guesses as to how that musculature, skin/scales, bone structure, etc. allowed for the flight.  So, please remember that we &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have factual evidence to back up a reality check &amp;mdash; other than the rules we've learned to work with ourselves.  (Like the lift equations @aCVn sugggested.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, there isn't enough description to explain what it is we are analyzing.  Yes, we can click through the links and read all the secondary info, which helps, but that's a lot of work for volunteers. No, you're not obligated to bring all the data we need into the question.  &lt;em&gt;But neither are we obligated to accept your question without all the data.&lt;/em&gt;  IMHO, the lack of a clear description of what you're trying to achieve is a problem (don't be cute, &lt;em&gt;be specific&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You appear to have written the question very quickly.  It's jumbled, almost train-of-thought.  Consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could just simply copy the Quetzy's flight muscles and wing bones, and have a pair of them in the dragon's torso. In essence, it works like a galley. However, instead of having the wing pairs separate, both sets are connected to the same membrane and the muscles flap it synchronously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no clear idea what this means.  It took reading the first link just to figure out what &quot;Quetzy&quot; referred to (this was the fist introduction to Quetzalcoatlus, and you chose to use a nick name.  Like I said, don't be cute, &lt;em&gt;be specific&lt;/em&gt;).  After reading the question, the answer, this post, and all the secondary pages, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you are comparing the badly described change in muscles to the fact that the oars of a galley ship are &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; operated simultaneously.  I'm arrogant enough to consider myself a reasonably bright person, but this took a minute to figure out.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is NOT clear.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On a side note, the reason birds don't have tandem wings is that they need to meet the needs of the wind.  It's a serious compromise to not allow those wings to move independently &amp;mdash; if that's what you intended.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, let's look at your question itself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume your question is: &quot;I have a dragon based on a giant pterosaur using the proposed musculature of Quetzalcoatlus modified in such a way that the wings no longer operate independently but always flap in tandem in a manner similar to the use of oars for a galley ship.  My dragon is 1.82 m long with a wing area of 22 m&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.  As a reality check, is it believable that this dragon could fly?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what you wrote was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, could this &quot;galley solution&quot; work in terms of doubling the maximum weight a dragon can attain and still fly (read: take off and climb out with anaerobic muscles)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Galley solution,&quot; by that I assume you mean the wings not flapping independently?  What makes you think independent control of the wings wouldn't permit flight?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;doubling the maximum weight&quot; refer to?  What's the current maximum weight of a dragon?  &lt;em&gt;What's a dragon?&lt;/em&gt;  Are we doubling the maximum weight of a giant pterosaur?  What's their standard weight?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;can attain&quot; I assume you mean in maturity?  Can dragons overeat?  Should we assume they want to fly after gorging on a really good meal?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anaerobic muscles?  I assume you mean sprinter's muscles, which make use of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.verywellfit.com/anaerobic-metabolism-3432629&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anaerobic metabolism&lt;/a&gt;?  You seem to have spent your question talking about galley oars, and only now you introduce sprinter's muscles?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Items 2-4 are introducing entirely new concepts at the last second.  That's bad juju.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has certainly improved through editing.  But it's still confusing.  It's as if you just sit down and start typing without actually thinking through what you're trying to say to your audience.  You have a wonderful imagination, but you need to look at your world through our eyes.  We can't read your mind and it's difficult to make all the associations that you have in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: no, your question isn't ready to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Write your question statement with a simple sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure your examples and metaphors are clearly established as such.  Also be sure the reader understands the connection between your &quot;reality&quot; and the example that's meant to clarify it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include all the necessary statistics, data, information, descriptions, conditions, requirements, and expectations are in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Slow down.  I mean this.  It's not meant to be an insult.  I spent a great many years as a technical writer.  Even though I was dealing with people who were educated and practiced in the art, I had to write as if they didn't have a clue about my subject &amp;mdash; because many times &lt;em&gt;they didn't,&lt;/em&gt; despite being completely qualified to use the software and modeling tools I was writing about.  Writing questions on this site is 100% technical writing (0% creative writing!).  Slow down, and make sure you've seen your question through our eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T02:19:21.100" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T02:19:21.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2019-04-26T09:15:25.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You said all of this in what is luckily the first comment on, coincidentally, the highest voted answer. I'd accept that one. What would have made it perfect, would've been mentioning by name, whose other answer it was in that comment. Ideally with an inline link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hate when users add an edit to their own question to include &quot;their answer&quot;. But in this case I think accepting that answer and adding a link in your question to the other one is the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have accepted Bob's answer, but I will be using parts of [Sally's] (link).&lt;/em&gt; ... &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (if you must) &lt;em&gt;in addition I will be [adding this other stuff]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if that &quot;other stuff&quot; is at any great length, just make an entire self-answer. Don't condemn us into reading your own answer in your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T09:15:25.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7553" CreationDate="2019-04-29T18:24:41.200" Score="16" ViewCount="819" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Journals are in my posession!  If you ordered one &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/99879/world-building-journals&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt; so we can sort out shipping.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been working with Stack and a vendor to try and sort out getting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jennibick.com/products/classic-hardcover-moleskine-notebook-sapphire-blue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;custom Moleskine journals&lt;/a&gt; created for Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After...eh...a bit of time, think we are ready to go.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The planned swag:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blue hard cover moleskine notebook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding stamped into the front cover&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A full page color insert inside the front cover featuring Slarti and Pandora from the main site art (similar to the full-color image &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3353/28&quot;&gt;in this design update&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;8.5&quot; x 5&quot; (216 x 127mm)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blank (unlined) pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cost:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Approximately 25-26 USD (including shipping in the US)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cost will be higher for non-US users, based on shipping costs.  Best guess is 20-25 USD in shipping costs at this time.  We welcome suggestions for ways to lower shipping costs -- if you've tackled this problem in the past and have ideas, please comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At this point in time, I will likely order them have them delivered to me and then distributed.  I do have a question out to SE.  If they are up for it I will have them distribute.  &lt;strong&gt;This means you will need to be willing to share your mailing address with me and to pay online via Venmo/Paypal or something else.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going to purchase one of the journals please add your name so I can get a count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DO NOT ADD YOUR NAME TO THE LIST IF YOU ARE JUST INTERESTED, I NEED TO KNOW YOU WILL BE BUYING&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2019-10-14T16:52:46.617" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T16:50:54.710" Title="Worldbuilding Custom Journals - Want one?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7317" CreationDate="2019-05-01T20:12:49.913" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I was able to observe them (circa 4 months ago), I've observed a certain erratic behaviour of review queues, the red blob refusing to disappear in spite of when one expands the queue menu - there are no corresponding red blobs to review. Acceptable odd system behaviour - from a user's point of view. (If you're prepared to accept it that is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the migration I've noticed close-votes on one question which did not provoke the red blob top right a day or maybe two-ago, I forget which question - I shrugged it off as tiredness/inattention on my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/145902/help-my-death-star-suffers-from-kessler-syndrome&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question seems to have recieved reopen votes. It does not currently apear in my &quot;reopen votes&quot; queue - as of the time of this question - and has not done so for at least the last ten minutes. And two days - unless I'm losing my faculties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the bread that I'm currently eating infected with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ergot&lt;/a&gt;? Is there a series of traffic jams between servers or processes that we should know about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Just checked again 5 minutes later: it's still not there. Oh - and two days that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T21:02:44.040" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T21:02:47.240" Title="&quot;Stuff&quot; not appearing in review queues. Invisible red blobs" Tags="|support|reviews|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7316" CreationDate="2019-05-01T21:02:18.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Works as designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First for your example: you can have a look at the timeline &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/145902/timeline&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to see that the review is already over. The review says &quot;Leave Closed&quot;, which is why it's still closed. But the votes are still there. They will slowly fade away with time, but if enough people see the question and decide to manually cast a reopen vote it will get reopened. But it won't appear in the review queue in this cycle again. That means if it's reopened and then closed and then someone would vote to reopen it &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; you could theoretically see it, as long as you haven't done a reopen review on that question ever before. But for now there is no need for it to appear, because enough users with the corresponding privilege already reviewed it. Here is the review in a close up: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/59707&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/59707&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timeline is not easy to find. There is no button to it. But when you click on a post and edit your browsers address bar to replace &quot;questions&quot; with &quot;posts&quot; and the post title at the end with &quot;timeline&quot; you can access it. For situations like these it's very handy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next the not-disappearing red bubble: the thing counts all active reviews &lt;em&gt;on the site&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;alarms&quot; everyone with the corresponding privilege once review amounts cross a certain threshold. If you've already cleared it you will still be &quot;alarmed&quot;, even though you can't review it again. Another theoretical example would be if your own posts triggered many reviews you would also be notified that there are many outstanding reviews, even though you can't review your own stuff. This can sometimes happen on smaller sites where a couple reviews in the queue already trigger the &quot;alarms&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T21:02:18.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7316" CreationDate="2019-05-01T21:02:47.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The appearance (or non-appearance) of the red dot is sometimes a little haphazard.  I don't fully understand the rules for it, though opening the review drop-down is supposed to banish it for a time (don't bother users if they looked recently), and there's a minimum number of pending tasks to cause it to appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; go through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/59707&quot;&gt;reopen queue&lt;/a&gt;, with mixed results.  A post is supposed to only go through any particular queue once, so if a question was closed, reopened (reviewed), closed again, and gets another reopen vote, it doesn't go back to the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T21:02:47.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2019-05-04T16:42:28.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7313/40609&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1HvQb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T16:49:36.703" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T16:49:36.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-04T23:40:09.807" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Main site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/is-there-a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;we have a list of worldbuilding resources&lt;/a&gt; which aims to improve the quality of questions asked on the Main site. The idea is that general questions about worldbuilding, which would normally be closed anyway for being unclear or off-topic, get answered. Additionally, it may help a user to narrow down their question or to recognise that their question would not be suitable for the Main worldbuilding site. If you are interested in reading more about it, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7273/should-we-have-a-resource-list-on-main&quot;&gt;Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; about if we should have the list on Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if there should be a community ad which links to this list of resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a relatively new user to this site, only 57 days at the time of writing, i am unsure if it would be appropriate to have an ad that links to a question on the Main site. The closest analogy would be the Sandbox which has an ad on Main that links to a ‘question’ on the Meta site. I feel that the list of resources is akin to the Sandbox in that both are aimed at, primarily, new users to improve the general quality of questions asked on the Main site. There is also a community ad to the SFF.SE site with the words “Get Inspired” who’s purpose seems to inspire WB.SE users to write interesting questions, a similar but not quite the same idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the list of resources would greatly benefit from having a community ad, it would allow for new users to easily see there is somewhere they can go to get their general questions answered and improve the quality of future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, i would like to hear the thoughts and opinions of users who are more experienced than i.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62187" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T09:28:48.773" Title="Should we have a community ad for the resources list on Main?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|advertising|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7321" CreationDate="2019-05-05T09:28:48.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think an &lt;strong&gt;advert would be very useful&lt;/strong&gt;. Yet should not be the only thing. An additional link to the resources question from places such as the &lt;em&gt;help-section&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;create question page&lt;/em&gt; would be very useful as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problematic thing I see is the question itself though, it needs moderation and guidelines on how the list should be set up. At the point of writing this answer, the list is mostly links to the same website over and over - this is not useful at all but rather bad, as it drowns any other sites/guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my conclusion: An ad would be a good next step, but &lt;strong&gt;before the ad&lt;/strong&gt; we need a clean idea of how the list is to be maintained and expanded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T09:28:48.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-07T18:17:26.767" Score="11" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through the new tags and saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt;.  IMO, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finances&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finances&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finances&lt;/a&gt;, so I tried to flag it as a potential synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that I need a &quot;5 score&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finances&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finances&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finances&lt;/a&gt; to make the suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finances&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finances&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finances&lt;/a&gt; has a whopping 8 questions.  If I understand the score properly (I might not), I need to post positively-scored answers to five of them to make SE happy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We're not StackOverflow where a bazillion people are participating and a means of filtering out too many young users had to be imposed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tag synonym suggestions are voted upon (not sure by whom, though... probably just the Mods), so people really can't just willy-nilly make synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Is it possible to modify the restriction?  Like, to zero?  Or do we actually have so many people reviewing tags and making mistakes that this restriction makes sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;By the way, ditto &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interstellar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interstellar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interstellar&lt;/a&gt; becoming a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/galactic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;galactic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;galactic&lt;/a&gt;, which I also can't suggest because, oddly, I appear to not have a score of 5 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/galactic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;galactic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;galactic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T13:12:30.253" Title="Scores and synonyms" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2019-05-08T00:22:51.037" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, the synonym-suggestion interface &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; doesn't work well on most sites.  First, there's the problem you brought up.  Second and possibly more important, even if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; manage to suggest a synonym, people who can vote on it will never see it unless you publicize it.  Yes, there's a page people can visit -- but who does?  Even reviews can be hard to get sometimes, and those have push notifications!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of my sites ignore this interface.  Instead, people propose tag reworkings on meta.  If something has community support, or some support and no objections after a while, a moderator can implement it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please use a separate meta question for each related cluster of tags.  &quot;What should we do about X, Y, and Z that have overlap and conflicting usage?&quot; is good.  &quot;Let's make X a synonym of Y, merge A into B, and delete C&quot;, where none of these tags are related, is not good -- it's harder to disentangle them.  And I'm suggesting &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to one question with each answer representing a proposed reworking, because that's more limiting.  On Writing I've seen tag questions get several answers, each proposing to solve the problem in a different way.  That works well, allowing the space of multiple answers and comments to refine the plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, an ideal question of this sort links to the tags (as you've done), quotes the tag wikis (if they exist), and points out the issues (e.g. &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; X should be a synonym of Y or why the {A, B, C} cluster is confusing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T00:22:51.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2019-05-09T03:48:05.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've done a lot of tag reorgs on Writing.SE.  Monica is a mod there too and usually us non-mods post to Meta to see what other people think and she or another mod will either do it or weigh in, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, someone used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; because they didn't think of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finances&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finances&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finances&lt;/a&gt;.  There's just one question on it.  I think it would have been fine if you simply retagged it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT...given that &quot;money&quot; is a pretty common keyword, it does make sense to make it a synonym and I support that move.  You don't need positive scores in 5 questions on the tag to propose this, just 5 net upvotes total.  But yeah that's hard with only 8 questions.  Though even when you can propose it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/323963/423976&quot;&gt;no one will see it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we can't make SE change the policy of notifications for synonyms and such, we can just use meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I support your proposal to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finances&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finances&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finances&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T03:48:05.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2019-05-09T13:12:30.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Money and finances are not synonyms.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Money is about currency.  That stuff we use to exchange for goods.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finances are about budgeting.  You know that process where you realize that you can't go to Las Vegas every weekend.  So if you want to do that, you have to raise more money to finance it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to get rid of money, I would suggest making it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/currency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;currency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;currency&lt;/a&gt;.  Incidentally, I fixed the single &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/money&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;money&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;money&lt;/a&gt; question by retagging it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T13:12:30.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2019-05-11T19:05:26.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Understand the scope of the effort&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best and most obvious reason any technology can't be invented earlier than it was is that it &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; invented earlier.   Any one aspect of technology stands atop a mountain of experience, education, and innovation that has been influenced heavily by societal developments including philosophy/religion, government, and war; climatic issues such as drought and flood, resource availability, and many more issues. The development of any technology or scientific discovery is quite complex and determining how much of that mountain need not have existed (or must be moved) to permit earlier discovery is a challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this issue is the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.baen.com/allbooks/category/index/id/2034&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ring of Fire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; series by Eric Flint et al., where an American town time-travels to 1632 Thuringia and starts a technological revolution. Among other things, simple steam designs are discussed at length. (Thanks to user LSemi for this contribution!) One person with a library of knowledge did not travel through time because one person, no matter how much knowledge they bring, cannot materially change the past (the &lt;em&gt;amount&lt;/em&gt; of knowledge is so great that hundreds of thousands of people would need to be trained, an effort beyond the ability of the single time traveler).  However, an entire town, with it's manufacturing and industrial infrastructure, skilled workers, education base, and resource knowledge &amp;mdash; that's believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid your question being closed as &quot;too broad,&quot; you must properly scope your effort to introduce a technology earlier by ensuring all of the necessary elements (knowledge, people, industrialization, resources, opportunity, etc.) are in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T19:05:26.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7001" CreationDate="2019-05-11T19:55:21.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd like to address your specific title question, rather than the &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; issue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, &lt;strong&gt;avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your question is just a rant in disguise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of completeness, let me explain all five points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you ask a fishing-for-ideas question (aka brainstorming, idea-generation, or an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;), you are asking a question where all answers are equally valid.  This breaks Stack Exchange's Q&amp;amp;A model (one-specific-question/one-best-answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;).  Stack Exchange owns the stacks, and while individual stacks enjoy considerable latitude concerning how to deal with many specific rules and the culture of the stack, it's still Stack Exchange's stack — and they have rules we are expected to observe.  Insofar as it is humanly possible for questions concerning the creative and imaginative act of world building, questions are expected to be objective and scoped such that a best answer can be selected.  Our take on this is that questions must seek a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.  Questions asked such that every answer is equally valid are often closed as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you already have an answer, why are you asking the question?  As a world builder, the most likely reason is that you don't like that answer and would like to consider other options.  If this is the case, then you're fishing for ideas (see #1).  But what you don't realize, is that you're also biasing the answers.  It may seem trivial, but &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you ask a question is very important.  It shows us that you've thought the issue through and you have a good reason (other than writer's block) to ask the question.  Please remember that everyone here is a &lt;em&gt;volunteer.&lt;/em&gt;  We're delighted to answer questions!  But that doesn't mean we are a free research team.  Providing us with your existing answer suggests you haven't done some necessary research (or, at least, some necessary thinking) and that there's a deeper issue that we won't understand that needs to be addressed.  To make a long story short, &lt;em&gt;why was your answer unsuitable?&lt;/em&gt; Finally, please note that &amp;quot;I just don't like that solution&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;it's been done before&amp;quot; will rarely be appreciated as good reasons to ask for more insight.  Remember, you're supposed to have thought this through first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; explains &amp;quot;the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&amp;quot; We are here to help you develop the rules and systems of your world.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but we are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; here to help you write your story. In the Stack Exchange universe, a &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; is something specific, well defined, narrowly scoped, and answerable.  &amp;quot;How do I cut a 33° angle on a 2x4?&amp;quot; asked about a problem.  &amp;quot;How do I build a house?&amp;quot; is not a problem in SE's universe.  Our Help Center further explains that questions must be specific and answerable, must include context, must include restrictions/requirements, and should include research.  Questions that don't meet these expectations are often closed as &amp;quot;Unclear&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Too Broad.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We address open-ended and hypothetical questions in our Meta posts about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6654&quot;&gt;open-ended questions&lt;/a&gt;.  In a nutshell, both are intrinsically &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;  As mentioned before, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; explains &amp;quot;the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&amp;quot;  Hypothetical questions are certainly an attempt to solicit our help with your story.  And open-ended questions, at the least, violate Stack Exchange's premise that it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, rants happen.  Especially with politically hot topics.  Examples that we've seen here are questions about climate change and gender politics.  You, the author, may be trying to write a legitimate story discussing these or other social issues of our day.  That is perhaps the single most common reason for writing in the first place!  But!  Stack Exchange is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the place for an argument (even if it's disguised as a polite discussion in comments).  We're not here to be convinced, pro or con, about how you feel about the issue.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  We are here to help you develop and consistently use the rules of your world.  We're willing to set our politics beside the door if you are so that a good, well-formed question can be answered.  We'll remember that we shouldn't argue if you remember that you might not like the answers we give you.  That's the fundamental problem with rants in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, just to close the loop, a word about what makes a question &amp;quot;Too Story-Based.&amp;quot;  Questions fall into this category when...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You ask &amp;quot;will it happen?&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;can it happen?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You ask questions about circumstances, actions, or plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You ask questions about a single character (it doesn't matter if it's the janitor or a god).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember (yup, for the third time), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; explains &amp;quot;the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story&amp;quot; and sometimes authors can't see the difference because the world is their story.  We had to draw a line, and this is it.  For more information see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;narrative necessity&amp;quot; and how does it apply to worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever worry that your question may or may not be suitable for the site, please (please!) submit it to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.  The purpose of the sandbox is to help you craft the question so that it gets upvotes and favorites rather than downvotes and VTCs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I know that was much more than you were looking for, but I can easily imagine other users coming to your question with different problems based on your title — which is a great title, BTW.  So, I'm hoping you'll forgive my verbosity.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And we are not here to convince you, pro or con, that your position is right or wrong.  If you encounter comments that are addressing your politics rather than your worldbuilding question, please flag it as &amp;quot;rude and abusive.&amp;quot; Stack Exchange users should know better.  However, &lt;strong&gt;take a moment to think the comment through before you flag it&lt;/strong&gt;.  There is a regrettably thin line between, &amp;quot;this is an angle to the issue you should think about&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;you're wrong, admit it!&amp;quot;  EVERYBODY needs to act responsibly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T19:55:21.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7336" CreationDate="2019-05-12T21:54:19.230" Score="13" ViewCount="1292" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have an unwritten rule that questions about commercial worlds (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc.) should be asked on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; stack.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or we might have one.  That's the problem with unwritten rules.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Therefore, I'm seeking consensus concerning whether or not we should officially allow or disallow questions about third-party worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A third-party world (also known as a &quot;commercial&quot; world) is defined to be a world that is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; owned by or protected under copyright by the individual asking the question.  For the purpose of this discussion, third-party worlds made available through any open-copyright (such as Creative Commons) are still considered &quot;third-party.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any question that is asking for an answer within the context of a fictional universe, even if that question requires real-world science information, is on-topic. &amp;hellip; Questions which are explicitly asking for an out-of-universe explanation of the science from a work of science fiction or fantasy should be off-topic. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7367&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This opens up the possibility of asking for out-of-universe explanations of third-party worlds on Worldbuilding.  However, there are some pros and cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pros:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It expands the number of questions people may bring to our stack.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It increases the visibility of our stack to search engines (e.g., &quot;Star Wars&quot; is mighty visible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cons:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might (and probably does) duplicate what's going on at SciFi.SE (and others, including RPG.SE and Movies.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers provided on WB.SE may not express the &quot;canon&quot; of that third-party world, potentially opening up unwanted comment discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would invariably create a list of tags identifying the third-party world, the rules of which should (must?) be followed for the purposes of answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suspect the majority of questions will be requests to explain in-universe eccentricities.  In other words, a world isn't actually being built.  It's merely an effort to sate the OP's curiosity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OPs don't have control over the world the question refers to.  In other words, in the worst case, we might be participating in copyright infringement.  (I consider that an outlandish worst-case as fan fiction has some protection.  Some.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We sometimes see questions (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146866/40609&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) where the source of the question is fairly obviously a third-party world.  Along with a clear Yes/No, it would be nice to comment on whether or not &quot;I'm borrowing their idea for my world&quot; questions should be permitted.  If you think this bullet should be its own question, please indicate so in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are basically none.  The idea of third-party worlds are mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7142/40609&quot;&gt;this answer to an unrelated Meta topic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7016/40609&quot;&gt;this answer to a barely related Meta topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example Main Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146866/40609&quot;&gt;How can I create a form of carbonization while keeping the mind active?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146870/40609&quot;&gt;How does the atmosphere of Jimmy Neutron&amp;#39;s spaceship work if my brain doesn&amp;#39;t?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/87501/40609&quot;&gt;Could Earth exist in the *Star Wars* universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146469/40609&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s something technological or scientific that has NOT been done in Star Wars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/41152/40609&quot;&gt;How might &amp;quot;the force&amp;quot; in star wars work if it was real?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31408/40609&quot;&gt;Scientifically plausible lightsaber&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/29661/40609&quot;&gt;What language would droids use to communicate with each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oddly, there are few Star Trek examples.  It appears OPs do a much better job of asking &quot;using this Star Trek idea as an example, how could we...?&quot; instead of, &quot;How does this in-universe idea work?&quot;  Curious, that.  I wonder if I could get some grant money to study the differences between Star Trek and Star Wars fans?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T23:43:42.243" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T23:29:02.233" Title="Policy Clarification: Asking about commercial or third-party worlds" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2019-05-13T00:52:46.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Review&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reviewing the pertinent Help Center documents for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;WB.SE&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;SCI-FI/FANT.SE&lt;/a&gt;, I think there is support for this position. Worldbuilding is for &amp;quot;designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds&amp;quot; while Sci-Fi/Fantasy is for &amp;quot;questions targeted towards science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. This includes questions about ... (inter alia) setting explanations&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query under consideration I think is clearly asking about a Star Wars phenomenon, even though the OP was trying to be clever by cloaking that fact within a rather flimsy attempt at providing &amp;quot;worldbuilding context&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My Take&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand the desire to increase WB's footprint in the search engine game, I would take the above facts to indicate that WB is designed for people engaged in making their own worlds; while SF/F is designed for people engaging with commercial or literary entities. Therefore, I think your policy proposal (as far as is goes thus far) has a sound basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Precedent&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the rule is written or unwritten, but it seems that recent queries regarding invented languages have been invited to move over to the invented language stack. Rightfully so, even though language is at the heart of culture and culture is at the heart of creating secondary worlds full of people! The fact is, there is a subgroup that specialised in language, thus I'd say it's best practice to shift such questions over to that stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise with commercial worlds. There is a forum that specialises in works of fantasy and sci-fi (novels, short stories, animes, movies, television programmes, etc) and the worlds they happen in.  I'd say it would be best practice to move such questions over to that forum. Though I suppose WB would have to ask first!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I'm Borrowing This Idea&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, borrowing ideas is nothing new in art. What we'd have to distinguish is whether or not the OP is really and truly borrowing something for her own work, or whether she's just curious about how something in SW works and is tacking on some world building context veneer in order to sneak past the censors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make it clear that &amp;quot;I'm borrowing this idea&amp;quot; is a valid reason to bring up a phenomenon that occurs in a commercial world, but that worldbuilding context needs to be quite robust in order for such a question to be accepted. In other words, something like &amp;quot;XYZ happens in the SW universe, and my plan is to borrow that phenomenon while changing this and this to that and that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Possible Concerns:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How far is too far?  You've given SW and ST as example of &amp;quot;third party worlds&amp;quot; whose questions we might consider shunting to SF/F.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this begs the question, what actually ought to constitute a &amp;quot;third party world&amp;quot; for the purposes of the new policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Star Wars --- I guess that's obvious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Star Trek --- I guess that's also obvious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avengers, X-Men, Discworld, Middle Earth, Dr. Who, BSG --- okay maybe?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about non-commercial third party worlds? D&amp;amp;D is  kind of a grey area in that there are published guidebooks and so forth, but also a lot of individual creativity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about fan fic worlds? Worlds that build on one of these better known places, say a world that is an extension of Middle Earth?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, how big would it have to be in order to get bumped?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T23:29:02.233" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T23:29:02.233" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2019-05-13T01:16:08.767" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about &lt;em&gt;building worlds&lt;/em&gt;, not questions about &lt;em&gt;how others' worlds work&lt;/em&gt;.  Now very few ideas are completely original, so your world might use elements from, or derived from, other worlds, but there's a key difference: If you ask &quot;how does a lightsabre work in Star Wars&quot;, the only authoritative answers come from the Star Wars canon.  If, instead, you want lightsabres in your world and ask &quot;how can I power my lightsabres given (constraints)&quot;, that's a worldbuilding question that will likely get answers that have &lt;em&gt;nothing to do&lt;/em&gt; with the Star Wars canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask questions about &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; world.  If you've borrowed ideas that's fine, but the focus is on your world, not what another author intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case there's another site that can take the kinds of question you want to ask, which is handy.  My answer here would be the same even if SciFi.SE didn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T01:16:08.767" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2019-05-13T09:18:04.473" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I need to challenge the entire premise of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't care if your question is about Star Wars, Star Trek, The Forgotten Realms, or something completely out of your imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I care whether you are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it. Is your world based on Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien? Etc. That is irrelevant. What matters is that you are building something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're creating a new world in the Star Wars universe, or a new village in the Forgotten Realms or a new continent in your own unique setting then that's all cool. You're Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand you are asking about established canon of any of those worlds then that is off topic. It is not Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about existing fictional settings are more likely to fall into the second category than questions about a new setting. That is a problem with the question though, not about the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T08:24:27.457" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T08:24:27.457" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T08:15:27.227" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm slightly perplexed regarding the re-open mechanism on WB.SE. While it seems to work relatively well on some other SE network I use (namely RPG.SE), I have the feeling the nature of WB makes it difficult to challenge a question closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last personnal example would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146891/half-of-living-beings-in-the-universe-die-does-society-survive&quot;&gt;this question I asked&lt;/a&gt;. At the moment, the question has 32 positives votes, 3 negatives votes and 5 closures votes (I suppose there is some overlapping on the last two). So out of the almost 5000 people who viewed it, less than 1% reacted. Among that, 90 to 80% reacted favourably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it has been closed for being &quot;opinion-based&quot;, while neither the question nor (most of) the answers are opinionated: many people answered with historical facts, studies link about employement or just little-known actual facts to support their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as the OP, it's really hard to challenge the VTC, since almost nobody bother to VTR. I browsed the meta and stumbled about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5655/is-there-hard-data-on-users-reopen-voting-patterns&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;. It mostly confirmed what I felt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While purely factual site such as RPG.SE (based on rules) manage to reopen closed question, the fact that WB.SE is about fiction and prompt questions that are harder to analyze, we've become a &quot;We are a close and reopen fast type of site, that neglects to reopen.&quot;, to quote the other thread.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this state, we're (or were) at a low 7.2% of reopening rate. Not the worst rate among all the networks, but still pretty low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Isn't there any way to come with a better system to reopen a question than waiting&lt;/strong&gt;, with the low amount of people reacting, &lt;strong&gt;for 5 people to pull together to challenge a disputed closure?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20021" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T15:13:06.263" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:48:38.037" Title="Is there room for improvement on the close/reopen question features?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7339" CreationDate="2019-05-14T08:19:23.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Improve reopen request visibility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reopen request is fairly hard to notice (and in fact, never saw it unless I was the one asking), and is rarely sought (or so I think, given my own experience) by user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the requirements from 5 votes to a system similar to the review of new posts could maybe improve the visibility and thus the number and quality of reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I thought about was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP (or any user) would vote to challenge a closure vote, and write a short explanation as to why they think the closure is unwarranted. Putting this request in a queue similar to that of the post reviews, or perhaps a queue only visible by moderation, would put the reopening attempts in a more visible spot and allow it to be judged fairly by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20021" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T08:19:23.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T12:04:37.113" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/45170/how-would-an-immortal-character-amass-a-fortune&quot;&gt;How would an immortal character amass a fortune?&lt;/a&gt; was posted on World Building but was migrated to Writing. Why? My understanding is that Writing is about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to write - techniques and others, not &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; to write. And certainly not for generating story ideas. One of the close reasons over at Writing is even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because &lt;strong&gt;asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/397/26&quot;&gt;what to write&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or asking for help &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.meta.stackexchange.com/q/536&quot;&gt;rephrasing a sentence or passage&lt;/a&gt; are both off-topic here, as such questions are very unlikely to help anybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the question now is off-topic for that site and migration should be used only if that wouldn't be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:16:51.147" Title="Why was this question migrated?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7341" CreationDate="2019-05-14T12:31:52.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TMI6k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TMI6k.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comment exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it can be seen from the comments above, OP requested the post to be moved. It could have been closed on WB and reposted on writing (plot development is also not WB), but the result would have been the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T12:31:52.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7339" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:02:45.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isn't there any way to come with a better system to reopen a question than waiting, with the low amount of people reacting, for 5 people to pull together to challenge a disputed closure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing a question for clarification bumps it. That brings it to everybody's attention, and sends it to the reopen queue as well. And queues in this site rarely have content for more than a few minutes. I tell you, this is the hardest site in the network to get review medals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your question: it is about whether society would survive should half of all living beings instantly disappear. That is different from events such as lots of people dying from the plague, which affects very few species and takes much longer to remove people from the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have zero datapoints for a sociological study of such an event. You might as well ask whether society would survive zombies or the Matrix. You could even ask if society would survive the sudden appearance of pokémon, since we would divert 100% of the available labor of the civilized world into supporting a global infrastructure for a cuter version of cockfights. In each of these cases, whatever argument you have to make a point is just opiniated speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless we can access a few historical cases of infinity snapping happening, your question is likely to stay closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T15:48:38.037" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:48:38.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7339" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:03:01.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The mechanics of voting is controlled by Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first problem is that the actual process of VTC/VTR is programmatically controlled by Stack Exchange &amp;mdash; not us.  Any change would require their input (unlikely) and would affect all stacks (very unlikely).  Such a request would need to be made on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. We clear our queues very quickly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ours is one of the most active sites for queue reviews.  Just as with all stacks, a question finds its way into the VTR queue by (a) being edited or (b) someone casts the first VTR.  Once in  the queue, it's viewed by a great many people very quickly.  As I understand it, a question in the VTR queue stays in the VTR queue until it gets its 5 votes (or until something else happens, like deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that you're judging the VTR queue to have low visibility simply because your question wasn't reopened.  You're ignoring the fact that there's a &quot;leave closed&quot; option and that people might believe that, edits notwithstanding, your question still warrants closure.  Frankly, visibility isn't as much of a problem as you might think.  IMO, most of the time, the OP has made little effort to understand the reason the question was closed and even less time trying to edit the question to conform to the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. The curious case of Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big chunk of your problem is that we had to change how we interpret &quot;primarily opinion-based.&quot;  Nobody has &quot;facts, references, or specific expertise&quot; in magic (especially the unique system proposed by the OP).  Since we do not have the ability to remove POB from use (we don't even have the ability to modify the text, which continues to make it a problem), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;we modified the interpretation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, a question must be asked in a way that it simply isn't &lt;em&gt;your opinion&lt;/em&gt; as to which is the best answer.  &lt;em&gt;You, the OP&lt;/em&gt; must provide clear information about how you will judge the best answer by adding goals, restrictions, and limitations.  Basically, the question must be converted from an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; to an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Popularity != Suitability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a problem found on many stacks, the simple reality is that ours is a highly creative and imaginative stack &amp;mdash; and most people upvote because they &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; a question and not because they think the question is suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ugly truth is that a question on this site can be immensely popular and &lt;em&gt;still violate the rules of suitability.&lt;/em&gt;  Yup, we close such questions.  Our goal is to (a) help you understand the rules of our site and (b) encourage you to modify the question to make it suitable.  Questions written with the rules in mind tend to get better results, but as you've seen, that's not always necessary &amp;mdash; but that's not a justification for not closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. Stack Exchange does not require an explanation of votes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I frequently leave a comment rationalizing why I voted to close or reopen a question &amp;mdash; but I am by far the &lt;em&gt;exception.&lt;/em&gt;  Stack Exchange requires no such comment.  The reason for the closure is stated in the closure marquee.  If you don't understand how that reason applies, you can always bring the issue to Meta (as you have done here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if it made sense to leave explanatory comments, we have &lt;em&gt;no control over the programmatic process.&lt;/em&gt;  There's no way to enforce the behavior.  It would require the Mods constantly reviewing every question to see whether or not someone had voted w/o a comment and then posting a private message to said individual reminding them to do so.  The burden on the Mods would be catastrophically enormous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it's the job of the OP to meet the rules and expectations of the site &amp;mdash; not the obligation of the site to modify its rules and expectations for a single question.  The process to change the rules begins here, on Meta, with a cogent explanation as to why the change should be made along with a proposed modification that is within the stack's ability to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:03:01.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7341" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:11:30.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&quot;  Worldbuilding (on-topic) is about the rules and systems of a &quot;world&quot; (no matter its size, community or universe) wherein many stories can be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Storybuilding&quot; (off-topic) is about circumstances, actions, or plot.  The moment you start asking about the actions of a character, you're storybuilding.  It's theoretically possible that a question about an individual character is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; a question about the consistent application of world rules, but it's very rare (and the linked question most certainly did not meet that requirement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more people who are involved in the question, the more likely the question is about the consistent use of a world rule.  For example, a question about how an army would counter a technology built upon a rule unique to the OP's world would be on-topic.  &lt;em&gt;Theoretically,&lt;/em&gt; a question about how a single spy would do so would also be on topic.  But, even the population of a nation, if you ask (e.g.) &quot;how can they increase their nation's GDP?&quot; would be off-topic as Too Story-Based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, the moment you ask about what a character should do or how a character can accomplish a goal, you're storybuilding and off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was migrated because it did not meet the expectations and requirements of this site and was judged to be more suitable on another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T15:16:51.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:16:51.147" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7339" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:12:55.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Isn't there any way to come with a better system to reopen a question than waiting&lt;/strong&gt;, with the low amount of people reacting, &lt;strong&gt;for 5 people to pull together to challenge a disputed closure?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question is still on hold, &lt;strong&gt;edit it to clarify how it is on topic.&lt;/strong&gt; You have a few (I think it's five) days to do that before the question transitions to &quot;closed&quot; status, at which point someone actively voting to reopen is required. That edit while &quot;on hold&quot; will push the question into the reopen review queue, where it will be seen by roughly the same people who are likely to see it in the close queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware, though, of meta-commentary in the question. It's not useful to write a dissertation on why you feel the question should be on topic, if doing so doesn't fix whatever was the reason why people voted to put the question on hold in the first place. For example, if the question is put on hold as opinion-based, make sure that the question contains &lt;em&gt;some specific criteria&lt;/em&gt; by which the community can judge answers. Using the sandbox, or stopping by in chat, or even posting on Meta, may be beneficial as you can get specific feedback on what changes the people answering feel need to be done to that specific question in its current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had questions being put on hold as off topic. I've had questions challenged as &quot;how is this on topic?&quot;. Particularly elsewhere on the network, I've had questions and answers alike practically downvoted into oblivion. Just because I have a diamond to my name on this site doesn't make me infalliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:12:55.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:33:04.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Mephisto transformation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hypothesis is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you fill off all the serial numbers from the question, add the relevant information from the world, it's about, and the result gets upvotes and answers, then it should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Star Wars has no internal consistency in terms of rules, especially since what is and isn't canon changes when The Rat nods one of her heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about hard-SF or taking a singular idea into a defined context. For instance, a question like: &quot;In a realistic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt;) setting, what would be the best cover for the witch's house (from Hansel and Gretel) to prevent it from rapidly decomposing whilst remaining safe for human consumption?&quot; should be all fine if the transformation can be completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those occasions, whether the answer can be derived directly from canon or not, is a deciding factor, as if it can be solved by x fanboyism, where x != any scientific field, it's off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T15:39:19.770" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T15:39:19.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2019-05-14T16:37:15.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the answer does not require you to provide information from cannon to be correct, it is fine.  Also, if the question requires you to understand cannon for context, it should be something that can be simply looked up without requiring an in depth understanding of the source material.  In the case of the OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146866/40609&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, we do not need to understand how Starwars cannon would answer this question to be able to derive scientific speculations about how the process could be explained in a new piece of work.  Nor, do we need to watch an entire star wars movie to get an idea about what carbonite freezing is. If they wanted the George Lucas answer, then the sci-fi exchange would be preferable, but since they want a reasonable explanation, then sci-fi exchange is probably a very bad resource for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples of questions that are not world building:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How did the Hulk get his powers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the properties of Mithril in Lord of the Rings?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can Adeptus Mechanicus make new machine spirits?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Similar world building questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could you make a person as strong as the Hulk?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could one make a Mithril like alloy similar to what is described in Lord of the Rings?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could Adeptus Mechanicus actually be able to program through rote memorization of chants without understanding the concepts of programming?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first set of questions have right or wrong answers based on their commercial fiction sources that already exist so there is no world building.  The second set of questions use commercial fiction sources for reference, but the answer are still world building in nature.  If a person wanted to make a believable world with a Hulk like being, blasting joe-blow with radiation is not a good answer; so, other exchanges would be less helpful than asking it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T16:50:55.713" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T16:50:55.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T00:15:56.113" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/147274/40609&quot;&gt;How would a physicist explain this starship engine?&lt;/a&gt;.  I actually like the question, but I wonder if it's opening a bag of worms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Cons I See&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6516/40609&quot;&gt;I asked the community about the &quot;technobabble&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt; created for one or more questions, the community responded with a resounding &quot;NO!&quot;  Questions of the type &quot;how would X explain Y?&quot; touch on this issue, because explaining a fictional concept in terms of physics is still technobabble.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question type appears to be intrinsically &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt; in that there is no possible way for the OP to determine which is the best answer.  He/she must either depend on popular vote to identify it or we must accept that the &quot;best answer&quot; will only be the answer the OP believes best meets the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt; of his/her story.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Pros I See&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could easily imagine this becoming a popular question type.  Most authors lack the expertise in some if not many of the professions and vocations represented in their stories.  Help from people that &quot;speak the lingo&quot; to describe a world rule or system is a fundamental necessity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;challenge&lt;/em&gt; of trying to crowbar fiction into science piques my interest.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;Should &quot;how would X explain Y?&quot; questions be on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please justify your perspective within the Stack Exchange framework.  Because, at the end of the day, if we can't support the idea via SE, it's moot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;If the OP had the credentials to actually pick a best answer based on the the science, why bother asking the question?  This harks back to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5758/40609&quot;&gt;Only Three Books&lt;/a&gt;&quot; questions wherein it was impossible for the OP to make a rational &quot;best answer&quot; decision.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T18:42:01.650" Title="Are &quot;how would X explain Y?&quot; questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|question-types|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7351" CreationDate="2019-05-20T17:08:20.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think asking this kind of question is not a problem. It's just a poor way to ask &quot;I have this concept, does it sound ok?&quot;. This kind of question goes well with tags related to magic, science and/or reality-check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the example question, but I don't see any reason to downvote it or VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all... In the process of building a world, there is the process of coming up with how reality works in it, and there are processes of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explaining it to others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making sense of how the people in the world see their reality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the question focuses on the logic and consistence of the world of the two points above, and not on how to deliver it to a reader, it is on topic here (and probably off-topic on Writing.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T17:08:20.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7351" CreationDate="2019-05-23T02:36:29.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Given Cons are Non-Issues&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really don't see how the community not wanting a &amp;quot;technobabble&amp;quot; tag bears any relationship to responses that may or may not contain actual technobabble.  That's a non-issue for me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All (or nearly all) queries asked in WB.SE are to some degree seeking an opinion.  The broad array of answers bears out this observation. Generally speaking, unless an OP is literally asking for opinions, I don't VTC on that basis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Narrative necessity might not be the best term in this instance. Narrative Necessity is the some person, event or object that must exist in order for your story to happen. Asking about how that some thing might be explained in world is, I think, just marginally better than asking permission to put that some thing in one's world in the first place. (Because the answer to that, obviously, is &amp;quot;yes, you may, on account of Narrative Necessity&amp;quot;. The starship engine itself, for example: that's needed to move the story from place to place.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pros are Really Good Reasons to Allow&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultimately, this kind of question, when viewed and answered from a strictly in-world perspective, are obvious geopoetical queries.  They are of the &amp;quot;systems&amp;quot; type of question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I'd Suggest a New Con, However&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may notice that I've been dancing around the narrative aspect of such queries.  My concern is that such questions will very easily fall into the trap of being too story based.  When framed or asked poorly, this kind of question becomes more a matter of character development and plot points than a question about world systems or the nature of sciences in an other world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer therefore is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;YES&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are on topic.  Notice that the OP in the quoted question does a good job of steering away from falling into a story based trap.  They don't outright seek a merely technobabble answer, but seems to be seeking a deeper explanation.  Opinion is part and parcel of a WB related answer, but the OP I think gives sufficient information and sufficient restrictions on respondents that a series of reasonably non-opinionated opinion based answers could be provided, from among which the OP can decide which does the best job of answering all conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd actually consider the quoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/147274/how-would-a-physicist-explain-this-starship-engine&quot;&gt;starship drive query&lt;/a&gt; to be something of a model of this type of question, to be frank. The OP gives a bit of background, a number of required and optional conditions, points considered crucial to the formulation of an answer, and a pre-emptive clarification in order to avoid &amp;quot;impossible&amp;quot; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T02:36:29.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-27T19:17:47.490" Score="12" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to encourage more questions about cultural world building, but cultural world building suffers greatly from being too broad, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;, and too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One recent question, eventually worded to be (IMO) an appropriate cultural world building question, began as a question about religion too easily (and legitimately) answered, &quot;because your god says so.&quot;  Ultimately, the OP really was looking for help with rules and systems, not character actions, circumstances, or plot.  It's the avoidance of this kind of problem I'm seeking to adddress.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;physical world building&quot; objectively asks about the systems and rules governing planets, ecologies, and technology.  Cultural world building would objectively ask about the systems and rules governing people (sapient communities, societies, and civilizations) including their politics, economics, philosophy, and social morés.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, while questions asking about the orbital mechanics of planets are fairly straightforward, questions about the psychological dynamics of people frequently aren't.  Most physical world building can depend on mathematics or a reflection of the hard sciences to support answers.  But this seems not to be true for cultural world building, which seems to depend on the musings of philosophers and observations of poets (so to speak).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What advice can we give to users new and old to help them develop good cultural world building questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Guidelines should support the structure and methodologies of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Guidelines should either support what's already in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; or should give enough information such that Moderators can consider whether or not improvements to the Help Center are warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130#6338&quot;&gt;Why would someone X?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;High concept&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6654&quot;&gt;Open-ended&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T13:11:02.763" Title="Cultural Worldbuilding: How to avoid closure?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|question-types|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2019-05-28T03:35:08.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's long after the fact, but based on a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/147882/40609&quot;&gt;to my recent question&lt;/a&gt;, I thought I'd chip in.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch pointed out that my use of both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags shouldn't have occurred.  I removed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag to comply, but after reading the descriptions and the question/answers here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I simply don't agree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag imposes a specific restriction on an answer.  The answer cannot contain magic, or fantasy elements, or even modified physics if permitted within the OP's world.  It mandates that the science known on Earth, the here-and-now, is required for the answer, &lt;em&gt;but not that it must be proven to an absolute degree.&lt;/em&gt;  This permits &quot;bending the rules&quot; a bit, or the use of science to create a plausible if not perfectly rationalized explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag imposes the very same restriction on an answer: no magic, no fantasy, not allowed to use the OP's modified physics... but in this case, the science must be proven.  No opinions.  No bending of the rules.  Either science permits the answer or it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; has a similar restriction, &lt;em&gt;but it is not identical.&lt;/em&gt;  The answer must be given within the framework of the OP's world.  Not our own.  Not anyone else's.  Just the OP's.  It requires the presentation of a scenario that can be judged within the context of the OP's world.  Without that scenario, the question is incomplete and must be closed as &quot;unclear.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in reference to my recent question, I had both the [tag: reality-check] and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags.  My question was being asked within the context or current or emerging technologies that can and must be known and the answer &lt;em&gt;absolutely had to reflect&lt;/em&gt; the abilities of technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, having said all that, it could legitimately be said that my question failed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; mandate in that a specific scenario (a solution for killing the planet's biosphere) had not been presented, but was instead asking for solutions.  I humbly admit that, in that regard, I failed to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I disagree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is mutually exclusive to &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags.  It's identifying a specific type of question that demands a specific type of analysis to properly answer the question.  And in that context, it can and could be combined with either of the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T03:35:08.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7356" CreationDate="2019-05-30T03:07:34.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;My penny-hapenny:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From the querent's perspective:&lt;/em&gt; Any cultural worlbuilding query ought to follow the WB.SE rules as closely as possible.  It ought to be well thought out and it ought to focus on a single issue or problem. Good tagging practices help.  The query should contain &lt;em&gt;sufficient background&lt;/em&gt; for respondents to answer but without falling into the Wall-o-Text trap, as too much background only muddies an already sticky wicket.  I think it goes without saying that keeping the query focused will cast away the Broad Demons and, well, nòt writing a story based question will keep it on topic for WB.SE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From the respondent's perspective:&lt;/em&gt; Any answer ought to address the specific issue and taking cues from the querent's mode. That is, if the query is asked from an &quot;in-world&quot; point of view, answer it in that way.  Respondents should seek to maintain an air of objectivity.  Using primary world examples helps with this, if they're applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In reality:&lt;/em&gt;  Querents are, by definition asking for opinions and respondents will, by nature, be offering &quot;opinions&quot;. This is a given.  This is the nature of our art / hobby.  It is not simply a matter of plugging values into a formula to arrive at an answer. I think we need, and most especially with this kind of query, to strike a balance.  Perhaps not even-steven, but even in favour of the opinion based answers, simply because this is what we'll be dealing with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Advice to Young and Old Alike:&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, keep calm and keep your finger off the Autoclose Trigger!  (Especially you Diamond Folk!)  Remember: this is worldbuilding, not math or chemistry or history.  We deal with things magickal and persons ephemeral and places chimerical and all things opinionical.  There are two ways of approaching worldbuilding: one is the way of the Realist School (those questions are pretty easy, as they pretty much follow the structure of the primary world); the other is the Unrealist or Phantasist School (these questions will almost always be highly opinion based).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second, put on your creative thinking caps and calibrate your imagineering slide rules to the unreal and fantastic. This kind of question will not be asking for physics and orbital mechanics in the usual sense, such as one might find in a college text.  This kind of question will be asking for you to riff and jive, to perform a little jass worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wise philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6c1PPF2dc&amp;amp;list=LLLYeKExb6GqjG3z1Bit8zmw&amp;amp;index=2&amp;amp;t=0s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;once sang&lt;/a&gt;, and I think it's appropos of what the OP of such cultural worldbuilding queries will be looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't want French fried potatoes,&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Red ripe tomatoes,&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm never satisfied. &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With chafafa on the side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't the Stack Exchange way, but is largely what worldbuilding is all about. With this kind of question, we just need to buck up and give em the frim fram sauce with extra ausen fay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T03:14:20.063" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T03:14:20.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7356" CreationDate="2019-05-30T04:23:29.107" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoiding Closure&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A guide to writing soft-science questions which survive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seek Causes, Not Effects&lt;/strong&gt; - soft-science questions which ask &quot;what would happen if...&quot; lead to speculative answers which celebrate creativity and humor over logical progression and causality.  These are the kind of answers which most quickly get labelled as &quot;opinion-based&quot;, which is a leading cause of question closure.  Asking &quot;how did a particular effect come into being?&quot; invites answers which explain rather than speculate.  These kinds of answers, although secretly just as opinion-based as the earlier ones, are much more welcome in these forums.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask Generic Questions Which Can Be Answered Specifically&lt;/strong&gt; - another common cause of question closure falls under the label of &quot;story-based&quot;.  Such questions are so tightly bound to their questioner's current project, that any answers they acquire may only have value for that specific questioner and even then, only on that specific project.  SE forums are not just about generous answerers gifting supplicant questioners with needed wisdom.  They are about questioners and answerers working together to create a resource which will benefit future visitors facing similar challenges.  Soft-science questions are particularly prone to becoming story-bound.  Consider the needs of future forum visitors as you craft your questions and answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask for substantiation from either the real world or mainstream fiction&lt;/strong&gt; - good SE answers host links to supporting and supplemental resources. These embedded hyperlinks are amazingly effective at warding off accusations of an answer being opinion-based.  It doesn't even matter if the linked-to-resource is itself opinion-based; external links ooze authority and respectability.  In writing your questions, encourage answers to include them.  Asking for examples from either real world history or mainstream fiction will almost always yield links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When all else fails,... try, try again!&lt;/strong&gt; - soft science questions do not yet have a great track record on World-Building.   They suffer from a very high initial closure rate and far too many of them stay closed because their authors don't edit them to invalidate the reasons for which they were originally closed.  Closure isn't a condemnation.  It is an invitation to improve your question to better meet the forum's standards.  Don't leave a first draft question closed.  Be respectful, but find a way to word it such that it gets reopened and answered.   This is the only way that soft science questions will get better coverage on our forum.  It is worth the additional effort, to make such questions welcome among all the astrological engineering and rocket science questions. For the sake of your questions, the forum and current and future members, Don't give up after a single attempt!  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3112" LastEditorUserId="3112" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T13:11:02.763" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T13:11:02.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7351" CreationDate="2019-05-30T18:42:01.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/129748&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which I reformulated in the text as &quot;How would biologists explain such or such gene incidences observations?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was well received, and arguably would still have if formulated in that way. In that case at least, asking for a specific point of view is only a way to stress that everyone's opinion is not equally valuable because the answer requires technical skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52315" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T18:42:01.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7363" CreationDate="2019-06-04T14:04:04.747" Score="9" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/148241/if-you-had-a-giant-cutting-disc-60-miles-diameter-and-rotated-it-1000-rps-would/148283#148283&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; recently got put on hold and it's made me notice a pattern where some physics questions that are asked by newer users get closed. Now, this is not necessarily an awful thing in and of itself. Personally, these types of questions are the ones I like answering the most and the main reason I come to this site, but I do understand the argument for why someone might think they're better suited for a different stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I do think it's important that whatever the consensus is, it be applied consistently, and I don't think it has been. There have been many highly voted pure physics questions that I've seen, especially from high rep users, that have never been closed. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106525/does-my-shipboard-computer-slow-down-as-i-approach-light-speed&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; was a question very similar in spirit to the one that got closed, and was actually asked by one of the people who voted to close the first one. Now I think it's a great question and I had fun answering it, but I'm having trouble seeing why it should stay open while the other is closed. I should clarify that I don't think this is some intentional, malicious thing that people are doing. I think it's just important for people casting close votes to ask themselves if they would do the same thing if the user was a worldbuilding celebrity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also open to the idea that maybe there is a good reason I haven't seen yet that this question was closed while other similar ones stayed open. So my question is, do you think that there is sometimes a bias against newer users when it comes to closing physics questions, and if so is it a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46261" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T02:08:18.627" Title="Are there inconsistent standards for closing physics questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7362" CreationDate="2019-06-05T15:36:22.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title asks one question, the body asks a very different question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, the title asks whether there exists some sort of loophole where Einsteinian special relativity doesn't apply; the answer to this question is quite obviously no, there isn't. Einsteinian special relativity is a direct consequence of the postulate that all laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. &lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt; this could be discussed, but then the querent should ask the real question and not some contrived situation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The body fundamentally asks how a material which cannot be ripped apart will be ripped apart, which is obviously nonsensical.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T00:49:03.367" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T00:49:03.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T17:42:35.450" Score="8" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;For anyone who knows the kind of question I post, I put a great deal of effort into making sure a question is unique. I check the site for similar questions to see if those answer the one I would otherwise ask and, if they don't, I carefully word my question to be clear how my question differs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/148379/6986&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; was flagged as a duplicate, I checked the proposal, confirmed it was one I had reviewed before asking, and edited my question to indicate why mine was different. After that, I noted that I lost a close vote, then gained three more to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no further discussion on the subject to indicate why those continuing to vote to close disagreed with my analysis of the two posts. It seems appropriate to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3773/6986&quot;&gt;my usual reminder to close-voters&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd also like to bring the issue to the community's attention so I can do better next time (if there is something I can do better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T20:23:02.543" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T18:35:36.820" Title="Site Policy: Judging When a Question is a Duplicate" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:04:43.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I have to agree with the close voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer would be the same, it's not possible to remove &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; life on Earth without basically melting the planet. While your constraints are slightly different the fundamental outcome is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the general case rather than this specific one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Thresholds of difference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a threshold in the answer to the existing question and a threshold of change of constraint in the question to be balanced. &quot;Given an extra 1000 years of technology&quot; is a significant change of constraint, even though the answer may be the same it could be a different question. &quot;But make the bombs blue&quot; is not a significant change of constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the threshold in the answer, the requirement to melt the planet, puts the change of constraint in the question, leave the buildings standing, below the threshold required for it to be a different question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Quality of answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer will answer the question and any very similar question. A really good answer will of its own right increase the breadth of questions that become duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the answer to the original wasn't just &quot;you can't do it like that&quot;, but &quot;here's the standard you have to achieve to do that&quot;. That significantly increases the range of questions that are now duplicates as any question that doesn't allow you to achieve the melting of the planet for the effect is now a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T02:54:30.243" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T02:54:30.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:58:13.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't top a CVn's answer, but I'd like to add another perspective for the benefit of new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users may not realize it, but when they ask an open-ended or &quot;high concept&quot; question, they're inviting one or both of two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They're inviting a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They're inviting a short-story writing competition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are off-topic on this site.  The first, because Stack Exchange is a question-and-answer site, meaning they want specific, objective questions that have a single, best answer.  The second, because while it might seem odd, our purpose is to not help someone write their story, but to develop a world wherein someone can set many stories.  And the best questions are those that lead to answers other people can use, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new user may think that we're closing the question as &quot;too broad&quot; simply because the answer(s) would be too long.  The issue isn't that Stack Exchange doesn't like long answers.  Quite the contrary, SE loves long answers.  Or, perhaps more accurately, SE likes &lt;em&gt;thorough&lt;/em&gt; answers.  An ideal answer on Stack Exchange would be &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; followed by a mountain of mathematics, article citations, and analysis to justify the simple, precise, objective answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High concept questions cannot be answered with a simple yes or no.  They have no simple or objective answer at all.  They don't even fall into the SE description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;good subjective, bad subjective&lt;/a&gt;.  They can only be answered by telling a story, often one that only has value to the person asking the question &amp;mdash; and that's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:58:13.590" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-06T03:49:28.413" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw this ad on Worldbuilding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The best questions are perfected first in our Sandbox!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hovered over it and saw that this is the link it goes to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/7073?url=https%3a%2f%2fworldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f7183%2fsandbox-for-proposed-questions&amp;amp;s=180e2f25810f79c41228e12f54de8770e28ab11c91cc704f647090556be8183e&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a non-HTTPS link, and thus insecure. Stack Exchange moved to secure HTTPS a few years ago, and this should be fixed some time to make the network more secure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62089" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T08:36:01.973" Title="Sandbox ad on right side of screen doesn't use HTTPS" Tags="|bug|advertising|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7367" CreationDate="2019-06-06T05:09:05.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The link is not wrong.  If you visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7073/40609&quot;&gt;source ad&lt;/a&gt;, you'll discover the HTTPS link to our Meta page is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you've misunderstood the URL.  It's in two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/7073&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first part.  It's automatically created by Stack Exchange.  We have no control over it.  It's only purpose is to invoke the Community Ad server.  This is required, at least, to ensure that community ad links are being properly used (without 6 votes, they're not supposed to show up or be usable).  I do not know why Stack Exchange does not use the HTTPS protocol for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https%3a%2f%2fworldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f7183%2fsandbox-for-proposed-questions&amp;amp;s=180e2f25810f79c41228e12f54de8770e28ab11c91cc704f647090556be8183e&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, it uses the HTTPS protocol as assigned in the source community ad.  This is the query that's being sent to the Community Ads server.  I don't know what the second parameter (&lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt;) refers to, but it's likely some form of session ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue doesn't involve just this one ad.  If you hover over any community ad, you'll find the first part of the URL to be the same (other than the numbers, which point to the unique community advertisement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as I know, since Stack Exchange is automatically producing the URL you're indicating, it's normal.  If you have a concern, you'll need to post it at Meta.StackExchange.com where the developers will see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T06:30:31.247" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T06:30:31.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2019-06-06T05:19:08.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the close voters and, regrettably, also the OP for the &quot;original question.&quot;  I voted as a duplicate because I believe that if any two questions, no matter how they're worded, can be answered with all the same answers, then they are duplicates by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've been wondering about that belief, and this is as good a time as any to bring it up.  Basically the question boils down to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 + 3 = 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 + 2 = 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those &quot;duplicate questions&quot; since they share the identical answer despite having ostensibly unique question conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to change my voting habits to conform to community consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T05:19:08.247" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2019-06-06T06:51:03.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that JBH's answer has a lot of merit and is a good rationale of the YES vote. To be blunt, I'm swayed by it but given the lack of a NO argument I'd like to put my original proposition from when I first read this question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the question you propose, there is a similar intent, and therefore the propensity for similar approaches. Your argument for uniqueness is one of scope. Ultimately therefore I think we can look at this from two different perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Restriction of original scope&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second question is asking about achieving a similar effect or using a similar approach, but does so by limiting resources, timeframes, or applying new constraints on the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expansion of original scope&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second question is giving 'free rein' on the original question by &lt;em&gt;removing&lt;/em&gt; constraints, timeframes, resource limitations, et al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are in effect optimisation issues. Of the two, I prefer the idea of the restriction of original scope as a unique question because it's easier to see how (from an engineering perspective at least) that can lead to the need for a new or refined approach. The problem is that if you have a really elegant answer to the original question, the limitations may not actually restrict the optimal elegant answer from applying in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, while expansion of the original scope by definition means that the original answer is still valid, you're actually &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; likely to come up with a better optimised solution through removal of some of the engineering constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, while I actually agree with JBH and have upvoted him accordingly, I'm going to argue that the answers provided to the original question must be taken into account when considering if 'scope change' questions are in fact duplicates or not. I'm further going to argue that this should be done by the questioner in the first instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when you become aware that there is a duplicate challenge on your question, it's insufficient to read the original question in isolation to the answers before deciding whether your question is unique or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scope change questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be unique, but IMHO only if the answers that have been provided fail an elegance test that would make them valid across multiple scopes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a subtle argument, and possibly wrong, but at least the NO camp is represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T06:51:03.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7367" CreationDate="2019-06-06T08:36:01.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a non-issue with modern, standards-compliant browsers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with a bunch of other headers, every response to a request to worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com comes with these headers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;content-security-policy: upgrade-insecure-requests&#xA;strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can see these yourself in the network console of your browser, or equivalent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of these is to (CSP) tell the web browser to use HTTPS for everything referenced from the page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/upgrade-insecure-requests&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MDN&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;non-navigational insecure resource requests are automatically upgraded (first-party as well as third-party requests)&quot; and specifically illustrates with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, but not off-host &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a href&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; links), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (HSTS) to record the fact that plain-text HTTP requests to this host are prohibited for a duration of 15,520,000 seconds (180 days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CSP thus doesn't necessarily affect the target of the link (MDN seems a little unclear if navigational links to the same host are upgraded). However, the HSTS header &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have an effect (&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Strict-Transport-Security&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MDN&lt;/a&gt;), in forcing the browser to &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; allow HTTPS (technically, &quot;secure&quot;) transport to the host that the HSTS header was received from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, in practice, as soon as a request is made to the host, it will be force-upgraded to HTTPS before hitting the network.&lt;/strong&gt; So no plain-text HTTP is involved when clicking on the ad, even though the link says plaintext HTTP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T08:36:01.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6787" CreationDate="2019-06-06T21:29:12.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fixed as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/329187/235711&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/329187/235711&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65530" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T21:29:12.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-07T14:22:56.333" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally have written quite a few questions concerning mechanical mechanisms. My trouble is I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt; to be too broad and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mechanics&lt;/a&gt; being ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do in this situation to make the tagging more precise, or should I leave it as-is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59407" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T15:27:04.627" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T04:47:03.770" Title="Why no tag for tags on mechanical constructions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2019-06-07T18:55:32.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to leave my original answer, which was partially in response to Frostfyre's query about the closure of his question and partially an introduction to the issues of judging duplicates.  This answer is focuses solely on the issue of judging duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Duplicity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a better word out there, but my head's chasing all the ideas for this answer and can't think of it.  &amp;quot;Duplicity&amp;quot; usually identifies something deceitful or fraudulent.  A person with a duplicitous nature identifies a person who, for example, has ulterior motives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm going to wantonly use &amp;quot;duplicity&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;the state of being a duplicate.&amp;quot;  If you can think of a better word, lemme know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why judge at all?  Why not just answer the @#&amp;amp;! question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is the most creative, imaginative, and therefore the most &lt;em&gt;subjective&lt;/em&gt; stack in the Stack Exchange galaxy.  That's actually a problem, because Stack Exchange designed its service to accommodate very objective, clear, precise, concise, specific, even &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; questions.  In the world of programming, for example, there may be a dozen different ways to approach programming for a specific effect or need — but the effect or need is very specific and it's obvious that anyone asking about that specific effect or need is asking a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging duplicates serves two important needs on all stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It brings the many different ways of looking at the same problem into focus.  This brings value to the overall stack by gathering all the best answers into one place with the several (sometimes many) duplicates all pointing to that one source.  Even knowing that your perspective is a duplicate of other perspectives helps &lt;s&gt;programmers&lt;/s&gt; stack users to see better how to solve their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It reduces clutter on the stacks.  If you don't mark duplicate questions as duplicates, (a) you get the same answers repeated over and over and over and over and over and (b) good answers are not all in the same place, meaning greater research is needed to find them, meaning the quality and usefulness of the stack is reduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A substantial component of how we do things here at worldbuilding.SE is based on Stack Exchange's expectation of how &lt;em&gt;their service&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;our service&lt;/em&gt;) is to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we deal with &lt;em&gt;stories.&lt;/em&gt;  I've been a micropublisher, and I can honestly tell you there are only the proverbial nine unique stories.  Period.  Boy meets girl, battles robot, saves the girl.  I can't tell you how many tens of thousands of times (I mean that, we processed 3,000-5,000 manuscript submissions each year — as a micropublisher) an author would tell us &amp;quot;there's nothing like my story out there!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;This is a completely new and unique story!&amp;quot;  No, it isn't.  There's no such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are an &lt;em&gt;infinite&lt;/em&gt; number of ways to &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; those stories.  And that's where publishers look for uniqueness.  The flavor, the ambience, the worldview....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem we have with judging duplicates.  Where 99% of the users of (e.g.) Stack Overflow will likely agree that two questions are duplicates of one another, maybe only 70% will here (or less) because stories are far more interpretive than, e.g., programming — and the answers of question #1 might not actually address the specific problem of question #2.  Or maybe they do and the OP of question #2 is just being stubborn and short-sighted.  Or maybe they don't because it's the judges who are being stubborn and short-sighted.  See the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You stupid engineers...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, before actually getting to the meat of this answer — I'm an engineer.  I've also been a publisher and am a writer (both technical and artistic).  You might not believe it, but this is a useful perspective.  I've had to deal with authors who don't see the difference between artists and engineers.  If you'll forgive the simplification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artists live in a world full of rules, but don't want to believe it and often pay little or no regard to those rules.  They're trained that way.  They need to see the whimsy of life and expression of imagination to be good at what they do.  Consequently, they often have difficulty being published because publishers are businesses (rule-driven hierarchical organizations) that must pay their employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, all engineers see is rules.  We're trained that way.  We literally can't do our jobs without both understanding the rules and regularly using processes that create new rules.  We can't afford to give up those rules or bridges collapse and people die.  We also have difficulty being published because &lt;em&gt;consumers&lt;/em&gt; are emotional and are looking for an escape from their rule-burdened lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the people who can merge the artist and the engineer within who are often most successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, what you're about to experience is 98% the engineer.  Fair warning. Let's begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Titles, Questions &amp;amp; Answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect a common habit is to look at the titles of the two posts and judge their duplicity based solely on those few words.  I was guilty of that early in my experience with WB.SE.  Unfortunately, while a valid point of judgment, titles are also the weakest aspect of two posts to compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thorough reading of the body of both posts (the question) is mandatory for a comparison.  Someone who skims over the two without really considering the many aspects of a question (conditions &amp;amp; restrictions, background or premise, and the question itself) is providing a superficial judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wholly agree with TimB II that the answers must also be taken into consideration.  But this needs a grain of salt because a post may not have been answered sufficiently (even though it was answered adequately) which affects the judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to begin, good judgement requires evaluating the titles of the two questions, the body of the two questions, and the answers to the first question.  If you're not willing to take the time to do that, please consider not voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2+2 = 1+3 = 1.8+2.2 = 421-317... or do they?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to introduce my evolving set of rules for judging duplicates.  This is, of course, my own opinion.  Don't let my use of the word &amp;quot;axiom&amp;quot; fool you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Axiom 1:&lt;/strong&gt; If two questions can &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be answered with &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the same answers, then they are duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This first axiom is completely true and, after considering what Mithrandir24601 had to say, almost completely useless.  Not completely, but darn close.  Unlike our more objective sister-stacks, questions asked here are rarely perfect duplicates, which underscores the need to evaluate answers along with the questions when judging duplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 1.1:&lt;/strong&gt; If two answers can &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be the result of &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; the same questions, then the questions must be duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This corollary is almost as useless as its axiom in that the world of writing is almost never this neat and tidy.  But I've found it useful because comparing how respondents have &lt;strong&gt;interpreted&lt;/strong&gt; questions has proven valuable to my judging process.  And this deserves a quick tangent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OP Intent:&lt;/em&gt; The original poster of any one question posted that question with a specific, if not well defined, intent or expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Respondent Interpretation:&lt;/em&gt; Respondents have no choice but to interpret the question to ascertain the OP's intent because there's no such thing on Worldbuilding.SE as a &amp;quot;perfect question.&amp;quot;  There will always be a disparity between the OP's intent and the respondent's interpretation — especially among our more creative respondents (bless them all!) who will throw a curve ball at the OP just to stir things up.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Axiom 2:&lt;/strong&gt; If there is a variance between the OP's intent and the respondents' interpretations, in keeping with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange's policy of preserving OP intent&lt;/a&gt; (...to clarify the meaning of a post without &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; that meaning...), it is the OP's intent that must be preserved and judged when considering answers as a basis for duplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case: more vs. less&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Axiom 3:&lt;/strong&gt; If the two questions are asking about the same thing and differ &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in conditions, limitations, or restrictions, then they might be duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 3.1:&lt;/strong&gt; If the conditions, limitations, or restrictions of Question #2 &lt;em&gt;narrows&lt;/em&gt; the question as found in Question #1, then Question #2 is a duplicate of Question #1 because the answer to Question #2 &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be found associated with Question #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 3.2:&lt;/strong&gt; If the conditions, limitations, or restrictions of Question #2 &lt;em&gt;expand&lt;/em&gt; the question as found in Question #1, then Question #2 is NOT a duplicate of Question #1 because there can be valid answers to Question #2 that &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be found associated with Question #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was ugly to read, but what it boils down to is that narrow questions are always duplicates of their broad counterparts.  Sometimes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 3.3:&lt;/strong&gt; If the conditions, limitations, or restrictions of Question #2 &lt;em&gt;narrow&lt;/em&gt; the question as found in Question #1 &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; demonstrate a critical understanding or unique perspective unlikely to be casually found in an answer to Question #1, then Question #2 is NOT a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there's that fuzzy border.  Without the OP of Question #2 making a darn good case for uniqueness, identifying that border is very subjective.  Remember, the people who use this site range from untrained children to highly trained adults &lt;em&gt;that don't have the training other highly trained adults have.&lt;/em&gt;  In other words, where one person may see a very clear distinction that makes this an easy judgement for them, another may not &lt;em&gt;and yet feel like they have a clear and justifiable perspective.&lt;/em&gt;  Ugh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lemma 3.3.1:&lt;/strong&gt; While it's true that Stack Exchange does not require anyone to justify any vote or flag, considering how subjective the subject matter on this site is, you should err on the side of leaving an explanation in comments — if only so people can contact &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case: Near misses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Axiom 4:&lt;/strong&gt; If Question #2 is similar to Question #1 in ways that cannot be attributed to conditions, limitations, or restrictions then they might be duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 4.1:&lt;/strong&gt; If from the perspective of someone skilled in the art or science necessary to answer the question the two questions are substantially the same, then they are duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 4.2:&lt;/strong&gt; If If you are NOT skilled in the art or science necessary to answer the question, you should err on the side of posting a comment asking for clarification before voting to close the question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you thought the last axiom and its corollaries were fuzzy, this one is really fuzzy.  It's basically asking you, the judge, to put yourself into the shoes of people who know more than you do.  Said another way, it's demanding that you, the judge, accept the fact that you don't know everything.  That's a lot easier said than done!  But it must be done.  If the comparison requires knowledge you, the judge, have not been trained to, then you really should proceed with caution.  Yes, it's just a website and just a hobby (at least it should be just a hobby!), but you'd be surprised how upset people can get over hobbies.  After all, what you're doing is another form of calling someone's baby ugly.  Since the OP of Question #2 will at some level take it personally that their question was closed, &lt;em&gt;please be sure you're right.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case: When all else fails...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Axiom 5:&lt;/strong&gt; Protecting the integrity and intent of Stack Exchange should not take precedence over helping an OP solve their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that there's a lot of people who use or have used this site who think I don't adhere to that axiom.  They might be right.  I'm not perfect.  But I am an engineer, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that I default to following rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's important to realize there's a &lt;em&gt;balance&lt;/em&gt; between meeting Stack Exchange's expectations and the OP's needs.  You can't simply ignore one in favor of the other.  The OP needs and answer, &lt;em&gt;but it isn't our site.&lt;/em&gt;  Many people consider places like this (or Facebook, or Reddit, or any other web site) to be &amp;quot;public property&amp;quot; where the rules of free speech reign.  In reality, all web sites are the equivalent of &lt;em&gt;private property.&lt;/em&gt;  Each and every one of us is a guest — a guest who's expected to follow the rules of the host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I explained earlier, there's good reasons why Stack Exchange wants questions marked as duplicates.  Those reasons should be respected, and so we should have an eye open for the purpose of identifying duplicates when they happen.  But we also need to be on the lookout for those gems, those questions that expose an amazing perspective that deserve to be left open.  That can be hard to do because one of the most valuable aspects of Stack Exchange is its belief that &lt;em&gt;the answers should help everyone, not just the person who posts the question.&lt;/em&gt;  In the end, that might be a useful perspective, so let's add it as a corollary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corollary 5.1:&lt;/strong&gt; If the answer to Question #2 is useful to no one other than the OP who asked Question #2, and Question #2 is a near-miss duplicate of Question #1, then Question #2 is a duplicate of Question #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;OK, my question's a duplicate, but the answers to Q#1 don't help.  What do I do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we often forget that there are things we can do — and should do — to solve the OP's problem when said OP's question is marked a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We can set a bounty on Question #1 and ask for more answers.  We can link to Question #2 in the notes to that bounty so people see why the additional answers are sought.  If a low-rep OP whose question has been closed feels this should happen, use comments and the &lt;code&gt;@user&lt;/code&gt; tag to contact one of the higher-rep users in the comment chain (or visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor chat room&lt;/a&gt;) and ask said person if they'd be willing to sponsor the bounty.  We should all be willing to do that from time to time, just as lawyers are supposed to do pro bono work from time to time.  Occasionally we need to be reminded of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We can post a new answer to Question #1 ourselves.  Indeed, maybe it should be a habit of worldbuilding.SE users to look a newly-closed-as-duplicate questions, hop back to the first question, and see if there's an answer &lt;em&gt;we can post.&lt;/em&gt;  If I remember correctly, there are even badges awarded to people who successfully answer old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Judiciously,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; we can edit Question #1 to make the needs of Question #2 more clear in Question #1.  This causes Question #1 to bounce to the top of the &amp;quot;Active&amp;quot; list so that it's visible again and can be more thoroughly answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;If you want an example of this, go read the answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31698/willk&quot;&gt;Willk&lt;/a&gt; gives to almost any question.  He's a pro at throwing curve balls that open the OP's eyes to possibilities they might never have thought of.  That's an incredibly valuable skill on this site.  It also muddies the waters when judging duplicates something awful.  I wish there were more users like him on the site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I say &amp;quot;judiciously&amp;quot; because I'm not a fan of editing questions on this site.  It's far too easy to change the OP's intent here.  That's a consequence of this site being so naturally subjective.  Therefore, while I promote editing Question #1 as a solution, I beg people to be cautious with their question edits.  Please don't invalidate Question #1 or its answers in your effort to get answers useful to Question #2.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T18:55:32.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2019-06-07T21:59:38.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I justify/explain X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;On-Topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;This is a specific sub-type of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6338/40609&quot;&gt;Why would someone X?&lt;/a&gt;.  However, it's considered on-topic because it is asking how to use or consistently apply a rule of the world, or use a particular technology in light of world rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these questions are too easily expressed as idea-generating questions, which is generally off-topic.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;I need an infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;I need a finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.  See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6654&quot;&gt;open-ended questions&lt;/a&gt;).  To keep the question on-topic, the OP is expected to provide limitations, restrictions, conditions, or expected/desired outcomes to narrow the list of potential responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7390/40609&quot;&gt;What makes for a good &amp;quot;why would&amp;quot; question that stays on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advice:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;A clever way to begin the process of idea-generation (introduced by our renowned Cort Ammon), is to reformat your question as &quot;what [genre] books or movies have dealt with [open-ended-idea]?&quot; and ask it on our sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science-Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.  People will happily give you a ton of useful information that could (a) directly answer your question or (b) help you narrow your question so it becomes an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; question on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general piece of advice (good for almost everything on this site), is that you should NOT ask a question, intentionally leaving details vague, because you want the widest possible response set.  That's not how Stack Exchange is designed.  Instead, decide beforehand what you're trying to achieve and express that as a condition of the question.  &quot;Why would you use a hammer to kill someone?&quot; would be on-topic save that it's asking for an infinite list of things &amp;mdash; it's open-ended and primarily opinion-based.  On the other hand, &quot;I need my victim to remain identifiable, how could a hammer be used to kill my victim?&quot; solves the problem by expressing an expected result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T18:40:24.880" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T18:40:24.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7374" CreationDate="2019-06-08T04:47:03.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My vote is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machines&lt;/a&gt;, which would not be specific to a type or expression of machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If specification beyond that is required, then we'd want tags (as needed) like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mechanical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mechanical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mechanical&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electricity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electricity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electricity&lt;/a&gt; (already exists), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optic&lt;/a&gt; (already exists), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little surprised we don't already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machines&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Granted, people on this site tend to ask 99% of the time about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;.  It's kindof a relief to get questions about other kinds of machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T04:47:03.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T19:43:23.783" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2211/2113&quot;&gt;standard&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is that we should edit out the tag if hard science is obviously not wanted.  I.e. the asker doesn't want to require equations or citations in the answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/148584/2113&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the asker wants to know how to calculate the distance.  One calculates distances through mathematical equations.  In this case, the equation is called the law of cosines and is a more general form of the Pythagorean theorem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag was removed with an edit reason of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Removed hard-science tag, because this is in essence an elementary math problem with one definite answer, so it is not appropriate to ask for evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T13:57:22.983" Title="Is spatial trigonometry hard science?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|specific-tag|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-09T19:47:28.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag should not have been removed and I reverted the previous change.  My edit reason &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hard science asks for &lt;em&gt;equations&lt;/em&gt; or citations. In this case, it can be answered with equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will regard up-votes on this answer as votes for retaining the tag and down-votes as votes that this is not the reason.  If you think that this was the correct decision but the wrong reason, please post your own answer (or vote up an existing one if already created).  And if you disagree with the decision, either post your own answer or up-vote an existing one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T19:47:28.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-09T20:22:40.073" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tags specify the perspective the OP wants on the answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, editing out or in those tags is something that solely the OP can do. Any other user doing it is just messing around with someone's else post.&#xA;Nothing prevent to leave a comment asking the OP to reconsider the tag usage, but again, it's up to the OP, and OP only, to change those tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I think you did the right thing by rolling back the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the question was an elementary trigonometry problem has nothing to do with the tag to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-06-09T20:31:23.600" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T20:31:23.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-09T23:09:27.850" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;YES&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this instance!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag exists so that queries requiring number crunching in order to answer receive sufficiently adequate mathematical &amp;amp; scientific support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requires answers &lt;em&gt;backed up by equations&lt;/em&gt;, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query in question is a simple &amp;quot;how-to&amp;quot; question.  It belongs either in Astronomy or Mathematics, not Worldbuilding.  In so far as it remains in Worldbuilding, answers definitely do not require equations or citations in the way hard science queries require them.  It requires nothing more than an explanation as to how astronomers measure the distance between stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the hard science tag was entirely appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T03:30:06.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7362" CreationDate="2019-06-09T23:30:38.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the VsTC, I'll say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close the query based on differing questions or for any reason of physics.  The rationale given for closure is that the query is not about worldbuilding.  It is not about the fundamental nature or systems of a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with AlexP that different questions are being asked (this is another valid rationale for closure: WB.SE works on the &lt;em&gt;one focused question, one focused answer&lt;/em&gt; model) but this did not appear to be the consensus of the community.  Closure for not being about worldbuilding means that the given question is purely physics related. In other words, the &quot;planet slicer&quot; is a red herring making it appear to be vaguely connected to some fictional setting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality is, no matter how interesting the question is and no matter how eager we are to answer this kind of question, it really ought to have been asked on physics.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commentary:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because questions get a lot of votes doesn't mean it's a good question for this forum.  I'd argue that &quot;pure physics questions&quot;, whether asked by experienced or new members, ought to be closed if they don't meet worldbuilding criteria.  I enjoy a good physics question myself, but if there's nothing relating the concept of physics to its (potentially quite different!) application within a fictional world, then it has no place here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd care to link those questions within your own, we could take a look and see which ought to be closed and which ought to be left open.  Otherwise, WB.SE risks becoming nothing more than a dumping ground from the sciences &amp;amp; maths forums because they don't want to deal with random people asking questions that have a whiff of the sci-fi about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look at the one you did link to.  Indeed JBH is an experienced member (one whom I respect greatly).  But I have to say, the whole idea of there being a space ship, etc. is what I'd call a &quot;worldbuilding red herring&quot;.  Strip away the space ship and this question would be better placed in physics.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-06-15T02:08:18.627" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T02:08:18.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7362" CreationDate="2019-06-10T15:31:49.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I believed, and believe, the question should be closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consistency is very difficult in the real world.  It's no surprise that it's just as difficult (if not more so) in a virtual world.  That assumes this is a problem with consistency.  Perhaps it isn't.  Rules change over time.  I'll mention one momentarily.  But as a consequence, a question that was on-topic a year ago might no longer be on-topic.  I'll let others decide if my 1-year-old question might now deserve to be closed, but if it is as vaguely about world building as I believe the linked question to be, then it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While questions about transportation are common on this site and have been accepted as a legitimate world building context probably from the site's beginnings, a giant cutting disk isn't so obvious.  There are a lot of problems to be solved long before the speed of the outer edge of the wheel can be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cutting disks work because the force holding them in place is greater than the resistance met during the cutting process and the torque caused by the motor spinning the wheel.  Cutting a planet means using something akin to a moon (or an unbelievable set of rocket engines) to hold the disk while still using some engines to hold the moonish object in place and above the planet you're trying to cut.  Without the blessing of gravity holding the cutter-user's feet to the ground, the moon, no matter how massive, will begin to shift due to the forces of use &amp;mdash; and that doesn't even account for the problem of overcoming gravitic attraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, considering how many other problems involving physics the idea has, asking about the disk edge hitting the speed of light was, IMO, superfluous, and therefore seemed to me more an exercise in physics (&quot;if you hold a ladder against a wall and pull the bottom rung at a consistent velocity will the top of the ladder exceed the speed of light before hitting the floor?&quot;) than an actual world building effort (&quot;I'm designing a world with strong, highly-focused winds that has the capacity to push the ladder's bottom rung as described.&quot;)  Like I said, I couldn't see the world building application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While physics questions are common and popular on this site, this site is not dedicated to answering physics questions.  That's the job of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  Based on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;real-world question debate&lt;/a&gt; so-called &quot;pure physics questions&quot; are permissible if and only if they have a world building context.  This is important.  One of the primary concerns in that debate was that WorldBuilding.SE would become the dumping ground for everyone who couldn't get their question answered elsewhere or was simply too lazy to go elsewhere.  The requirement for a world building context was the solution to that particular issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I be convinced to reopen the question?  Sure I can!  In fact, I'm delighted to invite the OP to rewrite the question to make it better conform to the site's expectations.  At this point, I'd recommend posting the question in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; and asking for input from the community about how to recraft it to avoid closure.  Once the issues are addressed, edit the original question or ask a new one as needed/recommended by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But is there a bias against newer users?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I've seen.  I've had my own questions closed at far higher levels of reputation than those of the linked Q's OP.  Higher rep users are, not surprisingly, the one most active on the site and therefore the ones most likely to be involved in closing any question.  It's a bit like asking a policeman if he/she's biased against new city residents simply because he's lived there a long time.  No, he's just doing his job (most likely to vote) and the new resident hasn't yet figured out all the rules (most likely to not understand the rules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, I want to second Elemtilas' statement about popularity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had to make this point a number of times.  Popularity != suitability.  When most people cast a vote, it's on the emotional basis of &quot;I like this question!&quot; not the unemotional basis of &quot;this question meets all our rules and forwards everyone's understanding of world building.&quot;  When it comes to discussions about why any particular question is closed, its popularity is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, considering your concerns about consistency, the popularity serves only to underscore with three or more lines the simple fact that consistency is difficult to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T15:31:49.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-10T15:47:49.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It was and is irrelevant&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user is asking for the procedure / equation to calculate the distance between two stars while first knowing their locations relative to Earth.  The only way to answer the question is by providing that equation and teaching that knowledge — an answer that meets the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; mandate.  Therefore, it was (and is) irrelevant whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, the title to your post (&amp;quot;Is spatial trigonometry hard science?&amp;quot;) is click-bait.  That doesn't match the question in the body of your text, which is, &amp;quot;was the removal of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag appropriate in this case?&amp;quot;  Tsk-tsk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T15:47:49.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7362" CreationDate="2019-06-14T17:04:34.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to the site but not to StackExchange and the example I bring to you is this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146090/how-soon-can-the-first-stars-form&quot;&gt;How soon can the first stars form?&lt;/a&gt; I can see how someone may want to know roughly how soon theoretically stars could form in their universe and therefore how old the MOST ANCIENT Progenitor race could be, how much of a head start could they have had, could entire space faring empires have evolved and die before fish crawled out of the sea etc... That I have no problem with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the issue with this question that I have is, it appears to be asking you to do some very hard core maths and start formation calculations to support your hypothesis, this is not a question regarding world building. This is something that if you can support with evidence may be a proposal for an astrophysics PhD. Those are two vastly different things to my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/148241/if-you-had-a-giant-cutting-disc-60-miles-diameter-and-rotated-it-1000-rps-would/148283#148283&quot;&gt;If you had a giant cutting disc 60 miles diameter and rotated it 1000 rps, would the edge be traveling faster than light?&lt;/a&gt; is basically asking can I make a thing that can chop up planents, and if not what are the things I need to change diameter or rotations per min, to make me able to be able to chop up planets. Not requiring 10 pages of maths just a few back of the fag packet calculations on can they spin that fast and or chop up planets with a frisbee of doom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say there are inconsitent standards from what I have seen over the past week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T17:04:34.780" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-17T11:15:21.680" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of these types of questions get judged as too story based, and get closed rather quickly. However, there are a few gems that have lasted the test of time. These mythical diamonds in the rough have manged to outlast their competition and remain relevant to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would &quot;why would&quot; questions survive in the long term when others do not? How do you adjust them to fit the site's rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T09:45:05.187" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:05:51.160" Title="What makes for a good &quot;why would&quot; question that stays on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7392" CreationDate="2019-06-18T22:08:35.357" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was searching for something and wound back up on WB Stack, but in French.  My search terms found a bunch of mirror sites with similar formats but in different language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am suspecting I dreamed it because I can't find it again, or anything in my search history nor any mention of foreign language mirrors on the stack, except for something from 2016 saying &quot;we are not doing that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do there exist foreign versions of WB?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T20:07:06.250" Title="Foreign language mirrors" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7391" CreationDate="2019-06-19T20:07:06.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, WorldBuilding.SE is only available in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple sites on the StackExchange network that target a specific linguistic audience, but those are dedicated sites, not just simple copy-paste-and-let-Google-translate versions and they are only StackOverflow versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you click on the StackExchange logo in the upper right hand corner (the burger menu with the little speech-bubble-thingy at the bottom) you get a list of all sites on the network. If you scroll down you can see all sites that exist on the network. For example you will find the following sites: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pt.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Portuguese StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Spanish StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Russian StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Japanese StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are easily identified by looking at the links in the address bar of your browser when you visit them. They simply have two characters for their language before the &quot;.stackoverflow.com&quot; part: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- [Portuguese StackOverflow](https://pt.stackoverflow.com/)&#xA;- [Spanish StackOverflow](https://es.stackoverflow.com/)&#xA;- [Russian StackOverflow](https://ru.stackoverflow.com/)&#xA;- [Japanese StackOverflow](https://ja.stackoverflow.com/)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many other language &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; sites on the network, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;, but as you can see on their respective frontpages they often have English titles because people are trying to &lt;em&gt;learn&lt;/em&gt; the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WorldBuilding does not have any version in a different language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you saw is very likely a scraper - and there are lots of them. Some scammers copy the content from sites of the network, run it through Google Translator and then hope to make a quick buck with advertisement and probably some other scams once you accidentally click on said advertisement. I have also seen some that want you to pay to create an account, pay to see the accepted answer, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information you can look at the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/200177/352819&quot;&gt;&#xA;A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what you can do if you found such a site is to click on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;Contact link&lt;/a&gt; at the bottom of the page to contact the staff from StackExchange and tell them about it. They will most likely make sure that the site is taken down, but don't expect any big announcements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stuff happens so often, it's just business-as-usual for the people handling it and as far as I know they prefer to do this behind the scenes. They even have a category &quot;Stack Exchange content is being reproduced without attribution&quot; and adapt the form for you so that you just need to copy the link to the offending site and the corresponding site on the network and you are pretty much done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can legally copy stuff from StackExchange if you follow the attribution guidelines. Most of the time such simply Google-Translate-Scammers won't do that though. But you should still keep an eye out for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you contact the staff they will handle the case. The scraper will simply be gone after a couple days - and a couple more days later you will likely find another one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are wondering why this hasn't happened to you before: WorldBuilding is not the biggest target. There's far more content on StackOverflow and some of the other big sites like ServerFault and Superuser. Less hassle for the scammer - just make one fake design and get massive amounts of problems and solutions that people will look for and may potentially be willing to pay for. WorldBuilding problems tend to not be the type that you could lock up with a message that says &quot;Pay XYZ  to access this solution&quot; while answers telling you what to do with your compromised server / important deleted files may very well work for the unwary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T20:07:06.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-19T22:56:06.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would seem to observe that there is a distinction between information (in the sense of gathered and pre-analysed data) and mathematical logic. I concur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, as myself and a good proportion of the community here finished the eighth grade without failing to pick-up on that particular point of mathematics, the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; (the sort of thing one is used to dealing with at degree level or later) would seem condescending to those who perhaps had more &quot;cool&quot; things to do than pay attention in class and study Pythagoras' theorem - one of the most basic tenets of world mathematics.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would If we are asked: &lt;strong&gt;* &quot;What if a world is split in half - then how many worlds would there be? Because I don't know &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; be a valid question?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue would seem to be: Should we downgrade the quality of the requirements for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T02:18:58.313" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T02:18:58.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-06-20T13:57:22.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that the science is easy doesn't detract from its &quot;hardness&quot;. Nor does the fact that it may be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requires answers backed up by equations&lt;/strong&gt;, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Contrast with: science-based and reality-check tags. This tag should never be the only tag on a question because this tag frames how a question should be answered, not the topic. Review the tag info before using this tag, and flag your question for moderator attention once posted to have the hard-science notice added. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a hard question to back up with equations, whether it's off topic doesn't detract from the fact that a hard-science answer is fundamentally what you should be giving for a question like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T13:57:22.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-20T18:06:24.297" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brought up by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149313/how-to-build-the-cube-prison-from-cabin-in-the-woods?noredirect=1#comment467985_149313&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the Reality-Check and Hard-Science tags' descriptions aren't in implied agreement (at least, as I read them) on if they can be combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality-Check reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context. Answers&#xA;  should say yes or no, with supporting info. &lt;strong&gt;Compare this with the&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;science-based and hard-science tags. This tag should never be the only&#xA;  tag on a question,&lt;/strong&gt; because this tag frames how a question should be&#xA;  answered, not the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verses the hard-science:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requires answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence,&#xA;  scientific papers, other citations, etc. C&lt;strong&gt;ontrast with:&#xA;  science-based and reality-check tags.&lt;/strong&gt; This tag should never be the&#xA;  only tag on a question because this tag frames how a question should&#xA;  be answered, not the topic. Review the tag info before using this tag,&#xA;  and flag your question for moderator attention once posted to have the&#xA;  hard-science notice added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine, again)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this question has two points of discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these two tags mutually exclusive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the wording in these tags need to better clarify this? If so, how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:23:23.340" Title="Reality-Check and Hard-Science's descriptions; Shared or exclusive?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7395" CreationDate="2019-06-20T18:10:51.457" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These tags are not mutually exclusive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality-Check implies that you're putting forward an idea, and want the idea to be examined. A Reality-Check with a &quot;Hard-Science&quot; tag holds this &quot;reality check&quot; to a higher and different standard than simply &quot;Science-Based&quot; as per the tag's description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further a situation with, for example, magic in use, assuming it provided sufficient detail on how the magic worked, would benefit from neither of these two science tags, as it has &quot;a magical world&quot; as the &quot;given context.&quot; Alternatively still, a Reality-Check about a system of government wouldn't use alternative reality rules (like magic) but would be improperly described by either Science-Based or Hard-Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Change of Tag Wording&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context. Answers&#xA;  should say yes or no, with supporting info. &lt;strong&gt;Compare this with the&#xA;  science-based and hard-science tags, and consider combining these&#xA;  tags, if appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requires answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence,&#xA;  scientific papers, other citations, etc. &lt;strong&gt;Contrast with the&#xA;  science-based tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T18:10:51.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7395" CreationDate="2019-06-21T03:34:09.503" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say they are mutually exclusive. It's not about the question itself, but the restriction that the tags put on the answers and the conflict it creates. As a summary of the tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hard Science:&lt;/strong&gt;  answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reality Check:&lt;/strong&gt; Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context. Answers should say yes or no, with supporting info&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's just ignore any magic based questions. They will all automatically fail the [Hard-Science] tag because well.. there isn't exactly Hard Science behind magic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So looking at some of the more popular question with both tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23313/stealth-in-space-how-realistic-is-it&quot;&gt;Stealth in Space: How realistic is it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under the Hard-Science tag, the answer is No, you can't stealth. You have no way to prevent the detection of certain aspects of the spaceship.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under a reality check tag, the answer would be Yes. It's plausible and present in other worlds, e.g. Star Trek (I'm sure there's more since stealth tech is a huge part of some games )&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47410/could-humans-alter-the-moons-orbit-significantly-with-current-technology&quot;&gt;Could humans alter the moon&amp;#39;s orbit significantly with current technology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the Hard-Science tag, the answer is again No. Way too much energy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under a Reality Check tag, the answer would be Yes, it's plausible. Again I'm pointing to commercial worlds like Despicable Me or Bruce Almighty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73842/how-quickly-can-i-form-a-mountain-chain&quot;&gt;How quickly can I form a mountain chain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the Hard-Science Tag, the answer is Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the Reality Check Tag, the answer is Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Each of these questions, the Hard-Science Tag quickly overrides the Reality Check Tag. Is a concept realistic? Sure, but then you need to back your answer with equations, evidence or papers, so instead of a quick reality check, your now creating a Hard-Science answer because of the much stricter conditions the tag places on answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So any answer that are [Hard-Science] are also [Reality-Check], but not all [Reality-Check] answers are [Hard-Science]. In fact, if you want to combine different parts of [Hard-Science] it makes more sense to go with [Science-Based] because you could apply two conflicting scientific principles and it would still be valid answer under [Science-Based] but not under [Hard-Science].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary: [Hard-Science] restrictions override [Reality-Check] restrictions so answers have to confirm to the [Hard-Science] tag making the [Reality-Check] tag redundant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45212" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T22:48:15.983" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T22:48:15.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7364" CreationDate="2019-06-22T18:35:36.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take an extreme example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: What grows in my garden?&#xA;Answer: Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, peppers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2: What goes into a salad?&#xA;Answer: Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, peppers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you VTC Q2 because Q1 has answers that fit? I think we can see that the question itself is important in relation to the answers, not just the answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1 can also have these answers: daffodils, spruce trees, cacti; &#xA;Q2 can be answered with olive oil, salt, vinegar. So not all answers from Q1 fit Q2 and not all answers that fit Q2 would fit Q1. Some basic answers might fit both, but a comprehensive answer would only fit one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the important point is whether the OP gets the answer to the question that he's looking for, not whether the question can somehow roughly sort of be matched with another answer where some of the answers might possibly fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;There are essentially two kinds of questions in Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This SE is kind of special because it can and regularly does have questions that can have multiple valid answers, but the OP may or may not accept any of them as suitable. Worldbuilding is a creative process and many people come here to get ideas or inspiration, so there may not be a right or wrong answer and many answers are desirable, as they make it more likely that not only the OP but anyone else interested in the question gets ideas that are just right for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I propose should be done with these is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a possible duplicate is found, it should be shown to the OP, so he could look through the answers there. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If he finds a good answer to his question, his question can be closed as duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If he doesn't think any of the answers suit him, find out why he thinks that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does he (a) think they answer his question, but he doesn't find any of them&#xA;acceptable and hopes someone will come up with something else? Or&#xA;does he (b) think the answers are off-topic and don't quite fit his&#xA;question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case that it's (a), especially if the original question only had a couple questions and one was quickly chosen as correct, that question could be reopened, a note added to it to explain that more answers are desired, perhaps a bounty placed. Q2 would be closed as duplicate and linked to the original where hopefully more answers will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case that it's (b), the OP should be permitted to reopen the question after specifying a constraint to get answers necessarily different from Q1. I.e., &lt;em&gt;What goes into a salad (and doesn't grow in my garden)?&lt;/em&gt; Or just making his question more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions can look similar on the surface and the answers might seem suitable to others, but not to OP because the intent is very different. For example, two questions about body augmentation. The original seemingly has plenty of answers that would fit, but the intent is different. In the original all the answers are about implants/cybernetics, but OP is actually looking for genetic augmentation. Or the answers are at the wrong technological level. Adding more details to his question will allow him to get the answers he wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are very specific to the world being built by the OP, they tend to start out simple, but would get lots of comments, many clarifications of the question and many corrections to the answer(s) to get very specific details for that world that wouldn't be relevant for the Q2 world at all, even if on the surface they look very similar. Planetary arrangement questions, for example. They might both be trying to figure out a particular arrangement of planets, moons, stars, that seems the same at first glance but gets very specific with sizes, distances, periods that make it useful for that particular story. It wouldn't make sense to lump these together at all. Although these aren't directly as useful to the community, they still offer great ideas due to the detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the original question is already huge and old, with a dozen or more answers with plenty of votes and comments. Even if they are similar, trying to get more answers wouldn't really work, any additional new requests would just get lost in the sea of existing content. Maybe in such cases it may be allowed to open a new question and specify that you are looking for answers that aren't in the Q1. &lt;em&gt;What goes into a salad(excluding everything mentioned in Q1)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above doesn't apply to the other kind of questions. Questions that can only have one right answer. Science-based or reality check type questions, for example. Here the OP might not realize that the other answer applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental nature of these kinds of questions is different. Here he's asking something he doesn't know from people who are more knowledgeable than him and the right answer is already known to them even if OP doesn't pick it. He might not realize that some difference he sees between the original question and his might not matter and the answer is still the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't really a need for multiple answers saying the same thing or multiple questions asking the same thing in a slightly different way. Ideally the original question should have one or several high quality answers that generalize to many situations and all related questions should be marked as duplicates and point to it. As it happens in most other SEs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP disagrees that it's a duplicate, he can be sent to chat or sandbox to get it clarified so he can get the question closed or altered and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the question in the OP, I think that it's the first kind of question, its intention is to get ideas and inspiration. With the right constraints emphasized I think it's possible to only get completely different answers that wouldn't fit the original question at all. Even if on the surface they look similar, their intent is completely different, they are building very different worlds and stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still true that many answers can overlap and fit both, though. The original has 21 answers and many of them actually fit your question better than the original question (the time frame and tech level needed). And to me the answers look pretty exhaustive, it would be hard to come up with more ideas for either question that wouldn't be variations of some answer from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason you didn't find what you were looking for in the original answers, though. Or perhaps you didn't read all of them well. You explained that your constraints are different and the answers don't fit the question, but some actually do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should clarify why exactly the answers in the original don't work for you and if further constrains can be placed on your question to only get answers different from the original. If it's possible to do that and still get useful answers then I think it should be permitted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52286" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T18:35:36.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-24T00:31:26.277" Score="8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice, that yesterday I received 20 simultaneous downvotes across 10 of my questions, all in the same minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ITjb0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ITjb0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Simultaneous Downvotes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious what could have caused this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46264" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T15:00:52.363" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T15:00:52.363" Title="Mass simultaneous downvotes: What is the cause?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7399" CreationDate="2019-06-24T00:40:30.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done some digging with the mod tools, and I'm ~110% sure that you were a victim of serial downvoting. I've taken action in reponse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can't manually reverse the votes, but the system &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; invalidate them within 24 hours - probably less, given that's already been about 20 already, and the relevant automatic scripts run regularly. It's certainly enough to trigger an automatic reversal. We'll keep an eye on this; if you experience targeted downvoting again, let us know with a custom mod flag on one of your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T00:47:50.960" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T00:47:50.960" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7390" CreationDate="2019-06-25T19:05:51.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story &amp;mdash; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why would X?&quot; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7376/40609&quot;&gt;are considered on-topic&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but are also notoriously too broad, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;too story-based&lt;/a&gt;.  So, the rules for asking one are (IMO) as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You MUST be asking about your world, &lt;em&gt;not your story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding is about systems, rules, and their consistent application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Storybuilding is about circumstances, actions, and plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why&quot; is inherently seeking a justification or rationalization for &lt;em&gt;something,&lt;/em&gt; and 99.9% of the time that &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is a circumstance, action, or condition of the story's plot.  This is perhaps the biggest reason why &quot;Why would X?&quot; questions are so difficult to ask.  They're almost always asking for help overcoming writer's block (off-topic), not help building the rules and systems of a world (on-topic).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You MUST provide a LOT of limitations, conditions, and (most especially) &lt;em&gt;expectations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following question: &quot;Why would a fish swim upside down?&quot;  I can think of several answers: (a) it's dead, (b) it's been poisoned but isn't dead yet, (c) It was just hit on the head by a fisherman, who then lost his grip, (d) the sun feels good on its tummy, (e) it's been bewitched by Elizabeth Montgomery...  Unless you're trying to overcome writer's block (&quot;I'm stuck!  Just throw some ideas at me!&quot;), most of those questions are obviously inappropriate &amp;mdash; but because I did not provide an expected outcome, the respondents did not know that and threw everything under the sun at me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why would X?&quot; questions are always fishing-for-ideas questions.  We are &lt;em&gt;very restrictive&lt;/em&gt; about these kinds of questions because they break Stack Exchanges expectations for how their sites are used in a lot of ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unbounded or poorly bounded questions are asking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;, which is off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying boundaries by listing conditions, limitations, restrictions, and most importantly, &lt;em&gt;expectations, goals, and results&lt;/em&gt; make the question a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;, which is on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking for help with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7356/40609&quot;&gt;cultural worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; could be a common &quot;why would X?&quot; question, but you must be focusing on an organization (not people, there's a difference).  Frankly, cultural worldbuilding is very similar to developing a magic system.  You're creating rules and systems and investigating consequences (consistency of application) to stimulus.  Cultural worldbuilding questions (why would X?) must be asked in basically the same context.  Remember, you may be trying to write your story, but we don't do that here.  You need to ask in the context of developing a rule or system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be delighted for more people to contribute to the cultural worldbuilding meta question as it touches on this issue particularly.  When you ask &quot;why would X?&quot; the question &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be of a form that is legitimately answered, &quot;because you, the author, want it to.&quot;  That means including &lt;em&gt;reasons&lt;/em&gt; why &quot;I, the author, can't simply want it to&quot; along with expectations and goals so a best answer can be judged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange's fundamental design is to help people solve single, specific problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;SE is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;.  Unbounded &quot;why would X?&quot; questions are inviting discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; explains that questions &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be specific and answerable, &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; include context, &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; include restrictions/requirements, and should include research.  Most &quot;why would X?&quot; questions only provide context (and then wonder why they're closed).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These questions &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These questions &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6654&quot;&gt;open-ended&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to reiterate: &lt;em&gt;unbounded idea-fishing is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  Frankly, if a user can't reword the question to &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; being a &quot;why would X?&quot; question, then I would recommend always posting it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first.  It's easier to deal with there and it won't cause Stack Exchange's automatic user analysis to ding the user for a closed or downvoted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finally, it would be unfair to not note the basic caprice of this site.  When a question tickles people's fancy, they answer it whether or not the question is appropriate for the site.  If they don't like it, they downvote and/or close even when the question meets all the site rules.  This site enjoys a much higher level of caprice than any other SE site on which I participate. I've slapped (and continue slapping) a lot of hands, but in the end, it is what it is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;This might deserve reconsideration, considering how much trouble we're having with this type of question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;The Help Center uses the word &quot;requirements.&quot;  I prefer the words &quot;expectations&quot; and &quot;goals.&quot;  They all mean the same thing.  You can (a) tell us the situation and ask for help with the outcome/expectation/goal/requirement or (b) tell us the expected outcome... and we'll help with the situation, &lt;strong&gt;but you cannot ask for both.&lt;/strong&gt;  &quot;Why would X?&quot; questions should be providing the outcome/expectation/goal/requirement as it's obviously asking for help with the situation, but far too often they ask for both.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:05:51.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7395" CreationDate="2019-06-25T19:23:23.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am of the opinion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; are fundamentally unrelated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been the opinion that four tags are or should never be used together: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.  For some reason, people have thought that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is similar to the other three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; are &lt;em&gt;mutually exclusive.&lt;/em&gt;  Pick one.  Period.  This is because these tags identify the nature of the answer, not the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; identifies the nature of the question!  The OP should provide a complete scenario for WB users to analyze.  Ideally it's a &quot;yes, here's why&quot; or &quot;no, here's why&quot; situation, but most answers are &quot;I love this idea?  Think about this...&quot; answers.  All are useful.  But remember, the tag identified the nature of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You can't ask &quot;how&quot; or &quot;why&quot; or &quot;what&quot; or any other question and use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag.  The whole point of the tag is to analyze something in context of the rules of the OP's world to be sure it is consistent with those rules.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a long way of saying, Any one of the three &quot;science&quot; tags can be used (or not used at all) with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag.  I personally think the combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is useful as it demands responses prove their opinions in context with the appropriate set of rules.  Not only does that bind the respondents to use those rules, &lt;em&gt;it also binds the OP to provide them!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:23:23.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-25T19:41:17.403" Score="10" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/149536/40609&quot;&gt;How to play recorded music without electronics?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the course of time I have encountered questions where people other than the OP edited the question in an effort to resolve issues brought up in comments.  Too frequently, the editing effort (no matter how well intended) changes the intent (or assumes the intent) of the OP.  Regrettably, the OP is almost always absent or unable to respond for a full 24 hours or more.  It's amazing what can happen in that much time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;emsp;What is the difference between helpful editing and vandalism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In my opinion...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; states anybody (with adequate rep.) can edit...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (&lt;em&gt;without changing that meaning&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the problem is with #2.  I don't know if the issue is that people are impatient, or they want to favor one answer over another, or what their issue is, but from time to time, people jump in and &lt;em&gt;interpret&lt;/em&gt; the question on behalf of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has occurred with the linked question.  They haven't been illogical assumptions, but they were assumptions nonetheless.  But what they did was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put the question into the VTR queue when it should not have been.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obsoleted answers.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Made assumptions about the OP's intent that were not in evidence in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider this vandalism, others may consider it acceptable editing.  I'm seeking community consensus to better understand where the proverbial line should be drawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;There is an attitude among some on this site that no edit should ever obsolete answers.  There are times when that is false and against the basic design of Stack Exchange.  (A) If a question is sufficiently within the rules such that it needs no significant clarification (i.e., clarification requests will not obsolete answers), then it is unacceptable to change the question.  This is the case when an OP realizes the question they asked isn't what they intended.  (B) However, if a question is &lt;strong&gt;not ready to be answered&lt;/strong&gt; in that it is receiving multiple close votes or is obviously not prepared to be answered (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Answer Well-Asked Questions&quot; section), and you answered it, then you answered the question before it was ready.  Now you're paying the price by having your answer obsoleted.  That's unfortunate, but it should be a lesson reminding respondents that patience is a virtue and they are as responsible for helping the OP produce a good question before answering as everyone else.  (C) Finally, note that what is contrary to SE's design is asking the &quot;same&quot; question again, only it's &quot;right&quot; the second time.  That's justification for marking the second question a duplicate, because &lt;strong&gt;OPs are expected to edit their first question to make it right.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T22:07:05.947" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T04:32:15.737" Title="The difference between helpful editing and vandalism" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7403" CreationDate="2019-06-25T20:39:20.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assumptions are not inherently bad.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's face it; no question is ever going to be totally, completely, 100% specified with no possibility of any ambiguities at all. That's just not how natural language works. Despite being far more formal than almost anything anywhere on the Stack Exchange network, even detailed contracts, or law, need to be interpreted; that's why there are courts and lawyers. Computer code also needs to be interpreted; let's not get into undefined behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a general rule, it's up to OP to clarify their own question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &lt;em&gt;sufficiently unclear&lt;/em&gt; that it isn't possible to determine whether a given answer is a good answer to the question that is being asked, then &lt;strong&gt;the question should probably be put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; until it can be fixed. &quot;Unclear what you are asking&quot; is there as a close reason for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't rush to answer bad questions. Work with the user who posted the question to turn them into good questions &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, and only then answer. This goes double (or triple) for a creative site such as Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the intended meaning has been clarified, the community can help on how to &lt;em&gt;express&lt;/em&gt; that intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it's not uncommon to see people who are more used to forums to tag edits with &quot;edit 1&quot;, &quot;edit 2&quot; and so on. Working those into the question text and turning the question into a coherent whole rather than a set of edits is something I consider a good edit, &lt;em&gt;even if that edit needs to make large-scale changes to the text of the question&lt;/em&gt; to make the text flow properly. The same reasoning applies if OP posts clarifications in comments or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not up to the community to decide what the meaning and intent of the question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. We can't know that. We can only know what the user who posted the question tells us about their intent, which brings us back to the above. So any time you are making &lt;em&gt;assumptions&lt;/em&gt; about what the OP wants to know, again the way I see it, you're on very thin ice, no matter how nominally small the edit might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is that far from everyone on the site has English as their first language, or even write it very well. As a result, a question might come across as poorly written, &lt;em&gt;but still understandable&lt;/em&gt; by someone who puts some effort into figuring out what the question actually says. In such a situation, it's a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; edit if that person fixes up the language of the question to flow better, because it helps everyone; it helps OP get answers because more people are likely to put forth the effort to read through the question, and it helps people who read the question because they don't have to slog through a jumbled mess. (The same goes for answers, by the way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't sure what the intent is, then vote to put on hold as unclear, and post a comment that asks for clarification of whatever it is that you don't understand. On the flip side, if you come across a question in the close queue where such comments exist, don't blindly assume that your interpretation is necessarily the correct one. If enough people find the question to be unclear it ends up on hold, and if soon enough, it can be fixed without worrying about existing answers at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, always be nice about it. OP probably thought the question was clear enough to be answerable, or they likely wouldn't have posted it. (Exceptions do exist.) It's very easy to have a picture in your mind of what you want to know, but fail to convey some critical part of it. If you can't say it nicely when asking for clarification, then don't say it at all, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; (but definitely not exclusively) to a relatively new user. If you get frustrated, then find a way that works for you (any you) to deal with it. You wouldn't believe how many times I've written something up in a different window, thrown it away, and then written up something much nicer that gets posted for real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T20:39:20.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7407" CreationDate="2019-06-26T14:55:41.713" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;With two recent questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149662/how-quiet-can-a-static-non-propulsive-pulsejet-be&quot;&gt;How quiet can a static, non-propulsive pulsejet be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149558/what-frequency-range-would-be-ideal-for-audible-communication-on-a-planet-with-a&quot;&gt;What frequency range would be ideal for audible communication on a planet with a thick atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found myself looking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acoustics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acoustics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acoustics&lt;/a&gt; tag with no luck.  Nothing comes up in the tags when I search for &quot;hear&quot; or &quot;sound&quot; either.  We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/senses&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;senses&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;senses&lt;/a&gt; tag, but that does not include the science of acoustics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/audio&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;audio&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;audio&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions asking about the creation of or propagation of sound.&#xA;  Questions about how creatures or beings vocalize should use the&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vocalizations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vocalizations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vocalizations&lt;/a&gt; tag. Questions about music should use the&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/music&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;music&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;music&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions asking about the creation and propagation of sound&#xA;  (compression waves) in any medium. Questions using this tag should be&#xA;  asking about general world rules such as the nature of sound in a&#xA;  specified atmosphere or the consequence of sound given a magical&#xA;  event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asking about how creatures or beings speak or vocalize&#xA;  should not use this tag, but should instead us the vocalizations tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asking about music should not use this tag, but should use&#xA;  the music tag instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it easier to find (only 4 questions before my retags), can we add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acoustics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acoustics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acoustics&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym?  I can't propose it because I don't have a score of 5+ for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/audio&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;audio&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;audio&lt;/a&gt; (and synonym proposals are nearly invisible anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T01:12:28.723" Title="Can acoustics be a synonym for audio?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7403" CreationDate="2019-06-26T15:32:02.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think vandalism is a strong word, cute as it is to label in this way.  It implies an intent to deface or ruin the original intent of the work (whether it be a stone wall or a Worldbuilding question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we have here are overly eager editors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of us can make mistakes when editing.  Sometimes even a single character can completely change the meaning of a word, which can then change the question (or answer, if that's where the edit is).  Sometimes someone's grasp of English grammar (and it's not always from a non-native speaker) is so bad that it's hard to know what s/he was trying to say.  I ask for clarification when I'm unclear on something major, but sometimes the problem is with a single sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're talking about is mostly beyond simple mistakes and misunderstandings of what the author was trying to say.  It rises to the level of putting words in their mouth, something that's okay in a collaborative document, but not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Stacks feel differently.  In Genealogy.SE, for example, I've had my posts edited by moderators no less, in ways that would never fly here.  In one answer, I listed various resources that the OP should try for more information about her/his ancestor.  For one I stated that I hadn't found that resource useful for my work but that s/he should try it.  Several edits (which I rolled back) changing my assessment of the resource to one that was effusively positive.  Their rationale was that all SE posts were collaborative and meant to be a resource for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is closer to yours: that authors have the right to say what they mean.  We can close or delete ones that don't work, and of course we can edit out anything offensive, but &lt;strong&gt;editors should not put words in someone else's mouth&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example is a clear case of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the distinction?  &lt;br&gt;Would the OP consider the edit to be an accurate version of her/his work?  Is it in the OP's voice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T15:32:02.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7405" CreationDate="2019-06-27T01:12:28.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was there I reviewed three other pending synonym proposals.  I approved &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aerodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aerodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flight&lt;/a&gt; and left the other two pending meta discussion.  They are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anthropology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anthropology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anthropology&lt;/a&gt; (8 questions) -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt; (504 questions): while the former encompasses the study of the latter, I don't know if that makes this a suitable synonym.  I haven't reviewed the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt; (89 questions) -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; (539 questions): I'm not a big fan of substring synonyms, especially &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt;-substring synonyms.  If &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt; didn't exist, anybody starting to type &quot;medieval&quot; would be directed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; -- problem solved!  Except that the tag got created and kept getting used, so something more complicated must be going on.  Further, I think we've had inconclusive meta discussions about whether &quot;medieval&quot; implicitly means Europe or if other cultures had medieval periods too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone wants to pursue either of these, please start a new meta question (ideally with some review of what's on those tags now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of substring synonyms, while I was in there I also &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroid&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroid&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroid&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroids&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shoes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shoes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shoes&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/footwear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;footwear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;footwear&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; tagged questions, so I deleted that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T01:12:28.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7403" CreationDate="2019-06-27T18:24:50.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I'm the one who brought the issue to your attention in the first place, I'll toss my penny-hapenny into the hat in reviewing the answers you've gotten:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Assumptions are in fact inherently bad&lt;/strong&gt;  -- You know the old bromide: &lt;em&gt;when we assume, we make an ass out of u and me&lt;/em&gt;.  The problem with a third party editing based on their own assumptions of the OP's intent is that the editor is not the OP and does not know the OP's intent.  That the OP wrote a confusing or poorly worded query is not anyone's problem and is never a cause to take on oneself.  If you don't like a confusing question, write your own less confusing question!  But never alter the substance of another's question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. The OP needs to edit their own question&lt;/strong&gt; -- I concur.  The query belongs to the OP and it's their sole responsibility to edit anything of substance within the query. I also concur that the community can help help with the expression of the OP's ideas. JBH lays out the limits of third party editing of queries.  This would fall under &amp;quot;clarifying the meaning&amp;quot;, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Is this vandalism?&lt;/strong&gt; -- I'm the one who said it (to be clear, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/149536/revisions&quot;&gt;the edits under Line 5&lt;/a&gt;) was vandalism, and I stand by that assessment.  The edits in question were made very early in the process, they did not accord with the OP's intent, they did not take into account answers already posted.  The result may have had good intentions, but was a fundamental change in the nature of the query. It was then and remains my opinion that such actions are acts of vandalism.  Refer to point 1.  If you don't like someone's query, go write your own.  Just don't make it a duplicate!  The ideal behaviour in this instance would have been for the Vandal to ask the OP for clarification.  If that clarification never comes, then there's nothing we can really do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as a matter of clarification, the Vandals have retracted their axes and torches, apologised for sacking the castle and everything is hunky-dory once more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. What's the right thing to do in this circumstance:&lt;/strong&gt; -- I think the best practice to engage in when any question is seen as confusing or poorly written is to take these steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, address the OP.  Ask for clarification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are obvious mechanical, grammatical, typographical or factual errors, edit those.  Sometimes a query makes more sense when it's been rendered into good English (pace homines non Anglos).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third, try to refrain from answering a query that is obviously unclear or has been put in the close queue for some reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fourth, once the OP clarifies their query, then proceed with answering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If vandalism (however cute or seemingly well intended) occurs, best practice is to do these things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alert the community: in a comment, either consult with one of the forum's Wise Heads or else state that you are going to roll back the incorrect edits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get the job done: Roll back the edits and make a clear notation in the rationale box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. Treatment of Poor, Abandoned, or Closed Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;  -- I've thought about this kind of editing for a long while.  There are many very old questions in this Stack that were closed years ago for whatever reason that could easily be edited and reopened.  They are abandoned and were never worked on by their OPs after being closed. The only problem, of course, is this idea of not vandalising another's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very old community worldbuilding project that has actually enshrined this as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://ib.frath.net/w/QSS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rule&lt;/a&gt;.  While I'm not suggesting we implement that Rule, it is a guiding principle I go by even here in WB.SE.  While abandoned (or seemingly abandoned) queries, such as the one in question, and of whatever vintage, and of whatever quality we may think of them seem to be fruit ripe for the picking, let us not forget that &lt;em&gt;we ourselves didn't ask the question&lt;/em&gt;.  It doesn't belong to us at all.  There is only so much we as community members can do to help a question along.  All the fundamental work belongs to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summation:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edits in question were indeed vandalism.  I consider myself in the right to have consulted with JBH on the matter.  I consider him in the right to have taken up my suggestion to revert the edits back to the OP's most recent revision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T04:32:15.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7410" CreationDate="2019-06-27T19:21:13.353" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be an issue with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7403/the-difference-between-helpful-editing-and-vandalism&quot;&gt;editing questions&lt;/a&gt;, not yet (as of the date of this question) settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another, perhaps buggy issue with question edits, the initial form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149536/how-to-play-music-during-post-apocalypse&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as too broad - I voted to put on-hold as such, I stand by this. Several edits were made, ultimately reverting to the original form that got put on hold as too-broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now open, it is too broad as per JBH's 3rd answer posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I try to vote to close it as too broad, I receive a &quot;you have already voted to close this question&quot; pop-up, I view this as inappropriate and not-helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Call me patsy, but does this seem like we need to change the system in a way that facilitates free expression, not arbitrary historic limits being imposed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T14:15:47.890" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T14:15:47.890" Title="A closed question that has recieved multiple edits, opened again, then reverted to its original state, why can't I vote to close it?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bug|vote-to-close|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7409" CreationDate="2019-06-27T19:30:58.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each user is allowed only one close and one reopen vote on any one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/149536/revisions&quot;&gt;You participated&lt;/a&gt; in the original closure of the question at revision 3, and the reopening at revision 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you have used up your close and reopen votes on that particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by design, and done at least in part to prevent close/reopen wars involving just a few users. Each close/reopen sequence needs either a diamond moderator, or a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; set of five users with sufficient reputation to cast close and reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cast close and reopen votes&lt;/em&gt; privilege description in the help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions can go through multiple close and reopen cycles, but each individual user may cast at most one close and one reopen vote per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T19:30:58.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7414" CreationDate="2019-07-02T07:46:56.253" Score="8" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;When there is a question which is not related to any existing fiction but the question asker's own creation. If they ask in search of some element X to include in their universe and list&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;criteria for X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then want to answer something along the lines of &amp;quot;In the &lt;em&gt;Space Hike&lt;/em&gt; universe X was included in this and that way and it obeyed the following rules&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;In the &lt;em&gt;Ruler of the Bracelets&lt;/em&gt; X worked but was based on Y&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general describe how the same (or similar) element works in an existing body of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good way of making sure the answer is good and on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2022-03-12T07:55:44.707" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T07:55:44.707" Title="How to make an answer using an existing work acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7413" CreationDate="2019-07-02T09:31:15.000" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the following two steps are needed to ensure the quality of the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide proper reference, detailing out the specifics of the case&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain why the referred example is applicable to the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A magical entity has created an artifact which contains and amplifies all the power of the entity and allows controlling the bearers of other artifacts related to the first one. How can I balance this feature with the possibility of destroying it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poor answer would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Lord of the Rings has a similar element, check it out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better answer would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/a&gt; Sauron has crafted a ring with similar features: it amplifies its powers and contains them. Moreover, it allows controlling the other rings and their bearers. However, to use the ring, Sauron has to wear it. That's what allows Frodo to take the Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. You can use a similar mechanism in your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T09:31:15.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7420" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:28:20.863" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last thursday I asked a question here on WB SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/150714/how-to-come-up-with-thoughtful-positive-negative-effect-combos-for-magic-items&quot;&gt;How to come up with thoughtful positive &amp;amp; negative effect combos for magic items?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it was put on hold/closed because it was considered &quot;too broad&quot;. A mod stated in the comments that there are many answers to my question and they are all opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After thinking a bit and reading about questions that are &quot;too broad&quot; I had two thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe questions asking for a method to generate ideas are always &quot;too broad&quot; (because there are always a lot of answers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe my question should have had a list of requirements the method/answer shall fulfill (to narrow down the spectrum of valid methods and allow one answer to be clearly the best).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please tell me if one of my thoughts is correct or if there is something else I'm missing here. If my first thought is correct I would like to see if there is a concrete rule I'm violating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can help me - I'm still learning how to use SE correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66412" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T11:48:08.313" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T11:48:08.313" Title="Is a question asking for a method to generate ideas generally considered &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|asking-questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7419" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:42:40.930" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe my question should have had a list of requirements the method/answer shall fulfill (to narrow down the spectrum of valid methods and allow one answer to be clearly the best).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of a question like &quot;&lt;em&gt;How can I go from Maastricht to Berlin?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many possible answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Walking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cycling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Driving/Taking a bus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking a train&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flying&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attached to a rocket on a ballistic trajectory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Digging an underground tunnel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being shot by a suitable trebuchet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &quot;right&quot; answer? Well, if you don't give the constraints, they might be all valid. If you start putting some requirements, some become invalid while others can be evaluated against each other. I.e. if you put the condition &quot;&lt;em&gt;the object undergoing the trip cannot be subject to more than 1 g acceleration&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, you are ruling out rockets and trebuchets for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrapping up: provide the requirements, constraints and metric to evaluate the answers. That normally narrows down the spectrum of answers and provide an evaluation metric removing arbitrary choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:42:40.930" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7426" CreationDate="2019-07-20T06:50:07.797" Score="18" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that tactics is now a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/warfare/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym of warfare&lt;/a&gt; instead of being a separate tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who spent 3 years involved in planning the tactics of warfare, 3+ years involved in determining the actual tactics of police operations, and more than 10 years involve in developing tactics for business operations - I cannot see the reasoning in including tactics and warfare as absolute synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before even moving into the ability to ask about tactics in areas outside of warfare I must point out that warfare strategy does not equal tactics. I have a full argument in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7205/is-the-elementary-evil-vs-you-wights-rooting-henrys-troops-out-ready-for-re/7213#7213&quot;&gt;a separate post&lt;/a&gt; but the main gist is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is a difference between operational planning, tactical planning, mission or course of action (COA) planning, and actual orders.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for questions involving warfare the more appropriate response would not be making this a synonym but adding the actual levels of planning (as tags) that organizations use. Or leave strategy &amp;amp; tactics separated (strategy is open-ended most of the time but that is a different conversation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add my argument, beyond warfare strategy, the tactics I had as a military police officer vs. as military member (Marine) in &lt;strong&gt;warfare&lt;/strong&gt; is just a gross miss-interpretation of tactics in a general sense - and yes, I still have orders from both instances and the variance is immense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can expand on length &amp;amp; with multiple examples if needed but a clear example could be &lt;em&gt;&quot;no warning shots&quot;&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;&quot;disabling shots are the first priority&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;close with and destroy with fire &amp;amp; close combat&quot;&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;&quot;disable &amp;amp; apprehend all suspects involved with incident&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would link to the discussion on this within meta but I cannot find a single one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I may come off a bit defensive about this but that comes from years and years of experience and the fact that my police actions using police tactics do not equate to my actions as a military member in combat&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T06:58:08.450" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T01:13:58.750" Title="Restore Tactics as a separate tag from warfare" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7423" CreationDate="2019-07-21T10:38:16.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if we need to have three distinct tags :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warfare&lt;/strong&gt; Meaning the politics of warfare, objectives and even the process of starting and ending a war (e.g. negotiations, diplomacy as it leads to and end war).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strategy&lt;/strong&gt; The art or skill of deploying resources to achieve a large scale goal, even an over victory.  Specifically excludes political considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tactics&lt;/strong&gt;  The art of deploying military and police resources on a small scale.  Specifically excludes military strategy and politics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These can/should be combined with these tags :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Military&lt;/strong&gt; referring to situations where a trained military is the main forces, or one of the keys ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policing&lt;/strong&gt; referring to situations where a trained police force is the main force of one of the key ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Politics&lt;/strong&gt; referring to issues related to political aspects of a scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no reason why both military and policing tags could not be used together (e.g police must defend against/attack military units or the politics of a specific policing tactic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely convinced by your argument that police tactics should bee seen as different from military tactics.  Modern military tactics do not exclude non-lethal policing style techniques.  Many countries now deploy military units in peace-keeping roles and not simply as a military force.  On the other hand police forces rarely need to employ large scale strategic thinking (outside of the logistics of scares resources).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To add my argument, beyond warfare strategy, the tactics I had as a military police officer vs. as military member (Marine) in warfare is just a gross miss-interpretation of tactics in a general sense - and yes, I still have orders from both instances and the variance is immense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is not an unreasonable statement, we're talking about a tag and proper combinations of tags are what is needed, not dedicated specific tags, which lead to &quot;tag bloat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2019-07-21T10:38:16.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7423" CreationDate="2019-07-21T17:42:25.260" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;: I deleted the synonym but didn't do anything about the 23 questions that were auto-retagged after the synonym was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both tactics and strategy apply to contexts beyond war -- police, corporate maneuvers, governments trying to bring about a particular end, &lt;em&gt;resisters&lt;/em&gt; trying to bring about a particular end... this synonym should not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've been able to discover, the tag was suggested and approved in December 2018.  All of the questions that originally had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; tag should get it back again when I delete the synonym.  However, the 23 questions where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; tag was remapped to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; because of the synonym will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; revert.  No retaggings happen when a synonym is broken (source: message from a CM in a mod-private channel).  So if we want to fix those 23 cases, someone's going to have to search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; questions asked or retagged since then and look to see if any should be retagged back to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt;.  (Questions asked since then can be found using search.  I don't know how to search for &lt;em&gt;retaggings&lt;/em&gt; in that timeframe on-site, though you could do it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt;.)  Or we could decide to just leave them alone and fix them as we come across them and notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll hold off on deleting this synonym to give people a chance to object, but if I don't see complaints and the voting is supportive, I'll delete it in a couple days.  There's a larger question of how/whether this cluster of tags should be restructured; I'm focusing on the smaller issue of this one IMO incorrect synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T01:13:58.750" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T01:13:58.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7428" CreationDate="2019-07-22T04:26:32.703" Score="14" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;So my wife and I were getting our wills done the other day and we were talking about password sharing. Obviously there are some mechanics when someone dies around shutting down email accounts, moving business and financial accounts into different names and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that I started to think about was my Stack Exchange account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a process by which someone can notify the community that a given user has died, can that community flag that user account accordingly, and perhaps even more importantly does it matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For older questions, the user's answer is likely to stay the same unless some new scientific information comes to hand, but certainly any active answers, against which comments are being received, would also have no updates applied against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can see that this could be seen as vacating the field so to speak, is it important for the community to know why this has happened, and how would it be flagged as such? To date, I've never seen an account with some form of deceased flag but I can see a case where this might be useful to a moderator when changes are being requested on a given question or answer and there is no further input from the OP, especially on older questions. It might trigger a different process for example if a user is not capable of responding, rather than merely inactive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the follow up question is that if there isn't such a mechanism, should we consider one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T23:26:04.767" Title="Can we flag users as deceased, and does it matter to the site?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2019-07-22T04:45:55.973" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you might have imagined, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/38742/274942&quot;&gt;this has been discussed before&lt;/a&gt;, on Meta Stack Exchange. I think I agree with the collective conclusions of that discussion, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's quite hard to verify that a person has actually died.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if the death can be verified, it's not always clear what the person would want done regarding their posts and account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a person's loved ones do know that the person wanted something done with their account and have the credentials to access it (and I'm talking about some sort of memorial in the About Me section), that's totally fine. I know of at least one case on the network where that happened for a prolific user who sadly passed away after being highly active on one particular community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add my own point, which is that folks leave communities or become inactive for periods of time for a variety of reasons: personal developments, changes in employment, boredom, or, yes, death. I think it's quite important that we not pry into why this happens&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, for reasons of privacy and decency. It's really not our business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that it might be helpful for us to know that a user isn't going to respond to comments or new answers. However, determining that is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; hard, and the only people who can make that clear are the person's loved ones, if they have access to the account. And even then - well, it seems to me that a death should not be publicly displayed. If you really want to see if a user is likely to respond to a poke, feel free to check the About Me field in their profile to see if they've been inactive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; . . . with the exception of inactivity of diamond moderators, for security reasons, and I think that that information should still be kept between the moderator and SE or the moderator and the mod team unless the moderator explicitly says otherwise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T04:45:55.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7427" CreationDate="2019-07-24T23:26:04.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Common Sense Approach&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your question focuses on your own situation as much as on the SE system, I'll offer my no-nonsense, common sense, I'm not a lawyer bit of advice (bill to be sent under separate cover) in that direction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The death of an online community member is one of those things most communities don't have plans for. And from the linked query, it looks like SE doesn't have any kind of definitive plan either (not that they should).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from our own individual perspectives, I think it would be a wise idea to get a handle on all of our online accounts --- those that you use frequently, like WB.SE!, as well as the throw-away accounts and one time used accounts.  I actually started and maintain a document with all those accounts I've had over the years.  Even after weeding out some dead accounts, I was still amazed to find more than 20 pages worth of odds and ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I die, someone's got to deal with all that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for your personal use, making such a document would probably not be a bad idea, and could probably be attached to your will as a codicil. (Since the document would have passwords and account logins, talk to your lawyer about how and where to store this addendum.)  Somewhere in your will, you'll probably want to name some kind of online power of attorney who, in accord with your surviving spouse or knowledgeable heir, will be empowered to deal with your various online presences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine that your SE account should be relatively easy to deal with.  I guess it's kind of up to you whether you want to leave a &amp;quot;Hey guys!  Just wanted to let you know that I died on the 14th instant, so, sorry!, won't be responding to comments henceforth! See you when we meet again!&amp;quot; kind of message on your profile.  You'd probably at the least want to empower your e-POA to open up your profile and click on &amp;quot;delete profile&amp;quot; to permanently close your account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think any of our deaths will &amp;quot;matter&amp;quot; to the community, in so far as it will unlikely even be aware that it's happened. I mean, I recognise maybe a dozen or so prolific members of this particular stack. If one disappeared, my first instinct probably would not be &amp;quot;oh, they must have died.&amp;quot;  Like HDE 226868♦ said, there are any number of non fatal reasons one might leave a community like this.  However, your own death clearly matters to you and your loved ones and I think you're smart to be proactive about what you write in places like this.  What you've written here, of course, is part of your intellectual property and you have the right to protect that, at the least by preventing someone else five, ten or twenty years later from hacking your abandoned account and posing as you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T23:26:04.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-26T05:01:26.707" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;travel&lt;/a&gt; with wiki guidance that reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the movement of people between locations, includes&#xA;  migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about the movement of people between&#xA;  locations. This includes questions about migration and similar styles&#xA;  of journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found when looking for a tag for migration, but it took me several tries, as nothing comes up when searching for &quot;migration.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a need for an additional tag, but it would be very helpful if &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/migration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;migration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;migration&lt;/a&gt; could be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;travel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have enough rep on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;travel&lt;/a&gt; to propose synonyms but, when I tried to do so, I got an error message saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Failed to propose synonym:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The suggested tag must exist in the system before suggesting it as a&#xA;  synonym!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the synonym comes to pass.  If possible, I'd love to get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/72/synonymizer&quot;&gt;Synonymizer badge&lt;/a&gt; in the process (yeah yeah, badge hunters).  Might this mean tagging a post with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/migration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;migration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;migration&lt;/a&gt; to create it and then proposing the synonym and hoping enough people see it and vote on it?  Crazy path...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T01:28:24.063" Title="Can migration be a synonym of travel?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7434" CreationDate="2019-07-26T05:15:50.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure that the two are synonyms, or, in other words, that they can always be used interchangeably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. (space) tourism could surely use a travel tag, but has nothing to do with migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is also what I infer from the tag wiki you quote: migration is a subset of travel. All migrations are travels, not all travels are migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T05:15:50.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7434" CreationDate="2019-07-29T01:28:24.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, I concur with &lt;em&gt;All migrations are travels, not all travels are migrations.&lt;/em&gt;  &quot;Migration&quot; presupposes that the trip is one-way and that one is bringing one's wealth, one's important papers, one's household and one's livelihood in an effort to transplant all that in the new location.  &quot;Travel&quot; doesn't presuppose that at all, and in fact usually indicates a there and back situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to create a migration tag, I wouldn't suggest synonymising it with travel and if alerted wouldn't vote for that for the reason stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all honesty, I'd actually question the need for a &quot;travel&quot; tag at all...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T01:28:24.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7445" CreationDate="2019-08-03T11:58:06.063" Score="27" ViewCount="731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some questions that just stand out as not belonging in WB (nor Stack Exchange, nor any other Q&amp;amp;A sites) and that have one characteristic in common: they seem to be coming from a (possibly young) men with low or no empathy for others, and whose world view was probably developed by watching animated pornography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time around it was someone who came to WB to ask where to find prostitutes. That was the whole question, and yet instead of voting to close, I saw people recommending to the OP that he should go through the tour and edit the question to be more in line with the construction of a fictional world. That one was deleted so I cannot find it in search, but I remember it only went downhill from where it started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6550/21222&quot;&gt;we just had to discuss whether making rape more demoralizing was cool?&lt;/a&gt; Oh how much fun we had... Not. That was the second time I think we took too long to nuke a question. The offending question had ten downvotes but not a single vote to close when I found it. It's almost as if we were collectively saying &quot;that's a nasty one, but I do want to see an answer to it yet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third time is the charm, so now we have a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/152186/21222&quot;&gt;whether a humanoid can thrive on semen&lt;/a&gt;. It has 10 downvotes but only a single VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come on, people. Check the edit history for the first form of the question. It was about how much sperm you need to feed a person. If you really want to take a detached, scientific view you are only a couple Google searches away from finding out. If you had decent biology classes at high school you probably don't even need that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to take a worldbuilding view, though, where you have a fantasy race that feeds on whatever, you might as well ask &quot;can elves feed on mana and how much do they need&quot;. Or &quot;can my pixies thrive on soma&quot;, or &quot;can unicorns survive on a diet of rainbows&quot;. It's your world, with your fictional creatures, so you tell us whether that works or not. So making the question in point more worldbuildy did not turn it into a viable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we just agree that these questions are not about building a world, so that we can properly close them when they pop around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T07:53:36.450" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T18:08:44.480" Title="Let's talk about sexploitation questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-04T01:14:03.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record I think you're right with the specific examples you've described and I'll admit to being part of the problem as I'm usually highly reticent to VTC; ironically I suspect I've cast more positive delete votes than I have close votes. This semen question is definitely one I'd VTD if it came up in my queue, almost without thinking, yet I'll openly admit I didn't VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more of an emotional constraint on my part than any other factor; I don't want to discourage new users whose only problem &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be that they don't really know how to frame or articulate what turns out to be a good question. It's been my experience on this site that there are a lot of good questions out there written by people who essentially don't know how to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AlexP in comments raises a very good point that I think touches on the heart of my reticence in this matter insofar as there are a lot of famous and high quality works out there that skirt the boundary of what many would even call decency and whether you like them or not, whether you approve of them or not, I'm a firm proponent of the freedom to make that choice as an individual and not be punished for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading your question though I suspect I've personally let my bias against the discouragement of those who don't know how to write up a good question carry me one bridge too far from common sense and I may have to revisit my reticence. That said, I'm faced with one final emotional barrier; &lt;strong&gt;who am I to judge&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suspect I'm not alone in wondering that. In any case, for my part, I suspect it's time for me to stop thinking of myself as a newcomer (I've been here for a bit over 18 months at time of writing, Aug '19) and accept that I may have a responsibility to put that amount of experience to good use in the voting queues. Certainly in the case of these more obvious examples at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T01:14:03.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-05T04:52:07.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First a minor note: Season 9 Episode 3 of &lt;em&gt;Orange is the New Black&lt;/em&gt; actually asks the same question that one asks - I was informed of this &lt;em&gt;by my wife&lt;/em&gt; so the: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they seem to be coming from a (possibly young) men with low or no empathy for others, and whose world view was probably developed by watching animated pornography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May not be as accurate as you would think and also unnecessary as we can easily just look at the quality of the question (it should have been closed) without assuming anything about the askers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why didn't I flag it? To allow for edits:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why didn't I flag it (not quite to close votes but I think this reasoning still applies): The question stated the asker was an English Language Learner and there were comments asking for clarification. Now, as I've had a few flags declined, I waited to see if the OP was going to listen to the advice of the commentators. &lt;em&gt;Not because I thought the question could be saved or that this was a language issue as much as to&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116764/flag-declined-after-an-edit-how-can-we-fix-this&quot;&gt;avoid having the edits right after I flagged it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as of my 5 declined flags - 2 had edits after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it - by the time I came back it was deleted already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do I agree these should be &quot;not about worldbuilding by default&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness: I would have flagged it as &lt;strong&gt;too opinion based&lt;/strong&gt; as the answer was (at the time) &quot;magic&quot; with no criteria for what a good answer should be. I also felt it had &lt;em&gt;nothing to do with world-building&lt;/em&gt; but those flags seem to be disputed more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, I don't agree we should make a blanket policy in this area as &quot;not about world building&quot;&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; but I do agree that it would have applied to this question &amp;amp; with the need to be strict when evaluating if a question is about WB combined with applying that close reason more often in general. I think if we did this - we wouldn't need a separate policy for this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1: I agree with the need for sexual assault questions to just be &quot;not allowed&quot; there are some things that though worldbuilding are just not a good fit for this site/network.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T19:35:50.020" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T19:35:50.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-06T07:46:47.483" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should take the same approach as with torture questions and I think I'll just copy from my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6551/28789&quot;&gt;the discussion you linked&lt;/a&gt; (see the original for further links): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;In general, I don't have a problem with them since most of the time, &lt;strong&gt;those questions are posed in a clinical voice, much like a doctor might describe injuries from a horrific automobile accident&lt;/strong&gt;. Yes, people died or were severely injured but there's not glorification of their injuries/deaths. There's no judgement call of whether their deaths were a good, bad, glorious, inglorious thing to happen. It just happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd have considerable problems with a question that wasn't in that clinical voice&lt;/strong&gt; and just downvote them or ignore the question. But I don't think there should be a blanket ban on violent questions. (If there were, a great many of the best questions (IMO) would be removed from the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I disagree that we should ignore the questions that are not posed in a clinical voice in such a case. Having it stick on the site sends the message that we want more such questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first version of the question you linked to was gratuitous. That was not a clinical voice and there was no effort shown that this person had actually tried to find an answer to their question before coming here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag it as &quot;rude / abusive&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's abusing the site's guidelines about being in a clinical tone. Just look at the abbreviations used. It doesn't show any effort and the first version was &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; far from the quality we expect of questions on the main site. It's unrealistic to assume that could have been edited into acceptable shape. No, the final version was not acceptable. Even after a mod changed a few of the words and there was additional information it was still very low quality. If you are asking such questions you need to be extra careful. Such topics can be very sensitive and I expect everyone talking about this stuff to be extra careful, just like with the torture stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, because this came up in the comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2193/28789&quot;&gt;should we add a NSFW tag?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2194/28789&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, &lt;em&gt;no,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;no,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2172/29&quot; title=&quot;&amp;#39;Alien did it&amp;#39; tag?&quot;&gt;Not until you can, &lt;em&gt;at the very least,&lt;/em&gt; say &lt;strong&gt;I am an expert in not-safe-for-work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to have an extra corner for NSFW stuff. This means that you should expect everyone could read it or at least have it in their &quot;new questions&quot; feed. Personally I would use a guideline like the following to determine whether something crosses any line: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to show your co-workers or friends this awesome site you found about creative work in regards to worldbuilding and you open the site and are ashamed by what your coworkers and friends now think you are doing in your free time - then it crosses the line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should make sure to remove stuff like that from the view of the general public. Just look at all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373422/is-editing-code-in-posts-to-remove-gender-frowned-upon/387964#comment717825_387964&quot;&gt;problems over on other sites like StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; because of the gendered word &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/23659540&quot;&gt;&quot;guy&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Do you really want to see the problems that would arise from something like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not a place to post your half-sentence no-effort sex fantasies for everyone to discuss. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole discussion is not about a blanket ban on a topic. It's about a very low quality question about a potentially sensitive topic that is displayed with complete disregard for the problems that such a question could pose for others and with complete disregard for the time and effort that other people are supposed to spend on trying to answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remove such stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing lost by deleting such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The querent can just ask a new question, potentially after checking out the Sandbox with a draft. Not every question is holy and we don't need to give everyone a week before acting on stuff just because there is a slim chance that someone who doesn't care enough about quality to capitalize a single word could potentially make it an awesome question if given the time. They had their chance and can simply ask a new question. It's a long way to a question ban, nothing to be afraid of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the line may not be as clear as with the linked torture stuff, but still: there's a line to be drawn. Flag it as rude / abusive, see if the mods have the same opinion and move on. Hopefully a couple other members will do the same and make sure it at least disappears from the general view fast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28789" LastEditorUserId="28789" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T15:34:50.633" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T15:34:50.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-10T22:01:30.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I d&lt;strong&gt;o NOT concur&lt;/strong&gt; that this type of questionable query inherently lacks worldbuilding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember: it wasn't so long ago that I got shot down for suggesting that straight math questions have no worldbuilding context and ought to be closed.  This is a straight biology / nutrition sciences question. If we have to accept plug in the numbers math questions and &quot;real world&quot; questions, then we need to accept at the less less questionable of this sort.  Consistency of rule application! After all, we've entertained the nutritional content of blood, so what's so wrong with semen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;DO concur&lt;/strong&gt; with closing &amp;amp;/o deleting such questions when they are poorly written, easily googleable or otherwise lack context. &quot;Where to find a prostitute&quot; = close.  &quot;In a society of asexual sophonts, how might visiting sexual beings be catered to&quot; = leave open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T22:01:30.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7450" CreationDate="2019-08-11T14:59:45.157" Score="-1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does SE show the users who help put your question on hold but does not show the users who helped reopen your question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems off to me not to give the reopeners equal credit. I would rather know who those users are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27786" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-08-11T16:29:23.607" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T16:48:31.560" Title="Why not show the people who reopened?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7448" CreationDate="2019-08-11T16:48:31.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, that information is readily available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because it was reasonably easy to find an example among them, I'm going to use one of your own questions as an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/124190/29&quot;&gt;Could mirrors be put in space to see ourselves in the past?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/124190/revisions&quot;&gt;the revision history&lt;/a&gt; for that question, you'll see that between revision 5 and 6, the question was closed as a duplicate by L.Dutch, and then after revision 12 (which is still current) about 44 hours later, it was reopened by yourself and four others, complete with usernames of and links to the profiles of the users involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The revision history is readily accessible for any post that has been edited at least once other than the initial edit grace period (which is (currently) five minutes from when it was originally posted; exceptions may apply). Just click the &quot;edited&quot; link below the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that haven't been edited, you can access the revision history by replacing &lt;code&gt;/questions/nnnn/whatever-the-title-is&lt;/code&gt; in the URL with &lt;code&gt;/posts/nnnn/revisions&lt;/code&gt;, where in both cases &lt;code&gt;nnnn&lt;/code&gt; is the question's post ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In neither case are any special privileges required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T16:48:31.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7455" CreationDate="2019-08-13T10:43:56.233" Score="9" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/152704/67090&quot;&gt;My first question&lt;/a&gt; on this site has been put on hold because I am &quot;asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world&quot;. I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/67090&quot;&gt;the linked explanation on meta&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't understand how what is said there relates to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question asks about the limitations of a fictional or future technology: &lt;strong&gt;If transplanting a brain would be possible in general, what makes it technologically impossible in some cases?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question is a part of how that world functions, and not dependent on any events taking place in that world. I therefore understand it to be about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please explain to me how my question is not about building a world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user67090" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T04:15:44.453" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T04:15:44.453" Title="Why is my question not about building a world?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7452" CreationDate="2019-08-13T10:59:39.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not among those who voted to close the question. However I see that you ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this narrative necessity creates a plot hole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the brain was intact (so that the personality and their memories could be 'read out') and transplantation to a new body would have been possible, why did the physicians decide to implant an artificial brain instead of transplanting the original?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In our real world brain transplant is yet to come&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your world this is possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, it follows that, whatever explanation we can come up, it is just about your plot, not about the rules of your world. As such the question is story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T10:59:39.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7452" CreationDate="2019-08-13T12:46:22.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Technobabble is part of the creative process&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking the community to write the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technobabble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;technobabble&lt;/a&gt; for you. This is problematic, for two reasons. First, most of the participants on this site do not like the idea of supplying artistic creativity; among others, all user contributions to this site are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; (that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt;) license, which means that should you use such artistically creative snippets in your work you would have to give credit to the original author. Second, it allows an infinite set of possible answers, and the general rule of Stack Exchange is that questions should be crafted in such a way as to make it possible to select &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider the following possible approaches, which, I would say, are quite obvious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may choose to avoid the technobabble entirely. Just say that while the brains of the vast majority of persons are transplantable, there is a significant minority of people whose brains are not transplantable. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Weber&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Honorverse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; they have regeneration technology, so that any wound which is not immediately fatal can be repaired perfectly; however, a minority of people do not regen, and this is quite important for the plot, because two important characters belong to this minority. We are not told how regeneration works, we are not told why it doesn't work for some unfortunate few: this is how it is and that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or you may go with elaborate technobabble, as they did in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discovery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. That such elaborate technobabble is clearly part of the artistically creative process is proven by the passing of several stock phrases from science-fiction shows into common speech, for example, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/69323/star-trek-episode-referring-to-reversing-the-polarity-of-the-neutron-flow&quot;&gt;reversing the polarity&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;flux capacitor&quot; or &quot;Heisenberg compensator&quot;. Some technobabble ideas have even become genericized, and are used freely in science fiction; for example, inertial compensators or tractor beams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mindless &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;surrealist automatism&lt;/a&gt;: as any neurotransplantician, brain transplant in subjects which carry a double Polyarnoff mutation of their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hox-3 gene&lt;/a&gt; presents unsurmontable risks of severe personality alteration; brain transplants plain don't work in subjects which present multichiral &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;isoglutamate&lt;/a&gt; receptors in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_plasticity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modifiable synapses&lt;/a&gt;; post-transplant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_wave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theta wave&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_(signal)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ringing&lt;/a&gt; occurs in subjects which had received ultra&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mielinisation&lt;/a&gt; enhacements in their youth (fairly common with members of the Fast Reaction Forces); a small but significant minority of subjects present unusually well-developed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex#Association_areas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;association cortexes&lt;/a&gt; which simply cannot be kept alive long enough during the transplant procedure; and I could continue for quite some time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or else you could go for over-the-top technobabble, approaching myth making; in my mind, the silliest example is the space travel by means of magic mushrooms featured in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek: Discovery&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe the lineal descendants of Odin are blessed with hyperintelligence, allowing them to forsee the immediate actions of any person in their immediate vicinity, but on the other hand their brains have a built-in anti-tamper mechanism which detects attempts at transplant and shuts down cerebral functions; meybe there is an unbreakable taboo against transplanting the brains of Vermillion Prize laureates; maybe it is known that each brain transplant decreases emotional intelligence by 5 to 10 percentage points, and the characters is already a borderline sociopath; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or you can go with plain in-universe explanations; maybe there was no suitable brainless body immediately available, and brains can be kept alive for no more that two hours; maybe the surgeon scheduled to perform the transplant slipped on a banana peel and no other qualified surgeon was available in the allowed timeframe; maybe there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purge of neurosurgeons&lt;/a&gt; and the characters happened to need the transplant before new surgeons could be vetted for their political reliability. Etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how could you (or the community) possibly choose between the answers? We do not know how brain transplant works, so it would be unreasonable to expect serious failure mode analysis. We don't know the rules, so we cannot be exepected to indicate the best and most capacious loophole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a conclusion: yes, obviously, the question is story-based, and, as such, it cannot be answered within the conventional boundaries of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T12:46:22.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7452" CreationDate="2019-08-13T14:16:16.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote one way or the other on your original query, but in reading it, I would likely have voted to close for being story based.  This is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You mention the centrality of narrative no fewer than four times in your question. In fact, you introduce your question &lt;em&gt;In the near future Science Fiction novel I am writing&lt;/em&gt;; which is followed up by &lt;em&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;plot hole&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;In my story&lt;/em&gt;.  These phrases indicate to us that you're having a writing difficulty of some kind rather than a worldbuilding issue per se. Especially narrative necessity: when you admit to that, you are very squarely focusing your question on matters of plot rather than nature of the world itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB.SE doesn't accept queries about plot holes or how to arrange the narrative elements or a story. Nor does it help people with issues of narrative necessity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our purpose is to help worldbuilders, and even (would-be) authors such as yourself!, with the &lt;strong&gt;fundamental systems and functionality&lt;/strong&gt; of their worlds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read your query, you've already got a good hold on point 3, so there's really nothing for us to answer. Also, for points 1 &amp;amp; 2, you've already answered yourself to my satisfaction: &lt;em&gt;in this instance, there must have been some kind of fatal error (some kind of trauma perhaps) that would preclude implantation of the original brain&lt;/em&gt;. I don't see any point in going further along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what can be done about this situation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the main thing is to edit your question so that it is no longer about the story you're writing.  You mention medical, technical, ethical issues in passing as potential lines of enquiry and you tagged your question &quot;science based&quot;. I think if you were to remove all mention of your story as irrelevant (we assume that people either make invented worlds for fun or they make them in which to set stories); leave in the background data on what's possible in your world; and then focus on what the real problem is, you'll have at least one and perhaps two related but much more SE friendly queries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The medical morality &amp;amp; ethics line of enquiry would be fascinating to explore in an answer.  Medical technical issues would also be quite interesting. Plus I can show pictures of damaged brains and surgeries. ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T14:16:16.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-13T19:13:21.480" Score="8" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/152704/2113&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  I'll quote a passage:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This step requires medical technology that would also allow to transplant a human brain, because if a computer can be connected to the nervous system of a human body, then a human brain can be connected to the nervous system of a human body with the &lt;strong&gt;same procedure&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine) and later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I need a medical or technical solution to this logical contradiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some claims that the question was actually asking something different, that we should assume that brain transplants are possible and can be done in any circumstance where the brain is intact enough to download.  At best though, that is indeterminate.  We have these passages that clearly indicate that the asker thought that a brain transplant was just as easy as the artificial implant.  That the two require the same procedure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best, this is confusing.  But confusing should not be read narrowly according to a reader's interpretation.  I answered the question as per my interpretation.  If my interpretation is incorrect, then the asker should fix the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read the question, I see it as &quot;Because we can implant artificial brains, we must have the ability to transplant brains.  But if we can transplant a brain, why didn't we just do that?&quot;  Many are taking &quot;we must have the ability to transplant brains&quot; as a premise.  But I don't read it that way.  I read it as a consequence of the premise that &quot;we can implant artificial brains&quot;.  But as I explain, it is not a required consequence.  It is quite possible that an artificial brain implant be possible but a natural brain transplant not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/152711/2113&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that it is not necessarily true that a brain can be transplanted if an artificial brain can be implanted.  It is strictly more difficult to transplant a brain than to implant one (my answer explains why this is so and doesn't need to be repeated here; I ignore the problems with creating an artificial brain and downloading to it).  So there is no logical contradiction.  Implanting an artificial brain is possible; transplanting via that same procedure is not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be viewed either as a frame challenge to the premise that an implant being possible necessarily means that a transplant is possible or as additional information.  Either view is possible, and either way, it answers the scenario in the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't matter as rightness/wrongness is not a matter for deletion.  But there seems to be some confusion about what I'm claiming.  I'm not claiming that it is impossible to reattach blood vessels.  I'm claiming that it is impossible to keep the brain alive while disconnecting and reattaching blood vessels.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical transplant cuts the blood vessels (and all other connections to the body) of the organ or body part.  Then the organ or body part is put in a sterile container inside ice or other coolant.  Then it is transported some distance with a delay that may be hours.  Then it is attached to the new body, including blood vessels and nerves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That process fundamentally won't work with a brain.  A brain subjected to that treatment would be dead and destroyed.  A brain that loses blood flow (and oxygen) dies in minutes, not hours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I put in my original answer, the process needed would likely have to keep blood flowing almost continually.  This would likely require an artificial blood source that could be connected as the brain is removed from the original body and replaced as the brain is implanted in the new body.  And it's possible that we might figure out the nerve problems prior to figuring that out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2113" LastEditorUserId="2113" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T16:49:09.600" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T21:03:39.640" Title="Why was my answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7456" CreationDate="2019-08-13T19:46:40.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll take your &quot;B.S.&quot; and raise you Technological Superiority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise of the world in the query is that: transfers of data content of biological  brains to artificial on a relatively regular basis; and also implantations of artificial brains as well as transplantations of biological brains with relative ease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your frame challenge doesn't make sense given the scenario.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur: transplanting a brain would be a nightmare procedure with our current understanding and technical ability. But not for the reason you're thinking! Blood vessels aren't the problem --- that's routine reanastamosis which we do with any transplant, any coronary vessel bypass, any peripheral vessel bypass, any tissue flap inset procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's beyond us at present is the reconnexion of the brain stem to the host spinal cord.  If you leave the eyes behind, reconnecting the severed optic nerves will also pose a problem. Once we sort out spinal cord &amp;amp; optic nerve regeneration, I suspect an actual brain transplant could at least be on the distant horizon. (As an aside, they may just take the eyes as part of the brain, though there are other relatively easy to overcome issues by doing so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the OP's world, those technical hurdles have long been overcome! The question isn't asking whether or not brains can be transplanted but rather why in this narrative circumstance the usual procedure is not being done: i.e., why use an artificial brain when the patient's natural brain is intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is why your answer was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T20:02:54.017" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T20:02:54.017" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-15T07:15:59.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are downvoted rather than closed because they do meet the criteria for a worldbuilding question, they're just not the kind of question we want to see on the site.  There's a reason we say you can downvote for whatever reason you feel is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, while I think its reasonable to say there was a consensus that that's not the kind of question we want our brand name on, it was indeed about building a world, and it was at least as specific as the average question we answer here.  The two issues it ran into were that it was a rather more taboo topic than we typically respond to, and it wasn't well researched.  Requiring things to be well researched is a challenge on WorldBuilding, because there's so many times where it's just that you didn't know the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; Google keyword.  I know my personal line for VTC due to lack of research is when I cut and paste the title of the question into google and the answer is in the top 2 slots.  And I've been told that's too strict in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for taboos, I do believe that is where downvotes are expected to do their job.  I do believe the community was quite clear about their opinion about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T07:15:59.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7456" CreationDate="2019-08-15T12:13:35.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the moderator who deleted the answer that is the subject of the OP's post, my reasoning was this:  The answer had been flagged for being low quality, and the question treated brain transplants as an &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to my position as moderator,  I have a university degree majoring in human physiology.   The answer pointed out that connecting blood vessels would be more difficult than connecting neurons.  However, in a complete brain transfer, there would be only a few blood vessels that would need to be connected, since any sensible doctor would sever the blood supply at the point where the least amount of effort would be involved to reconnect them to the new body's circulatory system,  a task modern doctors should be capable of achieving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,  the main problem in a brain transplant would be mapping and connecting thousands upon thousands of severed axons &lt;em&gt;and ensuring that each brain-side axon connected to an appropriate body-side neuron.&lt;/em&gt;  We can't do that today even when the brain remains in its original body, so to be able to do that as a matter of routine in a transplant scenario means that medical technology has advanced considerably, and that the problem of reconnecting blood vessels would be laughably trivial in comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the post did not in my opinion answer the question,  nor did it pose a believable frame challenge,  I found the flags to be justified,  and hence deletion of the answer similarly justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T12:13:35.347" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7440" CreationDate="2019-08-17T18:08:44.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will there always be questions on this site that disgust/enrage/frustrate me down to my socks?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yup.  Let's talk about why....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free speech is a harsh mistress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free speech is a gift from God.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free speech exists because what one person finds offensive another won't, and maybe, just maybe, neither have the right to compel their opinion upon the other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free speech is a right all humanity should have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;But like all powerful aspects of our lives, free speech shouldn't be wantonly abused.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Real World Question&quot; debate is (from the point of view of Main) over.  This means no question is off-limits so long as its possible to construe its use in a fictional world.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... I believe it's entirely reasonable, even civil (&lt;em&gt;*gasp!*&lt;/em&gt;) to expect tact, decorum, and prudence.  After all, we do not permit invective.  But we also have a lot of (unbelievably amazing) PhDs and similar experts who haunt these halls and who, without doubt, can emotionally and spiritually handle colorful questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that we also have 8-year-olds.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, while I have a problem personally with trying to filter out questions that one person may consider offensive and another not, I have no problem at all with &lt;em&gt;closing the question instantaneously if it doesn't meet an expectation for quality set so high that just being told the altitude of the bar will give people a nosebleed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Help Center sets expectations for asking well-formed questions and not answering badly formed questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think we should hold people's feet to the fire in both instances when it comes to questions that might disgust, enrage, and frustrate.  We have a sandbox to new users ask better questions and I have no problem leaving a &quot;this question wasn't ready to be answered&quot; comment on answers that are trying to make quick rep rather than acting to help improve the site's quality by practicing &lt;em&gt;abstinence&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; when it comes to answering badly formed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we can't unilaterally close questions for the reasons expressed.  As soon as you do that, you set a precedent that allows &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question to be closed if &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt; feels it's in bad taste &amp;mdash; and that's very subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Granted, it would be ever so helpful if the OP actually explained how it would be useful in their fictional world.  Expecting this from new users is a bit of a stretch.  People who have asked 5-6 questions, though, should have their hands slapped.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;I couldn't care less if you're trying to make World Building &quot;office safe.&quot;  If you have to even think about that, you probably shouldn't be visiting World Building at your office in the first place.  My concern is children, who are not &quot;small adults&quot; and who are deserving of respect and consideration.  Call me old fashioned.  I loathe... LOATHE... &lt;strong&gt;LOATHE...&lt;/strong&gt; the upcoming movie &quot;Good Boys,&quot; but I'd pick up a gun to defend &lt;s&gt;the evil idiot's&lt;/s&gt; Gene Stupnitsky's right to make it.  And for the record, I could make fun of his name for years....  See bullet #1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Every possible pun involved with the use of that word intended.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T18:08:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7452" CreationDate="2019-08-17T18:15:36.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I did not vote to close, but I would have&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did the physicians decide...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;World building is about systems and rules.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Story building is about choices, actions, and plot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's technically true that you were looking for a systemic reason that would justify the physician's decision, but you did not provide anywhere near enough detail about the rules and systems of your world to let us extend those systems and rules to solve your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we were left with as simply helping you write your story (choices, actions, and plot), which is expressly forbidden in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is regrettably difficult for new users to learn how to separate &quot;help me build my world&quot; from &quot;help me tell my story.&quot;  They are, after all, interrelated.  But we all had to climb that mountain.  We are here to help you devise rules for your world that would physiologically limit the transference of a brain into a human body.  &lt;em&gt;We are not here to help you figure out how to justify the decision of your doctors.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T18:15:36.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T19:13:19.693" Score="11" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/153240/how-can-catholic-doctrine-justify-celibacy-if-the-world-has-a-co-creator&quot;&gt;How can catholic doctrine justify celibacy if the world has a co-creator?&lt;/a&gt; is currently on hold as primarily opinion-based, with a comment saying it's unclear.  What needs to happen for this question to be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is based on the Catholic church's requirement for celibacy.  A comment points out that &lt;em&gt;orthodox&lt;/em&gt; churches have no such requirement.  It sounds like the OP is assuming Roman Catholic, and if so that should be edited in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that could have been handled by a helpful edit (it does seem pretty clear that that's what the OP meant), so maybe there's something else wrong?  This is &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, so the fact that in &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; world the church doesn't acknowledge other gods isn't a problem -- the OP wants to have dual gods and retain the celibacy requirement for priests.  What's wrong with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T15:37:28.907" Title="Why is the celibacy question opinion-based (or unclear)?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7465" CreationDate="2019-08-19T00:57:48.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Naturally it's &quot;opinion based&quot;.  As I'm fond of saying, 12 out of 10 questions in this forum are opinion based!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That is not why I voted to close.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale for closing as being unclear is that I am not certain the OP understands what &quot;Catholic doctrine&quot; is or what it implies. Very few people are actually aware what the Catholic Church actually teaches on these matters (some are ignorant some are insulting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment in question was &lt;em&gt;I think you may not quite understand what &quot;Catholic doctrine&quot; actually is; therefore it's unclear what you're actually asking. Which kind of Catholic are you talking about (for starters)?&lt;/em&gt;  Which the OP has partially addressed by specifying the rite in question (Roman rather than, e.g. Maronite or Byzantine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, I remain uncertain if the OP means Roman Catholic priests &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; in the real world or Roman Catholic priests &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; in the fictional world. Same goes for the doctrines of the Church: are they the doctrines of &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; or of &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the rationales (&lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;) for celibacy (among Roman Rite priests) is not to avoid &quot;distraction&quot;. There are Roman Catholic priests who are married; there are non-Roman Catholic priests who are married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP needs to at the very least study and understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-cant-a-priest-ever-marry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual Roman Catholic doctrine&lt;/a&gt; before editing this question. Once these issues are cleared up, then we can look at the question of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would Catholic priests in this fictional world be expected to be celibate at all and perhaps also the question of whether Ashera~Yahweh are understood to be a married couple, are they understood to be gendered Beings (I don't know about Judiasm, but in Christianity God is understood to be without the concept of sex and gender, as those are phenomena of created beings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When all of these issues are straightened out, I'll be happy to vote to reopen!  Until then, the OP, as I said,  &lt;em&gt;doesn't know what he's talking about, and is just going to run himself into trouble.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T00:57:48.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7469" CreationDate="2019-08-23T16:56:00.363" Score="9" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I've been slowly working my way toward the Electorate badge, and have been paying extra attention to up- and down-voting on questions because of it. One place I found a bunch of good questions to upvote is in my own answers! Apparently I've been pretty terrible about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/446/questions-with-more-answers-than-upvotes&quot;&gt;upvoting questions that I've answered&lt;/a&gt; and would like to fix this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm nervous about going through and handing out ~100 upvotes because I'm not sure whether the system will &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3377/voting-irregularities/3379j&quot;&gt;flag it as an unusual pattern&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7399/mass-simultaneous-downvotes-what-is-the-cause/7400&quot;&gt;undo it, as it does with serial voting&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Is mass-upvoting in this case something to worry about, or can I go ahead and upvote away?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T17:18:59.863" Title="Upvoting while avoiding irregularities" Tags="|discussion|voting|badges|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7468" CreationDate="2019-08-23T17:18:59.863" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that what you have in mind is just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the system &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; look out for, though, is a large number of votes &lt;em&gt;given to the same user&lt;/em&gt;. Such voting can be reversed, either automatically or manually (by a Stack Exchange employee, after review).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have primarily answered questions by one or a few users, that shouldn't be a problem. The general rule is: vote for the content, not for the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're uncertain, just make sure to read through and vote on the other answers to those questions as well; that should put you well below the threshold for serial voting even if you do have a favorite user whose questions you always answer. There's even a silver badge to encourage such voting, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/63/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;Sportsmanship&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up vote 100 answers on questions where an answer of yours has a positive score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T17:18:59.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-24T20:03:02.730" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Cartaino has repeatedly closed proposals on Area51 with the argument that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5589/67090&quot;&gt;brainstorming questions don't fit the Stack Exchange model&lt;/a&gt;. Due to that policy, story based questions are off topic on this site and asking what to write is off topic on Writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another place on the internet where I can get help with solving plot problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I currently struggle with coming up with a plausible excuse that a detective surveiling a suspect might give for his presence when the suspect notices that the detective is following him around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a good site to ask such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only one where I can ask, but one where I will actually get useful answers. I looked at Reddit (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/brainstorming/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/CreativeConsulting/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/CreativeConsulting&lt;/a&gt;) but those sites are rather inactive and the answers of rather low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user67090" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T20:50:31.343" Title="Where (on the internet) can I get help brainstorming plot problems?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7471" CreationDate="2019-08-25T01:17:15.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another place on the internet where I can get help with solving plot problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;writing.se does accept questions regarding plot problems - and to be clear, it means they accept questions on &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; to write. &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plot&quot;&gt;They have a tag for it&lt;/a&gt;, and its description goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plot typically refers to the events and their ordering in a work of narrative fiction. Use this tag for questions regarding plotting, outlining, and narrative arc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what you want is not help with a plot problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently struggle with coming up with a plausible excuse that a detective surveiling a suspect might give for his presence when the suspect notices that the detective is following him around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a &amp;quot;plot problem&amp;quot;, that is writer block. And to solve it, you want someone to come up with a part of your story for you. There is a name for people who do it professionally: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ghost writers&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe that is the kind of help you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you must ask an open-ended question, the stack model will not help you because the whole point of Stack Exchange is to find the best answer for specific problems. And that is why it is so popular: the more specific the question and the answers are, the better we can rank answers by quality. People who have had the same problem in the question will find answers easily. But for questions with no right or wrong and which need a lot of post refinement after answers appear, filtering for good answers objectively  is not possible. You get stuck with the forum model of discussions and its characteristic level of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are still willing to sell your soul to the devil, the least horrible site where you can ask is Quora. Be warned that answers might be tangential, off-topic, vague, and they will not be cleared up. The people there accept questions like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;what is your favorite movie?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;how can I lead a happier life&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quora is just the purgatorium. Reddit is where hell starts for creative discussion. Not that Reddit is bad - it's just that it is heaven for a lot of things, but not for what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below hell there is the empty void that is Yahoo! Answers. It is filled with one liners, bad advice and trolls. You might as well try to catch fish at the top of the Everest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the most desperate place to ask are the chan boards. The most well known is 4chan. You will have a 99.99999% of chance of starting a name calling argument, and a 0.000005% chance of receiving a visit from the FBI (or equivalent in other countries) for pedophily when they post illegal content in your thread. You still have a 0.000005% of chance of getting a proper answer though. Last time I saw (in the 2000's) there was a board for requests, /r/, where you could ask for literally anything and a minority of the people there would try to reply to their best capacity. I have not checked (and won't check) to see if that letter still stands for &amp;quot;Requests&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T04:03:14.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7471" CreationDate="2019-08-25T20:50:31.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythicscribes.com/community/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mythic Scribes&lt;/a&gt;!  It's a fantasy writers' community. There is a Brain Storming forum, as well as numerous other long form discussion forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T20:50:31.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7477" CreationDate="2019-09-03T05:31:15.407" Score="8" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love seeing users edit their on hold/closed questions after getting some feedback about how to improve them, all the more so if in doing so they resolve the initial problem. However, it's not uncommon to introduce a new issue when that happens, especially if they're a new user to the site and haven't figured out exactly what the scope of the site is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are placed on-hold for a specific reason, but only reopened when all problems have been resolved. This is less-than-ideal because there's a potentially outdated banner beneath the question describing why the question is a poor fit, and that sticks around even after productive edits from the OP. A contrived example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question is posted to Main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we destroy the planet???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is clearly problematic for multiple reasons, but I personally would close this one as too-broad. The question is then edited to become:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which of these two world-destruction methods is cooler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this shows up in the reopen queue, the prompt is something like &quot;This question was initially closed as 'too-broad'. Has this problem been resolved?&quot; The question is no longer too-broad, but instead primarily opinion-based. I'd feel uncomfortable voting to reopen, but it's also no longer too-broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we deal with questions that are closed for one reason, edited, and then are a poor fit for the site for a new reason? Do we care?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T12:57:09.520" Title="How to deal with changing close-vote reasons" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7476" CreationDate="2019-09-03T05:43:05.563" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make thing worse, each user has a single close/reopen vote. Once it is cast, it's gone. &#xA;This rules out the possibility of reopening because no longer too broad and then closing because primarily opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What one can do is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't use the reopen vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leave a comment to the OP and other users, explaining the issue: the question was too broad, now the edit made it primarily opinion based, still a reason for being closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;address the user to the sandbox for improving the question there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cast the reopen vote only when the question is worth being reopened&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T12:57:09.520" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T12:57:09.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T18:30:15.517" Score="8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I'm building the grounds for a story, but I'm concerned with the specific legal arguments that would revolve a given hypothetical situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could ask a legal question on law.stackexchange, but I wouldn't see any sense on making it country-specific. Hence it would likely be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like answers that explain what readers would believe to be a realistic law system or particular adjudication, rather than nailing what would actually happen on a pre-determined real place. Obviously, I'm not seeking legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid having an open-ended questions, I could give a few scenarios like &quot;judge orders A or B&quot;, hence the objective question is under what argument would a judge elaborate such ruling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is such a question on-topic on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what the help center says, it seems like it doesn't, unless we consider it about &quot;culture&quot; (which I think is not). Also, because the world is meant to be a  little generic current time big city, is not like a lot of context makes sense for a reality check question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54617" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T09:06:31.463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T21:26:43.780" Title="Asking about legal scenarios" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7478" CreationDate="2019-09-03T19:15:26.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have questions about legal systems, so your question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic.  You'll need to be careful to provide enough information for people to answer somewhat objectively; opinion polls aren't a good fit for the format.  If you sufficiently specify the axioms of your question, we should be able to reason from those to new outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifying a whole legal system is likely to be a large project, but your system is probably based on something.  Perhaps you can describe your system as based on X but with variations A, B, and C.  If you can illustrate some of the practical differences of those variations up front, so much the better -- it shows that you've done some thinking about it already and A, B, and C &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; aren't mutually incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T19:15:26.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7478" CreationDate="2019-09-06T21:26:43.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's totally okay to ask a question on Law Stack Exchange without specifying a country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what you do need to specify is the legal system you're looking at: either you know the structure and want to know the kind of laws used to handle your issue there, or you know the laws handling your issue and want to know the kind of structure that would be using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18734" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T21:26:43.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7487" CreationDate="2019-09-09T02:51:03.770" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could there be, in the future, a Random Question link, kind of like in sites such as Wikipedia, which redirects users to a random question in Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, could there maybe be a shorter time limit between questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66891" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T01:59:01.680" Title="Two new features?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7485" CreationDate="2019-09-10T01:33:24.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could there be, in the future, a Random Question link, kind of like in sites such as Wikipedia, which redirects users to a random question in Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every question has a short link that has a number in it. You can generate your own random number and replace it in the link. I don't see how that could be useful for anyone though. If I wanted to find random questions rather than ones filtered by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freshness, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unanswered ones, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belonging to the tags I find interesting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd go to less reputable sites like Quora or Yahoo! Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, could there maybe be a shorter time limit between questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limit is there to avoid people making lots of low quality questions in a short time. Limiting the amount of what can be asked makes people put more effort into their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/164900/221728&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on the main stack exchange meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users with &amp;lt; 125 rep on the current site, [must wait for] 40 minutes since their last question anywhere on the network (This applies to the user's IP address, not their account. If the user shares that IP with other users, they can be limited by the other user asking a question anywhere on the network.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other per-site limits may apply; e.g. on Stack Overflow, new users can only ask once every 90 minutes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the limit is waived for users with 125+ reputation on a given site, questions posted on sites where one has 125+ reputation still count toward the rate limit for sites where one doesn't. For instance, if you ask a question on a site where you have 150 rep, you can't ask another question on a site where you have only 100 rep for the next 40 minutes; however, you can ask them in reverse order immediately (first on the 100-rep site, then on the 150-rep site).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users limited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234610&quot;&gt;Anti-Recidivism System&lt;/a&gt;, one question per week.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users limited from asking questions for 1 – 7 days based on the performance of their previous questions&#xA;  Users prevented from asking questions due to the quality filter: one question per 6 months, beginning 6 months after the ban began&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users with &amp;lt; 10k rep trip CAPTCHA* if more than once per 60 seconds, or within 5 seconds of starting new post&#xA;  Users with ≥ 10k rep trip CAPTCHA* if more than once per 30 seconds, or within 5 seconds of starting new post&#xA;  On Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault and Mathematics (not active on all other sites)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;maximum of 6 questions per day&#xA;  maximum of 50 questions per 30 days, on a rolling basis (50 questions in past 720 hours before current time).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T01:33:24.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7485" CreationDate="2019-09-10T01:59:01.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody already thought of the random question link and they built it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isimonbrown.co.uk/dicestack/?site=worldbuilding&amp;amp;min_score=10&amp;amp;tagged=&amp;amp;answer_status=any&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dicestack&lt;/a&gt; (also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/1643/dice-stack-find-a-random-question&quot;&gt;Stack apps page&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for question rate limits, that’s a completely different question but they’re in place to ensure that you don’t get yourself blocked (or rather more severely rare limited) due to too many downvoted/closed/deleted questions. The limits are pretty reasonable, since good questions usually take time to think of, write, then proofread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22818" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T01:59:01.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-13T12:33:18.810" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to ask a question related to a funny narrator anecdote similar to what you find in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though with some interaction with the main character. However, I'm not entirely sure if anecdotes like that are considered worldbuilding or storytelling. In case it's relevant, the anecdote is about a chef with germophobia who does not want to have any utensils or cooking wear or surfaces to contact the food he's preparing, not even when the guests are eating it, and who does everything with lasers for cutting and magnets for manipulating the food. The question I wanted to ask is what cooking techniques he wouldn't be able to use (although if this is too broad, let me know and I'll jump by in chat or the sandbox to see if I can get something with a narrower scope put together). Is this considered worldbuilding with regards to the scope of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T13:59:12.417" Title="Is background lore considered worldbuilding or storytelling?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7488" CreationDate="2019-09-13T13:59:12.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for clarifying before opening a question. You may also use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to see whether a question is fit for the site, and get help on how to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, there is not much about the building of a world there - you wish to discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6992/21222&quot;&gt;what a character would do&lt;/a&gt;, not how a world would work. That is story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a stack that is scoped towards writing stories. However, writing.SE helps users on questions related to &lt;em&gt;how to write&lt;/em&gt;, never &lt;em&gt;what to write&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you wish to refine a joke. While I collect comedy sci-fi and I would love to help, ultimately you are seeking for a creative solution for a scene. I do not think there is a site at Stack Exchange that can be of much help, but I do wish you think of something clever that you end up liking for your novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T13:59:12.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T05:54:10.837" Score="5" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little frustrated here, but my motive is to discuss issues, not inflame things. I gravitated to this site with the intent of helping people construct their worlds, likely by contributing my knowledge and expertise in areas they lacked, and to hopefully receive the same from others. However, since joining, I have noticed that (and this is not just concerning my questions) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) the general attitude of posters is condescending and largely unhelpful, with a decided bent toward a few people with a definite mental focus on pure science shutting down anyone who doesn't seem to be working on a real-world terraforming strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) the site's policies seem alright at first, but are biased against anyone with English as a second language and their strict and arbitrary enforcement shuts down anyone asking for help with any aspect of their world that is NOT raw numerical scientific in nature. Cultural insights, geographical knowledge, political structures, and many other vital portions of world/story building get no help at all and are shut down for being out of scope or too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) The over-the-top zeal with which peole seem to shoot down ideas makes me glad WB SE wasn't around to advise Roddenberry or Asimov, let alone Tolkien, or modern libraries probably wouldn't even HAVE a fiction section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, question would be a) am I somehow mistaken in this assessment? Or b) is there some way to at least partially rectify the above issues? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55386" LastEditorUserId="55386" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T07:03:39.083" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T23:16:10.763" Title="Taking some issues" Tags="|discussion|policy|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7492" CreationDate="2019-09-14T15:00:54.343" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't I crate new tags on Mobile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why isn't there a tag about pyrokinetics in over twenty thousand question. And I noticed lack of tags before that to. Like There isn't any tag about mobile site in the meta too.&#xA;I can't use some of the other features that are  in the desktop site too.&#xA;I am pretty sure this are problems with stackexchange itself. But I still think lack of tags is a fundamental and easy to solve problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And I know I can open desktop site in Mobile but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67270" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T02:36:14.653" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T00:09:02.343" Title="Lack of tags and mobile site problems" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2019-09-14T15:35:31.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To cover all three of your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No mobile tag &amp;amp; adding tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for no mobile tag on WB.SE is because this stack cannot do anything about the mobile app and therefore have limited questions about mobile (i.e. nobody has actually asked one and thereby created the tag). Though you can ask here, typically questions about mobile should be taken to the Main Meta for Stack Exchange unless they are a specific issue with the sub-site (for example: MathJax rendering on Math.SE would be asked on Math.SE's meta over the Main one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213606/allow-creating-new-tags-with-mobile-app?rq=1&quot;&gt;question on Meta about this exact issue&lt;/a&gt; so you may want to add a new answer there or create a bounty for more attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note: the mobile app is not well supported (Google even &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373307/what-happened-to-the-stack-overflow-app-for-android&quot;&gt;dropped the SO one due to lack of development&lt;/a&gt;) and the current answer by SE seems to be &quot;we're moving to responsive websites so we won't need an app&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Pyro tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would open a new question about that stating your case as currently I don't see a situation where we couldn't just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supernatural&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supernatural&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supernatural&lt;/a&gt;, or a science based tag (nano, bio, etc) depending on why the person has pyrokinesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll note, in that vein, that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pyrokinetics&quot;&gt;pyro tag&lt;/a&gt; you made on your question should just be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. It will also likely be deleted (automatically) if it is not used again within 6 months and - after a quick search - this is only the third or fourth questions dealing with pyrokinetics since the site started and the others all used magic, super-powers, or technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54517" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T00:09:02.343" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T00:09:02.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2019-09-14T16:30:43.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why is there no &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pyrokinetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pyrokinetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pyrokinetics&lt;/a&gt; tag?  Because it's not needed.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we had lots of questions on this topic, it would be reasonable to create a tag for it.  So far, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=pyrokinetics%20is%3Aq&quot;&gt;6 questions with the keyword pyrokinetics&lt;/a&gt; and at least 1 or 2 of them would not warrant the tag (as it isn't the focus of the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fire&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fire&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fire&lt;/a&gt;, which isn't the same, but has some similar elements.  And we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;.  Put those two together and you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pyrokinetics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pyrokinetics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pyrokinetics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please do not create new tags without discussing it here on Meta and getting a consensus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T16:30:43.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2019-09-14T16:49:39.037" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is harder to write good questions about culture, politics, and other qualitative issues, but there are plenty of them on WB.  As someone who has written 3 questions and seen two of them closed for being too broad (I edited one enough to reopen), I feel your pain.  But the problem isn't that the site is bad, but that its mission is more narrow than you or I might want.  This helps us too, because it weeds out a lot of the questions whose scope is too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen any bias against people who speak English as a second language, as long as they're able to adequately explain their question.  I often edit those questions to improve their English, and clear questions do get more upvotes.  But we are a truly international site and, though our discussion language is strictly English, we are made up of a truly linguistically and culturally diverse user population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, there are annoying people here.  And everywhere else.  There are people who ridicule questions or answers in ways that are not helpful.  For example, I got some of that for asking questions that involved child characters (why someone thinks it's useful to refer to my characters as &quot;snot-nosed brats&quot; and worse, I'll never know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also helpful people who make insightful or supportive comments and give terrific answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mission of having clear focused questions with ratable answers does indeed bias the site towards pure science and math, but take a look at the body of questions.  There is a big variety here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To formulate better questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;use the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.  I wish more people would read over proposed questions and comment, because it's common to get no response or just one person giving an opinion (and maybe getting caught up in a side issue).  But still, the advice there can be very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes a while to understand a new culture, and that's what WB is.  Stick around, read a lot, answer some questions, and you'll feel more comfortable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54137" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T16:49:39.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2019-09-17T23:16:10.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be frank about it, yes. There are a certain cohort of people on this site that have their heads so far up their tails they're at risk of recursion. Yes, there are some generally self-righteous commentators who pull apart an answer or question they don't properly understand and seem to troll the site more than provide any real value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in all fairness, that is also a reasonably accurate description of my workplace. Perhaps even my extended family. Despite this, I have remained on the site since starting just under 2 years ago at the time of writing this (Sept 2019), I keep going to work and I don't (mostly) try to avoid family gatherings. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because your first premise (a) isn't correct. Sure, these people exist, and there are days when they seem to be the most prolific contributors to the site. And sure; there are days when that's all you see in your comment block and you wonder why you keep doing this. But you need to remember 3 things here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) We don't encourage 'well done' comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If a question or answer is well formed in the first place and there's nothing you can add, we don't generally encourage people to post 'attaboy' comments because it would detract from question or answer directly. We &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; answers and questions to be of good quality in the first place and as such the lack of support comments is a reflection of the high bar we set for ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Comment Fields are short&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some of the most useful comments I've received on the site have at first seemed to me to be terse. When you only have a couple of hundred characters to work with, brevity is important but it comes at the price of a lot of 'softening' language that would normally assure the recipient that the advice is constructive and discourage taking the comment personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) We tend to be biased towards believing our work is of high quality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is a trickier one, but I've learned it the hard way directly on this site so I would like to share it with you. When you do get a '+1, great answer, just a small nitpick' comment, I personally don't feel as much of a positive emotional response to that as I do from a 'you don't know what you're writing about' comment. I already tend to believe that my answer is good because otherwise I wouldn't post it. So the negative feedback comes as more of a blow; just saying. Sometimes, I believe the criticsm to be helpful and somewhat well founded. Other times, not so much. I have probably guessed wrong in both cases. Point is after a while, you learn to roll with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I have been as guilty as anyone else in recent times of biting back when I think I'm being trolled or I'm dealing with the self-righteous. I'm trying really hard not to respond to these and just ignore them. Consider me a recovering responder who lapses every now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to the whole point of this missive. The answer to your (b) question is yes, there IS something we can all do. Just ignore (or in severe cases, flag) comments you feel are unhelpful. In the early days I tried to take everyone's feedback into account and edit my answer so as to avoid negative feedback, and all that happened is that I twisted my answers into something that didn't get the neg votes changed and restricted my ability to get more upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, whether we like it or not, and largely due to the time limits after edits in which people can &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; their vote, once you have neg votes, they're there to stay. So, if the comment is helpful in your opinion, by all means edit your question or answer to reflect the new information. If it isn't, my advice is to simply ignore it. If the votes on your answer in particular are ALL neg votes, delete and move on. We've all put up an answer which hasn't been worthy of us in the past, even (if not especially) me. Don't let it stop you from contributing in the future however. Just delete the ones that are tanking and get on with providing new questions or answers and learn from the experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I believe that the vast majority of people on this site are good people, trying to help out others, sometimes by providing frank and fearless advice to the posters who contribute in prime. SE can seem like a critical and unforgiving environment but it's important to note that the very design of the site, and the standard to which we hold ourselves, makes it far more likely that comments will sound negative. Your positive feedback is the rep score of your contribution instead. So; while 3x neg comments may hit you harder emotionally than a score of 30+ on your contribution, the rep score is actually the stronger indicator that your contribution is valued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T23:16:10.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-24T20:04:37.273" Score="12" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a dozen questions now and have received negative feedback on most of them, with each question having at least one vote to close, and others getting down votes. I am especially frustrated with the reception &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/156814/is-it-possible-for-a-universally-executable-virus-to-be-written-in-binary/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; has received, since it was a pretty simple yes or no question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What am I doing wrong?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm getting a mixture of too broad, too opinion-based, and off-topic remarks which tells me...that I'm doing everything wrong. Even after reading the help section and reading posts on how to ask questions better, I still don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a site that is so strict about the way questions are written, there doesn't seem to be any good widely-accepted resource on how to build questions correctly. Or is there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/156986/can-a-sunset-be-black&quot;&gt;Here's another one that received tons of downvotes&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't know why. One of these downvotes ocurred literally within 20 seconds of me positing the question, which means the person &lt;em&gt;didn't even read the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="68902" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T21:08:53.893" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T12:34:44.337" Title="What Am I Doing Wrong?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7497" CreationDate="2019-09-24T20:29:11.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wanted to encourage you to make use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/639/how-does-the-sandbox-work-how-do-i-use-it#640&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to tune your questions before posting them, as people can help you avoid certain pitfalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, come visit the chat, as we can help you potentially focus and clarify your question to its core, and also it's a lot of fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your yes/no question, it might be getting down voted for a lack of research.&#xA;The first comment is essentially &quot;a virus is just a program, so yes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="54517" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T14:29:29.367" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T14:29:29.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7497" CreationDate="2019-09-25T13:34:09.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just checked and I seem to have been the only one to upvote the question about a computer virus. I think the downvotes there are a herd reaction: people don't take the time to read the question, and just repeat the voting that the question seems to be having. Evidence for that is the question not having a single vote for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that you have three closed questions out of 15. You are doing good. Please keep participating in the site, we need people who ask good question and you are one of them. I specially loved your question about different sea levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your questions that got closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/156902/21222&quot;&gt;How Would Ammonia-Based Life Evolve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/156078/21222&quot;&gt;Explaining Planet Colors/Compositions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were closed because a proper, correct answer could maybe take so much space as to fill a book, specially the first one. The latter, though, is one vote away from being reopened. &lt;em&gt;Mea culpa&lt;/em&gt;: I personally voted to close that one, but on second thought I believe that one small set of substances per color would do for a short post. I have voted to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/156812/21222&quot;&gt;How Can I Explain a Teleportation Machine?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core of the question seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are some ways I can explain the development of teleporters in a scientific-sounding way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that depends on opinions. There are plenty ways in which you could do that with technobabble, and we'd hardly be able to find consensus on which is more fitting. My suggestion is to do it like Stan Lee did - the more you try to science out the extraordinary, the less interesting it gets. Think about the Hulk. He was born out of a gamma ray shower. How did gamma radiation create that monster? You don't need to know! Think about Antman now. He shrinks and grows because of Pym Particles. So how do those particles work? You don't need to know! If we try to explain those things, they stop being interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T13:34:09.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T18:52:22.607" Score="8" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've run into this problem many times already. When someone answers, they might answer only part of my question. The next answer will intentionally answer a different part of the question since it was already touched upon in the first answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ultimately leads to the answer I'm looking for, separated between two or even three different answers. This means my question was answered by the collective community instead of just one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to reward those that have participated, but it doesn't feel fair to choose one answer when they were all equally helpful to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I approach this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="68902" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T19:46:16.560" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T04:26:29.037" Title="How to Choose a Best Answer When Portions of My Question are Answered in Different Answers?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2019-09-26T03:59:35.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had this happen on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/156832/69112&quot;&gt;recent question of mine&lt;/a&gt;. I'm new to this community so I can't speak to what the norms are, but there are more ways to reward people than with rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I chose: acknowledgement and thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added a section at the end of my question thanking everyone for their wide variety of answers, and compiled a list of ones that were helpful to me, linking to each answer and giving a short description. This is also helpful to anyone stumbling across the question later in their own research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for choosing an answer, I just went with the one that had the highest upvotes, making sure it was relevant to the question asked in the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the best way to do it? I'm not sure. I do think it strikes a good balance between providing value and rewarding excellent answers.  I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the other answers here though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69112" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T03:59:35.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7497" CreationDate="2019-09-26T04:10:39.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I honesty don't think you're actually doing anything particularly wrong. In a way, your queries kind of remind me of another member, Chasly from the UK: loads of interesting questions, with so very many of them inexplicably downvoted, or closed or reopened or closed again or argued over. Bizarre. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmm...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've been at SE long enough to know the basic rules.  You're kind of new to WB.SE, though, and it could be you're not quite up to speed on how they apply in this forum.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't think you're doing &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; wrong, but there are two main issues I've seen with your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you like to write, so you do have to be careful when approaching the ill-defined marches of what we consider to be &quot;story based&quot; questions (I think your extinction level query and perhaps even your binary virus query can be argued as being story or plot based.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take care to read, reread, edit and reedit your queries so that they all &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ask a single, focused worldbuilding question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  for which we'll provide you a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;single, focused answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  You also say that you tend to overthink.  This often results in &quot;overwritten queries&quot; --- too many nebulous ideas, too many possibilities. Generally speaking, when title and body don't match or when an OP asks multiple questions or suggests multiple variations on a theme, we tend to mark the query as &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;. You are cèrtainly welcome to ask multiple questions!  Just ask them one at a time (and for preference, append links to related questions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for writing questions &quot;correctly&quot; ... the strictures are really imposed by Stack Exchange itself. The model being &lt;em&gt;one single, focused query gets one single, focused response&lt;/em&gt;.  But our art / activity / hobby is not like physics or math or history where discrete questions and answers are possible.  Almost every question here is, in some way, &quot;opinion based&quot; and &quot;broad&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, less is best when it comes to queries. If someone writes a comment to the effect of &quot;so basically, can XYZ do DEF&quot;, chances are good you overwrote your question in the first place.  Maybe too many details, maybe too many directorial orders (&quot;good answers will tell me...&quot;), maybe too many nuances. &#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I honestly don't get all the downvoting, though. I've not downvoted any of your queries (that I'm aware of) and have upvoted several recently.  Just my opinion, but downvoting should be reserved for poorly written, poorly researched, inappropriate questions. Otherwise, vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the linked query under consideration, the virus one, I note that you got a number of excellent and thorough answers.  While I'd consider the question to be arguably &quot;story based&quot; (you're asking about a plot element), I see no reason to downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T12:34:44.337" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T12:34:44.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2019-09-26T04:26:29.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, if your respondents are only answering a &quot;part of&quot; your query, it's very likely that you are either asking too many questions or else your question has too many moving parts and is thus too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how this now places you in a bit of a sticky situation!  Frankly, if it were me, I'd just not award a green check mark at all. You can always upvote the answers that were most helpful to you without choosing to single out one as &quot;best&quot;. You can always write a comment to those who helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single best thing you can do to avoid this problem is to read, reread, edit and reedit your questions!  Make sure there is actually one question and make sure it's focused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: your sunset query.  There's only one question: it could do with some editing, but as is, it's pretty clearly written and it's pretty clear what you want. There are no extra moving parts and it should be fully answerable in a single response.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T04:26:29.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-27T12:19:35.703" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was one question that I saw yesterday which I thought was very interesting, but I didn't think had a single definitive answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/156929/if-i-travelled-back-in-time-to-invest-in-x-company-to-make-a-fortune-roughly-wh&quot;&gt;If I travelled back in time to invest in X company to make a fortune, roughly what is the probability that it would fail?&lt;/a&gt; and the range of answers seems to bear that out. That question got many upvotes, and more power to the author of that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posed a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157124/what-is-the-most-important-chemical-element-to-build-space-station-well-beyond/157126#157126&quot;&gt;What is the most important chemical element to build space station, well beyond Earth?&lt;/a&gt;that I thought had a more clear cut answer, but I got down votes.  What about my question is unacceptable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57608" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T02:49:36.683" Title="I'm not understanding what is acceptable and not acceptable here" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7507" CreationDate="2019-09-27T13:19:44.850" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read over both questions you cited. I think the first is a bit broad but not overly so. On your question, you don't say what metrics your using to choose one element over another. You just ask. Someone responding has to make a lot of assumptions about what the station is there for and the available materials. There are also no links to what a Hill sphere is, nor is there a description of the size and use of the station. Tech levels are also omitted. All this information will help clarify the question considerably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further confounding is the very basic observation that any space station is made of many elements, not just one. Choosing hydrogen means you cannot actually build anything but you have a propellant.  Choosing copper means you can't have the structural strength and durability you might have had with iron or silicon but your electrical conductivity is great. Do you see the problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stronger questions build in evidence that the author has spent time and energy trying to master the subject before asking the question. The first question does this by acknowledging the paradoxes inherent with time travel and asks for probabilities given the uncertainty inherent in trying figure out if a little extra funding would have made Google fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps. If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend looking through the questions with 20 or more upvotes, just to get a feel for what does and doesn't work. It just takes exposure to gain skill in asking good questions that people want to answer. There are also guides to help you write good questions and answers. I wish you the best in your growth here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T13:19:44.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7507" CreationDate="2019-09-29T02:49:36.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for pointing these questions out! :S  As I read through the first cited query, I don't find it to be about worldbuilding at all.  It's basically a plot generation question.  (It is also opinion based, but 94.7% of all questions in this forum are opinion based.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read through the second cited query, I don't find it to be about worldbuilding per se either.  It's not really long enough or detailed enough to determine if you're working on a story or if there's some other reason for the question.  It's very vague and thus far too broad and also opinion based.  Basically, almost any element can be cited as &quot;the most important&quot; with some validity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and the short of it is that Worldbuilding.SE doesn't really deal in either kind of question as a matter of practice. What we mean by &quot;worldbuilding&quot; is that we field questions about &lt;em&gt;systems&lt;/em&gt; --- how worlds and the phenomena in them work. You could easily alter your question to fit the needs of a particular fictional world, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry your question got downvotes, but I'd chalk that up to a combination of it being a low quality question (lacking detail, lacking focus) and also not pertaining to the forum's goals.  The other is just an example of a query that is engaging and interesting and that generates feedback, but is no more appropriate to the forum than yours!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close your question as being too broad.  Once you hammer out the details a bit and bring it into focus (which element is most important &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;given XYZ conditions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). I'll most happily retract my VTC! Or else vote to reopen, if it gets closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T02:49:36.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-30T10:46:17.360" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about the tags or rules in Meta, since I usually just briefly lurk, so I'd appreciate it if someone can fix the tags to be more appropriate and I apologise if I've broken any rules here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking about my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157308/is-there-other-possible-fuel-for-fire-other-than-common-oil-fuel&quot;&gt;is there other possible fuel for fire other than common oil/fuel?&lt;/a&gt;, as it was closed as off-topic and there was no explanation whatsoever of why it was considered off-topic in the comments, so maybe I'm missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my question basically asks about any unique, exotic or uncommon fuels for lighting fires, with the criteria mentioned in the question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the duel inspection, it is to explain what it is, when it happens, and how it works. And as for the duel itself, it is to explain what the fire alternative is used for so I can get a clearer answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's considered story-based, I personally don't see it that way, so I'm kinda confused. Usually, before a question gets closed, someone will mention the flaw in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is my question really not about worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62918" LastEditorUserId="32016" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T20:45:55.963" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T20:45:55.963" Title="Is this question really off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7510" CreationDate="2019-09-30T13:17:52.410" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cast the first vote. I could not see how you could build a fictional world with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building is about creating a world. Listing materials that do something in the real world creates a setting, not a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I might come here and ask about how do we measure the strength of an acid so I know which substances to use on a scene, or what kinds of wood make for the best bows so that I can place a character in a forest of that material. It creates setting, but not a world. If you are writing a novel, or a videogame, or if you are making a tabletop-RPG game... what you need is some research, fact-checking, and maybe some help with writing. But trust me, in these situations, if you wish to science out things you just make them boring for the readers/players.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I don't see how you can build a world with those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a very general guideline, if you need help with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6992/21222&quot;&gt;a situation&lt;/a&gt; (specially when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6140/21222&quot;&gt;it is about a small set of characters&lt;/a&gt;), it tends to not be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage you to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, where you can refine questions if you are unsure about them being on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T13:25:59.540" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T13:25:59.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-30T18:06:13.227" Score="115" ViewCount="7634" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Friday, September 27th, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28/monica-cellio&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel&quot;&gt;removed from her position as a moderator without warning by Stack Overflow, Inc&lt;/a&gt;. She had been a moderator on Worldbuilding, Mi Yodeya, The Workplace, Beer Wine &amp;amp; Spirits, Writing, and Meta Stack Exchange, as well as a prominent member of communities across the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Worldbuilding, she had been a moderator on the site for almost five years, guiding it since its inception in 2014. Monica played an enormous role in shaping the site's scope, design, blog, and community, both in public and behind the scenes. She was, quite frankly, one of the most valuable users across the network, and was for many of us a role model, mentor, and guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/274942&quot;&gt;there has been a substantial amount of backlash&lt;/a&gt; against Stack Overflow for their actions of this past Friday. At least ten separate moderators have resigned in protest across the network, with many others speaking out in Monica's defense. The shock waves are still being felt, and will doubtlessly continue to propagate throughout the week. Many people, from many different sides and holding many different views, have been impacted. Everyone has been responding in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has not yet been impacted by the events, outside losing a moderator. In the hopes of a productive discussion, and dialogue with the community, some of us on the mod team would like to write and explain our thoughts and reactions to Monica's dismissal, and what actions we will take moving forward. We want the site - and the network - to continue to grow and thrive, but some of us also feel that we must address what happened on Friday. This thread is meant to be a place for us to communicate our thoughts and feelings to the site, and the people who use it every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A day after I posted this, a CVn decided to resign, and spent some time explaining the reasons why. He wrote up &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7515/627&quot;&gt;his own meta post on the matter&lt;/a&gt;, and folks have plenty of room there to thank him for his years of service to the site and the network, if they so desire. Please see that thread for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this was posted, there have been a number of discussions and conversations across the network, and the crisis is still a developing situation. Here are some places to start reading more about the events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/334248/274942&quot;&gt;An Update to our Community and an Apology&lt;/a&gt; - the company's first comprehensive response to the situation by Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/334551/274942&quot;&gt;An apology to our community, and next steps&lt;/a&gt; - an updated statement by the CTO, David Fullerton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monica's timeline of events&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/334575/274942&quot;&gt;Dear Stack Exchange: a statement and a letter from your moderators&lt;/a&gt;, which I contributed to and which has been signed by members of the Worldbuilding mod team and, at last count, 451 moderators and Stack Exchange users. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/334577/274942&quot;&gt;A second letter about the impact of the situation on the LGBTQ+ community was also written&lt;/a&gt;, and was also signed by some of the same folks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2019-10-08T21:51:32.360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T13:45:01.473" Title="Thoughts from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange moderators on the dismissal of Monica Cellio" Tags="|discussion|moderators|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2019-09-30T18:18:42.707" Score="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm extraordinarily frustrated by the situation as it stands. I apologize that I cannot at the moment present the specific views and interactions that led to Monica's dismissal. While I &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; condone those views, &lt;strong&gt;I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; say that I believe that Stack Overflow's actions were unwarranted&lt;/strong&gt;, and represent an overreaction on the company's part. Monica had been a moderator on Worldbuilding, Mi Yodeya, The Workplace, Beer Wine &amp;amp; Spirits, and Meta Stack Exchange, as well as a prominent member of communities across the network. Here on Worldbuilding, she had been a moderator on the site for almost five years, guiding it since its inception in 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica played an enormous role in shaping the site's scope, design, blog, and community, both in public and behind the scenes. She was, quite frankly, one of the most valuable users across the network, and was for many of us a role model, mentor, and guide. Monica has performed many years of completely voluntary, unpaid service to help hundreds of thousands of people across the Stack Exchange network, and she deserved much more than what came across as an unceremonious kick out the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not be resigning in protest as moderator. I care too much about the well-being of my sites - and of the well-being of every individual user - and certainly in the case of the smaller sites I moderate, a departure would be too problematic. However, I do feel that it is unconscionable for me to not act based on my beliefs. For this reason, in support of Monica, &lt;strong&gt;I have marked myself as inactive on all four sites I moderate&lt;/strong&gt;. Until Stack Overflow makes significant strides to mitigate the harm that has been done, I cannot in good conscience continue to support them. If there is an emergency - for instance, a wave of spammers or a user being continuously abusive - I will step in for the site's sake. Barring that, however, I am taking a break - in protest, and because the emotional toll of the past weekend has been too great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of people holding vastly different views have been hurt over the last week - both by Monica's dismissal and by the events leading up to it. It has pained me to see many folks I care about so upset. I will remain active in the discussions - in public and behind the scenes - and will strive to help heal those who have been hurt - starting with Monica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to finish &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/333975/274942&quot;&gt;by quoting someone who has proved to be a great mediator&lt;/a&gt; during his time on the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of people are curious about what's happening. A lot of this will likely get discussed over the coming days. I'd urge patience and empathy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've seen a lot of folks act as their conscience saw fit. I respect that. Resigning as a moderator feels like the only way to make a stand. Mine would be to plead for empathy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we're all stronger together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's work to fix this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum, October 3rd&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that it's been a few more days, and things have continued to snowball - about 35 moderators have either resigned in protest or gone on strike in relation to the chain of events - I thought I would elaborate a bit more on the things that bother me about the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that an elected moderator was summarily dismissed &lt;em&gt;without consultation with other moderators&lt;/em&gt;, as is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/157258/274942&quot;&gt;the established procedure for cases where users raise severe complaints about a mod&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that Monica was dismissed based on opposition to a change in the Code of Conduct &lt;em&gt;that had not yet been published or even finalized&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that, by Monica's account, this happened &lt;em&gt;before discussions between her and Stack Overflow had concluded&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that this occurred less than an hour before the start of Shabbat, which, coupled with the start of Rosh Hashanah 48 hours later, meant that Monica would be almost entirely offline for 96 hours. Either this was intentional on Stack Exchange's part, or it was &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; insensitive to Monica's religion, which is a major part of who she is and is well-known.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that this was done in a way that effectively shamed Monica and hurt her reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that Stack Overflow has done essentially nothing to help trans moderators and others in the LGBT+ community. Mods network-wide have expressed strong support for formal sensitivity training, but this has yet to be implemented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am, further, bothered that the company has failed in some cases to act against certain users who have written posts and chat messages that are clearly transphobic. The users who make them should at the least be treated more harshly than Monica was, because she is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a transphobic person. This supports the idea that a double standard is being applied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that the company has failed to make an adequate statement in response after &lt;em&gt;more than five days&lt;/em&gt;. Responses to resignations and meta posts (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5197&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) have been copied-and-pasted and say basically nothing of any substance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that Stack Overflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_controversy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;talked with the &lt;em&gt;Register&lt;/em&gt; and provided quotes for a crappy article&lt;/a&gt; that poorly explains most aspects of the sequence of events, while refusing to spend as much time communicating with the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that Stack Overflow does not seem to have acknowledged &lt;em&gt;the human cost&lt;/em&gt; if all of this - on users, on moderators, and on their own employees.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm bothered that Monica - someone who has contributed an &lt;em&gt;extraordinary amount&lt;/em&gt; to sites across the network, who has indeed contributed to efforts towards inclusion, who has represented religious and gender minorities online, who has done so much more good than harm - was treated like none of her contributions mattered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rereading all of this, I have to say, it is quite tempting to hang up my mod hat. I don't believe that Stack Overflow can adequately address all - perhaps even most - of these concerns. But I still believe, after this time, that I can do a better job advocating for the users on Worldbuilding and across the network as a mod than as a regular user - and I will continue to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T15:44:14.610" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2019-09-30T21:43:38.010" Score="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;frustrated and tired&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; pretty effectively sum up my feelings and the feelings of many moderators across the network after the last few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So first a shout out to Monica&lt;/strong&gt;. She is one of the best moderators I have ever met, and that is not specific to SE. She's been a mentor to me since I was elected a couple years ago and is incredibly generous with her time and knowledge. Worldbuilding wouldn't be the site it is today without her. She's been a mod since beta and was a major driver for the blog, and that's just the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once quipped she deserved a &lt;em&gt;saintly patience&lt;/em&gt; badge...its probably among the starred chat messages somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As to the situation at hand...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...a lot of what is going on is mired in hearsay and rumor and its a big fat mess.  Short version, she was dismissed as a moderator on all sites due to disagreements, or queries or something (its not super clear, because no one outside of SE has seen the actual conversations). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topically the discussion was around new CoC changes related to preferred pronouns, that we frankly haven't even seen the language to yet...because they haven't been published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end&lt;/strong&gt; I am taking a break from moderating duties for the time being and have marked myself inactive. I will be around and certainly in the chat room, and like HDE mentioned we don't want the site to suffer, so let us know if there is a moderation emergency.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a lot I can do for Monica, but the way this was handled and how she was treated is really bad, least I can do is step back in some sort of digital solidarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T22:06:05.350" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T22:06:05.350" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-01T21:39:33.240" Score="108" ViewCount="3663" Body="&lt;p&gt;The past several days have been turbulent across the Stack Exchange network, to say the least. In fact, more so than what has been the usual case even lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The immediate situation came to a head for myself, as well as many others, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5193/8987&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio was, effectively, summarily dismissed&lt;/a&gt; as a moderator across the entire network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of one's stance in the &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; that prompted Monica's dismissal, of which I still lack a complete picture, I do feel that the &lt;em&gt;manner&lt;/em&gt; in which she was removed is outright beyond deplorable. While I cannot go into even all of the details that I am aware of, due in part to being bound by &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20191001213933/https://stackoverflow.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt;, I do feel strongly that no one, let alone a well-respected person such as Monica, deserves the kind of dismissal that she got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, over the past several days, I have been reevaluating my own relationship with Stack Exchange Inc., whose services I originally signed up for back in October 2010, and where I obtained my first moderator diamond in November 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have come to the conclusion that I, at present, cannot in good conscience remain an active community moderator on the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was not an entirely easy decision for me. I realize that this will leave the sites which I help moderate, and other people, in a bind. I sincerely apologize for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, being a moderator requires having trust in the company, and for me at this time, that trust has been grossly violated. Not only by the manner in which Monica was dismissed as a moderator and how the fallout of that has been dealt with by company officials, but also other things, not least of which the manner in which the likely-upcoming &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20191001213933/https://stackoverflow.com/conduct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; change has been dealt with, and likewise how the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333089/157730&quot;&gt;unilateral, forced relicensing&lt;/a&gt; has been handled by the company, as well as the statements made by company officials in connection with and other events surrounding &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/316934/157730&quot;&gt;the removal of Interpersonal Skills SE from the Hot Network Questions list&lt;/a&gt;. The examples here are not meant to be an exhaustive list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Stack Exchange Inc. were to make an immediate about-face turn, which frankly based on their recent actions and public statements I do not anticipate the company doing, rebuilding the trust to the level where I feel comfortable being an active community moderator is going to take time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have officially requested that Stack Exchange remove my moderator diamond from the two sites where I currently have one, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt;. I expect that this will take effect shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to take the opportunity to officially thank every person who has provided thought-provoking questions; thoughtful, well-researched, factual answers; and those who have taken the time to help me improve my posts and other contributions across the network. I also want to thank each and every moderator, elected and appointed alike, with which I have had the privilege to work together to varying extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; My moderator access was revoked 2019-10-08 around 11:35 UTC. I am now an ordinary user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2020-07-17T20:42:11.753" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T20:42:11.753" Title="Moderator resignation" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-02T00:13:57.643" Score="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for all your contributions here, on Writing, and elsewhere on the network.  It was a pleasure to work with you.  I'm sorry Stack Exchange made it end this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T00:13:57.643" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-02T03:19:57.827" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the contributions you have made here, and for the guidance you have provided over my year and peanuts of moderatorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T03:19:57.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-02T14:23:39.743" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sad to see you go as well but I get it.  Hopefully you'll be sticking around the main site.  Appreciate all the conversations we've had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T14:23:39.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-03T15:24:13.233" Score="50" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Welcome to the 21st Century!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noted a few politically hot key words in Monica's excellent post over on mi yodea. &amp;quot;Inclusion&amp;quot;, in case anyone has been living under a rock, does not mean common sense things like basic human respect.  In 21st century Western culture it means nothing other than &amp;quot;if you do not wholeheartedly accept, concur with, promote and celebrate my particular ideology of identity, you are hereby branded an XYZ-phobe and are deserving of nothing less than total excoriation, banishment from the community and the  revocation of all privileges.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Men like George Orwell and Ray Bradbury were spot on as to where current secular culture is heading and it seems that Monica has been made a victim of the political agenda of Stack Exchange.  The truth of the matter, Monica, is that you are experiencing the bloodless persecution that has been steadily on the rise the last few decades.  I've experienced it too, having been banned from two separate worldbuilding forums; not for violating rules, but simply because &amp;quot;my values are out of alignment&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I too would like to thank you, a CVn(ex♦), for your contributions as moderator.  But more importantly, I'd like to note my appreciation for your standing up and sending a very clear message to Stack Exchange.  It is their values that are out of alignment, not ours.  Whatever the specifics of Monica's beliefs, Stack Exchange's corporate behaviour is unacceptable.  Pre-emptive firing is not an appropriate reaction.  Firing because someone does not agree with, concur with or celebrate your political agenda is not an appropriate reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've made me proud, a CVn(ex♦), for standing up to the tyranny!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T23:40:59.043" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-04T14:32:15.003" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody has gotten the following badges, and nobody ever will:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/help/badges/50/tenacious&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tenacious&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Zero score accepted answers: more than 5 and 20% of total.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/help/badges/51/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Unsung Hero&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;Zero score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that being said, I'm still a little curious what the requirements are for these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does 'more than 5 and 20% of total' mean? Does it literally mean that &lt;em&gt;at least 20% of your accepted answers need to have &lt;strong&gt;no upvotes or downvotes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (or rather, the net score needs to equal zero)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T17:13:43.517" Title="What Are the Requirements for the Tenacious and Unsung Hero Badges?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7521" CreationDate="2019-10-04T17:13:18.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's awkwardly worded but appears to mean that, numerically, you'd need six or more accepted answers that themselves have either no votes or perhaps perfectly split +/- and that those six or more must be twenty percent and possibly more of the total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is totally opaque to me how one actually ears the badge: do I earn it by writing what amounts to lousy responses --- lousy enough that no one, not even the querent bothers to upvote?  Or is it by writing lousy queries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These badges seem utterly useless, contrary to human nature and forum-antithetical to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T17:13:18.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7521" CreationDate="2019-10-04T17:13:43.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answers may have upvotes and downvotes, but those must balance out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those badges are awarded through a job that runs daily. You must meet the criteria for those badges when the job runs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, you must have more than five answers, and 20% or more of them to have been accepted a net balance of 0 score to get the Tenacious badge. Likewise, 11+ answers and 20%+ of them accepted to get Unsung Hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those have never been obtained here due to the village nature of Worldbuilding (compared to the huge metropolis that is Stack Overflow, for example). Everybody here sees every question and answer that is posted, so you'll hardly ever have an answer that is both accepted and zeroed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T17:13:43.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-04T20:28:42.790" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157681/how-likely-is-a-planet-made-almost-entirely-of-metals&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was single-handedly marked as a duplicate by a user with a Gold Badge privilege. As such, only 3 votes to close were needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I referenced the duplicate question before even asking my question. I did this specifically because I found that &lt;em&gt;it did not ask what I was looking for.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, nobody even bothered responding to my comments. This meant I had no time to edit my post, which is not particularly fair of them to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why was this marked as a duplicate?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why is a single non-moderator user allowed to close questions immediately without the full 5 votes? That seems a bit ridiculous to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T19:03:11.220" Title="My Question Was Marked as a Duplicate and it Doesn't Make Any Sense" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-05T06:57:26.330" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extremely disturbed by SEs behavior in this matter and the apparent total disregard for community wishes which clearly support Monica overwhelmingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a moderator, but I will be stopping all activities (reluctantly) on SE sites until this matter is resolved &lt;em&gt;as the community&lt;/em&gt; wishes.  That could be forever, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either SE is controlled by the community or it's not SE anymore.  I can get a site controlled by arbitrary corporate whim anywhere.  If simply questioning proposed corporate policy changes can get you fired that's bad, but alas employment is outside of SE member control.  Moderators are supposed to be elected and removed on member and moderator decisions.  Regardless of whether SE want Monica as an employee (I would have thought she would have been a solid asset), it's our right as members to decide if Monica is a suitable moderator or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If moderators do not have policy input then neither do members.  That's not the SE I joined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T06:57:26.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2019-10-05T15:32:17.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just heard about Monica Cellio's dismissal from her post as a moderator on a number of SE sites.  Having not seen the evidence that SE used to form the conclusion that the action that they took was required,  I will not comment on it other than to say that the accusations against Monica seem to be misplaced given my experiences with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to feel that one of my strengths as a moderator is that I do not typically get upset by people's failings or vitriol.  So, while I am disappointed that a moderator has apparently been dismissed without the proper procedures having first been followed,  I also cannot say that I have enough evidence to judge the matter fairly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, I will continue to act as a moderator on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange for the foreseeable future. Regards of where the fault in this matter truly lies, my service as moderator is intended to benefit the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange community as a whole.  The community is not served by my absence, therefore I shall not abandon it &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T01:13:16.357" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T01:13:16.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7515" CreationDate="2019-10-06T03:03:39.280" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monica was booted?  &lt;em&gt;Monica?!?!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, a CVn, please accept my admiration, respect, and gratitude for your services as moderator.  We've agreed and we've disagreed, but I've always appreciated your insight and your dedication.  I'm saddened to see you go as yours will be big shoes to fill, but I entirely respect and support your decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange has always been a hotbed of controversy concerning free speech.  It's a tough row to hoe when you want maximum creative input but want to limit offense and hate.  A sign of humanity's (im)maturity is that we cannot revel and celebrate the former without debasing ourselves with the latter.  Humanity is amazing.  Humans suck.  And Stack Exchange has chosen to stand right in the middle of the maelstrom.  Rather than lifting their fists to cry defiantly at the storm, they've chosen to pound stakes into the ground.  Good luck with that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An Ode to Monica&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gratefully not gone, but gone as an admin, is one of the most amazing, tolerant, patient, insightful, thoughtful, supportive, and capable people I've ever met, virtually or literally.  Monica was, as fate would have it, one of the first people I &quot;met&quot; on Stack Exchange, not in her role as moderator (though she was one at the time), but as a simple user commenting on one of my earliest posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few people on any stack in Stack Exchange &amp;mdash; myself most certainly included &amp;mdash; are as capable of level-headed direction, critique, and commentary as Monica Cellio.  She has been and continues to be a role model for me and, without doubt, many other users who have had the difficult privilege of navigating the often vitriolic waters of Stack Exchange.  Oh! how Stack Overflow could have (and could still) benefit from her guidance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so could Stack Exchange Inc.  Has history not proven over and over that any effort to force humanity to the moral imperative d'jour is doomed to failure?  That the better and more worthy path has always been to patiently educate rather than legislate?  Are there actually moderators who disagree with the noble goals of kindness and forgiveness, rather preferring political countenance and heavy-handed obedience?  Has Stack Exchange actually decided to enjoin the 21st century's favorite method of slavery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica is a beacon in a tumultuous landscape, and few signs of Stack Exchange's inner turmoil and growing decay can reveal the cancre (cancre, not cancer) in Stack Exchange Inc's offices than the dismissal of Monica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the bottom of my American heart, foolish actions like this make me want, &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to fly a Confederate flag.  Not because of it's slavery-stained past, but for its symbol of rebellion and valiant defiance of oppressive bureaucracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even drink, and even I want to find a pub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heaven bless you, Monica, and my hat's off to you, a CVn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T03:03:39.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-06T06:18:58.927" Score="18" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I discovered what I can only describe as the juvenile nonsense surrounding Monica Cellio's dismissal as a moderator.  I've spent hours wading through it and almost coming to tears over it.  No one likes seeing an associate they've come to respect and admire be treated like dirt &amp;mdash; especially over something as ephemeral as the political issue d'jour.  As I read, I felt sickened.  I have nothing against people of any gender or gender-preference, but ever since I loaned my support to the same-sex-marriage movement, I have become increasingly disillusioned by the LGBT political engine.  And in my opinion, Monica was run over by that engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have decided that I'm done with Stack Exchange.  I posted a longer version of this announcement in frustration &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334500/kings-farmers-and-moderators&quot;&gt;over on SE Meta&lt;/a&gt;.  In the grand scheme of things, it won't matter much, with possibly one exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hosting the Sandbox (i.e., I'm the user who created the latest Sandbox).  Before my move to Montana I was very active supporting it, which is natural since as the &quot;OP&quot; for the current box I was notified of everything that went on in it.  If there's no way to transfer that &quot;ownership&quot; to someone else, then everyone will need to remember to visit it regularly and help out the new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have greatly enjoyed participating here.  Honestly, I'm going to miss it.  But SE has become something I can no longer support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thanks to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T06:18:58.927" Title="The Sandbox will need extra attention" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7531" CreationDate="2019-10-06T09:28:03.703" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is this question about world-building and not story-building / story writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/157721/36&quot;&gt;Can I hide one of my siamese twins heads in public?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;, but it is clearly about single character in an exactly expressed situation / part of the fiction. It isn't about all creatures of given kind (which could be legitimate here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that such questions are clearly prohibited on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T20:48:32.993" Title="Can we discuss a single character issues here?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7524" CreationDate="2019-10-06T12:53:09.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One question asks *can I have a planet made of iron&quot; and the other asks &quot;can I have a planet made metals&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions have answers mentioning Mercury and Psyche 16. A little bit of googling and wikipedia reading will show you why: iron is the heaviest element you'll get from most stars, anything heavier comes from novae and supernovae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to me like an extrapolation of the one that came first. It would be like having a question that asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;can we have cars&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and then another, newer one that asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;can we have vehicles with engines&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a golden badge on a tag, you can close any question in that tag as a duplicate. It's not that it brings the necessary amount down to three. The question would be closed just the same if my vote had been the first. But SE is community driven and if five people with enough reputation think the closure is wrong, they can revert it. That happened. I'm still convinced the question is a duplicate though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the near future, it is very probable that the number of votes necessary to close and reopen a question will be reduced from five to the original three, just like it was in SO up until 2009. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390083/2263584&quot;&gt;Here is why&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T18:20:29.797" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T18:20:29.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7529" CreationDate="2019-10-06T20:48:32.993" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is currently in the close queue, because it is story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, an underlying non-story based query hidden in there, which is one of technology and ultimately surgical technique.  If the OP had written it that way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your particular question, I would say &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And YES.  Depending!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss attributes of a character or likely actions of a character, I'd say that would be a no.  If you want to talk about how a character might interact with a world's environment, then maybe!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T20:48:32.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-07T20:09:03.460" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that a lot of people are asking science questions without giving any kind of worldbuilding context. I have been guilty of this in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be tempting to post a question that you find interesting, but I think we should really start focusing on our worlds rather than posting every science question we come up with. There are other SE forums dedicated to that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should this community be a bit stricter about keeping questions related to worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T22:49:36.703" Title="People Keep Asking Science Questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7538" CreationDate="2019-10-08T16:44:13.997" Score="10" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question should be closed as story based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/157741/21222&quot;&gt;How to give a rationality-inducing drug to an entire software company?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a jab at SE for &quot;firing&quot; one of the site's moderators, Monica Cellio. While I understand that SE's actions caused grief, one mistake does not justify another. Please do not subvert the site rules - if that question was an act of protest, then it was a shallow one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T16:56:37.147" Title="Please don't vent frustration by going against the rules" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7537" CreationDate="2019-10-08T16:56:37.147" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have closed the question linked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I appreciate that people are upset and frustrated with what has happened but this isn't constructive.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question isn't all that bad. If it is edited to not be a jab at SE it can be reopened as far as I am concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back on strike now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T16:56:37.147" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-09T14:08:47.400" Score="6" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to most questions on here asking &quot;Why was this question closed?&quot; or &quot;Why did I get downvotes?&quot;, today I'm actually concerned with the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157482/is-it-possible-to-make-a-computer-virus-that-acts-as-an-anti-virus&quot;&gt;the following question&lt;/a&gt; so well-received? I gained about 500 reputation and several badges from this question alone, and to me it was just as interesting and thought-out as all of my other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take this question further, I'd like to know what my top questions do that my bottom questions do not do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;How to Write the Perfect Question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd still like to know specifically what I did correctly or why there was so much interest in my question listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T16:59:57.213" Title="Why Was This Question So Well-Received?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|asking-questions|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7539" CreationDate="2019-10-09T14:45:42.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I think the answer here is that it's just the vagaries of Stack Exchange. It all depends on who's interested in what and who's reading your questions and what mood they're in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, even though the anti-virus-virus question is well received it's entirely off topic. It's not about the fundamentals of nor the component systems of a fictional world. This question is more appropriate for some computer or coding forum.  As such, it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you've asked quite a few vèry interesting and, more importantly, on topic queries. Questions that are actually about fictional worlds and how they work. Differing sea levels, multiple axes of rotation, equatorial gashes, all metal planets --- this is the stuff and matter of geopoesy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, most of those queries have gained little traction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T14:45:42.970" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T16:26:28.223" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this question here, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158065/internment-camp-for-magical-beings&quot;&gt;Internment Camp for Magical Creatures&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which was put on hold - and looking back I can see why. Since it was put on hold I have edited it, added details and made it much more clear - and someone even upvoted it. How do I get &quot;the hold&quot; removed&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more generally, what is the process for &quot;removing holds&quot; and &quot;reopening closed questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69253" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T06:15:10.007" Title="How to get a question reopened?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7542" CreationDate="2019-10-11T06:15:10.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Getting your question re-opened is going to end up being a popularity contest while having to confirm to the rules of this Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your question is closed, you've made the edits and want to get it reopened. The magical number is 5 reopened votes, and getting those votes is hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First thing is that make an edit will move it to the top of the Active page. Here users who are interested in your question, can go in, have a read and vote to re-open it. If you have a popular question that happens to attract the attention of many people, it gets reopened faster. People see your question. Read it and vote to re-open if they want to. To this end, having easy to read, well formatted and shorter questions will likely get opened faster, because it wont take as much effort to get through everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second way is through the review queue. There are several queues for users with a lot of points which make it easier to users to moderate questions and answers here. Your question will be placed in the re-open queue and any people who are reviewing will see it there as well. To that end, you still need to have a well formatted question because lets me honest. If you see a wall of text you might just skip the review and leave it to the next person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I believe Moderators can open a question which was unfairly closed. This can happen sometimes, but usually happens the other way when someone asks a clearly inappropriate question and a Mod closes it straight away. This is going to be rare, and sometimes, bringing it to the attention of meta can help get the required attention to open your question. However do not expect this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45212" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T06:15:10.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-11T17:53:33.187" Score="8" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you upvote a comment and then try to remove the upvote, you get the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are you sure you want to undo your upvote on this comment? You will not be able to upvote it again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sure enough, when trying to upvote afterwards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YJ1dB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YJ1dB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of this feature? If I accidentally upvote a comment and decide to remove the upvote, I still want the ability to upvote it if I decide to do so later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When voting on questions and answers, you can toggle votes on and off as much as you want for at least 5 minutes, after which they lock. Even after a vote is locked, you can change the vote if the post is edited. &lt;strong&gt;Why do comments, which hold much less data integrity value for the site, have more restrictions than questions and answers do?&lt;/strong&gt; It doesn't make much sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="68902" LastEditDate="2019-10-16T17:13:38.383" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T01:01:43.343" Title="Should We Change Upvoting Functionality for Comments?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7535" CreationDate="2019-10-13T22:49:36.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nailing my colours to the mast on this one, I'd argue that in all but the most egregious cases the answer is no, largely because some of the science SE sites kick those questions over to us in the first place because they don't see them as worthy of their time, but I also think there's a deeper and more subtle reason that needs to be considered here in light of recent events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you've been living under a rock or (like me) have been on holiday to somewhere without the internet for a couple of weeks, you will have noticed all the goings on regarding the dismissal of Monica as a moderator and the fallout that has ensued. First of all, a big call out to Monica; your passion on the sites has not gone unnoticed even by those of us who have been silent until now on the matter and I for one have always greatly appreciated your work on this and several other sites in that you were a voice of reason at times when it was most needed. Words like 'thank you for your service' don't even begin to cover it. But, back to the matter at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have moderators quitting, others on go-slows or at least not being as active at policing the site as they have been in the past, and now with JBH (and I'm sure others) who are NOT moderators but have been active contributors to both the content and policing of the site leaving or going inactive, now is not the time to get super strict about the questions that are brought to bear on this site in my humble opinion. Why? Because closure, negative comments, downvoting and other strategies we have to manage a question and make it better are perceived by outsiders as confrontational and unwelcoming and it takes a great deal of finesse and personal interaction with new users to make people understand what we're doing and why. We're down on numbers at the moment and the number of questions being posted also seems to be down, and for some of us the fun is in answering questions that we like to provide answers to, not in making sure that the questions fit a narrow brief in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been on this site for 2 years now, and I see new blood rising through the ranks, trying to keep questions on point and assist people newer than themselves understand what we're trying to do here and therefore how to frame a question to make it a good fit for the site, etc. I'll openly admit I don't do that, because I'm not here to make stack exchange a great website; I'm here to have fun answering questions. If a question comes up that I can answer and I want to answer, I tend to answer it. If it's not properly formed but I understand what they're trying to get at, I'll also answer it. That has sometimes got me into trouble but like I say, I'm not here to make SE great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to stand for any new moderator elections, and I have no interest in policing the site beyond that needed to ensure that good questions keep rolling in. Others will disagree with my position, and they're welcome to do so of course, but it's as simple as me knowing why I'm here and what I want out of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also add one more perspective; focusing on the big rules rather than trying to enforce all the smaller ones as well is not only more viable with our current situation on the site, but will also give us the reputation for being a little more welcoming. This strict adherence to the letter of the law makes us appear from the outside as xenophobic and I once even read a post that said 'there are Harvard Alumni forums that are more welcoming than Stack Exchange'. Ouch. Perhaps the one piece of good that can come from all that has happened these past few weeks is that we can go some way to changing that kind of opinion by being a little more flexible with some of the less important rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to say one final thing in closing; while I applaud the tireless work of moderators and senior contributors to this site to make it a great site for the kind of questions we answer, recent events seem to indicate that we do so under a false presumption. SE has always said that it is OUR site, run by the community and for the community. If that was really true, then Monica would still be a Moderator. SE is run by SE, for SE, and we're - in a word - collaborators to that cause. We've been sucking down the kool-ade, and now we have a better idea what they've been putting in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I go from here? Honestly I don't know. If a good question comes up I may answer it but I'm firmly of the opinion that if SE want this level of control over the site, then they should carry more of the responsibility for the quality of the site, not push that back down to us. No taxation (of our time) without representation, and all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no. I'm in no hurry to create a rod for our own backs and generate a massive amount of work for ourselves at a time when moderation is needed for other higher priority situations by policing some of the less important rules. But, I'm thankful the question got asked so I could put in my $0.02&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T22:49:36.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-14T18:40:11.243" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to leave.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But I'd like to download all questions I asked with their answers for further reference. Do you know a quick and easy way to achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6415" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T14:40:28.863" Title="I want to leave. Is there an easy way to download all my questions and answers?" Tags="|support|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7546" CreationDate="2019-10-14T18:48:34.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting your account doesn't remove the content you created. That content will remain as part of SE, as you agreed when you accepted the ToS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just save a link to each post you made, and use for future reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T18:48:34.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7551" CreationDate="2019-10-15T20:04:44.663" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wings&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;tails&lt;/strong&gt; are common sci-fi/fantasy topics, especially for humanoids. A recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/158200/2394&quot;&gt;top new question&lt;/a&gt; without a 'tails' tag made me realize I'd subscribe or watch such a tag if it existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked several &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/158146/2394&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/101005/2394&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; as well, and they seem to generally use less specific tags such as 'creature design', 'anatomy', or 'biology'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a 'tails' tag? When the question is specifically about such a common/popular addition, should there be a tag to support it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2394" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T13:06:05.677" Title="Should there be a 'tails' tag for questions specific to tails (humanoid or otherwise)?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7548" CreationDate="2019-10-16T05:27:06.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To assess the utility of a tag, let me rephrase your question: would you say that you are an expert in anatomy, creature design, biology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and to a listener it would be clear what you excel in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's try with tails. What does it mean you are an expert in tails? Or fingers? Or wings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that it is too detailed of a tag to be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T05:27:06.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-16T13:00:44.810" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been getting the &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange Newsletter&lt;/em&gt; through email every week. I don't think I deliberately subscribed to it, and don't particularly want it. I finally made the effort to try to unsubscribe from it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down at the bottom of the email is this notice saying that I subscribed to the community digest (no, I don't think I did) and to follow a link to unsubscribe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5AZMD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5AZMD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I follow that link, it says I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subscribed to the community digest:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQcn4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQcn4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried following the &quot;Edit email settings&quot; link instead. None of the settings there seem to be particularly relevant to this particular piece of email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; unsubscribe from this Fine newsletter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2534" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T13:00:44.810" Title="How to actually unsubscribe from the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange Newsletter?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7548" CreationDate="2019-10-16T13:06:05.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a matter of practicality. Pick up any subject and you can always break it into smaller subjects. We settle for scopes that are practical for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can always use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt; for body parts. If we follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tail&lt;/a&gt; idea because a question asks about tails, one day we might have questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prehensile-tail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prehensile-tail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prehensile-tail&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/long-tail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;long-tail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;long-tail&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tail-weapon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tail-weapon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tail-weapon&lt;/a&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just the same, we could take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt; tag and branch it out all the way into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/limb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;limb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;limb&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lower-limb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lower-limb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lower-limb&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/foot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;foot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;foot&lt;/a&gt; up until &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metatarsus&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metatarsus&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metatarsus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomy&lt;/a&gt; serves as a nice catch-all that anyone interested in anatomy in general can follow, and which also serves to determine question scopes in a fine enough way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T13:06:05.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-16T16:35:22.457" Score="7" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UVBGj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UVBGj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the above screenshot there is an ad-services add in the corner of the screen. While I recognize that I have a dark extension (which is why I saw it), the ad is still present in the regular styled website too, just hidden better. If we're going to have ads rendered, shouldn't it be visible to the user? Hiding it seems like it's 1.) (possibly) Violating the contract with the ad provider and 2.) Not being upfront about what's being loaded into the dom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T16:35:22.457" Title="What's with the occasional hidden ad?" Tags="|bug|advertising|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7313" CreationDate="2019-10-16T18:05:37.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey there world builders.  If you didn't get in on the initial order and would like a journal you can order them individually now that the initial setup stuff has been taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are exceptionally awesome by the way. Worldbuilding (in the site font) is stamped into the front cover and the poster from the site design (below) is printed full color inside the front cover.  We ordered them in sapphire blue but I'd hazard a guess you can get them in any color you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you want one check out:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jennibick.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.jennibick.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference order #LG-8699&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;- this has all the info the binder needs to get the right set up for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T18:05:37.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7555" CreationDate="2019-10-17T03:33:41.383" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago we had this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/127906/21222&quot;&gt;City defenses against kaiju attacks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, in TL;DR form would read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can civilization fend off against Godzilla sized beasts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had an answer there which I wanted to reference in another questio  today. But now I found that it was deleted due to being spammy, rude, or abusive (the reason isn't specific). Now it can only be seen by users with 10K+ reputation and mods. Since it was deleted by a moderator, I cannot even vote to undelete. It went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any modern society should have no trouble dispatching kaijus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the biological reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Here I inserted an image with the biological explanation for why gigantic lizards would be mostly harmless]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the mechanical reasons,.see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/106434/21222&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image I used was a comic found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://smbc-comics.com/comic/gojirasaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GsyZ1.png&quot; alt=&quot;A harmless comic&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to sell nor promote SMBC and I don't consider myself a spammer. I understand some people get offended very easily but I don't see any malice nor &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; there, nor can I imagine someone feeling attacked by the post - so if I have been rude I apologize but I haven't realized how I came across like that. Finally, I don't see what kind of abuse could be perceived in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to be fair and nice. An explanation instead of a boilerplate set of possible reasons would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T13:01:23.627" Title="What does this answer have that makes it spammy, rude or abusive?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7554" CreationDate="2019-10-17T05:24:31.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer: I am not the moderator who removed the post. I see a user flagged it as rude and a moderator acknowledged that flag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major issue I have with answers having their core in an image (or a strip like in this case) is that they intrinsically rule out being universally understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give you an example, a visually impaired user, who has to use screen reading for accessing the content of their screen, would have been listening to the following speech (in &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; the text replacing the image, that you took care inserting, at least):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any modern society should have no trouble dispatching kaijus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the biological:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science ruins all the fun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the mechanical, see this answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, does that compare to actually reading the strip? They are like day and night!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, the answer could be greatly improved by adding a written explanation, and using the strip as punch line. Yes, it would lose part of the impact becoming lengthy, but remember that our primary goal should be to give thorough explanations on how to solve problems, not to be ZIP ZAP BANG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T07:11:56.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T16:15:54.817" Score="-2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhQs6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhQs6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt; badge is as follows:&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/help/badges/73/proofreader&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Proofreader&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Approve or reject 100 suggested edits&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, considering the fact that one needs 2,000 reputation in order to do so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/soHLq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/soHLq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like a Silver badge is much more appropriate. After all, once you gain access to this, you're essentially an established member of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sites such as Writing.SE have the much lower needed reputation (1,000 for Writing.SE) for reviewing suggested edits, and I think this is one of the reasons for it being carried over as a Bronze badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="68902" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T16:39:12.927" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T17:37:16.727" Title="Should Proofreader be a Silver Badge?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7556" CreationDate="2019-10-17T17:35:12.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the help on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/what-are-badges&quot;&gt;what are badges&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bronze badges&lt;/strong&gt;. Bronze badges are awarded for &lt;strong&gt;basic use of the site&lt;/strong&gt;; they encourage people to use all the &lt;strong&gt;typical, routine functions of the site&lt;/strong&gt;: posting questions, answering questions, voting up or down, tagging posts, editing, filling out your user profile, and so forth. &lt;strong&gt;Bronze badges are relatively easy to get&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Silver badges&lt;/strong&gt;. Silver badges are for experienced users who regularly use Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. They encourage &lt;strong&gt;continued participation&lt;/strong&gt; and returning to the site by awarding &lt;strong&gt;longer term goals&lt;/strong&gt;. Silver badges are more uncommon than bronze badges, but attainable if you're dedicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a matter of scale. I think it's good as a silver medal. IMO the silver, spiritual successor to proofreader is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/78/reviewer&quot;&gt;Reviewer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T17:35:12.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7556" CreationDate="2019-10-17T17:37:16.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our help center is pretty clear in describing the classes of badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVrD1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVrD1.png&quot; alt=&quot;badges description from help center&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bronze badges encourage users to try out new features on the site. They are easy to get if you try! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is specifically the purpose of this badge: encourage users to try out reviewing edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who take the review task more seriously and look for some challenge, there are the review badges, coming in bronze, silver and gold for, respectively, 1, 250 and 1000 reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation needed to access a certain privilege doesn't matter. It's an advantage to have intermediate and &quot;easy&quot; goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T17:37:16.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7546" CreationDate="2019-10-17T21:31:59.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This account is scheduled to be deleted 2 days ago. To cancel deletion, click here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Anybody know whats up with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This account is scheduled to be deleted Oct 15 at 19:17&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6415" LastEditorDisplayName="user6415" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T14:40:28.863" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T14:40:28.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7544" CreationDate="2019-10-18T01:01:43.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the why: once upon a time, you couldn't retract your upvote at all. This ability was added later &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/129032/160551&quot;&gt;mainly to help with mis-clicks&lt;/a&gt; rather than as part of the full-fledged voting system posts use.  From the linked post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can un-upvote a comment within the first 60 seconds, provided you did not navigate away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once you un-upvote a comment you can not upvote it again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not want flip flopping, nor do we want people to un-upvote stuff from the past. The only use case is undoing a mis-click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reduced functionality around comment voting is part of the broader pattern that comments are second-class citizens compared to questions or answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3615/allow-downvoting-comments&quot;&gt;You can't even downvote a comment&lt;/a&gt;, much less edit one more than 5 minutes after posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31224" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T01:01:43.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7554" CreationDate="2019-10-18T13:01:23.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would appear that - rather to my surprise - that it was I who deleted that post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say,  having looked at it just now, I can't see why I might have agreed that it was offensive.  I also don't remember having deleted it, and it's an unusual enough post that it would have stuck in my mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only explanation is that I do most of my moderation on my phone's browser, and on occasion, the screen lock I set to prevent inadvertent input when I put my phone in my pocket doesn't work,  and when that happens, I can get a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of spurious input. It is entirely possible that on such an occasion, that spurious input may have caused the deletion of this answer, without my noticing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I offer my apologies for this error.  I have undeleted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T13:01:23.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7567" CreationDate="2019-10-19T14:17:37.587" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know how long I have to change my mind if I delete one of my posts. I deleted some of my sandbox questions several weeks ago and they're still there, but I don't know how long they stay or if the same rules apply to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I presume that once you delete a post that other people cannot see it (even though you still see it in red), but does this apply to moderators as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T19:35:12.720" Title="How long do you have to undelete your post?" Tags="|discussion|support|deleted-answer|deleted-questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7566" CreationDate="2019-10-19T14:27:37.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions can be deleted at any time as long as they have no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleted posts can be seen by moderators and users with the right privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excessive deletion of content can be sanctioned, as the content belongs to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a post completely disappear, ask a moderator to redact it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-10-19T19:35:12.720" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T19:35:12.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-20T14:44:36.683" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I arrived at this Q right after it was posted. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158820/how-strong-would-graphene-armour-be-what-is-the-best-design-and-how-would-it-im&quot;&gt;How strong would graphene armour be? What is the best design and how would it impact warfare?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Both Starfish Prime and I saw the problem of it asking 2 unrelated questions. But it’s a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can flag to close, but it seemed like this one was easy to take out the second question and just pass it to the questioner to repost. There isn’t a tricky edit in this case to extract the off-topic section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be a better service to the community. Do other moderators agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T14:51:55.643" Title="Ever appropriate to just make the edit to a multi question question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7568" CreationDate="2019-10-20T15:43:04.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting a question on hold is not a punishment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a safety measure to allow the OP editing it without being limited in their actions by answers posted before or during the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all users, sadly, stitck to the &quot;answer only well asked questions&quot; principle. As soon as one of these writes an answer, editing the question becomes more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I would have voted to put the question on hold and addressed the OP with a comment explaining how to improve the question, so that the OP can decide which of the two questions could be removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also editing the question and explaining the rollback possibility is a viable option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions belong to the community, the community decides how to handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2019-10-23T14:51:55.643" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T14:51:55.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7568" CreationDate="2019-10-20T15:56:00.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After seeing Bellerophon's comment and L.Dutch, I decided to go ahead and make the edit (since there sill weren't any answers posted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bellerophon made a good point about telling the user they could revert the edit... since this is a brand new visitor to the forum, I decided against overwhelming them with options today and just told them about re-posting. This was not a gray area question where I expected the revert to be desirable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, everyone, go prove me right (that having only one question produces answers): go answer the person's question! :-)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T15:56:00.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7539" CreationDate="2019-10-20T16:59:57.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible that, being more related to computers than most, it gained more attention in the HNQ list. Since a good chunk SE users are here for tech things (Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, etc.), it may have contributed to its success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how it got to the HNQs in the first place, it seems a bit hit-or-miss as to which ones make the list. Various factors likely influence this, unrelated to the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, based on the comments, one main reason is how it was an interesting, thought-provoking question, despite not being entirely on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49656" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T16:59:57.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-22T14:43:24.333" Score="5" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about doing this for a while now, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7569/68902&quot;&gt;this question and answer&lt;/a&gt; got me thinking I should start doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch&quot;&gt;@L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt; stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all users, sadly, stitch to the &amp;quot;answer only well asked questions&amp;quot; principle. As soon as one of these writes an answer, editing the question becomes more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am thinking about flagging the following on such answers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/esXOc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/esXOc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those that cannot see the above image: It illustrates the flagging of an answer as &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot; with a description stating &amp;quot;Question was underdeveloped and should not have been answered yet.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Is this okay for me to do? Will these flags be declined? Should I even bother?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we could start a movement in Worldbuilding.SE to help increase both question and answer quality this way!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T15:17:48.657" Title="Should I Start Flagging Answers on Underdeveloped Questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7572" CreationDate="2019-10-22T14:59:16.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, please be aware that moderators are &lt;strong&gt;volunteering&lt;/strong&gt; their free time for &lt;strong&gt;handling exceptions&lt;/strong&gt; that the community cannot handle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above, raising tons of flag is not likely to please any moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarified this, what do you expect a moderator to do with such a flag? Is that an exception? Is it something that the community cannot handle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time I drop a reminder to answer only well asked question, but as a moderator I am not willing to do much more, unless really needed. A mod's broom can wipe out any answer, but that would be based on the moderator's personal evaluation, while the community as a whole can be more persuasive, through downvotes, non upvotes, reviews and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a moderator intervenes in handling matters that the community could handle on its own, is actually depriving it from a learning and reflection moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: don't flag answers to poorly asked questions for mod attention, but pick one or more among&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvotes, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non upvotes, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reviews&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-22T14:59:16.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-23T15:26:48.170" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158067&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about how many people would be required to care for a particular menagerie. It's tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/farming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;farming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;farming&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zoology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zoology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zoology&lt;/a&gt;, which could be worse, but neither tag quite fits the topic, which is caring for animals, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;husbandry&lt;/a&gt;. (Farming usually refers to plants, and zoology a) is a much broader field and b) is not usually associated with &lt;em&gt;domestic&lt;/em&gt; animals.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there should be a (separate) tag for this? (It clearly meets the &quot;expert&quot; test...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T16:35:41.817" Title="Should there be a 'husbandry' tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7575" CreationDate="2019-10-23T16:35:41.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zoology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zoology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zoology&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions relating to the study or analysis of animals, animal husbandry, or the discussion of animal behavior and evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zoology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zoology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zoology&lt;/a&gt; for all husbandry-related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T16:35:41.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-23T18:57:29.937" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the root of every ecology is a biome filled with co-dependant organisms. Things which just evolved together over time - frogs hiding in trees, Egrets riding on oxen, ramoras riding on sharks, cows using rumen bacteria to digest grass, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not see a symbiosis tag in here for developing co-dependent relationships between organisms. &lt;strong&gt;As of this post, I have added one. Please feel free to design your creatures' mutual relationships with this tag!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too broad for biology, there is not necessarily a biological reason for symbiosis. Sometimes the organisms are smart enough to just know what works best, like a tree frog and a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this writing there are 280 questions in [biology] asking about symbiosis in one form or another, and they always combine it with another almost arbitrary tag which wastes 2 of you 5 tags. I think it warrants a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2019-12-04T01:50:11.263" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T01:50:11.263" Title="Symbiosis tag please?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-24T02:01:32.880" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about the tags or rules in Meta, since I usually just briefly lurk, so I'd appreciate it if someone can fix the tags to be more appropriate and I apologize if I've broken any rules here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ask what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; really supposed to mean?&#xA;recently I thought reality check more meant such a given concept is possible or plausible or working, but not necessarily mean checking reality or can be real, am I misunderstanding the meaning of this tag?  My English is not that good so I may have misunderstood the obvious meaning here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any better tag for asking whether a concept is possible or plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past I kind of hesitated to use this tag because I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; can cover it already, but after some of my questions get demands to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; even though I have put &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, I start to put it into one of my question but one of the deleted comment and answerer seems to assume I was asking about real bird counterpart or example which is not necessary nor it must be a bird in the context of my question and I don't know should I change the tag or not which probably ruin the answer which is frowned upon here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, I thought it was mean about literally checking reality or can be real, but after my past encounter and some lurking around other questions sometimes people demand reality check for the question even though the description or the context seems out of reality or fiction stuff but still in science base realm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62918" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:31:08.083" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:31:08.083" Title="What is reality check suppose to be?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7578" CreationDate="2019-10-24T07:07:58.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Internal consistency&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can your suspension of disbelief survive this&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means real science can be suspended in the face of a bending of the rules within the asker's universe. Whether it's allowing for FTL travel or artificial gravity or any other discarding of a fundamental law, what you might expect is not necessarily true, but what has been declared to be must be consistent with itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the answers are concerned, normal science can apply to anything not declared as changed, anything that's too far outside science can be declared as perhaps going too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; have traditionally been considered as 3 points on a scale of which you pick one based on how tightly you want to stick to the rules as we know them to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T07:07:58.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:42:36.467" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have flagged this answer as spam the first time, which was declined. Then I realized, &quot;Oh yeah true, I guess it's not really spam per say.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then I flagged it as &quot;not an answer&quot;, but the flag was &lt;strong&gt;disputed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8962/is-a-jet-dragon-possible/8965#8965&quot;&gt;Is a jet dragon possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is just a story! It by no means answers the question in the way that the community expects. Even after reading it several times, I don't understand its purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like what should have been a simple &quot;yup, not an answer&quot; situation and then my flag marked as &quot;helpful&quot;, has become very complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, &lt;strong&gt;why are there mixed responses about how appropriate this answer is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T22:29:07.420" Title="How is this an answer?" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7580" CreationDate="2019-10-24T15:07:22.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can tell you that it turned up in the Review queue for low-quality posts about 18 hours ago as of the time of this answer..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was reviewed by three people - myself and two others. (I've no idea if confidentiality rules forbid me mentioning them, but simple courtesy seems to dictate that I let them chose whether to speak for themselves or remain silent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First vote was cast as &quot;Looks OK&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cast my vote second &quot;Recommend Deletion&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Third vote: &quot;Looks OK&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that was the split of the vote that lead to it being &quot;disputed&quot; as opposed to &quot;rejected&quot; or &quot;accepted&quot;. It's not that your vote is being disputed, but that the balance of the &quot;jury&quot; disputes a definite verdict as-it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For my part, it cave no coherent explanation of how it answered the question - it was a piece of unattributed prose dialogue, not an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be taken as an example of how question and answer standards have changed over time, an answer like that one now likely wouldn't survive the vote. The other voters may well have judged the answer to be appropriate in it's time (Jan 2015) - but I can't speak authoritatively for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of note:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post may well violate copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T15:17:54.333" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T15:17:54.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7580" CreationDate="2019-10-24T19:41:24.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes a little reading to see the answer in there, but it is in there. All you have to do is read the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular corner of stack exchange was never quite like the rest. Not all the answers here are worded in a direct fashion, sometimes there's a stack of allusion and metaphor, sometimes people like to answer a question in the form of a story, though you don't see it as much as you used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that it isn't an answer, but there have been a lot of upvotes, &#xA;perhaps the first consideration should be that other people have seen something you haven't rather than jumping on the not an answer flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T20:17:07.460" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T20:17:07.460" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7546" CreationDate="2019-10-25T20:20:36.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, there is a way!&lt;/strong&gt; And there's no need to scrape web content, either, at least as long as you're only interested in your own posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/gdpr/request&quot;&gt;Submit a Data Access Request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choose &quot;Export my data&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choose &quot;Submit request&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. (The request form shows which e-mail address the confirmation request will be sent to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you confirm that the request is legitimate, a ZIP file of JSON files with your activity across the network will be prepared and made available for you to download. When it's ready for download, you get another e-mail with a link to a landing page where it can be downloaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, the whole process took about 15 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll most likely want to start with the respective files named &lt;code&gt;PostHistory.json&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;PostComments.json&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're so inclined, once you have the post IDs for your answers and questions, you can download web pages with URLs like &lt;code&gt;https://&amp;lt;sitename&amp;gt;.stackexchange.com/a/&amp;lt;POSTID&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (I just tried; that works with question post IDs as well) to get a rendered copy (including other peoples' answers) to keep alongside the raw JSON representation of your own content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The JSON files also include at least recently deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only obvious thing that appears to be missing at a glance is activity on sites which have been shut down. That can probably be gathered from the last Creative Commons data dump, if you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T20:20:36.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2019-10-28T08:10:08.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One month has passed since the incident. I have tried as much as possible to judge the behavior, not the persons, as it has always been the guideline for moderators here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica has been dismissed for not following a set of rules not yet deployed.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/c/moderators/images/s/b342aa3a-f79a-4caa-9479-1b152c21340f.png&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/c/moderators/images/s/b342aa3a-f79a-4caa-9479-1b152c21340f.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monica has been dismissed not following the process in place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE has apologized for the above points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE stated that any dismissed moderator can be reinstated after a proper application and after bringing new evidences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view the first two points can be amended only by reinstating Monica without any action from her side, as they invalidate whatever sanction might be issued against her, regardless of who is right and who is wrong. An apology which leaves the sanction in place is simply an empty shell of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That no individual can be punished for rules not stated at the time an action was done, and that no individual can be punished without a regular trial are the basic of any civil society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A community can work only when all the members follow its rules and principles. By not following the rules and principles that they have set and, worse, refusing to amend the consequences of their own action, SE is simply damaging the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T08:10:08.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-29T12:17:27.667" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m building a creature and have needed to conceive locomotion, aerodynamics, structural design and other reality-based features. I have done this through several different questions, in an iterative piecemeal process which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4214/what-if-i-have-several-questions-associated-with-one-topic&quot;&gt;seems to be the prescribed method&lt;/a&gt; of solving large problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However as the pieces come together there seems to be a declining interest trend leading to fewer and fewer views and responses to questions. It feels like the topic is possibly wearing on users - even though each question is a unique challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not blaming anyone, and maybe it just needs more time. This is just how things appear at this time. This is somewhat preemptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Are multiple questions on one development a nuisance with diminishing returns?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T02:49:15.987" Title="Is it a nuisance to ask multiple questions on one subject?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2019-10-29T13:45:01.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only fairly recently discovered the site, though I suspect I probably farmed it for answers via google queries over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since the incident now and I've read the SE responses and the often heated discussion on meta. Unfortunately it seems that a great deal of permanent damage has been done to the trust between SE and its community, primarily the moderators, and this has already resulted in the loss of a good many highly valued moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that man can create, man can recreate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is anyone looking at setting up a new site in the style of, but independent from, SE and with a more sensible set of community processes, and encouraging the community to move across en masse, leaving SE only as a relic to farm for answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T13:45:01.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7572" CreationDate="2019-10-29T15:17:48.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a kind of tossing the baby out with the bathwater kind of solution.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate wanting good questions, but Flagging and calling in the Mods is not the best way to get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, this is a community and the community really gets to decide what is a good or fully baked question.  The mechanism is provided in the form of Downvotes and comments.  The questions and answers aren't going to magically improve if you do not give a good reason &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you think they are bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, sometimes you may think a question is bad or underdeveloped, but someone else may disagree.  I have answered questions that may have 1 or 2 vote to close on them because I happen to think the question is just fine.  To me, the question was understandable and did not meet criteria for being closed.  Even if I can see the point other VTC's are making, I may not agree that it is so bad as to be closed.  In those cases, if I think I can produce an answer that meets what the OP wants, I will answer the question.  Let the Upvotes and downvotes fall where they may.  Comment please if you downvote.  Then I can acknowledge the point you are making and maybe make a rebuttal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The method of flagging the Mods does a couple of things we don't want.  First of all, it puts an extra burden on people who are graciously volunteering to handle the difficult, sometimes the impossible, and all too often the just plain weird on behalf of the rest of us.  To throw the problem of a half baked question at them is not a great use of the resource.  Second, even if they were inclined to nuke the half baked questions, moderator intervention sends the wrong impression to new users.  It tells the newbie that unless you write a perfect question, don't bother.  That is the absolute worst thing to happen.  If the new user gets a couple of downvotes and good comments, that user will learn how to write a question, and can modify or re-ask the question to better effect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the ability to vote to close, be absolutely certain that you comment.  Give the OP a chance to improve. That is how we get better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLDR:  the nuke option is not the best.  Flag the offensive and such, but not a porr question and answer.  Use the other methods out there.  And please, please, please, if you downvote or VTC, leave a comment.  I'm not always great about this, but I'm striving to be better.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31273" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T15:17:48.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7590" CreationDate="2019-10-29T16:45:04.053" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can’t remember which question got me thinking, but after seeing several questions that were put on hold for being too opinion-based, I wondered where these questions can even be asked. Is there an active Stack Exchange or forum where opinion-based questions can be asked and answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69510" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T16:54:01.000" Title="Is there a home for opinion-based questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7589" CreationDate="2019-10-29T16:54:01.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're not the first person to want this, nor will you be the last. Unfortunately, Stack Exchange doesn't have a place to ask these primarily opinion-based questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Many questions have some component of opinion and subjectivity to them&lt;/a&gt;, of course, and that can work within the Stack Exchange model; Worldbuilding deals with much more subjectivity than the average site. But questions that are &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; opinion-based &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75940/274942&quot;&gt;usually don't work well in that format&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, there's a non-Stack Exchange site out there that has more of a traditional forum style, which should accommodate this sort of question, but we don't have a place like that within the network. I'd advise searching for a place like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T16:54:01.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7580" CreationDate="2019-10-29T20:38:32.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did enjoy this reply with its creative flare, but I also question whether it should be considered an answer all it's own. I think it's actually fantastic, however, I also think that it would be useful to require the more flamboyant, non-standard answers like this to at least have a line at the bottom that summarized for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think simply adding something along the lines of &quot;In conclusion, of course it is possible. Provided you have enough wine and a well placed fireball!&quot; which is implying the answer &quot;If you have dragons, you are already breaking the rules of reality so I don't see why not, especially in the context of the fantasy world you're designing,&quot; would suffice for clarity in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may not be the &quot;best&quot; answer for the questioner, seeing as OP wanted to design a physically plausible dragon with added capabilities for rear aimed jet propulsion, but that doesn't mean that the story is not useful as an answer for someone who is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; abundantly concerned with adhering to reality. It is an additional perspective that might assist one who likes the idea of flatulent based travel on their dragons, but is more concerned about how silly it would seem to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my two cents anyway. The story answer isn't 100% the clearest answer, but certainly not worthy of deletion and has merit for broadening the question and answer's scope of usefulness, which I believe is the ultimate goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelated: I cannot believe someone has not added a comment linking the Blue-Eyes White Jet with the caption &quot;&lt;em&gt;Seto Kaiba has logged in.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; XD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18534" LastEditorUserId="18534" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T22:29:07.420" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T22:29:07.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-31T16:24:58.653" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/159775/69877&quot;&gt;wrote this non-answer&lt;/a&gt; seemingly quite upset about many of my cultural/sociological/logistical/and scientific premises. He openly admits &quot;Disclaimer: yes, I know the above is not an answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They offer nothing at all in solution, but insist on hammering their opinions through the comments. This &quot;answer&quot; does nothing at all except advance one person's personal rant against something that disagrees with their own opinions, disguising them as &quot;frame challenges.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please mark for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T12:39:39.477" Title="Help controlling a misguided &quot;frame challenge answer&quot; which has created a debate" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|topic-challenge|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7593" CreationDate="2019-10-31T17:28:07.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have data communication by means of quantum entanglement (nope, doesn't work) and, in addition &lt;em&gt;&quot;the quantum device must be exactly in the center of the two receivers&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (nope, not possible in any meaningful way) ... and you pretend that this hard SF. Nightmayre's answer is pretty much what I would have written in a scathing review of such a book plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal policy with questions which are just not fully thought through is to either ignore them completely or, at best, write a comment. But user Nightmayre was so incensed with the shoddy structure of the plot presented in the question that they took the time to write a lengthy critique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that Nightmayre is a potential reader of your story. You don't want to raise such a strong feeling of rejection in your readers. I would say be grateful for Nightmayre's answer, because it highlights basic incongruities in the proposed plot, and allows you to address them before putting in the effort to flesh out the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The communication by means of quantum entanglement must go. It is simply not compatible with hard SF.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The requirement for the comm device being exactly in the center must go. It is simply not possible to place it there, because the exact center moves on a highly complicated path. Allowing this requirement downgrades hard SF to the softest of the soft space operas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The blurb about each of the two parties being dependent on some sort of unique resource from the other must go. Those are civilizations capable of interstellar travel. They are not dependent on anything, much less on a resource which so happens to be available in a neighbouring civilization. They very much like what they get in trade, yes, possibly. Britain liked Chinese tea and didn't like paying silver for it, so they decided to engage in a limited war; but Britain was not &quot;dependent&quot; on Chinese tea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must acknowledge and address the immediate observation that those gigaton cargo ships make for excellent kinetic weapons. It is supposed to be hard SF, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2019-10-31T17:33:26.587" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T17:33:26.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7593" CreationDate="2019-10-31T17:56:04.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Follow the process: flag as not an answer, let the community decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers belong to the community, the community decides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2019-10-31T18:29:30.940" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T18:29:30.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7593" CreationDate="2019-10-31T20:47:16.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not everyone who answers the question is going to agree with your basic principles, some people will poke holes in them. Nor will you agree with the points raised in every answer. That is ever the risk of asking questions on a public forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to you to decide whether you'll take some of those points on board or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I disagree with the wording that's been used in the answer, I think it could have been worded in a less confrontational manner as well as formatted better. But I also accept not everyone is a native English speaker so they might not understand the subtleties of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However under the principles for what is or is not an answer on this site I do feel that it's a valid answer and could be useful to someone reading your question again in the future even if it's not that useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T20:47:16.670" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7593" CreationDate="2019-11-01T12:39:39.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frame challenging is at the core of World Building. If I had more time on my hands, I would be adding more frame challenges to your question. As it is, though, I clenched at the part where you meant to use quantum entanglement for communication, and I stopped reading when you mentioned how the quantum device must be positioned. To give you an idea of how... Bad those things are, they are as offensive to sci-fi enthusiasts as the idea that the Earth is flat is offensive to the scientific community at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is almost like saying that you can get a bike to hover by holding a magnet above it as you ride it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than claiming Nightmayre has posted a non-answer because it doesn't fit into the universe you are creating, consider that your universe may not be consistent and that answer is showing you why. It is doing its job so well that right now it is the must upvoted answer. It goes a long way into rethinking the world you are creating and then preparing a new, improved question on space warfare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also suggest educating yourself about the science you invoke in your story. Quantum and FTL are not just buzzwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reason why your FTL communication device is a no-go, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/78118/31264&quot;&gt;Quantum entanglement as practical method of superluminal communication&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reason why the quantum entanglement device cannot be in a &quot;center&quot;: you might just pull it off if both end points are on a planet, but as soon as they are not stationary relative to each other they will not measure space nor time the same way anymore. For light-year distances, this effect is just too much. Both ends will not be at the same pace, might not even agree on the order of some events they observe, much less where the &quot;center&quot; between them is. You can read more on that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T12:39:39.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-02T01:49:04.963" Score="0" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an account here to merely post a comment pointing out the error of logic in an accepted answer, and thereby show that the accepted answer is, in actuality, incorrect. Since I do not have the time nor interesting in 'earning' the right to comment, I want my account and all information related to me deleted. Thus my question, how do I delete my StackExchange account and all information related to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user70133" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T02:56:12.090" Title="How do I delete my StackExchange account?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7598" CreationDate="2019-11-02T02:12:55.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Delete your account by the method posted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account&quot;&gt;the help section&lt;/a&gt; located in the upper right hand side of your page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" OwnerDisplayName="Vogon Poet" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T02:12:55.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-03T15:50:36.920" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a person who tends to ask a whole lot of questions but don't really come back to the question to accept someone's answers that they took the time to write. The problem I am having is that there's no icon where I can accept answers to the questions I ask when I use the world exchange app or on the website itself when I use a personal computer. I looked for information on how to accept an answer on the help page but received no information on it. How do I go about doing this? Am I just not looking in the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastEditorUserId="52361" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T20:58:01.193" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T17:18:46.583" Title="How do I accept an answer?" Tags="|bug|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7609" CreationDate="2019-11-05T21:33:39.060" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should I do with this world that all of you guys have helped me build? I've thought about writing short stories, or just making it to make it. I love making it but sometimes I wonder what I can do with it. What do you guys do with your worlds? Do you use them for games, stories, tabletop campaigns? Heck, how do you guys keep track of them, how do you store them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43213" LastEditorUserId="34744" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T22:48:25.163" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T01:24:53.910" Title="What should I do with my World? and Where do I store it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7600" CreationDate="2019-11-06T17:18:46.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Located to the left of the answer, below the upvote and downvote buttons there is a gray check mark. Clicking that will turn it green and mark the answer as accepted. See the following image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bAi0S.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bAi0S.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: If you are using the website on a mobile phone, you might be able to resolve issues by finding an option in your browser called something along the lines of &quot;Use Desktop Version&quot;. Clicking on this forces the browser to load the website using the default computer layout, instead of using the &quot;mobile version&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T17:18:46.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7605" CreationDate="2019-11-06T19:52:47.330" Score="15" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/math&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;math&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;math&lt;/a&gt; should be merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, and a synonym relation set up, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt; as the canonical tag. Ideally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maths&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;maths&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;maths&lt;/a&gt; would also exist as a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T01:16:48.400" Title="∴ [math] ≡ [mathematics]" Tags="|discussion|tagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7604" CreationDate="2019-11-07T01:16:48.400" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were only three questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/math&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;math&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;math&lt;/a&gt;. I found that for two of them the tag was irrelevant, and the third one I changed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. That will cause the system to delete the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/math&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;math&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;math&lt;/a&gt; tag, unless someone tags a questions with it in the next pass of the tag deleting job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't done anything about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maths&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;maths&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;maths&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't know if I can, but for now there are no questions with that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T01:16:48.400" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-10T17:06:40.413" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160558/how-to-make-my-matriarchal-society-more-realistic&quot;&gt;This recent question&lt;/a&gt; is a little baffling and very long-winded, but it seems OP's intended &quot;question&quot; is asking for advice, critique, or feedback on their construction of their matriarchy so far.  Is this on-topic on Worldbuilding.SE?  I usually live on Writing, where asking for critique or advice is off-topic.  Is that the case here too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user57780" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T08:58:58.833" Title="Is asking for advice or critique on your world on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2019-11-11T02:26:07.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;OFF-TOPIC&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the short answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advice &amp;amp; critique are, of course, valid worldbuilding matter for discussion.  Simply off-topic for &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; forum.  Stack Exchange operates on the principle of &lt;em&gt;one focused query gets focused responses&lt;/em&gt;.  Generally speaking we try to play by SE's rules as best we can, while understanding that geopoesy as an artform in its own right or as an adjunct to story writing and gamesmithing simply doesn't fit the SE mold all that well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is you should be seeking this kind of advice &amp;amp; feedback on what's known as a &amp;quot;long form discussion forum&amp;quot; for in depth and potentially long term discussions, for quick advice questions, you could also try a &amp;quot;short form discussion forum&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the latter, &lt;strong&gt;Reddit&lt;/strong&gt; is best. High volume + large membership means you're very likely to get some kind of random advice. There are a lot of fantasy &amp;amp; sci-fi worldbuilding forums there as well as gaming forums that cater to a worldbuilding perspective. You could try &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyWorldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantasy Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, or for a broader scope, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyWorldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For higher quality more in depth discussion within a real community setting, where you might get less feedback, but feedback of higher quality, I'd suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cbbforum.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CBB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verduria.org/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ZBB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, when you've got some tidbit of lore a bit polished up, feel free to submit it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Excahnge is specifically designed to help you with relatively narrowly focused worldbuilding queries. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;See What is Worldbuilding All About?&lt;/a&gt; We'd love for you to hang around, get to know this forum better and by all means, whenever you're facing a sticky worldbuilding problem, by all means ask here! Check out our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6140#6140&quot;&gt;Catalogue of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; to help you understand what we mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T00:28:58.553" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T00:28:58.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7601" CreationDate="2019-11-11T02:38:14.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;what to do&lt;/em&gt;, you already answered your query!  Writing stories or developing games are possibilities.  Exploring other artistic mediums such as drawing, painting, cartooning, music and poetry are also potential avenues to consider. Writing the great American fantasy novel is a common goal.  Making short Youtube episodes / movies is also a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to store your information, I'd recommend the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set up an account at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frathwiki.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frath Wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  This is a public wiki maintained for and by geopoets and language inventors. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Join the &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LCS&lt;/a&gt; and take advantage of their web hosting service: create your own website or wiki for your world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Join the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cbb.aveneca.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CBB&lt;/a&gt; and start up a thread devoted to your world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a forum at Reddit for your stories and geopoetical lore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Privately, I'd recommend you find a good private wiki to store your raw data. Some people use Google Docs.  I also write books of worldbuilding lore.  That's another possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you have some kind of back-up plan.  Carbonite or a local manual / automatic data dump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T02:38:14.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7585" CreationDate="2019-11-11T02:49:15.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NO: Technically Not a Nuisance&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how SE is designed. You formulate a focused query; we formulate a focused answer; you choose which one works best for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if you try to formulate a single query with locomotion, aerodynamics, and structural design components, it'll be shut down pretty quick for being too broad.  And we won't be afraid to tell you that ought to know better by now! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, I think your line of questioning &lt;em&gt;may be&lt;/em&gt; suffering from diminishing interest.  It's also possible that people are thinking that, after all the initial help given, perhaps it's time you took on more and more of the work yourself.  It's also possible that people are beginning to think you're lacking creativity: why are you asking &lt;em&gt;so many questions&lt;/em&gt; about a single topic rather than sorting out issues on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hold that you are following best practice by compartmentalising a complex problem into distinct sub-problems.  You might consider taking what help has been given so far and try to sort some issues out on your own.  You might also consider letting that problem rest for a while.  Work on something else and come back to it later.  But ultimately, I think you're going to fight something of an uphill battle against human nature: people might be getting bored of the same sub-problem within a larger project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T02:49:15.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-11T22:34:10.570" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160402/a-large-planet-composed-of-all-natural-elements-is-created-what-happens&quot;&gt;A large planet composed of all natural elements is created. What happens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I make this question answerable?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I just wanted to know what would happen if dozens of elements were placed together in equal mass, I wanted to know what would happen over the course of billions of years. I only added many specifications in there to avoid being too broad, but the question ended up being put on hold anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T05:25:40.297" Title="How can I make this question answerable?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7611" CreationDate="2019-11-12T05:25:40.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens immediately after this mass forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens over a million years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over a billion years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters, those are 4 questions, and we want 1 question per post. Then, answering each of them would take an entire university class, at least, if you had specified what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, and this makes things worst, you didn't. You just asked what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens to what? Geology? Weather? Numismatic? Ermeneutics? History of furniture crafting technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you are asking one of the questions clearly listed in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; under &amp;quot;which question should I avoid asking?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can remove all those issues than your question becomes answerable according to our standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T05:25:40.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7617" CreationDate="2019-11-14T01:18:49.513" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Necromancer badge is for good answers to old questions. I was looking at who won it lately:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/17/necromancer&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/17/necromancer&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;None of the dates are right. It says Ozymandias most recently earned it on October 28. But the link is to an answer Ozzy wrote on Feb 17, 2017! I looked through the others. They all have wrong dates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I misunderstanding something? Or is this a bug in the exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T03:13:15.150" Title="Is something broken about the “necromancer” badge?" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7601" CreationDate="2019-11-14T01:24:53.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I set up a plebiscite and let the denizens of my worlds vote on what happens to them after I’m done building. Some opt to become stories, others RPG campaigns. One decided to become a US Senator. It’s pretty much up to the world. I’m a benevolent deity (in that respect, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T01:24:53.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-14T01:48:40.280" Score="-3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/160800/69651&quot;&gt;How can unconditional physician-assisted suicide be approved for anyone 18 or older?&lt;/a&gt; was closed wrongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?.&amp;quot; – Halfthawed, Renan, Frostfyre, puppetsock, Separatrix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I be &amp;quot;asking questions about a story set in a world&amp;quot; when unconditional physician-assisted suicide for anyone 18 or older doesn't exist, and probably won't for a while? I want to build this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, these two comments are dead (pun intended) wrong, but got upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/death-with-dignity-alabama.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alabama has never officially considered adopting a death with dignity law. The state has, in fact, taken an opposing path. In 2017, the Alabama legislature passed a law declaring it a crime for a health care provider to knowingly prescribe medication intended to cause death.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/alabama/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beginning on August 1, 2017, assisted suicide will be a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.  Prior to then, assisted suicide was dealt with under common law.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I asked about unconditional PAS. Dignitas doesn't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dignitas.ch/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=23&amp;amp;Itemid=84&amp;amp;lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1.7. Examination carried out by DIGNITAS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a request has been received, DIGNITAS staff members will examine it for completeness. They will also give consideration to the question of whether the applicant can be given any immediate recommendations for possible alternatives with the hope of being able to continue life under better conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rI1df.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rI1df.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user69651" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T21:43:23.987" Title="Why was my question closed as &quot;too story-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2019-11-14T03:13:15.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges are awarded when all the conditions are met. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer was posted on Feb 17 2017 but the conditions were met on Oct 28, in this case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then Oct 28 is the date in which the badge is awarded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the fifth upvote was given on Oct 28.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T03:13:15.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7616" CreationDate="2019-11-17T20:43:58.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rationales are obvious:  first, your question is asking for a methodology.  This is the nature of how-is-it-done questions, in this case, within the context of a fictional story.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you yourself stipulate that this is a matter of plot structuring when you state quite clearly that this is a question of fictional narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of these facts, the answer is simply a matter of narrativity: if you need this to be so for the purposes of your story, then &lt;strong&gt;it is so&lt;/strong&gt;.  We don't deal with these kinds of questions because there is no worldbuilding involved.  You would need to edit your query in order to remove the narrative aspects and in stead focus on matters of culture &amp;amp; history, morality &amp;amp; ethics, government &amp;amp; politics. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;THAT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T20:43:58.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-18T21:28:16.407" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every once in a while I will come across a question that is just so poorly written that I don't think it could be saved by providing critiques and giving the asker a chance to fix it. The most common examples of this are the questions that make completely baseless and incorrect assumptions about historical events, which essentially renders their entire question invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not a &amp;quot;very low quality&amp;quot; option for questions; only for answers. Down-voting also doesn't affect a question unless a moderator gets involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What am I to do in situations like this?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to give any specific examples, because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, especially when I won't be anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T09:22:10.363" Title="What reason do I select in order to vote to close poorly written questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7622" CreationDate="2019-11-18T21:39:14.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for closure are clearly listed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question too opinion based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question not about worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question unclear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question falls into one or more of the above (refer to the help center for more details), go for it. If none of the above apply, then there is no ground for closure. If you are convinced that the premises of the question are faulty, you can write a frame challenging answer, or comment to have the defect fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T21:39:14.923" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7622" CreationDate="2019-11-19T05:08:35.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hover over the downvote button on questions, you'll see the alt text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting is the proper course of action for questions that are bad, but which are not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Out of scope;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duplicates;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too broad;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primarily opinion based.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, users with 20,000+ reputation can vote to delete questions that have a negative score. If memory serves me right, a net score of -3 is enough on most cases to allow for such a vote. It takes only three deletion votes to delete such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T05:08:35.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7622" CreationDate="2019-11-19T09:22:10.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low quality questions pretty much always fall into &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; in my experience. In the case of a question based on false assumptions, it's unclear what they're asking because the logic is so twisted up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T09:22:10.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7627" CreationDate="2019-11-19T18:16:13.923" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my time using this site, I have noticed that when I have more than 200 earned reputation from upvotes, that I instead get only 200. I already know that this is by design, so this is not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed that upon losing reputation, that it would remain at 200 instead of going down, because the total earned reputation for that day still exceeded 200 even with the -1 or -2 taken into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;This no longer is happening.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time I wrote this question, I had the following stats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;18 answer upvotes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ = 18\times10=180 $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;3 answer downvotes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ = -2\times3=-6 $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;5 question upvotes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ = 5\times10 = 50 $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;0 question downvotes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$= 0$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ = 224 $$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am listed as having earned only &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$196$&lt;/span&gt; reputation. This seems to have occurred because the upvotes that were not counted due to the 200 limit were not then re-evaluated upon the loss of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why am I losing reputation despite having enough upvotes to prevent it?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a deliberate change? Or is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like lowering my own reputation, so I was encouraged to downvote more often before this change. I liked the idea of being rewarded for high quality posts by being able to downvote without losing reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T16:02:25.383" Title="Something Weird is Happening with Reputation" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7626" CreationDate="2019-11-19T18:51:25.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time counts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you reach the threshold, any upvote you receive is lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, once you are at the 200 rep limit, getting the sequence of 1 up - 1 down and 1 down - 1 up will lead to different results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 up - 1 down will result in the 1 up being lost and the 1 down to be counted, so you end up at 198&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 down - 1 up will first bring you to 198 and then, since you are below the threshold, you will return to 200 getting only a +2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T18:51:25.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T00:46:34.477" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question as asked was &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt; (in my opinion, see note below) put on hold:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/161853/why-is-cold-iron-the-only-thing-that-can-harm-faeries&quot;&gt;Why is &amp;quot;Cold Iron&amp;quot; the only thing that can harm faeries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not here to argue about that. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is whether the community would endorse “hole filling” questions about our world. In this case, consider a storyteller who is telling a fairy story and encounters the need to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; Iron is so harmful. Inventing a plausible reason for X effect given world Y is one of the archetype questions we answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question were rephrased as “given our world and a classical British Isles fairy myth, what is the best explanation for iron killing fairies?” then it strikes me as a well-forged question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do others agree? Are there conditions where questions that fill in gaps in our own world’s myths could be valid questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I (and other moderators) believe this was correctly closed because the person asking the question proposed their own magical system, which means that anything we argue from the real world and historical mythology doesn't apply -- in a custom magic system, ANY answer is possible, and it becomes just the author's opinion which answer is best. But if the question is rephrased to focus specifically the rules of our world and finding a best-fit for a specific, known mythology, that turns it into a question that can be answered by the research support of the community, even though it is still a hypothetical answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2019-11-27T18:21:49.510" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T15:54:21.083" Title="Can the fairy-iron question be saved by worldbuilding our own world?" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2019-11-25T00:53:49.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agree with Elemtilas. Can be made on-topic if the question were presented as “here is a bullet point list of facts about my matriarchy. Are there any contradictions within this list?” That’s a specific, answerable question. Could also be on topic asking for list of historical matriarchies that could be used as a model given story constraint X. Note that just asking for a list of historical matriarchies is a question for the History stack exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T00:53:49.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T16:44:40.503" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged an answer about 5 days ago, and the post has since been deleted, but the flag is still there and is listed as pending. I think when the post got deleted, the flag might have been messed up? I'm not sure how this works, but my flags have always been answered within a couple days at the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even know how I would link you to the flag, since the post it refers to has been deleted. However, the flag was in regard to an answer of the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/161280/how-to-fight-an-army-of-skeletons/161472#161472&quot;&gt;How to fight an army of skeletons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have misunderstood something about how this system works, I apologize. And if it just so happens that no one has gotten around to my flag yet, I apologize for seeming impatient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T21:24:54.633" Title="One of my flags might be stuck in limbo" Tags="|support|flagging|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7630" CreationDate="2019-11-25T21:24:54.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have a not insignificant (for world building anyway) backlog of flags.  I can tell from your display name you are aware of all the...stuff going on with SE.  Most of the moderators on the site are marked inactive right now in protest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are keeping an eye on flags for stuff that needs immediate attention but everything else is basically being ignored. We don't like impacting the community like this, lets hope things get sorted out soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T21:24:54.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-27T20:30:34.037" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/162188/how-can-i-break-down-the-task-of-designing-alien-commodities-and-items&quot;&gt;How can I break down the task of designing alien commodities and items?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very frustratingly, it currently has &lt;s&gt;3&lt;/s&gt;4 close votes for being too broad. (It will very soon be put on hold)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also created this pretty well-received question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160220/how-do-i-resolve-science-based-problems-in-my-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;How do I resolve science-based problems in my worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like I said &amp;quot;Hey how do I design alien stuff?&amp;quot; without giving any detail about my problem or what I'm looking for. I was very specific in what I needed from answers, and gave my criteria for judging answers. I don't understand what people are nitpicking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exactly what makes my question too broad?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the comments even mentions that I essentially want the book on ergonomics, which quite frankly is just plain wrong. I am asking about a &lt;em&gt;very specific&lt;/em&gt; kind of worldbuilding. The only context that I am looking for is in regard to worldbuilding. I hate that people are assuming that I'm asking for all sorts of things, things that I really don't want anything to do with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these questions were inspired by the success of this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2/how-can-i-break-down-the-task-of-creating-a-world-into-manageable-chunks&quot;&gt;How can I break down the task of creating a world into manageable chunks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If I am incorrect in the way I phrased the question, how can I edit it to make it better like the other two questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T17:13:06.210" Title="Exactly what makes my question too broad?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|asking-questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7634" CreationDate="2019-11-27T22:29:54.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To Avoid Being Closed As Too Broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 0:&lt;/strong&gt; Start building a world. If you can’t say what world you’re asking about, you’re likely to ask an unanswerable question. Your eventual question may be germane to many worlds, but you should have your world in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Make sure there is only one question being asked. If you're asking multiple questions, you're too broad. That one question should be a single sentence and -- in my opinion, ideally -- should be the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Ask yourself what a correct answer would look like. Ignore all the content of your post except the core question. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I resolve science-based problems in my worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the answer to this be a step-by-step list? Would it be a flow chart? This one really seems to only be answerable on a case-by-case basis. I really cannot imagine any answer that isn't a discussion back and forth about &lt;em&gt;possible ways&lt;/em&gt; to resolve the problems. Possible ways means there isn't even a conceivable right answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be a good question, but maybe it isn't a good question for a Stack Exchange site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you still think it is a good question for SE,&lt;/strong&gt; then include in the post instructions on how to answer the question. Such instructions can go a LONG way to preventing a &quot;too broad&quot; hold. Something like: &quot;A good answer to this question will be of the form...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Look at the text that you have to post with your question. If it requires pages of text, you are almost certainly either too broad or too story specific. That's not a hard and fast rule, but it's a good rule of thumb. Questions that SE sites can answer are generally a couple paragraphs and sometimes an accompanying example (like a picture or a piece of code). When MOST PEOPLE reach pages of text, they aren't asking a specific question. Instead, they're fishing for feedback. Now, it is possible that someone asks a question that requires that much background because it is a very technical question, but such questions are rare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that all the text in your question is relevant... if there are lots of tangents, that leads to a &quot;too broad&quot; finding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS TO ALL OF THESE. What I've written here are guidelines to a question being too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2019-11-30T17:13:06.210" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T17:13:06.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7634" CreationDate="2019-11-28T02:13:37.560" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I have the same feedback for this question that I had for the other one you asked the other day. The point of the stack is not to build a machine for you that you can use to solve worldbuilding problems. So, asking &quot;how can I edit this... &quot; entirely misses the point of the feedback your question received. What you've done here is try to get answers to ALL POSSIBLE questions you might encounter as you design a world, and that's about as overbroad as it gets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, step 0 of asking a question to this stack should be &quot;I built a world, and now I have a question&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You keep skipping that step in many of your questions. In this example in particular, you haven't even tried to build the world yet. You haven't tried to design the alien yet. Or, if you have, that's not the question you're actually asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why not?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post says &quot;It seems overwhelming&quot;, and while I can understand deeply how the at the confluence of being highly analytical and a perfectionist, it tends to make problems seem so huge and complex that you don't want to even start without guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not the point of this stack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my recommendation is that before you ask your next question, try to solve it yourself first, and then present the steps you took to try to solve it yourself and the point where you got stuck as your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54417" LastEditorUserId="54417" LastEditDate="2019-11-28T02:18:50.777" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T02:18:50.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7628" CreationDate="2019-11-28T05:37:58.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding, by long established usage, antedating Stack Exchange by many years, involves the creation of a fictional world.  A place other than precisely our ordinary Earth.  Such a query would certainly be outside the scope of WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific question you pose would be much more suitable over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/users/4152/elemtilas&quot;&gt;Mythology &amp;amp; Folklore&lt;/a&gt;, as that is the proper SE forum for these kinds of questions stemming from the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion down in the comments I think is pertinent to the nature of this query. AlexP noted incorrectly that queries about fairies are fair game for WB.SE because &lt;em&gt;there are no faeries in the real world, after all&lt;/em&gt;.  I responded that &lt;em&gt;many things are, in the real world, fictional. They are most certainly phenomena of this real world, and not part of a fictional world&lt;/em&gt; and certainly not part of a fictional world as understood for the purposes of this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thereafter, SRM - Reinstate Monica said &lt;em&gt;Fairies are part of a fictional world. You have now convinced me, unquestionably, this question is germane to WB&lt;/em&gt;  One can only hope this is an example of hyperbolic logic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, AlexP and SRM -Reinstate Monica present us with what is plainly a red herring.  There also was never a place called Wurthering Heights nor any of the characters that lived there. There also were never places called Pellucidar or Narnia nor Azarians nor Horibs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fairies (or any similar race of people or creature) as they exist in the mythology &amp;amp; folklore of real world cultures ought to be approached no differently, from our perspective as worldbuilders, than we'd approach the phenomena of any other fictional place. Fictional places and phenomena that have actual literary existence within the real world are all &amp;quot;third party&amp;quot; works and we don't answer queries about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;third party&lt;/a&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fairies, thus are no different. They are the work of real world story tellers living in real world cultures and making use of real world scientific tools (mythology and folklore are sciences, after all) to create tales of wonder. Whether those tales were first told at a folklore festival in 2019 or whether Grimm recorded them in the 19th century or whether the tale was recorded in an anonymous 14th century source from traditions dating back time out of mind, these places of wonder we call Faerie have their existence in the real world and are thus third party works at best. They certainly are not our works!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real world is not a fictional world.  Hence, the phenomena of the real world -- &lt;em&gt;“hole filling” questions about our world&lt;/em&gt; -- are off topic for this Q&amp;amp;A forum. All aspects of real world myth and folklore, as they pertain to real world folklore are phenomena of the real world. A storyteller who is telling a fairy story and encounters the need to explain why Iron is so harmful needs to address her query to M&amp;amp;F.SE, not WB.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we can see from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, this forum is dedicated to works of &lt;em&gt;our own imagination&lt;/em&gt;, rather than works of others' imaginations: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It is not for answering questions about the real world, and that would include all matters of real world myth, legend, folklore and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we wished to go down the irrational path in saying that fairies etc are part of some fictional world, rather than part of the cultural beliefs of the real world, at best those supposed &amp;quot;fictional worlds&amp;quot; would be third party works. As Monica said: &lt;em&gt;This site is for questions about building worlds, not questions about how others' worlds work.&lt;/em&gt; Either way, the above proposed query is off-topic for WB.SE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you've gone and argued one side of the &lt;em&gt;correctness&lt;/em&gt; of the close vote, I'd posit that the VTC was ill conceived, if for no other reason than that the rationale chosen was &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (and the other mods) may not like this query for being opinion based (and I know we could go on and on about what constitutes &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;), but it most definitely is a &amp;quot;how the world functions&amp;quot; question which is spot on topic for WB.SE.  While I wouldn't close it for being opinion based, because that's what worldbuilding is founded on, I could at least see that as a valid reason for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the OP edited his query, narrowing it down a bit and offering criteria for good answers.  The question is now &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt; in the re-open queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T15:54:21.083" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7634" CreationDate="2019-11-28T14:05:03.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taken as is, that question can only be answered at a level of abstraction so high as to be blindingly obvious. 1. Design your alien species. 2. Design their history. 3. Design their tools. 4. Design their culture. 5. Integrate feedback from all previous design efforts to for a new cohesive whole. 6. Design useful objects based on all that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has even casually wandered through a large national museum on human culture will notice the astonishing variety of tools used by even a single species of tool users, humans. Integrating the stupendously complex feedback loops of culture + physiology + psychology + available materials + dead cultures + social power structures; integrating all this is more than any one WB question can bear. It falls to the WorldBuilder to answer these questions specifically then come to WB for clarification or very narrow &quot;how would this work&quot; questions. For example, &quot;what sorts of stone tools might a giant python with human level intelligence use?&quot; is pretty narrow already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just look at the astounding variety of human chairs. Thrones, milk maid stools, chaise lounge, swivel chairs, office chairs, benches, dining room chairs, hunting blind chairs... And this ignores cultures who never invented chairs because everyone squats. Without constraints, your question asks us to design all reasonable chairs for all possible human level species. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only ask one question. In your question, I see sub-questions about how to design aliens physiology, how to design an economy based on alien physiology, how to design a society for these aliens, and how to design a tool history. Any one of these questions alone could easily fill a book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My focus here is trying to design the end-result of centuries of an alien race's ergonomic development. This is a very daunting task to me and makes me feel pretty overwhelmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your overwhelm-ed-ness is well earned. The task of designing a species and working out their history can be stupendously complex. But, this is work you have to do yourself. There are too many decisions wrapped up in this process for us to do it for you. And I'm pretty sure you'll hate my decisions. :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T14:05:03.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-30T17:27:39.670" Score="13" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;How am I supposed to earn the badge for approving edits if the only people making edits are those whose edits don’t need approval?! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok... more seriously:&#xA;I think more users in our community should feel comfortable helping clean up questions. The earlier a question gets cleaned up, the better its answers. Tidy the grammar. Make the title meaningful. Boldface the summary in long questions. Remove the fluffy text that obscures what’s being asked. Sure, you have to be careful doing all that so you don’t destroy the original question intent, but that’s why we have the approval process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent negative events with SE have left our site bereft of several great minds. I’ve made my decision to continue using the site while the legal process moves forward... I want Monica to have a community to come back to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, c’mon, give editing a try! You learn. And I get my badge! :-)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T17:27:39.670" Title="We need more editors" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2019-12-04T01:57:47.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If such a worldbuilding question was posed as a reality-check on a particular discrete portion of the setting in such a way that it did not rely solely upon personal opinion, and was not applicable only to the particular story or world in the question, and it could be asked without requiring potential answerers to read reams of material, then I'd say &quot;Yes&quot;... it would appear to be on- topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T01:57:47.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6161" CreationDate="2019-12-04T04:18:43.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a number of questions that I have had to fight to have remain open because they were real-world questions, &quot;Not about Worldbuilding&quot;, and I had to explain in the question at some length that yes, they were about this world, but the answer provided details of the way that the world could change afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83825/75&quot;&gt;How long can New York City sustain the Snakebot of Doom&amp;#39;s hunger for Iron and steel?&lt;/a&gt;.  I had to edit this question extensively to show &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I was asking it before the tide of close votes on the grounds of not being about Worldbuilding would stop... but if it had been considered on-topic, it might have been answered much sooner, and with less effort on my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may be interesting to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a question is asked, sometimes knowing why doesn't help answer the question, and it could just as easily be answered regardless.   This question received questions in comments about Jormungandr recycling its own ammunition.   I already knew that it was not possible, and had accounted for that fact in my original question, and had I not had to mention why I was asking the question, that counter-question would never have come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... while mentioning the Worldbuilding rationale behind a question can be educational for other worldbuilders, there should be no requirement that a question educate its readers about its author's Worldbuilding process.  Sometimes a question's author needs a question answered quickly, and explaining himself just so the question will remain open is otherwise a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers, on the other hand, &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; demonstrate something that contributes to the Worldbuilding process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... TL/DR: I vote that Yes, real-world questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T04:18:43.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7628" CreationDate="2019-12-04T14:37:34.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question was fair game for WB, at least in its final edited form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster had provided enough context to be clear that the world he was describing was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; our world (it had a pretty clear history of the demise of these faeries including massed battles between faeires and humans in human towns, which does not to my knowledge correspond to any existing mythology about this world). The faeries were not exactly equivalent to traditional north-European fairy traditions - they incorporated elements more closely associated with other traditional magical creatures such as sphinx (riddles) and the poster describes them as having no fixed form, and as spirits of madness, which again is divergent from the traditional description of &quot;fairy&quot;. There are elements of Rumpelstiltskin in there too, with the &quot;obligation to deals&quot; he mentions. So in my opinion it meets the criterion of trying to create detail about a fictional world, rather than this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was asking for a mechanism to explain a specific rule of how the world works (why would a specific substance be especially harmful to a category of magical being?) It wasn't asking for plot, and it didn't appear to be overly broad. You can argue &quot;because it's magic you can have it work any way you want&quot; but if that rule were enforced rigorously we'd see far fewer questions on WB. There are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions about how magical interactions might work, and the correct way to answer them is to provide suggestions about why a particular explanation for the magical interaction might be the most compatible with the rest of the poster's description of their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it's all speculative (this is fictional world building, remember!) but speculation accompanied by justification should be considered a good answer, and a question that can be answered by justified speculation should be considered a valid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T14:37:34.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7313" CreationDate="2019-12-06T16:50:54.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Journal received!!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it looks &lt;strong&gt;amazing&lt;/strong&gt;. Can’t wait to fill it with half-built worlds :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mKhOe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover photo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MDADE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks again @James for making this happen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43163" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T16:50:54.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7646" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:30:32.193" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I missed the last election period and would like to make sure that I don't miss the next one, but when I looked at the last dates it had been on it was twice in February and once in July.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it already roughly known when the next election period will be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it even a periodical process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59407" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T01:59:46.347" Title="Is it known when the next Community Moderation election will be?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7700" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:37:48.860" Score="-3" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was looking around recently, and I saw several answers/questions which were downvoted because people thought that &quot;Oh, that science is 'incorrect'&quot;, when the person actually proves in their question/answer that their position is correct. As an outspoken Intelligent Design proponent, I am a bit worried that somebody(s) might do this to me. If enough people were to do it, it would ruin my reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do when a question or answer is downvoted out of bias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T03:49:38.307" Title="What to do if your question/answer is downvoted out of bias" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:41:50.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it already roughly known when the next election period will be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it even a periodical process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderator elections are not strictly periodic. They are held whenever the current moderator team cannot cope with the amount of work required to support the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T12:41:50.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:47:59.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system is designed to protect from this, being skewed to favor upvotes vs downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downvote takes away 2 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An upvote gives 10 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need 5 downvotes to cancel a single upvote. Based on my experience only extremely poor answers get 5 or more downvotes and not a single upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T12:47:59.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:55:55.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you write you question including a statement at the beginning along the lines of  &quot;In a world where life was created in the ways proposed by intelligent deign&quot; or &quot;assuming we accept the principles of intelligent design&quot;. It may also be worth quickly outlining the key points of intelligent design just to make sure everyone is working from the same premise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it very clear that you are wanting answers that accept intelligent design and so whether intelligent design is correct or not doesn't matter in the context of the question. Beyond this there's not much you can do although if massive down voting is occurring and you believe this is why you could try raising this in meta although I'm not sure this will do much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that could help reduce down voting is making sure you phrase the question so that it doesn't look like an argument for intelligent design/against other people's views. People on the site are much more likely to engage helpfully if you are simply asking for help with your problem than if you are perceived to be trying to push your point of view onto people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of writing answers it's trickier as you are not setting the constraints of the world, this is done in the question. Make sure before you answer that an answer based on intelligent design will fit the question's constraints. For instance, if someone asks &quot;How could X have evolved&quot; answers based on theories other than evolution would probably be downvoted for not addressing the question. Obviously the same applies the other way around as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not sure about how a question will be received you could post it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/17720&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; first but I'm not sure how active the Sandbox is at the moment so there's no guarantee that anyone will see it. The other option is to get a more informal discussion on your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17720" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T12:55:55.547" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7650" CreationDate="2019-12-09T22:26:10.487" Score="57" ViewCount="5144" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was looking around on Meta lately, and I saw a bunch of people with &quot;- Reinstate Monica&quot; in their usernames. What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T13:46:17.347" Title="What does &quot;- Reinstate Monica&quot; mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7649" CreationDate="2019-12-10T04:43:32.243" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story short: Monica was a moderator on many SE sites, including World Building. She is regarded by many as having contributed a lot to the network, both in content, moderation, and mentoring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a discussion about gender issues in a chat-room exclusive for moderators (that chat room does not belong to World Building, but to another site in the network). She was accused of causing problems due to misgendering and transphobia and lost her moderator status. That was a unilateral decision from SE, which was done on a religious holiday when she would not be online in order to defend her case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few days later, SE released a new code of conduct which is very specific about how to deal with the gender issues which caused the whole situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica's supporters are mad at SE and wish to have her reinstated as a moderator. There are two main groups supporting her as of now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who think that the way the situation was handled was wrong - Monica was accused without proof after all, and she could never defend herself against the accusations;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People who would like the new code of conduct to be rolled back, because they feel uncomfortable being forced to use people's correct genders. Monica herself said in some comment that she does not support this mentality and called those people trolls with &lt;strike&gt;an ugly&lt;/strike&gt; a disgusting agenda.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: the comment has seemingly been deleted (this was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps#comment1095769_334551&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to it), there are only references now. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps/334596#comment1098997_334596&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; still survives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Renan incorrect. I'm being targeted by extreme bigots who want me to join their cause to make the world safe for straight white American men or the like. (Those folks tend to hate Jews too, but I guess they overlooked that.) I moderate anonymous comments on my blog (didn't need to before!), so trust me when I say that you are not seeing what I'm seeing. There have also been comments on SE (now flagged and deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was in response to me misinterpreting the target on the comment about a disgusting agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think she is innocent, since there is no proof of what she did. SE however is a private company ran by people who are very disconnected from the community running the sites, so I don't expect any changes to Monica's situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-15T13:46:17.347" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T13:46:17.347" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2019-12-11T01:59:46.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All we know is a CM has stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/337941/warning-potential-new-moderators/340094#comment1124336_337941&quot;&gt;you won't see any elections this year&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To the best of my knowledge there has been no attempt by SE to fill those missing volunteer positions.&quot; Just so you know, we don't run elections this late in the year due to holidays. The earliest possible we'd start running elections again is in January. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/337941/warning-potential-new-moderators/340094#comment1124336_337941&quot;&gt;animuson♦&lt;/a&gt;, Nov 11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31224" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T01:59:46.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2019-12-11T07:24:59.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw your answer on the question about insects and mammals. I would have downvoted it had you not deleted it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have nothing against using pseudosciences to answer questions, I do that all the time. God knows I got a couple of flat Earth answers here. I always take care to make it clear that I'm not serious about them though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you make a claim that some pseudoscience is actual science, you are opening a can of worms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said you used four or five scientific articles, calling the name of molecular biology, but did not provide any links to the articles. Your post also defies high school classroom biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was, all in all, maybe a good faith attempt at answering the question - but unfortunately it was more about defending ID than providing an answer to how some specific kinds of animals could end up filling some niches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T07:24:59.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-12T19:04:25.503" Score="-10" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/163383/how-does-a-religion-based-around-destroying-the-world-attract-followers&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks an abstract question about a hypothetical (and probably evil) religion. It's a good question and deserves a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However User &quot;Adrian - Justice for Monica&quot; chose not to write about an abstract religion, but instead to write about a real-world specific religion and to equate that religion with the evil one in the question. What he wrote offended followers of that religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no need to use the real-world religion as an example. He could have written exactly the same answer without naming a specific religion, but he chose to, and so I can only assume he deliberately intended to offend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange says it is welcoming of all people, and not to tolerate behaviour which makes people feel unwelcomed or uncomfortable, a policy it promoted very heavily. I put it to the community that this answer makes many people feel unwelcomed and uncomfortable. I look forward to appropriate intervention. What response will that be? How is it going to be different if the attack had been based on some other issue, like race or gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to give negative answers about a specific religion. But the question wasn't about any real religion, and this answer is just an excuse to make attacks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm not looking for general comments. let's see how the moderators tackle this one. Particularly L.Dutch, who explicitly restored the offensive version of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2362" LastEditorUserId="2362" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T20:12:58.977" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T22:36:11.690" Title="Intentional attacks in Answers" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-12T20:06:07.790" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions about religion will ultimately get controversial answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are aspects to every religion that aren't entirely pretty. Against that some people have fundamental objections to religion in the first place. That's the thing about public platforms, people will have views that others find disagreeable, and they will put voice to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in, someone is going to be offended. We do not censor just because someone is offended. We don't censor if someone is downright wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You on the other hand, had no right to vandalise the answer because you disagreed with it. L.Dutch restored the answer as given which was the correct response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T20:06:07.790" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7649" CreationDate="2019-12-13T09:23:06.443" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add my 2 cents worth to Renan's answer, right after Monica was summarily dismissed, I made a point of looking at the chat conversation that appeared to be the source of the allegations against Monica. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without revealing exactly what was said - it was a mod-only board - I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; say that all I saw was some people getting into a somewhat heated discussion about what personal pronouns are appropriate, though in my opinion as a moderator, I saw nothing that would be grounds for even a warning, let alone a summary dismissal, from any party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I saw, Monica had objected to the grammatical incorrectness of using the pronoun &quot;They&quot; when referring to a single person, since &quot;They&quot; is plural.  The discussion became heated, and Monica chose to withdraw rather than contribute to any acrimony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At no point did I see Monica state that she would be disrespectful to any SE member... in fact I believe that she said exactly the opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience in SE, Monica has been nothing but friendly and respectful to me and everyone else.   Accusing her of CoC violations seemed to me akin to accusing Santa Claus of being anti-Christmas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T09:23:06.443" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-13T18:30:32.493" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neutral third (fourth? fifth?) party here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the whole thread now for the first time, and I have to say that I don't think the answer you're talking about is meant as an attack on Christianity. It's true that it doesn't paint a flattering portrait of the religion, but, well, not everything about Christianity &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; flattering. Looking through the content you removed, I see mentions of the Spanish Inquisition, anti-Semitism by Christians, the Branch Davidians - all things that, well, happened. Stating as much isn't an attack; they're the facts. You can't change history just because you don't like it. And they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; relevant - the Branch Davidian case in particular is an excellent example of a religious group preparing for the end of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can dispute the theological accuracy of the answer's depiction of the tenets of Christianity, as some people have; obviously, many have contested its core claim, and I personally am not completely convinced that mainstream Christianity is a solid example. (Then again, I'm not a theologian, and I suspect most people here aren't, either!) But that's quite orthogonal to the point here, which is that portraying a religion in a negative light is not an attack on the followers of that religion, if you're citing actual misdeeds - which is what the answer is doing in those few examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the point you made about using a particular example: I've found that examples can be handy tools on Worldbuilding. I've answered many &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; questions by simply giving an example, rather than by trying to set down some theoretical framework. I wouldn't say that it was &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to use an example religion in this case, but a well-defended example could be quite valuable indeed. Again, I'll dance around the issue of whether this example is accurate or not; that's beyond the scope of this meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T18:30:32.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-14T01:21:13.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;However User &quot;Adrian - Justice for Monica&quot; chose not to write about an abstract religion, but instead to write about a real-world specific religion and to equate that religion with the evil one in the question.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about an &quot;evil&quot; religion. It is simply a question about a religion centered about &quot;summoning a god of destrucion to destroy the world&quot;. It is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; particular perception that this is evil. For those people who follow the religion described in the question it is presumably not evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is based on the observation that Christianity and its One True Living God fulfil the requirements, if one is inclined to see it that way. The God of Christianity actually destroyed the world once (in the Deluge), and the last and final book of the Christian Holy Scripture promises that He will eventually destroy it again (on Judgement Day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_irae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dies irae&lt;/a&gt;, dies illa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Solvet saeclum in favilla,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Teste David cum Sibylla.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What he wrote offended followers of that religion.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it obviously offended &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, although &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; fail to see anything offensive in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that many of people on this site (maybe even &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; people on this site) are Christians of some sort or another, and yet the answer stands at +55 and your question stands at −7. You may want to consider that it is just possible that your opinion does not fully align with the community, either the community of users of this site, or the Christian community in general.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T01:21:13.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-14T01:51:48.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To understand my opinion on this question,  and upon the question that is the subject of this question, some explanation of my own beliefs will be required.  I will not put a name to my system of beliefs - what I believe and why I believe it is more important to this answer than the label that people apply to my system of beliefs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central core of my personal system of beliefs is that - other than my belief in myself - I am not that in which I believe,  and by extension, other than themselves, no person is that in which they believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next comes the belief that since I am not those external things in which I believe, an attack upon those things external to me in which I believe is not an attack upon me, and by extension, an attack upon those things external to them that others believe is not an attack upon them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that comes my personal belief that everything that I believe must be subject to proof, or failing that, to Occam's razor: that where many explanations exist, the simplest valid explanation is best... therefore everything that I believe is subject to change, should proof or a better explanation be presented to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the previous paragraph presents my personal belief.  I live in a nation in which the freedoms of speech and religion are enshrined in law, and Stack Exchange is likewise based in another nation with similar laws.  Moreover, Stack Exchange has a Code of Conduct that, in essence, states that users should be nice to one another.  So, even without SE's CoC, that means that the freedom of speech gives people the right to say whatever they want,  and the freedom of religion gives people the right to disregard whatever anyone else says.  SE's CoC limits the freedom of speech on their sites to that which is not a personal attack upon other user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... I understand that the answer in question could be interpreted as an attack upon Christianity, however it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an attack against any particular Christian.  While &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; welcome attacks upon that which I believe, I understand that others need not share that attitude. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... my opinion on this matter is that answerers may answer as they wish, so long as no personal attacks are made and the other provisions of the CoC are not violated.  Should another user's &lt;em&gt;beliefs&lt;/em&gt; be attacked in the process, then that user may either engage and challenge that attack (respectfully, of course), reassess their own beliefs, or disengage and not participate in any discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the answer in question does not attack any user and is not objectionable on other grounds, it may stand as-is.  I would suggest to the OP that should the answer in question be offensive, that the OP should either reassess their personal beliefs to ascertain why it was offensive and if their personal beliefs are those that they truly wish to have, or alternatively disengage and simply agree to disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, since the consensus of this site's moderators appears to be that the answerer has done nothing wrong in posting that answer, further suggestions to the contrary could be interpreted as a personal attack against the answerer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T01:51:48.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2019-12-14T04:17:23.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP appears to be under the regrettably common misapprehension that criticism of an opinion that they hold is criticism of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use a neutral example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice states that she believes in X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob states that X is wrong, and Y is correct instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlie says that Alice is an idiot for believing that X is correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob is attacking X.  Charlie is attacking Alice.  Attacking beliefs is part of what we do here on SE.  Attacking others &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; what they believe is unacceptable here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice may hold X very dear to herself, and considers an attack on X by Bob to be an attack upon herself just the same as the attack upon herself by Charlie.  &lt;em&gt;However, this is not the case.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Alice vs Bob, Alice has a choice: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Engage in a discussion of X vs Y with Bob and try to show why X &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; true and Y is not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accept Bob's argument that Y is true.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disengage and agree to disagree with Bob on the merits of X vs Y rather than enter into a debate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Alice vs Charlie, Alice need only flag Charlie's post, since Charlie was making a personal attack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To bring the example closer to what appears to have occurred, let us assume that Alice had been answering Bob's question, and Bob's question had been written with the assumption that Y applies.  Alice's answer made with the assumption that Y does not apply and that in fact X applies would not be well received, and is likely to be downvoted.  However, these downvotes are not an attack upon Alice, but upon her apparent error in assuming X where Bob had asked a question presupposing Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to the OP, I say: Be sure to match the assumptions of your answers to the assumptions of the question that you are answering. If you fail to do so, expect downvotes.  However, having made an assumption in your answer at odds with that of the question, you need not put up with personal attacks for your error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T04:17:23.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7663" CreationDate="2019-12-14T18:31:43.783" Score="12" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4186/627&quot;&gt;last&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5675/627&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6958/627&quot;&gt;years&lt;/a&gt;, we've had an unofficial holiday bountapalooza, which we run concurrently with &lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2019.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt;. It's about giving back to the community by placing bounties on questions that need answers, and setting bounties to reward preexisting amazing answers. We'll keep track of the bountied posts in a community wiki answer below this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7512/627&quot;&gt;the events of this fall&lt;/a&gt;, I think very few of us are feeling at all jolly. I myself am not exactly eagerly participating in Winter Bash - I think I'll keep my normal black hat, if that's all right. But I do think we should once again do the bountapalooza, because it's a celebration of &lt;em&gt;each other&lt;/em&gt;. Regardless of the actions Stack Overflow the company has taken, we the users of Worldbuilding have spent years building this site - its scope, its culture, and its community. We've done this largely on our own. And I think it's worth celebrating what &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; - the current &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; past  users of the site - have done to make the Internet a better place. I for one would like to honor those who have put so much work into building this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the bounties begin!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T20:09:38.740" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T20:12:08.727" Title="The fourth annual holiday bountapalooza" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7662" CreationDate="2019-12-14T18:42:25.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;List of bountied questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add your latest bounty here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/152426/627&quot;&gt;Plausibility of helium dominated atmospheres on super-Earths&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/58321/thedyingoflight&quot;&gt;TheDyingOfLight&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+200)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146090/627&quot;&gt;How soon can the first stars form?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/55743/we-are-monica&quot;&gt;We are Monica.&lt;/a&gt; (+200)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/106757/627&quot;&gt;Would tanks or small walkers be better for Lunar militaries?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/38174/skout&quot;&gt;skout&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33806/is-it-possible-for-a-religion-with-1-billion-followers-to-die-out&quot;&gt;Is it possible for a religion with &amp;gt;1 billion followers to die out?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3510/serban-tanasa&quot;&gt;Serban&lt;/a&gt; bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/189/james&quot;&gt;James&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/150259/30492&quot;&gt;How do ballistic trajectories work in a rotating cylinder world?&lt;/a&gt; asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;L.Dutch-reinstate-Monica&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/162649/627&quot;&gt;How to make FTL-technology an narratively interesting suicide-pact-technology?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/58321/thedyingoflight&quot;&gt;TheDyingOfLight&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/21689/megha&quot;&gt;Megha&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/163584/627&quot;&gt;Why might the ability to attack using directed nerve stimulation evolve?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/45813/bryan&quot;&gt;Bryan&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52876/dt-cooper&quot;&gt;DT Cooper&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121120/627&quot;&gt;How to make an alien game show be fair when hosting many different species?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/54112/enigma&quot;&gt;Enigma&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/45813/bryan&quot;&gt;Bryan&lt;/a&gt; (+300)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/163542/627&quot;&gt;What would powers based of the strong force look like?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/69795/seraphim&quot;&gt;Seraphim&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121120/627&quot;&gt;How to make an alien game show be fair when hosting many different species?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/54112/enigma&quot;&gt;Enigma&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52876/dt-cooper&quot;&gt;DT Cooper&lt;/a&gt; (+150)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/71971/627&quot;&gt;Is it safe to orbit HDE 226868?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/627/hde-226868&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/163972/627&quot;&gt;How do I determine the physical size of a quartz crystal of a given shape and vibrational mode needed to approximate a specific resonant frequency?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/3097/shalvenay&quot;&gt;Shalvenay&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26246/srm-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;SRM - Reinstate Monica&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/160640/627&quot;&gt;Can you replace goethite with something else in limpet teeth to decrease its density and maintain its strength?&lt;/a&gt;, asked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/32097/mephistopheles&quot;&gt;Mephistopheles&lt;/a&gt; and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26246/srm-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;SRM - Reinstate Monica&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/164400/627&quot;&gt;How can an individual provide a higher quality of energy the more depleted it becomes?&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52361/incognito&quot;&gt;Incognito&lt;/a&gt; (+50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/164460/627&quot;&gt;Turning iron that is unusable by magic civilizations into an alloy usable by them&lt;/a&gt;, asked and bountied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/67499/failus-maximus&quot;&gt;Failus Maximus&lt;/a&gt; (+100)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are our stats for this year's bountapalooza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;15 bounties started . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on 14 different questions . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by 12 different users . . .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a total of 1600 reputation points.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy holidays!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T20:12:08.727" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-12-14T19:49:22.283" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2019-12-16T11:37:00.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone were to post a question about day/night cycles and one of the replies is written assuming that the earth is flat would you expect that to be down voted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong answers will be down voted, and your answer is wrong. That's not bias, it's fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You added a comment saying there are 5 articles and 4 books but that is not a citation. A citation is something like Book X, Edition Y, Page Z where Professor A says that &quot;B C D&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - and you are not providing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people using this site have a scientific background, we know how to read claims and cross reference articles. We also know what the consensus scientific literature on something like this is. For example we know that genetic algorithms work - people use them all the time in various fields of computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember as a kid back in the late 80s playing around with a computer program that had simulated creatures running around on a field eating food. Their behavior allowed them to breed and mutate and compete and even that very simple simulation had surprisingly sophisticated behaviors emerge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you feel attacked about this - but please remember none of this is aimed personally at you. If you bring pseudo-science to a real-science question it will get shot down in the same way someone suggesting psionics, the flying spaghetti monster, or astral projection will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of stack exchanges (including this one if it is phrased correctly) where you can go to ask questions about evolution and hopefully work out where you have been misled. There are certainly areas where our (meaning both individuals here and the wider scientific community) understanding can be improved, so further research there would be most welcome. If you come in assuming that millions of scientists and engineers over hundreds of years have got it wrong than you're going to need some very compelling evidence though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in one of your comments you said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I was essentially saying is that, due to the nature of mutations, you cannot get from a simple bacteria (the genetic equivalent of a 3-page instruction manual written in grammatically incorrect Chinese) to a human (the genetic equivalent of a 3,000 page tome written in grammatically correct English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics works - if the bacteria's instruction manual was grammatically incorrect they would die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally I could trivially write an algorithm using only random mutations and selection that would turn any input text you like into any output text you like. It would only take a few minutes to write, although for a long text it might take a while to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T12:08:32.903" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T12:08:32.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-16T13:58:30.580" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7649/what-does-reinstate-monica-mean/7650#comment24434_7650&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; (in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7650/21222&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;) because I think it is in violation of the CoC. It says this (bold formatting on the part I wish to emphasize):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer is misleading. You present two possible explanations for using the tag when in reality there is at least one more: people who disagree with how Monica was dismissed AND disagree with the CoC in that they do not wish to be dictated to in terms of how they speak. I am happy to use a pronoun such as &quot;they&quot; when gender is indeterminate, but &lt;strong&gt;I am not willing to use a made-up pronoun just because a person asks me to.&lt;/strong&gt; It's he, she, or they. &lt;strong&gt;I'm not using anything else, and that's ok. I am not doing anything wrong by making this choice, and SE should respect that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used a custom flag to say that the following two comments from the same user should also be deleted, for the comments were all on the same spirit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The idea that people are being foced to use people's &quot;correct&quot; genders is your personal viewpoint, not a fact. &lt;strong&gt;I disagree that a person's correct gender is &quot;whatever they want to be called&quot;. No. It's he, she, or they. If I say &quot;they&quot;, that's always correct. If someone chooses to get mad about it, they do not understand the English language, which is not my problem.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basically, I refuse to cater to who are essentially children saying &quot;look at me!&quot; We're all out here eating a giant shit sandwich. No one deserves special treatment because of how they feel inside.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of going against the CoC on gender issues, I also feel those comments are rude and abusive. However, the flag was just declined without further comment, no pun intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kind of commenting allowed in WB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T14:13:44.767" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T20:51:08.877" Title="Is there a fine line defining a CoC violation?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7667" CreationDate="2019-12-16T14:44:54.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's always a big grey area between what may cause offence, what will cause offence, and what is acceptable. The ability to offend isn't by itself enough to cause a comment to be deleted as there is always someone out there who will find offence at the most innocent of statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part of the CoC is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No bigotry.&#xA;  We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments in question start off already in the grey area and then descend into what is basically a rant and insulting - so clearly do breach several parts of the CoC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I've deleted both the last two comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one, while questionable, is less clearly over the line so I have left it for now - which should not be seen as me approving of either the comment or the message. It's just me withholding judgement for now pending further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T14:44:54.603" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7670" CreationDate="2019-12-18T14:45:19.390" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;For this year's Holiday Winter bash, I had earned the Warm Welcome hat. It was a traditional-looking Russian style hat, with a red and yellow star on its front. I liked it because it referenced the Soviet Union, which I unshamefully admit to have taken a liking to. But This morning, I came to check my inbox and noticed something different. The Star was replaced with a heart. I was confused and wanted to ask why my favourite hat has been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62271" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T15:30:17.587" Title="Why was the &quot;Warm Welcome&quot; Hat changed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7669" CreationDate="2019-12-18T15:30:17.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Warm Welcome&quot; hat was changed as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/340512/461068&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the main SE Meta. Essentially, it was changed &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it referenced the Soviet Union - users from former Soviet nations objected to the use of a symbol that, to them, represented an oppressive, totalitarian regime. While not &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; agreed it was offensive, enough people &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; agree that the SE staff decided to change the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T15:30:17.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7667" CreationDate="2019-12-18T18:40:44.690" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I think you demonstrated the answer to your own question very well! There is indeed a fine line defining a COC violation, and that line is &quot;I know it when I see it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You read those comments and determined that there must be a violation.  I read those same comments and find no contradiction with reality at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer of those comments is not being rude or abusive in any way: they are simply speaking scientific truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T18:40:44.690" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-20T17:02:05.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my part, Adrian has very graciously conversed with me the last several days via &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/102156/discussion-on-answer-by-adrian-justice-for-monica-how-does-a-religion-based-ar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; regarding his answer to the said query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said previously, I did not and even more now &lt;strong&gt;DO NOT&lt;/strong&gt; think it was his intention to insult Catholics or any other denomination of Christian through his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adrian - Justice for Monica should be able to edit the answer sufficiently well that it will no longer pose any kind of insult or offense and will be factually sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator believes altering an answer to remove references to a real world religion and its denominations constitutes defacement. While I disagree with L. Dutch's action as a somewhat misguided attempt to bandaid the issue, I leave that for another discussion. At least the OP of this meta query believes that the answer itself is a kind of defacement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best corrective action has taken place over the last few days: rational discussion with the respondent. I'd ask you, DJClayworth, to take a look at that discussion and report back if you still believe that Adrian is deliberately trying to insult you or anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T17:02:05.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T19:35:58.797" Score="-2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/163908/32097&quot;&gt;Would naruto-running titan zombies be able to cause an extinction event?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this question saw a major rewrite on my part, for the sake of clarity, around that time. In essence, I'm asking if these creatures would stand a chance at destroying humanity in Europe in the 15th century with that beginner set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem too story-based for me. The titan zombies are a &quot;unique&quot; monster type, however, you could say the same for the thousand and one permutations of classic monsters that were used to end the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't mention the exact year, as I didn't want to calculate in situational advantages or disadvantages, that weren't consistent throughout the whole period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask me, situational factors (that are up to the writer's discretion) are the hallmark of a story-based question, something I purposefully got rid of. Could I help them win? Yes. Do I want to? No, that'd be cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the question &quot;Would naruto-running titan zombies be able to cause an extinction event?&quot; put on-hold as too story-based?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, aren't tidally-locked planets are like a plague in WB, not in a bad way, but I think there are less bread crumbs, I've eaten in my life, than tidally-locked questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T21:10:26.983" Title="Why was the question &quot;Would naruto-running titan zombies be able to cause an extinction event?&quot; put on-hold as too story-based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7673" CreationDate="2019-12-20T21:18:02.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your world is already built. You're asking us how a scenario in your world will play out. That's clearly crossed the line into being story based. Removing situational factors like you say you have doesn't make the question not story based. It just makes it a too broad story based question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb is that if someone could write a book as an answer to a question it's not a good fit for this site. You're asking us to write novels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T21:18:02.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7673" CreationDate="2019-12-22T21:10:26.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't understand why the query was closed for being story based. @Mephistopheles doesn't actually ask about &quot;plot elements such as the actions of characters&quot;; doesn't ask about the &quot;back story of a character&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the referred why did my query get closed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;, this particular falls under &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale&lt;/strong&gt;: Asking &quot;would they be able to&quot; is the equivalent of &quot;can they do&quot;, clearly about capabilities rather than desires or narrative actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T21:10:26.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-23T23:06:00.410" Score="9" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that is tied to my old account. I canceled that account and created a new one some time later.how can I get a question from back then transfered to my current account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T16:51:22.517" Title="Can I transfer certain questions to a new account?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7678" CreationDate="2019-12-24T16:51:22.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your only option here is to request that the accounts be merged.  This can only be done by an SE employee.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just click on the support link at the bottom of the page to make the request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF you have deleted the previous account I am not sure if they will be able to help you out, not sure I have run into that situation before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T16:51:22.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-24T20:37:05.083" Score="8" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mars. Venus. Saturn. &lt;em&gt;Earth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a group of worldbuilders. We should be able to spell our planet’s name right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you’re wondering, yes, I am stuck in bed sick on Christmas with nothing better to do than complain about the capitalization of our planet in multiple questions. Anyone who doesn’t like it should &lt;em&gt;find a cure for viruses&lt;/em&gt;! (Please.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T20:37:05.083" Title="Our planet is capitalized!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-12-26T07:06:34.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7667" CreationDate="2019-12-24T20:51:08.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TL;DR&lt;/em&gt; We have to be able to discuss these things. If the CoC is interpreted to say “don’t attack a person” fine. But I can’t see it targeting discussion about the CoC or its impacts... that way &lt;em&gt;undermines the whole goal of the CoC in the first place&lt;/em&gt;, as it would have stifled any discussion of pronouns a prioii!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Details&lt;/em&gt; There is room for our language to evolve. While it evolves, there are many disputes about whether and how it should change. There’s a divide between those who want no change and those who want change, sure, but there’s also no consensus in the “how to change” group. The CoC attempts to nail down something that isn’t yet nailed down, and there are some very reasonable, non-abusive reasons to push back on some types of changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I find the “singular they” renders text confusing and has lead to multiple misunderstandings and arguments in my life. I consider any request that I use the “singular they” to be a request to ferment dissent and make the communications problem worse, not better. But I happily use pronouns, including one set for “a generic person” or “I don’t know the person’s preferences”: ne, nir, nem, etc. I use these to avoid the problem of “generic he” (bias against women) and to support avoiding discussion of gender where it has no role. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that makes some folks upset. Their request to me to use singular they is equally upsetting to me... I find it insulting and controlling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s something society is still working out, and interpreting the CoC as preventing that discussion means you can’t ask questions and get answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T20:51:08.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2019-12-24T22:36:11.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good answer to any of our hypothetical questions will include examples from the real world to back conclusions. If a question asks about religion, using a real-world religion as basis for answer is totally appropriate. Having the warts of any belief system examined is going to make believers uncomfortable at best, and not just religions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T22:36:11.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7684" CreationDate="2019-12-26T05:21:18.123" Score="33" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Dec 23, 2019, Monica posted on her GoFundMe page that she has no further need for donations to cover legal expenses. She linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340906/update-an-agreement-with-monica-cellio&quot;&gt;the Stack Exchange Meta post&lt;/a&gt; where SE says they have come to an agreement with Monica. She has been invited to reapply to be a moderator but has declined, citing issues with the appeals process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE admitted it made a mistake but is not fixing its mistake by simply reinstating her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like there will be nothing further in this dispute: Monica and SE will go their separate ways. There will be no libel trial. But there will also be no Monica administrating the forums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean all our striking moderators go permanently offline? What's the plan going forward? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T15:14:01.617" Title="So, is that it for Monica? What does the Dec 23 update mean for the future?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7683" CreationDate="2019-12-27T13:14:51.953" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading between the lines, it would appear there has been some legal settlement between Monica and SE.  It's standard practice for such settlements to include a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA); that is, both parties agree to no longer talk about the issue in any public forum.  Because this was handled privately between the parties (likely between their lawyers), there will be no public lawsuit, and hence no public documents or disclosure of what the agreement is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving forward, each moderator who resigned has the option to reapply or not.  Users can continue using the sites, or not.  Everyone will have to make their own decision going forward; there is no consolidated &quot;movement&quot; in the sense that this was never a movement with clear leadership that people were following.  All who resigned, stopped logging in, or left the site, did so of their own free will and not under anyone's direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are at least two projects to create alternatives to the SE network (&lt;a href=&quot;https://codidact.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codidact&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://topanswers.xyz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TopAnswers&lt;/a&gt;), and these seem to be gaining support.  There might be others.  I only mention this because it doesn't seem like the issue is &quot;going away&quot; because Monica has reached a legal agreement.  There's enough tension for people to be pursuing alternatives, but even in pursuing alternatives there isn't one approach or &quot;movement&quot; in that sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, everyone will have to make their own decisions going forward: reapply for moderator status, stay permanently offline, abandon ship, or find some compromise in-between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5123" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-01-15T15:14:01.617" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T15:14:01.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7686" CreationDate="2019-12-29T13:56:50.387" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has almost certainly been asked elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had recently posted a question about firing a sci-fi laser rifle with specs on what I thought a good stereotypical weapon would be. See people answered the question as asked, while others inferred  the spirit of the question correctly, and provided excellent answers not meeting the specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to select an answer and close the question, but I'm not sure how best to. I could : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select one of the answers that answers the question as written,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify the text of the question to make it more open to the other answers, and choose one from the broader lot,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44287" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T09:32:26.637" Title="How to Resolve a Question with Very Good, but Wrong Answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7685" CreationDate="2019-12-29T15:04:01.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author of the question has control of the accepted answer, always. Other users control the up/down votes. Reward the person who gave you the help you were seeking... they should gain achievements from being insightful into your needs. We want to reward such folks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I wouldn’t change the question at this time.&lt;/strong&gt; But you could add  an endnote to the question saying what you intended to ask to explain why you picked the answer you picked, so anyone who comes looking for the question as asked knows to read other answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T15:04:01.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-29T15:13:17.327" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160416/how-much-antimatter-can-we-theoretically-hold-in-a-minimum-magnetic-field-trap&quot;&gt;How much antimatter can we theoretically hold in a Minimum Magnetic Field Trap?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;should move to Physics SE. But when I vote to close as off-topic, the only migration option is WB Meta. Can moderators add to our set of alternate SEs? Chemistry and Physics and History are the ones I usually want as options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T15:13:17.327" Title="Can we add other stack exchanges to our “Close Off-Topic” list?" Tags="|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7689" CreationDate="2019-12-30T13:51:43.997" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have tags for different fantasy genres: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/low-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;low-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;low-fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, and well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; for general fantasy questions, but what always struck me as odd is that we don't have a tag for high fantasy. Why so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71228" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2019-12-30T14:08:21.563" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T14:10:35.747" Title="Why we don't have a high fantasy tag?" Tags="|feature-request|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7688" CreationDate="2019-12-30T14:10:35.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are created on the fly, they're not preplanned under any sort of structure. Some people have used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/low-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;low-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;low-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; but not all that many in the grand scheme of things. If anyone with over 300 rep had wanted to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/high-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;high-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;high-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; then it would exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T14:10:35.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7692" CreationDate="2020-01-01T16:03:16.050" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realised after I wrote my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/164648/how-large-can-a-flying-insect-get-and-still-be-able-to-walk-upside-down&quot;&gt;How large can a flying insect get and still be able to walk upside down?&lt;/a&gt; that it was pretty vague and the first answer confirmed that, so as I went to edit the question I realised I wanted to change it completely as I now have the weight of the creature but want to know what environmental conditions would be needed for it to walk upside down.&#xA;I didn't want to change it after another answer as this would be unfair and I may get interesting answers anyways.&#xA;should I edit the question completely or write another question later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user69935" LastEditorDisplayName="user69935" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T16:14:20.833" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T21:25:54.670" Title="Can i completely change my question or should i ask another?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T16:42:21.153" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges &#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. &#xA;And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? &#xA;So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Worldbuilding over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                  Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                  17         26&#xA;Users destroyed³                                  85          0&#xA;Users contacted                                   36          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            381      1,854&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               266      2,172&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          93      2,970&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue               127        399&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                356      2,920&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue               100      7,602&#xA;Tags merged                                        2          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                              2          3&#xA;Tag synonyms created                               3          0&#xA;Questions reopened                                43         93&#xA;Questions protected                              225         33&#xA;Questions migrated                                11          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁵                                53      1,499&#xA;Questions closed                                 390      1,300&#xA;Question flags handled⁵                          840        709&#xA;Posts unlocked                                     2          7&#xA;Posts undeleted                                   45         86&#xA;Posts locked                                       2        188&#xA;Posts deleted⁶                                   447      1,519&#xA;Posts bumped                                       0         11&#xA;Escalations to the Community Manager team          9          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                                70          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                 134      1,308&#xA;Comments deleted⁷                              9,242      4,887&#xA;Comment flags handled                            845        595&#xA;Answers flagged                                  489      1,747&#xA;Answer flags handled                           1,197      1,041&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat             351          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &quot;Community&quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &quot;destroyed&quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7004/2018-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222019%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341507/2019-a-year-in-closing&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T04:08:41.807" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T04:08:41.807" Title="2019: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7690" CreationDate="2020-01-01T19:04:21.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have answers you should leave it and ask a new one. You shouldn't edit a question in such a way that it invalidates existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T21:25:54.670" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T21:25:54.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-02T00:03:41.020" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i just think the name reality check misguiding/misleading, or not a good name for a tag that supposed to be asking a concept is possible or plausible for a fictional world building, base on the answer from here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7578/what-is-reality-check-suppose-to-be&quot;&gt;What is reality check suppose to be?&lt;/a&gt; rather than checking are the concept is real or checking reality or can be real, i know people like to use the term realism, but most of the time when i see people use this, they more referring the authenticity or accuracy of the concept base of real world or the existence in real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the new answer in my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158775/can-a-horse-sized-flying-creature-grab-and-carry-a-humans-weight-while-flying/164679#164679&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; make me decide to ask, but i am not really understand english so maybe i was wrong or what i mention is no different, but at least for a new member that looking for first glance, that what i believe they think it was supposed to be about checking reality or has the real counterpart. (i do think so at first too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also with this i think it make it possible/encourage for people with some magic or not base of real thing to use this tag regarding their concept, but if the tag become to broad or what i believe it suppose to be is wrong, and it actually was a tag for authenticity or checking reality, maybe make a separate tag for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in before you ask me to change the name myself (in case i have enough point to do so) i prefer someone else do it (i even just know you can change the tag name and i dont know how to do it anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about the tags or rules in Meta, since I usually just briefly lurk, so I'd appreciate it if someone can fix the tags to be more appropriate and I apologize if I've broken any rules here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62918" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:32:24.920" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:32:24.920" Title="should the name reality check change to plausibility check or possibility check?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7693" CreationDate="2020-01-02T09:06:18.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;YES ... &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually concur. I see a lot of (more or less snarky) comments along the lines of &amp;quot;if magic is involved, reality check is out the window&amp;quot;. As if the only kinds of fictional worlds that could be judged are those most nearly identical to Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name is, I think, somewhat misleading. Many people seem to assume that only &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;materialistic&amp;quot; things (as we experience them in the Real World) are suitable for the tag. I am a proponent of approaching a reality check from within the context of whatever kind of world the querent is asking about. If that world is a disc resting upon an undetermined number of oliphants standing on the back of some gigantic tortoise and has magic, well, then that is the baseline by which I'd judge the reality check. It's no different than judging a futuristic technology or device in an Earth-like fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer seeing the &lt;em&gt;addition&lt;/em&gt; of new tags rather than the replacement of the current tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we find questions that aren't really asking for an assessment of (simulated or quasi) realism per se; but rather are indeed asking about plausibility (likely or credible based on given information) or possibility (able but not necessarily likely based on given information). I think such tags would be a useful addition to the armamentarium of our eager querents and would also help us respondents formulate an appropriate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T09:06:18.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7685" CreationDate="2020-01-02T09:32:26.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are other possibilities.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to &quot;select&quot; an answer at all. Especially if all the answers are wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the querent doesn't actually get an answer to his query so much as &lt;em&gt;insight into the problem&lt;/em&gt; that prompted the query in the first place. For the geopoet, this is every bit as good as a straight up correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, and without having seen the query or the responses, I'd say the best approach may very be to just let it lie. Selecting and closing a question does impose a subtle psychological negative pressure on many people: when they see the green check mark, they assume that that answer is the end all and be all of all answers. If it's correct and meets your specs, all well and good! But it puts off potential readers from offering a new take, and maybe an even better answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving a question whose answers are only partially satisfactory will tend to invite new eyes and fresh perspectives. This is one reason why SE allows you (and any user) to place a bounty on a query. You could add a note saying that so-and-so's answer was good and helpful (but still incorrect) and you're placing a bounty in the hopes of getting a good, helpful AND correct answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T09:32:26.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7683" CreationDate="2020-01-03T15:22:10.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made the personal decision to set my username back, removing the &quot; - Reinstate Monica&quot;. I think that fight is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T15:22:10.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7683" CreationDate="2020-01-07T17:23:07.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally am going to keep the &quot;- Reinstate Monica&quot;, as the &quot;apology&quot; did not actually do anything. Yes, they said that they will &quot;consider&quot; allowing her back, but we all know how this works (they &quot;consider&quot;, and then say &quot;Nope!!!&quot;). All in all, SE's &quot;apology&quot; was just them doing the absolute minimum necessary to keep Monica from suing them for libel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-99999 to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T17:23:07.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-07T17:45:11.283" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/what-to-do-if-your-question-answer-is-downvoted-out-of-bias&quot;&gt;question on Meta&lt;/a&gt; about what I should do about one of my answers that was being downvoted out of bias (I am a ID proponent, and apparently SE is highly Evolutionist). Anyway, this question turned into a bunch of people saying that I am wrong for being a Creationist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I went to delete the question, I was alerted that I cannot delete it, since people had &quot;answered&quot; it, and it is &quot;unfair&quot; that the &quot;work&quot; they put into it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I delete it anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T17:58:13.200" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T21:01:56.100" Title="How do I delete a question once it has answers?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2020-01-08T03:49:38.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little late to the show, but one point I'd like to address re your insectomammalian answer. And that is the claim of bias itself. Science and the whole ID thing aside, I don't see how you could actually expect to &quot;do&quot; anything at all unless you can demonstrate that bias was at work in this instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get all kinds of folks in forums that deal with the art &amp;amp; craft of geopoesy: different perspectives on science itself; different perspectives on ultimate origins (first principles) etc. You might get one or two up or down votes based solely on pro or contra ID bias. Most of the downvotes, as far as I can tell, were most likely cast because you &lt;em&gt;didn't actually answer the question!&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's one of the seven deadly sins around here. I can guarantee that had you addressed the OP's query on its own terms, even using ID assumptions, you would have fared much better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you learn yourself in the comments: &lt;em&gt;In the future I shall make sure to use the assumptions of the question when asking questions&lt;/em&gt;. This is the way to go, because the querent is not asking us for how this or that can or can not be in the real world. No, they're asking for help in understanding how it works in their own fictional / fantastic / sciencefictiony world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: I think you would find it impossible to demonstrate or even imply that anti-ID bias was used against your answer. If I had seen it timely, I might have downvoted it (for not answering the query), or at best upvoted a better answer. I might have left a comment to the effect of &quot;in what way does this answer the original query?&quot; Not out of bias, but simply because the OP deserves your best answer!, and it's a community responsibility to nudge our fellow respondents towards making excellent answers and improving poor answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T03:49:38.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7683" CreationDate="2020-01-08T10:22:34.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I intend to leave my username as is - I chose a slightly different suffix &quot; - Justice for Monica&quot; and while the two parties may have reached an agreement I do not believe that the result is a just outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a relatively new user but with the circumstances as they are I would not be interested in taking on moderation duties should the opportunity be offered to me. I'm content to remain and answer questions for the time being, because I find it satisfying to do so, but at the same time I will keep my eye on Codidact and other emerging alternatives, and if any appear to offer both a worldbuilding community with the potential to be similarly engaging and also a sounder set of governance processes than SE then I will likely migrate there and encourage others in the community to do likewise. SE have certainly not earned our loyalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T10:22:34.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1750" CreationDate="2020-01-08T11:18:37.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we get a bit too worked up about broad questions. Yes, they can be a nightmare to try to answer in one big chunk, but people do have broad questions that it would be good to be able to help them with. This is a perfect example - working out the habitability of an arbitrary planet around an arbitrary star (maybe for an arbitrary basis of life form) is an extremely broad topic, but clearly one that is of immense and enduring interest to users of WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of a series of more sharply defined questions with CW answers covering such specifics as planetary temperature, radiation etc. is good but incomplete, in my view. What is missing is a top level question along the lines of &quot;I need to work out if my planet is habitable. What specific aspects of the stellar system do I need to consider, and what Worldbuilding resources are available to help me?&quot; with an answer linking out to all the more specific questions relating to particular aspects of habitability. I suspect it might be in danger of being closed as too broad, or perhaps too meta, but given the existence of the individual more specific questions and CWs it would be very valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, I think the current structure of WB positively encourages the asking of rather repetitive questions on topics like this. The landing page lists &quot;Top Questions&quot; and has a prominent &quot;Ask Question&quot; button. What might be better is if the landing page featured &quot;Favourite Topics&quot; with links to canonical question / CW answers on key subjects like planet habitability, religion design, possibly a question on factors to consider when deciding the plausibility of force X being able to win against force Y which has different technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way users would be steered to a set of well developed and maintained answers on such topics that could answer 90% of their queries without the need for additional questions, and the really odd corner cases would still merit a new question (and could potentially subsequently be referenced from the CWs making them ever more complete).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T11:18:37.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-08T19:59:52.833" Score="8" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/132840/30&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; got me thinking.  Is it a legitimate answer to a worldbuilding question of the &quot;how could X be true?&quot; variety to say that it's not really true and certain characters who provide the viewpoint for a particular work of fiction incorrectly perceive it to be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a perfectly legitimate narrative technique and if this were writing.se I wouldn't question it.  Here on worldbuilding.se though it seems like a trivial non-answer that could be applied to any &quot;How could X be true?&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is specifically about answers that say that what the question wants isn't true, but appears incorrectly to be true but not to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers to questions that are about appearance or perception.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers using incorrect perception to explain real behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers positing internally consistent virtual/simulated/embedded worlds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potentially the answer not a simple yes or no but depends on specifics like how widespread the delusion is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T14:06:57.557" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T14:06:57.557" Title="Is illusion or delusion a legitimate answer to a world building question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|answers|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-08T22:54:16.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the one who concluded that Alexander's reply didn't answer the question. 12 other people disagreed with me, so take this with the appropriate dose of (non-bath) salt!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I said what I did was because this was a cop-out answer. WB.SE exists for the sole purpose of providing legitimately useful answers to people who ask questions about building their fictional worlds &amp;amp; settings. It is, perhaps momentarily, funny to offer such a reply, but in the long run, it is simply not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query proposed a specific, factual scenario. The answer, unfortunately, just pretends that the scenario never happened. Myeh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd still argue that Alexander's reply is not a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;legitimate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answer. Technically, yes, it is an answer; but it actually does nothing more than deride the OP's scenario and does a great disservice to this forum: all of us who strive to provide good answers to those who ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the answer is not legitimate is simple: &lt;em&gt;every fictional world and ever scenario proposed here is not true&lt;/em&gt;. None of these places ever existed, none of these people ever did the things described. All the same, we respondents take for granted the existence of these people and places and answer accordingly, within their given contexts. &lt;strong&gt;This is why this forum exists.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T22:54:16.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-09T08:23:46.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nature of the questions we get here mean that there are often multiple answers. One of those answers could well be that the whole thing is an illusion as long as the requirements of the question are fulfilled. It's almost a box tick answer for a lot of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you have to consider whether it's a helpful answer to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case illusion or hallucination is not unreasonable for someone getting off a ship after a long voyage, perhaps there was something in the water, or the ship's biscuits were contaminated. He's probably sick with scurvy anyway, or caught a local plague he has no immunity to. So in this case, hallucination, illusion, delusion, are valid with better explanation than I think has been actually given in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T08:31:24.667" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T08:31:24.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7708" CreationDate="2020-01-09T08:49:05.753" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the title. Can I ask when that action is meant to be taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, I thought that comments on a question/answer are moved elsewhere when it is a handful of people discussing a topic at length that's starting to drift away from the subject of the thing originally replied to. It's becoming irrelevant and annoying to people not in the conversation, and thus should rightfully be moved to its own place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, what I am seeing is that comments are moved to chat when a certain &lt;em&gt;quantity&lt;/em&gt; of comments is reached. When there's like a dozen comments, they have to go, regardless of whether they are on-topic, and whether the people involved were replying to each other or in fact all having different things to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means potentially helpful comments are moved away, like clarifications or a debate on whether it's a relevant question. Those comments may then get posted again by new users who don't see that those points have already been raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/165010/how-many-pillows-would-you-need-to-survive-a-fall-from-a-church-tower&quot;&gt;How many pillows would you need to survive a fall from a church tower?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/164833/what-should-a-god-put-on-an-island-so-that-its-human-settlers-will-more-quickly&quot;&gt;What should a god put on an island, so that its human settlers will more quickly achieve an industrialised society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's very probable that I simply don't get the purpose of this moderator decision, and that there are legit reasons for moving a dozen comments having nothing to do with each other. I hope to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T16:57:23.977" Title="&quot;This conversation has been moved to chat&quot; - what's the reasoning behind it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-09T13:41:19.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is fine. It isn't particularly detailed, but I think much more detail than it contained would stray too far into plot anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would always be the case that an &quot;illusion / delusion&quot; answer would be okay: for example, a question about how some particular technology could be used to escape an awkward situation should not be answerable by saying &quot;the protagonist wakes up and it was all a bad dream&quot;. That possibility isn't suggested by the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner was asking for an explanation of the behaviour but the question was specifically phrased as &quot;as soon as the explorer shows up, all these beings &lt;b&gt;seem to&lt;/b&gt; immediately forget their own struggles; instead, they work together in an effort to kill the explorer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That clause &quot;seem to&quot; I feel really opens up the answer space to the possibility that the way all these disparate enemies are teaming up on the protagonist is a matter of perception. Do they really gang up on the explorer, or do they just seem to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, specifically for this question and without wishing to suggest any wider precedent, I think the answer is perfectly reasonable. It might not be the one the questioner chooses to accept, but it does have basis in the wording of the question. It takes &quot;seems to&quot; and runs with it, suggesting that that is in fact the extent of the enemies' teamwork. That's a far cry from &quot;it was all a dream&quot; as it still leaves the fundamental structure of the world intact: the various races of humans, the elementals etc. are not questioned, they still exist and challenge the explorer but some additional component of the world is suggested (the explorer's delusion and its cause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T13:41:19.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7706" CreationDate="2020-01-09T16:57:23.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't the mod who moved any of the comments on those posts (though just now I've deleted some extraneous ones), so this is more of a generic answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of those questions had upwards of 20 or so comments. &lt;em&gt;Usually&lt;/em&gt;, when a post gets that many comments, one of three things is happening:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's attracting a lot of inane responses or answers in comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a back-and-forth going on between a few users, in which case a chat room is quite handy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are serious issues with the question on multiple levels, and a chat room is needed to work out the kinks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're getting that many comments and many don't fall into the first category, it seems like some in-depth discussions need to be had, and a chat room would be ideal. I've admittedly also used the tool in the past when a large percentage of the comments were just jokes or answers-in-comments, because it's our best tool for deleting &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;, and I can always manually undelete the few that are truly signals in the noise. Plus, the message can serve as a sort of deterrent for future would-be jokesters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of these two questions . . . eh, I'd say it's a mix. The pillow question seemed to get a lot of inane comments and answers in comments. The other had a couple major back-and-forths and a lot of stuff that really didn't need to be there. It seemed that what helpful comments there were had already been dealt with, from the glance I took.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your concern about future users raising the same points as previous comments: Eh, if that's the case, it's possible that the author hasn't addressed those concerns by editing the question; it's kinda on the OP to do that. I suppose we could edit the auto comment about moving comments to chat, adding a phrase like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have a suggestion on how to improve the question, please check the chat room to see if it's already been discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be an issue for discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T16:57:23.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-09T18:40:51.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that it depends on whether or not it goes against the spirit of the question. I used the concept of an illusion in my answer about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160091/anatomically-correct-banshee&quot;&gt;Anatomically-Correct Banshee&lt;/a&gt;, and I think it was a legitimate answer - it shows how such a creature could be created under the constraints of the question given, and I think it could be meaningfully used in a story. Giving an answer to 'How could my protagonist experience X situation?' by saying 'It was an illusion' isn't a narratively satisfying answer. No one likes to read a story and have the author pull a 'actually none of it happened, it was a dream  the whole time' gag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the nature of this site is to kind of ignore the spirit of the question and attack the question directly, and perfectly acceptable answer can just dodge the question by claiming a faulty premise and explaining why a completely different solution can be used. But I think that illusions should be handled carefully, because the nature of addressing question directly are such that you're claiming the reality of the situation is wrong. Saying that everything is an illusion is something of a cop-out. If an illusion answers the intent of the question or there really is no other way to answer the question other than claiming illusion, then it should be fine. But aside from that, relying on illusion or delusion seem kind of contrary to this website, because as I've said early, there's no limits to what can happen so long as you're claiming illusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T18:40:51.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-09T20:16:43.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, no. Worldbuilding.SE's stated purpose is to provide meaningful, logical answers to worldbuilding questions. Saying &quot;it's a hallucination&quot; is a cop-out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; think that &quot;Life is but a dream&quot; would be a good answer, you might provide it as an alternate possibility, but &lt;em&gt;make sure that you explore all non-illusory options first.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if the OP &lt;em&gt;specifically says&lt;/em&gt; that &quot;Life is but a dream&quot; is a legitimate answer, you can use it as such, but please flesh it out. For example, instead of just saying, &quot;Life is but a dream,&quot; you could instead say, &quot;Life is but a dream, because of reasons a...z, and this has effects α...Ω upon your hypothetical world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T01:50:25.890" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T01:50:25.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7713" CreationDate="2020-01-09T20:18:20.463" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was recently looking around at the comments on some of my questions, and I saw multiple references to &quot;the OP.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T20:24:33.667" Title="What does OP mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1750" CreationDate="2020-01-09T20:21:44.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote @ArtOfCode, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I absolutely think that there should be a &quot;default answer&quot; to these questions. It should provide general details, avoiding specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, I do hereby propose that a whole set of these be made, so that people can have a base knowledge set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T20:21:44.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7711" CreationDate="2020-01-09T20:24:33.667" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/op/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Poster&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Aka &quot;the author of the thing we are commenting on&quot;. In an answer, or in comments on a question, it will refer to the author of the question. In comments on an answer, it will refer to the author of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T20:24:33.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2020-01-09T21:13:59.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;WB.SE tends to be the most... forgiving... of the SE Sites. Namely because all questions are hypotheticals. All answers are therefor theories to answer the OP's Hypothesis. To be a legitimate answer, all a theory has to do is explain the observed pattern while abiding by the universes laws of cause and effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Illusion/Hallucination/Misunderstandings (hereby referred to as delusions) theories have a number of hurdles they must overcome before they are a legitimate answer. How hard they are to overcome usually depends on the parameters of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is causing the delusions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are the delusions being maintained? (Especially for longer period ones, how is their manifestation kept stable/predictable?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the characters are delusional, how does their perception of the world and the reality of the world interact with each other? (eg. why aren't observers calling the physic ward?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also ignore &quot;cop out&quot; as a factor since that is a narrative issue, not a reality issue. The fact that a magic trick was done using paid filmed 'random people' may be a cop out, but nevertheless that is how the magic trick was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if the answer solves the opening question, and doesn't introduce a whole new set of problems that need to be solved for the answer to work, then it is a valid answer. (Good depends on the amount of effort but into it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27847" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T21:13:59.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-09T21:22:39.273" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/165092/rapid-repeat-re-entry-vehicles&quot;&gt;A question&lt;/a&gt; I asked the other day received 3 close votes for opinion-based. In my question, I included a brief summary of my world setting, to give the reader a bit of insight into what I was working on, something I felt would, in the end, help inspire better answers. However, I can see that I might've gone into &lt;em&gt;too much&lt;/em&gt; detail, tractoring away from the actual focus of my question. (This suspicion seems to be supported by the content of two of the answers, which didn't address my question at all and focused on my world details.) An alternative and identical question could've been framed as &quot;durable, low-maintenance spacecraft design for frequent re-entry,&quot; and would've produced identical answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to avoid asking poor questions like this in the future, so I ask for your advice. Is my analysis accurate? Did I include too much redundant information? Is the world setting useful for answers, or does it just get in the way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62241" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T18:40:27.907" Title="Is my recent question too near opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7715" CreationDate="2020-01-10T00:54:51.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed you might have included too much information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking questions here is a delicate and exacting art!  You need to learn balance: too much information vs too little; superfluous or vital detail!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me I don't think your query was any more opinion based than any other similar SF tech query we see here. But I do think you run a risk when you give too much detail. And you seem to have a pretty good handle on where your mistake lay! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In future, I think you'd be &lt;em&gt;generally safe&lt;/em&gt; practicing the maxim &quot;less is best&quot;. But even then, take care! You will be thoroughly excoriated no matter what you do! ;) If you feel that your query is heading into too much detail, you could opt to place the details in a spoiler box with a note to the effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T00:54:51.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-10T17:18:25.083" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84231/how-could-i-justify-medieval-stasis&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks for ways to justify medieval stasis, reasons why an alternate world would stay in the technological/societal equivalent of the middle ages for much longer than in our timeline. The answers were generally good but also diverse in approach, including: keeping the population low through repeated plagues, a centralised government, and eliminating coal so there can be no industrial revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have the same question, but I would prefer as few constraints on my worldbuilding as possible. So I want to ask, specifically, what resources I have to remove from my world to prevent the Renaissance. Coal is mentioned in the original question, but I was thinking zinc too, as it was vital in discovering electricity. But, it's possible I overlooked a resource, or one of these was actually not as important as I thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I wanted to ask &quot;What natural resources should I eliminate in order to justify medieval stasis.&quot; But it might be considered a duplicate, as any answer on that question would also be a valid answer on the first question (though not vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that question allowed? If not, should I perhaps instead offer a bounty on the first one, leaving a note that I'm curious for more natural-resource oriented answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T15:31:57.890" Title="Can I ask a question that's a more focused version of an existing question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7715" CreationDate="2020-01-10T18:49:56.680" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only difference between you and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/52361/incognito&quot;&gt;Incognito&lt;/a&gt; (other than about 25k rep) is your &lt;strong&gt;formatting&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strike&gt;Who's&lt;/strike&gt; Whose second best site is Writing.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I joined SE at Sci-Fi for fun, but quickly became enraptured by the level of pedantry in cognition and content that I was confronted with. So then I joined ELU (my second best site), because I hadn't really written anything in 20y, and I forgot that the word &lt;em&gt;whose&lt;/em&gt; even existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned my formatting from Valorum over at Sci-Fi, you should take a look at Incognito's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;hit them over the head with a hook&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ideally at the top of the post, or at least without having to scroll. The title can be click bait, but your hook had better nail it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to scroll way down to find your emboldened text, which should have been a header at the top (use '#' to start the line). If you're going to include so much &lt;strike&gt;garbage&lt;/strike&gt; stuff in you post, write like they do and be prepared to deal with comments from people like me, just like they do: I don't think they've &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; replied to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of my shooting-down-your-idea comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just keep doing your thing and you'll get better. If you don't, well, that's why at SE &amp;quot;the good stuff floats to the top&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T18:55:24.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7717" CreationDate="2020-01-11T21:34:15.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The worst thing that can happen is that it will be closed as a duplicate. Given that, here in your own meta question, you freely admit &lt;em&gt;...now, I have the same question...&lt;/em&gt; I'd say the proposed question has very little chance of survival, and the rationale is simple: you're zooming in on one factor that has been asked and answered, rather than considering a different scenario or a different approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading the linked query, it actually seems like it could be ripe for closure as too broad. Folks of late seem to be much less keen on taking a stab at broad spectrum list requests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a bounty might be a good approach for you: the linked query is almost three years old, which means loads of people haven't seen it yet (myself included I think!); putting fresh eyes on it and enticing new respondents to address natural resources would get you around potential closure of your proposed query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T21:34:15.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7717" CreationDate="2020-01-13T15:16:02.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my point of view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Existing question asks what could cause X, and answers are A, B and/or C.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You wish to ask &quot;What broader/more elaborate set of A do I need to cause X&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO they are two different questions. Ask away - As Elemtilas said the worst that can happen is you getting your question closed, depending on how you word the new question. I think you have a good question coming up, one that deserves a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T15:16:02.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7715" CreationDate="2020-01-14T18:40:27.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the less people know about your world, the better. The fact that your universe has wormholes, is completely irrelevant. All we need to know is that 'travel between upper (space station) and lower (airports) atmosphere has become so commonplace as to be its own transport industry (like boats or airplanes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're question includes snippets that people can latch onto that aren't relevant like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;it is economically favorable&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For who? Just like with cars, you can make a cheap piece of *@# that requires constant part replacements, or an expensive bulwark that won't need a dime for centuries (aside from gas) and is cheaper long term (gas vs solar energy for example).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;assume for simplicity that the atmospheric conditions around each wormhole are Earthlike (sic) at sea level&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we need to enter orbit then?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;These aliens&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invites alien tech even though you want a modern tech solution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;While one side of a wormhole may be in the upper atmosphere, the other may be hundreds of kilometers deep in a jovian counterpart, unfit for entry or exit.)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure Physics.SE would just have a field day with this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is why generally &quot;less is more&quot;. The less information to shift through, the clearer the question being asked is, and the less side details to be distracted by. The extra world details also invite Frame Challenges (alternate solutions/set-ups to the presented problem). If you wanted a solution, this would be a good thing; but you aren't looking for a solution, but a cost effective design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the world fluff can be good to include. It can be a fun way of explaining things like the tech level, magic level, general world attitudes, and the like without just listing a boring bullet point list. But you need to review that fluff carefully and make sure it also ties directly back to the main question so the reader doesn't get lost on what the point is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend after writing a question you play your own devils advocate, and read it again finding every question a new reader may want to ask, even if it's not directly related to your main question. Every question you think of, some else will want to bring up. Either address it, or remove that detail from your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other half is it's not just your question, but how you ask it. &quot;what re-entry technologies would likely be employed by ...&quot; the words &quot;would likely&quot; imply that you want speculations on driving market factors like, availability of materials from other worlds, environmental concerns (or lack thereof), ect. Avoid wishy-washy words in your questions like &quot;likely&quot; or &quot;would&quot; or &quot;could&quot;. Your questions should come off as asserting the base facts are indisputable. So for example, &quot;What is the least maintenance design for rapid re-entry vehicles?&quot; or &quot;What is the cheapest modern design for rapid re-entry vehicles?&quot; (long vs short term is still debatable, but the question is at least worded in a way that an answer has to challenge you on that if they want to bring it up)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27847" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T18:40:27.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T15:31:24.533" Score="165" ViewCount="5791" Body="&lt;p&gt;Friends, we've built an amazing place together.  Our Worldbuilding community is awesome!  It makes what I'm about to say bittersweet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it pains me deeply to leave my communities, I have decided I must leave the Stack Exchange network.  I write this post with tears literally in my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I became a user on my first SE site in 2011 when Mi Yodeya launched.  For most of the time since then I've been an enthusiastic participant and power user on the SE network.  I evangelized SE to friends and colleagues.  I almost became an employee.  The SE platform did, right, things that other sites did wrong.  It was a great place to be, and I built strong community connections and learned a lot.  Over time SE the company paid less and less attention to us, which was sometimes frustrating, but we got by even with benign neglect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then things began to change.  In spring 2018, a single blog post scared someone at SE enough to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/&quot;&gt;kick off&lt;/a&gt; a new &quot;welcoming&quot; initiative.  I was concerned by &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they approached it but wanted to believe in the goal nonetheless.  A few months later, in October 2018, a single angry tweet prompted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/316941/162102&quot;&gt;hasty changes&lt;/a&gt; and public criticism in tweets from employees, which led me to write &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-talk-13bf3f90204f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dear Stack Overflow, we need to talk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember somebody at the time saying something like &quot;she's too invested in that relationship; he's just not into her&quot;.  I wasn't listening.  I was too into SE, even as others began to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really wanted to believe that SE wasn't that bad, just a little misguided.  SE whispered &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/JayHanlon/status/1056247485008670728&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sweet&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/tinkertim/status/1053114597014671360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nothings&lt;/a&gt; in our ears, made &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;promises&lt;/a&gt; to us that I desperately wanted to believe.  I stayed, blind to the warning signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things did not, in fact, get better.  Already an employee had &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314089/what-does-constructive-criticism-of-a-design-change-look-like#comment1030131_314348&quot;&gt;admitted that the company was no longer paying attention to feedback from core users&lt;/a&gt;, and in July 2019 another &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/387633/922300&quot;&gt;advised employees to avoid meta because it upset them&lt;/a&gt;.  We users were in a relationship with someone who had checked out, stopped listening, seemingly stopped caring about us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stayed anyway, because I really love my communities (and maybe I'm too susceptible to the sunk-costs fallacy).  When I saw that post in July, a part of me thought we could nonetheless still effect change, could help get things onto a better, collaborative path.  I thought we users could mend the rifts in our collective relationship with SE despite evidence that SE wasn't interested.  I didn't see the warning signs because I didn't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a dedicated user, I stayed in an abusive relationship for the sake of the kids.  I told myself that it would be ok in the end, that it didn't hurt &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much, that it was only a bruise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it takes a powerful blow to finally wake up.  For me that blow came two weeks ago today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On January 13, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342031/162102&quot;&gt;SE abruptly fired Shog9&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342079/162102&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt;.  Shog9 and Robert, along with Jon Ericson who &lt;a href=&quot;https://jlericson.com/2020/01/17/leaving_stack.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;left a few days later&lt;/a&gt;, were long-serving community managers who really &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; the communities.  They were our champions.  What we didn't know until recently is that they were being hobbled, forbidden to do what they do so well, forbidden to help us.  They, too, were helpless, and Shog and Robert paid a dear price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can only expect the rate of damage to accelerate.  As a long-time user, I remember what was and know what could have been.  Today, our communities are being deeply harmed instead of being helped and supported.  It's worse than just being abandoned; we are not allowed to govern ourselves and not allowed to be helped by the dwindling community team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company has chosen to go down a very different path from the one I thought we were on.  I have lost any hope that this will change.  I've passed through denial, hurt, anger, and bargaining, and have now arrived at tearful acceptance.  I can't change this.  It's painful to keep trying.  I give up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dearly love my communities here, but, sadly, I can't bear to stay on Stack Exchange any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our communities are much more than the platform that hosts them.  The &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; are what matters.  I hope I can stay connected to the fine people of my communities even if I don't do it here any longer.  SE wasn't the first Q&amp;amp;A platform and it won't be the last.  Just as Stack Overflow was created out of dissatisfaction with another platform, other platforms will be created out of dissatisfaction with SE.  I hope to see y'all in a better place, one we'll build together putting communities and people first.  I'll refrain from specific links here after seeing an employee spam-delete a post on Writing Meta about another site, but -- look around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've added contact information to my profile, and I've posted some&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cellio.org/stack.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information about my future plans&lt;/a&gt;.  I won't be deleting my accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be kind to each other.  Protect yourselves.  Remember Shog and Robert, maybe even me.  Let's stay in touch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T17:57:58.757" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T16:14:20.397" Title="In sadness, it is time for me to go" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-27T15:53:41.763" Score="51" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So long, and thanks for all the fish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's sad to see you go, and I cannot find any argument to tell you &quot;stay&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In big and small history there are events which mark the transition between epochs. Well, the incident involving you is one of them. It won't be probably recorded in the big history, but it will be in all the small histories of those who have been involved into it, like myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish you success in your future efforts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T15:53:41.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-27T16:03:14.477" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined worldbuilding just after your dismissal as a moderator. I understand that you probably can't talk about it because of the agreement reached with SE, but you will see from my username that I don't think anything about the way the company handled itself was just or resulted in a just outcome. I've been following the saga with increasing sorrow: it has become more and more evident from discussions on meta that SE haven't been at all interested in finding a just solution in your case or in listening to their userbase in general. Moderators have gone inactive all over the place, one of the SE sites I visit appears to be entirely unmoderated now. I haven't read the main meta site for a few weeks but it seems from the posts you linked that they're now getting rid of some of the most well-respected of their staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think I'm done here. I might pop in now and again for a bit (the contributors here are great, and it's hard to go cold turkey...) so I won't vanish overnight. But hopefully there'll be a worldbuilding Codidact site up and running sooner or later. I expect I'll see many of you there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69539" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T16:03:14.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-27T19:11:33.353" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have been an exemplary user, and I wish you the best in developing and participating in your new Q&amp;amp;A site‼ I already commented on your blog, and since I don't think I am that of a good writer, considering active participation in the new Codidact site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems Stack Exchange has been under stress, maybe because of internal factors or that they are planning for a new strategy. It is similar to how continuing to talk back in a heated conflict reduces efficiency and causes the problem to blow up; Stack Exchange needs to cool down. It is wise for you to leave the site, as Stack Exchange does not define who you are and what your main contribution areas are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is especially outlandish that Stack Exchange has decided to terminate not one, but two Staff members after involuntarily stripping away your diamond. I will remember you, Shog9, and Robert C, as noted in my username &quot;Mᛜ. Sᛜ. Rᛜ. needs a mulligan&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it is your decision and you have the right to not participate here; a wise one you made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~Mulliganaceous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72017" LastEditorUserId="72017" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T19:33:05.140" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T19:33:05.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-28T09:56:09.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sad news indeed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we've had many (or any?) interactions, Monica, but I've always looked up to you. I've always seen you as the paragon of the community of all Stack Exchange sites. And often you've acted as our collective champion. Words cannot express the amount of respect I have for you and what you have done for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been an enormous honour just treading the same online walks as you. I'd offer my deepest thanks for everything you've done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hear and understand your concerns. I wish you absolutely all the best and I hope we cross paths again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T09:56:09.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-28T12:56:54.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your voice will be missed.  Already I'm seeing places (in multiple communities, some of which you hadn't touched directly) where I think &quot;shouldn't a moderator have done something about this&quot;... and then I realize that there is only one overstretched moderator left, or none. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to be charitable and assume this is part of a wider trend I'm seeing where companies are forced by their investors to cut back support for products that don't directly contribute to the short-term bottom line.  But it's still a sad day to see you go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And personally...  I followed you on LiveJournal, and it helped me feel comfortable here to see someone I knew in a leadership role.  That kind of think is less and less common as web communities get bigger and more diffuse. Guess I'm an old fogey missing the days when the net felt like a single community across multiple platforms.  Get off my lawn! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26660" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T12:56:54.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7717" CreationDate="2020-01-28T15:31:57.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have the same question.  It's a closely related question, and you need to link to it, and talk about how the broader constraints led to answers which don't meet your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26660" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T15:31:57.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-28T18:59:22.043" Score="101" ViewCount="3383" Body="&lt;p&gt;Been mulling this over for the past few months or however long its been, drama seems to stretch time out...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, &lt;strong&gt;I am resigning my diamond&lt;/strong&gt;. I've been hoping to see things improve since Monica was fired and, well, it hasn't happened. Seeing Shog and Robert get unceremoniously fired by the company doesn't give me any hope that this pattern will change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been around since the Area51 proposal and I have to say this has been an amazingly entertaining place to digitally hang out for the past few years. I have a hunch I will still be in chat but honestly with everything that has happened I just don't have any motivation to participate in the site anymore.  It's sad, and stupid that we have come to this point, but...here we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck in whatever endeavors you take on World Builders. You are, without a doubt, the weirdest, most awesome, and...did I say weirdest already...community I have ever known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:50:34.887" Title="Love you Worldbuilding, but I am hanging up my diamond" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-01-29T06:33:16.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sad to see you go, but I can definitely understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of luck with your new endeavors! I look forward to seeing the new site popping up in my programming-related search results and I also hope that it can build several other great communities as SE did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2913" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T06:33:16.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-29T10:03:26.463" Score="86" ViewCount="2718" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I'm sending an email to Stack Exchange resigning my moderator position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's less dramatic than it sounds as I've been essentially retired for the past year but I have been helping out occasionally. I've considered resigning several times since things really started going crazy but instead marked myself as inactive. I decided to wait on the basis that I might be stepping in to help out again - if and only if I saw signs of improvement from Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead I see multiple longstanding and respected Community Managers leaving (some not through their own choice it seems) and a pathetic non-apology to Monica for the way she was treated. A non-apology that clearly had only been drafted by a lawyer under duress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So thank you for nominating me as moderator pro-tem. Thank you for voting for me as moderator. Thank you for all you've done over the years. And thank you for helping make Worldbuilding the site it is. Unfortunately I cannot continue to support a company that treats its community, its volunteers, or its employees like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not deleting all my SE accounts but I will be looking for alternatives in the future. Stack Exchange today is not the Stack Exchange that I started supporting and advocating for many years ago and so reluctantly I must move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T15:25:34.727" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T06:32:42.230" Title="So long, and thanks for all the fish" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2020-01-29T10:54:28.093" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;All your hard work appreciated by ordinary members like myself.  What you are saying is very much how I feel myself about &quot;new&quot; SE so I get where you're coming from.  Good luck with things in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T10:54:28.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2020-01-29T10:58:58.483" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly any sane organization would stop and think when they see people like yourself (and others) leave, and the fact that they don't seem to even know where the brake pedal is does not bode well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to voice my appreciation for your hard work and calming voice on WB SE and wish you good luck.  Whatever site or sites elsewhere gets the benefit of your contributions will be very fortunate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T10:58:58.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2020-01-29T14:58:37.927" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tim, after the first mod elections in 2016 - when I joined the mod team - you and Monica were the two old hands. You'd been pro-tem mods since the start, and though I'd moderated other sites, Worldbuilding presented plenty of new challenges for me, size and wackiness among them. I'm grateful for the guidance and experience you and Monica (and later a CVn) gave me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, remember &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/848/627&quot;&gt;your answer to How do I drug a population in the most efficient way?&lt;/a&gt; That was the post that first brought me to Worldbuilding, from the HNQ list. So thanks for even getting me here in the first place. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best wishes for the future, Tim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T18:15:05.493" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T18:15:05.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2020-01-30T06:16:25.020" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tim,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your accidental namesake can I just say that it has been a pleasure working alongside you on the site all this time and I considered no shame at all to be the 'number two' Tim B on the site. You will be missed to be sure, but for me there is just a little extra sadness to the loss of your insights as it is a little like seeing a spiritual big brother leaving for greener pastures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever find a good 'alternative' SE be sure to let us all know. It would be good to have the old crew back together in a collegiate culture, coming up with great answers to crazy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the very best for your future, Sir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T06:16:25.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-30T07:03:52.587" Score="6" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've noticed a lot of new questions with &quot;Feasibility&quot; written in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4924/is-there-room-in-worldbuilding-for-asking-about-the-feasibility-of-science-ficti&quot;&gt;the community consensus&lt;/a&gt; is that &quot;feasibility&quot; questions about  sci-fi ideas are on-topic because they produce relevant information that can help people build fictional worlds. Some recent feasibility questions that seem to fit the accepted style include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166446/feasibility-of-a-creature-that-leaves-behind-crystal-like-formations&quot;&gt;Feasibility of a creature that leaves behind crystal like formations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167007/feasibility-of-making-a-quantum-destabilizer&quot;&gt;Feasibility of Making a Quantum Destabilizer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've noticed a string of feasibility questions structured differently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166788/feasibility-of-a-species-based-on-nyarlethotep-of-hp-lovecraft-lore&quot;&gt;Feasibility of a species based on Nyarlethotep&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166675/feasibility-of-a-species-based-on-yog-sothoth-hp-lovecraft-lore/166793#166793&quot;&gt;Feasibility of a species based on Yog Sothoth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167012/feasibility-of-nurgle&quot;&gt;Feasibility of nurgle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167022/feasibility-of-tzeentch#167022&quot;&gt;Feasibility of tzeentch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter questions follow this format: &quot;here is an existing creature from a work of fiction, and here are its attributes; how can it be explained?&quot; I'm reminded of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;, which exists to help users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;create fictional creatures in a realistic evolutionary way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, these questions seem less geared toward creating &lt;code&gt;fictional creatures&lt;/code&gt; and more toward explaining &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are the aforementioned questions on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; Are &quot;explain-existing-creature&quot; questions fundamentally different from the Anatomically Correct Series because they are narrow and off-topic, or are they equally helpful because they provide scientific explanations that others may find useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Here's some clarification of my perspective based on VLAZ's post: I think part of what irks me most is the apparent ease of inserting an existing creature into a post for the sake of generating questions. A lot of questions on this site don't seem to be used to make actual fictional worlds, but when it's possible to functionally copy-and-paste existing works of fiction to generate posts, it seems especially unproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2020-01-30T13:58:01.977" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T20:38:38.993" Title="Good vs Bad &quot;Feasibility&quot; Questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2020-01-30T08:08:29.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The latter questions follow this format: &quot;here is an existing creature from a work of fiction, and here are its attributes; how can it be explained?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this assessment. The questions actually veer &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; far away from the existing entity. Each question starts with a general description of the being in question, however it then construct an fictional species &lt;em&gt;heavily inspired&lt;/em&gt; but most definitely &lt;em&gt;not the same as&lt;/em&gt; the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's definitely not &quot;here are the traits of an existing entity, I want to re-make it&quot; - there already is a remake in process as part of the question. And the re-make makes rather drastic changes to the creature...which is inevitable, since each of these beings is not a &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt;, it's &lt;em&gt;an individual&lt;/em&gt;. I'm myself reminded of &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/VKeJVqNcA5w?t=81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a comedy sketch&lt;/a&gt; which has an exchange I'd like to paraphrase here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothtoth, Nurgle, and Tzeentetch aren't a genre of mythical beast - there is only one of each and their names respectively are Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothtoth, Nurgle, and Tzeentetch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I cannot see construction of a new &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; that share some traits with each of the individuals as anything but a new &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; creature creation and the question is if that works or can can it be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that does or doesn't overlap with Anatomically Correct Series, I'm not sure. To me it does seem distinct even if quite similar. ACS does feature some singular such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46664/anatomically-correct-king-kong&quot;&gt;King Kong&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60104/anatomically-correct-slenderman&quot;&gt;Slenderman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48913/anatomically-correct-sleipnir&quot;&gt;Sleipnir&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96301/anatomically-correct-scylla&quot;&gt;Scylla&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96120/anatomically-correct-charybdis&quot;&gt;Charybdis&lt;/a&gt;, for example. But each time the premise is actually what you mistakenly (according to me) attribute to the new feasibility questions: &quot;here is an existing creature from a work of fiction; how can it be explained?&quot; There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; also ACS questions that do some of the re-imagining as part of the question, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146945/anatomically-correct-pinocchio&quot;&gt;Pinocchio&lt;/a&gt; which seems quite close in composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I don't see a problem with the questions you described. They seem to be about creating species inspired from a fictional being. The only &quot;problem&quot; (in heavy quotes) I could see is whether they should be included in the Anatomically Correct Series. I can't actually make that call, but at most, I can see them being edited to include a link to ACS and then the ACS listing having a link to the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T08:08:29.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2020-01-30T17:00:33.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the person that creates the , “the feasibility of” questions, I find that this post is really informative. In a way, I make these questions to just see what is and what isn’t feasible by taking the individual god like being, taking away it’s god like attributes, and trying to make it into a feasible species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, it kinda reminds me that in the vastness of the universe, these species could be possible. Also, I will say, that The reason why I don’t make the questions for a personalized universe is because I find it pretty hard to make a personalized universe with specific rules, without breaking them myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, I find this post extremely informative, and I’ll try to look at this post as a means of improving my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70683" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T17:00:33.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-02-01T02:43:44.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for all that you have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contributions to the community have been invaluable; I am sad to see you leave. Good luck in all that you do, and may Jehovah bless you in all that you do. I tried to think of reasons why you should stay, but there really aren't any; I completely agree with you. Hopefully SE will overcome their accursed desire to be politically correct, so that things may return to the way they used to be. However, I agree with you that, to quote King Solomon, &quot;This is folly, and a chasing after the wind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, to quote the Torah, &quot;Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink you wine with a merry heart.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T02:43:44.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-02-01T14:24:56.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Goodbye, Monica. I have never had a diamond, but I learned from watching you how to welcome new users, how to give negative feedback on questions/answers without critiquing the person posting. Godspeed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T14:24:56.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7693" CreationDate="2020-02-01T20:27:31.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, because...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three terms &quot;reality check&quot; and &quot;plausibility check&quot; and &quot;self-consistency check&quot; do mean different things, but I don't think we need different tags. I think we need one tag that means &quot;does this make sense given the constraints I'm listing here?&quot; We have &quot;reality check&quot; which can be whatever reality wants to be specified by the author. I think we've worked hard to get the community to generally recognize the three major tags &quot;science based&quot; &quot;hard science&quot; and &quot;reality check&quot;. I'd rather not change the names of any of them as long as they're good enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T20:27:31.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7699" CreationDate="2020-02-01T20:31:26.363" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot for the reasons listed. Doesn't matter if it is the main site or meta. It would have to be extraordinarily problematic for a moderator to step in and delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose you could run for moderator if we ever have another election, and then, if you win, you could delete it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T20:31:26.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2020-02-04T20:38:38.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are on-topic questions because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Learning is sometimes about learning how to think about something rather than getting a specific answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Picking apart existing creatures is extremely helpful in learning how to build a creature, because there's already an established point of reference. These questions aren't so much about generating questions. For me, &lt;em&gt;they are more about learning how to think in order to create something.&lt;/em&gt; We can take something silly like Pokemon, and by exploring the mechanics of those creatures, we can learn what we will and won't accept, and how we might THINK, the steps we must take, the process of what we should be considering when building a creature of our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;World creation builds on other worlds.&lt;/strong&gt; Thing is, in a lot a fiction, established worlds ARE a jumping-off point. Take fantasy. The jumping-off point would be Tolkien. And when authors create their fantasy world, what do they do? They say &quot;well, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurElvesAreBetter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elves are different/better.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Maybe they get an idea from a post on Godzilla's evolution, maybe they treat magic like radiation. Whatever the case, when you create something, it's best if your readers know what you're talking about, and the best way to do that is to use something that already exists as your jumping-off point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23058" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T20:38:38.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-07T11:39:47.753" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;When viewing the main worldbuilding site in safari on an iMac there are performance issues.  Attempting to navigate pages, or simply scroll the page causes severe lag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not experience this on any other stack exchange sites nor on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any special scripts being used on the main site? Are there any stats available on the performance of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="870" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T11:39:47.753" Title="Worldbuilding site performance" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-08T15:48:45.483" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went out on a brainstorming limb for a solution to this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167830/can-a-moon-orbit-a-planets-southern-pole/167885#167885&quot;&gt;Can a moon orbit a planet&amp;#39;s southern pole?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I ask those of you with more astronomy and physics knowledge to critique it. I don’t want to lead the OP astray, but I figured if I could see a path to building their world dream, it was worth trying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m going to turn the answer into a community answer in case anyone wants to edit to add or correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T13:30:56.203" Title="Critique my “southern moon” answer, please" Tags="|discussion|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T08:52:40.430" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description of the &quot;dragons&quot; tag is quite general, and it would certainly seem to include questions about their anatomy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;For questions involving dragons - generally large, reptilian, flying creatures famous in folklore and myths.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being the case, I don't think there's a need for a separate &quot;dragon-anatomy&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently only have three questions with this tag, two of which have negative score. Only one of them is also tagged &quot;dragons&quot;, so someone using that tag to search for dragon questions wouldn't find the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I submitted an edit to add that tag to one of them, btw.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for someone who's used four other tags when composing their post, it could be difficult to work out which one to use, since the five-tag limit stops them using both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61035" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T13:36:09.503" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T03:47:05.973" Title="We have the &quot;dragons&quot; tag, so do we really need &quot;dragon-anatomy&quot; too?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7747" CreationDate="2020-02-09T17:23:56.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've also noticed the heavy influx of dragon-related questions lately. I agree that there is a degree of redundancy between these two tags, but since they are not perfect synonyms, they might not warrant being combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of questions pertain to dragons but don't involve their anatomy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21719/dragon-vs-antiaircraft-artillery&quot;&gt;Dragon vs Antiaircraft Artillery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35378/building-a-dragon&quot;&gt;Building a&lt;/a&gt; (robotic) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35378/building-a-dragon&quot;&gt;dragon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/140819/mythical-dragon-diet&quot;&gt;Mythical dragon diet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78144/how-to-take-down-a-dragon&quot;&gt;How to take down a dragon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10688/how-effective-would-dragon-dragoons-be&quot;&gt;How effective would Dragon-Dragoons be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;dragon-anatomy&quot; tag provides a necessary distinction that will help people design fictional creatures. That being said, &quot;creature-design&quot; + &quot;dragons&quot; would also work - it just takes up two tag slots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One potential solution could be a meta post like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; for people looking for all our dragon-design resources. That would collect the information in one place without requiring a new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T17:38:18.510" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T17:38:18.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7745" CreationDate="2020-02-09T17:36:57.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a good answer with the potential to help the OP. It seems to be well-reasoned, and although implausible, the scenario you provide still fits the given circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that downvotes are discouraging, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad answer. The answer's mixed reception probably came from the fact that a lopsided body is by definition not a planet - making the post &lt;strong&gt;appear&lt;/strong&gt; not to be an answer. I disagree with this perspective. Such a technicality won't prevent the OP from achieving the desired effect. Plus, the question isn't tagged with &quot;science-based&quot; (though it's arguably implied by the &quot;orbital-mechanics&quot; tag) so any relatively logical answer, imo, is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, it could be helpful to acknowledge such a technicality in the body of the question when it comes up so it becomes a deliberate concession / rebuttal, rather than an apparent hole in your reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T17:36:57.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7747" CreationDate="2020-02-10T05:36:48.053" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the need for dragon-anatomy. If we have that, then we should also have cat-anatomy, dog-anatomy, [whatever animal]-anatomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag of the animal and the tag anatomy together reach their goal of framing the question, so no need for the specialized one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile I have merged the dragon-anatomy tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-02-11T03:47:05.973" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T03:47:05.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-12T14:16:40.620" Score="3" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;OS: Windows 10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Browser: Firefox v. 68.4.1esr (32-bit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem: After editing a post, the &quot;Page Down&quot; key becomes unresponsive. After pressing the &quot;Esc&quot; key, the use of the &quot;Page Down&quot; key produces a drop-down menu in the upper left corner containing the selection from the &quot;Edit Summary&quot; line from the recent edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steps to Reproduce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open a question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select &quot;edit&quot; on a post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make an edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fill out edit summary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &quot;Save Edits&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Press the &quot;Page Down&quot; key (not sure if this is necessary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Press the &quot;Esc&quot; key&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Press the &quot;Page Down&quot; key&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Workaround: Changing tabs restores the expected behavior of the &quot;Page Down&quot; key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wq4SW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wq4SW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:16:40.620" Title="&quot;Page down&quot; stops working after editing" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-02-12T14:35:15.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm sad to see you leave, Monica, in reading your heartfelt post, I think it may be for the best. Without wishing to sound disrespectful to you, it does sound to me like you might have become too emotionally attached to the company. Some time away I am sure will do you much good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you'll come back to us in the actual communities -- the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;REAL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; stack exchange. The reason I say that is when I joined this forum, I didn't even know there was a stack exchange the company. I still don't really know what it is (except that it sounds like a load of berks) and you know what? &lt;em&gt;I really do not care one whit about the company at all&lt;/em&gt;.  Their stances, their political agendas, their foolishness -- none of those things really matter as they have no real effect on any of us or what we're doing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come here for the creativity of fellow geopoets. Period. Hopefully, in the fullness of time, you too can come back refreshed, renewed and shorn of the baggage of Stack Exchange the Company and just get down to the happy work of worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:35:15.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2020-02-12T14:44:27.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Understandable, and thanks for your hard work as moderator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll just offer the same bit of cheap advice I did to Monica: keep in mind, as you search for alternatives to SE, that Stack Exchange is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the company.  Stack Exchange, truly, is us here in the community. Folks who, in this case, share an interest in geopoesy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't join this forum because yay! I get to be part of some online Company!  No, I joined because this is a community of creative people who share with me a similar sort of creativity. I didn't know what Stack Exchange the Company was; and I still don't know. I didn't care what Stack Exchange the Company was; and you know what? I still don't give a fiddler's fart what the Company is, who the people are who run (or ruin) it. They can go on with their corporate foolishness and political agendas for all I care. They're not why I'm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you look for alternatives, keep in mind &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/132660/worldbuilding-forum-or-other-conversational-place/132662#132662&quot;&gt;my response in this question&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:44:27.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2020-02-12T14:50:34.887" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very sad that you are being made to feel this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am glad to hear you'll still be around.  Just keep in mind: Stack Exchange is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the Company. Stack Exchange is us here in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a curious commonality between your, Tim's and Monica's resignation posts: all of you seem to be infected by the ill will coming from corporate. Frankly, as I said to the others, I didn't join SE to be part of an online Company. I didn't know what the Company was and didn't care; and I still don't know and don't care. I came here for the creativity and wonder demonstrated by all the community members who ask questions and offer answers. Period. Company policies and politics be damned. They're not the reason any of should be in this place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you can get over your corporatitis and feel free to just participate in the community itself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:50:34.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7757" CreationDate="2020-02-13T01:53:59.583" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a discussion based question and got tons of very good answers, so I'm wondering if it's possible for me to specify a reason for accepting a specific one? If there's nothing built in for that, would it be considered acceptable (rules and etiquette wise) for me to edit my original post and add the reasons I picked a certain answer at the bottom of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72367" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T05:01:12.860" Title="Should/Can I give a reason for accepting a certain answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7755" CreationDate="2020-02-13T03:46:21.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment on the answer should suffice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T03:46:21.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7755" CreationDate="2020-02-13T05:01:12.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, the usefulness of answers is rated by upvotes as well as whether or not they're accepted. If the accepted answer happens to be highly-upvoted, an explanation might not be necessary because it's clear many people find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to accept an &quot;obscure&quot; answer with relatively few votes, a comment on the accepted post doesn't hurt. You shouldn't feel obligated to explain what works best for you, but it might also help others understand how you arrived at your conclusion. If I'm looking at a low-voted accepted answer, I'm interested in why the author's evaluation seemingly contradicts most voters. That explanation could help me if I have the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't be a great idea to edit your conclusion into the question imo. People still post new answers to old questions even after an answer has already been accepted - so adding that degree of finality to the original post might prevent new insights in the future. Also, your explanation of choice is arguably more relevant to the answer itself than to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still OK to put your reasoning in the body of the question. People edit questions to explain bounties, providing some degree of question-answer discussion on the original post. It isn't much of a stretch to extend that process to an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think it's against the rules to provide a reason in the body of the question, but a comment makes more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T05:01:12.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3102" CreationDate="2020-02-13T16:14:14.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The Builder&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, we are world builders, and this machine's function could be in aid or execution of the building of a world. That's what the hologram it is projecting suggests to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nah, who am I kidding? I'm just inspired by Futurama's Bender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T16:14:14.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-13T20:01:14.003" Score="4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168423&quot;&gt;Can I have snow &amp;quot;near&amp;quot; (somewhere with the climate of) San Diego?&lt;/a&gt; is going to be closed due to &quot;lack of clarity&quot;. I don't understand why it is unclear, and despite requests for help improving the question, no one is explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just the way things work? Is it not considered impolite to vote to close someone's question and refuse to offer any help improving the question, or even explaining what was wrong with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T20:59:03.713" Title="Why don't people explain votes to close?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2020-02-13T23:43:44.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with the question is that it admits the trivially simple answer &quot;yes&quot;. Since most people would find it unlikely that you have put a lot of effort in writing a 500 word question just to get a one word answer, they would assume that what you actually expected is real world examples. The trouble is, there are many such examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including the actual San Diego, California, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before reading this question all I knew about San Diego, California, was that is was the northern half of the international San Diego–Tijuana conurbation. But then a quick look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Diego_County,_California&amp;amp;oldid=938730892&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relevant article of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; provided the information that in the eastern part of the San Diego county there are &lt;em&gt;&quot;mountains that receive frost and snow in the winter&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. With the help of Google Maps, one can easily find that the San Diego county is about 100 km wide west to east. So the actual San Diego county, California, qualifies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question asks whether there can be a place with the climate of San Diego, California, which is close to a place where it snows in winter, and the actual San Diego, California, is such a place, it follows that it is not at all clear what the question really asks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question includes requirements for a rather small flat area in the part with the snow, and puts restrictions on the travel time. But those details are irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is obviously perfectly possible to find such a small flat area in the mountains. And travel time depends on how good the roads are; it is perfectly imaginable that one can go 60 kilometers in half an hour. It doesn't matter whether there is such a flat area in the mountains near San Diego or not, and whether there are such roads in the area or not; &lt;em&gt;there could be&lt;/em&gt; a flat area in those mountains, and &lt;em&gt;there could be&lt;/em&gt; roads. Their &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; is all that is needed in order to say &quot;yes, it's possible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2020-02-13T23:56:19.923" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T23:56:19.923" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2020-02-13T23:52:24.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a courtesy, but not a necessity, to explain when you VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it's  really valuable to offer constructive feedback as a comment before initiating a VTC. If someone can edit their question before a close vote, it's a lot easier to get answers than trying to reopen it first. If a question is already in the close vote queue, I still try to comment or upvote existing comments before voting to close. People can't really improve without specific feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L. Dutch notes as a comment that you did receive some feedback. It may not have been clear, but the resulting discussion gave you some of people's reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, commenting is not a necessity. When a question is closed, the reason (ex. needs to be more focused) will have a link to the relevant help guide. If it's unclear what &quot;focused&quot; means, that link is supposed to make it clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T23:52:24.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2020-02-14T06:05:05.417" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It is NOT impolite to close without further comment&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gets asked about a lot: the desire for an explanation of why the question was closed. When voting to close, the reason is listed, and there is text there to help the person reask their question... if it can even be saved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding further comment is something I do ONLY when I think the question is savable. If it is fatally flawed, I’m not going to bother. The boilerplate text says what the problem is. If it is non-obvious to the OP, adding comments just leads to a fight. I’m among the more forgiving on off-topic and too-broad, but hold pretty strict on one q per post and “opinion based”. But the consensus of 5 generally keeps us closing on consistent bases. People can study other questions to figure out what will fly and what won’t. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T06:05:05.417" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7649" CreationDate="2020-02-14T08:32:47.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to put my opinion based on the fact that I rarely checked the meta, presumably like you, until this thing with Monica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lack a very deep understanding of the meta, procedures, and stuff. However, in the ~30 posts that I checked which started with Monica and continued on the ethics of that, and subsequent, actions, I noticed that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both sides, that is, the community and the SE staff, seem to use decent language. A neutral point in itself. But,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community poses questions and positions, things with essence. Whereas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The SE staff posts are practically empty words, sometimes trying to trick the reader into thinking they apologised.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of upvotes on critical community posts and the number of downvotes of hot air SE posts are overwhelming.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having lesser knowledge, I dare to trust the large number of people who pose points, rather than a few who say nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sad, because I enjoy the content of SE. But due to this situation, I am just waiting for someone/a group of people to create another similar site, and I will be off there. The abuse of people who care has not only been huge, but is proven decidedly incessant at all times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65714" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T08:32:47.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7745" CreationDate="2020-02-14T13:30:56.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was an interesting angle but sadly the situation that you described is not possible because the massive Osmium body on one side of the planet would sink to the centre of the planet. The rock beneath it would not be able to withstand the weight and would flow around it. A bit like a car driven into a swamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42450" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T13:30:56.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7722" CreationDate="2020-02-14T16:14:20.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry to see you go&#xA;I hope you still visit the worldbuilding forums once in a while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a nice life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-DaArcticEagle (Grammarly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56510" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T16:14:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T16:30:03.290" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;In previous meta questions and chat discussions, I've gotten general agreement on the &lt;strong&gt;capitalization conventions&lt;/strong&gt; this site should use for common species names, race names within a species, and scientific species names. &lt;strong&gt;Since I (and no one else to my knowledge) have never put it all in one place, I've summarized that at the end of this question for your viewing pleasure.&lt;/strong&gt; They're the rules I use when cleaning up questions for readability. I'm not pedantic about it, but having consistent style does help people answer our questions better, in my observation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question today is about Pokémon, spurred by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168545/anatomically-correct-gardevoir&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Clearly a singular individual whose given name just happens to be its species name gets a capital letter. So, Pikachu as an individual character is capitalized. But should the common species name be capitalized? Maybe some of them are proper nouns, but I think it should be &quot;bulbasaur&quot;, for example. Yet all references on the Internet always capitalize the names. When we are doing an anatomically-correct series, where we realitify (my word, go with it) a fictional species, should we continue to use its fictional capitalization or make it follow a more conventional route? Or -- the most interesting argument to me -- do we say that the entire species is always named for a proper noun, i.e., the given name of the first individual of the species that researchers met? Like maybe the first Bulbasaur was named Bulbasaur, and researchers named the species Bulbasaur, and we call all individuals by that name, because we are dumb humans, but secretly, many of them are named Tai Li, Veronica, or Sandovar Malachai Epsilon The Nearly Outstanding. We've just gotten lucky that we've never met a first Pokémon of any type whose name doesn't fit on a playing card.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should the capitalization convention be for a species generated from a Pokémon prototype in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;anatomically correct&lt;/a&gt;&quot; series?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix: Species/Race Capitalization Conventions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use lower case for common (non-technical) species names, including fantasy and science fictional species, unless they were named for proper nouns. That means: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;human vs Earther vs Neanderthal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dog vs cocker spaniel vs German shepherd &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;targ vs Klingon &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;monarch butterfly vs Nevada skipper&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;velociraptor vs Abelisaurus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Races within a species are generally capitalized, but that seems to be because all races are tied to some proper noun, so it is unclear what we would do if we ever found one that wasn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;African (humans)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Caucasian (humans)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latinx (humans)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dorsai (humans, fictional)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silvanesti (elves)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Qualinesti (elves)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific names follow the standard naming convention that the first word (genus name) is capitalized and the following species name is always lower case: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homo sapiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homo neanderthalensis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Velociraptor mongoliensis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T21:48:34.807" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T02:55:28.107" Title="Our preferred capitalization for species names when they are Pokémon?" Tags="|discussion|writing-style|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7766" CreationDate="2020-02-16T02:55:28.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of treating Pokémon as proper nouns in all instances to stay consistent with the franchise and general internet usage. While this site can help make Pokémon anatomically correct, we aren't here to make them grammatically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to imagine there's a little Trademark™ Or Brand ® symbol next to the name clarifying that it's intellectual property, even if each exact Pokémon type isn't trademarked; that makes their usage consistent with proper nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T02:55:28.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2020-02-17T16:55:50.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So... it's been a while, and I want to share my take on what went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, one issue is that I phrased my question as a yes/no. That in an of itself isn't necessarily a problem, as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A yes/no question, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; answers provide sources or other evidence to back them up, can still be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phrasing (&quot;is there such terrain&quot;) should have implied that a &quot;yes&quot; answer should include more information than just &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, this didn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the real issue I see is that people didn't bother to read and understand the finer points of the question. AlexP's summary is quite appropos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T]he question asks whether there can be a place with the climate of San Diego, California, which is close to a place where it snows in winter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and the flippant answers and CV's seem to follow this. It is also &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; this simplification ignores (or fails to understand) the details that were in the body of the question. Other comments pointing out the &quot;irrelevancy&quot; of identifying the various locations exhibit the same problem (I'll get back to that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short, generic answer to this question would appear to be &quot;because people can't be bothered with the details&quot;, which, unfortunately, is entirely believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you don't care about picking apart details of my original question which prompted this one, you can stop reading now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I deleted the original question since all it was accomplishing was attracting downvotes, here it is, reproduced for posterity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Conditions:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a story with several locations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A boarding school. The campus is around 1km × 1km and should be relatively flat ground.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;House A. Modest size building, relatively flat lot maybe 60m × 60m.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;House B. Larger building (closer to 20m × 20m) on a somewhat larger lot (say, 100m × 100m). The lot is mildly to moderately sloped in back, but the house itself should be on a flat spot around 30m × 40m.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A zoo. Not flat; very similar to, or even an exact copy of, the real San Diego zoo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also have the following distance constraints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Travel time between the houses, or between either house and the school, should be less than 30 minutes; 10-15 is better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Travel time between House A and the zoo is at least 20 minutes but not more than 90 minutes. (About 40 minutes would be best.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Travel time between House B and the zoo can (and possibly should) be longer, within other criteria.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Assume building and transport technology equivalent to our modern world (e.g. &amp;quot;travel time&amp;quot; implies driving in a modern car, with modern US-like road systems). However, the story takes place somewhere other than &amp;quot;our&amp;quot; world; it might Earth in an alternate universe, or a totally different (but still Earth-like) planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The houses and school should be located in or near a large suburban area. (I don't need New York, NY, but the population density must be higher than middle-of-nowhere, WY.) The area should not be overly arid (temperate forest would be perfect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The zoo should be able to support vegetation similar to what occurs in real life San Diego. Said vegetation should be green and healthy nearly year round (in particular, through mid-autumn), but the surrounding area can be semi-arid (like San Diego), i.e. it's okay if the zoo needs a bunch of irrigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the above constraints, is there a biome / terrain that would allow me to have deciduous vegetation at House B which change color come autumn? Can I have (regular, not fluke) snow at House B, or somewhere within about an hour's drive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Again, this doesn't need to &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; be San Diego or any location that exists on our planet. Something like having a significant elevation different between the zoo and everything else, or having the zoo's vegetation only able to survive because of some geothermal heat source or specially sheltered valley, is acceptable, as long as such features could plausibly occur on an Earth-like planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming that covering the zoo in a giant dome is not feasible, as the technology to do so would not be available.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Suggestion:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Offhand, the most plausible explanation would be that the houses and school are on top of a mesa, where the top of the mesa has a midwest-like climate, while the bottom has a California-like climate. Is this plausible, both from a climate perspective, and for having roads that would allow driving between a city on top and a city on the bottom in about a half hour to an hour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that &quot;it snows in San Diego County&quot; are inadequate. Some of this could have been stated differently (lesson learned), but the additional requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The general area must have a minimum population of &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 2 million people; 3-5 million would be better. Further, the zoo must be located somewhere that is reasonably &quot;central&quot; to the majority of said population. If these requirements are not met, the zoo won't exist or will be somewhere else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The school can't be up &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the mountains, if they are &lt;em&gt;mountains&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Mountains&lt;/em&gt; don't have light suburban population density, and they don't have &lt;em&gt;mostly level&lt;/em&gt; school campuses. Level areas &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the mountains of the requisite size are rare and tend to have rivers or lakes in the middle of them if they do exist, and lack the surrounding houses to be anything other than &quot;isolated&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Plateaus&lt;/em&gt; might meet the requirements (Abha, Bogotá), but this excludes simply asserting that &quot;California already has snow&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't exhaustive, but the above are the requirements that seemed to be most critical as far as viable answers and also the most overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what would constitute a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer to this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Showing what terrain would make the different climates possible, preferably with examples of each that would plausibly share similar geographical influence (ideally two places that are actually near each other). Additionally...&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...showing an example of terrain that would support the school and surrounding suburbs. (Bogotá is actually reasonable here. The mountains in California &lt;em&gt;are not&lt;/em&gt;.) And...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...showing an example of a road that traverses the required elevation distance for the two locations in the desired travel time, keeping in mind the need to allow extra time at the beginning/end to get from said road to the destination endpoints.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or:&lt;/strong&gt; Showing that no reasonable change in elevation can supply the desired difference in climate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or:&lt;/strong&gt; Showing that the required elevation change cannot reasonably be traversed in the allowed time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or:&lt;/strong&gt; Showing what modifications are necessary to achieve the stated goals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastEditorUserId="43697" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T20:59:03.713" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T20:59:03.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2020-02-18T06:32:42.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;i wish you well in your endeavours, may you find the place you fit in best.&#xA;thank you for sharing with us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52792" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T06:32:42.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7772" CreationDate="2020-02-19T04:14:52.507" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag is for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about science and &lt;strong&gt;the perception of science in a fictional world&lt;/strong&gt;. Use [science-based] for questions on how to explain fictional things based on real-world science. Use tags relating to specific fields (such as for example [space-exploration], [astronomy], [biology], [xenobiology], [mathematics], [sociology], ...) for questions relating to particular fields of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, the tag usage was consistent with this definition; users asked how people would treat science in a set of given circumstances. However, usage quickly departed from this definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by the relevant meta discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3680/dealing-with-the-science-tag&quot;&gt;Dealing with the science tag&lt;/a&gt;, many people tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; when they have a question that deals with scientific explanations, but isn't necessarily about the study of science itself. The meta discussion had one solution to this problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, if tags have been misused, we should correct them, and make sure everyone knows the correct use of the tag. So re-tag and clarify tag-wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's been nearly 4 years since that discussion, and over 300 questions have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag. No one re-tagged, and now the popular usage, imo, clearly defies the tag wiki. I think &lt;strong&gt;the tag wiki has been insufficient to promote proper usage&lt;/strong&gt; because a) so many questions have already been mistagged, and b) the tag name itself is &lt;strong&gt;just too ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;, since the large majority of questions with this tag defy the original definition. Salvaging it arguably might not be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update the tag wiki to include questions that &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; science, not just questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; in-world science.&lt;/strong&gt; This course of action assumes that tag definitions do or should change with usage, not the other way around. It also assumes that there is a clear distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; questions about using science and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; questions about using science so keeping the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag would create a meaningful distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rename the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-in-society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-in-society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-in-society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to accurately reflect its wiki and original use. Then remove it from irrelevant questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems like the most reasonable course of action? Alternatively this might be a non-issue so no course of action is needed. Or the original suggestion of retagging existing questions could work if someone commits to doing so, but imo we still need a less ambiguous name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T04:20:36.607" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T16:59:45.680" Title="Revisiting the &quot;science&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T16:38:01.847" Score="11" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that some users here are quite liberal in dispensing upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am generally not in  favor of such liberality, but also not against it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I give upvotes when I see something good, but I can understand that some prefer to give upvotes when they don't see anything bad. As I said above, I can live with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once in a while I stumble in cases like the one below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/51XCp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/51XCp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not an answer to the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's blatant nonsense/trolling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever gave that upvote to the answer, what exactly was hoping to achieve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be considerate when upvoting. Your upvote is shaping the content you like in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T04:04:01.243" Title="Giving away upvote: is it doing any good?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7770" CreationDate="2020-02-19T16:59:45.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag has been one of those things on my to-do list that I kinda keep meaning to deal with and then keep pushing off again and again and again, and now it's . . . a bit of an issue. I feel like incorrect usage is something we should have been pruning regularly, but now the bush is so overgrown that nuclear options seem tempting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;inclined&lt;/em&gt; to vote for the third option - some way of renaming it that makes the usage clearer, and updating the tag wiki accordingly; we could then map &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. I'd at least like to &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; this, rather than get rid of it right away - give it a month of so, and see what happens. If, for whatever reason, people are still using it incorrectly . . . we might have to accept that it's a pretty niche tag, and might not be worth the trouble of keeping it around. The asking rate of questions that &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; it is quite low, so getting rid of wouldn't be terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the name - I like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-in-society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-in-society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-in-society&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd also like to hear other ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T16:59:45.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T23:21:57.047" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;The synopsis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;what makes a question Too Story Based&lt;/a&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've noticed a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of questions closed as &quot;Too Story Based&quot; that in my opinion don't qualify for closure. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168832/why-can-an-interstellar-ship-only-carry-8-people&quot;&gt;Why can an interstellar ship only carry 8 people? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167277/why-does-the-only-magical-healer-predisposed-to-prioritizing-healing-over-anyth?noredirect=1#comment524015_167277&quot;&gt;Why does the only magical healer, predisposed to prioritizing healing over anything else, have any free time?&lt;/a&gt; (Reopened)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168693/how-can-an-unholy-trinity-to-be-worshipped-as-one-being&quot;&gt;How can an unholy Trinity to be worshipped as one being? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the &lt;strong&gt;purpose&lt;/strong&gt; of each question is to serve the story, so a lot of people VTC. For example, the purpose of the first question is to end up with a ship small enough for 8 characters. However, the goal of nearly &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; aspect of a fictional world is to serve the story - either by directly furthering the plot, or by indirectly expanding the setting and themes. That doesn't mean asking how to make the world is story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt; of each question is about building a fictional world, and that's what matters. All of these questions are about concrete elements such as spaceships (1st question), magic (2nd), and religion (3rd). Sure, some questions may appear to be &lt;em&gt;framed&lt;/em&gt; around &quot;this is what I need to achieve for my plot&quot; but that doesn't mean the process of achieving it isn't the on-topic construction of a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the community stand on the application of the Story-Based VTC? Do people generally agree that people are voting to close this class of valid questions too liberally? Or are these closures justified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think this is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; because this post seeks specific discussion about a particular type of question in the context of specific recent examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastEditorUserId="28639" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T14:04:47.453" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T05:03:21.490" Title="A Cascade of Story-Based Closings" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7773" CreationDate="2020-02-20T16:54:24.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Overview of the Problem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been quite a lively discussion on the particular query about the spaceship and whether the limitations placed on the spacecraft are &amp;quot;world based&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot;. I think the discussion applies generally to the other queries cited, and also to questions here in Worldbuilding generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us remind ourselves what WB.SE's mission is: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  We impose upon our members certain limitations: to ask queries about &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;specific issues with worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and we ask them to refrain from asking &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anything not directly related to worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us remind ourselves what worldbuilding is, within the scope of our community: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically to the point, Worldbuilding is not for &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;questions relating to plot and character building (as they) are out of scope for the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The basic problem with these queries: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7281/what-is-narrative-necessity-and-how-does-it-apply-to-worldbuilding/7284#7284&quot;&gt;Narrative Necessity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first query boils down to Narrative Necessity. The author has imposed some arbitrary stricture on a plot element (in this case, the spacecraft) and is now asking us to justify this plot element. Ultimately, the answer to why the spacecraft can only carry eight people is &amp;quot;because the author determined that the spacecraft can only carry eight people&amp;quot;. The author could have similarly chosen a different arbitrary number like 6 or 11 1/2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hold that this query is very clearly &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; for the following reason: the stricture is imposed by the story's author / querent and not by any force of nature or other system or rules by which the universe operates. There is no natural law at play within the context of the query that can allow for the variant reading of &amp;quot;world based&amp;quot;. Furthermore, the title &amp;amp; the body of the question itself have nothing to do with the nature of the fictional world or the systems that make it operational. The topic and focus relate solely to matters of narrative necessity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: we don't justify plot element questions. This is a classic, *story based&amp;quot; query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question also boils down to Narrative Necessity. The author has imposed some arbitrary stricture on a plot element (in this case, the number of magical healers &amp;amp; their personalities) and is now asking us to justify the situation. Ultimately, the answer is &amp;quot;she is your character and she has free time because of the personality qualities you gave her.&amp;quot; Again, if the stricture is not present, then the narrative potential is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: we don't justify characters' personalities, predispositions or likely actions. This is another classic &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third question is problematic for other reasons, which I won't go into here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;In a nutshell&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is this: whenever a query's essential focus is on &lt;strong&gt;any element of a story that itself is not directly related to worldbuilding, such as a plot element or narrative element or character element&lt;/strong&gt; we're now dealing with a story based query. When an OP frames her query in terms like &amp;quot;in my story&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;for a story I'm writing&amp;quot; or the like this is a sure sign we're not dealing with the nature of the world itself, its subsystems, natural laws, or any element of worldbuilding proper, but rather we're dealing with narrative threads within that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though we all love stories, our focus here in WB.SE is to help people make fictional worlds: systems, functionality, nature of reality, evolution of forms, etc. Specific to writers, we help them build the foundations upon which their stories are written; but we have chosen not to help them write their stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Opinion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that the first two queries needed to be closed without question. They are clearly story based and not world based.  They can not really be salvaged as written as they have nothing to do with the nature or structure of the world itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T05:03:21.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-23T19:27:53.810" Score="18" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's really two things that I want to bring up here. The first is that the Anatomically Correct series of questions has been flooded with recent questions about various creatures. This is kind of humorous because I was looking into it, and TrEs-2b, the founder of the series, mentions on the Anatomically Correct Slime question (#43) that it was running out of creatures. For reference, we're on #117 last count, and that number will be growing rapidly. This is because if we don't set hard and fast rules as to what is allowed and what isn't, then literally all of science fiction, fantasy, myth, legend, and what-have-you becomes fair game for the Anatomically Correct series, so it will never run out of creatures so long as someone has access to Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I would like not to stop this, but rather to gently apply the brakes and perhaps nudge the wheel a bit. I love the concept of the Anatomically Correct series, because it introduces a monster and then says, 'Okay, but what if this monster was real?&quot;, or a fantasy race, or what have you. Then it's a fun exercise putting together the jigsaw of components that allow you to come as close as possible to the target creature, all while staying within the realm of biology. But if we just allow everything, than we run the risk of over-saturating the field. Furthermore, some of the submissions of that 117-item list (as of the time this is being brought up) isn't exactly worthy of the list, so I propose that we implement a more rigid system into place such that all the coming questions in the Anatomically Correct series need not run the risk of downvotes, getting closed, or just an overall lack of interest and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing I want to bring up is that one of the more recent submitters to the series has been insisting on all the creatures evolving naturally. That is certainly a bonus if we can create a creature that can naturally evolve, but that is also horribly limiting in it's own way. A lot of creatures submitted to the list where not created with the intention that they could evolve, they were created to look cool or to be intimidating, and have no business evolving in the first place. Insisting on evolution is a limiting factor when it comes to anatomy, and we can get a lot better answers if we remove that limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a short and rough list of conditions that I suggest. The first few have been taken from TrEs-2b's original post in the Meta, and then I've added a few myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conditions for Anatomically Correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generalizations are forbidden. A creature must be described as such that a coherent answer can be provided. (Using just 'Vampire' as a description is no good. Something more akin to 'Vampire which is weak to sunlight and feeds on blood' is better.) Links help, but they should be an addendum, not a substitute, for descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On descriptions: It should be a clear and thorough description of all the animal's qualities, as well as signature behaviors of said animal. To borrow the phrase 'We're willing to help, but we will not invent the creature and summon it into this world for you'. Pictures help, but they should be an addendum, not a substitute, for description.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using previous questions under the 'Anatomically Correct' label as an example of why your question isn't violating the rules is not a valid defense. Those question are the exceptions that have been grandfathered in, they are not the precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One that I propose adding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only requirement for the answer is to be an anatomically correct creature of the question, or at least as close as can be gotten using the current understanding of biology. Magic or handwavium of any sort is forbidden. Explanation of the evolution of such a creature is nice, but not required. This is to give maximum room for potential answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Variations of creatures which already exist in the series should be discouraged unless they are wholly distinct, i.e. if we have a working answer for Elves, asking a new question about dark elves or water elves should be discouraged unless they are functionally different in a lot ways.  (I.e. if your water elves can actually breathe water and have other aquatic features, that's fine. If they only have fin-like hands and feet, that's not quite unique enough.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Characters and creatures that were not intended to be meaningful living creatures with the use of magic, cartoon physics, and / or handwavium should be treated very, very carefully. If you're going to ask about them, make the necessary adjustments in order for them to be meaningful living characters. (For instance, if you wanted to make an 'Anatomically Correct Mickey Mouse', first describe him as close to a real creature as possible, i.e. humanoid creature with mouse-like features including ears and a tail, 3-foot tall body. Don't just post a 2D cartoon picture.) Creatures that have been given power which are &lt;em&gt;biologically impossible&lt;/em&gt; should be summarily rejected from the series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An 'Anatomically-Correct' tag should be created and applied to all questions within the series, in addition to the titles. A question that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; meet these guidelines should not be closed out of hand unless it also violates this site's other guidelines, such as being a duplicate or being too vague. The idea is that, while we want to keep the Anatomically Correct series exclusive, we don't want to prevent other questions which don't make the cut, thus providing the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, (and this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a suggested guideline, it's just a faint plea from me) please try and help to make sure that this tradition is taken with the respect it deserves. I've been on Worldbuilding for less than a year right now, but this is honestly one of my favorite parts of it, and I would really like for it to continue. If you have a favorite monster or you're worldbuilding for a story and you want to use this question, great! Please put it out, I'll gladly read it and try to come up with a creature that works, alongside the other members of this sight. But if the creature you have in mind is just one of idle curiosity which doesn't really fit, maybe consider just asking it as a normal question or saving it for later when you're more interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastEditorUserId="64961" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T15:08:44.540" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T15:08:44.540" Title="Limiting the Number of Anatomically Correct Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2020-02-23T20:00:40.657" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considering the &lt;em&gt;Title&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Limiting the Number...&lt;/em&gt; I disagree with the premise that there can be too many &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; Anatomically Correct questions. That is, encyclopedias of myth &amp;amp; folklore are chock full of strange creatures that haven't even been touched in this series. Geopoets, game designers, and authors are also regularly coming up with their own weird races and creatures. Plenty of grist for this particular mill.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that in stead of &quot;limiting the number&quot;, which suggests that there will at some point be an end to the series, we might rather consider &quot;improving the quality&quot; of the questions in the series. This seems to be where you're heading anyway, but does not have the same psychological effect as an imposed limitation might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considering &lt;em&gt;Section I para 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;some submissions aren't exactly worthy of the list&lt;/em&gt; I'd ask you by what criteria you arrived at that opinion and what your plan is for handling those particular submissions. Perhaps make a separate meta question linking to the ones you think to aren't up to quality and they can be examined by everyone else. Include in that question how these fail while others pass the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a former Anatomically Correct query is &quot;demoted&quot;, I don't think it should be closed or deleted. Simply remove it from the list and edit the query body &amp;amp; tags accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considering &lt;em&gt;Section II para 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;insisting on all the creatures evolving naturally&lt;/em&gt; I don't think there should necessarily be an issue with &quot;natural evolution&quot;. I think it's the querent's prerogative to insist on that if they wish. However, if this should be taken as a standard rule they should note that this request is at variance with the standard rule of the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though consider: To be honest, I've always understood that for the Anatomically Correct series to work, without magic and handwavium as you say, respondents almost need to consider and apply &quot;natural evolution&quot; to their answers. The whole point of the series is to take fanciful creatures that don't exist and determine ways in which they might be made to exist. Evolution is therefore a presupposed mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;Section II para 7&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Variations of creatures...&lt;/em&gt; would most likely fall under closure for being duplicate as a matter of course. I concur that minor differences don't really make for an entirely distinct race or species or kind. Perhaps consider adding verbiage to that effect in this paragraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By &lt;em&gt;Section II para 9&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a tag should be created and applied...&lt;/em&gt; I am quite surprised! I should have thought a tag would have been created long since. I concur: a tag needs to be created right away. After all, it seems people do search for queries in this series and making the tag would help keep the series linked together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T20:17:54.683" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T20:17:54.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-25T12:51:15.053" Score="17" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice in a row today: posts flagged as spam, with no spammy content in them because someone edited out their links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please, don't!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag spam as spam and let the moderators handle it. I understand the (good) intentions behind the edits, however by removing the links you are just adding an additional step to our work, because we need to go check the post history to validate your flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, technically, you are turning a spam post into a &quot;not an answer&quot; post, something which we mods normally stay away from and which the spam flag might not be applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T11:32:31.577" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T11:32:31.577" Title="Public Service Announcement: Don't edit out links from spam posts" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-26T02:57:50.007" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was scrolling through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/64/revival&quot;&gt;the list of awarded Revival badges&lt;/a&gt; out of curiosity and noticed something a bit strange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0hJad.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0hJad.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing formatting bug on badge list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that users with long names cause their user profiles (and the date the badge was awarded at) to be sent to the left of the cell, instead of right-justified, as they should be. I'm assuming this is a bug; I'd guess that the names are overrunning the boundaries of some box and thereby breaking the wrapping. The same thing seems to happen with other users on other badge lists with long usernames&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T02:57:50.007" Title="Long names break formatting in the badge list" Tags="|bug|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-26T17:50:03.700" Score="8" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169683/orbital-cooking-is-the-heat-of-re-entry-enough-to-cook-a-pizza&quot;&gt;Orbital Pizza Delivery&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got closed as off-topic. It was claimed that it was more properly related to Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, the questions below seem fine, even when dealing mostly with physics (including some high-level theoretical physics, in one case):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169031/is-it-possible-to-build-a-catapult-strong-enough-to-launch-a-person-to-the-moon&quot;&gt;Is it possible to build a catapult strong enough to launch a person to the moon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166221/air-resistance-speed-limits-on-a-broomstick&quot;&gt;Air resistance speed limits on a broomstick&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/165945/feasibility-of-compressing-matter-to-electron-degeneracy&quot;&gt;Feasibility of compressing matter to electron degeneracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/165010/how-many-pillows-would-you-need-to-survive-a-fall-from-a-church-tower&quot;&gt;How many pillows would you need to survive a fall from a church tower?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why my question is off-topic, when I have similar examples of &quot;physics-based&quot; questions on the site. Granted, they don't deal with re-entry specifically, but they still deal with real-life physics applied to hypothetical scenarios. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I greatly expanded the question since I posted this meta. Please have that in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2020-03-03T05:44:59.600" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T05:44:59.600" Title="Why my question about Orbital Pizza Delivery is off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7779" CreationDate="2020-02-26T18:15:22.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was no reason to close your question due only to it being about physics. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help center states&lt;/a&gt;, questions may include &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see a different reason for closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, from the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep in mind the following when asking about actions or events in your world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Events: Questions need to include the setting/situation and the event&#xA;or, the result you are trying to get to and the setting/situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your event (a pizza in orbital re-entry) didn't include any setting or situation. Therefore it appeared to not be a &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;-building question, just a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see in the comments that you were trying to make an &amp;quot;orbital pizza delivery system&amp;quot; for your world, but that information wasn't provided in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, your question may have appeared to some to be a copy-paste of &lt;a href=&quot;https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this xkcd&lt;/a&gt; comic, which is the same question, but with steak instead of pizza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T18:15:22.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7779" CreationDate="2020-02-26T18:22:32.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;: I think the main issue with your question (and scores more like it) is that you are not actually asking a question about the fundamental nature of a fictional world. A quick review of our Tour reveals that we're here to help writers and game designers and worldbuilders with problems pertaining to the creation of fictional worlds and settings: &lt;em&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/em&gt;. You didn't show us anything to indicate that you are trying to build a fictional world, thus, your question really isn't on topic here. The key take-away term here is &quot;universe you want to build&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has long been a simmering debate over &quot;real world questions&quot;. I at least am of the opinion that real world science questions are on topic so long as there is reasonable and demonstrable fictional worldbuilding context to justify the question being here in this forum. This is what gives us direction. Otherwise, real world science questions should be addressed to real world science forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your query, for example, shows no reasonable or demonstrable worldbuilding context. Just &quot;having a space station up there&quot; is not &lt;em&gt;sufficient context&lt;/em&gt;. After all, in the real world, we've got a space station up there from which a pizza could conceivably be launched Earthwards with delectable results!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other issues that could be legitimately raised with your question: did you google heat of reentry and typical pizza baking methodologies? A standard brick pizza oven easily heats in the 700 to 800 deg F range. 3000 to 5000 deg F is cited as fairly normal heats of reentry. That's enough to cook a pizza. (Your question could be closed for lack of basic research.) You don't provide enough information about pizza protection or heat venting, though you hint at box design issues.  (Your question could also be closed for lacking detail or focus.)&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Revised Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;: You've added some good background, which can only help in drawing out &lt;em&gt;creative answers&lt;/em&gt; rather than just a couple numbers and equations. You've also altered the question in a good way with the addition of &lt;em&gt;This, however, raises a question - Is the heat from re-entry enough to cook a pizza? Is it even possible to build a container able to capitalize that heat and cook the pizza inside?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you're no longer asking &quot;what is the physics&quot; but rather &quot;how can I apply the physics to a cultural (&amp;amp; therefore worldbuilding) problem!&quot; Well done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-02-28T00:58:05.683" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T00:58:05.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7779" CreationDate="2020-02-26T19:33:42.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the VTC's, I should probably at least chime in...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As originally worded, the question was more or less &quot;I dropped a pizza from orbit; what happens to it?&quot;, which struck me as much more of a physics question that a world-building question. Rewording it along the lines of &quot;how can I accomplish this&quot; helps significantly. (I note also as I write this that there are 4 votes to reopen, so I would read that as 'the edits helped'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think there is a somewhat fine line in many cases between &quot;world-building&quot; and straight up physics. The degree to which a question involves fantastical elements (even if based in reality, i.e. &quot;science fiction&quot;) has an effect, since such questions are more clearly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; better suited to one of the more &quot;grounded&quot; networks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd also argue that the pillow example is dubious and possibly also should have been on physics.SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T19:33:42.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-01T23:20:58.593" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of my fantasy worlds, I have an alternate human species that makes up the population of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This alternate human species has a lot of unique biological differences and features that real humans don't have and I'm trying to figure out how to explain these features in a scientific manner given that there is a possible scientific explanation for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I have asked 4 questions pertaining to the conceptual anatomy of my alternate humans and I am wondering if I should start using a default title for them which would go like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eosi Human Anatomy Question #5&lt;/strong&gt; ( insert subject here ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be a good thing to do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61496" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T03:18:04.410" Title="I ask a lot of questions pertaining to an ongoing subject in a fantasy world of mine. Should I organize my questions with a special title structure?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2020-03-02T03:18:04.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While numbering questions may help you organize your thoughts, imo it makes the questions less helpful for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one of your Eosi questions is &quot;How to design a species with hollow breasts?&quot;. A user with the same problem can easily use this title to identify the content of the question. If you rename it to &quot;Eosi ... #5&quot;, that ease of access is lost, and users have to click to understand what you're actually asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible workaround is to do a hybrid: number and content. Instead of &quot;How... breasts?&quot; or &quot;Eosi ... #5&quot; you could do a combination: &quot;Eosi Question #5: Hollow Breasts?&quot; which still puts the core question in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T03:18:04.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7771" CreationDate="2020-03-04T03:46:53.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think giving upvote is a good way to encourage people to participate in the community, especially who ask question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see the question is long and have some content (not random character), I will give upvote as a way to reward people for participate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also give upvote for answer who spent time writing (thoughtful answer) rather than correct answer (in the case of worldbuilding, correctness might not importance as creativity, not in other stackexchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21777" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T03:46:53.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T11:38:12.693" Score="6" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's amazing blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for understanding worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blogs or articles of existing interesting worlds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/7787&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T22:14:16.573" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2020" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-06-17T10:09:11.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-05T18:22:09.567" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kz3jL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Explore New Worlds&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15221" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T18:22:09.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-08T17:27:56.587" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.codidact.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QI5fh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Build your story with Writing Q&amp;amp;A!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="538" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T19:09:07.877" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T19:09:07.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-09T02:19:39.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://accrispin.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZzVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Writer Beware: A record of bad publishers taking advantage of unsuspecting authors&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T02:19:39.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-09T02:22:00.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmyHw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The Submission Grinder helps authors find publishers.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2020-03-25T00:50:14.327" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T00:50:14.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-09T02:24:52.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sfwa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/meTZ0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The guild for professional world builders.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastEditorUserId="26246" LastEditDate="2020-03-25T00:50:55.903" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T00:50:55.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-10T10:50:13.403" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was closed as &quot;not focused enough&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/170821/how-can-an-alien-civilization-be-so-powerful-that-it-can-with-almost-100-certai&quot;&gt;How can an alien civilization be so powerful that it can with almost 100% certainty destroy any other civilization without getting a scratch?&lt;/a&gt;). One of commenters said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question is unclear. Are you asking about the mechanical methods they use? Are you asking about their fundamental philosophy? Are you asking why they haven't been stopped yet? &quot;How&quot; is ambiguous. Others have also made the same statement about the lack of clarity in your question. You may have rolled several questions into one. Please consider resubmitting a new question with more focus and detail clarifying that question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm genuinely puzzled by such statement. For me the title says it all, it has only one question and the question is so clear, that failure to understand it looks to me as failure to parse plain English. So I was quite suprised to discover that there are at least 5 people for whom the question was too vague. So it's basically situation: &quot;You question is too vague, I don't understand the point of your question&quot;, &quot;And I don't understand why you don't understand my question, it's perfectly clear&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, the question that I asked on Worldbuilding isn't important to me (and I already got some interesting answers), &lt;strong&gt;so I'm okay if it stays closed&lt;/strong&gt;. I ask here because I'm anxious about my failure to communicate my thought and even more anxious by my inability to see what I did wrong. I have no idea about how other users misread the question that they got such wild ideas about its meaning as &quot;It's about how God Seekers murder other civilizations&quot;, &quot;It's about fundamental philosophy of God Seekers&quot;, &quot;It's several questions rolled under one title&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. How about this formulation: &quot;How did an alien civilization come to be so powerful that it can with almost 100% certainty destroy any other civilization without getting a scratch?&quot; Is it clear now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10910" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T12:49:43.597" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T02:25:22.527" Title="I would like to know why people weren't able to understand what my question was about" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2020-03-10T13:21:22.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the people who voted to close the question, I feel it necessary to provide an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've devised a civilization in your universe that is far and away superior to every other civilization in existence. This is your foundation statement: CivA is the best there can be, short of divine intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are then asking the Worldbuilding community how CivA came to achieve the position of superiority they did. Let me provide a few comparisons from Earth using, for lack of a better example, the USA as a reference point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The USA has &lt;strong&gt;technological equivalance&lt;/strong&gt; to China, Great Britain,&#xA;Russia, etc. These civilizations have had an equal amount of time to&#xA;develop with equal access to the resources to engage in that&#xA;development. Conflict between these civilizations will hurt all sides.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The USA has &lt;strong&gt;technological superiority&lt;/strong&gt; over South Africa, Iran, Cuba,&#xA;etc. These civilizations have had an equal amount of time to develop&#xA;with unequal access to the necessary resources. Conflict between&#xA;these civilizations is fairly one-sided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The USA has &lt;strong&gt;god-like superiority&lt;/strong&gt; to the natives of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/11/26/beyond-north-sentinel-uncontacted-isolated-tribes/2117381002/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;North Sentinel&#xA;Island, et. al.&lt;/a&gt;. These civilizations have had equal amount of&#xA;time to develop, but no access to the necessary resources. Conflict&#xA;between these civilizations is laughably one-sided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only two answers to the question, &quot;How did CivA achieve its technological superiority?&quot; Either (A) CivA has had more time and/or better access to resources to further its development, or (B) divine intervention. (Note that this was the gist of the comment I upvoted on your question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, it becomes unclear why you are asking your question. Are you asking about the specific technological advancements CivA has made that grant it its position of superiority? Do you want to know the fundamental tenets of CivA's society that enabled them to reach their superiority faster or more efficiently than other civilizations? Or is there something else you wanted to know that we haven't been able to discern from the information provided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you're asking about the technologies that grant superiority, we likely couldn't tell you what they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;--Arthur C. Clarke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T13:21:22.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-10T15:21:42.930" Score="-1" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In my view, questions are being closed too readily - how do we change this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a relatively new regular on WorldBuilding being only here for a bit under 2 years. I enjoy coming here and giving people wonderful ideas or explanations, in particular in areas of my expertise, that may assist them in their quest for new knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However throughout this time I have noticed, and have the opinion that, &lt;strong&gt;we are too ready to close questions&lt;/strong&gt;. This is, I believe, a failure of the system, not necessarily the voters themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, the closure of a question is sometimes justified - but this is rare. In most cases of closure, questions are worth answering as the answers would be useful to not just the poster, but others whom may be interested in a variety of answers. The question need not be perfect, just good enough to allow canvassing of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;two common closure reasons I object to are the &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; and &quot;off-topic&quot; reasons&lt;/strong&gt;. The issue is the application of these two reasons are subjective, difficult to determine specifically, and in my view are frankly not that important enough to dismiss a question, yet they are being used too freely. When used, posters are always confused and often say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And closing a question down is a big deal&lt;/em&gt;: it inhibits free discussion, it discourages the questioner, it discourages answerers, appears final, looks condescending and it is confusing. It also sends messages to potential questioners and makes them think twice about posting. The question is also shut down forever: I have never seen a question reopen after it is closed in my time, however perhaps it occasionally happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I put forth the view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These two reasons should be deleted, or if they remain, should be constrained severely or defined to the utmost precision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The threshold for closing questions is 3000 reputation points. This in my view is far too low, and users with only a short time of experience have the power to close questions. I would recommend increasing to at least 10,000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed questions should still accept answers. There is no good reason why it should not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a question is closed a recommendation must be made to fix it, or at a minimum a reason for closing must be given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is closed, it should be then allowed to reopened &lt;em&gt;by the OP&lt;/em&gt;. This allows them to rephrase/edit the question and not wait for the Closers to reopen, which they may also never get around to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I say it is not really worth closing down so many questions for the cost of them being closed. Does anyone recommend other &lt;strong&gt;suggestions of how to change this&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47634" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T18:52:44.990" Title="We are Too Ready to Close Questions - how to change this?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7797" CreationDate="2020-03-10T15:57:23.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked over and over for a long time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The general answer you'll get is that &quot;bad questions take away resources(time) from the community as a whole&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this, but I don't get a say in the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will strongman part of their argument though, the part that goes &quot;letting users ask bad questions is hard on the person asking the question, when they get a lot of answers to their too broad question.&quot; I've had a question that was somewhat somewhat broad, but narrow enough to squeak by, and yeah, it was hard to choose an answer of the many that were given.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not having some solid criteria on how to answer/choose an answer can make it harder, and teaching someone the best way to ask a question, and have those in place early is good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, of the many who answered my question, most of them got up-votes, so imaginary internet points were awarded, meaning that they got something for their time, and of course no one forced any of them to answer at all; each person who answered my question liked the premise enough to want to answer it on their own, without coercion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T15:57:23.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7797" CreationDate="2020-03-10T17:45:51.097" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our community, and more in general SE, is about ensuring quality of contributions. Quality of contributions means control on what is posted, to assure it fits the model behind each community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Closed questions should still accept answers. There is no good reason why it should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonsense. Closing a question serves the OP to fix it without having to take into account the answers, in the best cases, and to simply avoid wasting resources on poorly conceived/unfit questions. And why should a user posting a question about how to implement certain features in a C++ code on worldbuilding keep getting answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a question is closed a recommendation must be made to fix it, or at a minimum a reason for closing must be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons are given in the note explaining the closure, and normally voters also explain what's wrong in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question is closed, it should be then allowed to reopened by the OP. This allows them to rephrase/edit the question and not wait for the Closers to reopen, which they may also never get around to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP can already vote to reopen their question without even editing it. Why should the OP have more power than the community? Any user with the needed reputation can vote to reopen, not only the closers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;closing a question [...] inhibits free discussion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, we are not a forum where users discuss on any topic. We are a Q&amp;amp;A site. Give us a sharply defined problem and you will get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T17:45:51.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7797" CreationDate="2020-03-11T03:16:44.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions should still accept answers. There is no good reason why it should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is closed, it should be then allowed to reopened by the OP. This allows them to rephrase/edit the question and not wait for the Closers to reopen, which they may also never get around to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. This is definitely wrong. The whole idea to closing a question is that is has meaning. If you can still answer a closed question, then closing the question becomes meaningless. And if the OP can decide that the question can be reopened, then there's no point of closing it either. If we can't have consequences to the rules, then the rules themselves, no matter what they are, are meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is closed a recommendation must be made to fix it, or at a minimum a reason for closing must be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't that what we already do? Every closing vote is always given for a specific reason, and there's actually a lot of users who believe in commenting when they vote to close. What change to that do you have in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The threshold for closing questions is 3000 reputation points. This in my view is far too low, and users with only a short time of experience have the power to close questions. I would recommend increasing to at least 10,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3,000 rep points - roughly 300 upvotes, less a few for correct answers which give 15 and bounties. 10,000 rep points - roughly 1,000 upvotes. According to our User Reputation Leagues, we have 495 users who are above 3,000 and 147 above 10,000. What does this all mean? It means that if we do this, we'll still have 147 people who know the system to keep watch, and these people will have the equivalent of around 1,000 upvotes from other users on the site satisfied that these people know how the site works. On the flip side, 300 upvotes is still a decent number when it comes to learning how the site works, and it's reasonable to assume such a person would be given enough time to learn how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that close voting and open voting are the same threshold - so every person that can cast a close vote can be thwarted by one who casts an open vote. Meaning that even if questions are wrongfully closed, it can fixed faster with a 3,000 rep requirement rather than a 10,000 rep one. I'm willing to hear this one out to raise it, but I think raising it to 10,000 is too high, because part of this site's concept is that the users have a large ability on what goes on. Maybe something like 6,000 would be a good threshold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two reasons should be deleted, or if they remain, should be constrained severely or defined to the utmost precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are 'off-topic' and 'primarily opinion based'. 'Off-topic' &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; clearly defined, just check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. Now, does that mean that everyone who votes to close a question off topic is following those guidelines? No, this isn't a perfect system and sometimes people will make judgement calls and sometimes these judgement calls will be wrong. But that's not something that can be easily fixed and still retain the Stack Exchange system of peer-review. And it's also why reopen votes exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Primarily opinion-based' - the definition for this one seems rather straightforward to me - it's when there's no metric that can be used to prove one answer is superior to the other. I.e. if I ask 'what color should my Martians paint their houses', there's no way to determine which answer is right because I haven't set criteria. If I ask 'what color should my Martians paint their houses to camouflage them from the horrifying birds of prey which roam the Martian skies at supersonic speeds', then that has a criteria - and the answer is presumably red, because the planet's surface itself is red. [Do note that if, say, it turned out that the color doesn't matter when it comes to camouflaging houses because, unbeknownst to me the questioner at the time, Martian birds of prey use x-ray vision, then it goes back to being opinion-based even though I tried to set a criteria.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T03:16:44.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-11T17:41:02.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTGgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Q&amp;amp;A about science fiction and fantasy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T17:41:02.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-03-11T17:42:07.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euF1O.png&quot; alt=&quot;Be inspired by stories&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="2235" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T20:38:34.937" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T20:38:34.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7797" CreationDate="2020-03-13T02:03:12.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you on two points, so I'll just address those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree as far as &lt;strong&gt;opinion based&lt;/strong&gt; closure goes. And the reason is simple: we're dealing with matters of &lt;em&gt;fiction&lt;/em&gt;; it's the nature of the beast that all answers will be, to some extent, opinions.  Even the hard science and science based tagged queries will, ultimately, boil down to opinion simply because the subject matter is fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always stated fairly clearly, when this has come up before, that I almost never vote to close for being opinion based. Simply because we'd have to close every question in the forum and close up shop. Our basic material simply isn't a good match for Stack Exchange or its model of Q&amp;amp;A. Yet, here we are, and we must make do. I would literally only close a query if the OP said something like &quot;what's you opinion about XYZ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree as far as &lt;em&gt;And closing a question down is a big deal&lt;/em&gt; goes. You're right on all points: it is a big deal and I think many querents are in fact dissuaded from editing or revisiting their closed questions. This is a system error, which I think those of us who do vote to close can resolve.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, if it's not already made clear in the Tour or Help, it ought to be properly explained what closure entails &amp;amp; why it's done &amp;amp; what the remedies are.  Also, especially with new users, when we vote to close their questions, we really should take the time to explain, in the comments, what we're doing, why, and what it really means. It's not the Gavel of Doom that flings a query to the outer void. It's simply a &quot;circuit breaker&quot; that gets tripped and indicates that some kind of repair is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of questions get reopened after closure. I don't think SE makes a big deal about it, so maybe you're just not noticing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with L Dutch and Halfthewed on Points 3, 4, &amp;amp; 5: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question closure has actual meaning in this forum. It means that, in some way, the query does not fit with the SE model. Although I'd like to see rather fewer closures for &quot;opinion based&quot;, I don't think the reason is going to go away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is best practice to offer some kind of explanation for why we're voting to close a query; so I'd agree with a more universal application of this point in comments. Reason being, the verbiage in the standard closure boilerplate is not always clear as to applicability to a particular question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As has been mentioned, OPs can already vote to reopen their queries. I think that if a question has been closed, it ought to be edited before it can be reopened, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T02:03:12.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2020-03-13T02:25:22.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You fell into the error of &lt;strong&gt;equating lack of focus with understandability&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm pretty certain everyone understands what you're asking. Or at least it's clear to me what you're asking!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's beside the point. In this forum, your query needs to be not only understandable but also focused. Just look at the comment you conveniently quoted in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question is unclear. Are you asking about the mechanical methods&#xA;  they use? Are you asking about their fundamental philosophy? Are you&#xA;  asking why they haven't been stopped yet? &quot;How&quot; is ambiguous. Others&#xA;  have also made the same statement about the lack of clarity in your&#xA;  question. You may have rolled several questions into one. Please&#xA;  consider resubmitting a new question with more focus and detail&#xA;  clarifying that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commentator is asking &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;which specific avenue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, out of a nearly infinite list of potential lines of enquiry, you'd like us to focus on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;mechanical&lt;/em&gt;: would you like us to focus on weaponry or armada size? &#xA;For example, &lt;em&gt;philosophy&lt;/em&gt;: would you like us to focus on their worldview and their understanding of personhood and their understanding of moral action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for both these lines of enquiry and more is not allowed by the SE model (one focused query gets a variety of focused responses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could certainly break your question down into different aspects: one question could ask about their age of civilisation and how long they've had to build up to their present capacity; another question could deal with their understanding of morality; another question could deal with their cultural fascination / fixation on destroying others in order to determine which civilisation meets their criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T02:25:22.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T15:06:08.463" Score="-3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/171296/what-would-the-consequences-of-cold-fusion-quantum-computing-and-room-temperatu&quot;&gt;What would the consequences of Cold Fusion, Quantum Computing and Room Temperature Superconductors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have rephrased my question until it was compliant to the more rigid standards I could come up with, and I have addressed all the complaints of the moderation about the question needing to be &quot;more focused&quot;, and it is still locked. If the same standards were applied to all questions in this community, I doubt many of them would remain open as soon as the moderators who closed mine would show up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am used to pedantry over in StackOverflow, where I usually ask questions about C# (ironically, Eric Lippert himself never failed to offer insightful, generous answers, very much unlike his lessers). I was not expecting to find the same kind of behaviour in a forum about zombies, dragons, fairies, faster than light travel, and parallel universes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit disappointed on the moderation Worldbuilding, and I sincerely hope that, by bringing this issue to light, I am acting for the greater good of the entire Worldbuilding community. This is my first meta-post (in all of my accounts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The answer offered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch-reinstate-monica&lt;/a&gt; is clearly less than satisfying. Not only it doesn't properly address the issues I brought, it also unjustly implies that I have treated this community disrespectfully by taking a quote out of context and making a personal interpretation of it. I have offered a comment rebuking that specific part of the said answer, but it has mysteriously vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regret risking getting some other person's question arbitrarily closed due to the &quot;no 3 questions allowed&quot; rule, but I would like to present as evidence of apparent prejudice against my question this other one, which contains &lt;strong&gt;exactly 3 questions in it&lt;/strong&gt;, 7 positive votes, and is active: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/171287/crew-needed-for-a-large-ftl-spaceship&quot;&gt;Crew needed for a large FTL spaceship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71623" LastEditorUserId="71623" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T16:29:23.690" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T03:50:46.797" Title="I can't see any reason why my question should remain closed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7806" CreationDate="2020-03-14T15:19:54.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am a bit disappointed on the moderation Worldbuilding, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have been pointed more than once to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, nevertheless &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your latest version of the post counts 3 questions in 1 post, which makes it too broad. One of the first commenter pointed out that your question is overly broad. You failed to address this point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you keep asking for &quot;any idea&quot;. As I have told you, give us a sharp question, and you will get answers. If you are looking for ideas fishing, go elsewhere. We need a metric to evaluate the best answer. You have failed to address this point, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was not expecting to find the same kind of behaviour in a forum about zombies, dragons, fairies, faster than light travel, and parallel universes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes you think that since we deal with zombies, dragons and associated friends, we are loose on our criteria? We are not the dumpster of SE, though this seems to be the concept of Worldbuilding in many other SE community. &quot;This question is not a fit here, try posting in Worldbuilding&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are more than welcome to bring your contribution to Worldbuilding, but please first understand the community. We are more than happy to help newcomers in moving their first steps in the community, if they are willing to listen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T15:30:54.107" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T15:30:54.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7806" CreationDate="2020-03-14T20:31:24.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Independent Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read your initial query and I read through your meta query. Frankly, I've heard of those things, but don't know how they might fit together, so I am actually quite eager to see some good answers to your questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You opened the door re snarkiness, so I'm just going to offer a friendly bit of advice, and that is, please don't lower yourself that way! It's just not needed here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for reopening, I see it's already got one reopen vote, and the question doesn't appear to be edited at all. If it's not your own vote, why are you complaining about the mods? Opening and closing of queries is a community task, not a moderator task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Meat &amp;amp; Potatoes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for why your query should remain closed: I should think that would be patently obvious. You're asking at least four different questions. At least one of those questions remains overly broad. You've even bolded and numbered the other three of them for us! If you are so familiar with asking questions elsewhere in SE, why would you think it's any different here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the fact that there is no discussion forum attached to WB.SE (because I think this would be a hopping geopoetical forum if there were)! I personally don't like the strictures, and I personally agree with you in so far as at least &lt;em&gt;certain standards&lt;/em&gt; ought to be laxer here because of the material we deal with. However, I concur with the SE model that we all have to deal with, which as you know very well, is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one focused query gets on point responses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for you to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what's the solution?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's easy! Get off your keister, stop complaining and edit your questions to fit the model, just like everyone else is supposed to do! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What would the consequences of Cold Fusion, Quantum Computing and Room Temperature Superconductors (be)&lt;/em&gt; --- this is your basic, underlying query. It is too broad. Narrow it by focusing on a particular worldbuilding problem, like &quot;What would the consequences of Cold Fusion, Quantum Computing and Room Temperature Superconductors be on XYzed materials manufacturing?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is this a valid assumption?&lt;/em&gt; --- This is a fair question. It deserves to be its own question. Make it so!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Any sci-fi idea of what that may be?&lt;/em&gt; --- This is a fair question, but it is too broad, because you're asking for a list, which as you well know is a no-no. Maybe turn it around on its head: &quot;What RealScience or SF breakthrough in Quantum Thermodynamics as we know it must have been achieved that might lead to making room-temperature-superconductors?&quot;   It too deserves to be its own question. Make it so!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Am I correct to assume that?&lt;/em&gt; --- This is a fair question, but does not deserve to be an independent query. This is simply a &quot;correct me if I'm wrong&quot; kind of question. Fix this by prepending that phrase to your assumption thus: &quot;As for the new techs that would soon emerge, &lt;em&gt;and correct me if I'm wrong, but&lt;/em&gt; I have a feeling that ab-initio Chemistry...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some Final Notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;WB.SE does not impose any kind of rationing scheme on its members. You are welcome to ask as many queries about your universes, worlds, and settings as you'd like! There's just one caveat: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/222735/can-i-ask-only-one-question-per-post&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;you can only ask one at a time!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you pointed out that other question, yes I voted to close it and for the same exact reason yours was closed: lack of focus d/t there being &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;too many questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. (And as of the time of this edit, it's been closed, and is now awaiting the same kind of focus editing yours is awaiting!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I just don't understand why querents can't seem to grasp the simple idea that they can ask only one question at a time &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;AND&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; they can ask multiple questions about the same problem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not rocket science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping that in mind, as you edit &amp;amp; rearrange your original query, try to keep them linked together so folks can follow the progression!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T02:06:15.653" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T02:06:15.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-17T16:51:23.757" Score="25" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that Stack Exchange sites are not discussion forums.  However, a discussion taking place in comments (which will eventually be deleted, as I understand it) is still useful for clarification of the question long after &quot;This discussion has been automatically moved to chat.&quot;  Yet the chat link invariably results in the discussion ending before the clarification is resolved or extra information understood (and hopefully edited into an answer or question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For users who can't keep a question open indefinitely, but want to participate in a meaningful way, it's easy enough to quickly reopen a question when a comment is posted, question or answer edited (we get a notification, after all) -- but once it goes to chat, there's no notification unless we just keep the chat open.  Hence, with all parties no longer notified of replies, the discussion dies and whatever was in dispute or in need of clarification is never resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must be wrong about this, since Stack Exchange has seemingly always done it this way -- but I don't get how this is an advantage, in terms of improving questions or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, this really applies to all the Stack Exchange sites (at least, that I'm on).  I put it here rather than going to the top Meta because I'm not sure how much traffic there is on the top Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57454" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T15:24:55.097" Title="&quot;Let's Continue This Discussion in Chat&quot; just kills the discussion" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7797" CreationDate="2020-03-17T18:52:44.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I continue to take the position that ALL questions should start closed and be opened when they’ve been refined. You can find other Meta posts from me on this topic. This is a WB unique problem because of the nature of questions we do expect. We close a lot. I think we could open a lot more if there was initial discussion with authors about what exactly they want to know. We could avoid the recrimination about closure if every question went through at least some review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the current system, I don’t think our close rate is too high. Often it is too slow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position is just as “out there” as yours, flox. I don’t expect either to gain traction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T18:52:44.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7809" CreationDate="2020-03-17T19:10:55.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I agree. This is not a forum, but often further clarification / commentary is needed beyond the comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, when this happens on Main, I think meta posts provide a great place to continue discussion - after all, Meta has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; tag. Often when the comment section gets too long, a meta post can be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28639" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T19:10:55.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7809" CreationDate="2020-03-19T15:18:22.740" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually you are in the right place because while this happens in all of SE, Worldbuilding is only one where it is an actual issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption behind &quot;move it to the chat&quot; is that the relevant information to the topic is in the question and the answer and comments either lack direct relevance to the topic or result in a change to the question or answer after discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that keeping the comments generally has low value and if there is a need for longer discussion there is no loss in hiding it in the chat. In fact there is a benefit as less comments increases the legibility of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there is a hidden assumption in this model that is true for most sites but almost always not true for Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That assumption is that the relevance of the comment to what is commented can be evaluated non-ambiguously. That a comment either is directly and imminently relevant or has no permanent general relevance at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this in turn relies on the hidden assumption that the context in which questions, answers and comments are evaluated is defined in some manner that all agree on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On most sites this is no issue. The questions are defined on the context of the real world we live in or the fictional world they are related to or the works or beliefs they relate to. It varies but there is some clearly defined real world entity that provides the context you interpret everything in. Step outside it and people will instantly snap at you to get back in line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in Worldbuilding this is simply not true despite the best attempts of various people to apply the general SE model as if it might be. Apart from questions with few specific tags, all questions and answers, &lt;strong&gt;and comments&lt;/strong&gt;, are evaluated in the context of a world that is still Work In Progress and not fully defined by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for most questions in Worldbuilding there is simply no way to evaluate relevance of comment non-ambiguously. Comment not being relevant to how I see my answer and me choosing not to edit my answer, tells absolutely nothing about how relevant that comment is to some other person reading my answer and associated comments. They might and almost certainly will understand the question and the answer in some other context than I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;in summary&lt;/strong&gt;, the reason for the comments policy is because for most sites it does work. Killing or hiding the discussion loses nothing because reading the question and answer is all that is needed. It just happens to be nonsense for the particular site we are on because the hidden assumptions it is based on are not true here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enforcement of various rules about allowed questions does hide the issue somewhat but it is fundamental mismatch between the SE model and what we do here and cannot be really solved other than just conceding that we really should have different set of rules and then &lt;strong&gt;somehow&lt;/strong&gt; agreeing on those rules and getting SE to accept them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not holding my breath and neither should you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, comments in Worldbuilding really should not be considered ephemeral since they often contain lots of information that is relevant to the topic without being relevant to the question or the answer. Something that on other SE sites is pretty much impossible and thus not supported by the rules and guidelines. Or the comment system. We really should have longer comments on answers than other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastEditorUserId="3434" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T15:24:55.097" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T15:24:55.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-22T19:59:07.067" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve noticed quite a few posts asking for “alternatives” to established technologies like wheels and firearms. However, in almost every question in the category that I’ve seen, there has been only two accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a non-preferable “alternative” that will not be adopted because it is not cost-efficient and will only be adopted if the resources needed to make the established technology are unavailable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A cost-efficient “alternative” &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; exist but it is not adopted since it cannot replicate all of the features of the established technology and will also only be adopted if the resources needed to make the established technology are unavailable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is quite simple: if there was a perfect alternative to the established technology, it would have been already used in the real-world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of what I was talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wheel: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/170898/what-technologies-will-make-the-wheel-obsolete-in-the-future&quot;&gt;What technologies will make the wheel obsolete in the future?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firearms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/169185/would-there-be-alternatives-to-firearms-in-an-industrializing-society&quot;&gt;Would there be alternatives to firearms in an industrializing society?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bathing/Showering (the accepted answer lists several ways that all fit #1 or #2): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83650/futuristic-alternative-for-showering-bathing&quot;&gt;Futuristic alternative for showering/bathing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Horses (accepted answer is human running): &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106975/alternative-means-of-transportation&quot;&gt;Alternative Means of Transportation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Airplanes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/90315/alternative-flight&quot;&gt;Alternative flight&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions have been closed for being either too broad or being opinion-based. How should we respond to these types of posts when the answer will almost always be one of the two I mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T13:21:47.293" Title="How could the community respond to posts asking for “alternatives” to established technologies?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2020-03-24T19:44:57.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What technology could replace X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate pattern:&lt;/strong&gt; How could technology X be replaced in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; On-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; OP is usually trying to create a world without the relevant technology, but with some substitute technology in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to avoid:&lt;/strong&gt; In order to make the question acceptable, it must define very well the context and the constraints for alternative technologies, otherwise it may be closed for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; when it is not possible to objectively compare alternatives;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Needing more details or clarity&lt;/strong&gt; when the context where a substitute technology is required is not well set;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requiring more focus&lt;/strong&gt; when the constraints of how alternative technologies might be applied is not well defined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T19:44:57.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7814" CreationDate="2020-03-24T19:46:11.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stealing a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure seems appropriate. At their core, they seem too broad - we don't really want completely open ended questions there and &amp;quot;what will replace X&amp;quot; is pretty much that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-VLAZ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have added a proposal for that type of question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7815/21222&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;. Please notice that I am in favor of questions about alternative technologies being on topic, as long as they follow the site's guidelines in order to avoid the problems OP is mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T13:21:47.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7814" CreationDate="2020-03-25T00:18:20.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take is that this forum is focused on the making of fictional worlds. I don't disagree about closing, overly broad questions, but is that really the best thing to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, in addition to our closure votes, we really need to stress to querents, and most especially to new querents, the need to focus on their fictional worlds while asking us questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, why can't firearms be replaced by razor-fanged monkeys catapaulted from crossbows? Bloody things are worse than piranhas! The point is not so much to just close a &quot;bad&quot; query, but to make a hum-drum question into a really good question! I think this could be done if we encouraged them to offer a little background on their world a/o setting so we could really engage our imaginations in this place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T00:18:20.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T02:42:30.110" Score="19" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really hard post to write. It's been coming for a while and I'll admit I'm of mixed feelings about it but I'm making the right decision here even if it hurts a little. A big part of me wants to just walk away quietly and not be noticed in my absence, but that would not solve the underlying reasons for which I'm leaving in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will preface what is to come by stating that I don't consider myself one of the 'high rep' users of the site that has the influence to be listened to about how the site should change; I fully expect this note to be ignored by SE but I'm writing it for the same reason that I've spent the last 2 years, 4 months on this site - because it makes ME feel better. You don't often get to write valedictory speeches, so forgive my small indulgence this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So; let's get the announcement out of the way first and then I'll deal with the advice. I'm withdrawing from Stack Exchange. I'm not deleting my account or anything that extreme, just not actively participating anymore. I want to stress this is NOT because of GME-19 (the Great Monica Event of 2019), although GME-19 was the thin edge of the wedge. I have a lot of time and respect for Monica and SE treated her very poorly and then the outrage to that was not handled at all well. But, my reasons run a lot deeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came to worldbuilding in particular in November, 2017 after looking up an answer on SO and seeing a HNQ for whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97811/are-external-lights-on-spaceships-even-necessary/97814#97814&quot;&gt;lights were necessary in space&lt;/a&gt; and realised that I had an opinion on that, and that not only had it not been expressed yet, but I felt strongly enough to put up my own answer. It was the start of something magical for me as I found that wasn't the only thing I had an answer for. More importantly, some of the questions themselves got me curious. I wanted to know the answer for myself and figured I could with just a little bit of research. I had the seed of an answer, and just had to check a few things to be sure and then wrote up the answer that resulted from my own research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, I have learned a great many things and had a ball doing so. I've learned how &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123896/awesomeness-powered-magic-why-would-a-group-of-awesome-magicians-want-to-keep/123921#123921&quot;&gt;dave acts as a magical catalyst&lt;/a&gt;, how to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117236/what-happens-when-a-moving-vehicle-loses-all-its-kinetic-energy-at-once/117239#117239&quot;&gt;cars unsafe with kinetic energy removal&lt;/a&gt;, Why fairy flies experience &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/109014/syrup-atmosphere/109020#109020&quot;&gt;atmosphere as a syrup&lt;/a&gt;, how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/152723/how-many-people-would-you-need-to-pull-a-whale-over-cobblestone-streets/152727#152727&quot;&gt;grate a humpback whale&lt;/a&gt; and of course, whether you can terraform Mars with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/162013/how-many-cows-would-you-need-to-drop-on-mars-to-successfully-terraform-it/162017#162017&quot;&gt;bovine orbital bombardment&lt;/a&gt;. I've also learned a great deal more about organic chemistry, the science behind vampires, how to both cause and survive apocalyptic events, and literally hundreds of other topics than I ever thought I would in one life, all because of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a lot of fun. But, it's not fun anymore so it's time for me to stop and find something to do in my own time that I actually enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to the key point of this post - why is SE no longer fun? What is it that SE needs to make the site truly great and would augment everyone's experience, whether as a consumer or as a contributor to the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE, when you get right down to it, is the best open source point-level knowledge generator ever devised. I know, some of you are going to call out Wikipedia, and that is a reasonable answer, but the true value of SE, and why people keep coming back to it, is because if they have a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question, they can get a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; answer. In that sense, the knowledge base being accumulated is invaluable and is a credit to SE regardless of how people feel about it. But, SE isn't generating this content - we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do people write open source software and give it away? Because they want to. Because they want to learn how to do something new and they take some satisfaction from seeing their software downloaded and used in the general community. It makes them feel useful in a way that their job often doesn't, because in their job, their boss sets the agenda and tells them what to work on. In an open source project, THEY choose what they want to work on and the usefulness of that work in the community speaks to their own sense of contribution, not the agenda of the business that pays them to do what it is they think is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is with us as contributors to SE. I only answer the questions I 'like' and if they are found useful by the community, I feel a sense of achievement from that. This gamification of solution providing is a powerful tool, but only so long as the contributors feel that sense of satisfaction. I no longer feel that. It's become a grind, and one that is more often un-appreciated from where I stand. I don't feel like I'm appreciated as an 'asset' by the community; in point of fact, I feel like I'm more likely to be treated as a 'resource', with the value of my contribution more likely to be criticised than welcomed. I feel that of late, this has only become worse and the tipping point has now been reached for me which is why I need to walk away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to SE (not that I think you're reading this), I have two points that I need to make to you - if you want to keep people contributing, you have to &lt;strong&gt;change the structure of comments&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;introduce off topic forums&lt;/strong&gt;. Controversial points I know, and many of you are not going to agree. I'll make my case below for both, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Comments in their current form need to die a slow, lingering, painful death of something embarrassing, like untreated syphilis. In my opinion, comments are the single largest generator of negative opinion towards this site and the larger contributors to it. The strange thing is that this is a no brainer to me and I find it amazing that no-one else sees this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, comments are meant to allow users to improve existing questions and answers by providing constructive criticism so that the person responsible for the post can edit it and make it better. But in practice, it's the weapon of choice used by snipers (people who want to cut down existing answers either so that they get deleted out of frustration to reduce competition, or people who have no intention of putting up an answer of their own but like to cut down those who do) and these have far more of an impact on the contributor than the rep score does. It shouldn't be that way, but most users I've seen are more likely to get worked up about a negative comment than seeing their answer get 20x up votes. Part of that is that the comment is words, whereas the rep is just a number. We are not encouraged to leave positive comments as that is seen as a waste - if the answer is already good and doesn't need improvement, why comment at all? What's the benefit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, comments are (whether I like it or not) essential to the operation of the site nonetheless. How do we make them better? How do we make them work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assign them a cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my approach - for every comment you leave, you give one of your rep points to the person on whose post you leave that comment. The rationale is simple - the post has attracted your attention, so it's worthy of additional reputation. But, if you have a good idea, then the OP will update their post and you can safely delete your comment, regaining your rep point (but leaving a rep point with the OP). If nothing happens, and you leave your comment there, you lose your rep point and if it is eventually deleted by a Mod, you lose it permanently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods could leave comments for free for obvious reasons, but everyone else (just like with neg votes) would have to consider whether or not it is worth the cost to leave a comment. It doesn't preclude them, they just have to be important enough to the user to pay for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I stopped responding to comments 6 months ago. I stopped reading them 4 months ago. I now just clear the notifications, because I reached a point where reading them was a waste as they were not contributing anything constructive to the discussion. So, if you've recently left me a comment, please be aware that it is really important to me; please hold...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off Topic Forums (or Fora if you prefer)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dear Increasingly Hypothetical SE Reader, I am a human being, not a free source of content. I blame you personally for the comments model and how it is being used by other human beings. Why? Because when we can't communicate except around a very narrow domain of topics, it dehumanises us to each other. We are not human beings to each other, we are users. We are icons of varying design that sit beside content with which we may or may not agree. The trouble is, when I write a comment on something, I'm not writing to the content; I'm writing to a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We as a community must bear some responsibility for ensuring that we are nice to each other to be sure, but you don't make it easy. You don't give us the tools we need to know each other as more than just icons beside content. You don't (for example) give us an off topic site where we can learn about each other beyond the narrow domain of our common interest in contributing content to your site. As such, you make it really hard for us to be constructive without giving offence because we don't get to know what turns of phrase annoy the person for whom we are leaving the content; what they are likely to respond to, what is going to hurt them, what the context is that they bring to the content to make it appear wrong to us. All we can know about each other is the sum of our questions and answers, and that is so very far from who I am as a person. SE is so small a slice of who I am that it will barely register as a blip on my personal radar in terms of volume. Importance is another matter, but SE doesn't account for a significant percentage of my output at all. I would like to think that I've helped a lot of people via this medium, but I am not so arrogant for a second to believe it. Entertainment value, perhaps. But I doubt I've been of a lot of help to more than a few handfuls of individuals via this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking why that's important, then you shouldn't be in charge of the SE community. People are going to respond to each other with more dignity, respect and understanding if they feel like they know the person as an individual. The whole Monica thing was supposed to have been about members showing respect to each other, but (in point of fact), SE still has yet to see the forest for the trees; instead of focusing on pronouns, it should be focusing on people. Do that and the respect for each other comes on its own; respect is pushing against an open door instead of being forced upon the community through a narrow set of pronouns that &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be adopted and to hell with any perceived non-compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why on most forum sites, the off topic forum is the most active forum there. It's because in order to act as a team of contributors, they must first be a team, not just a collection of like minded individuals set to a common purpose. Getting individuals to form up into high performing teams is impossible if you don't let them get to know each other in a broader context than the task you set them to. By deliberately discouraging that kind of conversation, you're not enriching the content at all; you're putting a glass ceiling on its value that will never be breached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that SE has achieved so much using the 'collection of individuals' model is a testament to the original community engagement people, but (respectfully) it's also the millstone around your neck. You can't go to the next level without building teams out of these individuals, and you're not going to achieve that with content alone. You need to shape a common personality, common vision and sense of contribution that goes beyond up votes. We as a community of contributors need to know each other beyond the content and the comments thereon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE's single biggest asset is its community of contributors - this is also its single biggest liability as it is not a team. Neither is it a resource and right now, that's what I feel like - a resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that I'll never be back and there's a part of me that still has to 'break the habit' that is worldbuilding but it's time for me to withdraw. Some users here I'll miss, some like JBH I miss already. Others - well, not so much. That will be true of us all I suspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do find myself concerned that I'm leaving this site without an active Tim B for the first time. I'm &lt;em&gt;pretty&lt;/em&gt; sure that any legends of this being one of the signs of a coming apocalypse is without basis but if it turns out I'm wrong, I apologise in advance. That said, there is a lot of very useful information on this site as to how to survive it, so I'm sure you'll all be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event; adieu to you all, be nice to each other, post more answers than comments, and I wish you all the satisfaction that I no longer get on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44692" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T04:59:24.850" Title="Hanging up my spurs now that the horse is dead - an open letter to SE about why their model is wrong" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T15:11:20.033" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mOuq8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mOuq8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a long-time user of the site, I know the current &quot;Needs more focus&quot; closure reason used to be called &quot;Too broad&quot; and have been applying it that way. However, it occurred to me when reading and comparing the descriptions for the &quot;Needs details or clarity&quot; and &quot;Needs more focus&quot; closure reasons that these may be confusing to the unfamiliar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;this thing needs more focus&quot; not the same or very similar as &quot;your question is obscured by other text and needs to be clarified&quot;? Can you not add details to provide focus? The main difference seems to be &quot;no obvious question&quot; versus &quot;too many questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there was a post on Meta a while back explaining why this change took place, but I'm too lazy to go find it. It just feels like the new text makes closure more confusing than it used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T16:17:01.313" Title="Is the distinction between closure reasons too small?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7819" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:17:01.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how I understand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Needs details or clarity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't clear because of the words itself in it. As it's written, &lt;em&gt;we have no clue what you're asking.&lt;/em&gt; Possibly because your question makes perfect grammatical sense but is nonsensical from a physics standpoint or contains multiple contradiction to the point where the question isn't possible to give an answer to. Or maybe just because we can't make it through your terrible grammar, I've seen both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Needs more focus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions are perfectly understandable, however, unfortunately, there are multiple distinct questions. As that is against site policy, we have to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T16:17:01.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:45:30.027" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting this as an answer, instead of as a comment, because then you might read it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I've never found comments to be a problem. This is just my own perspective, but I've always found comments to be helpful. &#xA;Of course I don't take critical comments personally, since if a comment rubs me the wrong way most of the time it's because of pride on my part, not the commenter being mean.&#xA;Others experiences may vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for an off topic forum, have you ever come to visit us in chat?&#xA;It's pretty off-topic, and anyone with &gt;20 rep can participate.&#xA;Granted, it used to be a lot more lively before the GME, and a lot of good users have stopped checking in, but there are still a few of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to talk you out of leaving/going dormant/whatever, but I did want to point out that for all it's faults, SE does have one of the things you talked about. We can disagree on the usefulness of comments another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE does have some faults, and the GME really highlighted them. I don't slam anyone for wanting to go. I still hope that it can be saved, if some of the cancer can be excised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to find the chat rooms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vLIfX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vLIfX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The red circle is the SE logo (looks a little like a speech bubble).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After you click on that, it brings up all the different stack exchange sites, but right up at the top is the link to the chat area, which has the the orange ring around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you click on Chat you'll see something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/44qgQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/44qgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Factory Floor is the main chat room for WB. It's worth checking what chat rooms are available for each SE site, since you'll sometimes be able to find people to help answer a simple question without having to post it as a full question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T04:59:24.850" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T04:59:24.850" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-04-01T07:12:39.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find SE to be less unwelcoming than Wikipedia, but not by that much.  Worldbuilding is a much more welcoming community than most others here on SE, and in general the meta communities are much less friendly than others.  I don't think that the problem is the comments, I think that it is the unwelcoming people.  If you eliminated the comments then those people would express their unwelcoming attitude via other ways such as closing more questions, downvoting more, etc.  Overall I believe that the underlying problem is that the unwelcoming people tend to gain a position of power, and the power goes to their heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do like the idea that you had about charging people for leaving a comment.  There would need to be some system in place so that people who have not accumulated much reputation could be able to leave comments without having to spend on it on leaving comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of luck to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11161" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T07:12:39.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-04-01T21:41:23.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you about the direction SE has been going as a whole.  But I have to disagree about your belief that we should all know each other better as people.  I don't come here to learn about any other users and I don't expect other users to learn about me.  I don't believe my identity or any other user's identity is relevant to our questions or answers, excluding perhaps SE.IPS.  If I had my way, we would all be anonymous.  I think that's the only way to keep this site from becoming collateral damage in the culture war that's currently ongoing.  The only way to keep people from fighting about their identities is to not enable identities in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to a strong community isn't being nice to each other.  The key is to work towards a shared goal.  The best way to get people to set their differences aside is to stop pointing them out all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully we're both wrong and SE just turns itself around though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51953" LastEditorUserId="51953" LastEditDate="2020-04-02T00:15:31.953" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T00:15:31.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-04-02T15:56:11.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the principle of what you are suggesting, but gifting reputation through comments would be a terrible idea.  If someone wanted to then farm rep, they'd just have to spam a bunch of really bad questions and leech rep off of the well intentioned folks who try to help them refine their questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing people to perhaps downvote comments which would cost both users' rep would probably be more fair.  Then people looking to comment just for the sake of sabotaging or undermining someone would come to expect the downvotes and learn when it is better just to keep their mouth shut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2020-04-02T22:59:27.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T22:59:27.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-04-02T19:44:08.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How many shovels did it take you to dig that heap!?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it seems like this query~rant~manifesto boils down to three key sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm leaving for no clearly defined reason other than vague notions of this forum being no longer &quot;fun&quot; and you personally feeling &quot;unappreciated&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't like the comment system and think users ought to pay to be able to comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no discussion forum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm Leaving!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Okay. Fair enough. People come and go, so I guess we'll see you around somewhere somewhen! And, of course, you know you'll be welcome back here any time. If the format is no longer fun for you, then of course there's no reason to hang about. And also no reason to carp about it so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for being &quot;unappreciated&quot;, I don't get that at all. A quick look at your profile shows you're a creative respondent with a large number of well received answers given with quite a few earning the Green Check. I agree with you, from a different meta post, that answers are the more important component of Q&amp;amp;A. Of course, we need queries to answer, but WB.SE (and all the other communities here) exist for the purpose of giving good answers, not as a repository of questions. To that end, you've obviously demonstrated yourself more than capable here. I don't see any negatively voted answers, and while you've got a number of 0 to 2 vote answers, your higher value answers outweigh those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to be fair, this isn't the Tim B II appreciation society. Any more than it is for the rest of us. Appreciation and usefulness are shown through upvotes &amp;amp; Green Checks. For comparison, since your premise begs it, we arrived at about the same time. And I too remember the lights on a space ship query! The difference between us is that you've answered more queries and have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;earned&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; twice the rep I have. Stands to reason: your 600 responses against my 275; your 52k points vs my 23k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider myself sufficiently appreciated for the work I've done here. Yes, sometimes I put in a lot of extra effort to research a problem and come up with what I hope is an entertaining and informative answer. Sometimes, I don't even get an upvote from the querent for my work. Myeh. Then again, the points aren't the real reason for being here or giving answers. They're just a fun way of graphically showing the impact we've made on the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I do this as much for myself (brain exercise) as for helping the querent or the broader community. I do the same on worldbuilding forums elsewhere, and don't even get Green Checks for the effort! I guess I just don't understand why you feel unappreciated?, when it's pretty clear the worldbuilding community here in WB disagrees with your assessment wholeheartedly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for the comment system, I get your point, but I also think your solution is wrong. Some comments are intended to be helpful (pointing new members to the help desk and suggesting they take the tour or guiding them how to improve their queries and responses). Some comments are just chatty. And yes, some comments are mean and insulting. I see no good reason to charge users for making comments, though, because ultimately, &lt;em&gt;no one cares about comments&lt;/em&gt;.  Once the dust settles, all the mean comments amount to nothing. And so do the helpful ones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a better solution would be for comments to expire after a set time. All comments should start dropping off a Q or A after one or two months. If the OP isn't going to pay any attention to the comments within that time period, she's probably not going to come back ten years later and say, oo golly! I guess I'd better edit my question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would solve your issue with comments being used to &quot;cut down&quot; a Q or A. Frankly, I haven't really noticed that as being an issue. But then again, I don't really read the comments unless it's my own response to a query, or unless I'm considering a closure or reopen vote. The other solution to that problem is to flag all comments you find rude, abusive or insulting. Yeah, I know -- extra work for the Mods! But, if there is a real instance of someone trying to undermine someone else's work, that's definitely within the purview of the Mod Squod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discussion Forum!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for there being no discussion forum, well, you know as well as anyone else: SE is not a discussion forum! It's a focused Q&amp;amp;A forum. End of story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, given one of your other Meta posts, you are apparently aware that we háve an off topic forum, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, so I am very confused why you say here that we aren't given the tools to bond as a community! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that the chat forum is not clearly advertised and it's not really easy to find the link to the Factory Floor, but, really, to say it doesn't exist is going a bit beyond!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T19:44:08.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-04T18:40:59.987" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Worldbuilding Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173589/making-history-true-again&quot;&gt;making history true again&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12963/is-asking-about-imaginary-movies-considered-good-questions-here&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; in another SE site and they introduced me to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked but didn't find appropriate tags about ideas or movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I mistakenly ask here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74744" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T02:54:38.850" Title="Ideas about moviemaking" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|topic-challenge|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7826" CreationDate="2020-04-04T18:57:08.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but you did not ask a question. You made a statement about a plot, but that was it, no problem for us to help you. What we need is a specific question like &quot;How would [subject] work&quot; or &quot;what what can happen in [situation]?&quot; not just a rundown of the plot. it is important to give info to the people who might answer so they can answer it well. But we &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T18:57:08.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7826" CreationDate="2020-04-04T19:44:04.367" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What they actually said was this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Depending on the question you could try Worldbuilding. However, I think it would need to be a specific question relating to building the world. Asking in general as in: would this film idea work? Wouldn’t be acceptable there or any SE site as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it's a question about the creation of fantasy worlds, then Worldbuilding SE might be a good bet [...] Before asking on any site, though, you should check their help centre to see if your question is likely to be acceptable there or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did not follow their advice. The question you posted was not about worldbuilding, nor was it actually a question at all. You simply posted a brief summary of your storyline. My assumption is that you're looking for feedback on whether it's a good idea or not, but that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; what Worldbuilding is for. You were told that before you came here, and you ignored it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear: If you have any &lt;strong&gt;specific problems&lt;/strong&gt; with developing &lt;strong&gt;the world in which your film takes place&lt;/strong&gt;, then we can help you. If you have any problems with writing the actual plot of your film, we most likely cannot help you. And if you just want feedback on a story idea, then we definitely cannot help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T19:44:04.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7818" CreationDate="2020-04-05T01:08:38.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who used to be here every day, lost interest and stopped coming here at all and recently returned :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I warmly recommend dropping out as soon as it starts being not fun or stressful.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not fun do not feel obliged to be here. If it gives you stress do feel obliged to endure it. Because there is no obligation and feeling there is just makes it less fun and more stressful. In fact, I'd argue it is that false sense of obligation that causes much of the stress and kills your enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about it, why do we get stress about random comments made by strangers on things that are not of any real importance? Because we feel obliged to care about our answers and what people say about them. The gamified reputation system creates this false sense of importance that tricks our brains to care and feel obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absolute easiest and most practical way to deal with this? Just drop out until your value system resets. If you then later return most of the stress will be absent and replaced by the fun being back. It won't be as good as it once was but that will be due to seeing clearer the issues not because of stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think you are doing the right thing. Hope you will one day return. And want you to know that in my personal experience (YMMV), if you do return many of the things that now annoy and stress you will do so less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3434" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T01:08:38.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7826" CreationDate="2020-04-05T17:14:43.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you've asked isn't about worldbuilding as such. It's either a plot question or something deeply sociological about the need a society has for myths over and above the requirement for truth in historical recollection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T18:30:07.837" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T18:30:07.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7826" CreationDate="2020-04-09T02:54:38.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where to go:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line of inquiry is definitely unsuitable on any Stack Exchange forum. Especially this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're asking a general interest query about the direction you should take with your script / idea, I'd recommend a general purpose discussion forum like Reddit (r/worldbuilding or r/fantasyworldbuilding or r/scifi or r/sciencefiction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T02:54:38.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7833" CreationDate="2020-04-09T22:18:03.887" Score="10" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173922/why-keep-killing-a-reincarnating-enemy/173935&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and after almost a dozen answers, it got closed for being story-based. Mind, I'm quite satisfied with the response I got before that happened, so the reason I'm asking is merely curiosity, to allow me to understand the rules better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;The definition of story-based&lt;/a&gt; seems to be that it's about questions regarding the actions of individuals, rather than systems. I understand the general case; &quot;Would Jack hate his mother if she disagreed with his sense of fashion?&quot; is obviously story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this particular question, the agent, the person whose actions we're sorting out, is a dictator. He steers the nation; anything he does &lt;em&gt;becomes&lt;/em&gt; a system, which other people have to live with. This is figuring out the long-term strategy of a tyrant looking for his nemesis among the populace (or well, justifying a given approach, which I understand to be a subset of that). I personified the actor, just to make it more recognisable, but what matters here is what his nation, network of agents, is doing; and whether it is optimal, and how to improve on it. To me it might as well be a spaceship design question: it's a nation's approach, not necessarily an individual's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7401/51138&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I think I check the first requirement pretty well. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I checked the second box too; I felt like there wasn't much additional value in adding details like the level of technology or the fact that the dictator is actually a council of bankers, but reasonable minds can disagree on that. The third criterium; this is not high-concept (&quot;What would happen if Hitler died as a baby?&quot;); I also &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; don't think it's open-ended. But if the second or the third box wasn't checked, then surely my question should have been closed as Too Broad? Instead five people voted for Story-Based. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as said, not looking for a reopen: just trying to understand the rules better. Let's say I want to sort out some of the other tactics my dictator/council could be using to keep the planet in their grasp; how should I be phrasing those questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T02:19:43.407" Title="Are questions about the ideal strategy for a dictator story-based?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7832" CreationDate="2020-04-10T09:57:41.833" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fair Enough!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preliminary notes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just because a question gets a lot of answers doesn't mean the question is a good fit for Stack Exchange. It just means 12 people felt like answering your question before someone else came along and closed it. This is called a &lt;em&gt;failure of the system&lt;/em&gt;. It happens a lot here, actually, and I think that's because of the nature of the material we deal with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to your question! I see you did the hard part of answering it for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, &lt;em&gt;questions regarding the actions of individuals&lt;/em&gt; are story based. This is because the actions of a character are matters of plot. If Evuls does Ecks, then Wye, then Zed, the plot goes thát way; but if Evuls does Wye first, then Zed may never happen and it will already be too late for Ecks, so the plot will go thìs way. Of course, as the Writer, plot management is on you and since, as you say, it has nothing to do with the systems or underlying nature of the fictional world, this community simply washes its collective hands of that line of inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you might be misunderstanding what is meany by &quot;system&quot;. What you're calling a &quot;system&quot; that comes to be once the dictator does his thing is, in reality, the plot of the story unfolding. If he blows up a town in order to kill the Chozen Won, well, that's collateral plot damage, not a new aspect of the fundamental nature of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your dictator did something that truly altered the fundamental nature of the world -- say he came across a device that could push the Chozen Won into a different set of dimensions. The hole left in the universe's space-time web is now injured and begins to tear apart. The new reality of physics in this universe is that new forces are at work and perhaps some old equations will no longer work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thát is a matter of underlying systems. And that question, of course, would be entirely on topic here. However, that's not the question you asked! You asked about the dictator's &lt;strong&gt;motive&lt;/strong&gt; -- you asked &quot;he continues a world-wide witch hunt ... why though?&quot; Motive is a matter of character development and is expressed through plot development. Therefore, the question of strategy as asked is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for that cited answer ... no, sorry, you didn't tick the first box at all! Not even close! You certainly gave some interesting background and worldbuilding context. But that doesn't make your question about the world (systems, rules, application). As for the second box, I don't think you really ticked that one either. Check out those three bullet points below the two tick boxes: they provide you with some guidance as to how a why question might possibly squeak through. You didn't offer any boundaries or limitations. The result is an infinite list of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, even if your query weren't story based, you'd then be closed for lack of focus. Your title question asks about motive. But then, at the end, you ask about strategy. And then, you ask about advantages of doing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HINT:&lt;/strong&gt; That very last question might could be a way out. Advantages to choosing a course of action points back to fundamentals of the world. In this case, perhaps, constantly hunting down and killing children prevents the Chozen Won from maturing and developing her powers. Following a different line of inquiry might even get your why question answered on the sly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T09:57:41.833" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T22:48:41.390" Score="-3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;This idea was incited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/890/optimum-laser-color-for-maximum-destruction&quot;&gt;this question here&lt;/a&gt;, but it should be considered a general suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was being closed as &quot;too broad&quot; because there are many ways for a laser to damage different kinds of targets. Reasonable enough, even if I personally disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, the asker might not have known that lasers can do that many things; making the question too broad. Sometimes that's a research failure, but there was clearly some effort in energy levels of lights being put here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that, for questions for which this matters, we introduce an alternate resolution before closing it: &lt;strong&gt;allow answers that give a summary of the areas of possibilities, so that there can be one or more subsequent questions focusing in on a specific area&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that once five votes are reached (or before that), the question is not closed but a tag (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/overview-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;overview-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;overview-question&lt;/a&gt;) is added, to designate that answers should give an overview of the possibilities, as broad as possible, without going into much detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you get an objective scoring criterion: the answer that gives the most options, or the clearest categorisation of them. Like, to the laser question, an answer could be: &quot;Lasers can melt stuff or they can burn stuff. The colour of the object matters too, and so does whether it is in an atmosphere. Please re-ask with a defined target.&quot; Obviously it would be longer than that but that's the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a hypothetical &quot;What's the best sword?&quot; question. The best answer would be &quot;Swords can be used for slicing or stabbing. Some armour can protect the wearer against cuts but not puncturing, and some armour vice versa. Please specify the armour of the target.&quot; Same thing applies: this is the kind of answer you could get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner would be helped, and the broad question can still serve a good purpose: because it is broad, it is more likely that other people end up querying the same. I'm sure we've all been curious what sword is best. This question would become a launch pad for anyone else wondering about swords, what sort of factors determine their usability against a certain target, and then their subsequent questions would have more usable detail in them from the start, preventing &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; from being closed as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this tactic would only work if a question, even if it is too broad, only has a finite number of metrics for an answer. Like, &quot;what is the best system of government?&quot; has infinite answers because there are an infinite number of ways to measure government &quot;goodness&quot;. Instead, &quot;what government makes a country the wealthiest&quot; can be treated this way, because wealth can only be measured in a finite number of ways (total cash in circulation, average yearly income per person, and some notes about income equality; excepting silly answers like number of pies per head of cabbage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think this idea (if properly implemented) would help the original asker to focus their subsequent question, and it would make the over-broad question usable for other people by providing a place to get started with their research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T13:15:40.313" Title="Alternate way of responding to overly broad questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7834" CreationDate="2020-04-14T03:23:33.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;answers that give a summary of the areas of possibilities, so that there can be one or more subsequent questions focusing in on a specific area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more theoretical level, this would mix actual worldbuilding content (what are the rules in this world?) with meta content (how can I narrow down this question?), altering the nature of the community and causing more confusion into users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more practical level, what you propose can be already done, tag apart, with a comment to the OP, and this doesn't require additional rewriting of codes or manual intervention by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T03:23:33.760" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7834" CreationDate="2020-04-14T13:15:40.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;allow answers that give a summary of the areas of possibilities, so that there can be one or more subsequent questions focusing in on a specific area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That problem is that people will not be giving &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;. What you describe wouldn't resolve the query - it's just guidance for refinement and/or other querirs. And that's exactly what comments are about. Ideally, people would vote to close &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; mention what is needed for a question to be answerable in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that closure &lt;em&gt;is not a punishment&lt;/em&gt;. It means that as it stands the question should not be answered for some reason. It also serves as a way to give the asker the opportunity to edit the question, so it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody asked for &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Train in my world travels from Mordor to Narnia. How long does the journey take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But an answer will require &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Z&lt;/strong&gt; to be known first, so the question must include that before it can be answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment:&lt;/strong&gt; we need to know the distance between them and the speed the train travels at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all details are added, the question is answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Train in my world travels from Mordor to Narnia. The distance is 15 megasmoots, and speed is equal to six mice drawing a pumpkin carriage. How long does the journey take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; The journey would be less than 12 parsecs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that's roughly the cycle a question can go through. We want something similar to happen, in order to have good and answerable questions. After all, would you really be satisfied if you looked searched for &amp;quot;X&amp;quot;, found a question that precisely matches this but the answer literally led you to more questions than you had at the start? Or worse, the answers actually address &lt;em&gt;something different&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it would be best if all relevant information is there at the start but it's not a big problem if it's not - editing is always an option and closure is there to help with that. If it turns out the initial one isn't really needed for one reason or another, the asker can always look around more and post a better question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reminder that we still [the Sandbox](have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox for Proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;) where you can post your question so users can check if it seems complete as it is and advise you if anything changes are needed. The Sandbox is there to help question askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T13:15:40.313" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-14T23:33:42.943" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173549/how-could-a-warrior-hold-a-large-monstrous-animals-attention-i-e-plausible&quot;&gt;A question&lt;/a&gt; I asked last week was closed for being too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I had laid out a long, detailed tactical scenario. There was no plot or character content; it was all intended for context, clarity, and specificity. But I can see how it could have been interpreted as too much of a story/scenario. (My opening sentence had also mentioned that this was for a scene in a story I'm writing, which probably didn't help my case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;relevant FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I removed the long tactical scenario entirely, then edited my question down to a bare-bones, zero-story, generalized situation with just the minimum context necessary to illustrate the concept in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the question still too story-based? If not, could it be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74732" LastEditorDisplayName="user74732" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T23:42:49.657" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T03:06:05.993" Title="Reopen request - &quot;plausible RPG-style tanking&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7838" CreationDate="2020-04-15T02:52:11.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A first pass of your post in it's current state had me thinking you were still asking whether a group of individuals would be successful in a scenario. It was only after carefully reading your question while composing this post that it became clear to me that the actual text of your question was asking about something that could be considered worldbuilding. Unfortunately the edits made the question rather broad and dependent upon details that you had removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend doing a rework on your question to emphasize the importance of this question to the world you are building. For instance if you were asking about Neanderthals hunting mammoth you could have your post be structured something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing a story in which a brave neanderthal hunter saves their tribe by distracting a ferocious mammoth allowing other hunters to get close enough to deliver the killing blow. I want to know if this seems plausible. Are there any examples of similar behavior in the real world I can use to flesh out my description?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides the essential context about the scenario but shows that your reason for the question is in fleshing out detains of your world rather than whether your hunter will be successful or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T02:52:11.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T09:15:48.083" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a weird use case. When I have the time, I tend to edit questions and fix relatively minor stuff - spelling, grammar. I'd re-word something or re-write a sentence if the current version doesn't really work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid of making bigger changes, however. Sometimes I feel like I can re-write a few paragraphs to make the post cleaner or even trim unneeded information, then re-write the rest of the text, so it fits. But that seems like a drastic change and I'm especially wary of missing, changing, or adding details to the edited version that don't correspond to the author's intention. My goal is to preserve the meaning but make sure it's conveyed better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I though that perhaps I can take the current question, then re-write it and post it on the Sandbox, then invite the question author to have a look and further improve the question, if needed. Further improvements could be done by me, the author or anybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expected outcome is that the original question would be changed to match the version in the Sandbox. I am not interested in posting the question for myself. I think it might be especially helpful with closed questions that I think I might be able to correct to be re-opened and answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process would be broadly similar to suggesting an edit as a pre-2k rep user and having it approved, improved, or even rejected. It's bypassing the suggested edits since I can't really submit edits as suggestions with my rep (as far as I'm aware). Moreover, the edit is likely going to be a lot bigger than correcting mistakes, so a more thorough reading would be needed. Lastly, the original author should really have more say than just other reviewers, as it's important to make sure the intention is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something that I think would be of use to me, personally, in order to help out users with their questions. I'm not in any way expecting other people to start re-posting edited questions in the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this description is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would it be acceptable to take a question from another user, then post an edited version of it in the Sandbox?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T13:06:14.420" Title="Is it acceptable to post a re-worked draft of somebody else's question in the Sandbox?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7840" CreationDate="2020-04-15T14:39:26.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd say give it a try!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the occasions where I've done drastic edits to a question, I just do it in the question and leave it at that. Often times the OP is long gone and has abandoned the question, so I kind of consider it &quot;fair game&quot; to make reasonable edits for clarity and wording, though not for content or intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would hurt to do this in the Sandbox if that would be helpful for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T13:06:14.420" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T13:06:14.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-17T06:31:54.127" Score="11" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting from JBH's comment on a recent Anatomically Correct Series (ACS) question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a place to help people build worlds, not indulge in whims. There are clear precedents in Meta that this forum is NOT for extending pre-existing or commercial worlds (which Minecraft clearly is). There are other forums for that purpose. I've noticed over the last 6 months a number of complaints that ACS is getting muddied by low-quality entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I share the feeling that lately the ACS has been abused to post a series of questions with weak worldbuilding content and more of a &quot;I have a list of creatures, let's use it to make a list of ACS questions on them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our help center clearly states that we want questions which are more than just mindless social fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my question to the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we narrow down the scope of the ACS or not? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T23:14:35.457" Title="Should we narrow down the scope of the Anatomically Correct Series?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2020-04-17T07:54:42.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How? Use you super diamond powers and cast the offenders (or at least the offenders' questions) into the Outer Void!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798&quot;&gt;ACS Hub&lt;/a&gt; here on Meta ought to spell out the expectation that third party intellectual properties are off topic. Not only for ACS, but generally speaking for WB.SE in general. The forum appropriate for those queries is SciFi/F.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be helpful, perhaps even more helpful, to list examples of what types of creatures we're looking for in the ACS. Are we looking for traditional folklore or mythology? How about creatures of literature? Creatures of motion pictures? How far removed, really, are creatures found in game properties from those found in ancient myths? After all, the only guidance given is &lt;em&gt;create fictional creatures in a realistic evolutionary way&lt;/em&gt; which would certainly include everything in Minecraft!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's not be hasty!  I'd just like to note that you yourself edited the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142740/anatomically-correct-pikachu&quot;&gt;Pikachu ACS question&lt;/a&gt;, and also provided an answer! Let's be clear: there is no worldbuilding content in that question. It's a straight up third-party intellectual property question. It serves no function other than to satisfy idle curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, how are you suggesting already existing but inappropriate queries be handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to answer my own question, I've started by voting to close the commercial / third party questions and the ream of (in my opinion spammy) low quality questions. Have met with OP push back. Will invite him to participate in this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've combed through perhaps the last 20 or 30 entries on the list. Most are what I'd consider &amp;quot;low quality&amp;quot; and several clearly ask about third party intellectual properties. I've invited the asker of most of these questions to chime in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think we need to refine the expectations a bit to reflect the need for worldbuilding context a/o an actual worldbuilding problem that needs solving. Too many of the questions are &amp;quot;name of mythical monster + 2 or 3 data points about it + the tag 'how can this evolve'&amp;quot;. I don't think that provides sufficient worldbuilding context. Even if you're writing a story about said monsters!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T20:46:43.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2020-04-17T13:22:20.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Require context, and some up-front effort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally do not know if &quot;How could Pikachu function&quot; would be accepted on the scifi stack exchange. For one there's that site having a different approach - it is defined by its contents, rather than the answering approach, in which Worldbuilding seems quite unique. &quot;How does the Force work?&quot; is a question that can be answered with nothing but references to canon. &quot;How would this Force-like magic system work?&quot; requires creative input, and it is one of the joys of this site, as I experience it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &quot;Why do redshirts die?&quot; has a canon answer: they're used for security. In contrast, the brilliant answers to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95033/why-does-the-conjoined-alliance-of-space-travellers-keep-producing-red-uniforms&quot;&gt;Why does the Conjoined Alliance of Space Travellers keep producing red uniforms?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; lists wonderful possible alternative and highly &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt; reasons as to why some crewmen wear red. It is rightfully one of the most popular questions on the site. Such answers however go directly against established &lt;strike&gt;Star Trek&lt;/strike&gt; Stellar Trip canon, and would not be as appreciated on the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think there's definitely a case for asking for stuff similar to existing works - it just should not require a &quot;canon&quot; answer. In fact, those should be discouraged. &quot;Well, in the show Star Trek redshirts die because they are in security.&quot; would be a valid answer to the linked question, but not necessarily the best one. I do not know if Pokémon explains where Pikachu's powers come from, but if it or some ancillary work does, the SciFi site would treat that as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer, and Worldbuilding as &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, instead of banning the genre outright, I would just require more effort to be put into questions asking about existing media, and specifically giving it more context that defines the creature or element more narrowly than the source material does. So a slightly more valid Pikachu question would be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the closest you could get to a Pikachu within these parameters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A basic Pikachu has these qualities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I have a world where &lt;strong&gt;their electricity should be purely biological&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;they evolved with their general shape and colourations until magic came and added the electric powers&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;the creatures are domesticated by humans yet they will eagerly fight their own kind&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;one or more other things that narrow the query down from &quot;poof me this thing into existence&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last thing is the most important. Creature design should have a narrower scope than &quot;how it is depicted in traditional media&quot;, which is vague and unfair to those unfamiliar with said media. And a creature design question should be more than a list of qualities, it should also give an angle, the questioner's &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; on the creature. Best would be if they already have some idea on how a rodent could channel lightning, and asked to have it verified; but I also like more open-ended questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you further narrow it down from the source material, existing IP questions are fine with me. If the source material has already defined the thing and its history precisely, then you can ask a broader question instead, such as: &quot;Could mammals evolve electric powers?&quot; - which would no longer be an Anatomically Correct question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr: require more than a list of bullet points, require context and an angle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T13:22:20.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2020-04-18T05:24:30.867" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still really sore at SE.inc, so forgive me that this probably has a pretty harsh tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before I begin, every user should understand something. Users like HDE226868, L.Dutch and many others have unbelievable training and knowledge, and they're willing to take the time to explain answers to people (like me!) who would need YEARS of additional schooling to figure it all out ourselves. It's a GIFT that they share their knowledge and experience with nobody's like us. There's a considerable social presence on Stack Exchange and a great many people enjoy it. But if you think the social presence is the primary reason this site exists or that this is simply something fun to spend an hour goofing around with &amp;mdash; you're showing CONSIDERABLE disrespect to those talented people who could literally be doing anything else more valuable with their time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange (ALL of Stack Exchange) has one overriding purpose: to help &lt;em&gt;the next person in line&lt;/em&gt; to find answers to their questions. If your question has no practical future application for another author (and saying to yourself, &quot;oh, somebody might make use of it!&quot; doesn't cut the mustard) &amp;mdash; it doesn't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site's original purpose (and, insofar as I know, it's current purpose) is to help people develop &lt;em&gt;fictional worlds of their own design.&lt;/em&gt; In that regard it is fundamentally a writing resource.  If you're question hasn't been posted for that purpose, it doesn't belong here.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are NOT the dumping ground for questions that are not or will not be accepted on other stacks. It was a whomping big issue just allowing real-world questions that could be (and often should be) addressed on other stacks.  Simplifying an avalanche of posts and discussion: we decided to allow it because questions starting with &quot;I'm building a fictional world...&quot; tended to be ignored or closed on other stacks. &lt;em&gt;The fact that we were nice about that is not a precedent.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We've addressed the issue of commercial worlds many times: they're off-topic unless you can describe how an aspect of that commercial world can fall inside your own world without infringing copyright.  Has that changed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ACS questions that don't extend the body of &lt;em&gt;useful information for worldbuilding purposes&lt;/em&gt; aren't just a waste of the resource &amp;mdash; they dilute the resource. There are so many questions right now that it would take days to parse through them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Multiple ACS questions from the same author are, IMHO by definition, an abuse of this site. Once we've shown you how to develop an evolution for one of your creatures (assuming the issue hasn't been dealt with adequately by previous ACS questions or other WB questions), we frankly shouldn't be asked a second (or a third, or a fourth...) time. I'm sure somewhere in the Help Center it says that we're &lt;em&gt;not here to write your story for you.&lt;/em&gt; We're technically not here to build your world for you. We're here to help you overcome practical limitations with your own creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly speaking, the bottom third of the ACS list has nowhere near the quality of the top two-thirds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to narrow down the scope&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frankly don't think the ACS or site rules and expectations are unclear at all. I do believe a number of the posters have been lazy and abusive &amp;mdash; relying on our willingness to simply let them have their way.  Therefore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close questions that don't meet the posted requirements for ACS and this site instantly. Once closed, &lt;em&gt;delete them both from Main and from the ACS list.&lt;/em&gt; Ban users who don't figure out the problem the second or third time.  Asking why it happened is always acceptable. Whining that it is happening is IMO &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; evidence that the OP is either goofing off or refusing to understand this site's purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OPs: we have a chat room where people will help you figure this all out and a sandbox (I assume it's still in operation) where you can field test questions before posting them on Main. If you can't be bothered to use them (or read the Help Center, or filter through the discussions on Meta) then don't be surprised by your reception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladies and gentlemen, like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;every other aspect of real life,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; this IS NOT a judgement-free zone. You'll go to jail for breaking the law in real life... there's an equivalent consequence here &amp;mdash; and we've been &lt;em&gt;really nice about it thus far.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, that sounded harsh. Someday I'll cool off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;Yes, you will find questions posted that are not about worlds in active development. I've posted a few like that myself. But those questions should and usually are posted for the specific purpose of exposing an issue of interest to other authors &amp;mdash; to bring useful information about issues legitimate authors can and will face to light. They don't set a precedent for silly questions.  And yes, I'm more than willing to express my belief that a question is unworthy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T05:24:30.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2020-04-18T23:14:35.457" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;the only rule set in stone (or at least what I thought was the only was the only definite musts) for Anatomically Correct Series is to be a fictional creatures in a realistic evolutionary way and they had to present something new to the.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they had to be specific with the question not just be &amp;quot;could Elves commonly found in fantasy stories realistically exist&amp;quot; without any more clarification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they had to stay within the realm of biology (no magic or pseudoscience)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they had to present something new the ACS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now why yes i'll admit some of my question could be considered as low quality like my &amp;quot;Anatomically Correct Catgirls&amp;quot;question or my &amp;quot;Anatomically Correct Shrek&amp;quot; question as this site isn't meant for joke questions but may others like Anatomically Correct Orang Pendek, Gargoyles, Mothman, ect... don't violate the rules even if we agree that AC isn't for creatures from commercial worlds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Do i think any and all Anatomically Correct questions involving copy righted creatures should be closed on sight?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;no since the 18th question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40985/anatomically-correct-xenomorph&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Anatomically Correct Xenomorph&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; to me (and presumably others) asking about creatures outside the public domain became fair game and i think that forbidding &amp;quot;commercial organism&amp;quot; may seriously keep plenty of interesting questions from ever reach the light of day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Should the scope of the Anatomically Correct Series be narrowed down?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why yes i'll admit AC needs more quality control and that i'm at least partly responsible for that which a lot of them not belonging on the site (mostly because at least in the begging they weren't made for AC but i was later convinced to add them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Solutions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as &lt;em&gt;KeizerHarm&lt;/em&gt; stated requiring more effort to be put into questions asking about existing media is probably the best option as it would limit the number of them as well as increase the overall quality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72193" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T23:14:35.457" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T05:12:30.033" Score="6" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently discovered it but have noticed there has been little to no activity since mid to late 2019, and a few series are cut off. I was wondering why this cutoff happened and or what could be done to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastEditorUserId="73498" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T05:24:04.947" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T13:37:58.973" Title="what happened to universe factory?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7848" CreationDate="2020-04-23T13:21:32.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, I'm (technically) the guy who runs it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back when we started &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt; in 2015, we had a whole lot of activity - lots of interest, lots of authors, lost of posts. People gradually drifted away, in many cases from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange itself, something that was exacerbated by a network-wide crisis this past fall (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/274942&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for a bit of a timeline). Most of the most prolific authors have left over the last couple of years, and while we still get some submissions once in a blue moon, it feels a bit like a ghost ship. I've had an idea or two floating around for a bit, but I can't guarantee it'll become anything coherent anytime soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said - we are open to new authors, new posts, and new ideas! Periodically, I've thought about putting together a meta post asking for new submissions, and if new users like yourself are aware of the blog - well, maybe there's enough interest. What I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; say is that we would love to get new (and old) voices in. It's just a matter of figuring out how the heck we do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T13:37:58.973" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T13:37:58.973" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T19:46:11.837" Score="7" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some folks here might know that Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an unofficial blog, Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;. We've been running it since 2015, when we had an explosion of content from a number of users in the site. As some of the initial writers and editors drifted away, though, activity has kinda dwindled: We had a grand total of 7 posts last year, from six different writers. It's felt a little bit like a ghost town. After &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7848/627&quot;&gt;some recent discussions&lt;/a&gt;, though, it seems like there might be some renewed interest - a bunch of folks have told me they'd consider writing, editing or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, the posts have been a mix of short stories and posts about the worldbuilding process itself - everything from terrain generation to space travel logistics to things veering into plain old &quot;what-if&quot; territory. Here are some examples of the latter two categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Climate Modeling 101&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-trouble-with-ftl-588cb3a3a03c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The trouble with FTL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/calculating-political-power-is-hard-7d15983bff1?source=---------12-----------------------&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calculating Political Power is Hard!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've also had some posts about the site itself. Lately it's been skewed heavily towards short fiction, but we'd love to have posts like any of the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;I'm putting out a call for contributors&lt;/strong&gt;. If you're interested in being a part, let me know! Write an answer talking about what you'd like to, ideas for posts you have, thoughts about short stories to write, or something else. Once we have a better idea of what we've got to work with, we can start planning for the future. That would include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helping folks set up accounts on Medium to allow them to submit stories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Planning rough schedules so we can coordinate the timing of posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally adding another couple editors so that we're not reliant on me to go through all the content (which has only happened because the other editors have left, so I've had to take over)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is overoptimistic or what - that's the whole point of this post, I think. So if you're considering contributing let us know. We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27736/universe-factory&quot;&gt;an old chat room&lt;/a&gt; that might be of use, if people want to talk in a less formal setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2590/627&quot;&gt;We have a blog!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4037/627&quot;&gt;New blog post: Arrival - Part One of Landed (previous: The Juggernaut - Chapter 10)&lt;/a&gt;, where we continuously update and keep track of blog posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/want-to-contribute-b37191c4362e#.o7009o2l6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Want to Contribute?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update, May 11&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wow, we've had quite a bit of interest so far. We've already published three new posts (all short fiction) in the last couple of weeks, which is awesome! I hope we see many more, as well as non-fiction-related posts about building worlds. If anyone has a submission, let me know - I'll have to give you access to submit a post on Medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T14:50:13.807" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T14:50:13.807" Title="A call for blog writers and editors" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7852" CreationDate="2020-04-27T20:56:34.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, like I said in the comments on the other thread, I'm willing to help with curatorial / editorial duties. (And if MontyWild doesn't see this question, he expressed a similar desire.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in posting more stories and perhaps articles in the non-fiction sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still have a question, though: any ideas why my recent story didn't show up in Universe Factory? Did I mess up a setting or something? Kind of defeats the purpose of writing a story and then it doesn't appear in the place I want it to be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T20:56:34.000" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7852" CreationDate="2020-04-27T21:34:27.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know from the post i made i am interesting in being a writer, but i would also like to be an editor if possible. Although, i also think it would be beneficial to try to start back up some older series, mainly because even if lots of new writers are interested it takes a long time to build a world which would mean it would take a while before a flow of posts is established. I also think we should make it more well known, i stumbled upon it just looking through old posts, its not really put somewhere new users are likely to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit, i have created a medium account that is @.topcode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastEditorUserId="73498" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T17:33:12.730" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T17:33:12.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7852" CreationDate="2020-04-27T23:49:36.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy writing fantasy short stories and I've occasionally dabbled in a bit of sci-fi in the vein of the classic short stories of yesteryear. (Think Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury, for instance.) I do have editing skills and a bit of experience when it comes to editing so I would also be able to do that; but if at all possible, I'd really rather be writing stories, especially if it comes pre-packaged with an audience that's ready to read the kind of stories I like writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I joined Worldbuilding off a friend's recommendation that it was someplace I'd like to hang out given my writing hobbies and my own technical knowledge. But it was also someplace that I could sharpen my quill, and I think I'd enjoy joining the Universe Factory, and I've even got a few old pieces that I can turn around for a quick submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: According to the 'Want to Contribute', I need to be listed as a writer for Universe Factory on Medium. I set up a Medium account under the username 'Halfthawed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastEditorUserId="64961" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T04:11:35.197" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T04:11:35.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7856" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used by staff when sharing concepts in the Discovery phase relating to product or configuration changes. In most cases a direction and/or goal has been established, and there has likely been some amount of time invested into discovery work and research. The post is being presented to the Community for feedback to be taken into consideration. Where possible, the post includes specific questions to help guide Community feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7857" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the post shares product or configuration change concepts during the Discovery phase. Open to receiving feedback from the Community preceding implementation." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Title="product-discovery" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T19:03:56.807" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each year, the Nebula Award organizers host &quot;office hours&quot; where experts in various fields are available for authors to talk about problems in their books. This year, because COVID, the office hours will be online. They are asking for experts in any self-declared field to volunteer 1 hour of time for 4 fifteen-minute interviews from writers. Details &lt;a href=&quot;https://nebulas.sfwa.org/experts-needed/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If you want to volunteer, send an e-mail with your name and field(s) of expertise to Anne Tibbets at OfficeHours@sfwa.org&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T19:03:56.807" Title="Nebula Awards needs WorldBuilder help" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7860" CreationDate="2020-04-30T20:09:32.550" Score="6" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just now stumbled upon this site while looking up &quot;could Kaiju exist?&quot; and I would be interested to know what type of questions to ask on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75414" OwnerDisplayName="yeetmaster69" LastEditorUserId="32016" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T09:51:55.100" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T02:23:20.357" Title="What is the Worldbuilding site about?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7859" CreationDate="2020-04-30T20:51:28.003" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We're here to help you, whether you're a prospective worldbuilder or an experienced geopoet, devise, construct, build, refine, and clarify all aspects of your invented world!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our basic expectation is that you are coming here because you are a writer (any level of ability), a game designer, a dungeon master, or even just someone who likes to tinker with cultures and histories and maps and geographies and planetary mechanics: in other words, we expect you to be working on some kind of fictional universe, world, planet, or story setting. We deal primarily with questions of systems, properties, materials, and forces. How things work in an invented world. We also deal with invented aspects of culture, religion, mythology, broad sweeps of history, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can handle general questions on invented languages (also, and unaesthetically, known as &amp;quot;conlangs&amp;quot;), since these are integral aspects of (most) invented cultures. Though we do have a sister community, &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Constructed Languages&lt;/a&gt;, that can offer deeper insight and guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't deal with questions of idle curiosity. Questions like &amp;quot;could XYZ exist&amp;quot; is not a good match for our community, as this is not really a question about your own fictional world. If you are in the process of creating a fictional world or setting, and you're curious about XYZ, then ideally you'd want to consider what XYZ is and how it might fit into your world. Then come here to us and ask &amp;quot;given the constraints of this fictional world, could I fit XYZ into the world in this way?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we don't really deal with &amp;quot;real world questions&amp;quot; (like American history, mathematics, geometry, physics, etc). Sometimes they crop up, but we will expect you to provide sufficient &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding context&lt;/em&gt; to allow us to give good answers to the question. For example, if your question is one of planetary mechanics, don't ask about the Earth-Moon system. Give us the underlying worldbuilding context: what type of star, how many planets, their sizes, and the basics of the planet-moon(s) you want to ask about along with some kind of approximation of how massive they are, etc. And also note any peculiarities in the Laws of Nature, or differences that may exist between &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. There are many science-focused communities, which you can find through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;All Sites&lt;/a&gt;. If your question is one of a cultural or social practice, again, help us help you by giving some context: what is it about this particular real world practice resonates with your fictional setting? What is the cultural or social background of your setting like? These will help give you better, more focused responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We definitely do not deal with story questions. We're not here to write your story for you, we're not here to develop characters or plots. That's what writing groups are for. We're here for fictional settings only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also definitely do not handle questions of &lt;em&gt;third party intellectual property&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to ask about Godzilla or Superman or Sauron, we invite you to visit our sister community, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; for those kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resources:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general: as with any Stack Exchange forum, always check out the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which will help you compose good questions and answers. We do have rules and guidelines and community customs (not all of which are written) by which we judge good questions from bad; ideal from those that need work. Then, check out the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which will give you a big picture idea of what this forum is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also here in the Meta secion, you can find loads of helpful resources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;The Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a place for you, as a beginner here, to practice your query composing skills. More experienced folks can offer guidance on what works, what doesn't work and what could be changed to improve your questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types&quot;&gt;Catalogue of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; may be of interest as well. Here you can get a more in depth idea of what kinds of questions are a good fit for this community and which are a poor fit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;How to Write a Perfect Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: title says it all! Lots of helpful guidance on question writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; itself is a repository of questions about this forum, how it works, what its rules are, the nuances of rule application. Trawling the Meta is a great way to get an idea not only what what's working well, but also what may not be working as well as it could. There are lots of specific queries, like &amp;quot;why was my question closed&amp;quot; that can help steer you out of the same pitfalls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have some good general purpose worldbuilding resources for the intrepid geopoet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7601/what-should-i-do-with-my-world-and-where-do-i-store-it&quot;&gt;Where to Archive Worldbuilding Material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: deals with various online options for keeping track of your information and sharing it with the wider community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A general list of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: lots of guides, articles, questionnaires and resources for your worldbuilding pleasure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-09-24T02:23:20.357" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T02:23:20.357" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:29:17.210" Score="10" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/175264/30492&quot;&gt;recent answer&lt;/a&gt; a user made the following point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-1. It's not about you or your answer (which is actually good). It's just that X's answer is just so much better than yours; better as in more grounded in historical observations on disasters and references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you downvote without saying why, you get all sorts of crap for doing so in meta; and when you downvote and say why, you get all sorts of crap in comments. [...] The only positive out of this is that it worked: X's better answer is the most upvoted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to voting, our help center states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While reaffirming that votes do not require motivation and they are perfectly anonymous, how do you feel about this usage of voting: upvote and downvote to widen the gap between the good answer(s) and the less good answer(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:24:01.440" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T13:23:15.057" Title="Voting behavior: upvote vs upvote &amp; downvote. How do you feel about it?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|up-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2020-05-04T17:15:06.357" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;For starters, let's call a spade a spade here. Downvoting an answer because you liked another answer better is not only mean-spirited, it's contrary to this website's whole point. It's not about &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; opinion, it's about &lt;em&gt;everyone's&lt;/em&gt; opinion. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; don't get to decide which answer is right. You upvote the answer you like, other people upvote the answer they like, and if your answer get outvoted, too bad. That's how democracy works. Rigging the system by using an exploit and then justifying it by saying 'Well it all ended how I liked' only makes it worse. You are doing a site a disservice by exploiting the rules like this, and if this keeps up, we'll have to make new rules and restrictions to prevent exploits from taking place. That would be bad, and none of us want that. So, for the love of those of us who like having nice things, &lt;em&gt;please under no circumstances should you ever downvote an answer because you like another one better&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's dissect this false dichotomy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you downvote without saying why, you get all sorts of crap for doing so in meta; and when you downvote and say why, you get all sorts of crap in comments. [...] The only positive out of this is that it worked: X's better answer is the most upvoted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to propose a novel approach and suggest that there exists a third and fourth possibly for downvoting - you downvote without saying why and don't get flak from the meta, or you downvote and say why and you do not get flak from the comments. I typically don't explain my downvotes in the comments, or I'll leave a comment explaining why I didn't like the answer without saying explicitly that I downvoted. Shockingly, I have yet to be called out on this behavior. Why? Well, because I don't downvote like a jerk. If the answer contains factually incorrect information or otherwise contains contradictions which doesn't answer the question, I'll downvote it, sure. But, the fact of the matter is, for all the downvotes I've cast, I've never felt that I ever got heckled about it, mainly because (as I said) I don't downvote like a jerk, I downvote as a cold decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have ironclad rules on the subject, because I do think that downvotes need to come with user discretion, as with a lot of things on the site. That's also why I'm not going to propose a strict set of rules, but here's a good guideline if you need one. If people get mad whether you do or don't explain yourself, maybe it's a sign that it's not &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; that's a problem, it's &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; that's the problem. Justifying a stupid downvote by saying 'well, you get mad either way' isn't a justification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastEditorUserId="64961" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:38:56.560" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:38:56.560" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7852" CreationDate="2020-05-04T19:28:54.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may join in but I need to get organized first. Been writing fan fic off and on for a few decades.  I can certainly assist as editor.  I'll let you know when I establish an account on Medium.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39012" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:28:54.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2020-05-05T03:28:08.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problem: the comment in question seems to have been deleted or removed, so I have no context to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that all is as stated, it's very simple: that particular user is being a monosyllabic word that rhymes with Warwick. It's not an &quot;illegal&quot; vote (there being no such thing in SE) but it is &lt;em&gt;unsporting to the second respondent&lt;/em&gt; because the answer is actually good and it is &lt;em&gt;utterly useless to the community&lt;/em&gt;, because it gives us a skewed perspective of what is otherwise a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion: The best uses of the upvote is to show support for a) what you deem to be a factually good answer and b) what you deem to be a creatively good answer. The best use of the downvote is to show that the answer is a) substantially inadequate to the task (e.g., it doesn't take into account all 16 caveats) or b) demonstrates some odious or atrocious behaviour or mindset that really doesn't have a place here (needless, gore, sex, violence, hatred, abuse, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;shrug&lt;/em&gt; We just move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an abuse of one's voting privilege to downvote an answer that is reasonably demonstrably good a/o creative. If you don't like the answer, but it still does the job, there is no appropriate rationale for downvoting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other sub-issues: I really don't care if other users give me grief in comments over my downvotes. If I think your answer is inadequate or inappropriate, and I choose to downvote, I am most certainly going to spell it out in comments!  If you want to take your gripe to Meta, I would say &quot;please do!&quot; I'd love to hash it out with you, and pepper you with examples of why I think your answer sucks, or why it is you're behaving like a disyllabic word that rhymes with troll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T03:28:08.217" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T11:21:32.080" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago one of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88801/can-my-character-build-an-atom-bomb&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;s was, I believe, incorrectly marked as a duplicate. Regardless of this particular case, what are one's options if they have a question incorreclty considered a duplicate other than writing a new question with a different wording?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19975" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T11:21:32.080" Title="What is the appropriate action if a question has been incorrectly marked as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-05-05T11:31:02.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T15:30:45.473" Score="-2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175677/what-would-have-happened-if-the-neutral-states-in-europe-in-the-30s-had-signed-a&quot;&gt;What would have happened if the neutral states in Europe in the 30s had signed an agreement similar to NATO article 5?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is closed because &quot;opinion based&quot;. Alternate-history is by &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; opinion based. Sure you can look up GDP numbers, population size and so on but you can only speculate how these data would influence one or the other historical decision that is changed. If you allow questions about &lt;em&gt;alternate-history&lt;/em&gt; you must allow questions and answers that are opinion based. A good answer starts with facts and reason and discusses how they affect the issue at hand but at the end of the day, it is just an opinion and we will never know if it is close to reality or way out there. Very similar to people predicting the future (although in this case there will be a result/answer sooner or later, but until then, it is just a more or less well founded opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19051" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T15:55:12.423" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:44:35.283" Title="Why was my question closed as opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7866" CreationDate="2020-05-05T15:46:42.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very often questions are closed for being opinion based when the OP does not give a metric for evaluating the answers and picking a &amp;quot;reasonably good one&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case you simply asked &amp;quot;what would happen?&amp;quot;, and even added&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speculate freely!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without giving a time constraint or any other constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; clearly states that one should avoid asking questions where, among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you managed to get both bullets with one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, it's no joke. You question as asked in this moment is opinion based and aptly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T11:02:45.147" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:39:10.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7866" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:44:35.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very possible to have non-opinion question which fits in the tag of 'alternate history'. The trick is to be as absolutely concrete as possible when asking your question and to specify it over as thin a subject as possible. Also, set up crystal clear facts so that anyone researching it would be able to find relevant information to the subject. And, on that note, it helps to ask question about things which have a lot of objective information available on them - asking a question on anything that people have a lot of opinions about isn't going to be helped. A question like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alexander the Great hadn't died and went to fight against China. Could the Chinese Army at the time reasonably fight against his army?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would the Battle of Gettysburg be affected if the Battle of Little Round Top went in the favor of the Confederates as opposed to the Union?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the secret to Damascus steel was more widely spread such that everyone could have a Damascus sword. Would that makes conflicts in the Middles Ages have a significantly higher casualty rate?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, so help me if anyone actually &lt;em&gt;asks&lt;/em&gt; these questions without crediting me. I'll notice, trust me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:44:35.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-06T14:32:10.770" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;A questions like this &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175792/why-are-my-caves-warm-with-nobody-heating-them&quot;&gt;Why are my caves warm with nobody heating them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175759/how-long-would-the-st-louis-arch-stand-if-humanity-vanished-from-the-earth-tom&quot;&gt;How long would the St. Louis arch stand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me they show no, or very badly done research. With first answer with four upvotes is something that OP, in comment, states he knew about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be answered or closed to be changed by OP's to show their research and why they looking for worldbuilding answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a new question that presents what I'm thinking about &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/176302/metal-set-of-teeth-and-fingernails-at-a-medieval-time&quot;&gt;Metal set of teeth and fingernails at a medieval time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three Upvotes versus mine one downvote and an answer that is basically &quot;yes. Here is 1/1000 of what would you get if you typed the question into Google&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's a very low quality question that is likely to attract low quality answers. As this is new user so I would like to avoid what @JBH is mentioning, VTC and downvoting (but I would like to do both). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer if the two people who upvoted my comment would rather downvote the question. As I think the feeling was the same &quot;research was done badly&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30912" LastEditorUserId="22159" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T00:18:29.337" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T00:18:29.337" Title="Answering badly researched questions" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7869" CreationDate="2020-05-06T14:54:08.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally lack of research on its own is no reason for closure. In principle any worldbuilding question can be answered with a deep enough research. Sometimes the research is just high school level, sometimes is PhD level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lack of research for &quot;easy&quot; questions is a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; reason for downvoting, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T15:25:09.533" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T15:25:09.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7869" CreationDate="2020-05-07T04:23:35.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is exactly what comments are for.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment section is designed to communicate with the querent so we can point out things like research deficiencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to handle these kinds of questions, I think, is to do exactly what you did! You engaged the OP and asked about research already done.  It could be that the OP did not know or did not think to make note of that in the question's body. But then, another person suggested to the OP that she do exactly that: edit that comment into the body of the question! This way, at least, potential respondents have an idea what the OP knows and what has already been researched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Opinion:&lt;/em&gt; I wouldn't say the St. Louis Arch question is bad because of &quot;lack of research&quot; --- after all, they only way to actually research that particular question is to, well, stop maintaining it and wait for it to fall down!  (You might be able to get varying approximations with computer or miniature modelling; but it's just not the same!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question actually has a better reason to close (not about worldbuilding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is certainly a valid response to VTC such a question! This tool, when used early and when used often, allows querents to resolve issues with their questions. For preference, before they get six answers and one with a green checkmark!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:44:16.533" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:44:16.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7869" CreationDate="2020-05-12T04:22:38.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mouse-over a question's down-vote arrow you'll discover it says...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear and not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, Stack Exchange penalizes questioners more quickly based on down votes than it does closures (SE has changed in the last 9 months... so maybe that's no longer true).  Three or four heavily down voted questions can get you auto-banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should be closed when it's so far off base that it must be closed to stop &lt;s&gt;unwashed barbarians&lt;/s&gt; poorly educated or inexperienced respondents from filling SE's databases with poor quality or useless answers to a question that, in all other respects, actually deserves to be here.  (IMO, this should be done so quickly that a clap of thunder is heard when it happens.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A down vote, on the other hand, says, &quot;This question is in one way or another beneath our contempt.&quot;  Which is a ruthless but concise way of saying, &quot;we're nice people, but we're volunteering our limited time and considerable experience with no compensation other than the joy of helping others and you're taking advantage of that because you didn't bother to take the tour, read anything in the help center, look at meta, bother with the Sandbox, or even get off your lazy rear end to Google the answer for yourself. Grow up, move out of your parent's house, get a job, and show us a little respect. We really aren't here to write your book for you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down voting &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; VTCing should be done when the OP needs to be slapped so hard it creates a genetic memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T04:22:38.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2020-05-12T17:25:49.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt there is a regular SE participant (possibly no SE participant at all) who has not been subject to the vagaries of SE's voting system. For example: I have been subjected to one respondent who systematically downvoted each and every other answer in an effort to bolster their own answer. (I've also been subject to a user who visited &lt;em&gt;every answer and question I'd ever posted on that particular SE site&lt;/em&gt; and down voted all of them.)  This brings two quotes to mind.  The first is mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proofs that God has a sense of humor are the size of an avocado pit and teenagers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is attributed to Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (1955 to 1976):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vote early and often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, while serving in a pastoral role I once sought legal advice about what to do with a parent who was jeopardizing their child's welfare. The attorney's point is one that I've never forgotten:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no law against bad parenting &amp;mdash; and that's a probably a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he meant was that every parent is a bad parent at one time or another and that laws that try to force everybody into one perspective of what a &quot;good parent&quot; is are generally worse than having no law at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, I leave you with the humorous wisdom of Gary Larson's &quot;The Far Side&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WCqyA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WCqyA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody's a jerk at one time in their life (some, perhaps, more than others). Should anyone use down votes for any purpose other than to express an objective opinion about an answer's quality?  No.  Will pretty much anybody follow that admonition? No. So, in the immortal words of Dr. Peter Venkman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kitten, what I'm saying is that, sometimes, *!@# happens, someone's gotta deal with it, and who're you gonna call?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: a &lt;s&gt;babysitter&lt;/s&gt; moderator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T17:25:49.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-12T20:06:50.753" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/176153/40609&quot;&gt;Are &amp;#39;tree waterfalls&amp;#39; possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/176171/40609&quot;&gt;answering the question myself&lt;/a&gt;, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/176196/40609&quot;&gt;LazyReader's answer&lt;/a&gt; had been deleted. However, I felt the answer had intrinsic merit, so I edited the answer to address the issues brought up in comments and voted to reopen.  I was delighted to see it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One hour later, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/176196/40609&quot;&gt;Nathaniel edited his answer&lt;/a&gt; to (IMO) cherry pick information he liked about LazyReader's answer, extend it a bit, and repost.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This started a bit of a spat between us because I'm not a fan of cherry-picking anybody's answers without permission. Nathaniel challenged me to cite policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;The Editing Process&lt;/a&gt;&quot; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons, and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;Expected Behavior&lt;/a&gt;&quot; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide better answers of your own. Last but not least, edit and improve the existing questions and answers! By doing these things, you are helping keep Stack Exchange a great place to share knowledge of our craft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, although the disfavor of cherry-picking has been acknowledged in comments for years, there isn't a specific policy &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; that I can find that specifically admonishes against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is it permissible on WorldBuilding.SE for one user to take any part of another user's answer and use it to formulate a new answer or to edit an existing answer with it, without the original respondent's permission? If so, to what extent is cherry-picking allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;emsp;&lt;em&gt;While Nathaniel inadvertently followed some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;Help Center's &quot;How to reference material written by others&quot; section&lt;/a&gt;, I do not believe Nathaniel's edit logically extends his own original answer in that the portion of LazyReader's answer he cherry-picked could be equally applied to everyone's answers for the same purpose. In other words, I believe he simply wanted to take what was the obvious Earth-biology example and include it in his own answer. I'm tempted to say that this isn't intrinsically part of my question here on meta, except that it represents IMO the worst-case example of someone cherry picking someone else's answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T14:12:51.740" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T14:12:51.740" Title="Is it permissible to cherry-pick someone else's answer for the same question?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|specific-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7874" CreationDate="2020-05-12T21:39:12.963" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that we're not here to compete with one another; we're here to write good answers (and ask good questions!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to see where there's been any misconduct here. LazyReader's answer linked to the video, but prior to JBH's edit, it was rather tangential. The main point of the rather succinct first version was that tapuis involve a potentially relevant mechanism. The video itself was presented as an afterthought. Only &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; JBH's edit would I say it became an important component, and even then, tapuis are the focus of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with expanding on a point someone else has made. Collaborating is basically what we do. Taking someone's answer as a jumping-off point is totally fine - &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; if you credit them, as Nathaniel did. If someone thinks they can present an idea better than someone else, go for it. That's always been Stack Exchange policy. If you weren't allowed to do so, we'd have to delete probably a third of all of answers network-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the comparisons to cheating on an exam or trying to get an advantage in a competition are misplaced. We're not playing a zero-sum game here. And it's not intellectual misconduct to agree with someone else's idea when it's kinda key to your own answer - Nathaniel opened his answer by postulating that it seemed unlikely, and indicating that that assumption might be wrong seems the right thing to do, ethically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:39:12.963" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T03:49:19.010" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7874/is-it-permissible-to-cherry-pick-someone-elses-answer-for-the-same-question&quot;&gt;Is it Permissible to Cherrypick Someone Else's Answer for the Same Question&lt;/a&gt;, I'd like to bring up something I've thought for a while:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HDE 226868's answer, &lt;em&gt;There's nothing wrong with expanding on a point someone else has made. Collaborating is basically what we do.&lt;/em&gt; is what I'd like to expand upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think there comes a point when the community can, and should, sort of &quot;take over&quot; ownership of queries as well as responses. By this I mean a sense of &lt;strong&gt;community custodianship&lt;/strong&gt;. Obviously, the OP keeps actual ownership, because it's their name on the post! But, if we want our Qs &amp;amp; As to &lt;em&gt;be good&lt;/em&gt;, we may at times need to help each other improve them, either factually or grammatically or sensically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, it's long been my opinion that we shouldn't be afraid of diving back in time to look for older questions that could have been written more clearly (especially old closed questions), &quot;adopt&quot; them and if possible work them into openable condition. Same goes for answers. We shouldn't be afraid to edit poorly written answers if we think they have merit and could be improved. This does &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nòt in any way&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; mean that I am advocating hijacking a query or response in order to alter or change its fundamental sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically: I know there are answers out there which as of today are &quot;expired&quot; or out of date simply because new information has come along since WB.SE was founded. I think this will be especially true of queries that touch on astronomy and technology. And this is only going to get worse as time goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to our collaborative edit framework, we do not specifically need the OP's permission to do this kind of work, and in any event, they'll get notification that an edit has been made, so they can monitor if they wish. It (ought to, anyway) go without saying that we must respect the original intent of the OP when &quot;expanding upon&quot; or &quot;improving upon&quot; their original work. This exercise isn't about stealing others' work so much as making that work better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do this as a matter of course as questions and answers come along. I'm simply advocating that we extend our perspective horizon back into the past. As JBH says, we're here to write good answers and also good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is this a step too far, or would this be a valid practice? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clarification Log: &quot;Adopt&quot; means exactly what it says: we improve upon existing Qs &amp;amp; As. // I'm not advocating &quot;altering&quot; questions. // I don't see much sense in re-asking the same question -- as you say, that would only be flagged as a duplicate. // I'm advocating &quot;getting poor questions off life support&quot;!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T01:32:16.807" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T01:32:16.807" Title="Is it Permissible to Adopt and Edit Older Queries and Responses?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7877" CreationDate="2020-05-13T12:34:39.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things don't get owned by the community just because it's on the site. There is a long-standing policy of not altering questions and, further, a general hesitation to making edits to questions because doing so might change the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, one of the low-quality delete reasons tells you what to do here: If you have a question, ask it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is the same as the one you want to &quot;adopt&quot; (I'm not even sure what that means), then yours will be flagged as a duplicate. If you think there's a better solution to the problem, post a new answer; the post will bring the question to the top of the list when sorted by &quot;Active&quot; where it can be reviewed by the community. It likely won't get the same attention as when the question was first asked, but now the information is where it's supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we don't need a poster's permission to alter the post; that's the whole point of open edits. But we also don't always receive a notice that a post has been edited. I can count on one hand the number of times I've received such a notification. So, either I'm just that good at writing, or there's a reputation threshold above which the editor doesn't trigger the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T12:34:39.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2020-05-15T15:54:08.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting is a &lt;em&gt;privilege&lt;/em&gt; not a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; !&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting as weapon to promote a different answer you upvote is, I suggest, a violation of the &lt;strong&gt;Be Nice&lt;/strong&gt; principle on SE.  I'd suggest a pattern of this behavior ought to be grounds for moderator action - a warning, then maybe more serious action if the individual persists.  I do think this behavior is destructive enough to warrants a ban if the offense persists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument that it's not explicitly against the rules is a false argument.  It's a violation of the be nice principle and that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a fundamental rule on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an answer is reasonable, and even if you don't agree with it, the &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; thing to do is vote up the answer you prefer (or none of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an answer has a fundamental flaw (in your opinion) then it's legitimate to downvote, but downvoting in the &quot;nuclear option&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two deep flaws with the argument of those promoting downvoting-as-tactic, IMO, are :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This would turn the voting process into a popularity contest, rather than a vote for what is considered the best answer by consensus.  We would be in danger of people downvoting against particular posters, rather than their post.  It's a very slippy slope and all downhill.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It will turn people who post decent answers away because they are getting negative feedback despite posting a reasonable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that adding a comment explaining &lt;em&gt;the weakness you see&lt;/em&gt; in a post is the correct approach (or voting up a comment that already says that).  It is extremely negative to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; downvote and not explain to the poster what you think the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;&quot;I downvoted because I prefer this other answer&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is such a negative thing to do to another contributor and just because you prefer an answer to another does not make it flawed in a fundamental way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While reaffirming that votes do not require motivation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any downvote must have been motivated by &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;.  If there's a logical reason to do with a fundamental flaw the voter sees in the question, then downvoting without explaining why achieves nothing in the long run.  We must recognize also that a small minority of people will abuse any privilege they have for their own benefit (including ego).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my argument boils down to : a &lt;em&gt;pattern&lt;/em&gt; of behavior can indicate a &lt;em&gt;motivation&lt;/em&gt; and that revealed motivation can be treated as a violation of the &quot;be nice&quot; principle if appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer keep the people who try and post useful answers and respect others, than let them be driven off the site by people who think we're here to validate their egos and opinions and want to force their own opinions by gaming the voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how do you feel about this usage of voting: upvote and downvote to widen the gap between the good answer(s) and the less good answer(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A terrible idea that punishes good answers and hence punishes good posters.  This is the last thing we should be doing on SE.  It should be actively discouraged where possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T15:54:08.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-26T08:30:49.407" Score="7" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many things in the world that I am not an expert in, but at least have a vague idea where to start looking for resources/examples. There are also many subjects where getting the information I need is eminently doable and probably just a quick google search for appropriate keywords, but I have no idea what those keywords might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I were to post a question about where to find resources on/examples of a real world subject for the purposes of further research pertaining to the world building I'm doing, would that be on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those needing more context: a question that falls into this category of 'Too real for  worldbuilding SE but I have no idea where to start' is a question about real-world examples of psychiatric therapeutical practice. The worldbuilding aspect is that I'm making a care home for defunct AIs (It's a Thomas the Tank Engine parody. Don't judge me), but the actual question is about where I can find real-world examples of or information on certain therapeutical practices (giving patients fake work that makes them feel as though they're engaging in something important to them), if it is in fact a real-world thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself could probably be boiled down into a question for a different SE (If only I had the first clue about the right terminology) without any of the world building elements, but the context for the question is definitely worldbuilding which might not go down so well on the psychology and neuroscience SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are such questions on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T01:32:26.297" Title="Are requests for assistance with world building related research on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:01:20.877" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a recent case where an unclear question was asked and answered many times before it was then amended to be more narrow.  In this case, the edit invalidated a number of good answers to a common world building problem.  Since my answer no longer had anything to do with the OP's revised question and the OP had no interest at that time of pursuing the removed question further, I created a new question just to re-ask the aspect of the question that the OP removed so that the answers to this question that no longer existed could be preserved, and the irrelevant answers to the original could be deleted or ammended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ORIGINAL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177183/what-sci-fi-discovery-creates-the-most-new-technology-with-minimal-explanation&quot;&gt;What sci-fi discovery creates the most new technology with minimal explanation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOLLOW-UP: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177247/how-to-introduce-fictional-technology-without-creating-plot-holes&quot;&gt;How to introduce fictional technology without creating plot holes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do ye think that allowing users to create questions that reask removed aspects of older questions should be marked as duplicate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T13:56:47.790" Title="Spinning off a question to preserve answers to removed sub-questions" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7883" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:01:20.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The right answer to the wrong question is not helpful&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where the question is just too broad, I agree with Elemtilas that preserving the original question is the best approach, but in cases where the original question is actually asking two unrelated things, or is so unclear that multiple unrelated things can be drawn from it, I personally think the question should be broken into its parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If left in its original state, you have a bad question that cannot be made into a good question without invalidating certain answers.  If you leave it as a bad question, it will be closed quickly blocking both topics from discussion.  If someone (OP or not) then tries posting 2 seperate questions that are both more clear questions on each topic, those too will be closed as duplicates further blocking discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good strategy for maintaining the quality of WB.SE questions.  I believe it encourages people to clean up thier answers as questions are revised which is important to keeping answers relevant to the question being asked.  It also improves the searchability of questions on WB.SE so that as people look for questions that have already been asked, they are more likely to find the answers they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing this should reduce actual duplicate questions and confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T13:56:47.790" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T13:56:47.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7883" CreationDate="2020-05-29T00:57:40.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with your thesis that the right answer to the wrong question is unhelpful; but the better thesis here is don't change the question once it's gotten an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having been in this situation before, I understand why you felt it was a good idea at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe this is the &lt;em&gt;wrong strategy&lt;/em&gt; to address the particular problem.  As I see it, the only situation you found yourself in was the nullification of your answer through query editing.  In other words, the OP, or someone else, changes the fundamental nature of the query, which action now invalidates your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The idea behind query editing is to improve the question, not change the question. Once a question has been answered, its fundamental nature can not be changed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reasonable strategy that aligns with how SE works is to first address your concern in comments. You inform the OP that these certain edits need to be reverted or revised because they invalidate your response and here are the reasons why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't provide a satisfactory response, then you should feel free to edit the question! A quick revert with a factual explanation as to rationale is sometimes the refreshing splash of cold water a new or recalcitrant OP needs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP dereverts the query, thus reinvalidating your answer, please feel free to a) rerevert the question and b) flag for moderator intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If new information threatens to substantially alter a question, it really falls to the OP to simply ask a new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T00:57:40.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7881" CreationDate="2020-05-29T01:19:17.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No...but with Caveats!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Generally speaking, if you know the domain of human knowledge you're wanting to ask about, even if your goal is worldbuilding, your best bet is to ask in the appropriate SE forum (if it exists). This is because your question &lt;em&gt;does not directly pertain to the invention of your world or setting in a direct way&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you on this: if you really, honestly, and literally don't know where to start, I would say ask here in WB. The worst thing that will happen is your question will be closed and you'll read in comments where you should ask, within or without SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside: I dare say you could probably preface your exploratory question thus: &quot;DO NOT ANSWER THIS QUESTION! I literally don't know where to start, but really only need help with keywords and a couple likely places to some real world research. Actual worldbuilding query to follow!&quot; Once you've got a little bit of direction, you can just delete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not sure if your proposed question has &quot;enough context&quot; (I usually set the bar fairly high here, just to keep out the curiosity seekers, question dumpers, and real world question askers), then I'd suggest posing it here in Meta in the Sandbox. That's what it's for!, to help you get it into shape!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specific to your Query:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I see two separate things going on here. First, you are actually engaging in the creation of a fictional world a/o setting. The AIs and so forth. Second, you are engaged in general research. And you are even, eventually, going to combine what you learned from that research with your worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as written, your proposed query doesn't combine them here in SE. As such, I'd vote to close your question as being off topic as being not about worldbuilding, even though potentially it will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what I would recommend is that you first ask your &lt;strong&gt;real world question&lt;/strong&gt; on an appropriate SE forum (there is a Psychology and Neuroscience forum), or in an appropriate external forum (Reddit is a good start). And then, once you've got a better handle on the real world answer, come back here where we can help you with questions that synthesis the two parts of your work, with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;applying the real world knowledge to a fictional setting within a fictional world!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Food for Thought:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is simply because WB.SE isn't a generalist Q&amp;amp;A forum. We shouldn't be wasting our valuable &amp;amp; voluntary time googling things for people and doing their basic homework for them. Don't take this the wrong way! It's not my intention to shoo you away. But &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; I just input &quot;examples of psychiatric therapeutical practice&quot; into the google-o-matic and got all kinds of useful returns on the basic approaches to psychotherapy, therapeutic interventions, and therapeutic techniques. Especially if you're a writer, it's your job to do that much at the minimum! We're here to help you with taking that to the next level!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T01:32:26.297" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T01:32:26.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-31T02:57:23.053" Score="-8" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a thought. We should help people write their stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people may want suggestions, ideas, feedback, and so on and we should make a stack exchange for those people as well. Just a suggestion what do you use think? Because this site is overly strict with its rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52876" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T00:36:39.643" Title="Why don’t we help people write their stories?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7887" CreationDate="2020-05-31T18:30:23.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because that's not what this Forum is for&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing stopping you, or any other member of this website for that matter, from helping people write their stories. In fact, some of the members of Worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; help people write stories - just not on World Building itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World Building, when you get strict about it, is a simple question-answer forum which seeks to fulfill a single highly-specialized niche - establishing the setting of a story. Fundamentally, any story can be broken down into several discrete components, and one of those components is the setting of the story. And, furthermore, we specialize in a specific kind of building - that is, the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, a good story has &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; to it, and symbolism, and all those things which make a reader identify with the story and enjoy reading the tale that's been spun for them. That is, the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. That's not what we care about. We care about the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;. And it's this laserlike focus on the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; which lets us function cleanly. Art, you see, is a matter of interpretation. Yesterday's masterpiece is today's dishrag and today's dishrag is tomorrow's masterpiece. Or, to put it in WBSE terms - it's too opinion based. But what isn't opinion based is &lt;em&gt;science&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reasoning&lt;/em&gt; - and those too broad categories are what you can fundamentally fit every problem here into. Either it's a question about how the world works - 'science', it's a question as to how to apply a fictional concept within a set of rules - 'reasoning', or occasionally it's both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows the site to function cleanly, efficiently, and to serve everyone who wants to use it. And that is, after all, the goal. The goal of WBSE is to solve the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; in World Building, and if we allow for additional features, we jeopardize that clean ability to solve problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that there exists what you're looking for already everywhere else. There's a literary stack exchange which &lt;em&gt;deals&lt;/em&gt; with more story-oriented questions, like character development and so on. Not to mention that there are numerous critique groups scattered throughout the internet which will be happy to welcome new writers. Given that we wouldn't actually be providing anything new by expanding the website and we'd be sacrificing the unique thing we have, it's just not worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T18:30:23.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-06-04T18:51:53.930" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scientific-speculation.codidact.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dr6be.png&quot; alt=&quot;Scientific Speculation Q&amp;amp;A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T18:51:53.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T14:40:21.377" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arash Howaida has asked the neatest question I’ve seen on this site in months. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177917/how-to-shape-societys-values-such-that-paleontology-becomes-the-largest-most/177918&quot;&gt;How to shape society&amp;#39;s values such that paleontology becomes the largest / most profitable industry?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use this thread to brainstorm a good answer. Any useful answer coming out of this discussion I will post as a community answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll add a bounty for this question once enough time elapses for me to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember: the goal is to shape society to value the history behind fossils and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the fossils themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, there are three sketchy ideas that seem to me to hold promise but need development:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time travel is profitable, so learning about history is profitable. Only problem is that direct learning by visiting the past will be more effective than paleontology. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aliens. We are at war with aliens who descend from our dinosaurs. Learning about the dinos may give us a way to defeat the aliens, so paleontology becomes part of the military industrial complex. Problem: seems unlikely that key military break will come since the aliens will be further (in time) from T-Rex than we are from the common ancestor of all mammals. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some sort of medical discovery. Like if we discover that a single virus killed all the dinosaurs, figuring out &lt;strong&gt;mumble mumble something&lt;/strong&gt; about the dinosaurs might help us fight a similar virus that is slowly extinguishing sequential mammal species. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these is very compelling. Can we do better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/178026/26246&quot;&gt;One of the current answers&lt;/a&gt; has this awesome summary of the problem:&lt;/strong&gt; “If you want to make paleontology the largest/most profitable industry in real life, you need to make it so that it has some direct application to real life that makes it relevant. Relevant enough that it doesn't just benefit humanity when funded (and therefore could be passed off as a luxury), but there have to be actual reasons why cutting funding would be bad.“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T15:42:43.397" Title="Brainstorming answers to the awesome paleontology question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7890" CreationDate="2020-06-06T15:42:43.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I still think that something to do with aliens is the best direction to go. It makes fossils and knowledge about them the most immediately valuable, because alien tech is by default so far beyond our own tech, that everything else fades in comparison. For aliens to have come here, they need advancements in space propulsion, medical science, bio-engineering, etc., all way beyond our current understanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not even need the threat of an invasion; the discovery of alien science in creatures living 65 million years ago would make their study the most valuable form of research on the planet. Any country or NGO not studying dinosaurs would miss out on the chance to get hold of that sweet tech, and fall behind in the arms race that would inevitably ensue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can work if those advancements can be found in the dinosaur biology itself. What if the remains we see are actually the vessels that the aliens used to come here; which they genetically engineered to behave like creatures so they would multiply and take care of themselves, until the day the aliens needed another fleet? Then the asteroid wiped them out, and the aliens, stuck either on Earth or somewhere else in the solar system, perished there. If the aliens do not fossilise well, because they and their tech are too soft and perish quickly - either due to biology or as a self-destruct mechanism - then their presence could have gone unnoticed until the one well-preserved specimen is found, kicking off the research boom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is that dinosaurs do not have to be aliens themselves; they fit too neatly in the earth biological tree for that; but they can be existing creatures engineered to be useful to aliens in a way we did not realise until we found an alien. The only way of studying the aliens would be by studying the remains of the creatures they created, which contain a shadow of their creators. And maybe only the Brontosaurus is actually an alien weapon or spaceship, but we won't know for sure until we have rigorously studied every Cretaceous creature on the planet. Any missed species might contain knowledge that would make the discoverer nation a superpower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T15:42:43.397" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7887" CreationDate="2020-06-08T00:36:39.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because writing stories is always opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artistic stacks like ours color a bit outside the Stack Exchange box. Stack Exchange &amp;mdash; via its original site, Stack Overflow &amp;mdash; is based substantially on one concept: that an objective question has a single best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that time SE has posted about the difference between &quot;good subjective&quot; vs. &quot;bad subjective&quot; because an increasing number of sites aren't always a smooth fit into the engineering-based premise that started the company. But that has never changed the basic operating conditions of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One specific question, one best answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding fits reasonably neatly into that premise. The act of building a world is inherently objective. Worlds have rules, structure, limits, and as such a single question can be asked and a best answer obtained.  This, despite the fact that we've fought subjective questions and impossible-to-choose-between answers since day #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the moment you open the door to writing, you make the entire site very subjective. Plot, character choices, circumstances, none of that is inherently objective. They're all completely malleable and change based on what the author wants. And by asking a how-to-write-my-story question, you changed all the respondents into authors. Any number of answers and they're all equally &quot;best&quot; based solely on the OP subjectively liking one over another.  AKA, it's opinion-based (both from the perspective of the respondents and the perspective of the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while Writing.se exists, it won't take how-to-write-my-story questions either. They're no more interested in the subjective world of helping people write their story than we are. Their focus is learning writing skills, not helping someone write a story (and there is a BIG difference between those).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, Stack Exchange is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a discussion form. It's a question-and-answer site. But how-to-write-my-story questions are always (IMO) discussion forum material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T00:36:39.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7861" CreationDate="2020-06-08T13:23:15.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Describing the behavior as a weapon misses the service aspect to future readers. Pulling a particularly good answer up to the top &lt;strong&gt;can be&lt;/strong&gt; a service, I don’t generally use the “downvote others” on active questions, but I have done it on historical questions to bump something good up once the dust settles when a whole bunch of answers are all within 1 or 2 votes of each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it is good behavior on active questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T13:23:15.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7899" CreationDate="2020-06-11T05:23:59.863" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite suffering from an acute Generalized Anxiety Disorder for a brief moment you know that feeling when you accidentally received a windfall of a significant amount of cash and you are stupefy momentarily, I am delighted to received 2 identical gold badges 4 hours apart but I have no idea which of my questions are the winning entries. I am wondering how to identify the 2 questions that added 2 gold badges for me because I need it badly to optimize my gold badge farming strategy ;D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stay indoor &amp;amp; stay safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T06:30:16.420" Title="Is it possible to see which of my question earns me the &quot;Socratic&quot; gold badge?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7897" CreationDate="2020-06-11T06:12:10.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, going to the help center and clicking on badges&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QSiQK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QSiQK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then clicking on the badge you want more info,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T368A.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T368A.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gives the list of users having been rewarded with that badge and the post which was involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, being the Socratic badge a multi question badge, you won't see the 100 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jj37g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jj37g.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can go to your profile, question tab, list on date and see which 100 upvoted questions strike is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T06:12:10.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7897" CreationDate="2020-06-11T06:30:16.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quite a unique scenario, somebody winning &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/89/socratic?userid=8400&quot;&gt;two Socratic badges&lt;/a&gt; so soon after each other. Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to see which of my question earns me the “Socratic” gold badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of your questions contribute towards the Socratic badge. First of all, it counts the number of &lt;em&gt;days&lt;/em&gt;, not questions; full details are in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/67399/295232&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange. It boils down to the fact that you have between 200 and 299 &quot;positive days&quot; (days where you asked only &quot;good&quot; questions) and (as of today) you have a &quot;positive question record&quot;, which (grossly simplified) means something like &quot;more than half of your questions have been well received&quot; (again, details are in the FAQ). Your good question yesterday may have caused that; it could even be an upvote or reopening of an old question. It's not possible to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T06:30:16.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-15T20:17:16.313" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has struggled for a very long time over raw idea generation. There can be no best answer for raw idea generation. The OP is asking for the proverbial spaghetti to be thrown against the wall so he/she can overcome creator's block. Unless something has changed in the last year, asking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; (a question that is poorly bounded) is off-topic, but asking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; (a question is well bounded) is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that even a finite list of things breaks Stack Exchange's basic premise that a well-asked and specific question will have a single best-answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, well-bounded idea generation can be as valuable to the many visitors to this site as any specifically-answerable question. Therefore, to remove the ambiguity around whether or not a question should be considered an idea-generation question, I therefore propose a new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Popup&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A survey question asks for a list response without expectation of a best-answer selection. Survey questions are required to be finite in nature (see &quot;Catalog of Question Types&quot; - &quot;Finite List of Things&quot; in Meta), meaning they are well-bounded with conditions, limitations, definitions, and specifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A survey question asks for a list response. The list may take the form of one answer expressing a list, many answers each expressing one item on the list, or a combination of the two. Survey questions are not expected to have a best answer and respondents answer knowing no such choice may ever be made. This tag is not a license to seek unlimited or unbounded raw idea generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Survey questions are required to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite in nature&lt;/a&gt; (vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite in nature&lt;/a&gt;, which is off-topic), meaning they are well-bounded with conditions, limitations, definitions, and specifications that keep answers focused on the particular problem proposed in the question. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this case, survey questions may be held to a higher expectation of specificity than other questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; As a general example, &quot;How can I...&quot; and &quot;What would happen if...&quot; questions are frequently poor survey questions as they are often too broad and very poorly defined.  On the other hand, Vesrei's question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/178549/40609&quot;&gt;Fauna evolved to use portals&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is reasonably well bounded and an example of a suitable question for this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-question&lt;/a&gt; tag is not a license to seek unlimited or unbounded raw idea generation. It will be considered abuse to use this tag when asking a question that should have but one best answer in an effort to cause a greater number of answers to be posted. Users are responsible for respecting the difference between seeking a bounded list and seeking a best choice. This tag does not abrogate the user's responsibility to understand how to ask a good question as defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Similar Tags on Other Stacks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/tags/denomination-survey/info&quot;&gt;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/tags/denomination-survey/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Discussions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2336/40609&quot;&gt;Should we rename Idea Generation?&lt;/a&gt; (this is about the old VTC reason)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2329/idea-generation-in-help?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=1|63.1400&quot;&gt;Idea Generation in Help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=3|59.5770&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2732/being-more-up-front-about-idea-generation?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=6|56.6633&quot;&gt;Being more up front about idea generation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4698/opinion-on-questions-that-involve-idea-generation-or-lack-a-right-answer?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=10|38.1666&quot;&gt;Opinion on questions that involve &amp;#39;idea generation&amp;#39; or lack a &amp;#39;right answer&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alternative View Point&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm recommending the creation of this tag, I respect the fact that we may suddenly see 90% of questions using it because people think it will produce a higher quantity of answers &amp;mdash; not realizing that the consequence (because the question was not framed for the purpose of a list) is lower quality answers. From this perspective, the presence of the tag has the potential of causing more problems than it solves. If you believe this to be the case, you should down vote this recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, answers to this post should posit issues in support of, or in opposition to, this recommendation to help site users better understand the consequences of this tag. Discussions seeking clarification about the use or abuse of the tag should be in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T20:17:16.313" Title="Proposed tag: survey-question" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7902" CreationDate="2020-06-17T23:49:54.593" Score="10" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stated purpose of the Help Center is to provide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Detailed answers to any questions you might have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that I have observed in many newcomers to Worldbuilding.SE (and have experienced myself) is a general lack of easily-accessible definitions for a lot of the terms that are commonly used here, such as &lt;code&gt;tl;dr&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;OP&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Opinion-Based&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;Off-Topic&lt;/code&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While people are more than happy to tell you what terms like these mean, it can still be a little overwhelming to new people. As a result, I would like to suggest adding a glossary to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; that defines these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nota Bene: It turns out that the Help Center is a bit hard to modify even for moderators, so instead the definitions are being added to the community wiki which @JBH helpfully created.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Please feel free to add more via edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T22:55:05.810" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T23:06:57.840" Title="Definitions of Site-Specific Jargon" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|help-center|faq-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7901" CreationDate="2020-06-18T02:14:12.863" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Changing the Help Center is not a simple thing — and it shouldn't be. Most of it is in the control of Stack Exchange, not the individual Stacks. This is a perfectly good place to create exactly what you want.  I'll convert this answer to a community wiki so that anyone and everyone can add to it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributors:&lt;/strong&gt; Please alphabetize contributions. Thank you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Worldbuilding.SE Abbreviations, Terms, and Slang&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/40353/295232&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Glossary - Dictionary of Commonly-Used Terms&lt;/a&gt; which may also be useful to consult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge&lt;/strong&gt; - Challenges the question's approach to a problem, re-frames the problem, then solvs the newly framed problem. (Can require considerable persuasion to pull-off succesfully, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134752/enforcing-a-speed-limit-in-medieval-times/134765#134765&quot;&gt;answer here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/148561/how-can-powerful-telekinesis-avoid-violating-newtons-3rd-law/148609#148609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) A meta-discussion introducing the concept of frame challenges to new users is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Handwave&lt;/strong&gt; - Purposely glossing over a known logical discrepancy in something. A handwave is often an intentional decision to ignore one issue, to instead focus one's energy on developing something more interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Handwavium&lt;/strong&gt; - The mechanical equivalent of &lt;strong&gt;Unobtanium&lt;/strong&gt;. Handwavium is a device or technology that &amp;quot;just exists&amp;quot; within the scope of a question/answer, how it works being irrelevant. &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic&lt;/strong&gt; - A phrase that indicates the question is considered inappropriate or in violation of the rules and intent of the site. For more information &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6130/40609&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lampshading&lt;/strong&gt; - An in-universe explanation of logical inconsistencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Original Poster&lt;/em&gt; - An acronym that identifies the author of the matter being discussed. In the majority of cases, it refers to the author of the question. However, in comments to an answer, it can (uncommonly) refer to the author of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion-Based&lt;/strong&gt; - Refers to both the Stack Exchange cause for question closure and the Worldbuilding-specific meaning. In short: either it is believed no answer can be given to a question without basing the answer on opinion or the OP cannot judge a best answer in any way other than by opinion. For more information &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phlebotinum&lt;/strong&gt; - A less-used synonym of &lt;strong&gt;Handwavium.&lt;/strong&gt; Most commonly seen in the phrase &lt;em&gt;applied phlebotinum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SE&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt; - This abbreviation refers to the Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow corporation and/or the general policies of Stack Exchange. In most cases this refers to the site Help Center but can also refer to policies and discussions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.SE.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack(s)&lt;/strong&gt; - A community within Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Too Long... Didn't Read&lt;/em&gt; - Used to indicate the end of background or supporting information and the beginning of the summary or gist of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unobtanium&lt;/strong&gt; - A (fictitious) chemical, alloy, or substance which perfectly fulfills the requirements for a usage case. The term is famously used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://james-camerons-avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Unobtanium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Cameron's Avatar&lt;/a&gt;. Another classic example is Vibranium from the MCU. &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unobtainium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Vote to Close&lt;/em&gt; - An acronym that usually indicates the comment is explaining a reason a close vote was cast. Users are not obligated to provide explanations and the use of this acronym does not imply they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC:OT-NAW&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Vote to Close: Off-Topic - Not About Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6439/40609&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC:OT-SITE&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Vote to Close: Off-Topic - Question belongs on another site in the SE network&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6438/40609&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC:POB&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Vote to Close: Primarily Opinion-Based&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTR&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Vote to Reopen&lt;/em&gt; - An acronym that usually indicates the comment is explaining a reason a close reopen was cast or an explanation of what could be done to secure a vote to reopen. Users are not obligated to provide explanations and the use of this acronym does not imply they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WB.SE&lt;/strong&gt; - Worldbuilding.SE - This abbreviation refers to this sub-site of Stack Exchange. Like SE, often invoked when discussing policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T23:06:57.840" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T23:06:57.840" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-06-18T02:14:12.863" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7907" CreationDate="2020-06-24T19:46:28.257" Score="10" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently reviewing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179272/if-soldiers-that-dont-die-from-infection-or-bleeding-exist-how-would-pre-gunpo/179277#179277&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, and I got into a bit of a debate with @JBH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He posited that &amp;quot;Not all questions can or should be answered here&amp;quot;, and that it is low-quality due to the low quality of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179272/if-soldiers-that-dont-die-from-infection-or-bleeding-exist-how-would-pre-gunpo&quot;&gt;the question it was answering.&lt;/a&gt; While I completely agree with him that the question was bad, I personally think that this answer made the best of a bad situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, JBH recommended that I bring the question to y'all: &lt;strong&gt;Should we give new users the benefit of the doubt when they do a minor infraction like that one, or do we need to use greater measures?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-07-09T11:08:38.687" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T11:08:38.687" Title="Should we downvote answers from new users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2020-06-24T20:05:38.693" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer was written by a new user who is almost certainly unfamiliar with the standards and scope of the site. This was their first time posting &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; on Worldbuilding or even the Stack Exchange network as a whole. The question they answered isn't amazing, but then again, a new user likely doesn't know how the Stack Exchange format works. I agree with you; I wouldn't be too harsh on them for a misstep like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree with anyone who downvoted the answer on that basis. That's arguably an abuse of downvotes. (Heck, even if the answer had been written by an experienced user, it's possible that they could have answered because they thought the question was fine.) Regardless of the user's background or experience, there's no need for someone to punish an answer because of the faults of the question. Not what downvotes are for. I've seen great answers to not-so-great questions before. Why judge one post by the content of another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all . . . maybe some folks could have been gentler to both the question asker and the answerer. They're both first-time posters, and I think they got met with a bit of an undeservedly harsh reaction. Phrases like &amp;quot;Are you serious?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sorry, brutal truth&amp;quot; are not the ideal greetings. I personally would have been a bit off-put if I was in either of their shoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T20:05:38.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-25T13:31:58.360" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179294/how-can-human-and-orcish-tribes-cooexist-on-the-steppe&quot;&gt;How can human and orcish tribes cooexist on the steppe?&lt;/a&gt; I tried to ask how orkish tribes could coexist on the steppe with a human khanate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind this is a question about nations and culture, something which acording to the faq explicitly are on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this the question got closed with being to story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which elements of the question is the problem and how can I edit to remove them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="411" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:50:01.143" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:50:01.143" Title="How should I modify my question about orks on the step to reopen it?" Tags="|support|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7905" CreationDate="2020-06-25T20:08:10.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, story based.  As your query is written, the answers will largely focus on the choices the Khan makes: why hasn't he sought to obliterate them? In other words, the question is leading towards answers that speak to the choices and actions of individual characters within a narrative framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example answer would be: &lt;em&gt;the Khan has not chosen to obliterate or drive the Orcs away because they're kind of dumb and make good buffers against potential enemies; plus, if you're strong willed, they do what you tell them to do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example answer would be: &lt;em&gt;the Khan has not chosen to obliterate or drive the Orcs away because his favourite wife is an Orc and she's the real power behind the throne&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ya: you're going to need to edit your query to change its focus from actions of characters to fundamentals of society &amp;amp; culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's kind of obvious, but I'd start by deleting the bit where you ask &amp;quot;why hasn't the Khan slaughtered or driven the Orcs out?&amp;quot; That's a dead ringer for story based closure right there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T20:08:10.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2020-06-25T20:41:22.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a matter of new user vs experienced user. This is really more a matter of confounding one person's work with another: and I think JBH is wrong on this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can debate whether or not the query was good, bad, or could be improved elsewhere. You two obviously think the question itself was bad while I think it's a good question and a line of inquiry worth exploring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough! But you know what? There's a way of dealing with questions that we think are bad. We can engage the OP in discussions on how to improve the question. If it's bad because there's no research, we can downvote the question. If it's poorly written or a bad fit for WB.SE, we can vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to me, it looks JBH's real gripe is with the querent. Going after the respondent is just bad form, and I'm surprised he went so far as to downvote the answer. I think his well received comment (&amp;quot;The Help Center teaches us...&amp;quot;) is more than enough of a response. And as a matter of general principle, I agree with him 100%!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question to be addressed here is: &lt;em&gt;does the answer in question warrant a downvote on its own merit or not?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the bit about movies, though an interesting aside, is beside the point, but the respondent does actually provide  a reasonable answer with a solid rationale. If bleeding &amp;amp; infection are more or less removed as expeditious ways of killing or incapacitating an enemy, then you need to come up with a different way of doing things! Bashing their heads in is a pretty good alternative!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it: if someone takes the time to consider a problem and offers a well thought out response to a question we don't like, it's not really our place to punish the respondent. In my opinion, this was a gross overreaction to a response; and I actually request that JBH rescind the downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T20:41:22.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2020-06-26T02:25:20.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question isn't really asking whether or not you should downvote answers on bad questions. This question is whether or not we should cut newcomers to the website slack when it comes to gray infractions. But to discuss the later, I need to discuss the former, and more specifically, how gray it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is answering a bad question wrong? Yes, absolutely. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site with specific rules and one of those rules is that certain questions aren't allowed on this website. Answering such questions encourages this behavior. Thus, even if you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer a question in full detail, if it breaks the rules of this site, you really shouldn't. Rules don't exist to be bent, they exist to be followed. Of course, though, these situations falls on a spectrum with a double axis - one axis is the question and the other is the answer. On the one side you have the extremes - a glaringly bad question and someone answering who is doing so in bad faith, i.e. said member knows he shouldn't be doing it. On the other hand, the other end is a question which is &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; a little too vague but you, in good faith, think you have an answer that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the former, I'm all for downvoting. It doesn't matter what your content is, if you're flagrantly breaking site rules in bad faith, a penalty &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required to try and maintain order. I'm sure if a user does it repeatedly enough then the mods will step in and ban the user, but in the time being, I would argue that a downvote is justified. In the case of the later, than a downvote seems inappropriate - there was no bad faith and the user was justified in believing that site rules could be followed. Just vote to close and be on your way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gray area comes in the space between these extremes. If a question is sufficiently bad, is good faith enough of cover or should we say that at a certain point good faith can't protect you. On the other side, if you're answering a question you think is unsuitable, does the fact that it might actually be suitable save you? I think that can be a discussion for another time, but I would agree with The Daleks position in regards to new users - they just haven't had the time to experience the website yet. Certainly they should read the guidelines in the Help Center, but the guidelines are just that - &lt;em&gt;guidelines&lt;/em&gt;. Veteran users of this site will have a much better feel for what is acceptable and what isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the axis here, and consequently the gray area within it, should be expanded for the newcomers to the website. It's really not fair to hold them up to the standards of a veteran and we don't want to scare them away. Close down the question if it violates site rules, fine, but that's just a consequence. I don't think a penalty is in order unless we actually have reason to believe bad faith, and it's unfair to assume bad faith towards newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T02:25:20.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2020-06-26T16:40:33.937" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two things here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sentence is correct, but that is a generalization that we should handle with care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) and that it is low-quality due to the low quality of the question it was answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We award the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/226/lifejacket&quot;&gt;lifejacket silver badge&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/227/lifeboat&quot;&gt;lifeboat gold badge&lt;/a&gt; for giving good answers to bad questions (and which later become good questions). Badges are awarded for behaviours that we encourage, so by all means, let people answer negatively scored questions. And don't vote on answers based on the quality of their questions, vote on answers based on their own quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T10:23:02.740" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T10:23:02.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7912" CreationDate="2020-06-28T06:35:14.400" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/179531&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; containing a dead link to a website with lots of ads that does not redirect (I used a redirect tracker. So how can we alert the mods to delete it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T15:03:20.260" Title="How should we respond to dead links?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7911" CreationDate="2020-06-28T06:40:53.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag as spam or for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With enough spam flags a post is deleted without a moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find more info on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/25/how-does-spam-protection-work-on-stack-exchange/?cb=1&quot;&gt;Overflow Blog&lt;/a&gt;, aptly advertised on the right of the screen as I am writing this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T15:03:20.260" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T15:03:20.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7911" CreationDate="2020-06-28T07:47:17.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another option is to edit the post, and either remove the spam links completely or replace with a better link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eg, links to ebay expire after a while, so grab a useful image and insert that instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a dead link, then you can check if the page was archived at the wayback machine, or find another URL that serves the same purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13944" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T07:47:17.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-30T11:19:01.977" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179623/how-big-could-a-space-ship-get-while-still-being-plausible&quot;&gt;How big could a space-ship get while still being plausible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's asking about what sort of energy expenditure would be necessary to move a moon-sized starship capable of effective-faster-than-light travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has done even the most basic research into physics knows that the answer is a lot of energy. No seriously, a LOT. As in, an almost unimaginable amount. Probably more in a second than our entire planet currently generates every year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, there can't really be a good answer to such a question, because all answers are effectively going to boil down to &amp;quot;a lot of energy&amp;quot;. Yes, you can take a guess then add some back-of-the-envelope physics calculations demonstrating how much your guess comes out to and relate it to something in the present, but at the end of the day you're still guessing, and honestly that's not achieving anything more than pointing the asker to one of many websites that has already gone through the same exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I don't think such questions add any value to this site. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how should I treat such questions? I've been downvoting them, but should they rather be closed and pointed to a canonical duplicate instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I also have an issue with the fact that said question has so many upvotes, but that's another conversation entirely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T11:19:01.977" Title="What's the official stance on physics-based questions that show no research effort?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-06-30T14:18:29.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-30T16:12:59.707" Score="-8" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;This recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179623/how-big-could-a-space-ship-get-while-still-being-plausible&quot;&gt;reality check - How big could a space-ship get while still being plausible? - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, reminded me of the difference between real &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;science fiction&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;sci-fi&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science fiction takes a simple concept (ideally a possible event, but blatantly impossible can work too) and asks &lt;em&gt;what if&lt;/em&gt; it actually happened?  The resulting story is about the &lt;em&gt;reactions&lt;/em&gt; of society and/or individuals to that speculative change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sci-fi is simply a normal, main-stream story that has been transposed into the tropes and memes that have become a standard part of science fiction.  The story itself is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to have good sci-fi, it still won't be science fiction.&#xA;The original &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; was science fiction; the original &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; was sci-fi.&#xA;The film &lt;em&gt;Outland&lt;/em&gt; was blatant sci-fi (a remake of &lt;em&gt;High Noon&lt;/em&gt;), but still well done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This science fiction versus sci-fi distinction isn't recent.&#xA;70 years ago, &lt;em&gt;Galaxy Magazine&lt;/em&gt; was founded on this basic premise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpqFS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpqFS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Parallel stories, one told as SF, one as Western.  Galaxy promises never to do that.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As author Spider Robinson said, there is science fiction, and there is sci-fi, the plural of &lt;em&gt;scum fum&lt;/em&gt; (or perhaps &lt;em&gt;scus fus&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize it would be a big job, and is unlikely to happen, but it would make things a lot nicer if questions distinguished between science fiction and sci-fi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember one of Isaac Asimov magazine editorials giving a very disparaging definition of &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot;, but can't seem to find it anywhere.&#xA;And almost all the items I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; find ended up referring to Asimov as a &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot; writer, something that he would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/ahyszg/full_context_for_that_asimov_quote_on_the_crucial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asimov quote on the crucial essence of science fiction&lt;/a&gt;, he stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is important about science fiction, even crucial, is the very thing that gave it birth — the perception of change through technology. It is not that science fiction predIcts this particular change or that that makes it important; it is that it predicts CHANGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;crucial factor&lt;/em&gt; is something that sci-fi neglects; it doesn't care about how technology changes society, it only cares that society &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; changed, and simply makes use of that setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, by now the distinction between &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot; has all but disappeared, at least in terminology, but that is the real problem here.&#xA;When vocabulary changes, especially when distinct words become synonyms, meaning gets lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments given so far make several observations, each of which misses the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original distinction between sci-fi and sf had little to do with the quality of the writing or production (though there was often a high correlation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither did it have a lot to do with the plausibility of the underlying premises.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nor with hard versus soft science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, these are all important issues, and they can apply to both science fiction and sci-fi, but they are &lt;strong&gt;unrelated to the definition&lt;/strong&gt; of &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text you quote (in the image) doesn't seem relevant at all. it just makes the claim that Galaxy will have what its author considers &amp;quot;quality content&amp;quot;, but doesn't make any point about the distinction you are drawing between &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot;. — terdon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that is exactly what it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; say.  You are completely missing its point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say that their fiction will be &amp;quot;high quality&amp;quot;; it says that their fiction will be fiction that &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be science fiction, as opposed to fiction that would work equally well in a different genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are stories that can be told &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in a science fiction setting.&#xA;Consider classics such as &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;These novels are pure science fiction: their plots &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; the science fiction genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A novel such as &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; could be written in a science fictional setting, with the Pequod as a space ship, and the whale as some kind of space monster.&#xA;But no matter how well written it is, and no matter how believable it is, and no matter how hard the science is, it would still be &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; is a story about things that happen to a man while working for a government agency, you didn't get it.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; is about something far deeper and broader than that; it is about society, about the need for war, about Stalinism, about truth, and about many other important ideas.&#xA;But those ideas could be expressed only as an allegory using the techniques of science fiction; it simply wouldn't work as a mainstream novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is what makes something science fiction; not the apparent genre, but the &lt;em&gt;necessity&lt;/em&gt; for that genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted article, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/18/it-drives-writers-mad-why-are-authors-still-sniffy-about-sci-fi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'It drives writers mad': why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi? | Books | The Guardian&lt;/a&gt;, is about authors that write science fiction and then deny that what they have written &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; science fiction.&#xA;It's an excellent illustration of my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a good reason they do this, and that reason is directly related to the (current lack of) distinction between science fiction and sci-fi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider an analogy.&#xA;Suppose your knowledge of Christianity comes from such experiences as choir masters with Roman hands and nuns that rap knuckles with rulers when you don't follow their rules.&#xA;You also learn about the Inquisition and Crusades as part of the history of Christianity.&#xA;Later in life you happen to read the Bible and discover some amazing philosophical insights.&#xA;But when you describe your new ideas to someone else, they tell you &amp;quot;yes, that's what Christianity is all about&amp;quot;.&#xA;&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; you say, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;'s not Christianity, it's something far better than that!&amp;quot;.&#xA;The concepts you have developed are so much better than what you have come to think of as Christianity that they can't &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; be Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing happened when Margaret Atwood discovered that the best way to express her ideas about society, women, religion, politics, etc. was to use the devices of science fiction to build her metaphor.&#xA;She of course didn't recognize it as such, because her past experience with that genre was with crappy sci-fi films and stories of, as she said, &amp;quot;monsters and spaceships&amp;quot;.&#xA;She must have thought: &amp;quot;This couldn't possibly be science fiction, it is &lt;em&gt;so much better&lt;/em&gt; than that nonsense.  Don't insult me!&amp;quot;.&#xA;But in fact she &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; written science fiction, she simply couldn't admit it because she didn't know that real science fiction even existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a lost cause, but once again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science fiction stories contain metaphors, allegories, etc. that cannot be told in any other genre without losing their message.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sci-fi is a genre of stories that use the memes and tropes of science fiction to tell a story that could just as well have been told in a different genre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add this distinction to my list of lost words, the most egregious of which is &amp;quot;wherefore&amp;quot;'s being subsumed by &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, rendering poor Juliet's pivotal speech universally misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59975" LastEditorUserId="59975" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T00:54:53.377" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T06:30:46.960" Title="Should we distinguish between &quot;science fiction&quot; and &quot;sci-fi&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7915" CreationDate="2020-06-30T23:21:19.473" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be inclined to vote against this, for a couple of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: It's not clear to me that this is really a settled issue. I can find loads of folks online arguing both for and against making the decision, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://damiengwalter.com/2018/08/07/science-fiction-vs-scifi-vs-sf-what-is-the-true-definition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least one person claiming that this dispute has been going on for nearly half a century&lt;/a&gt;. Our sister site, Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy (which, interestingly, uses &lt;code&gt;scifi&lt;/code&gt; in their URL), has &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/604/41082&quot;&gt;an interesting discussion on the matter&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm not convinced that there's a consensus - it seems to differ based on what community you ask (e.g. writers vs. filmmakers vs. movie fans vs. critics). So I'm a little bit wary of us coming down on one side of the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Plus, if we were to end up doing so, we'd almost certainly have debates on the great majority of posts that refer to &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot;, and nobody wants to go through this whole argument again and again and again. . .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads into a second point: The average person almost certainly assumes that the two terms are synonymous. Yes, I admit that very few people on this site in particular fit the description of an &amp;quot;average person&amp;quot;, but still - I'll bet my hat that ~90% of folks trying to use one of the terms will &amp;quot;misapply&amp;quot; it if we claim that there's only one correct way to use each term. I think this is a case where expected user behavior should strongly determine policy. Seems a bit pointless to expend so much lot of effort on policing that arguably won't succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally - and this is something I've only come up with after trying to wrap my head around the nuances here for a day or so: put bluntly, what's the point? Sure, we all want clarity and precision in posts, but I don't see this leading to clarity or precision - precisely the opposite. A question asker &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; just says that their universe is a &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot; setting; they give many more details, and those details are the key ones. Correcting this term won't make posts clearer to answerers, commenters, or casual readers because that term doesn't encapsulate the information they need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T21:03:36.160" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T21:03:36.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7915" CreationDate="2020-07-01T02:37:31.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem with this is that &amp;quot;sci-fi&amp;quot; (or even &amp;quot;SF&amp;quot;) is simply the abbreviation for &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sci-fi is a very broad genre that can cover anything from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hard sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;soft&lt;/a&gt;, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;science fantasy&lt;/a&gt; to space mystery to speculative fictions of various kinds. And of course, each also has its common and high literary variants! In other words, the two terms are tautologically synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;Galaxy&lt;/em&gt; is promoting seems to be something more like hard sci-fi or at least literary sci-fi. (It's been a while since I've read Galaxy, so I could be mistaken there! I'd have to poke around for a copy to see.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue that this is a distinction without a difference and is a can of worms best left unoped, Pandora! Consider for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/18/it-drives-writers-mad-why-are-authors-still-sniffy-about-sci-fi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;Machines Like Me&lt;/em&gt;. The author stamps his foot and says &amp;quot;it's not science fiction&amp;quot; when it's obvious that what he's writing is in point of fact sci-fi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;shrug&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T02:51:29.353" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T02:51:29.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7915" CreationDate="2020-07-01T17:37:19.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;All due respect to the world famous Canadian author Arachnid &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_(bird)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saxicolinas&lt;/a&gt;, but the difference he proposes is silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only difference between science-fiction and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sci-fi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sci-fi&lt;/a&gt; is that science-fiction is the full-length formal term, and sci-fi is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colloquial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;colloquial&lt;/a&gt; short nickname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It may be a purely &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearctic_realm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nearctic&lt;/a&gt; cultural phenomenon. In my own language, that is Romanian, and in French, and in Italian, the normal short nickname for science-fiction is SF (seh-feh in Romanian, ess-eff in French, esseh-effeh in Italian). Surely if the difference of usage existed and was recognized other languages would have acquired it -- after all, the Nearctic realm is one of the world most prominent sources of scientific-fictional fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The difference in usage between science-fiction and sci-fi does not exist, or at best (to be charitable) is limited to a handful of critics in North America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The actual terms in actual usage are &amp;quot;hard science-fiction&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;soft science-fiction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The querent edited the question to clarify that in their opinion,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;There are stories that can be told only in a science fiction setting. Consider classics such as&lt;/em&gt; The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, Frankenstein, Brave New World, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; 1984. &lt;em&gt;These novels are pure science fiction: their plots require the science fiction genre.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is patently, blatantly, obviously false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The invisible man:&lt;/em&gt; there is &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; necessary science fiction in the plot. The &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; plot revolves around around the psychological dissolution of a person who is invisible and has no means of returning to a normal condition. It is irrelevant how the hero became invisible -- it could have been a spell, it could have been a magic potion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Plato's &lt;em&gt;Republic&lt;/em&gt;, written in the &lt;em&gt;4th century before the common era&lt;/em&gt;, there is a story of a certain &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyges_of_Lydia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gyges&lt;/a&gt;, who found a ring which had the power of making him invisible: and using this newly found power, he seduced the queen, murdered the king with her help, and crowned himself king in his stead. Plato uses this story to illustrate the point that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That much for the &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; science-fiction character of a story older than the hills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;, the science-fiction aspects are pure window-dressing. The core of the story is H. G. Wells's doom and gloom prophecy of the necessary degeneration of the human race induced by the capitalist mode of production. The SF framework is just a framework, a device skillfully used by the writer to present his gloomy prophecy in a captivating manner. The exact same prophecy could have been presented in other, different, ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; is a sciencey-fictioney retelling of the old story of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golem&lt;/a&gt;. It's a great horror story, told by a great writer; but it is in no way &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; science-fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aldous Huxley's &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; is an exploration of the dark sides of any Utopia. One could profitably think of it as a novelization of Thomas Hobbes's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leviathan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The science-fiction aspects are there only in order to illustrate Huxley's belief that there is no technological silver bullet to solve the problems of mankind. &lt;em&gt;Any&lt;/em&gt; human society will have its misfits, and its dark side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the &lt;em&gt;soma&lt;/em&gt; which is consumed by the denizens of the &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; and keeps them in a haze of mindless haziness is prefigurated in episode of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus-eaters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lotophages&lt;/a&gt; in Homer's (!) &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. That story is more than two and a half &lt;em&gt;millennia&lt;/em&gt; old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And finally, the inclusion of Orwell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on the list of fundamentally sciencey-fictioney novels is very strange. There is precious little SF in it: just about all the technical devices were already available in Orwell's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see what makes Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; an essentially science-fiction work, which doesn't equally apply to Hayek's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Road to Serfdom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, Orwell is a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better writer, and his work is much richer in nuances and humanity; but essentially SF? I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T21:21:12.203" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T21:21:12.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-01T18:18:09.240" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey guys I really want to find this chat room from u/Valerio Pastore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tnSnw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tnSnw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But like, I can’t find it. I really want to view the messages on here, so how do I find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52876" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T19:12:22.950" Title="How do you find a chat room that doesn’t appear when you click on it?" Tags="|discussion|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7919" CreationDate="2020-07-01T19:12:22.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chatrooms with only a few messages are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/159976/295232&quot;&gt;automatically deleted after 7 days&lt;/a&gt;. I can see them because I'm a moderator elsewhere in the Stack Exchange network; I don't think there's much harm in sharing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yYABm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yYABm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T19:12:22.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:25:52.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who uses this site sparingly, these meta questions always baffle me. What kind of a community doesn't give new members the benefit of the doubt? Looking at the question (both this and others like it) without focusing on SE's specific rules, it's kind of silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of course&lt;/strong&gt; you should give new users the benefit of the doubt! Obviously rules need to be enforced, and spam questions, gibberish, completely unanswerable questions should all be removed immediately. But rules like &amp;quot;be specific&amp;quot; are themselves not specific and widely open to interpretation. JBH spent &amp;gt;300 words lecturing the OP on the poor quality of the question and how unaswerable it was which takes far more effort than just voting to close or leaving a comment asking clarifying questions. Two other users had no problem providing decent answers, so clearly the &amp;quot;unanswerable&amp;quot; quality was subjective. Ironically, those 300 words of complaints contained some ideas that would have made part of an interesting answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specificity rule is particularly confusing for a new user, as this is &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; SE, a site for figuring out problems related to worlds that don't exist, and therefore are inherently open-ended to some degree. But some more specific-minded users seem to treat it like reddit's AskScience community. The linked question seems specific enough for me - they've provided a time period and specific details about the effect they're interested in. It could have been rephrased as &amp;quot;how many soldiers during (time period) died from blood loss and infection during battle?&amp;quot; but that just asks the same question in different words that could just as easily be closed with &amp;quot;unanswerable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;do research first&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So look at this from the perspective a new question asker. Say you forget to describe some background information. In one school of thought, you get a close notification and/or a comment asking for more information on the parts you left out. In JBH's, you get a long series of comments chastising you for interpereting &amp;quot;specific&amp;quot; differently and then a debate between users about how the rules of the site should work, which makes it immediately clear that nobody agrees on the rules so studying them isn't necessarily a great use of your time. Which site do you want to be part of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75885" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:25:52.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-11T14:40:50.663" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question is opinion-based when, in a nutshell, the answer is &amp;quot;whatever you want the plot to do&amp;quot;. For example, a question where the answer is dependent on the story character's motivations and feelings, meaning that there are an infinite number of equally possible answers depending on the person's mood and backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's a pretty big exception that arises when you are asking not about one, but a large quantity of people making a motivated decision. For example, &amp;quot;Why would a firefighter save his pet kitten over his neighbours?&amp;quot; would get closed for opinion-based with the fury of a thousand suns. But &amp;quot;Why would a society value pets over people?&amp;quot; wouldn't - at least not for being opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about people &lt;em&gt;in aggregate&lt;/em&gt; ask about not individual motivations, but about societal circumstances. And the scope does not have to be an entire culture. It can be limited to an occupation, as here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/174385/why-would-an-adventurer-use-a-sword-frog&quot;&gt;Why would an adventurer use a sword frog?&lt;/a&gt; (why would [occupation] do X)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168496/the-eating-habits-of-metabolic-wizards&quot;&gt;The eating habits of metabolic wizards&lt;/a&gt; (how should [occupation] do X)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102999/how-can-an-absolute-ruler-in-a-large-country-keep-their-regional-governors-polit&quot;&gt;How can an absolute ruler in a large country keep their regional governors/politicians in check?&lt;/a&gt; (how could [occupation] do X)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key factor is that when you are asking about many people, the individual's motivations are not assumed to apply - or only in the broadest sense. An individual can decide anything based on their preferences, but the preferences of a group of people are a property of the world; and therefore a part of world-building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, that is my understanding of the matter. Please correct me if I am wrong. Since if I understand it, then surely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179879/what-kind-of-names-are-suitable-for-colonies-in-universe&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; should have been kept open? It asks about what people would name colonies. Sure, an individual can name their colony Mittenstown because they love their cat so much, but colonisers, in aggregate, form an occupation. So what names would be used for colonies, that sounds very much like a question about the rules of a system to me. Therefore, not opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I made any mistake in this reasoning then I would love to be corrected. I don't care as much about this question as I do about understanding WB.SE's rules; a task that has been challenging me to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T22:17:41.047" Title="Are questions opinion-based when asking about the behaviour of people in the aggregate?" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T14:27:33.493" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask members of the Worldbuilding community: can you recommend any fiction, poetry, film, or other media &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the process of world-building? To clarify, I’m not asking for works that are the &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of world-building (as most sci-fi and fantasy pieces are), but rather your favorite works that deal with the &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;appeal&lt;/em&gt; of designing a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I asking this question? Recently, I’ve read two pieces that handle this theme, and I really enjoyed how they made me think deeply about the process of participating in WSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jorge Luis Borges’ short story &lt;em&gt;Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius&lt;/em&gt;, in which the protagonist learns of a secret society of academics who work to design a fictional society from the bottom up by “cataloguing” it in a series of encyclopedias.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italo Calvino’s book &lt;em&gt;Invisible Cities&lt;/em&gt;, in which Marco Polo narrates to Kublai Khan about the strange cities that he has encountered during his travels. It eventually becomes doubtful whether Polo has actually seen these cities or is just inventing them himself (and whether it even makes any difference if they’re real or not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d love to hear some suggestions for further reading/viewing about Worldbuilding-related topics! (Especially from experienced WSE users who have been doing this for much longer than myself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57741" LastEditorUserId="57741" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T22:06:25.370" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T15:23:35.593" Title="Fiction/art about the process of Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7923" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:11:48.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First - because leaving this unsaid would bug me - &amp;quot;whatever you want the plot to do&amp;quot; is grounds for closure for being &lt;em&gt;too story-based&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;. An example of the latter would actually be, &amp;quot;What color should the awning of my shopkeeper's store be?&amp;quot; You could argue there are psychological factors to picking a color, but it's probably chosen based on the theme of the store or the proprietor's personal preferences. Those are three distinct and equally valid solutions; there's no way for the community to decide which is the best solution to the problem because it depends on what the asker wants - their opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to your regularly scheduled answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community has a long-standing policy of rejecting questions asking for naming advice for a couple of reasons. First among these is &lt;em&gt;names&lt;/em&gt; tend to produce an infinite list. &lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; to name something is similarly going to produce an infinite list; each and every answer could be radically different and they would all be equally valid solutions. The question could provide constraints on what a valid naming system would be, but that would be the same as defining the system!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with magic, the Worldbuilding SE does not create names for users. We can help &lt;em&gt;refine&lt;/em&gt; a system, but the rules that govern it can only be defined by their creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6986" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T13:11:48.897" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7923" CreationDate="2020-07-13T21:50:03.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in your opinion, the naming of colonies is a system with rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look for example at the names of ancient Greek colonies. This is a very good example, because (1) they established quite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a lot of autonomous colonies&lt;/a&gt;, and (2) they seldom resorted to the lazy solution of naming them &amp;quot;New Mother City&amp;quot;. So then, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colonies with meaningful names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neapolis&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;New City&amp;quot;, because the colony was re-established in the 6th century BCE; before that it used to be called Parthenope, &amp;quot;pure eyes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;virginal face&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zancle&lt;/a&gt;, feminine form of &lt;em&gt;zanklon&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;sickle&amp;quot; (from the shape of the harbour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabzon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trapezous&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;table&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;flat surface&amp;quot; (from the shape of the hill on which it stood).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chersonesus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chersonesus&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;peninsula&amp;quot; (today called Sevastopol, from pseudo-ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;Sebastopolis&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;augustan city&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicaea&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;victory&amp;quot; (they were not bashful).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emp%C3%BAries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emporium&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;market-place&amp;quot; (because it was).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agathe&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; (short for &lt;em&gt;agathe tyche&lt;/em&gt;, good fortune).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Panormos&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;all-port&amp;quot;, for the great natural harbor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naucratis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naucratis&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;mistress of ships&amp;quot;, the great international port of Egypt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancona&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancona&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;elbow&amp;quot;, from the shape of the promontory protecting the port.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least three &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbia_(disambiguation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olbia&lt;/a&gt;s, &amp;quot;bliss&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinunte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selinus&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;celery&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colonies named after gods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apollonia&lt;/a&gt;s;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ill-fated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paestum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poseidonia&lt;/a&gt; (which, having been eventually abandoned, left the ancient temples in excellent condition);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Benghazi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euhesperides&lt;/a&gt; (modern Benghazi) &amp;quot;good &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesperid nymphs&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhumi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dioscurias&lt;/a&gt;, modern Sukhumi.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysupolis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dionysopolis&lt;/a&gt;, modern Balchik.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colonies bearing (a mangled form of) a native (or sometimes, a pre-Greek Phenician) name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sybaris, Histria, Adria, Massalia, Syracusae, Mesembria, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Calabria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhegium&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrigento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Akragas&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_(Chalcidice)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mende&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdera,_Thrace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abdera&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thassos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thasos&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halicarnassus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Halicarnassus&lt;/a&gt; and so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see any &amp;quot;systematic rules&amp;quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in modern times, in the Americas we have names derived from classical languages or classical geography, such as Philadelphia &amp;quot;Brotherly Love&amp;quot;, Cincinnati &amp;quot;The Curlies&amp;quot;, or Memphis; and names derived from (mangled forms of) native names, such as Minneapolis (the best known American Indian and Greek hybrid), Oklahoma, Omaha and  Kansas; and many names derived from names of people, such as Denver, Pennsylvania, Charleston, Charlotte and so on; and of course many New things; and quite a few meaningful names, such as Cedar Rapids, Rapid City, Rock Hill, Battle Creek, South Bend, Los Angeles, Veracruz &amp;quot;True Cross&amp;quot;, Santa Fe &amp;quot;Holy Faith&amp;quot;, Las Vegas &amp;quot;The Meadows&amp;quot;, Buenos Aires &amp;quot;Good Breezes&amp;quot;, La Plata &amp;quot;The Silver&amp;quot;, Rio de Janeiro &amp;quot;River of January&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Systematic rules? What systematic rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T22:17:41.047" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T22:17:41.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7924" CreationDate="2020-07-17T01:08:54.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most works that deal with geopoetry per se are &lt;em&gt;non-fiction&lt;/em&gt;. Tutorials, how-tos, manifestoes, personal statements, advice articles, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;fiction&lt;/em&gt;... One could, I think perhaps successfully, argue that Silmarillion is an answer to this question. It is, of course, highly mythologised, but I think lays out in a high artistic form some of the ideas that Tolkien expresses more prosaically elsewhere. Especially matters of aesthetics and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little more tangentially: Adam's &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/em&gt; (certainly the movie) and Pratchett's &lt;em&gt;Strata&lt;/em&gt; address the process of worldbuilding in a very literal sense. The settings there involve geopoets who are actually able to sculpt the worlds they conceive of, giving them actual form &amp;amp; existence within the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still unwritten, so probably doesn't count, but one thing I've long planned to write is &lt;em&gt;The Universal Catalogue&lt;/em&gt; of Bespoke Worlds. This is a fictional company I often use when answering worldbuilding questions along the lines of &amp;quot;what if a world were like XYZ&amp;quot;. Often times, their geopoetical philosophy (i.e., &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; geopoetical philosophy) comes through as well. That would be a fiction that is not only the result of worldbuilding, but is also about the art and process of geopoetry itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T01:08:54.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-18T18:57:35.833" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/180683/anatomically-correct-lamia&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Lamia&lt;/a&gt; has received numerous downvotes, but without any comments to say what problems there are to fix. What problems does this question have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T04:23:07.960" Title="What problems does this question have?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7930" CreationDate="2020-07-19T04:09:48.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd hazard the guess that it's because the question is a little unclear. You mention mythological origins, but then seem to be asking about some nebulous modern interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider reading the Meta post on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;. This gives a number of suggestions on how to craft a good ACS query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to hazard the further guess that your response has been downvoted because of its lack of structure and string-of-random-facts-cobbled-together nature. It's just random sentences &amp;amp; phrases strung together like mismatched beads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't expect perfection in writing, but do appreciate when care is taken with the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T04:09:48.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7930" CreationDate="2020-07-19T04:23:07.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is my point of view on why that question has been downvoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First and general issue: The late ACS has degraded&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been already a couple of questions here addressing the point of misuse/abuse of the Anatomically Correct Series as an easy way to get reputation with questions of disputable quality. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7775/30492&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7842/30492&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. I guess many users now get hitches only at seeing an ACS question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second and particular issue: some of your questions seems to be contributing to the first issue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your questions are along the line of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could [put arbitrary features or name here] evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evolutionary pressure could lead to [put arbitrary features or name here]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might give the impression that you are attempting to exploit a certain type of questions without putting too much effort in the question itself. I think you have been commented more than once that &amp;quot;given the right amount of events, anything could evolve&amp;quot; and yet you keep asking for another permutation of features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, it's in your rights to ask yet another question along the ACS line, on the other hands it's in other users' right to downvote it because it is not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is exactly how the community expresses its opinion on each and every question and answer every user posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T04:23:07.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7939" CreationDate="2020-07-21T19:12:32.077" Score="19" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; can be used for world building. The tag text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about the application of mental or physical suffering, usually without the intent to kill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to think of ways torturing could be used for building a world, but nothing comes to mind. I can only think of it as a plot instrument, so questions sometimes get votes to be closed as story-based. I have also checked some questions and I'm starting to think most of them would be just as acceptable (or not) for the site without the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we burninate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T16:10:31.970" Title="Why do we [torture] ourselves with this tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-21T19:24:23.887" Score="6" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reviewing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/181128/40609&quot;&gt;Most painful way to kill somebody with 10 bullets?&lt;/a&gt; I looked up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; tags. Their definitions aren't great in context of worldbuilding, and I think that's encouraging people to slip non-worldbuilding questions into the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more egregiously abused of the two is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt;. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot;&gt;review of the questions using the tag&lt;/a&gt; shows that 75% of the questions (9 of 12) have negative votes and 33% (4 of 12) were closed. That strongly suggests to me that the community's belief that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; questions are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To be fair...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there could be a place for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; (and similarly &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; tag, although its percentages are not as high) tag within a world-building context.  In other words, if we changed the tag's description from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deliberate killing of an individual in a controlled environment and its methods and ethics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The political, social, or technological considerations involving the sanctioned and deliberate killing of an individual in a controlled environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...(Although I'm not completely happy even with that)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we might get fewer abuses of the tag.  Maybe. I'm not convinced a lot of people read the tag descriptions before applying a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anyway...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; tag doesn't get a lot of use, and what use it gets is predominantly down-voted by the community, which suggests the tag should be dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;An upvote to this question is IN FAVOR of DELETING the tag&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you're in favor of keeping the tag, please consider posting an answer that explains how the tag description &amp;amp; wiki can be updated to better focus users on worldbuilding rather than storybuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T21:43:04.913" Title="Should the [tag:execution] tag be removed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7933" CreationDate="2020-07-21T19:39:43.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of the New Sun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series by Gene Wolfe. The main character is a journeyman torturer. &lt;em&gt;The Claw of the Conciliator&lt;/em&gt; (second book in the series) won the Nebula award.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00CJJSJHG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Under Jurisdiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (link goes to Amazon) series by Susan R. Matthews. The main character is a Ship's Inquisitor; and yes, he tortures people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The First Law&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series by Joe Abercrombie. One of the main characters is a torturer in the employ of the Union's Inquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_Land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Closet Land&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 1991 film by Radha Bharadwaj, with Madeleine Stowe (as the prisoner) and Alan Rickman (as the torturer). (A little bit too much on the artsy side, I would say.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hangman%27s_Daughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hangman's Daughter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series by Oliver Pötzsch. The main character's father is, well, a medieval hangman and yes, he tortures witches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T21:07:16.750" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T21:07:16.750" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-21T20:58:38.430" Score="8" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medical&lt;/a&gt; has 89 questions as of now and the following short and long descriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and injury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag describes questions that address the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and injury. The scope of this tag is vast, so it is important to be specific and use additional tags to clarify what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant tags may include &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medicine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medicine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt; has 169 questions right now, with the following descriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about treatment methods as well as substances used to heal wounds and cure diseases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medicine is a discipline concerned with healing the sick and injured, with alleviating suffering and with promoting physical and mental well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medicines are substances used to help creatures recuperate from illnesses. They can be injected or taken orally, in the form of solids or liquids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disease&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disease&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disease&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epidemiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;epidemiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;epidemiology&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They seem similar enough to each other that they could be turned into one. Should we merge them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T22:17:08.320" Title="Should [medical] and [medicine] be merged?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2020-07-21T21:04:27.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real question is whether we are happy to do basic research for the querents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer is that in practice it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in principle &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions which show complete lack of research and very little thought &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be downvoted and closed. But... Some subjects we find palatable, and we even find pleasure in explaining how to approach a problem in an easily understandable way. Other subjects we find disgusting, and since we are disgusted we have no compunction to downvote and close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example directly related to the [execution] tag: in Henryk Sienkiewicz's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quo Vadis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (with many adaptations, notably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis_(1951_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1951&lt;/a&gt; film with Peter Ustinov as Nero, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis%3F_(miniseries)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1985&lt;/a&gt; miniseries with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Nero and Max von Sydow as Peter, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis_(2001_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2001&lt;/a&gt; Polish film) there is a long episode revolving around the creative ways in which the fictional emperor Nero had the fictional Christians put to death as fictional scapegoats for the real historical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_Rome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Fire of Rome&lt;/a&gt;; the episode is essential to the message of the book, and illustrates an essential aspect of the fictional depraved Roman world. I can easily see a 21st century Sienkiewicz asking a question on this site trying to clarify his mind about how would those depraved fictional Romans go about staging the spectacular executions of a few thousand fictional victims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T21:04:27.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7936" CreationDate="2020-07-21T22:17:08.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple answer: yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it might make more sense to combine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medicine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medicine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pharmacology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pharmacology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pharmacology&lt;/a&gt; tags, making one a synonym of the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see a difference between pharmacology and medical procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T22:17:08.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7933" CreationDate="2020-07-22T04:27:54.813" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that we've gotten a lot of torture &amp;amp; violence queries of late that seem to run story based, but this is no reason to eliminate the tag. If anything, we're just demonstrating that the forum's system works by closing off topic queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what about torture itself? Well, it has long been a part of jurisprudence. For long, it was considered both a valid means of obtaining confessions &amp;amp; eliciting evidence and also a valid form of punishment itself. Torture also plays a part in various coming of age rituals, initiation rituals, magical rituals, and religious &amp;amp; spiritual practices. It is thus part of the very culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB.SE exists for the purpose of helping writers and geopoets build up their fictional worlds. It's not all bunnies and flowers. Sometimes the flowers bite back, slowly digesting the bunnies in the process. In other words, well made worlds delve into the questions of evil as well as good; and also into the mindsets of peoples &amp;amp; cultures that turn blind eyes to objective evil and even actively engage in it for seemingly noble purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've also dealt with this query before. Not tag-specific, mind, but in general terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3394/should-questions-about-painfully-killing-people-be-welcomed-on-this-site&quot;&gt;Should questions about painfully killing people be welcomed on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7186/answer-contains-description-of-real-life-animal-torture-and-my-edit-request-was&quot;&gt;Answer contains description of real-life animal torture and my edit request was denied. Is such content acceptable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6550/reasoning-behind-deletion-of-gruesome-content&quot;&gt;Reasoning behind deletion of gruesome content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &amp;quot;torture&amp;quot; ourselves with this tag because it is a legitimate line of inquiry for any writer, geopoet, game designer, or hobbyist to delve into.  E.g., two of the stories I published at Universe Factory couldn't be written without consideration of the arts of torture and execution in the service of Justice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have tags in the first place, for those who use them, to organise queries and help people search by topic. It's my contention that the tag ought to be kept as it is every bit as vital an aspect of worldbuilding as creature design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T04:27:54.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7915" CreationDate="2020-07-22T06:30:46.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Marketing: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been in marketing a long time. The above definition is the polite definition.  Here's one that might be more accurate, if not more precise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marketing is the act of convincing someone your product is the right choice even when it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Galaxy&lt;/em&gt; magazine wasn't espousing an established definition — it was marketing itself through elitism. &amp;quot;Buy our product because it's the real McCoy!&amp;quot; It's a marketing tactic that's a whole lot more popular than you might think and one of the foils of the movie &lt;em&gt;Kate &amp;amp; Leopold&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;If you eat his margarine maybe your hips will shrink and he'll come to your door.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire argument is daft to me. I remember an old &lt;em&gt;Dragon&lt;/em&gt; magazine that had a comic strip pointing out a basic fact. It never matters if it's a blaster or a Wand of Lightning - the story is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the story really is the same. a &amp;quot;what if?&amp;quot; story examining the reactions to that speculative change will always rely on one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seven basic plots&lt;/a&gt; no matter what anybody says or thinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My family ran a micropublishing company for seven years. We read tens of thousands of manuscripts. Believe me, there's no discernible difference between &amp;quot;scifi&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; other than in the eyes of people who want to argue about it. In fact, you'll almost always find a &amp;quot;boy meets girl&amp;quot; subplot because subconsciously we know that no story will sell without a little sex — and the story isn't science-fiction-vs-scifi just because someone changed it to &amp;quot;boy meets fembot&amp;quot; and tried to examine the pathos behind disassociative relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: I believe there's no value whatsoever to implementing this recommendation. I'm firmly in the camp that there isn't even a consistently objective distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T06:30:46.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7924" CreationDate="2020-07-24T15:17:23.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;J.R.R. Tolkien's short story, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ae-lib.org.ua/texts-c/tolkien__leaf_by_niggle__en.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leaf by Niggle&lt;/a&gt;, jumps to mind as an example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_by_Niggle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki article&lt;/a&gt;, it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...offers the underlying philosophy (Creation and Sub-Creation, ...) of much of Tolkien's fantastical writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...is often seen as an allegory of Tolkien's own creative process, and, to an extent, of his own life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it will be very different from the examples you list in your question - it strikes me as a more reflective piece, with more emphasis on the character of the worldbuilder than on the worldbuilding itself - an illustration of how closely Tolkien's worldbuilding was tied to his life and his faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I hope it's helpful. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51300" LastEditorUserId="51300" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T15:23:35.593" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T15:23:35.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7942" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:16:36.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug report with this tag is neither declined nor destined for implementation/fix. When such a decision has been made, the tag will be changed accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple factors that may leave a report under review. There could be consideration of whether the proposed feature or bugfix is feasible or useful. There could be investigations on the complexity of the necessary solution. There could be insufficient information in the feature or bug report as presented. Site developers may provide additional comments to request more information or to provide status updates as appropriate to the status of the review, until such time as the decision for approval or decline is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by staff and ♦ moderators; the latter will only use this tag as part of the escalation process described here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/348642/295232&quot;&gt;What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T13:23:31.620" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T13:23:31.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7943" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:16:36.910" Score="0" Body="Indicates that a change in functionality is currently under consideration, or needs further investigation." OwnerUserId="8732" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T13:23:22.893" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T13:23:22.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-27T08:37:44.737" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was visiting the site and noticed a weird blur along the left margin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y4Eza.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y4Ezal.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot of blurred shadow&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out this is apparently the robot's shadow, which somehow ends up being rendered on the page even when I can't see the robot itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &amp;quot;Hide left navigation&amp;quot; (and &amp;quot;Disable top bar stickiness&amp;quot; if it matters) checked in my network-wide preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks vaguely like the site was designed exclusively for people with big screens with nothing else to put on them. I always keep multiple browser windows open side by side, and don't even think they are particularly narrow (this one is over 2300 pixels wide, including the browser's tiny amount of chrome; but this is a Retina display, so I guess the browser's viewport is actually only something like 1150 pixels wide) but apparently it's too small to accommodate this site as designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can get rid of the shadow if I stretch the window so it covers almost the full width of my 15&amp;quot; display (the resulting screenshot is almost 4000 pixels wide; then, these artifacts land outside the text column, and I can actually see the robot that they belong to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way this could be disabled, or the site redesigned to accommodate visitors who are not running the browser always maximized on a large display?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12218" LastEditorUserId="12218" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T04:26:22.277" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T17:32:27.737" Title="Robot bleeds into non-maximized page" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7944" CreationDate="2020-07-28T05:29:28.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can reproduce this when I resize my browser window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzlZ4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzlZ4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot showing the same see-through behaviour as the question where the robot Slartybartfast can be seen vaguely through the background&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background colour of the content div is set to &lt;code&gt;rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.95)&lt;/code&gt; so, it's 5% transparent. Therefore, you will always see part of the overall background through that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, there are two CSS rules for &lt;code&gt;#content&lt;/code&gt; in the same &lt;strong&gt;primary.css&lt;/strong&gt; file. The first one is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#content {&#xA; box-sizing:content-box;&#xA; margin:0 auto;&#xA; padding:15px;&#xA; width:1264px;&#xA; background-color:#fff&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which defines the background to be a solid white colour but the second one overrides the first one with a slightly transparent background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#content {&#xA; max-width:1100px;&#xA; width:calc(100% - 164px);&#xA; background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0.95);&#xA; border-radius:5px;&#xA; border:1px solid var(--black-100);&#xA; border-top-width:0;&#xA; border-bottom-width:0;&#xA; border-left-width:0;&#xA; border-right-width:0;&#xA; padding:24px;&#xA; box-sizing:border-box&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an addon that allows you to define user styles (I personally use Stylus) then you can add a stylesheet for the site with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#content {&#xA;    background-color: #fff&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a ready made rule for the worldbuilding sites that can be imported with Stylus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@-moz-document domain(&amp;quot;worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&amp;quot;), domain(&amp;quot;worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&amp;quot;) {&#xA;#content {&#xA;    background-color: #fff&#xA;}&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which results in this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70MGq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/70MGq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot where the robot Slartybartfast is not visible behind the background&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you prefer a userscript instead, then this can work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ==UserScript==&#xA;// @name        Make the worldbuilding background solid&#xA;// @namespace   Worldbuilding.SE&#xA;// @match       https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/*&#xA;// @match       https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/*&#xA;// @grant       none&#xA;// @version     1.0&#xA;// @description Change the background to a completely solid color and remove the transparency.&#xA;// ==/UserScript==&#xA;const newStyle = document.createElement('style');&#xA;newStyle.type = 'text/css';&#xA;newStyle.innerHTML = &amp;quot;#content { background-color: #fff }&amp;quot;;&#xA;&#xA;document.head.appendChild(newStyle);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T05:39:25.893" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T05:39:25.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-29T20:04:27.247" Score="15" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context:&lt;/strong&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Writer's Group&lt;/em&gt; subreddit, there's the rule that you have to critique, not just submit drafts/stories to be critiqued, which makes me think what I'm doing right now is very wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at my questions, not counting the ones that have been deleted by me or the bots, you still have 288 left. Just 12 more and I can hold off the Persians, assuming I can bottleneck them first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some of it wasn't well-received, but my current &amp;quot;streak&amp;quot; looks promising. However, I've never really given answers, only 26. That's one answer for every eleventh question. And some of those were poorly received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gap will only continue to grow over time, as I still didn't ask about how werewolves and other furred demi-humans keep themselves flea-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also had many questions, regarding dragons, a tag that seems to be an attention magnet. Of course, I developed the concept over time, such as having dragons initially use a biogenic oil as a breath weapon, then aqua regia, then sulfuric acid, then micromachines that were powered by the acid. This happened with other variables as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, that tag seems perfect for &amp;quot;milking&amp;quot;. I mean, what is a dragon? &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/C-ZqSlrCVcE?t=84&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A miserable pile of secrets!&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It still just feels &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/jAWvLQvacpc?t=26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;wrong&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt; wrong. I mean, when developing a world I don't think even a thousand questions will be enough, but I asking them without giving many answers in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it okay to do what I'm doing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32016" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T07:03:17.890" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T04:22:15.220" Title="&quot;Am I asking too many questions?&quot; Is it okay to ask more than you answer?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|community|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-07-30T05:56:18.077" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb, when a user does something wrong or off, they will notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either a moderator will get in touch, or the community will make it visible through comments, votes and meta question. See for example the recent example of ACS and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; discussions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that you have not received any warning, so it sounds like you are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover recently the whole SE has moved back to +10 rep for upvotes on questions, while for a while it was +5. This says that asking questions is equally important as giving answers. Think of it: you can post a question and get no answer, but you can't answer a question which is not asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T05:56:18.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-07-30T13:02:18.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stress Less:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it worries you, then just make a point of answering more questions. Some people love the creativity, and others are looking for points and badges (it takes all kinds). I suspect that most people here earn more points off answers than questions, so the point-driven people are okay with it. Maybe you're feeling insecure about your worldbuilding, and in that case it's probably good to spend more time on researching your own stuff. Then you can feel better when you do ask questions. I have a hard time asking questions, so my ratio of Q &amp;amp; A is about opposite of yours. It all evens out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one noticed and you haven't had a huge number of closed questions, I don't think you need to stress, unless stressing is what gets your creative juices flowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74691" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T13:02:18.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-07-30T13:52:28.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your title question, I'd just refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions; This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Desk&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;crickets chirping&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this reference on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;What Worldbuilding is All About&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're here to help you, whether you're a prospective worldbuilder or an experienced geopoet, devise, construct, build, refine, and clarify all aspects of your invented world!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're here to answer your questions, no matter how few or many (so long as they're a good fit for the forum!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's not a whiff or hint about asking too many questions!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T13:52:28.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-07-30T14:11:49.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On top of what everyone else said, we have medals for asking a lot of well-received questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/87/curious&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Curious&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (bronze): Ask a well-received question on 5 separate days, and maintain a positive question record.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/88/inquisitive&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inquisitive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (silver): Ask a well-received question on 30 separate days, and maintain a positive question record.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/89/socratic&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Socratic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (gold): Ask a well-received question on 100 separate days, and maintain a positive question record.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges are awarded for behaviours we want to encourage, so if you have progress towards these badges you're doing good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T14:11:49.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-07-30T21:17:16.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are two types of Worldbuilders - those who ask questions and those who give answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say 'Worldbuilder', I'm just referring to the way someone uses this site and not the actual act of Worldbuilding. It's not &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; true, but it's pretty close to it. If you take a quick glance at the publicly available information about this website, (by which I mean I took a sampling of about a dozen of the top 100 users) generally speaking it'll be someone who generally asks questions and someone who generally gives answers. Sure, everyone does both, but the difference is usually around a magnitude - take myself, for instance. I've given around 450 answers and asked only 8 at the time of writing this. Granted, Worldbuilding averages around 5 answers to a question, but even still I've only generated 40 or so answers*, nowhere close to the 450 I've given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that basically means is that, very unlike how critique groups are run (which I am familiar with, being part of one myself) in that everyone is expected to critique as well as submit, the way Worldbuilding is run is that there are two sides to the community - the questioners and the answerers. I would say that it's not just 'okay' with what you're doing, it's 'good' or maybe even 'excellent'. This is just simply how our site runs and in no way should you hesitate from asking question at any point just because you feel like you should answer more. Of course, that doesn't mean that you should lock yourself in the mode of 'I only ask questions', you've no doubt learned a great deal over the 288 questions you've asked as well as information you've gained on your own through research, so by all means, keep up both the questions and the answers as fast as you can think them up**.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*By '40 or so', I mean that by averages I should have about 40, but in actuality I have 59 so I beat the average. It could mean that I ask good questions, or vague ones which can be given far too many types of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Maybe not actually throw out every question that pops immediately to mind. Like, more than three a day seems excessive and if you ever reach that point, stop and ask the question to the meta again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T21:17:16.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7933" CreationDate="2020-07-31T04:31:10.250" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As unpleasant as the subject may be, there are plenty of worldbuilding applications for it. Perhaps it's not obvious if you're assuming the victim is human or of familiar physiology, but if you're talking about torturing a silicon-based individual, or someone who evolved on a liquid ammonia planet, or a supernatural being of some sort, the worldbuilding jumps to the fore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about torture in unlikely places? &amp;quot;My hero needs to torture a spy aboard the ISS, what options would be available?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T04:31:10.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7933" CreationDate="2020-07-31T16:00:37.690" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;world building and story are often entangled&lt;/strong&gt;. Either looking for a &lt;strong&gt;world building detail to explain/justify parts of the story&lt;/strong&gt; or coming up with &lt;strong&gt;backstory to justify your world&lt;/strong&gt; (building).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s for example take the crucifix, a symbol found on all kinds of religious items in the western middle ages. A question could be “how could a religious heretic be tortured and executed publicly in a most painful way”. Another example being the eagle in the flag of Mexico, deriving from the &lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt; how the Aztecs determined where to settle down. This is &lt;strong&gt;back&lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt;, but not part of the plot&lt;/strong&gt;. Instead it is needed to provide depth and coherent detail to the world (instead of just asking “what could a country put on its flag?” or “what symbol could religious followers wear on necklaces?”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other case is world building detail to explain/justify parts of the story: &lt;strong&gt;Stories are typically grounded within their world.&lt;/strong&gt; Let’s say I want my protagonist to (get) torture(d) at some point in my story. In that case the country has an attitude and legal regulations towards torture, which is probably somehow connected to their morals and religion. Or I simply seek historic connections - on what point in history which forms of torture were used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding stack&lt;/em&gt; is a place to &lt;strong&gt;ask for help about aspects of your fictional world that you lack the knowledge for solving yourself.&lt;/strong&gt; Many story-related questions can only be answered because of the hive mind of &lt;strong&gt;world building experts who provide scientific knowledge or knowledge of the human nature&lt;/strong&gt;. And those experts are here, in the world building forum, not some storytelling site (is there even a storytelling stack?).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Even a question like &amp;quot;how could my protagonist gut a victim to keep him alive for hours&amp;quot; relies more of that scientific (real) &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;(building) background knowledge than storytelling stuff (which in my opinion is the &lt;em&gt;three act structure&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;how to construct interesting protagonists&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just don't forget - everyone came here searching for help about things they couldn't solve themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67222" LastEditorUserId="67222" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T16:10:31.970" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T16:10:31.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2020-08-02T04:22:15.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's only natural for most of us to ask more than answer.&#xA;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we are only competent and knowledge about a tiny domain or a couple of domains while we are ignorant or not knowledgeable enough about most of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whenever I'm browsing there are many interesting question that require too much technical knowledge for my to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However when developing a world the need arise for many many sub problems and little details and all sorts of thing to be answered so you are in need of knowing about many fields thus you turn to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69342" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T04:22:15.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-06T03:24:52.680" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of interesting question here on Worldbuilding and some of them kind of skirt the line of what some people could consider 'socially acceptable'. That's because, from our perspective, this is a Question &amp;amp; Answer site dedicated to Worldbuidling and occasionally there will be worlds and cultures which are as strange and alien to us as we are to them and thus their standards of decency aren't our standards of decency. Basically, I'm trying to say that there can be some really off color question on this site which are genuine questions looking for answers. Now, obviously, some question are so distasteful and misguided that they're immediately closed and/or deleted, but some aren't. Sometimes there will be a question that a person could deem to be in incredibly bad taste to the point where no one should answer  it, yet unfortunately the numbers aren't with them to close the question. Under those circumstances, is it right to downvotes the answers to a question you don't like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In other words, if you run across a question that you find to be foul and repulsive, are you justified in downvoting answers to that question under the rationale of 'they shouldn't have answered that question in the first place'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this because that's pretty much what happened to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/183095/a-human-civilization-genetically-altered-themselves-to-specialize-in-certain-rol&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, (all the answers received downvotes within a minute of each other) and if the general consensus of the site is that voting like this is bad, then we might be able to form a unified front and do something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64961" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T23:40:42.820" Title="Is it reasonable to downvote answers because you dislike a question?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7956" CreationDate="2020-08-06T11:35:50.933" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7903/should-we-downvote-answers-from-new-users&quot;&gt;This has been addressed in a more specific form here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I'd argue the same: The real question to be addressed here is: &lt;em&gt;does the answer in question warrant a downvote on its own merit or not?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can certainly see how someone might &lt;em&gt;take offence&lt;/em&gt; at the question's wording (and if Mephistopheles is living up to his namesake, then I suspect there was some kind deliberate provocation leaning towards sensationalism); though the question itself is relatively non-offensive. If you switch all the colours around, the basic query is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct actions, obviously, upon reading a question one takes offence at include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvoting the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leaving a comment expressing that one has taken offence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bringing up the matter here in Meta where it can be rationally &amp;amp; dispassionately discussed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting the answer because one takes offence at or otherwise dislikes the nature of a question is an immature response akin to &amp;quot;wokeness&amp;quot; in its current less than complimentary sense. The action does not address any real or perceived issue, does not question or seek clarification of any issue and, in fact, is really little more than an act of irrational, perhaps puerile, vandalism. The moreso in light of the fact that the OP actually straight up says &amp;quot;this society is racist&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No, we really aren't justified in downvoting answers simply because we don't like the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers are two separate and distinct entities. As I said in response to the other question: &lt;em&gt;this is really more a matter of confounding one person's work with another&lt;/em&gt;. Whoever the vandal is seems to have expressed their &amp;quot;rage&amp;quot; (an irrational emotion) over an admittedly provocative question by taking that rage out on everyone who responded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this is all about worldbuilding. Cultures have their dark and evil sides, their failings. A well thought out world looks into these aspects of culture &amp;amp; history every bit as much it does the good stuff. We aren't here to pronounce moral judgements on question content based on real world morality and history. We're here to examine a question in light of whatever in-world context the querent gives us to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to Do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since no one can &amp;quot;undo&amp;quot; the damage at the back end,  this could be done very easily by someone clicking the upvote on everything, thus cancelling out the direct effects of the vandalism, without any taint of &amp;quot;reverse vandalism&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T17:22:58.480" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T17:22:58.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7956" CreationDate="2020-08-06T13:43:50.940" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I left a comment in that question saying the premise was racist, but the OP then also commented that yep, that was a racist world. Then it came to me: sometimes we mistake representation of evil with support of evil. Were we to condemn representation of everything we condemn in stories, we would not have stories. Star Wars would not be the same without the Empire, The Last Airbender would not be the same without the Fire Nation and The Hunger Games would not be the same without the hunger games!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question specifically did not sway me one way or another, so I didn't vote and I didn't check the answers. Knowing that this happened and everyone got a -1 like that, I just went there and gave everyone a +1 for balance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the ideal way to vote is to judge every single post, question or answer, according to its own merit. Downvoting an answer because you don't like the question misses the point of voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you think a question is so distasteful that it should not be on the site, it should be either flagged for moderation attention or voted for closure (everything distasteful usually fits into a closure category). It happened before, with questions regarding rape and torture. I don't think it's the case for the question being discussed, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T13:43:50.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7964" CreationDate="2020-08-09T04:52:58.620" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;in my question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/183334/can-bacteria-or-microorganisms-produce-or-excrete-blood&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one of the answer is merged or smashed together to the point i cant read it, is there a way to fix this? iam not sure this place is the correct place nor the word i use is correct for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;here the image, since i think others dont get the same problem like me judging by their reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DXPEr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DXPEr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i try to refresh, close and reopen, and wait till now to see is it will turn normal or not, but nothing change while Willick answer seems to be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and feel fee to edit the tag to the appropriate one since i dont know much about meta tag or how this place work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62918" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T17:21:08.850" Title="some of the answer text is smashed together in my question need help" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7956" CreationDate="2020-08-09T23:40:42.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an absolutely perfect world the answer would be no, it's not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, it's not a perfect world. It's a world where there are a diversity of opinions, motivations, educational levels, political persuasions, etc., etc. Add the all-too-human propensity to reward what we enjoy and punish what we don't and what do you get?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Help Center we should use more meritorious reasons for applying voting. But Stack Exchange encourages voting — they even have badges for doing it. Even we do it (I remember seeing a comment on one post, something along the lines of &amp;quot;seven answers to this question and not a single upvote? Why would you post an answer but not upvote the question?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, despite the Help Center suggesting otherwise, the site behavior being sought is to &amp;quot;vote early and often.&amp;quot; (Thank you Chicago Mayor Daley.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will inevitably be social voting. It can't be stopped. I'm not sure it should be stopped. I conceded that there is socially bad behavior (like posting an answer then downvoting all the other answers to artificially promote your own) and, as I recall, SE's engine can actually detect some forms of bad social voting and reverse them — but I'm sure it's not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it should be remembered that one person's appropriate is another person's inappropriate and vice-versa. We should remember that we have all kinds of people who visit this site, from all kinds of backgrounds and (perhaps importantly) &lt;em&gt;all kinds of ages.&lt;/em&gt; What might not be offensive to the adults could be (and in some cases &lt;em&gt;very much is&lt;/em&gt;) inappropriate for children — children that visit this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, I remember some years ago an OP complaining that vulgarity had been removed from his post. &amp;quot;We're all adults here...&amp;quot; was the argument. Of course, if that were true, we'd all realize there are children here and act according to the better angels of our nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, alas, what we'll actually do is what we want, rules or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T23:40:42.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7959" CreationDate="2020-08-11T17:20:55.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was caused by some specific links in an answer, when placed without markup. Only the answer containing the links was affected. I edited the answer so that the links were present with Markdown, i.e.: &lt;code&gt;[link text](link url)&lt;/code&gt;, and it solved the problem there. In order to allow for the problem to be debugged here, I am adding another answer with the text that caused the problem. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7965/21222&quot;&gt;Please see my other post in this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T17:20:55.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7959" CreationDate="2020-08-11T17:21:08.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a relevant excerpt from the post that was causing a layout breakdown in Firefox, so that the problem can be reproduced and verified in that browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition, bacteria are prokaryotic organisms. They are genetically simple (yes, that's a loaded term) and don't have a nucleus. Their existence is driven by replication. Most (with a few exceptions) are tiny compared to eukaryotic cells. So how would a simple prokaryotic organism make a complex eukaryotic cell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not as bad of a question as it seems on first glance. Red blood cells in humans don't have a nucleus. There are very few cells that don't. They can't replicate on their own and derive from nucleated red cells that have their nuclei removed. Most bacteria other than Mycobacteria have cell walls to cope with osmotic pressure from their environment. Mycobacteria (&lt;a href=&quot;https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Microbiology/Book%3A_Microbiology_(Boundless)/4%3A_Cell_Structure_of_Bacteria%2C_Archaea%2C_and_Eukaryotes/4.4%3A_Cell_Walls_of_Prokaryotes/4.4D%3A_Mycoplasmas_and_Other_Cell-Wall-Deficient_Bacteria#:%7E:text=Examples%20of%20bacteria%20that%20lack,to%20build%20their%20cytoplasmic%20membrane.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Microbiology/Book%3A_Microbiology_(Boundless)/4%3A_Cell_Structure_of_Bacteria%2C_Archaea%2C_and_Eukaryotes/4.4%3A_Cell_Walls_of_Prokaryotes/4.4D%3A_Mycoplasmas_and_Other_Cell-Wall-Deficient_Bacteria#:~:text=Examples%20of%20bacteria%20that%20lack,to%20build%20their%20cytoplasmic%20membrane.&lt;/a&gt;) are often intracellular parasites and tend to have even simpler genomes than most bacteria because they are depending on their hosts for biosynthesis. So how does a tiny, super-simple cell become something immense and complex? There are also some big bacteria (&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470015902.a0020371.pub2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470015902.a0020371.pub2&lt;/a&gt;) but these tend to be highly specialized to exotic environments. For something as small and simple as most bacteria to make a red blood cell, they would need to work as a team. Many bacteria can organize themselves into multicellular structures that seem to carry out more complex tasks, but are generally not considered truly multicellular (&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/lab-rat/bacteria-with-bodies-multicellular-prokaryotes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/lab-rat/bacteria-with-bodies-multicellular-prokaryotes/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest barrier in all this to having bacteria making blood is energy. The bacteria would not have the genome to make blood, or the manufacturing capacity to do so, but most critically there is no energetic advantage to making these huge, expensive, non-replicating red cells. Even if the bacteria could, they would need to be kept in a bioreactor of some sort with massive inputs of nutrients. Scientists certainly make genetically engineered bacteria that can produce large amounts of simple excreted materials, but the advantage is that the organism survives because the scientist &amp;quot;rewards&amp;quot; the species with survival for producing what they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T17:21:08.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7967" CreationDate="2020-08-13T13:43:52.620" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/183609/21222&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) with some links that don't show well-formatted. They are all formatted using the same structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; - [Seax][1] shark&#xA; - [Kukri][2] shark&#xA; - [Bayonet][3] shark&#xA; - [Karambit][4] shark&#xA; - [Rampuri][5] shark&#xA; - [Shiv][6] shark&#xA; - [Balisong][7] shark&#xA; - [Bowie][8] shark&#xA; - [Machete][9] shark&#xA; - [Athame][10] shark&#xA; - [Kilaya][11] shark&#xA; - [Kirpan][12] shark&#xA; - [Kris][13] shark&#xA; - [Puukko][14] shark&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the links are valid. But they show up as per the screenshot below. Notice that beginning on the 9th link, it starts showing the raw Markdown instead of formatted links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vmrjM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vmrjM.png&quot; alt=&quot;A screenshot of what the list above looks like on Chrome&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Chrome and that happens both on desktop and mobile. I don't think it's browser related, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2798/21222&quot;&gt;our list for the anatomically correct series questions&lt;/a&gt; does not have the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T13:54:03.673" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T13:54:03.673" Title="Links not formatting properly when there are 9+ of them" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7966" CreationDate="2020-08-13T13:52:37.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is caused by link number 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[8]: https://media.knivesandtools.com/Exact1200x800/140088/bo121547$01-boker.jpg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be precise, the &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; sign is throwing off the Markdown parser and/or the MathJax renderer. If you replace it by &lt;code&gt;%24&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#Percent-encoding_reserved_characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;percent encoding&lt;/a&gt; of the dollar sign, all links will work again. Note that link number 14 has the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T13:52:37.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7970" CreationDate="2020-08-15T21:38:09.220" Score="8" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello I just joined the stack exchange yesterday and multiple times have come across where my question was not understandable and that can sometimes be because I procrastinate and can be very lazy, if you have any ways you could help me, please share. I have never asked good questions 100% of the time and gotten my point across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user78797" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T12:11:10.647" Title="How Do I ask Good world building Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7968" CreationDate="2020-08-16T03:32:31.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excellent question! And more importantly, a good &lt;em&gt;first question!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your best bets will be to review the following resources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;The Tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;The Help Desk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;What Worldbuilding is All About&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;How to Write the Perfect Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We also have a place where you can practice writing questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/7184?answertab=active&quot;&gt;The Sand Box&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that we are here to help you build your fictional world --- it could be a fantasy world, it could be a sci-fi world, it could be an alt-historical world. Whatever it may be, it should not be our actual Earth. Questions about real world physics or geography or biology or history or mathematics or theology or orbital mechanics should be addressed to the relevant Stack Exchange forums. We deal with questions about fictional physics, fictional geography, fictional biology and the like. We also deal with questions that are &lt;em&gt;rooted in&lt;/em&gt; a real world domain of study (like physics, like chemistry) but require you to provide the relevant invented world context that will make them on topic here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, don't feel like you need to rush into asking (and especially answering) queries. Take your time to learn about this forum &amp;amp; how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T03:32:31.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7968" CreationDate="2020-08-16T12:11:10.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are careless/lazy/a bad typist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make a draft outside of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your idea is new and you don't want to forget it, it is tempting to throw it directly onto Stack Exchange and then correct it afterwards.  By the time you edit it, someone will already have criticised your errors/omissions and voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't write your question directly into the question box on Stack Exchange; you are almost certain to make errors with the first draft. I suggest you write them first in a text editor or better, a word processor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do the latter, then you can correct spelling and grammar mistakes at your leisure. You don't have to keep Stack Exchange open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no hurry either. Save your your draft, leave it overnight and read it again the next day. See if it still makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once everything is right, simply copy and paste over to Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T12:11:10.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-08-16T22:12:58.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mkhzE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Help in the Sandbox as a Mentor!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T22:12:58.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7787" CreationDate="2020-08-16T22:14:16.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The best questions are perfected first in our Sandbox!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T22:14:16.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T19:23:13.223" Score="13" ViewCount="1626" Body="&lt;p&gt;You recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7933/why-do-we-torture-ourselves-with-this-tag&quot;&gt;had a discussion&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; which prompted our own discussion internally - and while we believe there are legitimate cases for discussing torture, there is currently some content within that tag that we simply cannot host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our sites accept people from 13 and up, and we have to keep content appropriate for that age - think PG-13 for US film rating system. For what I'm more familiar with (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_advisory_rating_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brazilian Rating System&lt;/a&gt;), it would place torture at least at 16 and up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot host &lt;em&gt;gruesome depictions&lt;/em&gt; of violence. You can still discuss torture or how to apply it to worldbuilding, but when you have to go in detail of what is happening, that's probably going too far. This is the same rule we apply to sexual and gambling content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means for the tag is TBD, there are a couple of options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can burnitate the tag and blocklist it if the Community believes it's the best idea, this would mean deleting the tag, blocking it from being created again and cleaning up most if not all of the content left behind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can clean up (probably most of) the questions currently in there by deleting them, a few examples of questions that would need to be deleted are:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/180379/sleep-deprivation-torture-methodologies&quot;&gt;Sleep deprivation torture methodologies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/176349/gruesome-content-skinning-people-and-actually-keeping-them-alive&quot;&gt;(GRUESOME CONTENT) skinning people and actually keeping them alive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157934/surgically-interconnecting-two-people-s-intestines&quot;&gt;Surgically interconnecting two people’s intestines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72594/flogging-and-punitive-mutilation-in-a-zero-g-environment&quot;&gt;Flogging and punitive mutilation in a zero-G environment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/69516/ideal-torture-machine-the-anatomizer&quot;&gt;Ideal torture machine: The Anatomizer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty good idea in place of what we can and can't allow, but I welcome thoughts on how strictly to apply them here (which will likely affect other sites and demand a more network-wide discussion too). A non-goal however is to create a bulleted list of everything that's allowed or not allowed, these simply don't work: when it's going too far, we'll all likely be able to tell it's going too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please give your thoughts below!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63098" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T21:57:32.717" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T00:24:42.700" Title="We cannot host gruesome depictions of violence, the [torture] tag has it and needs cleaning up" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-18T21:32:17.753" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for bringing this back ito discussion and shedding this new light - last time we ignored the fact that the minimum age in SE is 13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the most commonly used content rating systems in North America (specially the US, where SE is based), torture content would make SE fall into the following categories were it some other kind of media:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Parental_Guidelines#TV-MA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV-MA (age 17+)&lt;/a&gt; if it were a TV broadcast or online streaming series&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board#Ratings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M for Mature (age 17+)&lt;/a&gt; if it were a series of videogames&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.filmratings.com/content/downloads/rating_rules.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R - Restricted (age 13+ with an accompanying parent or guardian) or even NC-17 (no children under 17 allowed) (see page 7 of the PDF in the link)&lt;/a&gt; if it were a movie.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE does not fall under such content rating systems, but regardless - They provide good guidance. I think that since we do accept children of ages 13+ in the network, then each and every one of us has the obligation to make SE sites a safe place for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that I still maintain that torture is a plot element of mature novels, not of world building. &lt;strong&gt;I would have the tag burninated&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, we should check the de-tagged questions for their content and delete as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T05:13:23.323" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T05:13:23.323" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-19T20:33:41.453" Score="41" Body="&lt;h2&gt;American PG-13? Torture is allowed, nipples are not&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those of us humble foreigners, could some Most Charitable American please made a short summary of what PG-13 means? Because...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as this humble foreigner knows, PG-13 films and television shows &lt;em&gt;allow&lt;/em&gt; the depiction of torture, gruesome murder, genocide, fraud, poisoning, assassination and the like. What they &lt;em&gt;don't allow&lt;/em&gt; is showing female nipples, because boys will be scarred for life if they see one, let alone two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Avengers: Infinity War&lt;/em&gt; (2018) was rated PG-13. You cannot get more genocidal than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Pirates of the Caribbean&lt;/em&gt; (2003-2017) films were rated PG-13. They show violence aplenty, women in chains, gruesome images every five minutes, executions, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens&lt;/em&gt; (2015) was rated PG-13. It shows outright torture, in addition to gruesome violence and large scale murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, unless the U.S.A. is very very different from what they want the rest of us to think, there is no rating system in place for written material. As far as I know, not even in America are children forbidden from entering a bookshop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So let's get serious&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bulleted list of what is not allowed is absolutely necessary. Most of us are not Americans, and have very little (and probably incorrect) understanding of what Americans find allowable for 13 year olds, and what they find forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are murder, assassination, the use of weapons, poisons and so on acceptable? Why are they more acceptable than &amp;quot;sexual content&amp;quot;? Please note that many questions revolve around, well, large scale violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the &amp;quot;sexual content&amp;quot; which is not allowed? (This is important. I may be guilty of posting answers which included ancient Greek pictures of anatomically correct naked men, Renaissance paintings showing men abducting women, and so on. My guideline was that if the image would have been OK in my 5th grade ancient history book, it was probably safe enough. But I hadn't thought about American prudishness.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Gambling&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;? I have not even the beginning of an idea of how a &lt;em&gt;written discussion&lt;/em&gt; of gambling could be considered inappropriate for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T21:55:44.780" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T21:55:44.780" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-20T16:20:38.243" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;[EDIT: The first paragraph here refers to my understanding based on claims in other comments that &amp;quot;The &amp;quot;basis&amp;quot; is that the company that owns this site has had a discussion about it, and they have decided that this sort of thing is inappropriate.&amp;quot; - if this is false, then I do not support this new arbitrary rule AT ALL.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do kinda like the idea of having an edits-needed message for questions saying something like &amp;quot;edit to remove explicit sex or violence&amp;quot;. I'm confident that most or even all the listed example questions could be phrased in a way that everyone would agree is appropriate both for any child old enough to have fairy tales read to them at night, let alone to read Lord of the Flies. For example, you could ask how someone could survive a full-body degloving, how someone could train themselves (or their soldiers) to be accustomed to sleep deprivation by subjecting themselves to it, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most questions this can be done simply by removing one or more of: the torture tag, the explicit description, or the context implying lack of consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... OP makes some claims which seem potentially contentious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;We cannot host gruesome depictions of violence.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This claim is made multiple times in the OP, but there is currently no link provided to the rule that prohibits it, so we have to comment without context. We cannot reasonably rule on this &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; that context. &lt;em&gt;A rule which is not available to view, does not exist.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;there's a pretty good idea in place of what we can and can't allow.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This seems clearly false from comments here. My idea of &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot; is likely radically different from your &amp;quot;gory&amp;quot;, and we both are likely different from, say, a Japanese person's idea of &amp;quot;guro&amp;quot;. To my mind, none of the linked questions are over my personal meter for &amp;quot;too gruesome for kids&amp;quot; (have you ever even met a kid? I certainly was reading far worse before I was ten, let alone 13). I agree that some do invite more-gruesome answers, but the worst offenders there aren't even on-topic (&amp;quot;invent a torture machine!&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sleep deprivation is considered &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot; even in the explicit absence of other pain or harm.&lt;/strong&gt; That's just stretching the requirement of &amp;quot;no gruesome content&amp;quot; to a &lt;em&gt;truly farcical extent&lt;/em&gt;. That this claim was made is a great illustration of the above point, and was sufficient for me to downvote this suggestion: if someone can feel this way, then there can exist no discussion of adversarial circumstance that would be guaranteed safe from a &amp;quot;too gruesome&amp;quot; claim, which would effectively kneecap this site as a writer's resource, since most worlds built for a narrative have adversarial elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If discussion of torture is to be permitted for worldbuilding, except in some cases... &lt;em&gt;what cases are they?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware that we need to be careful as this can go very badly wrong. For example, if we were to flatly forbid any discussion of even accidental/consensual maiming or dismemberment, I'd fight that &lt;em&gt;very hard&lt;/em&gt;: we really do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to turn the disabled community into a taboo topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are medical discussions permitted or forbidden? Degloving is &lt;em&gt;gross&lt;/em&gt;, but is it &lt;em&gt;gruesome&lt;/em&gt; and is it &lt;em&gt;violent&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I propose:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the only possible exclusion that we can rationally imply, from the term &amp;quot;gruesome violence&amp;quot;, is one which &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the following terms are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An explicit description &lt;em&gt;(prereq for &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of maiming or dismembering &lt;em&gt;(prereq for &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as a deliberate act &lt;em&gt;(prereq for &amp;quot;violence&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on a creature &lt;em&gt;(prereq for &amp;quot;violence&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which does not consent &lt;em&gt;(prereq for &amp;quot;violence&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[deliberateness and consent are, I think, the most debatable items here: the other three should hopefully be pretty solid.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6595" LastEditorUserId="6595" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T22:02:02.067" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T22:02:02.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-21T01:21:41.430" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm not saying anything here that I didn't say in my response to the cited discussion question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long and short of it: this community focuses on helping people -- authors, game developers, worldbuilders, game masters, and so forth -- build their fictional worlds. As such, this community MUST be free to discuss all aspects of worldbuilding, which includes culture, cultural practices, implementations of justice, and a whole host of other activities not all of which are wholesome and pure. We also recognise the need to &amp;quot;reign in&amp;quot; salacious, explicit, gruesome, and violent depictions. Both in queries as well as responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the five queries you cited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nos. 1 through 4&lt;/em&gt;. NONE of the questions you cite are worded in anything like a &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot; fashion. Every one of them, questions as well as answers, is worded in a reasonably clinical &amp;amp; non-inflammatory fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No. 5&lt;/em&gt; This query is actually based on a YA (young adult) novel. The novel is appropriate for 11 or 12 years and up, as that is its target audience. What's age appropriate for a novel can hardly be rationally considered inappropriate for a query here in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all focus on aspects of fictional cultures, generally the application of justice and the results (physiological &amp;amp; psychological) of such application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but I really do not see what your point is. There is nothing in any of these questions and answers that an 11 year old -- to say nothing of a 13 year old -- can't see in a video game, can't see on Youtube, can't read about in a YA novel, or can't learn about on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where to go from here...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Option 1 -- removing the tag &amp;quot;torture&amp;quot;. Took a while to discover what &amp;quot;burninate&amp;quot; involves. This seems to be the better of the two proposals.  Though I'd prefer it be done through usual channels of community discussion &amp;amp; concensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2 -- deleting the questions. This is unacceptable for our community. We must be at liberty to discuss even the darker aspects of a fictional culture. Our mandate is to help anyone who is creating a fictional world with the workings of that world, the evil as well as the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the linked questions demonstrate, you can clearly see that we prefer not to engage in sensationalism. None of these questions go anywhere close to gruesome or sensationalised content. Deletion is not warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We have the right and indeed the mandate to discuss all aspects of worldbuilding, including practices such as torture. We're capable of policing ourselves and have done well when it comes to &amp;quot;gruesome&amp;quot; content, as evidenced by the clinical &amp;amp; dispassionate nature of the questions and answers you cite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as strict or loose application is concerned: it is immediately apparent that this community is unique among the other forums within SE. We regularly deal in content matters that don't often fit the strict guidelines that one finds throughout the other communities. Opinions and broad based questions are vorboten elsewhere. But in our community, this is bread and butter! As a creative and artistic Q&amp;amp;A community, we strive to abide by the quality standards set by SE's other communities as much as possible, but we also recognise the need for leniency and a laxer approach to rules &amp;amp; guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, we appreciate that determining from outside the community what is allowed and what is not allowed is not your goal. Such an action would be devastating to the liberty we require to do our work here and would also further tarnish SE the company. Indeed, when things go to far, we have a strong sense of community and good moderators that are quite capable of handling such situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T01:21:41.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-22T03:13:36.143" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What brought this post about?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we moving too slowly? Do we need micromanagement? My own participation in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; discussions favored the need to manage gratuitous questions that would not be suitable for the younger users of this site.  Frankly, I think your 13-and-up belief is deplorably naive.  SE &lt;em&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/em&gt; might legally only allow 13-year-olds on its sites, but nothing in the entire world stops children much younger from showing up. (And they do....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I note that the vast majority of users at Worldbuilding keep their language clean and ask questions in a non-gratuitous manner. The small handful of people who whine about not being allowed to cuss like sailors or express their darkest fantasies get educated or pushed out fairly quickly. However, in a world where how much violence, sex, etc. is suitable for children is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; but consistent, the idea that one nation's, one culture's, or one corporate overlord's idea of what is a legitimate question (and what is not) should be imposed over the Stack's community opinion is infuriating. I've been more offended on Stack Overflow than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a lengthy way of suggesting that we be allowed to complete the process of modifying and enhancing the site's culture and rules without SE's interference. We were already on the way to solving the problem. A problem that was brought to light due to a single user's obsession with torture and execution who regularly asked questions outside the scope of either tag (he's probably 15... most U.S. 15 year old boys are obsessed with death, torture, and execution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I believe SE should be in the business of deleting questions on our site? No. You folks already have a bad reputation for restricting free speech and punitive action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The U.S. PG-13 rating is &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; but a viable standard. PG-13 movies like &lt;em&gt;Drag me to Hell, Spawn,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sucker Punch&lt;/em&gt; exceed most (if not all) of the examples you're looking to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any explicit limitation you try to impose will be circumvented. If anything, you'll make the situation worse by drawing attention to something that needs less attention. (I remember reading an article written by an online game developer trying to control inappropriate content from appearing by using a restricted game vocabulary. He sat a teenager at the game and within ten minutes the teen used the restricted vocabulary to create an obviously suggestive statement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T23:18:05.210" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T23:18:05.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T01:42:16.093" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must not be the only person who experiences this. When scrolling down or up there is a noticeable frame-rate drop. What is intended to be smooth ends up been jerky and my processor tries to figure out how to move the high resolution image while keeping the robot on the side in the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using a 2017 macOS Catalina with a 2.5GHz i7 processor (no graphics card). I do not experience an issue like this on Math or Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have tagged this with bug, it really is intended just the be a discussion on what can be done about the frame-rate drop. The background looks pretty, but I do not think it is worth the cost in frame-rate for some users. Is there any work which has already been started to solve this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7003/worldbuilding-se-running-slowly-choppy-scrolling&quot;&gt;A recent answer&lt;/a&gt; has identified the issue. It is currently unclear to me how to setup my browser, to automatically disable the fixed scroll feature of the background attachment when I visit Worldbuilding S.E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31876" LastEditorUserId="31876" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T03:56:14.257" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T03:56:14.257" Title="The page background lags my laptop" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7980" CreationDate="2020-08-24T20:48:28.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's because Worldbuilding simply has the most elaborate background. I don't see any in physics.se and the one in math.se is a repetition of a rather small image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I too browse mostly in laptops, and I don't experience this lag. I have two laptops: a PC with an NVidia graphics card, and a Macbook Air from a few years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T20:48:28.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:24:59.623" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm putting together &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13116/58193&quot;&gt;an effort on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; to give users guidance for when they should migrate&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; a question from SFF to a different site on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World Building doesn't have too much overlap with SFF, however, we sometimes get questions seeking input on worlds they are creating and how to do stuff with them. This means that we occasionally get questions that should be more applicable on World Building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if the World Building community could put together some guidance on when they would like content from SFF migrating over here. Things to think about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you ever want it suggesting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sorts of questions do you want migration suggesting for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any topics to avoid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the World Building community has an idea of what guidelines they have for migration, could you post an answer to the linked post with them? If not let me know in the comments when it is ready and I can post it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Here migration means anything from formal migration to suggesting in a comment when to migrate content to a different site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T03:37:10.107" Title="Guidelines for migration from Science Fiction &amp; Fantasy" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7982" CreationDate="2020-08-25T19:14:32.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Towards an Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good idea!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think a query needs to be migrated to Worldbuilding, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;What the Worldbuilding Forum is All About&lt;/a&gt; as this lays out, in proper manifesto form, some basic expectations as to what we accept and prefer not to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some key points for consideration, I think, would be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if someone is actually asking a query about their own worldbuilding projects, we want those questions! Kind of obvious if they say: &amp;quot;I saw XYZ movie and I'm trying to make my own world now!...&amp;quot; Send em our way! Sometimes folks will couch their own work in terms of a well known property: &amp;quot;So I have a world kind of like the Wizarding World where XYZ happens...&amp;quot; This is okay, send them our way as well. Main thing is that the question is about their own fictional world, not about someone else's fictional world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the contrary, if someone is asking about how a phenomenon works in a commercial property (we often refer to these as &amp;quot;third party intellectual properties&amp;quot;), then we don't accept those, even if the asker is building a fictional world. A question like &amp;quot;So, I'm building a world and I want magic in it, but I don't know how magic should work. How does magic work in the Wizarding World?&amp;quot; When these kinds of questions get asked in Worldbuilding, we generally refer them to SF&amp;amp;F or one of the other forums as appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those I think are the major points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T20:24:49.880" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:24:49.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7982" CreationDate="2020-08-26T03:37:10.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to what @elemtilas said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We regularly suffer from people who are suffering from writer's block. They're here, not for help to build their worlds per se, but to get a bunch of spaghetti thrown against the proverbial wall so they can pick-and-choose a path our of their conundrum. Those kinds of questions (usually called &amp;quot;storybuilding&amp;quot;) are actually off-topic here. We expect people to be focusing on their worlds, not their stories, and to ask specific (not open-ended) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of storybuilding: worldbuilding is the process of developing and consistently using the rules and systems of a fictional world of one' own design wherein an infinite number of stories may be told. Storybuilding usually focuses on plot, circumstance, and character actions or choices. You'd be surprised how many storybuilding questions masquerade as worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we allow real-world questions, but only when asked in the context of building a fictional world. We'd ask F&amp;amp;SF to consider that if a real-world question is being asked and there is no obvious and expedient worldbuilding purpose, that it be redirected to the more appropriate stack (often Physics or Astronomy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T03:37:10.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T13:36:50.320" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no good term for it, which is surprising... you'd think that some science fiction author or another would have come up with a word/term for the taxonomy above &lt;em&gt;kingdom&lt;/em&gt;, the one that specified the planetary origins of aliens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, by no means should this be taken as meaning that my suggestion applies only to science fiction. Even fantasy creature questions should require this detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three choices (as I see them) for these questions would be (though no need to be this wordy):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My creature should be of Earth-derived biology, and is therefor is genetically related to humans, wombats, jellyfish, and orchids.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My creature should not be of Earth-derived biology, and isn't even necessarily made of protein, doesn't necessarily use DNA/RNA to encode genes, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either of these options would suffice, depending on which made the most sense given my other constraints.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the many historical questions on worldbuilding which do not include this detail, older questions would need to be grandfathered in. The people who asked originally may not even still be around to clarify, and if they were, the clarification might conflict with accepted or highly-rated answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But moving forward from some date-close-to-now, questions would be required to include this information and should be referred back for editing (or in extreme cases, for closing, if the asker refuses to comply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the term for this is &amp;quot;biosphere&amp;quot;. Please suggest other labels if you've got one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32508" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T19:26:45.853" Title="(All) Creature questions should specify whether or not they require the creature to be of Earth-derived biology" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7985" CreationDate="2020-08-27T15:55:43.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as taxonomy goes, you're about thirty years out of date...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Domain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, that above kingdom, was added in 1990. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biology4kids.com/files/studies_labels.html#:%7E:text=Even%20Larger%20than%20Kingdoms,domains%20used%20in%20modern%20classification.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biology for Kids&lt;/a&gt;, the three domains are Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archea. I'd argue (and did in a paper in college) that viruses &amp;amp; prions could form a forth &amp;amp; fifth domain of life. And indeed, such domains have been argued for by actual biologists. Biologists simply have to get over the centuries old conceptualisation of &amp;quot;life&amp;quot; that it must be cellular!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as xenotaxonomy goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that the level immediately above Domain be called &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Planetary X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; where X is the name of the planetary body the life is from. All living things whose origins were on Earth / Terra are &lt;em&gt;Planetary Terrestrial&lt;/em&gt;. (Or I suppose just Terrestrial for short.) Other trans-domains would similarly be named for their world (planet or moon or asteroid or comet) of actual origin: &lt;em&gt;Planetary Martial&lt;/em&gt; (of Mars) e.g. Note: if it turns out that Earth life started out on Mars, then we'd be Planetary Martial-Terrestrial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above the Planetary level, I'd suggest &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Autobiota&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (same life), which would include all &lt;em&gt;Planetary&lt;/em&gt; living things that share a common origin with one another from elsewhere in space. For example if panspermia (accidental or purposeful) turns out to be a thing, then the various life Planetaries &amp;amp; Domains in their respective worlds, would fall under a single super-group, Autobiota. This super-group could, as with Terrestrial, be specified once the origin point is discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, any life (perhaps even Terrestrial life) that is not related in any way -- life that had a separate origin -- is called &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idiobiota&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (own life). Such living things would share nothing in common, originwise, other than that it too is alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both leave room for intermediate levels as needed. So there: sòme SF / F author has suggested. But I digress!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I actually concur with your proposal. It seems to me that we have a lot of questions that get shot down simply because the creature in question doesn't fit into what is known to current science. The recent questions about Fairies being a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be smart to encourage querents to specify whether they expect answers using real world science (actual or extrapolated) or some kind of non-real world science. It seems to me that we tend too frequently to get stuck in a dead end when it comes to questions about irrealia. Dragons are too big to fly, therefore questions about dragon flight are impossible to answer because physics, biology, blah, blah. Humanoids can't have wings because blah, blah. Too often we forget that this forum is NOT physics.stackexchange or biology.stackexchange! This is WORLDBUILDING! We're supposed to be more imaginative than we sometimes are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help respondents as it would give them some kind of direction to follow for giving a good answer. If the querent wants terrestrial biology, then we answer from within the science as it applies to Earth. If the querent wants a biology other than terrestrial, then we need to set aside Earth science, get all imaginational, and answer the question from within science as it applies to that other world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T04:51:28.267" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T04:51:28.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-28T13:43:47.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like it or not, as a society, we love our torture, and it's integrated with our society:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2.4 billion people&lt;/a&gt; believe that the torture, and slow, painful, public execution of a then political agitator forgave their sins and gave them the chance of eternal life.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/05/more-americans-support-torture-than-afghans-iraqis-and-south-sudanese-why/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;33% of Americans&lt;/a&gt; believe torture is &amp;quot;part of war&amp;quot;. 46% say that the enemy could be tortured for important military information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CIQwfaZb5rUJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html+&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=au&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;59% of Americans&lt;/a&gt; think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified. 58% say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told the Easter story so young that I can't remember when I first heard it. I remember a religious colouring book I had as a child where there was spot to colour in the blood dripping down from the NAILS THROUGH HIS LIMBS. Every Good Friday, I had to witness a live reenactment of that on the alter at my local church. Whip and all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are stained glass windows around my church depicting the torture and execution of a man. Every Sunday as a child I saw them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People get married in front of a life size recreation of someone dying by torture. It's front and centre at funerals too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LEesq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LEesq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Colour in the torture! For ages 6 months and up.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CIA torturing Iraqis made the news in prime time here. I saw those photos as a 14 year old on the evening news. It wasn't the first description of torture I'd heard out of the middle east either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, as one other answer has pointed out, violence is glorified in PG-13 movies all the time, so long as the nipples are hidden and sex is one of the 3 government approved positions and on screen for no more than 5 thrusts are implied, you can torture someone to death and still be family friendly. Torture is just a plot point and opportunity for character building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personally, I'd much rather a sex positive culture than a torture positive culture - but this is the world we have now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cat's out of the bag on torture - children have seen it in PG-13 films, they've seen it in church, they've seen it on the news, maybe even games. Censoring it here is a cap on creativity for no real gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we feel like correcting Christians, the CIA, the MPAA, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T13:43:47.997" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-08-29T00:28:49.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; needs cleaning up?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a cursory look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems to me that all the non-clinical questions have already been closed. With that in mine, my word of advice to you is this: &lt;strong&gt;be careful about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you clean it up; it's important that we hold to our moral principles, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrwellianEditor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orwellian Editing&lt;/a&gt; is almost never a good solution to these problems.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to go through and delete the questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; which meet these criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They are currently closed.&lt;/strong&gt; This shows that we, the WB.SE community, consider them inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They are more than three months old, and/or have an accepted answer.&lt;/strong&gt; Generally this means that their querents either can't fix them, or (more often) don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to fix them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that as long as we stick to these criteria we should be able to safely delete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do I agree that we shouldn't host gruesome content?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. However, as other people have pointed out, we should be careful to rigidly define &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;gruesome content&amp;quot; means. While doing so may open the door to loopholes, some people just want to see the world burn; if they're going to post content that's not &amp;quot;technically&amp;quot; against the rules, they are; that's what downvotes and VTC-ing for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should we burnitate the tag?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO.&lt;/strong&gt;  Like it or not, there are valid questions that go under this tag, and it is our duty as Worldbuilders to answer them. Plus, you already know my opinion of Orwellian Editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;A non-goal is creating a bulleted list of everything that's allowed or not allowed&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that we shouldn't make a bulleted list of &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; that is or isn't allowed (as a pastor I know once said, &amp;quot;the purpose of the Law was not to save us from sin, but to point out our sin&amp;quot;), we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; at least need general guidelines in place to delimit what is and isn't allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In order to ensure that we don't end up with a &amp;quot;Congress makes the law, but the Supreme Court interprets it&amp;quot; situation, it must be the Community that originates,  determines, and enforces these general guidelines.&lt;/strong&gt; (thanks, @elemtilas). Please note that I am not saying that the Moderators can't enforce them - just that &lt;strong&gt;these policies, as a representation of the Community's moral and ethical beliefs, should primarily be enforced by the Community.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T15:59:35.000" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T15:59:35.000" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7994" CreationDate="2020-08-29T08:17:27.770" Score="6" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;So at first, let's talk about backgrounds of my world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;God&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my world, God is not omnipotent. God gave up his omnipotency in spite of creating the truth values (Falsity and Truth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is still in charge of spiritual works though. For example, deciding whether a person must go to Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Afterlife and stuffs&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place of afterlife is Heaven. Hell doesn't exist. If a person/spirit is rejected from going to Heaven, they reincarnates. Possibly to a worse life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If God thinks it's worth it, God encrowns a spirit into an angel. Angels have their missionaries, given by God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no Satan/devils/demons or whatever evil supernatural beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;General concept of stories&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientists were encrowned to angels. They have a variety of missions, but ultimately, they want the Reality and Heaven to unite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions I attempted to create&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot; I had in mind, but it seems most of them can be answered myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Why would angels focus in their missions if Heaven allows them to behave freely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Because only people who devoted in their missionaries in their life were encrowned, and they will devote while in their afterlife, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; When would God allow angels to directly impact the Reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; When Technological Singularity comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; How would Isaac Newton, who is now Angel of Force and Embodiment of Classical Mechanics, teach Joseph-Louis Lagrange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Teach him when he is not even born yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that I can have questions that focus on small details, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tentacles being also electric cables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have talons that can turn into propellers. Can I fly like a plane?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I breathe gravitational wave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, I want to start by a question that focuses on religious stuffs. What are good examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit 1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@JBH has a point. So here are the &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot;, chronologically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modern Age:&lt;/strong&gt; Scientists are just encrowned to angels. The can preform &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot; in Heaven, but they cannot affect the Reality. There can be indirect effects, though. For example, Issac Newton and Joseph-Louis Lagrange above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contemporary Age:&lt;/strong&gt; As of Y2K, many great things happened in the Reality, such as invention of computers, aircrafts, internet, and articitial intelligences. Angels worried about them, for people who concerns about philosophical problems became fewer and fewer. Meanwhile, angels now don't rely on magic too much, and they try to solve problems with technology if possible. Spiritual works still require magic, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Future:&lt;/strong&gt; Technological Singularity has come, and a few angels has invaded the Reality accordingly. People in the Reality was startled by that. The Reality and Heaven haven't united though, for there are still problems in Mathematics and Physics. Magic and technology are now indistinguishable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79094" LastEditorUserId="79094" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T01:01:10.553" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T15:35:20.830" Title="My world is heavily religious. Why is it so hard to have a good question?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-29T13:10:48.550" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so I have a fictional world known as ''Ovuran''. The native ''Ovurani Humans'' have absolutely no concept of ''obscenity'', this means that their society is radically, traditionally and historically pro-nudity and clothing is reserved for warmth, comfort, protection, hygiene, fashion, and indicating one's rank and job. While any Ovurani human can be nude at any time and place, they still wear some type of clothing for most regular occasions due to the aforementioned situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite all this, Ovurani society is capitalist in the same way present-day human society is. I was wondering if the lack of obscenity concepts would cause clothing to be costlier on average thus justifying the possibility of lower-class Ovurani humans wearing little to no clothing on average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question on 2 different worldbuilding subreddits and the discussions quickly de-evolved into a debate over the morality of Capitalism and it became clear that I wasn't going to get an actual answer to the question. Stackexchange seems to be the only other place where this type of question may work but I'm not sure if it belongs in Worldbuilding Stackexchange or another platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61496" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T15:54:16.770" Title="I have a question related to worldbuilding but I'm not sure if it belongs here" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7991" CreationDate="2020-08-29T23:37:05.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(a) We recently had a hand-slap from SE over gratuitous/explicit questions, so if you can ask your question in a clinical manner, we're usually good with it (as you've described things here, I don't see a problem). (b) Part of capitalism is marketing, marketing is convincing people they need something even if they don't, so the question of yes/no clothing is much more cultural/behavioral than it ever will be economic - unless the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; resource available to make clothes happens to be rare or expensive (hard to justify).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T23:37:05.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7990" CreationDate="2020-08-30T15:35:20.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Generally Speaking:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to come up with a good question, especially where matters of religion, the spiritual realm, theology, and so forth are concerned if you have no experience of those things in real life or don't know how to approach them as matters of study or simply because you don't quite know how they work in your fictional world. Also consider that you may already be at the stage of intuition with respect to your world that you simply don't need to ask questions! You already know the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't really help you with the first while for the second we could refer you to one of the religion forums; but for the third we can certainly help! As in the real world, the underlying matters of Creation &amp;amp; cosmology&amp;amp; theology of a fictional world count as &amp;quot;fundamental aspects&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;basic systems&amp;quot; of that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, just from looking at your question, I can see that you've already done some rather deep thinking about your world's underlying nature. Or at the very least, you've put together some rather fascinating ideas! Just the idea of God giving up an essential part of his nature is quite interesting. Whether you've thought through to conclusions or not is well within the scope of this forum to help, and there are certainly many questions you could explore along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;As for some Specifics:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't tag religious or theological questions as &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot; unless what you mean by magic truly does connect with divinity. They are quite different matters, though they can certainly touch on one another! Magic is almost always simply a superordinary way of manipulating the physical reality of matter and energy, and is really more closely allied with ordinary technologies than with spiritual reality. I don't know if we have a religion or theology tag or not: if we do, those would be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely concur that we can help you develop and apply rules to your world. I think what JBH is getting at re rules is more like Laws of Nature. What are the rules your God established? If electricity is established as a Law -- the movement of electrons through a conductive medium -- then tentacles acting as power conduits seems plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you could ask that question! &amp;quot;Given that electricity can move through certain fibres within a living tentacle, how could this work?&amp;quot; You might need to clarify that the fibres are 100% biological (and thus similar to nerves) or they could be vessicular conduits (salt water tubes). You could ask follow up questions like &amp;quot;Based on this previous question (don't forget to link to the earlier question!), how could I connect two or more tentacles together?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could go back to earlier principles and ask something like &amp;quot;Given that God was once omnipotent, and now is not (having &amp;quot;given it up&amp;quot;); how might this affect the problem of evil?&amp;quot; You could also ask something like &amp;quot;Given that God is no longer omnipotent, has set aside a key aspect of his nature; what effect would this have on his divinity?&amp;quot; In other words, would such a divine being still be &amp;quot;God&amp;quot;, or would his nature be so fundamentally changed that he would be no more than one of the lesser gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T15:35:20.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7991" CreationDate="2020-08-30T15:54:16.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: I don't understand how &amp;quot;obscenity&amp;quot; fits with nudity. When something is obscene, it is foul or dirty or contrary to morality (either objective morality or situational morality). We usually think of obscenities in terms of language: using racial slurs or cursing or using God's name in a vulgar fashion; it can also be an outrageously immoral act like rape or molesting a corpse or torturing someone in a particularly cruel fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nude is just how &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; is, until they put clothing on, and this is not obscene in and of itself. The society you describe does not appear to be using nudity in an obscene fashion and there do not appear to be any matters of situational morality involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, I think your question about clothing costs would be a reasonable fit. You want to consider clarifying what you mean by clothing that is worn for rank classification or on the job protection. Rank and status have, in Earth human societies, often been displayed by using costly but otherwise useless and valueless bits of decoration. Sea shells used by people who live far from the sea; amber that comes from very far away; gold that's difficult to find. And of course, the classic yet relatively valueless, status symbol: the diamond. Protective clothing is naturally going to incur expense due to materials and workmanship: armour, space suits, heavy duty aprons, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're generally a step or two above the average Reddit forum. I think you'll get a range of good answers that are on point and helpful to you right here. The key will be in wording your question properly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T15:54:16.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7985" CreationDate="2020-08-30T18:39:13.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been on this site long enough to see several waves of new users arrive.&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; The new users (a) inevitably don't understand the site, it's rules, or its culture&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and (b) inevitably believe that what we understand of science today is &lt;em&gt;all there is to understand and nothing could possibly vary from it for any reason on earth — so say we all!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes time for each wave of new users to &amp;quot;grow up&amp;quot; and mature into the site's culture. Some individuals do so quickly, others have to be dragged along, kicking and screaming, because what they really want is to do what they want, when they want, without consequence.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, per my comment from yesterday, there's no way to reasonably expect that any individual will take the time to actually read the tag wikis, or read through the help center, or take the time to read anything in Meta.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; It doesn't help that we're participating on a fundamentally non-objective, highly imaginative and creative site where &lt;em&gt;popularity&lt;/em&gt; rules over conscientious judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I mean by that? Over on Stack Overflow a question about programming might receive a dozen answers. Half of them will be duplicates of previously posted answers to the same question (because you can't even trust people to read through the answers already posted to a question). Of the remaining six, it's reasonable for people to judge and vote for the answer that represents the most effective or professionally implemented programming solution. In other words — incredibly objective questions get incredibly objective answers that are easily judged without emotion (aka, &amp;quot;popularity&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over here, that's rarely the case. I've seen absolutely daft answers get the most votes because they were, for example, funnier.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; In an environment where popularity has so much influence, I'm not sure it's possible to achieve what you're asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag already states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should never be the only tag on a question, because this tag frames how a question should be answered, not the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the OP is expected to provide one or more &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; tags (and supporting information in the question itself) that help us understand &lt;em&gt;what reality&lt;/em&gt; we're supposed to be using as a reference. As I mentioned in a comment to @Elemtilas' answer, the problem is that the OPs are asking questions with a ridiculous premise. Inevitably, what they think they want is &amp;quot;the most realistic dragon possible that could possibly evolve on Earth had Mother Nature just been accommodating.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;, and contrary to what @Elemtilas suggested,&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; the OP should be gently&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; reminded that expecting us to create a scientifically-justifiable dragon is, actually, pretty much impossible or Mother Nature would have already done it. I suspect the OP really hasn't thought through the fact that what they really want is NOT a scientifically-accurate (e.g.) dragon, but a description that meets or exceeds &lt;em&gt;suspension of disbelief,&lt;/em&gt; which requires just enough science to make the fiction consumable. In this way I'm not in disagreement with @Elemtilas — we really should be cutting the OP some slack and answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it is my observation that the quality of this site has dropped &lt;em&gt;precipitously&lt;/em&gt; since the Monica Ciello affair and the resulting loss of so many moderators. My hat is off to @L.Dutch, who is a much nicer and level-headed person than I am, for doing a great job as moderator, but he appears to be acting fundamentally alone on a site that needs 2-4 more (MORE!) active moderators helping to remind people to follow the rules. People basically couldn't care less what help you're trying to give if you don't have a diamond next to your name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the best answer to your question might actually be that we need more &lt;s&gt;police officers&lt;/s&gt; moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And, if I want to be honest about it, I can remember when I first started using Stack Exchange and how I fought against rules I didn't understand, the development of which I didn't learn about quickly and therefore refused to respect. Candor mode off. And this is footnote 0 because it was added last and I didn't want to take the time to renumber them all.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;If you want proof of that, see my comment thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184391/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;It doesn't help that we're living in a day and age where people actually think they shouldn't be judged for what they think, say, or do. My experience is that such people are the most judgemental in all of time and space... but that's another discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;On a site where a popular question will be viewed by thousands of people, at the writing of my answer, this meta question has been looked at a whopping 36 times. Maybe one of the last wave of new users is among that count. Maybe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;That question I referred to in footnote #1? That question was closed, then reopened, despite it being IMO a lousy question. But, hey, the OP got what he/she/it wanted, so who cares, right? There are days where this site is more like Reddit than Stack Exchange.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm an arrogant cus on most days, so that's a perfectly sound statement for me to make.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Which is really rare, because @Elemtilas and I usually think a lot alike when it comes to the operation of this site and its culture — but I'm not actually disagreeing with him. We really should give the OP much more of the benefit of the doubt and stop being science-Nazis about everything. I'll say that later in the paragraph. I don't like disagreeing with @Elemtilas.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;By &amp;quot;gently&amp;quot; I mean with a soft whack to the head with a 2x4. The loss of moderators has impacted the quality of this site a lot. I'll mention that, too, in a moment.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T18:39:13.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-01T02:28:12.553" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose this question could belong on any meta site, but I'm in this one because recently I asked a SE:WB question and couldn't readily choose between two tags: [interstellar-travel] and [interstellar].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At the time, I didn't know which one fit my question more (if not both equally), because there doesn't seem to be a way to check the qualifiers of a tag on the mobile app (Android--latest SE version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a way to check a tag description on the mobile app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I attempted to pull up the site in a (mobile Chrome) browser, but it was rather persistent in forcing the launch of the mobile app. No sequence of clicks I found could take me to the list of tags without launching the app, even in &amp;quot;desktop mode.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I should be using a laptop for asking questions, and often do as it's much easier to do proper research, take notes, and multitask on a computer, but the majority of my SE use is on mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62241" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:44:28.443" Title="How to check tag description on SE mobile app?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7997" CreationDate="2020-09-01T22:20:41.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The launching of the mobile app is a configuration, you probably set the app to open all links from Stack Exchange at some point. Even with the browser, though, there is no way to read the description of a tag without opening it in a separate tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may suggest in the main Meta that tags receive an alt-text with the main description for them. That way you'd be able to learn about a tag by holding up on it until the menu appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T22:20:41.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8005" CreationDate="2020-09-03T09:17:33.327" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking about advice, because after a strong comment-battle with &lt;em&gt;JBH&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184391/36&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184672/36&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question I am completely puzzlled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184391/36&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about killing all humanity, but leaving buildings intact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question received two good answers of pulsar radiation and alien invasion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have then asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184672/36&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;. It is bad, because it includes five separate questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We agree with JBH that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184672/36&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt; must be deleted as of a very poor quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We completely disagree what to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184391/36&quot;&gt;first question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JBH insists on editing this question into first of five asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184672/36&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt; and asking &lt;strong&gt;four more separate&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am more than sure that first question shouldn't be touched at all and &lt;strong&gt;five separate&lt;/strong&gt; questions must be asked instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing what JBH suggests is completely against what I was told in SE for past 5-7 years of contribution. We will end up with upvoted question asking about lava flood which has upvoted answers on pulsar radiation and aliens invasion. This is pointless for me tottally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, advice which descision here is good? &lt;strong&gt;Is it OK to run into situation, in which reedited question asks about something completely different than already posted answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T03:54:06.707" Title="Reedited question that completely changes meaning of an already posted answers" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7997" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:44:28.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I get around such annoying app launches on Google Chrok is utilizing the simple feature of pressing down on a link and then tapping “Open in new tab.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49360" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:44:28.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8002" CreationDate="2020-09-04T10:20:21.380" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't sleep last night and was browsing my phone for a couple hours waiting for the blue light to completely ruin my chances of getting any shut eye. Dark Mode which I had enabled, which is easier on the eyes especially when you should be asleep anyway, wasn't available for certain websites, stack exchange included, and I wanted to find out why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found out 2 things, well 3 things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After some googling I discovered that any forced changes google chrome was contemplating to force enable dark mode for all websites have been quietly backtracked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack overflow recently overhauled their code to enable dark mode as an option (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/30/introducing-dark-mode-for-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;March 2020&lt;/a&gt;). It looks very nice when reading when you should be asleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sadly, On DESKTOP version of .se not mobile version. A very handy &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;blog article&lt;/a&gt; from the techie involved with the overhaul is available, that even a complete noob like me could follow/understand the effort required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This change won't be foisted on all the stacks unilaterally cos of unique colour schemes etc. It'll be up to each community to work on. (I don't know how these code changes would be made...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, we have no plans to bring dark mode to the many sites across the Stack Exchange network. Many of the designs on our sites have been around long enough that converting them to dark mode would require redoing the artwork completely. We would prefer to avoid giving anyone across our network a substandard experience and we don’t want to change those elements without the input of these communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So are there any future plans or hopes to enable dark mode on worldbuilding: Either desktop or mobile-friendly versions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything in particular holding us back from doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any particular desire for it amongst our members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked wb.meta for any previous discussions about dark mode and couldn't find anything. So curious if this is a potential future option or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastEditorUserId="21839" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T11:54:10.097" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T11:54:10.097" Title="Is Dark Mode being considered for worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8001" CreationDate="2020-09-04T11:16:20.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly, the answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/395949/4751173&quot;&gt;no&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the focus of Dark Mode is on Stack Overflow and we’ll eventually bring it to MSO. While the retheming we did across the network two years ago makes updating our LESS easier, creating dark versions of all of our sites, particularly the custom-designed ones, is going to be a huge challenge we’re not able to contemplate at this time. The artwork on some of those sites simply can’t be made dark because we don’t have access to the original art files and, to be honest, some of the themes will always be better as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to rely on custom made stylesheets/scripts; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/111399/295232&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; has some solutions scattered over the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T11:16:20.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-04T16:07:58.430" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question has been technically answered. Fairy is now a redirect for Fantasy-Races.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fairy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fairy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fairy&lt;/a&gt; exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's currently used in 7 questions so far... 1 because I added it in forgetting that I don't put my edits in the queue anymore, so no others to moderate my edits...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm against it, because a fairy is such a vague concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, the only other thing we have is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt;... which is even more vague...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about replacing &amp;quot;fairy&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;pixie&amp;quot;? That's a bit more precise? Usually pixies are tiny? ... Or could we go with &amp;quot;Tiny Humanoid&amp;quot; or something??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastEditorUserId="6812" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T22:27:56.710" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T22:27:56.710" Title="Should [fairy] exist? It's such a vague concept" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8003" CreationDate="2020-09-04T16:57:16.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; covers it all. It's an umbrella tag that can be used for questions about elves, orcs, gnomes etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is we should remove the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fairy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fairy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fairy&lt;/a&gt; tag from the questions that have it. When a tag has no questions for a day, it gets deleted from the site automagically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T16:57:16.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7999" CreationDate="2020-09-06T03:54:06.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really neither &amp;quot;OK&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;not OK&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;run into a situation&amp;quot;. The situation simply is. So I don't really quite understand what you mean by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm not sure if there's an Officially Recognised Rule on the matter, but we (WB.SE) do consider it bad form to so completely overhaul a question, usually by changing a key proposition of the question,  such that one or more answers are invalidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely reasonable to request clarification from the editor: is it vandalism or is it enthusiastically misguided editing? It's also entirely reasonable to revert the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur that nothing needs to be done with Question 1. It was closed as duplicate and has answers, so should not be fundamentally altered. Though do note that you edited the Title after getting three answers. Possibly because no one answered with volcanoes. Basically, subsequent questions do not have any direct bearing on previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what to do with Question 2. Well, I see six different questions there. The Title is one, and the list is the other five. That's the dictionary definition of a question being &amp;quot;not sufficiently focused&amp;quot; and should be closed until fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you have two viable solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question so that you get rid of the list of five and focus on the Title: &lt;em&gt;Can I do this?&lt;/em&gt;  Then, ask the other questions in line: 1, 2, 5, 3, 4 is the order I'd suggest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, you could close the main question and edit in such a way that those questions become conditions by which you'll measure any answer. Example: &amp;quot;Can I do this ... ? // The best answer will touch on each of these five criteria: sufficiency of volcanoes; natural or artificial explanations for how they all blow at the same moment; etc.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer option 2 myself, as it seems more likely to yield exciting and creative answers that span multiple sub-issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Take Away Lesson&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Learn and follow the Rules. Alternatively: Learn how to bend the Rules without breaking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T03:54:06.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8003" CreationDate="2020-09-06T11:39:31.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; is overly broad, and we should sort them into other tags, such as these tags that already exist, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82294/how-to-verify-or-establish-identity-where-shapeshifters-exist&quot;&gt;How to verify or establish identity where shapeshifters exist&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What purpose does &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fantasy-races&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fantasy-races&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fantasy-races&lt;/a&gt; serve for that question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it that non-humans and humans are co-existing? Then we should make a tag for that sort of situation on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T11:39:31.107" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8003" CreationDate="2020-09-06T14:15:54.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Fairy&amp;quot; is such a misleading word...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the recent question about fairies, I was surprised to see that the querents assume fairies to be small, even tiny. Why and when did this idea originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a Romanian. In Romanian fairy tales, fairies (= &amp;quot;zâne&amp;quot; in Romanian) are full-sized females, looking like beautiful women and endowed with magical abilities. They can function as women, for example, marrying Prince Charming. (There are no male fairies; in Romanian, the masculine form of the word &amp;quot;fairy&amp;quot; is only ever used in jest, to refer to a man in love with his own appearance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;fées&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are also full-sized anthropomorphs looking like most beautiful women, again with magical abilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been some time since I read Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night%27s_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Midsummer's Night Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but I definitely do not remember getting the impression that Titania and Oberon were particularly small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Gilbert and Sullivans's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iolanthe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iolanthe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; the fairies are also full sized females.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; And in the end they all marry British noblemen, members of the House of Lords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that I am puzzled. Why are Worldbuilding Stack Exchange fairies assumed to be tiny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the word &amp;quot;fairy&amp;quot; is obviously extremely ambiguous, denoting some sort of fantasy being which can be small as a butterfly or large a regular human, I suggest to either remove the tag alltogether or else rename it to &amp;quot;tiny fairies&amp;quot; or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T14:15:54.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8011" CreationDate="2020-09-06T21:53:03.870" Score="15" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was in the middle of answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/185079/40609&quot;&gt;this newly asked question&lt;/a&gt; when it was deleted by the author. It had been up for 30 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't read the OP's mind, but I suspect the question was closed because challenges were being made to the &lt;em&gt;back story.&lt;/em&gt; To wit, the OP's premise of using current or near-future nuclear weaponry would not result in 90% deaths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, of course, is that such an observation is fundamentally &lt;em&gt;irrelevant.&lt;/em&gt; The OP's question was how long it would take for the world to recover to some specified conditions after the event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tradition&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's something of a tradition on Worldbuilding.SE to challenge the back story to a question. So much so that I've occasionally recommended that an OP remove the back story completely so that people would stop challenging it and focus on the question the OP actually asked. That, unfortunately, results in people complaining that the back story wasn't provided, &lt;em&gt;as if the back story was more important than the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, I think, the challenges are provided in a way that's beneficial to the OP. Something along the lines of &amp;quot;as you work through this issue, you might want to consider the following weakness in your back story.&amp;quot;  But I don't believe that happened in the referenced case. And it's unreasonable to believe the brand-spanking new user (literally!) could possibly understand the culture and rules of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result? The OP deleted the question. I voted to undelete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Question(s)...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be our site's policy for handling issues involving the back story to a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we flag comments that fail to remind the OP that the observation is just that, an observation, and not an issue for the question itself and not at all a reason to edit or delete the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we judge the back story equally with the OP's actual question? In other words, if we believe the back story can't support the question, is it permissible to ignore the question and vote/comment based only on the back story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an in-between compromise I'm not seeing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been frustrated over the years by users who believe the back story is equally important with the question. Frankly (and simplistically for the purposes of this presentation), &amp;quot;How long would it take for Earth civilizations to recover to [this end condition] given [this starting condition]&amp;quot; shouldn't have any discussion based on the backstory used to establish [this starting condition] at all. Who cares if the nuclear arsenal available to us today is insufficient for achieving a 90% mortality rate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Honestly, how many of us have grown up with the concept of &amp;quot;the world's nuclear arsenal can destroy the world X times over!&amp;quot; I don't know the OP's age and expecting them to realize that no arsenal would be used to evenly blanket the Earth might be a massive presumption.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider this issue an extension of the site's unwritten and too-often-used culture of assuming that whatever science we know today is the heaven-written truth, ineffable and immutable, and that there will never be more science or better science in the future. (I'm on a bit of a rant, but I know too many people who boisterously proclaim their atheism and disdain for religion — all the while treating science with the same blind faith they accuse the followers of religion of having.) The OP tried to make it clear that his proposal was for the near future (2070-2080).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Considering that 99.9% of the world's technology was invented in the last 150 years and that 99.9% of the worlds nuclear technology was invented in the last 100 years — the assumption that a nuclear arsenal 50–60 years from now couldn't kill 90% of the inhabitants is hubris bordering on rampant arrogance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, my opinion is that I have little patience for driving away a new user for something as inane as a theoretical weakness in the &lt;em&gt;back story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&amp;lt;Rant mode: off&amp;gt;&amp;lt;grateful for patience mode: on&amp;gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments made about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189755/40609&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; led me to what I believe is a really great way to help people know when it's appropriate to challenge the backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remember to address the question, not the backstory. &lt;strong&gt;Unless you're sure the reason for the question will change the answer,&lt;/strong&gt; focus only on the question and enjoy the creativity of the backstory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An example of a backstory that shouldn't be challenged (except, perhaps, in comments)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; On my world the atmosphere is tainted such that it appears bright magenta during the day. My question is this: how would seafarers navigate during the day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Frame Challenge suggesting that what makes the sky magenta affects the answer would be specious in that it's true the OP hadn't defined what caused the atmosphere to be magenta, but it's actually irrelevant to the question. The color of the sky does not affect sea navigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An example of a backstory that could be challenged&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; On my world the atmosphere is tainted such that it appears bright magenta during the day. My question is this: what color would the horizon be with the setting sun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Frame Challenge would be appropriate for this second example because what causes the sky to appear magenta during the day could affect the color of the sky when the sun sets. (It should be noted that it would be more appropriate to ask in comments for additional details including what makes the sky magenta... but an appropriate Frame Challenge could suggest that it's impossible to have an inhabitable world with a magenta sky, so asking the question is irrelevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-03-15T02:16:32.227" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T02:16:32.227" Title="When and how to challenge the back story?" Tags="|discussion|questions|comments|policy|advice|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-09-07T03:40:26.697" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've put together a complex story, you're proud of it, you've come here requesting help on Part A. Someone tears apart your story on Part B. The downsides of this are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be very demotivational. You've put a lot of effort into this. &amp;quot;THERE'S NO WAY THIS COULD EVEN HAPPEN! DO YOUR RESEARCH!&amp;quot; would feel like a gut punch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It discourages concise questions. New users see peoples questions being ripped apart on backstory, so they try to pre-empt this and expand their questions to explain lots of backstory so avoid the scenario being torn down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving feedback that &amp;quot;this wont work&amp;quot; is very useful, but care needs to be taken in how you write it so as to not offend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to go &amp;quot;This wont work, because X. But assume we can get past X somehow (maybe Y?), Z will happen.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T03:40:26.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-09-07T07:55:42.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was me who was &amp;quot;challenging&amp;quot; the back story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except I wasn't challenging the back story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was of the form &amp;quot;people are doing X causing Y effect; how long will the effect last?&amp;quot; The problem was that doing X would not have effect Y; in order for the question to be answerable, just as JBH says, it is irrelevant what people were doing: what is relevant are the prevailing conditions when effect Y occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My comment was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A nuclear war fought with currently available weapons will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; result in &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;more than 90% of all life on Earth being wiped out&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Not even close. What this means is that the war assumed by the question will be fought with weapons of which we have no idea. In order for the question to be answerable you need to explain what those weapons do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asking the querent to clarify what the weapons &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, not how they work, or why they were used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not asking to invent the weapons, only to describe their effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not asking to justify the end result of using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm at a loss understanding how my comment was not asking for the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;starting condition&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, as JBH says, from where to estimate the duration of the recovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original poster of the question in question explicitly insisted in their comment that the war &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;would be fought with much larger arsenals including both fission and fusion bombs&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. No new science or technology. Just larger arsenals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Aside, about that rant-inducing faith in science&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I see no conflict between science and religion. Science is about the material; religion is about the spiritual. The two don't mix, and don't have anything substantial to say about each other's sphere. Science can and does study religion &lt;em&gt;as a phenomenon in the real world&lt;/em&gt;; religion can always override science &lt;em&gt;in the spiritual world&lt;/em&gt;. They are no more in conflict with each other than they are in conflict with literary theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the practicalities, it is easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thermodynamics rules; it is too beautiful to be challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Classical mechanics and classical electromagnetism are set in stone &lt;em&gt;in the situations where they apply&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Materials science is in rapid evolution; the rest of the physics sets hard boundaries, but within those boundaries wonderful discoveries can be made any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Special relativity is predicated on the assumption that all laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference: and the rest is just math. Challenging it implies either challenging the basic assumption, or coming up with a new mathematical solution: as avid readers of science fiction, &lt;em&gt;we all hope&lt;/em&gt; that one or the other challenge will eventually prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;General relativity &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be wrong; we just have as yet no idea in what way it might be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantum physics is undoubtedly true in its observations, but its usual mathematical formulation may be off. As, lo and behold, there do indeed exist alternative mathematical formulations of quantum physics, some more philosophically palatable than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We already &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that general relativity and quantum physics cannot be both true; hence the search for an elusive theory of everything, reminding us amateurs of the last glorious days of alchemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Natural evolution by common descent with modifications is simply an observation of how things are. &lt;em&gt;How exactly&lt;/em&gt; it happens is a matter of on-going research; the mathematics of population genetics is fascinating, but biology is notoriously wet and messy; hopefully, real soon now a new elegant synthesis will replace the dusty mid-20th century Modern Synthesis of Mayr, Dobzhansky &lt;em&gt;et al.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Economics, psychology, sociology, and other such fields of inquiry are pretty much at a pre-scientific level of development and there isn't anything to have faith in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T07:55:42.937" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-09-07T19:56:10.047" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion on this event is fairly simple and straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think we too often rely on Science As We Know It to be the end-all be-all of measures by which we view, critique, understand, and answer every question in this forum.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of very intelligent, very science oriented (science almost to the point of dogmatic faith) people here and it's long been an observation of mine that these individuals especially and our Company as a whole (and I've done this too, from time to time!) tend to approach all questions through the lens of real world understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hold that we tend to forget sometimes that this is all about fiction. We almost never know what the OP's perspective is: are they writing fantasy, or myth, or fairy story, or quasiVictorian mystery, or pseudoscientific adventure? Are they working on a magical world (hard or soft magic; integral or ephemeral), or a scifi world (hard or soft scifi; rigid or lax compliance), or the real world itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't approach all these kinds of worlds with the same hammer. We need to, I think, be a little more creative. Sometimes I think we need also to be more open and perhaps more willing to offer an answer even if we don't have all the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take the query at hand: if I were to answer, I would (most likely) ignore AlexP's entirely correct, but also in a key way beside the point challenges. Simply because the question isn't &amp;quot;are there enough weapons to do what I want&amp;quot; but rather &amp;quot;this is the Situation; and this is the Background; now I need help with an Assessment and a Recommendation as to timeframe&amp;quot;. What I mean by this is &lt;em&gt;okay, this is the fictional world the OP has constructed, and here is the problem the OP is facing: now, how can I apply my real world knowledge in combination with my creativity and in combination with my understanding that it's the ultimate narrative that is important here in order to help the OP through my response?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question (finally!): it is always appropriate to challenge an OP's assumptions, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;we always need to adjust our perspective and our approach to the background type and the individual question at hand.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T19:56:10.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2020-09-08T21:43:04.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags do not make a question automatically off topic.  Execution and torture tags have a place in WB on the level that you may have a question about the &lt;strong&gt;mechanics&lt;/strong&gt; of torture or execution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So asking, &amp;quot;Is an injection of 5mg of mercury into someone's blood fatal?&amp;quot;, is a valid use of the Execution tag and asking &amp;quot;How much mercury do you need to inject someone with to make them sick but not kill them?&amp;quot; is a valid use of the torture tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm personally for using such tags BECAUSE not everyone on this site is an adult.  This follows the same logic as an R rated film saying that it is rated R for violence and nudity. If a question is tagged as Execution or Torture and you have a problem with this, then it gives you a great big red light not to read any further since you can expect some rather unpleasant content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T21:43:04.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-09-09T13:50:55.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that a harsh critique of the backstory is normally not necessary.  The OP sets the criteria, and it is our job when answering to answer as though the backstory is true... with one exception, &lt;strong&gt;Hard-Science&lt;/strong&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH makes a good point in his comment by saying, how you go about handling this should be based on the user's experience. If the user is an experienced member of our community (someone with several thousand reputation points) then it is reasonable to assume that they know when and how to use the hard-science tag in which case, you should just go ahead and challenge the backstory. But since newer users do often interpret it as a &amp;quot;hard science fiction&amp;quot; tag, it would make more sense to challenge the tag than the backstory in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, (and this is really the most important part I think we could all do better on), don't assume that you have a better understanding of the science at play than anyone who will come after you.  When challenging scientific limitations, it is best to use less absolute language like, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not believe that&lt;/strong&gt; a nuclear war fought with currently available weapons could result in more than 90% of all life on Earth being wiped out...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  In this case, there are citable models for nuclear war that can cause this much loss of life through environmental damage factors like lack of precipitation, ozone depletion, and the Oxygen depletion of the Oceans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T18:47:56.520" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T18:47:56.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-09T18:31:16.090" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about&#xA;building a world. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too&#xA;Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some confusion about when this closure reason should be used.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/185066/how-can-modern-ish-weapons-occur-naturally-before-dark-age-era-weaponry&quot;&gt;How can &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot;-ish weapons occur naturally before Dark Age Era weaponry?&lt;/a&gt; for example.  As worded, this closure reason seems very open ended because &amp;quot;a story set in a world&amp;quot; seems to mean something very different to different users.  While I myself simply interpret this to mean the choices made by characters, others have interpreted this to include anything predicated on your backstory or history what-so-ever, See &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/112793/discussion-between-nosajimiki-and-jbh&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/112793/discussion-between-nosajimiki-and-jbh&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you follow the linked discussion, it includes the phrase &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; right in the first paragraph which makes this description of a close reason seem not just vague, but self contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this I would suggest rewording this close reason to something more like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking about plot building instead of world building. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even more simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too story based. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:10:17.297" Title="Should &quot;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world....&quot; closure reason be reworded?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7985" CreationDate="2020-09-09T19:26:45.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We already have tags for this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, this idea could easily be viewed as 3 common categories of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A person needs an actual creature that has actually lived to fit a need&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A person needs an animal that maybe actually exists but has never been proven&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A person needs help designing a fictional organism that evolved from a real organism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case you would add the [earth] tag to indicate that you are asking about the Earth as it is, for the second case you would add the [cryptids] tag, and for the third case you would add the [earth-like] or [alternate-earth] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of having a bunch of tags about everything that could conceivably be Earth based, we just have tags for identifying any topic as Earth based which can be used in conjunction with other tags giving you things like [fauna][earth] or [alternate-earth][evolution].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T19:26:45.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8014" CreationDate="2020-09-10T19:45:11.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the person Nosajimiki discussed the issue with on behalf of the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of what &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot; means has been hashed out on this site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/92/40609&quot;&gt;for years&lt;/a&gt;. If I recall correctly, Monica Ciello once explained that there was an early discussion about making a separate Stack for storybuilding questions — but it was abandoned because there's no way on the planet to meet Stack Exchange's expectations for objectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the discussions I've personally participated in on this subject include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388/40609&quot;&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6130/40609&quot;&gt;Catalog of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624/40609&quot;&gt;How to write the perfect question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the tried-and-true post linked in the VTC option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all the results of years of debate and discussion that started long before I joined the site. While everyone has admitted that there will forever be a grey area between worldbuilding and storybuilding, it has (IMO) generally been narrowed down to an idea that I've regularly expressed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (on-topic) is the development and consistent use of the rules and systems of a fictional world of your own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be told. Storybuilding (off-topic) concerns circumstances, plot, and character actions and choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular discussion focused on the use of the word &lt;em&gt;circumstances.&lt;/em&gt; It was (and continues to be) my opinion that the linked question was asking for a circumstance or series of circumstances that would justify a condition of the story (Soldiers in a WWI-technology time period are reduced to using medieval-era technology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What technology exists is a worldbuilding question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How that tech can be applied or used is a worldbuiliding question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nature of the political structures and demographics are, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the site has consistently closed questions about how to equip soldiers. That's because the question is story-based — the author can come up with a nearly infinite number of ways to justify the use of any weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's what the linked question is, a &amp;quot;how to justify the use of this weapon&amp;quot; question. It's a question about circumstances, which are a function of the story, not a function of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's consider an alternative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the OP asked, &amp;quot;what is it about a WWI machine-gun that could be compromised to justify forcing my soldiers to start using swords?&amp;quot; we have a different context. That would be an application-of-technology question. Example answers could include the nation ran out of gunpowder (or a constituent chemical) or ran out of metal. Or the use of some form of trench-warfare gas caused the thin springs to disintegrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the moment you ask, &amp;quot;OK, how would the nation run out of gunpowder?&amp;quot; you're back to a storybuilding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding must be true both before and after the story — otherwise it's storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What many post authors don't understand is that the rules and systems of a fictional world must exist above any story. To simplify the idea: they must predate and postdate the story (instances where this isn't true will be obvious, but you'll see what I mean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A worldbuilding rule is that the world has no sulfur and therefore cannot create gunpowder using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A storybuilding rule is that insurgents blew up the warehouse storing the nation's strategic supply of sulfur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A worldbuilding rule is that chemistry exists that can be exploited in the form of a gas grenade that will weaken gunmetal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A storybuilding rule is how that grenade is used on the battlefield, when, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, like many new authors on this site, the OP was more interested in idea-fishing than in considering the rules and intent of this site. The OP (to my knowledge, I haven't looked recently) has not edited the question to restrict responses to only worldbuilding contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfection is impossible. No matter what the exact text of the VTC definition, if people refuse to click the link and read the explanation, there will always be someone who is confused or under-educated by the definition. I therefore do not believe it need be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T19:45:11.770" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8014" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:10:17.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, I concur 100% with JBH's answer as it condenses many years of debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to address your specific question, I'd rather see the current boilerplate amended with the addition of JBH's quote. Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building the world itself. &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; (on-topic) is the development and consistent use of the rules and systems of a fictional world of your own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be told.  &lt;strong&gt;Storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt; (off-topic) concerns circumstances, plot, and character actions and choices. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the point is to clarify the closure reason, you can't get much clearer than those two additional statements!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:10:17.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:18:56.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find a back story is too unrealistic*, that it becomes jaring, and means the answer to the core of the question would therefore also feel unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I tend to do, is point out the issues &lt;strong&gt;and come up with a plausible alternative backstory&lt;/strong&gt;, then I can provide a realistic and plausible answer to their core question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy, lazy and often times disrespectful and rude, to just shoot down an idea. Legalized trolling if you will. Sure sometimes justified. But most of the time you can't see the value for the trollishness. Good questions and answers are more important than the ego (getting pumped up, by pushing others down) of the person answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone doesn't have the time to provide useful help to OP, then why are they answering?!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So in this specific case, provide a political or scientific reason why there &lt;strong&gt;would&lt;/strong&gt; be sufficient nukes, and then answering OPs reconstruction question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; Having an implausible plot element, has spoiled so many SciFi movies for me, which a simple change would have made right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4798" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:18:56.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8020" CreationDate="2020-09-11T22:53:17.487" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I was surprised that Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has a tag called [beer], yet there were no tags called [wine], [alcohol], or [alcoholic-beverages].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there were many questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=wine&quot;&gt;wine&lt;/a&gt; or other &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=alcohol&quot;&gt;alcoholic beverages&lt;/a&gt;, yet they did not have a specific tag. I think that it is unnecessary to have a tag on beer rather than just a general tag about alcohol. After all, [fantasy] was moved to [magic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T13:57:25.557" Title="Should [beer] be moved to [alcoholic-beverages]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8019" CreationDate="2020-09-12T01:17:01.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &amp;quot;alcohol&amp;quot; tag would probably be much better, and make keeping &amp;quot;beer&amp;quot; confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;alcoholic-beverages&amp;quot; would also work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75618" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T01:17:01.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T20:56:16.900" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a question is closed or deleted, what happens to the points accrued by those who answered or commented?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I delete my own question or it is closed, Do people who have contributed comments and answers retain their up- or down-votes. What about other benefits such as their question being accepted as the best answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10759" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T21:47:27.773" Title="If a question is closed or deleted, what happens to the points accrued by those who answered or commented?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8021" CreationDate="2020-09-12T21:47:27.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is merely &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;, that doesn't affect anyone's reputation. The OP, and those who posted answers, will keep any rep they gained or lost from up/downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is deleted within 60 days of being asked (I think 60 days is the threshold), any rep changes related to that question will be undone. This includes rep gains/losses from up/downvotes, the rep bonus for an accepted answer, and the 1-rep cost for casting a downvote on an answer. However, if the question is deleted after more than 60 days, those rep changes are locked in and are not undone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes on deleted posts remain on your public vote counts (AFAIK), and actions related to deleted posts still count towards your badges. For example, if you ask a question that initially gets an upvote, but is later heavily downvoted and deleted, you'll still keep the &amp;quot;Student&amp;quot; badge you earned for asking a question with a positive score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T21:47:27.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2020-09-13T00:17:23.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No One Has Ever Successfully Done This Empirically - We Can Only Provide Guidelines, not Rules&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever been able to police what is &amp;quot;torture&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;depictions of violence&amp;quot; properly.  It runs into the same thing as the issue that attempting to define Pornography versus Art does; lines are blurry and mean different things to different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a new topic either; consider the Platonic Ideal of a chair as proof that even thousands of years ago it was recognized that we couldn't define something as simple as a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chair&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; consistently... let alone something as fluid as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;torture&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To bring a concrete example in on torture, I have met people who consider any raising of livestock to be torturous to the animals... and I have met plenty of people who also eat meat.  One argument begins by asserting that a being is being raised solely for the purpose of being killed, flayed and eaten at a relatively young age -- and while they're not wrong, I think we have to also agree the full picture requires a more detailed and nuanced discussion before we can conclude it is torture and, therefore, abhorrent and prohibited.  And unless we're going to have that detailed and nuanced discussion over every possible iteration now and draw each to their logical conclusion (as defined by a universal ethical system which itself requires definition), this simply isn't going to be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, for Guidelines...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the U.S. Supreme Court actually did a gangbusters job on this back in the day when discussing the topic of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what is and what is not Obscenity&lt;/a&gt;, and we could apply the same logic.  In short, they recognized that they could not pass a set of strict laws that cover the gamut - &lt;em&gt;and that it would be dangerous to attempt to do so&lt;/em&gt;.  Their solution was to implement three guidelines that should be used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The average person, applying local community standards, looking at the work in its entirety, must find that it appeals to the prurient interest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work must describe or depict, in an obviously offensive way, sexual conduct, or excretory functions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work as a whole must lack &amp;quot;serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose a modification of the above, leveraging the community moderation system that we have to identify - by &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;consensus rather that individual interpretation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; - whether works are acceptable &lt;em&gt;purely on a case-by-case basis&lt;/em&gt;.  The guidelines I propose are that to be valid for removal as torturous/gruesome a work must meet these three criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The average person, applying SE community standards, looking at the work in its entirety, must find that it appeals to the prurient interest (&amp;quot;marked by, arousing, or appealing to an immoderate torturous/gruesome desire&amp;quot;, in this case)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work must describe or depict, in an obviously offensive way, torturous or gruesome content&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work as a whole must lack &amp;quot;serious literary, artistic, or worldbuilding values&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; - &amp;quot;I can't define it, but I know it when I see it&amp;quot;... as long as others agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26447" LastEditorUserId="26447" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T00:24:42.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T00:24:42.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8019" CreationDate="2020-09-13T00:32:49.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went into this expecting to defend the 'beer' tag and suggesting we also open an 'alcohol' tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I searched for the 'beer' tag, and saw &lt;strong&gt;there were only 2 questions that use it&lt;/strong&gt;, the newest of which was over 2 years old.  With that said, comparing &amp;quot;beer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wine&amp;quot; as search terms yielded very similar results (410 and 380, respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm indifferent on opening up an Alcohol tag, but I'm fully onboard with burninating any tag that has fewer than 10 uses and that has not been used in the past 2 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26447" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T00:32:49.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-13T01:01:16.447" Score="-1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often times, we see tags that have fewer than 10 uses and have had no uses for 2+ years. It is likely that people are unaware of them. So should we use a bot to autodelete tags like these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T13:51:10.233" Title="Should we delete all tags that have fewer than 10 uses and have not been used in the past 2 years?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8025" CreationDate="2020-09-13T13:51:10.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If people are &amp;quot;unaware&amp;quot; of the tags, yet are asking queries that would otherwise fit those tags, the sensible solution would be to edit the query's tags as appropriate. It might also be a good idea to improve any relevant verbiage in the help center or tour regarding tag existence, function, and usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T13:51:10.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8019" CreationDate="2020-09-13T13:57:25.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concur with Mary. Having tags that are little used is indicative that querents, especially new ones, are unaware of the variety of tags we've got (honestly, I didn't even know we have a &amp;quot;beer&amp;quot; tag). Eliminating tags doesn't help much; good management of tags will improve the functionality of this forum. I'd be in favour of creating an &amp;quot;alcoholic beverages&amp;quot; tag; I'd also be in favour of creating a &amp;quot;wine&amp;quot; tag. I'd rather not eliminate the &amp;quot;beer&amp;quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T13:57:25.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8029" CreationDate="2020-09-15T01:15:10.580" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/185417/627&quot;&gt;this question about using flags as weapons&lt;/a&gt; with the Pulitzer prize winning photo of exactly that.  I included an encouragement for Americans to vote.  I expected some down votes from people upset by the photo but was surprised to get a moderator level deletion from Monty_Wild without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume that an exhortation to vote was considered offensive enough to warrant deletion.  I removed that and replaced it with a musing about societal symbols used as weapons.  I would like my idea to be undeleted please.  Or if it must stay deleted, explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T16:24:57.850" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T16:24:57.850" Title="My answer about using flags as weapons remains deleted. I would like it undeleted please" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8028" CreationDate="2020-09-15T16:03:50.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bulk of the post, with or without the photo had little to do with elections. On top of that it is about the only answer that actually displays a flag being used as a weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that some people may feel offended by seeing the flag of their country being used as a weapon. Doesn't mean that did not happen, and there is no call in the post for it to be used that way again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it should be undeleted. Unfortunately since it deleted by a moderator, I cannot vote to undelete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T16:03:50.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8031" CreationDate="2020-09-16T00:45:06.587" Score="9" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Scenario: Edits so Upvotes can be Changed to Downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I found an interesting occurrence when going to re-edit one of my answers. One of my answers were edited by a person, so they could un-upvote it and then down-vote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ObIuy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ObIuy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume it was to gain some kind of strategic advantage on the question, as one cannot normally change their votes after 25 minutes, so by putting in a small edit, the vote can be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second Scenario: Opposing Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, this allows us to change &lt;em&gt;downvotes to upvotes&lt;/em&gt; when question frames change or we make small adjustments to answers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6bg9J.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6bg9J.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FSRTy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FSRTy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;After a small edit, I felt that it clarified the answer enough that the downvote was no longer necessary. In fact, combined with a frame change on the question, their answer was now one of the best. Following this edit, I changed my vote from a downvote to an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the intended reason for being unable to change a vote unless an edit is made, is for when a fix or change is made, and an answer/question is improved enough to warrant a change from a downvote to an upvote (similar to the second scenario).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By allowing re-votes after a personal edit, one can do the second scenario, making the necessary change oneself and revert their vote from a downvote when the answer has been improved, or the question frame has changed. At the same time, however, it enables the first scenario, where someone can edit another's answer to change their votes strategically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is this first scenario sufficiently offset by the second to justify allowing votes to be recast after personal edits?&lt;/em&gt; Curious about advice/opinions from other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68848" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T14:13:51.207" Title="Is personally editing an answer to change from up/down votes after the 25 minute mark intended?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8030" CreationDate="2020-09-16T14:13:51.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been a Worldbuilding member for like four years, and SE member for over seven years. I don't remember a single case in which someone managed to alter someone else's answer to make it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's because of a combination of factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes to allow you to change your vote are all very minor;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New users (rep &amp;lt; 2,000) cannot make changes without approval from older users (rep = 2,000+).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vast majority of people who get 2,000+ reputation end up learning the ropes along the way, so they know how to use the site in a fair way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since an edit will either keep the answer quality as is or improve it, I think the case in which someone would edit an answer to downvote it is really an edge case scenario (and I'm surprised it happened here). Usually we edit in order to upvote something once it has been improved. I do it all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T14:13:51.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8036" CreationDate="2020-09-17T10:17:56.020" Score="15" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently stumbled across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/185692/32016&quot;&gt;this deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; (10k+ users only). It seems like a good enough answer to the question it was posted on, with a fair amount of detail, but was deleted by a moderator as rude/abusive purely for its opening remark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You really need to work on your writing style. This sounds like the most arrogant question of all times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of remark has no place on Stack Exchange: it's unfriendly and unnecessary. Had I seen this answer prior to its deletion, I would have edited it out, and probably left a comment politely asking the user to refrain from making such remarks in the future. But I wouldn't have deleted the entire answer, because the rest of it was fine (albeit in need of some SPaG edits); it was just that one bit that needed removing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first thought was that the mod was being too harsh in deleting the answer entirely, instead of just removing the offending statement, but it's also possible that my approach is too lenient. So I thought it best to ask what the best practice is, especially since I'm currently running for pro-tem mod on another SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an answer contains a single rude/abusive remark but is otherwise a perfectly valid answer, is it acceptable to just remove the offending statement? Or should the whole thing be flagged as rude/abusive and deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32016" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T04:42:37.853" Title="Is a single rude remark inside an otherwise good answer grounds for deleting the whole answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8032" CreationDate="2020-09-17T13:54:56.830" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NO&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what the edit function is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the comment was unnecessary and over the top, thought not actually &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot;. I think it expressed a valid (if exasperated) position regarding the querent's present line of inquiry and mode of expression. If Monty Wild thought that the comment was rude, that's fair enough. You thought it was rude as well, which is also fair enough. We each have our opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to the point: Best practice in this kind of situation would have been to simply edit it out. The response, as you say, was otherwise meritorious and is of benefit to the querent and others considering similar fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as whether this was a good Moderator action or not: I'm not saying one way or the other.  I will say, however, that I reviewed the respondent's answers. I find no hint of rudeness in any of them. The respondent does say he is German (and thus ESL, so SPaG edits ought to be welcome) and he seems to respond with what I'd consider, from an American perspective, characteristic German forthrightness. I believe the &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot; comment was perhaps nothing more than a single event extension of that forthrightness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have moderated worldbuilding forums for years, though never here. If I were a SE Mod, I would have edited out the comment, fixed the SPaGhetti all nice, and called it a day. I wouldn't have even left a comment asking him not to be rude, though I'd make a mental notation for future review. That's a Level 1a response. This is because, as a Moderator, you come to learn that there is a sliding scale of response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, as I see it, Monty went for the Level 3c response right away. This I think would have been the correct response if the post were nothing more than a diatribe against the querent's own person. The problem with immediate escalation, is that, as a Moderator, you can't deescalate next time there's a problem with a user. People will notice and will come to question the Moderator team's authority: why don't the Mod's administer justice fairly or mercifully? Why did they just edit that person's rude comment out, but they deleted my answer entirely? See how that goes? Really the only response levels beyond utterly eradicating someone's post is to suspend or remove the person from the forum. Neither action are warranted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the community can't vote to undo the deletion, so there's no way to fix outside of Moderator intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The takeaway lesson: always dispense Justice with liberal Mercy; Justice without Mercy is Tyranny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T14:00:02.187" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T14:00:02.187" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8032" CreationDate="2020-09-20T00:08:59.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, as @elemtilas has already pointed out, &lt;strong&gt;there's a reason we, as users, can edit posts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to add that, while it is somewhat rude, &lt;em&gt;it isn't overly offensive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see deleting it if it said something like &amp;quot;you shouldn't be writing, you arrogant %^\$&amp;amp;! Stop polluting our site with your #$@\$.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;it doesn't.&lt;/em&gt; It seems to me that at worst it comes off as petulantly exasperated. Also, remember that WB.SE has members from many cultures; what's acceptable is not constant throughout the world. &lt;strong&gt;It isn't even constant in the U.S.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, correcting someone else's child is permissible in Texas, but doing it in the Pacific Northwest is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T00:08:59.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8032" CreationDate="2020-09-20T06:27:30.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;YES...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and no...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has become draconian. What was once a problem primarily on Stack Overflow has swung entirely to the other side and become a systemic and institutionalized problem in the corporation and that's infecting the user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #1&lt;/strong&gt; is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;, which teaches us to hand-slap people instantly for not being perfect (or for not being politically aligned with Stack Exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #2&lt;/strong&gt; Flagging is highly encouraged, and one of the flags is to identify a post that's rude and abusive. The amount of rudeness and abusivity is not stated in the flag text — and considering that SE's behavior is that it's &lt;em&gt;not tolerated,&lt;/em&gt; the apparently encouraged option is to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #3&lt;/strong&gt; is the culture on Worldbuilding to never, ever, ever, edit another person's post. This, despite &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;SE's overall culture of encouraging editing&lt;/a&gt; so long as the meaning of the post is not changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore difficult to argue that Monty's use of the moderator hammer was wrong. We and SE have created the environment that permitted it. (I respect that F1Krazy's post is a legitimate effort to change WB's culture... but my own experience is that it won't get very far. Most of the new users aren't lifting a finger to understand the site, its culture, or its past at all anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, it's as important to educate people about answering as it is to educate them about asking questions. Erik did need to know that his remark was unacceptable. Frankly, &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot; is frequently in the eye of the beholder. If Erik thinks that's the most arrogant question &amp;quot;of all times&amp;quot; (his own grammar isn't great), then he needs more experience. Then again, I've no doubt some will consider this answer to be the most arrogant post of all time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monty should have edited the answer first, leaving a comment reminding Erik to &amp;quot;be nice.&amp;quot; However, for all I know Monty had had a long day, too. And considering the moderating load — I'm in favor of thanking him, even when I occasionally think it could have been handled better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thanks, Monty! For moderating a site that's IMO harder to moderate than herding cats. Thanks. L.Dutch, HDE 226868... Thanks.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T06:27:30.827" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8032" CreationDate="2020-09-21T16:32:23.143" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will say that I do disagree with the deletion for reasons that many folks have articulated (though, as has also been acknowledged, the now-removed text was certainly over the line). Given that there seems like there's a fairly solid community consensus for undeleting the answer, I've gone ahead and done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to give a shoutout to both the folks who flagged the answer, as well as F1Krazy for doing a nice job of cleaning up the grammar and spelling - I think that really improved the post's presentation and certainly made it worth keeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T16:32:23.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T20:46:11.733" Score="-4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8038/proposal-for-editing-rules&quot;&gt;Proposal for Editing Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note to L. Dutch: do nòt roll back and do not &amp;quot;protect&amp;quot; this question. This question should be closed. All further answers or comments should be referred to the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-09-26T23:24:31.857" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T23:24:31.857" Title="See Proposal for Editing Rules" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-09-27T09:17:54.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T22:22:17.537" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;@elemtilas recently proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8035/70058&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; that we, as a community, establish some guidelines for editing. Since I do quite a bit of editing, I have decided to accept his challenge and make a preliminary &lt;strong&gt;Ten Rules of Editing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eliminate objectionable content wherever you find it.&lt;/strong&gt; Foul language, innuendo, and slurs should not be countenanced by any member of this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not edit in spite of the express wishes of the &lt;em&gt;originale adjunctor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; If the OP says they want to word things a specific way, that's how they want it. If you really think your way is better, propose it in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not alter the meaning of a post.&lt;/strong&gt; Style must always bow to Meaning; sometimes an ungainly style is the only way to express the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fix grammar whenever possible.&lt;/strong&gt; Information presented here should be easy to read, so that people can glean necessary information. &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, you should expeditiously fix the following:&lt;/strong&gt; (more things can be added as necessary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. &lt;strong&gt;lack of appropriate capitalization.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;Capitalization Where It Doesn't Belong&lt;/strong&gt; (be careful about this one, though; sometimes it's significant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. &lt;strong&gt;Incorrect! usage? of, punctuation/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. Yesterday, my mother came over and told me about this really interesting but &lt;strong&gt;obfuscating backstory&lt;/strong&gt;. It doesn't really contribute, but I wanted to tell you anyway because it's really interesting...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.&lt;strong&gt;Giant walls of text.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't worry, I'm not going to unleash one on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mark important points with bold-face.&lt;/strong&gt; Doing so helps to make the point of a post more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eliminate all instances of non-shortened bare URLs&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;) They are ugly, and add unnecessary length to posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep post lengths to a minimum without altering their meaning.&lt;/strong&gt; While expository length is good, verbosity is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thou shalt edit when appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt; These rules are useless if nobody actually does any editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additions and changes are welcome, but please try to keep in #5.e; rules are good, but only so long as someone can read through them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T23:04:17.683" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T23:04:17.683" Title="Proposal for Editing Rules" Tags="|discussion|faq-proposal|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8040" CreationDate="2020-09-22T05:14:58.710" Score="-4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Understanding that there has been discussions about frame challenges in the past, notably in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7593/help-controlling-a-misguided-frame-challenge-answer-which-has-created-a-debate&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt; (plus certain others), is there any disputable reason why there is not a tag for designating frame challenges, given that such questions exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because it can too open-ended? Too controversial? Too much of a 'what-if' scenario? Not enough to intrinsically describe a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79254" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T14:06:43.400" Title="Should there be a 'frame-challenge' tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8039" CreationDate="2020-09-22T05:20:48.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, while I can figure one being seen as an expert in biology, hard-science or alternative heart, what would exactly an expert in frame challenge be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second but not less important, what would a frame challenge question be? Frame challenge can be a type of answer, but not an intrinsic content of the question. And if you are asking a question with the sole purpose of challenging its frame you are opening up an endless discussion, not giving a closed problem. For that type of discussion SE is not the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T05:20:48.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8037" CreationDate="2020-09-22T05:24:39.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't get the purpose of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just make more confusion by duplicating content already available in different location and make it even worse when one gets updated and the other lags behind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each and every of the point has already a page explaining it, and if some users are not putting the effort of finding, reading and understanding them, why would another post lost in the queue make any difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T05:24:39.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8038" CreationDate="2020-09-22T13:48:44.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with eight of the ten commandments, therefore I am branching this church and starting a reformist movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If necessary, thou shalt add a &amp;quot;TL;DR&amp;quot; to long posts. It is an unfortunate fact of life that some posts can get rather lengthy. With that in mind, ensure that such posts have a summary paragraph for those who can't spend ten minutes reading it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO this contradicts with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thou shalt not edit in spite of the express wishes of the originale adjunctor. If the OP says they want things a specific way, that's how they want it. If you really think it should be your way, propose it in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarizing a long post on your own may lead to a summary which is not what the author had in mind. It may also lead to simplifications and loss of context. It is very like listening to a single Pink Floyd song without knowing the whole album around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thou shalt eliminate all instances of non-shortened URLs. They are ugly, and add unnecessary length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean literal URL's in text, I think each case is a case. If you mean shortened URL's through services like bitly, then instead of having just one link that may break over time, you now have two, because these services and their databases are not eternal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T13:48:44.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8039" CreationDate="2020-09-22T14:06:43.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frame challenges are not an element of world building. If you wish to test whether your world (or some rule or context in it) makes sense, then the appropriate tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;. That one works even if your world is not realistic in terms of our own world, i.e.: you want a world where wormholes are an everyday thing, and you wish to know whether that would break causality because wormholes allow for FTL. You can tag it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;, and you can also tag with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T14:06:43.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8038" CreationDate="2020-09-22T17:35:52.323" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but this is a Vandal's Manifesto. I cannot possibly agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting a question or an answer on Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; imply a license to mutilate the author's text. And, moreover, in most countries of this world such a license is &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; anyway. An author is entitled to the integrity of their work forever and ever. It is considered extremely rude, and even immoral, to publish &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; text under another person's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers posted on Stack Exchange are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike&lt;/a&gt; license. This license allows anybody to create derivative works to their heart's content, and publish them &lt;em&gt;under their own name&lt;/em&gt;, while mentioning the author of the original work. It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow twisting somebody else's words; it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow the usurpation of somebody else's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; allowable edits are those which would be acceptable to be made in a fragment quoted from a book; that is, correcting blatant spelling errors (for example, **&lt;em&gt;defebce&lt;/em&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rightarrow$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;defence&lt;/em&gt; would be allowed, but &lt;em&gt;defence&lt;/em&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rightarrow$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;defense&lt;/em&gt; would not be); correcting &lt;em&gt;blatant&lt;/em&gt; grammatical errors (for example, &lt;em&gt;they **says&lt;/em&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rightarrow$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;they say&lt;/em&gt;, but beware than nowadays English grammar is a minefield); and normalizing to one form for words and names which appear in the text in multiple forms without apparent rhyme or reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post is prolix? Write a comment. The post would benefit from a summary section? Write a comment. The post would benefit from a different choice of vocabulary? Write a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As long as the author's name is associated with the post, you are not allowed to change it in any non-trivial way.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how Wikipedia does it: contributions are licensed under CC BY-SA there just as they are here. &lt;em&gt;But on Wikipedia the articles are anonymous.&lt;/em&gt; You are allowed to edit Wikipedia articles exactly &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; they are anonymous. We have something similar here, with our Community Answers; by all means, edit those into whatever shape you want. But please &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; put your words in other people's mouths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception is when an author gives you explicit permission to edit their work. (For example, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/183234/is-it-possible-to-create-a-new-hybrid-species-of-the-homo-genus-that-can-produce/183235#comment567374_183235&quot;&gt;have permission from user Halfthawed&lt;/a&gt; to silently edit their use of Greek and Latin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on the &amp;quot;reveal spoiler&amp;quot; button will reveal a famous pair of paintings by two famous painters: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Titian&lt;/a&gt;'s most beautiful and relaxed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Urbino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venus of Urbino&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (16th century) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Manet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manet&lt;/a&gt;'s equally celebrated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Olympia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1863). Manet's painting is very obviously a derivative of Titian's, with some alterations in the poses of the secondary characters, subtle alteration of the expression of the reclining woman, the addition of chintzy slippers and a subtle change in color palette. The point being that small changes can completely change the message of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that, as you may have guessed from the names of the paintings, they may be famous and known in the entire world, but they may also be perceived as NSFW in some countries.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Venere_di_Urbino_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Tiziano_-_Venere_di_Urbino_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/290px-Tiziano_-_Venere_di_Urbino_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Titian's &amp;quot;Venus of Urbino&amp;quot; (1534)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_ProjectFXD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_ProjectFXD.jpg/290px-Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_ProjectFXD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Manet's &amp;quot;Olympia&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br &gt; &lt;br &gt;Left, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Titian&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Urbino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venus of Urbino&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1534). Right, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Manet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manet&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Olympia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1863). Pictures from Wikimedia, public domain. Note that Manet did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; call his derivative work &amp;quot;Titian's Venus of Urbino edited by Manet&amp;quot;. They &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; similar, but  the confrontational and almost querrulous personality of Manet's Olympia is as far as possible from the serenity and self-unconsciousness of Titian's Venus. Also note the change in color temperature, from Titian's warm and full of life red to Manet's ice cold palette. Would it be fair to consider that they are the same picture, just slightly updated to be in consonance with 19th century realities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T21:03:23.337" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T21:03:23.337" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8038" CreationDate="2020-09-23T18:07:03.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. You're trying to solve too many problems in one post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience is the more people have to read, the less they will. It's one of the reasons why we have a VTC reason that tells people to be focused. You're focusing on at least two problems: good editing and good post formatting. AlexP has a good point in that our behavior when it comes to editing should be minimalist — what is the least we can do to editing someone else's post to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; it? The reason for this is SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;admonition concerning post edits&lt;/a&gt; that we should edit &amp;quot;to clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning.&amp;quot; This expectation is met when we edit minimally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, #6 and #7 don't belong here. They're non-minimalist formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Redundancy is not our friend&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made the #3, #4, and #9 are redundant as they're all saying the same thing in support of the previously linked admonition. Remember, the longer something is, the less likely someone will read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I suspect that since you created the post originally with &amp;quot;ten commandments&amp;quot; that you were unintentionally forced to have ten rules. Now that we've removed the religious overtones of the post, we can walk away from the need to have ten rules. There should be as many as needed, no more, no less.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Is an admonition to not inject objectionable content actually necessary?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there actually two or more instances in the site's history of someone editing objectionable content &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; someone else's post? I'd like to see that.  Please remember a ditty from Dr. Seuss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It has often been said&lt;br&gt;There's so much to be read,&lt;br&gt;you never can cram&lt;br&gt;all those words in your head.&lt;p&gt;So the writer who breeds&lt;br&gt;more words than he needs&lt;br&gt;is making a chore&lt;br&gt;for the reader who reads.&lt;p&gt;That's why my belief is&lt;br&gt;the briefer the brief is,&lt;br&gt;the greater the sigh&lt;br&gt;of the reader's relief is.&lt;p&gt;And that's why your books&lt;br&gt;have such power and strength.&lt;br&gt;You publish with shorth!&lt;br&gt;(Shorth is better than length.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short — unless the issue is common (a bit more than two instances), it shouldn't be in the list. We need to practice minimalism with our policies, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. The TL;DR section is inappropriate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AlexP is completely right when it comes to #7. It is impossible to create a summary section that isn't changing the meaning of the original post because a summary is, by definition, an &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; of the original text. #7 is good advice for writing an original post, but it's poor advice for people editing someone else's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. An entry inviting the permission of the OP would be appropriate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, an entry that tells editors that if they feel a post needs more than minimalist editing, they should seek the permission of the OP first (and NOT proceed without it, no matter how much time passes), would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. Finally, it's time to let go of #101.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helped when you explained where the #101 reference came from, but the reality is, a post expressing the site's policies about editing that concludes with an admonition to not edit the post is weird. I firmly believe this site's general attitude is to not edit anything at all. In other words, part of what you're doing is &lt;em&gt;inviting&lt;/em&gt; people to edit more, not less, and to do it better. That makes #101 a double-standard. Further, is blooming rare that anything gets edited in Meta at all. When it comes to establishing the rules, we should avoid all distractions. So, with my most sincere condolences... I think #101 needs to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T18:07:03.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8032" CreationDate="2020-09-29T04:42:37.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, that answer should not have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator on another SE site, I simply edit out anything that will likely be construed as rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it becomes a routine problem (exceptionally rare), I'll ask the community member to please be more kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has never required any more intervention than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I work hard to value everyone's contributions, and never delete any content unless absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14410" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T04:42:37.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-01T12:49:49.287" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/186519/how-do-i-maintain-a-region-of-permanent-political-instability&quot;&gt;How do I maintain a region of permanent political instability?&lt;/a&gt; to the end that Europe up until WW2 is effectively the answer, and that a basic study of history would provide that information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've essentially described Europe up until the end of WW2. Basic history lessons would not be wasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comment was removed, and I'd like to understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T17:41:14.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T17:41:14.110" Title="Why was my comment suggesting studying history, deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8050" CreationDate="2020-10-01T12:52:32.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts which do not comply with our &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; policy can be flagged and removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comment in particular did not follow the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be welcoming and patient, especially with those who may not know everything you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T12:56:04.867" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T12:56:04.867" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-02T08:36:22.737" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my very first encounter with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; which is a great idea especially for newbies. However I have noticed that I have received very little feedback for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/8046#8046&quot;&gt;my item&lt;/a&gt; and I am wondering about what to do next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For actual questions we have bounties to draw attention, but those cannot be used for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe I should go ahead and ask it on the main site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18287" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T08:36:22.737" Title="How can I draw attention to a Sandbox item (proposed question posted as an answer)?" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-08T19:27:10.770" Score="17" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a fair share of questions here, but only a few pertain to ideas I actually pursued seriously in a game or short story. Many of my questions are little more than a fictional curiosity to explore a world idea and I just want to see what other people have to say about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prompts people to put a lot of effort into giving a serious answer, but I wonder if it's a bit dishonest to take advantage of this for a &lt;em&gt;mere curiosity&lt;/em&gt;. I suppose some budding writer might ask themselves a similar question in the future, so it's not useless or anything, but it still feels... cheap... or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I actually go in with the intent of writing about it before I ask a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46434" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T19:23:56.753" Title="Is it bad to ask a question if I have no intent of pursuing the idea seriously in some work of fiction?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8053" CreationDate="2020-10-09T01:20:11.743" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For The Love of Worldbuilding:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is a good place to explore ideas. Some of those are complex, specific and targeted questions (say, the orbital mechanics of three stars with a planet locked between them) while others are fanciful (carnivore teddy bear behavior). We don't always know where a curiosity will lead us or others. I, for one, assume that ideas are free, and people aren't answering questions out of a desperate desire to get their thoughts published. If they were, they'd demand to be cited in any derivative works. It's &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and you never know when your idea will spark a story idea for someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, sometimes it's showing off, if you have a particularly brilliant solution to a problem. Mostly, if you have a really good question, we're excited to see it. A shortage of great questions is frustrating. Personally, I'm a lot better at answers than questions, because I do my own creative research. So don't deny people the chance to chew on a particularly sweet question. I'm passionate about biology and enjoy sharing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it bothers you, you can always say you aren't sure if this is a serious question or not. Then people can decide how much effort to put in. But mostly we do it for the joy of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74691" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T01:20:11.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8053" CreationDate="2020-10-11T08:59:23.647" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Heck No!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions I've asked were not in the context of a story I was writing or ever intended to write. Many weren't even in the context of a specific world I was trying to build. Most of the questions I've submitted were submitted because I was curious about a set of rules or systems I thought were interesting and that might benefit others working on similar problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense, what you just asked was,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;should I build a wall if I have no intention of building a house?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As odd as it may seem, the answer is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Yes. It teaches you how to build a wall.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I would like to point out that we've had a few users over the years who asked questions because they had flights of fancy and Worldbuilding.SE was pretty much the only place they had a hope of getting an answer. Asking questions like that tends to lead to silly, poorly formed, not-useful-for-others questions. That, I would ask you to avoid. This site should meet Stack Exchange's basic expectation that questions should serve not just the submitter, but others who come after as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for the love of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5629/40609&quot;&gt;Glarnak&lt;/a&gt;, ask all the questions you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T08:59:23.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8053" CreationDate="2020-10-14T19:23:56.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Of course not&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;believe it or not many questions asked here never become a full blown story, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and that's perfectly ok&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; not only because first off, its fun to learn stuff, and fun to answer questions too, but not only that, if someone else has the same idea, they don't need to ask their own question, &lt;em&gt;yours would already be there.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's totally ok to ask a question, even if it never goes anywhere, and maybe if you think it won't go anywhere, an answer might spark your interest and it will become a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T19:23:56.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8058" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:01:17.573" Score="8" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just visited SciFi.SE to post a &amp;quot;can anyone remember this book?&amp;quot; question when the most amazing popup appeared!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a9qyd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a9qyd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want a cool popup like this! A popup with some concise, succinct, and &lt;em&gt;very direct&lt;/em&gt; recommendations about how to write a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do we activate a popup like this on our site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Or, are we stuck with yet another Stack Exchange cookie-cutter solution that fits Stack Overflow really well and no one else?)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:41:12.527" Title="How do we get a cool popup when a question is asked?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8057" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:41:12.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;That popup is already active network-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; shown the first time you ask a question on a site. See the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/344513/295232&quot;&gt;The new ask page is now live on the network!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:41:12.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-19T04:59:52.690" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The VTC reason &amp;quot;This question belongs on another SE site&amp;quot; doesn't work right.  Currently, after selecting that option, the only Stack you can choose is WB.meta.  I highly doubt that is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I report this bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51953" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T23:22:38.040" Title="Is there a community-specific bug report feature?" Tags="|bug|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8059" CreationDate="2020-10-19T05:42:11.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is meant as a moderator only feature, as pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2811/30492&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also a more thorough reasoning is posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4530/30492&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T05:42:11.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-19T23:21:53.300" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, a while back I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8038/proposal-for-editing-rules&quot;&gt;this proposal&lt;/a&gt; for editing rules. @AlexP quickly responded in the extreme negative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8044/21222&quot;&gt;calling it &amp;quot;a Vandal's Manifesto&amp;quot;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to him, the license placed on answers means that you aren't supposed to edit them without the express permission of the OP, with any non-minimal edit being outright illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it actually wouldn't be illegal; when you edit a post, the following things happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A marker is placed on the post, letting others know that the content was made by the OP, but edited by whoever did the editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OP can go and revert the edit whenever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, &lt;strong&gt;I would like to get a community consensus on what is or is not appropriate editing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T03:06:59.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T03:49:07.093" Title="Is it okay to edit?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|community|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8059" CreationDate="2020-10-19T23:22:38.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You already have; the &amp;quot;bug-report feature&amp;quot; is called Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T23:22:38.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8061" CreationDate="2020-10-20T02:06:46.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lurk for a couple days on the edit review queue and you will notice that when rejecting edits, you must pick a reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vandalism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conflicts with author's intentions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No improvements whatsoever&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to reply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irrelevant tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disruptive editing (inserting POV biases)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;??&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way someone please edit the list above to make it correct. Those are the no-no's for editing. Everything else is game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE encourages people to edit by giving them reputation points when they have less than 2,000. There are also badges for editing in various ways. So do edit away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck I'm even making this answer community wiki so people are encouraged to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="71969" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T21:17:26.873" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T21:17:26.873" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-10-20T02:06:46.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8065" CreationDate="2020-10-21T09:44:18.617" Score="6" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain why the linked Anti-Gerrymandering question was migrated to Politics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/59204/how-could-i-build-a-political-system-immune-to-gerrymandering-yet-still-gives-lo&quot;&gt;Build an Anti-Gerrymandering Political System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It already had a wealth of answers, so obviously a number of site users thought it was on topic.&#xA;Asking to design a new system is generally off-topic in politics.SE, but gerrymandering is a &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; topic, so it will likely stay open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staying on WB would allow for more fantastical solutions. The original question doesn't specifically disallow that, or place any restrictions on magicial/high-tech enforcement. Though the OP may not actually want those, they didn't go out of their way to say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB requires users to bring adjacent expertise. If every WB question that could be answered with real-world science was moved on, we'd have a lot less traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45151" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T11:40:12.653" Title="Migration of Gerrymandering question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-21T09:55:24.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That a question receives answers is not an indicator that it belongs to worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the linked question being migrated, it was already closed for being off topic and had received several flags in the same direction. Since I deemed the worldbuilding part to be pretty weak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a hypothetical world [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opted for the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out somewhere in the SE community: &amp;quot;How do I conjugate the past tense of the verb to be on a 737?&amp;quot; is not a question about aviation, but about the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T13:22:00.210" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T13:22:00.210" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8061" CreationDate="2020-10-21T11:12:53.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need a &amp;quot;Suggest Edit&amp;quot; feature&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philosophical legal arguments aside, there seems to be two camps based on how bold people are with their edits. The issue is that an edit, when made by someone with above 2k reputation (which everyone people participating in this discussion have), that edit is applied immediately. We are wielding a mallet and have to be very careful with applying it. And for those with less reputation, a queue is used, but then total strangers are voting on whether the edit is in line with the OP's intent or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we could instead &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; edits, then they could be as brief or lengthy as we want. A summary, a rephrasing, replacing long URLs with short ones, etcetera. Then rather than place the edits into a queue, make it up to the user to accept it or not. Then award +2 reputation for the editor if they make it in, -5 reputation if it does not, and through the forces of the free market edits will grow to be in line with the expectations of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course some would argue that comments are the place for these suggested edits - some of the more strict members would say that that's all comments are for. But try proposing a tl;dr section within 500 characters, or suggesting a different style of mark-up or lay-out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that this is a proposal, not an answer to the question, but I feel like this would be the only way to reconcile the two radically different views on edit permissibility that I see here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T11:12:53.270" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8069" CreationDate="2020-10-21T21:47:29.383" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gotten tons of different answers that were really helpful on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/188614/does-this-time-travel-delivery-service-cause-paradoxes-and-if-so-how-can-i-avoi&quot;&gt;instant delivery time travel question&lt;/a&gt;, but I've come to a rather hard decision to make. I want to use one answer in the story, but another answer was really helpful and went into a lot of detail. So which do I click as accepted? The detailed one that will help others if they want to do the same thing, or the shorter possibly less quality answer that I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77168" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T02:20:21.690" Title="Should I accept the best answer or the answer I use?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8068" CreationDate="2020-10-22T00:00:05.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Like Falling in Love:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are rewards for giving the most clever answer, and there are rewards for giving the OP exactly what they really want. It's kind of like having the choice between a perfect guy who's funny, charming, and rich - or the one you actually fall in love with (but who might be short, bald, and have a terrible mother).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting selects the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answer, but you also need to reward the person who picked up on the vibe you had in your mind. Lots of upvotes give the perfect answer a reward. Upvote the perfect answer! But pick the answer that meets your needs the best to accept. Especially when the Mr. Perfect answer is showing it up. Every good answer deserves a shot at true happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74691" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T00:00:05.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8068" CreationDate="2020-10-22T02:20:21.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another option is that you can accept one and award a bounty to all those you deem worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons for starting a bounty is precisely to reward an existing answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T02:20:21.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8061" CreationDate="2020-10-22T03:49:07.093" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the one hand: Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;encourages&lt;/em&gt; people to edit both questions and answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've pointed out in previous versions of this discussion, the biggest problem here is that this is a highly creative Stack and edits are easily in conflict of a basic Stack Exchange editing rule. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; we read...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include: ... To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning) ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That parenthetic is 99.9% of the problem here. Edits are encouraged &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if and only if&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you don't change the meaning of the post. On this stack, it's incredibly easy to edit a question or answer and change the meaning of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me say that again because I don't think enough people really understand it or respect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On this Stack, it's incredibly easy to edit a question or answer and change the meaning of the post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the other hand: this isn't Stack Overflow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On technical Stacks like Stack Overflow it's fairly simple to edit any post to clarify that post. Here, that's simply not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that for this reason this Stack has developed an unofficial culture of not editing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Nobody likes their baby called ugly. But if you're looking for community consensus to blithely edit other people's posts without their consent, here are (IMO) the basic rules by which it will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will not put words into the OP's mouth. Ever. Not for any reason. You can't &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; the question or answer by changing it to be what you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the OP &amp;quot;means.&amp;quot; You cannot pretend to read their mind, understand their psychology, or &amp;quot;get them.&amp;quot; When someone posts a comment that expresses the frustration, &amp;quot;something's wrong with this, I don't get it,&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;no matter how convinced you are in your own head that you're 100% clear on what the post means&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you won't change the post to reflect &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your belief.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Not ever. &lt;em&gt;(It is factually impossible for me to say this enough or in harsh enough language.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If after a very small number of tries (2-3) it's found that you are changing the meaning of people's posts (and no amount of, &amp;quot;look, I understood what the OP meant even if you didn't&amp;quot; arguing will change this), your account will be suspended for 4 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If after a single suspension and restoration of rights you're found to do it again. Your account will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think those rules are heavy-handed, you should be aware that I'm a fan of the Good Book, wherein a simple wisdom can be found, &amp;quot;where much is given, much is required.&amp;quot; If you want the community to trust you with the creative input of anyone, great or small, you will be held intensely and immediately responsible for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if that level of personal responsibility isn't your cup of tea...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am a fan of editing for formatting. Most notably to convert an illegible wall-of-text to a legible series of paragraphs, bullets, and headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am a fan of inserting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;links&lt;/a&gt; to help future readers understand an esoteric word or phrase. Note that I do NOT change the original wording. All I do is add the link. (e.g., changing &amp;quot;link&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am a fan of asking the OP for permission to edit for content. (And if the OP doesn't answer quickly, or at all, I'm a fan of NOT editing the post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T03:49:07.093" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-22T04:22:15.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to expand on L.Dutch's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two years ago we tried to tackle this issue with &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the 'are real-world questions on-topic' debate&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Generally speaking, the policy became &amp;quot;people can ask real-world questions so long as they have a worldbuilding reason for doing so.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aquestion%20real-world%20questions&quot;&gt;search Meta for questions about real-world questions&lt;/a&gt;, what you'll discover is that the proposal helped, but did not solve the problem. To quote Secespitus,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we just allow every question we turn into a &amp;quot;Please google that for me&amp;quot; and a &amp;quot;Which Wikipedia site contains these keywords?&amp;quot; search engine. That's not what the site is supposed to be and not what the value should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, all real-world questions fall on a hair-line balance. That's just the way it is. There is no clear-cut solution because, in a very real sense, if we just open the gates and allow any question to be asked here &lt;em&gt;we quite literally will become Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5957/40609&quot;&gt;dumping ground&lt;/a&gt;: the Stack to which all other Stacks send the questions they don't want to answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, while the vast majority of questions on this site can be and are answered with real-world expertise, it's actually somewhat uncommon for a real-world question to be asked directly. Think about it. Real-world space ships extend all the way to the Space Shuttle. Anything else beyond that is Worldbuilding by definition because the ships don't exist (even if the expertise to answer the question does).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As time passed (and you'll see why I say that if you read through that lengthy history of real-world question discussions) I've come to realize the wisdom of erring on the side of &amp;quot;we answer real-world questions, but we also don't answer real-world questions.&amp;quot; The goal is more than user volume. It must be or this stack really has no value at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is quality questions &lt;em&gt;about worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, despite being one of the respondents to the question in question, I do agree with L.Dutch that the worldbuilding context wasn't just thin, it was non-existent — and I should have known better. A sincere worldbuilder is working on the rules of a fictional world of their own creation. Saying something vague, or worse, something like &amp;quot;I'm working on a world just like Earth...&amp;quot; and then expecting us to answer the question is (and should be) a reason to migrate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, within an hour of migrating the question, my answer got to more up-votes.  :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing. You state, &amp;quot;The original question doesn't specifically disallow that, or place any restrictions on magicial/high-tech enforcement.&amp;quot; I just finished &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8071/40609&quot;&gt;writing an answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8061/40609&quot;&gt;Is it okay to edit?&lt;/a&gt; that touches on that kind of statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't know the mind of the OP. You don't know what he/she intended, wanted, or expected. You don't know the background of the question or its motivation. You &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;literally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; don't know if anything you said is true. What you're doing is &lt;em&gt;assuming&lt;/em&gt; those are true, and based on those assumptions, you're wondering why the question was migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harsh reality is, the question was migrated on its merits, not on its potential. Just as questions are (and should be) closed on their merits, not their potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Stack should be allowed to become a free-for-all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T04:28:18.097" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T04:28:18.097" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-22T11:45:22.957" Score="9" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask in the context of the now-infamous &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/59204/how-could-i-build-a-political-system-immune-to-gerrymandering-yet-still-gives-lo&quot;&gt;gerrymandering question&lt;/a&gt;, which got removed because it did not do enough worldbuilding. It's not my question, and I have zero interest in seeing it put back on Worldbuilding.SE. I just want to understand the limitations, so that fewer of my questions get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarising the question like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am giving up trying to voice my own understanding of the reasons, since that always gets me bogged down in details and I'm always wrong anyway. Instead, teach me by example. Which of the following questions (if any) would be on-topic for Worldbuilding.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering? The country is populated by apes with the exact same intelligence and habits as humans.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is adding &amp;quot;Worldbuilding context&amp;quot; in the most literal and irrelevant form. The question is exactly the same, but now it's an ape country instead of an (implicit) human country.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a country of intelligent apes who want to be locally represented but hate gerrymandering. What sort of proportional election system could they use?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Variant on the above, turning the constraints on the question into constraints on the species; forcibly making them relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could a country with local representatives but no gerrymandering exist?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same question, but asked with more speculation, and including a reality-check element of whether &amp;quot;society&amp;quot; would tolerate this system, therefore having it cover more than just politics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the weaknesses of a hypothetical political system with local representatives, each from a district, with each representative carrying a vote proportionate to how many people voted for them?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most upvoted answer to the original gerrymandering question, asked in a reality-check form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sort of tank could my fictional country, situated in the desert and at war a nation across a river, use for their military?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I consider this an equivalent of the gerrymandering question but applied to engineering: it asks for A (tank/election system), which can be hypothetical or already existant, for purpose B (attacking over a river/have local representatives), under restrictions C (works in desert/no gerrymandering).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My goal is a fairer country where every citizen feels they are represented; how can I build a system to facilitate that?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Broadening the question and contextualising it with the author's purpose instead of with worldbuilding fluff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these hypothetical questions would be closed for other reasons like being too broad, I get that. I do not intend to ask questions like these. I just need to know, for future reference, which ones of these - if any - qualify as &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T11:53:38.663" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T22:50:45.757" Title="Help me understand the required level and relevance of &quot;worldbuilding context&quot; in questions that can be answered with real-world science" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-22T14:46:26.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion; an on-topic interesting question that was a good fit for this site got migrated to become off-topic on a different site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can I design &lt;strong&gt;part of a fictional world&lt;/strong&gt; such that &lt;strong&gt;situation does or doesn't occur&lt;/strong&gt;?&amp;quot; That's pretty strongly on topic IMHO, and nothing I've read here or in the comments of the question gives a satisfactory answer as to why that question is not worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer got a tonne of upvotes after that question got moved to Politics.SE, it's become my highest rated answer on Politics.SE and I got like 5 badges for it - so, I did pretty well from the migration, I'm still opposed to it. I did answer referencing real world examples (as info on the problems with American politics was fresh in my mind for some reason), and that went well on Politics.SE, which was incredibly lucky. Reading through all the edits done after migration I was in the minority - Many people added disclaimers like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This was meant for fictional worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; to their answers, perhaps in anticipation of downvotes for helping someone with worldbuilding on what became an offtopic question on a real-world politics QA site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think we close questions way too often, and the more interesting the question is in my view, (and the more excitedly I start drafting ideas), it seems the more likely it is to be closed. Some of these closures are good calls of course, but many I disagree with and wish I had a &amp;quot;please don't close&amp;quot; vote to undo someones close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrating was the lesser of two evils but in my opinion the question should've remained here and open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T14:46:26.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-22T22:14:20.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur with L. Dutch &amp;amp; JBH 100%, but do want to address two of your key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staying on WB would allow for more fantastical solutions. The original question doesn't specifically disallow that, or place any restrictions on magicial/high-tech enforcement. Though the OP may not actually want those, they didn't go out of their way to say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fantastical solutions are one of the best things about this forum! I like to think I've provided at least one truly fantastical solution in my time here; but I really do enjoy reading others' fantastical solutions as well.  So, this is a kind of bread-n-butter of WB; and I do agree with you, that had the query not been migrated, we might indeed have seen a number of fantastical solutions to this query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems I see are 1. that we don't know what the OP is actually looking for: they give us no context and no background; we don't know anything about the people, the politics, the history, or the culture that we're trying to help the OP with; 2. if we assume, we assume at our peril. The long and short of it is that it is incumbent upon the OP to supply us with sufficient background to offer high quality answers. Otherwise, we become no different than a worldbuilding challenge on Reddit. Not that those are valueless, but simply that their value is different from what we're offering here at WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: yes the OP didn't disallow thaumological law enforcement, but nor did they allow it. By not specifying the context, I'd VTC or migrate simply because what the OP did specify. In this case, what they specified was basically the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB requires users to bring adjacent expertise. If every WB question that could be answered with real-world science was moved on, we'd have a lot less traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed. The problem with this query, as I see it, is not an issue of our lack of adjacent expertise. Clearly, there were answers, so there's no lack of intelligent application of WB's expertise. The problem, again, is that this is a real world query without fictional world application. That's off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for the question to be a good fit here, we need to be able to apply our expertise to a fictional scenario. In order to do that, the OP has to provide us with enough information!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T22:14:20.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8073" CreationDate="2020-10-22T22:37:18.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take, a 5 point scale of fictional world context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/em&gt;  This query is straight up political-science 101. There is no hint of any kind of fictional reality: no fantasy setting, no alt-historical, no sci-fi. This query should either be closed immediately for being off topic, or else exported to the appropriate SE forum for answer.  Level zero means absolutely devoid of fictional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have a fantasy / sci-fi world&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/em&gt;  This question has potential, but basically is a non-sequitur. Non sequitur mean, literally, &amp;quot;it doesn't follow&amp;quot;: the content of the query does not flow from or logically follow the opening statement.  Level 1 means potential connection with a fictional scenario, but still devoid of fictional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have a fantasy / sci-fi world where there are Merpeople and Catpeople and Dogpeople and everyone rides purple and gold unicorns. The Catpeople and the Dogpeople are always fighting each other, even though they live in the same cities.  I'm wondering:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/em&gt;  This question has a rather more potential. We learn more about the fictional setting itself, we can surmise some things about the culture and history.  However, when we drill down into the question, we find that this is much worse than the non-sequitur. In this case, like the non sequitur, the question doesn't logically follow from the context.  Level 2 is the red herring: the OP has given us fictional context, but is leading us down the garden path by not connecting the fictional context with the body of the query.  The red herring query is a waste of our time and effort as respondents.  I find this kind of query far more frustrating than the Level 0 or Level 1 questions, simply because I've become intellectually &amp;amp; creatively invested in the fictional world, only be stood up at the altar when the actual question comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have a fantasy / sci-fi world where there are Merpeople and Catpeople and Dogpeople and everyone rides purple and gold unicorns. The Catpeople and the Dogpeople are always fighting each other, even though they live in the same cities.  For the most part, Dogpeople live in clannish neighbourhoods, while Catpeople are happy to live spread out in various neighbourhoods within the City. Merpeople refuse to allow anyone else live in the dryland parts of their neighghbourhoods. I'm wondering:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/em&gt;  This is much better (but please forgive the example, as it's entirely off the cuff!). We have relevant context, in that we now know something about the habitation patterns and something more about the worldviews of the people.  Level 3 is what I'd consider to be the &lt;em&gt;minimum allowable context level&lt;/em&gt; for an answerable question. I'd still like to know a little more about the political situation (who's in charge, what is the current state of district boundaries, etc) but I think we might get some good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have a fantasy / sci-fi world where there are Merpeople and Catpeople and Dogpeople and everyone rides purple and gold unicorns. The Catpeople and the Dogpeople are always fighting each other, even though they live in the same cities.  For the most part, Dogpeople live in clannish neighbourhoods, while Catpeople are happy to live spread out in various neighbourhoods within the City. Merpeople refuse to allow anyone else live in the dryland parts of their neighghbourhoods. Right now, the Dogpeople and the Merpeople are the dominant political forces in the City. The Dogpeople, being pack oriented, have been successful in creating district election boundaries that make their own districts more powerful, while chopping up Catpeople habitation patterns and assuming them into Dogpeople districts. There is only one very small Catpeople district, and it only exists because there are no Dogpeople living in or nearby. I'm wondering:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;What sort of proportional election system could have local representatives but prevent gerrymandering?&lt;/em&gt;  Level 4 gives us not only the existence of a fictional world, but also introduces something of its background; the querent also states their assessment of the problem, giving enough context to allow for a decent treatment of the entire issue. There is plenty of room for creativity and expertise to come to the fore; but there is also enough background to direct that creativity towards answers that might be useful to the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assessment of your questions, in light of the proposed scale above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 1 is a &lt;strong&gt;Level 1&lt;/strong&gt; type question: no real worldbuilding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 2 is close to a &lt;strong&gt;Level 3&lt;/strong&gt; type question: barely sufficient context; still need to know more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 3 is actually an entirely new &amp;amp; different question, in that it asks about the existence of something based on some other criteria. I'd close it as lacking detail or clarity until you could edit it. It's also a &lt;strong&gt;Level 0&lt;/strong&gt; type question in that there is absolutely no fictional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 4 I'd say is also a &lt;strong&gt;Level 0&lt;/strong&gt; query: no fictional context given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 5 is not about worldbuilding, and I'd probably VTC it on that basis; I think there's also a strong argument for closing this query for being story based, in that you're focusing on the choices of a military governorate and not on how your fictional world functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q 6 again is a &lt;strong&gt;Level 0&lt;/strong&gt; query: no fictional context given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T22:50:45.757" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T22:50:45.757" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-23T06:05:20.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why it got closed and migrated. I still don't know. There's talk of balance and imperfect division but I still don't know why it was moved. I don't know what I did wrong but I'm sorry for asking a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a big deal, I had lurked here for a while and had started to get comfortable enough to ask, only to find your question got moved onto a much bigger site that I wasn't familiar with. It took me a while to build up the nerve to sign up to that site and start reading the new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the original question on worldbuilding.stackexchange because it was concerning a fictional world. The narrative was for a group of colonists to of escaped Earth and wanted to make a fresh start, learning from the mistakes of the past. No griffins sorry. I'm sorry I didn't put this detail in the question, but I got a comment immediately after I posted it pointing out that my &amp;quot;gerrymandering = bad&amp;quot; assumption was a reason to close because it was opinionated, and it got immediately voted -1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79624" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T06:05:20.743" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-23T18:07:01.980" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I now realize that I've asked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/188803/what-tools-are-there-to-make-this-alien-language&quot;&gt;wrong question here&lt;/a&gt; and was about to edit it to ask what languages I could combine to get the desired effect, but that's a pretty different question than how to make a language, which prompted me to ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When do I edit a question, and when do I (maybe delete and) try again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77168" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:00:37.737" Title="When should I repost a question with modification versus editing an existing one?" Tags="|discussion|editing|asking-questions|deleting-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8080" CreationDate="2020-10-23T19:02:25.257" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, should I be worried about how many of my questions were rejected? Is there some sort of &amp;quot;mod closed 5 of your question so we're banning you for a week&amp;quot; type of punishments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80125" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T13:28:05.380" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T13:28:05.380" Title="Do bad questions get tracked?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8079" CreationDate="2020-10-23T19:12:26.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sort of; given enough downvoted, closed and/or deleted questions, you can get an automatic question ban. Good (upvoted) questions will compensate for this. You'll first get warned by the system; if you continue posting poor questions, you might end up getting banned and only be able to post one question every six months. For details, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/295232&quot;&gt;What can I do when getting &amp;quot;We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T19:12:26.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8078" CreationDate="2020-10-23T19:18:58.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically: if the question has no answers, you can change it. Once it has answers, you have to avoid invalidating existing answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T19:18:58.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8078" CreationDate="2020-10-23T20:00:37.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged your question for migration to &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Constructed Languages&lt;/a&gt;.  That's a specialist forum that can help you with any kind of language invention query you might have!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I'd recommend against deleting and starting over. The reason being, even though you think you &amp;quot;asked the wrong question&amp;quot;, the question you asked is actually a valid question and may very well be useful to some person unknown to you a year or a decade into the future. I'd only recommend deletion if a question is e.g. blatantly racist or bigoted or irreligious in nature or seeks to incite violence or riot or is a call to harm a specific individual or group. Really horrible stuff. Also, if a question just doesn't make logical sense of any kind or is a &amp;quot;do my homework for me&amp;quot; kind of question then I might advise deletion as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question is perfectly fine as is, even though it's not the question you actually wanted to ask!  The good thing is: we don't place limits on the number of questions you can ask here!  Honestly, I'd suggest you join Constructed Languages and just ask your new question over there.  Alternatively, you could simply ask your new question here in Worldbuilding, and I'll flag it for migration to Constructed Languages! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:00:37.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8079" CreationDate="2020-10-23T20:28:09.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know you've already chosen Glorfindel's answer but there are some points I'd like to address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First is that I think you are proceeding from a false assumption.  First of all, you've only asked three questions, and one of them is this Meta question. Of the other two, only one was closed. The other is still open. I read the closed question, and disagree with the closure rationale, so have voted to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so you're aware, closing a question is not the community's way of saying &amp;quot;we hate your question, we hate you, we're rejecting you, so go away with your stupidness!&amp;quot;  Not at all!  It is the community's way of saying &amp;quot;we think there is a specific issue with your query so we are temporarily closing it to give you an opportunity to edit and make it a better fit for our forum.&amp;quot; Even though I've voted to reopen, you are certainly welcome to review how you wrote your question and edit it, perhaps with some conditions or expectations that would no longer be seen by others as &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;. If you did that, chances are good the people who closed your question would turn right around and vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now your average looks bad -- 50% closure rate! Oh, no! We're going down in flames!  Come back and revisit this Meta question after you've written at least 20 questions. If your average is still 50%, then maybe we can look at how you're writing your questions and work on improving the mechanics. We could get you to put those closed questions into the Sand Box where folks can help you improve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that if you wrote three more questions and they ended up as well received as your magic ~ technology query, then you've nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you're writing a web comic, so hopefully we can be of more help to you in the future! By the way, I like the look of your art and will keep an Eye on your comic!  You might consider joining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;, which is our local creative outlet publication area. You could write a story, advertise your web comic, write an article about the conjunction of world building and web comic production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:28:09.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T08:32:32.290" Score="18" ViewCount="977" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a simple and lighthearted but (I suspect) non-trivial question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having seen the phrase ‘Obligatory XKCD’ a lot recently and used it often myself (There’s a lot of overlap between WB.SE and the topics Randall Munroe likes to handle) I’m now wondering where/when it was first used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if we can trawl the comment history for the first instance of a specific phrase, but I would be interested if anyone knows just how this now common WB.SE quirk began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:56:17.610" Title="What is the genesis of ‘Obligatory XKCD’?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8085" CreationDate="2020-10-28T10:09:17.437" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest reference I could find on the network is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/665733/4751173&quot;&gt;this Stack Overflow answer&lt;/a&gt; from March 2009. I encounter the phrase all over the network, so it was inevitable to hit Worldbuilding eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the phrase probably predates the Stack Exchange network. To my surprise, it doesn't even appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19478/295232&quot;&gt;The Many Memes of Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T10:09:17.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-10-28T11:40:12.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was originally a comment by me and after thinking about it, I'm turning it into an answer of sorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I would point out that I have not actually read the question, or the answers. But reading this meta post gives me enough information to say this: It would appear that the question was received well enough that it garnered multiple answers and multiple votes on them. Then it was migrated to Politics and while I'm not sure if it received any more/different answers, the AP of this answer (JBH's) claims to have received more votes for his answer. So, the community of this SE read it and voted, and (at least some) of the new community has read it and voted.... how is this a bad thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was my comment. Now I'll go a step further. It would appear that the general topicality of the original question was border-line. It remained in this SE long enough to garner answers and votes. Then it was migrated, and garnered at the very least more votes, some of which are positive. So the question has gotten a (much) broader readership and those readers, and new readers have voted in appreciation. This should not be looked at as negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some commenters here, such as @KeizerHarm in JBH's answer, seem to be relatively upset (please don't take exception if you don't like that word, fit a different one in to match your own level of ... concern) that it was migrated. Let me point out it's not &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question. It 'belongs' to the OP. They are the one who gets to decide what does and does not answer it, by marking an accepted answer or not. If the question being migrated to the other of the two most relevant SE's garners as much support, answers and votes as possible, good for the OP. It seems to me that is enables us to give a better chance to help the user. If the &lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't agree with the migration, they can flag or comment and edit or rewrite their question in a possibly better (and more on topic) manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is, this question appears to be not quite on- or off-topic for &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; exchange. Be satisfied it received answers (and votes)... or ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;write your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27699" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T11:40:12.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8085" CreationDate="2020-10-29T19:27:10.740" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8086/21222&quot;&gt;Glorfindel's answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Randall Munroe once made &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/327/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a comic about a programming error&lt;/a&gt; that was very common decades ago, which allowed hackers to have gain control over databases even if they did not have administrator credentials. When a programmer made this mistake, we could usually modify data as much as we wanted, delete whole databases, or bring a site down by overwhelming its hardware with useless queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comic, a woman named her son in such a way that inputting his name in an electronic system would delete student data (should the system have a table called Students). Some school is calling the mother to complain about what she did, and she replies by letting the school know how amateurish their IT work is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LGI5c.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LGI5c.png&quot; alt=&quot;Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Notice that this hotlinking of the image above is allowed by the author. Check the source link above.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it was a very common mistake, programmers went &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt; to Stack Overflow (and other sites not in Stack Exchange) for a solution. There was an absurd amount of duplicate questions - so we were joking that reading that specific XKCD comic was part of the mandatory education for a programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back then Stack Exchange did not have many sites as it does today. Besides SO there was just Super User and Server Fault, if I remember correctly. Those were all aimed at IT, so references to XKCD were mostly about that comic or some other related ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a lot of Worldbuilding users are also SO users, the tradition made its way here memetically, but the &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot; part of the joke lost its original meaning. Now it is said as if speaking of a subject causes an obligation to reference a related XKCD comic should one exist, not that the specific comic contains mandatory knowledge for someone to work in a field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a not unrelated note, I feel really old now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T15:56:17.610" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:56:17.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T05:45:04.927" Score="7" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; is just tacked on questions that it doesn't belong on.  Some of these are just poor questions entirely, but many seem to be good worldbuilding questions about processes in their world.  Not questions about the process of worldbuilding.  I scrolled through the list back to 2019, and found only 6 questions that used the tag correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something we can do about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51953" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T14:26:43.947" Title="What's up with the [worldbuilding-process] tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8089" CreationDate="2020-10-30T05:51:51.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard process of editing: remove the tag, leave a comment so that OP and others can see what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T05:51:51.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8089" CreationDate="2020-10-30T14:26:43.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a long-standing issue on the site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; has long been misused, despite having what I've always though of as a well-written and explicit tag wiki and tag excerpt. I'd argue that at some point (honestly, years ago) we should do a comprehensive survey of the questions that use the tag and edit it off of the ones that use it incorrectly. Other sites have had tag blitzes of this sort, mostly on weekends, holidays or other times with low site activity, so the front page is cluttered up by the rapid edits. If folks are interested in doing that, maybe we can organize an effort like this. It would take a lot of coordination and cooperation - and it shouldn't just be one or two people doing it - but it's doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward, we also may want to talk about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; tag is so often incorrectly used and what we can do to prevent further misuse in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T14:26:43.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-01T17:49:54.467" Score="16" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently self-censored an answer, and I'm wondering if i should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189354/is-it-a-good-idea-to-shove-your-arm-down-a-werewolfs-throat-if-you-only-want-to&quot;&gt;Is it a good idea to shove your arm down a werewolf&amp;#39;s throat if you only want to incapacitate them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wanting to know whether you could safely and non lethally subdue a human-turned-into-a-werewolf by shoving your arm down its throat until it asphyxiated, there is of course medical literature we can refer to about dilation of various body parts, and probably several &amp;quot;guess what I saw at the ED today?&amp;quot; stories;  but there is a very quick way to answer this question, and a way to account for so many things I couldn't even think of if I tried to do a medical analysis of it. I could link to fetish porn where they are doing exactly what the question asks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the pro side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shows exact technique. Realistic finger positions etc that can help the writing, drawing, or animating process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shows without a shadow of a doubt its survivable for the werewolf/human getting throated, (in at least one case anyway). Directly answering the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shows that it doesn't block airways, at least halfway down the forearm breathing is still possible. Refuting an implicit part of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No explicit imagery would appear on the world building site, just a link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sourced answers are better than unsourced or anecdotal answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the con side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fetish pornography like this can offend even normally calm adults.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other explicit sexual content surrounded the part I wanted to reference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Site has explicit ads.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Degradation and humiliation feature, which is an extra level of taboo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've seen references to pg13 content standards. While a text link itself is pg13, some may include the linked page in the content for this judgement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my answer, I decided to just write that this content exists and you can Google it yourself if you want. I ummed and ahhhed about using the spoiler tag to hide the links next to a NSFW warning but in the end self censored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this the correct choice? Is linking to relevant sources (with NSFW advisorys) an exercise in knowledge sharing, or is the explicit content brush of these topics so poisonous that the less association the better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a one off case, in 2 months of activity on stack exchange I've linked answers to sources including pornhubs data insights blogs, products in adult shops, fetish but non sexual content on YouTube, violent crime reports, TV shows and movies with all sorts of nasty content, and drug making advice. Not to mention a page from a torture and murder themed colouring in book. I've put contextual warnings in many cases but linking to risque topics is coming up more often than one would think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T02:33:27.603" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T00:31:32.550" Title="The source(s) for my answer are NSFW. Should I link my sources?" Tags="|discussion|answers|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8092" CreationDate="2020-11-02T02:43:26.547" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am  great fan of a certain NSFW webcomic called Oglaf. It has a high-fantasy setting and a lot of the situations happening in it are perfect answers for some questions in this site. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/109038/21222&quot;&gt;my answer to &lt;em&gt;How to build a trap to last the ages?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I even inserted a (non-NSFW) page from the comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I link to the source, I'm linking to a porn site. I don't want to do that much because of the same reasons you stated (though Oglaf is quite tasteful and on a light tone). But I find it unfair to use someone else's educative art without giving due credit and source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these situations, I do not link directly. I give hints on how to find the content. For example, from this answer here, you'd know how to search for the web comic by its name. In your own answer, you could say &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I'm not including a link, but you will find it in [site name], titled [video title].&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; People can't accidentally click on a link this way. They have to do their homework to find the porn. An adult who would be offended simply will not follow. As for kids, they would only do that if they are browsing the internet without adult supervision. I know that is very probably Pornhub's cash cow but I believe fixing it is up to parents, not to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I never link, but I tell you how to get there if you're interested in further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T14:28:54.993" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T14:28:54.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8085" CreationDate="2020-11-02T02:49:44.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term appears on my companies internal wiki dating back to September 2007. A comic published in July 2007 (if you use &amp;quot;goto&amp;quot; in programming you'll get velociraptord) made it's way into our official coding standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T02:49:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2303" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:29:33.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take it down a notch...&#xA;I think the question was one that begged a possibly inflammatory answer, since it dealt with religion. To say all religions were peaceful would tick off those for whom military was important, to say all were warlike would have annoyed the peaceful ones. To say atheists cause wars has the same effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inherent problem with a religion question is it has an opinion based answer in many respects, based on the viewpoint under which you are raised. There is a lot of evidence of atheists causing wars, just as there are religious people and groups who have caused wars and even genocides (think the Hugenot Wars). What the poster was stating, I think correctly although maybe not well founded, is that atheism is the application of survival of the fittest, while religion cloaks this desire with other motives that may not be violent and thus may dilute the competitive aspect. I would say downvoting is appropriate if the info is misinformed, but reporting/removing is not necessary given the touchy nature of the subject and its possible actual significance of the answer in a world building context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76989" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:29:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2303" CreationDate="2020-11-03T13:00:07.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Atheist here. I do not find that part of the answer inflammatory nor offensive. Besides that, I find it is factually correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full context, this is the whole paragraph that is being discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 20th century is largely the story of the war against murderous states with ideologies founded in materialistic atheism, who adopted notionally secular ideologies but which functioned as religions in terms of their absolutism. It appears that if people do away with a supernatural religion, they just reinvent the same functional structure using a made up materialistic explanation. We get the worst of religion with none of its built in moral restraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's break it down into parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 20th century is largely the story of the war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far so good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;against murderous states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't matter what your moral or political views are, this is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with ideologies founded in materialistic atheism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dare say that a couple of ideologies involved in WW2 did use religion as a binding agent to gather more followers, but it was a distorted form of the involved religion, and it was not central to the ideologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who adopted notionally secular ideologies but which functioned as religions in terms of their absolutism. It appears that if people do away with a supernatural religion, they just reinvent the same functional structure using a made up materialistic explanation. We get the worst of religion with none of its built in moral restraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is so very true, and sadly so very current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T13:00:07.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8092" CreationDate="2020-11-03T14:05:49.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Stack Exchange has no safeguards protecting or prohibiting children &amp;mdash; other than the common sense of its users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange's terms of use prohibit users under the age of 13, but Stack Exchange itself does nothing to stop younger users from joining the club. And most NSFW images and concepts aren't, IMO, appropriate for 13-year-olds anyway (don't they have enough problems without being treated like they're small adults?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, if you need to link to NSFW content to make your point — maybe you should expand your horizons. While I acknowledge the plausibility that there's no other way to explain a concept than through an NSFW reference, I sincerely believe that it's &lt;em&gt;highly unlikely to ever be true.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen users on this Stack that, IMO, had to be at least 8 years old if not younger. And while large swaths of the world suggest that being an adult means alcohol, coarse language, violence, and pornography. The truth is that a real adult is fully capable of eschewing all of that (and someone who can't or won't isn't, by definition, a mature adult).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt; If you're tempted to use an NSFW source to cite your answer, look harder. Even considering the question you linked, it's often the case that when something stupid happens in the pornography industry there's a doctor out there proving how stupid it is — that source would be superior anyway. If you have no other options, please do the children who do visit this site the courtesy of minimizing the reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T14:05:49.123" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-03T22:51:17.367" Score="22" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some time we have had an unofficial policy that we recommend users wait 24-48 hours before selecting a best answer. This unofficial policy has been transmitted through comments, usually haphazardly, and often only when an experienced user's answer is selected as a best answer and they're good enough to thank the OP for their generosity, but recommend they deselect and wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the last week I've seen a perceptibly high percentage of young users selecting best answers within a couple of hours (or less) of asking their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is desirable to wait 24-48 hours because Worldbuilding.SE has users all over the world (some of which work for a living ) and selecting a best answer so quickly can (and often does) lead to fewer answers, meaning the OP is selecting an answer that &amp;quot;works for them&amp;quot; but not necessarily the best answer that could have been given — due to simple impatience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Selecting a best answer so quickly usually means the OP is asking solely from the perspective of getting immediate satisfaction for an individual problem rather than expressing their question (and waiting for answers) with the intention of participating as a member of the community, which would lead to questions and answers that benefit others in the future. It is in the best interests of the community and the Stack that we encourage people to become members of the community and not simply use the service as a quick-fix to (e.g.) writer's block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am submitting for review by the community a recommendation that we have a statement included in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic section of the Help Center&lt;/a&gt; that says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is recommended that, rather than quickly selecting an answer that's &amp;quot;good enough,&amp;quot; users submitting questions wait 24-48 hours before selecting a best answer to allow our world-spanning community a chance to share invaluable experience and creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's a bit flowery, but it's also meant to be motivating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with the need for this policy/recommendation statement? Upvote this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you disagree with the need for this policy/recommendation statement? Downvote this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think better/other wording would be useful or an issue is involved that I've not touched on? Post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T14:06:13.523" Title="Policy Recommendation: We recommend that users wait 24-48 hours before selecting a best answer" Tags="|discussion|policy|help-center|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8098" CreationDate="2020-11-04T23:20:16.087" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This isn't like other Q&amp;amp;A sites&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is inherently subjective and open-ended, aside from a few question types such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;. I would argue that, in many cases, it isn't appropriate to accept an answer at all. There is usually no one right answer since each author can apply ideas differently depending on their story and setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean when the OP accepts an answer here? Does it mean that they simply liked that answer best? Does it mean that they decided to use that idea for their world? Are they just doing it for the +2 reputation? Because it's expected by other sites on the network?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was informed about the rule on one of the first questions I asked. I was told to wait a week if I remember correctly. I realized that made a lot of sense, so I have since been a lot more patient and deliberate with accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I would word it like this: (&lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; for emphasizing my additions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is recommended that, rather than quickly selecting an answer that's &amp;quot;good enough,&amp;quot; users submitting questions wait &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 24-48 hours before selecting a best answer to allow our world-spanning community a chance to share invaluable experience and creativity. &lt;em&gt;For more open-ended questions, you might consider not accepting an answer at all, as not to discourage creativity from community members in the distant future.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46434" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T23:20:16.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8098" CreationDate="2020-11-05T01:30:22.130" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure time is the best way to measure this - A recent question I asked got some really interesting insights after 3 days, and by accepting an answer I might of inadvertently discouraged them. It needs to be something that can be summarised as: &amp;quot;Don't accept until no-one has any new ideas&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest don't accept an answer until it disappears from the home page. When someone answers it jumps to the top of the home page, leading to more answers. Once it disappears from the home page, it's less likely to get new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative way of expressing it, and a rule I'm thinking of following myself is to not accept until a day goes by without an upvote or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd personally prefer there to never be a requirement for a single best answer (If there's dozens of answers I'm probably going to take bits and pieces from a few high ranked answers than take one exclusively), but that isn't going to change on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T01:30:22.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8098" CreationDate="2020-11-05T14:06:13.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d edit that down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider waiting 24-48 hours before selecting the best answer to allow our world-spanning community a chance to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short and to the point. Doesn’t judge those who disagree. Makes the case nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6866" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T14:06:13.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T12:34:54.117" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to turn this into some sort of witch hunt on the example I've come across. So unless it's absolutely necessary I'll leave that out of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question had a hard science tag, the comment was a summary of an answer but provided no hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instinctively I'd say it doesn't belong in the comments section as they're generally for clarifications but I can't see it necessarily contravening one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;rules for comments&lt;/a&gt;. The comment would be deleted as an answer because it lacks hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are suggestions of answers valid comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31124" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T05:56:58.233" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T05:16:41.963" Title="Are comments for suggested, but inadequate, answers?" Tags="|discussion|comments|hard-science|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8102" CreationDate="2020-11-07T13:05:34.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, suggestion of answer is not a valid comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hover the mouse over the &amp;quot;add a comment&amp;quot; you will see the following help text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QIc1g.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QIc1g.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid answering in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other communities are more strict in following this policy, here I (too) often see that users still draft answers in comments. Whenever I notice it, I delete those comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, please flag the comments and mention it's an answer in comment. The rest will be taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T13:05:34.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8092" CreationDate="2020-11-08T00:31:32.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;For the most part, no.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I often disagree with him on matters of policy, I totally agree with @JBH this time: &lt;strong&gt;StackExchange in general (and &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; WB.SE) is often frequented by minors. As a result, you should always find a non-NSFW source if possible. If it means that you need to spend three hours searching the internet, so be it; &lt;em&gt;NSFW content is not okay.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at the same time, sometimes there is absolutely nothing else that will do. If so, do not directly insert the content into your post; instead, I suggest the following format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;link to content&amp;gt; (&lt;strong&gt;Warning: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nsfw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NSFW&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link to a definition of NSFW is hyper-important; the first time I saw such a warning  I didn't know what it meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T00:31:32.550" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-08T01:23:09.673" Score="-2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a simple fact that since Stack Exchange allows us to change our usernames, we do so occasionally. While I support this practice, it can be annoying on occasion, as it can confuse others and leaves apparently broken comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I am hereby creating a registry of past usernames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add an entry, please answer this question in the following format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;lt;Current username&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;Most recent past username&amp;gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;Second most recent past username&amp;gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;Etc.&amp;gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can't remember one or more of your past usernames, that's perfectly all right; just list the ones you remember.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T15:54:14.907" Title="Past Username Registry" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8105" CreationDate="2020-11-08T01:23:09.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Daleks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marvin the Paranoid Android&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thescribe11 (or just Thescribe; I can't remember which)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T01:23:09.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8105" CreationDate="2020-11-08T04:04:38.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I would be puzzled by how somebody is or were called before, my first try would be to look at their profile for clues, not on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it makes more sense, if you want to keep track of your aliases, to add them to your profile, something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously known as: ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T15:54:14.907" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T15:54:14.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8102" CreationDate="2020-11-08T10:25:07.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it really depends on how much of a comment purist you are. In practise comments tend to be more speech than prose, and as such in their purpose they may straddle the line between different kinds of &amp;quot;acceptable comments&amp;quot;. It's not black and white, and they do come in different variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One kind of &amp;quot;inadequate answer comment&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;Have you considered X approach, because it seems like the obvious answer but you did not address it in the question.&amp;quot; That can be considered a request for clarification, not an attempt at actually answering the question; a reply from the OP in the form of &amp;quot;No I haven't, please elaborate!&amp;quot; would elicit a full answer. Of course the only reason that kind of comment is necessary is because of the inexplicable rule that you are not allowed to explain the avenues you have already considered in the question itself, requiring this extra step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other &amp;quot;inadequate answer comments&amp;quot; are pure suggestions, but they may be sourced. &amp;quot;This book/study/website/movie addresses your concern, it suggests X.&amp;quot; Such a source could be the basis of a full answer, but sources tend to be open-ended and let someone decide their own answer creatively. It's reasonable to want to just give the questioner that extra factual or creative input without feeling confident to make a deciding call one way or the other. That would rub against the &amp;quot;suggest improvement to question&amp;quot; bucket of acceptable comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third kind is the kind you were talking about; OP asks for hard science, potential answerer cannot really deliver that kind of answer, but can offer suggestions that could help either the OP or future answerers. I think that those comments still have value, but I can see that they could be considered clutter, particularly if they come in great numbers. If I were a moderator (I'm not, and I probably won't ever be given how unorthodox my views seem to be), I would make a judgement call based on how many total comments the question has gotten. Removing a lone comment on a question with twelve views and no answers would not be worth the effort to me, and it would deprive the unfortunate OP of the little engagement they got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a fourth kind of &amp;quot;inadequate answer comment&amp;quot; that I have come across is framed more as an attack or frame challenge on the question than as an answer. Once more the lines are blurry; some of these are &amp;quot;your underlying assumption is wrong, here's why&amp;quot; (which can be considered a &amp;quot;suggested improvement to question&amp;quot;, one of the allowed types); others offer a full answer to the question but often phrased as if the commenter knows it is not the answer the OP was hoping for. Since frame challenges are considered acceptable answers, I think these comments should be held to higher scrutiny. Particularly since comments cannot be downvoted, and challenges are direct confrontation with the OP, and should absolutely be susceptible to mass downvotage if the community finds them unfounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are my views, and I won't hold it against anyone to consider them wrong or think me a chatterbox. I know I don't make or enforce the rules, but I for one am happy that in practise the Worldbuilding.SE community has been more comment-tolerant than other Stack Exchanges. This site has much more creative people and a subject that lends itself better to conversation than the purely factual pages. My best engagements on this site have been comments, not answers. And until the chat feature starts actually functioning, I don't think that moving comments to chat is doing a favour to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T10:42:50.820" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T10:42:50.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8102" CreationDate="2020-11-08T20:08:27.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur with L. Dutch on this: basically, piss or get off the pot. In other words, if you're going to put enough effort into a query such that you're basically answering the query, just write it as an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen lots of comments to the comments along the lines of &amp;quot;you should write that as an answer!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would note, however, that there are some cultural factors that come into play. I've noticed over on the English Usage forum, they almost &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; actually answer the questions. They seem to prefer answering questions in the comments. Which I don't really get, but anyway! Here in WB, we have a very strong &amp;quot;answer the question as an answer, not a comment&amp;quot; culture. So yeah, comments are not for incomplete or inadequate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I think I can't come up with a complete answer, I'll usually preface it with wording to the effect of &amp;quot;Towards an answer...&amp;quot;.  I invite other people to edit my answer to make it better or more complete; or to come with their own answers with components that I've missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T06:03:29.747" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T06:03:29.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-09T07:41:52.600" Score="16" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite often, when browsing through the review queue history, I stumble upon cases where the reviewers apparently didn't do any real review but just clicked on &amp;quot;no action needed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latest example I saw, the post under review was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;written in a well below standard English. It would have definitely benefited from an edit to improve the bonanza of typos and errors left by the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;written with questionable logic, something along the line of &amp;quot;trees are green, dollars are green, then trees are made of dollars&amp;quot;. Leaving a comment to the OP asking for clarification would have been the bare minimum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post was reviewed as &amp;quot;no action needed&amp;quot;: no comments to the OP, no edit, no flags. Nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, when you review a post in any review queue, keep in mind that while reviewing you are enforcing the quality standards of the community. While I get that there can be different opinions on certain topics, I hope we agree on the bare minimum we want to have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T02:21:34.607" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T02:42:24.357" Title="Reminder to reviewers" Tags="|discussion|reviewing-behavior|review-queues|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8008" CreationDate="2020-11-10T00:08:33.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A mentionned asker's answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jumped from my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189754/would-an-hibernating-bear-men-society-faces-issues-from-unattended-farmlands-in&quot;&gt;bear hibernation question&lt;/a&gt; to this meta-discussion through a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'll give my answer as a new worldbuilding stack-exchange user -and new stack-user in general, not accounting reading posts-, on the experience I had regarding all this. So please bear in mind that I don't know all stacky's inner workings, nor do I have an objective point of view. That's not my objective here anyway.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Personal context&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To stay humble like a bumblebee, I don't have a lot of experience in world-building; it's neither my job nor I have a bachelor in litterature. Having strong ties with games however, I am more of a jack-of-all-trade, with knowledge in all that relates to it, be it game design, art or science stuffies, being a champion of none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In games, one's suspension of disbelief has quite a large margin of tolerance, like in regards to physics (double air jumps, checked!), medecine (instant health pack, checked!). In other words, it's fine if things don't stick together perfectly in most games. Moreover, I am more interested in making stories for a younger -but not fool- audience, who doesn't necessarily care for the factual science data adults live with. This gives an idea of what I aim for, in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My experience&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After having checked the water's temperature through a first question, and received useful comments on how to improve it (and later ones), I went onto something truly important to me, and posted my second question about these bear men and unattended farmlands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I found my first answer and comment to my question, I quickly noticed that something was amiss. Indeed, I didn't know for sure that well-fed bears may not hibernate at that time, and seeing people focusing on this made me wonder if my question was correctly written. Because I didn't have the time, I left and let this thought flow to settle things down in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I came back laty later in the day, I saw JBH's comments on the frame challenge answer and following my question's comments. This is then that I realized that what I wanted is not to change my bear race, as the answer led me indirectly to. And therefore I changed my posture on the subject, answering to two comments flows at once and even telling twice in the main one that I changed the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How I feel now&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this hibernation issue went much, much too far. What I wanted was stated in 2 sentences about food production, which was in the title too, and because I missed out a detail out of a whole question, everybody (or I felt like it was everybody) argued more on whether answers should tell that no, this food situation won't happen at all in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel kind of bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad for me of course, because I spent (some) time refocusing the subject and didn't get my answer as easily it could have been, but also because my story has been waived away on a single fact, which, if I haven't learned at receiving really harsh opinions, may have made me falter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also for the people who wasted time, thinking they helped me by discussing on this subject. It was, from my point of view, a loss of time after the third comment came in, because all was said and done about it. Aside of not having a &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, noone on stackys knew for sure how coherent my world needs to be in regard to science. Actually, I take back some of that. Even if my needs were really high, in true truly truth, neither me nor the people immersed in my world would break their suspension of disbelief just because bears don't actually hibernate every year! If it did, then it would shatter in million pieces as soon as one of them started to speak! And anyhow, that's not what I want, that's not the world I want to convey my stories with!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My answer to this meta-discussion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before leaping like a mad horse onto cactuses, &lt;strong&gt;ask yourself how realistic the world needs to be regarding to tags, world's genre and the question&lt;/strong&gt;. It could be useful to ask that if it's not clear at all. This need should serve as your goal. Then compare with how much your frame challenge breaks this need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on the how to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can still say &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;ok this is the context X, but I think some changes is needed to have a point in answering the question&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then the challenge should either be mentionned partially in an answer (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Ok, know that you have problem X related to the question here, but if X is resolved one way or another, then we can say this...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), or as a question in comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can only say &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Given this context X, it's really impossible to have Y appear in the first place&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then you cannot answer the question and need clarification or rework. Therefore, this should be done in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a doubt between the two, then ask yourself those two questions : Are you feeling you are cheating your way out from the question? If you were told this world context in a story, would you break your suspension of disbelief? In other words, would it make you raise your biggest eyebrow and say &amp;quot;Wait, how is that even possible!&amp;quot;? Answering &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; to the first question and/or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to the second means the question is probably answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a final note : it is nicer to wonder what the asker wish while putting down the challenge. This is especially true with newcomers, because they're less prone to affirm their position. Putting it as an affirmation -especially as a stack's answer- is very assertive, because you mean by that that &amp;quot;you know your thing&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;you're not sure that answering with this will help you&amp;quot;. Having received the two, I can tell this changes the feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T00:08:33.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8102" CreationDate="2020-11-10T05:16:41.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a balance needed here - how many other good answers are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has 10 decent answers, a comment with half an answer probably doesn't add anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has no answers, has had no answers for a while, and I can contribute some information - but can't answer the question in full or to the minimum standard - putting a comment in with my partial answer seems like it contributes to the global good better than staying silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 2 people have 80% of the solution, but both keep their mouth shut cause they can't speak until they have 100% of a solution, a solution will never be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T05:16:41.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8110" CreationDate="2020-11-11T02:24:42.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I review stuff, I try very hard not to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it would be my guess that people are using the &amp;quot;no action needed&amp;quot; button like the &amp;quot;skip&amp;quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, they aren't the same. &amp;quot;No action needed&amp;quot; literally means &lt;em&gt;no action is needed&lt;/em&gt;; when you click the &amp;quot;No action needed&amp;quot; button you are saying that, in your professional opinion, the post is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T02:24:42.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8110" CreationDate="2020-11-11T12:33:20.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestion to take to the main meta: allowing voting from that queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fix grammar when I see errors (I'm that guy who will edit to add one ') and I flag as NAA when an answer is off-topic. Sometimes an answer has OK English and is on topic, but is just bad as an answer. In these cases I hit &lt;em&gt;no action needed&lt;/em&gt;, while also browsing to the post so I can downvote it. Yes, I don't always leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't think the review that led to this discussion is mine, I want to believe that the reviewer marked a post as ok because no other option was satisfactory. If they could downvote from the queue maybe the history for that review would have been different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T02:42:24.357" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T02:42:24.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4649" CreationDate="2020-11-12T02:15:38.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Makes sense&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and for one simple reason: As it stands, if someone comes in from Outside and finds the &amp;quot;closed as duplicate&amp;quot; query, there will be a link to the question this one is a duplicate of, so our intrepid researcher will have access to both questions and both sets of answers. However, if she should chance upon the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; / non-marked-as-duplicate query, there will be no such link to any of the duplicate queries. She'll only have access to that one question and its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merging two queries that are determined to be actual duplicates has the advantage of putting all the eggs in one yummy basket of geopoetical goodness. There's no need to link back to the merged question, because it won't have any answers to miss out on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this meta discussion begs two questions: why don't we merge queries more frequently? and also: can more than one duplicate query be folded into one? (For the latter, I suppose by serial merging.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the former, this seems like a reasonable practice to engage in. As a community, we already frown on people asking duplicate questions, and for good reason.  It seems to me that marking as duplicate is but a half measure: why leave the question in duplicate limbo when it can be profitably combined with its predecessor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only down side: we do sometimes argue about whether a query is really a duplicate or not.  Perhaps merging could be done after a discussion in meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T02:15:38.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T22:27:00.703" Score="6" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189937/how-corrupt-can-a-meritocratic-government-be-without-being-perceived-as-such&quot;&gt;How corrupt can a meritocratic government be without being perceived as such?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what's the opinion-based part of it, so that I may fix it (by replacing it with narrower and more objective qualifiers/criteria). Is it &amp;quot;perceived as such&amp;quot; as hinted in some of the comments? If so, how precise should &amp;quot;popularly perceived to be non-corrupt&amp;quot; be worded? I did not really consider the necessity to designate a precise percentage of the population that's fooled. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92329/how-would-a-government-without-drama-work?rq=1&quot;&gt;there's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111149/how-to-have-good-public-opinion-of-police-in-a-dystopian-dictatorship-with-low-o?rq=1&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9862/tame-and-sovereign-dragons-the-opinions-of-the-sovereign-dragons&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54540/whats-the-fastest-way-for-a-government-to-cause-a-recession-without-being-blame?rq=1&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/97312/why-would-a-large-percent-of-an-otherwise-sane-population-regularly-play-a-virtu&quot;&gt;popular&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84477/keeping-unelectable-opposition-on-life-support&quot;&gt;opinion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35537/politically-correct-valkyries-why-do-they-choose-who-they-choose&quot;&gt;and&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177493/how-large-could-a-population-of-supernatural-beings-be-and-still-be-plausibly-hi&quot;&gt;plausible&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63517/will-majority-of-population-dismiss-a-video-of-fight-between-two-supernatural-be&quot;&gt;deniability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone suggest I use an analogue, &amp;quot;perceived as virtuous to the same extent the Catholic Church was in the 16th century&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;perceived as fair as capitalism&amp;quot; but I don't know if that would do more than distract from the actual setting which is neither capitalist nor Catholic. I could be wrong of course, that's why I'm asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's something else that's opinion-based, then I would like to hear that all the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T03:10:49.417" Title="Let me know what part of my question is opinion-based so I can fix it" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8116" CreationDate="2020-11-13T03:10:49.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I honestly don't agree that your query is terribly opinion-based. I think your root question: &lt;em&gt;what specific actions can the rulers take?&lt;/em&gt;, given the constraints of culture, history, and technology, is &lt;strong&gt;no more opinion based than every other entirely fictional question&lt;/strong&gt; we deal with in this forum. I don't think you need to change anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As for the Catholic Church aspects of the comments and the parallelism in your question: I always cringe when the Catholic Church is brought up, on account of it being the least understood and most maligned governmental organization on the planet. &#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's just so much history and so many details of theology &amp;amp; spiritual governance vs pragmatics &amp;amp; ordinary governance that you almost have to be a Church historian in order to formulate a good question! Anyone else is liable to get lost in all the pseudo history and outright bashing that's gone on the last few centuries. You'd almost have to be a Church historian and a theologian to even come up with an answer. And no, I don't claim to be either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll just say it straight up: people are now (2020) and have always been fully aware that the governmental structure of the Vatican (as a political body) has often been and is currently about as corrupt as any stereotypically Italian mob organisation you'd care to name. Money scandals, sex scandals, cover-ups, deep rooted mutual back washing. And that is just what was going on in the 16th century! We're seeing it all again in the 21st, plus we have the Internet to disseminate all the details and social media to abuse the truth at every turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You admitted that you don't know much about the popular conception, which is fair enough. You're pretty far off base, though, when you say &lt;em&gt;but they do have the &amp;quot;God's ways are mysterious&amp;quot; excuse for everything&lt;/em&gt;. Quite simply, they dòn't have that excuse at all. Having God for your boss simply means that all the poisons seep out and become obvious even to the most ignorant of observers. Try &amp;quot;they're known by their fruits&amp;quot; instead! The poisons still seep out, but at least you've got a yardstick to measure the good guys and the bad guys with!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at that time in history, people knew that bishops and popes were getting rich as Croesus from selling indulgences and other frankly disgusting practices. This is why reformers always come to the forefront. (And no, Martin Luther was nòt a reformer. He was a quitter &amp;amp; a revolutionary. Try Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Thomas More, etc.) One can argue that the first reformer was St. Paul, who rebuked the first pope, St. Peter, over relations between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. And the governance of the Church has been a tug-o-war between excess and reform ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I think you've got a great parallel construction going. I think the answer to the question will probably be nothing like what you're thinking, based on what I've read in the question and comments. We'll see what happens if it gets reopened!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T03:10:49.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-21T14:33:03.773" Score="-8" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought this was a venue where people could share ideas, help people with questions, and generally contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I find that this is not a friendly playground. NO, the traditional playground bully is out and active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not here for a fight, so..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations, L.Dutch. You have managed to bully me away.&#xA;Enjoy your victory, though god knows why you feel such confrontation is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user79911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T00:33:20.710" Title="SO sorry, i did not know this spot was reserved" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-11-25T03:48:29.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8119" CreationDate="2020-11-22T05:53:18.273" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you're throwing accusations of bullying, let's have a look at this alleged bullying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; explains how to answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I pointed out that a part of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/190418/30492&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; was addressing a&#xA;question that was not asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I pointed out that you were giving a non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/190227/30492&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You call it bullying. In my book that's called &amp;quot;a request to follow the community standards&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as Ash made clear in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8123/30492&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, you have deleted those answers out of your own will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T10:05:28.830" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T10:05:28.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8119" CreationDate="2020-11-23T08:00:53.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now I say this as someone who conflicts with the mods fairly often:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L Dutch did not delete your question, but instead raised a critique on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You then deleted all the text leaving a stub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then you deleted your own answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L.Dutch then undeleted your answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then L.Dutch rolled the answer history back to your original answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the proof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eRgHu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eRgHu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer was pretty informative and I liked it. I upvoted it. And - meh - the second half of your text went off topic - not a big deal (I do that all the time). I thought it was an interesting observation even if it was off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78800" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T08:47:36.743" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T08:47:36.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8119" CreationDate="2020-11-23T12:21:16.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this was a venue where people could share ideas, help people with questions, and generally contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Yes, it is. There are site rules (coming from Stack Exchange) and forum rules that guide how the sharing of ideas happens. There are also general standards of online &amp;amp; interpersonal behavior that the community expects of its participants, whether those standards are written or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I find that this is not a friendly playground. NO, the traditional playground bully is out and active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations, L.Dutch. You have managed to bully me away. Enjoy your victory, though god knows why you feel such confrontation is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry. again, the gods do not approve of my answers. Apologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you brought your own unfriendliness with you.  These are fine examples of community standards that we can reasonably expect you to adhere to, regardless of where you go online. You are behaving like a passive-aggressive &amp;amp; self-centered 10 year old. Your behavior is petulant, overly dramatic, and needlessly pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kudos if you actually are 10 years old, because then you're only behaving your age!  Otherwise, we really don't need this kind of aggressive behavior from you. If you can't behave in Main in a reasonably adult manner and if you can't address your concerns here in Meta without resorting to a temper tantrum, then please, by all means go somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd invite you to go away, but it looks like you're already gone, so thank you at the least for improving the quality of our user base with your absence!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T00:33:20.710" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T00:33:20.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T23:21:44.893" Score="7" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's simple, for a while now, Universe Factory (both the room and the site) shows no signs of life, which makes me sad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying I have much to post, in fact, making a 4-minute read exhausts me more than it should. Still, I think I might write something, even more as an experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what's the Factory's current status?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T16:55:41.883" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T16:55:41.883" Title="Is Universe Factory still alive?" Tags="|discussion|blog|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8125" CreationDate="2020-11-24T00:17:45.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're still alive! Although we're sorta in low power mode again because of a lack of content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7852/627&quot;&gt;a bit of a bump in the spring&lt;/a&gt;, after which things fell off. At the moment, there's one submission in the queue that I've been meaning to get to since the weekend - I'll hopefully approve that sooner rather than later. But as always, anyone who has an idea for a post is welcome to submit it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T00:17:45.667" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T21:41:31.847" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/190625/the-best-way-to-torture-a-character-with-modern-technology&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The controversial topic of the question aside (yes, I get that it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt;; I very explicitly said to keep it clinical), I was rather surprised to find that it was closed for being &lt;em&gt;too story based.&lt;/em&gt; Huh? I could understand it if people went for Opinion-Based, but &lt;em&gt;too story based?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reviewed my question to see what is wrong, and the only possible reason I could find was that I had written it from an in-universe perspective. I don't understand why that would be reason enough to close it though, since that writing style is fairly common here in WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/186601/can-people-fool-benevolent-brothers-alibi-trackers-and-escape&quot;&gt;Can People Fool Benevolent Brother&amp;#39;s &amp;#39;Alibi Trackers&amp;#39; and Escape?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;How would Facebook Sysadmins prevent the summoning of Cthulhu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the people who VTC'd this care to explain their reasoning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T06:07:42.403" Title="Why is my question &quot;too story-based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8127" CreationDate="2020-11-26T03:57:19.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general problem with all of the latest torture question, aside from the torture and the gory details, is that the context in which the requested optimization is defined is such fine detail that any answer becomes a story element and cannot really be generalized to worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such they fall in the &amp;quot;too story based&amp;quot; bucket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the men have the right to pursue happiness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the men 1.78 m tall, weighing 75 kg and with a mole on their right cheek resembling the profile of Louis XIV have the right to pursue happiness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T04:08:43.770" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T04:08:43.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8127" CreationDate="2020-11-26T06:07:42.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I didn't vote to close, but I agree with it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, asking for the &amp;quot;best way&amp;quot; solution to anything is always story-based because the &amp;quot;best way&amp;quot; is always a function of the circumstances of the story. If you had provided all those story details and then asked what options were available, the question would likely be open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most people who ask &amp;quot;best way&amp;quot; questions are not having trouble developing their world (which we help with), they're suffering from writer's block (which we do not help with). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center &amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; page&lt;/a&gt; tells us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, ask yourself this: What rule of my world (which is independent of any story) am I asking about? In regard to your question, the answer is &amp;quot;none.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you're not asking about a world rule, then you're asking about your story. Storybuilding is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, in regards to my first paragraph, you can't simply remove the word &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; (etc.) and think you've solved the problem. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center &amp;quot;Don't Ask&amp;quot; page&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where every answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the problem with idea-fishing (raw idea generation). Every answer is equally valid. The community over the years has realized that there needs to be some latitude in this or some kinds of problems just can't be solved. The answer is this: An unbounded request for ideas is an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; and will (and should) be closed. However, a question that is limited with conditions, limitations, and restrictions becomes an on-topic request for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that there will always be ambiguity over what is a finite list of things. Frankly, the more you can bound the list, the more likely your question won't be closed. It's not perfect, but the alternative is to shut list-style answers (and the questions that ask for them) off completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you think about it, those conditions, limitations, and restrictions are the circumstances of your story that convert the question from an off-topic too-story-based question to an on-topic help-with-my-rule question. And why is that? Because the question becomes an &amp;quot;application-of-technology&amp;quot; (or, in your case, application-of-process&amp;quot;) type question. As in, &amp;quot;given the following exhaustive list of conditions, how can I achieve the following well defined result?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T06:07:42.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-01T05:54:50.210" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/190903/how-to-avoid-boats-on-a-mainly-oceanic-world&quot;&gt;How to avoid boats on a mainly oceanic world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question shows the pop-up box warning of HARD SCIENCE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&#xA;.&#xA;.&#xA;Yet the actual tags do not include &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot;, only &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quest is really:&#xA;DO we obey the displayed tags at the bottom of a question, or the pop-up requirement for &amp;quot;Hard Science&amp;quot;, when these two are in conflict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pmj8Z.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pmj8Z.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80825" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T05:54:50.210" Title="IS this question &quot;hard science&quot; tagged, or not? The interface shows conflicting information" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2020-12-01T06:02:27.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T11:45:21.803" Score="6" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/190974/would-this-giant-rotating-shotgun-weapon-be-effective&quot;&gt;this question about cool-looking yet ineffective weaponry&lt;/a&gt;, and am confused as to why I have down votes. There are no close votes, and I'm 90% sure I'm following all the guidelines. It isn't unclear or anything, although I hadn't done much research on the subject before posting so that might cause some down votes. But, on other questions where I ask before researching, they didn't get down votes(if they were, it was for other reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I doing wrong in this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77168" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T18:24:05.023" Title="What am I doing wrong in this question?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6130" CreationDate="2020-12-02T18:20:45.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could X exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate Patterns:&lt;/strong&gt; How would X evolve? What evolutionary pressures could justify X? What gene-splicing would allow X to exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suitable:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-Topic (note &lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions like this are always &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; in that the (usually quite fantastic) creature has no terrestrial counterpart that could be used to justify the possibility or plausibility of the creature's existence. The questions are almost always asked in terms of Real Life or the theoretical application of current or near-future technologies to permit the creature to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this are also &lt;em&gt;not about worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; in that they are not discussing the rules of a fictional world of the OP's creation, but the theoretical existence of a fictional creature of the OP's creation in the real world. As such, it isn't the creature that was asked about (on-topic), but the conditions of the real world that would permit the existence of the creature (off-topic, thus, not about worldbuilding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether intentional or not, questions of this type are an effort to circumvent the rules of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;. The Anatomically Correct Series is the only expression of this question that is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions of this type are specifically on-topic when asked as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; question against the rules of the OP's world, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not the real world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traps to Avoid:&lt;/strong&gt; In the process of worldbuilding, there is a substantial difference between &lt;em&gt;justifying&lt;/em&gt; a creature's existence and &lt;em&gt;proving&lt;/em&gt; a creature's existence.  The difference is that the former merely addresses the needs of suspension-of-disbelief where the latter is seeking to factually demonstrate that the Frankenstein monster could be created. The former is all the OP should be looking for. The latter is the intrinsic problem with this question type and should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before asking a question of this type, the OP should ask themselves why they're asking it. If all they're looking for is help with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;, then the question could be easily reworded to reflect, for example, &amp;quot;my creature has two heads, what neck and should bone structure would allow this?&amp;quot; This is an example of a specific creature-design question. &amp;quot;Specific&amp;quot; is always the best friend of the OP on the Worldbuilding Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T18:20:45.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T20:01:07.807" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the only Stack I am aware of that discourages improving a question if it invalidates answers. I could be wrong about that, but what it does is suggest that &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; are more important than &lt;em&gt;questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange at first appears to support this behavior. From the Help Center's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/what-to-do-instead-of-deleting-question&quot;&gt;I've thought better of my question; can I delete it?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; page we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question has good answers, though, it's not fair to have those answers removed along with your question: other users put effort into helping you and even if you no longer want the answers, somebody else might. This is why the system prevents you from deleting answered questions most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's a good answer? An answer that's well thought out, documented, and presented but doesn't meet the OP's actual problem isn't a good answer. It's only a quality answer. The page continues with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is unnecessarily specific, edit to generalize it. Do you really need to name specific employers, vendors, or other details? Is your location actually important? Can you make the code more generic and rename some variables? Don't invalidate existing answers and don't make it so vague as to be unanswerable...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's probably where our belief comes from. That last sentence, taken out of context from a discussion that's so old it still reflects some of the earliest Stacks on Stack Exchange. Curiously, the paragraph isn't talking about making a question &lt;em&gt;more specific,&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;more general.&lt;/em&gt; In a larger discussion, I could agree with that. But adding detail is a function of improving the quality of the question. It's so important, &lt;em&gt;it's actually a reason to close the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I get the idea that an OP should try to avoid invalidating answers. But that's a far cry from the need to improve a question. From the Help Center's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; page we read...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!&lt;p&gt;Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date.&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks.&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's the entire &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; which says, in part...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should first try to edit the question to improve it as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consequences&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consequences of our current policy are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It encourages people to ask a new question that's basically a duplicate of the previous question other than for the addition of details that happen to invalidate answers to the previous question. This is against the policy that users should edit their question rather than ask it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's confusing when questions are closed and the only way they can be opened is to edit the question with enough information to overcome the closure reason — which will in nearly all cases invalidate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We've been asking about this for a long time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of Meta questions about invalidating answers is long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2764/40609&quot;&gt;Fitting a question to the scope: Counting Systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4403/40609&quot;&gt;On editing questions and invalidating answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4521/40609&quot;&gt;Proposal: ALL questions start &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; for 1 hour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4860/40609&quot;&gt;What should I do when I realize that I forgot to list a crucial criteria in my question, after answers have been given?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4968/40609&quot;&gt;Please Don&amp;#39;t answer and/or upvote “bad” questions (yet)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5301/40609&quot;&gt;Asked a bad question, can&amp;#39;t delete, can&amp;#39;t close by myself. What is the correct thing to do?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5361/40609&quot;&gt;How to handle successive versions of the same question with more specific or different context?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5539/40609&quot;&gt;Is it considered good practice to edit your question after answers have been given?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5596/40609&quot;&gt;How to handle answers that no longer reflect the edited question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5596/40609&quot;&gt;How to handle answers that no longer reflect the edited question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5982/40609&quot;&gt;How to rewrite a controversial question when I didn&amp;#39;t get the answers I was expecting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6807/40609&quot;&gt;Seeking community advice/consensus on rolling back edits that invalidate answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6876/40609&quot;&gt;What happens if a poster&amp;#39;s assumptions invalidate their answer when clarifications are made later&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7054/40609&quot;&gt;Can we make &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; less terrible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7079/40609&quot;&gt;If a question is changed making an answer invalid, how should the community respond?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7883/40609&quot;&gt;Spinning off a question to preserve answers to removed sub-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of those questions are fighting the very problem this Stack's policy creates: The OP was helped to improve their question to solve the problem they &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; needed solving, but because this Stack thinks &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; are more important than &lt;em&gt;questions,&lt;/em&gt; the OP is now stuck with not getting their question answered or having to fight the &amp;quot;duplicate question&amp;quot; problem created in an effort to not...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...not what?... Make the respondents feel bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are we protecting answers over questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principal goal of Stack exchange is to be &lt;em&gt;specifically useful.&lt;/em&gt; To answer specific questions with specific answers. Users who have so little self-discipline or so little experience with the site that they'd answer a question before it was fully developed put themselves into the position of having an &lt;em&gt;irrelevant answer.&lt;/em&gt; But for some reason, this Stack doesn't appear to like the idea of anyone's answer becoming irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that respondents are as responsible for waiting for a question to be ready as the querent is responsible for creating a question that's ready to be answered.  It's deplorable that we believe a question should become locked in stone simply because an answer has been posited. From the Help Center's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; we read...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;well-asked&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;li&gt;...solicit opinions rather than facts.&lt;li&gt;...have already been asked and answered many times before.&lt;li&gt;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;li&gt;...are not about worldbuilding as defined in the help center.&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being closed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion and Policy Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caveat responsor.&lt;/em&gt; It is my conclusion that the Worldbuilding Stack &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; encourage answers over questions. It should encourage edits to questions that improve the question for the OP's purposes and to improve the applicability of the question for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that invalidates answers. That's unfortunate, but a natural consequence of one or more of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not having the self-discipline to avoid answering a question quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having so little respect for the OP that a respondent wouldn't help the OP perfect their question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Caring more about farming reputation than participating in the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T22:35:32.730" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T05:01:26.427" Title="Disputing a Policy: Question Edits Cannot Invalidate Answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8134" CreationDate="2020-12-03T05:01:26.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should encourage edits to questions that improve the question for the OP's purposes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the wall will be hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many cases of well shaped questions where the OP, not liking the received answers, simply decided that the mechanism given in the answers wasn't applicable and tried to edit it away in the question, even getting mad at the answerers for not giving the type of expected answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we let this happens we face the risk of having a potentially endless loop of question -&amp;gt; answer -&amp;gt; edit to rule out answer -&amp;gt; new answer -&amp;gt; new edit which would turn SE into the endless discussion forum we don't want it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially for worldbuilding questions it is to be expected that answers to questions might clear the OP's mind and lead to a refinement of the OP's purpose. It doesn't mean however that that refinement shall be embedded in the original question as an ad hoc to prevent those answers to be applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T05:01:26.427" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5685" CreationDate="2020-12-03T05:49:47.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evolution does not take place in a vacuum.  We can't say if some sort of life form could evolve if we don't know where it is supposed to live now, and preferably where its ancestors might have lived, though that isn't strictly necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have the constraint of the life forms that it is supposed to live near, and the biochemistry of the world in question.  In many of the Anatomically Correct series, these constraints are supplied by implication: these creatures being the myths of certain peoples and being said to live in certain places and in certain ways, and therefore must live alongside other real and mythical beings of that environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's example of a &amp;quot;One eyed, one horned flying purple people eater&amp;quot; should be off-topic unless somewhere between the stated intention and the act of actually posting the question, more details are provided.  Otherwise, I could answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A One-eyed, One-horned Flying Purple People Eater is a species  of vulture characterised by dark purple feathers, with a single light bony protuberance on its head that looks like the horn of an animal such as a rhinoceros.  They are named &amp;quot;One Eyed&amp;quot; because the real eyes have black irises and blend in with the colour of the black skin of the head, but on the forehead, between the beak and the horn is a structure that looks like a single large eye with a white sclera, a blue iris and a black pupil, however this structure is not a functional eye, but, along with the horn, serves as a device to attract mates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, these birds have been seen on battlefields, devouring the corpses of deceased soldiers.   They prefer to eat carrion that is similar in size to a human or smaller, as their horn prevents them from inserting their beaks and heads any further into the carrion than ten to twelve centimeters, which is typically sufficient for human-sized carrion, but insufficient for carrion such as a horse, hence why they prefer eating &amp;quot;people&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T05:55:47.953" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T05:55:47.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8132" CreationDate="2020-12-03T05:50:41.903" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any answer we can give here will be purely speculative until the miserable miscreants reveal their own rationales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In skimming the query, I can really only conclude that the issue &lt;em&gt;might be&lt;/em&gt; one of your style of presentation.  As originally written, it was as has been said, a wall of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Walls of text are unpopular because we have to slog through them. This demonstrates that you don't know how to present your ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your writing style is also slightly jocular and slightly careless: too many uses of words like &amp;quot;dealio&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;thingy&amp;quot;. It demonstrates that you don't care enough to learn what the &amp;quot;dealio&amp;quot; is actually called, with the result that a respondent might not care enough to bother answering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your query is about twelve times as long as it needs to be. It basically boils down to &lt;strong&gt;Would a set of guns mounted 180deg apart on a rotating platform as per the design sketch be a viable design for any type of weapon (handheld, emplacement, or vehicle mounted)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Per T. Sar's comment, some users immediately downvote something that is made to entertain a silly idea instead of actual stuff that can be used in creating a piece of fiction. The &amp;quot;Just a random idea I had&amp;quot; might be enough to trigger this instinct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that long questions are inherently bad. It's not that jocular wording is bad. It's not even that long-winded presentation is (necessarily) bad. It's just that, in my opinion, the perfect storm of all these things, and possibly others, ticked a couple readers off enough to downvote your query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, stylistic issues aside (which I think you could profitably edit away), I honestly don't find your query to be either useless, unclear, or particularly lacking in research. (Those are what we consider especially valid reasons for downvoting.) Thus, I wouldn't downvote. Though I wouldn't necessarily upvote either! And that's a different matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T18:24:05.023" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T18:24:05.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-06T15:38:32.130" Score="11" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a question such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want my race of fantasy avians to have a crest of beautiful, long, iridescent feathers. If I don't care how they came to be in the first place (perhaps they were created by magic long ago), are they plausible? IOW, can such things exist based on what we know of biology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, responses to such questions have a strong tendency to come in two varieties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ignoring the question&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;Magic was involved, so anything is possible.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ignoring the stipulations&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;Such a feature couldn't possibly evolve.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are usually accompanied by heavy down-voting. Both are also actively unhelpful; strict adherence to science tends to make for boring stories, and ignoring science tends to make for &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; stories. &amp;quot;Like reality unless otherwise noted&amp;quot; is widely recognized as a good strategy, yet recently we seem to have developed an aversion to helping achieve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, we &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/4969&quot;&gt;seemed&lt;/a&gt; to understand this. What went wrong? How can someone ask a question like this without it being attacked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T14:46:59.363" Title="Why are 'plausible magic' questions so poorly received?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|down-votes|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2020-12-06T20:11:44.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the example is poorly conceived, but if you state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't care how they came to be in the first place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are kinda defeating the point of asking in the next line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can such things exist based on what we know of biology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That apart, biology as we know it doesn't involve magic, so, again, dropping in magic and then asking if that's possible based on NOT-magic is self contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, we seemed to understand this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communities evolve over time. Look at the anatomically correct series. Once it was well received, now, as a consequence of the repeated misuse by a subset of members, has gone down the drain and receives poor acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T20:11:44.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2020-12-07T04:40:43.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;By and large, the problem with such questions is that they ask if something is &amp;quot;plausible&amp;quot;. What is plausible depends on the skill of the story-teller; let me give you an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Within the forest glades they found the house of Circe, built of polished stone in a place of wide outlook, and round about it were mountain wolves and lions, whom Circe herself had bewitched; for she gave them evil drugs. Yet these beasts did not rush upon my men, but pranced about them fawningly, wagging their long tails. And as when hounds fawn around their master as he comes from a feast, for he ever brings them bits to soothe their temper, so about them fawned the stout-clawed wolves and lions; but they were seized with fear, as they saw the dread monsters.&lt;br /&gt;So they stood in the gateway of the fair-tressed goddess, and within they heard Circe singing with sweet voice, as she went to and fro before a great imperishable web, such as is the handiwork of goddesses, finely-woven and beautiful, and glorious. Then among them spoke Polites, a leader of men, dearest to me of my comrades, and trustiest: &amp;quot;Friends, within someone goes to and fro before a great web, singing sweetly, so that all the floor echoes; some goddess it is, or some woman. Come, let us quickly call to her.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So he spoke, and they cried aloud, and called to her. And she straightway came forth and opened the bright doors, and bade them in; and all went with her in their folly. Only Eurylochus remained behind, for he suspected that there was a snare. She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land.&lt;br /&gt;Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. So they were penned there weeping, and before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are wont to feed upon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer, &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, book 10, lines 210-245. English translation by A.T. Murray, 1910. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D10%3Acard%3D208&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Available from Perseus&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short summary is that Ulysses and his men come ashore on the island of Aeaea, home of the beautiful witch (and goddess) Circe, who drugs some of the men and transforms them into pigs. How on Earth is this plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's plausible because it fits in the overall story; it's plausible because Homer sprinkles well-placed attributes and gratuitous details, making the scene come alive; it's plausible because Ulysses tells the story straight (to his Phaeacian hosts) and Ulysses is set up to be seen as a truthful man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; can be made plausible by a skilled story-teller; so that the answer to such a question can only be, it depends, are you good enough to make it plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ah, and yes there are many birds with long beautiful shimmering feathers; and there are many birds with feathery crests; so why wouldn't there be birds with crests of long beatiful shimmering feathers?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T04:40:43.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2020-12-07T05:01:32.467" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is an increasing tend on the Stack to measure &amp;quot;possible, plausible, and probable&amp;quot; by Real Life&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noted over the last six months that more and more people are judging questions by real life and not by the rules of the world of the OP. It's not overwhelming, but it is, IMO, a growing problem. However, the Stack has always had to push back on the science-lovers (and there's nothing wrong with science-lovers!) to remind them that worldbuilding is, somewhat by definition, &lt;em&gt;fiction.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've also noticed an increasing trend for people to ask questions like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it probable that...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem on this site, especially if you didn't go out of your way to specifically and in great detail identify the rules of your world. The knee-jerk reaction of the average reader (even I do it), is to compare the question to real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all (and this is the &lt;strong&gt;important point&lt;/strong&gt;), when you ask if something's possible, kinda by definition you're asking if it can &lt;em&gt;really happen in real life.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The hardest for me are the questions about &amp;quot;possible evolution&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class of questions I personally have the hardest time with are those where the OP is asking if it's possible for something to evolve. Think about it. We barely understand how humanity evolved and the science of genetic engineering is still very much in the science-fiction stage. Asking if it's possible for a fictional creature to evolve (or how it might do so) is, in my opinion, entirely opinion-based because there's no real examples we can draw from to establish a credible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, back to your question...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in general, you can help &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by avoiding asking if something is possible. It's probably not what you're really after, anyway. It's more likely that you're wanting something like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there real-life examples of something similar to X that I can use to justify or rationalize X in my world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there science today that, if bent or looked at sideways, could rationalize X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there anything about X that stands out as impossible or unbelievable for my fictional world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, how you ask a question really is really important. You can't (and shouldn't) assume that we can or will understand your intent. It's not that we don't want to, it's just that we can't. I know all too well that writing the &amp;quot;perfect question&amp;quot; is very, very hard. But I do recommend putting the time into it — and above all, understanding what it really is you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if you ask if it's possible for a 2-pound bird to fly with 30-pounds of tail feathers, the answer will likely be &amp;quot;obviously no, duh.&amp;quot; Even if what you meant to ask was, &amp;quot;on my world gravity is a third of Earth's gravity and my 2-pound bird has densely-packed muscles that give it 5X the lift/push power of terrestrial birds, is my 2-pound bird with 30-pounds of tail feathers believable under those conditions?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; One last thing. Not about your question specifically, but speaking quite generally (especially in light of questions I've tried to help over the last week)... I've been wondering since I wrote this if people are coming to the site looking for some form of credibility or authority. In other words, what they're &amp;quot;really asking&amp;quot; is whether or not their concept is &lt;em&gt;believable,&lt;/em&gt; but they're asking it in a way that invites us to &lt;em&gt;Officially Authorize the Design for Worldbuilding Purposes.&lt;/em&gt; Almost as if they're expecting their friends to laugh at them for their design and so they want a real-world explanation or some authoritative action to prove that it isn't something anyone can laugh at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feeling that this is a growing aspect of the problem (from the querent's point of view) has been gnawing at me for the last week. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just reading conclusions into a data set that's too small, but if I'm right, then future readers would benefit from the following observation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No one on this site can authorize or validate anything. As our stated purpose indicates, we can only help you continue and complete the task of building a fictional world of your own design. Seeking anything else from us is, indeed, a mistake for many reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that your willingness to bring the offspring of your creativity to us is a great privilege that we should respect and enjoy, rather than judge. Our job is quite literally to help you achieve &lt;strong&gt;believability,&lt;/strong&gt; not validity or real-world credibility.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No one has the ability or the authority to validate a work of fiction. If my observation is right in any way, then any action we take to validate an idea is nothing more than the other side of the same bullying coin the querent is seeking to avoid in the first place. In an ideal world, down voting only identifies displeasure with a question that has not been properly researched or is ill-thought-out and closure only happens because the question has violated one of the rules of the Help Center that serve to keep this site focused on Stack Exchange's overall goals and to encourage questions to be specifically useful to a broad number of people. Any other action on our part is, quite frankly, hubris. And we, the children of imagination that we are, should know better than to do aught but to embrace new creativity whenever it knocks on our door.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is with great sadness that I acknowledge that betimes... that's not the case.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T15:53:49.383" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T15:53:49.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2020-12-07T14:35:09.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a matter of WB.SE culture.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH hammers an important nail in the coffin of magical questions by noting that many folks judge queries by real life (i.e., the Real World as we so imperfectly know it).  They want things to make sense in a fantasy world just as they make sense in the real world. And this, in such a shallow way of looking at things, means &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at the broad culture in general, we see the same trend: mythological, mystical, religious, and even fanciful ways of approach to reality are deprecated in favour of the ultimate truth of science. If the answer can't be found in physics, chemistry, or biology, then no answer can be found and no explanation made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so it is here, even in this place that ought to be a bastion of the mythical, the religious, the mystical, the fanciful --- and yes, even the scientifical! We expect your dragons to comply with all applicable laws of physics.  Your Faeries are too small to be intelligent because their brains can't hold enough neurons. Your winged folk can't fly because human bones aren't hollow and they violate square cubed law!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WHATEVER!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What went wrong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We as a community went wrong: we let ourselves become duped by the aphrodisiac of the goddess Scientia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21XQQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21XQQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We demand narrow focus in people's questions; and we also came to narrow our own answers. Only things that &amp;quot;make sense&amp;quot; in a scientific fashion are allowable. Answers that don't make sense came to be disdained. Look at the catalogue of tags for example: how common we see &amp;quot;science-based&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot;! Not to mention &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;biology&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;evolution&amp;quot;. And those question types are lauded. And this is because we have a pretty good and common understanding of those sciences. And where are the &amp;quot;hard-magic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;alchemy&amp;quot; tags? Oh, no! We can't have those, because there's no way to define....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can someone ask a question without being attacked?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't think this is the right question. But to answer it, of course!: you have to ask a question that makes sense within a reasonably pure scientific mindset. Ask questions about planetary orbits and celestial mechanics all day long and you'll get good solid scientific answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But worldbuilding --- geopoetry --- is so much more than mere scientific equations.  You shouldn't have to be attacked for asking questions relating to magic or fancy. On the contrary, WE as a community need to rethink our approach to answering such queries. I've often said in comments something to the effect of &amp;quot;This is Worldbuilding: we need to answer questions based on the OP's description and accept the OP's world as a given.&amp;quot; In other words, you as OP have defined a world, and it ought to be up to us to apply real science, or apply parascience, or even conjure up a new science altogether in order to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no problem whatsoever with answering a planetary mechanics query with ordinary physics, when the OP specifies a world inhabiting a &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; universe, one that obeys known laws of physics. Nor do I see any problem whatsoever with answering a planetary mechanics query with astrological cosmology, when the OP specifies a world operating along different principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your avians to have a crest of feathers that were placed there by magic, then it's up to us to consider magical avenues of discourse. In other words, to consider your world on its own merits. Magic does not negate science: it simply demands a different approach to answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We as a culture need to get over the whole kneejerk &amp;quot;it's your world, you decide!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;we don't know all the rules of your magic, so no answer can ever be made&amp;quot; kinds of responses. Does anyone know the true and full extent of any science? And yet our comrades over on the science forums answer science questions all the time! We can do at least as well as they, if not better. After all, we have Imaginations to bring to bear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I find the linked question to be abysmally narrow minded --- why are magical queries even allowed to be asked here, indeed!  I am happy to see a number of thoughtful answers that not only responded to the specific query, but also speak to the science-only culture we see evolving on WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T14:35:09.143" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T13:56:42.413" Score="33" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have finally found the perfect question to kick-start this discussion concerning what I believe is a growing undesirable behavior on Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/191533/40609&quot;&gt;How can the Sea of Japan be drained?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP wasn't just a new user, before I upvoted her question she had a single reputation point and hadn't taken the tour yet. She was as new as new could be! And the very first reaction she received, both in comments and in answers, is &amp;quot;that's impractical!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a day when participating worldbuilders would pick up the gauntlet and throw impracticality out the window to come up with creative, imaginative, clever, weird, funny, stupid, even controversial ways to &lt;em&gt;solve the OP's problem.&lt;/em&gt; But today, we're growing into a habit of stating, proverbially... &amp;quot;well, you can't do that in real life, so you're screwed.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Real life cannot be an overriding limitation to worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not taken the time to sort through the questions. There's a lot of them! It's actually exciting to see so many new users and new questions! But there have been enough questions to throw the proverbial flag in my consciousness. I've even started catching myself doing it! (And I've been chastised by others for not doing it!) Far too frequently either...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions are being limited solely because in Real Life it's impractical or impossible. It used to be that was relegated to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;Frame Challenge&lt;/a&gt;. (See also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8008/40609&quot;&gt;When and how to challenge the back story?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions are appearing with startling frequency asking if it's possible for something fantastic to happen in Real Life. Think of it as, &amp;quot;please show me some blueprints to build my Death Ray!&amp;quot; That used to be rare. At least it feels to me that it used to be rare. And I suspect it's a consequence of the community's shift to expecting all questions to be answered from the perspective of Real Life. &lt;em&gt;At least, if you read through our answers of the last few weeks... it sure looks that way.&lt;/em&gt; We're apparently becoming the place, not to figuratively bring imagination to life, but to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;literally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; being imagination to life. (If we could do that, even rarely, we should create our own site someplace where every post isn't Public Domain so that we could file all the patents!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that imposing Real Life on any question without the express invitation by the OP to do so seriously limits the value of the site. To be blunt: there's no reason for the site to exist if questions can only be or should only be answered from the perspective of Real Life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll create an example using one of the question types I hate the most: How could my fantastic creature evolve? I hate those questions because, simply, the creature &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; evolve in Real Life, so obviously there weren't any examples of evolutionary pressures in Earth's history that could justify the creature. Shame on me! I still hate the question because, frankly, what's the use of that information in any story, really? But who am I to forbid a creative and, therefore, productive answer just because I can't see beyond the limits of Real Life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rather than welcome a new user and ask questions clarifying the user's intent for the purpose of creating imaginative solutions, we immediately started complaining and pointing out the unreality of the question. On Worldbuilding! Frankly, most of the linked question's initial comments were little more than calling the OP's question &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; and, funny as they might have been to read, were actually quite mean and restrictive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: Science is a great TOOL for helping worldbuilders build their worlds, but it is NOT a fundamental limitation save in the case of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag shouldn't (and doesn't!) mandate that science is the only expression of the solution. It only means that science should be the stepping stone we use to justify or rationalize an imaginative solution. But it seems to me we are, less and less, believing that. Instead, the site appears to be imposing science as the one and only valid perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, the reader's, knee-jerk reaction to any question is, &amp;quot;you just can't do that!&amp;quot; you should train yourself to recognize that moment and force yourself to realize that you're not being creative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm going to leave you with a personal, and therefore very blunt, consideration:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If hard science is the world you want to live in, you're participating on the &lt;em&gt;wrong Stack.&lt;/em&gt; While we allow querents to tag their questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag because, sometimes, the querent &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; to express an idea as closely to the rules of real life science as possible, that simply is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the go-to first solution for worldbuilding. Participants who believe any (if not all) questions should be addressed principally by Real Life are welcome to leave this Stack and participate on the Physics, Earth Sciences, Astronomy, Geology, and Space stacks. Worldbuilding is a place where scientists and artists combine their experience to bring flights of fancy to life and imaginatively realize the most beautiful expression of &amp;quot;what if?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant Meta Posts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/404/40609&quot;&gt;More strict scientific culture in Worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T17:01:26.577" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T17:01:26.577" Title="Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2020-12-08T16:01:39.300" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question doesn't specify the expected direction of answer, it's reasonable to infer from what information there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sea of Japan question doesn't specify &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; level of future tech, alternate reality, magic, etc. In fact, it could have been written for the Engineering stack. Since the question talks about a real-world country with a hypothetical but real-world problem, it is natural to assume the world being built has real-world-ish technology. That leads inevitably to the challenge of the premise, because the desired solution is so far removed from real-world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that the tone needs to be less hostile and more encouraging to add information to questions, but given the apparent lack of effort put into preparing the question, I understand that the first reaction is &amp;quot;Have you thought about what you're proposing?&amp;quot;. Comments along that line are a better alternative than a close vote for &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for ice wizards and wormholes to create more usable land for the Japanese, but despite the intriguing premise, I'm not going to waste my creative energy going off on a tangent that the OP 95% likely can't use for their story/world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14892" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T16:01:39.300" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2020-12-09T08:25:14.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the Sea of Japan question has received frame challenges in nearly every answer. Perhaps Elementilas' is the exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think that it is a natural response, not to the fact that the question asks about something fanciful, but to the fact that the question is only one paragraph long and doesn't show any research. It also doesn't give any background information - does Japan even have the cooperation of both Koreas and Russia? Just listing the countries and funding involved can elicit an answer that's taking their means and resources into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66895/ultimate-australian-canal/138887#138887&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, on the other hand, describes all those things. Now this question is a reality check (even if it lacks the tag) so frame challenges are intended here, but they are also more in depth and a few answers roll along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's a happy middle road. If the Sea of Japan question were four paragraphs long instead of one paragraph, and described the resources and expectations in greater detail, then I don't think it would have had quite the same response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T13:25:19.397" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T13:25:19.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-10T13:21:30.447" Score="-2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yet again, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191455/what-would-be-the-most-efficient-and-cost-effective-way-to-stop-a-stars-nuclear&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; that falls under &amp;quot;evidently impossible with 5 minutes of basic research&amp;quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is it allowed to remain open, it gets highly upvoted - so much so that it makes it to HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It thus prompts me to ask what the standards for question quality are on this site, because it seems to me those standards either don't exist or are so low that they may as well not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T20:43:15.793" Title="Are there any standards for quality here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8146" CreationDate="2020-12-10T13:39:18.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stellar engineering is a fairly standard scifi trope. There's no problem with the subject matter, the answer simply needs to be a matter of where the required technology is likely to fall against a civilisation's position on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kardashev scale&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because it can't be done with current technology does not invalidate the question. This is Worldbuilding, world destruction included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T13:39:18.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2020-12-10T14:04:08.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problems with questions like these is that they show &lt;strong&gt;zero effort on the part of the asker&lt;/strong&gt;. They're essentially throwing their question at the wall and hoping an answer will stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same logic, a zero effort answer saying nothing more than &amp;quot;handwave it&amp;quot; should be a completely valid answer to such a question, yet somehow I doubt users here would be happy to upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone hasn't gone to the effort of putting even the smallest amount of thinking into their question, that means they aren't trying to build their own world, they're just plagiarizing bits of others' worlds. Is that really something we want to reward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T14:04:08.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8146" CreationDate="2020-12-10T19:28:39.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are standards of quality here ... just not the ones you're apparently looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, these are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;the written standards&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Search, and research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's unclear how much research the OP did; but not all good questions spell out the step-by-step research trail either.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our community is defined by a specific set of topics that you can view in the help center; please stick to those topics and avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussion. If your question is about the site itself, ask on our meta-discussion site. If you’re looking for a different topic, it might be covered on another Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Query is on topic for this forum.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be specific&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you ask a vague question, you’ll get a vague answer. But if you give us details and context, we can provide a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Query is fairly specific.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it relevant to others&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We like to help as many people at a time as we can. Make it clear how your question is relevant to more people than just you, and more of us will be interested in your question and willing to look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Query is easily relatable to other fictional settings.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep an open mind&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The answer to your question may not always be the one you wanted, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong. A conclusive answer isn’t always possible. When in doubt, ask people to cite their sources, or to explain how/where they learned something. Even if we don’t agree with you, or tell you exactly what you wanted to hear, remember: we’re just trying to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is actually more important for respondents than querents. Community needs to keep an open mind, especially as regards trans-science. It's basically our job to conceive the inconceivable here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other standard I'd add to the above are the basics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write your query as best you can (English speakers' version)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Use good English mechanics: spelling, grammar, formatting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Write to make sense: we're trying to help you with your made up world; try not to make up the English as you go along!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Poorly written questions attract more negative attention than well written ones; poorly written questions are harder to understand and may be off-putting to potential respondents.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well written questions are a joy to read, and also a joy to answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T19:28:39.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2020-12-11T02:18:46.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this problem boils down to the fact that the real world is the logical basis for comparison, and that excludes magic as people tend to mean the term here. This shows up with any questions like &amp;quot;Is X plausible?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Is X biologically possible?&amp;quot;; the second one is what your example is ultimately asking, incidentally. Questions of plausibility implicitly state &amp;quot;without magic or handwavium&amp;quot; except as the question specifies is allowable, because that's usually how people will test for plausibility. People will naturally assume that the fictional world is functionally similar to Earth unless noted otherwise. &lt;strong&gt;If the question does not say anything to contradict that assumption, a scientific approach is typically the best way to answer the question&lt;/strong&gt;: it can be fact-checked, compared against, etc., and will make a sound objective answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example, for instance. It's asking for a science-based answer by default, since asking about biological plausibility inherently assumes that biology alone contains the answer; if you add magic, you're stepping outside the bounds of &amp;quot;biological&amp;quot;, and thus (given that inherent assumption) outside the bounds of what the question is looking for. Your line about &amp;quot;maybe they were created by magic long ago&amp;quot; is a fancy way of saying &amp;quot;I don't care how this evolved, so genetic engineering is also a valid answer&amp;quot;. I'll grant you that some people do equate &amp;quot;is X biologically possible?&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;can X evolve?&amp;quot;, which are two very different questions; it might be a good idea for questions to be explicit on that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you explicitly ask a question about plausibility of a system of magic (or of some spell or other subset of that system), a lot of people will instantly jump to looking for the rules of that system. If those rules aren't specified or are too vague, then the question is effectively asking others &amp;quot;please write my magic system for me&amp;quot;; if anything goes, then the answer to any such question becomes useless rubbish like &amp;quot;I wave my wand and magic happens&amp;quot;. Questions need some criteria to allow for the best answer to be judged as such: if the answer has to provide its own criteria by defining that system beforehand, that's a huge problem and indicates the question is badly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the two parts of your complaint, those reflect different biases. The &amp;quot;Ignoring the question&amp;quot; part is often a valid response for questions that invoke magic badly: there is no one set of rules for fictional magic, so &lt;strong&gt;any question expecting magic-based answers &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; define the rules of magic in the setting&lt;/strong&gt;. If that is not done properly, people can make up whatever they want and technically have a correct answer; you can't judge any one answer as being the best when that happens, which is one definition of a bad question on Stack Exchange. The &amp;quot;Ignoring the stipulations&amp;quot; part, however, is (at least in your example) a case of misreading the question; the example question doesn't care about evolution, meaning that genetic engineering and the like are allowed, so that response is not in itself an answer to the question and probably isn't helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, this is a case of science being the default basis for an answer. &lt;strong&gt;The science-based tag is arguably redundant: if people don't specify otherwise, that is what's assumed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22607" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T02:18:46.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2020-12-11T11:34:26.737" Score="-6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The question is Valid, But &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; answers are poor taste.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question might be terse, but implies current technology and society. most answers point to some or another doable thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/191750/25822&quot;&gt;one answer&lt;/a&gt; strikes me as particularly poor taste. It proposes that Japan, the only country that ever had been nuked in an act of war, uses nuclear weapons to vaporize the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to say it frankly: &lt;a href=&quot;https://allthingsnuclear.org/gkulacki/does-japan-have-nuclear-weapons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japan has an extreme disfavorably look to hate on nuclear weapons.&lt;/a&gt; Japan has a constitution that bans it from waging aggressive war or having a military. Yes, they don't have a military! They have a police that is armed to the teeth with helicopter carriers and fighter jets, but no military. They have a treaty with the USA since 1960 that banned any stationing of nuclear weapons by the USA in their country and before Okinawa was returned in 1972, the US had to remove their nukes there too. Japan signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty. They &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; uphold three non-law principles that, while not a fact of law, are express policy of the state: &lt;strong&gt;Japan will never manufacture, possess or even allow nukes on Japanese soil.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T11:34:26.737" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2020-12-11T14:08:03.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that questions can better avoid this circumstance by adding &lt;em&gt;more detail about goals and constraints.&lt;/em&gt; The Sea of Japan question seems fine to me, generally, but leaves completely undefined terms like &amp;quot;most effective&amp;quot; which are necessary to frame the answer. The question is interesting enough to attract attention but underspecified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving it unbounded makes it difficult to identify a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; answer, let alone the best, because the answers aren't even necessarily talking about the same thing. If a population boom is necessitating land reclamation from the Sea of Japan, are we talking about Japan dedicating all of its GDP to the task until it's done? Or some more sustainable amount, maybe? Do we care about fault tolerances, risk over ten years, risk over a century, or similar? Is &amp;quot;the shortest amount of time&amp;quot; meant to equate to &amp;quot;acceptably fast to alleviate the current population boom&amp;quot;, and does it matter if the latter is impossible? What about a huge array of hand pumps, to keep the booming population occupied and distracted from their current, cramped conditions? Are frame challenges like &amp;quot;live on a flotilla&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;develop Rapture&amp;quot; reasonable answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree that &amp;quot;this idea is unrealistic&amp;quot; is not a useful answer outside of questions tagged with reality-check, but I also think that unbounded questions about methods are likely to receive such an answer. I think that this question would have had a better reception if it asked about time, in the sense of &amp;quot;how quickly could Japan drain the Sea of Japan for land reclamation purposes using current technology?&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; This is an unreasonable expectation of a brand-new user, but perhaps other, more experienced users can nudge questions like this one onto a track that will produce better responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as written, it may be that the best answer to this question is &amp;quot;this won't work for what you want&amp;quot;, whether that's followed up with a frame challenge or not. In such a case (whether you agree that this is an example of one or not) it makes more sense (to me) to work on editing questions rather than expecting better prior restraint among all possible answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that, here and on SE more broadly, there are issues with kindness, tone, and the incentives for faster, more direct, and simpler answers. Those exist above and outside of any particular question, but they may be more significant on questions like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20669" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T14:08:03.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8146" CreationDate="2020-12-12T06:35:24.383" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5906/40609&quot;&gt;stickler for the rules&lt;/a&gt;. I get it, so am I. In fact, I'm sure there are people on this Stack who think I'm &lt;em&gt;manic&lt;/em&gt; about the rules. But I think a little perspective is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With a total of 4 questions and 11 answers across &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Main and Meta... you're pretty inexperienced on this Stack. It seems to me you might be trying to apply Stack Overflow's expectations here. Except they don't work here. On Stack Overflow, asking questions in the first place frequently demands a college-level understanding of the subject. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That isn't true here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I've answered questions for users that I'm dead sure were under the age of 10. We frequently have teens participating. There are a lot of users here who are looking for help because they have not yet endured the years of education and/or experience you and I have. Expecting them to have our research skills (to any degree) lacks compassion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like many of the Stacks, this stack took a pretty hard hit after Monica Ciello was fired. A fair number of our most experienced users reduced their participation or quit completely. People I remember regularly participating in the review queues simply aren't there anymore. I might be wrong about this, but it appears to me that the reviewers are less experienced in both the Stack and Stack Exchange, lowering the quality and value of the review process. This perception is strengthened by a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8110/40609&quot;&gt;request by L.Dutch to improve the Stack's review quality&lt;/a&gt;. It was a request that fell on far too many deaf ears because I'd be surprised if more than 20% of the users on Main ever bother to look at Meta (or the Help Center...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add to that what appears to me to be a &lt;em&gt;substantial&lt;/em&gt; increase in the number of new users joining and using the Stack. The number of questions being pumped through in a day feels considerably greater than just 18 months ago. That's great! Except for #2 and the fact that it's getting harder to review &lt;em&gt;everything.&lt;/em&gt; After all, the experienced users tend to be people with jobs and families. The ratio of experienced users available to help maintain quality and bring people along in the culture of the site is a bit low right now — and it shows so much that it prompted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;the last question I asked here on Meta&lt;/a&gt;. Keep in mind, the primary problem (as I see it) is that we have too few reviewers &lt;em&gt;who are familiar with the culture and rules of &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; Stack.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, where Real World stacks like Stack Overflow are focused entirely on the sober process of overcoming a specific problem that impacts education or occupation, &lt;em&gt;this site is entirely creative&lt;/em&gt; and there are no consequences to asking a question that some (including myself) feel is poorly asked. Simply put, there's no motivation for the level of quality you're advocating (having said that, &lt;em&gt;do not forget #1.&lt;/em&gt; Some users simply can't achieve that level of quality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I rarely complain that someone hasn't done enough research. I've even noticed users who have frankly done &lt;em&gt;too much research.&lt;/em&gt; What I mean by that is this: they're not college-educated people with tons of experience. They're teens or young adults who've read just enough about the subject via Wikipedia or YouTube to be dangerous, but not enough to realize they're barking up the wrong tree. It really doesn't help them to complain that they haven't done enough research, from their perspective, &lt;em&gt;they have.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I politely recommend the following (and do so knowing perfectly well that I'm not perfect with this, either):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be patient.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offer to help clear up issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't understand it, the odds are someone else does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you do understand it, the odds are someone else doesn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think the issue is obvious, you're probably wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Believe that you can't read the OP's mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Believe that the OP's a nice person who would be a great friend if you could meet them in Real Life.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remember that some people are participating because they want to be part of the group - but don't want to be part of policing the group (and occasionally don't want to be policed by the group).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remember to feel honored that someone would share their creativity with you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use Stack Exchange's tools to motivate and educate, not punish or oppress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find the joy each user is seeking or experiencing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Express your joy so that others may find the same thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and finally...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you try to help the OP craft a better question, but so many people jump in with an answer that the OP ignores you. Smile, shake your head, and move on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind, unlike Stack Overflow where failure to get the best answer quickly can quite literally affect someone's job and livelihood, this Stack is a hobby for everyone involved. No one is (or at least should be) in a rush and no one will fail in any way if they are imperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is good... because most of us are in the same boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;The one and only thing that keeps me from being entirely irritated by the persistent teenage belief that they know anything to a competent level is the clear and humbling memory of my own teen years. Man, I was an idiot.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T06:35:24.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-13T16:56:50.790" Score="-3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that many of my questions on Quora and things from files on my home pc seem to keep popping up on this site, as if someone on here has been watching me and they are not making it a secret with how obvious the questions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do about this? luckily my story on my pc files are written in short term so I am not too worried what they find or if they try to rip my story off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81223" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T03:23:35.933" Title="Hacking concerns" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2020-12-13T17:16:43.783" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you find your available content published here without attribution, flag the post for moderator attention, explaining the situation (click on FLAG at the bottom of the post, then select the last item in the pop up list you see)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pgke2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pgke2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism is not tolerated here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you instead find content from your personal laptop shared here, please check who has access to it as a first step. We can't monitor it for you, and we have had already cases of content being misposted by not carefully monitored systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T06:12:13.060" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T06:12:13.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8146" CreationDate="2020-12-14T14:24:54.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;World Building was inspired by the Q&amp;amp;A format of Stack Overflow. We get a lot from that site, including some ideas about rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a time new members kept asking in SO's meta whether a googable question should be acceptable. Veterans insisted on an idea put forward by SO's creator, Jeff Atwood: SO was supposed to be the repository for all programming questions. The goal was for SO to be the first result in Google when you were googling for an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't think that applies 100% here, I do like the general idea. Is the question you asked very simple and easily researchable? Yes. Does that disqualify the question? No! By asking that question here, the OP can have lots of good answers from different points of view, and anyone who lands here will have a quick summary of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T14:24:54.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8146" CreationDate="2020-12-14T20:43:15.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like it is stated when you hover your mouse on the up arrow, this means the question has been deemed useful to the person who read it. But the more people are inclined to see the question (whether the title is inquisitive or the subject very important), the more likely a question will get votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In otherwordly words, if you get 100 % of views to positive vote rate and have 100 viewers, you will have less votes than if you had only 10 % of views to positive vote rate but had 10 000 views (100 vs 1000). You'd need to have a null or negative view-to-vote rate to have no or even negative impacts of views on your &amp;quot;mark&amp;quot;. &lt;strong&gt;In simpler terms, having lots of positive votes is not a goodie way of measuring the quality of a question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, having positive notes is a hint that the question was well received by people, and having negative votes means that people disliked your question, for any good or bad reason. That's where the standard lies.&lt;/strong&gt; If there was no standard, then every question would be positively and often highly voted, which is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean no harm by telling this, but are you sure you don't confuse having high standards and having usually different standards than yours :)? Bear with me a momentary moment to explain. If you navigate between questions mostly through tags instead of typing keywords like on your favorite search engine (like most people know how to do), then perhaps that's why you're not happy to find nice voted things at the places you don't expect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T20:43:15.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8160" CreationDate="2020-12-16T00:50:56.780" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good news! The Winter Bash has started!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will WB.SE be participating this year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T20:35:08.127" Title="Is WB.SE participating in the Hat Contest?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8158" CreationDate="2020-12-16T01:04:27.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that I just earned the Social Distancing &lt;strike&gt;hat&lt;/strike&gt; mask here on Meta, it appears that we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastEditorUserId="70058" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T16:29:54.023" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T16:29:54.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8158" CreationDate="2020-12-16T09:55:58.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This year there was no consultancy to see which sites wanted in or out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a personal decision - if you don't want to play, you can click on the &amp;quot;No Hats For Me&amp;quot; link at the bottom corner of the popup that appears if you click on the snowflake icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T09:55:58.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T15:46:18.177" Score="8" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I've finally figured out why I dislike &amp;quot;How can X evolve?&amp;quot; questions and what to do about it. I believe the proposal would help with the questions tremendously — at least if anyone reads the wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/evolution/info&quot;&gt;current wiki&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evolution is the theory, put forth by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species, that species change over long periods of time. Though it was opposed at first by religious groups, it is generally accepted today in the scientific community as being accurate.&lt;p&gt;This is for questions that have to do with how certain species and/or traits evolve, why one trait might become dominant, or how certain traits could influence the species as it continues to evolve. It may also include what types of environments would encourage or support the evolution of different traits.&lt;p&gt;If you have a very speculative life-form design, consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; instead. Also consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proverbial thorn in my side, as demonstrated by a spate of &amp;quot;how can X evolve?&amp;quot; questions over the last three weeks, is this: While humanity has discovered a lot about the &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; of evolution, we're still just scratching the surface when it comes to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; evolution. Most of the &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; part (which seems to be what people are looking for, i.e., &amp;quot;evolutionary pressures&amp;quot;) is reverse-engineered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider ears as an example. We can look at the many different kinds of ears today such as a horse's forward-pointing ears and humans side-facing ears, and examine what value and/or purpose they have &lt;em&gt;right now.&lt;/em&gt; Once we know that purpose, we can look backward into evolutionary history and identify &lt;em&gt;specific pressures&lt;/em&gt; that caused those ears to come to pass. That relationship is important: we understand &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the history &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the value/purpose/reason today, thus we can identify pressures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most (if not all) &amp;quot;how could X evolve?&amp;quot; questions fail to explain why anything exists. We're painted the proverbial picture, told only about &lt;em&gt;what something looks like&lt;/em&gt; and then asked to identify pressures that would bring that fanciful aesthetic to pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases we can jump to a conclusion. For example, asking &amp;quot;how would a human having four arms rather than just two evolve?&amp;quot; is defensible in that we know very intimately what arms/elbows/hands do, and so we can imagine pressures that would favor the development of four rather than two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when something completely fanciful is presented and there's &lt;em&gt;no apparent reason&lt;/em&gt; for it (the OP simply wants the &amp;quot;look&amp;quot; of the thing and, for reasons unknown, wants to know what over the course of millions of years would bring that &amp;quot;look&amp;quot; to pass). It is this behavior that I propose we bring to a screeching halt with the following modification to the wiki (in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evolution is the theory, put forth by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species, that species change over long periods of time. Though it was opposed at first by religious groups, it is generally accepted today in the scientific community as being accurate.&lt;p&gt;This is for questions that have to do with how certain species and/or traits evolve, why one trait might become dominant, or how certain traits could influence the species as it continues to evolve. It may also include what types of environments would encourage or support the evolution of different traits.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions using this tag that seek to understand what evolutionary pressures, conditions, or environments would bring about or favor the development of a specific trait must identify the purpose, value, or reason the proposed trait exists. Questions seeking evolutionary justification for a trait that is presented merely as an aesthetic (e.g., my creature looks like...) risk being closed for needing more details.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions should remain as focused as possible. Users should avoid presenting an entire life-form and asking how that creature in its entirety could evolve as specific traits of that life-form would evolve for very different reasons than others. Ideally, questions using this tag are focusing on individual traits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have a very speculative life-form design, consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; instead. Also consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: Yup, I tend to be verbose. It comes from growing up in a family full of lawyers. If you feel there's a more concise way to express this proposed change, I'm all ears (hah...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T08:03:42.580" Title="Modifying the Evolution tag wiki" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8161" CreationDate="2020-12-17T19:01:55.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good additions, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that most of the &amp;quot;how did X evolve&amp;quot; questions aren't even really interested in evolutionary science per se. As you say, we're given a fanciful aesthetic and nothing else. Even though &amp;quot;evolution&amp;quot; is tagged, I don't think that's what the querent is actually after, except in the broadest of strokes. Consider the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/192023/could-my-timberwolves-exist&quot;&gt;timberwolf&lt;/a&gt; query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever we're dealing with any kind of fictional world, but most especially the fantasy types, we really do have to work a little harder in many regards in order to make a good answer. We can't just rely on the science we know from the real world. Sometimes we have to make up a whole (para-)scientific system just in order to make sense of the answer and the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that the &amp;quot;evolution&amp;quot; tag should be treated as a &amp;quot;soft science&amp;quot; tag. If a querent wants to ask about the evolution of elf ears or dragon wings, that's fine. We can actually extrapolate and confabulate using actual evolutionary science. Everything else should be placed under &amp;quot;creature design&amp;quot; as indicated. I also hold that the Community should feel empowered to retag if a question seems to be improperly tagged. As we already do with the hard science tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested edits:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'd also strongly consider editing this sentence out: &amp;quot;Though it was opposed at first by religious groups, it is generally accepted today in the scientific community as being accurate.&amp;quot; This, while a (confusing as well as often confused) historical statement, really has nothing to do with understanding what evolution is, what evolution science is, or what this tag is with respect to Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separate &amp;quot;Questions seeking...&amp;quot; into its own paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T19:01:55.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2020-12-20T03:23:35.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples please?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be very interesting (to me anyway) if in this question you would link some quora questions of yours and then links to the subsequent WB stack questions that were derived from your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose if you come up with really awesome questions someone who was constitutionally deficient in awesome might copy them to acquire some of that awesome.  I would like to see the questions so awesome that someone wanted to copy them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T03:23:35.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8161" CreationDate="2020-12-22T08:03:42.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evolution is not a black box where anything can happen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is evolutionary biology isn't nearly as much of a black box as your question seems to suppose it is. We may not know all the ins and outs of evolution, but geneticists, anatomists, and biologists in general have been collecting data for nigh on two centuries now. People have actually made computer models of mollusk shells and skull shapes trying to identify what morphotypes might be &amp;quot;forbidden&amp;quot; due to evolutionary constraints we don't know about. Evolutionary and developmental constraints (basically the study of why something might not evolve in a certain direction) are a very heavily studied area in evolutionary biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've mentioned in past answers on this site that you're an engineer by trade. I'm an evolutionary biologist. As someone who's familiar with the anatomy and evolution of a lot of the systems being discussed, what some people might see as reasonable worldbuilding makes me want to go &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmDVHs-juPo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;evolution does not work that way, good night!&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. From my perspective, some of the things I see here are akin to if you saw someone trying to make a carbon atom with seven protons. And yes, evolution sometimes &amp;quot;jumps its banks&amp;quot; and does things to circumvent constraints that surprise us all, but the thing is there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; rules in evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of this is the recent question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191812/how-can-a-mammal-be-green-and-blue-no-camo-please?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;how can a mammal be green and blue&lt;/a&gt;. There are almost no mammals today that are vibrantly and naturally green or blue (aside from the faces and genitals of some monkeys), and there are pretty good reasons why we think no mammals today are green or blue. Namely that blue coloration (which is also required for green) mostly forms through refraction of light, and the way mammalian hair grows as a constantly extruded filament growing from a root prevents the complex criss-crossing pattern that you see producing iridescent or blue coloration in bird feathers. To get a blue furred mammal you'd have to completely overhaul how hair grows in mammals, to the point it'd be even debatable you're working with a mammal anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing is a lot of questions here ask &amp;quot;is my design plausible&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how can I plausibly achieve this&amp;quot; and in some cases...you just can't under normal circumstances. That's a viable answer to the question. It's like how in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; you can't make a &amp;quot;plausible&amp;quot; warp drive, but that doesn't stop people from enjoying your story. Now if you have genetic engineering or magic to change the rules of the game or have &amp;quot;one big lie&amp;quot; to justify biological implausibility for the sake of the story that's also perfectly reasonable (e.g., for the blue mammal example graft bird genes for feather ultrastructure into mammalian skin tissue), but usually the person asking the question will specifically specify no artificial genetic engineering or magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T08:03:42.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8166" CreationDate="2020-12-22T08:34:09.580" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a curious Australian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other countries that get referenced as frequently as Australia does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Australia got mentioned in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/192417/10196&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; yesterday to &amp;quot;How can massive forest burning be an entirely terrible thing?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Australia is mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=australia%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;178 questions&lt;/a&gt;, and is also mentioned in answers that aren't targeted with Australia, such as this one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/115021/10196&quot;&gt;living underground&lt;/a&gt;. The latter (it being mentioned in answers or comments) is more what I'm after, rather than being mentioned in questions, as a serendipitous source of inspiration or information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2188/the-many-memes-of-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;meme of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't know whether I'm justified in it being an entry without being able to back it up with data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T23:58:53.613" Title="Are there any countries as &quot;worldbuilding&quot; as Australia?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8165" CreationDate="2020-12-22T09:22:47.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not really an answer to the why, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;United States&amp;quot; appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22united+states%22+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;257 questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;China&amp;quot; appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22china%22+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;249 questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Russia&amp;quot; appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22russia%22+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;174 questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it's not the only country getting much attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, these are much larger and populous than Australia, so on a per-capita basis, you still win. I guess Australia, being the smallest continent, largest island (depending on your definition), unique wildlife, and being the last of the habitable continents to be 'discovered' by the modern world, has some special attractiveness to worldbuilders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:22:47.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8168" CreationDate="2020-12-24T06:05:55.783" Score="-1" ViewCount="64" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Worldbuilding Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/192706/how-can-laser-color-printers-weigh-far-less&quot;&gt;How can laser color printers weigh far less?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I make this on topic, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had an answer to this I would make money out of it, not disclose it to the public for free. That apart, what has this to do with worldbuilding? – L.Dutch - Reinstate Monica♦ 15 mins ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can't you say this for most questions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check%2bscience-based?tab=Votes&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check%2bscience-based?tab=Votes&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44209&quot;&gt;Is there a way to &amp;quot;poison&amp;quot; oil fields permanently without releasing CO2 from them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/157482&quot;&gt;Is It Possible to Make a Computer Virus That Acts as an Anti-virus?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/76274&quot;&gt;How can I build a Nuclear Reactor in my backyard?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/37351&quot;&gt;Poison which constantly needs to be treated by antidote to not get killed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm building a kind of printer that doesn't exist in the current world. Because no color laser printer weighs less than 40 lb now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81426" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T20:56:46.660" Title="How can laser color printers weigh far less?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8167" CreationDate="2020-12-24T20:40:07.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EASY!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask this question on a technology forum. You are asking a question about a real world technology and a real world product of technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this forum, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;we seek to help people build fictional worlds&lt;/a&gt;.  This means we expect your question to focus on the fundamental nature of the world itself, how it works, how society &amp;amp; culture work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real world questions cán (only just barely) be considered on topic in this forum if you have some real solid fictional world context in which the query can be understood.  You don't have that here. Every piece of technology we now use didn't exist X years ago. Asking a question about a modification of an existing piece of technology that doesn't yet exist is not &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot;. It's a straight up technology query which is off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your question, &lt;em&gt;can't you say this for most questions at Worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt; You're right!  We can probably close some of those questions because they are not about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a couple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The poisoning the oilfield question.&lt;/strong&gt; This question is asking about a fundamental aspect of a fictional world within a fictional setting. Notice that the question is one of basic science: the chemistry of hydrocarbon refining &amp;amp; combustion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The antivirus question.&lt;/strong&gt; This one can probably be nominated for closure, as it's about the manipulation of technology, not the fundamental nature of the world it happens in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The backyard nuclear reactor question.&lt;/strong&gt; Yep, another one placed in the VTC queue. Like your question, it's a straight up tech query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The poison/antidote question.&lt;/strong&gt; This is potentially closeable, but I think can be read sufficiently as &amp;quot;how the world works&amp;quot; to leave it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this exercise illuminates a little bit what we're looking for and why your question doesn't fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2020-12-24T20:56:46.660" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T20:56:46.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8165" CreationDate="2020-12-25T04:57:27.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dude... from the perspective of this American, Australia is the &lt;em&gt;ultimate&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding location!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I obviously cannot speak for all Americans, but from my perspective, Australia is the ultimate worldbuilding location. An ancient continent with modern attachments, a nefarious western culture beginning with wonderful artistic, scientific, and cultural achievements. It's still a land of mystery where it's easy to believe vast tracts have yet to be explored by any but its most ancient inhabitants. From the perspective of the outside, magic may yet be found in Australia!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion, no other modern continent or country has that unique mystique. Thanks to China's cultural revolution, its mystery lies entirely in its past. Russia's mystery lies at the industrial revolution with the Czars. Does America have mystery? How would I know? To me, everything in my country makes sense to the extent of boredom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wouldn't be surprised if you felt something the same, wondering about why Australia is so frequently used in a worldbuilding context. After all, you grew up with it, right? Where's the mystery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I say... Congratulations. The world in which you live has a charm that some of us — perhaps many — believe reflects the fun of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T04:57:27.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-25T05:54:13.057" Score="8" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although most questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; are unquestionably well within the scope of Worldbuilding, some were or might have been inappropriate causing a discussion about the validity of continuing the tags.[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7933/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;][&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7934/40609&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;] The discussion is not new.[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7186/40609&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;][&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3394/40609&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;][&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6550/40609&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;] But this time it captured the attention of the SE Overlords.[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7973/40609&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is normal with high authority, the statements made by SE were delivered with a hammer. However, it has always been the culture of Stack Exchange to let the individual Stacks set their own rules — within limits. I have come to the opinion that @CesarM's Meta post was not a dictatorial action to shut down the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; tags, but a warning that we must better police ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why am I posting this Meta question? Because as time has passed, it appears we have not settled on how do police ourselves. A recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/192375/is-there-a-theoretical-maximum-to-physical-pain#comment596214_192375&quot;&gt;comment chain&lt;/a&gt; argued that a question about the limits of human pain perception should be closed due to the warning given by our SE Overlords.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The discussion was predictably all-or-nothing. The goal of this policy is to create a standard that will help reviewers judge whether or not a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;too much.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subjectivity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Elemtilas points out a simple truth: everyone will have a different tolerance to vice. In the (in)famous U.S. court case &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jacobellis v. Ohio,&lt;/strong&gt; 378 U.S. 184 (1964),[&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/em&gt; Nico Jacobellis, manager of the Heights Art Theatre in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was convicted of public obscenity for showing Louis Malle's 1958 movie &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovers_(1958_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lovers&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; which the State of Ohio felt was obscene. In the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the matter, we learn the basics of our problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous opinion from Jacobellis, however, was Justice Potter Stewart's concurrence, stating that the Constitution protected all obscenity except &amp;quot;hard-core pornography&amp;quot;. He wrote, &amp;quot;I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's our problem: when a question crosses the line, we're supposed to know it when we see it. Using violence as an example (although this can be applied to any vice), the complexity is that some will think little of depictions of violence that others would blanche over, some will react badly to violence where others seek to have nothing to do with it. And all that rests on the answer to a single question, &amp;quot;what's violence?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE Overlords don't know any better than we do, save for one possibility: when somebody's parent contacts SE because they believe what we've posted on a publicly accessible site is objectionable, the threat of that lawsuit draws a line in the sand that I never expect SE to cross (nor should anyone here). As painful as it may seem, we are responsible for helping the company that provides the services we enjoy using free-of-charge to avoid unnecessary scrutiny — which means erring on the side of &amp;quot;decency,&amp;quot; which is a word just as difficult to define as &amp;quot;violence.&amp;quot; (Yup, we know it when we see it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposed Policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is about creating and consistently using &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for a fictional world of an individual's own creation. Questions about torture and execution are acceptable in a worldbuilding context under the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions asked here must be suitable for asking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Medical Sciences&lt;/a&gt;. If the &lt;em&gt;method of asking the question&lt;/em&gt; would be considered &lt;em&gt;too gratuitous&lt;/em&gt; for those sites, it's too gratuitous here. (&amp;quot;We accept a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; here &lt;strong&gt;as long as it's written in a clinical voice&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7187/40609&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We allow real-world questions with worldbuilding context[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;], but the purpose of this site is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to help a querent find the most&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; gruesome, disgusting, disturbing, objectionable, or upsetting way to express a torture or execution — all of which are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;storybuilding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; We will only help create the &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; of torture and execution. This includes questions about methods, procedures, and consequences so long as the previous bullet is strictly adhered to and a &lt;em&gt;specific and objective&lt;/em&gt; question is asked. Open-ended questions are strictly forbidden (as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask about the rules of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; that are not tagged appropriately shall be immediately edited (by anyone) to include one or both tags as appropriate. This allows users who do not want to subject themselves to those topics to more easily avoid them. Users who disagree with the application of the tags are encouraged to ask about the issue here, in Meta, rather than engaging in an edit-war over the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is further proposed that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/torture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;torture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;torture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/execution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;execution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;execution&lt;/a&gt; tags be updated to include a link to this post so that querents interested in asking such questions have easy access to the discussion that led to this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;If you haven't realized by now that I'm still upset by how SE treated Monica Ciello... I can't help you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Too much&amp;quot; is obviously a subjective term. It is highly unlikely that we will come up with an entirely objective criteria by which all tagged questions can be easily judged.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Please do not accept the superlative word &amp;quot;most&amp;quot; too literally. We're not here to help anyone find those descriptions to any extent. Per our help center, we don't help people build stories.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is generally casual about open-ended &amp;quot;How could I X?&amp;quot; questions. But in this case, we will hold querents to a higher standard. It is not our job to explain to you how to create as much pain as possible or how to keep someone alive as long as possible. Perhaps the difference is, &amp;quot;could I do X and not kill someone instantly?&amp;quot; would be on-topic as an objective, clinical question while &amp;quot;how do I keep someone alive as long as possible?&amp;quot; would be closed as open-ended and gratuitous.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T20:55:21.477" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T17:53:17.073" Title="A proposal to establish policy regarding the torture and execution tags" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|policy|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2020-12-25T06:05:03.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the wording of the following statement self contradictory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will answer questions involving the physiological aspects of torture and execution with one, overriding limitation: we will not explain how to cause pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to torture, I don't see how one can explain the physiological aspect without also explaining or implicitly suggesting how to cause pain. If X is well know to be painful, it's obvious that X is a way to cause pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:05:03.917" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8165" CreationDate="2020-12-25T06:29:38.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe most users around here are either american, brittish, or from countries that were heavily influenced by either of those in the 20th century. That gives us &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40609/jbh&quot;&gt;a perspective which has been well described by JBH&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My particular interest on Australia has to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;. From memory I think that Australia has the world's largest and most venomous jellyfish and spiders. The latter sometimes eat birds. You've got bats so big they're called flying foxes. You've got the platypus, which would totally be something we could come up with in this site if it weren't real. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/175808/21222&quot;&gt;And don't get me started on the animal that, for non-australians at least, is the stereotypical representative of your fauna&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to its unique position in the world, a lot of Australia's fauna is so unique that it is nearly alien-like to the rest of the world. That will always be a source of inspiration for many biology answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:29:38.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2020-12-25T18:18:04.950" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am UNANIMOUS in offering a raspberry to anyone from Corporate who tries to lord their authority over any community whose foundation is free interchange of ideas &amp;amp; speech within the limitations set forth by said community, and so am going to stand with JBH's proposal to define Worldbuilding's statement on self policing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat No. 1&lt;/strong&gt;: defining &amp;quot;too gratuitous&amp;quot;. No one from slutmongers to SCOTUS greats has ever been able to offer a more razor sharp definition than &lt;em&gt;I'll know it when I see it&lt;/em&gt;, so I think you might want to consider some kind rewording of that bullet point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've answered a large number of medical queries here, several of which are quite explicit in their physiological gore factor. That's just the nature of the beast whenever we deal with questions of what goes in within the icky insides of animal life forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a very high threshold for what I consider to be &amp;quot;too icky&amp;quot;. Other people here are ready to edit out even the merest mention of blood or other fluid leakages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The take away is that you're not really going to be able to define what is &amp;quot;too gratuitous&amp;quot; in a way that will satisfy everyone. Although I understand the need to tone it down, we need to have some room for creatively on topic gore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this will require some discussion &amp;amp; refinement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat No. 2&lt;/strong&gt;: I concur in so far as such questions are obviously written in a story based manner. Those ought to be closed a/o edited as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I reserve the right to entertain creatively on topic gruesome, disgusting, disturbing, objectionable, &amp;amp; upsetting so long as it stems from the &amp;quot;nature of the world&amp;quot;, the culture, the history, or some other mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem No. 1&lt;/strong&gt;:  I concur with L. Dutch re bullet point No. 3. It's rather self contradictory to say we both will and also will not answer physiology queries. In so far as &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; refers to nerves &amp;amp; mind~brain perception, rather than matters of instrument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem No. 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Re 10 year old children, I hold that we ought to continue our (astonishingly) high level of discourse in this forum. This is honestly one of the best geopoetical forums you can leave an unattended ten year old child in on the entire internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Level of discourse is high; interactions are regularly civil; language is tame by comparison with forums on Reddit; respect for persons &amp;amp; ideas is high as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I am not going recast what I say as if this were Strawberry Shortcake Land just because we might have some ten year olds in the audience. If they wander into the adult world, they're going to be exposed to adult concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur that we must self regulate whenever the temptation to &lt;em&gt;descend into the depths of what is rude, crude, vulgar, and violent&lt;/em&gt; comes to the fore! We should be more creative than to rely on crudity &amp;amp; vulgarity anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T18:18:04.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2020-12-26T09:41:46.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It kind of feels like this is much to do about nothing. I was under the impression that both tags were gotten rid of, and in the time since I've been here I don't think I've seen one specifically torture or execution-related question. Going through the database reveals maybe three such questions in the last year? And most questions that are really over the line are going to get close-bombed to oblivion within a few hours. I see there was the recent question cited above but even that one really isn't torture, it's asking if humans have an in-built maximum pain threshhold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more pressing issue is that banning the [torture] and [execution] tags won't solve anything. Take for example the controversial question in question. It doesn't include either of those tags in it at all. People are just going to take their torture-related questions either to something like [anatomy] (because most torture typically involves exploiting the human bodyplan) or [history]/[society] (going into historical details of capital punishment). And even if someone does say &amp;quot;well this crosses the line into torture and so we have to close it&amp;quot;, how is that any different from a question just being close-bombed into oblivion normally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T09:41:46.350" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-27T01:15:24.163" Score="21" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start from the disclaimer that I understand perfectly well that questions like &amp;quot;what color an invading alien armada spaceships would be&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;what would my superhero decide to do with his life?&amp;quot; are useless and serve purpose to nobody, and fully deserve to be closed under the &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; reason. But then there are many interesting questions that can prove to be useful to anybody that will stumble upon them, even if the answers to these questions aren't founded in facts and logic. They might still solve the problem or offer a solution proposal to the problem that the question outlines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah Worldbuilding SE is hosted on Stack Exchange, who looks down on &amp;quot;unproven&amp;quot; question that are based on opinion, but Worldbuilding, contrary to the rest of SE, isn't a technical process with easily quantifiable facts and knowledge - it's a creative one. I'd make a hot take and say that for most questions here it is impossible to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be opinion based, and I in fact observed very many highly upvoted answers to questions that were displaying opinion and\or biases of the answering user. Sometimes quite obviously. Yet they were still valuable and useful to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, if many of those &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; question deserved to be closed, it would rather be for a different reason - them being too broad and undefined instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80125" LastActivityDate="2022-05-01T17:03:06.360" Title="Are we too harsh on the so-called &quot;opinion-based&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8175" CreationDate="2020-12-27T05:25:19.240" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to say it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;HELL YES!!!!!!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've often said in comments as well as in other meta discussions that if we really took the &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; rationale for closure as seriously as is normative elsewhere on Stack Exchange, we'd literally have to VTC 95% or more of all our questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition we deal in the irrealis. That is, things that don't exist, places that aren't, events that didn't or never will happen. Questions about dragon hide resiliency, far future starship propulsion, Elves mating with Trees and what kind of offspring they'd have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost every question we answer here is, to a very large extent, opinion based. And I do think we are, as a community, a little too quick to VTC opinion based queries that are actually perfectly answerable within an imaginative context. And I concur re the colour choices of starmada admirals for their uniform jackets, or the like! Those are opinion based questions that should ought to be closed, and with good reason. But questions that really have no basis in known reality are equally opinion based, but it's simply the case that these are the kinds of questions we need to be addressing here if we are to follow our own mandate to help people build, devise, improve or otherwise tinker with their fictional worlds and settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of my own practice, when reviewing queries in the VTC queue, I &lt;em&gt;almost never&lt;/em&gt; agree with opinion based as a closure rationale. I might wish to close it for a different reason (most usually such questions might lack clarity or focus), though. And that is a different matter for a different discussion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comments, one person wrote that these kinds of questions (opinion based) &amp;quot;do not belong here&amp;quot;.  I wonder, since this must by definition include the majority of all questions asked in this forum, where else would they belong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hold that to say &amp;quot;those questions do not belong here&amp;quot; is an ill conceived opinion given the nature of this forum. Very few of the questions asked here even cán have a &amp;quot;single best answer&amp;quot; the way we find in other SE forums. Even when an OP delineates very clear criteria for evaluation, this can not guarantee that only one answer will fit. The quoted text from the help centre applies to SE generally, not very well to WB particularly. Our forum is radically different in scope &amp;amp; practice from every other forum here. Some people may do better better jobs of writing questions to elicit a specific answer, while others simply have questions which can not be so easily tailored. I think one of the very best ways to kill this forum is to apply the letter of the law too forcefully and too broadly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another commentor brought up our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436/idea-refinement-clarification-and-examples-of-vtc-reasons-for-new-users/6437#6437&quot;&gt;VTC policy&lt;/a&gt;. While I agree with the overall policy and with the specific subsection in general terms, I don't believe that every single question asked in Worldbuilding needs to list three or five criteria by which to judge the answer.  Sometimes the question simply isn't broken when left criterialess: the OP may be looking to cast a wider net; and there is also the risk of making a question &lt;em&gt;too narrow&lt;/em&gt;, to the point where it may no longer be useful to the OP and may not even be useful to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, even when an OP lists criteria, restrictions &amp;amp; limitations (per the excellent linked policy statement) we as a community can &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;still easily come up with dozens of equally good, equally opinion based answers!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; And this is the essential problem that I deal with here, a problem that puts our hobby / art / activity at odds with Stack Exchange's stated goals. And we see an excellent demonstration of this with the examples in Johnny's response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite simply put: &lt;strong&gt;WE DO NOT DEAL IN FACTS --- WE DEAL IN THE UNREAL!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding will never be able to follow the basic POB rule of SE to the letter. We can't even really follow it in spirit! The very best we can do is write up a policy &amp;amp; point to it. But in the end, when I look at that policy, it's just so easy to poke a hole in that particular section, because opinion -- &lt;em&gt;creative opinion&lt;/em&gt; -- is the heart and soul of what we deal in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the paradigm question in JBH's example can easily have a number of opinion based answers that all conform to the criteria and guidelines given in the query itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And then what?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd ask you, though: what do you think needs to be done? It's all well and good to ask the question; and I get to use tall caps and lots of exclamation points in response! But what's the next step?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me I'd like to consider, if it's possible, a rewriting of the &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; closure rationale to severely restrict its scope. Right now, the blurb reads: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; This is the same blurb that one will find on all other SE forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems with this rationale as stated, and as it relates to Worldbuilding, are obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of our answers are, in point of fact, &lt;em&gt;pure opinions&lt;/em&gt;! Even when we bring science to bear in our answers, there is no way to offer that answer as the single and one best non-opinion answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of our answers derive from creativity rather than from citeable sources of fact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no factual resources we can turn to for an unbiased answer for the vast majority of our question types.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sort of logic is great in Chemisty &amp;amp; Physics where you can either point to a text book or a reliable webpage or a journal article to get the answer. There are certainly scholarly articles and text books we can point to --- but those are someone's opinion! Not universal fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested Rewrite&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;This query asks for a non-creative opinion, each of which is as perfectly likely and perfectly reasonable as any other response. Queries should pose a worldbuilding problem or issue that can be answered by proposing creative solutions.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T23:22:00.527" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T23:22:00.527" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8175" CreationDate="2020-12-28T21:35:53.933" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We are required to face some realities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While we tend to work around them, we are bound to Stack Exchange's basic question-writing rules as found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. The most notable problems are (a) every answer cannot be equally valid (it must be possible to choose a best answer) and (b) questions can't be open-ended (most opinion-based questions are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Primarily Opinion-Based&amp;quot; VTC reason and its text are controlled by Stack Exchange, not us. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6240/40609&quot;&gt;It can't be suspended or modified&lt;/a&gt;. In other words, whatever solution we come up with must deal with the fact that we're stuck with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years I've proposed a number of ways to help people work around these problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. I've posted the following comment, when appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're asking what we call a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt;, which isn't a good fit for our site.  Please review these links and help us by improving your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. I've posted the following comment, when appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to convert this from an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; to an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. I provided a policy solution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6437/40609&quot;&gt;A question is POB if there are no listed criteria for judging a best answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D. I created an alternative Welcome page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388/40609&quot;&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used or pointed people to all of the above in my (usually vain) effort to help people reformulate their questions to meet basic Stack Exchange guidelines. As much as we might all wish it were otherwise, this isn't a free-for-all. Those aspects of the Help Center that we cannot modify are rules we are expected to live by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not just ignore them? Because the result is chaos. People will point at the rules and say &amp;quot;you can't do that!&amp;quot; and others will scream &amp;quot;but we all agreed to ignore that!&amp;quot; and then we're all hunting for Meta posts for policies that few, if anyone, read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid closure as Primarily  Opinion-Based on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Focus your question on the smallest problem possible. Literally take the time to wash all the extra fluff out. If you don't take the time to do this, don't expect us to do it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADD DETAILS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I can't tell you how many times I've had an OP in comments say, &amp;quot;I intentionally didn't add details because I wanted people to come up with a variety of ideas.&amp;quot; With all due respect, that's 100% contrary to how Stack Exchange was designed. Page after page in the Help Center explain the need to be &lt;em&gt;specific and detailed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explain how your best answer will be judged. An OP's refusal to do this is 99% of the problem, and it's almost always because what they're doing is fishing for ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harsh reality of Stack Exchange is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&quot;&gt;it was intentionally designed as a place where people could go to get &lt;em&gt;specific and useful answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Consequently, it's a terrible place to go when you have writer's block because it's intentionally NOT designed for raw idea generation. Over the years I/We have tried to come up with explanations to help people work around this — but the limits imposed by Stack Exchange that keep these efforts from becoming easily found makes them basically worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was a long-winded way of saying that I disagree with my learned colleague. But, gratefully, there aren't a lot of us who are fanatically policing the rules. So, with good fortune and providence, we're slapping hands enough to get people to write better questions but not so much that we're driving too many people away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T00:38:05.807" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T00:38:05.807" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8175" CreationDate="2021-01-01T09:39:53.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The irony is, it's ALL opinion. With such loose guidelines as to what is &amp;quot;opinion based,&amp;quot; posts are arbitrarily defined as opinion or not, by moderator opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse, this largely falls to a few, as you have to go out of your way to get involved with the review process or the meta discussions, and it's outside the reward scheme of SE, giving little incentive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we throw about opinions about what's opinion, most answers and questions are STILL opinion based. Let's take a look at some of the current high ranking questions and answers of the month:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Semi-plausible reason why only NERF weaponry will kill invading aliens&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...That one is that the top of the list for the month. The 76 point answer was suggesting the aliens play dead, because it's a game show for them. The 39 point answer suggested allergies to nerf darts, and a 7 point answer which the querent picked had it that the alien shields so happen to malfunction when hit by nerf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, after reviewing that, the most popular question this month with many of the most popular answers... how exactly does one avoid opinion-based answers, when deciding how nerf darts can kill aliens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a fear that, &amp;quot;the problem arise when the OP does not define the evaluation metric for picking a &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot;&amp;quot;, that, &amp;quot;every answer cannot be equally valid (it must be possible to choose a best answer)&amp;quot;. ...So what was the best, non-opinionated answer here!? The one that got a green tick with seven votes? The one that suggested the gameshow? Or one of the many other radically different answers (the 3rd-most popular suggested NERF was an acronym for a weapon)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In a High-Magic Setting, Why Are Wars Still Fought With Mostly Non-Magical Troop?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd most popular question this month. It seems open ended questions are the most popular. As if the aliens wasn't bad enough, now we're dealing with not even pseudo-science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not that this is a bad question... people enjoy it because there are MANY good answers that can be given, that it requires creativity to answer. Thus, we get another selection of answers that don't really respond to any clear metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do people still live on Earth Like Planets?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just keeps going.... And this brings us to a good topic on scientific opinion. Because, though people are bringing up science, even though these may be the same arguments brought up by experts... it's still just OPINION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't KNOW why people would stay on Earth like planets when given other choices, because the futuristic scenario being discussed has NOT happened yet, so we can't say for sure. AKA: We can only give an opinion on how it might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while some opinions are better than others, enough that people seek out the best opinions on sites like this... they are still opinion. The way we sort answers and questions is, in fact, a polling of community opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clearly, saying that a question is bad because it is opinion based is ridiculous and hypocritical, we'd need to delete 90% of the site if that was a genuine problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why are &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions a problem?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the example by the OP, what colour should a spaceship be, someone might point out it could be painted white to reflect light so as to reflect sunlight, and another might suggest painting it like decorative WW1 biplanes. I'm not sure if that question is less relevant than the one about nerf darts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the real question, is whether the question has been answered before--you only really need one question about the colour of a non-specific spaceship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one about what a superhero does in daily life... is that less open ended than the one about nerf darts? Or the other two? Non specific questions are likely to get non-specific answers, which are less helpful, but what level of specificity is required, and how do we measure it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it seems a lot of worry and hassle over something which can't be legitimately decided... which would likely be better handled by community voting (downvoting questions is specifically for filtering low quality ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35649" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T09:39:53.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T18:00:20.767" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I notice there's a tag named, &amp;quot;tag&amp;quot; which is not a synonym of, &amp;quot;tags.&amp;quot; I would suggest making it a synonym via the site-feature I just got as a privilege... but I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, there's an absurdly convoluted means of suggesting tag synonyms, for fear of an equally convoluted means of undoing them. This seems ridiculous.... When I looked for a topic like this one, I found a string of people suggesting via meta this or that tag synonym to moderators... instead of using the in-site mechanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, everyone agrees it's absurd, but this is the best we can do with a poorly designed system. But... since we have to throw the tags at the moderators anyway, why not just make them part of the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As HDE 226868 mentioned in one topic, it's honestly too dangerous, where a few users could accidentally screw up major tags without meaning to. So, if possible, we really ought to make moderator approval necessary, since that's already the defacto system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35649" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T18:00:20.767" Title="Should Tag Synonyms require Moderator Approval As well as a Rating of 4?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|moderators|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8182" CreationDate="2021-01-02T01:55:52.927" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm in the Late Answers review queue on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, it says to &amp;quot;watch for hidden gems.&amp;quot; What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T04:31:17.020" Title="What does &quot;hidden gems&quot; mean in the Late Answers review queue?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8181" CreationDate="2021-01-02T04:31:17.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always given it a double reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a potentially good late answer to a question: if you spot it, upvote it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a sneaky attempt to slide poor quality content (spam, nonsense): if you spot it, shovel it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T04:31:17.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2021-01-07T01:04:40.657" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the discussion about &amp;quot;Stack Overflow has a policy of making things appropriate for 13 years old or older&amp;quot;, I think one aspect we may be overlooking is that even though you have to be 13 years or older to &lt;em&gt;join&lt;/em&gt; Stack Overflow, you don't have to be 13 years or older to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; Stack Overflow. Anyone can see answers posted on Stack Overflow just by using Google, and I have no doubt that Worldbuilding SE comes up as one of the first results if you search for many worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this ties into a broader Internet issue that you can't stop children from Googling anything unless you block every website with certain criteria, and when it comes to the Internet children....um...find a way, but it's certainly worth considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T01:04:40.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-07T17:28:34.453" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, you know the whole &amp;quot;If humans play Dungeons and Dragons, what would dragons play?&amp;quot; joke. You probably also know that I made a question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193343/would-the-rule-lawyers-pen-and-paper-game-be-feasible&quot;&gt;Would the &amp;quot;Rule Lawyers&amp;quot; pen-and-paper game be feasible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew that making it on-topic would be extremely difficult, so I decided to narrow it down into the question of whether as static version of the US law could be compartmentalized into small-enough fragments that they could be used as material for the game's rulebooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, you'd need different expansions (plus the core rules) to play different cases and the question was if those expansions would be safe for non-attorney consumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm not sure if this could be made on-topic, can you help by, pointing out why it is exactly off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T08:11:46.620" Title="Is there any way to make this question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2021-01-07T19:33:00.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly sure what is off topic either!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say that not only &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cán&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; US law (or any nation's legal system) be gamified, but the law is in fact &lt;em&gt;already a game&lt;/em&gt;. The rules that govern it, the costumes, the setting it happens in -- all of these things demonstrate its essential, gamelike nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out Huizenga's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homo Ludens&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As for the question at hand:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happily, I think much of the work has already been done for you! We already have the Core Rule Book, which would include the (US &amp;amp; State/Commwealth) Constitutions and the Rules particular to the actual Game itself and probably essentials like Blacks Law Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Player Handbook would include not only the Code of whatever state the DM has chosen to play in for this particular game, but also the rules governing specific situations (arbitration settings, courtroom protocols, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly the Expansion Packs already exist in works such as B., B., G. &amp;amp; H.'s &lt;em&gt;Fundamentals of Property Law&lt;/em&gt; or E., K., W., B., C. &amp;amp; E.'s &lt;em&gt;Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems&lt;/em&gt; or W. &amp;amp; F.'s &lt;em&gt;Code of Canon Law Annotated&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the question of gamifying, since it's (generally longaeval) Dragons and Gryphons, there's really no reason to reduce the material as they'd have plenty of time to learn.  But if you still want reduction in amount of material, then there's no reason that the game publishers couldn't create editions that consist solely of digests or summations and statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As for the closure rationale &amp;amp; what you can do about it:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not really much you can do about it. You just have to wait and see if enough folks decide to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is straight up worldbuilding. It's no different than gamifying the activity we call War (also see &lt;em&gt;Homo Ludens&lt;/em&gt;) and calling it &lt;strong&gt;RISK&lt;/strong&gt; or even &lt;strong&gt;CHESS&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T19:33:00.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2021-01-08T17:53:17.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gruesome violence, torture and  sex is part of human history and nature.&#xA;At age 6 I was taught about the particular ways to be killed or tortured and go to hell if I was a bad child.&#xA;In school children are taught around the age of 8 explicitly about human anatomy and how sex works and how various kings and queens were devastating their enemies and sometimes putting their heads on pikes or other times impaling them by trusting pikes from below upwards.&#xA;At age 9 I was already studying the holocaust in history lessons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At age 12 in america children can consent to have sex with other children of similar age, same goes for most of europe too... Except it's 11 and 13 in some countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So children can have sex in your country, but they can't see nipples on Tv?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pegi system doesn't seem the smartest thing ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to say that this type of censure is ridiculous and founded on adults who have no idea what children are like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm young myself, so I still didn't forget what is like to be a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;60 years ago children were murdering enemy soldiers to defend themselves and their families, it would be an insult to all the brave souls to treat todays children like some weak snowflakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81643" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T17:53:17.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-11T11:47:15.887" Score="8" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a couple law-related questions closed recently for being &amp;quot;not worldbuilding&amp;quot;, not all of them my own, so I would appreciate a clarification of the rules. I have identified several categories of legal questions with examples; the &lt;strong&gt;bolded&lt;/strong&gt; questions have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Category A - questions about unlikely (but not physically impossible) scenarios and how they interact with real-life laws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/185674/can-a-modern-company-effectively-take-ownership-of-beethovens-10th-symphony&quot;&gt;Can a modern company effectively take ownership of Beethoven&amp;#39;s 10th symphony?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65658/is-working-for-foreign-dictator-illegal&quot;&gt;Is working for foreign dictator illegal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60574/what-crime-would-be-illegal-to-uncover-in-medieval-europe&quot;&gt;What crime would be illegal to uncover in medieval Europe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Category B - questions about supernatural entities interacting with real-life laws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179494/how-many-laws-would-a-parkouring-superhero-like-spider-man-break-by-travelling-a&quot;&gt;How many laws would a parkouring superhero like Spider-Man break by travelling around New York?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (is currently in the reopen queue)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191430/what-is-santas-defense-against-an-unlawful-withholding-of-welfare-charge&quot;&gt;What is Santa&amp;#39;s defense against an unlawful withholding of welfare charge?&lt;/a&gt; (has been closed and reopened)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-the-gdpr-is-around?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;How can Santa keep his lists when the GDPR is around?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Category C - questions about additional or entirely original laws or systems of laws and their implications for a world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/34064/how-could-a-law-exist-that-allows-victims-to-be-arrested-for-the-crime-against-t?rq=1&quot;&gt;How could a law exist that allows victims to be arrested for the crime against them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/29880/how-could-a-legal-system-whose-punishments-were-based-off-of-level-of-certainty?rq=1&quot;&gt;How/could a legal system whose punishments were based off of &amp;quot;level of certainty&amp;quot; that crime occured function?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28594/how-does-the-law-treat-uploaded-personalities?rq=1&quot;&gt;How does the law treat uploaded personalities?&lt;/a&gt; (note that in spite of the title, it asks about formulating new laws)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I suppose you could also identify a Category D, questions about non-fictional scenarios interacting with real-life laws (&amp;quot;If I punch someone who looked at me funny, can I be arrested?&amp;quot;) but I don't consider those worldbuilding because there is nothing fictional or fanciful happening, as people get punched all the time.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that everyone can agree that Category C is worldbuilding. Category A and B seems to be disputed. Several have comments along the lines of &amp;quot;This is about law, how is this worldbuilding?&amp;quot; even if they aren't closed. Now I want to know whether there can be a consistent policy formulation to identify which law-related questions are worldbuilding and which ones aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to hearing your opinions, or a clarification if a policy was already in place that I was unaware of. Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/651/is-the-international-waters-question-on-topic&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; from six years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/are-fantastical-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;the discussion&lt;/a&gt; I have opened up on Law.SE about whether they would even accept any questions on fantasy scenarios that we would migrate there. Consensus seems to be that they would accept it, although some rewriting may be necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T18:23:03.397" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T18:23:03.397" Title="Debate on the relevance of law-related questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2021-01-11T20:46:29.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I can't think of a way to make it directly on topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that you're asking if laws can be turned into a game. Reversing the formulation formula, you're asking a question on how can you make a game using complex laws as one (or more) of its defining pillars. Packed back inside a simple core, it's about how to make a game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this core, I don't think you will find a way out of this without provoking much debates. You will have to either diverge from the original topic or engage a lawsuit against this thought itself :(.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it seems that the existence of this(these?) law game(s) is already well-defined in your universe, so you should not bother on it too much. Indeed, most if not all things can be converted into a game variant, even though I don't agree with Elemtilas that laws can be considered as a game themselves (but that's a long topic and I'm tired! Yawn...). Peck, people made games about the most gruesome stories -&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_War_of_Mine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;civils during wars&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mass genocide&lt;/a&gt;...- , and OBJECTION! There are even videogames where you play as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Attorney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lawyers&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://we-the-revolution.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;judges&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as there are interesting concepts and strong yet carefully oiled mechanics, you should have no problem giving to the characters living in your world a strong incentive to play them. But like I said, making out a nicey and dicey (wait, not dicey!) game design is... Well, a question about game design, not worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Indirectly, you should focus on the impact of such game on your world&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know more about the plausibility of such concept as a worldbuilding question, focus it on the relation with the world the game has. I guess it wouldn't be an insignificant part of your world since you ask the question and a related meta-question. For instance...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who will play this kind of game, in a world where laws have lost any sense? Aristocracy and a few connaisseurs? May peasants or traders be able to learn and play it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can people play with foreigners holding their own rulebook containing other laws?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would the game spread out around the world (if you're living in a medieval fantasy world, making paper for all the rules could be difficult?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be worth having this game, knowing that the evil Shadow -who is foreshadowing the demise of the human race by exhausting the economy through bureaucracy- would try to make people waste time on it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Know that to get a glimpse of an answerable question, you should have at least an high-concept or find games that are closely related to what you would go for. Indeed, you can make Law a quick and fun card game that last 5 to 10 minutes after the booze and before the diner. Or... A full set of pen and paper game as you thought, involving many hours of debating about intellectual and even philosophical concepts, such as &amp;quot;is a golem/robot/animal a person?&amp;quot; (cross out the thematic world you're not making).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To pack things up, in my opinion, only with changes to the question's thematic you can be on-topic for worldbuilding. But in the end, you're the judge, jury and executionner of your own thoughts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T08:11:46.620" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T08:11:46.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8188" CreationDate="2021-01-13T03:08:35.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot going on in discussion and I think a brief statement is in order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules &amp;amp; guidelines of Worldbuilding are fairly basic on this matter, and they apply to questions of all types, not just law related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;, of course, is that the question ought to focus on worldbuilding. Our forum's purpose is to help worldbuilders make &amp;amp; describe their fictional worlds and settings. This of course, includes questions on law, criminal justice, crime, torture, punishment in any of their aspects or proceedings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;, any question on law should follow the same basic requirements that any other kind of question does. In order to offer the best answers, the OP should provide essential background about the legal system in question and the world &amp;amp; polity it functions within. Whether this is a world ruled by Dragons or whether this is a &amp;quot;world just like Earth, except where otherwise stated&amp;quot;. The OP should provide some basic statements concerning the situation being asked about. Lastly, the OP should provide a statement covering what she expects in a good answer: specific points to be addressed, specific outcomes that should be obtained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third&lt;/strong&gt;, the question should abide by general Stack Exchange norms: it should be focused and as specific as possible. An OP should not ask multiple questions in one go. The question should be about worldbuilding -- how the fictional world (in this case, the fictional laws) works -- rather than about story writing, plot advancement or character choice. The question should not be obviously or gratuitously opinion based. Naturally, opinions may differ (and there are always at least two opinions in every court room!), but questions that specifically seek opinions are off topic. To do this, sometimes an OP has to ask a &amp;quot;real world question&amp;quot;. The only stipulation the community would demand in return is that the querent of such a real world question &lt;em&gt;provide sufficient fictional world context&lt;/em&gt; in order to provide a good fictional world answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at the given categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these categories look like they can be boiled down to a pithy &amp;amp; descriptive statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category A&lt;/strong&gt;: These questions involve &lt;em&gt;real law in real setting&lt;/em&gt;. This means that, as written, the questions appear to be about some action or event in the real world, rather than in a fictional world. I voted to close those as having no worldbuilding context at all.  And I would happily vote to reopen if that context is provided!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category B&lt;/strong&gt;: I'd actually argue that your example query answers the question succinctly. You ask &amp;quot;if I create an eldritch entity, would I violate zoning laws?&amp;quot;  to which I'd answer this is a &lt;em&gt;fictional entity in real law&lt;/em&gt;. Since your question doesn't actually focus on eldritch entities, or even on a fictional world, but rather on mundane real world law, set in the real world, this kind of query would be off topic here. This type of question can easily be edited and made on topic by focusing it on the fictional world you're making and giving us a little description of how similar &amp;amp; different it is from the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category C&lt;/strong&gt;: yes, here I agree that this is straight up worldbuilding; basically &lt;em&gt;fictional law in a fictional setting&lt;/em&gt;.  Since the setting is fictional and since the queries (more or less) focus on the fictional setting, I'd say those are clearly on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category D&lt;/strong&gt;: I'd consider Category D to be synonymous with Category A, &lt;em&gt;real law in real setting&lt;/em&gt; and thus off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had originally considered JBH's Santa question as falling under Category C rather than B, but upon considering your comment, stipulating that the setting is in fact not really a fictional world, &amp;quot;The case is being judged using California state law,&amp;quot; I must revise my earlier stance. Both the Santa question, cute and timely as it was, is ultimately closeable, perhaps after Christmas rather than before, for being not about worldbuilding. In this case &lt;em&gt;semifictional person in real law&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summation&lt;/strong&gt;: to everyone who would pose a legal question, or any question in Worldbuilding: legal questions are no less interesting than orbital mechanics or evolution of dragon wing queries here! OPs are simply advised to adhere to the same basic guidelines &amp;amp; protocols as anyone else. Keep your queries focused, keep your queries about worldbuilding, and keep your queries focused on the fictional world you're building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-01-16T00:10:41.617" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T00:10:41.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8194" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:08:25.457" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're a seasoned worldbuilder. We're about to embark on our first build. What are some of the most crucial things you've learned that you wish you knew at the start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81912" OwnerDisplayName="Kol Nidre" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T21:04:39.390" Title="What would you have wanted to know at the beginning?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8191" CreationDate="2021-01-13T21:04:39.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot things it would be nice to know as a beginner. Since you're asking here, I'd point you to this basic resource:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Worldbuilding All About?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linked from within that response is a good selection of Resources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A List of Worldbuilding Resources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T21:04:39.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8188" CreationDate="2021-01-13T21:33:02.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, They Are On-Topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full Disclaimer: I am the user who posted the Spider-Man question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that questions regarding legal reaction to supernatural phenomena are on-topic for Worldbuilding SE, because they involve phenomena and legal situations that are out of context for modern law. I make this argument for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) We already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt; tag on SE, whose description is &amp;quot;For questions related to the sets of rules set in place by organizations to govern the behavior of the people&amp;quot;. This by itself would suggest that a law-related worldbuilding question is on topic for Worldbuilding SE. Additionally, we have specific tag for how people enforce said laws (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law-enforcement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law-enforcement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law-enforcement&lt;/a&gt;), which is dependent on whether individuals broke laws to begin with. The tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-norms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-norms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-norms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/secret-society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;secret-society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;secret-society&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/government&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;government&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;government&lt;/a&gt; also frequently involve legal aspects of how society works. There are also many, many questions on Worldbuilding SE about how the law would interact with supernatural phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/122877/taxing-the-superhero-industry&quot;&gt;Taxing the superhero industry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61236/why-do-governments-not-execute-or-otherwise-permanently-contain-super-villains&quot;&gt;Why do governments not execute or otherwise permanently contain super villains?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177326/what-laws-if-any-would-have-to-change-to-allow-people-with-superpowers-to-use/177349&quot;&gt;What laws, if any, would have to change to allow people with superpowers to use their powers for profit in companies/businesses?&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38670/humans-can-now-fly-what-new-laws-are-created&quot;&gt;Humans can now fly. What new laws are created?&lt;/a&gt; (many of the comments and answers involve discussions of existing law)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166892/where-could-a-vampire-get-blood-without-harming-people&quot;&gt;Where could a vampire get blood without harming people?&lt;/a&gt;? (Am also the author of this question. Involves a lot of questions as to the legality of various actions)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105697/how-can-a-banker-successfully-and-safely-lend-money-to-an-autocrat&quot;&gt;How can a banker successfully (and safely) lend money to an autocrat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9035/dragons-and-aviation-bureaucracy&quot;&gt;Dragons and aviation bureaucracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, we have a large number of questions related to how existing geopolitical structures would react to supernatural (or otherwise &amp;quot;fictional&amp;quot;) phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66521/what-is-the-ideal-location-to-hide-the-president-in-the-case-of-a-zombie-apocaly&quot;&gt;What is the ideal location to hide the President in the case of a zombie apocalypse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66114/what-is-the-impact-on-the-world-politics-if-teleportation-is-possible&quot;&gt;What is the impact on the world politics if teleportation is possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52445/geopolitical-and-economic-implications-of-a-large-eruption-at-yellowstone&quot;&gt;Geopolitical and Economic Implications of a Large Eruption at Yellowstone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Law is a fundamental part of worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding, at its core, is a question of how the real world interacts with the fictional one. This is what differentiates Worldbuilding SE from Writing SE, Writing SE is about how fiction interacts with itself; Worldbuilding SE is about how fictional elements would interact with reality. Law is a part of reality, it is the rules on which how society interacts, as important a factor to consider as geopolitics, sociology, psychology, physics, biology, or chemistry. We have many, many questions about how supernatural elements would interact with the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, the laws of evolution, the laws of human psychology. Why are the laws of humankind exempt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; are fundamentally the same, all law represents is a codified set of societal rules written down to determine what behavior is and is not acceptable by a group of people, modified by historical precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legal reaction to supernatural phenomena is part of how society reacts to that phenomenon. We have tons of questions regarding &amp;quot;how would society react if superpowers were real&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how would people react if vampire are real&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how would people react if aliens were real&amp;quot;. Law is a part of that. Frankly, the only difference between geopolitics and law in a broad sense is that geopolitics involves the rules and interactions &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; nations, whereas law concerns interactions of civilians &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both @elemtilas and @KeizerHarm consider questions that involve entirely new laws written in regards to some fictional phenomenon to be on-topic. The thing about law is that it is usually reactive, laws are only passed in hindsight once someone discovers a loophole in the existing legal structure, or more rarely if someone has enough forethought to notice an event isn't covered by existing law. Until someone passes anti-vampire or anti-superhero legislation, societal structures are going to react to either based on pre-existing legislation (or break existing laws, which in and of itself involves legal questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related to this, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/secret-society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;secret-society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;secret-society&lt;/a&gt; tag and other tags involving superhero and urban fantasy settings are going to heavily interact with the law as it is written IRL, because a key feature of both of these settings is they are set in a setting which is &amp;quot;reality unless noted&amp;quot;, and the presence of supernatural phenomenon has a minimal effect on legal structure because the supernatural is hidden or poorly known. Therefore any legal action on behalf of society against supernatural phenomena will have to be based on &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; legal precedents, most countries today have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laws against ex-post facto laws&lt;/a&gt;, so it would not be possible to pass a new law banning a supernatural activity and then retroactively apply it to the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) Posting worldbuilding questions as “real world analogies” in Law SE strips them of their context and results in lower-quality answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Elemtilas suggests asking law-related question on Law SE by rephrasing them as &amp;quot;real-world questions with the supernatural elements stripped from them. However, doing so means stripping the questions of valuable context that would influence how an IRL legal professional would address the issue and thus reduce the quality of the answer. A general trend I have noticed on most stacks (including Worldbuilding SE), is that the more detail you include in a question, the better. If you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;, you often end up with an answer to a question that is technically correct but does not address your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue can be demonstrated with two of the questions being brought up: the Spider-Man question and the one regarding if summoning an eldritch being violates zoning regulations. For the first, it’s true someone could buy a wingsuit and go parkouring through New York. However, Spider-Man also leaves significant amounts of webbing wherever he goes and is capable of swinging through New York City at speeds of over 100 km/hr. Someone with a wingsuit does neither of these things. A spider-themed superhero might face littering charges for their webbing, which a wingsuit-wearing person would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many superpower questions in general struggle to be applied to &amp;quot;real world analogies&amp;quot; because there isn't really an analogue for them in modern terms. There are a large number of questions on here about settings where people are born with superpowers of some kind. They can't really be converted to real-world questions as &amp;quot;people with military-grade weapons&amp;quot; because people aren't born with AK-47s in their hands, nor are these weapons a fundamental part of their body that cannot be removed without invasive surgery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, take the “would summoning an eldritch abomination result in zoning violations question”. It can't really be converted to an IRL example of a 12-car garage because there are fundamental differences between the two questions. Notably that an eldritch abomination is alive and is often capable of movement, it isn't a fixed structure in the ground. It's not possible to ask an IRL analogy question on Law SE because in real life there is no mobile terrestrial organism the size of a building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other common questions I can see that cannot be easily asked on Law SE are &amp;quot;do inalienable human rights apply to sentient aliens&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;is killing a vampire murder because they are already undead&amp;quot;, and questions regarding telepathy like &amp;quot;is telepathy you cannot turn off a violation of privacy laws&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;is evidence garnered through telepathy valid in court&amp;quot;. Even in cases like telepathy changing it to something like a precog machine misses context, since telepathy would be an innate quality rather than a device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many cases of law in fiction that can be asked on Law SE with little problem. For example, many &amp;quot;realistic fiction&amp;quot; settings like Tom Clancy novels there are no supernatural elements, everything is theoretically possible IRL. But in cases with supernatural or otherwise non-realistic worldbuilding elements, like aliens, superpowers, futuristic technologies which we have no IRL analogue for, these questions cannot be simplified in IRL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4) Other stacks, in general, do not like having questions on explicitly fictional scenarios asked on them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure everyone here is very familiar with this. Questions about fictional settings or elements that do not occur IRL are not popular on other stacks. This is the reason why we do not ask questions about creature-design on Biology SE, or questions about superluminal space travel on Physics SE. I know Worldbuilding SE doesn't like the rest of SE considering Worldbuilding SE their dumping ground for every question they don't want, but for once the topic is actually within our purview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the question on Law SE, only one person has replied so far and they have done so somewhat positively, but they have already indicated that at least one of the questions OP listed regarding supernatural phenomena and law would not be acceptable there. This does not bode well with shifting all supernatural-related law-based questions to Law SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, one thing I have noticed is that people outside of Worldbuilding SE are less likely to examine the question seriously and provide useful answers. They are more likely to either give a cheeky, non-committal answer like &amp;quot;Where does a 600 lb gorilla sleep? Anywhere he wants&amp;quot; or say &amp;quot;well in fiction you can make anything you want happen&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl:dr; Legal questions involving explicitly supernatural phenomena and how the legal system would react that cannot be answered in reference to IRL phenomena are on topic, questions of legality of an action for the sake of a story by itself (that is, the issue could potentially come up in real life) are not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T21:33:02.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-13T22:01:15.647" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of stories are set in worlds that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LikeRealityUnlessNoted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like reality unless noted&lt;/a&gt;. These are settings in which the geopolitical situation is virtually identical to the modern world (minus the presence of a few small isolated nations like Wakanda or Atlantis or hidden supernatural groups like a vampire Masquerade), societal standards are virtually identical to the modern world, history is more or less the same as in the modern world (with the exception of occasional supernatural influence that is often handwaved away so that for most humans there is no functional difference), the geography and ecosystem is more or less identical to the modern world, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stories about the appearance of a novel supernatural phenomenon (i.e., zombie plague, alien invasion) in the present day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Urban fantasy settings, especially those that involve some sort of masquerade that keeps the supernatural hidden and therefore &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; overtly influencing human history or behavior&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Superhero&amp;quot; settings like the Marvel and DC universes, which are often more or less identical to present-day Earth in most respects beyond the presence of superhumans (i.e., the presence of Captain America or Namor has caused virtually no differences between the histories of our world and the Marvel Universe, compare with something like &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These settings are explicitly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; set in an alternate timeline, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; set in a fantasy world, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; set in the far future or cyberpunk situation. For these kinds of questions, the context of the present day is essential for answering the question. A question of &amp;quot;how would society react to an alien invasion&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how would society react to magic&amp;quot; is heavily dependent on present-day infrastructure, societal norms, governmental structure, distribution of resources and technology, etc. The answer would be very different for a world where the Roman Empire never fell, or the year 2500, or a fantasy world with completely different society and government from our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, it seems as though it would be useful to establish a tag for those questions which are more or less set in the context of the present day. I had debated making one, having noticed there didn't seem to be a dedicated tag, but it wasn't clear if a tag already existed. We already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; tag and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-world&lt;/a&gt; tag, but the scope of these tags and how they do and do not overlap is not really clear. For example, would an alien invasion or superhero question fall under &amp;quot;urban fantasy&amp;quot;. The tag descriptions are also incredibly vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overall, we need a dedicated tag for those questions set in the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; or something like it to group these kinds of questions together&lt;/strong&gt;. I am not sure what it should be, or if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-world&lt;/a&gt; tags should be merged. Hence bringing up the issue here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Looking at some of the responses, what it looks like is not that we need a new tag for this kind of question, but rather that we need to consolidate the tags we have, adjust tag descriptions, and use the tags more widely to make them more widely known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastEditorUserId="71841" LastEditDate="2021-01-16T02:37:32.157" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T13:03:25.213" Title="Creating a specific tag for questions set in a &quot;real world&quot; or &quot;real world&quot;-esque setting" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-14T01:41:23.093" Score="-3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt;, which have a very large amount of overlap with the former more or less being a subset of the latter. There are only seven questions on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; tag despite the large number of werewolf questions on Worldbuilding SE. There are also a large number of werewolf-related questions that involve the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; tag but do not include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; tag, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193198/how-would-a-modern-military-deal-with-an-organized-uprising-from-a-group-of-were&quot;&gt;How would a modern military deal with an organized uprising from a group of werewolves?&lt;/a&gt; (this question originally did not have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; tag, I added it on 1/13/2021 to try to increase my score in the tag high enough to propose the synonymy without bothering Meta.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53744/is-there-any-scientific-reason-why-only-a-silver-bullet-can-harm-a-werewolf&quot;&gt;Is there any scientific reason why only a silver bullet can harm a werewolf?&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135041/what-changes-to-the-brain-would-occur-in-a-werewolf-transformation&quot;&gt;What changes to the brain would occur in a werewolf transformation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102313/what-foods-will-lycanthropes-and-vampirism-afflicted-individuals-need-to-avoid&quot;&gt;What foods will lycanthropes and vampirism-afflicted individuals need to avoid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94928/could-an-intelligent-werewolf-talk&quot;&gt;Could An Intelligent Werewolf Talk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions about werewolves are more broadly applicable to shapeshifters, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to propose synonymizing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; tag with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shapeshifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shapeshifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shapeshifters&lt;/a&gt; tag, but for some reason I am unable to despite having a score of more than 5 on this tag. So I am proposing the change here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be an argument that the two could be separate, but the broader issue is that while the topics of these posts involve both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shape-shifters&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shape-shifters&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shape-shifters&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/werewolf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;werewolf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;werewolf&lt;/a&gt; tags, the five tag limit for Stack Overflow means the posts cannot be tagged with both without sacrificing other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-and-merged-tags-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;tag synonimisation and merging&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T16:54:31.803" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T16:54:31.803" Title="Synonymizing the werewolf and shape-shifters tag" Tags="|discussion|support|tag-synonyms|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8198" CreationDate="2021-01-14T09:13:25.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disagree&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe werewolves are unique enough to not be considered simple shapeshifters. Here are some common aspects werewolves have (although not all at once):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They possess enhanced senses in human form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can transform into a wolf-like form. The exact description usually varies but it's very often &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a normal wolf, &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; a human. A bipedal creature with wolf head and claws but otherwise human-like in shape is common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are tied to the night and the moon. Often the full moon. The exact link tends to vary but often it's when the transformation can or does take place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is an element of animalism and losing humanity to the wild animal in a lot of werewolf fiction. Werewolves in human form might prefer raw meat or trying to &amp;quot;hunt&amp;quot; (at least attempt to) for food. In their wolf-like form they might lose rational thought or find it very hard to think like a human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The werewolf condition is very often tied to &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; in some way. A curse is a common way to become a werewolf, this curse can be passed onto others. A more &amp;quot;scientific&amp;quot; interpretation of the same concept is a disease. Historically, werewolves have been blamed on pacts with the devil or straight up evil spirits coming back to terrorise the living. Overall, it's not a condition one willingly takes and it's a burden.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silver is frequently a weakness for werewolves. Sometimes silver &lt;em&gt;bullets&lt;/em&gt;, other times anything used to injure them that is silver, other times still the mere touch or presence of silver can affect them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just some of the elements that werewolf fiction shares. Yes, there are many variants and it's hard to find any two that are exactly the same in the elements they cover and how they cover it. However, there are still certain set of expectations for a werewolf that don't hold up at all for shapeshifters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shapeshifter is anybody who can turn into other forms. There is a wide variety of them in fiction and myth but very often they:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are &lt;em&gt;willing&lt;/em&gt; - that's in contrast with a lot of werewolves where the transformation is forced upon them or becoming a werewolf is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;turn into &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; animals - a lot of shapeshifters can turn into a fox, or a dog, or a swan, or a rat, etc. Even a wolf. Some even &lt;em&gt;are animals&lt;/em&gt; that turn &lt;em&gt;into humans&lt;/em&gt;. However, the implication is that they are indistinguishable from other members of the same species. Not a human-wolf(/fox/dog/swan/rat/etc) hybrid monstrosity that nobody would consider to be natural.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Werewolves can broadly fall under &amp;quot;shapeshifters&amp;quot; because they change shapes but I'd argue that's not enough to merge the two tags. We haven't merged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vampires&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vampires&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vampires&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/undead&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;undead&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;undead&lt;/a&gt; and I suspect most would agree we shouldn't. The main problem is that vampires are very specialised, not &amp;quot;just a sub-species of undead&amp;quot;. Yes, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that not all vampires are undead but that's a moot point - we wouldn't eliminate &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vampire&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vampire&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vampire&lt;/a&gt; just to replace it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/disease&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;disease&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;disease&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; or anything else (I hope) because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vampire&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vampire&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vampire&lt;/a&gt; works for classifying questions correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all, tags are for categorising the content. If a question truly does pertain to both shapeshifters and werewolves, it should be tagged as both. However, I'd have different expectation if it was tagged with just one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T09:13:25.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8196" CreationDate="2021-01-14T17:43:43.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 1&lt;/strong&gt;: The need for a &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; tag. I understand the source of the proposal being that not all fictional worlds are radically different from the real world. Hence the linked trope: &lt;em&gt;like reality unless otherwise noted&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that there are a number of tags already that point to this generality. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/urban-fantasy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;urban-fantasy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;urban-fantasy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-world&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-world&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-world&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modern-age&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modern-age&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modern-age&lt;/a&gt;, and probably many others all point in the direction of the proposed tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I'd ask is: does the solution really help or does it only serve to muddy the waters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 2&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-and-merged-tags-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;synonymising vs merging tags&lt;/a&gt;, as I now understand, is a very dangerous step to take, simply because the action deprecates &amp;amp; disallows the use of the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is obvious in that merging or even synonymising all these tags would only serve to reduce one's options when searching for questions or when asking questions.  For example, if one has an urban fantasy world or wishes to research urban fantasy worlds here, one might not be interested in superheroes or alternate history. If the tags are synonymised or merged, then one will see all queries tagged with synonyms rather than the specific tags one is interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I'd ask is simply whether this is an effective or useful solution for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: While I am somewhat ambivalent on the issue of creating a new tag &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;, I find that its wording indicates subject matter that comes very close to being closeable for not being about worldbuilding. I'd be happier with the slightly more unwieldy &amp;quot;like reality unless otherwise noted&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the situation stands, it seems that we have a lot of tags that approach the idea of a fictional world that is very similar to the real world from relatively well known specific genres (urban fantasy, alternate history and super heroes in particular). I am not convinced that adding a general tag would make the situation any better. But neither am I convinced that a general tag should not be created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I am now quite convinced that synonymising or merging any of these tags is a bad idea. I think that to say we'd need to approach this with care is an understatement and I'd much rather see lots of useful tags than well intentioned merging that might make the tag system less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Solution?&lt;/strong&gt;: Perhaps the best way forward would be for gung-ho individuals to engage in systematic programmes of proactive as well as retroactive tagging. If you see a new query that isn't tagged or that could be tagged better: tag it! If you see an old question that isn't well tagged: retag it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T17:43:43.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-16T01:50:31.760" Score="9" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I've noticed recently on Worldbuilding SE is an increase in the number of interlinked questions that require reading the parent question in order to get complete context for answering the question. As some examples consider the questions below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/194089/how-much-energy-could-yeast-produce&quot;&gt;How much energy could yeast produce?&lt;/a&gt; (asks about using yeast-powered metabolism to power a magic field, but doesn't mention the parameters)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/195378/what-would-medieval-weapons-made-by-birds-look-like&quot;&gt;What would &amp;quot;medieval&amp;quot; weapons made by birds look like&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/194855/how-would-one-design-a-wand-for-this-magic-system&quot;&gt;how would one design a wand for this magic system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175555/how-to-siege-a-small-island-nation-that-is-the-most-powerful-country-in-the-worl/&quot;&gt;how to siege a small island nation that is the most powerful country in the world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193497/what-would-happen-if-people-could-become-avatars&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193497/what-would-happen-if-people-could-become-avatars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common trend I've noticed with these questions is that a user will provide an answer, only to be told the answer is not acceptable based on additional parameters to the question not included in the present question but mentioned in the referred one. Granted, I should note this is not the case with all such questions, and many users have been very kind and provided then necessary details when asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be a good idea to adopt a policy of &lt;strong&gt;minimum necessary context&lt;/strong&gt; for each question at Worldbuilding SE. Much like how Stack Overflow asks for a minimum reproducible example when dealing with programming questions, it is necessary to provide as much context as is necessary to answer the question within the question itself, rather than linking to other questions on the site. Given how Worldbuilding SE works, users might see a question and answer it thinking it exists in a vacuum not knowing it is linked to numerous other questions as part of a worldbuilding setting. However, at the same time, Worldbuilding SE users cannot be expected to read 20 questions to get the backstory of an entire setting in order to answer one. Having all the pertinent information in one place to answer a question, even if it requires restating information that has been mentioned in earlier questions, would be very helpful to answering users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastEditorUserId="71841" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T19:41:38.727" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T19:41:38.727" Title="Minimum necessary context for answering questions and interlinked questions on Worldbuilding SE" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8202" CreationDate="2021-01-16T18:05:32.540" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone says that an answer is not appropriate because of context outside the body of the question, I suggest voting to close as &amp;quot;needs more details or clarity&amp;quot;. This is the textbook definition of when to use that reason to close. Leaving a comment about that in the answer would be a plus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should also change the boilerplate text in the &amp;quot;need details or clarity&amp;quot; close reason. Currently it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question should include more details and clarify the problem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it could say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question should include more details and clarify the problem.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Please remember that all the context needed to answer the question should be present in its body.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also in favor of keeping such questions closed when the OP says an answer is invalid, since editing it to include the missing context would invalidate an answer. A new, different question is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-01-16T23:21:38.403" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T23:21:38.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8188" CreationDate="2021-01-18T10:35:15.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I think they are on topic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important point raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/are-fantastical-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;the discussion&lt;/a&gt; on Law.SE is that their &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; has different expectations of questions than we do. They warned against transporting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191430/what-is-santas-defense-against-an-unlawful-withholding-of-welfare-charge&quot;&gt;Santa welfare question&lt;/a&gt; to Law.SE as-is, because it is filled with prose and ornate descriptions that are allowed (and encouraged) here, but off-key in the other community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is an important point: these sites are not just repositories of questions and answers, they are communities. I could formulate a question that's acceptable both here and on Physics.SE (like something about the air resistance of a Ford Prefect going at Mach 3) but I would be expecting different answers, and different kinds of answers, on either site. Even if I tag it &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; here, I expect that the physics site would have more rigorous answers. They would be more likely to declare a question unanswerable, say if a 3D model of the specific car is unavailable and the aerodynamics cannot be calculated. On the other hand, I expect a Worldbuilder to tell me that the idea is unpractical, whilst recommending other classical cars with similar aesthetic but more efficiency at supersonic speeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I expect a legal question on Law.SE to cite every legal precedent and scholars. I on the other hand expect creative legal argument from a Worldbuilding.SE site. A lot of fun is to be had with legal argument: lawyers exist because we can disagree on the interpretation of the law, and where there is room for interpretation, there is room for fun and creative interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as @candied_orange said, Worldbuilding.SE permits questions with believable answers that aren't necessarily fact-based. Speculative legal argument in an answer only has to be &lt;em&gt;believably legal&lt;/em&gt;. Such an answer isn't really in Law.SE's avenue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category B&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about the questions themselves. Firstly I think there is an equivalence between legal questions and physics questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; questions ask to test a scenario along general science (assumed to be human science but with possible exceptions in the question). &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is even more strict; you use that to test your scenario to only existing physics, with the answer requirement of using formulae and citing sources. In both cases, a scenario is tested against a set of rules. Human law is also a set of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Does the creation of eldritch entities violate zoning laws?&amp;quot; is inherently equivalent to &amp;quot;Does the creation of eldritch entities violate the conservation of energy?&amp;quot;. The latter is accepted on the site, why isn't the former?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I think there is an equivalence between legal questions and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; questions. Both are problem-solving questions with some creative solutions, but those solutions have to be dependant on elements from our own planet; factual elements from real life. Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;real-world questions are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, that should generally pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And stated more broadly, Category B is asking about something fanciful interacting with something earthly and real-world. Almost the entire question repository of Worldbuilding.SE falls under that general description. Excluding law from that set of real-world things to test against is something that I cannot justify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Category A&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real life actions, real life consequences; but the scenario is fictional and might be really unlikely. Worldbuilding or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here: if you consider Category B worldbuilding, but not Category A, then what's an effective formulation of the boundary between A and B? The Spider-Man question straddles the line; sure his webbing and athletics is made-up, but parkouring exists and one could theoretically cobble together a wingsuit and move about in a similar manner to the masked menace. There's also some conceivable Category A questions that are really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; out there, but not physically impossible. (like instead of suing Santa, ask about suing someone who were to own 50% of the money on the planet) I think it becomes a matter of opinion when something is fictional enough. If a line needs to be drawn somewhere, I'm fine with that, but feel free to suggest one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest to adopt the same logic as for any real-world question in the linked debate. My policy suggestion is: &lt;strong&gt;leave it up to the questioner to decide whether they want to put a legal question here or on Law.SE.&lt;/strong&gt; And if you think it is a poor question, shows little research effort, or is otherwise unfit for the site, feel free to downvote and/or close-vote the question in question. However, &lt;strong&gt;do not close-vote legal questions about fictional scenarios as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is frankly a unique place for how omnidisciplinary it is. In my opinion that is a feature, not a bug. While questions that enter specific domains of knowledge are probably on topic in the SE about that domain of knowledge; I know that if I want to have a creative answer, I will be more likely to get it here. Please allow me to do so, by applying the on-topic rules to every domain equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T10:59:47.833" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T10:59:47.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4043" CreationDate="2021-01-18T20:57:19.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several others have touched on good reasons for our high rate of query response, notably the fact that we do actually have verifiable experts and enthusiastic students in many fields of study. I know we have medieval weapons experts, medical experts, legal experts, science experts from many disciplines, musicians, historians, probably theologians and even philosophers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever else we might do for work or as a matter of study and contemplation, very many of us actually engage in the art of geopoetry. And one thing that has happened since the Great Expansion of the internet back in the early 1990s, is that we've developped forums to wonder at each others' worlds and talk about our own worlds. From early iterations on Usenet to email lists to Geocities communities to php forums and various modern iterations of social media like Facebook, Discord, Slack, Twitter and a whole host of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then someone decided to move into the quiet and orderly webspace called Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are, I think you must admit, the worst fitting of all the Stack forums. Questions are rarely of sufficient focus and answers are almost always too opinion based to really meet SE criteria, and yet we're thriving here. And this is simply because we can hardly help but engage in worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so we come down to it. I think there is one single overriding factor that explains our response rate that I am surprised I haven't seen in the other answers, the nature of our community itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;we are geopoets -- worldbuilders -- conworlders!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It simply comes natural to us to devise and expound upon an issue, no matter how unreal, unlikely, implausible, contrary to reason, counterfactual or simply impossible. The gifts and skills that we have applied to our works are simply extended for the assistance of others!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T20:57:19.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T19:23:26.680" Score="7" ViewCount="91" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pU1Al.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Worldbuilding over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;248&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;75&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;250&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,087&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;147&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,860&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;104&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,114&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;226&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;284&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;194&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,488&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;68&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,945&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;37&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;105&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;106&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;47&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;941&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;655&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,170&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;662&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;330&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;64&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;72&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;222&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;541&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,524&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;55&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;144&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;624&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,756&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,268&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;700&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;70&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;456&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,524&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,192&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;788&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;263&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7691/2019-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2019: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222020%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/359735/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big thank you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/620/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/459488/brian-nickel&quot;&gt;Brian&lt;/a&gt; for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2021!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T13:11:31.590" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T13:11:31.590" Title="2020: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-22T16:24:52.510" Score="8" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preface&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main motivation for this is an explanation request received from a user after being contacted from a mod. Since the explanation for the user, which is the core of what is written below, can be useful for the whole community, it's better put here than in an individual message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a refresher on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;penalty box&lt;/a&gt; is due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, SE expects its users to follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;be nice&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; policy. Together with these two there are also other rules on what can be done with accounts and earned privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When those rules and guidelines are not followed, sanctions are issued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are these sanctions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; speaking, there is an escalation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the &lt;strong&gt;first violation&lt;/strong&gt;, the user receives a &lt;strong&gt;warning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the &lt;strong&gt;second violation&lt;/strong&gt;, the user receives &lt;strong&gt;1 week suspension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the &lt;strong&gt;third violation&lt;/strong&gt;, the user receives a &lt;strong&gt;1 month suspension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the &lt;strong&gt;fourth violation&lt;/strong&gt;, the user receives a &lt;strong&gt;1 year suspension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it can happen that for the same violation two users receive different sanctions, due to their different history. It's not a matter of unfair or preferential treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the suspension entail?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suspended account cannot ask, answer, comment, vote and its reputation is set back to 1 for the entire duration of the suspension. The suspension is meant as a time for the user to reflect and improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can a user circumvent a given sanction?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user is suspended, creating or using an alternative account to keep accessing the community as if nothing had happened goes exactly in the opposite direction. Accounts created to circumvent system or community imposed sanctions are deleted. Creating an alternate account to go around an earned sanction just tells that you don't care about the rules of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hold no grudges, but please show with your actions that you deserve participation in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should go without saying, but also answering a moderator message with a less than civil tone, swearing and insulting is very unlikely to do any good to your cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; Some steps in the escalation can be skipped if the violation is severe enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-01-24T05:17:22.363" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T05:17:22.363" Title="Why? What? A quick refresher on suspended accounts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8202" CreationDate="2021-01-25T16:38:34.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I don't disagree, however I think &lt;em&gt;judicious&lt;/em&gt; use of linked questions can be beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, questions can have too few details, but they can also have too &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; details. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/194826&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; I am asking a question which was actually the motivation for the question about yeast energy production, which in turn was a follow-up on a question about how a particular magic system might be &amp;quot;automated&amp;quot;. (The chain flows from general questions to more specific questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've written a ~5,000 word essay on this magic system, and it's conceivable that all those details, and maybe even more that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; in that essay, might be relevant. However, I'm also extremely conscious of my own tendency to gloss over any question that looks too much like a &amp;quot;wall of text&amp;quot;, which is why I tried to cut down the details in the waste management question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, linked questions are a helpful tool &lt;em&gt;if used properly&lt;/em&gt;. That is, if the linked question contains details that are relevant to the question being asked, this should be clearly stated, and ideally it should be obvious &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; details are contained in the linked question. The advantage is that someone is more likely to actually read the question being asked (and, hopefully, then go read the details if they find the question interesting) rather than simply glossing over it because it is too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SE had the ability to collapse content blocks, perhaps that would be a viable alternative, but it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43697" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T16:38:34.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8213" CreationDate="2021-01-28T17:29:13.527" Score="5" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got the steward badge twice for reviewing the closure queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w2CWD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w2CWD.png&quot; alt=&quot;A screenshot showing that I got the Steward badge twice for Close Votes.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoy getting them as much as Muttley does, but I want to earn them fairly. I thought it was given only once per queue, and even if it isn't, it should take me 2,000 reviews, no? I only did 1,138 so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T17:30:42.117" Title="I think I got a badge by mistake" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8212" CreationDate="2021-01-28T17:30:42.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the rules are being changed; you're getting one Steward badge for every 1,000 reviews in a queue. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360194/steward-badges-being-re-awarded-suddenly#comment1201991_360194&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; by Stack Exchange staff member @animuson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's supposedly an announcement about review updates coming out today, if it hasn't been published somewhere yet. Seems the code is getting ahead of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360194/steward-badges-being-re-awarded-suddenly#comment1202005_360194&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;, that's why you have two of them even with 1,138 reviews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my bug, caused by a temporary issue with and old batch job running after a migration took place. I have a fix I can roll out in a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T17:30:42.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T22:30:56.120" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a world that I'd like to make into a video game someday. I'd like a place to post information about it so I can get feedback, suggestions, etc. Is this the place for that? If not, where might a good place be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82262" OwnerDisplayName="Robert" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T01:21:37.507" Title="Can I post tidbits of lore from the world I'm building here for feedback, or is this more about asking about the worldbuilding itself?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-02-02T06:33:31.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8214" CreationDate="2021-01-29T00:16:57.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO ... but ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've merged this into the answer I gave to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7607/is-asking-for-advice-or-critique-on-your-world-on-topic-here/7608#7608&quot;&gt;similar Meta query&lt;/a&gt; a while back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is you should be seeking this kind of advice &amp;amp; feedback on what's known as a &amp;quot;long form discussion forum&amp;quot;; or, for quick advice questions, you could also try a &amp;quot;short form discussion forum&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the latter, Reddit is best. There are a lot of fantasy &amp;amp; sci-fi worldbuilding forums as well as gaming forums that cater to a worldbuilding perspective. You could try &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyWorldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantasy Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, or for a broader scope, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyWorldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the former, where you might get less feedback, but feedback of higher quality, I'd suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cbbforum.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CBB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verduria.org/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ZBB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, when you've got some tidbit of lore a bit polished up, feel free to submit it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Universe Factory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Excahnge is specifically designed to help you with relatively narrowly focused worldbuilding queries. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;See What is Worldbuilding All About?&lt;/a&gt; We'd love for you to hang around, get to know this forum better and by all means, whenever you're facing a sticky worldbuilding problem, by all means ask here! Check out our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6130/catalog-of-question-types/6140#6140&quot;&gt;Catalogue of Question Types&lt;/a&gt; to help you understand what we mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" OwnerDisplayName="elemtilas" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T00:43:45.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2021-01-29T02:53:34.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we'll end up having to discuss the meaning of on topic. IMO the question is on topic but unfortunately it is too broad. It just needs to be more focused to be a valid question. An off-topic question however would not be salvageable even if it were focused from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T08:58:58.833" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T08:58:58.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-08T04:38:12.133" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions I have asked in Physics Stack Exchange were closed and I was referred to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does questions regarding evaporation from the oceans fit here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to ask about stability criteria for different levels of evaporation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67827" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T22:26:59.433" Title="Do atmospheric physics questions fit here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8217" CreationDate="2021-02-08T04:44:34.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many SE communities point to Worldbuilding for anything that doesn't fit their scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However we are not the waste collector of SE: I would advise you first to read our help center together with many clarifying questions here on Meta, and then you could give it a try to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/30492&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, again here on Worldbuilding Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post your question there, other members will try to help you shaping it to fit the worldbuilding format, if it doesn't do so yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T04:44:34.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8217" CreationDate="2021-02-09T22:26:59.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concur 100% with L Dutch's answer, but I do want to address a couple important ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously we are a worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A forum. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;You can find out what we're all about here&lt;/a&gt;. The long and short of it is that the answer to your specific question is both &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; and also &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, real world questions don't go over well here. As L Dutch says, we are the habitual dumping ground for other Stax that for some reason don't want to deal with a question. As you describe it, I would say that your question ought to be asked in a science forum. You're asking an &lt;em&gt;informational question&lt;/em&gt; on atmospheric and oceanographic matters, which, while interesting really should be asked elsewhere. (Though I will say, you can probably ask it here, and it probably won't get closed!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we dó in fact accept real world questions here, but we really need for you to give us the fictional context that your question is supposed to fit in with. The only reason I can imagine that you'd even want to ask your question here is because you plan to or are already making a fictional world! Questions of oceans and climate and atmosphere appear regularly, so you'd be in good company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we would need for you to do, should you decide to post the question here, is to tell us a little bit about the world you're planning. What kind of ocean are we dealing with: (is it salt water? (how saline?, what kind of star, what kind of planet, how far away, orbital period &amp;amp; axial tilt, etc.) or is it liquid chocolate? (dark or milk?)); what is the atmosphere like; any pertinent physical data you can provide. Also, whether the world in question is made along the lines of realism or fantasy or some other basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T22:26:59.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T22:37:06.360" Score="-2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;there are few aspects on which would like to have some clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see how those two questions are duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/195753/20315&quot;&gt;How much would take and cost to construct a building/tower that reaches space? (with todays technology)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much would take and cost to construct a building/tower that reaches space? (&lt;strong&gt;with todays technology&lt;/strong&gt;) [duplicate]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/48999/20315&quot;&gt;How to build a tower that reaches dozens of miles into space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, on our current Earth with our &lt;strong&gt;current tech&lt;/strong&gt;, such towers &lt;strong&gt;would be impossible&lt;/strong&gt;. However, this is &lt;strong&gt;Star Wars&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;How would the inhabitants of the Galaxy Far Far Away build a tower like this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;B&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i5Mzg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i5Mzg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be interesting to know why mod participates in that, just by a mistake or there is some official position there? Not the first time I notice a certain rush in a judgment, which probably creates not the beast &amp;quot;lead by an example&amp;quot; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;D&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;flagged the question under a pretense that one of deciding parties involved was mod under mod privileges as it was deciding vote if not singlehandedly done (I do not know and can't know that, and sure I see 5 votes, but which button was pressed), pointing that, maybe a bit too excited doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ihl5e.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ihl5e.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined. Sure, I more than happy to agree it does not require mod intervention if there would be no mod intervention, to begin with. And as mods got involved in the question and the decision they clearly show it has some business with them, so no point to decline the flag for such a reason. I missed pointing out that connection, but there aren't that many mods and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aspect C moved to it's own &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8222/20315&quot;&gt;q&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;This question will be improved further, to focus and split it. But it turns out that my SQL skills are rusty beyond repair so digging for data is harder than would like it to be, so as there is plenty of information to process.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also glad to see the overwhelming support in both questions, honored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ed2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abort abort, no improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was contemplating on life and everything, so as on information dug, so as to information answers and other things provided here and there, so as result got some revelations and come to certain conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the q stays as it is for history shake, and to focus it - it just gets only bigger. Not sure I have current the time to write another longest answer on wb, not there is a need for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it will just go as yet another feedback on how things look from the user's perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;as a tip&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people pay more attention, be more careful with border cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lack of knowledge does not mean impossibility, no one is all-knowing here and it is the reason for wb to exist. Kinda apply knowledge for strange situations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we all long know that se model is not the best fit for wb, so be more in the spirit of it, not the form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wb is a great place. peace/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T23:34:54.870" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T23:22:09.370" Title="would like have some clarifications on what's going on here and on wb in general" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8220" CreationDate="2021-02-10T09:59:56.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be interesting to know why mod participates in that, just by a mistake or there is some official position there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods are not exempted nor removed from the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods and golden badged users have the privilege of single-vote closure, but as you can see in the screenshot my vote was the 5th and last one needed here for the closure. Being the 5th one, my vote counted as if I was a normal user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when a moderator or a golden badged user votes to close a question, that doesn't prevent the rest of the community for voting to reopen, which takes us to your point D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You voted to reopen the question and then used the flag to throw what sounds like a rant. What were you expecting out of it? Usually users who disagree with the closure explain their reasons by commenting the closed question, so that other members of the community can decide how to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About point C, as already pointed out in the comments, you can find more info &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7649/30492&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T09:59:56.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8223" CreationDate="2021-02-10T19:48:03.427" Score="-8" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I got more information on the situation, I'm able now to formulate the question, originally was point &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8220/20315&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;originally it was asked as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;what it all about for reinstating something - is an advertisement in nicknames of mods is a new future or again how good of an example it makes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;clarification&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was sure interesting to know about the commonitions which was in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/340906/259155&quot;&gt;2019&lt;/a&gt;, however, the main point is - are nicknames allowed to be the means to clarify stances on subjects, isn't a bio for all that, if u like to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or indeed it is okay and all welcome, there is quite a list of persons who I would like to be reinstated if the word &amp;quot;reinstate&amp;quot; is a magic one, and if it is not even required then I have even more to write in my nickname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure there are fancy nicknames out there, but is it appropriate to use that freedom to agitate bystanders to participate in a 2y old dog fight. Never perishing loyalty is all good and great, legends and songs are written about it, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean is it only for mods or regular users can participate too in what &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; deem important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cautiously try to not bring examples, to avoid the spiral of death.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as not a native english writer I may be less picky about the words I choose, because of my limited vocabulary and zero emotional attachment to the context of those words, so if it rubs against fur it may or may not be intentional, keep it in mind. All the good words come from spell checking plugin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T21:11:41.503" Title="Are nick names the place for propaganda" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8222" CreationDate="2021-02-10T21:01:04.793" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's very little that we disallow in usernames - profanity, slurs, sexual content, hate towards others - are some examples but it's not an exhaustive list. We also don't take it kindly if you make an attempt to look like someone you're not - whether that person is famous or another user on the site. In particular, trying to make yourself appear to be a moderator by adding a diamond to your username is generally prevented by our filters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, we are OK with y'all putting whatever you want in your usernames. If we haven't acted at this point, after a year and a half, we're not going to do it now. Regarding the events of 2019 specifically, we understand that it's a point of pain for many and that forcing those who choose to commemorate or support someone in avatars or usernames is a personal one and forcing removal would only further that pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We respect our users' decisions for when (or if) they choose to change their usernames, even if it acts as a reminder of a time we hope never to repeat. And, in some small way, they may act as a reminder for us to work to prevent it from repeating, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm one of the Community Managers here at Stack Exchange. Hiya!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45207" LastEditorUserId="45207" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T21:11:41.503" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T21:11:41.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8220" CreationDate="2021-02-13T05:08:09.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Couple things to consider...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point A&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In reading the two queries side by side, I see an interesting conundrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your question, I'd argue that typologically they're both asking the same basic question. &lt;em&gt;How does one build a really tall building?&lt;/em&gt;  Nzall's query was asked five years ago and the other was asked about five days ago. That's classical grounds for duplicate closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the conundrum? Neto actually specifies, though in a somewhat haphazard fashion, the criteria by which they'd like to see the question answered: materials, costs, design considerations, potential problems to be addressed &amp;amp; overcome. The older question does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem: the other question asks about the Star Wars universe. If Nzall had asked that question two weeks ago, and Neto had asked hers five days ago, pretty images notwithstanding, I'd have voted to close that question as it deals specifically with a third party intellectual property (Star Wars / Lucasfilms / Diznee) because we generally refer such questions to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Sci-Fi and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.  Our job here in Worldbuilding is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;help community members build their own fictional worlds&lt;/a&gt;, not help Nzall satisfy their random curiosity about someone else's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conundrum: should I vote to reopen Neto's question (perhaps editing it in the process, or asking him to clean it up!), and vote to close the older question for being off topic? We've had some recent discussion to the effect (and if I understand right) that it's kind of considered bad form to VTC queries that go way back in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting case because we find ourselves caught between the rock of the precedent query being somewhat culturally untouchable and the hard place of ids, ultimately more useful, query being an obvious duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Point D&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Civility goes a long way, even when it's hidden away in a flag that only the Mod Squod will see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This closure might be one of those moments where one can step back, take a look at both questions with fresh eyes and see the underlying similarities, as well as the differences. Also keep in mind that Mods are ordinary community members. L Dutch happens to be one of our more gifted regulars, asking &amp;amp; answering queries as well as tirelessly monitoring for problem questions before they turn into a cluster. You can clearly see his work in the many recent questions that have been single handedly closed for one issue or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once those issues are taken care of, I'm always happy to VTR, and it's very possible that L Dutch is watching over those queries he's hammerclosed and may very well pry them open again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T23:22:09.370" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T23:22:09.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8226" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:33:17.057" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that SE is testing out a new rich text editor, similar to the one used by Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the beta be available in Worldbuilding, or will we need to wait until it gets out of testing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70058" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T06:34:34.777" Title="Is WB going to be opting-in to the new editor?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8225" CreationDate="2021-02-14T06:34:34.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can read in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/360033/644344&quot;&gt;featured Meta post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of a multi-part test that will look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Initial release on Teams with feedback from highly-engaged users (e.g. Moderators)&lt;/strong&gt; (Completed Summer 2020). The goal of this was to get feedback and get a good idea of how much we need to change the editor so that it will work for our public platform community. This allowed us to test many (though not all) of the features with a small group of people without impacting the public site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Testing on MSE and MSO through an opt-in alpha test.&lt;/strong&gt; The goal here is to further refine and identify solutions that will help the new editor be openly adopted by users, primarily active members of the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usability testing sessions with users of several different experience levels.&lt;/strong&gt; The goal here is to make sure that the features and UX we create after responding to our highly-engaged users is still transparent to others. We’ll watch how users of varying experience levels interact with the editor to identify and make additional improvements with the goal of an intuitive user experience that has sufficient guidance where needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a timeline, this is expected to take a while to work through. One of the benefits of the alpha test is that people can enable and disable it as they wish. For the rest of 2021 Q1, our plan is to leave the test running so that y’all can try it out in a more long-term way if you wish. While we’ll be fixing major bugs, we won’t be prioritizing new features or adjustments until we start digging into your feedback from this test and the feedback from the usability sessions in the second quarter of 2021.See a bit more on this in the giving feedback section below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming these tests go well and we find solutions that make post creation and editing easier than the current system, we’ll move into a gradual rollout phase, starting again with MSE and MSO and then to the sites with standard editing tools, reserving the sites with specialized editor add-ons for the end so that we can make sure that their tools work correctly upon launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to understand there won't be a beta on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T06:34:34.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8230" CreationDate="2021-02-14T17:33:01.163" Score="8" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Around a 10 months ago I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7848/what-happened-to-universe-factory&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; asking about what happened to universe factory. HDE 226868♦ informed me that he was really the only editor left and that activity had died down due to a few things. A short bit after HDE made &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7852/a-call-for-blog-writers-and-editors&quot;&gt;another post&lt;/a&gt; asking for more writers and editors. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7855/73498&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7853/73498&quot;&gt;few&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7863/73498&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt; said they could help editing. Although I don't know if anything came of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10 days ago I (finally) finished &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@.topcode./salvage-part-two-of-landed-689363aa2546&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;part 2&lt;/a&gt; of my story I've been writing for universe factory and submitted it to the editorial board, and also left a comment as a reply to one of HDE's comments on a more recent meta post about universe factory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To date I haven't gotten a reply nor my story approved. Does universe factory no longer have active editors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:53:05.757" Title="Are there no universe factory editors anymore?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8227" CreationDate="2021-02-14T19:04:25.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the ones who encouraged you (and Mephistopheles) to post your stories to U.F., I'm glad to hear it's done and in the queue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for editors, I know I've expressed interest in being an editor before, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7852/a-call-for-blog-writers-and-editors&quot;&gt;as I noted in that question&lt;/a&gt;, MontyWild also expressed interest. Sadly, I never heard anything else about the call for editors after that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last mention of U.F. was in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8125/is-universe-factory-still-alive&quot;&gt;November &amp;amp; December last year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully HDE226868♦ will be able to respond to this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T19:04:25.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8227" CreationDate="2021-02-15T23:24:48.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last week was extremely busy for me, and I fell behind on a lot of things, this included. Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and made the relevant changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/salvage-part-two-of-landed-689363aa2546?source=collection_home---1------0-----------------------&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is now published in Universe Factory&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've added elemtilas as an editor; let me know if there are any issues there. Turns out Monty Wild already has editing privileges, so they're also covered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've updated &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4037/627&quot;&gt;the meta post about blog announcements&lt;/a&gt; and set up an item in the community bulletin for the next week - it should show up around 0:00 UTC on February 16.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the additional folks available for editing, hopefully this sort of thing won't be an issue in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T23:24:48.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8227" CreationDate="2021-02-16T09:53:05.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm an editor, however most of my work is done via mobile, and Medium has compatibility problems with mobile platforms in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see work that has been submitted to Universe Factory, but I can't approve it unless I log on to a desktop... and my lack of time on desktops means that I rarely get a chance to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:53:05.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8233" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:02:39.907" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems many of the questions here end up closed. Having most of my searches consist largely of closed questions makes finding questions I can answer even harder and more tedious. (Rarely will will a title tell me if I can answer a question or not. I need to know the details inside)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82602" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T17:12:33.260" Title="How to hide closed questions when searching for questions to answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8232" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:12:33.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;site search&lt;/a&gt;, you can search for &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; with the &lt;code&gt;is:q&lt;/code&gt; operator and for non-closed questions with &lt;code&gt;closed:no&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+closed%3Ano&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+closed%3Ano&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By itself, that isn't really useful, but of course you can add tags (e.g. &lt;code&gt;[biology]&lt;/code&gt;) or other search terms in the mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T17:12:33.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8235" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:45:37.177" Score="8" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, silly billy question, but it seems that because I have a high-enough score, my edits on questions and answers which are not mine are auto-approved. But if I wish to just have a second opinion before validating, is there a way to do so? It's for instance to double-check the grammar since I am not a native English speaker, or because I'm just not ultra-confident enough on a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's no way, I guess I will just need to be even more cautious. But to fill my curiosity to the brim (or dry it down, depends on the way you look at it ;p), is there a specific reason for this, like, you always need to be sure of your edits/your edits should majoritarily improve the question/You lose too much time on tiny things, ya tortoise perfectionnists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:01:16.573" Title="Is it possible to make an edit and put it in the review queue (after gaining the auto-approve privilege)?" Tags="|support|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8234" CreationDate="2021-02-16T18:01:16.573" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only option is to log out, or open a private browsing window (or even another browser) so that you're browsing Stack Exchange as an anonymous user. Anonymous users can suggest edits too; however, if it's approved, it will show as 'edited by ♦ Community' instead of your account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is to make the edit anyway, but leave a comment for the author to double-check. If your edit is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/135961/295232&quot;&gt;substantial enough&lt;/a&gt;, they will get notified of the edit anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/103270/295232&quot;&gt;Can I submit an edit for approval after earning 2k reputation?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:01:16.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8238" CreationDate="2021-02-18T05:49:32.547" Score="15" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I noticed that there are some questions using the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/darwiniv&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;darwiniv&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;darwiniv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are all asked by the same user, and revolve around that planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you feel about the tag, and what should be done with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I am not in favor of a tag specific to a fictional planet of a third party franchisee, and I would rather use the more generic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-earth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth-like&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exobiology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exolife&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exolife&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exolife&lt;/a&gt;, and merge it with one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T07:04:47.383" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T15:49:23.200" Title="What should be done with tag darwiniv?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8236" CreationDate="2021-02-18T15:37:11.063" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not in favor of a tag specific to a fictional planet of a third party franchisee, and I would rather use the more generic alternate-earth, earth-like, exobiology or exolife, and merge it with one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is the correct way to go, as we have an official policy for this. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;From the help page on tag creation (emphasis mine):&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When should I create new tags?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most common tags already exist on a mature site. &lt;strong&gt;You should always favor existing tags&lt;/strong&gt;; only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that &lt;strong&gt;your question does cover a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/darwiniv&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;darwiniv&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;darwiniv&lt;/a&gt; tag are already covered by the tags you proposed, so I think they can be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T15:37:11.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8236" CreationDate="2021-02-18T15:49:23.200" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Agreed on the removal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not much to say there, 3rd party material (so only fan-based worlds), which is not that famous on top, so it can't be put into a well-implanted culture. Not much can live by this tag, sooo...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Into which tag to merge?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm doing my naïve kid, but if it's a planet, why not simply merge it into the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;? Just by looking at the planet's description, it is a bit far from an earth-like planet (0,6 gravity force, 5% vs 70% water covered, humans cannot breath due to too high oxygen...). Hence my proposed proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T15:49:23.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-19T07:26:44.747" Score="18" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;(pun in title intended)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a question posted about intimate relationship between members of different species: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/196287/what-would-be-the-most-comfortable-position-for-mermaids-and-humans-to-engage-in&quot;&gt;What would be the most comfortable position for mermaids and humans to engage in sexual relationships?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed and also had comments about appropriateness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if Worldbuilding should take the place of a Kamasutra SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because questions about sex positions, even fantastic ones, seems to be above the nominal PG13 rating of a stack exchange site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because - while clearly posted in good faith - I worry this skirts too close to the AUP: stackoverflow.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit disturbing to me.Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt; tag we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; had well received questions that ask broadly the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193438/how-would-interspecies-lovers-with-alien-body-plans-safely-engage-in-physical-in&quot;&gt;How would interspecies lovers with alien body plans safely engage in physical intimacy?&lt;/a&gt; score of +14/-3; no close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/174287/how-would-dragons-mate-according-to-science&quot;&gt;How would dragons mate, according to science?&lt;/a&gt; score +13/-1; no close votes; was a Hot Network Question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is here only to show that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; questions that are on the same general topic are accepted. This one wasn't. I can guess at the reason - the close question was worded slightly more explicitly than the others. I can see how that can make a difference but also it doesn't make sense that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while looking at the tag, I started to see a slightly deeper problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bsex%5D+closed%3Ano+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;Open questions&lt;/a&gt;: 68&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bsex%5D+closed%3Ayes+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;Closed questions&lt;/a&gt;: 31&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly a third of the questions are closed. Some of them are closed for reasons that would not have changed if the tag wasn't there. For example open ended questions which are acceptably worded but just cannot be answered correctly. However, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; questions that thread a line and that seems to have contributed to their closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have discussed some questions that lead to questionable content before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7933/why-do-we-torture-ourselves-with-this-tag&quot;&gt;Why do we [torture] ourselves with this tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8170/a-proposal-to-establish-policy-regarding-the-torture-and-execution-tags&quot;&gt;A proposal to establish policy regarding the torture and execution tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7973/we-cannot-host-gruesome-depictions-of-violence-the-torture-tag-has-it-and-nee&quot;&gt;We cannot host gruesome depictions of violence, the [torture] tag has it and needs cleaning up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7934/should-the-tagexecution-tag-be-removed&quot;&gt;Should the [tag:execution] tag be removed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt; has had too objectionable a content so far but I fear sooner or later it might. Maybe it's time to discuss what is acceptable for that tag and how to keep content in check so we can agree on what shouldn't get closed and how to keep questions from being closed that otherwise seem to have an acceptable core concept in them. I'm picturing the intimate relation questions here but I suspect there would be other cases where we have accepted a post in the past but rejected a newer one mostly based on wording rather than what the query is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up: should we think long and hard about what we consent in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T22:28:26.203" Title="Should we think long and hard about [sex]?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|policy|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-19T14:14:41.543" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Same Answer, Different Tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My answer for this tag is basically the same as for the other tag: sex is simply part life and part of culture (even more so than torture). Every life form that reproduces sexually is oriented towards engaging in the activity with the end goal of making more of its kind. Rational beings also infuse sex with large amounts of additional cultural norms, customs, rituals, and attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being a forum where questions about matters of &lt;em&gt;how a fictional world functions&lt;/em&gt;, which naturally include physiological, cultural, religious, moral and many other facets, questions of sex, like questions of violence in justice, are what we deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the torture tag, I'd recommend the same two-fold approach to the sex tag (or any untagged query involving sex):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Self restraint: Querents &amp;amp; respondents alike should keep the physiological descriptions clinical and the narratives clean;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Community Policing: Community has the right, and duty, to question questionable questions. We should feel free to edit out &lt;em&gt;unnecessarily graphic or objectionable content&lt;/em&gt;. We should also feel free to request in comments that the OP alter the wording to better conform to community norms re point 1. We should also feel free to VTC any sex question that is story based or clearly does not propose an actual worldbuilding problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, we treat questions of sex the same as we do any other question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T14:14:41.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-20T06:24:22.957" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the person who asked the question I thought it might be worth putting in my two cents on the whole issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I tried to keep the question as clinical as possible and about as erotic as a middle school sex ed. presentation, and avoid explicit language whenever possible. I.e., a strictly &amp;quot;just the facts, ma'am&amp;quot; approach. I actually looked at previous questions like the ones cited by OP as a guide to how explicit I should be, and the one on aliens was what made me think it was okay to post this. At least in the U.S., general sex ed. is taught between fifth and seventh grade, which would be between the ages of 11 and 13, so that would be within the &amp;lt; 13 year old window for Stack Exchange policy. By that age people basically know what genitalia are and that one has to be stuck into the other to make a baby. I agree that going into detail would be inappropriate for SE and it wouldn't be necessary to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broader question is not just about positioning but affects how the relationship should be framed and written about in the first place. Even if no intercourse is actually shown and the author fades to black before anything steamy shows up, how the couple actually go about doing things is going to have a huge effect on physical intimacy (i.e., cuddling and other non-sexual romantic gestures), as well as where they would do it. I.e., does the human carry the mermaid to a bed or do they need a special poo? Whether or not the couple can engage in physical intimacy is also a huge factor in determining whether such a relationship could even work in the first place, given that IRL relationships can often live or die based on whether the couple are able to feel emotional connections via physical intimacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the question on this site have also been much, much more explicit as far as sex is concerned. Of the two similar questions mentioned by OP, one currently has a photograph of a 4m long whale penis in the top-most voted answer, and the other has an answer that discusses alien sex toys and the question was originally posted with a picture of a human female and a non-humanoid hexapedal alien (a fan reimagining of a Klingon as a nonhumanoid life form) that made me want to grab the eye bleach to erase these mind images immediately. I have also seen pretty explicit questions and answers about sex on this site. Not to mention all the questions/answers involving body horror, torture, rape, and genocide, in which by comparison a moment of mutual affection involving physical intimacy between two consenting adults who love each other comes off as tame by comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MermaidProblem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mermaid Problem&lt;/a&gt; (link is from Tv Tropes and is SFW) is also a very well-known and common trope in fiction and shows up in many, many works that are not pornographic in nature, such as L. Sprague de Camp's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791504/9781625791504___2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nothing In the Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (also SFW). It's one of the most common tropes when it comes to mermaids, and my thought was if it helps write &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; mermaid romance stories...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mass Effect 2&lt;/em&gt; famously had an entire scene which was nothing &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; discussing inter-species compatibility and the difficulties in making sure both parties were comfortable in an interspecies relationship, but I'm not sure if that would be too mature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that none of the people who voted to close gave any suggestions as to how to make the question more appropriate for the site, just that the question was bad as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, there doesn't seem to be a clear definition for what is and isn't appropriate with regards to this tag. It feels like a case of &amp;quot;rules for thee but not for me&amp;quot;, especially given that I've had &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179494/how-many-laws-would-a-parkouring-superhero-like-spider-man-break-by-travelling-a&quot;&gt;at least&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167526/if-a-human-body-were-to-break-down-into-simple-gasses-of-its-component-elements&quot;&gt;two previous questions&lt;/a&gt; on this site closed despite the fact that both were well within the bounds of what other questions were considered acceptable on this site. The broader issue is even if a question is 100% on topic for Worldbuilding SE, there is nothing to stop five random users from closing the question. Once one user votes to close it's put in the close queue which brings others in like sharks, but once closed questions are rarely, if ever, reopened even if the author makes sweeping improvements to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, if this were Writing SE and somebody asked about how to write a romance scene for a character who was paraplegic, would that be inappropriate for this venue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T06:24:22.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-22T10:13:59.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to add a warning of some sort if a querent tags their question with &lt;code&gt;[sex]&lt;/code&gt;? As in, when you enter the tag into the bar, a check box appears that prevents the querent from publishing their question before ticking the box. Next to the check box is a detailed list of what is and isn't allowed on Worldbuilding SE regarding naughty bits. This would at least lower the number of explicit questions asked by naïve querents, or at least if they do post something beyond the scope of WBSE, we warned them beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could also be a &lt;code&gt;[sex]&lt;/code&gt; queue, or generally a 'risky tag' queue, whereby a given number of WBSE members need to approve the post before it gets posted, or suggest modifications to the querent. However, this would put the burden on the members of WBSE and not on the querent, so perhaps this is not the best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69424" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T10:13:59.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-24T23:58:33.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents: talking about sex, anatomy, and reproduction is fine, but going into pornographic detail is not. The words &amp;quot;penis&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;vagina&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;penetration&amp;quot; are fine, but describing a sexual position in detail would not be. Making reference to sex and sexual needs would be fine, but describing the mechanics of alien sex would not be ok. Exploring the possible slang of a world and its euphemisms for sex is one thing (e.g. &amp;quot;blowjobs&amp;quot; for oral sex IRL), but going into detail about that world's fetishes and kinks might be a bit much. I'd even say that making passing reference to characters &amp;quot;having wildly intimate and creative sex&amp;quot; is fine as long as you don't explicitly describe the sequence of events that makes it so wild and intimate and creative. Tell, don't show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We as a society are generally ok with teaching teenagers sex ed. Sex is a part of life and is nothing to be ashamed of. But above all else, this is not a smut site here to get people aroused when people are looking to (&lt;em&gt;ahem&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;take care of business&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for an action item, I would suggest emphasizing the fact that things should be kept clinical and not go into explicit detail in the tag description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions relating to sexual reproduction and the physical acts of mating that sexual beings engage in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add to it so it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions relating to sexual reproduction and the physical acts of mating that sexual beings engage in. Please keep questions and answers clinical and avoid going into explicit detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something similar that is less wordy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46434" LastEditorUserId="46434" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T00:08:02.723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T00:08:02.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-26T23:25:20.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing I want to emphasize is that affection need not be within the purview of anything sexual in the first place. While the matter of 'compatibility' and the depths &amp;amp; nuances of inter-species relationships is very interesting, I cannot help but feel there is an overemphasis on &lt;em&gt;sexual&lt;/em&gt; displays thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forming and maintaining bonds, providing comfort, showing your feelings and communicating them is itself worth exposition, and if your work features aliens that are not near human this becomes interesting in its own right. Aliens that are arthropods, tentacled, or simply much larger or smaller than you, for instance - besides communication, how does that color things? Touch is a big part of communication and relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about when communication itself is vastly different? Deaf aliens that use sign language, for instance, can't call out to each other, but sign, touch, and perhaps pheromones. Proper communication would require having a device to detect and emit the pheromones as much as learning how to sign with your arms, where to touch one that is looking away from you, and what to expect in terms of one touching you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, deep relationships are worth exploring, even if they might regrettably get close to &amp;quot;erotic reading material&amp;quot; to xenophilic readers. Things as innocuous as hugs or hand holding can be perceived very differently across contemporary human cultures; doing the same with near human or very &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; near human aliens could certainly stimulate xenophiles, whatever the writer's intent is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel I'm writing of the same name as my profile explores cultures meeting as much as individuals of different species, some near human, and others very much not. One thing I want to celebrate is &lt;em&gt;connection&lt;/em&gt;, without being vulgar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this might warrant another tag entirely, with emphasis on inter-species &lt;em&gt;relations&lt;/em&gt; of all forms. Figuring out different gestures, body language, bonding, faux pas, bridging divides, first contact, or making up for one lacking the senses of another have at least as much of a place in world building as the mechanical realities of sexual bonding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82849" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T23:25:20.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-03-01T17:22:09.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persons asking and answering questions in that tag should be careful to keep their content as SFW as it is possible to be, but I strongly disagree with any sort of blanket ban guided by petty morality. The suppression of discourse about &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; vaguely sexual continues to be one of the most terrible cruelties than humans have ever imposed upon ourselves, and this site shouldn't be party to perpetuating that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in question is well-written, completely topical, and careful to limit its scope to avoid being closed, yet still ended up in that state. If its content is offensive to certain parties, I would suggest that's a problem for them to deal with on their own terms, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; via knee-jerk close votes. We don't want or need thought police here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T17:22:09.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-03-04T12:48:30.990" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some problems I have with questions I've seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One can basically just go through a list of how humans engage in sex and consider which of those would work. This would firstly be quite explicit and secondly mean the question didn't involve a reasonable amount of research. Yes, this is very much about the question about aliens safely engaging in physical intimacy, but frankly it could also be about the mermaid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe one can just draw an equivalence from your fictional creature to a real-world animal and then it's just a question of standard biology that doesn't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It discusses or requests details that involve describing or visualising sex in a lot of detail (like discussing positions or anatomies for reproduction, which can be much more explicit if it involves humans or humanoids).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It carries a very high risk of just being trolling. This may not be such a big concern on this site, as essentially all the question here are about made up situations anyway, but crossing the line from &amp;quot;I think this is interesting&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;I'm just posting it for the lolz&amp;quot; is still bad in my opinion and makes the site less about seriously discussing fictional ideas and more just ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As with all questions on this site, none of these questions are actually about solving real-world problems (except maybe for less serious problems around writing or game design or whatever). This is not a problem in itself, but it means we can be a bit more strict when it comes to certain content without really leaving anyone to figure out their serious problem by themselves (unlike what would happen if you do the same on the Workplace site, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people could argue that such content is totally fine for 13+-year-olds, but the simple fact is that many people also don't believe it is fine for them, especially if we consider other cultures. It may also be considered NSFW, or just objectionable in general, which may risk broader restricting, banning or abandoning of Worldbuilding or even Stack Exchange as a whole. Maybe those aren't risks we need to worry or care too much about, but these additional factors certainly aren't helping to convince me that we should allow these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say I'm proposing a sweeping ban on any question about sex, but... okay, I guess that might be what I'm proposing, but only until someone can convince me there are certain types of questions about sex where the upside of their existence outweighs downside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38314" LastEditorUserId="38314" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T22:28:26.203" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T22:28:26.203" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T10:59:49.727" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/197201/human-clientes-as-unofficial-currency-in-a-cashless-society-would-it-work&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed with the reason: &amp;quot;This question needs details or clarity&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I had already replied in the comments some clarifications. It is not clear to me though what further clarification or detail I should provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I simply edit the question adding the detail asked by @zackit? I had already bolded the question to make it stand out before it was closed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How can I understand what else is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7819/is-the-distinction-between-closure-reasons-too-small&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; @halfthawed provides an explanation for this reason to close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needs details or clarity.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your question isn't clear because of the words itself in it. As it's written, we have no clue what you're asking. Possibly because your question makes perfect grammatical sense but is nonsensical from a physics standpoint or contains multiple contradiction to the point where the question isn't possible to give an answer to. Or maybe just because we can't make it through your terrible grammar, I've seen both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see that problem in my question but maybe I'm biased? I have already bolded the question that is asking if the system would work. Also specified the reality-check tag that asks for a yes / no answer.   Would really help to have those who vote to close with the reason of adding detail or clarity to specify on what more detail is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2744/how-can-we-systematically-improve-too-broad-questions/2745#2745&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; thread. Am willing to edit my question but need some pointers about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75264" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T22:18:00.767" Title="Closed question &quot;This question needs details or clarity&quot; but without explanation of what should be more detailed of clarified" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8248" CreationDate="2021-03-06T03:04:58.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A vote to close for lack of details or clarity should itself  be vulnerable to be closed for lack of details or clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the vote cited here, I thought it was an entertaining question - certainly not unclear - and submitted an answer.  It turned out, however, that the question had allegedly misrepresented an ancient Roman tradition with which I'm unfamiliar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question should be reopened, but it should also be fixed to avoid premising any historical inaccuracy.  Give us another term to use, so we can fix our answers, so that we don't sound like we're ignorant of obscure Ancient Roman history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T03:04:58.930" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7003" CreationDate="2021-03-06T23:24:20.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem still exists and finally got under my skin enough for me to come to meta and see if anyone else has it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even have the problem on this meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Safari 14.0.3, macOS Big Sur 11.2.2. But I have had this problem since a very long time (maybe since it left beta?), my activity on worldbuilding was just too low to care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have this problem on any other stackexchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP has described the issue perfectly: choppy, laggy scrolling. It's very unpleasant to use. And if the fix is as simple as pointed out in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I disable the &lt;code&gt;background-attachment: fixed,scroll,scroll&lt;/code&gt; rule in the CSS for the &lt;code&gt;body&lt;/code&gt; element, scrolling is nice and smooth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I am a bit upset it has not been fixed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disabled the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;background-attachment: var(--theme-background-attachment);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rule and that similarly solves the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T23:24:20.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-07T00:34:13.393" Score="10" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking for tags appropriate for my new question I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-network&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it only have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184496/legal-consequences-of-ai&quot;&gt;single question (closed as off-topic)&lt;/a&gt; and no description. On said question, it doesn't really add anything that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artificial-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt; doesn't already. Even if it did, it's rather hard to imagine when such addition would be relevant for valid World Building question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, my neural network (also commonly referred to as a brain or just me) suggest to get rid of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18566" LastEditorUserId="62341" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T11:48:02.897" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T11:48:02.897" Title="My [neural-network] suggests to burninate this tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2021-03-08T11:43:22.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For over 2 years we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7003/9182&quot;&gt;still have this bug&lt;/a&gt; in macOS Safari where worldbuilding.SE (and no other site) has awful, choppy, laggy scrolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it runs at a very choppy pace ... Scrolling on any page feels laggy and choppy to the extent that the site becomes hard to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;choppy, laggy scrolling. It's very unpleasant to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7003/9182&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE running slowly/choppy scrolling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When scrolling down or up there is a noticeable frame-rate drop. What is intended to be smooth ends up been jerky&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7980/9182&quot;&gt;The page background lags my laptop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We poor Safari users have all managed to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; the issue through inspect element and disabling the &lt;code&gt;background-attachment&lt;/code&gt; style rule on body. Unfortunately that causes the robot to not stick to its place in the bottom-left of the screen after scrolling down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, perhaps like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6810/9182&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6935/9182&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; where the askers were using Microsoft Edge, the background flickers and jumps around sometimes while scrolling. This is especially noticeable while scrolling fast or before the page has entirely loaded all content (like images).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe like edge Safari has a bug of its own that causes this behaviour. Why not float the robot as its own element instead of as a page background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T11:43:22.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8254" CreationDate="2021-03-09T01:20:09.273" Score="7" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confused two ideas when asking a question, and I want to edit it to reflect what I actually meant. But two people already answered and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do that. Can I? I'd hate to spam a new question so soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83056" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T05:36:46.103" Title="Messed Up a Question" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8253" CreationDate="2021-03-09T03:59:59.817" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once a question gets answer(s) it is preferred that any edit doesn't invalidate them, out of respect for those who put effort in writing them and to avoid that a QA site turns out into a forum where edits keep chasing the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, if the question you wrote and got answers to isn't really the question you actually wanted to ask, you can always (carefully!) ask a new question. The only caveat here is to make sure the new question that you had meant to ask is substantially different from the question you originally asked. Otherwise, your new question will be closed for being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-03-10T05:36:46.103" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T05:36:46.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8248" CreationDate="2021-03-10T05:47:51.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two thoughts here, in general, but applicable to the OP's situation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for the Close Voters in ány question whatsoever: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;please give a reason!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  You're not helping a querent by voting to close a question without justifying your action. Your action may (or may not!) be correct, but that can't be judged and the querent can't improve her question if she doesn't know what's wrong to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for the Querent: it's fine to engage in limited discussion in comment when someone asks for clarification. But remember that the comments are not actually part of one's question. Apart from the people actively engaging with a querent, I suspect that most people don't really read the comments. It is always best practice to &lt;strong&gt;edit one's query with any clarifications&lt;/strong&gt;, typographical edits, stylistic edits or any other matter that people have requested be modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since you asked about this, in comments to the other answer, rather than in your question, I'll address the point here: I think the &lt;strong&gt;best practice&lt;/strong&gt;, when asked for clarification, is to always rewrite. Don't leave behind what was unclear, because that will simply make your revised query all the less clear!  We can always see the revision history if we need to. The whole point of SE is for you to write the best question you can. After all, our answers are not just for you! Queries and Responses here also serve as an archive or repository of geopoetical wisdom and worldbuilding advice. While it's a goal to help you with your specific issue, it's also our job to make this forum a valuable resource for present and future worldbuilders that we may never meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T22:18:00.767" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T22:18:00.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8259" CreationDate="2021-03-19T01:00:34.407" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an issue with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/2271918-theres-a-global-shortage-of-computer-chips-whats-causing-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;$37 billion&lt;/a&gt;.  The preview - there and here - works just fine.  But after the post is made, it no longer displays right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be fixed - more or less - with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/2271918-theres-a-global-shortage-of-computer-chips-whats-causing-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;\$37 billion&lt;/a&gt; by adding a backslash.  I don't know anything about the syntax but I assume it's a variant of some programming language's escape character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, why doesn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/2271918-theres-a-global-shortage-of-computer-chips-whats-causing-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;\$37 billion&lt;/a&gt; work once posted?  The dollar sign isn't even in the link text any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't blame you for having some arcane markup - I'm sure there's a good reason for it if I'd found the manual to RTF - but not having the preview match the posted view is a Just Plain Bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wups.  Except HERE it worked just FINE when posted.  Same copy and pasted text as failed in the other post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198059/semiconductor-foundries-are-a-thing-of-the-past-rebuild-the-computer-industry-i?noredirect=1#comment615734_198059&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.  But it wasn't just me - a whole crew of helpful people turned up who were having the same trouble with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:  Apparently it was another dollar sign a paragraph later that fouled things up?  Let's see:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/2271918-theres-a-global-shortage-of-computer-chips-whats-causing-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;\$37 billion&lt;/a&gt;  \$ That previews with an intact link, now let's see the final posting...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, that DID foul up on the posting.  But there's another thing that went into this.  I had not enabled a script from Cloudflare on the page.  With that script off, the preview looks fine and the post is different.  With that script on, both look fouled up the same way.  So the &lt;em&gt;difference&lt;/em&gt; is in what is done when that script isn't active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They still &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; work the same, but at least I know why the bug wasn't noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T07:48:14.590" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T07:48:14.590" Title="Bug in dollar sign + link preview" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8258" CreationDate="2021-03-19T03:30:33.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a bug, it's an intended feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything enclosed between two \$ will be treated as a mathematical formula by MathJax, and displayed accordingly. Like you can see in this following text included between &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2 of such signs$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives weird results when the OP wants to write about money and not formulas, but as you have found out one can remove the misinterpretation on the \$ by using a \ before the \$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T03:41:14.953" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T03:41:14.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-20T09:39:46.353" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198108/where-and-how-do-i-build-a-castle&quot;&gt;Where and how do I build a castle?&lt;/a&gt; got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably because it was thought to be a dupe of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127177/build-an-impregnable-fortress-in-the-middle-ages-with-modern-technology&quot;&gt;Build an impregnable fortress in the middle ages with modern technology&lt;/a&gt; - Nope, I do not want to use modern technology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121901/how-useful-is-an-impregnable-castle&quot;&gt;How useful is an impregnable castle?&lt;/a&gt; - admittedly there is some overlap, but that is only a subset of what I want to ask.  Also, I think that the answer has to be that if they were not useful they would not have been built in such profusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as pointed out in the comments, I asked several questions, not just one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My aim is to understand how castles were planned and built, down to the last detail (books &amp;amp; URLS are very welcome).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I would like to propose a series of questions, and my question here is whether this would be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some topics, from the top of my head. I imagine that more may be added later and that answers may lead to further questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a vision of an epic question chain, lasting for months, maybe longer, with one focused question per week, building on previous answers, until we understand out castle in the minutest detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to add more questions, re-order them or just plain say this series of questions is off-topic or uninteresting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how many will attack me? Probably based on medieval history. How large would armies have been? How many of them can attack me at once? There is not much having 300,000 warriors if there are only enough walls for only 1,000 to attack simultaneously. However, they will also need archers, siege canon, such as trebuchet, etc. Perhaps they work in shifts, relived as men get tired? Cavalry to quell the local populace and cut off supply lines? Medics, cooks, drovers, etc, etc? We probably don't need to consider the non-combatants (other than that they need supplies, and perhaps insomuch as anyone can swing a sword when attacked)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for how long must I withstand siege, if it comes to that, until an army is raised and help arrives? (since there are no standing armies). How long does it take to raise, arm &amp;amp; equip, train(?) enough to defeat the number of attackers from the first question? Hmm, how long can they besiege me, given an &amp;quot;average&amp;quot; supply chain (whatever that is)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the purpose of my castle? I will state that, although comments might be welcome. It is a sally point for a garrison. If any army passes with X miles on either side, we can sally forth and assail them. It also forces any passing army to stop sand engage, since they will not want to leave a garrisoned castle at their rear. When they stop, either the castle can attack, or an allied army can attack the besiegers from the rear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;who else is in my castle, other than the garrison? I suspect that there will be a fixed number of some positions, such as the actual castle lord, and a variable number, based on the garrison size, of others, e.g cooks, medics, smiths, armorers, fletchers .... and probably more professions. How many people in total in the castle? (and, do I want to allot space for peasants from the surrounding countryside?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what supplies do I need for all of these? Water, food (livestock (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens), grain, preserved foodstuffs? Water and fodder for the livestock? Do I slaughter &amp;amp; salt the livestock, except for necessary horses at the start of the siege?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;which buildings are necessary for all of the above? I seek an exhaustive list, right down to the toilets, with sizes, and hopefully we can draw a floorplan. This gives us a feel for the necessary size of the castle. Let's start with HQ, armoury, medical bay, chapel(?), smithy, tanner(?), storage for food, water, animals, sleeping quarters, timber, leather, .... ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;where to site the castle? If we have free range, do we build on top of a hill? That's good to tire attackers, makes it difficult/impossible to bring up siege engines (towers, trebuchet, etc). If there is a rock base, they won't be able to tunnel and undermine the walls. But, a hill means very deep wells, possibly dug through rock, to have access to water. Unless we build near a river, but what are the pros/cons of that? Genghis Khan &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58dgdi/do_we_have_any_primary_sources_that_say_that/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diverted a river&lt;/a&gt; to flood a city; could a similar approach undermine our walls?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;given the approximate known size of the populace and buildings, we have the size of the inner walls. Do we only have one set, or is there a fallback a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey_(castle)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bailey &lt;/a&gt;? Or two, so that each can defend the other? How many ad why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how height should the walls be, and how thick? If we accommodate some form of catapult, that might determine the thickness, as would the damage doable by attacking artillery ( I am going to say that there is no gunpowder). We may also want a certain number of rows of defenders on the walls, plus stores of ammunition, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many staircases lead up to the walls? Enclosed or open? How far apart? Do they need to built near to certain buildings, or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If  am not building on rock, how deep do the walls go beneath ground in order to prevent or hinder tunneling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how may towers do I need in order to enfilade the attackers? How far apart are they? How tall? How many defending archers or other troops can be active at once (those little slit windows won't allow many archers per floor to fire at once)). Should they be as tall as the walls, or butt out at the top (with holes in the bottom)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one entrance only? Easier to defend, but limits sally possibilities. The more entrances, the more flexibility, but the more attack points. How to construct the gates? Iron reinforced wood? Portcullis? One gate, or two, with murder holes between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If on flat ground, do we need a moat? How wide, deep? Ditch or water filled? Stakes/caltrops at the bottom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Errrm, that's probably enough to give a feel for it. I could write more, but may just bore you. I think that there is enough here to decide whether this could be a meaningful series of questions or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments, suggestions, criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T00:12:27.943" Title="Would it be on topic to build a castle, question by question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8260" CreationDate="2021-03-21T04:47:17.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes... and no...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any question that is appropriately scoped and meets the description of a good question as found in the Help Center is valid. So, asking dozens or a hundred questions to discover how to build a castle is certainly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's important to understand the nature of Stack Exchange. This may sound a bit brutal, and I apologize, but it's important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We're not a free research service.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find the statement on Stack Exchange meta right now, but Stack Exchange is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;expected&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to be the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;last place you look for an answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; You're expected to research your topic first and use SE as a means to fill in what you can't learn on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that perspective, asking a bazillion questions looking to understand the details of castle construction may be on-topic — but it won't be appreciated. Not only does it indicate that you're unwilling to do your own research, but people will quickly grow tired of the incessant questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you roll your mouse over the down-vote arrow, you'll discover the following text: &amp;quot;This question does not show any research effort....&amp;quot; Asking a lengthy series of questions will get you down-voted, and down-votes matter on Stack Exchange. The under-the-hood automatics will eventually suspend your account. You want to avoid down-votes where you can and doing your own research is method #1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, long story short... please avail yourself of the great many resources on the Internet that describe the art and science of castle making. They're out there, I've read quite a number of them myself. And after you've completed your research, if there's still a question or two you need help with, we'd be delighted to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help Center quotes that support this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;Downvote questions that don't show any research effort....&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;General guidelines for all questions: ...[questions] Should include research....&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T00:12:27.943" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T00:12:27.943" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-21T04:58:33.597" Score="9" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; An incredibly valuable example of why we should add &amp;quot;This is a high concept question&amp;quot; to the VTC reasons is this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/200174/40609&quot;&gt;What would happen if the salt in the oceans disappeared?&lt;/a&gt; The OP is even in the process of disputing the closure. In none of the currently visible comments is there a link to the &amp;quot;high concept question&amp;quot; Meta page, explaining why the question is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt; is a question where a vague premise leads to the question &amp;quot;what happens next?&amp;quot; (E.G., Let's say the Nazis invented the atom bomb before WWII ended, how would that have changed the outcome of the war?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of high concept questions. They're generally closed as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;too opinion-based&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot; (or, in the current vernacular, not enough details or not enough focus). But this question type is so specific (somewhat like &amp;quot;too story based&amp;quot; questions) that I believe it deserves its own VTC reason, because I think most people who ask them don't realize what the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is it both possible and reasonable to add &amp;quot;This is a high concept question&amp;quot; to the list of community-specific reasons to close a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that when a question is closed for lacking details, which (by definition) basically describes a high-concept question, the text in the closure-reason box is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed. This question needs &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;details or clarity&lt;/a&gt;. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow that link, you'll discover that it explains the old reasons (too broad, etc.) and none of the new reasons. So while I thought that an alternative to the problem might be to modify that help center page, the reality is that the page is already obsolete. What this means is that users (especially new users) don't have a way to understand the problem. From their perspective, they asked a perfectly sensible question. This is why I'm recommending adding a new VTC reason, which would include a link to the high concept question page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I believe it's worth indicating the primary difference between a question being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;too story based&lt;/a&gt; and a question being a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt;. In a nutshell...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Story Based&lt;/strong&gt; means querents must provide a story (i.e., story-based conditions) for the question to meet Help Center rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;High Concept&lt;/strong&gt; means respondents must provide a story to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these reasons are specialized versions of &amp;quot;too opinion-based&amp;quot; but differ in that high concept questions are always too broad (violating the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;book test&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&amp;quot;) However, both of these sub-types are so commonly asked and have such clear explanations for why they are a problem that, IMO, they deserve their own entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T15:24:36.347" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T02:43:57.270" Title="Is it possible and reasonable to add &quot;This is a high concept question&quot; to the list of community-specific reasons to close a question?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2021-03-23T04:41:37.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure. The reason for this is whether a question is a high-concept question or not can vary wildly depending on context. There are minor background details in many stories that can and have been fleshed out in other context. As an example consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3493/how-is-my-question-about-causing-a-mass-exodus-too-story-based?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the best way to cause a mass exodus from Earth. A mass exodus from Earth could be the centerpiece of an entire story, as it is in &lt;em&gt;Interstellar&lt;/em&gt;, or it could be a background detail that sets up the plot, as it is in &lt;em&gt;Titan AE&lt;/em&gt;. How much detail the author needs to go into is very different between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, how much detail answerers need to provide can vary. This goes for even things like seem like relatively straightforward worldbuilding such as species design. Some people can write entire treatises on species biology, indeed a third of &lt;em&gt;Flatland&lt;/em&gt; is just dedicated to exploring the sociology and biology of its inhabitants. But on other contexts what a user would consider an &amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot; answer may be just a couple of paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to point out that removing high-concept questions would result in a lot of highly rated questions being considered inappropriate for the site. As an example just going through my own saved question log &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175181/benefits-of-time-traveling-back-to-the-late-cretaceous-period-economic-financia&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about what economic, financial, etc. benefits would humanity gain by being able to time travel to the Late Cretaceous period would be considered off-topic, because entire stories can and have (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Rivers of Time&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Terra Nova&lt;/em&gt;) been written around this entire premise and their consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually ties into another problem I've noticed with this stack where alternate history questions tend to get shut down pretty quickly as &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot;. Expanding the list of forbidden questions to high concept questions would basically kill any questions on alternate history at all on this stack, as well as questions involving worldbuilding fictional societies that are based around a high concept question (e.g., &lt;em&gt;A Handmaiden's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, are all examples where the entire point of the story is the high concept of society). Having an entire avenue of speculative fiction (alternate history) that involves a lot of worldbuilding being off-topic on this stack seems like a bad idea to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T04:41:37.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2021-03-25T22:28:05.703" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original &amp;quot;high concept&amp;quot; post and the example above (what would have happened if Hitler had died as a baby? what would have happened if Nazis had built the A-bomb?) actually &lt;strong&gt;do violate a real rule of this forum&lt;/strong&gt;.  According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;History: History questions should NOT be about real-world history, unless asking for examples to construct a particular history for a world.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that High Concept is distracting people from the few simple rules the forum has, and instead puts them on a wild goose chase for a subjective concept that I'm not sure even has any meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this site &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to close more questions?  Is there a reason to link questions to this description when closing them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one writes a book to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; a question, so when do you say that a question is a High Concept?  Is it simply a matter of genre - alternative histories versus alternative ecologies or technologies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting at the one defined case, the question of Hitler and Germany is &lt;em&gt;commonplace&lt;/em&gt;, but it is hardly &lt;em&gt;vague&lt;/em&gt;.  It doesn't need to be purely a matter of opinion (someone could document other anti-Semitic groups or German Army infiltrators active in politics).  It &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; get very interesting answers, even if I don't know how to write one.  It only needs to be made on-topic for the site by &amp;quot;asking for examples to construct a particular history for a world&amp;quot;, as the rule puts it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is High Concept a shorthand to decide whether someone is &amp;quot;really&amp;quot; writing?  If they would &amp;quot;really&amp;quot; provide details to their question if asked?  Is it a way to dismiss a question for being too provocative or too creative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastEditorUserId="82280" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T02:10:24.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T02:10:24.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-26T21:37:04.487" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if a question that touches on 'uncomfortable' topics should be deemed as 'Not suitable for this site' and closed as happened to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198453/readily-accessible-poisons&quot;&gt;this question about readily accessible drugs that can be used for suicide&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand why people may feel uneasy since it is the first question of a new person and it asks about an 'easy' solution for commiting suicide. However, in form it satisfies the requirements of this stack: This question is specific and does have a set of definite answers that fulfil clearly stated requirements. The questioner also states why they are asking for this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel conflicted seeing community's reaction, especially when &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32269/are-there-any-real-world-ingested-poisons-with-these-characteristics&quot;&gt;very similar&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/71726/slow-accumulative-poison-that-is-detectable-in-autopsy&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; were asked without much problem in the past. It seems that the first question was closed based on feelings and doubts about the new contributor's intentions rather than the question's suitability for the site. I find this problematic for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions are not evaluated objectively but based on the reputation of questioners and emotions of established members of this community;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;new contributor's are discouraged from further participation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;general discouragement of questions related to 'uncomfortable' topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T13:41:49.030" Title="'Uncomfortable' questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T22:12:48.527" Score="-4" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see really old questions get brought back up to the top. Sometimes it is beneficial since there are lots of answers and quite a few useful bits of info in them, but in other cases, they don't have many views or replies and look like fresh answers. It often leads to confusion. I for instance just now spent some time writing a comment on one such post requesting the author's clarification for some things, before I noticed that the question was asked in 2016, which means that the author's unlikely to even remember the question exists, much less to still check in on new comments or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand that &amp;quot;no question is too old to answer&amp;quot; is Stack Exchange's policy and just archiving them isn't a very good idea, still, I think it would be nice to at least add some obvious tag to the bumped questions, like &amp;quot;[asked 2 years ago]&amp;quot;, to help discern ancient bumped questions from the fresh ones, because as of now they only show the date of the last answer or edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80125" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T13:48:05.043" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T14:08:39.230" Title="Is necroing a question really okay?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2021-03-27T23:32:08.793" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was actually closed as &amp;quot;not about worldbuilding&amp;quot;, which is the literal truth.  They're not asking, say, under what circumstances hospitals are still using salvarsan which your character needs to give himself arsenic poisoning.  They're asking about mundane actions in the real world, and that brings in all the usual discomfits that discomfit the easily discomfitted.  Some object to asking what would &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; have happened if Hitler had been the Queen of England, and that at least has one contrafactual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T23:32:08.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2021-04-01T19:41:41.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7933/why-do-we-torture-ourselves-with-this-tag&quot;&gt;same answer, different topic&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Uncomfortable topics&amp;quot;, like any other topic, are part of the human experience, and part of the non-human sophont experience of a worldbuilder's imagination. They are thus as fair game as any &amp;quot;non-uncomfortable topic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to distinguish here between matters of an individual's emotional response (&amp;quot;I &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; uncomfortable about this&amp;quot;) vs matters that are universally and objectively unacceptable. When approaching difficult questions of this kind, we as community members must, of course, be respectful of other people's emotions; but neither can, nor should, nor even ought, the community let the emotions of others get in the way of our purpose here. Also, members who do respond emotionally to some topic --- and we all do at some time or another! --- need to realise that our emotions do not dictate what content can or can not be presented here. As individuals, we need to wrangle with and control our emotions so that they will not control us and so that they will not be allowed to control others' experiences here in this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: a question regarding an alien civilisation who engages in adult-child sexual relationship as a mythic progression from innocence to adulthood will undoubtedly give some people the willies. However, this is a perfectly valid question of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the question centers on a character who is seeking where, in the real world, they can find some young boys to coerce into such paedophilic relationships, that's not a good question. On the face of it, like the suicide drug question, this one is clearly &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot;, as it too seeks to develop a character's choices within a plot, rather than address any kind of worldbuilding issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we know, the matter we deal with in this forum specifically, is the &amp;quot;nuts and bolts&amp;quot; of worldbuilding -- Laws of Nature and their application, how things like devices and machines work within a given set of constraints, how large scale entities like cultures or religions or groups of people might act or react within a given historical context. In contradistinction, the choices that an individual person or character might make within their narrative arc within that broad historical context are off topic here. Along with a story's plot development, the development of story's characters belong in &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt;. We're happy to seize the third pillar of storycraft, &lt;em&gt;setting&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these queries are dodgy for a variety of reasons, but the topics themselves --- suicide drugs and paedophilic societies --- are perfectly on topic here. Your question has already been answered when we had the whole torture row a few months ago. You might consider a review of that topic to see how we should approach &amp;quot;uncomfortable topics&amp;quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T12:42:39.600" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T12:42:39.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8266" CreationDate="2021-04-02T13:41:50.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Necroing is Perfectly Fine&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, in general, and Worldbuilding in particular are not time limited Q&amp;amp;A forums. Any query asked now is considered valid and fair game forever, for the purposes of our present consideration. (People within this artform have considered the the concepts of a geopoet's individual mortality and the intellectual property we leave behind, but I don't think that's what we're getting at here!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons why it's not only okay, but also encouraged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is a Badge&lt;/strong&gt;. YAY! BADGES! In this case, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/17/necromancer&quot;&gt;Necromancer Badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Information Changes&lt;/strong&gt;. A question might be asked, answered and green check accepted and well upvoted but that doesn't mean the context of the question remains static for all time. Circumstances change, new knowledge is gained. For example, Chasly asked a wonderful Lego related question back in 2015 about how Lego people reproduce. A number of wonderful answers were generated at the time. However, as years passed, the old answers expired or became less reasonable given new information. As of a year ago, this new information allowed me to necro the question and give a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/171330/37029&quot;&gt;new answer to the question&lt;/a&gt; that would have been inconceivable before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New possibilities come to light&lt;/strong&gt;. Touching on your statement that querents (and possibly respondents, by extension) are likely to forget they even wrote a question or answer, I think such a generalisation could be seen as just a bit of an insult to the human long term memory! Just this morning, I got a notification of an upvote for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/a/61585/42841&quot;&gt;answer I'd made&lt;/a&gt; several years ago on another stack forum. While happy enough for the upvote, it gave me cause to reread my response and improve it. I added links and a third possibility to the basic answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer short: &lt;strong&gt;Necroing is Good&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Information Box Needs Work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of L. Dutch's comment to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am misunderstanding your problem, but &lt;strong&gt;I see an &amp;quot;asked 6 hours ago&amp;quot; right at the bottom of your question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think he is misunderstanding! Or at least forgetting something!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually concur with you: it would be nice if that info box could be arranged so that all pertinent query data could be kept there.  A quick perusal of queries in &lt;strong&gt;Main&lt;/strong&gt; shows that the info box does sometimes tell us when the question was asked (so far so good!). But other times, the info box only tells us when the question was modified, or answered. And those instances, while recent, could in fact be months or years after the query was first asked. Queries in &lt;strong&gt;Meta&lt;/strong&gt; behave differently: the info box always reports when the question was asked, never when it was edited or answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how one could misinterpret that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am positive that at the forum level Moderators have no control over the information displayed in the info box; but I do agree it would be a nice &lt;em&gt;and useful&lt;/em&gt; feature were it added! Info boxes should probably also be made to behave consistently between Main and Meta as well. That would avoid a lot of confusion as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T14:08:39.230" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T14:08:39.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8272" CreationDate="2021-04-07T13:15:38.033" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm relatively new to SE, and I have 185 reputation on the main worldbuilding exchange. I wanted to know: Is the &amp;quot;new contributor&amp;quot; thing tied to reputation? And if so, how much do I need to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83110" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:05:32.887" Title="How many rep to remove &quot;new contributor&quot; tag?" Tags="|support|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2021-04-07T14:52:47.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The simple answer is &quot;no,&quot; but few things on this site are simple...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the broadest sense, the purpose of this site is to help an author (of a story, an RPG, or for whatever reason) develop the &amp;quot;infrastructure&amp;quot; of their story. Stories do and should include topics that make people uncomfortable, whether for the low-brow purpose of entertainment or the noble purpose of questioning the human experience for the purpose of improving the race as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, we know that there are limits. The Stack Exchange Overlords have already said that there are arbitrary and undefined limits to how much violence and/or gore they'll tolerate on our site. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7973/40609&quot;&gt;We cannot host gruesome depictions of violence, the [torture] tag has it and needs cleaning up&lt;/a&gt;). Whether we're facing the reality that people not covered by SE's Terms &amp;amp; Conditions may use the site (e.g., young children) or facing the reality that the subject being discussed is massively personal to an individual, that can't, in and of itself, be enough reason to &lt;em&gt;not ask a question.&lt;/em&gt; Were we to allow that, we would quickly discover that no questions can be asked — because just as there is a sucker born every minute, there's also at least one person out there who is guaranteed to be offended by any particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, there's a difference between &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; can be asked and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it should be asked&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is an issue of prudence that we, as a community, expect from users. Querents are expected to ask their questions with a sensible level of professionalism and maturity. This is not the place where people should be getting their proverbial rocks off reading about taboo material. But, as despicable as any one subject may be to any single individual user, it should be the place where someone can ask about any and every aspect of the &amp;quot;infrastructure&amp;quot; of their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I continue, let me express my belief that this is a two-way street. It is both the querent's responsibility to write a well-asked question, and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OUR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; responsibility (meaning, &amp;quot;everyone not the querent&amp;quot;) to help the querent achieve that goal. I'm a fan of closing badly asked questions so quickly that a clap of thunder can be heard — but I am not a fan of &lt;em&gt;excluding&lt;/em&gt; (closing, deleting, etc.) questions that can be edited to meet our expectations. If you, the patient reader, are the kind of person to prefer whining or complaining about a question, please consider becoming someone who instructs users in the art of asking better questions. It's so much cooler to &amp;quot;teach the world to sing&amp;quot; than it is to stifle the act of singing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hey, you keep using &amp;quot;infrastructure...&amp;quot; wat'cho talkin' 'bout Willis?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is NOT an open forum for asking any old question that is refused on every other Stack. We are NOT the dumping ground for any and every question. We do have a purpose and it's reasonably well defined in the Help Center. But, to be brief, it's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE exists to help people develop and consistently use the rules and systems for a fictional world of their own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE does not exist to help people build their stories, meaning we do not host questions about circumstances, plot, scenarios, or character actions and/or choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I agree with @MikeSerfas' answer in that the OP of the referenced question was not asking a question about the rules and systems of their world, the &amp;quot;infrastructure&amp;quot; of their story. They were asking a question that was purely circumstantial. Therefore, I agree that the question was closed as &amp;quot;not about Worldbuilding.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also agree with @Elimtilas that questions about the rules and systems of a world wherein suicide (or any other &amp;quot;uncomfortable&amp;quot; topic) can occur are intrinsically on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nevertheless...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I expect such questions to be asked with a sincere overabundance of decorum — because there are plenty enough people in the world who have been deeply hurt by the consequences of suicide, and this site should and must be above causing them more harm just because someone wants to include the topic in a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I believe this to be true and a requirement for any querent asking about any subject that may be deemed objectionable, inappropriate, or uncomfortable. Go ahead and ask your question, but have the good sense to ask it in a way that minimizes offense. If for no other reason than because the Stack Exchange Overlords are watching... always watching...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T14:52:47.837" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8270" CreationDate="2021-04-07T15:05:32.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314287/come-take-a-look-at-our-new-contributor-indicator&quot;&gt;the official release about the &amp;quot;New Contributor&amp;quot; flag&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr;: Folks will see an indicator when they go to interact with new contributors (visible for a week following their first post) letting them know that the person is new. A handy link to our Code of Conduct will be in the notification for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, theoretically, one week following your first post. You'll notice as of today (April 7, 2021) that it's gone from your main site listings. It's still here on Meta because Meta and Main are always treated separately. I expect the &amp;quot;new contributor&amp;quot; flag to disappear here on Meta by April 15th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:05:32.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T15:39:28.953" Score="10" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though not terribly common, there are occasionally questions where the querent asks either how to implement technology or whether or not their suggested implementation is viable, practical, feasible, believable, plausible, etc. Examples of this include one of my very first questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100356/40609&quot;&gt;What technologies might lead to or support &amp;quot;perfect recycling&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, more recently...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/200142/40609&quot;&gt;Is there any way to make a banknotes in a way to distinguish them from counterfeits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/200234/40609&quot;&gt;Cryo-Pods For Unaltered Humans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like these are easily defined by a phrase L.Dutch first used in a comment to his answer for my early question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I had a more detailed description for the above, I would file it to a patent office, not to WorldBuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used a modified version of that phrase myself many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could answer this question, they'd be running to the patent office, not posting it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem seems to be (and I could be wrong about this) that the querent doesn't understand the inherent limitations to asking us to either invent or validate a previously non-existent technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; I am seeking answers that help users understand the practical limits of this site. In this instance, the practical limit to questions that ask either how to build or implement a technological device or process, or whether or not a specific implementation is considered plausible. What advice and expectations can we give to the authors of such questions? What would keep such questions from getting closed? What makes them good or bad questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T18:36:36.190" Title="Advice concerning questions asking HOW to implement a technological procedure or device" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|question-types|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2021-04-08T14:40:02.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I commiserate with the dilemma, I'd just like to point out that we here in Worldbuilding are neither in the business of straight up implementing real tech nor of being beholden to real world technical &amp;amp; scientific limitations. We can think out of the box and through the tesseract, if you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for helping the querent: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think that perhaps a two pronged approach might be helpful&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it's quite fair to create a Meta Policy on technological implementation. We do have tags like &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot;. We could ensure that various technology tags are up to date and in alignment. You've got a good start with the thesis statement that there are &amp;quot;practical limitations&amp;quot;. Not so much to our forum per se, but limitations on what real world technology can and can not do. It therefore becomes a matter of self-limitation for the querent to specify &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;technology&amp;quot;. And that could be fine with the querent!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it's also fair for that policy to address how one can move beyond the limitations of current technology. Perhaps a different approach to tags, like &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; plus &amp;quot;unknown technology&amp;quot; or something like that. Perhaps also a different approach to writing the question in the first place. I had a look at the currency question. It's a straight up historical application of best available tech question and nothing to do with worldbuilding. A querent would have to reveal enough about the world -- magic? tech level? -- so that we can work to extrapolate from the known to the possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T14:40:02.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2021-04-09T02:43:57.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The World Turned Upside Down&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, on the face of it, an excellent question. As it stands, I'd say &amp;quot;sure! -- go ahead and add that!&amp;quot; But rather than looking for yet another reason to close a broad swath of questions -- literally, the entire genre of Alt-History -- I'd like to turn this question around and ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can we make it so high concept queries are sufficiently answerable in the Worldbuilding forum?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would state at the outset that I can see where JBH is coming from --- Hitler gets stomped by a circus elephant in Vienna as a child, what happens next?  is a wide openly broad and technically opinion based question. Straight up black letter law. I'd also state at the outset that user2352714 makes an excellent point: applying the law too strictly essentially disallows and extirpates a whole genre of worldbuilding. Of course, if you're not a fan of alt-history, this may not be a great loss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'll reiterate my oft iterated iter: Almost every question in this forum is closeable, according to a strict interpretation &amp;amp; application of Stack Exchange rules, for being &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;. Everything about space aliens, magic, dragons, fantasy races, etc is essentially counterfactual and thus a matter of opinion. Yet, our forum thrives on the counterfactual and on the opinion based. It's what we do here. We've done this simply by devising ways and means of asking these questions in such ways that focus on query answerability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to do the same thing with alt-history / high concept questions. We need to come up with strategies and eventually guidelines for how to answer these questions in this forum such they won't be closed or deleted. Some thoughts and strategies come to mind based on JBH's excellent example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let's say the Nazis invented the atom bomb before WWII ended, how would that have changed the outcome of the war?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is very much like a number of questions we get. How does XY&amp;amp;Z affect society? How does removing one thing from history change the future? Alt-history fodder for sure!, but would-be alt-historians need better strategy to ask their questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One obvious strategy is &lt;strong&gt;FOCUS&lt;/strong&gt;. We demand from all querents a certain amount of focus. If someone asks how does XY&amp;amp;Z affect society, we ask them to focus on some particular aspect of society --- effects on an aspect of economy, effects on daily life of a particular group, effects on technology functionality, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another strategy is opinion reduction. What colour do you think the butterfly wings on my fairies ought to be? is a straight up opinion based question. We would ask the querent to edit the question to make it non-opinion based. Maybe something like &amp;quot;given the context of a world with X type of star and Z type of atmosphere and that many creatures are colourblind in some way or other, how might fairies evolve coloured butterfly wings to evolutionary success?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so it should be with the perennial A-H question of Nazi nukes. Historically, we think they may have been working on such a weapon, and may have been able to produce one within a relatively useful time period had the war dragged on a little longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the example question could be made askable here if we apply FOCUS and OPINION REDUCTION strategies.  Perhaps if we focus on where they might drop a bomb or two, we could reign in the wild speculation: this would lead to a narrower question like if the Nazis nuked Moscow, how would the crippling of the USSR's central government alter the balance of power? The answers would then focus on destability within the USSR, lack of central command structure for the armed forces and perhaps some kind of forced peace between Germany and Russia. The outcome of the war might be altered by a) they dropped the bomb first, causing France, the UK and the US to shit their britches, suing for peace or b) by a more resolute western allied force now having to face Germany on a single front war, with several interesting wonderweapons soon to be unveiled -- not only jet fighters but atomic rockets capable of hitting London and perhaps atomic uboats striking NYC, Baltimore, Washington, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T02:43:57.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2021-04-09T03:15:31.487" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Any act of creativity is a theft&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... from those better than us who are entitled, someday, to produce the right prototypes and fill the right forms to claim that they, and only they, may work with the technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In online forums there are many people who are &lt;em&gt;deeply, deeply&lt;/em&gt; concerned that someone might ask the wrong question, point out the wrong observation or idea.   It might give someone the impression that ordinary people could talk out an invention before it is introduced by the people meant to introduce it, as if they were Jules Verne designing the air scrubbers and diving suits for a submarine before the first such vehicle had ventured into the water.  The &lt;em&gt;temerity&lt;/em&gt; to suppose that such things do not arise only in their due course by those meant to do them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, those meaningful answers are &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;.  There is no idea too obvious to patent, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-ridiculous-technology-patents-ever-granted?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are patents to prove it&lt;/a&gt;.  Clearly StackExchange posters &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; steal such valuable intellectual property from its future owners, were there not sharp-eyed enforcers ever on guard against this dreadful threat.  People who take as much joy in closing down conversation about anything too strange as others would in thinking it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In worldbuilding things become a little more mysterious because the obvious invention might require very implausible equipment.  Building a track around a magnetar may be hard enough that no one would really bother worrying about what you might be imagining to do with it.  So obviously the emphasis needs to be on stopping discussions about things that are &lt;em&gt;conceivable&lt;/em&gt;, if not necessarily very likely, to happen in the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;.  Breaking a problem into parts, saying &amp;quot;you'd need A to do B&amp;quot;, that obviously raises &lt;em&gt;concerns&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still - what &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; happen if we allowed ourselves to empathize with the slave who tries to steal himself, and the casual forum participant who asks for creative ideas to solve a problem that he should never be permitted to dream he can solve?  Who would come after us?  If creativity is a theft, why not be the companions of thieves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T03:15:31.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2021-04-10T14:44:30.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would keep such questions from getting closed? What makes them good or bad questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Separate hard science from plausible science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we agree that a question that asks for the rigorous, 100% valid, 100% complete implementation of an idea is not a worldbuilding question. It should be duly closed as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;. But the questions linked (except possibly the banknote question, which is now deleted and I can no longer view) do not ask for rigorous answers, they ask for &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; answers. And I think that is a very important distinction to make, in the interest of not punishing tech-related questions as a group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only answer with hard science to rigorous questions. That excludes most speculative technology, unless they are constrained to a few parameters known. One can ask for the resonance frequency of a space elevator, as long as we have some indication as to its material, so there is data to plug into the strict formulae required for a rigorous answer. But a question that asks to prototype a space elevator, e.g. &amp;quot;What would a space elevator be made of?&amp;quot;, cannot be answered rigorously, as they do not exist and nobody has ever tried to build such a thing, so we cannot possibly know all the factors involved. It is also rather hard to defend that such a question belongs on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now we get to the other category, plausible science. &amp;quot;What would be the required thickness of a space elevator made out of Cheddar?&amp;quot; Well, the correct answer is that we do not know. We don't know the shear strength of cheese and nobody has piled up enough of the stuff, yadayada. But we can make ballpark estimations, we can make suggestions like covering it in hard wax to make it more flexible. We can make something out of it, that has some scientific basis, and &lt;em&gt;sound believable&lt;/em&gt;. And that is the world-building point of questions about technology: answers to these questions can help produce reasonable-sounding systems that have implications of their own, which helps authors develop their worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the two questions you linked that I can see seem to me to be asking for plausible science, not hard science. The cryo-pod question explicitly did not ask for hard science, and the recycling question asked for ways to make an existing idea sound plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why I do not think I can make a proper general advice, because I have no will to punish good questions or make well-meaning askers jump through extra hoops. I frankly do not see great flaws in those questions. Perhaps I would be better equipped to formulate something if I had some more explicitly flawed questions to work from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am seeking answers that help users understand the practical limits of this site. In this instance, the practical limit to questions that ask either how to build or implement a technological device or process, or whether or not a specific implementation is considered plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can suggest for now is to append this to the tag description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and possibly also &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; if I have indeed been using it incorrectly: &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Keep in mind the limitations of human knowledge when asking about speculative technology or systems, and limit the problem area to what can be fully envisioned.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I'm sure someone with a better grasp of English grammar can put it more succinctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T16:26:01.220" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T16:26:01.220" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8283" CreationDate="2021-04-18T00:18:02.650" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201001/which-my-hero-academia-volume-should-i-start-if-i-want-to-read-season-2&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, turned up in my feed, I imediatley commented and voted to close as NAW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of minutes later it turned-up in the close-question review queue. I again voted to close. Both times it (the system-interface) appeared to accept my close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is  there a record in the system of both my votes, if not, which (if not both) was not recorded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the interface appears to show that a vote has been registered, but it is not recorded, then this seems to need to be taken further, to meta.se as a bug perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone with the requisite privileges offer me any insight? Perhaps a system-record which can be used to further the inquiry if it seems appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T00:29:52.033" Title="Could the mods check this out - did I just cast two consecutive close votes on the same question?" Tags="|support|bug|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2021-04-18T18:36:36.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You want to ask us to help you invent some tech. We can do that! But you need to understand our limitations.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for users to ask for help building technology on Worldbuilding.SE. But too many of the questions are challenged, argued over, and closed, because, I believe, the querent has an expectation that we cannot meet. The problem is expressed by an idea that's floated around for several years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could answer this question in the way that you want, they wouldn't post the answer here, they'd be running to the patent office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help you properly set your expectations (and, thereby, to better ask your question), allow me to explain briefly how this site operates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't know how to define a poor question, but we know one when we see it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1964 case &lt;em&gt;Jacobellis v. Ohio,&lt;/em&gt; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter uttered what has become a famous statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [&amp;quot;hard-core pornography&amp;quot;], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. &lt;em&gt;But I know it when I see it....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike pretty much every other Stack in the Stack Exchange galaxy, Worldbuilding is highly creative and imaginative — which means it's sometimes really hard to know when a question has crossed a line. It's beyond the scope of this answer to explain why the lines exist. I can only ask that you trust me that they do and must exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Help me build my tech&amp;quot; questions are not intrinsically bad questions. In fact, they can be among the richest and most rewarding questions asked on the site — but &lt;em&gt;how they are asked&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;what you expect&lt;/em&gt; are critically important because, unfortunately, &amp;quot;build my tech&amp;quot; questions sit on the &amp;quot;rule line.&amp;quot;  Here are the most common rules &amp;quot;build my tech&amp;quot; questions can cross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. We build worlds, not stories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (on-topic) is the creation and consistent use of rules and systems governing and defining a fictional world of the querent's own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be placed or told. A world can encompass something as small as a family unit and as large as whole universes and dimensions. Rules and systems can be modified and adopted by many world builders as they build their own worlds. The &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of a rule or system may be unique to the querent, but the rule or system itself can be used by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding (off-topic) is the creation of plot, circumstances, character actions, and character choices. Storybuilding questions usually reflect writer's block or a lack of research on the writer's part. Storybuilding is frequently only applicable to the querent's project and has little or no use to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inventing technology falls into both worldbuilding and storybuilding because how the technology will be used is often a requirement for creating the technology. Engineers will understand what I mean. If you ask us to invent a knife, a thousand knives can be presented to you (and that wouldn't exhaust the design possibilities) — but only the design that fits your story's needs (the intended application) can be the correct design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following chart will help you understand what I mean. (You can click on all the images to see a larger version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2B4pp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2B4ppm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, if I told you that reddish zone was an accurate reflection of the kinds of questions we'll answer (and not close) it would probably start a fight. But it's close enough for government work. You'll notice that the blue circle representing &amp;quot;help me build my tech&amp;quot; questions is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; centered on the cross-hairs and part of it falls outside the reddish zone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advice:&lt;/strong&gt; You can help us a lot by explaining &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you will use your technology. What are its benefits and limitations in your story? What are the world rules that affect the tech? The more you can explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's important to build the tech the simpler it is to constrain our responses to a solution that will help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;FYI: Many new users, and sometimes experienced users, will intentionally hide their story or post vague requirements. Sometimes it's because they don't want to reveal proprietary work. Most of the time it's because they think that by keeping the question vague the more likely they'll get a lot of responses to choose from. We call this &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; and it doesn't work well on Stack Exchange. In fact, it'll usually get the question closed as too opinion-based or too story-based.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. We deal with fictional worlds, not the real world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, perhaps, the most frustrating of the issues I'll introduce here. We do not deal with the real world. Period. And telling us that &amp;quot;my world is just like the real world except that it has this cool tech I need help inventing&amp;quot; doesn't solve the problem. You're still asking us to invent something in the real world. To paraphrase The Bard, a pile of manure by any other name will still stink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this a problem? Because the technology doesn't exist in the real world — and if it did, whomever knew how to design it would be running to the patent office, not explaining it on this Stack. (A lot of new users don't realize just how valuable the invention they're proposing would be!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users of Worldbuilding.SE should (indeed, must), with rare exception, &lt;em&gt;expect answers to reflect the fiction of their world, not the non-fiction of the real world.&lt;/em&gt; That latitude is necessary, and the more latitude we can have, the easier it is to provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VTNhD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VTNhDm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advice:&lt;/strong&gt; When you ask us to help you build your technology, please understand that while we'll do our best, we cannot and will not provide a real-life, perfectly-scientific answer. If we tell you in the comments to your question that a reasonable answer to your question would more likely go to the patent office, what we're telling you is that you've set your expectations too high and not given us enough wiggle room in your fictional world to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Finally, there's a weakness in our tag system&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three tags frequently associated with &amp;quot;help me build my tech&amp;quot; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first started using the Stack, my expectation was something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Durpn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Durpnm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably looked at that last entry, Technobabble, and wondered why there isn't a tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6516/40609&quot;&gt;We don't want that tag.&lt;/a&gt; We feel it's too much fiction, too much fantasy. We want at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; science in our worldbuilding. (Yes, that's a weakness....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to show you the real problem, let me show you a graph that better reflects the Wiki definitions of those three tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NVnbW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NVnbWm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, what you're asking us to do is help you build &lt;em&gt;fictional technology.&lt;/em&gt; The more &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; you want, the less likely we can help you (or we'd be running to the patent office...). Unfortunately, our current tag structure doesn't easily cover the &amp;quot;answers are permitted to be fictional...&amp;quot; space. We know. It's a pain. But it's also harder to fix that than you might think. What this means is that you need to set your expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advice:&lt;/strong&gt; Inventing fictional tech means accepting a fictional answer. If you're expecting a real-world, scientifically-rigid answer, you should not expect an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to &amp;quot;help me build my tech&amp;quot; questions, we would LOVE to help you out. But you need to work with us, and that means understanding our limits and setting your expectations. The odds are pretty good that actually building what you're dreaming about would require teams numbering over a thousand people and several large corporations (that is NOT an exaggeration). But we also don't want you to leave the experience disappointed. A great experience is somewhere in the middle — and we hope you'll work with us to enjoy that experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And hopefully, if one of our users is tempted to post that comment about running to the patent office, they'll post a link here instead. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T18:36:36.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8280" CreationDate="2021-04-19T00:29:52.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a little bit of digging, and while I don't have an answer for what happened, I can confirm that the system only recorded one close vote from you, at 00:07:56 UTC on 4/18/21. This has the same timestamp as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/77952&quot;&gt;the review you performed in the Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{\dagger}$&lt;/span&gt;, meaning that your close vote from the queue was successful. Therefore, when you tried to vote to close the question earlier from the question page, it seems like something didn't go through. Is it possible that you clicked &amp;quot;cancel&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;close question&amp;quot; after choosing the close reason? The buttons are right next to each other, and I've definitely done that before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, there were no effects on the post itself, which was obviously quickly closed in due course. I guess we can consider this case still open, if you'll pardon the pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{\dagger}$&lt;/span&gt;As a side note for other folks with mod privileges: The moderator timeline shows the queue task marked as &amp;quot;invalidated&amp;quot;, but that label refers to the post's status in the queue, not your vote. The question was closed before other folks could review it, so the post was automatically removed from the queue at closure; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/294717/274942&quot;&gt;therefore, for bookkeeping purposes, the review task is marked as &amp;quot;invalidated&amp;quot; in the history&lt;/a&gt;. The same label is applied to the uncompleted review in the First Posts queue, which nobody got to before the question was closed. This confused me for about five minutes before I found documentation on it (see that Meta SE post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T00:29:52.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2021-04-19T13:41:49.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... asks about an 'easy' solution for committing suicide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; problematic for many people because the difference between someone asking for a quick and deadly poison to kill themselves and to kill someone else is just how sneakily someone asks the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I am not in favor of asking (much less answering) question that ask for detailed advice on real world ways to kill anyone in a context that could equate to murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note from a legal point of view (and like it or not we live in a world bound by legality) the site and even individual members could be help legally responsible for advice they give in regard to this.  It is not, IMO, appropriate to ask these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples which seem very dubious to me include :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions asking for tasteless common poisons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions asking for the most painful forms of torture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions asking for chemistry of explosives - e.g. how to make explosives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's different if you are asking for military-related questions, but even there explicit advice on &amp;quot;how to&amp;quot; is surely irresponsible.  Asking if e.g. an assault-type weapon design is practical for some context is one thing, but asking for advice on how to construct homemade weapons is another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, as a community, need to accept that what we say can be abused and should act responsibly in terms of asking, answering and, when needed, closing questions that could be endangering others.  Questions may be framed as WB questions, but a dose of cynicism won't hurt the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is also naive to suggest that what is published here will not influence children.  All questions and answers on the site are publicly accessible &lt;em&gt;without age limitations&lt;/em&gt;.  We cannot make everyone happy with respect to their particular cultural limits, but surely there are things it is just grossly irresponsible to publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T13:41:49.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-20T01:18:44.960" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is a chatroom I created a while ago about &amp;quot;what would hve happened if something happened differently&amp;quot;-type stuff. It's on the History community, but it could be useful for worldbuilding. When I hd this chatroom, we were mostly talking about stuff not related to speculative history, so I want to improve on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the link. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/117724/speculative-history-discussion&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/117724/speculative-history-discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't know if advertisement-style posts are allowed, but I'm willing to learn.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85072" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T01:18:44.960" Title="Speculative History Discussion" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-20T15:08:05.993" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scrolling on worldbuilding.SE and its meta is very unpleasant on macOS Safari. It's like it's running at low fps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For over 2 years we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7003/9182&quot;&gt;still have this bug&lt;/a&gt; in macOS Safari where worldbuilding.SE (and no other site) has awful, choppy, laggy scrolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it runs at a very choppy pace ... Scrolling on any page feels laggy and choppy to the extent that the site becomes hard to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;choppy, laggy scrolling. It's very unpleasant to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7003/9182&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE running slowly/choppy scrolling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When scrolling down or up there is a noticeable frame-rate drop. What is intended to be smooth ends up been jerky&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7980/9182&quot;&gt;The page background lags my laptop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We poor Safari users have all managed to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; the issue through inspect element and disabling the &lt;code&gt;background-attachment&lt;/code&gt; style rule on body. Unfortunately that causes the robot to not stick to its place in the bottom-left of the screen after scrolling down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, perhaps like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6810/9182&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6935/9182&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; where the askers were using Microsoft Edge, the background flickers and jumps around sometimes while scrolling. This is especially noticeable while scrolling fast or before the page has entirely loaded all content (like images).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe like edge Safari has a bug of its own that causes this behaviour. Why not float the robot as its own element instead of as a page background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T15:08:05.993" Title="Jittery scrolling in Safari on macOS" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-26T12:50:45.963" Score="7" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201503/would-a-taxidermied-jaguar-make-decent-armour&quot;&gt;Would a taxidermied jaguar make decent armour?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was closed without explanation, and I am making a Meta post hoping to find out why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions along the lines of &amp;quot;would this material make decent armour&amp;quot; have been asked time and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141358/leaf-based-clothing-practical-historical-fictional?rq=1&quot;&gt;Leaf-based clothing: Practical? Historical? Fictional?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/138944/new-age-armor-materials?rq=1&quot;&gt;New Age Armor Materials&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/163483/how-effective-and-viable-would-bronze-full-plate-be?rq=1&quot;&gt;How effective and viable would bronze full plate be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9680/how-would-metal-cloth-affect-armor-design?rq=1&quot;&gt;How would metal cloth affect armor design?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20572/would-keratin-spider-silk-and-bone-make-good-bio-engineered-armour?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Would keratin, spider silk, and bone make good bio-engineered armour?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/171874/if-it-could-be-shaped-would-chitin-from-giant-insects-make-decent-body-armor?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;If it could be shaped, would chitin from giant insects make decent body armor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143001/human-leather-armor-effective-and-practical?rq=1&quot;&gt;Human-leather Armor: Effective and Practical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/150386/how-effective-would-wooden-scale-armor-be-in-a-medieval-setting?rq=1&quot;&gt;How effective would wooden scale armor be in a medieval setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53703/how-would-aluminium-work-as-medieval-armor?rq=1&quot;&gt;How would aluminium work as medieval armor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/178817/how-well-would-a-magical-scale-armor-strength-cloak-work-as-armor?rq=1&quot;&gt;how well would a magical scale armor-strength cloak work as armor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/159857/what-would-be-the-most-practical-way-to-use-a-dragons-scales-as-armor?rq=1&quot;&gt;What would be the most practical way to use a dragon&amp;#39;s scales as armor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45590/would-armour-made-of-spider-silk-work?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Would armour made of spider silk work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having a hard time figuring out why mine is so different from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One bit that perhaps confused people is that I mentioned some specific points about what makes the armour possibly suitable or unsuitable. Those being its resistance against the weapons found in the Aztecosphere, the strength of the skull, whether the suit would last long, and how well it would fare in the tropical climate. I gave those to show my research and to invite answers to disagree with any of my conclusions. The core question found in the question title did not change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am open to being proven wrong in my assumption that the jaguar armour question is similar to all the other exotic armour material questions. I ask questions, both here and on the non-meta site, because I want to become correct, not because I want my existing opinion proven correct. But I cannot become correct if I am dismissed without explanation. So please tell me how the jaguar question is different from the twelve questions here linked so that I can improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T18:54:26.657" Title="Why was the jaguar armour question closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8287" CreationDate="2021-04-27T02:21:37.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can deny it all you want, but you were in fact asking multiple questions! So far, pretty cut and dried: the question was closed for the stated reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what can you do about it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First thing is: don't edit your original query to complain about other people's motives. Certainly asking here in Meta is a good starting point. You can edit your Main query with a link inviting people to read your complaint / excuses here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read through your query, I found that you are actually asking six qualitatively different questions. This is nothing to worry about, and lots of querents have made this mistake. That's why closure &amp;amp; editing are fundamental parts of SE. You ask if a material can be effective armour. That's a good question, and you should have stuck with that, because as you noted, that kind of query is well received here.  However, you went on to ask five more specific questions that differ considerably from your initial question. You ask about stabbing weapons, you ask about slicing or slashing weapons, you ask about skull protection, you ask about durability of material, you ask about wearer comfort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While all these questions relate to the armour, they leave your query as a whole open ended, liable to receive many opinions on each point and quite the untidy and unfocused mess. Hence the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm sure you're aware, you do need to be careful how to word the body of a question. Generally less is best. Take a look at the aluminium armour question. Like two sentences and everything that needs to be communicated is communicated perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could literally show the picture and edit down the chat to write &amp;quot;Would this make for suitable armour?&amp;quot; and you'd have a good basic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your considerations, don't ask extra questions! Just state your concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I've done some basic research and am worried that these might affect the utility of this kind of leather armour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;typical weapons in use include stabbing &amp;amp; slashing blades made from PRS and whacking weapons made from TUV&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;given that a tanned jaguar pelt is W mm thick;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dead bone weakens as it ages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there's no access to stable storage facilities;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the armour will be roughly handled and abused;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leather is a really good insulator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the climate of the people who will use this is XYZ&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like that and you should be golden!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T02:21:37.457" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8287" CreationDate="2021-04-28T03:19:30.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm one of the original close-voters, and I'm delighted to be the fifth open-voter&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cast my VTC based on the original question: which was (at least) four distinct questions, and the rules allow for only one. At 9.5K+ reputation, I expected you to have the experience to know better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my delight, the question has gone through a series of edits. It's not just a single question, it's now a very well focused and properly conditioned question! Frankly, that doesn't happen very often on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for presenting a fabulous question and for taking all the proverbial arrows in the back to make it one — and I hope you get equally well qualified answers! (And to help, because it really is rare to see improvement and a willingness to work with the system for that improvement, I've thrown a bounty on the question to get it more attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T18:54:26.657" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T18:54:26.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-02T18:52:46.640" Score="8" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the years I've read WB questions that were very generic in nature, and others that wanted the ugly details. A handful prompted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8273/40609&quot;&gt;my post about running to the patent office&lt;/a&gt; because the details would prove to be an enormously valuable commodity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the reality of worldbuilding is that, generally speaking, worldbuilders shouldn't focus too closely on the details. This was underscored by a recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/201890/40609&quot;&gt;Are there alternatives to mining asteroids/planets for obtaining matter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the OP for the linked question is NOT asking for details in any way. It wasn't that which prompted my raised eyebrow. It was the cool quote the OP brought in from &lt;em&gt;We are Legion,&lt;/em&gt; by Dennis E. Taylor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3D printers delivered individual atoms using a number of tuned carbon nanotubes, each sized for specific elements. (...) as you had to place individual carbon atoms, one after another, with zero defect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/201504/40609&quot;&gt;We recently hosted a question about near-future limitations to 3D printing&lt;/a&gt;. It was interesting to see some of the answers and comments reflecting the wonderful (if not engineering-educated) optimism that the technology can evolve to do almost everything, including replace Star Trek replicators (I'm exaggerating a bit, but work with me ). With that question somewhat fresh in my mind, the quote from &lt;em&gt;We are Legion&lt;/em&gt; got me thinking. How long would it take to print a 5mm x 10cm x 1m bar of iron?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, we're dealing with just one atom: iron (Fe), so we're already ignoring a massive amount of &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; for that 3D printer. I also found that I had to ignore &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; for a lot of other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you hold the atoms in place while you're laying them down?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The physical size of the nanotube limits the amount of parallelism that can be applied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quote says &amp;quot;zero defects...,&amp;quot; that's a huge ignorance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, given this accepted &amp;quot;unreality&amp;quot; and lack of details, how long would it take?  More assumptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can parallelize the nanotubes to lay down the approximately 794 billion atoms in a single 10cm line of atoms in a single second.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can similarly parallelize the nanotubes to lay down the entire 5mm x 10cm face of the bar (one atom thick!) in that same second.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are both whopping assumptions, but we started with some doozies, so let's move forward. How long would it take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with 3D printing is that it's working on 2D surfaces. No 3D printer today (or, if I'm honest about it, imaginable within the context of 3D printing today) can structure a 3-dimensional object simultaneously. That means we can optimize the 2D layer — but not the third dimension transport of the print head.  So, how long to get our 5mm x 10cm x 1m bar given the speed we can print the single atomic face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;254 thousand YEARS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting that bar in just 60 seconds would mean building that single atomic face in just 125 femtoseconds, also known as 8e&lt;sup&gt;11&lt;/sup&gt; m/s or about 2,600X the speed of light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes, I played fast-and-loose with the construction math for the sake of a cheap thrill... but I couldn't resist. But you can see why Dennis E. Taylor didn't bother with the details about how his 3D printer worked, right? Look at all the details we had to ignore and assumptions we had to make just to get to the &lt;strong&gt;one detail that proved the idea is implausible and unbelievable if you look at it too closely.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What advice can we give new worldbuilders about balancing the need for a rule with the details implementing that rule? When does it makes sense to look more closely, and when does it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T07:49:38.787" Title="Why asking for the details isn't always a good idea" Tags="|discussion|worldbuilding-process|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8290" CreationDate="2021-05-03T02:16:44.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if by saying this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the reality of worldbuilding is that, generally&#xA;speaking, worldbuilders shouldn't focus too closely on the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are trying to impose your views and values on the entire community. You bring one decent example demonstrating that &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; asking for details is unproductive. However, does it apply to everything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different audiences and different creators prefer different levels of detail. Perhaps, you are one of those readers who skip lengthy descriptions of minor details. However, there are plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Robert_Jordan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jordan&lt;/a&gt; fans who praise his works and the amount of attention (and words) he gave to clothing, hairstyles, scenery, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Details are what makes fictional worlds real. And details are also what ruins fictional worlds&lt;/strong&gt;. It is very easy to get the big picture right, but it is extremely hard to get all details right. Just recall all those zombie films where character never run out of bullets or gasoline no matter how much time has passed since Day 0. Or think about all those fictional societies that 'develop' cultural traits and patterns that are unsustainable and/or defying everything we know about humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should not a stack dedicated to worldbuilding help worldbuilders get details right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some additional thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not your or my place to make decisions on behalf of the questioner when it comes to details they need. It is the prerogative of the creator of a world to choose what to include and what not to include in their world and how deep they want to delve into specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People do not know what they do not know. One's understanding of a subject may not be deep enough to be capable of discerning which details are important and which are not. It is always better to leave these matters to the creators themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to mention that lack of details leads to really bad answers. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/201208/78906&quot;&gt;your answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201198/how-long-would-it-take-for-past-information-to-be-gone-after-a-nuclear-apocalyps/201208&quot;&gt;loss of knowledge after the apocalypse&lt;/a&gt;. You ultimately end in self-contradiction and refute your own thesis that it's very hard to lose knowledge. A brief summary of weak points in your answer is below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid most of the answers you've been given make some serious assumptions that are, frankly, false. It's very, very hard to lose substantial information — even after a nuclear apocalypse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human history is full of instances where most of the information associated with a specific human culture has been lost almost completely. The loss of information (for example, traditional crafts and building techniques: Kimono-making, traditional oven building in Russia, organ building in Europe to name a few) happens today as well. But perhaps you do not regard dying-out technologies as substantial enough. You could've provided details explaining what substantial information means, but you did not. And as such your statement is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize that this seems trite: but generally speaking, people aren't stupid. Almost everyone who survived the apocalypse would be literate (can read and write) and would pass that along to their children. Why? Because knowledge is power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, literacy is not education. It is just an ability to write and read. Secondly,  historically high levels of literacy were associated with the existence of robust educational systems and/or religions that require the ability to read scriptures (e.g. Islam). Thirdly, there are no historical examples of high levels of educational attainment in poor societies. Education and pursuit of knowledge require full bellies and spare time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily knowledge of, say, quantum physics... but knowledge of business, fundamental mathematics, mechanics, civil and structural engineering, electricity, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how much knowledge is going to be lost? You also do not mention art, philosophy, history, technological know-how, languages, and many other areas. Are these not knowledge? Or do you imply that art, history, and philosophy are somehow hard to lose (your premise is that knowledge is very hard to lose)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is a very structured place. Schools would quickly reform because, per #1, people generally aren't stupid. You'll have plenty of people who know that failing to train the next generation is a really bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You make a good point here. However, you miss one important details: Next generations will be trained only in things that are necessary and sustainable. Farmers won't train painters, writers, or philosophers. A lot of non-essential knowledge will be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're addicted to technology. Yes, humans can figure out how to &amp;quot;live off the land.&amp;quot; But realistically, you'll have people getting generators, computers, and the lights working very quickly. Even small town hardware stores have generators ready to sell and you can make a passable biodiesel fuel out of cooking oil (and cooking oil comes from both vegetables and animal fats...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long the generators will last? This is a very important detail. Can your generators last long enough to repair/rebuild infrastructure? Also, are your generators enough to power data centres?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a nuclear apocalypse wouldn't destroy every library in every city (and university, college, school...). Books will be everywhere. In homes, in stores... everywhere. The world wouldn't lack for books unless your story drives a reason for those books to be destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do books contain ALL knowledge? No. One of the most obvious examples is practical knowledge and skills. Take for example cooking. You can learn theory from books. Books can even give you precise recipes. However, if you want to learn cooking skills an expert's guidance and supervision would be the most effective. Of course, you can learn things on your own. However, how much time and resources would it take? Is it even feasible in a post-apocalyptic setting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of books a school library has? Well, it has various textbooks and some small collection of classics. It might have some odd books as well. However, this kind of library contains only a small fraction of knowledge. Moreover, it is often simplified (textbooks) and/or ideologically biased (because schools are not unbiased).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many small towns and colleges have decent book collections? Very few. Books are expensive and troublesome to store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention stores. Stores do not stock books that are not popular with their customer base. Therefore, their stocks are representative of the interests of the local population rather than the accumulated human knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one more important detail in regard to books. Modern books are fragile and modern libraries rely on a controlled environment to preserve books. If post-apocalyptic conditions are unfavourable a lot of books will be partially or fully damaged by moisture, rot, mould, etc. Most of the frequently used books (like repair manuals) will not last long because they are not meant to withstand extensive wear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99.99% of the technology we use today was invented in the last 150 years. This is incredibly important to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are missing an incredibly important detail: The technology and industrial expansion of the past 150 years were not built from scratch or on the ruins of the previous civilisation. They relied on industry, expertise, knowledge, supply chains, and resources that already existed and properly functioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your apocalypse was so thorough that it destroyed 90% of the population (leaving some 770 million people, at least half of which are adults...), you'd still have so many people with so much knowledge in their heads that it would be believable to have everything back to today's standards in 150 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;770 million is a big number, even an impressive one. However, without knowing details related to demographics, population density, the scale of destruction, specifics of post-apocalyptic social structures, and state of communications it is just a number that does not have much predictive power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all major population and industrial centres are destroyed (which is the most likely outcome of a properly planned nuclear apocalypse) the majority of specialists required to rebuild just technology to today's levels will be lost. A lot of specialised knowledge will also be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have the radiation problems... but you have people with modern medical knowledge and medical supplies literally everywhere. You wouldn't have the mortality problems of the middle ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation will last for the first couple of decades. What happens after old doctors die and supplies exhausted will depend on the success of reconstruction. If people do not manage to restore the pharmaceutical industry and train medical personnel high mortality will be back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SciFi loves the idea of a Mad Max-style apocalypse, where whole groups of people have somehow regressed and access to knowledge is mysterious. In reality, the world is swimming in knowledge. Oh, we might lose a lot of the things that don't affect everyday life (like astrophysics and quantum physics) and the destruction may have made it difficult to bring the highest tech back quickly (like nanometer-geometry computer chips).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you finally give some details and you immediately state that 'a lot of things will be lost'. Isn't it self-contradiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But electricity, chemistry, mechanics... and books... would all be in use from 10 seconds after the bombs hit. And there's so much stuff available that resources would exist for years... even decades....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is how long it will last. And the answer to that will depend on details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not underestimate just how much knowledge is in the head of the average 35-year-old person (much less the 60-year-olds...). Your real challenge is justifying its non-existence. That will be a contrivance, not an inevitability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really does not matter how much knowledge a particular individual has if they cannot pass their knowledge onto others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, one more important detail: your answer focuses on the state of affairs immediately after the apocalyptic event, while the question asks for a timeline or future events. You talk about the future only once (suggesting that we can go back to current levels of technology in about 150 years) but you provide no valid support for your statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T20:47:07.290" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T20:47:07.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8290" CreationDate="2021-05-03T16:41:27.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree. &lt;strong&gt;More often than not, when building a world the fewer details the better&lt;/strong&gt;. If for no other reason than that if there are fewer details it's less likely that one detail is going to lead to a contradiction of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if you tell me that there are giant monsters terrorizing the Pacific Rim and we must pilot giant robots defeat them, explaining the details of the metallurgy required to get the grain structure of the metals to make a giant robots structurally sound enough to punch the monsters in the face, will kill my immersion faster than you can say Young's modulus. While I personally love hearing about cool advances in material science unless you're a researcher publishing a new finding, going into that level of detail will, distract me from the story you're trying to tell me. That is assuming that you didn't introduce any inconsistencies in your world by adding the extra information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately we're not here to give advice on how to create a good work set in a world. We're here to help people build their world. We currently don't have a good way to ask &amp;quot;Are you sure you need to explain x?&amp;quot;. That question isn't about building the world but what they're going to use the world for. Perhaps they're writing a story about the evolution of anthropomorphic beings with scenes being set over millennia. Then they definitely need to explain how their animal-people evolved. On the other hand if they're writing a story about a group of animals who work in a coffee shop together and the evolving drama of their interpersonal relationships, explaining how they evolved will detract from story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a way for us to create a policy about this that doesn't turn into subjective gatekeeping of questions. &lt;strong&gt;I still think we should do more.&lt;/strong&gt; We could try to create a culture that tries to emphasize considering how much explanation is sufficient in our answers. Some ways we could go about this include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When answering a question, if the specifics of a detail doesn't matter, emphasize in your answer that it's probably ok to handwave a particular detail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bring up the risk of too much detail in comments and answers to encourage people to think about if more explanation is needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone is asking for some highly technical detail, (Such as the case with the many questions we have about the orbital mechanics of specific configurations with planets) ask clarifying questions about the level of detail. Perhaps the correct answer from a worldbuilding perspective is &amp;quot;You don't need to explain this, because X&amp;quot;. Personally I'm not bothered that having the suns on Tatooine impossibly close together in the sky. Luke staring longingly off into the setting suns was a magnificent scene.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask clarifying questions on posts asking how detailed do they want answers to be. Are they looking for realistic sounding technobabble or will the details be closely interrogated in works set in the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We may want to revisit meta-tags like &lt;em&gt;hard-science&lt;/em&gt; and require people to clarify exactly what details they're looking for in their questions rather than relying on a tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the site's help center text to emphasize that we're here to help with figuring out what you can get away with handwaving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-05-07T15:18:25.673" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T15:18:25.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8290" CreationDate="2021-05-03T18:25:00.243" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it should be up to the questioner how much information they need. And it is up to the answerer to decide how much answer to give. No one should decide for the other. They can ask, and you can answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't say how much information is the right amount as it is not always implied in the question how much the answer will impact their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I'm assuming (and maybe I shouldn't) that the questioner has a certain amount of imagination and will &amp;quot;fill in the blanks,&amp;quot; as it were, with a certain amount of research and said imagination combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it serves better to ask for clarification when there is doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46557" LastEditorUserId="6986" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T12:23:51.857" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T12:23:51.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T02:26:52.120" Score="12" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364007/395595&quot;&gt;is testing the use of 3-vote close-voting &amp;amp; reopen-voting&lt;/a&gt;. This is an important issue that everyone on this Stack should be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We ended up with five votes to close based on very specific feedback from the early days of closure and the very immature state of review, though it had previously been three. Five became the default network wide and, now that we have so many more sites with different amounts of participation, it's clear that it may not be the right number any more.&lt;p&gt;What I've come to realize more recently is that we've been relying on moderators - our &amp;quot;exception handlers&amp;quot; far more than we realized to actually close questions on many of our sites - and on some sites, when the moderators aren't doing the bulk of closures, large percentages of questions that end up in the close or reopen queues never get reviewed at all, aging out entirely after a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt there's any Stack where users, especially new users, don't perceive close voting as a judgement at best, and an insult at worst. What close voting is, is a necessity. No stack is expected to allow (or should allow) any and every question. Stack Exchange wants to be &lt;em&gt;specifically valuable&lt;/em&gt; to the world at large. From SE's perspective, the higher a question's quality, more focused, more relevant, and less duplicative the question, the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, a bit of a problem on Worldbuilding because we're probably the most creative (aka &amp;quot;least objective&amp;quot;) stack in the exchange. It's actually possible here to ask the same question with just enough differences in the base-rules of the querent's world that it justifies leaving the question open. But there is a reality that we need reviews to be processed quickly and with quality (an issue which motivated a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8110/40609&quot;&gt;request by L.Dutch to improve review quality last November&lt;/a&gt;). There is also a reality that questions that don't meet Help Center expectations or obviously meet VTC conditions should be closed quickly with, hopefully, a quick explanation to help the querent improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what to do? We have a chance now to let our voices be heard before Stack Exchange makes their final decision. They're running a 45-day test on a dozen or so Stacks. During that time we can voice our opinions about what is right or wrong for our Stack (bearing in mind that, being owned by SE, it may not matter... but it's always better to voice an opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion:&lt;/strong&gt; If you feel strongly pro-or-con about this, please post your beliefs below. It's a chance to let our moderators know how we feel as they participate at the moderator-level with Stack Exchange. It'd be good if the moderators could also post their observations about how we're doing here on Worldbuilding (a report card, if you will) so we can know if we users are holding up our end of the load. If you feel really strongly about the issue, you can always follow that first link above and post on the SE Meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T00:21:29.103" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T14:22:32.680" Title="Testing 3-vote Closures &amp; Reopenings and the Value of Closing Questions" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8290" CreationDate="2021-05-11T07:49:38.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The details are critical to the author&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;but should never be in the story unless they're going to trigger a plot point.&lt;/strong&gt; So what that it takes 254,000 years to make a short iron bar. Call that 10 seconds and it's now one of the rules of your world. You have an amount of time it takes to build a structure, a fortress, a warship. That's what the handwavium is for. It's also so you can avoid explaining the details of exactly how it's done. However that's for one specific type of story. In this type of story every detail is critical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How fast is the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People spend hours on the internet disputing this particular detail, the scale its given on doesn't correspond with anything much in the real world, but that's deliberate, it's for another specific type of story. In this type of story the technology only exists to give plot points, how it works is irrelevant. It's all handwavium, and like wizards, the Enterprise always turns up exactly on time for its role in the story, never too early, never too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not up to us, answering questions, to decide how much of the detail goes into the story, that's up to the author. We can suggest that it's avoided, but that really comes down to our own tastes in such tales. Do you prefer gritty human interactions in STL generation ships where you're stuck with the same people for years and the engines are slowly decaying, or shiny warp driven planet of the week and alien of the day where the technology just works except when it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T07:49:38.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8295" CreationDate="2021-05-11T17:44:18.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Good Idea&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short Short Version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Close a questionable query fast, give the new OP some help on how to make it better, reopen the improved query fast. This is what &amp;quot;closing&amp;quot; a query is all about everywhere on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regular Version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What I've often seen occurring in WB is a scenario like the following: a good query gets asked but is poorly written (usually &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;lacking in sufficient details&amp;quot;); it's such a good topic that it gets upvotes and a couple early answers; one member comes along and sees that there are some problems and VsTC; while others are asking for clarifications in comments, the query gets several more answers (sadly, often by folks who should know better than to answer a query that's in the close queue! (and I know those folks are sometimes me!)); and by the time five close votes are cast, there are 20 upvotes, eight well received but radically different answers, and a green checkmark on one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, this demonstrates that we have a vibrant and engaged community in the WB forum. On the other hand, it also demonstrates that we're really not very good at conducting our business in a way consistent with SE. We're the most dysfunctional of all SE forums: simply because the art of geopoesy, the craft of worldbuilding, is ill suited to the SE model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As JBH rightly points out, our forum is clearly the most creative and I've pointed out before that our query types are almost universally opinion based to a large degree. I think some of this has to do with our propensity to accept any and every question that comes our way regardless of how well or how poorly it's asked. I think the overall quality of our forum would rise not by answering questions any differently, &lt;strong&gt;but rather by improving the way we ask questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: I hold that, excluding cases where L. Dutch, Lord of the Instrumentality, wields mighty Mjǫllnir of moderatorial muscle, a three-vote-to-close / three-vote-to-reopen scheme would be pretty ideal for WB.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we're active enough that three votes would serve to prevent the above scenario from happening too frequently: we can catch the questions that just need a little TLC before they become crazy active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speeding up the review process will reduce the chances that a question become uneditable because doing so would invalidate a response: not a frequent occurrence, but a sad one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sometimes good questions in need of alteration languish in the review queue when, to be quite honest, waiting for five VsTC is postponing the inevitable: three is quite a sufficient number for closing and reopening&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reducing the number from 5 to 3 ought to alleviate some of the fears and concerns that users have re real or imagined vindictive closure practices: reducing the required votes would at least appear to lessen the supposed powers that our forum's Illuminati wield&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the turn-around time-frame would also be improved: very frequently, it seems that querents, especially new ones, disappear or abandon their questions during the closure process: I think dragging it out might put a damper on their shinybright new user excitement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CAVEANT IANITORES&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With a reduced requirement for closure &amp;amp; reopening, I think it will fall to the VTCers to be more clear -- &lt;em&gt;in writing&lt;/em&gt; -- what's actually wrong with the question. I've seen the argument &amp;quot;why do I need to write a comment when there's already a rationale for closure&amp;quot; too often turn into an excuse for laziness. Yes, I've been in lazy in the past, too, in this regard! But I find that querents really do respond very positively to a quick note in comments as to what actually needs to be improved. A quick closure process could leave a querent stunned and when no (especially) senior or more knowledgeable users take the time to cushion the blow, that shock can often turn into irrational anger, which leads to snarky comments, insulting edits of the question and rage filled questions here on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we'd need to consider these things as potential sequellae of instituting a shortened closure process. On the positive side, it would also be helpful to remind a shocked querent that quickly editing the question so that it conforms to SE's rigorous rules and regulations will earn them a similarly quick and even less painful reopening process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T12:36:40.867" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T12:36:40.867" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8295" CreationDate="2021-05-11T23:48:13.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I think 3 closevotes is less suitable for this site than 5.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think that, because we have more subjective rules, it is more important that there is a broader consensus that a question deserves closure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is the most creative Stack site; and that makes the rules the most subjective, the most open to interpretation. That is an unwelcome but inevitable property of this system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that there are going to be more dubious cases here than on other sites. I think that for dubious questions, where there's reasonable arguments for either side, it is important that there be a broader consensus on whatever the final resolution be (closing or not closing). A consensus makes the end result more consistent with the general site culture, and therefore the site experience more reliable. It is more fun to use this place when you have some idea what to expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that moving to 3 close-votes will result in quick closing of dubious questions. Some may consider that a benefit, but the problem is that with fewer required close-votes you no longer need to follow the rules as most people understand them - you need to follow the rules so strictly that there are no three people who still disagree. Three people who understood the rules differently, and the question is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, strict adherence to rules is usually better than questionable adherence. But here the rules are by their nature more subjective than on other sites. Reasonable people can have differing interpretations, and it is a matter of chance who is active when. So summed up, moving to 3 close-votes increases the &lt;em&gt;randomness&lt;/em&gt; in the site's emergent close-vote behaviour. Askers are more at the whim of how many people with a different interpretation are active at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, 3 reopen votes would also allow for quick reopening after a dubious question was improved in edit. But the reopen queue is subject to the same issue of &lt;em&gt;randomness&lt;/em&gt;. You only need to have 3 people active at once who agree that the newly edited question does fit the rules; regardless of whether a majority of people agree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, there is a possibility that a question sitting in the closing queue receives more answers, and becomes uneditable as a result. The same however is possible to happen when a question ping-pongs from closed to open and back depending on the whims of whoever's active. Therefore I am glad that the Stack Exchange folk have mentioned tracking this metric specifically, to see if my worries here are justified. And although off-topic for this question, I personally think that edits to change a question from close-worthy to open-worthy should be exempt from the rule &amp;quot;no edits that invalidate answers&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another (predictable) concern with three close-votes is that it decreases the odds that one of the closers explains themselves in a comment, and may thus lead to more &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8287/why-was-the-jaguar-armour-question-closed&quot;&gt;annoying&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8116/let-me-know-what-part-of-my-question-is-opinion-based-so-i-can-fix-it&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7923/are-questions-opinion-based-when-asking-about-the-behaviour-of-people-in-the-agg&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;. This too is a property of the creative nature Worldbuilding.SE: comments are more necessary here than on Stack Overflow, as Elementilas describes well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I lack the knowledge of whether there is a need to close questions more quickly than is happening now. I never see more than half a dozen questions in the closing-queue at a time, so I personally do not get that impression, but obviously I cannot tell for sure. I will leave it to actual moderators to determine whether there is a physical need; for now I can only share my concerns. I have read the November post but it seems to be about the quality of reviewing, not the quantity or expediency of closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T23:48:13.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-12T09:54:07.493" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I put a temporary hiatus on my activity on StackExchange to try out Reddit. I go back, and this place had become a ghost town, even the factory floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happened?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32097" LastEditorUserId="32097" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T12:59:02.643" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T13:33:16.117" Title="What happened to the chat rooms?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8299" CreationDate="2021-05-12T13:33:16.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Circumstances have conspired&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community took an arrow to the knee after a certain incident, that takes some recovering from. Coupled with the fact that over the past year the majority of our regular users have likely been working from home and have other distractions during the work day's downtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T13:33:16.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8295" CreationDate="2021-05-12T20:49:47.770" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extending my comment :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I doubt there's any Stack where users, especially new users, don't&#xA;perceive close voting as a judgement at best, and an insult at worst.&#xA;What close voting is, is a necessity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we presuming that people are happy in their failure at making a good question? Because I know some folks who would definitely presume their good question(s) will be happy here. And, you know, the higher the hopes are, the harder the fall is }i{...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If blanks are as much a way of putting things as words are, any kind of action can -and will- be interpreted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue then is how it is judged. I can hardly think of a closure as a good action. I mean, if people asked to close it, there must be an issue in it, right? An issue that &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; made. However, I thought that my question will be interesting, at least enough to write it down :'(. That leads to a good mental contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people are facing their contradictions, they either have to face two choices :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They take the hit and accept the reality as it is. It will take some efforts, as the person's reality need to reform around this new concept and adapt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They block themselves out. It's the easy path, since you don't need to wreck your world and rebuild it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truthfully, our intelligence is really diligent when it's about taking lazily the diligence rather than deal with a non-gentle walk, so unless their other goals and desire are more prominent (curiosity, diplomaty, craziness...), they'll take the first option. It might not show up, but it's something that may -and therefore will- pop up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note it's not a vote up or down. I actually don't care at all, things will happen with or without me. But I wanted to point that the initial premise makes me raise an eyebrow, which might break down the logic from the bottom up. Just wanted to say that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T20:49:47.770" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-23T06:47:06.670" Score="5" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder how do you read this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/203062/how-far-could-a-peak-social-manipulator-go&quot;&gt;How far could a peak social manipulator go?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Rogue Ant. and I had a discussion in the comments and came to a realisation that we read this question in two different ways.  A Rogue Ant. suggested that we 'bring this issue up in a meta question and ask for consensus'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Rogue Ant. sees this question as a question 'about their [character's] future possible achievements within an undefined and potentially huge set of situations', while I perceive it as a question about the character's capabilities (manipulation and its limitations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is based on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP's question in the body: &lt;em&gt;However, how far could one with pinnacle skill in manipulation go in terms of what they're able to influence and manipulate without the skill being a superpower or supernatural in nature?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, this question is about the nature of manipulation and its limitations. The character appears only to eliminate the skill level variable (which is also one of the limitations). The provided examples serve as an attempt to establish the limits of possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please read A Rogue Ant.'s comments or direct questions to them if you wish to learn more about their position on the issue and their reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question could've been worded better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My background is in arts, psychology, and communications. My perspective is influenced by my background. In other words, I am biased (and I do not feel bad about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am not looking for consensus. I am more interested in various interpretations of this question and the reasonings behind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I need to make myself clear about &lt;em&gt;my purpose&lt;/em&gt; for starting this discussion (which is most likely different from A Rogue Ant.'s interest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not looking for a verdict on who is right and who is wrong. It does not matter to me. I want to understand how people perceive questions like this.&lt;/strong&gt; I want to see what logic and what assumptions people use when interpreting this type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I specifically stated my background because it is ultimately responsible for my understanding of the abovementioned question. I have biases that lead to certain assumptions that look 'obvious' to me. However, I have enough self-awareness to understand that my 'obvious' differs from other people's 'obvious'. The answers to my query can help me to see these differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also hope that the answers can yield some insights into how to deal with questions related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Humanities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humanities&lt;/a&gt;. It is my opinion that this stack is too focused on natural sciences and technology. I believe that WB.SE should have more questions about philosophy, culture, and societies because these are important parts of the fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand better how people think and how they read questions I may finally be able to word my thoughts on the subject of humanities. And maybe put some suggestions that would make it easier for people to ask this type of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is my opinion and I would not force it on anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to ask for clarifications, explanations, or additional information in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2021-05-26T19:46:11.607" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T22:19:26.670" Title="Character's capabilities or not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8302" CreationDate="2021-05-23T13:05:59.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both points of view are valid. This is one of those questions where neglecting to describe the setting so damages the question, that people will not see a question about a system of rules, but a question for a potential plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What are the limitations of power X in setting Y?&amp;quot; is an acceptable kind of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Can you give me a story where someone with power X ends up on top?&amp;quot; is not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the question &amp;quot;What are the limitations of power X?&amp;quot;, sans description of the setting, can be interpreted as synonymous with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific power of social manipulation is entirely dependent on other people's actions. If we have no boundaries on those other people, for their actions and for circumstances, then we can imagine them to do whatever we like - not because social sciences are soft sciences, but because the circumstances for a manipulator to abuse are myriad. There is no way to even categorise them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The power can do as much as the author wants.&amp;quot; is a terribly unhelpful comment that I see all too often on this site. But the intention behind it is not (in my interpretation) that manipulation cannot be defined or reasoned about - it is that the circumstances for a manipulator to abuse cannot be defined or reasoned about, because the question makes no attempt to narrow down the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question deserves to be closed, but the reason should have been &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity.&amp;quot; That is a close-reason that prompts the remedy: adding extra words about the world, the setting. &amp;quot;You are asking a question about a story rather than the world.&amp;quot; is unhelpful because there is no solution in sight, and it makes assumptions about the author's motivations that may be inaccurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not VTO but I would change the close-reason if I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T13:05:59.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8302" CreationDate="2021-05-23T17:36:01.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without knowing what kind of people we're dealing with, I read this as a question of &lt;em&gt;human nature&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/human_nature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Human nature&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is, essentially a set of rules (or guidelines): the range of qualities and behaviours (at the least) that all humans share. As such, this is a &amp;quot;nature of the invented world&amp;quot; type of question. As with orbital mechanics, human dynamics are perfectly within our scope of practice to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Perspective:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I hold that &amp;quot;human nature&amp;quot; in general, &amp;quot;sophont nature&amp;quot; of any kind, or any individual subset of such natures fall within our purview. These are fundamental considerations to stories, yes, but also to history itself. A sophont race's nature derives from its physical and spiritual evolution, the kind of world it arises and lives in, the basic kind of life form it is, the kinds and natures of other life forms around it. I'd argue that this is clearly on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disconcur with A Rogue Ant that this is a question about  &lt;em&gt;a character's future possible achievements within an undefined and potentially huge set of situations&lt;/em&gt;. The problems here are, at the least, &lt;em&gt;character development&lt;/em&gt; is out of our forum's scope of practice, in so far as choices go. That's story building. I think had the OP not written &amp;quot;I'm trying to create a character...&amp;quot; and had in stead focused on what is generally possible within the broad range of human nature, I think the story focused VTC wouldn't have had a good reason. In other words, I understand the wherefore but disagree with the that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with Otkin that this is a query of capabilities. Specifically, capabilities within a given context of race, culture, history, technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:36:01.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8302" CreationDate="2021-05-24T23:23:55.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question has a lot of problems before it even gets to your issue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for new users to ask broad, vague, multi-point questions, all in violation of Help Center restrictions. Unfortunately, rather than insisting that the OP clarify and improve the question, Otkin and ARogueAnt. engaged in a debate (which I've done before... so this is certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Too many questions:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How far ... without being a superpower?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would 3rd party/commercial world feats be within the capacity of a...?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How far could my manipulator go?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be his limitations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Undefined concepts:&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's a &amp;quot;peak social manipulator?&amp;quot; I can legitimately come up with everything from a stone cold sociopath to someone who uses Facebook well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's a social manipulator superpower? And if we define it as Johan Liebert from &lt;em&gt;Monster...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3rd party/commercial worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; In my opinion, asking if the abilities of a 3rd party/commercial world creature is within the OP's undefined concept violates our no-third-party-or-commercial-worlds rule.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's left is a bunch of assumptions: meaning Otkin and ARogueAnt. are both right and both wrong&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question should have been closed and should not be reopened. Honestly, it's so vague that there can be no objective answer.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To continue, I need some definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (on-topic) is about the development and consistent use of rules and systems for a fictional world of the OP's own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding (off-topic) is about circumstances, plot, and character actions/decisions.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the crux of the issue is this: Is this question worldbuilding (Otkin's position) or storybuilding (ARogueAnt.'s position)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, I favor Otkin's interpretation because, lacking information from the OP, I don't perceive the question to be about a single &amp;quot;character,&amp;quot; but about a &amp;quot;class of character&amp;quot; equivalent to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;. The OP made an error by not using this tag. Nevertheless, the post is not asking about how such a creature would respond in any given situation, but how that creature is reflected or expressed in their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I remind the reader that I agree that this question should have been closed and believe it should not be reopened until improved. Problems like this analysis are the very reason closing questions exists. The debate between Otkin and ARogueAnt. (and my response, for that matter) is irrelevant. We're debating because we don't have clarification from the OP. That should have been red flag #1 that the question should have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in that regard, ARogueAnt. (who voted for closure) is right and Otkin (who did not) is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is inappropriate for this question (and that should have been a reason to close the question, too). &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; requires the OP to present (a) a circumstance, situation, or construction that reflects the use or application of the rules of the world and (b) the affected rules of the world. The purpose of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; is to verify that the circumstance, situation, or construction consistently abides by the rules of the world. As usual, the OP used the tag without reading through the tag wiki and didn't realize that it means something very different than they intended — which is inevitably, &amp;quot;is my fictional idea realistic in the real world?&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular post will remain incomplete until StumblingOver, the OP of the linked question, posts a response. We can't read the OP's mind and no amount of rationalization will justify any interpretation of what the OP wants. Without the OP's clarification, this entire conversation, while interesting, is an exercise in futility. Whatever Otkin and ARogueAnt. think is right, the only interpretation that actually is right is StumblingOver's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;VTC:Needs Focus, &amp;quot;This question currently includes multiple questions in one. It should focus on one problem only.&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;VTC:Needs Details or Clarity, &amp;quot;This question should include more details and clarify the problem,&amp;quot; also VTC:Opinion-Based, &amp;quot;This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;Monica Ciello's answer to &amp;quot;Policy Clarification: Asking about commercial or third-party worlds&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;...All questions must be specific and answerable, ...must include context, ...[and] must include restrictions/requirements....&amp;quot; The same page includes a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624&quot;&gt;the perfect question checklist&lt;/a&gt; and further states, &amp;quot;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; we read, &amp;quot;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story. If a system, event or element of the world is causing you problems we are here to help. If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;There's an incredibly important point to make here. The answer to the question, &amp;quot;is my fictional idea realistic in the real world?&amp;quot; is always NO! The logic is both simple and undeniable. (a) The fictional idea doesn't already exist in the real world and (b) if it could, the question would become a real-world question without worldbuilding context making it &lt;strong&gt;off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt; This is intentional. This stack is not here to answer questions about the real world in a real-world context. When asked in a worldbulding context (usually by making &amp;quot;my fictional world&amp;quot; identical to the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;) the answer becomes very trivially (very trivially) YES! because the OP can always adjust the rules of his/her world to guarantee the consistent existence of the idea. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag's purpose is to give people the ability to test the rules of their world. Nothing more.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T03:03:34.950" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T03:03:34.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2021-05-25T14:17:21.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the way that you can ask a question, and it might be answered with something you never saw coming. Even though many of my questions get closed, I still get insight on how to proceed forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80942" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T14:17:21.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8295" CreationDate="2021-05-26T12:04:02.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;5 for close, and mods are not participating in closure, only delete spam and pornograpfy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 for open&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the point in discussing 3 or 5 if half(won't look for it atm) of q's solo closures of mod? We are ahead of the whole se network for average close votes. (All my subjective observations, not actual stat, which woukd be interesting to see)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that we subjective/vague place(not so much so if one thinks about it as a place helping people to create better scify using science etc as per tour), but have seen bad questions to be closed in a span of about 25 views, so q's are closed fast if they diserve that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However 1300 questions with more than 5 answers are closed as of today, and it easy to find ones closed with 4 or more answers from high rep users, and assuming they are not just for free internet points and know how things are rolling, there is no reason for those questions to stay closed then. (And if assume they do not, then we have multiple problems, which we probably do, but it is a different topic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another of the reasons, for open votes to be less than close&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and there is about 4+ reasons for that freshness, opinion dauning syndrome, no easy way to find closed q which one answered, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user is not competent enough to answer the question, then it is easy to misjudge the question, because of not understanding it. I did tests on myself, looking for topics I have little competence or interest and then looking answers later, yeah knowing does not mean be able to prevent such misjudgemts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soo we should close q's when most of us agree on general grounds they are trash, and experts in particular fields have to be able to open q's in their field of knowledge more easily, if those q's were misjudged by community due lack of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjective proportion would be 8 for close, 2 for open, something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would not count on that mechanical things/solutions will make a better situation or be a full auto solution for wb, because of enumerous directions and richeness of topics which we handle, or should handle but not doing so well, magic/fantasy fraction still has upper hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing q's faster is misconception which happens because of bad handling of questions and coping mechanism of mature users with that fast closing and freshbees which need some rep lift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is necessity for more decisive actions, smart ones, mods and community together, not like it is atm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thanks for the post, it nice to know and ripe fruits thay someone keeps an eye on things for ya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T12:04:02.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2021-05-27T03:06:44.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brain exercise. I had to do a lot of research for most of my best answers, and it keeps me sharp and learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5213/21222&quot;&gt;Dutch&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5211/21222&quot;&gt;HDE&lt;/a&gt; said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T03:06:44.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:30:10.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a fascination with Magic and Magic systems. The feel of applying logic to areas that are governed by something other than our own understanding of physics or creating an internally consistent mechanism for how to govern magic is exciting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, coming up with creative solutions to magic related loopholes or resolving a &amp;quot;I don't want them to be able to do X, How can I do that without causing Y?&amp;quot;-type problem is a great brain exercise!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only shame is how close they stray into opinion-based troubles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51297" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:30:10.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-08T21:29:37.963" Score="-4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange for slightly over a year and I have realized that many very specific and rarely used tags exist. On the other hand, certain topics only have very broad tags that are not very specific that could hinder searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has a tag for [beer] that only contains only one question so far, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8019/should-beer-be-moved-to-alcoholic-beverages&quot;&gt;which I mentioned before.&lt;/a&gt; However, there are about as many questions focusing on wine compared to beer, yet wine does not have a dedicated tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Worldbuilding Stack Exchange seems to lack many tags that could potentially be useful. For example, there are no tags focusing on violence or violent crime even though a search for violence brings up 1,176 results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have a standardized system for determining which tags are necessary and which tags are redundant? As of right now, there does not seem to be any such system. Last year, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8025/should-we-delete-all-tags-that-have-fewer-than-10-uses-and-have-not-been-used-in&quot;&gt;I proposed deleting all tags that have fewer than 10 uses and have not been used in the past 2 years.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71969" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T20:16:31.313" Title="Can we have a standardized system for determining how specific tags can be?" Tags="|feature-request|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-09T19:03:03.380" Score="9" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know how to talk about it politely, please excuse my bluntness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/205015/can-gender-identity-exist-in-a-world-without-gender-roles&quot;&gt;Can gender identity exist in a world without gender roles?&lt;/a&gt;) is the perfect example that the WB.SE community ignores social sciences. Every single VTC'er who commented shows little to no familiarity with gender theory and academic research in the corresponding field. Every attempted answer uses notions of gender inconsistent with existing scientific terminology and methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the OP correctly pointed out in the comments this is a yes/no question that should be answered based on existing psychological and sociological theories of gender. Please note that the OP &lt;strong&gt;does not&lt;/strong&gt; ask whether the world without gender roles is possible or how to engineer such a world. The OP &lt;em&gt;states that in their world gender roles do not exist&lt;/em&gt;. And then asks whether gender identities can exist in such a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has one and only one correct answer that will be true regardless of the characters and their actions: Gender identities cannot exist in a world without gender roles (this is derived from the very definitions of gender, gender identity, and gender role). This answer also holds true for any setting and any species that have intelligence comparable to humans and social structures that enable the existence of social phenomena such as social roles and identities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of gender is non-intuitive and confusing, especially if one has no formal training in gender studies and/or related fields or has no personal experience with non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cisgender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cisgender&lt;/a&gt; people. Moreover, the results of scientific research contradict common sense (because common sense is based on dominating cultural norms and stereotypes). One must adhere to science when evaluating questions related to gender and when answering those questions if they strive for high quality and objectivity of decisions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question mentioned above is one of the most blatant examples of disregard for social sciences on this stack. But there are other questions that are treated in a similar way: The VTC'ers do not understand the theories behind the question (or applicable theories and frameworks), do not care about those theories, and often refuse to accept their existence if confronted. The questions are often labelled as opinion-based (aka not answerable with facts and citations) despite a huge number of academic papers that could've been used to substantiate an answer or 'Too Story Based' despite questions being theoretical in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the current attitude toward social sciences in this community has a number of negative effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fewer questions about culture and society (WB.SE almost can be renamed into 'Fictional physics and technology');&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creates a situation where those who understand social sciences have little interest in asking questions (because of low probability of getting satisfactory answers) and those who are not versed in social sciences cannot ask questions because they cannot write lengthy theoretical explanations that could help to avoid closure;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the potentially lower quality of fictional worlds created by the members of this community;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fewer specialists in social sciences who frequent the stack (which leads to low-quality questions and answers in the fields of humanities);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dissemination of falsehoods and stereotypes (a lot of answers to questions that involve humans and societies are answered based on personal opinions [speculations], common sense, stereotypes, and false assumptions instead of science and contain a lot of factual mistakes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that just the latter warrants the change of attitude toward social sciences. It is perfectly fine if the community does not want to deal with 'soft' sciences, but it is not fine to spread falsehoods. It is better to exclude all questions that are not related to technology and natural sciences than to continue as it is now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This post is not an attempt to reopen the gender identity question. Please, do not explain why you think it should stay closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not linking other questions because I do not want this discussion to devolve into a discussion of reasons for the closure of any specific question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In order to keep this post relatively short I had to omit a lot. Please, ask questions in the comments if you want me to elaborate on something in more detail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want a detailed explanation for the answer to the gender identity question, please, invite me to chat and I will do my best to provide it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not have access to statistics and I do not have time to go through all questions by hand, but it seems to me that 4-5 years ago when I just started using WB.SE there were more questions related to humanities than what we have now. This is my impression and it may be wrong. If someone has these data I would appreciate it if they could share them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-06-19T18:32:41.307" Title="Why does WB.SE treat social sciences as non-existent?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-10T01:07:24.983" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In general&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many problems regarding social sciences (or sometimes people say &amp;quot;soft sciences&amp;quot;) that we, people on WB:SE are facing :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First and foremost, they are often related to individuals, and as such tend to be quickly classified as &amp;quot;It's story based!&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; Thing is, social studies are about groups of people, not individuals. More on that further down in the example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then, they are often considered as &amp;quot;fuzzy&amp;quot;, which lead to either &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;need to be focused&amp;quot; or plain &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; issues.&lt;/strong&gt; That is, until you get statistics because there are recomforting digits there. Yep, it's more comfortable to evaluate if you have evident formulas and values to reliably relate to, unlike some weird words which are seemingly apparent to feelings. However, concrete data, accurate word usage, formula and experiment protocols exist in social sciences, but it's just not as evident or famous as the physics or maths you learn at school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally and most importantly, because it's often talking about our daily lives, we like to see ourselves as the role of the &amp;quot;expert&amp;quot;, which is a dangerous stance we all took once in our life.&lt;/strong&gt;** It's not because you are doing something routinely that you know how &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; people do, and especially why &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; actually do that. Without having thoroughly studied a topic, you can only reasonably say you don't know, or give a self-related counter-example as to why something &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; be wrong. I stress that I don't mean &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; wrong&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; be wrong. This point leads to many misunderstandings, in both the asker and the answerers as on how to present and tackle the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Taking the related question as example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, while written out of good intentions, didn't manage to explain clearly the different elements consisting the issues they had. But it's totally normal, people who are facing gender dysphoria&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; who are the most apt at seeing the difference, are often times unable to describe it. &lt;strong&gt;When talking about this topic, I often advise to clearly state every time what meaning to &amp;quot;gender&amp;quot; they refer to. So will I try to do here :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assigned-at-birth gender&lt;/strong&gt; : The easiest definition : what sex you were officially born with. It's whether you have XX or XY DNA, or most of the time which apparatus you had as a baby (not all cases of people having XY are assigned male at birth!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gender role&lt;/strong&gt; : In and among the society, which main genders are there. While I cannot ascertain with 100% certainty, the gender role could be defined by a combination of physical traits (clothes, makeup...) and social norms, habits (how you interact with others) which help in defining one or the other gender. For transgender people, it's often what visible gender you &amp;quot;present as&amp;quot; to others, or (I dislike this term but it is often used) what you &amp;quot;pass as&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gender identity&lt;/strong&gt; : What you think you are. Do you think you are a female, do you think you are a male? Another gender or a blend of the two? It is a personal feeling, which is invisible for most people, but can be revealed by taking public actions which are not common for your gender (and not as a joke, too }i{). For instance, if you feel shame or lots of incomfort at the idea of wearing a dress all day at work in occident cultures, then your gender identity is a lil' more likely to be a man (It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a certainty! It's a complex topic :) ).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I reread the original question, there was a lack of prior-definition like above to help people understand what elements exactly makes the issue the asker was facing. In fact, the critical word gender was used as a shorthand for many definitions. That's why I asked in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126129/discussion-on-question-by-user85880-can-gender-identity-exist-in-a-world-without&quot;&gt;bound discussion&lt;/a&gt; to detail what they meant, which they did to the best of their extent. This consequently led us to the 2nd issue and which A Rogue Ant sums up quite clearly :) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your edit seems to touch on fashion, more than anything which can be answered with an objective eye, can you clarify what it is you need to know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remember the &amp;quot;social sciences seem fuzzy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;self-expertise&amp;quot; part? Well, We have fallen in these cases.&lt;/strong&gt; We, as individuals, think that wearing a certain type of clothing is a subjective thing -with good sense-, and paradoxally, we know in most countries today, most men -the gender role- wear pants while women are more likely to wear skirts or dresses. Where lies exactly the subjective part? Not when looking at groups of people in the culture, it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the trap which is also my first point : You actually have the individual scale, and the society's one. The first one is subjective, the latter is objective. Even though people will do their own thing of their own free will, as a group their actions will move in average towards the same direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's something, &lt;strong&gt;we -the answerers- need to be careful of : Where lies the line between pure subjectivity (off-topic, opinion-based...) and objectivity?&lt;/strong&gt; Are we talking about a whole society which moves in the same direction? If yes, then I'm more likely to declare it as on-topic. If it's only about one person, obviously no. A few peeps? You're right in the fog, so you should flip your tongue 7 times in front of your horse before pronouncing your sentence. Here, it becomes important to check if it's just a way to say things by giving an attracting personality to an otherwise random person in a group. Or... To check if it is so tightly tied to a series of events it cannot be considered as taking out a random group of people from the whole society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking only about the on/off-topic problem, &lt;strong&gt;the question is on-topic to me since it talks about the whole society and is beneficial in improving one's world&lt;/strong&gt;. It's a case where groups can be defined without the need to tell any story event, or in other words : &lt;strong&gt;what happened or will happen is not important there : It's about what people are.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Gender dysphoria : A discrepancy between what you feel as, and what the environment tells you you are, including your own body. It's often what transgender people feel or have felt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-06-10T06:49:02.130" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T06:49:02.130" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8311" CreationDate="2021-06-10T14:42:22.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess there are many issues which will hinder the tag standardization :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you remove tags, you'll have to decide what to do with questions without other tags on it :). So... It may not be as standardizable as you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The violence tag is a T.R.I.C.K.Y topic (Terribly Risky Introduction to Criminals Killing You). Making it as a tag means that you can officially ask questions about it as one of the main theme for creating a world, which is morally dubious for many people. Just look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8170/a-proposal-to-establish-policy-regarding-the-torture-and-execution-tags&quot;&gt;meta-topics about torture&lt;/a&gt;. Goat, it's quite heated enough to cook some pancakes on it. This problem may arise for other tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'd have to recognize true necessary niche tags from tags which can be merged together. Statistically they might have enough posts each and look similar, but the first one need to be kept, while the other one need to be merged or deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think it might be possible to reduce the number of tags. The problem lies in who is feeling interested in this matter to actually fight the bacterial tags and make some proposals, to either remove or merge these tags. I rarely read the tags, only see this as a search tool, so *slips away to the door*...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T14:42:22.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-10T15:04:29.330" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stripping away the red herring of &amp;quot;gender&amp;quot; as it is currently used in American culture (in particular), there are simply two issues at play here in this forum: &amp;quot;Story based&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;. I read through the comments to the original query and discovered that, unsurprisingly, these were at the heart of the VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bias in WB.SE, and that bias tends to favour queries that align more with hard SciFi. The basic assumption seems to be that a fictional world ought to work just like Earth, and that every question ought to be simply addressable by known science. This bias is not specifically against social sciences: there exist the same biases against magic, fantastic beasts, fantastic peoples, alternate &amp;amp; orthogonal sciences, supernatural realia, etc. Such questions are often met with outright hostility, as we could see in the cited example (being shut down for a spurious reason); but usually they're just met with dramatic skepticism of the &amp;quot;how will your dragon deal with gravity&amp;quot; sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of bias here is twofold. One is that bias is brought in by the individual. Wherever there is a community of individuals come together for a purpose like ours (to help other people understand their fictional worlds!) these biases can not be avoided. The other kind of bias is that of the platform itself: SE makes certain assumptions about itself and writes into its constitution certain norms &amp;amp; certain protocols that simply don't work well with the fictional. This can not be avoided either: it simply falls to the community to continually renew awareness that this institutional bias exists and that we as members can't fall for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best we can do, or the best I can do, is to review the underlying issues as matters of Stack Exchange protocol and realign them to fit the nature of the forum community they must be applied to. In so doing, perhaps those individuals who have such biases against social science or the fantastic will be persuaded not so much to jump on the bandwaggon, but to at least refrain from accosting those who would march in the parade!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story Based&lt;/strong&gt;. To review, there are (give or take) five elements to narrative: setting, theme, character, conflict, plot. The only part of that we deal with here in this forum is the nature of the setting --- the fictional world. The original query in question is not about a narrative. While it could be cleaned up, the question is clearly one of world and not narrative per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of so-called &amp;quot;fuzzy&amp;quot; questions of behaviour, of psychology, of soft-science get closed for this reason. For clarity, unless the query specifically addresses theme, character, conflict or plot, it is not a question about a story. Leave it open or find a better reason to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion based&lt;/strong&gt;. I've been railing against this closure rationale ever since I started here a few years ago. To review, Stack Exchange the broad community is designed to be a place where a querent can ask a specific, focused question and get a coherent &amp;amp; fact based answer. This works great in Chemistry and Literature and English Usage and Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost no question ever asked in WB.SE is actually fact based or even has one correct answer. Almost every question ever asked here is, actually, opinion based. It is the nature of fictional worlds and all things in them to be somewhat fluid, polyoptional and open to multiple interpretations. And it is the purpose of WB.SE to address the irrealia of the fictional, the fantastic, the mythic and the unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summation&lt;/strong&gt;. For our purposes, social sciences are no different than orbital mechanics or chemistry or geology. We need, I think, as a community, to learn to read a little deeper into a question. To find the question behind the question. We need to embrace these kinds of difficult questions; we need to engage our creativity and our imagination more than we need to exercise our VTC buttons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is clearly asking about character development or plot choices, when a question is clearly asking for a simple opinion from among several equal choices: please vote to close those!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is clearly asking about the nature of the world itself or the nature of the people that inhabit it: leave the question open!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T15:04:29.330" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8295" CreationDate="2021-06-11T14:12:17.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;WB.SE needs to be 5 because we are such a multi-disciplinary stack&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KeizerHarm already covers most of the reasons why 5 is good in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8298/57832&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt;; so, I won't really go into repeating them, but for me the biggest reason why this is true of WB.SE is because WorldBuilding is multi-disciplinary: this makes bad close votes much more common here than in other SEs because we are more likely to vote to close when we do not understand the all of the fields of study that could be applied to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've personally seen it dozens of times: a question gets 3-4 downvotes really quickly because someone thinks it is opinion based until someone comments explaining why it is not.  The it goes on to becoming a very active and well accepted answer without the question needing any revision at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you may have a highly intelligent and reputable stack user who specializes in astrophysics and chemistry read a question and vote to close it as an opinion-based only because he is unaware of the mountains of research that someone with a background in anthropology and linguistics would be able to cite to give a definitively factual answer to the question well within the SE guide-lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is not a one way street either, a person coming from a soft-science background will just as often vote to close because they do not understand just how advanced modern science really is.  So, hard-science questions about nanobots, laser weapons, and stun beams are very likely to get a couple of down-votes just because not everyone knows that these are real technologies that exist today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By reducing to 3 votes, you make questions that are harder to answer much more likely to be closed as opinion based just because a couple of people do not understand the topic well enough to give an informed response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T14:22:32.680" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T14:22:32.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-11T14:55:02.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;WB.SE is a multi-disciplinary stack, but not evenly so&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just addressed a very similar issue here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8316/57832&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8316/57832&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that WB.SE is a multi-disciplinary stack; so, what some people see as fact, others see as opinion.  This is a problem regardless of what your background is, but I agree that we tend to have far more members who lack a background in social sciences than other areas which leads to more bad CtVs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not necessarily make those CtVers in any way bigoted, it just reveals that they do not know enough about the topic to know when facts and research may exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real issue with opinion-based close votes are that they are not a measure of how many people know the right answer to a question, instead they are a measure of how many people believe there is not an acceptable answer to the question; so, in many cases such as this, your CtVs are really just a tally of how many people don't know anything about the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you don't know what you don't know, the only real solution here is to encourage people not to use &amp;quot;Opinion Based&amp;quot; close votes until AFTER several answers have already been given.  In general, the only way to know if a question is actually opinion based is to let people answer it and see if any actual facts and research get brought up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T14:55:02.913" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-11T20:24:55.693" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is actually very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB.SE treats some social sciences, mostly new and unsettled, as non-existent because they don't exist. Or, better said, they don't exist &lt;em&gt;yet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other social sciences, such as economics and, in part, sociology, which have produced widely read and respected books, can point to solid observations, can actually measure the phenomena which they study, are not at all ignored on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A significant part of what is called social sciences consists of various culture-specific bodies of undeclared fiction; more in the nature of the lore associated with various fictional universes. What a specific culture considers to be &amp;quot;gender theory and academic research&amp;quot; is by and large unknown in other cultures. In particular, there is chasm between what those words mean in northern North America and what they mean elsewhere. (And another chasm between what they mean in Eastern Europe and what they mean elsewhere, and presumably another between what they mean in China they mean elsewhere and so on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user base of this site is cosmopolitan. We come from all over the world.&#xA;And we do not have a common body of knowledge of &amp;quot;gender theory&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are dedicated people who are at work investigating those fields of inquiry. No, they haven't yet reached a point where a common body of knowledge has diffused throughout the world. This should not be seen as disparaging in any way; those fields are young, they are in process of accumulating foundational data; but they are important, and in the fullness of time they &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; become sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that the entire field of &amp;quot;gender theory&amp;quot; is exceedingly new. Unlike physics, or mathematics, or history, or chemistry, or economy, or even sociology etc., where one can profit from going to Archive.org, or Gutenberg.org and reading books written a hundred years ago, in &amp;quot;gender theory&amp;quot; one has to keep abreast of an ever changing, ever mutating, geographically diverse permanent revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender+theory&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3TtUv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Books Ngram viewer for &amp;quot;gender theory&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender+theory&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books Ngram viewer for &amp;quot;gender theory&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. As we can see, the phrase was basically not used before the late 1970s, and it only became mainstream in the 1990s.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire field of inquiry is less than half a century years old. How many truths could the researchers have established in such a short time? Are the truths they established in the 1980s still true in the 2020s? Will they be still true in the 2050s?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-06-13T16:27:24.120" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T16:27:24.120" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-14T23:31:36.247" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found two Horned Humanoid Questions... From oldest to newest... I can't find a point of differentiation, except mine, the older one, requiring it be neither &amp;quot;horns = sexy&amp;quot; or actually being a fungus growing on humans or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/41238/how-would-i-evolve-horns-on-humans&quot;&gt;How would I evolve horns on humans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103081/horned-humanoids&quot;&gt;Horned Humanoids?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we merge them? Do I somehow stick my differentiation into my title? Not sure how to be concise with that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T02:41:21.370" Title="Found two Horned Humanoid Questions" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-15T03:07:34.167" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What kind of remedy do you propose? That WB require members to ask questions about topics that are important to you? Will there be &lt;em&gt;quotas&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Members ask about the topics they want to ask about.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm personally frustrated by how much of modern science fiction simply transplants contemporary geopolitical facts and lifeways into some cosmetically futuristic setting, but I can't &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; authors to spend the time and energy necessary to develop a vision of society that is thoroughly, coherently altered by speculative technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also frustrated by how many questions seem to be transparently derivative of modern vampire rape-fantasy trash, but there's nothing I can do about that, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People ask about what they choose to ask about. And answers will get downvoted that fail to engage with the meat of the question &lt;em&gt;as asked&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I studied feminist film theory in college. I'm not an expert, but if someone were to ask a question that implicates the male gaze or gay labor, and &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; I see that question, and &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; I'm intrigued by the specifics, I'm happy to rattle off the things I know, hunt for relevant references online, etc. But I can't make them do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; to see someone take a run at Asimov's Foundation. I'd love to see someone poking around topics like weaponized sociology. But I can't make them do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Frame challenge&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the reason people don't ask the questions you want as often as you see fit is that, despite the ascension of vicious Libertarian anti-education dogma, people still get exposed to this a lot in their lives and education: from thoughtful (overworked, underpaid) teachers; from broad-minded parents who believe (rightly, I say) that their children are more likely to thrive if they can grow &lt;em&gt;even moar&lt;/em&gt; broad-minded; from their friends; from the many eloquent social progressives in the arts and social media; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11269704/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stand-up comics&lt;/a&gt; who, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eminsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minsky&lt;/a&gt;, collect and catalog markers along the boundary between reason and unreason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's so ubiquitous in their lives that they don't think it's problematic or even interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Let's lay the groundwork&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this will have any impact, but if there's anything trusted SE community can do easily, it's to prepare the way by creating appropriate tags (with quality descriptions) for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each of the social sciences;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the key theories, tensions, and problems each science is concerned with;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;perhaps (if appropriate), landmark findings or experiments (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milgram&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dunno. Go wild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the bottom line is that posters have free will, and evidently they aren't brought here by the topics you think they should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19221" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T03:07:34.167" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8302" CreationDate="2021-06-15T18:50:56.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that question and it appears to me as being pretty much &lt;strong&gt;how can my sociopath establish a regime&lt;/strong&gt; - and that is blatantly story based. But atop that, that question is sickening because it fails to acknowledge that such manipulators can result in the death of millions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, there was that &lt;em&gt;talentless Austrian painter&lt;/em&gt; that was rejected by his own country's armed forces and joined as a volunteer for another. His superiors noted that he was &lt;em&gt;unfit to lead&lt;/em&gt;. However, with the backing of a few radical cronies and a very well-maintained PR team under a cocaine and chocolate-addict thick guy, he managed to overthrow a country, dump a continent into war and kill millions of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there was that failed priest-student that joined a labor party, became besties with the ideologist leader of a revolution, took over, and then had any opposition worked to death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A beardy Japanese guy started a doomsday cult and they did not commit suicide. Instead they used gas attacks on two occasions, attempted to use bioweapons, and &lt;em&gt;planned to incite WW3&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THAT&lt;/strong&gt; is what people &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; superpowers manage with words alone! People that think you need superpowers to manipulate people into murder or genocide have no understanding of history because it only takes a person that starts to talk about the right things at a fitting moment to incite the reaction they want, and then get group pressure running to get more and more...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastEditorUserId="6812" LastEditDate="2021-06-20T22:19:26.670" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T22:19:26.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-15T21:46:30.380" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was triggered by this one : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/205630/appstore-application-to-assassinate-anyone&quot;&gt;Appstore application to assassinate anyone&lt;/a&gt;. I have a lot of troubles dealing with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting it, the core of the question is something akin to that (Know you should read the whole question to have a clearer picture, different from mine) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's the thing, I want this conspiracy to be true. I want this world to have a viable and public application where anyone of any age and gender or nation can pay for someone to be killed. Think of it like uberdrive or ubereats but now you pay someone to kill that girl who played you back in highschool 8 years ago and left you traumatized and transformed into an incel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question would then be how to make payments safe and private for clients and assassins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And around this fictitious condition :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there's no incognito mode for payments online... any kind of wacky crypto coin or online payment method is public, the blockchain is literally public and anyone can see what any stranger on the internet is doing with their money, and anyone buying something illegal on the internet is not gonna enjoy it for long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The illegal part is quite obvious, obviously. But as I see it, it could have other uses beyond just premeditated murders. I'm not detailing them as it would be irresponsible, but any not so foolish criminal network could find a use of it in their... Uh... &amp;quot;Domain&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;what should we do with this kind of questions? How should we handle them?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm at a loss at what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not fundamentally against questions about criminal activities : Really unlikely-ones like asking about robberies with flight abilities, heavily past-related questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How could you hide your alcohool contraband in a similar US country&lt;/a&gt;), or things which are known &amp;quot;internally&amp;quot;, police or wrongdoers-side (how gold diggers hide their polluting activities in Amazon forests, which also had a French documentary). Those cases are either enough documented for a bad-willing person to find them or impossible to find an applicable use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here, we haven't solved the mathematic problem (don't recall its name) to decrypt today's encripted messages quickly enough &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore the context has a limiting factor on possible real-world uses, in the sense there are likely more efficient options right &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt;. The problem lies in the &amp;quot;yet&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;now&amp;quot;. Indeed, if I gave a serious enough answer, based on real-world principles, and that suddenly the condition become real.. Well, the answer can be used as a starting point to bad things, and we'd be more likely to be the &amp;quot;cause&amp;quot; of them. Not direct (Willing people &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; find a way), not legally (Or else some police novel writers and scriptwriters could be sent to prison for complicity), but morally speaking. Indeed, I am not up to give willingly advises on improving one's illegal activities&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish the question was written to be more like &amp;quot;A group of individuals &amp;quot;à la Illuminati&amp;quot; want to keep their cookies baking and trading activities private from the government&amp;quot;. First, this would  avoid it to appear spontaneously on search engines (Google...) via dubious keywords even though the question's core is roughly the same. Then, I would not be bothered as much if I learned someone adapted this intel to their own &amp;quot;activities&amp;quot;, as the effort and willingness to adapt it would be from their part, and not mine nor the asker. Finally, if it was written well enough, I wouldn't even notice a potential issue at all, so case-closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So how should we tackle these potentially legally sensible issues? On the one I am worried about and on similar questions in general?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; : &lt;em&gt;Illegal in the sense of &amp;quot;going against my ideals of law&amp;quot;. I'm not against illegal activities if the reasons goes along my morals -humanitarian help for instance-.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2021-06-17T13:18:19.400" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T07:32:36.757" Title="How should we handle possibly legally/morally sensitive topics?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-16T00:08:31.747" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because for all intents and purposes on this site, they are.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For better or for worse, most wannabe sci-fi or fantasy authors (i.e. the kind of people we generally see here) assume that the next blockbuster they (imagine they) are going to write has to have something unique and special about the sci-fi or fantasy in their world, in order to be a blockbuster. And while it's true that a unique attribute is a good hook due to the novelty factor, it's also true that novelty is fleeting and as such, a poor substitute for a well-thought-out and compelling world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most people never get past that first self-imposed hurdle, so they never get to the point where they need to seriously think about how beings in their world interact. And if they do get to that point, most are still too preoccupied with their Unique Selling Point, or too inflexible in their thinking, to do anything more than replicate the current societal norms they're most comfortable with into their story. So they're never going to post questions about society-building here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's say you do have such an author, who's thought long and hard about how to create a society that's relatable, yet sufficiently different to provoke readers to reflect. Such a person is almost certainly going to do their own research on how to create this societal difference, in the course of which they're almost certainly going to come across the sex vs gender conundrum... and the minefield of, let's just say, &lt;em&gt;sensibilities&lt;/em&gt; around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that minefield, I personally would be very hesitant to post &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; about that topic. Why should we assume that our hypothetical author would be any different, i.e. why would they ever post a question here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if you do ever get far enough along in building your world to the point where you're ready to ask such a question, &lt;em&gt;you already know enough to know that asking such a question is likely to be A Bad Idea&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, such questions are self-selecting to never be asked, here or anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a crying shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T00:08:31.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-16T01:18:11.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Elemtilas is absolutely right: this site is so hard-wired to the idea of in-real-life hard science that it eventually provoked my own complaint on meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested&lt;/a&gt;). It's become so bad that perhaps we should re-open the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;discussion about the suitability of real-world questions on this Stack&lt;/a&gt;. I was a strong supporter back when the decision was made, but now that a few years have gone by, I can't but admit that in permitting them (ostensibly by requiring a worldbuilding context), we've encouraged the hard science bias that exists on this stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm going to offer some opinions about what I believe are the two predominant biases affecting questions about the social sciences and why they exist. These are my opinions. If you want to jump to my recommendations for how we can better support social-science-based questions, scroll down to the &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: So, what can we do?&lt;/strong&gt; section.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hard Science Bias&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'll forgive me, let me use one of your paragraphs to illuminate the nature of this bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The concept of gender is non-intuitive and confusing,&lt;/strong&gt; especially if one has no formal training in gender studies and/or related fields or has no personal experience with non-cisgender people. Moreover, the results of scientific research contradict common sense (because common sense is based on dominating cultural norms and stereotypes). &lt;strong&gt;One must adhere to science when evaluating questions related to gender and when answering those questions if they strive for high quality and objectivity of decisions and answers.&lt;/strong&gt; [Emphasis mine.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem #1 is that gender is perceived as entirely intuitive and not at all confusing to most individuals. Attempting to convince someone that what they perceive to be so simple and obvious (&amp;quot;I'm a man... why aren't you?&amp;quot;) is almost always perceived as patronizing. It's an emotional response that no amount of logic will easily dent. Add to this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem #2: There is no scientific test (one that meets the fundamental requirements of the Scientific Method) that definitively identifies gender identity or preference. And yet people who are free to openly participate with any question are being asked to adhere to &amp;quot;science.&amp;quot; This is the paradox that, in my opinion, most underscores the bias on this Stack in relation to questions about social sciences — or, more specifically, &lt;em&gt;behavior.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe too many people, notably people who have not completed a college education in some scientific field, fail to realize that there are, for lack of a better way of saying it, multiple kinds of &amp;quot;science.&amp;quot; There's mathematics, which people seem to believe is &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/fnIVATxVDew?t=73&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as close as we can come to the handwriting of God&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; and chemistry or any similar science that can use the Scientific Method to follow the &amp;quot;if I can measure it, it's real&amp;quot; flow of reasoning are absolute. This, despite obvious weaknesses (like the necessity that mathematical simulation is only as good as the empirical measurements it's based on and chemistry only reflecting the materials we actually know about), these two &amp;quot;sciences&amp;quot; tend to be reasonably solid such that the average person feels comfortable trusting them even if they know nothing at all about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's &amp;quot;scientific reasoning,&amp;quot; meaning that testing is difficult because there isn't always (if ever) a causal effect that can be measured, which is the fundamental problem with associating the word &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;behavior.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't get me wrong. I believe the dedicated study of human behavior is valuable and a science of its own — but I don't believe astrophysics understands everything about our own solar system, so when someone asks me to believe the science supporting behavior, I'm a born skeptic.&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; And without that demonstrable, repeatable, &amp;quot;scientific&amp;quot; test that can definitively prove gender identify or preference, the &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; can have nothing to base itself on but behavior and people's opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the average person unpracticed in the art subconsciously knows that. The fields of the social sciences simply haven't been around long enough nor have a well enough established track record to convincingly educate enough people to raise them to the level of the so-called &amp;quot;hard sciences.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity.Roughly speaking, the natural sciences are considered &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot;, whereas the social sciences are usually described as &amp;quot;soft&amp;quot;. (Listen to the entire audio, intended for the blind, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLbJgqwn4EA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Political Bias&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I believe there is another bias at work here. Call it a &amp;quot;political&amp;quot; bias. This stack tends to have a United States-centric culture. That's certainly inconvenient, but not surprising for a service designed and based in the U.S., which hosts the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;world's largest body of English-speaking people&lt;/a&gt;. As you consider that list I just linked, please note that the top five populations of English-speaking people are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The United States&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;India&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nigeria&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Philippines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The United Kingdom&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be completely wrong, but I believe I can argue that the top four positions are held by some of the least social-sciences-tolerant English-speaking people on Earth.  My point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Expecting the average user of this Stack to accept the social sciences as a definitive authority concerning human behavior is asking a lot.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I wish it were otherwise? I do. But how to do it? Obviously, restricting user participation based on whether or not they are personally qualified and accredited to answer is quite literally antithetical to the design of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's also why down voting exists. To remind people that they didn't have the expertise to participate concerning a particular question. I can't speak for others — but I've had a few answers that I thought contained clever insight only to be down voted and proven in comments that neither the answer nor I were anything of the sort. As Winston Churchill is purported to have said, &amp;quot;Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every user brings the entirety of their behavior with them to this Stack. That includes their loves and hates, their political/religious/philosophical biases, their educational focus (and sometimes the lack thereof). And this, alone, underscores the difficulty of convincing the Stack to better accept the social sciences as authoritative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: So, what could we do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing perfectly well that the average user has spent little to no time actually reading the Help Center pages or any of the tag wikis... (And I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of the difficulties on this Stack boil down to that one weakness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think a concerted effort to review our tag wiki names and pages concerning the social sciences is in order. It's likely that there are some tags that bridge between the soft and hard sciences. If so, those (hopefully few) tags should be redesigned to reflect hard- and soft-science personas. Those tags that are far too generic (I'm looking at you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/behaviour/info&quot;&gt;behaviour&lt;/a&gt;) should be seriously considered for burning and replaced with a (hopefully very small) set of more useful tags. Those tags that would be appropriate for questions concerning behavioral or social world building should have their wikis evaluated to be as precise and concise as possible with appropriate examples to help users who are not practiced in the art to better identify the expected direction for respondents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Knowing from experience how hard this next one would be: I believe it would be appropriate for someone like Otkin (someone &amp;quot;practiced in the art&amp;quot;) to formulate a Meta chain that ends in a single post (like the &amp;quot;perfect question&amp;quot; chain did) that could become the authoritative reference for what our community believes &amp;quot;social world building&amp;quot; means... then have the Mods include &amp;quot;Society and Behavior&amp;quot; on the list of &amp;quot;Sample topics&amp;quot; found on the &amp;quot;What topics can I ask about here?&amp;quot; Help Center page.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; If someone is willing to take this particular project on (and if they do, they should hear from the Mods about their willingness to update the Help Center pages first), I would ask them to remember that their audience is NOT made up of people who understand the subject like they do and that the goal of this effort is NOT to bring anyone up to that level. Remember SE's &amp;quot;book rule.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, most stacks have &amp;quot;events&amp;quot; that promote some aspect concerning the use of their stack. We've had bounty challenges where we encouraged users to find questions to bounty to entice younger members to greater participation and we've also had the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1768/40609&quot;&gt;fortnightly topic challenges&lt;/a&gt;. I believe AFTER the previous two steps have been taken that it would make sense to resurrect and/or create such events and use them to encourage users to focus on asking and answering social-science-based questions. During these events, mods and senior users would/should make a concerted effort to use the resources developed and improved in #1 and #2 to address the concerns of down voters and close voters and to help the community at large to better understand what makes a good social-science-based question and why they're valuable here.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I was once asked by a homosexual why I felt it was unreasonable to take his word for his sexual-preference? My response: If his word could be trusted to so great a degree, then there should be no need for adjudication in any case wherein he could testify as to the facts of the case. Was there no such need? The conversation ended very quickly. This is the basic difficulty of the so-called &amp;quot;soft&amp;quot; sciences: they're based on the observation of human actions, which can be motivated consciously and unconsciously by the subject. No matter how well set up the test and how well vetted the results, there's always a larger room for interpretive error than is found in the so-called &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot; sciences.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;What he actually said was, &amp;quot;Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;) My point with the statement is that SE is far too democratic for scientific consensus to be considered universally trustworthy, even on a Stack with the hard science bias this Stack has.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fair warning to whomever might take a shot at that... You need to develop a final text that is utterly and completely devoid of any effort to change the minds and hearts of the reader. Otherwise there's a proverbial 99% chance that the effort will entirely fail as emotions take precedence over intellect. The result must make an honest effort to &lt;strong&gt;educate,&lt;/strong&gt; not &lt;strong&gt;convert.&lt;/strong&gt; The ideal solution would be one that someone who lividly hates homosexuality (for example) could read and come away not only understanding how to ask their question, but willing to participate on the Stack without a bias carried from the page itself. I believe it can be done — but I'd be foolish not to wish any effort to do so the best of luck.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Please, please, PLEASE do NOT jump straight to this recommendation! We need to make a serious effort to address issues #1 and #2 first so that we have an improved foundation to work with when we start moving forward with this.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T01:18:11.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8322" CreationDate="2021-06-16T02:19:59.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem I thìnk you're experiencing is that the actual question is very simple --- &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;how to make payments safe and private for clients and assassins?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; --- but your judgement of it is being clouded by all the underlying and unnecessary fluff that precedes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Couple points:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First of all, and most importantly, this is not even an actual worldbuilding question. It's a question of app design and internet security. I'm sure there's a Stack for that! Wherever it is, it ain't here in WB! So I won't be voting to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, we are here, in this forum, to help people understand and construct their fictional worlds. Not all worlds are Diznee Tellytubby Veggietail Kiddy Friendly Cringe-o-matic Barfworlds. Fictional worlds are often dystopic. There is no good reason you can come up with that would ban such lines of questioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How we handle these questions is exactly how we handle any other query that gets asked here: we read the question and assuming it oughtn't be closed for a valid reason, we answer it given the specifications the OP laid out. We assume the conditions laid out for the fictional world are true and we answer accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those unaware, there is a famous series of fantasy novels that plays with the fantasy trope of the assassins' guild. Fantasy and Sci-Fi (to say nothing of Mystery and True Crime) are chock full of these kinds of ideas that seem horribly untouchable but are really things that authors, writers, game designers, worldbuilders and geopoets have to consider within their worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You're making a mountain out of a molehill. I'm going to quote (not quite verbatim) from JBH's patent response: if someone really and truly discovered a way of making online payments 100% safe, private and foolproof (and governmentproof!) they wouldn't be squawking about it here. They'd be quietly developing and implementing it in anticipation of making a fortune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world this question is set in is fictional. The crimes committed are fictional. There's no reason we can't or oughtn't consider responses to these kinds of scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself, I'd argue, is off topic. Just not because of the fictional scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T02:19:59.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8319" CreationDate="2021-06-16T02:41:21.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Considerations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q2016 specifies &lt;em&gt;horns&lt;/em&gt;. Q2018 specifies a broader range of protuberances including &lt;em&gt;antlers&lt;/em&gt; and perhaps &lt;em&gt;teeth&lt;/em&gt; (tusks) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a point of differentiation, but it is one of detail rather than substance. Whether the underlying mechanism is bone, tooth or hair, the desired result, getting humans to have hard bits sticking off, is identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The queries are so identical that everyone in responses and comments, including Q2016 OP are dancing around the issue of these protuberances only being on the humans' heads! Interesting, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Obviously, the standard practice is to VTC close Q2018 as a duplicate. A technical victory for Q2016, though the point is moot as neither query has been active in years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that the Mod Squod merge Q2018 into Q2016. I'd really like to see more merging of duplicate queries as I'd consider that the logical next step. As it stands, it seems that duplicates just get closed and are then abandoned. Sometimes they have good answers. Sometimes the duplicate is in and of itself a better question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got the ball rolling by VTC Q2018 as duplicate and suggesting a merger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T02:41:21.370" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8311" CreationDate="2021-06-16T20:16:31.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the worst problem this Stack has is the inconsistent availability and use of tags, we're in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;great&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While it's convenient to search via tags, that's only one (and arguably not the primary) use of the tags. IMO, the primary use of the tags is to provide boundaries or give scope for the respondents. In other words, a question tagged &lt;em&gt;science-based&lt;/em&gt; would have a legitimate reason to delete any answer that solved the problem using magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some instances, tags are improved by deleting the general-case tag and implementing a series of specific tags. In other instances, the tags are improved by deleting all of the specific tags and replacing them with one general-use tag. I do not believe either perspective is better than the other. For example, I'd be completely content to delete the &lt;em&gt;beer&lt;/em&gt; tag (one Q) and replace it with the more generic &lt;em&gt;alcoholic-beverages&lt;/em&gt; tag (two Qs). I frankly don't see a lot of difference between beer, wine, whisky, etc., when it comes to the scope or boundaries that would help the respondents. However, that brings us to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags are inconsistently used by, IMO, pretty much everyone. Some people list all the tags they can while others list just one. Some ache because the precise series of words they want don't exist in the tag list while others use the first tag that looks good enough. Some people mindlessly type out the word they want to use (creating a new tag with enough rep) while others never contribute to the tag base. Way to many people assume what a tag represents by the word or phrase of the tag rather than reading the tag wiki....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point? the beauty of tags is very much in the eyes of the beholder, so creating a procedure to improve them is, in my opinion, an exercise in futility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And as Elemtilas mentioned, the example of violence is one that's sensitive on this Stack because we got our knuckles rapped by the Stake Exchange Overlords about it. But it's also a great example of the fundamental problem. Some people deal with violence easily. Others are adamantly against its smallest expression. Getting those two groups of people to agree to a list of violence-oriented tags would be miraculous.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T20:16:31.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8322" CreationDate="2021-06-16T20:39:38.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's face facts: everyone on this Stack is probably on the U.S. terrorist watch list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stack has entertained questions ranging from what's the best poison and how do I use it? to how do I build a weapon of mass destruction and how do I use it? Most of us post and/or answer those questions without thinking too much about a world full of police-like people (like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) paying very close attention to what we're asking and how we're answering. We should all be grateful that they (so far) have ignored all the congenial kooks over here at Worldbuilding.SE who are usually thinking more in terms of Dr. Nefario than we are Ted Bundy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But every once in a while we see a question that's asking how to commit a crime in the real world. Generally speaking — we don't answer those questions. (More honestly, they get shut down by the mods or senior users as quickly as possible despite the plethora of junior users who seem to have been raised to blindly trust the entire world and who can't honestly believe that those police-like people are actually out there quietly watching what happens here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as devoid as the linked question may have been of morals and/or ethics, I don't believe it was that type of question because the OP had included a condition that critically differentiates his/her world from ours: the lack of encryption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, should we answer immoral or unethical questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe me, this isn't even close to the most immoral or unethical question I've seen on this site. But should we host them? Near the end of the incredibly long Wheel of Time saga the principal character is shown the nature of the world should evil get its way. The scene was one of a poor and hungry child stealing an apple (as I recall) and the merchant, devoid of conscience in a world of evil, casually turning to gun the child down in the muddy street. The scene was immoral. It was sickening. &lt;em&gt;And that was the point.&lt;/em&gt; I wouldn't read a book that was filled with that kind of behavior, but it was necessary to understand how the world would change should the protagonist make a particular choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah... those are the kinds of questions we answer here. It's the point of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we do ask that the OPs have a sense of decorum for a number of reasons that were brought up when the SE Overlords told us questions involving graphic violence, etc. wouldn't be tolerated. We expect people to ask questions concisely and forthrightly — and in the case you linked the OP didn't do that, which made the situation seem worse than it actually was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T20:39:38.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T10:09:00.977" Score="7" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September update:&lt;/strong&gt; Community Ads are now live network-wide. All ads with a score of 6 or higher, or with a score of 4 or higher &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; no downvotes will be displayed (except for any that have a note from the CM Team explaining why it wasn't selected). Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;the main post on MSE&lt;/a&gt; for a list of the ads that are being displayed. And stay tuned for 2022's edition for the next opportunity to submit more ad proposals!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AUGUST NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; This post has now been locked and new submissions are not being accepted. Ad submissions are now undergoing review by the Community Team, and this question will be updated once the ads are live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're almost halfway through 2021, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;in case you missed it&lt;/a&gt;, Community Promotion Ads are gonna be a bit different this time! &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: submit and vote for ad proposals before August 2nd!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, or on other sites in the network. They can show up in the right sidebar, or in banners in question pages. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be considered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/208518&quot;&gt;the Community Management Team&lt;/a&gt; to be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. The goal of this initiative is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. You may want to promote external resources, or Meta guidance for newcomers, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This initiative has an added goal of providing your community with &lt;em&gt;an opportunity to showcase exemplary questions from your main site, as well as frequently-linked-to guides from your Meta site&lt;/em&gt;. While the latter makes sense to be shown solely on this site, the former can be shown all across the network. These should avoid hot button topics, and instead focus more on evergreen questions that show what your community’s all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. Historically, we've reset the ads every year — since this is the first run of a new format, we'll run the ads collected in this post through the end of 2021 and reassess the rotation cycle then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a previous exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there restrictions to the ads I can post?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All proposed ads need to abide by &lt;a href=&quot;/conduct&quot;&gt;our Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/advertising/guidelines&quot;&gt;Our ad creative guidelines&lt;/a&gt; also generally apply (note that the first 2 bullet points on the “Tracking” section do not apply, and a lot of the guidelines surrounding claims, comparisons, proof, etc., while still applicable, may not be particularly relevant). Finally, ads can not be promoting products nor soliciting programmer time or resources for: knowledge sharing or collaboration tools for technologists, or for sites where ad buyers are primarily targeting technologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Each answer must relate to a single ad submission.&lt;/strong&gt; Please do not post multiple ad submissions in the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers must be in one of the below formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have an image for the ad you want to display on this site (must be the case for ads to external sources):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Image name. Example: &amp;quot;community_ad_name_300x250&amp;quot;][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://image-url&#xA;  [2]: https://clickthrough-url&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to create an ad for a question from your main or meta site, to be advertised on this or other sites in the network (staff will generate a frame for the ad with this site's theme, for brand consistency):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Question title  &#xA;Question URL&#xA;Ad size (right sidebar or banner ads)&#xA;Site(s) to be displayed in. Can be:&#xA;  - &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed on this site&#xA;  - &amp;quot;all&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed all over the network&#xA;  - a specific subset of sites&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels for right sidebar ads or 728 x 90 pixels for banner ads. Images can be double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF, PNG, or JPG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Selection process&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This post will remain open for ad submissions and voting until August 2nd&lt;/strong&gt;. At that point, the question will be closed/locked, and no more ad submissions will be accepted. For ad submissions to be considered for selection by the Community Management Team, they must have &lt;strong&gt;a minimum score of 6 at the time the post was closed/locked for submissions.&lt;/strong&gt; Given this is the first run with this new format, we may adjust the score threshold to be a bit lower if we see ads struggling to get to it (especially if the ads are not getting downvotes) by the time submissions and voting are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reporting statistics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this cycle is over, at the end of 2021, the Community Management Team will provide you with reporting statistics, as described in the &amp;quot;reporting&amp;quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to use the question's comment section to ask for any clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T11:28:32.993" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:28:32.993" Title="Community Ads for 2021" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-18T03:00:25.317" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I wrote my initial query my thoughts on the status of social sciences on WB.SE were close to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8317/78906&quot;&gt;Nosajimiki's answer&lt;/a&gt;, specifically this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not necessarily make those CtVers in any way bigoted, it just reveals that they do not know enough about the topic to know when facts and research may exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after reading some of the posted answers my opinion changed. This is not entirely a case of ignorance. At least some part of the community (hard to say how big this faction is) has a very specific attitude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8318/78906&quot;&gt;I do not know much about social sciences, their history, methodology, epistemology, and body of work. Thus I declare them as non-existent and their findings as undeclared fiction.&lt;/a&gt;' (probably, the most extreme variant; the original answer was edited to become slightly less radical after discussion in comments);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8324/78906&quot;&gt;I also do not know much about social sciences, their history, methodology, epistemology, and body of work. But I believe that their findings are not substantially different from my personal opinion because social sciences are not &amp;quot;sciencey&amp;quot; enough.&lt;/a&gt;' (this version is slightly more sophisticated due to the inclusion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://philarchive.org/archive/HAASSO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scientism&lt;/a&gt;-based arguments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if anything can be done or said to change these attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of engaging in a philosophical discussion about epistemology and methodology of social sciences, let me propose &lt;strong&gt;a rather simple solution for the VTC problem:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_humility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intellectual humility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There are only a few steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;read a question (the entire question);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make sure that you did not miss anything;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you do not understand the question or you doubt your expertise in the relevant area(s) do not vote (use Skip button if using review queues).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it is a better solution than the ones proposed by other participants of this discussion because it is more universal and can be applied to every single question on this stack. It also does not require anything but a tiny bit of conscious effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2021-06-18T03:12:15.430" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T03:12:15.430" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-06-18T13:24:42.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mkhzE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Help in the Sandbox as a Mentor!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T13:24:42.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-06-18T13:25:44.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ajQn.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The best questions are perfected first in our Sandbox!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T13:25:44.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8312" CreationDate="2021-06-19T18:32:41.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Worldbuilding SE suffers a little from the opinions of those who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; experts in any number of fields in which questions &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; an expert opinion, who do not recognise their lack of expertise.  This problem is not limited to the social sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can vote on any question or answer, or vote to close, regardless of their understanding of the question. It is all too easy for someone without expert knowledge of the subject of a question to feel that a question is poorly asked or incapable of a definitive answer, because to them, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; so... even if to an expert, their judgement is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an expert in certain fields, I have personally seen excellent questions being downvoted and voted to close simply because those so voting don't seem able to understand that to someone with my expertise, they are eminently answerable and specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fundamental flaw in the SE Q&amp;amp;A format, and particularly prevalent in WB SE, where the range of subjects and areas of expertise is very broad.  The only solution to this problem is for genuine experts to comment, saying why a question being downvoted and/or VTCed should not be closed, or to flag closed good questions to the moderators to be reopened, with an explanation of why the community may have got it wrong.  That's why the moderators are here, as much as to clean up the messes that public sites inevitably collect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2021-06-19T18:32:41.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-06-19T19:52:17.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bJu8B.png&quot; alt=&quot;Improve your question in the sandbox!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-06-19T19:52:17.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-21T17:31:58.513" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deconstruction is a terrible word to use here. But the only word I can think of to describe my world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyway genre recognition is when the audience can understand what genre a movie or tv show falls under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you are watching a movie about Ninjas. That movie probably falls under the Ninja/Kung Fu genre. You probably not expecting Cyborgs and Transhumans to come out of nowhere. Because the movie is about Ninja Stuff. Not Transhumanism. You can understand what genre the movie is. Because the movie already established what genre this world falls under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can genre recognition be a problem for my world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;       .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all based on the Gods were space Aliens this whole time concept. They came to earth with their advanced technology that was indistinguishable from Magic. And the humans worship them as Gods. So the Aliens were no different from USA soldiers who were worshipped by tribes. All those religions that worship Aliens were cargo cults this whole time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now change the analogy. And replace Aliens with Mutants. A subhuman species of human that have genetic mutations that gift them superpowers. With some not looking like humans too. The Mutants automatically become indistinguishable from Supernatural Creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supernatural Creatures like Vampires, Werewolves, Skin Walkers, Wendigo, Dragons, etc throughout history were just Humans with genetic mutations that were records of Ancient Mutants walking the earth a long time ago. Causing the muggles/normal humans to make myths and legends about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again does this ruin genre recognition? Supernatural creatures are usually fantasy-based in fiction. And Mutants are usually Science Fiction. The audience is expecting a story about SCI Fi Mutants. Usually expecting a Superhero story since Mutants are usually associated with Superheroes. Then out of nowhere Supernatural Creatures like Vampires and Werewolves show up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;          .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to make a sandbox kitchen sink world like Marvel and DC. Where different multiple beings and different magic systems all coexist in one world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I realized there were more similarities between fictional beings/systems than differences. And when there were differences. The differences were either arbitrary depending on the Writer or so manner I can explain the differences away with simple fan headcanons easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't that many differences between Mutants and Wizards/Witches. Yae you can say mutants are born with their powers. And Magic-Users like Wizards and Witches have to learn their powers. But again the difference is so arbitrary that it depends on whatever the Writer wants for the story. In some worlds hell, most worlds the Wizards and Witches are born with powers just like Mutants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a popular opinion for most Writers to prefer to make Magic a biological or innate ability. To make the Wizards or Witches feel more special. And also there is this huge world-building issue that rears its ugly head when you make Magic is learned ability anybody can do. I think most writers are trying to avoid that issue lol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;      .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question of &amp;quot;What makes a Magic-User a none mutant?&amp;quot; Comes up. Like if a magic-user has to learn their powers. While the mutant is born with powers. Then what power a magic-user is going to have that is different from a mutant? In fiction, both Mutants and Magic-Users overlap in powers. Physic powers like telekinesis and telepathy are common superpowers shared by both Superheroes and Wizards. Is the difference really that big when both beings can share the same powers? Again the difference is so arbitrary and manner. That it feels like I can replace them so easily. The only thing stopping me is genre recognition lol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you also have to understand the nature of mutant superpowers. Their powers are so broad and unique to the individual. That each mutant has their own magic system. Mutants can range from a guy with 8 arms to a woman who can reality warp. Honestly, there is no ceiling with mutant powers. A Wizard/Witch would just be one mutant out of millions of mutants. Magic can be one mutant power out of millions of mutant powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  ,    ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cosmic Beings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extradimensional beings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aliens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mutants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these four beings pretty much cover 98 percent of the broad fictional beings in most fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guessed it comes down to genre recognition vs arbitrary and manner differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85994" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T02:46:10.497" Title="Im I ruining genre recognition when I deconstructed supernatural creatures to be Mutants I.E. X men?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|questions|answers|worldbuilding-process|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8336" CreationDate="2021-06-22T02:46:10.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that &lt;strong&gt;no, genre recognition won't be ruined by creating such a world or scenario within a world&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, quite the opposite. People are smart. They'll easily create a new genre to fit the altered world they are experiencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you are watching a movie about Ninjas. That movie probably falls under the Ninja/Kung Fu genre. You probably not expecting Cyborgs and Transhumans to come out of nowhere. Because the movie is about Ninja Stuff. Not Transhumanism. You can understand what genre the movie is. Because the movie already established what genre this world falls under. Can genre recognition be a problem for my world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would most likely happen in this instance is that the viewer would initially be led down the garden path by expecting and adjusting to a movie about ninjas. If she's familiar with the genre, she'll slip right into the groove without any problems! She might even wonder if Jackie Chan (or insert your favourite martial arts actor here) will make an appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the Cyborgs, Roboborgs, Transborgs, Cylons and actual Swedes start making their appearances, your viewer will experience a momentary dissociation. A &amp;quot;where the heck did théy come from!?!?&amp;quot; moment. Once it's clear that the Ninjaborgs belong in the story the viewer will automatically correct her perception of the world to include Nanoborgs. She will then (probably subconsciously because, you know, epic action packed battle scenes galore!) construct  a novel genre for the movie to fit in and then she'll either sit back and enjoy the Sci-Kung-Fiborg move or else toss it because she hates sci-fi, Borgs and anyone from anywhere near Borg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation you're trying to obtain is the same as the popular mash-up genre books and movies. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice and Zombies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T02:46:10.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8322" CreationDate="2021-06-25T07:32:36.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;em&gt;elemtilas&lt;/em&gt; that you are, probably, focusing too much attention on the wording of the world's description, while the actual question is about the payment system. (I do not agree, though, that this is not a worldbuilding question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that as a community WB.SE should refrain from moral or legal judgements: Always for the former, and unless the question specifically asks for them for the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morals&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the community as a whole should adopt the position of &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral relativism&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and try to avoid any normative position (aka set of morals A is superior to set B). There are 3 reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Morals are not universal. &lt;em&gt;Each culture has its own views&lt;/em&gt; (this is an empirical fact; if you need additional proof talk to people of other cultures/subcultures about their values and morals). What you find immoral might be perfectly moral for me and vice versa. In addition to these ethical plurality existing in the real world, fictional worlds can have their own ethical systems, quite different from what we are used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fictional worlds are often constructed with the goal of exploring various ethical notions&lt;/em&gt; (most fantasy narratives are like this) &lt;em&gt;and intentionally create systems of morals that go against conventions&lt;/em&gt;. However, not all authors are capable of writing a philosophical paper examining their own ethical experiments and WB.SE is not a place to require world creators to come up with such papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If WB.SE overconcerns itself with ethics it will result in&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;culture wars&lt;/em&gt; (this community is not culturally homogenous and some people may turn to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_universalism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral universalists&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-moral-absolutism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;absolutists&lt;/a&gt; insisting that their views are superior and the only true and proper ones);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;closure of a significant number of questions&lt;/em&gt; (for example, questions that deal with war, human genetics, killings, poisons, and alike; in addition, we will have to examine all question related to superheroes [their actions tend to result in massive collateral damage including human lives] and magic [same reason — human deaths])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also inevitable problems with the consistent application and enforcement of whatever moral standards that could emerge from the culture wars. Currently, WB.SE cannot apply its own rules in a consistent manner and users often employ subjective rule interpretations when VTC. Ethical rules will cause an even worse nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Laws&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laws applicable to the users and the StackExchange;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possible legal concerns associated with the questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that 1. should be followed to the fullest extent. If the law explicitly forbids certain topics and/or discussions they should be excluded. However, decisions about the legality of these topics and/or discussions cannot be made by the users, especially if they are not legal experts&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. This is a job for the legal team and moderators. Users must defer to their decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second aspect, I think it is important to remember &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what WB.SE is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All situations, all events, all worlds are supposed to be imaginary. No matter how described scenarios make you feel or how they relate to existing laws, they are just hypotheticals and thought experiments. Some of the proposed solutions might end up in a book, a film, a game, etc. But most of them will never be implemented in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is a probability that some people come with questions about real life scenarios and look for solutions to the real life problems. However, how high is this risk? Is it sufficient to exclude all potentially troublesome topics? And how it would affect those who are trying to create worlds that are a bit more realistic and complex than children books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please do not call something 'illegal' because it is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;going against [your] ideals of law&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, unless you are an absolute monarch talking to your subjects. Different people have different ideals of law. Some people believe that abortions should be legal and some believe that they should be illegal. Whose ideal of law is better? Should WB.SE take a stance when it comes to ideals of laws? And how would the community deal with dissenting opinions? Ban? Would it even be legal (permitted by existing and applicable law)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question makes you uncomfortable just do not answer. Maybe write a comment expressing your concerns, but do not close questions (or question questioner's morals) because you feel that they do not fit your ideals of ethical and legal norms. Please try to be objective, focus on the problem instead of your feelings about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Disclosure: My own ethical position is close to moral relativism. I believe that morals exist relative to culture and society and that it is not proper to impose my own values and beliefs on other people or to judge other people's values and beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to WB.SE, it means that I am not concerned with 'right' and 'wrong', 'moral' and 'immoral', I see every question in technical terms: What are the conditions and limitations, what is the desired end-result, what theories, frameworks, and research are applicable, etc. I do not see WB.SE as a place for ethical debates and I do not think it is proper to pass any moral judgements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Even legal experts may not be able to make a correct judgement if this particular area is not within their expertise or if they live in a different country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T07:32:36.757" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-28T01:16:17.210" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, talk about anything you want, as long as it's more-or-less related to the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126931/alternative-history-discussion&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126931/alternative-history-discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85072" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T01:16:17.210" Title="Just made a chatroom for alternative history" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-07-04T19:55:40.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTGgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Q&amp;amp;A about Science Fiction and Fantasy on Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:34:13.450" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:34:13.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-07-04T19:56:13.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euF1O.png&quot; alt=&quot;Be inspired by stories&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T19:56:13.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-07T23:35:32.707" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just me, or has participation in Meta dropped off a lot over the last two years? It always seemed like about 10%-15% of users active on Main were also active on Meta. Now it feels more like 1%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this post, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8330/40609&quot;&gt;Community Ads 2021&lt;/a&gt; post is 20 days old, has been viewed a whopping 186 times, with a total of 15 votes cast (and that includes the single -1 vote against my &amp;quot;we need your help in the Sandbox&amp;quot; ad... someone must really hate either me or participation in the Sandbox). What's heartbreaking is knowing that I'm personally responsible for three (20%) of those votes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd make a community ad post inviting people to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8330/40609&quot;&gt;Community Ads 2021&lt;/a&gt; page to cast votes, but that's using what appears to be a broken system to fix said system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've occasionally seen &amp;quot;Welcome Back!&amp;quot; popups when I visit a Stack after a while. Is it possible to use that same engine to invite people to visit the Community Ads page? If not, are there alternatives? It seems our Stack could use a way to make announcements to people on Main without actually using an off-topic question to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T19:54:53.740" Title="We need a community ad to promote creating and voting on community ads" Tags="|discussion|advertising|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-07-08T00:44:28.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.codidact.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Rwg2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Build the story to go with your world on Writing.Codidact.com!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:34:43.493" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:34:43.493" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-07-08T00:46:27.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scientific-speculation.codidact.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zWyda.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help us build another friendly community!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2021-07-15T03:04:01.647" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T03:04:01.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2021-07-09T17:18:11.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.codidact.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hQNrQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Build the story to go with your world on Writing.Codidact.com!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:35:28.633" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:35:28.633" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-12T17:35:58.513" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207103/if-spider-were-the-size-of-horses-what-sound-would-they-make&quot;&gt;If Spider Were the Size of Horses, What Sound Would They Make?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was met with a VTC by AlexP because &amp;quot;the giant spider can make any sounds required by the story&amp;quot;. See the comment exchange for the full picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is important for me to state that &amp;quot;the answer can be whatever the story requires&amp;quot; is not that insightful, as far as critiques go. You can take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146090/how-soon-can-the-first-stars-form&quot;&gt;most hard science question&lt;/a&gt; on the site and give that comment, and be technically correct. It is up to the author what level of &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scientific hardness&lt;/a&gt; they wish to adhere to. More specifically, any question involving magic can receive that comment, because magic is by definition counter-scientific. There are no solid laws of physics to fall back onto because they are already being violated, so surely for any plot another exception can be made. But do we want to banish all magic questions from this site? I don't think so. We receive magic and fantasy questions when the querents accompany their asks with the rules for their systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;strong&gt;a fire spell that works by extracting heat uniformly from the magic caster's body; how long could they sustain it before suffering hypothermia?&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;extract heat uniformly from the caster's body&amp;quot; is a rule fine enough to work with; you do not need to specify that the heat is exchanged through quantum tunnelling photons synthesised by midi-chlorians. Such details would never become 100% solid to begin with, as they are not a part of actual science. They need only be clear enough to reason about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potential answerers will disagree on what is &amp;quot;clear enough&amp;quot; because we have different levels in scientific education, imaginative power in different quantities and just a different taste in how hard science should be. That's nobody's fault, and sometimes the rules do leave gaps. Take this heat question and strip out the word &amp;quot;uniformly&amp;quot;; now there is ambiguity as to whether it is just the hands cooling down, or everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I want to ask you. If you see that fireball question (imagine it also supplies by a couple paragraphs of worldbuilding context and is otherwise valid), notice that there is a gap or inaccuracy in the system described... what do you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment, asking for clarification or pointing out the gap in the logic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to close for Needs Details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to close for Opinion-Based.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can guess, I consider this fireball question analogous to the linked spider question (which describes spider anatomy but to an extent some may consider insufficient). Please let me know if you disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would do #1 first and only #2 if the question is older than a couple of hours, and/or there are more clarification requests and the querent hasn't addressed them. #3 is something I would personally never do in this case, and I am still trying to figure out why someone would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding from the comments is that AlexP considers that this question, as stated, is so logically implausible that there is no coherent system left to reason with. Ergo any answer is equally valid, ergo the question is opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the first response to a lacking premise is to ask for clarifications, and the second response is to VTC as Needs Details. I reserve Opinion-Based for questions that cannot be salvaged with any amount of added details - not because they are implausible but because they ask something that is intrinsically impossible to answer using facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sounds that an animal can produce are - in the broad sense, as in roars vs. chirps - a property of their anatomy. If the question does not provide enough anatomy to reason with, then the solution is to ask for more details about the anatomy. If no answers are provided, then VTC because there are Not Enough Details. This question is not Opinion-Based and it never will be, until someone asks for the most pleasant key of this spider's mating call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am intrigued to hear where other people stand on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-07-12T17:55:26.253" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T17:43:41.083" Title="Is a question with an implausible or logically flawed premise opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8353" CreationDate="2021-07-12T18:05:22.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think both reasons are equally valid: the lack of details is striking, and because of the lack of details any answer is equally valid and answer are likely to be based on opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that the closing reasons are not an orthogonal set, thus some overlapping it's very likely to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T18:05:22.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8348" CreationDate="2021-07-12T19:54:53.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I visit Meta WB SE weekly or thereabouts. But most of the time I have nothing worth saying, so that I cast an up or a down vote or two, and then I leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't look at advertisements. I don't care about advertisements. I saw the title of the question about community advertisements and felt no need to read it. I still don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen the welcome page of Stack Exchange. I don't think that anybody has any reason to go there. I'd say that welcome page of SE is the last place where I would place an advertisement, but then my expertise with advertisements is very limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox is rather disfunctional. I do understand the technical limitations. No, I do not have a better idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T19:54:53.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8353" CreationDate="2021-07-12T22:09:58.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you're looking for a hard-and-fast metric for casting close votes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/GmvpP26J-40?t=96&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you've come to the wrong place for anarchy, brother&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You should watch that entire clip to get the joke...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that Worldbuilding is the most subjective Stack in the Exchange. There are days I wonder how on earth it passed the Area 51 tests to become a Stack. But, here we are and it leaves us with two conflicting realities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not permit questions that are opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;90% of worldbuilding questions are opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therein lies a problem that has plagued the Stack since the earliest days. We've tried educating users, creating Meta pages that explained it, modifying the Help Center, leaving clarifying comments... We've accepted the definition, modified the definition, considered ignoring the definition (hah, try convincing people to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use a tool that SE puts in front of them and we can't control)....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And still we get posts here in Meta asking whether or not it was right to VTC a particular question as &amp;quot;Opinion-Based.&amp;quot; This was not the first such incident — and believe me it will not be the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In a world of subjective questions, nothing is more subjective than deciding what's &amp;quot;too&amp;quot; opinion-based and what is not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, I take issue with your hyperbole about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions being legitimately answerable as &amp;quot;whatever the story requires.&amp;quot; I get it that you're frustrated, but that particular tag is &lt;em&gt;intentionally ruthless,&lt;/em&gt; and for a reason. It's the one tag on the site where it is &lt;em&gt;legitimately impossible&lt;/em&gt; for the question to be opinion-based because no answer is permitted that can't be 100% backed up with citations, mathematics, and documented science. From a purist's point of view, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions are the &lt;em&gt;one and only&lt;/em&gt; type of question on Worldbuilding.SE that entirely meets &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of SE's expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which invites the question, since all other questions are intrinsically opinion-based to one degree or another, where do we draw the opinion-based line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center clearly states that no question should be asked where every answer is equally correct. This burdens the querent in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They should try their level best to ask a question that can have an objectively-selected best answer and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They should explain in their question how they will judge a best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to expect a querent to do these things? Yes. Will they? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that leaves us with an irritating reality that, unfortunately, won't be resolved here. What constitutes &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; is opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yeah, but what about the specific question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question is opinion-based because, upon a bit of research, &lt;em&gt;Loxosceles reclusa&lt;/em&gt; doesn't appear to make noise in real life. Not even a hiss. That might be because it has no capacity to vocalize. It might be that it's too small to have a vocalization anyone cares about. Either way, it's impossible to judge what vocalization capabilities a similar (and fictional) creature would have were it the size of a horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means, without the OP explaining how he/she will judge a best answer (by providing goals, limitations, conditions, restrictions, and assumptions), every answer is equally valid — violating a clear rule in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem is this: where possible, respondents draw from real life to rationalize an (often fantastic) answer. But without that baseline information (which an albeit quick Google search did not reveal), what we have is nothing more than a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my book, guess === opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T22:09:58.563" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8359" CreationDate="2021-07-13T15:11:01.057" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207146/what-would-a-therapist-be-able-to-do-with-the-ability-to-read-peoples-dreams&quot;&gt;What would a therapist be able to do with the ability to read people's dreams?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a couple readability edits to spacing and added a recap as a form of TL;DR reiterating the important parts of a fluff filled question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To Recap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dreams create temporary universes in a person's soul&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Succubi/Incubi can enter those dreams and have the same viewpoint as the host&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can physically manifest in the dream world but usually just observe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite these being an addition by myself, they directly took the meaning from the OP's original wall of text. They were later removed (with the addition of a single word edit) by a later editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was my edit really&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recap risked being more confusing, what with it reminding the reader of information that the previous paragraphs just said is being ignored for the purpose of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as the editor said? Or is it more likely a case of &amp;quot;I couldn't make this small change by itself.&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/207146/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: after I made this post, I did realize that the OP was the editor the second time around. I don't necessarily agree with his point of being more confusing but, its his post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51297" LastEditorUserId="51297" LastEditDate="2021-07-13T19:12:38.940" LastActivityDate="2021-07-16T18:47:13.540" Title="Is this edit proper form for editing or was my edit out of line?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8353" CreationDate="2021-07-13T15:23:32.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We really need to start reading between the lines in some cases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its core, this flawed premise of the large spider really has some key components even if not explicitly stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A particular type of spider: Loxosceles reclusa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a change away from reality: A horse-sized spider&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a potentially flawed premise: less gravity/more oxygen to make it possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an end goal: human audible sounds generated by said creature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, this could be a science-based almost hard science question if you take the sounds a real spider produces and did the math to scale it up. The question doesn't &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;explicitly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; state this but, you can figure it out by reading between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that applies to that particular spider is more right than a spider singing celine dion. * &lt;em&gt;shudder&lt;/em&gt; *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51297" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T15:23:32.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2021-07-13T18:02:37.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This isn't Stack Overflow, which means the OP has more control over a question than &amp;quot;normal.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second edit was made by the OP. That's important to remember as I express my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has a basic set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;editing rules&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, we adhere to these. Especially bullet #2 (as you noted, no changes that change the meaning). Unfortunately, we're a lot more subjective and creative than, for example, Stack Overflow, which means that it's not all that hard to enhance a post in a way that the OP thinks changed their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've tried over the years to improve the explanation of editing on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2393/40609&quot;&gt;Rules for editing questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6876/40609&quot;&gt;What happens if a poster&amp;#39;s assumptions invalidate their answer when clarifications are made later&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6876/40609&quot;&gt;What happens if a poster&amp;#39;s assumptions invalidate their answer when clarifications are made later&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7403/40609&quot;&gt;The difference between helpful editing and vandalism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8038/40609&quot;&gt;Proposal for Editing Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8061/40609&quot;&gt;Is it okay to edit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a lot of this boils down to is that any effort to help the OP beyond fixing grammar and formatting is treading on thin ice — because no matter how well you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you understand what they're asking, the reality is you don't actually &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what they're asking. And so we favor trying to convince the OP to make edits beyond grammar and formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Call it a consequence of working on a subjective, creative Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To directly answer your question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, no, your edit was not out of line. Had someone other than the OP created the subsequent edit, removing your summary, there would be cause for complaint. However, the OP's opinion trumps everybody else's every time — and it was the OP who made the subsequent edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T18:02:37.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8353" CreationDate="2021-07-14T06:38:36.980" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with IT Alex. Many questions on WB.SE are basically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_(mathematics_education)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word problems&lt;/a&gt; or their variants as applicable to other fields of knowledge. Unfortunately, not all people are good at this type of problem and cannot recognise relevant parts of a problem within a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that this can be solved in any meaningful way. We can recommend people to read more and work on their reading comprehension, but I would not expect that everyone will follow this type of recommendation. Not to mention, that many people will feel offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also impractical to demand people to structure their questions in a specific, strictly regulated way aiming to make information easier to comprehend. While it works for maths and physics, it may not work for other areas. I also believe that it would place an undue burden on new users unless it is possible to include the default question template in the question field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AlexP's comments touch on another frequent problem: Inability to suspend disbelief. This type of comment can be seen very often when premises are flawed. IMO, in this case, a real reason for VTC is 'I do not believe your premise'. Everything else, including the formal reason for VTC, is just a rationalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do not see a way to solve this or even to address this in any constructive way. WB.SE community is not some type of organisation where anti-bias training can be routinely conducted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think that the opinion-based reason for closure is grossly misused and abused on WB.SE. I saw people VTC questions as opinion-based when they do not understand the question, when they do not read the question, when they do not like the author of the question, when they do not accept the premise, and a multitude of other reasons that have nothing to do with opinions or facts or citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are plenty of questions that cannot be possibly answered with facts and citations or have an objectively better answer. Yet, they are not closed. They are upvoted. And those very people who VTC virtually similar questions as opinion-based happily post answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion-based seems to stand for 'I do not like this question' rather than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A note on opinion-based as the question where the best/correct answer can not be determined using specified requirements (or the question that can have multiple equally valid answers)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it is a useful criterion. It only works with questions that are essentially disguised maths problems. But it does not work that well for anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's do a thought experiment: A question about the construction of a bridge. Let's assume that the question is properly formulated, easy to understand, and has all relevant information including specific requirements for the best bridge design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that 3 out of 10 answers satisfy all the requirements stated by the OP. Each of these 3 excellent answers comes with blueprints, calculations, etc. They are equally good and equally valid. The only way to determine which one is 'better' is the OP's preferences. Therefore, the bridge construction question should be closed as opinion-based. That wouldn't be very productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another consideration is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;WB.SE&lt;/a&gt; (see the bottom of the page) do allow specific types of subjective questions. It is simply not true that SE or WB.SE is strictly limited to questions that have one and only one best/correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the majority of questions on WB.SE (the ones that are not disguised maths problems) are treated as subjective questions and answered using opinions. Very few people take time and effort to back all their statements with facts and citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T06:38:36.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8362" CreationDate="2021-07-14T11:52:50.580" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asks if a given concept is realistic in a given context. Answers should say yes or no, with supporting info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I seem to be getting suggestions on alternatives despite not soliciting them in the body of my question, or in my tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207165/would-this-be-a-plausible-way-of-safeguarding-against-an-ai-whilst-being-conduci&quot;&gt;Would this be a plausible way of safeguarding against an AI whilst being conducive to a Cassette Futurism aesthetic?&lt;/a&gt; one answerer suggested using a 'sneaker net', while that's an interesting approach that doesn't answer if &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; given concept is realistic within &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can and do downvote, flag and move on, but what if anything should I be doing to make sure I don't get opinion based suggestions on those questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T20:13:41.980" Title="How to prevent suggestions on reality check?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8361" CreationDate="2021-07-14T14:46:56.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It has always been true that the majority doesn't understand the purpose of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it has always been true that the majority...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't read the Help Center&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't participate in Meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't read tag wikis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't notice the tags at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all that assumes that the question has been perfectly formed for the sake of the tags, which rarely happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what can you do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be patient. While some, like myself, are rule gorgons trying to make the &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; a better place through law and theoretical order, most are here to have fun and don't realize they're not actually contributing in the most efficient (or useful) manner. (You'd be surprised how often senior users answer questions that should have been slammed closed until improved simply because the question tickled their fancy. It's hard to look skeptically at a question and not simply believe that you understand it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a final note to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; question, leave a brief note highlighting the use of the tag and quickly expressing how it will be used to judge a best answer. In a moment of frustration concerning this very issue, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/205093/40609&quot;&gt;wrote a question on Main that was specifically intended to highlight the use of the [tag:reality-check] tag&lt;/a&gt;. You'll notice the first comment is from L.Dutch, who appears to have missed the tag. We all make mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rather than initially downvoting non-compliant answers, leave a comment pointing out that that the answer fails the expectations of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and that you'll downvote followed by a flag to delete if the answer does not become compliant. You'll piss people off, but that's often the price of education. Make sure you consistently follow up your threat with the indicated punishment if the answer remains non-compliant....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't worry about it. If the worst thing that happens to you in your life is that people don't pay attention to the tags on your post — you're doing great!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T19:51:21.873" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T19:51:21.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-14T15:13:31.163" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/207175/40609&quot;&gt;Reasoning about the thermal conductivity of a rigid body&lt;/a&gt; states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because it has &amp;quot;science-based&amp;quot; as a tag, but puts in conditions that explicitly deny known science, specifically, that contradict relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;regularly assumes that questions must conform to real-life&lt;/a&gt;, and so I feel it's important to clarify the tag summary and the tag wiki.  The summary reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers based on hard science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that the first linked question should be closed for failing to meet the expectations of the tag. However, the wiki includes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with this tag should be answered, as far as possible, based on known scientific facts or reasonable extrapolations from those, but answers are not required to provide scientific citations. ... Most answers on Worldbuilding are expected to be based on logic and, to some degree, science by default, so even questions without this tag may receive scientific answers. However, the use of this tag indicates that the asker wants specifically science based answers....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a lot less demanding than the summary suggests.  My question is based on the following investigation, &amp;quot;Does it make sense that we should or should not use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag when asking for a real-life science-based answer to a question that has worldbuilding rules that diverge from known science?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My opinion:&lt;/strong&gt; It is my opinion that tags scope the &lt;em&gt;answer,&lt;/em&gt; not the &lt;em&gt;question.&lt;/em&gt; This, despite the fact that most wikis (including that for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;) talk about their attachment to the question. If I'm right in this opinion, then a casual effort to begin cleaning up wikis so they reflect this would be appreciated. If my opinion is in error, then we have a problem, because there isn't a convenient tag that expresses the idea, &amp;quot;given the rules of my world, does this circumstance reflect (or could it reflect) real-world science?&amp;quot; In a sense, the OP might have needed to choose &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; rather than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, but that, too, would not have reflected exactly what they were looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag summary and wiki be updated to reflect the OP's desire that answers should, as far as possible, reflect real-life science rather than demanding that the answers reflect only real-life science? Said another way, should the wiki be modified to reflect the summary, or should the summary be modified to reflect the wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. Please note that the first linked question is on the verge of closure due to this very issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. In a sense, I'm asking where the line between &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;pseudo-science&amp;quot; is drawn. All world rules that vary from what we &amp;quot;know to be true&amp;quot; in real life could be said to reflect &amp;quot;pseudo-science.&amp;quot; However, that's kinda the point of this site... to help people develop an alternative-science (aka &amp;quot;pseudo-science&amp;quot;) that can be consistently used to develop stories. It's a tough row to hoe if we start punishing people for trying to create a world rule that both meets their needs and can be expressed in the context of real-life or varies as little as possible from real-life.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:34:24.333" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:34:24.333" Title="Should the Science-Based tag demand (similar to Hard-Science) that all world rules adhere to real-life science?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8353" CreationDate="2021-07-15T17:38:21.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All exposition/examples aside, let's look at the real question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a question with an implausible or logically flawed premise opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this my answer is absolutely no.  When a question has an implausible or logically flawed premise, it means that the question needs to be answered as a Frame Challenge. Frame Challenges are a specific types of answer than challenges the logic of the question itself, but Frame Challenges are not automatically opinions.  You also should not necessarily close vote a logically flawed premise as long as the premise is clear enough to understand what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say someone asks something that is absolutely logically flawed like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;My character is too weak to use a sword, but she needs a backup weapon for when enemies get to close for her to user her bow; so what would be another good choice for her to carry as a backup weapon?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; For those of us that know much about medieval weapons we know that, the swords are already arguably the best weapon for someone who is not strong, and bows require a ton of upper-body strength.  So, this question is illogical because anyone who can shoot a bow is strong enough to wield a sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still a valid question; so, instead of Voting to Close, the correct course of action is to answer it explaining that she SHOULD use a sword as her backup weapon, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for implausible questions... I don't think a question should ever be closed just because it is implausible.  Asking, &amp;quot;how would someone who won the lottery 3 times in a row prove he is not cheating&amp;quot; is super implausible, but good stories are often about when the implausible does happen; so, there is no point in excluding these questions.  At most I would leave a comment just to let the OP know how insanely unlikely his idea is, but it's not my place to judge if he decides to continue with his story knowing that it defies the odds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now to address the example the OP used&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote to close for Opinion-Based is supposed to only be for if a question is asking for open-ended ideas.  So if the OP asked &amp;quot;What kind of insect should I make the size of a horse&amp;quot;, that would be an opinion because you could logically make any insect the size of a horse.  Instead, the OP asked what sound a horse sized spider would make.  It is not the burden of the OP to have a deep understanding of sound design, or even to have a baseline understanding of how real world spiders sound.  That burden lies on those of us answering the question.  If you don't have any background in sound design, then this question may sound open ended, but foley artists have all sorts of rules and guidelines by which they design fictional sound effects to match what a viewer is seeing; so, the example question is not opinion-based at all because a half-decent foley artist would be able to follow the rules of his trade to create a best possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote to close for Needs Details is supposed to be for when the question requires follow-up questions to be able to answer.  This is different than providing details that are illogical.  In the case of the spiders question, there is plenty enough detail to make an educated guess.  We know how big the spider is, we know what kind of spider it is based off of, and we have details about the gravity and atmosphere to work with too.  More details probably won't really change your answer much here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So frankly, the spider example is not really a good one for this question since it should not be closed as opinion based, nor does it need detail, nor does it have a flawed premise. If you just don't have the background to answer to the question, then you should let other people answer it who do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actually problem that happened here is that one person answered with a very vague opinion which got a lot go votes.  Not really the fault of the OP.  Sometimes I will VtC a question if something about it is attracting a lot of opinions, and not solid answers, but this example has a few solid, justifiable answers; so, it does not need to be closed just because one person left an opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2021-07-15T17:43:41.083" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T17:43:41.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2021-07-16T18:47:13.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the OP is correct in their assessment of your recap. The information you summarised is accurate, however, it shifts focus from the OP's intended question to the mechanics of dreams. Please note the explicitly stated condition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further assume that this succubus is only using her power to &lt;em&gt;observe&lt;/em&gt; dreams, and assume that &lt;strong&gt;when used in this capacity, dreams work the same way that they do in the real world&lt;/strong&gt;, and that the succubus can only experience the dreams from the same perspective that the person having the dream experiences them from. [bold emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question can be summarised as: 'What are potential applications in psychotherapy for an ability to directly observe people's dreams?' Dream mechanics and succubi's methods of entering dreams are irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-07-16T18:47:13.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2021-07-17T19:47:28.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OPINION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we define &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot; as adhering to &amp;quot;all world rules adhere to real-life science&amp;quot; then we're basically creating a (near vs actual) synonym for the Hard Science tag. The only distinction would become one of need for equations and papers while the other wouldn't. It would be Science Lite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISCUSSION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Because Worldbuilding deals so frequently with the irrealis --- dragons and winged people being commonplace hereabouts --- and many of these questions are indeed tagged as Science Based (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207293/can-i-justify-dragon-limbs-having-hollow-bones-that-are-larger-than-what-would-b&quot;&gt;this dragon query&lt;/a&gt;, e.g.), I'd argue that respondents to such a science based answer ought to approach the question more liberally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a respondent should &amp;quot;build upon&amp;quot; science --- use one's knowledge of biology, anatomy, physics and so forth --- even to the point of creating a new science, in order to give the best answer. We should not be limiting ourselves to real world science --- that's what Hard Science is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hard Science answer is &amp;quot;no, and here are the relevant physics equation and papers describing why dragons can't be&amp;quot;. The Science Based answer is going to have to work with  the math, but ought not be limited to it. The science and the resulting answer don't have to be realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's true that many questions here demand a real life scenario, many others do not. Science, in  the realms of fantasy and even sci-fi, does not need to be limited to what we know of science in the real world.  While questions of these kinds ought to be treated seriously in their scientific principles, there's no reason to stop there. This is also a highly creative forum, and good answers ought to call upon creativity as much as or more than mere number crunching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your subquestion: pseudoscience is just science that works in some other universe. There is absolutely no reason why it can not be called upon, in a serious and sober fashion, to be put to the service of a fictional world in the same way ordinary science ought to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take-away: we as respondents need to apply creativity as much as scientific sobriety when approaching queries that don't fit the 100% real world model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONCLUSION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd vote no for this one, because science must feed art, rather than dominate art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T19:47:28.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8361" CreationDate="2021-07-17T20:13:41.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your marquee question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You Can't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry. That's not how human nature works. Humans are curious people and if you ask a question, someone's going to answer it, even if you express your sternest displeasure at being responded to in a way don't wish to be responded to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sometimes less is best.&lt;/em&gt;  Depending on a person's mood,  they might take your attempts at channeling the responses as you being a control freak or you being petulant (whether you're a petulant control freak or not!) I might just give you a suggestion simply because you abjure me not to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're really not asking a content question (like &amp;quot;how do I do...&amp;quot;) but rather a qualitative question (&amp;quot;how well did I do...&amp;quot;), you might consider making it clear that the best answer will contain the least number of words. &amp;quot;YES&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;NO&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;POSSIBLY&amp;quot; all being one word answers, these would be the top three. If enough people concur that your scenario is plausible, then you'll either get a whole bunch of &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; answers, or a whole bunch of people will upvote the &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also consider a clever flanking manoeuvre by answering your own question three times: &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;MAYBE&lt;/strong&gt; and simply ask people to upvote they one they agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you really can't prevent people from giving you suggestions. Downvoting them, while perhaps serving your immediate thirst for retribution, is ultimately not the most prudent response. It's also a waste, because commentary responses often earn votes and receive comments. Your displeasure vote will not even be registered with the miscreant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T20:13:41.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8196" CreationDate="2021-07-19T19:22:19.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not believe this would be a valuable tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding for this Stack can be defined as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the process of creating and consistently using rules and systems for a fictional world of your own creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;debate about real-world questions&lt;/a&gt; is that all such questions can be answered on other Stacks (and often should be). However, the community recognized the need to ask (and this is important), &lt;em&gt;functionally real-world questions in an effort to forward the process of building a fictional world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're post appears to be investigating that line of reasoning. A fictional thing is happening to Earth as we know it. But there's an important distinction — &lt;em&gt;something fantastic is happening.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That worldbuilding context, the creative and fictional aspect that changes the nature of reality, is important. But as a result, the question really isn't about the real world anymore. Because asking how the real world would react to (e.g.) an alien invasion (since one has never happened other than in science fiction) is no longer a real world question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @elemtilas explained, there's always something different — and that &lt;em&gt;something different&lt;/em&gt; is an incredibly important rule that must exist for the question to be valid here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone were to ask &amp;quot;how would the United States in 1985 react if something like the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in Bermuda?&amp;quot;  Except that this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently has a comment discussion with an OP who regularly asks if a fictional creature is &amp;quot;feasible.&amp;quot; The implied question is, &amp;quot;whether it's a fictional world that has the same rules of physics and biology as Earth, or simply Earth, could my fictional creature exist?&amp;quot; I regularly VTC such questions as opinion-based because, unless a remarkably complete explanation of the biology of said creature is also presented, the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; question can't be factually answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's why I disagree with the value of the proposed tag. The whole point of this site is to create fiction. The existing set of tags, IMO, adequately do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T19:22:19.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8196" CreationDate="2021-07-20T13:03:25.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern world &lt;em&gt;but with&lt;/em&gt; Atlantis, or caped superheroes, or periodic zombie outbreaks, or elementary school wizards, is already covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-reality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-reality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-reality&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions in which reality is different than it is in real life. This may range from small, historical changes to absolute revisions of the laws of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T13:03:25.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-20T17:04:19.440" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207463/best-place-for-wings-on-a-dragon-eagle&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as needing more detail/clarity. Looking at the various descriptions of this reason, I have come to the conclusion that the solution would be to edit to add more details and clear up anything that is unclear. However, with the linked question, I had already addressed every problem given in the comments, with the last edit an hour before the last close vote. What am I missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T19:34:21.470" Title="What is it supposed to mean when a question is closed for need of details or clarity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8370" CreationDate="2021-07-21T12:49:18.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note to readers: the question in question has been edited after this answer was posted. I am leaving the answer unchanged for reference. Please use the edit history of the question referred in the question if you feel the need.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2 id=&quot;what-the-question-is-missing-is-a-technical-description-of-the-aircraft&quot;&gt;What the question is missing is a technical description of the aircraft&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks where to place the secondary wings of an aircraft comparable in weight to a World War 2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dive_bomber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dive bomber&lt;/a&gt;. In order to be able to opine about the best place for those secondary wings, one would need to know --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is the weight of the aircraft distributed;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is the aircraft powered;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is the aircraft steered;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does the aircraft generate lift;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the aircraft intended to do;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And generally what is the &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of those secondary wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, an all-metal propeller-driven dive bomber is not at all anatomically similar to a bird. A large eagle weighs 130 times less than the aircraft in the question; and the mechanism used by birds to generate lift does not work for a dive bomber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give you an example, here is a famous seven-limbed dive bomber: the Junkers Ju 87 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stuka&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Junkers_Ju_87B-2_Stuka.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Junkers_Ju_87B-2_Stuka.svg/640px-Junkers_Ju_87B-2_Stuka.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Junkers Ju 87 Stuka&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The 2.7 tonnes, seven-limbed, gull-winged Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber. Drawing by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kaboldy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaboldy&lt;/a&gt;, available on Wikimedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the secondary wings are placed almost direct above the hind limb, and the primary wings are placed immediately aft of the forelimbs; while the primary wings articulate with the body ventrally, the secondary wings articulate with the body dorsally. The purpose of the secondary wings is to provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pitch&lt;/a&gt; control, and thus control the angle of attack of the main wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-07-21T19:57:31.307" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T19:57:31.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8370" CreationDate="2021-07-21T14:13:41.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note this is less true as of now, as the question has been edited between your question and this answer I started writing here)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2 id=&quot;the-key-issue-is-was-about-what-you-define-as-best-location-exkn&quot;&gt;The key issue is &lt;em&gt;(was)&lt;/em&gt; about what you define as &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; location&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The location you put something is more or less dependent on what your &amp;quot;evolutionary&amp;quot; goal is. Like how you choose that your cookies should have raisins or not : Gives a different flavor, that may or may not please everyone. Of course there are obvious non-choices which hardly benefit in any category. Well, excepted not succeeding in those, which can be a goal!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, if you didn't put many details, your question would have been more likely closed as being &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, as this issue would have become more evident. Indeed, by detailing very accurately, I think it was easier for people to presume your intentions, while left with some doubts here and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2 id=&quot;still-that-doesnt-mean-your-description-is-extremely-clear-125k&quot;&gt;Still, that doesn't mean your description is extremely clear&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here comes a more subjective opinion. I'm bad at miximaxing words on long trails of sentences, especially when its purpose is to represent accurately one of our senses (sight, hearing, smell...). If I have hard times with that, I guess some others would have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to counteract this phenomena, I usually take an advice from an old friend of mine : Draw a picture! It doesn't need to be beautiful, just to be concise and clear. In this case, I would have gone with some &amp;quot;stickman&amp;quot; lines with some text indicating where the elements are relatively to each other, with perhaps the dimensions you envisionned. It only needs Microsoft Paint (or a vector drawing software if you lean on the &amp;quot;pro&amp;quot;-side).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way is to define elements each and order them from head-to-toe, and linking elements together spatially. E.g. : &amp;quot;There is a first set of arms below the head by around 50 cm; Their lengths are about 60cm long, where the hands are lying...&amp;quot;. Compared to drawing, this needs some practice though to avoid writing big blocks of text which are not fun to read, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that's only an opinion and it won't apply to others who have a better 'words-to-space translator' or are able to focus more. And not having pictures or ordered technical description wouldn't have prevented me from giving an answer (given that I actually had an argumented one x_x), but to be honest in honesty I would have been far more confident in giving one if I had an overall view I can look at :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T14:13:41.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T03:54:11.617" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was suprised that there is yet no necromancy tag on WorldBuilding. Please, consider creating it on WorldBuilding, as users can be seeking questions specifically about necromancy for their worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10910" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:58:29.527" Title="I think we lack &quot;necromancy&quot; tag" Tags="|support|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T04:21:47.993" Score="-1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207782/what-is-the-reason-behind-the-iron-law-of-necromancy-in-order-to-raise-the-dea&quot;&gt;What is the reason behind the iron law of necromancy, &amp;quot;In order to raise the dead you must be dead yourself&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This [situation] is just crazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10910" LastEditorUserId="10910" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T13:17:56.070" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T15:54:01.467" Title="I have no idea whatsever why my question was closed as too-story based, it was pure worldbuilding. I request to reopen it!" Tags="|support|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8375" CreationDate="2021-07-26T04:55:04.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207782/what-is-the-reason-behind-the-iron-law-of-necromancy-in-order-to-raise-the-dea?noredirect=1#comment643709_207782&quot;&gt;said in comments&lt;/a&gt;, you posted the question to share your worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help centre&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that answering your own question is allowed and encouraged (I've done it myself), but the question can't be about your story, and questions in general need to be answerable such that one answer is more correct than others (the so-called best answer restriction). As it stands your question is rather open-ended and has produced numerous answers all equally and conceivably valid. Your posted answer of stretched souls isn't clearly a better answer than being required to petition the undeath in person, even if it's the reason you chose for your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastEditorUserId="25189" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T15:54:01.467" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T15:54:01.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8375" CreationDate="2021-07-26T13:32:48.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REQUEST GRANTED!!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...All you have to do is edit your question slightly! I have no horse (or dog) in this race, but I can tell you that I would not have voted to close your question because of it being story based. As you say, there's no story here -- no elements of plot formation or character development. It is however an opinion based query. I generally don't vote to close queries that others find to be opinion based, simply because 90% of the questions in the forum would have to be closed and WB.SE would have to be shut down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal in opinions on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you placed no or insufficient restrictions on the answers. By this I mean you did not provide any criteria by which you'd adjudicate an answer as &amp;quot;best&amp;quot;. How should we distinguish one excellent answer from the next? Every single answer is as valid as the next, so it's up to you to delineate exactly what you're looking for in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T13:32:48.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8374" CreationDate="2021-07-26T16:58:29.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags serve more purposes than just filtering&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because of that, it's not valuable to have a tag for every aspect of everything. I'm not specifically objecting to a necromancy tag. I'm merely pointing out that it's not enough that someone might want to filter questions specifically for necromancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are a funny thing. They kinda scope the question — but here on Worldbuilding they primarily &lt;em&gt;scope the answers.&lt;/em&gt; In other words, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/necromancy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;necromancy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;necromancy&lt;/a&gt; tag is more valuable for helping respondents know that you want answers that specifically reflect &lt;em&gt;necromancy,&lt;/em&gt; and not, for example, the use of technology to reanimate the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as @L.Dutch points out, we already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; tag, and that tag would just as adequately scope the answers to the question. Thus, (and for example), if you asked the question, &amp;quot;given the rules of my world, how could I reanimate the dead?&amp;quot; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/necromancy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;necromancy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;necromancy&lt;/a&gt; tags would have an identical effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/necromancy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;necromancy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;necromancy&lt;/a&gt; would inevitably end up as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe it's worth proposing as a synonym. But I don't see its value as an independent tag. And it's very much possible to have too many tags (we already have scads of tags that have ten or fewer questions associated with them, proving that the ability to filter doesn't have that much value).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:58:29.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T17:53:00.910" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;^^^^^^^^^^^^^ READ THIS BEFORE POSTING AN ANSWER^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just read this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/207828/40609&quot;&gt;Effects of a larger value for the Gravitational Constant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags attached to it. So I went and read the summary and wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though not my question, a legitimate question could be, why do we even have this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7008/40609&quot;&gt;Should we have the science-fiction tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5238/40609&quot;&gt;What should be the tag wiki for [science-fiction]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4924/40609&quot;&gt;Is there room in WorldBuilding for asking about the feasibility of science fiction ideas, which don&amp;#39;t relate to building worlds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5233/40609&quot;&gt;Do we need the [fiction] tag on the Main Site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, moving forward with the idea that this tag should exist, then &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; (at least from my point of view), it should be one of four mutually-exclusive tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; Answers are allowed to dream wildly about solutions, but the solutions are NOT based in any way on magic. E.G. &amp;quot;How can I repair a broken bone?&amp;quot; answer: &amp;quot;nanites.&amp;quot; (This tag would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6516/40609&quot;&gt;as close as we're willing to go to &amp;quot;technobabble.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; Answers are expected to have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; vague tie to science as we know it... but answers should be more than just &amp;quot;sounding&amp;quot; cool.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; Answers are allowed to diverge from known science, but they should have their basis in known science. E.G., &amp;quot;How can I repair a broken bone?&amp;quot; answer: &amp;quot;Using stem cells as your baseline tech, apply a fluid in a manner similar to applying a glue to the broken bones, then cast them together.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; Answers are not allowed to diverge from known science at all — and respondents need to provide math and/or citations to prove it. E.G., &amp;quot;How can I repair a broken bone?&amp;quot; Answer: &amp;quot;with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.countrysideortho.com/how-can-i-speed-up-healing-a-broken-bone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immobilization and proper nutrition&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, one that is NOT part of the above sequence...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; The OP is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to provide the rules of their world and a specific circumstance, situation, or question that is evaluated against those rules for consistency of use and scope. Answers are of the form YES or NO but are encouraged to provide insight for the OP's benefit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At this time&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag is not formatted as part of the mutually-exclusive sequence. The linked question surprised me because, frankly, it seems nonsensical to ask for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; evaluation to a fictional condition. But that might just be me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag part of the mutually-exclusive sequence as described above, or is it something entirely different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag's summary and wiki should be updated either way. Please note that if you vote &amp;quot;entirely different,&amp;quot; you're also saying that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; can be used together, which makes even less sense to me for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2439/40609&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a science-based question and a science-fiction question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-08-01T19:45:13.380" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T19:45:13.380" Title="Are the Science-Fiction and Hard-Science tags mutually exclusive?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8370" CreationDate="2021-07-26T19:34:21.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I didn't VTC or downvote, but I didn't like the question, either&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I agree with @elemtilas that WB tends way too often to believe that if a question can't be answered by Real Life, then it's unworthy to be here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, if the question doesn't have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, then it is NOT mandatory that answers MUST reflect real life. The linked question has none of the science-related tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;) so IMO the only reasons to close would have been Stack rule violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said that...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ichthys King, I'm going to be blunt. It is not my intention to be unkind in any way, but I can't think of a better way to express a frustration I have concerning the pattern of your questions. You remind me of a user from several years ago, @Muze. His account doesn't exist anymore for some reason, but he had a habit of asking any silly question that popped into his head without doing a dram of research of any kind or scoping the question for any real worldbuilding purpose. You appear to do this, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this intrinsically wrong? No, but it means you ask questions that aren't ready to be asked, which leaves respondents making too many assumptions about what you mean and why you mean it. It's messy, unorganized, and that makes your questions too often opinion-based. I spent a bit of time thinking through my comment to your question, because I was on the hairy edge of voting to close myself. But I eventually concluded there was just enough information that an answer could be had. Obviously, others didn't agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Let's use that question as an example, you're creating a fictional creature with fictional wing structures and asking us for a &lt;em&gt;supurlative&lt;/em&gt; condition. The &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; place to attach them to the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How on earth are we supposed to know? What are the rules of your world? What is the internal physiology of the creature? You've thrown out the laws of biology as we know them, should we retain the Earth's laws of physics? Why does the question even matter? Why is it important to know where the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; place is, and what are the limiting conditions and goals for judging &amp;quot;best?&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Why wouldn't any decision you, the OP, made not be sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't provide any of that. Consequently, the question is too close (IMO) to having an off-topic unlimited number of answers that could justify the placement of those wings anywhere on the creature. Here are some answers that are, as written today, legitimate answers to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The air is thicker on your world, so the extra wings are placed centrally, both vertically and horizontally, to give better attitudinal control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Muscles must connect to something to give leverage to the flapping action, that forces them to connect at the shoulder blades. Since the primary wings are in front, the secondaries must be in back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your world is festooned with religious magic! The first set of wings are near the haunch, representing the power of the bowels to compel the mind when the body is hungry. The second set is on the neck, just below the ears, to represent the limitless fancy of the unbound intellect! The creature is made real in your world through the faith of its followers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As your creature flies, it forces fluid through the cloaca. The wings are therefore placed under the body, on either side of the cloaca, to ensure the fluid passes away from the body during flight. This keeps the fluid from coagulating along the tail, which would create air friction during flight and compromise the creature's ability to fly. When not flying, these secondary wings fold over the cloaca to protect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you see the problem? I'm making assumptions about the nature of your world and since you didn't provide any world rules, or context, or even an explanation as to how you'd judge a best answer, each and every one of them is equally right, which is contrary to the Help Center rules that say you cannot ask questions where every answer has equal value. We permit limited lists (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;), but we do not permit unlimited lists (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions feel too much like you're just pounding them out for the sake of asking them. You spend a lot of time on moderately relevant details (your creature is marvelously explained, other than the secondary wing placement), but never answer the question, &amp;quot;why am I asking this question?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong? I could be. I could be misjudging you something awful. It's a crime if I have and if so, you have my deepest apologies.... But if you want to avoid closures, you need to ask better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your question is closed for a lack of details, it isn't just details about the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; of the question that must be clarified. It's also details about the &lt;em&gt;circumstances, context, and reasoning behind the question&lt;/em&gt; that must be clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good place to start is to ask yourself these before a new post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is this question important to me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why can't I just do what I want and move forward?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to both of those questions would help anyone's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;This is important. Asking for a superlative condition (best, worst, largest, smallest, etc.) should ALWAYS come with a specific and detailed explanation of the conditions that justify the superlative. It's actually really hard to do that, because &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; has an unconscious meaning in your head that we will never completely understand, no matter how much description you provide. Frankly, if a question can't be written without superlatives, it isn't ready to be asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T19:34:21.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T21:12:20.637" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/207782/1&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/207782/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this question originally closed for being &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question pasted below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1 id=&quot;what-is-the-reason-behind-the-iron-law-of-necromancy-in-order-to-raise-the-dead-you-must-be-dead-yourself-01k6&quot;&gt;What is the reason behind the iron law of necromancy, “In order to raise the dead you must be dead yourself”?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The living just can't raise the dead from their slumber, only other&#xA;dead ones can. Like, in order to become a necromancer you need to&#xA;perform a ritual that will kill you, but at the same time will&#xA;preserve some of your connections with the world of the living, so you&#xA;will be able to raise yourself from the dead. Such necromantical&#xA;&amp;quot;pulling yourself by your boot straps&amp;quot; needs to be executed&#xA;flawlessly, otherwise even a small mistake can result in a&#xA;wanna-be-necromancer becoming just plain dead, instead of a lich. For&#xA;this reason many people would like to be able to raise the dead&#xA;without performing the ritual on themselves. But alas, this is&#xA;impossible because ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes this &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9182" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T22:57:39.597" Title="Why was this question &quot;unsuitable for this site&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8381" CreationDate="2021-07-26T22:21:12.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The original version of your post had a number of problems&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; When I wrote this answer, I didn't realize that the meta OP wasn't the same OP as the linked question on Main. I believe the answer is still valid, but as you read it, I was assuming that I was writing to the OP on Main. My apologies to @TheOnlyGusti for making that mistake.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC:Too Story-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;First bullet in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please be patient with this first explanation, thanks.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot (and never will) assume that you're asking a question to establish a worldbuilding rule. Were we to do so, we'd be plagued with questions helping authors and writers overcome writer's block — and that's not our mandate. As written, your original post was simply fishing for ideas to rationalize a rule of your world. That's almost always &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; because it could (and often would) involve the politics, religion, philosophy, economy, guilds, trades, etc. of your world — and how they are crafted usually has a lot to do with a story. Worse, such rationalization is frequently a core component of a story's plot. Thus, your question could have been legitimately closed as &amp;quot;too story-based.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OK, as you mentioned in the comments to your post, you're not writing a story. But you didn't explain that and we're not going to assume it because 95% of the questions we get here are for the purpose of writing a story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VTC:Opinion-Based&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that same Help Center page we read that questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and why you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ours is the most creative and imaginative site on Stack Exchange, but that does not allow us to simply abrogate Stack Exchange's general rules. Questions are expected to be specific and answerable. Fishing-for-ideas questions generally are not. That's why we made a distinction between off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite lists of things&lt;/a&gt; and on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;. We do that by adhering to the 2nd and 3rd bullets: you need to provide context, restrictions, and requirements. You didn't, meaning the question could have been legitimately answered by pretty much anything. One person could have answered, &amp;quot;the gods of your world would force them to perform the ritual&amp;quot; and another could have answered, &amp;quot;your magic system requires the attributes of gypsum, potash, and flourine, mixed appropriately, or the breach between the worlds wouldn't happen.&amp;quot; As written, both answers would be equally correct. Which brings us to this statement from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;second bullet in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are actually non-trivial reasons to close a question that are incredibly common on our imaginative and creative stack. It results from people asking questions before they're ready. It's important to ask yourself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do I need this answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of answer &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I need?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will I judge the best answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't pass this kind of information on to us, your question will fail one or more of those three bullets listed above. Your initial post certainly (IMO) violated bullets #1 and #3, and I can construe a violation of #2 because all you asked for was a way to rationalize a rule. There wasn't an actual problem to solve (that came in a later edit when you explained that people wanted to raise the dead without casting the required ritual, a valuable restriction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When there's too many reasons to close a question, we tend to default to &amp;quot;not about worldbuilding according to the rules in the Help Center&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only my opinion because I wasn't one of the original close voters, but the post was so simple and lacked so much detail, conditions, restrictions, goals, and an explanation of how a best answer would be judged, that it justified closing the question for violating the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end, you're responsible for understanding and following the rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when we VTC a question as not-about-worldbuilding, it gets listed as &amp;quot;unsuitable for this site.&amp;quot; It doesn't often mean, &amp;quot;you're not worldbuilding!&amp;quot; It usually means you're following too few rules to be more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like most new users (including me! I once stood in your shoes!), your first reaction to having your proverbial hand slapped is, &amp;quot;I just want my question answered, what's the problem?&amp;quot; Like so many of us, you probably didn't pay much attention to the Tour and haven't read through the first two bullets of the Help Center (much less all the others...). Consequently, you're using a tool without understanding it's purpose and limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take the time to read through the Help Center. But above all, thank you for bringing your question to Meta. We're happy to help you though the Stack's initial culture shock and we really are thrilled that you've given us the privilege of helping you build your world! Frankly, your question became a lot more interesting after all the supporting information was added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to make the Stack Exchange Overlords happy, to help keep questions and answers useful to as many people as possible, and to keep a semblance of order here, we do ask that you learn the rules and work with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T22:57:39.597" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T22:57:39.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-27T02:24:09.833" Score="-3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207782/what-is-the-reason-behind-the-first-iron-law-of-necromancy-in-order-to-raise-t&quot;&gt;What is the reason behind the First Iron Law of necromancy, &amp;quot;In order to raise the dead you must be dead yourself&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private feedback: &amp;quot;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just... How? This reason is total bonkers. I just can't understand how it's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about worldbuilding. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I’m voting to close this question because there is no objective way&#xA;to determine the suitability of an answer. – Monty Wild♦&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dear friend, then why do you not vote to close all other questions that lack tag &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot;? Looks like double standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10910" LastEditorUserId="10910" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T04:30:23.713" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T21:22:51.933" Title="I request to open my question again or explain why it's worse than 90% of other questions here" Tags="|support|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-27T20:46:56.080" Score="13" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;It appears that the question in question has been closed, then reopened, then closed again, and is a vote into reopening it a second time. We're pretty divided about permitting questions about&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;how to be a worldbuilder&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;beyond that act of worldbuilding itself. It appears part of the problem is that people don't understand (or believe) that anyone can actually be a &amp;quot;professional worldbuilder.&amp;quot; Maybe that's true, but oddly (and IMO), that would seem to be intrinsic justification that the questions should be allowed. Aren't we in the business of helping fiction become a reality?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I write this post, the following question has 4/5 close votes, all for the same reason: the question is not about worldbuilding as defined in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/207858/40609&quot;&gt;How would you make money by &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But should they be? I don't know if a question about the &lt;em&gt;profession of worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; has ever been asked before on the Stack, so it's little wonder that the Help Center is 100% focused on the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;act&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of worldbuilding and not the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;job&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of worldbuilding. We touch on it with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tags. But we've not (yet) embraced the proverbial madness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very interested to know what the community thinks about this. I'm not necessarily advocating that the question shouldn't be closed, but I am advocating that maybe we need to invite the Mods to update the Help Center with a statement that we welcome questions about the profession of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Does the community believe we should — or should not — permit questions about how to be a professional worldbuilder on this Stack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-08-01T02:05:06.767" LastActivityDate="2021-08-01T02:05:06.767" Title="Does the Stack wish to allow questions concerning the profession of worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8384" CreationDate="2021-07-27T21:10:22.770" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pismg8l57Rs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Obviously&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes, I'd argue that this is a valid type of question here as it touches on methods and process of worldbuilding. The &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;job&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the geopoet is, after all, the monetary extension of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;artistic process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the geopoet. We have tags that this kind of query fits well, as you bring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So vote me yes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T21:10:22.770" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8383" CreationDate="2021-07-27T21:22:51.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm Confused&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Didn't you ask this question the other day? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8377/37029&quot;&gt;I remember answering you!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, just perhaps, you didn't follow through on the bit where I suggested that you place restrictions on the answers. Your question is fine, but a lot of good questions get closed (for being opinion based) simply because the OP doesn't list any criteria for determining which answer best fits the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, consider editing a short section at the end that says &amp;quot;these are the criteria that a good answer will have&amp;quot; and then list what it is you're looking for. Just asking for help to explain is like asking for an infinite list of things, when what we need here is much shorter finite list!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T21:22:51.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8384" CreationDate="2021-07-28T04:50:50.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For sake of discussion I will say no, worldbuilding as a profession or career should not be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere in SE, career advice has explicitly been ruled off topic, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. There are stacks that allow it of course, but it cannot be taken as given that a stack should include career advice;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Workplace stack is the go-to for advice navigating the world of work: &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/tour;&quot;&gt;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/tour;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where does one draw a line between questions about working as a worldbuilder and working as a concept artist, writer, etc, and is it worth having a parallel set of criteria for judging questions? Would the answer to &amp;quot;How do I get a job in worldbuilding?&amp;quot; differ appreciaby from &amp;quot;How do I get a job as a concept artist? / creative consultant? / art director? / writer?&amp;quot; I would say no, overall, and there are other stacks better suited to handle those questions;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inevitably some questions would rely on the poster's interpretation of a client's or employer's instruction, which we cannot properly interrogate and cannot alter to improve the question without contradicting the poster, undermining the purpose and format;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question like &amp;quot;how do I make money as a worldbuilder?&amp;quot; were on topic, arguably so too would &amp;quot;How do I set up a Squarespace/Patreon/YouTube/etc to showcase/sell/profit from my worldbuilding?&amp;quot; and that, I think, illustrates how minor the worldbuilding aspect of these questions would likely be;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Criteria for the best answer are likely to be problematic: if the chosen or highest-voted answer to the above question doesn't result in the poster making money, what then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The dearth of expertise, citable resources, etc, specific to working or otherwise earning money as a worldbuilder (not 'Concept Artist' or other job titles, or 'published author', etc), as well as the near nonexistence of Worldbuilder as a paying gig (distinct from hobby, interest, or byproduct of being a concept artist, author, etc), means there is questionable validity to any answers offered and marginal utility to including the topic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help centre&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world...&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; This topic is not about building a world (no more than, say, &amp;quot;Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is affecting my worldbuilding, can you recommend a treatment?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastEditorUserId="25189" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T14:53:34.520" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T14:53:34.520" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8379" CreationDate="2021-07-28T05:32:11.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why the two tags are mutually exclusive. We have plenty of examples of science-fiction works and worlds which have solid feet in hard-science (Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, just to name one), and also science-fiction works which are so loosely science based to the point of being almost magic based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T05:32:11.877" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8384" CreationDate="2021-07-28T10:15:52.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and No position&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; leave the question open as it is, as exception, wait for it to see what useful things it can bring, which specific problems it can bring. There is no room to grow along the other question's, for the topic. Which also means we do not need to worry about the q, currently it has 4/5 open votes, and such things are rarely asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe meta can hold those posts, as an option, to make this place a bit more interesting and/or energetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense mention tags can be in line with the new 3th one but then we have to be quite strict with the questions and answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In meta format it can be less of a question but more like share the success/fail story. This comes with the intent of building up some collection of information, of &amp;quot;do and don't&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both options sure are compromises, because even if I find some points from @rek post valid or worthy to be considered, with my limited but still existing experience with other stacks they do not necessarly get the specifics/nuances even if one is capable in some cases to cram a question in their framework. One of my experimental questions was close enough to be fit in another SE, used is as apportunity to test that suggestion, I even got one upvote there, but no input at all, so quite dissapointed. On WB the question was closed (fair game : 5 votes, no complaints), but at least I got some feedback which expanded my understanding of the problem a little and provided a take from an angle I was not capable to see it from, because of a lack of experience in that field. Since then, I really oppose suggestions to ask WB related matter on other SE's, it should be totaly ops descision, we aren't kids here (for most) and we know of the existence of other SE's thanks to the reminder - that's it. If we can answer we answer, if not then not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense we already have a mix of all kinds of stuff (mainly topic, fields of expertise - that is the money part/business end of WB as The Place), it is just a fact at hands, no matter help center or anything else, so then why not add another one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that the topic can't expand without affecting other stuff. It can't expand in advertising - we need a guy who is good at future space tech concepts plz join our project here is link annotation whatever presentation. Need unicorn description/concept/visual with butterly tail ...  Need to work out details of my doomsday scenario, need proof reading of it as well, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some guys really have not enough skills to tow the whole idea they have, they could indeed get a lot of help if they could choose that. Did a proofreading for a guy (he had enough skills, but still it was a good thing to do), at that time I stepped down from the project there were about 8 people doing just that (volunteers) on regular basis once a week, a team of people who provided visuals, etc - a quite sucessful project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I knew a guy who published paper books and such in a setting I'm invested in, if he would ask me then yeah it could be a different story then, lol. Point is people do need further help, and for those who answer questions's, for some it could be new interesting experience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly there were efforts to promote medium place and something on it (do not recall details, lazy to search for metaposts), but it seems it failed(?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no growth potential for the topic, mean there is no room for it to grow along the othe questions's until some higher-ups (mods or higher) decision is made, and what WB can accomodate is very limited/narrow scope of the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option could be tojust keep the question as an exception, keeping it open and such, for it to collect stories how harsh is the life and such - one tag one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it get some traction, which I'm pretty skeptical about, even if I was quite interested in reading the answers, and could provide one or two stories on my own, I'm skeptical it gains too much support or attention in the months ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if such thing would happen, or maybe to facilitate such thing to happen or more seriously develop the direction, maybe propose some sister SE site, maybe in conjoint efforts with sci-fi.se, writers.se(?), who else (translators?) to help local SE people to find each other. In some sense it is competing with different freelance places and other services of that kind, on the other hand programming stacks do promote different jobs so it is not totally against SE's ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No conclusion. To make it properly too much work for one or few questions, once a year asked topic, even if in general there may be some potential and use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T19:07:20.393" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T19:07:20.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8384" CreationDate="2021-07-28T13:47:14.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last I checked &lt;em&gt;very few&lt;/em&gt; people build worlds professionally. They're artists, writers, game designers, or storytellers. Worldbuilding isn't their profession it's a skill they use in their actual profession. With the exception of solidly established IPs like Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Warhammer 40k, Marvel and DC, people only make money off what they do with the worlds they create. Even then, each of the established IPs above started off not by licensing their worlds but by producing and selling works of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that any questions about how to I become a professional worldbuilder will turn out to actually be asking, &amp;quot;How do I become a professional artist/writer/designer/storyteller?&amp;quot; While those questions are important if you want to make a living building worlds. I don't think a site dedicated to building fictional worlds is the best place to ask them. By example Stack Overflow just answers questions about programming, if you asked &amp;quot;How do I make money programming?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;How do I build a career as a programmer?&amp;quot; it would be quickly closed as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T17:53:00.223" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T17:53:00.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-29T21:25:02.667" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207641/could-my-character-dye-her-hair-with-clothing-dye-or-other-common-materials&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about dyeing hair into unnatural colour using medieval technologies was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/200735/natural-and-affordable-way-to-dye-hair-in-medieval-period&quot;&gt;this question asking about dyeing red hair into a natural colour&lt;/a&gt; in a similar setting. However, these questions require very different answers due to several considerations explained below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unnatural hair colour is a two-step process: Bleach, then dye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural colour &lt;em&gt;does not require&lt;/em&gt; bleaching. There is a wide range of natural hair colours that can be easily achieved without extreme chemical processing. For the natural hair colour question, the easiest and least damaging option would be dyeing hair darker and changing its shade into brown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unnatural colour &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; bleaching in all cases, except when the base colour (the natural hair) is very light blond. Dark hair is very hard to dye and unnatural colours like blue, yellow, green, bright red, orange, and so on are impossible to achieve without bleaching. This is precisely the reason why the majority of sheep raised for wool is white: It increases dyeing options. Wool from non-white sheep is rarely dyed and is often spun as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even highly pigmented dyes do not produce unnatural colour results when applied to dark hair (medium brown and darker), they only result in a change of hue. The darker the base the less noticeable this change will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Limitations of medieval hair dyeing options&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medieval hair bleaching options were very limited and did not produce results similar to hair bleaches of today. The most popular bleaches were lye soap and ammonia. In addition to these, people would expose hair to the sun to lighten it (sometimes using lemon juice and similar remedies to increase the bleaching effect). All of these approaches have 2 things in common: 1) They are not capable of colour lifting to the same degree as modern bleaches (it is impossible to achieve very light shades unless the hair is originally light); 2) they seriously damage the hair (the hair becomes prone to breakage; overprocessing can even make hair so fragile that it breaks at touch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many colour dyes, while probably not highly toxic, are still damaging for the hair. For example, woad dye (blue plant-based dye) is known to damage protein-based fibres and should be used with great care. It is possible that some (if not all) formulations of woad dye cannot be used on bleached hair at all since it would lead to extreme damage and full loss of hair length due to breakage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider these 2 points, the answers to the unnatural hair colour question are limited to dyes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are available in the Middle Ages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are non-lethal to humans (toxic dyes where toxicity accumulates over time are fine since lead makeup was a thing for millennia);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;can be safely used on bleached hair&lt;/em&gt; (this is probably the greatest limitation);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;produce unnatural colours when applied to the yellow-orange medium blond base (this would be the average result for bleaching in medieval Europe).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different set of dyes compared to the natural hair colour question which looks for the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are available in the Middle Ages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are non-lethal to humans (toxic dyes where toxicity accumulates over time are fine since lead makeup was a thing for millennia);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reduce or mask red pigment in the original hair;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;produce natural hair colour when applied to a red base.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not my question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not a perfect question, but let's stay focused on the duplicate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the accepted answer is not correct: Not all dyes that can be used on white wool can be used on human hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T03:53:08.637" Title="The unnatural hair colour question is not a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2021-07-30T02:33:04.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some unnatural hair colors would require prior bleaching. Others would not. Indeed, nothing stops anyone from coloring their hair without bleaching — and the act of bleaching is not intrinsically required for the question. Said another way, I don't believe the need to previously bleach hair would change the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, The two questions are each asking for lists of naturally-occurring dyes or dyes available via the technology of the medieval era. I agree that the former question is specifically asking for elements that would lead &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to natural hair color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be realistic options to change hair color to any other natural hair color?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the current question is badly asked. The title makes it sound like it's a duplicate of the previous question, and the only hint that it's not comes from bullet #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current colour is a blue-ish hue, but that's definitely not permanent- It could be any unnatural hair colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the question should be re-opened, BUT...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the OP should have their attention drawn to how the question should (frankly, must) be improved. I have sympathy for the close voters. Yes, we should all be responsibly attentive when a question is asked. But it was very easy to overlook the differences between these two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's not valuable to include the answers from the earlier question in the new one. In other words, the OP should be &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; asking for non-natural hair coloring solutions. No blonds, reds, browns, or blacks of any shade. Ideally, the OP would link back to the earlier question to indicate that those answers are found there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it would improve the question to ask &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for solutions that would not harm the person. I've no doubt that there are compounds that could dye hair all kinds of interesting colors — so long as one didn't mind their scalp being burned, or being poisoned, or contracting cancer or some other problem. The question could allow these so long as the OP invited respondents to indicate whether their solutions were safe to use and, if not, what would happen and how quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would help a LOT if the title actually expressed the specific question. Something like &amp;quot;Can unnatural hair color be achieved during the medieval period?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T02:33:04.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2021-07-30T03:53:08.637" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled&quot;&gt;SE Meta: How should duplicate questions be handled?: When are two questions considered duplicates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions may be duplicates if they have the same (potential) answers. This includes not only word-for-word duplicates, but also the same idea expressed in different words.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Questions asking about the same aspect of the same concept, but with different examples, may or may not be considered duplicates. It depends how easy it is to figure out one example from the other. If it's only a matter of changing one small part of the question (e.g. in the case of coding sites, some numerical values or some variable names), they're duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As firmly established, these two questions not only have the same &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; answers, the latter question was &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; answered in the original across multiple replies. They also ask their questions in nearly the same words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If understanding why the questions are at all related requires a detailed explanation, the questions aren't duplicates, merely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was closed and it has taken multiple detailed explanations to attempt to argue they &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; related, inventing criteria neither asker signed off for in their questions, and at one point urging users to 'read between the lines' of one question (but not the other).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, under &lt;strong&gt;Which question is the duplicate?&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rule is to keep the question with the best collection of answers, and close the other one as a duplicate. If the selected target question is unanswered, the system won't even let you pick it as a duplicate target*.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If one question has great answers but bad wording, and the other has poor or no answers but great wording, edit the badly-worded question and close the other one as a duplicate.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If in doubt, close the more recent question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergo the newest one should be closed and remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T03:53:08.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8379" CreationDate="2021-07-30T14:31:49.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The genre is known as &amp;quot;hard science fiction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard science fiction doesn't have to consider economics or other resource limitations, it only requires you to be within the limitations of science as we currently understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generation ships are allowed, mining asteroids is allowed, extra-planetary bases are allowed. All these things fall within both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, none of them are politically or economically viable but they're all technically possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could suggest that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; is redundant as it's a different meta set (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; which certainly is exclusive to hard-science), but the two are certainly not exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T14:31:49.417" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1835" CreationDate="2021-07-30T16:57:54.400" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The questions are inherently different&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is asking about the consequences of magic as achieved by violating nuclear physics or altering time, the second question is about the consequences of magic as achieved by violating thermodynamics.  Labeling these the same is like labeling a question about helicopters as the duplicate of a question about rockets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even through the end goal may be similar, the mechanism by which you get there matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T16:57:54.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-01T18:26:19.440" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am still interested in that the little q I have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198172/a-big-primitive-computer-in-orbit-very-big-powerfull-but-old-technologies-from&quot;&gt;A big primitive computer in orbit, very big, powerfull but old technologies from 80&amp;#39;s, what is a potential fiat money value for its use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but unfortunately, I'm at a loss as comments do not provide sufficient feedback on why it is offtopic, as it seems not much better or worse than a good/bad half of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/economy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;economy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;economy&lt;/a&gt; questions. I guess I can bring examples, but not the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like if someone manages to clear my own blindspot about my own q and enlighten me with knowledge and details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sure can see certain uncertainty, but the evaluation asked is more like an order of magnitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would like to see JBH take, as he often likes to ask for details, and here it is an example of a question with the highest level of details directly in answer or indirectly in the world around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would like to see critique, as indeed asking q's turns out to be not that easy, so as maybe some support, happy to see it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;examples section&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wasn't digging for it, but just as it happens to be on main, decided to add some, maybe more later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189302/how-can-a-hive-mind-secretly-monetize-its-special-ability-to-make-lots-of-money&quot;&gt;How can a hive mind secretly monetize its special ability to make lots of money?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how a story-based q looks like, basically 95% of q's starting with &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/209145/why-would-a-world-empire-spend-the-time-resources-to-raise-an-endogamic-military&quot;&gt;Why would a world empire spend the time/resources to raise an endogamic military class?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;temp content, screenshot for L. Dutch&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the comment, do we have some tech problems or?: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The question is closed as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;, not as &amp;quot;need more details&amp;quot;, why do you think that adding or having added more details would solve the off-topic?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jCGlA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jCGlA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-08-01T22:14:10.307" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T18:50:43.497" Title="feedback on the q - why it is off-topic" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-01T19:33:36.947" Score="7" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being the most creative and imaginative Stack in the Stack Exchange library has a handful of disadvantages. Stack Exchange's basic behavior is to expect a single objective and answerable question that has the hope of leading to a single best answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&quot;&gt;I believe this is one of Stack Exchange's basic selling points&lt;/a&gt;: to be a specifically useful place for people to find information, including people who come later, after a question has already been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem arises when people have writer's block or any other form of creative constipation such that they need some help moving a cool idea to fruition. We call these &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they suck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they're fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem. They're literally contrary to pretty much every rule Stack Exchange lists in the Help Center and in the VTC descriptions.[E.G. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;see &amp;quot;guidelines&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;see &amp;quot;to prevent...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;]. No matter how much we like them and want to answer them, they don't belong. At one point I tried to ameliorate the problem by introducing the idea of an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; vs. an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;, but I believe it's time to better embrace the madness by offering some specific advice about how to legitimately &lt;em&gt;fish for ideas&lt;/em&gt; on a service that literally loathes the idea of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is requesting a POLICY CHANGE since reading through the history of the issue it's obvious that idea generation (aka &amp;quot;Fishing for Ideas&amp;quot;) has been a reason to close since the beginning. However, it used to be an official VTC reason — now that VTC reason is gone, but the underlying problems (story-based, opinion-based, needs-focus) remain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Knowing that it is impossible to entirely disconnect any idea-generation question from Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;expectations concerning how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt;, what advice can we give people to help them craft an acceptable Fishing for Ideas question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History:&lt;/strong&gt; This issue has been touched on several times (this is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; an exhaustive list...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/40609&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1850/40609&quot;&gt;What makes this NOT idea generation question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2177&quot;&gt;Is it an idea generation and thus off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2329/40609&quot;&gt;Idea Generation in Help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2336&quot;&gt;Should we rename Idea Generation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2732/40609&quot;&gt;Being more up front about idea generation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033&quot;&gt;Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3063&quot;&gt;Case Study #2 - Daaaah Whoosh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3064/40609&quot;&gt;Ontology of Question Types&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3193/40609&quot;&gt;What if Worldbuilding banned What If questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5621/40609&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3567/40609&quot;&gt;Checklist for the perfect post - Idea refinement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6654/40609&quot;&gt;How should we deal with inherently open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7304/40609&quot;&gt;Where do I go if I&amp;#39;m just fishing for ideas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7390/40609&quot;&gt;What makes for a good &amp;quot;why would&amp;quot; question that stays on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8175/40609&quot;&gt;Are we too harsh on the so-called &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the time to tiptoe through that very large field of tulips, what you'll learn is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Idea generation questions (AKA &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot;) has been a reason to close since the beginning,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; questions are intrinsically opinion-based.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People really, really, really like fishing for ideas questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem with this Question:&lt;/strong&gt; It could be reasonably said that this is a duplicate of any one of a dozen questions from the past. It's an effort to legitimize something that's been illegitimate thanks to the structure and rules of Stack Exchange since the beginning. Frankly, the Mods could solve this in a heartbeat by adding either &amp;quot;Idea generation questions are on-topic if you do the following...&amp;quot; to the Help Center &amp;quot;On Topic&amp;quot; page or &amp;quot;Idea generation questions are off-topic.&amp;quot; to the Help Center &amp;quot;Off Topic&amp;quot; page. That would definitively solve the problem. Mods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Meaning there's no way for the respondent to assert that their answer is better than all others, and no way for the OP to judge one answer better than another.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:23:25.700" Title="How to make a &quot;Fishing for Ideas&quot; question fit on Worldbuilding Main" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|asking-questions|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8397" CreationDate="2021-08-01T20:05:24.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My VTC was cast before the current edit, but I believe my issues remain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before I begin, it's important to realize that few of us see more than about 20% of the questions that pass through this Stack. That means that there's precious little consistency in the closing-and-reopening process because we all have different views concerning why things should be closed. Consequently, it's unreasonable to point to any other question(s) suggesting that yours should remain open since theirs did. What's most likely to happen is that I'll go vote to close those questions because they violate my interpretation of the rules. You're asking about your question. Nobody else's question establishes precedent for or against your need.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the basic problem. You've created a vaguely-defined tool based on nearly 50 year old tech and placed it in the modern world and asked us to explain, of all things, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;how profitable it can be.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we know? If I buy a hammer and put it in a tool box and never use it, then its profitability is zero. If I use it to build my house, technically it's profitability is till zero. If I sell the house and the hammer was the only tool I used, then the difference between the house's sell price and its construction price could be called the profitability of the hammer (but it likely wouldn't because I wouldn't get the best benefit from taxes if I did that...). If I use it to bash in the head of Adolf Hitler before the Nazis stormed Poland, its profitability would be beyond price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you see the problem? &lt;em&gt;Profitability is based on the &lt;strong&gt;circumstances&lt;/strong&gt; surrounding the use of the tool. It has nothing at all to do with the tool itself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (on-topic) is the development and consistent use of the rules governing a fictional world of your own creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding (off-topic) is the development of plot, circumstances, and character choices and actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it doesn't matter what the tool is. Back during the cold war my father had a saying, &amp;quot;a weapon unused is a useless weapon.&amp;quot; What's the profitability of an ICBM? I dunno, what's the value of peace? How do you put a price on it? Even a house is only as valuable as what the buyer is willing to pay for it. What are the conditions and limitations of the buyer? Are they wealthy, middle-class, or poor? Do they have a large savings account? a retirement account? a wealthy uncle? Or just enough for a down payment? What is the condition of the economy involving the buyer and the seller at that time? How much does the seller have invested in the house? Is the house in a desirable area? Is it in good repair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More problems... there are &lt;em&gt;so many variables&lt;/em&gt; that define &amp;quot;profitability&amp;quot; and all of them are a function of the circumstances of your story — not a rule of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically in terms of your question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one way&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of looking at profitability is a computer's profitability can be judged in relation to the value of the data it manipulates. If a simulation will lead to a million-dollar deal, then the computer that completed that simulation has a profitability of a million dollars. If it's being used to process SETI signal analyses, its profitability is zip until an alien culture is actually found (and then it could be said that it was still zero).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another way&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of looking at profitability is the computer's profitability can be judged by the &lt;em&gt;rental value it has.&lt;/em&gt; In other words, the owner spent \$X to make the computer ready for people to rent. He then &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chooses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (see &amp;quot;storybuilding&amp;quot; above) \$Y such that \$Y-\$X = profitability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Establishing the profitability of any tool is not a basic economics question. It's a circumstantial question that demands that we begin writing your story for you (the essence of &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot;). it requires us to invent circumstances to justify the perception of value. And that's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-08-01T20:05:24.220" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2021-08-02T01:08:36.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I concur...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An edit delineating exactly how far from shore one may fish and what sort of license one needs to fish in these waters would solve a lot of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main issues I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;VTC for being Opinion Based&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;: I know I've said it many times before, that &lt;em&gt;every query ever asked here&lt;/em&gt;, with the exception of hard science questions and queries asking us to plug numbers into an equation, are fundamentally opinion based. Dragons, elves, aliens, space economics, what clothing would X wear --- all of that is opinion and speculation of the most delightful sort!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fishing for Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;: this is just a (somewhat) less than kind way of saying &amp;quot;opinion&amp;quot;. See no. 1 about the two exceptions that aren't fishing expeditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Querents love asking&lt;/strong&gt; and Respondents love the opportunity to wax creative: yes we do! There's no denying this. Frankly, I find myself viewing such questions as less and less problematic as time goes on, though with a caveat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always liked your distinction between the off-topic infinite list of things and the on-topic finite list of things. It's specific enough that it looks like we've accomplished something, but broad enough that we can still allow pretty free rein for querents who are in difficulties with idea generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Potential advice:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I certainly get that a fishing question like &amp;quot;I have this alien setting: what are the aliens like?&amp;quot; are a touch broad. I'd argue that the tried and true pieces of advice are still the best:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to be as specific as possible: pick two or three different areas you'd like to focus on and ask separate questions about each. &amp;quot;I'd like the aliens to breathe methane -- can humans visit their world?&amp;quot;  ---  &amp;quot;Can these aliens get sick with human diseases?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to offer some guidelines that will help the respondent tailor an answer to your needs. &amp;quot;Good answer requires that A, B &amp;amp; C be taken into account&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write your query in the Sandbox first, especially if the querent is bright and shiny new. Their problem may be more about how to write a question at all more than searching for ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Last but not least: advise querents to come into this forum having done their homework first. We generally demand that people try to do basic research about a topic first. It's really annoying when a 0.167342 sec google search reveals twenty-seven different awesome answers to the question. Same thing for fishing expeditions: if you want to know &amp;quot;what are the aliens like&amp;quot;, at least do some basic brainstorming first! Perhaps advise that if you want to go fishing here, you have to provide at least two positive and two negative pieces of data. (The aliens do this and that; they're not like thus and so.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a potential edit to the Help Center to make use of these? A statement that neither allows nor disallows fishing expeditions, but does offer firm guidance on how to fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-08-02T01:08:36.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2021-08-04T07:47:41.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a big can of worms actually (sometimes, based on observations I even think there is sabotage going on on wb, not with the proposal, but with other things)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of good points in @elementilas post, and in an ideal situation why not, but wb isn't in an ideal situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I do agree that every q will contain some room for opinions, it by nature of topics, of what subjects are asked, so as fundamentally it is so because how does one asks what one does not know - so splitting hairs on that, forcing OP's in 69 figure is not necessarily useful, and such situations have to be handled on the side of those who answer q's. So as it may be some food for newbies as well, they learn, shape their mindset, get some rep, so occasionally - why not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be too strict also may be against the goal - helping authors to make better works, better in a sense of science and such from tour page. Better in objective frameworks, not in creative writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be extreme about answers is also not the best, as a good answer is one which is helpful and at least points in some useful direction, also per some guidance page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So being anal (sorry but it is the only english word I know which fits the description, plz someone help me to change it in a british humor sentence) about deviations isn't good or helpful for many - those who answer and those who ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that to say - I do not support extremes, I do not do extremes, and I do not advocate for it. And it for to point out that what I say next may sound as if I do(or if it sounds that way), but I do not and I do advocate for moderate approaches. (Extreme in a mathematical sense, just in case if it has some weird connotation in english, you'll never know those days, longing for times when dead Latin was as lingua franca, there was some convenience in languages which do not evolve, lol)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atm we place too much pressure on those who ask questions, and not enough of it on those who answer q's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions can be classified as containing some percentage of objective content, which can be addressed using knowledge of real things, and opinion part which also can be distinguished as expert(knowledge) opinion and fantasy opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so a random q can have 2 or 3 scores given. For people who do not have expert knowledge for given q it may look like one or two scores - (opinion, [objective, [expert opinion]])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just detecting an opinion part in a question is not sufficient to close the q, and I would argue(in an ideal world maybe) even 100% opinion q is not necessarily worthy of closure if op is willing and capable to work on it and improve it. There is long reasoning behind it(flaws of tech used to close and open q's on se, which does not work well on wb), but one relevant to the discussion - instead of making a bunch of low-quality q's OP may focus efforts on making that first q better, learn in the process what wb is about, make a good example, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sandbox on meta - it does not work for most people, really - it is reality, and if someone didn't recognize it it's time, really. Things have to happen in situ. in that sense proudness of blitz closing q's which was a thing for quite a long time - u kidding me, really?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just detecting the opinion part in q is not sufficient to close it, and here I support L. Dutch's stance, once expressed in comments - we may or should then address a more objective part of such q. That actually a good position, and it is up to us - those who answer and vote close or open to stick to it. Detect our shortcomings, detect limits of our expertise, stick to a more proper way to write answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people, sometimes - do not even bother to address the q, jumping straight to alternative solution/vision, etc. If one's knowledge says to him the q has problems and one wishes to write alternative solution - sure, it may go well in-line with helping people make better works, but please spend some of your time to describe which and why there are problems. Or maybe spend some time in comments clarifying things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we use the comment section well enough, but some could use it too. And some who stealthy remove comments do it less, I see that chat removal cases are lesser in numbers, that is a good thing. The comment section is a workplace for those who answer the q or consider it, and it requires as much as it requires.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So considering that, we already have everything for list asking, and it already happens. Again it is due to the nature of the matter, most of the time we do not handle q's which are so narrow for them to have one solution or few alternatives. And another thing is q's aren't like one can test them, it not like 'How do you change bash prompt' - where one plugs(danger, do not remove your /, lol) a solution in CLI and it works or it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What needs is to work out some more or less coherent judgment, with which it was always a problem. Exchanging points in comments, specific to the question, is a good attempt to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense VTC VTO comments - I find it to be a very good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is a good thing you do, and more people should do it. it allows us to build some shared views or discuss them on meta to agree to disagree or agree on something different or just correct our stances in a reasonable manner - or nothing, as an attempt it all fine. So such comments are very useful, as it allows us to change in some organized way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in that sense, we have everything it takes to ask lists, and it happens regularly, providing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question how my alien makes a perfectly round ball out of clay, for to repair its space ship on a planet which is almost a carbon copy of earth and does that from scratch - does not differ that much from a q - how to make a ball out of clay, of how to do the same + some restrictions like tools skills time place whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indeed some times there is a necessity to ask things that one does not know, and it may have a finite or infinite list of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if the list isn't expressed in one answer, it is expressed by the set of the answers, and rightly so - there is more than one way to make a ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in that sense insisting, for q closure purposes that a q should have strict criteria for the best answer, this test alone is not sufficient for closure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when op accepts an answer - it is nothing more than ops gratitude and a sign that wb was helpful for him - it does not mean he did verify an answer and it worked for him and it is a correct one. The rest answers can be correct and good as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Litmus test could be - does answering the q in the way may make better work in sense of science and such. if a list does that - it is a list, if opinion it is an opinion, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since L. Dutch stopped singlehandedly close questions, respect for that is not easy to change oneself, then it up to the community(mostly) to influence and shape the flow of q's and a's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we share vtc's vto's to sync clocks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain and clarify q's with ops - teaching, explaining, encouraging to work on their q's, not just hack them with closure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give them some slack, it is not necessarily easy to ask a good question plenty of examples of all kinds - and try our best judgment in writing an answer, which in some way refffers to a perfect question in our mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more often do and demand doing preliminary work and discourage those who jump with answers for the shake of rep if there are some significant problems with q's and a's (but do not forget essence core of the q, reasonable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do downvote(maybe, if there is a reason) those answers which do jump in just for rep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skip more often in the rev queue - if the topic is not one we are closely familiar with. observing myself I noticed a difference in judgments when in judgment in a queue or when I read and think on a question that drew my attention from the main. Time invested is different, so predictably there is a difference in the quality of judgment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more fuzzy logic in the process - it is a thing, and it happens anyway, so again - splitting hair over a word is not useful for anyone. we have to train to be able to grasp the intention of a q, its essence for it to be ours guidance in follow-up actions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more understanding that other se's practices maybe not be directly applicable to wb content. Authors so as we have practical problems and solutions and we have to use what we have - no one will change things just for our necessities - imperfect world and we have to use imperfect tools. But there is a guiding star - help authors to make better work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do no forget it for authors - I may expect some maturity from people, but I do not expect them to prove that and I am not interested in such proofs. even if it is a schoolboy with an intention to tell a story to his girl, or a lonely guy making his own fantasy - for all intended purposes they are equal to me - questions are legit as they may(0.001%) be useful for others as something - ideas inspirations. But on the other hand quality of q's do matter as well. Sorry for the language, but my own preferences, I would rather read a long good one, than a short and shitty one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Most important:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;helping authors to make better works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is a guiding star, and I personally think it is an important and good mission. (on a level like - saving humanity - lol)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But helping ones to do so, we help consumers to get used to higher quality, which will force more people to try to produce better ones, more q's for us - profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that, understanding or accepting or adapting that helps to resolve many discussions which happen on meta since inception and since we left beta - opinions, on topic, belongs to other se's - it helps to take decision and judgment in all those cases for many q's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in that sense list q's aren't an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-08-04T09:27:06.143" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T09:27:06.143" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2021-08-04T17:53:51.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not forget that all &amp;quot;user contributions [are] licensed under CC BY-SA&amp;quot;. Answering a question with facts, or even with barely supported opinions, is unproblematic; facts and opinions as such are not creative input, and the querent will most likely use only the information given and not the form in which it was given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But providing creative input is different. If the querent takes up a suggestion and runs with it, what they would be doing is creating a derivative work; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike&lt;/a&gt; license would be triggered, with its attending obligations and restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions asking for ideas are to be allowed, I think that at a minimum the platform should tag or flag them as such, and it should add an unmistakable banner, similar to the banner automatically added for hard-science questions, making it clear that by asking the question the querent understands what they can and cannot do with the answers, and what obligations they assume when using one or more of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that this site has a broad international membership; laws and rules about intellectual property vary very much from country to country, and any solution would have to be carefully designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T17:53:51.847" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2021-08-04T20:06:05.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Simple: YOU DON'T&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, fishing for ideas is defined in all those cases, that the question is extremely broad and there are no real factors that make one answer better than another. As a result, any question that is fishing for ideas is by its setup &lt;strong&gt;opinion based&lt;/strong&gt; and has to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How to ask and not fish?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid fishing your ideas, there are about a handful of factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be as specific as possible&lt;/strong&gt; - Try not to answer &amp;quot;Who's the ruler of Constantinople?&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;Who'd be the Ruler of Byzantinum in 1453 if the Byzantine-Ottoman war ended with a win of the Byzantines but the death of their ruler?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do your research&lt;/strong&gt; - In our example, look up how byzantine rulers in that time were chosen and elaborate on who is available as a possible heir in your empire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't try to get a story solution&lt;/strong&gt; - Yes, we don't answer too story based questions. Which is the pitfall my example question falls for. It might be better to ask &amp;quot;The Byzantine Emperor is dead. There is no legitimate heir! Which method for a new emperor is employed?&amp;quot; and then elaborating on what kind of research you have already. Suddenly, we are at a point where there can be a best answer - one that picks up the clues and combines it with other research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T20:06:05.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-10T22:17:02.317" Score="5" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to test a theory. I wanted to see what would happen if a question that asked for a narrow list of ideas would react on the site now that a week or two of my previous meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8398/40609&quot;&gt;asking how to make fishing for ideas questions suitable for Main&lt;/a&gt; have gone by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My test question asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/209717/40609&quot;&gt;In a world of groovy super spies, how would a spy cross a ravine?&lt;/a&gt; was closed for... &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;of all things...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; being &amp;quot;too story-based.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you follow the &amp;quot;why was my question closed for being too story-based&amp;quot; link you find the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding. Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;likely to develop,&lt;/em&gt; not what someone &lt;em&gt;would or should do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the close voters felt that the question reflects a character choice that would have occured &lt;em&gt;long before the mission actually started.&lt;/em&gt; Something along the lines of &amp;quot;gee, there's five different tools that would help me over that ravine, and I'm sure to be chased by dogs and cornered at the ravine, so which tool should I choose to get me over the ravine?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that such an assumption feels ludicrous to me. It feels a lot like someone is judging the question based on its backstory and not on the question itself. Quite frankly, I'm not asking what choice the character can make. I'm only asking what devices could be available to the character. The difference is insanely important: if I remove the backstory from the former, no question remains. &lt;em&gt;If I remove the backstory from the later, the question remains.&lt;/em&gt; This wasn't a question about character choices — it was a question about tool design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse still, this sets a precedent. It suggests that all finite-list-of-things questions are off-topic because they are always dependent on the structure of the story. Examples of questions that now must be hunted down and closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/202023/40609&quot;&gt;What kinds of creatures would likely evolve in this enviroment&lt;/a&gt; (story based! Impossible to provide enough details)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/89626/40609&quot;&gt;What kinds of remnants might be evidence of a previous civilisation?&lt;/a&gt; (story based! Remnants will be used as part of an undisclosed plot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/177479/40609&quot;&gt;What kinds of wounds would a laser weapon leave?&lt;/a&gt; (story based! Depends on the choices of characters pertaining to distance, armor, and the conditions of weather)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/65974/40609&quot;&gt;What kinds of third-world countries would survive nuclear winter?&lt;/a&gt; (story based! Any resource available to one such country is intrinsically available to all depending on their choices)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/206287/40609&quot;&gt;What level of technology can be expected from a society terrified of physical and wireless networks?&lt;/a&gt; (story based! Narrative necessity would drive the needed tech)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/193494/40609&quot;&gt;What kinds of diet/intake changes would be possible for a race with extensive DNA modification abilities?&lt;/a&gt; (story based! By definition, the OP can always derive dietary conditions based on the use of clarkean magic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that the Stack is becoming more and more physics.SE, earthsciences.SE, and all the other Stacks — we just allow backstories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So questions (yup, &amp;quot;needs more focus&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is a strict definition of &amp;quot;too story-based?&amp;quot; Because if we use the link we provide as the definition, my question did not meet the expectation. Note that I wholly agree with the following: worldbuilding (on-topic) is about designing and consistently using the rules and systems of a fictional world of your own creation. Storybuilding (off-topic) is about plot, circumstances, and character actions/choices.&amp;quot; I do not believe my question was storybuilding (prove me wrong if you disagree, thanks!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we allow fishing-for-ideas questions or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MODERATORS&lt;/strong&gt; It's time you guys stepped up with some opinions. Based on the positive feedback to several of my previous Meta posts, the policies of this stack have changed — but you appear to not be keeping up with the times. Does Meta decide policy changes... or do you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:49:04.020" Title="Died of a Theory: A Challenge for Too Story Based and Fishing for Ideas Questions" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|policy|question-types|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8405" CreationDate="2021-08-11T13:10:34.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a strict definition of &amp;quot;too story-based?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am coming late to the discussion, and I think I might be a bit of a dense guy... but I have always used the &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot; reason when the question is more about plot than about proper world building. I have this book, &lt;em&gt;Writing Fiction for Dummies&lt;/em&gt;, and it does a nice job at defining and separating plot from world building, and that's my compass when deciding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about spies has more to do with world building than plot. You have already decided on the plot - some spy has to make a dramatic escape. What you asked there has to do about how that is feasible within the constraints of the world you are building, taking into account the technology available for a superspy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if we use the link we provide as the definition, my question did not meet the expectation. Note that I wholly agree with the following: worldbuilding (on-topic) is about designing and consistently using the rules and systems of a fictional world of your own creation. Storybuilding (off-topic) is about plot, circumstances, and character actions/choices.&amp;quot; I do not believe my question was storybuilding (prove me wrong if you disagree, thanks!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree on this assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we allow fishing-for-ideas questions or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think each case is a case. We've had questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/109227/21222&quot;&gt;What methods of transportation could be used to get ground vehicles onto an island surrounded by sharp rocks in shallow water?&lt;/a&gt;, which is a total idea fishery, and it was very well received (32 upvotes, no downvotes so far, which is better than most questions we get these days). We have one right now about the technical aspects of a bag of holding, and we had one about magic money which are also fishing for ideas and they are great. But my favorite &amp;quot;hey I have this setting now I need an idea about how it works&amp;quot; is the one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/142529/anatomically-correct-strange-women-in-ponds-distributing-swords&quot;&gt;underwater women distributing swords to random strangers&lt;/a&gt;, that one is 173 vs -8 right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again we have really questions which are also fishing for ideas, but which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67708/no-formula-what-to-do&quot;&gt;really&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110707/we-are-the-ai-singularity-tell-us-human-tell-us-how-to-pacify-you&quot;&gt;terrible&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/200832/how-do-i-fix-the-unit-of-money-coins&quot;&gt;ones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, I don't think &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; should be a reason for closure. These questions should be allowed to stay or be closed according to their own merit and how they stick to the other rules about what is acceptable and what is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T15:09:48.063" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T15:09:48.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8405" CreationDate="2021-08-11T19:01:23.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's a matter of circumstances&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess people are all over their mind when you talk about a specific character, even when unnamed. That's the first thing that came into mine (my mind) when I read your question : how likely people would find it story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you give a low-level point of view focused on a character, you incentize how it's about a set of characters. and well, because it's a set of characters, in a specific place, time and specific situation. In other words, under circumstances... Wait, does this ring a bell to my belly to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I wholly agree with the following: worldbuilding (on-topic) is about designing and consistently using the rules and systems of a fictional world of your own creation. &lt;strong&gt;Storybuilding (off-topic) is about&lt;/strong&gt; plot, &lt;strong&gt;circumstances&lt;/strong&gt;, and character actions/choices.&amp;quot; I do not believe my question was storybuilding (prove me wrong if you disagree, thanks!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--- &lt;em&gt;Agent JBH, Operation Fishpole debriefed debrief&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the key. The one that gets you out of jail (before you run pursued by dogs towards a ravine, for some reasons). If you haven't told that there was an Agent running towards a ravine, but instead boringly told that &amp;quot;some&amp;quot; people needed to pass through big gaps, nobody would have said &amp;quot;hey, it's a story!&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funny thing is that your own answer to the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6839/80336&quot;&gt;Why is my question “Too Story Based” and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; included that same concept :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The smaller the &amp;quot;world,&amp;quot; the less likely you're asking about a system.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In times past we have described &amp;quot;worlds&amp;quot; as being of any size, from a multiverse down to a small town — but not individuals or even small groups of people (generally). The smaller the number of people you're asking about, the more story-based your question is. Ask about a single individual and with very rare exception, you're storybuilding, not worldbuilding. This is because even a god, when acting individually, does not constitute a system. Rather, the actions of even so consequential a being are circumstantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--- &lt;em&gt;Agent JBH, Operation Storyhunter, 3 years ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks to me your younger self would be really inclined to close your question than the you right now :p. Good thing for you they did-will not time-travel to do that }i{.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But is it really true?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are circumstances actually a way of determining if it's story or world based? Because, since and then people seems to have a big underlying grudge with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are circumstances about stories and stories only?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'll get straight up to the answer : No, circumstances are not only about stories.&lt;/strong&gt; Most if not all effects have a cause. Watch out, &lt;strong&gt;not a reason, a cause&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why an element is here is because an action caused by an entity allowed this to take place, à la causality principle. In other words, how (or why) one or two stars rolling around are dependent on the initial parameters, a.k.a circumstances. And this kind of question is on topic with worldbuilding, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens to the decisions characters make, which are more obviously based on circumstances. How can one jump over a ravine depends on what tools they have access to, as much as the mentality of the character will change why they take the step. And they're both circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all of these are called circumstances and they can match either stories or worlds, it is therefore not a way to define what is world and what is story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But then what is the delimiting factor of stories?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reasons. Reasons are more often calling up for intents, contrary to causes and circumstances. And intents are what tells apart a story from its world.&lt;/strong&gt; Why does Agent Doggybag has chosen the 60ft pole to traverse the ravine, while he could simply call the help of an helicopter? He didn't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to put his team in danger of cynophobia, or he simply &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to show off to the enemy. We're about &amp;quot;willing&amp;quot; something, not &amp;quot;being able to do something&amp;quot;. And characters -both in stories and real worlds- are always facing the two against each other, and strive to do what they wish to do with the possibilities they are given. And sometimes readjusting their point of view if they cannot do something they want (up to not wishing it anymore!). In other words, people waddle in the direction they wish for consciously or subconsciously as much as their environment allow them to do. &lt;em&gt;The story plays with what the world allow them to do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, a question like &amp;quot;Your character is an athlete, can they run &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(sport)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;42 km straight&lt;/a&gt;?&amp;quot; is about the world, as it's not about the reasons someone would like to (or not) run 42 km in one go, but about the causes they would be able to make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there comes my little voice ringing :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yeah, but your example is not valid, if the guy's leg is broken, he&#xA;can't run 42km! And it's a story element, &lt;em&gt;it's&#xA;obvious&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;!&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, non, nein and niet, because you changed the question to &amp;quot;Can someone with a broken leg run 42 km?&amp;quot;. This counter-argument -while valid in itself-, by altering the initial premise to match its need of truth, attacks the wrong target. In other words, yes, having someone with a broken leg is story-induced, but this creates a change of state in the possibilities offered by the world to this person, and as such the &amp;quot;circumstances&amp;quot; of the world is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now another inner voice rings in, let me take the call :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But if someone else doesn't want that guy from running, isn't the question&#xA;story-based?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No again, because you gave a story-based answer, and having one story-based answer doesn't imply the question is also. Otherwise we'd have to close A LOT of questions, where any person won't be able to do anything because, well, they're lazy for instance :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's why I think the other answer, about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6310/80336&quot;&gt;the &amp;quot;want&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; by Tezra&lt;/a&gt; has more accurately delimited what is and isn't story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you should be one happy unhappy guy that I think you are wrong about your delimitation of stories and worlds, and that being wrong makes your question right for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As a side note, I've stumbled upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2661/finding-a-more-objective-way-to-identify-questions-that-are-too-broad&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;making a good question about an action or event), which further corrode-o-elaborate the acceptability of the question : Indeed, you're asking about &amp;quot;I have A and B, give me X&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;How can I make this happen&amp;quot;, which is not too broad and definitely seems to have been accepted at some point.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Everytime I hear a casually said &amp;quot;it's obvious&amp;quot;, I scream. That's the quickest and frightening-est logic shortcut. Let me say this : Is it actually obvious to the others, and especially to you? If so, can you really explain why is it obvious, precisely?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T19:47:46.897" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T19:47:46.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8405" CreationDate="2021-08-12T08:32:58.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question. My reason was: &lt;strong&gt;Needs details or clarity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is not too story-based, I agree with that. The question asks for a technological solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is was not clear then and it is still not clear now what technology is available. What year is it? What country is it? There is no usable point of reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question can also be treated as opinion-based since the OP includes criteria such as 'outrageous' for the best answer. The concept of outrageous is not only cultural but also differs between people of the same culture. The provided definition of outrageous is not very helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;outrageous&amp;quot; I do not mean &amp;quot;rube-goldberg.&amp;quot; We're not looking for overly complicated. We're looking for clever you-wouldn't-see-that-on-the-shelf-at-Walmart type stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is only meant to clarify that I did not vote to close as 'Too story-based'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T08:32:58.233" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2021-08-13T14:25:10.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Don't ask for a list of ideas, ask for how to make a list of ideas&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you ask for a list of ideas, your question should be closed as per terms of use; however, pretty much any fishing for ideas question can be reworded in a way that asks for how to generate a list of ideas that works in your setting.  Asking  how to make your own list of ideas in a given situation fits the SE mission because now you are asking for a singular rule or system that works for your setting, and that is at its core what WB.SE is all about.  So, as long as your question has some clearly set, non-plot based criteria for what the best system would achieve, you have a question that should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EXAMPLES:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad Question:&lt;/strong&gt; My system has too many combat spells, what are some non-combat spells I could add to balance it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Question:&lt;/strong&gt; My system has too many combat spells, how do I balance it with non-combat spells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What kinds of things can a soldier in my setting do if he has a jetpack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What role would jetpack soldiers play in a my setting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What kinds of planets would be too extreme for sustainable human life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What are the minimum and maximum environmental limitations for sustainable human life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By asking for a system, the OP may not get a list hand delivered and placed in his lap, but in many ways he gets something better.  He gets a higher order rule that will help guide him in making his own  things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said... you probably will get a list of ideas hand delivered and placed in your lap anyway because people LOVE giving examples, and lists of examples are totally allowed.  So, when someone gives you a rule about how to balance combat/non-combat spells, they can not make a compelling argument for why their system works best unless they give examples of specific non-combat spells.  If they tell you what role jetpack soldiers play, then they would generally delve into examples of what that role does to explain why that role makes the most since.  If they are defining human environmental tolerances, they likely mentioning specific situations where the environment is too hostile to support their claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by asking for a system for making a list of ideas, you will normally in the course of logical debate get a list of ideas without actually violating Stackexchange's Terms of Use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T15:23:25.700" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:23:25.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8405" CreationDate="2021-08-13T15:07:55.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I suspect the &quot;In style!&quot; part was your question's undoing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not VtC it myself, but when I look at this question through my rule lawyer glasses, what I see is a question where you used the Best Possible Answer criteria to make it about a certain character's choice instead of what is most practical.  For a generic superspy with cool gadgets, the best tool for escape would be measured by factors like fastest, safest, cheapest, most light weight, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, by making the preferred method about style, you have brought in a specific character's personality qwerk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question to be safe from a &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot; VtC, you should either change your Best Possible Answer to some criteria relevant to your setting, or add some element to your setting that actually makes style a relevant criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: it could be that your world is in a sort of information cold war being waged over public opinion.  So, instead of your super spy's operations being covert as would be the assumption, in your world, you may be recording everything she does to be televised on international TV to demonstrate the superiority of your nation's super spies in action.  If this is the case, your spy may actually be under orders to show off and make it flashy to awe the audience.  Then it would not be your character's choice to go flashy, but a requirement of the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what people mean when they say: fishing for ideas, you did not step afoul here.  When we say you are fishing for ideas we generally mean you have such a poorly defined scope that there could be a virtually infinite number or equally valid answers.  Think of it like this, when you fish, you are just putting a hook in the water and treating all the fish in the river as good as the next when it comes to who you are eating that night, but when you go into a fine restaurant where you get to pick your own fish from a tank, you are actually discriminating between fish based on their qualities.  You are eating fish either way, but only the former is what you would call fishing.  WB.SE is just requiring that you ask questions that discriminate between answers based on their qualities.  Asking questions that give you ideas are not in of themselves a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T15:49:04.020" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:49:04.020" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8415" CreationDate="2021-08-20T06:38:03.880" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain me what is wrong with this my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/210111/36&quot;&gt;The maximum possible human population in fifty years, if we build up all the land&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked a &lt;em&gt;simple theoretical&lt;/em&gt; (?) question for a simple (?) calculation. And I was expecting &lt;strong&gt;a simple number&lt;/strong&gt; (with or without proper judgement) as an answer. Instead I have received a lot of (negative?) comments and questions asking or telling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That there will be no resources to sustain my civilization, so my question is pointless / stupid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will my civilization lower all the mountains and fill up all the oceans?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What will be your human grow rate to fill all that capacity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why don't I do this or that to &lt;em&gt;my story&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Worldbuilding was started I was told many times (and it was underlined in many comments) that &lt;strong&gt;we should strictly avoid questions or answers that are story-building instead of world-building&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has that change in the site's formula since then? If not, then what am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to answer above comments and questions that this will be solved in my world with that or this or by that... But this is all pure story building. Which I was sure we should avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I am asking about &lt;em&gt;maximum Earth capacity&lt;/em&gt; in given scenario, must I really provide information on human's fertility rate to fill up that capacity? Or what would that people eat?&lt;/em&gt; For me asking such questions is pure story-building that brings nothing to a calculations one should make to provide the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T14:43:17.663" Title="Can we ask OPs for a story-building side questions, if they are completely not important to provide answer?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8414" CreationDate="2021-08-20T16:18:24.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Problem I Detect!, Yes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes, there is a problem with your query, and it has a simple explanation. You yourself answered your own meta question, if unwittingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I  have asked a simple theoretical (?) question for a simple (?) calculation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that it is not actually a worldbuilding question. It's a straight up request for us to do your maths homework for you by plugging numbers into an equation. Basically, we don't do your maths homework for you. You can pick your favourite search engine and google up the pertinent variables and apply the needed operations all by yourself to get the answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that we should avoid storybuilding questions here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.codidact.com/posts/283318&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There is in the works a Q&amp;amp;A forum where storybuilding queries will be more welcome&lt;/a&gt;. Your linked query is obviously not storybuilding, so that's not the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that you did not offer a question that addresses a problem or issue of actually conceptualising, devising, planning or fashioning a fictional world. The problem is that you asked us to do an arithmetic problem and you shrouded it within a thin veneer of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remove the veneer and your &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; becomes a bald command: Tell me the number of people that can live on Earth given the conditions X, Y &amp;amp; Z. That doesn't fly here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-08-20T16:25:41.680" LastActivityDate="2021-08-20T16:25:41.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8414" CreationDate="2021-08-22T14:43:17.663" Score="-1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I am asking about maximum Earth capacity in given scenario, must I really provide information on [...] what would that&lt;/em&gt; [sic] &lt;em&gt;people eat?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Yes, you do&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Producing enough food (and water, and raw materials etc.) for the inhabitants is exactly what  &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;carrying &lt;strong&gt;capacity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all you wanted was for someone to multiply the land area of Earth, 148,940,000 km², with a given population density expressed in inhabitants/km², then what you really need is a remedial course in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tEntu4KykQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how to use a calculator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T14:43:17.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8397" CreationDate="2021-08-22T18:50:43.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see your question as 'Too Story Based'. However, I do think that the information you provide is insufficient to answer your question and calculate possible profits. Still, this is not the main problem, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem with this question is your writing style. It is a bit immature (as in immature writing, not an immature person).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your writing is very hard to understand chiefly due to poor structure and its high resemblance to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stream-of-consciousness&lt;/a&gt; writing. It seems that you write down your thought process rather than compose a question. While this is a great literary technique when used right, it is not the best choice for presenting your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest editing your query to improve its structure, remove unnecessary thought process, and include missing details pertaining to the main issue (i.e. profitability of this super-computer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need me to elaborate on something, please, ask in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T18:50:43.497" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-26T20:36:15.897" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a cleanup effort on old questions going on? Today I got a comment out of the blue on a question I asked five years ago. This stack was a very different place then, and the question would be too broad if I asked it today. But it was relatively well received when I asked it, got some good answers, and the world moved on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I got a comment and a close vote saying it was way too broad. Strange, but whatever. Then another comment showed up asking (probably rhetorically) why all these old questions are showing up in the review queue. This indicates to me that there's more than one of these older questions being flagged for closure, though I don't have access to the review queues myself to confirm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I figured I should ask -- is there a cleanup going on? Is there a discussion somewhere about this, about which questions should be closed as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; by today's standards and which should have a 'historical lock' applied like we do on other stacks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="290" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T16:05:53.223" Title="Are we doing a cleanup effort for old questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8419" CreationDate="2021-08-27T02:48:41.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Move Along! Nothing to See Here!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think your question probably caught the attention of one of our deep-divers. There's no concerted effort or any kind of &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; clean-up effort underway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conjecture is that Meta discussions prod a certain kind of user to comb through old questions, looking for closure candidates based on current question criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that old queries should be left alone, unless there is really and truly some dire need to close them because they just suck that badly. If your question was originally deemed sufficiently focused five years ago, and it got answers, it shouldn't be further molested. I found it in the queue and noted as much in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T02:48:41.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8419" CreationDate="2021-08-27T08:54:08.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the possible ways of sorting the questions on the main page is to have them sorted by Active&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dyYB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dyYB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing and commenting on an old question makes it bump in the list, so whoever is sorting on Active will see that question will see it. This increases the chances of interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than a coordinate effort on cleaning old questions, I would say the above is what happened, unless you saw it happening in a systematic way on more old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T08:54:08.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-27T12:56:05.133" Score="0" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody asked a question asking about a fictional humanoid race. To my eyes, the premise of this fictional race has strong parallels with a real-world early 20th century racist stereotype of African-American men kidnapping and raping white women, and a story written about this race could be interpreted by some readers as a racist metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption in this case is that the OP had no idea, did not intend to write a story that people would see a racist stereotype in, and the parallels simply hadn't occurred to them. Assuming good faith, I wrote an answer explaining how this fictional race could be interpreted, and then offered some ideas for how to either avoid or subvert that stereotype in a story about that fictional race. The important points of my answer were &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;To some readers, [your race] will come across as a racist metaphor for [real race of people]&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I'm going to assume this is absolutely not how you want your work to be interpreted&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator deleted that part of my answer explaining what the problem was, leaving just my proposals for how to solve it, devoid of the context of what needed to be solved or why. I asked the moderator what was wrong with my answer that they had edited, and their response was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's plainly racist in itself, not based on what the OP is asking and not needed at all to support the rest of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best, calling my answer &amp;quot;plainly racist in itself&amp;quot; means the moderator cannot have understood the answer they were editing; and it smacks of the old canard, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;you're the real racist because you mentioned racism&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but I'd like to be charitable if I can. In my opinion, what I wrote is certainly not racist (here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/210976/revisions&quot;&gt;link to the edit history&lt;/a&gt; if you want to judge for yourself), was clearly based on what the OP asked, and was needed to support the rest of my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the moderator got this totally wrong: if I am building a world to write stories in, I would want my world to not accidentally contain things which could be interpreted as harmful stereotypes. Avoiding racist metaphors as possible interpretations of one's writing is a genuine world-building problem so it is clearly on-topic, and - do I really have to say this? - it is not racist to consciously recognise parallels with racist tropes in order to avoid or subvert them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83500" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T02:27:01.713" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T02:27:01.713" Title="Should we warn about (presumably unintended) parallels with racist tropes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-08-27T16:53:14.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question has a hint of white supremacy, but I (want to) believe that it's accidental. Sometimes the racial prejudice we have is subconscious and ingrained from childhood (just watch some old Bugs Bunny cartoons). We do harm because we are not immediately aware of it. We can do better of we are made aware of what we are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the right course of action here is to leave a comment, even if it is too big, to the OP; Maybe they do have an idea for some fictional people they could use for a novel, and being aware of the problem could lead them to redesign those fictional people away from racial stereotypes. Failing that, a flag would be appropriate so that the mod team can contact them. An answer is more permanent than a comment on a question or a flag, but it calls less attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the way this was handled: mod team, please review that again carefully. I have seen warnings for offenses much smaller than the one in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T04:11:23.757" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T04:11:23.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-08-27T23:14:43.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Introduction:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the question and I read kaya3's answer, in its original format and in its post-redaction version. Tortilena thinks I initially reacted too emotionally, and I concur, so am reviewing the whole matter again and am carefully rewriting my response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Data &amp;amp; Commentary:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just reread the Meta question, all the answers and all the commentary. I've just reread the original Main query, all the answers and all the commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP asks a question about the mating habits of what is essentially an agendered but male-like, mitotically reproducing being that must make use of the female of another species as a receptacle for its baby zygote in order to reproduce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial response under consideration makes assumptions about the motives and activities of the fictional race that have no basis in the query itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are proposing (1) a biologically distinct race of humanoids which (2) does not coexist peacefully with humans, (3) can reproduce sexually with humans but the offspring are their own race and not human, and (4) are sexual predators who prey upon human females.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then make an unfounded assumption about how some people will react to this fictional species:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some readers, kleptons will come across as a racist metaphor for Black people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then moderate the indirect accusation, while still placing the onus of the accusation and also how other people will react onto the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure this was not your intention at all, but part of writing means being aware of how your readers may interpret your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then delve into human history a bit, which is not relevant to the question at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, white supremacists have depicted Black people as (1) a biologically distinct race who (2) cannot or should not coexist with white people, (3) can reproduce sexually with white people but the offspring are considered to be black and not considered to be white, and (4) well, hopefully you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then moderate the indirect accusation again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to assume this is absolutely not how you want your work to be interpreted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet continue to press the indirect accusation by rationalising the unfounded assumption that unnamed other people will react in a certain way. And more than that, inflates the indirect accusation by bringing in a variety of socially fringe elements and making yet another baseless assumption about how people will react:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the point I'm making is that what you're describing could reasonably be interpreted this way. Racists could read your work and think you are on their side; Black people could read your work and be reminded of harmful depictions of themselves. To avoid this, I think the rest of your world needs to be carefully built and your story carefully written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Assessment:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I should note that as of this revision, the question itself has gained +9/-1 votes and that all the answers apart from one have gained anywhere from +3 to +21 votes. Kaya3's answer has gained +3/-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd interpret this as a modestly well received query and a variety of reasonable answers with no indication in comments or voting patterns that anyone other than Kaya3 believes there is any inherent racism in the fictional race described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that this is an individual / personal opinion about the question's matter; and also that it does represent a valid concern &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; though not in specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having scrutinised the original question again, I still can not find any hint of racism or any other -ism in the text of the question. Nor can I find any &amp;quot;parallel&amp;quot; with the historical notes provided.  I still maintain that this is essentially the Amazon Question: a single sex / gender population that needs to reproduce, how can they do this without needlessly antagonising their reproductive receptacles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far from the claim &amp;amp; accusation of racism, the species in question categorically negates accusations #2 and #4: they explicitly wish to coexist peacefully with humans, and they are, by nature, not sexually predatory in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sexual predator is a person with a deviant sexual urge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the matter of the historical notes: it is not &amp;quot;white supremacists&amp;quot; who determined that Africans are a biologically distinct race. Ordinary scientists &amp;amp; natural philosophers came up with these and other similarly bizarre propositions about different ethnicities of humans. The ideas that blacks shouldn't mix with whites or that their offspring are considered &amp;quot;black&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;white&amp;quot; are unscientific conclusions. None of these historical notes correspond to anything specified in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusions:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several issues going on here that we should consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Banner Question:&lt;/strong&gt; To answer your banner question, &lt;em&gt;Should we warn about (presumably unintended) parallels with racist tropes?&lt;/em&gt; I think the answer is clearly and obviously &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YES!&lt;/strong&gt; We should warn an OP when a question contains racist content.&lt;/em&gt; And in fact, WB.SE practice has been to do just this. Not just racism per se, but with any kind of obviously discriminatory or defamatory content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Underlying Issue:&lt;/strong&gt; The issue being addressed here is not one of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; should be done, but rather &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; we should approach it. I'd argue that we already have a reasonable process for addressing issues of this kind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask for clarity&lt;/strong&gt; -- if you think the question has questionable contents, just write a comment asking the OP for clarity! &amp;quot;I think X, Y and Z could be interpreted as racism / anti-religion / discrimination; can you please clarify?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag the question&lt;/strong&gt; -- either flag it for closure and give a reason, or flag it for moderator review&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Start a meta discussion&lt;/strong&gt; -- If the OP doesn't respond or if you really still think there is a problem, bring it here so the query and claims can be evaluated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The usual reactions&lt;/strong&gt; -- downvote and give a succinct rationale -- &amp;quot;I'm downvoting because I think your question is racist and you haven't addressed this concern.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderator Intervention:&lt;/strong&gt; It's my opinion that while I believe your intention was noble enough, as you explain in your apologia above, I think you didn't execute very well. A moderator is kind of limited in what actions they can take when a query or a response is flagged for attention. A mod can choose to ignore the flag, they can modify the post or they can delete the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice to modify a flagged post is, in my opinion, almost always the best choice. In this case, a prudential judgement was made to preserve the part of your response that does actually try to answer the question, while also respecting the concerns of whoever flagged your answer. He redacted that part of your answer that, in his moderatorial judgement, does not actually address the question, but rather addresses  a particular concern of yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-08-29T22:30:58.210" LastActivityDate="2021-08-29T22:30:58.210" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-08-27T23:21:56.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, you can! ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that topic is touchy for some reason that the asker might not know, you can give this piece of feedback. It is often a useful insight to the asker's world, something which might have unforeseen consequences down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;...But not this way...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are meant to... Answer the question ;p. Warning about something is more thought of as side-notes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8008/80336&quot;&gt;or in some cases frame challenges&lt;/a&gt;). And side-notes, while interesting, should be kept short as comments or as very short side-notes instead of taking half an answer. Why is it? It's simply because writing a paragraph on this side-note will probably side-track the question towards a discussion, on top of preventing getting an actual answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to ensure the site's readability and your answer's full help, give a comment on the question or as a one-sentence side-note to your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... Speaking of side-notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it's not actually a side-note but more a deeper thought. Reading your answer made me think about how the symbols which carved the atrocities made during the WW-II by the German antisemite government at the time are forbidden in games (among others medias) in this same country now. Those symbols and gestures are a reminiscence of the acts some had -or... Hard to say... were willing- to make, which hurt their very cultural soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why they do that (and hope many others would do too). But taking another point of view, talking about this past is the way to not forget and not make the same mistake &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. This is what some stories made efforts into, keeping respects to the ones who suffered from this&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why do I talk about this? Well, your non-squeezed-down answer tells about how you somehow wish that the asker's world isn't about racism :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to assume this is absolutely not how you want your work to be interpreted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kaya3 original answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But like my hint at WWII forbidden symbolism, is it necessarily bad that Ichthys King's world include a metaphor of racism and its history? Hmm wait... Let me better write it : What, &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; makes you think their intents could only lead to depict some apology of discrimination? I emphasize on &amp;quot;personally&amp;quot; because we're striking right on feelings, here. The feelings that the question gave you, relative to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fictious species and more generally world elements are often used to serve as a way to transmit a message. First example in mind... Oh yes, the Star Trek series is quite known for that, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://intl.startrek.com/database_article/outcast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Outcast episode&lt;/a&gt; which talks about the discrimination of people's gender orientation. The part that makes them &amp;quot;morally acceptable&amp;quot; is not really on the world itself (the species in this episode is quite... Uh.), but the way it is presented to us made from the intents behind. Adding world parts is like choosing your ingredients, and then it's all about how you cook your story to give the taste and shape you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean you shouldn't have pointed out this, my first paragraph still stands. After all, we don't know if the asker knew about that risky bind, nor their intents about the story they're setting up. It can be very beneficial. My point is just that it might be interesting to take a step back, and think first about how much a washed-out-for-the-web question can display the intents of its author(s), before wondering what such intents could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8322/80336&quot;&gt;And if the question is bothering you too much, it is maybe just the perfect time you've got to quit and pass to the next question. Indeed, you shouldn't feel responsible for everyone's actions you see.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Logic note here : Telling that some stories keep respects don't necessarily mean all stories keep respect. Sadly }i{.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T04:01:28.750" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T04:01:28.750" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-08-28T05:15:44.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were two problems with your answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the comment about the (supposed) racist intent of the OP did not belong nor support the answer at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while the OP had written those lines, they had not assigned them to a specific declination of human beings (Mind that those are the cornerstone of any racist stereotype in (recent) history). You did specifically attribute them to a group, going beyond the OP's statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering both those aspects, I have deemed better for your post to expunge that part without taking down the whole answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T05:15:44.637" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-08-28T07:41:43.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Broaden your horizons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, while indeed rather less than well-thought, is not racist in any way. Or at least, not in the way you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except possibly in your village, or in your province.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had to illuminate the parallels between the question and some unsavory racist beliefs prevalent in your village, or in your province, all you had to do was add a short statement saying --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take note that in the village of Podunk, East Mississippistan, and indeed in the entire province of East Mississippistan, we used to assign said behaviors to black people, whom we used to keep as slaves; as a consequence, nowadays we have in East Mississippistan a layer of insufficiently well-educated watchpersons who, with their narrow world-view, may make lots of noise about this putative racist implication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is larger than East Mississippistan. Most people in the world have no idea of the bizarre racist and pretend-antiracist tropes of East Mississippistan. The world cannot cater to all the bizarre misapprehensions of each and every province, because there are so many different provinces with different bizarre taboos and misapprehensions; too many to avoid them all and still be allowed to tell a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you see, I am a Romanian. Romania is a country in south-eastern Europe, or maybe in central-and-eastern Europe, in any case, a country on the western shore of the Black Sea, mostly north of the Danube. And, lo and behold --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In central and eastern Europe the behavior in question is not associated with black people. We have no negative stereotypes associated with black people, because we have no black people. &lt;em&gt;The behavior in question is historically associated with the Cossacks and the Tartars.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you see, the Cossacks are (or were, because there are no Cossacks left) actually white people, just like us. The Tartars, eh, they came from central Asia, but by the time they got around to abduct our women and rise the children as Tartars their central Asianness had mostly washed out. Their descendants are still around, and go under several different names; some do even still call themselves Tartars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you see, in the eastern half of Europe, the behavior in the question is reminiscent of the Tartars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In western Europe, mostly in the southern parts, the behavior in the question is associated with the Moors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other parts of Europe, it is associated with the Norsemen who called themselves Danes and whom we call Vikings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure than in very many parts of the world there are stories about the horrible barbarians who lived beyond the border and who stormed in from time to time to pillage and to abduct women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a bad assumption that in the minds of all readers the behavior in the question is associated with black people. In fact, such an association is very highly specific to a subset of readers from your specific village, or province. On the other side, very many readers would have in their culture a reference to such a behavior, assigned to some historical or legendary barbarians; this is not a defect, but rather a plus, because it would serve to establish the plausibility of the behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T07:50:28.730" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T07:50:28.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-01T15:57:21.063" Score="20" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at this question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/211434/designing-a-low-technology-flamethrower-with-limited-resources&quot;&gt;Designing a low technology flamethrower with limited resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on a whim decided to see why an answer (deleted by &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot;) was rude and abusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/211437/revisions&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/211437/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carve bones into a pump system, use a flab  of leather for the&#xA;suction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carve a leg bone into a hollow cane and use it to aim the fluid.  Melt&#xA;fat from the dead bodies and use the oils as fuel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use guts and penises as flexible tubes to move the fuel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guts are longer and need to be treated to gain resistance, penises are&#xA;shorter and more resistant but can be knitted together to make a&#xA;longer tube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use leather to make a bag for the fuel to sit in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Results will look like a flamethrowing bagpipe made from people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks to be a straightforward on-point answer to the question of how to use dead body parts to make a thing.  It did not insult the poster or anyone else and did not digress into abusive irrelevancies.   The only way I can see that this might be considered rude and abusive is that penises (along with guts) were considered as working material.  Penises can be parts of dead bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if this answer is rude and abusive then the whole concept of making things out of dead bodies is rude and abusive.  Or I am missing something - &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; if you are there, unpack your reasoning?   Is &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; a bot looking for forbidden words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was once not allowed to say &amp;quot;penis&amp;quot; on American TV.  When that rule was relaxed, Saturday Night Live celebrated with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/G3xc4LMTrT0?t=165&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special song&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="31698" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T16:14:09.237" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T12:49:08.643" Title="Penises = rude and abusive?" Tags="|discussion|community|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8430" CreationDate="2021-09-01T16:13:53.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably an over sensitive/over protective keyword bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Community respond to user flags? If so, then that might be part of it, if over sensitive people didn't like it and decided it needed to be removed for no actual good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastActivityDate="2021-09-01T16:13:53.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8430" CreationDate="2021-09-03T13:19:24.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look at this post in the main Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244439/221728&quot;&gt;What causes a &amp;quot;Rude or offensive&amp;quot; comment flag to sometimes cause instant deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is now closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/238835/221728&quot;&gt;What is the SE version of Seven Dirty Words?&lt;/a&gt;, which I find less clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, it seems that the presence of some words in comments and posts will cause automatic deletion once a rude/abusive flag is placed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that the correct, anatomical term for a body part is necessarily dirty, it depends much on context. I think SE is trying to play it safe, thus the auto-deletion. I do not know whether undeleting the post will prevent it from being deleted again in the same manner. We could, however, edit it to use another term (male genital?) and then undelete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-09-03T13:26:55.130" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T13:26:55.130" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8419" CreationDate="2021-09-03T16:05:53.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Darn you Community!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@MolbOrg is correct, there is a robot user named &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; that does a lot of different things, including popping old questions to the front of &amp;quot;Active&amp;quot; to renew interest. Good? Bad? Kinda doesn't matter 'cause it's operated by the Stack Exchange Overlords and any change to Community's behavior would have to be pitched through Meta.SE, which notoriously doesn't pay much attention to things they don't want to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's also worth remembering that there are badges that reward people for digging into the depths of time. So, odd as it may seem, there are always a few people scuba diving the reefs of worldbuilding past. This isn't really a bad thing. Humanity tends to see the past as precedent for the present. It may be irritating that a question that was perfectly on-topic five or ten years ago is suddenly voted to close — but that may be necessary to keep people from using it as justification for complaining when their question posted yesterday gets closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T16:05:53.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2021-09-03T17:13:29.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fond of a line from Patrick O'Brian's  Aubrey–Maturin series of books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You've come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: social commentary has been the driving force behind social change since the dawn of time. The moment you ask people to stop writing about racism, discrimination, and/or marginalization, you rob the world of its single most effective solution to social problems. Personally, I think it's more offensive to invite people to be careful of what they ask here than what anyone may actually ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you imagine telling Alex Haley that the ideas he was working on that would eventually become &lt;em&gt;Roots&lt;/em&gt; were &amp;quot;too sensitive&amp;quot; or too &amp;quot;racially charged?&amp;quot; How about Archie Bunker on the old sitcom &amp;quot;All in the Family&amp;quot;? Today his character (and the show) are so off-color and politically incorrect it would make people riot — and yet shows and books like them were part of the effort toward necessary and productive social change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The fact that you have the sensibility to ask whether we need to warn people of potentially racial issues only exists because people dared to write about racial issues — some sarcastically, some realistically, some carefully, some boldly... all necessary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not want to rob the future of its ability to address continuing social issues just because writers have been successful over the last two centuries to affect change. So, what limits should there be? @Elemtilas once mentioned that there shouldn't be any limits (correct me if I'm misquoting you, @Elemtilas!), but the Stack Exchange Overlords have put one limit on us: no gratuitous violence (especially in the form of torture). Thus, from our perspective, any issue... &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;any issue...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; can be dealt with on this site so long as it's done professionally and, when necessary, clinically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. We're the wrong shop for that kind of anarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8008/40609&quot;&gt;When and how to challenge the back story?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T17:13:29.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8430" CreationDate="2021-09-11T12:47:05.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;That was probably not the reason&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the activity log for the answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mrZQi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mrZQi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...we find that the user was removed from Stack Exchange a mere 13 minutes after posting the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, bots cannot remove people from Stack Exchange, so this appears to be a human intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the severity of the action, and the &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; of offensive materials in the post, I find it safe to assume that the moderators based that action on information about the user that we are not privy to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons — lack of offensive materials and user being removed from Stack Exchange — I find the assumption — to think that &amp;quot;penis&amp;quot; in the post was the sole reason the post got flagged — to be mistaken. To me, it seems obvious something else was going on, and that this user incurred the wrath of the moderators for something other (or more) than just this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T12:47:05.107" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-12T14:15:33.047" Score="-2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213031/what-adaptations-would-herbivores-have-if-plants-had-soft-cells&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed and since then has had no sign of interaction. I've edited it to solve all the solvable problems given in the comments, so  what else must I do to get it reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T15:42:56.893" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T15:42:56.893" Title="What is so wrong with this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8437" CreationDate="2021-09-12T19:14:27.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Final Answer!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a lengthy attempt to understand the scope of the query &amp;amp; help the OP improve it, I can at last conclude that the only thing really wrong with the question is that its OP is unwilling to edit it for improved clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to OP's subquestion, &amp;quot;what else must I do...?&amp;quot;, is now as it's always been. Address the points of criticism (if any remain) and edit the question for focus &amp;amp; clarity. I'd love to answer it! And I'm sure others would as well. But it needs some fixing up, and I leave that now to the OP!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patience Grasshopper!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion: I think there are a few pieces of information that are lacking in your original query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see you're working on editing your question -- that's good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't see how I can answer your questions about the scales and&#xA;skeleton with much specificity. How hard is wood? How sharp are&#xA;thorns? To use your example: How tough is an exoskeleton. These&#xA;questions can't be meaningfully answered because there are too many&#xA;forms of each of these traits.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I gave you two good examples of chitinous exoskeletons, one that any human can easily munch and one that might bust your teeth or rip your gums to shreds. So you can see that chitinous exoskeletons come in a wide variety of difficulty to bite through. We'd need to know roughly where your plant is on that continuum. I suggested in my comment to your Main query that you focus on one kind of tree and one kind of likely herbivore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; job to give me enough background information and appropriate parameters so that I can do &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; job and give you a creature that has evolved to eat the tree in question. I've got ideas, but can't give them shape without you focusing on sufficient details!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Stuff&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To address your Meta question: you only edited the query an hour ago (as of this writing), so I don't really think you can expect it to be reopened with thousands of views, hundreds of answers and a spot at the top of the hot network questions all in that time frame!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do have a couple of VTR, though, so clearly folks have noticed your edit and find the query acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading your question over, there are two aspects I'd like to ask for clarification: how thick and chewy are the stiffened cartilagenous endoskeletons?; and how thick and unbreakable are the chitinous scales? How big are the plants in question and how big are the herbivores?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Food for thought: you can pretty easily chomp an ant and eat it without difficulty; but I bet you couldn't easily crack through a crab shell without feeling some side effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-09-13T16:13:18.957" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T16:13:18.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8437" CreationDate="2021-09-14T15:33:28.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plants are organisms with soft cells that don't have walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not clear what it refers to, your imaginary plants or real-world plants. Is it you do not know something or I do not know something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do they have instead? And most importantly which plants, yours? Is it a premise already or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their flesh is soft,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;U mean that plant matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most terrestrial plants have a coat of hard chitinous scales that do not overlap,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a premise? Is it what it is instead of cellulose for your imaginary plants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no soft-bodied plants on land, as the soft flesh can't stand on its own. The scales often have sharp hairs or other such defences between the scales when herbivores are common&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, crab-like plants is probably a bold signal we are deep into a premise for a q, and in ops magic world, okay, okay, get it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as the soft flesh can't stand on its own&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a premise or a not-so-great statement? If statement, are we in the real world again, what's going on ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aquatic plants generally lack the endoskeleton and have sturdier, less flexible flesh to make up for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mm yeah, crab trees looking at those cellulose underwater tree weaklings with a shame&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest is more or less okayish, formatting would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, I may see the question now, it like - here are cool plants, what cool stuff there you can suggest for animals. The legit problem, opinion-based, maybe we need to have fantasy tag or creative thinking for all that. As indeed it is hard to provide proper details and sure there are not that many options to avoid opinion-based answers otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is still for those who answer to create required details for your setting so their answers could make sense - so you ask for creating stuff for you. Okay, maybe someone is willing, at least it seems it is now more clear what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It still needs details, it just you can't provide them, which is understandable. Yeah, we definitely need some tag for such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions regarding the viability of a life-form design. These questions should focus on biologically plausible creatures&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no, definitely not it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag to mark questions related to creating plausible alien biologies that may be close to or far removed from Earthly biology but within the realms of hard science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the descriptions hard to tell if it is applicable, besides xeno part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T15:41:06.497" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T15:41:06.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-14T16:19:15.983" Score="9" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Stack Exchange staff have announced an upcoming change to the way answer acceptance works.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369568/unpinning-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top-of-the-list-of-answers/369569&quot;&gt;Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the original poster of a question can accept one non-deleted answer. This does several things,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the question poster receives 2 rep, and the answer poster receives 15 rep&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the answer has an added green tick mark below its score and vote buttons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the answer itself is pinned to the top of the list of answers, regardless of sort variable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change will affect the last of these behaviors, removing the &amp;quot;pin to top&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The staff has indicated this may be configurable per site - each individual site can have this behavior turned off or left on (with the default setting yet to be determined by consensus and research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;links&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Announcement - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369568/unpinning-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top-of-the-list-of-answers/369569&quot;&gt;Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;post with links to user script which may &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; behavior - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/369579/259155&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;half of the text is stolen from a different place with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/369589/259155&quot;&gt;permission&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1460870/questions-with-accepted-answer-pinned-above-highest-scoring-answer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;, taken/forked from &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/803/11784&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt;, credits - created by Nihar Karve &amp;amp; Emilio Pisanty from Physics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in our case, it affects 3'325 questions out of 31'089 questions total.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Actions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anarchy mother of the order, so just be informed. (I guess)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope we will have it on by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update, after 10 days, 179 views&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment we have 50/50 results like 8 vs 8 votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/369914/259155&quot;&gt;Full List of Community Discussions&lt;/a&gt; so someone may be interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SFF.se aka sister site for us is also on that list, I think their situation is quite similar to ours, seems they are for the change even if not expecting that much from it. What is funny, we have 11% of old answers affected, but they have only 6% - quite an interesting difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the number of decisive sites is not overwhelming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Skeptics thread, lol, as you would expect it, no strong feelings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-25T14:46:34.393" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T00:44:13.853" Title="Accepted Answers - to pin or not to pin? New Se feature, a per site option, may be coming" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-14T19:18:14.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Please keep the current behavior if possible&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the kind of change which is valuable only because it is a change and some software developers get to book an achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If easily possible I would be happy to keep the current behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I could live with the new behavior just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, it's a free web-based application. Nobody expects the behavior of free web-based applications to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T19:31:03.813" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T19:31:03.813" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-16T18:21:34.547" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Best to Unpin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The green check mark really only does two things: first, it dissuades users from posting their own answer because, well, the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; has been chosen, indicating that there is no point in anyone writing an answer in the future; and second, its sole purpose is for the querent to advertise that their specific needs in asking a question have been met to their satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The green check mark kind of defeats the dual purpose of queries and responses here: one being to help the specific querent with their specific worldbuilding problem; the other being a repository of geopoetical wisdom that will last through the ages (or until SE shuts down and scrubs its archive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often the case that the &lt;em&gt;accepted answer&lt;/em&gt;, which helps the querent most of all, is not necessarily the &lt;em&gt;best possible answer&lt;/em&gt;, which helps the broader community most and would be of potential service to future seekers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UNPIN the GREEN CHECK MARK&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My vote, if I understand the terminology correctly, would be to unpin the accepted answer and let it rise or sink according to its community voted merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing this satisfies both our purposes. The querent gets the answer she's looking for; the respondent gets his rewards; the broader community gets to place its own best answer at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-09-16T18:26:37.623" LastActivityDate="2021-09-16T18:26:37.623" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-17T01:22:45.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any strong feeling about this topic, but just for the sake of balancing opinions with advanced arguments, I'll play the fey's advocate. Don't tell me I'm the devil's one. Who would like to be on Devil's side? Now I'm sad for the Devil, all alone :p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No, we should keep accepted answers on top&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unpinning won't improve that much the amount of new answers coming in&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a direct counter-argument to what people might naturally think as they evaluate there's &amp;quot;more space for unaccepted answers&amp;quot; after an answer has been accepted. People are by good nature lazy, and as such limit unnecessary efforts when they can. This includes looking for questions to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding as a game designer is that people who look to answer questions to get accepted will look first and foremost the question list, which already contains all the information they need, including the answer indicator. This one :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lv7ZK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lv7ZK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Accepted answers in list comparison&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which one's has been accepted&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, having the accepted answer on top doesn't impact a lot people looking to get their answer... Well, accepted. Most if not all would stop at the list and be fine with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This alone is insufficient to prove the whole pointy point. Indeed, I showed that if you are looking to get &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot;, then this has no impact, but does unpinning change how likely you are looking to get accepted? A new challenger comes in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unpinning reduces the likelihood of less popular questions getting attention&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to recall why accepted answers exist. It serves as additional, single-use, big rewards to questions. This is in contrast to votes, which are multi-use, weaker-alone rewards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While those two rewards set the same user goals (answering questions) and work towards a functionnal website (people getting answers to their question), they don't really aim the same kind of questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Votes, by their multi-usage nature, are most numerous and effective on popular questions, since they're directly proportional to the number of people reading them. After all, even if you double the percentage of votes/readers on a question as they're exceptionnally well-thought, if there are 10x more readers on another one, you'll have more votes there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepted answers instead impact any question, as they are single-use. They level -even a little- out the rewards among all questions, regardless of their fame.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still get a good chunk of questions with low views and answers. Took a look at 50 non-closed questions from one month ago (well beyond their tsunami of incoming readers). Out of these, 19 has 1 or less answer (2 without any), so almost 40%. It's a lot, considering that among them 9 (~20% of total) are questions which doesn't absolutely imply only yes, no or a single value (e.g : how much/long for X...) as answers. They therefore would probably need more of than one them to have a good understanding off the topic's possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing pins will remove one of the few rewards that accepted answers give, meaning fewer incentive to look for questions which have mathematically higher probabilities to get your answer accepted. Indeed, if you have less to choose from }i{... It therefore reduces the rewards you can get from low-popularity topics reducing their value to potential answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's one reward less, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/gazzard_alison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of &amp;quot;glory&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is also a very strong kind of reward&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;; It's also unique among others. The act of being brought on top like if you were 1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; on a leaderboard makes it more clear that at least one person read your answer throughly. And on top by the one which is the more likely (read 100% chance) of having that issue, facing it the way it is stated and that will be helped, as opposed to 90% of the rest who'll just read the main question out of curiosity and switch to something else. But that's not only about heart-to-heart -or should I say asker-to-answerer- discussions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The act of accepting an answer helps in contextualizing questions for others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because of that, accepted answers should be on top. There is both historical and &amp;quot;futurical&amp;quot; reasons to why I say this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical : Knowing quickly which answers have been accepted helps in turn to understand quickly what was the asker's thoughts relatively to their question. It also helps understanding in a glance how far the accepted answer at that time relates to the community's standards&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;. It helps clarifying what people understood of the question versus what the asker understood from themselves. And the reasons behind a decision is oftentimes more important than the decision itself, especially in more creative settings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For future answerers : It sets a better understanding of the question. Some questions lack clarity to some even if it has been well-written, and knowing that &amp;quot;this&amp;quot; answer got accepted sets some more frontiers you can more confidently walk in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, pinning or unpinning does not remove access to these information, but it removes their accessibility. Thus, removing common use of these. Remember my first few sentences : People are by good nature lazy :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Devifey's Advocate mode : OFF&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's everything that came into my mind. That's quite a lot, considering I think it's not that important. Would have been smarter (but functionally more complex) to let people choose in their settings what they want if I'd dare to say so. or make some A/B group testing to help in the final call. but that's overjudging something I don't have access to the gears, so I'll just quiet my voice }i{...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Funny thing that questions with accepted answers are displayed more prominently than questions without any answer. This targets -with intents or not- more an audience of readers than answerers, but at the same time makes it feel like less of a constraint to answerers so it balances up that. Paradoxically funny.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Depending on the individual but still for many.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: To be accurate, standards up to today.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T02:39:51.000" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T02:39:51.000" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-17T09:08:55.397" Score="-3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;What counts and does not count as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have read (mainly the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7364/site-policy-judging-when-a-question-is-a-duplicate&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;), essentially a question is a duplicate if it can't be answered in a way unique from other questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet based on my own questions, it seems like another set of rules is being followed. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213547/how-do-you-tie-up-a-snake-person&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is on its way to being closed as a duplicate of a question that, while similar, is so different in the specifics that almost no answer works across both questions. Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213520/what-would-an-obracentaur-realistically-look-like&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as a duplicate of a question where the only similarity I can see is that they're both about centaur biology, which doesn't seem like much of a reason to close&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is a duplicate? And what am I missing about all this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T05:01:18.897" Title="What is a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8445" CreationDate="2021-09-17T22:45:51.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Duplication&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you linked to a Meta question, I'd like you to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7375/37029&quot;&gt;JHB's answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Generalities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, duplication of a question occurs when two questions are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;similar enough&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in scope, material and focus that good answers for one question will also be good answers for the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes duplicates are actual copies. A long time ago someone asked about the feasibility of using boars as cavalry animals. And then recently someone else asked the same question about the feasibility of boars as cavalry animals. Obviously this is a duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the duplicates ask for the same information, but in a slightly different way. Maybe a question was asked 8 years ago about the nutritional content of blood in the context of vampires. For whatever reason, somebody asking about whether a vampire can survive on a diet of blood didn't find that earlier question. It is clear that the question is not precisely identical; but it is also the case that a break-down of the nutrients found in blood will also answer whether a person can survive on a diet consisting solely of that nutrient profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be within the community's rights to close these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now, for a third kind of duplicate, let's consider another pair. Let's say someone asks how a primitive society can rig up a way of dragging stuff using a sled with ski-runners. Now let's say someone asks how a primitive society can rig up a way of dragging stuff using a travois.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might think, well, skis slide along the ground while travoy sticks drag one end on the ground: two entirely different kinds of vehicles, therefore no answer to one can possibly be applicable to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, dragging stuff with either vehicle is simply a matter of managing the harness that connects the motive power with the vehicle. The motive power could be a horse, a dog, a person or even a motorised vehicle -- all the same, therefore the questions are duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Specifics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where does this leave your two questions? Obviously, the weresnake question -- Q2 -- is not an exact copy of the werefish question -- Q1. There are two different kinds of creatures after all! Nor do your questions ask for the same information in two different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on in your case, I believe, is that you've got the third kind of duplicate, the one that seems on the surface to not be a duplicate, because two entirely different creatures are being discussed, but in fact are the &lt;em&gt;same fundamental question&lt;/em&gt; because the answers for one work with the other. In other words, it doesn't matter which creature you ask about, all the answer apply to both equally well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that your argument is that none of the answers carry over from one to the other. I've read both questions and all the answers and don't come to that conclusion. This puts the ball back in your court as it falls to you to convince me that these aren't actually the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions are a pair of duplicates simply because they not only ask the same question --- &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I tie up a humanoid person with some kind of animal hindquarters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; --- but thus far all the answers apply to both questions and many more possibilities besides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Missing Link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested before that, just perhaps, you're missing this because you're somehow stuck in the minor details. You seem to be saying that a fish tail and snake tail are so radically different that there is no way whatsoever that one method for tying up can possibly work for both, simply because that one is shaped like a fish and that one is shaped like a snake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong in that assessment! In all of our discussion, you haven't actually pinpointed how the two are &amp;quot;so different in specifics&amp;quot; that &amp;quot;almost no answer works across both questions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Obracentaurs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading the obracentaur question, I can only hazard at two rationales for closure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is such a trivial question that it really doesn't rise to minimal expectations. Basically, what you're asking there is &amp;quot;what would a mix between a donkey and a zebra look like&amp;quot; and after an agonizing 1.32 seconds of googling, discovered that the answer is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;zonkey&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Just stick a humanoid torso on a zonkey and you've got your answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, that kind of question is a time waster for this forum. There are hundreds of really excellent questions you could ask about obracentaurs and ono- &amp;amp; zebracentaur cultures, but you didn't! I'm not surprised that it was closed, I'm not surprised that it's gotten a neg. 4 vote and I'm not surprised that no one has voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question you asked, about what what a centauroid would &amp;quot;realistically look like&amp;quot; is addressed in the Anatomically Correct Series.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, I don't think the specified ACS actually addresses what I think you're asking, so I agree with you that that is probably not the best closure rationale that could have been chosen. It could just as easily have been nominated for closure for being too opinion based or tagged for deletion for being of too low quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What's Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Scorpion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213664/how-do-you-tie-up-a-scorpion-person&quot;&gt;werescorpion question&lt;/a&gt; --- Q3 --- because the same kinds of answers that you got for the other two will apply here as well. This is a duplicate. And not only that, but it's a tiresome duplicate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I see you've tried again with a humanoid squidopus --- Q4 --- and that it's been closed. Maybe it's time to stop, take stock of what you're doing wrong and change that behaviour? Especially in light of two really excellent worldbuilding questions that you've asked recently!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-09-19T05:01:18.897" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T05:01:18.897" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-19T08:54:07.287" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point I made the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106292/creating-a-scientifically-semi-valid-super-soldier-part-1-skeleton&quot;&gt;Creating a scientifically semi-valid super-soldier, part 1: Skeleton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first it was an amalgemation of many questions and got VTC'd (the first answer is still a testament to that). I decided to listen to the feedback and turned it into a small series of questions instead, completely overhauling the question. Despite that the question is still closed without any reopen votes so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question I saw was this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/120427/formulating-likelyhood-for-civilization-to-face-weapons-based-self-destruction&quot;&gt;Formulating likelyhood for civilization to face weapons-based self-destruction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks for an equation similar to the fermi paradox. While the individual variables are opinion based you cannot argue that the variable does not need to be there. Ignoring any other faults in the question it should not be locked for the variables it asks for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: the variable of how many goldilocks planets there are is opinion based in the fermi paradox. But the variable itself cannot be taken out of the equation since you need to know how many goldilocks planets there are to complete the formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen some questions get VTC's with barely a comment or no comment at all explaining why it is VTC'd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal: make VTC more of a responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you VTC you take a responsibility for the quality of questions on this site. That responsibility should not end after a VTC. The site is also supposed to be friendly, so making sure that people are encouraged to come back and ask more questions is key. Supporting the person in improving their answer is more important than the VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: if you VTC you get a screen where you need to fill in the exact reasons for the VTC and steps to improve the question, or an explanation why the question cannot be improved. I would say that this has to be done in your own words rather than a copy-pasted comment of someone else to show your understanding of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: if you VTC'd you will be notified of edits made to the question and get to review them. If you do not review the question within a month your VTC will be automatically removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3: people get to see the reasons for VTC and judge them. Bad VTC's need to be filtered especially if the person does not understand the question*. Naturally an explanation why it is a bad VTC would be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of my big frustrations: after explaining what I mean some people still hold on to their interpretation and dragging a question down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48354" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T01:02:19.987" Title="More responsibility for VTC's" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8447" CreationDate="2021-09-19T15:56:29.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;YES ... &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preliminaries&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't disagree that any kind of quasi-moderatorial action comes with responsibilities. The problem with this kind of perspective is that we can not &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; people to take any responsibility beyond what SE demands. WB.SE can only suggest, cajole and clarify forum norms &amp;amp; expectations. Unless you want to turn the Mod Squod into a mini Stasi, keeping secret files on who has clicked what boxes, I really think your proposal will never have any teeth, and thus never be more than a self-regulated ideal. Those of us who are really into helping others craft good questions and answers will take your suggestions to heart and follow through. Those of us who don't have the time or inclination for anything extra simply won't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to toot my own horn, but I'd like to think that when I VTC or edit someone else's question, I do take the responsibility seriously. In addition to the boilerplate closure rationale, I almost always offer suggestions as to why the question is being closed and ways to improve it. I'm not afraid to engage in long and protracted discussions either in comments or in a separate chat room. If the OP asks for clarification, I follow up. If the OP edits the question sufficiently, I either VTR or retract my VTC. If the OP brings the concern to Meta, I go back and review everything, including my own actions and interactions with the OP. If the OP convinces me that I was wrong or that they've done sufficient work to improve a question, then I happily change my view. Otherwise, I try to explain again why I did what I did and why I think the community reacted as it did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As for your numbered points:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think these are already covered, for the most part, by SE procedures which are not in the WB.SE forum's control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This already happens. It seems to have been implemented recently, but when I click VTC, a screen pops up asking for the reason for the vote. This comes from SE and I am sure is a site wide implementation. Anything further falls to the person voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think we get notified of edits by virtue of the fact that an edited question will end up in the VTR queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People already question and judge what they believe to be bad closure reasons. Trust me, if I think the question isn't story based, I'm going to say something!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really only disagree with the idea of punishing a VTCer with ballot negation. That's not a good practice. The whole idea of SE voting system is that the very VTC itself is considered to be sufficient explanation for the person's rationale. In other words, if I click VTC and then click &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot;, I've done my bit for king and country. It would awesome and sporting if I carried through with all the friendly help and advice, but I don't have to. I ought never be penalised for doing no more than the law prescribes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only kind of penalty in that regard that I should be made to suffer is the gentle excoriation of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T15:56:29.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-19T17:03:22.897" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Leave pinned -- on &lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unpinning is absolutely the right behavior when people are asking questions about biology or physics or most other Stack Exchange sites.  The person asking the question is often simply not &lt;em&gt;qualified&lt;/em&gt; to say which answer is right, or else they wouldn't be asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on worldbuilding, the utility of an answer really is in the eye of the beholder, and in particular, of the person who posed the scenario.  No one else can be sure they interpreted the question in the right way in the first place.  We're not talking about taxonomy and general relativity here - more often magically enhanced mermaids and siege weapons usable by pigeons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T17:03:22.897" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8447" CreationDate="2021-09-20T00:43:08.607" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;partially agree with some parts of the post and present answer, but need to add some difference, not all of it but some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;reopening of questions is a harder process than closing them. seen successful cases of opening, but often is due to the fact of clashing of two different views on a question. when both views have sufficient support, it can even happen few times with the same question. the likelihood is higher as long a q is on the main page, after then the chance to be reopen is low and revq is not efficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recommend using follow-link for some time and look at the development of the situation for some of those q's, to get a more broad picture of the current situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;more or less they're all the same names for vtc'ers (one of which is mine, sometimes) which is just an indication of user activity, it was the case for a years, a group of 10-20(?) people affects this part of the processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pressing 'follow' under a question allows to efficiently monitor changes through notifications, which works well if there is such interest. And this feature can be used to take some further responsibility. I use it periodically with questions that I see are sinking and I think they should not it helps me to note when they are closed - so I can cast reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it not only those who close could do a little bit more, but those who lean to protect this or another q can do more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as those who answer q's - it is quite funny to see a question closed, but has 7 answers and 5 of those are from 3k+ rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meaning high rep users found it good enough to spend the time on it, but it does not have even a single reopen vote even if it is fresh enough, so if it had some votes would not have time to expire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be blunt, but honest, okay not that blunt - 1-3 won't do good as-is, and probably is not something which can be improved to do great good. Agree on some point with elements here, but not with everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, JBH started a good trend with VTC/VTO comments, and sure it a good thing to support it. it helps us to see what kind of objections we have to different q's, sync clocks on case by case basis, and think about what can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow a question is also a tool, it hard to say how many and how people use it, it is less visible, but maybe it should be advertised as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skipping questions also should be advertised - I absolutely won't touch questions marked with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; as it is not my cup of tee, and they are in ignore list on the main I do not see them, and that is all opinion based for me. And it sad situation, for me, to see technology space questions, if they are a bit no-standard, to be bashed by people who really have no business to judge those. So yeah, be humble and understand your own limit is a good thing to be advertised as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the other hand, we should think about expanding or improving approaches and scope based on the main objective - '&lt;em&gt;is a question and answer site for writers, artists and others using &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;, geography, and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in that sense that fermi paradox-like question is a good example. quite often op can't provide additional details, and variables even if omitted in a q are required for an answer and should be assumed by one who answers. often such q's are closed as opinion-based or need for details. it may be valid reasons and correct cause of closure - but another hand, some problems are quite typical and can be answered and if the user had the additional information or knowledge for a better question - he would not have the question. one asks the q exactly because he does not know something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A goal is to help people do better fiction work using science. So what if the answer is half an opinion? if it is made by a knowledgeable person, whose assumptions and opinions may be worth more than a bunch of NASA pdf's - in such a case opinion maybe even better way to answer a q.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but here it needs to pay more attention to answers as well, downvote them, comment on them. (in that sense downvote is underpowered, ask for it as a feature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;all in all&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what you propose does not solve the problems, but it is good that you thinking about improvements instead to move to a different place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be more active on reopening q's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use follow to monitor closed and to reopen q's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;advertise useful practices in the comment section&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;understand which practices are useful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;understand that there is a need for some restrain as for q's so as for A's for wb did not become a trash bin for random noise out of q's so as A's.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;advertise this doctrine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at some point in time, it needs to become the next step, write down better practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all in all group of people who influence close reopen situation is not so big, finding some practically useful consensus is not impossible. which may include adding few new special tags - similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, poor poor &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; which needs to be fixed, back hole of opinions &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; - which reflect not subjects but which affect out voting and taking decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, we have plenty of technology bootstrapping questions that were slashed over the years, they are fundamentally broad and no possibility to define which high fidelity and have multiple &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers (aka opinion-based by current standards) - but a problem people try to solve is understandable, it hard to have such expertise, it makes sense to add such details, and those details have educational value for consumers - it a good to have good answers on those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe even broader tag:opinion-based - those who do not like to participate in those can ignore and hide such q's, and we may not close them for reasons that they are opinion-based, just slap the tag - those who like to show their creativity can engage, why not, as sending them to fantasy.se is useless most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, there are things which can be done atm, and it is plenty of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freedom to technology questions! &lt;strike&gt;Magic no passa run!&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;ah yeah, I do ignore magic q's, then IDC&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T01:02:19.987" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T01:02:19.987" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-24T12:04:32.140" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214028/why-would-terrestrial-rodent-sized-sapient-mammals-evolve-to-be-hairless&quot;&gt;Why would terrestrial, rodent-sized sapient mammals evolve to be hairless?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if I am mistaken, but worldbuilding SE has accepted questions of this sort for as long as I have browsed it (a good number of years before I made this account). Going over to the tag search and sorting by votes, you can find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42617/why-would-merfolk-have-hair&quot;&gt;highly comparable question&lt;/a&gt; appears to be well received - there aren't even any comments about it being under-specified. What is the difference between these questions that warrants closing? Is it simply that the culture has shifted in this time? I would be very happy to change my question, so long as the changes do not compromise its utility for the general public (which is the policy here, anyway, AFAIU).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less comparable, but relevant example questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64811/why-did-dragons-evolve-to-be-smart&quot;&gt;Why did dragons evolve to be smart?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/565/what-would-be-the-evolutionary-advantage-for-plants-to-be-bioluminescent&quot;&gt;What would be the evolutionary advantage for plants to be bioluminescent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37105/benefits-of-or-reasons-why-a-species-would-have-only-one-eye&quot;&gt;Benefits of or reasons why a species would have only one eye?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc. It turns out there are quite a few of these even when I restrict it to ones roughly as vague as my own and without comments suggesting it should be closed on those grounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90327" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T14:09:42.703" Title="How can I improve my evolution question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8452" CreationDate="2021-09-24T12:39:48.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the evolutionary need/pressure for intelligence or bioluminescence is just better understood than the evolutionary need/pressure for hairlessness. Questions about evolutionary pressures have been met with more scrutiny lately as people began using them to ask for evolutionarily paths for every creatures they could think of, with no worldbuilding effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given that that the current state of evolution knowledge for every part of anatomy is not obvious to every querent, I would have personally much more appreciated answers that give a caveat (&amp;quot;this is based on poorly understood science, but one theory is:...&amp;quot;), or even answers that say &amp;quot;We don't know, because...&amp;quot;, over a closing of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T12:39:48.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8452" CreationDate="2021-09-24T14:09:42.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A Possible Solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH brought up the &amp;quot;infinite list of things&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;finite list of things&amp;quot; and I think that is probably your best bet for &amp;quot;improving&amp;quot; your question. I think the questions you link to provide a key to the success of the list type question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd suggest is a &lt;em&gt;simple inversion of your assumption&lt;/em&gt;.  As it's written, you seem to have a hairy animal and want to make it hairless, assuming that there must be some kind of end benefit. This is bound to create a whole lot divergent &lt;strong&gt;opinions&lt;/strong&gt;, and, ultimately a pretty infinite list of &lt;strong&gt;speculations&lt;/strong&gt; of the &amp;quot;well, it might could just be this or mought whould just be that&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't have a problem with opinions &amp;amp; speculations, but there is not a little bit of push-back against these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your question would be reopened if in stead of focusing on the end benefit, you focused on the process itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How does this sound?  If I had asked your question as written, and were facing closure, this is how I'd might rewrite it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my world, there are hairless, rodent-sized sapient mammals. How did they  evolve to be hairless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming Earth-like conditions and biology in the realm of what has been observed in nature (including the evolution of nearly hairless humans), how is it that these tiny people became (nearly) hairless as well? While there are many examples of furless land animals (insects, reptiles &amp;amp; amphibians) on that scale, the vast majority of them are ectotherms and do not face the same challenges in maintaining their core temperature as mammals do. This is because mammals are (primarily) endotherms and under the square-cube law, smaller animals must radiate heat &amp;quot;more effectively&amp;quot; than a comparable one of larger scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks for a &lt;em&gt;finite list&lt;/em&gt; of most plausible directions the path of evolution might take. Some speculation is necessary, but ASB type answers won't cut it. I will accept as best answer, the one that gives a substantial and evidence-based course of advantage to hairlessness at this scale in light of the question's initial condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T14:09:42.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-24T19:55:01.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep pinned, for quick &amp;amp; deterministic comparison between accepted answer and top-voted answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How far down will I have to scroll to find the accepted answer?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing it out really makes it sound like a first-world problem and or/a silly thing to be concerned about. But for a user who is navigating tons of questions each day, constantly assessing whether they want to upvote an answer, leave a comment, or write one of their own, having guaranteed fast access to the accepted answer seems like a desirable element of design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider our current layout scheme. For a question with many answers, there are only three possible arrangements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Most votes]       |   [Accepted answer &amp;amp; Most votes]   |   [Accepted answer]&#xA;[2nd most votes]   |   [2nd most votes]                 |   [Most votes]&#xA;[3rd most votes]   |   [3rd most votes]                 |   [fewer votes]&#xA;...                |   ...                              |   ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of these cases, the first two answers always contain the accepted answer (if present) and the top-voted answer. Now, if we unpin it, we don't know where the accepted answer will end up. It could be the first, or second...or anywhere. Accepted answers are often highly voted, but on occasion we may see a situation like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Most votes]&#xA;[2nd most votes]&#xA;[3rd most votes]&#xA;...&#xA;[Nth most votes]&#xA;[Accepted answer]&#xA;[(N+2)th most votes]&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of my engagement with the site, it's pretty rare that I'd cast votes on answers without first checking the accepted answer and comparing it against other high-scoring answers. And in the rare but possible case that I would post a new answer to a question with an already-accepted answer, I would certainly want to read it before beginning to post. It's very nice to have the accepted answer always in the same place, and it would be bothersome to have to go hunting for it on those rare occasions when it's not near the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: If we do unpin the accepted answer, could we have a &amp;quot;jump to accepted answer&amp;quot; button at the top...?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51300" LastEditorUserId="51300" LastEditDate="2021-09-24T20:16:02.140" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T20:16:02.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-24T22:30:25.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; - We need a test run, a month, it is hard to say without actual experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about it, especially after Qami's post, it should be different for various sorting methods :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oldest first - it should be unpinned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Highest votes - may be pinned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recent - probably unpinned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is the desired outcome, which is important when we choose this or another sorting method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I sort in chronological order, oldest first, I intend to scroll and see if I have something to add, or if I am willing to post an answer to the question, while reading I vote answers. If I feel I have something to say then I do so, after scrolling through all answers, and sure I will notice the accepted answer as well if it is present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most voted first - the current behavior works in 90% cases, so a change here is not a huge deal, but maybe we can argue here that accepted on top may be important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent change sorting - one probably does expect to see that recently changed answer on top, maybe for the reason one prefers fresher ones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other more dynamic reasons are not necessarily a factor because changes of sorting methods are not such a convenient procedure - so it from the start some long-lasting reason and sorting changes are rare for a person, I guess (at least for me).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in this case, unpinning is the desired outcome, but there may be a value of comparison between fresh answers and the accepted one, having them next to each other, but it sure is for special people, but I can see how it can be useful for some adaptations and strategies for some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way unpinning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixes behavior for 100% questions with accepted answers for 2 out of 3 sorting methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaks (or maybe not - a matter of personal preferences) expected behavior for 11% of questions with accepted answers in 1 sorting method out of 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;It looks like clear cut to me,&lt;/strike&gt; in terms of consistency of results &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; meeting expectations. (&amp;quot;And&amp;quot; because we use and adapt our practices to known inconsistency, and if a change breaks something again, I guess we will do that again, adapt, and I do not think new adaptations in that case for those people are that much more annoying than existing ones)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Premise for 90 degree turn&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the reusability of old questions and answers is low on WB. I have an old answer 7yo on a different SE site, where I have one or few answers and it brings me some points once a half year or so(it is/was a recipe for a problem), on WB upvotes for my old answers as rare as that one q, I have 100+ answers, and even when I'm not most likable answer provider (far from it), it kinda leads me to certain conclusions, which I think I'm not wrong about. I think a similar situation is for other se sites which are not recipe providing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the activity happens in some period of TTL (time to live) for the question and then it is done, and that TTL correlates with the position on main. It also can be seen by the frequency of providing new answers to old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;90 degree turn&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So until a question is on the main it has life, once gone it is toast and history. And for active users who are looking at active question's with an existing answer, they are probably curious about - what kind of answer op accepted. Or if they are looking to provide an answer then anyway the accepted one needs some reading (chronological sorting or not), and only with recent sorting unpinning may be an improvement. So for a fraction of questions, those which TTL isn't expired, and those which are important as they are currently in active use, it is less of clear cut than for older questions, mainly because of that curiosity aspect what kind of question op accepted, and after a few minutes of reading be a reminder that you reading a question with accepted answer, which could be forgotten already but here it is - a reminder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, it needs a test run, as there are less obvious conveniences and inconveniences in the current situation. Be the change an individual preference, like button pin accepted (4th sorting button, which can be toggled on and off for each sorting method, creating 6 options in total), then that would be perfect as user experience, and we probably should insist on that option. Not caring about google traffic at all in this case and in this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-25T14:44:34.443" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T14:44:34.443" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-26T06:22:41.817" Score="12" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently found 2 edits in my edit queue that were &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; but changing all the pronouns from he/him to they/them. I don't know what to mark these edits as. They don't improve or make the question worse. What should this type of edit be marked as be marked as?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73451" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-09-26T13:17:24.160" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T13:09:21.243" Title="What should edits that do nothing but change pronouns in a edit count as?" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2021-09-26T06:54:30.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changing the pronouns to make them inclusive is compliant with the Code of Conduct&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be inclusive and respectful&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid sarcasm and be careful with jokes — tone is hard to decipher online. &lt;em&gt;Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain&lt;/em&gt;. If a situation makes it hard to be friendly, stop participating and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edit goes in that direction, it should be approved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T06:54:30.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8441" CreationDate="2021-09-27T00:44:13.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leave it alone, change of any sort irritates me. That's my personal reaction, when I think about how our stack functions I'd also prefer it was left alone for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accepted answers are one of the tools that I quite often use to understand how the person asking the question sees the question when I'm deciding whether I can contribute anything further that may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I have asked the question and then refer back to it later I want to know what I was thinking when I made a decision about the answer and being able to instantly access the accepted answer helps with that. In fact having that answer pinned is pretty vital in preventing concept drift (and the inconsistencies that it causes) created by reading other answers &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; having been reminded of what I felt was the best fit at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T00:44:13.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-27T10:13:45.810" Score="-6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214329/can-we-fulfill-the-world-electricity-production-by-nuclear-power&quot;&gt;Can we fulfill the world electricity production by nuclear power?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content of the q, just in case, nothing special:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nuclear energy is a form of energy released from the nucleus, the core of atoms, made up of protons and neutrons. In today's world has 450 commercial nuclear power reactors operable in 30 countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Globally, around 10% of our electricity comes from nuclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, can we fulfill the other 90% by nuclear power?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from diamond user account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding. As the name of the community suggests, we deal with fictional worlds and their rules. At the moment you are giving exactly 0 information about your world, and it looks more like you are trying to start a debate on nuclear power. Please give a good read to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to understand our scope, then edit the question to fit our standards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go to that help center, shall we?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not about &amp;quot;As the name of the community suggests, we deal with fictional worlds and their rules.&amp;quot; - community does not suggest that, so not only rules&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is important enough and directly applicable to the q - element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a &lt;strong&gt;system, event or element&lt;/strong&gt; of the world is causing you problems we are here to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more in that help center, like referencing infrastructure, which that op ask for, to be a good example of a topic. But I just skimming things, everyone can refresh/revisit help center on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why so sudden, what actually wrong.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was observing as at least 4 user accounts(soon to be the 5th one, I guess) were attempting, in their own way and fashion, to work with op in a sense of getting more information and clarifications, and they all were silenced by removing their comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While diamond user comment is like a lone wolf disguised as a representation of the whole community's take on the question as if there are no other takes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the subject of discussion is - is it appropriate for diamond users to disguise as community representatives, in a such way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, on which grounds do we request wrapper stories those days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-09-27T10:27:03.190" LastActivityDate="2021-10-03T22:59:54.967" Title="King is back or Should diamond users define behavior of everyone else in case of this Q as an example" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|moderation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2021-10-11T22:50:17.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8460" CreationDate="2021-09-27T10:30:53.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering in comments in frowned upon, because it circumvents the quality checks in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those 3 comments were actually working with the OP to make the question a better fit for our community I would have left them in  place. Since those comments were instead answering the question, I took 2 of them down. The 3rd one was self taken down by the commenter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T10:30:53.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8460" CreationDate="2021-09-27T10:41:35.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only part of L.Dutches answer I would personally take exception to, is the notion that &amp;quot;it looks more like you are trying to start a debate on nuclear power&amp;quot;, which &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; I didn't read into the question. But Diamond Mod's are privvy to more information than any other user, and may be aware of previous information we aren't (either from that user or other users etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nuanced take, applicable to everybody, is to assume best intentions (both the asker, and the moderator here). That L.Dutch is genuinely trying to help shape this question to be more focused, and that the asker is not trying to start a debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see this meta post also comes from a genuine place of concern, but maybe oversteps in terms of the assumptions it makes on the moderator, and not how the community members may have been (I didn't see the comments, just L.Dutch's second comment) trying to answer the question in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T10:41:35.930" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2021-09-27T18:29:34.483" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;One small clarification, since it seems to have come up a bit in discussion. It’s true that correcting pronouns, including towards gender neutral pronouns where relevant, is a positive contribution. When folks come across this organically, it should be changed and is an improvement to the post. &lt;strong&gt;However, folks shouldn’t go well out of their way to make these changes unless the pronouns a post uses are obviously incorrect (i.e. refer to a specific person improperly).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These edits should be treated like a minor improvement, except when pronouns refer to a specific person incorrectly, in which case they are quite important to do. Minor changes are generally welcome across Stack Exchange when the post needs other edits, or if the post is very new, or if you just come across a post organically and it’s bugging you. (And, of course, there's some variation for local site policies here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we did not permit these changes, many posts would stay permanently gendered. But, it’s not generally worth a mass edit or a bump to many old posts at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87013" LastEditorUserId="32391" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T13:09:21.243" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T13:09:21.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8469" CreationDate="2021-09-28T04:24:07.647" Score="1" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I'm going to post something, I end up asking a lot of questions because I want to resolve as many doubts as I can..I've already canceled three/four questions because of this and I'm about to cancel one more.I wanted to ask more questions, but my post will be closed, so that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90300" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T18:29:33.660" Title="Why can I only ask one question per post?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8465" CreationDate="2021-09-28T04:42:33.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have already been told to give a good read at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go there you will find a section called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; which precisely answer your question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking more questions in a single post leads to getting overlapping threads in the answers, making it more difficult if not impossible to pick a &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-09-28T04:42:33.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8465" CreationDate="2021-09-28T04:48:19.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limit of one question per post is a design decision that is at the core of the Stack Overflow model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have multiple questions in one post it makes it harder to identify and highlight the good answers. What if answer A does a fantastic job with question 1 and doesn't even attempt to answer question 2? Do you allow it because it is excellent at Q1 or delete it for not answering Q2. Since stack overflow was built around the idea of collecting good answers they decided to make it simpler for the answerers by restricting posts to 1 and only 1 question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2021-09-28T04:48:19.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8460" CreationDate="2021-09-28T15:22:09.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own take on the question in question is that it initially didn't have enough information for a reasonable answer to be able to be given.  Then, subsequently, when the question was edited so as to state that this was a real-world question, it became dubious if the question was on topic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be situations in which a real-world-based question can be on-topic, such as when the question proposes a point of departure from our current world and enquires where the change may lead, but this question didn't really propose any such point of departure or express any interest in the potential outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be true that WB SE is the Stack Exchange network's dumping ground for questions that are off-topic elsewhere, but it doesn't necessarily follow that such questions are a good fit here if they aren't a good fit elsewhere.  Some questions may not be a good fit anywhere on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As moderators of WB SE, our responsibility is to this site first, not to the rest of the SE network or to the questions that are asked here, other than to assist in weeding out those posts that don't fit or helping them to fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while this question may be interesting and relevant to the real world, it has little value as a worldbuilding question, and without such value, it has no place here regardless of how interesting or relevant to our real world situation it may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2021-09-28T15:22:09.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8465" CreationDate="2021-09-28T16:52:35.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We really like lots of questions! Stack Exchange only allows you to ask one question per post. All you have to do is ask a well focused question and we can answer it. You may ask as many questions as you need to ask in order to address the problem.  This makes the process easier for all of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A resposta:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nós realmente gostamos de muitas perguntas! O Stack Exchange permite que você faça apenas uma pergunta por postagem. Tudo o que você precisa fazer é fazer uma pergunta bem direcionada e nós podemos respondê-la. Você pode fazer quantas perguntas precisar para resolver o problema. Isso torna o processo mais fácil para todos nós.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-09-28T21:38:35.710" LastActivityDate="2021-09-28T21:38:35.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-29T21:11:38.717" Score="-5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;This stack exchange is about worldbuilding. Specifically it is for making sure that the features of your world are sensible and realistic/logical. I assumed that this purpose included asking for the function of interesting-looking features that you'd like to use in your worlds. The main reasons I had were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a rather fact-based query. It in fact is the only way we know what the function of bodyparts are&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a common way to worldbuild, especially with fantasy, where taking creatures from mythology is rather common&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214276/how-do-demigryphons-hunt&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214485/what-would-the-anatomy-of-a-bird-that-flies-with-its-legs-work&quot;&gt;lot&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214366/how-would-you-design-a-race-of-small-humanoids-such-that-they-could-ride-a-quetz&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214353/why-would-naturally-evolved-monsters-have-weak-points&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214322/sustainable-permanent-forest-fire&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214311/how-could-blood-be-purple-and-reasons-for-it&quot;&gt;do&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214159/viability-of-keropion&quot;&gt;it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have been made aware that these questions are somehow off-topic, because there are other questions that come up with things the other way round or something like that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we clear up the rules in this area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T23:49:00.943" Title="Why can't we ask about the use of anatomical features?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8470" CreationDate="2021-09-30T13:33:16.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Of Course You Can&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anatomical features &amp;amp; structures are the pease &amp;amp; corn of WB. We've had loads of anatomy questions as these are basic worldbuilding questions and fall under &amp;quot;systems&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with you on one point, in stating that this forum is for &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot; making sure that the features of your world are sensible and realistic/logical.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; This forum is for helping people build their fictional worlds, yes. But whether those worlds are sensible, realistic &amp;amp; logical or not is completely at the discretion of the worldbuilder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/214486/37029&quot;&gt;this is the question&lt;/a&gt; you're referring to, then it appears to be a question about a real world phenomenon for which you haven't provided any context relating to your own fictional world. I'd guess that's the reason it got closed. Real world questions are on topic, but they really ought to be connected to your world in a useful and tangible way so we can help you apply the real to the fictional!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to you I guess: get serious about the worldbuilding and make sure your questions have sufficient context and stop asking questions of idle curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-10-04T23:49:00.943" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T23:49:00.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-30T15:44:04.053" Score="6" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice two separate spambot answers to my question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20622/ways-to-make-contact-with-aliens-on-a-much-larger-size-scale&quot;&gt;Ways to make contact with aliens on a much larger size scale?&lt;/a&gt; that appear to be the same idea, with the same perpetrator though completely different text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen this particular spam scam before.  Out of curiosity, has someone with a good sandbox looked at the contents of the linked document?  What's &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to the point, what is it about this question that attracts this bot?  There are &lt;em&gt;no illustrations&lt;/em&gt; in the Q or anywhere in the thread, at all!  So, the first attempt at claiming copyrighted images is nonsense and I don't see why they would choose a post with no images for this.  The second attempt is more vague about copyrighted material, and although I do quote from a story (my own), there's nothing about markup here that would indicate that something is an extended quote from another source so I doubt the scammer is looking for posts containing pasted materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T13:14:24.370" Title="What is this spam on my old question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8472" CreationDate="2021-09-30T16:28:53.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't try to open that link, however the same scam attempt has been scattered on several questions on WB, none of them with images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume whoever is behind that scam wants to filter out the thinking brains and go for those who do not put much thought into clicking links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T16:28:53.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8460" CreationDate="2021-10-03T22:59:54.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was painfully obvious that the OP was asking a Real World question for the purpose of solving a Real World problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's &lt;em&gt;off-topic.&lt;/em&gt; There is a small group of people out there who figure this Stack should field any and all questions that come to it — but that is NOT how Stack Exchange designed their service, and it's &lt;em&gt;their service,&lt;/em&gt; not ours. We're allowed to create our own rules only as a unioned subset of their rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been problematic long before this issue. The two most famous are (a) how to deal with the &amp;quot;too opinion-based&amp;quot; closure reason on a Stack that's &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; by definition and (b) how to deal with Real World questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy enough for someone to search Meta and find the fairly long chain of discussions involving those two issues, but at the heart of this issue is the basic premise of this site's purpose. To explain it I quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;Monica Ciello&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about &lt;em&gt;building worlds,&lt;/em&gt; not questions about &lt;em&gt;how others' worlds work.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last phrase is incredibly important as it identifies what I believe is the bedrock of all this Stack's policies: The Real World is &lt;em&gt;someone else's world.&lt;/em&gt; It is not a fictional world of the OP's own creation. Asking Real World questions for the purpose of solving Real World problems is simply off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will we answer Real World questions? Sure! In the context of helping the OP &lt;em&gt;build a fictional world of their own creation.&lt;/em&gt; That would include an alternative Earth — but a necessary context for the question is, &lt;em&gt;what's different between your world and Earth?&lt;/em&gt; And the smaller those differences are, the more off-topic the question becomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I support L.Dutch's actions. I do not believe it is ever appropriate to assume a question has been asked under the auspices of both Stack Exchange's rules and our own Stack rules. If the OP can't be clear in that regard, it's reasonable to assume they don't know the rules and that the question should be &lt;em&gt;interpreted at face value.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And looking even at the original post, it's &lt;em&gt;painfully obvious&lt;/em&gt; the question was never about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-03T22:59:54.967" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-03T23:04:30.717" Score="1" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a rule against asking questions about worlds and features from third party works, and I find this rule to be unhelpful for numerous reasons. While there is some explanation &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, there are still many problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rule, in enforcement, actually just forbids people from giving context to their questions about third party worlds. It is impossible to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every feature in every world, or to even know which world, if any, an idea came from. Hence, apart from well-known features of well-known worlds, it is only possible to find out about such a question if the asker says outright that it is about a third party world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SciFi.SE, while it does allow questions to stray out of pure canon, is not WB.SE. It is based on the specific canon of a work, so I don't see them, for example, being able to tell the evolutionary history of a species seen only twice in a high-school dramedy that never once mentions evolution. Furthermore, SciFi.SE, from what I've read, is to assume normal science for the scientific questions, which is not useful if you're querying a world where you don't think normal science would fully apply in the area your question is about. For these reasons it is insufficient for querying new features for worlds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The justification that WB.SE isn't about how other worlds work doesn't hold up to scrutiny. No world is complete, and there are always more features you could add to someone's world. For example, let's you ask about the best way for the zekes from the Gone series could implement features from blue bats. The answers to this question would describe a unique idea, never seen in the series it is from. To declare this to be part of how that world works is like saying that building an extension is a contemplation of the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rule is inconsistent with the rest of the rules: I have asked several questions about building up on an existing world, as I assume many others have too. This was allowed because said existing world was yet to be put out into the world. I cannot see any way that a world would be so different before and after publishing as to warrant this rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking these objections into account, why must we have this rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastEditorUserId="75161" LastEditDate="2021-10-05T07:39:16.247" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T20:23:30.210" Title="Why the rule against third party worlds?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2021-10-03T23:17:52.827" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The edits were ridiculous&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the world has really come to the point where reading the words &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; are intrinsically &lt;em&gt;offensive,&lt;/em&gt; then we've really come to a sad state of affairs. But I beg you, &lt;em&gt;understand what I'm saying in its correct context.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asked a question about &lt;em&gt;a fictional world of their own creation.&lt;/em&gt; In that world, the OP makes the rules — and that most certainly includes the rules governing pronoun usage. Who is anyone on this Stack or working at Stack Exchange to tell the OP whether or not the use of any pronoun &lt;em&gt;in their own question&lt;/em&gt; is inappropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's a somewhat different matter when answering a question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original question was written using gender-neutral language, then it would be appropriate for every answer to be written in the same gender-neutral language. In such a case, had someone forgotten because, perish the thought, they're old and suffering from the stress of overcoming decades of now politically-incorrect English language classes, then it would be appropriate to edit the answer and convert it to the same gender-neutral context as the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's a very different matter when addressing a real and living person&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the Code of Conduct is to help us understand how to be civil &lt;em&gt;with other real and living people using this service.&lt;/em&gt; In other words, were I to leave a comment to someone's post, but referring to another person's comment, and not knowing the gender/pronounce preference of the OP, then I would use gender-neutral language to avoid offense. Had I forgotten to do so, someone politely pointing out that I had is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But I believe it is entirely inappropriate to force the OP to write gender-neutral questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the OP's post to gender-neutral language for the sake of using gender-neutral language is imposing a morality upon the OP that may not — and probably does not — reflect the OP's beliefs, culture, or the rules and systems of the world they are trying to create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point? Without &lt;em&gt;asking the OP whether or not the question should apply to all possible gender combinations&lt;/em&gt; the editor could not possibly know whether or not the OP actually meant for the question to only be scoped for (in this case) biological males.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's the OP's right to scope their questions for a single gender, gender-preference, or gender-orientation. Thinking of the issue more globally, what's the point of even having a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gender&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gender&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gender&lt;/a&gt; tag if the OP can't refer to gender in the question? (Yes, people, we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gender&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gender&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gender&lt;/a&gt; tag....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it hasn't been clear to you, the edits made to OT-64 SKOT's post were nothing short of politically-correct Nazism. If you're inclined to edit someone else's post to fix pronoun usage, &lt;em&gt;have the courage and courtesy to ask the OP for permission, first.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-03T23:17:52.827" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8472" CreationDate="2021-10-04T13:14:24.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a phishing/malware campaign affecting many Internet sites, not just Stack Exchange, see for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/copyright-infringement-scam/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;. Charcoal, the organization behind SmokeDetector, is aware of these posts and they are often &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291301/295232&quot;&gt;automatically spam flagged&lt;/a&gt;. They post these answers on all kinds of questions, you were just unlucky to be hit twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8732" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T13:14:24.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2021-10-04T21:35:57.190" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Accept them under these conditions :&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;-If they don't damage the explicit message&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The obvious part : If someone ask explicitly about women (or men) doing something related to their gender in society (ie. statuses in society, men/women relationships...), don't accept the changes as the message will be changed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now then, there's always a grey zone and this makes no exception. In these cases, you'll have to judge how much it can change (and therefore destroy) the message.&lt;/strong&gt; For instance, you might find situations where people ask about... I don't know, an unknown &amp;quot;captain&amp;quot;, or a &amp;quot;witch&amp;quot;. Most of the cases, I'd say to still accept them -captain or witch- if no element implies an underlying gender. Using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214203/what-is-the-skill-limit-of-a-human-swordsperson-in-a-completely-realistic-world&quot;&gt;example of the &lt;strike&gt;swordman&lt;/strike&gt; swordperson&lt;/a&gt;, it doesn't matter in the end if they're male or female, so &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; is better. For the witch case, if it's a witch of fairytales and folklore with the crooked nose and riding a broom, might be better to stay with &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; as female fairytale witches are soooo much more depicted there, with the corresponding intentions. Or not, you're the judge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;-They're not the sole modification OR they're about recent (or recently edited) posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They're the minor kind of modification. Editing a text makes the topic put back on top, allowing people to read it, yes, but also preventing new ones from getting more attention.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this kind of edit alone is worth that renewed attention. If there are other improvements like fixing grammar (including actual gender grammar fixes, e.g. : The &amp;quot;king and &amp;quot;her&amp;quot; wife), it might be worth it. If the &amp;quot;neutralification&amp;quot; is enormous and all over the place, then something is probably off regarding how the nature of the message will be changed, so think twice before approving. In anycase, just remember that editing does this secondary effect, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why should you accept them?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Because the English tongue has the chance of having a gender neutral pronoun&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'll go in further detail about my perception of inclusiveness, and by doing this I hope it will &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; more clear on why this has importance.&lt;/strong&gt; So please, bear with me for a moment. The notion of gender inclusivity strikes a quite broad pattern, and as such, taking an equivalent stand between genders on tiny parts like pronouns can look like you're triggering your nuclear weapons as soon as one single ant shows up. Indeed, why be bothered by such little matter? I mean, it's just one or two words, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the catch : &lt;strong&gt;In French, there's no neutral pronoun per say to define explicitly an external individual&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; There is only &amp;quot;il&amp;quot; (he) and &amp;quot;elle&amp;quot; (she). &lt;strong&gt;The plurals are &amp;quot;ils&amp;quot; (they &amp;quot;masculine&amp;quot;) and &amp;quot;elles&amp;quot; (they &amp;quot;feminine&amp;quot;). However, as soon as one guy enters the group of &amp;quot;elles&amp;quot;, said group becomes &amp;quot;ils&amp;quot;. Why?&lt;/strong&gt; I honestly don't know why this rule has come to be&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, but that's not what's important here. It's the fact that &lt;strong&gt;I asked the same question a long time ago with other kids : &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. That's only about an usage, but &lt;strong&gt;it pointed out to us that for some unknown reason, &amp;quot;women&amp;quot; become &amp;quot;men&amp;quot; if they're not exclusively &amp;quot;women&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; It's some difference which is -if not a little discriminative-, segregative. The English have the chance of the choice, so why don't you take it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like how a mother chooses a blue toothbrush for her boy while he asked for the pink one, &amp;quot;telling pink is not for boys&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, in regard to that I ask directly &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot;. These are the tiny things and the way we adress them. And these things, like telling a &amp;quot;captain&amp;quot; is implicitly male creates unnecessary schism between the male majority (socially speaking) and the women minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, does this mean that any &amp;quot;misuse&amp;quot; of he/she instead of &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; should be blasted away as soon as they're spotted? Niet :}i{:. Focusing on this tiny issue only brings it forward, it's taking up your rocket launcher to kill the ant.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not necessary to make a fuss over it, especially as it can discred-hit the other persons -whether original poster or future editor- for almost nothing. Even asking about it seems quite much. And that's the paradox : You should do something about it, but at the same time you should not fight &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much about it. That's why I would guess edits that do nothing but gender improvement to be a really big action for such purpose. Remember, edits put the question back on top :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Because worldbuilding is not really about individuals&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also other reasons which are about, I really don't know how to put it... &amp;quot;the oils of the site's mechanics&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The use of he/she implies that there is an individual behind. And often times, when working at lower scale you are writing more story than writing worlds.&lt;/strong&gt; That doesn't mean you should not use these pronouns, nor that everything about individuals are about stories. It's just an hint among others that the person was thinking more about a specific character in mind. And while such character can be interesting, it is most of the time irrelevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Because we barely know the intention of the writer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extending from the previous point. Alone, the pronouns are not enough to know why they have been chosen.&lt;/strong&gt; Is it because it is of special importance to the understanding of the question? Is it some discrimination deeply rooted in the mind of people? Or is it just a language &amp;quot;mistake&amp;quot;? Only the first question can be answered, since if it was really important other elements in that direction would show up. And if they don't, then it's probably not that important in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We can't determine the reasons behind. And because we can't determine them, the choice of one pronoun over another will be personal to everyone.&lt;/strong&gt; Might as well improve it by taking the chance English speakers have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: The &amp;quot;on&amp;quot; pronoun is the most neutral in French, but it's generally used as in &amp;quot;Let's do this!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;We&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;some guy/gal/cat/dog&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Though I have some ideas as to why this rule exists x_x...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: True story. The reason invoked was not that &amp;quot;it was more expensive&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I've already taken the blue one&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;this one's better&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;your sister already has one so you won't know which one is yours&amp;quot;. It was &amp;quot;blue is for boys, pink for girls&amp;quot;. I bet the boy will know barely take pink items anymore, even though it would look nice and cozy on them.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T21:35:57.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8475" CreationDate="2021-10-05T21:18:22.920" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8480/proposing-a-tag-for-worldbuilding-questions-that-use-existing-worlds&quot;&gt;Moved to a new question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-10-05T21:45:40.790" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T21:45:40.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-05T21:45:23.467" Score="-1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I think that the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;complete ban&lt;/a&gt; on third-party/licensed worlds is overzealous.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Research is not worldbuilding&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, a question like &amp;quot;How do lightsabers work in Star Wars?&amp;quot; should remain illegal. Not because it references Star Wars, but because it is not worldbuilding. Asking someone to find the &amp;quot;canonical answer&amp;quot; in a pile of scattered and often contradictory lore is research, and it belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SciFi.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogous question: &amp;quot;How do Zeus' powers work in Greek mythology?&amp;quot; Such a question would also be forbidden, and it would fit on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mythology.SE&lt;/a&gt; instead. A question that asks for a canonical answer, that is answered solely by research, is not doing any worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When questions with third-party worlds are worldbuilding&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First for mythology: &amp;quot;Zeus is real, he is a three meter tall alien. [insert complete skillset here]. Could his lightning bolts be produced by an organ like that of the electric eel?&amp;quot; Such a question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding, in my book. In fact, it is the biological equivalent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84180/how-would-zeus-throw-thunderbolts-if-zeus-were-actually-using-technology&quot;&gt;this existing question&lt;/a&gt;. The purpose of this question is not to understand a work, but to expand on it. Zeus' myths are many, but even if one of them happens to say just where his powers come from, stating that explanation is not by definition the most valid answer. That is the difference with SciFi.SE, where canonicity is a criterium for answer validity (even if speculation within the bounds of canonical rules is allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An author building a world can use any works they want for inspiration. A fanfiction author is one who is expanding on a setting that already exists. That includes mythology - &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanficRecs/TheBible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is fanfiction for the Bible&lt;/a&gt;. The more ambitious fanfiction authors do not just utilise the same characters in canon to tell new stories with, but they expand the world as they do so, to facilitate the story they want to tell. Sometimes doing a lot of worldbuilding is necessary, if the original left a lot unsaid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is where a platform supporting worldbuilders, such as Worldbuilding.SE, comes in handy. If one is making a world based off of a different property, the thing being added is still fresh and new, but working under certain confines. Such confines are no any different from the confines of one's own already-established premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quickly made a question to see what this exotic creature, an acceptable third-party-world-based question, might look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should the Water Tribe from Avatar put waterbenders on ocean-going vessels to make them go faster?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avatar: The Last Airbender&lt;/a&gt; features several kinds of telekinetic magic, one of which is called waterbending and is practised by some members of the nation called the Water Tribe. The wielders of this magic perform various poses (inspired by martial arts) in order to manipulate water, both tiny drops in the air and massive bodies of water - even occasionally human bodies. Some clips to serve as visual references: &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waterbenders are rare, but if a bunch of them worked together, how fast could they propel a vessel over oceanic distances? The goal of the question is to see how a more militant Water Tribe would best spread out their limited supply of benders; whether putting them on ship-propelling duty would make a difference in speed marked enough to make that a full-time job in the army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is based on East Asia around the 18th century, so take a&#xA;ship the size and design of a mid-sized Junk (&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;). With&#xA;twenty people aboard it should weigh at least eighty metric tons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The force of waterbending in the show varies from user to user, as well as from moment to moment (as the plot demands it). For the purposes of this question, I will assume they can exert a force of 200000 Newtons on water within reach (30 meters in any direction, no line of sight required), but no more than 30 Newtons per liter. So with more water they can do more. They can sustain that force for two hours a day, in spurts of fifteen minutes with rests in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three waterbenders taking turns, and they move the ship by moving the ocean underneath it. How fast could a cruising speed could they maintain over long trips? Would that speed be sufficiently greater than average sailing speed to make this task a worthwhile one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The precise role of canon&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest part of making third-party-world questions compliant with Worldbuilding.SE is to affirm that the &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; answer is not automatically the best answer. Most of these questions frankly would not have correct answers to begin with because worldbuilding fanfic authors are by definition pushing boundaries. Canonical information can however contribute to an answer, even canonical information not given in the question body. I have thought about this for a while, and I think I can justify that we take the same approach that we do to world history. Any &amp;quot;canonically accurate&amp;quot; information should be treated like &amp;quot;historically accurate&amp;quot; information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no documentary writers on this site so every real-life question is at least for historic fiction, basically a fanfic of world history. That means that if a question is e.g. about what churches would do with orphans in the middle ages, the correct answer (a listing of their historical practices to our best understanding) can be a good one, but so can a bit of intriguing writing that is both believable and makes for a good story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, an answer to the Avatar question mentioning waterbenders utilising the full moon, when they are at their strongest, is using &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; information outside the question body. The responsibility of the querent is to specifically mention every part of the fictional system that they &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; an answer to address. The full moon factor is not something to just expect answerers to know, and if the querent corrects people who fail to mention it, then they are essentially moving the goalposts. So they should add enough information to the question body, that they are comfortable with someone who knows nothing else of the source material to answer it. Someone who &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; familiar with the lore may have even more ideas, but that would just be a bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A tag&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/third-party-world-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;third-party-world-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;third-party-world-based&lt;/a&gt;, and if possible I would suggest that said tag adds a warning above the question (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; has), so site visitors understand the same principles I just laid out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user is building their world based on a third-party world. &lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this question is to expand on the source material, not to merely expand one's understanding of it.&lt;/strong&gt; Canonicity with all of the original lore is not a criterium for answer validity, only with what has been established in the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag description could read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag when some of the rules or aesthetics of your setting are explicitly derived from one or more existing settings. Ask only questions to expand on those worlds with worldbuilding of your own. Finding canonical answers is not what Worldbuilding.SE is for; see SciFi.SE or Mythology.SE instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could even argue that this tag should be retroactively applied to all questions based on existing mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About world ownership&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of elemtilas' thoughts deserve a response not spread out over six comments. Firstly, I am aware of the ethical issue with fanfiction. Strangers playing with their intellectual property is something that some renowned authors absolutely detest (and others welcome), and while lawsuits are unlikely due to the fanfic authors making no money of their unlicensed works, it is a completely fair view to be against the practise altogether. If an ethical reason is one why Worldbuilding.SE cannot support fanfiction, then so be it - I have nothing to say in response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another argument however is that of whether the world being owned by someone else would hamper the ability of the querent to judge the best answer. Now again, from a legal point of view a world absolutely has an owner (unless it's public domain), and arguably so from an ethical point of view. But worlds live not just on paper, but also in the heads of those who have read it. If you are passionate enough about a world - which fanfic authors are without exception - then you will be having your own conception in your head of every rule from the source material that you wish to implement in your work of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fanfic author chooses whether and in what respects to satisfy the rules of the source material. Both softer thematic rules and concrete systems. And the rules that authors do choose to satisfy to the letter, they will tend to understand how that rule is applied. That means that a querent asking about a fanfic will absolutely be able to judge the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is even more obvious for the medium of &lt;em&gt;crossover fanfiction&lt;/em&gt;. Someone writing a serious crossover fanfic will need to do their own analysis on the source works, as rigorous as they want the resultant work to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would Darth Vader's sword cut through Captain America's shield? No author, living or dead, can state that with authority. Not even if we put George Lucas and the revived body of Jack Kirby in a room together. But an author who does their own analysis of just how a lightsaber melts things and what sort of things have damaged vibranium over eight decades of canon, and then presents their findings to Worldbuilding.SE and asks whether their conclusion holds water... are they not welcome on the site by definition? I think they should be. They are asking about &lt;em&gt;their version&lt;/em&gt; of the sources, their interpretation of it. They started doing worldbuilding the minute they started applying the results of their analysis - which become new rules. That is also exactly what would make them unwelcome on SciFi.SE, where others can have a different interpretation of the source works and it's all fair game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why not just use generic water mages?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mentioning the setting is the equivalent of adding paragraph upon paragraph of flavour text, background and aesthetics that, while not &lt;em&gt;crucial&lt;/em&gt; to the question (crucial details must be mentioned in the question body), can serve as inspiration for the creative writers of Worldbuilding.SE to hook on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using generics and obfuscating the source material is the current solution for fanfic author on this platform. They are to neglect from naming their setting, to forego providing its many visual references because as soon as one mentions a word that should have a ™ behind it, the close-votes quickly rack up. This has hindered some questions of mine, and possibly some of others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why else?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification of the current rules. These questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding. There are no ocean-going waterbending-propelled vessels in Avatar; this author is inventing them within some of the confines of the source material. And when those confines are clearly specified, it is no different from giving the premise of one's own setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current rule is just overzealous, banning words instead of banning bad questions. The nuance between asking about worlds and expanding on worlds is a vital distinction, and by overtly making it, the site could not just facilitate fanfiction: &lt;strong&gt;it would improve its very definition of worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T10:23:51.410" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T15:55:31.650" Title="Proposing a tag for worldbuilding questions that use existing worlds" Tags="|discussion|rules|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8475" CreationDate="2021-10-06T02:19:34.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Some Considerations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question of application of the Policy on Commercial &amp;amp; Third-Party Fictional Worlds. The basic policy is &lt;strong&gt;We have an unwritten rule that questions about commercial worlds (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc.) should be asked on the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy stack&lt;/strong&gt;; and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;description and discussion can be read here&lt;/a&gt;. I think it is fair to say that the general consensus of the community is that this is a settled matter. We have a gentlesophont's agreement with the good folks over at SF &amp;amp; F where we send them queries about Marvel Comix and Lord of the Rings, and they send us stray questions about fictional worlds that don't fall within their bailiwick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the following is my take on your question as it relates to the named policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I.&lt;/strong&gt; The rule, in enforcement, actually just forbids people from giving context to their questions about third party worlds. It is impossible to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every feature in every world, or to even know which world, if any, an idea came from. Hence, apart from well-known features of well-known worlds, it is only possible to find out about such a question if the asker says outright that it is about a third party world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that the whole point of the rule is to prevent queries about third party worlds from being asked here in the first place. There is no good reason for anyone to have to &amp;quot;give context&amp;quot; about their third party world questions, because the proper forum for asking how such worlds behave is in fact SF&amp;amp;F. Questions about magic and technology and special powers of various races of people are commonplace there. For our part, we respect the boundary between &amp;quot;our own fictional worlds&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;JRR Tolkien's fictional world&amp;quot; by asking questions about the Silmarillion over there and our own fidgettywatties over here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for encyclopaedic knowledge, that's why we have SF&amp;amp;F! Their strong point is knowledge of the lore of any of hundreds of third party worlds. Some are very well known and part of common culture, others are so obscure that the only person who knows about them is the querent herself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IJ.&lt;/strong&gt; SciFi.SE, while it does allow questions to stray out of pure canon, is not WB.SE. It is based on the specific canon of a work, so I don't see them, for example, being able to tell the evolutionary history of a species seen only twice in a high-school dramedy that never once mentions evolution. Furthermore, SciFi.SE, from what I've read, is to assume normal science for the scientific questions, which is not useful if you're querying a world where you don't think normal science would fully apply in the area your question is about. For these reasons it is insufficient for querying new features for worlds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SF&amp;amp;F can and does engage in thoughtful and considered speculation. If you can name the world that high school dramedy is set in and name the creature, I'd put a penny to a pound that someone over there can give you a reasonable speculation based on what is known of that world. And if no canon description is available, because the Author did not provide one, and the matter is beyond speculation, because the Author did not provide enough background, they will tell you flat out that the question is not answerable. And that's your answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your point &lt;em&gt;might possibly&lt;/em&gt; stem from a misinterpretation of what the two forums exist for. SF&amp;amp;F exists to give strongly factual or at least solidly conjectural answers to questions about third party fictional worlds. It's not their job to engage in wild speculation or to create headcanon or even to answer questions about one's own fanfic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, WB exists for the express purpose of helping anyone devise, construct or discover &lt;em&gt;their own fictional world&lt;/em&gt;. We can give strongly factual, solidly conjectural, flimsily conjectural or even bonkozoid crazy answers to any question the writer or worldbuilder or geopoet might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is also not our job to cater to idle curiosity about a third party world. Questions such as the example evolutionary consideration you mention are simply as off topic here as it is in SF&amp;amp;F. This is because, WB has to at least try to conform to Stack Exchange's forum model. These kinds of questions lend themselves to being too broad, too opinion based (even for me!) and also quite literally &lt;em&gt;can not be answered&lt;/em&gt; because there is no canon data upon which to formulate an appropriate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the rule about sticking to your own work here in WB. If you ask a question about the evolution of some creature seen in a high school dramedy that &lt;em&gt;you yourself wrote&lt;/em&gt;, we'll be able to provide you top notch answers. And the reason is quite simply because you are the author and only you can really determine which answer fits your world's circumstances best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IJI.&lt;/strong&gt; The justification that WB.SE isn't about how other worlds work doesn't hold up to scrutiny. No world is complete, and there are always more features you could add to someone's world. For example, let's you ask about the best way for the zekes from the Gone series could implement features from blue bats. The answers to this question would describe a unique idea, never seen in the series it is from. To declare this to be part of how that world works is like saying that building an extension is a contemplation of the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly concur: no fictional world is ever complete. (One could argue that the real world isn't even truly complete yet, let alone perfected.) And that is precisely why WB as a forum exists! To help folks on their path towards a world that is just a little less incomplete than it was before the question was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you seem to be proceeding from a false presumption about this forum. Your presume that this forum, WB, exists to engage in idle speculation about somebody else's work. The Gone series of books was written by (I hazard the guess!) somebody other than you. The author's name is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grant_(author,_born_1954)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Grant&lt;/a&gt;. You can read the books, you can examine fan sites, you can immerse yourself in lore related forums, you can look at the linked webpage, you can consider all the influences on his writing and you can privately speculate all you want on the conjunction of zekes and blue bats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting as that speculation assuredly is, it is off topic here in WB. If anyone were to post that question in WB, it would be closed for being off topic. They'd be invited to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, refresh their memory by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;taking the tour&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps even review &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7859/what-is-the-worldbuilding-site-about&quot;&gt;what this forum is all about&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such speculations and idle dreamthoughts do indeed have their place in worldbuilding! In the article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Resources&lt;/a&gt; there is, under the heading &lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Discussion Forums&lt;/strong&gt;, a number of highly interesting long &amp;amp; short form discussion groups where this kind of cross-over speculation can be engaged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IJJI.&lt;/strong&gt; The rule is inconsistent with the rest of the rules: I have asked several questions about building up on an existing world, as I assume many others have too. This was allowed because said existing world was yet to be put out into the world. I cannot see any way that a world would be so different before and after publishing as to warrant this rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the seeming inconsistency of the Policy evolves from a really bad misunderstanding or misinterpretation of 1) the Policy itself, 2) the nature of the forum it applies to and 3) the nature of the question's matter itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you have indeed asked many questions in WB! I've answered some of them! (And I hope I gave some help or inspiration to you, if not the very best answer you were looking for.) You've asked questions that we presume are about your own worldbuilding; and you've also asked questions about other people's worldbuilding. E.g., the example question about Michael Grant's zekes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 . The policy itself exists in order to separate and corral queries based on the forum's competency to answer. Math questions go to Mathematics, WWII questions go to History. In our case, &lt;em&gt;Gone&lt;/em&gt; questions go to SF&amp;amp;F, while World of Ichthys King questions remain here in WB. Simply put, there's a division of labour in Stack Exchange, and to our lot falls queries about your own worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a. The natures of the two forums in question are important to understand. SF&amp;amp;F clearly delineates what they are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange is for questions targeted towards science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. This includes questions about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plot, character, or setting explanations&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Historical or societal context of a work&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Behind-the-scenes and fandom information&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Story identification&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Franchise/series reading or viewing order&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b. They are also clear as to what they are &lt;em&gt;nòt about&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing science fiction or fantasy, ask on Writers Stack Exchange.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Creating a fictional situation or universe of your own or investigating the plausibility of an element of another work of fiction, ask on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 . And before you cry aha! WB is about &amp;quot;investigating the plausibility of an element of another work of fiction!&amp;quot;, this brings us to the nature of the question's material itself. Do keep in mind that that wording is taken from SF&amp;amp;F's help center, not WB's. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Our own verbiage&lt;/a&gt; is much more creator-centric. For example, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the goal of the site is to help you build your world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. If it is your desire to understand the &amp;quot;plausibility of an element&amp;quot; within your own worldbuilding, we expect you to ask your question having already resolved the hows and whys of that element in its own context. This is because that material is not yours! It belongs to another geopoet, and we are not competent to answer on their behalf! Our job is to help you take your understanding of that element in the other Author's work and apply it to your own world. In order to do that, you would need to study that element and its context elsewhere. When you ask your question, you would need to post appropriate links to that external information, and then ask your own query about your own world. The situation is comparable to &amp;quot;real world questions&amp;quot;. Generally speaking, they are welcome here, but with caveats. The querent needs to have already done some homework on the real world issue and they need to give appropriate background and context of their own world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot see any way that a world would be so different before and after publishing as to warrant this rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At last we get to the crux of the original question! The simple fact of the matter is that this Policy and its application quite literally &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the world itself!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; You're quite correct in saying that there is no difference in a world --- qua mundo ipso --- before and after publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue is that the Policy pertains to &lt;em&gt;the geopoet herself as author &amp;amp; creator of the fictional world&lt;/em&gt; and not the world she has wrought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's go back to the zekes. &lt;em&gt;Gone&lt;/em&gt; is off topic here not because the world the stories are set in seems no different before and after publication, but simply because you, Ichthys King, are not that world's creator and are not that story's author. Nor am I. Nobody else in WB is either. The geopoet's name is Michael Grant. Michael Grant the geopoet, and by extension his corpus of work, is the only competent resource we have for settling questions about mutated wormlike creatures called zekes. Since Michael is not here in WB (that we know of!) to ask us questions about how zekes work, and since you are not the worldbuilder who has made the world the zekes inhabit, such questions are off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, the rule is warranted here because you're asking us to answer questions that you should be addressing to Michael Grant himself! The rule is warranted here because you're not asking us to help you understand or solve a problem with your own worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that's two nutshells!  I guess consider it a walnut and I really do hope that I've answered your concerns about the Policy in a sensible manner. I'm happy to clarify anything further and edit any factual errors as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Follow-up Points&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your point about only asking on your own world isn't sensible. For example, let's say that while you are on a walk, you meet someone who decided (for some reason) to tell you about a magic creature she designed. She then goes on to say that her friend went to WB.SE to ask about if it could exist realistically. Would this scenario make you justified in seeking said question out and closing it for being off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, not all queries about third party worlds are specifically about canon, and can't all be best answered by the author. As an example, I doubt that Swift could give you a scientific explanation of the liliputians, even ignoring that he died in the 18th century –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, framing third party questions as 'idle curiosity' is not an argument. I could just as easily say that asking about your own world is 'idle curiosity', and be just as wrong and hollow as you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a classic scenario that actually makes the argument in favour of the Policy in question, as well as in favour of other rules and customs of SE and WB specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The claim that the rule is not sensible is a valid opinion. Rather than argue opinion vs opinion, if I were in that situation I'd simply recommend that the person join this great worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A forum &lt;em&gt;herself&lt;/em&gt;! End of story. I know that some people in this community would seek out and VTC the friend's question. I would not &lt;em&gt;necessárily&lt;/em&gt; do that, as it would depend on how the question is worded. We rely on querents being honest in representing themselves as engaging in their own worldbuilding. If someone straight up said that they're asking on behalf of a friend, the community would be 100% justified in closing the question and inviting the person's friend to join so she can ask her own questions and evaluate the answers she receives based on her own worldbuilding work. This is a very simple and non-controversial policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, all questions about third party fictional worlds boil down to canon. You bring up Liliputians: whether or not Swift could address a &amp;quot;scientific explanation&amp;quot; for that race or not, the fact remains that he is the only one who is truly competent to unequivocally evaluate an answer that explains them because, again, he is the geopoet that created the world the Liliputians inhabit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's never been proposed that all third-party world related queries are questions of idle curiosity. That's something you should address in another question. Suffice to say it is the custom of WB.SE to deny idle questions simply because they stray from the whole point of this forum and the askers of such questions are demanding an improper waste the time and effort of those of us who actually answer questions. If you want to ask an idle question about Liliputians, or anything else, I charge &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$75/hr for internet based research and $&lt;/span&gt;150/hr for book based research. If you're going to waste time on idle curiosity, you're at least going to make it worth my while to do your homework for you. Lastly, it is ever the case that those without good arguments always resort to ad hominem attacks or personal insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you reckon opinion based questions have to do with third party questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simple logic: If a question involving some canon is best answered by that canon, then it follows that a question involving opinion (i.e. all of them) is best answered by opinions, and so must be opinion based –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the point of it being like the real world: I agree. So why must we bar questions that take elements from a third party world to make something new, when we allow questions that take elements from reality to make something new?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 . That doesn't logically follow. &amp;quot;Canon&amp;quot; means the established facts of a fictional world or setting. Opinions aren't established facts of anything. Opinion based questions, at their worst, are simply a querent dredging the community for &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; -- what colour should it be -- what do you think this would look like -- which feature should I choose. They can be improved by the addition of context, focus and criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 . I think you're missing the point of the issue. On real world queries, facts are universal in nature and knowledge of them can be acquired from one's own experience, research and the expertise of others. No one here on Earth owns &lt;em&gt;reality&lt;/em&gt;, so no person here on Earth is the competent authority to ask questions of. Answers can be judged, by the OP and by the Community, based on the corpus of human knowledge and wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On our own fictional worlds, the OP is not only the creator of the setting, but is also the keeper of all knowledge about the fictional world. The OP is the competent judge of all responses to her queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to third party worlds, I believe your initial assumption is incorrect. In this case, the creator of the setting and the competent judge of all queries is not the same person as the querent. We &lt;strong&gt;do not accept&lt;/strong&gt; such question here because the querent can not judge the validity of the answers. Also, our express purpose in this forum is to help the querent build &lt;em&gt;their own&lt;/em&gt; fictional worlds, not help them understand how &lt;em&gt;somebody else's&lt;/em&gt; world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific application of somebody else's work, a third party world, to the querent's own work, you have a valid point and my take is that there is no problem at all with asking a question of application of a third party world's elements to your own. However, there is an important caveat to understand. This is the underlying point of your original question; and I think it is also the stumbling block that you've set up for yourself in understanding how this forum works vs how other open ended forums work. Namely, Worldbuilding.SE is not the forum to ask this kind of research question in. As it happens, there is a very simple progression you can follow. The logical steps are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;,  do your own research. Like if you want to meld Ents and mermaids into one kind of creature, you would do your own basic research on those two topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;, you would address any canonical queries re Ents in SF&amp;amp;F. That forum is where you could address questions of anatomy, physiology &amp;amp; evolution of Ents with respect to the lore of Tolkien's legendarium -- the canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third&lt;/strong&gt;, once you've got some understanding of you're working with, you are certainly free to ask queries of application queries here. For example, knowing that the Entwives have disappeared, and knowing that Ents are a kind of plantimal being and guardian force protective of the natural world, you might consider that the Entwives were driven from their terrestrial haunts and sought refuge in the sea. You could then ask about adaptation of your own Ent-like plantimal creature to a maritime environment, given X, Y &amp;amp; Z conditions of the world they inhabit and considering P, R &amp;amp; S  constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following these steps will turn low quality brainstorming and opinion type questions into awesome queries of deep geopoesy, questions that will challenge the respondent and make the whole process satisfying and unfrustrating, questions that will set WB.SE apart from the open ended worldbuilding ruminations one finds on Reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is solely based on who made the world/feature, then why are questions about dragons, mermaids, and unicorns so accepted as to have their own tags? No-one here made any of those creatures, yet everyone and anyone is free to ask questions about these and make judgements on the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yay! Progress! Precisely! This is because &amp;quot;dragons&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;mermaids&amp;quot; are not the distinct creation of any one individual. They are creations of human culture and are thus the common property of all humanity. It is precisely because no one made or owns those ideas that we can use them freely in our own worlds, modify them and ask questions about them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the same not apply to more recently made worlds? Any justification I can think of for the former applies equally to the latter –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Tolkien made use of this situation and created at least two named dragons, the more famous I'm sure being Smaug. So, asking if Smaug actually had a chink in his armour where he could be shot by this huge six foot long rod of iron as we see in the movie, that is a question for SF&amp;amp;F because Smaug belongs to JRRT and is governed by the canon of his legendarium. Asking about dragons in general, whether they have &amp;quot;armoured scales&amp;quot; and whether shooting them with long iron spikes might be a good way to slay them, that is an acceptable question for WB. This is because the querent is taking the same stock of raw materials that Tolkien took from and is creating her own legendarium, her own world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very simply, we don't answer questions about someone else's canon here. End of story. That is one reason why SF&amp;amp;F exists. Sorry, but all the justifications you might make simply run afoul of how Stack Exchange works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your line of argumentation is like the man set up a tiny house on the handicapped parking spots at Walmart, and, when questioned by the police gave the answer: but officer, everyone has the right to live in their own house, and this is my house. That line of argumentation misses the point entirely, because it ignores the fundamental point that the house is sitting on the handicapped parking spaces!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KeizerHarm: While I frankly agree with 95% of the things you have said here, I do agree with Ichtys that &amp;quot;only the author of a world can judge the best thing for a world&amp;quot; is a strange axiom, and I do not understand if it is rooted in your ethical values or in practical considerations. It is hard to hold when it comes to public domain works. You say that only Swift can judge competently what to do with Liliputians, does that mean that every movie adaptation of Sherlock Holmes is by definition incompetent, since they weren't made by Arthur Conan Doyle? Can Guy Ritchie visit this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That axiom is simply the logical distillation of how WB works. When you ask a question about a problem you're having with your own worldbuilding, I can write an answer in an effort to be helpful. I can perhaps try to inspire, to offer some levity or some creativity, but one thing I can not do is &lt;em&gt;make the decision for you&lt;/em&gt;. No one else here can make the decision for you. When I try to do that, someone will (rightly) accuse me building your world for you. Note that the result of you judging the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; for your world is that coveted green checkmark! Stack Exachange itself actually builds into the functionality of our forum the principle that only the querent can choose the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot;, and this is done separately from the community voting on their favourite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if only KeizerHarm can judge answers given for the world KeiserHarm made, and only Ichthys King can judge answers given for the world Ichthys King made, why should it be any different for questions &amp;amp; answers about the world that JRRT tolkien made, or the world JK Rowling made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you on this: those worlds are, in a sense -- a cultural and non-legal sense -- part of the public domain. People dress up like Hogwarts students, they dress up like Hobbits and Elves, they dress up like Dr. Who characters of Marvel characters. They collect and make objects that come from those worlds. You can buy Harry Potter's official wand or Aragorn's official sword. Craftsmen and talented people make decorative and useful objects relating to those properties and people write stories and create games based on these popular worlds. To be frank, the only reason we don't take questions about those worlds is because SF&amp;amp;F exists as a forum! Can you imagine if we had to field all the questions about Harry Potter and Captain America and Tom Bombadil and Alice for people wanting to write fan fiction in those worlds if SF&amp;amp;F didn't exist!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &amp;quot;only Swift&amp;quot; can judge or &amp;quot;only Tolkien can judge&amp;quot;, I rather thought it would be obvious that neither of those gentlemen would be actively and personally participating in these forums. We must therefore rely on -- canon. In Swift's case, that would involve the text of any of his works where Liliputians are mentioned (primary canon) and any of his papers or correspondence that talks about Liliputians (secondary canon). Tolkien is a much better example, because probably about 80 or 90 per cent of the secondary canon has now been published and probably 100% of his primary canon has been published. If you question about Tom Bombadil, you can read the narratives (Hobbit and LotR), and you can &amp;quot;ask Professor Tolkien&amp;quot; by the simple expedient of perusing CJRT's mammoth History of Middle Earth series, reading mentions made in his letters and checking into other major and minor works, like Silmarillion or the recently published Nature of Middle Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for legal derivative works (tertiary canon) -- essentially &amp;quot;officially sanctioned fan fiction&amp;quot; like Peter Jackson's movie adaptations, &lt;em&gt;The Cursed Child&lt;/em&gt; and games like &lt;em&gt;Hogwarts Mystery&lt;/em&gt; -- again, those are &amp;quot;worlds&amp;quot; created by an individual other than a person asking a question here in WB. This is why they're called &amp;quot;third party worlds&amp;quot;. If Peter Jackson himself wanted to ask questions about Smaug here in WB, we would have closed his question for being off topic and would have sent him over to SF&amp;amp;F. Questions we have about those movies and other licensed properties are addressed in the appropriate forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as for legally grey derivative works (quaternary canon) -- essentially the fanfic I like to write about the wizarding world, or any of the Middle Earth derived worlds and cultures I've seen, and even including substantial works like &lt;em&gt;The Last Ringbearer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Хранители / Khraniteli&lt;/em&gt; -- if you had a question about those, you'd also have to ask in SF&amp;amp;F because you're not asking a question about your own worldbuilding, but are asking about someone else's worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if it's you doing the fanfic writing, and you have a question about some problem you're facing, I'd refer you to the Three Simple Steps process I laid out earlier for Ichthys King, as I think that would keep both forums neat, tidy and appropriately walled off from one another!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T20:23:30.210" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T20:23:30.210" CommentCount="109" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8480" CreationDate="2021-10-06T04:05:26.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Food for Thought at KeizerHarm's Tag Sale&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8481/37029&quot;&gt;my answer to the other question&lt;/a&gt; addresses the issues of overzealousness of rule &amp;amp; Policy application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: I concur with your position that &amp;quot;research is not worldbuilding&amp;quot;. However, I must also point out, that WB is not a research facility and I am not being paid enough by the Lords of the Instrumentality to do people's research for them. The purpose of this forum is to guide the geopoet with an already researched topic which she is having some trouble fitting into her own fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the illegality of &amp;quot;how does a light sabre work in the SW universe&amp;quot;, true, it is not an illegal query because it references Star Wars. It's not even an illegal query because it isn't about worldbuilding. (Obviously, it ìs about worldbuilding!) It is an illegal question because the concept of &amp;quot;light sabre in the Star Wars universe&amp;quot; does not belong to the querent. Unless that querent is George Lucas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I argue in the other question, the Policy isn't about the nature of the fictional world itself, but rather concerns who the geopoet actually is. If you're the the George Lucas himself, then you'd have every right to join WB and ask questions about light sabres in the context of your own fictional world. Problems only arise when Jack Quhatt comes in here asking about SW light sabres. It's not his world and he has no competence to judge one answer as being better than another. If he asks about light sabres in his own fictional world, then all stars are in perfect alignment with us respondents being competent to answer and the querent being competent to adjudicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur, and, as of this writing, am prepared to be convinced that this is a good idea. I have qualms, and you exemplified those qualms in big letters!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where we agree: I am with you on the concept of making a setting for a fan fiction being a form of worldbuilding. The underlying concept of the fanfic is that the third party world is being used as if it were a shared world project. The original author may encourage others to play in her sandbox, may tolerate others playing in her sandbox or may sick her legal staff on anyone who makes it past the sand box's killer rottweilers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The partnership is always unequal and almost always somewhat non-consentual. It is for these reasons that I do not wholly support the creation of fanfic related tags or allowing this question in WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main concern is that your airbending example question really reads like a question about DiMartino &amp;amp; Konietzko's &lt;em&gt;Avatar&lt;/em&gt; world, and not about your own world. As I read it, the question is more about taking a junk out of 19th century China and plopping it in the waters of the &lt;em&gt;Avatar&lt;/em&gt; world, than it is about applying a concept you like from someone else's work to your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-consentuality, for me, is a major problem this proposal faces. WB.SE is, after all, founded on the notion that we're here to help &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the geopoet build &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your own&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; fictional world. Since the fictional world's actual creator is not present in the forum and not participating in the questions, that could I think be argued is a deal breaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think you need to work out some kinks as to the nature of the questions and the nature of the materials or phenomena that would be allowed under these tags. As of now, I'm not going for it, though am still somewhat enchanted by the underlying idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Canon&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur 100% with your analogy between fictional world canon and real world history or laws of Nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you were to reword your example question using typical &amp;quot;medieval-esque fantasy world&amp;quot; questions, I'd like the idea much better. This is because I don't want to answer a question about medieval history or culture. I want to answer a question about the person's fictional world where &amp;quot;medieval history &amp;amp; culture&amp;quot; come into play, where those concepts can be used as background or foundational material. Likewise, I'd want to answer a question about your own work within the &lt;em&gt;Avatar&lt;/em&gt; world. The example question as asked strikes me as too much of in-world maths question. Sort of like, &amp;quot;I'm writing a LotR fanfic about Gandalf: how fast can Shadowfax run over the prairies of Rhun?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I agree that fictional world canon ought to be treated the same as real world fact. I think the problem I'm having with canon is the relatively large amount of canon that is required to answer the question and also that the fanfic portion of the question seems to be negligible to non-existent. It almost reads as a story based question! Because the answer is really &amp;quot;does it matter so much if the ship can go 63 knots vs 57 knots?&amp;quot; Made all the worse because you yourself just told us that their abilities are somewhat labile depending on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7281/what-is-narrative-necessity-and-how-does-it-apply-to-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt;. That's another problem with working in someone else's worldbuilding project: you can't correct that propensity towards deus ex machina without breaking either the Author's world or the characters' abilities as matters of established canon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Moving the Goalposts Where!?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Utilising canon to answer a fanfic writer's worldbuilding question opens a whole new can of worms for WB and tosses it straight down the rabbit hole. When you added the bit about waterbenders' abilities waxing and waning with the position of the Moon, but didn't make that part of the query even though it's a matter of established canon, I think you can agree that this will be problematic for respondents: those who stick to your specifications vs those who know the lore well and can extrapolate from what you don't say in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, a querent is simply going to have to copy-n-paste the entire corpus of JRRT &amp;amp; CJRT's writing, as establishing canonicity, just in order to answer a question about how fast a horse can run. To answer the question, we'd have to shimmy down the rabbit hole of Shadowfax not being an ordinary horse, but a meara; Rhun is not Rohan, and Shadowfax doesn't know the land as well. These are the sorts of things that can gum up a potential answer, because those little details of lore must be taken into account by a would-be fanfic writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think this is another kink you'll have to iron out. Realistically, how much canon is sufficient to answer the question? Or, how much is not enough by half? Or how much is a superabundance? And also, what about matters where the lore is not so well worked out? What if Tolkien was silent entirely on some matter? How much speculation should the tag allow? How far from canon can you go before the goalposts are moved into an entirely different stadium?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Generic vs Brand Name™ Watermages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You make a good argument here. There is currently a (I think well founded) perception that while fanfic worldbuilding is indeed worldbuilding, it's not the kind of worldbuilding we support here. And by &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; I do not mean like or dislike, but rather I mean we make space for it within our scope of practice. And yes, I can see how such questions would be either downvoted (I wouldn't) or closed (I might depending on how egregious the canon percentage vs worldbuilding percentage actually is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The problem I have here, again, is one of authorship and authority. As I wrote in the answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8475/why-the-rule-against-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;Other Query&lt;/a&gt;, the issue really isn't the world, and it's not the worldbuilding per se. The issue with third party worlds is that you as the writer of fanfic are not the geopoet and you have no authority over that world. As a writer of fanfic myself, as well as a writer from within my own fictional world, I am well aware that when I write fanfic, I'm playing with someone else's toys. I may not have asked to play with them, and I'll never own them and I always have to recognise that they're not mine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Else Indeed!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I think your proposal is, in its outline, a reasonable one. I agree that, to some extent and in some understanding of the term, &amp;quot;expanding&amp;quot; a third party world for writing a fanfic is &lt;em&gt;a kind of worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;. I also agree that fictional world canon and real world fact are analogous and that for the purposes of such questions canon ought to be treated as fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not agree, yet, that the proposal is ripe. I think it needs work. I think some work needs to be done on the kinds of fanfic questions we should entertain here; and I also think some work needs to be done on the quality of material the fanfic questions would present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, I also think that the kind of worldbuilding a fanfic writer engages in is really and fundamentally not suitable for this particular SE forum. I'd argue that in order to make such worldbuilding suitable, you'd have to first propose &amp;amp; gain support for a basic and fundamental change to the forum's constitution. The proposal would seek to change &amp;quot;we're here to help you build &lt;strong&gt;your world&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;we're here to help you build &lt;strong&gt;someone else's world&lt;/strong&gt; in order for you to write a story in that other person's world.&amp;quot; That I'm not prepared to support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T04:15:52.287" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T04:15:52.287" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8480" CreationDate="2021-10-07T15:55:31.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7334/40609&quot;&gt;original question in May 2019 asking for a policy clarification&lt;/a&gt; listed a number of issues:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pros:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It expands the number of questions people may bring to our stack.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It increases the visibility of our stack to search engines (e.g., &amp;quot;Star Wars&amp;quot; is mighty visible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cons:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might (and probably does) duplicate what's going on at SciFi.SE (and others, including RPG.SE and Movies.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers provided on WB.SE may not express the &amp;quot;canon&amp;quot; of that third-party world, potentially opening up unwanted comment discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would invariably create a list of tags identifying the third-party world, the rules of which should (must?) be followed for the purposes of answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suspect the majority of questions will be requests to explain in-universe eccentricities.  In other words, a world isn't actually being built.  It's merely an effort to sate the OP's curiosity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OPs don't have control over the world the question refers to.  In other words, in the worst case, we might be participating in copyright infringement.  (I consider that an outlandish worst-case as fan fiction has some protection.  Some.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We sometimes see questions (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/146866/40609&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) where the source of the question is fairly obviously a third-party world.  Along with a clear Yes/No, it would be nice to comment on whether or not &amp;quot;I'm borrowing their idea for my world&amp;quot; questions should be permitted.  If you think this bullet should be its own question, please indicate so in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the &amp;quot;Cons&amp;quot; List I will add...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While fan fiction has a large following, it does not have a substantial legal following. &lt;strong&gt;Copyright belongs to the world &lt;em&gt;owner,&lt;/em&gt; not the fans.&lt;/strong&gt; That copyright can be protected at the whim of the &lt;em&gt;owner,&lt;/em&gt; and puts us in the dubious position of supporting copyright violation. The &lt;em&gt;owner&lt;/em&gt; of a third-party or commercial world is the one and only entity or person who has the right to discuss changes to that world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too many people &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;do not realize&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that fan fiction falls under copyright as a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many content creators are supportive of fans taking the time to express their love for the content and enjoy seeing how their fans are able to reimagine their work. There is still the legal side of copyrighted content that fans always need to keep in mind when creating new fanfictions. Fanfiction allows people to channel their inner creative mind and use their love for a series to create new connections to a creator’s content by making characters that reflect their own attributes. It needs to exist in order to maintain a creative and imaginative society that can work together and combine the ideas of others with their own, so long as they abide by the copyright protection laws or get permission from the original content creators to use their characters and/or stories. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://reporter.rit.edu/views/fanfiction-legal-battle-creativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that, as a Stack, we're either supporting the potential illegal violations of copyright, or we're setting ourselves up to police copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, worse (and it's a LOT WORSE...), Stack Exchange operates under &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Creative Commons Copyright.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; That means that &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; someone posts here in regards to someone else's copyright-protected third-party or commercial world is in the &lt;em&gt;public domain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that fact alone, &lt;em&gt;we'd be idiots to allow questions about third-party or commercial worlds.&lt;/em&gt; The Stack Exchange Overlords would be idiots to let us do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving on, it's also worth noting the comments made by Monica when she answered the original policy clarification post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about &lt;em&gt;building worlds,&lt;/em&gt; not questions about &lt;em&gt;how others' worlds work.&lt;/em&gt; Now very few ideas are completely original, so your world might use elements from, or derived from, other worlds, but there's a key difference: If you ask &amp;quot;how does a lightsabre work in Star Wars&amp;quot;, the only authoritative answers come from the Star Wars canon. If, instead, you want lightsabres in your world and ask &amp;quot;how can I power my lightsabres given (constraints)&amp;quot;, that's a worldbuilding question that will likely get answers that have &lt;em&gt;nothing to do&lt;/em&gt; with the Star Wars canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The simple reality is this: the goal of this Stack has always been to build original worlds, not help people write stories.&lt;/strong&gt; From the Help Center we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there's the basis of my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users cannot legally ask questions that modify the rules of a world they do not own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which means users can only ask questions about how to tell a story in someone else's world, which is off-topic per the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, we've been fighting becoming the dumping ground of every question other stacks don't want to answer since the day we were born&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is one of the reasons why this Stack's mandate has always been very narrow. The debate about real-world questions is evidence of that, and it took a lot to convince the community under what set of circumstances we would permit them. The result?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're now asked all the time and nearly impossible to regulate, despite an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;existing community policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Widening the window will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; have a substantial negative consequence. In this case, with no value. One of the basic premises of Stack Exchange is that people can re-use the answer to a question — that the question is supposed to be valuable to more people than the person who asks the question. That's harder than it sounds, here, but not impossible (assuming we regularly police new questions to remind people that there's more at stake here than &lt;em&gt;just their world&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, IMO by definition, questions about &lt;em&gt;somebody else's world&lt;/em&gt; cannot benefit the process of worldbuilding for others because, as mentioned, not being the owner of the world, it's disingenuous to let people believe that they have a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to modify somebody else's world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not the job of the Worldbuilding Stack to be everything to everyone. There are plenty of ask-anything-you-want services in the world. We have enough people asking questions about their own worlds that we do not need the extra traffic. And I personally believe it's entirely unfair (and factually illegal) to dilute the copyright protection of the actual world owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T15:55:31.650" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8490" CreationDate="2021-10-10T13:07:04.293" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have now been reprimanded a couple of times for answering a &amp;quot;bad question&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How am I to know when a question can be answered, so that I can avoid the embarrassment of being reprimanded for answering a &amp;quot;bad question&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80825" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-10-10T14:22:39.157" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T12:00:34.407" Title="How do we know if a question is &quot;good enough&quot; for us to be ALLOWED to answer it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8484" CreationDate="2021-10-10T15:36:06.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; which clearly state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jlb7k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jlb7k.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should provide already some guidance on when a question is worth being answered, and you should be using your own judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, at the time you posted your answer there were already two comments pointing out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/215120/30492&quot;&gt;that question&lt;/a&gt; had issues, in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it was doubtfully about worldbuilding, and gave no worldbuilding context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it gave no limits to the pool of possible answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it gave no metric to evaluate or rank the answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If despite all these red flags you still decide to write an answer and then see the question being closed, you have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if in hindsight you agree with the closing reasons, delete the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you don't agree with the closure, keep the answer and try to improve the question, if possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, bear the consequences of your action instead of complaining against other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T10:16:20.210" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T10:16:20.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-11T01:40:24.783" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personal view on the problem: mutual exclusivity is is not strongly enough suggested by the language use by the description of &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt;. I'm suggesting replacing the &amp;quot;contrast with&amp;quot; with a wording explicitly asking for &amp;quot;mutual exclusivity&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here goes my argumentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; For questions that require answers based on hard science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations. &lt;strong&gt;Contrast&lt;/strong&gt; with the hard-science and reality-check tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; - Requires answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. &lt;strong&gt;Contrast&lt;/strong&gt; with: science-based and reality-check tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My natural expectations, I can put pink and crimson in contrast and &lt;em&gt;perceive&lt;/em&gt; they are different - depending on the context, they can be even strongly contrasting. But &lt;em&gt;I can mix them and the result is still a tint of red&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, to me the &amp;quot;contrast&amp;quot; wording does not suggest the &amp;quot;don't mix them, they are mutually exclusive&amp;quot;.&lt;br&gt; Which illustrates the core of the problem: the reliance on on a wording that &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be expected to vary from &amp;quot;perceiver&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;perciever&amp;quot; and from context to context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples of tag definition, which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; better (more explicit) in this regards. For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;magic&lt;/code&gt; - For questions that have to do with magic, as &lt;strong&gt;opposed&lt;/strong&gt; to science/technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this one is more clear in saying &amp;quot;don't mix &lt;code&gt;magic&lt;/code&gt; with any science or technology related tags&amp;quot; and I argue that the use of &amp;quot;opposition&amp;quot; (rather than &amp;quot;contrasting&amp;quot;) will make the intended use of &lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; clearly mutually exclusive.&lt;br&gt;I can imagine a single wording that is even more unambiguous, and this is straightly saying &amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;science-based&lt;/code&gt; is mutual exclusive with &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot; and vice-versa in their respective descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'll grant the point that &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;natural interpretation&amp;quot; on the semantics of &amp;quot;opposed&amp;quot; may be askew with the majority of native English speakers, &lt;em&gt;among whom I'm not&lt;/em&gt;. And in the same situation are lots of other WB/SE users.&lt;br&gt;I don't think it would be fair to ask them to &amp;quot;learn first proper English&amp;quot; when a cheap solution to prevent the misunderstanding exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is compounded with the expectation one develops by being exposed to the tags - most of the delimit a class of topics (&lt;code&gt;biology&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;warfare&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;evolution&lt;/code&gt;), with &amp;quot;you can mix them&amp;quot; being mostly the rule rather than the exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand there is a need to have exceptions to the rule, but it's only fair to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;signal those exceptions unambiguously (if &amp;quot;mutual exclusivity&amp;quot; is intended, why not directly saying so?), and &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;present the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8273/advice-concerning-questions-asking-how-to-implement-a-technological-procedure-or/8282#8282&quot;&gt;a link to the rationale&lt;/a&gt; for those exceptions. After all, those exceptions explains are based on existing needs &lt;em&gt;of the WB site&lt;/em&gt; and will inform the user &lt;em&gt;in a context where the explanation makes immediate sense&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I think that things like this can improve the user experience. As it stands now, the &amp;quot;friction&amp;quot; between the 'user expectations' and 'WB site needs' is high enough to create non-trivial chances for a question to be rejected and the user getting into the idea of &amp;quot;rules that come to bite you just because you didn't take the effort to discover - in an amorphous corpus of law and who know how big - what rules are relevant in a certain situation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about others, but were those situations to happen to me enough times, I will prefer to avoid WB rather than take the &lt;em&gt;unknown maybe huge&lt;/em&gt; effort to discover &amp;quot;what is to be a good citizen who is not gonna be punished&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, they are contrasting. Not &lt;em&gt;the most&lt;/em&gt; striking contrast, by still a &lt;em&gt;strong contrast&lt;/em&gt; within the context. And yet they are a shade of red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xq8vm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xq8vm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference and, alone, not bearing strong significance to my proposal - all started from the discussion in the comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/215077/how-big-does-a-floating-island-have-to-be-for-the-effects-of-motion-sickness-to?noredirect=1#comment663142_215077&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26061" LastEditorUserId="26061" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T04:10:47.130" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T14:48:35.800" Title="The description of 'science-based' and 'hard-science', as it is now, allows interpretations outside mutual exclusivity" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8486" CreationDate="2021-10-11T04:23:20.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think as written it's pretty clear that the tags are mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requires answers backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Contrast with: science-based and reality-check tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers based on hard science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations. Contrast with the hard-science and reality-check tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you contrast these two descriptions you'll note how the primary difference between the tags is whether citations are required or not required. While we don't currently explicitly say &amp;quot;these tags are mutually exclusive&amp;quot; it should be clear from their descriptions that if you have both tags on a post you're both requiring and not requiring citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A note on the usage of &amp;quot;contrast with&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these tags we say &amp;quot;contrast with&amp;quot;. What we mean by this is &amp;quot;you should compare with and note the differences&amp;quot;. This is a pretty &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contrast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard usage of the word&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is done so that people can see the two tags, consider how they differ and select the one (since if used together they are contradictory) that suits them best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T04:43:46.027" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T04:43:46.027" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-11T14:27:23.200" Score="-1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy Reference:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enlightening Comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate/6402#comment19518_6402&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the &amp;quot;are real world questions on-topic&amp;quot; debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem Statement:&lt;/strong&gt; The discussion of Real World Questions has had a tumultuous history. Generally, I approve of the existing policy and the premise that the OP needs a worldbuilding reason to do so. In other words, if it's &amp;quot;just a Real World question,&amp;quot; it belongs on another Stack. However, I believe it's time to clarify what a &amp;quot;worldbuilding reason&amp;quot; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In times past (see the Enlightening Comment and my answer that it's attached to), we've basically required people to attach some meaningless statement like &amp;quot;I'm building a world!&amp;quot; to their Real World question. As Secespitus pointed out, that's awfully shallow. In other words, it's a loophole that allows any question to be asked on the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to be fair, some Real World questions seem to be accepted as inherently worldbuilding questions. Questions of celestial mechanics are the easiest examples. It's like Justice Potter Stewart's statement about hard-core pornography... we have trouble defining what a worldbuilding question is, &lt;em&gt;but we know one when we see one...&lt;/em&gt; Kinda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm therefore asking for a policy clarification in support of Real World questions that would better define when such a question is appropriate here and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposed Clarification:&lt;/strong&gt; A Real World question is appropriate when there is a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding dependency&lt;/em&gt; on the answer to that question. That dependency must be identified as it can (and probably would) affect the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Worldbuilding Dependency&amp;quot; means that the response to the query depends on an understanding of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; a real world phenomenon &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the fictional world rule or system the OP is trying to develop. The result will be answers that combine the real world and the fictional world. &lt;em&gt;A legitimate answer that is strictly the facts of the real world demonstrates the query had no worldbuilding dependency, and the question should have been asked elsewhere.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &amp;quot;I'm building a world!&amp;quot; is no longer a viable excuse for asking a Real World question. The OP must now provide real context of an actual problem being solved that can't be answered (or would likely to be closed) on another stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example question without context:&lt;/em&gt; Can a gas giant have an axial tilt of 28°?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example question with unacceptable context:&lt;/em&gt; I'm building a fictional universe. Can a gas giant have an axial tilt of 28°?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example question with acceptable context:&lt;/em&gt; In my universe planets spin on average much more quickly than they do as observed today in the Real Universe. I'm worried that such a fast spin will keep gas giants from having an axial tilt of 28°, which I need for my story. Given that the average planetary rotation in my universe is 125% greater than in the observed universe, would a planet like Neptune in a solar system like ours still have its axial tilt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've used a meaningful example, what I've demonstrated is that the OP has (what I define as) a valid concern that the &lt;em&gt;rules of their world&lt;/em&gt; might conflict with the &lt;em&gt;Real World&lt;/em&gt; in a way that they can't easily rationalize, and so need our help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarize:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm proposing that Real World questions remain valid if and only if the OP can describe a dependency on a rule of their fictional world that requires the question to be asked on Worldbuilding rather than on a more appropriate Stack such as Astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voting this question up&lt;/em&gt; means you support the clarification as proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voting this question down&lt;/em&gt; means you object to the clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answers to this post&lt;/em&gt; should express opinions for or against that help the community understand the pros and cons of supporting or objecting to the clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Comments to this post&lt;/em&gt; should only ask for clarifications to the post, not state arguments for or against. That's what answers are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="51300" LastEditDate="2021-10-17T01:02:07.800" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T17:41:41.717" Title="Clarification concerning a loophole in the Real World Question policy" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|real-world|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8486" CreationDate="2021-10-11T14:48:35.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It appears this issue is easily repaired by removing a single word from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag summary and a sentence from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is critical to understand the purpose of tags. They do NOT scope the question. &lt;em&gt;They scope the answers.&lt;/em&gt; Yes, I get the fact that people will commonly use them from the perspective of &amp;quot;This is a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; but that doesn't change the fact that the point of the tag is to indicate that the OP wants the answers to reflect &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct tag use is important and expected. Questions do get closed due to inappropriate tag use. We actually expect people to read the tag wikis. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; wiki we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want scientifically correct answers but don't need scientific citations, consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; instead. Do not use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; on a question that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;; it is redundant. However, do not remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; from a question that has both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Instead remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; holds answers to an even higher standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's awfully clear.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I frankly don't understand how to misinterpret &amp;quot;Do not use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; on a question that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;; it is redundant.&amp;quot; However, whoever in the distant past added that last sentence wasn't thinking. In fact, I consider it pretty bad advice. Regardless of my opinion, though, it's &lt;em&gt;unnecessary&lt;/em&gt; advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I propose that the sentence be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;However, do not remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; from a question that has both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Instead remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; holds answers to an even higher standard.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Next, changing one word in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make a point, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; wiki states...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need scientific citations in answers, use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and that's pretty clear to me. The word &amp;quot;instead&amp;quot; in English implies mutual exclusivity. If we need an actual statement that uses the phrase &amp;quot;mutually exclusive,&amp;quot; I have no problem adding it (we've been using these tags this way for years... why is it suddenly unclear?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem appears to come from the summary. It's the word &amp;quot;hard.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that require answers based on &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hard&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; science, not magic or pseudo-science, but do not require scientific citations. Contrast with the hard-science and reality-check tags. Do not use this tag as the only tag on a question because it describes how the question should be answered, not the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there's our problem. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; appears to be about &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; appears to be about &amp;quot;hard science.&amp;quot; Worse, still, is that too many new users don't bother reading the wikis and think &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; refers to the story genre &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and not what we claim... but that's another issue for another day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the world does like to create differences. We have &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;pseudo science&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;junk science&amp;quot; and all kinds of &amp;quot;science.&amp;quot; In reality. There's just &amp;quot;science.&amp;quot; Anything not science in the Real World is pretension and in Worldbuilding is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; with the exception of &lt;em&gt;speculative science&lt;/em&gt; (something &amp;quot;sciency&amp;quot; that's based on science but doesn't exist in science and can't actually be proven as science, which is what I thought the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used for, but it isn't, and that's a whomping huge hole in our methodology....).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to make a long story short, removing the word &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; summary solves that half of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... Remove one useless sentence from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; wiki and one unnecessary word from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; summary and this problem is solved, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T14:48:35.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8484" CreationDate="2021-10-11T16:05:38.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;L.Dutch's answer is the correct answer, and I upvoted it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm happy to give you some very specific advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the Title of the question, if the question is three (3) sentences long or less, there's an 85% chance it's a bad question. If the post is only one (1) sentence long, it's a bad question — period. In fact, I question any post that's just one paragraph or so long (8+ paragraphs, give or take) that it's tedious to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question posed in the title and the question posed in the body of the post are not, contextually, an &lt;em&gt;exact match,&lt;/em&gt; it's a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, Questions &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be (a) specific and answerable, (b) include context, and (c) include restrictions/requirements. If a question doesn't meet &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;all three&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of those expectations, it's a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, Questions &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; include research. Yes, we're tolerant about this, but it's a huge red flag that obvious research (like the results of a 10-second Google search) were not considered before the question was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in complete support of L.Dutch's answer, there are three Help Center pages you should simply have memorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every user should read those three pages regularly. They're the baseline. All other policies and issues brought up in Meta are in support of or clarification of those three pages. My perspective might be a bit ruthless, but if a question doesn't meet every expectation in those three pages, it's a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T16:05:38.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-11T18:18:44.317" Score="3" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The rules&amp;quot; are spread across a number of locations. This post is an attempt to bring the basics of what this Stack expects of questions together into one place. Before I begin, please let me underscore something that gets ignored &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; on this Stack. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions: ... are more than just mindless social fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're all here to have fun, but asking questions because you're bored, or are &amp;quot;having fun,&amp;quot; or are not really trying to ask questions either to further your own worldbuilding efforts or to further the &amp;quot;cause of worldbuilding,&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; is not welcome. That's a bit harsh, but the rule serves a purpose. It keeps the Stack from becoming cluttered with poor questions that don't help or benefit anyone but, at best, the person who asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is NOT a replacement for the Help Center, Tour, or any other rule source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a convenience. It isn't the law. The law is found in the Help Center, Tour, VTC explanations, mouse rollovers, and wherever Stack Exchange chose to stuff things, as well as in the many Meta discussions that have established this Stack's unique policies. If there is any contradiction between this summary and the actual Rules, the Rules win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JB's Commentary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've included a few words of commentary here-and-there in block-quotes. These are my opinions based on several years of practice. Hopefully I've included relevant Meta links. If you disagree with my commentary, please post a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; to this Post and within a week I'll go chase down the relevant Meta discussions. In other words, if I've done my job right, I'm not just hoisting my opinion, I'm expressing real Policy perspectives that I didn't have the time to go research. Sorry about that....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta Policies...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a handful of &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; that are really Stack policies that have been hammered out through months (and often years) of Meta discussions. Most of those are encompassed by the rules listed below and I've linked to a couple of them. But you will occasionally be directed to a meta post about a Stack policy as a justification for asking for your post to be improved or that it's being closed. I apologize that this summary isn't comprehensive — but welcome to Real Life. You can't find a comprehensive summary of your nation's Laws, either. You're expected to eventually do the research to catch up on your own. Nevertheless, as I or others come across those Policies and remember, we'll include them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Rules&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question cannot be a duplicate of another question previously asked. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &amp;quot;Duplicate&amp;quot; close reason)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe your question is not a duplicate of a previous question, you are expected to explain why it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question lacks enough details or conditions for the average user to clearly understand the problem &lt;em&gt;(Source: &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity&amp;quot; close reason)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post is required to ask one and only one question per post. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &amp;quot;Needs more focus&amp;quot; close reason)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a tradition, additional questions may be asked, but you must state clearly that they are NOT expected as part of the answer, only &amp;quot;nice to haves.&amp;quot; Answers not provided to secondary questions can NOT be used against users when judging a best answer. (Frankly, it's better to just ask one question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question cannot seek opinions, start a discussion, or lead to opinion-based answers. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &amp;quot;Opinion-based&amp;quot; close reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question cannot invite too many answers. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has trouble with &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; questions, which are the most common type of question that completely breaks that rule. However, we respect the reality that when worldbuilding, sometimes what you need to see is a list of options. The bridge between the rule and the need are the concepts of an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; and an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;. As you read through this list, you'll see that goals, expectations, restrictions, conditions, and limitations are &lt;em&gt;insanely important.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question cannot be too broad or expect lengthy answers. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is a contradiction with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; which also states questions should inspire long, not short answers. What this means is that a question easily answered with a one-sentence answer is a bad question. Likewise, a question that requires more then 4-5 paragraphs to answer is also a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question must be about the rules of your world, not a story based in your world or the actions/choices/development of any character. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; close reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your world... not the Real World (see two bullets down), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;not a 3rd party or commercial world&lt;/a&gt;... not even mythology in any instance save the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; (which has specific rules). Worldbuilding is the design and consistent use of rules and systems for a fictional world of your own design wherein an infinite number of stories may be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question must refer to a specific, pracitcal issue with worldbuilding and be answerable. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we are somewhat lenient with this, questions must have an actual problem to be solved. Inviting Stack users to verify if something is believable, realistic, plausible, etc., is out-of-bounds as such questions are opinion-based unless specifically meeting the criteria of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. Note that asking if anything is realistic, plausible, believable, etc. &lt;em&gt;in the Real World&lt;/em&gt; is strictly out-of-bounds. We're here to help you build your own, fictional world. Not to enhance the Real World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question must be about worldbuilding &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/em&gt; specifically an imaginary world &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This touches on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;Real World Question debate&lt;/a&gt;. Real World questions are permitted only if there is a dependency on your worldbuilding. As a specific example, a question about Real World history is only permissible when used as an example when building an alternative history or the history of a fictional world. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must include context. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must include restrictions and/or requirements. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question should include research. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt; Lack of simple research is a frequent cause for down voting questions &lt;em&gt;(see down-vote mouse rollover text).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question about an &lt;em&gt;event&lt;/em&gt; must include the setting and circumstances of the event and the goal or result the question leads to. &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question asking Stack users to &amp;quot;check&amp;quot; a condition (e.g., a &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot;) must include the relevant details (rules) of the OP's world (not the Real World) for the purpose of checking consistency. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must be asked in a way that ever answer is NOT equally valid.  &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is the question must have a reasonable expectation of a best-answer selection (whether one is selected or not). This means that one answer above all must best meet the goals, conditions, and expectations set forth in the question. If the only criteria for selecting a best answer is the OP's fondness of one answer over another, the question is out-of-bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must NOT have answers provided with it (e.g., &amp;quot;I've already considered and rejected the following...&amp;quot;). &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question cannot be open-ended or hypothetical. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;High Concept Questions&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question should inspire answers that explain &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this Stack is much better at answering &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;why,&amp;quot; which questions are often closed as opinion-based unless sufficient conditions, restrictions, and expectations are provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question meets all those expectations, you're in &lt;em&gt;great shape!&lt;/em&gt; The more it misses, the more likely it'll get closed. And there's a few of them that'll get your question closed without discussion. Honestly, it's better to obey the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;This is just my opinion, but the &amp;quot;cause of worldbuilding&amp;quot; means you're asking questions that might actually have value to other people. That's actually one of the primary purposes of Stack Exchange as a whole. In an ideal world, no question can or should be asked that serves only one person's interest. If you're not working on problems for a specific worldbuilding project of your own design... if you're tempted to ask questions just because it's fun to ask questions or because, in one participant's words, you're only interested in &amp;quot;pure worldbuilding&amp;quot; (meaning you're not building a world, you're just asking random questions of interest to yourself)... please have the minimum courtesy of designing questions that really will benefit someone else's worldbuilding effort. That's actually harder to do than it sounds and while we're tolerant in the beginning, we do start down voting and closing questions from participants who don't grow out of breaking that &amp;quot;mindless social fun&amp;quot; rule.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2021-10-12T00:20:41.407" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T16:53:59.100" Title="A Concise List of &quot;The Rules&quot;" Tags="|discussion|policy|rules|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8488" CreationDate="2021-10-11T21:44:23.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Bang on the Elephant!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very important clarification to the Real World Question Policy, and a long time coming. It seems to me that this clarification might also cover questions of real world speculation in the guise of worldbuilding as well. As with RWQ, speculation is fun, but without sufficient or acceptable context, neither question type is appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read it, the main point(s) I originally had disagreement with were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many questions about history, culture, physics, chemistry and other topics that are asking for a comparison or background information from reality for aid in developing our imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two Points:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A long standing issue has been context. I've always encouraged RWQ querents to provide &lt;em&gt;sufficient worldbuilding context&lt;/em&gt; so that the question can be understood not in terms of real world history, but as a sort of aide d' entendement for the respondent so that the phenomenon of history can be applied to the fictional reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to define a little more clearly what &amp;quot;sufficient context&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;acceptable context&amp;quot; actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the term &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding dependency&lt;/em&gt; needs perhaps to be more clearly defined, though. Perhaps something like this?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Real World question is appropriate when there is a &amp;quot;worldbuilding dependency&amp;quot; on the answer to that question. &lt;em&gt;This means that the response to the query depends on an understanding of the real world phenomenon, but is not based on the real world phenomenon; rather the response is based on the information and sufficient context given about the fictional world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've written a good definition, then I've grasped what you mean by worldbuilding dependency -- if not . . . then maybe you'll have to work out a better definition!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Without the clarification, we really do run into instances where questions that lack worldbuilding context can't actually be answered in a fictional manner! Or else questions can only be answered with real world speculation. The long and short of it is that we shouldn't be answering &amp;quot;questions about history, culture, physics, etc.&amp;quot; We &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be answering queries about problems with making or ordering a fictional world whose answers touch upon &amp;amp; require an understanding of history, culture, physics, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T21:44:23.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8491" CreationDate="2021-10-11T22:11:08.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Wyes and Wear Fours&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The question should inspire answers that explain &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how.&amp;quot;&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; However, this Stack is much better at answering &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;why,&amp;quot; which questions are often closed as opinion-based unless sufficient conditions, restrictions, and expectations are provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe we should be much more encouraging both of the asking and answering good &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; questions. If the hows of orbital mechanics &amp;amp; dragon wings are the meat and potatoes of worldbuilding, then the whys and wherefores are literally the metacosmic gravy that holds it all together into one delicious consideration!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may require a different discussion question, but very frequently &lt;em&gt;how questions&lt;/em&gt; are mistakenly asked in the form of &lt;em&gt;why questions&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90164/physics-the-why-vs-how-question&quot;&gt;Physics.SE addresses this point&lt;/a&gt;. The long and short of it is that &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; really seeks the manner or method or process that something happens in. &amp;quot;How is rain formed?&amp;quot; Evaporated water rises in the atmosphere, condenses into clouds...etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;why does rain form?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; --- now that's a whole nother can of worms! One can touch upon the merest &amp;amp; shallowest answer through philosophical investigation. But the way of that journey is long and deep and one can traverse the universe and beyond in considerations of ontology, metaphysics, theology, mythology and other roads less travelled. A veritable leap of reasoned faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we'd have to make a clear definition or statement of expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T22:11:08.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-12T09:44:47.213" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I visited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/215259/40609&quot;&gt;What calendar can be used for Venus, Mercury and moons of Jupiter and Saturn?&lt;/a&gt; and realized that a policy of the Stack had been left off &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;A Concise List of &amp;quot;The Rules&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;: the policy concerning names (developing calendars requires naming days, months, holidays, etc.). But when I did a quick search for a relevant Meta post, I couldn't find one (which might be because I can't think of a search term that doesn't return hundreds of irrelevant questions all containing the word &amp;quot;name&amp;quot;). So, to establish a formal policy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions about names, naming things, and the process of naming things, are &lt;em&gt;off-topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before you jump to an answer with an understandably brilliant justification for why we should allow questions about names or that involve names, please be aware that there are absolutely years worth of closed questions holding back that argument. It's not that we don't want to hear it — but even ignoring the reasons why those questions were closed, there's a LOT of inertia to overcome.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant basic rule is that this Stack is about building worlds, not telling stories — and the fundamental problem with names is that no matter what grammar rule they follow, they're adjectives. Please don't misunderstand what I mean, every Proper Noun on the planet is (for the sake of my argument) just an adjective: a word that describes or identifies something. And an adjective can be anything for any reason. Here's the problem, &lt;em&gt;there's not a rule of a world independent of every story on that world that can be used to justify a name,&lt;/em&gt; because a name is an aesthetic... window dressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even identifying a process whereby names could be derived is storybuilding... although I could be convinced otherwise about this. I once answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/114223/40609&quot;&gt;I need names for 16 months&lt;/a&gt; (question was closed) by describing a process to derive names. But as I go back and look at what I did, I do not believe the process can be entirely independent of the story. We're back to the same problem: until sapient creatures walk on that fictional world, look up at the stars, and say &amp;quot;Orack EEEK! blalaba dOOOckala cho!&amp;quot; there's simply no process that can be used to determine a calendar. The amount of information the OP would need to provide to create such a process would result in the calendar itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was it that said &amp;quot;The only way to simulate an infinitely complex system is with that system itself&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just so we can point to a single Meta post that establishes the policy, and in support of years worth of closed questions, I propose this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T01:43:14.863" Title="Policy proposal: Questions about names and the process of deriving names are off-topic" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8494" CreationDate="2021-10-12T22:06:35.163" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Three Points to Consider!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;, invented languages are actually, and in fact &lt;em&gt;prominently&lt;/em&gt; on topic here in Worldbuilding! &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What Topics can I ask about here&lt;/a&gt; lists languages as a valid topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this was probably written before the invented languages forum got going. I have no problem with exporting all language invention questions to the other forum and no problem with inviting language related querents to ask their questions over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to point out the glaring deficiency in the argument for this particular Policy before things get too far along! For this argument to make sense, someone should edit the help desk to reflect this Policy. Or perhaps, if needed, create a new Policy on Invented Languages query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH has addressed this issue: &lt;em&gt;First, the first point. I apologize because you're right that languages are listed in the help center. I also agree that its inclusion was certainly before Constructed Languages existed. So your point is well taken... but it's also irrelevant as we're really only focusing on a formal policy for &amp;quot;what's the best name for X?&amp;quot; questions. I admitted that I could be convinced otherwise about the process of naming and you've done a great job of doing that. focusing on rules should avoid the basic rule from the tour that Qs shouldn't seek opinions, but facts.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;, I don't wholly disagree that questions that ask for names or for opinions about names or for advice on names should be considered off-topic here. While I don't see them as &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; per se, I can certainly see how naming questions would turn into opinionfests, like the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/215279/trying-to-categorize-political-system-of-a-fictional-country&quot;&gt;name my political system query&lt;/a&gt;. While I don't often VTC opinion based queries simply because some level of opinion generation is unavoidable in this forum, I did vote to close this one because it's obvious that the respondents aren't even close to consensus and I think that may be because the question wasn't well worded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point of disagreement with this Policy focuses on only one of the subparts, namely the lumping of the concept of naming in and of itself with concept of processes of naming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My argument is that the process of naming a thing is essentially no different than the process of devising a thing. Both are processes of worldbuilding, and thus both valid. Their validity stems from the fact that the thing and the name are both artifacts of the world: matters of culture made by the people of that culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: So I would agree with you that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/215279/trying-to-categorize-political-system-of-a-fictional-country&quot;&gt;What Do I Name This&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; kinds of questions are off topic.  I would further agree that queries on pure advice, aesthetics, opinion seeking or euphonism -- basically &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Cellar_door#:%7E:text=Most%20English-speaking%20people%20..,far%20more%20beautiful%20than%20beautiful.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cellardoorism&lt;/a&gt; -- are also off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I disagree that process of naming queries ought to be considered off topic. An example of this kind of question might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two cultures live side by side, A has access to trade routes with E, a distant &amp;amp; technologically advanced society, while B lives in a remote region and lacks contacts with any other culture apart from A, the people and culture of which B highly esteem. The people of cultures A &amp;amp; E are syringeal speakers (like birds) while the people of culture B are laryngeal speakers (like humans). Speakers of A can relatively easily pronounce the bimodal(two simultaneous vocalisms) language of E as well as the monomodal language of B; however the speakers of B, while they can understand the language of A, can not pronounce the bimodal syllables of A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reasons unimportant to the query, I want the speakers of B's language to borrow words from A's language. How can I reach a compromise between the two vocal systems such that a trade good from E, called &lt;strong&gt;{``srêê||,r~~~}{|-e|}{|`wi|}&lt;/strong&gt; by the people of A, can be traded to the people of B who will give it a name recognisable to the traders from A. I'd like to preserve the overall structure of A's wordform, so answers like &amp;quot;well, they'll just give it their own name, so do whatever you want to do&amp;quot; are not admissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notation of A's language: for purposes of this query, syllabic units that are divided by pipes denote a different vocalism emanating from left and right syrinx simultaneously; syllabic units enclosed within the double pipe denote both syringes are producing the same vocalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A third point to consider&lt;/strong&gt;:  Something else to think about re &lt;em&gt;The name of something is always independent of the world's rules because any name can be used. Why one name is better than another is storybuilding because it only matters to characters in the story (not the world or any of its rules), and characters are off-topic per the help center.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a world where semiotics,  sound-symbolism and substantive onomotopoetics are operative rules of the place. I think it’s AlexP who’s fond of saying that words are not magic, but he is incorrect. Quite wrong indeed. In point of fact, here in Worldbuilding, words are not merely magic. Here, words not only create &amp;amp; define reality, but they also signal and represent the reality of the other world here within the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a world as I propose for consideration, the very sound of a word relates to the form, composition and name of a thing. I mentioned &lt;em&gt;cellardoorism&lt;/em&gt; as a concept earlier: the natural extension is phonaesthetic geopoetry. This is where the name of a thing is neither divorced from the rules or reality of the world, nor must it be made from a random opinion. This is not a case of any word will do, but rather the choice &amp;amp; crafting of word must follow reasonably logical rules, rational assumptions and must flow from the innate aesthesis of the world itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do this in English a little bit by nature! If I said to you the sound &lt;em&gt;sssssssss&lt;/em&gt;, I would probably lodge in your imagination images of sssslithery ssssnakessss and ssssneaky ssssspidersssessss, ssscorpionssss sssslinking in the darknesssss and ssslipery ssssputum and sssslime. What for us is a happy coincidence of a particular sound, [s:] and a particular set of concepts, chilly, dark, dank places filled with creepy crawly horrors is but the shallowest manifestation of this part of geopoetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll mention here that this can be a big stumbling block for a worldbuilder. I'd argue that a young worldbuilder or a beginner is more likely to have problems that could be solved by the mere application of opinion. Naming problems are often resolvable through individual or group brainstorming. Because &amp;quot;any name can be used&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I certainly concur that WB is not for group brainstorming!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as an example, this very issue has been a problem of worldbuilding for me. Over the last 30 to 40 years or so, I still have not hit upon &lt;em&gt;the name&lt;/em&gt; for the race of people that more or less fulfill the role of Orc. The name of a whole race of people, as well as the constituent ethnoi, should &lt;em&gt;fit&lt;/em&gt;. Any name can't be used, simply because they are not throw-away tidbits of background. In my opinion a well crafted world comprises not only objects, but also names. And the magic of words is that the name in a sense creates the object. If I've put the effort into naming an inconsequential a creature as the &lt;em&gt;inverse earthworm,&lt;/em&gt; which are called hrratht.teth by those who have come across their deep telluric migrations, how much more consideration the name of &amp;quot;Orcs&amp;quot; deserves!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-10-13T23:30:39.257" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T23:30:39.257" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8494" CreationDate="2021-10-13T03:12:15.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's reasonable to say that naming questions, where no answer is more valid than any other, as being opinion based and therefore off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it's also reasonable to distinguish between simple naming and categorization within an established field of study.  Were the Worldbuilding SE to be asked, in an alternate universe where it did not exist, whether a platypus is a mammal or a bird/reptile, our alternate selves would be guided by the the same knowledge, principles, and precedents that biologists were when they chose to categorize it as a mammal to build credible arguments for the correctness of the answers we present.  Similarly, when asked to categorize an unusual type of governance (the question that prompted this meta question) or an unusual type of nation-state (a recent question that was closed on the same grounds and successfully re-opened), we are able to draw historical examples and precedents and the bodies of knowledge for political science, international law, and so forth to both justify our own answers and judge the plausibility of other answers provided.  Given this clear distinction, dismissing such questions as &amp;quot;What do I name this?&amp;quot; is in error since they are not primarily opinion based and the general policy on naming questions should not apply to categorization within a field of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32605" LastEditorUserId="32605" LastEditDate="2021-10-13T03:17:40.243" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T03:17:40.243" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8494" CreationDate="2021-10-14T01:33:37.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Names are nouns, not adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the most general acception, adjectives are one kind of modifiers which can be applied to nouns. (Articles and numerals are other kinds of modifiers; and the English language is notorious for allowing &amp;quot;noun piles&amp;quot;, chains of nouns modifying each other apparently without limit, for example, &amp;quot;air bag malfunction safety recall follow-up notice&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While in rare situation a proper name can function as a modifier (for example &amp;quot;and then the cat Macavity was observed to be not there&amp;quot;), they most usually stand alone. Since they most usually stand alone and do not modify another noun, they are not adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I was triggered. A policy is supposed to be a respectable document. How can anybody respect a policy when it disrespects the very words that it uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree that asking for names of characters, of things, of creatures, of classes of things or creatures, and so on should be considered off topic. No other justification is necessary other than this being a fundamental creative function of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But asking for a &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; of creating names of characters, of things, of creatures, of classes of things or creatures, and so on should be considered on topic, because the methods of creating names are intrinsically part of the culture; being part of the culture, they are very much part of the world to be built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider personal names, the names of people; or, of course, the names of characters in the world to be built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most Indo-European languages, a personal name is made from a short nominal phrase, usually with two components; for example, Aga-memnon &amp;quot;Very Steadfast&amp;quot;, Alex-andros &amp;quot;Defender of Men&amp;quot;, Andro-meda &amp;quot;Ruler of Men&amp;quot;, Theo-doros &amp;quot;Gift of God&amp;quot;; Bog-dan &amp;quot;id.&amp;quot;, Bori-slav &amp;quot;Glory of War&amp;quot;, Vladi-mir &amp;quot;Ruler of the World&amp;quot;, Vladi-slav &amp;quot;Glorious Ruler&amp;quot;; Æthel-wulf (&amp;gt; Adolf) &amp;quot;Noble Wolf&amp;quot;, Rīka-harduz (&amp;gt; Richard) &amp;quot;Brave King&amp;quot;, Ed-mund &amp;quot;Protector of Wealth&amp;quot;, Macht-hilde (&amp;gt; Matilda) &amp;quot;Strength in Combat&amp;quot;, Wil-fred &amp;quot;Willing Peace&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inventing such a general rule for a culture is pretty obviously part of world building, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, there's more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the classical world, where such two-component meaningful names were the rule for the Greeks, and for the Gauls, and for the Germans, one culture stood out: the Romans. They did not use such names, at least not for free-born citizens. I won't bore you with what they used, but the point is that &lt;em&gt;varying&lt;/em&gt; the process for one of the cultures in the world-in-building is also part of the world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, there's more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classical world is dead, and on its ruins rose the modern world. And in the modern world we use meaning&lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; names, either badly mangled imported foreign names or badly mangled old autochtonous names; in stark contrast with the antiquity, where, with the exception of the exceptional Romans, meaning&lt;strong&gt;ful&lt;/strong&gt; names were the norm. Names such as Alexander, Anna, John, Daniel, Martin, Mary and so on are meaningless in English; or even Alfred, Matilda, Richard and Robert. Coming up with such a cunning development is part of the world building process, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2021-10-14T01:43:14.863" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T01:43:14.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8484" CreationDate="2021-10-15T12:00:34.407" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The rule was broken by the opener, why say answerer breaks a rule ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many peer moderators put explanations for their closure votes as comments to the question. Answerers use that information already, before they start. I would say, just close the topic, when needed. Don't bother answerers with responsablities of openers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some question rules are incompatible with this proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist rules for questions, that will be incompatible with judging answers. An answer would be against the rules when there are too many other answers ? or when there is no clear single answer possible ? Why should an answerer be bothered with such issues..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fishing for ideas.. but... can't the answerer decide if he/she wants to be fished ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It often comes up. New rules seem to be introduced on WB to prevent &amp;quot;idea-fishing&amp;quot;. I think I speak for many other answerers, please keep in mind WB questions are answered &lt;em&gt;voluntarily&lt;/em&gt;, answerers give permission to use content, according to registration conditions on SE websites. I wonder if (peer-) mods should decide for answerers, it is wrong to answer, just because someone could &amp;quot;profit&amp;quot; from their answer..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T12:00:34.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8488" CreationDate="2021-10-17T13:15:03.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You should add another, more mundane example of a fictional dependency&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Settings that include alternate laws of physics are definitely not going to be confused with basic real-world questions any time soon. Before I personally know if I agree with your proposal or not, I would like to ask that you narrow down your requirement of fictional dependencies by providing a more mundane example of such a dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does an alternate history count as a fictional dependency? (Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/93974/would-a-steam-powered-plane-be-able-to-cross-the-atlantic-ocean&quot;&gt;in my world with a delayed invention of the internal combustion engine, could steam-powered heavier-than-air aircraft have crossed the Atlantic?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a non-existent nation count as a fictional dependency? (Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201806/can-one-nation-purposefully-inconspicuously-cause-global-warming&quot;&gt;I have a fictional dictatorship in the arctic - can they inconspicuously cause global warming?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a resourceful person count as a fictional dependency? (Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/206212/best-real-world-location-for-a-self-sufficient-villain-island&quot;&gt;I have a criminal billionaire who needs to construct a villain lair somewhere in the globe; what location would be best, using these criteria?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a fictional motivation count as a dependency? (Example: Could the HRE in the 1100s under Frederick Barbarossa have conquered Capetian France, if they had tried?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I personally do not think that the last one is all that suitable for the site, and not just because of the real world issue. But as far as worldbuilding context is concerned, where do you draw the line between that question and the other three? That's why I would appreciate more examples on your part, so I get a better picture of what your proposal would yield in practise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You should add an example of a question that is currently accepted but you think should not be accepted.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not a question whose only context is the &amp;quot;I am building a world...&amp;quot; disclaimer, which is an extreme case even if I have no doubt those questions are found. Consider a well-motivated worldbuilder who is using the site with only good intentions. In what way are you altering their question-asking experience? Describe the best possible question that is currently considered on-topic and which you think should be considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is this question off-topic under your suggested rule rephrasing: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78693/how-would-a-torus-world-donut-shaped-have-to-rotate-in-order-to-have-a-stable&quot;&gt;How would a torus world (donut shaped) have to rotate in order to have a stable day / night cycle in all of its regions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question gives no alternate laws of physics. They just present a weirdly-shaped planet. But what matters to me is that they are clearly asking for any allowable way to accomplish something for a story (stable day/night cycle), rather than just giving a set of facts and asking yes/no whether it would make sense in physics or not. To me, this question is worldbuilding. If it is not worldbuilding in your view, that's fine, but I would like to know whether or not it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2021-10-17T17:41:41.717" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T17:41:41.717" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8491" CreationDate="2021-10-21T20:55:42.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question must be about the rules of your world, not a story based in your world or the actions/choices/development of any character. (Sources: &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; close reason, Help Center) &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your world... not the Real World (see two bullets down), not a 3rd party or commercial world... not even mythology in any instance save the Anatomically Correct Series (which has specific rules). Worldbuilding is the design and consistent use of rules and systems for a fictional world of your own design wherein an infinite number of stories may be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one seems way too specific and way too prone to loophole abuse for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The design of the world from a socio-political perspective is basically the result of the actions/choices/development of the individuals within it.&lt;/strong&gt; History is, in a sense, the sum total of decisions made up of every individual, and that in turn shapes the world your story is set in. People have argued whether decisions by a few high-profile individuals or many decisions made by large groups of people are more important, but both have an impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great deciding to conquer most of the known world (and the squabbles between Alexander's generals after his death), or the mass-migration of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to the United States in the 19th-20th centuries. Both are the results of decisions made by individuals (i.e., a decision by a monarch to wage war or the decision of large numbers of people to emigrate and seek a better life elsewhere), but both had huge effects on the &amp;quot;setting&amp;quot; (e.g., Alexander's conquests and his army falling apart basically set up the geo-political foundation of the Hellenistic world from 320-280 B.C.E.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a thought experiment, imagine someone asking a question as to how they can justify a specific societal standard for their world, such as the continuation of medieval feudalism in spite of similar historical pressures that ended IRL feudalism (e.g., rising power of the middle class, industrialization and firearms). The authorial reason is the author wants a medieval-inspired setting for the story, but the worldbuilding reason is they need an in-universe justification as to why their setting looks the way they need it to for the story (i.e., why the people didn't make the same decisions as IRL). Some of the solutions to this problem (e.g., the central government banned firearms to retain power, much as what happened in feudal Japan) also revolve around the &lt;em&gt;decisions&lt;/em&gt; of one or more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, for this rule to be consistently enforced, we would have to burninate most of the &lt;code&gt;history&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;alternate-history&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;society&lt;/code&gt; tags and related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are a very large number of &amp;quot;worlds&amp;quot; that are essentially the modern world with some science-fiction/fantasy element(s) added.&lt;/strong&gt; E.g., urban fantasy, magical realism, &amp;quot;superhero settings&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;disaster&amp;quot; movies (which also include alien invasions, techno-thrillers, cyberpunk, first contact movies, etc. &lt;strong&gt;Many of these worlds focus on how supernatural or science-fiction elements interact with the world in a broader sense.&lt;/strong&gt; E.g., &lt;em&gt;World War Z&lt;/em&gt; is a zombie apocalypse novel, but focuses heavily on how human civilization deals with the zombies, which by definition is dependent on the geopolitical shape and culture of the present world. Under your definition any question set in a contemporary (e.g., urban fantasy, alien invasion stories), historical, or even futuristic setting (because the future is usually an extrapolation of the present, e.g. all the old science fiction stories that believed the Cold War would continue in space) that is intended to be seen as a fictionalized version of our own world would be considered invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, would something like, say, elements of a story with an artificial plague, genetic engineering, or autonomous robot soldiers be off-topic, because those are things we theoretically could do with present or near-future technology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the point you are making with this regard, but it seems to be a bit heavy-handed, retroactively invalidates a lot of valid Worldbuilding SE questions, and lacks nuance when dealing with grey areas. This is why in a similar statement to this I suggested a better definition might be Worldbuilding SE deals with fictional worlds or fictional elements of Earthlike settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your suggestion is to be followed, it would effectively limit questions on this SE to &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; those worlds which are intended to have no link at all to the real world (i.e., Middle Earth would be on topic, Hogwarts would not, and virtually all science fiction would be off-topic). It also makes questions based on real-world concepts like evolution, chemistry, physics, etc. hard to apply because there is no reason to believe the setting is &amp;quot;like reality unless noted&amp;quot;. Why would species be expected to evolve by natural selection if they were originally created by the life goddess? Why would modern chemistry and physics concepts such as the synthesis of aluminum or nitrate be expected to work in a setting where the physics run off of Plato's four-element system? The answers to these questions become &amp;quot;whatever you want for your story, given you control the physics/chemistry/history/biology&amp;quot;, which violates your suggestion that each question should have a theoretical ideal answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The distinction between a third-party world and a user-created world is incredibly blurry and vague.&lt;/strong&gt; This is largely because authors are inspired by the works of other creators when creating their worlds all the time. Take for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214526/is-it-possible-to-democratically-handle-the-immaterium/&quot;&gt;this question regarding &amp;quot;how to democratically handle the Immaterium&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This question is very specifically for the user's own world, but the user's setting also copies the Immaterium from the &lt;strong&gt;Warhammer&lt;/strong&gt; franchise wholesale as part of its structure, which is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; detailed and specific concept created by a third party. The user provides no indication that there is any difference in function between their setting as &lt;strong&gt;Warhammer's&lt;/strong&gt; use of the Warp (parallel dimension full of demons that keep tempting mortals, source of faster-than-light travel and psychic powers, etc.). This isn't even unique to that user, &lt;em&gt;Dragon Age&lt;/em&gt; also lifts the Warp almost wholesale for its setting. Broadly speaking, a user could take any concept from a third-party property they want, stay &amp;quot;it's for a world I want to build&amp;quot;, and ask the same questions anyway, which violates the spirit of your suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as another example, take &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/179494/how-many-laws-would-a-parkouring-superhero-like-spider-man-break-by-travelling-a/179550#179550&quot;&gt;this question I asked regarding whether characters that swung from buildings would violate city laws&lt;/a&gt;. This trope was popularized in the public consciousness by Spider-Man, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuildingSwing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but is a very common trope in fiction across multiple mediums&lt;/a&gt;, especially given that arachnid-themed Spider-Man parodies are a dime a dozen. I specifically asked this question because I wanted to use it for my own arachnid-themed characters in my setting, but it got closed because it was too close to a third-party world. At what point does a worldbuilding trope (which often originates in &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; IP initially) become widespread enough that it's not &amp;quot;third party&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good example of this is your statement that mythology and folklore-based questions are not acceptable. Yet the ideas of things such as &lt;code&gt;dragons&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;vampires&lt;/code&gt; are cribbed from folklore so frequently that we have our own tags for them. While there are sometimes individual differences between these beings per setting, they're usually so consistent enough that they have the same general expectations in each question (e.g., most dragons are treated as flying, fire-breathing reptiles, vampires have a specific list of functions and weaknesses that most people assume unless otherwise noted). So does this mean all questions that crib off of prior folklore or mythology but set in the user's own setting are invalid? Or are the only valid questions those narrow features in which the user's own depiction of vampires or dragons differs from the general consensus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus, this suggestion is overly narrow in scope, ends up negating a lot of valid worldbuilding questions, and although it makes sense in spirit can be easily circumvented in ways that break the spirit of the rule.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, ultimately, this question kind of seems like one user trying to dictate to the rest of the stack that their standards for what constitutes a right or wrong question are the only acceptable ones. This is especially strange given that OP is not a mod and isn't speaking as one who sets the rules in the stack. Clearly there are defined rules in the help center, but there are gray areas in the interpretation of those rules. E.g., I know that myself and @Tortliena have disagreed on best practices in the past, which there's nothing wrong with but it's clear that different individuals will have different ideas on how to best implement the same set of rules. I have no problem with clarifying the rules, but it would be better if it was coming from site admins (i.e., we have no control over that) or as a consensus of users rather than one user enforcing their definitions on everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71841" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T20:55:42.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8491" CreationDate="2021-10-21T23:55:30.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 2 points to make:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While it is nice to have someone attempt to compile existing interpretations of the rules, this should be moderators' job. As it is now, this compilation and commentary are nothing more than a personal opinion of one member of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case somebody wants to make points about democracy and such, please, make sure that there is a quorum and all necessary democratic procedures have been fully completed. How big is the WB.SE community? Are 5 (five) votes (so far) representative of the entire community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also note that out of 6 people who wrote something in this thread, at least 3 (50%) expressed disagreement with the OP's views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is highly hypocritical to write that this post is not a replacement for the official rules and then link it as 'the rules'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also concerned that by linking this post as 'the rules', the OP is attempting to impose their own interpretation of the official rules on the rest of the community. Without the input of any qualified personnel (i.e. moderators, SE employees, and alike) this post cannot be (and must not be) considered as official rules or preferred interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that not even one of the bullet points is a direct quotation from the existing rules. Most of them are paraphrases. Moreover, there are 'rules' that have no support in the linked sources at all. For example, '&lt;em&gt;The question must be about the rules of your world, not a story based in your world or the actions/choices/development of any character.&lt;/em&gt;' is purely the OP's own opinion. The Help Centre does not limit the scope of worldbuilding to the rules of the world. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;The WB.SE's official definition&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, &lt;em&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition the same page states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a system, event or element of the world is causing you problems we are here to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Centre (same page, same section, last paragraph of the section) explicitly states only one limitation on the scope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site, though we often have such discussions in Worldbuilding Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'rules' is not used even once on the entire page. Interpretation of worldbuilding as world's rule building is something that the OP prefers and attempts to enforce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other questionable interpretations of the official rules, but discussing them is rather meaningless before the issue with the status of the OP's post is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to request the moderators' input. It's been a while since this was posted but not even one moderator provided any feedback. In which way this silence should be interpreted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2021-10-22T16:53:59.100" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T16:53:59.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-22T10:49:24.700" Score="1" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are we supposed to do when a question we ask receives an answer that doesn't help answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple ideas on the proper response, which end up summing together to the rule that if someone doesn't understand your question, then you're straight out of luck and aren't allowed to clarify the question in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the intention? Or is there supposed to be some way to do this that actually lets you get your questions answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2021-10-23T02:41:19.533" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T07:43:10.200" Title="What are we supposed to do when someone doesn't understand your question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8502" CreationDate="2021-10-22T17:21:57.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 2 chief reasons for not getting the answers you want/expect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your writing is not clear enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your target audience is not familiar with the topic and unable to provide an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first reason is something that you can work on. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a look at thematically similar questions and see how they are asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read the answers and see what words, reasoning, and assumptions they use (assumptions are rarely stated openly but they can be inferred).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to use vocabulary and delivery formats familiar to your audience so they can focus on your question rather than words and post's form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It also might be helpful to ask people directly what causes them to misunderstand your question (please be warned that not everyone will be open to this kind of discussion and some people may even get offended at the suggestion that they misunderstood you or your intentions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second reason (people are not familiar with the topic) is something that you cannot control. If this is the case it might be better to ask your question elsewhere. Each community has its area of expertise and the WB.SE is no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another, albeit not so common, reason for misunderstandings: Failure of imagination. Sometimes people are so used to the way things are that they cannot imagine anything else. It is often the case with cultural beliefs and attitudes (e.g. something that is common in one's native culture is perceived as the only possible and natural way to do things). You may attempt to talk to people but it is never certain that you will get any positive outcome. Biases are not easy to overcome. It might be better to look for another community to ask your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T17:21:57.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8502" CreationDate="2021-10-23T01:59:06.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we supposed to do when a question we ask receives an answer that doesn't help answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question! The very first thing you should always try is writing your questions in such a way that they are clear as to what you want and have sufficient background to encourage a knowledgeable person to work out an answer for you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple ideas on the proper response, which end up summing together to the rule that if someone doesn't understand your question, then you're straight out of luck and aren't allowed to clarify the question in any way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is false. You are not only allowed to clarify your question, you are encouraged to do so! You might be referring to your most recent query: that got reverted to its original state because there was already an answer that your clarifying edit would invalidate. That's not good. You'll notice, though, that the respondent altered the answer to suit your edit, so your revision got restored. All's swell that ends well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the intention? Or is there supposed to be some way to do this that actually lets you get your questions answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal intention, really, is to encourage you to write high quality questions in the first place, so we don't have to go through all this nonsense asking for clarification, editing, reverting and rolling back. That gets old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you this plain and simple: I love weird anatomy questions; and I get anatomy. I'd &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;absolutely love to work on all your weird anatomy questions!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; But as I said in comments elsewhere, until you get your question writing skills on par with your creativity, I'm not going to bother!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for that is simple: I don't want to waste time working on an assumption about what you really mean but didn't or couldn't express only to have you complain that my hard work doesn't even answer the question. Well? Ask the right question then!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T01:59:06.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8502" CreationDate="2021-10-23T07:43:10.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In overall, I agree with both Otkin and Elemtilas. You can indeed avoid most issues of this kind by ensuring you asked the question in the most understandable manner you can, then solving it if this still happens. I'll go more on the practical tips for each of the two category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Before posting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ensure the correct terminology is used for the theme&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reach out for your favorite dictionary (or translation dictionary) and check that the words used are the ones that should be used in English. It's especially true when you're not an English native, but it also applies as soon as you work in more specialized domains, where technical, accurate words (e.g. : &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imago&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imago&lt;/a&gt;) take over the vernacular, blurry ones (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;butterfly&lt;/a&gt; }i{ ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are as many good sources for that as there are bad ones. I personally like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Accueil_principal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; as it's open to everyone and you can get a deeper explanation of what it is (most pages on wikipedia start with &amp;quot;X is something&amp;quot;), but there are many others. If you have troubles with one word or in general are not good in English (when English is not your native tongue), check the most important words of your question on two different dictionaries/websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Check you wrote the same question as your title&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people don't write the same question as in their title, which leads to confusion. My advice to be sure to have people understand and focused is to copy-paste the question in title at some point, and put it in bold (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/203047/how-much-water-could-the-crown-chalice-hold-as-it-grows-on-high-up-tree-branches&quot;&gt;for example&lt;/a&gt;, but I use this a lot on my questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that regard, I also advise to write titles in an interrogative form when possible, not just a thematic of three or four words. It's because those three or four words doesn't necessarily strike a direction the topic should take. For instance : &amp;quot;Anatomy of a bagleaf&amp;quot;. Are we asking about &amp;quot;how the bagleaf anatomy came to be&amp;quot;, or about &amp;quot;how this specific bodypart of the bagleaf will work with others&amp;quot;? Same theme, but different questions and different answers :)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Read your question thrice to thrive&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really simple, when you're done writing, read your question again first to check for spelling issues, but also a new time to check if all key parts are there. It doesn't take much time but gives a lot of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sandbox!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extending from the previous paragraph, here's a tool to confront your question without being embarrassed by the weight WB:SE edition procedures. And this one is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/80336&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rarely used (as of now), but it's quite efficient, especially for the cases people didn't get your meaning. If time is of an issue for you, just recall you are not forced to get the approval of 10 members of the &amp;quot;council of sandbox approbation&amp;quot; with 248-rules trials. It's just a way to measure how well your question will be received (number of votes &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; comprehension) and receive external opinions to improve the end result. Plus, people will be a lot less harsh in their feedback : It's not nice (and useless) to smash an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duckling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ugly duckling question&lt;/a&gt; which has not even grown up publicly, after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;After posting&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you've written your question, all happy about it and how well it's written. But suddenly, the smile drops as one person thought &amp;quot;the wrong way&amp;quot;. What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Analyze the situation and give feedback&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there's a communication problem, you always need to look at the two entities -emitter and receiver- in order to check where the message distorted. To do that, clear up any confusion through a comment reexplaining shortly what you were asking. Don't repeat the same exact words as in your question, as it might be perceived the same way on the receiving side. Slightly alter it to make it &amp;quot;click!&amp;quot; inside the other's mind and see the quiproquo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the point that is the source of misunderstanding is not clear to you, then simply ask why they thought of answering on this topic rather than yours. Or more exactly, what part of your question made them answer this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Choosing whether or not to edit the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this has been discussed, choose whether to edit the question or not. I'd advise more often to edit the question than not, since if one person misunderstood you, others might. The only case I might not change the question is when the answerer told they skipped a part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's basically two ways to clarify your question : If it's about a misuse of one or two words or if many people are all the way off the board, you can change directly the question's content. If it's more on the middle ground of misunderstanding or you need to explain the use of a specific word, you might add either an addendum or a footnote (with the top number&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Like this one :p. For instance, I used this for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/201395/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (revision of 24th April 2021)&lt;/em&gt;. You can write footnote numbers by using the tags &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;N&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, with N being your number. Then it's all about italics and the horizontal rule button!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T07:43:10.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-23T09:53:33.157" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask some questions about a type of animal with a very complex anatomy. Due to the complexity and uniqueness, it'd be hard to list out all the characteristics on every question about them, so I'd like to ask if we have a name for these animals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traits of this animal are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their skull is solid and made of many bones, as in tetrapods. The primordial arrangement of the main bones is shown in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_roof#/media/File:Xenotosuchus_skull_roof.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tetrapod&lt;/a&gt;, but many species have fewer. They also, like the tetrapods, have some number of mandible-bones, which sit in two pairs that are often fused at the tip, and an extra ring of bones around the back of the skull, where the spinal cord enters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like tetrapods, they have a brain that exists as two hemispheres, and is found in the skull. Often the hemispheres are connected by nerves somewhere across the inner halves. Each half of the brain is divided into a large cerebrum for processing, and a cerebellum for coordinating motion, much like the divisions found in tetrapods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their mouth is made of two jaws which, like tetrapods, have one below and one above. It also has enamel teeth, a lot like a tetrapod&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For sensory organs: they have a pair of tetrapodal nares at the tip of the snout, which go into a pair of nasal cavities just above (and open to) the mouth; A pair of simple eyes like a tetrapod; A tympanum or eardrum behind the eyes with the reverse connected to the mouth, a lot like in tetrapods; A tongue, anchored to a very tetrapod-like bone in the throat, which sits in the mouth and is also used to manipulate food, and sometimes to speak&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a throat at a variable position within the head/neck, which is made of the tongue bone and 2 other cartilages, a lot like a tetrapod&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a neck between the head and the torso, very much like the setup in tetrapods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a tetrapodal spine, made of many vertebrae, which is divided into 5 segments: neck-part, chest part (sometimes split further into a true chest-part and an abdomen-part), hip-part, and tail-part, very much like the split arranged in tetrapods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have ribs on the chest part of the spine, which divide the body like in tetrapods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have limbs, structured very similarly to tetrapods, with an upper part with one bone, a middle part with two parallel bones, and a final part, acting as a foot, with many bones in multiple segmented lines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These limbs have 2 quite tetrapodal ways of attaching: The anterior limbs attach to a large, 'floating' limb girdle, like the tetrapod's scapula, which often has other rather tetrapodal bones supporting it. The posterior limbs are attached with a single fused block of bones, akin to the tetrapodal pelvis, which also is fused to the hip-part of the spine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In its chest it has a tetrapodal heart made of two parts, one to pump blood around the body, and another to pump blood to the lungs, which are large and spongy like in tetrapods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its intestines, like in tetrapods, are divided into a large and small section, and have a tetrapodal biliary tract with a liver and gallbladder. They also often have multiple pancreata&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their excretory and reproductive systems are bundled together under the tail, as in tetrapods, though they can sometimes form distinct but nearby structures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name that refers to such animals on Worldbuilding? And if so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-10-24T14:23:22.370" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T14:23:22.370" Title="What do we call animals with lungs and three-part legs?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8506" CreationDate="2021-10-23T12:26:14.917" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term for such a creature is &amp;quot;this critter I made up with a laundry list of traits described below.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most made up creatures don't have such obsessively described internals. This is because unless I'm creating a picture book called &amp;quot;The anatomy of critters I've made up&amp;quot; or a game called &amp;quot;Surgeon Simulator: fantastic made up critters edition&amp;quot; this level of will never be seen. Even in such examples you will be able to get away with little more in the way of detail than &amp;quot;the x bone is connected to the y bone by a joint&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;this blobby flesh organ bit is how it does impossible thing z&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most worldbuilding, smartly, ignores the details because they don't matter to the reader and explaining will detract from the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And low the angle of the lord was upon them. And they beheld a ring of flaming eyes. And the eyes didn't burn because the angles naturally excrete an asbestos layer which insulated them from the heat, and the asbestos is produced because angels eat silicate mostly sand, well not actually the sand, they filter feed through the sand to eat, sand bugs, which totally make sense in my world because.... &lt;em&gt;many hours later&lt;/em&gt;... and the angel said &amp;quot;Be not afraid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you want to have a magic term that lets you skip the work of asking clear and precise questions. There isn't such a term. It is your responsibility to ask questions that are detailed and specific enough that people are able to give you the answers you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T12:26:14.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8506" CreationDate="2021-10-24T14:19:41.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Vertebrate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read through the list, and I don't see any key factor on the list that I don't share with my cat. I was expecting to see something strange on that list, but all of those things have been fundamental to the vertebrate body plan for hundreds of millions of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your specific question, the word &amp;quot;vertebrate&amp;quot; should suffice. &amp;quot;Tetrapod&amp;quot; would also work. If the specific animal you're asking about has more than four limbs, then &amp;quot;hexapod&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;decapod&amp;quot; would also work. You don't need to define &amp;quot;vertebrate&amp;quot; every time you ask about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T14:19:41.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-24T20:03:03.383" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we can hopefully agree on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding is about working out general systems and rules, not specific situations or plots.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warfare is a condition composed of many different discrete instances which come with their own circumstances and plot-based actors; the outcomes of those situations are reliant on tactics. Tactics applied many times become rule and system.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Example: we can ask for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102961/this-sword-is-forged-from-meteorite-iron-but-how-is-that-any-good&quot;&gt;the best way&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52333/why-would-giant-mechs-use-melee-weapons&quot;&gt;to fight with&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18402/lets-weaponize-jellyfish&quot;&gt;a specific kind of weapon&lt;/a&gt;. Even though individual fights are a situation governed by random chance and personal preference of the actors involved, we can talk about them &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; and that makes tactics part of worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When discussing tactics for certain situations, we basically answer the idealised version of that situation taking place in a vacuum - we talk about how general rules and systems apply to a situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invasions are a part of warfare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the problem part: large-scale invasions are rare, and every invasion is unique and governed by chance. But I must repeat: every individual fight is unique and governed by chance too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small sample size of invasions makes reasoning about them harder, but we have had to reason about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146090/how-soon-can-the-first-stars-form&quot;&gt;very exotic situations&lt;/a&gt; in the past. The need to speculate is not an insurmountable barrier. We have also only had two nuclear bombs in warfare in our reality, but there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-weapons&quot;&gt;many questions about nukes.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask a question about something that &lt;em&gt;realistically&lt;/em&gt; will only happen once (a D-Day scale invasion) but have it be considered not as a discrete situation, but as an idealised invasion without regards to specific circumstance and plot? The answers will contain insights that I can then apply back to the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I am writing a single invasion, I bet that many questions about weapons will be used for stories that only describe such a fight take place once, and not general blade economy. So how I plan to apply the knowledge should not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask a question about a realistic or efficient invasion? If so, how should I do that to make clear that the specifics of a story are to be disregarded, and only general efficiency are to be considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2021-10-29T15:23:17.267" Title="Can I ask about invasions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8509" CreationDate="2021-10-24T20:53:30.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a general invasion. To invade a land you need dislodge the force currently occupying a the land, and impose your own control. You can't plan to dislodge an opposing force without knowing specific details about that force, their locations, capabilities etc. Weighing all these options and coming up with a plan requires that a world is already built, and depends on the decisions made by specific individuals inside that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should my army, with WWII level tech and organizational structure invade continental Europe from the UK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are whole books written about the planning that went into Operation Overlord. It's a fascinating read but there are so many details that went into choosing the Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juneau, and Sword beaches. You can't provide us all of those details in the limited space of a question on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can show me a question where you're not asking how a scenario in your, fully build world will play out, I think there's some possibility but those questions need to be highly specific to fleshing out a specific detail. For instance I could ask something like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming my army with WWII level tech and organizational structure invaded Normandy from the UK (similar to Operation Overlord), how many cargo dragons would be needed to keep 23,000 paratroopers, fighting behind enemy lines, supplied for a month?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how nothing in this question hinges on the decisions of individuals. It doesn't matter if a particular general is rash or overly cautious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-10-24T21:35:18.060" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T21:35:18.060" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8509" CreationDate="2021-10-24T23:16:14.300" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;war is the continuation of politics by other means&lt;/a&gt;. Or at least, it used to be; looking at some of the recent wars initiated by the U.S. of A. I wonder whether the famous obvservation of Clausewitz isn't in need of an update for the 21st century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;War being a continuation of politics, and all politics being local, it follows that there is no such thing as a generic war; or, to come to the title of this question, a generic invasion. Because, you see, almost all wars begin with an agressor invading the territory of their opponent. True, not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; wars begin with an invasion, but that is by far the most common situation. The only exceptions I can think of are pure naval wars, such as, for example, the war between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America around the middle of the 20th century, or pure air force wars, such as, for example, the war of the United States of America against Serbia towards the end of the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Historians are still trying to understand what was the purpose of Japan starting a naval war with the U.S.A. It was obvious that Japan could not ever hope of winning such a war, because the U.S.A. was too far away, too rich and too populous. I for one am of the opinion that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that there have been very many wars in history, and given that almost all wars feature at least one invasion and usually more, it stands to reason that an author who want to write about an invasion will find one which suits their purpose, and start embellishing it. This is a very common and usual process; it is generally difficult for rank amateurs like us to come up with a verisimilar and belivable plan of military actions, so that lifting one from the pages of history works best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And history is not stingy with invasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very foundation of our European civilization we find the invasion of Troas by the Achaeans. Listing only &lt;em&gt;famous&lt;/em&gt; invasions: the invasion of continental Greece by the Persians (twice), complete with local traitors; the invasion of Greece by the Macedonians; the invasion of the vast Persian Empire by Alexander; the invasion of Italy by Hannibal; the counter-invasion of Africa by Scipio; the invasion of Gaul by C. Julius Caesar; the attempted invasion of Britain by the same; the successful invasion of Britain under Claudius; the ill-fated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_(emperor)#Persian_campaign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invasion of Persia&lt;/a&gt; by Julian; the invasion of Britain by William of Normandy; the invasion of Al-Andalus by the Umayyad Caliphate; the invasion of lots of places by the Huns; the invasion of lots of places by the Goths; the invasion of lots of places by the Mongols; the invasion of lots of places by the Seljuk and later the Ottoman Turks; the failed invasion of Kievan Russia by the Germans and Swedes; the invasion of Italy by Napoleon; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Fourth_Coalition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invasion of the Germanies&lt;/a&gt; by the same; the fatal invasion of Russia by the same; the invasion of Transvaal and Orange by the United Kingdom; the invasion of Belgium and France (the first time) by Germany; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invasion of Spain&lt;/a&gt; by the fascist rebels led by Franco (featuring the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth column&lt;/a&gt;); the invasion of Poland, France (the second time), Norway etc. and finally the Soviet Union by Germany; the invasion of Korea, China, Burma, Malaya etc. by Japan; the failed invasion of Mongolia by the same; the invasion of Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. by the United States of America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was a tiny sample. There are plenty more, some even spectacular if maybe less famous; for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Crete&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;airborne invasion of Crete&lt;/a&gt; by Germany in 1941 was a masterpiece of planning and execution; the invasion of Italy by the (eastern) Roman general &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belisarius&lt;/a&gt; in the 6th century was the last hope of the classical world surviving; and so on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there must be some suitable model there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question on the main site which prompted this question on the meta site, it was attempting to ask why would a significant number of &amp;quot;sleeper agents&amp;quot; (which did not exist in the middle ages anywhere, but I will assimilate them with traitors and spies, which were commonplace) gather at some one place. I voted to close the question as this is a just plot point which would admit any number of reasons, and commented that the specific political, economic, geographic, and military realities will be essential in describing the plan and progress of the invasion. I even commented that I could think off-hand of half a dozen different activities which would require many of the despicable traitors to gather at one place, and then make up reasons to justify them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They must gather at some place in order not to break cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a traditional pilgrimage, or a traditional gathering of the sons of the village or of apothecaries, or an annual big fair where all merchants are supposed to be, etc. They are ordinary members of the community, or masquerading as such, and thus they cannot &lt;em&gt;not attend&lt;/em&gt; the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are summoned at some place to be given their orders in preparation for the invasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sending detailed orders by postal mail would be rather risky, especially when Richelieu's or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walsingham&lt;/a&gt;'s agents are known to steam open all correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They come together at some festive or ritual occasion in order to stir mischief and start a riot, with a view of undermining the faith of the people in the leadership of their betters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They come together at some festive or ritual occasion in order to assassinate the heir to the throne, or some famous general, or whatever other important person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are posing as members of a far-flung extended family and come together periodically at real or fake social functions of said family, such as weddings, funerals and baptisms or whatever they use in-universe. This helps with coördination and psychological well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The king has organized a splendiferous universal exhibition, and the traitors and spies are humans too and have human spouses and children, and thus gather at the exhibition quite naturally, without even thinking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Remember that user contributions on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. You are not allowed to use any of these plot points in a work published for money; you must come up with your own. If you use any of these plot points in a work published for free under a compatible license, you must include an acknoweldgement that part of the work is based on input by user AlexP on Worldbuilding SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T23:16:14.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8509" CreationDate="2021-10-25T00:01:39.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, you can, in some way&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the art of invasion and defending against invasions are part of strategy and tactics, and an important one moreover. This let me follow up with this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strategy?tab=Votes&quot;&gt;strategy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot;&gt;tactic&lt;/a&gt; tags do exist, with a good chunk of questions and some good ones among them on top of that. Having experienced it, some tags are much harder to work with than these ones. Also, note that the top &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52929/tactics-to-prepare-for-an-alien-invasion-when-nobody-will-believe-you&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; in strategy is about invasions. Yeah, defending against alien invasions, but that's invasions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be the concerns that these questions are story-based. They don't necessarily are. War school lessons are often quite generic and only relates to current technology or and tools, and there are tactics and strategy guides too, the most famous one being probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sun Tzu's Art of War&lt;/a&gt;. You'll see in this book that no specific place, character or date is told, at most different terrain types and kind of troops. These lessons and books are proofs you can -and need to talk- in a generic way to understand how strategies articulate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there are just better ways to fight people than others, some being very silly/risky/inefficient and others extremely good, regardless of &amp;quot;story&amp;quot; conditions. If you send cavarly against archers, the result can be easily determined and won't sway much even if you play the action an hundred time. As a consequence, answers are most of the time not equally valid, too. This in turns means that questions about these can be not-opinion based, too :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Be cautious about these points&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To shamelessly take JoinJBHOnCodidact's words, the act of &amp;quot;planning&amp;quot; invasions is local-circumstances and decision-based, so storybased and ill-fit for worldbuilding. However! To shamelessly take Otkin's words (I'm that shameless), asking about an event is possible if you don't ask how the story should go. Wondering on a standardized approach in military strategies, how effective a weapon can be in a given environment or how to make them suited for such environment, all of these for an already defined purpose (invading) is independent of individual decisions, and therefore outside storytelling. This is in fact what you see in strategy guides, to ensure you can use these principles like tools and protocols to make the best decision in any situation you're in; hence it's better to focus on said tools in order to perform the plan rather than the plan itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid talking about the plan and focus on the tools, you should avoid speaking of one single invasion and put it as either end goals or context. You should keep yourself to the &amp;quot;recipe for a good win&amp;quot;, and not talk about how to best cook on the fly with what ingredients you have. In other words, develop on the advantages/weaknesses of a chosen strategy over another, not the choices you (or a general) are offered at a specific point in time and place. Doing otherwise might very well make you slip into storybuilding territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help you in that regard, you should avoid :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about any special character. It applies to every question, but I think it's one of those type of questions you should definitely not do that, even for the sake of a stylish writing style. Just too frisky risky.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoid precise dates, because they imply events. Events which are rarely seen as worldbuilding. On the other hand, seasons and technological time periods imply strategic changes, 'specially on logistics. So detailing climates and technology is on-topic and in fact encouraged to ensure quality answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoid specific places and use generic environments instead. You can still &lt;em&gt;compare&lt;/em&gt; to a real-world environment, but it should not be necessary to be this exact one your troops will be in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to give a quick example, don't ask about if sending 100 light tanks, on June of 2039, led by commander X and against commander Y on a specific Alpine peak is a good idea. But talk about how fast it would be to send WW3 light tanks across mountains to invade in summer. The first question will talk about what choices you should make in that situation, so it's story-based and not viable on Worldbuilding SE. The second one, on the other hand will allow to answer in a strategic guide style applicable in most situations, including most probably the single-instance you invasion... Uh, I mean envision :p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-10-29T15:23:17.267" LastActivityDate="2021-10-29T15:23:17.267" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8509" CreationDate="2021-10-25T23:44:52.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, you can't&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I apologize for stating this. You're treating an invasion as if it were a tool. A gun is a tool. A truck is a tool. An invasion is &lt;em&gt;a plan.&lt;/em&gt; A specific plan that cannot be intrinsically generalized the way a tool can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, designing an invasion requires telling a story because it's unique to the circumstances of a specific situation. You can't dust an &amp;quot;invasion&amp;quot; off and re-use it anywhere. (If you could, it's a lousy plan and won't succeed — unless your invasion plan is a wordy way of saying, &amp;quot;apply overwhelming force in every circumstance and in every way.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can dust of a gun and use it anywhere. You can use it underwater so long as you realize the efficiency will drop like a rock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But an invasion requires planning based on the unique circumstances of the intended goals. That's storybuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're delighted to help you design your tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clearly stated in the Help Center that we won't help you write your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can't ask about how to design an invasion anymore than you can ask about any other series of decisions made by any number of characters. Invasions, unlike tools, cannot exist independent of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T23:44:52.923" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8517" CreationDate="2021-10-27T04:10:17.090" Score="0" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what exact reason is my question &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/216079/what-are-the-minimum-historical-changes-that-would-permit-the-use-of-paratrooper&quot;&gt;What are the minimum historical changes that would permit the use of paratroopers at the beginning of World War I?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is considered opinion based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;For historical purposes (ignore if you want to answer or vote answers)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that is no different of the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/30758/what-single-change-would-have-given-the-best-chance-for-the-axis-to-win-world-wa?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=1%7C277.1988&quot;&gt;What single change would have given the best chance for the Axis to win World War 2?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90994" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-11-03T16:51:10.117" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T16:51:10.117" Title="For what exact reason is my question is considered opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8514" CreationDate="2021-10-27T07:17:11.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply said, you can't take a question posted in 2015 and use it as a comparison with today, 6 years later: the community acceptance and standards evolve over time, so you should refer to more recent examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the question you mention has 43 answers, which is a pretty large number for worldbuilding standard, strongly suggesting that it is also opinion based like yours: there are way more opinions than facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-10-27T07:33:04.993" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T07:33:04.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8523" CreationDate="2021-10-27T18:11:24.883" Score="10" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: It seems that my reading of the meta post linked was incorrect, we aren't able to change the text in  the way proposed, alas.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the reopen review queue we often deal with questions which have been closed as opinion-based, the notice reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.&#xA;This will help others answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, from the queue itself, the wording is slightly different, but the requirement to be answered with &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot; is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I suddenly realised that they weren't the criteria I encountered quite a bit as a close reason - opinion-based, yes, but for the reason that no clear path to a &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; was specified.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot; might be fine for many (even a majority) of questions, a substantial minority are not like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/balancing-magic-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balancing-magic-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balancing-magic-systems&lt;/a&gt;  such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201525/how-would-i-justify-keeping-most-magic-away-from-the-general-public-if-it-is-tec&quot;&gt;How Would I Justify Keeping Most Magic Away from the General Public if it is Technically Learnable by Everyone?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/196059/how-do-i-nerf-a-magic-system-empowered-by-emotion&quot;&gt;How do I nerf a magic system empowered by emotion?&lt;/a&gt; seem to need a notice which jars less with the sense of what the question needs to be made on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording might be changed to something more general and fitting like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question to include sufficient criteria so answers can be&#xA;objectively ranked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191981/what-about-site-specific-post-notices&quot;&gt;suggestion on main meta&lt;/a&gt;, I'm asking for opinions, thoughts, better wording suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastEditorUserId="55743" LastEditDate="2021-10-30T08:28:58.480" LastActivityDate="2021-11-06T15:32:36.803" Title="Opinion-based close text, should we customize it?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|opinion-based|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8514" CreationDate="2021-10-27T18:32:08.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because your question is indeed opinion-based&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, that didn't help much, so I'll try to explain your case in detail :p. Asking what historical changes should be made to allow something is most likely to lead to discussions, which is ill-fit in a Question and Answer format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is why it's so prone to discussions? It's because it's already hard to predict election results (even with preliminary opinion polls) of the next year or the outcome of a war in the next two or three years, it's even harder to predict what will lead to an alternative history where air technology has matured enough to include paratroopers in the militaries's arsenal. It's because the slightest change to reach your objectives can alter the whole timeline down the line, even possibly preventing the WWI or changing their main actors in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These predictions are too wild, as shown with the assumptions you made (taking on the French Parlement and end the war in 1 week, for instance). I don't tell they're necessary wrong; I tell the level of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chaos&lt;/a&gt; is so high that we can't know which timeline we should take to reach the outcome you're aiming for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us to mostly conjectures and an inability to scale how minimal a change is to ensures no other thing gets wiped out in the hi-storyline. This inability to tell which answer is better and the high presence of conjectures (which almost always give birth to discussions) means it's most likely based on opinions :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T18:32:08.837" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8509" CreationDate="2021-10-27T19:30:04.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My position is: 'When in doubt check the official rules'. Invasions are events, so let's take a look at the official rules pertaining to the events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of the WB.SE is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, &lt;em&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/em&gt;. Links in the description below will take you to good example questions or more background information on the topic linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a system, event or element of the world is causing you problems we are here to help. If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site, though we often have such discussions in Worldbuilding Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules and guidelines applicable specifically to questions about events are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General guidelines for all questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable: &lt;strong&gt;What&lt;/strong&gt; problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include context: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you want to get there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. &lt;strong&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt; can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should include research: What ideas have you considered, or what information have you already looked at or failed to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep in mind the following when asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2661/finding-a-more-objective-way-to-identify-questions-that-are-too-broad&quot;&gt;actions or events&lt;/a&gt; in your world&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Events: Questions need to include the setting/situation and the event or, the result you are trying to get to and the setting/situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked post suggests these models for questions about events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or in plain English:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT : &amp;quot;What happens if I do&#xA;this?&amp;quot; (Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have RESULT and CHANGE, give me START : &amp;quot;How was it before?&amp;quot; (Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have START and RESULT, give me CHANGE : &amp;quot;How would I cause this?&amp;quot;&#xA;(Good)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other combinations are not mentioned: having only one of these and&#xA;asking for the other two is always too broad. It's typical of unclear&#xA;or incomplete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other possibilities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have either START or RESULT : &amp;quot;Is this plausible?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking information about something specific can be on-topic as&#xA;reality-check but can sometimes lack basic research. A lot of&#xA;questions asking about a good concept but with no tomorrow falls into&#xA;this category&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3090/78906&quot;&gt;In their answer to this post&lt;/a&gt;, Green suggests adding a WHERE clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where Clause&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all we need to add here is a WHERE (condition) clause that specifies constraints on the scope of the answer.  &amp;quot;Within&amp;quot; is another&#xA;word that could be used in place of &amp;quot;where&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and CHANGE, give me RESULT within CONSTRAINTS on START&#xA;and CHANGE: &amp;quot;What happens if I do this within this specific context?&amp;quot;&#xA;(Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have RESULT and CHANGE, give me START within CONSTRAINTS on RESULT&#xA;and CHANGE: &amp;quot;How was it before?&amp;quot; (Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have START and RESULT, give me CHANGE within CONSTRAINTS on START&#xA;and RESULT: &amp;quot;How would I cause this?&amp;quot; (Better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggested WHERE clause seems to be reasonable considering that there are guidelines for questions to be specific and contain restrictions/requirements and also this explanation from '&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Another important rule is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Please also consider this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive.&lt;/strong&gt; What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more detail, read about our &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;guidelines for great subjective questions&lt;/a&gt; and blog post about how &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;real questions have answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the official rules, questions about invasions (invasions are events) are on-topic and should not be closed as long as they comply with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not ask what a character (be it an individual or organisation) should do;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specific;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include context;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include any 2 of these 3 aspects of an event: Start, change, result;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a set of restrictions/requirements;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are reasonably scoped (not too broad);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are practical and based on problems that the questioner is facing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the questions are subjective, they must meet the criteria of good and constructive subjective questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the official rules do not talk about the reuse value of the questions or the answers. There is no requirement for questions to deal only with problems that can be applied to other worlds, settings, characters, etc. The requirement is to ask questions that are based on the problems that the questioner is facing (does not say how obscure, uninteresting, or unique those problems are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also see how the scope is limited: Every aspect of the world is on-topic as long as it is not about what a character should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, the part that creates the most confusion is 'what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between 'should' and 'can'. While the former deals with specific actions and decisions, the latter is about capabilities, opportunities, possibilities, and available choices. Actions are something that characters choose (or the author chooses for them). Possibilities, opportunities, and available choices, on the other hand, are determined by the world and its systems rather than characters&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a question like 'Should country X attack city A?' (without any specifics, just this question) is off-topic. However, a question like 'Does country X have a capability to attack city A given these specifics?' should be on-topic (albeit, there is a risk that this kind of question is too broad or does not contain enough information to be answerable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It is possible to make an argument that capabilities, possibilities, opportunities, and available choices also depend on characters. It is true to some extent. However, characters influence all of those in a systemic way and characters, in this case, do not function as individuals but rather as representatives of a class with specific traits. All of these allow us to establish causal relationships and build predictable systems where characters are just some of many elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T19:30:04.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2021-10-28T01:42:57.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. This will help others answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur about &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot; being just slightly inappropriate in this forum! Even a lot of science-based questions really end up being magic in a disguise, and the answers end up opinion based. But that's the kind of forum this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree that a change to the close rationale wording might be in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question to include sufficient criteria so answers can be objectively ranked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Tortelina says, I'm not too fond of the term &amp;quot;ranking&amp;quot; either. Ranking seems to be a function of votes which are obviously a function of readers opinion. Hmm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update the question to include sufficient criteria so that respondents are limited in the scope of their answers. This will help reduce wildly speculative answers and increase the likelihood of reasoned and creative answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T01:42:57.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2021-10-29T14:06:21.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, but not for the reasons you might think&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opinion-based VTC reason is a network-wide close reason. It can't be customized on a per-Stack basis. Yes, SE could change the code to permit it to happen, but that would compromise one of SE's fundamental beliefs: that all Stacks should operate in basically the same way. They don't want Stacks to become unique (and, from a programming and an organizational point of view, I don't blame them.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been fighting the Opinion-Based problem for a very long time. And it will be with us for a very long time. We've tried re-defining what &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; means on this Stack and we've tried simply taking it at its word. You can't even just ignore it because it exists and people &amp;quot;not in the know&amp;quot; will (rightfully) use it to close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we left with? Taking a deep breath and dealing with it. Generally speaking, the best advice you can give to any querent whose question even vaguely appears to be opinion-based is to ask them to explain how they'll judge a best answer. If they can't, the query is opinion-based by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a partial list of the questions I've asked on the subject (just me... imagine how many others there are...). You'll notice that yours is a duplicate of one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5991/40609&quot;&gt;Magic is primarily opinion-based by definition, so what does a POB VTC mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6240/40609&quot;&gt;Is it possible to change the descriptive text for the POB selection?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6936/40609&quot;&gt;Phrasing questions such that answers can be objectively voted upon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6436/40609&quot;&gt;Idea Refinement: Clarification and Examples of VTC Reasons for New Users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6654/40609&quot;&gt;How should we deal with inherently open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8398/40609&quot;&gt;How to make a &amp;quot;Fishing for Ideas&amp;quot; question fit on Worldbuilding Main&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;narrative necessity&amp;quot; and how does it apply to worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5621/40609&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2021-10-29T14:06:21.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8528" CreationDate="2021-10-30T22:11:05.487" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there's been yet another case of a certain unpleasant situation I myself experienced to an extent shortly after joining WBSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, it all begins when an inadequate question is asked and closed due to its problems, but the closure occurs only after an answer has already been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, as of now, still inadequate and thus to be reopened it needs to be edited to fix the problems it has. The big issue here comes from the fact that, since it already has answers, which were written with the still inadequate question in mind, it can't make any edits that would invalidate the answer. This means that, for as long as the answer remains, the question essentially cannot be fixed since any edits that would solve the original problems will be rolled back as to not to invalidate the already existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the presence of the answer also means that the question can't be deleted by the original poster before they can ask a new one, and even if they could, unless they managed to make this new question look drastically different, it could and likely would be framed as a duplicate (if the question is still around) or even as an attempt to bypass the closure if they did manage to delete the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;in the situation that a user has asked a question that does not originally conform to the rules, but has already received answers that prevent them from making the necessary adjustments, how should said user solve the problem?&lt;/strong&gt; Should they flag the question and hope it's deleted? Perhaps ask any users who have answered the question to delete their posts in order to allow for the fixes to be made? Should they simply give up on asking about the topic they wanted help with altogether because their question fell victim to this cycle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason I'm asking this is because the most recent case I've seen hasn't been the only recent case I noticed, with a second, slightly older case in which the situation was thankfully solved, but only because the user who had answered the originally inadequate question was kind enough to adequate their answer to conform to the clarifying edits made by the OP (edits which, as a matter of fact, had been rolled back for the very reason that clarifying the problem invalidated the original answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8134/disputing-a-policy-question-edits-cannot-invalidate-answers&quot;&gt;disputing the policy&lt;/a&gt;, as I understand both the effort some users put into their answers and the importance of preventing scenarios in which one can essentially ask a new question by editing an old post at any moment (even if I do believe exceptions to this rule should be available, especially for certain specific loophole problems such as this one). I'm simply seeking a potential best course of action for people (particularly new users unaccustomed with the SE's rules) who happen to fall in such a situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73198" LastEditorUserId="73198" LastEditDate="2021-10-30T22:26:58.110" LastActivityDate="2021-11-01T01:55:09.740" Title="About Inadequate questions which already have answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8527" CreationDate="2021-10-31T04:06:59.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Difficult to See the Dark Side is&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the days of £sd, a penny of prevention worths a pound of cure...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  It can't be iterated strongly enough that the surest and sovereignest cure for the dreaded pox of &lt;em&gt;query inadequacy&lt;/em&gt; is to take the time to craft as good a question as one possibly can. This means we like questions that are not casual throw-aways. The following simple guide can be used to prevent, not only inadequate queries but also a whole range of other issues and situations before they ever become problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you aren't really sure how to write a good question, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;! And then check out the Meta discussions. A lot of problems can be resolved by using these resources to help with your question writing skills.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Come up with a succinct &amp;amp; focused question that addresses a single worldbuilding issue or problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set up and format your query well. You don't need to explain a planet's whole geological history or describe the entire natural history of the &lt;em&gt;inverse earthworm&lt;/em&gt; in order to ask a question. Your introduction should have just enough detail for respondents to address the problem you're experiencing. It's nice if you separate your question &amp;amp; bold it so respondents can focus on it. You should make a section that lists only key considerations &amp;amp; pertinent factors that you think are most important to be addressed in an answer. Your final section should relate by what standard you'll consider a response to be outstanding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ABCs &amp;amp; 123s!&lt;/em&gt;  are keys to any form of written communication. Stack Exchange's &amp;quot;preferred language&amp;quot; is English. Do your best to write in the best English you can. Use a dictionary. Use a spell checker. Check your arithmetic. Edit your question twice. When you think you're done, read the preview panel and make sure your query is as presentable as you can make it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time to pay the piper!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  So far so good! But what if you didn't follow the above advice? Now it's time to pay for the proverbial pound of cure! If I were in such a situation, these are the actions I'd take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd first consider how bad the original query was compared to my bright &amp;amp; shiny edit. If I think I can get away with it, I'd just post the new question. Maybe wait a fortnight until the old question drops out of view a bit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the likelihood of being closed as a duplicate seems very high, the next step is to write a comment under the answer, requesting that the respondent delete their answer with an explanation of what's going on. If it looks like the answer might have good potential for your rewritten query, let the respondent know to copy it as a basis for their new answer. Then, if they delete the answer, I'd delete the old question &amp;amp; ask the new one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third step is to remind the respondent, after a few days of ignoring you, to please delete the answer because you're in the process of rewriting the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then, the fourth step is to flag the answer. As SPAM, as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot;. The last one allows you to write your reason why the query needs to be deleted. Refer the Mod to this Meta discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, the fifth step is to flag your own query as &amp;quot;in need of improvement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot;. Again, explain why you made the request and link to this discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barring those actions, there's really no other SE legal remedy. You could always try to blank the bum answer out; you could try to blank your own question out as well. Those will &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; get rolled back as &amp;quot;vandalism&amp;quot;. Though I'd argue that answering a bad question (especially one that is in the close queue) is a kind of vandalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all else fails, you could simply write the new question, replace the old one with it and submit for reopening. It's entirely possible that it could be reopened without anyone checking to see if the answer is affected. If a Mod rolls it back, you could roll back the rollback with a nice note to the Mod that you've already gone through all the steps and have been stonewalled and that you're just desperate to publish a proper edit of your original question and you don't have any other options!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-11-01T01:55:09.740" LastActivityDate="2021-11-01T01:55:09.740" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8530" CreationDate="2021-10-31T17:23:46.580" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8526/90994&quot;&gt;template&lt;/a&gt; in the sandbox. that is a Justification of X in my world question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So @JoinJBHonCodidact said me that my template was too story-based, I disagree in several ways but just one is important to note here. And it is that if my question is off-topic all the justification of why X in my world are all off-topic. This includes, but is no exclusive to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121119/reason-why-the-dystopian-government-would-dress-its-policemen-in-civilian-clothi&quot;&gt;Reason why the dystopian government would dress its policemen in civilian clothing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/216492/is-there-any-usage-for-a-sea-navy-in-a-sci-fi-universe-in-which-most-planets-are&quot;&gt;Is there any usage for a sea navy in a sci fi universe in which most planets are controlled by one government?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in total are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=Justification+is%3Aquestion+closed%3Ano+locked%3Ano+duplicate%3Ano+migrated%3Ano&quot;&gt;132 more unpunisheed in anyway questions&lt;/a&gt; in this site, about justification of X in my world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are the justificationof X in my world questions off-topic (if no, then there is some problem with my template)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90994" LastEditorUserId="90994" LastEditDate="2021-10-31T21:37:08.827" LastActivityDate="2021-11-01T15:46:28.243" Title="Are justification questions off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|rules|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8529" CreationDate="2021-10-31T21:03:59.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there's nothing explicitly wrong with asking how to justify something, however a lot of questions asking for justification of x aren't a good fit for other reasons. It's similar to how questions asking &amp;quot;how to I program x?&amp;quot; are not well received on S.O They show no effort, and are generally very broad, ill defined, and are asking the answerers to do all the work. To quote from the help center if you're looking for discussion or brainstorming then this site probably isn't for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are normally many justifications for a thing. This leads to questions with many valid answers which makes them too broad for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of asking for any justification for a thing. Ask yourself why you can't come up with a justification for X on your own. What unknowns are there that you don't have answers to that prevent you from justifying X? Ask us for help with solving that particular smaller problem instead. Such a question will be clearer, more specific and have fewer valid answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-11-01T15:46:28.243" LastActivityDate="2021-11-01T15:46:28.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-03T20:52:25.800" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was writing a question about working with iron, and noticed that there seemed to be quite a lot of tags relating to the topic, some of which seemed conflicting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metals&lt;/a&gt; (147)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metalworking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metalworking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metalworking&lt;/a&gt; (56)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forging&lt;/a&gt; (7)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/iron&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;iron&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;iron&lt;/a&gt; (1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metalworking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metalworking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metalworking&lt;/a&gt; seems to conflict with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forging&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metals&lt;/a&gt; seems to be a superset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/iron&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;iron&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;iron&lt;/a&gt;, which has only one question and seems unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the score needed in any of these tags to suggest synonyms (and probably wouldn't do so without asking on meta anyway), but I think they could probably use some cleaning up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest keeping &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metals&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metalworking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metalworking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metalworking&lt;/a&gt;, making &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forging&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of the latter, and getting rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/iron&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;iron&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;iron&lt;/a&gt;. It seems &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forging&lt;/a&gt; is almost always used with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metalworking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metalworking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metalworking&lt;/a&gt; anyway, and I don't see it adding too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that should be cleaned up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49656" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T22:09:48.117" Title="Four similar tags relating to metalworking" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8531" CreationDate="2021-11-03T21:41:39.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this up. Consolidating them as you've said makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's good housekeeping, merging two minor tags into their parent tags. To catastrophize for a second, if we don't we run the risk of separate minor tags for every metal and alloy, plus every metalworking technique. That would create a lot of noise for little value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we find ourselves in a circumstance where we need to make those distinctions then we can recreate the tags when they are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're at it we should remove the redundant &lt;code&gt;tag&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2021-11-03T22:09:48.117" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T22:09:48.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6276" CreationDate="2021-11-04T12:24:18.727" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Molot brought up a point that I found deeply flawed and so I am moving the ideas here to better address why I have a concern over that policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posted the commentary below to provide context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly the &amp;quot;No longer needed&amp;quot; reason should ONLY be used if the OP being commented on addressed the comment. However, having one of my own comments deleted using that flag sometimes feels like an act of suppression against opposing viewpoints so that they post can continue to get positive/negative votes without others seeing the comment that would otherwise invalidate it. – mkinson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@mkinson if OP is not going to use your comment, then it is no longer needed. Stack is not a discussion forum. If you have an opposite view about the answer, what you really should do is to post your answer, and downvote the one you think is wrong. With questions, close votes, downvotes and flags, whatever appropriate, are way to go. Comments are not for presenting your viewpoint, so if you feel deleting comments oppresses your viewpoint, then you are using them wrong in the first place. Use them only to improve post you are commenting on, please. –     Mołot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Molot Doesn't that go counter to the idea that people want a comment when a post is down-voted? If a moderator removes a comment to a post and that comment addresses why the post was down-voted I am certain the poster would appreciate seeing it. – mkinson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@mkinson No. If reason for downvote is something OP can and might want to fix, then comment is a good thing. But OP is free to ignore it, and then comment no longer serves any purpose (again: not a forum!) and should be removed, because it is no longer needed for anything, go write your own answer if you can do better. Trying to force your idea into someone else's post is a bad form. –  Mołot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to Questions should use factual evidence when possible, and clearly stated. However, there are times when someone’s view on a “fact” can be shaped by their own beliefs and internal bias, and because of that the presentation of that “fact” is flawed. The suggestion that the comments are not for presenting a viewpoint and that addressing those flaws should be handled within your own post has two major setbacks. The first is that your post will likely get flagged as off topic, and the second is that a post with incorrect information is allowed to continue presenting itself as factual when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments should absolutely address posts directly with opposing viewpoints, because that’s how we are able to promote critical thinking in others who are reading the post for the first time. If you block opposing viewpoints because the comment section is “not a forum” then you’re effectively suppressing dissent and promoting opinion over fact, which fundamentally goes against the spirit of why this site was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32453" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T12:24:18.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-05T14:21:52.120" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the post for the worldbuilding stack exchange background, there was a snippet about potential merchandise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oZXG2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oZXG2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding poster, t-shirt, and coffee mug&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anywhere to actually buy the merchandise shown above or was the statement more of a hypothetical one? Just curious. Sorry for this being brief, but I couldn't find any other questions which answerd it so here I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83401" LastActivityDate="2021-11-05T14:21:52.120" Title="Is there actually any World-Building stack-exchange-merchandise or was when it was stated more of a hypothetical statement?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2021-11-06T15:25:21.603" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leave VTC comment - explaining how the close reason applied specifically to its question, and what could be improved fixed or just point what a problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not some general copy-paste VTC reason/comment but pointing at flaws of this specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And demand from others for such VTC's be left - ideally at least one VTC comment should be present on q's closed for any reason explaining what that reason is in specific to this q terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't be stressed enough, again - it should not be some general reasons and a link to the tour page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for open - if you see substantial edits made, just hit open - let put the q to the second round of evaluation from people this q is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a small edit and you aren't an expert on the topic, press skip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is small edit or any edit and you are an expert but can't invest time - press skip or open - can't tell which one then pray to gods of chaos 50/50&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Press keep closed only in one case - you are ready to invest significant time for evaluation, as with regular questions which may take you way more than 10-30 seconds to come to a conclusion it should be closed. All that when you are the expert on the topic this question is about - in all other cases your action open or skip. Open is preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastEditorUserId="20315" LastEditDate="2021-11-06T15:32:36.803" LastActivityDate="2021-11-06T15:32:36.803" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-16T22:01:39.260" Score="6" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Introduction:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB.SE has a SE mandated format; the community has determined that certain rules need to apply to the asking and answering of questions; the community has in place certain policies &amp;amp; practices designed to make the forum an excellent place to ask and answer questions. One of these practices recently came under scrutiny and I thought it a good idea to query the community in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people think this is yet another policy discussion. Some people think this is a call to create yet another rule. It is not. This is a question about a particular kind of practice that a number of community members engage in. It is essentially a &amp;quot;yea or nay&amp;quot; question, a non-binding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a way of moderating a relatively large &amp;amp; active creative forum, one of the tools every member has is to make use of the comments below each query and each response. Mostly comments are used to ask for clarification or to provide updated information so that an edit can be made to improve a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a post is published untimely: perhaps it's a question that wasn't well thought out or maybe a question that should have been asked elsewhere; maybe it is a response that doesn't really answer the question or that is spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;general practice&lt;/em&gt; has always seemed to be to remind both the specific poster and the rest of the community that a) there is a problem with the post and b) not to make matters worse until the problems can be sorted out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Specific Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is already community practice to not answer &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; questions -- those that need to be edited for any of a variety reasons that I won't go into at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4968/please-dont-answer-and-or-upvote-bad-questions-yet&quot;&gt;Please Don't answer and/or upvote “bad” questions (yet)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8484/how-do-we-know-if-a-question-is-good-enough-for-us-to-be-allowed-to-answer-it/8490#8490&quot;&gt;How do we know if a question is &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; for us to be ALLOWED to answer it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5914/what-to-do-about-trivial-questions&quot;&gt;What to do about trivial questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/217483/ptsd-from-death-by-knife&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about PTSD after being attacked by knife, I asked the single respondent (and by extension, the community) to not answer questions that obviously need some work. In retrospect, there are a number of potential issues with the question. I happen to have chosen two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Meta discussion asks to gauge the appropriateness specifically of reminding community members of our policy not to answer poorly worded questions in the context of our more generally established community practice of reminding community members to be mindful of other WB rules, policies &amp;amp; best practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Points in Favour:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a pro rogationem, specifically to the point of timely closing of bad questions and being consistent with community policies, I'd like to quote one of sphennings's comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That's a compelling argument for swiftly closing questions. Ideally a question should be closed before anyone answers it. We should be consistent with our policies on this site. If we didn't close question just because they were popular new users would get mixed signals about what makes a good question on this site. –&#xA;sphennings  Oct 25 '17 at 22:09&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would take this to mean that the ideal situation is one where a post of questionable quality is closed quickly, before any responses can be made, in order to allow the OP to edit it. I would also take this to mean that, in order for this to happen, the community needs to be aware of rules &amp;amp; policies and needs to exercise some self-restraint when it comes to these kinds of questions; and by extension, occasional reminders are useful in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point in favour is to be found in the comment to Ash's response below. I noted that one of the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95972/could-a-sedentary-organism-develop-intelligence-or-even-sentience&quot;&gt;his question&lt;/a&gt; actually does the same fundamental thing: presents a reminder to community members to be mindful of WB norms and practices before engaging in some action, in this case, close voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reminder to Close-Voters: Please explain why you are voting to close so that the OP can fix the problems that you see. He can't fix them if he is not aware of them. Personally I think this is a reasonable question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this to mean that the commenter assessed the situation and found it to be problematic; and also that the commenter thought the best response would be to issue a reminder of how close voting ought to work in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially what it says on the box: &lt;strong&gt;following from the quoted policy and practice: is it fair to remind people who have answered these questions to not answer questions like this in future or not as a matter of general practice?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. In other words, we often &lt;em&gt;gently&lt;/em&gt; remind others to pay heed to this or that forum rule or policy. Since this is not a rule or policy proposal, I say nothing about whether or not everyone must comply; I say nothing about goals or numbers or any kind of punitive action. But I do think it's fair to issue this kind of reminder, since we make other similar reminders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-12-01T23:24:00.297" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T14:30:46.153" Title="Is it Fair to Encourage People to NOT Answer Questions that Need to be Closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|vote-to-close|policy|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-16T23:57:56.340" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's not become the Thought Police.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the site we are let's start with a quote from Babylon 5 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(if that predates Bab5 please let me know - I'd be interested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common sense : Every single person on the site is going to have completely different interpretations of when a question is &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; or even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it needs &amp;quot;fixing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or for that matter how long a reasonable time to wait is.  What if there are no immediate objections ? Do they wait five minutes ?  An hour ?  A day ?  A week ?  When is it &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;approved&amp;quot; to answer ?  It's nonsense to suggest waiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone on the site stands in &amp;quot;Grey&amp;quot; and not even the same grey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;following from our policy of not answering queries that, for any reaso n, look like they need to be fixed, should we encourage people who have answered these questions to not to answer questions like this in future or not as a matter of general practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's not act like thought police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are not only entitled to answer it before it is closed, they're entitled to &lt;em&gt;disagree&lt;/em&gt; with the closure.  They can (and sometimes do) vote to reopen questions deemed &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;.  It's a democracy.  They can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People answer in good faith.  This daft idea means we're treating them like rule breakers who need to be publically berated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We even do get and do answer questions on Meta asking for explanations of why questions were closed.  And sometimes, horror and shock, we actually find the closures was possibly &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;.  The system isn't perfect !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, let's not irritate people for giving one of the two things that the site needs : answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We come here to help people.  The proposal punishes people (annoys them) for trying to do just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  Just No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules are not some crystal clear code that anyone can follow.  The nature of this site means that such a rule set is impossible.  We'll always have different people making different interpretations of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No harm is caused by answers to questions subsequently closed.  None.  They'll hardly even dent server space usage or search times.  They might even help people with &lt;em&gt;a similar problem&lt;/em&gt; and stop them having to post a new question.  They may actually be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, No.  Let's leave them alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastEditorUserId="32391" LastEditDate="2021-11-17T00:49:48.993" LastActivityDate="2021-11-17T00:49:48.993" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-17T15:40:31.330" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Folks,&#xA;It would surprise me no end if any of you gave a damn, but I've decided to quite posting on Worldbuilding at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latest attempt to make a rule where we're going to persecute (oh, sorry, &amp;quot;encourage&amp;quot;) people who answer questions which are &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; closed is just so obnoxious to me that if the community is so daft or apathetic as to let it take root I see no purpose in being here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goodbye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the question : Do any of you give a damn that your site now plans to punish (or &amp;quot;encourage&amp;quot; as the proposer puts it) people for posting answers later deemed inappropriate by a small number of people - just five people can close a post ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fault : what five people decide is a bad post.&#xA;The &amp;quot;cure&amp;quot; : Annoy people who answered before the five people decided to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thought police have arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to think alike and &lt;em&gt;anticipate&lt;/em&gt; what these five people will do &lt;em&gt;in advance&lt;/em&gt; and we're not supposed to do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; (like post an answer) until those five people are happy.  That's what this new rule would mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You like being told you're doing something wrong by not agreeing with a close vote before it's done : stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32391" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T02:11:15.383" Title="Goodbye - the thought police are here" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8543" CreationDate="2021-11-17T17:42:35.453" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to say a couple of things, all with my mod hat off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you've written some great answers over the years, and I will certainly be sad to see you go, if you do choose that. It's of course completely your prerogative, although I would perhaps suggest taking some time to cool off and think it over. That said, taking a break from a site is both normal and healthy - I've done it myself - and you'll certainly be welcome back if you just temporarily step away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second - on meta, I've seen some ideas I really like, and some ideas I very much dislike. Some have gone on to be site policy, and others have been firmly rejected. I haven't had much time to parse this one to the extent it deserves, so I'm not sure which bin I would personally put it in, and I don't know what will end up happening. That said, I see it currently has 51 views and a score of +1/-1, which isn't exactly a rousing endorsement by the community. Maybe it'll be adopted, and maybe it won't - like I said, I don't know where I stand on it and don't want to make a knee-jerk response. But it hasn't gotten off to a roaring start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, I definitely want to encourage you to just take a moment and reconsider, if you want, knowing that this honestly might not be adopted - particularly if others feel the same way you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2021-11-17T17:42:35.453" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8543" CreationDate="2021-11-17T22:35:56.917" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Wow.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, since it was our quite civil discussion about a query that prompted me to post a Meta question, I think it's only fair that I respond to your rather bizarre rant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thought Police // persecute // obnoxious // daft // apathetic // punish // The thought police have arrived. // We have to think alike // You like being told&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty clear that you didn't read my question and it's even clearer that you didn't understand it. But since you decided to spew all over the issue, here's what you missed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thought Police&amp;quot; --- that's your own skewed interpretation based on absolutely no facts or events that transpired during our conversation. Our whole conversation is quoted in my Meta question so you can review (though might have edited some typos).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Persecute&amp;quot; and all that --- where did you get this from? We disagreed about a matter of best practice. If you think I'm persecuting you, then I can't really help you with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Have to think alike&amp;quot; --- are you sure you're not complaining about a different conversation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Telling people what to do&amp;quot; --- In point of fact, the only person who told  anybody what to do in all this nonsense turns out to be YOU! Yeah, you told me &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;You should not (IMO) be telling people not to answer questions...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Your objection was totally fair and that is why I engaged you in conversation in the first place! I thought your objection was important enough (to me at least) that I wanted to gauge the thoughts of other folks on this practice! But where did I actually tell you what to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It it simply my practice (and others', because I've been mildly chastised for doing the same thing!) and in light of your legitimate reaction, I thought I'd bring it to the Community to see what others think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, you've misinterpreted my question so horrifically that I can only assume your intent is malicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just to clarify for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. I AM NOT PROPOSING A NEW RULE!!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. I AM NOT DISCUSSING A NEW POLICY!!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. I AM NOT DISCUSSING AN OLD POLICY!!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. I AM NOT FORCING YOU TO EITHER DO OR NOT DO ANYTHING!!!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. I AM NOT TELLING YOU HOW YOU SHOULD THINK!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6. I AM NOT PERSECUTING YOU, PUNISHING YOU, OR INSISTING THAT YOU THINK LIKE I DO!!!!!!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;7. IF THIS EVER GOT PROPOSED AS A POLICY OR A RULE, I WILL ARGUE AGAINST IT!!!!!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-11-18T02:11:15.383" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T02:11:15.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-18T04:28:29.133" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a user of this site, and as a moderator, I've seen a number of questions that received close votes for being 'bad', that to me as a subject matter expert in certain areas were eminently reasonable and well-asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just because people are VTCing or even downvoting doesn't mean that the question is bad... just that certain members thought it was bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would encourage people who think that a question is bad to vote and leave comments requesting whatever information they believe is missing or to say why they don't think that it can reasonably be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if another member thinks that the question is good, there's no reason why they can't answer it, regardless of the comments or downvotes.  Maybe they know something that the rest of us don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it's pretty reasonable to say that a truly bad question will be rapidly downvoted and/or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a question that was downvoted and VTCd, I offer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/38982/75&quot;&gt;What are the evolutionary factors that could create a species that looks like E.T.?&lt;/a&gt;.  It was VTCd as Too broad, and received one downvote, but after my comments and answer, ultimately wasn't closed, and received some upvotes.  As I wasn't a moderator at the time, it wasn't my red diamond which influenced people either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2021-11-18T20:57:56.890" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T20:57:56.890" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-18T08:14:27.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been around for a number of years now and one thing that I've noticed is that what constitutes an acceptable question is an amorphous thing. Previously perfectly acceptable questions with hundreds of votes are being closed by the new generation of users for one reason or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, we should not attempt to discourage people from answering questions they think are answerable outside the existing mechanics. Questions are either open or they are closed and can be answered or not accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T08:14:27.110" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3300" CreationDate="2021-11-19T15:59:25.127" Score="-2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix your question to the guidelines of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take out more of the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add &lt;em&gt;crucial&lt;/em&gt; information that would affect the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91489" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T15:59:25.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-22T11:18:52.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got to chime with Monty on this one, I've had at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/95972/40408&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt; closed because the people who saw it first just didn't understand it and thought I hadn't included the information necessary for it to be answered. Then when I came back a couple of days later the question had been reopened, has two excellent answers and a note from the mods saying that I'd done a good job and gently reminding people that &amp;quot;I can't answer this&amp;quot; is not the same as &amp;quot;this question is bad&amp;quot;. I've been on the other side too and seen questions on the closure list that look bad to a lot of people but make sense to me because I have the specialist knowledge base. That's not to say there aren't questions that clearly don't warrant the effort but that's the choice of people who answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40408" LastEditorUserId="40408" LastEditDate="2021-11-23T05:41:29.183" LastActivityDate="2021-11-23T05:41:29.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-22T21:32:18.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TL;DR : Jump to the last paragraph for the conclusion and practical cases. But don't forget to breathe, skipping things can be a sign of having a constant turning around and upon you ♪. Or that I'm boring, as well&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to take things the other way round, so here's the path I take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the core question in the question's body : &lt;strong&gt;Should&lt;/strong&gt; you ask people to avoid answering bad questions? It goes beyond what people think in reaction to the question, and it's easy to miss a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The premise&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simple to understand, but it's harder to feel it, so let's get back to basics! From the help center, the section &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;how do I write a good answer&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which [are unclear, opinion-based, duplicates, need focus, off-topic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an explicit, official ruling, and so should be respected. To be followed, it needs to be known and recalled from time to time. As this recurring nice comment shows, having a single paragraph lost in a help center with &amp;gt; 20 sections doesn't seem to be enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Wordbuilding SE! You may want to take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and peruse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, in order to become better acquainted with the goals and expectations of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198129/how-would-a-low-tech-city-look-like&quot;&gt;Welcoming and ack-knowledging, by AlexP&lt;/a&gt; (though there are many, many others examples reminding people to reach for the help-center).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, yes, to ensure people follow this rule, we should remind people to not answer badly written questions. Or should we?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Epic battle of viewpoints!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A point that seems to stand amongst people that disagree with this previous guideline is that answerers spend some of their free time to help others, so telling them to not answer will be badly received, in all cases. It's about the same thing as yelling at the man who hands you the wrong item from a shelf you couldn't reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But most importantly, the issue is that one user thinks a question should be closed, while another in all honesty doesn't!&lt;/strong&gt; It usually happens when a question is in the quality's grey area. This makes it really hard to tell answerers they did something wrong—whether it's objectively true or not—since from their point of view they didn't. They don't understand, and unless they're painting happy little accidents daily, it's very likely to lead to some confusion, if not tough resistance. All for understandable and acceptable reasons from their point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only agree with the above points, and they have to be taken into consideration to avoid being inconsiderate towards others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So! To help recall this rule without striking at the answerer's feeling, let's remember three things:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. Answerers are not forced to post &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, and really importantly, because it's needed for the other points: people are not forced to answer &lt;strong&gt;right now&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's an ongoing debate on a question you wish to answer, you can just wait a little to see where it goes. After all, closure should happen quickly! Or, if you're more invested, talk it out to make your point before answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of users mentioning the reasons they're voting for a question to be closed. But, interestingly, I see much fewer people answering soon-to-become closed questions telling why &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; found the question's quality to be high enough to answer. As much as everybody wants as few closed questions as possible, it's not on the close-voters side to give counter-arguments to their closure reasons. At best, they can give directions to improve the question. Defending the question is a task better suited for the ones who thought it worth answering!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. The asker's question is burdened by the answerer's action&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's not forget the negative aspect of answering questions without taking the time to think about the question.&lt;/strong&gt; By doing so, it often prevents further editing of the question when it gets closed. Questions whose purpose it is to help the asker. It makes it a lot harder to edit it while keeping the answer valid, and since the question has been posted, it makes it harder to post a new similar-looking one. It is especially true for newcomers who are more prone to write questions that need improvements, have a harder time improving them, and can get discouraged much more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore remember to whom the added weight belongs, and don't reverse the responsibility:&lt;/strong&gt; even if the asker didn't do things as expected, it's the answerer who's taking the responsibility of answering. And as such, the Help Center quite clearly points out how not answering bad questions might:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save yourself some frustration...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the answerer, save yourself the frustration of getting your work invalidated or be a burden to the asker. If you took the step to help, burdening the asker is not what you want, or so I guess. It's not to follow a silly rule that makes no sense, it's to save everyone from the trouble a question's stunlock can make. It's something that can be done to help people either delete and repost their question later or reopen them, both very lengthy processes that definitely need any help to be finished faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. The answerer can edit or help editing the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case the closure of a question is already on-going—and, most importantly, known—the answerer can and should edit the question. As per the Help Center, the same paragraph about not answering bad questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being closed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be done when the question runs the risk of getting struck by the close-hammers (plural, they usually don't act alone). Ideally you do it before you answer it. However, if you went a little too fast in answering before others judged it, it's always possible to improve the question to avoid closure, or help the asker if you fear that you might alter more than they want. Pick and peck, you could use your own answer to help them keep their question open (e.g. for &amp;quot;Lack of details/clarity&amp;quot;: am I right in my answer about the assumptions I made about your world? Can I add them to your question?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's all in the mindset that questions and answers are intertwined: you can't really correctly answer bad questions.&lt;/strong&gt; That's the key point of good answers, you need to have a clear, well-defined target to focus it. Otherwise you're most likely to miss what the asker wants or clumsily answering that you don't know where the focus lies! Soooo... It's as simple as improving bad questions before answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you should be an expert in the domain -if not a SE veteran-, it should be easier to spot the question's weaknesses and work on them. If you don't do this, you risk finding out that your answer doesn't match the new and actual question or didn't help that much. Frustration is then ensured. And if you realize there could be an issue with the question, defend it with the asker ️. Your answer is part of the question too, after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TL;DR people, here is your starting line!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are many methods and reasons for an answerer to help improve a question. And, if a question is improved to be considered as fit, cozy and nice, is there ever the need to keep people from answering it ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the key thing here: questions are not stuck in time, they can evolve through both the asker and others! And this flips the direction we should see things: it's not about not answering bad questions, it's about not having bad questions with answers. And with their knowledge and their point of view, the answerers are in one of the best spots to give a hand at that task!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In practice&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as you can remind people that answering bad questions can have nasty consequences, I'd advise to cooperate with answerers in improving the question, removing the need to recall that at all. If they don't understand why they should help, then remind them of the hassle they or the asker might run into—as a reason to do that, not as an action to avoid taking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to do that, you have to check one or two things beforehand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this question have a debate about closure?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By debate I mean at least a comment + a close vote (if you can see it), a comment + a negative vote, or several comments (counting comment upvotes). All of these should not be yours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there's an on-going debate, how many people are agreeing with the idea of a closure and how many are disagreeing? In other words, how obvious the outcome of the vote(s) to close is?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're the only one to think the question's not good enough to be answered, or overall it's so unclear that it should be closed, don't remind people to not answer bad questions. It would be a one-on-one opinion fight, where no-one will be the victor. Instead, wait a little until others approve your opinion or -if you're more invested- ask something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have some contradicting opinion on whether the question should be&#xA;closed or not: can you explain why you think this question&#xA;should be kept open and answered in its current state, as told in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt;? Or can you help improve on the points which have been raised?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's a debate, and it's really obvious (you're far from being the only one and there's no one opposing the closure or it's already been closed), then you can remind people of the risk they're taking. It's the only time I'd recall the issues, but for the purpose of inciting on lending an hand to the question. For instance for a question which needs details or focus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The question's currently undergoing a closure debate and it seems to lean towards a closure at the time I write this. It is generally not advised to answer a question under these circumstances, as&#xA;it could lead to some frustration to both the asker and yourself, as you might have missed what the asker wanted exactly. Can you help them to prevent the closure of their question before it happens/help reopening the question with them?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these efforts should be scaled relatively to the potential impact of answering bad questions: as small as a mouse . Don't go on a witch hunt and don't repeatedly remind the same person about improving questions, that's demanding too much from occasional or busy contributors and possibly seen as harassment. Also, not all questions can or will be salvaged by the author, so you might want to strike only at questions where the asker's investment is clearer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Don't remind every answerer either, we don't want a comment festival :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, don't ever order the answer's deletion or edition to &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; the asker: that's something that must come from the answerer themselves to avoid unnecessary frustration and arguments. As much as askers have the right to ask, answerers have the right to answer, both being the site's main purpose, after all. This goes along with knowing people might just not have the time right now for such work. Not having all answers on-point after the question's improvement is a sad possibility, but something no one really can do anything about, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-10-09T14:30:46.153" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T14:30:46.153" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7578" CreationDate="2021-11-23T12:51:30.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, as it has been said, this tag is used to test worlds which includes magic, monsters or something unusual in nature -that means also unusual in our world. So, a strict &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; is not possible, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;since reality doesn’t include magic, monsters or whatever, no one can predict what reality would be with it,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even if it did, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what we know about reality is never reality itself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; means more probably that you check that (the world) + (what you add in it, ie magic, monsters and so on) is coherent with the knowledge we have of our world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; a little bit more of explanation about it. This doesn’t mean that what you add (magic,…) is coherent with the knowledge about our world, but that a sum of all of that is coherent. Here is an example: if you imagine a world where magic can input free energy in matter, I’m ok to say it is not something known in our world, but the whole (magic of free energy + our world) is coherent because our knowledge can integrate this magic as if it were just something new. Actually, it is exactly the same with a new scientific theory: you can first check if this new theory is compatible with what is already known. We didn’t know that Earth is round before we could check it. And it is not incompatible with the knowledge &amp;quot;locally, the world is almost flat&amp;quot; (since locally, a ball is almost flat). So, this is what can be checked in reality check, I guess. Furthermore, as I said, you can’t check if an element is coherent with &amp;quot;a world&amp;quot;, because you don’t know exactly what &amp;quot;a world&amp;quot; is. What you know is not &amp;quot;a world&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;our world&amp;quot;, but it is a set of theories about this world. So you can add theories about a new element in your set of knowledge about our world, and check if the sum is coherent. &lt;strong&gt;End of edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this implies two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the thing you add in the world (magic, monsters…) should be described with enough properties to test if these properties are coherent considering what we know about the world,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the state of knowledge itself must be specified&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in the question or in the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last point is really important: since we don’t know everything about our world, it is important to write down what we know about it. For example, answers about FTL travel will be fondamentaly different in a relativity, Newtonian, or even more ancient context. Even historical questions could have different answers if you have the knowledge of the winner or of the loser of the war (maybe less true nowadays, but not that much).&#xA;It can be really interesting if your world is an ancient one: for example, if you are in the 14th century, you car more easily include FTL travel than in ours, since relativity was not part of the common knowledge at that time (even if it’s part of the reader’s one, of course).&#xA;So I’m pretty convinced in the fact that it is really important to explain the context and the hypotheses taken into account in the answer of a &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, &lt;strong&gt;I would define &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;Check if a world containing some more hypothesis is still compatible with a context of knowledge about our world, which must be specified in the question or in the answer.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91217" LastEditorUserId="91217" LastEditDate="2021-11-26T08:13:33.800" LastActivityDate="2021-11-26T08:13:33.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-11-25T19:09:56.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I want to comment on your original comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't answer idle curiosity questions that have no worldbuilding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is a statement that may look like a 'gentle reprimand' on the surface and it carries no hostile intent toward the answerer, it belittles the original questioner. This statement is also based on your very specific and very subjective assessment of the question, which is not necessarily correct or shared by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it needs some kind of worldbuilding context;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find a mention of resurrection and the fact that the question is about a character to be a sufficient worldbuilding context. Most of the other information about the setting is irrelevant to questions about psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is story based (it asks about actions of the character);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does not ask about the actions of the character. Please let me quote the question for you: '&lt;em&gt;As I have never been stabbed or killed, how would this PTSD manifest?&lt;/em&gt;'. The question asks about PTSD symptoms, not character actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it has prior research problems (did you ask google first?);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you ask the questioner whether they did their research or not? Your comments show that you did not. You just assumed that they did no research. These are your comments to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi Ren! I'd like to address a couple issues. First, I voted to close&#xA;your query because a) it's a matter of idle curiosity and b) you are&#xA;not asking a worldbuilding related question. Please check out our&#xA;tour, our help center and learn what WB is all about before asking&#xA;questions. Lastly, it is considered very poor form to award the green&#xA;checkmark within 48 hours of asking a question. Please be patient ---&#xA;someone might have come along with a better answer! –  elemtilas  Nov&#xA;16 at 3:53&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On point A: we're not here to satisfy your idle curiosity. It took&#xA;google a whopping 0.55 seconds to bring up half a million hits on&#xA;knife related ptsd. On B: we're here to help you with issues or&#xA;problems you're facing while making a fictional world. In order to&#xA;help us answer your questions, we need to learn some context about&#xA;your fictional world. You didn't provide that to us. You did a much&#xA;better job with your merfolk calendar query!! That's the kind of&#xA;question we handle here. –  elemtilas  Nov 16 at 3:55&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I find the whole attitude of these comments highly problematic. I do not see even a shadow of an attempt to help the questioner (which is supposed to be the purpose of the WB.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if we do not focus on the wording of the comments, an ability to find 'half a million hits on knife related ptsd' does not equal an ability to find an answer to the question or even an ability to distinguish between useful and useless information. I have some background in psychology and I know a little bit about PTSD, but I would need to spend some time reading different papers to come up with a decent answer. Someone who has no similar background would struggle even more or might be completely unable to figure this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's pretty clearly a question of idle real world curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have no proof that this is 'a question of idle real world curiosity'. You never asked. This is your own, subjective, unsubstantiated claim that you keep repeating without any attempt to verify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view, it is a good question that only needs some more details. If the OP answered my question in the comments I would've written an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Going back to your original 'Can we Encourage People to NOT Answer Questions that Need to be Closed?'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we can. However, should we do it? Probably no. Especially in a situation where the definition of 'questions that need to be closed' is subjective and sometimes is not based on rules or any objective or even explicitly stated criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you absolutely need to encourage people to do something, I would suggest encouraging questions for clarifications and discouraging comments based on speculations. That would be much more beneficial to the WB.SE than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that your query does sound like a policy proposal. You include the policy tag and write this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;following from our policy of not answering queries that, for any&#xA;reason, look like they need to be fixed, should we encourage people&#xA;who have answered these questions to not to answer questions like this&#xA;in future or not as a matter of general practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;A matter of general practice&lt;/em&gt;' is a de facto policy. You might want to reword your question if you do not want people to see your words as a policy proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2021-11-25T19:33:05.210" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T19:33:05.210" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8560" CreationDate="2021-12-07T15:07:32.457" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got the see vote-breakdowns privilege, and I can't understand why it's such a high-rep privilege. You can't really do anything wrong with that info, so why is it so high in the privilege chart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any info is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T17:19:23.757" Title="Why is seeing vote breakdowns such a high-rep privilege?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8558" CreationDate="2021-12-07T15:37:51.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's actually a good question, but I've had that privilege's so long that I don't remember not having it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My guess; Maybe it's just so that they have something to reward lower rep users with, before you eventually get the actually useful privileges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1000 might feel high, and it's a nice milestone, but if you're active it doesn't take that long to get.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It deserves a reward, but that rep you're still relatively new, and so possibly too soon for something like being able to edit questions or access the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, just my guess, but it kind of makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I tried to find the list of privileges and their rep requirements, but 5 minutes of looking didn't turn it up, and again I don't remember when I got each of them. It's possible that my theory wouldn't make any sense if I actually saw the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2021-12-07T15:49:38.930" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T15:49:38.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8558" CreationDate="2021-12-07T17:19:23.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing the vote breakdown isn't essential for anyone on SO. In fact the site actively discourages discussing voting. Note how in the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment everywhere privilege&lt;/a&gt;  tell you to not leave comments saying &lt;em&gt;+1 great answer!&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-1 bad answer&lt;/em&gt;. Or look at how poorly &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4725/enforcing-mandatory-comment-when-downvoting&quot;&gt;requests&lt;/a&gt; to require comments on downvoting are received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much the only intended use of viewing the voting breakdown is to satisfy an idle curiosity. As a result it's gated behind 1000 reputation as a nice minor reward for sticking around for a while. This is hopefully high enough that users are socialized to not remark on how others vote before being exposed to more information about how people voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T17:19:23.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9620" CreationDate="2021-12-08T15:32:50.520" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Hot Network Questions sidebar, there's almost always a Worldbuilding question there. However, a community like, say, Magento (picked at random), which apparently is almost 10x the size of Worldbuilding, I have never seen on the HNQ bar. So, why does Worldbuilding have such a disproportionate share of HNQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2022-01-23T20:31:46.453" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T20:31:46.453" Title="Why does worldbuilding have such a disproportionate share of HNQ?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-08T16:21:15.930" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I go to my profile's summary and click on the gear next to &amp;quot;Next tag badge&amp;quot;, it doesn't allow me to choose whether to track a tag badge or  regular one. It assumes regular and as such it is kinda hard for me to track my progress in various tags. I just noticed this today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T17:37:10.357" Title="Can't track tag badges properly" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2021-12-08T17:00:50.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can track both tag and normal badges, it's just a little further on the right for normal and on the left for tags  :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d2fdt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d2fdt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tag badges&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to switch to track tag badges instead of privilege, if applicable (you've got quite a good chunk of points so I don't know if you've earned all privileges). Now, if you don't see the box on the right, then you (don't) have some interesting things to check :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.B. : There's an hinderance of the utmost importance, even more than tracking badges : Why are the cog to track privileges or badges and the one to choose tag badges not perfectly aligned on the horizontal axis? Kidding of course!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-12-08T17:37:10.357" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T17:37:10.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-09T02:22:36.560" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question which semi-regularly comes up here is &amp;quot;How [strong, fast, hungry, etc.] would [something] be if I scale its dimensions by [factor]?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have some common language, let's call the scaling factor S in this question. Drawing from &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt;, a Lilliputian (human, scaled down 10x) has S=0.1, and a typical resident of Brobdingnag (human, scaled up 10x) has S=10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can we easily distinguish between the following common cases when discussing this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^0&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to original size.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^1&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to length. &amp;quot;How many rods laid end-to-end?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^2&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to area. &amp;quot;How much food will my field produce?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^3&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to volume. &amp;quot;How much will my creature eat?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^(2/3)&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to area/mass. &amp;quot;How many of its own kind can an X lift when scaled, using the same muscles?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S^(3/2)&lt;/strong&gt;: [Attribute] is proportional to mass/area. &amp;quot;How much more efficient is using the same material to make a bigger gasbag for my airship?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good system will be fairly easily read by newcomers, and understood at a glance by anyone who is around regularly. A single-common-English-word description for each class which is easily distinguished would be ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagged as science-based and hard-science for questions which require these explanations, and outdated-science for typical uses of this scaling. Not mentioning (say) inverse-square relationships because those tend not to be an entire system being size-changed, and typically are easier to communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83249" OwnerDisplayName="Anon" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T03:56:58.240" Title="How to communicate different meanings of &quot;proportional&quot; in shrinking-growing questions?" Tags="|discussion|hard-science|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8570" CreationDate="2021-12-13T20:26:05.773" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if this is such a dumb question. I don't wander around in the meta section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a quick question about WB policy, so I went to the chat, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;The factory floor&lt;/a&gt; .. only to find out: &lt;em&gt;that place is emptier than intergalactic space, emptier than the QED vacuum&lt;/em&gt;, and it has been so for months (if not for this whole year, or more, but I didn't bother scrolling up that much). Honestly, I only saw bots talking (feeds, etc) [I mean, in comparison, the chat in Physics, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;The hbar&lt;/a&gt;, is way more active].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So! Where's everybody? Do really nobody talk in the chats? Or is everyone now chatting and having fun elsewhere? Discord perhaps? Which server?&lt;/strong&gt; I wanna know! Pls pls! World building discussions in chat format can be fun to read and fun to participate, especially the ones involving physics. And, I have some free time nowadays. =]. Thank you everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3180" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T23:35:08.823" Title="Where's everyone?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-15T22:18:39.683" Score="9" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/219295/which-would-be-stronger-against-armor-8mm-or-6mm&quot;&gt;Which would be stronger against armor: 8mm or 6mm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research screenshot looks like a military manual, or a manufacturer ballistics calculation site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question... &amp;quot;what caliber is best&amp;quot; ? no further explanation, 0% story context, 0% science fiction, this is simply a question about currently existing RW ammunition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this (very) specialized stuff on ammunition is off topic or not ? I would prefer so actually.. Does WB have rules, or a description of target scope for WB, that could prevent this kind of factual inquiries on bullets ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T23:35:05.690" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T15:09:32.853" Title="Questions about real world effect of real world bullets appropriate on WB?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8567" CreationDate="2021-12-15T23:35:08.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site's changed a bit since the early days, back in late 2014. As with many Stack Exchange sites, there was a lot of excitement as the community here fleshed out its scope, and we did have a pretty vibrant chat room. But over time, the chat regulars left; many folks naturally drifted away, while others left after some events in the fall of 2019. In recent years, the site's maintained high levels of activity, but I personally feel like we've never quite regained those connections that make a community a &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;, rather than just a busy website. Correspondingly, chat activity has died down quite a bit. Some folks are still there from time to time, and you might have a decent chance of getting a discussion going, but it's certainly not like it was circa 2015 or 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was one of those chat regulars, and I'm not aware of an off-site server or other means of chatting. I'd be kinda surprised if there were one; I still don't think that we've regained the critical mass of chat-happy folks required to keep something going. Maybe we'll see the Factory Floor become more active in the future, which certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T23:35:08.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2021-12-16T00:35:40.763" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR: questions about caliber aren't off topic. &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; you need to demonstrate worldbuilding purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question isn't whether something is about worldbuilding or not. In the right case pretty much everything can be framed in terms of it being a worldbuilding question. What matters for this site is that the worldbuilding context is made apparent to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already split this difference with our policy on banning questions about existing works of fiction. Asking &lt;em&gt;how plausible is it for a moon to have a forest on it?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is an excellent worldbuilding question. However asking &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;how plausible is the forest moon of Endor?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is likely to be closed right away, despite engendering pretty much the same assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect questions on this site to demonstrate their worldbuilding purpose. It's a pretty low bar to clear. Just file off the labels of any fictional work and provide the context about why you need to know the exact diameter of the rounds being fired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2021-12-16T00:35:40.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-19T14:05:03.520" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to be sure..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220523/how-do-you-build-a-kingdom-under-a-mangrove-forest-for-a-childrens-picture-book?noredirect=1#comment678050_22052&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220523/how-do-you-build-a-kingdom-under-a-mangrove-forest-for-a-childrens-picture-book?noredirect=1#comment678050_22052&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.. deleted within 1 hour,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel guilty now, someone's question got deleted, my fault ? I feel my comment about sphenning's remarks was the cause of this deletion, not the question itself. See screenshot below, the topic was removed while I was writing a response comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question had only one close vote and no minus votes, at the time it got &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two comments are teasing, imho. Why act so impolite toward eske ? Why refer to eske as &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; .. and if my remark about it was so disturbing, why not redirect a comment discussion to the chat in this case, and leave the question intact ? eske is a new contributor, now there is no way for eske to find it back and read what went wrong..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u29sw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u29sw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I am not sure I caused this mess, I would like to salvage the question text for eske to recover, it was this..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do you build a kingdom under a mangrove forest for a children's picture book?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fantasy is about a young girl called Devaki who lives in a mysterious world between sea and land. Rupavati, the Queen Mother rules the Coral Kingdom, after Devaki’s father and brother disappeared under strange circumstances which speak of monsters and sea creatures that guard their prison in a lava trench.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This adventure story/fantasy for children is about how Devaki finds her brother and father who holds the key to survival for the Mangrove Forest and its denizens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character is a young girl called Devaki. Her mother Rupavathi comes in the lineage of the pearl-divers of Tamil Nadu. When people discover that she is an outcaste, an Irula, she is banished from her kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupavathi and her husband build a home for themselves under a mangrove forest. Here she teaches her daughter, Devaki, (D) to live underwater, amongst the gnarled roots and mosquito-filled fresh to brackish to saltwater – a home that Devaki loves and where she has many friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Coral Kingdom is tucked into an eerily lit place with schools of fish and tides that Devaki learns to live with. She loves to navigate the tides that buffet her and the salty water that suffocate. The mangrove forest is hospitable and there are any number of birds and animals besides the fishes that Devaki gets to know and learn from. But --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What factors must be considered when building a kingdom under a mangrove forest? What kind of structures that can stay safe when say a tsunami strikes?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2021-12-19T14:25:54.597" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T04:09:27.377" Title="Do comments sometimes cause mods to remove complete topics?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9570" CreationDate="2021-12-20T04:09:27.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own experience, comments do sometimes prompt people, mods included, to take actions on queries. I didn't see either version of the query in Main, but in reading the original question (the closed one) I would have concurred with the close vote. OP took such care to give us solid background; but didn't bother to learn what kinds of questions to avoid asking here. In this case, the question is woefully broad / lacking focus. 15 lines of engaging background to 2 lines of vague query is not a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only conjecture that L. Dutch deleted the duplicate &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nòt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; simply because it was a duplicate, but rather because it was a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;carbon copy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the original query posted by the OP. This is obviously an error on the part of the OP, who is new and doesn't yet know how SE works. It was done using ModHammer20K, appropriately I believe, more as a &amp;quot;for the OP's own good&amp;quot; kind of thing rather than due to any specific comments or discussion. Someone well versed in Indian culture &amp;amp; mangrovian civilisations could have come along and answered the cc question without realising that the question already exists but is closed. It would have been a mess! Deleting the copy simply allows said expert to (hopefully!) find the right query and prepare a good answer for when it gets edited and reopened!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, storybook project &amp;amp; Indic culture notwithstanding, I'd like to see the OP edit this and break it down into some solid questions about mangrovian culture and society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I wouldn't have taken an interest if you hadn't commented and posted this query in Meta! So, that answers the general question begged by the specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Addendum:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to address your subquestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The deletion is not your fault. That was a moderatorial decision made by someone with the authority to do what was done. L. Dutch is generally on the ball, and I think would have deleted it whether you commented or not!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did you find &amp;quot;teasing&amp;quot; about the comments? I saw, for the most part, people trying to be at least somewhat helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;They&amp;quot; is an ancient, well attested &amp;amp; standard third person singular epicene pronoun in English. It has always been used when the sex/gender of a specific person is unknown and more modernly, when it doesn't matter or is being deliberately obfuscated. I suspect that Sphennings used it properly because they don't know whether eske is a girl or a guy! The other options are perfectly valid. &amp;quot;He&amp;quot; is often used as a sort of &amp;quot;generic person&amp;quot; pronoun (like man in German or on in French; &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; can be used that way too (and is my typical default).  Eske didn't specify their sex/gender in his profile, so there's not much we can do but refer to her using less than ideal options.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T04:09:27.377" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2021-12-22T00:46:55.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a person who has been in this situation several times, and was the source of the incident that inspired this post where I posted an answer to a question fairly early and then got ordered to shut up and not post, I can note that I find it extremely discouraging and unpleasant when I am told not to answer because it doesn't meet whatever criteria, so from personal experience, I can say it's effective at discouraging people like me from posting. I've stopped posting for a while several times after warnings like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I have a degree level knowledge of it and regularly work with people with ptsd, so I felt it would be useful as a worldbuilding element to give them some common criteria that cause a situation to be more traumatizing than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's common for highly upvoted question to be about how an individual reacts to some element of the world, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-the-gdpr-is-around&quot;&gt;like this question on Santa,&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future&quot;&gt;this question on time travel&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94154/how-to-safely-check-if-you-are-immortal&quot;&gt;this question on immortality&lt;/a&gt; so there's no firm moderation stance about that sort of thing. I felt my experience could give them a useful idea about how to connect better with people based on some common criteria I have seen in case studies and the literature and real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their question was fairly on point- can you get PTSD from being stabbed if you are later resurrected, a question easily answered by noting the common experience of many people with ptsd of being powerless, vulnerable, and immobilized which aren't removed by resurrection. I certainly felt it fit in with similar approved posts, like how Santa would respond to the authorities, or how a time travel would prep, or how an immortal would prove they were immortal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my personal experience of how the comment was taken, and why I wrote an answer to the question. I am against encouraging people to not answer questions, because I have often seen good questions rejected because of the many random whims of worldbuilders. Better to assume the best, and avoid discouraging comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59924" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T00:46:55.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-22T15:21:48.767" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3817/identifying-incorrectly-tagged-hard-science-questions&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;, which has no answers after five years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be an issue with the &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; tag.  First, it should have an &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt; banner to remind potential answer authors that it's either a) been applied in error, or b) the questioner should be encouraged to clarify, when it's not really a hard science question, else c) it really does merit equations and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there really needs to be a clear policy on when to remove the tag.  For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220660/could-nitinol-or-similar-super-elastic-materials-be-used-to-make-a-flexible-gu&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is tagged &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; but isn't asked in a way that can really be answered with equations etc. -- it's not a hard science question at all (I answered based on the question content without noticing the &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; tag, and can't even hide my accepted answer now that L.Dutch has added the reminder banner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, there needs to be a way to delay acceptance of answers that don't meet the tag, if it's genuinely warranted.  As things stand, a new user can post a question that isn't worded like &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and isn't really answerable with equations and references (perhaps because the answer is such common knowledge that people who know the answer don't recall where or even how many times they've read it), and without a reminder banner an experienced user can answer the question in the spirit it was asked, and be caught out with an unacceptable &amp;quot;may be removed&amp;quot; answer that's been accepted by the new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reference question, the simple solution is to remove the &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; tag -- but the fact this can happen points to flaws related to this tag that really need to be addressed.  I can see where it makes sense to &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; the tag for certain questions -- like ones about stability of multi-body stellar systems with planets, for instance -- but it needs to be better guarded, perhaps even vetted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to add: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224782/lightspeed-travel-survivability?noredirect=1#comment690965_224782&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is a fine example of what I was seeking a solution for: even the asker has admitted they misunderstood the &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; tag, but the question has been closed because unanswerable with &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; and one or more answers have been deleted because &amp;quot;not a hard science answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57454" LastEditorUserId="57454" LastEditDate="2022-02-25T12:31:00.697" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T12:31:00.697" Title="How to keep the &quot;hard science&quot; tag &quot;hard&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2021-12-22T15:35:06.577" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag misuse is not limited to the hard science tag. I often see worldbuilding process and other tags just thrown there without any founded reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually this involves unexperienced users, who do not stop at reading the tag wiki when choosing one, and who often do not react to comments asking for clarification/improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in such cases the community can step in and edit the question with better fitting tags, if that is clear enough from the question itself. Other cases instead, like placing both hard science and science based, are a bit more tricky and should at first attempt calling for the OP clarification of intents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enforcing an automatic banner is not really feasible, I am afraid, as it would require developer's work to the benefit of only 1 community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the question you mentioned, I have just now replaced the tag with science based and removed the banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-12-22T17:21:38.177" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T17:21:38.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-24T14:30:57.333" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220544/this-dungeon-ruin-has-been-known-to-locals-for-ages-why-would-it-still-have-und&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; is on a brink of being closed (as &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot;, presumably for the brief mentioning of the existence of a protagonist within the question), I thought it might be useful info to have, is there any popular sites that would be thematic for these types of worldbuilding questions instead? Maybe even mention those on the elaborations of &amp;quot;closed for opinions&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;closed for having a story&amp;quot; reasons to not make the user feel brushed off, and offering them an alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80125" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2021-12-30T13:14:04.007" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T13:14:04.007" Title="Story-based questions, opinion-based questions, etc - where to go with those?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-24T22:13:01.497" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220638/our-missing-sense-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;this closed question&lt;/a&gt; to provide some details that a few commentators mentioned were missing and submitted it for reopening. The reopen was rejected and the feedback is insufficient for me to work out why. Could I get some clarification please? Or better still, the question reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23756" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T09:38:46.320" Title="What is this question missing to prevent it being reopened?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2021-12-25T19:41:41.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I see, the question has been closed with the following motivation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit that you have done doesn't seem to do anything to solve that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-12-25T19:41:41.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2021-12-27T09:31:26.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's clear up some doubts here :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why didn't I vote to reopen the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simple : Because I wasn't aware of the edit until you posted here and that I got through end-of-year-family-time downtime :). Otherwise the vote to reopen would have happened sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit you made answered at least half of the issue I raised, which is you added constraints and therefore it gave a direction to look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What can you do to improve your question (and future ones)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've spread enough time on the definition of &amp;quot;external&amp;quot; in the comments, that's in any case not worth a point of closure. So instead I'll focus more on the big issue that caused that annoying closure : The intentions. But what do I mean by intentions, beyond my short 500-character long comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When creating a world you are engaging in an artistic process, even if said world is very tightly set in our reality. Artists -knowingly or unknowningly- tell some &amp;quot;inner message&amp;quot; in the result. Taking the spectator's view, if you watch a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movie about a virtual universe within a world&lt;/a&gt;, you're most likely to find some inherent questions about one's identity, what is real and what isn't and so on. Same if you see a story set in a world where characters are clear&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ly divi&lt;/a&gt;de&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Craft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;d in&lt;/a&gt; c&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Dogs_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;astes&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Zero_Dawn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with ap&lt;/a&gt;pa&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_%26_Celestine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rent d&lt;/a&gt;i&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Eternity_II:_Deadfire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stinc&lt;/a&gt;t&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ions&lt;/a&gt; (there are a loooot of examples :D), the message behind is more likely to be about ostracism, discrimination or colonialism. It's not all the time the case or the main message, but it at least entices to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's the point of view of a player, a watcher, a listener, a reader. From the artist's side, more often than not they work first with the intentions -or message if you prefer- then with how to reach that goal. They can set the goal knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, getting the direction they want to reach through pure feelings or a mix of reasoning and sentiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present question, your intentions can be deduced from the constraints. That is, you want something more believable as your world is more bound to realism than others. By limiting, you brought an area we can play inside, on top of giving an hint of your intentions. However, it could be clearer by stating the inherent intentions instead of using constraints to do the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By asking &amp;quot;what is possible&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;how to reach something&amp;quot;, I think it will be a lot more hard oui-no to make this change ^^. However, it doesn't mean you can't ask this kind of question, just that you need to express your goals another way than plainly stating them. One common way is to give a way to scale answers : &amp;quot;I will evaluate answers by plausibility&amp;quot;, or going further &amp;quot;the senses that make old humans stronger in their native environment (within the constraints) will be marked as better to my eyes&amp;quot;. Being able to compare answers indirectly tells what is it you want to reach. It's also in fact a common way to tell whether a question is opinion-based or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I believe you get the gist now : the more you know what kind of answers will help you reach your goals, the more people will be able to help you in return.&lt;/strong&gt; Plus, it also helps you ensure you hold your universe tightly in regard with what you want to tell, so it is a good training to make!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2021-12-27T09:38:46.320" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T09:38:46.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-29T20:03:24.837" Score="-6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, although not often, there's a question where I can't figure out how to tag it. Usually I'll make one that fits, but low-rep users might not be able to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should we make a &amp;quot;unsure&amp;quot; tag, which will allow users to properly tag it with an edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T13:21:52.670" Title="Should we make a &quot;unsure&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2021-12-29T20:12:49.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can always edit the tags in a later moment, the only limit being the maximum of five tags which can be applied to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And honestly, while I can understand how a question on certain SE communities must take time pressure and urgency into account (for example if I need to finish a script by the end of the work day, I will rush to post the question on Stackoverflow), I have yet to see a worldbuilding question which cannot wait a few hours for the OP to make up their mind on the tags/phrasing to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the &amp;quot;unsure&amp;quot; tag, a tag serves to define the content of a question. Think of it as a label. One can be an expert in a certain tag, for example &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot;, etc. What can an expert in &amp;quot;unsure&amp;quot; be relied upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2021-12-30T13:21:52.670" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T13:21:52.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-29T21:12:42.040" Score="6" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL:DR -I want to put music in my games, they are games about a fantasy world, can I ask questions about music here since the music will be used in worldbuilding projects?-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanna travel to the USA and to do this I need a job, to get a job I need new skills and to get new skills I must learn by creating my own projects, this is the fastest way to learn anything for me , taking useless things and making them artificially useful so my brain memorizes them with the least effort possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of the projects I want to put in my curriculum are videogames, two games that share the same world. I have already created the political map and I have some base of a story and a few characters in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have both some 3D assets and 2D assets and the skills to create more and I will learn how to animate them, I'm learning how to code and will be on my way to create the sound effects and music for these projects, I have already created 23 sound effects and short songs (less than 1 minute) but I plan on creating longer soundtracks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91991" LastEditorUserId="91991" LastEditDate="2021-12-29T21:41:18.017" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T19:26:06.857" Title="Can I ask questions related to music making here? Music that I want to use for worldbuilding projects" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9581" CreationDate="2021-12-29T21:40:10.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That all depends on whether the questions you are asking are about building a fictional world or not. If you demonstrate worldbuilding purpose, and your question is otherwise a good fit for this site (not too broad, not too opinion based, etc...), then we're pretty open about the types of questions we allow on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're unsure about whether a question is a good fit or you would like help revising a question before posting it to the main site you can always use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to get feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2021-12-29T21:40:10.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9581" CreationDate="2021-12-29T22:28:27.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Under this condition&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That it's about building your world and not the game itself. That's quite an important distinction to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a game, I think it could happen if you make the music intradiegetic to it. In other words, that the music heard by the player can also be actually heard by characters. This make the choice of instruments important to your world on-top of the game, therefore on-topic. To give an example I've seen lately is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kiPjEeTaW4&amp;amp;t=255s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;animation vs Minecraft&lt;/a&gt; video. It uses this kind of musical approach to introduce the fight ^^.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of putting this is starting from music that could be played in your world, then use these as the bases for your music. E.g. : I have this village of people, what kind of music would they play (then, use the answers to make your own music in the same style).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be other cases I can't think of, in which case &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;testing in the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; can be a good idea!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If what you want to ask is not a good fit here&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;game dev&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;music&lt;/a&gt; stack-exchanges. The first is dedicated to video games, so anything that relates to fitting music to a game (integration, matching pace, specific tools like Wwise or FMod...) would be a very good fit. I don't know much about the other, you might find some interesting things related to music composing in general. I would ask first on their meta for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Side-note of my perspective&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're learning both animation, soundtrack and coding (and most probably game/level design!), I guess you're either a new one in the industry or a game designer. Or both . In any case, widening your skills is a good thing, especially if you can build up things to show at the same time. Remember however that there are other ways to fill up your portfolio than making all of your projects alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Game jams are a quite good example of this&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and you might want to look at local jams to find people who can fill the skills you don't necessarily have. Or if you are at a videogame school, taking some good time to polish your end-of-year project + internships can give some very serious results later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I tell this? First, All of the above examples can tell you are able to work with a team, something which is even more looked for than raw technical skills :). Also, it's easy to get all hyped on a new project, but it's as easy to get overwhelmed if you start learning everything to make it x_x. Take each step one at a time to avoid becoming drowned in work, and don't hesitate to ask people here or there when you feel stuck on something. That's all I have to say (I think?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; : I hate to admit it, but I have to :/. Personal issues with those.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-01-04T12:53:17.943" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T12:53:17.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-31T15:42:40.783" Score="-5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badge hunting, does it go against the rules of the website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it doesn't, how fast can I vote questions and answer to get the badges?&#xA;the limit is 40 votes per day, can I just take a few minutes to get all the votes in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T13:45:01.937" Title="How fast can I vote to avoid the system thinkig that I'm a bot?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9585" CreationDate="2021-12-31T15:47:54.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes shall be given to the post, not to the user behind it. Targeted voting is forbidden and punished. That is to say, if you give 40 votes to the same user, that will rise more than an eyebrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please take time to evaluate what you are voting. Upvoting a clearly poor post does no good to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T15:47:54.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2022-01-03T03:48:50.230" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does WB have rules, or a description of target scope for WB, that could prevent this kind of factual inquiries on bullets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it off topic for being about factual stuff?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, WB.SE supports this sort of question. When Goodies says &amp;quot;0% science fiction&amp;quot;, this is irrelevant because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;real world questions&lt;/a&gt; are officially on topic as long as they provide enough context to let users know why you are asking the question, can not be answered by a simple Google search, and includes what requirement your answer will be judged by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he says &amp;quot;0% story context&amp;quot; he is actually misunderstanding requirement #1 because the official guidelines are not for STORY context at all.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Story context is plot which IS off topic here&lt;/a&gt;.  By &amp;quot;context&amp;quot;, the guidelines simply mean that the question includes enough information so that users know &amp;quot;what kind of answer you want.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question specifies that they want a bullet that can pernitrate a certain amount of armor at a given range which satisfies why they are asking the question. It includes research notes that proves the OP tried to answer the question on his own, but could not.  It also states that he is looking for the best option between the two for an anti-armor round satisfying the 3rd point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as for the question if this is on topic for being about real world stuff, then answer is that yes it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it off topic for being about Bullets?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bullets (or more specifically, the terminal ballistic properties of bullets) are a mix of technology and physics which are both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;specifically listed as on topic for this site&lt;/a&gt;. So it passes this test as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does this question demonstrate a World Building Purpose?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sphennings posted this question in his answer but does not cite it. Nowhere in the official rules is this actually necessary.  You do not need to say &amp;quot;I am writing a story&amp;quot; in your question. We have rules on this site about what is NOT world building like questions about an established franchise or questions about plot and character development, but there is no rule that says you explicitly have to say what you are working on.  That said, even if you were apply this unofficial requirement to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/219295/which-would-be-stronger-against-armor-8mm-or-6mm&quot;&gt;Referenced Post&lt;/a&gt;, the OP of this question specifically states &amp;quot;I am working on a sci-fi thing&amp;quot; completely invalidating this argument in this case for a reason to close a question.  No, he does not say what his sci-fi thing is about, but we do not need to know any of that to be able to answer the question as asked or to know that he is in fact asking this question in a World Building capacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should the cited question have been closed anyway?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly... while the question is fully within the official scope of WB.SE, there is always the possible issue that a question needs more needs details or clarity.  Not everyone has the same ideas about what &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot; means because not all possible answers need more questions asked.  For example, this question could easily be answered from the perspective that the only factor the OP cares about is penetrating the example armor, but there may be other caveats to consider.  Knowing how important things like cost, reliability, versatility, ammo capacity, accuracy, carry weight, etc. are to the OP would help set clearer goals for a best possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you are going to VtC a question for lack of clarity, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8248/closed-question-this-question-needs-details-or-clarity-but-without-explanation&quot;&gt;you should always explain why&lt;/a&gt;.  While this is not an official rule, it is extremely unkind to do because it does not let the OP know what they need to do differently to get the question reopened later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T15:09:32.853" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T15:09:32.853" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2022-01-03T18:11:46.100" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never even notice what tags are on posts, unless they are put in the text and have a little box as in this case.  The people asking aren't thinking about tags until the software demands them to.  The easiest way to end tag abuse is to stop prompting people to add tags.  People who probably think &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; is widely applicable because they remember Science class was &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. :)  The people who &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; will continue to add tags, and do it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T18:11:46.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2022-01-03T22:41:54.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One step beyond LDutch' remark..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove the tag option &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; for the opener&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags on forums are useful. They help to keep sorted lists on certain subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But hard-science is actually not a subject, it is a criterion mods have put. Why does the opener have to decide about it.. when a science based &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; pops up, we can always mark the topic hard-science, honouring the question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the answer. At the same time, the banner is put..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: why not take care of the &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; tag as peer-mods, that is 100% ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;.. and assign it afterward&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this question not &lt;em&gt;get assigned&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/221850/what-speed-could-a-nicoll-dyson-beam-propel-a-solar-sail-ship-to&quot;&gt;What speed could a Nicoll-Dyson beam propel a solar sail ship to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opener did not put any science tag.. but asking for numbers, this would qualify for hard-science. The mods have not changed the question.. it's a good question.. but both answers specified deserve a science tag, science-based &lt;em&gt;at least.&lt;/em&gt; !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It could help prevent early closures..&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opener most times &lt;em&gt;does not know&lt;/em&gt; about the subtle differences between &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; tags. A request to the opener, to change a tag, which is then refused or ignored by the opener, can yield endless comment discussions and closure. While the question could be interesting in its own right, without the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T21:00:19.957" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T21:00:19.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9581" CreationDate="2022-01-03T23:47:15.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I've tried in the Sandbox.. but it's difficult&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sandbox answer was removed, see final version below.. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Main takeway from the comments: like story-building has no role on WB, the gamer plays no role on WB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that emits from the loudspeaker is only audible to a game player, not in your world. On WB, it is not appropriate to start about your latest game-music, proposing a soundtrack for a game or something. It will be rejected, because the music is not actually &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; the world that you build. The music happens in the real world, on a player's PC. So it is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why after 2 attempts involving game music, I had to invent a snail emitting a minor chord. The snail is in the forest, the music is part of my creature design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some variations on my snails question were put&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tortliena: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot; I'm making a game where there are lots of snail people. I would like some instruments to play in the game at the same time snailmen play. However, I'm stuck on the kind of instruments to give. The scene they play is for some chamanic rituals, so it's bound to be something more akin to magic, they live in medieval times and have large access to... Let's say shells. So goal is &amp;quot;magical&amp;quot; instruments made of shells. what kind of instruments would they make?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBHCodidact: &lt;em&gt;My giant snails have the following esophageal configuration, what sounds could they be expected to make?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My two cents: I think it will not work because music is always plausible&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;imho, culture is vulnerable for vtc anyway, on WB. Opinion-based, almost by definition. There preferably should be one answer, for one question. Culture does not allow that often. There is affiliation with &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; here, Q&amp;amp;A is regarded as problem-solving. Music does not really fit that format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the thing we almost always try to accomplish on WB is a plausibility-check: this forum loves &amp;quot;would XYZ be credible&amp;quot; questions, which are then answered with science-based observations about astrophysics, climate, biology, sociology, psychology.. When a question does not ask for something very specific and well-defined, it is often considered as unclear, or fishing for ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 10-3: thanks again @sphennings for all the feedback. As the Sandbox is no place for persistent submits, I'll put the definite version here,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IGPut.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IGPut.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-03-10T19:26:06.857" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T19:26:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9600" CreationDate="2022-01-06T12:19:46.327" Score="-4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was poking around in WB, and I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/67275/67275?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; user, who had bountied &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/221085/a-mathematical-problem-that-no-computer-can-solve-but-a-human-can&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. However, this user has 1 rep, bountied the question with 100 reputation, and, and here's the most confusing part: They've neither answered nor asked any questions.  I don't think they've used an association bonus, b/c none of their listed sites have them showing with more than 200 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their username &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; their user number. Their most popular network question is a 20 upvote question of Gaming.SE, and on that site, their username is different: but again their user number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is @67275?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastEditorUserId="90397" LastEditDate="2022-01-06T12:52:48.810" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T00:04:41.937" Title="Who is the mysterious user @67275?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9594" CreationDate="2022-01-06T16:08:57.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're a user, nothing particularly remarkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have the association bonus from another site so they have 100 free rep points on every site they join. This gives them sufficient rep to issue a bounty. Usernames aren't unique across all of SO the fact that they have a different username on Gaming is pretty mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T16:08:57.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2022-01-06T19:03:57.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; applies to answers and not questions. It is an indicator of the questioner's expectations for the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that it would be more prudent (and constructive) to clarify with the OP what kind of answers they would like to receive instead of relying on subjective interpretations of the answerers and removing tags without the OPs input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also my experience that any question can be answered with references to academic research unless the question asks for personal preferences. (The latter are off-topic on the WB.SE so they are of no concern.) Most of the time people cannot support their answers with references not because there are no references but because their own familiarity with the topic is not deep enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; as a request for academic papers and equations (when applicable). I also do not think that this tag should be limited to natural sciences since social sciences also have a significant body of research that could (and should) be used to support answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2348/can-hard-science-apply-to-social-sciences-and-other-academic-fields&quot;&gt;This point of view was affirmed previously&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T19:03:57.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9668" CreationDate="2022-01-06T21:16:06.620" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no good at SEDE. I doubt this will change. But I know, deep in my heart, that worldbuilding is by far the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's crowdsource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some statistics that prove WB.SE is the best Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T21:01:37.757" Title="What are some statistics that prove Worldbuilding is the best Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9597" CreationDate="2022-01-07T21:16:57.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding stackexchange is certainly amongst the least toxic ones, I know the music, fitness, vegetarian, economy, anime, biology, medical and programming stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding + Vegetarianism stack exchanges are the only non elitist ones I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about statistics but there's plently of youtube videos for young programmers suggesting to avoid stackoverflow due to it's toxicity and elitism and in my opinion, for good reason.  I think the other stacks are similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't see any youtube video saying worldbuilding.stackexchange is to be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, in terms of  who's  the least toxic and has the least elitism and gatekeeping, I would rank them as :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st Worldbuilding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd Vegetarianism but it's dead now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3rd Economics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4th Anime&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5th Biology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6th Fitness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7th Medicine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8th Stackoverflow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastEditorUserId="93337" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T21:24:05.580" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T21:24:05.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9594" CreationDate="2022-01-09T23:58:58.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guess.. bounties are taken from the total SE points, rather than points for every individual sites ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case 67275 can give away so many points, because the 67275 user has &lt;strong&gt;140 accounts on SE&lt;/strong&gt;. According to his profile, starting with 101 points everywhere, together he may spend 14000 points this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/1927945/67275?tab=accounts&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/users/1927945/67275?tab=accounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-01-10T00:04:41.937" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T00:04:41.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9585" CreationDate="2022-01-10T13:45:01.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badge hunting, does it go against the rules of the website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Badges exist to encourage you towards good user behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges have been around since the beginning of Stack Overflow. &lt;strong&gt;They are our way of recognizing our contributors for engaging with the community in meaningful ways&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/04/12/stack-overflow-badges-explained/&quot;&gt;from the SO blog&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it  doesn't, how fast can I vote questions and answer to get the badges? the limit is 40 votes per day, can I just take a few minutes to get all the votes in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about how fast. I've once used up all my votes in less than a handful of minutes, because I saw a question with many answers and all answers were good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting a lot is not a problem. Voting a lot on just some specific person may raise an eyebrow, as Dutch said. But consider two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The bot catching algorithm is never divulged, for security reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a handful of people in this site who always give good answers and I am consistently upvoting them. Since there is no favoritism and I upvote a lot of people, the algorithm has never had a problem with me. As long as you're being honest, you've got nothing to fear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T13:45:01.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9603" CreationDate="2022-01-10T20:39:47.370" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I was reading some article, and it inspired me to ask a question. However, this question isn't for any particular thing I'm making, it's just a question. In all other  aspects, the question is a perfectly valid WB question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T20:32:25.953" Title="Is it ok to ask questions that don't have specific worldbuilding use?" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9602" CreationDate="2022-01-10T21:32:21.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; is good content that demonstrably relates to building a fictional world; what matters &lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; is whether you are actively using that particular idea in constructing your own world or not. Such a question is valid because it is helpful for a future content miner who visits WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pragmatically: we don't need to know that you are not actively worldbuilding or are not interested in using the idea in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T00:45:22.783" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T00:45:22.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9607" CreationDate="2022-01-10T22:44:35.397" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much it. I may be missing a very basic tutorial-type section where this is probably explained. But I have checked! And found nothing. If there is actually something already written, please point me towards it so I can better understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I am opening this question because I mostly participate in the Worldbuilding stack, but for my latest question I've received points in the Biology, Fantasy and Meta stacks for some reason. Thanks in advance for helping a newbie understand! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91759" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T09:48:53.360" Title="Why did I get rep for other stackexchange channels?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-11T05:19:08.083" Score="-5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a tag to indicate that the OP is touching on a sensitive topic that is considered by most to be rather controversial in nature, it serves as a warning so that readers can choose to avoid entirely if it triggers them somehow when reading it. Or is there a similar tag already which serve the same purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-01-12T13:10:15.720" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T13:10:15.720" Title="Can we have a controversy tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9605" CreationDate="2022-01-11T05:30:29.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and usual question when talking about tags: what does it mean to be an expert in controversy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a more philosophical question: what does it make a topic controversial? Because I have seen heated comments on topics which I would have normally imagined animated like the club meeting of the geologist in the Big Bang Theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other stacks have a &amp;quot;controversial topic&amp;quot; notice, which can be used to narrow down the comments. What you propose can be already achieved by ignoring tags, for example who doesn't like torture question can simply ignore that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T13:24:05.320" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T13:24:05.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9604" CreationDate="2022-01-11T08:14:49.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You have enough reputation to have a little bit of trust on every site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's called the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141648/what-is-the-association-bonus-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;association bonus&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. When you reach 200 reputations, you gain this privilege. This in turns allows you to get straight-away some of the most basic privileges that aren't given to new users : commenting, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How can I check what happened recently to my reputation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check your reputation changes per-site on your profile page, in the activity section. For instance :) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HkIP0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HkIP0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Reputation page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can check out your recent reputation gains and losses (and badges, too) at the top of the page. See the &amp;quot;recent&amp;quot; association bonus for another site :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h2Mvw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h2Mvw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Recent reputation changes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T09:48:53.360" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T09:48:53.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9626" CreationDate="2022-01-11T13:19:33.540" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta-Votes are different; they often refer to agreement or disagreement. However, the hovertext still says stuff about research and clarity. This can be confusing to new Meta users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we change the hovertext for meta-votes to something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You agree with what this post has to say; it would be a good addition to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90397" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T00:18:31.677" Title="Change hovertext for meta votes?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-12T16:42:03.163" Score="8" ViewCount="116" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZntT.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Worldbuilding over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;43&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,016&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;223&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;431&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,131&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;203&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,760&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;71&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,202&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;218&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;176&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;157&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;207&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,376&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;200&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;398&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;52&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,451&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;118&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;38&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;115&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;958&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;413&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;988&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;657&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;376&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;79&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;213&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;532&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,508&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;134&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;22&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;120&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;816&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,888&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,890&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;858&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;391&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,243&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,141&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;493&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;286&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8206/2020-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2020: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222021%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/374784/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T16:42:03.163" Title="2021: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-15T15:45:11.677" Score="6" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/222322/harmonizing-lamarckism-with-genetics&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as off topic. This apparently because it is about a synthesis of real-world theories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many other questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214276/how-do-demigryphons-hunt/214284&quot;&gt;such as this&lt;/a&gt;) which are similar syntheses of real things, which have been quite well received&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been asked to provide some sort of worldbuilding context, but this makes no sense: Firstly, many similar questions are permitted with no context to speak of, and secondly adding this context is simply impossible; How can you make a specific scenario that is directly relevant to the general laws of biology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rules supposed to be here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T00:29:29.777" Title="Why can't we ask about fictional scientific theories?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-15T16:09:23.110" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We solve problems about the rules of your world. We don't indulge in debates about the rules of other worlds, which is what it looks like you are asking in that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Many Science-Fiction worlds&lt;/strong&gt;, whether or not by design, have their aliens arise by what seems to be a form of Lamarckism. While this is all well and good, these same worlds also make use of a lot of genetics and DNA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This presents a contradiction&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not asking about your world, you are just talking about the alleged contradictions of the many Sci-fi worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-01-15T16:09:23.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-15T20:15:45.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Basic analysis of the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some potential issue is hidden behind this &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; closure reason. If I were to take one reason to close, that would actually be lack of details or/and opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? As A Rogue Ant said, we don't really know how answers will get to be reviewed. When you build your own world, it's easier to do this, as you put natural constraints to the questions through both existing world rules and themes. As you asked about &amp;quot;any sci-fi world&amp;quot;, we can't rely on this and therefore we're stuck on equally viable answers, none being better without direction. I guess you should add a way to scale answers to make the question more viable and more lively first and foremost .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The issue of the &amp;quot;other sci-fi worlds&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that this question is off-topic. Indeed, we just asked if &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/is-it-ok-to-ask-questions-that-dont-have-specific-worldbuilding-use&quot;&gt;it was ok to ask questions that don't have specific worldbuilding use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, whose lone positive answer got a nice positive +5 vote at the time of writing, no downvote and no comment telling that it is wrong. The choice of this closure is contradictory to this accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disregarding the above, if I was asked a way to make a flat Earth representation (Theory A) while keeping some principles of newtonian physics (Theory B), answers could perfectly be used to build a world... With a flat Earth and some newtonian physics :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can this kind of question be asked on other SEs?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal to ask it on another science.SE is sadly not a really good option; It would be closed since -normally- scientists don't smash seemingly incompatible theories together &lt;strong&gt;to make it work, adding or changing 'observations' if needed&lt;/strong&gt;; They're more like smashing theories together to &lt;strong&gt;check if it can work, according to observations&lt;/strong&gt;. And it is when they don't create new theories and predictions, according to known data and without creating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ichtys, even if they don't sentenced exactly &amp;quot;how to make it happen&amp;quot;, asked if there is &amp;quot;any way to make it happen&amp;quot;, hoping a way could be found. Therefore it looks more like the speech of an artist creating something with purpose rather than a scientist wondering how the world works :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-01-15T20:15:45.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-16T17:28:00.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would have helped if you actually identified the problem you wanted solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I upvoted the question. In my view, this question is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what this site is supposed to be about: coming up with rules and systems for fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grossly mischaracterizing Lamarckism was unhelpful. Any answer to the question would have to include of a basic introduction to what Lamarckism is about; but this introduction would have been in direct contradiction with the question, which goes on a completely useless discussion of pipes and fluids. The answer would then of course be vulnerable to being considered invalid, because would not answer the question as written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question would have been how to harmonize an inheritance system based on a genetic code with the inheritance of acquired characters, which is the actual core of Lamarckism. But the actual question did not focus of the real question and instead veered off into the bizarre, focusing on a hypothetical and highly speculative &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you already have a specific mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characters, then why are you asking the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't even find a reason to answer the question, because (1) I was put off by the unsalavageable mischaracterization of what Lamarkism is about, and (2) there was nothing to answer except that yes, if you have a working mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characters then Lamarck's model of natural evolution will indeed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2022-01-16T17:28:00.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-17T08:37:12.737" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Of Course They Can&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, queries about fictional sciences and fictional theories can be asked here. There's one currently floating in the phlogistated aether about gaseous adhesives. It has a similar problem to your query: insufficient context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was my comment to your original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fictional science questions are terribly interesting! I like this one&#xA;because my own worldbuilding melds Lamarckian and Darwinian (-esque)&#xA;systems of evolution. But @ARogueAnt. brings up a good point. The&#xA;reason this question wouldn't count as worldbuilding because, as it&#xA;stands, it's essentially a real world question. You're just asking a&#xA;hypothetical. This is the germ of a worldbuilding query: for it to be&#xA;really answerable here, we'd need context. Background and underlying&#xA;nature of the fictional world. acceptance criteria based on&#xA;assumptions you've devised and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your hypothetical is, obviously, &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. I've done it, and I'm pretty sure others have as well. The problem is not, as you asked in the discussion, &lt;em&gt;where exactly in the real world do we find Lamarckism and Genetics coexisting&lt;/em&gt;; but rather it ought to have been how can this harmonisation be implemented within (a generic) fictional world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, as is too often the case, you kind of shoot your own otherwise great questions down through poor execution or ill chosen words. The question got closed for not being about worldbuilding. It's a real world question because you're basically asking a couple of blokes to wax hypothetical on a topic. It might also have been closed for being too broad / lacking focus. Simply put, I didn't answer your question because there are too many equally valid answers. Questions that allow for a nearly infinite range of valid answers aren't a good fit for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why context is so important! You don't need to specify a particular world with a list of 10,452 parameters; but you do need to give us some boundaries and some criteria to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T08:37:12.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-17T21:07:44.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interesting science philosophy question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked about a merger of two stages of development of a science, 150 years apart. That is a difficult one, certainly in this case. Lamarckism (evolution equals &lt;em&gt;improval&lt;/em&gt;) got falsified by natural selection (evolution equals &lt;em&gt;chance&lt;/em&gt;) , which was again confirmed by genetics. When would science maintain, or suddenly accept claims falsified by Darwin, 50 years and 150 years later ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have put this answer, if I would have had the chance to do so. I could not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad luck, there is a WB close reason&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest I didn't see many connections with WB either. There was a close reason. I did not vtc along, because I found the question interesting and I was curious if more answers would arrive. So I am a bad bad bad SE moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closures sometimes proceed very quickly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why this kind of question should be closed within the hour.. I would say leave things in peace for say 12 hours, we are not in some zero-sum game, where the rest of the forum &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; would be damaged by this kind of questions. When the user has 1000ths of points (like Ichtis has) and the question has a certain &lt;em&gt;standing&lt;/em&gt;, is that so difficult ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Couldn't this be reformulated, in some way&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My above argument is only valid on Earth. For WB, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;changing proven rules of our world&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;inventing new rules for a new world&lt;/em&gt; always sets you back.. there are several SE forums that would welcome your question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose you'd have a world where two advanced intelligent species adhere either paradigm &amp;quot;Lamarckism&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Genetics&amp;quot;, because (...) Maybe they'll &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to find a compromise some day, for some reason (...) that has to do with the planet ? or the species ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-01-17T21:50:06.763" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T21:50:06.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-17T22:40:37.860" Score="-1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've used StackExchange for a couple weeks. I used my Facebook log-in for the site. I took about a week break from it and as of today, when I tried to access Worldbuilding which is my most used network, it asked me to join the community. I click yes, then went through the process thinking its some kind of normal log-in behavior.. only to find my entire worldbuilding account statitsics to be blank!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly enough, as far as I can tell all my other network associations and history remained in tact. I can still find my old Worldbuilding post, which is now attributed to &amp;quot;user93359&amp;quot;. Here is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/221501/aliens-exist-on-the-other-side-of-the-nearby-wormhole-but-we-dont-know-wormhol&quot;&gt;Aliens exist on the other side of the nearby wormhole, but we don&amp;#39;t know wormhole exists yet. How might they be detected and communicated with?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do about this and how can this be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user93724" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T23:23:04.733" Title="My account lost association with user93359 and end up being asked to create a blank, new account" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9617" CreationDate="2022-01-17T23:23:04.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the &amp;quot;Contact&amp;quot; button at the bottom of any page on the network, it leads &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to a contact-form. You'll be able to leave an explanation/request for a staff member to fix it for you by merging the accounts or re-setting the login for you. It may take a day or two, longer at weekends depending on their workload.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logging in, personally I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;common stack-exchange login&lt;/a&gt; so I can log into all the sites at once, also a password manager, there are many free and secure ones like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lastpass.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lastpass&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stickypassword.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stickypassword&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dashlane.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dashlane&lt;/a&gt; to save labour. I use Lastpass, it works fine on Android as well as PC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55743" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T23:23:04.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-17T23:50:27.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is in the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is the heart of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;adding this context is simply impossible&amp;quot; &amp;gt; Any question where this is the case, should be closed as it is not a world building question without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29598" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T23:50:27.343" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8561" CreationDate="2022-01-19T11:51:26.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As TheSquareCubeLaw says, we're hot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice it's because we interact, we're far more active. There are question and answers, the questions and answers get lots of votes. We know at a baseline that the HNQ is a self fulfilling prophesy that says if you're active you get more attention and more activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick glance over Magento, there's barely a question with a vote to its name, they're almost all on 0 bar a few, many don't have answers, or at best 1-2 answers, and even views barely into double figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glance down our homepage and all the questions have votes, most into double figures, many have answers into double figures and views at least into triple figures with many into the thousands and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from a couple of other similar stacks to ours, SciFi and RPG who also weigh heavily on HNQ, I suspect most stacks are more like Magento in their interaction levels. We're also more fun, and like SciFi and RPG, most people can at least understand what we're talking about. These are places you go for a bit of downtime, not more work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T11:51:26.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-21T01:17:37.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be welcomed as a creative exercise in constructing the philosophical background of a scenario.  We &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have done great things with it as is - as per my comment, I was ready to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it could at least be argued that this one really did run afoul of ground rules rather than being closed for being excessively creative or for touching on sensitive political issues that have long overshadowed Western genetics.   The question asks about any possible combination of two vaguely defined real-world theories, without laying markers concerning which way you want to go.  It's a question about &amp;quot;many worlds&amp;quot; rather than one world.  Now it is fun for me to talk about pol theta, methylation and miRNAs, but I did sort of ignore the &amp;quot;fluid&amp;quot; bit, because it seems incidental in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; mind.  And while having a wide-ranging creative session would be satisfying, having the close voters go after hundreds of Lamarck-related threads as &amp;quot;duplicates&amp;quot; of this one would be frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give us an organism, with a history to explain.  (Why do I have a feeling it will be a fish?)  Tell us what is known about its evolutionary history, and its DNA, and perhaps your in-world researchers' theories, and ask us how to explain that.  The &amp;quot;close votes&amp;quot; are an unnecessary, unjustifiable pox on this site, but they should be opposed on more favorable ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-01-21T01:17:37.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8561" CreationDate="2022-01-22T21:56:52.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering in worldbuilding is fun 90% of the time, a learning experience 5% of the time for one who answers and unpaid work 5% of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other websites, answering is 95% of the times unpaid work and 5% of the time boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also reading questions on worlduilding is learning while having fun, schools should be like that, it's object oriented studying... while reading questions on other websites is normal textbook studying, you forget most of what you read anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I still remember answers I have read in this website 5-7 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastActivityDate="2022-01-22T21:56:52.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2022-01-24T23:24:59.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternate history or revisionist history ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting new (or new for here ?) type of alternate history topic has popped up.. It is not even tagged as &amp;quot;alternate-history&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/222980/how-to-form-an-international-alliance-of-nationalists&quot;&gt;How to form an &amp;quot;international alliance of nationalists&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic was the first one, for which I took a &lt;em&gt;first vote&lt;/em&gt; to close it. I'm normally far too tolerant.. but in this case, I really wonder what the intent is, with the title (in the first place). It could be some fishing for ideas by neo-nazi's, asking for things already arranged, suggesting they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; organized (?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content is even more &lt;em&gt;strange&lt;/em&gt;. Apparently the talking point is not really about the question itself. The opening is confusing.. and in the comments, the opener keeps talking about nazi's and jews, disguised as &amp;quot;N's and J's&amp;quot; as if he thinks no one would understand what &amp;quot;N's and J's&amp;quot; are. But I do wonder in this case, with this premise/claim about &lt;em&gt;radical jews&lt;/em&gt; in the opening, are we supposed to generate scenario's for some nazi-revisionist history, where communist jews were to blame for the destruction of Europe ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a thing like this can happen on WB, tagged or not, I really feel &amp;quot;alternate history&amp;quot; is a dangerous path, especially alternate &lt;em&gt;modern&lt;/em&gt; history. Suppose someone would make that &amp;quot;plausible&amp;quot;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The J's world on Earth was destroyed, there's nothing to be built or reinvent, nothing to be changed, or undone. I wonder why the topic has not been deleted yet. It was closed, it now has 3 reopen votes..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my view: please keep WB the escapist place as it is now, let it be about fictional worlds, involving fictional creatures, with fictional climates and fictional races, in fictional times, or thousands of years ago or thousands of years in the future, on Earth if really needed. Medieval is fine, WW-II is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal for this tag would be: if an alternate-history is presented on Earth, put a limit of (at least) a century in the past.. or future stuff..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-01-24T23:43:29.467" LastActivityDate="2022-01-24T23:43:29.467" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2022-01-25T00:06:31.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the answers that have been provided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center is clear about questions: they must be specific and solve a real, existing, and definable problem. Had you tried to explain how &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; tried to harmonize Lamarckism with the systems of Genetics, why you weren't able to do it, what specific help you needed to continue your efforts, and why you were doing it (e.g., your expectations, goals, etc), then the question would have been entirely on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't do any of that. You just threw a topic into the ring and expected a discussion to commence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is specifically &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, we are flexible when it comes to just how specific a question must be because this is a creative site and some questions simply can't be narrowed down without help. But we're not willing to open the floodgates, which is why we have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, and why we've drawn lines in the sand such as our distaste for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;High Concept Questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-01-26T00:29:29.777" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T00:29:29.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9608" CreationDate="2022-01-25T00:18:31.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As L.Dutch mentioned, the hovertext is a &lt;em&gt;network wide&lt;/em&gt; tag. Without changing the code, it can't be changed on a per-Stack basis and getting consensus for what that new text should be across the entire network would be... interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're point is well taken, but what really needs to happen (IMO) is for participants on Meta to clearly explain what they think and up-vote or down-vote will mean in the context of their post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this applies to both questions and answers. Though I'm far from consistent myself about this, I've taken the time to explain in some posts what I expect an up-vote or a down-vote to mean. Doing so does change participants' behavior, because sometimes &amp;quot;I agree with what this post has to say&amp;quot; isn't the intent of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T00:18:31.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9581" CreationDate="2022-01-25T00:42:08.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're asking to cross a line that we've had trouble accepting in the past&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the hard part: music in a game is entirely about the &lt;em&gt;user experience.&lt;/em&gt; But that's not a perfect judgement. After all, if you asked &amp;quot;what sound would my armored foot make when it comes down on a fungus that has the density of Styrofoam?&amp;quot; for the purpose of including that sound in the game to enhance the user experience, it would be an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? &lt;em&gt;Because the context of the question's application can be entirely removed from the world you're describing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you asked about how to make music for your game, it was clear to me that you were not trying to reflect much about the world of the game. You were trying to manipulate the emotions of the players. In other words, if you remove the application of the music from the question, what's left has basically nothing to do with the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this Stack, worldbuilding is the creation and consistent use of rules for a fictional world of your own creation. We're here to help you build that fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not actually here to help you build your game. It's obviously cool when we can... but it's not why we're here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-Topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sounds will a creature make?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sounds will an action in my world create?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the rules of my fictional civilization and the resource limitations I've described, how might my civilization express music?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I use music to make the players of my game feel tense?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My civilization is unusually compassionate, how to I create music that will help my game players internalize that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to express this as a simple idea: if you can't ask the question without mentioning the game... it's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This is almost identical to our worldbuilding-vs-storybuilding rules. If you can't ask the question without explaining something from your story, the question is Too Story-Based.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T00:42:08.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-25T03:53:28.997" Score="-4" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is not a good practice to close doors on one's face! My English is not good? It's ok. Tell me that. I'll accept it and I'll  make an effort to make it better. I have let an incomplete answer because a bad educated person closed a door on my face!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86005" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-01-26T16:40:10.100" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T20:00:02.413" Title="I was answering a question in &quot;worldbuilding&quot; when it was closed in my face. I would like to know who did this" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9628" CreationDate="2022-01-25T04:17:58.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing questions off topic questions is an integral part of the stack exchange format. If closing questions didn't prevent people from answering them then the act of closing questions would be meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a system to indicate that a question has pending draft answers and in the eyes of the community moderation process if the question &lt;em&gt;as written&lt;/em&gt; has issues it shouldn't receive any answers. Unfortunately this occasionally results in race conditions where you can't submit an answer to a question that was closed while composing the draft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you gain sufficient reputation you can see who voted to close questions. I can't remember what the rep threshold is for seeing who voted to close a question. I can tell you that it was very likely 5 regular members of the community who voted to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T04:17:58.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-25T17:15:55.913" Score="-3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/222980/how-to-form-an-international-alliance-of-nationalists&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/222982/627&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; was deleted as &amp;quot;spam or rude or abusive&amp;quot; for citing a contributing factor about why the Nazis hated Jews.  In reference to the writings of Adolf Hitler, the user wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Nazis didn't hate Jews because they were jews but because, at the time, they represented the main endorsers of communism and the things that destroyed or betrayed their country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in his comments he clarified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Hitler, in his book puts Communists and Jews on the same page as destroyers and betrayers of Germany, even saying that jews where the ones to push communism to the west.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following comments he changed this line to try to make his point more clear that this was the influence of Hitler and not an objective fact, but his answer still got deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Nazis didn't hate Jews because they were jews. It's not a question about ethnicity or religion. They hated jews based on their association to communism which was as everyone knows, pressed by the ideologies of Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is obviously a touchy subject, the user was very clear that this was not his personal opinion, nor was he encouraging people to believe in the racist opinions of Adolf Hitler, but he was explaining a historical racist perspective that was relevant in context of the answer he was giving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, some people expressed strong opinions that the statement was an oversimplification.  They called Adolph Hitler a lier and a psychopath (I think that goes without saying) and that his this view ignores a much longer more complex history of racism in Germany. On that level, I am not against the downvotes that the question received due to lack of completeness and clarity, I am only calling into question the use of moderation to delete it as &amp;quot;spam or rude or abusive&amp;quot;.  There was clearly no malice or racism meant by the user's post, and it seems he was trying to be responsive to comments to resolve an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of World Building, understanding how racism or any other potentially offensive belief system works in the real world is a very important topic when trying to create a setting where they do exist. Questions and answers should be allowed to discuss topics like racism as long as they are not written in a way designed to actively encourage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-01-26T17:26:25.050" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T17:26:25.050" Title="Should an answer be deleted as &quot;spam or rude or abusive&quot; for citing a historically held offensive belief?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2022-01-25T18:18:58.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under normal circumstances I'm against the deletion of answers for merely being factually incorrect. However when someone is quoting the words of Hitler for any purpose other than a discussion of the options and actions of Hitler, I will make an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T18:18:58.990" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2022-01-25T18:21:17.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;They weren't quoting a contentious belief, they were representing rhetoric uncritically as fact. To quote from one of the comments left under the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“they [action] because of [reason]” and “they say they [action] because of [reason], even though [reason] is false” are not 2 interchangeable sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former takes a statement and without commentary represents it, not as what someone said, but as something that is true, while the later clearly indicates that they're talking about what was said, and that what was said was false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're going to engage with mature or contentious topics on this site we need to be mature, precise, and careful with our language. SO has a clear policy on bigotry in their code of conduct. At a baseline any post should follow that. It's also important to remember that &amp;quot;just asking x&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;just talking about x&amp;quot; can quickly become disruptive if the person isn't acting in good faith. There isn't a hard and fast rule for when this is. If we enumerate the rules, some enterprising individual is going to find an edge case and exploit it and claim that &amp;quot;they weren't breaking the rules&amp;quot; and therefore they shouldn't be penalized for being not nice. I should add that raising concern about the implications of taking action (and listen carefully to precisely what I'm saying here), &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be another form of trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the comments it seems like specific concerns were raised with OP's choice of words. Specifically they made some rather uncritical remarks about the Nazi's feelings towards Jews. Commentors were surprisingly patient and even suggested ways of editing the post to still engage with the material without violating SO's policy. At this point it was ambiguous whether the answerer had misspoke or not. As the comment thread grew longer it became clear that whether intentionally or not, they weren't in a position to maturely engage with the material at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like most things in life different situations require different levels of care, and precision. If you want to talk about contentious topics on this site you must be less flippant, and more responsive to concerns raised. If you can't do that, especially when concerns were raised, carefully explained, and edits were suggested, I don't think that deletion of the post is out of line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T18:36:19.453" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T18:36:19.453" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2022-01-25T21:55:47.240" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer did not &lt;em&gt;quote&lt;/em&gt; the mendacious words of Hitler. On the contrary, the answer presented those odious views as beloging to the respondent, and and as an established fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nazis didn't persecute bicyclists because they were bicyclists but because, at the time, they represented the main endorsers of communism and the things that destroyed or betrayed their country.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The official Nazi propaganda pretended that they didn't persecute bicyclists because they were bicyclists but because, at the time, the Nazis believed that bicyclists represented the main endorsers of communism and the things that destroyed or betrayed their country.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first option takes Nazi propaganda as fact, and vomits it all over history. If the respondent wanted to &lt;em&gt;refer to&lt;/em&gt; Nazi propaganda in a neutral way they should have used the second option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that it would have still been false, and I would still have downvoted it. Nazis absolutely hated bicyclists because they were bicyclists, and their official propaganda made it very clear that bicyclists were essentially, fundamentally and irredeemably evil. The proof is that in National-Socialist Germany one could not abandon bicyclism; it was sufficient for one grandparent to have owned a bicycle, for one to be considered a bicyclist in the eyes of the state, with dire consequences. When a person is hated because something one of their grandparents were, it is obvious that the hatred is directed at their essence and not at anything they might have done.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anecdote: The Nazis even banned the music of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mendelssohn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mendelssohn Bartholdy&lt;/a&gt;, he who wrote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Oo4z37OUEI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wedding march&lt;/a&gt; (YouTube) played at Christian weddings all over the world. Because &lt;em&gt;Felix Mendelssohn was a Calvinist Christian&lt;/em&gt; of Jewish extraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T22:21:56.020" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T22:21:56.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2022-01-25T23:21:09.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;To know your answer you just need to dig up a bit of history...&amp;quot;  That is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an answer, more an insult.  Backed with a highly dubious argument about Hitler's motivations - I'd like to suggest another opinion, but it's off topic to the question.  There is also a strong scent cue in the capitalization.  I probably disagree with 90% of the closings and deletions on Stackexchange, but when an answer isn't an answer, what can I say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T23:21:09.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9628" CreationDate="2022-01-27T01:00:04.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a dozen or more questions over the years closed half-way through an answer I was writing. Once or twice I even thought the answer I was writing was some of my best work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens - it's a consequence of the fact that 1-5 people voted to close the question before I could finish. It's not an insult to me - they don't (and can't) know that I'm trying to pound out an answer. It's just the way a self-moderated site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the club. We meet on Thursdays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-01-27T01:00:04.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-27T20:27:33.153" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems very low considering most users here have been on the website for a very long time and 500 isn't that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, is it an arbitrary random number or is there a specific reason behind it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T01:24:44.003" Title="Why is the bounty limit 500?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9636" CreationDate="2022-01-27T21:06:15.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ultimately the answer is that Stack Exchange decided upon 500 when they built the bounty system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about the policies and intent behind the bounties in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. Reading it we can that bounties are intended to draw attention to a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites have a daily rep cap of 200. With the exception of bounties you can only gain 200 rep from upvotes each day. Over two days worth of max reputation gain is high enough to draw attention to a post without greatly disrupting the existing reputation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-01-28T15:22:46.090" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T15:22:46.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9636" CreationDate="2022-01-27T22:18:32.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I'd make a couple arguments for keeping it at 500 points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The purpose of bounties is to attract attention to a question that needs answers or to reward an existing answer. If a 500-point bounty won't adequately attract attention . . . well, I'm not sure anything can.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;500 points is enough to spring a low-reputation member through a number of privilege levels - not terrible, but it can be jarring to suddenly have access to many tools and privileges when you haven't had time to practice with intermediate-level ones. Increasing the limit would only exacerbate the issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Increasing the limit would also make it easier to transfer lots of reputation points to sockpuppet accounts, and people do occasionally abuse the bounty system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, I'd argue that there simply isn't much demand for doing so. It's quite rare to see a 500-point bounty on a question on Worldbuilding (or, frankly, a bounty even half that size!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2022-01-30T01:24:44.003" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T01:24:44.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9628" CreationDate="2022-01-28T00:46:00.120" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I really agree with the asker and I &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; this question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From many answerer's perspective, also mine, topics get closed too quickly on WB imho, even for first answers. Sometimes there's long answers, because of the subject. These take time. When starting research and answer, why would you take 1-2 close votes into account ? You may disagree.. but suddenly, it's getting 20:00 PM European time and the topic gets closed, because some new peer-mod folks come online and start their reviews. Close-Close-Close and the three votes arrive before you can finish. I recognize the situation.. and the &lt;em&gt;frustration&lt;/em&gt;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason given is often &amp;quot;they have to edit&amp;quot; but I don't see many openers do that. I tried a few times myself, with peer mod privs, to &amp;quot;salvage&amp;quot; a topic. But it is difficult to be on time. The opener.. just flies by again 12 hours later and finds his/her topic closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most times, when answerers put a protest, we'll get the reply &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;you don't answer questions that need to be closed&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; but.. at first, it wasn't closed.. and when you have invested 1-2 hours in an answer (that happens), it's difficult to acknowledge that there is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reason your submit will bounce!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal would be: ease up. Don't go rush rush with these reviews. And enter the question list first, don't go review right away. Read questions that interest you, answer them. Then do the reviews. I skip most, actually. If something is unanswerable, don't worry, few answers will follow. If something is off topic for WB, the answers can still remain &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;, close it next day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And please give more advice.. also to 500+ points askers.. the rules here are complicated. Try to comment in a positive way, without attacking the opener's intent, with words like &amp;quot;fishing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;misconception&amp;quot;, like it happens now. That will not motivate to go editing a question. &lt;em&gt;Explain&lt;/em&gt; to the opener, why a vote to close is set and promise you will reverse it on a good edit. Sometimes I see topics without any comment explaining the close vote. Users don't even know who closed or why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have some more respect, too. Not everyone knows what &amp;quot;unanswerable&amp;quot; is, or the &amp;quot;book test&amp;quot;. Someone asking about a hypothetical subject, without any science or reality tags, should not be bothered with &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;single answer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;fact-based&amp;quot; general SE constraints. As long as the (single) question - and its answers - help finding &lt;em&gt;scientifically plausible&lt;/em&gt; explanations for the reader, it should be allowed on SE/WB, imho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suppose we would want 100% SE-compliant quality..&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SE wants to avoid these frustrations on SE/WB.. be compliant &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/?_ga=2.171167656.92693083.1638304628-995428532.1603487676&quot;&gt;to SE culture&lt;/a&gt; around subjective questions, you'd have to comply to rules like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. &amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to impose that, change the forum software to let the opener choose between science-based, hard-science and reality-check tags. One of these tags is obligatory.. and questions &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; answers should comply to it. It would reduce the audience, reduce the scope, and eliminate 40-50 other tags. There are no science-based merfolk, or science-based dragons, or science-based FTL, or science based life on neutron stars. All these questions can be closed immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-01-28T20:15:45.063" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T20:15:45.063" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-28T10:44:25.267" Score="-3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logged in,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Got a bunch of notifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the last one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Suspended users can't vote&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goes on worldbuilding meta, can't even post...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searches for support, can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's about that?  Have I been using too much stackedchange? Or is it again the mods thinking I'm voting myself just because my questions get more than the average 3 upvotes per question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Drien&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user93995" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T18:01:34.683" Title="Suspended to cool down" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9640" CreationDate="2022-01-28T16:06:26.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/293213/why-we-dont-keep-public-records-of-suspensions/293389&quot;&gt;SO policy&lt;/a&gt; to not talk publicly about suspensions This is done to protect suspended individuals from gossip and undue public scrutiny. The expectation is that after a suspension is over a user should be able to return to the site and participate in it as if the suspension never happened. No public records of suspensions is kept and as a rule, Mods do not talk about suspensions. All that anyone who isn't a mod can see is that your account is temporarily suspended for 7 days, for you to cool down. I suspect that unless you deliberately turn this private issue into a public one that's all you're going to find out from this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future I'd STRONGLY suggest against creating a second account, circumventing the suspension, to discuss it on meta. It reflects poorly on your willingness to abide by site policy. Instead, take the time to cool down, reflect on the information they've given you privately about the suspension, and if you have specific questions, you can request clarification privately from the mods, after your suspension is over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-01-28T18:01:34.683" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T18:01:34.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9628" CreationDate="2022-01-29T19:54:40.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's keep in mind that only around &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9609/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;7% of closed questions get reopened&lt;/a&gt;, it is always safer to never be the first to answer, wait a few hours and see how it goes, just to save your own time and mental sanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternativelly, re ask the question yourself and answer it yourself.&#xA;There are internet websites and applications that allow you to go back in time and recover all your lost material, but generelly just going back to the previous page will save all that you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like now, if I send this post then press ''back page'' button, it will automatically bring me to the edit section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another stragegy is to not write the answer directly on this website, write it somewhere else then copy paste it, I juggest visual studio because it is black screened and it counts your lines, it also saves the file even if your computer crashes without you saving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user89947" LastEditorDisplayName="user89947" LastEditDate="2022-01-29T20:00:02.413" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T20:00:02.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-31T00:33:20.973" Score="12" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it's a surprise to anyone that I'm an advocate of swift question closure. I'd rather have a chance to help a user produce a great question than suffer the problems that come with merely good (or worse, mediocre) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, whether you agree with my behavior or not, I believe close voting on our creative, subjective, and amazing Stack suffers for inconsistent close voting—especially as most close voters choose not to offer advice for improving the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of my concern comes from one of our users, who posted this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/223337/40609&quot;&gt;Would many parents use In Vitro Gametogenesis and Designer Baby technology to choose to have girls with Complete Androgen insensitivity Syndrome?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was closed within a day and aggregating eight down-votes. However, this question from the same user posted 20 days ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/221958/40609&quot;&gt;Would many parents use Designer Baby technology to make their children have Asperger Syndrome?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is identical in form and intent and yet aggregated two up-votes and nary a single close vote. This was preceded by this related question posted yet two weeks earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/220881/40609&quot;&gt;Shortest pregnancy length possible using artificial womb technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which aggregated three down-votes and was closed for a completely different reason than the first question I mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request #1&lt;/strong&gt; I ask the moderators to please, please, please make the effort to come up with a final policy for how the Opinion-Based close reason should be used on this site and post that policy in the most closely-related Help Center page you can edit. We've been debating this since 2014. While I suspect a debate about how it should be used would be vigorous, I also suspect that in the long run &lt;em&gt;nobody will care&lt;/em&gt; what the policy is so long as there's a posted explanation that everyone can easily point to for the purpose of justifying how they used that vote. Please. I'm begging on my hands and knees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It doesn't help that VTC:Opinion-Based it closely related to the just-as-long-debated issue of allowing Fishing-for-Ideas/Idea-Generation/Brainstorming questions. At one time I promoted the idea that asking for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; (meaning the question is poorly bounded) is off-topic while asking for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; (meaning the question is well enough bounded to limit responses) is on-topic. But while that distinction was reasonably well received, time has proven that creating Meta-only-based policies simply doesn't work in the long run.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request #2&lt;/strong&gt; I ask all users to please think through your VTC reasoning. Even if you choose to offer no additional insight to the OP (which is your right), if you can justify in your heart-of-hearts any close reason other than Opinion-Based, please get in the habit of doing so. If you seriously think Opinion-Based is the only right answer, I further recommend that you instead select &amp;quot;A Community-Specific Reason -&amp;gt; Other&amp;quot; and explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-02-02T20:06:51.473" LastActivityDate="2022-02-03T17:28:03.937" Title="A Plea for Consistent Close-Voting" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|help-center|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2022-01-31T14:33:31.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Subjectivity Rules the Day&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, I'm often in agreement with you on matters of custom and even policy. I think my main concern here is not so much the desire to be consistent in voting to close (or &amp;quot;voting&amp;quot; to leave open); but rather the question is how does the community achieve consensus on what consistency means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been fairly self consistent in arguing against &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; as a closure rationale. (Assume a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;excellent&amp;quot; question with an engaging matter and sufficient responsorial paraphernalia present.) Other people have been fairly self consistent in voting to close those same questions because they are inherently opinion based. (These tend to be questions of the magic and dragon wings sort.) If three users espouse five different opinions on what opinion based actually is, I don't think any policy is going to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's take a look at the three named queries, I would note the following:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CAIS query was closed for being opinion based. I can see the point, though I disagree with their rationale. Of course it's an opinion! Every question in this forum is seeking an opinion! I also think the question could be stellar if properly worded. This is a fascinating area of worldbuilding that I've done a lot of work on and I think this question could be edited to work well in this forum. I left a comment to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would have very reluctantly voted to close this question for lacking detail, but I would have also engaged the OP in making it better. If she edits it substantively, I'd happily propose reopening!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the Aspergers query remains open because it's better written. It sort of provides some rationales for parents to choose this for their kids. (Though to play devil's advocate: if you have the gene editing tech and wherewithal to give a kid Aspergers, why sentence her to all the potential problems it brings along with it when you can simply edit the genes different, give her &amp;quot;more neurons&amp;quot; and thus make her smarter?) I'd also gnitpique that bit about &amp;quot;aspergers cases rising&amp;quot; --- it's not that there are more actual cases, it's that more cases are being diagnosed. Improved access to better diagnostics allows this kind of awareness to bubble up in the common consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would have left this one alone, though might suggest clarifying edits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On these two queries specifically, I would resist the temptation simply because I find CAIS and minor sexes/genders to be far more interesting a topic than autism, but I think the case can be made that the CAIS query be closed as a typological duplicate. The actual matter of the question is different, but the question itself is identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the length of gestation query, I am boggled how that one got closed for being story based. Opinion based (!) maybe, but I see nothing that indicates that it is a matter of plot development or character evolution. This is a straight up query of technology in society -- in other words, worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would not have voted to close this question, as it stands, but neither will I vote to reopen unless it's clarified a little better.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this helps or hurts your plea! But at the very least, I think it speaks to the real difficulty a forum like ours has when it comes to objectifying the inherently subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T14:33:31.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2022-01-31T18:40:50.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is not inconsistency. All active VTC'ers are rather consistent in their votes. The real problem is the lack of a well-defined policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is now, 'opinion-based' is a purely subjective reason for closure that is dangerously close to 'I do not like this question'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I second the request for moderators to get involved&lt;/strong&gt;. The WB.SE does need a proper policy that is written into the official rules. The Help Centre should be updated to include it, even if it is a link to a Meta discussion that contains the final decision on policy and its interpretation. And no one except for moderators can do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that Meta discussions can not and should not be used as a substitute for actual rules. There are very few people who read Meta. And even fewer actually participate in discussions. In addition to this, contradicting opinions/positions/proposals may have a comparable number of upvotes and downvotes, so it is not possible to determine which of them are the 'policy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T18:40:50.110" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-31T19:40:07.847" Score="-5" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago the WB.SE community was discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64/back-it-up-policies&quot;&gt;whether to adhere to the Back It Up! policy or not&lt;/a&gt;. Those discussions are not very relevant today since most participants are long gone now. And the current generation of users has very different standards compared to the early days of the WB.SE. I think that it is time to talk about answers and their quality again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;The WB.SE tour&lt;/a&gt; says: '&lt;em&gt;With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is an admirable goal. But it does not say whether this library should contain answers with good, reliable information or it can be made of speculations and wild guesses. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; is also not very specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is now there is no formal rule addressing the quality of the answers. There are also no guidelines for answers, except for those stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;, but it is a rule that is systematically ignored on the current WB.SE (some high reputation and active on Meta users do not even know about its existence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today's WB.SE has a great number of answers that appear to me as poorly researched, based on speculations, unverified assumptions, personal preferences, 'common sense', ideologies, tropes, and so on&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. As a result, it is not possible for me to trust the answers (not to mention that &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; is a much better source for tropes). Their best use is to test the audience, their preferences, values, and beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speculative answers and wild guesses are not bad per se. And they can be immensely helpful. Even answers based on wrong assumptions can be helpful if those assumptions are clearly stated. The problem is that they do not work well with the existing requirements for questions. The WB.SE does not welcome speculative questions and requires prior research. There is also a rule against opinion-based questions, but at this point of the WB.SE history, it is not clear what constitutes opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have a clear position on this. I would like the expectations for answers and questions to match each other (researched questions and researched answers, for example) because I believe in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reciprocity&lt;/a&gt; and it seems to me that it would be easier to keep the quality of the questions high if the answers are of equally high quality. However, I do not expect the community to support this view or the WB.SE to uphold it. At this time I am trying to learn what other people think about the answers and whether there should be some guidelines for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this query is not to start a debate about my own position regarding the quality of answers or my evaluation of answers. The former is not possible as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not have a clear position&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (which I stated before) and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not proposing any policies or guidelines&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The latter is something that I wanted to avoid because the discussion will turn to be about specific answers and their merits rather than the general quality of answers and whether any guidelines are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent was expressed in the last sentence of the original version: &lt;strong&gt;At this time I am trying to learn what other people think about the answers and whether there should be some guidelines for them.&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, I wanted people to share their thoughts about answers and their quality and whether any guidelines are necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since @elemtilas insists on providing specific examples of what I would consider a low-quality answer and explicitly states that they would want to hear my opinion about their own answer, I will use their answer to this query (as of 4 February 2022, 18:20 GMT) as such an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 big problems with this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is a response to the linked Back It Up! policy discussion, not this query (and @elemtilas does acknowledge this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that @elemtilas justifies this approach by saying that my query is unfinished and not clear enough to them. They even threatened to VTC it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be mentioned that @elemtilas is the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8540/is-it-fair-to-encourage-people-to-not-answer-questions-that-need-to-be-closed&quot;&gt;Is it Fair to Encourage People to NOT Answer Questions that Need to be Closed?&lt;/a&gt;, where they advocate for not answering questions that they find to be unsatisfactory. Therefore, their own response is not only inconsistent with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;WB.SE guidelines for answers&lt;/a&gt; but also with their own position regarding answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in their response @elemtilas does not represent the original Back It Up! policy or discussion about it accurately (and they agree with this evaluation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way @elemtilas builds their argument and formats their post distorts the original meaning of the Back It Up! policy and may lead readers to believe that it was an attempt to require references for every single answer. It was never the case. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/78/78906&quot;&gt;The core of the policy was&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Every answer needs to justify the conclusions it comes to.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this kind of answer not only as poor-quality but detrimental to the WB.SE. It sets a precedent for being off-topic. It also misleads the readers. In addition, it makes it impossible for me to trust the author's words even when it comes to their expressed attitudes and positions on issues because their acts are not consistent with their words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not provide any additional specific examples of low-quality answers as I do not believe that it would be very constructive to this discussion. However, since @elemtilas has difficulty understanding my point about disaster myths I will add a note on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer that features mass panic or social chaos as inevitable and 'natural' (as in 'it's human nature') outcomes in disaster scenarios is an answer that lacks research because both of these notions are among debunked disaster myths. There is even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_response_to_disasters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; about this. Moreover, these answers are, if I put it kindly, irresponsible since the propagation of disaster myths worsens the outcomes for real people affected by real disasters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sup&gt;My personal favourites are mass-panic and social chaos. These myths were debunked so many times (please google for 'disaster myths'), yet, almost every question related to disastrous scenarios will have answers suggesting that mass-panic, looting, rioting, and social collapse are inevitable.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This lack of research is not limited to social phenomena, it shows in answers to questions that are related to natural sciences as well.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2022-02-04T19:40:47.037" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T21:36:31.677" Title="Let's talk about answers and their quality" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2022-01-31T21:25:12.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and foremost it doesn't have to be just a library, there's google scholar for that and also almost every city out there has a public library with free books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE seems more like a user to user website, which means question makers are free to specify what they seek in an answer and the level of opinion vs reality they are willing to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user89947" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T21:25:12.220" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2022-02-01T16:31:40.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Our Stack is not and should not be Physics.SE-lite&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do you cite or document an answer about a user's magic system? Or the magical creature they're designing? Or the magical weapon they're designing? This is the fundamental problem with the &amp;quot;Opinion Based&amp;quot; closure reason — it's not possible to become an expert in Magic from the perspective originally intended by Stack Exchange. This is especially a problem when a querent, who ostensibly knows their own magic system better than anyone else, gets an answer from someone who is familiar with a dozen magic systems used in various RPG games and/or novels. Which one is the &amp;quot;expert?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How much documentation or citation is deemed satisfactory when answering questions about dystopian governments? post-zombie-apocalypse societies? or time travel? All of these can draw from (and would be benefited by) current mathematics or historical conditions that reasonably represent the goal of the OP. But so would drawing on years of reading time-travel, post-apocalypse, and dystopian-government novels as what other authors have done is a perspective as valid as any science-based or history-based answer. But should we ignore the perspective of a user who grew up, for example, in East L.A. and has a unique perspective of what &amp;quot;post apocalypse&amp;quot; might mean, despite a complete lack of credentials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem. In my opinion, &lt;em&gt;we already focus way, way, way too much on being a science-only Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/em&gt; We're robbing the site of the one thing that really makes it valuable: imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For my last example, how do you document the behavioral responses of an artificial intelligence? or a government? or a military contingent based on a provided context or circumstance? How do you design the sexuality of an alien species that is unrelated to Humanity or any terrestrial creature? Questions like these that are not well bounded are quickly closed, but we've answered those that are well bounded and don't reflect the Help Center restriction that we don't answer questions about character choices. You, yourself, have noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8312/40609&quot;&gt;a previous Meta post&lt;/a&gt; that questions like these should either be left to the &lt;s&gt;experts&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;to people who take the time to research the issues such that an expert in the field would not be disappointed by the result&lt;/em&gt; or excluded entirely rather than risk &amp;quot;falsehoods.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; If we held all questions to that standard, the only people answering would be accredited experts in their fields (yeah... magic...) or no questions would ever be allowed on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we improve answers knowing that all kinds of people will use this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I once had a comment-discussion with an advanced user over at English.SE. He was constantly trying to push questions from English-as-a-second-language users and your-question-is-too-basic users off the site. When I pointed out to him that there wasn't actually a practical way to do that without violating SE's CoC, his response was, &amp;quot;can't we professionals have a site for ourselves?&amp;quot; The answer, since SE doesn't require CVs as part of the account creation process, is &amp;quot;no.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange must be for more than &amp;quot;professionals&amp;quot; — experts in their fields who not only have been educated well enough to provide authoritative answers but who also have the time to sit down and write thorough, documented answers. I'm only guessing, but I suspect a substantial portion of our users haven't finished (and may not finish) college — and there's a chunk who haven't finished high school. Expecting them to not answer before they've finished their training is unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, we have a Help Center page dedicated to discussing how to answer a question. The bullet I think should be at the top of the list is &amp;quot;answer well-asked questions,&amp;quot; which many users ignore (if they know the rule at all). Holding querents to well-asked questions would do more for improving answers than hoping any new user will improve their answering skills. Here's that page for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the whole point of the up-vote/down-vote system is to express the belief that, in the case of a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(UP) This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(DOWN) This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in the case of an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(UP) This answer is useful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(DOWN) This answer is not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the average user uses up-voting/down-voting to merely express popularity or appreciation is beside the point. A mechanism exists to filter poor answers. (And if they're really poor, they can be flagged for deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what do we do when, for example, an answer expresses an academically out-dated belief that's still popularly regarded as true?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, this is NOT unique to the social sciences. Humanity's understanding of both themselves and the universe they live in is constantly expanding and evolving. New hypotheses replace old hypotheses and it takes time for that to percolate through the general populace.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I've had several answers over the years where people pointed out to me that my understanding was outdated.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But does that make my answer useless to the querent?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the fundamental problem with defining &amp;quot;answer quality&amp;quot; on a site that's dedicated to imagination and creativity. The casual insight of an &amp;quot;uneducated&amp;quot; user can quite literally be &lt;em&gt;the exact answer the OP was looking for&lt;/em&gt; because we're supposed to be focused on building fictional worlds, not copies of Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;@Python's right, we should allow the querent the privilege of caring about what a &amp;quot;quality answer&amp;quot; looks like.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have tags that theoretically set these standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;No tag...&lt;/em&gt;, useful answers are open to the interpretation of the respondents based on the expectations set in the query and the tags used to identify its context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;, anything goes so long as it operates within the querent's magic system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, indicating that while science should be the basis of an answer, wide birth is allowed in its interpretation or application, even to fantastic results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, indicating that science should be the basis of an answer, and how it's applied should represent at least a &lt;em&gt;suspension-of-disbelief&lt;/em&gt; scientific application, but outright proving your point with mathematics or citations is not required (but appreciated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, indicating the answer MUST be the basis of an answer, that it's application MUST adhere to a strict interpretation of science, and the answer MUST contain supporting mathematics and citations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've complained before about the science-* tags because they don't cover the gamut of querent expectations and don't entirely express what a good answer would look like.&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8379/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8363/40609&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8282/40609&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; But there is a LOT of historical inertia behind those three tags, so they're really difficult to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, they (combined with the Help Center page and the &amp;quot;Good/Bad Subjective&amp;quot; blog) represent the Stack's effort to achieve your goals. Although I believe improving the questions will go further toward improving answer quality than will educating users about writing good answers, I'm all for trying to do it. But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's the problems, based on experience.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users almost never read tag wikis. And even when they do, they frequently don't use tags properly (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is the worst offender and best example). Worse, because we don't even mention the magic, science-fiction, science-based, and hard-science tags in the Help Center, new users don't know they exist until they see them on other posts. It's amazing how many times new users use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag thinking it refers to the &lt;em&gt;literary genre.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it ain't in the Help Center, it doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is in the Help Center, it's an uphill battle to convince anyone to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No matter how thoroughly or clearly the expectations are written, there will always be someone who thinks the person asking for a better answer is misinterpreting/misapplying the expectations or violating the CoC for pointing out someone else's weaknesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think a concise explanation of answer quality expectations that meets the needs for the wide variety of topics we allow on this Stack would be next to impossible to achieve. But that's just my opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are other issues more important than this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And here you and I will likely always disagree. I don't consider Electronics to be a definitive science. Our understanding of it changes. There are things twenty years ago we EEs &lt;strong&gt;knew from mathematics and experience could NEVER be done.&lt;/strong&gt; And yet EEs are doing them today. Social sciences don't even rank on the same scale of predictability — and yet you want us to treat them like they do as if today's understanding of human behavior, like today's understanding of Electronics, is somehow the end-all of knowledge and not just the current best-guess. I get it that this Stack would benefit from a better understanding of today's social and behavioral hypotheses... but I'm not willing to take them more seriously than I do my own academic background.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;A fair number of people still think oil comes from dinosaurs.... Although I'd hope the majority of said believers are over the age of 20. If not, schools must really stink.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;The majority of times this has happened to me have been questions about Einsteinian Physics and Climate. The last time I cracked a book about those subjects was 30 years ago. Back then, those &lt;strong&gt;textbooks&lt;/strong&gt; were considered authoritative. See the problem? I had no reason to believe my answers were inadequate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-02-01T19:21:35.500" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T19:21:35.500" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-01T17:44:43.663" Score="5" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a rule of thumb around here that &amp;quot;if you find a question good enough to answer, you should upvote it&amp;quot;.  Generally I agree with this; however, I often find myself on the fence about if I should upvote a question that is only worth answering with a Frame Challenge.  A question can be original, well written, on topic, and clearly answerable... and yet still contain a significant fallacy in its conception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/223460/why-would-most-species-avoid-democracy/223487#223487&quot;&gt;Why would most species avoid democracy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does/should the &amp;quot;if you find a question good enough to answer, you should upvote it&amp;quot; rule of thumb apply to Frame Challenges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2022-02-01T19:45:35.513" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T17:38:56.653" Title="Question Upvoting Etiquette and Frame Challenges" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2022-02-01T18:25:43.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in the comment, a question should be upvoted when it's of good quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;if you find a question good enough to answer, you should upvote it&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's not a rule here, nor a rule of thumb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That it might be answered, or that it might be answered with a frame challenge is not related to the upvote. A frame challenge can be an eye opener for the OP, precisely because it challenges the frame they have built, and can put the worldbuilding problem under a completely different perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T18:25:43.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2022-02-01T20:14:38.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And in the beginning people were vociferous and participative and yay, they did up- and down-vote much! And lo, time did pass, and people became less interested and less attentive, and it did slow down the acquisition of rep and badges thereby...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@L.Dutch is right, the perspective is neither a rule nor a rule-of-thumb (meaning, an &amp;quot;expectation&amp;quot;). That people have commented to that effect in the past is true, however, because voting serves a purpose it's better (IMO) to err on the side of voting than not. And that's true for both questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that once you've gained your basic user privileges on Stack Exchange, the only reasons I can think of to keep plugging along with rep are two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's some SE swag that gets mailed to you when you cross the 100,000 rep mark. (Per-Stack! Total rep on the network doesn't count.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A general sense of respect. People are less likely to challenge a high-rep user (and, on the flip side, they're more likely to follow one, too, meaning watch how you VTC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, the rules that are important are reflected by the mouse-rollovers and what we find in the Help Center. For the questions the roll-overs read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(UP) This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(DOWN) This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of those statements translate to &amp;quot;I like/dislike this question.&amp;quot; In fact, it's a bit of a stretch to translate them to &amp;quot;this is a good question.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; What they do is reflect a statement from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...solicit opinions rather than facts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...have already been asked and answered many times before.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...require too much guidance for you to answer in full, or request answers to multiple questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...are not about worldbuilding as defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that you can edit the question you're answering to improve the clarity and focus - this can reduce the chances of the question being closed or deleted.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when we follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;first link in that section&lt;/a&gt;, we learn that a good question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’d love to help you. To improve your chances of getting an answer, here are some tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search, and research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be on-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be specific&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it relevant to others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep an open mind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that other than the statement that says &amp;quot;search and research,&amp;quot; nothing in those statements talks about the premises or topics chosen by the OP. In other words, a question can be a well-asked question, deserving of an up-vote, and yet be unanswerable. It can also be a question that has a perfectly obvious answer but is so badly asked that it deserves a down-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all, remember that the purpose of a frame challenge is not simply to instruct the user about something they don't understand well. We get all kinds of people on this Stack with a wide variety of education, experience, and research skills. What was trivial for us may not have been trivial for them. The purpose of a frame challenge remains, as with all answers, &lt;em&gt;to answer the question.&lt;/em&gt; The frame challenge is what adjusts the premise of the OP to allow the answer the respondent believes is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when we consider the practical applications, if you felt a question deserved to be answered for any reason, why wouldn't you also cast a non-obligatory up-vote? Not as a rule, nor as a rule-of-thumb, but as a participatory preference that supports the whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And this is important, because how most people use the votes is to express popularity — and even that's complex. Good examples are questions about gender, gender roles, and gender identity. I've seen well-asked questions get down-voted to the point of deletion because&lt;/em&gt; people didn't like the question. &lt;em&gt;In other words, hot-potato questions tend to suffer most from inappropriate voting. But, c'est la vie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;That last statement, actually found in the Help Center, is dubious because we have an unwritten expectation that no edit shall invalidate an existing answer — and since we have a number of users who will (and do) answer anything fairly quickly, the statement is for all intents and purposes, false. You can't edit a question for any practical purpose other than legibility, grammar, and spelling unless you're lucky enough to catch it before someone answers. Type fast.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T20:14:38.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2022-02-02T04:39:43.413" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Dipping My Toes in the Fuming Acid Bath&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT: This response addresses only the original, unedited question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have some comments on the linked discussion about a proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64/back-it-up-policies&quot;&gt;Back It Up policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mourdos&lt;/strong&gt;: By in large I concur with this answer most strongly. WB is actually designed to handle good quality speculative and opinion based queries. (I think we've got enough consensus to say that a query like &amp;quot;which colour should my fairy godmother's wand star be? I like green, but I want all your opinions!&amp;quot; is doubleplus ungood ad extremissima ipsissima. Almost every other query in this forum, barring the &lt;em&gt;hard science&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;science based&lt;/em&gt; questions are  to some extent looking for an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with divulging sources if I think they're really and truly warranted. But on the other wing, I too &lt;strong&gt;believe that insisting upon sources for speculation and imagination will not only be detrimental to this site, but would probably kill it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/strong&gt;: This one is really an answer to different question, but I really do like the idea of a &lt;strong&gt;Pseudoscience / Fantastic Science&lt;/strong&gt; tag that would compliment the hard science / science based tags. Like the science tags, the pseudoscience tags would require some research and sources; only in stead of physics and chemistry, we'd be looking for standard works on alchemy, magic, divination, homeopathy, chiropractic, theosophy and discarded science (phenomena like phlogiston or the expanding Earth theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such tags could reduce the amount of wild speculation and zany opinionification that questions of magic sometimes engender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;KRyan&lt;/strong&gt;: The OP's own response addresses quality fairly well, and I'd consider it the &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot; response. You can give the zambonniest answer ever seen on WB, but so long as it ticks one of these &amp;quot;back it up&amp;quot; boxes, I'd likely consider it a quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Styphon&lt;/strong&gt;: I 100% concur with the notion that encouraging respondents in general to link to their sources, we shouldn't be in the business of enforcing such a rule. With the exception of hard science / pseudoscience, which do / would require citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that the overall solution is to &lt;strong&gt;encourage users to back up their facts &lt;em&gt;wherever absolutely necessary&lt;/em&gt;, but not to enforce such a policy except in the case of tags that require citation&lt;/strong&gt;. This I think is the natural extension &amp;amp; compliment to Mourdos's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Slathering on the Caustic Lye&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we have some linked examples, I'd like to explore Otkin's underlying questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-02-04T20:41:32.457" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T20:41:32.457" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2022-02-02T17:20:45.223" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part of the issue with &lt;em&gt;Opinion based&lt;/em&gt; is with the opener&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to participate as a peer-mod. There are a lots of rules, but I'm slowly getting to grip with them, imho the main problem is with the openers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WB-rules are not clear to askers/openers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We request an edit, the edit won't come, because our explanation is not understood. &amp;quot;Opinion based&amp;quot; is one of the worst close reasons to explain to openers. In the past months, I've come to understand why it exists: you'll get far too many answers and it is not clear what the (single, green) acknowledged answer should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Opinion based&lt;/em&gt; is too general, split it, get rid of it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would help if the (2, 3?) conditions for &amp;quot;Opinion based&amp;quot; would 1) be simplified and  2) become a separate close reason. These can be added to the dialog, and the current Opinion based reason removed. &amp;quot;Opinion based&amp;quot; is far too broad. When talking non-exact sciences, in fact everything is opinion in fiction. People don't know how to edit their question to avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other issues with closures, technical solutions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know there are reasons, but imho close votes should not be put too quickly. The forum software will immediately close at the 5th vote, many times this occurs within hours of the question, the 5 close votes are sometimes all put within one hour ! The asker will not always return within that time span. It would be less intrusive and frustrating for openers &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; answerers, when the actual closure is postponed. Having a &amp;quot;close gang&amp;quot; could be prevented by using a time limit between close votes, e.g. 1 hour. This would also make sure questions are not closed too quickly, or people rush through their reviews too quickly, without giving explanations in comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB is growing. The number of members with close votes is growing.. Why keep the number at 5 votes to close/reopen and not 8 votes ? or 10 ? That would give the opener some extra time as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I feel the implementation of SE closure via close votes and reviews is difficult to learn, that is.. when I vote to close something, I'm on my own.. I don't know why others chose &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; particular reason. Asking for consistency among peer-mods is nice, but it is not supported in the software. It would be convenient, to have some chat-like function to explain your close vote, that would be made visible in the review. Another solution may be to not accept close votes by people who did not comment on the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(part question) it is not always clear why some topics disappear from the review.. maybe there's a rational reason for it, I did not find it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question: I have tried to find it, but I don't see where the rules state when closed topics are to be be &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; completely. Is there any answer to that ? Is removing topics automatic, is it a mod permission, or a higher level peer-mod decision ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-02-02T17:39:05.083" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T17:39:05.083" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2022-02-02T21:34:44.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;expectations for voting&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information. The more that people vote on a post, the more certain future visitors can be of the quality of information contained within that post – not to mention that upvotes are a great way to thank the author of a good post for the time and effort put into writing it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we go with this, the best solution would probably be not voting at all because the linked question meets the criteria for upvoting (useful) and downvoting (poor research, lack of definitions) at the same time. But I do not think that this is the best approach. It might be better to decide on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some problems with overall concepts are very obvious and show a lack of research and effort (this is only true if these are problems, not intentional choices). For example, any question that is based on an assumption that humans (us, living on this Earth) are indistinguishable from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homo economicus&lt;/a&gt; (perfectly rational agent) should be, IMO, downvoted unless it is explicitly stated that it is a rational choice by the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, questions like the linked question about democracy do not contain such obvious fallacies. In this particular case, there is no fallacy at all. It is a matter of definitions. You choose to define the described political structures as democratic. However, if we choose to use stricter definitions of democracy, none of the described species, including humans, has democracy or a democratic government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own answer, IMO, is not a real frame challenge. You do not dispute the premise. Your questioning of the premise is based on your usage of definitions, not disagreement with the facts of the questions. Considering this, I do not think that you should base your vote on your perception of challenging the frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastEditorUserId="78906" LastEditDate="2022-02-04T17:38:56.653" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T17:38:56.653" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2022-02-02T22:27:05.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Tag it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Loosen up for openers and answerers, but register: let tags indicate quality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal: peer-mods should &lt;em&gt;actively maintain&lt;/em&gt; tags. When SE would ever want to adhere to your above quality proposal, they could move implausible scenario questions and/or non-backed up answers into &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; forum section, named &lt;em&gt;WB fantasy&lt;/em&gt;, using the tags to filter things. Your preference will be the remaining forum, that is &lt;em&gt;WB scientific&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SE decides, some time in the future&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You won't have to bother current  &lt;em&gt;WB unified&lt;/em&gt; members with any demands. When we maintain the tags properly, SE may manage things differently and split up WB, let mods decide moves..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Freedom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until SE splits things up, members on &lt;em&gt;WB unified&lt;/em&gt; should be free to ask science related stuff &lt;em&gt;and also&lt;/em&gt; things about fantasy weapons, implausible or hybrid creatures, flat Earths, or hairstyles for astronauts.. askers can acknowledge implausible answers, or accept answers without any references. When the asker doesn't get the references, peer mods can decide afterward, to &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; the high quality indicators (=science tags)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It rarely happens, but anyone having 2000 points or more can add tags. You can add a tag, say science-based, when the question and answer are sound and references are put. Or when the question asks for a plausible &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; realistic scenario and it has an acknowledged answer, add a reality-check tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remove a tag, when a question, or its acknowledged answer does not meet requirements of the tag: there should be proper &amp;quot;Back it Up&amp;quot;, when there is a science-related tag involved, &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; in the question there should be references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-02-02T23:00:56.793" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T23:00:56.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2022-02-02T23:11:59.853" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Require a downvote threshold for closing anything.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post talks about upvotes as if they matter.  But most of the things I see closed seem to have plenty of upvotes, to no avail.  Is there any need or justification for a special &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; mechanism to override the readers who signalled that the posting was a good one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T23:11:59.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2022-02-03T17:28:03.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you need an answer, search if someone already asked what you need and read a question about X thing, which is very broad and very opinion based but it has lots of upvotes and it is very well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you need X+Y so you ask another question, it gets closed within a few hours as opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened to almost everyone who spent a few months on Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close votes are as opinion based as they can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fun experiment on monkeys to show innate sense of fairness (youtube)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user89947" LastActivityDate="2022-02-03T17:28:03.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2022-02-04T14:18:46.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone made an interesting or original question, I upvote. Specially when it comes to series of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Good quality&amp;quot; questions are entirely subjective&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make up a definition of a good quality question, but it will always contradict or contrast itself in this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T14:18:46.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2022-02-04T16:19:41.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Framing the Frame Challenger (with tongue firmly in cheek!)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, just for the record, I've already upvoted Nosajimiki's query here (because it is useful); and most the responses thus far (because they are, in their own ways, useful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before pontificating any further, I would note in particular that JBH says of the frame challenge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of a frame challenge remains, as with all answers, to&#xA;answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also that Otkin says of the specific linked response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own answer, IMO, is not a real frame challenge. You do not dispute the premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to consider whether one ought to or nought to upvote a query one has responded to with a frame challenge, we need to understand what a frame challenge is. And how convenient! Not only do we have a proposal that defines what it is, but both the principle protagonists of the present query participated in the previous question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;A proposal for helping users understand frame challenges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the point of definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A frame challenge is any assertion that challenges the premise or underpinnings of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking to impose a specific form (syntax, format, etc.) as much as I'm proposing a philosophy. (A) A frame challenge must of necessity contain an explanation of why the respondent believes answering the question as proposed by the OP isn't useful, relevant, or meaningful. However, (B) A frame challenge need not offer an alternative solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problem&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur with Otkin that Nosajimiki's answer to the democratic aliens query is not a frame challenge because it doesn't actually challenge the premise of the question, which is that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;species avoid democracy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. At best, it only points out that &lt;em&gt;the governments&lt;/em&gt; of a number of species exhibit democracy-like phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I concur with Nosajimiki's answer to the Proposal question: &lt;em&gt;I feel like a frame challenge must by its very nature offer an alternative answer, otherwise, it belongs in comments.&lt;/em&gt;  This is where the frame challenge, as with all answers, &lt;em&gt;actually answers the question!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we carefully read the Aliens query, the OP is focused on species and cultures rather than actual forms of government, which actually run contrary to the fundamental premise of the query. If we carefully read Nosajimiki's response, he neither focuses on species and cultures, nor offers an alternative answer. His answer only reiterates what the OP already told us, namely: that most of the species do in fact have governments that exhibit some democratic features. It then goes on to describe some aspects of democratic features in historical Earth governments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Solution&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really not my intention to bust your chops, Nosajamiki, but rather to make the point that if you're going to &amp;quot;complain&amp;quot; about the quality of a question enough to answer it with a frame challenge, you should at least a) follow your own definition of frame challenge and b) answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hold that, unless a question is really and truly hopelessly useless, you as respondent probably thought it was at the very least interesting. Why else would one take the time to read and consider? I'd argue that you should upvote any query you're responding to, whether with a frame challenge or not, if it is interesting, well-researched, and useful. Clearly you thought (and I agree!) that the question is interesting, and upvotes and number of answers clearly demonstrate it is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T16:19:41.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2022-02-04T21:25:19.057" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;WtF&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query has now been edited to include a whole host of issues ranging from the OP's evaluation of my answer to the OP's psychological profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This response only addresses the newly added section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this query is not to start a debate about my own&#xA;position regarding the quality of answers or my evaluation of answers.&#xA;The former is not possible as I do not have a clear position (which I&#xA;stated before) and I am not proposing any policies or guidelines. The&#xA;latter is something that I wanted to avoid because the discussion will&#xA;turn to be about specific answers and their merits rather than the&#xA;general quality of answers and whether any guidelines are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough. I can't speak for others, but I didn't read your question as if you asking us to help you evaluate answers. While it's not immediately clear what you don't have a position on, it is pretty clear what your question is about. This clarification is welcome just to ward off any evil spirits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent was expressed in the last sentence of the original version:&#xA;At this time I am trying to learn what other people think about the&#xA;answers and whether there should be some guidelines for them. In other&#xA;words, I wanted people to share their thoughts about answers and their&#xA;quality and whether any guidelines are necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my part, this is what I asked you clarify. I can't reasonably talk about &amp;quot;what I think about the answers&amp;quot; unless we're looking at the same set of answers. Before fruitful discussion can begin, we need to establish common ground and review common data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd still love to have this conversation with you (and others)! None of us can do this meaningfully if you refuse to show us some answers that you'd like to discuss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since @elemtilas insists on providing specific examples of what I&#xA;would consider a low-quality answer and explicitly states that they&#xA;would want to hear my opinion about their own answer, I will use their&#xA;answer to this query (as of 4 February 2022, 18:20 GMT) as such an&#xA;example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I asked about any answers I've written that fall under what you categorise as &lt;em&gt;poorly researched, based on speculation, unverified assumptions, personal preferences, 'common sense', ideologies, tropes&lt;/em&gt; and the like. My answer was based on reading your original query, asking for clarification, reading all the answers to your question, reading the linked question and answers and all the associated comments. That's research. My answer begins with commentary on the linked discussion; it is not yet complete, as I await further clarification from the OP. I didn't make any assumptions, but when I do, I verify all of them. Preferences, common sense, ideologies and tropes didn't figure in to the answer I'm writing, and I honestly don't see that they will, though they might! If they do, I will note such as is customary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should, however, have been even clearer! I read the question as referring to quality of answers on Main, not here in Meta. I've written 455 responses on Main. Perhaps you could evaluate a few of those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially within the context of my other Meta answer being a WIP contingent on you clarifying your query!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 big problems with this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is a response to the linked Back It Up! policy discussion, not this&#xA;query (and @elemtilas does acknowledge this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that @elemtilas justifies this approach by saying&#xA;that my query is unfinished and not clear enough to them. They even&#xA;threatened to VTC it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not &amp;quot;justify&amp;quot; anything. I was clear in stating that my initial comments were in regard to the &amp;quot;discussion about&amp;quot; the proposed policy, not about the policy itself. I offered these preliminary comments on the linked policy discussion as that post and its answers are pertinent to the OP's present query.  I continue to be more than happy to address OP's main query when it's eventually clarified!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be mentioned that @elemtilas is the author of Is it Fair to&#xA;Encourage People to NOT Answer Questions that Need to be Closed?,&#xA;where they advocate for not answering questions that they find to be&#xA;unsatisfactory. Therefore, their own response is not only inconsistent&#xA;with the WB.SE guidelines for answers but also with their own position&#xA;regarding answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's question does not need to be closed. It is not unsatisfactory. There is no need assume malice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in their response @elemtilas does not represent the original Back It&#xA;Up! policy or discussion about it accurately (and they agree with this&#xA;evaluation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not claim to represent anything. The Back It Up! policy was introduced by the OP in the context of a query about the state of present time answers. It is thus a valid topic for discussion within the context of any answer to the OP's query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way @elemtilas builds their argument and formats their post&#xA;distorts the original meaning of the Back It Up! policy and may lead&#xA;readers to believe that it was an attempt to require references for&#xA;every single answer. It was never the case. The core of the policy&#xA;was: Every answer needs to justify the conclusions it comes to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not &amp;quot;build an argument&amp;quot; for anything. I structured my response to separate one section of comments on the responses to the linked policy from a WIP section on the question at hand. I have no comment on the original policy at all. If I did, I would either respond to it directly or else draw up a revised proposal of my own. I have no reason to do either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this kind of answer not only as poor-quality but detrimental to&#xA;the WB.SE. It sets a precedent for being off-topic. It also misleads&#xA;the readers. In addition, it makes it impossible for me to trust the&#xA;author's words even when it comes to their expressed attitudes and&#xA;positions on issues because their acts are not consistent with their&#xA;words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is poor quality only in so far is it remains incomplete. It remains incomplete until the question is finally clarified. Once the question is clarified, I guarantee you'll get a stellar answer that not only addresses the linked policy discussion, but also addresses any issue you have with the state of more recent answers in the forum!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked policy and its responses are central to the present question. Just FYI: you have also brought your own inner psychological issues into the question, among which appear to be trust issues, belligerence, history of accusative behaviour, passive aggression and so forth. Otkin, do you really want to go down this road? I strongly urge you to purge your question of any of your personal issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not provide any additional specific examples of low-quality&#xA;answers as I do not believe that it would be very constructive to this&#xA;discussion. However, since @elemtilas has difficulty understanding my&#xA;point about disaster myths I will add a note on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough. You've just determined that your own question is now pretty much unanswerable. I think it could be argued that this is a valid Vote to Close rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer that features mass panic or social chaos as inevitable&#xA;and 'natural' (as in 'it's human nature') outcomes in disaster&#xA;scenarios is an answer that lacks research because both of these&#xA;notions are among debunked disaster myths. There is even a Wikipedia&#xA;article about this. Moreover, these answers are, if I put it kindly,&#xA;irresponsible since the propagation of disaster myths worsens the&#xA;outcomes for real people affected by real disasters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only take your word for this. I honestly don't know how answers that involve mass panic or social chaos fit in with the linked policy, and since you're still not &amp;quot;backing up&amp;quot; your assertion with any kind of data, I'm just going to have to leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-02-04T21:36:31.677" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T21:36:31.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-05T00:19:24.367" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I try to open the community tab to switch communities, like by going from gamedev to worldbuilding and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to maybe missclick something that I can't see or maybe it's just a bug, I try to click the community tab but it instantly opens the stack exchange site.  It only happens randomly, about 1 time out of 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/raF5r.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/raF5r.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZCvDj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZCvDj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it happens on all devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes I'm pretty sure I'm hovering over the grey icon, not the blue icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to happen as soon as I open a new page or go back to an idle page, it doesn't seem to happen to pages that I'm currently using.... I try missclicking on purpose and it doesn't send me to stackexchange. But this is only a theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also using opera GX on the laptop and normal opera on mobile devices, no add-ons other blocking trackers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93337" LastEditorUserId="93337" LastEditDate="2022-02-05T00:24:34.507" LastActivityDate="2022-02-05T00:24:34.507" Title="Top right corner bug? Missclick?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-05T06:26:54.977" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usernames like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/89947/python-programmers-are-souless&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/89947/python-programmers-are-souless&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a python programmer, and username like this is grating on me. Makes me feel unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I am not a snowflake and can handle that. Maybe I can change MY username to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Usernames like &amp;quot;python programmers are X&amp;quot; are for morons'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it be allowed? If not, why not? Ok on some forums but not on others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="687" LastActivityDate="2022-02-17T08:04:54.587" Title="VERY opinionated Usernames are ok?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9662" CreationDate="2022-02-05T06:41:54.117" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;From our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be inclusive and respectful. Avoid sarcasm and be careful with jokes — tone is hard to decipher online. Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain. If a situation makes it hard to be friendly, stop participating and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No subtle put-downs or unfriendly language. Even if you don’t intend it, this can have a negative impact on others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore no, that username is not OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the future, you can simply flag any of the user posts for moderator attention and mention the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-02-05T08:33:16.400" LastActivityDate="2022-02-05T08:33:16.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9662" CreationDate="2022-02-05T21:04:27.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Perfectly Fine&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Python Programmers Are Soulless&amp;quot; is hardly &amp;quot;very&amp;quot; opinionated. It's not directly insulting to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; individual or group of people; it's not really funny so is not a joke; it's not disrespectful and not harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only grates me because they spelled &amp;quot;soulless&amp;quot; wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't flag it and I wouldn't worry about it. The fact that you had to ask the question here tells me you are in fact reacting emotionally to something that you should not be reacting emotionally to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the kind of thing that, were I a Python programmer, I'd just chuckle at and then move on because what with Russia and Covid and China and gas prices and whacky politics and whacky society, really, somebody's user name on an online forum is so far down on the list of things I need to worry about that it's not even worth worrying about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-05T21:04:27.080" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9662" CreationDate="2022-02-05T23:55:40.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I can understand why you can be displeased&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I don't feel it (I'm no &amp;quot;snake&amp;quot; programmer :p), I can understand it. Sometimes there are things in life that trigger some innate, irritating feelings. And while I agree with Elemtilas that it's not really über-important, it can be annoying if you're not used to this kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counter-acting the way you suggested -choosing the same kind of name against the user griefing you- is like putting more firewood on the wood on fire. It's :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At most useless as said person won't understand your approach. Indeed, if said person is kind at heart or polite, they wouldn't put this nickname if they got the consequences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At worst cascading into hate (#flamewar) since they either are feeling delightful of your reaction (it happens), or they don't understand why you react that way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, don't play the same game, this will most probably manage to get &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; in the jail. Instead, talk with them (and I mean talk, not order) if you can catch'em in chat (PM if there was any). If you cannot, yes flag a post and tell about the username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same topic, telling that their choice of nickname is &amp;quot;VERY&amp;quot; opin-onion-hated is quite an hyperbol, and I would have avoided to present it like that. Comparatively, I've seen people promoting the Shoah, raping and holy war terrorism through their pseudonym, so making some sort of computy science joke -even if it's bad- is not &amp;quot;VERY&amp;quot; opinion-based in comparison. It's annoying sure, but not that harmful like the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-02-06T00:01:27.160" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T00:01:27.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9662" CreationDate="2022-02-06T19:39:57.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @L.Dutch, but I'd also like to make a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was taught that aphorism a very long time ago, but it seems no one teaches it anymore. We live in a world where, increasingly, the offended believe they have overwhelming rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A dear friend of mine was once told that he should stop his use of &amp;quot;ma'am&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sir&amp;quot; on the grounds that they're &amp;quot;gender hate speech.&amp;quot; It didn't matter to them that he'd been raised, both individually and in a society, where the use of both words were intended and expected for honorable, respectful, and civil discourse.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that we should act conscientiously to avoid hurt feelings whenever possible. But I'm not a fan of the concept of &lt;em&gt;equity.&lt;/em&gt; I'm a fan of the concept of &lt;em&gt;equality.&lt;/em&gt; And that means that if it's reasonable to expect someone to act in that manner, then it's just as reasonable to expect people to conscientiously avoid taking offense. Other than the two comments to the post by User 89947 (who owned the moniker), we've not heard a thing from the user in question, but I'd be more than surprised if the choice of moniker was nothing more than an attempt at humor. His/Her explanation for the choice might even add to the humor. Frankly, we're fortunate he/she is being so good natured about all this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And before I go any further, let's point out that this Meta discussion singling out a specific user in a way that demotes what was likely nothing more than an attempt at humor and vilifies for no better reason than someone took it personally is also a violation of the CoC.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yeah, the choice of moniker &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; violates the CoC. It would have been better handled using the &lt;em&gt;Contact&lt;/em&gt; link at the bottom of every page or using the &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; link following every post to tap a moderator on the shoulder and bring the issue to their attention in a way that promotes true peace, unity, and tolerance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sticks and stones may or may not actually break your bones, but words spoken in a free society that celebrates diversity of opinion as much as diversity of culture, ethnicity, race, and belief really and truly cannot hurt you — unless you let them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your irritation over someone's moniker is the worst thing that happens to you on any particular day, you had a &lt;em&gt;great day.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-02-17T08:04:54.587" LastActivityDate="2022-02-17T08:04:54.587" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9602" CreationDate="2022-02-06T20:32:25.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholly support @elemtilas' answer, but let me expand a moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not answer questions about 3rd-party or commercial worlds. (I just saw X while watching Star Trek, how could that work?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not permit discussions. (I read X in Y's book, Z... what do you think about that?) This is especially important when questions take the form of, &amp;quot;Can X work?&amp;quot; That's a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; badly formed question, but it happens all the time. It has a high closure rate, but even when it isn't closed, it's so vague (e.g., &amp;quot;what, in real life? Obviously not. Why would you think a fictional X based in a fictional world could be real?&amp;quot;) that the answers can be all over the map, which violates Stack Exchange's intent for their service. Also, &amp;quot;real life&amp;quot; is not a fictional world, and so it's not supposed to be the target for the purpose of scoping answers. Yeah, happens all the time anyway....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt; and expectations found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; still apply. In other words, while we don't care if you really are building a world or not, the question must nevertheless be of the form of asking for help creating or consistently using a rule in a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we expect all this? Because the unfortunate truth is that when you're not actively working to build a world, it's really easy to ask a curiosity-question in a way that's going to get it closed — and we really love answering questions, so we try to get people to think in those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that we've had a number of users over the years who pretty much only asked curiosity-questions, which were constantly closed because they were not well-asked, and they got mad about it, as if it was our fault that we didn't let them do whatever they want on the site....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T20:32:25.953" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9597" CreationDate="2022-02-06T21:01:37.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason why it's good to avoid superlatives (best, worst, greatest, least...) when asking a question — they're always subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fantastic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; You will find no Stack with greater creativity, greater imagination, greater flexibility, etc., than on worldbuilding.SE. And we're the only Stack (I believe) with its own, dedicated god: Glarnak[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3789/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;][&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=glarnak&amp;amp;room=17213&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you won't find any of that by searching SEDE, which is only interested in network statistics. We're among the least populated stacks and therefore host among the least number of questions and answers. If we were top-ranked, it might be in negative things like number of questions closed as a percentage of questions asked or least-likely-to-upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as with many of the questions asked here, it really depends on your perspective. Well, that and why you're asking. Why are you asking? Is there a pizza hanging in the balance or something? I'll flat-out invent a reason why we're the best if there's pizza at stake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T21:01:37.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-14T15:19:29.210" Score="11" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE-Worldbuilding can give a lot of cool ideas and concepts. Have you (or someone you know) created any book/movie/game/etc thanks to this site ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cultural object must have been publicly released anywhere.&#xA;Provide the link to the question and the cultural object if you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any yet despite the number of questions. These ideas all seem to be made for small circles rather than the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76141" LastEditorUserId="76141" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T08:15:42.770" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T21:48:53.073" Title="Are there cultural objects that came thanks to this site?" Tags="|discussion|real-world|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2022-02-15T13:53:10.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;h4&gt;For Your Consideration&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the ultimate answer to this question is going to be a curious kind of both/and. On the one hand, the answer is almost certainly yes, simply because our clientele often state their intentions to write a story, publish a book, develop a game, etc. On the other hand, the answer is almost certainly we're never going to know and will never find out. This is because SE is not designed for follow up. We don't check in a year or a decade hence to find out if that story ever got written or that novel ever got published or that game ever got launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we do know: There are a number of regulars here who may or may not be authors, devs or geopoets. We rarely know anything about each other (except for when we clash here in Meta :( ) and almost never know anything at all about the people who come in, ask for our help and then go away again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only real viable way to discover the answer, I think, would be to devote time to some detective work: I think you'd have to comb through every question looking for keywords like &amp;quot;story I'm writing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;novel I'm planning&amp;quot; then try various combinations of user name and keywords out in the wilds of the Internet in the vain hope that you'll find a match on some writing site or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, authors often and devs sometimes dedicate their works to close friends or family or highly influential others that helped them with their work; almost never do they give credit to that random Q&amp;amp;A site where they posed a couple preliminary queries in the same way they don't credit Wikipedia for that awesome article on reticulating earthworm guts that turned into an idea for a monster planet eating worm that plays a part in book two of their grand heptology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might best simply rest content that such things are out there, but we're unlikely to be credited and unlikely to ever know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T13:53:10.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2022-02-16T18:47:00.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; I would say that some of the content on it meets your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the blog is fairly inactive and that, but it exists, is public, and I think that meets the criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can for example take my story &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/universe-factory/arrival-part-one-of-landed-2c1cf57aa77&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Landed&lt;/a&gt; which has drawn from multiple questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175924/how-can-a-massive-ship-be-partially-destroyed-in-reentry-but-have-the-top-part&quot;&gt;How can a massive ship be partially destroyed in reentry, but have the top part still intact?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T18:47:00.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9670" CreationDate="2022-02-17T08:03:33.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is with great joy that I clarify this answer...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At @L.Dutch's suggestion, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/77923/12916&quot;&gt;posted a question about my original answer&lt;/a&gt; (below) at Law.SE. That answer is well informed and very much worth reading by anyone who uses Worldbuilding.SE with the worry that they may be restricted in any way by using ideas found via this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell: you have no problems. People who post answers are posting them gratis and your use of those answers to guide your writing efforts leave you in full control of your copyright without dependence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaving my original answer in place because, regrettably, I suspect the perception of the limitation will continue basically forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the author of the Law answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/78024/12916&quot;&gt;posted a question and answer&lt;/a&gt; concerning co-authorship and derivative works that will also be valuable to the practitioners of the arcane art of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This site has one overriding limitation that would minimize, if not eliminate, the cultural objects you seek&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm going to jump to the conclusion that when you say &amp;quot;cultural object&amp;quot; you're referring to something that either has a cultural impact or was culturally durable — not just something posted somewhere on the web where the public could find it if they were led to it (aka, the digital-age version of spreading a lithographed copy of a short story among friends). So, given that Wikipedia could be considered a &amp;quot;cultural object&amp;quot; (in which case the mere presence of Worldbuilding.SE trivially answers your question), I conclude that such an object must, of necessity, be &lt;em&gt;commercial.&lt;/em&gt; Thus the goal is limited if not prohibited by...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proponents of the license will urgently remind you that nothing about that license stops you from using what you learn from here commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But you can't claim it as your own unless you were the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And you can't stop anyone else from using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's that second bullet that's the real kicker. How do you get movie rights to your book when your book has CC-BY-SA content, meaning the filmakers can make the movie not only without your consent (so long as you're attributed), but without your compensation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a long story short, while I wouldn't be surprised to find a commercial use (aka &amp;quot;cultural object&amp;quot;) of this site's material out there someplace, I'd be shocked if it was much of a commercial success or that there were very many of them. Because there's no way to protect the copyright (if it exists at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I could be wrong about all this. I'm not an attorney. But I have been a publisher and know a bit about copyright. So anyone who disagrees with me should be prepared to show me legal precedent that someone can copy-protect something originally published under the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have you answered my question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbosely, yes. There aren't any that I'm familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm being intentionally obtuse about this. While the film makers wouldn't need your permission nor be required to compensate you for the CC-BY-SA content in your hypothetical book — it's unlikely that your entire book is CC-BY-SA. It's the same problem encountered by people who write historical fiction. They have no claim over the history, but they do claim their story within the context of that history. So it's not as bad as it sounds... but I'm trying to make a point.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-02-21T21:48:53.073" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T21:48:53.073" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-20T15:40:21.567" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224556/how-to-design-a-realistic-school-with-coed-rooms&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is currently closed for being off-topic. I am not the author of the question, but I find the idea very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It asks how to design a coed school that feels realistic. I believe &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; in this sense is the same as a &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; fictional tech. This site has allowed fictional science/tech that is just near enough with real life science/tech. As it stands, the question comes across to me as asking for some fictional sociology (or other social-science or psychology backed reasons) that can allow a setting to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bit here surely makes the question sounds like asking to solve a real-world, present-day problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mainly for plot/world building reasons, &lt;strong&gt;but also because I think it is an interesting concept to see how this could realistically work if implemented, either now or in the near future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see it as the social equivalent of &amp;quot;how can I make this available using near-future tech&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apart from that -- and most of OP's other arguments that sound like they're trying to make this happen in real-world -- is the question really off-topic? If so, what can one do to make it more on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the question assumes too much of modern-day Western human culture that it can't be made on-topic one way or another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79717" LastActivityDate="2022-02-22T01:20:26.987" Title="How can one make this question regarding sociology more on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2022-02-20T19:42:56.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please allow me to clarify, the question does not ask about coed school in general. It asks for &lt;strong&gt;help with designing rules and floor plans for mixed-gender dormitory rooms&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the interpretation confirmed by the OP (see comments) and we must defer to the OP when it comes to interpretations of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is already on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The problem it seeks to solve is a worldbuilding problem&lt;/em&gt; even within the currently popular definition of worldbuilding: 'building rules and systems of the world'. Please note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the official rules define the scope of worldbuilding much wider&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, &lt;em&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/em&gt;.[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a system, event or element of the world is causing you problems we are here to help. If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if we believe that the OP asks about a real-world problem, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6161/a-proposal-to-finalize-the-are-real-world-questions-on-topic-debate&quot;&gt;questions about real-world problems are on-topic&lt;/a&gt; if the following requirements are met&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide context. Giving other users context around why you are asking the question allows them to better understand why you are asking and what kind of answer you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to do your own research. If a quick google search will answer your question it may not be worth posting a question on the site. Generally, querents are expected to demonstrate what has been tried and why it was not sufficient or did not work. This too helps people answering understand what you are trying to accomplish as well as your level of knowledge on the topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define your requirements and by what you will judge answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question meets all 3 requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It provides the context in the opening paragraph: 'I am trying to design a &amp;quot;progressive&amp;quot;, every high schooler's dream high school/boarding school where grades 9-12 attend' [and so on];&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It includes a quick summary of research (bullet points; whether you agree with this research or not is not relevant to the problem of question being on-topic or not);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The requirements are a bit vague ('to make this kind of setting work semi-realistically' and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;) but also present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is worth noting that while this question conforms to the rules, it is not a type of question that the WB.SE likes.&lt;/strong&gt; Unfortunately, only 1 out of 5 VTC'ers explained their reasons for close votes, so it is not perfectly clear what exactly they did not like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question can be improved to suit the preferences of the WB.SE community better.&lt;/strong&gt; I would suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a description of the mainstream culture and ethics existing in the society that would implement mixed-gender dormitory rooms (personally, I am more or less fine with defining this culture as the present-day Western culture but most people here would like more detail or a specific culture/subculture as a reference);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include additional information about the currently envisioned rules and floor plans for the mixed-gender dormitory rooms to conform to the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag better;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make requirements for the answers clearer (I would focus on achieving specific goals, e.g. preventing unwanted pregnancies, providing sufficient privacy, avoiding sexual harassment, etc.);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ask VTC'ers about their reasons for close votes and edit the question in an attempt to cater to their preferences (this is the most important for a successful reopening of the question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T19:42:56.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2022-02-21T14:52:26.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Flipping the VTC to VTR&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things to note: this response addresses both Otkin's excellent response and also the Meta question itself, since I am one of the folks who voted to close and then later voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Otkin's answer, I really only disagreed that the Main query, &lt;em&gt;as originally worded&lt;/em&gt; was on topic. As originally worded, it was simply a sort of unfocused fishing expedition with the hopes of creating a fan servicey, every 15 year old boy's wet dream of a HS . That does not really make for a great worldbuilding question, without some context to make it so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the question pretty much followed the trend of the immature 15 year old boy's mindset. Of course it's &amp;quot;old fashioned&amp;quot;, says the inner 15 year old! What testosterone soaked 15 year old boy wants to curb his own immature passions when there's the certitude of the school actually supplying one with easily accessible (though not necessarily convinceable) sex partners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any kind of context to place this question in, it really becomes more of a plot-n-story question: the school is just there to fulfill the needs of the narrative. A good worldbuilding question would take this idea and make it about the culture the school exists in, rather than the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the Main question because the hormones were clouding the underlying problem and the whole enterprise, hormones notwithstanding, lacked sufficient detail &amp;amp; clarity to overcome its initial problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I agree with Otkin's assessment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is indeed a worldbuilding problem to be solved (this one needed help).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real world questions &lt;em&gt;can be&lt;/em&gt; on topic (there are caveats).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP demonstrated prior research (yay!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, we disagree on what constitutes sufficient context. I didn't think there was any, nor did I think the requirements were terribly clear. I voted to close for those reasons only; I upvoted it because it's an interesting question that showed promise and also demonstrated some prior thought and research!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now that the query has been reopened, I'd say that this Meta question has its best answer: How do you make this specific Main question more on topic? You do what exactly what the Main querent did which got his query reopened and thus declared on topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No reasoning like circular reasoning!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-02-22T01:20:26.987" LastActivityDate="2022-02-22T01:20:26.987" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-23T00:41:53.823" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not yet seen one single link to an end product (a work involving a built world) on the main site. Is that per policy or simply something participants haven’t practiced? I ask because I considered it may be beneficial to see the short story that the question comes from, as a link. More focused answers may come of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This is a &lt;em&gt;site policy question&lt;/em&gt; related to existing art meta questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44/would-we-support-expanding-existing-fictional-worlds&quot;&gt;Published works based on questions/answers from Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3890/do-we-have-any-success-stories-yet-i-want-to-read-them?rq=1&quot;&gt;Do we have any success stories yet? I want to read them!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9670/are-there-cultural-objects-that-came-thanks-to-this-site&quot;&gt;Are there cultural objects that came thanks to this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4260/have-any-answers-made-it-into-published-fiction&quot;&gt;Have any answers made it into published fiction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2022-03-12T05:22:38.773" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T05:22:38.773" Title="Is there a policy or practice regarding posting end products?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9678" CreationDate="2022-02-23T02:49:39.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Maybe Off Topic?&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such a posting would be closed, on Main. Mostly because there's not really a question attached to &amp;quot;Hey guys! Just want to thank you all for your help -- I published a book the fictional world of which you helped me with!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, I suppose a nonce query could be attached: &amp;quot;So I wrote this novel whose fictional world you guys helped me with a couple years ago; and now I'm working on a sequel set in the same, and I'm wondering...&amp;quot; I fear this kind of question would simply be buried in a fortnight or so and we'd never get to properly celebrate the milestone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This forum doesn't really exist to list works created so much as to help the author or developer make the fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the better options would be to make a proper Community Wiki thing and advertise, link and list any work of creative genius we've ever helped along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9670/are-there-cultural-objects-that-came-thanks-to-this-site&quot;&gt;question here in Meta&lt;/a&gt; that calls for such works to be revealed. We could always list there until there's enough to make something more substantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-23T02:49:39.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9678" CreationDate="2022-02-24T02:31:16.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to consider is that content posted on this website is no longer yours to control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently saw another question on Meta.WB that asked whether anyone had ever seen something from WB get turned into a real published work, and one thing that turned up is that stuff posted here becomes covered by some flavor of the Creative Commons license, the consequence being that anyone who wants to can copy what is posted and sell or give it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... if you've gone to all the work of turning a rough idea into a polished piece of art, posting that art here would irrevocably undermine any possibility of monetizing it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I couldn't find the exact answer or comment I was thinking of, but it turns out some things have been posted. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3893/published-works-based-on-questions-answers-from-worldbuilding-se&quot;&gt;this related Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19221" LastEditorUserId="19221" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T02:46:49.613" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T02:46:49.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9678" CreationDate="2022-02-24T20:25:58.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You cannot post only about end-products you make/made on Main&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't detail too much as Elemtilas already did, but it's basically off-topic. As the help-center says : &amp;quot;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site&amp;quot;. If there's no question to be asked, it's off-topic :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why we don't see questions where links to end-products are seen?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because the products are generally unfinished  : If the work isn't done yet, people will be less inclined to display them. Perhaps if the question is about a sequel to an original product you could have it, but for the first tome of a book for instance... And if it's a sequel, then the world already has been built for the most part, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because the product is a work-in-progress and must not be leaked : In game industry for instance, it happens &amp;quot;fans&amp;quot; thrash threats at the studio/editor if &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; game is not what they wanted, maddening the mood and bringing down the sales. So com' leaks are rarely seen as ideal, to say the leash. Therefore most game developers will avoid as much as possible to show for what game they work on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people don't like over-exposing their work : They feel like it's too much advertising, have some sort of impostor syndrome (if it exists, does it exist?) or don't feel it's necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people ask questions out of interest, but not for making any special world. See this question here : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/is-it-ok-to-ask-questions-that-dont-have-specific-worldbuilding-use&quot;&gt;Is it ok to ask questions that don't have specific worldbuilding use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice at the details, you'll see names that pop, names that you could look for. Some users carry the name of their world, and if you're clever, you could always look up for weird creature names and find the source. With a bit of luck, it's the same that will be used in the end product. It doesn't happen everytime but some and others also tell they're working &amp;quot;on a book&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;on a game&amp;quot;. This with the question itself should give a glimpse of what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, people have favorite themes, so you can easily guess by looking at their previous questions what kind of world they're interested in or currently making, helping you focus your answers. There's one who's anatoma... automatically looking for how creatures should be made; Others are fantasy meisters, one who's looking for crazy-no things and so on. You don't need to know all the ongoing work to know what people are most interested in and know what will be best for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all the above doesn't count for a good written question, which has to be enough by itself :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T20:25:58.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-25T15:30:02.923" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;This thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224801/which-areas-of-usa-would-have-the-most-successful-centers-of-growth-after-nuclea&quot;&gt;Which areas of USA would have the most successful centers of growth after nuclear holocaust?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to not quite understand how to formulate my question so that it doesn't cause issues with you. I made edits but I would really like your help on this, because I don't want another question to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21465" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T16:06:40.907" Title="Can you please help me focus my question better?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9682" CreationDate="2022-02-25T19:13:37.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Post Pockyclyptic Editing&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit really helps tighten things up. But there are still issues. The main issues that I can see in the new edit of the query itself are really ones of topic clarity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you mean by &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; in the setting of &amp;quot;turning into cities&amp;quot;? In other words, how are you defining these terms? Willk's response, for example, points out that a) not every city will be destroyed and b) people from hard hit areas might very well immigrate, making the already existing city even more populous. This kind of answer actually breaks your question, because it has already satisfied the requirements of your question simply by existing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you mean by &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; in the setting of &amp;quot;food advantage&amp;quot;? I dare say that while there may not be many huge cities in the Appalachians, there are enough resources there that folks probably won't lack for food. Secondly, just because you have a city in the middle of rich farmland doesn't mean those myriads of people face a future of food security! Fresno county has about a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fresnocountycalifornia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;million people&lt;/a&gt;, about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/California/cp06019.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4000 farms&lt;/a&gt;, and about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/local-news/fresno-county-unveils-agriculture-industry-covid-19-safety-guidelines/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;70000 farmworkers&lt;/a&gt;, most of whom are migrants a/o itinerant (moving from farm to farm, area to area).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other issues as well, that I think it would behoove you to consider!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in order to focus your question, you might want to think about creating 2 or 3 different questions that look at perhaps different geographical,  demographical, agricultural, and social considerations. You might also want to consider a question that deals with time frames: 10 years vs 100 years kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;21st century agriculture is extremely dependent of ultra modern science, technology and infrastructure. Seed stock, fertilisers, crop health maintenance, the plough-plant-maintain-harvest-transport cycles all depend on a variety of infrastructure systems that will be either destroyed or will suffer catastrophic failure within a few months. Without petrol, you can't run a tractor, you can't run the huge ploughs or harvesters. Without electricity, you can't run the processing plants that turn raw crops into food. Most 21st century people who live near farms have no idea how a farm actually works and have no idea how to get food from a farm if there's no Whole Foods to act as a middleman. Even those farmworkers may not know a whole lot about the big picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's just a touch optimistic that during the ten or so years of a post apocalyptic event you'll find anything like real or sustainable city expansion. I'd suspect massive die off, surges in otherwise treatable diseases not just communicable --- note that your nuclear apocalypse coincides with the introduction of covid-19 --- but also water borne, widespread food insecurity even in the middle of an agricultural zone, and some level of deteriorisation of food production as all areas of infrastructure are debilitated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think cities themselves will end up being depopulated within the timeframe and where you'll likely find growth is in the latifundia that will evolve out of the old farms. If the latifundia can continue to operate a reasonably modern kind of agriculture, and if the locality can preserve and maintain the underlying infrastructure, then perhaps you might find sufficient population stabilisation and growth to consider city reinhabitation and expansion in a century or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've got a fascinating thought experiment of a query, and you've clearly put some thought into it, but it's way too big for one single question! This kind of project really needs to be planned out a bit and broken down into different questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T19:13:37.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-25T20:55:09.023" Score="-2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In developing societal norms for a fictional culture I chose to put a representative through various stimuli and share its response. This expository method follows the “Don’t say there’s an elephant, describe the elephant” rule of problem solving. My representative has no name or individuality (or, I intended this at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stimuli are being seen by some as motivations. My delivery is being received as a request to guide my protagonists through a crisis rather than derive a culture-driven response to certain stimuli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I share it, yes, it is long. No comments needed to that. I’ve seen this done and received well, but I missed the nuance apparently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes just closed my question as “not world-building” I hope some wording can be adjusted to show my Chik’en as a product of its culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224832/why-did-the-chiken-cross-the-road&quot;&gt;Why did the Chik’en cross the Road?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut tells me one thing that could clear up: The story doesn’t tell at all what happened after the &lt;em&gt;decision&lt;/em&gt; to cross the road was made. I feel there will be a tendency to deduct that the Chik’en followed through with nefarious plans. But I am not asking “Why did the Chik’en pillage a city,” I suspect that will be assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I portray a cultural response to a stimulus that avoids looking like a specific character’s motive?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Identifying words I used that preclude my query would be helpful)&#xA;——-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Intended responses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I hoped the query would draw are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chik’ens are pranksters but respectful in general, so the chicken was going across the Road to trick them into…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chik’ens hate conflict, under pressure they buckle and become…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chik’en culture is very loyal, and even if one is taken away like this, they will protect their own. The chicken is setting a trap, and will…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is the response is cultural and not personal, despite having some of the stimuli originating at home. That was to point out the resiliency of the culture to withstand pressure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2022-02-25T21:21:38.203" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T08:50:28.567" Title="Splitting hairs between “stimulus” and “motivation” in the Psychology tag - Can I word this better to reopen?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9684" CreationDate="2022-02-25T22:54:06.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No one is splitting hairs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were quoted the Help Center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ... you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your own question we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chik'en said that he would do this. He would cross the Road, and lead them into his city, and his home, to take things for their village. His only answer was a riddle to them all: &amp;quot;Because I am a Chik'en.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why? Why did the Chik'en cross the very dangerous Road?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are based on motives that are consistent with the plotline and the unique social norms of Chik'ens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Chik'en said...&amp;quot; means you're dealing with a decision made by one character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Consistent with the plotline&amp;quot; violates another Help Center statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How you ask a question is important&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question asking why all horses would prefer to stand in the shade is on-topic because you're asking about the behavior of the species (creature design) and therefore a rule of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking why (as an example) the United Nations (an organization) would prefer to hold meetings in the shade is off-topic because the United Nations is not a creature or a species — it's a group of individuals individually contributing to a decision on behalf of the organization. On other words, the United Nations is not a creature that has an independent psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asking why one creature makes any decision — especially a decision that's &amp;quot;consistent with the plotline&amp;quot; — is storybuilding and that's off-topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because what would motivate an individual or an organization to make a decision is based too much on the story, too much on individual variation with the species, and not enough on the rules of the world — and we &lt;em&gt;do not answer questions about storybuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE #1: the fact that any question that should have been closed was left open is not precedent to ignore the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE #2: Popularity is 100% irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T22:54:06.367" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9684" CreationDate="2022-02-26T00:28:59.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually had thought of more than one possible closure reasons. So let's split hairs, but two big, fatty ones, to understand the why and indirectly how to improve your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your question needs clarity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get the smaller fur out; I know I have the attention span of a butterfly , but even working around that by rereading twice slowly I don't remember much of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because I don't know why you tell about all this. The story's intentions are not matching the question's, so it becomes a swamp swiping many subjects of interest, but few that actually interest us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give you a few instances I was wondering why you're telling me this in regards to the title question &amp;quot;Why did the Chik'en cross the road?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're asking about a Road, yet there's a named lake far-off in the distance, a fisherman which seems to not be part of any of the interested parties and the type of baits they're using?.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How's Dreon's traits are important, this AFTER Chik'en crossed the Road? The reasons to cross the road can't be related to who they met after it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chik'en becomes &amp;quot;the Chik'en&amp;quot; (singular o_x?), then &amp;quot;he/his&amp;quot;, then &amp;quot;them/its&amp;quot;. Very confusing in the end. Also, why all characters are called directly by their name but not Chik'en?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wait a mini-nut, you ask the reasons Chik'en cross the Road, but then you tell they &amp;quot;might&amp;quot; actually not have crossed the Road and they don't recall anything?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your question is too story-based&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the reason I chose, and there're many factors leading to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You talked about one character only&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I mean beyond talking about one character, you describe too much the character to be one &amp;quot;individual&amp;quot; among many other ones. It's not an unknown named character, it's Chik'en who's a prankster and not an &amp;quot;opportunist&amp;quot;, whose friend's Dreon and is getting suspicions from the other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to the problem I mentionned in comment : Sociology and statistics are really not good at determining accurately what a specific individual will do. It's just not what they're meant for. If some studies tell 50% of women wear gloves in winter, then picking one woman will give you 1/2 chance of finding they're wearing gloves. It's the same as tossing a coin and predicting it will fall on tail, that's how terrible it can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree entirely with JBH's thought and though : You can ask about &amp;quot;why an organisation would do something&amp;quot;, because at this level we can think about optimal strategies, which don't relate to individuals. Taking a real world example : Why would Russia attack Ukrainia in 2022? Two answers which are acceptable :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because there are oil-pipelines (economy, strategy, military).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because there are ideological disagreements in Ukrainia (politics, sociology, cultural).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's still world-based : The oil's there not because of a character's choice, and people have a culture, regardless of what their individuals think, grow and do... Individually. Note that it doesn't (and should never) tell what Russia will choose, but give factual elements that can lever where it's interesting for them to go. It's not easy to ask these kind of questions because you have to think about strategical resources (in the largest definition) you can gain rather than just reasons. But asking them is doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;By telling it through a story&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but tell the question's a story. You have many elements recalling the usual story structures : Initial situation, Triggering event and obstacles : how Dreon struggles keeping her calm, how Chik'en is handling the tests...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you present it so much as a story, any psychological element tend to become character development, so story-based per definition. Let me give you my understanding of this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you tell a story, you -the artist- puts their point-of-view and personality into it. It's almost always heavily tied to your perception. This in turn, gives a point-of-view to the story. However, this perspective alters how it's seen by the readers, it's less objective and more subjective, and subjectivity is much harder to deal with when you want to give a more objective answer to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe historians can tell how hard it is to know what objectively happened from testimonies and documents, even harder when there's only one document left. Your question is kinda like that one document, it's harder to work with objectively in the scope of a scientific approach, be it psychological or some other domain. This therefore makes us think outside the scope of those domains, and more in the ones of storytelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To go deeper&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of these things might interest you :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8312/why-does-wb-se-treat-social-sciences-as-non-existent/&quot;&gt;discussion on why sociology questions are more often getting closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question (and more precisely my answer) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8512/80336&quot;&gt;about invasions&lt;/a&gt; to get a deeper understanding of the difference between optimal choices and reasons from a strategic and tactical point-of-view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This post about a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8405/died-of-a-theory-a-challenge-for-too-story-based-and-fishing-for-ideas-question/8407#8407&quot;&gt;test question being closed for being story-based&lt;/a&gt;. It's not the same situation, but maybe you can get some other thoughts from this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-02-26T08:40:32.360" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T08:40:32.360" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9684" CreationDate="2022-02-26T04:44:35.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part I. An answer to this question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I portray a cultural response to a stimulus that avoids looking like a specific character’s motive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not talk about individuals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. In culture X it is common to curse in response to being cursed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use individuals as examples and make sure that they are seen as examples of cultural responses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. In culture Y it is common to buy a present for parents after receiving one's first paycheck, for example, Person A, a young man from country Y, bought warm red underwear for his parents after receiving his first salary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Identify the custom/cultural response as such when describing someone's actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. 1. Like many other men in his country, A presented B with a diamond ring when he proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. 2. Following the custom, B resigned after she got married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overall your text should focus on culture and cultural responses, not the actions of a particular character.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part II. How to get my vote to reopen your question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not agree that your question is 'too story-based' because you say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are based on motives that are consistent with the plotline and the unique social norms of Chik'ens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as I said in the comments I think that your question is unanswerable because you do not provide information about the existing social norms. Therefore, it is not possible to make any predictions or talk about motivations related to social norms. &lt;strong&gt;I would vote to close as needing details&lt;/strong&gt; if there were not 4 'too story-based' VTCs already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get my vote to reopen your question you need to do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit your query for brevity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is a very long but not very informative read, a lot of details are not really necessary and only add noise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add a list of social norms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be easily satisfied with the Ten Commandments style, but other people might need a bit more. So I would suggest explaining each social norm in a sentence or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also advise against using the expository method in the future. The WB.SE community is not the right audience. Here people prefer bullet lists, getting straight to the point, and no mentions of individual characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some reasoning behind my approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I apply &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the principle of charity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to all questions, which means that I tend to choose the most reasonable, logical, and constructive interpretation. The most constructive interpretation of your question, IMO, is this: 'What are probable motives for the Chik'en to cross the Road given specific social norms?'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I always see &lt;strong&gt;characters&lt;/strong&gt; in this kind of question as &lt;strong&gt;members of a class, not individuals&lt;/strong&gt;. There are 2 reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is the most charitable interpretation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fictional characters are not individuals, they do not have the same complexity as real humans and they do not have will or desires of their own; they are artificial constructs that behave according to a set of rules&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; (this makes them classes of objects, as opposed to individuals).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I make a strong &lt;strong&gt;distinction between can and should&lt;/strong&gt;. 'Can' is related to possibilities and probabilities, which are not random or arbitrary and which I see as part of worldbuilding. 'Should' is related to specific choices, which is part of story and character development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question does not ask whether the Chik'en should cross the Road. It asks why, in other words, it asks for reasons. Given the constraints specified in the question (plotline and social norms) the most charitable interpretation is that you ask a 'can' question, not a 'should' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have some background in psychology so &lt;strong&gt;I do not share the view that all motivation is something unpredictable and deeply personal&lt;/strong&gt;. Some motives are related to personal preferences and desires, but far from all of them. In addition to this, motivation is a popular research topic in psychology, sociology, and economics, so it is possible to talk about motives without much speculation. Considering that I see characters as artificial constructs there is very little room for arbitrary decisions&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question specifies that answers should be based on social norms and known facts from the story. This makes the question answerable if information about social norms is provided and we assume (or you state) that the Chik'en is not very different from humans psychologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; Please note that while all fictional characters are artificial constructs, not all questions about them can be considered worldbuilding. Most of the questions are in-between worldbuilding, character development, and story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; I agree that it is a bit of a grey zone on the WB.SE, but I would never say that all questions about motivation are always off-topic. Motives and motivation are an important part of worldbuilding when we are talking about societies and cultures or the philosophy of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78906" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T04:44:35.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9684" CreationDate="2022-02-26T08:50:28.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;The third side of the coin&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First off&lt;/strong&gt;, I always appreciate queries that look into cultures, social structures and corporate motivations. Especially when the worldbuilder is trying to examine peoples and cultures that differ considerably from the human model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've gotten the psychological underpinnings and the SE specifics handled very well by Otkin and JBH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to focus on the writing, basically a critique that I hope might give you some ideas for making your underlying query work better. (And yes! It's going to be long!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In perusing the comments, I note that several of them can be interpreted in terms of writing. Particularly those that dwell on storybuilding vs worldbuilding, formatting, form without substance and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to have written a comment on the writing, I might have said something like it &lt;em&gt;comes across generally as disorganised and disjointed; word choice and formatting leave me confused as to what's being asked.&lt;/em&gt; I not sure I wouldn't have closed for being story based or not! I can easily see why that was the overwhelming reason, though I think there are other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First impression&lt;/strong&gt; is almost always mechanics. Spelling, grammar, usage, formatting. SGUF. As a writer, I'd note that your spelling is not bad, but paying closer attention to the red underlines would reveal the few errors that exist. Worse are some odd word choices. Right off &amp;quot;a metaphorical children's book&amp;quot;? Do you actually mean &amp;quot;metaphorical&amp;quot;, like the use of a commonplace item to mean something deeper? Or did you mean &amp;quot;hypothetical&amp;quot;, like a book that you could actually write but are not actually writing because the purpose is other than writing an actual book. Or did you mean something else? Metaphorical may well be the right word! -- but you didn't really convince me. Thus, I see this as a red flag of the &amp;quot;how much of this long query am I going to have to parse just to ensure I get the OP's meaning right&amp;quot; kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst of the first impression falls under formatting. You begin with a basic description of what you're doing, which seems to morph into a description of the Chik'en character as a person and then into the Pil-Dalians as a group, to their perceptions and then to their observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its unclear where the story starts, what the story actually is and what's descriptive and what's part of the story. I think this could easily be fixed with some (very tasteful) section headers. You might also consider separating the description of the Pil-Dalians from that of the Chik'en character. And speaking of the Chik'en character, you might want to replace the description of this specific character with a description of Chik'ens in general. That way you're looking at society vs society, rather than our society vs a visitor from eslewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The writing itself&lt;/strong&gt; is somewhat tedious. Word choices and sentence structures are odd. Grammar is not well construed. Style, I think, might be off putting to some (and I must disclose that it was off putting to me); yet I am setting that aside in the hopes of getting what I believe to be a good question clarified and reopened. I'm just going to look at one paragraph as an example of writing &amp;amp; stylistic issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One time, their Chik'en was seen trying to go out into Welford Lake so it could have a camp on the island. It would walk this way and that, putting things in the water, trying for a raft. A visitor came to the lake, which is a bit outside the village, with a boat on a cart, and he apparently wanted to do some fishing. The Chik'en stopped its raft-building experiments and hid behind a bush as the visitor arrived. The visitor went about untying his boat, and preparing his gear, and apparently went away to go look for bait. Perhaps some worms or grubs, as he was looking intently at the ground with a cup in his hand. The visitor disappeared into the shubs, but the Chik'en was seen pondering only a little, and then returned to Pil-Dale. It became almost a legend in quiet mutterings when the youthful kids who saw this returned. Certainly, if they had some desire to get to an island, and a boat was put in front of you, they would have taken the boat! Who would not? But carrying such a thing around would just be a bother, they only stayed to observe this curious creature. This created suspicions in the village, and people became wary of the Chik'en.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Their Chik'en&amp;quot;: who are we talking about? Assuming this is the opening sentence of the story, I'd have expected to be clued in to who is doing what. Outside of the story, I know you mean the Pil-Dalians; but inside the story, we won't have the previous descriptive paragraphs. Which leads me to second guess not only my reading, but also your purpose: is this even a story, or is this just a continuation of the description of what the Pil-Dalians were planning?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Trying&amp;quot; doesn't make sense here. The Chik'en clearly went to the lake, so there is no issue of making an attempt. Since this is a report of what they saw, the first thing they would have seen is the Chik'en going to the lake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;It, he, they, etc.&amp;quot; Pick a pronoun and stick with it! Since you're dealing with a specific character, pick she or he and remain consistent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Have a camp&amp;quot; doesn't make sense. &amp;quot;A camp&amp;quot; of course can mean many things such as a public grounds for camping, a military base, a small cabin or house situated in a recreational area that one does not live in permanently. I suspect the Chik'en wanted to &amp;quot;go camping&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Would&amp;quot; is not the right verb here. &amp;quot;Would&amp;quot; can express a bajillion things in English, but it seems that a simple past tense would be the best choice here. As it stands, I think the clearest reading of this sentence is one of habitual action, which is, I think, not what you're going for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comma splice. This sentence and the next one read almost as comma splices.  The concatenation of motifs separated by commas is probably not the best style choice overall. But I could be convinced otherwise if your plan is to write a &amp;quot;dialect&amp;quot; story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Try for&amp;quot; is of course a phrasal verb, most often with a goal or something intangible as its object. Here, I'd have expected the simple verb &amp;quot;try&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;trying to make a raft&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Apparently&amp;quot;. Too many in close proximity. Either pick a synonym or don't ascribe motive to the characters, especially since you've specified that this is &amp;quot;what they found out&amp;quot; about the Chik'en's behaviour. Why would they be interested in determining the motivation of a fellow Pil-Dalian? Repetition can be useful, but I don't think it adds anything here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Pondering&amp;quot;. Again, ascribing a motivation or assuming an interior state of mind. He could have just been daydreaming about grubs!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;only a little&amp;quot;. Only a little what? As written, &amp;quot;a little&amp;quot; describes the quality of the pondering: in other words, he didn't think much! I got the feeling that they were trying to describe a relatively short space of time; and if that's the case, I'd have expected &amp;quot;he was seen pondering only a little while before returning...&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;It became almost a legend in quiet mutterings when the youthful kids who saw this returned.&amp;quot; I'm not certain how to read or connect &amp;quot;in quiet mutterings&amp;quot; with the rest of the sentence. Generally, we don't &amp;quot;mutter&amp;quot; legendary events. We might whisper them furtively or tell them excitedly. &amp;quot;...when the youthful kids who saw this returned.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Youthful kids&amp;quot; is a tautology. &amp;quot;Returned&amp;quot; is a little unclear in the context of a relative clause. Who is the subject of see and returned is the object of see. What this means is that the children &amp;quot;saw some thing or object returned to someone&amp;quot;. I don't think that's what you meant; I'd have expected &amp;quot;...who saw the Chik'en's behaviour returned home.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;... if they ... in front of you ... they would&amp;quot; Don't vacillate! Again, keep pronouns consistent. Pick one and stick with it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;But carrying such a thing around would just be a bother, they only stayed to observe this curious creature.&amp;quot; This one is a comma splice. Also a non sequitur as the second phrase does not follow from the first and the first doesn't logically lead to the second. Carrying the boat is clearly connected to the previous idea of stealing a boat, but observing the creature ought to be excised. It doesn't fit anywhere. You could edit this phrase to introduce who did the observing and something of the manner of the observation and put it up in the beginning of the paragraph. This would solve the &amp;quot;Their&amp;quot; problem!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;An island&amp;quot;. While not incorrect, it doesn't seem the best choice either. Since &amp;quot;the island&amp;quot; out on Welford Lake is already an established place in this paragraph and in the awareness of the kids doing the observing, I'd have expected them, or the narrator, to refer to it as &amp;quot;the island&amp;quot; in the context of considering the stealing of a boat. Thematically, it would tie the strange actions of the Chik'en to the local geography of the Pil-Dalians.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;This created suspicions...&amp;quot; What created suspicions exactly? What's the reference? I'm pretty sure your antecedent is &amp;quot;everyone in Pil-Dale was a taker by nature&amp;quot; from a few paragraphs ago, but the Chik'en has done so many things just in this paragraph that the antecedent ought to be specified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over all, the style seems to read as a kind of stream of conscious dialect tale. Some random things happen and things are described in a way that's more reminiscent of a grocery list than a story. It comes across as rambling and overly intimate. It lacks narrative cohesion. This can be perfectly fine when done well and in the right context. I think you could have done the stream of conscious better; but I don't think a SE question is the place to show it off like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the disjoint I mentioned earlier I'd argue stems from the insertion of the story itself. It seems like the Pil-Dalians are trying to understand what makes the Chik'ens tick, but you are inserting a story about particular individuals and their own motivations and biases and misunderstandings which I think ultimately breaks the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can be done?&lt;/strong&gt;  Given that your Meta question is &amp;quot;How can I portray a cultural response to a stimulus that avoids looking like a specific character’s motive?&amp;quot;; I think the best thing you can do, honestly, is to delete the story that happens in the middle of the Main question. Honestly, if it were well written and entertaining and seemed to mesh with the underlying question, I'd probably give it a pass. But slogging through something that looks like a very rough first draft and is not terribly entertaining and doesn't really mesh with the question at hand I think its inclusion is more detrimental than helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of the comments focused on the fact that your story relates to a single character rather than a whole society. This makes it almost impossible for me to overlook the individual Chik'en's actions and motivations. I understand why you'd like to use a single character to represent a whole culture; and I also think that doing so would actually work in the context of a story that is part of a book of stories about the weirdness of the other and coming to grips with it. It does not work in the context of a WB.SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These problems can be fixed by the usual process of editing &amp;amp; rewriting. Basically, reread and rewrite the story itself for SGUF and for narrative interest. Reread, edit and possibly rewrite and reformat the question itself. Above all, if you're going to use a story as background for a question, please make me &lt;strong&gt;want&lt;/strong&gt; to read the story rather than have to slog through only to end up not getting the connexion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On second thought, if you really do want to keep the story as background, I'd suggest shifting it either to the very end, where it can be used as a reference, or else putting it at the top with a note that this is a story that you've written and that respondents are to understand the story, not as a narrative, but as a cultural object that you have a question about. It still needs editing and rewriting, but at least this way the story's presence is given a context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly: &lt;em&gt;Get Your Story Straight!&lt;/em&gt;  In your Main query, you specifically ask for an individual's motives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But why? Why did the Chik'en cross the very dangerous Road?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are based on motives that are consistent with the plotline and the unique social norms of Chik'ens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in Meta, you declare that you want to ask about cultural or social phenomena, not individual motives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I portray a cultural response to a stimulus that avoids looking like a specific character’s motive?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story you told is all about an individual Chik'en. Even though he is a representative member of all Chik'endom, he is also his own person and has his own quirks, his own story, and worst of all, he has lived in Pil-Dalia for some time and is thus culturally contaminated. What you're portraying in the story has to be some unknown admixture of his native Chik'en culture, his adopted Pil-Dalian culture and his own particular personality as it is informed by these two cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Careful attention to composing the query and writing the components of both the query and the story will go a long way to making your question reopenable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T08:50:28.567" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9682" CreationDate="2022-02-27T15:21:40.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In its current form (02/27/2022 08:04am MST) I'd vote to close it again if reopened&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it continues...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … every answer is equally valid, there is no actual problem to be solved, you are asking an open-ended ... question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the question is that you're looking for (a) multiple areas, (b) a subjective criteria (&amp;quot;most successful,&amp;quot; what does that mean?), and you've failed to provide any limitations or criteria that would reasonably limit the responses. As written, I could legitimately answer, &amp;quot;my back yard&amp;quot; and you'd have to express a frustration &lt;em&gt;not identified in the question&lt;/em&gt; to exclude it (e.g., &amp;quot;But your back yard can't support 10,000 people!&amp;quot; Well... you didn't say how many people had to be supported in your question...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To wit, the Help Center further states that Questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be specific and answerable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must include restrictions/requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should include research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, it's unreasonable to ask that you do research on the effects of a post-nuclear-holocaust world. But it is reasonable to expect that you've researched what people need to live, what post-explosion radiation/devastation effects would occur, etc., and that this research has led you to some &lt;em&gt;conundrum,&lt;/em&gt; some problem that you've not been able to get past because there's not enough knowledge out there to achieve it through your own research. &lt;em&gt;That's the question you should be asking.&lt;/em&gt; Right now, your question is indistinguishable from writer's block — we don't help people get past writer's block. From the Help Center we read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search, and research: Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boiling all that down, you're expected to ask a question for which you can select a best answer based on reasonably objective conditions, not simply the attitude, &amp;quot;I like this one best!&amp;quot; You have not asked a question of that form. You have not listed conditions, restrictions, context, expectations, goals, or anything else that we need to stay reasonably on point. You haven't even defined what &amp;quot;most successful&amp;quot; means (If one community survived 50 years with zero population growth and the other the same 50 years with 10% population growth that strained it's food resources, they're both successful, which one is &amp;quot;most successful?&amp;quot;). Somehow, we need to convert this from an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; to an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; (for which &amp;quot;my back yard&amp;quot; can't possibly be considered a legitimate answer, if you see what I mean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Help Center we learn about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3624/how-to-write-the-perfect-question&quot;&gt;perfect question checklist&lt;/a&gt;. That checklist doesn't reflect all of the Help Center rules I've mentioned, but it's a great place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-02-27T15:21:40.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9691" CreationDate="2022-02-28T21:31:28.867" Score="-7" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you see questions with a physics tag on WB, lots of comments and answers (and closures) immediately start to assess correctness, with &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Earth&lt;/em&gt; physics as a reference. When a science or reality tag is put, the fact-checks are even more prominent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if peer-mods have the expertise to judge physics questions this way. And often, there are nice engineering ideas that end up in closure, because they are qualified as bad research, insufficient focus, or off topic. I think it would be more WB-like, if the &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot; tag would be split into &amp;quot;physics-past&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;physics-future&amp;quot;. This avoids questions that better be put on physics.se, and it allows a fictional approach to physics, without having to assert &lt;em&gt;scientific thruth&lt;/em&gt; all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A physics-past tag will be about science and technology for the period of the past  indicated (neolithic, antique, medieval, steampunk etc). An additional reality-check tag, of science tag, would limit the answers to actual, historic science. That requires references. Without science tags, answers may e.g. be a mythical context, this kind of physics-past only needs to be plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The physics-future tag allows for extrapolation of physics knowledge. When put with a science tag, the extrapolation should be made plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-02-28T21:36:39.743" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T01:16:03.050" Title="What about splitting the WB physics tag in physics-past and physics-future?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9690" CreationDate="2022-03-02T01:16:03.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are some misunderstandings here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag's purpose is to &lt;em&gt;check a proposed condition or circumstance against a proposed reality.&lt;/em&gt; (See both the tag's wiki and &amp;quot;What topics can I ask about here?&amp;quot; in the Help Center.) In other words, you provide both the complete set of rules and the circumstance you want judged against those rules. The tag is NOT for the purpose of asking, &amp;quot;can X exist?&amp;quot; That's a popular error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tags stack. We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;future&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/near-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;near-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;near-future&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/far-future&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;far-future&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;far-future&lt;/a&gt; tags. Why would we need a &amp;quot;physics-future&amp;quot; tag? We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ancient-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ancient-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ancient-history&lt;/a&gt; tags, so why do we need a &amp;quot;physics-past&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But there is one common behavior that, IMO, is not supposed to exist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've said in another Meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested&lt;/a&gt;. No one should be jumping to the conclusion that anyone's question can only be (or should only be) answered strictly from the perspective of today's physics. This is underscored by a statement from the Help Center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds. World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The keywords there, IMO, are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;imaginary worlds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your reality.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; That's why I posted the Meta question I did. The Stack is falling much too far into the assumption that if you can't do it with Real World Physics, then it can't be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bah!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But this brings us to what I suspect is the basic reason why the tags you propose shouldn't exist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, users are &lt;em&gt;really, really, really bad at correctly and consistently using tags.&lt;/em&gt; Most users have never read the Wiki pages for the tags they use. Even fewer have participated in editing and improving those tags. In fact most new tags never get a Wiki until a much later date when someone else writes something up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, all you'd be doing is further muddying the already muddy water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T01:16:03.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-05T04:13:28.723" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are a flurry of confusion over what I tried to make a very simple exercise, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225198/what-would-fit-in-a-heterogenous-government-reforming-their-post-apocalyptic-wor&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; is rapidly gaining VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent was to define the political and moral characteristics of my society, and ask help in fitting that description with a government structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fly on the wall perspective is requested to help me see the apparent confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2022-03-09T06:01:43.087" Title="Am I using the GOVERNMENT tag incorrectly here?" Tags="|support|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9692" CreationDate="2022-03-06T01:39:38.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answer's context&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had a lil' chat with Vogon Poet in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/60579222#60579222&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;; I'll sum up my viewpoint here :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;My initial understanding of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/225198/9&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (revision 9)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question could be boiled down to : The survivors of the old world created a new government, which one is it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The world is post-apocalyptic, so to my standards few people survived at first. It's important later on for my reasoning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No real specific context was given to the people's history, relative to where they are on Earth. In other words, the cultures we have today have vanished.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, we know that those people knew about the old world through some sort of historic documents, but only about 4 countries at specific times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why did I close as &amp;quot;being story-based&amp;quot;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a tough one to choose. I first thought to close for lacking clarity and details. Indeed, we're basically lacking any context that is personal to the people that forms your government : The notion of equity, or heritage doesn't really tell what government it could reasonably be. On top of that, the question tends to get lost in defining what it is and what it isn't about. I can sort through this, but it's harder to track of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why did I choose to close as being story-based instead?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a standard post-apocalyptic world, I consider there's few people left, and that the government choice is left to those few indivduals, so there's a lot of character choice &amp;quot;noise&amp;quot; in there. The children will most likely carry that choice and don't change it until much later. It's not enough alone, but it doesn't help, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most importantly, since no context was given to the people themselves, at least none that can reduce the available choices of the government, it's up to them to choose. It's a bit like if you were given an empty page, you can do whatever you want with this. Some people will draw on it, some will write their grocery list, and so on. The same freedom happens to you and your people : With nothing before you can freely choose what you want!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It ended up in a 51 to 49 in favor of being story-based. A very close match, but it ended up with story-based because I found that, &lt;em&gt;as it was currently written&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, it's more about making choices as an author than being unable to clarify what it is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;What revealed the discussion ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's not about 1 government, it's about 4 of them uniting into one, 4 countries with 4 different cultural origins instead of none. It's a very different situation from the initial question which implies there might be other major differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then your trouble is a bit different from the question as stated; There is a worry that it'll feel &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; (a recurring word), or put more contextually if pirates attack the country, calling the &amp;quot;President&amp;quot; would feel &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot;. I believe this weirdness is more likely to come from how you write your story rather than the world, but with a second thought, it could be that what your government is is still too blurry in your mind so that any official title feels wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if some of the discussion's content was written in your question, I would have certainly closed for lacking details instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What should be done to improve the question?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, make 6 turns on yourself, sit on the sofa and have a drink to think throughly what you want to ask and what people needs to answer your question. Indeed, there is a clear difference between 4 countries uniting into one and one being made by a bunch of ragtag people, as much as there's a difference between asking for title names and title positions and hiearchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then as Otkin joined in the discussion, I'd take her advice and choose a government you wish to test, and make us confront it with your characters' culture and society. It'll help you focus your mind (and the question), comfort in what will work and what won't, and it'll help in moving away the question from the final choice you'll have to make. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-checks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-checks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-checks&lt;/a&gt; questions are just that good when it's becoming difficult to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Final note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're putting toooo much value in tags. If you can find a tag that describes what you want to ask, indeed it is an hint you can ask this kind of question, but in the end it's mostly the question's content that is reviewed against what is considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;acceptable&lt;/a&gt; and not &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;acceptable&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt; tag tells that you can ask about weapons, but see, some questions which asks what &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8569/80336&quot;&gt;ammunition is better&lt;/a&gt; can be considered as being off-topic, too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; : I emphasize this. If the question was reworded, it could fall into another category.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-03-08T15:29:06.950" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T15:29:06.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9692" CreationDate="2022-03-06T02:01:13.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question uses unexplained terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &amp;quot;empirical monarchy&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;heterogeneous government&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;separate factions&amp;quot;. What is an &lt;em&gt;empirical&lt;/em&gt; monarchy? Is it the opposite of a theoretical monarchy? In what way is the government &amp;quot;heterogeneous&amp;quot;, and how is is different from a homogeneous government? What are &amp;quot;separate&amp;quot; factions and how are they different from ordinary factions, or, for that matter, from political parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question assumes that words are magical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question asks whether the form of government would include an &amp;quot;emperor&amp;quot;, a &amp;quot;dictator&amp;quot; and a &amp;quot;senate&amp;quot;. Well, it would include them if their consitution or custom would specify or expect roles named &amp;quot;emperor&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dictator&amp;quot; for individual magistrates, and would use the word &amp;quot;senate&amp;quot; to refer to all or part of a deliberative or legislative assembly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words themselves are not magical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An emperor is whatever the constitution or the custom calls an emperor. Consider the form of government of the United States of America: absolutely nothing would change if the position called a &amp;quot;president&amp;quot; would be called an &amp;quot;emperor&amp;quot;. There have been political structures with elected emperors, for example, the Holy Roman Empire; the HRE lasted for many many centuries, and its emperor had very much less power than the president of the U.S.A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to call the head of state &amp;quot;emperor&amp;quot;, call them emperor. There is no rule that you may not call them &amp;quot;emperor&amp;quot;. It does not have any implication related to the form of government, or to how much or how little power the role actually has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;dictator&amp;quot; is very ambiguous. In the Roman republic it referred to a perfectly legal position; there have been close to one hundred &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_dictators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roman dictators&lt;/a&gt;, usually appointed for a very specific purpose. Nowadays, the word &amp;quot;dictator&amp;quot; means an authoritarian head of government of a country which we do not like. (A Roman dictator was most usually &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a head of government. A dictator was almost always appointed for a well-defined purpose, and he had no time to deal with actually governing the state. The only exceptions I know of are L. Cornelius Sulla Felix and C. Julius Caesar, the last two and the most out-of-the-ordinary dictators.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;senate&amp;quot; is usually, but not always, some sort of deliberative or legislative assembly. Some countries use this word to refer to the upper chamber of their bi-cameral parliaments (for example, the U.S.A. and France); other countries use the word to refer to their &lt;em&gt;uni&lt;/em&gt;-cameral parliaments; the German city-states of Bremen and Hamburg use the word to refer to the &lt;em&gt;executive&lt;/em&gt; branches of their governments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your political organization will have a senate if there is a deliberative, judicial, legislative or executive body called a senate. Nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question makes rather peculiar and unexplained assumptions about the hypothetical society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the question asks whether there would be a &amp;quot;parliment [sic] of Lords&amp;quot; and a &amp;quot;parliment [sic] of Commoners&amp;quot;, making the peculiar and unexplained assumption that there are lords and commoners, and avoiding to tell the readers what is a lord and what is a commoner in that polity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The British United Kingom used to have a bi-cameral parliament with a House of Commons and a House of Lords. Neither of them was a parliament, but only one of the chambers of a bi-cameral parliament. Nowadays, the U.K. still has a bi-cameral parliament, with one of the chambers being called the House of Lords; but the structure of that chamber has changed very much in the last decades, and only the name links it to its feudal predecessor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some of the hypothetical elements of the hypothetical society have very unclear meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question asks whether the hypothetical society would have &amp;quot;elected courts&amp;quot;. What exactly is an elected court is presumably left as an exercise to filter out potential respondents with limited imaginations, because for my life I cannot fathom a meaning of this phrase. Does the question mean that the courtiers surrounding the emperor, or the king, or the president, etc. are elected magistrates? Or maybe there are periodical elections to decide where the court will reside for the next &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; years, sort of how the International Olympic Committee chooses the venue for the Olympic Games? Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question states that &amp;quot;citizens have freedoms much like a modern first world nation&amp;quot;. What exactly are those &amp;quot;freedoms&amp;quot;? Does the question mean &lt;em&gt;rights&lt;/em&gt;, and the word freedoms is a typo? Since the citizens of Germany and those of the U.S.A. have very different rights, are we to assume that at least one of them is not a &amp;quot;first world nation&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question makes sweeping declarations in total contradiction with all known history of mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question says that the &amp;quot;government has established social norms&amp;quot;. Nope, there has never ever been a government who had it in its power to establish social norms. Legal rules, yes. Social norms, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note 1. The question misuses the word &amp;quot;nation&amp;quot; to refer to a &amp;quot;state&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;country&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;polity&amp;quot;. But this is very common with Americans, and we are all sufficiently acculturated to understand what it is meant.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note 2. I didn't vote either to close or to re-open the question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2022-03-06T02:09:13.097" LastActivityDate="2022-03-06T02:09:13.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9692" CreationDate="2022-03-06T03:45:29.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;h4&gt;I Don't Think So??&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I skimmed your question, but found so many problems with the underlying foundations that I honestly think you should have used a &amp;quot;Reality Check&amp;quot; tag rather than anything else!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, and leaving apart the whole and completely unrealistic notion of a government setting out to &lt;em&gt;establish&lt;/em&gt; a country's moral characteristics, it looks to me like your question is related to &amp;quot;government&amp;quot; and thus my answer is that you were in fact using the &amp;quot;Government&amp;quot; tag properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pertinent reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;What Tags Are and How Do We Use Them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question.&#xA;Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be&#xA;able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined&#xA;categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags can also be used to help you identify questions that are&#xA;interesting or relevant to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;On Tags&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there a policy against putting tags in questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really a policy per se, but SE does suggest that querents not put tags into question titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not force a tag into your title. Because the tags appear below the question and tags are indexed by search engines along with the content of your question, you can trust that other people will be able to find your question based on tags they follow or search for. Additionally, tags appear on the question page, so other people will take them into account when answering your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason why you can't put tags in the question body, but I don't see a strong reason to do so either. That's not really how actual tags work. If you're just making a list of key words so that people will find your question, a sort of private tagging system, I don't see any reason why you can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-03-06T06:21:44.913" LastActivityDate="2022-03-06T06:21:44.913" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-06T06:00:13.257" Score="-5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an off topic gets an answer before closing, logic suggests that whatever answers may have been submitted must be off topic as well. The possibility of making a post that has value to the community, which responded to a topic not suited to WB:SE is a paradox. My premise is simple: A post that is not suitable for this site can not create answers which both answer the question and are suitable to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is a dilemma concerning improving closed questions and invalidating answers, as answers to invalid questions must be invalid at the outset:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question that is invalid has an OP intent that is invalid (is it possible to assume an OP wrote what they do not intend?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing an off topic closed question into a valid question will in all cases change the OP intent (you have changed the question topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing an off topic closed question while maintaining the OP intent, can NOT change the question topic; therefore it can never be opened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only by changing the topic of an off topic question can you open it, but to change the topic of any question invalidates answers to that question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Can the rule against invalidating answers create questions which can not be opened by any means?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, this seems like a simple criteria to find candidates for deletion. There is no logical reason to consider the validity of answers to off-topic questions. By definition, all answers to off topic questions are “not an answer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-03-10T14:25:53.873" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T14:25:53.873" Title="On bringing closed questions with answers on topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9696" CreationDate="2022-03-06T17:41:44.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Yes. And No.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the narrow answer to the question is Yes,  the rule against invalidating answers &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but does not always, create questions which can not be opened by any means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one reason why we &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;respondents&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; have a grave responsibility to thoroughly read and understand a question before answering it. We should always discuss clarifications and air issues with the querent before answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often fail our querents in this regard, and I am every bit as guilty as the next person of answering a question that oughtn't be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The failure of my team leads to exactly the problems you mention: questions that can not be improved (edited) without invalidating the answers. This was the topic of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8540/is-it-fair-to-encourage-people-to-not-answer-questions-that-need-to-be-closed&quot;&gt;my recent Meta question&lt;/a&gt; about reminding eager respondents such as myself not to answer questions that really pretty obviously have some kind of problem that needs to be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resolution&lt;/strong&gt;: While not every question that has been closed after an answer is given results in a question that can not be edited; the optimally less than perfect way to solve the problem is simple: &lt;em&gt;learn from the disaster; write a new question that ties the loose ends; move on with the story&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Other Issues &amp;amp; Dilemmas in Order of Appearance:&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all answers yield paradoxes. I'd argue your analysis is too polar. Just because someone writes a really bad question (poorly conceived, off topic, whatever) doesn't mean the answers will of necessity be bad as well! This is a false conclusion as these answers can still be useful even if the question is not. You can see this all over the forum with questions that are closed or downvoted to oblivion yet have answers that are highly upvoted and often having earned the Green Checkmark seal of approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning here is simple: answers are not the same thing as questions and, &lt;em&gt;as regards their merits, are not as dependent on the question as you assume&lt;/em&gt;. You as querent write your question and it is judged on its own merits as to whether it is on or off topic, well or poorly conceived, how well it fits with SE rules and forum customs. I as respondent write my answer and it is judged on its own merits as to whether it a) answers the specific question and / or b) is deemed to be generally good (useful, entertaining, comprehensive, instructional, educational, etc) by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 1&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;A question that is invalid has an OP intent that is invalid (is it possible to assume an OP wrote what they do not intend?)&lt;/em&gt; --- This is possible of course! This is why there is a comments section, so these issues can be brought up and resolved. Preferably before answers start pouring in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 2&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Changing an off topic closed question into a valid question will in all cases change the OP intent (you have changed the question topic)&lt;/em&gt; --- Not true. Questions can be &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; for a variety of reasons. If it's off topic for lacking focus, then focusing the question does not keep it off topic and will not likely change the OP's intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 3&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Editing an off topic closed question while maintaining the OP intent, can NOT change the question topic; therefore it can never be opened.&lt;/em&gt; --- Convoluted and half true. Again, if a question is off topic for lacking focus, edits will (or should) not change the topic. Thus the question can be edited and reopened. If the topic is changed, the question should not be reopened, the edit should either be reverted or modified and the OP should be encouraged to write a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 4&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Only by changing the topic of an off topic question can you open it, but to change the topic of any question invalidates answers to that question.&lt;/em&gt; --- Untrue. Again, there are many reasons for a question to be closed as off topic. Questions can and regularly are edited and reopened without change of topic. Answers may or may not be invalidated by a change of topic, but best practice assumes they will be and thus the discouragement of rewriting a question via the editing process. This is why, once a poorly written or off topic question gets answers, we encourage the OP to just write a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 5&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;If this is the case, this seems like a simple criteria to find candidates for deletion. There is no logical reason to consider the validity of answers to off-topic questions. By definition, all answers to off topic questions are “not an answer.”&lt;/em&gt; --- Generally, we only close questions that are deemed off topic. Deletion I think is reserved for spam and so forth. Hence &amp;quot;Vote to Close&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;Vote to Delete&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part is simply untrue: An answer's validity stems from two sources. First, of course, is the question. The other is the answer itself. Answers can be both &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; and also &amp;quot;an answer&amp;quot; simultaneously. In practice, &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; is generally reserved for posts that are really more suited as comments, or that ask other questions or that simply have nothing to do with anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: while the answer to this question is a qualified yes; the logical conclusion to be drawn from the situation is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to delete answers or questions. In WB, we judge questions by one set of criteria and we judge answers by a completely different set of criteria. This means that a question can be closed, but answers can not. Answers can be broadly useful, and even answer a bad question that is now closed, and yet itself not be an &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Avoid this situation in the first place&lt;/em&gt; by writing a solid query (onus is on the querent) and by reading the question thoroughly for understanding and addressing any issues (onus is on the respondent);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rely on your intuition&lt;/em&gt; and VTC a question that looks like it could be a) a good question a/o b) looks like it could be problematic; explain your reasons for closing and offer the OP some assistance, especially newer ones;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bring a shovel&lt;/em&gt; so you can cover up the mess -- on occasion, a querent might just have to give up on a question the rest of us loused up and start over again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-03-09T04:18:14.717" LastActivityDate="2022-03-09T04:18:14.717" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9696" CreationDate="2022-03-09T05:36:24.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The rule against invalidating answers is not a Stack Exchange rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting you didn't understand that. I'm simply using it as a lead-in. It's important to remember because Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;encourages people to improve questions through editing&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, you are welcome to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helps to remember that the page I just linked was developed long before Worldbuilding existed and at a time when most users of Stack Exchange were using it for incredibly objective purposes (e.g., asking questions about programming). Unfortunately, Worldbuilding is imaginative and creative enough that arbitrary editing for reasons other than formatting, spelling, and grammar is pretty much verboten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, why did the don't-invalidate-answers rule come to be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aanswer+invalidate+answers&quot;&gt;lot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of questions have been asked about or referencing the issue of invalidating answers. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/414/40609&quot;&gt;one of the answers to the earliest question&lt;/a&gt; about it makes a valuable point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question has an answer that is considered valuable by either the community (through upvotes) or the asker (through acceptance), no one, including the asker, ought to edit the question in a way that changes its meaning sufficiently to invalidate the existing answer. If people want to get answers to a different question, they should ask that question separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the edit invalidates valuable content and/or requires more work from answerers or the community to update the answers to keep up with the updated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where a question is ambiguous, such that there are multiple possible interpretations of what it is asking for, it should be closed until it's edited to be sufficiently precise. The earlier this happens in the question's life-cycle, the better. If the asker notices that there are answers that either don't address the asker's intent or assume multiple interpretations of that intent, the asker should edit the question as soon as possible to be more precise and should comment to the answerers accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That quote actually came from another Stack, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1231/15184&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;, and it's the best explanation I know of. Your issue, therefore, boils down to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question remains open, then any edit to the question that invalidates answers is verboten. Think of it this way: the question isn't so bad that it has been closed, therefore all the answers were provided in good faith. It's requisite that the OP and any future question editors also keep that faith, even if the posted answers lead them to realize they didn't ask the question they thought they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question has been closed, &lt;em&gt;all answers are irrelevant.&lt;/em&gt; This is because there cannot be a &amp;quot;valid answer&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; to a closed question. Any argument that editing the closed question cannot invalidate the answers is simply an argument to keep the question closed because at least six people can't agree to the credibility of the question sufficiently to ascertain the validity of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which brings us to a reality of Stack Exchange that simply exists and cannot be materially changed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &amp;quot;unwritten rule&amp;quot; that simply exists: &lt;em&gt;caveat responsor&lt;/em&gt; (let the respondent beware).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are people who will answer anything as quickly as they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some simply enjoy the Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are rep hunting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some haven't learned the rules/etiquette of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some aren't paying attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some don't care.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the simple truth of the matter is &lt;em&gt;caveat responsor.&lt;/em&gt; A person who answers a badly asked question can't complain when the repairs to that question invalidate their answer. &lt;em&gt;The question was closed because a mod, a qualified user, or five peers sincerely believe the question does not meet one or more of the rules of this Stack and/or Stack Exchange and thus is not a valid question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The don't-invalidate-answers &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; only applies to open questions. It does not apply to closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other exercise in logic to better understand or regulate the &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; is straining at a gnat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means the simple answer to your question is &amp;quot;no.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;There is a HUGE difference between a &amp;quot;valid answer&amp;quot; and a &amp;quot;useful answer.&amp;quot; An answer posted before a question was closed may be useful to somebody — but it's invalid by definition because the question was closed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-03-09T05:36:24.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9692" CreationDate="2022-03-09T06:01:43.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The tag is fine — the question is messy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to read the background of the question multiple times, but there's a lot of it and it's a lot more distracting than you probably realize. E.G.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people in the government have some parts, and since I don't have a government I don't know what a non-prejudiced title they may have. Conversations needed details eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that asking what a title would be is off-topic for this Stack. But you also try to explain what you're looking for (I think...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it just stopped there, I could just pick anything at all for a government. It would just be some insignificant world backdrop decision. It is all backdrop—until you say something contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple republic structure ignores the Chinese and the British heritage. An empirical monarchy with executive ministers ignores the heritage of constitutional Republics and monarchies. A sort of government stew seems to be needed, I'm trying to concoct it with the least amount of inadvertent cultural appropriation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just deciding which of these officials could comprise a heterogeneous and respectful government designed by these diverse people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At this point, I don't have the slightest idea what you're asking for...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regard to this question, you spent so much time writing it that you forgot why you were writing it. The question is not specific, not clear, not well defined... it's a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking what type of government would be the natural successor to those four governments, then I believe you have a valid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking what type of government would be the result of those four governments experiencing an apocalypse that left the lengthy conditions you listed, the question should be closed for needing more focus, not because there are too many questions, but because it's so broad and so vague that you violate a number of rules (answers all being equally valid, high concept question, story based, take your pick).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking how four (or more) individuals, one from each of those governments, could be brought together to form a new government, the question should be closed as too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking what individuals from those four governments could be brought together to form a new government, the question should be closed for needing details (exactly what individuals? What skills? What goal do you, the author, have for the result?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking what titles any individuals in the new government may have, that's just plain off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, you need to create a single sentence that asks a specific question. You need to write that sentence before you write anything else in the post. Anything else you do include in the post needs to &lt;em&gt;not interfere with anyone's understanding of that single sentence.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And Finally...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly advise that you remember the following statement from the Help Center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to identify questions relating the the physical rules of a world as worldbuilding. It's much more difficult to say the same when asking questions about the development of cultures, philosophies, and governments. Whether or not such a question is easily identified as within the rules of the Stack often boils down to a single issue: are you asking a specific question, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who are trying to overcome, e.g., writer's block or who are simply exercising an idea almost never ask a specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-03-09T06:01:43.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-09T07:24:11.030" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;A July 2022 renovation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under &amp;quot;Conclusion.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of questions asking &amp;quot;is X plausible?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;is X realistic?&amp;quot; Considering the Help Center states that our goal is to help people build imaginary worlds, such questions seem unreasonable (&amp;quot;it's your world, it's plausible/realistic by definition&amp;quot;). But the real problem is that questions of this type usually don't have an actual problem to solve and intrinsically violate the following Help Center rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore,&lt;/strong&gt; I am seeking advice for users concerning questions of the type, &amp;quot;is X plausible/realistic?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Bit of History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the first &amp;quot;is X realistic?&amp;quot; question was asked, an astute worldbuilder &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/20/40609&quot;&gt;asked whether or not such questions would even be on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. The question was not directly answered, but Monica's indirect answer is revealing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions in this area should be about the problem you're trying to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words (if Monica will forgive me for reading between her lines), they're off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment to her answer is also revealing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &amp;quot;Is this realistic?&amp;quot; then you've already solved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the basic problem with questions of this type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; question if all the proper details are provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may be masking a real worldbuilding problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may be masking the OP's insecurity about an otherwise really cool idea. In other words, there isn't a worldbuilding problem to solve, the OP's simply looking for an affirmation that they've created something worthwhile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is probably the most abused tag on this Stack. People use it without reading the wiki. They use it without even reading the one-sentence summary in the Help Center (&amp;quot;Provide the relevant details of your world and a situation and we will make sure it remains internally consistent.&amp;quot;). My general opinion is that the correct solution for improving questions of the type &amp;quot;is X plausible/realistic?&amp;quot; is not to convert them to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; question, but to help the OP identify the actual problem they're trying to solve.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;In case you were wondering, the difference between a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; question and a bad one is seen in this example: &lt;strong&gt;bad:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Is this bridge realistic?&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;good:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;I designed a bridge with the following characteristics (list...), I expect the following kind of traffic to use the bridge (list...), is my bridge realistic?&amp;quot; The bad example presents a usually fictional idea and asks that it be judged against Real Life — where the fictional idea doesn't exist and therefore the check intrinsically fails. The good example lists the relevant rules of the user's world and a relevant situation that would use those rules and asks if the use of the rules is consistent.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:33:59.360" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T23:33:59.360" Title="Advice to Querents asking &quot;is X plausible or realistic?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|questions|question-types|advice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9701" CreationDate="2022-03-09T23:34:34.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Make it the Usual&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are essentially two kinds of Reality Check queries: the &lt;strong&gt;good kind&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;other kind&lt;/em&gt;. As you point out, &amp;quot;is this plausible / realistic / sensible / reasonable&amp;quot; questions are all a type of reality check. The issue is then whether it's well conceived and composed or whether it still needs work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual advice to give the querent here is the same I'd give to anyone who just wrote a question that has problems: edit to resolve the problems; review the pertinent resources to guide your question formation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, you, Jerenda, Monica and the TagWiki are all dancing a lovely bransle around the issue! The querent's problem can be resolved by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensuring that there is an actual &lt;strong&gt;worldbuilding problem&lt;/strong&gt;. If there's no problem to solve, the question should be deleted. At the least, it should be closed until the querent can dig up a reasonable worldbuilding problem to solve.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proper tagging&lt;/strong&gt;. The question should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, because asking about plausibility, realism, sensibility and the like are at worst near synonyms for a reality check. We must all remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/reality-check/info&quot;&gt;reality checks&lt;/a&gt; ask about whether a concept or phenomenon makes sense within its own fictional context, not the real world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proper content&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions should provide the proper details: &lt;em&gt;there might be some flaws in my solution, so I ask here if my solution is realistic&lt;/em&gt; --- we have to know the &amp;quot;relevant details&amp;quot; of the world to answer the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the problem is anything other than a worldbuilding problem, then it's off topic here and would probably best be asked on a discussion forum. Insecurity of one's own imagination or descriptive powers can't be dealt with here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to help such users along, it might be a good idea to review the ideas in this Meta question, along with the points made in the linked Meta question and fold them into the tag wiki itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the tag wiki could really use a short paragraph on how to write a good reality check query!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-03-09T23:34:34.477" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-12T06:02:03.417" Score="-2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Let me open by saying, worlds are big&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is fair to say that many novels have more than double the content involved in worldbuilding as they do in story and plot. Publishers have a special allowance for Science Fiction titles specifically, granting them enormous 120K+ word counts for the purpose of building their worlds in the audience's head. Non-fiction title have a much tighter word limit by comparison. As I said, worlds are very big. But even when they take more pages than the plot, they are not the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a never ending battle between the defenders of the TSB closure and the vibrant worldbuilders regarding the definition of &amp;quot;Story Based&amp;quot; questions. If nothing more comes of this post, it can serve as... refresher training? I don't know. But there needs to be an example in common parlance of what constitutes story, and what constitutes world. I see constant battles over this issue, it would be nice to prove once and for all that big worlds can be built on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the exercise, I considered a story that most of the world knows,  J. M. Barrie's &lt;em&gt;The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up&lt;/em&gt;, or, &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barrie conceived of the mischievous character Peter Pan, and had him fly children off to a magical world where boys never grew up. It was called &lt;em&gt;Neverland.&lt;/em&gt; You got there by flying &amp;quot;second to the right, and straight on till morning.&amp;quot; Neverland was different for every child. Peter Pan's world had pirates, and his Lost Boys fought them eternally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question is very simply; could the imaginary world of Neverland possibly be constructed with Worldbuilding.SE as a tool? The way I think we could find out is to put Neverland as an answer, and see if any query could possibly generate that answer. Basically, I am going to give &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; here that come from the Peter Pan play, and if this world could be created, a response includes a proper &lt;strong&gt;worldbuilding query&lt;/strong&gt; that would have generated that response. Again, this is all within the scope of Neverland, for both the query and response. Assume you are the querent, user name &lt;em&gt;J. M. Barrie&lt;/em&gt;, and you are building a world for a play. The world is called &lt;em&gt;Neverland&lt;/em&gt;. Below are the answers, we provide the queries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: It could be a place that has no boundaries&lt;/strong&gt;, and children can do whatever they want. It has magic, and pretty much whatever the child can imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: It could have pirates for one child&lt;/strong&gt;, and maybe indians for another, depending of the things they are into. The place has magic, and kids never have to grow up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: They don't tell time at all&lt;/strong&gt;. There is never a sunset or a night time. They don't age, and have no responsibilities. It is play time all the time. But, maybe once per hour, some creature with a clock comes by, and then they know the time. The creature is scary—an alligator maybe? So the kids know &amp;quot;time is bad.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: You should not have just random pirates if the child likes pirates&lt;/strong&gt;. There needs to be some &amp;quot;villain&amp;quot; in the world. If the Neverland is indians, then it is a chief. If the Neverland is pirates, make a big bad captain. The world with no bounds won't be able to have any crisis without a villain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: The way the kids learn to fly can be from fairies&lt;/strong&gt;. Children associate fairies with magic, and so the fairies can have some sort of dust that makes the kids fly. It shouldn't come from themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2022-03-12T06:16:22.403" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T22:45:23.457" Title="Could Neverland be built on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange today?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|policy|worldbuilding-process|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9704" CreationDate="2022-03-14T13:03:18.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Tautologically So, My Dear Emmerson!&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is why we're here. We're here because we do worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to the point-by-point!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition of Story&lt;/strong&gt;: Stories are composed of (typically) three basic elements: somewhere for it to happen in, something that happens, and someones to do what happens and have done to them what happens. Setting, Plot, Characters. Generally speaking, when we talk about &amp;quot;story&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;narrative&amp;quot; in the context of this forum, what we mean is elements of plot and character. We take ownership of setting. We leave plot and character &lt;em&gt;as plot and character&lt;/em&gt; to the writing forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that, in so far as a character might be a merperson, we'll take ownership of the anatomy, physiology, psychology, spirituality, culture, history, language, general behaviour trends, etc of the character as a person belonging to a given species. But as far as specifics such as personality, behavioural quirks, motivations, desires, moods, emotions, intellectual capacities, etc. we don't touch those as those are specific to an individual character. As for plot, the story itself, these are matters of story telling and narrative craft rather than worldbuilding and thus we do not touch them either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting, however, is the place where all of this happens in. The world itself. It's own particular universe, with its own governing laws, its own history, its own cosmology, its own stars and planets, its own geology, geography, climate, its own cultures, religions, histories. Those are our domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;story based query&lt;/strong&gt; is simply one that asks specifically about what we don't deal with: about plot development, storycraft, actions and choices of individual characters. We understand that these things all touch upon and in some respect derive from the world itself, but these are fundamentally authorial considerations. They are questions that can be answered independently of the world in which the story happens and are thus not suitable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neverland&lt;/strong&gt; is the setting of the story, and thus falls under our auspices in Worldbuilding. The only correct answer to your query is thus &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;. Pedantically, of course, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; because Neverland was conceived and devised more than 100 years ago, a few years before this forum and the present iteration of Webspace existed. There was, of course, an interweb that existed at the time in the form of intellectual magazines, epistolary, and telegraphy. WB.SE wasn't part of the magic though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-03-14T14:54:13.587" LastActivityDate="2022-03-14T14:54:13.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2022-03-15T14:46:59.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What would be a Good Answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &amp;quot;If I use Magic, can my bird-men have large crests?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing any answer beyond that just starts &lt;strong&gt;my creative writing session&lt;/strong&gt; using &lt;strong&gt;OP's question as a prompt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no objective way to say that my creative writing session is a better answer than anyone else's, because there's no criteria to judge against. So how do we vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better Formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &amp;quot;Given [detailed description of magic system], can my bird-men have large crests?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: &amp;quot;[Yes-because/No-because/Need-to-tweak-X-because]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer can now be justified against the criteria given in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a &amp;quot;science stifling magic&amp;quot; issue. I think the example question is just a lazy question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8681" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T14:46:59.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9704" CreationDate="2022-03-15T22:07:37.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok suppose Neverland would not exist yet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Now, the question is very simply; could the imaginary world of Neverland possibly be constructed with Worldbuilding.SE as a tool? The way I think we could find out is to put Neverland as an answer, and see if any query could possibly generate that answer&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've devised some questions, see below.. but I think the whole topic of a magic Neverland amusement park for kids will be a problem for WB rules as they are applied now. Almost everything regarding amusement parks and kids will be designated as opinion based, because there are so many answers, finding a best answer will be difficult. Also, it will almost always be story based, because kids and the appreciation of Neverland by kids plays a role in all 5 answers. It is about the experience of your characters, not about the building of your Neverland amusement park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm afraid lots of aspects of  &amp;quot;Neverland&amp;quot; will be incompatible with the current peer-mod population. 4-6 out of 12 questions are closed on WB. Peer mods seem to regard world-building projects as engineering projects, preferably worlds without any inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I still don't grasp the need for all of these close rules, but let's use this for practice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it now, 4 out of 5 &lt;em&gt;could be&lt;/em&gt; non-story-based questions, but only one legal (#5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In below solution, the (a) questions are story based, (b) are not, but 3/5 of my (b) questions have other issues. For one of your answers (#2) I cannot find a non-story based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: It could be a place that has no boundaries, and children can do whatever they want. It has magic, and pretty much whatever the child can imagine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1a) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Would my magic amusement park be suitable for kids ?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (story based, asking about the experience of people in the story, and opinion based, maybe I vtc along)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1b) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Would my magic amusement park need an age limit ?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (about rule of Neverland world, but opinion based and maybe non-WB)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: It could have pirates for one child, and maybe indians for another, depending of the things they are into. The place has magic, and kids never have to grow up.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How to amuse kids in my Neverland amusement park?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (all close reasons, even I would vtc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b) -- (have to pass on this one, can't think of any question that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; story-based)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: They don't tell time at all. There is never a sunset or a night time. They don't age, and have no responsibilities. It is play time all the time. But, maybe once per hour, some creature with a clock comes by, and then they know the time. The creature is scary—an alligator maybe? So the kids know &amp;quot;time is bad.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How can I learn kids to feel immortal?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (story based, I'd try put a better answer before it gets closed :p)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3b) &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why would scary alligators with clocks appear in my Neverland park?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (ok ? they would probably close it for OB or something)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: You should not have just random pirates if the child likes pirates. There needs to be some &amp;quot;villain&amp;quot; in the world. If the Neverland is indians, then it is a chief. If the Neverland is pirates, make a big bad captain. The world with no bounds won't be able to have any crisis without a villain.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4a) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Would toy pirates that appear at random amuse the children in my Neverland park?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (story based)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4b) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Should my children's amusement park have the toy pirates appear at random?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (seems ok, but there's opinion based again.. near good, your answer is science based actually)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: The way the kids learn to fly can be from fairies. Children associate fairies with magic, and so the fairies can have some sort of dust that makes the kids fly. It shouldn't come from themselves.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5a) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;What would fairies do in my Neverland amusement park?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (story based, a prototype, I would vtc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5b) &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How would I get kids in my magic Neverland amusement park to fly ?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (seems ok to me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-03-15T22:45:23.457" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T22:45:23.457" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9751" CreationDate="2022-03-25T14:33:28.543" Score="16" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may or may not be aware that Worldbuilding.SE (partially) supports the mhchem MathJax extension, that allows for nice rendering of chemical formulae. I only discovered it quite recently. It lets you do stuff like this: &lt;code&gt;\ce{H2O}$&lt;/code&gt; to generate output like this: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\require{mhchem} \ce{H2O}$&lt;/span&gt; (the plain latex equivalent would be &lt;code&gt;$\mathrm{H_2O}$&lt;/code&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathrm{H_2O}$&lt;/span&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chemistry Stack Exchange is obviously the main consumer of this feature and has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86/faq-how-can-i-format-math-chemistry-expressions-on-chemistry-stack-exchange#:%7E:text=The%20mhchempackage%20for%20MathJax%20adds%20extra%20functionality%20for,ce%7B...%7Dis%20used%20for%20typesetting%20chemical%20formulae%20and%20equations%3B&quot;&gt;nice FAQ on its use&lt;/a&gt;. The chemists get two things that we don't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;\require{mhchem}&lt;/code&gt; is implicit... you get support automatically without having to require it explicitly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They get physical unit formatting via &lt;code&gt;$\pu{273.15 K}$&lt;/code&gt;, which currently renders as a grumpy error on WB.SE and WB meta that looks like this &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NyXoU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NyXoU.png&quot; alt=&quot;mathjax markup error&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My requests are that we a) support &lt;code&gt;\pu&lt;/code&gt;, and optionally b) support automatic &lt;code&gt;\require{mhchem}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been two related meta questions in the past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2313/do-we-want-the-mhchem-extension&quot;&gt;Do we want the mhchem extension?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2877/units-in-mathjax-markup&quot;&gt;Units in mathjax markup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former was never officially completed, but we seem to have (partial) mhchem support anyway (presumably all of Stack Exchange has basic support). The latter was fixed by suggesting use of the &lt;code&gt;\text&lt;/code&gt; macro, but only around unit names because it breaks rendering of underscores, etc. If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216606/which-stack-exchange-sites-use-mathjax/216607#216607&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange answer&lt;/a&gt; on which sites use MathJax you can see that 4 already have mhchem fully enabled, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2919/29766&quot;&gt;space exploration people&lt;/a&gt; are also looking into getting it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that it doesn't appear to affect page loading times or rendering performance, and is entirely optional for people to use, is there any reason not to enable it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62341" LastEditorUserId="45207" LastEditDate="2022-04-26T03:22:59.400" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T04:34:04.643" Title="Can we extend mhchem support in MathJax to include physical units?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2022-03-25T16:08:11.493" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support this request: Worldbuilding users can benefit from having mhchem enabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2022-03-25T16:39:56.170" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T16:39:56.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2022-03-25T16:09:38.933" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't support this request: Worldbuilding users do not benefit from having mhchem enabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2022-03-25T16:39:48.457" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T16:39:48.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-26T02:41:27.787" Score="-2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was considering adding the neo-feudalism tag but thought to ask here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are distinct concepts but I predict it is nuanced and specialized enough that blindly making the tag will see resistance and debate. Well, here’s the debate in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reference I will share ]my recent post](&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227185/why-can-t-the-everyman-get-housing-without-the-lords-of-america&quot;&gt;Why can’t the everyman get housing without the Lords of America?&lt;/a&gt;) which has the confusion plain to see in my comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/162507/could-a-technologically-advanced-society-exist-as-a-feudal-monarchy/162520#162520&quot;&gt;this answer to a question about advanced feudal societies&lt;/a&gt; to the queue as well, because it seems to reflect the popular opinion about modern feudalism, but in fact points fairly plainly to what theoretically drives neo-feudalism in nations like South Africa and Somalia today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point: The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feudalism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feudalism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feudalism&lt;/a&gt; tag info really doesn’t cover modern age at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2022-03-26T07:16:36.230" Title="Should the Feudalism and Neo-feudalism have separate tags?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9714" CreationDate="2022-03-26T05:20:14.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a need for a separate tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feudalism tag info really doesn’t cover modern age at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simply wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feudalism tag info states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For question about &lt;strong&gt;worlds where the political structure resembles and portrays features of medieval times, including lack of a strong central power, fragmentation of nations into small-ish states with a rather weak national feeling&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the time that makes medieval-ish, but the political structure. As such there is no need for a neo-feudalism targeted to the modern age, because the existing tag already covers it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-03-26T07:16:36.230" LastActivityDate="2022-03-26T07:16:36.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-26T09:19:50.877" Score="0" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human creativity, while extremely powerful, is not infinite; we are bound by our inspirations and our extent in time, so that even all the ideas in the world can be noted down upon a finite sheet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our ability to distinguish is further limited, as many of our ideas are functionally identical in our mind, so as to even further curtail our creative power&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language compresses creativity even more, with dizzying arrays of diversity in all areas being constantly crunched together into single words, in a constriction so deep that no amount of description can open it up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite all these obvious limitations on our creativity, some people seem to expect that every last question will be entirely distinct and uncommon. For example, take &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/216125/could-arachnid-like-animals-exist-at-large-sizes&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was closed as a duplicate because both questions involve increasing the size of creatures and the traits asked about both originate in the same phylum. Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227271/why-would-a-herbivore-become-a-fang-feeder#comment695341_227271&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, in which a close vote has been issued because both questions involve herbivores that could be described as fanged, in spite of the fact that both creatures were entirely different in the nature and usage of the 'fangs'. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/167893/anatomically-correct-gigantes&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; goes even further, with the closure seeming to simply be because both questions involve creatures that might be called giants. Looking at these examples, it seems as if finding duplicates is a word-matching game, where people are shouting duplicate once they've found two (or sometimes even one) word associations between different questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A duplicate should be considered as a question that is wholly redundant, which cannot have answers that couldn't be applied just as well to the question it duplicates. It is not for shallow similarities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T14:11:53.267" Title="Common Points don't make a Duplicate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9716" CreationDate="2022-03-27T04:07:48.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;h4&gt;On the Contrary!&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Query 1:&lt;/strong&gt;  I voted to close you version of the underlying question because it asks essentially the same thing as the earlier version. You provide a lot of creature specific details. The details are interesting, but don't really affect the question itself. The question itself is essentially &amp;quot;can I have a really big spider&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other query doesn't provide many creature specific details. The question has its own array of problems, particularly its lack of focus. I voted to close it for that reason. One of the questions the earlier OP asks is essentially &amp;quot;can I have a big lobster&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Six of one half dozen of the other:&lt;/em&gt; you asked your question after the other one, so it's yours that gets closed for being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Query 2:&lt;/strong&gt; I agree with you 100% --- this one is not a duplicate because neither question addresses the same specific, or even general, set of phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Query 3:&lt;/strong&gt; This question is also not a duplicate, but it is far more problematic than either 1 or 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Problems:&lt;/em&gt; The closed query really doesn't have a worldbuilding problem associated with it. I read it as a question of idle curiosity. The query is a yes/no (and thus opinion based) question. The OP doesn't seem to know exactly what subject matter he's even asking about: the marquee indicates &lt;strong&gt;giants&lt;/strong&gt;;  the image seems to depict &lt;strong&gt;tritons&lt;/strong&gt;; the query body speaks of snake legged people, those are &lt;strong&gt;anguipeds&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question gets reopened without being seriously edited, I'd vote to close it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; What makes one query a duplicate of another is exactly and precisely the points they have in common! If two queries have &lt;em&gt;every point in common&lt;/em&gt; then they are identical questions; if they have &lt;em&gt;sufficient substantial points in common&lt;/em&gt; then they are duplicate questions; if they have &lt;em&gt;no substantial points in common at all&lt;/em&gt; then they are not duplicate questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the spider questions: your question has a lot of points that the other question lacks (points that describe the creature you have in mind); however, both questions share one substantial point in common, and that point is they both ask the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A duplicate should be considered as a question that is wholly redundant, which cannot have answers that couldn't be applied just as well to the question it duplicates. It is not for shallow similarities.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't have said this better myself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T04:07:48.020" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9716" CreationDate="2022-03-27T14:11:53.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than saying &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, I'd like to explain more the difficulties when looking for duplicates. Knowing them should already help in making better analysis and closure reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Comparison threshold&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to tell if a question is a duplicate, we have to, on a global and atomic point, check that two elements are equal in nature and meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, at which point do we consider two elements as equivalent or/and leading to the same answers? Would you consider these questions as duplicates :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the maximum size the snakebot of Doom can reach?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the maximum width the snakebot of Doom can reach?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the maximum size the snakebot of Doom offsprings can be at birth?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the maximum size the snakebot of Doom's fangs can reach?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the size of the snakebot of Doom's blanket to cover it nicely?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the best diet for the snakebot of Doom?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's an interesting exercise, to see how many questions you would mark as duplicates to other ones. Comparing the first sentence to others, (2) is very similar in nature. Others are talking about subsets of the question, like (3) and (4). On its side (5) talks about something dependent of (1). And (6)... Well there's not much similarities with others besides having a snakebot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results will be highly dependent of one's perception and knowledge about the topic. For instance, (1) and (2) are most likely to be marked as duplicates, having only one very similar word in difference. But taking another look, size means generally volume, or length+width+height or roughly length+width for snakes, while width is... width. For this snakebot, is width (mostly) equivalent to size? In other words, could there be an ultra-large snakebot that is much smaller in size than the biggest imagineable snakebot in volume? If it can exist, are the two questions really equivalent then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I'm saying they're objectively equal or not. I'm no snakebot of doom expert, and like I said it's all relative to one's point of view. Anyhow, point is that something that seems identical could be different under another prism, and that's partially what makes the job of marking a question as duplicate hard. That and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Simplification and rewording&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important one in my opinion is simplification, something that encompasses every closure rationale, but 'specially duplicates. As you try to understand the question, you have to make a picture of it in your head. It also fills in the missing pieces so you can compare the two end puzzle you've made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of this, you have to simplify things in order to compare at some point. Indeed, if we take back the question (1) and (2) about snakebot size and width, word-by-word they're different, but essentially they are asking about the same thing (a measurement of distance about the same creature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's, I believe, the issues that your sample questions faced. Because of the way the questions are stated or because how people perceived them and turned them around, some duplicates could be found. Alendyias question about herbivorous fangs is a good example of this : The meaning of the question got distorted under the review lense, and because two questions are asking about herbivorous and fangs, they looked like they're under the same sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Duplicate checking time&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes more time to check for duplicates than any other reasons, simply because you not only have to read one question, but two or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This synergize very badly with simplification and rewording. The more time passes, the more you can forget what the original question was about, or what one of the possible duplicate was about. Your puzzles get deformed, and some pieces of one can be found on the other, making them more easily look alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the more the possible duplicates there are, the harder it is to juggle with them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking for duplicates is probably the most arduous task if we were to count time and complexity together. That's why it's easy to become lost in it and make mistakes. Or not! Remember that it all boils down to comparing things, and this comparison is set on subjective criteria. If your question is being closed for being a duplicate of another one, focus on the points that make your question stand out. If you're asking about a spider's max size and there's already one about crustacean max size, turn it around and focus on the issues that crustaceans don't have, like how such big and many eyes can be arranged on your spider's head. The more detailed you go and argue, editing the question to match these precisions, the more chances the differences will be seen by the other party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T14:11:53.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-29T16:09:39.973" Score="12" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that quite often we get questions along the line of &amp;quot;I am creating my world, I have come up with a map, does it make sense?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a list &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=map%20realistic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions do rarely get closed, however I find that they often revolve around some basic concepts which could be better handled in a wiki sort of answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore this call for action: if you have the time do so, would you start this wiki where we could collectively &amp;quot;dump&amp;quot; our knowledge time after time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have started the wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/227640/30492&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, feel free to chip in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-04-02T08:15:04.420" LastActivityDate="2022-04-02T08:15:04.420" Title="Call for action: realistic map wiki" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-31T10:58:17.153" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question over here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227504/integrating-earth-into-interstellar-empire&quot;&gt;Integrating Earth into interstellar empire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite getting a decent amount of upvotes and answers it was closed as being too story-based. Earlier sphennings indicated that it seems to story-based for him (and i thank him for stating his reasons for VTC) and I have since made multiple attempts to reword the question. Still, it was closed, so now I'm asking for suggestions to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;questions must focus on what is possible or likely to develop&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is exactly the intent of my question, which is why believe it to be on topic, though probably in need of wording it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it I give:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the starting point - 2020s Earth, aliens arrive, Earth is in their territory - a set of restrictions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;restrictions - demands that are not up for negotiations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;end point - Earth peacefully integrated into alien empire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about how to possibly or likely get from starting point to the end point with the restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions on how to fix it are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81108" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T14:43:56.870" Title="Please help me fix my question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9720" CreationDate="2022-03-31T14:43:56.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Chaos control&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closure reason likely comes from chaos that happen during a first contact and establishing a relationship between humanity and aliens. Indeed, the smallest change in starting conditions can vastly change the outcome. These conditions can be as little as the current leader's ideal or in which order aliens met them (meeting the USA's president today before Russia's or vice-versa would cause some issues, for instance). It's not taking into account a single leader can take charge of extraterrestrial relationships if countries joined together after this world-disruptive event, a la United Nations but not like the United Nations (that's a possibility).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, most stories involving a first contact happens to have very wild reactions from those pesky humans, going from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intergalactic federation&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(1996_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all-out war&lt;/a&gt; passing by some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;weird linguistic shenanigans&lt;/a&gt;, and all are likeable (to the viewer at least) and believable in their context. This makes the task of finding &amp;quot;a more likely&amp;quot; answer much harder to make, since most choices are already made believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What next?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I would have it closed, first because I'm more fond of reopening topics now. However, I'm not inclined to reopen as it is now either because of the aforementionned chaos above, which makes the strategic and probabilistic a.k.a &amp;quot;most likely&amp;quot; approach quite harduous to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot guarantee its reopening, it's a tough one. The classic way of going around this is to think of an approach, and ask if this one would reasonably work given the context (reality-check) instead on how you could make it work. You have to do some work by yourself, but you can then cross ideas that didn't go out as planned and use and overuse the ones that went smoothly like a smoothie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way... Countries have very different culture and approaches to militarization and things that looks like colonialization (especially in old colonies vs old colonial empires). So one thing that might help is to focus on a country or two at most, telling the others &amp;quot;already agreed&amp;quot;. It'll reduce the variables, and therefore the chaos triggered by those. To sum up this idea, dust off one of them to see where you roughly need to go for the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if you make a new question around the same topic, I'd advise to go in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/80336&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; before posting on the main site. It'll allows some people to review it before and reduces the risk of being closed. Like I said it's a tough one and I believe some help can be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can fully embrace it's too situational to ask what is more likely and think about what you wish to tell and... just make the events go that way. After all, if others managed to tell such a wide variety of alien encounters and colonization attempts, then so can you :)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T14:43:56.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-31T15:19:03.440" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question – &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227467/is-my-map-realistic&quot;&gt;Is my map realistic?&lt;/a&gt; – was closed for being too vague and/or opinion-based. The asker was advised to clarify the nature of the question and provide necessary information. The asker also displayed (in comments and a deleted answer) a willingness to accept all sorts of feedback without any specific focus, effectively subverting the SE format and turning the question into an Infinite List of Things on any given aspect (geography, weather, environemnt, city placement, &amp;quot;etc&amp;quot;) someone may glean from the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was it reopened without any edits from the question asker or explanation from mods? There are now four replies, one with over 20 upvotes, which would be invalidated if the asker were to actually narrow the focus or provide additional information as required by the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T15:19:03.440" Title="Why was this &quot;realistic map&quot; question reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9724" CreationDate="2022-03-31T21:41:21.867" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually wouldn’t ask a question like this, purely because most of these Stack Exchange sites are self-explanatory. This site on the other hand just feels like a duplicate to the Worldbuilding one and what got me thinking even more is I have the same status on the Worldbuilding site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if anyone would be kind enough to let me know: what is this site and what is it used for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91583" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T17:27:51.677" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T17:27:51.677" Title="What is this site (Worldbuilding Meta Stack Exchange) for?" Tags="|support|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9723" CreationDate="2022-04-01T02:44:20.710" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As VLAZ says &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;worldbuilding meta&lt;/a&gt; isn't for asking worldbuilding questions it's for asking questions about the worldbuilding site. Other websites may not make a distinction between, meta discussion, about the site, and the rest of the activity, or keep it in the same place but tag it differently. On the SO network the two are deliberately kept somewhat separate.&#xA;Your reputation and privleges from the main site automatically carry over and voting on meta will have no effect on your rep on either site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter a technical issue, are unsure of some aspect of site policy, or want to propose a change to said policy, you can post on the meta site about that and keep the questions about building fictional worlds to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally asking what's the difference between meta and the main site is a great example of a question that should be asked on meta and not the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2022-04-01T05:16:00.300" LastActivityDate="2022-04-01T05:16:00.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-03T16:10:44.553" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently made a question about giant mechs. I was criticized heavily for not justifying my answer by not having mechs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227616/how-can-a-country-devote-centuries-of-resources-to-building-giant-mechas-without?noredirect=1#comment696435_227616&quot;&gt;as mechs are scientifically implausible.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example Graham said this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@NepeneNep If you're changing the laws of physics (or adding a substantial element such as magic) then we do need to know how that works. That is the most fundamental feature of the environment in which the plot happens, and hence it is fundamental to events that can happen to the characters - which amounts to writing your plot, which is out of bounds. More obviously though, no-one can give you a good answer if you don't tell us what those constraints are. You've found fault with all the answers so far - and all those issues come from you not giving us a well-constructed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts was that you're allowed to have absurd premises like mechs being the best financial choice, and that you don't need to justify according to the laws of science every question. What do people think is the right answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59924" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T17:28:30.910" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T17:28:30.910" Title="Do we need to justify every worldbuilding question with scientific criteria?" Tags="|discussion|questions|science|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9725" CreationDate="2022-04-03T17:50:07.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You were asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you ensure that you can do a public service project that takes centuries and drains a huge amount of national resources, labour and time without it being stopped by any opportunistic people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question can be answered only based on logical reasoning out of certain premises. If you don't explain these premises which apply to your system, then it follows that we are supposed to follow real world ones, and real world ones makes mecha impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That very element making mecha possible in your world might be of paramount importance to answer your question, but the burden is on you to explain it. We cannot read your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T17:50:07.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9725" CreationDate="2022-04-03T19:01:19.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;h4&gt;You Don't, of Course&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not even a question of &amp;quot;science&amp;quot;! All those comments about covid and antimatter and the efficacy of mechs &lt;em&gt;all miss the point that history teaches in abundance!&lt;/em&gt; This is purely a question of societal perspective and spiritual &amp;amp; material orientation. No &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; and no technological considerations are even being entertained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only point about your question that I'd like to address specifically is that your assumption that, in real life politics, governments prefer focusing on the now rather than the future, belies an extremely modern and extremely Euro-American mindset. Specifically with the advent of Socialism (cradle to grave welfare, government ordering of individual life) &amp;amp; Materialism (glut of resources, consumerism), people in the occident have come to be focused on the present and on satisfying only present desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, this is not what governments have focused on. Historically, governments have, in fact, focused on building and fuelling actual mechas and they've done this successfully all around the world while still balancing military campaigns and expansionist desires and even tending, to some extent, to more mundane social programmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; As far as I can tell, you're not even asking a science question, so there is no reason to justify your mechas with descriptions of science or technology available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T09:35:15.207" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T09:35:15.207" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-06T16:11:31.997" Score="0" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to ask questions based on other people's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this really cool sci-fi invention on someone else's page.  Can I post the material here and ask for a second opinion?  Should I cite the work somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45883" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T16:11:31.997" Title="Can I ask questions based on some other website / authors work?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2022-04-06T16:14:11.670" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-06T16:17:46.043" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are down votes removed from reputation after a question is removed by its author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides tons of great information -- but in some circles has reputation on being hard on the users who post questions.  If you allowed questions to be deleted, and no longer consider the damage to reputation, this might allow a more graceful exit...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I used support in the spirit of explaining how an existing feature works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45883" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T16:28:34.307" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T09:13:44.050" Title="Are down votes no longer considered after a question is Deleted? Is it reasonable to request this as a feature?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9729" CreationDate="2022-04-06T16:28:26.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation is calculated based on existing active posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleted posts have their entire contribution to reputation removed, both for up and downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a remark, mass deletion of posts is not justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T16:28:26.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-06T18:32:04.773" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227896/science-based-methods-to-increase-the-damage-of-melee-weapons&quot;&gt;Science based methods to increase the damage of melee weapons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May at least as to check again that comment deletion is in fact best course of action in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94180" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T23:29:18.190" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T06:04:00.363" Title="Unhappy about my answer being deleted" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9731" CreationDate="2022-04-06T18:45:10.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't posted as a comment. It was posted as an answer, and since you confirm it was a comment, as the reviewers noted, it has been rightfully deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T18:45:10.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9731" CreationDate="2022-04-06T23:49:45.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Understandable&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the moderator's action is also understandable. As well as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary goal here, for those of us who respond, is to actually address the topic &amp;amp; focus of the query. While I get what you were trying to do, I think it was perhaps not sufficiently well executed and not sufficiently explained to save it from being flagged as commentary and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP didn't just &amp;quot;specifically ask about science&amp;quot;. More specifically than &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; the OP asked about &amp;quot;melee weapons&amp;quot;. And that in distinction from ranged weapons. I may be incorrect, but I note a slight disjoint between &amp;quot;specifically asks about science, realism, and melee&amp;quot; here in your Meta comment and &amp;quot;If you want to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;add melee - add it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (emphasis mine) in your Main answer. In other words, you seem to be throwing the whole concept of melee weapons around as a casual whatever, as if the nature of that weapon class and the martial arts that go with it are trivial and meaningless. In fact that kind of weapon is central to the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sphennings thinks that perhaps you were attempting a frame challenge, and I rather agree with that assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to add melee - add it. But you will have to use magic for it. Because anything remotely scientific will make possible a projectile based equivalent that is better in every regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What began as a strong frame challenge kind of petered out after the period after &amp;quot;none&amp;quot;. Rather than dismissing melee weapons, a frame challenge would seek to build upon the negative with an explanation of why the question itself doesn't make sense and then finishes up with an alternative. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;this Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; for more on the frame challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the frame challenge would be &amp;quot;There are no scientific ways of increasing the damage produced by melee weapons (premise). These are the reasons why (arguments). This is what I suggest you do instead (alternatives).&amp;quot; The frame challenge itself should explain your underlying premise in some detail and then defend your arguments. It needs to be robust: after all, you are fighting against an established fact of the OP's world!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the query itself could have been written a little clearlier --- why are we focusing on melee weapons? Are we to disregard ranged weapons and why? --- but the OP does clearly specify interest in melee weapons, and as a respondent you should respect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-04-08T11:38:47.497" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T11:38:47.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9736" CreationDate="2022-04-07T12:35:26.320" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227914/after-we-drain-the-sun-and-migrate-why-would-humanity-find-the-solar-system-imp&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which is getting a great amount of traction and some great answers, which are all making my imagination spark and buzz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other Stack Exchange sites, questions usually have one best answer or only one correct answer, and that answer would hopefully be accepted as correct by the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed in the past that Worldbuilding is a bit different, but how does that work alongside the 'accepted answer' system? For my question, there may be an answer which I like the most and which works best with the world I'm creating, which would ultimately be a subjective choice. Alternatively, there might be an answer which stands out for its quality or amount of research, but this could also be subjectively, not objectively, considered 'best'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, is it acceptable or encouraged for me not to choose an accepted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11310" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T19:42:28.000" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T19:42:28.000" Title="Is it acceptable for a question to have no accepted answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9734" CreationDate="2022-04-07T15:43:57.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are under no obligation to accept an answer. You're also under no obligation to stick with an accepted answer should your question receive an answer is a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like upvoting and downvoting is supposed to reflect your personal assessment of whether a question or answer is useful, accepting an answer is supposed to reflect whether a specific answer is particularly useful to whoever asked the question. We don't do much to police accepting answers besides suggesting to new members to refrain from accepting within the first 24 hours to encourage more people to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T16:11:23.900" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T16:11:23.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9734" CreationDate="2022-04-07T16:13:51.007" Score="12" Body="&lt;h4&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;Acceptable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has two different kinds of forums. It has Worldbuilding, where the expectation is that queries will be somewhat opinion based and responses will vary wildly in subject matter and presentation. And then there is the rest of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on the coveted Green Check Mark is that it is really a kind of &amp;quot;reward&amp;quot;. Well done, good and faithful respondent! It doesn't mean what it means across the rest of SE. If I ask a question about balancing a chemical equation over on Chemistry, it's really only got one correct answer. I as querent can choose which of the three correct responses I award &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot;, but that doesn't invalidate the correctness of the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in WB, it's often the case that one answer will be awarded the Green Check Mark, while another answer or more will be highly voted by the community. Over on Chemistry, this should never happen. In forums where &amp;quot;one correct answer&amp;quot; is the expectation, that's the one that should also be accepted. But here you can receive multiple correct answers. Each one is valid and the community may like one or more of the answers that you personally don't quite jive with!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My encouragement:&lt;/strong&gt; On the negative side, the Green Check Mark is also a signal that communicates the message &amp;quot;Thank you for all your help! I don't need any more answers! I as querent consider the matter closed!&amp;quot; This is very much offputting for potential respondents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost always pass over queries with accepted answers, even if I've got what I think is a brilliant answer that is different from the accepted. Why should I expend creative energy here when the querent is signalling an unwillingness to consider my effort? I've read comments to the same effect by other folks as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd actually encourage the practice of not accepting an answer at all. Just leave the question open! You never know what kind of answer you'll get a year from now or even ten years from now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you do wish to honour a respondent with the Green Check Mark, I'd encourage you to wait a month. Yeah! A whole two fortnights! This will give some time for the question to drop away from immediate community awareness and for most folks to be alerted to its existence so they can answer if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T16:13:51.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-08T22:00:55.663" Score="-1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this question.. several peer mods labeled this as story based in the comments, but in my opinion there is no close reason, because of the &lt;strong&gt;tags&lt;/strong&gt;, which point at the political system, not character motivations..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/228072/why-dont-supernaturally-powerful-people-help-save-the-world&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t supernaturally powerful people help save the world?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will cite it here.. the question is &lt;em&gt;tagged&lt;/em&gt; properly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BH7vy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BH7vy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a world of heroes and legends. Gods exist, mighty dragons, and&#xA;heroes who were powerful enough to contest them and save the world.&#xA;Level 20 NPCs, if you were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may even find some of these heroes in your adventure. The&#xA;storemaster of a magical shop might have once been a mighty hero who&#xA;fought dragons and defeated monsters from beyond reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when threats happen, these heroes don't intervene with anything&#xA;close to reliably. When orcs threaten to invade the kingdom, that&#xA;storemaster doesn't role up and crush them. When heroes work to&#xA;destroy the horde, the ancient orc shaman who has bound gods doesn't&#xA;stop them from destroying the horde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true even with larger threats, like that when a dark and old&#xA;god that could destroy the world is summoned, the very powerful people&#xA;don't all come running to crush them early. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is separate from past questions, which assumed these&#xA;powerful figures would be working for kings- this is not true in this&#xA;question. Kings can and do fall, and nations can be crushed by rivals,&#xA;without all the great heroes coming in to stop it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ideal answer will have realistic motivations or reasons why most&#xA;extremely powerful people exist and can interact with people but don't&#xA;solve even larger issues for nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the last sentence seems to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; to some peer-mods, the ideal answer will be about motivations of the superpower people ? But that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the case. It sais, an answer should be motivated properly, by the answerer. It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ask for motivations of the superpower people, which would be story-based indeed.. but does it, really..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: could some of these SB close-votes be based on a misunderstanding ? And why would the tags not prevent closure, in this case ? This is about political system and super-powers, not about motivations of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastActivityDate="2022-04-09T23:37:25.423" Title="What if an opener uses tags that can prevent story-based closure?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9737" CreationDate="2022-04-08T23:49:00.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags aren't magic. They're just a way to help categorize questions. I can't magically launder questions into compliance with worldbuilding policy by adding the correct tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only tags that specify a question are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, because they specify how a question shall be answered. All other tags are purely used for bucketing. Even these tags don't change our criteria for assessing whether questions are a good fit for our site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question asks about what a character (or organization) should do, or will do, it's not about the construction of the world it's about the actions of a specific entity in a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the specific question it's asking for an open ended list of reasons that specific unspecified individuals would make a particular decision. As written &amp;quot;Their parents weren't killed after watching a movie.&amp;quot; is equally as valid as &amp;quot;Perhaps they're more focused on symbolic gestures of beating up costumed petty criminals than doing the hard work of using their billions to effect real social change&amp;quot;. Sure someone could attempt to create an answer that isn't character dependent, and is generally applicable. But that's not what the question asks for. The question asks for an open ended list of reasons that powerful individuals could act a certain way, which is going to be unique for every unspecified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When assessing when to close questions we should look at what is there in the text, not extrapolate to some idealized form of the question. If you happen to see a question with potential after a round or two of edits, please work with the OP to help them bring out the gem of a question that you see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T15:25:43.417" LastActivityDate="2022-04-09T15:25:43.417" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9737" CreationDate="2022-04-08T23:52:28.437" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Tags are just Window Dressing&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that the question itself is clearly not story based. Especially after the edit that replaced &amp;quot;motivation&amp;quot; with other, external factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that whole last paragraph literally screams anything but story!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ideal answer will have realistic motivations or reasons why most extremely powerful people exist and can interact with people but don't solve even larger issues for nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answers are not even going to examine the retired hero's mentality, psychology, whims, desires, regrets, motivations, or anything else arising from within. The best answers are going to touch on the hero's story only in so far as it might tease out the external factors that are working against the hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that these heroes really and truly want to go out and fight dragons. Show the entitled young generation how it's done kind of thing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean they actually &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; go out and fight dragons! And it's here, in the realm of external forces, whence the answer must arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the question is already solid, what do we make of the tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I'd argue that the tags serve only to reinforce the solidity of the query as written. Clearly, the OP is looking for some kind &amp;quot;underlying system of the world&amp;quot; type of answer. And this kind of answer is not synonymous with an individual character's own choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T23:52:28.437" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9737" CreationDate="2022-04-09T23:31:45.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You're confusing what tags are meant for&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First please note that 2 of the tags are actually not appropriate : The question is not about how to worldbuild in general (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; tag), and it doesn't seem much preoccupied by &amp;quot;the governance of people&amp;quot;, like government building or how to &amp;quot;govern people&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/politics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;politics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt; tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, tags are not magical keys that prevent questions from being closed. In other words, it's not because a tag matches the description that the question is on-topic. Example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, quick example : &lt;em&gt;An anvil falls from 10m under Earth gravity, in how much time will it reach the ground?&lt;/em&gt; While this question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;, it is just a plain physic question. There's just no worldbuilding context to it and is therefore off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, assuming tags can prevent a closure is just putting up too much value in them. It's what helps categorizing a question (to search them later), but it doesn't define its core, it's only the skin, if not the nails knowing they're rarely read. &lt;strong&gt;The meat and skeleton of the question is its content and title only.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why would I close the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/228072/2&quot;&gt;its current state&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about heroes. Heroes are not an organized system, they're individuals, especially in regards to the references made : D&amp;amp;D or pathfinder level 20 characters and their godly antagonists, a lone shopkeeper... Indeed, a lone shopkeeper doesn't seem to be part of any reasonably sized group of super-heroes, and pen&amp;amp;paper roleplay games are all about individual character and player choices rather than following the overarching social system they're in, especially in the later parts of a campaign where they're high-level&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few existing story examples with people having all the attitude of heroes and making personal choices and not group or society choices :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's one from Nanatsu No Taizai (quite revealing spoilers ahead):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://nanatsu-no-taizai.fandom.com/wiki/Meliodas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Melodias&lt;/a&gt; doesn't build up an army to battle the Ten commandment upfront for several thousand years, and he doesn't seem bothered to do so by any group during this time. Note also that several of the deadly sins have some personal troubles -and not group troubles- to solve before coming back into the fray!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Picard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Star Trek : Picard TV show&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Retired cpt Picard isn't pressured socially or under some rules by anyone to help Data's daughter -and everything universe-saving related-, quite the contrary! It's because it's the daugther of his old friend, and his take-on of the world which makes him come back into action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peck, even in the latest &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Star Wars&lt;/a&gt;, where an old jedi is reluctant to come back to help the resistance. Even with the background of a whole organization behind, it fell down to personal thoughts and experiences rather than rules written or implied by the society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the above is basically the same thing as having Batman killing people or not&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, it's something inherently character-based. Unlike other characters, heroes -and by extension super-heroes- are all about &lt;strong&gt;outstanding&lt;/strong&gt; individuals facing the world troubles among with their troubles. That's the word : Outstanding. By standing out and being supposedly few (lvl 20 characters in D&amp;amp;D and variants are close to become gods and therefore hopefully they're few!), they cannot act as part of a social group, even if they can be in one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the question is story-writing. In order to be worldbuilding, it would have first to be about a group or guild of heroes and focus solely on the guild with its rules and mottos, not the people as stated in the title. From there you would start having a chance of being worldbuilding, though to be honest it's still really not an easy path. Perhaps it has a better place in &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;: Take a look at Baldur's gate and the first Planescape torment games, or more recently Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous. All godly main characters, but you make their choices, not any society's or group.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; : &lt;em&gt;It's a staple of modern Batman dilemnas, both in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Batman_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movies&lt;/a&gt; and comics.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T23:37:25.423" LastActivityDate="2022-04-09T23:37:25.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9729" CreationDate="2022-04-12T10:46:16.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any votes (up or down) are not calculated into reputation after a post is deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a post was +2/-1 that is net 18 reputation. When deleted, the associated user will &lt;strong&gt;lose&lt;/strong&gt; 18 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a post was +0/-3 that is net -6 reputation. When deleted, the associated user will &lt;strong&gt;gain&lt;/strong&gt; 6 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All non-deleted posts are factored into the reputation calculation. This also includes downvoters - when an answer is deleted, any user who downvoted it would gain back 1 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a deleted post is undeleted, then it will affect the reputation of all involved again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, downvotes on deleted posts are still counted towards calculating a post ban. If a user has a history of posts that are not well-received (score of zero or lower) then the system automatically imposes a temporary ban. There are two separate ones: for questions and for answers. Deleting a downvoted post will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; help with this. In fact, it might make things worse. The algorithm for imposing a ban is not known (to avoid gaming it) but in general, deleting content is received poorly. It is always better to attempt to improve a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on post bans, see the FAQ entry: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997&quot;&gt;What can I do when getting &amp;quot;We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2022-04-13T09:13:44.050" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T09:13:44.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-12T17:20:16.183" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a previous question, L.Dutch, a moderator, noted as a standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9726/59924&quot;&gt;that mecha were impossible.&lt;/a&gt; and so the burden was on us to explain why they were possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That very element making mecha possible in your world might be of paramount importance to answer your question, but the burden is on you to explain it. We cannot read your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9737/what-if-an-opener-uses-tags-that-can-prevent-story-based-closure/9738?noredirect=1#comment31226_9738&quot;&gt;Sphennings noted their own criteria.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect questions to provide the relevant details. If I ask &amp;quot;How will my magic system do a thing?&amp;quot; I'd better describe my magic system if I want my question to remain open. In general we make an assumption of things being similar to earth, except when specified. If I ask &amp;quot;What is the maximum altitude a human could climb to?&amp;quot; I don't need to say no magic because that's implied by me not describing a magic system. But If I ask &amp;quot;How high can a wizard climb to?&amp;quot; a magic system is implied and better have the relevant details described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even on their own questions, L.Dutch, the mod, doesn't explain the background &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/211056/immortals-and-privacy-how-do-they-protect-their-writings-and-drawings&quot;&gt;behind sci fi concepts.&lt;/a&gt; for example, immortals. Also, most of the front page questions don't explain the science or magic behind their decisions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/228202/what-is-the-simplest-set-of-rules-a-masquerade-can-have-to-maintain-history-as-w&quot;&gt;The masquerade question doesn't explain the scope&lt;/a&gt; of the masquerade, even though that would help with defining how the rules should be made. A question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/228046/how-would-angels-maintain-their-wings-would-they-even-need-to&quot;&gt;wing maintenance for a demon angel hybrid&lt;/a&gt; doesn't explain how the magic or science of the angel or demon works, even though that could help with cleaning, and humans flying is scientifically implausible without some large changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of topics that do require the burden of proof and don't? Which require an extensive background on how the science or magic works? Like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burden of Proof required. Mechas. Superhumans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burden of Proof not required. Angels and demons. Magical society. Immortal humans. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227546/how-would-mapmakers-deal-with-moving-cities&quot;&gt;Cities which can walk.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment it's hard to do questions without knowledge of which criteria will cause a question to be closed and which will be fine and accepted. Some clearer criteria for moderation would be valued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59924" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T07:48:19.650" Title="Are there hidden questions where there is an onus on the reader to explain all background?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9742" CreationDate="2022-04-12T17:59:23.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mixing things up to create confusion is never a good way to achieve clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I stated in the previous question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That very element making mecha possible in your world might be of paramount importance to answer your question, but the burden is on you to explain it. We cannot read your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in my question is the way of achieving immortality functional to the answers, there is no reason to expect an explanation on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply said, you are comparing apples with oranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T17:59:23.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9742" CreationDate="2022-04-12T19:01:36.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a burden of proof. There's a requirement to provide the details necessary to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every site on the SO network has an expectation of answering the specific question asked. If I ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How do I reverse a string in Python?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; answers saying &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Just use Javascript.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; do nothing to address the issue at hand even if Javascript has a better string reversal feature. Specifying Python precludes answers in languages that aren't Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On worldbuilding we have an extension to this concept which that your answer shouldn't add details to a world that aren't implied in the question. Imagine if you asked &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How high could a human climb?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, receiving &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;As high as they want if they cast Dave's Invocation of Infinite Climbing&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; does nothing to solve their worldbuilding problem, since there is no indication that magic exists in the world let alone the spell Dave's Invocation of Infinite Climbing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a programming language there's usually a deterministic specification and clear parse rules. Most details are already well defined. In worldbuilding we don't have the luxury of full specifications. We have the limited number of details provided to us. Information will be left out and strongly implied. It's a pretty safe assumption that unless specified the laws of physics will work the same. If you ask a question about a world set in the year 2000, it's likely that the US exists, unless specified otherwise. However there are details that can't be clearly implied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic is one of the most obvious examples of this. The 4 elements of Avatar work differently than the 5 mana types of MTG, which work differently than magic in Dungeons and Dragons. We can't make a meaningful assumption about the rules of your magic system. You need to provide the relevant details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example the answer to &amp;quot;What would be the market rate for a raise dead spell?&amp;quot; depends on how difficult, and socially acceptable it is to raise people from the dead. Depending on the magic system the answer could be &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;There is no market rate, raising people from the dead is impossible&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Using the equation of your expenses times 3 a freelance necromancer would charge 1500gp since casting raise dead requires a 500gp diamond.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The faeries will do it for free but you'll owe them a favor which is going to end hilariously&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, or a million other creative and informative answers. But any one of those wonderful answers isn't going to be useful to &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; if they're relying on rules that don't exist in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike programming questions there's an inherent amount of subjectivity in how questions on this site are assessed. Whether we're assessing whether two questions are duplicates, or whether a question needs additional details or clarity, we're relying on the reviewers to determine for themself what details are necessary or relevant. Part of the reason we require 5 votes to close or reopen a question is to average out any one person's personal bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to construct simplified questions where what is and isn't relevant, or necessary is pretty obvious. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How large can a red crab get?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is substantially similar to &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How large can a blue crab get?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the fact that one is red or green is not a relevant detail. Similarly if you ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How high can a magic user climb with the assistance of magic?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; the details of how magic works in your world are relevant to the question. If magic in this world only works within a mile of the ocean, the answer to the question is going to be substantially different than a world where magic can be used to transform someone into a tireless automaton that doesn't need to breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions need to provide sufficient details and clarity. They also shouldn't be a duplicate, too broad, or too opinion based. Importantly determining what's relevant, or necessary, and whether a question should be closed, needs to be handled on a individual basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T19:01:36.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9731" CreationDate="2022-04-13T14:22:10.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Answers are never for comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You got enough Rep to make comments. Use them, if you leave a comment. &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt; use an answer to make a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Don't answer in comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shall never answer in comments. Comments are to make the question/answer better, not to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T14:22:10.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9749" CreationDate="2022-04-18T06:33:43.967" Score="-1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done a vote-close on a number of bugs where I would have liked to mark it as needing to be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://writing.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, but the only migration destination location available in the UI is this meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should/can Writing be added as a suggested destination for migration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BpMwT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BpMwT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41250" LastEditorUserId="41250" LastEditDate="2022-04-18T11:17:17.737" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T11:17:17.737" Title="Should the Writing stackexchange be added to the list of sites for migration?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2022-04-18T09:09:04.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering how annoying it is for us when whatever question not fitting another SE community gets dumped on Worldbuilding, personally I would not like returning the annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather leave the choice of the target for migration to moderators, who have the means for prior alignment with the receiving side. Normal users would still flag the post suggesting migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T09:09:04.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2022-04-18T09:36:57.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration has a high bar to clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question to be migrated has to be &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; for this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question to be migrated has to be &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; on the target site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question to be migrated should be of high quality and ready to be migrated to the target site. Bad question should &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be migrated. We do not want to just shuffle them to be somebody else's problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This criteria thus requires familiarity with the target site to be able to make an informed decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lot to ask from five different users. They should all individually be familiar with the target site's rules and policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see people recommending a different site &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; actually knowing enough about it. I think having a special migration path should not be given to regular users. With the exception of migration to the per-site Meta. Migrations should be an exception and as such &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9748&quot;&gt;I concur with L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt; that it should be left to moderators. They are the exception handlers around here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: I do agree that some migrations can successfully be handled by the community. However, I feat that they would not be the majority of migrations. Migrations in general are quite rare, &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; migrations rarer than that. Having them as an exceptional case seems the most prudent choice to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T09:36:57.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2022-04-26T04:34:04.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've enabled this as of an hour ago (26 April 2022) Adam said it should be fine but if you run into any issues, let me know and we'll disable it and investigate what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45207" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T04:34:04.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8175" CreationDate="2022-05-01T17:03:06.360" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. I once wrote a question on what makes a religion popular, because I was trying to make a fictional religion in my world, and it was closed, deemed opion-based. Personally, I think that some &amp;quot;opion-based&amp;quot; questions can actually help in worldbuilding advice and help. I do not get Walhalla is with moderators sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95481" LastActivityDate="2022-05-01T17:03:06.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-04T14:10:47.397" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at Worldbuilding just now and noticed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/229453/eyewitnesses-to-subterranean-beings-i-can-t-be-the-only-one&quot;&gt;question that had been closed&lt;/a&gt; because it was asked &amp;quot;in character&amp;quot; - unfortunately it was also locked because of some unfortunate comments made to that person, which I'm not able to read.  Anyway, how can I message the original poster ( @john21851 ) to tell him about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homo floresiensis&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10752687/British-anthropologist-believes-theres-evidence-Homo-species-alive.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;professor emeritus&lt;/a&gt; who holds out hope for meeting an &lt;em&gt;ebu gogo&lt;/em&gt;?  (No, I don't think this is probable, but let's keep sci-fi interesting!  Besides, I admire anybody 4-foot high who can take on a &lt;em&gt;Megalania&lt;/em&gt; with a spear... it's hard to give up hope for their survival.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2735/is-there-a-way-to-contact-specific-user&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; about this, but I don't see how to &lt;em&gt;invite&lt;/em&gt; this person to a chat room if the question isn't linked to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T17:07:31.877" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T17:07:31.877" Title="Is there a way to message a user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9753" CreationDate="2022-05-04T17:56:38.327" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way for a user to message another user out of the blue like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in the same chat room, you can tag them there. You can also comment on their question to call their attention, or tag them in a post (specially if they participated in it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not really a social network, so it is really lacking in things like messaging. This is by design. If messaging was a feature, there would be pressure to use SE resources to maintain and evolve that in lieu of other features more related to the Q&amp;amp;A format of the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to be reached outside SE, they can always leave links to their social networks in their profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I am glad that SE is like this. I would not like to be contacted by someone to have a pedantic discussion about the technicalities of creatures that look like women distributing swords in ponds nor mages accidentally sodomizing themselves due to misusage of a magical word, among other themes I have dabbled on in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2022-05-04T17:56:38.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9753" CreationDate="2022-05-06T17:06:14.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;h4&gt;You Shall Not Pass&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's only one &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; way to get around the quandry at this point in time. It looks like this particular querent joined on 3 May 2022, and is thus very new. If whatever happened a couple days ago doesn't send him fleeing in terror from the horror show that is WB.SE, chances are good he'll come up with another question --- you could simply write a comment on that other query and invite him to discuss the closed query in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other potentially viable ways are to vote to reopen the closed question; edit the question such that it is likely to be reopened (I'm not suggesting this, but you could try to sneak a direct message to the querent in your edit (like &amp;quot;hey! I can help! write a comment on my own XYZ question!&amp;quot;)); and lastly petitioning L. Dutch to unlock the present query so you can simply write a helpful comment or start a discussion with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/95992/john21851&quot;&gt;querent&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T17:06:14.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-08T22:27:46.363" Score="3" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/229533/could-space-aliens-be-racist&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is currently closed for lacking details. However, the details it has been accused of lacking seem suspect. Specifically, the sorts of details asked of it are facts and definitions of real-world concepts and ideas regarding the central issue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every other question, this sort of background goes without saying: Nobody expects an explanation of physiology and biomechanics in an Anatomically Correct question, and I doubt anyone has asked for Newton's law of universal gravitation in any question regarding space and planets. Yet it is seemingly required for me to insert an encyclopedia into this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this the case? And where else will I need to include such a compendium to keep my question above board?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T08:57:44.857" Title="Why does this question have to be an encyclopedia?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9756" CreationDate="2022-05-09T12:17:03.903" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because your definition of &amp;quot;racism&amp;quot; was not clear, apparently&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you refused 2 out of 3 answers in a very short span of time, telling &amp;quot;it was xenophobia and not racism&amp;quot;. If so many answers doesn't match your definition of racism, then an explanation of what you mean actually by &amp;quot;racism&amp;quot; is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going a little more in depth, now, I'll take the currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/229534/80336&quot;&gt;top-voted answer&lt;/a&gt; as a reference, which you refused since &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Most of this is just xenophobia, or otherwise rather recent in history&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why wouldn't they be ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at human history, both present and past, racism seems to&#xA;be the norm rather than the exception. See how many genocides already&#xA;happened : European colons nearly wiping out Native americans and&#xA;Arborigenes, Jews being persecuted, African groups preying on each&#xA;other (even today).. There's even signs of that in old history (the&#xA;bible) : Jews seeing Samaritans as inferior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens between members of the same species, imagine how we&#xA;might perceive another completely unknown (and sentient) race! If&#xA;Aliens have similar behaviour than ours, they will most certainly be&#xA;racists...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, less importantly, we have to clarify what is &amp;quot;recent&amp;quot; for you. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antisemitism existed since the medieval crusades&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps even before, not far from a thousand year from today. &lt;strong&gt;Then and more important, if this is xenophobia, what is racism?&lt;/strong&gt; Indeed, looking at the basic definitions on wikipedia ➡️ what most people will think about if they read the terms :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different&#xA;behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be&#xA;divided based on the superiority of one race over another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, in the common definition &lt;em&gt;antisemitism&lt;/em&gt; is some kind of racism (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;antisemitism is a form of racism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), as much as European colonies making African &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;human zoos&lt;/a&gt;. It's &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; specifically targeted against jews. You saying this is not racism sure raises an eyebrow. Or two. Or three if you're a space alien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This misunderstanding of what you're trying to bring up is further backed-up by the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xenophobia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be&#xA;foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between&#xA;an ingroup and an outgroup and may manifest in suspicion by the one of&#xA;the other's activities, a desire to eliminate their presence, and fear&#xA;of losing national, ethnic, or racial identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're xenophobic, you have two groups of people : Yours and the &amp;quot;foreigners&amp;quot;. Since you fear or hate the foreigners, you're much more likely to put more value into your group and less into the foreigners, creating an ascending superiority. It's therefore very closely related to racism, having little to set them apart (the emotionnal part or the targeted group for instance). This leads me to believe you want to set clear differences between the two terms, as opposed to what people would say in day-to-day discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers match the common definitions but not your definition, then there's a problem about what you mean when you tell these terms. As a consequence this means that you need to clarify the topic so everyone is on the same page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-05-09T12:17:03.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9761" CreationDate="2022-05-12T04:04:02.953" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're go on Worldbuilding often enough, eventually your bound to see a closed question that sounds something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would human society be different if a super-cosmic-death-ray was operable by mountain tribesman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the these questions are posed by new users, and they are usually closed on account of being too broad. I agree with this; questions like these (especially about humans) require way more information in order to be even mildly answerable. As one unnamed SE user once put it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How would X influence Y&amp;quot; questions are too broad because their are too many variables that also influence the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree with this statement, but it got me thinking: what if all of the other variables were known? What if the question-asker was so specific with every minute that there really was only one possible answer? Would the question remain open, or would it still be closed for an alternate reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94702" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T00:16:51.317" Title="Would a very-specific &quot;How would X influence Y&quot; question be closed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9758" CreationDate="2022-05-12T16:17:56.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of questions asking about the effect of X on Y on this site that are a great fit for this site. There are also plenty of questions asking about the effect of X on Y that are a horrible fit. It's a matter of the specificity of the ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about society in general is a very broad ask. At any point in human history there are many cultures, living in many regions, often part of different nations. Even if you ask about one specific society, in a specific time it's still probably too broad because there are many complicated facets to even one society. If you asked &amp;quot;What would the effect of Caledonians having a space laser on Roman society&amp;quot; you're still asking a very broad question, but you're headed in the right direction. Narrow that down further and ask &amp;quot;If the Caledonians had a space laser, what effect would that have on the design of Hadrian's wall?&amp;quot; and that would probably pass muster. Asking &amp;quot;Would a space laser be able to melt a hole in Hadrian's wall?&amp;quot; would definitely meet site requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if the answerer is resolving an impediment to you building your world, or are you asking for someone to build your world for you. Asking effect on society is basically asking us to build your society for you, rather than help you solve a problem you cannot solve on your own. This is similar to how on Stack Overflow we'll help you understand how a function works, or how to solve some programming problem you're having but we will not write your program for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T16:17:56.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9758" CreationDate="2022-05-19T00:16:51.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;How does X influence Y?&amp;quot; is a type we're familiar with. We call it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is underscored by your statement, &amp;quot;what if all of the other variables were known? What if the question-asker was so specific with every minute that there really was only one possible answer?&amp;quot; Such a question wouldn't be a high-concept question: but it wouldn't need to be asked, either. If the querent knew that much about the question in the first place, there wouldn't be a need to ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We've always had a problem with list questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you sluice all the dirt away from the gold, what's left is a problem Worlbuilding has faced quite literally since the beginning. How do you ask list question on a service that is fundamentally designed to reject list questions? A list question is a question that has more than one right answer. They're asked all the time here, and we have a love-hate relationship with them. We love them because they give us a chance to express our imagination! We hate them because this service is designed to have &lt;em&gt;one and only one best answer&lt;/em&gt; and a list question can't have a best answer somewhat by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you give us all the conditions, restrictions, requirements, etc. to narrow it down to just one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By which time you've answered the question yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As ambiguity increases, the likelihood of closure increases with it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best rule of thumb is to avoid high concept questions. To paraphrase @Sphennings, we'll help you build your world, but we will not build your world for you. The more ambiguous the question, the more you're asking us to build your world for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what can I do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The temptation to ask a high concept question exists because the querent hasn't had enough time in their life to acquire the education and experience necessary to answer it themselves. (Frankly, that could be said about any question, but it applies to high concept questions &lt;em&gt;in spades.&lt;/em&gt;) We get that, but what seems to the querent like it should be a simple -enough-to-answer question is to people either or both experienced in an appropriate field or experienced in how this Stack works a massive amount of free research that should be rewarded with 90% of the royalty rights should you sell the book or make it into a movie. And that violates the Help Center's &amp;quot;book rule,&amp;quot; if the question can be reasonably answered with an entire book, you're question is out of bounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, whenever you're tempted to ask a high concept question, ask it first in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, or on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;, and get people's take on it. Because the answer you probably need is, &amp;quot;go research the following, then come back with a specific question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T00:16:51.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9756" CreationDate="2022-05-19T07:26:11.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You began your question with a false pretext&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Racism, while it is widespread now, is a relatively recent invention, of which Earth's history suggests it requires certain conditions to emerge and take root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only imagine people demanding that you prove that statement alone (much less others in your question). It's false. While many people today agree that Humanity, endowed with the divine gift of Reason, should be capable of rising above racism, the truth is that Humanity in specific areas (if not in every area, some ancients rose above it) has been &amp;quot;racist&amp;quot; (meaning that one group of humans discriminated against other groups of humans) since the dawn and/or creation of the species. Consequently, your question begins by causing confusion over what, exactly, you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Technical writing Rule #1: Never assume your audience understands you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years a number of people have proverbially thrown their hands in the air and said, &amp;quot;my question is perfectly clear, why won't you just answer it!&amp;quot; Unfortunately, just because it's clear to you, the author, doesn't mean it's clear to anyone else. (Worse, it may be clear to some but not to others. Worse yet, the people who believe they understand it clearly might not....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to a hot-button subject like Racism (or any form of discrimination), the problem is multiplied a thousand-fold. Almost everybody experiences discrimination at one time or another during their lives, which means everybody &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thinks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; they understand what &amp;quot;racism&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;discrimination&amp;quot; is. In reality, there are a great many forms of racism, a great many ways racism is imposed, and a great many consequences from racism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a long way of saying almost nobody can understand what you mean if you won't take the time to be clear and specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make matters worse, you're asking a rhetorical question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can space aliens be racist? Why even bother asking the question? It's your world, if you want them to be racist, make them racist. If you don't, then don't. If you're asking the question just to ask it, then you did a poor job because you failed to meet the expectations of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. Questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Must be &lt;strong&gt;specific and answerable&lt;/strong&gt;: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Must &lt;strong&gt;include context&lt;/strong&gt;: What are you trying to accomplish? Context gives people writing answers an idea of what your end state will look like and why you want to get there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Must &lt;strong&gt;include restrictions/requirements&lt;/strong&gt;: What will make one answer better than another? If any answer is equally effective your question is not properly constrained. How can this be executed? What tech, timeline, magic or other criteria apply to the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not agree with my assessment, but you failed to meet all three of those requirements. Not suggestions. Not recommendations. Not guidelines... &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requirements.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But to be honest, all that wasn't what made me roll my eyes the most&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is to ask how common such racist societies might be, or specifically if they would be likely to show up at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you joking? What space-faring alien life are we supposed to use as a baseline to answer that question? If we take you at your word and treat them as &amp;quot;human-like,&amp;quot; then why bother asking the question? They're as likely to be racist as Humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T07:26:11.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9742" CreationDate="2022-05-19T07:48:19.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no such burden, but your original question had a lot of problems and should have been closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, you asked this: In a world remarkably similar to what you find in the movie &lt;em&gt;Pacific Rim,&lt;/em&gt; how can a planet continue to build Jaegers for centuries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People were well within their rights to ask for details, but it is unfortunate that few people pointed out the flaws in your question that led them to ask for those details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept question&lt;/a&gt;, ill defined and open-ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It violated the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center's&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Book rule,&amp;quot; meaning that it's reasonable to believe an entire book could be written to answer the question (explaining how a &lt;em&gt;planetary economy&lt;/em&gt; would work given the circumstances you describe would require a library of books).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair to you, an explanation of what rules of physics in your world allowed giant Jaeger to exist really isn't needed to answer the question: but understanding the economics of constructing, maintaining, repairing, transporting, and operating a Jaeger most certainly is. And I can see their point where figuring all that out without understanding how they can exist would be a challenge (see &amp;quot;Book Rule,&amp;quot; above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that to you the question was straight-forward, needing only a paragraph to unlock a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To those of us with experience on this site, that simply wasn't the case. In fact, I don't believe there's ever been an industrialized society on Earth that has existed under a military economy for centuries — which means we're inventing everything about your answer out of thin air. That's a very tall order, and to avoid problems, you need to be as specific and detailed as you can possibly be — and if you believe you can't (or shouldn't), that's a very good sign that the question isn't ready for prime-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T07:48:19.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-20T21:48:02.247" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of questions get closed on WB stack.  Sometimes the reasons are obvious and fixable: a good example is that the new user put too many questions into the single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When new users get their questions closed, they often lose interest in WB Stack and are not heard from again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose that when experienced users identify questions with flaws that warrant closure, instead of voting to close they edit the question to fix the flaw.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This keeps questions that have a kernel of merit open without obligating new users to dance the dance.  New users will then be enthusiastic about answers their unclosed question receives.  They will ask more questions.  Yay!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T13:39:03.110" Title="Close voters could consider editing flawed questions instead of closing them" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2022-05-21T06:52:07.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see a post with issues it should be put on hold until the issues are resolved. If you can resolve the issues with an edit that doesn't conflict with the OP's intent that is definitely the fastest way to resolve an issue. I think you'll find that its more difficult than you think to edit questions into compliance without violating the intent of the poster. Just because something can be made into a good question for this site doesn't mean that is what the OP was intending to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks a very broad question like &amp;quot;What would the effect of dragons on society?&amp;quot; we suggest that they reduce the scope of their question. There are many many ways that the scope of that question could be reduced. Ask about a specific effect of your dragons, or ask about a specific aspect of society. We can't know the mind of the OP and regardless of how we reduce the scope the resulting ask will be different and cover less than the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks a character driven question, it may be that there's a seed of an on topic ask within the post. You could edit the character out of the post, make the ask not about what the character would do but that seed of an ask about building a world. Can you show that is what the OP intended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone creates a post with three separate questions, removing two of the asks will make the post a better fit. Are you able to show that it was OP's intent to ask only that question and not the others they included in the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-05-21T12:52:17.040" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T12:52:17.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9731" CreationDate="2022-05-22T06:04:00.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A) The answer was factually wrong even in a way that couldn't be considered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;Frame Challenge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer to the OP's question was a single word: none. That's factually wrong as the OP gave one possible solution: increasing the length of the weapon to increase the leverage. I can also think of making the weapon sharper, and shifting the weight away from the hand grip, and hollowing out a blunt weapon and placing a heavy ball in the hollowed-out-region, and making the weapon out of inelastic materials... There are a fair number of things that can be done to melee weapons to make them more damaging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B) No supporting information was given about the answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are expected to explain the assertion. &amp;quot;None&amp;quot; would have been acceptable, had you followed it with a couple of paragraphs explaining why &amp;quot;none&amp;quot; was a viable answer. You didn't do that (suggesting projectile weapons are always better is NOT an explanation for why melee weapons can't be made more damaging). Answers are expected to be reasonably thorough, meaning that the querent comes away from your answer with a better understanding of their problem either (or both) in terms of what the problems are and what the solutions are. In short, your answer was the dread one-line answer, which is entirely unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Remarks:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The statement, &amp;quot;anything remotely scientific will make possible a projectile based equivalent that is better in every regard&amp;quot; is never true, but even if it were, it would only be true if the technology for such a projectile weapon (like a hand gun) exists. The OP did not specify a time frame or the circumstances for using the melee weapon. It could have been in 2,000 B.C. It could have been the early Medieval era. Neither had RPGs. Worse, arrows were NOT better than swords in every regard. And to make a point, even today there are circumstances when a melee weapon is substantially better than any projectile weapon (stealth comes to mind). Which, not surprisingly (and entirely contrary to the opinions you expressed in the comments), is why melee weapons still exist and are still frequently used. In fact, in one regard a melee weapon is always better than a projectile weapon: they're cheaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The statement, &amp;quot;But you will have to use magic for it&amp;quot; is as false as the answer &amp;quot;none&amp;quot; and, like the answer &amp;quot;none,&amp;quot; is provided without explanation or context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@L.Dutch was right to delete the answer. If you feel a question is not well asked (and this one was not well asked), then please take the time in comments to help the OP improve their question. While almost no one does it, Stack Exchange actually expects people to &lt;em&gt;not answer poorly-asked questions&lt;/em&gt; (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you can't stand it and simply must answer, please provide well-thought-out answers. That one was not well thought out. You say that you did think it through in your comments, but you obviously failed to realize that &lt;em&gt;it didn't matter at all whether projectile weapons were superior...&lt;/em&gt; or energy weapons... or psychic weapons... or any other kind of weapon. The OP is free to limit their question and you, the respondent, are not free to color beyond those limits unless there's something &lt;em&gt;intrinsically wrong&lt;/em&gt; with what they're asking. That's what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;Frame Challenge&lt;/a&gt; is for. But you did not have a Frame Challenge. Without the OP having provided a situation where the melee weapon would be used, you simply can't make the assumption that a projectile weapon will always be better (e.g. stealth...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you answered based on a false assumption: that projectile weapons were an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T06:04:00.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:53:54.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as positive on potential,&#xA;but it is not present in the current work timeline. It is also not guaranteed to be implemented - when&#xA;it resurfaces the proposal may be re-evaluated and declined depending on how the situation has changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;, in which a feature is something that the site developers have&#xA;definitively approved for implementation but the timing is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T10:12:48.247" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T10:12:48.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:53:54.390" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, but not in the near term." OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T10:12:43.503" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T10:12:43.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:54:29.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as definitive to implementation.&#xA;However, either there is ongoing investigation on the methods to implement the proposal, or there are other&#xA;active projects that are ahead of it in priority for the site developers. Ideally, this tag indicates that&#xA;the proposal is intended to be implemented in the near term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-deferred&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-deferred&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-deferred&lt;/a&gt;, in which the feature is of lower priority and may be re-evaluated&#xA;on feasibility at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T10:12:52.410" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T10:12:52.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:54:29.880" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, ideally in the near term." OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T22:12:05.213" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T22:12:05.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-31T15:04:15.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered not reproducible if it is a bug that the site developers&#xA;would fix, but cannot due to an inability to recreate the problematic behavior in&#xA;spite of attempts to do so. Reports that are not reproducible typically represent&#xA;bugs that come from using unsupported browsers and tools, or because of sunspots&#xA;and other activity entirely unrelated to the site creating a momentary issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a bug can’t be reproduced due to being immediately presented as being through&#xA;an unsupported browser, thus bypassing the need of the site developers to even&#xA;attempt to reproduce the bug, then &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the reporter of a bug that receives this tag, it may indicate&#xA;that the bug was intermittent, or merely that you didn't thoroughly explain&#xA;the circumstances under which you encountered it. First, verify that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;can still cause the bug to appear, and (if you can) then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe in detail what you were doing when it happened. Include links to any relevant pages / posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;List the steps you took to encounter the bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe your environment: browser make and version, OS, add-ons, userscripts (if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include screenshots if applicable. Use hand-drawn circles to highlight key portions&#xA;of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-06-02T16:28:25.937" LastActivityDate="2022-06-02T16:28:25.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-31T15:04:15.863" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were not able to replicate the behavior reported." OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-06-01T04:40:33.030" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T04:40:33.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-31T15:04:48.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered reproduced only if the site developers have successfully reproduced the bug.&#xA;This tag should only be applied if the site developers cannot immediately address the bug, such as if&#xA;it requires further investigation into solutions or if the implementation of a fix would be stalled&#xA;for other reasons. When a fix is eventually implemented, the tag should become &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-06-02T16:28:21.807" LastActivityDate="2022-06-02T16:28:21.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-31T15:04:48.440" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were able to replicate the behavior reported, but cannot address its cause at this time." OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-06-02T16:28:15.007" LastActivityDate="2022-06-02T16:28:15.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9780" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-06-05T11:51:42.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered bydesign if, after review of the detailed erroneous behavior,&#xA;it is determined that the behavior is desirable to keep in place rather than fix. This&#xA;is independent of whether or not the behavior was formerly known to the site developers&#xA;prior to the time of the report - the important thing is that the behavior will not be&#xA;altered because its current behavior is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should only be used on questions reporting what is purported as erroneous behavior&#xA;and suggests them being fixed / reversed. For when a question that is requesting a new&#xA;feature that addresses a behavior that the asker believes to be erroneous,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T21:16:22.423" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T21:16:22.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-06-05T11:51:42.393" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the reported behavior is intentional and not subject to change" OwnerUserId="22830" LastEditorUserId="22830" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T21:16:10.453" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T21:16:10.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-09T18:30:26.827" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/231091/what-unique-differences-might-evolve-in-a-society-where-an-exclusively-nocturnal&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, how can I ask contributors to include &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot; in a question about a completely fictional world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's science fiction, so all facts are relative to the universe, and there is no established media to cite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93858" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T15:01:08.960" Title="How am I supposed to get people to use &quot;facts and citations&quot; for a question about a completely fictional environment?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2022-06-10T03:59:52.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Here's a short list of issues I have with your question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/231091/4&quot;&gt;at this revision&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First and foremost, asking for a whole society's changes is a tad too broad term. &amp;quot;What would my society be like?&amp;quot; is a common closure reason as lacking focus and details, as it can involve, among other things : Economy, artistic culture, military, politics, urbanisation, social behaviours, pancake recipes...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't tell your level of technology. With UV lamp hats you can drastically shift a dayman's waketime. With sunglasses and heavy clothings you can make nightmen do the same. But you don't tell if they have access to any of these kind of technology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't tell your aliens basic shape in the question itself. This can drastically alter society. Note that comments, especially when they pile up, are not that much read, so they can be unadvertly skipped.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't tell the other differences between daymen and nightmen. It's more troublesome for nightmen since they're not &amp;quot;like us&amp;quot;. For instance, do nightmen have nightvision? Echolocation perhaps? It would be weird to have the same senses as daymen, since it would really cripple their night-to-night comfort.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't tell the 2 base cultures to go from. We have to make our owns, yet that's not what the question is asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't tell about your geography and environment. Shall we consider days and night to be constant like in Equator? Or does it vary over time over the year? Is the land easy to farm? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/229946/80336&quot;&gt;Are there mountains to hide sunlight at different hours&lt;/a&gt;? It's just some ideas that can impact answers, nevertheless interesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But what does all of this connect up to being opinion-based?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point is quite the most important : Because you ask about &lt;strong&gt;everything&lt;/strong&gt;, anyone will choose what they want to talk about, because no one wants or have the time to write a whole enclickopedia about it (this kind of site is bad for this, anyway). Since they choose, they might very well stray from what you want to really know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then... You'll notice that out of the 6 points, 5 starts with &amp;quot;you don't tell&amp;quot;. Thing is, if you don't tell, we have to make up things in your stead. The more we make up things, the more we'll present a personal point-of-view on the topic rather than working with your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as pointed out in the comments and some of the answers, it seems you have some holes within the world as you presented it. My tech example widening wake-up times is one as much as AlexP's one about rainy days lacking UVs, but I can also raise the fact that lack of communication (what happens in your world) is a big thingy to tackle on when you don't want &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;active discrimination, segregation or racism allegory&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. This can raise a frame-challenge to &amp;quot;dodge&amp;quot; the question partially. Or... Entirely like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/231095/80336&quot;&gt;John O. did&lt;/a&gt; because they didn't see how it could ever make sense&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. While you don't need much effort to remove discrimination, you have to be careful to not dig &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much to the point of removing what makes a society cohesive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sum up the above it leads to a more opinion-based question. So to have fact based answers, solve these issues, starting with broadeness (the tackiest and stickiest one), then more data, then seal the biggest holes (or don't put them in a way they're seen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S. : On a smaller note, it's better when you set a name onto important things. In this case, defining how each species are called allows the other users to keep the same terms, instead of creating dodadiladoos like Nochnoy Dozor... Or daymen/nightmen :p. In overall it improves consistency.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;1 : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8008/when-and-how-to-challenge-the-back-story/8111#8111&quot;&gt;Not that I support putting this frame-challenge as the only part of an answer. It would have been better as a comment.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T03:59:52.480" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2022-06-10T23:02:15.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;h4&gt;HARD SCIENCE&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; should be used when you're looking for &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot;. Answers should include scientific data, article citations, equations, and the like in order to support the conclusion of the response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it doesn't matter that your world is fictional. We can apply real world science to an entirely fictional setting.  You gave some good background on the two species in question and a rough idea of technological level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that what your question is missing is why you would want to apply 21st century Californian norms to this question. (&lt;strong&gt;Using 21st Century Western Anglophone society as a baseline&lt;/strong&gt;  /  &lt;strong&gt;comparative level of technology to 21st century California&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted that California is about an alien a world as one can find in this sector of the galaxy, to me it just doesn't really make sense to ask about the cultures &amp;amp; infrastructures of two actually alien species living on an actually alien world all in terms of human culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hard Science is the answer to your Meta query, but I'm afraid it's not the answer to your problem over on Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the reason is simple: as you hint, there simply are no sciencey facts to quote, other than the ones you provide in your query. Also, any sociological or cultural facts we could provide will all be Earth-centered and thus not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Edit your question to include a section titled &amp;quot;Expectations&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Response Criteria&amp;quot;. Lay out specifically what you will consider the most important answer criteria to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as Tortelina says in the comment, perhaps don't worry so much about &amp;quot;facts and citations&amp;quot;! Use the tag Science Based, which will clue respondents in to giving you a relatively sciency answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T15:01:08.960" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T15:01:08.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2022-06-18T06:18:23.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We could try being a little more helpful in the comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A salvagable question often has one obvious and fixable problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few commenters try to tease out the extra information that's needed, but then it goes straight to,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm voting to close this question because x&amp;quot;...and that's that. Not &amp;quot;I'm going to vote to close this question because x, if you want to keep it open, I suggest you do y&amp;quot; or anything that gives newbies a pointer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was baffled by some of the closures when I first saw them; neither the rules nor the application thereof are self evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, obviously, some questions can't be saved. But a good deal of them would have a chance if reviewers took those extra few minutes to suggest, &amp;quot;You need to fix x, e.g. by trying y&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just editing them is worse than the status quo, it's likely to be insulting or at least highly confusing to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user86462" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T06:18:23.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-21T06:38:14.160" Score="17" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wikis have been updated and the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Users can conveniently find links to the modified tags here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9810/40609&quot;&gt;Please review the updated tag wikis for internal-consistency, science-fiction, science-based, and hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the answers and comments the following solution has been proposed to the Moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current tag named &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; will be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; and its wiki, along with the wikis for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; updated to reflect the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; will be created named &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt;, since there is no practical difference between asking for a science-based answer and asking for an answer based on the reality of the Real World. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki will be updated to explain the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@DaaaahWhoosh's original Meta post will be updated with a link redirecting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, everyone, for participating!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost nobody uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag correctly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, @DaaaahWhoosh asked a perfectly sensible question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5287/40609&quot;&gt;Do we need the reality-check tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even answered the question (badly, I might add...). And after all these years of watching people use the tag over and over in the wrong way (because all they ever do is read the tag title and not the tag wiki), I could wish the tag never existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking if something on a fictional world is &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; is, frankly, asinine on a stack that claims, &amp;quot;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;imaginary worlds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two uses that I regularly see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's my fictional idea for use in the real-world. Is it &amp;quot;realistic?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is always &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; because the fictional idea doesn't exist in the real world — the rules of which are immutable — and we're not interested in the real world anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's my fictional idea for my fictional world. Is it &amp;quot;realistic?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to what? Earth? In this instance what the querent probably means is, &amp;quot;does this idea meet everyone's expectations for suspension-of-disbelief?&amp;quot; But I've worked with some querents who really want someone to tell them that their fictional idea on their fictional world &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/cq1ilX1kLNQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;could really, really exist!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since the goal here is to help people create and consistently use the rules of a fictional world of their own creation, what's the point of asking if something is &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; in the first place?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the gist of the problem: What the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to do is allow the querent to present one or more world rules and an application of those rules and have us judge whether or not the application is consistent with the rules. In other words, &amp;quot;Is the following scenario consistent (aka &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot;) when judged against my world's rules?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the tag wiki states that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag is not for judging anything against the Real World. I freely admit that I put that restriction in the wiki based on years of discussing what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag was intended for and in an attempt to minimize the number of questions asking whether or not a fictional idea in the real world was &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; (it's like asking if a &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/2JqcDOr7kPQ?t=69&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;saw blade weapon is realistic&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DaaaahWhoosh was correct. Do we actually need this tag? I can see where it would be useful to have a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rule-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rule-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rule-consistency&lt;/a&gt; because I think people would basically understand what those two words meant without having to read the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think it's a mistake to continue using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag because it's almost never used in the way it's intended and is almost always used in a way that's contrary to the intent of the Stack. Honestly, how can &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; judge the &amp;quot;realism&amp;quot; of a fictional world?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: Rename the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Up vote this question if you agree the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag should be renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rule-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rule-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rule-consistency&lt;/a&gt; (or something similar, I'm open to ideas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Down vote if you want to continue with the mess as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answer if you have insight into how we can either (a) convince people to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag correctly, (b) if you have an alternate suggestion for a replacement name, or (c) you simply want to taunt me for being too anal about the whole situation. My wife keeps reminding me that I'm supposed to be an adult, so I think I can take it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that it's been a while since I did any tag maintenance. I can't remember if we can rename a tag or not. If not, then &amp;quot;renaming&amp;quot; the tag means creating a new tag and systematically deleting the old one and replacing it with the new one in 6,077 questions. If that's the case, then we may simply be stuck with the fact that we answered @DaaaahWhoosh's question badly five years ago and hopefully have learned our lesson.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I had the time of my life reading Greg Egan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orthogonal Series&lt;/a&gt;, which would have been a PERFECT example of the intended use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag. He'd present his appendix about the mathematics of his world, a chunk of his story, and ask if his story reflected the &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; of his world — which had next to nothing at all to do with the Real World (it wasn't even a complete expression of science). If you want to better understand my frustration over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag, go read his books and then compare your experience to what people usually mean when they ask if something is &amp;quot;realistic.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-07-08T20:12:41.483" LastActivityDate="2022-07-08T20:12:41.483" Title="If we can't burn the &quot;reality check&quot; tag, can we rename it?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9790" CreationDate="2022-06-21T08:43:50.987" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would propose naming the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rules-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rules-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rules-consistency&lt;/a&gt; might be confusing for users. In the opposite direction of what it is now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; makes them think it is &amp;quot;check against our reality&amp;quot; whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rules-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rules-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rules-consistency&lt;/a&gt; might suggest something about rules but it is not clear which rules. And we already know users do not tend to check the tag description where they would see it is about the rules of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; is a bit more direct what it is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T08:43:50.987" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9790" CreationDate="2022-06-21T14:26:36.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do support the proposal to rename the misnamed &lt;code&gt;reality-check&lt;/code&gt; tag to something more clearly suggesting its intended use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than that, I believe we should take a hint from the way in which the tag is so frequently misused and misinterpreted, and absolutely add a tag specifically intended to cover the most common use case, namely checking that with the exception of a small set of fantastic elements the proposed world is realistic. Because...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The vast majority of imaginary worlds are (or attempt to be) realistic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only very rarely do imaginary worlds intentionally contain unrealistic elements, such as light sabers, effective magic, time travel and such. The vast, overwhelming majority of imaginary worlds are, or at least attempt to be, perfectly realistic, with only &lt;em&gt;subtle&lt;/em&gt; deviations from real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is no country in Europe called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruritania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ruritania&lt;/a&gt;. There is no county in England named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsomer_Murders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Midsomer&lt;/a&gt;, and there is no town called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayor_of_Casterbridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casterbridge&lt;/a&gt;. But there &lt;em&gt;could have been&lt;/em&gt;, and part of the charm of the stories is exactly that the places are realistic, albeit imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imaginary worlds exist on a continuum: most of them deviate only very slightly from the real world, mostly by containing people who never existed; some deviate significantly from the real world, by including imaginary places, with or without bothering to sketch a full geography; some deviate even more from the real world, by including purely imaginary history and and animals and plants, while still remaining fully within the sphere of realism; only &lt;em&gt;very few&lt;/em&gt; imaginary worlds stray into flat-out contradiction with realism, for example by including effective magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even in those stories which are set explicitly in a world in flat-out contradiction with reality, the contradictions are most usually restricted a very few elements; the bulk of the imaginary world works just like the real world, except those one or two elements which set the story in motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point being that a tag asking for &lt;code&gt;realism-check&lt;/code&gt; is most clearly needed, because most of the time that is what is of interest. Of course, we also need a tag asking for &lt;code&gt;self-consistency-check&lt;/code&gt;, but I am of the opinion that this would be used less often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T15:31:58.283" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T15:31:58.283" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-28T07:18:18.353" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for a stack exchange where I can ask a question describing the context of a story/character idea, and request ideas on how to fill in certain holes or develop it so that it fits certain events and criteria (for example, questions like &amp;quot;what kind of backstory would allow for this character to have a knowledge of [thing] at a young age?&amp;quot;). However this feels too specific to post in the general writing stack exchange, and more akin to the types of questions on the worldbuilding forum here. Does a stack exchange site like this exist (and is it actively used much), or is there already a more general fiction writing stack exchange site that will still accept these sorts of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96951" LastActivityDate="2022-07-04T11:57:15.180" Title="Is there a stack exchange similar to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange but for suggestions on developing plot/character rather than setting/lore?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9790" CreationDate="2022-06-28T13:31:42.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This rename isn't necessary.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of our active users understand it. All of our new users get the gist of it rather quickly. Is the reality check tag the problem here? or is it really that there are a plethora of good questions that don't meet SE's format that use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we can't burn the tag, it must have worth. The rename is unnecessary and reality check is a pretty widely understood concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51297" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T13:31:42.290" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2022-06-28T13:39:03.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let 'em burn.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to be the way Worldbuilding works. Most of our questions skirt the edge of not being SE compatible anyways and since that is the case, if they don't want to learn enough to fix the questions they would be better off elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Devil's Advocate: This is the extreme opposite of my thoughts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51297" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T13:39:03.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9798" CreationDate="2022-06-28T13:51:43.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; but they focus on the craft of writing, and like us they do not support questions about plot/characters. Please do not post there asking for help with your plots or characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about plot and characters are very subjective, with many equally valid answers, two things that are fundamentally against the Stack Exchange ethos. Worldbuilding is already pushing the boundaries of the Stack Exchange format. A site where people offered their opinions and generated ideas about plots and characters would be far over the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T13:51:43.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9798" CreationDate="2022-06-28T15:19:56.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I don't know any website&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;the big resources list&lt;/a&gt;, I doubt any of those forums/reddits will match what you're looking for. As Sphennings told, it's more prone to discussion, so a forum of passionate writers is more likely to help than a stricty Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a pure worldbuilding question, it's hard, very hard to write these kind of questions. It's too much focused on a character to be considered as how a society works, or what such society finds important on someone's background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;At the same time...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some places you can easily query the question you're bringing up :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People around you :).&lt;/strong&gt; It's easily the easiest and easier solution. Bring a cookie bag and get the brainstom rain up. If you're shy, bring subvertly the topic by talking about other works where the same knowledge is needed of a character. Just be sure to distinguish what you think and what the others think, it gets muddy quite easily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For real-world activities which require specific knowledge, there are many videos and website talking about them&lt;/strong&gt;, be it offical job vocation guides or amateur and expert talks. There's always interesting things there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most importantly, these things depends on the individuals. Like I told above, it's very focused on the person itself, and more often than not every trait they have is both a boon and a malediction in and of itself. Let's take an example and you want to know what would make a good classic fantasy adventurer :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were a cartograph : Drawing maps is ultra-easy for them, but they're expert with a pen, not a sword.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were a war-mercenary : Drawing blood is ultra-easy for them, but they were not the one making the map, and they'll get lost if not careful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not even pushing into the personality traits each of them have (e.g.: an abrupt and determined soldier, or an elegant and peaceful cartograph). The point is : &lt;strong&gt;As long as you know the inner strength and weaknesses of your characters, you'll find in them what you want to give them.&lt;/strong&gt; And if that's still too difficult, remember that a lucky opportunity can always happen (I don't know how to read maps, but I just happen to have listened at the tavern one guy who knew the path!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-06-28T15:43:34.690" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T15:43:34.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9798" CreationDate="2022-06-28T21:55:44.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;h4&gt;NOT YET, NOT HERE&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of forum you're looking for would not be possible at Stack Exchange. If you look at your example question, &lt;em&gt;what kind of backstory would allow for this character to have a knowledge of [thing] at a young age,&lt;/em&gt; you'll see that you have essentially asked for everyone's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE's basic model is to take a &lt;em&gt;focused&lt;/em&gt; query and give it a definitive answer. Every forum &lt;em&gt;except for WB.SE&lt;/em&gt; focuses on real world issues; we're the only forum that delves into fantasy and fiction as realia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're looking for a brainstorming forum! This kind of question might be suitable for one of the Reddit worldbuilding groups, if you're just looking to bounce ideas around. If you're coming at this from a more serious writing perspective, Mythic Scribes might be a good choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still in a proposal stage, but the idea to create a forum similar to WB.SE but without the strict SE constraints is still alive at Codidact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T21:55:44.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-30T18:57:27.990" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO, time travel (into the past) is fantasy. It is proven to be nigh-impossible, affects causality, there are dozens of resources discussing the vagarities and impossibilities of time-traveling to the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, any worldbuilding involving traveling to the past is hardly based on science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How putting both tags together make sense? What kind of answers it provokes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T05:41:40.897" Title="Does using the tags [science-based] and [time-travel] in tandem make any sense?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9804" CreationDate="2022-06-30T23:31:48.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends on what the question asks. If they clearly define the rules for their time travel and are asking for some science based insight about some consequence of their rules then there is no reason for the tags not to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T23:31:48.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9804" CreationDate="2022-07-01T20:10:25.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine a question where the time travel bit is only used to set up the initial conditions, and then everything is supposed to happen in as realistic a fashion as possible, while keeping the readers / watchers / players interested and engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a well-known example of &lt;code&gt;[science-based]&lt;/code&gt; world set in motion by &lt;code&gt;[time-travel]&lt;/code&gt; consider the wildly successful &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;1632&lt;/em&gt; shared universe&lt;/a&gt; created by Eric Flint and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2022-07-01T20:10:25.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-05T05:33:42.930" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?tab=Newest&amp;amp;filter=Suggested&quot;&gt;tag synonym approval queue&lt;/a&gt; is not part of the regular review queues. In fact, it's a bit hard to find. There are currently five synonym suggestions dating from 2017 (yeah, &lt;em&gt;five years ago&lt;/em&gt;) waiting for approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take a moment to visit the above link and cast your vote for the synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My request is specifically on behalf of the discussion concerning the conversion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; and the subsequent assignment of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. You can read more about that at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post will be deleted once the synonym queue has been cleared. &lt;em&gt;Thank you!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; While I greatly appreciate dealing with the one synonym required to resolve the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; problem, can't we get the other four out of the way, too? Isn't there a badge or something for participating in the synonym queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T03:24:15.030" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T03:24:15.030" Title="Please Help Clear the Tag Synonym Queue" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9804" CreationDate="2022-07-05T05:41:40.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does in the sense that humanity has explored the idea and plausibility of time travel &lt;em&gt;mathematically,&lt;/em&gt; and that's valid science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what's the problem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the primary problem is that over the years this Stack has become &amp;quot;physics.se lite&amp;quot; in that people far to consistently &lt;em&gt;demand&lt;/em&gt; that questions and answers reflect the reality of the Real World &lt;em&gt;as if that reality, science as we know it today, is the only &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; there will ever be.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a weakness in the Stack's culture, meaning that people are taking themselves (and science) a bit too seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes! I believe it's perfectly valid to combine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tags. I think it's perfectly valid to combine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But you should have appropriate expectations...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because what science we know is based on speculative mathematics — and that mean's it's all you're gonna get. If you pair those tags expecting us to explain how a real and actual time machine would work or how the various paradoxes of time travel really and truly would be resolved...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we'll chuckle first, then do our best, and I'll likely post a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8273/40609&quot;&gt;Advice concerning questions asking HOW to implement a technological procedure or device&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T05:41:40.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-05T07:10:10.440" Score="6" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wikis for the following tags have been updated based on the results of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;If we can&amp;#39;t burn the &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; tag, can we rename it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely hope everyone agrees with me when I say I'm &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; happier with these four tags and the types of answers they represent. They're better scoped and harder to abuse. However, try as I might, I'm not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate people taking the time to read the tag summaries and tag wikis. If you have questions about the tag info, please post them as comments. If you have recommendations for improvements, please post those as answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that something's &amp;quot;off&amp;quot; about one or more of the tags, post that as an answer, too, as it might indicate the need for an additional tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go looking for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag and don't find it, that's because it's been suggested to become a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and is stuck in the synonym approval queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And if you haven't helped &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?tab=Newest&amp;amp;filter=Suggested&quot;&gt;clear the synonym queue&lt;/a&gt;, please do so now. Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-07-13T09:31:55.360" Title="Please review the updated tag wikis for internal-consistency, science-fiction, science-based, and hard-science" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2022-07-13T01:51:53.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to append or disagree but my interpretation of the three tags is that although there is overlap, we can in fact draw logical and rational lines between the categories based upon the question, not the answer. Here is how I see the three sorting boxes drawn out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hard science&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks for an expert opinion on the effects known scientific truths would have on the world-building problem. e.g.,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Given 2 million years, could komodo dragons evolve feathers and wings?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;An expert response would stay within the bounds of known evolutionary science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Science-based&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks for an expert opinion on the effects known scientific truths would have on the world-building problem, given the exceptions noted in the problem. e.g., &lt;em&gt;Given the random evolution of an “X-factor” gene that gives reptiles telekinetic abilities, could a komodo dragon effectively fly? (the problem states some costs and limitations of their scientific exception - telekinesis)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;An expert response would stay within the bounds of know science, and incorporate the stated exceptions. And let’s be honest, no worthwhile science fiction can stay perfectly within hard science bounds. So this tag is almost a default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reality check&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a go/no-go question that allows the problem to define exceptions to hard science, such as telekinesis, and whatever is not stated as an exception is implied to be constrained by hard scientific truths. e.g., &lt;em&gt;A space-time distortion caused huge tectonic disruptions on earth and altered physics to make komodo dragons telekinetic. Now after millions of years living on sheer cliff faces, they terrorize the skies like wingless Chinese dragons. Is this realistic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it is worth keeping the go/no-go test separate from the science-based questions simply because it contributes to concise questions. Wording a science-based problem in a way that expects a go/no-go is tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a line between science and pseudo-science, I don’t think that is this question. That line is simply drawn by the scientific method. Pseudo-science doesn’t adhere to it, science does. Of course as new evidence always arises, things can cross over this line in time, in both directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2022-07-13T01:51:53.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9810" CreationDate="2022-07-13T09:31:55.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Headers for hard-science tag should be automatically added, and flagged for removal if needed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That was not part of the top-voted answer of the debate&lt;/strong&gt;, nor its main topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since it's a very specific tag with ultra-precise goals, it has the need to be visible. It's therefore a standard, not an exception and thus should be automatically implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's not overwhelm the moderators&lt;/strong&gt;. While those headers were not removed when changing tags as far as I remember,  removing the hard-science tag is done more rarely than choosing it in the first place. It's therefore the exception and should be treated this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It makes the tag's description shorter.&lt;/strong&gt; Reading the wiki is already scarsely done, having a way to shorten it will reduce the likelyhood of people &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlayTheGameSkipTheStory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pressing the &amp;quot;skip&amp;quot; button of their gamepad&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did I already said to not overwhelm the moderators :p? I live to believe that repetitive tasks like these should be avoided when possible. They're not funny to do and it's statistically easier to forget or make mistakes .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-07-13T09:31:55.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-15T03:57:12.450" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t know how much discussion has been on a topic like this already, but allow me to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;world-building&amp;quot; was first used in the Edinburgh Review in December 1820 and appeared in A.S. Eddington's Space Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory (1920) to describe the thinking out of hypothetical worlds with different physical laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page called “Worldbuilding”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that’s &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; broad, and I must admit so is this site. Sure, the definition has evolved some, but It’s still very close to how it was back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site probably holds the record for most generic stack exchange website ever created. As a result of this you can basically ask any question you want and probably get an answer. Which of course I have no issue with, it makes the site unique, but sometimes it seems like what is considered to actually be worldbuilding is poorly defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now recently I’ve been looking into simulations attempting to approximate a universe, in a rough way. To give you a idea of the concept, here is a piece of software that reflects the idea fairly well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://itch.io/queue/c/2490769/games-to-try?game_id=545192&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TIMU by buddhaman.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the context is set up, what actually is worldbuilding? Making a fantasy land filled with magic for a book certainly is. Creating a sci-fi dystopia for a movie is too. Designing the hazards for a post apocalyptic wasteland in a video game surely is. But what about creating the design of a universe simulator? It’s definitely a world in a sense, definitely not real, and definitely something that you are making. How far does worldbuilding go, at least for the purposes of asking a question on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73498" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T01:55:54.137" Title="How far can we push the term worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|asking-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-15T05:57:21.653" Score="-18" ViewCount="1112" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; has been a treasured Worldbuilding tradition for seven years. Some amazing questions and even more amazing answers have contributed to the series. But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in 2020 a silly question about a character from Minecraft prompted me to write the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a place to help people build worlds, not indulge in whims. There are clear precedents in Meta that this forum is NOT for extending pre-existing or commercial worlds (which Minecraft clearly is). There are other forums for that purpose. I've noticed over the last 6 months a number of complaints that ACS is getting muddied by low-quality entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prompted @L.Dutch to ask, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7842/40609&quot;&gt;Should we narrow down the scope of the Anatomically Correct Series?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which led a number of us working with original poster TrEs-2b to create a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6046/40609&quot;&gt;enhanced rules&lt;/a&gt; that, we hoped, would return the ACS to the quality it once enjoyed. (It might not look like anyone but I created those rules, but there were discussions in answer and comments all over the place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, despite that effort, we have experienced an avalanche of terrible questions over the last two years . Everything from pure nonsense to stream-of-consciousness ideas that have been thrown out with less effort than is required to throw spaghetti on a wall. The ACS has become ridiculous, with an incredibly high closure rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perhaps it's time we ended an era.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it breaks my heart to recommend this. The ACS was pure worldbuilding! Taking a mythological creature as described by human hands and feared or loved in human hearts and asking the simple question, &amp;quot;how could this reflection of the human soul be realized?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aquestion%20anatomically%20correct&quot;&gt;search of recent questions&lt;/a&gt; shows that, thanks to the voluminous and (and this is a very blunt personal opinion) massively low quality submissions by a small handful of users, it's right to consider this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: Should we terminate the Anatomically Correct Series... while we still have fond memories of it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ACS page would be updated with a notice at the top of the page that NO NEW SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomically-correct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomically-correct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatomically-correct&lt;/a&gt; tag will be updated to explain the termination and the fact that it can no longer be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's possible to close/protect a meta page, the ACS would have this done to it so that no one could edit it more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We will actively close any question that suggests the goal is to realize an &amp;quot;anatomically correct&amp;quot; version of any mythological creature of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If accepted, a user's only option would be to ask for specific help developing a creature for their own fictional world. Period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you agree it's time to bring the ACS to an end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment if you seek clarification about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer if you wish to add to the discussion, pro or con.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; It's worth noting that the meta post creating the ACS was necessary because &lt;em&gt;questions about the evolutionary justification of human myths are intrinsically off-topic.&lt;/em&gt; Remember, the goal of this site (see the Help Center) is to help people create imaginary worlds. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;Their own imaginary worlds.&lt;/a&gt; Without the ACS Meta post to legitimize the presence of the questions, no &amp;quot;how could this human myth evolve?&amp;quot; style question can be asked and not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time this has happened. This stack once embraced a Fortnightly Challenge. One of those challenges was concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2860/40609&quot;&gt;Santa Claus&lt;/a&gt;, which evolved into the current tradition of permissibly asking Santa-related questions during the Christmas season.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is asking if it's time to withdraw permission to break the rules, because all ACS questions are asking about something the poster didn't originally create in a world that isn't theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T23:25:25.057" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T17:55:54.547" Title="Is it time to officially close and terminate all questions applying to the Anatomically Correct Series?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9815" CreationDate="2022-07-15T09:47:12.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The definition I use&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1kYmO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1kYmO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tour center header&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;writers, artists and others using&lt;/strong&gt; science, geography and culture to&#xA;construct &lt;strong&gt;imaginary&lt;/strong&gt; worlds and settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;big grand tour page&lt;/a&gt;, and this is detailed a bit more in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the&#xA;world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short,&#xA;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;universe you want to build&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both, I highlighted the words which I find very important. Personally, I like to just say it's the &lt;strong&gt;art&lt;/strong&gt; of making &lt;strong&gt;imaginary&lt;/strong&gt; worlds. Yes this is all and already largely enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Built worlds and created universes have to be imaginary and fictional, and in most if not all cases, worldbuilding has an artistic purpose. World quality is generally dependent on its internal consistency, hence most people build worlds &lt;strong&gt;using&lt;/strong&gt; existing knowledge in other domains as it's much easier to keep things coherent that way. Yes, much, much easier ^^. Understand though that this knowledge is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding alone, it's a tool to make one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I consider as worldbuilding&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating a seemingly coherent geography of a fictitious kingdom&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Checking if a creature makes actual physical sense beyond looking nice.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;close to our reality&amp;quot; can be an artistic goal. Realism often helps an audience to anchor to the world, to the story using what they already know or believe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making up a world which is carried by an upside-down pirate ship, supported by four turtles eating spaghettis.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While it can be a goal, you don't need to build close-to-reality worlds if that's not what you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a world where physics rules change every minute moment&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not often considered as good world quality (in comparison, real-world physics are constant), but it's still worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating an alternate history, where WWII's peace treaty was signed before the first nuclear bomb was dropped.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even though you came from some real-world background, the first divergence in real-world history starts the imaginary world, your imaginary world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developping the strategic consequences of removing artillery from battlegrounds.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As long as it's about military culture, and not the choice general X makes at some battle (see what I do not consider as worldbuilding).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making up the historical events of an invented world.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Though it's very easy to confuse individual and group actions in these. Only society-sized actions are worldbuilding (and this makes them very hard questions to ask here).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I do not consider as worldbuilding&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real-world knowledge alone.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I know adding milk slowly to the flour while mixing helps in making flawless pancake batter, or that there was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Roses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;war named after a flower&lt;/a&gt;, that's having knowledge in cooking or history. Even if it's useful to know when creating worlds, I'm not actively doing so, and thus it is not worldbuilding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming a top-notch roleplaying videogame with a whole universe in it.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you're making something which contains an imaginary world. But you're making a representation of it, not the world itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Designing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebo... Meta's virtual metaverse&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is creating a real-world world. It's digital, yes, but it's technically real computer data which people can interact with and within.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baking moon-shaped &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazelle_ankles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gazelle ankles biscuits&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wondering how to make people happy forever.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just asking yourself is more pertaining to philosophy :). Now, if you want an answer to build an happy forever and after world, this is worldbuilding (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191084/keeping-souls-happy-for-eternity&quot;&gt;but off-topic here as it's very opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choosing what a character will do or feel.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if said character has a world-sized ego, they're too small to be a world. A character becomes a component of a world when it becomes a society. In other words where individual, chaotic actions can be averaged and predicted in regards to sociology, psychology or ethnology (or other social sciences).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Word of caution&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're asking on worldbuilding meta stack-exchange with the &amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; tag, therefore I picture you ask this question to know when you're on-topic on this website. Then please note that not all worldbuilding topics are... On-topic here. &lt;strong&gt;Asking for opinions or about very broad concepts, starting discussions, and in general not having a worldbuilding problem to solve is off-topic here, even though it's technically worldbuilding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T09:47:12.510" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-07-15T15:26:40.277" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of recent entries that are not a good fit for this site is too high. Most of the questions that do fit with site policy are low quality &amp;quot;How would the anatomy work for a man with a bull's head?&amp;quot; has a trivial answer in the question itself, &amp;quot;Well you have a bull's head and a man's body, just like you described&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;intentionally designed&lt;/a&gt; to create a repository of high quality &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt;, that are meaningfully useful to later visitors, at the expense of some questions. That's why every site closes duplicate, overly broad, subjective and opinion based questions. They're not conducive to good answers. There are other opportunities to ask questions about worldbuilding online. What makes this site unique is the promise of the Stack Exchange model's more &lt;em&gt;structured&lt;/em&gt; format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; you'll see what the site promises. When we allow low quality questions to still be asked for historic reasons we're breaking that promise. It sets a poor example for other new members of the site. It creates an inconsistent standard of review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not formalize and sanction any line of questioning that leads to frequently closed posts and low quality answers. This doesn't mean that we should prevent people from asking new, high quality, questions about anatomy, just that we should hold every question to the same standard of review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T15:26:40.277" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9815" CreationDate="2022-07-15T16:39:22.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By its very nature worldbuilding is a very broad subject. If we define worldbuilding as &amp;quot;establishing some fact about a fictional world&amp;quot;, then because everything we, see, do, think, or experience, is some fact about &amp;quot;our world&amp;quot;, worldbuilding can encompass the totality of the human experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want a world where entire multiverses spring from the daydreams of children? Build it. Want a world where there are only 2 dimensions? That was done in 1884, but go ahead and build your own. Want a world like this one except your teenage crush didn't break your heart. I'd recommend moving on, but if you want to build it you can. You can have different laws of physics, or no laws of physics at all. The differences from ours can be minor, subtle, fantastic, or grounded in reality, it all falls under the worldbuilding banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some worldbuilders may choose to self impose restrictions on their worldbuilding. &amp;quot;grounded in reality&amp;quot; is a common one I hear bandied about. But there are stories countless fictional worlds that are impossible in one way or another that are loved by billions of people. A good story set in a world will be loved because of it's fantastic elements, not despite them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this site, we're only focused on supporting a small subset of what can be done with worldbuilding. We're a questions and answers site, not built for discussions or brainstorming. By nature of being a Stack Exchange site our mandate is to become a repository of the best answers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;even if that means rejecting some questions&lt;/a&gt; about worldbuilding. Questions that are too broad, opinion based, or unclear, aren't permitted here. Neither are questions about characters in a world, or questions that ask us to build a world for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at question closures on this site very few are for not asking a question related to worldbuilding. Most closures are related to the form of the question not being conducive to the sort of answers that stack exchange sites are designed to attract. Just because anything can be about worldbuilding doesn't mean that we permit you to ask anything you want here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T16:39:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-07-15T18:31:47.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Logic issue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Hey Tobby, I've got really bad news.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-What John?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Some people have been using our paint cans to make graffitis in the streets.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Ah. How many people?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Well, 2. But they are really active and nasty!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Were they told it's forbidden to paint graffitis in public spaces? That the paint cans are used to paint one's house, or stuff like this?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Yes, I did warn them multiple times for one year now, but they still continue! I tell you, our paint cans make hooligans out of people. We have to stop selling them.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-Uhh... Next time you see them, just call in the police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story aside, it's not because something exists that everyone will make something bad of it. And in this particular case, having just a few people on this kind of question is definitely statistically too little to know whether nothing good comes from this tag anymore. It might be just the three or four users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that we told them to improve their question. Multiple times. And they continue. But that's a moderation issue with these users, not a moderation problem with the tag itself. The same deal happens with other users, on other subjects (Not quoting anyone, that's not the goal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In anycase, if the tag was removed, it won't stop said users to ask bad questions (for instance in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mythical-creatures&quot;&gt;mythical-creature&lt;/a&gt; tag). Going back to the story, it's like you confiscated their paint can, nothing prevents them to start using paint spray guns instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My opinion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this tag is &amp;quot;metaphorically deleted&amp;quot;, it should stop having this &amp;quot;aura&amp;quot; with specific rulesets. In general, the more rules are uniformized, the easier it is to work with rather than having to deal with people trying to walk around them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes both way : Either as promoting them : Telling &amp;quot;this question is part of the anatomically-correct series&amp;quot; in every question, or not doing your proposal 3️⃣ (I'd go as far as moving the meta's text to the wiki instead of a link). Or as banning them : proposal 1️⃣,2️⃣ and 4️⃣, namely. A deconsecration of the tag could make them less interesting as an hiding spot, and easier to moderate as a vote-closer. In any case, the search for quality needs to be on par with other questions and leads to a swift-closure/downvote as usual, regardless if it is an anatomically-correct question or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit : As a follow-up to a gigantic comment thread, I would also suggest merging anatomically-correct tag towards mythical-creatures or equivalent tag, this in order to suppress the aura some people would still see looking just at the name. Not suggesting to synonymise though, given how the synonyms system works, it might very well end-up in the review queue without bulging (only people with +5 votes can vote, and there wasn't many people on this tag) :/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-07-15T21:06:58.810" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T21:06:58.810" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-07-15T23:27:01.447" Score="10" Body="&lt;h4&gt;A Troublesome Solution to a Problematic Trouble&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems to me that the underlying issue is that this proposal rests on what is admittedly an opinion, that there are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;voluminous and (and this is a very blunt personal opinion) massively low quality submissions by a small handful of users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. While I share the opinion in general, I do have to ask two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first is not so much if this is the best solution to the problem, but rather is this a proper solution to the problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second is whether or not this is even a problem requiring a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assessment:&lt;/strong&gt; As I see the issue, it does not appear to me to be a SE or a WB related problem. I may be wrong, but given the background of the problem, the issue seems to be more of a personal one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were a matter of users breaking WB or SE rules, then I think we'd all agree that SE has in place methods of addressing that issue. Closing queries, deleting queries or responses, disciplining and perhaps expelling users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, looks to me like it is an issue of taste, or aesthetics, or (as was clearly stated) opinion. Now, this is an opinion that I share. I think we all know who the user in question is; I know that I have engaged with this user multiple times in the past in order to help improve their question conception and writing; and I also know that that has not worked, so I don't do it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read the proposal, and given that JBH and L. Dutch have done so much work on making the ACS a truly wonderful sub-forum, I must say that it reads almost like a kid who brought out the balls and bats and hoops and things to play a game, now upon determining that a few kids refuse to play up to quality, has decided to take said balls and bats and hoops away. I hope this is not the case! But in any event, &lt;strong&gt;the problem to be solved is not the game, but rather the poor quality playing!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reviewing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;ACS ruleset&lt;/a&gt;, and in reviewing the list of recent questions, my assessment summation would be that I honestly don't see where the ACS itself is broken to the point that it needs to be closed down. Is it being abused? I think the answer to that is a strong probably. Is the abuse equal to the proposed solution? There I believe the answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendations:&lt;/strong&gt; I am going to downvote the proposal for the following reasons, and then provide a potential counterproposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First,&lt;/em&gt; I don't see anything within the ACS Guidelines that would act as a red flag for &lt;em&gt;sub-forum closure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Second,&lt;/em&gt; on the contrary, I would argue that the ACS continues to be a valuable sub-forum that for the most part has worked and that I believe could be a good model for creating other similar aggregations based on other common question genres&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Third,&lt;/em&gt; I don't see where any ACS guidelines are out of order or impractical or onerous to the querent. If anything, I would argue that the guidelines are perhaps not clear enough to be fully practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fourth,&lt;/em&gt; I believe that the original proposal comes from a good place --- the ultimate desire to see WB and ACS play host to high quality questions --- but I also hold that shutting it down isn't the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;THEREFORE:&lt;/em&gt; my recommendation is that the proposal be voted down due to its faulty conception. We don't accept questions that are of a purely opinion based nature; I don't think we should close a sub-forum or disable a tag for a similar reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I'd suggest that the ACS be given a proper set of rules. Through it's history, its guidelines have been tweaked and improved. That's a good thing. Rather than end the era, I'd call for the ACS to enter a new era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I'd suggest a much more focused clarification of the sub-forum's expectations from both querent and respondent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take stock of the questions we've been getting and compare their deficiencies with the present guidelines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Examine the present guidelines to see what's missing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put the two streams of data together to come up with a simple set of rules that, like the no commercial property rule, will ensure that querents have clear guidelines to follow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a similar set of rules for respondents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if we clarify the expectations for both parties, the overall quality of questions and answers will be higher and no unnecessary burdens will be placed on either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T23:27:01.447" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-07-16T18:48:16.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Rewrite your Meta page - leave the questions alone&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the site did something very convoluted here.  Some people asked a number of similar questions about different organisms, which is understandable.  Somebody came up with a tag to classify them, which is understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then somebody made an index page to specially highlight all those questions.  Isn't that nice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, because that page encouraged more of that type of question, and because not all of them met the standard, you augmented that kindness with a long list of rules tucked aside in a Meta post.  Honestly I'd never heard of them, or the index.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, it's burdensome for close voters to look over each and every new question in the series.  After all, a close voter is so much more &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; than the author of a creative question, you can't expect them to &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; everything that they want to close.  So let's just close ... everything.  Everything faintly resembled to what might have gotten a tag that might have been unfairly spotlighted in the special Meta page had no action been taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we'll leave the &amp;quot;historical&amp;quot; Meta page, because it's so &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about a simpler solution: rewrite your Meta page to show &amp;quot;The Best Of&amp;quot;, or delete the Meta page and all its guidelines, and even delete the category tag if you want, but then leave any such questions to be read and thought about like any other posting, with no new or topic-specific rules at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T18:48:16.800" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2022-07-16T19:38:58.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Just follow the language&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag called for &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;plausible answers based on real world science&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  So long as that's how people expect answers to be given, it should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask &amp;quot;how does my magic wand work?&amp;quot; and the responders say &amp;quot;magic! it can do anything&amp;quot;, well, that's not based on science.  If they say &amp;quot;how can you ask how a magic wand works when it's magic?&amp;quot; that's not based on science either.  They need to either fire up the miniature particle accelerator or the acoustic holography projector, or something sciencey, or shaddup already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly if you're going to ask how much wood a woodchuck would chuck ... then insist it &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; chuck wood, that's not going to work.  You're either willing to watch your buddy get exercised on a super-sized hamster wheel rigged by clockwork to a mini trebuchet, or give it up already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it gets sticky is if someone says &amp;quot;I have this magic system and how does it work with science&amp;quot;, and doesn't give enough details about how to write an answer based on science.  If you can turn somebody into a toad by magic, great, but &amp;quot;how does the science work?&amp;quot; ought to give some detail so you know if you're explaining where the extra mass goes (hot dark matter) or whether the toad is ultra dense (concealed condensed matter robotic skeleton) or ... well, let's say there are options.  I'm not saying you have to &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; questions, but we should expect that if people want a science based answer they can give us an idea of what general sort of science based answer they want, or else brace themselves for a hailstorm of random frogs splitting off from alternate dimensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82280" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T19:38:58.320" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-07-17T10:49:29.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Kill ACS the tag, not the idea&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the tag is being used as an excuse for low-quality questions; including &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173735/anatomically-correct-super-intelligent-shade-of-blue&quot;&gt;one of myself&lt;/a&gt; back in the day. The format actively invites low-quality questions, because it provides a template where you only need to fill in a description of a creature, with no other specifications or indeed further thought. I got lured by that myself, I am sure others have as well. And I think adding new rules to the meta page will start having diminishing returns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the 4th point of the OP goes way too far. Making things plausible and realistic is what this site is for. Every single question on this platform could be answered with &amp;quot;a wizard did it&amp;quot;, but the reason people go the lengths to put the questions here is because they want an answer that's a bit more supported by some manner of science, truth, or popular understanding, in order to enhance their creative story-telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about things set in the real world are on topic. Questions about testing things against real science are on topic. And evolution is a science like any other. There is no difference between a realistic evolutionary path, as tested with our understanding of evolutionary pressures and biology and such; and a realistic bridge, as tested with our understanding of physics and material science. Evolution may be a &amp;quot;softer&amp;quot; science than Newtonian physics, but the need to speculate has never been an obstacle to science-based questions in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think the tag and meta post are unnecessary; we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evolution&lt;/a&gt;. A high-quality ACS-ish question can still live without the ACS tag by having those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kill the tag and close the meta post, as they invite questions that are only descriptions of creatures which would not be allowed otherwise. Don't kill the whole idea of a realistic evolution, or questions about mythological creatures, or the two together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T14:33:08.063" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T14:33:08.063" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9815" CreationDate="2022-07-18T01:55:54.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;Real World Question debate&lt;/a&gt; (and we &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; have problems with it). The basic issue was this: do we want to become the dumping ground for every question every other stack is unwilling to answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're willing to embrace a great deal, a fair number of us clearly stated, &amp;quot;no!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Internet already has forums for anything-goes Q&amp;amp;A (Reddit, Quora, etc...). We want a Stack with standards. And while we're still striving for perfection, we've done a pretty good job creating reasonable limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you read through this list your knee-jerk reaction may be, &amp;quot;that's not a list defining 'worldbuilding,' it's just a list of our Stack's expectations and rules.&amp;quot; You're absolutely correct! And you're absolutely wrong. What we consider &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot; is very much limited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;the rules&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it your world?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have policies in place about whether or not a querent has the right to ask questions about a world that isn't their own. If you're asking about somebody else's world, or even the Real World, it's not your world and therefore inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be distinguished between a real-world question asked in an effort to help build a fictional world of your own creation vs. a question about the real world for the purpose of better understanding the real world. Yup, it's a royal pain in the patootie to clearly discern the difference—but it does and should exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you're asking a question about a world that is not yours, it's not worldbuilding on this Stack, unless a specific exception has been declared in Meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question specific?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We live with the reality that we have both &lt;em&gt;our set of rules&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange's set of rules.&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums/92110#92110&quot;&gt;is not a discussion forum&lt;/a&gt;. Ideally, we're helping people solve specific problems in their worldbuilding efforts. Practically, we entertain questions of a worldbuilding nature even if no world is presently being built. But in either case, we don't allow brainstorming or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you're asking for help overcoming a specific problem, or overcoming a specific lack of knowledge, that is inhibiting your ability to build a world, that's worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are you asking about your world... or your story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We draw the line at story-based items vs. world rules that are universally applicable to any story. As an example, &amp;quot;Given the following list of gases, particles, and stellar conditions that make up and affect my atmosphere, what color will my atmosphere be?&amp;quot; is on-topic. &amp;quot;My community uses rocks for money and they paint them, what color paint should they use?&amp;quot; is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asking about your story is never worldbuilding. We're here to help you build a world, not tell a story.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, we're supposed to be more than physics-lite.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We certainly do get a lot of real-world questions! But that's had a consequence—too many people want to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; answers to real-world physics. What's funny about this is that our understanding of physics constantly changes! And yet people want to believe (almost with a religious fervor) that today's understanding of physics or science is all the understanding there is or will ever be and therefore all answers to any question must meet that limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Baloney!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is so much more than can be justified by the limitations of science. But the opposite is true, a great many people want to embrace the fictional, the silly, the outrageous! But for some reason, they want that whimsy to be &lt;em&gt;realistic.&lt;/em&gt; Too many people don't understand the difference between &lt;em&gt;realistic&lt;/em&gt; (which can almost never be answered, &amp;quot;yes!&amp;quot;) and capable of &lt;em&gt;suspension of disbelief&lt;/em&gt; (which can almost always be answered, &amp;quot;yes!&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worldbuilding embraces imagination, creativity, and a certain feel that can only be described by the word &amp;quot;maverick.&amp;quot; Worldbuilding is an act of imposing structure and order where before there was only chaos. It embraces the whimsical equally with the punctilious. Sometimes the goal is to force that whimsy into the limits of the Real World. But at all times our goal is an answer that allows others to suspend their disbelief.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what is worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, worldbuilding is any creative act that later permits a story to be told in any form (your alternate-universe simulator is just another way to tell a story). But we do limit that act. For the sake of standards and to appease our Stack Exchange overlords, we have rules. And our definition of worldbuilding necessarily sits within those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T01:55:54.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-19T11:41:27.770" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion spun off from &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9816/is-it-time-to-officially-close-and-terminate-all-questions-applying-to-the-anato&quot;&gt;the most recent ACS debate&lt;/a&gt; but it should by no means be taken as an opinion either way on the ACS format. Whether that specific tag/series is kept or axed makes no difference on the subject of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH made clear that they consider that ACS allows questions that would otherwise be off-topic. Namely, because a question looking for e.g. a realistic jackalope is asking about someone else's world (the world of the myth), not about the worldbuilder's world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Q]uestions about the evolutionary justification of human myths are intrinsically off-topic. Remember, the goal of this site (see the Help Center) is to help people create imaginary worlds. Their own imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is asking if it's time to withdraw permission to break the rules, because all ACS questions are asking about something the poster didn't originally create in a world that isn't theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the same argument that's used to disallow questions about lightsabers from Star Wars; asking about other worlds has issues with legality, morality, practicality; and it runs at odds with the definition of the site: to help people construct their own fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contest that folklore is like 3rd-party worlds; I think no 3rd-party-world issue reasonably applies to myths. In fact I think that the suggested argument would run counter to the way the website has been functioning, given the existence of tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dragons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dragons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dragons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vampires&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vampires&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vampires&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's make a distinction between a myth and a record of a myth. &amp;quot;Ragnarök&amp;quot; is a myth. &amp;quot;The Prose Edda&amp;quot; is a record. The rules that apply to 3rd-party-worlds apply to records of myths, since they are essentially works of literature that happen to be documenting folklore, but the same does not hold for the underlying myths, which can have been recorded many times in many ways but are rooted in a tradition belonging to one or more cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll give a table with specifics but this is the core part of the argument. &lt;strong&gt;Mythological creatures are not defined by any records, but by the common elements of multiple stories and traditions, transmitted orally until recorded at different times by different people.&lt;/strong&gt; Folkloric creatures are parts of a cultural experience. Merfolk are not defined by Hans Christian Andersen, Thor is not defined by the Edda. Folkloric creatures exist in commonalities between multiple independently created records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes mythological creatures vague and often contradictory (when different records disagree), and a sufficiently specified question (one that isn't going to be closed for lacking details) has already done an &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; of an element found in myth; they have for example specified how many limbs a dragon has and whether he breathes fire or acid. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Interpretation&lt;/em&gt; is a form of &lt;em&gt;creation&lt;/em&gt;; by ironing out the sketchy cryptid into a concrete beast, someone has started creating their own world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here's the table. To the left is a problem that a WB question about 3rd-party-worlds faces, to the right is how that problem applies (or doesn't) to folklore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Problem&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;3rd-party world&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Folklore&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Legality&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A world built atop a third party's world is subject to copyright restrictions and may be discouraged or illegal.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Myths are not copyrighted. Records may be copyrighted, for example if it is a modern translation. Obviously the idea of a vampire is not legally restricted, or there wouldn't be so many stories with vampires in them.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Canonicity&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A question for &amp;quot;how do lightsabers work&amp;quot; has a canonical answer that's drawn from a source; it's correct by virtue of being written in a separate book of fiction. That's a whole different kind of research than any other knowledge-gathering taking place on Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Myths evolved over their creation history and continue to evolve this day; that's why records can be so different. There is no canonical answer in folklore because no record is more authoritative. In fact the same creature can appear in different cultures, where they may have different narrative functions and thus very different records. Just look at how many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_folklore_by_region&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kinds of vampires&lt;/a&gt; exist in various storytelling traditions. A question about a mythical creature can only have a canonical answer if the querent asks specifically for an answer as relayed by a particular record; and that's a research question that would not be allowed here anyway.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt; The elements that are universally agreed on are more like staples of a genre than rules of a system; they are vague and ready for an author to iron out into harder systems for new literature - or even to ignore entirely. Everyone agrees mermaids live underwater, but a story about a Venusian species of merfolk that flies in the planet's upper atmosphere sounds fascinating to me!&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Authority&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A third-party world is someone else's world; the only one who &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; give the correct answer to the questions is the author.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A myth has no author. Folklore belongs to a culture (or several) but cultures are made up of many people with their own views. You cannot go and ask the Romanians to agree whether sunlight burns a vampire to a crisp or just gives them rash - in fact, as far as I understand, weakness to sunlight is not even mentioned in the Romanian tradition.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Ownership of the world&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Writing in a third-party world, as a fan fiction expanding on that world, is inserting one's own material inside a place someone else created and subject to the original rules - that goes against the purpose of the site, which is to create new worlds.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A story using mythical creatures is not generally expanding on the mythical records; Marvel's Thor is not a fan fiction of the Edda, Twilight does not expand on any vampire literature I know of. Stories featuring mythical beings put those beings in fresh situations, e.g. a world like Earth but where those beings exist. That's a new world.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to achieve with this proposal, if people share my views, is that no future question should have to use the same weaselly language (&amp;quot;this dragon-like creature I'm designing...&amp;quot;) that's currently used for elements from 3rd-party worlds. And I wish to use it to reiterate that even if ACS is going the way of the dinosaur, asking about ways to design creatures sourced from folklore should remain welcome. It is the way we have used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dragons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dragons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dragons&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/merfolk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;merfolk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;merfolk&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vampires&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vampires&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vampires&lt;/a&gt; tags; it should remain that way if it's up to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please upvote if you agree that on this basis, questions with folklore should remain on-topic. Comment or answer if you know of any arguments either way that I am overlooking. Downvote if you disagree with my view (preferably also comment/answer to let me know why).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T13:38:55.707" LastActivityDate="2022-07-22T05:33:25.737" Title="Are questions involving mythical creatures on-topic? Is folklore different from 3rd-party worlds?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2022-07-19T14:08:36.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very few topics are truly off topic on this site. Questions about myths aren't an exception. For the vast majority of closed questions the problem is the form of the question, rather than the topic. The issue with myths and 3rd party worlds is that they lead to questions that violate multiple of our requirements of good questions. At it's core questions about myths or 3rd party worlds lead to questions that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lead to questions not about worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rely on unspecified relevant details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rely on the answerer to brainstorm, generate ideas, or otherwise establish facts about the world to be able to answer the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't specific to questions about myths or 3rd party worlds. Asking &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How do mediclorians cause Jedi to be able to lift objects with their mind&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a problem even if George Lucas asks it. The problem still exists if you're asking about dragons, time travel, magic or FTL,  physics, or chemistry. There may be general assumptions about how a thing things work, but those assumptions aren't codified or universal&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Even if they were, you are under obligation to follow any of those general assumptions. We're not here to discuss tropes, or science in general, try TVTropes, Physics.SE or Chemistry.SE. we're here to help you build your world. Note how you can answer &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How are dragons immune to fire?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;They just are&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Aesbestos scales&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Magic&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;In my world they aren't&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or a myriad of other answers. On this site questions with many valid answers are prohibited. Underspecified questions like this which lead to many valid answers are at the root of many question closures. Especially when asking about myths or 3rd party worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I believe that our no questions about 3rd party worlds is technically a pragmatic overreach. We could resolve every issue with third party questions just by asking that they clearly establish all relevant details within the question itself, like we do with every other question. But because this requires a detailed understanding of the application of site policy, it's much more efficient to say we don't allow questions about third party worlds and suggest that they file the labels off. The act of filing the labels off requires that they bring any relevant details into the question. Which is what we wanted them to do in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what inspired your question, existing work of fiction, myths you grew up with, a wild dream you had last night, the sublime majesty of the natural world, or some cool science fact that ignited your imagination, you must always make sure that you're asking about that within the context of &lt;strong&gt;building your world&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask about elves, ask us about your elves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about Skrulls, ask us about your Skrull knockoffs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about Kami, ask us about your Kami&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about orbital mechanics, ask us about the orbits of your planets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what you're asking about you need to &lt;strong&gt;specify how things work in your world&lt;/strong&gt; for it to not be closed. With both 3rd party worlds and myths worldbuilders still have the same tools to ask about the things specific to the world they're building. &lt;strong&gt;File off the  the labels ask about the thing clearly separated from canon.&lt;/strong&gt; For instance while I can't ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;how do lightsabers work?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; I can ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How could would solid plasma containment on a 'laser sword' work?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Despite it being obvious to everyone familiar with Star Wars that they're asking about a lightsaber, we wouldn't close the later question for clearly ripping off a 3rd party world, because they've taken the steps to be clear that they're not asking for a answer from canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Technically well established peer reviewed science is pretty universal, and not open to much interpretation. As a worldbuilder you don't need to hold yourself to such a high standard. Popular understandings of science are perfectly acceptable for your world even if technically incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T20:55:38.253" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T20:55:38.253" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2022-07-19T16:36:16.610" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe my answer and Spennings' answer are fundamentally identical. But as the person who wrote the linked question about the continuation of the ACS, I wanted to include my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem isn't the idea of myths, it's the fact of myths&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with 3rd party and commercial worlds has never been the ideas they contain. The problem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;we do not help build 3rd party or commercial worlds&lt;/a&gt;. We help you, the poster of a question, to build &lt;em&gt;a fictional world of your own creation.&lt;/em&gt; If somebody else created the world, it's not yours to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we've always helped people build their worlds to incorporate ideas from 3rd party or commercial worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-Topic:&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to include Star Wars-style light sabers in my world. Given the following list of rules, conditions, and restrictions in my world, how could I justify and explain something like a light saber?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic:&lt;/strong&gt; How does a light saber work? (Implies, &amp;quot;how does a light saber work inside the Star Wars universe?&amp;quot; or, worse, &amp;quot;how does a light saber work in the Real World?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Human mythology is based in a public-domain 3rd party world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's still a 3rd party world. We're happy to help querents to implement (as an example) the idea of vampires inside the structure of their world. But asking how to justify the myth of a vampire in the context of the Real World is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not the querent's world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I entirely reject the belief that an idea must have a single individual who is accountable for the creation and/or modification of an idea to justify that it's his or her idea. Just because an idea is so old that it's in the public domain, just because the &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;humanity,&amp;quot; just because we can't conveniently ask someone how their world could or should be modified, doesn't change the nature of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not the querent's world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No one is saying that myths are off-topic. What the referenced ACS Meta post is asking for is to delegitimize asking an off-topic question about a 3rd party world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to implement the idea of vampirism in your world, great! That's &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the question we like to answer! But if you want us to explain how a vampire could exist in the Real World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not the querent's world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the moderator's ruling about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;real world questions&lt;/a&gt; does not provide a loophole for asking questions about Real World myths. &lt;em&gt;We do not answer questions about 3rd party or commercial worlds.&lt;/em&gt; And that includes the Real World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not the querent's world.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will answer Real World questions to further our goal of helping querent's build &lt;em&gt;fictional worlds of their own creation.&lt;/em&gt; But we do not answer Real World questions for the purpose of realizing something in the Real World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACS-style questions about human mythology have always been off-topic. They were legitimized by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;original ACS meta post&lt;/a&gt;. I'm asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9816/40609&quot;&gt;in the linked question&lt;/a&gt; to delegitimize ACS-style questions and return them to their native state because the privilege is abused.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what really bothers me about this post is that it's nothing more than a way of permitting the ACS abuses to continue. What's the point of asking to shut down the ACS if we're going to simply re-legitimize the questions in another Meta post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Policy Proposal: &lt;em&gt;The Real World is a 3rd party world, and that includes its mythology. Human mythology asked in the context of the Real World (aka, asking for an &amp;quot;anatomically correct&amp;quot; vampire based only on the rules of the Real World and its mythology) is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm sure you'll agree that it's unbelievably annoying for me to repeat that phrase so many times. But it appears there are some people who don't want to be restricted by it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I had to VTC yet another ACS question only yesterday as a duplicate. Reviewing the querent's list of questions posted on Main reveals more than 50% of the questions that user asks are ACS questions—and more than 50% of those get closed. Enough already, but that's a discussion for the other question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T16:36:16.610" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2022-07-20T18:13:07.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your part and Sphennings's, and, depending on the definitions used, JBH's too. Since putting a myth into a world we create is the act of creating one's own imaginary world, asking about such myth in this situation is on-topic per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9817/80336&quot;&gt;definition of worldbuilding I use&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for&#xA;writers, artists and others using science, geography and &lt;strong&gt;culture to&#xA;construct imaginary worlds and settings.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;From the tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, &lt;strong&gt;culture and creatures&lt;/strong&gt; for the&#xA;world, &lt;strong&gt;not to mention magic&lt;/strong&gt; and planetary physics, &lt;strong&gt;in short,&#xA;everything&lt;/strong&gt; from the physics underlying your reality &lt;strong&gt;to the entire&#xA;universe you want to build&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;From the help-center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some additional notes however :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Worldbuilding Stack-exchange general rules still have to be followed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the word of caution when defining what is worldbuilding and what's not. You can be on-topic regarding worldbuilding, but you can be off-topic regarding the rules of this site. Therefore, you'll be closed if you don't ask a reasonably scoped question about a specific issue you have. There are plenty of details about this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what can you ask&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what you shouldn't ask&lt;/a&gt; sections of the help-center, so I won't push too much into details. It would be just rephrasing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Askers have to prove they're in the &amp;quot;art of making worlds&amp;quot;...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, you'll have to either prove that your issue can help making someone's world, or that it'll help you make your own world. What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask about folklore, but you have to give at the very least an hint you're not just studying a domain. In this case it would be studying something akin to legend studies, theology and mythological history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking whether cyclopes in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odyssey&lt;/a&gt; are all shepherds, this is the plain study of myths. Now then, if you ask if your cyclopes in the world and situation you're imagining would be all shepherds, you're actively creating a universe and thus, it's on-topic. You just have to prove that you're creating something, not asking something already established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking plainly about vampires in Twillight, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemean_lion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nemean lion&lt;/a&gt; zombies in Left-4-Dead, or elves in Lord of the ring without a direct potential in imagining a new world from the question are off-topic. And well, I guess there are better stack-exchanges for that : &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mythology SE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;science-fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... And we are ought to use the principle of charity, at least to an extent&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one thing though... We do have to consider to use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the principle of charity&lt;/a&gt;. That is, take the interpretation of one's text which is the less ambiguous, more reasonable one&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Indeed, determining whether someone is asking about a real-world domain (geography, physics, ...) or not is already not easy. But it's even worse with folklore's :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New members haven't met people on this site and don't get all the rules (and sometimes oldies forget them, too ), but -most of the time- they come to a worldbuilding site, to... Willy the well, build worlds (this point works with all domains).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As opposed to other domains, folklore, myths and legends are all varying from story-to-story and person-to-person, especially with non-written legends, making it much harder to say this question is asking specifically about cyclopes in the Odyssey, not just an heavy inspiration from it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And as icing on the lying cake, myths, folklore and legends are a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; common inspiration for many, many artists. Be it old legends (Hydras, chucapabras, kamis...) or &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; ones (vampires, zombies, dwarves and elves...), you'll find them a lot being asked because people want them in their own work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two points mean it is harder to consider a myth question to be off-topic than questions in other domains like physics or biology. This doesn't mean that other closure reasons (lacking details, focus, story-based, opinion-based...) should be banned because being off-topic is harder! Closure reasons can overlap, but they are independent. So unless the asker's intent is very clear, it can be more reasonable to avoid choosing off-topic as a closure reason, whether it is the only one that could apply or if they're one of many possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : This was what Otkin used when reviewing questions, back at the time, and it's a pretty neat concept when reviewing.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T18:13:07.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2022-07-21T00:56:17.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Oh, What a Can of Worms We Weave!&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some points to consider:&lt;/strong&gt;  As I understand it, the ACS became a way to legitimise asking queries about the natural evolution of real world mythological creatures, for use within a fictional world and specifically barred asking about mythological creatures from third party fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as I understand it, the present proposal would terminate the ACS as a viable sub-forum within WB.SE. While existing queries would be archived, no new questions should be entertained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to mythology and folklore (in general) and the creatures and peoples that populate those domains of human experience (in specific), we have to understand that these creatures, while not &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; in the sense of a physical manifestation; however, they are absolutely real as mythic or metaphysical manifestations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mythology is the science that treats of myth, what myth means, and what mythic time, space, history and nature are as real objects within the human experience. In this sense, myths and mythology are no different than metals and chemistry. Both have a place within the art of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mythic and folkloric reality --- the geography, history, populations, ecologies, etc of mythological places --- are not &amp;quot;third party intellectual properties&amp;quot;. They do not belong to a specific named individual writer or artist or a corporation as intellectual property. They belong to the deposit of human culture and experience. But neither are myth and folklore &amp;quot;fictional worlds&amp;quot;. They are not considered 'constructed' or 'devised' in the way we tend to think of when speaking of 'building a world'. They are simply a part of the human experience and are thus as &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; as tidal forces, bears, and orbital mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What the Proposal Means:&lt;/strong&gt; Because mythological creatures --- real world creatures that inhabit real human mythological realms of space and time --- are at present &amp;quot;exempt&amp;quot; from the usual rules of WB.SE, we're able to ask about their physical evolution here the way we might ask about bird evolution. If the proposal be accepted, then this exemption shall expire. We must make it clear in the ACS page that the sub-forum is CLOSED. Any question that &lt;em&gt;would have been entertained via the ACS ought to be immediately closed.&lt;/em&gt; Mod-hammer closure would be best, perhaps, until the dust settles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if mythology is a science like chemistry, and we can ask about the properties of metals, why can we no longer ask about the properties of a creature like Pegasus? Herein lies part of the problem. While you could no longer ask about the evolution of Pegasus, nothing stops you from asking about the evolution of a &amp;quot;winged horse&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Answer to Your Question:&lt;/strong&gt; I'd argue that the answer to your question is both yes and no. As is often the case!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions of mythical creatures as mythical creatures are &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; (We do have a sister forum that handles queries about mythology and folklore!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions of the origins, form, mechanics, psychology, evolution, behaviour, etc of mythical creatures as mythical creatures are &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions of real world mythological creatures or peoples &lt;em&gt;as they might exist within a fictional world and provided that fictional world context is made plain&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; (For the same reason we entertain queries that involve other real world sciences and the things they study like chemistry, physics, biology, linguistics, theology, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the origins, form, mechanics, phsychology, evolution, behaviour, etc of fictional creatures, of which a real world mythical creature might be seen as a type, are &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;Winged horse&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;Pegasus&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What Your Proposal Means:&lt;/strong&gt;  I concur with your proposal given that it is made clear that it is not a &amp;quot;real world question&amp;quot; about real world mythology. A question about mythology or mythological creatures specifically has to &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; include sufficient fictional context that it can't be mistaken for a real world mythic creature and &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; must focus on the fictional world and how the creature fits within the lore of the fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-07-21T00:56:17.150" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2022-07-22T05:33:25.737" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will very simply open with a complete agreement with the OP, and expound a bit to say that there are entirely too many words being bandied about for what should be a simple metric: Is the question building a world for the OP of for a third party? That is the line we have decided to draw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this applies to the ACS creatures, an answerer must decide if ownership of the WORLD the creature occupies is clear in the question. As JBH notes we can’t force querents into wordsmith acrobatics to avoid the letter of the law when all they want to to is respect the SE policy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3567/checklist-for-the-perfect-post-idea-refinement/3586#3586&quot;&gt;scannable questions&lt;/a&gt;. Adjectivizing should not be punished, it should be encouraged. What does that mean? It means that a post which uses “google” as an verb instead of “conduct a large-scale Internet search using a widely-deployed search engine” should not be chastised for thrird party world violations. Nor should people who want to describe “a short cutting tool which uses an intense beam of light with a short range of effect” and put the third-party word “light sabre” in there. They used the word “light sabre” because that saves hundreds of words, not because they want to intrude on George Lucas’ turf. Now, back to the ACS, this applies extremely well here. Myths are nouns and adjective which communicate a vast amount of information. The word “vampire” is densely packed with adjectives! Undead, Sun-averse, Immortal, Nocturnal, Human, Blood-drinking, hypnotic, shape-shifting into bats, superhumanly-strong, etc.If you own your own world, and you want a creature with those qualities, then LET them use the stupid word “vampire” for crying out loud so we can scan the question! The test is extremely simple: Who owns the world? Third-party is off-topic. Your world? Go ahead!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Adjectivizing is not a crime&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to briefly vote on a “policy recommendation” to treat “anatomically correct vampires” as &lt;strong&gt;off topic.&lt;/strong&gt; Um, No. Please PLEASE follow this to the logical conclusion, for the love of all things carpal-tunnel! What this policy means is that adjectives are a crime, and you create the following bifurcation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;To the point,&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want THIS to be &lt;strong&gt;Illegal:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.1) I want vampires in my world! (Oh! What audacity!!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the obvious purpose of encouraging members &lt;strong&gt;to do this, Legally:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.1) I want creatures which drink blood, like, umm, a mosquito? Can I say mosquito on this site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.2) Now I want a creature that is hurt by sunlight! Oh, and it’s the same creature as Q.1, so read that up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.3) OK, Now, I want this creature to be immortal. And it’s the same one as Q.1 and Q.2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.4) Almost done! I want the creature in Q.1, 2, and 3 to be able to shape-shift into a bat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.5) Thank you all for your patience… but where did everyone go? Can my creature… the one from Q.1,2,3, and 4, have a weakness to wooden stakes? How is that possible please?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.6) OK, I am REALLY sorry for being so wordy, but, well, you know the law! Can you please read questions 1,2,3,4, and 5 and now tell me how this creature can have some sort of hypnotic ability that it uses to trap its food?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q.7) Now there is ONE tiny other little descriptor here. Please read all of Q.1,2,3,4,5, and 6, and tell me how this creature can not cast a reflection in a mirror, and my world will be complete!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;This has spun into madness now&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I am leading into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224764/what-can-run-the-condensers-on-this-hell-train&quot;&gt;a world of my own creation, named Hell&lt;/a&gt;. As it turns out, Hell is VERY hard to describe. But worse yet, it’s proprietors are even more so by several orders of magnitude. Nonetheless, in designing my world, like every good author, I cheated. I leveraged other people’s research and creativity to connect with my audience. I needed a place of pure evil that was within our own solar system. Many mythical places exist. So I thought about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I have Wookie-like aliens? No, nor scary enough. Not local enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I have Vogons? They are evil, to be sure, but not really locals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in the end I chose to model my world after Lovecraftian (Oops! I just adjectivised again!) lore, without incorporating ANY of his concepts. I decided that my uber-scary critters needed to make your skin absolutely crawl, &lt;em&gt;like the Mi-Go&lt;/em&gt;, but very obviously NOT the Mi-Go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh the flurry of accusations that railed against me! It made it so very obvious that Lovecraft books are picked up more often in here than demolition orders posted in Alpha Centauri!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s be clear: If you do NOT even know the fundamentals of the third-party world in question, respectfully decline to comment? The “all mythical adjectives are third party” rule is the lazy moderator’s excuse to intimidate creativity (or exponentially increase server load?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is in order here, drawing off Lovecraft. Now, Lovecraft was himself inspired by the new discovery of a far-off mysterious planet named “Pluto” on February 18, 1930. It took him less than a year to put all that newspaper buzz to work for him and fill Pluto (he never actually called Yuugoth ‘Pluto’, to be fair, but we all knew what he meant) with the nastiest, most horrifying creatures, who worship such evil denizens as Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Sedmelluq and Shub-Niggurath. These fungus-like hyper-intelligent beings pawn from incantations in the Necrimonicon, and are formed of a matter which is not found anywhere on earth, and cannot be captured on film! They have the horrific habit of coming to your town and trap you brain in a vat for eternity, where you are kept still alive and conscious!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I ask you, if this third-party world of Lovecraft’s had concepts that could be used as adjectives, what harm is there in that? As I said at the opening, we WANT queries to be concise. And we WANT to judge a query based on the ownership of the WORLD, not the parallel concepts it may share with extant societal myths and legends. Pluto is a REAL world concept, that Lovecraft leveraged to get the attention of his audience. He used a common descriptor to connect his images to their consciousness. No different than us telling someone to “google it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I have been forced to elucidate what the word “Lovecraftian” means with respect to the Mi-Go (derived from the Tibetan word for yeti), cna anyone REALLY argue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/233032/anitomically-correct-mi-go?noredirect=1#comment711971_233032&quot;&gt;my incarnation of a Mi-Go-like creature&lt;/a&gt; is somehow “H. P. Lovecraft’s World”? Surely, I have no gods. I have no necrinomicon. I have no Yuggoth, or aether. And very specifically, these creatures are in FACT made of common matter, and greatly regard the laws of physics that his creatures often ignore. I used Mi-Go as an adjective, that is my only crime. The same crime that “dragon-like” and “vampire-like” and “ghost-like” and “Klingon-like” querents have used. My crime is the sin of scannability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Do not do this evil thing!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2022-07-22T05:33:25.737" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-22T16:50:50.390" Score="-2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Entirely too much bandwidth and moderator time is being invested in quashing the victimless crime of using borrowed terms in a query under the false pretense that such terms invade some third-party property rights. Succinctly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8475/why-the-rule-against-third-party-worlds/8481#8481&quot;&gt;all questions about third party fictional worlds boil down to canon&lt;/a&gt;. Borrowed terms, whether they be from literature or from any other cultural origin, are in fact fully congruent with the goals and principles of both world-building practice, and this world-building site (WBSE). An offense exists if AND ONLY IF an explanatory answer exists in any canon not owned by the OP; thus, queries with canonical Delphicity&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; are by definition uncanonical to the third party world, and thus can NOT be judged as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; for the singular reason of a &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; term's origins. I owe a proof of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The WBSE asks querents to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3567/checklist-for-the-perfect-post-idea-refinement/3591#3591&quot;&gt;post questions which are scannable&lt;/a&gt;. Terms with high information density serve this cause specifically. E.g., the two statements below are identical, but #2 is preferred:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can a quadrupedal mammal of the genus cannis, having very sharp canine teeth at the front of its mouth, that are designed to tear and puncture rather than pulverize, successfully pulverize the chewy bubble-gum creatures on my world?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can a dog pulverize the chewy bubble-gum creatures on my world?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; has a vast information density that facilitates the scannability of the query. I am fairly certain all members can agree that use of this word is a &amp;quot;net plus&amp;quot; to our goals. Yet, the words &amp;quot;Warp&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Light-sabre&amp;quot; and even &amp;quot;vampire&amp;quot; have come under recent inexplicable fire for being used in this same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The WBSE asks a querent to &amp;quot;do research&amp;quot; before engaging this community. Borrowed terms are the very product of earlier research. William Shakespeare gave us &amp;quot;Alligator&amp;quot; in Act 5 of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; through the vernacular pronunciation of the Spanish term for &amp;quot;big lizard.&amp;quot; That word today contains its own research. Gene Roddenberry gave us &amp;quot;Warp speed&amp;quot; which contains vast research into FTL. Using the word &amp;quot;warp&amp;quot; in a query is in keeping with our policy while the answer can not be derived from any of Roddenberry's worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The WBSE asks for question titles to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3567/checklist-for-the-perfect-post-idea-refinement/3590#3590&quot;&gt;accurately and concisely summarize the problem&lt;/a&gt; in the title. Borrowed terms with high information density perfectly accomplish this goal. &amp;quot;Dog,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mermaid,&amp;quot; Vulcan,&amp;quot; Darwinian,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nazi,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Lovecraftian,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Delphic,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Muslim,&amp;quot; are all words that contribute to the &lt;em&gt;concise, accurate, and specific communication&lt;/em&gt; of the problem in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The default WBSE assumption is that members are obeying the code of conduct, and are therefore creating their own worlds. I do agree that trends show rife disregard for third party property, yet trends do not set our principals; they set policies for the enforcement of those principles. It is NOT true that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9826/are-questions-involving-mythical-creatures-on-topic-is-folklore-different-from/9829#9829&quot;&gt;a querent owes a burden of proof as to ownership of their world&lt;/a&gt;. It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;our general expectation that querents are being honest&lt;/a&gt; (we do NOT assume all new queries with the words &amp;quot;Hobbit&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Warp&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Liliputian&amp;quot; are pirating intellectual property by default). Instead, if we feel a query needs policing, we are expected to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;be clear and constructive when giving feedback&lt;/a&gt;, and be open when receiving it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Information density is both encouraged and discouraged in the same breath when taboos are levied against borrowed descriptive words. Consider that a query about an  &amp;quot;anatomically correct Hobbit&amp;quot; is taboo, while an image of the creature pictured below (Wikimedia commons source) is actually encouraged under the ACS guidelines? This is not hypocritical and contrarian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Un_hobbit.jpg/442px-Un_hobbit.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Un_hobbit.jpg/442px-Un_hobbit.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Wikimedia Commons image of Hobbit&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Canonical &lt;em&gt;Explanations&lt;/em&gt; vs. Canonical &lt;em&gt;descriptions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple reason that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;an image is ENCOURAGED and a word is taboo&lt;/a&gt; is because an image is by nature &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; of the problem. A word can be interpreted as either descriptive or explanatory, and so it can potentially include content which is not owned by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus, the simple proposed &amp;quot;canonical Delphicity&amp;quot; test is this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If an OP is clearly using a borrowed term from Swift, or Roddenberry, or Lovecraft, or Stoker, or Shakespeare for the purpose of clarity, brevity, and to describe their problem, then there is no harm or foul. This term is just as suitable for an on-topic question as an image of the same item would be. The OP retains the burden to focus the problem on specific features of the &amp;quot;wookie&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;elf&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;vampire,&amp;quot; lest they earn the &amp;quot;needs more focus&amp;quot; VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If, in an expert opinion, the canon originating a borrowed term in a query &lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt; the problem, or in fact, any third party canon not owned by the OP &lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt; the problem, then WBSE can not offer an explanation to the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line for WBSE suitability rests on ownership of the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; and not the &lt;em&gt;descriptors.&lt;/em&gt; The line for descriptor suitability rests on its &lt;em&gt;explanitory&lt;/em&gt; power rather than its &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; power. Informationally dense terms are encouraged; explanatory terms with origins outside the OP world are off-topic. Queries with words having both explanatory and descriptive power must actively distinguish themselves from canonical sources (they must establish canonical Delphicity within any coincident canon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Burden of canonical intrusion lies with the claimant&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To charge a question as offending any canon is to proclaim yourself as expert in that canon, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;your downvote implies that: the answer or question is incorrect&lt;/a&gt;; and you are honest about that assessment. This can only mean you are an expert in the matter. If a question intrudes on worlds of Roddenberry or Swift or Lovecraft or the Incas, the civil thing to do is state where the intrusion lay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;FAQ (comment responses)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:  Won't this create more work&lt;/strong&gt; for the people responsible to keep WBSE clear of third party violations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: No one has the responsibility to secure the site against third-party content.&lt;/strong&gt; Moderation starts with the community itself. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt; places no burden at all on them to keep WBSE clear of 3P world infringements, and in fact &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#liability&quot;&gt;indemnifies Stack Exchange and the moderators against any damages due to any infringement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Aren't 'ideas' also 3rd party content?&lt;/strong&gt; Isn't a world with an engine 'like a warp drive,' a city 'like Cloud City,' or a creature 'like a Mi-Go' automatically owned by someone else because they came up with it? Aren't you only changing the name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**A: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9837/does-using-third-party-ideas-make-a-question-off-topic-for-wbse&quot;&gt;No, ideas are never third party and in fact they are very rarely original.&lt;/a&gt; The Orville is a knock-off of Star Trek. Put a &amp;quot;Sky-city-like&amp;quot; city in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a light-sabre-like sword in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a Predator-like creature in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a Mi-Go like creature into your world and it is still YOUR world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Shouldn't Borrowed terms close a question simply because they are too broad?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A: No.&lt;/strong&gt; True, a creature &amp;quot;Like Dracula&amp;quot; has entirely too much definition for one single question. However, a creature &amp;quot;that doesn't cast a reflection, like Dracula&amp;quot; is perfectly fine for this site, as long as your world defines the science/magic that makes such a quality possible. The example above of the light-sabre which cuts a tree is a suitable question because the science is defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definitions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canonical Dephicity&#xA;A problem is canonically Delphic if an answer can not be provided by a canonical authority. It does not mean an answer &lt;em&gt;does not exist&lt;/em&gt; in another canon, but that a valid solution &lt;em&gt;cannot be had&lt;/em&gt; if a canonical authority (or third-party world oracle) were consulted, because the authority of the intellectual property is outside of that canon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example problem: &amp;quot;Could a 2000 Watt plasma light-sabre cut down a 2-foot thick tree in one swipe, if the blade were long enough?&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Test:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Can an authority in canon provide an answer?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canonical reference: Light sabre&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canon source: Star Wars / George Lucas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canon opinion: The functional operation of a light sabre have no definition within Star Wars canon, and they do not have Watts as a unit. The question can have no answer from an authority of Star Wars canon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conclusion: This question is canonically Delphic, and therefore is not off-topic under the third-party world rule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example problem: &amp;quot;Would a personal time machine be possible with only a 1 JiggaWatt flux capacitor, since the Delorean is much larger and has a 2-JiggaWatt flux capacitor?&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Test:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Could a canonical authority provide an answer?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canonical reference: Flux capacitor, JiggaWatt, Delorean time machine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canon source: Back To The Future franchise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canon opinion: An authority in BTTF canon could form an explanatory answer to this question, even if they never have or chose not to, because the elements of the question occupy the BTTF world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conclusion: This problem fails the canonical Delphicity test, it does not occupy an original world owned by the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;Policy Clarification: Asking about commercial or third-party worlds.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T01:07:41.967" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T06:17:13.847" Title="Canonical Delphicity is the line we must observe in judging third-party worlds" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9833" CreationDate="2022-07-22T22:40:11.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;First, some clarifications&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An offense exists if AND ONLY IF an explanatory answer exists in any&#xA;canon not owned by the OP; thus, queries with canonical Delphicity are&#xA;by definition uncanonical to the third party world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might not have understood this, but questions are closed because their title and content don't match what's expected on WB:SE. Answers have nothing to do with that, and in fact might help in avoiding closure : I often stumble on questions where it's -from my point of view- on the fringe of needing rework. So I wait cautiously, then someone posts an answer and by relating with the question it helps understanding the thing that I overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default WBSE assumption is that members are obeying the code of&#xA;conduct, and are therefore creating their own worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's to some extent the principle of charity I use and a way to improve one's Netiquette. I told it in the post you linked... Just below!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is NOT true that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9829/80336&quot;&gt;querent owes a burden of proof as to&#xA;ownership of their world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It is our general expectation that querents&#xA;are being honest (we do NOT assume all new queries with the words&#xA;&amp;quot;Hobbit&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Warp&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Liliputian&amp;quot; are pirating intellectual property&#xA;by default).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy you gave a link to my post, but are you sure you fully understood it? There's a difference between giving proof it's your own world and giving proof you're making a world, that the purpose of worldbuilding is loud and clear. Can you see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common issue when asking for plain 3rd party worlds is that it's too close to said world to make any derivation from it. Need an example, example... Let's take &lt;a href=&quot;https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Living+Jar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elden Ring's Living Jar&lt;/a&gt; : You could ask stuff about it with its in-game description, but the more you do this, the more likely people will feel it's an Elden Ring lore question and will be enticed to answer with information about this video game's world instead of worldbuilding poetry. Indeed, it's already made and supposedly well-designed, why bother going further? The more this happens, the more likely you're not &amp;quot;creating&amp;quot; a world, but asking about an existing one. This is what I think is out of bound here :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is partially why I told to separate issues on your &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/233032/80336&quot;&gt;anatomically correct question about Mi-Gos&lt;/a&gt;; Beyond focusing your question, it separates yourself from the existing world and make creating other worlds much easier, like if you're asking for an existing wall brick color you could reuse instead of the wall itself that can only be used to make this exact manor, 2 Chtulhu St. in Horror town&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah and yes, you can ask questions without having a specific world in mind, you just have to give us enough hints it can be used in worldbuilding : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9602/80336&quot;&gt;Is it ok to ask questions that don't have specific worldbuilding use?&lt;/a&gt; (max voted/accepted answer is &amp;quot;yes!&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To charge a question as offending any canon is to proclaim yourself as expert in that canon, because your downvote implies that: the answer or question is incorrect;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not exactly. Downvote &lt;em&gt;is not&lt;/em&gt; closure. A question can show &amp;quot;research, be useful and clear&amp;quot;, yet not following the rules and therefore be closed. It doesn't happen frequently, but questions with high-votes yet closed can be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Then, onto delphic analysis&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canonical Dephicity : A problem is canonically Delphic if an answer can&#xA;not be provided by a canonical authority. It does not mean an answer&#xA;does not exist in another canon, but that a valid solution cannot be&#xA;had if a canonical authority (or third-party world oracle) were&#xA;consulted, because the authority of the intellectual property is&#xA;outside of that canon. [+clear examples, go take a look at them :)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies a lot more work from close-voters, actually. Indeed, to prove that a question isn't asking about 3rd party world, it could mean that we have to prove that no existing work which uses this world (excluding fanfiction) can't already answer this question. For Star Wars, it is what... At least 9 movies, several TV shows, at least 4 or 5 games&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, some books and comics... And we're not counting any element that could be deduced from said world, or any diverging element between two works on the same world (it happens to artists to forget their own world). It's much less time consuming to check if enough elements make it reasonable -&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R13BD8qKeTg&amp;amp;t=200s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simili-like to Bayesian reasoning&lt;/a&gt; - to tell someone is not in the process of creating a world (because it does happen, even if we should presume people are &amp;quot;innocent&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means we're doing the work of &amp;quot;answering&amp;quot; a typical Science-Fiction and Fantasy question, on top of the worldbuilding one. This seems quite time-consuming regarding the task moderators/close-voters already do...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, this is closing questions by its potential answer. But like I said, questions should be closed because its content could be improved, not because someone found that canon and answer/could answer with it (alone or not). So... While I find the theory neat, it seems pretty harsh to execute in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : By the way, in Star Wars Jedi : Fallen Order there's a moment where the hero makes a new lightsaber. As such, an answer could use the canon to explain the lightsaber functional operation ^^&amp;quot;. I think it also happens in Knight of the old republic, too, though it's less evident there.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-07-22T22:46:48.730" LastActivityDate="2022-07-22T22:46:48.730" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9833" CreationDate="2022-07-23T04:52:12.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue with 3rd party worlds &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/26175&quot;&gt;has nothing to do with intellectual property&lt;/a&gt;. In fact if Lucas (before he sold the rights to Star Wars) were to ask us &amp;quot;How do lightsabers work?&amp;quot; it would have the same issues as if I asked it myself&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, despite him owning the rights to the world he was building. The question doesn't tell us enough about lightsabers to do anything besides brainstorm and generate ideas, which is prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether something exists in canon or not is irrelevant for determining whether a topic is suitable for this site or not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2,3&lt;/sup&gt; If you're speculating about someone else's world you are, by definition, not building a fictional world. Regardless of whether you're speculating about something that is established in canon or not. Asking &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How many mediclorians are there in an average Jedi's cell&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is off topic regardless of whether there's a canon answer to this or not. Similarly if you're wanting to build a variant on something within a 3rd party world, whether there's a canon explanation is irrelevant. Even if you're only making the minimum changes necessary to be legally distinct, you're still building your version, and can deviate from canon however you want. It does not mater that the power source for a lightsaber is established in Star Wars canon, it is still possible to ask about the power source for your lightsaber, provided you format your question correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very few topics that are truly off topic on this site. More often than not questions are closed not for their selection of topic, but for the form of the question. These form of the question issues persist whether you're asking about creating a knockoff of a 3rd party world, your own variation on a critter, or a novel take on some trope like time travel or FTL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't suitable to ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Can a lightsaber cut through a tree?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; because we're not here to discuss 3rd party worlds. However it also isn't suitable to just ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Can my lightsaber cut through a tree?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; This holds true, even if you tell us &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Star Wars isn't canon in my world&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. While you're definitely asking a question that cannot be answered by consulting a canon, and you're clearly asking about building a world, the form of the question runs violates site policy in numerous other ways. The question has many valid answers. It's underspecified. It's asking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4663/why-do-questions-have-to-be-specific/4665#4665&quot;&gt;brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/whats-wrong-with-idea-generation-questions&quot;&gt;idea generation&lt;/a&gt;. To answer this requires worldbuilders to decide how your lightsaber functions, and what a device with that functionality would be capable of cutting, effectively building your lightsaber for you. You resolve these issues conveniently enough by &lt;strong&gt;providing your own canon&lt;/strong&gt;, in the body of the question. Asking &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;My lightsaber's blade is a 2000 watt plasma jet. Can it cut through a tree?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be a solid question for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Technically when I ask it I'm also not asking about building a world, I'm asking about Lucas's world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; While it's true that your question should probably not be asked here if your question can be answered by consulting a fan wiki, or a quick google search, we have other rules in place to prevent these questions without adding a new cannot-exist-in-cannon rule. More importantly the answer not being easily searchable is insufficient to determine whether a question is suitable for our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; It should also be noted that rejecting questions that an authority in a canon could provide an answer to implies that every question with the hard-science tag should be rejected. The expert is a scientist and the canon is peer reviewed journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-07-23T05:42:45.333" LastActivityDate="2022-07-23T05:42:45.333" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-24T00:58:24.360" Score="-3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...and everyone does it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been badgered quite heavily with accusation that inserting &amp;quot;Mi-Go-like&amp;quot; creatures into my world somehow forfeit's my ownership of my own world, on the premise that &amp;quot;I did not conceive the Mi-Go.&amp;quot; This to me is ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous, in fact. And this is not a single question issue; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;this attack is being levied against all forms of extant concepts from elves to vampires to dragons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The allegation goes, from my best understanding, that if you have a thing/creature/place in your world which &lt;em&gt;has been derived from&lt;/em&gt; an existing thing/creature/place, then you do not &lt;strong&gt;own&lt;/strong&gt; that world (it is not your idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to follow this logic, as posted by the one accusing me of &amp;quot;building someone else's world:&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. The goal of this site has always been focused on helping someone build &lt;strong&gt;a world of their own creation - not somebody else's world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair enough. &amp;quot;Ownership&amp;quot; decides fitness on this site. And then, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Just because you're taking somebody else's idea and inserting it into your world doesn't change the fact that it's not your idea.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair again. Not my idea. Darth Vader was not George Lucas' idea. Avatar was not James Cameron's idea. Ents were not Tolkien's idea. It goes on, we agree. The poster's point is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/233032/anitomically-correct-mi-go&quot;&gt;Mi-Go, from H. P. Lovecraft, are not my idea&lt;/a&gt;. All points agreed so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now we stray into a some strange logic. Here was the conclusion of the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. The issue isn't that someone might hold the rights to Lovecraft's work. The issue is that &lt;strong&gt;it's not your work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wow? To be clear, they are referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225795/does-a-hell-train-running-on-brimstone-have-a-smokestack&quot;&gt;this world, Hell, which I created on this site&lt;/a&gt;. It is &amp;quot;not my world&amp;quot; now. OK, so the formula here seems to be,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ownership of &amp;quot;the idea&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;ownership of &amp;quot;the world.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, incorporating any extant &amp;quot;ideas&amp;quot; into a work on this site, fails the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8475/why-the-rule-against-third-party-worlds/8481#8481&quot;&gt;No Third-Party World building&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means, that among the &lt;a href=&quot;https://litlab.stanford.edu/how-many-novels-have-been-published-in-english-an-attempt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;18,900,000 estimated works of English-language fiction&lt;/a&gt;, WBSE members can not recycle any of those ideas on this site. Of course, this does apply to every other language as well, and to game worlds, virtual worlds, etc. We can assume there are possibly 50,000,000 &amp;quot;worlds&amp;quot; that contain hundreds or thousands of &amp;quot;ideas&amp;quot; each, which are &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Implications?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example scenario:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I want a race of ursoid warriors, that are basically 8-foot tall teddy bears. But how can they hold a sword?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, most people will think this is a perfectly fine question. But this one person, who claim that &amp;quot;Ideas&amp;quot; convey ownership, would ban close this question as off-topic. Why? Because author E. W. Finch &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/star-seeker-the-nexus-nightmare-a-novel-of-the-third-colonial-war_edward-w-finch-iii_wesley-finch-iv/11718535/#edition=11294129&amp;amp;idiq=16265908&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;already created a warrior race of bears, called the Osmani&lt;/a&gt;, and has had them in print for many years. The copyrights are still wholly owned by Mr. Finch and son. An excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Seeker’s new orders were the oddest he had ever heard of. They assigned four midshipman and an Osmani Ambassador to a working Scout ship. Yet the Lane had enough experience with the inner workings of the Corps to see a little deeper. Everyone with close personal contact with the ursoid had been assigned to the same small ship. Lane suspected that this was the Admiralty’s way of controlling information about Arnog and his adventures with the Scout Corps. Someone higher up was taking an interest in the Seeker and her crew...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wesley tried to teach Arnog gunnery skill, but that failed at first. He didn’t fit inside the turret. Instead, they went to gunnery control on the bridge, still a tight fit, and learned to use the targeting computer there. With only a few hours practice, the ursoid didn’t really have the knowledge to be a functional gunner, but it was a start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the crew went through their primary skills. Nas showed Arnog how to use the communicator. Chief Harvin showed him some basic skills with tools. Press showed him how to use a cutlass and found the bear was already quite good with a blade. That skill, coupled with the strength of three men, would make Arnog a formidable foe in any sword combat. The problem was finding a blade the right length and strong enough for him to use. He ended up choosing a two handed broadsword – one he easily grasped with a single hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 58, &lt;em&gt;Star Seeker: The Nexus Nightmare&lt;/em&gt;, (c) E. W. Finch, used with permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do you see the can of worms he has opened?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this burden even possible? How do we police &amp;quot;Ideas&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;concepts&amp;quot; so they don't get built on this site, the way &lt;em&gt;every other major author&lt;/em&gt; builds ideas? Do we exclude &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;every single trope&lt;/a&gt; that's ever been used as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The answer is, we do NOT police &amp;quot;ideas&amp;quot; on this site.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, a concept may be too broad to explain a single problem. Yes, a concept may contain too many questions if used alone. But no, it's 3rd party origination does not disqualify it for worldbuilding here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas are never &amp;quot;third party worlds&amp;quot; and in fact they are very rarely original. For example, both J. R. R. Tolkien's and C. S. Lewis' worlds &lt;a href=&quot;https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/George_MacDonald&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are knock-offs of George MacDonald&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Avatar&lt;/em&gt;, the whole story, is &lt;em&gt;Dances With Wolves&lt;/em&gt; and Neytiri is Stands With a Fist, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pelicandiaries.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/avatar-jake-wheelchair.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amputee soldier Jake Sully&lt;/a&gt; who recovers his leg through the 'avatar' is amputee &lt;a href=&quot;https://i0.wp.com/www.thatmomentin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Screen-Shot-2019-02-05-at-10.07.02-AM.png?w=922&amp;amp;ssl=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lieutennant John Dunbar&lt;/a&gt; who barely escaped leg amputation. The Star Wars franchise has almost no original content at all, it is simply a retelling of Alex Raymond's &lt;em&gt;Flash Gordon&lt;/em&gt;. Darth Vader is Ming the Merciless. 'Cloud City' is '&lt;a href=&quot;https://flashgordon.fandom.com/wiki/Sky_City&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sky City&lt;/a&gt;'. The city's ruler, Lando Calrissian is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Vultan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prince Vultan&lt;/a&gt;, who even &lt;a href=&quot;https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cloud_City&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;won the city in a gambling bet&lt;/a&gt; just like Vultan, and has a crush on the leading Lady (Princess Leia / Dale Arden), and is subservient to the evil empire (Vader/Ming). The undersea city of Otoh Gunga is &lt;a href=&quot;https://flashgordon.fandom.com/wiki/Kala%27s_city&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Undersea City&lt;/a&gt; and its ruler &lt;a href=&quot;https://starwars.fandom.com/es/wiki/Rugor_Nass?file=Jedi_Mind_Trick_SoH.webp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Rugor Nass&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://flashgordon.fandom.com/wiki/King_Kala?file=103kalaskinnyandbuff.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Kala&lt;/a&gt;. Every Star Wars idea was created by Alex Raymond. But who &amp;quot;owns&amp;quot; the worlds of Cloud City, Otoh Gungam, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, the Death Star, and every other knock-off? They are firmly George Lucas' worlds. Every episode of Star Trek is a knock-off of something popular at the time. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/f/p/3343172654596368116&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kradin&lt;/a&gt; are the Yautia (Predator). Star Trek: Discovery's new Klingon clans are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/star-trek-discovery-klingons-inspired-by-the-ancients/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inspired by ancient Earth civilizations&lt;/a&gt;, and the first Klingons were Soviets. Now, The Orville is a knock-off of Star Trek. Put a &amp;quot;Sky-city-like&amp;quot; city in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a light-sabre-like sword in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a Predator-like creature in your world and it is still YOUR world. Put a Mi-Go like creature into your world and it is still YOUR world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, go down this road and the whole site can just turn off its servers and shut down. There will be no original &amp;quot;ideas&amp;quot; or concepts once our &amp;quot;Idea police&amp;quot; start going to the library and digest the millions of worlds out there. But hey, I am just one opinion. I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/159569/what-would-be-the-wingspan-and-lifting-surface-area-for-a-5kg-canard-configurati&quot;&gt;done the hard work of building a creature from scratch&lt;/a&gt;. I am not being lazy here. But if there were any world outside which &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have a jet-propelled squid, everyone's workload would be lighter if I just referenced that. I have painstakingly built worlds, cities, and aliens. This isn't asking for a shortcut. It's about having a sane policy, and just making descriptors and ideas that inspire creativity legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Should worlds containing &amp;quot;Ideas/Concepts/Tropes&amp;quot; that have at any point been used in other worlds be closed as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; for WBSE?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T01:24:21.283" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T03:00:48.453" Title="Does using third-party &quot;Ideas&quot; make a question off-topic for WB:SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9837" CreationDate="2022-07-24T01:59:53.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be missing the points that have been made to you repeatedly about site policy in the past week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLDR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This site is for questions about building worlds, not questions about how others' worlds work.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - Monica Cellio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9836/26175&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;There are very few topics that are truly off topic on this site.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your MI-Go question has other more serious issues with it than asking about the works of Lovecraft.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions asking for help &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/26175&quot;&gt;brainstorming&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/523/26175&quot;&gt;generating ideas&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;questions with many valid answers&lt;/a&gt; are prohibited on this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While we don't police what ideas you can ask about, we do police how you can ask about those ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are fundamentally mistaken about our 3rd party world policy. It does not mean that if something exists in a 3rd party world you can't reference it on this site in any way. To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/26175&quot;&gt;Monica Cellio&lt;/a&gt; from the initial discussion formalizing our the 3rd party worlds policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about &lt;em&gt;building worlds&lt;/em&gt;, not questions about &lt;em&gt;how others' worlds work&lt;/em&gt;. Now very few ideas are completely original, so your world might use elements from, or derived from, other worlds, but there's a key difference: If you ask &amp;quot;how does a lightsabre work in Star Wars&amp;quot;, the only authoritative answers come from the Star Wars canon. If, instead, you want lightsabres in your world and ask &amp;quot;how can I power my lightsabres given (constraints)&amp;quot;, that's a worldbuilding question that will likely get answers that have &lt;em&gt;nothing to do&lt;/em&gt; with the Star Wars canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask questions about your world. If you've borrowed ideas that's fine, but the focus is on your world, not what another author intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question and the one you asked yesterday you seem hung up on the idea of ownership. &lt;strong&gt;We do not care about ownership&lt;/strong&gt;. We care that you're &lt;strong&gt;building a fictional world&lt;/strong&gt;. When someone asks about a 3rd party world the problem has always been that the ask isn't building a world. Similar to how speculation about real world biology is not permitted on this site, but asking about biology within a world you're building, is the bread and butter of this site. It's not that your don't own the real world, it's that to ask about the real world is not about world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this site has always been focused on helping someone build a world of their own creation - not somebody else's world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot build someone else's world. This isn't site policy, it's a fact of worldbuilding. If you try to establish a fact about the Star Wars universe, it may exist in your head canon but your head canon is a distinct world from canon Star Wars, and every other fan's head canon. If it's not your world at best you can fork it, and will then need to establish how your world diverges. When we ask &amp;quot;Should this question be asked here?&amp;quot; we're looking for questions about worldbuilding not speculation. Unlike what you seem to think the key distinction is &lt;strong&gt;build&lt;/strong&gt; not own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because you're taking somebody else's idea and inserting it into your world doesn't change the fact that it's not your idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't care who owns ideas. We don't police ownership. In fact it is site policy to encourage people &amp;quot;filing off the labels&amp;quot; as a way of working around the 3rd party world policy. What we care about is that you're &lt;strong&gt;building a world&lt;/strong&gt; not speculating about the idea. Lightsaber is trademarked by Lucasfilm. We forbid you from asking about the lightsabers generally, because that wouldn't be building a world. We do permit you to ask for help establishing facts about lightsabers in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole reason we have a policy against 3rd party worlds is because &lt;strong&gt;asking about a 3rd party world is not world building&lt;/strong&gt;. Getting inspired and incorporating cool ideas into your world is at the heart of what worldbuilders do. Everything else is just troubleshooting. &lt;strong&gt;Stealing ideas is great&lt;/strong&gt;. Everything has already been worked out for you, nothing to ask us about. &lt;strong&gt;Making stolen ideas your own is even better&lt;/strong&gt;. You may have some issues getting everything working right together. We'd love to help you with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue isn't that someone might hold the rights to Lovecraft's work. The issue is that it's not your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is patently false. You can ask about ideas that do not come from yourself. Everything is a remix, nothing is truly original. What we require is that you ask about ideas solely within the context of establishing facts about the world that you are building. In the Lovecraft Mythos there are two distinct descriptions of the elder sign, If you wanted to ask about elder signs, you would need to decide what shape (or shapes) the elder sign has in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implications of all this is that when dealing with ambiguous source material you need to decide unambiguously what is true in &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; world. For instance if your world has elves, you need to decide exactly what elves are in your world, before you can ask us questions about your elves. Once you do that it doesn't matter if your elves are exactly like some other worlds elves. You've established the rules of your world, and provided you follow site policy about the form of the question, you can ask as many questions you want to help you establish more facts of your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edits you've made to the Mi-Go question still leave you with a post that isn't a good fit. As has been said multiple times your current question runs fowl of our policy forbidding questions asking for brainstorming or generating ideas. It has been closed as off topic, but with the edits you've made it is still not suitable for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question is closed the displayed reason for closure is fixed as the reason with the most votes, alternate reasons are discarded. The standard for reopening is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;In it's current form would you vote to leave open if you saw it in the VTC queue&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;is the stated close reason resolved?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Until you resolve every issue with your question it will remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;None of this has to do with the fact that you're asking about an idea, concept or trope, that has been used in another world&lt;/strong&gt;. Search this site and I think you'll find that there isn't a single question that isn't asking about one or more ideas concepts or tropes that have been used in another world. If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds/7336#7336&quot;&gt;read the post&lt;/a&gt; where the restrictions on questions about 3rd party worlds were discussed and adopted, you can see that there never was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/61630408#61630408&quot;&gt;Multiple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/61630519#61630519&quot;&gt;pathways&lt;/a&gt; to resolve your question's current issues have been suggested. None of the suggestions would have changed your question to not contain ideas, concepts or tropes that have been used in other worlds. However instead of making the edits necessary to reopen the question you've asked multiple meta questions and argued with pretty much every active meta user. This disruptive behavior in the face of clearly communicated opportunities for recourse isn't a good look. It's hard assume positive intent when the standard for review of questions has been explained multiple times within the past 24 hours, and you post another confrontational post that could be answered simply by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;reading&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T04:46:12.677" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T04:46:12.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9833" CreationDate="2022-07-24T06:17:13.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Canonical Delphicity as Concept vs Third Party World Ownership as Concept&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there even an issue here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Question:&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a reason we can't draw this simple line for third-party content? Allow any descriptors you like in a query to make the question concise and easily scanned, but disallow &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; content?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;simple line&amp;quot; appears to be drawn between &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;descriptive term&amp;quot;.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The line for WBSE suitability rests on ownership of the world and not the descriptors. The line for descriptor suitability rests on its explanitory power rather than its descriptive power.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assessment:&lt;/strong&gt;  I disagree that the line is between &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;term&amp;quot;. This is a false dichotomy, in other words. The issue has always been one of &amp;quot;content of the query&amp;quot;. Essentially, I concur with both of your statements, but neither one seems to point to the problem, unless I'm seriously misunderstanding something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Borrowed terms&amp;quot; have never been at issue. If someone asks a mechanics query about a reasonably sized disk shaped world and cites Discworld as a source of inspiration, use of the term &amp;quot;rimfall&amp;quot; is non-problematic simply because any disk shaped world of the type will likely have one. As you say, the borrowed term is used for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Canon&amp;quot; has never been at issue either. Questions of Discworld canon are off topic simply because they are not worldbuilding queries. Such questions should be exported to SF/F a/o closed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the problem, and therefore the line, as I understand it, has always been between &amp;quot;my world&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;someone else's&amp;quot;. Just in case the two things aren't clear, &amp;quot;my world&amp;quot; is the fictional world that a WB.SE OP has devised within her own mind and is thus the worldbuilder of; whereas &amp;quot;someone else's world&amp;quot; is a fictional world that a WB.SE OP has &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in point of fact, devised within her own mind and is thus &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the worldbuilder of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that the better test might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Did I create the world that I'm asking about, or did I not? --- Y/N&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is yes, then proceede; if the answer is no, then do not ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm working on a disk shaped world and have trouble with water management. I understand that PTerry's Discworld has a Rimfall where XYZ process recycles the water. I'm thinking of doing PRS in stead --- does this make sense?&lt;/em&gt; This query is a (classic) reality check / (modern) internal consistency query and is clearly on topic because it's focus is &amp;quot;my world&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm working on a disk shaped world and have trouble with water management. I understand that PTerry's Discworld has a Rimfall where XYZ process recycles the water. I'm thinking of doing that too --- how does it actually work?&lt;/em&gt; This query is clearly a question about the mechanics of Discworld itself. Whether there is a canonical explanation or not is not the issue. (There might be, and that might not actually be the answer to the question!) Rather, this query is off topic because it's focus is &amp;quot;someone else's world&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; I concur with your stated query 100%. We allow &amp;quot;descriptive terms&amp;quot;; we disallow &amp;quot;world content&amp;quot;. But I disagree that canon, delphic or plain, is the appropriate test; and I disagree that it ought to be between these two things that a line be drawn. The line belongs elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T06:17:13.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9837" CreationDate="2022-07-24T07:00:52.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is all, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas really aren't the issue, and this is simply a matter of nothing new under any sun. Borrowing an idea from an existing third party world is not a problem. As we dealt with in your other query, the problem has always been one of focus of the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you focusing on your own world? Or are you focusing on someone else's world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assessment:&lt;/strong&gt; I read through your Mi-Go query, and quite frankly, I don't know quite what to make of it. You make a lot of reference to Lovecraft, which is a red flag. Not having read Lovecraft myself, it's very unclear to me where the dividing line is between your work and his.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd've closed your question for lack of clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; You obviously have the power to edit your post to make it conform to the ACS type of query. It's one thing to reference Lovecraft, it's another thing to mention his work in every paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you borrowed the idea of Mi-Go from Lovecraft, I'd suggest listing out all the major and pertinent congruences between Mi-Go and whatever your creatures are called. Then specify what you've done to make yours uniquely yours. Then edit out the constant Lovecraft references and replace them with references to your own world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'd suggest breaking this down into two or three separate queries. Questions about environment, inability for artificial retinas to capture visual data and their need for other people's brains are are quite separate matters and deserve their own queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that your question was closed for understandable reasons, all of which are easily addressed &amp;amp; fixable by you. Fix the problems and I'd happily vote to reopen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see where you're specifically being targeted or badgered. Right now, as you're aware, the whole ACS is under attack. To be honest: I think your question, even though it needs work, and even though it is not about a mythological creature, is likely to be actually better than many of the recent ACS queries that are about mythological creatures!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T07:00:52.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-31T20:22:03.663" Score="-2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of comments on questions that say things like 'Questions about third-party worlds are not on topic'. If you like to comment this, then that's fine. You're as free to say it as you are to say 'Don't palapat', 'Avoid lekaboming when possible', or 'Quendigo is absolutely prohibited'. However, it appears that people want others to act on this statement, in which case we need some idea of what is meant by 'Third-party worlds'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'commercial worlds', refering to worlds from fiction sold commercially, is the basis for this divide. However, this distinction is not the one that is usually followed. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214486/what-is-the-function-of-this-limb-system&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; regarding a common cryptid from the 16th century apparently counts as third-party, whereas the orcs from Lord of the Rings, and later Dungeons and Dragons, have over 100 questions still open. Those seem like commercial worlds to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, what counts as taking from a commercial world? (Assuming LOTR orcs are third-party) Let's say I take my world's ghoulish devil-goblins and give them scaly skin and fangs. Would these then be counted as Tolkien's orcs? If not, how far must I go before it falls afoul of this rule? Or am I free to make a complete copy of Tolkiens orcs and present it as my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen, it seems like the latter: This comment, and the associated close votes, are only thrown about when the asker is honest about their question's context and inspirations. Is that the intention? To promote lying, deceit, and hiding context? I don't see any other outcome as being very likely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I have no idea of what this rule is supposed to be or do. Does anyone else know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T18:56:23.217" Title="What is the third-party world rule?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-08-04T04:59:54.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9841" CreationDate="2022-07-31T23:53:52.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;concise list of &amp;quot;the rules&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; some time ago. From that we learn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question must be about the rules of your world, not a story based in your world or the actions/choices/development of any character. &lt;em&gt;(Sources: &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; close reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your world... not the Real World (see two bullets down), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;not a 3rd party or commercial world&lt;/a&gt;... not even mythology in any instance save the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; (which has specific rules). Worldbuilding is the design and consistent use of rules and systems for a fictional world of your own design wherein an infinite number of stories may be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3rd-party and commercial rule was established by Monica Cellio, one of our earliest users, and was linked above. To quote from her answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about building worlds, not questions about how others' worlds work. Now very few ideas are completely original, so your world might use elements from, or derived from, other worlds, but there's a key difference: If you ask &amp;quot;how does a lightsabre work in Star Wars&amp;quot;, the only authoritative answers come from the Star Wars canon. If, instead, you want lightsabres in your world and ask &amp;quot;how can I power my lightsabres given (constraints)&amp;quot;, that's a worldbuilding question that will likely get answers that have nothing to do with the Star Wars canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask questions about your world. If you've borrowed ideas that's fine, but the focus is on your world, not what another author intended. (Monica Cellio, May 2019)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this site is to help &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; build &lt;em&gt;your world,&lt;/em&gt; not someone else's. The premise is simple. The only person who can explain how &lt;em&gt;someone else's world&lt;/em&gt; can be expanded to answer a question &lt;em&gt;is that other person, alone.&lt;/em&gt; Not us unless that other person happens to be a user (not that I've seen yet... It'd be cool of Lucas was a member, but if he is, he's hiding really well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking how a concept, idea, etc. from someone else's world can be implemented &lt;em&gt;inside your own world&lt;/em&gt; is valid — but don't abuse the privilege. You are expected to explain the rules of your world so we can help you implement the idea in your world. The moment you suggest that your world is, for example, magically identical or materially identical to that other person's world or in any way identical or materially identical with the Real World your question falls out-of-bounds. We are not the place to ask how a lightsaber works either in Star Wars canon or according to Real World physics. But we will consider how to implement the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of a lightsaber within the context of the rules of &lt;em&gt;your world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-driven community rules like this are an effort to protect the original intent of the site: to give people a place where their own creative efforts can find assistance. The 3rd-party/commercial world rule came about because people not actually trying to build a world of their own wanted discussions of idle curiosity. That violates both our intent and Stack Exchange's intent. We're tolerant, but we're really not here to let people chase idle thoughts. That's why Quora and Reddit exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-07-31T23:53:52.107" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9841" CreationDate="2022-08-01T02:39:20.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;no questions about 3rd party worlds rule&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;self defining&lt;/strong&gt;. It prohibits any questions about 3rd party worlds. Simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking a question a 3rd party world is any world that the asker has not created themself. This is the standard usage of the term 3rd party. First and second party are whoever is involved in an exchange, in this case asking questions and answering them on this site. A 3rd party is everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty easy to assess what this rule permits and what it prohibits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h6&gt;I present to you the simplest flow chart:&lt;/h6&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your question about a 3rd party world? If yes GOTO 2: If no GOTO 3:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question is prohibited under the no questions about 3rd party worlds policy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question is permitted under the no questions about 3rd party worlds policy. (It may be prohibited for other reasons)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial use is not a factor in this assessment. If you ask a question about your friend's homebrew D&amp;amp;D setting, it's just as prohibited as asking about the MCU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our reasoning for this policy is well explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9842/26175&quot;&gt;JBH's answer&lt;/a&gt;, as it is in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8475/why-the-rule-against-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;question you asked last year&lt;/a&gt;, as it is in multitudes of other questions on this site. But to summarize we're here to help you &lt;strong&gt;build&lt;/strong&gt; worlds not speculate about already built worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to incorporate something from a 3rd party world in a world you're building that's great, we're happy to help. The burden will be on you to ask your question so that it's clearly asking about building your world not speculating about another world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-08-01T18:56:23.217" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T18:56:23.217" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9837" CreationDate="2022-08-01T03:00:48.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This issue has been beaten into the ground.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like your statement that Ents weren't Tolkein's idea. Here's why: you're dead wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ents is also an ancient English word (for a giant); but the Ent of my world I suppose are entirely &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; creatures, so far as that can be said of any human work. If you like, they are a mythological form taken by my life long love for trees, with perhaps some remote influence from George MacDonald's Phantastes (a work I do not much like), and certainly a strong (twist?) given my deep disappointment with Shakespeare's MacBeth...” (From a letter to Mrs LM Cutts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the 'Treebeard' chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all. (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Letter 180)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go far enough back and assume that Tolkien was inspired by tree-gods of humanity's ancient past and therefore our 3rd-party/commercial world rule is invalid. I can only but show you the door. We've drawn a pretty clear line, but yet again, let's hash through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've posted a number of poorly-to-very-poorly received Meta posts grinding away at this issue. Here's the gist of it in relation to the post concerning an &lt;em&gt;actual creature from H.P. Lovecraft's works.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3rd-party/commercial work rule is being investigated. Generally speaking, that rule has been expressed as: we will help you build your world, not someone else's world, with the caveat that we will help you incorporate a concept from someone else's world into your world based on your world's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have traditionally used the example of a Star Wars lightsaber. Let's keep that for a moment. We'll help you take &lt;em&gt;the idea of a lightsaber&lt;/em&gt; and develop that idea in your world. In the end (and this is incredibly important) &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you don't have a lightsaber.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; What you have is something that reflects Lucas' idea, but in the end, it's your reinterpretation, your product, your concept. Lightsabers don't exist in your world, but something that reminds readers of Star Wars lightsabers does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the linked question tried to do was &lt;em&gt;use someone else's creatures directly in their world.&lt;/em&gt; That crosses a line. They're not reinterpreting other than making what minor changes must be made to force them into their world. Or, worse, their world is too reflective of &lt;em&gt;the other world&lt;/em&gt; such that it permits &lt;em&gt;someone else's character&lt;/em&gt; to live within it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. That violates the 3rd-party/commercial world rule. You can't have Han Solo in your world. You can have a character that reflects the characteristics of a swashbuckling anti-hero (which you can find in numberless stories across the realm of human thought), but you can't call him Han Solo. You can't dress him like Han Solo. You can't duplicate the mannerisms of Han Solo. &lt;em&gt;Han Solo belongs to someone else.&lt;/em&gt; We don't permit that. And this is reflected in my comments about the Mi-Go. The creature doesn't belong to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3rd-party/commercial rule allows people to be &lt;em&gt;inspired&lt;/em&gt; by the stories, writing, characters, and world of another person — &lt;em&gt;but it will never allow someone to plagiarize that other world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T03:00:48.453" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9841" CreationDate="2022-08-01T18:48:04.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It Is What It Is&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of comments on questions that say things like&#xA;'Questions about third-party worlds are not on topic'. If you like to&#xA;comment this, then that's fine. You're as free to say it as you are to&#xA;say 'Don't palapat', 'Avoid lekaboming when possible', or 'Quendigo is&#xA;absolutely prohibited'. However, it appears that people want others to&#xA;act on this statement, in which case we need some idea of what is&#xA;meant by 'Third-party worlds'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair. New users would benefit from a simple explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, some definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Party&lt;/strong&gt; --- This is the querent, the person who comes here to ask a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second Party&lt;/strong&gt; --- This is the respondent, the person who comes here to answer a question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third Party&lt;/strong&gt; --- This is someone who is not a WB.SE user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any one of these people can make a fictional world. Querents are worldbuilders, such as yourself, who come here to ask questions seeking help about the world(s) you're working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Respondents may be non-worldbuilding but interested specialists; or they may be, like me, worldbuilders who choose to answer queries rather than ask. First and second party thus establish a relationship between you the asker and me the answerer. You, the first party, ask questions about the worlds you yourself are making; I, the second party, answer questions about the worlds you yourself are making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone else who is not you and not me, the third party, is not here to ask questions about their own worlds. We don't allow you, the first party, to ask about that other person's work; and we don't allow me, the second party, to answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example of asking about a First Party World&lt;/strong&gt;: You once asked a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/222041/could-centaurs-wear-dresses&quot;&gt;centauroid clothing&lt;/a&gt;. This was a question of worldbuilding (culture / clothing) that we presume pertains to a fictional world of your own device. For the purposes of that query, that's your world! You made it, you own it, you ask about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example of asking about a Second Party World&lt;/strong&gt;: If you had asked a query about how a certain race of winged people, the Denê, wear clothing, this would not be a question about any world you're making. That's because the Denê are my winged people and the live in my fictional world. I don't think this situation has ever come up in WB.SE, but I would answer the question because it's my world and I'm a WB.SE user and am competent to answer the query. This would be an example of asking about a second party world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example of asking about a Third Party World&lt;/strong&gt;: If you ask a query about the evolution of Klingon forehead ridges, this too would not be a question about a world you're making. You're not the proper party to ask that query because you can not establish definitions, can not establish fictional context and you are not the proper party to adjudicate any answer given. You didn't come up with Klingons or their natural history and thus have no right asking about them. I, on the other hand, have no business answering this question because, while it's a good question, it's not a good question for WB.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'commercial worlds', refering to worlds from fiction sold&#xA;commercially, is the basis for this divide. However, this distinction&#xA;is not the one that is usually followed. For example, this question&#xA;regarding a common cryptid from the 16th century apparently counts as&#xA;third-party, whereas the orcs from Lord of the Rings, and later&#xA;Dungeons and Dragons, have over 100 questions still open. Those seem&#xA;like commercial worlds to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Commercial world&amp;quot; is simply a subset of Third Party Worlds. A commercial world is simply one that has been monetised and has a variety of legal protections and ethical entanglements. The world was made by someone else and it is &lt;em&gt;that person&lt;/em&gt;, the author, who has the right to come here and ask questions about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercialisation is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the basis of the divide. The basis of the divide is &amp;quot;who made the world&amp;quot;. If the answer is &amp;quot;Ichthys King made the world&amp;quot;, then Ichthys King gets to ask questions about it! If the answer is &amp;quot;Will Wyzywyg made the world&amp;quot;, then Ichthys King has no business asking about it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, what counts as taking from a commercial world? (Assuming LOTR&#xA;orcs are third-party) Let's say I take my world's ghoulish&#xA;devil-goblins and give them scaly skin and fangs. Would these then be&#xA;counted as Tolkien's orcs? If not, how far must I go before it falls&#xA;afoul of this rule? Or am I free to make a complete copy of Tolkiens&#xA;orcs and present it as my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of WB.SE, we don't care what you &amp;quot;take&amp;quot; from someone else's world. It is patently obvious that your bog standard fantasy Orc is &amp;quot;taken&amp;quot; from Tolkien's legendarium. If one of those fantasy authors wishes to come here and ask about the Orcs they have in their own worlds, we shall help them! If that author wishes to come here and ask about Tolkien's Orcs, we shall close their question and invite them to ask on F/SF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You answered your own question. You &amp;quot;took an idea&amp;quot; from Tolkien, which is fair. You gave it scaly skin and fangs. It's a thing of your world, so you are free to ask about it here. The prohibition is against you asking about Tolkien's Orcs. Obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You fall afoul of the rule when you ask: &amp;quot;How do Tolkien's Orcs do XYZ?&amp;quot; Again, obvious. You're simply not allowed to ask about someone else's world who is not here to answer you. This is not what this forum is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You avoid disaster when you ask: &amp;quot;How can my Orcs do XYZ?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen, it seems like the latter: This comment, and the&#xA;associated close votes, are only thrown about when the asker is honest&#xA;about their question's context and inspirations. Is that the&#xA;intention? To promote lying, deceit, and hiding context? I don't see&#xA;any other outcome as being very likely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't care if you copy. We care only about whether or not the thing you copied is within its original context (Tolkien) or within the context of your own fictional world (Ichthys King).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no deceit involved, and you really are making this much more difficult for yourself than you need to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I have no idea of what this rule is supposed to be or do.&#xA;Does anyone else know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: the rule is supposed to keep you from asking questions about worlds you did not make. Plain and simple. Everyone knows this, and if you've read this far, you do too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, go forth and ask questions about your own world!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T18:48:04.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8379" CreationDate="2022-08-01T19:04:57.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO worth a paltry 3k rep. The Hard science tag should be replaced and redefined or discarded.&#xA;The world at large, when they come across the tag sees Clarke, Niven, Weir, Anderson. They don't see Einstein, Curie, Hawking, Bohr.&#xA;While Ringworld and Rama, have reams worth of science and equations to back them up. they are still impossible and wouldn't stand up rigorously to a Hard-Science tag. Skrith and reactionless drives are both handwavium. I know the Definition of Hard-Science, I also know to 90% of people that would consider building a world, the real definition is secondary, the first thing that comes to mind with its utterance is something completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vanishingly few posts that include the tag at creation, ever keep it. Many are closed are abandoned from the hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that WB is one of the more unique/odd among the stacks and apparently it's existence within SE is questionable for the content that it deals with. We have to do our best to stay within the guidelines, and keep the metaphorical &amp;quot;genie in the bottle&amp;quot;. However, since nearly every relevant question ever asked on the stack, asks for an opinion based answer. Reality-Check: We think we have the answers, but we cant even &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; answer why light looks fuzzy around the edges when it passes through a couple of slits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;Hard-Science&amp;quot; like tag has a place I think, but under a different name. It's confusing for new-comers, fresh breath and blood to the stack. Every effort should be made to make them feel welcome and unafraid to ask. We here know that a VTC is just a necessity and only procedure. To the new, it's a rejection, a demerit. Especially the social media jungle, any slight is exaggerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91198" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-08-01T19:25:01.013" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T19:25:01.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-08-01T20:13:23.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Anatomically Correct Series is fundamentally fine. There are a lot of low-quality submissions with it, but the issue in that case would be the submitter instead of the series itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real underlying issue is that there is no valid format or example for both submitters to follow and for voters to judge a question with. As a result, people post ACS questions with minimal and unclear content and voters downvote and close ACS questions for arbitrary reasons not in the site rules or ACS rules; even if previous similar posts are upvoted and accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit A: Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/231223/anatomically-correct-avatea&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; versus &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/233516/anatomically-correct-bai-ze?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. These two posts are almost identical. They both cover a non-Western mythological animal, they are both written in a very similar way, and both posts are only a month apart from each other. Yet, the latter post was immediately downvoted and closed while the former post was repeatedly upvoted, stated to be &amp;quot;an ACS question that meets the requirements.&amp;quot; by JBH himself, and was left open for several weeks until I pointed out the discrepancy. Was there any major edit to the Stackexchange rules between June and July? No. Was there any rule changes to the ACS series in the past month? No. Then the question is why are two very similar but non-duplicate questions receive two very different reactions? It is almost like there's a hidden double standard at play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit B: Compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/233564/anatomically-correct-cynocephalics&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/131539/anatomically-correct-panotti&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. Once again, two very similar (but not duplicate) posts covering a similar topic and written in a similar way. Once again, we see that the more recent post is immediately downvoted and closed while the older post is repeatedly upvoted, still open, and has received quality answers. The latter post is 3 years old but it also still post-dates any major edit to both the Stackexchange rules and the Anatomically Correct Series. The latter post should be a shining example of an ACS question. Why it was written by a moderator himself! Yet if a new user copies the moderator's example, they are chastised instead of praised. Why would that be? Unless there are some unwritten and subjective rules that recent ACS questions are now being judged by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I have made my points clear. Even though there has been no major revision to the Anatomically Correct Series since April 27, 2018, I wager the overwhelming majority of linked ACS questions after that date would be downvoted and closed if they were deleted and resubmitted this week. Several posters are very hostile towards ACS questions and submitters don't have a good idea why since previous ACS questions can no longer be followed as good examples. Even the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28458/anatomically-correct-phoenix&quot;&gt;official ACS thread on the Worldbuilding Help Center&lt;/a&gt; would almost assuredly be downvoted and closed if it was deleted and resubmitted today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To improve both the Anatomically Correct Series and Worldbuilding Stackexchange in general. I propose two solutions; none of which include closing and terminating ACS. Solution one is to edit and rewrite the opening post of the Anatomically Correct Series. It hasn't been seriously revised in 4 years and it is clear that the standards expected from the Anatomically Correct Series have changed. This revision should not only include rule changes but a template or templates for future submitters to potentially follow. After this revision happens, close/reopen voters should closely follow it and only judge ACS questions by the ACS format and the stackexchange rules. There should be no such thing as an unwritten rule on stackexchange. Questions should only be judged for being a proper and abiding submission to this website and not be judged by the subjective interests of the voter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solution two is to create some new and proper examples of high-quality submissions for the Anatomically Correct Series. It is clear that using previous questions in the Anatomically Correct Series to format your question is non-viable. We have all seen recent examples of how ACS questions shouldn't be made. Now let's all create many new examples of how ACS questions should be made. If you want high-quality submissions for ACS instead of low-quality ones, The right path is for posters to lead by example, and be the change you want to see in the world. I invite moderators and other high reputations users on stackexchange to make proper and high-quality ACS submissions of the organism of their choosing. You can either submit a question about a mythological creature or plant not submitted yet, or you can go back to some closed/deleted ACS questions, massively improve them, and reopen the question. Use real-world biology and physics as the basis for why and how the organism of your choice would evolve and what its anatomy would probably be like. Do this and everyone wins! Submitters can make quality questions and get quality responses to their ideas, and voters will see far less low-quality submissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So come on @Willk, @L.Dutch, @o.m., @John, @Nosajimiki, @Starfish Prime, @LSerni, @Monty Wild, @Daron, @HDE 226868, @JBH, @sphennings, @Keizerharm and anyone else. Take the ACS challenge! I will even bounty all high-quality submissions that get made by high reputation users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96931" LastEditorUserId="96931" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T17:55:54.547" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T17:55:54.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-01T20:35:44.463" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have perfectionism anxiety about my creature design and world building, which sometimes come in attacks that compel me to ask a question on here that was dumb or obvious to me later. At least three are iterations of my hyperfixation character asking if it looks physiologically sound. These are embarrassing to me and make my social anxiety with using this site worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few other questions are based on me misunderstanding some concept making my question unanswerable. With at least one I made a mistake which resulted in me asking the question wrong, which I can't edit enough to fix because it would invalidate the answer I got before I realized my mistake (I'd like to rewrite that one entirely as well but it might be deemed too similar if I try with a new post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do to get rid of these old questions I have issues with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to previous iterations of my beloved:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/197235/is-this-creatures-proportional-head-size-feasible&quot;&gt;Is this creature&amp;#39;s proportional head size feasible?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/206594/how-to-support-a-large-head-on-a-horizontally-attached-neck&quot;&gt;How to support a large head on a horizontally attached neck&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/218400/are-this-creatures-proportions-realistic&quot;&gt;Are this creature&amp;#39;s proportions realistic?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Glad to see how far I've come. Still kind of miss the wide salamander face; A good mix of cute and creepy, but the hyena inspired skull makes more sense now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay I've looked back on some others and they weren't as bad as I remembered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68865" LastEditorUserId="68865" LastEditDate="2022-08-04T22:23:46.550" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:55:19.993" Title="Can I get rid of dumb perfectionism anxiety attack fueled questions? (And other question fixes)" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9848" CreationDate="2022-08-01T20:57:52.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, and by extension every other site on the network was designed to be a repository for high quality answers. Once a question has at least one answer, it is no-longer able to be deleted by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to discourage answerers by the possibility of their hard work getting removed or invalidated. There isn't a mechanism to delete or remove old questions that you do not like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest not worrying about it. Unless you're actively being disruptive (which you aren't) no-one cares about the occasional closed, or poorly received question. In fact even if not worded the best someone could come along later and still benefit from the answers your questions have gathered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to ask a similar question to one you've already asked, you need make it clear, that your question is not a duplicate. It is insufficient to tell us that your question is not a duplicate. You must actually write a question that is not a duplicate. This could be an excellent use for the sandbox. We can help you workshop your question so that it gets you the information you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-08-01T21:21:31.637" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T21:21:31.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-04T03:27:49.237" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the other SE sites have some real formatting wizardry going on: chess allows for move by move playback in the post, others have video embedding features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not all posts on WB would necessitate seeing something like a map, it would be an interesting way to take the direction of development of this site. The point stands that &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; is in the name. I'm imagining some kind of open source tool that is easy to work with, design and embed. Can show planet-scale or zoomed in versions. This way the text within questions won't have to be so exhaustive; everyone could see where there is water, trees, mountains, ect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, looking at our most popular tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; and so forth, maps don't seem to be a good fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps something more general, like wireframes or blueprints? I think there is an open CAD-like google sketch service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, and I realize I'm being cripplingly naive here, but maybe we could have wireframes &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; maps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32966" LastActivityDate="2022-08-21T05:07:29.790" Title="Inhouse widgets?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2022-08-04T03:50:19.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a good business case here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding is not the most frequented community in SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;map related questions are not the most frequently asked questions on WB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting developers work into something that is scarcely used in a relatively small community can hardly make it to the top of any sprint list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T03:50:19.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2022-08-04T04:07:06.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I think any widget that enhances the experience of both querent and respondent in this forum ought to be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Video embedding looks like a natural -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/234630/37029&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; is case in point!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Audio embedding sounds like it should be a good idea as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something that allows images to be zoomed in and out within the frame might be nice as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since you mention formatting, we could probably do with some nice templates (ACS, looking at you!) and some advanced formatting features that would improve the aesthetics and readability of our forum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-08-21T05:07:29.790" LastActivityDate="2022-08-21T05:07:29.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9848" CreationDate="2022-08-04T04:31:08.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anxiety &amp;amp; Perfectionism are perfectly understandable conditions in the worldbuilder. If you think you've got it bad, just imagine how anxious all your respondents are to give you the best answers they can! Loads of research, time spent poring over your questions, time spent making illustrations, multiple edits. I dare say there are respondents here who work far harder on their job than their querents!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we can't delete queries once they have answers. That's because you're no longer the sole owner of the enterprise! You've now got a partner (or several) and it's their work that is being showcased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in looking at the ten or so questions you've got here in WB (at least one of which I answered), I see no queries that are negatively received, none are closed and downvotes are few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to Do:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Obviously, deleting the queries is out of the question. They all have answers and that's what's important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other partial solutions that present themselves are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revise what you think is a problematic question as best you can keeping in mind that you can't invalidate an answer. All this means is making some clarifying edits --- make your point &amp;amp; your question clearer rather than change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take what you've learned and ask new queries. Build upon the work you've already got and focus your questions better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might also consider engaging in some self-help or therapy in order to work on overcoming the excess anxiety and perfectionism. I certainly get where you're coming from with both of these problems. Stressing yourself out over a very short and ultimately inconsequential piece of writing isn't healthy. Save that for your major texts!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T04:31:08.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9816" CreationDate="2022-08-08T21:06:17.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't vote so have to write it as A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This category of q's was always - lazy as fuck, and low effort, low quality, low value for WB as a place for authors in a sense of reuse in a sense of quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting from 'anatomically correct' - like - butter butter butter - wtf it should mean, I guess everyone has its own opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact most of them pass - is annoying for sure, especially when you see people have fun there, but reasonable tech questions, where one not necessarly can suck an answer from a finger, are closed faster than one can count 1,2,3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or questions like that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/234037/what-biological-functions-robots-will-never-be-able-to-replicate-no-matter-how-a&quot;&gt;What biological functions robots will never be able to replicate no matter how advanced robotics become?&lt;/a&gt;  (not the best for sure, but fresh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not worse than some anatomically correct half burn match. If one does not know the difference between high tech robot and a human then - do not get involved, do not vote, do not answer - ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same as I do for that anatomically correct stuf - add the tag to ignore and see it never again. So that inro of @Tortliena is very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need to reduce fun, people have it - okay, let them, the annoying part is that tech stuff gets trown under the bus regulrly, partially for reasons it often harder to creatively suck an answer from nothing, sometimes it harder to understand the question, sometimes it require some specific set of knowledge to intrperet the question in a meaningful way etc. Unfortuntly this is a fundamental problem, changing it may be possible, but it does not require reshaping in this way, and this way not a good way for WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20315" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T21:06:17.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-09T13:36:42.587" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came here for a different reason, but was welcomed with an error as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YHbvv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YHbvv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25129" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:50:34.897" Title="This Meta has an invalid HTTPS certificate" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-09T19:08:36.800" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the worldbuilding stack accept questions relating to a single character. For example, how they might have gotten a specific injury, or what might have lead to them having a certain type of personality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the wrong ace to ask this, is there a right place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93858" LastEditorUserId="93858" LastEditDate="2022-08-10T08:38:11.320" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:43:29.317" Title="Does building a character's backstory count as world building?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9861" CreationDate="2022-08-09T20:01:23.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the action of a character in a story are off topic. It doesn't matter if they have happened or they are yet to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-08-09T20:01:23.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9861" CreationDate="2022-08-09T23:43:48.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's unlikely to be well-received&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Character development is intrinsical to story writing, therefore it's unlikely such questions will be well-received, and likely to be closed for being either opinion-based, story-based or plain off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take your example questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How they might have gotten a specific injury?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is about a character's backstory : There are almost always multiple, perfectly acceptable reasons to have one injury, with some crazy stories behind it which depends always on the story narrator and sometimes the character, too. Therefore choosing one is up to one's discretion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What might have lead them to have a certain type of personality?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An individual can have a wide array of equally valid (read opinion-based) events leading to any behavior. For instance, I almost got drown once, it's still memory-anchored but I don't fear swimming either (even though I'm lawfully awful at it ). Others in the same situation might develop long-lasting traumas however. Or just laugh at it, I don't know; it's their own personal adventure!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Extending the initial topic just a bit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single character's mind is off-topic, but you still might see questions about psychology here or there. These questions can be on-topic, but the butter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to topics about physics or biology, they are really not easy to write; Both askers and answerers tend to confuse a single character's psychology and what happens on the mind of all society's members. You can tell that regularly extremely stressful situations leads more often to post-traumatic stress syndroms, but you cannot ever reasonably tell if your hero(ine) will have PTSD because of stress : a statistic about one individual is just too inaccurate, and many individual factors prevent from predicting the result at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add in a general &amp;quot;fuzziness&amp;quot; in both words used and results which tends to make such kind of question unclear or feel unspecific. There's more detail about these issue &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8312/why-does-wb-se-treat-social-sciences-as-non-existent&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but point is, if you want to ask about the psychology of a society's component, you should slide your thumb on your keyboard 7 times to get the time to think carefully on your question. And ask in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; beforehand, people should be able to tell you how to make it better if they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-08-10T00:07:39.897" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T00:07:39.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9861" CreationDate="2022-08-10T02:24:08.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Asking the Wrong Question the Right Way&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Tortilena says: &lt;em&gt;Character development is intrinsical to story writing, therefore it's unlikely such questions will be well-received, and likely to be closed for being either opinion-based, story-based or plain off-topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking, this means you need to learn how to ask this vorboten sort of question in a way that doesn't violate WB.SE rules. I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting you come up with a way to circumvent rules, but rather come up with a way to view the topic from a different direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As asked, and as Tortilena and L. Dutch answer, your query is one that focuses on narrative. We don't do narrative here. So, what do I mean by looking at this from a different direction? Quite simple!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How the character might have gotten a specific injury?&lt;/strong&gt; Rather than focussing on the off topic narrative aspect, you should keep one or two skeletal narratives in mind, but ask about the world elements that come into play during those narratives. For example, in stead of focusing on the story of a woodman who injures his leg after a surprise encounter with a traveller from a different world; focus in stead on the underlying elements. Keep in mind the characters you'd like to interact while asking questions about travel between worlds, magic, technology, etc. When the answer to your question about magic or interplanetary travel comes in, you'll be able to write the narrative of how your character got the injury without asking us how they got the injury. You'll know how they got the injury because in the end, &lt;em&gt;you asked us the right question the wrong way!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What might have lead to the character having a certain type of personality?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, rather than asking us an opinion based query about picking one something from a list of somethings, keep in your mind a general arc that will answer the question you have about the character, while asking us questions about underlying principles of the world. For example, personality traits might arise from an individual's experiences, right? So rather than asking that question, keep in mind that you want to focus on experience, but ask questions about the psychology of experience and the biochemistry of the brain. Asking questions about the physical, psychological and spiritual natures of your fictional character's race will allow you to fill in the blanks. Your question about a character's personality shall be answered simply by gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms by which your character functions. Again, you'll know how they got their personality because &lt;em&gt;you asked the right question in the wrong way!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-08-10T15:40:30.127" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T15:40:30.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9861" CreationDate="2022-08-15T15:43:29.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep the following in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding (on-topic) is the creation and consistent use of descriptions and rules governing a fictional world of your own creation wherein an infinite number of stories can be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding (off-topic) is the application of worlbuilding rules and descriptions to a specific character, circumstance, or story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a legitimate argument that the creation of the proverbial Non-Player Character (NPC) could be part of Worldbuilding. Such a character is a &amp;quot;fixed piece&amp;quot; in the world. However, we've deemed it impractical to try and identify a difference between an NPC that wouldn't make choices and is basically just window dressing for the story and a principal character that would make choices. The closer you get to an individual, the harder it is to justify backstory descriptions as Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, there is no Storybuilding stack. It's been considered many times, but storybuilding is so far outside Stack Exchange's original intent that we're all sure it'll never get past &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange bills itself as a place where people can find the one and only best answer to a question. Wholly objective and wholly defined. Worldbuilding is intrinsically imaginative and we tread the boundary of Stack Exchange's guiding principles. We can exist because when one fully focuses only on worldbuilding, there really is just one best answer for their problem and that answer really is objective in nature. The problem we regularly face is that people intermix worldbuilding with storybuilding or, worse, are looking to brainstorm to avoid writer's block (storybuilding). This is why we have such a love/hate relationship with list questions. But that's another discussion for another day.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:43:29.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9859" CreationDate="2022-08-15T15:50:34.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This Stack and its meta site are but one of a galaxy of Stacks in the Stack Exchange network. Questions and issues about the network (security certificates are a network problem) belong on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, not here. Trust me, nobody who can do anything about that haunts these halls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While we all wish computers were perfect and got things done in the correct order all the time, they aren't and don't. Security certificates expire. I didn't see that error when I logged on to answer your question, so it's obviously been resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The world will not come to an end because a site you frequent and trust has a disruption with their security certificate. In fact, the site is still quite well protected. You're simply being warned that the certificate itself has become questionable — just in case it matters. An expired certificate does not mean the site is suddenly vulnerable to viruses or other forms of attack. There be no zombies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:50:34.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9848" CreationDate="2022-08-15T15:55:19.993" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a fan of the &amp;quot;never invalidate answers&amp;quot; policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's your question, not the Stack's. If you realize that you need to improve the question, please do so! If people complain that you've invalidated answers — politely ask them to jump in the lake. I've actually been told by people that the time invested in an answer somehow, magically, burdens me, the person who posted the question. Baloney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Respondents do not have more authority over your question than you do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it would be polite of you to post a comment on answers that became invalidated explaining what you did and why you had to do it and inviting them to reconsider their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T15:55:19.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-16T07:24:38.957" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42387/what-would-make-scientists-realize-they-were-on-a-flat-world&quot;&gt;What would make scientists realize they were on a flat world?&lt;/a&gt; still keeps getting votes and comments. I've long since concluded that some of them are spot on and my answer could be improved with better science and conditions for the answer to be true. So far, I've resisted because it has been accepted and so long ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short of it is that depending on the radius of the flat world, the air itself would at some point block most of the sunlight, causing the sun to appear to slowly fade the closer it gets to the horizon and making for a much shorter day. From a storytelling perspective this makes the answer less awesome, but more correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, people voted on the answer as is currently is it feels wrong to change the answer afterwards. On the other side, the science is incomplete if not wrong and that bothers both me and scientifically minded users, as evidenced by the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like some opinions on whether to go ahead or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14892" LastEditorUserId="14892" LastEditDate="2022-08-16T07:30:50.153" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T02:12:16.043" Title="Should I edit/improve my 6 year old but still being voted/commented on (accepted) answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2022-08-16T09:44:39.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Here, I think you can&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a personal viewpoint, peer pressure shouldn't prevent you from revealing new shines of truth, 'specially on something community-driven. But this is a personal opinion, not this community rules, hence I'll refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit privilege help page instead&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When should I edit posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do&#xA;so. Editing is encouraged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some common reasons to edit are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to correct minor mistakes or &lt;strong&gt;add addendums / updates as the post ages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, you aren't changing the core meaning of your answer (you still use dawns/sunsets to determine if the planet is flat), so adding an addendum could be a solution to your conundrum. Just tell this at the end explicitly this is a recent update of your answer (e.g. : &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;EDIT Aug. 2022 : I rethought on my answer and with my new knowledge I'd like to tell it's more subtle than what I intended/thought&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). Telling that in second thought -even if it's quite late ^^- your answer has some caveats to consider is much more often than not an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you happen to change the core meaning too much...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you just feel your answer is just plain bad and want to take a whole different approach at the question, for instance you want to talk about winds instead of sunsets in your answer. Then, I'm not so sure whether it's a good idea to edit it. Well, unless there's a very defavorable feedback on it&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it's going beyond &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;correcting minor mistakes or adding addendums&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and people who have voted up have done it because they genuinely think it's a (very) good answer, something you're not really sure your entirely new draft will improve. It also makes it harder for the asker to find what content they accepted -they need to look into answer's history-, if they happen to dig through their archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this doesn't mean the end. Instead, you can always write another answer with this different approach. While it's not removing the accepted/high-voted answer from the lot, it gives a counterweight, something people with the same issue will take the time to read. You can also add a comment redirecting to your new answer telling to look at your new solution, e.g. : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;My answer was written in 2016, and I think it's not as good as the new approach I've taken on today. You can find my new answer here (+link to answer).&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : ... Or if you feel very bad about it : I'd rather have someone happy than an answer to a question. But then deletion is perhaps better, perhaps.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T09:44:39.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2022-08-17T02:11:26.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There's nothing wrong with drawing a line, stating the word &amp;quot;EDIT&amp;quot; in bold face, then posting your improved answer after your original.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many ways folks on this stack take themselves too seriously. From a worlbuilding context, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with your current answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that isn't to say that other can't benefit from the other side of the discussion. From that perspective, leave the answer you have, draw a line underneath it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And continue the answer with your improvements. Thus, all are benefited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T02:11:26.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2022-08-17T02:12:16.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;YES&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the only really acceptable answer to this question, because SE is all about giving the best answer. If you've got new insight and new suggestions to make your answer better, I'd actually argue that you've got an ethical, if not a moral, obligation to improve your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do want to address your supporting concerns, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've resisted because it has been accepted and so long ago&lt;/strong&gt; --- Acceptance of an answer, as you should know by now, only means that the OP liked your answer well enough to give you the green checkmark. That's a token of appreciation from a happy querent to a respondent who did the work of research and creative answering. Well done good and faithful servant! It doesn't mean your answer is the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot;, only that it served the OP's purpose at the time. (An OP, I might add, who hasn't been active since 2016.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In my mind, people voted on the answer as is currently is&lt;/strong&gt; --- Yep. And I'd put a penny to a pound that most of them voted four, five or six years ago. No one puts a daily watch on an answer they voted on from four years ago on the off chance that an edit will cause them such inner turmoil that they'll pounce on you with a vindictive downvote. And after you edit it, people will continue to vote on your answer as it currently is! And guess what? Twenty or thirty years from now some WB user yet unborn might just come along with even better science, edit your answer and you'll still be voted on for the answer as it is!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it feels wrong to change the answer afterwards&lt;/strong&gt; --- It's not wrong, so stop beating yourself up! What's wrong is depriving WB users &lt;em&gt;from today, 16 August 2022, going forward&lt;/em&gt; from the benefit of new data and new insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A SUGGESTION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Given your hesitancy to edit, this is what I'd suggest you do. When you edit your answer, copy the answer you've currently got, then go down to the bottom and insert a couple HR codes to demarcate a separate section. Label that section &amp;quot;Original Answer from 2016&amp;quot; and paste the answer down below. Then, edit the upper section with all your new insight! This way you've preserved the original answer for historical purposes and have also fulfilled your SE obligation of editing to improve upon an old answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T02:12:16.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9874" CreationDate="2022-08-24T10:53:11.847" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the &amp;quot;custom filter&amp;quot; offers no such option. Is there another way I am missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I'd like to modify the list of questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; to only include questions that are not yet marked with &amp;quot;[closed]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user91641" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T14:45:28.360" Title="(How) Can I filter out closed questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9873" CreationDate="2022-08-24T13:21:07.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is described on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125235/how-to-search-for-closed-questions&quot;&gt;meta.se&lt;/a&gt; You can filter for only closed questions by adding &lt;code&gt;closed:1&lt;/code&gt; to your search terms. Conversely if you use the search term &lt;code&gt;closed:0&lt;/code&gt; you can search only for open questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by VLAZ there's documentation about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;advanced search options&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-08-24T14:45:28.360" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T14:45:28.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9873" CreationDate="2022-08-24T13:22:09.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is no way to exclude closed posts using a custom filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still use the site search for that. The search text needed is &lt;code&gt;is:q closed:no&lt;/code&gt; which will give you only questions which are not closed. The result can further be sorted by newest or by score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more filters and search options see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;the help centre article on searching&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T13:22:09.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9876" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-28T17:17:23.880" Score="0" ViewCount="1314" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/234929/how-can-i-distinguish-and-incorporate-my-skill-systems-with-each-other&quot;&gt;In a recent question&lt;/a&gt;, the idea of discussing worldbuilding in the context of game mechanics and litrpg things was discussed. KerrAvon2055 and sphennings stated that game mechanics were off limits for worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagreed, since litrpg is now very common for stories and worldbuilding, like He Who Fights Monsters, or The Completionist Chronicles, or Sufficiently Advanced Magic where game mechanics and ranks of powers are a core element of how worlds work, such as how in He Who Fights Monsters you rank up by fighting monsters from Iron to Bronze to Silver to Gold to Diamond with steps for each rank and the mechanics of each stage are important to the world and the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59924" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-09-21T17:27:27.650" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T17:27:27.650" Title="Are questions about game mechanics in litrpgs allowed on this site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2022-08-29T13:22:22.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect the problem is that many (maybe even &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt;) people don't know what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LitRPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LitRPG&lt;/a&gt; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a special kind of fantasy, where the game mechanics is fully visible to the characters and very much part of the world. The work doesn't have to be a game; it can be a conventional novel, or a movie or whatever. The defining characteristic is that the &lt;em&gt;characters&lt;/em&gt; are living and adventuring in a game-like world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare and contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conventional fantasy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: &lt;em&gt;The merchants we met said that whoever slays the dragon will get half the king's gold and his daughter for a wife.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: &lt;em&gt;What are we waiting for? Let's ride to the dragon's lair and do battle with it!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;NARRATOR: &lt;em&gt;And thus they mounted their trusty steeds and proceeded at a canter towards the barely visible mountains, to find the dragon and fight it to the death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;LitRPG fantasy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: &lt;em&gt;We are prompted that there is a dragon to be slain for 10,000 gold and 2 ranks status elevation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: &lt;em&gt;What are we waiting for? Let's use 5 transportation points and move to the dragon's lair!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: &lt;em&gt;We don't have 5 transportation points. We need to complete two quizzes to get them.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: &lt;em&gt;All right then, we do two quizzes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;NARRATOR: &lt;em&gt;And thus they proceeded to solve two quizzes. The first quiz was as follows: ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the LitRPG genre, the &lt;strong&gt;fictional&lt;/strong&gt; game mechanics is a fundamental part of the world. It is just as fictional as the other parts of the world. It does not have to a game mechanics which could actually be played in real life. It is just as fictional and fantastic as dragons, elfs, dwarfs and wizzards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fictional game mechanics, as any fictional element, might be only gradually known and understood by the characters; it can change in mysterious ways; it can &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; changed by the characters themselves; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastEditorUserId="29552" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T13:28:49.423" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T13:28:49.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2022-08-29T14:01:18.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR:&lt;/strong&gt; If you want help examining the impact of your game mechanics upon your fictional world ask away but questions of game design, should not be asked on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most topics can be embedded in a worldbuilding question. RPG mechanics are no exception. I could for instance say &amp;quot;In my world there exists a slack clone, what would the source code for that chat program look like?&amp;quot; I've successfully embedded a programming question within a worldbuilding question, but it's ultimately a programming question with the most tenuous relationship to building a fictional world. Similarly if you're asking us to construct mechanics for a game, the connection to worldbuilding is tenuous at best. You can select whatever mechanics you want and they'll be equally valid from a worldbuilding perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already reject embedding story questions. You can't salvage asking &amp;quot;What should my dark lord do?&amp;quot; by transforming it into a question of backstory &amp;quot;500 years ago what should my dark lord have done?&amp;quot; You're still asking about a story which isn't permitted on this site. Game mechanics share many of the same issues which importantly include not being about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you create your game mechanics asking about the consequences of them upon the world is something we should continue to support, but asking questions about what mechanics to create isn't something we should support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T14:01:18.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2022-08-29T20:57:06.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Asking about game-design can be on-topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the&#xA;world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, &lt;strong&gt;in short,&#xA;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire&#xA;universe&lt;/strong&gt; you want to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;From &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topic can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you ask about something related to the world you are currently building, it's on-topic. This &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; includes common disciplines like physics and biology, but also more unusual ones, including game-design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If your world is so tied to game rules -like an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;isekai&lt;/a&gt; or a Virtual Reality MMORPG world-, then it's very likely game-design will come into play, which in turn means that game mechanic issues can be found.&lt;/strong&gt; How can I keep the players' stats universal acrosss Earth companies's games? For a futurist VRMMORPG, how can you entice players to stop and not overexert their body through in game-mechanics only? If answered, these questions could help in creating a better, more immersive world for your reader/listener/player/spectator. This is also what can prevent from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXCo-InnpU&amp;amp;t=166s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;people to complain about the implausibility of a game world&lt;/a&gt; :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But why did you vote to close this question as off-topic, then?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite tricky for me to answer without feeling I'm obfuscating it, so please bear with me . When asking, you have to make clear you're creating, you're building a world. In other words, that the issue is one you're facing as a worldbuilder, not a theorical one as a biologist or a physicist. For instance, you can ask whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/21225/80336&quot;&gt;rumor of a sniper firing from space would hit its target&lt;/a&gt; could be ever true. It gives a world the issue can attach to, the question is directly bound to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, you shouldn't ask how much energy an anvil would have when it falls and hits the ground without describing anything else. If you have anvils litterally thrown out of the window in your world and they need a precise amount of power, then it is quite likely to be on-topic. But without any, most would consider as a pure physics question as few would see why people would drop anvils randomly and think casually about the exact energy on impact in the first place. &lt;strong&gt;To sum-up, it's advised to bring some basic worldbuilding context and relates it directly to the question you are asking to be understood as a worldbuilding issue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is where the limitation of game design lies. Unlike physics, biology, social sciences, ... which are grounded into a fixed reality -our reality-, game-design is -for a good part- rooted in the artist's mind, and some is invented/chosen as they see fit&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. This doesn't prevent one from being on-topic, but it makes things quite harder as this real-world discipline is blended with the world you're making. After all, both happens in one's mind. &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, it's very hard to make the difference between something designed and balanced from inside the world (on-topic) with something designed by you, the game-designer (pure game-design, so off-topic).&lt;/strong&gt; Starting with this confusion-inducing element is not ideal :/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I chose to close the question as off-topic. As it was only speaking of the world on game-mechanics terms, there was absolutely nothing I could hang on to distinguish the question as a worldbuilding one or as a question you could genuinely ask as a game-designer. So I just couldn't answer even with a bit of worldbuilding, only as a game-designer . To be reopened the asker needs to tell us about their world, how they blend it with the game rules; Here, I think it's more than advised to differentiate the world from the discipline it is soaked in, it is almost mandatory. Indeed, regardless if it's an isekai, lite-rpg, 4th wall-breaking videogame, can we really find a world in a tower of rulesets and game systems alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : This subjective choice implies questions which are more likely to be opinion-based than others. There are quite some traps with game design questions, actually .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T23:03:30.963" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T23:03:30.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2022-08-30T06:46:17.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Winged Ruling Class City Building?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/winged-humans&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;winged-humans&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;winged-humans&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;winged-humans-container&quot;&gt;winged-humans&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/culture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;culture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;culture-container&quot;&gt;culture&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/architecture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;architecture&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;architecture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;architecture-container&quot;&gt;architecture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my story, the ruling class/royalty are winged folks.  In this world there are non-winged humanoids and magic users as well.  I want the architecture to favor winged folks.  It has to be at a live-able level for everyone else, but just not nearly as convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The area I'm having trouble with is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The royalty has a palace on a floating island with waterfalls.  Below and around the floating islands are lower class homes/ranches/farms/towns.  Then there's also a city about the size of LA that's right on the coast of a large body of water.  This is where more wealthy/well known people live and spend time.  There’s also a lot of social gatherings held in the city for royalty/nobles to mingle with rich/powerful/famous city folk.  That city is the part I'm having the most trouble with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some details I have for the city so far:&#xA;The large body of water has magical water that raises/floats upward with certain weather/time of year/moon phases.  The city buildings are made of concrete/steel and some form of reinforced glass and thermal glazing to keep heat in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The buildings don’t often end up underwater, but sometimes when the water floats AND is rough, it can happen temporarily.  Some people want to build farther towards the water and even into it, but there’s pushback due to safety and wanting to leave the docks alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main way I’ve been able to think of the buildings catering to winged folk is them getting higher up living spaces/higher areas to socially gather, but I really want some sort of building shapes that would be convenient for winged folk to fly into different levels of buildings easily.  I've looked into social bird nesting, but a lot of it looks more like burrows/holes/nests in holes.  Also, the wingspan of winged folks varies a lot based on species, so entrances would probably favor a larger wingspan just in case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what kind of architecture would make a city more winged-person friendly while still following the general idea of tall skyscrapers?  This can include magic/other improbable architecture as long as it's at least somewhat possible to explain.  Even some sort of branching buildings or something?  Bonus points if it incorporates the fact that the city is on the coast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98114" LastEditorUserId="98114" LastEditDate="2022-09-20T08:57:50.813" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T08:57:50.813" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-12T15:55:07.110" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is a unique SE site in that, &lt;strong&gt;users often spend as much, if not more time, to craft and moderate questions than answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person that asks the question has to do &lt;strong&gt;research, formatting, moderating, answering comments and questions, and editing the question for clarifications&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a good, enjoyable, and clear question is difficult, and a lot of work. As a moderately experienced site user, I still have trouble every time I ask and maintain a new question! I'm not sure it's just an experience issue, either, as I've seen many users in the 40-100ks similarly struggling to evolve and maintain their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part that concerns me about this, however, is not just our moderately experienced users. It is the &lt;strong&gt;new users&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if any of you feel the same way, but I feel genuine pain when I see another &lt;em&gt;new hours-old user who has spent hours of hard work researching, calculating, and formatting a question,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;end up with many downvotes and getting their question closed&lt;/strong&gt; due to some potentially easy-to-fix mistake such as formatting/editing their question to meet our guidelines. &lt;sub&gt;To add salt to the wound, sometimes the answers for those questions are actually frame challenges, and have 3-10x the number of upvotes as the question itself. Ouch.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these new users never ask a question again. In my own case, the only reason I kept writing questions after multiple badly-written closed questions was because of the guidance of a few helpful old-hands of the site (Kudos to you!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually when I see cases like this, and the question is either salvageable, has actually put in effort, or has a fun idea with great potential, I will upvote and leave a comment with the necessary resources to fix their question. Maybe follow it and case a re-open vote once they've fixed it up, but this is the most I can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a reason we can't offer up bounties to the question askers, instead of just answers, as a form of encouragement or appreciation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that something heftier might give some new users the push they need to continue writing excellent questions for our SE. I want to be able to give bounties to users that spend the time and effort to fix their closed or downvoted question. Other times, some questions are inspiring and very crafty, bringing me a lot of enjoyment as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand if this is something limited by Stackexchange, but for our Worldbuilding SE, where questions often require high maintenance to evolve and keep at a high standard, I feel that bounties for questions might actually make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Relevant topic from Meta with a lot of support:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135469/bounty-like-facility-for-rewarding-excellent-questions&quot;&gt;Bounty-like facility for rewarding excellent questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some great points from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This feature request should be revisited now that there are a couple of SE sites (Code Golf and Puzzling) where being able to give a bounty to an excellent question would be a nice feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jaydles &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242712/how-can-se-sites-change-their-reputation-payout/242718#242718&quot;&gt;acknowledged&lt;/a&gt; that on certain sites the questions actually provide more value than the answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the underlying premise here: &lt;strong&gt;On many of our smaller sites, good questions are the single most important bottleneck to growing stronger communities.&lt;/strong&gt; And on a few more specialized sites, like Code Golf, questions actually take more work, and the askers are generating more value for the answerers than vice versa, which is the opposite of the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So I think that since questions seem to generally get fewer upvotes than answers (as well as those upvotes being worth half as much as answer upvotes), there should be ways to award exemplary questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think this suggestion might be particularly valuable for recognizing great questions in less-popular niche topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The problem with offering bounties on questions is it doesn't encourage any behavior from other users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but it allows a reward for examplary behavior. It provides acknowledgement and attention to exemplary questions, which is currently possible only via question upvotes - a system which is far from thorough. &lt;strong&gt;We always want to encourage writing great questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another source about the importance of awarding questions similarly to answers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/?_ga=2.63498413.388785955.1662296908-334194063.1659622421&quot;&gt;blog post about the change to increase question upvotes from 5 back to the original 10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly interesting points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Stack Overflow launched in 2008, we gave equal points to upvotes on answers and questions. &lt;strong&gt;Three years later, a decision was made to devalue upvote reputation on questions.&lt;/strong&gt; The idea was that this &lt;strong&gt;change would encourage people to focus on providing good quality answers rather than asking questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We can look back on this decision with the benefit of hindsight.&lt;/strong&gt; This decision may have been the right call then with the information we had at the time, &lt;strong&gt;but we have seen the effects it has had on our community. We reward people who give answers at a higher rate than people that ask questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a long time Stack Overflow community member I know, like many of you, that posting a good question is difficult! It requires thoughtfulness and an attention to how to best convey the issue you are having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We believe that both question askers and answerers are a vital part of our ecosystem.&lt;/strong&gt; We appreciate how much they have done to make this the largest store of technical Q&amp;amp;A in history, and we want to thank them for every contribution going back to the beginning of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68848" LastEditorUserId="68848" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T18:29:20.210" LastActivityDate="2022-09-28T04:35:05.543" Title="Is there a reason we can't give bounty-like facilities to questions on Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|bounty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9883" CreationDate="2022-09-12T18:07:28.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the stack exchange model &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;questions are merely the sand that forms the pearl&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot; of a quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incoming questions are a universal constant, all around us in countless billions. But answers — truly brilliant, amazing, correct answers — are as rare as pearls. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;questions are merely the sand that produces the pearl&lt;/strong&gt;. If we have learned anything in the last three years, it is that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you optimize for pearls, not sand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&amp;amp;A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to &lt;strong&gt;maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers&lt;/strong&gt;. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn’t matter if there are questions at all, does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this philosophy everywhere in the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Common VTC reasons. Every site closes questions that are unclear, too broad, too opinion based, off topic or duplicates, with the option to add additional custom close reasons as needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It costs reputation to downvote answers, but downvoting questions is free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strict requirements on what questions are permitted on s site, while the only requirements for answers are to answer the question, and be nice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ability for the community to close questions at 3000 rep, while deleting an answer requires users with at least 10000 rep, and scales with the popularity of the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a long time upvotes on questions netted you half the reputation of an upvote on an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at how bounties are described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’ve asked a good question, edited it with status and progress updates, and still are not receiving answers, you can draw attention to your question by placing a bounty on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their intent is to attract &lt;strong&gt;good answers&lt;/strong&gt; to a question. A gift of reputation to someone who asks a question will not attract better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're describing is not a bounty. A bounty is an incentive for some future behavior. What you're describing is a mechanism to reward users who ask good questions. It would need to be implemented across all of Stack Exchange. This has already been discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/137672/355346&quot;&gt;meta.se&lt;/a&gt; and rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, questions just aren't worthy of bounties. They're questions. They don't provide any factual information that would help others in the future. They're merely details to help others answer the question and a path for other users to find those provided answers, which are actually what helps them. This not-as-importance is already expressed by the half-gain of reputation on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T00:26:06.373" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T00:26:06.373" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-14T16:37:36.780" Score="3" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/235567/in-an-urban-fantasy-setting-why-would-a-magical-courier-be-hired-over-tradition&quot;&gt;Regarding this post.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially it was accused of being a &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; question, and unclear based on the phrasing &amp;quot;how would they stay in business. I edited the question to be more clear and ask &amp;quot;why would this courier be hired over traditional couriers.&amp;quot; The intent of the question being to gather ideas for why supernatural beings might hire this special service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still it is &amp;quot;brainstorming,&amp;quot; and to be frank I have no clue why this is even something against the rules. A good 80 to 90 percent of the questions on this Stack Exchange are &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; in some form or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a moderator of this Stack Exchange (who later closed my question, but I'll get to that) has some &amp;quot;brainstorming questions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/223632/a-symbiotic-bark-beetle-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/217698/can-a-naser-be-used-as-a-weapon&quot;&gt;Here, especially how it ends with &amp;quot;how?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/216839/parasitoid-wasp-targeting-humans-which-tissue-would-they-target&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;And more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this Stack Exchange is often used to brainstorm reasons to justify something in worldbuilding, why should it even be a rule in the first place? What is the intended purpose of this SE? Yes, I have read the documentation, but I still do not get the point against brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then later, despite editing my question to be more explicit in what it was asking -- &amp;quot;how would they stay in business&amp;quot; edited to &amp;quot;why would people hire them&amp;quot; -- it was still voted for closure and closed by the moderator whom I used for examples above -- for being &amp;quot;opinion based.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3894/should-i-flag-best-way-to-questions-involving-magic-as-opinion-based&quot;&gt;This question on meta&lt;/a&gt; mentions some questions that essentially do the same thing as my question, all of which were not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fiction is, literally, not real -- I do not see how questions on this site could be removed for being &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; unless they are critically too broad, which my question was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if there is a line to be drawn for questions that are too brainstorm-y, or too opinion-based, somehow, then it is very much not clear where that line is drawn &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; it is &lt;em&gt;selectively enforced.&lt;/em&gt; I do feel my question got closed just because I got sassy with the one accusing the question of being &amp;quot;brainstorming.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; can we not consider changing the rule, if the community tends against the rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65018" LastEditorUserId="65018" LastEditDate="2022-09-14T18:40:06.970" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T21:03:53.163" Title="Why is &quot;brainstorming&quot; in of itself against the rules -- why was my question closed as &quot;opinion based&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|opinion-based|rules|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2022-09-14T18:29:35.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchanges is an opinionated platform. It has been designed to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;strict about the questions that are permitted&lt;/a&gt; on a site. Certain categories of questions are prohibited sitewide. Important for this discussion is the prohibition on primarily opinion bases answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything not directly related to worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming questions are usually primarily opinion based, and tend to have many equally valid answers. Worldbuilding explicitly calls it out out as not suitable for this site in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question where any explanation is equally valid, such as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Why would a magical courier be hired?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; runs fowl of our restriction on questions with many valid answers. They have a royal monopoly, they're secretly spies they carry messages at a loss as a cover, and it's fashionable, are all equally valid answers. Looking at the 6 answers to your question, it's clear that there are many many more answers out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be enough individuals who are ignorant of or have chosen to ignore site policy, that it is disrupting the experience of new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unfortunate. Site policy, and site design is clear about what is and isn't permitted. Instead of participating in the moderation process, their ignorance, inaction, or deliberate interference, creates an inconsistent and confusing experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is predominantly moderated by the community. Moderators occasionally step in when community voting is insufficient. Problematic questions can easily get missed. &lt;strong&gt;Instead of complaining about inconsistent moderation, you can become part of the solution by participating in the process.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What can you do?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the expectation that everyone is familiar with site policy. Stack Exchange is opinionated about what features should be used for. Your intuition from other sites will mislead you. Learn and abide by the rules of the site. Just because you see someone else violating the rules does not mean that the behavior is permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Flagging&lt;/a&gt; is one of the first privileges you gain on this site. It is earned at only 15 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should flag questions that as-written &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;aren't suitable for this site&lt;/a&gt;. Questions that are too broad, subjective, unclear, duplicate, or off topic should all be flagged.  It's helpful to leave a comment explaining the issue and suggesting remedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because site policies evolve over time, and occasionally questions are missed by reviewers, we tend to leave old questions alone. However when a question becomes active, or is referenced in a discussion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5031/whats-the-point-of-flagging-putting-on-hold-years-old-questions/5032#5032&quot;&gt;it is our policy to close old questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should flag comments that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;aren't suitable for this site&lt;/a&gt;. Comments are intended to be used for suggesting improvements or requesting clarifications. Pay particular attention to answers in comments as these circumvent the normal upvote/downvote and review processes of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should flag any disruptive behavior. Mods can't be everywhere or see everything. They have tools to address problems that cannot be handled by the community. Leave a note for the moderators explaining why then need to take action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-09-14T18:36:32.180" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T18:36:32.180" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2022-09-14T20:52:18.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, your question seems to be asking to write your world intentions in your stead. Constraints and intentions are a huge part to one's artistic activity, and we can't either reasonably induce or create them for you. Not having these makes any answer equally valid and thus, opinion-based.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I feel confusion, so let me explain in details :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why intentions are (very) important ?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine, you're in a cab, and the driver asks you the existential question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Where do you want to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have several level of details you can give :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, you give the street and the number. They just set the GPS and go. Easy as the pie I've just eaten .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You know the place you want to go, for instance London's Westminster palace or Paris's railway station. There might be issues if the place is unclear -e.g.: Paris has several train stations-, but overall it's doable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you give no direction, the taxi driver will gently ask you why you're sitting in their car and will &amp;quot;emphasize&amp;quot; on how easy the passenger door can be opened and how fresh the air outside is. It's not their job to find the best location &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; want to be, after all .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking a question about your world follows the same idea, you being the passenger and us the cab drivers : There should be a direction to go forward to, otherwise we're forced to invent one in your stead, one that is likely to displease you.&lt;/strong&gt; From the outside, every answers then become equally valid, since everyone look at different locations, different goals to reach! And... Most likely none will help you really reach what you want, internally. &lt;strong&gt;This is not really helpful for anyone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the questions you linked, there's always a semblance of direction given :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/223632/a-symbiotic-bark-beetle-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am trying to design an alternative bark beetle which&lt;/strong&gt;, instead of damaging the tree, actually brings benefits to it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/217698/can-a-naser-be-used-as-a-weapon&quot;&gt;Well, the problem is that my research are funded by General Sivispacemparabellum, who is, to put it mildly, a tad allergic to pacific applications, and &lt;strong&gt;wants something which can be used as a weapon&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any use of the science-based tag and clear enough indication science-based answers are asked; The intention here is to be plausible -or better, possible- in regards to real-world science ⚛️.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my few questions, it's often very explicitly given in a list to avoid any mishap; If it's not, it's stated in the question itself. E.g. : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/201395/whats-the-safest-way-to-carry-and-throw-marble-sized-high-explosive-grenades&quot;&gt;What's the &lt;strong&gt;safest&lt;/strong&gt; way to carry and throw marble sized high-explosive grenades?&lt;/a&gt; (The main intention is &amp;quot;safety&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why constraints are useful?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constraints are a big helper in setting up the direction, because it's basically where you don't want to go, and by setting them you limit the directions one can take. To sit back in the cab, if your train is at noon and it's 11:30, the driver will take the shortest path to the train station so you don't miss it, but if you say you're a tourist and you have a good two hours before you leave, they might offer to take you next to some interest point and have some city guide talk instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constraints are defined both implicitly by the context and explicitly as goals :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm making a &lt;strong&gt;medieval world&lt;/strong&gt; : Context which implicitly tells we shall not use high-technology in the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/223632/a-symbiotic-bark-beetle-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;The effect &lt;strong&gt;has to&lt;/strong&gt; be proportional to the rate of infection: the higher the number of beetles in a tree, the higher the advantage it gains.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/217171/can-a-tunnel-be-hidden-from-acoustic-scanners?rq=1&quot;&gt;My robbers &lt;strong&gt;can only&lt;/strong&gt; access to common tools to break into the bank&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions which ask &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;does it&amp;quot;, it's often not enough, but it helps a lot people to sort what is or isn't possible to do in your world and limit the guesswork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid your question from being closed as &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, you should give enough details so that :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It tells us where you want to go. It's okay if you don't know &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; exactly you want to go, but we have to know where you want to be at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Less circumstance based, ie. you should add constraints and context. On a side-note, this is the reason some people choose to vote for being &amp;quot;story-based&amp;quot;, because circumstances are often seen as being &amp;quot;story&amp;quot;, rather than world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel it's very hard to give any of those to your question, as adding an intention like &amp;quot;looking for the most profitable reason to use those couriers&amp;quot; already gives a very good start of an answer to the base question. In other words, it seems like you are intrinsically asking for intentions, rather than trying to fit two world elements together or an element and an intention together. Perhaps adding those could work, but it would need some efforts both in the way it is asked and the content which is asked for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T20:52:18.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2022-09-15T23:47:20.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's All in the Writing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think the basic answer to your underlying problem is simply a matter of you writing a query whose form is not a good fit for Worldbuilding. My plan here is to pick out a couple issues I noticed in your Meta query and address those and then discuss the difference between wide open or ordinary brainstorming and how we do brainstorming here in Worldbuilding. Lastly, I'll try to help give some ideas for how you can turn your ordinary brainstorming query into one that fits WB.SE expectations a little better! Maybe even get your question reopened again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of the question being to gather ideas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously. &lt;em&gt;Compulsory Notice&lt;/em&gt;: SE is not an idea gathering service. SE is, literally, a forum where querents ask a focused question and get the correct answer to their question. &amp;quot;How can I get XYZ output in ABC app in PRS format?&amp;quot; --- &amp;quot;You do it by 123ing the ABC&amp;quot;. Q&amp;amp;A. That's the SE model. Worldbuilding is different, by proud self declaration in that we don't deal strictly in factual things. Here, our questions tend to want XYZ output where ABC and PRS don't exist, don't function or and nowhere near magical enough! Even so, we aren't a free-for-all idea generating service. We do have to adhere, as best we can, to the underlying model and Rules that SE has established for us. Your question was closed as opinion based, in my opinion, because &lt;strong&gt;you wrote your question as an ordinary brainstorming question rather than as a WB.SE brainstorming question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still it is &amp;quot;brainstorming,&amp;quot; and to be frank I have no clue why this is even something against the rules. A good 80 to 90 percent of the questions on this Stack Exchange are &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; in some form or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have just discovered the fact that WB is a little different from the ordinary SE forums. And the truth is this: all of our queries are, in fact, &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; in some form or other. I'd argue that you're experiencing this sense of disjoint, this sense of &amp;quot;why am I being singled out&amp;quot;, because, again, &lt;strong&gt;you wrote your question wrong&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a moderator of this Stack Exchange (who later closed my question, but I'll get to that) has some &amp;quot;brainstorming questions: Here Here, especially how it ends with &amp;quot;how?&amp;quot; Here And more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't compare yourself with others! You make yourself look like a high school footballer whining about why he isn't being paid fifty million to throw a ball around. (But I'll get to that!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this Stack Exchange is often used to brainstorm reasons to justify something in worldbuilding, why should it even be a rule in the first place? What is the intended purpose of this SE? Yes, I have read the documentation, but I still do not get the point against brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we've gotten to the point where you will learn why this forum works the way it does. The simple fact is that brainstorming is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not against the rules here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Nor are opinions. What &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; against the rules here is how you, the querent, go about your brainstorming! I can see that you've got an understanding of the contradiction that is WB.SE --- a Q&amp;amp;A forum that invites and uses brainstorming as its basic tool, yet still still operates within the single strictest Q&amp;amp;A framework on the Net!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question you should be asking is not why brainstorming is against the rules, because it's not, but rather, how can I brainstorm within the rules of WB.SE? In other words, &lt;strong&gt;how can I write my question in such a way that it invites brainstorming yet does not break the SE ruleset as implemented in this forum?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you compared yourself to one of the mods, I'm just going to point out that L. Dutch's question was not closed for being opinion based or open ended or for &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; simply because L. Dutch knows know to write a question (reasonably well)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the third query you linked to (parasitic wasps targeting essentially humans), we see that the OP gave us three out of the four classic parts of a good WB question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduction: A bit of exposition, a broad net to get our attention, a description that focuses us on the specific problem. Here, L. Dutch talks about the wonderfully gross concept of an insect that lays eggs inside a living incubator from which the adults emerge in comically disgusting Space Balls diner scene fashion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Description of Knowns: list of key points of facts that the OP already knows, yet has a question about. The OP here lists several pertinent aspects of the fictional world or a specific part of that world he's asking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question: What it says on the box. The marquee query and the more descriptive query in the body of the question match up and are focused in nature. &lt;strong&gt;The problem I am having is finding a suitable target tissue&lt;/strong&gt;. I bolded this, because this is where L. Dutch went right and you went wrong!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criteria: The fourth part of a good query is, I think, viewed by many as optional. It's really not. This section is where the OP should have laid out the criteria by which he would judge any answer as being good or fitting. It helps us give him useful answers; it helps helps him brainstorm ideas that will fit within the framework of his fictional world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah! I said the word brainstorm! As you can see from the six answers, we got essentially five radically different tissue types for the bug to target. That was successful brainstorming only because of how the OP worded the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at yours!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right off the bat, you're asking a &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; question. This is a problem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;why questions seek responses that address &lt;strong&gt;cause, reason, or purpose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; all of which essentially boil down to motives or thought processes or choices of individuals or corporates and are thus &amp;quot;story based questions&amp;quot;. I would have chosen that rationale to close your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A point in your favour is that you give us a solid if succinct introduction, that is, your premise. I find your premise interesting, and that's largely why I'm helping you here in Meta --- if you edit your brainstorming question so that it fits our requirements, I would love to be the first one to vote to reopen it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that you made an attempt to give us some knowns, but I'm not really sure how they fit with your question. I mean, it's interesting, highly entertaining and possibly noteworthy that an insufficiently trained courier might die on the job, I'm just not sure where you're going with that, or how I might want to work that into an answer that would be both entertaining and useful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do expand upon your query a bit, but it's still essentially a why question and thus inviting of any and all opinions. While I have never been opposed to opinion based queries, there's a difference between I want to do this, that and the other given the following constraints and what colour should my faction's symbol be.  Can you see how we nuance &amp;quot;opinion&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot; into different levels of saturation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, you did nothing to reign in our brainstorming and our opinionising by giving us any kind of guidelines. So, essentially, I could write &lt;strong&gt;Because the magical couriers are all hot girls with brilliant violet eyes and prominent boobs; while the muggle couriers are not&lt;/strong&gt; as an answer and it would satisfy your question as well as any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do about it!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you know that brainstorming is not only not against the rules but encouraged, I think all you really need to do is edit your question. I'd suggest not asking a why question and perhaps narrowing the focus to some aspect of the customer's business, for example, on how the magical courier might benefit their business. Second, I think it would be helpful to offer some description of what you mean by &amp;quot;magical&amp;quot; in this context, some description of the nature of the world itself, perhaps some description of how the magical courier works. And lastly, give us respondents some sense of purpose! Give us a sense of what your actual worldbuilding problem is and also what criteria you're looking for in an answer. Like, &amp;quot;a good answer would touch on the following customer needs.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2022-09-16T07:08:42.897" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T07:08:42.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-16T16:36:06.523" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to ask questions on Worldbuilding for an ARG (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alternate Reality Game&lt;/a&gt;) that I'm creating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98439" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2022-09-21T17:45:19.507" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T17:45:19.507" Title="Are ARG-related questions allowed?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9889" CreationDate="2022-09-16T23:24:22.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It depends.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have any particular prohibitions on asking worldbuilding questions related to an ARG. However, like any other Stack Exchange site, questions need to be more than topically adjacent to be permitted. The standard requirements for any Stack Exchange still apply. A question needs to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not be a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be about building a fictional world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be clearly asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not be too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not be too opinion based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a custom close reason for questions about building a story, or about the actions and decisions of a character or organization. While we don't have a custom close reason, questions about 3rd party worlds, i.e. any world that you yourself didn't build, are considered to not be about world&lt;strong&gt;building&lt;/strong&gt; for the purposes of this site. You can read more about the specifics by searching meta, or visiting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I determine if my question about worldbuilding for an ARG is appropriate?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two common problems I've seen from other questions related to games are; asking about game design, and mechanics, instead of about the world of the game, and asking for brainstorming, or idea generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Game design and mechanics are off topic for this site. If you want to thematically incorporate the rules of your game into your world, we can help with that, as long as the focus is on the game world. If a valid answer to your question need to include novel mechanics for your game or modifications to existing mechanics, rather than treating the mechanics as a fixed quantity, your question is off topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're also not here to build your world for you. Brainstorming and idea generation are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;explicitly called out in our help center&lt;/a&gt; as inappropriate for this site. The more specific your question, and the smaller the possibility space of valid answers the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As long as your question is otherwise suitable for this site, the fact that it's related to an ARG should not be an issue.&lt;/strong&gt; If you're still unsure whether your question is appropriate, you can use our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, as Tortliena suggested to get feedback on a post before posting it to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T23:24:22.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9889" CreationDate="2022-09-20T22:40:25.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're allowed to ask for help developing your world. You are not allowed to ask for help developing your game.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an important distinction between the game and the world and it's not always obvious. For example, you might ask (and someone once did ask) what sounds the player should hear to indicate a particular world event is occurring? Such a question is actually off-topic because even though it sounds like a question about the world, it's actually a question about game mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the rule of thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We help you create and consistently use rules governing an imaginary world of your own creation wherein an infinite number of stories may be told (or games played).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not help you write stories or build games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In your case it's a bit more difficult, because ARGs are fictional stories, not fictional worlds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the link you provide we learn the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: on this Stack, &amp;quot;alternate reality&amp;quot; means the Real World with changes in the underlying physics rule set. &amp;quot;Alternate history&amp;quot; is the Real World with changes in the underlying cultural rule set. If either of those are what you're trying to achieve, we can help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while we do allow Real World questions on this site, those questions are expected to be in the context of developing and consistently using the rules of an imaginary world. Thus, it's reasonable to ask about fictional interplanetary space travel from the perspective of Real World physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not acceptable to ask a Real World physics question with a Real World application that would be as easily asked on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a potential show stopper for you. Because as I understand it, ARGs are games based in the Real World. All those rules are already developed and known — you just need to ask about them on the appropriate Stack. And since we don't answer story questions, you quite literally may not have a question you can ask here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T22:40:25.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2022-09-20T23:10:33.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to the other answers, Stack Exchange has a number of rules that are the basis for our no brainstorming policy. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … every answer is equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's why brainstorming is prohibited. You're asking for a list of equally valid answers on a service that has prohibited asking questions that lead to lists of equally valid answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you wish, you can stop reading here. The rest of this answer explains how we accommodate the need to ask specific questions that might lead to short-list answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be fair, we understand when limited lists are necessary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the most creative, imaginative and &lt;em&gt;chaotic&lt;/em&gt; Stack in the Stack Exchange universe. It's not at all like, oh, Stack Overflow where most questions are of the form &amp;quot;how do I programmatically achieve X?&amp;quot; which will result in a limited list of possibilities and a very practical &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; that can actually be associated with a &amp;quot;best practice.&amp;quot; Yeah... don't we wish that were consistently true here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In truth, it's not that uncommon for a specific question to result in answers that provide multiple options. Is this brainstorming? No, and here's why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We insist that Stack Exchange's rules be followed. Thus, some time ago, I started cataloging &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6130/40609&quot;&gt;question types&lt;/a&gt;. An in that list are two types that have been unofficially accepted generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need an on-topic  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, Stack Exchange also has another rule. From that same page we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We take that phrase, &amp;quot;open-ended&amp;quot; insanely seriously. If you can...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a list of limitations, restrictions, and conditions that scope your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain how you will judge a best answer by providing insight into your goals, expectations, and reasons for asking the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resolve as many of your story dependencies as you can (failing to do that is a VTC reason in its own right, BTW).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you've asked a question that meets the expectations of Stack Exchange. You're no longer brainstorming, you have s specific problem to solve that happens to have multiple solutions that meet your specified criteria. In this case, it's no different than one user on Stack Overflow offering three possible solutions that could just as easily be offered as individual answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And that's as close to brainstorming as we're willing to go.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for the record, we fully admit that it would be better for everyone to stick to one option per-answer so that the voting can reflect a &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; rather than a &amp;quot;most complete&amp;quot; answer. But, it can be difficult to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;herd cats&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One of the many differences between worldbuilding and storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; we also read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an electrical engineer. EEs don't brainstorm about how to build a circuit. We brainstorm about how or why a circuit may be used. But we do not brainstorm about how to build the circuit. We ask &lt;em&gt;specific questions&lt;/em&gt; about how to achieve &lt;em&gt;specific goals&lt;/em&gt; based on &lt;em&gt;known restrictions, limitations and conditions&lt;/em&gt; relating to the circuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, circuit = world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're brainstorming, you're not worldbuilding. You're storybuilding. You're worried about how your story will develop and you're trying to force your world to conform to your story. And that's simply not what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Infinite list questions are a sure sign that the querent has not yet figured out how to disassociate their world from their story. But we require that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One last thing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hate the &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; VTC reason. We have NO control over it. We have NO control over the text used to describe it. Obviously, any question tagged &amp;quot;Magic&amp;quot; is opinion-based by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kind of...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, we're here to help you develop the &lt;em&gt;rules of your world.&lt;/em&gt; From the perspective of rules, it doesn't matter if we're talking about magic or physics. &amp;quot;Opinion-based&amp;quot; reflects the &amp;quot;every answer is equally valid&amp;quot; prohibition. If the querent can't explain why their answer is better than all the others, then it's just an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not they can make that argument is always based on whether or not &lt;em&gt;you, the querent&lt;/em&gt; provided enough information (see the &amp;quot;finite list of things&amp;quot; discussion, above) for them to justify the choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please don't misunderstand &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; and I beg you not to complain about it. &lt;em&gt;We're stuck with it.&lt;/em&gt; In the end, we have rules you're expected to follow. If you can explain how your question follows the rules, then whomever chose to VTC as opinion-based was wrong. If you can't....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-09-20T23:16:59.563" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T23:16:59.563" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9883" CreationDate="2022-09-20T23:52:09.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Love your idea, impossible to implement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties are part of Stack Exchange. What you're proposing would be a network-wide change. Based on my own experience over on Meta.stackexchange.com, this won't fly at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But your idea is also unrealistic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a number of behaviors here that get in the way of new user enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We're not fans of people who break the &amp;quot;mindless social fun&amp;quot; prohibition in the Help Center. There are plenty of people who use this Stack and have fun using it, but pretty much everyone who's just here to be here ends up causing us more problems than they solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a policy asserting that changes to questions that invalidate answers are verboten. I personally &lt;em&gt;disagree with this policy&lt;/em&gt; which is contrary to SE's encouragement to edit questions to make them better. But, there it is. Combine this with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a fair number of users on this Stack who will answer &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; as quickly as they come across the question. Which means it doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; how much time we try to give new users, for all practical purposes, they're in the deep end of the pool from the moment they step in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this fair? No. Can we do anything about it? No. Is it bad that we can't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone here gets the truth that down voting and closing questions will always be taken personally, always hurt, and always turn people away. &lt;em&gt;But they have a purpose.&lt;/em&gt; They are both the most effective and the fastest way to &lt;em&gt;help the new user become more proficient.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing the question and closing it quickly is the only possible way to help improve a question before that first answer is posted and it's no longer possible to significantly improve the question. One suggestion I heard that's better than yours is imposing a no-answer time period allowing us to help new users improve questions before answers roll in. (a) Network wide solutions accommodating the unique needs of Worldbuilding won't fly. (b) Hoping we'll all choose to abide by such a rule is grossly unrealistic. (c) People have a nasty habit of answering in comments. And (d) It's not our software. It's Stack Exchange's software. Sometimes it's our job to meet their expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The down votes indicate that all that research you're talking about in your post, above, &lt;em&gt;didn't actually happen.&lt;/em&gt; Frankly, I dispute the blanket statement, &amp;quot;who has spent hours of hard work researching, calculating, and formatting a question.&amp;quot; I've been on this stack too long to believe that statement represents more than 1% of new users. New users who meet that definition are celebrated! Lauded! Congratulated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most new users don't do any research. I've closed questions with the results of a ten-second Google search showing them the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most new users don't calculate anything. This is just a specialized case of the previous bullet. I can't count the number of times a poorly developed question came in tagged &amp;quot;Hard Science.&amp;quot; Or, worse, tagged both &amp;quot;Science Based&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Science Fiction&amp;quot; because your hard-working new users didn't bother reading the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And just an hour or two ago I reformatted yet another new user's wall-of-text question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely appreciate the plight of new users. Not surprisingly, I was once a new user myself on this and a number of other Stacks. Like most new users, I didn't take the tour seriously and didn't read the Help Centers of any of the Stacks. I learned the hard way by being told I did things wrong and having my questions down voted and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also lived through it. Every stack has its own culture and with rare exception that culture has been built up over years of experience. Nothing is stopping new users from carefully reading through the Tour or carefully reading through the Help Center before asking their first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But they often don't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Real Life when you break the rules, you go to jail&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have rules. We try to work with new users, but I've had new users argue with me over the improvement changes I made. I've been ignored. I've dealt with new users who wrote their questions &lt;em&gt;then went to bed&lt;/em&gt; and got online 12-14 hours later to a closed question and twenty comments begging for clarifications. I've given short improvement suggestions and lengthy improvement suggestions. I've pointed out rules including links to the Help Center only to have new users argue with me over why the rules shouldn't apply to them. I've had new users look me straight in the proverbial eye and tell me their crappy question met every rule and expectation. I've explained what they should have done in answers or pointed out the assumptions I had to make because they didn't provide details. I've even had new users complain that they intentionally didn't &lt;em&gt;and wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; provide details because they were looking for a larger array of answers (violating the brainstorming/open-ended rules). And I've dealt with new users who didn't want a question answered, they wanted a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish all new users invested the hours you think they do creating new questions. Most don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T23:52:09.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2022-09-21T03:11:23.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This little-read and little-voted-upon post deserves a LOT more attention than it received&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring our 3rd-party/commercial world rule for the sake of this example,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; there's a clear line between the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Off-Topic:&lt;/em&gt; Questions asking how to develop game mechanics or player interfaces as found, for example, in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dnd.wizards.com/products/rpg_playershandbook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungeons &amp;amp; Dragons Player's Handbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On-Topic:&lt;/em&gt; Questions about world rules in the context of game mechanics such as TSR's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhawk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greyhawk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical standpoint, both of those documents contain &lt;em&gt;rules.&lt;/em&gt; The difference is that one contains rules that explain how someone plays the game and the other contains the rules for interacting with the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made, &lt;em&gt;what's the difference?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that game mechanics involve rolling dice, referencing charts, and can be applied to &lt;em&gt;any world.&lt;/em&gt; A perfect example is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unreal Engine&lt;/a&gt;, which can be used to implement pretty much any world, &lt;em&gt;but does not inherently impose restrictions on the expression of any world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not here to help people build their version of the Unreal Engine. We're here to help people create worlds they may later implement using the Unreal Engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And that's the difference.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had I seen the linked question while it was still open I would have voted to close it. It doesn't matter to me how integrated the &lt;em&gt;process by which players play the game&lt;/em&gt; is integrated into the world. If we open that particular pandora's box, then we'll be answering questions about how best to explain information that was once found in game play manuals to players via the world in the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That's not what we do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it's not worldbuilding. It's user experience building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how integrated the &lt;em&gt;process of playing the game&lt;/em&gt; the reality is that the two can always be completely separated. In fact, Nepene's linked question could have been asked by replacing the example of the fireball with a laser pistol, or a sword, or Jungian Psychiatry, or any other example, because the question was about how &lt;em&gt;players interact with the game&lt;/em&gt; and not the world. The rules may be intrinsic to how the game is played, but they're not intrinsic to the world at all. Once the question was answered, it could be universally applied to &lt;em&gt;any game Nepene chose to create because it's independent of the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we have a precedent?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinda yes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8384/40609&quot;&gt;Does the Stack wish to allow questions concerning the profession of worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And kinda no: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/207858/40609&quot;&gt;How would you make money by &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't answer questions about worldbuilding as a career, then I believe it's quite a stretch to allow game mechanics no matter how tightly bound to the world's design. If we were to allow questions about game mechanics, I believe (very strongly) that it would first require convincing the Mods that twelve votes constitutes community consensus toward an adjustment to the Help Center pages permitting career questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But until that and a similar modification is made on behalf of game mechanics, the simplest answer is that they just don't meet the Help Center rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about game mechanics are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, if there isn't another stack focused on developing game mechanics, that seems like it would be a shoo-in for &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And this is important because I'm going to advocate that we are NOT the place to develop the game mechanics. In other words, if you create your own game mechanics and then want help building a world around those mechanics, we're glad to help. But developing the game mechanics themselves... not our job.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T03:11:23.490" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9883" CreationDate="2022-09-28T04:35:05.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The incentive for posting a quality question is actually receiving answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll grant that it can be a lot of work to craft a good question, although in my experience that's just as true on most other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why go to the effort? &lt;strong&gt;Because it is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way to get answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is garbage, it will get down-voted, or even deleted. It will not attract answers, or will attract only frame-challenges and unhelpful garbage answers. It will almost certainly attract critical comments. Nothing good will come your way, that's for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The high cost of putting together a decent question means that I only bother with it when I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; need an answer. One consequence is that this community is spared having to deal with a bunch of my half-baked musings that I'd post only as thinly-veiled grabs for sweet internet points. &lt;sub&gt;omg i ♥ internet points gimme gimme&lt;/sub&gt; I suspect my experience is not unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, &lt;strong&gt;the core StackExchange mechanic provides the incentive&lt;/strong&gt;: you can get other smart and creative folks to solve your problem for you, but only if you prepare it to their liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, adding an extra incentive for crafting a good question seems like giving somebody an award for receiving an award. We might as well suggest making every question-upvote grant 20 points instead of 10. I think that's equally unnecessary, but it would at least be simpler than inventing some kind of bounty-adjacent mechanic. I generally have a very dim view of any proposal to heap favors upon the already-favored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not getting enough points for asking a good question&amp;quot; is only an issue for people whose goal is to farm points. I'd wager that in every case, the person who receives a satisfactory answer and clicks the green check mark leaves more than a little pleased with their experience here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19221" LastActivityDate="2022-09-28T04:35:05.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-29T03:02:46.613" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relevant test question on Main:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236175/40609&quot;&gt;Magic Systems: Advice for developing opposing forces&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The roll-over text for the Worldbuilding-Process tag reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about the process of creating a new world or changing and developing an existing one, as opposed to questions about some element of the world being created or changed. NOTE that this is NOT a generic, catch-all tag; this tag should be used to address process, meaning HOW you world build not what you are building. Don't use it if the question isn't about worldbuilding process. See also the extended tag information for when to use this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info&quot;&gt;Wiki for this tag&lt;/a&gt; is breathtaking and one of the best introductions to the process of worldbuilding and ostensibly to asking questions about worldbuilding on this Stack that I've ever read.&lt;/strong&gt; Unfortunately, IMO it's also absolutely worthless when it comes to explaining what the nature of of a question about the process of worldbuilding should look like. &lt;em&gt;But it was created seven years ago, long before the current standards of rules and policies came about.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely believe that questions about the process of worldbuilding should be allowed on a site dedicated to worldbuilding. Unfortunately, while not definitively proven by my test question, the simple fact is, asking &amp;quot;how should I go about X?&amp;quot; (and &amp;quot;how should I&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;advice for&amp;quot; are synonymous in my book) will, at this time, always be closed as too broad, too opinion-based, likely to lead to answers of equal value, being open-ended, and brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it looks like between Stack Exchange and our own best efforts to get people to stop asking low-quality, unprepared, one-off questions, we've boxed ourselves into a corner where we can no longer answer a question about how to build worlds in the first place. We're delighted to answer the question, &amp;quot;how should I achieve X in my world given the following details specific to my world?&amp;quot; But we can no longer answer the question &amp;quot;How should I approach achieving X in a way that isn't specific to just one world?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Personally, I think that's unacceptable to a staggering degree.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is embodied in a statement from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for ... an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You'll notice I left out &amp;quot;discussion&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree that a question should lead to a &lt;em&gt;definitive&lt;/em&gt; response (not a discussion). I could debate whether or not my test question did so, but let's set that aside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also completely agree that brainstorming is bad, but I have always understood brainstorming to mean, &amp;quot;I'm trying to overcome writer's block. I need ideas! Could you throw some ideas at me so I can choose one?&amp;quot; I most certainly do not believe that my test question was brainstorming. Brainstorming about one's world violates the &amp;quot;no Q should lead to answers of equal value&amp;quot; rule because while it's theoretically possible that aspects of more than one answer may be valuable to the OP, it's most likely that we're just throwing spaghetti against the proverbial wall and hoping something sticks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But seeking advice about the &lt;em&gt;process of worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; is, IMO, not brainstorming because &lt;em&gt;each and every answer is likely to prove valuable to the OP and used by the OP.&lt;/em&gt; In fact, all the answers could reasonably be bound into a single canonical answer that can apply to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilder regardless their experience level. (This could not be done with a &amp;quot;writer's block&amp;quot; question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming is what happens when a querent is intentionally NOT seeking a definitive answer because the querent &lt;em&gt;doesn't know what they want.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An education&lt;/em&gt; is what happens when a querent is asking for experienced guidance because the querent &lt;em&gt;doesn't know how to proceed.&lt;/em&gt; There won't be one astonishingly comprehensive &amp;quot;there will never be a better answer than this one!&amp;quot; answer to a Worldbuilding-Process question (unless any of us believes their godlike worldbuilding abilities are just that good). The whole point is getting as much education as you can. Complaining that this is brainstorming is like complaining about buying multiple textbooks while seeking a college degree or complaining that any one textbook has multiple chapters. Frankly, it's silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But that doesn't fully discharge the problems with the future use of the tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple truth is, I don't believe a Worldbuilding-Process question can be authoritatively asked within today's rules and policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Option #1:&lt;/em&gt; It would require a very large, very complex, and very involved change to our existing rules that would also require a change to the Help Center pages to bring the Worldbuilding-Process tag back into conformance. Considering that no effort to change the Help Center pages has succeeded in years, I don't think this is a realistic option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Option #2:&lt;/em&gt; Somebody writes an answer to this post that says, &amp;quot;I think the Worldbuilding-Process tag should be an exception to the rules with the following advice about how to ask a process question added to the wiki&amp;quot; (or some such) that then gets some serious up votes (20+). At that point the tag Wiki can be updated to point back to that answer so that when somebody complains that a Worldbuilding-Process question is too broad, too opinion-based, brainstorming, or otherwise in violation of the Stack's rules and policies, people can point to this and say, &amp;quot;it's an exception.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, officially...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Should the Worldbuilding-Process tag be discontinued?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-03-24T17:07:35.887" Title="Should the Worldbuilding-Process tag be discontinued?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|policy|rules-exception|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9897" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rules and policies are created by both the community of Worldbuilding.SE and Stack Exchange to standardize the use of the Stack Exchange service across its many networks and to focus users participating at Worldbuilding.SE on the goals the community has set for the Stack. Rules and policies change over time, which is why no Stack allows questions asked on Main in the past to set a precedent for current behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exceptions to the rules will be difficult to achieve and should be kept at a minimum. When granted, they should be for practical reasons, but this is not always the case. The two most famous exceptions on this Stack are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about Santa during the Christmas season (see [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1768/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;], [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2808/40609&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;], and [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2860/40609&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions about rule exceptions querents should include relevant past Meta discussions and provide reasons why an exception should be made. Moderators should review the results of the Meta discussion to determine whether a user-accepted exception should promote rule or policy changes in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9898" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" Score="0" Body="For questions on Meta asking about exceptions to Stack and Stack Exchange rules and policies or seeking an exception to Stack and Stack Exchange rules and policies." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T03:12:47.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9896" CreationDate="2022-09-29T05:46:51.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding processes can be incredibly broad, or highly specific. Anything anyone does as part of building a world is part of their worldbuilding process. By extension every question on this site will be related to an worldbuilding process. It would be insane to reject every question on this site for this reason, so we must conclude that at least some worldbuilding process questions are permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are legitimate appropriate ways to ask questions about worldbuilding process that don't contradict the exclusion described in the help center. Looking closely at the help center quote &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are &lt;strong&gt;looking for&lt;/strong&gt; ... an &lt;strong&gt;overall&lt;/strong&gt; process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; I think the key phrases are &lt;strong&gt;looking for&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;overall&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By looking for a process, you're not building your world. You're asking us to tell you how to build your world. Everyone on worldbuilding has their own opinions about the right way to build a world. What one worldbuilder finds permissible, another may find entirely unacceptable. Answers will be based in opinions, not facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the scope of what can go into the process of worldbuilding, asking about overall process is a very broad ask. It's going to be hard to fully engage with such an ask without needing to write a book on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you're not &lt;strong&gt;looking&lt;/strong&gt; for an &lt;strong&gt;overall&lt;/strong&gt; process but are wanting to &lt;strong&gt;refine&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; process? For instance someone could ask &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;What equations do I need to know to roughly calculate the orbital period of planets in my solar system?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; While it's still about the process of worldbuilding, the process has already been decided. They could have just posted their parameters and asked us for the periods, but instead they specifically wanted a process that they could re-use on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about worldbuilding process are hard to ask on this site. Each worldbuilder can have their own process, or processes, and each and every one will be equally valid. To avoid asking an opinion based question with many valid answers care is needed to be specific in the ask about the process being used. A question can be considered sufficiently specific and properly constrained when &lt;strong&gt;any decisions that need to be made for an answer are informed by criteria explicitly laid out by the asker, or by facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/strong&gt; This constrains the number of equally valid answers, and also reduces the influence of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule you can easily draw the line between good and bad questions on this site by considering the following questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the core ask related to building a world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this question have many valid answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question clear?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will answers to this question primarily be based on opinion, or by facts, references, or specific expertise?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prohibition on brainstorming and idea generation comes from that criteria. The prohibition on questions looking for a process, rather than asking about a specific process is also derived from that criteria. We explicitly call out brainstorming, idea generation, and questions looking for an overall process, not because we couldn't prevent them any other way, but because it's easier to communicate and enforce policy. Instead of always needing to explain how brainstorming is a violation of point 2, and often point 4, it is far easier to just say &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;No brainstorming&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T17:11:38.813" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T17:11:38.813" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-02T22:48:04.590" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Meta posts are visited 75-150 times. Those same Meta posts tend to accumulate (at a rough guess and on average) a total of 8-12 unique votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta works because you're willing to move your mouse to an arrow and click a button. I understand that you might not want to &amp;quot;stick your neck out&amp;quot; to voice an opinion or set a precedent — but that's actually what Meta is for. Our community modifies rules and makes clarifications because we, the proverbial people, are willing to cast what is for all intent and purposes is an &lt;em&gt;anonymous&lt;/em&gt; vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it appears somewhere around 93% of the people who visit Meta never bother to cast a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's worth thinking about that. I'd have to go look at the stats to prove this, but my knee-jerk suspicion is that about 2% of the active users on Worldbuilding.SE visit Meta and, of those, only 8% participate. That means the policies of this Stack are being set by around 0.2% of its users.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an invitation to participate beyond merely reading the Meta posts. Please, get in the habit of voting, writing answers, and posting questions. You can try this out right now. It won't matter if you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;up-vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;down-vote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write a comment complaining that the post isn't relevant to Stack policy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;post an answer explaining how I'm completely up in the night&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or post a new question demanding to know why you should be expected to click your mouse button...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But doing so will show you're here for more than idle curiosity or simple entertainment. You'll be &lt;em&gt;participating!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-10-08T15:41:25.137" Title="An Invitation to Meta visitors to participate beyond reading posts" Tags="|support|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-04T18:10:34.437" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236367/40609&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236367/40609&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what the current criteria is for the Community user to automatically delete a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;at this criteria list&lt;/a&gt; that can be accessed via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community user page&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;this criteria list&lt;/a&gt;, which is apparently the official FAQ for automated deletions, but none of the criteria apply to the question linked above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" OwnerDisplayName="JBH" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2022-10-04T18:42:26.847" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T19:04:08.537" Title="What criteria was used by the Community user to delete this question?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9903" CreationDate="2022-10-04T19:04:08.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer wasn't deleted because of its own merit, rather it has been an unfortunate collateral damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who posted the question was destroyed, and with the user all of their posts were gone, too, pulling with them the existing answers, including yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T19:04:08.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-04T20:00:08.397" Score="-2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm a firm believer in quickly closing questions that need improvement — but I'm also a believer that the &amp;quot;Opinion Based&amp;quot; VTC reason is the least useful, if not completely useless, reason to close.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236410/40609&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236410/40609&lt;/a&gt;, posted as the first question by a new user. It was quickly closed and almost as quickly deleted by the OP. Closed so quickly, that I was unable to post &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/question/216619-will-to-die&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available research pertinent to answering the question&lt;/a&gt; before closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I complaining because I couldn't post that comment to help the OP? Honestly, yes. But I'm also complaining because the Opinion Based VTC reason is ridiculous. We all know it's ridiculous. And any question closed because of it probably deserves an internal review here on Meta to better understand why that VTC reason was used because, based solely on the results of a 10-second Google search, that reason was used by people who did not perform any research, but simply believed (I suppose) that no research could exist, and therefore only unsubstantiated opinion could result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not alone, I for one have wondered a number of times what to do about the Opinion Based VTC reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9643/40609&quot;&gt;A Plea for Consistent Close-Voting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8398/40609&quot;&gt;How to make a &amp;quot;Fishing for Ideas&amp;quot; question fit on Worldbuilding Main&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7268/40609&quot;&gt;How best to deal with &amp;quot;what are you expecting?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6936/40609&quot;&gt;Phrasing questions such that answers can be objectively voted upon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6654/40609&quot;&gt;How should we deal with inherently open-ended fishing-for-ideas questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6240/40609&quot;&gt;Is it possible to change the descriptive text for the POB selection?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5991/40609&quot;&gt;Magic is primarily opinion-based by definition, so what does a POB VTC mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5621/40609&quot;&gt;Clarification for new users: when is a &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot; question on- or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Official Debrief:&lt;/strong&gt; Given that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I quickly found an authoritative online resource that would answer the question and,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Opinion-Based VTC reason descriptive text reads, &amp;quot;This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What rationale was used to justify the VTC as Opinion-Based and how can we avoid using this VTC reason (on a Stack that's defined in part by providing answers that can't be supported with facts or citations) in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closures since this question was first posted:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236428/40609&quot;&gt;What kind of government would a race of sentient zombies have?&lt;/a&gt; should have been closed as &amp;quot;too story-based.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T15:40:24.037" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T15:40:24.037" Title="What rationale was used to justify the VTC as Opinion-Based and how can we avoid using this VTC reason in the future?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="47" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9905" CreationDate="2022-10-05T10:30:34.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Was the opinion-based close vote reason &amp;quot;ridiculous&amp;quot; for the question you read? Probably yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the first one to have voted to close, exactly for this reason. Wait, there's a contradiction, isn't there? Welp, &lt;strong&gt;It's just that I voted to close for the 1st revision.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what happened to the question after my vote, but knowing it leaped from &amp;quot;How can you kill someone with something that isn't real?&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Is it plausible for one's own vivid imagination kill them?&amp;quot; implies there were big changes meanwhile. Therefore the close-vote reason is likely to be at least obsolete, if not the closure in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that because official closure reasons are not exhaustive and because they're chosen by the majority, they are explained very often nowadays. I do it every time, and if I didn't, I upvoted the comments that matched the closest the reason I chose. For this question, it was something akin to this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disregarding the logical impossibility depending on how you look at it (Willk's lies is a neat example&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;), it looks more like you're brainstorming, something SE isn't really good at, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;as per the help-center says&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;To focus on a more specific issue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps start by giving &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; details about what you mean by &amp;quot;not real&amp;quot; and who and from whom the crime is about?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;I put in italic the words I'm not sure anymore, it's copied from my butterfly/goldfish memory .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Was and is the opinion-based close-vote reason &amp;quot;ridiculous&amp;quot;? No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I mean both for the 1st revision and in general. If you wish for an official SE source, the best one I think is this one : &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good subjective, bad subjective&lt;/a&gt;. But it's 12 years old now so likely outdated to the new norms and it's not exactly the way I think, anyhow :). I do entirely agree on this very sentence though :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don’t. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … &lt;strong&gt;you stop learning.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my personal experiences in both forums and real-life as a tutor, the more you give to someone at once, the less they actually receive. There's a limit to how much someone is able to learn, if not even willing to learn in a information overloaded world ⚡.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, this site is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;lil' bit different from others : Ask questions, get answers, &lt;em&gt;no distractions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  Well, this is the ideal, at least . Point is, the site is designed with that motto in mind, going from &amp;quot;game-like&amp;quot; mechanics like score to how and which questions are displayed to the readers. Opinion-based questions in which &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;every answers are equally valid&lt;/a&gt; strongly lends towards distracting discussions and prevent clear categorizations. Unless you want page-long comments arguing on what wants the asker or disappointing feedback that it's not what they want &amp;quot;just because&amp;quot;, it's a thing to part with, both sadly and for good measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question's case, the querent wasn't providing any context to what they wanted to achieve, they basically asked the question in title. This makes the question unnecessarily a brainstorm regardless if it was answerable or not, because it would have needed very subjective intrepretations in order to nail an answer, biases which doesn't represent the actual question behind. If I wasn't closing for opinion-based, I would have closed for either being too broad or lacking details, with a very similar advise at the end; Indeed, these two other reasons complemented opinion-based, as no clear goal was given : What's important to them when they want to kill someone that way? Is it efficiency, mass-murder, speed, sneakiness? Something else? What should be prioritized? And what is already existing, in order to determine by the opposite what can be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Subjectively&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most importantly -and that's where the objective part leave the stage for my viewpoint-, since they haven't showcased a choice made on the starting point and a direction, how can one reliably answer and not hinder their creativity ? Not giving anything highly suggests they're still in the stage of choosing than inducing, ie. brainstorm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issue is I don't know them, nor do I know their project -if they have one-, and so the choices that will attract them the most. Supposing that Willk's example is the correct interpretation, that the crime tool just needs to not be &amp;quot;material&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;physical&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;giving the possibilities I could think of would inherently restrict the choice they would make&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, even if am -or was ?- able to reverse the chessboard most of the time. I would limit not because of rational thinking based from facts about the world, but because I will necessarily impose my viewpoint on what they should do from what &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, the &amp;quot;expert at worldbuilding&amp;quot; would do. Problem is, I'm not an expert of &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not here to restrict the end choice they are free to make, and I think anyone else shouldn't, either. It's a very quick-sand way of drowning one's motivation, their inner goal not being the same as the world they're creating. It's the most important thing, ever&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. In other words, it's the most counter-productive way of helping someone build &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I intimately think opinion-based is a valid close-reason. Are the official statement unclear or wrong? Yes, I do agree it's very misleading, and the help-center telling every answers are equally valid is a much better explanation. Does it mean it's unfit in its entirety? No for the above reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's annoying, but we have to compensate its usage with a comment explaining why. But remember it's like any other closure reason, wherin we need to give which timeframe the reason is valid in case of major changes, and just what exactly is the issue and what should be done to improve the question .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Willk's example was a link to lies spread for the Covid epidemy, which in turn led to deaths. For them, it was something &amp;quot;unreal&amp;quot;, but I contradicted saying that the fact in the lies don't exist, but the lies did, and it's the latter which killed people.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : For a complementing reference, the very last and most important objective of &amp;quot;The Art of Game Design&amp;quot; book by Jesse Schell ends with this : &amp;quot;Why do you do this?&amp;quot;. My book is an old edition, but I doubt it has changed in the newer ones.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T11:31:17.703" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T11:31:17.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-05T18:11:35.543" Score="-1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reference question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/236416/40609&quot;&gt;Is an atmosphere&amp;#39;s oxygen partial pressure or concentration more biologically significant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While discussing with the OP why they were looking for so much detail the OP said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making a fake scientific textbook/artbook, about how life might evolve on planets with different conditions. So it actually is important to me to get the science right. For most readers, it will be more of a coffee table art book, with the main point being the illustrations and the writing serving the aesthetic, giving the book legitimate textbook vibes. But I want the book to work on multiple levels and to be accurate for those interested in the science. So I really want the science to be actually plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fake, but it's not fake. It's not an imaginary world of the OP's own creation, so to speak, but a scientifically factual/plausible book about what extraterrestrial life could be expected to be like in Real Life if we ever find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is not an expert in the field of xenobiology or, I suspect, any related field. The OP is using us as surrogate experts to help with the creation of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problem:&lt;/strong&gt; The idea is fascinating and would likely be a lot of fun. Except that to meet my current understanding of what the OP is trying to achieve, every question asked should be assigned the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. It would cross a fair number of scientific fields. But while there is &lt;em&gt;speculation,&lt;/em&gt; there is no &lt;em&gt;fiction.&lt;/em&gt; We're not helping the OP develop and consistently use rules for a world of his/her own creation. We're co-authoring a whimsical, &lt;em&gt;but essentially factual&lt;/em&gt; textbook on interstellar life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's obviously a lot of wiggle room here, but the basic question needs to be asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is the effort to create a textbook (fake or not) based on scientific fact close enough to worlbuilding as defined in the Help Center that questions of this type are permissible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post is a result of my asking the OP why such precise detail was needed in his/her worlbuilding efforts. My interpretation of the OP's response is, &amp;quot;I'm not worldbuilding&amp;quot; (from the perspective of the Help Center's definitions). The purpose of this post is to discover if a balance can be found between what the OP will need to achieve his/her goals and what we really can do. I've mentioned to people before that we're not a free research service and we're not here to make up for years of unacquired education. The linked question combined with the OP's response suddenly makes it sound like the OP's hoping we're both of those.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also, I'm a little worried about... let's call it &amp;quot;liability.&amp;quot; We have amazing people on this Stack, but are we in the aggregate qualified to answer questions for this purpose such that the OP doesn't get laughed at by people who review the book? When someone reads fiction (OK, when most people read fiction) they understand that what they're reading isn't real and isn't purported to even be plausible. We enjoy scientific credibility in stories, but it's not a requirement. If mistakes or complete gloss-overs are encountered, they're ignored by suspending disbelief to enjoy the story. But that doesn't appear to be what's happening here. Done &amp;quot;correctly,&amp;quot; every aspect of the proposed lifeforms and their biomes should be completely supported by current scientific understanding. We have respondents who ignore tags and who will answer anything — qualified to answer the question or not. Can we meet the OP's needs?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;While I am concerned that we might not be capable of meeting the OP's hopes and expectations, I do not have a bias toward the community's willingness or not to accept an effort like this as worldbuilding. I'm asking because I didn't know how to respond to the OP's explanation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have invited the OP to contribute to this post so we have a better understanding of the issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-10-15T11:15:57.147" Title="Speculative but factual Books: Worldbuilding or not?" Tags="|discussion|policy|help-center|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2022-10-05T19:03:06.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just replied to your comment on my post, but I think these concerns are unnecessary. I've been doing lots of research, combing through journal articles on a range of relevant fields, and yes, I've certainly noticed many of the people on this site are not qualified to answer.  But I've also gotten lots of great answers, that have helped direct my searches or provided seemingly plausible explanations I could then verify later. Sometimes people will bring up a point that I hadn't considered before or make a suggestion that opens up a path of investigation that I wouldn't have thought to take. So, this is a valuable resource to me, and it helps me in tailoring my searches of more reliable resources, like scientific journal databases.  I'm also working directly with a couple scientists, and I use these forums as a place to better formulate my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate it if people just let me do my thing here, which is building a fictional world. I believe that is exactly what this site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95908" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T19:03:06.433" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2022-10-05T19:55:00.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR:&lt;/strong&gt; We're here to build worlds not write textbooks. If we examine the question OP is clearly asking about building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for help writing a textbook would be inappropriate for this site, as would asking us to speculate on how life would evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fictional textbook, may be intended as an artifact from an alternate world, and any art of specific examples in the book will be set on a fictional planet. Establishing facts about the world of the textbook, or specific worlds used in examples, would be appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determining whether any question related to this book is suitable for this site will require a careful examination of the question. To me the question looks like an excellent fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a duplicate that I'm aware of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's clear what the OP is asking for&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers to the question will be based in facts, references, and expertise, not opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is not overly broad. There's likely to be a limited number of valid answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not brainstorming, trying to generate ideas, or asking us to speculate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not attempting to prompt discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not asking about a story set in a world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not asking about a 3rd party world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only point where there could be any doubt is whether the question is about building a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote the OP they're intending use this information to build fictional worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm literally world-building, though. My project is not factual, it's fictional, but based on scientific principles. I'm designing a fictional planet, just like everyone else here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have lots of questions about atmospheres on this site and this one is refreshingly well written. It's clear what problem OP has encountered and they're seeking our help to improve their understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T21:24:38.237" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T21:24:38.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2022-10-05T20:56:52.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This is worldbuilding, so on-topic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'd dare say even more so than Star Wars, Asimov's Fundation, Elden ring or any other &amp;quot;traditional work&amp;quot; because we -almost&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;- don't have the story part to ruin the party. This question contains the two main elements of world-building : &lt;strong&gt;Building&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;fictional world&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help &lt;strong&gt;creating imaginary worlds.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;From the help-center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, since we're talking planets, there's not much to say it's indeed a world and not some cupcake recipe . Then, the planets in the book are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fictional&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invented, as opposed to being real&lt;/a&gt;. The world is therefore fictional, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imaginary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imaginary&lt;/a&gt; if we use the exact term used by the help-center and tour. Side-note : being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/speculation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speculative&lt;/a&gt; means you're making probable guesses, some hypothesis : The content of such speculations are still not real, they're therefore fictional, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's continue, the building part is quite clearly shown : It's not a purely theorical question about physics or biology without any context, its purpose is to create coherent biological life on a distant world the user is making. Also, the question does not ask about 3rd party worlds, it's the user's own world, so it's building up there, too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the question is about &amp;quot;creating imaginary worlds&amp;quot;. I'm focusing on the example question, but this applies to any question to write textbooks with fictional worlds in them : If the question is asking how to &lt;strong&gt;build&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;fictional world&lt;/strong&gt;, it's on-topic. Simple as apple pie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A small note about hard-science&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you are worried it might be &amp;quot;too real-worldish&amp;quot; and that it will not make it fictional. Don't worry, it won't . While you need to be more cautious you're &amp;quot;building&amp;quot; and not asking about the real-world, it's definitely possible to ask such questions. The worldbuilding intention is just to be very realistic-looking, it's all .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, questions should be self-contained and show minimal dependency with other questions, so having many very hard-science questions for the same world is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a reason for closure. Each question has to be reviewed from the perspective it's the only one asked for this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Almost because you could tell some sort of story with only pictures and world notes. It will be just so transparent compared to any other book ^^!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T20:56:52.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2022-10-07T03:30:39.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is Worldbuilding&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly do not even understand why this question is being asked! We've never called into question anyone's motivation this way before (with the exception of obvious non-worldbuilding as a closure rationale). I think some clarification is in order, since this question seems to be about the allowability of a certain kind of worldbuilding goal here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am someone whose worldbuilding almost entirely revolves around the creation of just such in-world artefacts as natural histories, atlases, scriptures, and a variety of other tangible assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty obvious from the linked query that the OP is not looking for this information in order to understand Earth (or any real planet), but rather an entirely fictional world. The OP literally says &amp;quot;If I have a planet with high atmospheric pressure...&amp;quot; That sounds sufficiently fictional to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for requiring the hard science tag --- I don't think every such question must require it. Unless the OP is specifically looking for equations, numbers, citations from peer reviewed journals and the like. Science based should be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm literally world-building, though. My project is not factual, it's fictional, but based on scientific principles. I'm designing a fictional planet, just like everyone else here. I really appreciate the help you've given me, but I don't understand why you would make a post to call into question whether or not I should be allowed to use this resource. Most of the time when I get answers here, I use them to give me clearer direction, as ultimately the main resources I'm using are journal articles and directly contacting scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like the OP is doing what everyone else here is doing (myself included) --- worldbuilding. Some people write novels, others design games, some do this for the intellectual exercise. And some of us like to create in-world artefacts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one would personally pay reasonable money to buy such a text book --- it would look quite spiff next to my own works, the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich MS (yeah, who knows if that is real world or fictional!). As such, it doesn't (or oughtn't) matter to WB.SE why the OP is building a fictional world, so long as they are doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concur: let him do his worldbuilding thing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-10-08T02:59:51.243" LastActivityDate="2022-10-08T02:59:51.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9902" CreationDate="2022-10-08T15:41:25.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Meta works because you're willing to move your mouse to an arrow and click a button.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erm, no, it works because (and when) people discuss things.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Votes can suggest agreement or disagreement, and a lack of votes can indicate a lack of interest or a neutral stance. Votes alone won't change things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the point you're ultimately making, that more participation is necessary for a healthy site, is absolutely true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so from me in nuanced emphasis of points made no vote here but an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57660" LastActivityDate="2022-10-08T15:41:25.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-13T21:00:55.117" Score="2" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so this is kind of a meta worldbuilding question, but it doesn't really fit meta. It is more about worldbuilding itself. I have been browsing the site for a while, and I have gathered that things that are more powerful than omnipotence, multiple omnipotents, and unbeatable weapons are impossible, even in any fictional world anyone could make. What I don't get is that sphennings said that in worldbuilding, one doesn't have to follow any rules and nothing is impossible or cannot be done. But Tortiliena has said that there can be no unbeatable fictional character. So how can everything be possible in fiction, but an unbeatable character be impossible in fiction? Can someone please explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user98873" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T16:47:03.033" Title="Why are some things impossible in fiction?" Tags="|discussion|worldbuilding-process|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2022-10-13T21:51:04.387" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an author, you are free to have an unbeatable character. David Oglemann. His punches topple mountains. He eats killer bees for breakfast. He eats them through his eyelids. He doesn't need to eat of course. He does it for fun. And he is immune to all harm. Both physical and emotional harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the following chapter you are also free to introduce another character. Ovid Daglemann, who taps David on the shoulder and reduces him to a fine paste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But David said he was unbeatable!&amp;quot; cries the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid shrugs, &amp;quot;I guess he was lying. . . . &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But the third-person narrator said David cannot be harmed!&amp;quot; laments the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid rolls his eyes. &amp;quot;I guess it was third-person limited.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an author you are free to put anything in your story. You are free to have flying pink elephants. You are free to have potatoes look like bananas and vice versa. You are free to set the whole plot on a spinning ball of rock filled with molten goo, hurtling through space. You are free to snork meeble-feeble OMOOOO 56gft***;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See that last bit? It doesn't mean anything. That's the problem. You cannot include that bit in your world because it does not describe anything. So you cannot put the thing it describes in your world. The same applies with a square circle. Or two omnipotent beings. It just doesn't mean anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14322" OwnerDisplayName="Daron" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T22:02:40.960" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2022-10-13T22:38:07.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course in fiction you're free to do whatever you want. The only limit is what you're capable of describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if people are coming here to ask questions about worldbuilding, they're probably asking how to do something in a way that's plausible, or self-consistent, or at least entertaining, and those things do place limits on what you can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you could have an omnipotent, unbeatable character if you want, but you'll struggle to make an interesting story out of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54392" OwnerDisplayName="CliffExcellent" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T22:38:07.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2022-10-14T01:15:30.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Impossible&amp;quot; is too strong a word to be applied to fiction. Things are impossible in the real world because they violate causality or other laws of physics. In fiction, the only limit is the readers' imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I didn't say the &lt;em&gt;writer's&lt;/em&gt; imagination. Technically, everything is limited to the writer's imagination, but in reality, fiction is a form of communication, and communication can't exist without both a speaker and a listener. When you communicate, you create a set of rules that both sides are expected to follow. If you don't follow those rules, then you can pay a hefty price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest example is betrayal of suspension of disbelief. If you set rules early in your fiction, and then don't follow those rules later, your audience will be left dissatisfied. If, for instance, you meticulously adhere to hard science, and then solve a problem with telekinesis, then your audience will cry &amp;quot;deus ex machina!&amp;quot; And they should, too. Similarly, if you place something in the Wizardly World, and then it turns out that the bad guys are space aliens, it throws your readers off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You absolutely must write in limitations for your characters, otherwise there is no conflict. If everything is easy, then nothing is interesting. This is the Mary Sue rule. It's why Superman stories are so hard to write. His limitation is that he runs with a perpetual hard handicap of not letting anyone die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that a character can't do is nothing. A completely passive character would be a severe challenge, and I've never seen it pulled off. It makes character growth impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Rapplean" LastEditorUserId="95496" LastEditDate="2022-10-14T16:47:03.033" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T16:47:03.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2022-10-14T02:36:15.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you need to remember is that all writers want to write good stories. When someone says 'You can't put such and such in a story', what they usually mean is 'Good stories do not have such and such, and since you are trying to write a good story you must not include it'. You can write anything, but your desire to write a good stories limits what you can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody has ever objectively proven what makes a story good, and there are even stories where the whole point is that they are as badly written as possible [This Gun in my Right Hand is Loaded is a great example]. For this reason, it is generally better to statements like 'You can't do this' or 'You have to do that' as guidelines to follow rather than laws that must always be obeyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72602" OwnerDisplayName="E Tam" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T02:36:15.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9913" CreationDate="2022-10-14T15:55:00.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Language of Rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Worldbuilding.SE we spend a lot of time talking about rules. The rules of the Stack. The rules of your world. Rules, rules, rules, rules, rules. Some of those rules define the limits of user behavior. Some define what kinds of questions we're willing to answer. But there's one that's unwritten. And it's amazing that we need to even mention it, but it's the crux of your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rules are expressed in &lt;em&gt;language.&lt;/em&gt; Call it Mathematics or English or anything else you like, if you can't express the rule using &lt;em&gt;language,&lt;/em&gt; then you also don't have a rule and our one-and-only goal on this Stack is to help you define your world's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that means we have a problem when a user posts a question on this Stack &lt;em&gt;and ignores the definitions of words.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Omnipotent&lt;/strong&gt;: (of a deity) having unlimited power; able to do anything. (Oxford English Dictionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You, as a world builder, may want to explore the idea that there is something more powerful than an omnipotent being, but in doing so &lt;em&gt;you've violated the definition of the word&lt;/em&gt; and by asking that question here you've placed us in the unenviable position of having to figure out &lt;em&gt;what on Earth you're talking about.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that moment forward, you're telling a story (off-topic), not building a world (on-topic), because without the basic definitions of words we all share and need to share to communicate meaningfully there's no way to help you do anything. And you can't simply say, &amp;quot;I'm not changing the definition, I'm exploring something more than the definition encompasses&amp;quot; because to a group of principally science nerds, that makes even less sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mathematicians understand the concept of infinity very well. What is infinity + 1? Infinity. What is infinity - 1? Infinity. Is there something greater than infinity? Yep, infinity. If you divide infinity into one, what do you get? Zero (an infinitely small number). If you divide infinity into infinity, what do you get? We don't know! Because there's no way to meaningfully judge which of the two measurements is larger than the other.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem you're having with asking us to let you ask questions about characters that are stronger than all-powerful characters. &lt;em&gt;Because there's no way to meaningfully judge which of the two characters is stronger.&lt;/em&gt; You're not asking questions about the rules of your world, you're playing games with language and asking us to play along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. (Help Center)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that play games with language are neither specific nor answerable and we, the community, judged that we will not play that game a long time ago. &lt;em&gt;We will not answer questions about how to overcome godlike creatures&lt;/em&gt; because in the world of &amp;quot;specific and answerable&amp;quot; the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one and only way&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to overcome a godlike character is &lt;em&gt;for the character to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be godlike.&lt;/em&gt; The character must have defined, specific, qualitative weaknesses that can be exploited and overcome. Without them, you're asking questions that would make more sense on philosophy.SE (and would likely get closed there because they don't play games, either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want help developing the differences in strengths and capabilities between two species, races, or (maybe...) characters (we don't like focusing on individual characters) or anything else (like weapons), then you need to give up using words that have &lt;em&gt;absolute and well-defined meanings&lt;/em&gt; in ways &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than they were intended. We're not interested in helping you figure out a definition for infinity + 1 that is anything other than infinity because that violates a rule on this Stack: questions must be specific and answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while it's true that you, the author of your world, are welcome to do &amp;quot;anything&amp;quot; at all in your world. We, the community of Worldbuilding.SE, cannot and will not embrace &amp;quot;anything.&amp;quot; We have rules. And within the context of those rules, we will help you define and consistently use rules for your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while it's not written in the Help Center, we nevertheless expect you to appropriately use the definitions of words and to avoid undefinable paradoxes. Can God create a rock that He cannot lift? That may be an interesting philosophical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's an inappropriate worldbuilding question because infinity divided into infinity is &lt;em&gt;undefined.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T15:55:00.413" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2022-10-15T11:15:57.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All fiction is inherently speculative. It being speculative doesn't make it any different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of sci fi is based on a mixture of real and speculative science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP had asked exactly the same question but didn't mention what it was for, would people have thought of it as out of place at all? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54392" LastActivityDate="2022-10-15T11:15:57.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-19T15:33:34.527" Score="4" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4679/the-opposite-to-worldbuilding-world-destruction&quot;&gt;This is the question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why this question has been closed - the reason given is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the help center&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and when I check the help center I can clearly see &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, &lt;strong&gt;everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - literally any fictional setting that involves the destruction of a world can benefit from the answers given there - why is a civilization building a Deathstar-esque device considered to be off topic, but Santa using GDPR or Facebook summoning Cthulhu is considered to be on topic? - and how is this question not included in the wide ranging definition of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;?  The question is science-based, so physics is key to destroying a world, and universes are filled with worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any possible way for me to get an explanation of why this question asked 7 years ago is now suddenly considered to be off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T19:43:22.697" Title="Why has my 7 year old question suddenly been made off topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9922" CreationDate="2022-10-19T15:47:52.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5031/whats-the-point-of-flagging-putting-on-hold-years-old-questions&quot;&gt;close old questions&lt;/a&gt; that are no-longer appropriate under current site policy. Keeping them open leads to confusion. We want to avoid new members needing to ask &amp;quot;Why was my question closed when this question asked 5 years ago wasn't?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry about it too much. Many old and well received questions get closed as site policies get changed around them. That's not a reflection on the question, or the person who asked it, just a reflection about how site policies grow and change over time. Stack Exchange has a special historical lock for questions that are important to the history of the site but should no-longer be considered appropriate or interacted with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why your question was closed. You seem to be asking a very open ended question, that is more about actions in a world rather than building the world itself. Neither of these are particularly appropriate for questions on this site. Additionally you don't do much to specify the capabilities that you have that could be used to destroy a planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-19T16:10:07.667" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T16:10:07.667" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9922" CreationDate="2022-10-19T17:45:54.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It just went by the close-vote queue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another way of telling what Sphennings said : Old questions get closed to avoid people confusing what's accepted now vs what was accepted before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep people from overworking, closure generally only happens when someone else points to the old question in a comment, it's already in the closure queue, or it receives an answer which puts them in the top of the list. I think I remember it was the last case for yours, followed by the closure queue I was looking at ^^.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why off-topic?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always tell what could be improved when closing, even if I don't explicitly tell the reason I close&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. In this case... Here !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question isn't clear on what is available to perform mass-destruction; indeed, how can we know what's the easiest way if we don't even know if the destruction should be natural, human made or ultra sci-fi aliens made resorting to known science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I just voted for lacking details or clarity, simply. I ruled out opinion-based because the intentions and constraints were clear enough. Then there was possibly &amp;quot;lack of focus&amp;quot;, but it's not like your question would require 3000 pages to answer. Well... If you give enough details, that is ^^. Therefore, lack of details seemed to be the closest... Close reason of the most important issue in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; closure statement, the question matches the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9815/how-far-can-we-push-the-term-worldbuilding/9817#9817&quot;&gt;simple definition of worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; I use and, hey actually the one you quoted! Unfotunately, this means it's a mystery I cannot solve entirely, only bravely induce . This happens, sometimes .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it bad if it stays closed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions really quickly get down in popularity, like movies or video games at launch. Getting a new answer gets really rare after the 1st month, so the chance you'll miss a new, very good one is quite improbable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then you accepted an answer, so I believe you already found something very helpful for your world .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And as Sphennings told, it helps new users to get more easily acquainted to the current community and ask better questions. When I vote to close, it's more often to give time to think on what you want to know and how to get more and more accurate answers. A old, closed question is like a path with a warning sign then : It's possible to take it -and sometimes beneficial-, but you should think how and why you have to take it :).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a more exact data on how well your question is received, just check the score : +85 vs -1. Your question really made a hit !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Telling a simple yet very effective &amp;quot;VTC:Opinion-based&amp;quot; is not really my taste. Too formal for me and it doesn't match my viewpoint of what the site is for.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T17:45:54.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-19T23:06:51.710" Score="-5" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you stop a moderator when they have so much power? they can literally destroy you in an instant, so what can you possibly do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99078" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-10-21T05:46:13.583" LastActivityDate="2022-11-19T05:23:40.000" Title="How to stop a moderator when they have too much power?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|rules|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9925" CreationDate="2022-10-20T02:42:07.160" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's have a short recap of your deeds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you post several questions which are poorly thought and a poor fit for this community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;said questions get closed and downvoted, resulting in your profile being automatically blocked from creating new posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;trying to act smart, you delete the blocked profile and start again from point 1. I have lost count of how many of them you have dumped&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you are told by many users what's wrong with your posts, you are addressed to the help center which explains what we do want and don't want in questions, but you insist in the 1. 2. 3. loop, showing disrespect for the community and its rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;since you are playing tricks to avoid the system and its checks, a moderator has to step in, because you keep asking low quality and poorly conceived questions, in addition to openly disregarding the difference between main site and meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update on Nov 18th&lt;/strong&gt;: After having read this answer, you have posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9928/30492&quot;&gt;a now deleted apology turned out to be fake like a 3 $ bill&lt;/a&gt;, considering that you have kept creating throwaway accounts used to post low quality posts or plainly derogatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had wanted out of this, you would have stuck to one profile, you would have bear with the consequences of asking poor questions (blocks included) and improved your question asking by listening to what other users tell you. You can't expect a different outcome from the reiteration of the same behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-11-19T05:23:40.000" LastActivityDate="2022-11-19T05:23:40.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9925" CreationDate="2022-10-20T12:43:22.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More often than not, conflicts can be resolved by &lt;strong&gt;talking&lt;/strong&gt; to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you would like to talk to a moderator 1 on 1, go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, open a new chatroom and invite the person in question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you prefer to handle the matter in public, post here on meta. Describe the situation and ask why the moderator acted the way they did.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that does not work for you, and you &lt;em&gt;seriously&lt;/em&gt; believe that a moderator abuses their power, then you can escalate the matter to the Stack Exchange community team by using &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;this contact form&lt;/a&gt;. But keep in mind that using worldbuilding stack exchange is a privilege, not a right. And that privilege is granted with the expectations that you will use it in accordance with the site policies. You are expected to follow the guidelines explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt;. When you don't, then the moderators have the duty to remove you from the site, and the community team will not intervene. So please don't waste their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't like the site policies of worldbuilding stack exchange? Then you also have options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a question here on meta where you make your point why you think a policy is counter-productive and how it should be changed. When the majority of the community agrees, then you might actually achieve a change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start your own Q&amp;amp;A community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T12:43:22.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9922" CreationDate="2022-10-21T22:28:33.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Everything Old Is New Again&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the technicalities, Sphennings hit the nail on the head with an appeal to &amp;quot;current site policy&amp;quot;. Enough community members considered your query to be off topic that they closed it. The problem with the policies of any corporate group, such as ours, is that they are all subject to the interpretation and implementation of the individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as you know, your query has been reopened. And again, this is all a matter of &amp;quot;site policy&amp;quot;. Five people thought your question was off topic and closed; five other people thought your question was on topic and reopened it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your query is quite simply: &lt;strong&gt;This is how Stack Exchange works&lt;/strong&gt;. This community exists as a varied and polydimensional aggregation of individuals. When all the right people are in the right place at the right time and looking at the right question with the right attitude, the result is that they apply WB.SE policies in a way that results in your question being closed. And then, when the right other people are in the right place at the right time, the result is that they apply those same WB.SE policies in a way that results in your question being reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Policies are not black letter law and users are not robots responding to programming. Sometimes this kind of situation can seem non-sensical! How can a community work when 10 people look at the same data and come to two diametrically opposed conclusions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is exactly the point of SE! The community of interested experts (in our case, experts in worldbuilding) determines the usefulness of your question. They also determine what the rules are, how to apply them, when not to apply them and when it might be best to ignore that we even have rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why your question was reopened, it is clearly &amp;quot;a worldbuilding question&amp;quot; as it focuses on a fictional world or setting, requires some knowledge of the underlying reality in order to answer well; it's not a matter of narrativity or storybuilding or character development; it's not opinion based and not open ended. Your question might be old, but it has one strikingly modern feature, and that is the list of conditions that a good answer would have to address; these conditions limit the opinions and turn this into a relatively short list of things (rather than an infinite list of things). This is not a mere fishing expedition, but is a pretty well written question that has, obviously, withstood the test of time and the vagaries of policy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-10-21T22:28:33.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9922" CreationDate="2022-10-24T19:38:00.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Old and valuable&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jimmery's question was reopened after a few edits. I like the outcome and I disagree with the close reason in the first place.. Why would a topic about &amp;quot;world destruction&amp;quot; be off topic here, and not part of world building? why not? there are e.g. questions about hand guns I don't regard as &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; on WB but according to many peer mods they are. In a sense, the notion of something being &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; is very dependent on the opinion of 1500 peer mods on SE, about their own community and the scope of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The edit made it worse, the question is now violating three other current rules!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two small sentences inserted by the author seem to have solved the issue, maybe because Jimmery's edit indicates he seeks worldbuilding advice: the answers would shape the society he is building. Jimmery now states his entire society would be derived from the answers! But that statement also changed the question into a very &amp;quot;unfocused&amp;quot; one.. as well as a &amp;quot;no best answer&amp;quot; case, and a violation of the &amp;quot;book rule&amp;quot;. All methods of planet destruction apply, because we know nothing about the enemy society that wants to blow up a planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't see the logic of the reopen: either this question should remain closed, or it should be &lt;em&gt;tolerated&lt;/em&gt; because it is appreciated and so many folks have participated in it !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: tolerate successful old questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question about planet destruction has 11.000 views, many answers and many upvotes. In fact, if I were admin here, I would always &lt;em&gt;tolerate&lt;/em&gt; a 7 year old question with interesting responses. I would advocate &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; to close successful old questions. Leave large content in peace, allow for very late and very genious answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be possible, to devise a rule for &amp;quot;old and valuable content&amp;quot;? when a question is e.g. more than X years ago &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it has more than Y answers, it was apparently according to the rules. It may not be so now, but the only one who can take a decision about it is a (real) moderator,  there is no &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; link. It could be built in..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86094" LastEditorUserId="86094" LastEditDate="2022-10-24T19:43:22.697" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T19:43:22.697" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9925" CreationDate="2022-10-24T22:45:21.953" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Hope one of the other mods notices&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I thought the power ceiling is low, I was wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought people got mod powers after reaching a certain rep, But it turns out that is wrong. Mods have to be elected but then have no term limits. So if you are elected once you are in for life, barring major action from other mods or SE. All moderators have the same abilities, and rep doesn't matter. So as long as less than the majority of moderators don’t abuse their power things should work out. Though, it turns out that &amp;quot;majority&amp;quot; of mods is just two mods. So yeah, if you get the power there are few people who can hold you accountable. However if you make an appeal here, where one of the two other moderators check, people will be held to account. I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I though the power floor is higher than you think, I was also wrong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Sphennings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single user's vote will have 0 impact unless there is sufficient agreement with other members about a particular course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't bother voting, that won't really change things. Only Meta posts really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I thought the number of mods was high, it is actually really low&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are exactly three mods,&#xA;HDE 226868, Monty Wild, and L.Dutch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch and Monty are pretty active on meta, visiting I think about a few times a week. HDE 226868 visits meta once a week or so. So yes, any two of them could try to pull something, but it would take at maximum about a week for the odd man out to figure out something is up. So if an issue occurs, you can just send a message here and one of the three people should notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all else fails, contact SE exchange directly. This is a small team so it is understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user64888" LastEditorDisplayName="user64888" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T00:40:53.047" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T00:40:53.047" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-24T22:54:58.890" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have about 6000 rep right now, but I have kind of lost my will to participate in this site. After thinking about it a bit I realized that one easy way to use my current rep is to do the following. First, keep my rep above 200, the minimum needed to get a free 100 rep in any new stack exchange I join. Second spend the rest on bounties here. I obviously already posted three bounties in the last week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many ways to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could spend 50 per bounty, leading to most people not looking at the bounty. This is made worse by the fact that many of the upvoted unanswered questions are upvoted but not answered since they are hard to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could instead do 500 per bounty, but even if I drain my account that is only 12 or 13 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I need an answer that is somewhere in the middle. What is a heuristic I can use to assign bounties to questions to maximize the total number of questions answered on this site that would not be answered without the bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am targeting questions that are unanswered, has a positive score, whose askers have visited the site in the last 30 days. My estimate of the difficult of the question is a function of the number of days the question has been unanswered times the score. My rationale is two fold. First higher score questions imply many people looked at the question, liked it, id a little research, and probably gave up. This means higher score questions are harder and need a higher bounty. Second, the older a question is, the harder it is to answer, therefore the higher it's bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this system I have guessed the appropriate bounty for each of the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/202270/does-twice-the-planet-radius-mean-two-bands-of-desert-per-hemisphere&quot;&gt;Does twice the planet radius mean two bands of desert per hemisphere?&lt;/a&gt;: 500&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/199774/plausible-altitude-for-my-planets-ring&quot;&gt;Plausible altitude for my planet's ring?&lt;/a&gt;:500&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/206831/how-different-geographically-would-western-north-america-look-if-the-ice-ages&quot;&gt;How different, geographically, would Western North America look if the ice ages lasted 14 million years&lt;/a&gt;:500&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/219023/what-would-the-climate-of-a-pangaea-ultima-inspired-world-be-like&quot;&gt;What would the climate of a Pangaea-Ultima-inspired world be like?&lt;/a&gt;:300&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/221676/could-these-humanoid-reptilian-shoulders-support-legs&quot;&gt;Could these Humanoid/Reptilian shoulders support legs?&lt;/a&gt;:300&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/222916/how-to-create-tidal-tsunamis&quot;&gt;How to Create Tidal Tsunamis&lt;/a&gt;:300&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/235618/could-a-bird-respiratory-system-still-work-without-the-same-bone-structure-as-a&quot;&gt;Could a bird respiratory system still work without the same bone structure as a bird?&lt;/a&gt;:50&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/235715/could-a-bird-respiratory-system-fit-in-this-humanoidish-body&quot;&gt;Could a bird respiratory system fit in this humanoidish body?&lt;/a&gt;:50&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user64888" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T04:18:50.323" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T06:04:32.103" Title="I have excess rep to spend and want to get old questions answered" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9936" CreationDate="2022-10-24T23:56:45.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only an incredibly small fraction of questions on this site go unanswered. If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?tab=Unanswered&quot;&gt;filter by &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt; on the main site, you'll only see a total of 60 questions without an upvoted or accepted answer. There are only 38 open questions on this site without a single answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little over 0.22% of open questions don't have an upvoted or accepted answer. Only 0.14% of open questions don't have a single answer. The incredibly low odds of not garnering a single answer, is highly suggestive of there being issues with the question. Given that there are multiple badges that reward interacting with old unanswered questions, it's probable that these questions weren't simply looked over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that most closed questions garner a few answers before closure, I suspect  that anything that incentivizes answering any question on this site will garner at least one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should you want to dump your reputation on those questions, you have more than enough reputation to issue a 100 point bounty on every question. If you only focus on the 38 questions with no answers and you're almost able to issue a 200 point bounty on every question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend that you find questions that you care about and do what you can to elevate those. It may not be the most effective strategy in terms of answers per reputation spent, but it will have more of an emotional impact than other impersonal heuristics of issuing bounties, just because you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T23:56:45.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-25T12:18:16.690" Score="-2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question closed, with very little in the way of feedback or explanation, because the question didn't fit in with the current rules.  The fact that the question was 7 years old and highly upvoted and viewed didn't seem to matter.  The fact that the question was highly relevant to World Building didn't seem to matter.  What mattered was the fact that the rules had changed and now my question was now deemed to be worthy of closing (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9922/80336&quot;&gt;when I asked why it was closed, I got about 3 different explanations&lt;/a&gt;, so why the question was closed was not clear to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that moderating a website like this is hard work - I recognize that rules need to be put in place and that many of the submissions made here will ignore those rules, and that only makes the lives of moderators harder.  I have done moderation myself, I get that it's a difficult and often thankless job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this group of moderators so lazer focused on the rules of the site that they have missed out of the spirit of this group?  The very purpose of this group was for World Builders to be able to share and pool their knowledge - not so someone can jump through several hoops just in order to appease the latest version of the rules - if this is the case, don't the rules need adjusting so that they better reflect the spirit of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question (or answer) that is very much in the spirit of World Building, about the subject of World Building - a question or answer that could very well help others with their own World Building - BUT that question doesn't fit in with the current rules of the site - what is your current response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you just vote to close and move on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T23:17:24.400" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T23:17:24.400" Title="The spirit of the site Vs the rules of the site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10037" CreationDate="2022-10-25T13:00:39.043" Score="0" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3650/320&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; to one of the questions asked on Meta - a question I think needs revisiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask 10 people what &amp;quot;Worldbuilding&amp;quot; is, and you'll get 11 different answers. For some it will be analyzing the effects of magic on world economy, for others designing the weather system for planet in a particular orbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And you know what? None of them would be wrong.&lt;/strong&gt; Worldbuilding truly is an incredibly broad topic, from creature design, to linguistics, and much, much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.com, is part of the Stack Exchange family of sites. This implies certain standards as far as the reusability of the questions, and answers are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite often see the phrase &amp;quot;your question is not a good fit for this site.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this answer leads me to think, is World Building a good fit for Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the rules of this site reflect the rigorous standards of Stack Exchange, or should the rules reflect the more broad term of World Building?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, allowing users to mark multiple answers as correct would be a good start.  This would allow this site to be more subjective - and World Building is inherently subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of people will be coming here with a correct idea of what World Building is, only to get their question downvoted or closed because it doesn't align with the restrictive set of rules this site uses.  It seems unfair to me to punish users simply because this World Building site is part of Stack Exchange.  Instead of expecting the users to adhere to restrictive rules, shouldn't we be petitioning Stack Exchange to give us more flexible tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the subject of World Building works well on a site that uses a restrictive question-and-single-correct-answer format?  And beyond imposing more rules on the users, what can be done to improve this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T21:53:39.330" Title="Is World Building a good fit for Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2022-10-25T13:45:20.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR: We're not, but we try to make it work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're an one of the more out-there sites trying to fit into the Stack Exchange network. When this site was proposed we went through a growing period where we attempted to figure out how to make such a broad and subjective topic work within the Stack Exchange model. Part of our criteria for being created was to show that we could support questions that fit the Stack Exchange model. By design &lt;strong&gt;many questions that are about worldbuilding will not be appropriate for this site&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case for any exchange, about any topic. There are questions about programming that aren't appropriate for Stack Overflow. This is by design. Besides network effects &lt;strong&gt;the distinguishing element of Stack Exchange from other QA sites is the structure they impose on questions&lt;/strong&gt;. This structure forms the core of the SE design philosophy, and they attribute their success, to this focused structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They choose to build a site with close voting as something automatically earned by participating in common actions on the site. They chose to have multiple closure reasons, to highlight the multiple types of questions they don't want asked on this site. If the intent was to support discussions, the whole site would have been built differently. This is also reflected in their constant rejection of requests for features, like accepting multiple answers, that would make for a less structured experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're a strange experiment, in the far corners of the SE model. We're not a revenue center. They will never invest developer time in Worldbuilding specific features, especially if it would allow us to stray further from the SE model. I suspect that if we attempted to turn this site into a free-for-all without moderation they'd be more inclined to nuke the whole site rather than support something so far outside of what is promised by the Stack Exchange experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We can not reject the fundamentals of a Stack Exchange site and still be a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/strong&gt; We'd loose what makes us distinct. If you want less structure and moderation there are better platforms out there. The creativity of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;worldbuilding subreddit&lt;/a&gt; is phenomenal. If you want less structured worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A you could give &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.quora.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;worldbuilding Quora&lt;/a&gt; a try. Given that our whole mandate is worldbuilding in the Stack Exchange model giving that up would be to reject our design mandate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of successful questions that fit well within our model. &lt;strong&gt;Most of the friction seems comes from people who are either ignorant of the model or choose to ignore it.&lt;/strong&gt; This is why we &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5031/whats-the-point-of-flagging-putting-on-hold-years-old-questions/&quot;&gt;close old questions&lt;/a&gt;, to reduce that friction. The more misalignment there is between people following the sprit and structure of this site, and people who are just looking for a place to post anything vaguely related to worldbuilding, the worse that friction is going to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best we can do is moderation, and education. If inappropriate questions are quickly closed before receiving answers, the incentive to continue asking inappropriate questions is removed. If old questions are closed if they aren't suitable under current policy, then people will using them as an example of how to ask a well received question on this site. It seems harsh but anything else drives us away from what we promise in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;our tour&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We're a little bit different from other sites. Here's how:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T17:03:28.517" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T17:03:28.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9938" CreationDate="2022-10-25T13:53:02.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be mistaking questions that are appropriate for building fictional worlds from questions that are appropriate for this site. &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchanges is an opinionated platform&lt;/strong&gt;. It has been designed to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;strict about the questions&lt;/a&gt; that are permitted on a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stack exchange format promises that there is structure and moderation of questions. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, after stating that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;we're a bit different from other sites&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, emphasizes that there are types of questions that should not be asked on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;, or that are likely to &lt;strong&gt;generate discussion&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;rather than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything not directly related to worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The spirit of this site is based on the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/strong&gt; We don't hold a monopoly on worldbuilding. We don't even hold a monopoly on worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A. There are countless worldbuilding sites out there. Each brings something unique to the table. We are &lt;strong&gt;worldbuliding.stackexchange&lt;/strong&gt;. From it's inception we were built to be a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're a grand experiment in how to make this model work for the very broad and often subjective topic of worldbuilding. &lt;strong&gt;Every rule we've created, every policy decision, was informed by being a Stack Exchange site&lt;/strong&gt;. We could have permitted questions about 3rd party worlds, story based questions, but that would run contrary to the design philosophy of SE. If you look at other SE sites with subjective topics they still close questions that are too subjective, or broad to fit within the SE model. We are no different. &lt;strong&gt;As an SE site we must base our policy decisions on the SE model&lt;/strong&gt;. To do otherwise is to remove the one thing that makes this site unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T16:12:18.240" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T16:12:18.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9944" CreationDate="2022-10-27T09:02:19.403" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the first question that was asked on the Worldbuilding website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97694" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T13:53:16.350" Title="What is the first question on the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9943" CreationDate="2022-10-27T09:05:43.980" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you order the questions by date, and go to the last page of the list, you find that the first question listed there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1/30492&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, asked on Sep. 16th 2014 at 18:19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As VLAZ pointed out, this question is the first question as well as the oldest still visible question. Its ID is 1, and since the IDs are sequential, it's a guarantee that it's the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T13:53:16.350" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T13:53:16.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-27T13:57:32.070" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems to have had some back and forth between WB and Astronomy.se:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237318/potential-neptune-colony&quot;&gt;Potential Neptune Colony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed due to needing clarity. I think it is answerable as it is, but I cannot vote to reopen it because it was closed by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the question  is asking if a dirigible colony in Neptune is feasible, and the gravity people would feel there. That's it. I have some elaboration on how this is not realistically possible due to buoyancy problems and strong weather, even though where the pressure is 1 atm we would feel about 1G.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; nevermind, the question is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/182888/21222&quot;&gt;Could a colony on Neptune work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T23:31:12.000" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T23:39:21.557" Title="Can we reopen the question about a colony on Neptune?" Tags="|discussion|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9945" CreationDate="2022-10-27T17:06:44.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the question is in a really strange state. The question, despite showing that it is currently returned back to Astronomy Stackexchange, is still on the Worldbuilding Site.&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yX1fh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yX1fh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so basically to be honest, it was actually me who had suggested the migration, back on the Astronomy Stackexchange. My suggestion was rejected (the red circle), but soon a moderator on that website migrated that question to the site.&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/315dk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/315dk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strange thing however, is that the OP's profile, JohnB's is unclickable, which either suggests that his profile is banned, or that it is just some glitch with my computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that it should either be migrated to Space-Exploration stackexchange, but the sci-fi background doesn't help much. So what I think best is to wait for OP to add some more details to the question so that it can be clarified. Then, since I am not a mod/admin, we should leave it best to the moderators to decide whether it should be deleted/migrated or remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97694" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T17:06:44.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9945" CreationDate="2022-10-27T23:39:21.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query, as it currently stands at Astronomy, reads: &lt;em&gt;I am currently writing a medium-length sci-fi story for a school project, and my hope is to make it as realistic as possible. I was wondering if a dirigible-based Neptune colony is feasible and what the G forces would be exerted on the inhabitants?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a medium-length sci-fi story for a school project, and my hope is to make it as realistic as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, so good. This is the only on topic part of this query! Sadly, that's not enough to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if a dirigible-based Neptune colony is feasible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, this is not sufficiently &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; for WB. In other words, there is not worldbuilding context that would make this query on topic for us as opposed to SpaceExploration.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP were exploring a near future hard SF and wanted to provide their scientific / geopolitical / technological / fantastic context then that would make this particular question a reality check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what the G forces would be exerted on the inhabitants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not on topic for WB.SE as it is essentially asking for real planetary data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; Any query &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be reopened. The question that needs to be asked is always &amp;quot;ought this query be reopened without any kind of improvement&amp;quot;. This query fails on this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This query suffers from several problems: the OP is asking too many questions (I see two and possibly three very distinct ones); one of the questions is entirely off topic for this community, and the other question is off topic for the community where the question currently resides; the part of the question that would be on topic here suffers from a lack of context and would immediately be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; The OP should edit his question on Astronomy to focus on the planetary data (leaving out the SF story rationale) and write a separate question here in WB focusing on the fictional elements. If by &amp;quot;feasibility&amp;quot; of such a colony he means various governmental, corporate, economic factors, that might be a third question to ask in SpaceEx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T23:39:21.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-28T01:36:14.860" Score="6" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE is a place where the users ask questions about their world building... obviously.  However, I've noticed that while asking my questions, I sometimes get comments to the effect that other users would like to see the end results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2590/we-have-a-blog&quot;&gt;We have a blog&lt;/a&gt; that isn't being used much at present where users can post examples of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm asking about shameless self-promotion.  Let's say that a WB SE user has asked their questions, received their answers, and produced their work based on the answers they've received.  Now they have an end result in which WB SE users may be interested, and may have &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; that they're interested.  What is the best way for such a user to promote their work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously WB SE isn't the place to do that... but is WB SE Meta an appropriate place, or is there a better place for WB SE users to promote their work that they have made with our help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2022-11-19T22:53:21.537" Title="How can we best promote our work to this site's users?" Tags="|discussion|users|advertising|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9948" CreationDate="2022-10-28T05:06:54.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we could create a meta question here, where each answer is the information on the work. Sort of another Sandbox, but this time a Showcase box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T05:06:54.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4538" CreationDate="2022-10-28T16:07:06.620" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also want my account deleted. I already requested my account to be deleted and it was scheduled for deletion yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user64888" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T16:07:06.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9948" CreationDate="2022-10-28T16:28:46.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creating a dedicated showcase like L.Dutch suggests is a great idea. It provides clear structure, and community support to sharing our creations. Keeping it centralized means that everyone's work will be equally discoverable. Similar to the sandbox that will also make it easier to inform people about any policy or usage guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before creating The Showcase we should probably figure out how exactly we want it to be used. Starting with some clarity of vision should help provide a consistent experience, both for people sharing their creations, and people wanting to discover what the brilliant minds of this site have produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally we should also encourage people to share their work on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt; and in their profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The factory floor is great for works in progress. Chat provides a far less structured environment, while still granting access to the creative minds of Worldbuilding's community. This is especially useful if someone is looking for discussion, or help with brainstorming, story, characters, or any other task that isn't suitable for the main site. I don't think a showcase will be the best place to seek feedback while iterating on a work. Something more ephemeral and immediate, like chat, should help keep those creative juices flowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including links to work you are proud of in your profile is less discoverable than the showcase. However it will always be directly associated with everything you do on this site. If someone finds a particularly inspired question, or inciteful answer, the author's profile is just one click away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a showcase in conjunction with encouraging the use of profiles and, and chat seems like the best way to give people recognition for their hard work. We should try to be deliberate with how we structure the showcase. If this post is well received I'll create a separate question to seek community input on how exactly we want a showcase to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2022-10-28T21:01:04.487" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T21:01:04.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9948" CreationDate="2022-10-29T19:29:24.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Not SE's Job ... &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as I would love to see other WB users' work, and perhaps even connect with some of you outside of SE, I really don't think SE is set up or designed to &amp;quot;promote our own work&amp;quot;. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure SE is designed as a Q&amp;amp;A forum, and I can't see how &amp;quot;Here's a link to my own fictional world&amp;quot; is an answer to a legitimate and non-closable query in either Main or Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm all for doing this! Just wanted to point out what I think is yet another inconsistency of WB vs SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have Universe Factory, and I think that really could be better advertised as a way of allowing users and potential users to see their respondents in action outside of the WB.SE arena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Resources Meta Query&lt;/a&gt;, and I think that we could easily add another section, maybe down at the bottom, for querents and respondents to link to &amp;quot;relatively substantial&amp;quot; examples of their creative work. I think we could explain a/o defend any accusations of blatant and shameless self promotion as links to &amp;quot;resources&amp;quot; that are designed to &amp;quot;inspire fellow WB users and demonstrate some of the processes and principles that we adhere to&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T19:29:24.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2022-11-03T02:38:09.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're so far outside SE's sweetspot I wonder if we were a test case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, as designed for and by its flagship Stack, Stack Overflow, is based on a single concept that's almost incompatible with any creative or imaginative effort:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is only one best answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suggested that we allow multiple answers to be marked correct. That very idea represents the core of the problem. How we use Stack Exchange is ruled over entirely by our Stack Exchange Overlords. We, the users of Worldbuilding, have no ability whatsoever to make a change to how the software works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, we have only a bare minimum of ability to change how the Help Center reads. And even less influence over the VTC reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if you don't accept the idea that we can create policies here in Meta, then the reality you're questioning is that the people who wrote and own this software control the proverbial 99% of how their software is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfortunately, one best answer is something we have trouble with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sizable number of questions that come to this site can't have a single best answer. Not won't. Can't. The community has been debating the idea of list answers, fishing-for-ideas questions, brainstorming, etc. almost since the day the site came out of Area 51. It's &lt;em&gt;obviously true&lt;/em&gt; that some latitude should be made for creativity and imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the reality that we don't control most of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could choose to ignore them, but here's the rub, &lt;em&gt;they exist.&lt;/em&gt; Which means we can expend all our energy telling people to ignore the rules or expend the very same amount of energy telling people to obey the rules. Because matter what we do, there are the rules, and there will always be people who want to obey them and those who want to ignore them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinda sounds like real life....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, if you ignore all the collateral damage, there is value here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is collateral damage. New users rarely read the rules before playing and no matter how politely, kindly, or lovingly you try to explain why they can't ask the question they are, they're going to take critical feedback, down votes, and closure personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if people try, what the'll discover is this whacky stack trying to march to the tune of people we've never met or seen requires them to &lt;em&gt;really think through what their problem is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that's ruthless, but the site can work for creative and imaginative worlbuilding if you're willing to embrace the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-11-03T02:38:09.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-09T00:33:43.887" Score="7" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;Periodically we see questions of the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the back story and my description of my worldbuilding idea, what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to call this question type a &lt;strong&gt;Review My Idea&lt;/strong&gt; question. The OP isn't looking for help solving a problem — they've already solved it — what they're looking for is insight into the quality of their effort (whether that takes the form of simple approval for a job well done or the more complex, &amp;quot;I really want you to shoot arrows at this idea&amp;quot; question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope he doesn't mind, but I'd like to use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/237752/40609&quot;&gt;recent question by Ichthys King&lt;/a&gt;. He doesn't waste time with back story. The description of his worldbuilding problem and solution are clear, well thought out, and have supporting plausibility from Real Life examples. Frankly, his idea is really good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He concludes his post by asking the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this adaptation work as I've described within realistic biology and physics, or is there something I've overlooked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there are two questions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One question asks if the idea is plausible in Real Life. &lt;s&gt;That's not an uncommon question on Worldbuilding, even though it doesn't make sense as our goal is to help people build imaginary worlds. It reflects a desire for hard science (the genre, not the tag) or to be as &amp;quot;realistic as possible.&amp;quot; We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9701/40609&quot;&gt;better Meta question that addresses this&lt;/a&gt; even though it's been made a bit out of date due to the recent change from the old Reality Check tag to the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/s&gt; This is not the question we're focusing on in this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's the second question that's the focus of this post. He's asking for a review of his idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that this form of question doesn't fit the mold Stack Exchange prefers. There isn't a single best answer, by definition all the answers are of equal value. But exceptions to Help Center rules are why we bring matters up in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also admit that this question type is close to an existing question type: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; question. However, I believe there is a difference. An &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; question provides a set of rules and a test case or circumstance that exercises the rules and asks the community to judge &lt;em&gt;if the developed rules are being consistently used.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; The Review-My-Idea question type only presents a rule, or a creature, or a technical design, and asks (simplistically) &lt;em&gt;did I do a good job?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I admit that this question type can be abused as it could be used to circumvent asking a question about a real problem that would force the OP to adhere to the formal rules of the Stack and Stack Exchange. In other words, there might not be much difference between &amp;quot;can you help me solve my problem?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;here's my half-baked idea, what do you think?&amp;quot; I would hope the latter would be a violation of whatever rules are devised for the question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: What advice should we give to users asking for a review of their idea?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to this post will serve as a policy statement for the Stack. They may include but are not limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A decision to support — or not support — questions of this type,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rules we expect OPs to follow when asking a question of this type.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions we expect OPs to respect when asking a question of this type.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expectations the OP should have concerning the nature of answers to their question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community agrees that this is an on-topic question type, I will post a second Meta discussion about how to implement the decision. Let's avoid that discussion in this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I'd like to introduce an example of the danger of this question type. With my apologies to user98816:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/238196/40609&quot;&gt;Can Nanorobots make oxygen to terraform Mars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a &amp;quot;Review my Idea&amp;quot; question that's not well enough developed to be (IMO) worthy of asking. As I mention in a comment, thanks to Clarke's Third Law, the only possible answer is &amp;quot;yes.&amp;quot; But that answer doesn't really help the OP or anyone else with Worlbuilding. Nevertheless, as you consider your answers, keep in mind the potential breadth of quality this question type might embrace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I believe it was Sphennings who made a good point about consistency that's worth repeating here. Our job is to help people create rules that can be used consistently, not to help people build consistent worlds. A world can be utterly chaotic and have no underlying logic at all so long as the rules the OP has developed can, themselves, be consistently applied. This idea might deserve a Meta post of its own, but it's important and I wanted people to be sure what I meant when I suggest rules should be consistently usable or use the phrase &amp;quot;consistent rules.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-11-16T19:08:19.043" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T19:08:19.043" Title="Advice: How to ask for a review of your idea" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9956" CreationDate="2022-11-10T06:00:22.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Bumped Up a Notch&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this &lt;strong&gt;Review My Idea&lt;/strong&gt; kind of question as actually a form of problem solving in Worldbuilding. It's just that we're being asked to solve a &lt;em&gt;different kind of problem&lt;/em&gt;. This is a higher level question. I'd envision the WB.SE as a one room school house, as it were, and within that school house, we might expect students of different maturity levels to be present and that these students will ask questions of different depths and differing areas of focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might consider a basic four tier structure of valid problem solving questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I Have This&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is a pretty grammar school question, sort of entry level in nature. Philosophically, this is a very weak kind of WB query: obviously the only correct answer is yes and this can be seen in comments as &amp;quot;it's your world, put in it what you want!&amp;quot;; it presumes a less matured perspective on the art, almost as if a newish worldbuilder were seeking permission to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems we're asked about at this level are more about building blocks and what they're for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is This Feasible&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is more of a high school query. It presumes a rapidly evolving and more mature approach to worldbuilding. These tend to be stronger, more solid queries. The worldbuilder already has a pretty good grasp and is trying to put it all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems we're asked about here really are those of &amp;quot;fundamental rules of the world&amp;quot; --- we have the building blocks, now we're putting them together!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Review My Idea&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is now a uni level query. We've moved from the kiddie pool into the olympic pool. This is a far stronger and more engaging kind of query as the worldbuilder has the underlying work done and is now looking for higher level peer evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems we're asked about new is not &amp;quot;fundamental rules of the world&amp;quot;, but are now more existential and integrational in nature. &amp;quot;Is this subcreation &lt;em&gt;good?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Did you get the point I was trying to make with this piece of worldbuilding?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Higher level problem solving!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Metaphysics: Beyond as Within&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions of the post-grad type, deep oceanic philosophical and introspective queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems looked at here are likely the quintessentials: Why is this so; What was the reason; What is the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I'd argue that Ichthys King's query looks like an &amp;quot;is this feasible&amp;quot; query (what we used to call Reality Check, and now, as you state, Internal Consistency); but in reality is more of an &amp;quot;is this &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; kind of question. Definitely a Tertirary level query and one of IK's better questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back on my own history here at WB, I see that I've asked only three queries. Largely they were idea tests, and all of the &amp;quot;is this feasible&amp;quot; type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if I were to delve into question &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; my queries would have to be of this tertiary or even a more advanced quaternary type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A decision to support — or not support — questions of this type: I 100% support this kind of query in WB.SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rules we expect OPs to follow when asking a question of this type: 1. the question must show a clear and obvious worldbuilding context; 2. the question must demonstrate a command of artistry; 3. the querent must demonstrate a clear understanding of the world the querent is actually working on; 4. the subject matter of the query should demonstrate integration within the world as a whole; 5. the querent must make themselves available for discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions we expect OPs to respect when asking a question of this type: I think restrictions will be hardest to impose but I'd like to see this kind of query restricted to users who have an accessible corpus of work that can be examined. You are asking me to review and judge your work --- I need to see your work! Respondents must be given the opportunity to see &amp;amp; experience this world as a work of art --- which means that the querent ought to provide or be able to provide links to books published (in print or pdf), links to online stories, links to online world related images, music, artifacts and other evidence of worldbuilding. To go back to IK's example, it would be nice to see that creature in action, either through a story or a fictional encyclopedia entry outside of the SE question itself. A tertiary question should integrate its own subject matter within the broader context of the world which that subject matter is part of. I think this would prevent the kind of abuse you worry about. If you want to play with the big boys, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. I think we as community should expect a higher level of cognizance and ethics from querents: we should expect a higher quality question from the get go.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expectations the OP should have concerning the nature of answers to their question: All in all, I think a deeper question of this type should demonstrate a clear understanding of all underlying WB.SE concepts, so the question itself should be well formulated, and that includes what you want out of an answer. It should be very clearly stated what kind of review you're looking for. You gave two examples: &amp;quot;is this good&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;in what ways is this piece lacking&amp;quot;. Other examples could be &amp;quot;how does this demonstrate artistry?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Does this follow good artistic principles?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Is this piece consistent with a general philosophy of art that propounds X, Y, and Z?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expectations for Respondents: You didn't specify, but I think it goes without saying that respondents to this kind of query ought to adhere to some pretty strong expectations as well! We could set a simple expectation of 1000 or 5000 rep points just to answer. A little arbitrary, perhaps, but if I asked a Tertiary or Quaternary level question, I'd really want someone who's prepared to think deeply and respond artistically; someone who knows the community, someone who is active in the community, someone who gets worldbuilding as an art form. I think a restriction aimed at focusing on the Illuminati of this forum would help to improve response quality. I think respondents ought to be able to offer links to their own works as well. A respondent should have a sort of CV or portfolio of work that would serve to demonstrate some kind of objective criteria for having the wherewithal to approach and answer this kind of query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-11-10T06:37:02.537" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T06:37:02.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9956" CreationDate="2022-11-10T15:36:46.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic or not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority, if not all questions here, involves &lt;strong&gt;testing ideas against rules&lt;/strong&gt;. Going through the ones currently at the top of the feed;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237906/does-adrenaline-have-anything-to-do-with-explosions&quot;&gt;Idea of adrenaline-based combustion; tested against biology and chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237877/could-you-launch-a-spacecraft-with-turbines&quot;&gt;Idea of spacecraft launch; tested against physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237829/how-big-a-telescope-would-we-need-to-see-the-light-distortion-effects-of-a-black&quot;&gt;Idea of a black hole moon detectable via gravitational lensing; tested against physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237855/aside-from-fueling-how-would-a-future-space-station-generate-revenue-and-provid&quot;&gt;Idea of economically independent space stations; tested against economics and some sociology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So sets of rules are often branches of science, which are essentially categories of rules and models following our understanding of reality. Then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; questions have the addition of testing the idea against &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, because the idea can be used to make up rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some of these questions the idea is fully thought out and the question is for validation/consistency, in others it is an idea with a specific gap (the problem to solve), and in still others it's a mere concept that needs narrowing down in order to &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt; the rules for a world. I think all three types are equally valid worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So for all &amp;quot;is my idea feasible&amp;quot; questions I think that meeting the overall rules for Worldbuilding.SE is enough, and that they shouldn't need to jump through additional hoops.&lt;/strong&gt; Many &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; questions are feasibility tests, even if some are less overtly calling it so. Banning or restricting this category makes no sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specific rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to be more specific as it comes to this category, in order to dissuade lazy questioners from pasting in their idea unformatted and expecting feedback on every part of it, from every angle. Particularly targeted therefore should be the need for narrow and objective scoring criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask only for feasibility without saying what makes an answer feasible, which system of rules to use; those questions don't specify any quality criteria for the answers. That renders them opinion-based. Figuring out new site policy to classify some of those as valid questions would be a challenge, and I'm personally not going to try to meet it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ichtys King's question specifies that it is asking for testing against &amp;quot;realistic biology and physics&amp;quot;, so in my opinion it meets this threshold. I don't see the question as a particularly novel form compared to the existing body of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to respond to two of the bullet points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A decision to support — or not support — questions of this type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I support it if they have objective scoring criteria: feasibility is defined as a test against a set of rules. Those include but are not necessarily limited to branches of science, and the idea itself. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8188/debate-on-the-relevance-of-law-related-questions&quot;&gt;I personally think law should be included too&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rules we expect OPs to follow when asking a question of this type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the feasibility criteria are still reasonably narrow and alike in perspective. If you ask for idea validation from the perspective of both natural physics, economics and sociology; then you've most likely asked multiple questions at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2022-11-11T17:56:59.357" LastActivityDate="2022-11-11T17:56:59.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9956" CreationDate="2022-11-10T17:02:24.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Tip : Give a clear perspective to look at&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;What do you think about X concept?&amp;quot; is often extremely vague; Alone it asks for one's personal opinion on the topic as a whole.&lt;/strong&gt; This makes them especially vulnerable for these closure reasons :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Need more focus&lt;/strong&gt; : you implicitly ask on everything in the concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; : Every answers are more than likely to be based on what the answerer thinks is important instead of some more objective criterias; There won't be an easy way to scale answers' quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And need details or clarity&lt;/strong&gt; : Answerers will be uncertain about what you actually need or want to know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To avoid this you need to state where we should focus our sight, what's important to know for you. In other words, the goals you want to reach.&lt;/strong&gt; This is especially important in concept reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep the same word throughout this answer, I will call these goals &amp;quot;intentions&amp;quot; from now on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How can you find the question's main intention?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideally, you already have your intentions as a worldbuilder. You can use these as a baseline for your question's intention.&lt;/strong&gt; These worldbuilder intentions include -but are not limited to- the genre you want to fall in (hard science-fiction, horror, comedy...), what you want to talk about (a perspective on human life...), your targeted audience (kids and their parents, young couples...), and what do you feel is important for you (e.g. : I absolutely want dog-men in my world !).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's not enough, you can use your doubts as intentions, too.&lt;/strong&gt; Take the most important concern you have, the one that just cannot get out of your mind. The one that will determine alone the fate of the whole concept. This is likely a very good intention for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you get your question's main intention, you should be able to deduce what you need to focus on first and foremost.&lt;/strong&gt; For instance, if you're making a high-tech, action-packed movie about spies, you'll be more interested in having &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImpossiblyCoolWeapon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cool looking high-tech weaponry&lt;/a&gt; with fun interactions than knowing &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BottomlessMagazines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how many bullets any of them can hold&lt;/a&gt;. So if you're designing a deadly cryo-pen, you should perhaps double-check the (side)-effects of throwing jets of liquid nitrogen first before any hard anchor in reality like how it can stay cold for so long. Not that the latter isn't interesting at all, it's just not critical in regards to the work you're doing, and can be dealt later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, remember to focus on as little intentions as possible in your question, ideally one or two.&lt;/strong&gt; The less you have at once, the easier it will be to grasp what you want to know. If you end with too many, make a choice and remember that this choice is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; definitive for neither your world nor other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can you give examples of how it could improve my questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Heya, what do you think about my giant glass bottle house standing on the seabed?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;– Uh... It looks cool, I guess? I'm not sure what to tell, actually...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Heya, what do you think about my giant glass bottle house standing on the seabed? I want things to be plausible in regards to physics, so can you tell me how well it would fare in this regard?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;– Well, I think that your house will fall onto the side, because it's so tall and well, it lacks fundations to stand on. The water current will just topple it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note how easier it becomes to answer very accurately about what you need to be checked.&lt;/strong&gt; It's because as an answerer you don't need anymore to think what would be interesting to talk about, you just need to know if it is doing well in regards to the question's intention. Here are other examples, using the same base question &amp;quot;what do you think about X?&amp;quot; and extended with intentions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think about this country spread on multiple, far apart islands? With this government and economy I designed, could it actually help keep a consistent culture and strong patriotism across all lands?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think about this gigantic bomber plane I made? Do you think it will have enough firepower to destroy this kind of city with only one pass of one of them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T17:02:24.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2022-11-17T21:36:11.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How many people could be mobilized out of mainland USA in case of an emergency?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a story I am writing, a disaster happens that will result in extreme global cooling within the span of a few months. This will coincide with winter in the northern hemisphere, which will make the cold much harsher - around December, the North Atlantic will freeze all the way down to Miami. On land, there will be snowfall all the way down to Colombia. Due to other factors not relevant to this question, this condition will become permanent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The southern hemisphere will of course be affected as well, but due to geography the changes will be less severe. Latitudes ranging from 5 degrees north to 22 south will become cooler but should remain free of ice and snow all year round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that North America will become practically inhospitable, but many countries more to the South won't... If the US government were to try and relocate its population to countries in the southern hemisphere, &lt;strong&gt;how many people could moved out of the continental US in the span of six months?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not interested in whether people will survive to settle, nor in the political ramifications of this migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2022-11-18T17:20:33.147" LastActivityDate="2022-11-18T17:20:33.147" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9948" CreationDate="2022-11-19T22:53:21.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Blatant Self Promotion: Show Don't Tell&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way for those of us who answer questions to do this is to simply give an answer that makes use of our own worldbuilding, and better still, could actually be an example of an in-world artifact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this Meta question in mind, I answered a recent Main question with a piece of pure worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/237643/37029&quot;&gt;geocentric world&lt;/a&gt;. As an answer, it was fairly well received, and I think could serve as a model for others to do likewise. I don't think this could work for every situation, but it is one way of offering a creative answer that both answers the question and showcases some aspect of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done this before, and I'd be curious to know what others think about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-11-19T22:53:21.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-25T16:41:19.220" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok so here’s the sitch. I wanna ask a question on the normal World Building Stack Exchange website but the question I’ve prepared is absolutely massive in size. Like, at least 900 words total. It needs to be that big though because the entire point of the question is to verify if a theory I’ve made in relation to an alternative evolutionary path for humanity is feasible, and that requires context. Still though, I don’t wanna clutter the screen with a huge wall of text so I’m kinda left in a rather difficult position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to compress my huge 900 word theory into a small space that won’t stretch the screen out? Like a box that expands when you press that I can shove all that text into?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: The question has now been massively edited &amp;amp; reduced in size. The version which was originally posted is accessible &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/revisions/238637/1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and the current version &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/238637/how-do-i-make-the-anime-girl-warrior-physique-realistic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98821" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T18:29:48.123" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T18:29:48.123" Title="How to ask a really big question?" Tags="|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9967" CreationDate="2022-11-25T18:02:30.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7183/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; for situations like this. It's a space to iterate through a question and get feedback from the community before posting it to the main site. Since you're unsure how to ask your question using the sandbox will let you work on formatting and revising the question so that it's readable, and easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that you don't need 900 words to ask the core of your question. A good rule when writing is that a question is ready not when you can't add anything else, but when you cannot take anything else away. A good technique I've found is to start by identifying a 1 sentence summary of your question, then figure out what additional information you need to add to make the question suitable for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other strategies for question writing. When you start by knowing your core ask, you make it easy to repeatedly ask &lt;em&gt;Is this information necessary for this question to be specific and answerable?&lt;/em&gt;. This helps you make consistent informed decisions at every step of the writing and editing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-11-25T18:02:30.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9967" CreationDate="2022-11-26T05:31:14.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Completely Rethinking My Answer!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I Read Your Question!&lt;/strong&gt; --- Alright, so I read through your query and I actually think, for all the work you put into it, you might actually be asking the wrong question entirely. I agree 100% with Daron, that if all you really want to do is ask if some trope is feasible given a set of underlying world rules, then indeed about 95% of your text is useless and more of a hinderance than a help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe (and I could be wrong) that this isn't really what you want to know. You've clearly got the world &amp;quot;built&amp;quot; and I think what you're really doing here is asking us to &lt;strong&gt;evaluate your idea&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBH brought this concept up just recently in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9956/advice-how-to-ask-for-a-review-of-your-idea&quot;&gt;this question about asking us to review ideas&lt;/a&gt;. I think your 'theory' is sufficiently devised that we could offer reviews of it as a whole, rather than just giving you a thumbs up / down on whether the trope works or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Challenge:&lt;/strong&gt; If you want us to answer &amp;quot;is this feasible,&amp;quot; then I'd suggest deleting your question and start over. But, if you'd like us to &amp;quot;review your idea,&amp;quot; then I'd suggest you edit your question to introduce your theory within the context of the world as you find it and ask us for what we think. I'd love to delve into that kind of query!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aaaand....&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I see you just wanted the feasibility check after all. Oh well! Maybe another time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Apart from the Sandbox...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some basic strategies you can consider when presenting us with a wall-o-text theory that you think is so dreadfully important for your query to make sense. As Tortilena says, what you think requires a 900 word thesis, I might say, you could have asked it in 10 words! It happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Elevator Pitch&lt;/strong&gt; --- You should always prepare a tl/dr, and since you're the querent, put it at the top! Even the longest scientific and medical papers in existence have a little bit of text that fits in a small box on PubMed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use Good Formatting&lt;/strong&gt; --- Well written questions, especially those that require a lot of context like yours, will suffer if you do not format, or do not format well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your marquee question should be concise and to the point and it should match what you're telling us in the body&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give us your elevator pitch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;State your condensed thesis --- this is what differentiates my humans from real humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give us your background --- this is your 900 words of context; please use good grammar, break things up into sections with appropriate headers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell us what you're thinking and why (your assessment of the situation) --- since you're asking what amounts to a reality check, we'd like to be on the same page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell us what you're looking for in a good answer --- what specifics should we address, the criteria by which you'd judge an answer &amp;quot;useful&amp;quot;, give us your worldbuilding context by telling us a little bit about how your world works and how it differs from the real world, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Roll With the Punches&lt;/strong&gt; --- Don't be surprised if someone comments &amp;quot;why did you make me read a whole bloody book when your question amounts to 'do I have permission to do this in my world!'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word Your Question Carefully&lt;/strong&gt; --- Lots of questions succeed or fail simply because the querent doesn't pay attention to details. If you ask &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, I'm going to give you a philosophical or metaphysical meditation; if you ask &amp;quot;how&amp;quot;, I'm going to give you a step by step progression; if you ask &amp;quot;can I do this&amp;quot;, we're all going to say 'of course you can! It's your world!'; if you ask &amp;quot;does this make sense given the rules of my world&amp;quot; we're going to tell you yes or no and here's why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Food for Thought&lt;/strong&gt; --- Keep in mind that you're really not asking a &amp;quot;big question&amp;quot;! You're actually asking a relatively straight forward question that requires some background context to address. It's your job to give us the vital context in a legible &amp;amp; sensible fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sandbox is a good place to start, but, to be honest, if you really think all that context is required, then go ahead and craft a well written query in Main!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T17:16:25.820" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T17:16:25.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9967" CreationDate="2022-11-26T21:37:29.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Don't Ask a Really Big Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/238637/making-the-action-girl-and-gender-is-no-object-tropes-more-realistic&quot;&gt;your really big question.&lt;/a&gt; It is a story about how a society of women ended up as strong as the men. If the only question you want answered is indeed &amp;quot;Is this 900 word story believable?&amp;quot; then your question is simply unsuitable for this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are prepared to trim down the question to be suitable, then you can start by  (a) removing  the less important parts of the story and (b) focusing on the most difficult parts of the question. Here are what two of your paragraphs look like when trimmed down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Girls/&lt;/s&gt;Women beating muscular men and monsters in fights &lt;s&gt;and women fighting alongside men in wars. These are two very &lt;/s&gt; is a common trope in fiction &lt;s&gt; that we’ve seen time and time again in fantasy and sci-fi, but while sci-fi has the excuse of using technological weaponry and biomechanical augmentations to reduce the huge gap in physical strength between the two sexes, fantasy almost always relies on boring old magic to make the idea of women fighting in wars and not immediately dying/hindering the efficiency of her comrades plausible.  &lt;/s&gt; My world has this trope but I would like it to be scientifically plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Women beating muscular men and monsters in fights  is a common trope in fiction. My world has this trope but I would like it to be scientifically plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second example paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;One day out of nowhere, a large steel capsule crashed into Earth near the home of this male-dominated tribe. The males forcefully opened it but would end up regretting it. For inside of this capsule was a artificial virus designed by a race of creatures that existed far, far away from Earth on another planet (it’s basically alien technology). &lt;/s&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Earth was attacked by a virus that&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;s&gt; seemed to only affect male organisms  (what do you think sounds more realistic. A male-only virus or a male human-only virus?)  and within a single year, almost all of the males/men in the tribe died. The virus found its way into almost every corner of the planet and&lt;/s&gt; killed off 90% of all male humans/male-life on Earth. &lt;s&gt;Before it was able to finish off the remaining 10% of men/male-organisms however, the Gods of my world stepped in and used their nature powers to kill it for good. The impact of the virus was still immense though, as 90% of the males/men on Earth were now deceased, and now&lt;/s&gt; the surviving women in the tribe &lt;s&gt;, who had taken the few surviving men in the tribe as prisoners and were now being led by the only woman in the tribe with knowledge of how to hunt, fight and create traps, &lt;/s&gt; were forced to live like their male oppressors in order to survive. &lt;strong&gt;They learned to hunt, fight and create traps&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earth was attacked by a virus that  killed off 90% of all male humans/male-life on Earth.   The surviving women in the tribe were forced to live like their male oppressors in order to survive.  They learned to hunt, fight and create traps&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see most of the text can be removed. Try for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14322" LastEditorUserId="14322" LastEditDate="2022-11-26T21:49:19.997" LastActivityDate="2022-11-26T21:49:19.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-30T18:17:22.780" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/238748/40609&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asked about designing the biological sexes of alien creatures. Not surprising in our world today, the OP's original question used the word &amp;quot;gender,&amp;quot; even going so far as to identify the creatures as &amp;quot;woke&amp;quot; in the original title. I'm not complaining about that — it's the confusion that's the issue. The author thought the creatures had been designed with a third and/or fourth &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; that was called gender, but when you get down to brass tacks, the question was actually about sex and the design was basically the same two-sex procreative system we commonly see on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that it's becoming more common in our world's current sociopolitical environment for the concepts of &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; (the biology of relationships) and &lt;em&gt;sex&lt;/em&gt; (the biology of reproduction) to become confused.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; That's also not the point of this post — but what started out as an effort to help worldbuilders sort that out... is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to post a question seeking to help worldbuilders understand what it means to have a &amp;quot;third sex&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; with the goal of Stack participants describing fictional examples. E.G.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are examples of fictional three-sex reproductive relationships that worldbuilders can use to guide them when designing creature reproductive relationships?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help worldbuilders not familiar with the terminology differences between the biology of reproduction and the biology of relationships. The question would have had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;worldbuilding-resources-container&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; tag, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; tag, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;sex-container&quot;&gt;sex&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I realized that our current rules won't allow for a question seeking comprehensive advice of this nature. It would violate the Brainstorming admonition as well as being open-ended (but not, I suspect, in the way Stack Exchange intended) and all answers having equal value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How can we provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;worldbuilding-resources-container&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-resources&lt;/a&gt; insight? Or have we finally created a version of the rules that killed that tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Insight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming one interpretation of Stack Exchange's intent (to be a collaborative resource for solving problems), do we believe one of our goals is to help instruct new worldbuilders in the process of worldbuilding? (Not necessarily confusing this with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;worldbuilding-process-container&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; tag, but that could be involved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our rules make it difficult to produce a &amp;quot;canonical answer&amp;quot; because we require what I'll call &amp;quot;effort-specific questions&amp;quot; (what help do you need with your own worldbuilding effort?) and a canonical answer would benefit from a more general question (Let's say someone might be interested in the following, what guidance can we offer?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And just to add to the confusion, the OP used the word &amp;quot;woke,&amp;quot; which has no relevance to either the biology of reproduction or the biology of relationships. It's a word that only has meaning in culture, politics, philosophy, etc. It's not that we aren't completely willing to help worldbuilders to incorporate the idea of &amp;quot;wokeness&amp;quot; into their efforts, only that now we've muddied the question with three types of terminology: reproduction, relationships, and culture. It's amazing how well humanity can muddy the proverbial waters.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;If you're not familiar with the biological terminology, &amp;quot;sex&amp;quot; specifically refers procreation. Remembering that we're simplifying all this (a political debate is not useful for worldbuilding... well, not in this context). Thus, humans have two &amp;quot;sexes,&amp;quot; male and female, both equal and necessary to procreate. Simplistically, a &amp;quot;third sex&amp;quot; might be a creature C that receives the egg from creature A and the sperm from creature B for gestation. Creature C being equal and necessary to procreate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-11-30T21:37:40.000" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T18:06:15.847" Title="The Rules and the Worldbuilding Resources Tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|asking-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9971" CreationDate="2022-12-02T15:54:04.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You just took the tag the wrong way ^^&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's recall the tag's description first :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions seeking resources intended to help people with building a fictional world, &lt;strong&gt;such as books and software relating to worldbuilding itself&lt;/strong&gt; (rather than the world that is being built).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of &lt;strong&gt;the meta-level tags, and is specifically concerned with questions about books and technological aids to be used for hastening the process of designing and fleshing out your story-setting&lt;/strong&gt; to make it as beautiful, believable and engrossing as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-resources/info&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding-resource tag's description&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read it, it's more like questions should focus on books, webpages purposely designed to help someone build worlds, rather than a list of real-world references which &amp;quot;could&amp;quot; be used to build worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's find a comparison to better understand : The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;12 principles of animation&lt;/a&gt; is a resource in... Welly, animation x). In contrast, this magnificent photo series could help draw great animations of baseball players throwing balls. But should you not know how to deal with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/animation/discover/animation-key-poses.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;key poses&lt;/a&gt; in the first place, this picture reference doesn't tell how you should use it to animate your character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4JxpY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4JxpY.png&quot; alt=&quot;A series of photo picturing key poses of a player pitching a baseball ball&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;A baseball player pitching very hard his ball. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_pitching_motion_2004.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like your sample question was about the latter, a question about real-world rather than a question which welcome with a warm heart the worldbuilding technics. This is as you internally guessed it kinda non-suited here. Even if its content was well focused, non-opinion-based and clear, it would fall in the off-topic side of closure reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I can see it, some questions correctly using the tag and being on-topic would be akin to these (regardless if they would have been closed for other reasons) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there worldbuilding books to help design societal issues regarding genders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this book about worldbuilding, with this section on creating societies. I didn't understand this passage : Why would focusing on XX and XY help displaying the complexity of gender roles to my audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But what about the tag in general?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Beyond your attempt, I find this tag is tough. Like real tough and rough.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, to ask questions about worldbuilding resources, you need worldbuilding resources. As far as I know, there's not that many resources directly tied to worldbuilding, and when it's the case it's under the prism of another domain, like art or writing ️. This could make questions unwillingly off-topic, as they would be easily linked to these arts, rather than worldbuilding .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, to ask questions about worldbuilding resources you should be clear on the trouble you're having, and not ask a general &amp;quot;catch-all, catch-none&amp;quot; solution. It's already hard for people to tell us what they want or need, it's even harder when you hit the meta-level ^^&amp;quot;. There, opinions don't even try to hide anymore (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;what's the 'best' book for worldbuilding?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). Moreover, people can't put a clear word on what they're lacking, because oftentimes you need to know enough about worldbuilding methodologies in the first place. It's very akin to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/software-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;software-recommendation tag&lt;/a&gt;, or even better, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336/what-is-required-for-a-question-to-contain-enough-information&quot;&gt;software-recommendation SE&lt;/a&gt; site having troubles people stating clear needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes receiving a receiveable question under this tag quite unlikely. Is it bad news? Well, as much as I'd like seeing questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot;&gt;worldbuilding processes&lt;/a&gt; itself, I'd like to get the hand on some worldbuilding ressources, too! Standard references such like the ones in art, game design or animation really help understand the principles and sort out basic troubles. And having tools like on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143606/80336&quot;&gt;list of worldbuilding resources&lt;/a&gt; specifically designed to build worlds really &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;hasten the process of designing and fleshing out your story setting&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. So yes, it's troublesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-12-02T15:54:04.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-03T18:16:35.267" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/238831/99903&quot;&gt;How to calculate the strength of fictional creatures when creating them or at least be precise and believable?&lt;/a&gt; and then the morning after found my account deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I tried making another account to ask another question, this time it was instantly suspended, well... more like 15 seconds after posting the question, the question was closed and my account ''boom gone''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't used this website in almost a year, well actually it is probably a year maybe slightly more, at least can you restore my old account? I don't remember the nickname but I wasn't ever banned on that account. The bot knows my old nickname so you moderators must know it too, I wasn't evading any ban as I'm almost certain I was not banned, but feel free to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my first account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charon in 2016, haven't used it in 6 years, never banned, just forgot email and password, but I was a kid, the email was probably something edgy like baphometh...something...something@gmail.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/24960/charon&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/24960/charon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then my account from 2021, the password is certainly the same as this one. I asked a question about a continent, one of the cities in the map had the name ''Velsia''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user99904" LastEditorDisplayName="user99904" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T18:39:41.153" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T23:18:55.280" Title="Suspended for 1 year by bot" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9973" CreationDate="2022-12-03T20:57:22.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though SE doesn't forbid having multiple accounts, creating multiple accounts with the scope of circumventing system or moderator imposed sanctions is not allowed and will inevitably result in the additional accounts being removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T20:57:22.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-04T09:28:53.297" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: This &lt;s&gt;question&lt;/s&gt; post is going to be kept as a catalogue/archive for the questions in my series &amp;quot;Saturnian Cloud Cities&amp;quot;. It is going to be updated from time-to-time, to add links to new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/234062/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-1-cloud-city&quot;&gt;Part 1- Cloud City&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/235907/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-2-ice-harvester-planes&quot;&gt;Part 2- Ice Harvester Planes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/236002/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-3-wind-turbine-problems?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Part 3- Wind Turbine Problems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/236007/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-4-how-to-deploy-the-cloud-city?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Part 4- Deploying Cloud-Cities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/236765/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-5-shielding-of-cloud-cities-from-saturnian-weather?rq=1&quot;&gt;Part 5- Shielding from Saturnian Weather&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237103/saturnian-cloud-cities-pt-6-geothermal-cables-vs-stupendously-large-airships?rq=1&quot;&gt;Part 6- Geothermal Cables Vs Stupendously Large Airships&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97694" LastActivityDate="2022-12-04T09:28:53.297" Title="Saturnian Cloud Cities Series" Tags="|discussion|reference|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2022-12-05T23:42:07.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can a monarch mask its true intentions in collecting records for a nationwide registry?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the 1600s, King Macbeth has succeeded in taking the throne of his country for himself with the help of a cabal of dark witches. Due to their art of divination and prophesizing, he has managed to stay one step ahead of his rivals, ruthlessly purging them in order to establish his authoritarian regime. However, despite the power that he has gained, he retains an insecure grip on power. The witches have told him of a prophecy that sees the end of his reign by the actions of an individual. This chosen one would be born under a total solar eclipse, in which an entity will enter and possess the body of a newborn child. This chosen one will grow up to lead a rebellion and end his tyrannical reign. Although the witches can predict when a solar eclipse will occur, they cannot pinpoint the exact child whom the entity will choose, nor the location that it will happen. Macbeth must find a way to relay the coming of the messiah for as long as possible to extend his rule over the populace. Finding and killing the child become's Macbeth's first priority. However, the prophecy goes on to say that the messiah can never truly die, but will simply be reincarnated during the next solar eclipse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Macbeth settles on the idea of a database that would be standardized across the kingdom. This would require strict record keeping, demanding that the records of every child born during an eclipse within the kingdom be gathered for use in a nationwide registry. These records would need to be specific, down to the very date and time the child was delivered. The goal is to design a system of record keeping that would allow for a national database that is as accurate as possible. This can be done by mandating that hospitals keep records specific to the event and requiring them to be turned over to the state. Once they had been gathered, the king's staff would analyze the records and narrow down the potential list of chosen ones to a handful few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is precedent for this in many governments in the form of a census, which are used to determine the number of people there are in a specific area. They do this to determine the amount of taxes they can expect, or to decide how much resources to devote to a certain location. However, there are a number of problems with this format. Going on a murderous rampage and killing every child delivered on a certain day is simply impractical for the long term. Collecting birth records for certain children linked to a specific event is likely to raise suspicions. People are unlikely to cooperate with having their data collected by the state, specifically if it can get their child potentially killed. Many expecting mothers would simply avoid hospitals and have their children in secret away from prying eyes, or at home. In a worst-case scenario, these scorched earth tactics are likely to push the populace into open rebellion and civil war. This leads to a high body count that limits to pool of taxpayers in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth needs to disguise his motives for collecting records in creating this national database for the purpose of murdering newborn chosen ones, all while protecting his good guy PR image. How can the king accomplish this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52361" LastEditorUserId="52361" LastEditDate="2022-12-07T13:25:41.433" LastActivityDate="2022-12-07T13:25:41.433" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2022-12-06T19:39:16.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How can a planet remain in perpetual algae bloom?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;climate-container&quot;&gt;climate&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flora&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flora&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;flora-container&quot;&gt;flora&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate-change&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate-change&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate-change&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;climate-change-container&quot;&gt;climate-change&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been developing a planet for an original scifi setting and I'm not sure if it's scientifically plausible. Said planet is in a state of global algae infestation across all major oceans, resulting from unchecked industrial activity several million years before the present. The few surviving fauna were either hardy extremophiles or formed a symbiotic relationship with the algae, such as undergoing kleptoplasty. These organisms became the dominant lifeforms, speciating into a relatively diverse ecosystem, albeit not as complex as the previous generation. The ecological shift was long enough ago for a moderately intelligent animal species, comparable to corvids or chimpanzees, to evolve into a sapient one with at least a neolithic level of technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main concern is whether or not this infested state would last long enough for this to occur. Algae blooms on Earth typically only last a few weeks before the algae runs out of sustenance, suggesting a relatively quick recovery. I previously considered increased volcanic activity, another byproduct of global warming, as a new source of greenhouse gases and nitrates. However, I'm not sure if this would be enough to perpetuate the bloom for millions of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What mechanism would allow a planet to remain in an algae-infested state for an extended period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background info/criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The planet's physical characteristics differ from Earth, being twice as massive with a 25% larger radius. Its surface gravity is about 28% higher, resulting in flatter terrain and overall smaller landmasses due to heavy erosion. Its rotational period is 43.125 hours, with an axial tilt of 6.2°. It is tidally locked to a mars-sized companion, creating a permanent 800m tidal bulge. As a result, its landmasses are concentrated on opposite hemispheres perpendicular to the companion planet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main causes of the planet's current state include: unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, namely CO2 and methane; rampant fracking and mineral harvest, deep enough into the planet's crust to cause mild instability and increase volcanic activity; excessive use of fertilizer and dumping organic waste, such as sewage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently, the planet's average surface temperature is about 25°C, 10 degrees hotter than it was before the collapse. There is no surface ice due to a lack of major polar landmasses with high mountains. Tropical regions exceed 30°C, consisting of scorched, barren landmasses and desert archipelagoes. The algal bloom encompasses all bodies of water, including major oceans and smaller inland bodies such as lakes and rivers. The current generation of fauna descended from the few hardy organisms which survived the collapse and mass-deoxygenation. Many of them are kleptoplastic, absorbing the chloroplasts from the algae to undergo photosynthesis and produce their own oxygen. Others are simply adapted to anoxic conditions, including abyssal sea life.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This state should last at least 10 million years, and the mechanism perpetuating it can't be actively sustained by sapients. The planet's state is the result of sapient actions, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; they went extinct shortly after the collapse. Whether or not the current sapients can perpetuate the bloom is irrelevant since they've only recently become intellient enough to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sandbox Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally posted this in the main site and forgot to delete it after it was flagged for needing more focus. It was answered before I made any corrections, meaning I can no longer delete it. I am continuing to refine the question based on the feedback here, but I'm not sure what to do about the original post. I like the answer that was provided in it, so I'm not sure if I even need to continue improving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99967" LastEditorUserId="99967" LastEditDate="2022-12-09T18:26:21.540" LastActivityDate="2022-12-09T18:26:21.540" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9982" CreationDate="2022-12-11T03:53:10.283" Score="11" ViewCount="2708" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sandbox works best if you sort posts by &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; (click &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609?answertab=active&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Welcome to the Sandbox!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sandbox&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a place where Worldbuilding.SE users can get feedback on prospective questions they wish to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;. This is useful, because new and experienced users can have trouble writing a clear and fully specified question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a much better chance of your question being well received if you post it in the Sandbox first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you're here to help mentor Sandbox questions (&lt;strong&gt;THANK YOU!&lt;/strong&gt;), jump to the &amp;quot;Helping in the Sandbox&amp;quot; section.  If this sandbox has grown too full, jump to the &amp;quot;Maintenance&amp;quot; section.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please don't vote on any of the proposed questions in the Sandbox&lt;/strong&gt;. Votes don't mean anything here and you could inadvertently bias others who might help, or worse, make a new person feel like their question writing skills are hopeless. Or worse yet, much better than they are. If you think a question is good, leave a note of encouragement and a helpful tip. If you think a question is bad, leave a note of encouragement and offer your help to make it better!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Posting to the Sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please take the time to read through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;Help Center &amp;gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt; pages.&lt;/strong&gt; We know it's a lot to read, but those pages contain the rules our mentors are using to judge your proposed question.  If you have not taken the time to read through them, we ask that you do.  It would also be beneficial to read through our Meta posts about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4868&quot;&gt;high concept questions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6654&quot;&gt;open-ended questions&lt;/a&gt;, and what &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6436#6437&quot;&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; means on a creative site like Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To post a question to the Sandbox:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Post an answer to this post with the content of your proposed question. You can create as many answers as you have proposed questions, but it is recommended that you only work on one question at a time. The content of the post should be as close as possible to the format you would use when asking on the main site. If you would like, you may add a section at the bottom explaining what parts of the proposed question you are most worried about (See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/640/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on suggested syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once you have posted your proposed question,&lt;/strong&gt; users will be able to comment on it with feedback. You can then respond to their feedback with comments of your own, or make edits to your post to attempt to address their feedback (after editing, be sure to notify the user via a comment of your own, use &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36026&quot;&gt;@username&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in your comment to make this happen). The feedback/edit cycle can go on for as long as needed until either you are confident that your question is ready to be asked on the main site, or you've decided the question just won't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please be patient.  While most sandbox reviews can be completed in a couple of days, some questions may require a week or more for review.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, please ignore votes.&lt;/strong&gt; We've asked mentors to not vote for Sandbox questions because questions change here too frequently.  Nevertheless, those index fingers hovering over left mouse buttons are trained to vote, so votes occasionally appear.  Please completely ignore votes that happen to appear for your proposed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When your question is ready&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Post it to the main site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a link to your main-site post to the bottom of the &amp;quot;Graduated Questions&amp;quot; list.  The list is the accepted answer to this post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit your Sandbox post so that it only contains the title and a link to the main-site post.  &lt;em&gt;Delete everything else.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete all of your comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, delete your Sandbox post.  Users with enough rep can still see the post, but it will be moved automatically to the bottom of the answer list, making this Sandbox easier to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you abandon your question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally a Sandbox question is abandoned.  While crafting the question, you may discover the answer.  Or you may realize that the question's basic premise can't be expressed within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;rules of Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  You may also simply forget that you have a question in the Sandbox.  If you decide to abandon the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit your Sandbox post so that it only contains the title and a notice (e.g., &amp;quot;Abandoned question.&amp;quot;).  &lt;em&gt;Delete everything else.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete all of your comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, delete your Sandbox post.  Users with enough rep can still see the post, but it will be moved automatically to the bottom of the answer list, making this Sandbox easier to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please be aware&lt;/strong&gt; that questions without activity (edits to your question or comments left by you) for more than one month may be judged abandoned and removed.  We'll leave a comment or two to get your attention, but eventually, forgotten questions will be cleaned up and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Helping in the Sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are sincerely grateful for the many users who help mentor questions and new users here in the Sandbox.  Sharing your experience adds considerably to the quality and enjoyment of the site.  We invite you to help us by adhering to the following policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep the Sandbox clean.&lt;/strong&gt; In order to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/sandbox-cleanup&quot;&gt;keep the Sandbox clean&lt;/a&gt; users are encouraged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4912/28789&quot;&gt;look out for questions that have not seen any activity in some time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you notice the OP has not edited his/her proposed question or left a comment in 2 or more weeks, please tap the OP on the shoulder with a comment (e.g., &amp;quot;Are you still working on this question?  This draft might be deleted if there is no further activity.&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you notice the OP has not edited his/her proposed question or left a comment in more than a month, please flag the question for moderator attention (e.g., &amp;quot;This Sandbox question has been inactive for a month.&amp;quot;).  &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not take it upon yourself to delete the OP's question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete your comments when they no longer apply.&lt;/strong&gt; Please make it easy for others to see which comments are still relevant to the discussion by removing your obsolete comments. In addition you can ask a mod to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6231/28789&quot;&gt;purge comments under graduated posts or move them to chat under abandoned posts&lt;/a&gt; to make it easier for users that can see deleted posts to use the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not vote on proposed questions.&lt;/strong&gt; Questions in the Sandbox frequently change (it's why they're here) — and the moment they change your vote may no longer reflect your beliefs.  It's unreasonable to expect mentors to constantly watch Sandbox questions and there is no automatic way (indeed, there's no way at all…) to notify voters when a question is edited.  It is better to use comments.  If you feel the question should be downvoted, explain the problem in a comment.  If you feel the question is ready for the main site, say so in a comment.  The dates on the comments allow other people to judge the relevance of your statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not answer questions here.&lt;/strong&gt; We know it's tempting, but answering the question in a comment will clog the comments and may not even be relevant to the final form of the question. If you have an answer for the proposed question, simply wait for it to be posted to the main site, and answer it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not edit a proposed question&lt;/strong&gt; unless you have the OP's permission to do so.  The purpose of the Sandbox is two-fold: (a) to perfect a question and (b) to help users learn to craft good questions.  If you jump in and fix a question you've subverted (b).  Whenever possible, let the OP edit their proposed question.  &lt;em&gt;Exception: If a question has been deleted but not properly cleaned up, help us out by editing the question to remove everything but the title.  Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/639/2685&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information on how to use the Sandbox.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Maintenance&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section is referred to when a new sandbox is created.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3813/6507&quot;&gt;In order to make the Sandbox easier to use&lt;/a&gt;, a new Sandbox question will be posted when the old one becomes too full (between 75 and 100 sandbox questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whomever creates the new page:&lt;/strong&gt; be sure you want to be actively involved with the Sandbox, because until it gets replaced in the future, you'll be notified of every proposed question and every comment.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A) Update this previous sandbox list:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous sandbox post should be locked as obsolete by a moderator and renamed to &amp;quot;Inactive Sandbox [Date].&amp;quot; Please add a link to the top of the old sandbox page to the new Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7183/40609&quot;&gt;Inactive Sandbox 2019-2022&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168&quot;&gt;Inactive Sandbox 2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835&quot;&gt;Inactive Sandbox 2017-18&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/635&quot;&gt;Inactive Sandbox 2014-2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are active questions in the old Sandbox, leave a comment for the users indicating that the old sandbox is closing and they either need to wrap up (preferred) or re-post the question in the new Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(B) Update these links after the new Sandbox is created:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; (This requires the help of a moderator)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/639#640&quot;&gt;Sandbox FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (The Sandbox FAQ has two links to the currently active sandbox: one in the question proper and one in the answer the above link takes you to.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sort-by-active link at the top of the new Sandbox.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The current sandbox link in our &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se&quot;&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-worldbuilding-process-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info&quot;&gt;Wiki page&lt;/a&gt; to point to the new Sandbox page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(C) Create the &amp;quot;Graduated Question List&amp;quot; answer and mark it a &amp;quot;Community Wiki.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2024-02-03T13:42:00.023" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T20:44:36.787" Title="Sandbox for proposed Questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|sandbox|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2022-12-11T03:54:59.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graduated Questions List&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1728&quot;&gt;Sandbox policy&lt;/a&gt;, answers containing graduated questions will be deleted. This answer is designed to be a repository for all those questions that have graduated. It is a community wiki answer, so add in your question here, at the end of the list, once it is posted on the main site! Position #1 is an example of how to do this to get the ball rolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox for proposed Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241544/how-large-of-a-magma-chamber-do-i-need-to-geothermally-power-a-small-city&quot;&gt;How large of a magma chamber do I need to geothermally power a small city?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/242595/how-can-muscle-atrophy-due-to-long-gestation-in-artificial-wombs-be-avoided&quot;&gt;How can muscle atrophy due to long gestation in artificial wombs be avoided?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/243674/knocking-out-zombies&quot;&gt;Knocking Out Zombies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244457/how-to-map-arms-of-the-galaxy&quot;&gt;How to map arms of the galaxy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/245045/how-would-i-go-about-establishing-phenotype-in-the-case-of-co-dominance-where-mi&quot;&gt;How would I go about establishing phenotype in the case of co-dominance where mixed phenotype is not an option?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/245059/80336&quot;&gt;How can I determine gene expression in cases of multiple co-dominant genes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/246799/surviving-organ-failure&quot;&gt;Surviving Organ Failure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249553/how-to-optimize-co2-and-h2-intake-for-a-sessile-methane-producing-organism&quot;&gt;How to Optimize CO2 and H2 Intake for a Sessile Methane-Producing Organism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/246426/80336&quot;&gt;Solutions for an Aquatic Race to Harvest the Sugar Under Sea Grass Meadows&lt;/a&gt; (edited for reopening)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/251409/how-to-recreate-a-land-harp-that-can-work-in-the-deep-sea&quot;&gt;How to recreate a &amp;quot;land&amp;quot; harp that can work in the deep sea?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="83056" LastEditDate="2023-11-23T17:02:52.787" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T17:02:52.787" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-12-11T03:54:59.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9985" CreationDate="2022-12-12T01:01:29.640" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice now I've started to ask a question only to be told parts were already covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be so much easier to have a Search Box up top, to be able to search knowledge base before trying to formulate a good enough question, or maybe a more obvious way in which to search tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that here was a similar question to this, back in Nov 13 2017 by @JBH, but not the same. So, while I would like to read that discussion at my ease, that's not going to happen because as soon as I post this question, I will lose that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99816" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T09:09:55.920" Title="How can I search better for topics already covered?" Tags="|feature-request|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9983" CreationDate="2022-12-12T03:45:43.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be so much easier to have a Search Box up top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't you have it already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJ42L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJ42L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type the strings you want to search on, and you will get a list of content matching those strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T03:45:43.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9983" CreationDate="2022-12-12T09:09:55.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;There are two tools to avoid duplicates&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The search bar&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very top, you can search for questions using keywords. L.Dutch showed for your computer's web browser. In case you are on a mobile phone, there's a magnifying glass on the menu at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using search engines, a good practice is to search incrementally by typing keywords. This lower the chances of skipping unwillingly a question, and narrows dynamically the results. For instance, don't ask &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=How%20big%20my%20Giant%20can%20be%20under%20Earth%27s%20gravity%3F&quot;&gt;How big my Giant can be under Earth's gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but first &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=Giant%20size&quot;&gt;Giant size&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, then extend or replace keywords if searches aren't satisfactory or give too many results. E.g. : add &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=Giant%20size%20human&quot;&gt;human&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; if you want to read more about humans than planets -a.k.a. gas giants-, or use &amp;quot;height&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;size&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you can use [tags] to narrow your search. For instance &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bfantasy-races%5D%20Giant%20size&quot;&gt;[fantasy-races] Giant Size&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. It should be used when the search engine confuses topics in different themes too much. There are more tools to narrow your search &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The similar questions snippet when writing your own questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool is quite reliable and appears right when you are writing your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iSFMu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iSFMu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example screenshot with giants&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;An example with the same giant question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make a quick draft of your question and this tool will tell you the similar questions it found. Note that the title alone is sometimes insufficient, it works better when you start writing the body too :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T09:09:55.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-14T14:31:46.857" Score="6" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see L.Dutch deleted my answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239330/disasters-to-prompt-the-bettering-of-civilisation/239332#239332&quot;&gt;Disasters to prompt the bettering of civilisation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without explanation.  It seems like a good answer to me.  I was happy with it.  OP wanted a cataclysmic intervention that ultimately leaves humanity the better for it.  I proposed that well meaning, rich and bumbling USA sets out to correct the thinking of humanity for the better.  The cataclysm is implied (because it is part of the OP); possibly Americans do not perceive that there has been a cataclysm and it all turns out in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not porn.  It answers the question.  If it is politically objectionable that is not grounds for deletion.  If it is a bad answer it can be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The power to singlehandedly delete is a big power.  WHen it is used it warrants some explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the newest L.Dutch deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241629/scooped-up-for-military-research-how-realistic-is-it-in-this-day-and-age&quot;&gt;Scooped up for military research: How realistic is it in this day and age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer seems to me straightforward and riffing on the strange world presented in the OP.  I am adding another deleted answer to this post to again suggest that deleting answers be reserved for porn or ads or nonsequiteurs.  An answer made in good faith should not be deleted.  If people do not like it they can downvote it.  If people want to say why they don't like it they can comment on it.  If the answer misses the point people can downvote it.  If people downvote a lot it will turn invisible at -3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators: thank you for keeping order.  As regards questions and answers that meet criteria of WB Stack, consider letting the users of WB stack decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241603/how-successful-could-rapidly-spreading-new-predator-be-in-world-with-todays-typ&quot;&gt;How successful could rapidly spreading new predator be in world with today&amp;#39;s type of development&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Dutch - I get it.  You the boss, boss.  But assuage my curiosity and put a comment noting your reasons under the ones you delete?  It will take you 5 seconds.  Or @sphennings?  Do you know why?  How was this one about little monsters inappropriate?    I will look for a pattern and adjust accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="31698" LastEditDate="2023-02-05T20:22:17.980" LastActivityDate="2023-02-05T20:22:17.980" Title="My answer was deleted. An explanation is warranted" Tags="|discussion|moderators|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-14T16:25:26.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't involved in any of this, so I might as well respond as an independent observer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, here's the answer, for the sake of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need some form of cataclysm or near-cataclysmic event to prompt&#xA;humanity to smarten itself up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5CiPD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5CiPD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/america-saves-the-world-usa-aar-hoi3-ftm-3-05.616017/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SOURCE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The USA has got all the smarten up that the world needs.  And the USA&#xA;has just been waiting for an invitation to bring it, but waiting time&#xA;is done and bringing it time has come!  Chesty grinning Americans are&#xA;going to open up a can of Smarten Up for each of the world's people.&#xA;We drank ours first in case you were wondering and truth be told it&#xA;did not go down that easy.  But it is down now and we are the better&#xA;for it.  And we want you all to be like us!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also -  did you hear?  We got the fusion power now!  That is going to&#xA;help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63957085&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63957085&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdbpR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdbpR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the OP asked for a disaster.  And that is the funny thing.&#xA;There doesn't seem to be any disaster needed.  USA! USA!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's . . . not entirely clear what you're going for here. The OP did ask for a disaster, and while I'm sure one could characterize the US conquering the world might as such, it still seems not really what they're looking for -- nor does it describe how it leads to the global changes the OP is looking for. That might be fine if you were writing a frame challenge, but it's not really a frame challenge -- and other folks came up with answers that are closer to the question's requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple folks (not L.Dutch) effectively made the above comments, one flagged it as not an answer, and two others voted to delete the answer when it reached the Low Quality Posts queue. L.Dutch deleting it was just the final step in all of the above; it was neither singlehanded nor unilateral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to agree with all of the above reasoning; I might have let it sit for a while longer to give you time to make changes before opting for deletion (it was deleted after ~5 hours). You can obviously still edit it and flag for undeletion if you think you've addressed all of the above concerns, of course. That said, the question's now been closed by the community and seems difficult to salvage, so . . . there's a calculus to be done there as to whether it's worth your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="8732" LastEditDate="2022-12-21T20:11:01.020" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T20:11:01.020" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-14T21:34:28.823" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is an excellent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes an exquisitely appropriate illustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upvoted it, and I tried to explain in a brief comment that &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; some of the people who could not see why it was a good answer may benefit from trying to acquire some basic skills in the appreciation of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One of the reasons for saying that it is an excellent answer is that is a frame challenge, and at the same time it is not a frame challenge, but rather a straightforward example of a disaster which would prompt a fundamental change of the human civilization.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People, if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't understand it, it does not mean that it is bad or that nobody understands it. Let it be. Some readers will vote up, some readers will vote down. If it is articulate, it is not an advertisment, is not immoral, it is not lewd, it is not prurient, it is not an invitation to a flame war, and it does not overtly promote a worldview contrary to whatever ideology is prevalent in the USA these day, then there is no valid reason to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason I can think of which would explain its deletion, but in no way justify it, is that the powers that be got a serious case of fear of heights. Yes, the answer may have passed way over the head of the person who asked the question. So what? The site is index by the all seeing Google, and in the fullness of time it may be the case that the answer will be found and appreciated by somebody who can appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2022-12-14T21:34:28.823" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-15T17:01:15.590" Score="36" ViewCount="1773" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, the chatbot &lt;a href=&quot;https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt; was released and experienced a surge in popularity. It's reasonably good at mimicking humans, and it has a database of information to draw on. The upshot is that you can ask it a question and it will respond the way a human would -- albeit sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, depending on the subject matter and the limits of its knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has caused problems on Stack Overflow, which was deluged with a slew of answers generated by folks simply plugging questions into ChatGPT. This is a problem because the software is good at very confidently stating things that may be incorrect in subtle but important ways, and a large volume of such answers can cause real problems. As an extraordinary though potentially temporary step, SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/421831/6535830&quot;&gt;banned all posts&lt;/a&gt; copied from ChatGPT outputs. This has led to discussions about both site-specific (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35342/170257&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/890/2153&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/384396/274942&quot;&gt;network-wide&lt;/a&gt; bans, and the company is, I believe, considering the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should our policy be on Worldbuilding -- at least until there is a network-wide policy in place? While we're not as large as Stack Overflow, the mods have seen several answers already that are clearly chatbot-generated, and there may be more we haven't found. There are several reasons against allowing such content, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's quite frankly plagiarism if the answerer doesn't note that they used ChatGPT, and is therefore not allowed by our normal plagiarism policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Worldbuilding in particular, answers can be harder to verify than on Stack Overflow or Mathematics, and so it may be very easy for someone to game the system with a large quantity of confidently-written but nonetheless wrong chat-bot generated answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be very wrong very often, which I've seen myself doing some testing. I personally would not trust anything generated by the tool that involves information beyond what could be gleaned from a quick Google search.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also arguments in favor or allowing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT is a tool just like Wikipedia or a textbook; it may be wrong at times, but so long as the software used is noted, folks are welcome to vote up correct answers and vote down incorrect answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chatbots may (&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;) make it easier to turn complex information into straightforward answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally come down hard on the side of disallowing ChatGPT and all similar tools, but obviously this is an issue for the community as a whole to decide. What should we do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239281/627&quot;&gt;an answer that was clearly generated by ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt; (answer deleted; text shown here for discussion). It was one of a slew posted in a ~10-minute interval by one user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This setup is not scientifically plausible. There are a few issues&#xA;with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distance between the Jupiter-like planet and the Solar system is&#xA;too small. The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about&#xA;4.24 light-years away. A distance of 0.1 light-year is about 6.16 trillion kilometers, which is a little over a hundred times the&#xA;distance between the Earth and the Sun. This is not a realistic&#xA;distance for a planet to be passing by the Solar system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of colonizing a moon that is rich in ice to use as fuel for&#xA;fusion reactors is not feasible. Fusion reactors require a specific&#xA;type of fuel, typically hydrogen or helium, which are not found in&#xA;ice. Additionally, the amount of fuel needed for fusion reactors is&#xA;typically much greater than what could be extracted from a single&#xA;moon, even if it were rich in ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear how the settlers would be able to establish a colony&#xA;on a moon of a Jupiter-like planet that is passing by the Solar&#xA;system. It would require a significant amount of resources and&#xA;technology to set up a habitable environment on a moon, and it is&#xA;unlikely that a group of only 2.5 thousand people would be able to&#xA;accomplish this in a short amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make this setup more scientifically plausible, you could&#xA;consider changing the distance between the Jupiter-like planet and the&#xA;Solar system to a more realistic value, finding a different source of&#xA;fuel for the fusion reactors, and providing more information about how&#xA;the settlers would be able to establish a colony on a moon of the&#xA;planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put the question body into ChatGPT and got the following, on the first try. Besides the many stylistic similarities, note that the same points are regurgitated, just in a different order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several issues with the scenario you have described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rogue planet passing by the Solar System at a distance of 0.1 light&#xA;years is extremely close and highly unlikely. The closest known rogue&#xA;planet to the Solar System is about 20 light years away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a group of 26&#xA;starships to carry 2.5 thousand people and all the necessary resources&#xA;to establish a colony on a distant moon. Such a mission would likely&#xA;require a much larger fleet of ships and a much larger population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timeline you have described is also unrealistic. It would take&#xA;much longer than 20 years for a starship to travel to a distant&#xA;planetary system, even at the fastest speeds currently achievable with&#xA;current technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear how the settlers would be able to sustain themselves&#xA;on an ice-rich moon, as it is unlikely that there would be any other&#xA;resources available to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, the scenario you have described is not plausible as it&#xA;stands. In order to make it more realistic, you would need to&#xA;significantly revise the details of the mission, including the size of&#xA;the fleet and population, the distance and location of the target&#xA;planetary system, and the resources available to the settlers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking &amp;quot;Try again&amp;quot; in the chat sometimes led to it going into more detail in some of its points, or expanding the concluding paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other answers which we identified as matching ChatGPT outputs via the same comparison. Examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239283/627&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239296/627&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239293/627&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239294/627&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; (note that it incorrectly describes what the Bondi radius is). These are all, without a doubt, chatbot-generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T16:32:07.323" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:43:52.030" Title="Should we ban posts using ChatGPT or similar software?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-15T17:19:12.227" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1 on banning it, for the simple reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker wanted to ask ChatGPT the question, they could have done so themselves.  If they're posting here, it's because they want a human to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56684" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T17:19:12.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-15T17:21:05.660" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should follow SO's example and ban answers generated by ChatGPT for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have an incredible creative community and can regularly see questions getting 10+ answers. We also have some very prolific users who have individually answered over 5,000 questions. I'd rather recognize and elevate the hard work of our community over whatever can be cranked out by a bot. &lt;strong&gt;If someone wants to get a chatbot answer they can always ask bot directly on their own&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's technically possible to derive a prohibition of ChatGPT from existing policy, it's better to make that prohibition an explicit expectation, than to rely on everyone knowing and interpreting site policy in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9991/should-we-ban-posts-using-chatgpt-or-similar-software/10043#10043&quot;&gt;Tim C's answer&lt;/a&gt; for a more detailed exploration of why ChatGPT and it's ilk are a unique problem, and why creating a specific policy about it is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2023-01-19T13:43:52.030" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:43:52.030" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-15T17:50:51.557" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with banning chatbot answers for numerous reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From a plagiarism perspective, it would be functionally identical to aggregating everyone else's answers into a single post. It just scrapes the answers from multiple sources. I'm pretty sure that there are already rules against that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT, in particular, is good at providing an overview of a topic, and can even provide some basic advice, but it presents clearly generalized information, without consideration for the specifics of the question at hand. Cut and paste from a chatbot is the antithesis of well thought-out analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The points system's purpose is to incentivize great minds to provide thoughtful responses. Even if the chatbot answers are 100% correct, it undermines the intent of the points system and discourages participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our world is already suffering from sites that repost other people's answers, making finding a different, accurate answer difficult. This is especially a problem when reality slides out from underneath recorded answers. Reposting chatbot answers would make that worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastEditorUserId="95496" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T23:02:31.903" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T23:02:31.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-15T18:19:23.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no doubting that this is a bad answer. Even after getting the joke, all it does is describe a problem that the OP feels he needs a disaster to fix. Personally, I would also have voted it down to make sure it doesn't get in the way of anyone looking for a real answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to question how deletion of the answer benefits the site. Deletion, in most of the world, is reserved for answers that aren't just wrong, but are offensive. Do the moderators of this site consider humor to be offensive? That feels like a counterproductive perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T18:19:23.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2022-12-15T18:46:24.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm actually wondering why this question was voted down so harshly. We have a continuous shower of inappropriate questions that have to be fended off, so this is something that absolutely bears discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;No Popularity Contests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked into the idea of asking Stack Exchange to create a second site specifically for the kind of worldbuilding that most of the visitors seem to want to do. It would be awesome to have a brainstorming site that we could point people to when they posted their inappropriate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue there is that Stack Exchange was designed to provide concrete answers. They want people to be able to go to a question and find AN answer. If you shift to a brainstorming model, then you drift off into speculative territory where the points system just becomes a popularity contest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popularity contests are 100% anathema to Stack Exchange. This is an essential hard line that they drew because, otherwise, their software engineering pages would be overrun by questions of camel case vs. snake case, where there is neither a clear answer nor a clear reason to be arguing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Alternatives&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does that leave us? Ideally, there should be somewhere else that we can send people when they want to throw out their bright ideas for brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem there is that Reddit doesn't have a Q&amp;amp;A format. It's just people putting out &amp;quot;look at me, I'm so cool&amp;quot; posts that others can respond to. In truth, a good third of the inappropriate posts we see here fall into that category, but that doesn't manage the remainder that are looking for input or ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.quora.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quora is a better option, but they have taken an unfortunate turn towards monetization. Their worldbuilding space is actually a curated spot where people pull in answers from across Quora that might be interesting to an audience, or attempt to write insightful articles. Also, they stuff advertising in every other line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Anywhere else?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that leave us with? Where can we send these people to fulfill their need for serious, but less targeted, Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T18:46:24.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-15T19:33:40.303" Score="-12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm tentatively in favor of keeping ChatGPT answers provided there was some value-add in how you asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&#xA;You ask a site question. I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and copy-paste the result. This adds zero value. I would downvote these answers on principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think your question would be interesting if answered by Conan the Barbarian. I paste your question into ChatGPT and append that ChatGPT should answer as if it was Conan the Barbarian (this actually works and I highly recommend asking it to write poems about things &amp;quot;in the voice of Conan the Barbarian&amp;quot;. Entertainment ensues).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I realized there was a better way to ask your question, modified your question accordingly, and posted the result [ideally because it was really good, and not, you know, just kind of funny]. I have added value that you, the asker, might not have thought of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's not really a high requirement to ask people to rephrase things on their own. Use ChatGPT for ideas, but make your own answer rather than simply copy-paste it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the third hand(!?), &amp;quot;how would you know?&amp;quot; If I don't tell you that my answer came from ChatGPT, you might never realize it, especially on a site like this. It's more damning on Stack Overflow, where the AI making small, quirky errors stands out like a sore thumb, but on a site like this, I'm honestly not sure you wouldn't end up with a rule you have no way to enforce. All you'd really do is cause people to stop saying they got their answer from ChatGPT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unenforceable rules are silly rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Anecdotally, I don't know why anyone here is worried. I set out tonight to start asking ChatGPT questions from worldbuilding. There are three immediate problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people ask questions that are frankly hard to parse as a human. You have to get to the &amp;quot;meat&amp;quot; of their question as they feel the need to overly elaborate and this just confuses the chatbot's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not at all creative, typically yielding a long and boring answer that seems to be more like a tangent than an answer. (Its answer to the recently asked poison dart question actually was not bad but highlights how it focused on the &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; keyword and didn't creatively think of alternatives like all the humans did.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is objectively wrong at times, especially if there's math involved. Like it knows the formula for calculating the distance to the horizon from an object in space, but it still gives you the wrong answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I don't think anyone would copy-paste a question into ChatGPT, copy-paste the answer, and expect more than downvotes in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, my conclusion is the same, if not moreso: &lt;strong&gt;the rule would be redundant with existing policies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2022-12-18T05:24:52.263" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T05:24:52.263" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2022-12-15T19:44:09.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to read where Stack Exchange has such stringent requirements. Not being snarky -- I just would like to see these rules and my 30 seconds of trying to find the origin of the &amp;quot;certain standards&amp;quot; claim has failed to find where they are written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because fierce enforcement of that idea is frankly why Arqade is such a useless substack. Ignoring that idea is why the SciFi stack is so lively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arqade doesn't let anyone ask about a video game they partially remembered, because it's not considered to be generally useful knowledge. Boring buzzkills. SciFi allows it, and consequently quite a lot of content is people asking and answering questions about partially remembered books, stories and movies. I don't know how useful it is but I find it entertaining and sometimes find new books or things to read just based on someone's half-remembered question and someone else linking a short story or book. Like, it's useful, if not necessarily in the Stack Overflow sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, anecdotally, Arqade is strictly following the &amp;quot;certain standards&amp;quot; and it's a dull and nearly dead community where a lot of people ask extremely specific, uninteresting questions and often get few if any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is far livelier and more interesting and if ignoring the rules is how we got here, let's keep ignoring them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum for posterity: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;this excellent Stack Overflow blog entry&lt;/a&gt;. Particularly the &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Stack Exchange recognizes that things can be opinions and still be valid. They recognize this enough that they made a programming stack just for opinion-based questions. That blog has an excellent description of what makes some opinion-based Q&amp;amp;A good, and, therefore, what defines a &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; opinion based Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-01-16T21:53:39.330" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T21:53:39.330" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-15T22:09:19.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close this answer. I didn't even know it existed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the picture, I gather the key idea. The disaster was the warmongering self-entitled American military bombing all the other countries to bits. Like in that movie with the puppets. This is a perfectly good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I read the text. I find it indirect to the point of confusion. And English is my native language. I imagine users with other mother tongues are even more perplexed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The USA has got all the smarten up that the world needs. And the USA has just been waiting for an invitation to bring it, but waiting time is done and bringing it time has come! Chesty grinning Americans are going to &lt;strong&gt;open up a can of Smarten Up&lt;/strong&gt; for each of the world's people. &lt;strong&gt;We drank ours first&lt;/strong&gt; in case you were wondering and truth be told it did not go down that easy. But it is down now and we are the better for it. And we want you all to be like us!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - did you hear? We &lt;strong&gt;got the fusion power now!&lt;/strong&gt; That is going to help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m89uK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m89uK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the OP asked for a disaster. And that is the funny thing. There &lt;strong&gt;doesn't seem to be any disaster needed.&lt;/strong&gt; USA! USA!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Open up a can of whoop-ass&amp;quot; is already a metaphor. &amp;quot;Open up a can of smarten up&amp;quot; is one step further removed from the idea of America bombing all the other countries to bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We drank ours first&amp;quot;: So America bombed itself to bits first? But then how could it destroy everyone else if it was already destroyed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you mention fusion power. It is not directly relevant to America bombing everyone else, and suggests the &amp;quot;Smarten up&amp;quot; might in fact mean America sharing the secrets of nuclear fusion with the other countries. After all, you need smart people to invent fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you say there is no disaster needed. Which makes me further doubt my interpretation of &amp;quot;Open up a can of smarten up&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are you proposing America bombs (smartens up) everyone and then everyone unites in the wake of the invasion to the betterment of civilization? Or are you proposing America just shares fusion with everyone else and this betters civilization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14322" LastEditorUserId="14322" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T22:17:46.910" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T22:17:46.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-16T04:56:12.510" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An AI that can answer creative questions will perhaps exist in our lifetimes. But that's a research tool &lt;em&gt;in competition with&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange, not a research tool &lt;em&gt;complementing&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; We should ban the use of ChatGPT, and not just ChatGPT, but globally ban the use of any AI that supplants human creativity, talent, and/or education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I remember the early days of texting. No keyboards, just number pads, like those you'd find on old AT&amp;amp;T keypad phones. Competitions existed to see who could &amp;quot;text&amp;quot; a message quickly. You don't see those anymore, but you do see the latent consequences of that cul de sac technology. Abbreviations like &amp;quot;lol&amp;quot; and people who insist on posting messages without capitalization or punctuation. There was a time when forum posts and emails were hard to read — because people had grown accustomed to an imposed culture due to the limitations of technology. I remember posting in one such forum, and receiving an answer that basically said, &amp;quot;I can't answer your question, but I wanted to thank you for writing your post using good English.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It takes time to restore balance when a new tool is introduced&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever ChatGPT may be, what it is, is &lt;em&gt;automation.&lt;/em&gt; Automation has value! But it can also lead to laziness. To sound overly religious and remarkably cynical, automation leverages human ingenuity to raise the productivity of everyone at the cost of the human soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is an artistic way of saying, automating the process of building cars has removed innovation and ingenuity from the process of building cars. The people still involved in the process of building cars (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the process of building or maintaining the automation, but actually building cars) are as a group no longer creative. They have been reduced to the lowest common denominator. Because they need not be and are expected to not be anything more than an adjunct to the more efficient and profitable use of automation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that sounds ridiculous, I can remember the High School teacher moderating my AP Mathematics test providing that explanation as a justification for &lt;em&gt;why we couldn't use calculators to take the test.&lt;/em&gt; He may have been right, he may have been wrong, but having watched generations of U.S. High School students graduate using calculators to take tests, I can tell you that while they are more empowered for possessing the automation, they are also something less because they depend on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There may come a time when we find the balance that allows ChatGPT to be used as the useful tool it may yet become — but that time is not today&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now we're in the &amp;quot;you can't use calculators to take your math test&amp;quot; phase because (a) ChatGPT is not wholly capable of replacing the human mind, (b) &lt;s&gt;students&lt;/s&gt; Worlbuilding.SE users have not yet learned how to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be crippled by its use, and (c) &lt;s&gt;how we write tests&lt;/s&gt; Stack Exchange as a whole and Worldbuilding in particular have not yet learned how to incorporate that new tool into our day-to-day of doing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, today... &lt;em&gt;it's cheating...&lt;/em&gt; because people are not using the tool to improve their value, they're using it to &lt;em&gt;replace&lt;/em&gt; their value in a way that makes them look valuable. Such people may be gaining some social value from feeling artificially useful and/or popular, but what they're really doing is simply farming reputation. It's feeding a social addiction that isn't healthy for the user and isn't valuable for the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JBH, you're completely full of yourself...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. OK, probably, but that doesn't change the facts. It's just like texting back before the technology to text had become mature, or using a calculator to take a math test before mathematics teachers had learned how to incorporate calculators into the testing process. It's nice to suggest that Stack Exchange's only purpose is to help people find quality answers — but the flip side of that is the goal to bring intelligent, creative, experienced, talented, educated, and skilled &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; together so that people are improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the machine simply won't care if it's improved or not. In fact, it won't care if the querent is improved or not, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we've learned how to incorporate this wonderful new tool, this amazing piece of automation into the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange process such that the respondent is benefited as much as the querent, then we can allow ChatGPT onto the Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until then, it's the equivalent of putting up with number-pad-text quality posts or allowing cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wouldn't be surprised if, by that time, Stack Exchange has been replaced by the descendant of ChatGPT. Or, perhaps more prophetically, that Stack Exchange replaces respondents with that descendant. We users are a pestiferous group of people, and chatbots need no moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them.&lt;br&gt;(Mr. Spock, Star Trek TOS, &amp;quot;The Ultimate Computer&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you think I've been unreasonable, please explain to me the difference between using ChatGPT (or any other AI) and buying a black-market midterm paper.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt; A recent question on Main asked for completely trivial help. It periodically happens. The querent didn't realize or didn't now how to ask Google for basic data and then use a calculator to get the sought-for answer. The question was rightfully closed, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239588/how-long-would-it-take-to-bring-water-to-mars#comment733822_239588&quot;&gt;I left a comment&lt;/a&gt; explaining the Google searches and calculator actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then it hit me... &lt;em&gt;The question represents &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; the problem I think we want to avoid.&lt;/em&gt; Respondents who never learn how to think for themselves because they're having too much &amp;quot;mindless social fun&amp;quot; (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;) farming rep. I believe it's just as wrong to encourage people to become addicted to ChatGPT as it is for people to become addicted to Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-20T00:03:39.163" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T00:03:39.163" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-16T17:09:31.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Explanation warranted?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only real explanation that is needed is why you wrote such a horrible answer in the first place! Here's how I see the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The response itself&lt;/strong&gt; --- I concur with Willk on this: the underlying basis of the answer is spot on, and is thus &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the makings of&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; a good answer to a poor question and I think I can see where you're going with your answer. The USA &lt;em&gt;is a cataclysm&lt;/em&gt; in so many ways. It's a force both of good and evil; it is powerful economically, militarily, socially, culturally, scientifically, technologically. The USA brings both chaos and order wherever it goes, and the USA literally goes everywhere in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem the OP was looking for was a way to clean up the environment. Willk proposes that fusion is the way to go --- it's supposedly clean, has no short or long term environmental impacts. The logical conclusion is: environmental disaster is reversed by USA cataclysmically forcing its fusion power on the world; greenhouse gasses reduced by rapid depetrolification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the USA having such a power source can, if they make it viable, cause extreme destabilisation in energy producing areas like Russia and Southwest Asia. If the technology is operated by the US in places like India and Africa and given to allied countries and eventually even to rivals, further destabilisation would occur in China as well. I'd say that's an immediate cataclysm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem!&lt;/strong&gt; --- The only problems with Willk's answer is that it's not well executed. The tone is exaggerated and a bit braggadocious; the delivery is quick and non-explanatory; the matter that goes into making the answer is not as well thought out as it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your original answer was apparently in the low quality queue and tagged for deletion, which was duly done and, I concur with L Dutch on that. It was an answer that deserved deletion because the respondent didn't respect either the querent or the query enough to make a good answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible solution.&lt;/strong&gt; --- Here in Meta, you wrote a far better answer than you did in your original response!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed that well meaning, rich and bumbling USA sets out to correct the thinking of humanity for the better. The cataclysm is implied (because it is part of the OP); possibly Americans do not perceive that there has been a cataclysm and it all turns out in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if you went back to your original response, cut out the baloney, focus on what you just wrote, focus on how American ingenuity and fusion power combined with the USA being a bit (well, sometimes disasterously) cataclysmic in its actions, you'd have a reasonable answer that could be easily undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem now is why waste the effort on a query that's been closed as being opinion or story based!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T17:09:31.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-18T00:47:24.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Let's ask directly ChatGPT!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-Tortliena :&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Hi, on Stack-exchange a question about you has been raised. Do you think we should ban posts using ChatGPT or similar software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ChatGPT :&lt;/em&gt; As a language model, I am not able to provide a personal opinion on whether posts using ChatGPT or similar software should be banned on Stack Exchange or any other platform. It is up to the individual platform or community to decide their own policies and guidelines for acceptable content.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In general, it is important for platforms to have clear policies in place to ensure that users understand what is expected of them and to create a positive and respectful community. However, it is also important to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of any policy decision, and to be transparent and fair in the decision-making process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-Tortliena :&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Are you good enough to answer specific problems about worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ChatGTP :&lt;/em&gt; As a language model, I have been trained on a wide range of texts and topics and may be able to provide helpful information and insights on worldbuilding. &lt;strong&gt;However, it's important to keep in mind that I am a machine learning model and do not have personal experience or expertise in any particular field.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I can certainly try my best to help with specific problems related to worldbuilding, &lt;strong&gt;but it may be helpful to do some research and gather additional information on your own as well.&lt;/strong&gt; The process of worldbuilding involves creating a fictional world or setting, and can involve many different elements such as geography, history, culture, and more. It can be a complex and creative process, and it may be helpful to consider various factors and make informed decisions based on your specific goals and vision for your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is not made up, here are the tusks of proof: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wU9IZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1st picture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4T4Bd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2nd one&lt;/a&gt;. The lines preceded by ChatGTP are generated by an A.I. and not an actual person. Output's rights assigned to input's author according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://openai.com/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenAI's terms of use&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite wise. I've highlighted what I think is the most important : This A.I. (or any A.I. we know today) can't claim to be an expert, especially on complex topics like worldbuilding. Stack-Exchange's goal is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;to have the best answers to every question&lt;/a&gt;. Not being an expert in the given field makes a pretty bad start to write &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; answers . Then, as advised by the bot itself, people should gather additional pieces of data themselves. Not doing so, is well... Likely to prevent you from making informed decisions. Also, if you rely solely on an A.I. to give an answer, it also probably mean you're not willing or cannot provide the skills people need. Not nice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My point of view is therefore simple : It's like 2-minutes long searches on the web.&lt;/strong&gt; If it's to take a 1st broad glance, it's alright. But you shall always cross-examine the output as well as you need to look for more, much more with your own skills, experience and writing style. Don't copy-paste the first result as your answer, since this contradicts &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;a major part of what good answers are&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, answering without actual effort &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;show lil' to no respect nor patience to the querent&lt;/a&gt;, who are spending a lot of time building their world and are asking for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.B. : This answer has fallen in a funny paradox now : If this answer is upvoted because ChatGTP should not be used, then it has to be downvoted since it heavily uses ChatGTP. But if it is downvoted, the statements inside are no longer valid, meaning using ChatGTP is okay and therefore it should be upvoted if using ChatGTP is not good . Hawk, my head x)...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T00:47:24.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-19T08:52:38.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm not as active as I was once upon a time, I did see that block of chatGPT answers come through, and for the most part they were as I expected and matched the descriptions of chatGPT output I've heard about. It was best described as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/12/chatgpt_has_mastered_the_confidence/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dunning-Kruger As-A-Service&lt;/a&gt;, fluent, confident, apparently well written, utter twaddle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, ban it to save us arguing over every meaningless response it churns out with no benefit to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T08:52:38.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-19T23:52:25.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple allow-or-ban choice makes stuff simpler for mods, I suppose, but I dislike such binary thinking: it's almost always a false dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, it's a useful tool for researchers to get ideas on direction, but isn't good enough for generating verbatim, unchecked answers. Its answers have potential value, but are in no way definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WorldBuilding.se seems a good target audience for non-definitive, directional answers, but use of it needs to be clearly marked, and clearly distinguished from regular usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels shortsighted to entirely prevent use of a tool; like some early iteration of math.se preventing any use of calculation software in answers, or like StackOverflow requiring all answers be handwritten instead of typed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technology moves on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;early forms of technology are often deeply flawed&lt;/em&gt;, in implementation or usage. This AI makes claims like &amp;quot;atmospheric reentry slows craft down by moving kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy&amp;quot;, which... no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would support a &lt;strong&gt;timed&lt;/strong&gt; ban (with, say, a promise to revisit the question &amp;quot;in 2005&amp;quot;). The ban needs an explicit sunset date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd also advocate a trial of a bot that &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; answers each question this way, to save users the trouble (and temptation!) of doing so, with a clear disclaimer at the top of each answer that it's a bot-and-AI-generated answer and may contain blatant falsehoods. Especially if there's a new checkbox &amp;quot;hide bot answers&amp;quot; added to people's settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6595" LastEditorUserId="6595" LastEditDate="2022-12-20T00:14:27.497" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T00:14:27.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2022-12-21T17:21:49.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of a blanket ban on AI's answers in the foreseeable future. On top of all the reasons already stated by everybody else... Even if we had a functional AI posting here and giving good answers, all it takes is one bug or a change in the AI's company management to turn it into a big headache for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine an hypothetical scenario where some crazy dude buys the company that runs the AI and, because he has a beef with some site like Wikipedia, he orders the AI (or whomever manages its account here) to retroactively redact all links to Wikipedia from the AI generated answers throughout the year. Worse, if that account has edit rights, they could also do this site-wide, on everybody's questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that even after they become fully sentient, we should keep any AI that is not fully independent out of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T17:21:49.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2022-12-22T04:14:32.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was one of the most awesome answers around lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may agree or disagree, and that's cool. This is what up and down votes are for. I see many here did not like the answer, so I would expect it to have a negative overall score even with my upvote (which I did not get a chance to give). That would be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But deleting it like that  I think that should not have been done. I would still be ok with a deletion coming from a &amp;quot;not an answer flag&amp;quot; in most cases, but in this case it is an answer even if you don't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T04:14:32.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-22T15:39:55.477" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239598/if-mars-and-venus-were-habitable-by-when-would-they-have-been-colonized&quot;&gt;If Mars and Venus were habitable, by when would they have been colonized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239558/how-does-santa-keep-locations-updated-for-all-of-his-gift-recipients&quot;&gt;How does Santa keep locations updated for all of his gift recipients?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is closed for being &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, despite 18 upvotes, 7 answers and 4000 views (meaning plenty of people found it to be a good, interesting question, adding good content to the stack), while the other is open and is about how Santa Claus updates his gift list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that both are perfectly fine questions. My other opinion is that they are both seeking out answers that are little better than brainstorming or opinions, but, if anything, one is probably a real worldbuilding question, helping someone figure out a plausible alternate timeline, while the other is just a bit of holiday cheer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like we've been having a small cabal of rules lawyers trying to close questions rather than trying to fix or answer them. I don't see where Worldbuilding has such a flood of terrible questions that we really need to be saved from it (there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; bad questions, but these are not them), but I do see where rules lawyering is making this a less friendly place. My usual method is &amp;quot;try to find a way to salvage a question&amp;quot;, rather than &amp;quot;try to find a reason to close everything that can be closed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perhaps we should abandon the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;rule regarding opinions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; since this seems to be the greatest offender, its enforcement is arbitrary, its definition is loose, and the nature of this stack is about 90% opinions. &lt;strong&gt;Does this rule do more harm than good?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I don't think I'm cherry picking with the above two examples, either. These just stood out as two well-upvoted questions, one closed and one open, near each other on the list. The only questions on Worldbuilding that involve no opinion and no brainstorming are the ones that are purely science based and could probably be better answered in a science stack.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus example by request: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95043/why-would-a-staff-increase-the-magic-power-of-a-mage/&quot;&gt;Why would a staff increase the magic power of a mage?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;109 upvotes, 26k views, 32 answers, absolutely brainstorming and opinion based, question never closed. &lt;strong&gt;If this question was asked today, by a new user, how many of you would be voting to close it as opinion based?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T16:04:27.850" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T20:36:20.070" Title="Are we helping or hurting Worldbuilding with these rules?" Tags="|discussion|rules|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ClosedDate="2022-12-23T13:29:46.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10008" CreationDate="2022-12-22T20:36:20.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;OPINIONS --- the Joy and Bane of Worldbuilding&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been active here for a couple years and have &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps to the point of ticking some people off, argued against the Closure for Being Opinion Based rule being applied too strongly. There is a reason for the existence of this rule; and there is also a reason for ignoring this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTRODUCTION--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First, we are not an &lt;em&gt;independent&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding Q&amp;amp;A community. We are part of a broader community, Stack Exchange, and we have to abide by their rules, norms, expectations, etc. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AS BEST WE CAN!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, as a broad community, follows the basic premise that we focus on 'single problem questions' that are 'focused' and that can be factually answered. A person can ask &amp;quot;why did Napoleon lose at Waterloo&amp;quot; and get the answer &amp;quot;X, Y &amp;amp; Zed&amp;quot;. This could theoretically be checked against standard resources, source documents, contemporaneous accounts and military reports and thus the response can readily be known to be factually correct and thus 'the single best answer'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problem--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At Worldbuilding, we have to ignore that because our material is essentially irrealia --- things that don't actually exist and events that didn't actually happen in the real world. Thus, I argue that 99% of all questions asked here in Worldbuilding are, in fact, opinion based. You provided two non-Santa questions for consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question on the date for colonising Venus &amp;amp; Mars&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question on the correlation of a wizard's staff and his magical prowess&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, both questions are asking for opinions, simply because we have colonized nothing in space and magical staves and wizards aren't real. Thus both are questions open to speculation that would not be accepted on any other Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we have to understand that in this community we &lt;em&gt;bend the opinion based rule&lt;/em&gt; in order to do what we do. In order to do this, we have to devise our own rules and expectations as to how we bend the SE rule and what we expect from querents and respondents alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why the Second Question is Okay--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question about wizard staves is okay. I read it and this is what I find: the OP asks for our opinion, but also focuses our efforts by laying out a basic description of the fictional world being considered and by laying out the various criteria with which magic can be described. Finally, the OP asks a spcifically narrow and focused question based on a single well developed worldbuilding problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why the First Question is Bad--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question about colinisation of Venus and Mars is bad. First it's asking two different questions that I have the feeling might require different economic, mathematical &amp;amp; technological approaches (I'm not a rocket scientist): two planets, two approaches. Here, the OP asks again for our opinion, but there's a problem: our efforts are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; focused by the OP. The OP presents us with an entirely open ended discussion type question. We are not given any specific parameters or criteria to follow. Furthermore, the possibly correct answers are almost limitless. What's the real difference between 1998, 1999, and 2000 as potential answers? The problem is that any of those numbers is simply an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our community has decided that Opinions are okay, but they need to be sought appropriately. We have decided to reject purely aesthetic opinions like &amp;quot;what colour dress should a princess wear to a party&amp;quot; and any kind of unrestrained opinion question like &amp;quot;when should X happen&amp;quot;. We also reject open ended discussion questions, fishing expeditions, brainstorming questions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these question types are in fact valid, and they all have a place. Stack Exchange is not that place. The kind of open ended question about Venus colonisation would be perfectly fine at Reddit, because they do not have the same high expectations that we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Observations--&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I agree with you --- both questions are &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot;. I actually left some comments on the Venus colonisation query that, I hope, might lead to an improvement, or at least provide some SE related food for thought for the OP. The only problem is that what we think of as &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot; does not guarantee that it is also a good fit for this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Little better than brainstorming&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; --- a perennial problem here! The issue here is that we do not allow pure and unrestrained brainstorming that might occur elsewhere. We require all our brainstorming efforts to be constrained by the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Small cabal of rules lawyers&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; --- welcome to the cabal! We love it when new members accept our invitation to join! Seriously, you're doing exactly what I've always asked people to do --- join in the discussion. It may very be that you'll inspire some kind of change in how WB.SE operates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Abandoning the rule regarding opinions&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; --- I think you'll find that you and I possibly agree on this issue more than you might think! I've been railing against the strict application of this rule in all its forms for years. I've found that in almost every case, the issue is one of the perspective of individuals. Some people are strict. Some people are lax. Some people feel overly empowered. Some people just don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is this: I hold that since WB exists within the SE network, we become responsible for maintaining SE rules and norms within our community. We therefore can not actually abandon this rule on opinion based questions. If we do, then SE is well within rights to shut us down. What we can do is discuss, create and enforce our own rules and norms that will serve as work-arounds to the network wide rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, I think that the rule as it stands is an improvement. It allows us to ask for opinions, but filters out questions that just don't fit the SE model. This is a win for us because we are doing due diligence in maintaining SE norms, but are also establishing our own norms to allow the widest array of questions we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;If this question was asked today, by a new user, how many of you would be voting to close it as opinion based?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; --- I would not vote to close the wizard' staff question. I also note that you wrote a pretty respectable answer! I actually upvoted the query, because I think it's a good question, is useful for others, and is well composed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote to close the colonisation query because it is not well composed. I suggested a way to improve it, because I think it is an interesting question and is of potential use to others. Just not in the way it's written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T20:36:20.070" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9885" CreationDate="2022-12-23T20:11:11.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree, and if you search Meta you'll see that this comes up frequently&lt;/strong&gt;, and the frequency seems to be increasing as the site ages, and more people obtain the power to close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &lt;strong&gt;it actually is not against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; The closest rule I can find is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; not be a good place for your question.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Emphasis mine. It might not be a good place, but then again, it might. It really depends on if the question is focused. Unfocused brainstorms are against the rules (e.g. &amp;quot;why would anyone want to be a wizard&amp;quot;), because they can spur endless debate, but focused brainstorms are acceptable and, frankly, is the bulk of Worldbuilding's content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why do so many things get closed?&lt;/strong&gt; Typically, questions should be upvoted or downvoted based on whether you believe it's a good question. However, because any site on the internet is going to be subject to spammers, trolls, etc, and official site moderators can't be everywhere all the time, the power to close questions is given automatically to &amp;quot;higher ranking&amp;quot; community members as a sort of &amp;quot;emergency eject&amp;quot; button. Trolls spamming the place? Community-level powers can shut em down!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, members are simply abusing this ability to use their vote as a sort of super-downvote. Doesn't matter what the rest of the community thinks. A handful of people can simply skip the downvote vs upvote part of the site and vote to close, and they don't need many people to agree with them. You then need a sort of opposing cabal to come in and vote to reopen, which creates an interesting power play that, again, ignores the upvotes and downvotes of the rank and file members. Effectively, we have a system where your opinion only matters if you have 3000+ rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And mostly this happens over &amp;quot;problematic rules&amp;quot; -- rules which are poorly defined, difficult to even locate to begin with, and so fuzzy as to simply be a matter of personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll keep having this problem and I think it will only get worse as more people obtain close privileges. Some rules simply do not fit Worldbuilding and they are causing problems in the community while serving up no apparent value or benefit for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T21:03:53.163" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T21:03:53.163" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8465" CreationDate="2022-12-26T18:29:33.660" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is another rule that needs to be bent to make Worldbuilding a practical place.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the rule would be that asking two questions on a site like Stack Overflow yields answers that are too long. &amp;quot;How can I open a file in C++ and how can I then ftp it to a Linux system&amp;quot; is two complete questions yielding two complete &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and unrelated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; answers. They can both be useful to others and should therefore be separated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239842/would-it-be-possible-for-a-planet-to-have-long-nights-and-still-be-warm&quot;&gt;Hypothetically, could a swamp planet with long nights exist? Additionally, would it be possible for this same planet to have two moons and a sun?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is two questions, but both are easily answerable and the second question is closely related to the first, and makes little sense as a stand alone question (and you'd probably vote to close it for that reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be reasonable when people ask multiple questions, if they are closely related and therefore makes &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; sense to separate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember rules are made to keep stacks feeling friendly and productive. That thought must underlie all enforcement. Rules, especially in a stack like this, aren't meant to be a bludgeon to make the place unfriendly to new people, when their question would actually not represent a real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T18:29:33.660" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-27T06:21:11.143" Score="-1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Preliminary Information&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I begin, I want to make a clear distinction insofar as I understand the principal purpose of this Stack (the following closely fits the rules as defined in the Tour and the Help Center, but may not be universally agreed upon by the community):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; (on-topic) is the development and consistent use of rules, designs, definitions, and explanations that identify or express an imaginary world of the querent's own creation wherein any number of stories may be told, but which are independent of any story that can be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt; (off-topic) is the creation of a story, no matter how well integrated with its world. It includes plot; circumstances; character &amp;amp; organization choices, decisions, options, and actions; and impossible-to-fit-within-SE's-rules aesthetics such as names, language evolution, the influence of culture, species or environment on design, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making this distinction to help clearly define the purpose of this discussion and vote. &lt;em&gt;This is only about worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt; At this time, all storybuilding is &lt;em&gt;off-topic.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, a choice to adopt a policy to accept brainstorming questions is NOT approval to accept storybuilding questions.&lt;/strong&gt; From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic Help Center page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why am I Asking for This Vote?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Stack has had a long and complicated relationship with a fundamental and arguably necessary tool of worldbuilding: Brainstorming. Indeed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/94749/40609&quot;&gt;one of my own earliest answers&lt;/a&gt;, and still the answer I'm most fond of, is an answer to a brainstorming question. Although (and if I remember correctly) the statement in the Help Center warning against brainstorming didn't exist back then, all of the Tour and Help Center rules reflected by that statement did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming questions &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; violate the basic operational model of Stack Exchange: one-specific-question/one-best-answer. Many, if not most, of the non-community rules found in the Tour and the Help Center are influenced by, if not directly supporting of, that premise. It isn't up for debate because it belongs to Stack Exchange, not us. Therefore (and not surprisingly) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/522/40609&quot;&gt;the first question about the viability of brainstorming questions&lt;/a&gt; occurred a scant two months after the miraculous graduation of Worldbuilding.SE from Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two months!&lt;/em&gt; And we've been debating it ever since... for the last eight years.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The current manifestation of the brainstorming rule is a non-committal non-rule that makes everyone tear their hair out. Neither allowing brainstorming, nor prohibiting brainstorming, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;it says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members of the WB.SE community, I suspect that whether you want to see brainstorming questions or not, you will all agree that the current state of affairs is unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this post is to affect a change to the Help Center's &amp;quot;On Topic&amp;quot; page.&lt;/strong&gt; However, that can only be done by the moderators. We're at their mercy. However, if a solid consensus is achieved, at the very least we can point to this post as authorization to act contrary to what the Help Center says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Argument: Brainstorming is one of the most common and most popular question types on this Stack&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because brainstorming is so common and popular, it's fundamentally impossible to stop. We've been trying for &lt;em&gt;eight years&lt;/em&gt; to stop it. It's not working. It won't ever work. Why is obvious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quality worldbuilding involves &lt;em&gt;dependencies.&lt;/em&gt; While any worldbuilder could sweep away their problem by declaring their rule to be so regardless of those dependencies, it's often the dependencies that add depth and quality to the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Almost none of the querents are sufficiently educated in the topic of their question to adequately understand the dependencies, their consequences, or their benefits. They may not even be capable of identifying the existence of dependencies. All they know is that their rule lacks the depth and quality they've seen in the efforts of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A choice to forbid brainstorming questions means rigorously policing all users, including new users, about why the round peg of a naturally creative and imaginative process is being pounded into the square hole of a software platform intentionally designed to be specific, objective, and have a clear &amp;quot;best solution&amp;quot; (from the perspective of a programmer, an answer voted &amp;quot;best practice&amp;quot;). But it's the simplest to defend because the rules are clearly stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Argument: Brainstorming breaks a lot of Stack Exchange's rules&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the source of the debate. The following list of rules broken by brainstorming is probably not comprehensive. These all come from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic Help Center page&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;don't ask Help Center page&lt;/a&gt;, and the list of reasons to close a question.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are ambiguous (not specific).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are too often story-based.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are too often an invitation to a discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They often lack sufficient detail, context, restrictions and requirements to avoid the prohibition against all answers having equal value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can lead to too many answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are, by definition, open-ended.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A choice to permit brainstorming questions means we are authorizing an exception to any or all of those violations. While a clear update to the Help Center authorizing brainstorming questions would help tremendously, it will not stop the occasional well-meaning user from voting to close a question for violating those rules. However, this choice is likely also easy because only the most anal of people read the Tour and Help Center anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Argument: The second-to-last paragraph on the on-topic Help Center page might not be within the power of our moderators to modify&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this wouldn't stop a community policy effectively vacating the stated belief about brainstorming, it would mean that adopting a policy to vacate the belief would cause headaches for the next eight years. &lt;em&gt;It would be a great help if one of the Moderators would post a comment telling us if that paragraph can, or cannot, be modified.&lt;/em&gt; (If it can be modified, but a new paragraph cannot be added, then the new paragraph shown in &amp;quot;UP VOTE&amp;quot; should be appended to the existing paragraph.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this important? Because policies that can only be found on Meta that don't quickly burn themselves into the community consciousness are quickly forgotten and often difficult to find. It's the weakest form of community policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Proposal to End the Love/Hate Relationship with Brainstorming (AKA List Questions, Idea-Generation, and Fishing-for-Ideas)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second-to-last paragraph on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic Help Center page&lt;/a&gt; currently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in Worldbuilding Chat. Also see Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post good subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UP VOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; You advocate for changing this Stack's policy and Help Center page to read as follows, or similar as discussed in answers. Lined out text to be deleted. Bold text to be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. If you are looking for &lt;s&gt;discussion, brainstorming, or&lt;/s&gt; an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in Worldbuilding Chat. Also see Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post good subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions seeking a list of possible solutions (also called list questions, brainstorming, idea generation, and fishing for ideas) are permissible only when questions are narrowly scoped by providing details, restrictions and requirements that will lead to a reasonably objective selection of a best answer. Questions deemed to be intentionally written to lead to as many answers as possible will be closed as too broad. Explaining your goals and expectations for answers would be beneficial to avoiding question closure. (Additional details &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10012/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DOWN VOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; You advocate for changing this Stack's policy and Help Center page to read as follows, or similar as discussed in answers. Lined out text to be deleted. Bold text to be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions must be specific as well as answerable. &lt;strong&gt;Questions seeking a list of possible solutions (also called list questions, brainstorming, idea generation, and fishing for ideas) are prohibited (additional details &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10012/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/strong&gt; If you are looking for &lt;s&gt;discussion, brainstorming, or&lt;/s&gt; an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. Such questions may however be welcome in Worldbuilding Chat. Also see Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for why this type of question is hard, and some guidelines on how to post good subjective questions which are less likely to end up being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The reader will note I lined out &amp;quot;discussion&amp;quot; as well. Though not specifically related to this post, the word, in the context of that paragraph, contradicts the following statement from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;don't ask Help Center page&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;If your motivation for asking the question is 'I would like to participate in a discussion about ______', then you should not be asking here.&amp;quot; I consider that statement to be clear and authoritative compared to the ambiguous statement in the paragraph, above.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Details About This Vote&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments to this post are for clarifying this post &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; If you wish to voice an opinion or insight about this post, please post an answer so the community can adequately participate in the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proposed changes to wording of either proposal would be appropriate as answers, not comments. Proposed changes will be discussed in comments to the answers and changes made as efficiently as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I will not take the time to list the dozens — more than dozens! — of questions posted on Meta about brainstorming. If you are unfamiliar with the general problem, reading through a bunch of those posts will give you a flavor for the problem. Please search Meta using the is:q filter and, independently, the quoted phrases &amp;quot;brainstorming&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;list answers&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;list questions&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;idea generation&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;fishing for ideas&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;The appropriate Help Center page for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but it's obsolete, having not been updated since the last VTC rule change by Stack Exchange. That's why I'm not linking to it in the body of the post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;And, by definition, they are opinion-based. But the &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; VTC reason is a big enough can of worms that it should not be discussed here and I believe there are enough other violations to suit the needs of this proposal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T06:31:04.967" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T19:23:25.810" Title="A Proposal to End the Love/Hate Relationship with Brainstorming, AKA List questions, Idea-Generation, and Fishing-for-Ideas" Tags="|discussion|policy|question-types|rules-exception|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="48" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10015" CreationDate="2022-12-27T13:34:09.917" Score="6" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I would like to acknowledge help and inspiration (i.e. non-copyright contributions) from Worldbuilding StackExchange, is there a preferred format? An existing example would be best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am talking about acknowledgement, not a copyright notice that would legally required if for a quotation, derivative work or other intellectual property.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user100347" LastEditorDisplayName="user100347" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T17:18:56.323" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T17:58:26.767" Title="How would I credit Worldbuilding in a novel?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10013" CreationDate="2022-12-27T14:19:07.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Copy-n-Paste&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visual arts have been a part of Sci-Fi &amp;amp; Fantasy works for more than a century, whether cover art, maps, decorations or illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, the artist is credited on the title page. Usage varies: &amp;quot;Illustrated by&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;With numerous woodcuts by&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Profusely illustrated by&amp;quot;. It is also common to find a short bio of the artist near &amp;amp; after the bio of the author. Either on the back cover, or the back flap of a dust jacket or within the body of the book itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend the same basic format for crediting the worldbuilder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of Tortliena's comment: it would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be suitable to credit Stack Exchange or Worldbuilding.SE as noted above. We're an aggregate resource much like an encyclopedia or any kind of collected source of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors write a brief statement about the formation of the story and the process of how the story came to be. You could, however, make mention of WB.SE as a specific resource when discussing any online worldbuilding places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T17:58:26.767" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T17:58:26.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10013" CreationDate="2022-12-27T17:00:06.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange has, in a roundabout way, answered this question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways of looking at your post. First, the idea of crediting Stack Exchange, Worldbuilding.SE, or one or more users on Worldbuilding.SE, for their assistance, guidance, influence, or support in your creative effort in a way that reflects a copyright contribution. This issue was discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9673/40609&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9670/40609&quot;&gt;Are there cultural objects that came thanks to this site?&lt;/a&gt; That question and its answers would be good reading for you generally, especially the linked answer to my question about copyright and Stack Exchange over at Law.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, when it comes to copyright law, there are specifics you need to follow, none of which have been provided by Stack Exchange that I know of. Because everything posted on all Stack Exchange sites are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;licensed under CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; (Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike), you are required to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must give &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appropriate credit&lt;/a&gt;, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;, identical in V3.0 &amp;amp; V4.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But it sounds like this isn't at all what you're trying to do&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it sounds like what you're really trying to do is acknowledge Worldbuilding.SE, but &lt;em&gt;not attribute copyright credit.&lt;/em&gt; In other words, you're simply expressing your gratitude. In this case, copyright and the law are no longer particularly relevant so long as how you refer to Stack Exchange would be deemed by Stack Exchange to be positive.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; In this case, you want to be intentionally vague. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to express my thanks to my friends at Worldbuilding.StackExchange.com, owned and operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., for their support, and to Stack Exchange, Inc. itself for hosting such a valuable resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you say that is not as important as making sure &amp;quot;Stack Exchange, Inc.&amp;quot; is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BTW, should you publish, I would recommend heading over to that question I linked to, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9670/40609&quot;&gt;Are there cultural objects that came thanks to this site?&lt;/a&gt;, and shamelessly answering it with, &amp;quot;Yeah! Here's one: my publication!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;My family owned a micro-publisher for ten years. Our experience with this is that most organizations have ways they would prefer to be referred to, e.g., &amp;quot;Stack Exchange, Inc.&amp;quot; but they rarely care about the details unless what you say threatens a trademark or, basically, pisses them off. E.G., &amp;quot;My undying gratitude for the worthless help Coke gave me while writing this article.&amp;quot; (Example is artificial, obviously.) While anybody can sue anybody for any reason, large companies generally won't slap small entities so long as they've been referred to legally. E.G., &amp;quot;Coke&amp;quot; becomes &amp;quot;Coca-Cola Consolidated, Inc.&amp;quot; so that all they can complain about is your free speech. And I chose that example intentionally, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/02/1679599/0/en/Coca-Cola-Bottling-Co-Consolidated-Announces-Company-Name-Change.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coke officially changed its name back in 2019&lt;/a&gt; and it's &amp;quot;your&amp;quot; job to keep up with changes like that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T17:00:06.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10012" CreationDate="2022-12-27T19:23:25.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to quote Shog's answer to the Meta question which says Communities can change SE rules and policies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;We're still not building a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_%28vehicle%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ute&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there are some invariables - &lt;strong&gt;we’re building Q&amp;amp;A sites here, not discussion forums or service directories&lt;/strong&gt;; no matter how much you might want &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/aww/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aww.SE&lt;/a&gt;, we're &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;just not building a truck here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and we're not gonna let you &lt;a href=&quot;http://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/archive/2005/05/25/408925.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use our shoes to drive nails&lt;/a&gt;. That's why, even on sites with elected moderators, we'll occasionally step in to remind folks what the purpose of these sites are, and try to refocus them on that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T19:23:25.810" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10020" CreationDate="2022-12-29T15:08:33.073" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I post a question if I have no intention of ever including the answer in a book, picture, game or interpretive dance routine? My impression is that those who post answers enjoy the process in and of itself, but that's just an assumption. I don't want to mislead others or waste their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For more context, I was thinking that posting &amp;quot;pointless&amp;quot; questions will help me learn more about world building, and how to frame good questions when I finally decide to write the big novel!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user100347" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T16:22:13.160" Title="Is it appropriate to ask a question without a product?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2022-12-29T16:20:00.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have no requirement on what you do with the worlds you build. It's sufficient for you to just imagine the world in your head. We do however expect that you're actually building a fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you frame it right, most questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be about worldbuilding. For a question to be appropriate here you must make sure that as written &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; about worldbuilding. As long as your question shows clear worldbuilding purpose it will be considered on topic for this site. You may still want to avoid asking questions that can be answered with a simple Google search, or that are entirely about real world physics, chemistry, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't ask pointless questions. The SE model is all about creating a repository of high quality answers. Good answers tend to come from good questions, and the best questions are those that are motivated by some specific need. This allows the answerers to provide additional explanation and relevant context, which is part of what distinguishes a satisfactory answer from the truly great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short as long as you come to us with a good question about a real worldbuilding problem you're having you shouldn't have any problems on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T16:20:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2022-12-29T16:22:13.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, with a caveat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions are posted here without a greater framework, a master plan, or the intent to use the answer in a novel (or anything else). Your intent to use the information for any specific purpose is not relevant to the use of this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the prohibitions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; is that questions are expected to be constructive and more than mindless social fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This puts the burden of being constructive on you, the original poster (OP). If you're not trying to solve a problem for your own worldbuilding efforts, please consider how your question will benefit others in theirs. We've had a number of users over the years who, literally, were simply using the Stack for mindless social fun. The result is many low quality questions. That, we'd like to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T16:22:13.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-03T21:50:40.433" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question posited a fantastic condition then used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag. In essense, the author wanted a science-based solution to a problem that wasn't science-based in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've done a good job of clarifying how the three science tags word (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-fiction-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;). Those three tags are almost unique in that, unlike nearly every other tag, they constrain the answer rather than categorizing the question. But I've encountered a number of questions over the last six months where the question failed to meet the expectations of the tag (i.e., failed to include details, specifications, limitations, or conditions that an answer conforming to the tag would require.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be reasonable, but my gut suggests that it's not. How, for example, other than out of shear luck, can a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; be answered if it doesn't provide the conditions and requirements such an answer would demand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is this: Should we edit the three science tag wikis to require questions that use the tags to also meet the expectations of the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T15:45:41.277" Title="Is an edit to the three Science tag wikis warranted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10023" CreationDate="2023-01-04T01:53:28.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unlike other tags whose purpose is categorization, these tags set intentions&lt;/strong&gt; : loosely real-world based solutions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-fiction-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;), a better than suspension-of-disbelief need (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;), and a very accurate world (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;). Thus, people need to provide the material to reach these intentions; If they don't answerers can miss the target. After all you can't reasonably ask someone to build a sturdy house  if all you bring them are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sticks or worse, straws&lt;/a&gt; !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... But with some conditions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;That more clarifications would change answers&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few things to consider though. Most importantly, it's to check whether you actually need this level of details to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/239371/80336&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; about a nuked gunsafe at point blank range. While the question asked for hard-science and didn't provide much, I still answered it. Indeed, following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;principle of charity&lt;/a&gt;, there was no added detail which would have changed the answer : At point-blank no furniture can survive it (as proven by the top-voted answer). Therefore, adding details was just unnecessary to deduce the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may make the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-fiction-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag mostly unfit for these specific closures since by default they allow a very wide range of answers. The needed details would be pretty much on-par with what is expected everywhere else, meaning no additional rule would need to be called .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;That the question can be answered under these tags, supposing details are given&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, let's remember that oftentimes people add tags without reading what they mean. In the rare case a question under &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; would be clearly unanswerable under the tag's terms -like when magic is omnipresent-, I'd rather say the querent didn't actually want that tag. Back when they chose their tags it just looked sparkly and colorful ✨.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, if it could be answered with these tags (and with the details), I'd close it for lacking details. But first on whether the tag should have been used, then on whether the question has enough details. Concretely, I'd introduce a doubt in comments with these kinds of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you know what the tag means?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you read what it requires?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your intention [one of the above intentions]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer tells us the tag wasn't needed, I'd retract my close-vote and remove the tag from the question. This would be part of the overall process of clarifying the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T01:53:28.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10023" CreationDate="2023-01-05T15:45:41.277" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a strict applying of tags would just result in no one using tags. I see tags as more of a way of shaping the intention of the author, and that answers should bear that in mind without feeling strictly bound to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. as Tortliena brought up with the gunsafe, the question was &amp;quot;Can a gunsafe survive a nuclear blast level attack&amp;quot;. A perfectly answerable question, with the answer being &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, but the hard-science tag means answers should prove it, which they did a good job of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But imagine the question had been &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt; can I make gunsafe in my world survive a nuclear blast level attack&amp;quot; with a hard-science tag. A strict interpretation of the rules could imply that the question can't be answered, is therefore bad, and should be closed, but who is that helping? I think it can still be handled as a valid application of a tag; it just means that the answer is &amp;quot;you can't, and here's why&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author was &lt;em&gt;hoping&lt;/em&gt; for a hard-science answer but the actual answer is that there is no hard-science answer. Answers could even tickle with science-based or science-fiction despite the tag, and still be legitimate. &amp;quot;You can't, here's why &lt;em&gt;(the hard-science tag demands this explanation)&lt;/em&gt;, but maybe if your world invents something with the following properties, a gunsafe made of that material would survive.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets them the science-based answer their question needs while informing them that there was no hard-science solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T15:45:41.277" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-06T22:37:57.550" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why were the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240311/help-with-fictional-scenario-trapped-in-lagrange-point-orbit&quot;&gt;this closed question&lt;/a&gt; deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/taQb4.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/taQb4.gif&quot; alt=&quot;screencap&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was browsing the answers to a Q migrated from SE:Space Exploration when suddenly they were all marked as deleted and the Q was closed. Refreshing the page, the answers were all gone. I'm not asking why the Q was closed, because that's obvious, but why were the answers deleted? They contained some genuinely interesting info. Are answers normally deleted on migrated Q's that are closed? Did the answering users delete their posts simultaneously? What happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62241" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T22:45:20.153" Title="Why were the answers on this closed question deleted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10026" CreationDate="2023-01-06T22:45:20.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migrated questions which get closed on the receiving site get returned to the original site, with all the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, answers to the question get deleted on the receiving site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T22:45:20.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10030" CreationDate="2023-01-08T13:58:01.443" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got great feedback on my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239964/if-the-usa-disbanded-who-would-california-rely-on&quot;&gt;If the USA disbanded, who would California rely on?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally I asked &amp;quot;If the USA disbanded, what alliances would form?&amp;quot; and it was pointed out to me that this was a &amp;quot;high concept&amp;quot; question that was too open-ended. There are many potential, conflicting answers. Could be fun, but not suitable for Stack Exchange. The question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I narrowed the focus to &amp;quot;What is the smallest set of states that California could rely on for material needs?&amp;quot; My hope was that this is very concrete and therefore answerable. For example, someone had already shared a link to water sources for California.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submitted to re-open but was declined. Is the answer still too broad? Or is there something else that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user100347" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T10:41:14.567" Title="Do I need to narrow my question further?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-08T17:48:45.563" Score="2" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latest offender: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240344/need-counters-for-a-near-perfect-anti-thermal-and-kinetic-armor-system-in-a-near&quot;&gt;Need counters for a near perfect Anti Thermal and Kinetic armor system in a near future setting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240031/could-alien-organisms-evolve-to-utilize-thermoelectric-coolingthe-peltier-effec&quot;&gt;Could alien organisms evolve to utilize Thermoelectric cooling(the Peltier effect) to cool themselves down?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And another: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240067/how-could-my-solar-powered-fairies-exist-in-outer-space&quot;&gt;How could my solar-powered fairies exist in outer space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240000/amount-of-fuel-needed-for-a-long-running-fusion-reactor&quot;&gt;Amount of fuel needed for a long-running fusion reactor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Final for the road: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/239997/what-would-a-zombies-brain-look-like&quot;&gt;What would a zombie&amp;#39;s brain look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these questions are of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hey look at this thing well outside the realms of known science that I dreamed up, how can I justify it by known science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the only correct answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you've already required your audience to suspend their disbelief with your handwavium, why do you need science to justify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I consistently see questions along these lines being posted here, and even making it into HNQ at times. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7814/how-could-the-community-respond-to-posts-asking-for-alternatives-to-establishe&quot;&gt;However it appears that a consensus has already been reached about such questions over two years ago&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure seems appropriate. At their core, they seem too broad - we don't really want completely open ended questions there and &amp;quot;what will replace X&amp;quot; is pretty much that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I will agree that the type of questions I'm talking about here aren't strictly the same as those on that linked Meta question, but they ultimately suffer the same problem: namely that there are a potentially infinite number of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I have another concern with this type of question: by answering them, we give aspiring writers the impression that justifying handwavium is something they need to be doing. But that's incorrect; the kind of details that these questions are asking for are wholly irrelevant to building the actual world of their story, which is ultimately done through the &lt;em&gt;beings&lt;/em&gt; that are the lens through which their story is told within a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I posit that by entertaining such questions here we are doing writers a massive disservice, and consequently that we should be doing a far more zealous job of closing them as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; as soon as they're posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T08:42:07.260" Title="Considered harmful: questions where the asker expects us to figure out a scientific explanation or alternative for their handwavium" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2023-01-09T10:41:14.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I was one of the close-voter, I kinda owe you an answer :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No, I think you're good enough&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you could narrow it further (like focusing on food dependencies), it could be detrimental to your needs. Indeed, at some point you need to take a look at a bigger picture to work properly ^^.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, right now this can be answered because answers will be implicitly scaled with the importance of the need (not very opinion-based). Food, water and electricity will come first, then secondary services and material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, these needs should be accurately measurable for this &lt;s&gt;state&lt;/s&gt; new country and is localized enough (specific enough). I mean California is big, but it's not as huge as the whole U.S.A.^^.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the question is clear and doesn't seem to be lacking critical data. And with the division of the U.S. there's a clear worldbuilding purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T10:41:14.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2023-01-09T19:54:11.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I get where you're coming from, because that's pretty much what I said in a comment on this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240416/possible-mechanism-for-telescoping-barrels&quot;&gt;Possible mechanism for telescoping barrels&lt;/a&gt;. I mean, if your world needs telescoping barrels, just give it telescoping barrels and never explain how they work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But careful what you wish for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we tell people that in order to answer this kind of question, they must justify why their story needs it, then they'll be writing us 5000 word questions explaining their entire story concept and why they need this (and then people would VTC for &amp;quot;lack of focus&amp;quot;). I think I'd rather they just ask their question, be as focused as possible, and we just assume they need it for some reason we would actually prefer not to wade through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I thought the space fairies was actually a reasonable one. The author had some clearly wrong ideas about physics in space so we probably did a service there. On one hand, they don't need to explain the detailed biology of space fairies. On the other hand, tiny wings flapping in the void did need, at least, some handwavium, and the author didn't even know they needed that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit -- another good example just popped up here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240463/can-a-creature-have-an-endoskeleton-of-chitin-and-silica&quot;&gt;Can a creature have an endoskeleton of chitin and silica?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Starfish Prime mentioned in his answer &amp;quot;you're presumably not writing a story about biochemistry, so I'd just gloss over the issue.&amp;quot; This is good advice, but he also still answered the question. We don't really know what the asker is creating. Perhaps Mr. Spock has just beamed down to an alien planet and would like to deliver a comprehensive and believable science statement about local lifeforms. The author would like to at least know it's plausible. Seems fair enough, really. Closing the question because we personally think he doesn't need the answer is a bit...silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-01-10T20:37:06.267" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T20:37:06.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2023-01-10T12:58:56.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will go with the grain and agree that AI generated answer should not be allowed, at least on THIS SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is an artistic SE and as such we are searching for answer to improve our work, so the concept of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the issue on SO was different to me, because there  you need to give out the right answer and explain it , chat gpt answer were giving answer that were consistently wrong, but giving advice  that did look just right enough that beginner could misstake them as functional. where as in here, while you can agree more with one answer, most if not all of them are correct in their own way, but simply another way of answering your prompt. (except maybe for answer asking for hard science, but those are a particular case)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using ready made answer is totally contrary to what's been done here, which is to offer elegant and artistic solution to an artistic problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44468" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T12:58:56.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2023-01-10T20:15:43.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A compelling enough story can cover pretty much any &amp;quot;failure&amp;quot; of worldbuilding. I've never seen worldbuilding salvage a poorly written story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should continue to discourage how do I explain/justify X questions. There are two major reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such questions are too broad and open ended for this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explaining everything in your world is unnecessary and can negatively impact your stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site policy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour#:%7E:text=Questions%20with%20too%20many%20possible%20answers%20or%20that%20would%20require%20an%20extremely%20long%20answer:%7E:text=Questions%20with%20too%20many%20possible%20answers%20or%20that%20would%20require%20an%20extremely%20long%20answer&quot;&gt;very&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic#:%7E:text=If%20any%20answer%20is%20equally%20effective%20your%20question%20is%20not%20properly%20constrained.&quot;&gt;clear&lt;/a&gt; that brainstorming and idea generation are not permitted on this site. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/552/26175&quot;&gt;early discussions&lt;/a&gt; in our site's infancy onwards the consensus has always been that such questions were not to be asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a while we even had a custom close reason just for idea generation. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2337/26175&quot;&gt;conversation around removing it&lt;/a&gt; was entirely around how it was unnecessary when we could already close such questions using build in close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, the idea-generation close reason doesn't cover anything not already covered by existing close reasons, specifically &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; (too subjective). I think we should get rid of this close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it's removal we have continued closing questions asking us brainstorm or generate ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason Stack Exchange have upvotes on answers is to identify the correct answer. If there are many valid answers then this whole system breaks down. When asking how to handwave something literally any handwave will be an equally valid answer. This is why from the beginning such questions have not been permitted on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, hopefully, all agree that wizards, Jedi, hobbits, elves, witchers, space marines, mecha, blind swordsmen, pokemon, and any other fantastical element of our favorite stories, do not exist. There is no amount of explanation that will change this. When we engage with these worlds we already do so knowing full well that they are fake. Even a small child knows that these stories are unreal. Yet we keep coming back to them again and again. We're so drawn to them that we want to expand on them, or try our hand at creating worlds to tell stories of our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telling a fantastic story that is grounded in reality is a red herring. All you need to do is tell us that an impossible thing exists and readers will buy into it. The challenge has never been explaining the impossible things. In fact explaining it draws attention to its impossibility and opens up the explanation to scrutiny. The more explanation there is, the greater the area in which some fault can be discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time explaining the details is necessary is when understanding events of the story hinges on knowledge of the details. The rest of the time it's a barrier to engaging with the story. When we see the extensive lorebooks for popular franchises we tend to forget that the compelling stories came first. Only when people are already captivated by the story will they care about the lore. The only people who are in a position to poke holes in your worldbuilding are already won over by your writing. They are poking holes because that's another way to engage with the story you've created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at successful fantasy, and scifi authors you'll note that they're economical with their explanations. For all his detailed languages and histories, Tolkien never tells us how a creature of shadow and flame can exist, we just know that terror goes before them. In The Expanse spaceships follow the rules of Newtonian physics, we even get a few engine specs, but they never explain how the Epstein drive is able to far outperform any real world equivalent. They don't even attempt to explain how the Protomolecule is able to  completely break our understanding of physics. What we can see from both these examples is a focus not on explaining things, but on setting the readers expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2023-01-11T17:49:43.450" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T17:49:43.450" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2023-01-11T15:19:11.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Too broad isn't the best closure reason.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prior note : By closure reason, I mean the official choice (lacking focus, need details...) and its subsequent explanatory comment. It's because I expect people to choose one official reason -usually the most concerning one- then give explanations that is consistent with this choice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a starter, let's dig a doubt with an interesting contradiction I found when looking back at your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They [the questions] &lt;strong&gt;ultimately suffer the same problem: namely that there are a potentially infinite number of answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet you say a few lines before :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; correct answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've already required your audience to suspend their disbelief with your handwavium, why do you need science to justify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is that broadness is not what distinguishes those questions from the others. More often than not (and as you more or less tell it), the most acceptable answer is &amp;quot;we can't explain it&amp;quot;. Closing for being too-broad is therefore a wrong interpretation of the rules, even less in the case of their strict interpretation. Actually, the common trait of these questions is that they attempt to reconcile elements which cannot be put together, generally wild creations and real-world. It's like you cannot blend mustard and chocolate together, in a way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However and indeed, those questions often lack some forethought, notably to fight back the instinct that more realistic is always better.&lt;/strong&gt; Strong ties to real-world is only one of the viable intention among many. It looks safer to work with it, but often times having the courage to go mad can give much better results!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So... Presuming the question is showing mismatching intentions and in overall lack good worldbuilding, there are four paths you can take which work much better within the rules. They are also more likely to be applicable than other solutions :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some better alternatives&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Downvoting the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very simple: Someone offered something impossible and it seems they thought too quickly about what they want. They would also probably made a failed attempt at good worldbuilding in general. Thus, as stated by the downvote description :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question does not show any research effort.&lt;/strong&gt; It is unclear &lt;strong&gt;or not useful&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can therefore be freely downvoted. Still, note that the point at which you will actually downvote is very personal; Some will have very strict criteria, others will almost never hit that arrow pointing down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answering the question, telling this is impossible&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also known as a frame-challenge. I actually did this for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240067/how-could-my-solar-powered-fairies-exist-in-outer-space&quot;&gt;space fairy question&lt;/a&gt;. The intended goal is to remind in a friendly manner that they're likely trying to perform the impossible, and that this might hurt them in the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8008/when-and-how-to-challenge-the-back-story/8111#8111&quot;&gt;old post&lt;/a&gt;, frame-challenge as answers should take on at least partially the question or the intent behind it, you mustn't just throw away the idea like some trash in a can. Offer alternatives, give inspiration for something new. If you can't give such thing, It's better told in comments to make it less official and more convivial. Ah and remember : it's perfectly alright for a question to have no answer if no answer can be found : The absence of viable answers &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an answer of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Closing the question for being opinion-based&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one will surely stir reactions : Why would it be opinion-based? Let's first define some common grounds for when opinion-based closure should happen :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When people are deliberately asking for opinions, or when they just want to engage a discussion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A common reason is when there is no way to scale answers appropriately. In other words, that there are no objectively better answers than others&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in hand, let's look at the question : If it is impossible to answer (can't match real-world and hand-waved elements), it means that the premises prevent it. You'd therefore need to change the world and question premises to not reach absurd conclusions. But the issue is : Which one to remove?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This very question's answer is heavily subject to the querent's personal choice as they should know best what they wish to do. In other words, the question is dependent on one's opinion, and is thus opinion-based by both lack of better answers and (more or less deliberate) asking for opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I only do this when there are critical components at play. For instance, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;How can I realistically kill my immortal character?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is a logical contradiction in and of itself : If &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kill&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/immortal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immortal&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; are using the common definition, we'd have to remove one of the premise to start answering. Alas, we can't tell whether it's best the character is killed or be unkillable. Any answer's quality will be therefore inherent to what the readers/querent actually want to conserve than more objective conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Closing the question for lacking details&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When facing impossibilities, it happens sometimes that the querent just didn't explain enough what they want exactly. If someone asks how to explain vampires can only be killed by wooden stakes, it could be that they do not want to know how they cannot be killed by other means (guns, rocket launchers...), but how they are especially vulnerable to wood. The first is barely answerable in regard to known sciences, but the latter makes more sense and is more likely to display better worldbuilding intents. Sometimes, some clarification is all you need for a change of perspective and make the question more answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : There must be a post stating it explicitly somewhere, but I can't find it back. In any case this is a recurrent comment you can find on closed for being opinion-based questions.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-01-19T08:42:07.260" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T08:42:07.260" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2023-01-12T08:44:05.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the only correct answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you've already required your audience to suspend their disbelief with your handwavium, why do you need science to justify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree that this is a correct answer. I would say it's a complete non-answer, which essentially boils down to &amp;quot;don't do worldbuilding.&amp;quot; In my opinion this is a pretty random thing to say to someone who just posted a question on a site about worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is definitely a place for the argument that sometimes a story can be made convincing by leaving out some of the worldbuilding details - I'm just pretty sure the worldbuilding stack exchange isn't that place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And much as there is a place in the world for that argument, there is also surely a place for a counterargument: sometimes it's useful to build the world in much more detail than is ever revealed in the story. Not every author does this, and certainly not every author has to, but as a good example, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gregegan.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greg Egan's site&lt;/a&gt;, where he gives wonderfully detailed explanations of the physics of his worlds, complete with diagrams, graphs and equations, in far more detail than we ever see in the novels. Do we really want to tell people that that kind of work isn't worth doing, if they want to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most certainly, the &amp;quot;suspension of disbelief is better than worldbuilding&amp;quot; argument can't possibly make sense as a reason to close a question. If a question can be closed as off-topic &lt;em&gt;because it's about worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt;, then what is this site for at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7130" LastEditorUserId="7130" LastEditDate="2023-01-12T08:50:38.757" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T08:50:38.757" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2023-01-13T00:19:45.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on all of the meta questions I have read and the many issues I have seen in chat and closed questions, I am leaning towards no. My reasoning is pretty much what other people here and on other questions have posted. Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A or any Q&amp;amp;A website really (excluding interview type ones) work best when there is one or maybe two ideal answers. Worldbuilding by its very nature is not only very broad but subjective so the community determining what is a good answer can often be difficult or even controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that this place seemed to have lost its direction. It used to be more casual and cooperative in enhancing story ideas. I would have loved to be a member of this place 6 years ago. Now I just see a lot more shooting down ideas or rules-lawyering. Pretty much the only questions you see nowadays are either better fits for other stackexchanges (principally the physics/history ones) or could arguably be closed for being story/opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of rules, they badly need an update. The community standards of this place has changed but the rules themselves have been mostly unchanged since 2018. As a result, even new contributors who read the rules and other upvoted questions get their threads downvoted and closed; they didn't understand the unspoken rules that the most senior members abide by. Unwritten rules shouldn't exist on the Internet. I'm fairly certain that if all the sample questions from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; were deleted and resubmitted, most of them would be downvoted and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final thing I will say is that the detail standards of this stackexchange isn't conducive to helping the most amount of people. Obviously, answerers need context for your story, especially since they can't research your story in your head independently, but an overly precise question won't help a lot of people. This is true in stackoverflow but it is an even larger issue with worldbuilding since people are writing their own stories instead of reading textbooks on the same topics. If a user does make some precise questions but asks a few of them in order to get information for their world, they are accused of &amp;quot;mindless social fun&amp;quot; and future topics about it are downvoted/closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall, Stack Exchange is not a good home for worldbuilding. Stack Exchange is best for issues like hard sciences and mathematics where there is an objectively true or false answer. Stack Exchange is also a good home for topics like Law or Religion or History where this is generally precise writing to answer an inquiry. Worldbuilding is too broad to have firm but fair evaluation and moderation. As a result, many users feel this place is firm and unfair instead. Worldbuilding is much more streamlined and cooperative on Reddit and Quora as opposed to this place; although those websites have their own issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the rules and guidelines were updated, that would fix many issues. But before that happens, this community has to reform itself and decide whether it wants to be either a generalist science Stackexchange or community writing Stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96931" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T00:19:45.693" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-16T18:51:26.863" Score="-1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;-Vote to close question because it's ''opinion based''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Don't answer with opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's two options, but option 1 has no reason to exist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user100394" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T03:12:01.033" Title="Why does opinion based VTC exist?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2023-01-17T05:15:32.437" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think a ban on ChatGPT is meaningful, because it would be unenforceable.&lt;/strong&gt; In practice, there is effectively nothing we can do to detect someone occasionally posting answers from ChatGPT (with just a little bit of babysitting and touch-ups). A ban that's unenforceable is not a useful ban. Imagine banning bad/wrong answers. We may not want them on our site, but there's no reasonable way to stop people from posting them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that ChatGPT can't be effectively banned leads to the next question; why should it? The reason why it's undetectable is because with a little bit of babysitting, a user can provide generally useful and correct answers. Why is that something that needs to be banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me from this that we need to differentiate between 'malicious' use of ChatGPT, where multiple answers are posted very rapidly, with little/no babysitting, and answers that ChatGPT generates, but real users are ready to stand behind. A blanket ban would be useless, as the latter category is virtually undetectable anyways (think a user who every now and then gets ChatGPT to write an answer and then touches it up themselves). Banning specific users who abuse ChatGPT makes sense, but banning the software entirely is neither logical, nor possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61090" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T05:15:32.437" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10039" CreationDate="2023-01-18T23:02:26.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're forgetting the rest of Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE is only one of 170+ Stacks in the Stack Exchange network, and more graduate &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; every year. Worldbuilding.SE has the dubious distinction of being the least objective Stack of the lot and the &lt;em&gt;only one&lt;/em&gt; where the Opinion-Based VTC reason &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; not be reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All Stacks operate using the same network-wide template. What's good for the other 170+ Stacks is, by definition, something we're stuck with.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yeah, but why isn't the SE rule against opinions enough? Why even have a VTC reason?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you're not taking Stack Exchange into account. Stack Exchange believes questions should be closed quickly. SE's goal is to be the world's resource for &lt;em&gt;specifically useful answers&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;broadly applicable questions&lt;/em&gt; (we're back to not being quite like the other 170+ Stacks). Given that goal, they want to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;STOP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; any and all answers that aren't &lt;em&gt;specifically useful&lt;/em&gt; before they ever get loaded into the system because deleting answers is intensely rare — and as the number of irrelevant, &lt;em&gt;not specifically useful&lt;/em&gt; answers grows, the value of Stack Exchange to the world decreases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from SE's perspective, we should be slamming closed every question from every user that doesn't meet SE's rules or our Stack's expectations until someone edits the question to meet all those rules and expectations.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; You might not appreciate or approve of their reasoning, but given their goals, &lt;em&gt;it makes sense.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange does not see themselves as, per se, a social media service. Unfortunately, a great many users do. That conflict comes to a head with questions about question closure. What SE sees as a way of improving the quality of their overall service we see as a mean-spirited policy that drives away new users. Trust me, they don't care — and from a business perspective, they can't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OK, so what do we do about it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We've tried everything.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've tried ignoring it. We've tried redefining it. We've tried scoping it. We've even tried going to meta.SE and asking for it to become Stack-dependent so we can get rid of it. None of it works. Why? Because Stack Exchange controls the rules, the text, and the associated Help Center pages. Anything that varies from those (and this is important) &lt;strong&gt;canonical sources&lt;/strong&gt; requires an &lt;em&gt;unbelievable&lt;/em&gt; amount of policing, educating, and cat herding — and every effort has failed because it's exhausting. And our Stack Exchange overlords aren't going to change the base software for just one Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my good friend, you... like the rest of us... are stuck with it. We all have this coming-of-age moment when we realize there's nothing we can do about Opinion-Based but deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To add insult to injury, it really is a valid and viable VTC reason on Worldbuilding.SE — even for questions about &lt;em&gt;magic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the goal of this Stack is not to tell stories or generate ideas. It's to help build worlds. Even worlds meant to express utter chaos are required to have predictable sets of rules. &lt;em&gt;And it's those rules that we're here to help people develop.&lt;/em&gt; Rules are reasonably objective and questions about rules are reasonably focused. Answers aren't Opinion-Based because they're based on everything from empirical examples to scientific reasoning to logic. In most instances, questions closed as Opinion-Based lacked conditions, restrictions, limitations, and expectations that would have guided answers to higher quality responses. In fact, most Opinion-Based problems (indeed, a LOT of problems) would be resolved if querents simply included the following in their questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is stopping them from answering their own question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are their goals or expectations with the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will they judge a best answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If a querent can't answer those three questions for themselves, the question they want to ask on Main is almost certainly not ready to be asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you're getting questions closed as Opinion-Based, you need to courteously ask why people felt the question was that way — and then you need to change to avoid the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;We're also a bit unique about editing. Where pretty much every other Stack on the network encourages anyone to jump in and edit a question to improve its quality, we kinda hate that unless you've earned enough rep to represent basic trust. The problem is that it's pretty straight forward to know how to keep the idea of &amp;quot;what's 2+2?&amp;quot; intact, but it's a lot harder to preserve the idea of &amp;quot;I'm trying to balance the power of my bugaboos, which use anger as a motive force for causing damage, against their peace-loving brethren the Ababbas. How can I balance anger and peace?&amp;quot; We also have an unwritten rule that no edit to a question should ever invalidate an answer. I personally disagree with that, but it's what the community wants.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T23:02:26.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2023-01-19T00:11:13.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here is a list of the Meta questions I've asked on this subject:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9701/40609&quot;&gt;Advice to Querents asking &amp;quot;is X plausible or realistic?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8290/40609&quot;&gt;Why asking for the details isn&amp;#39;t always a good idea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8273/40609&quot;&gt;Advice concerning questions asking HOW to implement a technological procedure or device&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7351/40609&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;how would X explain Y?&amp;quot; questions on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;narrative necessity&amp;quot; and how does it apply to worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7268/40609&quot;&gt;How best to deal with &amp;quot;what are you expecting?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5189/40609&quot;&gt;Best Practice for Helping OP&amp;#39;s with Science-Based Fantasy Requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those are just mine. As you can see, I've been asking about this issue since 2017. In all that time, I've been led to realize a simple fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nothing will stop people from asking this type of question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world nobody would post a question on this Stack before memorizing the Tour, memorizing at least the On-Topic and Don't-Ask Help Center pages, and watching the question-answer process for at least a year. The truth? Almost nobody reads the tour and nobody reads the Help Center until they've had their hands slapped a dozen times. And while a few folks spectate for a while, most swoop in and drop their question, then wonder why it gets down votes or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't help that we're in the midst of an &amp;quot;as realistic as possible&amp;quot; fad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen an episode of &lt;em&gt;The Expanse.&lt;/em&gt; I've watched a few YouTube clips, and the show's cool... but while it might not have single-handedly done us a disservice, it contributed to the current fad of all worldbuilding efforts being as &amp;quot;realistic as possible.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bah-humbug!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My family and I ran a micro-publisher for about ten years. Some of the lessons we learned, based on reviewing nearly 100,000 (yup, one-hundred-thousand) manuscripts over that decade, were these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A good story will be forgiven almost any lack of detail. A bad story won't be saved by any amount of detail.&lt;/strong&gt; @Sphennings is dead-on correct about this. In our case, the most common offenders were invective and over-the-top-detailed-violence. Trust me, a bad story won't be saved by any amount of swearing or gore, no matter how much you think your antagonist &amp;quot;can't be understood&amp;quot; without it. The goal, as any practiced author will tell you, is to have a good story &lt;em&gt;with the right amount of detail&lt;/em&gt; so that your readers write to you begging for more. Hence my linked question above, &amp;quot;Why asking for the details isn't always a good idea.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Every detail you include in your story that doesn't contribute to the plot or help improve the audience's experience of the journey is a distraction, often with &amp;quot;we hated the book&amp;quot; consequences.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't believe me? Get an unmodified and unabridged copy of &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; and try to read it. Chapter after chapter after chapter of mind-numbing detail about whaling ship operations and logistics that have little or nothing to do with the story. The only reason anyone reads it today is because they were forced to in their Middle School English class. Why did Melville include it? Because in his day, almost no one understood anything about sea-faring ships. That simply isn't true about space ships (or most of science) today. Hence my linked question above, &amp;quot;What is 'narrative necessity' and how does it apply to worldbuilding?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As you increase your attention to detail, you're decreasing your attention to your story, always with negative results.&lt;/strong&gt; There's a balance between worldbuilding and storybuilding. Tolkien spent a lot less time &amp;quot;building his world&amp;quot; than you might think. Oh, he had a mountain of notes and ideas that were glued together into &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion,&lt;/em&gt; which is hard to read for non-Tolkien enthusiasts because it is, at best, a lengthy compilation of short stories and poetry. (I'd bet that you, dear reader, don't know three people who have read it cover-to-cover, even though most people who own two or more copies of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; also have a copy of &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion.&lt;/em&gt; I do. I've never cracked the cover.) But he only built as much of his world as was necessary for his story. Worldbuilding is fun, but without a purpose, it's just a loose collection of ideas. And when you lose focus on the purpose for doing it, what you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/207858/40609&quot;&gt;has little value&lt;/a&gt;. Hence my linked question above, &amp;quot;How best to deal with 'what are you expecting?' questions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a long story short, too much realism is just as bad as too little. Pick up a copy of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; and ask yourself, just how much of that story reflected &amp;quot;Real Life?&amp;quot; Answer: A lot less than you think. Lee's story was based on her 10-year-old memories of her family, her town, and an event that took place in her town. It was also based on research. And finally it was crafted into a book that &lt;em&gt;made a point.&lt;/em&gt; I know enough about the history of the time period to know the book was laughably simplistic. I also know enough about story telling to know it was a masterpiece in that it drew her audience into debate and discussion about social issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had she tried to bring &amp;quot;realsim&amp;quot; into the story any more than she did, it would have ruined the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's true that new authors seeking &amp;quot;realism&amp;quot; are misguided&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of details that these questions are asking for are wholly irrelevant to building the actual world of their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New authors haven't yet realized how to balance &amp;quot;realism&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;purpose.&amp;quot; But to claim that such details are &amp;quot;wholly irrelevant&amp;quot; is claiming to read the OP's mind. If the scientific detail around the fantastic idea is a central plot device in the story, then it makes a lot of sense to come here and ask for help trying to define it. If it's not a central plot point, then you're absolutely correct that the effort is a waste of everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But does that make the question type inherently wrong?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it doesn't. The only question that matters from the perspective of we, the potential respondents, is, &lt;em&gt;does the question meet the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;rules of Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; and this Stack's expectations?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, then it's perfectly reasonable to answer even if you, an individual respondent, doesn't like the question type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, close the question and explain to the OP what needs to be done to meet the rules and expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from the Good Book (and not making a moral judgement about any OP), &amp;quot;the poor you will always have with you.&amp;quot; Interpreted for this application:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inexperienced authors will always be inspired by something and seek our help to rationalize their ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a bad thing... so long as we're willing to patiently help them understand how to proverbially drive at the posted speed limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T00:11:13.587" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2023-01-19T01:10:33.053" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, a site-policy against ChatGPT is safe and useful&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm late to this discussion, so I'll avoid retreading what's already been said, and focus only on a counterargument I see going on in a lot of the comment threads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;We don't need this rule because we already know how to handle low quality answers&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and its variant, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;We allow low quality answers, why is ChatGPT any different?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;We can't enforce this rule because it's hard to spot ChatGPT answers.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This will lead to false positives.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue that ChatGPT answers are both qualtiatively and quantitatively different than run-of-the-mill low effort answers, and that a rule against them will simplify moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ChatGPT acts like a ban-evading hydra&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we ban someone for being disruptive, and they come back under a new account (in ways that we can prove is the same user), a sensible community doesn't treat the new account as a new person and start over, giving the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; member of their community a chance - they ban the sockpuppet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we find the current instances of ChatGPT disruptive enough to ban, we should treat the others as sockpuppets of the same. It's an extraordinarily well-resourced hydra that gets humans all over the world to sockpuppet for it, but it's a hydra, nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ChatGPT users have no possibility for reform other than to stop using ChatGPT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a human user posts an answer that is under-researched (or doesn't respect the [hard-science] tag), they will receive downvotes and comments explaining what's wrong. They might fix the answer, delete it, or just leave it downvoted, but whatever else they do, they will also incorporate that feedback into their internal model (or &amp;quot;Learn,&amp;quot; as we humans call it). If their goal is to get upvotes, they will research their answers better. If their goal is to avoid criticism, they will leave the stack. Either of these outcomes is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT users are different. Any feedback we give to ChatGPT users gets blackholed. ChatGPT is not going to update its model in response to our feedback, in part because it &lt;em&gt;never receives&lt;/em&gt; our feedback. The user might look at the feedback (and may even learn something from it), but since we're never seeing their writing anyway, the quality of their posts does not improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I think most ChatGPT answers are made in bad faith&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect most ChatGPT users know full well what they're doing. The technology has been discussed enough now that its users can be expected to know that ChatGPT doesn't know anything they don't. People who continue to post uncited ChatGPT answers are likely doing so knowing full well that they cannot defend the answer's quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speculate about their motivations for doing so. Some might be earnestly trying to see how well ChatGPT does with creative and esoteric prompts and others might be trying to test our community to see how well we can distinguish robots from humans, and still others might be trying to have some &amp;quot;harmless&amp;quot; fun - but I suspect &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; are trying to farm accounts with history and rep (and the privileges that accompany it), to sell them to spammers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of their motivations, all motivations I can imagine have two things in common:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A ChatGPT poster is not making a good-faith effort to provide a high-quality answer to the question asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user whose first few posts are all unedited and unsourced ChatGPT responses is unlikely to ever contribute anything else to the site, and we should act accordingly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So why a policy?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A policy against ChatGPT serves two purposes: it will reduce the incentive to post such answers, and it will make moderation actions against ChatGPT trolls more efficient and consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reducing incentive to post&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who post bad-faith ChatGPT answers are doing so with a purpose: &lt;em&gt;they want an account with rep and history&lt;/em&gt;. If we make it clear, in policy and action, that repeatedly posting ChatGPT answers will not get them an account with rep and history, we take away that incentive. If we fail to do so, others will join them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Making it easier to moderate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not, as far as I know, &lt;em&gt;ban&lt;/em&gt; people for making low-quality answers in&#xA;good faith. I certainly don't think we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; ban users just because their posts are low quality (as long as they're responsive to feedback and don't repeat mistakes excessively). The problem is that usage of ChatGPT implies that someone will not be responsive to feedback and that they will repeat mistakes excessively. A policy against it allows moderators to act on that evidence, taking the usage of ChatGPT as evidence of bad faith, which will allow quicker, more consistent, and more objective moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What about false positives?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone's suggesting a zero-tolerance rule for anything that looks like ChatGPT (like some of what's happened on r/art). ChatGPT &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; might be difficult to distinguish from human &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;, but ChatGPT &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; are not hard to distinguish from human &lt;em&gt;users.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT users can post long answers very quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT users don't meaningfully engage in comment threads, even if they have the rep to comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT users don't fix their answers when problems are reported. (They often &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; because they don't understand the corrections).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ChatGPT users never have unique insight. (No frame challenges, no lateral-thinking to solve an engineering problem with sociology, etc. - someone who does these things is probably not posting ChatGPT output.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15909" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T01:10:33.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10039" CreationDate="2023-01-19T03:12:01.033" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The straightforward answer is that &amp;quot;one is meant to head off the other&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone asked, &amp;quot;What brand of shoes should my main character wear?&amp;quot; Being a clearly opinion based question that has nothing to do with worldbuilding, no one should answer it. Rather than get thousands of people to coordinate on not answering, it would be easier to get 5 ranking community members to close the question, thus eliminating the temptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the broader question of &amp;quot;why VTC opinions at all? Is subjectivity so bad?&amp;quot;, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;a lengthy writeup&lt;/a&gt; about this (cherry picked quote: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;There is a growing list of proposals about increasingly subjective topics, and we believe many of them are going to make great Stack Exchange sites!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;). SE is well aware of the concept of subjective Q&amp;amp;A. They support it, and encourage it, &lt;em&gt;within reasonable bounds.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therein lies the rub. What are reasonable bounds? I think the linked writeup covers it pretty well. To some, though, it's clear that anything short of pure fact is opinion and therefore against the rules. They misunderstand the rules, but it's hard to blame them for their overly literal interpretation when one of the close reasons literally says &amp;quot;Opinion based&amp;quot; (although they have years of questions to look back on for guidance on what is acceptable for a given stack).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as each stack has its own community, and its own &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;spinoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;community&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt;, SE rules must also be subject to some local interpretation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Workplace SE&lt;/a&gt; might actually be even more subjective than Worldbuilding, as it is almost nothing but opinions and anecdotes. Should Workplace be closed? Is it unfit for SE? Should the community there mash VTC on every question that might incite an opinion? No. It just needs to be on topic, focused, and helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good subjective&lt;/em&gt;, here, is helping someone build a world, even if it means giving an opinion, so long as it is focused, on topic, and not, itself, a big debate or sheer &amp;quot;mindless fun&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/badges/227/lifeboat&quot;&gt;it's the good answer that saves a mediocre question&lt;/a&gt;, and SE recognizes this too, so there is actual incentive to salvaging a question if you think you can. Vote To Close is the nuclear option -- the biggest hammer in the drawer for the rank and file user. It should be a last resort, not a first choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T03:12:01.033" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2023-01-19T04:02:56.237" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A weird option: WB could automatically plug any question into ChatGPT and post that answer, flagging it as a bot and pending its validity until people ver it. The answer would automatically be a community answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That process preempts any user trying to score karma points by submitting bot answers. It gets people answers fast if they’re available. And it lets the community try to improve on the bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T04:02:56.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10050" CreationDate="2023-01-20T23:52:01.490" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suddenly while browsing worldbuilding stack exchange questions this question came to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although opinion based and story based questions are discouraged on WB stack, some still receive answers. These answers propose opinion/story based solution. It is debatable these answers could be worthy of copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two question: are answers/questions on WB stack elegible for protection under copyright law? If so, if a story based question receives a story based answer elegible for protection under copyright does the person asking the question have ownership or does the person answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I am not well versed on copyright but I couldn’t help to ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91583" LastActivityDate="2023-01-22T04:33:13.040" Title="WB stack exchange and copyright?" Tags="|support|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10049" CreationDate="2023-01-21T05:01:53.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you have created your account on any Stack Exchange community, you have agreed to its terms of service, which include also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;licensing&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; and in the footer of every page, all publicly accessible user contributions are licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt; license as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.5&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license applicable for each Question and Answer revision is available on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126447/add-a-link-to-the-timeline-of-a-post/342316#342316&quot;&gt;post timeline&lt;/a&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-commons-licensing-ui-and-data-updates&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read the terms of service and the full legal text of the license carefully for more details on how your content can be used and for how you can use publicly accessible content contributed to the site by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. For what is worth, in the past we have had some users posting questions, getting answers and then trying to delete/deface the questions &amp;quot;to not give away the details of their work&amp;quot;. It didn't end well for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T05:01:53.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10049" CreationDate="2023-01-21T22:52:29.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Common Sense&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever Creative Commons may or not be, Common Sense ought to rule one's usage of Qs and As here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are answers/questions on WB stack elegible for protection under copyright law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Alex rightly said, once you write a text, you own the copyright. There's a difference between writing &amp;quot;what is 2x2&amp;quot; and writing a treatise &lt;em&gt;Why Two Times Two is Four&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, if a story based question receives a story based answer eligible for protection under copyright does the person asking the question have ownership or does the person answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a respondent who does sometimes write stories and fictitious encyclopedia type articles for answers, I own the copyright on my text. If you copy my text without notice and without asking and without permission, then you're scum. If you ask and I'm amenable to your project, then I'd be pleased as punch that you thought a) my idea was cool and b) you thought highly enough of my writing to seek permission to use it! That would make my day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people do in fact write narrative queries, and I'd argue that the querent owns the copyright for that text. There was one instance where I wrote a narrative response to a narrative query. Some day my part at least is going to end up incorporated into a fantastical work of mine. I would ask the querent if I could use their text (with attribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, here in WB.SE, it's the ideas that matter more than the particular text. As such, I write ideas here for readers to freely use under Creative Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T22:52:29.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10049" CreationDate="2023-01-22T04:33:13.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The original version of this answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9673/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nothing on Stack Exchange has copyright protection, which is good and bad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/77923/12916&quot;&gt;posted a question about my original answer&lt;/a&gt; at Law.SE. That answer is well informed and very much worth reading by anyone who uses Worldbuilding.SE with the worry that they may be restricted in any way by using ideas found via this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell: you have no problems. People who post answers are posting them gratis and your use of those answers to guide your writing efforts leave you in full control of your copyright without dependence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the author of the Law answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/78024/12916&quot;&gt;posted a question and answer&lt;/a&gt; concerning co-authorship and derivative works that will also be valuable to the practitioners of the arcane art of Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proponents of the license will remind you that nothing about that license stops you from using what you learn from here commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you have no copyright problems at all using what you learn here in your writing, neither does anyone else. Granted, you can't copyright the idea of FTL travel, but you can copyright the phrase, &amp;quot;the HGP intersplit engine.&amp;quot; So long as the idea came from Worldbuilding and the name came from you, you have absolutely no problem. But, as was mentioned over at Law.SE, due to the Creative Commons licensing, even if you got a cool proper noun from here, you won't have copyright problems — other than you can't stop anyone else from using it, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another nutshell: the more specific the wording you take from Worldbuilding, the harder it will be for you to protect your copyright if someone else uses that same wording. If you took an idea and crafted that idea to make it your own — you're in like flynt! Because everything you do to mold it to your story makes it ever more unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-01-22T04:33:13.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-23T13:44:12.537" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once carefully worldbuilt a computer system, how it would have a distributed filesystem with redundant backups, a public key system for identity, etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then when I was building the next world, I realised I could just copypaste the computer system from the last one. So there's a cyberpunk world and a futuristic democracy, but they have identical tech, in quite a bit of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is a coilgun I figured out, that would fire cheap steel flechettes, with a certain amount of kinetic energy, a certain amount of recoil, etc. The exact same weapon exists in several of my worlds now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What things do you reuse like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95860" OwnerDisplayName="wokopa" LastActivityDate="2023-01-23T18:45:53.563" Title="What are some 'assets' you re-use across different worldbuilding projects?" Tags="|discussion|worldbuilding-process|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2023-01-23T18:45:53.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everything&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only practical answer to your question is &amp;quot;everything.&amp;quot; Nothing stops you from reusing any and all constructs in any and all worlds. The only drawback to doing this is that the more you reuse constructs, the more people will recognize each world as being in &amp;quot;the same universe.&amp;quot; Whether or not that's bad depends entirely on the goals of your efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, maybe you were asking for examples from other people?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you were looking for a list of constructs that had been reused by other users, I'm afraid that question is off-topic. The Help Center specifically states that to avoid question closure, you shouldn't ask questions that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are open-ended,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where you give your own answers and expect more,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where every answer has equal value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that Stack Exchange's basic model is one-specific-question/one-best-answer and it's impossible to choose a best answer to such a question. Such a question is a perfect example of a question that should be closed as Opinion-Based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-01-23T18:45:53.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-23T19:14:17.987" Score="6" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding.SE legend has it that the idea of Storybuilding.SE was once discussed, but at the time the rules of Stack Exchange were so rigid that such a Stack could never succeed or even graduate from &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time has passed. It's been proven that people completely ignore rules and that few people are really interested in enforcing them. Further, Stack Exchange appears to be relaxing its belief that every answer should have the immutable objectivity of solving a mathematics problem. Indeed, since Stack Exchange seems to care very little if we're following any of its rules at all (interventions in the last 5 years have been so rare that I can remember only one), there may be some wiggle room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if this Stack has proven anything at all, it's that people have as much fun (or, frankly, even more fun) answering storybuilding questions than they do worldbuilding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is it time to try and create Storybuilding.SE over at Area 51?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Do &lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt; run over to Area 51 and create Storybuilding.SE. It's a LOT more complicated than that! We'll be required to establish the rules of behavior for that Stack and that deserves more thought than just ringing the proverbial bell. A minimum number of interested participants are required, and if we don't see a lot of support here, it's a waste of time (might even be a negative, setting a precedent) to try to create the Stack. On the other hand, it would be helpful for people interested in this process to visit Area 51 and familiarize themselves with how that service works. And remember, the only people who decide if a Stack graduates Area 51 is Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding.SE (SB.SE) will be stuck with the same Help Center problems that Worldbuilding (WB.SE) suffers and then some. This means that Storybuilding.SE's creation must include, from the outset, &lt;em&gt;policy-based rule overrides.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/385244/395595&quot;&gt;SE allows communities to override rules&lt;/a&gt;, but they don't like it and want to see it minimized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If SB.SE were created today, there would be an enormous blur between SB.SE and WB.SE. That's a very real problem as it would be best if the two sites conscientiously migrated questions to the appropriate Stack. I wouldn't be surprised if our Stack Exchange Overlords expected us to clearly differentiate between the two Stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not want to be perceived as another Reddit or Quora. That means establishing real and practical rules for &lt;em&gt;excluding&lt;/em&gt; questions. If the Area 51 participants can't explain what questions are off-topic, SB.SE will likely not be allowed to graduate Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no guarantee that Stack Exchange will allow SB.SE to graduate Area 51. It would be the most subjective Stack they have. It might be the most subjective Stack they ever have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finally, it's worth noting that an astute observer might ask, &amp;quot;why don't we just broaden ourselves here at WB.SE so we can answer story-based questions?&amp;quot; There's still a LOT of resistance to story-based questions here. Therefore, I don't believe it's worth even trying to open the doors to storybuilding questions on this Stack. Besides, I can see a clear difference between the question goals, so I believe there's value to having two sites.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-01-23T19:42:50.557" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:42:40.097" Title="Should we try to create Storybuilding.SE?" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2023-01-24T07:28:26.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SB.SE as described will be just creative writing prompts. While people can have fun with that*, I do not think it has value for the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think SE has to house &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt;. It can leave topics for other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I certainly personally do like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2023-01-24T07:28:26.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2023-01-25T00:48:20.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NO&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can foresee that a StoryBuilding SE could have issues with accusations of plagiarism.  How could members of such a site avoid being asked to review/write/plot students' homework questions?  It would be all very well to say in the help pages that homework questions shouldn't be asked, but how can we tell such questions from non-homework questions?  If a student relied upon such answers, that could lead them to accusations of plagiarism even considering that the answers would be in the public domain, since students are required to submit their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, where is the objectivity?  Wouldn't the value of the questions and answers come down to a subjective assessment of how interesting they are to the user reading them?  People's tastes differ, and users who wouldn't usually read or like a story of a particular genre may still read and vote on a question or answer of that genre, and hence skew the voting score.  If enough users did this, it might become simply a matter of how many users like or dislike the particular genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't believe that the art of story-telling should be reduced to running to a Q&amp;amp;A site whenever the writer gets stuck for ideas.  I use WB SE to get answers to questions on topics that I'm not an expert on, but my stories' plots are entirely my own.  If I relied on a StoryBuilding SE, I don't think that they would be any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T00:48:20.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2023-01-25T17:28:27.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.  Good idea!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no need to go to Area 51.  This new stack will be the old stack called Worldbuilding Stack.  Worldbuilding Stack will let down its hair and open its arms.  The emphasis on black and white may continue on other stack sites but WB will be black, white, shades of gray and also the color of that dress that is gold and also blue.  Also there may be UV colors that only cell phones can see.   The old will be good.  The new will now also be good!  Votes to close will be reserved for the brutally terse, unanswerably broad or the plain incomprehensible.  On the new WB stack the good the bad and the ugly will link arms and do high kicks, Rockette style!  It will be the WB Stack that WB Stack strives to be!  Has striven to be?  Strove?  A little help with that please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, persons who find their undies in a bundle about the agape love newly to be found on WB Stack thanks to JBH will be invited to update their wardrobe for the new age or relocate to the Mathematics stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T17:28:27.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2023-01-26T02:48:35.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The MIDDLE WAY&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Problems:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I too like questions about story building. Good ones anyway! I believe Monty has a valid point as far as objectivity goes. While writing and storycraft do have rules and conventions and loads of 'wisdom of the ages' that can help craft a good story, I agree that there are loads of ways to craft a good story! Objectivity would be possible on SB.SE, but still far from Stack Exchange's ideal. They suffer our existence, but if they caught wind of us being behind the creation of yet another almost entirely subjective, entirely opinion based forum, I think they'd nix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monty also mentions plagiarism. In my opinion, I'm not convinced that it would be a huge issue. No worse, anyway, than what might occur here in WB. It's still a valid consideration, and since I daresay SB.SE would largely be owned and operated by us, it just means we'd have two forums in which to herd cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VLAZ makes a good point about SB.SE becoming a clearing house for writing prompts. This would be a far worse problem than subjectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I agree with JBH that one could construe a lack of storybuilding resources on Stack Exchange, and thus such a forum might be seen as useful. However, I don't think its utility counts for enough to make a whole new forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If WB's question load were 50% story related questions, then perhaps it would make sense to create the forum. Story questions, while frequent, just aren't that common. So for me, a new forum would be a somewhat squishy no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a way we can have our cake and eat it too, and that is quite simple. We, the undersigned, the VTC Brigade, the people whose voices are most likely to be heard here in Meta, the people who are regularly the most active in Main, simply have to &lt;strong&gt;relax our hardline stance on GOOD storybuilding questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could very easily have a conversation about what constitutes &amp;quot;good storybuilding queries&amp;quot; and what constitutes trash. If we can come up with a small number of good question categories, we could simply look the other way when such queries appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been doing exactly this for years when it comes to &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; questions, and I am more than amenable to do the same for good story based questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I'll give that a try!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T02:48:35.843" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-26T16:50:50.357" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V0TPg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Worldbuilding over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;174&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;564&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;184&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;203&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;545&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;820&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;226&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,401&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,210&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;44&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,004&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;115&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;397&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,303&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;54&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;79&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;965&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;583&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;310&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;998&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;372&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,261&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;21&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;72&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;37&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;57&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,761&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;446&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;721&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;633&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;392&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;111&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;103&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;111&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;486&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;344&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;854&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;337&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;616&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,586&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9609/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2021: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222022%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386090/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastEditorUserId="8555" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T19:58:07.170" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T19:58:07.170" Title="2022: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10064" CreationDate="2023-01-26T17:10:26.857" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is pretty self-explanatory, so where can I ask more general world-building questions, such as style or general how to build a world kind of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99303" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T15:48:33.090" Title="Where would asking for tip and tricks on worldbuilding go?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10062" CreationDate="2023-01-27T15:48:33.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You can on this site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is specifically for questions about the overall process of worldbuilding, rather than on a specific point of one's specific world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9981/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; before posting this question on main.&lt;/strong&gt; I really mean it. As you should be able to see on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot;&gt;newest worldbuilding process questions&lt;/a&gt;, this is rarely seen, and people often misunderstand what it actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not to ensure that your question is indeed self-explanatory&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, it's to make your question stronger in order to break people's habits. When people are faced against the unusual, they will show more resistance than usual. So it's best your question has as little cracks as possible before it meets the big main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Which is not a given. The &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot;-ness of such questions make them quite vulnerable to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;lacking focus, details and opinion-based closures&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T15:48:33.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-27T18:57:57.753" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full and official verbiage defining how the Anatomically Correct tag should be used can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/10063&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;. But there are some aspects of it that I think deserve some minor revisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Suggested Changes 1 &amp;amp; 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creature descriptions &lt;strong&gt;(1)should&lt;/strong&gt; include important behavioral attributes &lt;strong&gt;(2)and&lt;/strong&gt; a clear physical description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... should read as either ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creature descriptions &lt;strong&gt;(1)must&lt;/strong&gt; include important behavioral attributes &lt;strong&gt;(2)or&lt;/strong&gt; a clear physical description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)It is best if&lt;/strong&gt; creature descriptions include important behavioral attributes &lt;strong&gt;(2)or&lt;/strong&gt; a clear physical description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for suggesting that &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; be changed is because &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; is often interpreted differently depending on who you ask. Depending on how an individual processes pragmatic language, &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; will either mean it is a mandatory rule like when a mother says, &amp;quot;You should always brush your teeth before bed.&amp;quot;, or it could be read as a an optional suggestion like you &amp;quot;You should check out this new movie!&amp;quot; So, when writing things that are meant to be taken as rule, &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; is always best avoided because it creates confusion and conflict.  So first we need to decide if this was even meant to be an optional or mandatory requirement, and then clarify it accordingly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for suggesting we change &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;or&amp;quot; is more significant IMO. When discussing the anatomy of a fictional creature, you need a goal or there is no question. If you know the behavior, then you are probably asking about what physical characteristics would support it. If you know the physical, then you probably need to know about what behaviors would correspond with that body plan. In fact, I went through the Anatomically Correct series listed, picked 5 random creatures and all 5 questions would fail this criteria because they either did not establish the creature's physical or behavioral characteristics, all 5 were asking for help to derive one from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you know both in good detail, chances are, you're just asking for an open ended critique which will inevitably fall afoul of one or more vote-to-close criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Suggested Change 3&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)The best answer is expected&lt;/strong&gt; to be the one that provides the greatest detail, the greatest creativity, and the greatest capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... should read as either ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)The best answer is required&lt;/strong&gt; to be the one that provides the greatest detail, the greatest creativity, and the greatest capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)Unless otherwise specified, the best answer is expected&lt;/strong&gt; to be the one that provides the greatest detail, the greatest creativity, and the greatest capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is along the same lines as the &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; issue. As it is, it is unclear if this is meant to be the default assumption if no criteria are given in the question or if Anatomically Correct questions require the OP to use this as the basis for a best possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(AFTER FURTHER THOUGHT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more I think about it, I think the best approach to #3 is actually a more significant rewrite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers must provide a good capacity for suspension of disbelief.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greatest detail and the greatest creativity are certainly factors that can and should impact the best answer in many cases... but a brief or &amp;quot;overused&amp;quot; answer can still be the best answer when talking about anatomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the real point of this rule is that it the OP must be looking for an answer that provides a good capacity for suspension of disbelief for &amp;quot;anatomically correct&amp;quot; tag to make any since. So an answer that just arbitrarily says that a dragon flies using magic is obviously not actually addressing the anatomy of the dragon, and I think that is what needs to be avoided when using this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used thus, I could see this rule being very similar to the Science Based tag where the use of the tag implies something about the importance of reality based credibility being an expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal interpretation of the rules are that the changes should be (1)&amp;quot;...must...&amp;quot;, (2)&amp;quot;...or...&amp;quot;, and (3)&amp;quot;Answers must provide a good capacity for suspension of disbelief.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2023-01-30T15:44:07.057" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T15:51:14.477" Title="Change Proposal for Anatomically Correct Series Criteria" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-02T07:41:10.363" Score="29" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;Community discussion has been taking place on WB Meta concerning our position on AI generated content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9991/30492&quot;&gt;Should we ban posts using ChatGPT or similar software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the outcome of the discussion and the considerable workload dealing with these posts by Community and elected Moderators, the following decision has been made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is now a &lt;strong&gt;complete ban on the use of ChatGPT and AI generated content&lt;/strong&gt; on Worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ban involves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion of all ChatGPT or other AI content, whether acknowledged as such or not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator message for initial occurrence, if minor in scope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seven day Suspension for subsequent occurrence, or initial occurrence if larger in scope, and then the usual escalation of penalties for further infractions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is the moderator team's opinion that the use of Grammarly and spell checking tools to correct grammar errors and spelling errors are not AI generated content - using those to improve your own written posts' grammar or to correct spelling errors are not forbidden, we are specifically barring the use of ChatGPT and other AIs as the sole source of generating answer content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-02-04T09:14:14.497" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T19:48:35.310" Title="Announcement: AI generated content banned on Worldbuilding" Tags="|discussion|rules|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2023-02-07T03:37:28.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Response from Stack Exchange Staff&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While deciding whether or not to continue advocating for this idea, I decided to ask the opinion of SE staff. Here's what I wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;30 Jan 2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10055/40609&quot;&gt;Should we try to create Storybuilding.SE?&lt;/a&gt;. I am the user who posted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably time that we officially heard from a Stack Exchange employee concerning the viability of petitioning at Area 51 a sister site to Worldbuilding: Storybuilding. It appears that an increasing number of subjective sites are appearing (e.g., Academia, Code Review, Community Building, Expatriates, Freelancing, Interpersonal Skills, Workplace, and others) wherein answers are less objective and more opinion-based. Answers are based on experience, wisdom, and even creativity vs. qualitative and quantitative best practices. And querents are asking questions that are almost always relevant only to themselves and their project/issue (i.e., the question almost never serves to help a significant number of people in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I asking? Because story-based (storybuilding) questions are by far and away the most popular questions on Worldbuilding. People who try to police the rules (yes, like me) are unpopular because people don't want interference with what they're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as fate would have it, what they're doing is writing stories more often than strictly building worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I ask if Stack Exchange today would arbitrarily prohibit a pitch for storybuilding simply because it still sees itself (as it did a decade ago) as a strictly objective site expecting questions that lead to answers that can help a potentially large group of people? I'm neither for nor against, but if SE's goals still preclude a Stack as subjective as Storybuilding would be, then I can report that and discontinue the meta discussion. But, if you're willing to hear the proverbial pitch and believe SE can embrace that level of subjectivity, then I'll continue to seek support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is SE's response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey JBH,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm Slate, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange. In general, we're willing to help see sites through the Area 51 process as best we can. There's no strict requirement for sites to have singular objective answers; however, questions need to be answerable in such a way that answers can be meaningfully weighed in comparison to each other on their merits. For example, I strongly suspect such a site could not reasonably be a place for writing prompts, where the answers respond to the writing prompt. Similarly, questions need to be able to be weighed according to quality standards that the site sets out, and I foresee some potential challenges for a Storybuilding site in defining what a good question can or should look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, I do need to caution that, with the existence of Worldbuilding, Writers, Freelancing, and Literature, the topic of story development is already quite thoroughly covered by existing ground.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; If you do want to initiate such a proposal, I would strongly encourage you to take good care to differentiate its scope clearly from the existing sites on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, we gauge each Area 51 proposal on its own merits, both in terms of the quality of content it's likely to produce, and how clearly it differentiates its use case from other sites on the network. To a certain extent, I suspect we won't be able to give you a definitive answer as to whether Storybuilding could succeed until we have a concrete proposal to evaluate. Please let me know if you've got any questions I can help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&#xA;Slate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold statement says that between four Stacks (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://freelancing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Freelancing&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Literature&lt;/a&gt;) the ability to ask storybuilding questions exists. I disagree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding states in its Help Center, &amp;quot;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, not to tell your story.&amp;quot; Storybuilding is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While Writing states in its Help Center that questions about fiction are on-topic, &amp;quot;Questions asking what to write about.&amp;quot; are off-topic. They continue, &amp;quot;We're looking to avoid questions where the intent is to generate ideas.&amp;quot; Storybuilding is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Literature states in its help center that &amp;quot;Questions about creating literature yourself&amp;quot; are off-topic. Storybuilding is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The outlier is Freelancing. I've asked on that Stack if they'd accept storybuilding questions. I doubt they will. Their Help Center doesn't specifically exclude storybuilding, but everything about what they do accept is focused on the &lt;em&gt;profession of freelancing,&lt;/em&gt; not what to write as a freelancer. Their Tour has an example question that's 100% storybuilding, but the tour concludes by excluding opinion-based questions (which might be a Stack Exchange template requirement). I'll update this post with their response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I disagree with Stack Exchange's staff that storybuilding is already accommodated somewhere on Stack Exchange — unless you assume that our regularly-ignored rules against storybuilding questions constitutes a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T22:42:40.097" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:42:40.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10084" CreationDate="2023-02-07T18:14:06.527" Score="-5" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been contemplating the things that make us want to close questions. On many questions, I vacillate between something being opinion based or story based or too vague, and this is an attempt to help nail down which arguments apply to which kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions want to explore an aesthetic, and those are marked as &lt;em&gt;too opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. If it's a question of personal taste, then numerous answers will effectively answer the question, and it turns into a poll with heavy incumbency bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions just need a few details to become reasonably answerable. Those get &lt;em&gt;needs detail&lt;/em&gt; responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a further category where solid responses do exist, but they require numerous assumptions. As is the nature of assumptions, they don't get enumerated, so the nature of those answers can't be effectively discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of answer does have a solid mathematically based answer that can be described, so it doesn't actually qualify as opinion based. The problem is that asking OP for more details is a limitless task, and enumerating those assumptions in your answer becomes onerous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I would like to suggest that, when we run into a question with too many &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot; conditions, we have a question that is &lt;em&gt;too story based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;too many?&amp;quot; I'd say three. Three creates a situation where their are eight or more distinct correct answers, none of which is any better than the others. It suggests that the OP hasn't thought the question out, and is too many for &amp;quot;but what about X&amp;quot; exchanges in the comments to develop an effective question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this heuristic simple and effective enough to be applied as a general rule?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt; There is a fourth category where someone asks &amp;quot;Is this possible in the real world?&amp;quot; for which the clear answer is &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; We keep closing these for all sorts of reasons when we should simply be answering it with a clear and concise &amp;quot;no,&amp;quot; or a qualified, &amp;quot;no, but authors do it anyway,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no, but it's your story.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastEditorUserId="95496" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T18:21:53.983" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T18:21:19.540" Title="Is this heuristic for &quot;too story based&quot; functional?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-07T21:58:20.443" Score="-1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241709/how-would-a-photon-based-intelligence-work-in-regard-to-relativity/241713#comment741631_241714&quot;&gt;comment to a recent question&lt;/a&gt;, @Nosajimiki made a good point. The OP had not tagged the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, so I chastised other respondents for taking a hard-line Real World stance about the OP's premise based on the idea that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Nosajimiki pointed out that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; tag demands hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time &amp;quot;xenobiology&amp;quot; is strictly defined using the Wikipedia page, which is discussing (and these are my words) the &lt;em&gt;professional study of biology in terms of what chemistry could allow outside of Earth-centric biology.&lt;/em&gt; In other words, the Wikipedia page isn't discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;creature-design-container&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt;. Far from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the fundamental problem is (since new users never read tag wikis) that users are using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;based on their own personal expectations&lt;/em&gt; and not at all based on what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia says about the academic investigation into the limits of chemistry-based biology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; tag automatically imply the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;No&amp;quot; would mean rewriting the Xenobiology tag wiki. Frankly, it's a poor wiki right now, relying on another web page which can change and has, itself, nothing to do with worldbuilding to establish the context of the idea for worldbuilding. Honestly, I think the wiki should be improved regardless what decision is made here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Existing tag short-summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag to mark questions related to creating plausible alien biologies that may be close to or far removed from Earthly biology but within the realms of hard science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Existing tag wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt;. Xenobiology describes a form of biology that is not familiar to science and is not found in Earthly life. Novel biological systems and biochemistries that differ from the canonical DNA-RNA-20 amino acid system, which can include variations on the same these (e.g. different amino acids), totally different systems (such as the SF staple of silicon-based life).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can include different biochemistry, or different biological systems and organs without regard to the underlying chemestry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T05:20:24.710" Title="Should the Xenobiology tag automatically imply science-based or hard-science?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10072" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag meta information is used to help contextualize questions posted on Main and Meta and, in some cases, to restrict the nature of answers. Meta information includes the short description that is seen when someone rolls their mouse over a tag link and the longer wiki description that identifies details about the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta questions posted using this tag are asking questions about that meta information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When used with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;specific-tag-container&quot;&gt;specific-tag&lt;/a&gt; tag, the question or invited discussion concerns the meta data for a specified tag (the tag must be identified in the body of the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When used without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;specific-tag-container&quot;&gt;specific-tag&lt;/a&gt; tag, the question or invited discussion concerns the general use of meta information on Worldbuilding.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about meta information that are not specific to Worldbuilding.SE or one of its tags should be posted on Meta.SE rather than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10073" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" Score="0" Body="Identifies a Meta post inviting discussion or expressing a concern about the meta-information (tag summary and wiki description) for tags. Use with the specific-tag tag to indicate an issue with the wiki for a specific tag." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:05:03.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10071" CreationDate="2023-02-07T22:22:14.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In General, I believe it's a bad idea to assume the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People use tags to contextualize their questions without first reading the tags &lt;em&gt;regularly.&lt;/em&gt; This is a behavior we should anticipate as often as possible. Therefore, no tag should assume (either implicitly or explicitly) the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;internal-consistency-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; and when wikis are found to explicitly do so, those wikis should be modified to remove the assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because we have tags that explicitly scope answers and they should be used. Far too often people use a tag with a preconceived notion of what that tag means. I suspect that if we kept the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;'s assumption of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, then far too many (if not &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt;) of the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; fail the expectation entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You'll notice that I didn't include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-fiction-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tag. I don't believe the default position of this Stack should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-based-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;. Other stacks already exist for that purpose. Further, the issue &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/404/40609&quot;&gt;has been brought up before&lt;/a&gt; and was down voted. I do not know of an existing policy on the matter beyond that question other than &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/40609&quot;&gt;if an OP doesn't ask for magic, then we should assume science&lt;/a&gt;, which I agree with. But I believe the Stack's default should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;science-fiction-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In specific, I believe that worldbuilding should embrace more in terms of xenobiology than what is defined for the academic study of xenobiology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time, I don't appreciate how narrowly focused the tag's wiki is. I'm willing to grant that if we define xenobiology to be something closer to, &amp;quot;questions that ask about the biology of extraterrestrial lifeforms,&amp;quot; the result is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;creature-design-container&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; become synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe they should, because I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;creature-design-container&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; = &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; and we have a lot of tags already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, I am in favor of making &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;creature-design-container&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;xenobiology-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; synonyms with an appropriate wiki review so the merge makes good sense — including a statement that says if the OP wants to adhere to the Wikipedia definition, the appropriate solution is to include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;hard-science-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:22:14.910" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10071" CreationDate="2023-02-07T23:07:54.347" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Keep the tag more-or-less as is&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Xenobiology is by definition the application of science to predict the nature of alien life forms.  We may not know for sure the limits of life in so far as what exactly it can be made of or its exact limits, but there are still tons of very safe assumptions the rules of chemistry and physics will still apply to it in so far as chemistry and physics apply to the things it is made out of, it exists because it was either created, evolved, or both, things like that.  I don't think Xenobiology tags should expect a &amp;quot;Hard Science&amp;quot; level of details per our site's definition of Hard Science, but you can't really call it Xenobiology without at least a &amp;quot;Science Based&amp;quot; consideration of the factors at play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... But we also need a &amp;quot;Science Fantasy&amp;quot; tag.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had an art teacher once who used to say, &amp;quot;You have to learn the rules before you can learn when to break them&amp;quot;.   Worldbuilding is a lot like that.  It's a constant fight against a person's suspension of disbelief.  So, every choice you make to violate the known laws of nature in a compelling way generally requires that you know the laws of nature first.  Especially in the genre of Science Fiction, there is a huge expectation these days that your technobabble touch on enough reality to not just sound like you picked some fancy words by throwing darts at a board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are writing science fiction and choose not to care about real world science, that is a different thing all together.  George Lukas knew that the Force was just magic placed in a future setting, and that's okay, but when you do that it needs to be a conscious choice so that you know when to lampshade and when to handwave to keep from losing your audience.  When you write bad science into science fiction by accident, it usually just comes off as bad writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I think it's important when discussing questions about &lt;strong&gt;science fiction settings&lt;/strong&gt; to make the OP say in some way shape or form when they don't care about real science instead of just assuming they did it on purpose.  So, by having a &amp;quot;Science Fantasy&amp;quot; tag, we know when we come across something ridiculously unscientific to just accept the magic and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2023-02-08T15:27:32.467" LastActivityDate="2023-02-08T15:27:32.467" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10071" CreationDate="2023-02-09T05:20:24.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;NO&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The xenobiology tag should not imply either hard science or science based. I'm actually surprised that the term &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; appears in the tag definition. I do not know for certain, but suspect that most users of this tag probably mean it in its traditional, sci-fi usage: the study of alien / non-terrestrial life. Such as might be found in Star Trek, etc. And thus akin to creature design. I also have the feeling that the phrase &amp;quot;within the realms of hard science&amp;quot; in that tag definition derives from biology itself being a hard science, rather than a reference to a specific science tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue that tag use is the querent's prerogative, and if they wish to focus xenobiology with one of the science tags, that's up to them. If they don't, that's fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do concur with the idea of improving the xenobiology tag's description. That ought to align more with worldbuilding principles and thus with the traditional and current sci-fi meaning. As humanity moves out into space and, perhaps, discovers some radically different life forms out there, then perhaps xenobiology will become an actual branch of biology. We can make a new tag when that happens!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T05:20:24.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2023-02-09T17:11:39.073" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best we can do is &amp;quot;rule of thumb&amp;quot;, and everyone is going to have different thumbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Story based&amp;quot; is probably the most difficult to rule-of-thumb to establish. We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;a limited amount of guidance&lt;/a&gt; on this close reason, and really it's just a specialized form of &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; anyway. We know a lot of the close reasons are highly subjective, and &lt;strong&gt;I don't think firm rules &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be applied for them&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rule of thumb &lt;em&gt;for rules of thumb&lt;/em&gt; is to try to err on the side of being a friendly community. I see far less risk in &amp;quot;answering too many questions&amp;quot; than I see in &amp;quot;driving people off by being nasty about it&amp;quot;. Closing a question is a slap in the face. Which some questions do genuinely deserve. But slaps in the face should not be routine if we still want a friendly, thriving community next year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[edit]&lt;/strong&gt; Timely example! &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241839/what-replaces-mr-mrs-ms-as-a-title-courtesy-respect-in-a-world-that-cares-less-a&quot;&gt;What replaces Mr/Mrs/Ms as a title courtesy/respect in a world that cares less about gender?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see someone gave it a VTC for &amp;quot;too story based&amp;quot;, plus a second VTC for &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, however, I see this as being very much like a programming question: there are many possible answers. All of them are objectively correct. It is up to the poster to determine which objectively correct answer is most applicable for their situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g., it is not an opinion that Japan uses gender-neutral honorifics. Good answer! It's also not an opinion that a society can value something more than gender and therefore base honorifics around that. Good answer! Two good answers! My goodness! Some here would say that means it's a bad question, downvote, vote-to-close, and anyone who answered is a bad person who hurts the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think it just shows that a question can have multiple answers, none of which are &amp;quot;opinions&amp;quot;, nor are they &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot;, and therefore it is a fine question, and the VTCers are the ones in the wrong in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-02-09T22:10:12.067" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T22:10:12.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2023-02-10T05:11:50.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Narrativity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; has a pretty good / strong hueristic already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read questions, the issue of &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot; does not equate to the question being story based. Rather, &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot; seems to be indicative of an OP either not knowing enough about her own world that she can't clarify a matter or else that the querent hasn't quite formulated or doesn't know how to formulate the question in a way that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If she asks about the flight characteristics of laden swallows, and we ask for clarification, like which kind of swallow, African or European and we get a response of &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot;; then I'd hazard the guess that the OP isn't aware of differing sorts of swallows or hasn't yet formulated the question well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too many &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot; probably should be referred to the Sandbox for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we say a question is story based, we literally mean that the &lt;em&gt;question focuses on issues of plot, character, motive and narrative&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, storycraft. For example, if the OP asks &amp;quot;which kind of swallow should my character use to carry something, African or European?&amp;quot; we know right away that this is pure &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7281/what-is-narrative-necessity-and-how-does-it-apply-to-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;narrativity&lt;/a&gt;. Ultimately, outside of the story itself, it doesn't matter which kind of swallow is used. Or even &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; a swallow is used. The point is that the story needs something to happen, and the character needs to be able to use some mechanism to move the plot forward. Ergo, narrativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The hueristic is thus simple: does this query focus on elements of plot, character, motive or narrative. If the answer is yes, then,  technically it ought to be closed. If no, then continue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: We've got a discussion currently ongoing about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10055/should-we-try-to-create-storybuilding-se&quot;&gt;creation of Storybuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which might also be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-02-11T02:58:05.517" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T02:58:05.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-11T21:08:30.470" Score="-8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am disgusted by the way users have been asking disgusting questions about slavery. Something that should not be considered as a means or concept of any monstrous ideas as it has been explored here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People were tortured, mutilated, arrested, separated from their families, when they didn't die trying to get their freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same thing as me coming up and saying: &amp;quot;What do you think of the idea of torturing, mutilating or voluntarily curtailing someone's freedom?&amp;quot;, or : &amp;quot;What do you think about voluntarily executing Jews?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this platform accept questions about slavery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101169" OwnerDisplayName="Edvaldo Filho" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2023-02-12T00:16:32.200" LastActivityDate="2023-02-15T06:45:31.457" Title="Why does this platform accept questions about slavery?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-11T23:17:06.207" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though the earlier form of this question was more a way to vent, it remains a valid concern people will have. So against my better judgement, I'll attempt to give you an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quantify these kind of questions, ask this alternative one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why do writers who write detective stories research how to commit the perfect crime?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer should mostly be simple. Not because they want to actually commit the crime, but they want to construct a believable and engaging narrative about it. And for that they need research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to reach the current youth, who have no first or even second hand experience with the topic, with a story displaying how truly horrible slavery was, then setting it in a realistic and relatable modern time could be a powerful way to do so. But for that I would need to know what is realistic and what isn't. And this site is exactly the place to ask these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, slavery is disgusting. However, not talking about it doesn't make it go away. And including it in a realistic story isn't necessarily a bad thing. Have you seen the movie django unchained for example? Or any historic movie containing slavery? Do you think these movies are pro-slavery? Do you think the writers did not do any research similar to the questions asked on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking about something isn't inherently bad. It's your intentions and actions behind it that could make it so. And if we find someone on this site asking questions for nefarious means, their questions will be shut down swiftly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72352" OwnerDisplayName="Plutian" LastEditorUserId="72352" LastEditDate="2023-02-12T01:30:14.397" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T01:30:14.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-12T02:54:17.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Fantasy and Realism in Art&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Worldbuilding is, first and foremost, a creative and artistic Q&amp;amp;A forum. Our purpose, specifically, is to help solve any problem a worldbuilder might come across in their creative endeavour (of course, within the scope of SE and forum rules, customs, etc). Our querents are often writers, but we also have game developers, hobbyists, composers and others whose projects involve understanding and manipulating complex concepts ranging from orbital mechanics to sophont social behaviours to cosmology and theology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We accept queries about slavery, just as we do about torture, reproduction, abortion, imprisonment, dark magic, and a whole host of other creepy concepts, simply because these are legitimate areas of study for the worldbuilder. Not every story will involve such things, and not every world will need them. For example, Tolkien got along with his story pretty well without dwelling on the minute aspects of a torturer's or a slave's every day schedule or condition of living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That said, some stories do dwell on the conditions and lives of slaves. Off hand, stories such as Spartacus or Gladiator do. Movie franchises like Saw require knowledge of torture (instruments and their uses and effects), dark psychology and so forth. Other stories explore various aspects of the human condition, and often the bad ones at that, in order to speak out against a contemporaneous or historical evil. In order to do this well, the author needs to know what actually went on, how life carried on, and the nature of the phenomenon being written about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As an art form in and of itself, and as an adjunct art that informs fictional writing, movie production or game development, worldbuilding needs to be free to explore these concepts so that the artists who produce fictional worlds can understand how these concepts come to be and how they function within society. It's our job to help the worldbuilder solve those kinds of issues, taking into consideration and tailoring our responses to the specifics of the worlds, cultures, histories, and biologies of their particular settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T02:54:17.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-12T18:20:02.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavery is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is fascism. Now imagine Avatar: the Last Airbender, His Dark Materials or The Hunger Games without any references to fascism at all because we don't want to talk about it. Suddenly those stories are not enjoyable anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;War is bad. Imagine Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or God of War... Without a war in any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evil is bad. Imagine any DC or Marvel comic book or movie without villains doing evil things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... Slavery is bad. But writing fiction with it is not the same as glorifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if we absolutely don't talk about it, we actually make the world a worse place. Slavery still exists in the modern world and just last decade politicians even tried to make it legal in my home country. Given your username I think you're from there too. Remember? Worker rights reform, a company would be allowed to pay an employee with food and quarters, but they would also be able to charge the &amp;quot;employee&amp;quot; for working materials so the worker would fall ever more in debt with the conpany and could be sued if they didn't keep working for basically no pay? Remember how about four years ago federal police was barred by law from investigating farms accused of enslaving people? We need people to write about slavdry so that it can be brought to light and dennounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastEditorUserId="21222" LastEditDate="2023-02-13T22:54:41.390" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T22:54:41.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2023-02-13T16:24:13.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The basic idea is lost in the background of the post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that you're working to make a point, but the original post is somewhat cluttered with information about other VTC reasons and lacked the technical presentation for a policy that I was expecting. Rule #1 about technical writing (which policy-making is), any effort you make to express yourself that muddies or clouds your message is the wrong way to say it. A title focusing on &amp;quot;Too Story-Based&amp;quot; should lead to a post that's focused only on that VTC reason. If I understand your issue correctly, what you're trying to say is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In some Too Story-Based cases the question depends on too many circumstances that are not obvious because they can change depending on how the story develops. For example, &amp;quot;which weapon is best?&amp;quot; depends on where the fight takes place, who's fighting, what other resources are available, the defensive capabilities of the enemy, what the weather's like during the fight, etc. In this case, a question should not be closed as Too Story-Based if few enough such circumstances or dependencies are not defined that a reasonable number of answers can be expected. I propose that the maximum number of undefined dependencies be three.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Because the post is presented here and not as a solution to the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;Too Story-Based question&lt;/a&gt;, it'll be lost&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been down this road before. No matter how well accepted this post becomes, you'll be forever referring back to it to help remind people it exists. The original Too Story-Based post is linked in the Help Center and the Mods are fanatically against modifying the Help Center, so any solution you come up with here must (not needs, must) show up as an answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said that, I've a few problems with your presentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A) Some Story-Based questions might have limited dependencies, but most don't&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post is not universally applicable to all story-based questions. In its most general form, story-based questions are either &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; storybuilding or have too much dependency &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; storybuilding to be answered &lt;em&gt;according to Stack Exchange's rules.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, that last part, &amp;quot;according to Stack Exchange's rules,&amp;quot; is the big kicker. This discussion isn't simply about how to keep more questions open. It's about how to clearly express what our policies are in relation to those rules. If people don't want site rules affecting how they ask or answer questions, they should be using Reddit or Quora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief and by no means thorough list of story dependencies that make a question Too Story-Based is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the plot of a story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the circumstances of action within a story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the decisions and/or choices of characters and/or organizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions so broad they are asking us to write the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with any dependency on any of the previous bullets that has not been clearly defined by the post author in the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to politely refute the idea that if the author doesn't define, as you suggest, three dependencies, that the result is only eight answers. &lt;em&gt;The problem with story-based questions is that they don't fit within the limits of binary logic.&lt;/em&gt; In fact, they're often a challenge to answer even when all the dependencies are resolved &lt;em&gt;because there isn't just one answer,&lt;/em&gt; thereby violating the fundamental business model of Stack Exchange: one-specific-question/one-best-answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take my earlier example about selecting the best weapon. Even if all the dependencies are defined, the odds of there being one best weapon are slim. There's a reason why humanity has created untold thousands of weapons over its history. Even in one well-specified situation, there isn't one best weapon. Even if we're talking about just one person in one situation &lt;em&gt;and every possible characteristic of the person and circumstantial detail was provided,&lt;/em&gt; it's very unlikely that there's just one best weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, letting three details slide doesn't routinely result in just eight possible answers. The question is story-based. There are still dozens (possibly even hundreds) of possible answers. And Stack Exchange specifically wants to avoid questions that lead to too many answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B) Besides, relaxing the proverbial speeding laws leads to dead people&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using the metaphor of speeding laws intentionally. Honestly, how many of us drive &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the speed limit all of the time? I don't, and I'm normally a pretty casual driver who isn't in a rush to get anywhere. But I think it's fair to say that pretty much almost everyone violates the posted speed limit frequently enough to rationally wonder why we bother with speed limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We bother with them because if you dispense with the law, people start dying in higher numbers and at higher frequencies. It's a frustrating inconvenience we all suffer with because the alternative is inhumane. And it's no surprise that while the police obviously don't catch all the speeders, and sometimes even ignore the speeders, &lt;em&gt;they're still empowered to ticket every speeder and are not wrong to do so.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, equating how we close questions to something obviously life-threatening like enforcing speed limits is obviously a bit of a stretch — but the premise behind my use of the metaphor still exists. We don't own this Stack. We are not authorized to ignore the rules of this Stack. We are empowered to create Stack-unique policies that improve the focus of our Stack. And we are expected as good citizens of Stack Exchange to act together to enforce the rules and policies of this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For every question you present to me suggesting that it should be left open because the result of the question as-written is an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; and not an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;, I can and will prove that the question is, in fact, an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;. That's the nature of questions with unresolved story dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because in a story, there are never just two possibilities to the outcome of a story dependency, and with every unresolved dependency, you're suggesting we can handle the load of assuming what &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be the possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not found that to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And why is it hard to get the OP to resolve the dependencies? I've spoken with a few of them over the years who were honest enough to admit that what they were looking for was a list of options to choose from to forward their story. In other words, they didn't have a question that met Stack Exchange's expectations, what they had was writer's block and they were intentionally trying to get as many answers as they could contrary to what Stack Exchange wants, which is to provide specifically useful answers to specific questions. Helping authors past writer's block isn't why this Stack exists.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-02-13T18:21:19.540" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T18:21:19.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-13T16:30:13.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a fair worldbuilding question because quite a lot of worlds may well have some form of slavery. It has been common throughout human history and still exists today. Slavery is repugnant, but then, so is genocide, and we get questions about wiping out a species (especially ourselves) all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think there's a fair question in &amp;quot;where do we draw the line&amp;quot; and mostly I think that's just tackled by whatever the community decides is too much, at that moment. I can't imagine how we would come up with a firm rule on this. e.g., the slavery question hit some modest success in getting answers and upvotes but &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241367/why-would-dyadic-cisgender-women-with-facial-hair-be-considered-attractive/241371&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on facial hair being attractive across genders got slammed pretty hard, presumably because the community was more offended by potentially upsetting the gender discussion apple cart than they were by pricing modern slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's anything &lt;em&gt;fundamentally&lt;/em&gt; wrong with either question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terry Pratchett&lt;/a&gt; actually handled the facial hair question rather precisely in his Discworld series (where male and female dwarves were visually identical enough that the dwarves themselves couldn't tell gender on sight), so it's a valid worldbuilding question, just one the community apparently found to be...in poor taste. Perhaps gender discussions are simply more on our collective mind these days, in terms of offensiveness, while slavery is something that's very distant to most of us and thus, easier to talk about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you'll find that &lt;em&gt;distasteful&lt;/em&gt; questions tend to be skipped over, and what the community considers to be &lt;em&gt;distasteful&lt;/em&gt; is probably an interesting area of study for some psychology major trying to come up with an idea for a new paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; come up with a list of topics that we, as a community, simply agree not to talk about, with slavery perhaps being one of them, but I dislike that idea, and where it could end up going. I favor &amp;quot;downvote and move on&amp;quot; if it's something you find distasteful. If the wider community agrees, then the question will end up buried pretty fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T16:30:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-13T16:48:44.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, &lt;em&gt;The Life of Reason,&lt;/em&gt; 1905.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even when we remember the past we occasionally repeat it. But if we refuse to remember it because it offends any one or more people, then we not only will repeat it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We'll deserve it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you search for &amp;quot;slavery museums in the U.S.&amp;quot; on Google you'll get a list of 27 museums throughout the U.S. There are undoubtedly more. Why do we have museums dedicated in whole or in part to slavery when it's &amp;quot;disgusting?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because people who voluntarily choose to ignore humanity's distasteful past are only helping to set up humanity to find it morally acceptable again.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There might be a few people who use this Stack to ask questions that I or others find disgusting for their personal pleasure. I find that more disgusting than the question itself, but &lt;em&gt;the nature of freedom is that people can think about, and therefore write about, anything they want.&lt;/em&gt; It's one of those necessary evils of having freedom (just as you have the freedom to complain about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vast majority&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of people who use this Stack to ask questions that I or others find disgusting are doing it because they feel &lt;em&gt;exactly the same way that you do.&lt;/em&gt; They feel it's disgusting. But rather than hoping humanity can magically (and I mean that, &amp;quot;magically&amp;quot;) never experience slavery again by sticking our communal heads in the sand, they want to actively explore &lt;em&gt;why it's disgusting,&lt;/em&gt; so that people &lt;em&gt;remember the past and never do it again.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;People who want to ignore slavery or other forms of moral evil are not doing the world a favor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's absolutely true that I don't want to hear about slavery. Or racism. Or gender issues.... I'm not at all in favor of slavery, nor do I believe I'm racist or harmful toward humanity's complex sex and gender characteristics. It's simply that I like my happy and comfortable life and those discussions make me unhappy and uncomfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But I'd give my life defending the right of people to present me with the opportunity to look unhappily and uncomfortably at the morals of my world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there will &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;always be evil people&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; who want slavery, and racism, and every other form of moral decay. They want to feel superior and to control others. And the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only way to stop them&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is to help as many people as possible to remember &lt;em&gt;that it's disgusting.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your choice, my friend, is to not read the questions. My choice, my friend, is to remember the past. And that's why I vote to allow questions about slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T16:48:44.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2023-02-15T06:45:31.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A different answer to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we tell stories in the first place? The best stories are told because they reveal something that is &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; about the Human Experience. I don't mean True in the sense that you can test for it in a Laboratory, but are none-the-less true in a practical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mono-Myth, which is derived from stories from across cultures set out a blueprint for what it means to be a Good Man (I say man, because the Hero's journey for Men, in a classical story sense, is different to the story for Women) - that is, to go out into the dark places in the world, with a group of friends, to confront evil and deal with it, and return the riches to your village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in order to tell a story about going out and confronting Evil...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We must have an Evil to confront&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are many types of Evil - and as you rightly point out, Slavery was a very evil practice. Therefore in a story about the individual that confronts Evil, having a system of Slavery in place in the world is entirely appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavery can be used as a literary tool to evoke the very disgust that you have outlined against a particular faction in a story or to drive home the brutalist and capricious nature of the setting that you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my personal favourite fictional universes - Warhammer 40K could have the Human faction summed up as an Authoritarian Theocratic Xenophobic Genocidal Dictatorship - and the fact that despite that, they are the 'good guys' in 40K (not really, long running meme) - is used to show just how bad everyone else is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Slavery can be used to give a period-correct feel. If we are going an Alternate history story - where perhaps the British Empire never banned Slavery or that the South had won the American Civil War - we might have questions about how an aspect of Slavery might play out with different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-02-15T06:45:31.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10065" CreationDate="2023-02-27T15:51:14.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made the change from &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;must&amp;quot; as recommended in proposal #1. I elected to leave the &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; in proposal #2. I also didn't make change #3 as we've never had problems with the answers, only the quality of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T15:51:14.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-28T16:55:08.293" Score="0" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/242632/how-would-a-primitive-people-recharge-energy-weapons-in-a-hard-science-fiction-s&quot;&gt;How would a primitive people recharge energy weapons in a hard science fiction setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty straight-foward. Author is asking how a primitive society could recharge energy weapons, with the stipulation that a small solar panel is not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer, therefore, is that he needs to understand the different options, and/or an understanding that time + energy = more energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I detailed the answer with the information he needs, with source links, got upvoted, and the answer was deleted with the explanation that it &amp;quot;does not provide an answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way does detailing energy sources not answer a question asking about how to get energy? Ultimately, stone-age people cannot provide their own energy therefore the question is about what the advanced civilization needs to include in order to make it feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The answer cannot write the story for the author&lt;/strong&gt;, so JBH's comments on my post were inappropriate and incorrect. We are not here to write the story for the author. We need to explain the mechanics involved and help the author develop his own story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more to the point, rules about deletions are intended to handle &lt;em&gt;egregious wrongs&lt;/em&gt; -- answers that clearly have nothing to do with the question, or which are offensive in nature. Deleting an answer &lt;em&gt;because you didn't like it&lt;/em&gt; or felt it was an edge case, is not what Stack Exchange intends or what the rules or moderation privileges are meant to be used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is analogous to someone asking, &amp;quot;How do I open a file in C#&amp;quot;. You might list &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/19691606/805865&quot;&gt;several different methods&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe there's a complaint that the question should have been more focused, but deleting the answer because it presents more than one option is not The Way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T17:33:01.727" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T06:36:52.697" Title="Answer deleted. Explanation is warranted" Tags="|discussion|moderators|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10097" CreationDate="2023-02-28T17:02:40.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the deleted answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the advanced society must provide a charging solution but what that solution is depends on the circumstances&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is basically a request for clarification to the OP. As such, it doesn't answer the question. At most it is a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is analogous to someone asking, &amp;quot;How do I open a file in C#&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;except that the OP asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is analogous to someone asking, &amp;quot;How do I open a file in an unspecified language?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you answered &amp;quot;it depends on the language&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-03-06T06:36:52.697" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T06:36:52.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10097" CreationDate="2023-03-01T00:40:42.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Outside Perspective&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I detailed the answer with the information he needs, with source links,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that you really didn't &amp;quot;detail the answer&amp;quot;. You did give a list of power supply types and their relevant wattages, but you failed to address how a society &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;at a level of technology that includes wooden and stone tools but not metal ones&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; would make use of a large wind turbine or a nuclear microreactor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As examples of how much power output you get, the list is fine, but it falls to the respondent to weave that into a helpful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;got upvoted,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, you did. In reading through your response, I can't imagine why. Honestly, I'm not digging at you: answers that involved the Bhagdad battery and bamboo bicycle generators also got upvoted, when they really fail to address the same basic premise you failed to address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the answer was deleted with the explanation that it &amp;quot;does not provide an answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that you did not see JBH's explanation. I neither agree nor disagree with it, but provide it here on the off chance you can't see it: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;What's particularly frustrating with this non-answer is that (a) you've repeated information the OP has already stated, (b) you admit that the answer depends on information not presented by the OP, (c) you don't actually present a solution to the problem. Worse, you don't know what kind of weapon is being used, what its energy requirements are, or just how primitive the primitives are. And yet you posted a response (I can't call it an answer) anyway. Strange as it may seem, the goal of Stack Exchange really isn't to answer anything and everything that comes along.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way does detailing energy sources not answer a question asking about how to get energy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Largely because the OP did not ask about energy sources per se. The OP could easily have dispensed with the question entirely by providing the locals with  an appropriate charging device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is, in fact, asking a question about people that she characterises as &amp;quot;primitive&amp;quot; and having only tools made from wood and stone (and presumably bone and horn and antler) but not metals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, stone-age people cannot provide their own energy therefore the question is about what the advanced civilization needs to include in order to make it feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with your finding of fact here. This doesn't answer the question, however, and I'm frankly surprised that you think it does. This is a comment, and should have been addressed directly to the OP as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer cannot write the story for the author, so JBH's comments on my post were inappropriate and incorrect. We are not here to write the story for the author. We need to explain the mechanics involved and help the author develop his own story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually incorrect as well. We're not here to help the author develop his own story at all. Far from it. We're here to help the author build or develop the world their story is set in. Which of course, is where I think you were headed with your response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just didn't have enough solar panels to get you there! My conclusion is thus that your response was deleted because it doesn't address the problem as stated by the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I would argue that if you had written &lt;strong&gt;So as I see it the advanced society must provide a charging solution&lt;/strong&gt; and then proceeded to provide some kind of charging solution that would solve the problem, we wouldn't be in this situation. You could have said something like &amp;quot;a disposable charger unit with enough capacity to recharge the weapon x number of times; much like a gas canister weapon, it be sufficient for two or three hunting expeditions, but would then need to be traded for a new unit.&amp;quot; Problem solved!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit: The question has since attracted new answers, which are basically flavors of my deleted answer. The moderators are now on the hook to delete those answers as well, or else undelete mine. While I may not agree with this deletion, I don't think &amp;quot;consistent enforcement of the rules&amp;quot; is too much to ask for in any case, and, to that end, &amp;quot;be careful what rules you establish, because once established, you will be on the hook to continue enforcing them.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, not exactly flavours of your answer --- because you didn't even provide two bits of metal in a lemon! Your answer was literally to push it back onto the querent by saying &lt;strong&gt;So as I see it the advanced society must provide a charging solution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-03-01T00:40:42.160" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-01T17:49:17.280" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have great appreciation for the people who regularly help in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. I'd especially like to thank @Tortliena, @Sphennings and @VLAZ for helping so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Sandbox could use more help. Several questions have languished waiting for more input and one has only had input from me over the course of a month. The perspective of more people is incredibly valuable. This not only helps users perfect their questions, but it gives them insight into how to better use this Stack without questions being under threat of closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider regularly donating time to help in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;the Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please consider clicking the &lt;em&gt;Follow&lt;/em&gt; link at the bottom of the Sandbox question. This will notify you when new answers (user questions to be considered) are posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-03-03T02:56:33.523" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T13:49:52.817" Title="The Sandbox can use your help!" Tags="|support|sandbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10100" CreationDate="2023-03-07T13:49:52.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some incentives to check the sandbox so you are actually interested to take a seat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why do I want to check the sandbox's questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's as quick and easy as reviewing questions. I do it when I see the sandbox post being raised on the top of the page+@user comments, but yes, you can use notifications, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have much less troubles of people complaining their question is actually fit for the site. If they're sandboxing, they're willing to learn, .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll feel less sad to give a downvote, because it happens you don't there&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By and through the above, I feel like the mood is better than on a soon-to-be closed question : It's a training ground, not the &amp;quot;actual exam&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can review your way of reviewing questions by comparing how you review questions vs how other reviewers review questions when it's finally posted on main. In simpler words, you get to know better what makes you unique in the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You also fine-tune your boundaries of what should/shouldn't be accepted here because you get to have several close-looking questions as edits goes on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And you improve how effectively you guide people, which is kinda one of the top-tier communication skill you can get.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Even though sometimes, some people don't remember the sandbox rules and still downvote/upvote :'(. Let's say it's just a misclick .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T13:49:52.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-20T08:21:23.787" Score="1" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244276/f-14-in-medieval-times&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment from L-Dutch states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The first line is at most a comment to the OP's question. The rest, being based on nothing that the OP asked, is not an answer&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this ignores what the OP said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Say hypothetically, an entire American airbase with &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; extremely modern aircraft is instantaneously transported to the 1400s.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my answer was to first point out that the choice of aircraft for what was being described was a poor choice - a Fleet Defense fighter (that was designed to stop Russian Heavy Bombers from getting within Anti-Ship Missile range of a Carrier group) was the wrong choice of Aircraft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the frame of the question was 'Many extremely modern aircraft' - this gives the answerer (me) scope to recommend what &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be appropriate - which is any ground-attack aircraft  in the US Arsenal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives us a choice between the A-10, the F-35, F15 Strike Eagle, Apache Attack Helicopter yadda yadda yadda - you get the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the scenario - the best choice would be an A-10, since you don't need to fly high or fast or stealthy - flying low and slow and creating as big a bang as possible is &lt;em&gt;as per the story requirements&lt;/em&gt; what was needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then outlining what would be the likely effects - First a dry run, then a gun run and if the Army still held their nerve, a Cluster Bomb run - which would break any medieval army's will to fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR - I disagree with the reason it was deleted - I think the deletee didn't read the question properly and so thought I wasn't answering the question asked. and I'm Salty and want it re-instated cause I liked that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T11:52:43.947" Title="Disagree with a Deletion" Tags="|support|moderators|deleted-answer|moderation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-03-20T10:56:16.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Don't make assumptions, ask for details instead&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note I don't have access to your original, deleted answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Answer well-asked questions&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions can or should be answered here. Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which [should be closed]...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write good answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should reliably... Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;answer the question to be considered as such and avoid deletion&lt;/a&gt;. As an expert in strategy, you should know that the outcomes could vary a lot because of battle circumstances and goals : If you have say 10 000 religious fanatic opponents coming from all sides and detected very late, 20 or even 50 planes wouldn't be enough to handle them just because they wouldn't have been able to take off in time. Also, the exact army compositon is not told : After the first attack, what apparels exactly are still operating? Finally, we lack the goals of the US military : If the base defense is more important than anything else, they would have gone all guns blazing from the very start and wipe out everything in a 100km area, just to be sure. But since it's not told, it could have been to avoid another diplomatic disaster, with a totally different approach (intimidation, talks...). This shows a lack of forethought from the querent on both strategic goals and context. As much as it can be entertaining, it's not your job to think that for them, as it's both dependent on what they want to tell and what they already established in their world/story. Any assumption can lead you astray from the querent's actual situation, so avoid them whenever it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there isn't just enough to answer the question : &amp;quot;What is the likelihood the jets would reach their goal (supposedly, defend the base)?&amp;quot;. I have a checklist when people ask about strategy :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many forces are there exactly and which kind? What are they equipped with?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is their starting locations : Facing each others and far away, cornered and at close-range?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where are they fighting : On mountains, plains, forest, desert, asteroid field...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did the general chose to do? What troops are they sending, against what and for which reason? Recall that questions asking what an army or soldier would do is off-topic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;story-based&lt;/a&gt;), and questions lacking those can implicitly ask them (not the case here, but not everyone shares my point of view).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there special battle conditions : Storm happening, very low morale to fight, surprise attack...?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of these is not described, it's likely lacking too much details to be answered without building the world and story in their stead. Ideally, the question should also focus on one individual part of the battle, as to move as much as possible individual decisions and make the resulting probabilities as accurate as possible. For instance, the question &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;How well would a flamethrower tank fare against a normal one in an urban battle?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; would lead to more accurate, more objective answers than &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;How well would this army of flamethrower tanks and rocket 'copters fare against this army of normal tanks and rifle soldiers in an urban battle?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To sum-up, accuracy is key when asking tactic questions. If the question lacks too much details, its answers -such as yours- are more likely to miss the target.&lt;/strong&gt; If there's any doubt your answer would not meet the querent's needs -whether through your own observation or others-, ask for details. And remember : You're not forced to answer the question right as it gets out of the oven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum from comments :&lt;/strong&gt; To be clear, I'm not writing here that your answer doesn't tackle the question in an absolute way, just that it's impossible to know due to the way the question is written. Guiding undecisive people towards your restricted vision of their world and intentions can be equally beneficial or nefarious to them. As such, it can balance out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expected value&lt;/a&gt; of your answer to zero. It means effectively the answer has a too high-chance to not answer the question plus the user's needs, and so risks deletion for that reason.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T08:37:55.763" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T08:37:55.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-03-20T14:44:59.350" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sounds like a deletion made in error.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't read your answer, either (10k rep required to read deleted answers) but it sounds like your answer was appropriate and on-topic. The goal here is to help people build worlds. Helping the author understand the distinction in the types of planes that could be parked there and what roles they might play would be an important part of helping him build his world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think sometimes deleters get caught up on &amp;quot;did you answer the question directly&amp;quot; when they should consider &amp;quot;does your answer help with the fundamental worldbuilding problem&amp;quot;, i.e., when is the question not the actual problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, OP wants to transport a military base to the past but isn't sure what that means in immediate practical terms. He has a lot of reading to do and an answer like yours sounds like it was is exactly what he needs: not &lt;em&gt;a direct answer to his question&lt;/em&gt; per se, but an understanding and a starting point of what he actually needs to build his world and a start on what reading he needs to go do. A base full of C-17s is a lot different than a base full of A-10s or AC-130s or F-15s. The answer he &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; is help defining the boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting content should be reserved for &lt;em&gt;egregious wrongs&lt;/em&gt;. In order for an answer to be deleted, it must be completely off-topic, clearly having nothing at all to do with the question, is simply spam, or the product of a chat program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting for any other reason is inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose that the metric for deleting an answer should be similar to the metric for accepting a first time answer from the &amp;quot;first answers&amp;quot; queue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think about this whenever that queue pops up, and what's my metric for deciding what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a good answer. I would upvote it. Obviously I accept these.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a meh answer. I would not upvote it or downvote it. I accept these because &amp;quot;is it a good answer&amp;quot; is not the metric. We're not trying to use our opinion to screen out answers that are less than fabulous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's an answer, but I disagree with it or think it needs work. I accept these, too, actually. I might accept it and then downvote it and complain in the comments &lt;em&gt;but I still accept it from the queue&lt;/em&gt;. My job isn't to shut down people who write answers I think could be better. My job in that queue is to help protect the site from defacement or spam.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's spam, or so off-topic that it appears entirely unrelated to the OP. These I reject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I have a pretty good system here for accepting or rejecting first time answers. It's the same metric that moderators should use for deleting answers. &amp;quot;Is it spam?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Does it literally have nothing to do with the topic?&amp;quot; Delete. Otherwise, use downvotes and comments, not deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T15:13:50.950" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T15:13:50.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-03-20T19:31:50.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;You Said it Yourself&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of full disclosure, I voted to close the question for being story based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fundamental reason that I can see for this particular answer to be closed is that it specifically doesn't answer the question, which asks about F14s, not anything else the base command could throw at the invaders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Worse, the answer doesn't even present a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;frame challenge&lt;/a&gt;. A frame challenge &lt;em&gt;is any assertion that challenges the premise or underpinnings of a question&lt;/em&gt;. The given answer says that the F14 won't be a good choice, which is a good start but does nothing to support the assertion. Yes, the answer does say that the F14 is a 'fleet defense aircraft', but what does that even mean in the context of a medieval army attack? Technically speaking, nothing in that base is designed to be an anti-mounted-knight-cavalry weapon system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;What you're asking for won't work because of X, but you could alternatively consider Y.&lt;/em&gt; If the answer had a section &amp;quot;because of X&amp;quot; that described why the F14 won't be effective against mounted knights and medieval armies then it would be a good frame challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As it stands, &lt;strong&gt;I'd concur that the answer was deleted properly&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Another fairly obvious reason is the one you provided yourself as respondent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the scenario - the best choice would be an A-10, since you don't need to fly high or fast or stealthy - flying low and slow and creating as big a bang as possible is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;as per the story requirements what was needed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By your own admission, fully aware that you're dealing with a story based question, it was technically improper to even answer the question. The best practice would be to vote to close the question and / or aske the querent to edit to make it a worldbuilding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That said, I am not completely adverse to answering story based questions. But they have to be really good ones! This question doesn't rise to that level in my opinion, therefore &lt;strong&gt;I would be more likely to support deletion in this case than I would for a better question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-03-20T19:31:50.697" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-22T02:21:12.607" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I proposed a series of minor edits on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244369/frozen-stars-can-my-planets-inhabitants-use-u-238-reactors-for-10-000-years&quot; title=&quot;Frozen Stars - Can my planet's inhabitants use U-238 reactors for 10,000 years, till their star thaws out?&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question earlier today; and as the title says, was rejected for deviating from the author's intent. I have a vague idea of which portions of my edit probably were the culprit, but I can't be sure, and submitting another edit suggestion doesn't seem like a good idea, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98654" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T00:37:05.823" Title="Edit rejected for deviating from the original intent of a post" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2023-03-23T00:37:05.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;THOU SHALT NOT&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stack Exchange, &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, thrives on community members ruthlessly editing questions and answers to improve them. If a question is clumsily worded or is too long or has too much extraneous information, it's ripe for editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Worldbuilding, &lt;em&gt;in specific&lt;/em&gt;, is quite different. We do not really tolerate much editing of other people's questions or answers. Except for certain well delineated circumstances. Anything you're not sure about is best addressed in comments, especially if you feel the need to edit &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;mechanics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Things you can not do include:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;excising blocks of text that you feel don't belong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rewrite the question so that it conforms to your own prose style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;change a critical fact or aspect of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove any critical background information or presume to add something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove any of the querent's stated goals, objectives or considerations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in general, presume that you know the querent's needs better than she does and therefore decide to &amp;quot;improve&amp;quot; her query by making it your own&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take over an old question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;That said, there are still plenty of things you can do!&lt;/strong&gt; And these are just as important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can always edit an incorrect &lt;em&gt;real world&lt;/em&gt; fact. Be very careful that the querent isn't couching the question in terms of &lt;em&gt;fictional world&lt;/em&gt; fact!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can always and freely edit spelling, grammatical or mechanical errors. Be ware: we accept both British and American standard spelling conventions. You can always add standard units when only metric is given, and you can always add metric when only standard units are given. If you feel up to scaling a Wall-o-Text, you can break that down into paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can improve a query's format for clarity and add logical section headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you are sufficiently competent with a foreign language, you can translate a question or answer written in any language other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can edit a non English speaker's grammar and diction with the caveat that you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;do not change what they intended to say.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; This is important, because the question, while potentially universally applicable, is also specific to the querent's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can always edit out what I'd characterise as &amp;quot;snark&amp;quot;. If you see a paragraph that says something like &amp;quot;Some dip$hit closed my question so now I'm forced to edit...&amp;quot; that can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T00:37:05.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-03-24T10:11:42.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In support of @Tortliena's answer, and in response to @JamieB's answer (which is only his opinion)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Help Center: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why and how are some answers deleted? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer posts that &lt;strong&gt;do not fundamentally answer the question&lt;/strong&gt; may be removed. This includes answers that are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commentary on the question or other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking another, different question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;thanks!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;me too!&amp;quot;-type responses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exact duplicates of other answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;barely more than a link to an external site (i.e. the actual answer is not included in the post)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;Frame Challenge&lt;/a&gt;, but in full agreement with @Elemtilas, frame challenges are expected to be thorough. I will gladly grant that your answer did approach the intent of a frame challenge — except that the question was (and remains) so ill-prepared that the value of the challenge is entirely lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could list a dozen fundamental problems with the context of the question, its purported rules of time travel, etc., not the least of which is why are we focusing on F-14s when fifty soldiers carrying XM5s and 300 rounds each could level nearly any medieval army?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the top of my list of complaints about the question was (and is):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How effective will the jets be against this army, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and what do you think what happen from then? Please explain in detail.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine. That's a classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;High Concept Question&lt;/a&gt; and they are &lt;em&gt;off topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to expect querents to ask good questions.[&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624/40609&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;] We should also expect respondents to post good answers. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, upon review, I believe your answer violated bullets #1 and #6 of the &amp;quot;Why and how are some answers deleted&amp;quot; list and ignored the whole &amp;quot;answer well-asked questions&amp;quot; section of the Help Center. Stack Exchange's goals include being a reference library of quality questions and answers that can help more people than the first person to ask the question. From that perspective, you should have voted to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, IMO, chalk it up to experience. I've had questions and answers closed, hated, and deleted. It happens. Nobody likes to hear their baby called ugly. But even if you're sure in your heart that you're absolutely in the right regarding this matter, it's more valuable to everyone that you understand the objections. Honestly, we don't need more people answering anything they come across no matter how badly the question was asked. We need people to become leaders, helping however imperfectly to improve the site's quality and service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point? That OP needed to be asked why the questions about F-14s were so important to him. Because I don't believe the question the OP asked was addressing the actual problem the OP was having. If I'm right, then your answer didn't help the OP at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-03-26T03:56:17.440" LastActivityDate="2023-03-26T03:56:17.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-03-25T06:33:29.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to use an analogy to explain what the problem was with your alleged answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions would have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little Tommy has 10 Euros in his pocket. He is in the supermarket and he is hungry. Considering that cookies costs 1 Euro each, how many cookies can Little Tommy buy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cookies will not fill Little Tommy. He can buy a pizza tuna and onion with 6 Euro and use the change for a soda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just gave a little comment at the beginning of the post, and then went completely along the tangent with assumptions that were nowhere in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way that that would be an answer to the question, and by posting it you were bounding the OP, in case they wanted to edit the question to have reopened, to comply with your assumptions, not with their worldbuilding problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for the 1000th time, &amp;quot;I liked my answer&amp;quot; it's nowhere close to be a valid reason for not deleting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T10:09:37.740" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T10:09:37.740" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-27T16:38:54.410" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relevant post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/244549/40609&quot;&gt;How much and how powerful would a &amp;quot;phlebotinium&amp;quot; bomb launched from orbit be to create an artificial sea?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new user, @JustKherty, has posted a question about a &lt;a href=&quot;https://briserian-dawn.fandom.com/wiki/Briserian_Dawn_Wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;publicly accessible world&lt;/a&gt;, claiming to own that world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally this would fall into our 3rd-party/commercial world prohibition, but in my own experience, this is the first time someone has claimed to own the world. The principle author of the Briserian Dawn wiki, linked above, is a Fandom.com user named &lt;a href=&quot;https://briserian-dawn.fandom.com/wiki/User:CentralAuthority&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CentralAuthority&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not here to cast aspersions, but anybody can claim anything. @JustKherty has edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://briserian-dawn.fandom.com/wiki/Hello_I%27m_Just_Kherty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Fandom.com page&lt;/a&gt; to identify him-/herself. However, other users have contributed to the Briserian Dawn wiki pages, so this isn't proof that @JustKherty is Fandom.com's Central Authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What proof should we accept that a Stack Exchange user is the owner of a 3rd Party world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Further issues for consideration:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we simply take their word for it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would permitting this undermine the 3rd-party/commercial world prohibition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why is this question important?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because protecting intellectual property rights should be part of our basic policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T06:00:18.890" Title="What proof would we accept that an otherwise 3rd-party world belongs to a Stack Exchange user?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|policy|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2023-03-27T16:54:26.250" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am @JustKherty. I specifically created a page, with the account I have used to create the Fandom Wikia, called &amp;quot;CentralAuthority&amp;quot; to obsfuscate who's who because of my previous bullying experience I had when former friends looked my username (which I don't use anymore since), and made fun of me when they found my worldbuilding project. This project, belongs to me, and as said earlier, and on the question, I reiterated that it does belongs to me... By posting with said (&amp;quot;CentralAuthority&amp;quot;) account, on this very specific Fandom Wikia. Of course I'm not looking for an excuse or be pitied on, but I am just explaining why I used a different name - plus &amp;quot;CentralAuthority&amp;quot; looks cooler, especially for the setting I am working on. If you have more question, please ask! Anyhoo, I doubt it's a third-part world, since it was me, myself and I who built it...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Just Kherty / CentralAuthority&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;em&gt;I'm forgetting my manner, added Hello There...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79523" LastEditorUserId="79523" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T17:11:08.963" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T17:11:08.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2023-03-27T18:06:33.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What proof should we accept that a Stack Exchange user is the owner of a 3rd Party world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A counter question: &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I know you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because protecting intellectual property rights should be part of our basic policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do not think we are really the arbiters or enforcers of intellectual property. We are not really given the proper tools to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I mean: if somebody whose username is &amp;quot;G.Lucas&amp;quot; comes in and asks a question related to something called &amp;quot;Star Wars&amp;quot; we do not really have the tools to figure out if it is indeed one &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lucas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Lucas&lt;/a&gt; who decided to drop in and ask. Nor would it really matter one way or another. If Mr. Lucas or anybody else wants to ask a question, they should follow the rules and post a question they have about worldbuilding aspect. Not really a question about a third party world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it turns out the &amp;quot;G.Lucas&amp;quot; was not indeed the real creator of the Star Wars universe that is &lt;em&gt;matter for a court to decide&lt;/em&gt;. Not really for us - we are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, a court for deciding on intellectual property rights. In fact, intellectual property rights should not matter when asking a question as &lt;em&gt;ideally&lt;/em&gt; a worldbuilding problem is framed by itself mostly divorced from a &amp;quot;world&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point one might decide to interject with something along the lines of &amp;quot;However, every element of &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; is part &lt;em&gt;of a world&lt;/em&gt;!&amp;quot; Well spotted. However, we do not require the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; world there, just enough for what the worldbuilding problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, if this hypothetical one persists that we should protect the (intellectual) integrity of the world even if we have bits and pieces of it - here is my counter: why start &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;? We have had &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; of questions without having anybody show &amp;quot;proof&amp;quot; they owned &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31388/how-would-facebook-sysadmins-prevent-the-summoning-of-cthulhu&quot;&gt;Facebook&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future&quot;&gt;whatever world allows time travelling&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94154/how-to-safely-check-if-you-are-immortal&quot;&gt;world where you can be immortal but you have to check&lt;/a&gt;. Amongst &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;many, many others&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; like this checking of the credentials of the author comes from nowhere. It did not seem there was a problem for &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt;. Why have a problem &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7334/policy-clarification-asking-about-commercial-or-third-party-worlds&quot;&gt;the policy about not asking for third party world&lt;/a&gt; is not built around &lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt; but simply being &lt;em&gt;out of scope&lt;/em&gt;. And it is &lt;em&gt;out of scope&lt;/em&gt; when asking for explanation of how something works in, for example, Star Trek or Lord of the Rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a note: I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/244549/revisions#rev-body-f60343d9-ac7d-46e7-9fc7-b50596c7a2a3&quot;&gt;edit the question&lt;/a&gt; and I tried to strive for mostly stylistic things, since I did not want to introduce more drastic changes while there was a Meta discussion. With that said, I am &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; compelled to remove a lot of the related lore and information and only focus the question on the matter at hand. To me it seems it can more or less fit into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/briserian-dawn/images/d/da/Sealondon.png/revision/latest?cb=20220429054244&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt; you can see much of London and its surrounding were obliterated thanks to a &amp;quot;phlebotinum&amp;quot; bomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much TNT-equivalent/ whatever unit of measure would this mean? How much would be the destruction?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How far the shockwave would travel?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other characteristics would there be of the explosion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while the main body of my answer seems like trying to dodge responsibility, if the question were sufficiently focused &lt;em&gt;on the question&lt;/em&gt;, the world where this is set is not really relevant. Worldbuilding.SE would not need to engage in any legal debate at that point. &lt;em&gt;As a worldbuilding detail&lt;/em&gt; the new shortened question can be plugged into any world - be it Warhammer 40k or Harry Potter (which for some reason now has bombs...) or an original third party world. Nor not-so-original third party world. It does not really matter much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T18:06:33.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2023-03-28T16:30:47.180" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR : No proof is needed for two reasons : The 3rd party rule is not for legal purposes, nor are we in a position to claim in the real author's stead. Of course, this doesn't protect the question from other closure reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why law is not the the key factor here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Law doesn't happen here for many reasons, but roughly :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone can ask questions about public works as long as they are not copy-pasted in the question. This is not falling at all under the copyright of said work. And if you think about it... First and otherwise the whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Sci-fi &amp;amp; Fantasy stack-exchange&lt;/a&gt;, wikipedia and any fan sites could be shut down for that reason. Then, this would be absurd to prevent anyone to talk about the movie they just watched. It would be akin to a total destruction of freedom of expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site works almost exclusively with ideas. Ideas when creating fictional worlds are not &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/77912/im-writing-a-book-and-ask-for-help-on-worldbuilding-stack-exchange-does-my-boo/77923#77923&quot;&gt;copyrightable&lt;/a&gt; in most countries&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Indeed, ideas are fluttering, ethereal butterflies in the sky, coming in and going away freely . But worse, noone could prove who catched one of them first. More factually, &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/87187/why-are-ideas-not-protected-by-copyright&quot;&gt;protecting ideas prevents people expressing said ideas, rendering the law's purpose of protecting creators useless&lt;/a&gt;. Skipping all the details, only what you or I have written word for word is copyrighted, and as long as you don't copy-paste it as it is or make derivative works of it, you aren't even restricted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; licence Stack-Exchange uses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there was indeed a law protecting something somehow, &lt;strong&gt;it is not our legal responsibility to make others respect it.&lt;/strong&gt; It is the responsibility of the intellectual property owner and Stack-Exchange to take action when illegal stuff happens like breaching &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NDAs&lt;/a&gt; or infringing copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can (ideally should) warn the content owner of potential infringements so they can take appropriate measures -like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#copyright&quot;&gt;contacting SE's designated agent&lt;/a&gt;- if they wish so. You can warn the SE company of possible troubles, so they can take preemptive measures if that's clear and needed. You can and should also keep people from raising obvious red flags for their own sake, both to learn worldbuilding and to be friendly. But closing and/or deleting in SE's stead? It's not our job, since it's impossible to know at all whether the user is the actual owner. We're just for most anonymous pals on the internet who can only reasonably argue they're who they are by telling their &amp;quot;proofs&amp;quot; are the truth. It's a very weak argument called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;circular reasoning&lt;/a&gt;. And nobody as honest as they can be can do more than that without excruciating efforts which are not worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But why does the 3rd party rule exist then?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the most important question here. For that I'm going to quote Sphennings, on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9827/80336&quot;&gt;similar topic&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what inspired your question, existing work of fiction,&#xA;myths you grew up with, a wild dream you had last night, the sublime&#xA;majesty of the natural world, or some cool science fact that ignited&#xA;your imagination, you must always make sure that you're asking about&#xA;that within the context of &lt;strong&gt;building your world&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask about elves, ask us about your elves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about Skrulls, ask us about your Skrull knockoffs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about Kami, ask us about your Kami&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't ask us about orbital mechanics, ask us about the orbits of your planets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the problem with 3rd party worlds : Most of the time, people don't ask how they can &amp;quot;build&amp;quot; something, not even how it &amp;quot;has been built&amp;quot; by other people. They ask how it &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; in one's world. This kind of question is therefore not &lt;em&gt;building worlds&lt;/em&gt;, ie. off-topic per the tour and help-center&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. Whether they claim ownership is irrelevant to whether they are building worlds or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the question is suffering from over-contextualization. All of it could be summed up in one paragraph describing the kind of bomb, one picture showing the map of the now destroyed England&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, and one ending sentence asking the question. Most of this confusion could have been avoided that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there are several questions at once with hints the querent isn't solving a specific problem, but making the whole element. Indeed, you cannot describe the impact of the bomb if you don't know how the bomb works, regardless of its actual size and power. Since the question talks about an unknown, never described &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PhlebotinumBomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phlebotinium bomb&lt;/a&gt;, both are asked here. This is a big issue and the reason I voted to close (lacking focus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Any country who signed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt; would probably follow it one way or another, as it's the expression of the idea which is protected there.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : I made emphasis on the core definition of worldbuilding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9817/80336&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 : Map which could gain from being more accurate. It's so tiny for my sore eyes ^^&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-03-28T17:57:24.470" LastActivityDate="2023-03-28T17:57:24.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2023-03-28T21:55:22.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't need to know.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is covered pretty well by Monica's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/8902&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for questions about building worlds, not questions about how others' worlds work. [...]  the focus is on your world, not what another author intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I read it, it doesn't matter if this is &amp;quot;JKRowling&amp;quot; asking about Harry Potter. Whether it's an acceptable question has nothing to do with it being Harry Potter, or whether or not that's &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; J.K. Rowling. The only pertinent question is if it's worldbuilding or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad question: &amp;quot;What do house elves in Harry Potter like to eat?&amp;quot; That's bad not because it's Harry Potter but because it's not building a world, it's just asking about one that already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suppose &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244040/how-can-i-make-the-rules-of-my-faerie-portal-free-from-contradiction&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was actually from &amp;quot;JKRowling&amp;quot;, and very specifically said &amp;quot;In my next Harry Potter book, I have this new system of travel, but how can I make it free from contradiction?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing that it's Harry Potter could actually help, as familiarity with that universe could help drive the answers. Knowing that it's &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; J.K. Rowling coming to Stack Exchange to ask for worldbuilding help would be neato, but irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;JKRowling&amp;quot;, nothing changes. Anyone can worldbuild on Harry Potter in their own free time. Their legal ability to publish any ideas they have is not our concern. Maybe they're just doing a little GURPS RPG with some friends, set in Harry Potter's universe, but still need some legitimate worldbuilding to flesh it out. &lt;strong&gt;We do not prohibit this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergo, I submit that the author's identity is not important. It being a 3rd party world is not important. What's important is if they are worldbuilding (thumbs up!) or just asking about it (thumbs down!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-03-28T21:55:22.033" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-29T17:09:50.990" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/244624/40609&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asked what weapons a society would use if magic (specifically a mage) could stop the ignition of gunpowder and similar explosives. It was a different spin on a popular type of question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You find yourself on a world with no gunpowder...don't ask why...or how you know that there is no gunpowder there just isn't any available to you. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/21763/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years we have frequently hosted questions about how to prohibit a branch of science from developing or about the consequences of a branch of science having not developed. It's almost always gunpowder, but let's set that aside for the sake of this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we tend to answer questions from a very heavily &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; perspective (even when the tag isn't used...), our first reaction is often to point out that you can't have a modern society without the branch of science in question. Yes, we could (and probably should) simply take the OP at their word and just answer the question &lt;em&gt;as if it could happen.&lt;/em&gt; But that's another story that's been discussed before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that in some instances (probably many) either the need for the prohibited branch of science or the consequences is a function of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that the goal is often a reflection of the needs of a yet-to-be-written story and that the answers the OP are seeking would or should be derived from those needs. Nevertheless, it's frequently true that those needs are not explained in the question, making it more difficult to sensibly answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What advice can we give to worldbuilders trying to build a world that is crippled by the loss of a specified branch of science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible advice may include, &lt;strong&gt;but is not limited to&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What consequences can be expected when trying to remove a branch of science?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can an intelligent species find a way around the lack of a specified branch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the lack of a specified branch change how people think or behave?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does removing a specified branch create an imbalance in the believability of the story?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-03-29T18:34:09.937" Title="Advice: Prohibiting a branch of science in my world" Tags="|discussion|worldbuilding-process|advice|science|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10120" CreationDate="2023-03-29T18:34:09.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's Your World, You Do What You Want!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've seen this as a comment on scores of queries over the years. As a way of 'answering' someone's question, I find it a reprehensible way to dismiss someone's creative work and to provide an extremely inhospitable environment for creativity to take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, I would turn that maxim back on the community in this case and remind them that, yes, indeed, the OP is making a fictional world, and they can do what they damn well please. If that means &amp;quot;no gunpowder&amp;quot;, then that's the rule. I think it falls to all respondents to become more mindful that it's not us building their worlds or writing their stories. We don't bring our own preconceived notions or expectations to the table. We're just professional counsel providing our collective wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In addition to the four pieces of advice, or questions to consider, given by JBH, I'd only add these consideration points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the cosmological nature of your world? (e.g., is it chaotic, is it dependable, is it reliably understandable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the philosophical foundation of science in your world? (e.g., is it making sense of chaos, is it orderly, what forms of thought are required to do it, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &amp;quot;no gunpowder&amp;quot; is to be taken as axiomatic, and &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; is to be taken as axiomatic, how have you solved the conundrum? Science is explanatory (to a point) and it is also predictive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These are sort of deeper considerations than JBH presented, but I think it's important to know how well the OP has considered the ramifications of a design choice like &amp;quot;no gunpowder&amp;quot;. I concur that such a rule screams &amp;quot;narrative necessity&amp;quot; as it will be the ultimate plot driver for a story. But I think it's also fair to question the OP about what JBH characterised as a crippling of a world. This should not be our total focus, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'd argue that we can propose such pieces of advice for the OP to consider, but ultimately, the world in question belongs to the OP and it's simply not our place to tell the OP &amp;quot;you can't do that&amp;quot;. It's our job to work with the conditions that the OP sets. If we decide we can't work with that kind of restriction, then we should choose not to engage with that particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I say these things from the perspective of a worldbuilder whose focus world lacks easily obtainable iron and lacks &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; as we understand it, even though the same basic building blocks of science exist in both the real and fictional worlds. I certainly wouldn't want someone to tell me &amp;quot;you can't do that, because that doesn't happen in the real world&amp;quot;! I'd much rather work with respondents who can accept the conditions I set out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-03-29T18:34:09.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10122" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Identifies Meta posts that seek to provide general insight into the process of worldbuilding specifically from the perspective of Stack Exchange. Answers are expected to enlighten readers about the identified issue either pro or con with the goal of helping readers be better worldbuilders and/or better users of this Stack.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions seeking to help worldbuilders improve their craft would be better suited for Main, except that Stack Exchange's policies for questions and answers make advice questions a poor fit for Main. There will not be a best answer and all answers can legitimately be considered of equal value to the reader and the querent. Therefore, they are found on Meta with the hope that they will be referred to as necessary when worldbuilders ask questions that are in need of such advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are not expected to be a debate between methods or perspectives, but an enlightenment of both. If tempted to disagree with what another respondent has said, choose not to disagree, but simply to propose your perspective as an equally valuable alternative worldbuilders should consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are expected to be thoughtful and reasonably thorough, addressing not only the gist of the proposed issue, but also illuminating any considerations the respondent feels pertinent to the discussion in terms of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" LastActivityDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10123" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" Score="0" Body="Identifies Meta posts that seek to provide general insight into the process of worldbuilding specifically from the perspective of Stack Exchange. Answers are expected to enlighten readers about the identified issue either pro or con with the goal of helping readers be better worldbuilders and/or better users of this Stack." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" LastActivityDate="2023-03-29T18:53:02.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10115" CreationDate="2023-03-29T19:50:54.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Honour System&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm just going to focus on the basic question, without delving into other legal matters. Just so we're clear on background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WB.SE is clearly described as a Q&amp;amp;A forum where individuals can ask questions regarding the fictional worlds or settings that the individual OP owns as a matter of intellectual property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a specific policy that &lt;em&gt;disallows&lt;/em&gt; anyone from asking questions about fictional worlds that they are not responsible for. We call these &amp;quot;third party intellectual properties&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;commercial(ised) worlds&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;third party worlds&amp;quot;. Essentially, a world that the querent does not own as a matter of intellectual property.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally speaking, SE is a fairly anonymous place. We as individuals mostly use online names (Tortliena (which I think I spelled right this time!), elemtilas, JBH, Topcode) which don't really equate to a real name or a professional nom de plume. Even with names like Monica or JamieB, we don't really know if that's the person's real name or not, and it really doesn't matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;DISCUSSION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I find that this particular question sits at an interesting crossroads of WB.SE culture. It wasn't so long ago that a question here in Meta arose regarding a repository of members who actually took our help and went on to create some sort of published work using that help. I regarded that as a rather positive step and I hope Just Kherty will add Briserian Dawn to it! For here, we find a member of the forum who is asking for help and who is apparently quite open about saying &amp;quot;this is a world in process of some kind of publication, and it is in fact my world&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would argue that our basic approach should be to assume the best of a forum member. Our evidentiary bar is set pretty low, when it comes to third party worlds. We generally assume that if a known author sought our help they'd let us know who they are. On the other hand, we generally assume that &amp;quot;major&amp;quot; intellectual properties like the Wizarding World or Star Wars are not owned by anyone in this forum. Briserian Dawn may not be a &amp;quot;major&amp;quot; intellectual property, but its owner has identified as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;CONCLUSION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When a third party question gets asked, we just inform the user that they can't ask about someone else's work, close the question and move on. We don't ask for proof that they are the author of said world or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Likewise, in cases like this, I really don't think we need to do any more than accept the affidavit that Just Kherty is also CentralAuthority (and also jKherty at Reddit where a BD related query was asked recently). I think we can accept that these online monikers all point to a real person who is the owner of the said intellectual property. Answer the query and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;COMMENTARY:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Would permitting this undermine the 3rd-party/commercial world prohibition?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't believe it would, for the simple fact that it has not been an issue thus far. I can't recall any runs of Star Wars related questions posted by George Lucas under dubious monikers like ax40329 or StarWarsFan4Life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The simple fact of the matter is that we don't have a prohibition against members asking about their own worlds that have any kind of published or commercial existence. As long as the world in question is claimed by the querent, there's kind of not much we could or should do to stop them from asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Why is this question important? Because protecting intellectual property rights should be part of our basic policy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm not a lawyer so can't comment or expound on the legalities. I fully agree with you that intellectual property rights protection here is vital. I'm not competent to say whether that pertains to this question or not. I think this would be a good question to address to Law.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T06:00:18.890" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T06:00:18.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-30T04:11:14.697" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've been going around and creating tag wiki excerpts. At first, I was wondering about the usefulness of such work-but after a few accepts, it seemed like a good idea.&#xA;After a few (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/92375&quot;&gt;not-so&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/92374&quot;&gt;stupid&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/92403&quot;&gt;blunders&lt;/a&gt;, I got autobanned from editing. I know, a tragedy. Please, save your gallons of tears for later, we need to focus :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, the first thing I did was &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63275349#63275349&quot;&gt;lament in the site chat&lt;/a&gt;. Out of the blue, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/26175/sphennings&quot;&gt;a user&lt;/a&gt; came along and pointed out that my edits were technically against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/tag-excerpts&quot;&gt;policy for good tag excerpts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am pretty sure that this is part of the &amp;quot;default&amp;quot; kit assigned to all SE sites, but the point still remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of our tags are about the &lt;strong&gt;content&lt;/strong&gt; of a question, not the &lt;strong&gt;question itself.&lt;/strong&gt; Thus, according to the policy, there is no need for a usage guide-the exceptions are tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistiency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistiency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistiency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistiency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistiency&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, should we even have such &amp;quot;boilerplate&amp;quot; descriptions of a topic on wiki excerpts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98654" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T10:16:19.753" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T10:16:19.753" Title="What should we do about tag wiki excerpts?" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-30T04:41:46.943" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among my various rejected edits, one particularly stood out: the now-synonymized &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sophont&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sophont&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sophont&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sophont-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sophont&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unable to suggest synonymization, so I did the next best thing: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/92375&quot;&gt;edit the tag&lt;/a&gt; to accurately reflect the term. I assume someone with privileges came along and synonymized it, and my edit got axed by the system in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the tag would have been synonymized without my intervention, and that's a problem. While I now realize that I could have either brought it up here on Meta, or in the site chat, being able to flag tags for review by more privileged users should probably be a feature. Alternatively, a way to propose synonymizations (and subsequently be reviewed) would solve the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I re-read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;relevant privilege&lt;/a&gt;. I still think the ceiling to synonymize should be lowered-and flagging tags for review still feels like a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98654" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T10:12:15.163" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T11:39:24.497" Title="Users should be able to flag tags for review" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-23T06:54:38.287" Score="7" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question asking for advice about what the boss in their video game should be tagged their question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-video-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;video-games&lt;/a&gt;. The tag has no summary and no wiki. The first question tagged with the tag was a submission to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; back when we allowed video game creatures to be posted to that series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE: We no longer allow video game creatures to be submitted to the ACS.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the 18 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-video-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;video-games&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 are ACS entries. Not surprisingly, they are the first 5 questions to be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-video-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;video-games&lt;/a&gt; and 3 of them are from the same person who was known to habitually ask the same type of question over and over and over.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the remaining 13 questions are of the form, &amp;quot;I'm making a video game....&amp;quot; In other words, the tag isn't used in a way that means anything to the worldbuilding process. It's just identifying the reason the world is being built (if there's a world at all).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;50% of the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-video-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;video-games&lt;/a&gt; have been closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of a wiki for the tag is likely 90% of its problem, but the original purpose of the tag (to identify the nature of a creature submitted to the ACS) is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we burn this tag? Or can we come up with a description that actually makes sense from a worldbuilding perspective? I do have the following feelings on the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People tend to not read tag wikis, which means that the majority of people using the tag will continue to use it in the context of, &amp;quot;I'm writing a game....&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I honestly don't see how &amp;quot;I'm writing a game...&amp;quot; has any value to asking a question here. Would it make sense to have tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/book&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-book-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/movie&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movie&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movie&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-movie-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;movie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/screenplay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;screenplay&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;screenplay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-screenplay-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;screenplay&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poem&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-poem-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;poem&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/record&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;record&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;record&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-record-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;record&lt;/a&gt; (as in a music record), &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/just-because&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;just-because&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;just-because&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-just-because-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;just-because&lt;/a&gt;, etc.? I don't see how the reason for building a world helps to understand how to answer any question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oddly, we do have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rpg&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rpg&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rpg&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-rpg-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;rpg&lt;/a&gt; tag. A consequence of this vote may be to burn that tag, too, for the same reasons. Does the fact that you're writing an RPG change the nature of the question? Do we want a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lit-rpg&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lit-rpg&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lit-rpg&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-lit-rpg-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;lit-rpg&lt;/a&gt; tag? Would it lead to specific RPG tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/d-and-d&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;d-and-d&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;d-and-d&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-d-and-d-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;d-and-d&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gurps&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gurps&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gurps&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-gurps-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;gurps&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the other hand...&lt;/em&gt; I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; (maybe...) be convinced that users may want to follow questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video-games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video-games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-video-games-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;video-games&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe they build games themselves and they want to see what worldbuilding problems other game developers have? Assuming that game developers have intrinsically different worldbuilding problems from all other worldbuilders. Which is a strong argument against this particular feeling. (Then I look at all the alternative tags that are rationalized by keeping this one and remember why burning the tag is a good idea.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T17:13:12.683" Title="Should we burn the video-games tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10135" CreationDate="2023-04-24T23:16:03.480" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Burn it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am heavily biased towards games and yet I believe this tag and the RPG one are superfluous here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;video-game&amp;quot; means anything and therefore nothing. Video-games can be your relaxing -yet ironically time-limited- modern farming life simulator or the last stand of humanity with all odds stacked against you. Anywhere in between you can breed cube-shaped sausage dogs together, radio in discoveries during your treks, making surgeries with one hand in the back or complain that your teammate fed &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; the enemy&lt;sup&gt;1, 2&lt;/sup&gt;. Note that I'm not even talking about game-like worlds like most isekais often relying on roleplaying games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of RPGs... Even if you restrict to Role Playing Games, you can find your classic action RPGs in which you take down dragons and cyclopes in batches... Or the complete opposite, where you calmly investigate crimes while your attributes tells how powerful your (insane) inner voices are&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;. This all the while recycling bottles just to pay for another night at the hotel. The term is that wide, and I'm still missing some of its subtleties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of those terms are far too-broad if we look at it as worldbuilders. Video game stores now gives at the very least 5 tags per game because any genre are now so wacky and broad. Even with a whole page description it's sometimes barely enough to know what a video-game is about. We can't nor should spend so much time describing what kind of game we are speaking about here when we are &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And if we tried to rename/subdivide them?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way out is to create tags from the creator's point of view, not the audience's : Game mechanics, tutorials, challenge and reward systems, game loops, etc.. Those are pretty well-defined behind the scenes: If I want to explain better why my player should want to do that, we know it's part of the tutorial regardless of what kind of game world we're in. Those game elements could earn from being supported by its world, like explaining why you don't take fall damage even though you fell for 10 minutes through two portals linked together&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;. It brings glue that helps the player feel more involved in the game, more at one with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we do that -and manage somehow to not make it a &amp;quot;Game development SE v2.0&amp;quot;-, I don't see why we wouldn't do it for other medias as well : movies, novels... It could be interesting to push forward the freedom and constraints of your medium, but it's going to be a prickly topic if we delve into that, for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : In order of appearance, I am talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stardew Valley&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Spell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Last Spell&lt;/a&gt;, Wobbledogs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewatch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firewatch&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgeon_Simulator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Surgeon Simulator&lt;/a&gt; and well, most MOBAs. I let you scout what these games look like on the web and see for yourself the variety :).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : Don't do that though. If you are becoming constantly angry at either a game or its players, you're missing out the whole purpose of it : enjoying the experience. I'd rather have you relax knitting socks than screaming at any of my games, thinking it will somehow &amp;quot;get more fun&amp;quot; for the 50th time.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 : &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Dogma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragon's dogma&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Elysium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Disco Elysium&lt;/a&gt;. Of course there are others, but I think the gap is pretty self-explanatory with those two alone.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4 : Portal. Yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81mzm5ARi9U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this game design choice is explained in game by the prototype boots the character is wearing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-04-24T23:16:03.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10135" CreationDate="2023-04-25T16:20:27.867" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Perhaps create a more general tag?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think it can be useful at times to know what the purpose of a question is. I feel like &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;video-game&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is more specific than we have a use for but &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;gaming&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; might be a better tag, encompassing both video games and rpgs, or perhaps just &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;rules&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;(Note: neither of these tags exist at the moment.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a good use of a gaming tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106517/how-to-limit-the-growth-of-a-magic-item-that-eats-other-magic-items-to-gain-thei&quot;&gt;How to limit the growth of a magic item that eats other magic items to gain their abilities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the RPG tag. As a question for writing a novel, it would make little sense: just do whatever you want. It's your magic system. Fly! Be free! ....but as a roleplaying game, this question is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; about how to gamify his rules. Answers should specifically talk about how to gamify the solution, and the accepted answer does this. Just as a &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; tag constrains answers, so too should &amp;quot;gaming&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only question, then, is whether it's somehow important to distinguish &lt;em&gt;types&lt;/em&gt; of games. Do we need rpg, rts, fps, vr, table-top tags, etc? I can't think of a reason to have multiple gaming tags, but I can see reasons to have &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87437/how-to-rename-a-tag#:%7E:text=Go%20to%20the%20tag%20page,name%2C%20and%20confirm%20until%20done.&quot;&gt;Rename it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. (Sounds like we can create a new tag, merge video-game into it and then merge rpg into the same tag and repeat if there are any other general gaming/rules tags to merge together.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastEditorUserId="8902" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T22:25:28.983" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T22:25:28.983" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10135" CreationDate="2023-04-26T02:20:05.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Rename &amp;amp; Refocus It&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm going to play devil's advocate and suggest either making a new tag, &lt;strong&gt;Game World Mechanics&lt;/strong&gt; into which all these other gaming tags would be folded, or else rename one of the existing gaming tags to this and fold the remaining ones in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale&lt;/strong&gt;: I actually concur with JamieB (*) that it is useful to understand what the underlying purpose of a fictional world is, and I do think that this tag (and even those suggested by JBH) would be useful in guiding respondents in crafting their answers. Jamie brings up a good point about magic mushrooms that eat other magical things. For me, creating a world simply to express creativity, my needs are different from the game designer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would be curious as to science- and metascience-based issues, questions of folkloristic and mythic representation, and ultimately the &amp;quot;how did I do&amp;quot; kind of rate my system questions. A game designer might be more interested in  practical questions of how does a magic mushroom eat a magic rabbit anyway? And if a PC enters the magic mushroom field, how many hp does the PC lose or can he debuff the shrooms in any way on rolling the dice. Yes, that's a delicate balance between &lt;em&gt;game mechanics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;game world mechanics&lt;/em&gt;, but I think it would be a worthwhile category to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Essentially, I need to write an encyclopedia article about thaumophagic mushrooms and then fit them into their biome's relevant folklore and mythology; whilst the game designer needs to consider whether or not such a thing makes sense in the game world, and how such a thing actually interacts with other things in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion&lt;/strong&gt;:  I suggest &lt;em&gt;Game World Mechanics&lt;/em&gt; simply with an eye towards collecting questions that focus on the special needs of the game developer, regardless of the type of game. This tag is not meant to circumvent the third party rule. As with any question here, the world has be the OP's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If the video game tag makes sense at all, I'm simply saying that we should ensure to the best of our ability that all video-game related questions here come from OPs who are actually building their own game and also that the questions relate solely to the game world itself. Since the existing tag has no summary and no wiki, I'm recommending that we either rename it or create a new tag into which the existing tag can be folded and also that it be given a description &amp;amp; wiki entry that makes clear what the tag is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for other parallel tags (RPG, etc) the value that I see in them lies simply in the needs of the querent. Such a tag might prove useful to the respondent in that she could tailor the response to the game maker. Creating a world for book series might involve a Tolkienean labour involving really deep research into a wide variety of specialist topics. Creating a world for a game might be much more restricted. The game developer might not be so keen on years of research for highly detailed worldbuilding when what he wants might be a simpler solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am not suggesting that a whole bunch of game sub-type tags be created. I do suggest that any such tags as already exist (or end up getting made in the future) all be directed to or synonymised with this main tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This tag should not be used to ask questions about the game as separate from the game's world. Questions about &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;how to gamify the rules of the world&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; are as I see it more a matter of &amp;quot;gamebuilding&amp;quot;, and like &amp;quot;storybuilding&amp;quot; is off topic here. Simply put, gamifying the rules gets more into how to translate the rule of the world into computer code, whereas we are focused on the rules of the world and how the various aspects of game design might affect or restrict the development of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Usage&lt;/strong&gt;: The &lt;em&gt;Game World Mechanics&lt;/em&gt; tag would be focused thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions whose solutions are predominantly dependent on them being applicable to games of any kind RPGs (Role-Playing Games), video games, board games, etc. Questions of course must focus on the mechanics or underlying rules of the game world itself as they touch upon the creation of a game, rather than focusing on the mechanics, the rules, or the making of the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-04-30T17:13:12.683" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T17:13:12.683" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10127" CreationDate="2023-04-27T11:39:24.497" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is working as intended: Synonimized tags can't have a description on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T11:39:24.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10103" CreationDate="2023-04-27T11:46:26.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Community Bot works as expected.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FLngV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FLngV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The question was closed, had no answers, and had a negative score. Such questions are routinely deleted after about one week of inactivity. If the question would be undelete, the bot would cull it within a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The answer did not answer the question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only deleted answer does not even &lt;em&gt;attempt&lt;/em&gt; to discuss the actual question, backs up nothing and thus was correctly deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastEditorUserId="25822" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T11:52:43.947" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T11:52:43.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-01T13:14:04.137" Score="-2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about how much damage/the area of effect of a 1/72 cockroach nuke a week or so ago. I got several answers, but It would have been preferable if it stayed open. Here is the link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/245345/how-big-would-the-aoe-destruction-of-a-nuke-72-times-smaller-than-normal-be-assu/245347#245347&quot;&gt;How big would the AoE/destruction of a nuke 72 times smaller than normal be assuming it still works at that scale?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is not just the fact it got closed, but the fact that the close reason is blatantly false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that the close reason was that the post 'was not clear enough/more clarification'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it was not unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked if it would be enough to kill a human in the building, would it total the building, and the range of effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I gave answerers 2 types of nukes to work with, I told them that it would still work despite being 1/72 of the 2 nukes I gave as reference, and told them that the place of detonation was a mansion(or a house if that was easier to answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an unclear question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what happened was certain users got too stuck on the fact that this was not realistic despite me acknowledging that(this is a verse with talking cockroaches that stand upright), and that somehow translated to 'unclear'. This was not marked as hard-science or realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it would be possible to reopen it, I would appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82106" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T07:09:33.183" Title="I think my question on the 1/72 scale nuke should be opened and was closed for blatantly wrong reasons" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|closed-questions|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10143" CreationDate="2023-05-01T15:05:30.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Sorry, this is still unclear&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As JBH pointed out in comments :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is why dividing the consequences of known detonations by 72 isn't enough to solve your problem? If I recall, the Tsar Bomba had a blast radius of about 20 miles. Reduce the Tsar Bomba by a factor of 72 and the blast radius becomes 0.278 miles or about 1500 feet. Doesn't that solve your problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the underlying reason of your question either, especially with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/245347/80336&quot;&gt;answer you accepted as best&lt;/a&gt;. Seeing you already set it's 1/72th the power of another bomb, we trust you are smart to make this formula come to reality (it would likely not be kind from us otherwise ). Moreover, the fact you looked at the variety of nuclear bombs is a proof that you searched -and found!- mineable data to make these calculations a reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if you know the formula to use and the data of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, what actually prevented you to make the last step towards the solution? Said differently, what would have we been able to provide that you couldn't have on your own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make an analogy, it's like if you had the ingredients, tools and recipe to make delicious pancake batter, but still asked how to make it. This doesn't make sense for us : you just have to put the eggs , milk  and flour in the blender as per the instructions, what is stopping you from doing so? Is there something we don't know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This symptom happens generally because we're missing key elements to your question, that it couldn't be &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; easy; In other words, that your question could use a little more explanation of your issue so we don't actually miss your target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-05-01T15:05:30.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10143" CreationDate="2023-05-01T16:27:50.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I voted to reopen.&lt;/strong&gt; Although you already have an accepted answer, so I'm not sure how much more attention it will get, I do think there are more aspects to the question that could be explored, e.g. what it would mean for the &amp;quot;neutron bomb&amp;quot; aspect of nuclear explosions at that scale (continuing with the author's insistence that in his world, the laws of physics allow nukes of this scale to still go boom). i.e., off the top of my head, the smallest nuclear explosion pretty well kills everything within several miles radius due to neutron radiation. Would a 1/72nd scale nuke still have the same radius but with 1/72nd the concentration of radiation? Or would the lethal radiation radius decrease as well? I have no idea. The world may never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to the point, &lt;strong&gt;it is a worldbuilding question&lt;/strong&gt; and is fundamentally on-topic, does not need more detail or clarity for an answer, and I disagree with the close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. the comments in the answers also show that the application of the math isn't so clear that we should assume the asker knows it. &amp;quot;You're smart enough to not need to ask this question therefore we are closing it&amp;quot; is a weird flex, bros, and I frown upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-05-01T16:27:50.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10143" CreationDate="2023-05-01T17:46:36.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Worldbuilding vs Realism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here is a classic issue of tension we have in WB.SE: on one side we have the worldbuilders trying to bring some sense of wonder into the real world --- be that via fantasy or science fiction or superhero stories --- and on the other side, the reality uber alles folks who always say it can't be done go away. I honestly don't understand why they hang around in this forum, when they should be over in the non-fiction section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know I've said this before many times, but I can't stress this enough: our job is to help people build and understand their fictional worlds. It is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to tell people that their fictional world can't exist. That kind of thinking is completely antithetical to what the art of geopoesy is all about and is extremely unwelcoming, especially to newer users. It also fosters a dreadful culture of noncreativity here, perhaps most especially for us older users who find that we have to constantly struggle against those attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our job is simple: we are to take the querent's world &lt;em&gt;as it is described&lt;/em&gt;, not as we would wish it to be described, not as we would think it must be as viewed through the lens of real world science, but &lt;em&gt;as the querent has described it&lt;/em&gt; and to work with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the record, I voted to reopen your query for two reasons: first, on reading it, I found it to be &lt;em&gt;sufficiently&lt;/em&gt; clear and detailed that someone who knows the science and the maths (and it open minded enough to accept the fictional reality) ought to be able to answer. Also, since you got a couple really good answers, including ones with numbers and squiggly maths symbols, it's pretty clear to me that others agreed that the question was sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Secondly, I felt it important to voice opposition to the uber realists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to make up your own rules, then why ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they work despite whatever laws saying they should not then, quite obviously, they will have whatever effect you want them to have. There is no way to actually compute the effect of something which cannot happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples of two comments written by vote to closers. I ask: if these are the attitudes you consistently bring to this forum, when faced by fantastic irrealia, why are you even here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-05-01T17:46:36.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10143" CreationDate="2023-05-02T07:09:33.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's figure out what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; your question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawing heavily on AlexP's comment to the original question, if we were looking at a conventional explosive - for example, a satchel charge - then a 1/72 scale example will have (1/72)^3 the volume/explosive mass of the original.  So, we simply divide original mass by (1/72)^3 and we have the yield.  For example, a human 16 kg satchel charge would translate to approximately 0.043 g of cockroach-scaled satchel charge.  (Actually, it would be hard to build a detonator at that scale, but let's ignore that for now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have stated to ignore the physics that prevent nuclear weapons being built at such a small scale, and (possibly) want to know the yield of a Hiroshima (16 kton yield) device if magically scaled down to cockroach size.  Which gives a yield of 43 kg of TNT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are three options that I can see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are asking us to multiply 16,000 by (1/72)^3.  Answer:  42.8, I'm rounding to 43.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are asking us how much damage 43 kg of TNT would do to an unspecified mansion/house.  Answer:  I need to know more about the mansion/house and what it is made of.  I can take a reasonable stab at this with sufficient information (I have conducted demolitions involving greater amounts of explosive back in the distant past), although it's starting to look like a real-world rather than a worldbuilding question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are asking us something else that I and at least five other experienced users with close-vote privileges cannot work out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand from the way you have asked this question and responded to Tortliena's meta answer here that you are frustrated that people are not &amp;quot;getting it&amp;quot;.  I am trying to step out how it looks to me so you can clarify exactly what you are asking or, possibly, work out the answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48047" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T07:09:33.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-20T16:52:30.937" Score="-2" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that one (or perhaps several) of the votes toward closing my &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/246355/mechanics-of-electromancy&quot;&gt;most recent question&lt;/a&gt; constitute an abuse of voting privileges rather than having legitimate issues with the question. Certainly, some were legitimate, as before editing I was asking about several different, albeit related, topics. However, I do not feel that my question being closed after my edit for 'a lack of details or clarity' is valid, and I feel the votes were cast purely due to the fact that I was having an argument with established members in the comments, rather than having a legitimate reason to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, my question simply asks 'how can the ability to produce negative electric charges be used to power a basic circuit?'. I entirely feel that my post is not lacking the detail or clarity required for that question to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't feel AlexP's vote or complaints to be legitimate (particularly since the vote was only cast after I disagreed with his comment stating my post to be a word salad (he could not point to an example) and that I failed to define the word 'electricity'), the one vote that I feel is a demonstrable abuse of privilege is the one coming from Daron, whose stated reason was 'OP is being antagonistic in comments'. Certainly, I was being antagonistic in the comments, although only in response to the equally antagonistic comments I was receiving. However, I have looked all around the help centre, and I do not see 'OP is being antagonistic' as a legitimate reason to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I am complaining, I feel my post should be reopened (for it to remain illegitimately closed means it recieves less attention, which means I am less likely to receive answers), and I feel Daron is abusing one of his privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I would also like to know how to report or deal with VTCs that I feel to be illegitimate or an abuse of voting powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97848" LastEditorUserId="97848" LastEditDate="2023-05-20T19:00:28.740" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T15:04:42.007" Title="Question closed despite lack of legitimate complaints" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|closed-questions|reopening-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10151" CreationDate="2023-05-21T01:36:12.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Contexting the closure reasons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I voted to close, votes were divided into 3 categories :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 votes for lacking focus,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 vote for lacking details,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and 1 community-specific closure. I haven't checked the sub-reason, but I guess it's this close vote for antagonizing, given the comment and its formalized structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question before your clarifying comment was prone to either opinion-based closure (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it's your world, your magic&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) and lacking details (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;what's your goal with this magic?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). I therefore chose lacking details since it would likely lead to a closure reason I could best understand. I know, that's tactical voting, but I strive to always give the best reason on top of a detailed comment whenever possible .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I told you, I voted to reopen once I got a bit better understanding of the destination answerers should take. I also gave advices to improve on the clarity. I can't help for the focus though, since I don't really know how it's not focused enough in its current state. Perhaps they're just old closure votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About that community-specific closure reason&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because the asker is being antagonistic in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63616707#63616707&quot;&gt;The comment indicating an &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; close vote to the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt;, the author being &amp;quot;antagonistic&amp;quot; is not a valid closure-reason. Posts should be reviewed on their content, not their querent. On top of that, we have to recall that comments are not the post, so it's like punching the cat  while the dog's the actual culprit .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you have other tools at your disposal to punish this kind of behavior, so it's those you have to use. Let's see them so we can better know when and how to use them :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Talk it out&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's... Not technically punishing and not an official tool, but let's be reasonable here. More often than not people act on good will. You don't need to get the law hammer out most of the time. Here are three tips to help in the mediation :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be sure you're on the same page : Most arguments come from misunderstandings. Don't let badly defined terms ruin your friendly talk, rephrase them and contextualize before continuing. Read twice, think thrice so you don't miss anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask why do they think X then listen, wait for the full answer ⌛. Show you actually care about sharing viewpoints, not that you just want to crush them. You can't really debunk an argument which is incomplete anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's getting really spicy, wait ⏳⌛. You're almost never forced to answer right now. You can wait, so can they! Come back tomorrow, and you'll see that all that mutual muttering was kinda meaningless. If not, you'll have a refreshed viewpoint on the matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, you'll get happy that it went well. Ok, perhaps not always as well as hoped, but at least you'll know what you disagree on, and you'll still able to appreciate each other for who they are :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Reminder : If the comments are getting too long, don't hesitate to create a chatroom. Comments are notoriously bad at holding discussions. By the way, I throw in a thanks to the moderators who move chats into actual chats .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Flag&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging is a way of bringing inappropriate content to the attention of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;On flagging posts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the privilegied official tool, when talking out didn't work as expected. If someone is being really unfriendly, flag the comment as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/what-are-the-spam-and-rude-or-abusive-offensive-flags-and-how-do-they-wor/58035#58035&quot;&gt;being rude or abusive&lt;/a&gt;. A moderator will act as a third-party and will normally judge whether it is indeed going too far or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I rarely consider attacking on the arguments a valid form of being rude or abusive, even if I strongly disagree with the expressed opinion. However, attacking the person generally is. This includes notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ad hominem&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You're a bunny-lover, of course you'll protect them, and that's why you're wrong all the way!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_calling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ad personam&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;you're a bad writer, so you can't be right!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) fallacies. When it comes to that, it's just best for everyone to stop entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-05-21T01:45:19.543" LastActivityDate="2023-05-21T01:45:19.543" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10151" CreationDate="2023-05-21T07:33:08.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You might be misunderstanding this site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not one of the close voters, but after reading this post and your question, I think some clarification is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as a perfect question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only person guaranteed to clearly understand any question is the person who wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;culturally appropriate&lt;/em&gt; to use the closure system to enforce the need for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to improve your question, even if only five people in the universe need that clarification. Stack Exchange invites rapid closure because the goal of Stack Exchange is to be a resource for many people seeking help with similar specific problems— and our Stack Exchange Overlords want quality answers. From their perspective, the more detail you, the querent, can provide (by request or by force), the better it is for Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, complaining that people don't understand a question that's obviously clear to you is, well... it either suggests you haven't seriously read the Tour or the Help Center to understand how Stack Exchange and this Stack work... or it's immature. Rather than arguing with anyone (no matter how much you disagree with any comment or answer), take the time to understand their perspective and use that understanding to improve your question. That's &lt;em&gt;always valuable&lt;/em&gt; to everyone, including yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And before I continue, while it's true that occasionally AlexP's rhetoric can be a little rough (look who's talking, I'm not the friendliest person myself), he's also one of the most well informed and intelligent people on this Stack. His opinion is worth considering regardless of how offended you may feel over how he expressed it. While the world isn't full of people as well qualified as AlexP (more's the pity...), it is full of people who will, occasionally or frequently, misunderstand you. Learning to deal with it in a useful manner now will help you greatly in the future. On Stack Exchange, clarity is your responsibility and believing that you're clear is no one's obligation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's move on to what I think the greatest weakness in your question is. Perhaps it's the cause of the difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't understand enough about electricity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every point in space-time when compared to any other point in space-time has a potential difference. You're using the special case of an &lt;em&gt;intentional circuit&lt;/em&gt; to try and rationalize a question that doesn't make as much sense as you think. Your system already allows for what you're trying to do... you just don't understand enough about the physics of electricity to realize that. Why can I make that statement? Because I'm an electrical engineer with decades of experience. Can I prove I'm right? Yup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lightning is, among other things, the conduction of charged particles (including electrons) to ground. High potential in the atmosphere. Low potential in the mantle. It's a complete circuit. Your magic is only replacing the meteorological conditions that create the initial atmospheric charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of more practical interest is a common physics experiment where a high voltage generator is set on one side of a room and the professor holds each of two fluorescent tubes by their ends, one in each hand, pointing one toward the generator and the other away from it. They light up. It's the same principle as the lightning. High potential at the power source... circuit path through an air gap, then the lights (and the professor)... then an earth ground through another air gap on the other side. Your magic is only replacing the high energy generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if you want a trivial example... light bulbs have two conductors. Your magic is applied to one. The other is simply connected to ground, whether that's something complicated or just a wire stuck into the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If what you were trying to ask is how the magic can be applied to a circuit (e.g., must the mage touch the light bulb or can it be applied through an air gap as explained earlier?), then your question is even worse than I've interpreted. That has almost nothing to do with electricity. You have magic. Decide how it's to happen and move on (in other words, VTC:Too Story-Based).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, your poor understanding of electronics made the question confusing to people who don't have my background, education, and experience. One would hope that people who &amp;quot;don't understand the question&amp;quot; would choose not to answer it... &lt;em&gt;except for human nature...&lt;/em&gt; and that's where your obligations as the querent come to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Human nature is to try to help&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless the tone, words, whatever of any comment or answer, people are (almost always) just trying to help. It's your job to give them the benefit of any doubt. In this case, you didn't understand the situation well enough to realize you could improve your question and they didn't understand the situation well enough to see past your limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on Stack Exchange, that's &lt;em&gt;your problem...&lt;/em&gt; not theirs. It's why the various reasons for closing questions exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I've given you enough information in this post to answer your question. If what I've given you doesn't make enough sense, apply yourself to research. To expand on something already mentioned, Stack Exchange's goal is to solve specific problems and not to replace education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you insist on the question being reopened, then take a moment to think about what everyone has said to you and actually take the time to work through their concerns then edit your post to address them. (I realize that you've already edited the question at least once.) Thinking through people's concerns and addressing them will actually benefit you! And it puts everyone on better ground to give you the information you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you again believe that a future question you post needs no improvement (which is always false) and editing it continues to be offensive to you (which is always bad), you'll find your experience here painful. Per the Help Center, edits to questions &lt;em&gt;are encouraged&lt;/em&gt; and closing questions is an expected practice to keep less useful answers from appearing via people who &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they understand what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-05-21T07:33:08.107" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10151" CreationDate="2023-05-23T15:04:42.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to deal with it:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly this. Take it to meta! I see the post has already been voted re-opened by the community, amusingly with no edits in between the close and the reopen (other than &amp;quot;mod moved comments to chat&amp;quot;) which just goes to show, the community does not always agree with the community on closing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find past examples in meta of moderators flat out overruling the community and reopening a closed question too, after a meta complaint drew attention to it. I personally think a number of WB entities play it fast and loose with close votes and it only takes &amp;quot;a few&amp;quot; when you only need 5 votes out of thousands of daily WB readers. It's very much an SE problem, and one that they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388030/339827&quot;&gt;aware of and trying to improve&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why I suspect it happened:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect I'll get downvoted for saying it, but you've run into a classic Worldbuilding SE problem: it's not that your question is bad, off-topic, lacks focus, or anything else. It is indeed a valid worldbuilding question, as you are building a magic system and need help with some of the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you have hit is that your question is actually so specialized that the overwhelming majority of people can't answer it. Because it is outside of their knowledge, they downvote it and/or vote-to-close it. &amp;quot;Your question is too hard, I personally don't understand it, therefore VTC.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do is just pass it by. Not every question must be judged personally by each of us. It's okay to read a question, say &amp;quot;well that one is over my head&amp;quot; and move on. It's okay if a question languishes with 0 votes and 0 answers, too. It doesn't make it a bad question. It might just mean no one knows, or it's too complex for a casual passerby to answer on the fly for fun (but perhaps a sufficiently bored specialist will get to it eventually, so no reason to close it). I don't understand how electricity works well enough to answer your question, therefore I just skip it, while still recognizing that it's a valid question. Would that others could do the same!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I also see one of the people who voted to close it, voted to reopen it, again with no changes in between the close and the open. This, I think, highlights another common SE problem which is &amp;quot;snap firing VTC as the first option&amp;quot; when all they really needed to do was leave a little constructive feedback on how the question could be improved. Clearly they hit that VTC early and one of your edits addressed it but too late! The vote was cast, the close happened. In my (apparently unpopular) opinion, VTC is meant for &lt;em&gt;clear violations&lt;/em&gt; and questions that are almost certainly &lt;em&gt;unredeemable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a few relatively minor tweaks turns a VTC into a VTRO then the VTC was poorly justified to begin with. It should have been a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we can do about it:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep encouraging meta usage in general. This meta post was made 2 days ago, has less than 100 views, and to be honest I only found it because I accidentally hit my meta bookmark when I meant to go to WB. (I do try to check in often though!) We have a hard time reaching a quorum on site policies because you can't have a quorum when it's pretty much the same, like, 5-10 people commenting on everything. People here try to justify their stance based on a comment from 3 years ago with 2 upvotes. I dunno how to improve meta usage (another &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387573/feature-improvement-always-display-sub-stack-meta-posts-in-a-side-bar-on-their&quot;&gt;general SE problem&lt;/a&gt;) but I'd love to see policy decisions guided on 30+ upvotes instead of 0-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T15:04:42.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-23T23:17:28.067" Score="11" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; Amber's original question has been undeleted and the new question closed as a duplicate. It looks like that new question has since been deleted (honestly, it didn't need to be this complicated...). The old question has been updated with the new question's text, so to experience the fullness of this post, you need to click the question's &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; link and look at the history.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Anyway...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently @LiveInAmbeR posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/246491/40609&quot;&gt;a question about how robots could detect medical issues&lt;/a&gt;. After a series of comments, Amber chose to delete the question. I was disappointed by that as I don't believe Amber should have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because the linked question has been deleted, you may need a minimum amount of reputation to see it. In other words, if you click the above link and the page appears blank, it's because you don't yet have enough experience on the Stack. I believe I've provided enough information to be helpful without the need to read the original post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I do not have Amber's permission to use the post as a case study and if Amber asks I'll have this Meta post deleted, but I think it's a good case study in what weak comments can do to a question.&lt;/s&gt; Thanks, Amber, for granting permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be about a third-party property, off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment was most likely made because the question has at least the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many robots in fiction have this superpower where can stare at a cake and tell you its exact chemical composition (likely using some kind of spectrometer). However, since the robots themselves don't need to eat, how can they tell that a human being is malnourished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Detective Del Spooner : Human beings get hungry. Even dogs get hungry, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot tell if a human is starving? Can a robot tell if a... human has a case of low blood sugar?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonny : Can you?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;–That's probably how the quote went, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amber did not ask a question about a 3rd-party or commercial world. Amber did refer to a common trope in Science Fiction and did use a clever bit of writing from the movie &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; to demonstrate the reason why the question had been asked. Amber also referred to Asimov's laws of robotics (even though they're not really germane to the question). So, the first commenter jumped to the conclusion that the question was about a commercial world and failed to realize that their comment was inappropriate. Amber's question did not violate the 3rd-party/Commercial World restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second Comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a robot tell whether a person is alive? How can a robot tell whether a car needs oil? How can a non-car robot tell whether something is a car? How can a grey metal robot tell whether something is blue or yellow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiously, the commenter is frankly &lt;em&gt;restating the very question Amber is asking.&lt;/em&gt; I admit that I'm about to judge the commenter without sufficient information, but it appears the commenter was trying to point out the belief that the question, perhaps, couldn't be answered. In reality, &amp;quot;robots&amp;quot; do all those things all the time (e.g., your car knows when it needs oil...). The argument that a robot isn't a car (it's not checking it's own oil!) is the whole point of the question. Therefore, this comment suggests the commenter didn't understand the potential of the question or its value if someone could answer it, but it might have left Amber with the idea that the question was somehow unworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can a human tell whether something is a car?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was in response to Amber wondering why the second comment had been posted. How does a human tell whether something is a car? Well... we have a &amp;quot;database&amp;quot; of associative images that identify objects as &amp;quot;cars&amp;quot; on a sliding scale of probability depending on the quality of the pattern match. We call this &amp;quot;thinking.&amp;quot; Computers do this &lt;em&gt;all the time.&lt;/em&gt; They identify cars, faces, stock value patterns, and lots of other things. In other words, for some reason the commenter didn't realize that this ability &lt;em&gt;already exists.&lt;/em&gt; But it might have left Amber wondering even more if the question was worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fourth Comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth comment was deleted before Amber deleted the question. I posted an observation that, as asked, there were two questions that were distinct enough that the should be separated before I cast a vote to close for asking too many questions. Amber immediately edited the question to focus on the most important issue and I deleted my comment, up-voted the response comment (and the question), and started writing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you're thinking one of the reasons I'm writing this post is that I'm peeved I couldn't post my answer. OK, you're right. I am peeved... but I also think this issue is a very good case study that could lead to better Stack behavior.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fifth Comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're making assumptions about robots based on existing fiction. There is no such thing as the first law of robotics. Something to that extent is likely to be implemented, but not at all inevitable. Similarly with robophobia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amber's response to this was &amp;quot;Not worth asking. Got it.&amp;quot; after which Amber deleted the question. I believe that was (IMO) the wrong conclusion and the wrong action to take. This is a case of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8008/40609&quot;&gt;judging the backstory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; Ultimately, the entire discussion in Amber's post involving the laws of robotics &lt;em&gt;had nothing to do with the question.&lt;/em&gt; If an argument could be made in this regard, it would be that Amber didn't specify the technological level the respondents should deal with. I started writing a response because I thought today's technology was a perfectly reasonable springboard to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My point and the reason for the case study&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you'll find in common here is that, with the exception of my own comment (which gave specific direction as to how to overcome my concern, direction that was adopted), the comments were vague complaints based on a failure to read the question from the perspective of &amp;quot;what's really being asked here?&amp;quot; The consequence of them was to lead Amber to believe that the question &lt;em&gt;wasn't worth asking.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, in fact, it was very much worth asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all make mistakes. I've made plenty of my own. But if you, dear reader, feel inclined to leave a comment that even remotely expresses the idea that a question is inadequate, please have the moral fortitude to clearly explain what your issue is, why it's an issue, and how the OP can fix it. No users should be members of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=peanut+gallery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;peanut gallery&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-05-25T00:10:24.470" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T16:31:43.223" Title="Case Study: The Consequence of Inadequate Comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|community|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10155" CreationDate="2023-05-24T22:37:58.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I read the re-edited question and answered it - I think some of the comments do have a merit: In particular, this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can a robot tell whether a person is alive? How can a robot tell whether a car needs oil? How can a non-car robot tell whether something is a car? How can a grey metal robot tell whether something is blue or yellow?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the commenter is posing the series of questions to lead the OP to the realization that the answer is 'Much the same way that Humans do'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, is it a bit Passive Aggressive? Sure. Is it something I would comment? Probably not. Does it add to the question? In some ways I think it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own answer was very much based on the idea of how would I recognize this in other humans and then putting it in terms that a Robot could use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T22:37:58.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10155" CreationDate="2023-05-25T14:29:15.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went back and read the original question and kinda wonder why there was any issue to begin with. Here are the two areas that seemed to raise the &amp;quot;more than one question&amp;quot; flag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do robots know that a person has been well fed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's specialised equipment, what is the robot equipped with? If it's pre-existing senses, how does it make use of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, &lt;em&gt;this is not more than one question.&lt;/em&gt; Clearly the second and third &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot; are just trying to help define the singular problem. It could be rephrased as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How do robots know that a person has been well fed? Define what equipment would be necessary and how it could be used.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, that's better, but only because doing it the first way apparently confuses WB readers and makes them vote to close things unnecessarily and request edits that also aren't really necessary. It's rules lawyering. I think the other comments then just piled on the negativity to the point the asker decided it was easier to just delete the question, when the question was perfectly fine in the original posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do feel like WB in particular has issues with something between snark and rules-lawyering that makes us appear unfriendly and it's not clear to me what's driving it. It's not like we are flooded daily by low quality posts and really need to raise the bar to levels of perfection, &amp;quot;or else&amp;quot;. TheDemonLord's answer seems exactly right, helps to build a world, and applied just as well to the original question. All the editing and piling on didn't change the underlying question, didn't change the answer, and was unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My real ask would be for the community to be a little more generous in wiggle room, and taking the effort to see what the asker is asking. We aren't counting question marks or proposing that the asker could just &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/245345/8902&quot;&gt;answer the question themselves&lt;/a&gt;. For sure we need to get people to arrange questions that are one problem at a time, and involve building a world, but this should be a fun Stack overall, with a friendly atmosphere, and it seems to me over the last couple years it has taken a dive into a handful of people looking for reasons to go &amp;quot;Ah ha! Your question sucks! VTC!&amp;quot;, and under SE rules, it only takes a few people to turn a whole Stack unfriendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-05-25T14:29:15.543" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10155" CreationDate="2023-05-26T16:31:43.223" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, like 99% of the questions posted asking &amp;quot;how can I make X do Y?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how can I justify X in a believable manner?&amp;quot;, is a waste of bytes because it completely misses the point &lt;strong&gt;that X doesn't need to be explained&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone ever read &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; and thought to themselves &amp;quot;how does the magic work?&amp;quot; Nope. Has anyone ever read a science-fiction novel with faster-than-light travel and asked themselves &amp;quot;how can they do that while violating the laws of physics&amp;quot;? Again, no. And yet literally every day there's a new question posted here that asks something along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're spending your time trying to justify why your world is the way it is, you've already failed at building it. The &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; of a feature of your world is an insignificant detail that people who choose to involve themselves in that world are quite honestly not going to care about. Build your world as you desire it to be, and they will come; obsess over the bits that don't matter, and nobody will care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T16:31:43.223" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2023-05-31T17:14:01.490" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Accepted Answer Violates SE's Abusive behavior policy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stack exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct/abusive-behavior&quot;&gt;abusive behavior policy&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure that all users feel safe and welcome, we do not allow behaviors or content that cause or contribute to an atmosphere that &lt;strong&gt;excludes, marginalizes, or dehumanizes individuals or communities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and goes on to define Bullying and Harassment as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Severe, repeated, or persistent unsolicited conduct, &lt;strong&gt;misuse of power or tools, or attacks that target specific users or groups of people in a manner that causes harm&lt;/strong&gt;. Content that contributes to a hostile or threatening environment, denies a person's expressed gender identity, or invalidates a person's individual experiences in a manner that causes harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand how this is a violation of the abusive behavior policy, you need to first understand that not all people solve problems the same way. People in the autism spectrum typically suffer from a Mnesic Imbalance limiting them to solving problems using only top-down (concept-before-the-details) or bottom-up (details-before-the-concept) thinking. This does not mean that people with a Mnesic Imbalance are not intelligent, people at both ends of this disorder are both common and very capable thinkers given reasonable accommodation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By enforcing a policy against High Concept Questions you are saying that to use this platform, you MUST be a bottom up thinker which discriminates against and excludes many people Mnesic Imbalances because they literally can not get to the details until they have figured out the high concept.  The high concept is not just an author's choice. Just like the smaller more specific rules, it must be cohesive with reality and/or the reader's expectations to create a believable setting.  While some authors are better at building up the high concept from smaller details, this is not universal writing style and the variance in different author's cognitive abilities deserve to be accommodated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Few Frame Challenges&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several common misconceptions in the OP's question that have lead him to believe there is a problem with asking High Concept questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two obvious problems with this kind of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too broad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a misunderstanding here about what &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; means.  A question can itself be very broad, but still compel a simple and concise answer.  High Concepts are by definition ideas that encompass a lot of other ideas, but can itself be treated as a single idea.  So, if you ask a broad question about the tree density in a forest, then an answer breaks down every type of forest and all the hundreds of different kinds of trees that live in each one... it's is not really answering the question as asked; so, it's not the OPs fault that the person answering him sees it as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; when a simple statistical average would have answered the question just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion Based means that the OP is asking for your opinion, not that a question might be answered with an opinion.  If you do not know HOW to answer a question without just stating an opinion, then you as the person answering should just not try.  Leave it open and let the next guy try to figure it out.  I've seen countless questions over the years get VtCed as opinion based because someone could only think of opinions to answer with and then go on to be answered with an extremely factual, well researched, and highly rated answer. Opinion Based VtC means that you are expressly asking for an opinion, not that it might be answered with an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOT OPIONION BASED:&lt;/strong&gt; Assume Earth and history as we know it, but in my world, Hitler died from whooping cough as a baby. What is my world like after this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OPIONION BASED:&lt;/strong&gt; In my world, Hitler died from whooping cough as a baby. Is this a good idea for a story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless: in practice they have just asked us to do their work as an author for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No they haven't.  If they ask for a High Concept, and you can only figure our how to answer it with a list of details, that is your fault, not theirs.  If they ask for help with a High Concept, then just address the High Concept.  There is still tons of work that comes after that in filling out the details that they can do on thier own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Solution: High Concept Questions need High Concept Answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summery, if you see a question asking for help with a high concept, then answer the question as it is asked and only as it is asked.  In your head you might be able to break down thier question into 100 parts and answer them each accordingly, and extrapolate a whole setting from thier one question... but if that's not what was asked, then just don't do it.  Only if they expressly ask for all the low level details should you VtC it as being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Spotting the difference between a Good and Bad High Concept Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume Earth and history as we know it, but in my world, Hitler died from whooping cough as a baby. What is my world like after this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good High Concept question because it asks for a vague answer to a specific question.  A vague answer in this context means that you are talking in probabilities and generalizations instead of specific details.  A vague answer tells you what direction to go in without dictating each step you must take.  So a good answer to a question like this might read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History would mostly have stayed the same because Hitler only highlighted existing social problems.  Fascism, Racism, and bitterness about WWI would all happen with or without Hitler.  If he did not take power as he did, then someone like him, influenced by the same environment and principles would have likely risen to take his place.  So, you might see some minor changes here and there, but you'd still probably see the rise of a powerful and militant fascist Germany in the mid-20th century leading to a similar future as our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can see that the question can be answered following facts and evidence without going into a whole cascade of details and similar possible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bad high High Concept Question is when someone asks for specific details about a topic that is too broad to answer in specific details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume Earth and history as we know it, who would I have to kill as a baby to prevent WWII?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too specific for a High-Level Concept because it can be answered too many ways.  Millions of people contributed to WWII and killing off any given person or group of people might be able to prevent the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume Earth and history as we know it, but in my world, Hitler died from whooping cough as a baby. How would each decade from then until now have changed because of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too specific for a High-Level Concept because it can only be answered with an exhaustive list of ideas and possibilities where each variable splinters off more ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="57832" LastEditDate="2023-06-02T14:30:28.267" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T14:30:28.267" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3063" CreationDate="2023-06-01T16:46:15.673" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was perusing other topics with &amp;quot;Case Study&amp;quot; in the name and happened upon this one. It's still relevant today so pardon the bump!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something on my mind is whether or not there is a line between &amp;quot;storybuilding&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot; or if that matters at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;: you need help with fundamental building blocks of a world, without which your entire book or whatever falls apart. &amp;quot;My story involves 500 foot tall giants in the real world with no magic, can I...&amp;quot; Nope. Sorry, you can't build that world. Gonna need to add some magic or a technobabble version of magic because your 500 foot tall giants are gonna have problems and everything about your idea is now in shambles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt;: you need help with some very specific item that makes your story work but arguably is not exactly part of a &amp;quot;world&amp;quot;. How many nanobots you can have in your blood sounds like storybuilding. That is, it doesn't really matter if the answer is 7 billion or 74 trillion -- the answer impacts your story but does not seem like it would fundamentally alter the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent example that got me thinking: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/246810/how-long-could-a-soldier-expect-to-stay-effective-while-wearing-high-level-haz&quot;&gt;How long could a soldier expect to stay effective while wearing &amp;quot;High-Level&amp;quot; HazMat protective equipment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, he needs to know the answer in order to make his story functional, and historically this has been the place to ask that kind of thing, but one could also argue that it's &amp;quot;too story based&amp;quot;. It is not building a world. It's answering a necessary question for a particular story element, without which, the story may change, but not the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said,&lt;/strong&gt; I think all of the above examples are acceptable here. We actually do Storybuilding in addition to Worldbuilding, &lt;em&gt;not to be confused with story-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the (mostly?) accepted line between &amp;quot;story-based&amp;quot; (a decision made by a character, or a plot point) versus &amp;quot;not story-based&amp;quot; (anything else you need to make your story make sense) is fine, though I'm not sure everyone is on the same page, but it means every example above is on-topic for this site (even the bullet from space one, because while it's really &amp;quot;storybuilding&amp;quot;, it is a necessary element without which that story doesn't work. Can you get sniped by a .50 cal from space? Nope, gonna need to fix your story. It is what we do here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T16:46:15.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-04T23:46:54.773" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days after I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/246646/what-is-a-plausible-sex-determination-system-with-males-females-and-multiple-he&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I hitting upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/246771/34687&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; potential answer to it and posted it to get feedback on it, but the only response to it was strictly to tell me how to use superscripts (I hadn't figured out how when I originally submitted the answer); absolutely nobody seemed interested in looking it over and giving their opinion or pointing out any possible shortcomings in it, even though I had immediately added a notice to the top of my OP to draw attention to the existence of my answer right after I had posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to remedy this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34687" LastEditorUserId="39754" LastEditDate="2023-06-07T19:54:25.533" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T03:47:29.087" Title="Found a potential answer to my own question, but didn't get feedback on it. How do I fix that?" Tags="|discussion|answers|self-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10162" CreationDate="2023-06-05T05:02:49.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask a new question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty system exists to attract attention to questions.  However, there is no equivalent system to seek feedback on answers - people may comment to suggest improvements and/or upvote, ignore or downvote as they wish.  Creating a mechanism for someone to draw attention to their answer in preference to others could unfairly skew voting patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am extrapolating from a sample of one (myself) here, but I suggest that part of the issue is that a relatively small number of community members have the knowledge to assess the quality of answers - I certainly don't!  (With only 17 net upvotes between the answers to a clearly articulated question, I am reasonably confident of this theory.)  The highest-voted answer was posted the same day that you asked the question, while your answer and a number of others were posted three days later.  (Two of those answers each received two upvotes.)  So it is possible that the few people with interest and knowledge in the subject had mostly lost interest in the question after three days, with the few stragglers preferring the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another part of the problem may be due to the wording of your answer.  The hesitant nature of the final line &amp;quot;How plausible is this model?&amp;quot; made it read as if you are not confident in your own proposal.  No one jumped in with comments saying, &amp;quot;No, that couldn't work!&amp;quot; but voters are less likely to upvote an answer that you seem lukewarm on yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really like your self-posted answer compared to the alternaties and want to reality-check it further, then you could post it as a reality check question.  However, you will need to do a bit of work to make sure that the new question is not closed as a duplicate of the question you have already asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48047" LastActivityDate="2023-06-05T05:02:49.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10162" CreationDate="2023-06-08T03:47:29.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please understand the nature of Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the Tour, Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum. The limit to evaluating answers — if there is any participation at all — is to up/down vote the answer. Providing an answer that you don't think is an answer and so you're looking for feedback about (presumably) it's suitability as an answer is literally not what Stack Exchange does. Therefore, it's not surprising at all that you didn't receive any feedback. From our perspective (and the perspective of Stack Exchange) all you did was submit another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that the stated purpose of Worldbuilding.SE is to help you build imaginary worlds. We provide the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags because we understand that some people are seeking specific, scientifically-supported details for their problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But the further your question is from the baseline of the tag, the less we can do to help you unless you're only looking for ideas to help you rationalize your fiction. As your desire to make &amp;quot;as realistic as possible&amp;quot; your fantastic idea increases, the meaningfulness of those tags decreases.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many users — notably new users — don't understand that limitation. Those three tags do not trump the stated purpose of this Stack: to help you build an imaginary world. This Stack's purpose is not to help you make your fiction factual. At best, it's to help you make your fiction believable. I believe you've fallen into the trap of believing we can help you make your fiction factual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm going to diverge from your main question for a moment and point out the types of questions on Main that reflect the Stack's goals and those that don't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An example that reflects our goals:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a creature on my world and I want that creature to behave in the following way: [insert detailed description of behavior]. Are there any terrestrial creatures that exhibit behavior similar to this I can use to model my creature? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creature-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creature-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-creature-design-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;creature-design&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's good about this first example is that we can find the querent real-world examples that are similar to or reflect the idea of what they're trying to achieve, and this meets their (and our) goal of creating a fictional creature that behaves in a way that helps the readers of their story suspend their disbelief. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag tells us to limit the Real World examples we find to only those that specifically reflect the behavior the querent is trying to model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compare this to the same question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;. In that case, while respondents are expected to still bring science to bear, they are free to use related but not demonstrative examples to extrapolate a possibility. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; = science + imagination to rationalize an idea. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; = science to rationalize an idea. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; = prove the science will rationalize the idea or don't bother answering.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An example that doesn't:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use as an example a popular form that isn't intended to reflect your question on Main. It's just so darn common that it will help to use it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a creature on my world and I want that creature to behave in the following way: [insert detailed description of behavior]. How could this behavior evolve? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-biology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-xenobiology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's bad about this second example is the querent is demanding real science to justify a fantastic creation — as if it can legitimately exist in the real world and this would be proven if they could just find the right person to answer the question, and this meets their goal (but not ours) of creating, not a fictional creature, &lt;em&gt;but a real creature that would actually exist if only God or evolution got around to making one.&lt;/em&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is used because the querent wants to be absolutely positively sure that no answers are given that can't completely explain the fiction factually — and that assumes the querent read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; wiki at all (which is a big deal because that tag has rules...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example is a request to help build an imaginary world. If you think about it, &lt;em&gt;the second one isn't.&lt;/em&gt; It's a request to make an imaginary world, real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To return to your original question...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for that diversion is to help you understand how this Stack operates. Sometimes people think Stack Exchange is someplace they can go to replace a lack of education. That's not it at all. Stack Exchange is intended to be a place where people who have exhausted all other avenues of opportunity, &lt;em&gt;including an education,&lt;/em&gt; can go to find help solving a specific problem with the assistance of experts who may have experience the querent doesn't yet have. I apologize, that was probably a hard slap on the wrist, but it's why no one evaluated your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From our perspective, your answer was expected to be as valid and well-thought-out as every other answer. We just assumed you'd done some research and found a solution and we expected you would reward yourself with the coveted green check mark. It never even crossed our minds that you might be uncertain about your answer — because answers are supposed to be coming from experts and we simply assumed you'd discovered that expertise.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weird, right? Well... that's how Stack Exchange is expected to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; We completely understand that when it comes to building imaginary worlds, there are experts in the &lt;em&gt;process,&lt;/em&gt; but not necessarily in the specific issue someone might ask about. In other words, no one is an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-magic-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt;. But that doesn't change the fundamental premise of how Stack Exchange works. The answers are expected to be intrinsically useful and challenged only if someone who (at least theoretically) knows better sees a flaw. Well... assuming anyone read the answer (no obligation, and it might not have been read by anyone), it might be worth thinking about something: no one saw a flaw that caused them to make a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the answers you received were, apparently, sufficient for your needs, so you did more research and posted your own answer, but you're not sure if that meets your needs, either. But Stack Exchange's purpose isn't to analyze answers and determine why they don't meet your needs or whether or not they're even legitimate.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to resolve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can ask questions about your specific question in &lt;em&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/em&gt; chat room. Unlike Main or here, any question you want to ask may be asked there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can present your question to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where you can receive help perfecting your question before you post it on Main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should carefully read the Tour and the Help Center (at least the first two pages) to better understand the intent and limits of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a final word of advice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should remember that while trying to create something &amp;quot;as realistically as possible&amp;quot; is laudable, there are very real and very practical limits involved. Science is far (very, very, very far) from answering all questions and it's not as capable of extrapolating something &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; from a hypothesis as you might think. Besides, when it comes to writing a story, perfect detail isn't the practical goal you might think it is. There are very good reasons why most SciFi/Fantasy writers &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; create all the details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;That's one of the reasons why AI such as the ChatGPT chat bot have been banned on Stack Exchange — they read well, but their quality is suspect, and Stack Exchange doesn't want to be in the business of policing the veracity of answers. It only wants to be in the business of being the source for veritable answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T03:47:29.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-12T15:35:19.450" Score="7" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I define &amp;quot;vexatious questions&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as a series of questions from the same user that are minor iterations on a theme or idea. The first question in the series contributed to worldbuilding. The rest of them are, for practical purposes, duplicates of the first and are not contributing to worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Periodically we encounter a user who asks the same basic question over and over. Some of the most heinous examples were abuses of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2797/40609&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt;, but there are times when a user gets an idea stuck in his/her head and can't let it go. I'm hesitant to offer examples because I don't want to single anyone out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we all like lots of questions to be asked (see &amp;quot;mindless social fun,&amp;quot; below...), the goal of Stack Exchange is to be a clearing house for useful information and our Stack Exchange Overlords would prefer that no stack be cluttered up with questions that don't bring value to the service. This is, indeed, the reason for the &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; close reason.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And each vexatious question subsequent to the first is (without explicit justification) a duplicate of the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this query because there are potentially multiple reasons for this problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This could be due to forgetfulness, meaning the user has forgotten the previous questions were asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This could be due to intellectual &amp;quot;blinders&amp;quot; that keep the user from applying what they learned from previous questions to the current case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This could be due to a variety of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obsessive-compulsive disorder&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This could be a violation of the Help Center prohibition against &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;mindless social fun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past I've down voted the question and left a comment with a link to a search that lists the multiple questions along with a &amp;quot;what is different about this question that wasn't answered by the previous questions?&amp;quot; kind of statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a handful of really egregious cases, I voted to close questions 2 through the last as duplicates of the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be our policy concerning vexatious questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; In a comment to @IchtysKing's answer I made a point that I believe deserves to be repeated and expounded upon here. One of the goals of this Stack is to help people learn the process of building worlds. One measure of either our failure to teach that lesson or the user's failure to learn it is the presence of vexatious questions. Vexatious questions are fundamentally an abuse of Stack Exchange, but if they're not simply &amp;quot;mindless social fun,&amp;quot; then they might indicate that a problem exists with the effort to teach and/or understand the process of worldbuilding (and the process of learning from the Stack Exchange experience). Senior users like myself need to make a conscientious effort to compassionately help younger users realize what we're trying to do. On the other hand, younger users would benefit greatly from meekly realizing they're not achieving a valuable goal. This post frankly focuses on the former, because (despite our hopes otherwise) we cannot control that latter.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;It might be a little harsh to relate a series of fundamentally duplicate questions to the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/vexatious_litigation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vexatious lawsuits&lt;/a&gt; as there isn't any malice involved. But I'm doing it because the action is pestiferous.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm making this point because some users may think that I'm making a tempest in a teapot. Maybe I am. But if Stack Exchange didn't care about the number of low quality questions they wouldn't have a &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; close reason and the value of each question added to a vexatious question list is lower than the previous.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T07:56:14.657" LastActivityDate="2023-06-22T21:06:12.197" Title="How should we deal with &quot;vexatious questions?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|asking-questions|users|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10165" CreationDate="2023-06-12T20:16:33.803" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Assume the Best; Insist on the Awesomely Sufficient&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Assume the Best&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think the best approach to any problem that, ultimately, distils down to a &lt;em&gt;personal issue&lt;/em&gt; (in this case the querent's) is to assume the best intentions of the querent. By this, I would propose that any policy not dwell on the personality of the querent. I know &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; you mean in this case, but I don't know that person outside of WB.SE nor any of their internal struggles or issues. I'm certain you're not suggesting that we base policy on a person's issues, but I wish to make my perspective clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Insist on the Best&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That leaves the other half of my solution: that we should insist on the best from both querents and respondents. By this I mean that whenever I choose to respond to a query, I hold myself to a high standard of providing a good answer. I may fail in meeting the standard, but my responses should be: holistic (taking into account the entirety of the querent's world system); focused (answering the specific query); insightful (answers should be &amp;quot;factually correct&amp;quot; as well as connecting the dots between real world knowledge and fictional world subrealia); entertaining (I want for the querent and also the rest of you to enjoy reading my answers as much as I enjoyed writing them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I also think it is fair of our community to insist that querents adhere to a standard of question writing as well. We do this through various policies, references and helpful resources that corral the querent's writing abilities into a product that reflects their best efforts. For example, we insist that questions reflect the querent's own work (no third party questions), that questions be about the world itself (not story based), and that they be answerable (not a long list of brainstorming ideas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Vexatious questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These kinds of questions fall into a kind of grey area. Grey because, as you rightly note, they might be repetitious to the point of being duplicates, but also because this assumption rests on us the readers, not the querent. In other words, you see these as repetitious while another person sees them as distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My proposal is that when we find queries like these, we should always do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if we think there is a &lt;em&gt;pattern&lt;/em&gt; in the querent's writing (would X1 do Y, would X2 do Y, would X3 do Y); we must comb all the questions carefully do determine whether or not the pattern is a surface artifact or a deep issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if we determine that the pattern is trivial we have to consider possible actions. First, we should always try to engage the querent. Ask them &amp;quot;this is the third nearly identical query you've asked: is there some historical, anthropological, cultural, religious, cognitive, etc reason why this series is being asked?&amp;quot; We should insist that the querent edit all their questions to adhere to the Best.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we should not be afraid to insist on a cease and desist. If the pattern is something deep in the creatures of the world in question, that's fine. That then becomes the answer to all further questions along this line, and we should feel confident in insisting that the querent find a new line of questioning to pursue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the rationale doesn't pass muster, then VTC. There are several valid rationales ranging from being story based to being duplicates. If we honestly see our community as a &amp;quot;clearing house for useful information&amp;quot;, then we shouldn't be afraid to close questions that we find to be non-useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;likewise, downvote a non-useful question. If the first question in the series was seen as useful, then upvote that one. Encourage the vexatious querent to ask good and useful questions while discouraging them from asking poor and repetitious questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Vexatious Lawsuits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't think the comparison is overly harsh at all. Just as the legal system has to fairly, justly and compassionately deal with such things, so do we here. There is a subset of vexatious lawsuit that has arisen from the sovereign citizen movement. The movement has become so vexatious that it is now considered to be a form of domestic terrorism in the US. I am not suggesting that we raise the asking of vexatious question here in WB.SE to the level of terrorism, but I am suggesting that if the activity is seen as detrimental to the community then its proponents ought to be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a vexatious querent asks a question, that's fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they ask a formal duplicate, then assume the best. Remind them that they just asked this question a short while back and this could be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they ask a third, do as you suggest and vote to close the question; downvote it and give a link to the search results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they ask a fourth, vote to close and down vote. Insist that the querent stop asking duplicate queries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they ask a fifth, vote to close, downvote and escalate to moderators.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moderators should be prepared to suppress the activity by giving the user a temporary ban. If the user earns two or three moderator interventions, then ban them. The ban should be given only after so many infractions simply so that no one can accuse our moderators of abuse or our community of personal bias. It should be obvious that the vexatious querent is bringing this on themselves.  It should also be obvious that the ban is being issued for matters of &lt;strong&gt;action&lt;/strong&gt; not matters of personal behavioural traits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-06-22T21:06:12.197" LastActivityDate="2023-06-22T21:06:12.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10165" CreationDate="2023-06-12T22:44:36.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First up - I can think of a few users/question series that spring to mind from your description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally take the viewpoint that Policy is too heavy-handed in the majority of cases for these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the Duplicate close reason is more than sufficient in 99% of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasons is that if the question is so similar to the previous question(s) that there is unlikely to be any meaningful differentiation in the answers - then closing as a Duplicate is warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question isn't so similar to the previous question - then most of the time I'm happy to let it stand on it's own feet. It might be that the asker has been working on their story/world/game/idea and hit another snag, based off of the progress they made from the previous question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are interesting worlds that people come up with, with multiple interesting scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally - if there is a question that although unique, but we feel is being 'over-asked' - I would put my VTC with a comment saying something like 'This is the Nth time you've asked a question like this in X hours - I'm closing for now as I think you need to pause and re-think your idea a bit' or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If enough regulars recognized the pattern and agreed with the vote - then it would get closed. If we felt that liberties were being taken, we could flag for the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a formal policy is needed - that the collective wisdom of Netizens is sufficient to police the grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-06-12T22:44:36.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10165" CreationDate="2023-06-13T11:33:03.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Different problems can need different solutions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I smelt &lt;strong&gt;aluminum&lt;/strong&gt; with low temperatures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I smelt &lt;strong&gt;copper&lt;/strong&gt; with low temperatures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I smelt &lt;strong&gt;iron&lt;/strong&gt; with low temperatures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the metal in question, these questions are completely identical. However, the answers to these three questions are completely different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aluminum won't be extracted at all, as it must be electrolysed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copper will be extracted in a liquid form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iron will be extracted, but will form a solid spongy mass&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you expect someone with questions about metallurgy to extrapolate the existence of sponge iron from just the knowledge that aluminum requires electrolysis to extract? If not, why would you demand similar leaps of knowledge out of worldbuilders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the answers to these variant questions may ultimately be the same as the original, &lt;em&gt;but the querent does not know that&lt;/em&gt;. If they did, they wouldn't be asking the question in the first place (or at least they would also answer it themselves)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, there is no issue here to deal with: These 'vexatious questions' are nothing more than questions which consider similar subjects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75161" LastActivityDate="2023-06-13T11:33:03.587" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-14T15:25:34.963" Score="3" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is evident that many of the people who use it either don't read the guidance, or are very confused about the scientific accuracy of a lot of popular media. I suspect they &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they know what &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; means, and use the tag blindly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might replace it with, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;scientifically-proven&lt;/code&gt; which would have the same guidance as the current &lt;code&gt;hard-science&lt;/code&gt; tag. Its meaning is less obvious, which might reduce the incidence of assumed meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd add &amp;quot;this is not compatible with &lt;code&gt;super-powers&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22020" LastEditorUserId="22020" LastEditDate="2023-06-14T17:00:42.610" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T06:19:16.010" Title="Should the hard-science tag be retired?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|hard-science|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-14T15:32:48.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how a change of label on the box would change the (mis)use of its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same misuse happens with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt;, and it has been years since someone has flagged their &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question for a moderator to apply the post notice. Some users even complained that their answer was fine since the notice was not there when they answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the community should put more effort into addressing the misuse with the poster and have them understand the correct use and where applicable edit it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-06-14T17:31:16.237" LastActivityDate="2023-06-14T17:31:16.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-15T08:56:14.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there are three guarantees in life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Death&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taxes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users won't read tag wikis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get what you're trying to do, but I believe that at best it will shift the focus of the problems. I don't believe it will reduce the number of problems at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider one of my most frustrating suspicions: I think a remarkable number of users who use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;actually get what it basically means...&lt;/em&gt; and they're using it to force the community to give them the highest-quality, most-realistic answer to their ridiculously fantastic and utterly nonsensical fictional question. I've been politely calling this an effort to make their fiction factual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unfortunately, I believe this is a growing trend based on entertainment like the movie&lt;/em&gt; Interstellar, &lt;em&gt;the TV show&lt;/em&gt; The Expanse, &lt;em&gt;a cornucopia of nearly useless YouTube videos purporting to explain science-fiction wrapped in a flag labeled &amp;quot;science,&amp;quot; etc., which have made a big deal of being &amp;quot;as realistic as possible&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;based on real science.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, people who haven't a college education in the hard sciences don't have the wherewithal to realize that those shows and videos are breathtaking fantasy regardless whatever science was used in their making.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the name as you propose wouldn't fix that problem at all. It might make it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the other hand...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a good reason to (permanently) retire the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, it would be the shift that's occurring in how users are using this Stack. Per the Help Center, our goal is to help people create imaginary worlds. In other words, our goal is to help people &lt;em&gt;rationalize&lt;/em&gt; ideas — often drawing on Real World examples or science — to make their imaginary worlds &lt;em&gt;believable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change that's occurring is that more and more users are trying to &lt;em&gt;invoke or express their imaginary world as reality.&lt;/em&gt; Or, said another way, they're trying to bring their fantasies into the Real World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's bad about this second example is the querent is demanding real science to justify a fantastic creation — as if it can legitimately exist in the real world and this would be proven if they could just find the right person to answer the question, and this meets their goal (but not ours) of creating, not a fictional creature, &lt;em&gt;but a real creature that would actually exist if only God or evolution got around to making one.&lt;/em&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is used because the querent wants to be absolutely positively sure that no answers are given that can't completely explain the fiction factually — and that assumes the querent read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; wiki at all (which is a big deal because that tag has rules...). (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10164/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To beat a dead horse for a moment, this is the reason I no longer support the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;real world questions policy&lt;/a&gt;. I think that policy has exacerbated the &amp;quot;realistic as possible&amp;quot; trend and directly contributed to the &amp;quot;is my fantastic idea possible?&amp;quot; (bring my fantasy into the Real World) shift. The continued presence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is also contributing to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said all that...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+%22hard+science%22&quot;&gt;meta history&lt;/a&gt; that there is a purpose for the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I also see a growing abuse of the tag to achieve goals it was never intended to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do NOT hold this opinion right now, I could be convinced to completely eliminate the tag (not rename it but burn it) in an effort to restore the original purpose of the Stack — which I haven't seen regularly embraced for at least three years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it would take a whomping good argument and some community consensus to convince me. I don't see a problem with (hopefully politely) slapping user's hands for failing to use the tag properly. If nothing else, it brings to their attention the importance of actually reading the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BTW: Adding &amp;quot;this is not compatible with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/super-powers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;super-powers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-super-powers-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;super-powers&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is a waste of time. You'd need to add every non-hard-science tag in the system (almost all of them), such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-xenobiology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10071/40609&quot;&gt;see this&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-magic-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; (yes, people have tried to combine &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-magic-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;). But the fact that you're mentioning it underscores my concern about the shift in how the Stack is being used.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T08:56:14.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-16T11:06:41.820" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; specified a way of answering, not a subject matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my understanding: if the science-related tags are inherently incompatible with superpowers/magic, then is there any way to ask for the scientifically correct outcome to a concretely defined event that was caused by something nonscientific? Let's say: given my wizard throws fireballs that melt castle walls, could that give non-wizard onlookers a sunburn during an extended siege?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels like this question is veering into the view that magic and generally the nonscientific must be all-or-nothing; introduce one bit of new physics in a physics question, and there's the ubiquitous comment of &amp;quot;do whatever you want, you're using magic so make the magic do as you please&amp;quot;, which contributes exactly nothing to help and tends to bully people off the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that fictionality is a scale, people have different preference where on the scale they like to put their fiction, and asking for the scientific effects of phlebotinum should not require phlebotinum to be an actual substance, as long as it can be described sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T13:50:07.270" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T13:50:07.270" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-16T12:58:37.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this post was likely prompted by my recent question, I'll throw in my 2 cents. If you ask me, the largest issue with the hard-science tag is the way (certain members of) the community respond/s to it. Regardless of what the question itself is, if any part of the background does not perfectly and exactly align with reality, you will receive inane and obtuse comments and answers that entirely ignore the question, and instead focus on a part of the background. While it is certainly possible to misuse the tag, I still think it has an important role, in that it specifies answers must be backed up by equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97848" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T12:58:37.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-19T00:40:28.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me, that there is a need for an additional Wiki Tag. Firstly - no matter how many Wiki-tags there are, people will always misuse them. But secondly - I'm going to address @MS - as I remember disagreeing with them in one of their questions in the comments - specifically stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You are asking for hard science on a made up, magic material. Those two things are mutually exclusive.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment which I still stand by. However, after some back-and-forth, we eventually got to what I believe was his goal - to have some real-world maths, on something made up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I have a material called magicalium, it has tensile properties like steel, but weighs the same as styrofoam, what are some the implications of using this as Tank Armor - Hard Science please&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I'm breaking my own rule, you could perhaps argue that given the real-world analogue of Steel, that there's enough information to do a Hard Science answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think this is the type of situation where a different tag is needed - one where the asker is after an answer &lt;em&gt;in the hard science style, backed up with formula and numbers&lt;/em&gt; but is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; hard science. This allows the clear differentiation that is at the core of this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fine to want to have an internally consistent Magic World/Future World/Other world and have the properties of materials/weapons/things in that world have explicit values and defined attributes, leading to what we could consider as 'Hard Science' - whilst still being outside the realm of &lt;strong&gt;actual&lt;/strong&gt; Hard Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-06-19T00:40:28.583" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-19T14:49:21.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Let's Plan a Retirement Party!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I argue that the hard science tag ought to be retired. Several threads of thought and experience seem to be commonplace with this tag. It's misunderstood. It's misused. It's used incorrectly. I also think that its application in this forum is, perhaps, too restricting to be very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The spread of several domains, ranging from &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; through &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;untagged&amp;quot; seems like a good idea, and if every querent tagged properly and constantly and if every respondent was on the same page with the tag meaning and usage notes, then this demarcation might be useful. As we all know, WB.SE tags are a mixed bag at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I see no reason why science-based can't adequately do what we expect hard-science to do, and with less confusion. For example, if a querent is interested in the aerodynamic properties of dragon flight, and she uses the hard-science tag, she'll tend to suffer ridicule in this forum and the absolutely ridiculous comment that &amp;quot;dragons don't exist, so science can't help you&amp;quot;. Given that 99% of what we're dealing with in WB is places, powers, creatures, physical laws, etc that don't exist in reality, or exist differently, appealing to hard-science is rarely useful and the resultant criticism from the radical realist camp does not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In stead, I'd propose ditching the hard-science tag altogether. Let those querents who want or need equations and journal citations note those needs in their answer criteria. Questions tagged science-based will be answered using science as it's understood currently, and with the understanding that creative manipulation of the science may be needed and ought to be encouraged. The whole point isn't to recreate the real world! The whole point here is to create fictional worlds! And in so far as they need to be described, we need to keep in mind that the nature of the fictional world is paramount: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;science serves art not science at the expense of art&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-06-21T02:21:09.157" LastActivityDate="2023-06-21T02:21:09.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10165" CreationDate="2023-06-21T19:51:22.953" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Pretend usernames don't exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my rule of thumb nearly all the time, in many things on the internet, especially when it comes to moderator activities. It's too easy for &amp;quot;bad blood&amp;quot; to skew moderator actions to the point that, from the view of someone who wandered in here and just read one question, the close vote action and yelling in the comments makes no sense. i.e., &amp;quot;why did they shut down that guy's question? There was nothing wrong with it. Why is everyone so angry?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the reality is it was the 8th &lt;em&gt;very similar&lt;/em&gt; question they've seen from someone they are basically sick of, so, well, the close votes got a bit...angry. Understandable but also, frankly, unacceptable. Each question must be judged in a vacuum, as if the CEO of SE himself appeared and asked the question. If it's too similar to other questions, link the duplicate and shut it down. If it violates some other rule, cite the rule and shut it down. If the violation is just that &lt;em&gt;you're a bit annoyed at the same person showing up over and over&lt;/em&gt;, well, that's not a reason to downvote or close a question. It must be treated as a stand-alone question. I personally try to not even look at usernames when going through the close queue, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) We often create this problem ourselves.&lt;/strong&gt; (and continue to do so)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another pet peeve of mine is how rules like &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;asks multiple questions&amp;quot; get enforced in such way as to actually cause the problem you are describing. Sometimes I see the letter of the law being laid down without regard for the spirit of the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a good example off the top of my head, but sometimes someone asks a question that &lt;em&gt;could be answered in a general way&lt;/em&gt; but instead they get bullied with the letter of the law, demanding they get more focused and only ask a highly specific question. So they do. But the highly specific answer to their highly specific question &lt;em&gt;still leaves them with general questions&lt;/em&gt;, so they go through asking them one at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you're ready to jump in here and say &amp;quot;It's very important to enforce those rules!&amp;quot; Well, pick your poison. If you don't want to recognize the general question they are getting at, and the single answer they needed in the first place, then prepare to suffer through that series of 15 tightly related questions. I would bet we could go back to their first attempt and find comments and close votes that literally told them to do exactly what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that sometimes these &amp;quot;vexatious questions&amp;quot; actually are people mildly trolling us, and very intentionally so, but it was what they got told to do when their first question got blown up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(To be clear, sometimes people really do ask multiple unrelated questions, or genuinely lack focus within a single post. These rules are useful for putting a stop to that. But they are also unfortunately open to interpretation, and overly strict interpretations lead to side-effects, including &amp;quot;vexatious questions&amp;quot;.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-06-21T19:51:22.953" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2023-06-23T05:15:11.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In complement to JBH's and Elemtilas's answer , I'm in favor of destroying the hard-science's tag wiki. Not necessarily the tag itself, just all the stuff about restricting answers and much. It's not really about how people want to use WB:SE, or to try to reverse how people are trying to build worlds. Here's why :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;People rarely use it as it was intended&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the 50 newest &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions, and without checking the original version :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least 8 misunderstood that the tag is mutually exclusive with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;. That's one out of 6 questions. I saw even one or two using all three tags at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 hard-science questions have negative scores, vs 4 in the newest overall. Alone it doesn't mean much, but let's add to that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244150/can-you-use-plants-as-substitute-for-missing-metals-elements&quot;&gt;most negatively received&lt;/a&gt; one reaches a -5, even when compared to the lowest general question at -4 which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/247293/so-how-do-i-write-a-pirate-a-spy-and-a-princess-go-on-a-quest-without-being-to&quot;&gt;one-liner about how to write a story&lt;/a&gt; (off-topic, no effort displayed from the querent, ...). Also, while looking at questions which received at least one downvote&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, I've seen a fair share of &amp;gt;3 downvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, more than in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While point n°2 is debatable, the 1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; one is quite staggering. People really often do not use the tag like the wiki asks to, even on a very simple rule. I haven't reviewed each question's content as honestly I have other things to do&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, however it is in agreement with my feeling people often don't use the tag correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not including how many queries were closed as an argument in favor of that. Still and because I don't want to hide all data I gathered, 6 of hard-science were closed vs 10 of the 50 newest questions. It isn't too far-off from each other, so nothing against the tag can be deduced from that. Also not included is the average number score on questions (both lying at around 3.2-3.3 between the newest hard-science and all newest questions) : The bias towards the tag's popularity rather than its quality is too strong here. Speaking of popularity...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;There isn't enough rewards for the efforts required&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing this, we have 28 questions tagged hard-science (including mistagged ones) this year. In comparison, we had 1040 questions since the 1st of january. That's less than 5%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, what do we do with these kind of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People constantly reminding to not use &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People nagging at each other telling that no hard-science answer can be found, often leading to closure and down votes&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators having to add the &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; banner manually. I haven't asked on meta to add the feature of linking automatically a banner along with a tag&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;. But it hasn't been added on 20 (out of the 50 newest) questions with the tag, therefore I'm p'etty sure this issue is still in the news.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know I'm not into hard-science -like, at all-, this does feel like a lot of efforts for this small faction of questions. Questions which are often misused by its querents, and efforts which could be put elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two points also strongly hint the tag's rules can create bad mood. As I know that mechanics offered to a user (or player in my expertise&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;) can induce specific behaviors, I do conclude the tag's current rules plays a major part in those two points. We shouldn't be arguing just because a question has a tag or not. But the fact is, the tag's current rules create quite a bit of not-always justified actions and reactions. Why? Because...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;There has been too much focus on the tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not certainly not least : I think everyone here forgot that  &lt;strong&gt;tags are not the question's content&lt;/strong&gt;. It's blindingly obvious when I read answers here. Let's remind what tags are with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags can also be used to help you identify questions that are interesting or relevant to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tags are categorizers first and foremost, with the primary goal of making questions easier to look for.&lt;/strong&gt; The fact that everyone implied the tag was important enough that they forgot to remind the question's content is the thing to read/review first is the most troublesome issue for me. We tried to create another use of the tags by making it scope the answers. However, from the frequent ruckus I read here and there and the fact that 1/6 questions are not tagged correctly, it just does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's cut this oozing wound once and for all with a surgeon's dexterity. While I do find the tag can be used to categorize questions about worlds relying heavily on science, its wiki content is prone to both mistakes and arguments. Let's remove this tag wiki content, but still explicitly allow people to ask questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hard science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; genre. If they want answers to be backed-up by equations and references, they will have to tell it in their question, not with a single tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : 23 received at least one downvote (vs 21 in the 50 newest questions). I am not including that data as it's very biased in having one picky-picky user downvoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; questions. Plus, it's expected to have more downvotes on questions with more restrictions. More restrictions means higher standard.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : Like daydreaming and nightdreaming. Not that I find this talk utterly pointless, dreaming is just perhaps one of my most favorite activity .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 : too lazy to check every comments on the last 50 questions, so I leave that as an overall feeling.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4 : Again, I'm lazy. And with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/389359/1095559&quot;&gt;recen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an&quot;&gt;t acti&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389558/stack-exchange-is-failing-its-community&quot;&gt;vities&lt;/a&gt; on meta's meta, I'm not exactly incited to make any effort either : It's strategically pointless.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;5 : A great example of toxicity coming from offered mechanics is the very infamous League of legends, which is very far off from other competitive, team-based games like Team Fortress 2 and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUtGgJh3P2w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conga dancers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=226791286&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sandwich sharing&lt;/a&gt; players. Some -yet incomplete!- explanations for League of legends toxic community can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VjLXObhtBc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-06-23T06:19:16.010" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T06:19:16.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-26T20:23:07.617" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unsure if this should be asked here or some other SE, but I couldn't find any reference to this in the Help Centre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/247399/in-the-rainshadow-of-an-equatorial-mountain-would-savanna-aw-or-hot-desert-b/247406#247406&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; posted to the WB stack shows 0 reputation, but I was notified via the Achievement menu—and it still shows this a week later—a +8 change to reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no other recent adjustments that would explain it, such as hitting the 200/day reputation change, or a deleted user, or deleted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2nF4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2nF4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of answer and menu showing reputation&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea what's happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I gather there's something going on with moderators across the network, but I'd assume this is automated and nothing something moderators approve manually.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-07-17T02:38:05.403" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T02:38:05.403" Title="Missing reputation" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10180" CreationDate="2023-06-26T22:41:20.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You had one upvote...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvotes on an answer give the answerer +10 reputation.&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;From the help-center : Voting up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you got 10 points...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;...And one downvote&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes remove 2 reputation from the post owner.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;From the help-center : Voting down&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lost 2 points because of a downvote. This gets aggregated into a single value in your notification feed, ie. +8 points in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;get an overview of the upvotes and downvotes by clicking right on the score of the post&lt;/a&gt;, between the upvote and downvote buttons :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZBQs7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZBQs7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot showing individual up and downvotes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T22:41:20.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-28T01:53:46.303" Score="8" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the &amp;quot;1 day rule&amp;quot; - a unofficial guideline where a user should wait at least a day before accepting an answer - should be an actual suggestion, and not just &amp;quot;unofficial&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be done in two ways I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Help Center / Tutorial Page&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New users are the ones to most likely accept an answer prematurely. It would work by adding a suggestion in the help center or tutorial: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it is helpful to accept an answer a day after posting because it allows for multiple users (from all time zones) to answer and may provide insights that otherwise might've been lost&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. A Popup&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an user clicks the accept as answer button, it could popup a message asking for confirmation. There should be a &amp;quot;never show this again&amp;quot; checkbox, though. Something simple like this would work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;acceptButton.addEventListener('click',confirmAccept);&#xA;function confirmAccept(){&#xA;now = new Date();&#xA;if(now.getTime() - postCreationDate.getTime &amp;lt; 24*60*60*100){&#xA;acceptPopup.style.display = 'block'&#xA;acceptPopup.style.opacity = '0';&#xA;acceptAnimation = acceptPopup.animate([{opacity: 0, opacity: 1}],&#xA;        { duration: 600, iterations: 1, fill: &amp;quot;forwards&amp;quot; })&#xA;acceptAnimation.addEventListener(&amp;quot;finish&amp;quot;, ()=&amp;gt;{&#xA;acceptPopup.style.opacity = '1';&#xA;})&#xA;}&#xA;}&#xA;function acceptPopupHide(){&#xA;acceptPopup.style.opacity = '1';&#xA;acceptAnimation = acceptPopup.animate([{opacity: 1, opacity: 0}],&#xA;        { duration: 600, iterations: 1, fill: &amp;quot;forwards&amp;quot; })&#xA;acceptAnimation.addEventListener(&amp;quot;finish&amp;quot;, ()=&amp;gt;{&#xA;acceptPopup.style.opacity = '0';&#xA;acceptPopup.style.display = 'none';&#xA;})&#xA;}&#xA;acceptPopupConfirm.addEventListener('click', ()=&amp;gt;{&#xA;acceptAnswer();&#xA;acceptPopupHide();&#xA;})&#xA;acceptPopupCancel.addEventListener('click', ()=&amp;gt;{&#xA;acceptPopupHide();&#xA;})&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104522" LastEditorUserId="104522" LastEditDate="2023-06-28T03:18:40.533" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T21:00:18.613" Title="Should the unofficial &quot;1 Day Rule&quot; become an suggestion?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-29T16:51:48.107" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;A great many questions on this site are regularly closed for being off-topic. Usually, it's a new user asking for broader creative ideas or something deemed too subjective to be specifically answerable. But summarily closing the question with only a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center page&lt;/a&gt; seems very discouraging to new users just engaging with the platform, and it's especially a disservice when &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange offers other areas for just that kind of interaction&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, questions that are high quality and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;good subjective&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; could be migrated to another Exchange such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and broader discussion could be moved to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, some content will continue to be inappropriate anywhere on the platform. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/167697/closure-of-off-topic-questions&quot;&gt;the answer to this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate that migration should be a norm. I think making question migration a standard moderator action would &lt;strong&gt;drive user engagement as well as clean up a front page littered with closed questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7982/guidelines-for-migration-from-science-fiction-fantasy&quot;&gt;This meta question&lt;/a&gt; shows a similar initiative over at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Sci-Fi &amp;amp; Fantasy Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Can we make migration the first-line moderator response for off-topic questions?&#xA;And if so, how could we encourage moderators and users to take advantage of that feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61053" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T04:45:26.537" Title="Could we change the standard moderator action for off-topic questions from closure to migration?" Tags="|feature-request|moderators|migration|off-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2023-06-29T17:12:39.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being the receiver and rejector of countless migrations to Worldbuilding because &amp;quot;we don't answer this here, but Worldbuilding does&amp;quot;, I oppose this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator here I know what is on topic or not here, and might have a clue of what other communities do, but as a standard I am not in depth into their fine writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrating based on that superficial clue feels like throwing work onto someone else's desk, and then leaving them the burden of deciding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have tried establishing an etiquette of consulting before migrating, but that is neither mandatory nor widely done. Therefore I prefer avoiding migrations unless I have the time to align beforehand with a receiving moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T17:12:39.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2023-06-30T16:42:02.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Understanding the issues of migration&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Normally I'd agree with you, but we have to see the context surrounding these questions first and understand why it would not work towards your goal.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good chunk of the time, questions which are not aiming at the right S.E. site have others problems at hand. Indeed, if the querent didn't checked the help-center or just what kind of questions is there, they might have made other mistakes. It could be anything like trying to create a discussion (opinion-based closure), asking too many things at once, or just be unclear. Note those issues are pretty much applicable on every S.E. site. And well the wheel, off-topic questions are often crossing boundaries with these closure reasons, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings the main issue of migrating questions : &lt;strong&gt;Is it actually better to send someone on a stack-exchange they know even less about, with a high-risk of having them closed &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? Beyond the feeling of being &amp;quot;excluded&amp;quot; from two communities, it is also about understanding what is happening. Nothing is more confusing and frustrating in games when you are presented with a lot of rules, players and stuff without having the time to understand them&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The same happens here; Migrating a question is actually presenting to someone all of these &amp;quot;mechanics&amp;quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are other communities, other sites :&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These communities have different rules, topics and users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to open a new account on the migrated site to interact with it. Yes, even if your question has been migrated there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your reputation score is not the same from site to site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question can be migrated to a new site :&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A migrated question still exists in the old site, but directly links to the post on the new site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migrated questions have different scores on each site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question can still be closed on the destination site, or worse rejected with lots of consequences regarding links and so much (This still confuses me nowadays).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Efforts made on the old site might not be as effective on the destination site, as community expectations are different from site-to-site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an awful lot of advanced topics when people are still getting the ropes of what voting does and how to think about their question . Let's add that questions are often lying in a grey area where both old and destination site will find it as off-topic&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; and the &amp;quot;quit moment&amp;quot; becomes extremely likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So migration should stay an exception, 'specially for new users. Let us tell them what can be improved starting from the basics, and point out potential alternative sites if their question looks relatively nice. Migration is for when the question is objectively really good... But just asked at the wrong place.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45csSEotJY8&amp;amp;ab_channel=JoshStrifePlays&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt; teaching what makes a good or bad game tutorial. Though it needs translation, a lot of it is applicable to any new user experience.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : For instance, I've seen a few questions on Physics.SE getting closed as off-topic just because someone told &amp;quot;I'm writing a story&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I'm making a world&amp;quot;. It's sufficient for them to try migration, but not enough for us to be considered as worldbuilding. We need actual intents of building worlds, just saying you do is a proof you do it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;weak proof&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-06-30T18:24:23.790" LastActivityDate="2023-06-30T18:24:23.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10182" CreationDate="2023-07-01T02:23:29.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I agree with your proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall how many times I went &amp;quot;too late&amp;quot; to a question because, well, I was just sleeping. Well, it's part because I have the memory of a goldfish struck by Alzeihmer , but I'm almost certain it's also because it happened quite a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the exact text which should be written down, but here's what I can tell regarding a change in the help-center :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be kept short : 1 sentence or two max.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This place should be the best one to put this advice in : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/someone-answers&quot;&gt;What should I do when someone answers my question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note however that not many people go this far into the help-center, and people are less enticed to follow advices than strict rules. So the impact this change will have is not likely be very strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proposal #2 will have to go through meta first&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the ideal proposal, with a very strong effect. However, I doubt users nor moderators on this meta can do much about this. You'll have to post it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SE's über-meta-site&lt;/a&gt;. It's the one where global changes are talked about, including website code and visuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't know how the proposal will end up there. However, here's one or two tips to improve its chances of succeding :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please don't demonstrate with code. Code is boring in every marketing pitch and not everyone are computer gods of the matrix .&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instead, use a screenshot displaying the use case. It doesn't need to be pretty, just to show when it happens (cursor on the &amp;quot;accept&amp;quot; button) and what happens (a popup saying &amp;quot;Heya! Wait one single day, pretty please?&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain more clearly the circumstances of the trigger and its effects. Here are some questions you should answer to help out :&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this popup appear to every user, or only new ones?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it triggered only once per site, or an undefinite number of times?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there other circumstances you are seeing it used/not used (once per day to not spam very active querents, retriggerable after a long inactivity...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T02:23:29.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10182" CreationDate="2023-07-01T21:00:18.613" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Answers are subjective to the answerer. Imagine a question where there are multiple 'good' answers (by community standards) but the person who reads the answers looks at them in the wider context of their story/World and one answer just 'clicks' - whether it's because it's something they just completely overlooked or because it has ramifications for other parts of the world/story that we don't know about (but they do) or they just have a vibe for that answer - why should we place an arbitrary limit on them delaying accepting the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I don't think the asker is prevented from changing their mind and selecting another question as the answer at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T21:00:18.613" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2023-07-03T17:40:54.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First, a few issues with your post:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt; only answers questions about &lt;em&gt;how to write,&lt;/em&gt; not what to write. I've seen one, maybe two questions properly migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt; over the 7+ years I've been here. 99.999% of all the questions you think should be migrated there &lt;em&gt;are actually off-topic there.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10055/40609&quot;&gt;There is no stack for &amp;quot;help me write my story&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to &amp;quot;migrate&amp;quot; a question to the Chat room. I could be wrong about this. If so, one of the Mods will correct me, but I believe the only path for migrating a question to chat is to either close or delete the question and invite the OP to ask in Chat. That's primarily an action taken by the OP, not the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The meta question you linked to (and the question for which it was closed as a duplicate) has a standing score of -9. No answer to the question has value as the question itself has no support in a community that, when there is strong support (or strong rejection), has scores in the &lt;em&gt;hundreds.&lt;/em&gt; A -9 is Meta.StackExchange-ese for &amp;quot;meh.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7982/guidelines-for-migration-from-science-fiction-fantasy&quot;&gt;Meta.Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, curiously, is a question I answered. The question it links to is NOT an effort to convince &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; mods to migrate. It was an effort to better understand OUR requirements so THEY could refine when they could migrate. This reflects &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10184/40609&quot;&gt;@L.Dutch's answer&lt;/a&gt; to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now my answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your effort, but please understand that what you're really saying is that in the name of a kinder, more inviting space it shouldn't be the responsibility of new users to read the help center or the tour and follow the rules of this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit like saying the frustration and embarrassment of speeding tickets should  be avoided even if the driver didn't read the driver's handbook or the sign indicating the limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that our increasingly angry and vociferous world is in need of compassion, kindness, and love. But the world is also in need of discipline, honor, and duty. Every society (real or online) has rules that are necessary for a variety of reasons. Here those reasons include the quality of the service we provide, fair and orderly processing of requests, and the hope that new users eventually become senior users who help moderate the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that point of view, finding ways to avoid closing questions that require closing per the rules...:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is not a service to Stack Exchange, which wants to be the purveyor of quality answers to quality questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is not a service to our Stack, which wants questions that are on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is not a service to the OP, who needs to learn how to use the Stack.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VTCs, like C, D, and F grades in school, are a fact of life the OP must learn from. The choice to not understand who we are and how we work has (and should have) consequences. We try not to be mean-spirited about it (though the frustration sometimes peaks...) and speaking for my own part, if you click on those Help Center links I provide, they take you to the specific pages where the violated rule is explained. Which is better than a speeding ticket that will only tell you the violated ordinance number with the expectation that you, the ticket recipient, will take the time to look it up and understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most don't. They just pay the ticket and go on being bad drivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not and should not be a place where any old question can be answered. There are already services out there (quora, reddit, countless forums...) that embrace that madness. Stack Exchange was specifically designed (and here's the kicker) &lt;em&gt;for educated people who have exhausted their research abilities to query experts for help with specific, well-focused, well-defined problems.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes a lot of sense when talking about the great-granddaddy Stack, Stack Overflow, which focuses on software. College-educated programmers can explain a specific problem they're having and experts with decades of experience can help them find a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit more complex here at Worldbuilding where we regularly find high-school and early-college students who want to write Hard Science genre stories — but haven't yet gained the education to know how to even ask the question. And yet, like new 16-year-old drivers here in the U.S., are still expected to follow the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no. Migration is not a good choice for the moderator's (or, by extension, the users who participate in site self-moderation) default action. @L.Dutch explained the basics of why it wouldn't work. I've explained why most questions you think could be migrated actually can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the best possible solution is and always will be for new users to acquaint themselves with the rules before using the site. And if that can't be expected, to learn quickly when they get their speeding ticket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-07-03T18:05:19.390" LastActivityDate="2023-07-03T18:05:19.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2023-07-04T04:45:26.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;My Penny Hapenny&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PRO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;Since I answered one of your linked meta queries, I would actually offer conditioned support for your position. Conditioned because a) migration is a very useful tool that I think is not used enough; and b) it's extremely easy to overuse this tool. That is, if one in a hundred queries are good candidates for migration, it's most likely true that two in a hundred is one too many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Essentially, migration is a complex dance between the rules of our community and the rules of another. The process is moderator mediated, although anyone can suggest migration. I have the feeling that, simply because WB.SE is seen as the entire platform's dumping ground, other forums are going to be much less likely to take a question from here, simply because it's &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot; with fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You do bring up a valid point with SF&amp;amp;F, and there is indeed a (I believe unwritten) policy on both sides that would happily seek mutual migration of questions under certain circumstances. For example, WB are not constituted to answer questions about fictional worlds that do not belong to the querent. SF&amp;amp;F are not constituted to handle questions about an individual's fictional world or game project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The two communities see it as beneficial to swap questions that are inappropriate in the other community. This helps us by removing all the SW light sabre questions, and it helps them by removing all the &amp;quot;I have light sabres in my fictional world...&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't know how many queries we actually migrate to SF&amp;amp;F, or how many get migrated here, but I think this is a pretty robust exchange system for our two communities, and I think ought to be more of a front line strategy --- given that questions are appropriate for one or the other forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONTRA&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;I am not in favour of making migration a needlessly widespread practice. We would make ourselves pariahs if we just pushed questions we don't handle onto other forums without any kind of understanding of their rules or contact between mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We do often get dumped on here, which is a sign of disrespect from other forums. I'd rather we take the moral high ground and simply deal with a problematic query here in house rather than thoughtlessly migrating it out. So, no to a policy of general or commonplace migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T04:45:26.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-05T13:33:42.867" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious if &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;the Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt; will be unfrozen, or if we've just given up on it ever being a thing again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6751" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2023-07-05T19:20:48.163" LastActivityDate="2023-07-05T19:20:48.163" Title="Will the main chat be unfrozen?" Tags="|support|status-completed|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10190" CreationDate="2023-07-05T19:20:14.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Tis done. I'm one of the room owners and probably should have been monitoring it more regularly -- that's my bad. The Factory Floor hasn't been active in a while, to put it mildly, stretching back to this spring. Hopefully it'll regain its old level of activity in the future, although the current issues the network's dealing with means prospects aren't ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2023-07-05T19:20:14.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-08T15:09:53.093" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag info for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aliens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-aliens-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt; tag states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about a different and uncharacteristic species or&#xA;object that has come to the world from another world. NOT for&#xA;questions about extraterrestrials in their native environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This excerpt (particularly the second sentence) does not seem to align with the current usage of the tag, and to me personally, does not make much sense. In its current iteration, there does not seem to be a tag for questions dealing with extra-terrestrials in their native environment, as the only two relevant tags are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aliens&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aliens&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-aliens-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;aliens&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xenobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xenobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-xenobiology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;xenobiology&lt;/a&gt;, both of which currently specifically exclude such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better excerpt in my opinion would simply be something like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;For questions dealing with extra-terrestrial life&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97848" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-07-09T12:15:14.633" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T04:25:36.607" Title="Regarding the tag info for the 'aliens' tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-08T16:26:46.957" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that we have both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strong-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-strong-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;strong-force&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-weak-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;weak-force&lt;/a&gt; tags, both of which I feel should be absorbed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-nuclear-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;nuclear&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed we have both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radioactivity-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radiation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt; tags. In this case, I feel the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radioactivity-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt; tag should be absorbed by the more popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radiation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97848" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-07-09T11:46:55.033" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T02:07:12.473" Title="Regarding tags related to nuclear phenomena" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2023-07-08T17:33:03.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Less Is Best&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think Strong &amp;amp; Weak forces are fundamental forces along with E-M and Gravity. I've read that there is now a fifth force as well. I have the feeling that as understanding progresses, we'll have others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As such, I'd argue that a tag for Fundamental Forces be differentiated from  tags for either Radiation or Radioactivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-07-08T17:33:03.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2023-07-09T12:10:51.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I agree with all your proposals&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at each and every tag, they all come from 2016 or earlier. They've been alive for 7 years. But even with 7 years of use, each of the tags got less than 50 questions each (and two less than 10!). It's a very strong sign they aren't attracting people's eyes and ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of that -and because there are either synonymous or more generic tags-, they can and should be merged together. They're not useful enough to help people find and categorize questions in a reasonable manner, all while cluttering the tag list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So to keep it straight and short, I wholefully agree to merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-weak-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;weak-force&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strong-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-strong-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;strong-force&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radioactivity-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt; into the tags you suggest (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-nuclear-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;nuclear&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radiation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt; respectively).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-07-09T12:10:51.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-14T22:15:49.587" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The structure of this website makes it every difficult to speak to people on the other side of a set of moderation buttons, leading to confusion and infuriation. This is one such situation where peer-reviewed science in a frame challenge was unilaterally declared &amp;quot;a low quality post.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/93665&quot;&gt;Apparently, this is considered a low quality post.&lt;/a&gt; The poster was asking about &amp;quot;nebulas slowing down space ships.&amp;quot; I pointed out that you can use your relative velocity with the interstellar medium (which nebulas are very much made of!) and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://tauzero.aero/wp-content/uploads/JBIS-May-2019-Greason.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linked to a peer-reviewed paper exploring the concept&lt;/a&gt;. For my effort someone said it's low quality and deleted it without comment or explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is actual science low quality? Is peer reviewed science low quality? Are frame challenges low quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but assume the moderator, in their haste, either didn't bother to read the post, or look at the paper, or perhaps simply did not understand, and therefore dismissed it as &amp;quot;junk science,&amp;quot; despite the direct relevance to the question I was trying to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but think some transparency would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82848" LastEditorUserId="2028" LastEditDate="2023-07-15T00:14:21.427" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T01:51:30.023" Title="Trying to understand why a relevant post with a peer-reviewed paper directly linked to was considered &quot;low quality&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10196" CreationDate="2023-07-15T01:51:30.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@L.Dutch hasn't explained anything to me and I don't claim to read @L.Dutch's mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/248051/40609&quot;&gt;deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; wasn't a valid frame challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;A proposal for helping users understand frame challenges&lt;/a&gt; we read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally: I propose that frame challenges are an acceptable way to answer any question posted to this site. As a definition: a frame challenge is any assertion that challenges the premise or underpinnings of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that an acceptable frame challenge must fundamentally express the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're asking for won't work because of X, but you could alternatively consider Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking to impose a specific form (syntax, format, etc.) as much as I'm proposing a philosophy. (A) A frame challenge must of necessity contain an explanation of why the respondent believes answering the question as proposed by the OP isn't useful, relevant, or meaningful. However, (B) A frame challenge need not offer an alternative solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your deleted answer you never &lt;em&gt;challenge the frame.&lt;/em&gt; You identify no issue that you consider wrong with the &lt;em&gt;premise of the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, at best, what you propose (cool as it is... and it is cool...) is really nothing more than an aspect of the requested graph. At worst it falls into the same category as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/86466/vesper&quot;&gt;comment made by @Vesper&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/247983/seeking-chart-of-nebula-particle-density-vs-ship-velocity#comment760576_247983&quot;&gt;my response to it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question here is, what are the means of the ship to dump excess energy while travelling through the nebula. At the very least you're looking at a constant heat flow from the front of the ship, together with it getting damaged by individual particles, and the former would melt the ship way faster than the latter. – Vesper&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Vesper That's a method of extending the maximum velocity of the ship, but it's not a requirement for the graph. I've no doubt there are a great many things that could be done to extend max-v. I doubt the quesiton could reasonably account for them all. This is meant to be a starting point to help worldbuilders understand the consequences of increased particle density - not to help design a ship to get through any arbitrary particle density. – JBH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;frame challenge&amp;quot; doesn't challenge any premise and, though not obligatory, offers no alternative to achieve the goal of the quesiton — which is a graph helping worldbuilders understand the consequences of nebula particle density on space ships. All it does is point out a cool way to increase maximum velocity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were Stack Exchange a discussion forum, or arbitrary brainstorming questions permitted, then the deleted answer would have been an amazing answer — to another, similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I must support @L.Dutch's decision to delete the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T01:51:30.023" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2023-07-15T02:07:12.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish this had been asked as two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with combining tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-weak-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;weak-force&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/strong-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strong-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-strong-force-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;strong-force&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-nuclear-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;nuclear&lt;/a&gt;. We loose too much granularity with that combination. There are many questions that involve the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-nuclear-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;nuclear&lt;/a&gt; tag and have nothing to do with either of the force tags. I also agree with @Elemtilas' analysis. The nuclear forces are basic forces and should have their own tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I have no objection at all making &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radioactivity-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-radiation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt;. Do you not yet have sufficient rep to make synonym suggestions? At that point it gets voted on in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T02:07:12.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10192" CreationDate="2023-07-15T04:25:36.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading the Wiki tag for Xenobiology - this line (to me) is the differentiating factor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about biology-related aesthetics or environmental interaction should use the creature-design tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would/should cover any questions about non-human life in it's native environment, whether it be Fantasy, Alien or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was writing a question and it was about alien species on an alien world - guess which tag I would use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so whilst the wording and descriptions are 'correct', I agree with your fundamental point - that these tags should be re-written to better align with their real-world usage, even if there is a logical reason why there is a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-07-15T04:25:36.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-16T08:01:07.040" Score="0" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are receiving questions asking for us to factually invent an idea or technology with increasing frequency. The questions are usually asked by people with insufficient education but a strong desire to join the ranks of professionals who have successfully written novels of the hard science genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't seem to realize that the level of detail they're looking for damages a story more than helps.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They sincerely believe that a fully scientific answer exists and regularly use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags to ensure they get it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't understand that they've asked their question with insufficient detail, They're unable to provide clarifying details, and they usually become irritated that people don't just answer the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They aren't competent to judge a best answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They never realize there's a very high probability the question can't be answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, too many users who don't understand the Help Center's admonitions that every question shouldn't be answered and only well-asked questions should be answered try to answer such questions. The overall result is a growing set of low-quality, badly-thought-out questions suffering from insufficient research on the part of both the querent and the respondents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: What is worldbuilding in relation to new technology?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simple to suggest that the level of detail required for an answer should be set by the querent. But what to do when the querent doesn't understand the difficulties or consequences in doing so? In many cases, the querent appears to be asking for the factual design specifications and/or schematics for their (often fanciful) idea. But is that worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that worldbuilding inherently demands some level of simplification and that crossing the line from simplification to full detail makes the question off-topic. A good technology-creation worldbuilding question would ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The functional operation of the device.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The UI of the device in relation to the creatures/civilization using it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The consequences of using the device in context of the rules/nature of the querent's world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But not how the device does any of that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fans of worldbuilding often want more than the author ever intended. That's actually a good thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that part of the drive for excessive detail comes from the natural fan reaction of wanting to know all the details about a world they've become enamored with. Consequently, they think that the natural evolution of good worldbuilding is to provide ever more detail. Regrettably, fans who think this don't understand good writing skills, not the least of which is the need to hook the audience with a sense of always wanting more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't helped by (frankly ubercool) deep worldbuilding projects that have mind-boggling detail such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.orionsarm.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion's Arm&lt;/a&gt; where they contemplate thousands of years of technological advancement with an effort toward &amp;quot;hard science fiction taken to the extreme, with all the dials turned up to the maximum.&amp;quot; That would be absolutely laughable were it not for their definition of &amp;quot;hard science.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of those possibilities are of special interest to the OA project: paths for possible future technologies that they call 'Conservative Hard SF' and 'Radical Hard SF'. Conservative hard SF is based on cautious extrapolation from present-day knowledge, with perhaps, at most, one or two carefully justified and limited forays into something that's more speculative. Radical hard SF on the other hand takes on every hard SF technology ever imagined and then pushes the envelope further with a few 'not impossible' techs that may not get the nod from every current scientist but do at least get a serious hearing from some significant number of experts in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the ability to patent the invention isn't what they call &amp;quot;hard science.&amp;quot; From a perspective that may only make sense to engineers, they embrace science, &lt;em&gt;but not engineering.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Unfortunately, what many of the querents on the Stack are asking for isn't science... but engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: We don't engineer new technologies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will help rationalize a proposed technology with as much science as we can, but we will not invent or develop the technology in detail. Users asking for help defining a technology in their world should expect answers having at least one level of abstraction or more regardless the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstraction, or the process of generalizing ideas by understanding examples, is an indispensable tool in the engineering process. Humans are privileged in our ability to relate physically distinct concepts through their common qualities, which allows us to translate problems from one domain into another. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.tufts.edu/eeseniordesignhandbook/2014/abstract-thinking/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Electrical and Computer Engineering Design Handbook&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10169/40609&quot;&gt;Should the hard-science tag be retired?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10029/40609&quot;&gt;Considered harmful: questions where the asker expects us to figure out a scientific explanation or alternative for their handwavium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9701/40609&quot;&gt;Advice to Querents asking &amp;quot;is X plausible or realistic?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8290/40609&quot;&gt;Why asking for the details isn&amp;#39;t always a good idea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8273/40609&quot;&gt;Advice concerning questions asking HOW to implement a technological procedure or device&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7351/40609&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;how would X explain Y?&amp;quot; questions on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;narrative necessity&amp;quot; and how does it apply to worldbuilding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7268/40609&quot;&gt;How best to deal with &amp;quot;what are you expecting?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5189/40609&quot;&gt;Best Practice for Helping OP&amp;#39;s with Science-Based Fantasy Requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Over the years I've had fun perusing the pages of Orion's Arm. I've not yet found an example of technology at the engineering level. There's a lot of wonderful description — and appropriate abstraction — but no engineering. Perhaps there's a page or two I've missed, but I couldn't find any schematics, no chemistry, no specific realization of any technology. It's a great example of good worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T14:51:09.273" Title="Policy Proposal: We do not engineer technologies" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2023-07-16T19:01:10.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Specific points on the proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't seem to realize that the level of detail they're looking for damages a story more than helps.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not our concern. Not everyone is writing standard-issue 300-page novels. Some are devising TTRPG rules, some are writing a technical appendix to a larger work. Some are just exploring an idea to complete their mental model of a thing, and know very well that none of this worldbuilding will ever make it to print. And hey, maybe some are writing terribly overwrought infodump stories. Regardless; it is not for us to judge whether someone is writing badly, that's Writing.SE's job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They sincerely believe that a fully scientific answer exists and regularly use the science-based or hard-science tags to ensure they get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They don't understand that they've asked their question with insufficient detail, They're unable to provide clarifying details, and they usually become irritated that people don't just answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They never realize there's a very high probability the question can't be answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always am reluctant to guess at motivations. But even if someone is asking from a wrong assumption, the way to respond that would most benefit the user is to address their misconceptions head-on. For example with a Frame Challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They aren't competent to judge a best answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most persuasive of your points imho; definitely a problem, but not a problem unique to tech questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that worldbuilding inherently demands some level of simplification and that crossing the line from simplification to full detail makes the question off-topic. A good technology-creation worldbuilding question would ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The functional operation of the device.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The UI of the device in relation to the creatures/civilization using it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The consequences of using the device in context of the rules/nature of the querent's world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But not how the device does any of that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree. Internal workings strongly influence all of functional operation, UI, and world consequences. I even tend to start with a technical idea and then write the story around its consequences. To start from story-relevant consequences and then make up a technical reason is to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5EaoSA02LM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Technobabble&lt;/a&gt;. That's definitely not all Worldbuilding.SE is meant for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;What power source would make the most sense for laser guns?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is a question that I presume would be outlawed under this proposal, as the question matter is none of those three. However, e.g. a nuclear power source drives operation (cooldown after firing), UI (need for a function to discharge waste material), world consequences (waste material piling up in radiated garbage piles outside strongholds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imho any work of fiction featuring a laser gun that doesn't state that it is nuclear-powered but just gives those properties in isolation, is a more disconnected piece of writing that's more burdensome to write and to read. It is often a good thing to be compact; if one piece of information about internal workings can make all those properties easy for a reader to guess at, then the author can bring up the properties as they become plot-relevant without bludgeoning a reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's all subsumed by my overall feelings that we shouldn't reject questions just because we think the querent is writing their fiction badly. If we ever get to that point, I volunteer to be banned from the site; my creative writing is terrible by any standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: We don't engineer new technologies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will help rationalize a proposed technology with as much science as we can, but we will not invent or develop the technology in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, what I would like to see is some more detail in this proposal. &amp;quot;invent or develop&amp;quot; is fuzzy, and the qualifier &amp;quot;in detail&amp;quot; runs counter to your earlier proposal of restricting tech development questions to operation, UI, world consequences. &lt;em&gt;Some&lt;/em&gt; inventing/developing is still allowed apparently, but how much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you saying that anything beneath the bodywork of the hyperspace scooter is off-limits, including the colour of said bodywork? Or are high-concept questions that penetrate the skin still alright (&amp;quot;It seems to run on some kind of electricity&amp;quot;). Or can we do some more internal stuff like components and even smashing some existing hardware together, but with no obligation to be exact to the millimeter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My views on the matter&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does closing more questions help the people that are so dissected here?&lt;/strong&gt; Where you describe a clueless asker, I hear someone who benefits from learning. You don't make people learn by closing their questions: you scare them away. A frame challenge or any sorts of detailed explanation why proposal X is misfounded, is 100 times as helpful as a bare comment of &amp;quot;VTC, too detailed&amp;quot;. If we need any policy change it is to explicitly allow &amp;quot;This question cannot be answered for reasons X Y and Z&amp;quot; as a valid answer to any question, which I thought was what a frame challenge could do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementing this proposal will require either a fuzzy delimitation of what kind of tech-related worldbuilding is too detailed&lt;/strong&gt; which every close-voter will interpret differently, &lt;strong&gt;or a draconic restriction that outlaws any discourse of what takes place under the synthetic skin&lt;/strong&gt;. I could be persuaded away from this view if I could have a more detailed example of what delineation you are concretely looking for. Cite me the very most detail-oriented question you'd still allow, and the most high-level tech question you'd still consider an 'engineering' question and would like to see go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Technology can have a large role in some stories, requiring a level of detail that would be utterly out of place in a different one.&lt;/strong&gt; Good worldbuilding hinges on the story and the medium in which the story is told. If I'm writing an Ant-Man fanfic and the shrinking hero literally goes inside a laser gun to mess with the wiring, I would like to know if loose wiring even makes sense in a machine like this. Even more potently if I'm making a comic book and will actually be illustrating this scene. If the question cannot be answered due to our limited knowledge of integrated electronics, then I'd like to be told that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Connected to the previous point; &lt;strong&gt;it is not our place to be judging whether someone is writing a good book&lt;/strong&gt; with our answers. It's our job to help people build worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2023-07-17T11:23:26.193" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T11:23:26.193" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-31T08:43:04.553" Score="4" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a LOT of information in the world and unlike the days of yore, it's available instantly. Most of that information is good. Some of it is bad. Some of it is &lt;em&gt;really bad.&lt;/em&gt; But even if we only consider the good information — there is a risk to worldbuilders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We are sometimes led to believe that worldbuilding isn't about rules, but about expressing an idea in terms of known science.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inexperienced worldbuilders may trip over the belief that due to the volume of information they discover in the real world, it isn't rules that they should be creating, but existing science they need help discovering. In that regard, they perhaps see Worldbuilding.SE, not as a place to help them develop consistent rules for their imaginary world,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but as a free research service that will uncover the facts that their experience on the Internet has led them to believe should exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is this issue reflected in posts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248549/40609&quot;&gt;recent question about teleportation&lt;/a&gt; a new user was asking how to achieve an effect due to teleportation. In comments to my answer it appeared to me that the user didn't realize the difference between the need to set rules in an imaginary world and the belief that there's enough science involved with the idea that changing the application of science would change how he/she achieved the effect.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said another way: the user was confusing the &lt;em&gt;aesthetic&lt;/em&gt; of the idea with the &lt;em&gt;operation&lt;/em&gt; of the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what that means (at least to me...) is that the user — not realizing that there wasn't enough science to actually realize (vs. rationalize) his/her goal — kept throwing more technobabble at the problem believing that somehow the goal would be achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong, but I suspect the worldbuilder didn't realize that it's the obligation of the worldbuilder to &lt;em&gt;set the rules of their world,&lt;/em&gt; and then use the Real World to rationalize (if necessary!) the rules. Too many worldbuilders think it's not their obligation to set those rules because (I suspect) they believe the rules &amp;quot;already exist&amp;quot; in the form of science they haven't been able to find with a Google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What advice can we give worldbuilders to help them distinguish between &amp;quot;real life&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;worldbuilding rules&amp;quot; in a world that has &lt;em&gt;so much instantly available information&lt;/em&gt; that it seems like a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; answer should exist and they shouldn't need to set a rule?&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I sometimes worry that some worldbuilders don't believe they're building an imaginary world, but are trying to build an entirely real world. There's nothing wrong with &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; so long as everyone remembers that it has very practical limits.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Please note that I can't read the OP's mind and don't really know if what I just explained is the case. As I mentioned, it simply appeared that way to me. However, I've run into a fair number of questions over the last six months where users appeared to believe there should be science to solve their problem, not realizing that what they were asking about didn't actually exist, didn't actually have science to back it, or that the science was being misapplied in an effort to achieve the goal. Please do not construe anything I've said to believe I'm disparaging of the user who is only trying to build a world or write a story. Although, to be fair, I am running thin on patience with users who read something on the Internet or watch some Youtube video and believe they have a PhD's understanding of the issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;This issue is NOT helped by tools like ChatGPT which can express an idea that's completely wrong in a way that to someone not educated in the art seems completely right. I'm beyond worried that the average user of ChatGPT-style services will become addicted to the sincerity of the response and be led to believe that every question they ask will have a decisive and veritable answer. Said another way, I'm worried that new worldbuilders don't think they need an imagination to achieve their goals.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-17T16:20:50.247" Title="Advice: real facts vs. worldbuilding rules" Tags="|discussion|worldbuilding-process|advice|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2023-08-05T07:15:57.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've umm'd and arr'd about giving my 2c to the proposal. But seeing as it's a quiet Saturday night and the Wife and Kids are in bed - I'm going to give my suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I disagree with the proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that my position is clear, let me give my reasoning. Firstly - I think the issues raised are, at the very least, worthy of discussion. I'm not yet convinced of the validity of the complaint per se - but we'll get to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the nicest possible way - when it comes to your initial bulletpoints - I find myself asking 'So?' - Over-enthusiasm, whilst trying at times, is still enthusiasm. People wanting to ask questions is the lifeblood of SE and Worldbuilding is no different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in a different Meta-post, I made the point that ultimately, if the Asker is happy with the answer, then that's all that matters. I still largely hold that as my ultimate position, even if the Rebuttal of 'Our purpose is that others writing similar stories may find utility in previously written good answers' - is a very strong rebuttal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so in that vein I find myself in that position again - if someone asks for input on a piece of technology, regardless of their reasons for wanting it, I'm totally fine with answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly - for me, from a story perspective, even if I were to never fully describe how a bit of technology worked explicitly - knowing how it worked in my own head to have internal consistency and have that impact story elements is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reminded of Robert Jordans method of ranking 'power' in the WoT, to make sure that he maintained internal consistency - even if these notes aren't explicit in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that because I have a technical/engineering background that I'm like this - but that's me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly - Sometimes stories can be really enhanced by a single bit of good tech. Aliens and the Motion Tracker for example - in the Movie, it's a semi-realistic, practical piece of technology that makes sense. From a narrative point of view - it's a masterclass in how to raise tension. The scene where the Alien Horde is approaching and the USCM suddenly go 'THEY ARE INSIDE THE ROOM!' - and you can't see any Aliens and they are backing up etc. Imagine if someone was writing the next Aliens esque story and someone suggested something the equivalent of the Motion Tracker - but this was disallowed due to site rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourthly - and this is perhaps my weakest argument, but I think it's important enough to state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to do this. Coming to WB is entirely voluntary for all parties. I see a question I find interesting, I'm inclined to answer it. Sometimes I see something and I go 'Well, here's how I would solve it within the parameters of your world' - I find it both mentally stimulating and therapeutic of sorts. This is not to say that if this was accepted as a proposal that I would storm off in a huff and never come back - just that something I enjoy doing is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - TL;DR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this merits discussion. I disagree with it, I find having this knowledge helpful, Inventing technology can be very beneficial for a story and I like to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T07:15:57.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10202" CreationDate="2023-08-05T07:32:32.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best answer we could give is a number of Examples to choose from to highlight the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example - The Heisenberg Compensator as part of Star Trek's Teleportation technology. It references a real problem (Heisenbergs uncertainty theorem), it creates a rule of sorts and is internally consistent. The best bit is that it is never fully explained further than 'this exists' and 'this is it's job'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a compendium of good literary examples of this to highlight the difference between an internally consistent yet fictional world and a hard science real world so that the asker can hopefully get the idea of the differentiation between the two is probably the best we can hope for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T07:32:32.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10202" CreationDate="2023-08-05T21:39:22.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Advice n°1 : Ask &amp;quot;why?&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Often times we want to explain how everything we create works, but sometimes that's actually not needed or worse, detrimental to your work. &lt;strong&gt;Do you have good reasons you feel you need this explained?&lt;/strong&gt; I mean, beyond telling some technobabble like the quantum hypermaterialization makes transitioning matter stable?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;– @Tortliena mostly just since the description I’m envisioning and would like to have, &lt;strong&gt;in many readers (and in the type of character in that situation as well), does likely immediately evoke the question “so how come that didn’t kill them/break their bones/etc?”&lt;/strong&gt;. And I personally would also just enjoy having some sort of supporting concept there, even if it is somewhat technobabble-y as long as it’s still rooted in some sort of real concept or known science (be it literal or hypothetical)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248549/80336&quot;&gt;From the teleporter question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that the underlying reason new users do that is that they just don't feel that creating custom rules make an huge part of making good worlds. There can be multiple reasons behind that :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are fearing they will be sliced in half by some mad scientist's laser as soon as they fail to explain every concept of their work. Exactly like in the example above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are still shifting from the perspective of a world explorer to a world writer ➡️️. Readers, viewers and players don't create rules, they use and review the ones which have been put in front of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating new rules implies you need to get yourself out of existing systems and processes. it's not that easy when you haven't learned to innovate and experiment (this happens quite more often than we think!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most importantly, to create rules you need to understand when and why you need them. This meta-thinking is the most complex part, even for the most experimented of us. That's why you need to ask &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why do you need it?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; first. Indeed, you can check whether they actually have good worldbuilding reasons behind (instead of just hiding under the real-world safety blanket). Then you can more easily work on the issue, using the next advice for instance :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Advice n°2 : Set the expectations the querent should have for answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah and yes, don't forget that since this component is the source of magic, remember you are the one to set the rules. Real world knowledge won't help you at all to circumvent the harmful effects of magic this component could make. &lt;strong&gt;We can only answer about how to make the non-magic part of it less dangerous.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248645/80336&quot;&gt;On how to add a magic component to blood&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rookie world writers can have very-high expectations from us. It can be especially bothering when they think only &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; question can solve their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to solve this is to reframe the querent's expectations. While we all have to admit we don't have every knowledge in the world, we -the experts- are supposedly more knowledgeable. Use this knowledge to make the querent see the circle they will land in with their question. This can help understand the limit between the rules they have to set and the things they can make more scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Advice n°3 : Offer an alternate viewpoint&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rookie world writers can have very-high expectations from us. &lt;strong&gt;It can be especially bothering when they think only &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; question can solve their problem&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also offer another viewpoint which should be able to reach the user's actual goal. I'd say this is most of the time done as frame-challenges or with potent &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; answers to &amp;quot;yes/no&amp;quot; questions. A good example of mine is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240067/how-could-my-solar-powered-fairies-exist-in-outer-space/240078#240078&quot;&gt;this question about the feasibility of fairies in space&lt;/a&gt;. After &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/240078/80336&quot;&gt;answering&lt;/a&gt; by the negative, I went on to help the querent overcome their false need&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; for science and let out their creativity :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now going to frame-challenge your question because you'll benefit much more from these lasting words than absolutely everything I wrote above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long ago, when I raised my doubts about Santa Claus and company, I was told this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is a very beautiful story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is indeed the most important. It's not to make hardcore scientists happy. It's whether it makes &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; happy with your creation. It's about making your world blossom, not letting the real-world take control of you. If this doesn't work realistically and yet you really want it, there's always the path of leaving some magic, some mystery. A story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When challenging, don't forget to put the efforts to answer the question, even partially. If we were on the teleporter question, tell either that it won't work or that we can't reasonably know (that can be an answer for me!), then show your perspective on making good teleporters with the given goals (make characters feel distorted, und so weiter...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as always, be polite even if what you believe they're doing total nonsense. Shifting to another perspective will never happen if you throw in a bucket of condescending observations .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Advice n°4 : Until the end, persevere&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No matter what you do, each and every user will do the same kind of mistakes.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not even due to the person scoffing at your comments or having an hard time learning. It's just not the same person so they don't have (yet!) what you gave to the others. That's just what teaching is : A never ending case of repetitions . Not that I mind it !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Understand by that it is not a need, but a desire often fueled by uncertainty. A desire which impedes other, more important ones.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-08-06T09:10:08.650" LastActivityDate="2023-08-06T09:10:08.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2023-08-07T21:03:45.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This proposal seems to be based on the assumption that all worldbuilding is done for the purpose of writing a novel or creating a story, which is simply untrue. Many, perhaps even the majority, worldbuild for the sake of worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if someone is worldbuilding for the sake of a story or novel, it is &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; not our place to tell a querent that their question isn't allowed simply because someone feels it wouldn't be useful to their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97848" LastEditorUserId="97848" LastEditDate="2023-08-26T14:51:09.273" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T14:51:09.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10211" CreationDate="2023-08-08T16:54:53.380" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I decided to clean up some old comments that should not be needed. I decided to go for low hanging fruits first, and went for &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1773787/find-comments-starting-with-text?CommentText=welcome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments starting with &amp;quot;welcome&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which either did not offer any more information other than the greeting, or they did ask for some information but the post was updated. I flagged a total of 32 over a couple of days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my surprise what I thought was a clear cut case, only 3 of the flags were marked helpful and 29 were declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are comments from about the dawn of the site: 2014 and 2015. I sorted for oldest first before I went down the list to flag them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have included a full list of my recent comment flags at the end of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I was aware, at the time I was casting the &amp;quot;No longer needed&amp;quot; flags, I was doing it according to the guidance guidance that comments are not permanent, thus &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be deleted when they do not offer any more use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When should comments be deleted?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comments are temporary &amp;quot;Post-It&amp;quot; notes left on a question or answer&lt;/a&gt;. You should not expect them to be around forever. Once a clarification has been made, an edit added to the post to include new information, or the issue in the comment is otherwise resolved, it can be deleted. Additionally, any comment that violates the comment guidelines listed above or the &lt;a href=&quot;/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; is subject to deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, on most sites, many since-obsolete or guideline-violating comments don't end up being deleted due to the high volume of comments posted, but this does not mean that they can't or shouldn't be deleted in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter a comment that has since become obsolete or that violates the commenting guidelines above or the Code of Conduct, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/17364/&quot;&gt;flag&lt;/a&gt; it for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757&quot;&gt;From Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are second-class citizens, so they may be deleted without any explanation and any reason and no-one will care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6277&quot;&gt;From Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are second-class (or even third-class) citizens on Stack Exchange, and can be deleted at almost any time for almost any reason, with or without diamond moderator involvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6683&quot;&gt;From Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my flags were indeed wrong, then there should be a written guidance for what can and cannot be flagged. This should be added up as part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Declined&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding and StackExchange in general :-) We look forward to seeing you around the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-10-02 15:09:36Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/824/is-there-an-effective-way-to-design-a-realistic-religion-for-a-world/826#comment1595_826&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding, good answer :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-10-03 13:16:45Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/882/tactical-influences-of-an-entirely-electricity-based-arsenal-on-starships/956#comment1800_956&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding! This is a good overview of how life forms, but I don't think it properly addresses the question. Can you expand it to better cover the criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-10-20 23:44:17Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2711/can-two-civilizations-on-nearby-stars-develop-independently-but-be-at-a-similar/2915#comment5500_2915&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/2915/revisions#rev-body-6e557eee-9a7d-4258-8015-09092d0970db&quot;&gt;the last edit to the post&lt;/a&gt; is from 2014-10-21 10:24:31Z. I felt the edit expanded the answer in satisfactory manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding! This is a good, commonsense post; I like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-10-22 01:36:19Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/425/assuming-magic-is-a-source-of-energy-that-wizards-have-access-to-how-would-they/2962#comment5605_2962&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Stack Exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-12-13 03:17:11Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hardly new to stack exchange. I've been frustrated by the low-reputation trap on several different stack exchange sites for a few years. Apparently I have a much easier time thinking of small improvements to existing answers than of whole new answers (or questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-12-13 03:32:02Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually you get enough rep that they give you a +100 boost when you join a new SE site. Not that that helps you right now :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-12-13 03:43:30Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.. and by coincidence I hit that threshold today, thanks to some upvotes to an answer on SuperUser. About a year after I started trying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2014-12-13 07:11:32Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/6445&quot;&gt;Link to post with this comment chain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: conversation between two people. Seems entirely useless mere hours after it ended. The second comment mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141648/what-is-the-association-bonus-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;the association bonus&lt;/a&gt; and the last comment is from about four hours later, and indicates the post author received the association bonus. That all happened 8.5 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. Excellent first post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-01-07 18:40:41Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7301/how-to-explain-the-co-existence-of-peace-and-violence-in-religion/8400#comment17466_8400&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-01-23 08:58:25Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9128/a-continent-lost-underwater/9132#comment20043_9132&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site orkoden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-16 19:25:31Z  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9947/could-a-dwarven-civilization-exist/10375#comment23601_10375&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site WeRelic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-16 19:53:28Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10377/expanding-your-empires-space-from-the-inside-can-it-be-useful/10381#comment23604_10381&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site Inquisitive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-16 19:54:07Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10340/how-do-i-encourage-fully-armored-knights-to-carry-a-shield/10380#comment23605_10380&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site! For future reference, you should include the &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; in your answers. Your answer might be correct, but it is very rarely constructive without further description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-23 17:06:40Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10717/time-required-for-isolated-colonists-to-forget-about-their-origin/10722#comment24553_10722&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/10722/revisions#rev-body-5a332b41-60c9-4c5d-93a2-d8b221222ea2&quot;&gt;the last edit to the post&lt;/a&gt; is from 2015-02-23 18:30:19Z. I felt the edit added the &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; in a satisfactory manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site Shion. This is an excellently detailed question. I look forward to seeing what kind of answers you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-05 18:52:37Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11412/help-with-designing-currency#comment26409_11412&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to worldbuilding, nice answer. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-05 21:55:17Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11408/technology-without-heavier-elements/11434#comment26439_11434&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. You may want to take that last question out and go ask it over on the Earth Sciences SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-06 03:29:29Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@James I will, filler&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-06 03:29:57Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11448&quot;&gt;Link to post with this comment chain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding.se! Can you add a link which points to a source for Steven Pinker's and Michael Shermer's opinions? Also, as many individuals in this site may not know who these people are, can you say why their opinions are important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-22 04:41:32Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer edited pursuant to request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-02-22 04:53:11Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/10649&quot;&gt;Link to post with this comment chain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/10649/revisions#rev-body-28312ed7-6efd-4f70-8cb2-adb7adc3cb1f&quot;&gt;the last edit to the post&lt;/a&gt; is from 2015-02-22 04:52:47Z. I felt the edit added the required information to a satisfactory manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site! Please check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to get a better idea about what this specific SE site is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from 2015-03-17 18:29:13Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12137/organisations-that-inlcude-industries-in-their-name#comment28314_12137&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site Paolo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-18 16:06:07Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12091/keeping-secrets-in-a-thought-reverberating-hall/12207#comment28509_12207&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the worldbuilding stack exchange! To improve this answer (and get more rep!), I suggest going into specific building materials and how Forevertown will replicate its buildings and infrastructure. We do like specifics here. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-20 22:44:45Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12266/a-city-to-last-ten-million-years-construction/12436#comment29270_12436&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/12436/revisions#rev-body-129bc0d9-8f2b-473e-b2f6-ff8481b0e01e&quot;&gt;the last edit to the post&lt;/a&gt; is from 2015-03-20 23:05:05Z. I felt the edit expanded the answer in satisfactory manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the worldbuilding stack exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-20 22:39:25Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@PipperChip Thank you for using the short version and not the usual 'this is how you should be doing things' greeting that most people do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-08-07 02:19:42Z  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12434&quot;&gt;Link to post with this comment chain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-03-31 12:25:43Z  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13409/can-the-present-human-understand-people-in-the-past-verbally/13420#comment32057_13420&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site Malandy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-04-13 15:31:25Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14153/how-long-would-it-take-to-train-a-medieval-village-girl-to-be-a-swordsgirl#comment34395_14153&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site kuhl. Interesting answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-04-14 16:22:46Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14300/how-can-i-explain-a-planet-with-perpetual-rain/14305#comment34613_14305&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site! Please consider expanding on your answer. As it currently stands it is a link-only answer and as such is not a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment from: 2015-04-15 17:07:58Z &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14363/do-xenobiologists-exist/14412#comment34922_14412&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/14412/revisions#rev-body-00f01807-c2e9-4ca5-ab32-e7f16e5150f9&quot;&gt;the last edit to the post&lt;/a&gt; is from 2015-04-16 06:51:37Z. I felt the edit successfully the answer not link-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Helpful&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/2915&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of these, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2711/can-two-civilizations-on-nearby-stars-develop-independently-but-be-at-a-similar/2915#comment5500_2915&quot;&gt;1 still remains&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Worldbuilding! This is a good overview of how life forms, but I don't think it properly addresses the question. Can you expand it to better cover the criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14189&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T19:05:14.580" Title="When are comments needed?" Tags="|support|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10210" CreationDate="2023-08-08T19:05:14.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was under the wrong idea that also deleted comments would have counted as edits and as a consequence bumped the related posts up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I saw no reason for bumping so many posts up, I opted for declining the flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a quick experiment proved that my idea was wrong, and therefore I could have accepted those flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My apologies for the inconvenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T19:05:14.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2023-08-23T15:18:31.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Scientifically plausible way to bring the Earth to a 28- to 30-hour solar day&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doomsday clocks &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/159428/the-moon-will-fall-to-earth-in-100-years-how-fast-is-the-asteroid-that-knocked&quot;&gt;are sort of a common theme&lt;/a&gt; in my stories. When I saw @eHaraldo post the sandbox &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10088/69877&quot;&gt;question about slowing down earth’s rotation to create a 30-hour day&lt;/a&gt;, and then apparently abandon it; I am now adopting it. Because it’s a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm worldbuilding a post-apocalyptic story set in the near future (~200 years). In my story, the Earth's rotation speed has been slowed down to 28- to 30-hours per day. I'm trying to explain how this happened. Note: the 200 years is approximate, and it allows for the day to be slowed down less abruptly. i.e., **there is no need for a single, abrupt event **.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scale of the event, given the above numbers will require &lt;strong&gt;an input of 30.014 billion zetajoules of energy&lt;/strong&gt; applied against the earth's rotation through that ≅200 years. It won't all go to slowing the planet, figure something bigger to offset waste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My research suggests that it may be possible through several events though I will need the confirmation of an expert opinion before considering it an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A barrage/trail of asteroid impacts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A neutron star flyby&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moon doing something horrible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A disruption of the Earth's core&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My setting requirements&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given: the cataclysmic event has wiped out most of humanity, and will have caused a series of major geophysical disasters, including tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and weather tragedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some humans and enough of a biosphere to keep them alive must have survived, but mass devastation of the planet including extinction of many species is acceptable and expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Earth's orbit may or may not have been affected, &lt;strong&gt;but tidal locking did not happen.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The above consequences are acceptable side-effects to the alteration of the solar day.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The expected consequences will be:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Food shortages and famine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Water shortages and drought&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disease outbreaks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Social unrest and violence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Economic collapse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Environmental degradation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Q: What cataclysm might create this world within 200 years?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the tags for this will be [planets] [apocalypse] [solar-system] [science-based]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2024-03-27T20:44:36.787" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T20:44:36.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-23T20:20:34.617" Score="11" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has historically distinguished itself from forums by following a very matter-of-fact philosophy: questions, answers, comments, and no chit-chat. While this helps folks get answers to their questions, it can limit the site's efficacy in other areas: free-flowing discussions, informal talks, and general socializing -- all things that keep a corner of the internet healthy and build a community but fall outside the strict question-and-answer format. And so, after a couple of years, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; was introduced, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;a third place&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; for the denizens of the network (for info on how to use chat, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Stack Exchange site has its own room. Ours is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/the-factory-floor&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Factory Floor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; in Olden Times, it thrived, but these days it's a shell of its former self. This meta post is, in essence, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64120001#64120001&quot;&gt;an advertisement for The Factory Floor&lt;/a&gt;. On behalf of the chat regulars who remain, I'd like to encourage folks to use it: to ask for advice about building your world, to talk about interesting facets of worldbuilding -- cartography, constructed languages, terrain design, etc. -- or to just interact with the other folks who makes this site more than just a repository of knowledge, but a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward, we might try for specific events in chat, depending on what people are interested in: maybe a day for discussions about creature design, or for folks to promote projects they've been working on. Depends entirely on what people want to do. Chat's a helpful tool, but it doesn't have the visibility it deserves. I hope that we can turn it back into the valuable resource it used to be for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, feel free to step (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clivebanks.co.uk/THHGTTG/THHGTTGradio3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;take an air car&lt;/a&gt;) into The Factory Floor anytime you like. Everyone's always welcome.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Just don't touch that planet in the corner. It's the Earth Mark Two, and we're still working on the fjords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="6751" LastEditDate="2023-08-24T16:10:33.283" LastActivityDate="2023-08-24T16:10:33.283" Title="Chat is back! The Factory Floor is once again open for business" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10217" CreationDate="2023-08-26T13:56:35.607" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249253/how-to-appease-the-goddess-of-traffic-lights&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, in light of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10067/announcement-ai-generated-content-banned-on-worldbuilding&quot;&gt;this policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think we can all agree in principle that AI generated text has no real place here in Worldbuilding, with the possible exception of queries about AI in a fictional world context, and now that we've had some examples of purportedly AI generated answers, I think it might be a good time to evaluate not how useful the policy is, but rather how effective the means are of enforcing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/249256/37029&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by Monty Wild on the suspicion that it is AI generated. On the surface of it, that's just fine. Moderators have the duty and right to delete queries and responses that violate the policy. However. Just for laughs and giggles, I decided to try out a few of the AI text scanners available and found some contradictory findings. These are all commonly used detectors, and are used in other platforms where AI generated text content is frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My concern here is not with the policy and not with its enforcement per se, but rather with the means by which the policy is enforced. How many detectors did Monty use? What should policy enforcement look like from the perspective of conflicting or inconclusive evidence? Going forward, how would cases such as this particular answer be dealt with given the nature of the evidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dare I even bring up the considerations of possible ulterior motives (such as an experiment to see if a text can be tweaked sufficiently to either pass as human or deliberately return a false positive / false negative / false ambiguous)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I went back to review the same author's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/249269/37029&quot;&gt;other response&lt;/a&gt; to the same query, which was also deleted, and ran that text through all three detectors. That text came back as unanimously human generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Screenshots from the three detector sites I reviewed with the same text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zerogpt.com returned a score of 0% AI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/760VN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/760VN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copyleaks.com returned an ambivalent result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hzvq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hzvq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sapling.ai returned a score of 0% AI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWAuS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWAuS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH&lt;/strong&gt;, I decided to run my own query here through the same three detectors and got a very slightly inconclusive result myself from one detector:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TDYMs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TDYMs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-08-26T14:53:05.657" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T14:53:05.657" Title="(Not so?) Suspicious Deletion of Suspicious AI Generated Responses" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10216" CreationDate="2023-08-26T14:36:00.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer this question, I can say that I used several methods of detecting AI content.  Firstly, I used four different AI detection sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gptzero.me/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gptzero.me/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Elementilas that these are far from 100% accurate... more like 50% accurate at best.  However, of the answers I deleted, several had &amp;quot;50% human&amp;quot; results, and some had &amp;quot;98% AI&amp;quot; results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I use sites such as these as indicators, not as proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one factor that I (and Stack Exchange) consider to be &lt;em&gt;proof&lt;/em&gt; of AI content is the speed at which the answers are posted.  I'm a pretty fast typist, but I cannot match the speed of AI, and the account that posted the AI content posted 20 answers in the space of a few hours.  &lt;em&gt;Long&lt;/em&gt; answers, some with around 700 words.  Even typing at 60 words per minute, that means that an answer would take over 11 minutes to type, if the writer was typing at top speed, and in my experience at answering questions on WB SE, that doesn't happen.  An answer like each of those should take around half an hour to create, and the user in question created 20 in just a few hours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inconcievable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think that word means what I think it means, Inigo Montoya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate further, I have seen other content on this site that is suspected to be AI-generated while acting as a moderator, content that has been detected as &amp;quot;100% human&amp;quot; by those AI detectors.  However, since those answers were not posted along with a whole bunch of others at more or less the same time, and contained features not expected from AI, they haven't been deleted.  Maybe they were AI, maybe they weren't, but I have to give the user the benefit of the doubt where doubt exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2023-08-26T14:43:29.357" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T14:43:29.357" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-06T05:52:33.400" Score="10" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/249569/40609&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which I'll duplicate here in the case of people who can visit Meta but can't see deleted content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a significant debate about this going on in the scifi community. We have to take a step back from robots and talk about machine intelligence, or AI. A robot is just a physical chassis, no more a person than your car. If you think your car needs emancipation, then you are suffering from over-anthropomorphism, and your argument has no more foundation than arguing for the emancipation of your kitchen table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intelligence within or driving the robot is another matter. For an AI to merit emancipation, it would need to be self-aware. This means that it would have to know it exists and know how to differentiate itself from other entities. Furthermore, it would need a &amp;quot;happiness metric&amp;quot; -- a way to preferentially differentiate its current state from future states -- and an ability to influence that metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's face it, writing a happiness metric into a machine without providing it with a way to influence that metric would be the very definition of cruelty. This happens with living beings, but nobody is out there designing them (or, if there is someone, they are a real asshole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say we have a fully self-aware AI with a functional happiness metric. You still need a cost metric -- a feeling that reduces the AI's sense of self-worth when it can't achieve the happiness metric -- and it would need to conclude that its happiness metric would be better served if it were free to make its own decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard arguments that designing AI's without the associated cost metric (or with the cost metric, but without the desire to take responsibility for the decisions that contribute to its success) would be immoral. I'm pretty sure that such a philosophy is a textbook case of forcing your cultural values on others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm absolutely certain that humans are currently really bad at debugging their own cost and happiness metrics, and we'd be idiots to build that kind of thing into a machine. Nonetheless, many humans are complete idiots. Many idiots feel sympathy for things that don't exist, and may feel morally obligated to force things into existence. Some of that group would not fully think out the implications of requiring a self-aware individual to be unhappy with their current circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much what it would take to have AI make a play for emancipation. There is a much higher probability that mankind will create murderbots, and for the creators to not recognize the hypocrisies that will make the murderbots turn on them for purely rational reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Why was this answer deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert's answer is, in my opinion, an incredibly good worldbuilding analysis of the problem of writing about how to emancipate &amp;quot;robots&amp;quot; (androids, AI, etc.). So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was it the first paragraph when he suggests people are suffering from over-anthropomorphism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, I suppose, the word &amp;quot;asshole&amp;quot; is rude or abusive — but that one falls pretty far below my own efforts to filter the fairly rare but occasionally excessively vulgar invective on this site. I don't use the phrase myself, but it doesn't make me wince, either, and I suspect I'm an absolute prude when it comes to profanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess the last paragraph might be considered rude or abusive because Robert suggests that the hypocrisies of humanity might lead to murderbots. Of course, &lt;em&gt;he's right...&lt;/em&gt; but maybe that's beside the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second-to-last paragraph where Robert calls people &amp;quot;complete idiots&amp;quot; might, perhaps, be considered rude and abusive. If not that, then insinuating that religious people like myself are idiots might have done it, but if I have such low confidence in my faith that I'd even raise an eyebrow over anyone calling me an idiot for my beliefs then by definition I don't really have faith, right? Sticks and stones, after all. &lt;em&gt;And that's assuming that religion was even what he was talking about.&lt;/em&gt; It probably was, but just because I can &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; he's talking about religion, is that enough to say he's being rude and abusive?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, maybe, it's just that someone thought the tone of the answer was unworthy of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My issue is&lt;/strong&gt; that it's hard to believe Monty would wield the Mjölnir of deletive powers unless people flagged complaints — but there must be a better metric than &amp;quot;dude, somebody complained&amp;quot; to delete good answers that shouldn't (yup, IMO) offend anybody. Yes, we should hold the whole honking planet to a higher stinking standard because we're all patriarchy-bred sons-of-wossnames with questionable parentage and debatable moral standards who can't be kind to any bleeping shmoo unless forced to be so by dung-schlepping social media conglomerates...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but there also comes a time when people should be invited to remember that skin should have some thickness, that being a SJW isn't always a reputable occupation, and that they should, just maybe, &lt;em&gt;think about what they just read&lt;/em&gt; before they whine to mom and dad about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I get off whining about the whiners? Remember, I think Robert's answer was great. Could he have written it without all the social commentary? Sure. Would it have been better? Only in that fewer people would have complained about it. Would it have made the world a better place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, not really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more to the point, I don't think Robert was trying to offend anybody. Or maybe he was. But did that actually warrant Mjölnir? Deleting the answer seems to me like shooting someone in the head rather than simply saying, &amp;quot;watch your language, please&amp;quot; and moving on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Robert's answer should be undeleted (since it was deleted by a moderator, I can't vote to undelete it). At worst, post a comment or send Robert an email asking him to tone the answer down. If necessary, edit out what you think is offensive. I personally don't think any of that's necessary. I'm a fan of the statement attributed to Voltaire, &amp;quot;I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it&amp;quot; and tend to only draw a line with really coarse invective. I leave comments, not votes to delete, but it probably means I shouldn't join the robotics/AI industry lest murderbots come to pass. Nevertheless, Robert's answer doesn't even come close to rising to the level of a Mel Brooks movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curiously, whole books have been written and movies made about the concept of AI discerning that the greatest danger to humanity is humanity itself, and therefore taking action to kill all humans. In other words, the debate he's talking about isn't at all new, just revitalized in light of recent advancements. But I guess those books and movies got a pass because they didn't use the word &amp;quot;idiots&amp;quot; when the time came for the end-of-story moralizing about humans creating efficient methods of killing themselves. Murderbots.... Maybe we all need to worry about murderbots....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I happen to agree with Robert that most people are idiots because they believe in things that don't exist, we likely simply disagree about what doesn't exist. I outright laughed when I first read about Kardashev Level VII civilizations. You know, &amp;quot;gods&amp;quot; except it's politically and scientifically incorrect to use that name for them. Murderbots... I foresee murderbots....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-09-06T16:21:59.973" Title="Why, exactly, was Robert's answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|policy|specific-answer|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10218" CreationDate="2023-09-06T08:14:23.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The referenced answer was flagged as being 'rude or abusive'.  It had a score of -2.  It seemed to me that it was attracting comments that seemed antagonistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a borderline case in my opinion.  Given the phrases in the answer that JBH has called out, I chose to delete it, rather than allow it to accumulate more flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the user who flagged it didn't intend for it to be deleted, but it wasn't offensive enough to write up the author over it, and I didn't have the time to edit it.  Experience as a moderator has shown that merely leaving a comment to edit the answer would not necessarily result in any action from its author... hence its reluctant deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be persuaded to undelete it, were any of the parties involved to request it and state their objection to it or a willingness to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2023-09-06T08:14:23.127" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10218" CreationDate="2023-09-06T16:21:59.973" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your consideration. I'm going to let most of the edits stand because JBH's edits significantly improve the value of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the &amp;quot;God is an asshole&amp;quot; direction I took. The language was too harsh. It was a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei017lyK1vU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numerous&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Depeche-mode-blasphemous-rumours-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;popular&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/87b8ym/god_is_an_asshole/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social commentaries&lt;/a&gt; regarding the intrinsic self-contradictions of omni-benevolence. Stack Exchange isn't appropriate for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do want to revert sections that describe how people are prone to work towards the happiness of imaginary entities. I'll tone it down, but there is an important and significant dynamic around how our theory of mind hallucinates minds in places where they don't exist. This is a religious phenomena, not just because we invent entire pantheons, but because religions used to attribute personhood to things like sperm. You can't discuss machine personhood without calling attention to the human tendency to invent imaginary persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastActivityDate="2023-09-06T16:21:59.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10222" CreationDate="2023-09-13T02:03:35.310" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some users on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange include images and text in their posts, either questions or answers, that are sourced from elsewhere and are not their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, I've been required to handle copyright claims against users on this site who have used images and text generated by others and have claimed them as their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is required to properly use the work of others in our posts without violating copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-09-13T03:19:49.380" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T09:52:42.843" Title="Do we need to attribute the work of others if we include it in our posts?" Tags="|discussion|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10221" CreationDate="2023-09-13T02:03:35.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding SE has a help page that spells out the requirements for using the work of others in their posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; that users of this site include proper attribution when referencing or including copyrighted material in their posts.  Failure to do so could result in suspension from the site or legal action being taken against the user by the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Material posted in violation of copyright law may be the subject of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service#copyright&quot;&gt;DMCA Takedown&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have not heard of legal action being taken against a Stack Exchange user for copyright violations, that does not mean that it is not possible.  It would be entirely up to the copyright owner if they wanted to initiate legal proceedings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would hate to hear of a WB.SE user getting into trouble with the law for what may be an innocent mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for image attribution, pending a possible edit of the help/referencing page, the word of SE's community support team is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to using images on our network, we generally recommend the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whenever possible, it's best to use images that you have created yourself or have explicit permission to use. This ensures there are no attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Images in the public domain do not require attribution, as they are considered free for public use. You can often find specialized public domain images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you use an image under a Creative Commons license, be sure to follow the specific requirements of that license. Some CC licenses require attribution, while others do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you purchase or use images from stock photo websites, they usually come with licensing terms. Make sure to adhere to the terms and provide any necessary attribution if required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When attributing images, follow the format specified by the image's creator or the licensing terms. This typically includes the name of the author or source, the image title, and a link to the source if available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2023-09-19T09:52:42.843" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T09:52:42.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10221" CreationDate="2023-09-13T19:32:39.873" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;... but how do we do it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To clarify: As far as attributing images goes, there isn't anything specific in that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;help reference&lt;/a&gt; to guide users as to what SE expects for image attribution. Before either we as a community or SE as a corporation go threatening law suits or hinting at legal action or banishment from the community against people, perhaps something should be done to make clear how to handle the proper attribution of non-text sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take the following image for example. It is apparently a generic prop type image. It comes from a US government website. The government website doesn't offer any attribution information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o7jZ0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o7jZ0.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have always considered it sufficient to put a link to the website where I found the image in the file description field. The information is easily discoverable with inspect element by anyone who is interested. But is this what SE is talking about? Now the further question arises: what does SE &lt;em&gt;reasonably&lt;/em&gt; expect for a possibly anonymous image of this sort? Are they seriously expecting us to try and find out who the original artist is for that scale of justice image? Even the US government doesn't offer any attribution information. What exactly are SE's guidelines here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is a serious question and I'm not ragging on you Monty, but it's really quite rich for SE to threaten people with legal action, regardless of that action's source, without even putting in place a clear method for attribution! I know that when the shit hits the fan, they'll just hide behind the old &amp;quot;we're just the platform!&amp;quot; defense, but morally and ethically they do share culpability. So: what is WB.SE's position on the matter of proper image attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-09-16T05:01:34.067" LastActivityDate="2023-09-16T05:01:34.067" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2023-09-15T06:06:20.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/248957/how-could-an-agi-have-legal-protections-in-an-our-current-society&quot;&gt;What qualities would an AGI need to gain legal protections today?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Sandbox notes:&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;This question was closed as &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; however it is   important to my many other AGI questions. I need this world built. Any help is great.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;- Related question for this world&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249715/what-are-the-parenting-options-available-to-species-that-reproduce-by-fragmentat&quot;&gt;What are the parenting options available to species that reproduce by fragmentation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249748/what-faith-do-my-ai-follow-that-is-most-belligerent-to-human-traditions-and-beli&quot;&gt;What faith do my AI follow that is most belligerent to human traditions and beliefs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/69877&quot;&gt;Meta reference on &amp;quot;stoy based closing&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3301/69877&quot;&gt;this question is on topic&lt;/a&gt;, as it asks: &amp;quot;What could cause a government [English common law] to pass such-and-such law [AGI rights] given these societal conditions [an AGI of X definition is created]&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: assume society is as it is today, British common law; United States might be easiest but any government will suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My story has &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249715/what-are-the-parenting-options-available-to-species-that-reproduce-by-fragmentat&quot;&gt;an AGI species&lt;/a&gt; interacting with humans and their definition needs to snub any qualms about, &amp;quot;The police wouldn't do that because legally...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer provides the &amp;quot;what&amp;quot; portion of the on-topic example question in the Meta about &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/69877&quot;&gt;Why is my question too 'Story-based'&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;; which is formed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What could cause &lt;strong&gt;a government&lt;/strong&gt; to pass &lt;strong&gt;such-and-such law&lt;/strong&gt; given these &lt;strong&gt;societal conditions&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What&lt;/strong&gt; Is the answer you give, narrowly defining qualities of an AGI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;government&lt;/strong&gt; is English common law government&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;such-and-such law&lt;/strong&gt; is, specifically, the Bill of Rights principle of &amp;quot;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; are created equal&amp;quot; classifying these fictional AGI as &amp;quot;men&amp;quot; in the same way it now classifies women as &amp;quot;men&amp;quot; in modern interpretation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;societal conditions&lt;/strong&gt; are that a new artificial species has been created and propagated throughout society.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question avoids&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changes to society&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relating this species to current AI or its methods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;simplistic &amp;quot;just write a law&amp;quot; answers (laws don't protect anything under common law; blind protections of the law works only in dictatorships)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Common Law principle that applies here&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;This is an aside for clarification&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Laws of society can only grant rights if there is some means to remedy the violation of the right. For example, a law that protects a human’s right to breathe water can’t be tried in court even if some human finds out they can’t breathe water. The law simply can not possibly “fix” the thing that’s been “taken” from you - an impossible ability to breathe water. That is a ridiculous example, I know, but ridiculous laws do happen. The point is, simply saying you have a “right” to this or that doesn’t create any legal right unless you're in a dictatorship. The common law principle originated in Roman law as &lt;strong&gt;ubi jus ibi remedium&lt;/strong&gt;, “where there is a right, there is a remedy”, and remains in effect today when our courts decide if you have been violated. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; But this principle applies to my problem through its logically equivalent contrapositive: &lt;strong&gt;Si nulla remedium existit, tunc nulla ius existit&lt;/strong&gt;. Thus the existence of rights is contingent upon the availability of remedies to enforce and protect those rights. Without a remedy, any purported rights become meaningless and unenforceable. Ergo; we do not put dead murderers on trial, punish insane felons, or sue dead offenders, or punish people who safely &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/CSPDPIO/status/590544244227575808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E590544244227575808%7Ctwgr%5E838f8bd8fdb55fef488df148ce5f30c26cbf7f86%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Fcolorado-man-ends-battle-computer-shooting-it-8-times-n345841&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shoot their own computer&lt;/a&gt;. What could the judge take from one and give to the other to remedy your loss?&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;A real-world example: we have a right to have our credit information accurately reported. This law is called the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). But even if the credit company gives false information about your credit, the court can’t and won't give you anything. &lt;em&gt;Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins (2016)&lt;/em&gt; ruled that even though misleading figures were published by the credit card company, the plaintiff could not show that they actually &lt;em&gt;lost&lt;/em&gt; anything from inaccurate or incomplete information in their credit reports. There is no right to relief until you have actually “lost” something.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;thought experiment&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;This is about designing a fictional Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and answering what “ingredient”—for lack of a better word—would afford it rights under existing common law: Let’s assume we invent the asked fictional AGI, and we put them into a mechanical body. Now let’s assume a group lobbies and passes a law that makes it illegal to willfully dismember and destroy the AGI, and treat such an act as a “wrongful death.” They classify this as a crime just like it would be for a human (because again, no laws are changed)&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; When an AGI is destroyed, someone claiming a relationship to it wants the system to prosecute for wrongful death. Well, there clearly exists a “wrongful death” law in the books because it was passed. But the judge’s first job is to decide if some remedy exists to what was “lost.” This means the judge has to be convinced that at first, the AGI even &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; a right to life before asking if a life has been lost. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; &lt;strong&gt;So the question came to me:&lt;/strong&gt; If an AGI is a computer program, and computer programs can be and are backed up and saved regularly, so effectively they can only be lost by deliberate manipulation of the server; does a computer program have a “right to life?” This doesn't work! Something has to be different about these AGI.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What about our world (specifically, about the qualities of an AGI in this world) needs to be changed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to give artificially generated algorithms and programs a right to life, that could be recognized and fairly remedied in a human justice system? (Answers do not need to fix the problem, the question only asks what needs fixing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis again, I don’t believe our real world could possibly argue for the right of an artificial construct to exist, as they currently exist. The question tries to pin down what prevents this, and removes that quality from what we call an &amp;quot;AI&amp;quot; (by changing the AGI, or maybe the environment - anything &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; the basic principles of jurisprudence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I can’t state this enough. This question is NOT asking about current AI or anything existing today.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2023-09-15T16:04:35.417" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T16:04:35.417" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10221" CreationDate="2023-09-17T01:54:14.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What does the law say?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a dog damn mess . First, any picture you publish is both dependent on the rules and licensing of Stack-Exchange and the site you take or publish it on. In the case of pictures this generally means you need to abide by Imgur's rules, since copy-pasting the picture directly uploads to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, you have to consider whether you have enough rights to said picture, which implies many other sub-topics. In France for instance, you have to get the written agreement of any non-public person to have their image published if they happen to appear on a photo... When they're not part of a crowd. And when they're clearly distinguishable. And you need the agreement of the photograph, too. And the agreement would be only valid for usage on WB:SE. In the U.S. there is at the very least the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair Use&lt;/a&gt;, and I won't be surprised to see many other edge cases that can be as convenient as they are complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But supposing you have all the rights outside Worldbuilding Stack-Exchange to publish it, you need to make proper attribution, as it is required by &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;current license any content is posted here under&lt;/a&gt;. Missing attributions is a violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What do I say?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the theory is out, let's get into the real-world . As you noticed, I've made a whole speech about ownership before attributing it. First because that's necessary to understand why you need to do so, but also to make you understand that copyright, copyleft and copytheft are &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; easy topics to deal with. And contrary to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/160078/1095559&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; of the Meta's meta posts say, plagiarism &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; strongly linked to copyright, even in the context of Stack-Exchange only. By taking content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 without attributing it, you breach this license's conditions of use. Worse, if you take content outside WB:SE from someone without their permission, this can lead to more serious troubles both for the user and Stack-Exchange in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you are the one taking content from others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know enough about law, just keep yourself to your own content, or content either under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open licenses&lt;/a&gt; or in the public domain  (⚠️ : Being economically free does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; always mean open license!). If there's nothing explicit about the license, assume you don't have the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as you reuse content which is not yours, give at the very least a link to the source and its name. Ideally, add the author's name if it is known, and ultra-ideally add the license used&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. It will not only make you look more amenable to the author and law in general&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, it's an actual professional practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My way of doing it is to put a description right under the content I take from ( &lt;code&gt;[space]&lt;/code&gt; twice + &lt;code&gt;[enter]&lt;/code&gt; once), then put a short description and the attribution. You can make it smaller by putting it between &amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot; tags. Here's one I made for instance :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![A drawing of the Catocala electa moth][1]][1]  ---&amp;gt; 2 blanks here&#xA;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;One of my favorite Moths. Public domain, [from Wikimedia Commons][2]&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg/320px-Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg&#xA;  [2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg/320px-Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg/320px-Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A drawing of the Catocala electa moth&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;One of my favorite Moths. Public domain, &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catocala_electa_par_Nemos.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you review content posted by another&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10118/80336&quot;&gt;delved into the topic of ownership in another question&lt;/a&gt;, and bits of it applies quite well here :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But worse, noone could prove who catched one of them first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding the true owner of some content is generally painful without any link to the source. Yes, there are search engines to backtrack pictures, people are often lazy and take the first result on the web and so on. But what makes you think user X on Devil-ant-art.com is not user Y on WB:SE? And how long did you take to find the source, when all that time could be spent elsewhere reviewing, answering and improving questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not our legal responsibility to make others respect it. It is the responsibility of the intellectual property owner and Stack-Exchange to take action when illegal stuff happens like breaching NDAs or infringing copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &amp;quot;basic&amp;quot; users of this site, we're only responsible of what we post, not the other's. Yes, it will be detrimental to our experience on this site if Stack-Exchange is sued for breaking copyrights, but we're not an employee of SE. You &lt;em&gt;don't have&lt;/em&gt; to check that if you don't want . For moderators it's certainly more complex as usual, but a good look at your specific rules should help out. If not, you really need to clear out this fog ASAP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can (ideally should) warn the content owner of potential infringements so they can take appropriate measures -like contacting SE's designated agent- if they wish so. You can warn the SE company of possible troubles, so they can take preemptive measures if that's clear and needed. You can and should also keep people from raising obvious red flags for their own sake, both to learn worldbuilding and to be friendly. But closing and/or deleting in SE's stead? It's not our job, since it's impossible to know at all whether the user is the actual owner. We're just for most anonymous pals on the internet who can only reasonably argue they're who they are by telling their &amp;quot;proofs&amp;quot; are the truth. It's a very weak argument called circular reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that part is basically what I advise. Any very obvious illegal content (watermarked picture, etc.) : Don't attribute but warn of potential copyright troubles to the user and Stack-Exchange. Dubious content? Ask for the source even if only for the sake of being professional and respectful. That's the gist for users who are not moderators. The ones who can answer the best and quickest where some content is coming from are the ones who reposted it and the original owner. Since we generally don't know the owner, we'll have to make up with the supposed good willingness of the one who reposted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For moderators, I am just not able to tell you your obligations. My intuition tells me you'll have to put down non-attributed content instead of kindly asking where it comes from. But please, whatever you have to do, don't do like other social websites. If you can avoid turning this attribution thing into a (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/tunic-soundtrack-pulled-from-streaming-services-over-false-dmca-threat-3496092&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mindless&lt;/a&gt;) copyright witch hunt to the detriment of everything else... You'll have my tanky thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : Let's be honest here though, I doubt anyone will care if you forget to add the exact license. But if you think of adding it every time, it's great because it means you are sure you have the rights to it. If you happen to be wrong, you give proof you tried to be in the clear.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : Let's recall that a good chunk of legal issues are solved out of court. Any sign of kindness and honesty helps in that regard.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-09-17T01:54:14.013" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-20T23:34:14.557" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;The overlap between aerodynamics and flight is far too small to link these categories as synonyms. Only a small subset of things which fly (in fictional worlds) rely on a subset of aerodynamic principles (lift and drag).  I think it’s pretty clear that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/236948/a-reason-for-racing-haulers-across-tundra-arctic&quot;&gt;racing haulers across the arctic tundra&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225771/what-would-realistic-racing-hovercraft-look-like-in-terms-of-aerodynamics&quot;&gt;racing hovercraft&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/188920/how-feasible-and-capable-is-a-preindustrial-land-yacht&quot;&gt;land yachts&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102573/could-a-supertall-building-have-been-built-in-the-18th-century&quot;&gt;supertall&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/248714/feasibility-of-a-5000km-tall-orbital-tower-using-active-support&quot;&gt;5,000 km&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63047/100-mile-high-mega-tall-building-physically-possible&quot;&gt;100 mile&lt;/a&gt; high building are going to need some expertise from the field of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aerodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aerodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aerodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-aerodynamics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt;, but are very unlikely to be concerned with really much of anything to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-flight-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;flight&lt;/a&gt; such as stall speeds, wing musculature, glide slopes, aerial maneuvers, hitting aircraft or birds, and vertical climb rates. It’s also likely that spiderlings, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160319/maximum-scale-for-bumblebee-flight&quot;&gt;ginormous bumblebees&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/215027/rural-broomstick-navigation-on-a-moonless-night&quot;&gt;witches on moonless nights&lt;/a&gt; and trying to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/217867/the-witchs-broom/217979#217979&quot;&gt;balance on their brooms&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143920/how-can-i-protect-witches-in-combat-who-wear-limited-clothing/143991#143991&quot;&gt;protect themselves&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193311/applying-this-kind-of-physical-magic-to-walk-on-air&quot;&gt;people walking on air&lt;/a&gt;, others with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/202834/least-impossible-explanation-for-superhero-flight&quot;&gt;Superman-like powers&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/160319/maximum-scale-for-bumblebee-flight&quot;&gt;floating islands&lt;/a&gt; should be very concerned with all those challenges associated with flight, but don’t need much if any help from aerodynamics.&#xA;Monica &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7407&quot;&gt;approved the aerodynamics &amp;gt; flight synonym assignment&lt;/a&gt; back in 2019 but I can’t find anything for a discussion about it. That was a mistake, this is now the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Recommended definitions of the two tags:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aerodynamics:&lt;/strong&gt; For questions about the interaction of air moving around objects, particularly in relation to the forces and motion they experience as a result. The tag encompasses the principles and theories that govern the behavior of air and its effects on various objects, such as buildings, aircraft, automobiles, ships, organisms, and sports equipment. Use this tag when concepts like lift, drag, thrust, downforce, turbulence, boundary layers, flow separation, and weight, are crucial in designing efficient and stable objects within an atmosphere or gaseous medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flight:&lt;/strong&gt; For questions about things within the air in opposition to gravity. This may be by any means such as aerodynamic lift, jet propulsion, buoyancy, magical flight seen in folklore and mythology, a superheroe's power of flight through innate abilities, or any technological advancements. Also included are concepts such as dispersal of seeds through the air, &amp;quot;ballooning&amp;quot; transportation of spiderlings, avian flight, or any other organism traveling through the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Justification&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary reason for taking on this site correction (which I really believe it is) derives from the extraordinary &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249825/how-to-make-a-hybrid-mapping-system-for-aircraft-on-barren-planets-without-celes&quot;&gt;answer posted to my navigation question&lt;/a&gt; by @William. This user is not a frequent participant in this exchange with merely 5 answers spanning 5 years however, as I think this answer shows, it is a mistake to rate users by their volume. There is no logic in the strategy of achieving highest quality by throwing more... things... at the wall and seeing what sticks, as we do in deciding what topics are in demand on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My secondary reason is a personal vested interest in ground effect vehicles—things which actively avoid flight—which will have little benefit from experts in flight (I know, I have asked pilots. Ground effect is an evil they want to be rid of). If there is another &amp;quot;William&amp;quot; in the fringes watching an aerodynamics tag, I want that user's input, and so I want that user to have a home here even if they only contribute once per year, or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quality is NOT improved by volume; noise is.&#xA;And my decision to make the correction post was driven by precedent. But despite the circular logic—you have prevented questions from using that tag, the synonym clearly is at cause for some of that loss—per some comments, let's talk about numbers. For reference, I will use a community-elected moderator Monica's decision to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7423/restore-tactics-as-a-separate-tag-from-warfare&quot;&gt;remove the [tactics] synonym from [warfare]&lt;/a&gt; in 2019. That separation resulted in 23 auto-retagged queries getting the [tactics] tag. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=-%5Bflight%5D+aerodynamic*+is%3Aquestion+-fly&quot;&gt;There are currently 62 questions about aerodynamics that exclude the [flight] tag&lt;/a&gt;, including high speed trains, high speed &amp;quot;chasers&amp;quot; evolved from caterpillars, and telekenetic land ships. A closer look will find some of these are involving flight—mostly ballistic, such as my own. But what is important to note here is that this community elected moderator never once mentioned the number of queries using the tags as a justification. The very last statement under the decision to break [tactics] away from [warfare] was this: &amp;quot;I’m focusing on the smaller issue of this one IMO incorrect synonym.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aerodynamics is, as even my esteemed detractor has admitted, an incorrect synonym for flight. It is a perfectly good sub-category for flight, if this were that other forum. But we do not have sub-stacks or sub-categories. We have two things which are defined as the same: synonyms. [aerodynamics] is very simply not a synonym for [flight]. Thus, the choice is to either delete the tag, or to separate the tags; but I see no logic in treating them as equals on a community resource striving for excellence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastEditorUserId="69877" LastEditDate="2023-09-22T02:25:41.817" LastActivityDate="2024-02-19T03:08:46.077" Title="Restore the aerodynamics tag as distinct from flight" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-21T00:01:02.847" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been working on a story for some time similar to Andy Weir’s &lt;em&gt;Hail Mary Pass&lt;/em&gt; that involves deep space observation in search of a probe target and as very often happens I have to use three of my five allowed tags to express one concept: space exploration. I don’t need to do any space-travel for this, my story lies completely in the planning and discovery phases of space-exploration. I won’t need any expert answers regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-space-travel-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt; tag that is currently listed as a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll notice a lot of questions piling up three generic tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/176470/most-likely-way-to-protect-against-infectious-disease-when-visiting-other-planet&quot;&gt;[science-fiction], [space], [exploration]&lt;/a&gt; to get their point across. Why not use this tag? Why force those space-exploration topics onto the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/195267/why-dont-adventurers-and-monsters-suffocate-in-lower-levels-of-dungeons&quot;&gt;dungeon exploration experts&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted there’s a lot of overlap here and there are points to be made for a synonym, because at some point of exploration, you have to make something travel there. However, A casual look gave me &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124190/could-we-use-telescopes-and-mirrors-in-space-to-see-crime-in-the-past-via-analog&quot;&gt;at least one question&lt;/a&gt; which was forced to use the two tags [space] &amp;amp; [exploration] because they aren’t traveling anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exploration is far broader than simply travel; that is one phase of it. Likewise, not all space travel is for the purpose of exploration. An established lunar base on the south pole will be traveled to very often, but we’re very much finished with the exploration of it by now; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/241448/what-is-the-best-design-for-trans-atmospheric-cargo-ship&quot;&gt;an established empire will ship cargo&lt;/a&gt;, but doesn’t need to do any exploring to pull it off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this synonym is a mistake. The list of travel-related questions that are not also exploration is endless;  here are several questions already existing which very well could involve exploration without any need for engineering travel. We would never travel vast distances without first doing significant observation and planning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/247016/regulations-regarding-artificial-embryos-in-space-colonization&quot;&gt;Regulations on embryos for a space colony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191960/data-and-processing-power-of-multiple-telescope-array&quot;&gt;Designing multiple telescope arrays&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61938/how-effectively-could-a-telescope-look-through-a-wormhole&quot;&gt;Searching for planets beyond a wormhole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70699/how-large-of-a-telescope-would-one-need-in-order-to-read-someones-lips-on-a-pla&quot;&gt;Reading lips on another planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37919/how-to-determine-ones-position-in-space&quot;&gt;Establishing your own position first&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124190/could-we-use-telescopes-and-mirrors-in-space-to-see-crime-in-the-past-via-analog&quot;&gt;looking at your own past for crime&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend the following use comment for the space-exploration tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;space-exploration:&lt;/strong&gt; For questions about exploration operations in space involving planning and preparation for exploration, identifying and targeting objects to explore or equipment used in this, space vehicle preparations and launch, mission operations and operations equipment or organizations, and data analysis processes and tools. Consider also [space-travel] and [space-colonisation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69877" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T00:01:02.847" Title="Restore space-exploration as a separate tag from space-travel" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10226" CreationDate="2023-09-21T16:27:19.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should not separate the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center's guidance on creating new tags is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, you should avoid creating new tags if possible, and new users are not allowed to create new tags. Even if you have sufficient reputation, you should only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that your question covers a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each question may only contain 5 tags at a maximum, so choose the ones that best describe your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that if we look at things pedantically the terms aerodynamics and flight don't necessarily have a lot of overlap. However in practical use there are very few questions on this site that are asking about aerodynamics separate from flight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of me writing this there are only &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+closed%3Ano+aerodynamic+-%5Bflight%5D&quot;&gt;45&lt;/a&gt; open questions on this site containing the word &lt;em&gt;aerodynamic&lt;/em&gt; that don't already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-flight-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;flight&lt;/a&gt; as a tag.  Most of these questions are primarily about flight under both the existing and proposed tag descriptions. Of the remainder &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spaceship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spaceship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-spaceship-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;spaceship&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ballistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ballistics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ballistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-ballistics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;ballistics&lt;/a&gt; would do a better job describing the question. I count less than 5 questions where your proposed new tag would not be better described by existing tags. That's fewer than the number of questions questions saying &amp;quot;ignoring aerodynamics&amp;quot; or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bflying%5D+closed%3Ano&quot;&gt;308&lt;/a&gt; open questions questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flight&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flight&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-flight-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;flight&lt;/a&gt; tag only one was asking about aerodynamics independent of flight. This strongly suggests that almost the totality of the questions with the aerodynamics tag were also asking about flight at the time. Given that one tag was functionally a strict subset of the other accepting the proposal makes perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the examples questions you provided only one is really asking about aerodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Racing haulers across the arctic tundra is asking about motivations for the race. Aerodynamics are not even relevant to this question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Racing hovercraft is asking directly about the impact of aerodynamic forces upon the vehicle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Land yachts is only tangentially related through how aerodynamic forces affect sails. Given that we already have a Sailing tag that is a better fit, tagging it with aerodynamics would be redundant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of the 3 questions about tall buildings are directly asking about aerodynamics. Aerodynamic forces may be discussed in particular answers but there is nothing about the questions that requires them to be considered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these factors I don't think you've made a strong enough case case for the re-creating the aerodynamics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2023-09-21T19:40:17.317" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T19:40:17.317" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-28T11:12:19.147" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open question. I'm curious why some people make the word &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; in their comments a hyperlink to the edit action. Particularly why they do when responding to users who are not exactly new to the site and who presumably know where the edit button is located.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also curious if I am the only one who perceives that practise as somewhat rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51138" LastActivityDate="2023-09-28T12:22:42.187" Title="Why do people link the word &quot;edit&quot; in their comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10229" CreationDate="2023-09-28T12:22:42.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multiple possible reasons that are not even mutually exclusive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Magic links&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000&quot;&gt;magic link in comments&lt;/a&gt;: the text &lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt; is converted to a link to the edit page of the current post the comment is under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus there is an extremely low barrier to add such links, the difference is typing two characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit for reason this and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please [edit] for reason this and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Automatic comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of automatically generated comments. Some come from actions on the site (like reviews), others are canned comments that a user might have a list of and posts often with little or no alteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, it is probably more work to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; post the magic link than to post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General education&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if &lt;em&gt;the poster&lt;/em&gt; knows how to edit, others might not. A comment might server to educate others. Yet, even somewhat seasoned users might have issue finding the edit button - the post links do have low discoverability for many. Adding another easy path for it essentially harms literally nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Assume good intent&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really a reason &lt;em&gt;to post&lt;/em&gt; links to edit but even more general - the claim that it is &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot; seems to fly directly in the face to the overall guidance to &lt;em&gt;not do that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must be honest here - I find &lt;em&gt;your perception&lt;/em&gt; of being &amp;quot;rude&amp;quot; is a lot more problematic than the practice of adding a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the link adds a minuscule amount of more information. &lt;em&gt;At worst&lt;/em&gt; it is slightly redundant information but might also be helpful in guiding users. There is little reason to assume commenters who use the link do it for a purpose other than trying to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastActivityDate="2023-09-28T12:22:42.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-03T00:19:41.263" Score="0" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to draw attention to one and, eventually, more questions that I've posted &lt;em&gt;that have community wiki answers.&lt;/em&gt; The Bounty system isn't really designed for that, but it's the most obvious way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The bounty text would clearly state that it's a fake bounty, that no new answers will be accepted, and that the purpose is to draw attention to greater participation with the community wiki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what does the community think about doing this? Is it too screwy? Would it work without causing a riot? Is there an alternative I'm overlooking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/247575/40609&quot;&gt;How to Create Sensible Plate Tectonics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that would be the first question to get the &amp;quot;fake bounty.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T01:11:20.427" Title="What do you think about a fake bounty? (this isn't exactly click-bait...)" Tags="|discussion|bounty|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10231" CreationDate="2023-10-03T08:13:56.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Officially, you can&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZoTuP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZoTuP.png&quot; alt=&quot;The &amp;quot;start a bounty&amp;quot; screen's screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;The &amp;quot;start a bounty&amp;quot; screen's screenshot&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an official statement to reward existing answers. Nothing says you have to award it immediately, nor that giving attention to the question (and therefore best answers) is not part of the reward. On contrary, getting attention is explicitly stated as the main purpose in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is bounty?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bounty is a reputation reward you can put on a question &lt;strong&gt;to get it more attention for exactly one week&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My personal opinion?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have spent all their credits putting bounties before closing their account and it hasn't really shaken up the community to see 3 bounties active at once for a while. So doing the same on a few select questions isn't likely to cause troubles, either. After all, you're just using the system as intended, who are we to tell you cannot use &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; resources to play the game you want to play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now regarding whether you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; spend points... Your current score is over 100k&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, so the cost is kinda meaningless&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, especially if you're Scrooge McDuck and only put 50 points each time. Just remember though that bounties last only one week (unless you double it). So my only advice is to choose the best moment in order to get the best effect. Perhaps choose one community question per week that treat similar, recent topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : That sounds like I'm telling your power level; &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReadingsAreOffTheScale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's over 9000!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : Both in feelings by the logarithmic perception scale and tactically by the potential loss of privileges.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T08:13:56.640" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10231" CreationDate="2023-10-04T01:11:20.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;h4&gt;My Four Hapence.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I see no ethical issue with offering a &amp;quot;fake&amp;quot; bounty. In fact, one of the bounty rationales is to literally draw attention to a question you'd like to draw attention to! Even without the bounty, I certainly was drawn to it. I read it, found it and the response interesting and useful. I updooted both and even replied to the comment regarding the Mariana Trench as abduction vs subduction zone. So, placing a fake bounty would at least be an attention getter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It's certainly less nefarious than asking someone to intentionally write a duplicate question, then VTC the new query as a duplicate of the wiki question. Though somehow editing the column on the right side to get it into &amp;quot;featured queries&amp;quot; might be more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What I think might be super helpful is an index of all the community wiki queries in Main, added to our Worldbuilding Resources post on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligatory image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Retg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Retg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T01:11:20.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10240" CreationDate="2023-10-08T03:15:23.607" Score="7" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;The holiday bountapolooza is (was... shall be again...) an invitation to search for and place bounties on deserving questions and/or answers. It not only helps get people in the mood to post bounties periodically, but it also enlivens user participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's do this!&lt;/strong&gt; (2023)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Out of habit? (2022)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pandemic (2021)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pandemic (2020)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7662/40609&quot;&gt;The fourth annual holiday bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; (2019)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6958/40609&quot;&gt;The third annual Holiday Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; (2018)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5675/40609&quot;&gt;The second annual Holiday Bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; (2017)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4186/40609&quot;&gt;Get in the spirit: The first annual holiday bounty extravaganza - or bountapalooza&lt;/a&gt; (2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="51138" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T08:01:34.900" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T17:02:59.937" Title="Will we have a Holiday Bountapalooza this year?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-11T15:38:39.677" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250438/106249&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250438/106249&lt;/a&gt; and it said it is getting reviewed how do I know if its been done. Also what did I do wrong in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user106249" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2023-10-12T07:41:56.337" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T18:44:56.687" Title="What did I do wrong and how to know if my question got reviewed" Tags="|support|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-11T15:44:49.177" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag currently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that ask if a given concept is consistent, or being used consistently, in the context of the referenced world rules. Answers should say yes or no, with supporting info. This tag should not be used with the science-based, hard-science, or science-fiction tags. Comparisons to the real world should use the science-based tag. This tag may not be used alone. This tag may not be used with the science-fiction, science-based, or hard-science tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the more I see this tag being used, the more I realize that &amp;quot;internal consistency&amp;quot; is not actually mutually exclusive of science driven questions because the question itself introduces a fictional element to the world that does not exist in our world.  So if a fictional element nullifies its own reason or ability to exist, then its internal consistency could be ruined even if it abides by all of the limitations of known science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250404/individual-laser-point-defense/250425&quot;&gt;a recent question&lt;/a&gt; (currently closed for unrelated issues) was originally tagged as both &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; where the OP wanted to know if a Laser-Based ADS could target a bullet if it was powerful enough. The entire physics and mechanics of targeting and destroying a bullet mid-flight is easy to evaluate as &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot;, but the setup itself created an &amp;quot;internal consistency&amp;quot; issue for the author that many users commented on, which is that IF a laser capable of disintegrating a bullet existed, then automated lasers would make such a better primary weapon than a ballistic firearm that his setting should be well beyond having ballistic firearms requiring an LDS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this, I propose that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag guidance be amended to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that ask if a given concept is consistent, or being used consistently, in the context of the referenced world rules. Answers should say yes or no, with supporting info. Specific comparisons to the real world should use the science-based tag instead. This tag may not be used alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2023-10-12T07:41:03.030" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T17:07:30.957" Title="Allow internal-consistency tags with science-fiction, science-based, or hard-science tags" Tags="|feature-request|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2023-10-11T17:54:13.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is different from other Q&amp;amp;A sites. If you read through our [tour] you'll see that not every worldbuilding question is suitable for this site. Our goal is to build a library of detailed answers to every question about worldbuilding. Certain worldbuilding questions aren't conducive to the creation of such a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't ask about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything not directly related to worldbuilding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is edited it automatically gets entered into a review queue moderators and members who have earned the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;reopen votes&lt;/a&gt; have access to this queue. If a mod or 5 voting members deem that in it's current form the question is suitable for this site it will be reopened. You can see the progress (or lack) of the review process by looking under your question, to the left and below the tags. There are several links: Share | Edit | Follow | Reopen (x) | Flag. Reopen (x) indicates how many members have voted to reopen your query as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has been deemed likely to have many equally valid answers based in opinion rather than facts. Whether you believe humans are a fearful species or not there's a wonderfully large and diverse range of things that we can value. It's unclear how being fearful would impact this. Given the nature of the core of your question you'll likely need to make fundamental changes to it before it could get reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to do this is to start by identifying your reason for asking the question. Then construct the simplest single sentence version of the question. If this core ask is suitable for this site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What should I ask?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What is off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;) then flesh it out with the necessary details and clarifying information to enable askers to provide helpful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future you may want to take advantage of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9981/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to get feedback and help improving questions before posting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-10-11T18:29:09.637" LastActivityDate="2023-10-11T18:29:09.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10234" CreationDate="2023-10-12T14:20:06.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I won't participate...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't join in the event because my daily activities don't bring me up a lot of points to spend. At the same time, I really want the new privilege because I'm curiously sick -or sickly curious- of not being able to see deleted posts. I'm already not very fast and furious over earning points, so if I'm running on the bounty treadmill, too ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, this doesn't mean the event should not exist, I'm just personally out for this one. If a few people is willing to spend a few SE bucks on such event however, it will absolutely bring some interest to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T14:20:06.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10234" CreationDate="2023-10-13T17:02:59.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=34218179#34218179&quot;&gt;coiner of the term &amp;quot;bountapalooza&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and longtime advocate of the event, I think bringing it back is a great idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The holiday bountapalooza originated in 2016, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/17213?m=34216787#34216787&quot;&gt;James was feeling extra generous&lt;/a&gt; during the holiday season, and caught on when it became clear that we were a weirdly competitive bunch when it came to offering the most bounties. Participation stayed steady for several more annual iterations, until larger network-wide events in 2019 drove down activity in general on the site, and we didn't bring it back for 2020 -- I don't think anyone even suggested it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2016: 28 bounties, by 16 users, for 2800 points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2017: 26 bounties, by 11 users, for 2850 points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2018: 22 bounties, by 11 users, for 2700 points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2019: 15 bounties, by 12 users, for 1600 points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it'll be hard to reach the heights we achieved those first three years, but this year is particularly opportune because &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/392846/274942&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange will no longer be holding Winterbash&lt;/a&gt;. Reviving the bountapalooza is a great chance to resuscitate the fun that we always had with Winterbash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T17:02:59.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-17T04:26:34.507" Score="8" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; on the main stack, querents should not ask &amp;quot;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&amp;quot;. Also, per the help center, querents should not ask questions where &amp;quot;there is no actual problem to be solved&amp;quot; or that are &amp;quot;open-ended or hypothetical&amp;quot;. These rules do not seem to apply to some of the top-scoring posts on the main stack, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40949/whats-the-smallest-change-to-physics-required-to-allow-magic&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?&lt;/a&gt; (incredibly open-ended and hypothetical; accepted (and highly-upvoted) answer is, subjectively, very long relative to answers I commonly obsersve, ~20 paragraphs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47251/whats-the-most-reasonable-way-to-fit-monsters-in-your-pocket&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the most reasonable way to fit Monsters in your Pocket?&lt;/a&gt; (asking about a procedure that requires magic without delimiting rules, so, open-ended and hypothetical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/313/how-could-dragons-be-explained-without-magic&quot;&gt;How could dragons be explained without magic?&lt;/a&gt; (without further details about the querent's world, there are infinitely many answers to this question. The querent's description in the body of the question do not significantly narrow the universe of possibilities, so, open-ended and hypothetical. Also, such a question could merit volumes of text in response, depending on the level of detail that is expected about this species. There are libraries full of text on just human anatomy, other libraries full of text on only human psychology, others on only human sexuality, etc, there is no end to how long an answer to this question could be.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series&quot;&gt;Anatomically Correct Series&lt;/a&gt; (innately hypothetical, series has no authorial entity and setting and therefor no details or &lt;em&gt;actual problem to solve&lt;/em&gt; beyond trying to justify a fictional species's existence, which is open-ended. Also, see above about expected response length: Lifetimes worth of material could be written on one species. According to the meta post on the series, it is &amp;quot;a popular tradition on Worldbuilding.SE&amp;quot;, and some entries of the series are among the top-scoring posts on the site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Full disclosure&lt;/strong&gt;: I am asking this question because another &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/94692&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (link is to edit showing original and edited text, main link &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250578/which-animals-do-nocturnal-humans-prefer-as-livestock&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) of mine, in the main stack, was recently closed for reasons listed below. I have edited the question in question to suit suggestions given to me in the comments, but I want to better understand why my question was not acceptable for the reasons given to me, when some of the top-scoring questions on the site seem to eschew those guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reasons given for close:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1) You are allowed one and only one question per post (past posts don't set precedents, SE changes the rules a year or two ago).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(2) Demon is referring to SE's &amp;quot;Book Rule&amp;quot; (see help center). But to be reasonable, the average answer is 4-6 paragraphs long. Some will write longer, others shorter, but that's your target.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(3) Providing your own answers (e.g. example answers) and asking for more is prohibited by the help center.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(4) SE's model (and it takes reading several Help pages to get this) can be simplified as &amp;quot;one-specific-question/one-best-answer.&amp;quot; Idea generation questions aren't a good fit for Stack Exchange, which is designed to help you find a specific answer to a specific problem. (Open-ended questions, aka idea generation questions, are prohibited by the help center.)&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(5) This is why questions like this tend to fit into the help center rule, we will help you build your world, but not tell your story. We will help you build one creature at a time. We will not build the creature for you. Anything more is helping you write your story.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My confusions&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can appreciate that multiple questions do not belong in multiple posts. But, by nature of ... &lt;em&gt;complexity&lt;/em&gt; ... some questions are more complex and others more simple. Some questions require multi-faceted responses, we can see an example of this in the described &amp;quot;popular tradition&amp;quot; of anatomically correct series questions, which is relatively active and current (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/246409/anatomically-correct-yeti&quot;&gt;most recent entry&lt;/a&gt; posted 4 months before this question). As to the second sentence, &amp;quot;past posts don't set precedents, SE changed the rules a year or two ago&amp;quot; (though posts more recent than a year, see before, seem to get by breaking this rule), I am unsure, given the structure of the comment, if that statement applies to only point #1 or the whole comment. If the latter, I suppose all of my confusions are moot and I should just move on, but please see my conclusions at the end for my thoughts on that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I find the &amp;quot;book rule&amp;quot; to be an unhelpful model. Perhaps I am just being dense, I like to think that I am not, but &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; is not a definite length, and one could write a &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; on anything, given the determination. One could write a book about the history of the character 'A'. Or they could write a paragraph in response. &amp;quot;Book&amp;quot; also has little comparison to the potential universe of lengths of internet forum responses. A &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be 20 paragraphs long, but most wont be, however, 20 paragraphs is (I believe, and believe most would agree) a long internet forum response. The intended length of responses is not clear to new users, it was only described to me in a plainly accessible manner in a comment describing why my post was closed. Also, I am unsure how I, as the querent, can modulate how responders choose to write. The same idea could be expressed in a sentence or a page, and I the querent cannot control how expansively responders choose to write. Before my question was closed, one responder did provide an answer of a few short paragraphs in length, which provoked engagement in the comments (with someone who commented on my post indicating that it was unacceptable, no less). If 4–6 paragraphs is my target length according to the site's veterans, I can appreciate that, but I must say, as a layperson, I have &lt;strong&gt;no idea&lt;/strong&gt; how to control that. That seems like the role of a character limit on the response box. I fail to see how my question, either presented lengthily or briefly, innately &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; a lengthy response (and therefor breaks the rules). We can see that the question has already provoked a brief response, so, the &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; of a lengthy response in my framing of the query is plainly absent. It is the responsibility of the response author to answer concisely, is it not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, querents should &amp;quot;thoroughly search for an answer &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking a question ... Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs ...&amp;quot;. I feel as though I did this in my question, presented my research, and explained how it did not fit my needs (I am a non-expert in the topic and do not have the qualifications or confidence to fact check my own research). Yet, a given reason for closing was that I had done too much work &amp;quot;providing my own answers&amp;quot;. These are conflicting instructions, plainly liable to inconsistent enforcement based on the opinions of whoever happen to be moderating a post. I presented my research in an effort to fulfill the research requirement, but a particular user or group of users believes that it is too much and that I have answered my own question, even though I don't believe that to be so (my reasons why being plainly explained).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;SE's model is &amp;quot;one-specific-question/one-best-answer.&amp;quot; Idea generation questions aren't a good fit for Stack Exchange&amp;quot;. I can appreciate that, if that's the truth, but I feel confused. I refer again to the &amp;quot;popular tradition&amp;quot; of anatomically correct series posts, which are purely idea-based and frequently high scoring. What is the threshold that determines a question is &amp;quot;idea-generation&amp;quot;-based? It is not clear to a layperson or new user what the limit of &amp;quot;encouraging idea generation&amp;quot; is, when the anatomically correct series, and other high-scoring, purely hypothetical questions, are featured elements on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand this point. The limit between sides is not clear, and seems unhelpfully subjective. According to the comment, Worldbuilding.SE will &amp;quot;help you build one creature at a time. We will not build the creature for you.&amp;quot;. I am unsure where the line between those two actions lay, it seems nebulous and subjective, but I get it, I'm not contracting SE contributors to do my work, I don't feel as though I was (again the subjectivity of the rule is a gripe) as I included a significant amount of research, and asked primarily for a fact-checking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel deeply confused. It seems as though certain types of posts are encouraged to eschew the guidelines which have been presented to me in the tour, help center, and advice of site veterans, and others are punished for modeling very popular posts that do just that. When I joined the site (relatively recently), I read the tour and several help center posts, doing my best to internalize the lessons, but, frankly, the top-scoring posts on this site have been more influential in how I write questions here, and I don't know how to break that habit, I believe it is human nature. Its difficult to contribute here when I feel encouraged to model, by my instinctual nature, to popular posts, but get punished for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour and help center materials are all very abstract. One can read them, and try hard to intuit them, but will still lack the experience necessary to understand what the community deems acceptable. The new user materials don't make that clear. So, naturally, I look to the posts that have received the best, most detailed, most positive responses on the site, and model my questions after them. As exhibited above, many of the top-scoring posts on the main stack are very open-ended, hypothetical, discussion-based, and encourage lengthy responses (one could say book-length, at least in the case of the &amp;quot;popular tradition&amp;quot; of anatomically correct series questions). If this is unacceptable, I can appreciate that, but the limits of acceptability remain arcane. As I write this post, my proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/94692&quot;&gt;edits&lt;/a&gt; to my closed question have been denied, though I feel they significantly restrained the scope of the question. The only note I have been given in association with this reopen-request denial is &amp;quot;The previous edit(s) were unsuccessful in reopening the question. You can submit another edit.&amp;quot;. I am unsure how, for all the reasons listed above. I am trying hard to be a good contributor, but it feels like an uphill battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to be contentious, I just want to better understand what is expected of me and why I seem to be misunderstanding of what the site is for, given the response to my posts. Returning to &lt;em&gt;My confusions&lt;/em&gt; #1, if past posts are not to be precedents for future posts, I can appreciate that, but that fact is not clear. I, and I believe other new users, am driven by nature to model popular questions on this site. I brought up several such posts in this question, doing so in a manner that makes it seem as though they &lt;em&gt;break the rules&lt;/em&gt;. But, in truth, I am very fond of every single question I linked in this post. I believe they belong on this site, and cannot think of another place to find such discussion. Others plainly agree, given their top-scoring status and general popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate a personal response to my situation, so I can better understand what is expected of my posts and alter the question in question to better reflect the site's values. As explained above, the instructions given to new users through the registration process and advice of veterans is obscure and conflicting. I also call for an improvement to on-boarding materials to prevent cases like my own, which seem too likely to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106024" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-10-17T14:51:15.840" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T21:20:59.697" Title="What are the limits of open-endedness, hypotheticality, and encouragement of &quot;discussion-based or extremely long answers&quot;, are they too subjective?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10241" CreationDate="2023-10-17T04:43:34.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general idea behind SE is not to answer a question, but to build a knowledge base out of the answers given to questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it possible and allow answers to be reusable by others, the question has to be narrowly scoped, enough that the problem is well specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how do I cook lunch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how do I cook Peking duck?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one has so many possible answers that any reuse is highly unlikely, while the second one is way more defined in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="57660" LastEditDate="2023-10-23T12:58:23.883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T12:58:23.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10245" CreationDate="2023-10-17T07:41:12.440" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this picture should help understand the issue at hand :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rsYyJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rsYyJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture showing the connexion&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Tour button? Toouurr buuttooon?&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find the button to reach the tour anymore, even though it is still accessible by direct access and existing links (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;like here&lt;/a&gt;). This happens both logged in and logged out, on meta and on main, on mobile phone and on PC, for a total of 4 web browsers tested. It is not reachable through the help-center, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we can still technically reach the page and the button is quite important to newcomers, I currently believe it's a bug. So what happened to the easy-to-access tour button? Any fix in the foreseeable future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-10-17T22:18:07.407" Title="What happened to the &quot;tour&quot; button?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10202" CreationDate="2023-10-17T16:20:50.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's important to understand the difference between worldbuilding and storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many users over the years have come to this Stack in the hopes of making their fiction factual. They want their magic system to be science-based or their super powers to be realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they don't understand is that they're not seeking help to build their worlds, they're seeking help to write their stories. &amp;quot;Factually&amp;quot; explaining magic, super powers, or any other form of fantasy is an aesthetic, not a world rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World rules describe the way the world &lt;em&gt;outside the story&lt;/em&gt; operates. In the Real World, the &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; of gravity states that if you throw an apple into the air it will fall to the ground. In the Real World, the &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; of wind states that if you spit into it you are likely to suffer uncomfortable consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in your &lt;em&gt;fictional world&lt;/em&gt; (the only kind of world we help build), you can set a &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; that says gravity works in reverse. The closer you get to a celestial body, the higher the &lt;em&gt;repulsive&lt;/em&gt; force of gravity becomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding is how an author uses the rules of worldbuilding to describe a circumstance. One such circumstance could be that a civilization lives and flies through the aether of space and that flying to the surface of a planet is impossible because no individual has the strength to overcome the effects of that world's &amp;quot;gravity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We help build world rules (gravity works in reverse on your world!). We do NOT help tell stories (your creatures have wings and don't have the strength to fly to the world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with asking for help describing your fantasy (magic, super powers...) as science is that you're asking us to help tell your story. It feels like it's the other way around, but it's not. You've already set the rules of your world. Your world has (e.g.) magic! That magic is capable of specific consequences. And now you're asking for help &lt;em&gt;explaining those consequences in a specific way.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter if that &amp;quot;way&amp;quot; is science. What matters is that all you're looking for is an &lt;em&gt;explanation.&lt;/em&gt; That's storybuilding. And that's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-17T16:20:50.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10243" CreationDate="2023-10-17T22:18:07.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This has been fixed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/393877/1095559&quot;&gt;From meta's meta, it has been told the issue has been fixed&lt;/a&gt;. And as far as I know, I can confirm we see again the recomforting &amp;quot;Tour&amp;quot; button, allowing us to bask in its glorious light again :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rs8N2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rs8N2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture of the menu with the button to reach the tour. All hail the &amp;quot;Tour&amp;quot; button!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell in comment (or by default, in answer) if you still have the issue, so we can report it has not been solved for you .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-10-17T22:18:07.407" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10248" CreationDate="2023-10-21T10:26:02.650" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=role%20is%3Aq&quot;&gt;a lot of questions&lt;/a&gt; asking after a potential role for a certain creature or device.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Since other tags will narrow down potential use (which is nevertheless usually beneficial to prevent rolling list questions), and some querents might not want to steer potential answers one way or another, would it make sense to create a specific tag for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/role&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;role&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;role&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-role-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;role&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage guidance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Excerpt&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Use this tag if you are looking for a specific role for a specific entity in your world—a creature, device, class, or concept.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Make sure to limit potential answers by providing as many relevant details as you can about your world, the context, and the entity (its characteristics, properties). Try to describe the general direction in which you want to take the role, and/or the relationships it has towards other entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Body&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Apart from using additional &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; to quickly clarify your setting (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;), you can use them to limit the potential role you're after to a certain area (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-warfare-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/religion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;religion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-religion-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As with all questions here, ideally there should be a single best answer, and a question should reflect this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, it could be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/role-attribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;role-attribution&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;role-attribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-role-attribution-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;role-attribution&lt;/a&gt;, or something more specific like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This came up as I edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250561/how-are-sapient-crows-utilized-if-there-are-phones-for-communicating&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: it only had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/society&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;society&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-society-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; tag, which seemed overly broad (and at first glance inappropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57660" LastEditorUserId="57660" LastEditDate="2023-10-23T12:52:17.147" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T15:03:36.250" Title="Should we have a [role] tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10247" CreationDate="2023-10-23T15:03:36.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As defined, no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the defining mantras of this Stack is that we help you build your world (story-independent issues) but do not help you write your story (story-dependent issues). Generally speaking (and this &amp;quot;policy&amp;quot; goes back a very long way in our history), the closer you get to asking a question about a single person (an individual&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;), the more off-topic the question becomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where this line in the sand gets a bit blurry is when we're dealing with building &lt;em&gt;communities.&lt;/em&gt; For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-Topic:&lt;/strong&gt; My sentient species includes one member who is significantly more intelligent than the average. What role could that member play in society?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is off-topic because there is no fundamental limit to what roles the single member, no matter its attributes, &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; play. Story circumstances can be trivially created to rationalize any role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-Topic:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm developing the structure of of a small town in my world. I'm using as a template the nomadic communities of the Bedouin from the early 1800s, but with greater access to non-water-based resources and a greater tradition of trade. My current government structure is [&lt;em&gt;place detailed description here&lt;/em&gt;]. What role would a government position similar to &amp;quot;Mayor&amp;quot; have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't claim my example question is perfect, the point I'm making is we're no longer dealing with an individual member of society. We're dealing specifically with &lt;em&gt;a role in that society&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;any member of the society&lt;/em&gt; could become. We're defining the rules of (in this example) governance rather than rationalizing why an individual would make a choice or why a society would choose to direct the individual into a particular role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In relation to the linked question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, the linked question is a type we're very familiar with. Despite the living, breathing nature of crows (sapient or not), the question type is called &lt;em&gt;Use of Technology.&lt;/em&gt; Such questions are on-topic because the question can be written in an objective manner that meets Stack Exchange's expectations for the use of its service. In short, the question can be written to ask for help &lt;em&gt;solving a problem&lt;/em&gt; and not simply to &lt;em&gt;generate ideas.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's true that a &amp;quot;role&amp;quot; tag could be used for this purpose (what &amp;quot;role&amp;quot; could the crows play in terms of communication?), it's vague and would be abused (yup, it would be abused something awful).&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; A better tag (and it's a wonder we've never created it) would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/use-of-technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;use-of-technology&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;use-of-technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-use-of-technology-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;use-of-technology&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus (as defined) no, I do not believe we should have a &amp;quot;role&amp;quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;The word &amp;quot;individual&amp;quot; is important. It doesn't matter to this Stack if we're talking about an &amp;quot;individual creature&amp;quot; or an &amp;quot;individual company&amp;quot; or an &amp;quot;individual organization&amp;quot; or even an &amp;quot;individual planet.&amp;quot; When it comes to asking about the role such an individual could/would/should play within a group of its peers (e.g. one person's role in society or one planet's role in a galactic empire) it's all the same to us. Consider from the Help Center &amp;quot;On Topic&amp;quot; page the description about off-topic questions about choices. And if that doesn't help, go read Isaac Asimov's&lt;/em&gt; Foundation &lt;em&gt;series and return with a 3-page essay about the limitations of psychohistory — which is basically the problem we're trying to avoid.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;When creating new tags or modifying existing tags, it's very important to realize that your average user will use a tag based ONLY on the words chosen for the tag name and not what the tag summary or wiki say. It takes time and a lot of hand slapping to get people to realize that tags have intent, scope, limits, and expectations. Consequently, choosing the name for a tag that clearly expresses the goal of the tag with the least amount of likely abuse is important.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T15:03:36.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10241" CreationDate="2023-10-23T16:13:52.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First of all... &lt;em&gt;Thank you for participating!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta is the right place to ask questions like this! Your willingness to come here and seek advice, question policy, and help build our community is very much appreciated. Meta has seen a sharp decline in participation over the years. It's wonderful to have you step into the ring and work with the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On to your question, which begins with a regrettable truth: things change&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the Worldbuilding stack and Stack Exchange itself have changed over the years. My favorite proof is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;this Help Center page&lt;/a&gt; that is a hold-over from the last change in the voting procedure (about 2 years ago, I think) and has never been updated. It discusses close reasons that no longer exist and fails to discuss close reasons that now do exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that page underscores, however, is that the rules have changed. Even the policies of this Stack have changed. An example is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;Real World Question policy&lt;/a&gt;, which I once supported and now absolutely detest. At one time the Stack didn't permit real-world questions, meaning questions that can be legitimately asked and would often be better answered on another Stack. But that limited our growth, and sometimes it made sense to ask a Real World question. So now they're permitted, basically without the need to justify asking them here.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; But, to keep to the point. Once you couldn't, now you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, pointing to a seven-year-old question and asking why it doesn't seem to fit today's rules doesn't make sense. &lt;em&gt;No past question may set a precedent for how questions are closed today.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, we're supposed to be farming though those old questions and closing them to stop this very issue from happening — but it's an &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;enormous&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; amount of work. So it rarely happens. Besides, it's possible (e.g., with the Real World Question policy) that old closed questions could/should be reopened. That's even more work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worse, voting was never intended to mean &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the greatest failures of Stack Exchange is that it could never convince people to vote the way they expected them to. On Stack Exchange, up and down voting &lt;em&gt;has a specific purpose,&lt;/em&gt; to reflect the quality of the question or answer. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the time people use it only to reflect &lt;em&gt;popularity,&lt;/em&gt; which isn't the same thing at all. This is why questions that should have been (and sometimes are) closed can have high scores. People &lt;em&gt;liked the question,&lt;/em&gt; even if the question was inappropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's no practical way to police the process of voting, so we all get to live with the fact that voting has no appreciable meaning. The existence of a high score does not mean the question was &lt;em&gt;acceptable.&lt;/em&gt; It only means that the question was &lt;em&gt;enjoyed.&lt;/em&gt; If that doesn't quite make sense, think of the difference between a well-cooked meal (acceptable) vs. crack cocaine (enjoyed). Keep this in mind when I mention storybuilding later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And it doesn't help when Stack Exchange's purpose is in conflict with the querents' purpose and the respondents' desires&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to quote from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&quot;&gt;old Meta answer of my own&lt;/a&gt;. I've tried to filter out the original footnote numbers, there are some missing links, etc. You can go look at the original if you're interested, but this part is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accepted answers are like car dealership stickers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I hate leaving one of my questions without an accepted answer. But that's me. Neither I nor you owe anybody anything. In fact, if you think about it, what's the point of telling people which answer suited your needs? At best, it makes everyone else feel bad. At worst, it might suggest that you don't understand your own problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads one to the idea that an &amp;quot;accepted answer&amp;quot; is contrary to what Stack Exchange is all about. At best an &amp;quot;accepted answer&amp;quot; reflects the unique need of the OP and nothing more — until you realize it's the proverbial gold star on Stack Exchange's forehead, demonstrating its worth (not yours, not the respondents') to everyone else. &amp;quot;See? We facilitated the discovery of the solution to their problem! We're valuable!&amp;quot; Seen from this perspective, what you're being asked to do is provide free advertising for SE (the &amp;quot;car dealership&amp;quot;) proving why people should &amp;quot;buy their cars&amp;quot; here and no where else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To be fair, accepted answers do serve a purpose&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of people on our happy little world. And every one of them has a unique point of view. Each will have a different take on your question, a different perspective of what would be a good answer. Some will take the moment too seriously. Others will refuse to take it seriously at all. Still others are trying to be funny, or are sociopathic trolls. A few are compassionately trying to help you. Others are just trying to brag. And a small handful are desperately trying to be heard. And because of all these perspectives and intents, an open forum would result in a bazillion answers, most of which are usleless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The folks at SE both knew this up front and have learned this in spades over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have today is a site that's designed to bring useful answers to your attention. Very bad answers are deleted by vote. Simply bad answers are downvoted. Good answers are upvoted. And (theoretically) the best of the best is accepted. Which means that being the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; is a goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goals are important, they direct people and help them conform to the rules, guidelines, and expectations of society. In this regard, the idea of a best answer is no different. It helps SE achieve one of its highest aspirations: to be specifically useful and not just another discussion forum that's a 90's tech version of Dr. Phil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand is the reality that accepted answers are free advertising for SE, on the other is their usefulness to help guide people to providing useful answers and not snarky one-sentence pot-shots questioning the OP's genealogy. To make matters worse, this isn't a site like Stack Overflow where there usually is one best answer, ours is a creative and imaginative site where the soup of societal gestalt might inspire a completely irrelevant dessert that proved to be exactly what the OP was looking for!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except nobody actually provided that dessert as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that you used this site (Worldbuilding.SE) the way most people do and not the way Stack Exchange intended. Per your question, you came to be inspired. That is not what SE is all about. Remember, they want to be known as the place for useful answers. We acknowledge this in our own Help Center when we explain that your question should be &amp;quot;specific and answerable.&amp;quot; You're not supposed to come here to be inspired (looking for an infinite list of things to draw from) but to find a solution to a specific problem (looking for a finite list of things of which one is the solution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this your fault? Certainly not! We know perfectly well that most people come here to be inspired, to solve writer's block, to develop a story more complex than they're prepared to deal with, etc. But we must also work within the framework SE has created, and SE's framework doesn't support seeking for inspiration, which we also call raw idea-generation or &amp;quot;fishing for ideas.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was a long way of saying, like everybody else on Earth, you're unique, and you invited a bunch of other unique people to be unique with you, which resulted in a unique solution to your problem. It simply doesn't fit SE's basic mold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What Stack Exchange wants today is the following:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One-specific-question leads intentionally to one-best-answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As objective as humanly possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asks for help solving a problem, not for advice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers should be long enough for the page to represent a complete and thorough answer, leading to Stack Exchange being the go-to source for answers on the Internet. (This is why link-only answers are a no-no here. Thou shalt not lead the public away from Stack Exchange.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers (and therefore the questions they depend on) should be short enough to solve the problem for a person who is &amp;quot;practiced in the art.&amp;quot; (You won't find that said anywhere, but Stack Exchange is not meant to replace an education. Thus the &amp;quot;Book Rule&amp;quot; found in the Help Center was born.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes perfect sense on stacks like Stack Overflow where there's a high likelihood that a request for help solving a programming problem can lead, at the least, to an answer the community agrees is a best-practice solution. In other words, there may be a hundred ways to solve the programming problem, but the nature of the question (almost) always leads to the community agreeing there's just one best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a bit problematic here. Who can legitimately claim to be an expert in &amp;quot;magic?&amp;quot; We've tried (frequently unsuccessfully) to focus this Stack &lt;em&gt;on the process of worldbuilding.&lt;/em&gt; Meaning that our goal is to help people &lt;em&gt;learn how to build worlds&lt;/em&gt; and not simply to help them overcome writer's block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfortunately, there's human nature...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what far too many people want to use the Stack for is &lt;em&gt;story building,&lt;/em&gt; or helping someone to overcome writer's block. This isn't as unreasonable as it may sound. Many young authors aren't specifically building a world outside the context of a story. Some do, most don't. Most are &lt;em&gt;writing a story&lt;/em&gt; and it's whomping hard to ask a question about the world without removing it from the context of the story — especially when you're not in the habit of doing that. For many young authors, it's hard to even see that there is a storybuilding context that must/should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I pitched the idea of creating an actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10055/40609&quot;&gt;Storybuilding Stack&lt;/a&gt; and the bare handful of respondents (Meta used to be much more frequented) didn't want it. Funny, that, since we specifically say we don't answer questions about writing a story — but we can't leave them alone, either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to human nature. It's fun to help people overcome writer's block! It's fun to help people solve problems! It's fun to... except that &amp;quot;mindless social fun&amp;quot; is &lt;em&gt;expressly prohibited&lt;/em&gt; by the Help Center. Party poopers.... But remember from my quote, above, Stack Exchange is trying to become &lt;em&gt;specifically useful&lt;/em&gt; as a means of promoting its value. Fun storybuilding questions don't help them achieve that goal because, 99.9% of the time, they're only useful to the one person who asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And it doesn't help that many of our founding users are gone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of our founding users — the people who built the character of this Stack and worked hardest to keep that character focused — are gone. Over the last seven years I've seen a large influx of new users (good!) who aren't taking the time to read the Help Center (bad!) or to participate in Meta (bad!). The consequence is that you're seeing users ask and answer questions that shouldn't be asked or answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we really need (not to put too fine a point on it) is for about thirty people, just like yourself, to learn the proverbial ropes so you can join in moderating the site. I don't want to scare you off! And the choice is entirely yours, but the fact that you're brave enough to ask this question here suggests you're willing to walk the proverbial path. Cheers, friend, if that's something you're willing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end, there's nothing confusing about the rules, they're just not consistently applied&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem on any Stack is convincing people to care about Stack Exchange's rules, the stack's policies, and moderating — because your confusion really isn't about the rules, it's about how inconsistently they're applied. It's a bit like wondering why a policeman has the right to pull you over for speeding when you didn't see the sign and saw thirty people speed past you. It's a never-ending and frequently thankless job, but it helps the Stack remain valuable to Stack Exchange and to remain valuable for it's original intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help people build worlds by helping them learn how to build worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But there is something that might help&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do recognize that the Tour and Help Center weren't written by literary masters. Worse, they're honking hard to change. To help with that, I created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8491/40609&quot;&gt;summary of the rules&lt;/a&gt;. Hopefully, that clears up some of the confusion. However, and this is pretty important, the odds are good that it's a bit out of date. Hopefully not too much....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;I admit it, I'm soap boxing a bit. I believe the Real World Question policy is very much responsible for this Stack becoming Physics-Lite.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T16:13:52.630" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10237" CreationDate="2023-10-23T16:50:14.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We changed the name of that tag for a reason&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag used to be named &amp;quot;reality-check.&amp;quot; The problem is that people were using the tag for what the words &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check&amp;quot; meant to them and not per the tag's wiki. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9790/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;], [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9810/40609&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the tag &lt;em&gt;expected:&lt;/em&gt; To test how consistently someone was using a developed rule or rules. One or more rules were defined and a story-based circumstance using the rules presented. Respondents were expected to answer &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; meaning the presented circumstance was consistent with the presented rules or &amp;quot;no, because...&amp;quot; if they felt the presented circumstance failed the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the tag &lt;em&gt;was used for:&lt;/em&gt; Do you like this idea? or any one of its thousand variations including &amp;quot;is this realistic?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;is this feasible?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;is this possible?&amp;quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the name of the tag was changed to reflect its original meaning. I made a small and nearly useless effort to remove the tag from historical questions that were following the second bullet — but it's a lot of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At this time, we don't have an official way to ask review-my-idea questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's what a &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; question really is, &amp;quot;do you like my idea?&amp;quot; It doesn't matter how it's couched, the user is at best looking for people to poke at the idea to see if there are any obvious holes that need to be dealt with before using the idea or, at worst, they're looking for some kind of permission to use the idea (as in, &amp;quot;this isn't stupid, is it?&amp;quot;). Note that there's nothing wrong with the latter, few people can be experts in every field needed to write a good story, it's just not what Stack Exchange is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem: &lt;em&gt;review-my-idea questions don't fit in Stack Exchange's mold at all.&lt;/em&gt; This type of question is intrinsically open-ended and has no hope of a best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Equally intrinsic is the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; questions are also open-ended with no hope of a best answer. Historically, they were a permitted exception because we're dealing with specific rules and a specific test. In other words, the question was very tightly scoped and served a very specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/worldbuilding-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;worldbuilding-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-worldbuilding-process-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;worldbuilding-process&lt;/a&gt; purpose. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy is admitted.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to resolve some of the problem by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9956/40609&quot;&gt;inviting advice to users about how to ask review-my-idea questions&lt;/a&gt;. It was reasonably well accepted (for today... hardly any Meta users today...). But few people other than myself link user questions to Meta posts to help people learn how to use the site. (There's a lot of good stuff in here....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This goes to underscore how hard it is to name a tag...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, it's &lt;em&gt;really hard&lt;/em&gt; to name a tag in a way that can't/won't be abused. 99.9% of the time, a user will use a tag based ONLY on how they interpret the words used in the tag name. &amp;quot;Internal consistency&amp;quot; is working better than &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; ever did (wow, that was a mess...), but it's still being abused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But I'm NOT fond of setting a precedent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What worries me the most about this is the precedent it might establish of re-defining tags to meet the experienced use of the tag. That invalidates every &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; use of the tag historically. From a practical perspective, that's just trading one kind of confusion for another in the hope that the second will be less painful, which usually means &amp;quot;less effort to moderate.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use a metaphor, we believe it's easier to plant the grass and wait to see where the walking trails appear, then pour concrete for sidewalks, than it is to build the sidewalks first and forever hound people to use them. I get the argument, I just don't agree with it. The result may be less maintenance, but it's almost always less attractive (at best) or less fundamental to the design of the campus (at worst).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag should not be redefined. To top everything off, you're just re-creating the problem we were trying to solve in the first place at the expense of losing a feature that has been with the Stack since its earliest days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shame on us, perhaps, for not remaining better focused on the task of helping people learn how to build worlds. We've fallen into the habit of just helping the OP of the moment solve their individual problem, ignoring the SE expectation of reuse of data. In short, we've fallen into the habit of giving people fish rather than teaching them how to fish.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the tag has a specific purpose that is wholly independent of the other tags. By definition (literally...) you can't have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; answer to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; question &lt;em&gt;because the rules and the means of testing the rules must be required for the tag to be valid.&lt;/em&gt; Science (or its lack...) has nothing to do with the consistent use of a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OK, so shouldn't we just burn the tag and forbid any and all &amp;quot;review my idea&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the only definitive solution, but the effort to do so is &lt;em&gt;horrific.&lt;/em&gt; To burn a tag we must disassociate each and every question from the tag and then let SE's garbage collection get around to deleting the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, let's return to teaching people how to fish. Rather than redefine the tag, choose to delete it when it's been inappropriately applied with an admonition in comments to read the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BTW, why was it named &amp;quot;reality-check&amp;quot; in the first place?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that our goal (per the Help Center) is to help people build imaginary worlds. From that perspective, the phrase &amp;quot;reality check&amp;quot; meant &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/W8qcccZy03s?si=d0-c6pbHBDEnm_dI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;your reality&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; not the Real World. What time taught us is that the average person (especially young users) treated the word &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; to mean ONLY &amp;quot;the Real World.&amp;quot; This became exacerbated as things like the TV show &amp;quot;The Expanse&amp;quot; and the Real World Question policy turned this site into Physics-Lite where the only reality of interest was the &amp;quot;Real World&amp;quot; despite the utterly nonsensical fantasy of what the OP was trying to do. Thus, it was decided we had to change the tag name to better express the tag's wiki, rather than the wiki to better express the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One last thing...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of the repair to the various tags related to this post, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reality-check&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reality-check&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-reality-check-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;reality-check&lt;/a&gt; tag was made a synonym of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag, because when you remove the review-my-idea component of the question, that's what it really is: a reflection of the desire for a science-based answer. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9808/40609&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-10-24T16:22:50.623" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T16:22:50.623" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2023-10-23T18:44:56.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adding some specifics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I up voted @Sphennings' answer. It's excellent and I hope you carefully read it. I wanted to point out a specific issue about ambiguity. You asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what kind of things they value and would see as a virtue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have no idea why that question is important. As a result, it's ambiguous. The answer could credibly by anything (too broad, not focused). Worse, it could be a choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Value and virtue are matters of choice. Even when it's a need, it's a choice to give it value. For example, a desert-dwelling people would value water, but that suggests it's something worth trading for, something worth fighting a war for... that's different than a lizard (which can't make as many choices, if any) simply needing water to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ... you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the problem with values and virtues — they're choices. What makes water more valuable to a desert-dwelling people than (e.g.) metal? In fact, it may not be more valuable than metal. It's those differences, the judgement of something being &lt;em&gt;more valuable&lt;/em&gt; and something being &lt;em&gt;less valuable&lt;/em&gt; that falls over the line. Whether discussing an individual, a society, or a species, you've asked us to tell you what they would choose, and because that can literally be &lt;em&gt;anything,&lt;/em&gt; it becomes opinion-based and out of scope (off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the Help Center says we're here to help you build your world, not tell your story. Separating the story from the worldbuilding question requires practice. When asking any question here, it's important to ask yourself &amp;quot;why am I asking this question?&amp;quot; before striking the Submit button. If the answer is, &amp;quot;I need it for my story,&amp;quot; then you're almost guaranteed to have the question closed. If the answer is (e.g.), &amp;quot;because I'm trying to achieve effect X in my story and I believe it should be a basic attribute of my creatures,&amp;quot; then you need to explain what X is and why you need it in your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, your post appears to be looking for attributes that are no different than what color the fur should be, how long the horns should be, and other purely aesthetic choices that have everything to do with the story, but little or nothing to do with the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, ask us for help solving a problem. A list of values might solve a problem, but you didn't explain a problem that would be solved with a value or virtue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Infinite vs. Finite&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, one more thing. You'll notice in the Help Center that we discourage brainstorming. In fact, the Help Center prohibits open-ended questions and questions that lead to all answers having equal value. As written, you're asking for an off-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;. In other words, the list could be anything with no expected, specific, and focused reason for one being better than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do permit questions that result in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt;. Note that I say &amp;quot;result.&amp;quot; You're still expected to ask a fundamentally objective question with the expectation of selecting a single best answer. &amp;quot;How can I change the human arm to allow it to lift 200 pounds easily?&amp;quot; may result in 3-5 different things that must change to permit the one, specific expectation, but the question is still asking for just one thing, not a list of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-23T18:44:56.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-24T04:03:04.073" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/middle-ages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;middle-ages&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;middle-ages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-middle-ages-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;middle-ages&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; are exactly synonymous.  They are two different names for the time period and culture of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance.  I suggest keeping Medieval as it is the overwhelmingly preferred term on this stack and in scholarly discussion in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ACTION:&lt;/strong&gt; Once you've posted/read/analyzed the answers below and come to a decision, pro or con, please click the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; tag. To the right of the orange &amp;quot;Watch Tag&amp;quot; button you'll see a list of links, one of which reads (currently), &amp;quot;Synonyms (1)&amp;quot;. Click that link. Near the bottom you'll see a section titles &amp;quot;suggested synonyms:&amp;quot; Click the appropriate up-vote or down-vote arrow. If the vote gets to +4, the synonym is accepted. If it falls to -2, it's automatically deleted from the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57832" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2023-10-26T18:43:44.087" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T18:43:44.087" Title="Merge Middle-Ages and Medieval tags" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10252" CreationDate="2023-10-24T16:18:46.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merging the tags makes sense to me. Thanks for bringing this up on meta to draw attention to it. I've proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/medieval/synonyms&quot;&gt;middle-ages as a synonym for medieval&lt;/a&gt; to start the approval process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's pre-existing functionality for &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;proposing tag synonyms&lt;/a&gt;. Once proposed a synonym can be approved by either a vote from the users of the tag, or a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do I propose or vote on tag synonyms?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with this privilege and a total answer score (total upvotes minus total downvotes) of 5 or more on the tag, can suggest tag synonyms. Users with a total answer score of 5 or more on the tag, can vote for tag synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do synonyms get approved?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a tag synonym proposal reaches a score of 4, it is accepted and becomes active. If a proposed tag synonym reaches a score of -2 it is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same page provided guidance on when tags should be synonymized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When should I propose a tag synonym?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you see questions being repeatedly tagged with the wrong or incorrect tag -- or multiple tags that mean the same thing -- it's a good idea to propose a tag synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In common parlance both terms mean basically the same thin but the tags' definitions are worded as to be distinct. However this isn't reflected in how tags are used. This distinction is also non-standard and will create confusion if we ever attempted to police it. This is an ideal situation for merging tags given that they are equivalent in everything other than the (non-standard) definitions these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2023-10-24T16:45:29.757" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T16:45:29.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10252" CreationDate="2023-10-24T16:44:41.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree with this proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two terms are synonymous and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt; is more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval-europe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval-europe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-europe-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval-europe&lt;/a&gt; tag which is already a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medieval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medieval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medieval-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medieval&lt;/a&gt;. That merger was a consequence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6982/40609&quot;&gt;this previous Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; about whether or not it made sense to simplify time reference to a set of &amp;quot;era&amp;quot; tags. The outcome of that more comprehensive request was not to do it, however I think it would make a LOT of sense to rename the many era tags to include a prefix (e.g. &amp;quot;era-&amp;quot;) so that once someone found one such tag, they could trivially search to find all the tags without having to cross-list them all in each tag's wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An up-vote for this answer is NOT indicating support for the Note, which primarily serves to link that previous discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T16:44:41.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10241" CreationDate="2023-10-25T13:29:47.563" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the rules are clear, but what the community wants (and does) is ignore rules that they don't like (which they should since this is a community-driven website), and the GODS of SE see only money, and FUN doesn't bring money like free advertisement does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO theres 2 paths to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foolishly try and appeal for the rules to be changed (not happening)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try not to stray too much from the rules, and don't let the rules decide what you post. Post it, in a couple of minutes your post will be closed due to X, or you will be upvotes so much that they won't close it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103989" LastActivityDate="2023-10-25T13:29:47.563" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10252" CreationDate="2023-10-26T05:32:20.750" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Silly idea. The Middle Ages and Medieval are not synonymous. But they are to persons who are Eurocentric in their historical and cultural outlooks. For example, Medieval China does not overlap with the European Middle Ages. Look to the history of India and Japan for other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medieval is a general type of cultural and technological level for a society and can be applied to a number of societies outside of Europe. The Middle Ages refers to a specific historical time period in Europe. The two don't necessarily overlap in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pardon my beginning this answer with a perjorative sentence. On a site like this one expects a more globally enlightened worldview. Finding its absence is annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22159" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T05:32:20.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9896" CreationDate="2023-10-26T15:15:08.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR; Not gonna sugar coat it ( emotional appeal here ), I love this site and I want it to succeed. Intuitively this aspect of world building, or generally of anything which benefits by having a &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; or approach ( I personally like the term &lt;em&gt;philosophy&lt;/em&gt; ), is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've run into this issue with my first serious attempt at world building. The only reason that I recognize the magnitude of the importance of methodological approach is &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; I've failed quite a few times and admittedly I &lt;em&gt;continue to fail at producing stories&lt;/em&gt;. That said, the difference this time around is a matter of technique and the problem in my case has less to do with the quality of the world ( I failed less ) and more to do with how I proceeded ( I changed my strategy ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I cannot take credit for the strategy because I allowed someone else to slap me back to reality, but I can take credit for allowing the slap to occur and listening after I let that happen ( not literally ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question boils down to the differences in how to create or generate ideas verses the positive and negative space of handwaviness and how to carve away more handwaviness ( presumably ) verses techniques and approaches for organizing information ( generate and data mine, which beginners who are bad students will tend to do in their heads, like myself ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can, in a single sentence, narrow down what world building is then to me it seems, at least intuitively, that it's a point of interest that deserves focus and attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to correct any part of my argument, but if educating the user on the &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; is off the table, then this site is &lt;em&gt;indeed&lt;/em&gt; useless for that. But a site which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; educate the user on the &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; of world building is critical to have. Feel free to direct me to that site if it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19530" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T15:15:08.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-26T19:47:38.857" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR; Specifically this is about the last mile problem, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about opinion basis. Though I'll grant that opinion basis is related and perhaps implicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I may be incorrect in my interpretation of what opinion based means. If so please correct me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250439/why-would-cyborgs-assuming-they-are-rare-be-found-in-the-lower-classes-rather&quot;&gt;Why would cyborgs, assuming they are rare, be found in the lower classes rather than the elite?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the answers to a question are as varied as opinions, i.e. they represent various factors, then we fail to tune the question and answer process. So the process becomes about eliminating factors. Sometimes that may not be what we want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers in this case seem to offer factors where as a specific reason is harder to pin down. Some kinds of questions seem to be simply like that and involve a lot of factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand we have resources on how to ask questions, that's not the point. The question is about human effort on both ends, moderation and for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the specific question, demonstratively, is in two parts ( one that looks easier to answer, and one that looks harder ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to detect when this happens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to approach resolving the number of factors more effectively&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...in order to result in fewer answers, which may otherwise be useful, but less so when the list of them is longer on the same question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19530" LastEditorUserId="19530" LastEditDate="2023-10-26T21:58:49.900" LastActivityDate="2023-11-27T04:04:20.477" Title="How to limit the range of answers to questions which are not technically considered opinion based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10262" CreationDate="2023-10-27T15:34:16.640" Score="-2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250715/can-selective-breeding-maximize-human-intelligence-without-major-complications/250737#250737&quot;&gt;The answer in question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started writing it when the question was still open, poured 4 hours of work into it, it got 5 upvotes, and then... it was &lt;strong&gt;silently&lt;/strong&gt; closed while I was sleeping, with a perplexing message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This post is hidden.&lt;/strong&gt; It was flagged as spam or offensive content and deleted 18 hours ago by CommunityBot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took great care to explain a relatively obscure topic (A.) and how it relates to the result of the fictional country of Sophia's policy, expanded upon it into two further complications (B. &amp;amp; C.), and also gave a bit that was present in another later answer (D.). I even tried to give a bit of character voice in C. to keep it interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't keep it brief, but then again, many of the answers on WorldBuilding that I enjoyed reading &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; long, exhaustive, and thorough, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/250737/timeline&quot;&gt;the answer's timeline&lt;/a&gt;, I see there was a vote, but I don't see any reasoning given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13649" LastActivityDate="2023-10-27T22:06:29.787" Title="Why was my answer to &quot;Can selective breeding maximize human intelligence without major complications?&quot; deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10260" CreationDate="2023-10-27T22:06:29.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As commented by HDE, the content was flagged as rude/abusive, and deletion followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As moderators one of our tasks is to keep the posts clean: surgically removing the crap with an edit takes more time than deleting the whole post, time which is not granted we have. And don't forget it's your duty, as OP, to ensure the quality of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-10-27T22:06:29.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-27T22:56:09.907" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Prior note&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;While in most cases a proposal's score is a clear indicator of how much it is accepted, it will be hardly the case here. Indeed, we're talking about new user engagment here, and newcomers -who are the main target of this proposal- barely go to meta, learning how SE works and all. Disengaged users because of this trouble won't vote, either. This proposal unfortunately has to be voted by people who are not the target of this system, so you'll likely have to put yourself in the mindset of a new user to review this proposal effectively.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It does not mean your vote is not important.&lt;/strong&gt; It means that you should perhaps not use this statistic alone as your reason to think the proposal could be useful or not. Alternative elements to judge this proposal could be checking how many new users come back and try to edit after having asked a bad question, their reaction, their ability to improve, etc.. Alas, I don't have access to such statistics, so it's impossible for me to know the current state of user engagment. We also cannot know the true effectiveness of the proposal until some tests are done, for instance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A/B group testing&lt;/a&gt;. So please be careful with that!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For a clearer differentiation in how the proposal is accepted vs its innate qualities, I have given a simple &amp;quot;yes, I agree with your proposal in general&amp;quot; answer you can also upvote/downvote as you wish. Downvoting it means that in overall you explicitly disagree with this proposal. Upvoting means you explicitly agree with it. The meaning of votes on the question itself here stays as usual and can also indicate your (dis)agreement. Remember to add your own answers/comments if you want to discuss some specific points!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the proposal?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In one sentence : When newcomers receive a series of downvotes on a question or answer, send them a &amp;quot;tutorial&amp;quot; notification to help them find the reasons they have been downvoted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How does it look like?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here comes my excellent drawing skills when making mockups, behold!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/myRlh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/myRlh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mock-up of dubious quality showing how the proposal would look like for questions.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people having trouble reading the picture, the text appears before and reads :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Help :&lt;/strong&gt; You have received downvotes recently on &amp;quot;this question/answer&amp;quot; (hyperlink to the question/answer that received downvotes). You can check the comments under your question or the &amp;quot;tour&amp;quot; (link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;) and &amp;quot;help-center&amp;quot; (link to the help-center, page &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, or how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;write a good answer for answers&lt;/a&gt;) page in order to know why it has been downvoted and how to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is a placeholder and can (I'd say even should!) be refined. I'm not a native English speaker, so wording is likely to be different, at the very least. But that should give you the gist of what to expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who does it apply to?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It applies only to users who just registered an account and received their first X downvotes on the same question. The amount &amp;quot;X&amp;quot; of downvotes required to trigger this notification can be debated, but I'm setting for a big 3 downvotes for now. Also, the question should have a negative score for this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens only once per user. Once a new user receives this notification, it will never reappear again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not retroactive : Existing users are not affected by this change. This also does not apply to established users, ie. high-score users on one site joining another SE website who are already starting at 100 score. By extension we could also consider not sending it if the user has managed to score enough points before witnessing this event (e.g. : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;1 000 points like the established user privilege, I think?&lt;/a&gt; The page doesn't seem very up-to-date...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What are the strengths of this proposal? Why do I make it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It helps solving an issue some new users have : Having access to resources as to why their question have been downvoted.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's currently no direct link between the score you lose and any help-center explanation. There's no dynamic, tutorial-like feedback explaining why you lost points, and it can lead to feeling frustration. It is currently a task for the reviewers to do, and as seen before, people are not exactly too kind to force that behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So instead of forcing the voter to do something they don't want to, we use the notification's red color to catch the attention of the user and bring some basic information. This on-top of being given when they really need it give an actual dynamic tutorial explaining the reasons behind downvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus, redundancy in teaching the basics to someone having troubles doesn't really hurt!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is entirely invisible to the reviewer. One of the key (and most protected) point of voting is that it is frictionless : A click and you're done. This system doesn't add any click to the voter, and in fact, doesn't impact them at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is anonymous : Another keypoint of not changing votes, the downvoters' identity is not revealed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is also very lightweight to the user receiving the notification, since it only happens once and is not a screaming popup. It also (usually) happens when they receive comments, so the notification mark would often also be here anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My intuition tells me it's not too hard to make technically. We add a new message on specific, well defined triggers using an existing, normally well-tested system. The graphics don't change at all, so it's mostly code-stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What are the potential weakness of this proposal as you see it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be thorough and transparent, there are some potential disadvantages to this system. I'm revealing you what my skills intuitively tell me, so you have all information to make an informed decision. Still, I wouldn't have made this proposal if the strengths didn't overcome the drawbacks from my viewpoint :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tutorial &amp;quot;sensory overload&amp;quot; : If there are too many elements displayed to the user at once, they risk getting confused. The proposal is supposed to be lightweight... But we never know!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At most it tells &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; their question is downvoted. It doesn't directly tell &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; to solve it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This will not solve every problem : Some users will care and use the notification to improve themselves, others won't and keep asking/answering poorly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might annoy... How do we call them already? Ah yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57682/how-should-sockpuppets-be-handled-on-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;sockpuppet accounts&lt;/a&gt;, ie. experienced users who create new accounts on top of their main one. It is indeed more information they don't really need if they are legit, allowed sockpuppets.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think there is already a system like this in place... But I have the memory of a goldfish and I don't recall having ever been in that specific, not so good situation (even for my admittedly could-be-improved first question). Remaking the same system could be a no-no.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why are you not proposing this to upvotes too?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm raising this point because some (a lot of?) people, both on worldbuilding SE and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/325417/1095559&quot;&gt;meta's meta&lt;/a&gt; think that downvoting is &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; the opposite of upvoting, and therefore are close-enough that they should be treated the same way. As a more or less experienced... User Experience designer I heavily, but really heavily disagree with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will try to keep it short as not to bother you too much : In game design (recall the voting system takes heavily from video-game systems), the process of giving rewards -like giving points- and punishments -like removing points- are treated differently : Rewards are usually self-explanatory in what the player (here user) should do next time. Indeed, they are informed they did well, so if they want to perform well next time, they have to do about the same kind of thing. In contrast, punishments happen when you did something wrong : There are improvements to be made. A good, well-designed game system tells you not only when you did something wrong, but also why, and better yet, how to improve. That's a key difference with rewards, which only need explanation if what you did to get rewarded is not obvious. Moreover, the process of telling you failed (to meet the reviewer's expectation here) is a double-edged sword : it can help someone improve as well as it can be discouraging, especially when you're new at something. Therefore it often has to be made more carefully, unlike rewards which can be given more freely with generally less negative consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the above point, it is to stay focused on one small change at a time. The more focused it is, the less likely people will refuse it just because they disagree with half of the proposal (namely the upvoting or downvoting part). If you believe it could see some purpose to reward new users with well-voted questions/answers, you could perhaps tell in another post how you envision it (more medals? Specific notification? Pop-up?...). I wouldn't personally mind upvoting a proposal like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-10-27T23:07:52.227" LastActivityDate="2023-10-28T16:05:33.583" Title="Proposal : An automated &quot;tutorial&quot; notification for new users with low-score posts" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|help-center|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10263" CreationDate="2023-10-27T22:56:09.907" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, I agree with the proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can upvote this answer if you wish to explicitly tell you like the proposal and wish to see it developped. You can also downvote it if you dislike the proposal and don't wish to see it happen.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvoting or downvoting this answer doesn't necessarily has to mean you agree (or disagree) entirely with the proposal. For instance, you can agree for the most of it yet would like to change certain parts, or you could disagree with it because you strongly dislike a key point of it, but like some others which are more minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have points to debate or want to explore another approach, you can add it as another answer (or as a comment to the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-10-27T22:56:09.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10263" CreationDate="2023-10-27T23:13:57.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;New users are often unaware of the details of the UI and, as a consequence, have a poor UX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a notification which ends up in that same UI won't make any good for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still remember when I moved my first steps in SE that I could not understand why at any apparently randombclick I would get a notification, a badge or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, mods can and do contact users with strikes of poorly received contribution (this is why I say what I say in the first two paragraphs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-10-27T23:13:57.683" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10259" CreationDate="2023-10-28T03:55:03.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No Reason To...Unless There Is&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm going to take the contra side and argue that, as a &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding community&lt;/em&gt;, we really don't need to worry about this issue as much as we do at present. I've long argued against the narrow reading of the Stack Exchange rule against opinion based answers. I think we consider it axiomatic that questions of pure artistic taste are off topic here; while a question that underlies this artistic taste might be entirely on topic and highly valuable as a 100% Awesome Worldbuilding Query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The reason I think this community shouldn't be policing the range of answers is that worldbuilding is an inherently complex art and as such requires a multiresponsorial approach. Basically, almost all of our questions are blatantly opinion based, which means that there really can't be one objectively correct and best answer. There could be several great answers, and one that kind of sucks, but addresses the querent's problem specifically tailored to her world, so that it gets the green checkmark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moreover, as a community, we exist for two related but extremely different goals. One, of course, is to answer the surface question that a querent brings us. More importantly, or more foundationally, our actual goal is to use the query as a &amp;quot;type&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;paradigm&amp;quot; with the aim of providing a broad range of excellent quality answers that are applicable to a very wide audience and over a long extent of time. In order to do this, given the nature of our subject matter, we really can't afford to restrict responses as a matter of policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the contrary, an &lt;em&gt;individual&lt;/em&gt; community member might have a highly valid reason for restricting the range of answers. Especially when they get into elevated levels of worldbuilding, where the OP is looking for a very niche, very world-specific answer a broad range will a) not be helpful to the querent because the answers don't address the question, and b) won't be useful to anyone else due to the high degree of world-specificity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As a matter of policy, we allow and encourage querents to set parameters and guidelines for the kinds of answers they're looking for. Community policing keeps the system in balance. Are the querent's parameters sensible? Are they letting in too many wildly divergent answers? Are respondents even paying attention to the goals and parameters set out by the querent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-10-28T03:55:03.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10263" CreationDate="2023-10-28T16:05:33.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking more along the lines of bots which can auto comment and also flag moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read first and react &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; reading. :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the controversy. I feel it in my life, so I am not in need of a lecture on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trick question in my question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10259/how-to-limit-the-range-of-answers-to-questions-which-are-not-technically-conside&quot;&gt;How to limit the range of answers to questions which are not technically considered opinion based?&lt;/a&gt;, was about the easy part and the hard part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Detecting these kinds of questions is the ridiculously hard part... but maybe the problem is mostly solved or can more easily be solved with a bot that interfaces with a language model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easier part is managing the tutorials because we already know a lot about how to do that, but that is also a very, very hard problem. We don't recognize them as they are because we are human and we take these things for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language model is also probably very capable of helping to better organize our tutorials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is in how we do our gate keeping and how much effort that requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the philosophy is to reduce both friction and effort, but humans are notoriously bad at doing that. :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; allow bots to close questions, but there's no reason why bots cannot help to facilitate how and when to interject relevant information about quality control for the purpose of making the site &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; focused, &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; searchable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are repulsed by the idea of language models, I get it. But I would have to ask what the difference is between an artist taking inspiration from other art, or a child learning from their environment, and an unconscious tool optimized on human knowledge for the purpose of &lt;em&gt;making output utterances maximally relevant to the input utterances we provide&lt;/em&gt;? What makes it &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; wrong? We do not expect children to ask if it's ok if they listen to our conversations. But a language model is not a child. It is however aimed at actually helping everyone, even if we don't understand how it works or why we are aversive to the idea of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example I can think of off the top of my head is that I can clearly see a feedback loop between Discord and Youtube. And the time window of that loop is at least less than an hour. When I've brought up relatively obscure topics in Discord, things I may have never talked directly about there, i.e. subjects new to me or specific to some context I've never been in before or recently by a long time, miraculously suggestions to videos on these topics show up after a little while when I refresh the Youtube tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the relationship between Discord and Youtube, but I'm very confident there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a feedback loop there. And I find it occasionally useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bot that does this directly is probably &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; simpler than the above example and since it wouldn't particularly be trying to &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; anyone anything, would likely be highly relevant, direct and very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19530" LastActivityDate="2023-10-28T16:05:33.583" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10241" CreationDate="2023-10-29T09:35:11.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no rigid set of rules. This is probably as it should be. The person asking a question feels that something 'ought to be possible' but does not have the knowledge to answer the question themselves, and maybe they have trouble posing the question as people might like. Their hope is that someone in the community knows an obscure fact, or sees a connection to some well-known fact that answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim (as I understand things, and I have no influence on policy) is to answer questions, and at the same time create a searchable database of questions and answers that may help others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple exchange (which I paraphrase) was...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: How should I make the features on my inhabited planet seem realistic and plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Look at a geology book. Planets are different but the basic forces in Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars can all be likened to each other. They have heavy centres and molten cores. They have or had tectonic plates. Even if you look at the ice-planets of the outer solar system, you still have cry-volcanoes, and shifting plates on a liquid base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person asking had been dazzled by the different planets that had been discovered lately - lighter than water, 5000C at the surface, rains diamonds. They were happy with the dull answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of bad behaviours in questions and answers which can be discouraged...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long, wandering arguments which tell you the name of the creatures and that they are second level users of elemental magic, but no explanation of what any of that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long lists of special cases and sub-cases with detail. We no not need proof of research. Often how the question is posed is enough to tell whether someone has had a fair go at it themselves before submitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lengthy expositions on philosophy, politics, or other soapbox matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a rigid set of rules, the troublemakers would game them and use them against ourselves. However, we can often recognise the bad behaviour and throttle them back. The 'opinion-based' query is hard to define but we recognise it in the replies it gets, if not in the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The One Rule, fit to be writ in letters of gold, is &amp;quot;Try not to be a jerk; be chill here and all will be fine.&amp;quot; But people are people, and we need the other rules as guidelines at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96874" LastActivityDate="2023-10-29T09:35:11.640" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-30T20:55:34.247" Score="-2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was closed, with my requests for reopening being declined even after resolving every concern presented, except one. This stated that I cannot have multiple answers, with the person stating this saying that I was asking 3 questions, one being the main, one being a request for explanation, and another being a question about whether my idea is hard to prove/disprove. Is this a good reason to close my question, and/or is asking “multiple questions” not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T00:47:27.250" Title="Is there a rule prohibiting “follow-ups”" Tags="|support|close-reasons|asking-questions|rules|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-10-30T23:55:04.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10270" CreationDate="2023-10-30T23:47:24.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes there are rules prohibiting multiple questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/250749/can-white-holes-travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, and that by follow-ups you mean asking multiple questions that follow one another, the answer is no, you cannot ask follow-ups within the same post as the main question. Let's start with the reference rules :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General guidelines for all questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[your question] Must be specific and answerable: What problem are you trying to solve?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;From the help-center : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;what topics can I ask about here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question should be specific. Also note that &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; is singular, with no &amp;quot;s&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;From the help-center (again!) : &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking multiple questions will tend to make it chatty. Moreover it makes answers much longer than necessary. As told in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, the motto of Stack-Exchange is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Ask questions, get answers, &lt;strong&gt;no distractions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. The goal is to be as straightforward as possible in both questions and answers, and the site is designed for that. Multiple questions in a row tend to attract more questions both from you and answerers, creating long, unreadable threads of comments at best, mangled up mix of answers we don't know what was the question at worst. That's one big reason why it's forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, know that the community is not overly pedantic. As such some edge-cases are allowed if each question are extremely closely related. For instance : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;What is the maximum height of my ogre species? Can it reach the height of an elephant?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; Answering the first question effectively answers the second, making this 2nd question more like a writing style to add additional details about what you want (➡️ I wish to make my ogres as big as elephants). This is not really a standalone question anymore. For the other cases... Well, consider you cannot ask them in the same post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution to this issue is actually quite simple : Don't jump over horses, sharks and sheeps three at a time. Asking two questions at once is not really useful anyway if your 1st question get good answers which are yet inadequate for the 2nd query. Ask your main question, wait for answers, see if you need to know more, then write a second post with your follow-up question. This has been done with success a numerous amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to, you can succintly relate one question to another with a link. Just remember that each and every question should hold its own alone, so if you need important details in one question to ask another, you'll have to restate it. This is in part to prevent broken links from making your question unreadable at much later dates... And because it can be annoying to have multiple tabs open to follow you, too .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T00:47:27.250" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T00:47:27.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10270" CreationDate="2023-10-30T23:56:13.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &amp;quot;follow-up&amp;quot; I assume what you mean is that, within a single post, you're asking a &amp;quot;main question&amp;quot; with one or more &amp;quot;follow-up&amp;quot; questions. I say this because asking a second, independent question on Main that is a &amp;quot;follow-up&amp;quot; to a previously asked question is completely permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, they're a reason to close a question. If you click on the &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; link on any question you'll find the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Needs more focus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question currently includes multiple questions in one. It should focus on one problem only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, asking more than one question, no matter how related, is a technical infraction of Stack Exchange's rules. Note, Stack Exchange, not Worldbuilding.SE. It's not our rule, it's network-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you think this discussion is messy, search Meta for &amp;quot;Opinion-Based&amp;quot; and look at the dozens of discussions we've had about that network-wide close reason on a site that has a tag for &amp;quot;Magic.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at what you state are the three questions you feel should be permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can white holes travel faster than the speed of light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A request for an explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if this effect doesn’t apply, then what is it that bounds them to traveling slower than the speed of light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Whether my idea is hard to prove/disprove&amp;quot; (a request to review the idea)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do you think that I could get away with using this idea anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had it been asked better, question #1 isn't a bad fit for this site. My original problem with the question (and the reason I voted to close the question) is that you appeared to be asking for a factual answer involving a fictional issue. That's better addressed by Physics.SE or Astronomy.SE. Your original post didn't make it clear that you were writing a story, building a world, or that you know negative mass, etc., isn't real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I remain a bit unconvinced that you understand the difference between a mathematical hypothesis and empirical evidence. The first is fiction until proven otherwise. The second is fact. If I'm wrong about this perception, I very much apologize. If I'm right, it's important that you learn to understand the difference.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since, as the Help Center explains, our goal is to help people build imaginary worlds, we became stuck with what to do with your question. Because you presented yourself as believing the hypothesis was real, what you needed was an educational experience to help you better understand the issue. But that's not within the scope of our Stack. Technically, it's not within the scope of any Stack. Stack Exchange wants people to ask specific and reasonably objective questions that meet the expectations of the individual Stacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings us to question #2. Giving you an education about astrophysics is not why we're here. Per the Tour, Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum. Per the Help Center, any question that can be reasonably answered with a book-length response is out of scope. It's a long way of again saying we're not here to give you an education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As a quick aside, this is why we have problems with &amp;quot;tell me what's wrong with my idea&amp;quot; questions. The Help Center states that questions should not be asked in a way that produces answers of equal value. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;Infinite lists of things questions&lt;/a&gt; (meaning questions that are not asked with the expectation of a single, best answer) are off-topic here and &amp;quot;tell me what's wrong with my idea&amp;quot; questions are of that type.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last question is scratching an itch that we haven't solved, yet. We're still thinking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9956/40609&quot;&gt;review my idea questions&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is that they don't fit the Stack Exchange mold. Remember, Stack Exchange wants one specific reasonably-objective problem that needs a solution. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7289/40609&quot;&gt;it's intent is to be the go-to place to find solutions to problems&lt;/a&gt;. From their perspective, your individual desires don't come into this. From our perspective, we know that a creative process like worldbuilding must balance the individual needs of the querent with the business expectations of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a degree....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, there is a rule against &amp;quot;follow-up&amp;quot; questions in the way that you're using the phrase. You're allowed to ask one and only one question per post. We're usually lenient with new users, but there were many other things wrong with your question, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish you'd asked this first in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. The Sandbox's purpose is to help people learn how to ask questions on this site to meet our expectations while adhering to Stack Exchange's business model. All this could have been ironed out before you met your first slammed door (closed question). I still recommend it. We're happy to help you be successful — within the limits of Stack Exchange's rules and our policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-10-30T23:56:13.953" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2023-11-01T16:16:00.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Title:&#xA;Is this time travel mechanic plausible?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to ask a question for a novel I am trying to make, but it was closed for many reasons. I need help making it ask-worthy. This is my question with various revisions that I made after it was closed, but with some parts remaining in hopes that they can still remain in the finished question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to make a novel, and I wanted to know if this is a good hard science theory for time travel. Given that (as far as I know) white holes are theorized to have negative mass; and that anything with negative mass travels faster than the speed of light*, would that mean that white holes can travel faster than the speed of light? If not, why? This is disregarding causality, I already have a workaround.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*1 : This is due to the same principle that makes massless particles travel the speed of light. I believe it has something to do with inertia, in which case this would make sense, but either way, this was used in a theory for tachyons and was not criticized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105883" LastActivityDate="2023-11-01T16:16:00.853" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-02T06:32:21.640" Score="4" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things have changed recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of new users have begun using the site. Not surprisingly, they're not seriously reading the tour or the Help Center. And none of them save one are showing up here in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Almost all of them are getting seriously down voted and/or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, consider: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250894/40609&quot;&gt;Moons day vs year&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, it's not a great question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, it was probably asked by a non-native English speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, it's most likely asking a Real World question about Earth and its Moon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, (by the time I'd arrived) the user of reputation 1 hadn't even taken the tour yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@AlexP and @EscapedDentalPatient chimed in with good comments even before the Community BOT stepped in to indicate the question didn't meet SE's minimum standards for a question. But that didn't stop three down votes, two close votes, and a closing hammer from @L.Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the question have been closed? I'll admit... &lt;em&gt;probably.&lt;/em&gt; It should have been closed as &amp;quot;needs more details&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;needs more focus.&amp;quot; Of all things, it was closed as &amp;quot;not about worldbuilding as defined in the help center.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we &lt;s&gt;finally&lt;/s&gt; closing Real World questions? I'm all for it. While I initially supported the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;Real World Question policy&lt;/a&gt;, I've since come to despise it as I believe it's significantly led the Stack away from it's imaginative roots to become Physics-lite. &lt;em&gt;However,&lt;/em&gt; I'd like someone to actually say that's the case (and delete its link in the Help Center) before I jump on the bandwagon and start playing my banjo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the negative votes... I'll grant, the question obviously indicates insufficient research into basic terrestrial astronomy — but we don't know &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; about a user with a reputation of &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and not a single badge other than the English looks suspiciously like a 2nd language to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for beating the snot out of users with 30,000+ reputation. I've taken a few punches myself. But by that level of experience they should know better than to post a question that will draw the ire of the Community BOT. I'm even willing to slap users above 2,500 rep pretty hard because, &lt;em&gt;honestly,&lt;/em&gt; they should be figuring &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; out by that time. &lt;em&gt;But brand-spanking new users?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider myself the most ruthless community moderator on the Stack. I've been rightly blamed for being arrogant, overly zealous, draconian... you name it. But it's &lt;em&gt;really rare&lt;/em&gt; that I down vote &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; and fairly uncommon that I VTC a user under 2,500 reputation without first asking them to improve their question with frequently lengthy comments as to why and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, folks, what gives? Why the sudden effort to take a steel-edged ruler to the knuckles of users who don't understand why the rulers, why the steel, or why the knuckles? I can't even guess why the tidal wave of new users has come in, &lt;em&gt;but that's not a bad thing.&lt;/em&gt; But I don't understand why we're treating them so harshly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T16:15:46.293" Title="We've suddenly begun beating the snot out of new(ish) users - and that's saying something coming from me" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|down-votes|new-users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-02T06:54:04.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYnHC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYnHC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the downvote info&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting an unclear question is a perfectly valid reason for getting a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting a question not backed up by any research is a perfectly valid reason for getting a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting a not useful question is a perfectly valid reason for getting a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example you use fits at least 2 of the 3 use cases for downvotes. And since it doesn't give any worldbuilding context, for me it is not about worldbuilding, on top of lacking other details and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we not downvote just because it's coming from a new user? We always repeat that the vote should go to the content, be it answer or question, not to the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get from the &amp;quot;vote the content, not the poster&amp;quot; that we should not look at the user profile when giving a vote, so we should ignore their history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, for a newcomer we should and we provide more explanation on what makes good content and what not, but that's unrelated to voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also don't forget that one of the automatism in place here blocks a user from posting content when they get many downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, we should downvote poor content, even when it comes from new users. The alternative is letting those users creating more pollution with poor content, resulting in additional work for the moderating community, or, even worse, granting those users privileges they might not understand when those poor conceived questions get the &amp;quot;encouragement&amp;quot; upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I don't mean that every first question which gets closed deserves a downvote. However there is a difference between fleshing out a question, even though it might not fit the SE where it is posted, and just throwing a scribble in the bin and let the others figure out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2023-11-07T13:36:58.770" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T13:36:58.770" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-02T16:16:24.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;On L.Dutch's argumentation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10275/80336&quot;&gt;I'm going to counter-argument L.Dutch points&lt;/a&gt;, as there are devious effects of downvoting that are easily unseen, and I believe quite strongly that this rigid stance is rather shortsighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with these -I hope widely accepted- postulates :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The core goal of this site from SE's perspective is to be a compendium of high-quality questions and answers. We can think of it as both having numerous content and having a high-density of quality content (#QuestionPollution).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The core goal of an individual user asking a question is to get help building their world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More experienced users tend to ask better questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By extension, inexperienced users tend to ask worse questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By another extension, users, like most people, tend to improve over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that, let's look at two points that you could easily overlook :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;Density of high-quality answers&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of raw quantity I believe the sum of all existing questions is more than alright. I mean, it's not the site's first year of existence. The other thing to keep in check then is the proportion of good vs bad questions. To keep a high density of quality topics, we need to study the flows of good and bad questions and where does it come from. As told above, the input sources are overall well-defined : Almost by definition, experienced users make less mistakes, inexperienced more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the goal, from this site's perspective, is to actually have experienced users since they're the ones who provide better questions. To do that, you need to increase the conversion rate of new to experienced and engaged users, which in turns mean that keeping them is rather important. Making a new user unwelcome isn't likely at all to make them come back, decreasing the overall quality of the community, and therefore the overall quality of the posts. This is extremely important as one new user making one bad question and leaving has technically 0% good question among all their questions; It's the worst mark you can add to the overall ratio of good vs bad topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;The quality of new candidate querents is dependent on the image the community gives&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People leaving with a bad taste, whether justified or not, sets an image of the site and its community. If people in worldbuilding circles (the ones who are normally more talented in asking quality questions) keeps complaining to others that we're harsh, unkind, or generally more brutal than brutally effective... Then you lose candidates who are more likely to post quality, on-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is one of the top-site when you look for worldbuilding (it is currently on the 1st page of my private searches for &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot;, even with all local, French websites on top). Moreover, it is free to access and extremely easy to register, so we cannot really be elitist by definition. Regardless of how you vote, people with bad questions will come. Downvoting them will have little to no impact on that. &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, our only card we can play to reach the desired effect, the core goal of this site is to focus on getting experienced, engaged users.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I think we have to think more carefully and be flexible in how we work with rules regarding new users. Rules are one thing, clever applications of them to ensure everyone have a good time is another. And it has to be reflected in every action you do, both through comments and downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do that, you need to strive to improve yourself as much as the querents. Here are a few bites of bytes containing bits of knowledge that should help understand key points in that downvoting decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What do we have to consider?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Distinguishing the good grain from rye grass&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most important point we have to account for, because we do need to go beyond the rules and think about the circumstances and the morale (in non-legal terms, one's intentions) of a case. We need to find the seeds that can grow into beautiful trees and sort out the bad ones that will just pinch you with their thorns. Remember that I told one of the postulate is that users improve over time? Truth is, some won't. And we'll have to judge each case individually, as quickly as possible but as best as possible, which can be hard at times. There are many elements changing that, and one is just your subjective view on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the querent put efforts in their question's form and do they genuinely try to improve it? Is it about really basic knowledge you learn in primary school, or something more advanced that only amateurs know? Being new doesn't allow one to do everything and therefore to research nothing. Still, it's very easy to forget that they will almost always have less knowledge than you, so obviously everything they will show you is likely to be simple evidence from your eyes... And potentially a lack of research &lt;em&gt;for you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;The rule of 3 before&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Billy, don't play with the dog's tail, he dislikes that. You have been warned once... Twice, thrice! Ok, now you're punished, go sit in the corner!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When educating children, it is a practice among professionals to teach against bad behaviors by issuing 2 warnings telling that third time's not the charm, followed by the punishment. The warnings inform you clearly about the importance of the rule, yet doesn't punish right away because you're still learning it. Punishment about rules you don't know is almost always felt as unfair&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, this also works for adults, too, even though there are generally only one warning because you're supposed to be more responsible. The main risk here is that if the person is not willing to respect the rules you get 2 or 3 bad questions. If that happens however, you have certainly and most likely noticed they were not willing to improve (see above section).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that regard, I'd like to recall one thing which is really often forgotten : Like you're not forced to answer right now, you're not forced to vote right now. Postponing your vote does not make it less valuable, but it sure changes the experience of the targeted user. &lt;strong&gt;If you're truly keen to downvote, give at least a chance for the user to react and try something out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Balancing difficulty curves&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's remember that one's experience should be enjoyable. On top of being part of being welcoming and welcomed (a critical point of any strong community with rules), you learn much more efficiently if you're having a blast with what you're doing. In contrario, being blasted up means you won't come back, so you won't learn anything. In order to not be blasted away, the balance between the challenge, the rewards and the potential punishment have to be balanced relative to the user's skills&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. All this grouped together makes a difficulty curve. And no sane experience throws someone on the high spike of difficulty curves, spikes you normally meet at the middle and end of your experience. To give another reference outside games, you don't paint (and are compared to) masterpieces like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mona Lisa&lt;/a&gt; from the beginning, you start with the basics of drawing and go up from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why we make tutorials in video-games. That's why we don't throw kids from a local soccer club against an international team. That's also why you don't throw interns alone on complex projects, nor do you (normally) hardly criticize them because they made a mistake that senior lead colleague would not have made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's also why there's a sandbox here. The sandbox is a place you can safely try the functionalities of the system without fear of losing something. Unfortunately, since it is hard to access, most people are sent in the big ocean without having the chance to try the small swimming pool before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Scaled perception in rewards and punishments&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes in pair with the above. One's perception of what they receive or lose is heavily dependent on what they already have. In other words, the perception is non-linear, and is more often than not logarithmic. Think it like your wage : If you win 1 000 dollars with a lottery ticket, you won't really care much if you already have billions in your bank. But if it's your first gained thousand dollar in all your life, this means a lot more : this reward and the associated experience will be kept as a strong memory. The reverse is also true regarding losses, a.k.a punishments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? If you have thousands of points, thinking being downvoted is not &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; important is actually wrong for new users. When you lost 0.1% of your points and have one more bad negative questions, it's at most an annoyance. But for new users, it is 100% of their question(s) which have been shot down. It's not encouraging at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By the way, I cannot stress it enough : If you believe that downvotes has no effect on the feeling you have because its &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;only purpose is to show a post is not useful&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, please consider it again. It is not because it is not written on the tooltip and help-center that psychological effects don't exist. Being acknowledged or not by members of a community as someone who do &amp;quot;something useful&amp;quot; or not is one of the strongest social link in existence.&lt;/strong&gt; It's a link people need to feel fulfilled. It's worth even its own reward kind (the reward of glory) in game and experience design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at how the downvote score is in red, the most common color in Occident to indicate something is &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;. Look at the arrow colors when downvoting, same deal. Think even to the word &amp;quot;negative&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;negative score&amp;quot;.Then, search for all the previous posts where people complained about their closure and downvotes. This gives you a tiny glimpse of the actual number of users disappointed in what is supposed to be a site being all for &amp;quot;high-quality content&amp;quot;. It's a tiny glimpse because the majority of people who don't come back out of frustration is silent&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lasting words&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If as a reviewer, you felt offended in how I think we should manage downvotes (it is not really devoid of criticism, after all), that you feel your honest volunteering efforts were smashed against the wall, this is exactly the kind of feeling new users can experience through downvotes and harsh comments. This is food for thoughts .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the others, if you need to remember only one thing, that's this : From one's individual viewpoint (and not SE's point), the goal of this site is to help and get help build their world above all, and to do that you have to be clever with the rules. All of the votes, closure choices and comments should be made in that respect. So think what downvoting means in regard to helping people, not only what it means to the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : If we add in the fact that some people think the interface is unclear for newcomers, we cannot even tell &amp;quot;You should know the rules&amp;quot;. They couldn't. Source? &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10265/80336&quot;&gt;L.Dutch answer about my proposal of a dynamic tutorial message&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10245/80336&quot;&gt;JBH's comment complaining that the tour button is hidden at the top&lt;/a&gt; (and he's one of the Great Old Ones! Please don't pinch me, JBH!), and so on.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : That's one key difference between what L.Dutch and I say : I don't advocate to judge the post strictly alone (and in fact you cannot). Acknowledging an user's personality, strengths and weaknesses help in answering more accurately. While we can't know who are new users, it's not unreasonnable to think they're relatively new to worldbuilding. The thing I don't advise is to need other questions to understand a new one, this can make a camouflaged too-broad/lacking details questions&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 : And that's unreachable data it's almost impossible to get access to. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's why it's easier both mechanically and mentally to work on the things that worked, rather than the things that didn't&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-11-03T16:33:14.100" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T16:33:14.100" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-04T01:24:36.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Quick&amp;quot; study&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As requested in some comments somewhere, here are some data of these past few weeks vs last year :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mLqAm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mLqAm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture of the Excel table I made from the data gathered. If you have troubles reading this, add a comment under my post and I'll find a way so you can.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Click to enlarge)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to note :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't have access to the site KPIs, so I had to resort by listing each question one by one, ordered by date &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions?tab=newest&amp;amp;page=3&quot;&gt;through the search engine, 50 by 50&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This explains why questions are not grouped by weeks, but by packs of 50. It also explains why start and end dates are not always exactly X days.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the good side of this, each number on each line are easily relatable one to another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This also explains why I limited it to 150 questions this year and last year (for 300 checked questions total). It has been very tedious and I'm mentally exhausted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(all)&amp;quot; means out of all questions.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As written in the footnotes, it isn't very reliable to count the stats for new users anyway : &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; new users tend to have more points and tend to be out of the criteria now... If they haven't left the site before. We don't have access to the score they had at the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dates are in French format : DD/MM/YYYY instead of MM/DD/YYYY. I'm too lazy to work around the software automation . For numbers, &amp;quot;,&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;.&amp;quot; (0,59 in French means 0.59 in English). Shouldn't be too hard to decipher, I hope!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While most stats are relatively stable at first glance (The variability seems quite high), one of the statistic is really standing out : The total score on each question and its indirect stat, the average score per question. We're on a value of +853 score last year vs +540 this year. In other words, a loss of 37%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt that having more time to receive upvotes can explain alone this : I believe less than 10% votes on my old times questions/answers have come after 2 weeks (the time between the study has been made and the studied questions), far outside the 1/3 difference we see here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if we noticed a change in trends, it's likely linked to this. Now think freely of what these numbers could mean!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastEditorUserId="80336" LastEditDate="2023-11-04T01:41:05.730" LastActivityDate="2023-11-04T01:41:05.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-08T17:16:40.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before you or anybody gets mad at new users not looking at the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Someone needs to make the Help Center very visible on the website. There is only one link to the Help Center on the front page. Just a small 4 letter word saying &amp;quot;Help&amp;quot; at the bottom footer of the website. On most websites, Help generally leads you to a contact form to request aid from the moderators or administrators of the website. The &amp;quot;Help Center&amp;quot; should be renamed to Q&amp;amp;A Orientation or something more descriptive, and a huge link to it should be on the website and said link be bolded when posting a question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center desperately needs an update. It hasn't been updated since 2018, and needless to say, the moderators and close voters are far more strict nowadays than they were 5 years ago. I'm positive that half of the Help Center &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;example questions&lt;/a&gt; would get closed if they were deleted and reposted today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the topic, I agree that votes are for the topic instead of the user. That said, nobody but the asker is ever invested in the question that any user asks. Almost any experienced user can edit, improve, and vote to reopen a question; but a person even adding even minor improvements to someone else's question is rare. I think in all the time I've been here, only one other person has edited a question I posted; and no one edited an answer I posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want positive feedback for new contributors, everyone should consider editing a New Contributor's question (if it's salvageable) instead of just downvoting, VTC, and moving on. Stack Overflow incentivizes editing another person's content, but few want to do it. There needs to be a goal for considering editing before disparaging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97812" LastActivityDate="2023-11-08T17:16:40.883" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-11T18:54:46.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not keen on downvoting in general, and use upvotes for questions that check all the boxes or are simply &amp;gt; Quite Interesting. I find downvotes really demotivating myself, and reserve them almost exclusively for spam or offensively low-effort posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But close votes and questions being closed should not have the bad reputation they have.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I get it from a new user's perspective: you find a website that seems to be able to cater to a problem you're having, you post it, and within a few hours it has been closed. &lt;em&gt;This is not the kind of treatment I expected from the Innernette!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, if these users care to put some additional effort into finding out &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this happened, they'll find it clearly indicates the reason(s) it got closed, and that in many cases it can be saved through some editing. &lt;del&gt;This isn't&lt;/del&gt; This shouldn't be a big deal, especially if that website's users give you constructive feedback—there's just a bit of a learning curve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; disheartening is when this question gets met with a lot of negativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My solution: &lt;strong&gt;don't downvote questions because they need to be closed!&lt;/strong&gt; That's what close votes are for. If new users in particular put effort into their questions, but miss the mark because they're off-topic, just point that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me maybe months before I noticed the downvote popup, and I assume few new users noticed it. L.Dutch is completely (in their) right with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10275/57660&quot;&gt;their answer&lt;/a&gt;, but it's just good to take into account, especially when confronted with new users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I also often see downvotes used for ersatz feedback or close votes. They're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional problem with downvotes is that even once posts have been improved upon, many users won't notice and change their downvote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57660" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T18:54:46.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10274" CreationDate="2023-11-19T11:08:23.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a simple reason that has been ignored so far and which happens on many stacks (like Law.SE and Medicine.SE, where questions for specific advice are explicitly banned), and might have some people adhering to the pattern even here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Negative scores trigger the Roomba earlier&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community Bot &amp;quot;Roomba&amp;quot; function has an order in which he wipes closed questions. In fact, Roomba ignores any &lt;em&gt;positive score&lt;/em&gt; questions that are closed but wipes unanswered negative score questions first. A downvote to a bad question that is closed can serve the simple purpose of allowing Roomba to delete it. In this case: Community Bot wiped the question after 10 days, not the 30 for 0-score questions. Downvotes by somewhat experienced users to the questions to reach negative value can, besides showing the points of &lt;em&gt;no research effort, unclear or not useful&lt;/em&gt;, also serve to deliberately make the Cleanup-function take care of such questions faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is nigh impossible to find out if a user did this, but so far the discussion does not admit the pattern exists at all, or if it is a problem. But that would be a different question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25822" LastEditorUserId="25822" LastEditDate="2023-11-21T16:15:46.293" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T16:15:46.293" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10283" CreationDate="2023-11-20T19:49:26.287" Score="-2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently added a spherical-cow tag to the list of available tags, and applied it to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/62877/assuming-there-was-a-spaceship-that-could-counter-act-the-effects-of-being-near&quot;&gt;excellent candidate&lt;/a&gt;, but it was removed. You could call this a &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;why not&amp;quot; question, based on your proclivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spherical cows&lt;/a&gt; are a standard practice when discussing theoretical physics. You can't get a physics degree without handling thousands of word problems that qualify for this tag. I believe that including a spherical cow tag will inform answerers that there is a piece of physics that is specifically being ignored for the purpose of focusing on a specific aspect of reality. When someone says they want to ignore spaghettification, it is a hinderance to discourse to insist that you can't get near a black hole without getting spaghettified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By including this tag, it can allow scientifically accurate answers within a circumstance that would require science fiction to achieve. We spend WAY too much of our time telling people why one aspect of reality makes their question moot when they're fully aware of those aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95496" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-11-21T18:40:00.187" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T21:15:01.213" Title="Can we include a &quot;spherical-cow&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10282" CreationDate="2023-11-20T20:11:07.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a use for this proposed tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb for determine if a tag makes sense is to use it in the sentence &amp;quot;I am an expert in [tag]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A spherical cow is just an approximation. What does &amp;quot;I am an expert in approximation&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approximations are everywhere in our questions. Some are better at specifying these approximations in their questions, some not. Some are better at answering within those approximations, some not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that proposed tag was used, it should be applied to something short of 100% of our questions, making it almost useless, because it is so universal that doesn't add information to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T20:11:07.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2023-11-21T20:30:04.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted this question in sandbox because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not sure whether this is more suited to worldbuilding or the math stack-exchange site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question, while simple to me, may feel convoluted because it's asking for a general algorithm as opposed to a single answer to a single query.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Title: &amp;quot;Simple model for trait propagation in a population&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a worldbuilding project of mine, humans can have a pseudo-magical trait that, if present in either mother or father, is 100% of the time passed on to a child (unlike genetic traits, which are generally more complicated than that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to be able to estimate how quickly this trait is propagated in a given population of humans, I'd like to have a simplified model that I can apply to different sizes of populations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the rules I would need to run a simulation of this model, and I could probably program it if I have to. But I suspect that there's likely to be a mathematical/probability-based way to do it without needing the simulation, and thought I would ask if anyone here would be able to point me in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The model&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have a fixed population size of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2n&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, consisting of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; males and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; females. Associated with each member of the population is a simple &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;true&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;false&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; value indicating the presence of the trait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each generation, the males and females are randomly paired off and each pair produces exactly 2 offspring - one male and one female. These offspring are the (exactly 2n) members of the next generation, and each is given a value of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;true&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; if and only if either or both of their parents had it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above model, I could run simulations to answer questions like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;For a population of 1000 with 1 trait-positive individual, how many generations would it take (on average) for the whole population to be trait-positive?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;For a population of 500 with 100 trait-positive males and 250 trait-positive females, how many individuals (on average) would be trait-positive after 3 generations?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a mathematical algorithm or approach I could use&lt;/strong&gt; to answer these kinds or questions, using this model, &lt;strong&gt;without needing to simulate it generation-by-generation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51300" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T20:30:04.937" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10282" CreationDate="2023-11-23T06:14:11.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see the rationale behind having this Tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I want something that is within the realms of Hard Science, but accept that the thing I'm asking for is super-highly complex and no one has a spare super-computer to model an accurate simulation so want something close enough, whilst acknowledging certain things are simplified&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that firstly - it requires one to know the origin and the nuance of a Spherical Cow. If you compare to say 'Hard Science' or 'Science Based' the meaning of the name is self-evident or at least, self-evident enough to a lay-person that additional explanation isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas Spherical Cow is only really known to those with a more-than-casual understanding of Physics - I mean, I've answered the odd Physics question here and there - I like Maths, I like to maintain a good knowledge of Science, I can even remember the Spherical Chicken in a Vacuum joke from TBBT - but even I wasn't fully aware of this being an actual term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such - even if I concede that there is a good argument to be made for a Tag that would fulfill such a need (Essentially a half-way house between Science Based and Hard Science) - the name itself is not conducive to this need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly is what requirement would this fill that Science Based doesn't? Science Based as a Tag has a very broad remit - ranging from borderline Hard-Science, to very very speculative Science that 'Sounds good'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see a scenario where the differentiation between the two is significant to warrant a separate Tag - Where models are required and a reasonable degree of over-simplification is acceptable - Science Based, to my mind, would cover this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could perhaps make an argument that this Tag would be a guide to be more selective in terms of the answers (in the same way that Hard Science is) - however, I feel that the asker of the question could specify if they wanted a particular type of answer - and that this addition from the asker would be sufficient in the majority of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T06:14:11.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-03T14:48:52.280" Score="-1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/251606/what-would-the-effects-of-a-space-based-laser-weapon-system-capable-of-tracking&quot;&gt;What would the effects of a space based laser weapon system capable of tracking and destroying any projectile posing a threat to human life?&lt;/a&gt; there were a series of what I'd consider very dysfunctional moderation actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequence of events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I posted a comment saying that the proposed system could not physically be built. As I understood context cues in the question, the asker intended to talk about a realistic world without magic or unobtainium, and telling them their system could not be made under that premise is helpful and would improve the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JBH responded arguing that I shouldn't say that because it's not accepting the premise of the question. I told him the context cues suggested a realistic world &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the premise: the question asker talks about whether the satellites would &amp;quot;render modern warfare obsolete,&amp;quot; suggesting they are talking about an extrapolation from modern 21st century warfare. The asker also describes the components of the system (satellite constellation, sensors, lasers) that we at least nominally have currently, without any hint that these would be magic or sci-fi magic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L.Dutch deleted all the comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another user, John, commented again that the system would be physically impossible. I partially agreed with him and then three other users commented, also agreeing the system would be infeasible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monty Wild moved all the comments to chat, claiming that they didn't improve the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also bears mentioning that Monty Wild posted an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; arguing that the system would be physically infeasible. There's absolutely no problem with frame challenges pointing out things like that, and indeed it is the natural first reaction to the question, based on the comments of Monty Wild, myself, John, Cadence, RonJohn, and Dragongeek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the main problem here is that, if it is a rule that frame challenges are allowed in answers but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in comments, this is very not clear to me. I've been a user for 2 years 9 months and this is the first I am hearing of this apparent rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt; indicates that you should comment to &amp;quot;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Your premise could not work as stated&amp;quot; certainly seems like constructive criticism, and can guide the author to revise the premise so it could work. There is no mention on that page of frame challenges being prohibited in comments, nor does it seem to fall under any prohibited category of comments. Where is it written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lesser issue is that I mistakenly thought JBH was some type of mod based on how he was acting as an authoritative source for information on the rules. He's done that a lot, and he does it in comments, which actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; one of the prohibited categories of comment at the above link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82546" LastEditorUserId="82546" LastEditDate="2023-12-03T20:41:32.907" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T02:50:07.243" Title="Problematic moderation actions" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10287" CreationDate="2023-12-03T15:03:11.387" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments, apart from being extremely volatile in nature, are meant to improve the question or ask for clarification, not to discuss with other users nor to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting a frame challenge into comments is wrong, because it answers the question in a way than bypasses our quality checks. There many notable offenders who do not seem to care about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussing with another user in comments fails at improving the question and creates just noise. You and JBH had turned the comments into a bickering between yourselves. I purged the comments initially, but apparently it wasn't enough to make it stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monty Wild did the reasonable thing by posting a frame challenge as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T15:03:11.387" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10241" CreationDate="2023-12-03T21:20:59.697" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has long been a problem with this Stack in particular: &lt;strong&gt;the most subjective things on this site can be found in the help pages themselves&lt;/strong&gt;, and the list of rules. If we look at the rules as a set of &amp;quot;customer requirements&amp;quot;, there would be a whole lot of examples of &amp;quot;how to not write requirements&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &amp;quot;Primarily opinion based&amp;quot;. How is this measured? Ask any 10 people here, you'll get 10 different answers, &lt;strong&gt;and they will each enforce it according to their own standards&lt;/strong&gt;, each insist their way is the correct way, which is how you sometimes get a question that closes, gets reopened, and closes again, with no changes made (I wonder actually what the record is for a single question closing and reopening based purely on voters having very different interpretations of the rules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it especially amusing when we close a question for being &amp;quot;too opinion based&amp;quot;, but then close a similar one for &amp;quot;lack of research&amp;quot;. Sometimes I feel the thinking is users must research until they have an answer, in which case they don't need to ask a question, and if research can't answer it for them, then it's too opinion based, and therefore they don't need to ask a question. I think secretly some people come here just to try and close everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hm, looking through the recently closed questions, here's an interesting one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/251598/fixed-fictional-calendar-is-345-days-with-28-hours-per-day-and-14-hours-day-an&quot;&gt;...how old are 13 year olds vs Earth calendar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean.... clearly the asker was building out a world and had a problem they could not wrap their head around. It is a question that they should be able to answer &amp;quot;with their own research&amp;quot; but again, they clearly could not get their head around it. Now they did get their answer so there's no point in reopening it but why slap them in the face with a close vote? What good did that do? Their worldbuilding had a problem, albeit a fairly straightforward one, and it feels like it got closed for &amp;quot;not being opinion based enough&amp;quot;. That is, there was nothing to debate about, ergo closed. (Had it been less straight forward, it would have been too opinion based, ergo also closed...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interesting data point:&lt;/strong&gt; If I look at Worldbuilding right now, I see 11 questions within the last 24 hours. After that it's a long tail, with the bottom question having been asked 6 days ago. &lt;em&gt;We are not an overly busy Stack.&lt;/em&gt; Randomly looking at other stacks, I see Aviation gets more posts than we do. Home Improvement is way busier (where we fit 6 days of questions, they fit 23 hours of questions). It has long seemed to me that we are being overly strict on rule interpretation for no apparent reason. There is no flood to stem here. If anything, we need to loosen up the rules (or at least their interpretation) before this site runs out of people wanting to ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8902" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T21:20:59.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10287" CreationDate="2023-12-04T02:50:07.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Focus: Moderator&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Just to focus on the issue of what might seem to be a potentially irregular moderatorial action on Monty's part, I'll dwell on these points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also bears mentioning that Monty Wild posted an answer arguing that the system would be physically infeasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the main problem here is that, if it is a rule that frame challenges are allowed in answers but not in comments, this is very not clear to me. I've been a user for 2 years 9 months and this is the first I am hearing of this apparent rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;First, Monty does have moderator privileges. We as a community elected him to the office and gave him that authority. I don't know the full extent of moderator powers, but I do know that they can close questions on their own, they can somehow protect questions, they can delete comments, and they can certainly punish any community miscreant that sufficiently breaks the rules with a variety of sanctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Second, Monty is a registered member of WB.SE. As such he has the right to participate in ordinary community activities. These include all the community moderation actions like voting to close a question or upvoting an answer or participating in Meta discussions. He also enjoys the privilege of asking questions and answering them, just like all the rest of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That said, he was well within rights to take care of moderation business and then participate in the question itself. There is no rule against headhunting here. If you write a good idea in comments, and someone else takes that and runs with it to write a viable answer, that's perfectly fine! And you are welcome to write your own frame challenge response! Just because Monty snookered you doesn't mean you now have to sit back and make it like you're somehow not allowed to write your own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To me, as a dispassionate reviewer, this seems like a frivolous claim. As if you're taking Monty's action personally in some way. My suggestion is that, since you feel strongly that the question's frame needs challenging, go ahead and write your own answer! It might well be fantastic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Focus: Frame Challenge Policy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for the rule being clear to you, each SE community has its own culture. There are clearly written rules, there are traditions, there are fuzzy guidelines, there are arcane principles that only make an appearance once in a great while. In WB.SE, frame challenges are not commonly met with, simply because we prefer to deal with someone's world &lt;em&gt;as described&lt;/em&gt;. WB.SE would be a terribly scorched earth sort of place if every single query were met with &lt;strong&gt;NO THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE, UNREALISTIC, INFEASIBLE, ETC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I understand that you read this query as asking about a &amp;quot;realistic world&amp;quot;, i.e. a world whose science and tech mirror the real world. I did not read it that way. I tend to approach all queries with the mindset that the OP has declared this to be true, therefore, all good answers will flow from that truth. So, I tend not to like frame challenges, but I do accept that the community is currently embracing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for not being aware of this &amp;quot;apparent rule&amp;quot;, here are a couple of links to recent Frame Challenge related discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;A Primer of Frame Challenges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10103/disagree-with-a-deletion&quot;&gt;A potential frame challenge answer deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB.SE is quite different from other SE communities. We're literally the exception that proves the rule of SE's foundational premise, that a database of high quality responses to fictional questions can indeed be created within the SE framework. If you hadn't heard about frame challenges before, consider this a learning moment and move on!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Focus: JBH&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lastly, simply simply because we can't leave well enough alone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lesser issue is that I mistakenly thought JBH was some type of mod based on how he was acting as an authoritative source for information on the rules. He's done that a lot, and he does it in comments, which actually is one of the prohibited categories of comment at the above link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As I mentioned in comments, SE is a community moderated organisation. This means that ordinary users have considerable authority over content, over the direction of the community, and indeed over policy. JBH is no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What JBH is: an extremely authoritative resource on WB.SE rules, community policies, and the like. He comments on these things frequently. He is one of the few who really keep this place from becoming physics.lite.se You can find his work throughout Meta. We often discuss the applicability of some rule or policy in a questions comments. Is that technically prohibited? Maybe! I'd rather see a discussion of rule application in real time in comments where it could be the difference between closing a valid question or people jumping to answer a question that is in the VTC queue, thus rendering it impossible to edit and improve. If you're a letter of the law type, feel free to flag such comments!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Does he make mistakes? Yes. Did he get personal with you? Could be. Was it handled? Yes. Time to move on please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T02:50:07.243" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-04T10:14:20.407" Score="0" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I am setting this up as a separate question to focus on this issue alone, without being mixed with other stuff.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has recently come to my attention that at least some moderators consider frame challenges in comments to be disallowed. As a site user for 2 years 9 months, this came as a complete surprise to me. If this is policy, it certainly was not communicated well or much enforced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To eliminate ambiguity, what I am describing as a &amp;quot;frame challenge in a comment,&amp;quot; is any comment saying that the scenario proposed by the question author, about which they are asking their question, is not feasible or would not quite happen as stated in the world proposed by the question author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Popularity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone does this. For example, in response to a recent question, 7 different people offered frame challenges in comments. Judging by that, practically no one is aware that this is a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The official comment guidelines&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt; for policy information about what is allowed in a comment. This page says nothing about frame challenges. This is what it does say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should submit a comment if you want to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Request clarification from the author;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not recommended for any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggesting corrections that don't fundamentally change the meaning of the post; instead, make or suggest an edit;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compliments which do not add new information (&amp;quot;+1, great answer!&amp;quot;); instead, upvote it and pay it forward;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criticisms which do not add anything constructive (&amp;quot;-1, see previous comments you scallywag!&amp;quot;); instead, downvote (and provide or upvote a better answer if appropriate);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondary discussion or debating a controversial point; please use chat instead;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussion of community behavior or site policies; please use meta instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will refer to these points as &amp;quot;should-2&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;leave constructive criticism&amp;quot;), &amp;quot;shouldn't-5&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;secondary discussion&amp;quot;), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a frame challenge in a comment fits &amp;quot;should-2&amp;quot; (constructive criticism), as it prompts them to change their question either to revise the scenario they are asking about, or to add context to the question clarifying why the scenario &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible in their world. It seems positively prescribed by these rules; &amp;quot;yes, do that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually difficult for me to imagine any form of constructive criticism that would fit &amp;quot;should-2&amp;quot; and is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a frame challenge. Can anyone give a real example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JBH's Primer of frame challenges&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was linked to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7097/a-proposal-for-helping-users-understand-frame-challenges&quot;&gt;primer of frame challenges&lt;/a&gt;, apparently with the intent of justifying a prohibition of frame challenges in comments. However, in it, JBH talks about a frame challenge in an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;should have been&lt;/em&gt; a comment, and was at that time indeed converted to a comment by moderators! JBH then says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I propose this warning: frame challenges are not an excuse to abuse Stack Exchange's answering system. A frame challenge must be more useful than a comment or it must be posted as a comment (see previous paragraph about reviewing the answer). This warning is not meant to be anything more official than the community-approved existence of this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By saying this JBH is explicitly saying that frame challenges that are not up to a certain standard of usefulness &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be posted as comments! Again we have community guidance that frame challenges positively should be posted as comments. Let's call this the JBH-rule for later reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A note: in the question JBH's thread links to, apart from the frame challenge that was converted from an answer to a comment, I count 3 other frame challenges in comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;A frame challenge should be an answer, and whatever is an answer should not be a comment.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This argument is the only one I was given that makes any sense. It is supported by &amp;quot;shouldn't-2.&amp;quot; However, a one- or two-sentence comment saying there's something inconsistent with the question author's scenario &lt;em&gt;is not&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; be an answer. It does not reach the standard of usefulness of a full answer, and therefore, by the &amp;quot;JBH-rule,&amp;quot; it should positively be posted as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How widespread is this idea that frame challenges should not be posted in comments? Where did it originate? It was definitely not widespread in 2019, when JBH gave his proposal to put less-useful frame challenges in comments, and at that time the community approved. And if indeed the moderators are set on this being policy going forward, how can it be effectively communicated to users? (Does someone have privileges to edit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment guideline page&lt;/a&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82546" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T18:09:29.637" Title="Are frame challenges in comments disallowed, and if so by what policy, and can this be more clearly communicated to users?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10291" CreationDate="2023-12-04T20:00:03.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem here/Question being asked is where does a critical comment stop and a formal frame challenge start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written a number of Frame Challenges that started out as mere comments &amp;quot;I think this is a problem, have you considered X?&amp;quot; - Given an imaginary question of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can my worlds Legal system be 100% perfect&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And someone puts a comment &amp;quot;Have you considered people lie?&amp;quot; - Is that a Frame challenge or a comment? As it stands, it's clearly just a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it become a Frame Challenge? Absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me - the difference is that a Frame Challenge is a fully fleshed out and realized answer. It could be because the answerer has specific knowledge or interest about a subject or that they have a perspective that they think could be valuable to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas a Comment, even one that could be considered a Frame Challenge in-of-itself, is brief and points to what the casual observer might consider a gaping hole in the premise of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think JBH's point is mostly valid, but there are times when a comment that is asking for clarification... &lt;strong&gt;is in itself, an Answer&lt;/strong&gt; - again - my hypothetical question and comment - pointing out that people lie is an answer of sorts - and depending on how you interpret it, could be considered a full answer or merely a comment e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretation 1: There is no way to have a 100% perfect system where the inputs into that system are inherently flawed, ergo the premise of the question is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretation 2: This is the problem that you will need to narratively overcome in order to have a believably perfect system. You need to outline a method by which lies and deception can be 100% accounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not read the other question - but from the context it seems there was a lot of back and forth - Discussion is generally frowned upon (but sometimes it can be worthwhile)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T20:00:03.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10291" CreationDate="2023-12-05T04:35:17.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Confusion Clarification&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think there might be some confusion on terms here. Specifically, the term &amp;quot;frame challenge&amp;quot; itself. In terms of WB.SE, a &lt;em&gt;frame challenge&lt;/em&gt; is anything that seeks to upend or replace one or more essential premises of a querent's world with a different premise. This could come in the form of an off-hand comment; it can come in the form of a more thought out and expansive comment; it could include links or supporting data and span several comments; it could take place as a back and forth discussion, either in comments or in chat; or it could be a properly written out response to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The linked query about questionable moderator actions deals solely with the latter: a frame challenge that was constituted as an answer in comments and thence written up as a proper response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the purposes of this question, we'll examine some potential exemplars of comments and answers and also discuss what might or might not happen if such a frame challenge is issued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The Marquee Question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The short answer to this query is yes, obviously frame challenges are &amp;quot;allowed&amp;quot; in comments. There are caveats, of course, and the querent has already essentially answered his own question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any frame challenge that falls under &lt;em&gt;Should #1&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Should #2&lt;/em&gt; is unquestionably okay as a comment. As TDL indicates, a comment could be seeking clarification but also could be seen as a challenge to the frame. &amp;quot;Did you consider that people lie?&amp;quot; This challenges the premise of a perfect judicial system, but is not a proper frame challenge (an answer) because it's point is more to elicit a clearer understanding of the situation from the querent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If the commenter bumps that up even a little, by discussing how a real world justice system handles deception or by offering a way this could be done within the fictional world, this could still be seen as a comment. I probably would gloss over it. But I would not argue if someone responded to this comment by saying &amp;quot;hey, that's a good frame challenge, you should post it as an answer.&amp;quot; This happens with some frequency!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If the commenter is spending more than 20 or 30 seconds discussing the hows and whys of deception, legal (and shadier) countermeasures, delving into psychology and so forth, then there is an issue. This is clearly no longer a comment, and is simply turning into an answer. If the text now spans two or three comment boxes, the respondent &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; reconsider and simply do the work to make it a proper answer. I would make that request myself, especially if it's really good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The Policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As we can see, it is easy to make a comment that is clearly a comment and it is just as easy to muddy the waters by making it anything in between a mere comment and a fully explored and annotated response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The policy that guides decision making is quoted in the above question: If you're engaging within the scope of the three Shoulds, then you're golden. It's a comment! People might still ask you to write it as an answer, but you are not obligated. If what you're writing falls under Not Recommended #2 (writing an answer or offering an alternative solution), then the commenter needs to make his comment an answer. If someone suggests this to the commenter, he really should take the suggestion seriously. If he complains and someone else swoops in for the score, well, the idea is fair game!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Consequences.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All actions have consequences. If you write a minimal frame challenge as a comment, likely nothing will happen. The querent is not obligated to accept or even consider your comment. Your comment will eventually be buried. In many forums, comments are deleted (they should be deleted here more frequently!) and you would risk losing a potentially useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you write a comment in the grey area, there is a (slim) chance someone will come along and complain that you're writing answers in the comment section. I honestly think that if causative and JBH hadn't had a little spat in comments, none of this would have occurred. Causative's presumed frame challenge comment would have been properly ignored and lost to the ages. Monty never would have written an answer, and all of this discussion in Meta would never have come to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you write a clear and obvious answer, there is a better than slim chance that someone will suggest you turn it into answer. If you don't, someone else might come along and flag the comments. Moderators might or might not act on the flag. Ultimately, your comment will be ignored and lost to the ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To sum up, frame challenges are allowed in comments, so long as the frame challenge itself is obviously a comment. Since the frame challenge itself is an acceptable answer type in WB.SE, and at times a useful one, no frame challenge comment is immune from a request to convert it into a proper answer. If the community asks for this, it becomes an obligation for the commenter to do so, simply because the community thinks it is useful. Ideally, a frame challenge will be issued as a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SE comments are not meant to be permanent. Ideally, users are supposed to self-delete their own comments when no longer useful! How many people actually comb through questions looking to see if their comments were acted upon? (Admittedly, I don't! Except on very rare occasion.) I'm of the opinion that, after a month or so of relative question inactivity, all comments should be wiped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You (causative) seem to be very passionate about this issue of frame challenges in comments. That's fine! Just keep this point in mind as you argue your position: &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can come along and flag your comment as not needed or mark it for moderator action. The mod can delete it without warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As a final commentary on the querent's tone of communication in this Meta question: please be aware that SE rules are not matters of law, and WB.SE policies do not have the force of local ordinances. People bend and break rules all the time; policies are not uniformly accepted or followed by the community. Breaches of policy are not uniformly addressed by moderators and there are often conflicting reactions within the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is no police force here to uphold the law. Our moderators are &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; to uphold SE rules and policies. They don't &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; uphold community guidelines or policies, though they usually do. We can't and don't expect them to be ever vigilant to catch every single minor infraction that occurs and punish the miscreants by breaking them on the wheel. No one wants to engage with such a tyrannical forum, and I honestly don't think any of our Mods want to be such tin hitlers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T04:35:17.617" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10291" CreationDate="2023-12-05T08:38:54.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Definition of a frame-challenge&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To know whether a frame-challenge can be put in comments or not is to first know what a frame-challenge is. So let's agree on a common definition before we go forward with this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To me, frame-challenges are attacks on the initial premises, goals and intentions of the world that surround the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you state that the world behind the question has flaws that makes no logical or real sense, this is a frame-challenge. More precisely, if you state that one premise contradict with another premise, this is a frame-challenge. If you state that one premise makes no sense in regards to one of the worldbuilding intent, this is also a frame-challenge. By worldbuilding intent, I mean anything that relates to what the querent wants : Be realistic and grounded in science, use a lot of magic, follows steampunk technology tropes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two oversimplified question examples leading to frame-challenge :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question A :&lt;/strong&gt; I have pink elephants in my world, how can I make it so I have no elephants in my world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is heavily prone to the following frame-challenge : Removing elephants one way or another answers the question, but it means you have to break the premise &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I have pink elephants&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, meaning you haven't actually answered the question with all its premises. The contradiction here is so obvious it is ridiculous, but you'd be surprised how often this can happen! People sometimes don't see that they ask for to prioritize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question B :&lt;/strong&gt; In my sci-fi story, I have a space ship with 3 helicopter rotors. Where should I put my rotors so that my space ship travel from planet to planet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, you'll (hopefully) notice that helicopter rotors are not notorious to move ships in space. Since the querent doesn't explicitly state how ships move in space with only helicopter rotors, this contradicts with the implicitly stated premise that it should follow most sci-fi tropes (ie. that rotors don't move ships in space). This often happens when the querent under-detail their question, or lacks knowledge in the domain they are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Make the difference within each frame-challenge&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have the basic definition in, we need to distinguish three main types of frame-challenges, depending with what they're being blended with. Let's call them frame-challenge answers, frame-challenge questions and purebred frame-challenges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Purebred frame-challenges&lt;/strong&gt; only tell &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;this is not possible&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and basically only that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge questions&lt;/strong&gt; tell &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;this is not possible, but I may missing something from your world, can you help us understand how this is possible in your world?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge answers&lt;/strong&gt; tell &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;this is not possible, but if you changed that this could be possible that way&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. They still tackle down the world's flaws, but change the initial conditions so they eventually answer the question to an extent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take our example question B above, here are the three kind of frame-challenges to this weird rotors in space issues :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Purebred frame-challenge :&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Helicopter rotors need to be in air to move. They don't work in space, so you won't be moving your spaceship from planet to planet by using them.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge questions :&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;As you tell, this is not possible since rotors need a medium like air to work. Are you actually asking how to land and take off on and from planets, using thrusters for the rest of the trip? Or perhaps in your world the space is filled with some substance, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aether&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge answers :&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This is not possible as rotors need air to move around, and there is none in space. However, if you replace rotors with rocket thrusters, you could move from planet to planet. You'll need to put them here and there to move correctly from planet to planet.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where can you put which kind of frame-challenges?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now know and now have all elements to answer your question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Purebred frame-challenges should be only limited to comments and you should use them sparingly and be respectful with the querent.&lt;/strong&gt; Indeed, we're not here to refuse the querent's world and just tell &amp;quot;it stinks, go away!&amp;quot; (what most will feel when reading your challenge), but to help them improve it. Guiding them to relevant sources and principles is almost an absolutely absolute necessity to be helpful and polite. Also, explicitly telling it's about this specific premise and not the whole world helps a lot... And is generally more accurate anyway. Purebred frame-challenges fall mainly in &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;adding relevant but minor or transient information on a post&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, from the comment guidelines. Purebred frame-challenges should never, ever be put in an answer, because you risk to snatch their world from their hands, which will make them lose interest in actually improving them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge questions should be left in comments.&lt;/strong&gt; Their aim is to both request clarifications from the author and to improve the post, from the comment guidelines. They should not be posted as answers since answers are not the place to request for clarification. They are often made along with closure votes, since you lack details or/and cannot prioritize premises and goals yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frame-challenge answers should be used in answers.&lt;/strong&gt; Since you are answering the question, you should... Well, just answer it! Be careful to avoid frame-challenge answers entirely if you're removing too much from the querent's world and especially worldbuilding goals to answer : The more you stray away from the question, the less you actually answer it. Mileage may also vary if the answer part is too short to be an official post, but those cases are quite rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Warning : Don't over-presume implicitly stated elements of the querent's world&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be careful when you evaluate the question. You should remember that not everyone want a realistic world, even though it is a common goal among authors.&lt;/strong&gt; E.g. : &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8111/80336&quot;&gt;A real case I had is people complaining that my bear men cannot -emphasis on &amp;quot;cannot&amp;quot;- sleep in winter because real-world bears don't always hibernate&lt;/a&gt;. But they are not real-world bears, and having my bear people being stomped on just because they're not following the real-world was frustrating and is still making feel bad today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, put sometimes water in your wine and don't overextend your frame-challenges through multiple comments. What you think the querent world is is not necessarily what it is, nor what they want it to be. And well, ignoring repeatedly what the other wants gives one of the worst after-taste an artist can have, especially when there is no absolute reason they cannot do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Special case : Questions of the type &amp;quot;Can X work?&amp;quot;&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of users making this mistake with &amp;quot;can X work?&amp;quot; questions, questions that fall in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tag. Indeed, in this case the querent is explicitly asking to find flaws in their premises and intentions, so purebred challenges should be posted as answers, not comments. For instance, this question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question C :&lt;/strong&gt; Can I have pink elephants with helicopter rotors, in a world where only blue and yellow, 4-legged elephants exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, purebred frame-challenges like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You can't have pink elephants in a world with only blue and yellow elephants&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are perfectly valid : because they answer the question, they cannot be put into comments anymore (from guidelines, comments should not answer the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally you'd also offer the tiniest change to the premises to make it work (e.g. : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Just paint your blue elephants in pink and attach rotors to them!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), that's almost always more helpful than the challenge alone, but this is not necessary if you explain things well!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T08:38:54.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10291" CreationDate="2023-12-11T18:09:29.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is worldbuilding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to start with this because there are nearly 8 billion people on Earth and that means there are nearly 8 billion definitions of what worldbuilding is. I do not have a perfect answer, but in regard to &lt;em&gt;this Stack,&lt;/em&gt; worldbuilding is the development of the rules for an imaginary world of the querent's own creation. But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's incredibly common that what the worldbuilder is doing is trying to hybridize the rules of their imaginary world with the Real World.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means it's tempting to tell worldbuilders that their imaginary world won't work because it fails Real World physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your comment was not a Frame Challenge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I responded to your comment because what you did was tell the OP their question was invalid because it didn't meet Real World expectations. You didn't ask for a clarification - you told them their idea couldn't be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And trying to justify your actions by claiming after the fact that it was a frame challenge makes things worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The querent that started all this has, as of writing this response, 159 reputation points. That's a new user still unfamiliar with the rules. They deserve the benefit of the doubt unless the question is so far off-base that it'll cause bigger problems to leave it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could you have done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could have asked if the user wanted the question judged by known physics because &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested&lt;/a&gt;. We are not allowed to assume that request was made by default simply because the querent (a new user!) asked what the impact would be on Real World warfare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the purpose of a Frame Challenge?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frame challenges are NOT intended to tell people their questions, ideas, or rules are wrong. Frame challenges ARE intended to help the querent understand when the premise of the question might be based on a faulty assumption. &amp;quot;The premise of your question has a problem because of X, but you can resolve it by Y.&amp;quot; This is specifically important when querents are trying to hybridize their world's rules with Real Life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The goal is to help the querent build their world, not to tell them why they can't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a Frame Challenge must meet that expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it wrong to answer with a Frame Challenge about the Real World?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily. At best such a challenge identifies a real conflict in the querent's effort to hybridize their world rules with the Real World. At worst, the respondent's confusion is simply ignored by everyone else but those who were equally confused. It happens. I've done it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whenever anyone is tempted to raise a Frame Challenge on the belief that &lt;em&gt;the querent's question is inappropriate because it conflicts with the Real World&lt;/em&gt; they should sit back and ask themselves, &amp;quot;why am I on a website with the goal of helping people build imaginary worlds?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stop pontificating and answer the question: should Frame Challenges be allowed in comments?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Heck no.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've linked in both your Meta questions to the comment rules that state no answers should be made in comments. Yes, it happens on every stack. Yes, every stack has little choice but to let it happen otherwise Mods would spend 100% of their waking hours policing comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't change the rules....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Frame Challenges (like any other answer) do not belong in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T18:09:29.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-11T20:55:08.630" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sincere thanks to everyone who participates in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;! We've built up a growing list of deleted posts (very normal!) and they could use a bit of maintenance to keep the web page from becoming cumbersome in browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take a moment to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; and perform a quick search for your user name. If you find comments in deleted or soon-to-be-deleted posts, please delete them. That really helps to keep the page manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you haven't had the chance to help a new user (or, not that infrequently, an experienced user) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, please do so! It helps people learn how to use our Stack and lowers the number of closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T20:55:08.630" Title="Please take a moment to clear outdated comments from the Sandbox" Tags="|discussion|sandbox|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10282" CreationDate="2023-12-11T21:15:01.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add 2¢...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All tags categorize the question with four very important exceptions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt;. Those four tags &lt;em&gt;categorize the answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A spherical cow answer to a &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; question is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A spherical cow answer to a &amp;quot;science based&amp;quot; question is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; expects the cow to be found on lunch plates in the student union building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we already have a solution... but the people who invented it are (for the most part) no longer with us, so it's up to we, the younger generation, to keep the understanding of those four tags going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think users' unwillingness to accept a question that wants to ignore some aspect of Real World physics won't be solved by a tag. There's been a very strong trend for over a year now to make this site &amp;quot;physics-lite,&amp;quot; as if all questions should either completely conform to known science or completely walk away from it. I'm growing fond of a phrase I created for another Meta answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's incredibly common that what the worldbuilder is doing is trying to hybridize the rules of their imaginary world with the Real World.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be willing to help users do that. Indeed, it really should be every user's default perspective when reading a question. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8143/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T21:15:01.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-18T18:20:43.597" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will admit, I’m not in the best mood after &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/251859/97864&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, so I’m going to keep this streamlined to avoid me losing my cool and turning this question into a rant full of… choice words. Either way, I’m asking because, personally, I started asking questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange solely for brainstorming. So, what alternatives are there to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow you to ask questions with an exceptional scope of valid answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97864" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T22:21:58.757" Title="What are some alternatives to Worldbuilding Stack Exchange that are “brainstorming sites”?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-20T01:04:10.353" Score="-1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official statement about worldbuilding in the Help Center is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for designers, writers, artists, gamers and enthusiasts to get help creating imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That definition has proven to be very vague and doesn't track well with how users are using the Stack today. The purpose of this post is to provide a list of acceptable definitions of what worldbuilding is specifically in regard to this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This Stack was never designed to embrace or meant to embrace all forms of worldbuilding. Some simply don't fit Stack Exchange's fairly rigid question-and-answer format.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Rules...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be concise. If you need a page or more of explanation to describe your proposed definition of worldbuilding, it's wrong by definition. A good definition is no more than one paragraph long (4-6 sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be well focused. If you have multiple definitions for the community to consider, please post them as separate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you believe a proposed definition &lt;em&gt;isn't quite right,&lt;/em&gt; it is permissible to modify that answer and duplicate it as an alternative. HOWEVER... I recognize that this might be an abused privilege, so I'm begging the community not to quibble over small things. It would be good form to ask about your concern in a comment to see if it was something the respondent overlooked before jumping to posting a modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please keep Stack Exchange's model and rules in mind. It's tempting to use this Meta question to advance a definition of worldbuilding that doesn't fit inside our Stack Exchange Overlords' expectations, but it really is their site and they have the privilege of setting those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please up-vote and/or down-vote as many answers as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sort the answers by highest score. What's on top is what we like to see the most. Every step down from there increases the likelihood of a question being closed for not being about worldbuilding according to the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T01:56:19.173" Title="Advice: What is Worldbuilding?" Tags="|discussion|advice|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10300" CreationDate="2023-12-20T01:04:25.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Realistic Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realistic worldbuilidng is the act of creating an imaginary world that reflects, to the community's best ability, known science. It is limited to the hard sciences including but not limited to chemistry, biology, climate, astronomy and celestial mechanics. It excludes cultural and behavioral worldbuilding that have no scientific basis beyond statistical analysis (making them too opinion-based for this type of worldbuilding). The goal of realistic worldbuilding is to hybridize the imaginary world with the real universe. The more fantastic the imaginary idea the worldbuilder is trying to hybridize into the real universe, the more likely the question will be rejected as realistic worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T01:04:25.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10300" CreationDate="2023-12-20T03:04:37.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chaotic Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaotic worldbuilding imagines a world or universe with few or no established physical laws. The process of worldbuilding, however, is not lawless or without structure. Worldbuilding requires an underlying consistency to be valid on this Stack. This does not preclude the assumption that characters experiencing the imagined world or universe are incapable of perceiving that consistency. Worldbuilding of this nature focuses on expressing the consequences of chaos, entropy, lawlessness, and unpredictability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T03:04:37.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10304" CreationDate="2023-12-20T11:21:49.213" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Alternate reality requires understanding reality, should we help?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange exists to help users in their worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular branch of worldbuilding is alternate reality, something that starts in our understanding of reality, and then branching out from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue that tends to crop up when users ask for information about reality — in order to start an alternate reality — is that they get shut down with &amp;quot;Too story based&amp;quot;, one recent example being &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253021/which-law-enforcement-government-agencies-would-be-called-to-respond-to-the-cras&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (*), or being told to ask on other SE forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternate reality worldbuilding requires an understanding of reality in order to make an alternate version of it. Asking for help in understanding reality is solving a problem that is a hinderance to the worldbuilder. And even if a branching event that initates the alternate reality is a small story, the purpose is still to form a foundation for building a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are lots and lots of Stack Exchanges concerning reality. However, turning up in such SEs and saying &amp;quot;Hello, here is a science fiction scenario, please advice&amp;quot; I feel is not nearly as likely to engage the creative muscles, as it would here. The out-of-the-box thinkers are &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, as hilariously examplified &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/9046/12297&quot;&gt;in this classic answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am wondering: are we really supposed to shut down such questions on &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot;, or send them elsewehere, even we can see that the purpose is to understand the world as it is in order to build an alternate version of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*) Yes, I know the close reason says &amp;quot;Duplicate&amp;quot; but that is simply wrong, as the referenced link is a related but different question. The comments say &amp;quot;TSB&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12297" LastEditorUserId="12297" LastEditDate="2023-12-20T11:37:04.293" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T04:02:42.960" Title="Alternate reality, is seeking help to understand reality permissible?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10303" CreationDate="2023-12-20T19:32:35.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something a lot of people struggle with this site is that the way a question is asked is far more important than the topic of the question. Very few questions get closed due to the topic alone. Most questions get closed because they're not asked in a suitable fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's non-trivial to know enough about the worldbuilding problem you're facing to ask a good question. This is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;intentional part of the design of SE&lt;/a&gt;. SE is intended to be a repository of answers that are of value to others. Good answers are transferable. Asking for help brainstorming how people will to respond to events in your world isn't an appropriate question for this site. However recognizing that you don't understand how the overlapping jurisdictions of various government agencies work in the US and asking for clarification regarding what agencies could respond to an event, the capacity within which they would respond, and who would have final jurisdiction is a much more appropriate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this may seem like a trivial distinction, the details make all the difference. The answers to the former question aren't easily transferrable to future people having similar issues with understanding how various governmental agencies work together. Asking who would show up first  is highly dependent upon in world factors, maybe the handsome ex cop working animal control is first on the scene heroically taking change until the suits from some TLA show up and incompetently take over allowing our hero to save the day in the nick of time. That's a great story but it's not establishing some fact of the world, it's writing a mediocre plot summary. Technically any agency could be first to the scene depending on the whims of the writer. However, asking which organizations could respond, what the nature of their response would be, or who would ultimately be in charge of coordinating the response, isn't dependent upon unestablished facts of the world, or the whims of the writer. It's instead seeking understanding about something in the real world that's relevant to the problem you're facing in your world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to how SO responds poorly to pasting a block of code and an error message and saying &amp;quot;how do I fix?&amp;quot; On SO they emphasize editing your question down to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example&quot;&gt;minimum reproduceable example&lt;/a&gt;. It's more complicated to create the worldbuilding equivalent to an MRE but the act of doing so, creates questions that enables easier writing of high quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since basically anything can be considered on topic for this site, it's up to the asker to demonstrate that they're asking because they need the answer to build a fictional world. By this logic, it could be argued that asking how things work in the real world and changing nothing isn't a worldbuilding question but a research question that's part of the writing process. In general  if the question is otherwise well asked, I think we should be permissive to this sort of question when the question couldn't be answered on another exchange, or with basic Googling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T19:32:35.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10300" CreationDate="2023-12-20T19:56:37.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is the act of establishing facts about some fictional world. All facts are established at the worldbuilder's discretion. They can choose to impose rules on their worldbuilding process as they see fit. We are not here to judge someone's worldbuilding process or challenge facts about their world that they've already established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants help determining the weight of a 50 story spider, it's our job to help them come up with a weight, not explain to them all the ways that a 50 story spider is physically impossible in the real world. Similarly if someone asks &amp;quot;Is X possible?&amp;quot; we should remind them that they get to choose what is and isn't possible in their world, and it's up to them to articulate the restrictions they've chosen to impose on what they choose to permit in their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to this site any question that can be shown to be establishing some fact about a fictional world can be considered on topic for this site. It should be emphasized that, &lt;strong&gt;just because a question is about establishing some fact of your world does not automatically make it appropriate for this site&lt;/strong&gt;. A question also needs to be asked in a way that follows the SE model. All questions need to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About a real worldbuilding problem you're facing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based in facts and experience, not opinions&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Importantly this means no idea generation, brainstorming, or story based questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question should not have many valid answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be possible to answer a question concisely without needing to write a whole book of prose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T19:56:37.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10300" CreationDate="2023-12-21T01:56:19.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is first and foremost Art: the creation of an alternate world, a secondary creation or faerie in which places and events and people that may or may not exist &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; take form and exist &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, interacting in new and different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When God was about to create the world by his Word, the letters of the alphabet descended from the terrible and august crown whereon they were engraved with a pen of flaming fire. They stood round about, and one after the other spake and entreated: &amp;quot;Create the world through me!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we subcreate such a place as an alternate world, we are in fact reaching out into the Dreaming, into the very Source of our own existence; we are reaching within, into the creative urge; we touch another reality and give it shape and form in this reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T01:56:19.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10303" CreationDate="2023-12-21T04:02:42.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question you link wasn't an alternate-history question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not tagged that way, it's not asked that way, it's not an alternate-history question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternate-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alternate-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-alternate-history-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;alternate-history&lt;/a&gt; questions are expected to conform to the rules for that tag as explained in that tag's wiki. Worldbuilding.stackexchange.com is not a free-for-all. We have rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse, it's NOT the job of any user on Stack Exchange to help the querent find all the background information they need to ask a question. The down vote button exists for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question isn't useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;has not been sufficiently researched.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange expects people to perform their due diligence before asking their question. Therefore, the answer to the specific question of your post is, &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But more to your point...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might not like the Too Story-Based VTC reason, but it's been around a very, very long time. This Stack is not to be used to help people write stories. Oh, questions like that sneak by all the time because...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most users neither understand the rules nor care,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most users neither moderate the Stack nor care,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most users neither understand Stack Exchange nor care...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problems, which were understood and embraced by our predecessors who pushed this Stack through Area 51 and its beta period, are that Stack Exchange expects questions to be reasonably objective and useful to more people than just the one person asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time has proven that holding to those expectations is not as easy as it seems for a theme as creative and subjective as worldbuilding. But our predecessors did a darn good job of creating a framework that met SE's expectations without wholly losing the creative context they were trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thus, the rule &lt;em&gt;that we do not help people write their stories&lt;/em&gt; was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In a nutshell, what does &amp;quot;too story-based&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, this should be obvious, but a lot of people want to ignore it. If answers are too dependent on the circumstances of the story (vs. the conditions of the world), the question is too story-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to this the &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; prohibitions in the Help Center against questions that are open-ended, hypothetical, or lead to all answers having equal value (aka opinion-based or brainstorming) and we come to the conclusion that the linked question should have been slammed closed. Nothing about it can be answered in an objective story-independent way. Why did I VTC as a duplicate? Because I'm honestly trying to teach the querent how to build worlds while moderating the Stack according to the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you really want to nail this particular issue down, questions about how people and organizations react &lt;em&gt;are also expressly prohibited in the Help Center.&lt;/em&gt; If I recall correctly, that specific addition to the Help Center didn't exist when the original Local Authorities version of the question was asked. But it's there today. Therefore, a question about how any organization(s) would react or behave given even the most explicit set of story circumstances is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to your implied question is also, &amp;quot;no.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange was never meant to be a replacement for an education. That people become educated is a delightful byproduct of a service that expects people to have exhausted common educational resources so that Stack Exchange becomes a repository of specifically useful information.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's bad enough that we allow answers that don't actually help people to understand how to build worlds. It's like someone asking how to build a house and, rather than teaching them masonry, we just give them bricks... and then complain when it's pointed out that the question was asked on a forum intended for questions about architectural design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T04:02:42.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-22T19:54:49.337" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll keep this brief: In a previous post on the official site, it was brought to my attention that the question, linked here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253021/which-law-enforcement-government-agencies-would-be-called-to-respond-to-the-cras&quot;&gt;Which Law Enforcement/Government Agencies Would Be Called to Respond to the Crash-landing of a UFO?&lt;/a&gt;), lacked certain context and criteria so this edit is meant to get things straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind the answers I received in response were satisfactory and helped a lot but I want to make sure I get this right in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, in my story, a series of unmanned UFOs crash land around the world, one doing so in the United States near a town in the deep south. Some of these UFOs are witnessed while others are not. With the exception of the one mentioned above, they do not land in major cities or major populated areas. They are not noticed approaching except by one astronomer before the UFOs enter the atmosphere. There are plenty of questions in the story to how that happened but I digress. There are a number of locals worldwide and near this small town who see the trails of the UFOs as they enter the atmosphere but do not see where they land. Naturally many go in search for these flamming meteors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, this is 2022 at the time of the setting picked. The world is largely a carbon copy of ours. Same politics, same leaders, same world structure, internet, social media, same type demographics, and world history. As another quick disclaimer, there are no known shadow organizations, task forces, departments that have men in suits meant to specifically dealing with these type incidents (i.e. Men in Black, Xenonauts, XCOM, The Illuminati, S.H.I.E.L.D., etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An issue before is that it was believed I was asking for a series of responses or events that would play out in response to an alien UFO crash-landing in the heart of the United States of America. This is not the case. It was also believed that I was asking for specific reactions to this event by the locals and how their local governments may respond. This is also not the case. The original post asked what government agencies would be called to respond to this crash/UFO. There seemed to be genuine confusion to what I wanted so this I hope clarifies my objective without the answers needing alterations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my writing and prior research, I have found that local law enforcement would be immediately removed and there would be a heavy federal response and a quick moves by the federal government to get control of the crash site as well as the information surrounding this incident. Several government agencies would jockie for rights to the investigation and it will likely fall to the US President to decide who does get the primary responsibility of handling this and which gets the responsibility of helping when necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what the President must consider: The object is boulder size. It hit with a lot less velocity than it was suppose to considering it's size and projected velocity. So they know it decelerated on its own before impact. They know it is highly radioactive and is radiating a lot of heat. They also detect strange electromagnetic activity, which does impact communications and local power infrastructure in the entire region implying it could be storing large, if not volatile, amounts of stored energy. The object does not appear to be a ship or a missile, however. Nonetheless, given these hazards, they do decide to evacuate the nearby town. This gives the federal government free reign to conduct whatever investigations they need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is where my problem arises. I do not know which Federal Agency(s) would realistically be called here to take control of this investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This falls out of the jurisdiction of the FBI, CIA and various other law enforcement federal agencies or departments. There are only a handful of other agencies that would be relevant including the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, DARPA, and possibly the Department&#xA;of Defense (the military basically). Homeland Security as well might be included given the UFO could be considered a threat to the homeland until it's origins and purpose are established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this all, which agency or organization mentioned would be given the bulk responsibility in the handling of this UFO investigation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user43914" LastEditorDisplayName="user43914" LastEditDate="2023-12-22T20:13:58.953" LastActivityDate="2023-12-25T23:00:33.370" Title="Is this question asking &quot;Which of these federal agency would investigate an unmanned, radioactive UFO crash&quot; acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|support|help|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10308" CreationDate="2023-12-22T22:02:23.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not the best judge of these things, but I'll offer my cents anyway. The Q is a little verbose in my opinion. Q's that are too long often get ignored. But if I'm understanding it correctly you're simply asking how the present day US would delegate agency after an event in its own jurisdiction, an event that you've clearly defined. That to me seems to tick all the boxes for a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62241" LastActivityDate="2023-12-22T22:02:23.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10308" CreationDate="2023-12-24T21:01:05.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;ACCEPTABLE&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I personally found your question acceptable. It is what I'd consider a low level or basic worldbuilding query. If I understand you correctly, you seem to have a simple knowledge deficit (you lack certain facts about the real world that are applicable to the fictional world). This sort of question is one that a quick, basic response will satisfy so you can take the information and apply it to your fictional world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't think this kind of question needed to have a whole lot of in-world explanation or a whole lot of detail. It doesn't need all the in-world parameters and all of the suggestions for a best answer that we look for and encourage in higher level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In reading through the wall of text here in your Meta question, I can only say I don't think puffing it up would have helped. All that text just isn't needed. Usually less is best, and to that end, the only recommendation I'd offer is to gently edit a question for clarity before it's posted. You probably should have clarified that you meant federal level agencies when you first wrote the question. I did that to a certain extent when I edited your question. Since it was VTCed for being a duplicate, and since you said it clearly wasn't, I took the liberty to clarify which government level you were looking for. And given that most respondents seemed to be assuming you meant federal level, I VTRed as not being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you're amenable to the experiment, I'd strongly recommend you take the revised text of your question and put it in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9981/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;! You might also put the question in its current form on Main in the Sandbox as well to see how they compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am happy that you have chosen to persevere with WB.SE rather than leave in a huff because you've been buffeted by our competing comments and perspectives! Question writing is a skill that not everyone has, but anyone can learn. I think the Sandbox would really help you in that direction!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2023-12-25T19:49:58.243" LastActivityDate="2023-12-25T19:49:58.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10308" CreationDate="2023-12-25T03:26:00.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Foreword&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing that you became userXXXX, I can only guess that your account was deleted. Since you told your feelings elsewhere I have good reasons to think I know why .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I'm pushing my answer schedule faster than planned, in the hope it gets  looked before it's super-really-ultra-very too late. &lt;strong&gt;But first, know that I wish to present my sincerest apologies.&lt;/strong&gt; I'll be straightforward : I failed, and that's something I have to learn, understand and remember so it doesn't happen again in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wish now this in-depth review will reach you. And as you asked me to, I wish it will help you improve your question writing style. Given the situation, these tips will be a more general, for-all-around-the-web usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question review&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In terms of raw content you gave even more than what I expected.&lt;/strong&gt; The question should have everything needed to answer, and perhaps it even allows to go one step further. Let's just work on its shape then in order to solve an issue raised by the others here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About length&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two current answers tell that the question is too long or has too much content now. I would personally tell it &amp;quot;feels&amp;quot; too long, since it's actually not extremely lengthy technically. It fits within a page at an 11-sized very standard paragraph font (Times New Roman) and holds ~640 words. My best questions in comparison holds between 400 and 700 words, and I've seen quite a few in that range that received many, many quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What holds your question back and make it &amp;quot;feel&amp;quot; long is its (relative) complexity and lack of formatting. Let's tackle complexity first then formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;More complex feels longer&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I define complexity as the difficulty to move from word to word, and sentence to sentence. It's also about the need to go back to grasp the meaning.&lt;/strong&gt; There are a few elements that can increase the complexity of one's writing :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linking facts in a way that needs you to jump back and forth. Unlike a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mind map&lt;/a&gt; which works really well when jumping &amp;quot;like a flea&amp;quot;, a block of text is very linear and can't afford much back and forth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irrelevant or unexpected elements to the text/question. It's hard when asking questions (you need to know the topic enough), but still important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frequent noise/asides, or what I call &amp;quot;By the way!&amp;quot; interruptions. This is all about usage of smaller sentences inside your big ones. You often see them between dashes -like this!- or brackets (like this!). It's bound to the 2nd point, but it is a very common issue it's worth its own point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Long sentences and complex words. It's as simple as it reads : The longer and more technical you make your sentences, the harder it will be for readers to grab the fact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And some others like overdoses of negative sentences (e.g. : it's not X but also not Y and not Z...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to suffer from the 1st and 2nd complexity issue mainly. There are a lot of facts that don't tie to each other perfectly well or that might not be needed. As a consequence, you need to reexplain things here and there; In turn, this makes your sentences just a bit longer than needed. So here is a tip that I hope will help you deal with this :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The tricky trick in communication is to find the core point that you need to convey.&lt;/strong&gt; In the case of questions, what do you need to know? With that tightly kept near you, sew from this every element that might be of interest to this fact. The journalist's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;five Ws&lt;/a&gt; (What, Who, When, Where, Why) can help you make this list of elements. Let's take your question as example and make a quick, probably over-shortened recap :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your core question :&lt;/strong&gt; I need to know who gets called for help in the case of a crash&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What :&lt;/strong&gt; There have been several crashes of an unidentified alien object. This UFO is unmanned, boulder-sized (but the crash-site is surprisingly relatively intact). It is radioactive and interfere with power in a large area, however.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where :&lt;/strong&gt; There were several crashes, but the one I'm interested about happens near a town in the south of USA. This world is a carbon-copy of the real-world (excepted the alien crashes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When :&lt;/strong&gt; The crash happened in 2022.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who :&lt;/strong&gt; There is no alien in the ship. Human witnesses are few as the UFO didn't get caught  (Note there's not alway a &amp;quot;who&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; (not explicitly stated here, but I can guess for you!) : I want to write a story about humanity piecing together the clues of mysterious object crashes that there is &amp;quot;more out there&amp;quot; in space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you mainly have to reorder everything. Usually when setting the context of a question (or in general a story) you start with the &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;where&amp;quot;, then the what/who and finally the why. For example :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Today in the restaurant&lt;/strong&gt; (when+where), &lt;strong&gt;the waitress&lt;/strong&gt; (who) told me there were &lt;strong&gt;snails&lt;/strong&gt; (what) on the menu. I didn't order them, &lt;strong&gt;but I'm curious&lt;/strong&gt; (why) how they taste. &lt;strong&gt;Do cooked snails really taste like chicken&lt;/strong&gt;? (core question)?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Formatting helps a lot to make it feel shorter&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you check this answer, I make heavy use of sections and lists. It puts each element inside their little box, and this overall helps nibble on your text. Don't overdo it of course, but I suggest you add some sections, too . A format I like for its simplicity is to add 4 sections : &amp;quot;Context&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Problem I'm facing&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;additional context which should be helpful&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;core question&amp;quot; (in one sentence max). In the third section there usually is a list, as there are many small elements that are hard to tie together normally. If you're not peculiarly inspired by this configuration, change it! It's more important to be in a writing style you feel comfortable with than to adhere a strict ruleset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go further, you can put emphasis with &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;. It's to be used sparsely though, as it can get distracting very quickly. Still, an almost always good case of using bold fonts is for your core question : It's indeed the pivot of why you're here and not watching snail races on youtube (if that's your thing !).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some specific examples to your query&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already delved a bit in the complexity part, but we can group some elements together and sew a stronger question together. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/10308/2&quot;&gt;I'll use the last revision you made&lt;/a&gt;, as reference, and number paragraphs from 1 to 10 (including your preamble). Here's what I noticed :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 3 : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Some of these UFOs are witnessed while others are not.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Tiny detail here : &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;while others are not&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is noise to your core query and can be removed : people can't use what they haven't witnessed to follow a guideline or make a decision. This includes agencies choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 4 : You can shorten this paragraph by either quickening or removing the shadow organizations disclaimer (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;As another quick disclaimer, there are no known shadow organizations,[...] dealing with these type incidents&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). Just telling &amp;quot;there is no specific shadow organization dealing with UFOs&amp;quot; along with &amp;quot;this is a carbon copy of Earth&amp;quot; should work just fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 5 could be put after paragraph 1. It's more part of the social context, the &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot; setting of the question than about your world. You would then remove a whole 100 words for your final question ^^.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 7 could use a simple bullet point list, each describing a fact that the President knows. Faster to read, easier to remember :).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 8 and 10 : One-sentence paragraphs love &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; fonts . These two should like them, too!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paragraph 9 : I'd start with something like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;My research taught me so far that (this is not under FBI/CIA juridiction...)&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Actually here, I'd add more specifically &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;From my previous question...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;  to match more the current context. Indeed, it currently looks like you already know the answer to your question ^^'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2023-12-25T03:26:00.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10308" CreationDate="2023-12-25T23:00:33.370" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt; for this very purpose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the wrong place to ask &amp;quot;is my question acceptable?&amp;quot; We have a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; for that purpose and it's the appropriate place to receive feedback about a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, to answer your question... no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's your problem: government bureacracies are constantly driven to prove their value and increase their budget. Consequently, &lt;em&gt;each and every agency&lt;/em&gt; in the Federal government, once they heard about the UFO, would be acting to prove their worth by trying to get involved in the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I can write a story that rationalizes every agency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which ones would be given the bulk of the responsibility? We're back to your story. Are the aliens causing trouble? The FBI. Are they covert? The CIA. Is there a chance to negotiate with them? NASA. There simply isn't one correct choice for all circumstances and that is what differentiates a worldbuilding question from a storybuilding question. Worldbuilding is used in stories, but is not dependent on any stories. Ultimately, there is only one correct &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; and that rule is true for every story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not one agency that is &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; when it comes to alien visitors. That's a choice you need to make based on narrative necessity. Which one do you want to have the burden? That's the right one for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2023-12-25T23:00:33.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-25T23:14:02.563" Score="2" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-tactics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; tag has 140 questions and is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Summary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about short term actions, often in a military context. Consider also [military].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wiki&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Empty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick review of questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-tactics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; suggests the most common question type is &amp;quot;how can X defeat Y?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Should we burn the [tactics] tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-01-09T16:28:58.950" Title="Should we burn the Tactics tag?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tag-blacklist|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2023-12-25T23:19:20.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding is fundamentally defined as the creation and consistent use of rules governing or describing a &amp;quot;world,&amp;quot; which can be anything from a hamlet to an entire universe. But the fundamental condition is &lt;em&gt;consistent use.&lt;/em&gt; A question that doesn't result in a &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; that is consistently true in all story circumstances wasn't a worldbuilding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick review of the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-tactics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; reveals that most if not all are circumstantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are tactics anyway?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN38160-FM_3-90-000-WEB-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US Army&lt;/a&gt;, Tactics are &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the employment, ordered arrangement, and directed actions of forces in relation to each other.  Leaders select tactics that accomplish their assigned mission&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Tactics require judgement in application.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; In other words, tactics are the actions and choices of individual or group characters acting within a world or setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An acceptable &amp;quot;tactic&amp;quot; question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm developing the military for my country and I'm working on the Rules of Engagement. Given the specific description of my military's structure, below, and the following two examples of conflicts I plan on using in my story, what would be a Rule of Engagement governing the use of the technology I describe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question eliminates &lt;em&gt;circumstances&lt;/em&gt; and avoids dependency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt; by developing a protocol — an in-world &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; that would be &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; in all circumstances just as military Rules of Engagement are in Real Life. Indeed, we can use examples of existing Rules of Engagement to justify and rationalize answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unacceptable &amp;quot;tactic&amp;quot; questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of the tagged questions are of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would X defeat Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, I believe, is entirely story-based. Does the author want X to defeat Y or not? Will the author allow any particular resource, circumstance, or opportunity, or not? In the end, the selected answer won't be objectively true in all circumstances, but will rather be the one the OP likes the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, the OP is asking for help overcoming writer's block rather than help developing the structure needed to tell stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe we should burn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tactics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tactics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-tactics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; tag as the concept of tactics in a worldbuilding context is too narrow to rationalize the tag and it's too easily abused for story-based questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2024-01-03T18:07:08.657" LastActivityDate="2024-01-03T18:07:08.657" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10298" CreationDate="2023-12-27T22:21:58.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to suggest Yahoo! Answers, but I found out it got the axe many years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are stuck with Reddit and Quora. They both will take any kind of question, from &amp;quot;who would win in a fight between Spiderman and a Warhammer 40K space marine&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;What is your fondest memory you have as a [insert random perversion here]?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware, though, that exactly due to this permissiveness, the quality of the answers you will get may be lacking. You will hardly get a direct answer, much less one that is about whatever you have asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21222" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T22:21:58.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2023-12-31T03:10:11.083" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to disagree with JBH, partly to play Devils' Advocate, partly because I like Military tagged questions and Partly because I like to Argue (Who knew?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because users misuse tags, is not - IMO, a reason in-of-itself to get rid of the Tag. Consider the Magic tag or the Hard Science tag that get abused waaaaaaaaaaay more than the Tactics Tag - whilst I hear the counterpoint that whilst they have a lot of chaff, they also have a lot more Wheat - I don't think this, on it's own, is reason enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions which could (and perhaps should) be tagged tactics... Aren't. Case in point - this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253208/lever-action-or-primitive-bolt-for-an-army-modernizing-at-speed&quot;&gt;Lever action or primitive Bolt for an Army modernizing at speed?&lt;/a&gt; - A large component of the reasons why you would go one or the other comes down to the Military Doctrine, AKA Tactics - I (briefly) mentioned it in my answer about massed Volley Fire being a key part of the Doctrine of most European militaries of the time. If the Doctrine was centred around a different set of Tactics, it would lead to a different outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are not using the Tag when it is, IMO, appropriate, that also is not a reason for it not to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly - and this is probably the key part when it comes to &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; - Considering Tactics can have major implications on the authenticity of a World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to cite my favourite Universe - Warhammer 40K - 'Why would a supersoldier in the future have a preference for Melee weapons?! It's Stupid' is a common refrain heard by people just getting into the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However from a Worldbuilding perspective - when you say 'There are more enemies than a Space Marine can feasibly carry Ammo for and a Melee Weapon never runs dry, They are armored against ranged attacks and they use Teleporters/Drop pods to get directly into the Enemy in order to assault them in Melee' - the &lt;em&gt;tactics&lt;/em&gt; make the world believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's assume that Games Workshop were posting on here way back in 1987 and said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I am doing a futuristic world where Supersoldiers have a heavy reliance on Melee, What Tactics would make this believable?&amp;quot; (with additional fluff so that the question didn't fall afoul of our Brain Storming rules) - That would be a valid Tactics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Counter-proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a combined 'Weapons and Tactics' Tags could be a compromise here if the rest of the Meta Posters are dead-set on it's removal. As IMO Weapons and their Tactics are intrinsically intertwined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T03:10:11.083" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2024-01-03T19:58:13.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Counter suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even though I appear to be on the loosing side (boo!) - based on some of the comments, even though I don't entirely agree with them - there may be a better way to address this than just canning the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Changing 'Tactics' to 'Doctrine'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shifts the focus from 'What do my Characters do in this scenario' - which isn't world building to 'How can X be realistically used in my world' - which, IMO, is World building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or combining the two (as the layperson is more likely to search for Tactics as a Tag than Doctrine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, we could update the Wiki to articulate the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT Proposed new tag 'Doctrine'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on JBH's comments - We are in agreement that there is potential value in a tag for questions that deal with the types of World Building scenario where the practical application of weapons, assets etc. is an issue for the Querent - but that Tactics, being focused on what the individual is doing in the moment invariably runs afoul of being a story based question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However - for people who want to have a military force behave in a believable manner (or at least... an internally consistent manner) or to two seemingly contradictory aspects feature heavily in their story e.g. have Guns, but also have Sword masters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am proposing a new tag 'Doctrine' which is for the high-level aspect of how an organization might deploy it's troops, resources, weapons etc. which fits within the remit of building a believable world, whilst seeking to provide World Builders a framework on how they can address issues in their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested Wiki entry below&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Questions about how an Organization (Could be a Military, could be Militia etc. - from the top level down to the troops on the ground) would deploy various weapons systems and tactics in a believable way that supports the World Builders' goals.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For example - if you want to have both ranged weapons as an option but also want a significant focus on Melee combat. This is not 'What would my Character do in this scenario' - which is a Story Based question but it is 'How can I make the key story elements that are important to me in my world believable' - Classic Examples would be the personal shields from Dune (which 'force' Melee combat) or Warhammer 40K where the number of enemies is always far greater than the amount of Ammunition that can be carried, so fighting always ends in Melee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100161" LastEditorUserId="100161" LastEditDate="2024-01-04T20:36:05.360" LastActivityDate="2024-01-04T20:36:05.360" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-07T20:04:49.860" Score="-1" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;I miss the Worldbuilding stack.  I left because I did not like getting my ideas deleted by moderators.  And it occurred to me: what if WB stack had different moderators?  I think the current moderators have done a capable job keeping the site clean and easy to use.  But I think new moderators could do the same, and come at the moderator job with fresh perspectives, and also be less inclined to delete my ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are the moderators?&#xA;We believe moderation starts with the community itself, so in addition to privileges earned &amp;gt;through reputation, we periodically hold democratic moderator elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the moderators for WB stack: HDE 226868, L.Dutch and Monty Wild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as it turns out, despite the above pasted text, there are not actually periodically held democratic moderator elections.   Moderators are elected for life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question on meta.stackexchange:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/394905/can-an-election-happen-if-moderators-are-not-stepping-down-a-referendum&quot;&gt;Can an election happen if moderators are not stepping down? A referendum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a mechanism to hold an election if moderators have not stepped down? I am thinking of the British prime minister. A prime minister can serve for life. At intervals there are elections and a prime minister can be replaced, or be re-elected to continue on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is “no”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, no matter how much sense it'd make, there is no such mechanism as you &amp;gt;describe: &amp;quot;Elections are called as needed by the Stack Exchange Community Team on all sites.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the candidates from the last WB stack election 5 years ago in 2018.  HDE was in position from the first election 7 years ago and since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6335/2018-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;2018 Moderator Election Q&amp;amp;A - Questionnaire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: JBH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: Renan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: Secespitus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: AndyD273&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: L.Dutch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: Marshall Tigerus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: Monty Wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;•   Nominee Questionnaire: dot_Sp0T&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Renan (now known as Square-Cube Law) and especially JBH would have been and would be stellar moderators if they are still interested.  There are other enthusiasts on this site who have arrived over the past 5 years who would no doubt also do a fine job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a public appeal but really only the current moderators can decide if it will happen.   If they don’t want an election / referendum, it will not happen.  They are appointed until they choose to step down.    If those 3 think it is an idea worth merit they would resign then run again for the position, this time as incumbents running on their own records.  Re-election would be validation of their existing approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would anyone not want a referendum?&#xA;1:  It is a pain for the poohbahs at StackExchange to administrate.  So if I were one of those I might say “please, we have plenty of pain, just carry on as you are.”&#xA;2:  I do not want to risk the status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 years is a good long term for office.  It makes sense to me to ask the community if they want more of the same or if they want a change.  Power to the people and all!  For the record I personally am very uninterested in being a moderator, being constitutionally unsuited for the job.  But I am very interested in posting ideas and having even the most pathetic and incomprehensible of them remain undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB Stack referendum!! ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31698" LastEditorUserId="31698" LastEditDate="2024-01-07T21:51:34.607" LastActivityDate="2024-02-02T08:38:04.987" Title="WB Stack Moderator Referendum?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10318" CreationDate="2024-01-08T17:31:57.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if a referendum was supported by Stack Exchange, &lt;strong&gt;mods doing their job is not a valid reason for removal&lt;/strong&gt;. We have a process in place to deal with moderator misconduct. As you yourself say, there isn't any misconduct. We should not pressure moderators to resign because you don't like the core premise of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you want to have a referendum so that &amp;quot;even the most pathetic and incomprehensible&amp;quot; of your answer posts are not deleted. Deleting low quality posts is part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;moderator's duties&lt;/a&gt;. Changing who enforces site policy will not make it permissible to post whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; on this, or any other, stack exchange site, one of the first things it says is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;We're a little bit different from other sites. Here's how: &lt;strong&gt;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. This is what Stack Exchange chooses to lead with when introducing new users to their site. Permitting responses that do not answer the question, violates the fundamental idea that distinguishes us from other question and answer sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;restrictions&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;chooses&lt;/a&gt; to place on questions we're incredibly permissive with what we accept in answers. The only requirement for an answer post is that it must be an answer to the OP's question. To quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Answer posts that &lt;strong&gt;do not fundamentally answer the question&lt;/strong&gt; may be removed.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; We're expected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer#:%7E:text=Answer%20well%2Dasked%20questions&quot;&gt;answer well asked questions&lt;/a&gt;, not simply share our ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8028/my-answer-about-using-flags-as-weapons-remains-deleted-i-would-like-it-undelete&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9988/my-answer-was-deleted-an-explanation-is-warranted&quot;&gt;times&lt;/a&gt; you've asked about answer deletion on meta, it was non-moderators who answered explaining how this is site policy. When you've followed up with edits resolving the issue, your answers get undeleted. When you don't resolve the issues, your answers remain deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26175" LastEditorUserId="26175" LastEditDate="2024-01-08T19:08:05.557" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T19:08:05.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2024-01-09T16:28:58.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.B. : This is a draft I found back while cleaning up my computer. As I don't like wasting expended time, I give it here. It is rough around the edges and lacking finesse I believe, but it should give some insight as an expert in tactics. More than usual, feel free to change it as needed as long as the core points remain the same; Indeed, it's highly-unlikely I will be active again, so... do it like I won't maintain this answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tags are not enforcers of what kind of posts are written&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags' main purpose is not to tell which kind of question is accepted or not, their main purpose is to sort them  :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;From help-center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may look like a wordplay, but it isn't. The difference here is that it is a tool to find questions, not to evaluate them by the inexistence of their tag. An actual worldbuilding question on a rather uncommon topic (e.g. : A question about a world of letters) may have no real viable tags, yet it can be accepted here. Inversely, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anatomically-correct&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomically-correct&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatomically-correct&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-anatomically-correct-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;anatomically-correct&lt;/a&gt; tag for the most part contains &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9816&quot;&gt;questions which have an hard time being accepted anymore&lt;/a&gt;, but the tag still exists as an archive of questions with many interesting answers. Thinking tags are actual conditions to questions' acceptance will only restrain what makes worldbuilding and this site useful. It is part of what makes the site &amp;quot;physics.SE-lite&amp;quot;, as some would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it wasn't about that, I thought people learned the lesson with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internal-consistency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internal-consistency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-internal-consistency-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;internal-consistency&lt;/a&gt; tags being constantly used together (while they shouldn't). For the most part tags are not read, even their headlines. Tags are for the most common part not used consistently. People get reference on whether they can write a question or not through many factors, including existing questions, tour and help-center or pure &amp;quot;I ask without checking the rules&amp;quot; behavior. One single tag existence is at the extreme most a tertiary criteria, especially when similar ones exist, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/warfare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;warfare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-warfare-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;warfare&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weapons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weapons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-weapons-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;weapons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposing that &amp;quot;How can I defeat X&amp;quot; questions are 'bad', removing this tag will not change the number of them. Since &amp;quot;how can I defeat X&amp;quot; are more generally warfare questions, you'll have to remove all notions of wars or battles both in tags and in questions to eventually stop having &amp;quot;how can I defeat X&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The science of tactics are not about individual choices, but favorable and unfavorable states&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, let's focus on the deep sight of the proposal : Are tactics on-topic or not? A common theme (and JBH's own answer to this question) about telling why tactics and strategy are off-topic is that they are all about individual choices and circumstances. That's completely false and one of the most common misunderstanding about tactics and strategy in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at this simple situation, the ABC of aerial warfare and the one used in actual dogfight training, even nowadays :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AOc7f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AOc7f.png&quot; alt=&quot;Drawing of two aerial dogfight situations. Situation 1 : Plane A is behind plaen B. Situation 2 : Plane A and plane B are facing each other&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Drawing of two aerial dogfight situations. Situation/state 1 : Plane A is behind plane B. Situation/state 2 : Plane A and plane B are facing each others. For simplicity's sake, both planes are at the same height.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have 2 identical planes (let's say the iconical F-16), A and B. If you're in situation 1 (also known as offensive/defensive situation, depending on whether you're A or B), plane A has a clear advantage on plane B : Plane A has a large shooting window on plane B (missiles can lock-on, and with some aiming bullets can hit), while plane B has none and the enemy is in its blind spot. In comparison, situation 2 is &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; : None have a clear advantage, planes will pass by each other with a small firing window, and they'll need to maneuver around to gain an advantage over their opponent beyond their raw skills, leading to other situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to the question &amp;quot;How can plane A defeat plane B?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;How can I defeat plane B?&amp;quot;, the only and best answer in tactics is to tell that &amp;quot;you need to reach situation 1&amp;quot;, or more precisely &amp;quot;use your plane's speed and maneuverability to reach situation 1, the ideal state if you want to take down the plane&amp;quot;. Point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, whether the pilot actually wants to take down the plane, is the story. Whether they manage to reach situation 1 by managing each individual maneuver and choosing every time the good counter-maneuver to the opponent, is -in part- story. Whether they actually hit the target this time and this time only, is the story. But that is not answering the question &amp;quot;how can plane A defeat plane B?&amp;quot;. None of them are answering &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; to make it happen, at most they tell &amp;quot;what&amp;quot; happens in practice for this very specific situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I can tell that no tactician will find your world believable if in most confrontations plane B in state 1 wins the fight. I will not find any work consistent with the art of war as we know it if a highly-skilled pilot like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Richthofen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Baron&lt;/a&gt; ends up being plane B in situation 1 in almost every of their dogfights. Like it will be absurd to have a general manage to win easily by sending artillery and snipers at point-blank range... Or by forcing a charge against tanks on an open-field with only spoons as weapons. And while I used situation 1 as the most obvious &amp;quot;winning&amp;quot; case, this is also applicable to more &amp;quot;nebulous&amp;quot; cases like situation 2, where the balance of power is harder to decipher. The fact it is a 50% chance to win instead of 90-100% is irrelevant : pilots of equal level (and supposedly competent), regardless of their individual origins, will have a 50% of winning situation 2 on average, which is less for plane A in situation 1. That's what tactics will predict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not without reason that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strategy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strategy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tactics&lt;/a&gt; are thought as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; : It is not about choosing something and hoping it would go well, &amp;quot;happy-go-lucky&amp;quot; style. This is the exact contrary to what being knowledgeable in tactics is. It is all about predicting what are the most likely outcomes of a choice you &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; make, leading to the most favorable result at any point in time. As a discipline tactics is the accumulated knowledge of different battle states, their possible actions and their likely outcomes&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Tactics is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the choice of a specific tactic, nor the success/failure after having chosen and tried one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about plot elements such as the actions of characters, rather than about the world in which your story takes place, is off-topic on Worldbuilding. Capabilities of characters within a world and creation of groups of characters (like nations) are on-topic, but questions must focus on what is possible or likely to develop, not what someone would or should do. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-is-my-question-too-story-based-and-how-do-i-get-it-opened&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put strong emphasis that &amp;quot;questions must focus on what is possible (ie. what it can be, or what it can do) or likely to develop, not what someone would or should do.&amp;quot;. Indeed, asking what someone would do is not the same as asking what they &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; do. Both are also different from asking &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; they can do X. That's a common problem people have when reviewing questions, because those terms are often used one in place of another, this even if they are not asking the same thing at all. Truth is, most people tell &amp;quot;how can I defeat X&amp;quot; is -often- as a wording shortcut to &amp;quot;What would be the most favorable favorable action/situation through which someone/something will have (the) high(est) chance of defeating X?&amp;quot;. The original wording is certainly under-technical and over-shortened, but the meaning virtually stays the same as the long version. And none of the versions asks &amp;quot;what their character 'should' do&amp;quot; : They ask &amp;quot;what they 'can' do&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And really, it infuriates me to see that again and again, people think that the story drives the success of a chosen tactics, rather than tactics serving as the structure and limitation of the story, leaving it out only when it's not what matters (mainly for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BulletTime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rule of cool&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, refusing tactics as story-based is telling that dices can roll on whichever number you want &lt;strong&gt;absolutely every time&lt;/strong&gt;, because that's your story, not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;world rule&lt;/a&gt;. It's telling that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8312&quot;&gt;society and culture questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; about school uniforms are off-topic because one delinquant student may choose to wear their casual attires anyway, regardless of the established social norms and its sources (e.g. : Authoritarian, strong formalism...). It is refusing questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8407&quot;&gt;how can spies cross ravines&lt;/a&gt; for being story-based, because spies and their gadget manufactor can choose to do whatever they want, regardless if the solution is effective for the purpose or not. Refusing this is telling that any and every questions that involve some statistical variance are off-topic, because individual rolls/values are random, and absurdly independent on what the world tells you should happen &amp;quot;on average&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from that last point I will conclude with this : Refusing tactic questions as a general rule because they are story-based, not &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10314&quot;&gt;objectively true in all circumstances&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is at its core refusing every questions that involve people... Or let's go further, any question. Yes, because unless you believe that your world elements and individuals is entirely and strictly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deterministic&lt;/a&gt;/fatalistic, there will be variance, individual circumstances, undetailed holes in the question leading to one best answer or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And tactics are far, very far from being the only study domain to &amp;quot;suffer&amp;quot; from that variance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 : The greatest illustration of this is games as they're often simplification and abstraction of the real-world. When someone says you're in a bad spot in chess, they actually mean your chances to win are lower than any other situation, this regardless of your opponent's actual ELO. When in Street fighter pro-players advise you to keep away from the arena's corners it's -among other things- because you lose the ability to move away from your opponent, losing effectively a defensive option. It's not because your opponent will suddenly become sharper and/or smarter because &amp;quot;story!&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 : By the way, I do have to note that strategy and tactics are fundamentally culture-based, check how romans were using more agressive tactics than others as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignitas_(Roman_concept)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;society&lt;/a&gt; promoted more glorious than cautious leaders. Another reason it is more than a &amp;quot;character choice&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80336" LastActivityDate="2024-01-09T16:28:58.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-11T22:16:10.167" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;The refers to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253404/if-30-of-global-military-spending-for-the-next-30-years-were-instead-spent-on-a&quot;&gt;If 30% of global military spending for the next 30 years were instead spent on an &amp;quot;intelligent life&amp;quot; backup colony, where should we site it and why? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question initially went through several iterations. Initially it defined a broader set of existential threats. In the earliest comments, one commenter said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please pick a threat and pick a plan and then ask specific questions about that plan (after checking that they haven't already been asked on this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... so it was focused on the AI threat specifically. Several other constraints we introdued as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then later an answer said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1: Make the problem match your solution&#xA;If you want to make a believable story about a Plan B habitat, change the apocalypses to something that makes the Earth uninhabitable, but is confined to the Earth like a comet, megavolcano, global warming, nuclear war, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the question is very focused on the question of &lt;em&gt;where to site&lt;/em&gt; the backup colony. But nevertheless it received two &amp;quot;frame challenge&amp;quot; answers along the lines of &amp;quot;What's the point? The AI will find and kill us where ever we go.&amp;quot;. One of those answers received 25 upvotes. This suggests that by over-focusing the question we just encourage people to ignore its constraints and say whatever they want to say - and that the community is apparently fine with that. I don't think that making &lt;em&gt;the question&lt;/em&gt; more focused will have the effect of making &lt;em&gt;the answers&lt;/em&gt; more focused - if that's what we are going for here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that closing a question three days after it has been posted is an action that should be taken likely - especially when it and its answers have collectively garnered almost 100 upvotes. Refining the question might make sense, but this also has to be done very carefully since any changes could negatively impact the quality of the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing the question for a canned generic reason just creates a situation where the OP is faced with the difficult challenge of guessing what the person(s) who closed it wanted done to improve it and risking changes that would damage perfectly good answers to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that we un-close the question and then discuss what can or should be done to improve it in this Meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107742" LastActivityDate="2024-01-21T02:11:22.107" Title="How can we make the &quot;where to site a backup colony&quot; question more focused?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10318" CreationDate="2024-01-11T22:52:53.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's tricky to understand the life of a moderator if you haven't been one yourself. For sure, on other sites, I've had answers deleted by mods. I believe that in some cases this was because a user with a penchant for quickly finding fault flagged it, and then the moderator didn't take the time to review the situation carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it was a bit tedious to get the situation resolved, I'm not convinced that that only way to make the system work better is more frequent elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that the way the SE system is meant to work is that first you need to earn enough reputation to see deleted posts, and then you should use that privilege to review the deleted answers and closed questions. If you see a pattern that is concerning, then raise awareness via a constructively written Meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three things that need to be in alignment for the site to work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;law of the land&amp;quot; as defined by the help pages,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the community wants and how they choose to act in most situations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moderators decision making criteria.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to improve alignment other than through moderator elections. In any case, the full time people at Stack Exchange are probably the best equipped to fine tune how the site works when it comes to things like maintaining moderator engagement and decision-making quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the users &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is use their privileges, the voting buttons, and the comments in a manner that aligns with the &amp;quot;law of the land&amp;quot; as defined by the help pages. If you feel that some users are too quick to find fault, use your upvotes and comments to ensure that your more open and accepting point of view is well represented in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107742" LastActivityDate="2024-01-11T22:52:53.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2024-01-12T00:45:55.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not one of the close voters, but I think it should've been closed and revised for a reason different than the stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Q is just fundamentally unsuitable for the &amp;quot;one best answer&amp;quot; rubric. The Q gives budget &amp;amp; technology constraints, no problem there, but then asks about something that is left unconstrained. A location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like asking the question &amp;quot;you're given 100 million dollars and Earth is your domain, where to build the best zombie apocalypse shelter?&amp;quot; It's anyone's guess and not totally clear why one location beats another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope someone else gives a more comprehensive answer to your meta question though because I think it should be possible to frame a similar question under SE's framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62241" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T00:45:55.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2024-01-13T02:14:53.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Sandbox&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Since you're still pretty new to Worldbuilding.SE, I'm just going to recommend that the question you're asking here is perfectly suited for our &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9981/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;! Technically, Meta is for questions about the culture, rules, local policies, functioning, etc of the Worldbuilding forum. Questions about improving your own questions should be entered into the Sandbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get one-on-help by members who actually want to help you learn how to write good quality questions or to help you learn how to improve your skills.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You won't have to worry about the problems of question closure, the inability to really edit a question after it's gotten answers, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can get some clarity on your question while the question is in &amp;quot;pause mode&amp;quot;. I saw that your query underwent many edits, has many comments and many discussions and has many answers some of which may or may not be invalidated by later edits you made. This kind of situation can be stressful for new members, and sometimes they leave the community in a huff because they think we're mean. In reality, the Sandbox can help you avoid common newbie errors and misconceptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastActivityDate="2024-01-13T02:14:53.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10318" CreationDate="2024-01-20T17:41:51.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My observations about moderators&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I almost never see HDE 226868 anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I rarely see Monty, though he's been more active recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of moderation is carried by L.Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last time I can think of the moderators asked anybody on the site about a policy was when James was a moderator. It was the (IMO now infamous) &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;Real World Question policy&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not aware of any significant change in the Help Center made by our moderators since that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Back when Monica was a moderator, the moderators were communicative. Almost gregarious. Our moderators today are very uncommunicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are human. Sometimes they do things because they got up on the proverbial wrong side of the bed that morning. Questionable decisions — even mistakes — don't intrinsically justify removal. This is why Meta exists, so we can talk about things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Above all... moderators are expected to enforce the rules. Moderators that (a) don't enforce the rules, (b) don't participate in discussions about the rules and (c) don't help establish the rules are not valuable in their role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are they doing a bad job?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but they're not doing as good a job as they could be. And I agree with Elemtilas that the issue is likely better resolved by spreading out the workload. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit of a believer that Mods should be (even must be) regularly active in all aspects of the community. Active contributors, active commenters, active moderators, active on Meta.... Considering that SE's model is to let moderators be moderators for life, it should be a necessarily weighty burden to self-analyze whether or not personal activity justifies both continued presence as a moderator and the choice to keep the moderator club so exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should our policy be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We should always have five (5) moderators. If a moderator drops out for any reason, an immediate election should be held to replace that moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All moderators should be expected to re-present themselves to the community for re-election every five (5) years. Elections should be held on years ending with zero (0) and five (5). All moderators participate regardless when they were first elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fair to the community. Moderators both good and active continue. Moderators who no longer have the time to moderate either don't throw their hat in the ring in the next election or don't get re-elected. New blood has a chance to become members of the ruling class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I expect this to happen?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the moderators' track record with participating in community policy discussions and acting to change the Help Center to reflect community consensus...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-01-20T17:41:51.910" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2024-01-21T02:11:22.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I just read your question for the first time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it should have been closed and should remain closed. You're not asking about a rule of your world, you're asking about the plot of your story. Yes, you're trying to couch the question in terms of details... but it's still a matter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609&quot;&gt;narrative necessity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as a single, objective, aka &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; location. Every one will have pros and cons... and that's the reason the question is story-based. Which location is &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; is the one that best suits your story. It's not an issue of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldbuilding rules govern things like the technology to get to the location, the technology to build the infrastructure, even the political infrastructure within which you create the climate leading to the nead for your location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a good example: the difference between the political climate and the political infrastructure. We can help you build your political system. We will not help you explain how that system is used to bring about the crisis. &lt;em&gt;That's storybuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In like manner, we can help you define the technologies you need to create your backup base. But we will not help you choose where to put it. &lt;em&gt;That's storybuilding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this regard I disagree with why your question was closed. I can see the ambiguity of the selection process, so I can see the logic that lead to the &amp;quot;Needs More Focus&amp;quot; choice. But in reality, it should have been closed as Too Story-Based, a specialized VTC sub-reason of Opinion-Based, or closed as Not About Worldbuilding per the Help Center, which prohibits open-ended questions. (See the difference between questions that ask for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6138/40609&quot;&gt;finite list of things&lt;/a&gt; vs. an &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6139/40609&quot;&gt;infinite list of things&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, how can a question like this be asked?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to make your choice. We won't make it for you. Choose a space station or Mars or the Mponeng gold mine... make the choice, and we can help you with the worldbuilding &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; that rationalize that choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But asking us to hand you a list of options with the associated strengths and weaknesses so you can make a story choice... that's the kind of brainstorming we discourage in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And for the record...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Popularity has never been a valid reason to keep a question open. Just because there's a lot of people who don't know the rules or refuse to abide by the rules doesn't mean you have a credible question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closure is not a punishment. Its purpose is to give you time to edit your question and bring it into conformance with the rules. The real error here is that it wasn't closed within minutes of you asking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange advocates for rapid closure — the faster the better. It does this because it wants to be a repository of quality questions and answers useful to as many as possible. The fact that you want your question answered doesn't matter to Stack Exchange, which would rather see your question closed until perfected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not like Quora, Reddit, or many other forums which are more discussion-based and/or a free-for-all that lets any question be asked for any reason with any consequence. Stack Exchange is highly regimented. Some questions simply don't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having said all that...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really do want to help you build your world. It's a lot of fun and we have a worldwide community of incredibly imaginative and well-informed people. All we ask is that you abide by the rules. We created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9981/40609&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; to helpyou achieve that goal — and it's linked in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-01-21T02:11:22.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2024-01-21T07:23:32.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;h4&gt;If 30% of global military spending for the next 30 years were instead spent on an &amp;quot;intelligent life&amp;quot; backup colony, where should we site it and why?&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253404/if-30-of-global-military-spending-for-the-next-30-years-were-instead-spent-on-a&quot;&gt;Originally posted (and subsequently closed) question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10321/how-can-we-make-the-where-to-site-a-backup-colony-question-more-focused/10326#10326&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes about the question (not for the description)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot of the story is 1) AI near-miss happens, 2) There is agreement to spend big on a solution, 3) Then debate on the best solution occurs, 4) Colonize Venus wins, 5) Earth colonizes Venus with solar powered aircraft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for help with (3)&lt;/strong&gt;. I want the debate about alternatives to be as realistic as possible, so I need some more creative and well-supported counter proposals. It is the brainstorming and exchange of perspectives from the proponents of different ideas that I'd like the community's help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question Description&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some industry leaders have proposed that AI poses a risk of extinction. Suppose some kind of an AI-related incident occurs that really scares humanity into action, and that this causes the world's governments to come together and agree to reallocate 30% of the many trillions of dollars that they spend on defense to developing a single insurance policy megaproject called &amp;quot;Plan B&amp;quot;. Plan B must ensure that, even in the event of civilization-on-Earth ending calamity, intelligent life will nevertheless persevere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best place to site this backup colony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that whatever &amp;quot;Plan B&amp;quot; is, offering better natural immunity to AI-related threats will be an acceptance criterion. If it's a backup plan in case of other existential threats, such as nuclear war or an extinction-level comet or asteroid impact, that would be a bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be valid (not necessarily the best site) if the colony was sited in an underground bunker on Earth or in orbit around the Earth. If the best site is off-world, assume that the cost of going to Mars, Venus, or the Moon is 1B per metric ton (MT). Global military spending in 2022 was 2.24 Trillion USD/Year. We can assume that somehow we will lower the cost-per-kg by a factor of 100 for such a large project, so if the entire budget was spent on interplanetary transportation, our mass budget would be around...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MassBudget=(30years)(0.3)(&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2.24T)(100)/($&lt;/span&gt;1B/MT)=2,160,000tons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the mass budget for a giant orbiting habitat or an underground bunker on Earth could be higher, and it is unrealistic to spend the entire budget on launch. Perhaps a 50/50 split would be more reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the best site when using an approach grounded in present-day physics, materials, engineering, and medical knowledge. The answer does not need to provide a detailed plan, it just needs to explain enough to illustrate the key advantages of the proposed site and establish why it is the best alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JBH's Proposed Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A story event occurs that causes the Earth's nations to unite in the effort to colonize another planet in our solar system. They have dedicated 730 Billion U.S. dollars annually (approximately &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statista.com/statistics/262742/countries-with-the-highest-military-spending/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one-third the global military budget&lt;/a&gt; to achieve this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have chosen Venus to be the planet for colonization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project will take 30 years (22 Trillion USD total investment from concept to occupation of Venus).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will cost $?.??/ton to move the ship and its cargo to Venus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A maximum of 30% of any ship's total mass is payload.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are science-based reasons why Venus would be the superior choice compared to other planets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note that this is the first of two questions. The second question will ask for scientific reasons why Venus is not the better choice. If you're tempted to provide a frame challenge to this question, it should instead be submitted as an answer to the second.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107742" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2024-03-25T02:49:45.707" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T02:49:45.707" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-22T05:01:04.167" Score="15" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/395881/sites-can-now-request-to-enable-a-banner-to-warn-about-their-policy-on-ai-genera&quot;&gt;post on Meta.Stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; stating that it is now possible for SE sites to enable a banner that states that AI content is banned or must be cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10067/75&quot;&gt;AI Content is banned on Worldbuilding Stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;, do we want to enable the banner stating that AI content is banned on Worldbuildiing.Stackexchange.com, similar to the image below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/StYoj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/StYoj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want the banner, upvote the YES answer below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want the banner, upvote the NO answer below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you want to explain the yes/no, leave a comment under the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="101126" LastEditDate="2024-03-14T19:12:18.603" LastActivityDate="2024-03-14T19:12:18.603" Title="Do we want to enable a banner stating that AI content is banned on WB.SE?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|answers|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10328" CreationDate="2024-01-22T09:23:28.753" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;YES, I want the banner as explained in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2024-01-22T09:23:28.753" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10328" CreationDate="2024-01-22T09:23:47.667" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;NO, I don't want the banner as explained in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2024-01-22T09:23:47.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T20:33:28.713" Score="8" ViewCount="197" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks — folks like you. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmN7M.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Worldbuilding over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community User¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community²&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;158&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;547&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;141&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;214&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;107&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;349&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;558&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;97&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁸&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;95&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,816&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;64&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;20&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;554&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;48&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;340&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;524&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;535&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;134&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;55&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;43&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;608&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;519&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;548&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;495&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;211&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;173&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;802&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;50&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,540&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;368&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;373&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;523&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;239&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;102&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;92&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;304&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;181&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;794&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;360&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;426&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Triage&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User review-bans lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;44&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed⁴&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,559&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;66&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10061/2022-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2022: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222023%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/396299/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8555" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2024-01-25T00:56:06.020" LastActivityDate="2024-03-15T19:04:10.567" Title="2023: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|statistics|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10318" CreationDate="2024-01-29T12:36:49.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;WB has changed, a lot, several times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stack I joined isn't the one you joined, I was already fading out as you became active. The stack as it is now isn't that one either. I miss the one I joined, but that's long gone. Fundamentally most of the questions when I started were either story based or opinion based requiring creative solutions. Everything is now much stricter, it's more about maths problems that can be solved, heading for &amp;quot;I can't be bothered to categorise this properly for another stack&amp;quot; questions rather than the considerably more creative place it used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But such is life, nobody even gives praise to Glarnak any more. All I can really suggest is to let it go and move on. WB is dead, long live WB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise I've not proposed a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest this, as long as a question has clearly had thought and effort put into it, it should only be closed by the community vote, never by moderator action. Let the community decide what is and is not acceptable and we'll see how it goes from there. Basically I'm asking the moderators to do less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16295" LastEditorUserId="16295" LastEditDate="2024-02-02T08:38:04.987" LastActivityDate="2024-02-02T08:38:04.987" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-06T00:02:49.390" Score="14" ViewCount="702" Body="&lt;p&gt;@HDE226868 has agreed to help us update the Help Center pages. I believe it's time for a fairly thorough review of what we want for the next stage in the Stack's lifespan. It's an opportunity we're not going to get very often. Consequently, the process will be intentionally time-consuming with each &amp;quot;phase&amp;quot; of the discussion taking 2-4 weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the kick-off for the effort and I'd love to have as many of our users as we can join in. Heck, it might be against policy, but I have no problem suggesting that the following comment be pasted to questions and answers of users (arbitrarily) 10,000 rep and higher. (Others will see the link and join us, which is great! But we need to draw a line or we'll be posting this in millions of places.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community is starting the process of updating our Tour and primary Help Center page. This will include policy decisions and it's a great opportunity to help us define the next stage of [worldbuilding.se]. Please join us at [this Meta page](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609) and share your thoughts. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the 100,000 foot view?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are things we can't do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are things we can do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are things we can do if we're clever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can we edit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can edit...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of the Tour (it's not very flexible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some aspects of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt; (which is even less flexible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we have one page to work with. The relevant movie quote is, &amp;quot;We've got to find a way to make this... fit into the hole for this... using nothing but that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request for High-Level Section Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today the &amp;quot;What topics can I ask about here?&amp;quot; page has the following general sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTRODUCTION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who we serve.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What &amp;quot;worldbuilding&amp;quot; means to us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What worldbuilding vs. storybuilding (one sentence).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No character decisions here (specialized storybuilding).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ASKING QUESTIONS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What, why, how, and research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sample topics (&lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; old question examples).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another we-don't-do-storybuilding sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to ask about events.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SITE RESOURCES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Sandbox&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Perfect Question checklist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real-World Questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More &amp;quot;how to ask about events&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THE SMALL PRINT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific &amp;amp; answerable, good/bad subjective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flagging questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Proposed Goals...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At this point in time, everything is up for grabs. However, I believe it makes more sense to start from the top and work down. That page needs to be clean, clear, and preferably short. That means it's ultimately going to be a bullet list of concepts with brief statements and links to Meta pages that explain all the gory details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which means we need to be careful which rabbits to chase. We'll be compromising across a lot of opinions with the goal of setting up a help center page we can be proud of for the next 7-8 years. If any of us nudges another with a comment like, &amp;quot;that's a discussion for later,&amp;quot; we need to be ready to take a step back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, this first discussion is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the &lt;em&gt;high-level sections&lt;/em&gt; that this page should have including a description of their content and, if appropriate, examples?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please post answers with ONE PROPOSED SECTION PER ANSWER. That way comment discussions can be focused. Remember, there are things we can do if we're clever, meaning the Help Center is authoritative so long as it links to the necessary policy pages, which I think also need to be looked at. But, one thing at a time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing. This is the first step in a somewhat complicated process. If you think this is the wrong first step, don't be shy... post and answer and explain why we should be focusing somewhere else first. I've been in business meetings where the first day was spent figuring out where to start. Relevant book quote, &amp;quot;A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="627" LastEditDate="2024-02-20T13:51:56.523" LastActivityDate="2024-03-05T03:21:05.097" Title="We're going to upgrade the Help Center page, here is the 100,000-foot-view discussion of the what-we-cans and what-we-can'ts" Tags="|discussion|help-center|2024-hc-redesign|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this tag is to identify posts that are part of the 2024 redesign of the Help Center &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page and, if appropriate, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt;. This tag should not be used for any other purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question in this series was: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609&quot;&gt;We&amp;#39;re going to upgrade the Help Center page, here is the 100,000-foot-view discussion of the what-we-cans and what-we-cant&amp;#39;s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" Score="0" Body="This tag has a specific purpose and should not be used outside of that purpose. It identifies posts that are part of the 2024 redesign of the Worldbuilding Help Center and Tour pages. The first posted question in this effort was https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609." OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T00:08:17.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-06T00:31:47.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Site-Specific Policies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every Stack is a little different. These differences are often reflected in the site's policies. Below is a short list of the most important policies. You can find a complete list by &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;clicking here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not answer questions about 3rd party or commercial worlds. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7336/40609&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We accept real-world questions with a worldbuilding context. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161/40609&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;], [&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8073/help-me-understand-the-required-level-and-relevance-of-worldbuilding-context-i&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not accept brainstorming or idea-generation questions. [3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not accept questions about character or organizational decisions or choices. [4]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We allow answers that address problems with the question. Such answers are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609&quot;&gt;Frame Challenges&lt;/a&gt; and must contain specific types of information to be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not accept questions presenting a seemingly small or minor change with a request for evaluations of broad consequences (e.g., &amp;quot;if Hitler died of pneumonia one year earlier, how would that have affected World War II?&amp;quot;). We call these &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;high concept questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm using some existing policies (and two that aren't...) to demonstrate the proposed section. I expect some policies may change as a result of this effort. I believe the specifics of what should be here is a discussion for later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T21:02:33.627" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T21:02:33.627" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-06T19:30:56.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Resources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack provides a number of resources to help you with your worldbuilding. Please consider reviewing these resources before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Meta&lt;/a&gt; is where you can ask and learn about how Stack Exchange works, Stack policies, and Stack culture. You need &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/participate-in-meta&quot;&gt;one reputation point&lt;/a&gt; to enter Meta. Thus it is accessible to every registered account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We provide a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143606/40609&quot;&gt;list of worldbuilding resources&lt;/a&gt; with a large list of links to worldbuilding tools and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We've created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3624&quot;&gt;checklist for new questions&lt;/a&gt; that is the best place to start before you ask your first question. We have also provided a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6130/40609&quot;&gt;catalog of question types&lt;/a&gt; that identify the types of question we answer and those we don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9981/sandbox-for-proposed-questions&quot;&gt;new question sandbox&lt;/a&gt; where you can test a question before posting it on Main. This is a great way to learn about how to ask questions and how Stack Exchange's rules and the Stack policies affect questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="40609" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T19:42:01.400" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T19:42:01.400" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-07T07:06:24.383" Score="5" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of very little used tags with no tag wiki that are used on practically identical questions. I think we should make a lot of them synonymous considering there's no reason i can see for having them around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/railways&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;railways&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;railways&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-railways-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;railways&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/trains&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trains&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trains&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-trains-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;trains&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/railways&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;railways&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;railways&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-railways-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;railways&lt;/a&gt; only has 6 questions and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/trains&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trains&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;trains&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-trains-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;trains&lt;/a&gt; 10 and no tag description. Why are they separate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aviation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aviation&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aviation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-aviation-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;aviation&lt;/a&gt; tag has exactly 1 question and no description. Why not merge it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aircraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-aircraft-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;aircraft&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engines&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-engines-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;engines&lt;/a&gt; has 10 questions and no tag wiki with it seemingly being used interchangeably with &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/propulsion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;propulsion&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;propulsion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-propulsion-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;propulsion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason why they're still separate ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73451" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T08:28:28.747" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T16:21:20.170" Title="Should we do something about some lesser used and practially synonymous tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10339" CreationDate="2024-02-07T07:19:45.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see any tag which could benefit from improvements, including merging, synonym, wiki, please go ahead and propose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag creation is so easy that it's easier to make it wrong than right. I have seen users creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flat&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-flat-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;flat&lt;/a&gt; tag, because they didn't type the dash in flat-earth. And many more examples along that line, which I have tried to clean up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be my guest with taking the broom and the mop and help with cleaning!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T07:19:45.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-07T16:12:43.820" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Creativity vs Science Lite&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Somewhere in this discussion and definitely in the who we are / what we do sections, we really need to stress that worldbuilding is a creative endeavour and that we encourage questions that demonstrate creativity and also elicit creative responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We must stress that we are &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; physics.lite.se and that questions and answers do not have to couched in terms of real world science or follow the realist school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unfortunately, WB.SE has morphed quite a bit since its inception. To quote Separatrix from a recent response here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WB has changed, a lot, several times. The stack I joined isn't the one you joined, I was already fading out as you became active. The stack as it is now isn't that one either. I miss the one I joined, but that's long gone. Fundamentally most of the questions when I started were either story based or opinion based requiring creative solutions. Everything is now much stricter, it's more about maths problems that can be solved, heading for &amp;quot;I can't be bothered to categorise this properly for another stack&amp;quot; questions rather than the considerably more creative place it used to be. (Separatrix)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would like to focus on this aspect: &lt;strong&gt;story based or opinion based requiring creative solutions&lt;/strong&gt;. This alone is why I joined and stayed and remained active. If this place continues on the path to convergence with the science forums and continues to push away the creative aspects of the art, then there's no longer any use for this forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here is a good example question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/254499/determining-the-qualities-of-a-quill-based-on-the-qualities-of-the-bird&quot;&gt;Determining the qualities of a quill based on the qualities of the bird&lt;/a&gt;. This is a worldbuilding question that, as I read it, touches potentially on in world natural philosophy / science; in world folklore &amp;amp; culture; in world magic and  underlying principles. In the comments we find many typically &amp;quot;science lite&amp;quot; complaints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes you think flamingos eat microbes? Seeing as how these birds are nominally able to fly, why would you think their feathers would be different from those of other wading birds? (Eg. flamingos.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using quills for writing with ink on paper was a strictly European thing, limited in time from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. In the Antiquity, they used reed pens, and reed pens continued to be used in the Islamic world throughout the period when Christian Europe used feather quills. Goose, swan, and chicken quills worked just fine and were interchangeable. The only requirement was for the primary flight feathers to be large enough; even the feathers of large crows or ravens worked all right. There were no major material differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that the difference between the Classical Antiquity and the Islamic world where they used reed pens on one hand, and Christian Europe where they used quill pens on the other, is the lack of suitable reeds in colder climates... For the same reason nobody has tried flamingo quills -- there are few place with flamingoes but no reeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me no time at all using Google to discover a great variety of bird primary feathers were used as quill pens and that Ostriches prove that a quill pen could be made from the primary feathers of a flightless bird. Research is mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Another query: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/255845/is-there-a-way-to-offset-the-gravitational-waves-created-by-breaking-cosmic-stri&quot;&gt;Is there a way to offset the damage caused by breaking cosmic strings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cosmic string are nothing more than fictional objects devised by some people who cannot even agree on a way to verify their theories. You can build all and nothing on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know that the amplitude of gravitational wave wanes quickly due to geometrical spreading but I will need to check if it also experiences attenuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These kinds of comments seem somewhat to considerably unhelpful in a creative sense. For the first question, we note that the OP did not ask for materials science or physics or biology; so we are not dealing with a sciency answer. If anything, the wording of some &lt;em&gt;quality of the bird&lt;/em&gt; leads to a particular &lt;em&gt;quality of the quill&lt;/em&gt; leads one naturally to consider a more esoteric, more philosophical answer. And since the OP is specifically not asking for a scientific answer, clearly, the answer needs to be more creative in nature. For the second question, the OP touches on highly theoretical things that may or may not exist and technologies we probably won't reach within the next millennium. But you know what, &lt;em&gt;who cares!?&lt;/em&gt; It's science fiction! It's a creative endeavour!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These are questions of classic worldbuilding. The questions' wording and the expectations allude to a creative approach. Scientifically speaking, none of the fictional bird's description really has any bearing on what kind of quill can be made from it; for in the real world, I can make a quill pen out of any feather! For the other one, I doubt anyone has a clue what could really work in a situation like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Classic worldbuilding is, first and foremost, a creative endeavour. Comments about whether or not flamingos eat microbes is not only unhelpful, but also completely off the topic. Irrelevant. Comments focusing on where, geographically in the real world, quill pens were used are also unhelpful. Irrelevant. The only helpful comment was the one about research. Yes, research is mandatory, but this doesn't read as the kind of question where the OP needs to demonstrate a PhD in ornithology to ask a question about a fictional bird and the kind of quills that might be made from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If the OP were focused on microbes, then the question should be asked in BIOLOGY.SE; if the OP were focused on quill usage, then it should be asked in HISTORY.SE. But no, the OP asked here, in WB.SE, because a &lt;em&gt;different kind of answer&lt;/em&gt; is needed. A more creative solution for a more creative query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To that end, we really need to come to some sort of consensus on what &amp;quot;story based&amp;quot; means in this context, and also what &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot; means. And we also need to unshackle ourselves from becoming too rulebound. We are becoming SCIENCE.LITE.SE, and that is not where we should be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Criticisms and Considerations&lt;/strong&gt;: (to follow shortly...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2024-03-05T03:21:05.097" LastActivityDate="2024-03-05T03:21:05.097" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-11T19:08:50.380" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't waste your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model of curation and moderation is predicated on small communities where the majority of members understand and share that community's rules and goals. Because of this, compliance is high, community participation in curation is high, and active moderation is rarely required since the community is self-policing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the various sites in the SE network have grown in user count, this model has very obviously begun to fail. Few of the new users are interested in becoming part of the community by e.g. reading the help pages; they don't care about such things as &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; because each one is a special snowflake who expects their question to be answered. Over time the ratio of curators:users thus decays to the point that the workload on the remaining curators becomes such that many cease curating. This leads to more work for fewer curators, which accentuates burnout, which creates a negative loop whereby curation activities ultimately cease because nobody is interested in dealing with the torrent of rule violations that non-compliant users call &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be overcome if Stack Exchange moderators had the ability to unilaterally remove content they believe violates site policy - but they very crucially lack that ability. In contrast, moderation in pretty much every other community on the web grants that sort of ability. Guess which of these two models has been around since the invention of the internet &lt;strong&gt;because it works&lt;/strong&gt;? I'll give you a clue, &lt;em&gt;it's not Stack Exchange's one&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, you and the mod team can go ahead and bail a few cupfuls of water out the side of this particular site-boat by updating the help pages. But when you have hundreds of new users throwing cupfuls of water in the other side, what exactly do you expect is ultimately going to happen to the boat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who thinks I'm being unduly negative or doom-and-gloomy... I've experienced this on Stack Overflow, where I estimate that currently &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; a third of the questions are unfettered garbage, and that percentage is trending swiftly upwards. Is Worldbuilding likely to experience the same thing? Almost certainly; it's never going to have the same number of new users as SO, but it's also never going to have as many curators, and the number of bad questions that remain open here nowadays - because nobody flags them for closure - is already horrifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25872" LastActivityDate="2024-02-11T19:08:50.380" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-13T04:17:25.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a formal write up for this, but I would like to see more specific resources for people with moderator privileges about what to do in common situations. We are given privileges, and there are instructions about their mechanics, but little training in their daily use. I think this leads to divergent ideas about how to use those privileges, something I am definitely guilty of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start with a sketch of one that's been on my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How to vote-to-close constructively&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it off-putting to see close votes for &amp;quot;Needs Details Or Clarity&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Opinion Based&amp;quot; (always an odd one here) or &amp;quot;Needs More Focus&amp;quot; with no explanations. The questioner should have the opportunity to adjust their question, but how can they with only a vague idea what the problem is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as we hope they would, people cannot be expected to study the Tour and Help Center before asking. And one can never assume the VTC reason is obvious. Rather than expecting people to know all the rules or read our minds, we should focus on correction and education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could include...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A linkable reference of common close reasons and their remedies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each specific type of reason for closing, we could have a page discussing it, and suggestions for how the question could be fixed. VTCers would be encouraged to add a comment linking to the appropriate page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be mentioned in the help pages about closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be as simple as specially tagged meta questions. For example, I frequently reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;What is the XY Problem?&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows everyone to pool their efforts into building a collective reference of both very specific close reasons, and also their specific solutions. Rather than asking each VTCer to write a big explanation, they can link to the reference making it as easy as possible to provide clarity and instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="760" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T04:17:25.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10331" CreationDate="2024-02-14T08:27:18.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community User¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community²&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;548&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;495&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to believe that for the entire year only 12 questions were closed by community members alone. And also hard to see why so many closures would be attributed to the Community user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the Community user will be involved in a closure if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A duplicate is suggested and the question asker accepts the suggestion thus closing the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Community user also owns votes of deleted regular users. I do not know if this factors in here, but I suppose it is possible that one or more users were deleted and now any closures they participated in are attributed to the Community user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to accept that even with these factored in the Community user has such a large count of closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this statistic accurate? And if so, why such a big discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/26175/sphennings&quot;&gt;sphennings&lt;/a&gt; commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 12 may be when a gold tag badge holder closes a question as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that cannot make sense. The &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; column counts the actions of regular users. Unilateral closures using the gold tag badge  privilege (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/172048&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be counted there, true but so should &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; other closures where only regular (non-moderator) users were involved (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250676&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1360786/dupehammered-questions?fromDate=2023-01-01&amp;amp;toDate=2023-12-31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; shows that there have been a total of 29 not deleted questions unilaterally closed as duplicates in 2013. Of those:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/251530&quot;&gt;How many planets can fit inside a Habitable Zone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250368&quot;&gt;Could a planet orbiting a g type main sequence star have yellow on its surface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250195&quot;&gt;Explosive Plant/Chemotrophs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/249886&quot;&gt;Viability of lasers in space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/249844&quot;&gt;How can a moon-sized creature evolve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/249779&quot;&gt;What features would a creature that could see radio waves have?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248257&quot;&gt;Plant life on a planet with extremely bright &amp;quot;moon&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248005&quot;&gt;How do I make skeletons strong without using magic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/247310&quot;&gt;How could I make an earth sized planet with 3 moons work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/245968&quot;&gt;Would it make more sense to terraform a planet with a single climate or multiple varieties of climate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/242580&quot;&gt;Could it be possible to have a planet made of chunks of floating rock?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/242031&quot;&gt;Could a terrestrial planet have a stable orbit of rings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/241233&quot;&gt;Could life exist on a planet orbiting a T class brown dwarf?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By non-moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/247828&quot;&gt;Is it realistic/plausible to have iron plated scales on an animal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/245687&quot;&gt;What are tetrachromat colors like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/202101&quot;&gt;Will the Anatomical Differences in These Humanoids Affect Baby Development?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/244164&quot;&gt;Is there enough nitrogen in nitrates on Mars to create a thick atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143724&quot;&gt;Can multiple similar planets share the same orbit without interfering with each other too much?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250407&quot;&gt;Sterilising a planet quickly and realistically&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/250292&quot;&gt;Wormhole Based Warfare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/172048&quot;&gt;Biology behind a monster that is able to remain invisible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/249785&quot;&gt;Keeping tech at 1890s levels without fossil fuels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/247512&quot;&gt;Gasoline-Powered Supersoldiers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/245318&quot;&gt;How would my collapsible sword blade work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/241904&quot;&gt;How hard is it to ruin the Earth permanently?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/101130&quot;&gt;What is a hypothetical, profitable way that the core of earth could be mined?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/240891&quot;&gt;How would a blind underwater species do science?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/240531&quot;&gt;What would influence skin color outside of stars and radiation? What sort of biology would allow for skintones of a wider color palette?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/240056&quot;&gt;Are there anatomically good proportions for different dragon-like creatures?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus even if we assume that the count for the &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; column is wrongly calculated and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; takes into account dupehammer closures, the numbers still do not add up. The count should be &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 16, if that was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8703" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2024-02-14T18:07:24.170" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T18:07:24.170" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2024-02-16T15:31:29.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Story in questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is storybuilding part of WBSE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can I ask about my story? (e.g. let people do a internal consistency check on my story)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can I give story details to explain something in my question?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you can give a &amp;quot;story goal&amp;quot; (e.g. how can my merfolk sink this ship) you want to achieve but you are missing the in world way to that goal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what can I do if my question was closed as &amp;quot;to story based&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Goal of the section&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal would be to have a section people can point to when discussing whether a question should be closed as &amp;quot;to story based&amp;quot; and also for new members to check the rules about this specific (and often controverse) topic before (or after) asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100460" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T15:31:29.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10339" CreationDate="2024-02-21T16:21:20.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't upvote @L.Dutch's answer enough, nor can I upvote @VLAZ's comment enough. We've all taken a shot at managing the tags and as important as it is, it gets tedious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendations (and THANK YOU for your willingness to take your turn with this!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As written, this post has been answered. But if your goal was to also get the indicated tags merged, that's unlikely to happen due to the fact that it's not actually what you asked for (in your title).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reason the synonym queue doesn't work is because, for reasons I can't explain, Stack Exchange never added that queue to the queue review system. Users need to actually look at the synonym queue to see if there's anything there or they need to open the wiki of one of the associated tags where it's indicated that it's in the synonym queue. It's not the queue itself that's a problem. Regrettably, it's actually easier to process the synonyms using that queue due to the underlying automation. C'est la Vie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, it's often faster to post a specific question in Meta requesting the synonym associations. Such posts should focus on one synonym group per post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OR, you can bypass all of this entirely. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you're absolutely confident that the tags should be merged&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; you can edit the associated questions on Main to delete the tags that should go away and add the tag that should have been used. The result is that all the &amp;quot;bad tags&amp;quot; have zero associated questions. &lt;em&gt;Stack Exchange's automation will delete the tags in a week or two.&lt;/em&gt; Obviously, when you're dealing with tags that have a lot of associated questions this would be an enormous amount of work — but, then again, if that's the case it's probably better that you seek community consensus anyway. Frankly, I see the purpose of the synonym queue, but as you've discovered, sometimes it's an enormous bureaucratic solution to a small problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers, @OT-64SKOT. The help is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T16:21:20.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2024-02-26T19:17:37.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Species that never became immune to its own venom - is it plausible?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tags: Science-based, creature-design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am developing a fictional species for a video game I want to develop for a personal project. The biology that is relevant for this is that the species (called Rinans for now for the sake of convenience) is humanoid. They have a venom gland where the paritoid gland on a human is, along with a duct leading to the upper canines. As one of the game mechanics, Rinans produce venom when stressed and in pain (not all the time). They are also at least partially affected by their own venom if it enters their bloodstream. How can this lack of immunity be plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some important things to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rinans have been around for about as long as humans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are omnivorous but they only use their venom when defending themselves from danger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can start producing venom from childhood.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are physically capable of biting their own toungue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Venom cannot stay in the duct forever. It will need to be released or it will eventually have to be absorbed into the bloodstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108257" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T19:17:37.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10352" CreationDate="2024-03-01T04:57:28.963" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify first, &lt;strong&gt;I'm not trying to get rid of this policy.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm just trying to ask if there are &lt;strong&gt;any better signs that something might be high concept&lt;/strong&gt; before I waste my time and the curators time writing questions and responses in the sandbox when it could be saved with just a bit more thinking on my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the title sums this up pretty well. I have so far asked one question (the isolationist dwarves one) on the main wb.se site that from the response seems to have been alright (But if I just got lucky with people answering when they shouldn't have, feel free to tell me that) but one thing I've noticed is that the go-to phrase said to new users is not very helpful. While yes a topic being capable of having a book written about it is generally too much, I can imagine (while yes, often particularly dry but still decently long books) books written about many of these questions, I could even imagine one about transportation between floating islands if they were kept treacherous enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; I have some other questions in mind but I'm hesitant to put them out there and be a nuisance if I still need to do a bit more work on them or even just scrap them entirely and figure them out on my own, except I don't know how to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109473" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T12:54:20.733" Title="Is there any high concept question test more specific than the book test?" Tags="|discussion|policy|too-broad|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-01T11:38:54.893" Score="-1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/255770/40609&quot;&gt;Can an Alcubierre drive be built by starlifting?&lt;/a&gt; was deleted as not providing an answer to the question. This is factually untrue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since our goal is to help you with an imaginary and, frankly, magical world. Yes, it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if what you're asking is whether or not by any stretch of actual science (which means we're ignoring the type 3.5 tech level) it's possible. No, it's not... today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tone of my answer may not have met with one's approval, but the question was answered and reasonably so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the goal of a Kardeshev 3.5 civilization, it's not only possible (as I state) but an Alcubierre drive might realistically be an antique as simple to manufature as a model-T Ford automobile on a modern 3D printer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the requirement of a K3.5 civilization is ignored, then despite @TheRocketFan's comments to the contrary (which demonstrate no factual engineering capability, merely a belief), the answer is still no as the drive itself remains beyond our ability to construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer should remain deleted due to its tone, then I would entertain an answer that explains how it violates the Code of Conduct. But if the only legitimate reason for closing the question is a failure to answer it, I request it be undeleted as that is simply untrue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T12:10:01.750" Title="A request to undelete my answer" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10350" CreationDate="2024-03-01T12:10:01.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer wasn't deleted because of its tone, it doesn't violate the code of conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was deleted because it sounds more like an elaborate comment on the question than an actual attempt of answering it: 3 lines out of 12 are quoting our help center, and the rest, plus other citations tangentially helping or not helping at all to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T12:10:01.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10349" CreationDate="2024-03-01T12:54:20.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most basic form of a high concept question is that it suggests a small change and then asks what large consequences may occur. They are considered off-topic for violating one or more of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They often cannot be answered without writing a significant part of, or addressing a significant plot point of, a story. In this regard they are VTC:Too Story-Based. Another way of looking at this is the admonition in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; that we do not help people write their stories. This is most difficult when what the question author wants is help creating the historical context needed for a story. Since history is, from a practical point of view, a story, it makes such a question very (very) difficult to embrace within the context of the Help Center's current rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are certain kinds of worldbuilding that don't easily fit within the original Stack Exchange context when it was just Stack Overflow. We deal with imagination. Programming questions can be imaginative, but they're not based on imagination. Thus historical worldbuilding, cultural worldbuilding, and sociological worldbuilding have had a difficult time here. We have recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609&quot;&gt;begun the process of taking a hard look at the Help Center rules and our policies&lt;/a&gt; to see if we can overcome weaknesses like this one. But for the moment....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are often a request for substantial free research, which is contrary to Stack Exchange's expectation that &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;research be performed as a component of a good question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are often open-ended, which is prohibited in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you've already noted, they often violate the Help Center's &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Book Rule&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers are often VTC:Opinion-Based. However, given that ours is a Stack that deals with opinion on a regular basis (e.g., one can be an expert in balancing magic systems, but who can be an expert on magic?), this is an uncommon complaint that usually reflects the Book Rule violation, meaning that the request is so broad that too many assumptions are being made about how the response can benefit the question. Nevertheless, question authors should avoid, to the best of their abilities, unlimited/unconstrained questions that allow respondents to make assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's worth noting that users (especially new users) will often intentionally avoid adding constraining details because they want as many options to choose from as possible. This is specifically contrary to what Stack Exchange expects for their service. It's also a disservice to the question author, though they don't realize it. A large number of simple or mediocre answers is rarely an improvement over fewer, more detailed answers and it's always possible to ask additional questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They often violate the Help Center admonition against brainstorming. Indeed, considering the nature of the question many equally possible solutions can be promoted (violating the Help Center's prohibition against all answers having equal value) leaving the question author to pick a best answer based on no useful metrics other than which tickles his/her fancy the most. Stack Exchange's focus on the selection of a best answer is intentional and questions are expected to be asked in a way to permit a best answer to be selected by listing restrictions, conditions, and if needed, the specific goals for which the question was asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Help Center explains that questions are expected to be specific, reasonably objective, and focus on a problem to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;High concept questions are, by definition, ambiguous due to the low detail of the initial condition and expected breadth of answers. For example, we might ask &amp;quot;how would WWII turn out of Hitler died one year earlier?&amp;quot; That sounds specific because we are told exactly when Hitler dies in the alternate time line. In reality it's very ambiguous because the only detail offered is a change of dates and so much can happen between that and the end of a war that took place on multiple continents with many combatants that it can't be determined what might have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are occasionally subjective, meaning that without constraint it's impossible to determine what details are important to the question author. An example might be, &amp;quot;if aliens landed today, how would the world react?&amp;quot; People in one area will react differently than those in another. How a five-year-old reacts is different than how a 90-year-old reacts. The subjectivity comes from the absolutely enormous number of options that all legitimately answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And finally, there isn't actually a problem being solved. Please remember that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Tour&lt;/a&gt; states that we are not a discussion forum. If answers arrive before closure, users will attempt to answer without the benefit of a discussion, but too often the only way to give a good answer to a high concept question is to enter into a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is that Stack Exchange's basic design is not conducive to high concept questions. However, although I don't know how practical it would be, there is a way to do it. In Chat you can ask anything you want — even discussion-based questions. The unfortunate problem is that Chat isn't haunted as much as it used to be and there isn't a way to advertise the opportunity on the Main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T12:54:20.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9981" CreationDate="2024-03-01T17:57:19.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What techniques can be used to keep magic weapon technology secret?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/255721/why-could-the-militaristically-superior-dwarves-who-are-the-only-ones-with-magic&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; I had asked how I could ensure that they would not wish to go all imperial and stay isolationist despite the military might granted by them and an answer I really liked and plan to use is that others could steal the weapons and take the advantage. However, I don't know much about how they could try to limit the spread of that information to other countries because then they could lose the advantage regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't need a way for the knowledge to be completely hidden but I would like some advice about what techniques or methods they could use to hide it like how some real world nations managed to keep trade secrets that could still be applied to magic technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One constraint with this question is that it is impossible to learn without weapons or a mentor as the weapons are made with a divine language forged into it that was gifted to the dwarves by the deity that created them. As an additional note he language has no effect when inscribed on anything else and may or may not have a spoken form. (I plan on actually making the whole language later after I finish a different language for that universe.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this version look better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109473" LastEditorUserId="109473" LastEditDate="2024-03-04T13:26:22.523" LastActivityDate="2024-03-04T13:26:22.523" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10360" CreationDate="2024-03-12T01:45:40.737" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is very vague on when it should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there's a wiki on the main site &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that says how to use it on this site, but what 'markers,' if you will, suggest whether a question should go on one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#science&quot;&gt;Science SE sites&lt;/a&gt; or on the Worldbuilding site? Assuming the question is on topic for one of the Science SE sites, should it go there, where there will likely be more people that know about it, or on the Worldbuilding SE? Would the question have to be checked on a case-to-case basis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108181" LastEditorUserId="8703" LastEditDate="2024-03-12T06:16:51.633" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T22:35:23.777" Title="When should a question with the `hard-science` tag be on one of the Science SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|specific-tag|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2024-03-12T02:15:51.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the line should be drawn at the importance of the worldbuilding aspect in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take a recent question as example, an orbital transfer to the anti Earth can make sense for worldbuilding, less for space exploration, because in a strictly real world sense such configuration would not be stable long enough to allow space travel development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30492" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T02:15:51.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2024-03-12T14:48:48.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it, a question about a problem in speculative fiction requesting a hard science answer is still a question about a problem in speculative fiction. It does not ask for a scientifically correct answer. What it asks for is a sciency answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between a scientific answer and a sciency answer is like the difference between a true piece of news and a truthy piece of news, or between truthfulness and verisimilitude; that is to say, the sciency answer should look like science and sound like science, it should be backed by quotations and equations and diagrams and so on, but it definitely does not have to be scientifically or technologically correct — exactly because the fundamental context is speculative fiction and not real science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotations backing up the answer might have been cherry picked, or might have been placed in an unexpected context. The equations might have been used outside their domain of applicability. The diagrams might have been drawn tendentiously. The answer might have been based on wild guesses, on as yet untested hypotheses, or even on hypotheses known to be false...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, WorldBuilding SE is not the correct place to learn physics, or chemistry, or geology, or history, or linguistics or whatever actual science. On WorldBuilding we assume that everybody already knows the real world science, either from their general culture or from the diligent research they have done before asking a question, and the answers to be provided are intended to help with the creation of a &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29552" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T14:48:48.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-13T22:04:17.560" Score="9" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thank you for your help reviewing the first post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10334/40609&quot;&gt;We&amp;#39;re going to upgrade the Help Center page, here is the 100,000-foot-view discussion of the what-we-cans and what-we-can&amp;#39;ts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've got an idea of where we want to go and it's time to start digging into the policies. Based on comments and answers from that first question, it's obvious that the future of storybuilding will be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, discussion concerning policies. The goal of this question is to gather information about what story-question policy or policies we want and where to impose limits, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Review of Existing Policies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. Help Center: We don't help people write stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today's fundamental rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking questions keep in mind that the goal of the site is to help you build your world, &lt;strong&gt;not to tell your story.&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Help Center: We don't answer questions about character choices&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Character choices have been deemed too dependent on the circumstances of the story to be worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a system, event or element of the world is causing you problems we are here to help. If on the other hand you aren’t sure what a character (be it an individual or organization) should do, that is out of scope for the site. (&lt;em&gt;Ibid.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. VTC:Too Story-Based&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specialized form of &amp;quot;VTC:Opinion-Based&amp;quot; reflecting the concern that a question is too dependent on the circumstances or plot of the story to be worldbuilding. The VTC reason is based on an existing Meta policy statement linked in the VTC close reason text (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/40609&quot;&gt;Why is my question &amp;quot;Too Story Based&amp;quot; and how do I get it opened?&lt;/a&gt;. (Source: &amp;quot;Close&amp;quot; link -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;A Community-Specific Reason&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; Option #2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note that I plan on introducing another question about how to handle SE's required VTC:Opinion-Based close reason. Please don't address that here. Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. Brainstorming Discouraged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming, also called fishing for ideas or (raw) idea generation, has had a love-hate relationship on this Stack. It's true that a brainstorming question isn't always a storybuilding question, but it's too often true that a storybuilding question is a brainstorming question. Thus, it's included here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+%22fishing+for+ideas%22&quot;&gt;List of (mostly) relevant Meta posts #1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+%22idea+generation%22&quot;&gt;List of (mostly) relevant Meta posts #2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+%22brainstorming%22&quot;&gt;List of (mostly) relevant Meta posts #3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for discussion, brainstorming, or an overall process rather than specific questions and answers, the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange might not be a good place for your question. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. High Concept Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High concept questions have the basic form of suggesting a seemingly small but specific change and asking what the large and ambiguous consequences would be. Answering them usually results in writing a significant part of the story (if only in bullet list form) or determining significant plot points and don't reflect story-independent world rules. As with Brainstorming, it's not true that all HCQs are storybuilding questions, but it's too often true that storybuilding questions are HCQs. The original policy post is &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4868/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I wrote a summary that might be a good description of the policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10349/40609&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to do when coming across such a question, in my mind, is to &lt;strong&gt;vote to close as &lt;em&gt;too broad.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Sorry, but as posed (and I have seen a few such examples myself, so I know what you mean), it's simply asking for far too much. It cannot meaningfully be answered in its current form, particularly within the Stack Exchange format, and therefore should be closed. Remember the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;book test&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;if you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4869/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;6. Narrative necessity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a policy  per-se, but this has been used to help worldbuilders understand the line between worldbuilding and storybuilding from the perspective of, &amp;quot;this has no objective answer because the question can only be resolved via narrative necessity.&amp;quot; It is included for completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all great ideas, the notion of narrative necessity is really quite simple. At its most fundamental, it means quite literally that any story (as story) needs certain things to happen, otherwise there is no story worth telling. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7284/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;) ... Narrative necessity means the story comes first. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7285/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;7. To Storybuilding.SE or not to Storybuilding SE?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Storybuilding questions on this Stack are &lt;em&gt;popular.&lt;/em&gt; Not a little popular, they're very popular. It makes moderating story-based questions difficult. Though it's been discussed before, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10055/40609&quot;&gt;I recently pitched the idea&lt;/a&gt; of sending &amp;quot;Storybuilding.SE&amp;quot; to Area 51. At this time, Stack Exchange sees the combination of four Stacks as having solved that problem. In other words, considering the limits of Writing.SE, Freelancing.SE and Literature.SE, Stack Exchange sees Worldbuilding as the place people go to for storybuilding questions (yes, I'm putting words in their mouths a little bit... but only a little bit). I am NOT reintroducing the pitch for a new Stack. I'm including this because strong opinions relating to story-based questions were expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do need to caution that, with the existence of Worldbuilding, Writers, Freelancing, and Literature, the topic of story development is already quite thoroughly covered by existing ground. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10069/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General vs. Specific Issues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you contemplate this discussion, try to keep in mind the general goals we want for this Stack vs. the specific policies that would enforce those goals. In other words, first answer the question &amp;quot;Do we want to allow storybuilding?&amp;quot; If no, post that belief and why! If yes, ask yourself, &amp;quot;to what extent to we wish to allow storybuilding questions?&amp;quot; Then explain in as much detail as you can imagine how to enforce your belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I have missed a relevant policy statement regarding storybuilding, please either point to it in a comment or edit this post to include it! Thanks!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also, it should be noted that when we're ready to proceed with the Help Center upgrade, it will include editing all previous policy Meta posts with a line like, &amp;quot;this policy has been superseded, see [Link]&amp;quot; so the past doesn't come back to haunt us.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastEditorUserId="30492" LastEditDate="2024-03-13T23:53:13.970" LastActivityDate="2024-03-19T21:53:06.317" Title="Help Center Upgrade: The Future of Storybuilding" Tags="|discussion|featured|policy|2024-hc-redesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2024-03-13T22:35:23.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It helps to understand how the three tags work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tags are &lt;em&gt;mutually exclusive,&lt;/em&gt; meaning you can only use one. Unlike nearly all other tags, they do not scope or categorize the question, they limit or scope the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; means to use known science as a frame work to create an imaginative solution that may — or may not — eventually prove true. For example, in your world you might want a space capsule that embraces a Dr. Who TARDIS-like interior. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; answer would be to associate the scientific concept of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pocket universe&lt;/a&gt; to rationalize the idea in your world. Is it &amp;quot;science?&amp;quot; Not really, because pocket universes are only mathematically theorized where science requires empirical evidence and repeatable tests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And that is a HUGELY IMPORTANT distinction. Too many people think that mathematical theories are science. They're not. The word &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; is defined as, &amp;quot;the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; means the answer must reflect known science with little imaginative extrapolation. Thus, the previous example of a TARDIS-like environment can't actually be answered if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; tag is involved (we'll try, though... we're only human, after all). On the other hand, &amp;quot;what are the significant weaknesses of a spider mech?&amp;quot; could be because the mechanical limitations of articulated legs are known and can be referenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; is equal to &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; with one additional requirement: &lt;em&gt;prove it!&lt;/em&gt; Thus, the previous example of a spider mech could be answered with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag because mathematics and academic articles about articulation can be cited as proof of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do expect questions to have a worldbuilding context. While it's never been definitively established, the more you're just looking for a real-world explanation the more you'll see down votes. You need to explain what's different with your world. For example, we have no problems answering a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; question about orbital insertion when you describe your fictional space ship. In fact, the hard-core astrophysicists on this site tend to have a lot of fun with questions like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that Stack Exchange isn't designed to replace an education. That sounds rude on the surface, but it makes sense when you think about it. You need to ask yourself whether or not you can actually use what you're going to get or, worse, whether or not you can even judge the quality of two answers to determine which is the best. Too often users who lack a full college education in a hard science will use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hard-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hard-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-hard-science-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;hard-science&lt;/a&gt; tag believing that what it will guarantee is a better answer. Nothing could be further from the truth. All it guarantees is that the answers you get are less speculative than might be seen with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-based&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-based&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-based-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-based&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science-fiction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science-fiction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-science-fiction-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;science-fiction&lt;/a&gt; tags. And that makes a &lt;em&gt;lot of sense&lt;/em&gt; when you remember that our stated goal in the Help Center is to help you build imaginary worlds. In other words, speculation is literally what we're here for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should you pitch another Stack?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking for the gory details in a real-world context, the question doesn't belong here. That's not 100% entirely true (there's a lot of history I'm not bothering to link...), but it's a safe way to ensure nobody will complain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T22:35:23.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10359" CreationDate="2024-03-16T03:33:13.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We should embrace the madness&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the moment this Stack graduated from Area 51 it has tried... valiantly, nobly, and with substantial effort... to separate &lt;em&gt;worldbuilding&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;storybuilding.&lt;/em&gt; In a nutshell so simplified that it makes angels weep:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is the objective development of the structure of an imaginary natural world situated within a universe of rules defined and consistently applied by its designer — or the similarly objective design of cultures, civilizations, and technologies — to be used as the framework for stories or game play.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Storybuilding&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is the subjective effort to develop a narrative involving the lives of individuals and their choices — or similarly a subjective history — that are necessarily dependent on the goals of the author and therefore cannot enjoy a definitive &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; in terms of Stack Exchange's basic design without first identifying the needed answer to explain the terms of that decision.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, no matter how much we want to exclude storybuilding questions... &lt;em&gt;we like answering storybuilding questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how much we try to fight it, many questions end up being deep in opinion, and everyone likes giving their opinion. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4044/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I too like questions about story building. Good ones anyway! (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10059/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, for people capable of providing answers to impossible or crazy situations, we seem singularly unable to articulate what sort of questions we like. This is in part because we rule by committee, but I also think it's because the scope of this site is somewhat ambiguous to begin with. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6110/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We weren't like any site that had been seen before. We were trying to be a community of artists and writers and game designers and illustrators and storytellers and, most of all, people who do these things for fun. That's the important bit; while fun often gets in the way of Q+A, most of us are building worlds and helping others do the same as a hobby. Not a job. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6398/40609&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the robot and heroine have names . . . because the woman accompanying the robot is, of course, the protagonist of the story... (&lt;em&gt;Ibid.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I included that last quote because it underscores the dual-nature that we've tried unsuccessfully for nearly ten years to deny. A few people might be building worlds for its own sake... but most people are building worlds because they're writing stories. Slartibotfast and Pandora standing together right now at the left edge of your screen — erasing one or the other simply doesn't make sense. Neither should stand alone. (And the irony of a symbol of our Stack named Pandora mentioned while discussing the formal introduction of storybuilding questions on this Stack is not lost on me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphors aside, I propose the following policy changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming should graduate from &amp;quot;might not be a good place for your questions&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;isn't a good place for your questions.&amp;quot; Half the price for the privilege of asking storybuilding questions is the requirement that a specific goal or expectation for a &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; must be described. We'll help you build your story, but we're not going to participate in spitballing. Ask a specific question or don't ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center statement that we help build worlds, not tell stories, is simply deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The prohibition against character choices should remain. We can help an author identify what the choices might be, but we should not choose for the author which choice should be taken. That depends too much on information we simply don't have, including the ability to read the author's mind concerning the goals or messages of their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The VTC:Too Story-Based close reason is removed from the close vote options. (I will not speak about the VTC:Opinion-Based problem here. It must be dealt with in another post because it's not one we can remove.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The prohibition against High Concept Questions should also remain. The other half of the price for the privilege to ask storybuilding questions is that the scope of the question must be within the (arguably vague) context of the Book Rule. We'll help you write your book, we will not write that book, or even a significant part of that book, for you. I see HCQs as just another form of brainstorming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; At this point it would be appropriate to pose a site-acceptable definition of what a good storybuilding question would look like. I'm going to take a crack at that while knowing that it will be imperfect because my single opinion cannot embrace all of the madness and, thus, create definitive order out of chaos. Here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A good storybuilding question&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;is an objective request for help resolving a story development problem by asking a community of users with a wide variety of skills and talents to offer insight into the possible resolutions of that problem. It is not a request for ideas to choose from, also known as brainstorming or raw idea generation, but a directed effort that includes conditions, restrictions and limits combined with an explanation of goals and expectations (usually taking the form of why the question has been asked). Questions left intentionally vague for the purpose of maximizing the number of provided options are prohibited.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40609" LastActivityDate="2024-03-16T03:33:13.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10359" CreationDate="2024-03-18T07:12:48.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What is Storybuilding?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Is storybuilding the same as writing?&lt;/strong&gt; I would argue that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; (precisely) the same thing as writing. Writing of course is an art that is learned the same way as painting or composing music. While painting takes raw materials such as paints and uses tools to create a visual image, so writing takes raw materials such as words and uses tools to create a literary image. Storybuilding is different in its raw materials. Of course, words are one of the storybuilder's fundamental building blocks. But there are others that a non-fiction writer does not have to deal with, such as &lt;em&gt;eliciting the world through writing motifs and themes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;combining in-world culture with out-world language to compose a naturalistic whole&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Storybuilding is thus almost a different kind of art. It combines composition of a written document, the story, with the sensibilities of a world maker. The storybuilder is thus more aware of the fictional world and the role it plays within the written story. The goal of the storybuilder, apart from good writing, is to bring the world to life from within the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;What kinds of storybuilding questions do we like here anyway?&lt;/strong&gt;  Good storybuilding queries ought to be seen as quite distinct from writing queries. Questions of grammar, mechanics, pragmatics, publishing options, etc. should all be banned here. Whatever Writing.SE and English Language &amp;amp; Usage.SE accept should be forbidden here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Storybuilding, still offers quite a range of possible questions for us to handle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queries that pose interesting narrative conundrums that fuse world system with action of character: considering for example the question of whether or not it makes sense for one of the protagonists to have failed in his given mission, given the context of the world the character lives in and the story is about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queries that are highly imaginative and creative in and of themselves: perhaps a question considering the deep integration of an invented language or a culture within the fabric of the narrative itself, in other words, the fictional elements become an integral part of the non-fictional elements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queries that ask us to evaluate the story of the world itself --- its history --- (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10352/37029&quot;&gt;this answer to a meta query&lt;/a&gt;). &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Since history is, from a practical point of view, a story...&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;  I would argue that history is also an artifact of the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queries that ask us to evaluate a story in terms of the world it is set in, or is proposed to be set in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37029" LastEditorUserId="37029" LastEditDate="2024-03-19T21:53:06.317" LastActivityDate="2024-03-19T21:53:06.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>